/lit/ - Literature

>>20193639
>The theme is always the same: the delivery of the Word, the misinterpreta- tion of the Word, and the redemption of the Word on every level, at all times and places. The reason I’ve now gone some distance toward explaining why I think of it as psychedelic, the reason why I think of it as eschatological and apocalyptic is because — it’s hard to tell how much of this material he took seriously and how much of it was grist for his literary mill — Joyce was perfectly conversant with Renaissance theories of magic. The entire book is based on La Scienza Nuova of Giambattista Vico, who was a Renaissance sociologist and systems theorist, and Joyce once, in a famous interview, said that if the whole universe were to be destroyed and only Finnegans Wake survived, that the goal had been that then the entire universe could be reconstructed out of this. This is a very Talmudic idea, that somehow a book is the primary reality. The idea in some schools of Hasidism is that all of the future is already contained in the Torah. Then when you ask them, “Well, if it’s contained there, then isn’t it predestined?” the answer is no, because the letters are scrambled and only the movement of the present moment through the text correctly unscrambles and arranges the letters. This is Joyce-thinking for sure, and it’s very close to a central theme in Joyce — and a central theme in the Western religious tradition — which is the coming into being of the manifestation of the Word, the declension of the Word into matter.