1, Plummet

WITNESS THE SPECTACLE OF THE WAKING BODY.
WHEN THE BODY IS AWAKE THE SOUL ACQUIESCES 
TO EYES, TO EARS, TO LOCOMOTION AND TOUCH.

WHEN THE BODY STIRS, THE SOUL FOLLOWS
IN THE BODY'S ORBIT.

                                    ~

WITNESS THE SIGHT OF THE SLEEPING BODY.
WHILE THE BODY IS ASLEEP, THE SOUL, ALL-PERCEIVING,
OVERSEES THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BODY,
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE EYES, OF THE EARS,
OF MOTION AND TOUCH.

WHILE THE BODY DREAMS, THE SOUL SURVEYS
THE SPECTACLE OF THE SKY.

. . . . . . . .
What is the little book
of the collected work of sleep?

What is the sleepless continuo? 
The endless malady?
The restless octave
that inoculates night?

. . . . . . . .
Nocturna suppressio.
The bacterially spreading falsetto.

. . . . . . . .
Dark dialyzes day's deliriums.
(Desperate cases demand desperate doses.)

Diazepamic diatonic.
The chemically sung interval
between sleep and shortfall
(the short slip between

falling hypnagogic
off a cliff and falling
off a cliff). The shudder
awake, the crash.

- from The Hideous Hidden (2016) by Silvia Legris, pg. 20

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 materiality 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.

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 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). 

The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp (1632), Rembrandt.

On pg 241 of Finnegans Wake there's a reference to this painting by Rembrandt in "Aasdocktor Talop's onamuttony legture"where Joyce places himself in the role of the doctor providing an anatomy lesson. The Wake is on some level a close examination of the inner life of the human body. 

"Aasdocktor Talop" turns the name of Rembrandt's Doctor Tulp into an anagram of Plato ("Talop") while "Aasdocktor" not only recalls the proctologist license plate in Seinfeld, it alludes to the author of the Wake who never shies away from a scatological joke. The double-a "Aasdocktor" line appears within the same extended paragraph (FW 240-242) that gives the Shem/Glugg/Joyce character the cryptic AA name "Anaks Andrum" (FW 240.27) before referring to him as "He, A.A." and the annotations to these lines connect this to the A.A. middle initials of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce.

As a university student Joyce had tried to become a doctor, attending medical school in Paris. In Dublin, he hung out with medical students like Oliver Gogarty who, in the guise of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, coldly describes seeing corpses "cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom."

In Stephen Hero, Joyce wrote: "The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection itself is the most modern process one can conceive." A line later in this chapter of the Wake (II.1) splices together new surgical words with "mortisection or vivisuture, splitten up or recompounded." (FW 253.34)

My review of John Bishop's study of the Wake, Joyce's Book of the Dark, goes in depth on Bishop's theories about the human body underlying everything at play in the Wake. Among other examples, the anatomy lesson angle of the Wake stands out in the introduction to Shem to begin chapter 7 (FW 169) where we get this comical description of his anatomy:

Shem's bodily getup, it seems, included an adze of a skull, an eight of a larkseye, the whoel of a nose, one numb arm up a sleeve, fortytwo hairs off his uncrown, eighteen to his mock lip, a trio of barbels from his megageg chin (sowman's son), the wrong shoulder higher than the right, all ears, an artificial tongue with a natural curl, not a foot to stand on, a handful of thumbs, a blind stomach, a deaf heart, a loose liver, two fifths of two buttocks, one gleetsteen avoirdupoider for him, a manroot of all evil, a salmonkelt's thinskin, eelsblood in his cold toes ... 

Later on in the Wake, during an active seance scene there springs brings forth "A disincarnated spirit...with messuages from my deadported" who is said to disbelieve in miracle cures like the "soulsurgery of P. P. Quemby." (536.06)

Joyce himself had all kinds of medical ailments during his life resulting in many treatments, including a dozen surgical procedures on his eyes. In early 1941 in Zurich, he was suffering severe abdominal pains and underwent emergency operation for a perforated ulcer. Weakened by loss of blood, Joyce died in the hospital following surgery and a blood transfusion. An autopsy showed two ulcers, one which had led to extensive blood loss, and his intestines were badly damaged. Joyce had been suffering stomach pains for years, even mentioned it several times in the Wake including "he's knots in his entrails!" (FW 231.25) but his Parisian physicians kept misdiagnosing him with nervous stomach cramps. Had his badly damaged innards been correctly diagnosed earlier he may have lived long enough to write a sequel to Finnegans Wake.

Last year in June, I was in Dublin for the James Joyce Symposium at Trinity College where I presented a paper. That was my third trip to Dublin in a span of nine months, prior to which I'd never been to Ireland before. The city was bustling for the centennial celebration of Ulysses, which first appeared in 1922. On Bloomsday, June 16th, after attending some panels at Trinity, I wandered around the city and watched locals in the pubs genuinely thrilled for Bloomsday like they were celebrating a local sports team's victory. Dublin was lit and I had a great time hanging with friends throughout the symposium. 

Joyce's cultural politics may share in the broad outlines of a general disillusionment consequent upon the betrayals of international socialism in the early years of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, in Fairhall's persuasive reading, 'however we try to define his ambivalent, elusive politics,' Joyce 'was in any event not a passive esthete, but a literary revolutionist for whom writing represented the supreme political act. (p. 290)

Roy Benjamin teaches English at Borough of Manhattan Community College and has published many articles on Joyce, mostly focused on specific themes and patterns in Finnegans Wake. Among his published articles is a fascinating exploration of the role of axial precession myths in the Wake, a paper whose insights I was inspired to write about at length on this blog several years ago. The publication of a new book-length work by Prof. Benjamin, one of the more prolific and seasoned scholars of Finnegans Wake alive today, is a valuable addition to the canon of Joyce criticism. The new book Beating the Bounds: Excess and Restraint in Joyce's Later Works is published as part of the Florida James Joyce Series (edited by Sebastian D.G. Knowles) printed by the University Press of Florida (side note: ain't it ironic that the state of Florida, of all places, has an academic book production system churning out fascinating scholarly studies of James Joyce? For real though, the series has produced some great books but they need to do something about the exorbitant list prices). 

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

    I am profoundly 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 newsvenues, as well as the Orange County Registerand the Irish Times. 

"wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. In four tubbloids"
(FW 219.16-17) 

    Gerry's group continues to meet once a month. Our Austin collective gathers two Thursdays a month. The Wake Watchers of NYC meet once a month. Dozens of other collectives around the world 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.)

"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

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 Magazinereviewed 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).

Press Event: Reunion Party is Set for Friday, February 2, 2024, Venice, CA, on the birthday of James Joyce

Jan. 18, 2024 - (Venice Beach, CA) For many, reading Finnegans Wake would be a daunting undertaking. But after 28 years of perseverance, the Marshall McLuhan/Finnegans Wake Reading Club (a.k.a Venice Wake) in Venice Beach has finally reached the last page of James Joyce's infamous and widely considered unreadable novel. It took 28 years to read a novel that Joyce took 17 years to write! 

