Coda: The Media-Cultural Imaginary of Finnegans Wake

This challenges readings of Finnegans Wake as Joyce’s turn away from film, as medium and narrative model, since its logos-focused method seems more radiophonic than cinematic, because words, voices and languages rather than images and film techniques continuously shuffle, layer, clash and blend, like criss-crossing wireless broadcasts. Nonetheless, Finnegans Wake represents further experimental ekphrasis, because Joyce ‘retrofitted’ older technological influences while engaging with film’s successor: early television. The lantern’s dissolving views can be regarded as ‘visual palimpsests’, one picture shimmering through the outlines and interstices of another. Joyce’s verbal equivalent reached its hypostasis in Finnegans Wake’s ‘verbal dissolves’, as forms and meanings continually morph in and out of each other, like multi-layered images or filmic cross-fades and superimpositions. Joyce carries this process into the future by mixing different television broadcasts and questioning the medium’s potential power. Additionally, Stuart Gilbert’s short film treatment of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ employed animation effects which shed a very suggestive light on the ‘morphing’ techniques implicit in Joyce’s method. With an imagination saturated by visual forms, Joyce remained well capable of viewing moving pictures in the projection box of his mind and translating them into his ‘moving dream panorama’.