[00:00:00 - 00:00:12] Finnegan's Wake is the last and most ambitious and most puzzling work of the British writer [00:00:12 - 00:00:17] James Joyce, who of course wrote Dubliners and Ulysses. [00:00:17 - 00:00:24] And if Ulysses is the algebra of literature, then Finnegan's Wake is the partial differential [00:00:24 - 00:00:26] equation. [00:00:26 - 00:00:33] Most of us break down at algebra, few of us aspire to go on to the partial linear differential [00:00:33 - 00:00:37] equation. [00:00:37 - 00:00:43] In some ways I think it can arguably be said that this is the quintessential work of art, [00:00:43 - 00:00:52] or at least work of literature of the 20th century, and Joyce intended it that way. [00:00:52 - 00:00:59] Joseph Campbell called it a staggering allegory of the fall and redemption of mankind, equally [00:00:59 - 00:01:05] respected critics have called it a surrender to the crossword puzzle portion of the human [00:01:05 - 00:01:07] mind. [00:01:07 - 00:01:15] So the main thing about it is that it is linguistically dense, it is dense on every level, it has [00:01:15 - 00:01:20] over 63,000 individual words in it. [00:01:20 - 00:01:26] It's long more words than most fictional manuscripts have words, period. [00:01:26 - 00:01:32] It has over 5,000 characters in it. [00:01:32 - 00:01:39] Ulysses was designed as a kind of, Joyce thought of it as his day book. [00:01:39 - 00:01:47] It follows the peregrinations of an ordinary Dubliner, this is Ulysses, an ordinary Dubliner [00:01:47 - 00:01:55] through the vicissitudes of his day, his struggles to buy some kidneys to fry for breakfast, [00:01:55 - 00:02:04] his chance meeting with his wife's lover, so forth and so on. [00:02:04 - 00:02:09] Fairly straightforward exposition of the techniques of literature that have been perfected in [00:02:09 - 00:02:16] the 20th century, stream of consciousness, so forth and so on, slice of life. [00:02:16 - 00:02:24] Finnegan's Wake was designed to be the night book to that day book. [00:02:24 - 00:02:32] So it was conceived of as a dream and one of the questions that undergraduate sir asked [00:02:32 - 00:02:37] to shed ink over is whose dream is it? [00:02:37 - 00:02:39] And what is this book about? [00:02:39 - 00:02:45] I mean, when you first pick it up, it's absolutely daunting. [00:02:45 - 00:02:47] There doesn't seem to be a way into it. [00:02:47 - 00:02:50] It seems to be barely in English. [00:02:50 - 00:02:59] And the notion that one could, by spending time with this, tease out characters, plot, [00:02:59 - 00:03:07] literary tension, resolution, this sort of thing seems fairly unlikely. [00:03:07 - 00:03:14] Actually it's one of the few things that really repays pouring effort into it. [00:03:14 - 00:03:21] The first 25 pages are incredibly dense and most people are eliminated somewhere in those [00:03:21 - 00:03:23] first 25 pages. [00:03:23 - 00:03:30] And so you never really, it's a language and you have to gain a facility with it and you [00:03:30 - 00:03:31] have to cheat. [00:03:31 - 00:03:32] That's the other thing. [00:03:32 - 00:03:41] And there's lots of help cheating because it has spawned a great exegetical literature, [00:03:41 - 00:03:49] all kinds of pale scholars eager to give you the Celtic word lists of Finningham's Wake [00:03:49 - 00:03:58] or a discussion of the doctrine of the transubstantiation in Finningham's Wake or so forth and so on. [00:03:58 - 00:04:05] Hundreds of these kinds of doctoral theses in comp lit have been ground out over the [00:04:05 - 00:04:08] decades. [00:04:08 - 00:04:17] The reason I'm interested in it, I suppose I should fess up, is because it's two things [00:04:17 - 00:04:20] clearly. [00:04:20 - 00:04:28] Finningham's Wake is psychedelic and it is apocalyptic/eschatological. [00:04:28 - 00:04:35] And what I mean by those phrases is, first of all, what I mean by psychedelic is there [00:04:35 - 00:04:40] is no stable point of view. [00:04:40 - 00:04:43] There is no character per se. [00:04:43 - 00:04:46] You never know who is speaking. [00:04:46 - 00:04:54] You have to read into each speech to discover, you know, is this King Mark, Anne Olivia Pluribel, [00:04:54 - 00:05:01] Humphrey Chimptonier, Wicker, Shem, Le Penman, Sean, who is it? [00:05:01 - 00:05:04] And identities are not fixed. [00:05:04 - 00:05:09] Those of you who have followed my rap over the years, I'm always raving about how psychedelics [00:05:09 - 00:05:11] dissolve boundaries. [00:05:11 - 00:05:18] Well Finningham's Wake is as if you had taken the entirety of the last thousand years of [00:05:18 - 00:05:22] human history and dissolved all the boundaries. [00:05:22 - 00:05:34] So Queen Mob becomes Mae West, you know, all the personages of pop culture, politics, art, [00:05:34 - 00:05:46] church history, Irish legend, Irish internecine politics are all swirling, changing, merging. [00:05:46 - 00:05:49] Time is not linear. [00:05:49 - 00:05:57] You will find yourself at a recent political rally then return to the court of this or [00:05:57 - 00:06:03] that Abyssinian emperor or pharaoh. [00:06:03 - 00:06:05] It's like a trip. [00:06:05 - 00:06:10] And the great technique, I was thinking about this as I was thinking about this lecture, [00:06:10 - 00:06:15] the great technique of the 20th century is collage or pastiche. [00:06:15 - 00:06:23] It was originally developed by the Dadaists in Zurich in 1919. [00:06:23 - 00:06:29] Right now it's having a huge resurgence in the form of sampling in pop music. [00:06:29 - 00:06:33] And Joyce was the supreme sampler. [00:06:33 - 00:06:44] I mean, he draws his material from technical catalogs, menus, legal briefs, treaty language, [00:06:44 - 00:06:50] pathologies, dreams, doctor-patient conversations. [00:06:50 - 00:06:57] Everything is grist for this enormous distillery. [00:06:57 - 00:07:03] And yet, you know, what comes out of this, once you learn the codes and once you learn [00:07:03 - 00:07:13] to play the game, is a Joycean story that all graduates of Ulysses will recognize. [00:07:13 - 00:07:22] I mean, the main, what Joyce was about was an incredible sympathy with common people [00:07:22 - 00:07:32] and an awareness of the dilemma of, you know, being a Jew in Irish Ireland, being a devotee [00:07:32 - 00:07:40] of scholasticism in the 20th century, of dislocation and disorientation, of being the cuckolded [00:07:40 - 00:07:45] husband, of being the failed divinity student. [00:07:45 - 00:07:50] All of these characters and themes are familiar. [00:07:50 - 00:07:53] It's quite an amazing accomplishment. [00:07:53 - 00:07:57] There's nothing else like it in literature. [00:07:57 - 00:08:02] It had very little anticipation. [00:08:02 - 00:08:09] The only real anticipator of Joyce in English, I think, is Thomas Nash, who most people have [00:08:09 - 00:08:10] never heard of. [00:08:10 - 00:08:17] Thomas Nash was a contemporary of Shakespeare and wrote a famous, I don't know what that [00:08:17 - 00:08:28] means in such a context, but a novel called, it was called The Wayfaring Traveler. [00:08:28 - 00:08:37] Anyway, Nash had this megalomaniac richness of language, this attitude that it's better [00:08:37 - 00:08:43] to put it in than take it out, and that's certainly what you get with Joyce. [00:08:43 - 00:08:55] I mean, Joyce is so dense with technical terms, brand names, pop references, localisms. [00:08:55 - 00:09:02] The way to conceive of Finnegan's Wake, really, is like a midden, a garbage dump, and there [00:09:02 - 00:09:09] is in fact a garbage dump in the Wake that figures very prominently. [00:09:09 - 00:09:16] What you as the reader have to do is go in there with nut-pick and toothbrush and essentially [00:09:16 - 00:09:23] remove one level after another level after another level and sink down and down. [00:09:23 - 00:09:29] The theme is always the same, the delivery of the word, the misinterpretation of the [00:09:29 - 00:09:35] word, and the redemption of the word at every level in all times and places. [00:09:35 - 00:09:42] The reason I've now gone some distance toward