Location:
Venice - Abbot Kinney Memorial Branch Library
501 S. Venice Blvd. Venice, CA 90291
https://www.lapl.org/branches/venice

We invite you to celebrate community & literature evoked by this line written by James Joyce from Finnegans Wake (p.154): "Let me be Los Angeles." 

The book group will begin again on Friday, February 2, at 1:00 P.M. 

Book club founder Gerry Fialka (Wikipedia) will read aloud the last and first lines of Finnegans Wake restarting the book where he began his book club 28 years ago beginning mid-sentence:

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.

Available for Reporters/Editors: 

Archival Video Footage of the Venice 'Finnegan Wake’ book club in action on YouTube (Courtesy of book-club member Duncan Echleson):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o_s2m-oUlE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa-xa8fLy2Y&t=28s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM5lOcpzLQM&t=19s

To learn more about the Marshall McLuhan/Finnegans Wake Reading Club (a.k.a Venice Wake), visit https://LaughTears.com/McLuhanWake.html 

"Fialka brings his distinctive approach. My phone interview with him lasted one hour and eight minutes, and its zigs, zags, and sheer velocity were unmatched in my nearly 20-year journalism career. Was I writing about Finnegans Wake, or was I suddenly inside it?" - Lois Beckett, The Guardian 11-12-23 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years

Marshall McLuhan/Finnegans Wake Reading Club is an independent, unaffiliated public-service literary group. Not a part of the LAPL.org. Free admission.

Book-club founder Gerry Fialka available for interviews on request at pfsuzy@aol.com 

Recent NEWS articles about the Venice Wake's record-setting 28-year read-a-thon:

The Guardian (Sunday edition, called The Observer)
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years

The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/11/16/finnegans-wake-book-club-california

and

[Finnegans, Wake! blog]
https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2023/11/guardian-observer-celebrates-galaxy-of.html

and

Mental Floss 
https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/book-club-reading-james-joyce-finnegans-wake-30-years

and NEW YORK TIMES
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/books/finnegans-wake-james-joyce-venice-book-club.html

and RADIO:

https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/venice-book-club-humperdinck-indigenous/finnegans-wake

and

https://www.wbur.org/npr/1213890392/this-book-club-finally-finished-finnegans-wake-it-only-took-them-28-years

and

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/finnegans-wake-book-club-1.7028252

and TV:

CBS Evening News and more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCIAHiEwINU

Worldwide news coverage, too:

Paris https://actualitte.com/article/113760/insolite/ce-club-de-lecture-a-mis-28-ans-pour-lire-finnegans-wake

Poland https://www.novinky.cz/clanek/koktejl-v-kniznim-klubu-cetli-jedno-dilo-28-let-ted-si-to-chteji-zopakovat-40446363

Prague https://lubimyczytac.pl/czlonkowie-pewnego-klubu-czytelniczego-przeczytali-ksiazke-zajelo-im-to-duzo-czasu

Pretoria https://maroelamedia.co.za/vreemdhede/boekklub-lees-28-jaar-lank-aan-een-boek/

Mandarin 第一本就選中「天書」WorldJournal.com/wj/story/122986/7516835

Munich, Süddeutsche Zeitung https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/james-joyce-finnegans-wake-buchclub-lesen-1.6302605

Berliner-Zeitung https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/panorama/james-joyce-finnegans-wake-buchklub-liest-28-jahre-an-einem-buch-und-faengt-jetzt-wieder-von-vorn-an-li.2159346

Estadão, São Paulo, Brasil: https://digital.estadao.com.br/article/282303914871638

Stockholm, Sweden: https://omni.se/bokklubben-laste-varldens-svaraste-bok-i-28-ar/a/0Q618E

London Times theTimes.co.uk/article/book-club-takes-28-years-to-read-james-joyces-finnegans-wake-vfzvlgcm5

Miami en Español https://www.infobae.com/leamos/2023/11/18/en-1995-empezaron-a-leer-una-novela-de-james-joyce-en-grupo-acaban-de-terminar

Books are to be call'd for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does.
- Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871)

Yes, this does read like an exhortation for an author like Joyce to bring forth books like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Whitman not only called for books "on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep" to wake a reader into a more fuller alertness, but to involve the reader in the construction of meaning in the work itself. In this way Whitman and Joyce seem to be in conversation, and Joyce did own a copy of Whitman's Democratic Vistas in his library. He was also inspired by Leaves of Grass ever since he was a young writer and he made references and allusions to Whitman repeatedly in his work, especially Finnegans Wake. That quote alone though, from a book Joyce owned, by an author he admired, could be an intriguing answer to the persistent question of why each of Joyce's books increasingly challenges the reader so much. It's worth thinking about, at least.

    Lately, I've been interested in Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and what impact he had on James Joyce (1882-1941), and this influence seems more significant than most commentators have tended to note. This interest sprung from time I've spent in the past year around south Jersey and Philadelphia areas where so many places are named for Whitman, who spent the final two decades of his life at a house in New Jersey recovering from a stroke. While I was driving across the Walt Whitman Bridge to enter into Philly from Jersey one day, I recalled the first time I encountered the impressive harp-shaped Samuel Beckett Bridge in Dublin and how impossible it seemed that there might be a prominent bridge named after a poet in the USA. The naming of the New Jersey bridge in honor of Whitman happened in the mid-1950s and sparked the local conservative Catholic community into an uproar, one person offering this critique in a letter: "As a thinker Walt Whitman possesses the depth of a saucer and enjoys a vision which extends about as far as his eyelids. A naturalist, a pantheist, a freethinker, a man whose ideas were destructive of usual ethical codes- is this a name we wish to preserve for posterity?" The Port Authority decided to keep the name, and a statue of Whitman stands near the bridge this day. Whitman once wrote "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." Joyce was an exile from Ireland for nearly four decades, yet his books concentrate entirely on Ireland. The initial reception of Joyce's work in his native country, though, was far harsher than any reactionary furor against Whitman. Each country has since affectionately absorbed its poet, Joyce is now celebrated in his native Ireland, just as Whitman is revered in America. The two authors are also among the prime literary heroes celebrated across the entire globe. Finnegans Wake has been translated into Japanese and its translation into Chinese was advertised on billboards in Shanghai. I was struck recently while traveling in Asia when I passed a huge bright colorful billboard in Bangkok that featured this quote: "Peace is always beautiful" - Walt Whitman.

    It's been interesting for me while reading Leaves of Grass alongside my ongoing reading of Finnegans Wake with different groups, and noticing how often there's a noticeable dialogue across eras between Whitman and Joyce. According to Stanislaus Joyce in My Brother's Keeper, James Joyce's interest in Whitman dates back at least to 1901. An early notebook Joyce wrote poems in around 1901-1902 was titled "Shine and Dark" the name derived from Whitman's line "Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river" from "Song of Myself." This would've been when Joyce was just turning 20 years old and yet consider how the images in that one Whitman line resonate with the mytho-cosmic river of life Joyce wrote about decades later in Finnegans Wake. The dual "shine and dark" opposites dominate the fabric of the Wake like opposite riverbanks, "mottling the tide" of the river, darkened by earth/mud, like "our turfbrown mummy" (FW 194.22) Anna Livia (the tidal river Liffey)---it's all there in that one line from "Song of Myself." Another indication of how Joyce felt about Whitman's poetry during these early years of his writing is found in the essay Joyce wrote in 1902 on the Irish poet James Clarence Mangan where his effusive praise for the Irish poet is tempered with "it does not attain the quality of Whitman." 

