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06855_Field_TCUM T420.txt
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1996-04-10
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16 lines
The same nursery rhyme comments on the consequences
of the fall of Humpty-Dumpty. That is the point about the
King’s horses and men. They, too, are fragmented and
specialized. Having no unified vision of the whole, they are
helpless. Humpty-Dumpty is an obvious example of integral
wholeness. The mere existence of the wall already spelt his fall.
James Joyce in Finnegans Wake never ceases to interlace these
themes, and the title of the work indicates his awareness that
“a-stone-aging” as it may be, the electric age is recovering the
unity of plastic and iconic space, and is putting Humpty-
Dumpty back together again.
The potter’s wheel, like all other technologies, was the
acceleration of an existing process. After nomad food-
gathering had shifted to sedentary plowing and seeding, the
need for storage increased. Pots were needed for more and