Finnegins Wake

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 at 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 a 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.

That's long 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.

Finnegan'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 fess up, is because it's two things clearly.

Finnegan's Wake is psychedelic, and it is apocalyptic slash 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, Anna Livia Pluribel, Humphrey Chimptonir, Wickersham, the Penman, Sean, who is it?

And identities are not fixed.

Those of you who have followed my rap over the years, I am 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 internecine 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 catalogues, 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 Joyceian 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 Traveler.

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'm now gone 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 Ciencia Nuova of Gian Battista Vico, 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 survive, 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, whose earlier practitioners were people like Robert Flood, Athanasius Kirscher, 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 philosophers 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.

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 transubstantium 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 1939.

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.

The 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.

Introduction to a strange subject.

Running riddle and fluid answer, 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 cashemar 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 re-enact 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.

Humphrey, and Humphrey Earwicker runs a pub in Chapalazade,

which is a suburb or a district of London.

And he has, as it says, an idyll wifey, who is Anna Livia Pluribel.

And 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 struggle in history is enacted by the two boys,

Jerry and Kevin.

They are Shem the penman and Sean the other one.

And they, 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.

Joyce 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 oversees to the Green Isles

of Britain in the Eyre.

His chief Germanic manifestations are Voden and Thor,

his chief Celtic, Manan and Maclaire.

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, Chapellezad.

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 is 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 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.

River run, past Eve and Adams,

from swerve of shore to bend of bay,

brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation

back to Halif Castle and environs.

Sir Tristram, the Olordo 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 Gorgio's,

while they went Dublin their mumber all the time,

nor a voice from a fire bellowed,

Misha, Misha, to Tart Toff, Thart Patrick.

Not yet, though Venice soon after,

had a kid's scab butt-ended a bland old Isaac.

Not yet, though all's fair in Vanassie,

were Sophie festers wroth with two-in-one Nathan-Joe.

Rot a peck of Pa's malt had gem or shen

brewed by arc-light and roary end to the Reganbow

was to be seen ringsome on the aqua-face.

The Fall.

Ba-ba-ba-ba-dal-ga-ra-hagatak amina-arung-kwarak-brantong-nerung-kwabang-varahutting-gat-ak-tul-hur-dimun-wang-am-anun-nuk.

Of a once wall-strayed 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-tum toes and their upturn pike toe and place

is at the knockout in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the greens

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 Eve and Adams from swerve of shore to bend of bay

brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howarth Castle.

So, at this point,

we'll be 25 minutes to see this point in the last four days

and then the next four days of the most CSV series,

we're seeing a couple of his Entscheidung recently,

so...

...

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 Yearwick or what this first sentence says

is River Run and it's the River Liffey

which we will meet in a thousand reincarnations because Anna Livia Pluribel is the personification of the goddess River.

The river runs past Eve and Adam's 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

vicos 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 Guillain-Baptiste Vico's La Ciencia Nuova, the vicos 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, thin 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 Earwick 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 C. Nall, 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, via Lorde d'Amours, for o'er the short sea, had passing corps, not yet

re-arrived, from North America, from the coast of Brittany, on this side, the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor, to welterweight his penicillate war

Now this is, this word penicillate is typical Joyce punning

Peninsulate war, obviously, is it being launched from Brittany

Penicillate war, because

Sir Tristram is the great archetype of the lover, and

and so his war is a 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 Oconee

Exaggerated the cells to Lawrence County Gorgio's, 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

Top Sawyer, because Tom Sawyer was Finn, 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 and

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 Thuart Petric

Tartoff is Celtic for Thuart Baptized

So St. Patrick has not yet baptized in Ireland

Not yet, though

Venison after and

The Venison is a is a pun on venison and very soon

Had a kid scab butt-handed 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 spares in Vanassie where Sophie Sester's rocked with two and Nathan Joe

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 Jem or Shem brewed by arc light and

Rory and to the Reagan brow 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 the this