    In the winter of 1906 after having left Ireland and settled in Rome, Italy, the 24-year-old Irishman Joyce was working as a clerk in a bank trying to support his wife and newborn child. Joyce was miserable with his life at that point, he hated Rome and he had barely any leisure time thanks to the grueling demands of his clerk job which involved working 8:30am to 7:30pm handwriting hundreds of letters per day. He worried about how he could ever find the time and energy to read or write anything. The poems of Whitman fed his soul around this time, we know because on December 7th, 1906, in a letter to Stanislaus, he mentions: "Thanks for Whitman's poems. What long flowing lines he writes." You can just imagine the young writer struggling at that stage of his life and how he may have been impacted reading lines like these from Whitman's poems: 

"I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up" 

"Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes." 

"Something long preparing and formless is arrived and form'd in you,
    You are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes." 

(Whitman quotes are from the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass which seems most likely the one Joyce possessed.)

Brian Fox's book James Joyce's America (2019) deals extensively with Joyce's view of Whitman. Fox shows how Whitman had gained great influence in the Irish literary world "since at least the 1870s" (Fox, 127). WB Yeats and John Eglinton (the real world Dublin librarian/author who appears as a character in Ulysses) were especially big enthusiasts of Whitman, but Fox argues the Irish republican nationalists "made him in their own idealized image" (Fox, 129) and in the process turned the radical poet into something conventional and orthodox. Fox tries to argue "that Joyce responds to this by turning Whitman against the orthodox ranks of his supporters"  (Fox, 128), who Fox repeatedly refers to as Whitmaniacs. James Joyce's America is full of hot takes and fresh readings, and in discussing Whitman and Joyce, Fox builds an argument that Joyce initially viewed the American poet as a model decolonized national poet, but Joyce's placement of Whitman in Ulysses is more nuanced, and that "it would appear that the significance Whitman had for the younger Joyce as a potential model for a national poet did not translate into the later work, particularly Finnegans Wake." (Fox, 135) On this last part I disagree with Fox. Even he himself documents the extensive presence of Whitman in Ulysses and he notes some (but not all) of his appearances in the Wake.

    Fox makes it seem like young Joyce was a huge fan of Whitman, he argues that in Ulysses he started to become more agnostic about the American poet, and then by the time of Finnegans Wake he has become practically hostile and mocking of Whitman. Reading this felt as if Fox wanted to fit Joyce's views on Whitman into something like the progressive structure of lyrical-epic-dramatic form (outlined in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), whereby once he gets to Finnegans Wake, Joyce has become an indifferent god paring his fingernails. Doesn't it make more sense, considering all the references to Whitman in the Wake, that the poet he had loved and was inspired by as a youth remained an influence throughout his life? Giordano Bruno is one good example of a figure the young Joyce adopted as his hero and maintained an interest in while working on the Wake. There are other examples (Dante, Shakespeare, Ibsen). Why make Whitman out to be an aberration? It's clearly documented that Joyce had an appreciation for Whitman as early as 1901 all the way thru the 1930s. Give Whitman that props. None of this is to disparage Fox's superb study of the meaningful American connections in Joyce's life and career, but I disagree with his framing of the Whitman influence.

    A good counterpoint to the assertion that Joyce no longer held Whitman in high esteem while working on the Wake comes from the story of when Sylvia Beach transformed Shakespeare & Co bookshop in Paris into a Whitman shrine one year. This was in 1926 when Joyce was fully immersed in crafting his Work in Progress that would become Finnegans Wake. Sylvia Beach was assisting Joyce with his manuscripts while also working on French translations of Whitman with Adrienne Monnier. That year, Sylvia Beach founded the Paris branch of the Walt Whitman Committee, to be headquartered at Shakespeare and Co. There's a whole chapter about this in the excellent book Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (1983) by Noel Riley Fitch. A party in the bookshop that February is described: "At the party for Ulysses's fourth birthday (the forty-fourth for Joyce), at which both author and publisher wore eye-patches, they talked of Sylvia's plans for the Whitman exhibit, and Joyce quoted some lines from Whitman's poetry." (Fitch, 228) Later that year, the bookshop was decked out for a celebration of Whitman, attended by the likes of Joyce, Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and other Paris literati. Beach recalled of that event: "Only Joyce and the French and I were old-fashioned enough to get along with Whitman." (232) So, clearly Joyce maintained his admiration for the American poet during the period while he was writing the Wake.

******

The text of Finnegans Wake has a bunch of references to Whitman and Leaves of Grass. A quick rundown:

- FW 81.36 "the cradle rocking equally" etc alludes to Whitman's line "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking" from Leaves of Grass

- FW 263.09 "old Whiteman self" would be Whitman and his "Song of Myself" which Joyce alludes to most often. Reading thru the rest of this chapter you'll find lines that sound like Whitman, see for example 274.03"The allriddle of it? That that is allruddy with us, ahead of schedule, which already is plan accomplished from and syne."

- FW 329.18"The soul of everyelsesbody rolled into its olesoleself" captures the essence of the pancosmic perspective in "Song of Myself" where Whitman contains and embodies everything and everyone. This line in the Wake also describes the Here Comes Everybody character at the center of the book. HCE definitely comes across as a version of the self in Whitman who declares,"I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I an encloser of things to be." 

- FW 469.25 "this panromain apological which Watllwewhistlem sang" again refers to "Song of Myself" and its author "Watllwewhistlem" with the capitalized W making for a whimsical Wakean transformation of Whitman's name.

- Virtually the entire Yawn chapter (III.3) and especially the section known as Haveth Childers Everywhere (on pgs 535-554) bears considerable Whitman influence. Adaline Glasheen was the first to point this out in her Census of Finnegans Wake. J.S. Atherton confirms this in his Books at the Wake: "The similarities do in fact suggest that Joyce had Whitman's work in mind when he wrote these passages." (p. 288) Donald Theall in his Joyce's Techno-Poetics also discusses this at length. When HCE begins his monologue the text says "Old Whitehowth is speaking again" (FW 535.26). This section in Finnegans Wake is the rare moment when the central figure HCE speaks at length and it is here where Joyce most clearly links his everyman character HCE with Whitman. 

- A general point of comparison between texts: Whitman, who worked as a printer and self published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, went pretty far off the rails with using exclamation points in Leaves. The final omnibus 1892 edition of 334 pages has by my count at least 2.2 exclamation points per page. Finnegans Wake is as exhortative as any book, the title can be read as an exhortation (finnegans, wake!) and it far exceeds Leaves with more than 5.4 exclamation points per page! 

*****

"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy," wrote Nietzsche. This idea is prominent in both Leaves of Grass and Finnegans Wake. Each celebrates the biological body as a living artifact of all that came before it, a pinnacle of all that led to the production of this physical being, from the birth of the universe and the formation of cells and the earth to the development of living organisms and the survival of species through millennia. All of that is inside of us. The sleeping body at the heart of Finnegans Wake is known as Here Comes Everybody and his descent into the deepest primordial sleep comes across in a fabric made of more than 70 languages. ("Human bodies are words, myriads of words," Whitman wrote.) The concept of time melts into one single rippling pan-cosmic plane and somehow it seems the Wake contains all that ever was, is, or shall be. Yet on one level the main character of the book is a middle-aged pub owner asleep with his family in their house in Chapelizod, outside Dublin. 

