Wednesday, December 10, 2014

New Finnegans Wake Audio Recording Project "Waywords and Meansigns"

Some extremely ambitious Finnegans Wake fans have organized a project to create a new audio recording of the text in its entirety.

From the group's website:
Waywords and Meansigns is an upcoming audio version of James Joyce's famous text, Finnegans Wake, to be read in its entirety. The book will be divided into 17 sections, and there will be a different music/reader/performance group assigned to each section. Featuring established as well as up-and-coming artists, Waywords and Meansigns will offer a version of Joyce's work that is stimulating, accessible, and enjoyable to even the most casual of readers and listeners.
The project will feature various artists, musicians, and other daring creative folks who will each record one of the book's 17 chapters in full. I have signed on to create a recording of one of my favorite chapters, the "Inquest of Yawn" (Book III, chapter 3). Participants are free to add whatever music or effects they want and interpret the text through their reading however they see fit.

I love this idea. This is something Finnegans Wake has needed for a long time, a true Here Comes Everybody recording. It is a book that's meant to be heard, after all. Listening to James Joyce read a few pages from it aloud seems to open up the entire text to new possibilities. When I embarked on a cover-to-cover reading of the book, I found it essential to listen to Patrick Healy's recording in order to appreciate the text's river-like, meandering, extending flow and cacophonous play of consonants and vowels.

Not only to hear it, but to actually read it aloud or perform it really enhances and amplifies the Wake experience. It's a challenge for your mouth; occasionally the extraordinary patterns of employing the lips, tongue, and teeth will cause one to break out into laughter. Take the following passage, for instance.
"For, with that farmfrow's foul flair for that flayfell foxfetor, (the calamite's columitas calling for calamitous calamitance) who that scrutinising marvels at those indignant whiplooplashes; those so prudently bolted or blocked rounds; the touching reminiscence of an incompletet trail or dropped final; a round thousand whirligig glorioles, prefaced by (alas!) now illegible airy plumeflights, all tiberiously ambiembellishing the initials majuscule of Earwicker" - FW, p. 119
To navigate a reading of that passage is to maintain the inflection of one expanding sentence with many interruptions, while encountering strange Joycean mutant words like "whiplooplashes" and "plumeflights" and immediately judging their pronunciation. There's also plenty of fun alliteration. In fact, that snippet encapsulates the reading experience pretty well. It's actually a passage describing the very nature of the Finnegans Wake text itself, taken from a chapter (Book I, ch. 5) that serves as a primer for how to read this bizarre book. It's all about the sound. As readers, we've become so used to eyeing the page and determining meaning from the letters we see. The Wake seeks to reawaken the sound of language, opening up the larger possibilities of the spoken word from which language originally sprung, "here keen again and begin again to make soundsense and sensesound kin again." (FW p. 121)

I look forward to recording my contribution and hearing the rest of the recordings in the "Waywords and Meansigns" project. It'll be a challenging endeavor for all involved, but it also promises to be lots of fun. I'm thankful for the brave souls who are putting it all together and wish them the best of luck.

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Book Review (Part 4 of 4): Joyce's Book of the Dark by John Bishop




"For too long were the stars studied and man's insides neglected. An eclipse of the sun could be predicted many centuries before anyone knew which way the blood circulated in our own bodies."
- James Joyce 

The eighth chapter of Finnegans Wake is perhaps its most famous section. Known for containing the names of over a thousand of the world’s rivers embedded in its prose, the chapter is devoted to the mother goddess archetype in Joyce’s mythology, the river-woman Anna Livia Plurabelle, “angin mother of injons… the dearest little moma ever you saw” (FW p. 207). In Joyce’s numerology the number 8 is associated with the female, the feminine life-renewing energy, perhaps because 8 is the symbol of infinity ∞ upright. In Ulysses, the 18th chapter is dedicated to Molly Bloom's final soliloquy consisting of 8 long sentences, and her birthday is on September 8th (also the birthday of the Virgin Mary). The centrality of the female in his final work is hinted at right from the opening word of Finnegans Wake, “riverrun” which contains 8 letters.

James Joyce considered the Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP) chapter to be the showpiece for his entire book. It was his pride and joy, the chapter upon which he was “prepared to stake everything." While the public and his own supporters were questioning the merit (and sanity) of the early published fragments from his Work in Progress, Joyce declared in a letter to his patron “either [ALP] is something, or I am an imbecile in my judgment of language.” Fellow Irishman James Stephens agreed, declaring it to be “the greatest prose ever written by a man.”

Joyce went through seventeen different revisions of the chapter during the Wake’s creation, constantly weaving new river names and foreign words into its pun-laden network, while exhausting himself into a “nervous collapse,” as he told Ezra Pound, from the thousands of hours he worked on it.

The chapter opens with the text forming a triangular shape, the delta symbol ∆ of ALP:

O
tell me all about
Anna Livia! I want to hear all
about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course,
we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. (FW p. 196) 

The ALP chapter consists entirely of a dialogue between two washerwomen scrubbing clothes on opposites sides of a river while chattering and gossiping to each other about ALP and her husband. All throughout the chapter, the inquisitive washerwoman (later referred to as “Queer Mrs Quickenough” FW p. 620) excitedly begs her opposite (“odd Miss Doddpebble” FW p. 620) to divulge more about Anna Livia: “Onon! Onon! tell me more. Tell me every tiny teign. I want to know every single ingul” (FW p. 201). As the chapter comes to a close, night begins to fall, the river widens and rushes more loudly, and the two women can no longer hear each other over the “hitherandthithering waters of. Night!” (FW p. 216).

A beautiful audio recording from 1929 captures Joyce reciting the closing pages of ALP with a playful and theatrical brogue, giving us our one single glimpse at how he intended his enigmatic work to sound. It’s noticeably mellifluous and musical, with Joyce rolling his r's and lilting the vernacular between the two chattering washerwomen.

John Bishop acknowledges that this flowing sonority is the most frequently praised feature of the chapter, but as with the rest of the Wake though, there is so much more to this poetic prose than its "sounddance" (FW p. 378). Initiating the need to explore deeper into the sediments of ALP, Bishop admits: “Not many readers, however, are likely to struggle through very many pages of prose so torturous as the Wake’s simply because, though they may not mean anything, they sound nice.” It is this often overlooked meaning that Bishop endeavors to elucidate.

For the ultimate crescendo of his unique and fascinating analysis of the Wake, Bishop devotes the final chapter of his Book of the Dark study to an investigative plunge into the “riverpool” (FW p. 17) of Anna Livia. With Joyce putting so much emphasis and hard work into his showpiece chapter, Bishop surmises, “we might make the chapter something of a test case of the book as a whole.” Similarly, while there are so many great insights throughout Bishop's Book of the Dark, its final chapter is so rich, enlightening, original and compelling that it could in fact stand as a “test case” for Bishop’s book as a whole. So, to conclude this lengthy summary of Bishop’s delightful and dense book, we shall take a close look into this last chapter, which he entitled "A Riverbabble Primer."

Emphatically putting the final flourishing touches on his fascinating and well-argued thesis that Finnegans Wake represents a rendering of the sleeping state of one man, Bishop takes a microscope to the vivacious streams of the ALP chapter to confirm his theory. He finds ALP’s massive network of rivers is undulating with the sound and pace of a pulse. In short, Bishop argues that the riverwoman Anna Livia Plurabelle represents the watery bloodflow heard pumping inside the sleeper’s body throughout the night.

This accounts for the overall back-and-forth dialogue structure as well as the recurrent rhythm of twos found “ufer and ufer” (FW p.214) again, echoing the binary sounds heard in “the pulse of our slumber” (FW p. 428). The sleeping mind absorbs and amplifies these sounds, unconsciously creating the dream association of flowing rivers until the sleeper becomes immersed in a “watery world” (FW p. 452).

Bishop extends this thread of logic further until we envision the sleeper lying in "foetal sleep" (FW p. 563) with the sounds of pulsing bloodflow triggering reminiscence of and regression to the prenatal bliss of "whome sweetwhome" (FW p. 138) when he was united with the body of his mother or “himother” (FW p. 187). Two hearts beating as one, “uniter of U.M.I. hearts…in that united I.R.U. stade” (FW p. 446).

Of course this is a very radical and unique idea, unlike any interpretation of ALP any Wake scholar has put forth before. It's also fun to ponder and Bishop, a scholar with about as much knowledge about Finnegans Wake as anyone else in the world (he’s been reading it for over 40 years and wrote the introduction to the Penguin edition), presents a most compelling case with his often spellbinding wizardry of exegesis.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Finnegan Wakes! as a Royal

"A being again in becomings again." - Finnegans Wake p. 491

I'm pleased to report that Finnegan has reawakened and is participating in this year's World Series.

A young hard-throwing southpaw named Brandon Finnegan is pitching out of the bullpen for the Cinderella story Kansas City Royals. "A kingly man, of royal mien" (FW p. 68) baseball's new Finnegan "our goodsend Brandonius" (FW p. 327) will become the first player ever to participate in both the College World Series and the Major League Baseball World Series in the same year. A scant five months ago the 21-year-old kid was sitting in a college classroom here in Texas.
Finnegan was selected 17th overall out of TCU in June. The 21-year-old made 13 minor league appearances (five starts) split between High-A Wilmington and Double-A Northwest Arkansas before being promoted to the majors in September. Finnegan was the first 2014 draftee to earn a big league promotion. http://nesn.com/2014/10/brandon-finnegan-could-make-history-play-two-world-series-in-same-year/

Surprisingly, Mr. Finnegan is the first ever representative of the Finnegan tribe in MLB history. (There's been a few Finnegans in the minors, none of them named Tim though.)