explaining why I think of it as psychedelic, [00:09:42 - 00:09:49] the reason why I think of it as eschatological and apocalyptic is because he really, you [00:09:49 - 00:09:51] know, it's hard to tell. [00:09:51 - 00:09:58] We don't have James Joyce around to ask how much of this material he took seriously and [00:09:58 - 00:10:05] how much of it was grist for his literary mill, but he was perfectly conversant with [00:10:05 - 00:10:07] Renaissance theories of magic. [00:10:07 - 00:10:17] The entire book is based on La scienza nuova of Giambattista Vico, who was a, I don't know [00:10:17 - 00:10:22] what you would call him, a Renaissance sociologist, basically, and systems theorist. [00:10:22 - 00:10:31] And Joyce once in a famous interview said that if the whole universe were to be destroyed [00:10:31 - 00:10:38] and only Finnegan's Wake survived, that the goal had been that then the entire universe [00:10:38 - 00:10:42] could be reconstructed out of this. [00:10:42 - 00:10:51] Some of you who are students of Torah, this is a very Talmudic idea that somehow a book [00:10:51 - 00:10:54] is the primary reality. [00:10:54 - 00:11:02] You know, the idea of in Hasidism in some schools is that all of the future is already [00:11:02 - 00:11:11] contained in the Torah, and then when you ask them, well, if it's contained there, then [00:11:11 - 00:11:13] isn't it predestined? [00:11:13 - 00:11:19] And the answer is no, because the letters are scrambled and only the movement of the [00:11:19 - 00:11:26] present moment through the text correctly unscrambles and arranges the letter. [00:11:26 - 00:11:29] This is Joyce thinking, for sure. [00:11:29 - 00:11:36] And it's very close to a central theme in Joyce and a central theme in the Western religious [00:11:36 - 00:11:45] tradition, which is the coming into being, the manifestation of the word, the declension [00:11:45 - 00:11:54] of the word into matter, and in a sense what Joyce was trying to do was he was in that [00:11:54 - 00:12:05] great tradition of literary alchemy that whose earlier practitioners were people like Robert [00:12:05 - 00:12:10] Flood, Athanasius Kershner, Paracelsus. [00:12:10 - 00:12:16] These are not familiar names, but in the late flowering of alchemy, when the birth of modern [00:12:16 - 00:12:23] science could already, the rosy glow could already be seen, the alchemists turned toward [00:12:23 - 00:12:29] literary allegory in the 16th and early 17th century. [00:12:29 - 00:12:32] Joyce is essentially in that tradition. [00:12:32 - 00:12:42] I mean, this is an effort to condense the entire of experience, as Joyce says in The [00:12:42 - 00:12:53] Wake, "All space-time in a nutshell" is what we're searching for here, a kind of philosopher's [00:12:53 - 00:13:02] stone of literary associations from which the entire universe can be made to blossom forth. [00:13:02 - 00:13:13] And the way it's done is through pun and tricks of language and double and triple and quadruple [00:13:13 - 00:13:16] entendre. [00:13:16 - 00:13:19] No word is opaque. [00:13:19 - 00:13:28] Every word is transparent and you see through it to older meanings, stranger associations. [00:13:28 - 00:13:40] As your mind tries to follow these associative trees of connection, you eventually get the [00:13:40 - 00:13:46] feeling, which is the unique feeling that The Wake gives you, which is about as close [00:13:46 - 00:13:54] to LSD on the page as you can get because you are simultaneously many points of view, [00:13:54 - 00:14:05] simultaneously many dramatis loci, many places in the plot, and the whole thing is riddled [00:14:05 - 00:14:09] with resonance. [00:14:09 - 00:14:18] A man doing a task on one level is on another level a Greek god completing a task and on [00:14:18 - 00:14:25] another level some other figure of some more obscure mythology. [00:14:25 - 00:14:31] So really one thing about Finnegan's Wake, it's like a dipstick for your own intelligence. [00:14:31 - 00:14:36] What you bring to it is going to determine what you get out. [00:14:36 - 00:14:43] And if you have read the books which Joyce was familiar with or if you have armed yourself [00:14:43 - 00:14:52] with such simple things as a Fodor's Guide to Ireland or a good map of Ireland or a good [00:14:52 - 00:15:00] work of Irish mythology, then it immediately begins to betray its secrets to you. [00:15:00 - 00:15:05] And it's so rich that it's easy to make original discoveries. [00:15:05 - 00:15:10] It's easy to see and understand things which probably have not been seen or understood [00:15:10 - 00:15:20] since James Joyce put it there because he had this kind of all-inclusive intelligence. [00:15:20 - 00:15:27] Maybe I didn't make clear enough why that to my mind is an eschatological phenomenon, [00:15:27 - 00:15:30] this production of the Philosopher's Stone. [00:15:30 - 00:15:36] It's because it's about the union of spirit and matter, that's what the Philosopher's [00:15:36 - 00:15:38] Stone is about. [00:15:38 - 00:15:44] And writing a book which aspires to be the seed for a living world is about the union [00:15:44 - 00:15:46] of spirit and matter as well. [00:15:46 - 00:15:58] And the Christian scenario of redemption at the end of profane history is another scenario [00:15:58 - 00:16:03] of transubstantial union, union of spirit and matter. [00:16:03 - 00:16:12] This seems to be, in fact, the overarching theme of Finnegan's Wake and of the 20th century. [00:16:12 - 00:16:20] In terms of the temporal context for this book, it was finished in 1939, a few months [00:16:20 - 00:16:25] before 1939, and Joyce died early in '39. [00:16:25 - 00:16:32] In a sense he died in one of the most science fiction moments of the 20th century because [00:16:32 - 00:16:42] the Third Reich was going strong, it had not yet been pegged down a notch, schemes of eugenics [00:16:42 - 00:16:56] and thousand-year racially purified super civilizations, all of that crazy early 40s stuff was happening. [00:16:56 - 00:17:01] And the book is surprisingly modern. [00:17:01 - 00:17:06] Television appears, psychedelic drugs appear, all of these things appear. [00:17:06 - 00:17:08] He means presciently. [00:17:08 - 00:17:10] He was some kind of a prophet. [00:17:10 - 00:17:17] And also he understood the 20th century sufficiently that the part he hadn't yet lived through [00:17:17 - 00:17:21] was as transparent to him as the part that he had. [00:17:21 - 00:17:24] He could see what was coming. [00:17:24 - 00:17:30] Well that's by way of my introduction. [00:17:30 - 00:17:37] I want to read you what some other people have said about this because I don't think [00:17:37 - 00:17:40] I can say enough on my own. [00:17:40 - 00:17:47] This is the indispensable book, if you're serious about this, A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's [00:17:47 - 00:17:48] Wake. [00:17:48 - 00:17:54] And it takes the view that we don't know what this thing is so we have to go through it [00:17:54 - 00:17:57] literally line by line. [00:17:57 - 00:18:05] And he tells you the story, the entire story in the one-page version, in the ten-page version, [00:18:05 - 00:18:07] and in the 200-page version. [00:18:07 - 00:18:13] And even in the 200-page version there are sections where Campbell simply reports, "The [00:18:13 - 00:18:17] next five pages are extremely obscure. [00:18:17 - 00:18:20] Mark it." [00:18:20 - 00:18:27] But this is just a short section and one of the things about working with the Wake is [00:18:27 - 00:18:34] you become, at first this language which is so impenetrable and bizarre, it ends up infecting [00:18:34 - 00:18:40] you and you become unable to write or talk any other way. [00:18:40 - 00:18:47] So I'll read you some of Campbell's introduction and I think you will see it's like the Wake [00:18:47 - 00:18:53] itself except in baby steps. [00:18:53 - 00:18:57] Introduction to a Strange Subject. [00:18:57 - 00:19:02] Running riddle and fluid answer, Finnegan's Wake is a mighty allegory of the fall and [00:19:02 - 00:19:04] resurrection of mankind. [00:19:04 - 00:19:11] It