Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals
Finn Fordham
Top 10 Best Quotes
“the kind of curves you simply can’t stop feeling”
“Treating ‘life’ as an object to which we are more or less adequate excises crucial elements from life just at the very time that we are living it: such elements as sleep, rest, laziness, and the absence of labour, energy, and work. To say that these kinds of stasis are not living is not only to limit the plurality of life but to make it lopsided, tipping it towards the stresses that we find in modernity’s cult of perpetual activity.”
“The ‘wrong thing’ happened, we are now told, during the ‘dark flush of night’ (527.07). A flush usually brings colour to cheeks, so a dark flush is a mild oxymoron, like a dark light, and is all the more suggestive, since the dark flush of night is probably an erotically charged flush.”
“The radical unravelling of character is a consequence of Joyce’s rewriting procedures. Initially, Joyce drafted particular characters that are peculiar in being dehistoricized, their social contexts unspecified, as a rule absurd, with an inconsistent mixing of historical allusion. They are carriers of Joyce’s exercises in style, rather than self-consistent entities. They have neither clear origins nor destinies, and float out of the scriptural ether like the ventriloquized voices that issue from the medium Yawn. Over time, rather than becoming more specific, they proliferate, change name, sex, nation, class, period. Any clue to a naturalistic context that might be provided—such as their form of employment, for instance (writer, alchemist, postman, Madame of a brothel, striptease artist, mercenary, innkeeper, General, tailor, policeman) — is quickly qualified and elaborated rapidly in revision, by incorporating some element from another conflicting historical framework. The consequent multiplication of temporal and spatial contexts means that the delineating limits of character blur. It is through revision that character is refracted and multiplied, stretched across incompatible and incongruous realms. Characters begin to overlap. The incongruities produce the comic surrealism of the text, its fast-moving encyclopedism and, by reaching across and embracing wide fields of reference, provide the base to interpret Finnegans Wake as an all-encompassing ‘universal’ myth. But the effects of Joyce’s revisions and the characterization of his revisions also undo this universal myth and explode universality.”
“The incomprehensibility of Finnegans Wake seems to be close to this but only in opposing associations—there is a repeated sameness in the underlying story of the fall, and superficially a sameness in the sheer difficulty of the whole, but the noises it makes are in no way monotonous—echoes do generate echoes, and yet each one is distinct from the source, never a blunting blurriness but a sharpened shifting. Each element generates a double which separates miotically from what produced it, and often re-emerges at a distance, the sign that a series has begun.”
“Taking your own reflection as a lover is, moreover, another piece of prudent economy—for after all it costs nothing.”
“Self-critique ends up in self-destruction; flow becomes glut; accretive construction becomes unwieldy exaggeration; self-reflection becomes a disappearance through petrification; gathering becomes obsessive hoarding; order becomes disorder; consumers become producers, as the audience turns on the show. Through excess, through writing being taken beyond reasonable limits of sense and on into an exuberant sense of fun, Joyce replicates the moment in the historical cycle of the ricorso, the extreme point of the historical process. He takes his writing to a distant place where it teeters through the last anarchic stage of Vico’s cycle, as it moves from one epoch to another.”
“Seamus Deane has defined the Wake as the fall of man into language—designating both the writer’s and the reader’s fall.16 As an elaboration of this, we may add that one of the Wakean falls is the fall of the human, or the idea of the human, under language and culture, under their proliferating representations.”
“Nonetheless innuendo and imperfectly definable actions hover over the actions of the hermit.”
“More precisely, it is a stretching out and serial transformation of a single event until that event disappears, swallowed in allusions, as humanity is destined to be swallowed in the eternity of the universe.”
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Book Keywords:
stasis, flush, curves, living, ricorso, fall, hermit
