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Nobody is talking about James Joyce in a forum apparently dedicated to books. This tells me that all of you are either philistines, or ill-informed. In the hope that it's not simply the former (though I fear it might be) I've decided to open a thread on the writer perhaps the best suited for discussion in the internet forum format. Yes, believe it or not no writer born in the early 20th century could ever be accused of just, like, getting the Internet (60 full years before its invention, no less). In a lot of ways Joyce's four major works (Dubliners , Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake) anticipate Man's fall from relatively consistent reality to all out libido bone-zone in a way not really paralleled by any writer then, or since. Simply put, he is unique and worth all the time he demands the reader put into him. Which of course leads me to... BUT HE'S HARD q_q Yes, he is. But he's also easier than he ever has been. Perhaps no generation before ours is as well-equipped to read Joyce as our current hyper-technological one. This revelation was most apparent to John Barger, Joyce devotee and inventor of the word 'blog' (go figure) who suspected him of being the secret grand-father of Artificial Intelligence. You have wikipedia, hundreds of internet projects dedicated solely to unraveling the infinite mysteries of his work, and over a hundred years of some of the best critical work in the field at your disposal. He is massively influential (even psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan lays an unabashed wreath at his doorstep) and continues to be read and worked upon by later writers to results, in my opinion, that have yet to hold a candle to his momentous achievement. He was what the word genius was always meant to denote, and your ego wouldn't be worse off for being humbled by his. God knows he has done it, and to good effect, for everybody else who has ever dared approach his alter. The Major Works There are four, already mentioned, and they are all connected to one another. Indeed, Joyce performs some literary magic and has Dubliners, his first book, a collection of short stories, retconned into being the creation of the fictional alter-ego from his second book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. What's more Joyce effortlessly moulds the works around the material of his own life to the point where even Richard Ellman's biography of him begins to seem no less part of his Canon than the works he'd end up producing, but that's beside the point. For now let's just hit The Four: Dubliners Chances are you've already read one of the stories in this short-story collection if you've ever taken an English lit course at a university, and it probably bored you. I know it did for me. I find this one isn't the best to start with since in a lot of ways it's a work of realism totally familiar if you've ever read, say, anything by Emile Zola. It is fundamentally the work of a stylist showcasing his mastery of naturalism. Of course this isn't to say that it isn't worth it. I just find that returning to Dubliners after a sally with either Ulysses or Finnegans Wake to be more fulfilling than without. Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories whose progression is meant to emulate a coming-of-age played out in gestalt between its disparate stories; starting from childhood and ending in death. It's the first of Joyce's works to establish Dublin as the city he'd fashion out of himself and into a universal city. The Dublin theme will never abate, so get comfortable! The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's autobiographical alter-ego, is born. Or, being rather technical, it's also where he grows up. This book is fun to pick-up and open up to different places since the style is meant to imitate Dedalus's psyche as it develops from the place of a deeply Freudian nursery drama into a Freudian-still-though-in-a-more-neurotic-way quest of the writer to come of age and establish the principles of his art. This book, in my opinion, is the best place to start. One anecdote worth remembering heading into this book is that once one of Joyce's critics complained about Stephen Dedalus being an unlikable twat and Joyce responded by sending him a copy of the book with the words "as a Young Man" underlined. I have also taken that liberty. ULYSSES The dirty one. Tonnes of occult hijinks occur against the background of an ""ordinary"" June 16th Thursday as Stephen Dedalus (!) and Leopold Bloom (the titular Ulysses) wander around Dublin, forming esoteric patterns of all sorts, and doing everything there is to a life exactly once (at least). People will tell you "stream of consciousness" or whatever is somehow all this book is about, but