"So This is Dyoublong?" Living Inside the World of the Wake, Part 3

Continuing my American-spectator-in-Ireland, wandering psychogeographical exploration of Finnegans Wake and relevant sites, jumping around the map of Dublin and the Emerald Isle, recalling my time staying there a few years back.

In part two I mentioned that the earliest settlement of Dublin involved two adjacent towns, Dubh Linn, and Atha Cliath. Having recently done a close reading of the Nightlessons chapter (II.2) of the Wake where the bicircular diagram appears, I've become convinced the diagram is, on one level, a reference to the doublin' bi-circular dual-town Dublin origins, a map of ancient Dublin. See more about this here and here. 

"Vieus Von DVbLIn" (FW 293)

vieux = old Dublin

{Views of Dublin} 

(circle diagram as map of old Dublin )

"Vieus Von DVbLIn"  (FW 293.13)

early-Viking Dublin  

{if interpreting this line as a chronogram the roman numerals V+V+D+V+L+I add up to 566 which is half of the Wake's recurrent 1132, also indicating Dublin circa 566 AD, the Viking era}

Dublin as a town began with the Norse Vikings who invaded and set up a settlement at Dubh Linn. There were already small Gaelic settlements in the area around the Liffey estuary. Atha Cliath was the adjacent settlement where the wickerwork bridge crossed the river Liffey. The name Dubh Linn is old Irish. The Vikings rendered it in old Norse as Dyflin or Dyfflin, which pops up in Finnegans Wake a few times as "in Dyfflinarsky" (13.22) and "in Dyfflinsborg" (582.21). 

The river now known as the River Poddle used to form a pool or a confluence of waters where it met the Liffey River, this pool was known as Dubh Linn which means Black Pool. This body of water historically fed into a protective moat around Dublin Castle. In present day, there is a subterranean network of rivers formed by the confluence of these waters, which runs underneath Dublin Castle. 

                                                        "mind the poddle!" FW 208.30 

See the River Dodder in FW. The Dodder River, Poddle River and the Grand Canal are the remnants of this confluence. "Polycarp pool, the pool of Innalavia" FW 600.04

After this confluence pool was closed off by established embankments of artificial development, the area now known as Temple Bar would frequently breach the sea-walls and flood. This overflowing of the riverbanks seems to be what's taking place when the formatting of the text mutates in the middle of Nightlessons II.2, when the left & right marginal notes disappear and the middle column of text overtakes or floods the page (FW 287-292) and becomes "Floods Area" on FW 289.28.

Besides the modern-day remnants of this confluence of waters in underground networks of rivers, there was also a relatively recent (2018) discovery of a 13th century columnar tower uncovered in an underground excavation near the River Liffey, it's called Isolde's Tower. Read more about Isolde's Tower here.

Joyce in a 1924 letter to Harriet Weaver describing his latest work: "Some of the words at the beginning are hybrid Danish-English. Dublin is a city founded by Vikings." The Norse Vikings had established the city but then after the Anglo-Norman invasion of the 12th century led by Strongbow "from bank of call to echobank, by dint of strongbow" (FW 547.31), the Norse community was pushed out to the north side of the river. The Norse community went "from bank of call to echobank" from one riverbank to the other, settling in the northwest of city center an area that became known as the Town of Ostmen (meaning Eastmen) and later Ostmannstown, today called Oxmantown. Variations on this neighborhood Oxmantown appear throughout FW. "Olaf's on the rise and Ivor's on the lift and Sitric's place's between them" (FW 12.31-32). According to Fweet, these three streets named after Vikings are Olaf Road, Ivar Street, and Sitric Place, all near one another in the northbank side of Dublin. 

Joyce had spent the first decade of his life living in the south side of Dublin, in Bray, and then in Blackrock, but around when he was 11 years old Joyce's father began facing financial issues, and the family moved to the north side of the river in 1893. They lived in Drumcondra ("Draumcondra's Dreamcountry" FW 293) and later on North Richmond Street which is not only used a setting for the story "Araby" and is mentioned by Stephen in Ulysses, it also appears in FW in a list of Joyce's past addresses, "12 Norse Richmound" on FW 420. Many sites on the north side of the Liffey are noteworthy for Joyce research. The James Joyce Center is on North Great George St. where they preserve the door of the building that once stood at number 7 Eccles St, the home of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. The house at 7 Eccles St was where Joyce's friend once lived, it is also on the north side of town but that whole block has been turned into a hospital, actually it's the same hospital Bloom mentions in Ulysses: "The Mater Misericordiae. Eccles street. My house down there." Years later the Mater Misericordiae hospital expanded and swallowed up the Bloom house. (Read more about visiting Joyce's Dublin addresses in this Guardian piece.)

One afternoon when I was staying in Dublin, I explored the north side, and walked around the Stoneybatter neighborhood on the outskirts of the east entrance to Phoenix Park. Stoneybatter the name means Stony Road, as this area used to be a rocky thoroughfare leading from the countryside into the city. Stoneybatter today is a diverse neighborhood with a substantial Brazilian population. I was at a Brazilian cafe in Stoneybatter once when I ate delicious pão de queijo. Encountered numerous street art murals around Stoneybatter, a place that appears in FW as: 

"stoney badder" FW 242.23

"Staneybatter" FW 291.11

"stony battered" FW 553.29

In Ulysses, the "Cyclops" episode opens:

"I was just passing the time of day … at the corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye. I turned around to let him have the weight of my tongue when who should I see dodging along Stony Batter only Joe Hynes."

When I was in Stoneybatter, I walked along Arbour Hill Road, a street which also pops up in FW a few times. In FW there are multiple allusions to an old site in Arbour Hill Rd area known as Scaldbrother's Hole, it was the hiding place of a notorious thief, Scaldbrother, who would plunder victims and then escape into a subterranean network of caves he knew how to navigate well enough to evade capture. Scald, from the Norse word for poet. See more here, and Glasheen's Third Census of FW mentions:

Scaldbrother—Mm Staples [Hugh Staples, scholar] says that a curious subterranean building in Oxmantown (part of Dublin) is named "Scaldbrother's Hole" after a notorious thief who inhabited it. Scald is a Scandinavian poet. 223.19.

[More here.]

...walking further west along Arbour Hill Road the road makes a ninety-degree turn and curves to the south towards the Liffey ("backtowards motherwaters" FW 84.30). If you continue on that road southward you will come to a park which today contains the Anna Livia statue, formerly located on the Liffey itself but moved to this small park perched over a pond. Locals call it "the floozy in the jacuzzi." When I went to see the Anna Livia statue there were three Irish gents snugly seated together on a bench, enjoying a smoke. Just a park in Dublin with a statue of a river goddess from Joyce's night-novel and a trio of Dublin guys being dudes. 

                (Floozie in the jacuzzi and the three Irishmen.)

Then I was walking westward along Parkgate Street towards Phoenix Park…. Joyce makes specific mention, in Ulysses and FW, of the Phoenix Park murderers having their last drink at a pub on Parkgate Street. Also, located on Parkgate Street is the Nancy Hands pub, named for the first female pub owner in Dublin and in Ireland (link). The Nancy Hands pub is mentioned several times in Finnegans Wake. I enjoyed a pint there one afternoon, and I appreciated the atmosphere of the old place, it felt cozy and historic, and the pub was filled with families, grandparents, grandkids, generations gathering together there for lunch and pints. Just next door to the Nancy Hands pub I noticed a sign for a realtor named Finnegan Menton. A nice little coincidence to see the signs of the Nancy Hands beer garden featured in Finnegans Wake adjacent to a local Irish Finnegan's sign, but this is Finnegans World. 

(Read more about this pub at Peter Chrisp's blog.)

Nancy Hands pub and Finnegan sign.

The pub chapter of FW (II.3) ends with a sailing off of a ship, "So sailed the stout ship Nansy Hans. From Liff away." (FW 382.27) Walking out of the Nancy Hands pub you would turn right and walk westward to go over to the entrance to Phoenix Park. There's a hotel right near the entrance, Phoenix Park Hotel, which isn't specifically mentioned in the Wake but felt significant because the book centers around an inn or hotel, which is also a pub. "Finn's Hotel Fiord" (330.24) More about that shortly.

