In October of 2021, my copy of Finnegans Wake began to fall apart. I had owned the book for nearly fifteen years at that point, and I had spent the previous year and a half reading and re-reading and annotating it over and over again. So it wasn’t a surprise. Most of this post was written then.
Continue readingOn this June 16th, in the middle of another read through Ulysses, I find myself thinking of two Joyce quotes about Finnegans Wake.
Continue readingThe quote in my title plays a pivotal role in David Lynch’s movie Fire Walk with Me and in Season 3 of his show Twin Peaks. I was reminded of it recently when I came across a passage from Arthur Schopenhauer quoted by Joseph Campbell and Henry Robinson in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. In discussing the way that HCE and his accusers often blend with each other in the Wake, they cite Schopenhauer’s description of the world as a kind of dream: “It is a vast dream, dreamed by a single being, but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Thus everything interlocks and harmonizes with everything else.”
This post reflects on the idea of dreams in the work of David Lynch and Finnegans Wake.
Continue readingIn rereading Ulysses, I recently reviewed the passage where Mr. Bloom helps a “blind stripling” cross the street, and Bloom’s reflections remind me how central sense perception is to Joyce’s work.
In this post, I look at a few places where sense perception is important to Ulysses before turning to Joyce’s treatment of the senses in Finnegans Wake.
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The Suspended Sentence 