Joyce's final novel . The central reference point in Bob and Cameron's dialogue — both for reading McLuhan's media theory and as the structural model for Bob Dobbs's own charts. New to it — start with dialogue 01 for why McLuhan's whole project turns on the Wake, then dialogue 10 for how Bob maps it onto the formula chart.
Key characters as media archetypes
The media-archetype roles below are Bob Dobbs's interpretation of the Wake in his Formula Chart — not Joyce's own scheme. Joyce's text supplies the family; the mapping onto bottom-up / top-down media grounds is Bob's.
- ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle): The mother. In Bob's Formula Chart, she functions as the bottom-up ground — "effects preceding causes," the feminine, environmental, emergent side of media.
- HCE (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker): The father. Also "Here Comes Everybody." In Bob's chart, the top-down bureaucratic ground — "causes (in quotes) merging with effects," the masculine managerial response.
- Shem and Shaun: The twin sons. Figures on the chart — the previous anti-environment, actors/retrievals. They "hop over each other" as media forms alternate between cultural enemy and weaponry across eras.
- Issy: The daughter. A third figure type in the chart.
Across the dialogues
Established as McLuhan's lifelong key — his post-1951 writing read as a justification of the Wake, which is "about media as art forms"
Bob's thesis — everything McLuhan wrote after ~1951 is a sentence justifying Finnegans Wake and the way it works.
"McLuhan came up with a way to translate Finnegans Wake... all his writings are sentences justifying Finnegans Wake and the way it's done."
The Wake is about media as art forms — Joyce treats the media themselves as the book's content, which is why McLuhan reads it as a media text.
"Finnegans Wake is about media as art forms."
Nevitt's reframing — the Wake as a recently achieved form of consciousness, and Trump as its unwitting mime
Barrington Nevitt called the Wake a "recently achieved form of consciousness"; Bob extends it to the present, reading Trump-era media as an unwitting miming of the Wake.
"Barry Nevitt saying that Finnegans Wake is a recently achieved form of consciousness… if anybody is miming Finnegans Wake, it's Trump."
Becomes the organizing structure of Bob's formula chart and the tiny note chart
Bob's formula chart is organized around the characters of Finnegans Wake — the Joyce family supplies its structure.
"it's organized around the characters of Finnegans Wake."
The Tiny Note Chart is two rows lifted out of the formula chart.
"those two rows… They're pulled out of the formula chart and become the tiny note chart."
The public "media as characters" reveal, the Joyce-family mapping of the chart, and Bob casting his own work as updating the Wake
In a 1977 ABC interview (released during the 2011 centenary), McLuhan said publicly for the first time that in Finnegans Wake Joyce presented the media as characters. Eric McLuhan's PhD work covers the Thunders and media characters in the Wake in more detail.
"Joyce presented the media as characters."
Murray Gell-Mann named quarks after Finnegans Wake in 1963 ("Three quarks for Muster Mark").
"quarks were named in 1963 by Murray Gell-Mann."
The dynamism of the question "Who are we?" — carried by the ALP/HCE interaction — is at play across the whole chart and in the persons of Joyce's family.
"you could say that that's the… dynamism."
Bob frames his own charts as illustrating and updating the Wake, just as McLuhan applied it.
"I'm illustrating Finnegans Wake… updating it."
Theall's satire and the buried letter — the Wake mocking end-times visions, its dung-heap letter becoming the chart's "chain letter of phase shifts"
Per Don Theall, the Wake satirizes apocalyptic and end-times visions — Joyce includes all stages of apprehension, satirizing even himself.
"Finnegans Wake satirized apocalyptic visions or those that thought they were coming to an ending point"
The letter searched for in the Wake — the chart's top "chain letter of phase shifts" — is found in a dung heap.
"The letter is in a dung heap."
Invoked as the work that exploits the omnipresent gaps of language, and which Bob says he "made into a chart" (his "Herculean Act")
The chart is Bob's bid to stand in McLuhan's and Joyce's line — to have done to the Wake what he says McLuhan only justified sentence by sentence: rendered the whole book as a single legible structure, a labor he casts as heroic self-assignment.
"I made Finnegans Wake into a chart. Herculean Act."
Named the ground beneath the chart — beneath McLuhan sits the Wake; HCE "indistinguishable from a radio," the chart a palimpsest of "unused Finnegans Wake," and the cacophony of texting read as a page of the Wake
The Wake displaces McLuhan as the chart's ground — Bob calls his book "unused Finnegans Wake," a palimpsest that writes over McLuhan's own reading to add "way more factors that need to be illustrated" than McLuhan lived to add.