A passage on FW 564 describes the entrance to Phoenix Park:

Finn his park has been much the admiration of all the stranger ones, grekish and romanos, who arrive to here. The straight road down the centre (see relief map) bisexes the park which is said to be the largest of his kind in the world. On the right prominence confronts you the handsome vinesregent's lodge while, turning to the other supreme piece of cheeks, exactly opposite, you are confounded by the equally handsome chief sacristary's residence. Around is a little amiably tufted and man is cheered when he bewonders through the boskage how the nature in all frisko is enlivened by gentlemen's seats. FW 564.08-17

Sign at entrance to Phoenix Park.

A short walk on the "straight road down the centre" entrance of the park leads to the Wellington Monument, the "Zenith Part" (FW 494.13) of the Wake and Phoenix Park. The Wellington Monument is a central recurrent motif in FW, starting from the "Willingdone Museyroom" section where the Wellington Monument has an underground museum beneath it, full of artifacts from Wellington's defeat of Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo. To search for an underground Waterloo museum at the Wellington Monument, though, would be like asking if there's a basement in the Alamo. It's just a Wakean dream conflation from Joyce's mind of the obelisk in Phoenix Park standing as a phallic imperial monument to the Irish-born Duke of Wellington, combined with the diorama hilltop museum outside Brussels where Joyce as a tourist had visited the site of the Battle of Waterloo. 

Wellington Monument (Phoenix Park)

The Willingdone monument in real life was interesting to behold, the four sides each featured  their own weathered copper frieze depicting battles, and the sides of the shaft of the obelisk itself featured, in faintly visible faded golden lettering, the names of battles from Wellington's career. There you see the "Pyrenees" and "Monkaseer" etc. One of the friezes displays the scene from the Battle of Waterloo.  

Waterloo frieze on Wellington Monument.

On the Wellington monument in FW, the Joyce scholar Andrew Gibson writes:

The monument was not just a tribute to the 'Iron Duke'. It was also an assertion of British imperial triumph within the Irish capital. Here [in FW], however, Wellington's name functions as a vortex attracting miscellaneous allusions to warfare with which he had no connection [...]. Part of the comic point is to deface the references to Wellington's actual victories that adorn the monument itself.
(p. 162, James Joyce Critical Lives) 

That Joyce defaces the Wellington Monument throughout the many allusions in FW is a helpful point. And there are so many references to it, starting with the Willingdone Museyroom scene but then appearing over and over in so many mutating forms. Toward the end of the book, the monument is invoked in a mix of Sanskrit language (perhaps a postcolonial response to British imperialism in India?) with "vellumtomes muniment, Arans Duhkha" (FW 595.22). Can't neglect to also mention the sexual shame aspect, the erotic undercurrent of many of the references to the phallic "Zenith Part" (FW 494.13) in Phoenix Park. In the Wake "the sphinxish pairc" FW 324.07 becomes an Edenic riddle, where some shameful event of a sexual nature is rumored to have occurred. My Dublin guide did mention to me that even nowadays the local Irish teenagers meet in the park for furtive encounters since the Catholic families tend to be pretty tight-knit and uptight households. Gotta find a place to fulfill those desires. Phoenix Park is huge, easy to get lost in. There are many deer in Phoenix Park, it's a vast green space spanning many miles. Phoenix Park is more than double the size of Central Park in Manhattan. It's like a dense dark forest at night, you could see why a primal Wakean scene is a mysterious dream encounter in the park at night. 

A couple of Finnegans Wake-connected pubs flank the outer edges of the park, the most significant one being the Mullingar House in the village of Chapelizod. Joyce's father John Stanislaus Joyce had frequented the Mullingar House when he once worked as a clerk nearby. Lucia Joyce wrote to Frank Budgen in 1933 confirming the central location in Finnegans Wake when she mentioned that, "The principal bistro he [James Joyce] says is the Mullingar Inn" of which the main character is the landlord, HCE the innkeeper. The principal bistro, great phrase. There was a bowling green in the backyard of the Mullingar Inn where Joyce's father John Joyce once had a moment of glory, according to the scholar John Gordon (blog): "His prowess as a bowler, on show on the bowling green in the inn's back yard, was noted in a June 20, 1876 item in The Irish Times." 

I visited the pub now called the Mullingar House in Chapelizod once and enjoyed a pint. It's a 20-minute ride on the bus from Dublin city center. Mullingar House is decidedly not a tourist spot, it's a pub frequented by locals. It wasn't crowded when I was there, and even though there are multiple commemorations of the place's significance to Joyce and Finnegans Wake, there was no indication any person cared much about the connection. You can see, though, a placard above the front entrance touts it as "Home of All Characters and Elements in James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake." I can't help but wonder if there's some reference there to the recurring initials HCE from the Wake in that phrase "Home of all Characters and Elements."

Joyce plaque in Mullingar House pub.

As I mentioned, the pub hugs the edge of Phoenix Park. Looking at the map I noticed there is a prehistoric dolmen, a megalithic burial site, located in Phoenix Park spatially in the vicinity of the Mullingar House pub (less than 1,000 feet or 300 meters away). A line from FW mentions "Finmark's Howe" (FW 553) where howe is a tumulus or prehistoric burial mound. Many megaliths and tombs appear in the Wake. Whatever significance the Mullingar House may have initially had for Joyce in his life is perhaps less important at this point. For him to have centered the wide Wakean universe on that place, the literary weight it holds now from its placement at the heart of such a phantasmagorical hypertextual construction of thermonuclear poetry as the Wake, that alone gives it immense weight and shadow significance, more than eight decades after the book's publication. Joyce's final novel is sometimes said (by its most ardent acolytes) to contain everything in the universe, therefore that sign above the entrance really says it all, "Home of All Characters and Elements in James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake." That place is a fulcrum of the universe. (More info on Mullingar pub here and here.)

Across the park to the north, on the opposite side of Phoenix Park in the Castleknock neighborhood there is an old turnstile gateway in the stone wall of the park leading directly to a beer garden at an old tavern called the Hole in the Wall. This pub appears in Finnegans Wake, too. It's another pub for the locals, not a touristy spot. It sits outside the city center in the local streets. This place has also been known as the Black Horse Tavern in the past and it too was even called Nancy Hands pub at one point. I examined an old photo of this place in a prior post on the significance of the portal in the Wake's symbology. The wall and the gate next to the tavern are all very much the same today as they were more than a century ago. (See more about this pub at my post "Beyond the Portal".)

"A glass of Danu U'Dunnell's foamous olde Dobbelin ayle." (FW 7)

Wake pubs:

-Nancy Hands (Stoneybatter)

-Hole in the Wall (Castleknock)

-Mullingar Inn (Chapelizod) [center of the whole thingamagog]

The Mullingar pub might be the principal bistro but the Wake also conflates all these pubs. When the lines on the opening page mention "their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park" that seems to conflate Castleknock and Chapelizod, both places with pubs along the park edges, and both have an "upturnpikepointandplace"---whereas the Chapelizod pub is next to a turnpike road, the Castleknock pub has a turnstile gate. The pubs stand in for each other and for all pubs. Joyce does the same with hotels in FW, where Finn's Hotel could be the principal inn, but it's conflated with other Dublin hotels, "the unguest hostel in Saint Scholarland." (FW 135.19) Just as Dublin is conflated with and becomes a double for all cities in the world. 

*   *   *

As I've mentioned before, Dublin in the Wake is not just the setting for a story, it's much more than that. I'm not sure there's any other piece of literature which celebrates a city in so much depth and detail as this (including Ulysses), not just in a descriptive way, the names of Dublin locales form the fabric of the text. Once you learn the names of places you'll notice they are embedded on every page like gravel on a street.

A particularly rich example is the section known as Haveth Childers Everywhere (FW 532-554) where the main character HCE, the master builder, speaking in the first-person, describes the designing and constructing of Dublin. What stands out "from lacksleap up to liffsloup" (FW 547) is not just the lack of sleep in "lacksleap" it's also referring to going from Leixlip (west of Dublin) over to the Liffey's Loopline Bridge (train bridge, which is still there). When HCE mentions how he "ranked rothgardes round wrathmindsers" (FW 541) that invokes the districts of Rathgar and Rathmine in the south part of Dublin.

