This post considers Stephen Dedalus’s notion of “esthetic arrest” from the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joseph Campbell’s connection of this idea to the Hindu concept of “maya,” and the development of Joyce’s style in Finnegans Wake.
Continue readingI’ve recently returned to my re-reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I’m finding the final chapter more interesting than ever before — and funnier! I’ve laughed out loud several times reading it, including one scene that I’ll discuss here in this post, a scene in which a strange character repeats himself. I compare it below to a recurring gag on my favorite television show, The Sopranos, and I reflect on the significance of Joyce repeating a moment from his own life, enshrining it in art in a way reminiscent of what William Wordsworth called a “Spot of Time.”
Close readings of Joyce, reflections on life, and fragments of pop culture — all this and more on today’s post!
Continue readingThe Qabalah is a tradition popular in Western esotericism. It was originally a form of Jewish mysticism, dealing with the idea of God’s power “emanating” into creation in ways detailed in a diagram called the “Tree of Life,” a series of ten spheres (called “sephiroth”) that represent various concepts: they are arranged descending toward the sphere representing the physical universe. During the Renaissance, Hebrew Qabalah became an influence on Western Hermeticism, occultism, and “magick.” Ideas derived from the Hebrew system became combined with other esoteric ideas like astrology and tarot. Later occultists, including members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which W.B. Yeats was a member, engaged in “magical” practices that drew upon Qabalah, such as imagining spheres of light on the body corresponding to the sephiroth.
So what does any of this have to do with Finnegans Wake? There are several references to Qabalah and other occult topics in the novel, which Joyce likely learned about through his interest in Theosophy, a spiritual movement that blended a number of different beliefs and practices from all around the world. After losing faith in Catholicism, Joyce investigated other spiritual traditions like this, before more or less rejecting most of supernaturalism. I qualify that last sentence because the issue of what exactly Joyce personally believed, at various points in his life, is complicated, but we can be confident from his mocking references to Theosophy in Ulysses that by the time he wrote that novel, he did not accept it and found it at least kind of silly.
The most major Qabalistic reference in Finnegans Wake is the list of ten syllables running down page 308 in II.2, which I have discussed here.
This post will muse a little more about the relationship between Qabalah and the Wake, and I will even suggest that the Wake could function like a Qabalistic classification system and could be the basis of practices that are enriching to an individual. Belief in the supernatural is not necessary to view the Wake this way or to use these practices.
Continue readingIn the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen.
–Finnegans Wake, III.1
The Holy Trinity crops up again and again in the Wake and in Joyce’s other works.
But what does this doctrine mean in Christianity, and in Catholicism specifically (the tradition in which Joyce was raised and educated)? And, more important, how does Joyce use it?
Read on for more!
Continue reading
The Suspended Sentence 