    In Leaves of Grass, Whitman addresses you the reader directly, whoever you are, and celebrates your existence. 

"Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid and liquid,
You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky,
For none more than you are the present and the past,
For none more than you is immortality."

Even the tiniest most insignificant life forms are the source of infinite glories. "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars... And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels," Whitman wrote. There are many passages in Leaves of Grass which resonate with what Joyce was trying to do with the Wake. And whereas the Wake's language is obscure, dense, difficult to comprehend---and we've already touched on the influence Whitman might've had on those linguistic pyrotechnics---when you notice how often Joyce alludes to Leaves of Grass you might begin to read and interpret Leaves of Grass as a guide to Finnegans Wake, in less opaque language. 

"Immense have been the preparations for me,
 Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me.

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care."    
(Leaves of Grass)

When trying to make sense of how, in Finnegans Wake, the inner experience of a dreaming Irish publican could be so expansive and all-encompassing, it is this type of poetic perspective of Whitman's concerning the hidden histories reflected inside of every living soul which might begin to explain things. 

"List close my scholars dear,
Doctrines, politics and civilization exurge from you,
Sculpture and monuments and any thing inscribed anywhere are tallied in you,
The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records
reach is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same,
If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they all be?
The most renown’d poems would be ashes, orations and plays would be vacuums."
(Leaves of Grass)

******

There are not many people who've ever lived about whom it could be said they were ascribed the quality of cosmic consciousness, especially not modern figures, but among those few are Walt Whitman and James Joyce. Richard Maurice Bucke, who wrote the book Cosmic Consciousness in 1901, was a personal friend of Whitman, was Whitman's first biographer, and a big part of his inspiration to write a study of people throughout history who seemed to be suffused with a cosmic consciousness was because of his experiences hanging out with Whitman who he perceived as some kind of demigod. A vast, limitless cosmic perspective is evident across Leaves of Grass, where the poet wrote, "The clock indicates the moment--but what does eternity indicate? We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers, There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them."& "A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient, They are but parts, any thing is but a part."

    As unscientific as all this might be (and come on, we're talking about the minds of poets here), the same level of cosmic consciousness has been ascribed to Joyce---in Philip K. Dick's novel The Divine Invasion (1981) he wrote, "I'm going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn't exist until centuries after James Joyce's era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work." (underline added)

    I want to add to this that reading these two works together, Whitman (in Leaves) and Joyce (in the Wake) could be said to have possessed what I will call an "earth consciousness" as well. One of the great sections of Leaves of Grass is entitled "A Song of the Rolling Earth" wherein Whitman celebrates the miraculous mysterious globe that is our only home, this rolling round orb of earth. 

"I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those of the earth,
There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the theory of the earth,
No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account, unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude of the earth."

*****

In his very good book The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (2007), the author Lewis Hyde has a chapter on Walt Whitman where he offers an interesting theory on the origins of Leaves of Grass. Sometime in 1855, Whitman came across a huge exhibit in New York City that featured etchings of Egyptian hieroglyphs and tomb carvings that had been assembled by an Italian archeologist 15 years prior, including an etching of the resurrection of the dead god Osiris showing a figure pouring a libation onto Osiris' coffin and long stalks of wheat growing out. This was right around the time Whitman wrote the first edition of Leaves of Grass and also when he published the poem “A Poem of Wonder at The Resurrection of The Wheat” which was included in the final 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass under the title "This Compost." 

    This directly relates to Finnegans Wake where the Egyptian myths of the resurrection of the dead god Osiris are a recurrent motif in the text, and this image of wheat growing out of the casket of Osiris is alluded to several times, as in "the cropse of our seedfather" (FW 55.08) and "your hair grows wheater beside the Liffey that's in Heaven!" (FW 26.08) There may not be a more important theme in the Wake than that of renewal/resurrection which is evident in the title Finnegans Wake, taken from an Irish American ballad about a corpse who wakes up at his own funeral (notably, after a libation splashes on him). 
    The renewal/resurrection theme is also extremely prominent in Leaves of Grass, a book that constantly confronts death---"And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me"---while highlighting the resilient forces of vegetation growing out of decay, "It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions." In the aforementioned book The Gift, while discussing the inspiration Whitman took from the Osiris etching, Lewis Hyde emphasizes that Whitman's image of the grass was originally conceived as "the grass of graves" a metaphor which is explored variously throughout Leaves of Grass, as for instance in picturing grass as "the beautiful uncut hair of graves."
    We can tie this directly to the Wake when considering some of the ways grass appears in Joyce's text, for instance: on pg 24 we are in the middle of Finnegan's funeral and there's an emphasis on the resurrection, the reawakening, the phoenix bird rising from the ashes, the idea that Finnegan can be rejuvenated in a number of ways including, "And would again could whispring grassies wake him and may again when the fiery bird disembers." (FW 24.11) The "whispring grassies" comes up later in the closing lines of the book (FW 628.12) "We pass through grass behush the bush. Whish!" With that image in mind now notice the whispering effect in this bit from Leaves of Grass: 

"And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)

I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,
O suns—O grass of graves—O perpetual transfers and promotions,
If you do not say any thing how can I say any thing?"
(Leaves of Grass)

As I mentioned above, Lewis Hyde argues that the poem which appears under the title "This Compost" in Leaves of Grass is foundational to Whitman's whole project. "Behold this compost! behold it well!" Whitman declares. He marvels at how the earth can receive the most diseased corpses and somehow cleanse and transform all that death and disease into sprouting spears of green grass, that the earth "gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last." In Finnegans Wake, this process is embodied in the midden-heap, a giant garbage mound containing all the scattered detritus of history, the "Compost liffe in Dufblin" (FW 447.23). Once you start to draw these parallels, they spring up everywhere you look in these two texts. Not much can be said to be clear about Finnegans Wake, but when read alongside Whitman's Leaves of Grass, clearly there is an important link there. By reading the Wake through an interpretation of Whitman we might begin to gain a better appreciation for the gifts these artists gave to us.

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- Peter Quadrino

No matter where I went, whether all the way out in Leopardstown or in the heart of the city, every time I looked up something nearby it seemed there was mention of it in the Wake. It's hard to overstate how much one feels embedded in the Wake due to the places and place names one encounters in that city. At one point I relocated to the city center and, looking on the map, I notice across the street from my hotel was a funeral parlor by the name of Fanagan. This was on Aungier Street, central Dublin. Sounded familiar, so I looked for it in Finnegans Wake and, sure enough, Fanagan's funeral parlor is punned on several times in the book. They've been in business in the same location since the year 1819. You will find "Fanagan's weak yat his still's going strang" (FW 276.22) among other appearances, "and all the fun I had in that fanagan's week." (FW 351) That's Dublin, the center of Wake world. The text of Joyce's encyclopedic 1939 novel is so wide open it seems to encompass everything that's ever been or will be, yet it all revolves around the reliable center anchor that is Dublin and environs. A real place on a map. The same Dublin I was staying in, strolling through, the same street as present-day Fanagan's undertakers fashioning their own wakes for Finnegans for the last two hundred years. 