"unused McLuhan or unused Finnegans Wake is what I'm presenting."
Bob names his method on the Wake — not authorship but palimpsest, "medieval commentary" written in the margins of Joyce's and McLuhan's manuscript; the chart is glossed onto the Wake, "the best portrait of where we've come to," its cacophony read as our texting.
"That's a palimpsest or it's medieval commentary."
The Wake read as a way of seeing, not just a ground beneath the chart — and, in McLuhan's "lead kindly foul" (foule = crowd), the corrective to mistaking a collectivity for an individual
Every word in the Wake is generated out of a whole system of latent possibilities — its depth dimension — which is why the Tiny Note Chart takes a "hovering" perspective; Bob ties it to the ground spectrum read as "what it is not, but could be."
"with what might be called the cloud of implication that characterizes everything in Finnegans Wake, that relates closely to the whole question of the, I hate to say the word perspective…"
Recast as the Romantic "double fixation" exploded — where the Romantics froze both the moment and the artist, Joyce blows subject and maker open, the exemplar of flight made conscious
The Wake is Cameron's exemplar for the Romantic "double fixation" undone — a century after the aesthetic moment froze both the experience and the artist, Joyce explodes both, HCE multiple and the characters and geography blending into one another.
"And probably Finnegans Wake is a great example of that, but even Ulysses."
Pushed from ground-of-the-chart to lived medium — no longer a book to read but a condition to inhabit, the networked present it names down to the coinage "emailia"
Bob's strongest formulation of the Wake's realization — not a text but the medium of networked life, its "said, respond" structure become email (Joyce even coins "emailia"), the whole internet already inside a book legible as such only in the last decade.
"We live Finnegans Wake now, literally."
Paired with the Bible as the two books that "bracket the Gutenberg Galaxy" — iON’s canon against linear time
iON’s two-book canon, per Bob — the Bible and Finnegans Wake, the works that "bracket the Gutenberg Galaxy" and its linear time.
"two important books to read are the Bible and Finnegans Wake. The two books that bracket, you know, the Gutenberg Galaxy."
Promoted to the one artwork adequate to the Tech Body — where representation is said to fail entirely, the Wake's sheer complexity is held to be the sole thing that can even approach an unimageable anti-environment
The Wake set as the limit case of imaging the Tech Body — since ordinary "representations don't come anywhere near it," the Wake is named "the closest and the only attempt to get to it," its adequacy lying precisely in a complexity that matches an anti-environment nothing else can depict.
"The complexity of it is Finnegans Wake."
The flip returns to its source — the character-swapping of the Wake named as the model for how the Tech Body's talk keeps reversing, the only way to speak "without a point of view"
The Wake's family reversals set up as the dialogue's master figure — the twins flipping into the sister and into each other is the same "dynamic power of reversal" McLuhan formalized as cliché↔archetype and the Tech Body performs by "going back and forth on purpose," so no side hardens into an identity.
"understand why the twins flip into the sister and the twins themselves flip into each other."
Filed as Electric-Age satire — with Pound's Cantos the Wake becomes the era's instance of Menippean satire in Eric McLuhan's four-hundred-year scheme, the subject of his thesis on the form
The Wake takes its place in the satire lineage — with Pound's Cantos it is "a different kind of Menippean satire," the Electric-Age term in Eric McLuhan's four-hundred-year scheme and the subject of his thesis on the form in the Wake.
"the Electric Age, which created Pound's Cantos and Finnegans Wake."
Named the exact portrait of the present — the digital squares the global identity crisis into the "hyper-texting world" the book already depicts, so McLuhan's classroom "radio program" is now the medium young readers simply live
The Wake pushed from "ground beneath the chart" to literal diagnosis — the digital "squares" the global identity crisis into the very "hyper-texting world" the book portrays, so Schafer's recollection that McLuhan taught it as "a radio program" lands as Bob's "your texting… is Finnegans Wake."
"Finnegans Wake becomes more accurate as a portrait of our situation."
Recast as a hologram — any section reproduces the whole, so understanding one fragment is understanding the book, dissolving the demand to master its sixty languages page by page
The Wake's part-whole structure named — Cameron reads Bob's point as making any section "a hologram," "a reproduction of the whole," so there is "no point in understanding the whole": knowing one section well enough is understanding it all, the same way speaking a language is not speaking every sentence in it.
"any section of Finnegans Wake may be taken as a hologram."
