Author Archives: Matthew Leporati

Happy Bloomsday, 2024

Leafy Speaking, Part 1

This series of posts looks at the famous closing monologue of Finnegans Wake.

“We Live Inside a Dream”: David Lynch and James Joyce

The quote in my title plays a pivotal role in David Lynch’s movie Fire Walk with Me and in Season 3 of his show Twin Peaks. I was reminded of it recently when I came across a passage from Arthur Schopenhauer quoted by Joseph Campbell and Henry Robinson in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. In discussing the way that HCE and his accusers often blend with each other in the Wake, they cite Schopenhauer’s description of the world as a kind of dream: “It is a vast dream, dreamed by a single being, but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Thus everything interlocks and harmonizes with everything else.”

This post reflects on the idea of dreams in the work of David Lynch and Finnegans Wake.

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Four Zoas, Five Senses

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The Four Old Men appear throughout Finnegans Wake in a number of guises. Campbell and Robinson list some of these appearances as four judges, four winds, Four Master Annalists of Ireland, Four Waves of Ireland, Four Evangelists, four Viconian ages, and four chroniclers.

This post discusses the Four Old Men and elaborates the connection Joyce draws between them and William Blake’s Four Zoas. I consider how both sets of symbols can be attributed to four of the five senses, the fifth sense (touch) being attributed to their combination or that which underlies the four (HCE or, in Blake, Albion). My speculations are tentative and incomplete, but they may be an interesting jumping off point for future thoughts on the subject.