Tuesday 24 March 2015

St Patrick and the Druid in Pictures

'Much more is intended in the colloquy between Berkeley the arch druid and his pidgin speech and Patrick the [?] and his Nippon English. It is also the defence and indictment of the book itself, B's theory of colours and Patrick's practical solution of the problem. hence the phrase in the preceding Mutt and Jeff banter 'Dies is Dorminus master' = Deus est Dominus noster plus the day is Lord over sleep, i.e. when it days.'  

Joyce to Frank Budgen, 20 August 1939, Letters I p 406

It struck me that this St Patrick and the Druid piece is so visual that it calls out to be illustrated. So, inspired by Clinton Cahill, Stephen Crowe and John Vernon Lord, I've made my first attempt to illustrate Finnegans Wake.

The first picture shows the night world of the book, defended by the Archdruid Balkelly, who is wearing a 'heptachromatic sevenhued septicoloured roranyellgreenlindigan mantle'.  

Saint Patrick, on the right, is dressed as a Japanese Buddhist bonze (monk). He is the messenger of the dawn, and Japan is the land of the Rising Sun ('the messanger of the risen sun...shall give to every seeable a hue and to every hearable a cry)'. At his first appearance, Patrick is called 'the Chrystanthemlander with his porters of bonzos' (609.32): 'Chrystanthemlander' combines the Japanese chrysanthemum with Christ, anthem and lander. Joyce has him talking Japanese.

In the middle is High King Leary, who is also HCE and Finn, buried in the book's opening chapter, but who now 'rearrexes from undernearth the memorialorum.' (610.03)



The sky is covered with a thick black cloud because, in their encounter with St Patrick, 'the druids by their incantations overspread the hill and surrounding plain with a cloud of worse than Egyptian darkness.' (The Catholic Encyclopedia). This was miraculously dispelled by the saint.

The druid is claiming, in pidgin English, that the daytime visible world of colour is an illusion. When we see a coloured object, we are seeing the one colour it has reflected, rather than the six colours of the spectrum it has absorbed. But a true seer, like the druid, can see the 'sextuple glory of the light actually retained...inside them.'

Pointing at High King Leary, he explains that his red hair, orange kilt, yellow breasttorc, green mantle, blue eyes, indigo gem on his ring and violet warwon bruises on his face are all really various shades of green! 

A green-coloured resurrected king reminds me of Osiris - 'Pu Nuseht [the sun up] lord of risings in the yonderworld' 593.23

Patrick is not impressed at all by the druid's argument, and accuses him of being colour-blind: 'you pore shiroskuro blackinwhitepaddynger'. You poor chiaroscuro black and white Irishman. 'Shiro' is Japanese for white and 'kuro' for black. 

The sun rises, dispelling the black clouds of the Book of the Night, and Patrick kneels in worship before the rainbow. Daytime colours are visible, and the furious druid is defeated.



Patrick and the Druid are opposites in every way. The druid is dressed in rainbow colours but only sees green. Patrick is dressed in black and white ('niggerblonker'), but can see the rainbow.  But each will have their turn as day and night alternate.

'Yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only is order othered. Nought is nulled. Fuit fiat!' 613.13




Tuesday 17 March 2015

St Patrick and the Druid


'He is the only saint a man can get drunk in honour of,' Joyce said, in praise of Patrick....The only saint (Joyce) would praise was Saint Patrick, him he vaunted above all other saints in the calendar.' Padraic Colum

Happy St Patrick's Day!

It's a good day to look at Joyce's own treatment of St Patrick in this sketch, which he wrote in the summer of 1923 while on holiday in Bognor Regis. This was the fourth Wake sketch Joyce wrote, following Roderick O'Conor, Tristan and Isolde and St Kevin.

'St Patrick and the Druid' eventually found its way into Finnegans Wake, at the very end, on pages 611-2.


Joyce sent this to his patroness, Harriet Shaw Weaver on 2 August 1923, with a letter saying 'I send you this as promised – a piece describing the conversion of St Patrick by Ireland.' (Letters III: 79)

Harriet Shaw Waver was baffled by it, not least because much of it is written in pidgin English! 

But she made the above typescript for him, which he corrected, and which she then mislaid. So these corrections never found their way into the published text.  This was not among the manuscripts she gave to the British Museum and was published for the first time, in June 1989, by the James Joyce Broadsheet.

