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 reading“It was of a night,” begins the Prankquean paragraph. It’s an opening that suggests traditional beginnings of stories, but the odd phrasing reminds me of the opening lines of William Blake’s most famous and most anthologized poem, “The Tyger”:
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night
The phrase “forests of the night” sounds strangely abstract, and Joyce’s clause “It was of a night” is even more so, using the indefinite article, rather than the definite: it is impossible to know where we are in time or space. It’s not even that it was night – it was of a night. Some indefinite night. Like Blake, Joyce evokes a hidden quality of the night, something that is universal and nonspecific. In Finnegans Wake, this aspect corresponds to the Unconscious, the dark parts of our mind.
Continue readingWhat happens at the end of the Prankquean episode? This post explores the baffling ending of this important passage.
Continue readingThis post continues last week’s post by closely examining the Prankquean’s puzzling riddle, which occurs several times in Finnegans Wake.
Continue reading
The Suspended Sentence 