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I'm doing it. I'm reading Finnegans Wake page-by-page and will try to make sense of what I can in this thread. Feel free to join me. I have: - Potato - Alcohol - Finnegans Wake (Restored Edition) - McHughs' Annotation book - http://www.fweet.org/ (tho how this site works is still obscure to me, maybe a goon can help me here. all I know is that it should help) - And a bunch of pdfs from ""scholars"" pretending to ""understand"" what any of it means. This is a bad idea. Wish me luck.
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Aug 23, 2020 00:59
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I salute you on your damned voyage, I was never able to get more than a few pages in.
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Aug 23, 2020 01:12
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I wrote a bunch of first thoughts here initially, but I've decided to edit the post to be more investigative this time round. I didn't know what the point of this thread was but saw that any discussion of FW would inevitable devolve into troll posts about its incomprehensibility, so what follows is my attempt at a linear unveiling of the events in the book. Hopefully this will encourage goons to give it a try, and maybe invite some fellow sleuths. So here it goes. It is conventional knowledge to writers that they should start at the beginning, and that is indeed what Joyce does in FW. Though it may appear to open in the middle of a sentence it's important to note the work's retro-causal structure. I take as basis for this assertion Joyce's open fascination with the ideas of Italian Renaissance thinker Giambattista Vico (whose most pertinent work "La Scienza Nuova" I am reading concurrently with FW). Giambattista Vico theorized that Civilization follows an "ideal Eternal History" (or ricorso, literally re-emergence in Italian) that is divided into three ages: the age of gods , the age of heroes, or kings, and then finally the age of democracy. In the age of gods Vico emphasizes the significance of Poetry: quote:First came the myths of the gods, which were histories from the crudest age of pagan civilization, when people believed that all institutions necessary or useful to humankind were deities. The authors of this poetry were the first peoples, who were all theological poets; and traditions relates unequivocally that they founded the pagan nations through their myths of the gods. Humans, at that time completely illiterate (in the strongest sense possible) had to struggle with their consciousness, because while the capacity for metaphor and dream did exist, language as such did not (I'm relying on my knowledge of Lacan here). What needed to occur was the development of a communal alphabet through the association of the sounds and/or symbols to myths (call it "sexual metaphor") , and so to create poetry as such retro-causally. Vico places much importance on Homer's contribution here. From this point, though completely an oral history, what does start to emerge is an alphabet who's characters should be thought of as, just that, characters (they're a sign for the initial dream-stuff). It is only after this point (logically) that people to begin to identify their direct corporal existence as somehow identical to the phantasmagoria. Lacan, after Descartes, is careful to have psychoanalysis never cross that line. At this point I don't need to move onto the rest of the ages Vico describes, but I will note that the evolution between the ages is the obvious one (in the age of heroes, people with eminent domain over peasants are seen as demi-divine, hence the myth of Hercules, and in the Age of Democracy you get , you know , schnifffff, ze synthesis). This absent middle, that is simultaneously the cause of itself, is where Joyce's Finnegans Wake opens, and remains. quote:"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle & Environs. The recirculation is , in fact, the beginning. Lacan describes this place as the unconscious; that which "loses itself as much as it finds itself again". However, much like Ulysses, which took the aesthetic premises of Naturalism/Realism to such extremes that those premises broke under their own pressure, FW here seems to have chosen the Unconscious, or mythism, as his subject for the back-breaking extrapolation. I will move on from the first sentence in the next post (don't worry, I don't expect the pace to be this gruelingly slow). If you want any references for this thesis on the retro-causal I recommend checking out Lacan's seminar on the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. almost there fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Aug 25, 2020 |
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Aug 23, 2020 01:50
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I salute you on your damned voyage, I was never able to get more than a few pages in. thank you. This is my second attempt. gently caress this book, I love it.