is a strange book, a compound of fable, symphony, and nightmare, a monstrous enigma [00:19:11 - 00:19:15] beckoning imperiously from the shadowy pits of sleep. [00:19:15 - 00:19:20] Its mechanics resemble those of a dream, a dream which has freed the author from the [00:19:20 - 00:19:27] necessities of common logic and has enabled him to compress all periods of history, all [00:19:27 - 00:19:33] phases of individual and racial development into a circular design of which every part [00:19:33 - 00:19:36] is beginning, middle, and end. [00:19:36 - 00:19:44] In a gigantic wheeling rebus, dim effigies rumble past, disappear into foggy horizons [00:19:44 - 00:19:49] and are replaced by other images, vague but half consciously familiar. [00:19:49 - 00:19:56] On this revolving stage, mythological heroes and events of remotest antiquity occupy the [00:19:56 - 00:20:03] same spatial and temporal planes as modern personages and contemporary happenings. [00:20:03 - 00:20:06] All time occurs simultaneously. [00:20:06 - 00:20:13] Tristram and Wellington, Father Adam and Humpty Gumpty merge in a single precept. [00:20:13 - 00:20:16] Multiple meanings are present in every line. [00:20:16 - 00:20:22] Interlocking allusions to key words and phrases are woven like fugal themes into the pattern [00:20:22 - 00:20:24] of the work. [00:20:24 - 00:20:30] Finnegan's Wake is a prodigious, multifaceted monolith, not only the cauchemar of a Dublin [00:20:30 - 00:20:36] citizen, but the dreamlike saga of guilt-stained, evolving humanity. [00:20:36 - 00:20:41] The vast scope and intricate structure of Finnegan's Wake give the book a forbidding [00:20:41 - 00:20:44] aspect of impenetrability. [00:20:44 - 00:20:50] It appears to be a dense and baffling jungle, trackless and overgrown with wanton perversities [00:20:50 - 00:20:52] of form and language. [00:20:52 - 00:20:57] Clearly, such a book is not meant to be idly fingered. [00:20:57 - 00:21:02] It tasks the imagination, exacts discipline and tenacity from those who would march with [00:21:02 - 00:21:03] it. [00:21:03 - 00:21:08] Yet some of the difficulties disappear as soon as the well-disposed reader picks up [00:21:08 - 00:21:12] a few compass clues and gets his bearings. [00:21:12 - 00:21:18] Then the enormous map of Finnegan's Wake begins slowly to unfold. [00:21:18 - 00:21:25] Characters and motifs emerge, themes become recognizable, and Joyce's vocabulary falls [00:21:25 - 00:21:29] more and more familiarly on the accustomed ear. [00:21:29 - 00:21:34] Complete understanding is not to be snatched at greedily in one sitting. [00:21:34 - 00:21:37] Or in fifty, I might add. [00:21:37 - 00:21:42] Nevertheless, the ultimate state of the intelligent reader is certainly not bewilderment. [00:21:42 - 00:21:49] Rather, it is an admiration for the unifying insight, economy of means, and more than Rabalaisian [00:21:49 - 00:21:54] humor which have miraculously quickened the stupendous mass of material. [00:21:54 - 00:22:00] One acknowledges at last that James Joyce's overwhelming micro-macrocosm could not have [00:22:00 - 00:22:08] been fired to life in any sorcerer furnace less black, less heavy, less murky than this, [00:22:08 - 00:22:11] his incredible book. [00:22:11 - 00:22:17] He had to smelt the modern dictionary back to protean plasma and reenact the genesis [00:22:17 - 00:22:22] and mutation of language in order to deliver his message. [00:22:22 - 00:22:30] But the final wonder is that such a message could be delivered at all. [00:22:30 - 00:22:32] Every book has to be about something. [00:22:32 - 00:22:36] I mean, so what is this book about? [00:22:36 - 00:22:49] Well, as far as anybody can tell, it appears to be about someone named, well they have [00:22:49 - 00:22:57] hundreds of names actually, but for economy's sake, someone named Humphrey Chimpton Earwicker, [00:22:57 - 00:23:01] or abbreviated H.C.E. [00:23:01 - 00:23:12] And Humphrey Earwicker runs a pub in Chappalazzo, which is a suburb or a district of London, [00:23:12 - 00:23:20] and he has, as it says, an ittle wifey who is Anna-Livia Pluribel. [00:23:20 - 00:23:27] And now these two people, this barkeep and his wife, and their two children, Jerry and [00:23:27 - 00:23:35] Kevin, or Shem and Sean, and then they also have hundreds of names because they occur [00:23:35 - 00:23:38] on hundreds and hundreds of levels. [00:23:38 - 00:23:45] Every brother's struggle in history is enacted by the two boys, Jerry and Kevin. [00:23:45 - 00:23:51] They are Shem the penman and Sean the other one. [00:23:51 - 00:23:56] And they dichotomize certain parts of the process. [00:23:56 - 00:24:03] So here is, in one paragraph, this is the Cliff Notes version of what Finningens Wake [00:24:03 - 00:24:04] is all about. [00:24:04 - 00:24:15] If you commit this to memory, you will never be caught wanting at a New York cocktail party. [00:24:15 - 00:24:22] As the tale unfolds, we discover that Humphrey Chimpton Earwicker is a citizen of Dublin, [00:24:22 - 00:24:27] a stuttering tavern keeper with a bull-like hump on the back of his neck. [00:24:27 - 00:24:35] He emerges as a well-defined and sympathetic character, the sorely harrowed victim of a [00:24:35 - 00:24:41] relentless fate, which is stronger than, yet identical with, himself. [00:24:41 - 00:24:47] Joyce refers to him under various names, such as "Here Comes Everybody" and "Haveth Childers [00:24:47 - 00:24:49] Everywhere." [00:24:49 - 00:24:55] Indications of his universality and his role as the great progenitor, the hero has wandered [00:24:55 - 00:25:02] vastly leaving families, that is deposits of civilization, at every pause along the [00:25:02 - 00:25:07] way from Troy and Asia Minor, he is frequently called "the Turk." [00:25:07 - 00:25:12] Up through the turbulent lands of the Goths, the Franks, the Norsemen, and overseas to [00:25:12 - 00:25:18] the green isles of Britain and the Irish, his chief Germanic manifestations are Woden and [00:25:18 - 00:25:22] Thor, his chief Celtic, Manannan Maclur. [00:25:22 - 00:25:29] Again, he is Saint Patrick carrying the new faith, again Strongbow leading the Anglo-Norman [00:25:29 - 00:25:34] conquest, again Cromwell conquering with a bloody hand. [00:25:34 - 00:25:41] Most specifically, he is our Anglican tavern keeper, HCE, in the Dublin suburb, Cappella [00:25:41 - 00:25:42] Zod. [00:25:43 - 00:25:52] Like Ulysses, the ground zero here is the utterly mundane, you know, middle class, tormented [00:25:52 - 00:25:57] Irish people embedded in the detritus of the 20th century. [00:25:57 - 00:26:07] But there's an effort to never lose the cosmic perspective, never lose the sense that we [00:26:07 - 00:26:15] are not individuals lost in time, but the front ends of gene streams that reach back [00:26:15 - 00:26:23] to Africa, that we somehow have all these ancestors and conflicts swarming and storming [00:26:23 - 00:26:25] within it. [00:26:25 - 00:26:37] It's a glorious, psychedelic, heartful Irish view of what it is to be embedded in the [00:26:37 - 00:26:39] mystery of existence. [00:26:39 - 00:26:43] Well, okay, enough arm waving. [00:26:43 - 00:26:47] Now let's cut the cake here. [00:26:47 - 00:26:54] River Run, past Eves and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious [00:26:54 - 00:26:59] vicus of recirculation back to Hallif Castle and environs. [00:26:59 - 00:27:06] Sir Tristram, the allure d'Amores for o'er the short sea, had passing core re-arrived [00:27:06 - 00:27:13] from North Amorica, on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe minor, to welter fight his [00:27:13 - 00:27:21] penicillate war, nor had top sawyer's rocks by the stream Ocone exaggerated themselves [00:27:21 - 00:27:28] to Lawrence County Gorgios while they went Dublin their mummer all the time, nor a voice [00:27:28 - 00:27:35] from a fire bellowed Misha, Misha, to Tart Toff, Tart Patrick. [00:27:35 - 00:27:42] Not yet, though Venice soon after had a kid's gab but ended a bland old Isaac, not yet, [00:27:42 - 00:27:50] though all's fair in Vanity, were Sophie Fester's