After the overture that begins Finnegans Wake, one of the first paragraphs is about, among other things, human creativity moving through history, building cities and literature.
Continue readingWho Could Have Built This?
Leave a reply
Author Archives: Matthew Leporati
A Zero-Sum Game in the Land of Space (Part 2)
This post extends my last post by examining what has become for me one of the key paragraphs of the book, starting on page 81 in I.4.
Continue readingA Zero-Sum Game in the Land of Space (Part 1)
HCE’s fall results in his breaking into two halves, two “sons,” each with some of the qualities of the Father. Shem and Shaun are the introvert and the extrovert; the poet and the politician; the blasphemer and the priest; the oppressed and the oppressor; the shunned and the celebrated. And so on. They are the “contrary” forces that William Blake writes about.
They battle each other in conflicts that represent the wars of history and all interpersonal conflicts ever (which correspond to the brawl at Finnegan’s Wake in the song). But at the end of the day, they’re just two little boys scuffling.
Two early and significant explorations of the brothers occur in I.6 and I.4, the former a diatribe from Shaun about his brother, and the latter a description of a fight between early versions of the brothers before they fully divide from the father.
This post will examine the passage in I.6, and a future post will look more closely at the passage in I.4.
Continue readingClothing in Finnegans Wake (Part 3): Scaldbrother
You can read the previous entries on this subject here and here. In those posts, I sketch out the idea that the naked body is a symbol in the Wake for art, while clothing is a symbol for the facts of reality. The Wake suggests that, in a sense, fiction is “truer” than fact, for art contains the patterns that repeat with variations in life, the same anew.
This post extends my thoughts on this subject.
Continue reading
The Suspended Sentence 