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Aug 23, 2020 01:51
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almost there posted:gently caress this book, I love it.  I think it's saying something that "...during mighty odd years this man of hod, cement and edifices in Toper's Thorp piled bildung supra bildung pon the banks for the livers by the Soangso." is probably the most easily understood/parsed phrase on the first two pages. Meaty Ore fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Aug 24, 2020 |
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Aug 24, 2020 23:26
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Okay, so in the last post I did my due diligence and discussed the space Joyce is trying to work within, and define, but now that we have all that pure space the question naturally arises, "What do I populate it with?". quote:Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rock by the stream Oconnee exaggerated themselse to Laren's County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venisoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old issac: not yet, though all's fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the reggin-brow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface Adventure, and tons of deferment. Note that Joyce begins on "Sir Tristram" which my annotations say refers to Tristram of Lyonesse, a long epic romantic poem that is essentially a 20th century retelling of the medieval love story of Tristan and Isolde. Joyce starts there, but with each subsequent myth Joyce moves chronologically backwards, becoming more ancient; less re-discoveries of ancient myths and more the stuff of ancient myths themselves. Essentially, the narrative frame begins to move widen its focus from particular myths, and onto the actuality of myth itself. Indeed Joyce is daringly placing the plot of FW at the start of an investigation into the source of all myths. Perhaps Joyce is in some way naming the myth of Freud as the form new myths would have to take. By this I mean that myths either can't be, or no longer have any reason to be, directly the dream-stuff anymore. What remains is an investigation of all that came previously, an attempt to peek at what might form the other side of this night. And so we move to ground-floor, where the Elder gods croak "Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax!", in what is perhaps properly likened to an attempt by ancient man to activate the voice from behind the uvula. Here, in properly subversive fashion, Joyce stages the War in Heaven. Lucifer must fall before Man, and while we retroactively place the war in heaven in some place above, Joyce, like Freud, finds it more fitting to see in that a mistake and instead situates it deep down past the "face of the earth". It is interesting to note that the War in Heaven only takes place at the chronological end of the bible (here the beginning, because of the opening theme of exploration) , because of course the history of the bible has to be taken as a synchrony of Eternal history and revelatory history. Only at the end of the history of revelation would one be able to properly state what had happened at the very beginning. At least, that is, until Joyce asks of Modernity to put revelation back into proper order. So we have a war in heaven taking place in the deep. This reiterates the unconscious structure that simultaneously "loses itself as soon as it finds itself again" from the opening line. Here we have the most high and most low happening concurrently, without the retroactive fetish of religion's separating of heaven from the bowels of Hell. What I will note here, before moving on, is that unlike the Unconscious which Lacan describes, which operates on strictly separate plane from the conscious since it is always-already constitutive of it, Joyce's unconscious is an attempt to delineate a properly impossible fantasy of a conscious unconsciousness. Here we see Heaven in the Ocean, whereas Lacan strictly keeps Heaven in Heaven (he famously declared Catholicism "the one true religion" for that reason). Lacan never tried to correct the retro-causal illusion of religion like Joyce clearly attempts to do here. The war in heaven ends with the world-egg and so a prophecy of the coming fall (in Lacan it isn't an egg but a mobius strip ,where beginnings and ends share a coincidence in entity) quote:Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish. Joyce, in my opinion, is clearly raging against Freud in these lines. It's perhaps that saving myth from something secular like psychoanalysis is what James Joyce is trying to achieve. That's the end of Joyce's pre-Genesis from what I can tell, from here we move onto our first solid character Mr. Finnegan (o why did ye die!) himself. I'll post more in the coming days, please let me know if this is doing anything for you. I will admit I am mostly doing this to convince myself there's some solid thoughline here lol, so help or encouragement would be nice. EDIT: can anyone tell me how to change the name of a thread? I was thinking something less masochistic, maybe something more along the lines of a Let's Read? thx in advance. almost there fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Aug 25, 2020 |
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Aug 25, 2020 03:40
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You need buttons for that. PM me or post in the thread. E: A couple of things I noticed reading your post: quote:Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rock by the stream Oconnee exaggerated themselse to Laren's County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venisoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old issac: not yet, though all's fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the reggin-brow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface Am I seeing the Joyce family in here, hidden among all the other names? With a "mum" just before "Nora", too... almost there posted:And so we move to ground-floor, where the Elder gods croak "Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax!", in what is perhaps properly likened to an attempt by ancient man to activate the voice from behind the uvula. These are frogs; it's what they say in Aristophanes' Frogs as the protagonists enter the underworld. Safety Biscuits fucked around with this message at 08:10 on Aug 25, 2020 |
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Aug 25, 2020 06:34
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Yesssss good thread this.Safety Biscuits posted:
You most definitely are. Look in the first sentence: quote:riverrun, past Eve and Adam's... quote:past Eve and Adam pa stEvean dAda -- three generations of Joyce men: James, Giorgio, Stephen.
