ONE OF KHLEBNIKOV'S MANIFESTOS begins with a radio—call: “To all! To all! To all!"[1] There is a crucial point in Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" where a similar call is made:
- Sandhias! Sandhias! Sandhias!
- Calling all downs. Calling all downs to dayne. Array!
- Surrection. Eire—weeker to the wohld bludyn world. 0 rally, 0 rally, 0 rally! Phlenxty, 0 rally! To what lifelike thyne of the bird can be.[2]
The Eastern note (the first thrice—repeated word is a chant from a Sanskrit prayer), the call to the "whole world", the idea of re—birth (the resurrection and the Phoenix) and the-idea of mankind being able to live like a bird——all these Show that the parallels with Khlebnikov are quite close. Marshall McLuhan thinks that
- James Joyce's book is about the electrical retribalization of the West and the West's effect on the East...[3]
What he means is that "Finnegans Wake" is a sort of premonition of the end of literature, the end of the age of literacy, as Radio and electronic communications media threaten to supplant the familiar primacy in art and culture of the written word. The complete dominance in culture of the written word has been a largely Western fact: the cultures of the East have preserved more of their tribal, oral heritage. Hence the coming of Radio in a sense redresses the balance between East and West, inasmuch as it promises, on the one hand the superseding of the West's culture of literacy,and on the other an extraordinary new life on a global scale for a transformed version of the oral cultures of the East.[4]