The piece is based on the story of Patrick's arrival in Ireland, and his magical duel with the Arch Druids of High King Leary. On the eve of Easter, the saint lit a paschal fire on the Hill of Slane. 

'avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick' 03.09

'The kindler of the paschal fire.' 128.33


At this time of year, it was the law that no fire could be lit before a new one was kindled at Tara. When the druids at Tara saw the light from Slane, they warned King Leary that he must put it out or it would burn forever. The Tripartite Life of St Patrick gives different versions of the duel that followed. 


Here, the chief druid is called Lochru, a name Joyce added to the typescript above, though the addition was lost.

In the story, the saint wins the magical duel. But in his sketch, Joyce only gives us the druid's side, and so he described the piece as 'the conversion of St Patrick by Ireland.'

Patrick's enemy is the 'archdruid of Irish chinchinjoss' - 'chin-chin' is pidgin for talking and 'joss' means god. So he's the top man in Irish God-talking - or theology!


Our druid is called Berkeley, because he's also the Irish philosopher and bishop, George Berkeley (above), author of An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), in which he argued that the objects of sight are not material, but ideas in the mind.

Joyce's archdruid has his own theory of vision, which he explains at length to an uncomprehending St Patrick. This is how Joyce wrote it in his very first draft, when it was in clear English, from www.ricorso.net:

'The archdruid then explained the illusion of the colourful world, its furniture, animal, vegetable and mineral, appearing to fallen men under but one reflection of the several iridal gradations of solar light, that one which it had been unable to absorb while for the seer beholding reality, the thing as in itself it is, all objects showed themselves in their true colours, resplendent with the sextuple glory of the light actually contained within them.'

So the druid is claiming that the visible world of colour is an illusion. When we see a coloured object, we are seeing the one colour it has reflected, rather than the six colours of the spectrum it has absorbed. But a true seer, like the druid, can see the 'sextuple glory of the light actually contained within.'

He then points to High King Leary, witnessing the duel, and uses him as an example of what a true seer can see:

'
To eyes so unsealed King Leary’s fiery locks appeared of the colour of sorrel green, His Majesty’s saffron kilt of the hue of brewed spinach, the royal golden breasttorc of the tint of curly cabbage, the verdant mantle of the monarch as of the green of laurel boughs, the commanding azure eyes of a thyme and parsley aspect, the enamelled gem of the ruler’s ring as a rich lentil, the violet contusions of the prince’s feature tinged uniformly as with an infusion of sennacassia.'

The druid claims that King Leary's red hair, orange kilt, yellow breasttorc, green mantle, blue eyes, indigo gem and violet bruises are all really green!
 
Joyce then expanded this, adding pidgin English and Latinate terminology - so 'absorb' became 'absorbere'. He also included a description of the druid's rainbow coloured outfit:

'
Topside joss pidgin fella Berkeley, archdruid of the Irish josspidgin, in his heptachromatic sevenhued roranyellgreeblindigan mantle then explained to Patrick the albed, the illusiones of hueful world of joss its furniture mineral through vegetable to animal appearing to fallen men under but one reflectione of the several iridal gradationes of solar light that one which that part of it had shown itself unable to absorbere whereas for the seer beholding interiorly the true inwardness of reality, the thing as in itself it is, all objects showed themselves in their true coloribus resplendent with the sextuple gloria of light actually retained within them. In other words, to vision so unsealed King Leary’s fiery locks appeared of the colour of sorrel green while, to pass on to his sixcoloured costume His Majesty’s saffron kilt seemed of the hue of boiled spinach the royal golden breast torc of the tint of curly cabbage the verdant cloak of the mouth as of the viridity of laurel leaves, the commanding azure eyes of a thyme upon parsley look, the enamelled Indian gem of the ruler’s maledictive ring as an olive lentil, the violaceous warwon contusions of the prince’s features tinged uniformly as with a brew of sennacassia.' 


I love the change of 'the violet contusions of the prince's features' to 'the violaceous warwon contusions of the prince’s features'. They're King Leary's battle bruises!



Joyce then dramatically developed the transition between the two parts of the druid's speech, changing 'In other words' to this:

'Patfella no catch all that preachybook belong Luchru Berkeley bymby topside joss pidgin fella Luchru Berkeley say him two time with other words' (August typescript)

Patrick didn't understand Berkeley's message, so Berkeley told him a second time in a different way.