they clearly haven't bothered to read it. Every chapter is patterned after a different Art, and their styles morph accordingly to accommodate it. One chapter tells the story of a birth of a child at the same time the English language forms itself out of the primordial mud, sliding seamlessly into the medieval, and finally into cockney; another yet is a schizophrenic stage drama that occurs at a brothel, and another another yet is told through newpaper headlines and articles. This book would already be the foremost masterpiece of English prose modernism if it weren't for... Finnegans Wake loving. Insane. Stephen Dedalus famously announces in Ulysses that "history is the nightmare I am trying to awake from," and Finnegans Wake is directly that nightmare. It's also the only book famed literary critic Harold Bloom claimed had the power to recentre the Western Canon after Shakespeare. It's exegesis is seemingly infinite, and as far as anybody can discern it eschews characters for esoteric sigila and everything happens simultaneously in it at all levels. It took Joyce 17 years, and often 14hr days, to write. It'd be crazy to think it should take the reader any less to understand fully! Which brings me to something of a conclusion...have fun! These books are meant to be playfully probed, pondered, and discussed; not conquered. The fun of the Wake for example comes from playing in its dense thicket and that feeling of BY GOD I THINK I GET IT that comes from the safe hands of a master who as his swan song composed a great plaything and universal religion in one fell swoop. Perhaps one needs the taste of the former works to really appreciate this one. I for sure as hell didn't come to the Wake until I was convinced Joyce was a solitary genius worth the exegesis of Benedictine Orders. As a note I'll probably be adding some misc. to the end of this op detailing his lesser works and some worthwhile secondary sources. But to get things rolling I want to ask: what's the deal with that loving potato Bloom carries around? almost there fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Sep 4, 2020 |
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Feb 21, 2020 19:08
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Feb 21, 2020 19:14
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James Joyce is v cool and it's weird how a writer so experimental can inspire such devotion. Not complaining obviously, I'm one of the fan club members.
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Feb 21, 2020 19:28
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almost there posted:to the end of this op detailing his lesser works and some worthwhile secondary sources. Joyce's Voices by Hugh Kenner comes to mind. I used it (among others, of course, I'll dig through my bibliography later tonight) while writing my MA thesis on how, in Portrait almost there posted:style is meant to imitate Dedalus's psyche as it develops note: I did so primarily for the sake of translation criticism, but obviously it did involve stylistic analysis of key fragments representative (in my student mind, at least) of stephen's bildung. it's been a while and i by no means claim to be an expert, but i'm definitely down to discuss style in Portrait. as far as Joyce goes, it's a relatively accessible subject anyhow
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Feb 21, 2020 19:37
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J_RBG posted:James Joyce is v cool and it's weird how a writer so experimental can inspire such devotion. Not complaining obviously, I'm one of the fan club members. you're right, it's bizarre. I think it has something to do with his ability to constantly innovate on and reintegrate each work into his foundational project. Some critics have said that Joyce only ever wrote 4 autobiographies, which seems true, but I think that sort of judgement doesn't do justice to his obvious undergirding project. I haven't seen any critic make serious reference to what is certainly something of a project to replace or supplement the world religions with a universally graftable cult of the artist. Like for Joyce it's Dublin and in the way he did it, but what about you, and where you're from? Certainly Joyce can be found under any rock. It's a fascinating proposition. Lex Neville posted:Joyce's Voices by Hugh Kenner comes to mind. I used it (among others, of course, I'll dig through my bibliography later tonight) while writing my MA thesis on how, in Portrait Joyce's Voices! Another thing about Joyce is even his very name seems infinitely punnable. What were your references? I always wonder to what extent Joyce directly engaged with Freud's work, because he must have, though he did also have a superhuman resistance (apparently) to the ideas of psychoanalysis.