Phrase the fall and the multi-syllabic word

Baba la barra gave rid of that word

These are the Viconian thunders and

They announce the beginning of each Viconian age and

And when when the thunder speaks, you know, then that there you're into a

transition

Then it actually launches in in the last paragraph into a fairly straightforward

evocation of at least the mythological

Finnegan as you all probably know there is an Irish drinking ballad of great antiquity called the Ballad of Tim Finnegan or the Ballad of Finnegan's Wake

And it tells the story of

Tim Finnegan who was a hod carrier a bricklayer's assistant and he was given to

Hitting the po team rather hard and he fell from his ladder

It's the Humpty Dumpty story. He fell from his ladder and he broke his back and

His friends waked him in the grand Irish fashion and at the height of the wake they became so

carried away and

Intoxicated that they upended a bucket of Guinness over his head and he

revived and

Joined the dance

Tim

Finnegan lived in Walken Street a gentle Irishman mighty a pretty beautiful brogue so rich and sweet

To rise in the world he carried a hut

You seed a sort of a tipplin' way with a look for the nick of poor Tim was born

To help a man with his work each day to drop of the crater every morn

Wack for the dam out and stay a partner with the floor your trotters shake

Wasn't it the truth? I told you lots of fun at Finnegan's Wake

One mornin' Tim got rather full his head felt heavy which made him shake

Fell from a ladder and he broke a skull and they carried him home his corpse to wake

Roll him up in an ice-ling sheet and laid him out upon the bed

A gal and a whiskey at his feet and a bottle of poor poor at his head

Wack for the dam out and stay a partner with the floor your trotters shake

Wasn't it the truth? I told you lots of fun at Finnegan's Wake

His friends assembled at the wake and Mrs. Finnegan called for lunch

First she brought in tea and cake, then pipes, tobacco and whiskey punch

Billy O'Brien began to cry, since it's a nice clean corpse that you will see

Tim O'Brien, you know you did it? I had a hole your gups at Paddy McGee

Wack for the dam out and stay a partner with the floor your trotters shake

Wasn't it the truth? I told you lots of fun at Finnegan's Wake

Then McGee O'Connor took up the job, a bitty cc, you're wrong I'm sure

Billy gave her a belt in the grop and left the sprawling on the floor

And the war did soon engage, woman to woman and man to man

Jalala was all the rage and a row and a ruction soon began to

Wack for the dam out and stay a partner with the floor your trotters shake

Wasn't it the truth? I told you lots of fun at Finnegan's Wake

Then McGee Maloney raised his head when a nuggin of whiskey flew at him

It missed and fallen on the bed, the liquor scattered over Tim

Tim revived, see how he rises? Timothy rising from the bed

Said, what'll your whiskey? I don't like glazes down a mondial

Do you think I'm dead?

Wack for the dam out and stay a partner with the floor your trotters shake

Wasn't it the truth? I told you lots of fun at Finnegan's Wake

This is the resurrection

I mean Tim Finnegan is very clearly for Joyce a Christ figure

And here is then the first evocation of Tim Finnegan

The fall, then the Viconian thunder

Of a once Wall Street old par

Which is just an old person

Is retailed early in bed and later on life

Down through all Christian minstrelsy

The great fall of the off-wall entailed at such short notice

The Fitchute of Finnegan

Now this word, P-F-T-J-S-C-H-U-T-E

Fitchute is Norwegian

I'm informed

And it refers to the act of falling

And the act of falling from a hill

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 tum toes

And their upturned pike point 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