You can follow the development of this to the published text, which has more pidgin, at the www.ricorso.net website and the James Joyce Digital Archive.

PATRICK'S ANSWER


When Joyce added the piece to his book in 1938, he included Saint Patrick's answer, making him Japanese, because Japan is the land of the Rising Sun.  Joyce could also have been thinking of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.

'the messanger of the risen sun...shall give to every seeable a hue' 609.19

At his first appearance, Patrick is called 'the Chrystanthemlander with his porters of bonzos' (609.32): 'Chrystanthemlander' combines the Japanese chrysanthemum with Christ, anthem and lander.  Christ is the 'risen sun' (Son). Bonzes are Japanese Buddhist priests or monks.

St Patrick's Japanese answer to the druid's argument is to accuse him of being colour blind:

'you pore shiroskuro blackinwhitepaddynger' 612.18

You poor chiaroscuro black and white Irishman. 'Shiro' is Japanese for white and 'kuro' for black. 

Patrick follows this with an obscure reference to the shamrock, which the saint famously used to demonstrate the Trinity (left).

In Joyce's version, it becomes a handkerchief:

'My tappropinquish to Me wipenmeselps gnosegates ahandcaughtscheaf of synthetic shammyrag to hims hers' (612.24)

There's a scatological level running through the whole piece, echoing the earlier Wake story, of 'How Buckley Shot the Russian General'. That story was reintroduced on page 610, when Juva says that King Leary has bet on both the druid and the saint: 'He has help his crewn on the burkeley buy but he has holf his crown on the Eurasian Generalissimo' 610.11-12

Patrick, the invader from the East, is the Eurasian Generalissmo.  

In the earlier story, the Irish Buckley shoots a Russian general after seeing him relieving himself and wiping himself with a green sod. Our 'shammyrag' plays the role of the sod in the earlier story, and it's not clear if Patrick's wiping his arse ('hims hers') or his nose ('gnosegates') with it! But the story of Buckley and the General is reversed – the Eurasian, wiping his arse with a shamrock, is now victorious over the Irishman.

The Saint then kneels down in prayer to the Rainbow - to the world of visible daytime colours:

'to Balenoarch (he kneeleths), to Great Balenoarch (he kneeleths down) to Greatest Great Balenoarch (he kneeleths down quite-somely), the sound salse sympol in a weedwayedwold of the firethere the sun in his halo cast. Onmen.' 612.27

'Arcobaleno' is Italian for rainbow. Balenoarch is also God, the whale (Balena, Baleine) ruler (arch).

'the firethere the sun in his halo cast. Onmen'  is a play on 'The Father the Son and the Holy Ghost, Amen' - the Trinity again.

The appearance of the sun - 'the firethere the sun' - spells defeat for the druid. In the original story, St Patrick caused the sun, blotted out by the druids, to reappear:

'The druids by their incantations overspread the hill and surrounding plain with a cloud of worse than Egyptian darkness. Patrick defied them to remove that cloud, and when all their efforts were made in vain, at his prayer the sun sent forth its rays and the brightest sunshine lit up the scene.'  

The Catholic Encyclopedia 

'That was thing, bygotter, the thing, bogcotton, the very thing, begad! Even to uptoputty Bilkilly–Belkelly-Balkally. Who was for shouting down the shatton on the lamp of Jeeshees. Sweating on to stonker and throw his seven. As he shuck his thumping fore features apt the hoyhop of His Ards.

Thud.' 612.31-6

The Archdruid, furious at his defeat, tries to shout down the sun. He shakes his thumb and forefingers in defiance at St Patrick's arse, or at the High King (Ard Ri). Then he falls to the ground with a thud. On the scatological level ('shatton' is 'shat on') this may be the sound of the Saint's turd hitting the ground.

The Irish hail the new dawn and the sunrise:

'Good safe firelamp! hailed the heliots. Goldselforelump! Halled they. Awed. Where thereon the skyfold high, trampa-trampatramp. Adie. Per ye comdoom doominoom noonstroom. Yeasome priestomes. Fullyhum toowhoom.'    613.01-4        
                          
The 'firelamp! is the sun and Ireland (''God save Ireland!' said the heroes'). 'Heliots' are helot and worshippers of Helios, the sun. Elsewhere Joyce calls Ireland 'Healiopolis' (24.180 and 'Healiotropolis' (598.08), after Tim Healy, governor general of the Irish Free State from 1922-8. McHugh says Dubliners called the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park 'Healiopolis'.



