Finnegan's Wake is the last and most ambitious and most puzzling work of the British writer
 James Joyce, who of course wrote Dubliners and Ulysses.
 And if Ulysses is the algebra of literature, then Finnegan's Wake is the partial differential
 equation.
 Most of us break down that algebra, few of us aspire to go on to the partial linear differential
 equation.
 In some ways I think it can arguably said that this is the quintessential work of art,
 or at least work of literature, of the 20th century, and Joyce intended it that way.
 Joseph Campbell called it the staggering allegory of the fall and redemption of mankind.
 Equally respected critics have called it a surrender to the crossword puzzle portion
 of the human mind.
 So the main thing about it is that it is linguistically dense, it is dense on every level.
 It has over 63,000 individual words in it.
 It's more words than most fictional manuscripts have, words period.
 It has over 5,000 characters in it.
 Ulysses was designed as a kind of, Joyce thought of it as his day book.
 It follows the peregrinations of an ordinary Dubliner, this is Ulysses, an ordinary Dubliner
 through the vicissitudes of his day, his struggles to buy some kidneys to fry for breakfast,
 his chance meeting with his wife's lover, so forth and so on.
 Fairly straightforward exposition of the techniques of literature that have been perfected in
 the 20th century, stream of consciousness, so forth and so on, slice of life.
 Inegan's Wake was designed to be the night book to that day book.
 So it was conceived of as a dream and one of the questions that undergraduates are asked
 to shed ink over is, whose dream is it?
 And what is this book about?
 I mean when you first pick it up, it's absolutely daunting.
 There doesn't seem to be a way into it, it seems to be barely in English.
 And the notion, you know, that one could by spending time with this, tease out characters,
 plot, literary tension, resolution, this sort of thing, seems fairly unlikely.
 Actually it's one of the few things that really repays pouring effort into it.
 The first 25 pages are incredibly dense and most people are eliminated somewhere in those
 first 25 pages and so never really, it's a language and you have to gain a facility with
 it and you have to cheat, that's the other thing.
 And there's lots of help cheating because it has spawned a great exegetical literature,
 all kinds of pale scholars eager to give you the Celtic word lists of Finnegan's Wake or
 a discussion of the doctrine of the transubstantiation in Finnegan's Wake or so forth and so on.
 Hundreds of these kinds of doctoral theses in comp lit have been ground out over the
 decades.
 The reason I'm interested in it, I suppose I should fast up, is because it's two things
 clearly.
 Finnegan's Wake is psychedelic and it is apocalyptic/eschatological.
 And what I mean by those phrases is, first of all, what I mean by psychedelic is there
 is no stable point of view, there is no character per se, you never know who is speaking.
 You have to read into each speech to discover, you know, is this King Mark, Annalivia Pluribel,
 Humphrey Chimptonier, Wicker, Shem, the Penman, Sean, who is it?
 And identities are not fixed.
 Those of you who have followed my rap over the years, I'm always raving about how psychedelics
 dissolve boundaries.
 Well Finnegan's Wake is as if you had taken the entirety of the last thousand years of
 human history and dissolved all the boundaries.
 So Queen Mob becomes Mae West, you know, all the personages of pop culture, politics, art,
 church history, Irish legend, Irish intermessing politics are all swirling, changing, merging.
 Time is not linear.
 You will find yourself at a recent political rally, then return to the court of this or
 that Abyssinian emperor or pharaoh.
 It's like a trip.
 And the great technique, I was thinking about this as I was thinking about this lecture,
 the great technique of the 20th century is collage or pastiche.
 It was originally developed by the Dadaists in Zurich in 1919.
 Right now it's having a huge resurgence in the form of sampling in pop music.
 And Joyce was the supreme sampler.
 I mean, he draws his material from technical catalogs, menus, legal briefs, treaty language,
 mythologies, dreams, doctor-patient conversations.
 Everything is grist for this enormous distillery.
 And yet, you know, what comes out of this, once you learn the codes and once you learn
 to play the game, is a Joyce-ian story that all graduates of Ulysses will recognize.
 I mean, the main, what Joyce was about was an incredible sympathy with common people
 and an awareness of the dilemma of, you know, being a Jew in Irish Ireland, being a devotee
 of scholasticism in the 20th century, of dislocation and disorientation, of being the cuckolded
 husband, of being the failed divinity student.
 All of these characters and themes are familiar.
 It's quite an amazing accomplishment.
 There's nothing else like it in literature.
 It had very little anticipation.
 The only real anticipator of Joyce in English, I think, is Thomas Nash, who most people have
 never heard of.
