Last week I went into the forest and read Finnegan's Wake.
Well, I guess read is the wrong word.
You don't read Finnegan's Wake, Joyce's seminal modernist work.
You simply allow it to wash over you, as if viewing an endless stream of artwork the ultimate European gallery.
You allow it to climb inside your mind and rustle around for a while, attacking countless houses of meaning, a display of pure aesthetic mastery.
In the Wake, Joyce is totally unrepentant with his assault on his audience.
He assaults language and pre-determined meaning in all its forms.
He attacks the totalitarian world of the signifier through a beautifully constructed artistic artifice, made up of half and quarter meanings, diffusions, dislocations and glimpses of agreed upon written form.
All of this goes on against the backdrop of the infinite rhythm which is understood largely through the language of music.
The words and sentences from the Wake play out inside your mind like a wondrous, disjointed symphony, written in a key which our ears have yet to become accustomed.
In terms of its meaning, the work is a blatant challenge to a set of meanings, buried within language, which we take for granted in our daily quest to communicate and make sense of our world.
At the core of The Wake, sits the gem - that all meaning in language is arbitrary - we simply created it ourselves and through the continuous assertion of countless egos, eventually closed the limits of meaning.
Yet Joyce in this work appears to be incessantly anti-established meaning.
He never stops aggressively identifying the arbitrary nature by which we assert language as a way to govern our existence.
In effect, Joyce repeatedly splits the technology (language) which we employ over and over to understand our world, to the very core.
This book is like a log splitter upon linguistic meaning.
The meaning which was built up over the years of human civilisation is taken and inverted, played with, reversed, destroyed, laid waste to.
"With futurist one-house ballet battle pictures and pageant of past history worked up with animal variations amid everglaning mangrovemazes and beorbtraktors by Messrs.
" Why does Joyce carry out this task so relentlessly? I think when I asked myself question, everything finally clicked with Bob Dobbs and his repeatedly referenced connection between the Wake and the android Meme.
It is Bob's view that the era we happen to have just come through circa 1993 to current is what's known as the Android Meme.
He defines this as "...
the ability of human-invented technology...
to acquire the intimacy of speech and intuition.
" In other words, the Android Meme is technology that has the qualities of "being alive.
" We download the archetype of the android meme into our nervous systems through the media and through television and most average people have very little power to resist it.
While the android meme is still in infancy, still growing and gathering energy by furnishing and renovating the minds of the innocent, it is works such as Finnegan's Wake which stand in the way of its total domination.
Bob states that, "The Android Meme absorbs any response made to it.
The artist's task is to understand and meditate upon the why's and wherefore's of its present techniques.
This effort has nothing to do with how an artist survives economically.
" Thus, The aim of the wake is to overwhelm all assumed modes of thought.
Joyce achieves this aim through continuous play - by teasing, toying and de-centering the reader.
As a duty towards fighting against the Android meme, I recommend everyone go to forest at least once and explore this masterpiece.