This is fairly transparent

If you're Irish or a citizen of Dublin

Because what it's talking about is

Dublin is imagined to be situated

Basically in the belly of an enormous giant person

Who is Finnegan

Finnegan lies like a giant reclining figure

Along the Livy there

Husband and wife

River and mountain

And this is actually then

The focus has changed

And now we're talking about the geography

He was a solid man

Earth's solid man

But then somehow he turned into something

Where the Humpty Hill head of himself

Promptly sends an unquiring one well to the west

In quest of his tumpty tum toes

And if you have a map of Dublin laid out

You can actually see this enormous man

In the landscape

And there are many enormous men and women

In the landscape of this planet

And Joyce maps the Dublin geography over all of them

Some of you may know

Eastaxivatl

The magical mountain in Mexico

Eastaxivatl means the sleeping woman in Toltec

And many mountains are imagined to be sleeping people

So here he introduces this theme

And this is one paragraph

This is the invocation of Finnegan

As Hod Carrier

Big Mr. Finnegan

Of the stuttering hand

Freeman's Mower

Lived in the broadest way

Marginable

In his rush lit too far back

For messages

Before Joshua and Judges

Had given us numbers

Or Helviticus

Commuted Diteronomy

One yeasty day

He sternly strokes his teat in a tub

For to wash the future of his fates

But ere he swiftly took it out again

By the might of Moses

The very water was eviporated

And all the goodnesses had met their exodus

So that ought to show you

What a pension junchi chop he was

And during mighty odd years

This man of hod cement and edifices

H-C-E

Hod cement and edifices

In topper's thorp

Piled bildung

Pond the banks of the livers

By the so-and-so

He iade iddle feifee anee

Og'd the little critier

With her hair in huns

Took up your part in her

Off while babulous

Mither ahead

With goodly trowel in grasp

And ivar-old overalls

Which he habiticulary fancied

Like harum childerick egberberth

He would calculate

By multiplicables

The altitude and multitude

Until he seesaw by neat light

Of the liquor where Twint was born

His round-head stable of other days

To rise in undress masonry

Upstanded

Joy granite

A wall worth of a skeer scrape

Of most Eiffel, Howarth, and Towerly

Originating from next to nothing

And celiscating the hymnals and all

Hierarchitectipofloppical

With a burning bush

A bob off its bubble top

And with Lorenzo Tuller's

Clittering up

And Thomas Abbacchett's

Cluttering down

Now

What this paragraph says is

He was a great builder

And I think if you think back through

Your impression of hearing it read

You knew that

You know

These words that are associated

Words like

A wall worth of a skeer scrape

Of most Eiffel, Howarth, and Towerly

These are skyscraper words

Woolworth, skyscrape, and Towerly

Howarth, so forth and so on

And he can do this

He can build up

A pastiche of surfaces

Of impressions

Now

You might say

Why is there no economy?

