tayzay wrote:
BoB: Is JJ making a point with the above excerpt? and if so, what is he pointing to?
Translation anyone?
Tayzay
BOB: Quotations from the writings of Marshall McLuhan (MM):
One of the etymologies of "matching" is "making" (mac-ian). This polarity is inherent in consciousness as such. Certainly in the cliche´-to-archetype process, if cognition is matching our sensory experience with the outer world, re-cognition is a repeat of that process. We have seen how dreaming involves a ricorso of this waking experience of the day: "The unpurged images of day recede" (Yeats). The whole of Finnegans Wake is a ricorso, a scrubbing purgation of private and corporate experience in the collective "dreaming back". "Making sense" is a phrase that indicates repetition of some experience which yields a sudden truth or meaning. In Le Demon de l'Anglogie Mallarme´ reveals a creative process as a recap of the actual stages of apprehension. That is, creativity is the parallel of cognition, a retracking of the labyrinth of sensation. Ancient mythology is packed with examples of this awareness. Daedalus, the mightiest maker or engineer of antiquity, contrived the labyrinth that enclosed the Minotaur. CA-MMWW-148
Necessarily, therefore, all artistic imitation first arose from the pagan liturgies or mysteries. If Daedalus was the first to note this relation, Joyce was the first to see in these ancient rituals of descent and return the perfect externalization, in drama and gesture, of the stages of human apprehension. The retracing of any moment of cognition will thus provide the unique artistic form of that moment. And its art form coincides with its quiddity, except that the artist arrests what is otherwise fleeting. IL-MM-34
Any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition is a "minotaur" which must be slain by the hero artist. Anything which interferes with cognition, whether concupiscence, pride, imprecision, or vagueness is a minotaur ready to devour beauty. So that Joyce not only was the first to reveal the link between the stages of apprehension and the creative process, he was the first to understand how the drama of cognition itself was the key archetype of all human ritual myth and legend. And thus he was able to incorporate at every point in his work the body of the past in immediate relation to the slightest current of perception. JQ-MM-5
Bob Dobbs