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 readingGossip and Gifts
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Tag Archives: William Blake
Doing, 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.
Continue readingWilliam Blake’s Contraries and Finnegans Wake
“It was of a night,” begins the Prankquean paragraph. It’s an opening that suggests traditional beginnings of stories, but the odd phrasing reminds me of the opening lines of William Blake’s most famous and most anthologized poem, “The Tyger”:
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night
The phrase “forests of the night” sounds strangely abstract, and Joyce’s clause “It was of a night” is even more so, using the indefinite article, rather than the definite: it is impossible to know where we are in time or space. It’s not even that it was night – it was of a night. Some indefinite night. Like Blake, Joyce evokes a hidden quality of the night, something that is universal and nonspecific. In Finnegans Wake, this aspect corresponds to the unconscious, the dark parts of our mind.
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The Suspended Sentence 