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 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 readingThis post looks at the recurrence of telescopes in Finnegans Wake.
Continue readingEvery telling has a taling, and that’s the he and the she of it
Finnegans Wake, I.8
In many ways, Finnegans Wake is a book about storytelling. It’s a collection of stories. In some places, full stories are told from beginning to end; in other places, they abruptly start and stop, get interrupted, meld into other tales, or get lost in confusion (like the history of HCE in I.2-4).
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The Suspended Sentence 