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09106_Field_TCGG T871.txt
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themselves to one side of it, the mythic and collective. J. S. Mill,
Matthew Arnold, and a great many others devoted themselves
to the other side of the dilemma, the problem of individual
culture and liberty in an age of mass-culture. But neither side
has its meaning alone, nor can the causes of the dilemma be
found anywhere but in the total galaxy of events that
constitute literacy and Gutenberg technology. Our liberation
from the dilemma may, as Joyce felt, come from the new
electric technology, with its profound organic character. For the
electric puts the mythic or collective dimension of human
experience fully into the conscious wake-a-day world. Such is
the meaning of the title Finnegans Wake . While the old Finn
cycles had been tribally entranced in the collective night of the
unconscious, the new Finn cycle of totally interdependent man
must be lived in the daylight of consciousness.