 Thomas Nash was a contemporary of Shakespeare and wrote a famous, I don't know what that
 means in such a context, but a novel called, it was called "The Wayfaring Traveller."
 Anyway, Nash had this megalomaniac richness of language, this attitude that it's better
 to put it in than take it out.
 And that's certainly what you get with Joyce.
 I mean, Joyce is so dense with technical terms, brand names, pop references, localisms.
 The way to conceive of Finnegan's Wake, really, is like a mitten, a garbage dump.
 And there is, in fact, a garbage dump in the Wake that figures very prominently.
 And what you as the reader have to do is go in there with nut pick and toothbrush and
 essentially remove one level after another level after another level and sink down and
 down.
 And the theme is always the same, you know?
 The delivery of the word, the misinterpretation of the word, and the redemption of the word
 at every level in all times and places.
 The reason I now go on some distance toward explaining why I think of it as psychedelic,
 the reason why I think of it as eschatological and apocalyptic is because he really, you
 know, it's hard to tell.
 We don't have James Joyce around to ask how much of this material he took seriously and
 how much of it was grist for his literary mill.
 But he was perfectly conversant with Renaissance theories of magic.
 The entire book is based on La Sienza Nuova of Guillaume-Baptiste Wickeau, who was a,
 I don't know what you would call him, a Renaissance sociologist, basically, and systems theorist.
 And Joyce, once in a famous interview, said that if the whole universe were to be destroyed
 and only Finnegan's Wake survived, that the goal had been that then the entire universe
 could be reconstructed out of this.
 Some of you who are students of Torah, this is a very Talmudic idea, that somehow a book
 is the primary reality.
 You know, the idea in Hasidism in some schools is that all of the future is already contained
 in the Torah, and then when you ask them, well, if it's contained there, then isn't
 it predestined?
 And the answer is no, because the letters are scrambled and only the movement of the
 present moment through the text correctly unscrambles and arranges the letter.
 This is Joyce thinking, for sure.
 And it's very close to a central theme in Joyce, and a central theme in the Western
 religious tradition, which is the coming into being, the manifestation of the word, the
 declension of the word into matter.
 And in a sense, what Joyce was trying to do was, he was in that great tradition of literary
 alchemy that, whose earlier practitioners were people like Robert Flood, Athanasius
 Kircher, Paracelsus, these are not familiar names, but in the late flowering of alchemy,
 when the birth of modern science could already, the rosy glow could already be seen, the alchemists
 turned toward literary allegory in the 16th and early 17th century.
 Joyce is essentially in that tradition.
 I mean, this is an effort to condense the entire of experience, all, as Joyce says in
 The Wake, all space-time in a nutshell is what we're searching for here.
 A kind of philosopher's stone of literary associations from which the entire universe
 can be made to blossom forth.
 And the way it's done is through pun and tricks of language and double and triple and quadruple
 entendre.
 No word is opaque.
 Every word is transparent, and you see through it to older meanings, stranger associations,
 and as your mind tries to follow these associative trees of connection, you eventually, you get
 the feeling, which is the unique feeling that The Wake gives you, which is, it's about as
 close to LSD on the page as you can get, because you are simultaneously many points of view,
 simultaneously many dramatis loci, many places in the plot, and the whole thing is riddled
 with resonance.
 You know, a man doing a task on one level is on another level a Greek god completing
 a task, and on another level some other figure of some more obscure mythology.
 So really, one thing about Finnegan's Wake, it's like a dipstick for your own intelligence.
 What you bring to it is going to determine what you get out.
 And if you have read the books which Joyce was familiar with, or if you have armed yourself
 with such simple things as a Fodor's Guide to Ireland, or a good map of Ireland, or a
 good work of Irish mythology, then it immediately begins to betray its secrets to you.
 And it's so rich that it's easy to make original discoveries.
 It's easy to see and understand things which probably have not been seen or understood
 since James Joyce put it there, because he had this kind of all-inclusive intelligence.
 Maybe I didn't make clear enough why that, to my mind, is an eschatological phenomena,
 this production of the Philosopher's Stone.
 It's because it's about the union of spirit and matter.
 That's what the Philosopher's Stone is about.
 And writing a book which aspires to be the seed for a living world is about the union
 of spirit and matter as well.
 And the Christian scenario of redemption at the end of profane history is another scenario
 of transubstantial union, union of spirit and matter.
 This seems to be, in fact, the overarching theme of Finnegan's Wake and of the 20th century.
 In terms of the temporal context for this book, it was finished in 1939, a few months
 before 1939, and Joyce died early in '39.