"Our goodsend Brandonius" (FW p. 327) is wearing jersey number 27.


Through the bizarre magic that Finnegans Wake always creates, if you open to page 27 of the book you'll read: "a blue streak over his bourseday shirt."

And we find "Brandonius" on page 327.

James Joyce laughs.

Friday, September 26, 2014

"Surfing Finnegans Wake" with Terence McKenna



This came up in our last reading group so I figured I'd share it here.

This is Terence McKenna, a celebrated philosopher/ethnobotanist/psychedelic researcher/lecturer and eloquent Irishman known as the Bard, devoting a couple hours to lecturing about Finnegans Wake. He reads from a few pages, dissects them a bit, ponders the psychedelic universe Joyce placed inside a book, and even branches off into talking about Marshall McLuhan.

In a world where seemingly everything is on YouTube, there are surprisingly few recorded discussions related to Finnegans Wake. McKenna's gift for gab is a perfect fit for Joycean reading-and-exegesis, making this a very special rare gem.

Enjoy.

(Note: He does have a few odd gaffes---calling Joyce a British writer and locating Chapelizod in London instead of Dublin---but otherwise his info is sound.)

Friday, August 8, 2014

When James Joyce went to Africa on a Word-Hunting Safari



(IMPORTANT PRELIMINARY NOTE: I had some suspicions that this was somehow a fictional account. It didn't seem possible to me that Joyce's many biographers would have overlooked such an unusual expedition undertaken during the peak of his fame in the 1920s. Peter Chrisp, whose Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay blog is a must-read for Joyce fans, confirmed for me that this was indeed a mental rather than a physical trip to Africa. The biggest clue comes from the essay's opening quote in French which translates to: "What's the good of moving when you can travel so magnificently in a chair?" I was tricked. Nevertheless, it's still a fun story to read.)


In 1924, while in the early stages of drafting, pondering, and scribbling notes for what would eventually become Finnegans Wake, James Joyce made two separate trips to Africa... to go word-hunting.

That's right. Joyce, half blind, ventured to the heart of Africa (twice!) to essentially capture some rare and unique words and languages in a butterfly net.

Joyce scholar Robbert-Jan Henkes writes about this in his essay "James Joyce in Africa: An Expedition to the Sources of the Wake" available in entirety here, but strangely there is no mention of these journeys in any of the Joyce biographies. Henkes' essay appeared in the Genetic Joyce Studies scholarly journal so please be forewarned that the genetic studies folks tend to break things down to the most minute elements as transcripted (often sloppily) in Joyce's notebooks. This also appears to be why nothing about these African word safaris have appeared in Joyce material before, the scholarly community only just recently picked up on it from sifting through his travel notebooks. (See note below.)

Henkes uncovers that Joyce was following in the footsteps of Scottish missionary and linguist Dan Crawford who published two books about his African journeys:
Joyce, on his word-safari, followed the itinerary of the two books of Crawford closely, and he brought home many specimens of ‘black thinking’, 103 from his first trip and another 75 from his second one. And from these specimens, a good many found a place in Finnegans Wake: 24 straight from the travel notes and another 21 via the transcription of the notes by Mme. Raphael in the 1930s, so you could say that the expeditions were fruitful.
Joyce absorbed a great deal of words, phrases, and tribal/native perspectives not only from these journeys but from the reflections contained in Crawford's travel books. The essay notes: "This will be typical of Joyce’s collecting procedure and we will see that during the entire journey he will alternate specimens of African ways of saying with noteworthy expressions from Crawford’s hand." Among his eloquent considerations, Crawford wrote that "night blots out the world to reveal a universe" and one can imagine this idea enhancing Joyce's intentions to devote his new and unformed book to the night world.

Among the lexical specimens Joyce acquired were phrases like "talkingtree" which were the name for trees that had writing carved into them, and "shadowstealer" which is what the natives called photographers. But more tellingly, the blind poet learned the ways of the native people who sleep outside in pitch black darkness surrounded by jungle:
Making his way through the jungle in the direction of Lake Mweru, Joyce was struck by the quantity of fruit on the trees. Not all fruit was edible, but how could you find out? Simple. Crawford: A good old rule I find workable is the eating of any fruit nibbled at by the monkeys.’ After which Joyce noted stenographically: ‘what monkeys eat / Man’. The dense African forest by night was full of sounds, all intimately known to the native. Crawford: “For the hundreds of night-sounds — rustlings, twitterings, raspings, tinglings, and roarings — are all known to even Africa’s tot, the ears being called his ‘eyes of darkness.’” These two poetical observations both made it into the Wake. The night sounds appear in I.4 on FW 095.31, when the ‘fourbottle men’ are discussing how Anna Livia got lost in he woods, and the ear as the eye of the dark is now in I.1 on FW 014.29: ‘lift we our ears, eyes of the darkness from the tome of Liber Lividus’.
The Wake is loaded with references to Africa. Besides containing a multitude of African languages or "darktongues" (FW p. 223)* Shem is called a "Europasianised Afferyank" (p. 191) and Anna Livia Plurabelle "our turfbrown mummy" (FW p. 194) has many African qualities. Sheldon Brivic has a whole chapter devoted to ALP's Africanness in his book Joyce's Waking Women where he states that "her African features proliferate as central determinants of her role." There are also frequent references to the Victoria and Albert Nyanzas, two lakes in Africa believed to be the sources of the Nile River.

*Karl Reisman has written a great deal about "the Affrian Way" (FW p.497) in FW at his blog here.

It is the non-visual, ear-opening perspective I find most intriguing out of all this, though. With Joyce's book of the dark, he really tried to reawaken a pre-industrial, ancient tribal oral tradition, to reawaken the sense of hearing. Simply eyeing the Wake's unconventional and original linguistic constructions certainly has great appeal and could keep a reader coming back to it forever but to hear this bizarre poetry bouncing around through time and space often sounds to me delightfully disorienting. Noted Wake evangelist Marshall McLuhan held the theory that Joyce was preparing us for our cyclical re-entry into tribalism, the electronic global village, through his all-inclusive book of "broken heaventalk" (FW p. 261).

If you could withstand a little scholarly pedantry and minuscule nitpicking, I highly recommend going to check out Henkes' piece. It even has a grainy picture of Joyce in safari gear.

Friday, May 30, 2014

"A Slow Devouring": Profile of a Finnegans Wake Reading Group in Boston

It's not exactly recent (published in 2008) but I found this article in The American Scholar very worthwhile. It's an engaging, well-written profile of the Thirsty Scholars Finnegans Wake reading group which has been gathering in Cambridge weekly for many years, detailing the unique nature of a Wake group. The attendees are from all walks of life and certainly not a collection of certified scholars:
While many literary scholars have only a cursory understanding of Finnegans Wake, this group of Web designers, data analysts, and aerobics teachers has jerry-rigged an impressive understanding of it while meeting at a bar, their pace somewhere between struggling and savoring.
The article serves as both a description of the reading group and an exploration of the intrigue behind the book itself. On this latter point, he consults with a few literary scholars, one of who offers some thoughts on the Wake's intentionally-designed "Here Comes Everybody" dynamic:

It is not written for the individual, but for people working together to construct ‘meaning’ across national, linguistic and historical boundaries. And in that sense [the work] anticipates in extremely challenging ways the phenomenon of globalization,” Vicki Mahaffey, a professor of English, wrote in the description of a course she taught at the University of Pennsylvania. She warned that the Wake, the “most atypical, experimental book,” is not often considered intelligible in the usual sense of the word. “It has been defended, though, as the verbal equivalent to the achievement of splitting the atom; by splitting the word, Joyce aims to unleash previously untapped creative and interpretive energy.” In an e-mail to me from her new post at the University of York in Heslington, England, she wrote, “I think the communal aspect of reading the Wake is real: what I usually say is that it is the first book written to be read collaboratively (rather than individually or competitively).”

When I lived in California, I had the blessing of getting to partake in the Venice Wake reading group led by Gerry Fialka. A noted devotee of the technology prophet Marshall McLuhan (who was himself a devotee of Joyce and the Wake especially), my good pal Gerry liked to say "James Joyce invented the internet and disguised it as a book." The same idea is hinted at in this article:
A phrase on page 296—“And let you go, Airmienious, and mick your modest mock Pie out of humbles up your end”—led Joel to Google, where he discovered that the word Airmienious ties together the page’s multiple references to Armenia and the Germanic general Arminius who defeated three Roman legions in 9 A.D. The Wake, in this sense, captured the dizzying amplitude of the Internet before it existed. Like the Web, the book is an incredibly vast, far-reaching, piecemeal collection that is brilliant and unifying when taken in context, but gibberish when not. (Also, a portion of each has been dedicated to naked women.) Almost every phrase in the book is a sort of hyperlink to a half-dozen other sources or ideas...
I recommend you go ahead and read the full article.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Joseph Campbell on How to Read Finnegans Wake

The approach described below could serve as a primer for how to study Finnegans Wake. In fact, Campbell very accurately describes the way we study the book in our Austin Finnegans Wake Reading Group.

