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 --- from list phillitcrit-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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