'THE DEFENCE AND INDICTMENT OF THE BOOK'


Describing this piece to Frank Budgen, Joyce wrote:

'Much more is intended in the colloquy between Berkeley the arch druid and his pidgin speech and Patrick the [?] and his Nippon English. It is also the defence and indictment of the book itself, B's theory of colours and Patrick's practical solution of the problem. hence the phrase in the preceding Mutt and Jeff banter 'Dies is Dorminus master' = Deus est Dominus noster plus the day is Lord over sleep, i.e. when it days.'  

20 August 1939, Letters I p 406

So Joyce's druid represents the night world of Finnegans Wake - a world when we don't see daytime colours, but do apprehend the sextuple glory of inner reality (even if it looks green because it's Irish!). Then St Patrick comes and brings the sunrise and daytime colours. The druid defends and St Patrick indicts Finnegans Wake.

Patrick and the Druid are opposites in every way. The druid is dressed in rainbow colours but only sees green. Patrick is dressed in black and white ('niggerblonker'), but can see the rainbow. But each will have their turn as day and night alternate.

'Yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only is order othered. Nought is nulled. Fuit fiat!'
613.13

What I wonder is how much of this did Joyce foresee when he originally wrote the sketch in Bognor Regis that summer in 1923? Did he even know he was going to write a night book?

Patrick drives out the snakes from Ireland

'MY IRISH SAINT'


A rare example of a red wine praised by Joyce
'Joyce, who loved wine, had the waiter bring us a special kind which he recommended to us very earnestly. It was Clos de Saint Patrice (otherwise known as Chateauneuf du Pape) from the part of France where Saint Patrick sojourned after he made his escape from captivity in Ireland....'He is the only saint a man can get drunk in honour of,' Joyce said, in praise of Patrick as well as the wine. The talk turned on other saints, but Joyce would have none of them.  He dismissed Saint Francis. He declared he took little interest in Augustine. Aquinas then...? Joyce would have none of the good Doctor either, or of Saint Ignatius, despite his Jesuit training.  The only saint he would praise was Saint Patrick, him he vaunted above all other saints in the calendar. 'He was modest and he was sincere,' he said, and this was praise indeed from Joyce. And then he added: 'He waited too long to write his Portrait of the Artist' – Joyce meant Saint Patrick's Confession.'

Padraic Colum, Our Friend James Joyce p182

The saint was with Joyce at the beginning, in Bognor Regis, and at the end of the writing process. Here's a lovely recollection from the Swiss writer, Jacques Mercanton:

'On the Quay de Lutry...he installed himself on the little wall at the harbor's edge, stretched out his legs, pulled his straw hat down over his forehead, closed his eyes like the lion of Asia and basked in the last sunlight....So he sat there, pondered over 'Work in Progress', spoke of St Patrick, whose intercession was indispensable if he was to complete the book, wherein he has the saint carry on a dialogue in Chinese and Japanese with a druid....He made no move to leave until the cold evening air began to chill him: 'I follow St Patrick,' he said, pointing to Mrs Joyce, who was motioning to us from the platform of a streetcar. 'It is the title of an erudite book by my friend Gogarty, the Buck Mulligan of Ulysses. It would interest you.'
  Then with a sigh, 'Without the help of my Irish saint, I think I could never have got to the end of it.'

'The Hours of James Joyce', Portraits of the Artist in Exile, ed Potts, p.219 

A footnote to this tells us that Gogarty's book was found on Joyce's desk after his death.










Wednesday 4 March 2015

Television in Finnegans Wake


Here's a scene from Mary Ellen Bute's wonderful film 'Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake', which you can see on youtube and ubuwebBute needed to find ways of visualising Joyce's text, and one of them was to re-invent the Wake narrator as a television newsreader. It might seem that she's taking liberties here, but television is in Joyce's book.

The 'Stories' chapter (p309-82) is set in a pub, based on the Mullingar House in Chapelizod, which I visited in 2013 and which has this plaque on the wall.



The extraordinary thing about the Wake pub is that it has a television set! 

