From Cliche to Archetype 319 the production of the hoard of objects and a diversity of diets. Man becomes a producer and a consumer, organizing trade and markets with ensuing wars (“cormacks and daltons” [line 9]… “Racketeers and bottloggers” [line 19]). It’s the money economy, i.e. “allforabit” where “the tally turns round the same balifuson” (lines 18–19). The entire page is devoted to tracing the “meanderthalltale” (line 25), the labyrinthine ways of the alphabet technology as a kind of prototype of all cliché or breakthroughs. One of the principal effects of “allforabit” specialism is not only the production of a “hoard of objects” (line 8) but the endless tossing of same onto the middenheap. New technology as an automatic means of scrapping or rejecting the preceding culture creates the “liberorumqueue” (line 24), the endless production “to con an we can” (line 25). Writing as a means of retrieving “ancientry” (line 33) led to a vast scrap heap of retrieved data even before the advent of “lumpend paper” (line 31). The middenhide grows mountainous with the castoffs of cultures and technologies. One theme in “middenhide” is the popular invisible quality of the environments created by new cliché or techniques. The forms of these technologies are imprinted not only on human language but on the outer world as well: “But the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever, man, on all matters” (lines 35–36) gave us the “ruins,” the deciphering and retrieval of which fascinates the literate humanist. Vico, in his Scienza Nuova, which Joyce found so useful, stresses that all ancient fables and tales are really records of moments of technical breakthrough to which the ancients assigned the status and name of a god, but Vico also insisted that the effects of such breakthroughs were recorded in the new “wrunes” (line 36), writing into the patterns of human speech and sensibility. Vico, like Joyce, insists that new technology is not added to culture, but it “ruins” whole societies, tossing them into the middenhide or heap, whence they are forever being retrieved and refurbished by succeeding generations. This page of the Wake, like many others, is an approach to Yeats’s “rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” It is the tradition from which the individual talent must filch the fragments that he will shore against his own ruins. For Joyce, as for Yeats, the rag-and-bone shop is a collection of abandoned clichés. It is the clichés that are the invented probes of artists and society, enabling them to ascend or descend the ladder of human accomplishment: “please to stoop” (line 2) and “O stoop to please” (line 10). The need of the poet for ever-new means of probing and exploration of experience sends him back again and again to the rag-and-bone shop of abandoned cliché. The testimony of artists in this matter is impressive. The stages by which the literary archetype became substituted for the technical cliché as the means of creation is one of the subjects of this book.