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Aug 25, 2020 18:02
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Safety Biscuits posted:Am I seeing the Joyce family in here, hidden among all the other names? With a "mum" just before "Nora", too... Wow, good catch. I would have never have noticed it. I'm reading a work of criticism from oxford publishing that goes on about how Joyce wrote FW. Specifically how he would basically just take what he intitally wrote and lacquer / transpose draft ontop of draft, so it seems to make sense. It adds a sort of mini personal myth spiral within the grander mythical one. I wonder if reference to a tree of Jesse is hidden anywhere? Safety Biscuits posted:These are frogs; it's what they say in Aristophanes' Frogs as the protagonists enter the underworld. iirc Frogs takes place in Hades right? and Dante talks about how pagans misidentified Hades as Hell? So not only do Heaven and Hell coincide , but its a retrograde version of that hell too. I think that still contributes to my tentative thesis about Joyce using the Freudian myth as his driving theme for the plot. The reader is unanchored from Eternal time and begins to move inwards, towards the Unconscious, instead of simply backwards. My uvula comment was mostly just a reference to the significance of the Voice in psychoanalysis, and I feel that's more or less anchored by Joyce's decision to structure FW after Vico's New Science. I maybe shouldn't have said elder gods though, i just wanted to emphasize the primoridal-ness Joyce is trying to get across. and uhhh ya, what's a button lol almost there fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Aug 25, 2020 |
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Aug 25, 2020 19:29
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J_RBG posted:pa stEvean dAda -- three generations of Joyce men: James, Giorgio, Stephen. Nice catch! And it's hidden inside Joyce inverting a myth, too. almost there posted:iirc Frogs takes place in Hades right? and Dante talks about how pagans misidentified Hades as Hell? So not only do Heaven and Hell coincide , but its a retrograde version of that hell too. I think that still contributes to my tentative thesis about Joyce using the Freudian myth as his driving theme for the plot. The reader is unanchored from Eternal time and begins to move inwards, towards the Unconscious, instead of simply backwards. Right, Frogs is in Hades. And just cos these frogs are frogs doesn't mean they're not also elder gods. At best only tangentially related, but fun, here's Sondheim's Frogs - stay for the "Invocation and Instructions", at least. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VFblNTINfo ("Buttons" - I meant the mod buttons that let you edit threads, which includes changing titles and tags. Just ask me and I'll change it.)
