Because of the Joycean turn that the mystery has taken of late, I’ve started rereading Finnegans Wake before bed.
Some things that catch my interest …
The relationship between brothers Shem and Shaun, penman and postman—the one who writes messages and the one who delivers them. Or. the man of traditional writing and the man of dispersed communications. Which of these is [in]visible belfast more interested in? Or, to put it differently, I keep wondering, why The Star Factory? It’s such a traditional book in so many ways, it’s difficult to know why this group or person is so interested in that book … and why they want us to be interested in it as well.
Ana Livia Plurabelle … who is associated with the river(s), the plurabilities, and so on.
Phoenix Park, in Book 1.
The importance of letters and delivering letters. The whole book seems to fit within the space of time it takes to write, deliver, and receive a letter, and the events seem to form around that central one.
The book as a literary representation of sleep and dreaming. I need to do more research on this.
Well, Shem the Penman is often thought of as being Joyce's alterego in the book and an experimental (or at least hermetic) writer; Shaun the Post is the social conformist.
ReplyDeletePhoenix Park is the site of HCE's crime which is never exactly named, though it involves two young girls and is likely to have been of a sexual nature. Kind of disturbing if we connect that to [In]visible Belfast.
Finnegans Wake is the night to the day of Ulysses in some sense, but the night is also a cycle as the last sentence runs back into the first.
So does that mean a never ending sequence of nights?
ReplyDeletePer the second paragraph you wrote--yeah, disturbing to you and me both.
A neverending sequence is one possible interpretation, or just one night that never ends; there's never only one answer when it comes to the meaning of the Wake. Another point about the narrative is that while it does have a cyclical nature, you can start in at any point. Wake reading groups rarely start from the first page.
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