The Boston Mess and Finnegans Wake

"My dear sir! In this wireless age any owl rooster can peck up bostoons. But whoewaxed he so anquished?" - Finnegans Wake, p. 489-490

Tonight I've been digesting some information about the explosive events that occurred in Boston, Mass recently.

I've also been flipping through the Wake in the process of composing a post for my other blog. While in the midst, page 98 suddenly popped off an explosion (some doodles I'd made in the margins catching my eye) and drew my attention. So I stopped there and read this:

"Big went the bang: 

then wildewide was quiet: 
a report: silence: last Fama put it under ether. 
The noase or the loal had dreven him blem, blem, stun blem.  

Sparks flew. He had fled again (open shunshema!) this country of exile, sloughed off, sidleshomed via the subterranean shored with bedboards, stowed away and ankered in a dutch bottom tank, the Arsa, hod S.S. Finlandia, and was even now occupying, under an islamitic newhame in his seventh generation, a physical body Cornelius Magrath's (badoldkarakter, commonorrong canbung) in Asia Major, where as Turk of the theater (first house all flatty: the king, eleven sharps) he had bepiastered the buikdanseuses from the opulence of his omni box while as arab at the streetdoor he bepestered the bumbashaws for the alms of a para's pence. Wires hummed. Peacefully general astonishment assisted by regrettitude had put a term till his existence: he saw the family saggarth, resigned, put off his remainders, was recalled and scrapheaped by the Maker. Chirpings crossed. An infamous private ailment (vulgovarioveneral) had claimed endright, closed his vicious circle, snap. Jams jarred. He had walked towards the middle of an ornamental lilypond  ... 
Mush spread. On Umbrella Street where he did drinks from a pumps a kind of workman, Mr Whitlock, gave him a piece of wood. What words of power were made fas between them, ekenames and auchnomes, acnomina ecnumina? That, O that, did Hansard tell us, would gar ganz Dub's ear wag in every pub of all the citta! Batty believes a baton while Hogan hears a hod yet Heer prefers a punsil shapner and Cope and Bull go cup and ball. And the Cassidy Craddock rome and reme round e'er a wiege ne'er a waage is still immer and immor awagering over it, a cradle with a care in it or a casket with a kick behind. Toties testies quoties questies. The war is in words and the wood is the world. Maply me, willowy we, hickory he and yew yourselves. Howforhim chirrupeth evereach-"
- Finnegans Wake, pg. 98

It's all there. The bombs, explosions, "islamitic" "arab at the streetdoor", it even mentions the name of a boat "S.S. Finlandia" which the character was "occupying" just like the second suspect was found hiding inside a boat in someone's backyard.

"Turk of the theater" is the accused suspect from Chechnya ("Asia Major"), a "badoldkarakter" who is sought in an action movie chase in the theater of media. (It's worth mentioning that this page comes from a chapter all about the main character HCE committing a blurry, nebulous, unproven, shadowy transgression and then being chased like foxes after a rabbit, getting caught and devoured to pieces. It's also worth mentioning that earlier in the same chapter we find "exploded from a reinvented T.N.T. bombingpost up ahoy" p. 77.)

Perhaps most importantly, the press, the media, the newswires, the "war is in the words" is a repeated motif all throughout the entire page here. The key thing I've been so struck by and have pondered so much with this Boston event's information is how conflicting the news reports are. The mainstream corporate media is spouting questionable information straight from the police and government authorities ("Mush spread") while pretty much every independent news source has its "Wires hummed" and "Jams jarred" with provocative and treacherous news items such as that the FBI has been in contact with the suspects for many years, the family of the suspects are all loudly stating their two young relatives were framed and mentored by the FBI, that the New York Times and other news sources reported last year that the FBI has been facilitating domestic terrorist plots.

"Chirpings crossed" from the lips of the suspects' distressed aunt the other day as she declared with 100% certainty that the mysterious man who appeared on the news getting stripped naked and arrested by authorities in Boston recently was in fact her older nephew, the same man who the authorities claimed was already killed in a shootout, "recalled and scrapheaped by the Maker", his corpse subsequently driven over by his own brother as he fled the police, leaving him "a casket with a kick behind". Surely, her "quoties" now raise a lot of "questies."

