In 2020, during my first re-read of Finnegans Wake since about 2006, I ran across a sentence that I later described as “overwhelming” me, such that I had to put the book down.
Continue readingLongtong’s Breach
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Tag Archives: Far reading
Solving and Salving Life’s Robulous Rebus
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 readingProper Sins
Like most works of literature, Finnegans Wake rewards close reading, a method of textual analysis that involves close attention to language, structure, and literary devices. The Wake generally requires far more demanding and involved forms of close reading than most literary texts because of the complexity of its style and content.
The Wake also rewards what we might call “far reading,” where the reader has to draw together information from different parts of the text, often signaled by echoes. Again, this is true of other works of literature, but the complexities of the Wake also introduce difficulties here.
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The Suspended Sentence 