Monday, 29 May 2017, Pages 385-387

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
There will be no reading on Monday, the 5th of June, as it is the Pentecost Monday. 

Today we stopped at "... no more of him." (387.32)

The four old men are lost in rambling reminiscence of their lost young days. Who are these four old men? Why four?

Anthony Burgess interprets the significance of the number 4 as follows: 
"There are four weeks in a lunar month, and these will give you the four old men who have so much to say, though what they have to say is rarely of much value - Matthew Gregory, Mark Lyons, Luke Tarpey, and Johnny MacDougal. They are the four gospellers, as well as the four provinces of Ireland, and they take off to impersonal regions where they represent the four points of the compass, the four elements, the four classical ages, and so on. They are always together, followed by their donkey, and it is in order to think of them as a single unit, their names truncated to Ma, Ma, Lu, and Jo and crushed together to make Mamalujo. They end up, in the fading of the dream, as four bedposts."
(Source: http://www.metaportal.com.br/jjoyce/burgess1.htm)

Plausible interpretation of what goes on on these pages is available here!

Remember though that this is all a dream, a nightmarish dream! Before the Fall of the Man.

We will continue with our reading of FW on 12th June.

Monday, 22 May 2017, Pages 384-385

Stopped at "... like a foremasters in the rolls, ..." (385.35)

Was this chapter not supposed to be about King Mark, Tristan and Isolde? Well, we did catch a whiff of their story. And we got confused, bewildered, puzzled, perplexed, muddled with how it all moved from "...  here now we are the four of us, ... there they were, ... all the four, ... when he was kidding and cuddling, .... onliest one of her choice, ... they all four remembored who made the world, .... " and so on.

In such a state of confusion, it is heartening to read what Anthony Burgess had to say about FW:
" Finnegans Wake is as close to a work of nature as any artist ever got - massive, baffling, serving nothing but itself, suggesting a meaning but never quite yielding anything but a fraction of it, and yet (like a tree) desperately simple. Poems are made by fools like Blake, but only Joyce can make a Wake."
(Here Comes Everybody by Anthony Burgess, Hamlyn Paperback, 1965, p.185)

If you want to know more of what Burgess wrote about Finnegans Wake, his essay, Finnegans Wake, What it's all about,  is a real pleasure to read and is an eye-opener about Joyce's work!

Monday, 15 May 2017, Pages 381-384

We read as far as "... now pass the fish for Christ sake, Amen: ..." (384.15)

That means we have started a new chapter - book 2, chapter 4. It is a short chapter of just 16 pages. The tavern scene is over. The drinks have been drunk, most of the customers have left.

Joseph Campbell says the following about this chapter in his 'A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake':

(By the way this is the only book I have found which lends lots - I mean real lots - of sense to Finnegans Wake.)

"(HCE's mind now sails forth, like a sea-wanderer returning to the bounding deep, on a ship of dream. What he is to dream will form the matter of the present chapter. It will be a dream of the honeymoon voyage of Tristram and Iseult. His body, helpless on the floor, will be the King Mark of the story; but his spirit, rejuvenated in the sonlike image of the successful lover, will know again the joys of youthful love. The honeymoon ship is surrounded by waves and gulls, and these become the presences of the Four* Old Men asleep. They had failed to quit the tavern with the departing company, and now bear witness to the dream of the broken master.)"

(A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, p. 245)

The chapter begins with a song, the first line of which - Three quarks for Muster Mark!' - is world famous because the Caltech physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, chose the word quark from the above line, to name the building blocks of protons and neutrons that he discovered. Discovery Magazine writes: "It sounds like "kwork" and got its spelling from a whimsical poem in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This highly scientific term is clever and jokey and gruff all at once, much like the man who coined it." For his discovery, Murray Gell-Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969.

* Today a question came up about the possible significance of the number 7 in Finnegans Wake. Trying to find plausible answers, I realised that Joyce used many numbers apart from 7 again and again. Some of these are 4, 28, 566, 1132, ... More about it another time. Meanwhile, if any of you have some insight into the use of these numbers in Finnegans Wake, would you please share it in the comments box below?

Monday, 8 May 2017, Pages 379-381

(First of all apologies for missing weeks of reading and posting on this blog about what was read. Now the blog goes on...)

Today we stopped at ",... that bothered he was from head to tail, ... (381.28)
(Note that the sentence is not yet complete.)

The paragraph we are currently at is said to be the first Joyce wrote when he started with Finnegans Wake. Perhaps because of that the language reads almost normal though it is still not easy to understand what it is all about. The section starts with mentioning King Roderick O'Conor the last king of Ireland.

We also read today these 'strange words': BENK, BUNK, BINK, BENK BANK BONK. Joseph Campbell explains them as follows:
"These capitalised syllables represents the fall of Finnegan, the rocking of a boat at the bottom of the sea of sleep, also a series of stiff punches that the prizefighters are throwing at each other, in sum, a combination suggesting the ultimate collapse and doom of HCE. (Mainly they represent the 'midnight Angelus' that announces the change of power in the family.)"
(A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, New World Library, P. 242, 2005)