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Feb 21, 2020 19:52
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I dug up a few more, will continue editing this post: "Towards a Critical Text of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by Hans Walter Gabler [pdf on jstor] "Translating Baby Tuckoo: Portraits of the Artist as a Very Young Man" by Patrick O'Neill [pdf downloadable here, click on 'Baixar este arquivo PDF'] Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf by Deborah Parsons
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Feb 21, 2020 19:56
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thanks! there's nothing Hod appreciates more than a diligent curate, other than perhaps a builder
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Feb 21, 2020 20:00
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almost there posted:Joyce's Voices! Another thing about Joyce is even his very name seems infinitely punnable. what with my MA thesis being primarily focused on translation criticism, there was little room to completely dive into psychoanalysis but even on a superficial stylistic level the going back and forth between primal urges and a more rational focalisation is immediately apparent, definitely. I'm sure there's more to be found online on how much, and how much explicitly so, Joyce drew on Freud e: still talking about Portrait, obviously
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Feb 21, 2020 20:05
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almost there posted:I haven't seen any critic make serious reference to what is certainly something of a project to replace or supplement the world religions with a universally graftable cult of the artist. Joyce is reading all about Mohammed and Confucius while writing FW and attempting to see how sacred texts build authority while also being malleable enough to be used for whatever purpose. (Incidentally, when Mohammed received his visions, and before he formulated them into words, they were so debilitating that he would have to lie down in a darkened room for days on end, apparently (hope I'm not mangling the story.) That is literally how Joyce coped with the pain of his eye surgeries and iritis. So there's something about that.) That playing with sacred authority is something he gets from Dante too, because the Divine Comedy places him in the centre of a cosmic vision, but is also about how you can't square the circle between the divine on the one hand and the representation of reality through language on the other. If you read Paradiso one of the weird things is how many Joycean puns and neologisms Dante makes in it. And I mean I think FW and Ulysses to an extent are trying to have some degree of predictive power and continue to be relevant in the future with their emphasis on coincidence and chance connections (especially in language). But it's also kind of 'just a joke' imo. That said it's spooky when you read FW and it seems to describe what you're going through that day. That never gets old, and no other book is capable of doing it almost there posted:I always wonder to what extent Joyce directly engaged with Freud's work, because he must have, though he did also have a superhuman resistance (apparently) to the ideas of psychoanalysis. John Bishop who wrote 'Joyce's Book of the Dark' (one of the few books to attempt to sum up FW as a whole) once said it was because they were rivals on the same territory, and Joyce didn't think Freud's philosophy was adequate to the task, whereas literature was.
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Feb 21, 2020 20:06
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Lex Neville posted:what with my MA thesis being primarily focused on translation criticism, there was little room to completely dive into psychoanalysis but even on a superficial stylistic level the going back and forth between primal urges and a more rational focalisation is immediately apparent, definitely. I'm sure there's more to be found online on how much, and how much explicitly so, Joyce drew on Freud you'd think that, but Joyce was famously reticent to psychoanalysis since Jung failed to do anything for his daughter. And the way things are with psychoanalysis you can make a pretty compelling argument for shakespeare somehow traversing the fold and ending up with Freud's Totem and Taboo on his bookshelf. I mean yes we have lists of books on Joyce's bookshelf, but I suspect he got more material from Bruno or Vico than he ever did with Freud or his ilk. If I remember correctly i read somewhere he rather liked william james? you're right tho, the psychoanalytical vein is rife for Joyce regardless of his personal opinions on the science. i'm compiling a list myself
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Feb 21, 2020 20:12
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J_RBG posted:the Divine Comedy places him in the centre of a cosmic vision, but is also about how you can't square the circle between the divine on the one hand and the representation of reality through language on the other. If you read Paradiso one of the weird things is how many Joycean puns and neologisms Dante makes in it. Great post! I'm so glad you brought up Dante, because I'm convinced Dante divided by Joyce = Beckett. Visionary poetry more broadly has always had religious aspirations, and we know for a fact that Dante wrote The Divine Comedy with the idea that it would become indoctrinated as the Fifth Gospel. The fact that it didn't and was left to seem hanging despite its obvious poetic merit points to a higher reluctance of the Papal State to cede any of its doctrinal power to plebian artists (certainly this cant seem like that controversial of a statement anymore?). And ya, those chance connections are the whole thing. Lacan goes so far as to see in the Wake something of a primordial rebus of an unconscious history. It actually ends up being Lacans final confrontation with Joyce that totally upends his entire Real-Imaginary-Symbolic knot with the Symptom. Certainly it's something I'm going to drudge up sources for, but it suffices to say that Lacan renames this new idea of the Symptom as the Sinthome (a pun on Saint Thomas, and man, and ofc symptom) after a word from the Wake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinthome almost there fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Feb 21, 2020 |
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Feb 21, 2020 20:26
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 I only said "stream of consciousness" with respect to one chapter's opening which stopped me dead the first time reading it. The second time at Ulysses I made it nearly half way through before...well not really sure. Just moved on or something happened at work that demanded attention and I lost momentum.Anyway been working my way back towards it of late via a reread of Portrait and got a copy of Dubliners waiting in the wings for a read soon. Looking forward to The Dead in particular.