The Wake as engineered groundlessness — Joyce said to have "erased everything at the bottom" so nothing certifies it, the something-from-nothing of language the book's hundred simultaneous conversations enact
Bob's account, relayed through the Evergreens, of the Wake's design — Joyce deliberately removed any bottom so the book is "a something coming at a nothing," the linguistic case of the Christian "something comes out of nothing."
"that he erased everything at the bottom of the wake so nobody could say or find a ground to it."
Made the yardstick for a rival — the book becomes the test Bob holds Baudrillard to, the thing that already does what French theory gropes toward, while Cameron defends it as posing the question of answers rather than being one
Cameron's defense of the Wake against Bob's it-is-the-key reading — it cannot be "the answer" precisely "because the whole book is a question about answers," a cyclonic vision that poses human life as a question rather than resolving it.
"Finnegans Wake can't be taken as the answer... because the whole book is a question about answers."
Returned as design principle — the Wake as the book whose "audience takes over the art form," the "putting on" McLuhan engineered his own book-making from
Bob's account of the Wake as method — read aloud in a group it becomes the case Duchamp described, where "the audience takes over the art form," the reader-made "putting on" McLuhan engineered his own book-design from.
"it's a case where the audience takes over the art form."
Named the archetypal archive — the archive fallen through itself, grounding nothing yet enabling everything, and the "mega scene" pun that makes the magazine an archive
Bob calls the Wake the archetypal archive — Joyce "out-archived everybody" — the archive that, as Cameron adds, has "fallen through itself," grounding nothing yet enabling communication.
"It's maybe the archetypal archive, the breakthrough, the thing that nobody can get past."
Read as the prophecy of processing — Nevitt's "process as figure" makes the Wake the book that foregrounds information-processing itself, and Joyce's obsessive lifelong overlaying recast as "a diary," the anti-narrative the plot-summarizers keep missing
The Wake's formula for the present, via Nevitt — asked what the book is, Nevitt answered "process as figure," which is why it is prophetic: it foregrounds the sheer processing of information rather than any content.
"it's process as figure."
The Wake reframed as a diary — Joyce's ceaseless post-publication correcting and overlaying makes the book a record of daily processing, not a finished story, the self-absorbed patterning he is "a prophet of."
"So it just struck me that he was doing a diary."
Given a discovery date — 1953, the year "Crick and Watson discovered the gene and McLuhan discovered the meme", when the Ford-grant essays first read media anti-environments inside the book rather than its sixty languages
Bob dates McLuhan's "discovery of the techne meme" to 1953 — the Finnegans Wake essays that won the Ford grant — pairing it with Crick and Watson's gene as the year form itself became legible; McLuhan stopped seeing the book's "sixty languages" and started seeing "movie" and "television" anti-environments in it, "seeing synchronically."
"And that's when Crick and Watson discovered the gene and McLuhan discovered the meme."
The Wake as total anticipation, relayed as McLuhan's claim — Bob reads "the clatter of email and texting" of the last fifteen years as already scored in the book, its line-fronted paragraphs the very form of "endless bickering, responding."
"All future technologies are in Finnegans Wake."
Staged as the service environment's mirror — a book that must offend, read live against a Facebook forum's genre-hunting, with the page-18 "organized ignorance" passage offered as the whole of human life in a sentence
The book's ep50 function named — not a text to be decoded but a mime of the service environment itself, so its refusal to yield a conclusion reproduces the joke the media surround plays on everyone, and the forum readers still hunting its genre are the punchline.
"This environment is a Menippean satire on all of us. And the Wake mimes that."
Given a physical center — Bob's discovery that McLuhan's most-repeated public word, "discarnate," sits at the exact middle of the book (p.292, beside the Vesica Piscis), and is quoted in War and Peace with the word itself silently dropped
Bob's discovery gives discarnate — McLuhan's most-repeated public word — a physical home: line 15 of p.292, the exact middle of the book, beside the Vesica Piscis diagram; the concordance shows it used only once, and McLuhan quotes the surrounding passage in War and Peace (pp.14–15) with the word itself dropped.
"And there it is right in the center of Finnegans Wake."
Reclassified outright — from a book that anticipates the present to one that documents it, then read against itself as the text that displays a chart in the era declared unchartable
The bluntest genre claim in the archive — the Wake is stripped of fiction entirely and reclassified as documentation, which is what licenses every subsequent reading of it as a description of media rather than a work about language.
"It was not a novel. It was a guide to what was going on in the world, you know?"
A textual detail recruited against the session's closing theme — the book that is said to defy charting opens its final movement by displaying one, so the Wake is made to stage the very Gutenbergian gesture the unchartable present has retired.
