“Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is jokey for Jacob.”
Thus begins James Joyce’s parody of himself, which is an exploration of how “Shem the Penman” is a gross, smelly weirdo whom no one likes.
Shem is one half of HCE, the introverted and artistic side of human nature. His brother, Shaun, is the extroverted and practical side.
Continue readingFinnegans Wake I.1 is a survey of the fallen world, a prelude to the novel. At the end, whiskey is spilled on the body of the fallen Finnegan, the All-Father. He begins to rise, but the mourners at his Wake hold him down and tell him to go back to sleep: the universe is predicated on his fall and death, the splitting open of the cosmic egg so that his many children, his dream selves, can live their lives. This entire concept is an analogy for the arising of individuality out of the flux of the universe, as we feel and fall.
Continue readingAfter 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 readingYou 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.
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The Suspended Sentence 