If you travelled back to the Mullingar House in 1937-8, when the chapter was written, and told Mr Keenan, the landlord, that one day his pub would have a television, he would surely have dismissed the idea as science fiction. But I can confirm that it really now does have television three sets, showing sporting events. Finnegans Wake has the power to predict the future!

A Mullingar House television, photographed in April 2019

'There were no television sets in bars until eight years after FW was published, and no television sets in Irish bars for about twenty years later.  And yet Joyce has a television set in the bar!

Robert Anton Wilson from an interview transcribed by Scott McKinney and published in 2012 on the OnlyMaybe blog  

The pub television is first introduced as a radio, a  'tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler, as modern as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute....eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes.' (309.26).   Later we receive its broadcasts, first a weather forecast (p324) and then a Horse Race report (341-2).  The radio seems to be turning into a television, for the horse race is 'verbivocovisual':

'Up to this curkscraw bind an admirable verbivocovisual presentment of the worldrenownced Caerholme Event has been being given by The Irish Race and World....Hippohopparray helioscope flashed winsor places as the gates might see....' 341.18

Another Mullingar House television

Soon after, there's we get the first explicit mention of television:

'The other foregotthened abbosed in the Mullingaria are during this swishingsight teilweisioned.'
345.34

Zwischenzeit is German for 'interval' and Teilweise' means 'partly'. Perhaps the radio is only partly a television here.

Now follows the key passage, which Joyce wrote in December 1937. The pub drinkers have been listening to a double act, Butt and Taff, who are trying to tell the Crimean War story of 'How Buckley Shot the Russian General.' On page 349, the characters appear on the pub television screen, with Taff fading (becoming Tuff) and Butt emerging (becoming Batt). They are then replaced on the screen by the figure of the Russian General, a version of HCE:
 
A 1938 Baird television
In the heliotropical noughttime following a fade of transformed Tuff and, pending its viseversion, a metenergic reglow of beaming Batt, the bairdboard bombardment screen, if tastefully taut guranium satin, tends to teleframe and step up to the charge of a light barricade. Down the photoslope in syncopanc pulses, with the bitts bugtwug their teffs, the missledhropes, glitteraglatteraglutt, borne by their carnier walve. Spraygun rakes and splits them from a double focus: grenadite, damnymite, alextronite, nichilite: and the scanning firespot of the sgunners traverses the rutilanced illustred sunksundered lines. Shlossh ! A gaspel truce leaks out over the caeseine coatings. Amid a fluorescence of spectracular mephiticism there caoculates through the inconoscope stealdily a still, the figure of a fellowchap in the wohly ghast, Popey O’Donoshough, the jesuneral of the russuates. The idolon exhibisces the seals of his orders: the starre of the Son of Heaven, the girtel of Izodella the Calottica, the cross of Michelides Apaleogos, the latchet of Jan of Nepomuk, the puffpuff and pompom of Powther and Pall, the great belt, band and bucklings of the Martyrology of Gorman. It is for the castomercies mudwake surveice. The victar. Pleace to notnoys speach above your dreadths, please to doughboys. Hll, smthngs gnwrng wthth sprsnwtch! He blanks his oggles because he confesses to all his tellavicious nieces.                 349.06-29

This is an astonishing account of the working of television, merged with the Crimean War 'Charge of a light barricade' combines beams of light firing at the 'bombardment screen' with the Light Brigade charging the Russian guns at Balaclava.  You can imagine how Joyce's imagination took off at the name 'Light Brigade'!

Here's Erroll Flynn in the 1936 film, 'Charge of the Light Brigade'. If you've ever seen this on a cathode ray set, you will have experienced both the beams of light and the charging cavalrymen simultaneously. I wonder if Joyce saw this film, released just two years before his own Crimean War treatment.

There's also a religious dimension to Joyce's text, suggested by the word 'iconoscope', a technical television term, from the Greek eikon (image) and skopon (to watch). The General's appearance on the screen is like that of a Saint from a Russian Icon, or a Spectre - 'idolon' is from the Greek eidolon - spectre - which also gives us 'idol' . This all suggests the miraculous impact of early television.

icon of Alexander Nevsky, another Russian general


To Joyce, with his Jesuit education, 'General' would also recall the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, nicknamed the 'Black Pope'.  Between 1915 and 1942, this was Wlodimir Ledóchowski (right).

