FINNEGANS WAKE BY JAMES JOYCE (Book I) Chapter 4

“Bite my laughters, drink my tears. Pore into me, volumes, spell me stark and spill me swooning, I just don’t care what my thwarters think.”
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

When you have spent a bit of time in Ulysses – you wonder what Joyce might possibly have dreamed up next. I mean, after Molly, where could you possibly go? But after many years of hemming & hawing, sheming & shauning, I think it is hightides to swim in the Wake. So I have ordered my Wake Skeleton, my Book of the Dark, and the thing itself – and in we shall leap again.

The plan for this four-week Salon is NOT to read the whole shebang – but to CONTINUE from where we left off in the Oxford World Classics edition. We will practise slow reading – and for this one, I want to pay attention to what the book requires of us: five pages a week? One? And if we are fired up to connote, continue we will – five to ten week sessions at a time. The practice, as we developed it, had each reader responsible for a section – approximately 20 lines – and they brought some insights as well as a reading of the section to our meeting.

Originally devised for those who have recently completed our study of Book I, Chapter 1, we are now opening up this study to anyone with an interest in furthering their appreciation of Joyce and reading this extraordinary work. If you are new to the book then there is time to read Chapter 1 before 9 November! Please email us if you are interested.

There is an epic group of Wakians who, having travelled through with me before, have planted the seeds, laid the rails – and some of those tumbling minstrels have joined this study – so we have veterans. Although this is my second time through, I lay no claim to expertise – but I have learned how to play in the Wake.

According to Margot Norris (whose introduction I am using as a buoy), it is not important to learn what the work is about. What it is about is the form itself – and the nature of indeterminacy that punctuates all of our communication and artistic renderings. As Joyce had started in Ulysses, the Wake continues to probe the looseness of identity. We don’t get to fix the characters – not even their names – but instead are offered shifting personas rendered through the prism of the dreaming mind, the quest for origins, the paradigms of myth and archetype, the fluidity of water . . . all this in a constant play of language: puzzles, riddles, puns, historical allusions re-imagined in language that tilts towards children’s rhymes. If you have a sense of playfulness and are ready to let loose and run, come along to the Anna Livia with us . . . .

Just to get you started (or remind you):

“Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude, the evidencegivers by legpoll untrustworthy irreperible…”

Finnegans Wake (page 57 of recommended edition)

SALON DETAILS:

• Ongoing virtual study: first book, chapter 4, 4 meetings
• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• Wednesdays, 1.30-3.30 pm (UK time)
• Starts 19 and 26 April, then 31 May and 21 June 2023
• Cost: £100, includes notes and resources
• Recommended edition: Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce,  Oxford University Press edition (June 2012); ISBN-13: 978-0199695157