 In a sense, he died in one of the most science fiction moments of the 20th century, because
 the Third Reich was going strong.
 It had not yet been pegged down a notch.
 Schemes of eugenics and thousand-year racially purified super-civilizations, all of that
 crazy early '40s stuff was happening.
 And the book is surprisingly modern.
 Television appears, psychedelic drugs appear, all of these things appear.
 I mean, presciently, he was some kind of a prophet.
 And also, he understood the 20th century sufficiently that the part he hadn't yet lived through
 was as transparent to him as the part that he had.
 He could see what was coming.
 Well, that's by way of my introduction.
 I want to read you what some other people have said about this, because I don't think
 I can say enough on my own.
 This is the indispensable book, if you're serious about this, A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's
 Wake.
 And it takes the view that we don't know what this thing is, so we have to go through it
 literally line by line.
 And he tells you the story, the entire story, in the one-page version, in the ten-page version,
 and in the 200-page version.
 And even in the 200-page version, there are sections where Campbell simply reports, "The
 next five pages are extremely obscure."
 Mark it.
 But this is just a short section.
 And one of the things about working with the Wake is you become, at first, this language
 which is so impenetrable and bizarre, it ends up infecting you.
 And you become unable to write or talk any other way.
 So I'll read you some of Campbell's introduction, and I think you will see it's like the Wake
 itself, except in baby steps.
 Welcome to a strange subject.
 Running riddle and fluid dancer, Finnegan's Wake is a mighty allegory of the fall and
 resurrection of mankind.
 It is a strange book, a compound of fable, symphony, and nightmare, a monstrous enigma
 beckoning imperiously from the shadowy pits of sleep.
 Its mechanics resemble those of a dream, a dream which has freed the author from the
 necessities of common logic and has enabled him to compress all periods of history, all
 phases of individual and racial development, into a circular design of which every part
 is beginning, middle, and end.
 In a gigantic, wheeling rebus, dim effigies rumble past, disappear into foggy horizons,
 and are replaced by other images, vague but half-consciously familiar.
 On this revolving stage, mythological heroes and events of remotest antiquity occupy the
 same spatial and temporal planes as modern personages and contemporary happenings.
 All time occurs simultaneously.
 Tristram and Wellington, Father Adam and Humpty Dumpty merge in a single precept.
 Multiple meanings are present in every line.
 Interlocking allusions to key words and phrases are woven like fugal themes into the pattern
 of the work.
 Finnegan's Wake is a prodigious, multifaceted monolith, not only the coshimar of a Dublin
 citizen, but the dreamlike saga of guilt-stained, evolving humanity.
 The vast scope and intricate structure of Finnegan's Wake give the book a forbidding
 aspect of impenetrability.
 It appears to be a dense and baffling jungle, trackless and overgrown with wanton perversities
 of form and language.
 Clearly such a book is not meant to be idly fingered.
 It tasks the imagination, exacts discipline and tenacity from those who would march with
 it.
 Yet some of the difficulties disappear as soon as the well-disposed reader picks up
 a few compass clues and gets his bearings.
 Then the enormous map of Finnegan's Wake begins slowly to unfold.
 Characters and motifs emerge, themes become recognizable, and Joyce's vocabulary falls
 more and more familiarly on the accustomed ear.
 Complete understanding is not to be snatched at greedily in one sitting.
 Or in fifty, I might add.
 Nevertheless, the ultimate state of the intelligent reader is certainly not bewilderment.
 Rather it is an admiration for the unifying insight, economy of means, and more than Rabelaisian
 humor which have miraculously quickened the stupendous mass of material.
 One acknowledges at last that James Joyce's overwhelming micro-macrocosm could not have
 been fired to life in any sorcerer furnace less black, less heavy, less murky than this,
 his incredible book.
 He had to smelt the modern dictionary back to protean plasma and reenact the genesis
 and mutation of language in order to deliver his message.
 But the final wonder is that such a message could be delivered at all.
 Every book has to be about something.
 I mean, so what is this book about?
 Well, as far as anybody can tell, it appears to be about someone named, well they have
 hundreds of names actually, but for economy's sake, someone named Humphrey Chimpton Earwicker,
 or abbreviated HCE.
 And Humphrey Earwicker runs a pub in Chappelazade, which is a suburb or a district of London.
 And he has, as it says, an Ittle wifey, who is Annalivia Pluribel.
 Now these two people, this barkeep and his wife, and their two children, Jerry and Kevin,
 or Shem and Sean, or, and then they also have hundreds of names because they occur on hundreds
 and hundreds of levels.