Another line here is worth venturing into for a moment: 

"I richmounded the rainelag in my bathtub of roundwood" (FW 542)

That's Richmond Hill in Rathmines, and Ranelagh another district in the south part of Dublin city, and then Roundwood which is a village in County Wicklow just outside of Dublin where there is a reservoir ("bathtub of roundwood"). I went out to Roundwood once for a short stay, it's in a beautiful green valley in the region of Glendalough, with scenes of mountains and valleys that were carved in the glacial period. The green hills are wavy and serene. 

Glendalough
"In yonder valley, too, stays mountain sprite." FW 564.26

Roundwood is the name of the village, Glendalough is the valley, and the reservoir itself is called the Vartry. All of these places are named repeatedly in Finnegans Wake. Vartry water and the Roundwood reservoir are also invoked in Ulysses: 

on his expressed desire for some beverage to drink Mr Bloom in view of the hour it was and there being no pump of Vartry water available for their ablutions let alone drinking purposes

            [from Eumaeus chapter]

            ... 

Did it flow? Yes. From Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow… 

[from Ithaca chapter]

Driving through the area I also noted the name of the Sugarloaf Mountains which also appear in Ulysses and in FW: "would ondulate her shookerloft hat" (FW 243.28)

*   *   *

Let's circle back into County Dublin proper… 

On a trip back in June 2022, I was staying at the Royal Marine Hotel in the neighborhood of Dun Laoghaire, right on the coast overlooking Dublin Bay with Howth Head looming on the horizon. This is a historic hotel, and yes it is mentioned in the Wake as "ye olde marine hotel" (FW 30.16).

One stop away on the DART train headed south from Dun Laoghaire will take you to Sandycove, where the Joyce Tower and museum is located. I visited the Joyce Tower, otherwise known as Martello Tower number 11, in late June of 2022. I was actually there visiting the tower at the same time as the Joyce blogger Peter Chrisp and his wife and we all hung out for an afternoon.

Sandycove, Dublin

I was amazed with the Sandycove Martello Tower. A resonant space, it felt like a giant stone seashell echoing the nearby roaring waves of the scenic rocky seacoast, a poignant Joycean shrine. Ideal omphalos for Ulysses. What stood out to me being inside the tower space where Joyce, and his friends Gogarty and Trench would've stayed for a few historic nights in September of 1904, was the realization that Joyce stayed there because he was otherwise basically homeless, but then he had fled in fear after Gogarty fired a shot from a revolver near his head when he was sleeping. Being in that resonant echoey interior of the stone tower space it was noticeable how that revolver blast must've scared the living shit out of the young Joyce. I could feel that there.

The stone sea shell fort by the sea also contains a library of Joyce-related books and a collection of artifacts. Included in that batch of materials was a letter Joyce wrote to Gogarty in the summer of 1904 and signed "Stephen Dedalus." I remember one of the things that struck me among the artifacts was a trunk that had belonged to Joyce. It seemed like that thing must've been important for the itinerant author, lugging around notes, scraps, vital books, papers, notebooks in trunkfuls, in a trusty archive, like this was his version of the internet. This was his version of Dropbox or a data storage cloud. A portable storehouse of his important stuff, which he must've lugged around in his many travels and different homes. Joyce once wrote a letter to a friend asking him to retrieve a briefcase filled with notes and ship it to him: "In this briefcase I have lodged the written symbols of the languid sparks which flashed at times across my soul." (see p. 277 of Selected Letters, ed. Ellmann)

You can see the trunk at the Joyce Tower's excellent website here: https://joycetower.ie/collection/artefacts/jtaa_0085-james-joyces-cabin-trunk-c 

                                                                Credit to JoyceTower.ie

Joyce's wallet is there too. I like that custom crafted symbol of the golden triangle with the initials JJ in the middle. Pretty incredible to see.

credit to JoyceTower.ie

Also in the Joyce tower, among many interesting documents and artifacts encased in glass there was a piece of paper with Joyce's handwritten drafts for lines in FW, an original manuscript. Check it out:

All of these lines ended up in the final text of Finnegans Wake. You can see Joyce was drafting out lines, words, different versions of a passage on a piece of stationery from Shakespeare and Co. The paper is undated (just says "May") but this would've been when he was drafting the Shaun chapters so it was likely May of 1924 in Paris. Looking at Joyce's letters I think I confirmed: June 1924 in a letter to Harriet Weaver, Joyce quotes these lines in a letter sent from Victoria Palace Hotel where Joyce was living at the time (V.P.H. the cryptic letters are mentioned multiple times in FW, it must've been a place where Joyce was especially productive in his working on the Wake).

Here's what Joyce wrote on the sheet and where this material ended up in the published book: 

"with half a glance of Irish friskey from under
the shag of his parallel brows" (appears on FW 470.32-33)

"my soamheis brother" (FW 452.22)
[you can practically see Joyce chewing on and crafting this phrase---so-am-he-is brother while making a pun on Siamese twins, he mentions this in 27 June 1924 letter to HSW]

"amstophere" (FW 452.01)

"walk while you have the night for morn, light breakfast bringer, morroweth whereon every past shall full fost sleep" (FW 473.23-4) [these are the closing lines of book III.2]

*   *   *

I have moved to Dublin to have it out with you,

majestic Shade, You whom I read so well

so many years ago,

did I read your lesson right? did I see through

your phases to the real? your heaven, your hell

did I enquire properly into?

- John Berryman, Dream Songs #312

These lines quoted from the poet John Berryman from his Dream Songs are often interpreted by critics to be about Yeats. On the other hand, this is likely regarding Joyce, as the esteemed Joyce scholar Katherine Ebury has written an insightful article detailing the many Joyce references in the Dream Songs and Berryman's deep interest in Joyce, including when the poet embarked on his own voyage to Dublin where he paid a visit to the Joyce Tower in Sandycove, bringing along a photographer who captured the scene (see the article for pics and more info). 

The spectator in Dublin encounters not one Martello Tower but several along the coast, like stone sentinels. They are all numbered. See Martello towers in greater Dublin area. An old, mossy, medieval sentinel tower stands on the island off of Howth called Ireland's Eye. I was really struck by the appearance of that tower on Ireland's Eye, especially as glimpsed from the Howth Castle area.

That one on Ireland's Eye is designated Martello tower number 3 North. Built in 1803 or 1804 to ward off Napoleonic invasion. Beyond the famous Joyce tower at Sandycove in the south, further down the coast is the Martello Ten tower in Dalkey. Owned by a friend and supporter of this blog, Martello Ten is an incredible historical site, I once had the privilege of getting to spend a few days there. The Joyce Sandycove tower is visible from atop Martello Ten. The Sandycove tower is the omphalos naval point in Ulysses, and I've now come to think of the Martello Ten in Dalkey as Wake Tower, dedicated to Joyce's even grander ode to Dublin and Ireland. 

From the Martello Ten in Dalkey you can see out across the water to Dalkey Island which also has a Martello tower looking back, along with the ruins of an old monastery, a glimpse across centuries. The Dalkey Island tower is Martello Tower number 9. I don't often see Dalkey Island mentioned as must-visit spot on a tour of Dublin, but it's definitely one of my favorite places I encountered. The little island has wild goats, and you're provided with a fantastic view of the Vico Road across the water.

Martello Tower on Dalkey Island.

*   *   *

"Treetown Castle under Lynne. Rivapool? Hod a brieck on it! But its piers eerie, its span spooky, its toll but a till, its parapets all peripateting." (FW 266.04)

    

"Eblinn" (FW 264.15)

 

"A phantom city"   (FW 264.19)

 

"Libnud" (FW 600.11)

*   *   *

"Each day, and each hour of the day, he thought of Ireland."
- Philippe Soupault describing his friend Joyce 

In part 2, I had been trying to figure out why Joyce stayed away from Ireland for so long, never returning again after the summer of 1912, and yet constantly thinking about, writing about, talking about Ireland, seemingly. 