Well there is no economy

Because economy

Is an aesthetic criterion

For shoemakers

Not for artists

And

You know

Economy is the curse

Of the Bauhaus

Babblers from hell

Which Joyce was very concerned

To refute all of that

If you have to place this

In a context

It's in the context

Of the most

Hallucinatory

Of the Baroque

You know

This is Arkhamboldoland

This is a work

That would have been

Welcome at the

Rudolfine Court

In Prague

It's a work

Of magical

Complexity

And

Enfolded

Self-reference

Now

We've just been

Through

These first

Four paragraphs

Now

I'll read you

What

Joseph Campbell

Has to say on it

By no means

All

Of what he has

To say on it

The first four paragraphs

Are the suspended

Tick of time

Between a cycle

Just past

And one about

To begin

They are in effect

An overture

Resonant with all

The themes

Of Finnegan's Wake

The dominant motif

Is the polylingual

Thunderclap

Of paragraph three

Baba baba

Daru your woman

That one

Which the voice

Of God

Makes audible

Through the noise

Of Finnegan's fall

Narrative movement

Begins with

The life

Fall

And wake

Of Hod Carrier

Finnegan

Pages four to seven

The wake scene

Fades into the landscape

Of Dublin

And environs

We've just heard

How he fell

From the ladder

Now we move

Into a description

Of the

Of the wake

And there's

A certain voice

That appears

At certain times

It's where

There are a lot

Of words

Ending in

A-T-I-O-N

Continuation

Of the celebration

Until the examination

Of the extermination

The

Okay

These are the

Twelve judges

Each character

When they appear

Has a certain

Tempo

To their character

So when that

Tempo

Enters the text

You know

The character

Is present

Even though

There may be

No trace

For example

An Olivia Pluribel's

Tempo

Is the tempo

Of the hen

Hear a little

There a little

Go a little

See a little

Do a little

The hen is scratching

This is this

Nervous

Bird-like

That's

An Olivia's

Signature

Here's just one

Paragraph

From the wake

Scene

Which

Builds

And has

Quite a

Some minor

Amount of humor

Associated with it

Jeez

I should

Say

Makul

Or

Hwaya

Didi

A day

Of a

Trying

Thursday

Morning

Sobs

They

Sided

At

Filigan's

Crissomor

Wake

All

All the

Hulavans

Of the

Nation

Prostrated

In their

Consternation

And their

Duodismally

Ploflusive

Plethora

Of

Eulation

There was

Plums

And

Groons

And

Cheriffs

And

Sitherers

And

Raiders

And

Cinnamon

To

And

They

All

Gained

In

With

The

Shout

Most

Choviality

Agog

And

Magog

And

The

Round

Of

The

Magog

To

The

Continuation

Of

That

Celebration

Until

Hand

And

Hungen's

Extermination

Some

In

Kink

And

Chorus

More

Can

Keenan

Belling

Him

Up

And

Laborin'

