The math problem comes in Finnegans Wake II.2 occurs right after Shem/Dolph shows his brother how to draw the two interlocking circles that I discussed in my last post. This post explores the math problem itself.
Continue readingAs 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 