So Joyce calls his General 'Popey O’Donoshough, the jesuneral of the russuates', and describes him wearing various religious seals.

JOHN LOGIE BAIRD

 

'Bairdboard' is named after John Logie Baird, who transmitted the first television images in 1925.  This is the first known photograph of a moving image produced by Baird's 'televisor', in around 1926. It shows his business partner Oliver Hutchinson.


This is how I picture Joyce's Russian General emerging, like a spectre, on the screen of the Mullingar House television.

Joyce, who opened Ireland's first cinema in 1909, followed the development of television almost from the beginning. The Wake has what may be the earliest use of 'television' in literature, published in transition in 1927. This appears in the published text at 150.32-5:

transition, October 1927

I think one reason that Joyce was interested in television was that it was a new technology which required new words. 'Television' itself combines the Greek 'tÄ“le' (far) and the Latin 'visio' (seeing). It's almost a Wake word!  According to the OED, the word goes back to 1900, when The Century Magazine, imagining the future, declared 'Through television and telephone we shall see and hear each other as though face to face.'

Frank McNally of the Irish Times told me on twitter that his paper first used the word in 1906. He also discovered that there was a racehorse called Television in 1927, the same year that Joyce published his piece. Frank posted this picture from the 'Gossip from the Course' column of 9 June 1927.


Horses and televisions again! This is what Jung would have called a synchronicity.

In the passage above, Joyce has come up with his own alternative, 'faroscope', meaning 'far seer' (Greek 'skopon' again). It also has the special Wake echo of the 'fire escape' in Medina Place, Hove, used by Charles Stewart Parnell to escape from being caught with Kitty O'Shea (cf 'a skyerscape' 4.36; 'fuyerescaper! 228.29; 'fairescapading in his natsirt' 388.03). There's also 'Pharos', the Greek lighthouse.  

Imagine if the television pioneers had been Joyce fans. Along with the physicists' 'quark', adopted from Finnegans Wake by Murray Gell-Man, we might today talk about what we saw last night on our faroscopes rather than our televisions.

Here's another early use of the term, added to the text in the early 1930s:

'Television kills telephony in brothers' broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!' 52.18

Television will replace the telephone, for our eyes demand their turn, after our ears.

THE ICONOSCOPE

Zworykin with his iconoscope
The 1930s saw big leaps forward, with electronic television improving on Baird's mechanical system. This was the work of many inventors, but the most important was probably Vladimir Zworykin, who invented and named the iconoscope, the first practical television camera tube.



An iconoscope focussed an image through a camera lens on a  'mosaic screen', a mica plate, covered with vast numbers of tiny silver cells, made photo-sensitive by being coated with caesium (Joyce's 'caeseine coatings'). Each cell on the screen built up an electrical charge, whose strength depended on how much light it received. This complete image, or teleframe, was then scanned by a stream of electrons, which traversed the mosaic screen in a series of slightly sloped parallel lines. So Joyce gives us:

'Down the photoslope....the scanning firespot of the sgunners traverses the rutilanced illustred sunksundered lines'

Again, there's the Battle of Balaclava here, as the Russian gunners traverse the British lines. 'sunksundered' is an echo of 'rode the six hundred', from Tennyson's 'Charge of the Light Brigade'.

The image captured on the mosaic screen, in the form of a stream of electical impulses, was then converted into a radio carrier wave for transmission - 'borne by their carnier walve'

These signals were then picked up by radio receivers - tv aerials -and converted back into an electrical current, which was then amplified and used to create the image on the television screen.

Synchronizing pulses added to the signal at the end of every scan line and teleframe ensured that the receiver remained locked in step with the transmitted signal ('Down the photoslope in syncopanc pulses').

THE CATHODE RAY TUBE


To convert the electrical current back into the original image ('its viseversion'), televisions used the Cathode Ray Tube, also named by Zworykin. This was a vacuum tube containing an electron or spray gun, which bombarded a flourescent screen with a narrow beam of electrons ('bombardment screen... Spraygun rakes and splits them'). This caused the screen to glow, recreating the original teleframe.


BRITISH TELEVISION IN 1937


1937, when Joyce was writing, was a big year for television in Britain.  On 12 May, the BBC broadcast the coronation of George VI, which drew much a bigger and more widespread audience than expected.  Here's a passage from May the Twelfth, the Mass Observation survey.