In the Conclusion of The Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Campbell first describes Joyce's style of combining multiple words and punning on many different languages, often with rhythms that echo nursery rhymes, songs, prayers, etc. Following this, he shares these instructions:
This complex fabric of semantics, associative overtones, and stem rhythms is merely the materia prima of Joyce's communication. To this, add an enormous freight of mythological, historical, and psychological reference. It would be well-nigh hopeless to attempt to trace the design of any page were it not that a thread of logic runs through every paragraph. True, the thread always frays out into lateral associations which in turn disappear into almost inaccessible tenuities of meaning. Yet the main lines can all be followed. Joyce provides an answer to every riddle he propounds. In every passage there is a key word which sounds the essential theme. This word is supported, augmented, commented upon by other expressions in the same passage. Taken together, they not only indicate the mood but convey the meaning. The task of opening the way into any passage thus divides itself into three stages: 
1) Discovering the key word or words. 
2) Defining one or more of them, so that the drift of Joyce's thought becomes evident. 
3) Brooding awhile over the paragraph, to let the associations running out from the key centers gradually animate the rest of the passage.
Presently, the whole page will be alive with echoings and amplifications, re-echoings and sudden surprises. 
Amidst a sea of uncertainties, of one thing we can be sure: there are no nonsense syllables in Joyce! His language means so much that any intelligent reader can shave off some rewarding layers of meaning. The clarity and scope of the discoveries will depend almost wholly on the perception brought to bear; as the Master himself says: "Wipe your glosses with what you know." (FW p. 304).
Certainly there are many ways to approach the Wake. Mainly, I think you can break these down under two categories which we may call Horizontal and Vertical (as Scott from our Austin group termed it). Vertically, you dig down into each paragraph, sentence, or word to extract the dense meanings and references which may then bring meaning to the rest of the page or section. Horizontally, you just stream on through the musical, playful prose and let the sounds wash over you, triggering emotional or cerebral responses as they may.

The Night Owl speed-reading Wake group in Los Angeles I described here once certainly used the Horizontal approach. There is, no doubt, lots of fun to be had doing it that way. In our group here in Austin we use the Vertical approach, sticking with two pages which we examine and excavate thoroughly, just as Campbell describes. After two hours of discussion, usually we've identified the key words and phrases, defined them, pieced apart some puns, and eventually discovered the thematic "thread of logic." To close our sessions, we have one or two readers recite the pages in full, a touch of the Horizontal method. Just as Campbell describes, the pages do indeed come alive with echoings and surprises as we realize the thread of meaning is weaved intricately all over it.

Sunday, May 18, 2014

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin, TX

What:
The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin meets twice every month to read aloud from, dissect, and discuss one of the richest, funniest, most baffling, bewildering and beautiful books ever written, Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.

When/Where:

1st Tuesday of each month at the Wheatsville Co-op in South Austin (location changes occasionally, contact me for details)

3rd Thursday of each month at Malvern Books on 29th Street

***UPDATE: We are no longer doing in-person meetings. Since the Covid era, we now meet twice a month on Zoom. Contact me for more info here: peterquadrino[@]gmail.com 

Who:
This gathering is completely FREE and open to the public. No prior knowledge of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required. All you need to bring is a sense of humor, curiosity, and an openness to reading aloud in front of strangers.

How:
We read two pages per meeting, the process consisting of each participant reading two lines at a time going in a circle until we've gotten through the two pages. Then we dig into the text trying to decipher the many meanings and layers involved (usually with some help from annotations and guides), often branching off into discussing a variety of subjects like history, philosophy, pop culture, mythology, biology, etc until we've covered most of the content in those two pages. We usually close by having a couple participants do a final reading of the two pages in full. As regular attendee Terry perfectly put it, we take it apart and put it back together again. Much like Humpty Dumpty whose story is a key theme in the book.

While the Wake is notoriously difficult to read because of its multi-layered and multi-lingual dream language, its unique poetics come alive when read out loud, allowing its aural puns and wordplay to be experienced. It also rewards the group setting as multiple minds dredge up their own interpretations thus giving a better glimpse into the sleeping mind of main character HCE or Here Comes Everybody, consisting of "myriads of drifting minds in one." (FW p. 159)

For further info, feel free to contact me at this e-mail address:

peterquadrino [at] gmail.com

(substitute @ for [at], you know the drill)

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

On the 75th Anniversary of Finnegans Wake


"What's all this about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake. That's the important book."
- Nora Joyce, shortly after her husband's death


Finnegans Wake turned 75 years old this past Sunday. It was originally published on May 4, 1939 after James Joyce had devoted 17 years to writing it.

Cover for original 1939 Viking Press edition.

Peter Chrisp has a nice piece about it over at his exquisite blog where he displays the two original covers of the book for both its UK and US editions which were published at the same time. They both feature a reddish brown color in homage to the color of the River Liffey or the hair of main character Anna Livia Plurabelle "with her auburnt streams" (FW p. 139).

Chrisp's blog piece also goes into Joyce's Time Magazine cover story that was published during this time. It was for this photo shoot that Gisele Freund captured the only color photographs of Joyce ever taken.

The Time article is available here to read in full and it's well worth a look. It eloquently captures the initial reception of this most enigmatic book from the renowned and befuddling author Joyce:
It is packed with jokes, plays on words; it contains nonsensical diagrams, ridiculous footnotes, obscure allusions. Sometimes it seems to be retelling, in a chattering, stammering, incoherent way, the legends of Tristan and Isolde, of Wellington and Napoleon, Cain and Abel. Sometimes it seems to be a description, written with torrential eloquence, of the flow of a river to the sea.

As a gigantic laboratory experiment with language, Finnegans Wake is bound to exert an influence far beyond the circle of its immediate readers. Whether Joyce is eventually convicted of assaulting the King’s English with intent to kill or whether he has really added a cubit to her stature, she will never be quite the same again.

*   *   *

In honor of the Wake's 75th birthday, we may as well take a look at the 75th page of the book. After all, any page of the Wake can be closely perused to extract a good sense of the essence of the entire book.

Page 75 is the opening page of chapter 4, which begins with the words:

"As the lion in our teargarten remembers the nenuphars of his Nile"

"teargarten" is a pun on the German Tiergarten meaning zoo, but you can also picture the lion shedding tears of sadness for being stuck in the constrained garden of a zoo, looking back on the beautiful "nenuphars" (lotus flowers or water lilies) floating on the surface of the Nile River.

The river is the key symbol for the whole book and the lotus, as Joseph Campbell loved to point out, suggests the lotus flower growing out of the navel of the sleeping god Vishnu who dreams the universe (see page 598 of FW).

Less than two years after the Wake was published,  Joyce died ("gone for age, and knew not the watchful treachers at his wake" FW p. 75) and was buried in a cemetery close to a zoo, which led his wife Nora to remark, "My husband is buried there. He was awfully fond of the lions--I like to think of him lying there and listening to them roar."

Further down the page:

"It may be... that he reglimmed? presaw?"

Despite its age, the Wake is and will forever be a modern book, "as modern as tomorrow afternoon" (FW p. 309). It contains all of history and constantly metamorphosizes, follows and predicts the times we live in. The great sage of the technological revolution Marshall McLuhan thumbed the Wake daily for insights and considered it a guidebook for studying the effects of media technology.

The Wake was, after all, produced during the opening stages of the Big Bang-like explosive expansion and acceleration of technology and media. Joyce wrote it between 1922 and 1939. Radio, telephone, television, transportation were all growing rapidly, the world being completely revolutionized and Joyce "with his deepseeing insight" (FW p. 75) was keenly aware of what this meant for humanity.

Legendary science fiction author Philip K. Dick was a student of Finnegans Wake and speaks these words through one of his characters in the opening pages of his novel The Divine Invasion:
You think James Joyce was crazy, is that what you think? Okay; then explain to me how come he mentions 'talktapes' which means audio tapes in a book he wrote starting in 1922 and which he completed in 1939, before there were tape recorders! You call that crazy? He also has them sitting around a TV set -- in a book that started four years after World War I.
[...]
Someday I'm going to get my article published; I'm going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn't exist until centuries after James Joyce's era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I'll be famous forever.
It's always fun in my Austin Finnegans Wake reading group when we come across phrases like "handwriting on the facewall" (FW p. 135) that appear to describe Facebook. 

Further on down on page 75, we read that the "shamanah" or shaman (Shem/Joyce) "prayed, as he sat on anxious seat ... that his wordwounder ... might, mercy to providential benevolence's who hates prudencies' astuteness, unfold in the first of a distinguished dynasty of his posteriors."

Parsing through the annotations found at the website FWEET.org (or in Roland McHugh's book of annotations) you'll occasionally find an especially enriching, insightful little quotation from the endlessly varying source books Joyce took notes from. For that final phrase, Joyce was apparently inspired by a passage from a book by French writer Francois-René Chateaubriand on the Native Americans, a quote which nicely sums up the approach of the shaman-poet Joyce:
"Age itself cannot rob the sachems [Algonquin chiefs] of this happy simplicity: like the old birds of our forests, they still blend their old songs with the new airs of their young posterity."
*   *   *

All these years later, the magnum opus of perhaps the greatest writer of all time remains largely unread, ignored, often disparaged by the general public.

Scholars digging through the Wake's bottomless archaeological depths continually uncover scores of previously undiscovered designs, intricacies, and hoarded jewels. A scholar named Roy Benjamin recently detailed the Wake's important and not-so-hidden matrix of the precession of the equinoxes embedded all throughout the text, for instance.

Devoted reading groups across the globe gather regularly to raid Finnegan's tomb, finding strangely contemporary items like Nike sneakers, iPhones, and yet-to-be-invented social media platforms.

Philip K. Dick never did get to publish his theories on Finnegans Wake. And the world Joyce wrote for remains very far from comprehending, or even desiring to comprehend, his most cherished offering.

