Two of my favorite sentences in Finnegans Wake are among the shortest.
At the end of the book, during ALP’s magnificent final monologue, in which she (as the River Liffey) prepares to rush out to the ocean, she anticipates her daughter dropping like rain to become the next ALP. The cycle is going to begin again. She recalls when she herself fell from her mother, as she addresses the resurrecting HCE, the next iteration of her husband:
Continue readingBook I, Chapter 8 of Finnegans Wake is the ALP chapter. It starts like this:
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tell me all about
Anna Livia! I want to hear all
As I discussed in “The Prankquean’s Riddle,” one of the issues raised by the riddle — “Why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease?” — is the enigmatic question of identity.
Some ways of glossing the riddle include “Why do I look like you?” or “Why do I look like our children?” or “Why are we a family; what makes us a family (the Porter family, a pod of peas)?”
What is a family, anyway? What am “I,” that I can resemble or be something at all?
Continue readingIn 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.
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The Suspended Sentence 