In a description of the fallen world in I.1, the narrator says of the people,
But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life’s robulous rebus
“Sneeze out a likelihood” is a garbling of the phrase “squeeze out a livelihood,” but this potential solution to life’s puzzle is not just a way of making a living but a likelihood: a probable event, a state of mind that one is likely to inhabit.
Continue readingBook 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 readingThis 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.
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The Suspended Sentence 