May the Twelfth,  Faber and Faber, 1937


According to Television and Short Wave World, of April 1937,  pubs in South East England were now buying tv sets (despite Robert Anton Wilson's comment at the beginning of this post).


Thanks to Finn Fordham, who quotes this in his article 'Early Television and Finnegans Wake'.

Most viewers would have been watching on cathode-ray sets like this Baird televisor, advertised in the same magazine.

1937 advert for a Baird cathode-ray television.

But a new type of mechanical television was coming....




'ELECTROSCOPHONIOUS' TELEVISION

In the same year, the British Scophony company demonstrated a new system, a mechanical rival to the cathode-ray.  Scophony gave the the highest performance ever achieved with mechanical scanners.  This was designed for the home and for theatres.   



'There is no other television company or experimenter in the world, who has today anything equivalent in size of picture for the home and larger screens to those shown by Scophony. This is, therefore, an achievement of which Britain can be very proud.'

Television and Short Wave World  April 1937


 
'Scophony have developed a special type of liquid cell....The introduction of this special light relay which permits of the modulation of an almost unlimited amount of light puts an entirely different complexion on the possibilities of optical mechanical systems.... The whole secret of the success of the Scophony system can be summed up in four words, 'plenty of modulated light.''

Television and Short Wave World, April 1937

The system was able to produce plenty of modulated light thanks to two Scophony inventions -  Supersonic Light Control (the liquid cell above) and Split Focus. Here's how they are described in Scophony's 1938 manual, from Scotland's Early Technology library.





The Supersonic Light Control System was invented by John Henry Jeffree, Scophony's chief engineer, in 1934. You can read some articles about the system by Jeffree, posted by Chris Long on his optics website.


From the Perluma optics site

This 'simple explanation'(!) shows how the control worked.



I still don't fully understand this, but it looks mighty impressive! 

Here's another diagram from Scophony's brochure showing the light control's use in a television set. The light was scanned across the screen by two mirror drums, a small high speed one to produce the line scan, and a large slow speed unit to produce the frame scan.  





Joyce knew about Scophony.  'Split Focus' is referred to in 'splits them from a double focus'. He mentions the light control in a passage added to the Letter chapter in May 1938 in which he imagines the future of television:

'(his electroscophonious* photosensition under suprasonic light control may be logged for by our none too distant futures as soon as tone values can be turned out from Chromophilomos, Limited at a millicentime the microamp)' 123.12-15

*The published text has 'dectroscophonious', a mistake by the typist who misread Joyce's 'el' as 'd'.

A Scophony home television at Radiolympia

It looks as if the television in the pub episode is also a Scophony one. At the end the transmission seems to break down, as a voice exclaims:

'Hll, smthngs gnwrng wthth sprsnwtch!' 349.26

Hell, something's gone wrong with the supersonic switch! The missing letters represent missing parts of the television image.


In 1937, Scophony looked like the future, but that future never came. With the outbreak of war, the BBC stopped its transmissions. It was feared that German bombers would lock on to the signals, which would guide them straight to the Alexandra Palace. The radio engineers were needed for the war effort. 
 
Yet Scophony lives on in the pages of Finnegans Wake.


 
And here come those racehorses again!

JOYCE'S NOTES ON TELEVISION


A lot of the information above comes from Danis Rose, who transcribed Joyce's notes on television in his Index Manuscript, published by the Wake Newslitter Press in 1978. The Index Manuscript is a transcription of one of Joyce's last working notebooks, known as VI.B.46. You can also read Rose's explanations of television in the James Joyce Digital Archive.

Here are Joyce's notes, with page and line numbers added by Rose, showing where each item appears in the Wake.  The letters 'G' and 'S' refer to the green and sienna coloured crayons which Joyce used to cross out each entry when he transferred it to his text.  So 'shortwave' is not crossed out because Joyce didn't use it.


Rose writes, 'I have not been able to find a reference to the singular material, guranium satin, with whch Joyce, in II.3, constructs his bairdboard bombardment screen.'

Another unusual entry for an account of television is the word 'ghastly' which inspired Joyce's description of the Russian General as 'the wholly ghast' 349.19

POSTCRIPT 2021: JOYCE'S SOURCE DISCOVERED!


