Tag Archives: William Blake

Fights All Over Cuxhaven

Among the catalogue of rumors about HCE in I.3 comes this sentence:

A wouldbe martyr, who is attending on sanit Asitas where he is being taught to wear bracelets, when grilled on the point, revealed the undoubted fact that the consequence would be that so long as Sankya Moondy played his mango tricks under the mysttetry, with shady apsaras sheltering in his leaves’ licence and his shadowers torrifried by the potent bolts of indradiction, there would be fights all over Cuxhaven.

The most interesting thing I learned from the annotations is that Cuxhaven is a real place! It’s a German port where an air-raid was conducted in World War I. On an initial read, I assumed it was a made-up name meant to sound like “cucks haven,” which is an appropriate name for the fallen world in Finnegans Wake.

Read on for thoughts about this haven for “cucks,” which I connect to the idea of the deathbed.

Continue reading

Happy Bloomsday, 2026

The years keep rolling right along — WordPress reminded me this morning that I’ve posted something on every Bloomsday for the past three years, so I now feel like I have to keep the streak going.

On this Bloomsday, I find myself thinking about Joyce’s description of William Blake making breakfast, one that I think was the seed of Ulysses.

Continue reading

Stop! You’re Under (Esthetic) Arrest!

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 reading

When Is a Man Not a Man?

The beginning of Chapter I.7 — all about Shem the Penman — tells the brief story of Shem asking the “first riddle of the universe” to all of his brothers and sisters. The riddle is the title of this post, and it’s written in straightforward English there. The “brothron and sweestureens” take turns guessing, but none can get it right, so Shem has to tell them the answer: “When he is a […] Sham.”

This post looks at the riddle as it recurs throughout Finnegans Wake, considering what it implies about masculinity and art.

Continue reading