Newsgroups: alt.tanaka-tomoyuki,alt.fan.hofstadter,alt.books.james-joyce Subject: TT: Parallels between GEB and FW Date: Aug 1998 let's see. have i left out any similarities, except the real obvious ones like these? --- both are books. --- both are written by white men. =------------------------------------------------------------------- Parallels between GEB and FW by TANAKA Tomoyuki =------------------------------------------------------------------- contents: -- preface -- short description "GEB, Tristram, Joyce" from the "GEB" FAQ -- 1. long -- 2. inspired by Carroll -- 3. contains puns and hidden tricks -- 4. constant allusions in form and content -- 5. end of book points to the beginning -- 6. special emphasis on certain initials -- 7. covers many subjects -- 8. centered around riddles -- 9. instructs and entertains -- Appendix: some loose ends =------------------------------------------------------------------- -- preface the similarity between GEB (Go:del, Escher, Bach) and FW (Finnegans Wake) was something i noticed as soon as i started reading GEB. and this similarity was one of the things i asked Prof Hofstadter in my first letter to him, which i wrote in 1982. since then, i've learned more about both GEB and FW. i included a short description "GEB, Tristram, Joyce" in the "GEB" FAQ (see next section). i think this is quite enough for a Usenet FAQ file. i will elaborate a bit here. this material will be a part of the book on GEB themes i'm hoping to write/compile within the next 10 years. (let me know if you want to contribute chapters, sections, or ideas.) =------------------------------------------------------------------- -- short description "GEB, Tristram, Joyce" from the "GEB" FAQ | | in GEB the author comments that GEB contains "Shandean | digressions". (Page 748) | | the adjective "Shandean" comes from this book | The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. | (1759-67) by Laurence Sterne | | which is considered to be one of the strangest books ever | written. the entire book is available online at | . | | one literary work DRH probably had in mind when he wrote GEB is | "Finnegans Wake" by James Joyce. the book begins as | follows: | "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to | bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of | recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. | Sir Tristram, [...]" | | http://www.mcelhearn.com/joyce.html | http://cal.bemidji.msus.edu/English/Morgan/SharedTexts/FWpage.html | http://www.con.wesleyan.edu/~polson/finnegans.html | http://plaza13.mbn.or.jp/~FWKEY/FALLtxt.htm | http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/jj/fwake2.html | [one more link by Jorn here] | | characteristics GEB and "Finnegans Wake" share: | long, inspired by Carroll, contains puns and hidden | tricks, constant allusions in form and content, end of | book points to the beginning, special emphasis on | certain initials ("GEB", "EGB" in GEB; "HCE", "ALP" in | FW), etc. | | for more parallels see | http://www.cs.indiana.edu/hyplan/tanaka/GEB/GEB_FW.txt | |------------------------------------------------------------------- now. i'll elaborate on the similarities. =------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 1. long GEB is 777 pages. FW is 628 pages. curiously, DRH's and JJ's other books are all about the same size. DRH: MT, LTbdM and JJ: Ulysses. [elaborate] this probably has to do with the maximal size of a book that can be comfortably manufactured. but it also is probably related to the amount of information that can be held in an author's head without the details getting "swapped out". =------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 2. inspired by Carroll GEB's debt to Carroll is plain for everyone to see. right on the cover of GEB it says "A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll" (as a sub-sub-title). the main characters of the dialogues T. and A. are from Carroll. etc. etc. [elaborate] FW's debt to Carroll is more complex. i've often wondered two things. 1. if the portmanteau word or the Jabberwocky language is completely Carroll's invention, then it seems that the homage that FW shows to Carroll seems too meager. since the entire FW is written in that language, i'd expect a big dedication to Carroll in front, like the one to Pound ("il miglior fabbro") in The Waste Land. 2. would Joyce, the innovator of literary technique, be contently spending the last two decades of his life on FW, when the main technique used in FW were invented by someone else already? i recently found out the answers to these questions in James Atherton's "The Books at the Wake" (1959). the chapter 5 "Carroll, the unforeseen precursor" details Carroll's influences on Joyce. in a nutshell, Joyce didn't know about Jabberwocky until parts of FW were published, and many people pointed out the similarities to him. Joyce began reading Carroll and Carroll's biography, and was shocked. but then Joyce also found the characters Carroll/Dodgson, Alice, Isa Bowman, and other of Carroll's friends extremely useful for the design of FW, and busily worked them into FW. ["Jest jibberweek's joke" etc --- poss. elaborate] =------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 3. contains puns and hidden