75 years after its birth, the Wake still appears to be awfully young. Perhaps ageless.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Wake Art: Visual depictions of the "dreambookpage"


Clinton Cahill's depiction of the Yawn scene.

It's often said of Finnegans Wake that it is a book for the ear, that it's meant to be read aloud and experienced through the dimension of sound. Yet there are also plenty of episodes that feature thoroughly described visuals and when reading some of the vignettes---like the Mookse and the Gripes or the Ondt and the Gracehoper---one can't help but try to form a mental image of the characters.

When it comes to visual description, I'm especially fond of the scene at the opening of the "Yawn" chapter (Book III, Chapter 3) where the sleeping giant Yawn is approached by four chroniclers (and their donkey) who become mountain-climbing archeologists. Ascending up his unfathomably huge body, "they hopped it up the mountainy molehill, traversing climes of old times gone by of the days not worth remembering." (FW p. 474)


The supine, snoozing Brobdingnagian body of Yawn is envisioned in beautifully poetic if immense and absurd proportions:
"There he would lay till they would him descry, spancelled down upon a blossomy bed, at one foule stretch, amongst the daffydowndillies, the flowers of narcosis fourfettering his footlights, a halohedge of wild spuds hovering over him, epicures waltzing with gardenfillers, puritan shoots advancing to Aran chiefs... The meteor pulp of him, the seamless rainbowpeel... His bellyvoid of nebulose with his neverstop navel... And his veins shooting melanite phosphor, his creamtocustard cometshair and his asteroid knuckles, ribs and members... His electrolatiginous twisted entrails belt." (FW p. 475)

With its layered meanings and opaque, obscure prose, any visual representation of the content of Finnegans Wake will of course be entirely dependent upon the interpretation of the artist. Here are some of these illustrative interpretations I've come across.

  • I've posted on this blog before about the Wake-inspired graphical constructions of Id-Grids and Ego-Graphs: A Typographical Confabulation with Finnegans Wake. It's a fun book to flip through and stare at its pages; seeing Wake phrases isolated out of their natural habitat tends to highlight their curious rhythm and mysterious density. You can see more samples from it over at BrainPickings.


  • Cartoonist Ralph Zeigermann created fantastic panels depicting the Mookse and the Gripes episode . Their intensity and humor reminds me of the Ren & Stimpy cartoons. These are a must-see.




    • A new edition of Finnegans Wake is now available from The Folio Society (for an absurdly exorbitant $195) featuring illustrations by artist John Vernon Lord. At the Folio Society website you can see samples of Lord's art and even peek inside his intricately inscribed notebooks on the Wake.

    • Over at the blog for the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, Clinton Cahill has been sharing his own efforts at illustrating the Wake in monthly blog posts for a while now. He mostly uses charcoal for his sketches, creating a shadowy hazy texture that feels perfect for the opaque subject. I especially like this piece of HCE's fall: 

    • Of course I have to mention the wonderful work Stephen Crowe has been doing for a while over at his blog Wake in Progress. He's been illustrating the Wake one page at a time for four years now. I highly recommend checking out his blog, it's one of the best ongoing Wake projects out there.
    • Lastly, Joyce's daughter Lucia had an artistic gift and used it to draw some illustrations for early publications of chapters from the Wake. See this link for more.

    Tuesday, February 11, 2014

    Book Review (Part 3 of 4): Joyce's Book of the Dark by John Bishop

    "(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop) in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world?" 
    - Finnegans Wake, pg. 18
    After the resolute reader has made it through the first 300 dense pages of Joyce's Book of the Dark, its author provides us with a brief respite in the form of an entertaining chapter-long primer on how to read Finnegans Wake. This chapter, entitled "'Litters': On Reading Finnegans Wake," also prepares the reader for the forthcoming exegetical finale, the climax of this enormous study (which we will discuss in Part 4).

    FW structure (by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy)
    Bishop begins with an apologia for the style of writing he's employed thus far in the book in which words, quotes, and snippets from all over Finnegans Wake are taken and utilized throughout his own prose, often out of context. For instance, in one Bishop sentence he might use three completely unrelated quotes from Joyce's book to build his point. He argues that the Wake itself endorses this kind of reading, pointing to the enigmatic nightbook's references to the ancient practice of Virgilian fortune-telling (Sortes Virgilianae) in which a reader opens the works of Virgil at random ("volve the virgil page and view" FW p. 270) and then interprets the lines as referring to their own life at that moment, a practice of divination very much like using the I Ching. The same tactic works with the Wake. As Allen B. Ruch puts it, "Finnegans Wake seems uncannily alive, as if it's aware you're reading it." Indeed, the Wake can be seen as a Western version of the I Ching which is also known as the Book of Changes---the key symbol of the Wake is a river. Just as Heraclitus wrote that you can never step into the same river twice, it's often said of the Wake that it's a different book each time you read it, as its riverine text is "moving and changing every part of the time." (FW p. 118) (Philosopher Robert Anton Wilson, who was known to randomly flip open the Wake and riff on it during stand-up routines, has an essay discussing in detail the parallels between the Wake and the I Ching in his book Coincidance.)
    I Ching diagram

    The Wake itself is also explicit in "indicating that the words which follow may be taken in any order desired" (FW p. 121) because, unlike a novel with a sequential and orderly plot, Joyce's circular book might be said to have no beginning or ending and is composed in an alphabet soup of "expolodotonate[d]" (FW p. 353) English, a giant scrapheap of words and letters that have been "blown to Adams" (FW p. 313) or "litterish fragments" (FW p. 66).

    The experimental American composer (and noted I Ching devotee) John Cage displayed the idiosyncrasies and strange pleasures that may derive from this type of approach to the Wake in his essay (read aloud here in a gem of a video) "Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake" in which he constructs mesostic poems from dug up Wake words.

    Marshall McLuhan was known to keep a specially customized copy of the Wake so as to similarly explore the potentials of piecing together its lexical elements like a child playing with Legos:
    The Wake was McLuhan's vade mecum. In later years he kept one copy unbound, with each page pasted onto a sleeve of 3-ring paper. The stack stood in an accessible spot just outside the door of his office. McLuhan was forever plucking fresh pages like a gambler toying with oversized cards. He liked to snap the pages into new configurations, up, down, across, and read the phrases in a kaleidoscopic collage, much as Joyce himself had written them. (Source)
    For Bishop, the Wake's frequent allusions to its own brand of "pure chingchong idiotism with any way words all in one soluble" (FW p. 299) are signals to the reader that this type of free associative reading is not only suggested but required if one is to grasp Finnegans Wake. Breaking down a passage from the Wake's opening pages, Bishop details how our hero's fall into sleep brings with it the collapse of every conceivable standing structure; ladders, buildings, trees, etc. but also rational, readable structures too. Bishop frequently adopts particular Wake phrases to return to over and over again to hammer home his theoretical points---in this case, he advises that we must be like Finnegan who "stottered from the latter" (FW p. 6) or tottered and fell from the ladder, except we must be prepared to totter or fall from the letter, the normal rational language of letters. Thus, Bishop concludes:
    Together, all these elements are stating obliquely what is everywhere evident in Finnegans Wake anyway: that the language of the book, like the language of dreams and like language autonomically disrupted by the stutter, will operate in a manner unpredictably different from that in which rational language operates. As a reconstruction of the night, Finnegans Wake is "freely masoned" (FW p. 552), "freewritten" (FW p. 280), and structured "in the broadest way immarginable" (FW p. 4) by free associations.
    Continuing his impressive interpretative plundering of Wake passages, Bishop takes us through the first paragraph of the Shem the Penman chapter (FW p. 169) which describes, in an exaggerated and absurd parody, the author Joyce:
    Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is joky for Jacob. A few toughnecks are still getatable who pretend that aboriginally he was of respectable stemming (he was an outlex between the lines of Ragonar Blaubarb and Horrild Hairwire and an inlaw to Capt. the Hon. and Rev. Mr Bbyrdwood de Trop Blogg was among his most distant connections) but every honest to goodness man in the land of the space of today knows that his back life will not stand being written about in black and white. Putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at. (FW p. 169)
    Bishop shows us that in order to understand the Wake's author and the text itself we must read "between the lines" and pursue "distant connections" in our free associative reading because the life of Shem ("an outlex" who is outside the laws---Latin lex---of reason), just like the material of dreams and sleep, "will not stand being written about in black and white", thus it cannot be conceived merely by reading the words on the page. The text of Finnegans Wake is "superscribed and subpencilled" (FW p. 66) so its meaning must be sought above, below, and beyond merely the printed words, just as we would interpret a dream by reading past its bizarre surface material, as Bishop declares:
    The greatest obstacle to our comprehension of Finnegans Wake since its publication has surely been a failure on the part of the readers to believe that Joyce really meant what he said when he spoke of the book as a "reconstruction of the nocturnal life" and an "imitation of the dream-state"; and as a consequence, readers have perhaps too easily exercised on the text an unyielding literalism bent on finding a kind of meaning in every way antithetical to the kind of meaning purveyed in dreams... What it really requires of its reader is the ability to pursue "distant connections" and, in doing so, to leap all over the place.
    The actual words and material of the Wake available to be absorbed and assimilated by the literate mind conceals hidden, buried, invisible meanings. In other words, "the speechform is a mere sorrogate" (FW p. 149). The physical pages are "packen paper" (FW p. 356 [German Packenpapier, "wrapping paper"]) that must be dug through to discover what lies beneath the surface. The Wake's 5th chapter, which describes the nature of the book itself and its puzzling style, uses the metaphor of a mysterious buried manuscript that's been dug up out of garbage heap by a pecking hen. This exhumed document with its "writing thithaways end to end and turning, turning and end to end hithways writing and with lines of litters slittering up and louds of latters slettering down" (FW p. 114) is pored over by various expert scholars and scientists trying to decipher its "changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns." (FW p. 118) This process of digging and deciphering is a key recurring theme in the Wake and a perfect metaphor for the experience of reading it.
     
