Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication by Donald F. Theall (review)

274 LEITERS IN CANADA 1996 new culture.' It is hard not to share much of the editor's admiration of, and alienation from, Colin McKay. Here such ambiguous sentiments have been channelled into a deeply nuanced and impressive study. (JAMES NAYLOR) Donald F. Theall. Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era afTechnology, Culture, and Communication University of Toronto Press 1995. xxi, 328. $55.00 Three theses are advanced in Donald Theall's Beyond the Word: the idea that 'a common productive activity is present in all cultural production from cartoons and comic strips, TV series and hypermedia, to poetry, painting, and drama'; the centrality of James Joyce's literary innovations in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to contemporary technological culture; and the vital role of contemporary technological culture in shaping social values, identities and, most important, people's lives. To make these arguments Theall covers substantial critical ground, but his approach is primarily informed by communication theory - Marshall McLuhan in particularwith frequent references to thinkers as diverse as Giambattista Vico, Gregory Bateson, and Mikhail Bakhtin. The cultural examples on which Theall relies are equally broad (and support Theall's first thesis above); in addition to references to Joyce he includes examples that range from Shakespeare, Pope, and Lewis Carroll to film (especially films directed by Fellini and Makavejev), advertisements, and science fiction. The first thesis here takes issue both with the isolation of different forms of cultural production from one another and with the privileging of one form of cultural production over another. Theall insists that all forms of cultural production have the potential to contribute significantly to social life, the negotiation of cultural tensions, and the activity of transformation (hence his third thesis). The most important aspect of this point lies in its contribution to communication theory: instead of relying primarily on forms of media art, Theall persuasively argues that communication theory can benefit from also drawing on the so-called higher arts. Indeed, he argues, these different arenas of cultural production cannot be separated. At the same time, the range of Theall's references allows for several interesting and lively juxtapositions of different forms of cultural activity. But while, for Theall, both advertisements and art embody aspects of the poetic broadly conceived, Joyce's work is paradigmatic of both modem technological culture and its transformative potential. Theall, following McLuhan, argues that Joyce's writing anticipates future ideas in a way that advertisements typically do not. And yet he never fully tackles the challenge that Joyce's work poses to most readers. When Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were first published they were repeatedly criticized for their difficulty and obscurity. To be sure, other more accessible writers like HUMANITIES 275 twenlt1eth-<:enll:wrv ,..'''\"............,',.........._ ....."......... - but this is an "' ..." ... ...,....o"... f- that is in tension with the more democratic thesis that Theall is h ......'tAT01[T01" is his on the social to invest cultural with He describes the pnras,es) as rthe exuberance the Word is sometimes uneven in its thE~oretiCal1nt:ef1iTel1tl()nS itnevertheless communicates its own eX~)1o:ratj)rv mSlgnLt, and paSSlOlrl.. David G. Creamer. paper ...