This post considers the symbol of the cross in Finnegans Wake.
Continue readingAntechristian Crossing
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Tag Archives: William Blake
Gossip and Gifts
This post discusses more of Chapter I.8, including the gossip of the washerwomen and the gifts for the children of ALP. It extends my overview of the chapter.
Continue readingDoing, Being, Seeming: The Prankquean and Identity
As 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 readingSolving 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.
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The Suspended Sentence 