And now I realize more and more that he could not go back, he would absolutely have been in danger if he went back. See my post about Evil Days and the friends of Joyce's who were killed during the violence of the Irish War for Independence. After 1922 and the establishment of the Irish Free State, Joyce still wouldn't go back to Ireland because he felt under threat for the scandalousness of his famous book Ulysses and how it depicted Ireland, maybe the nationalists might've considered him not loyal enough to the cause. On top of that, it was in 1922 when Nora brought the children to Ireland and they got caught in a cross-fire shootout. 

A letter from Joyce to T.S. Eliot (the publisher of Finnegans Wake in the UK) recounts that violent incident of 1922 and serves as a good coda to this exploration of Joyce and his connection to Dublin. 

JJ letter to TS Eliot Jan 1, 1932

I have been through a bad time telephoning and wiring to Dublin about my father. To my great grief he died on Tuesday. He had an intense love for me and it adds to my grief and remorse that I did not go to Dublin to see him for so many years. I kept him constantly under the illusion that I would come and was always in correspondence with him but an instinct which I believed in held me back from going, much as I longed to. Dubliners was banned there in 1912 on the advice of a person who was assuring me at the time of his great friendship. When my wife and children went there in 1922, against my wish, they had to flee for their lives, lying flat on the floor of a railway carriage while rival parties shot at each other across their heads [...] I did not feel myself safe and my wife and son opposed my going.

More than 90 years after that letter was written, I'm grateful for the safe and welcoming city that Dublin is today and for the time I got to spend there exploring the city's rich culture and history and the endless elements and connections with Joyce's art and life. 

*

To be continued, beyond Dyoublong... 

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert roasted FWATX reading group on TV, and quoted me

Stephen Colbert, offering a prayer to the Good Book (FW).

Last week, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS did a segment roasting the Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin, Texas (yes, our group, the one this very blog is about) and he even quoted my words from the recent NPR article about the group. That really happened. Colbert quoted me, on national television, talking about Finnegans Wake.

Watch the clip below (starting at 3:55):

There are layers to the joke here because Stephen Colbert, who is a proud descendant of Irish immigrants, is no lightweight Joycean, in fact, he has been performing passages from Ulysses at Bloomsday events for decades. 

While he's making fun of Joyce's craziest book, he knows of what he speaks, and so he is either in on the joke and making fun of himself too, or, it could be this is Colbert's way of staking his claim that Ulysses is the superior of Joyce's major novels. Maybe a bit of both. 

Either way it's amazing that Colbert was roasting our Finnegans Wake reading group on TV. Just to even see the book cover of Finnegans Wake appear on television is extremely cool! They just awakened millions of new Finnegans, gave birth to new HCEs and ALPs. Here Comes Everybody. 

An added dimension to the joke is that the other subjects Colbert talks about in the segment, like vagina-scented candles, astrology, poop jokes, frauds, pyramids, Indiana Jones, hoarding, etc all of that is essentially akin to what's encountered in reading Finnegans Wake. 

What's also a funny connection for me is I once encountered Stephen Colbert in person. True story: I was on a tour of the Tower of London on Thanksgiving Day back in 2008 and I happened to be on the same tour with Stephen Colbert and his family. I recognized him and he noticed that but I played it cool. All these years later, and he was quoting me on his tv show.

I've been a fan of Colbert's comedy since way back when he was a regular on the show Strangers with Candy with Amy Sedaris. I enjoyed his time on the Daily Show, and of course his long-running satirical show The Colbert Report was iconic. I find myself cracking up any time I think of the titles of some of his ridiculous books, like I Am America (And So Can You!) (2007) and the prescient America Again: Re-becoming The Greatness We Never Weren't (2012).

A bit more about his Joycean bonafides, from a Kirkus Reviews article: 

Colbert is a longtime admirer of Joyce. When he published his 2012 children’s book I Am a Pole (And So Can You!), he arranged to have the manuscript displayed next to the Ulysses manuscript at the Rosenbach [museum in Philadelphia].

And in March, he recalled how Joyce’s masterpiece landed him in trouble during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics at the Ireland House. “There was a stage up there with a traditional band playing and they had a football game on,” Colbert said. “I went upstage and I said, ‘Who wants to celebrate Irish culture!’ And I took out a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. There was a riot, I had to be hustled out by security.”

Back in 2022, on St. Patrick's Day, Colbert tweeted this:

Maybe one of these St. Patty's Days he'll get so drunk that he'll make it through all of Finnegans Wake and then I'll add him to The Pantheon of Finnegans Woke.

Interview with Texas Standard (on KUT Austin NPR station) + other recent podcasts

Last week I was interviewed by the Texas Standard radio program on KUT, Austin's NPR station, talking about the Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin which has been gathering to discuss Joyce's greatest book for more than 12 years now. Audio clips from the interview with KUT's reporter Sean Saldaña appeared here, with a brief article and some pics from the group's history. The premise of the article, of course, is that we've been meeting for a very long time, reading one or two pages per meeting, and we're not nearly finished with the book yet. 

The piece has been shared on social media, garnering some witty responses. My favorite ones are the comments observing that the readers in the picture look like a deadlocked jury trying to reach a decision on a tough case. That pic is from back in the golden era of our reading group when we used to have big gatherings at the Irish Consulate in Austin (eternal thanks to Adrian Farrell, Claire McCarthy, and Paul Breen for all their support over the years). We would also have meetings at the (now defunct) bookstore Malvern Books and they'd put up a big sign in the window advertising our meetings, which is also shown in the article. The KUT interview was a fortunate full-circle cipher completion moment for me because Malvern Books back in those days used to advertise our reading group meetings on KUT, and new people joined the group because of those ads. Nowadays, our meetings are all on Zoom, and our attendees come from far beyond central Texas, although there are still plenty of original members who still participate. 

As I alluded to in the interview, I originally started the group in Austin because I had attended a similar group in Venice, California (the Marshall McLuhan/Finnegans Wake book club run by Gerry Fialka) when I lived in San Diego for a few years, a story that was originally told in The Guardian piece about the Venice Wake group published in late 2023. It's always pretty amusing seeing the response of the general public to these news pieces because to most people it seems super bizarre that a book club would be so focused on a close reading of one book for so long, and yet in the galaxy of Joyce reading groups it's pretty standard practice. I recently shared links to several active Finnegans Wake reading groups around the world, many of whom have been meeting to read the same book for years. 

*   *   *

Here seems like a good place to share some other podcasts I appeared on in the past six months, again discussing Joyce and Finnegans Wake. 

• Back in February, to celebrate Joyce's birthday, Gerry Fialka of the Venice Wake reading group organized a panel discussion to talk about Finnegans Wake, the panel featuring some of the most accomplished and prolific Joyce scholars in the world including Sam Slote (Trinity College Dublin), Tim Conley (Brock University), Finn Fordham (Royal Holloway Univ. of London), Roy Benjamin (Borough of Manhattan Community College), as well as myself. It was a huge honor for me to be on a panel with scholars I admire and whose work I have such great respect for, and we got into a pretty lively discussion covering many topics over more than 2 hours. Go check that out HERE.

• Back in December, I took part in a panel discussion with a big group of several Joyce enthusiasts from around the world as part of the Maybe Night event. This panel was organized by the great artist and Wakean Bob Campbell, and among the many interesting panelists were Toby Malone (from the excellent podcast WAKE), Eric Wagner (who recently published Straight Outta Dublin, a book on Robert Anton Wilson and James Joyce), a few folks from the Ukrainian Wake reading group (including Linda Lotiel whose "Mind Map" illustrations of the Wake are phenomenal), the writer and esoteric thinker Oz Fritz, the creator of FWEET Raphael Slepon, and others, for the winter solstice 2024 event, go check out that video HERE.
  

Stay tuned!

