Tag Archives: Close Reading

“What tyronte power!”: Nightmare Alley and Finnegans Wake

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In an effort to make this blog as popular as possible, I will be discussing here an obscure 1947 film noir and making tenuous connections between it and James Joyce’s little-read and little-understood mysterious final novel.

It’s sure to bring readers in droves!

In all seriousness, I recently viewed Nightmare Alley (1947), and since my brain is obsessed with the structure of Finnegans Wake, I ended up viewing it as a fall, rise, fall story whose themes are addressed by Joyce’s novel. I thought it would be interesting to write about here.

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The Incertitude of the Void

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In re-reading Ulysses, I was struck by the word “unlikelihood” occurring in a significant place (Stephen’s Shakespeare theory, Chapter 9). The word has a prominent place in the Prankquean episode in Finnegans Wake , where a variant of the word is one of the PQ’s rejoinders to Van Hoother.

This post looks at the word “unlikelihood” in Finnegans Wake and Ulysses.

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Illysus Distilling

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I had the opportunity recently to visit the Great Jones Distilling Company in Manhattan and take a tour of their distillery. [No, they are not sponsoring this post] It was a marvelous time — an excellent tour I took with a friend — at the first distillery opened in Manhattan since prohibition (and it opened in…2021!).

The experience put me in mind of references to distilling in Finnegans Wake, which is what this post will be about.

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