Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from August 22, 2021

What is Finnegans Wake? An Incompletion in Alphabetical Order

What is Finnegans Wake? An Incompletion in Alphabetical Order   Philip Harvey   This Incompletion is given with thanks to fellow members of the Finnegans Wake Reading Group in Melbourne. Many of the definitions derive from our discussions over the years, both in the room and on zoom. The quotes are from page 93 of ‘Finnegans Wake’, by James Joyce, with an introduction by Seamus Deane (Penguin, 1992).   1.      AN ANTHOLOGY FW is an anthology of world literature, sacred and profane, reworked into original English, without sourcing of any of the quotes, or an index. It is an anthology of proverbs and sayings turned inside out and back to front, so that their proverbiality becomes simply the lever, or the ghost writer, or the template for whatever proverb or saying is next being invented. It is an anthology of stories bowdlerized and pulverised and reorganised to make up one basic story told over and over until it burgeons exponentially into one big story. That big story is made u