Surfing On Finnegan's 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 Olivia 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'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 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 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,

being 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've 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 Nueva of Giambattista 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 that 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 alchemist turned toward literary allegory in the 16th and early 17th century.

Joyce is essentially in that tradition. Joyce is essentially in that tradition. I mean, this is an effort to condense the entire of experience.

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 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.

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.

He 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 and the entire story in the one page version,

in the ten page version, and in the two hundred 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 Kashimar 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.

And Humphrey Chimpton 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 Olivia 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 overseas 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 Saint 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, Chepelazod.

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 Halith Castle and environs.

Sir Tristram, the Olor de Amores 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, Tart Patrick.

Not yet, though Venice soon after had a kid's gab butt-ended a bland old Isaac.

Not yet, though all's fair in Vanasi, were Sothie festers wroth with two-in-one Nathan-Joe.

Wrought a peck of Pa's malt had gem or shen brewed by arc-light,

and Rory end to the Reganbow was to be seen ringsome on the aqua-face.

The Fall.

Ba-ba-ba-ba-dal-garah-hagatak-a-minah-arung-kwarak-brantong-nerung-kwabang-varahutting-gat-ak-tool-hur-dimun-wang-amanung-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 living.

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.

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 Earwick.

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 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, violor de Amores, 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, is 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 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,

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,

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 thou art Petric.

Tartoff is Celtic for thou art baptized.

So St. Patrick has not yet baptized in Ireland.

Not yet, though venison after,

and the venison is a pun on venison and very thin,

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-fairs in Vanassie,

were sothicesters wrought 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.

Wrought a peck of Paul's malt had Jem or Shem brewed by Arclight,

and Rory unto the Regan 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 this phrase, the fall,

and the multisyllabic word,

Baba-labara-gavirr, 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.

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 poteam 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 Watkins Street,

a gentle Irishman mighty odd.

He'd a beautiful brogue so rich and sweet,

to rise in the world he carried a hut.

You see, the sort of a tipplin' way,

with a look for the liquor poor Tim was born.

A help a man with his work he'd stayed,

either off of the crath or every morn.

Wankled the dam out, dance to your partner,

who held the floor your trotter shake.

Wasn't it the truth?

They 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 gallon of whiskey at his feet,

and a bottle of poor poor at his head.

Wankled the dam out,

and stay a partner with the floor your trotter shake.

Wasn't it the truth?

They told you lots of fun,

at Finnegan's wake.

His friends assembled at the wake,

and Mrs Finnegan called for lunch.

First you brought in tea and cake,

then pipes, tobacco and whiskey punch.

Middy O'Brien began to cry,

said a nice clean corpse to ever see.

Tim O'Connor,

you know why did you die?

I heard a hole your gub,

said Paddy McGee.

Wankled the dam out,

dance to your partner,

while the floor your trotter shake.

Wasn't it the truth?

They told you lots of fun,

at Finnegan's wake.

Then,

Maggie O'Connor took up the job,

a biddy CC.

You're wrong, I'm sure.

Biddy gave her a belt on the gob,

and left the sprawling on the floor.

When the war did soon engage,

woman to woman,

and man to man.

Jalala was all the rage,

and a row an eruption soon began to work.

Full of that old dance to your partner,

while the floor your trotter shake.

Wasn't it the truth?

They 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 him falling on the bed,

the liquors gathered over Tim.

Tim revives,

see how he rises.

Timothy rising from the bed,

said,

well, you're a whiskey,

I don't like this,

and I'm a deal,

do you think I'm dead?

Whack!

Well, that I know,

don't see a partner,

let the blow your trotter shake.

Wasn't it the truth?

They told you lots of fun,

that 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 fit-shoot of Finnegan.

Now, this word,

P-F-T-J-S-C-H-U-T-E,

fit-shoot,

is Norwegian.

Uh,

I'm informed,

and refers,

it's,

and it's,

it refers to

the,

the act of falling,

and the act of falling from a hill.

Finnegan,

a 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,

uh,

Finnegan.

Finnegan lies,

like a giant reclining figure,

along the Livy,

there,

husband and wife,

river and mountain.

And,

and this is actually then,

the focus has changed,

and now we're talking about the geography.

Uh,

he was a solid man,

earth's solid man,

but then,

somehow he turned into something where,

uh,

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 Istaxivatl,

the magical mountain in Mexico.

Istaxivatl means the sleeping woman in Toltec.

And many mountains are imagined to be,

uh,

sleeping people.

So,

here he introduces this theme,

and,

uh,

this is one paragraph.

This is the,

the invocation of Finnegan,

uh,

as hod carrier.

