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'Finnegans Wake' is a book, so far as I can tell, that suffers immensely from critical, academic, analyses. There's lots of binary is/isn't thinking, and desire to apply only one or three readings to any word or passage, whereas the book encourages a much more amorphous arrival at information. For example, many critical studies of the opening bits of the book completely excuse the sexual aspects in favor of (a) the biblical and/or (b) the geographical. To be fair, a and b are present, but so's c, being the sex stuff, which is duly brushed aside. Or, my curiosity-rousing notion that Issy is not only daughter and sister but the third, middle, peacemaking and aware, brother, whom Joyce planned out in his notes and then excised, supposedly, from the finished book. And, my fave obfuscation, is the Mammon Lujius analysis done by Jung, which breaks it down by the four apostles, Matt, Mark, Luke, and John-boy... but ignores the very blatant, er, Mammon part.
And nobody, apparently, likes to deal with the fact that time and space are both immensely and ephemerally elastic and utterly rigid, plastic, and likely to shatter under pressure. People just walk back down the years to some previous date, continually. Discontinuities appear, from character perspectives, as the same things are done more than once, from one end as a repetition and the other perspective as is for the first. See the piratey queeny gal showing up every so, asking for a cuppa and stealing either a kid, or when all the kids is gone, a serviceable doll/mannikin that is in fact, a kid, too, and again, possibly, Issy/third-summers-brother.
Joyce - as lefthanded penman - writes himself into the story, retroactively writing himself out of the story, in a manner that prefigures fictionsuits entirely (complete with someone - as in real life, apparently - brushing past Joyce on a busy street, in a foreign city, and whispering in Latin that his latest book is execrable). Violent contact with strangely knowing entities.
Plus: supersonic airplanes, PCs, etic and emic realities via individual perspective, spaceships, and more. |
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