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Feb 22, 2020 07:11
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You are in for a treat with Dubliners.
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Feb 22, 2020 14:49
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J_RBG posted:You are in for a treat with Dubliners. Looking forward to it after having enjoyed Portrait so much on recent reread as an actual grown assed adult rather than someone Stephen's age at the close of the book the first time (and having visited Dublin in the meantime). I really enjoyed seeing the sophistication of the story and inner dialogue expand as the book went on. The crisis of faith around the midpoint and all the visits to the brothel was hilarious Guess there is no point spoilering a hundred year old book though is there
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Feb 22, 2020 17:20
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almost there posted:what's the deal with that loving potato Bloom carries around? The potato is a symbol of both Bloom's undeniable and inescapable Irish-ness and humanity's inherent symbiosis with the things we as a society often deem lowest in life (earth, roots, foods, agriculture, manual labor). Historically, potatoes are a a bit of a two-headed symbol for the Irish; of both their widespread poverty, colonial history, and agrarian societal foundations but also their corresponding capacity to persevere and overcome these hardships. Bloom's "potato" is a modest burden, but more importantly a source of comfort for him. It provides Bloom, an undeniably lonely individual, with a sense of belonging to a community with a shared history. I remember him fondling it fondly (joycean alliteration!!) in his pocket here and there throughout. In the more general application of the potato, it is a reference to our inescapable human connection to natural things that is tied so inexecribally to our evolution and existence (sex, the ocean, food) that is such a constant theme in Ulysses. The characterization of the Irish as a people in Ulysses is authentically historical and nationalistic, but Joyce uses this authenticity as a mirror to examine the universal and fundamental human condition. That his metaphors work on so many levels while remaining so authentic to his lived experience is a big part of what makes Ulysses so great. We are all carrying the potato, whether we know it or not. hobbez fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Feb 23, 2020 |
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Feb 23, 2020 23:01
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hobbez posted:We are all carrying the potato, whether we know it or not. Well said. The mysteries of Joyce's books, like the mysteries of the New Testament, are seriously worthy of contemplation. That being the case, here's a list of some for goons to dig their knives into: 1) Who is Mulligan gossiping with at the 40ft hole? 2) Is the infamous Man in the Macintosh mystery meant to be an impossible mystery pointing towards the messiness of textual exegesis, or was Nabokov right to claim that that was a cowards answer? (It's interesting to note that one biographer of Joyce's claimed a mysterious man none of the family knew showed up to Joyce's funeral, apparently acting belligerenty). Don't be afraid to speculate! 3) What is the nature of the dead priest's ostensible simony in The Sisters? 4) Should the fact that Joyce first published The Sisters under the Stephen Dedalus pseudonym mean anything? Can you spot any chance connections between Dubliners and Ulysses? 5) What is the nature of the postcard Josie Breen's husband receives? The infamous "U.P: up."? 6) Who is the dreamer of The Wake? That's all I can think of right now, maybe goons can think of more? My personal theory of the sixth mystery is that Finn is in fact the dead priest Father Flynn from The Sisters. It links up too well not to be the case. The rumour that undies him, the two sisters that keep cropping up to gossip, etc. In a lot of ways I'm convinced The Sisters was a deeply important story for Joyce. It does, after all, launch his entire cycle. almost there fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Feb 26, 2020 |
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Feb 26, 2020 08:13
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almost there posted:I'm so glad you brought up Dante, because I'm convinced Dante divided by Joyce = Beckett. Visionary poetry more broadly has always had religious aspirations, and we know for a fact that Dante wrote The Divine Comedy with the idea that it would become indoctrinated as the Fifth Gospel. The fact that it didn't and was left to seem hanging despite its obvious poetic merit points to a higher reluctance of the Papal State to cede any of its doctrinal power to plebian artists (certainly this cant seem like that controversial of a statement anymore?). There's a funny anecdote in Ellmann's biography about him being obsessed with the Divine Comedy and someone nicknaming him "the Dante of Dublin". The idea that he patterned his career after Dante, though, seems kind of silly. Bilirubin posted:Anyway been working my way back towards it of late via a reread of Portrait and got a copy of Dubliners waiting in the wings for a read soon. Looking forward to The Dead in particular. Look out for Frank Delaney's Rejoyce podcast when you do, it's about five minutes an episode and talks about Ulysses in minute detail, and is charming to boot. Sadly he only got about halfway before he died.