 Every brother's struggle in history is enacted by the two boys, Jerry and Kevin.
 They are Shem the penman and Sean the other one.
 And they dichotomize certain parts of the process.
 So here is, in one paragraph, this is the Cliff Notes version of what Finnegan's Wake
 is all about.
 If you commit this to memory, you will never be caught wanting at a New York cocktail party.
 As the tale unfolds, we discover that Humphrey Chimpton Earwicker is a citizen of Dublin,
 a stuttering tavern keeper with a bull-like hump on the back of his neck.
 He imagines as a, he emerges, sorry, as a well-defined and sympathetic character, the
 sorely harrowed victim of a relentless fate, which is stronger than, yet identical with,
 himself.
 The voice refers to him under various names, such as, "Here comes everybody," and "Haveth
 Childers everywhere."
 Indications of his universality and his role as the great progenitor, the hero has wandered
 vastly, leaving families, that is, deposits of civilization, at every pause along the
 way from Troy and Asia Minor, he is frequently called the Turk, up through the turbulent
 lands of the Goths, the Franks, the Norsemen, and overseas to the Green Isles of Britain
 and the Ire.
 His chief Germanic manifestations are Woden and Thor, his chief Celtic, Manon and Maclur.
 Again he is St. Patrick carrying the new faith, again Strongbow leading the Anglo-Norman conquest,
 again Cromwell conquering with a bloody hand.
 Most specifically, he is our Anglican tavern-keeper, HCE, in the Dublin suburb, Chappelazade.
 So like Ulysses, the ground zero here is the utterly mundane, you know, middle-class, tormented
 Irish people embedded in the detritus of the 20th century.
 But there's an effort to never lose the cosmic perspective, never lose the sense that we
 are, you know, not individuals lost in time, but the front ends of gene streams that reach
 back to Africa, that we somehow have all these ancestors and conflicts swarming and storming
 within it.
 It's a very, it's a glorious, psychedelic, heartful, Irish view of what it is to be embedded
 in the mystery of existence.
 Well, okay, enough arm-waving.
 Now let's cut the cake here.
 Her run past Eves and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious
 vicus of recirculation back to Howarth Castle and Environs.
 Sir Tristram, the lord of Moors for o'er the short sea, had passing corps re-arrived from
 North Amorica, on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor, to welter-fight his penicillate
 war, nor had Top Sawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselves to Lawrence
 County Gorgios, while they went Dublin their mumber all the time, nor a voice from a fire
 bellowed "Misha, Misha" to "Tart Toff, Dart Patrick."
 Not yet, though Venice soon after had a kid-scab but ended a bland old Isaac, not yet, though
 all's fair in Vannessy, were Sothea Sester's wroth with two-and-one Nathan Joe, Rottepeck
 of Paws Malt had gem or shen brewed by Arclight, and Rory end to the Reganbow was to be seen
 ringsome on the Aquaface.
 The Fall, "Baba, Baba, Dal, Gara, Hagatak, Amina, Arong, Quarack, Brontong, Nerung, Quabang,
 Varah, Huting, Gatak, Tul, Hur, Demon, Wang, Amang, Nunuk," of a once wall-straight old
 par is retailed early in bed and later on life do it down through all Christian minstrelsy,
 the great fall of off-wall entailed at such short notice the fit shoot of Finnegan, earth's
 solid man, that the Humpty-Hill head of himself promptly sends an unquiring one-well to the
 west in quest of his Tumpty-Tumtoes, and their up-turned pike, toe, and place is at the knockout
 in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since Devlin's first-loved
 Livy."
 So, now, granted that the first pages are dense, and it isn't all this dense, because
 even though the concept of fractals lay years in the future, the effort here is to tell
 the whole damn thing in the first word, to tell it again in the next two words, to tell
 it again in the next three words, and so on.
 So here in these first roughly three paragraphs, a huge amount of information is being passed
 along.
 First of all, we're given a location, if we're smart enough to know it.
 "River Run, past even Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious
 vicus of recirculation back to Howarth Castle and Environs."
 Well, now, if you know the geography of Dublin, you know that's where you are, because, and
 notice Howarth Castle and Environs is H-C-E. These initials recur thousands of times in
 this book, always bringing you back to, to remind you that this has something to do with
 Humphrey Irwicker.
 What this first sentence says is "River Run," and it's the River Liffey, which we will meet
 in a thousand reincarnations, because Anna Liffey, a pleura bell, is the personification
 of the goddess River.