Finnegans Wake Reading Groups Global Database

Dublin, ie https://www.Sweny.ie/reading-groups

Dublin, ie https://jamesjoyce.ie/reading-group/

Dublin, ie https://ModernistStudiesIreland.org/fw-reading-group/

Glasgow, Scot. https://www.facebook.com/groups/992732634091543/

London, uk https://ies.sas.ac.uk/news-events/seminars/finnegans-wake-research-seminar

Kyiv, Ukraine @wake-in-progress.bsky.social

Zurich, ch https://TuesdaysWake.blogspot.com/

Melbourne, au https://www.bloomsdayinmelbourne.org.au/finnegans-wake

Boston, Mass. ThirstyScholars.tumblr.com

NYC, usa FinnegansWake.org

Austin, Texas https://finWakeaTx.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-finnegans-wake-reading-group-of.html

Santa Fe, NM JoyceGeek.com/GroupRead/

Santa Cruz, usa https://finniganswakesantacruz.blogspot.com/ 

Venice Beach LaughTears.com/McLuhanWake.html 

~

Information gathered by Peter Doyle Coogan.

The Solstice Maybe Wake Night

Maybe the longest night of the year is the night on which the dreamworld of Finnegans Wake unfolds? A remark by Joseph Campbell & Henry Morton Robinson in their Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944) suggests they believe it may be so. From there sprung the premise for celebrating Finnegans Wake on the longest night of the year, HERE, meticulously arranged by Bobby Campbell. This webpage features comics, videos, links to various Wake-related subject matters (including links to recent blog posts by Oz Fritz on crossovers between the likes of Aleister Crowley and Francois Rabelais with Joyce), and other audio-visual Joycean treasures. There's a recording of a panel I participated in with several others, discussing all things Joyce and Finnegans Wake, plus Robert Anton Wilson, and also touching on Terence McKenna's Timewave Zero theory. 

Maybe Night, Solstice 2023

In the panel session, I mentioned Harry Levin's book James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, which was originally published by New Directions in 1941. Despite being one of the earliest critical works discussing Finnegans Wake, it still stands as a great entry point, on par with the Skeleton Key. (Later in the discussion I mentioned a quote that I forgot the attribution for, and it turns out that was from Levin's book: "The peculiarity of Joyce’s later writing is that any page presupposes a reading knowledge of the rest of the book. On the other hand, to master a page is to understand the book. The trick is to pick out a passage where a break-through can be effected.") 

Time Magazine reviewed Levin's book in 1942, noting that Joyce himself felt it was a rare reading which caught onto what he was doing: "The review of Finnegans Wake by Harvard's Harry Levin was one of the few that gave James Joyce the sense that his book had a reader."

It's worth quoting more from that Time article of 1942, which perceptively captured the Wake's relevance within the context of those tumultuous times:

In Finnegans Wake naturalism and the artist himself all but disappear; the book is a shimmering death-dance of chameleon-like symbols; an attempt at nothing less than a complete serio-comic history of human consciousness—in Levin's neat phrase, a "doomsday book," culminating in a Phoenician paradox of dissolution and resurrection. 
...
Finnegans Wake derives much from the philosopher Giambattista Vico's cyclic theory of history, which is highly apposite to the present. According to Vico, and Joyce, the first of a civilization's four phases begins, and the last collapses, in fear of thunder, and a rush for underground shelter; and in that sheltering cave, religion and family life begin again. Today the ambiguous thunder talks above every great city of the earth, and the shelters are crowded, and a civilization, if it is ending, is no less surely germinal. In one great warning work of literature after another, meanwhile, a similar mental cavern is retreated to and explored (Joyce's was a Dedalean Labyrinth).

Find the Others: The Lightning-Struck

"Remember the lightning-struck? Those who experienced something profound and rare, so they sought out others who had felt what they felt? Other than the coded messages of their newsletter, there’s nothing conspiratorial to their organization. What it really is is a community. And a community, after all, is just a conspiracy everyone’s aware of, in on, participants in. Sure, the bigger communities become, the more complex their problems and the more corrupt their leaders. But in these niche groups that are only nominally conspiracies, because no one knows who they are, you can find the teeny-tiny instance of grace that can make our meaningless trajectories tolerable, even beautiful: the intimacy of sharing ourselves with another person. Although the lightning-struck have modest aims and probably zero influence, their club has given them a method by which they can communicate to their cabal, their little conspiracy of no importance, and share with others what the lightning gave them, because the only reason Those Who Know, know, is because somebody, somewhere, let them in on the secret…" 

(from a recent Esquire article on the 50th anniversary of Gravity's Rainbow)

New York Times: "Peter Quadrino, another member, said that reading Joyce created an urge to discuss his work with others."  

The Guardian: "Peter Quadrino, 38, joined Fialka’s group around 2008 or 2009. He would drive up three hours from San Diego, where he lived, to attend the meeting. “If you’re really interested in Finnegans Wake, it’s kind of hard to find people who will talk about it with you.”"

Washington Post: "“It’s a giant friend group, and it’s like you’re reading a poem — basically a multilingual, multi-referential poem — with so many different people,” said Quadrino."

Smithsonian Magazine: "For many readers, Finnegans Wake isn’t a text to master or a puzzle to solve. Instead, it’s something of a psychoactive agent. The question of what it means is less interesting than how it affects the reader."

"I have always been grateful for what I call the Joyce community, however you define it. It was initially a scattered bunch of readers who shared a common interest. I wouldn't be where I am without all those contacts. In my isolation I needed kindred spirits. Harmless maniacs like the Joyceans tend to flock together, and flock we did, after extended correspondence gave way to more and more gatherings. What I refer to here is not a common or overlapping interest but the many friendships that grew out of it; they can last even if Joyce is given up, as has happened in some cases. I think I am not the only one who feels that in case of a real emergency, material or emotional, there would be Joyceans friends to turn to, and this is reciprocal. Maybe some of us share an underlying despondency as well as some built-in irony. I am not talking about our views on the works or the author, but the people."
- Fritz Senn, Joycean Murmoirs (2007), pg. 50

The Guardian/Observer Celebrates the Galaxy of Wake Reading Groups

Print edition of the UK Observer/The Guardian from Sunday Nov 12, 2023. Courtesy of Peter Chrisp.

The Sunday edition of The Guardian newspaper, The Observer, prominently featured an article about the Venice Finnegans Wake Reading Group having recently completed a full cycle of reading the text after 28 years. The media ecologist, Venice Wake group founder, and self-described "antiquarian ne'er-do-well" Gerry Fialka receives some great coverage here. And alongside descriptions of other Finnegans Wake reading groups led by renowned Joycean scholars Sam Slote in Dublin and Fritz Senn in Zurich, The Guardian piece interviewed me to discuss the background of the Austin Finnegans Wake Reading Group I've been hosting going on 12 years now, originally inspired by my visits to the Venice group. 

    I am honored to be a part of this celebration of Wake reading groups around the world. The author, Lois Beckett, did a great job covering the oddity of one-page-a-meeting reading groups dedicated to Joyce's bizarre night-book. To look at a global newspaper and see the front page with all the wars and turmoil and then have this article appear next to all of it feels like a celebration of the eternal forces of creativity and imagination. Poetry, the realm of the mind, the joy of art, language and humanity, remains undefeated.

    The Guardian piece appears on the heels of the same story being reported in newspapers and journals all across the world. Over the past couple weeks, the news of Gerry's Venice Wake group passing a 28-year reading cycle has appeared in Chinese, Afrikaans, French, Polish, Czech, various news other weird news venues, as well as the Orange County Register and the Irish Times. 

"wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. 

In four tubbloids"

(FW 219.16-17) 

    Gerry's group continues to meet on the first Tuesday of each month. Our Austin collective gathers two Thursdays a month. The Wake Watchers of NYC meet twice a month. Dozens of other collectives around the world continue to excavate the text of Joyce's puzzle book. Novelist philosopher Umberto Eco once described Finnegans Wake as "the book of an epoch of transition, a time in which science and the evolution of social relations propose a vision of the world that no longer obeys the schemas of other, more secure epochs yet lacks any formula for clarifying its own situation.  The Wake attempts to paradoxically define the new world by assembling a chaotic and dizzy encyclopedia from the old one and filling it with explanations that once seemed mutually exclusive. Through his clash and the ‘Big Bang’ of these oppositions, something new is born." (Read more testimonials here.)