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Mar 1, 2020 15:45
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One story into Dubliners, the Sisters. I am really going to enjoy this, the writing is so fluid and evocative, and the dialogues real.
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Mar 28, 2020 23:28
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LOL there are some downright awful people in this book but drat am I enjoying this
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Mar 30, 2020 02:58
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Just finished A Painful Case and am totally blown away by it. So quietly condemning
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Mar 31, 2020 04:20
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Isn't that the one based on thinking about what Stanislaus' life might be like? Joyce could be pretty cold.
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Mar 31, 2020 13:40
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Safety Biscuits posted:Isn't that the one based on thinking about what Stanislaus' life might be like? Joyce could be pretty cold. No idea. Its the story of the stolid man who befriends a married woman and then cuts her off when things turn romantic, and two years later he reads of her death in the paper.
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Mar 31, 2020 17:49
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Having read about it more, could that possibly be Little Chandler you are thinking of?
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Mar 31, 2020 17:58
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Nope! Although thank you for reminding me of Little Chandler, he's such a sweet guy. This is from Terence Brown's intro to my copy of Dubliners:quote:[Joyce] drew with almost clinical dispassion on the experiences and even the private [sic] diary of his long-suffering brother Stanislaus... who afforded a model for Mr Duffy in 'A Painful Case', as Joyce imagined what else might become of him in a later life of unfruitful bachelorhood. Presumably the source for that is in Ellmann's biography.
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Apr 2, 2020 06:42
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Just finished it. I love this book so much
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Apr 2, 2020 07:43
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Bilirubin posted:Just finished it. I love this book so much I just read it for the first time as well. It was incredible. I felt like “The Dead” couldn’t really live up to the hype, given the high quality of the entire book, I felt it would merely be more of the same caliber writing Nope, the ending of The Dead was transcendent, a real masterwork. I had chills. I am tempted to just start it over again. My first read of “A portrait of the artist” will surely be up soon!
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Apr 22, 2020 05:48
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I got the same feeling from the ending of The Dead as I did from the ending of Mrs Dalloway.
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Apr 22, 2020 08:23
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Any of you guys gonna read Finnegans Wake?
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Apr 22, 2020 12:11
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I'd be up for reading through FW again if others get onto doing it. But the best advice is to crawl consistently than power through, at a rate of like 3-5 pages a day
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Apr 22, 2020 17:51
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J_RBG posted:I'd be up for reading through FW again if others get onto doing it. But the best advice is to crawl consistently than power through, at a rate of like 3-5 pages a day I have been feeling the siren call to make an attempt to r a while. Considering buying a copy and letting it collect dust out of the corner of my eye for a month or two, until I’m feeling brave enough. I’d suggest a reading group but that seems impossible for FW
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Apr 22, 2020 19:28
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A human heart posted:Any of you guys gonna read Finnegans Wake? First let me finally finish Ulysses Mrenda posted:I got the same feeling from the ending of The Dead as I did from the ending of Mrs Dalloway. I too had thoughts of Woolfe come to mind while reading it.
