Author Archives: Matthew Leporati

“What tyronte power!”: Nightmare Alley and Finnegans Wake

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In an effort to make this blog as popular as possible, I will be discussing here an obscure 1947 film noir and making tenuous connections between it and James Joyce’s little-read and little-understood mysterious final novel.

It’s sure to bring readers in droves!

In all seriousness, I recently viewed Nightmare Alley (1947), and since my brain is obsessed with the structure of Finnegans Wake, I ended up viewing it as a fall, rise, fall story whose themes are addressed by Joyce’s novel. I thought it would be interesting to write about here.

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The Incertitude of the Void

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In re-reading Ulysses, I was struck by the word “unlikelihood” occurring in a significant place (Stephen’s Shakespeare theory, Chapter 9). The word has a prominent place in the Prankquean episode in Finnegans Wake , where a variant of the word is one of the PQ’s rejoinders to Van Hoother.

This post looks at the word “unlikelihood” in Finnegans Wake and Ulysses.

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The Past Lives in You

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I recently had the opportunity to see The Lion King on Broadway with my daughter. It was the first time I had seen it, and the first time I heard the song “He Lives in You.”

As I found myself humming it this week, I realized that it sums up a major idea of Finnegans Wake, that we each embody the past. An Eternal Story plays through all of history, and it is present right here, right now, in each of us.

In this post, I explore this idea and discuss the one sentence I found in the Wake that contains the name “Simba.”

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