tricks -- 4. constant allusions in form and content obvious [elaborate] such books naturally invite annotations and, yes, annotations are written about both. annotations to GEB were prepared by Hofstadter for the translators of GEB. (see LTbdM, p.57-59). Roland McHugh describes how he started his FW annotations, published several years later as a book. "I began to annotate my copy of FW. I transferred information to it in very small writing, using a mapping pen. I could actually get two lines of writing between every two FW lines, and I used twelve different colours of ink to specify different languages." (McHugh "The Finnegans Wake Experience". p.55-56) =------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 5. end of book points to the beginning obvious [elaborate] =------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 6. special emphasis on certain initials "GEB", "EGB" in GEB Giant Electronic Brain Egbert B. Gebstadter trip-lets on the cover also A and T ATTACA DNA bases: A T C G "HCE", "ALP" in FW Howth Castle and Environs Here Comes Everybody Haveth Childers Everywhere =------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 7. covers many subjects usually a book covers only one subject. GEB and FW cover many subjects, not just one or two like regular books do. and they cover these subjects by making connections between them. ("Tao of Physics" did this with two.) GEB covers: math, logic, Go:del's proof, Escher, Magritte, Bach, Cage, programming, AI, molecular biology, Zen [elaborate] FW covers: Vico's philosophy of human history, fall and rise of man, Dublin, history of Ireland, the sacred books, countless other things having to do with Western literature and history [elaborate] so in terms of subjects covered there is almost no overlap. this and the difference in style (GEB is written for the general reading public; FW is not) ensures that there is little overlap in the readership. =------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 8. centered around riddles GEB is centered around AI, the riddle of human mind. while discussing that main riddle, various sub-riddles are encountered: --- Go:del's proof, its method and its ultimate meaning --- mystery of life (life vs. non-life) --- various paradoxes --- Zen koans the central riddle for FW is the FW itself: what do parts of FW say (each line of FW is a riddle), and what does FW mean as a whole? =------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 9. instructs and entertains many textbooks contain cartoons (e.g. "Calvin and Hobbs") meant to entertain. that's not what i mean by "instruct and entertain". GEB is a special book. one of the aspects that make it special is this: "it is a book that instructs the reader about a serious, intellectual subject; but the author also goes out of his/her way to entertain the reader". (the serious, intellectual subjects in GEB are the Go:del's proof, AI, molecular biology, (Bach, Escher, Magritte, etc), as listed earlier.) when i thought of other books that fit this description, i could think of only one: TUTUI (TSUTSUI) Yasutaka. "bungakubu tadano kyouju" (1990, in Japanese) in each chapter of this comedic novel the protagonist gives a lecture loosely based on Terry Eagleton, "Literary Theory". i found it extremely funny, and instructive (i took notes). in the margins are short glossary entries for terms and people. (but i'm asking myself, can Tutui's book be used as the MAIN textbook in a college course? what if Tutui's book were less risque?) and possibly one more: "How to be ridiculously well read in one evening" (Penguin) =-------------------------------------------------------------------- i remember the pleasant surprise when the "Marx for Beginners", "Capitalism for Beginners", "Nietzsche for Beginners"... series of books came out. but in my mind they are not in the same league as GEB and "tadano" and FW. it is because in the "for Beginners" books, the words and the pictures are not integrated at all. i love Smullyan's books, but these (as well as Rucy Rucker "Infinity and the Mind" or Michio Kaku's books) don't quite compare with GEB/FW in the elaborateness of the efforts to entertain (hidden tricks, etc). =-------------------------------------------------------------------- i couldn't think of FW in this way before, but now i discovered all the guidebooks (which Joyce must have fully anticipated), i can think of FW as a main textbook (and a humorous one) for learning about all the subjects that it covers. five decades after the publication of FW, the state of FW guidebooks (sub-textbooks) is quite good --- Skeleton Key, Annotations, Census, etc and there's even a cartoon book. it is as if the GEB dialogues correspond to FW, and the main text of GEB corresponds to the FW guidebooks. =-------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Appendix: some loose ends --- this must be a random coincidence: GEB features Dr. Earrwig. FW's main character is H.C.Earwicker. (I'm sure JJ makes puns using the word "earwig".) --- Martin Gardner, talking about the complexity of GEB, compares it to JJ's Ulysses. --- both begin by alluding to Genesis. --- both were translated into Japanese by Yanase. =-------------------------------------------------------------------- END