Big Mr. Finnegan,

of the stuttering hand,

Freeman's Mauer,

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 Deuteronomy.

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 choppy 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 supra bildung

pon the banks o' the livers

by the so-and-so.

He,

iade idyl feifee ani,

og'd the little creteir,

with her har in huns,

took up your part in her,

off while babulous,

mither ahead,

with goodly trowel and grass,

and ivor-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 obscure scrape,

of most Eiffel,

howeth,

and towerly,

originating from next to nothing,

and salascating the hymnals and all,

higher-architect-tip of flopical,

with a burning bush,

a bob off its bubble top,

and with Lorenzo Tuller's clittering up,

and Thomas a bucket's clattering 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 skyscrape,

of most Eiffel,

howeth, and towerly.

These are skyscraper words.

Woolworth,

skyscrape,

in towerly,

howeth,

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 Arkamboldoland.

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 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 exterminate.

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, Anna Livia 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 Anna Livia's signature.

Here's just one paragraph from the wake scene,

which builds and has quite a minor amount of humor associated with it.

Shays, I should shay.

Makool, makool, or why a diddy a day.

Of a trying Thursday morning.

Sobs they sided at Filagon's chrysomorous wake.

All the hulavans of the nation prostrated in their consternation.

And their duodismally ploflusive plethora of ululation.

There was plums and groons and cheriffs and sithers and raiders and cinnamon too.

And they all gined in with the shoutmost chauviality.

Agog and magog and the round of them agrog.

To the continuation of that celebration until hand and hungen's extermination.

Some in kink and chorus, more can-can keenin'.

Belling him up and filling him down.

He's stiff, but he's steady as Priamolam.

Twas he was a decent gay labourin' youth.

Sharpen his pillow scone, top up his beer.

Ere whar in this wharrel will you hear such a din again?

With their deep brow fundigs and the dusty fidelios.

They laid him brawn-drawn a langlast bed.

With a buckalypse of fisky for his feet.

And a barrel-load of gunas o'er his head.

Ti the total o' the fluid hang the twaddle o' the fuddledo.

Well, it's a drunken Irish way.

That seems clear.

But there are a lot of things going on.

Ere whar in this wharrel will you hear such a din again?

And he's stiff, but he's steady as Priamolam.

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 Olivia Pluribel.

I mean Anna Olivia Pluribel is Molly Bloom on acid, basically.

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 final soliloquy in Ulysses do we really contact her.

Anna Olivia, 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, Grandpapas is fallen down.

Meaning the great father God is at wake.

Grandpapas is fallen down.

But Grinny spreads the board.

Meaning Anna Olivia is always there.

She's always there.

And in the wake, really you could almost say that Molly Bloom's soliloquy

has been expanded to 300, 400 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.

The river dissolves everything and carries it out to sea.

Let me read this description of Anna Olivia Pluribel

and then we'll go back to the synopsis.

How beautiful and how true to wife of her, when strangely forbidden,

to steal our historic presence from the past post-propophoticals,

so as to will make us all lordy airs and lady maiduses 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 napper on for her mask and her sabos kicking arias,

so ser, so soli.

If yous ask me and I sack you, how, how?

Greeks may rise and troisers fall.

She is mercenary.

Through the length of the land lies under liquidation, flut.

And there's nare a harbow nor an eyebrush

on this glabrous flace of hershroft.

What our vaulter?

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! Puff!

And even if Humphrey shall fall

frumpty times as awkward again

in the beard's busaloom

of all our grand remonstrances,

there'll be eegs 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 hen.

Well, Nora felt that Jimmy would have been

much better as a singer.

She so stated that she had great hopes

for his voice.

She was a very practical woman, Nora Barnacle.

There wasn't a literary bone in her body, I think.

I think that's what Joyce loved about her

was that she was the real thing.

And all these women, Molly and Olivia,

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 he was serious or not.

And it was very hard to find a publisher.

It was a typographical nightmare.

Joyce was going blind.

And so, you know, trying to keep track of the spelling.

And there's hardly a standard spelling in there.

There's 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 of a day,

you know, I live,

and you live, to some degree,

the entirety of global civilization.

I mean, Rome falls,

algebra is discovered,

the Turks are beating at the gates of Vienna,

and it isn't even 11 a.m. yet, you know.

So, there is this sense of the co-presence of history.

We're imprisoned inside the linear assumption that

I'm a person in a place, in a time,

I'm alive, most people aren't.