Being in Dublin means being at a crossroads of mulitverses, a centerpoint of alternate realities, the axis of a mandala where worlds intersect and converge. Joyce scholar Struther B. Purdy wrote an article for the JJQ entitled, "Is There a Multiverse in Finnegans Wake, and Does That Make It a Religious Book?" In that piece, Purdy argued that Joyce's linguistic manipulations and the unmooring of space/time leads to words creating alternate worlds:

Past and present are coterminous because they are different places. Different places and different times coexist; words make worlds. Worlds are therefore a) plural and b) as unlimited in number as are words. "Budlim" (FW 337.26) is not Dublin distorted phonologically to add to the description of the earth's Dublin but a Dublin-like city in another Ireland, possibly the eerieland/"Ereland" of FW 264.31. The "battle of the Boyne" is locatable as the battle of that name in 1690, while the "bettlle of the bawll" is a shadow battle in a different world. (FW 114.36, 337.34).

Further multiplying the shadow worlds of "Dublin-like" cities in Joyce's "Errorland" (FW 62) or "Aaarlund" (FW69) hovering next to and intersecting with earth's Dublin are the various names for Dublin that proliferate throughout Finnegans Wake. Wander the city, take the bus, or ride the train around Dublin, and you'll frequently encounter the Irish names for places (signs and announcements include both the English and Irish language) especially Baile Atha Cliath, the city's Irish name, which translates to Town of the Ford of Hurdles. Hurdles are basketwork, (hence "at Wickerworks" FW 289) which was used as a ford or bridge to cross the river. In the Wake it appears as "fordofhurdlestown" (203.07). Seeing the words Baile Atha Cliath pop up so often around town always harkens back to the Wake where variations of "Baulacleeva" (FW 134) and "Bauliaughacleeagh" (FW 310) inundate the page, "the deep drowner Athacleeath." (FW 539). In the Dublin of the pre-Viking invasions era, there actually were two settlements along the Liffey named Atha Cliath (hurdle ford) and Dubh Linn (black pool). The two names are now interchangeable. Dear dirty Dublin or "Dix Dearthy Dungbin" (FW 370) the center of the Joycean universe, it is astounding when you consider how devotedly Joyce's books focus on Dublin.

Even after his young and defiant departure from the emerald isle with Nora Barnacle in 1904, Joyce made a few trips back to Ireland, first in 1909 and again in 1912. Never again after that. Biographers note that he stayed away for fear he might be attacked in the street, thinking of an incident that happened to Parnell where an assailant threw quicklime powder in his eyes. Nora and the kids got caught in a crossfire in Galway on a visit once. The period of the Irish Revolution was extremely violent, and nationalists not only might accuse Joyce of not sufficiently supporting their cause, in those days they were likely to be angered by Joyce's depictions of the Irish.

Whether reading Joyce's books or walking the streets of Dublin, the emphasis on psychogeographies leads me to be interested in recalling the facts of when was the last time Joyce was physically present in the country he wrote so much about. Here are some details on the last visits James Joyce made to Ireland:

• July 1909 the exile returns to Dublin for the first time since he left with Nora in 1904. Joyce arrived by ship into Kingstown Pier (now Dun Laoghaire, same pier from which they had disembarked). First thing he spotted on getting off the ship was Oliver Gogarty's fat back, and he avoided his old nemesis. James and his son Giorgio took the train into the city center and were welcomed by his father and sisters at Westland Row Station (present day Pearse station). This was the trip when Joyce bumped into a friend, Cosgrove, who said he'd taken long walks with Nora after dark when they were first dating. Joyce fell into despair, went over to 7 Eccles Street (in north Dublin) to be consoled by his friend Byrne. These events became integral to Joyce's conception of his novel, Ulysses. On that same trip, Joyce met with his nemesis Gogarty for one final tense encounter. Gogarty would soon be transformed by Joyce's pen into Buck Mulligan, the arrogant foil to Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. By the time Joyce left Dublin with his son in September 1909, he felt sick of the place. 
• But he would return shortly thereafter, on 21October 1909. This time he stayed for more than two months. This time it was a very awkward departure when he left Nora in Trieste. He was heading into Dublin for a business venture, looking to find a good location for the new cinema he was helping to put together, the first of its kind in Ireland. He settled on 45 Mary Street, not far from busy Sackville Street (present day O'Connell Street). On this trip, he was also meeting with publisher George Roberts trying to get his first book Dubliners published. During this trip he "went to Finn's Hotel, visited Nora's old bedroom and wept. After dining there, he sat at the table and wrote to her, sobbing as he did so." (Bowker, p. 189) Joyce and his business partners went up to Belfast looking for more sites to build a cinema. The Volta was opened on Mary Street in Dublin in December. During this long time away from his young wife, Joyce and Nora exchanged naughty letters. Seems he had become so aroused, he couldn't resist going to visit the brothels in Nighttown. There's an implication that he might've caught a venereal disease at this point. He confessed this to Nora who stopped sending letters to him for a while after.
• July 1912, Joyce rushed off to Dublin with Giorgio to meet Nora and Lucia. Bowker pg. 200-201 details how Nora brought Lucia to Ireland to meet her family in Galway in 1912. They also went east where the Dublin Joyces met the girls at Westland Row station on July 8. That's when John Joyce broke down in tears at the sight of Lucia, feeling sad that he'd become disconnected from his favorite son. James Joyce in Trieste was troubled with jealousy, grew anxious over not hearing from Nora, became sad because she stayed at Finn's Hotel without even mentioning to him that it was where they first met. So he borrowed money from friends and rushed off to Dublin from Italy with Giorgio on July 12. Upon arrival, they stayed at 17 Richmond Place with his brother Charlie and family. Of this visit, Bowker writes: 

Joyce was anxious to refresh his memory of the city which he had made the centre-point of his creative imagination. There were places to revisit and fragments of gossip to be gleaned from every encounter, every visit to a bar, every edition of a Dublin newspaper. (p. 201) 

After more difficulties with the printers and publishers over the publishing of Dubliners, Joyce wrote the broadside "Gas from a Burner" attacking those who refused to publish his works for fear of upsetting the Ireland of the time under British rule and Catholic control. He took a ship back to Trieste, never to return to Ireland again. Soon thereafter he started writing Ulysses. 

Decades later, in 1941 when Joyce and his family managed to escape Nazi-occupied France to enter into Switzerland, an Irishman named Sean Lester greeted them. Lester, the last Secretary-General of the League of Nations, records Joyce's answer when Lester asked him why he did not go home to Ireland: "I am attached to it daily and nightly like an umbilical cord."
(see more here)

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"And Dub dig glow that night" FW 329.14

The city today has a population that keeps growing, worsening a severe housing shortage. Dublin has become an international tech hub, home to headquarters of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, &c. The many colorful lights gleam at night from ultra-modern architecture along the quays of the “efferfreshpainted livy” (FW 452), the effervescent ever-fresh-painted Liffey. Modernized as it has become, the city still constantly summons connections to Joyce's 1939 novel. Of course, the same applies for Ulysses, that book by itself generates substantial tourism to Dublin. As I mentioned in a previous post, I got to walk around the city during the Ulysses centennial on Bloomsday 2022 and really get a feel for the local pride around that book (John McCourt's recent book Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland gives a great account of the shift in Ireland's attitude toward Joyce). 