Maybe Finnegans Wake could be a pretty reliable guide to navigate this whole mess that left "bloodstaned breeks in...boaston" (p. 11). After all, Boston appears all throughout the Wake. The Wake actually describes itself as a letter, a "nightletter" written on "a goodish-sized sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass.)" as it says on page 111.

The Wake is therefore sending us a letter about this whole "boastonmess" (p. 364), straight "from Boston transcripped" (p. 617), and I think it's telling us to wake the fuck up.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt Recites from Finnegans Wake

Page 439 from rcjohnso on Vimeo.


A nicely done visual adaption/image collage with Joseph Gordon-Levitt (of Inception and 3rd Rock from the Sun fame) reciting a page from Shaun's lustful lecture to a bunch of young Catholic school girls in Book III, Chapter 2.

I'd love to hear more stuff like this. The Wake is ripe for interpretive recitation by actors.

Reading Group Reminiscences

As it so often tends to do, the Wake made its omniscience humorously obvious to the participants of our latest reading group here in Austin. Prior to digging into the text, we had some discussion about the big Finnegans Wake promotional campaign to promote the first ever Chinese translation of the book, talked about the book's seeming awareness that the reader is reading it, and also about cities as living beings.

We should not have been surprised when, in the course of the two pages we studied, the Wake winked at us with a couple lines that sounded like Chinese, referencing Confucius and other Chinese elements (bottom of pg. 131) while the next page had, among many references to the nature of cities, the line "weighs a town in himself."

I would've liked to have kept thorough notes on all of the Wake meetings we've had here in Austin as well as the other ones I've been to but unfortunately it hasn't worked out that way. I do, on the other hand, know which pages we've looked at in every Wake group I've ever been to and so here I would like to share one or two lines from the different Wake groups I've attended and reflect on those a bit.

Finnegans Wake Billboards in China

Right around the time of James Joyce's birthday (February 2nd) this year the newswires were all buzzing about Finnegans Wake. The first-ever Chinese translation of Joyce's notoriously opaque masterpiece sold out of its first 8,000 copies in China after a big advertising campaign helped spread the word around.

There are so many strange things about this story, but this part is my favorite:

The book, widely considered Joyce's most experimental and inscrutable work, was promoted by an unusual billboard campaign in major Chinese cities — with 16 of them in Shanghai alone. The official Xinhua News agency said it was the first time a book had been promoted that way in China.

There were 16 billboards throughout Shanghai (in the 21st Century) ADVERTISING A NEW EDITION OF FINNEGANS WAKE.

This is something out of an alternate universe, a hilarious Joycean oddity just like the other recent bit of Joyce news.

What's so funny about this is that Finnegans Wake is filled with advertisements and references to advertising, starting with the second page: "the skysign of soft advertisement!" The key role of advertising is made clear on page 181 where there's an ad referring to Joyce himself, sounding like a a hilarious parody of a singles ad on Craigslist:

[Jymes wishes to hear from wearers of abandoned female costumes, gratefully received, wadmel jumper, rather full pair of culottes and onthergarmenteries, to start city life together. His jymes is out of job, would sit and write. He has lately commited one of the then commandments but she will now assist. Superior built, domestic, regular layer. Also got the boot. He appreciates it. Copies. ABORTISEMENT.]

Joyce was very aware of the growing industry of advertising and how important it would become in modern society. His most famous character, Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, was an advertisement canvasser by trade and throughout his daily musings he ponders creative ad ideas and "the infinite possibilities hitherto unexploited of the modern art of advertisement."

I can't find any academic studies of the importance of advertising in Joyce's work so it's certainly something to look deeper into. Maybe sometime down the road I'll take a crack at exploring it more fully. Leaving aside Bloom's myriad advertising thoughts, the Wake alone is absolutely flooded with ads (just like pop-up ads, since the Wake is after all a lengthy premonition of the web surfing experience). The FWEET search engine shows 63 different references to advertising that you can look at and I'm sure they've barely scratched the surface.

For now I'm still soaking in the surreal nature of the Finnegans Wake billboard campaign in China.

A Multimedia Examination of "The Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Maggies"

As the massive glittering galactic dream of Finnegans Wake proceeds along, its universal sleeper falling deeper into unconsciousness, the book's content becomes darker, denser, deeper until we reach the most difficult (and multi-allusive) chapters at the very center. As dawn grows nearer, the book grows a little bit lighter until the gorgeous poetic prose of the early morning hours represented in the final chapter.

