MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND JAMES JOYCE:
BEYOND MEDIA

"abnihilisation of the etym"

Donald Theall and Joan Theall

Joyce anticipated this relationship in speaking of "bits" in relation to TV broadcasting in this pub scene where the customers watch a fight on TV (possibly the first fictional TV bar room scene in literary history). The TV image of the fighters, Butt and Taff, has its own metamorphic quality, closely associated through language with the newly discovered medium of television and also relating tales of some historic battles. TV is the "abnihilisation of the etym" (discussed below), which Joyce predicted would occur in the world of "verbivocovisual presentements" (TV and film):

[In the heliotropical noughttime following a fade of transformed Tuff and, pending its viseversion, a metenergic reglow of beaming Batt, the bairdboard bombardment screen, if tastefully taut guranium satin, tends to teleframe and step up the charge of a light barricade. Down the photoslope in syncopanc pulses, with the bitts bugtwug their teffs, the missledhropes, glitteraglatteraglutt, borne by their carnier walve.
Spraygun rakes and splits them from a double focus: grenadite, damnymite, alextronite, nichilite: and the scanning firespot of the sgunners traverses the rutilanced illustred sunksundered lines Shlossh! A gaspel truce leaks out over the caseine coatings. Amid a fluorescence of spectracular mephiticism there coaculates through the iconoscope steadily a still, ... I (Finnegans Wake: 349.07).

Terms associated with TV broadcasting and TV technology abound in this passage about the transformation and "viseversion" (vice versa imaging) of Tuff's image.
The name of the discoverer of television, John Logie Baird (in 1925, the year before Joyce began the Wake), is included, since the television receiver is described as the bairdboard bombardment screen," which receives the composite video signal "in sycnopanc pulses" (the synchronization pulses that form part of the composite video signal), coming down the "photoslope" on the "carnier walve" (i.e., the carrier wave which carries the composite video signal). The receiver is conceived as a "light barricade" against which the charge of the light brigade (the video signal) is directed. "Teleframe", "scanning", "spraygun", "caesium", and "double focus" all refer to some aspect of TV technology and their use can be similarly explained.

The above quoting from Finnegans Wake was Joyce's version for his self immortalization project from the following: How does a TV work?

Definitively far beyond media...