The source of Joyce's notes was finally tracked down, 42 years after Rose published them, in a brilliant piece of detective work by Ian MacArthur and Viviana-Mirela Braslasu's.  You can read their discoveries in 'Television in Notebook VI.B.46', in Genetic Joyce Studies 2020:

'Having earlier given the hostelry a radio, Joyce then added a television. The source of most of the notes that Joyce made in notebook VI.B.46 on page 095 come from the December 25th 1937 edition of Popular Wireless & Television Times3 with the magazine cover cameo’s boasting “All the Latest Television News”.'


This is the source of most of Joyce's notes, but not 'telavicious nieces' which is MacArthur and Braslau's transcription of Rose's 'telavicious mica'.

'It may be a pun on ‘television pieces’, which would tie the entry to the index Joyce was recording, or, to speculate even further, it may be a reference to some distant—hence the use of the prefix ‘tele-’ as ‘tella-’—relatives: the ‘vicious nieces’. But what Joyce really meant, we may never know.'

MacArthur and Braslau couldn't find  'guranium satin' either, but they suggest another possible source for this:

‘‘Uranium Satin’ was a type of glass, popular in the 1930’s and used mainly for vases and ornaments. Mildly radioactive from the compounds of the element added in the glass making, today it is a collecters’ item..... Joyce may have included it in his notes because of its green fluorescent properties. He had read the article “CONCERNING FLUORESCENCE” on page 394 of the magazine we identified. Public demonstrations of television started in 1936. The pictures were small and described as ‘greenish-hued’. Perhaps we can see a greenish ghostly image of the slain Russian General intruding onto the television screen of the pub...'

A uranium satin vase from ebay


Another mystery is
'logged'.  It's possible that Joyce was thinking of a radio log, which is referred to several times in the magazine's articles on radio.



Most of Joyce's notes were taken from just two articles, 'Television Topics', on the Scophony mechanical system, and 'Light and Electrons', a technical description of the electron beam system. He then used the notes to create a strange hybrid of a mechanical and an electronic television.  The Finnegans Wake device combines split focus and a supersonic light system from a mechanical television with the spray gun, caesium coating and iconoscope of an electronic one.


'I am really one of the great engineers, if not the greatest, in the world besides being a musicmaker, philosophist and heaps of other things.'


To Harriet Shaw Weaver, postcard of 16 April 1927, Letters Vol I, p250.

'TELEVISION TOPICS'


The most interesting article, 'Television Topics', is Joyce's source for his information on the Scophony system. From this, he took 'electric', 'scophony', 'split focus', 'supersonic light control', 'scanners', 'viceversus', 'traverses the picture', and 'scanning spot'. 

Imagine the reaction of James Joyce, who had never seen a television set, to this description:

'We have had the privilege of witnessing the first demonstration of television pictures received from Alexandra Palace on a large screen by mechanical means. And when we say large, we refer to a picture nearly six feet wide....Our biggest difficulty was in realising that we were actually looking at television and not watching an ordinary film being run through.'



The next page of the article supplied Joyce's list with 'teleframes' and 'Baird board'


MacArthur and Breslasu cite this section from 'Television Topics' as the source of 'Baird Board'.


What struck me here was the mention of the possibility of colour television, which Joyce also refers to in Finnegans Wake.

'his electroscophonious photosensition under suprasonic light control may be logged for by our none too distant futures as soon astone values can be turned out from Chromophilomos, Limited at a millicentime the microamp' 123.12

Here Joyce, imagining the none too distant future of television, invents his own colour television company -  Chromophilomos, Limited (Chrômophilos is artificial Greek, meaning colour-loving).

MacArthur and Breslasu tracked down Joyce's 'ghastly' to 'ghostly' which appears twice in a section on fluorescence in the 'Television Topics' article. This section also gave him 'fluorescence' (used in 'amid a fluorescence') and 'energy beam' (used in 'metenergic reglow of beaming Batt').


'LIGHT AND ELECTRONS'


The second article used by Joyce is a highly technical explanation of the electron multiplier. Here he found 'spray gun',  'photo-sensitive',  'bombarded', 'caesium coating', 'micro-amp',  'tone values'. 'stepped up' and 'iconoscope'



'Shortwave', the first item in Joyce's list, came from the heading of another article. 



The whole magazine is fascinating to read now, looking back from the television future that the writers were imagining. 

To finish, here's a lovely page showing what a family Christmas might be like around a television set.