The first chapter of Book II sets off a stream of difficult but resplendent material with a detailed playbill for "The Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Maggies" (p. 219) featuring all of the book's characters putting on a show in the "Feenichts Playhouse". The play revolves around the children of the book: Mick (the twin brother Shaun representing the Archangel Michael), Nick (twin brother Shem representing Lucifer or the Devil), and the Maggies (little sister Issy and her friends, representing the colors of the rainbow). The playbill promises to enact "a Magnificent Transformation Scene showing the Radium Wedding of Neid and Moorning and the Dawn of Peace, Pure, Perfect and Perpetual, Waking the Weary of the World" (p. 222), a sentence which sounds like a promotion for the Wake in its entirety.

Glossing The Wake Through Two Pictures

"wipe your glosses with what you know" - FW p. 304

During some pretty idle and aimless book perusing and internet browsing I came across two images which I decided are good illustrations of important elements in Finnegans Wake. A saying goes that if a picture is worth a thousand words then a symbol is worth a thousand pictures. Let's take a brief look at how these two symbolic pictures sum up massive pieces of the Wake.

This is a woodcut by Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige from 1853. In imagining the recurring "characters" of Finnegans Wake, a family of five (sort of), I've found that it helps to maintain the idea of these figures as morphogenetic organic elements, not as individual people. A seemingly simple nature scene such as this one then manages to serve as a family portrait when you consider each character's earthly element:

HCE as Mountain
ALP as River
Shem as Tree
Shaun as Stone
Isabelle as Cloud

That's entirely what's represented in that picture. "Because it's run on the mountain and river system" (FW 288.F3). If you want to count the image in the Wake of the Chapelizod pub in which this "family" sleeps you can even find some little buildings in there.

This next one is both simpler in its representation and more difficult in concluding what exactly it means in the Wake.

Pretty familiar scene there. What's it got to do with the Wake?

From first page to last, Finnegans Wake is positively loaded with rainbows. The entirety of the 1st chapter in Book II, the stage play of "The Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Maggies" (the enactment of "a rainborne pamtomomiom" as p. 285 describes it) frequently features the seven colors with a dance of the seven rainbow girls who are described in endlessly varying names which always refer to the seven colors, as in "Rose, Sevilla ... Cintronelle ... Esmeralde, Pervinca ... Indra ...Viola" (p. 223) or, spelling out the acronym RAYNBOW on pg. 226:

"R is Rubretta and A is Arancia, Y is for Yilla and N for greeneriN. B is Boyblue with odalisque O while W waters the fleurettes of novembrance."

Page 247 has the line "Split the hvide and aye seize heaven!" which indicates splitting the white (Danish "hvide") so the eye sees seven colors.

In the final chapter of the book, there's a debate between Bishop Berkeley and St. Patrick revolving around light and the visible universe in which the druid Berkeley refers to "the his heptachromatic sevenhued septicoloured roranyellgreenlindigan" (p. 611). There are many interpretations as to the importance and meaning of the recurring rainbows and Joyce himself indicated in his letters that the book features an elaborately developed theory of colors. John Bishop in his outstanding study Joyce's Book of the Dark devotes a lengthy chapter (entitled "Meoptics") to exploring the idea that the Wake's play of colors represents visions streaming across the inside surface of the eyelids of the sleeping person within whose body (Bishop argues convincingly) the whole book takes place. In the midst of his exegesis, we're led to some very intriguing considerations of the human eye, a fleshy filmscreen and projector. (I'll have lots more to say about Bishop's great book and his unique ideas very soon.)

Coming back to the organic scene from the first picture, I'm led to think about the bright white light of the sun interacting with the waters of the river mother evaporating into mist and daughter clouds whose raindrops bend light into rainbows, the rain eventually falling down the slopes of a mountain and turning back into a river ("Because it's run on the mountain and river system" FW288.F3). I could also start talking about the Wake's recurring use of the word "heliotrope" and moving towards the sun but I'll stop here...

iSpace

During our last Finnegans Wake Reading Group meeting here in Austin we covered what is no doubt one of the more fascinating pages of the Wake, coming at the conclusion of Chapter 5 (Book I) which discusses in myriad detail the exotically inscribed letter dug up out of a garbage heap by a hen and now being examined by all kinds of archaeologists, scholars and forensic experts. This letter, "a polyhedron of scripture" (p. 107), a "radiooscillating epiepistle" (p. 108) written in "anythongue athall" (p. 117) and considered to contain "as human a little story as paper could well carry" (p. 115) is, of course, representing Finnegans Wake itself.

