The female pirate of Finnegans Wake who arrives three times at the Jarl van Hoother's door, asks why she looks like a poss of porterpease, and carries off his children each time he fails to answer. In this series she is Bob's figure for the technology that changes you while you are still asking what changed — and, on the authority of a marginal note in McLuhan's own copy of the Skeleton Key, the thing Joyce scholarship gets wrong. Dialogue 78 opens and closes on her.
Across the dialogues
Raised from an episode of the Wake into the series' test of Joycean competence — Bob makes her the thing the scholars miss, which turns a fable about stolen children into the measure of whether a reader has understood the book at all
The riddle is treated as the chapter's governing question rather than a puzzle to be solved — an identity complaint lodged by someone who cannot yet name what altered them.
"Why do I am a lookalike, a poss of porter piece?"James Joyce, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 1:01:31
The Jarl's failure is diagnosed as a media effect, which converts a folk-tale of stolen children into the standard case of an environment operating below notice.
"he doesn't know the media changed him. So a new unconscious has been recreated, created in him."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 1:09:15
The reading that makes the episode structural — if the stolen children are words, the theft is the moment expression escapes its speaker, which is where Cameron plants the Android Meme.
"I think children there could be understood as words."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 1:06:58
Bob gives her the initiative the fable's surface denies her — she is not raiding the household but retooling herself out of it, which makes her the agent of the change rather than its symptom.
"It allows the prank queen to adjust herself with these new words."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 1:07:13
A marginal note in McLuhan's own Skeleton Key is produced as the session's closing card, and Bob widens it from one critic to the whole field — the Wake's scholarship failing on precisely the figure that names the technology.
"He says that Joseph Campbell doesn't understand the role of the Prank Queen, which is the role of the phonetic alphabet, I guess."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 2:31:24
Connections
The female pirate who comes three times to the Jarl van Hoother's door, asks her riddle, and steals his children.
Bob reports a marginal note in McLuhan's copy of A Skeleton Key saying Campbell does not understand her role.