    Everything about the Wake, in both the macro and microcosm, is essentially a puzzle or a riddle. It describes itself in this sense as a "nightmaze" (FW p. 411), a "jigsaw puzzle" (FW p. 210), a "beautiful crossmess parzel" (FW p. 619 [Christmas parcel + crossword puzzle]), a "cryptogram" (FW p. 261), or "holocryptogram" (FW p. 546) and challenges us "to salve life's robulous rebus" (FW p. 12[a rebus is a pictogram puzzle]). Bishop attests that if you perform Virgilian sortilege and open the book at random, you're bound to come upon a riddle of some sort: "Every word, every phrase, every paragraph, and every story of Finnegans Wake requires the same kind of solution as a riddle does. And this includes the English."

    As anyone who's ever participated in a Finnegans Wake reading group knows, trying to solve the riddles on each page is where all the fun lies. Parsing through a single page with a group, you'd be amazed how many things other people will find that you would've never caught on your own. The group approach gives you the feeling that you're all tasked with interpreting the elements of one very long and complicated dream, the dream of HCE or "Here Comes Everybody." Bishop suggests that if you've broken out in laughter in the process of solving these dream-riddles then you are on the right track:
    …dreams operate exactly as riddles do, not simply in the wholly intuitive process by which they are untangled, but in the kind of understanding they yield. The successful interpretation of a dream results not primarily in an intellectual understanding, but in an illuminating "click" that wakes up the dreamer in the middle of his own life. And just as the analysis of a dream produces a sudden recognition, just as the solution of a good riddle generates a ripple of mirth, so a good "reading [of the] Evening World” (FW p. 28) works to liberate “everyone’s repressed laughter” (FW p. 190), whose release is a sign that the book has been read rightly: in risu veritas, as Joyce remarked of the Wake (Latin “in laughter there is truth”).
    As we dig into the unconscious mind of HCE and try to interpret its many puns and riddles, we are also confronted constantly with forms of child's play, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes. It is this aspect of the Wake that Bishop explores in his book's penultimate chapter, called "The Nursing Mirror." It is considered a forgone conclusion in modern scientific and psychoanalytic circles that dreams and sleep entail a regression to the infantile state. On this subject, Bishop refers to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams which states: "Dreaming is a piece of infantile mental life that has been superseded" and "to our surprise, we find the child and the child's impulses still living on in the dream." Passing into a deep unconscious snooze, the Wake's hero returns to "first infancy" (FW p. 22) and becomes "an overgrown babeling" (FW p. 6). Our immersion into this night world consequently turns us into children as well since, as Bishop describes it, "Joyce puts his reader into a position roughly analogous to that of a child encountering an unknown language for a first time."

    It is a childlike curiosity and abandonment of authoritative literal reading that will provide the most rewarding experience for a Wake reader. The aforementioned exhumed document representing the Wake itself is described as being "folded with cunning, sealed with crime, uptied by a harlot, undone by a child" (FW p. 94). Despite the novel's highbrow literary reputation, Bishop proclaims "one must become a child again if one is to read the Wake."

    The buried "childhide" (FW p. 483 [childhood that is hidden]) unearthed in the playful, joyous, humorous Wake represents a crumbling of the old man institutions of rational, literalistic language and its supposed "awethorrorty" (FW p. 516 [notice the presence of "horror"]). "The old man on his ars" (FW p. 514) supine and sleeping gives way to the child inside coming alive with no regard for grownup daytime rules and rational structures. The Wake celebrates this child inside all of us, "The child we all love to place our hope in for ever" (FW p. 621).

    At the heart of the Wake, at the end of one of its densest chapters (Book II, chapter 2 "Night Lessons") the children have begun to take over power from their parents as the old era closes and a new one begins. The children tease their parents in a letter sending "our best youlldied greedings to Pep and Memmy and the old folkers below and beyant" (FW p. 308) while also inscribing doodles in the margins, including an apparent thumb-to-nose image. But the most eminent and comical symbol of this playful "thumbtonosery" (FW p. 253) that Joyce's book represents is the Manneken Pis statue and fountain in Brussels which the Wake makes frequent reference to. The statue depicts a small boy, a "wee mee mannikin" (FW p. 576), continually pissing with a grin on his face. One can see why Joyce took a liking to this statue; in his greatest work he virtually obliterated language, the very foundation of all respectable reasonable rational adult structures, to rubble and took a piss on the ashes.

    Sunday, February 2, 2014

    Happy Birthday James Joyce

    "A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights?" 
    - Finnegans Wake, p. 627

    Today, February 2nd, marks the anniversary of James Joyce's birth. A highly superstitious man, he insisted upon both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake being published on his birthday. The latter would lead to some misadventures as, after 17 years of laboring on his final book and making endless hand-written revisions and additions to the page proofs, he finished writing the book in November of 1938. This left barely two months to proofread the entire 628-page linguistic nightmare and get it to the printers.

    Joyce and his friends worked around the clock to prepare the final manuscript, its author barely sleeping at all during this time and once collapsing from exhaustion during a walk in Paris. Richard Ellman tells a story from this period's "frenzy of proofreading":
    [Paul] Léon supplied a last drama by forgetting a section of the revised proofs in a taxi. He rushed back to stop the driver, but the taxi was gone. Bitterly ashamed, he hurried to Joyce's flat to inform him; Joyce did not reproach him, seemed rather to take it as the usual sort of bad luck. Léon telephoned to London to send more proofs, but the taxi driver, after two hours, miraculously appeared with the missing package. (Ellman, pg 714)
    The first printed copy of Finnegans Wake was presented to Joyce on January 30th, 1939 and three days later on his birthday he gathered with family and friends to celebrate the culmination of nearly two decades of intensive work. Paris' best caterer baked seven cakes, each one a replica of Joyce's seven books, with icing the color of the books' bindings. At the dinner celebration, Joyce told the guests how the idea for the Wake came to him in 1922 when he was at Nice in France and, after dinner, Joyce and his son sang a duet and his son's wife read aloud the last pages of Finnegans Wake.

    The world was busy preparing for a second World War during this time, though, and the great author had been virtually cast aside as a lunatic for so thoroughly dedicating his gift to such a strange and difficult-to-comprehend book. Within two years he died at the age of 59, the world collapsed into "Booms of bombs and heavy rethudders" (FW p. 510) and the great historic dream epic of co(s)mic puns, riddles, and jokes was left to collect dust until a young Joseph Campbell (with Henry Morton Robinson) published the first intensive study of Joyce's magnum opus in 1944.

    James Joyce did not lead an easy life. Born in 1882, he was the eldest of 10 children in a family that collapsed into debilitating poverty, his mother died when he was a teenager, and his father let an already struggling household fall into complete disrepair. Growing up, he lived in probably two dozen different addresses because of unpaid rent. This pattern continued when he had his own family, bouncing between apartments and flats in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris as he struggled to get any of his books published and feed his wife and two children on an English teacher's salary.

    He tended to get by on loans from friends until Harriet Shaw Weaver, convinced of his genius, became his patron and supporter, eventually helping him get the chapters of Ulysses published serially. Despite its controversial content (the novel was banned in English-speaking countries for 11 years after its publication), Ulysses made Joyce the world's most famous writer in the 1920s. His reputation took a swift decline as he would then dedicate the rest of his career to writing Finnegans Wake whose chapters were also published serially for a baffled and disappointed audience. Suffering through numerous eye diseases and surgeries, the mental collapse of his beloved daughter Lucia, public excoriations of Ulysses (copies were piled up and burned in Ireland), and friends withdrawing their support for his bizarre new book, he carried on in his work. As he writes in the Wake, "You will say it is most unenglish and I shall hope to hear that you will not be wrong about it. But I further, feeling a bit husky in my truths." (FW p. 160)

    All these years later, we're still unraveling the riddles of his final "worldstage's practical jokepiece" (FW p. 33). An unyielding, unique, damn near heroic dedication to crafting and completing these encyclopedic texts seems entirely worth it in retrospect as their study and appreciation has already far exceeded his 59-year lifespan. In fact, especially as regards the Wake, one might say the world is only beginning to learn how to approach and appreciate his art. With its combination of world languages (over 70 have been identified) and rational-mind-cracking prose-poetry, Finnegans Wake seems like it was written for the children of the future.

    Here are some links to check out today about Joyce and his birthday: Peter Chrisp writes about Joyce's selecting James Stephens (because they shared the same birthday) to finish writing the Wake in case he couldn't continue, and Flavorwire presents 10 authors on James Joyce.

    Wednesday, January 8, 2014

    Book Review (PART 2 of 4): Joyce's Book of the Dark by John Bishop

    "In fact, under the closed eyes of the inspectors the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody" 
    - Finnegans Wake, pg. 107

    As one progresses along through Joyce’s Book of the Dark, the analysis grows deeper and more thorough (as well as dense and slightly more difficult to read) while the rewards of Bishop’s deep investigations become more exciting. At the heart of the text lies the chapter entitled “Meoptics,” the second-longest chapter in the book, in which Bishop comprehensively discusses the visual aspect of Finnegans Wake. Of course, since it’s a book of the dark in which we share in the experience of a main character who is asleep, the chapter begins by driving home the point that there is rarely anything actually visible in the Wake except pitch-black darkness, hence the hundreds upon hundreds of references to darkness, blackness, and every other kind of murkiness all throughout “the lingerous longerous book of the dark” (FW p. 251).