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Aug 26, 2020 09:09
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So I’ve read over what I wrote, and I am unsatisfied in places. Before moving on to the characters, and a discussion of the Wake’s use of sigla (according to the critical work of, in my opinion, the foremost scholar on the Wake besides Lacan, Roland McHughs) I just want to summarize, clarify, and elaborate on some of the stakes I’ve already driven into the ground of the Wake’s thicket so far. I apologize for the bore this may be cause for to the reader, and invite you to skip it, but I believe in preparing carefully for a hike as crazy as this one, as I suspect a lot of the reason people lose interest in this book very quickly is that they believe, rightfully, that a novel should be something one reads during their time-off. Though, obviously, the Wake is an attempt at a literature of a totally different species. So if the reader, like me, is interested in some of the wilder species in the garden, they wouldn’t be amiss in attempting to take the proper precautions. ~~GENERAL POINTS FINNEDAGAIN~~ So that said, the clarifications go as follows: 1) The first sentence is extremely significant. It introduces something at the level of a lack (which is “deeper” than the Unconscious), before even the first word, ‘riverrun’, manages to firmly establish itself on the page. The rest of what follows could, and perhaps should, be seen as an attempt to “catch up” to what begins in medias ras . A good question to ponder: is the primordial lack introduced by the lowercase ‘r’ of the first word, generative of what follows close on its heels? Or, in other words, is the last sentence of the book actually the beginning of that sentence, or is this just a retro-causal illusion (one might call it rationalization) meant to cover for--in an attempt to come to terms with--the scandal of the initial lack? (Perhaps it is also interesting to ponder why this narrational device remains a staple of literature more generally). The Lacanian in me suspects that the lack introduces into the mix the prophecy of its own relief. Relief from what? Why, the desire of the Father, why not? (It is also important to note that Lack is mythically aligned to the Christian story of The Fall. Consider for yourself what Adam and Eve do after tasting of the fruit?, Why, they realize they lack clothes!) I will elaborate on the relation of the Father in literature and psychoanalysis as becomes necessary. 2) I somewhat overstated the significance of Vico’s work. That is not to say that I won’t make reference to the fact that the structure of Vico’s “New Science” is parroted by Joyce in the structure of the Wake (and Ulysses) , but it only means that I am liable to agree with McHughs here in moreorless keeping that correspondence to the titles of the Wake’s Four Parts, and their corresponding themes. So, in an attempt to wash my hands of Vico (though I am reading it New Science concurrently with the Wake) for the time being, here is McHughs summary of the Wake’s structural relation to the New Science: McHughs posted:
(McHughs elaborates further here, but I will bring these up as they get touched upon over the main course of things.) Lacan admired Vico, and perhaps saw in Vico a herald for the coming “Age of Freud”. Vico, I think, is an important reference to keep in mind primarily because Vico deals in history. This is significant because the popular perception of psychoanalysis (which to clarify, is really mostly only an adjunct of literature itself) seems to be that it only floats in mid-air, and is only concerned with masturbating itself. I disagree, we are all caught up in it, much like the Nightmare Stephen Dedalus declares, in Ulysses, that he is trying to Wake up from. 3) I previously said Joyce is attempting to paint a conscious unconscious, and I believe this should be clarified. When I made mention of the fact that “Lacan keeps Heaven in Heaven”, while “Joyce does not” , I meant to introduce the register of the Symbolic Order. A quick elucidation of this sometimes confusing concept with the aforementioned example might be helpful. While Joyce is most certainly correct in “flattening” the picture of Heaven, by mingling with it, scandalously perhaps, the image of Hades, and with the image of a battle meant to take place in Heaven occurring in Hell, Lacan is careful to keep in tact the symbolic structure of a place symbolically (logically) distinct from Hell, and it is for this reason alone that he espouses Catholicism as the ”one true religion”. With this I think we can gain an interesting insight into the function art generally serves, that is, when it is not busy being religion. Perhaps it doesn’t in fact have to do with a depth of feeling, as some commonly believe, but with a flattening that works to show the gaps in the symbolic order of things itself. Which is to say, of course, that a work of art reveals to us a work of the Unconscious. That settled , and our stakes firmly in the right places (hopefully), let’s move on to a meatandpotatoesparticular discussion of things. I realize now that without a systemic approach this thread will never be finished, so I’ll try to lay the groundwork here. I will follow a notation for the Wake, which goes like [book_#. chapter_#, paragraph_#] from here on out. Unfortunately this means we have to go back and quickly