----- Original Message -----
From: "neville attkins" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 02 January 2001 12:37
Subject: finnegans wake more than just a bit loopy
| I think of linearity as meaning like a line
um...
it may be the same as what you are saying, Neville...
I was thinking of linearity as meaning *in a line, sequential, a line of
elements without an index *within that set of elements and without any other
device beyond reader memory and external notation to provide random access
to the elements or sorting into other sequences with exactly the same
elements...
The pages are bound in a book and numbered and there is nothing I recall to
suggest that in reading we should not observe the top left to bottom right
convention of our culture
so F W
| spends a lot of its effot confusing lines; what comes
| first what comes next is open to question.
I don't think there is any question about what comes next in Joyce's
start-to-finish-but-circular line(s). Surely any doubt that comes in is
Joyce's *narrative and techniques. ANYTHING may be said, may happen from the
reader's point of view, the first time; but not in the sense of the reader
of a hypertext where the reader may go by a different route and so create
alternative and structurally valid sequences of linguistic events.
Now that we have hypertexts, I guess we can see, in retrospect, all the
"non-hypertexts" as being in the same set as the hypertexts, mazes without
alternative routes
& the current availability of links, variable and other ways, helps me look
again at texts such as plays which may or may not be cut by directors and
the story telling texts, pointing to oral traditions where the same stories
come round again and again but in different orders, different emphases...
I'm thinking as I write of the last few days spent with friends where to a
great extent we have spent the time telling each other stories of ourselves
and friends and relations, with cuts and jumps brought in by interruptions,
calls to food, demands by the cat that it be fed, tv schedules etc
I want to speak of the linear rather than the line because the line has
other aspects and connotations, the idea of itself as a unit rather than a
continuum whether the endstop is brought about by breath or other rhythmical
measure
But in so far as we are speaking of a straight route without ways off, ways
to diverge from that line, then, yes, by linearity I meant like a line
| Any portion of FW because of the multidimensional and
| multi lingual quality of the thing is such that every
| point is in many dimensions
I'm not with you there, I believe, that is, that I do not fully grasp your
meaning
therefore before and
| afters get all mixed up.
Surely one only concludes about the mixup of before and after when one has
made considerable progress with the text. Without prior knowledge of the
text, on initial reading one would be confused, finding conventions violated
| I don't really see what your point about polysemy is?
Ha! I'm not sure myself. & that was in part me not knowing what your point
is, though that may well have been me and not you.
| Are you saying that all texts are open to reader
| interpretation, and so all texts are polysemous.
um... um-um-um... all texts are open to reader interpretation but I wouldn't
say that all texts exhibit or even encourage polysemy.
this
| may be true BUT some texts encourage it and some do
| not.
Yes. And your citing of Milton is a good example. Could we distinguish, do
you think, between polysemy and multiple readings? There would be overlaps
a-plenty, of course. A hypertext could be polysemous as well, but the link
structure of the hypertext enables multiple narratives to be derived from
it; and polysemy would come from other elements, linguistic coinage, which
you mention, among them as well as from the possible of multiple narratives.
What I was after emphasising is that the structural aspect in hypertext
which makes it hypertext is nothing much to do with the many particular
techniques JJ employed i.e. I don't see FW as hypertext though the
proposition is illuminating
I hope that's slightly less clearer mud
Lawrence
|