Status Updates From Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wa...

C.K.Ogden,a fairly good acquaintance of Joyce, wrote of Peirce in The Meaning of Meaning (London: Kegan Paul, 1923). This state-of-the-art 1923 survey of linguistic theory appears in the Wake as as the ‘Maymeaminning of maimoomeining’ (267.03).

Joyce was always alive to what his acquaintances were up to, indeed, in the lines of Finnegans Wake is concealed a diary, a form of critique of the cultural scene around him.

A clear Brunian ‘coincidence of contraries’ has surfaced again, for to be happy when miserable translates Bruno’s paradoxical motto which preceded his play Candelaio: ‘In tristitia hilaris: in hilaritate tristis’—in sad- ness, happiness and in happiness, sadness.

It brings us to a confrontation with that important perception of Finnegans Wake, that its apparent sense of affirmation, plurality, and multiplicity shades into or hides a stronger idea of nullity. From the infinitely meaningful, universally affirming, it is a short step to the opposite, to indifference, to voids of meaning and value.

the kind of curves you simply can’t stop feeling

‘Already the messages of citizens were flashed along the wires of the world. . . . To those multitudes, not as yet in the wombs of humanity but surely engenderable there, he would give the word: Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come, the lightening of your masses in travail.’

The ‘wrong thing’ happened, we are now told, during the ‘dark flush of night’ (527.07). A flush usually brings colour to cheeks, so a dark flush is a mild oxymoron, like a dark light, and is all the more suggestive, since the dark flush of night is probably an erotically charged flush.

Beckett wrote (now notoriously) of ‘Work in Progress’, that ‘it is not about something, it is that something itself ’; Tindall revised this idea, saying ‘Finnegans Wake is about Finnegans Wake’, and we can refine this further: ‘in part Finnegans Wake is about the writing of Finnegans Wake’.

His writing processes involve a psychological scorching, as self-reflection passes through the ‘slow fire of consciousness’: a hellish toasting of thoughts in the forge of the mind.

Chaosmos, however, is an aptly disunified concept, voicing the word ‘chiasmus’, or ‘arch’, that symbol of structural harmony, and in itself a bridge, like many of the Wake words themselves, between chaos and cosmos.

Nonetheless innuendo and imperfectly definable actions hover over the actions of the hermit.

Joyce saw perhaps what Wittgenstein felt—that ‘Colours spur us to philosophize. [. . . They] seem to present us with a riddle, a riddle that stimulates us — not one that disturbs us.’

He is therefore transforming the stuff of his life into some powerful dangerous chaos like death, or chaos of death: a Satanic inverse creation as we’ve noted.

It is a case not of the Emperor’s but of the Everyman’s New Clothes.

But Joyce proclaimed his vision as comic, seeing himself as ‘red-nosed’, not ‘blue-jawed’. Of an international catastrophe, he said, with apparent flippancy: ‘Now they’re bombing Spain—isn’t it better that I’m making a colossal joke instead?’

Seamus Deane has defined the Wake as the fall of man into language—designating both the writer’s and the reader’s fall.16 As an elaboration of this, we may add that one of the Wakean falls is the fall of the human, or the idea of the human, under language and culture, under their proliferating representations.

More precisely, it is a stretching out and serial transformation of a single event until that event disappears, swallowed in allusions, as humanity is destined to be swallowed in the eternity of the universe.

Taking your own reflection as a lover is, moreover, another piece of prudent economy—for after all it costs nothing.

Interesting analysis of Shem the writer and his opposing twin Shaun.

Highly recommend. This book clearly explains Finnegans Wake pointing to various essays and historical context. Clearest explanation thus far for me.