    If you enjoyed this, I can also recommend you check out the trove of recorded interviews Gerry Fialka has conducted with accomplished Joyce scholars like Sam Slote of Trinity College Dublin, Roy Benjamin from Borough of Manhattan Community College in NYC, Decio Slomp from Brazil, Benjamin Boysen from Denmark, John Gordon from USA, or the late John Bishop who wrote perhaps the greatest analysis of Finnegans Wake ever. Another good one I heard recently is Gerry's interview with media theorist and author Douglas Rushkoff. Many more such podcasts from Gerry to check out on Youtube. 

    If you want to check out more of my writings on Finnegans Wake, I'd recommend starting with this piece or this book review series or this close reading of a passage, or this video essay I made. Lots more in the works, watch this space.

(Many thanks to Lois Beckett, Peter Coogan, Gerry Fialka and everyone who has ever been to the Austin Finnegans Wake Reading Group.)

Notes on Ulysses, Pomes Penyeach, and Textual Materiality in Finnegans Wake

It's evident that by the time he got to Finnegans Wake Joyce's unit of attention had narrowed to the single letter. He had fully absorbed the great lesson of his seven years with Ulysses, that what he was engaged in day after day was not "telling stories," no, but formulating minute instructions for printers, whose habit of attention goes letter-by-letter likewise. - Hugh Kenner, "Shem the Textman" from p. 38 of Finnegans Wake: A Casebook

*   *   *

Ever since the big Joyce birthday this past February 2nd of 2022, which was also the centennial of Ulysses (1922) being published, I've been thinking about the richness of Joyce's own descriptions of Ulysses provided in the meta-textual-commentaries within Finnegans Wake (1939). These meta-commentaries show how much Joyce emphasized the material qualities of these texts. In a previous post I touched on scholarly work I was reading showing Joyce's intricate intentions for the final textual product of his books. With the first edition of Ulysses, to give one example, there were specific words referring to specific numbers set to appear on corresponding page numbers. These subtle quirks were lost when pagination was changed in subsequent editions. With Finnegans Wake, mercifully the pagination tends to be fairly consistent across different editions. But material quirks reign across its pages, the whole thing is made of puzzling epiphanic typos, "prepestered crusswords in postpositions" (FW 178.03-4), the reader is continually compelled to "Stop and Think" (FW 88.01) and the book has an entire chapter that serves as a metatextual primer on the appearance of the text itself (Book I, chapter 5). Within that chapter are also fascinating insights about Ulysses from Joyce's perspective, including on its material qualities. 

Taking a look at the Letter chapter (I.5), starting on page 122 we get this commentary about Ulysses:

the toomuchness, the fartoomanyness...the cut and dry aks and wise form of the semifinal; and, eighteenthly or twentyfourthly, but at least, thank Maurice, lastly when all is zed and done, the penelopean patience of its last paraphe, a colophon of no fewer than seven hundred and thirtytwo strokes tailed by a leaping lasso (FW 122.36-123.06)

How better to describe the blizzard of verbal information confronting a reader of one of Joyce's big novels than "the toomuchness, the fartoomanyness"? Overflowing and excessive, too much information packed into too many digressions, unsolvable riddles, and obscure jokes. Within that outlandish approach is a dynamic mixing of different styles, as with the penultimate or "semifinal" chapter of Ulysses, "Ithaca" which overflows with precise mathematical details, or Xs and Ys, in a cut-and-dry unadorned Q&A fashion, described here as "the cut and dry aks and wise form of the semifinal" (ask and whys or x and y's). "Ithaca" is the 17th or "semifinal" chapter of Ulysses but since he had already completed the 18th and final episode, this was actually the last chapter that Joyce was trying to complete before the final typesetting of the text. (In addition to that, Joyce mentioned to his patron Miss Weaver in a letter from Oct. 1921: "Ithaca is in reality the end as Penelope has no beginning, middle, or end.")

The process of typesetting Ulysses was hectic, not least because the text contains so many idiosyncrasies and the printer Maurice Darantiere ("thank Maurice") was a Frenchman who didn't speak English, but also Joyce kept jotting in more lines to be added into the text.

I recently got to view some of the typescript pages of "Ithaca" and they are filled with these "whiplooplashes" (FW 119), these long curvy lines indicating new blocks of text to insert. This could be in the reference here to "a leaping lasso" the rope-like lines lassoing in new bits to add into the final text. I think it's fascinating that Joyce, within Finnegans Wake, here comments not only on the materiality of his previous book Ulysses (including describing the first edition page count of "seven hundred and thirtytwo") but also the process of its creation, thanking the printer Maurice for his "penelopean patience" in dealing with the frantic final stages of composition.

From Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript (1975).

The "last paraphe" "when all is zed and done" could refer to a number of things that appear at the end of Ulysses: "paraphe" means initials or signature, a final flourish, which could be the "Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921" at the end of the text; or it could refer to the last long paragraph of the Penelope chapter; the word "paraphe" also is immediately followed by "a colophon" which means a printer's emblem at the end of a book, so the expression "thank Maurice" might actually be an allusion to the final page at the end of the first edition of Ulysses, the printer's emblem.

from the Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: 1922 Text with Essays and Notes (2022).

One other more remote possibility for the final "paraphe" at the end of Ulysses could be that mysterious black dot at the very end of the Ithaca episode: since this was the last chapter Joyce wrote, that concluding black dot might be Joyce's final flourish in writing that work (before moving on to his next book where all the characters have become typographical icons, "the Doodles family" or "Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies" FW 299.F05, FW 20.13).  At an exhibit on "Women and the Making of Joyce's Ulysses" at the Harry Ransom Center here in Austin, I got to witness up close one of the typescript pages for the end of Ithaca where Joyce added in the final question "Where?" and the famous black dot. The typescript page had handwritten instructions in pencil (too faint to see below) in French, specifically addressing Maurice Darantiere about the final dot—"ne pas oublier le point final" ("don't forget the final point") and "imprimer SVP" ("please print"). Having known about this infamous black dot for years, it was incredible to witness the handwritten notes up close. 

Typescript for Ithaca with Joyce's handwritten notes.
(Harry Ransom Center, Univ. of Texas at Austin.)

Continuing with the meta-commentary from the Letter chapter (I.5):

the ulykkhean or tetrachiric or quadrumane or ducks and drakes or debts and dishes perplex... in the case of the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner... a Punic admiralty report... had been cleverly capsized and saucily republished as a dodecanesian baedeker of the every-tale-a-treat-in-itself variety... (FW 123)

It seems the word "ulykkhean" is the closest thing to Ulysses that appears in the Wake, besides "his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles" (on FW 179.27). Perhaps it's fitting that the Danish word ulykke which means misfortune or accident, is echoed here. Not only is the story of the Odyssey about a series of misfortunes at sea, in Ulysses mistakes become portals of discovery, and there are several noteworthy "accidents" both large and small throughout the book. My sense is that Joyce is actually conflating Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in this passage, that word "ulykkhean" meaning accidents or mistakes could refer to the Wake where essentially every word is a mistake, a typo.

The Wake is also a book of dots and dashes or a "debts and dishes perplex" and the cryptic words "tetrachiric" and "quadrumane" here both mean "having four hands" which could refer to the four book structure of the Wake, the four stages of the Viconian cycle, the annals of the four masters (medieval history of Ireland), or the four provinces of Ireland (compare pg 325.32 "our quadrupede island"). We are clearly focused on Ulysses when reading of "the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner… a Punic admiralty report" which gives strong emphasis to the Homeric parallels with Joyce's book. The word "periplic" refers either to circumnavigation or to a sailor's documentation of the ports, coasts, and routes on a voyage. The Punic wars, referred to here, took place in the Mediterranean Sea where the wanderings of Odysseus would have occurred. Every part of this passage is interesting, but for Joyce to describe Ulysses as "the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner" is especially funny, combining "littleknown" with a popular best-seller or best-teller since Homer was an oral poet. At the time Joyce was writing this passage (late 1920s), Ulysses was stuck in that in-between stage where it was still pretty difficult for a reader to acquire a copy, yet it was also popular, or rather it was notorious. 