review some passages already somewhat covered. That said, you can follow along using a physical copy of the book, or, if you dont have one handy, you can check out the one on: http://finwake.com/desktop.htm So, let's begin again, shall we? BOOK 1: THE BOOK OF THE PARENTS / THE AGE OF GODS CHAPTER 1: FINNEGANS FALL (1.1.1) “riverrun, pa stEvean dAdam’s…” we begin, and remain at the unconscious, at the place of lack, and a place that corresponds mythically to the story of Adam and Eve’s fall from Eden. Joseph Campbell, in his book “A Skeleton’s Key to Finnegans Wake” calls it “a suspended tick of time between a past cycle, and another one about to begin,” but I don’t think its a stretch to say that we are always-already rearriving at this “tick” of weird time. Also, Man of Hod: J_RBG, and Bygmeister Safety Biscuits have collaborated to delightfully point out that paragraph seems to be littered with the ghosts of the dead fathers of the Joyce line. These crypto-archaeologists deserve medals in my opinion. A flourish of Lacanian interpretation: The first line already alludes to the desires of the dead father so significant in literature and psychoanalysis! I’m truly agog at the subtle beauty of it. I hope goons can keep up the good work. (1.1.2) ” Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor…” quote of entire passage already posted. What conclusion I already alluded to is that the lack figured in 1.1 means to ask for relief, whose resulting sign is but…? but a quest for an adventure to find what was lost! I already talked about how the narrative frame at this point seems to “move chronologically backwards, becoming more ancient; less re-discoveries of ancient myths and more the stuff of ancient myths themselves. […] the narrative frame begins to widen its focus from particular myths, and onto the actuality of myth itself.” This is all well and good, but here is McHughs discussing, from the vantage point of someone who seems to possess the ability to hold the whole damned Wake all at once in his mind, what the narrator is all about : McHughs posted:The tone of Book 1 is one of reservation over the accuracy of its contents. The narrators are usually historians engrossed by a narrowing speculation over the irretrievable past events they study. Towards the close of the Book their scholarly tone fades. [Chapter 8, paragraph 1] is spoken by two washerwomen, but its subject is still an uncertain antediluvian treasure. I think this bit of context will prove important as we progress in our reading of the Wake. What comes to mind to me is , weirdly enough, the figure of Indiana Jones. I now wonder less why the mythical figures of those who study the past seem somehow to have something doing with adventure. (1.1.3) The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) Ah, the most famous 100+ letter word in the book (mostly because its on the first page). The word is meant to sound like divine thunder and ends in the most appropriate exclamation mark in the literary canon. Vico ascribes the birth of all religion to the mystery of the thunderclap. He describes how its mystery led to the pagan idea of an alter atop of Mount Olympus supposed to house an angry God, and how the institution of augers would be erected in order to contain the tumult of its chaotic madness. All said, what’s absolutely crucial here, I believe, is that this doesn’t actually seem to depict The Mythical Fall of Finnegans Wake (which happens later in [1.1.7]), but seems rather like a speculative POV of that phenomena told from the narrator’s perspective. I am somewhat beginning to suspect that the narrator might actually be Vico himself? Though, of course, we know that can’t be true because Joyce has alluded to there actually only being something like 10 characters in the novel. I’ll talk about the strange significance of the sigla, and finally tackle the scene where Finnegan falls off the ladder, next post. Here's a picture of another mythical man falling off of a ladder dead:  Safety Biscuits posted:("Buttons" - I meant the mod buttons that let you edit threads, which includes changing titles and tags. Just ask me and I'll change it.) I’ve decided on a thread title. If you will, why not name it : "Reading Finnegans Wake: pftjschute, none of this makes any nonce". almost there fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Aug 27, 2020 |
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Aug 27, 2020 03:50
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Can't wait until you get onto the second page lol. Also thank you for making explicit that connection between parents and the age of the gods––for some reason that information had been sitting around in my brain but hadn't been put together. One thing I'll say about McHugh is that his work is an invaluable step forward for Wake readers, but also, if you're interested, read others like John Bishop (RIP) and Derek Attridge if you can get hold of their stuff. Christine van Boheemen-Saaf does Lacanian Joyce things too. John Bishop makes the cool point that Joyce probably hated Jung/Freud (or 'jungfraud' as he calls them) so much because they were on contested territory. Joyce was attempting to do through art what they were attempting to do through psychoanalysis
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Aug 27, 2020 12:32
