Second Post - May 5

Daily Summary                    Reading Finnegans Wake

Chapter / Pages :                10 - 16

What happens?                   The scene has moved to a crazy Dublin Museum (also the Wake) which details a great deal of recent and ancient history of Dublin. The hyperactive narration of a guide leads us through the museum.

Experience of the text:      I find that the text continually admits, then ejects me from it. Cognitively, I am “in” the text, experiencing what is happening, and then I am “out” of the text, totally perplexed. I toggle back and forth between these two states.  This, I find, is part of the humor and attractiveness of the text, strangely enough.  (The phrase, “Drinking from a fire hose” comes to mind.)

Again, the idea of circularity and fragmentation figure largely in the reading experience.  Already, I see things re-occurring in the text. Also, I experience much of the text as pulses of coherency – sentences don’t presage what follows them nor extend what immediately went before.  This suggests dream logic.

Procedure:                           1. First reading – aloud    2. Second reading – read with annotations / gloss  and the Skeleton Key text by Campbell 3. Third reading – silent read through following first two readings. 

                                                       

Discussion:                          

Here is a sentence, picked at random. Page 10, first full sentence:

“Toffethief, that spy on the Willingdone from

his big white harse, the Capeinhope.”

I chose this at random to illustrate the overall density, and shall I say, the depth of the text.  Any sentence that you select illustrates many key aspects of Joyce’s intent.  But first, let me try to break this down a little bit.   “Willingdone” is at once “Wellington” who saved the world from Napoleon and was Britain’s biggest hero.  This opening section goes on extensively about “Willingdone” and “Lipoleum” as existing in a series of displays in a museum.  This topic is run through EXTENSIVELY. “Willingdone”, aside from being Wellington, signifies intent, heroism and courage: “willing it done”.  We can read both connotations as existing at the same time in this, and other sentences as a parallelism, which is par for the course in FW.  “Toffeethief” limns an Irish song of some sort, “Toffee was a Welshman, Toffee was a thief”.   “His big white harse”, is a continuation of the trope of Willingdone (and Lipoleum) being on horseback (as in heroic paintings), i.e. ‘a big, white horse’.  But also, it reads in the sense of a “hearse” for Finnegan, his wake and all.  “Capeinhope” is simultaneously, “Copenhagen” (extending the Norse trope of the book, England and Ireland having been heavily affected by the Scandinavians in their history) and also, “Cape of Good Hope”, which figures in British colonial expansion.

So we see that one minor, random sentence is something of a microcosm for a lot of the undertow and tropes of Finnegans Wake.

A major concern of Joyce’s, hinted at by this text is his exile to France from Ireland.  Wellington and Napoleon are backdrop to his (and Europe’s) recent history and a matter of direct personal concern to him, having switched alliance (?) and country from Ireland/Britain to France.

Now, again, trying to absolutely pin down the action captured by the sentence is no trivial matter.  Who, what, when, why is the Toffeethief spying on Willingdone from his white horse / hearse?  This is happening in the present, but also, in more than one past – the Norse invasions, the British colonial explorations, the Napoleonic Wars.  The text is germane to many circular, recursive events and is holographic, in a sense.  Each sentence contains a view of an array of the total events.

The analysis of even one sentence launches crazed, fevered ideas and associations, as in the above.  Is this what Joyce intended and planned?  I think it is.