Customer Reviews

The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake

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The bibliography alone is worth the price. Prof. McLuhan describes the Menippean tradition beginning with Lucian and traces a continuous line to Joyce. He describes the breakdown of the Greek Logos into the Trivium, and how the ratio between Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic (and the culture itself) changes under the influence of technology. He shows how Joyce uses the thunders as rhetorical gestures enacting the transformation of culture by technological metaphor using textual context and multilingual etymology. Sounds horribly stiff, perhaps; its really much more fun (and much freer) than most over-conceptualized scholarship.

This book make FW a bit less obscure. First he narrows his focus to the ten 100-letter Thunderwords in FW and shows that, like DNA in a chromosome, each Thunder contains all the themes of its section in microcosm. (find the Joseph Campbell on Finnegans Wake video and hear him read the first thunderword for the full effect) Second, he fits FW in the genre of Minippean satire, so its disorderly mess has a bit of company on the bookshelf. Hey, "Every artist creates his own precursors", Borges wrote. When I went to school, it was Horatian and Juvenalian, nice and nasty, Garison Keillor vs Howard Stern. Well, now there's room for Tristram Shandy and Frank Zappa, too. A good entree to the subject.

trivia: The author's dad was the guy Alvy Singer produced to silence the movieline bore in Annie Hall.

Yes I said yes. (Now and then I realize how esoteric my books about Joyce and "Finnegans Wake" are.) Anyway, Marshall McLuhan's kid Eric dove headlong into the Frey oops fray and came up with a winner. "FW" takes place on a Thursday, as does "Ulysses." And Feb. 2, 1882, was a Thor's Day too. Oh my gosh...how does one write a review of this book. I guess it's for Joyce fans, or those who have read "Finnegans Wake" more than once. To me, reading "about" the Wake is as fun as reading the Wake. "Oh; THAT'S what that means!!" Let's face it, we all need a lot of help. If you've seen the paperback "War and Peace in the Global Village"---where, I think, the page called "What the thunders said..." is found---you'll have a headstart. Enough! or too much. Thanks, Eric McLuhan.

Like the Gnostic text Thunder, Perfect Mind, the Wake is a song of oblique wisdom. Eric's father and Terrence McKenna are my two favorite analysts of Joyce. Eric is not as funny as these two but I love this book. Much ado about long funny words. If you don't LOVE the Wake, skip this, but if you do, Eric has many gnarly thoughtlets for you to play with.