But, in fact, when you deconstruct all that,

that's just, 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 always looking at things

and explaining to himself how they work,

using very crackpotted notions of hydraulics 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 baths,

and you close your eyes for 30 seconds,

and empires fall,

dynastic families unfold themselves,

power changes hands,

princes are beheaded,

a pope disgrace,

oh, that was for you.

And then somebody drops something,

and you wake up,

and 15 seconds have passed.

That's 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,

Faulkner certainly,

was what they called stream of consciousness.

But what it was,

was it was an ability to really listen

to the associating mind

without trimming, pruning, judging, denying.

One of the great puzzles to me

is the great antagonism

between Jung and Joyce,

because you would have thought

that they would...

have been comrades in arms but Joyce loathed psychoanalysis he didn't 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 in into

literature it's very hard to surpass you know Thomas Pynchon William Gaddis these

people they 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 in gravity's rainbow is obscure as a randomly chosen

page here I I can understand the impulse to 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 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 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

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 Adda Adda is is his pain of praise to Finnegan's Wake

basically and and the idea tacked in there is the idea of causality and ordinary cause illustri 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 are prisoners of language then the key which will set us loose is somehow also made of language what else could fit the lock

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 the

as close as anybody ever came

entire contents of the universe down into about 14 cubic inches. Joyce and

Proust had one meeting and supposedly Joyce said to Proust, 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 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. Joyce lived in Trieste for a while and taught English. He may

have been as a as a habitue of Paris, he may have been familiar with hashish, he

probably had some familiarity with absinthe but I doubt that it was a

lifestyle for him. I think that the whole of the 20th century is informed by this

hyperdimensional understanding and that you know Jung tapping into it in in the

20s, the Dadaists in 1919 in Zurich, the Surrealists, even earlier the Ecole de

Pathophysique, L'Entrement, Jaurie, all of these people. It's what it's about the

20th century is this, 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 by

print and we are living in a in a terminal civilization. I mean I don't want to say

dying because civilizations aren't animals but we are living in an age of

great self-summation when we what we look back at is basically since the fall of

Rome there has been an unbroken working out of certain themes. Scholasticism,

the Aristotelian and Platonic corpuses, Christianity always presented as somehow

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 14th century nominalist

theologian. 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 at least not this

evening to judge it. How do you how do you place a value on an entire civilization but 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 someone like Joyce I think just brings that

to an excruciating climax because it's all there you know 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 and

and that and the task is to hold it in your mind I think it was James I think it

was some 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 you

know too often this is lost sight of and the point of it it's not simply that we are

our 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 distilling processes that we can launch some kind of new new dispensation

for the human enterprise because we we have played it we have played it out it's a it's

it's now a set piece all of it I mean when I listen to rock and roll now I it says in

it's interesting to me but it has the completeness of 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 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 our our circumstance the ballad of Finnegan's wake has hundreds of verses

and in an Irish pub but can keep people going all night all night long it's a celebration of

complexity and of the human journey and of and Joyce doesn't judge I mean you know it

says somewhere in Finnegan's wake here in Moy Kane which is the red light district of Dublin here in

Moy Kane 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 Phoenix come and be parked that's that passage about death here

in Moy Kane 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 a transformative sort of vision somehow complexity is what is the ocean we have to

learn to surf yes that's the river and 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 it's it's and then it's very optimistic I mean Molly Bloom's speech is

you know probably the single most optimistic outpouring in all of 20th century literature not

that there was much competition but 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 history 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 not exactly a saloon

singer I mean he did but but still shall I try and find a passage let us now whether health dangers

public orders and other circumstances permitting of perfectly convenient if you police after you

police police pardoning mine drop this jitter pokery and talk straight turkey mate to mate for while the ear

remember be we milk alls may sometimes be inclined to believe others the eye whether browned or

nolanced finds it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself habeas are a set moon vegetables habeas

oculus ad hoc minus polypobatus tip drawing nearer to take our slant at it since after all it has met with

misfortunes while all underground let us see all there may remain to be seen but i am a worker

a tombstone mason anxious to please every avery buries and julie glad when christmas comes his

once a year you are a poor jewist unctuous to police nopey bobbies and tunny belly solely when

tis thine took or home gin we cannot say eye to eye we cannot smile nose from nose still one cannot

help noticing that rather more than half of the lines run north south in the nimsies and bukharahas

directions while the others go west east in search from malazies via bulgarad for tiny tot though it

looks when schwamp humpsling alongside other incanabula it has its cardinal points for all of

that tip now this word tip which keeps occurring throughout the text no one is clear what it means

but um joe camel's guess is it's a tree branch which is tapping against the window and whoever

whoever is dreaming this huge hallucinatory gizmo of a dream every once in a while the tap of the

branch breaks breaks breaks through