This is where I think he conflates Ulysses with the Wake: this popular book about the mariner "had been cleverly capsized and saucily republished as a dodecanesian baedeker of the every-tale-a-treat-in-itself variety" so it sounds like he flipped that book upside down in some clever way, as if the Wake is a capsized version of Ulysses. It also could be saying the original Odyssey was capsized and turned into the "dodecanesian" twelve Bloom-focused episodes at the heart of Ulysses (more about that shortly), but I think that word "dodecanesian" also echoes dodecahedron the "polydron of scripture" that is the Wake, a book with a geometry lesson in its center (II.2). 

Going further into the Wake, looking at Book II.1 has some interesting stuff about Ulysses as well. In that chapter, the Joyce-based character Shem the Penman is now named Glugg. Glugg gets rejected by the girls in a kid's game and runs off into exile where he then composes his art. The text has become weirder and more opaque at this stage of the book, but the annotations suggest references to the events and context surrounding Joyce's composition of Ulysses. Looking on page 228, the densely constructed lines include several puns on World War I trench-digger dialect (Joyce was writing Ulysses in the middle of the war). Then TS Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) which took inspiration from the early serialized episodes of Ulysses (Joyce responded in kind by borrowing inspiration from The Waste Land in the Wake), seems to be present in "He do big squeal like holy Trichepatte" (FW 228.06) because the original title for Eliot's Waste Land was actually "He Do the Police in Different Voices" (taken from a line in Dickens). And most relevantly, the page mentions "ban's for's book" and "banishment care of Pencylmania, Bretish Armerica" because Ulysses was banned in America and England. Returning to the materiality of the book, we then get this encoded allusion to the final words at the end of Ulysses:

quit to hail a hurry laracor and catch the Paname-Turricum and regain that absendee tarryeasty, his citta immediata, by an alley and detour with farecard (FW 228.22)

"Paname-Turricum" with "tarryeasty" becomes a reversal of "Trieste-Zurich-Paris" which appears after the final “Yes” from Molly to conclude Ulysses. These are the cities Joyce lived in during the composition of Ulysses. "Paname" is a nickname for Paris (apparently from Panama hats, which are mentioned several times throughout Ulysses), "Turricum" is the old name for the settlement that became Zurich (the name is actually Turicum with one r, the double-r here brings in turret a tower like the Martello Tower where Ulysses opens), and "tarryeasty" would be the city of Trieste, but also John Gordon suggests Tara for Ireland of the east. I think it could even be a subtle reference to the Irish name of the city of Dublin, Dubh Linn, meaning "black pool" (hence "tarry") on the east coast of Ireland. I think "regain that absendee tarryeasty" also involves regaining his absentee city starting with the letter D, Dublin which Joyce was exiled from but mentally immersed in while he lived in Trieste, "his citta immediata." McHugh suggests there's also subtle reference to Swift here with "quick, hurry" followed by Laracor which is a city in county Meath, Ireland where Swift was a vicar. Also involved here, one of many Irish authors alluded to in this section is the 19th century Irish author Charles Lever, who wrote the novel The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer hence "hurry laracor." Lever was from Dublin, but he actually died in Trieste where he was living on assignment as British consul. This passage in the Wake centralizes train travel, perhaps recalling Joyce's odyssey across Europe in his years of exile, as he tried to avoid the destruction and turmoil upon the outbreak of the Great War, "detour with farecard." The train ticket could also be a metaphor for Joyce's constantly returning to Dublin inside his head while living abroad.

On the following page is where the names of the middle episodes of Ulysses are presented in the form of distorted Wakese:

Ukalepe. Loathers' leave. Had Days. Nemo in Patria. The Luncher Out. Skilly and Carubdish. A Wondering Wreck. From the Mermaids' Tavern. Bullyfamous. Naughtsycalves. Mother of Misery. Walpurgas Nackt. (FW 229)

These are the 12 middle chapters of Ulysses, the Bloom-focused chapters. The first 3 and the last 3 chapters are excluded. This list suggests a couple interesting points (leaving aside the puns and wordplay on the chapter titles): for one thing, by drawing attention to the episode names this way Joyce seems to be expressing the importance of these titles despite them never actually appearing anywhere within the text of Ulysses itself; and secondly, the absence of the first three and last three chapters from this list highlights the emphasis on the Homeric correspondences embodied in the chapters focused on Leopold Bloom, strengthening the case for Ulysses "the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner" being very much about navigation and seafaring. My friend Decio Slomp, an engineer from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, recently published a book documenting all of the nautical references embedded in each episode of Ulysses to argue exactly this: it's all about navigation.

*   *   *

In 1927 Joyce was once again broke, hurting for cash, begging Sylvia Beach for help despite the substantial royalties she'd already been sending him for Ulysses. An exasperated Beach bristled at his pleas, listing out the monthly income he was receiving off Ulysses and suggesting he be a better friend "to me who is your friend if ever you had one" and admit that he was spending considerable sums of money (29 April 1927, see Gordon Bowker's Joyce biography, p. 363). Wishing not to upset the proverbial applecart, Joyce sent her manuscripts for Dubliners and Stephen Hero, the friends made peace and eventually agreed to have Shakespeare and Co publish Joyce poems in a new collection, Pomes Penyeach.

Pomes Penyeach was published by Shakespeare and Co in July 1927. The title plays on the French word pomme and the covers are the colour of James Joyce’s favourite apple, the Calville. They are susceptible to fading and no two copies seem to be the same shade. pic.twitter.com/o25xTghhsT

— Glenn Johnston (@johnstonglenn) July 7, 2022

Another edition of Pomes Penyeach was printed in 1932 by Obelisk Press. Joyce scholar Katarzyna Bazarnik writes of this edition:

Pomes Penyeach was published once more during Joyce’s lifetime by the Obelisk Press of Paris in 1932. This was the most beautifully designed of all his books, printed on specially imported Japanese paper (called Japan nacre or iridescent Japanese vellum). It consisted of nine loose folio sheets, folded and laid one within the other, placed in a portfolio bound in pale green silk. The poems were printed in black on recto of each leaf, in facsimile of Joyce’s handwriting and opened with illuminated, multi-coloured initials designed by Lucia. Additionally, the pages were interlaid with sheets of transparent tissue on which the title and text of each poem was printed in green in the lower left-hand corner. (Bazarnik, "Joyce, Liberature, and Writing of the Book" from here.) 

Bazarnik shows a copy of this rare 1932 edition of Pomes Penyeach which belonged to Harriet Shaw Weaver that got damaged in a fire in her garage:

Pomes Penyeach, Obelisk Press, H.S. Weaver’s copy
burnt at the edges by a fire in her garage. (KB here.)

Seeing the imprint of Joyce's handwritten title and signature on the cover of this rare, delicate, and nearly destroyed book of poems (or pomes) further fed my fascination with Joyce's own interest in the material presentation of his writing. These ideas actually converge and resonate when Joyce weaves in a mention of Pomes Penyeach within a very rich passage in the middle of Finnegans Wake, p. 302. The passage is worth looking at in detail, since it appears to describe Joyce "signing away in happinext complete" signing autographs from beyond the grave, and now coming back to life ("Can you write us a last line?") sending messages, his letters to the reader sounding like modern-day text-speak:

me elementator joyclid … the aboleshqvick, signing away in happinext complete, (Exquisite Game of inspiration! I always adored your hand. So could I too and without the scrope of a pen. … Can you write us a last line? From Smith-Jones-Orbison?) ...
And i Romain, hup u bn gd grl. Unds alws my thts.  …
Two dies of one rafflement. Eche bennyache. Outstamp and distribute him at the expanse of his society. To be continued. Anon.
(FW 302.12-30)

Joyce as "me elementator joyclid" intertwines Euclid whose Elements pop up throughout this geometry/mathematics lessons chapter (II.2). The way "joyclid" is described as "me elementator" also includes the word mentator, as in one who mentates, drawing our attention to the person whose mental activity gave written life to the consciousness buried in the pages of Finnegans Wake, a glimpse of "me" "joyclid" breaking the fourth wall. It does seems like Joyce is pulling back the curtain here to reveal himself, "the aboleshqvick, signing away in happinext complete"---the abolished bolshevik, still scribbling his signature from the next dimension beyond the grave "in happinext complete."