Roth with two-in-one Nathan Joe, [00:27:50 - 00:27:59] Rottopeck of Paws malt had gem or shen brewed by arclight, and Roary end to the Reganbow [00:27:59 - 00:28:03] was to be seen ringsome on the aqua face. [00:28:03 - 00:28:05] The Fall. [00:28:05 - 00:28:17] Baba ba ba dal garra haga tak amina arung quaraq brontong nerung quabang varahut ingat [00:28:17 - 00:28:23] ak tul hur dimun wang ama nunuk. [00:28:23 - 00:28:30] Of a once wall-straight old par, is retailed early in bed and later on life do it down through [00:28:30 - 00:28:38] all Christian minstrelsy, the great fall of off wall entailed at such short notice the [00:28:38 - 00:28:46] fit shoot of Finnegan, 'Earse solid man, that the Humpty Hill head of himself promptly sends [00:28:46 - 00:28:52] an unquiring one-well to the west in quest of his Tumpty tum-toes, and their upturned [00:28:52 - 00:28:59] pike toe and place is at the knock-out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust [00:28:59 - 00:29:03] upon the green since Devlin's first loved Livy.' [00:29:03 - 00:29:13] So now granted that the first pages are dense and it isn't all this dense because even though [00:29:13 - 00:29:21] the concept of fractals lay years in the future, the effort here is to tell the whole damn [00:29:21 - 00:29:28] thing in the first word, to tell it again in the next two words, to tell it again in [00:29:28 - 00:29:31] the next three words, and so on. [00:29:31 - 00:29:40] So here in these first roughly three paragraphs a huge amount of information is being passed [00:29:40 - 00:29:42] along. [00:29:42 - 00:29:48] First of all, we're given a location if we're smart enough to know it. [00:29:48 - 00:29:55] River run past even Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious [00:29:55 - 00:30:02] vicus of recirculation back to Howarth Castle and Envyrens. [00:30:02 - 00:30:10] Well now if you know the geography of Dublin, you know that's where you are because, and [00:30:10 - 00:30:17] notice Howarth Castle and Envyrens is H-C-E. [00:30:17 - 00:30:25] These initials recur thousands of times in this book, always bringing you back to remind [00:30:25 - 00:30:28] you that this has something to do with Humphrey or Wicker. [00:30:28 - 00:30:34] What this first sentence says is river run and it's the river Liffey which we will meet [00:30:34 - 00:30:40] in a thousand reincarnations because Anna Livia Pluribel is the personification of the [00:30:40 - 00:30:43] goddess river. [00:30:43 - 00:30:48] The river runs past even Adams and there is a church there on the shore named Adam and [00:30:48 - 00:30:55] Eve in Dublin from swerve of shore to bend of bay and then this strange phrase brings [00:30:55 - 00:31:00] us by a commodious vicus of recirculation. [00:31:00 - 00:31:07] This announces the great architectonic plan of the wake that it is in fact going to be [00:31:07 - 00:31:17] based on the sociological ruminations of Giambattista Vico's La sciencia nuova, the vicus mode of [00:31:17 - 00:31:24] recirculation because as I'm sure you all know, Vico's theory of the fall and redemption [00:31:24 - 00:31:32] of mankind was that there were four ages, I can't remember, gold, silver, iron, clay, [00:31:32 - 00:31:33] I think. [00:31:33 - 00:31:41] And so this idea of the recirculation of the connectedness of the cyclicity of the, as [00:31:41 - 00:31:49] he says, the same again, again and again, fin again, sin again, the same again. [00:31:49 - 00:31:56] And this is one of his great, great themes is the recurso. [00:31:56 - 00:32:02] Everything comes again, nothing is unannounced, love affair, every dynastic intrigue, every [00:32:02 - 00:32:10] minor political disgrace and a minor political disgrace figures very prominently in this [00:32:10 - 00:32:19] book because as the carrier of Adam's sin, the great dilemma for Humphrey Earwick is [00:32:19 - 00:32:30] that he is running for a minor political post, alderman, but apparently one night, rather [00:32:30 - 00:32:36] juiced, he relieved himself, well, there are many versions and you hear them all and they [00:32:36 - 00:32:43] are all given in dreams and in mock trials and in accusatory fantasy. [00:32:43 - 00:32:52] He either innocently took a leak in the park or he fondled himself in some way in the presence [00:32:52 - 00:33:01] of Maggie and her sister in such a way that his reputation is now at great risk and it [00:33:01 - 00:33:08] all depends on the testimony of a cad, a soldier, or perhaps three soldiers. [00:33:08 - 00:33:09] It's never clear. [00:33:09 - 00:33:11] It's constantly shifting. [00:33:11 - 00:33:21] And this question of what happened when Maggie Seenall with her sister in shawl at the magazine [00:33:21 - 00:33:30] wall haunts the book because on it turns the question of whether HCE is a stalwart pillar [00:33:30 - 00:33:36] of the community or in fact a backsliding masturbator and a monster and so forth and [00:33:36 - 00:33:45] so on as one always is if one is trapped in a James Joyce novel. [00:33:45 - 00:33:51] Then this puzzling list in the second paragraph is simply a list of things which haven't happened [00:33:51 - 00:33:52] yet. [00:33:52 - 00:34:00] Sir Tristram, lover of music via Lord Amours, for O'er the Short Sea, had passing core, [00:34:00 - 00:34:08] not yet, re-arrived from North Amorica from the coast of Brittany on this side, the scraggy [00:34:08 - 00:34:14] isthmus of Europe Minor, to welterweight his Penicillet War. [00:34:14 - 00:34:20] Now this word Penicillet is typical Joyce punning. [00:34:20 - 00:34:24] Peninsillet War obviously is being launched from Brittany. [00:34:24 - 00:34:33] Penicillet War because Sir Tristram is the great archetype of the lover and so his war [00:34:33 - 00:34:34] is Penicillet. [00:34:34 - 00:34:40] Okay, so that's the first thing that has not yet happened, it's telling you. [00:34:40 - 00:34:47] Sir Tristram has not yet come to Ireland, to put it simply. [00:34:47 - 00:34:55] Nor has Top Sawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated the cells to Lawrence County Gorgios [00:34:55 - 00:35:00] while they went Dublin their mummer all the time. [00:35:00 - 00:35:04] Now this is further obscurity. [00:35:04 - 00:35:15] There is a stream in Georgia and Top Sawyer is a reference to Tom Sawyer because Tom Sawyer [00:35:15 - 00:35:22] was Huck Finn's friend and Huck Finn is Finn in America. [00:35:22 - 00:35:26] There is a huge amount of Mark Twain that has been poured into these books because of [00:35:26 - 00:35:34] the Huckleberry Finn connection, Finn in the new world. [00:35:34 - 00:35:40] And Top Sawyer's rocks is a reference possibly to testicles and so forth and so on. [00:35:40 - 00:35:46] Every single word, I mean you can just take a word and go into this until you exhaust [00:35:46 - 00:35:48] yourself. [00:35:48 - 00:35:51] And then the next thing that has not yet happened. [00:35:51 - 00:35:58] Nor a voice from a fire bellowed Misha Misha to Tartoff Thou Art Petric. [00:35:58 - 00:36:03] Tartoff is Celtic for Thou Art Baptized. [00:36:03 - 00:36:08] So Saint Patrick has not yet baptized in Ireland. [00:36:08 - 00:36:17] Not yet, though Venesun Ashley, and the Venesun is a pun on venison and very soon, had a kid [00:36:17 - 00:36:20] scab but ended a bland old Isaac. [00:36:20 - 00:36:23] It's a reference to the Isaac Esau tale in the Bible. [00:36:23 - 00:36:36] It's also a reference to Isaac Butts who was a figure in the politics of the Irish rebellion. [00:36:36 - 00:36:44] Not yet, those alls fares in Vanessy where Sophie Sester's rocked with Tua Nathan-Joe. [00:36:44 - 00:36:52] That's at this point a very obscure reference but there is a great incest and sister theme [00:36:52 - 00:36:54] in Finnegan's Wake. [00:36:54 - 00:37:04] And the twin, the mistresses of Jonathan Swift become carriers of a huge amount of energy [00:37:04 - 00:37:15] in here, as do the mistresses of Thomas Stern because it's better to be swift than stern [00:37:15 - 00:37:18] or something like that. [00:37:18 - 00:37:21] And then the last of these things which hadn't