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might try and get someone to send me my copy of the wake so i can take part in the fun. in the meantime, here's our exagmination round his factification to provide everyone a little context https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1254/d4ba30e903dc6e292ba6410380f444d2bbcf.pdf
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Aug 27, 2020 14:08
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J_RBG posted:Can't wait until you get onto the second page lol. Also thank you for making explicit that connection between parents and the age of the gods––for some reason that information had been sitting around in my brain but hadn't been put together. haha ya, I kinda knew i would have to finitagain. I kinda regret how I started this thread off, but if goons can forgive me the false start I think some interesting things might end up getting said here. And the authors seem cool, thanks for bringing them to my attention. I'm at the point where I'm grabbing every reputable work of criticism on the Wake I can lay my hands on so its much appreciated. I may be yung but I'm not so easily freudened! (thank god Joyce never got the chance to pun on Lacan). Lacan was super obsessed with the Wake since its publication and I think we have a better chance of a reading that doesn't devolve into new age jungian nonsense (  ) with it rather than without it. Though I will admit I am super interested in looking at what discrepancies between the two thinkers may arise. I dont intend to hammer Joyce's work into a Lacan shaped hole if I can help it, I'll admit that I'm just as curious as to what a nonsecular psychoanalysis might look like.CestMoi posted:might try and get someone to send me my copy of the wake so i can take part in the fun. in the meantime, here's our exagmination round his factification to provide everyone a little context Thanks! I can't believe I forgot to post that. I'll post a list of good secondary material, including that one, into the OP probably some time this week. And welcome to the thread! the more goons we can get the better, I really do want this be as collaborative reading as possible. I welcome all sorts of wild associations and crackpot interpretations. And every adventurer their sword: I really recommend u pick up a copy of McHughs Annotations (its a bit expensive tho, $50 in canada) if u attempt this book with us. Though of course you dont have to, I just dont think I'd have a chance myself of making it through if it werent for that one. The annotations on finnwake.com are also OK.
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Aug 27, 2020 17:59
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Some of the older, more foundational scholarly works on the wake are available freely online. Here's Clive Hart's Structure and Meaning in FW (Bear in mind that we have only had 80 years to read this book and new conclusions are being reached about what it actually contains all the drat time) fweet is good but only if you search for a word and then click through, it gives you an annotated version of the page you have before you.
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Aug 27, 2020 19:23
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As another recommendation for a guidebook, I found Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon's Understanding FW to be a good read, although it's waaaaaay out of print. I've never read the entirety of the damned thing myself, just chunks, and I'd hardly pretend to have understood all, or even most, of what's hidden there.
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Aug 31, 2020 20:55
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so i powered through the first half of the first chapter and I gotta say I'm surprised how much sense its actually making? I noticed several things about it. 1) joyce's language seems to be less of a play on dreams than a representation on how memory functions. Surprisingly I think this is because it makes too much sense narrative wise, and not enough sense in the particulars. When people dream they tend to have a pretty distinct sense for what happened and what was said in the dream (though this might only be the effect of reporting it after the fact, granted) and not enough of a sense for what the drat thing meant. Here I think it's pretty obvious that Joyce is dissolving some godhead in acid to see where the pools congeal, but as for the details of anything specific being said you're left with only what you can associate with it (i constantly feel like i have something on the Tip. of my tongue). What's truly remarkable though is just how often my associations tend to line up with the gist of what's going on even without consulting the critical work. 2) the first chapter seems to be a pretty stinging assault on fascist ideology. Like you start off with this Finnegan character who seems to me a representative of a worker whose sole job is accumulating culture, and building things, you know, just living life in a sort of primitive way for his family until the thought of modernity and all of its inventions cause his head to swell and fall off the ladder. From there you get the crowd of hypocrites at his funeral (what else could you be at a funeral?) with their crying sort of seeming false, less a genuine cry for Finnegan (unlike the cry of his wife you can hear in the distance) and more of a false lamenting of "pre-fallen" times. Then, suddenly, the