SCROLLING AWAY THE REEL WORLD

So how did Joycean literary cinematicity develop after Ulysses? The notion of ‘hands-on’ play is both integral to optical toys and to linguistic creativity in Joyce's next major work, Finnegans Wake (1939), based as it is on a ludic approach to language which kaleidoscopically deforms and reforms its graphic and phonic elements. Although a comprehensive examination of Finnegans Wake in cinematic terms is beyond the scope of this book, it clearly continues to reference and explore the by then well-established moving image technologies such as film, as well as emergent ones in the form of television broadcasting. Indeed it confirms that transformative visual and linguistic play were fundamental and ongoing to Joyce's artistic processes. As discussed in Chapter 2, the young Joyce performed a boisterous charade punning on the kaleidoscope's ability to produce moving patterns through symmetrical permutations of coloured shapes in combination and dispersal, by colliding with a partner, then flying apart. This riddle reappeared in Finnegans Wake as: ‘Answer: A collideorscape!’ (143.28). Philip Kitcher treats Joyce's trope as the foundation for his method of reading the novel. It occurs in a passage in which a ‘fargazer’ seems to look back telescopically over the time and space of their own life, but also the text ‘scape’ of the novel itself, which continuously figures and refigures Irish and collective human history in a synaesthetic moving ‘panaroma of all flores of speech’ (143.26 and 3–4, respectively). Kitcher argues that Joyce's reference to ‘a device in which the same elements constantly rearrange themselves in new patterns’ is a prompt foregrounding the novel's own endlessly recirculating system of recombination and dispersal at thematic, motific and linguistically granular levels. Consequently, in this coda, I want to show that, far from abandoning his fascination with the past and future of moving image media in Finnegans Wake's linguistic turn, which has been seen as marking Joyce's reorientation towards the ‘radiophonic’, his last novel continues to express it in ingenious ways.

Finnegans Wake played on how film simulated reality as moving images with a virtualism unsurpassed in any medium before, punning it homophonically in the phrase ‘roll away the reel world’ (64.25–6).