"in the beginning of the last book of Finnegans Wake, there's a section at the beginning where a hand comes forward and holds up a chart."
Turns from a book being interpreted into a specification being fulfilled — read forward as the blueprint of the environment now arriving, with Cameron supplying the unit of account that makes the demand it places on a reader precise
Cameron gives the book a unit of account — where Ulysses distributes the varieties of human reality across chapters, the Wake compresses them into single words, which is the same demand stated as a formula.
"So the conclusion I came to is that every word in Finnegans Wake is a chapter."
The book is made a specification for an environment rather than a description of one — whatever the Wake contains is what the Tech Body will deliver, which turns Joyce from a witness into an engineer.
"Which is like a crystallization of all that Finnegans Wake is. The tech body is going to have everything in it."
The Mutt and Jute exchange is recruited as the book's opening scene of pre-tribal contact — two individuals meeting before any bond exists, staged in a language deliberately too multiple to be understood.
"And the beginning, page 16 or so of Finnegans Wake, Joyce has Mutt and Jute, two guys talking."
Offered as the only adequate medium for the session's own argument — ordinary speech cannot carry the required complexity, so incomprehensibility becomes a formal requirement rather than a defect
Bob makes the Wake's difficulty functional — if the point cannot be said in sequential prose, then the book's unreadability is the argument being demonstrated rather than an obstacle to it.
"You can't generate enough complexity unless you talk Finneganese."
Named the map of the unchartable — Bob's working reference for the Android meme milieu, and Cameron's evidence that Joyce wrote from the art formula, so the Wake's scattering of words becomes the deliberate display of a plural genesis
The Wake given a compositional principle rather than a style — written from the originary position, which is why any of its words could have been other words.
"In one of the Joyce essays in the early 1950s, he says something like, Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake from the position of pre-tribal awareness."
The book is treated as instrumentation — not a work to interpret but the only available chart of a milieu defined as unchartable.
"I find Finnegans Wake is a good map of the uncharted and unchartable milieu to refer and bounce off of."
The title turned into the session's closing question — the plural origin has already been retrieved technologically; what is missing is waking to it.
"So the wake. The whole question is, can we wake to what we already know in a certain way?"
The pamphlet's trap door — a question about the closing triptych turns the session into an hour of Book IV read aloud, and the book stops being a subject the dialogues discuss and becomes the ground they are standing on
The page-614 vicociclometer paragraph is read as the book's own account of itself — Joyce telling the reader what they have just been through.
"this is a summary of Finnegans Wake. This is Joyce telling us."
The Wake is the theory of everything the postmodernists gave up looking for — it does the macro and the micro, general relativity and the quantum, in one book.
"The actual theory of everything is Finnegans Wake, which, you know, does the macro and the micro, the general relativity and the subatomic or the quantum."
Cameron names the session's structure: the pamphlet has opened a trap door, so the media argument and the Wake turn out to be one continuous surface rather than two topics.
"That leads out of your pamphlet over to the Wake."
Defended as a method rather than a subject — its formal excess is argued to be the only accurate description of collective dialogue, and the destination the chronological chart is meant to deliver people to
The book is claimed as a descriptive instrument rather than a literary object — its form is said to be the only one adequate to simultaneous sensory dialogue, which is why Bob keeps steering the chart toward it.
"Finnegans Wake is the most accurate way to describe, the way it's presented I did."
The book's two scales are held together rather than traded off — full of material only about Joyce and simultaneously about everything, which is the form Bob says the tech body requires.
"It's both the widest possible collectivity and the most tightly focused individuality."
Connections
Joyce's final novel, 1939 — seventeen years in the making.
McLuhan read the Wake as a book about media as art forms — Joyce presenting "the media as characters."
Bob's formula and tiny note charts are organized around the characters of Finnegans Wake.
McLuhan used Joycean "thunder" passages to open each chapter of his 1968 book.
Nevitt's gloss — the Wake is a "recently achieved form of consciousness," the answer to McLuhan's cliché/archetype question.
Theall's 1950–51 reading group is what Cameron credits as decisive in McLuhan's serious turn to Finnegans Wake.
Barry Nevitt's gloss — Finnegans Wake “makes the ground bigger.”
Joyce scholar whose books on Finnegans Wake supply Bob's reading of W.T. Stead as a model for HCE.
Joyce's Wake is the central text — Cameron reads its "complete undecidability" as foundation.
Corroborates that McLuhan taught Finnegans Wake "was not a book; it was a radio program" — in 1951–52.
Its top line, "a chain letter of phase shifts," refers to the letter searched for in Finnegans Wake.