I'm taking you through some of my experiences exploring sites relevant to Joyce's work, especially Finnegans Wake. I had been reading the book for at least a decade before I ever set foot in Dublin. When you gain even a passing familiarity with districts in Dublin, a shockingly significant portion of the text starts to become recognizable. I think it is likely true that nothing could better prepare someone to read Finnegans Wake than to visit Dublin and learn about the city. I don't mean to promote the place, although I do love it there. It's just that the Wake is obsessed with Dublin to the point of absurdity, at one point when the opaque book offers a moment of clarity, for instance, it turns into a commercial promoting the city:

This seat of our city it is of all sides pleasant, comfortable and wholesome. If you would traverse hills, they are not far off. If champain land, it lieth of all parts. If you be delited with fresh water, the famous river, called of Ptolemy the Libnia Labia, runneth fast by. If you will take the view of the sea, it is at hand. Give heed! (FW 540.03-08)

I think it is fair to say the text of the Wake contains even more information about Dublin than Ulysses does. Dublin serves as the setting for Ulysses and it is as thoroughly described as could be. In the Wake, though, Dublin becomes the entire texture of the language. Dublin is the subject, object and predicate. City district names blend, morph, and become verbs. To the extent there are characters in the Wake they are on some level representative of aspects of the environment, the father connected with Howth Head, the mother is the River Liffey, the daughter is a cloud, for example.

Everything in the entire history of this place across varying scales of time all coexists on the same plane in the Wake. Dublin becomes a crossroads of multiverses where time folds into and becomes part of space. You notice there is so much history embedded everywhere around Dublin, and how the text of the Wake seems to embody this landscape, its earth layers filled with centuries of history. There is a Timefulness to the place. This is a term coined by the geologist Marcia Bjornerud to describe spaces containing a palpable presence of deep history. As she explains: "I see that the events of the past are still present… This impression is a glimpse not of timelessness but timefulness, an acute consciousness of how the world is made by–indeed made of–time." (p. 127 Saving Time, Jenny Odell) I thought of this when I saw a Martello Tower or when I saw Howth Castle or the rocky cliffs in Dalkey or the promontory in Bray or the rugged coastline at Greystones. Joyce in the Wake captures the essence of this observation in the phrase "this timecoloured place" (FW 29.20). 

A more expansive example of this timefulness quality of Dublin is provided by Joyce when Stephen is walking along Sandymount Strand in the "Proteus" episode of Ulysses and he has this vision of being among the vikings: 

   Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Dane vikings, torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the collar of gold. A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon, spouting, hobbling in the shallows. Then from the starving cagework city a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers’ knives, running, scaling, hacking in green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague and slaughters. Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves. I moved among them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the spluttering resin fires. I spoke to no-one: none to me.

"Famine, plague, and slaughters" marked the years of the brutal Viking invasions of Dublin. What Stephen describes are not only scenes of bloody wars in Scandinavian Dublin but also visions of hordes of locals feeding off beached whale carcasses "hacking in green blubbery whalemeat," and this cluster of images comes up again in the first chapter of the Wake as the reader is guided along on a tour of Dublin. 

Men like to ants or emmets wondern upon a groot hwide Whallfisk which lay in a Runnel. Blubby wares upat Ublanium. (FW 13)

Men feeding off "a groot hwide Whallfisk" whale laying in a runnel or a river channel. And the last part is not just the blubber wares of whale meat but the bloody wars at Eblana, another name Joyce uses for Dublin. (Eblana was the name given by Ptolemy in early maps of the Dublin area.) The bloody wars in Dublin becomes a motif repeated again a few more times in the ensuing paragraphs, while also giving the various names for Dublin. 

Blubby wares upat Ublanium.

…

Blurry works at Hurdlesford.

…

Bloody wars in Ballyaughacleeaghbally.

…

Blotty words for Dublin.
(FW 13-14)

I think what is being captured in the varying names for Dublin being stacked this way is showing the changes across time due to the bloody wars and blurry works. But, again, in the Wake all of these historical eras and events are ongoing and coterminous with each other, all active in the same space. 

In the last post, I was describing visions of Dublin, seeing the ink and paper of Finnegans Wake merging with the sewage, rainwaters, roots and soil of the city. I was thinking of the letter in the book, on one level representing the Wake itself, buried deep under the city, taking root in the inner terrain of Dublin. Interlocking with the city innards, like an artery, soaking in the detritus of the city, draining down to the Liffey. Blackpool. Dubh Linn. 

what was beforeaboots a land of nods, inspite of all the bloot, all the braim, all the brawn, all the brile, that was shod, that were shat, that was shuk all the while, for our massangrey if mosshungry people, the at Wickerworks, still hold ford to their healing (FW pg 288) 

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If to be able to read Ulysses it is advisable to relate the movements of the characters to a map of Dublin… in Finnegans Wake it is the text itself that, in a sustained embodiment of modern creativity, becomes the map, the pilot's book, the topographical pattern, the metaphoric grid, the model and the structure capable of projecting the image of the world onto a screen, on a two-dimensional page…   

(Carla Vaglio Marengo, "Mapping the Unknown, Charting the Immarginable, Fathoming the Void: Space, Exploration and Cartography in Finnegans Wake", from Joyce Studies in Italy, 2022)

There is a circularity to the geography of Dublin as it's presented in the Wake. It starts with a sentence that cycles around town starting from Adam and Eve's Church, going along the swerve of shore, out to Vico Road in Dalkey, and then "by a commodious vicus of recirculation" cycling around out to Howth Castle. The drilling down into the history embedded in the layers of the landscape I mentioned above seems like a centripetal spiralling down into the vertical depths of "Shuvlin, Old Hoeland." (FW 359.24-26) The "Nightlessons" chapter (II.2) has a bunch of geographical aspects to it, the lessons studied by the children involve the geography of Dublin. It seems the Euclidean overlapping circles diagram on FW p. 293 has a geographical interpretation to it, maybe that is what the directions are providing in the second paragraph of that chapter (on pg 260), where the reader is given an itinerary through the city, we circle "wheel, to where. Long Livius Lane, mid Mezzofanti Mall, diagonising Lavatery Square, up Tycho Brache Crescent" (FW 260) and so on.

A few pages prior there is a passage with a geographical survey of the city: "where G.P.O. is zentrum and D.U.T.C. are radients write down by the frequency of the scores and crores of your refractions the valuations in the pice of dingyings on N.C.R. and S.C.R." (FW 256.29-32) This denotes the GPO, or General Post Office, on O'Connell Street as the center ("zentrum") of the city, with radii "radients" branching out via the DUTC (Dublin United Tram Company) pathways, and then the "N.C.R." and "S.C.R." are the North Circular Road and South Circular Road. When you stare at the map of Dublin with this in mind, looking at the rounded roads along the north and south you could see how the city might be considered a circular or oval oblong shape, as Joyce calls the city elsewhere in the Wake, "D'Oblong." (FW 266.06) This spatial geomapping has some historical accuracy, as described in Roy Benjamin's book Beating of the Bounds, the North and South Circular Roads were originally designed to be the boundaries of the city. 