happened yet. [00:37:21 - 00:37:29] Rata Peck of Paul's Malt had gem or sham brewed by arc light and Rory into the Regan bro was [00:37:29 - 00:37:33] to be seen ringsome on the aqua face. [00:37:33 - 00:37:35] That seems pretty obscure to me. [00:37:35 - 00:37:41] According to Joseph Campbell it's simply a reference to the presence of God moving over [00:37:41 - 00:37:47] the waters in the first lines of Genesis. [00:37:47 - 00:37:48] Ringsome on the aqua face. [00:37:48 - 00:37:59] Then this phrase, the fall and the multi-syllabic word, Baba Labara Gevurrba, that word, these [00:37:59 - 00:38:07] are the Viconian thunders and they announce the beginning of each Viconian age. [00:38:07 - 00:38:22] And when the thunder speaks you know then that you're into a transition. [00:38:22 - 00:38:29] Then it actually launches in the last paragraph into a fairly straightforward evocation of [00:38:29 - 00:38:34] at least the mythological Finnegan. [00:38:34 - 00:38:39] As you all probably know there is an Irish drinking ballad of great antiquity called [00:38:39 - 00:38:43] the Ballad of Tim Finnegan or the Ballad of Finnegan's Wake. [00:38:43 - 00:38:52] And it tells the story of Tim Finnegan who was a hod carrier, a bricklayer's assistant, [00:38:52 - 00:39:00] and he was given to hitting the potine rather hard and he fell from his ladder. [00:39:00 - 00:39:02] It's the Humpty Dumpty story. [00:39:02 - 00:39:10] He fell from his ladder and he broke his back and his friends waked him in the grand Irish [00:39:10 - 00:39:16] fashion and at the height of the wake they became so carried away and intoxicated that [00:39:16 - 00:39:28] they upended a bucket of Guinness over his head and he revived and joined the dance. [00:39:28 - 00:39:34] Tim Finnegan lived in Watkins Street, a gentle Irishman mighty hot, paid a beautiful brogue [00:39:34 - 00:39:37] so rich and sweet to rise in the world he carried a hut. [00:39:37 - 00:39:41] You see the sort of a Tipline way with a look for the lick a poor Tim was born, a helper [00:39:41 - 00:39:44] man with his work he'd stay, neither half of the crafter of Fremarn. [00:39:44 - 00:39:48] "Hark, for the dam out and stay a partner, whelt the floor your trotters shake, wasn't [00:39:48 - 00:39:51] it the truth I told you, lots of fun at Finnegan's wake." [00:39:51 - 00:39:56] One morning Tim got rather full his head felt heavy which made him shake, fell from a ladder [00:39:56 - 00:39:59] and he broke a skull and they carried him home as corpse to wake. [00:39:59 - 00:40:03] Roll him up in an ice-cream sheet and laid him out upon the bed, a gallon of whisky at [00:40:03 - 00:40:06] his feet and a bottle of polka at his head. [00:40:06 - 00:40:10] "Hark, for the dam out and stay a partner, whelt the floor your trotters shake, wasn't [00:40:10 - 00:40:13] it the truth I told you, lots of fun at Finnegan's wake." [00:40:13 - 00:40:18] His friends assembled at the wake and Mrs. Finnegan called for lunch, first she brought [00:40:18 - 00:40:20] him tea and cake then pipes, tobacco and whisky punch. [00:40:20 - 00:40:25] "Middy O'Brien, me gat to Christ, it's a nice clean corpse did you ever see, Tim of [00:40:25 - 00:40:28] onion why did you die here, howl your gobs at Paddy McGee." [00:40:28 - 00:40:32] "Hark, for the dam out and stay a partner, whelt the floor your trotters shake, wasn't [00:40:32 - 00:40:35] it the truth I told you, lots of fun at Finnegan's wake." [00:40:35 - 00:40:39] Then Maggie O'Connor took up the job of biddy, she see you're wrong I'm sure, biddy gave [00:40:39 - 00:40:42] her the belt and the gob and left the sprawling on the floor. [00:40:42 - 00:40:46] "Hark, for the dam out and stay a partner, whelt the floor your trotters shake, wasn't [00:40:46 - 00:40:49] it the truth I told you, lots of fun at Finnegan's wake." [00:40:49 - 00:40:54] Then Mickey Maloney raised his head when a noggin of whisky flew at him, it missed and [00:40:54 - 00:40:57] fallen on the bed, the liquor scattered over tip. [00:40:57 - 00:41:02] "Tim, my wife, see how he rises, Timothy rising from the bed, said, 'will you have a whisky [00:41:02 - 00:41:05] around like Blaises, Tannemondale, do you think I'm dead?'" [00:41:05 - 00:41:10] "Hark, for the dam out and stay a partner, whelt the floor your trotters shake, wasn't [00:41:10 - 00:41:19] it the truth I told you, lots of fun at Finnegan's wake." [00:41:19 - 00:41:26] This is the resurrection, I mean Tim Finnegan is very clearly for Joyce a Christ figure [00:41:26 - 00:41:34] and here is then the first evocation of Tim Finnegan, the fall, then the Viconian thunder, [00:41:34 - 00:41:42] of a once wall straight old par, which is just an old person, is retailed early in bed [00:41:42 - 00:41:46] and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy. [00:41:46 - 00:41:53] The great fall of the off wall entailed at such short notice the Ftjut of Finnegan. [00:41:53 - 00:42:09] Now this word P-F-T-J-S-C-H-U-T-E-Ftjut is Norwegian, I'm informed, and it refers to [00:42:09 - 00:42:13] the act of falling and the act of falling from a hill. [00:42:13 - 00:42:21] Finnegan, earth's solid man that the humpty hill head of himself promptly sends an unquiring [00:42:21 - 00:42:27] one well to the west in quest of his tumpty tum-toes and their upturned pike point and [00:42:27 - 00:42:33] place is at the knockout in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green [00:42:33 - 00:42:37] since Devlin's first love Livy. [00:42:37 - 00:42:42] This is fairly transparent if you're Irish or a citizen of Dublin because what it's talking [00:42:42 - 00:42:53] about is Dublin is imagined to be situated basically in the belly of an enormous giant [00:42:53 - 00:42:58] person who is Finnegan. [00:42:58 - 00:43:07] Finnegan lies like a giant reclining figure along the Livy there, husband and wife, river [00:43:07 - 00:43:09] and mountain. [00:43:09 - 00:43:17] This is actually then, the focus has changed and now we're talking about the geography. [00:43:17 - 00:43:26] He was a solid man, earth's solid man, but then somehow he turned into something where [00:43:26 - 00:43:32] the humpty hill head of himself promptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest [00:43:32 - 00:43:39] of his tumpty tum-toes and if you have a map of Dublin laid out you can actually see this [00:43:39 - 00:43:47] enormous man in the landscape and there are many enormous men and women in the landscape [00:43:47 - 00:43:53] of this planet and Joyce maps the Dublin geography over all of them. [00:43:53 - 00:43:59] Some of you may know Istaxi Vatil, the magical mountain in Mexico. [00:43:59 - 00:44:07] Istaxi Vatil means the sleeping woman in Toltec and many mountains are imagined to be sleeping [00:44:07 - 00:44:08] people. [00:44:08 - 00:44:15] So here he introduces this theme and this is one paragraph. [00:44:15 - 00:44:25] This is the invocation of Finnegan as hod carrier. [00:44:25 - 00:44:32] Big Mr. Finnegan of the stuttering hand, Freeman's mower, lived in the broadest way imaginable [00:44:32 - 00:44:40] in his rush lit too far back for messages before Joshua and judges had given us numbers or [00:44:40 - 00:44:44] Helviticus commuted ditteronomy. [00:44:44 - 00:44:51] One yeasty day he sternly strucks his teat in a tub for to wash the future of his fates, [00:44:51 - 00:44:55] but air he swiftly took it out again by the might of Moses. [00:44:55 - 00:45:01] The very water was evapourated and all the goodnesses had met their exodus. [00:45:01 - 00:45:05] So that ought to show you what a pension junshi chapi was. [00:45:05 - 00:45:13] And during mighty odd years this man of hod cement and edifices, HCE, hod cement and edifices, [00:45:13 - 00:45:21] in toppers' thorp piled buildung supra buildung pon the banks of the livers by the so and [00:45:21 - 00:45:22] so. [00:45:22 - 00:45:30] He iada idil fifee ani, ogd the little critere, with her har in huns took up your part in [00:45:30 - 00:45:31] her. [00:45:31 - 00:45:38] Off while babulus, mirror ahead with goodly trowel in grasp and ivarold overalls