The paragraph's emphasis on signatures ("signing away","I always adored your hand") calls to mind a line from earlier in the book (FW115.06-08), "why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own?" The implication seems to be that Joyce knew by the time he was writing this that he was so famous that anything he ever wrote, scribbled, or signed would become valuable as part of his legacy. 

"Exquisite Game of inspiration!" hints at the creative game known as the Exquisite Corpse, made famous by the surrealists. Since Joyce has already brought himself into the equation here as "joyclid" and alluded to his continued existence after death "signing away in happinext complete" the reference to Exquisite Corpse seems a clever way of suggesting his corpse is constantly revivified by readers playing the game of reading this book. Collaboration among creators who are unaware of each other's contributions is the core of how the Exquisite Corpse game works, thus Joyce seems to be directly addressing the collective game of interpretation involved in reading Finnegans Wake. After all, the text at one point expressly considers whether "His producers are they not his consumers?" (497.01) Readers are active participants or collaborators with Joyce in giving meaning to this chaotic text. As Joyce scholar Alan S. Loxterman described in his essay "Every Man His Own God: From Ulysses to Finnegans Wake":

Joyce was working toward his ultimate achievement, an anomaly in the history of literature which expands the way we read. Today, and into our foreseeable future, Finnegans Wake survives not as the completed comprehensible entity which previous fiction (including Joyce's own) had conditioned us to expect. Rather it remains what Joyce first called it, a 'Work in Progress,' an artistic arrangement of words which requires continuous collaboration from its readers to make those words meaningful as a text. (from Joyce's Finnegans Wake: A Casebook p. 115)

The impression I get from the paragraph on FW302 is that it's like Joyce letting the reader know he's still actively writing from beyond the grave, exchanging letters with the reader. Hence, "Exquisite Game of inspiration! I always adored your hand" could be like a reader actively complimenting Joyce on his writing here in the middle of a book. Then they request one last line, "Can you write us a last line? From Smith-Jones-Orbison?" McHugh notes Smith-Jones-Orbison as an allusion to the mathematician and puzzlemaker Henry Dudeney who used the names Smith, Jones, Robinson in his puzzles published in The Strand Magazine in the early 1900s. (Joyce would have been familiar with this magazine, it was published by the same company as Tit-Bits which Bloom reads in Ulysses.) Bringing in a popular puzzlemaker/mathematician makes sense here in the geometry chapter and it's fitting that the usage implies Joyce as the creator of mathematical puzzles. My reading of why Robinson becomes "Orbison" is the "orb" represents Joyce's boast that he had squared the circle, or circled the square. Since Dudeney appears elsewhere in the same chapter in another triptych ("Dideney, Dadeney, Dudeney" see FW 284), I wonder whether Joyce knew of Dudeney having developed a hinge method for turning a triangle into a square, by splicing it into pieces, rotating them (circling) until they form into a perfect square.

"And i Romain, hup u bn gd grl. Unds alws my thts." This is Joyce, writing sometime in the late 1920s, predicting the clipped condensed language of millennial text messages. It's also yet another example of Joyce in the Wake calling attention to individual letters. The lowercase "i" certainly stands out, especially alongside the capital R in "Romain" and together suggests something like "iDomain" or maybe an echo of "iSpace" which appears earlier in the text (124.12), a link that could actually make sense since the German word Raum means "space." This amusing little line comes across in the context of the passage like Joyce answering the request to "write us a last line" with a declaration that he still remains. If "i Romain" really does echo the earlier "iSpace" (FW 124.12) with Raum (space) involved, then it seems to imply Joyce declaring that while he's absent from time, he remains in space through all of his printed works and the "signatures" of his surviving manuscripts and materials, "paperspace." "Unds alws my thts" has implications beyond "and always in my thoughts" which are enhanced by the minimized phrasing---"Unds" in the context hints at girl's undies and in millennial slang "thts" would be thots or promiscuous women, as though he's promising the girl that she remains among his favorite ladies. (This line has a footnote at the bottom of the page which carries similar implications: "Lifp year fends you all and moe, fouvenirs foft as fummer fnow, fweet willings and forget-uf-knots." [FW 302.F04] Not only does Joyce invent fweet here, he's once again calling attention to the visual presentation of the text on the page by using the so-called long S or lowercase F for the letter S in this sentence. The "fouvenirs foft as fummer fnow" are souvenirs left for his readers, and invoking snowfall here recalls the ending of "The Dead" where the snowfall is also described with f-words, "faintly falling"---compare also FW 17.27 "flick as flowflakes." And then "forget-uf-knots" would be the flowers called forget-me-nots, but also seems to be Joyce once again declaring he will not be forgotten, due to the "knots" of riddles his readers are forever unraveling.)

"Two dies of one rafflement." So much information saturates these short sentences. The sound of two dice in "Two dies" along with the presence of the French word rafle for "game of dice" in "rafflement" draws an allusion to Stéphane Mallarmé's groundbreaking poem Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (One Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance). The essay I've referred to throughout this post, Katarzyna Bazarnik's study of Joyce's focus on the textual object discusses the remarkable influence Mallarmé had on Joyce. In his study of Mallarmé and the dice poem, R. Howard Bloch's book One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern (2016) points out that "Joyce kept a copy of 'One Toss of the Dice' close at hand while writing Finnegans Wake." (Bloch, p. 26)

Condensed in here with Mallarmé is also one of Joyce's earliest publications, his essay "The Day of the Rabblement" published in 1901 as a student. The essay was rejected by the university paper, so Joyce and his friend Francis Skeffington (who was later murdered in the chaos following the 1916 Easter Rising) collaborated to publish a pamphlet of two essays together and distributed them throughout Dublin, hence this passage in the Wake concluding with "Outstamp and distribute him."

Joyce's student essay "The Day of the Rabblement" (1901).

The notebook dates at the JJ Digital Archive suggest Joyce was writing these lines around the same time Shakespeare & Co was publishing his poetry collection Pomes Penyeach (1927), thus the echo of the title in"Eche bennyache" resonates. Each, penny each. And then, "Outstamp and distribute him at the expanse of his society." The word "Outstamp" strikes me as another way to say express, but it also alludes to printing, Joyce's printed works for over a century now distributing across the world "at the expanse of his society" literally expanding the Joyce society and doing so at our expense as we shell out each penny, "Eche bennyache." "Eche" also contains the initials HCE for Here Comes Everybody. And McHugh notes the early Middle English word eche means "eternal, everlasting." The writer lives on through his printed works being distributed expansively throughout society, "To be continued. Anon."

Evident in the phrase "Eche bennyache" is also ache, belly ache. Joyce suffered from severe stomach issues while writing the Wake and shortly after the book's publication he died during surgery for an ulcer. Going back again to the section examined earlier (pgs 229-231 of book II.1) some of the same themes and references stand out, where the focus is on the autobiographical Shem character, the riddles he writes, and how "he's knots in his entrails!" (FW 231.25). 

"And oil paint use a pumme if yell trace me there title to where was a hovel not a havel (the first rattle of his juniverse) ..." (FW 230.36-231.02)

Joyce declares, I'll paint you's a poem ("pumme") if you'll trace me the riddle to the title to where was a novel not a novel (the first riddle of his universe). The first rattle of his junior verse, "Et Tu Healy" which he parodies immediately after these lines. This was Joyce's first poem written when he was 9 years old. His father proudly had it printed so he could distribute copies, even sending a copy to the Vatican. No surviving copies of "Et Tu Healy" have been identified as of this writing, though if one were to be discovered it could fetch up to 2 million dollars at an auction. A poem written by a 9-year-old. Only a few lines from the poem are known, and Joyce parodies them on this page (231.05-08). Echoing the earlier quoted assertions of "i Romain" and "To be continued. Anon." this same page also begins a sentence with, "Though he shall live for millions of years a life of billions of years" (FW 231.18-19).