Youth

Sharpen

His

Pillow

Scone

Top

Up

His

Beer

And

Where

In

This

Whorl

Will

You

Hear

Such

A

Din

Again

With

Their

Deep

Brow

Fundigs

And

The

Dusty

Fidelios

They

Laid

Him

Brawn

Drawn

A

Lang

Last

Bed

With

A

Buck

A

Fiskey

For

His

Feet

And

A

Barreload

Of

Gun

Sore

His

Head

To

The

Total

Of

The

Fluid

Hang

The

Twaddle

Of

Drunken

Irish

Waish

That

Seems

Clear

But

There

Are

A

Lot

Of

Things

Going

On

Where

In

This

Whorl

Will

You

Hear

Such

A

Din

Again

And

He's

Stiff

But

He's

Steady

Is

Priam

Olam

All

This

Dionysian

And

Sexual

Imagery

Is

Fully

Explicit

In

Some

Ways

More

Realized

As

A

Character

Or

More

Lovable

If

That's

The

Word

Is

Anna

Livia

Pluribel

I

Mean

Anna

Livia

Pluribel

Is

Molly

Bloom

On

Acid

Basically

I

Mean

Molly

Bloom

We

Don't

Lose

Her

Outlines

We

Understand

Molly

And

Because

Molly

Doesn't

Offer

Us

That

Much

Of

Her

Own

Mind

She

Stands

For

The

Eternal

Feminine

But

Only

In

The

Really

Contact

Her

Anna

Livia

It's

Her

Book

It

May

In

Fact

Be

Her

Dream

And

The

Whole

Thing

Is

Permeated

With

Her

Tensions

And

Her

Cares

As

It

Says

Grand

Puppets

Is

Fallen

Down

Meaning

The

Great

Father

God

Is

At

Wake

Grand

Puppets

Is

Fallen

Down

But

Grinny

Spreads

The

Board

Meaning

Anna

Livia

Is

Always

There

She

Always

There

And

In

The

Wake

Really

You

Could

Almost

Say

That

Molly

Bloom

Soliloquy

Has

Been

Expanded

To

Pages

And

The

Whole

Thing

Is

A

Meditation

On

The

River

The

River

Is

The

Feminine

And

The

First

Image

In

The

Book

And

The

Last

Image

Are

The

Image

Of

The

River

Dissolves

Everything

And

Carries

It

Out

To

Sea

Let

Me

Read

This

Description

Of

Anna

Livia

Pluribel

And

Steal

Our

Historic

Presence

From

The

Past

Post

Propofoticals

So

As

To

Will

Make

Us

All

Lordy

Heirs

And

Lady

Meduses

Of

A

Pretty

Nice

Kettle

Of

Fruit

She

Is

Living

In

Our

Midst

Of

Debt

And

Laughing

Through

All

Plores

For

Us

Her

Birth

Is

Uncontrollable

With

A

Naperon

For

Her

Mask

And

Her

Sabos

Kicking

Arias

So

Ser

So

If

You

Me

And

I

Sack

You

How

Greeks

May

Rise

And

Troisers

Fall

She

Is

Mercenary

Through

The

Length

Of

The

Land

Lies

Under

Liquidation

Flute

And

There's

Nare

A

Harbow

Nor

An

Eye

Brush

On

This

Glaberous

Flace

Of

Hershroft

What

Our

Vault

She'll

Loan

A

Vesta

And

Hire

Some

Peat

And

Sarch

The

Shores

Her

Cockles

To

Heat

And

She'll

Do

All

A

Tarf

Woman

Can

To

Puff

The

Business

On

Puff

To

Puff

The

Blaziness

On

Puff

And

Even

If

Humphrey

Shall

Fall

Frumpty

Times

As

Awkward

Again

In

The

Beards

Busalume

Of

All

Our

Grand

Remonstrances

There

They'll

There'll

Be

Eags

For

The

Breakers

Come

To

Mourn

Him

Sunny

Side

Up

With

Care

So

True

It

Is

That

There's

Where's

A

Turnover

The

Tay

Is

Wet

Too

And

When

You

Think

You

Catch

Sight

Of

A

Hind

Make

Sure

You're

Cocked

By

A

Hinn

Well

Nora

Felt

That

Jimmy

Would

Have

Been

Much

Better

As

A

Singer

She

So

Stated

That

She

Had

Great

Hopes

For

His

Voice

And

She

Was

A

Very

Practical

Woman

Nora

Barnacle

There

They

All

Are

Nora

Joyce

For

Sure

He

Died

Shortly

After

It

Was

Published

Although

It

Had

Been

Known

In

Manuscript

For

Over

Ten

Years

To

The

Literati

Of

His

Circle

It

Was

Called

Work

In

Progress

And

People

Didn't

Even

Know

If

It

Was

Going

Blind

And

So

You

Know

Trying

To

Keep

Track

Of

The

Spelling

And

There

Hardly

A

Standard

Spelling

In

There

Hardly

A

Word

That

Is

Not

Somehow

Fiddled

With

And

Changed

Around

If

You

Pay

Attention

To

What

You're

Calling

Life

As

It

Is

You

Will

Discover

That

It's

Not

A

Simple

Thing

At

All

That

It's

Like

This

I

Mean

I

Used

To

Say

When

You're

Vacuuming

Your

Apartment

Rome

Falls

Nine

Times

An

Hour

And

Your

Job

Is

To

Notice

And

You

Always

Do

Notice

But

You

Never

Tell

Yourself

That

You're

Noticing

So

In

The

Course

I

Mean

Rome

Falls

Algebra

Is

Discovered

The

Turks

Are

Beating

At

The

Gates

Of

Vienna

And

It

Isn't

Even

A.M.

Yet

You

Know

So

There

Is

This

Sense

Of

The

Co-Presence

Of

History

The

We

Are

Imprisoned

Inside

The

Linear

Assumption

That

I'm

A

Person

In

Fact

When

You

Deconstruct

All

That

Is

Fiction

And

The

Truth

Is

More

This

Onrushing

Magma

Of

Literary

Association

And

You

Know

In

Ulysses

You

Get

An

Enormous

Amount

Of

Half

Baked

Science

Leopold

Bloom

Is

Electrics

And

Electricity

And

This

Sort

Of

Thing

I

Think

You

Know

People

Say

The

Psychedelic

Experience

Is

Hard

To

Remember

Dreams

Are

Hard

To

Remember

But

Harder

To

Remember

Than

Either

Of

Those

Is

Simply

Ordinary

Experience

You

Know

You

Lie

In

The

Bath

And

You

And

Then

Somebody

Drops

Something

And

You

Wake

Up

And

Fifteen

Seconds

Have

Passed

That

Is

The

Reality

Of

Life

But

We

Suppress

This

Chaotic

Irrational

Side

The

Genius

Of

Joyce

And

To

Some

Degree

Although

In

A

More

Controlled

Form

Proust

And

Then

There

Were

Other

Practitioners

For

Faulkner

Certainly

Was

What

They

Called

Stream

Of

Consciousness

But

What

It

Was

It

Was

An

Ability

To

Listen

To

The

Associating

Mind

Without

Trimming

Pruning

Judging

Denying

One

Of

The

Great

Puzzles

To

have been comrades in arms. But Joyce loathed psychoanalysis. He thought that to use all

this material to elucidate imagined pathologies was a very uncreative use of it, and that

it should all be fabricated into literature. It's very hard to surpass. You know, Thomas

Pynchon, William Gaddis, these people, everybody genuflects to Joyce, but very few people plow

in the way he did. I mean, Thomas Pynchon is considered a difficult, hallucinatory writer,

and there isn't 20 pages in Gravity's Rainbow as obscure as a randomly chosen page here.