    Occasionally, though, visual dreams do occur inside the head of our dreaming hero. “And Dub did glow that night” (FW p. 329). But if the phenomenon of vision entails light bouncing off of objects and then reflecting back to the retina, we are led to wonder how anyone can have visual dreams with their eyes shut. Thus begins a highly fascinating inquiry by Bishop into the optics of one who has their eyes closed. The word “meoptics” (FW p. 139) suggests “my optics” and “myopia” or nearsightedness and Bishop discovers that our sleeper’s eyes are awakened by phosphorescent (“fusefiressence” FW p. 378) flashes on the insides of his eyelids which remain closed in “blepharospasmockical suppressions” (FW p. 515, Greek blepharon means “eyelid”), and “his eyelids are painted” (FW p. 248) with “his own length of rainbow” (FW p. 79) which seems to emanate from inside the body.

    In a dark room with eyes closed, the eyeballs are suddenly somehow lit up to form visual dreams which the eyes view across the inside surface of the eyelids like a movie screen. Bishop elaborates: “because the shimmer falling over all surfaces of the world perceived in dreams is created out of the eye’s flesh and cast forth in a semblance of the real, HCE’s ‘eyebulbs’ (FW p. 531) might be understood to create light---‘fleshed light’ (FW p. 222)---like ‘glowworms,’ ‘fireflies,’ ‘lightning bugs,’ and other forms of life that radiate out of living tissue.” As his own flesh flashes forth florescent streams of light, the sleeper confuses them for meteors or “falling angles” (FW p. 21) or lightning bolts or “starshootings” (FW p. 22) and his “gropesarching eyes” (FW p. 167), groping and searching, try to capture these elusive glowing flickers.

    Continuing his inquiry into the visual dreams taking place inside the Wake, Bishop engages in one of his rare discussions of the secondary characters in the book, the children Shem, Shaun and Issy. Alluding to the chapters of the Wake known as “The First and Second Watches of Shaun” (the first 2 chapters of Book III), he notes how “the dreamed image of Shaun” lights up the sleeper’s eyes and becomes visible---“now, fix on the little fellow in my eye” (FW p. 486). Known as “Shaun the Postman” he also carries letters and thus literacy and daytime reality, signaling the awakening of the dreamer’s ego. He is associated with space, visible space, and his “spatiality” (FW p. 172) is to bring forth forms of visible space to be “seene” ([scene] FW p. 52). Bishop also notes that Shaun is “as much a figure through whom we see things as a figure whom we see” which is why extended portions of the Wake are actually narrated by Shaun. This all makes sense when you consider the location of the Shaun chapters toward the end of the book when the night is reaching its conclusion and the sleeper will soon wake up to daylight.

    With this perspective of the Shaun character in mind, Bishop also sheds new light on the chapter known as “The Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Maggies” (Book II Chapter 1). What seems to be going on in this chapter, according to most Wake commentaries, is a children’s game in which Shem and Shaun have to try to guess the color of Issy’s underwear, leading to a conflict between the two brothers. The chapter is in the form of a stage play, a pantomime filled with rainbows and references to the word heliotrope (which literally means "moving toward the sun"). For Bishop, the entire thing plays out inside the body of the sleeper and he explains the frequent references to heliotrope as having to do with the movement of the “unknown sunseeker” (FW p. 110), the sleeping body of HCE, floating “toward sunrise, resurrection, and the wakened discovery of sunlit vision" as nighttime progresses toward morning.

    In this chapter-long vignette, Shem and Shaun take on the roles of Mick and Nick or the Archangel Michael and Old Nick (nickname for Lucifer/Satan), representing the powers of Light and Darkness battling it out inside the eyes of the sleeper. Associated with visual space and daytime reality, the Shaun/Mick figure attempts to awaken the dreamer to light (Joyce sometimes spells Shaun as “showm” or “shone”) and recapture his grasp on reality. Shem/Nick is the force of darkness or deep sleep trying to subdue the dreamer back into blacked-out sleep and the unconscious realm with its “shameful” repressed material. Bishop sees this as the struggle “which structures any dream, during which a variable force impinging on the ‘tropped head’---pain, desire, a sensory disturbance---seeks to return the ego toward wakefulness… while a concurrently acting counterforce [which Freud calls] ‘the universal, invariably present and unchanging wish to sleep,’ dissolves all such ‘upsits’ ([upsets] FW p. 127).”

    As for the mysterious Issy character, always one of the toughest elements of the Wake to pin down, Bishop sees her as the ideal beauty who “drifts through the Wake in the guises of so many female models, movie stars, actresses” always inviting the envious eyes of the sleeper inside of whose eyelids her apparition floats like a “skysign of soft advertisement” (FW p. 4). Appearing surrounded by “rainbow girls” she seems to be the sleeper’s associative interpretation of bright rainbow phosphenes ("truetoflesh colours" FW p. 481) flashing on the retina causing HCE’s “Envyeyes” (FW p. 235) to try “to catch… by the calour of brideness” (FW p. 223) these tenuous clouds. Symbolizing two aspects of HCE himself, Shem and Shaun tussle with each other as the “shameful” devilish Shem tries to guess the color of Issy’s drawers while the watchful eye of Shaun steps in to censor him and send him back down into the dark unconscious. Complicated as this "rainborne pamtomomiom" ([rainbow pantomime/pandemonium] FW p. 285) all may sound, for Bishop this entire entanglement embodies the situation inside the closed eyes of the Wake’s sleeping hero.


    Of course, there is so much more to his interpretation than my cursory summary suggests, and the visible colors/rainbow theme of Finnegans Wake is one that’s rich enough to write an entire book about. Joyce, who suffered from countless eye diseases and endured about a dozen ghastly eye surgeries during his writing career, was keenly interested in the mechanics of vision and explicitly attested to the Wake’s elaborate “theory of colours” in letters to friends. Bishop’s “Meoptics” chapter unpacks a wealth of information about the color spectrum and Helmholtzian optics found to be present in the “acheseyeld” ([exiled] FW p. 148) Irishman’s magnum opus. Bishop even uncovers a mass network of blinking/eyelid references within this book of forty winks, leading to an examination of “those lashbetasselled lids” (FW p. 474) which, he explains, developed on the bodies of animals living outside of water so they could refresh their eyes with saltwater or “meye eyesalt” (FW p. 484). I assure you, Bishop goes much further in his attempt to “define the hydraulics of common salt” (FW p. 256) in the Wake’s sleeping hero but we’ve covered enough about the eyes, let’s move on to the ears, which any reader of the Wake knows are the most important. “Ear! Ear! Not ay! Eye! Eye! For I’m at the heart of it” (FW p. 409).

    *   *   *

    “In sleep our senses are dormant, except the sense of hearing, which is always awake, since you can’t close your ears. So any sound that comes to our ears during sleep is turned into a dream.” – James Joyce

    When commissioned to create a portrait of Joyce in 1929 to be included with the publication of a section from the as-yet-unfinished Wake, Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi came up with a disarmingly simple illustration featuring a large spiral. This symbol could be representative of many things (and indeed spirals are ubiquitous in Finnegans Wake) but I prefer to picture it as a symbol for the ear. The auditory realm is vast in its scope, allowing one to hear all around them, but the wide world of sounds swirls its way into the inner ear like water whirlpooling down a drain.

    In his study of the Wake’s auditory dynamics (the chapter entitled “Earwickerwork”), Bishop maintains that the “sound sense” (FW p. 109) of Joyce’s book is its most crucial component. He mentions fellow Joyce scholar Adaline Glasheen’s suggestion that a  reader should try to count how many times the word “ear” appears in the text as well as other auditory words like “hear” and “listen” and “sound.” With the help of the online search engine FWEET (Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury), I found those words appear almost 300 times in the 628 page book and that’s not counting the words like “Bullsear!” (FW p. 9) and foreign words such as the ubiquitous “oreilles” (“ears” in French) and other ear ciphers.

    The ears of the sleeping body at the center of Finnegans Wake never fall asleep, thus the hero’s central nickname “Earwicker” which derives from the Anglo-Saxon Euerwaar or “Ever-Waker” and designates a watchman.  All of the sounds in his surroundings leak into his head as “Acoustic Disturbance” (FW p. 71) and find their way into his dreams. These sounds include his own body’s snoring, the beating of his heart, the grumbling of his stomach (“all the vitalmines is beginning to sozzle and chew and the hormonies to clingleclangle” FW p. 456), farts, grinding teeth, and perhaps sleepily mumbling to himself “imeffible tries at speech unasyllabled” (FW p. 183). Outside sounds like cars, trains, singing birds, and even a rooster crowing “Cocorico!” (FW p. 584) proliferate towards the end of the book when morning approaches, confirming (according to Bishop) the work’s overall chronological structure of one single night experienced by “one stable somebody” (FW p. 107) as opposed to the “universal dream of some disembodied global everyman as some Wake critics have attested.”