Just as the historical events of the place are not abstract or in the past but actively occurring alongside each other, the city of Dublin doesn't just exist as a static entity in the Wake, it's constantly in motion taking formation as the streets branch out from the river in the heart of the city forming like veins carrying the lifeblood of the community. When Joyce had sent his patron Harriet Weaver a draft section of the Anna Livia chapter including his annotations shedding light on what was going on in the passage, he explained one of the lines this way: "All this is to give the idea of the growth of Dublin, branching out into one street after another." The branching streets and the tracks of the trams and trains venture out from the heart of the city to the suburbs and back. This is the same network described at the opening of the "Aeolus" chapter of Ulysses with the headline blaring "In the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis" followed by details of the same radii lines of the Dublin United Tram Company expanding outward from the GPO in the center of the city.

The detailed geomapping with the GPO serving as the centerpoint becomes even more outlandish elsewhere in II.2 when the focus is on the suburb of Chapelizod, to the west of city center, the place where the Mullingar Inn pub is located. This pub is considered to be the location of all the events of Finnegans Wake, with the pub owner and his family asleep upstairs and, according to some interpretations, dreaming all of what we're reading in the book. In a passage on pg. 265 the distance from the Mullingar pub to the GPO is given as "only two millium two humbered and eighty thausig nine humbered and sixty radiolumin lines to the wustworts of a Finntown's generous poet's office." (FW 265.25-28) Naming the GPO "generous poet's office" is fantastic, bravo Joyce, but breaking down the distance into "radiolumin lines" is truly mindboggling. McHugh's notes say that there are 2,280,960 twelfths of an inch in three miles (the distance between the GPO and the Mullingar pub). But "radiolumin lines" conjures not only the radius, but also rays (radius) of light (lumin) which gets into all kinds of physics ideas about lightspeed as a measurement. Too much for me to comprehend right now, but we will come back to the landmark Mullingar pub later on.

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 Centering ourselves at the General Post Office on O'Connell Street, nearby there is the pointed Dublin Spire structure, the city's focal point and a memorial of the site of Nelson's Pillar which once stood there before it was blown up in 1966. If you started from there and walked a few blocks up to Henry Street and turn left, walk a bit and you'll be on Mary Street, a busy shopping area, and you will pass by 45 Mary Street which was the site of the Volta Theater, the first cinema in Dublin, which Joyce had helped arrange on one of his final visits to Ireland. 

From there if you turn left and walk back down toward the river you'll come upon Bachelor's Walk along the north quay of the Liffey—this street is mentioned on pg 214 of the Wake, a part you can listen to Joyce himself reading aloud in a recording, "of a manzinahurries off Bachelor's Walk." From Bachelor's Walk you can cross onto Ha'Penny Bridge to walk across the Liffey onto the south side of the river. This bridge was originally called "Wellington's Iron Bridge" and it appears this way on FW 286.11, with the capitalization and no distortions. On one of my stays in Dublin I was in lodgings right on Bachelor's Walk and got to walk across Wellington's Iron Bridge every day. Here's the view from the bridge after crossing to the southside, where you can see Merchant's Arch, a spot featured in Ulysses.

Merchant's Arch from Wellington's Iron Bridge (aka Hapenny Bridge)

Once you cross the bridge you can walk thru the archway, this area used to be filled with bookshops, described in the scene where Bloom is observed scanning books in Ulysses:  "They went up the steps and under Merchants’ arch. A darkbacked figure scanned books on the hawker’s cart." Walk under the archway, go a few blocks then turn left and you'll be heading toward Trinity College. In June 2022, I had the honor of presenting a paper in an auditorium at Trinity for the centennial Joyce conference. It was an incredible moment in my life. I spoke on the morning of Bloomsday. Just outside of Trinity if you walk down Nassau Street you will encounter Finn's Hotel, the site where James and Nora Joyce first met. Finn's Hotel is considered by some scholars to be Joyce's original title for Finnegans Wake. Walk around the corner and you'll find Sweny's Pharmacy and down the street from there is present-day Pearse train station, which used to be Westland Row station which comes up in Ulysses and which Joyce himself had arrived at in one of his last visits to Dublin.

When walking down Nassau Street you can also turn right and go down Dawson Street, and there you will find the historic Hodges Figgis bookstore. This place has been in operation for over 200 years (albeit including moving locations), it is one of the oldest bookshops in the world. It pops up in Ulysses and in Finnegans Wake. It's a fantastic bookstore, a great place to browse for hours. I can tell you that they've got an impressively deep collection of Joyce books. I was there eyeing their several shelves of Joyceana and, can you imagine what it must've felt like when I discovered they had a book on the shelf which named me in the index? I'm not kidding. The book is called James Joyce and the Arts (part of the European Joyce Studies series) and there's an essay in there by Derek Pyle which mentioned THIS BLOG in a footnote. I was in the heart of Dublin, in a bookstore that appears in Ulysses and the Wake, and found my name in a footnote in a Joyce book. Achievement unlocked, life goal accomplished. 

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The inspiration for the thoughts I'm sharing here I originally conceived while standing atop Killiney Hill observing the landscape around Dublin, the rolling green Wicklow Mountains in the distance, and I was envisioning how the hills would look in the night in centuries past when, in the words of the Wake, "There were fires on every bald hill in holy Ireland that night" (FW 501). I've been curious about that phrase "holy Ireland" and it doesn't seem to be common, then I saw the same phrase used in a book by the American poet Susan Howe, The Quarry, which mentions "reciting secret languages of holy Ireland." Susan Howe is the daughter of Mary Manning Howe, an author and playwright who was born and raised in Dublin. She was a close friend of Samuel Beckett, and as a playwright she adapted Finnegans Wake to the stage. (see here)

Ireland is a famously evocative environment for writers. I'm focused on Joyce and the Wake here, but Ireland has a rich literary tradition beyond Joyce, and the country today continues to be very welcoming to writers. There are frequent articles about the literary mecca of Dublin, here's one example.

One of the first things that strikes me every time I arrive in Ireland is noticing the old stone walls covered in mossy mold from the sea air, soon as I see the mossy old stone I know where I am. This comes up in the Wake where "though he's mildewstaned he's mouldystoned" (FW 128.02) That moldy stonework and the sea air are part of the recipe for literary brainwork I associate with "holy Ireland."

A passage in Ulysses captures this mixture beautifully:

The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum [Latin, "sky"]. God’s air, the Allfather’s air, scintillant circumambient cessile air. Breathe it deep into thee.

