Category Archives: Dubliners

Oh, We Dublin Posting, Huh?

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I’m back from the first trip to Dublin I’ve taken in my life. It was a marvelous experience: this blog’s editor and I spent a weekend visiting Joycean sites, some obvious (Sweny’s pharmacy and Davy Byrne’s from Ulysses) and some more obscure (the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park where Mr. Duffy stands at the end of “A Painful Case” and the corner of Hume street where the girl from “Two Gallants” waits). At many locations, I read quotations from Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, and Dubliners. If you’ll forgive some flowery language, I later described this process as akin to casting magic spells around Dublin, “binding” my consciousness to those locations and to the city as a whole.

Read on to see some pictures and quotes!

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Four Zoas, Five Senses

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The Four Old Men appear throughout Finnegans Wake in a number of guises. Campbell and Robinson list some of these appearances as four judges, four winds, Four Master Annalists of Ireland, Four Waves of Ireland, Four Evangelists, four Viconian ages, and four chroniclers.

This post discusses the Four Old Men and elaborates the connection Joyce draws between them and William Blake’s Four Zoas. I consider how both sets of symbols can be attributed to four of the five senses, the fifth sense (touch) being attributed to their combination or that which underlies the four (HCE or, in Blake, Albion). My speculations are tentative and incomplete, but they may be an interesting jumping off point for future thoughts on the subject.

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