    Indeed, Bishop’s textual analysis diverts sharply from the general consensus of Wakean criticism at times but he always backs up his imaginative arguments thoroughly and convincingly. This was particularly the case with his piecing apart of the pages which open Book II, chapter 3 of the Wake. This is perhaps the most difficult and dense chapter in Finnegans Wake, but the opening seems to be describing a very complex and powerful radio, “as modern as tomorrow afternoon… equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas” (FW p. 309) inside Earwicker’s pub. At least that’s how it had always been interpreted. I had always loved this image since it was one of the many examples in the Wake of technology that hadn’t been invented yet. Bishop sees things differently though, and the results of his detective work appear to be impeccable.


    He begins his virtuoso exegesis of the radio passage by emphasizing the most worthwhile approach to interpreting the Wake: “rather than reading it linearly and literally, we interpret it as we might interpret a dream, by eliciting from the absurd murk a network of overlapping and associatively interpenetrating structures.” Digging into the murk of this ostensibly electronic passage he uncovers that “this harmonic condenser enginium” (FW p. 310) not only conceals the appearance of the sleeping body of HCE at all times but specifically alludes to his head (“enginium” = Latin ingenium or “mental power”) described as having “a howdrocephalous enlargement” (FW p. 310) (Greek kephale means “head” and the medical term hydrocephalus means “water on the brain”). Concurrently, he finds embedded throughout the passage all the anatomical parts of the ear, leaving the Wake reader agape for not realizing all along that what we are dealing with here is just a very dense and radio-analogy-filled description of “the lubberendth of his otological life.” (FW p. 310)


    Alongside a diagram of the inner ear, Bishop includes all of the ear anatomy terms like “hummer, enville, and cstorrap” ([hammer, anvil, and stirrup] FW p. 310), “routs of Corthy” ([rods of Corti] FW p. 310), and “tympan” ([tympanum] FW p. 310) which are found to be lurking all over this Wake passage we once thought was describing a radio device. This leads him to declare that “Earwicker, as a recurrent ‘character’ in the Wake, is constituted essentially of two vast, vigilant, and radarlike ears with a large and hydrocephalus head wedged vacantly somewhere in between.”


    HCE’s “pricking up ears… picking up airs from th’other over th’ether” (FW p. 452) don’t simply perceive sound, though, they also interpret as they listen, for even while asleep his mind can’t help but activate its predisposition for making what Bishop calls “audiophonic associations” no matter how absurd they may be. As Bishop explains, “Like all of his body, HCE’s ears are humanly made and organized, wired by parents and the authority of literacy.” So the sounds that his “vast, vigilant, radarlike ears” absorb then enter into a massive knotted web of phonetics (what the Wake calls “funantics” FW p. 450), a matrix of words and language which reach back through connections and meanings beyond HCE’s conscious mind, recalling again the aforementioned etymological archaeology of Vico. For Bishop concludes his line of thought thusly:
    If a reading of [Vico’s] The New Science shows HCE lying at the evolved end of a diachronic language whose roots lie unrecapturably buried in the unconsciousness of prehistory, immersion in the Wake’s ‘funantics’ complementarily shows Earwicker lying at the center of an immense phonological tangle whose totality is language as a synchronic structure.
    Concluding his study of the Wake’s “otological life” (FW p. 310) and “funantics” (FW p. 450), Bishop more or less advises the reader who wishes to engage this notoriously difficult and “superliterate” text to become like HCE and merely listen, letting the breeze of mixed sounds wash over you, drawing up sparks of association, memory, emotion here and there inside one’s radiohead. As hard as this may be, the Wake reader must try to give up the natural inclination to make rational sense out of everything and “abandon the monied and privileged reflex of literacy in order to attain to ‘dummyship’ and become as good an illiterate as HCE.” Or as Finnegans Wake itself states: “What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for.” (FW p. 482)

    Monday, January 6, 2014

    Book Review (PART 1 of 4): Joyce's Book of the Dark by John Bishop


    "Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?" - Finnegans Wake, p. 114


    Since first discovering John Bishop's monumental book about 4 years ago, I've been disappointed about how little discussion there is about it on the internet. Now that I've finally gotten around to reading it (twice), I'd like to change that here.

    Joyce's Book of the Dark is a masterpiece of literary criticism while at the same time an eye-opening scholarly consideration of sleep. Bishop begins with the provocative premise that Finnegans Wake is, at all times, a record of what goes on inside the body and mind of one sleeping person (that is, not just dreams, but even the extended mysterious dreamless periods) and proceeds to build upon that argument almost ad nauseam, deploying snippets from the text of the Wake relentlessly through twelve progressively groundbreaking chapters concluding with a most brilliant and original theory of what the flowing female character Anna Livia Plurabelle really represents in the book.

    One of the most fascinating things about Finnegans Wake is that you can study it through any particular lense and construct a pretty good argument that the whole book is all about, for instance, fly fishing---as a funny New York Times piece explored once. There's a whole series of books on Kabbalah in Finnegans Wake; George Cinclair Gibson wrote a well-received book Wake Rites arguing that the ancient rituals of Tara underlie the whole thing; Benjamin Boysen's humongous new study of Joyce declares it's all about love; Marshall McLuhan posited it is “about the electric retribalization of the West” via technology and, following McLuhan, Donald Theall considered it a kind of hybrid literary-electronic-hypertext device. The Wake undoubtedly has a special verbal Rorschach quality to it, inviting endless interpretation, which is one of the reasons why it's so rewarding to read with a group.

    Bishop's sleeping body argument is by no means a radical one, though. While Joyce offered few clues about his Work in Progress over the 17 years of its composition and died shortly after its publication without getting to explain much about it, he did certainly make it clear as day in his letters and conversations with friends that this book of his was to be about the night, a "reconstruction of the nocturnal life" and "an imitation of the dream-state." This is part of what makes Bishop's thesis so compelling. Many readers consider Joyce's Book of the Dark to be the finest analysis of Finnegans Wake that's ever been written and I have to agree. Building a gigantic scholarly mountain of material on top of his rather simple thesis, Bishop's text is definitely the most extensive treatment of the Wake thus far; with 385 pages plus 80 pages of footnotes (which are filled with enough enlightening material to form a small book on their own), it's about as wide as a coffee table book and is peppered with geographical maps, etymological charts, diagrams, and illustrations to convey his theories. He writes with an engaging, humorous though densely informative style while incessantly weaving in quotes taken from all over the Wake. This lends his argument an increasingly convincing credence but also forces the reader to slowly parse through passages since, essentially, you're oftentimes reading a collage of various Finnegans Wake snippets.


    While Joyce’s most famous work Ulysses maintains a reputation for being impenetrable and puzzling, it's also sprung forth a pretty substantial library of exegeses which make quite clear the book's intentions and intricately constructed mechanisms. With an evolving, erudite and increasingly odd writing style, Ulysses tells the story of Leopold Bloom, a rather ordinary modern human being during a single day in Dublin, zooming closely into his inner experience and the way in which his mind and body interact with the world around him.  While Ulysses is often associated with the stream of consciousness technique, Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, is essentially an account of the "stream of unconsciousness" as its hero drifts off into sleep. Ulysses follows one single day, and the Wake one single night. In the latter, though, all rationality, reason, relativity, spacetime and other daytime mental structures collapse and crumble along with the conscious mind. This is, as Bishop argues, part of the meaning behind Finnegan's fall on the first page, "The fall... of a once wallstrait oldparr" which is "retaled early in bed" (FW p. 3).

    With the fall into sleep, there is also a fall inwards of our sensory perception, the world of objects disappears and we fully inhabit the world of our own bodies, in which all dreams take place. Everyone and everything we experience during our dreams is in fact ourselves (Bishop makes liberal use of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams to support this). The same goes for Finnegans Wake, in which a sleeping body underlies every scene, character, and event. As Bishop writes, "All things at the Wake start here, 'in the flesh.'"

    Early on in the text, Bishop introduces a thought experiment that he frequently returns to:
    Suppose that we charged ourselves with the task of providing in chronological order a detailed account of everything that occurred to us not last night (such an account would be far too sketchy to be useful) but in the first half hour of last night's sleep; or better yet, suppose that we fall asleep tonight intent on preserving for liberal study in the morning a detailed memory of the first half hour of sleep. ... What we are likely to recall... is a gap of obscurity far more stupefying than anything Joyce ever wrote.
    Alluding to the etymological source of the word "bed" which derives from a root referring to a dug up spot of turf (think "flower bed"), and quoting from various sources such as Schopenhauer who said "there is no radical difference between sleep and death," Bishop explains the numerous references in the Wake to a corpse---"the presence (of a curpse)" (FW p. 224)---as an intertwining of sleep and death. The sleeper in the Wake is, after all, "tropped head" (FW p. 34) and "Dead to the World" (FW p. 105), completely unconscious of himself as an entity with a name, address, personal history, etc. He no longer possesses an identity or has a body. He simply is a body.