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Apr 22, 2020 19:39
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Bilirubin posted:First let me finally finish Ulysses Ulysses doesn’t really get that good until you start the reread
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Apr 22, 2020 22:58
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hobbez posted:I’d suggest a reading group but that seems impossible for FW Dozens of such reading groups exist! But they tend to be irl rather than in this format, which might be difficult. The face-to-face thing means you can suggest readings very quickly off the back of someone else
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Apr 22, 2020 23:02
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hobbez posted:Ulysses doesn’t really get that good until you start the reread Last attempt I made it a third of the way through and just ran out of steam, so its kind of already a reread, in part!
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Apr 22, 2020 23:57
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J_RBG posted:Dozens of such reading groups exist! But they tend to be irl rather than in this format, which might be difficult. The face-to-face thing means you can suggest readings very quickly off the back of someone else tbb finnegans wake zoom
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Apr 23, 2020 00:33
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CestMoi posted:tbb finnegans wake zoom 
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Apr 23, 2020 21:37
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CestMoi posted:tbb finnegans wake zoom o poo poo
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Apr 24, 2020 20:04
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Finnegans Wake has turned 81 If you had bought this book in May 1939 you would be aware that Europe, and the world, was on the brink of a seemingly inevitable war. It’s a bad, terrifying time. Virginia Woolf writes about it in Between the Acts, a moment in time where people attempt to preserve some sense of normality knowing full well that everything is about to descend into barbarism. This means that if you’re one of the few people willing to read Finnegans Wake on the 4th of May, 1939, you probably have other things on your mind. But you’ve probably got to this point because you’ve read Joyce’s other stuff, which has acquired a reputation that precedes it. You know a little bit about him: student of Italian literature, socialist wanting to forge (in both senses of the word) the conscience of the Irish race, very into sex with lifelong partner Nora, fluent in many languages, writer of difficult books. You open it and you see the letters ‘J.W.P’ –– they stand for Joyce Work in Progress. He kept the title secret from the printers until the last second, infuriating them. It was known as ‘Work in Progress’ for its sixteen years of gestation, and it’s an oddly fitting title, you will reflect when you finish it. It was his first completed work since Ulysses, which had been subject to censorship, and which had won Joyce derision and praise, infamy and fame. But the word from those in the know, who have read a few issues of ‘transition’ for example, is that this is even more incomprehensible than the last. Something totally indifferent to actual people and their real concerns. It’s meant to be like a druid or Finn MacCumhaill mumbling to himself while asleep or something, the latest in an overly intellectual artist's navel-gazing masturbation, utterly unconcerned with real issues and doing crossword puzzles in his head, an exercise in total futility, perhaps even a genuine document of real insanity, who gives a poo poo? It seems like one massive mistake that has taken Joyce half his career to write, the worst book of all time. The title even has a mistake: shouldn’t that read ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ like the song? The first page of the book proper says ominously: “I” Then you turn the page and there’s a blankness at the top, followed by this firing shot: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” You don’t quite get it, and if anything, as your eyes scan the page, there are even more difficult sentences to come. Like this for example: “bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!” Either you have enough sense to put the book back at this point, or you stick with it. So you stick with it of course, because you’re an idiot like me. You have nothing better to do. One thing to notice about the first page is that it’s neat: three paragraphs (or is more the case that one has been accidentally truncated?) and the last one ends with the page. So the page is its own complete thing. It feels almost designed. (All editions of Finnegans Wake have the same number of pages, 628, and take care to replicate the layout of each page. Almost out of superstition) Paragraph 1 is just the first sentence. In retrospect it’s not too difficult, the only words that don’t make immediate sense to me are ‘commodius’ and ‘vicus’ but I presume the proper nouns have something to do with Dublin, because this is James Joyce. How do you find out what the 'sentence' means then? You thankfully don’t live in 1939, there are all sorts of reference guides like Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake, and Edmund