The aforementioned Susan Howe has a sister who is also a renowned poet, Fanny Howe. In her excellent book The Winter Sun, Fanny Howe writes of when she and her sister, both American born, first went back to their Irish mother's home country and encountered Dublin:

"Then we were herded into a bus and headed for Dublin where the clouds were much lower than they were in America. My sister and I gulped in the atmosphere of a new country; it entered our systems like a potion that suffuses the whole and would never leave either of us. It was our mother's body." (pg 30, The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation)

"Holy Ireland.""God's air, the Allfather's air," the atmosphere that was "[their] mother's body." To bring this "back to Howth Castle and Environs", the "scintillant circumambient cessile air" and the mossy stone that make up the poetic potion were noticeable in abundance when I went up to Howth one afternoon. I took the DART, Howth is the northmost stop. Howth feels like how I imagined Ireland would be before I ever visited the country. Howth was very green, chilly, cloudy, soggy wet, misty, lots of boats on the docks, and plenty of old stone structures covered in moss. The vibes feel very historical there. I went and checked out Howth Castle and environs. The piratess prankquean "grace o'malice" had trod this ground, ported at this peninsula. It was so interesting being there observing this real and historical space and considering how deeply it has been lodged into my brain as a mythic site, thanks to the legendary Grace O'Malley scene in the Wake. 

Grace O'Malley was a real person, a female pirate from Ireland who, according to legend, arrived at Howth Castle one night in the 16th century, hoping to stay for the night as it was customary in those days for the castle to keep its doors open to offer hospitality to visitors. After she was denied entry at the door, she kidnapped a child from the royal family. All of this is enacted in the language of a fairy tale in the Wake, where the prankquean "grace o'malice" poses riddles to the doorman and kidnaps two children. I found the experience of walking around Howth surreal, considering there's a street named after Grace O'Malley and you can walk up the Howth Castle door where the prankquean "made her wit foreninst the dour." (FW 21.16) Walking around the castle area it felt imbued with a spooky presence, this was a relic of half a millenia ago, the grounds were well trodden, the walls seemed to be alive. Look at the rotting and tree-rooted parapet in the second picture below, notice the timefulness, this was a space filled with time.

BACK TO HOWTH CASTLE AND ENVIRONS

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In the year 1906, James Joyce was living in Rome, working long hours as a clerk at a bank, finding very little time to write, and he felt miserable. His biographer Gordon Bowker notes: "He wished himself far away–beside the sea at Bray…"
    Away from home only a couple years at that point, Joyce longed for the scene of his childhood home by the sea in Bray. Whereas Howth with its rocky promontory is the northernmost stop on the DART train in Dublin, at the opposite end the southernmost stop on the train is in the village of Bray which also has a jutting promontory. Joyce conflates the two places in the Wake, calling it "Brayhowth" (FW 448.18). The train station has a mural of Joyce. I got to spend a few days exploring Bray, a stony beach scene. There's a film studio there, one day as I was walking along the rocky beach I saw a camera crew doing a shoot.

Bray Head

Joyce spent years as a child living with his family in a house on Martello Terrace in Bray, right next to the sea. I got to see the house where Joyce lived from 1887-1891, it is extremely close to the beach. When the Joyces lived there the house would sometimes flood when the waves got especially rough. Being there and seeing how close it was to the shore, seeing the incredible view facing out from the front of the house, looking straight towards the big rocky green Bray Head, seeing the waves and the sea, I thought OF COURSE a future poet would've grown up here. 

The Bowker biography of Joyce notes: "James would sometimes take [his brother] Stannie for walks along the beach. Living and walking beside the sea became a lifelong pleasure for him." (Bowker 28) This beach was also where Joyce acquired his fear of dogs, he and Stannie once threw rocks at a dog on the beach, it attacked them and bit a chunk out of Joyce's chin, supposedly the goatee he maintained as an adult was to hide the scar. This was also the house where the famous scene of the political fight over Parnell at the family Christmas dinner table that's depicted in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would've taken place.

In 1935, Joyce's daughter Lucia went to stay in Ireland for a summer, and she stayed with some family members in Bray. She thought Bray Head looked like her father's profile (see Lucia Joyce, Schloss, pg. 343). In one of his letters, Joyce wrote to her suggesting she could take the train into Dublin city center to visit the GPO. 

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view from Blackrock

About midway between Howth and Bray along the coast is the neighborhood of Blackrock. When riding the train seeing the Irish names for the stops I was interested in the Irish name for Blackrock An Charraig Dhubh, because of the Dubh for black, same as Dubh Linn, for black pool. One night I had dinner at the beautiful home of some friends I'd met in a reading group at Sweny's. The view out their front window looking at the bay was picturesque, with Howth Head prominent on the horizon. When Joyce's family moved from the house by the sea in Bray up to a house in Blackrock, living closer to the city center of Dublin transformed the young Joyce's life. His father would take him around the city showing him sights and telling him stories, as Bowker in his Joyce biography explains:

Joyce was absorbing the intricate layout of the city he was to immortalize in literature... landmarks not just on the map of Joyce's Dublin but also on the map of his creative consciousness. And through those streets of that Victorian city, past shops, cafés, bars and newspaper offices, moved and jostled the Dubliners [who] would people his fictions. John sometimes joined in his son's sightseeing perambulations, regaling them with tales of Dublin life and characters and pointing out places of interest... It was a leisurely city with an air of languor, not subject to the dictates of business or industry. The sights, sounds, smells and texture of Dublin introduced James to a world he would transform into the focus and playground of his imagination. The spirit of the place would permeate his thoughts and writing, wherever he happened to be in the world, and would supply the dream-like setting for the great rumbustious Finnegans Wake. (Bowker, p. 42)

There's an interesting mention of Blackrock in Portrait of the Artist as well, with Joyce once again focused on the geo-mapping of the city:

Outside Blackrock, on the road that led to the mountains, stood a small whitewashed house in the garden of which grew many rosebushes... Both on the outward and on the homeward journey he measured distance by this landmark: and in his imagination he lived through a long train of adventures…

The image above is the view from the train stop at Blackrock. Often the mentions of Blackrock in Finnegans Wake are having to do with the Dalkey-Blackrock-Dunleary tramway, "Dullkey Downlairy and Bleakrooky tramaline" (FW 40.29-30) which I believe would have been essentially the same route as the present day DART train. 

In fact, I found that virtually every single one of the present day DART train stations in Dublin are named in FW. Compare the following list (incl. FW page/line numbers) with the map below:

• Howth           (too many to list)
• Kilbarrack315.28; 327.24
• Raheny17.13; 39.09; 129.24; 142.15; 204.18; 497.20
• Harmonstown(see above, also nearby "Artane" appears twice)
• Killester427.01
• Clontarf Road(too many to list)
• Connolly (Amiens St) 443.15; 549.31
• Tara Street(too many to list)
• Pearse (Westland Row)553.3
• Grand Canal Dockseveral references to streets on Grand Canal
• Sandymount247.34; 323.02
• Sydney Parade60.27; 553.31
• Booterstown132.04; 235.36; 386.24; 390.03; 507.35; 582.33
• Blackrock40.30; 83.20; 294.22; 541.02; 582.32
• Seapoint129.24; 588.15; 594.34
• Salthill and Monkstown261.F04
• Dun Laoghaire(too many to list)
• Sandycove/Glasthule321.08; 529.23
• Glenageary529.26
• Dalkey (too many to list)
• Killiney 295.F02; 431.21; 433.13
• Bray53.30; 313.31; 448.18; 522.30; 537.34; 624.32