    Following this logic, Bishop makes a good case for the main character's recurring initials of HCE standing for hoc corpus est or "this is the body," a Latin phrase from the consecration of the Roman Catholic Mass. The HCE initials take on thousands of different permutations and varieties throughout the book, but while the Wake refers "to him by all the licknames in the litany" (FW p. 234) he is ultimately a corpse (German Leichnam "corpse"), "he's rehearsing somewan's funeral" (FW p. 477), "in beautific repose, upon the silence of the dead" (FW p. 452). Elaborating on his initial thought experiment, Bishop concludes:
    These considerations will enable us to begin filling in the vast "blank memory" we all have of the night by allowing us to see that what must take place in parts of sleep void of dreams is the body itself, which has to be there in the "Real Absence" (FW p. 536) of everything else for one "to be continued." ... Since the content of our "knock[ed] out" hero's "tropped head" here is largely "his own body" (FW p. 185)... what is ultimately being represented is less a dream than the fertile ground of dreams ... Finnegans Wake, in other words, is a representation of a human body. This is only what we might expect of a work entitled the Wake, where, as at all wakes, the body is the life of the party. 
    This all comes from the chapter on “The Identity of the Dreamer” in which Bishop also ponders the daytime identity, the real regular human being who is the star of the show, lying asleep at the Wake. As Joyce filled his book with references to a giant garbage dump or rubbish heap, Bishop sees this as referring to the “chaotic trash heap of mnemonic bric-a-brac, scraps, trivia, personal memories, and particles of information gathered from such places as the Encyclopedia Britannica and Dublin’s papers and lore.” Sifting through the repeated elements within these scraps, one gathers that “our hero seems to be an older Protestant male, of Scandinavian lineage, connected with the pubkeeping business somewhere in the neighborhood of Chapelizod, who has a wife, a daughter, and two sons… What emerges from an examination of the details is the sense of someone as singularly unsingular as Leopold Bloom.”

    Therefore, just as Joyce lifted a drab Dubliner in Bloom up to the lofty heights of a mythological Everyman in Ulysses, Bishop finds that the sleeping figure through whom all of Finnegans Wake emerges is a regular 50-something year old pubkeeper, a perfectly normal guy, or as the Wake so humorously describes him: “One of the two or three forefivest fellows a bloke could in holiday crowd encounter” (FW p. 596), “somebody mentioned by name in his telephone directory” (FW p. 118).

    Whereas Bloom was a man with a very creative, intelligent, and inquiring mind, always trying to come up with new advertising ideas and pondering the scientific explanations behind natural events, Bishop postulates that Joyce chose a middle-aged Protestant publican to be the source of the lively cosmic and colorful circus of history that is Finnegans Wake to emphasize the dormant energies lying within all of us always. “What he is unconscious of is precisely his own potential, and the possibility that life could be so much more.”

    This is where the ideas of Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico and their major influence on Joyce become so important. It is through his study of Vico that Joyce developed the perspective of the human body containing the entire history of the species within it. As Joyce’s friend Frank Budgen once wrote:
    We carry around within us in the unvisited yet populous recesses of our minds signatures of a past infinitely more remote. From the dawn of life to the moment in which we live all experience is written in the structure and function of our bodies---all is preserved in the depths of our memories. This is the unknown country into which we are led when we begin to read [Finnegans Wake].
    Since there is an unbroken link of life (as Joyce wrote in Ulysses “The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh”) from the earliest humans all the way down the line of history and ancestry to yourself as you are right now, your body contains all of that history within it. Our bodies weren’t instructed how to evolve in the womb from a one-celled organism into a human being, nor do we consciously move our bodies to digest our food or circulate our blood. This important information is all contained within the unconscious wisdom of the biological system. It’s all within our DNA. And this is what Finnegans Wake explores as it depicts the night, when the conscious mind dissolves into the body. 

    *   *   *

    Einstein raised an amused eyebrow. "Jeem," he said, "you look into words like a biologist looking down a microscope. I begin to believe you really meant all those paradoxes you were reciting last night, about the content of mind being nothing but words."
    "The history of consciousness is a history of words," Joyce said immediately.

    -  Robert Anton Wilson,  Masks of the Illuminati, p. 229
    A recent issue of New Scientist magazine (Sept 7-13, 2013) featured a cover story about how linguists now say “it is possible to excavate thousands of years of human history from the words we speak.” Unfortunately, there is no mention of 18th century Italian philosopher/historian Giambattista Vico who pioneered this idea in his book The New Science (a strange omission considering the synchronicity between their titles). In one of the more enlightening chapters of Joyce’s Book of the Dark, Bishop thoroughly describes Vico’s special brand of verbal archeology and takes us through its major role in Joyce’s conception of the style of Finnegans Wake and even draws interesting parallels between the Wake and The New Science.

    It is generally recognized by Wake critics that Vico’s work, The New Science, strongly influenced Joyce but, as Bishop strongly contends, they don’t even come close to recognizing the magnitude of that influence. Every study of the Wake simply repeats the same facts: that the whole text, split up into its 4 books, is structured around Vico’s idea of a cyclical history (“vicous cicles” FW p. 134) with 4 repeating stages and that references to these 4 stages reoccur throughout. While this is certainly true, it doesn't begin to touch upon the importance of The New Science which, Bishop argues, Joyce conceived “as an intellectual foundation that would underlie Finnegans Wake as the Odyssey had Ulysses.”


    Vico’s work is essentially an attempt to reconstruct how the rational, enlightened mind of modern man grew out of the beastly animal lifestyle of cavemen, who Joyce calls “our family furbear[s]” (FW p. 132) or forebears. This is an important endeavor as, while we’ve built layers and layers of reason atop our irrational aboriginal mind over the centuries, these irrational foundations still underlie and influence our current state. Predating Freud, Vico invents his own version of depth psychology to burrow into the ancient sources of the human mind to its original infantile state out of which language and civilization eventually grew. While Freud was focused on the influence of one’s parents in striving to cure irrational disturbances within the psyche, Vico’s perspective is that all of history weighs down upon us. As Bishop explains:
    The individual cannot purge himself of neurotic unhappiness by rethinking familial past alone, because his parents are largely innocent transmitters of a language and an ideology determined by a history that transcends them and himself both. Fully to understand the irrationalities understructuring his mind, he has to exorcise his parents’ parents, and his parents’ parents’ parents, and [quoting Vico] the ‘first men, stupid, insensate, and horrible beasts,’ who laid down the foundations of human civil life and consciousness.
    This partially explains why Joyce frequently rejected the influence of modern psychoanalysis, once declaring “my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud of Jung.” Bishop points to a strong Vico influence in all of Joyce’s work, even accounting for the complete re-writing of his first novel which began as Stephen Hero and turned into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a detectable Viconian perspective as the prose depicts Stephen’s mind growing from childish talk toward refined, intellectual language. Vico sees the aboriginal human mind as equivalent to the mind of a small child and it is out of childish babble that “articulate language began to develop by way of onomatopoeia, through which we still find children happily expressing themselves.” (A later chapter in Bishop’s book, “The Nursing Mirror”, explores the playful childishness of the Wake and begins by quoting Freud who wrote, “dreams simply make us into children once more in our thoughts and our feelings” and concludes with Bishop declaring “one must become a child again if one is to read the Wake.”)

    Examining the historical development of consciousness through language, Vico’s New Science posits that language begins with the body. This is the first key etymological principle espoused in his book, “Words are carried over from bodies and the properties of bodies to signify the institutions of the mind and spirit.” Hence we use the word “head” for the top or beginning of something, refer to the “eye” of a needle, “mouth” for any opening, “teeth” of a comb or rake, “hands” of a clock, etc. (Bishop even points to the root of the word “language” which derives from Latin lingua or tongue.) These origins are present in all of our language if we consider the deepest etymological roots of words, as Bishop displays with massive two-page charts showing the various networks of words that grew from one common original root.

    Vico’s next two etymological principles highlight how important his work truly was for Joyce in creating the Wake, which he called his “history of the world.” The second principle holds that “the internal social history of a people is implicitly preserved in and transmitted through its language, and that all words carry a subliminal record of an entire past: etymology, in short, is also a form of history, or verbal archaeology.” Studying the origins of words and common roots between certain words begins to shed light on the dynamics of the earliest social groupings, the original families and their developing hierarchies. This of course calls to mind the one family of Finnegans Wake which seems to lie behind all characters in human history, their tensions evident in phrases like “The family umbroglia” (FW p. 284) and “family histrionic” (FW p. 230). 

    The third of Vico’s etymological principles states that the etymology of language “can reveal not only the internal social formation of a people, but also the international forces that transformed that people through trade, war, migration, colonization” and “miscegenations on miscegenations” (FW p. 18). When nations collide, their cultures and languages collide as well. This is especially true of the English language since their empire expanded to the far reaches of the globe, pillaging other nations while splicing in pieces of their language. As the Wake has it, “our social something bowls along bumpily, experiencing a jolting series of prearranged disappointments, down the long lane of… generations, more generations, and still more generations.” (FW p. 107)

    Since it is language that structures our consciousness and creates our reality, we carry all of this history within us. This vast history is what Joyce draws forth through the unconscious mind of HCE. Bishop notes that the Wake “treats its central figure as the raddled blur of millions of persons, most of whom are completely absent from the consciousness that they unconsciously helped to shape. ‘As a singleminded supercrowd’ (FW p. 42), our hero is ‘more mob than man’ (FW p. 261).” The endless gamut of historical figures that pop up on every page of the Wake are there because, in a strange way, they are present in the unconscious (timeless and spaceless) sleeping mind of this humdrum middleaged pubkeeper as having contributed to it. Bishop comes to this incisive conclusion:
    HCE’s personality, then, is defined not only by family and contemporaries, but by people as remote in history as Christ and Constantine and Attila. These people are members of his personality: they arise in his ‘nightlife’ not simply in composite structures that obliquely capture his identity, but as parts of him, by virtue of having made parts of his consciousness possible. Thousands of people from the past and from all nations crowd into HCE’s dream to constitute the mind beneath his mind. In the individually dreaming body they establish a thickly entwined human community whose evolution in history has vitally formed the ground of his wakeful life. His ego or ‘I…be the massproduct of teamwork.’ (FW p. 546)




    PARTS
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    3
    4