which [00:45:38 - 00:45:49] he habeticularly fancied, like harum childiric eggerberth, he would calculate by multiplicables [00:45:49 - 00:45:57] the altitude and multitude until he seesaw by neat light of the liquor where twint was [00:45:57 - 00:46:07] born his round head stable of other days, to rise in undress masonry upstand'd joy granet, [00:46:07 - 00:46:16] a walworth of a skere scrape of most eyeful howeth and towerly, originating from next [00:46:16 - 00:46:24] to nothing and celiscating the hymnals and all, higher architech tip of floppical, with [00:46:24 - 00:46:30] a burning bush a bob off its bubble top and with lorrens o' toolers clittering up and [00:46:30 - 00:46:35] thomas a buckets clottering down. [00:46:35 - 00:46:43] Now what this paragraph says is he was a great builder and I think if you think back through [00:46:43 - 00:46:47] your impression of hearing it read you knew that. [00:46:47 - 00:46:57] You know these words that are associated words like a walworth of a skere scrape of most [00:46:57 - 00:47:07] eyeful howeth and towerly, these are skyscraper words, woolworth, skyscrape, in towerly, howeth [00:47:07 - 00:47:09] so forth and so on. [00:47:09 - 00:47:17] And he can do this, he can build up a pastiche of surfaces of impressions. [00:47:17 - 00:47:21] Now you might say why is there no economy? [00:47:21 - 00:47:30] There is no economy because economy is an aesthetic criterion for shoemakers not for [00:47:30 - 00:47:32] artists. [00:47:32 - 00:47:42] And economy is the curse of the Bauhaus babblers from hell which Joyce was very concerned to [00:47:42 - 00:47:44] refute all of that. [00:47:44 - 00:47:52] If you have to place this in a context, it's in the context of the most hallucinatory of [00:47:52 - 00:47:54] the Baroque. [00:47:54 - 00:48:01] This is Arcamboldo land, this is a work that would have been welcome at the Rudolphine [00:48:01 - 00:48:03] court in Prague. [00:48:03 - 00:48:15] It's a work of magical complexity and enfolded self-reference. [00:48:15 - 00:48:19] Now we've just been through these first four paragraphs. [00:48:19 - 00:48:26] Now I'll read you what Joseph Campbell has to say on it, by no means all of what he has [00:48:26 - 00:48:29] to say on it. [00:48:29 - 00:48:34] The first four paragraphs are the suspended tick of time between a cycle just passed and [00:48:34 - 00:48:36] one about to begin. [00:48:36 - 00:48:41] They are in effect an overture, resonant with all the themes of Finnegan's wake. [00:48:41 - 00:48:50] The dominant motif is the polylingual thunderclap of paragraph three, which the voice of God [00:48:50 - 00:48:54] makes audible through the noise of Finnegan's fall. [00:48:54 - 00:49:00] The narrative movement begins with the life, fall, and wake of Hod Carrier Finnegan, pages [00:49:00 - 00:49:01] four to seven. [00:49:01 - 00:49:07] The wake scene fades into the landscape of Dublin and environs. [00:49:07 - 00:49:10] We've just heard how he fell from the ladder. [00:49:10 - 00:49:20] Now we move into a description of the wake, and there's a certain voice that appears at [00:49:20 - 00:49:22] certain times. [00:49:22 - 00:49:30] It's where there are a lot of words ending in -ati-on, continuation of the celebration [00:49:30 - 00:49:33] until the examination of the extermination. [00:49:33 - 00:49:36] These are the twelve judges. [00:49:36 - 00:49:42] Each character when they appear has a certain tempo to their character. [00:49:42 - 00:49:48] So when that tempo enters the text, you know the character is present even though there [00:49:48 - 00:49:50] may be no trace. [00:49:50 - 00:49:56] For example, An Olivia Pluribel's tempo is the tempo of the hen. [00:49:56 - 00:49:59] Here a little, there a little, go a little, see a little, do a little. [00:49:59 - 00:50:01] The hen is scratching. [00:50:01 - 00:50:06] This is this nervous, bird-like, that's An Olivia's signature. [00:50:06 - 00:50:12] Here's just one paragraph from the wake scene, which builds and has quite a minor amount [00:50:12 - 00:50:17] of humor associated with it. [00:50:17 - 00:50:29] Jays, hyshud shay, makul makul or hwaya didi-di, of a trying Thursday morning, sobs they sided [00:50:29 - 00:50:37] at Filigan's chrismorous wake, all the hulavans of the nation prostrated in their consternation, [00:50:37 - 00:50:43] and their do-dismally ploflusive plethora of eulogation. [00:50:43 - 00:50:49] There was plums and groons and cheriffs and sithers and raiders and cinnamon too, and [00:50:49 - 00:50:54] they all goined in with the shoutmost chauviality. [00:50:54 - 00:51:01] Agog and ma-gog and the round of the ma-grog, to the continuation of that celebration in [00:51:01 - 00:51:05] Tolhandan Hungan's extermination. [00:51:05 - 00:51:12] Some in kink and chorus, more can-can keenan, belling him up and filling him down. [00:51:12 - 00:51:16] He's stiff but he's steady as Priamolam. [00:51:16 - 00:51:22] Twas he was a decent gay labourer-in-youth, sharpen his pillow-scone, top up his beer, [00:51:22 - 00:51:27] ere where in this whorl will ye hear such a dinigan? [00:51:27 - 00:51:35] With their deep-brow fundigs and the dusty fidelios, they laid him brawn-drawn a lang-last [00:51:35 - 00:51:41] bed, with a buccalypse of fisky for his feet and a barrel-load of gunna sore his head, [00:51:41 - 00:51:47] see the total of the fluid hang the twaddle of the fuddle-dow. [00:51:47 - 00:51:53] Well it's a drunken Irish way, that seems clear, but there are a lot of things going [00:51:53 - 00:51:54] on. [00:51:54 - 00:51:59] Ere where in this whorl will ye hear such a dinigan? [00:51:59 - 00:52:03] And he's stiff but he's steady as Priamolam. [00:52:03 - 00:52:15] All this dionysian and sexual imagery is fully explicit. [00:52:15 - 00:52:22] In some ways more realised as a character or more lovable, if that's the word, is Anna [00:52:22 - 00:52:23] Livia Pluribel. [00:52:23 - 00:52:28] I mean, Anna Livia Pluribel is Molly Bloom on acid, basically. [00:52:28 - 00:52:38] I mean, Molly Bloom, we don't lose her outlines, we understand Molly, and because Molly doesn't [00:52:38 - 00:52:45] offer us that much of her own mind, she stands for the eternal feminine, but only in the [00:52:45 - 00:52:49] final soliloquy in Ulysses do we really contact her. [00:52:49 - 00:52:56] Anna Livia, it's her book, it may in fact be her dream, and the whole thing is permeated [00:52:56 - 00:53:00] with her tensions and her cares. [00:53:00 - 00:53:06] As it says, "Gran Pappas is fallen down," meaning the great father god is at wake. [00:53:06 - 00:53:14] "Gran Pappas is fallen down, but Grinny sprids the board," meaning Anna Livia is always there, [00:53:14 - 00:53:18] she's always there. [00:53:18 - 00:53:25] And in the wake, really you could almost say that Molly Bloom's soliloquy has been expanded [00:53:25 - 00:53:33] to 300, 400 pages, and the whole thing is a meditation on the river. [00:53:33 - 00:53:38] The river is the feminine, and the first image in the book and the last image are the image [00:53:38 - 00:53:40] of the river. [00:53:40 - 00:53:45] The river dissolves everything and carries it out to sea. [00:53:45 - 00:53:50] Let me read this description of Anna Livia Pluribel, and then we'll go back to the synopsis. [00:53:50 - 00:53:59] How bootiful and how true to wife of her, when strongly forbidden to steal our historic [00:53:59 - 00:54:06] presence from the past post-prophothoticles, so as to will make us all lordy heirs and [00:54:06 - 00:54:11] lady madices of a pretty nice kettle of fruit. [00:54:11 - 00:54:17] She is living in our midst of debt and laughing through all plores for us. [00:54:17 - 00:54:24] Her birth is uncontrollable with a napper on for her mask and her sabos kicking arias. [00:54:24 - 00:54:26] So ser, so solly. [00:54:26 - 00:54:30] If yous ask me and I sack you, how, how? [00:54:30 - 00:54:33] Greeks may rise and Trojsters fall. [00:54:33 - 00:54:36] She is mercenary. [00:54:36 - 00:54:42] Through the length of the land lies under liquidation, flut, and there's nare a harbo [00:54:42 - 