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unchangeable stuff of human history. It is, in brief, the verbal
equivalent of the processes that are its subject and theme; the con–
crete realization of the identity of time and space. But since it
does possess its own being, its own ontology, it may be said to stand
in relation to time-space as a part to a whole-a synecdoche. Or,
shall we say, it is a kind of
Logos
of the Einsteinian vision of the
universe.
According to Vico, each of the three successive ages of history
had its appropriate mode of communication: in the Theocratic
period, it was the Hieroglyphic; in the Heroic, the Metaphorical;
and in the Civilized, the Abstract. "The language of the gods was
all dumb, and very little articulate; the language of heroes was
composed of equal quantities of articulation and dumbshow;' the
language of men was all articulated, and very little in dumb-show."
By the Hieroglyphic, Vico seems to mean that before primitive men
could register in speech their reactions to Nature-the thundering
of the Sky-god, for example--they made use of signs and gestures
-an anticipation of ·the school of Paget in England today. And
since the visual precedes the aural image, the first recorded lan–
guage is the pictograph. Now one of the features of the Joycean
method that we have left unmentioned is the importance of the
visual aspect of the word, its "look" on the page. Although rarely
if
ever does a verbal effect depend on the eye to the exclusion of
the ear, he does employ punctuation, space-divisions, capitals, and
other visual equivalents for aural effects. Modern language, inso–
far as it is set down in print, is pictorial; and part of our response
to the meaning of a word is our sense of its visual image. To this
extent it also is hieroglyphic.
The point is worth making because Vico believed that in the
period of "the barbarism of reflection" that marked the final stage
in
the historical cycle language returned once again to the hiero·
glyphic. This is not a clean-cut stage like the others but rather one
of confused transition between decadence and the emergence of
real barbarism. It is the moment when the rational and the pre–
rational function side by side with mutual indifference. In this
Alexandrian interlude the scholiasts, encyclopaediasts, and other
Joyce includes uproarious parodies of the first (the whole second
"looters" of the knowledge that has just been accumulated function
side by side with the prophets of the emergent barbarism. Since
