Pluribus Wake & Dance First

The show Pluribus on Apple TV is a binge-worthy series with an interesting premise, and now it's been nominated for a whole bunch of Emmy awards. I don't watch a lot of shows but I thought Pluribus was amazing, engrossing, definitely worth your time, especially if you are interested in Finnegans Wake. 

I was alerted to the fact that Pluribus has some kind of connection to Finnegans Wake when Bob Campbell brought it up in a podcast roundtable discussion I participated in last winter. Then when I was watching the first episode I was struck when I recognized a familiar face appearing in the opening sequence: the Finnegans Wake scholar and performer Adam Harvey. Adam is the long-standing organizer of JoyceGroup Santa Fe in New Mexico, a weekly gathering which reads Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Adam is also an actor with a history of performing lengthy Wake passages, he maintains the JoyceGeek blog and he's created a helpful video series breaking down each of the ten thunderwords in Finnegans Wake. Adam is an old friend of mine, I think the last time I saw him was in Dublin back in 2022 during the Ulysses centenary symposium. It was pretty surreal when he showed up as a "hippie astronomer" in the opening scenes of Pluribus, definitely a moment that had me doing the Leo-DiCaprio-pointing-at-the-TV meme. That is such a cool role for him too, right at the start of that show, I was really excited for him.

Adam Harvey (left), "hippie astronomer" + noted expert in the Finnegans Wake community.

Pluribus (its title an allusion to Anna Livia Plurabelle perhaps?) is the brainchild of Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, who is also from New Mexico and films this show in New Mexico where it mostly takes place. Adam Harvey's appearance as "hippie astronomer" finds him at an observatory somewhere out in New Mexico reacting to a mysterious celestial object approaching the earth. The actor's IMDB page shows an alternate name for him is "Shem Deplume" (thanks to my friend P.D. Coogan for pointing this out).

So that was a fairly subtle indication or signal I picked up on that there is some kind of undercurrent related to Finnegans Wake in this show, but it doesn't take long for the Wake to be more prominently featured. Still in the first episode, before the engine of the story has yet to really kick into gear, we see the two main characters drinking at a bar, and one of them asks, "You ever read Finnegans Wake?"

There's much that can be read into the discussion of the Wake by these characters in a drinking establishment and everything that unfolds from there. I don't want to spoil the show for you, you'll have to go watch it. I will mention that the elements of an all-knowing, all-encompassing, omni-overmind of all living things in the universe, what amounts to a Here Comes Everybody type of situation plays a factor in the show and the main character is a writer. 

The Wake-ness of it all can be explored in depth, and if you're interested to dig into the interpretations of the presence of Finnegans Wake in the Pluribus TV series you can listen to a 90-minute podcast episode examining exactly this, courtesy of the gentlemen who produce the "WAKE: Cold Reading Finnegans Wake" podcast and also the Wake-focused blog "The Suspended Sentence" has a post discussing how the themes of the Wake factor into Pluribus. There's also a reddit thread in the r/jamesjoyce subreddit that features some discussion of this topic. 

I'll just say that when I had originally started this blog way back in 2012, I was inspired to do so partly because there just didn't seem to be enough discussion about Finnegans Wake on the internet at that time. The last few years, however, it seems we've witnessed the Wake enter the cultural zeitgeist in a big way (see: the media blast of Wake group news culminating in Stephen Colbert quoting me on his now-defunct Late Show) and I'm thrilled to see this latest manifestation in a truly incredible and deservedly acclaimed TV show. 

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Speaking of unexpected Joyce/Wake sightings on Apple TV...

While the Pluribus series is exclusively available on AppleTV, another surprising piece of Wake media also available to watch on AppleTV (as well as other platforms) is the 2023 movie Dance First, a biopic about Samuel Beckett. 

I'm not a big Samuel Beckett guy, but it's a pretty good movie. If you're really into Beckett, you'll probably love it. Why I must mention it here, though, is because THIS is the movie that we had been hearing rumors about for years in which James Joyce is portrayed by the actor Aidan Gillen from Game of Thrones. The rumored movie was supposedly gonna be something like "James and Lucia" about Lucia Joyce's life and Joyce's years laboring on the Wake, but it turns out the James and Lucia thing actually formed the first act of this film, Dance First.

There's an entertaining segment of this Beckett biopic all about Beckett trying to convince Joyce to take him on to work for him as an assistant, and then eventually James and Nora Joyce trying to set up Beckett to marry their daughter Lucia, played brilliantly by Gráinne Good. I thought all the Joyce scenes were fantastic, very well done, it all looked exactly as I would've envisioned it. Joyce sipping Fendant wine in a Paris apartment stacked with books, Beckett there as an assistant, Lucia all giddy and bubbly, developing a crush on the young Beckett, and Nora was an amusing character too. 

When Beckett finally gets to meet Joyce after stalking him for a while in the cafes of Paris, this song from Liszt plays. I dug the details, like Gillen's Irish accent having a Dublin dialect as contrasted with Nora's Galway dialect. Joyce always looking at a book thru a magnifying glass. If you watch closely, there's even a subtle reference to Joyce's fear of dogs, he hits a dog with his cane while walking the streets of Paris. The elder Joyce counsels the young Beckett, "The important thing is not what we write, but how we write. We must write dangerously, Beckett." Joyce in his apartment speaking profundities to Beckett, but always interrupted by Nora and Lucia before getting to the ultimate key. 

This was from the introduction of Joyce in the film. The Joyce of the Paris years, working on the Wake, maybe a little grumpy, lamenting his daughter's mental illness, he was indeed a different guy than the Joyce who wrote Ulysses.

And then this scene where Joyce talks about the minutiae and objects and details of human lives, getting into the types of mundane details collected in his writings, he says "These are the furniture of our lives." I don't think it's too much of a stretch when I suggest this seems to be a reference pulled from what I wrote about "furniture" in the Wake here. Credit to the creators of the film who did their research! 

And then there's this scene with Joyce wearing the eye-patch and copies of FW in the Shakespeare & Co bookshop with Sylvia Beach introducing him at an event. Beach holds what appears to be a solid approximation of the first edition of Finnegans Wake with the reddish-brown cover. There's an anomaly in the scene though, because the event is to commemorate a new French translation of the Anna Livia episode, but that had appeared in 1931, whereas Joyce didn't finish writing the Wake for another eight years after that. That one minor detail seemed to be the only noticeable example of poetic license employed in the Joyce segment of the film.

We will have to wait for the split-off series or film somebody will have to make that will focus exclusively on Joyce in the 1920s-30s because I think it makes for an interesting story. Aidan Gillen getting to play the role more extensively would be great. But watching Dance First gives a satisfying visual representation of the Paris years of Joyce, Lucia, Nora, and Beckett. 

(Hat tip to Tamar Stieber for recommending.)