It's the first chapter we dug into for the group, chosen because it serves perfectly as an introduction to the text as it frequently describes the nature of the Wake, stressing the need for "penelopean patience" (p. 123) for a reader perusing its "toomuchness, the fartoomanyness" (p. 122) in which every word is "as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons" (p. 120). At one point the book frankly asks the reader, "You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods" (p. 112).

In examining the letter we manage to go through the whole history of writing, paper, manuscripts, printing, etc. as we study the palimpsest-like document which "has acquired accretions of terricious matter whilst loitering in the past" (p. 114). Direct comparisons are made to the Book of Kells (especially its so-called Tunc page), another exhumed text whose pages are densely packed with intricate details and arabesques.

As the chapter approaches its conclusion, an expert breaks out "his dectroscophonious photosensition under suprasonic light control" (p. 123) to closely examine the "debts and dishes" or dots and dashes of this "new book of Morses" and we soon witness some of the most textually strange lines of any book ever made. We are told that "The original document was in... unbrookable script, that is to say, it showed no signs of punctuation of any sort." This led to interesting interpretation and discussion at the meeting as we considered what exactly is punctuation? Little symbols inserted in text to break up its flow, generally agreed upon signs that are there to direct literary traffic.

This perfectly weird selection soon follows:

accentuated by bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina, — Yard inquiries pointed out → that they ad bîn "provoked" ay fork, of à grave Brofèsor; àth é's Brèak — fast — table; ; acùtely profèššionally piquéd, to=introdùce a notion of time [ùpon à plane (?) sù ' ' fàç'e'] by pùnct! ingh oles (sic) in iSpace?! (p. 124)

Getting the easy part out of the way, the first phrase uses broken text in a hilarious manner to depict "bits of broken glass and split china." The rest of it was marinated on for a while among the meeting participants. The notion of breakfast is popular throughout the book as the sleeping hero will soon Wake to break his fast, probably with a fork. Joyce also seems to mock the "grave" serious professors who would no doubt comb his book's pages missing the important element of humor.

Considering the medium of writing, to carve streams of symbols or letters across the space of a page is to "introduce a notion of time upon a plane surface." What is, of course, most stunning here is the appearance of the word "iSpace" which sounds perfectly like an Apple product that Joyce is describing in a book published in 1939. It's one of the book's most blatant examples of puncturing holes ("punct!") in time and space, momentarily poking its head deep into the future.

I'm happy to say that after only 5 months, the Wake group here in Austin has already attracted some very colorfully minded folks with interesting approaches to unraveling streams of meaning out of the buzzing, lively words of the Wake. One participant sent me her further thoughts upon reflecting on the iSpace theme and they really perfectly represent the kind of creative exegetical brainstorming that I hope to incite through this group, so I will close with those words:

I-space is internal space, as in the interior life, the dream state, the void, the womb, or the undifferentiated space of the spirit of God over the waters in Genesis. The pronged instrument of the fork is literally a fork (two paths) signifying differentiation or duality, good and evil, male and female, the two brothers in FW. The pronged instrument is also phallic (in the procreative act) or the writer’s pen (in the creative act) which “punctures” the page, or creates meanings through punctuation (note that Tunc is contained in punctuate), making order out of chaos. The fork of the “grave” Brofesor is the spirit of inquiry, like the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. The I-space of unknowing is punctured by knowing: the dreamer awakes, the innocence of the Garden is ruptured, the amniotic sac tears and there is birth. There’s a pun on the word “grave”, i.e., death punctures life, Adam and Eve’s inquiry produced death. You could also say that coming into being punctures the void. Of course FW is a wake, which is both a funeral (death) and waking up. The circularity of FW is punctured by choosing to read the work in a certain order or by attributing meanings to the words. Also, Shem is “Shame”- Adam and Eve’s shame in the dualistic/differentiated/knowing state.