File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_1997/phillitcrit.9711, message 595


Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 00:13:46 -0500
From: Gregory {Greg} Downing <downingg-AT-is2.nyu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Farbenlehre


Pat, you may also want to take a look, at some point, depending on the angle
you are approaching this from, at the way in which Joyce uses (Anglo-Irish)
Berkeley's _New Theory of Vision_ as a crucial grounding for some of the
epistemic presuppositions of _Finnegans Wake_. One of the very first
passages of _Work in Progress_ (its pre-1939 title), drafted in summer 1923,
is the "pidgin fella Balkelly" passage (in any FW edition -- with one
uncommon expection -- at pp. 611-12). I.e., it was one of the first four
passages drafted, but was not "placed" in the book till very late, and was
located right near the end (the whole thing is 628 pp.).

If you want more detailed exegesis, contact me -- but the story is basically
that Berkeley is the celtic (and chinese...) archdruid who argues that the
color we think we see when we look at something is only the color that the
object in question is reflecting and thus "rejecting" so to speak, and that
the true inward colors of a thing are all the colors that it absorbs and
that we therefore do not see. So the inward reality that we do not see,
given ordinary perception, is complex and multicolored, whereas "common
sense" acknowledges only the one reflected/rejected color -- so that in the
case of Balkelly's debate opponent, Same Patholic, everything is green green
green green green green green (OK, in Wakese, "sorrelwood herbgreen, ...hue
of boiled spinasses, ...justsamelike curlicabbis, ...verdant readyrainroof,
...plenty laurel leaves, ...olive lentil, etc."

Joyce claimed "pidgin fella" was the defense of the book itself, and
certainly insists on recognition of complexity and subjectivity as basic
premises. Talk about your Farbenlehre.

Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing-AT-nyu.edu or downingg-AT-is2.nyu.edu



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