00:54:47] nor an eye-brush on this glabrous place of her-shruft. [00:54:47 - 00:54:53] What our vultures shall loan a vesta and hire some peat and sarch the shores her cockles [00:54:53 - 00:54:59] to heat, and shall do all a tarf woman can to puff the business on. [00:54:59 - 00:55:02] Puff, to puff the blaziness on. [00:55:02 - 00:55:10] Puff, puff, and even if Humphrey shall fall frumpty times as awkward again in the beards [00:55:10 - 00:55:19] bussulum of all our grand remonstrances, there'll be eggs for the breakers come to mourn him, [00:55:19 - 00:55:22] sunny side up with care. [00:55:22 - 00:55:28] So true it is that there's where's a turnover that Tay is wet to, and when you think you [00:55:28 - 00:55:34] catch sight of a hind, make sure you're cocked by a hen. [00:55:34 - 00:55:40] Well Nora felt that Jimmy would have been much better as a singer. [00:55:40 - 00:55:45] She so stated that she had great hopes for his voice. [00:55:45 - 00:55:48] She was a very practical woman, Nora Barnacle. [00:55:48 - 00:55:52] There wasn't a literary bone in her body, I think. [00:55:52 - 00:55:59] I think that's what Joyce loved about her, was that she was the real thing. [00:55:59 - 00:56:08] And all these women, Molly and Olivia, they all are Nora Joyce for sure. [00:56:08 - 00:56:16] He died shortly after it was published, although it had been known in manuscript for over ten [00:56:16 - 00:56:20] years to the literati of his circle. [00:56:20 - 00:56:29] It was called "Work in Progress" and people didn't even know if he was serious or not. [00:56:29 - 00:56:31] And it was very hard to find a publisher. [00:56:31 - 00:56:34] It was a typographical nightmare. [00:56:34 - 00:56:41] Joyce was going blind and so trying to keep track of the spelling. [00:56:41 - 00:56:44] There's hardly a standard spelling in there. [00:56:44 - 00:56:52] There's hardly a word that is not somehow fiddled with and changed around. [00:56:52 - 00:56:58] If you pay attention to what you're calling life as it is, you will discover that it's [00:56:58 - 00:57:01] not a simple thing at all. [00:57:01 - 00:57:03] That it's like this. [00:57:03 - 00:57:12] I mean, I used to say when you're vacuuming your apartment, Rome falls nine times an hour [00:57:12 - 00:57:15] and your job is to notice. [00:57:15 - 00:57:20] And you always do notice but you never tell yourself that you're noticing. [00:57:20 - 00:57:31] So in the course of a day, I live and you live, to some degree, the entirety of global [00:57:31 - 00:57:32] civilization. [00:57:32 - 00:57:41] I mean, Rome falls, algebra is discovered, the Turks are beating at the gates of Vienna [00:57:41 - 00:57:45] and it isn't even 11 a.m. yet, you know. [00:57:45 - 00:57:52] So there is this sense of the co-presence of history. [00:57:52 - 00:57:59] We are imprisoned inside the linear assumption that I'm a person in a place, in a time, I'm [00:57:59 - 00:58:02] alive, most people aren't. [00:58:02 - 00:58:08] But in fact, when you deconstruct all that, that's just, that is fiction. [00:58:08 - 00:58:18] And the truth is more this onrushing magma of literary association and you know in Ulysses [00:58:18 - 00:58:22] you get an enormous amount of half-baked science. [00:58:22 - 00:58:29] Leopold Bloom is always looking at things and explaining to himself how they work using [00:58:29 - 00:58:36] very crackpotted notions of hydraulics and electricity and this sort of thing. [00:58:36 - 00:58:43] I think, you know, people say the psychedelic experience is hard to remember, dreams are [00:58:43 - 00:58:51] hard to remember, but harder to remember than either of those is simply ordinary experience. [00:58:51 - 00:58:59] You know, you lie in the bath and you close your eyes for 30 seconds and empires fall, [00:58:59 - 00:59:06] dynastic families unfold themselves, power changes hands, princes are beheaded, a pope [00:59:06 - 00:59:11] disgraced, so forth, that was for you. [00:59:11 - 00:59:18] And then somebody drops something and you wake up and 15 seconds have passed. [00:59:18 - 00:59:24] That's the reality of life, but we suppress this chaotic irrational side. [00:59:24 - 00:59:31] The genius of Joyce and to some degree, although in a more controlled form, Proust and then [00:59:31 - 00:59:37] there were other practitioners, Faulkner certainly, was what they called stream of consciousness. [00:59:37 - 00:59:46] But what it was, was it was an ability to really listen to the associating mind without [00:59:46 - 00:59:51] trimming, pruning, judging, denying. [00:59:51 - 00:59:58] One of the great puzzles to me is the great antagonism between Jung and Joyce because [00:59:58 - 01:00:10] you would have thought that they would have been comrades in arms, but Joyce loathed psychoanalysis. [01:00:10 - 01:00:18] She thought that to use all this material to elucidate imagined pathologies was a very [01:00:18 - 01:00:25] uncreative use of it and that it should all be fabricated into literature. [01:00:25 - 01:00:36] It's very hard to surpass Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, these people. [01:00:36 - 01:00:41] Maybe genuflects to Joyce, but very few people plow in the way he did. [01:00:41 - 01:00:51] I mean, Thomas Pynchon is considered a difficult, hallucinatory writer and there isn't 20 pages [01:00:51 - 01:00:59] in Gravity's Rainbow as obscure as a randomly chosen page here. [01:00:59 - 01:01:07] I can understand the impulse to want to get the universe into a book because it hints [01:01:07 - 01:01:12] at something that we've talked about in some of these circles, or whatever they are, which [01:01:12 - 01:01:25] is that the character of life is like a work of literature. [01:01:25 - 01:01:31] We are told that you're supposed to fit your experience into the model which science gives [01:01:31 - 01:01:45] you, which is probabilistic, statistical, predictable, and yet the felt datum of experience [01:01:45 - 01:01:49] is much more literary than that. [01:01:49 - 01:01:57] We fall in love, we make and lose fortunes, we inherit houses in Scotland, we lose everything, [01:01:57 - 01:02:06] we get terrible diseases, we're cured of them, or we die of them, but it all has this strom [01:02:06 - 01:02:13] and drang aspect to it which physics is not supposed to have, but which literature always [01:02:13 - 01:02:14] has. [01:02:14 - 01:02:19] I think that, I don't know if it's true, but I think what Joyce believed and what I'm willing [01:02:19 - 01:02:29] to entertain at some depth is the idea that salvation is somehow an act of encompassing [01:02:29 - 01:02:39] comprehension, that salvation is an actual act of apprehension, of understanding, and [01:02:39 - 01:02:45] that this act of apprehension involves everything. [01:02:45 - 01:02:52] This is why the alchemic, before James Joyce and this kind of literature, the only place [01:02:52 - 01:03:02] where you've got these kinds of constructs was in alchemy and magic, the idea that through [01:03:02 - 01:03:14] an act of magic the universe could be condensed to yield a fractal microcosm of itself. [01:03:14 - 01:03:20] Then what Joyce is saying is that the novel, which was unknown in the alchemical era, the [01:03:20 - 01:03:29] novel comes later, arguably, but the real zest for the novel comes in the 19th century, that [01:03:29 - 01:03:40] the novel is the alchemical retort into which these theories of how things work can be cast. [01:03:40 - 01:03:47] I think the great modern exponent of this, although now dead, and certainly one who owed [01:03:47 - 01:03:54] an enormous debt to Joyce, was Vladimir Nabokov, especially in Ada. [01:03:54 - 01:04:05] Ada is his paean of praise to Finnegan's Wake, basically, and the idea tacked in there is [01:04:05 - 01:04:10] the idea of causality and ordinary cause-uistry. [01:04:10 - 01:04:17] See that what all these people are saying, I think, and what the psychedelic experience [01:04:17 - 01:04:28] argues for as well, is that we are somehow prisoners of language, and that somehow, you [01:04:28 - 01:04:35] know, if we are prisoners of language, then