The reason I’m interested in it, I suppose I should fess up, is because it’s two things clearly. Finnegans Wake is psychedelic and it is apocalyptic/eschatological. What I mean by those phrases is – first of all what I mean by psychedelic is there is no stable point of view. There is no character per se. You never know who is speaking. You have to read into each speech to discover is this King Mark, Anna Livia Plurabelle, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Shem the Penman, Shaun – who is it? Identities are not fixed. Those of you who have followed my wrap over the years, I’m always raving about how psychedelics dissolve boundaries. Well Finnegans Wake is as if you had taken the entirety of the last thousand years of human history and dissolved all of the boundaries. So Queen Mob becomes Mae West, all the personages of pop culture, politics, art, church history, Irish legend, Irish internecine politics are all swirling, changing, merging – time is not linear. You will find yourself at a recent political rally then return the court of this or that Abyssinian emperor or pharaoh. It’s like a trip and the great technique – I was thinking about this as I was thinking about this lecture – the great technique of the 20th century is collage or pastiche. It was originally developed by the Dadaist in Zurich in 1919. Right now it’s having a huge resurgence in the form of sampling in pop music and Joyce was the supreme sampler. I mean, he draws his material from technical catalogs, menus, legal briefs, treaty language, mythologies, dreams, doctor/patient conversations – everything is grist for this enormous distillery. Yet what comes out of this once you learn the codes and once you learn to play the game is a Joycian story that all graduates of Ulysses will recognize.
What Joyce was about was an incredible sympathy with common people and an awareness of the dilemma of being a Jew in Irish Ireland, being a devotee of Scholasticism in the 20th century and of dislocation and of disorientation of being the cuckolded husband, the failed divinity student. All of these characters and themes are familiar. It’s quite an amazing accomplishment. There’s nothing quite like it in literature. It had very little anticipation. The only real anticipator of Joyce in English I think is Thomas Nash, who most people have never heard of. Thomas Nash was a contemporary of Shakespeare who wrote a famous – I don’t know what it means in that context – but a novel called The Wayfaring Traveler. Anyway, Nash had this megalomaniac richness of language. This attitude that it’s better to put it in than take it out and that’s certainly what you get with Joyce. Joyce is so dense with technical terms, brand names, pop references, and localisms. The way to conceive of Finnegans Wake really is like a midden, a garbage dump and there is in fact a garbage dump in the Wake that figures very prominently and what you as the reader have to do is go in there with nut pick and tooth brush and essentially remove one level after another level after another level and sink down and down.
And the theme is always the same. The delivery of the word, the misinterpretation of the word and the redemption of the word in every level at all times and places. The reason I’ve now gone some distance toward explaining why I think of it as psychedelic; the reason why I think of it as eschatological and apocalyptic is – it’s hard to tell because we don’t have James Joyce around to ask – how much of this material he took seriously and how much was grist for his literary mill – but he was perfectly conversant with renaissance theories of magic.
https://dominatorculture.com/post/78408036619/surfing-finnegans-wake-part-1
The reason I’m interested in it, I suppose I should fess up, is because it’s two things clearly. Finnegans Wake is psychedelic and it is apocalyptic/eschatological. What I mean by those phrases is – first of all what I mean by psychedelic is there is no stable point of view. There is no character per se. You never know who is speaking. You have to read into each speech to discover is this King Mark, Anna Livia Plurabelle, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Shem the Penman, Shaun – who is it? Identities are not fixed. Those of you who have followed my wrap over the years, I’m always raving about how psychedelics dissolve boundaries. Well Finnegans Wake is as if you had taken the entirety of the last thousand years of human history and dissolved all of the boundaries. So Queen Mob becomes Mae West, all the personages of pop culture, politics, art, church history, Irish legend, Irish internecine politics are all swirling, changing, merging – time is not linear. You will find yourself at a recent political rally then return the court of this or that Abyssinian emperor or pharaoh. It’s like a trip and the great technique – I was thinking about this as I was thinking about this lecture – the great technique of the 20th century is collage or pastiche. It was originally developed by the Dadaist in Zurich in 1919. Right now it’s having a huge resurgence in the form of sampling in pop music and Joyce was the supreme sampler. I mean, he draws his material from technical catalogs, menus, legal briefs, treaty language, mythologies, dreams, doctor/patient conversations – everything is grist for this enormous distillery. Yet what comes out of this once you learn the codes and once you learn to play the game is a Joycian story that all graduates of Ulysses will recognize.
What Joyce was about was an incredible sympathy with common people and an awareness of the dilemma of being a Jew in Irish Ireland, being a devotee of Scholasticism in the 20th century and of dislocation and of disorientation of being the cuckolded husband, the failed divinity student. All of these characters and themes are familiar. It’s quite an amazing accomplishment. There’s nothing quite like it in literature. It had very little anticipation. The only real anticipator of Joyce in English I think is Thomas Nash, who most people have never heard of. Thomas Nash was a contemporary of Shakespeare who wrote a famous – I don’t know what it means in that context – but a novel called The Wayfaring Traveler. Anyway, Nash had this megalomaniac richness of language. This attitude that it’s better to put it in than take it out and that’s certainly what you get with Joyce. Joyce is so dense with technical terms, brand names, pop references, and localisms. The way to conceive of Finnegans Wake really is like a midden, a garbage dump and there is in fact a garbage dump in the Wake that figures very prominently and what you as the reader have to do is go in there with nut pick and tooth brush and essentially remove one level after another level after another level and sink down and down.
And the theme is always the same. The delivery of the word, the misinterpretation of the word and the redemption of the word in every level at all times and places. The reason I’ve now gone some distance toward explaining why I think of it as psychedelic; the reason why I think of it as eschatological and apocalyptic is – it’s hard to tell because we don’t have James Joyce around to ask – how much of this material he took seriously and how much was grist for his literary mill – but he was perfectly conversant with renaissance theories of magic.