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