scene of the funeral goes out the window and out onto the body of a giant (specifically the monument to wellington in dublin, clearly a phallus) where you traverse all these specific sites representative of a past history, told by historians who clearly are missing something. This is told in a thick ribaldry because Joyce is mocking the firmness of asserting a word's solidity. Things seem half remembered, pervaded by their associations, and the seriousness of the historical figures are all undercut by funny embarrassing stories (like the scene where the boy shoots a cap off of Wellington's "harse"). Then there's another cut and you have a sort of ode to the wives of these figures who pick through their pockets and look at all these "deeply serious" things with a giggle, and the men who love them for it. I noticed Joyce loves to use very cute vowel sounds when describing these characters, but they seem to really be the crux of his true admiration. 3) our relationship to history is far more tenuous than the written word makes it seem. what's clear is that the solidity of words make us feel established in ourselves. We fend off chaos by making huge standardized languages like English. There's this great scene where the wife (i think?) is in this sort of tomb-mound (finnegans'? or the giant's?) with a sort of archaic history written into it somehow, but the history (which is highly mythologized and un-historical) cuts abruptly because the narrator gathers the writer of it may have been caught in the crossfires of one of the events he's describing. Now I'm at the point of the conversation between what seems like homosapien (Mutt) and neanderthal (Jutt) and it's weird and funny. Gotta say I'm starting to feel it. And ya screw doing effort posts , that was a mistake. Notes from the trenches of verbal war from here on out. Meigh Hob have merci on myshawl. Selachian posted:As another recommendation for a guidebook, I found Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon's Understanding FW to be a good read, although it's waaaaaay out of print. thanks for the rec, i'll check it out. Though im slowly starting to think i'm not suppose to, like, get it, man. almost there fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Sep 3, 2020 |
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Sep 3, 2020 01:56
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Great post. I would absolutely say the entire thing is, among other things, a massive rebuke to fascism. In the period between 1922 and 39, the period FW was Work In Progress, fascism ascended, it would be loving mad for Joyce just not to touch on the subject. Philippe Sollers called it the most meaningful anti-fascist document from the interwar period. I won't say much more, but you can kind of guess that the mingling of languages and histories all together doesn't exactly make for a coherent nationalist ideology. And yeah, the masterbuilder seemsto eat, sleep, breathe culture. poo poo out culture. It's not a building, it's 'bildung supra bildung'––cultural formation, cultivation, education on top of each other, perhaps in the sense of covering over the previous one. Later on, when we meet HCE, he is never too far from a mention of culture Incidentally, I think 'Work in Progress' was a fine title. But I can see why he preferred Finnegans Wake The word of that section for me is 'hierarchitectitiptitoploftical'. It sounds exactly like what it is, a grand construction mishmashed together of things that aspire to greatness, but of course the word falls down before the end. Absolute genius. I love finding the words that seem to describe the book, or all of history. That's the important thing in FW––the words sound like what they are. What they are is right in front of you the whole time, it's not behind the word. That's the only rule in reading the Wake. This is partly why I agree with you 100% about this book not necessarily being a dream by the way. I think way too many early critics got too hung up on that framework. Perspective shifts too much, for starters. I think it has important similarities (like for example the not making much sense unless you're in the process of reading it) but it's not like anything before or since. We're best just kind of submitting to it, letting the river flow and finding our way through the darkness, patiently. Anyway, you're in for a treat with those few pages after the Mutt and Jute conversation. There's some brilliant nuggets where the book explicitly talks about itself, as it does throughout e: oh, and the whole posting your notes thing is great––I'm often curious what readings other people have when they're not trying to tidy up their thoughts too much. It's frustrating that essentially the most dedicated reading of the book is in academic circles; it means that only a particular type of reading gets privileged, that sort of slow, meticulous, hyper-pedantic way. Which to be fair Joyce responds to very well. But I wonder what happens if you write down what happens when you read this with no expectation of being published. What sort of observations get recorded. I want to be validated in my feeling that the book is as ~spooky~ as I think it is. Jrbg fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Sep 3, 2020 |
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Sep 3, 2020 02:29
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