The movie Backrooms made a splash this month, turning a massive profit on a meagre budget of less than ten million dollars. The film is noteworthy because it was made by a twenty-year-old Youtuber, who was also responsible for a series of short videos about the titular extradimensional space.
This post suggests that Finnegans Wake can be read as a kind of “backrooms,” a maze that underlies reality.
Continue readingThis post considers Stephen Dedalus’s notion of “esthetic arrest” from the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joseph Campbell’s connection of this idea to the Hindu concept of “maya,” and the development of Joyce’s style in Finnegans Wake.
Continue readingThe beginning of Chapter I.7 — all about Shem the Penman — tells the brief story of Shem asking the “first riddle of the universe” to all of his brothers and sisters. The riddle is the title of this post, and it’s written in straightforward English there. The “brothron and sweestureens” take turns guessing, but none can get it right, so Shem has to tell them the answer: “When he is a […] Sham.”
This post looks at the riddle as it recurs throughout Finnegans Wake, considering what it implies about masculinity and art.
Continue readingIn Chapter V of Portrait, Stephen converses with the dean of University College Dublin, who is English, and reflects on their different relationship to the language they speak:
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
The passage speaks to Joyce’s relationship with English and with language in general (important for Finnegans Wake, of course), as well as the Celtic Revival movement that, in Joyce’s day, sought to restore the Irish language (a movement with which Joyce largely disagreed).
This post considers the idea that a language can “belong” to a person in this sense, and it tries to grapple with what Joyce is doing to this idea by writing Finnegans Wake. I even discuss the Bad Bunny Superbowl halftime show controversy — which makes this my most topical post yet!
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The Suspended Sentence 