Metalanguage
First it should be considered the following:
In Ulysses there was
the full page S, M, P and dot until
the 1961 editions at the beginning of each of the three sections and the dot
at the end.
In Finnegans, it seems that only when it was still Work in Progress
it was used the square symbol for the book,
or for the title that stands for it.
I do not know of any such symbolism, I mean some kind of figure or imagery that might have existed standing for Portrait of an Artist (or Stephen Hero), or the Play.
I am investigating but it seems to me that is unlikely that Joyce was sufficiently mature or aware of this "method" he would use in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
It is obvious that the three books are autobiographical, written at specific ages and dwelling with problems of such ages.
Since the problems he was experimenting when he wrote The Portrait of the Artist as Young Man were, from the literature point of view, his idea of aesthetics or the style he was abut to be the foremost representative, let's elaborate a bit about it.
The new aesthetic Jame Joyce brought to Literature
What Joyce essentialy found and has made his name upon can be better understood through the book of Douglas Hofstadter:
press
it
We are going to leave out Bach and Goedel out and use Escher to connect Joyce to the concept:
In Brazil, young people aspiring to attend College are submitted to a tropicalized version of ACT and recently there was a question about language function under metalanguage and specifically the question was about perhaps the most famous music of Bossa Nova, Samba de Uma Nota Só, or One Note Samba. Which marvellously serve us here, because we can figure Joyce nicely and comfortably through one of Brazil's best contribution to the world music.
I quote THAÍS NICOLETI DE CAMARGO, Portuguese-speaking consultant from the Brazilian Newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, commenting the ACT of that year and which we use here to set starting parameters for our case of Joyce:
"The language, read in the context of communication theory, is the whole system capable of producing communication. In this sense, music and painting, for example, are languages. Each has its own code, which must be shared by sender and the receiver of the message so that there is, in fact, the transmission of the intended idea.
The so-called "functions" are emphasis of resources that operate according to the intent of the message producer. The advertising language, whose goal is persuasion, strengthens the traits that identify the receiver, so that he or she is the center of the communication process.
The meta-language, one of the functions of language, often has been used as an artistic resource. As function, what happens is that the language turns to its own example, for instance, when we ask someone the meaning of an unfamiliar word. In literature, it is a resource capable of creating distance between the reader and the work. Hence the fact that it was widely used by modernist authors, which had as part of their aesthetic the intention to make the reader realise that art is an "artistic work.
To understand the issue, it is interesting to hear the "One Note Samba", one of the landmarks of bossa nova, from Antonio Carlos Jobim and Newton Mendonça, immortalised in the voice of João Gilberto and Frank Sinatra, with the lyrics:
This is just a little samba
Built upon a single note
Other notes are sure to follow
But the root is still that note
Now this new note is the consequence
of the one we've just been through
As I'm bound to be the unavoidable consequence of you
There's so many people who can talk
and talk and talk
And just say nothing or nearly nothing
I have used up all the scale I know and at the end I've come
To nothing I mean nothing
So I come back to my first note as
I must come back to you
I will pour into that one note all the love I feel for you
Any one who wants the whole show show do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ci-do
He will find himself with no show better play the note you know
The melody performs exactly what the lyrics say, because these verses are in fact sung in a single musical note. This explicit manipulation of musical resources sets the metalinguistic function in this song. And the composer's intention was to show the public a new concept of popular music, which incorporated the melody diction of speech, stylised in the insistent repetition of the same musical note.
Escher's framework chosen by Fuvest brings a design that, like a kind of vicious circle, draws itself, melting in the screen space the product and producer of the artistic creator.
It is exactly what Joyce does and it serves marvellously to what Aristotle said:
"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."
An that's what modernist authors are all about.
To kill it completely we must just
add the medium between the sender
and the receiver, which is highlighted in
red above and is a perfect example of what McLuhan meant when he said that
"The medium is the message."
And it is also the perfect case of the blind men in Aesopus fable... People from the Ivory Tower, stuck with their own set of what it is, what it is not and what it should be, fail to realise not only Joyce, but McLuhan also...
I did a job analysing Joyce under McLuhan where it is extensively demonstrated what it is said above and everything said there using Ulysses is valid here for Finnegans and does not need to be repeated.
We go directly to the message, or better yet, the medium, as it was used by Joyce, using excerpts from Finnegans.