Epstein’s Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake. Joseph Campbell (who took the word ‘monomyth’ from the novel) did his Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake but, for some reason, assumed the one given the ‘heroic’ characteristics was the hero of his mythological scheme. Rookie error! (He also didn't spot that the references to him being a Nazi were pejorative and taking the piss out of him) Joyce is not interested in ‘traditional’ heroes, or very much ‘traditional’ really, which you can tell from him turning Odysseus into Leopold Bloom. My favourite resource is fweet.org, which is essential to anyone to reading today, and contains a sort of potted synopsis in its database. But even you will find gaps in its glosses. The Epstein I mentioned is the best synopsis out there, and shows that the book actually is coherent and does have a throughline. But you can also turn to what the sentence does without recourse to help. It starts in medias res, literally, in the middle of a sentence. You will find out the beginning of this sentence eventually. But for now it seems the subject of the sentence is ‘riverrun’, who ‘brings us’ back to Howth Castle and Environs. Why is ‘E’ capitalized? I suppose, for now, it’s just a joke (or I might not notice it at all). The running of the river goes past some landmark called ‘Eve and Adam’s’, perhaps something to do with the garden of Eden, from the edge of the land, the ‘shore’, into the sea, the ‘bend of bay’. But it brings us by a sort of circling back on ourselves back to the land. Is this magic? If you look at a map of Dublin bay, you see what Joyce is talking about.  What you immediately see is that any explanation doesn’t have to be too deep. (As Joyce said about Ulysses, the ideas aren’t necessarily that complex, it’s just the presentation has to be.) The headland labelled ‘Howth’ kind of hooks round, and the Liffey flows out into the sea only to hit the land opposite. Joyce is interested in circles, things echoing and returning back through time and space. But here also the novel gives ultimate priority to the movement of water, and the dynamics of fluid. The water directs our attention, whatever that means. Finnegans Wake is about difficulty, like Ulysses is. It revels in it, finds it beautiful and fun. Wants to acclimatize you to a particular kind of difficulty. It plunges you in at the deep end, so to speak, and even taunts you at times when you’re in it. So here's the difficult part of the sentence, semi-explained: ‘Vicus’ means settlement in Latin. But that itself doesn’t immediately make much sense. Is the town of Dublin itself the recirculation? ‘Commodius’ looks like a misspelling of ‘commodious’ meaning accommodating. It sounds a bit like Dante’s Commedia, which sets God in the middle of a series of rotating circles, and envisions hell and purgatory as cones with concentric circles. ‘Vico’ is the name of an 18th century Italian philosopher, Giambattista Vico, who wrote about time being circular (and we know Joyce likes Italian literature). There's a Vico Road in Dalkey (south of Dublin, where the bay begins to bend). This is linguistic difficulty, referential difficulty. Thank god for google, and thank those brave saints who read the book initially and brought us to this point is all I will say. You're on your own if you want to link things up, though. Ok so we don’t fully get the first sentence, but let's keep our chins up and move on. Anthony Burgess once said that you could write pages and pages about the first sentence alone. If you haven’t got the impression by now that the book exposes gaps in your knowledge, and shows any interpretation to be insufficient, you’re in the wrong thread. The next paragraph contains two sentences. The first full sentence of the book is long, separated into five chunks by colons, the other is shorter, just one chunk. They all talk about things that haven’t yet happened: 1. Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore [Fr. pas encore = not yet] rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: 2. nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doubling their mumper all the time: [what?????] 3. nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: [people used to use turf or peat to fuel fires in Ireland] 4. not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: [in Genesis Isaac begat Jacob and Esau, a pair of feuding brothers who switch identities] 5. not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. [what is it with families in this?] 6. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface. Laid out like that it becomes easier to see how this is preparing us for things that will happen, including something that will happen fairly soon. And so in the two paragraphs we’ve got space (aka Dublin bay) and we’ve got time (aka before everything happens). It seems to be kind of before the creation of the world: before heroes could be heroes (1), before rocks grew and exaggerated themselves (2, perhaps puberty on a boy’s testicles, or a metaphor for building), before humans learned how to harness fire and build religions (3), before Oedipal family dramas could begin (4), before lovers’ tiffs could even begin (though why sisters, and what does ‘twone nathandjoe’ and ‘vanessy’ mean?) (5), and before light, alcohol or rainbows, or a ruler's brow (6). It’s like Joyce’s own weird version of