Links: Finnegan Wakes at Burning Man and the Birth of the Wake in South France

One of the highlights of the International James Joyce Symposium that took place in Antwerp a few months ago was the "Finnegan Wakes" recording project organized by Gavan Kennedy. This ambitious documentary production involves intrepid readers sitting in front of a camera with a musical selection of their choice playing in their ears while they recite a page of Finnegans Wake aloud. Gavan's project sprung up at Burning Man last year and now for this year's (currently ongoing) Burning Man event they will gather burners from all backgrounds to bring the Wake to life.

Gavan wrote a piece for the Burning Man Journal blog describing the project:

Finnegans Wake is a resurrection story: a man presumed dead, laid out at his own funeral (or ‘wake’), is brought to wakefulness by the noise of his mourners as they fight over his reputation. Each time the work is read and wrangled over, the same thing happens: it arises off the page. The performance of every Burner gives birth to new participatory art that wakes Finnegan-again.

This year's event notably features a lecture and a series of workshops given by Finn Fordham, one of the world's foremost scholars on Finnegans Wake. Finn authored the excellent book Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unraveling Universals and also edited and provided the introduction for the Oxford edition of the Wake. An expert on the genesis and development of Joyce's masterwork, Finn delivered a fascinating presentation in Antwerp on the late stages of the book's production and Joyce's response to the harrowing world events of the late 1930s, while essentially debunking the notion the Joyce had planned to write a subsequent novel, something simple about the sea (instead, as Fordham compellingly suggested, Joyce wanted to write something on the Greek revolution).

The lecture Finn is set to share at Burning Man sounds extremely fascinating from his preview provided in Gavan's article:

What can participating in the great text-machine of Finnegans Wake tell us about the theme of artificial intelligence and the human-machine interface? A great deal, it turns out, because Joyce imagined his work as a machine. 

In my talk I will explore this idea of a text as a machine — a machine of memory and of meaning, which seems to have a life and an intelligence of its own. Intelligence can be understood as a consequence of an evolved complex arrangement of matter. We tend to locate intelligence within the bounds of the human body, especially the brain, or mind. But this very intelligence also imagines itself elsewhere: in a thunderclap, a burning bush, a crowd, a termite colony, a computer, a corpse, and also a text — all can seem to have their own intelligence. Joyce was fully aware of such magical thinking.

Hopefully this lecture will be recorded and available online soon.



In the meantime, here is a video clip of yours truly reading pg 178 from the Shem chapter for the "Finnegan Wakes" project that was filmed each night during the recent Antwerp Joyce Conference:





One other link I'd like to share here is an interesting new blog post from dependable Wakean Peter Chrisp over at his Swerve of Shore blog discussing the birthplace of Finnegans Wake in, of all places, a hotel on the Riviera in Nice, France. The Hotel Suisse recently commemorated the occasion with a plaque unveiled during an official gathering of luminaries including noted Joyce enthusiast and Irishman, Bono. Peter Chrisp explains, "The Hotel Suisse was one of those grand seaside resort hotels that Joyce spent so much of the 1920s and 1930s staying in. He was there from mid October to 12 November 1922."

Chrisp details the detective work done by scholars to discover the exact time during which Joyce initially began putting together the raw elements that would become his final novel. They confirmed that a particular notebook of Joyce's scribblings contains his corrections for the recently published Ulysses, etched in October 1922 while he stayed at Hotel Suisse in Nice. He apparently got bored of jotting down all the corrections, so he began compiling notes and lists from newspapers, material that eventually made its way into Finnegans Wake, as Chrisp outlines in detail.

Here's a look at a page from that notebook:

A list of "theatre superstitions" compiled by Joyce in a notebook. (From "Swerve of Shore" blog.)

Be sure to read the whole story as laid out by Peter Chrisp at his blog. If you are a fan of Joyce and you are not regularly reading Chrisp's "Swerve of Shore" blog you are missing out on a treasure trove of insights.