 The river runs past even Adams, and there is a church there on the shore named Adam
 and Eve in Dublin, "from swerve of shore to bend of bay," and then this strange phrase
 "brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation."
 This announces the great architectonic plan of the wake, that it is in fact going to be
 based on the sociological ruminations of Guillaume-Baptiste Vico's "La Sciencia Nuova," the vicus mode
 of recirculation, because, as I'm sure you all know, Vico's theory of the fall and redemption
 of mankind was that there were four ages.
 I can't remember, gold, silver, iron, clay, I think.
 And so this idea of the recirculation, of the connectedness, of the cyclicity, of the,
 as he says, "the same again, again and again, fin again, sin again, the same again."
 And this is one of his great, great themes, is the recurso, everything comes again, nothing
 is unannounced, love affair, every dynastic intrigue, every minor political disgrace,
 and a minor political disgrace figures very prominently in this book, because as the carrier
 of Adam's sin, the great dilemma for Humphrey Erwickard is that he is running for a minor
 political post, alderman, but apparently one night, rather juiced, he relieved himself,
 well, there are many versions and you hear them all and they are all given in dreams
 and in mock trials and in accusatory fantasy.
 He either innocently took a leak in the park, or he fondled himself in some way in the presence
 of Maggie and her sister, in such a way that his reputation is now at great risk, and it
 all depends on the testimony of a cad, a soldier, or perhaps three soldiers, it's never clear,
 it's constantly shifting, and this question of, you know, what happened when Maggie seen
 all with her sister in shawl at the magazine wall, haunts the book, because on it turns
 the question of whether HCE is a stalwart pillar of the community, or in fact a backsliding
 masturbator and a monster and so forth and so on, as one always is if one is trapped
 in a James Joyce novel.
 Then this puzzling list in the second paragraph is simply a list of things which haven't happened
 yet. Sir Tristram, lover of music, Villalor de Mors, for o'er the short sea, had passing
 corps, not yet, re-arrived from North Amorica, from the coast of Brittany, on this side the
 scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor, to welterweight his penicillate war. Now this word, penicillate,
 is typical Joyce punning, peninsulate war, obviously because it's being launched from
 Brittany, penicillate war, because Sir Tristram is the great archetype of the lover, and so
 his war is penicillate. Okay, so that's the first thing that has not yet happened, it's
 telling you. Sir Tristram has not yet come to Ireland, to put it simply. Nor has Top
 Sawyer's Rocks by the stream O'Coney exaggerated the cells to Lawrence County Gorgios while
 they went Dublin their mumber all the time. Now this is further obscurity. There is a
 stream in Georgia, and Top Sawyer is a reference to Tom Sawyer, because Tom Sawyer was Huck
 Finn's friend, and Huck Finn is Finn in America. There is a huge amount of Mark Twain that
 has been poured into these books because of the Huckleberry Finn connection, Finn in the
 new world. And Top Sawyer's Rocks is a reference possibly to testicles and so forth and so
 on. Every single word, I mean you can just take a word and go into this until you exhaust
 yourself. And then the next thing that has not yet happened, nor a voice from a fire
 bellowed "Misha Misha" to "Tartoff thou art Petrick." Tartoff is Celtic for "thou art
 baptized." So St. Patrick has not yet baptized in Ireland. Not yet, though Venice soon after,
 and the "Venice soon" is a pun on Venice and then very soon. Had a kid scat butt-ended
 a bland old Isaac. It's a reference to the Isaac Esau tale in the Bible. It's also a
 reference to Isaac Butts, who was a figure in the politics of the Irish Rebellion. Not
 yet, those all's fairs in Vannessy were Sotheast's sisters wrought with Tua Nathan-Jo. That's,
 at this point, a very obscure reference, but there is a great incest and sister theme in
 Finnegan's Wake. And the twin, the mistresses of Jonathan Swift become carriers of a huge
 amount of energy in here, as do the mistresses of Thomas Stern. Because it's better to be
 Swift than Stern, or something like that. And then the last of these things which hadn't
 happened yet. "Rot a peck of Paul's malt had gem or shem brewed by arc light, and Rory
 unto the Regan bro was to be seen ringsome on the aqua face." That seems pretty obscure
 to me. According to Joseph Campbell, it's simply a reference to the presence of God
 moving over the waters in the first lines of Genesis. "Ringsome on the aqua face."
 Then this phrase, "the fall," and the multisyllabic word, "Baba labar agavirur," that word, these
 are the Viconian thunders. And they announce the beginning of each Viconian age. And when
 the thunder speaks, you know then that you're into a transition.
 [silence]


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