This post continues last week’s post by closely examining the Prankquean’s puzzling riddle, which occurs several times in Finnegans Wake.
Continue readingThe Prankquean’s Riddle
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Author Archives: Matthew Leporati
The Prankquean
Book 1, Chapter 1 of Finnegans Wake consists largely of a survey of all existence to show that the fallen Finnegan/HCE is the substance of the world around us. Everywhere we look, from the landscape to the history found in museums to books and poems and stories, we find variations on the same story, the old tale of the Fall of Man peeking through.
One of the set pieces in the chapter concerns the encounter of “Jarl Van Hoother” with “the Prankquean.” It’s an example of how even a folk story and oral poem like this (the “first peace of illiterative porthery” or alliterative poetry) contains variations of the same Eternal Tale. In other words, it is Finnegans Wake condensed down into a paragraph (arguably every paragraph is Finnegans Wake condensed down into a paragraph — every part contains the whole).
Continue readingThe First Page
This post is drawn from an email I wrote two or three years ago explicating the first page of Finnegans Wake. I present it mostly unedited. Future posts will not be a line-by-line explication of the text.
Continue readingProper Sins
Like most works of literature, Finnegans Wake rewards close reading, a method of textual analysis that involves close attention to language, structure, and literary devices. The Wake generally requires far more demanding and involved forms of close reading than most literary texts because of the complexity of its style and content.
The Wake also rewards what we might call “far reading,” where the reader has to draw together information from different parts of the text, often signaled by echoes. Again, this is true of other works of literature, but the complexities of the Wake also introduce difficulties here.
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The Suspended Sentence 