the key which will set us loose is somehow [01:04:35 - 01:04:37] also made of language. [01:04:37 - 01:04:40] What else could fit the lock? [01:04:40 - 01:04:52] So somehow an act of poetic leisure-dormaine is necessary, and Joyce, in Finnegan's Wake, [01:04:52 - 01:04:58] I mean, he didn't live to argue the case or to work it out, he died shortly after, but [01:04:58 - 01:05:05] this comes about as close as anybody ever came to actually pushing the entire contents [01:05:05 - 01:05:11] of the universe down into about 14 cubic inches. [01:05:11 - 01:05:25] Joyce and Proust had one meeting, and supposedly, Joyce said to Proust, "I'm too young for [01:05:25 - 01:05:27] you to teach me anything." [01:05:27 - 01:05:30] Are you all familiar with the remembrance of things past? [01:05:30 - 01:05:34] Well, it could hardly be a more different work of literature. [01:05:34 - 01:05:42] I mean, it is stately and cinematic, and you always know where you are, and the characters [01:05:42 - 01:05:43] are defined. [01:05:43 - 01:05:52] It's an old-style novel, but there are places in it where he just takes flight and prefigures [01:05:52 - 01:05:57] the kind of writing that Faulkner and Joyce were able to do. [01:05:57 - 01:06:07] As far as psychedelic influences, I don't know that there are arguably any. [01:06:07 - 01:06:10] Joyce lived in Trieste for a while and taught English. [01:06:10 - 01:06:19] He may have been, as a habitué of Paris, he may have been familiar with hashish. [01:06:19 - 01:06:31] He probably had some familiarity with absinthe, but I doubt that it was a lifestyle for him. [01:06:31 - 01:06:39] I think that the whole of the 20th century is informed by this hyperdimensional understanding, [01:06:39 - 01:06:52] and that Jung tapping into it in the 20s, the Dadaists in 1919 in Zurich, the Surrealists [01:06:52 - 01:06:58] even earlier, the Ecole de Pathophysique, L'Entremont, Jari, all of these people. [01:06:58 - 01:07:09] What it's about, the 20th century, is this, well, McLuhan's phrase comes to mind, the [01:07:09 - 01:07:18] Gutenberg Galaxy, the spectrum of effects created by print, the classes, the conceits, the industries, [01:07:18 - 01:07:26] the products, the attitudes, the garments, all of the things created by print. [01:07:26 - 01:07:31] We are living in a terminal civilization. [01:07:31 - 01:07:40] I don't want to say dying, because civilizations aren't animals, but we are living in an age [01:07:40 - 01:07:44] of great self-summation. [01:07:44 - 01:07:54] What we look back at is basically since the fall of Rome, there has been an unbroken working [01:07:54 - 01:07:57] out of certain themes. [01:07:57 - 01:08:07] Scholasticism, the Aristotelian and Platonic corpuses, Christianity always presented as [01:08:07 - 01:08:13] somehow a rival to science, is in fact, paves the way for science. [01:08:13 - 01:08:19] There would have been no science had there not been William of Ockham, who was a 14th [01:08:19 - 01:08:24] century nominalist theologian. [01:08:24 - 01:08:34] Western civilization has had a thousand years to work its magic, and now there is a summation [01:08:34 - 01:08:35] underway. [01:08:35 - 01:08:41] I don't certainly presume, at least not this evening, to judge it. [01:08:41 - 01:08:47] How do you place a value on an entire civilization? [01:08:47 - 01:08:59] But in the same way that when a person dies, their entire life passes before them in review. [01:08:59 - 01:09:10] When a civilization dies, it hypnagogically cycles the detritus of centuries and centuries [01:09:10 - 01:09:15] of struggle to understand. [01:09:15 - 01:09:26] One like Joyce, I think, just brings that to an excruciating climax, because it's all there. [01:09:26 - 01:09:34] It's all there, from the smile that tugs at the lips of the woman in the Arnolfini wedding, [01:09:34 - 01:09:42] to quantum physics, to what Molière said to his niece in the 15th letter, and so forth [01:09:42 - 01:09:46] and so on. [01:09:46 - 01:09:49] The task is to hold it in your mind. [01:09:49 - 01:09:59] I think it was William James who said, "If we don't read the books with which we carefully [01:09:59 - 01:10:08] line our apartments, then we're no better than our dogs and cats." [01:10:08 - 01:10:15] Too often this is lost sight of, and the point of it is not simply that we are "esthetes" [01:10:15 - 01:10:21] "literateurs" and that here in the twilight of the gods we should sit around reading James [01:10:21 - 01:10:22] Joyce. [01:10:22 - 01:10:23] That isn't the point. [01:10:23 - 01:10:29] The point is that this is the distillation of our experience of what it is to be human, [01:10:29 - 01:10:40] and it's out of these kinds of distilling processes that we can launch some kind of new [01:10:40 - 01:10:50] dispensation for the human enterprise, because we have played it out. [01:10:50 - 01:10:54] It's now a set piece, all of it. [01:10:54 - 01:11:06] When I listen to rock and roll now, it's interesting to me, but it has the completedness of polyphony. [01:11:06 - 01:11:13] It's a done deal somehow, and we're looking backward and we're anticipating. [01:11:13 - 01:11:19] The purpose of literature, I think, is to illuminate the past and to give a certain [01:11:19 - 01:11:23] guidance as we move into the future. [01:11:23 - 01:11:33] This book, by being at first so opaque and so challenging to aesthetic canons and social [01:11:33 - 01:11:42] values, eventually emerges as a very prescient insight into our circumstance. [01:11:42 - 01:11:49] The Ballad of Finnegan's Wake has hundreds of verses, and in an Irish pub it can keep [01:11:49 - 01:11:54] people going all night long. [01:11:54 - 01:12:05] It's a celebration of complexity and of the human journey, and Joyce doesn't judge. [01:12:05 - 01:12:10] It says somewhere in Finnegan's Wake, "Here in Moycayne," which is the red light district [01:12:10 - 01:12:18] of Dublin, "Here in Moycayne we flop on the seamy side, but up 'ne' ent prospector you [01:12:18 - 01:12:23] sprout all your worth and woof your wings. [01:12:23 - 01:12:27] So if you want to be phoenixed, come and be parked." [01:12:27 - 01:12:29] That's that passage about death. [01:12:29 - 01:12:35] "Here in Moycayne we flop on the seamy side, but up 'ne' ent you sprout all your worth [01:12:35 - 01:12:37] and woof your wings." [01:12:37 - 01:12:46] It was a very optimistic, transformative sort of vision. [01:12:46 - 01:12:50] How complexity is the ocean we have to learn to surf. [01:12:50 - 01:12:52] That's the river. [01:12:52 - 01:12:57] Yes, that's the river, and that's the psychedelic side of it. [01:12:57 - 01:13:02] Imagine that you can get 63,000 different words in here, tell a story, and have all [01:13:02 - 01:13:12] the common articles and modifiers operating normally anyway. [01:13:12 - 01:13:16] And then it's very optimistic. [01:13:16 - 01:13:25] Molly Bloom's speech is probably the single most optimistic outpouring in all of 20th [01:13:25 - 01:13:27] century literature. [01:13:27 - 01:13:29] Not that there was much competition. [01:13:29 - 01:13:37] Yes, yes, the final affirmation, yes. [01:13:37 - 01:13:43] Sam Beckett, Nobel Prize winner, genius in his own right, but secretary to James Joyce [01:13:43 - 01:13:52] for many, many years, and passionately in love with Joyce's tragically schizophrenic [01:13:52 - 01:13:54] daughter. [01:13:54 - 01:14:01] You want an unhappy story, the story of Sam, you'll find out why Sam Beckett is not exactly [01:14:01 - 01:14:04] laughing all the time in his work. [01:14:04 - 01:14:10] A very, very complex relationship to Joyce's schizophrenic child. [01:14:10 - 01:14:13] Joyce's family life was not very happy. [01:14:13 - 01:14:19] I think he had a wonderfully sensuous life with Nora, but I don't know what it would [01:14:19 - 01:14:24] be like to be the guy who wrote this book and live with a woman who thought you would [01:14:24 - 01:14:29] be better off as a saloon singer. [01:14:29 - 01:14:34] Not exactly a saloon singer, I mean he did, but still. [01:14:34 - 01:14:35] Shall I try and find...