Not With a Whimper, But a Bang

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 870, 6 April 1956, Page 26

Not With a Whimper, But a Bang

.HAVE never got to the end of Joyce’s formidable last work Finnegan's Wake, though I must have read the first thirty pages a dozen times. I have learned, though, that the work is based on the cyclic view of history first made coherent by the 17th century Italian philosopher Giafnbattista Vico. According to Vico, an evolving culture can be divided into four periods, which he calls theocratic, afistocratic, democratic and chaotic. The end of the chaotic period is announced by a thunderclap, awakening the heafts of mén to the supernatural, and then the cycle begins all over again. I could not help remembering this last work when T. A. Rafter opened from 2YC a series of talks on the hydrogen bomb. He took as his subject the power of the bomb, and though I Knew in a vague way of its enorrnous destructive power, it gave me a shudder to know that radio strontium could be deadly 220 miles from the centre of the explosion, and that the whole of the North Island from Wanganui south could be devastated by a single bomb, No one could say that our world is chaotic, nor that a great thunderclap hangs over it like a curse. Mr. Rafter’s last words wefe extinguished by a fault in transmission, but I did heat him put the choice ahead of us quite squarely We

can choose, he said, between a ruthless totalitarianism, ot long term physical mutations, transmitted through the, genes for many generations. Either prospect terrifies. There is surely the third way out of unity-against this madness which threatens to obliterate us all, but how that can be achieved is anybody’s euess.