Genesis, of God moving over the waters that exist before time. The natural world and the human world is blended, made to stand as a metaphor for each other. In fact it’s impossible to say what truly is a metaphor here: what is the representation of the ‘true’ thing? We don’t fully get it, yet again, but at least the way the paragraph ended sounds beautiful, and so inventive. The spell is beginning to work. The third paragraph then moves from setting to add the foundational material of the story about to unfold. What has already happened? is the question answered by this paragraph. There’s one relatively simple sentence, then a big sentence. Oh, and a word with a hundred letters in parentheses. This is the first of ten ‘thunderwords’––Joyce was phobic of thunder. Someone once asked him why someone so intelligent should have such an irrational fear, and he replied that they evidently hadn’t had a Jesuit education. Watch this if you want to understand this thunderword. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV3vT5nW_I4 But you kind of get what the word does just by looking at it, seeing it interrupt the sentence and arrive portentously after the words ‘The fall’ (Genesis again). This paragraph has a general gist you can get: ‘The fall [sound of thunder!!!] of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself promptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.’ Someone has fallen off a wall like Humpty Dumpty, but this is a story that is going to be retold again and again. That fallen man, Finnegan, has become like a part of the geography: his toes are over there, his head over there, as if he was a giant. But this is the man of the title, surely? And on the first page he’s already dead. Are we at his wake? In the song, Finnegan is a hod carrier (works on building sites basically) and falls off a ladder because of his whiskey, and is thought to be dead, but resurrects because of the same whiskey (now we think of ‘pa’s malt’ that was mentioned in the second paragraph). But this isn’t just the plot of the song recounted. The points mentioned here are elements of Dublin’s geography, and reference is made to a time before now, when 'devlinsfirst loved livvy'. The page therefore begins and ends with a river: implying a time when Dublin loves the river Liffey, and/or the devil/Devlin loves someone called Livvy and/or the historian Livy who wrote about the foundation of Rome. But then why is 'devlinsfirst' just one word? First is not adverbial here... I won't answer that. I will say in concluding my  that Joyce is creating a new myth about his home city, or something that sounds like a myth. But it more often sounds like itself: the thing you can’t help but notice reading this is that it’s intensely patterned. You will notice your own individual things that nobody else will. You could get a lot of the main priorities of the novel from just reading this first page. Here in handy bulletpoint form: 1. The novel is overtly concerned with circular time, things repeating and echoing in history. 2. The novel takes most of its spatial references from the area around Dublin 3. The novel uses as its founding principle the movement of water 4. The novel sets up its own strange, weirdly sexual mythology, and surrealises its reference points, blending them all together. 5. It takes its reference points from the highest of ‘high’ literature to the lowest: Humpty Dumpty is as interesting for readers of Finnegans Wake as Giambattista Vico’s New Science is. 6. The book is very difficult: meaning is constantly deferred, the man in the title of the book is dead, and boundaries between things and words blur into each other. 7. So everything seems to be a metaphor for everything else. 8. But we can still kind of grasp meaning in the chaos. Finnegans Wake is potentially anything, though it helps to try and keep a handle on the general gist. But it’s more importantly a repository of mistakes that turn out not to be mistakes: the grammar of these sentences is conventional, spelling is incredibly precise. It gives the impression that every choice is deliberate, and that if you notice something, it’s been put there on purpose. This is why it seems spookily as if it’s predicting the future at times: it’s blatantly designed on the one hand to give the reader free rein to notice patterns in the text, but on the other, the reader is constantly aware of the figure of Joyce and his authority over the text. It makes itself relevant despite seeming entirely indifferent to us: its bird's-eye view of everything gives it something kind of, whisper it, eternal that no other book can quite muster. (I would have got this out yesterday in time for May 4 but I'm a loving lazy bastard!!)
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May 5, 2020 16:43
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Howth is very pretty, and when I stayed there it was cool so folks were burning peat for warmth. So the cool, the damp, the blue sky, the peat smoke, and the ruined abbey we walked by all struck me as very of another time. Not so different than when Joyce was alive I'd bet.
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May 6, 2020 00:21
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Happy Literary Cosplay Day
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Jun 16, 2020 08:53
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