" Well it’s curious; I’ve been talking about how modern quantum physics is getting more and more Joycean, and ethology is confirming a lot of Joyce’s insights into anal-territorial behaviors and so on.
And Joyce was also a major influence on Marshall McLuhan, as McLuhan always admitted. Every book McLuhan wrote, he talks about how much he learned from Joyce. And the whole McLuhan view of how media affect the mind - Finnigan's Wake has a whole history of media in it, from sign language up to television, which didn’t exist then.
That’s another of the precognitions in Finnigan's Wake, the television set in the bar, and 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! But McLuhan got the whole idea of the global village and the effect of media on mind, and the evolution of mind reflected in and being fed back to by the evolution of media. All that’s in Finnigan's Wake.
Joyce developed that out of Vico, the sociologist who studied how language is - how songs, in Vico’s theory, songs lead to languages and languages lead to war, and every war is really a dance that people have agreed to do without quite realiziing how they get into it, because they’re hypnotized by their language, and they don’t quite realize what they’re doing, but they’re going through this evolutionary pattern that’s more intelligent than they are.
It seems to be some kind of - Burroughs would call it a virus, Vico calls it divine providence.
Some people think Vico is very sarcastic; he was writing while the Inquisition was still in full force. "
Robert Anton Wilson
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