I can understand the impulse to want to get the universe into a book, because it hints

at something that we've talked about in some of these circles, or whatever they are, which

is that the character of life is like a work of literature. We are told that you're supposed

to fit your experience into the model which science gives you, which is probabilistic, statistical,

predictable, and yet it's the felt datum of experience is much more literary than that. I mean, we fall

in love, we make and lose fortunes, we are, we inherit houses in Scotland, we lose everything, we get

terrible diseases, we're cured of them, or we die of them, but it all has this strong and drawn aspect to it,

which physics is not supposed to have, but which literature always has. And I think that, I don't

know if it's true, but I think what Joyce believed and what I'm willing to entertain at some depth is the idea

that salvation is somehow an act of encompassing comprehension, that salvation is an actual act of

apprehension, of understanding, and that this act of apprehension involves everything. This is why the

alchemic, before James Joyce and this kind of literature, the only place where you've got these kinds

of constructs, was in alchemy and magic, the idea that, you know, through an act of magic, the universe

could be condensed to yield a fractal microcosm of itself. Well, then what Joyce is saying is that the novel,

which was unknown in the alchemical era, the novel comes later, I mean, arguably, but the real zest for

the novel comes in the 19th century, that the, that the novel is the alchemical retort into which these,

these theories of, of how things work can be cast. I think the great modern exponent of this,

although now dead, and certainly one who owed an enormous debt to Joyce was Vladimir Nabokov,

especially in Ada. Ada is, is his pain of praise to Finnegan's Wake, basically, and, and the idea

attacked in there is, uh, the idea of causality, and ordinary casuistry. See, that what all these people

are saying, I think, and, and what the psychedelic experience argues for it as well, is that we are

somehow prisoners of language, and that somehow, you know, if we're prisoners of language,

then the key which will set us loose, is somehow also made of language. What else could fit the lock?

So, somehow, an act of poetic leisure domain is necessary. And, and Joyce, in Finnegan's Wake,

I mean, he didn't live to argue the case, or to work it out. He died shortly after. But this comes about as

close as anybody ever came to actually pushing the entire contents of the universe down into about 14

cubic inches. Joyce and Proust had one meeting, and supposedly, Joyce said to Proust, uh, I'm too young

for you to teach me anything. Are you all familiar with the remembrance of things past? Well, it could

hardly be a more different work of literature. I mean, it is stately and cinematic, and you always know

where you are, and the characters are defined. It's an old style novel. But there are places in it,

where he just takes flight, and, uh, prefigures the, the kind of writing that Faulkner and Joyce were

able to do. As far as psychedelic influences, I don't, I don't know that there are arguably any.

Uh, Joyce lived in Trieste for a while, and taught English. He may have been, uh, as a,

as a habitué of Paris, he may have been familiar with hashish. He probably had some familiarity with

absinthe. Uh, but I doubt that it was a lifestyle for him. Um, I think that the whole of the 20th century

is informed by this hyper-dimensional understanding, and that, you know, um,

Jung tapping into it in, in the 20s, the Dadaists in 1919 in Zurich, the Surrealists, even earlier,

the Ecole du Pas de Physique, L'Entrement Jaurie, all of these people. It, it's, what it's about,

the 20th century, is this, uh, well, the, McLuhan's phrase comes to mind, the Gutenberg Galaxy,

the spectrum of effects created by print. You know, the classes, the conceits, the industries,

the products, the attitudes, the garments, all of the things created, uh, by print, and we are living

in a, um, in a terminal civilization. I mean, I don't want to say dying, because civilizations aren't

animals, uh, but we are living in an age of great self-summation, when we, what we look back at, is

basically, since, um, the fall of Rome, there has been an unbroken working out of certain themes.

Scholasticism, Neil, the Aristotelian and Platonic corpuses, Christianity, always presented as, uh,

somehow a rival to science, is, in fact, paves the way for science. There would have been no science,

had there not been William of Ockham, who was a, uh, 14th century nominalist theologian. Uh, really,

Western civilization has had a thousand years to work its magic, and now, there is a summation

underway, and I don't certainly presume, uh, at least not this evening, to judge it. How, how do you,

how do you place, uh, a value on an entire civilization? But, uh, uh, in the same way that

when a person dies, their entire life passes before them in review, when a civilization dies, it, it

hypnagogically cycles the detritus of centuries and centuries of struggle to understand. And, uh,

someone like Joyce, I think, just brings that to an excruciating, uh, climax, because it's all there,

you know, the, the, the, the, it's all there, from the smile that tugs at the lips of the woman in the

Arnolfini wedding, to quantum physics, to what Moliere said to his niece in the 15th letter, and so forth,

and so on. And, uh, and the, and the task is to hold it in your mind. I think it was James, uh, I think it was, um,

William James, who said, if we don't read the books with which we carefully line our apartments,

then we're no better than our dogs and cats. And, uh, you know, too, too often this is lost sight of.

And the point of it, it's not simply that we are esthetes, literatures, and that here in the twilight

of the gods, we should sit around reading James Joyce. That isn't the point. The point is that this

is the distillation of our experience of what it is to be human, and it's out of these kinds of, of

distilling processes that we can launch some kind of new, uh, new dispensation for the human enterprise,

because we, we have played it, we have played it out. It's, it's, uh, it's now a set piece, all of it.

I mean, when I listen to rock and roll now, I, it's, it's interesting to me, but it has the

completedness of, uh, polyphony, you know? It's a done deal somehow. And we're looking backward,

and we're anticipating. And the purpose of literature, I think, is, is to illuminate the past

and to give a certain guidance as we move into the future. And, and this book, uh, by being at first

so opaque and so challenging to aesthetic canons and, and social values, eventually emerges as a very

prescient insight into our, uh, uh, our, our circumstance. The Ballad of Finnegan's Wake

has hundreds of verses, and, uh, in an Irish pub, it can keep people going all night, uh, all night long.

It's a celebration of complexity and of, uh, the human journey and of, uh, and Joyce doesn't judge.

I mean, you know, it says somewhere in Finnegan's Wake, here in Moy Cain, which is the red light

district of Dublin, here in Moy Cain, we flop on the seamy side. But up in the end, prospector,

you sprout all your worth and woof your wings. So if you want to be phoenixed, come and be parked.

That's that passage about death. Here in Moy Cain, we flop on the seamy side. But up in the end,

you sprout all your worth and woof your wings. It was a very optimistic, uh, uh, uh, transformative

sort of vision. Somehow complexity is what is the ocean we have to learn to surf.

Yes, that's the river. And that's the psychedelic side of it. I mean, imagine that you can get 63,000

different words in here, tell a story and have all the article, common articles and modifiers

operating normally anyway. Uh, it's, uh, it's, uh, and then it's very optimistic. I mean, Molly Bloom's

speech, uh, is, you know, probably the single most optimistic outpouring in all of 20th century

literature. Not that there was much competition, but, uh, yes, yes. The final affirmation. Yes.

Sam Beckett, Nobel prize winner, genius in his own right, but secretary to James Joyce for many,

many years and passionately in love with Joyce's tragically schizophrenic daughter. One of the,

you know, you want an unhappy story, the story of, of Sam, you'll find out why Sam Beckett is not

exactly laughing all the time in his story. Uh, a very, very complex relationship to Joyce's

schizophrenic child. Joyce's family life was not very happy. I think he had a wonderfully sensuous life

with Nora, but I don't know what it would be like to be the guy who wrote this book and live with a

woman who thought you would be better off as a saloon singer. Uh, not exactly a saloon singer. I mean,

he did, uh, but, but still, shall I try and find-

and find-

h