the Wakean suppository

an introduction to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

gather ‘round, gather ‘round!

so you are curious about Finnegans Wake but you have come up against a wall, the very wall Joyce broke through — oh! you see there the different bricks patching part of the wall he walked through? here is a ladder, go on and begin with the first step “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s” and the second step “from swerve of shore to bend of bay” and the third and so on. what is beyond this wall, you ask? dear reader, there is the nowhere of the schizophrenic beyond!

probing the unknown can be terrifying, but you’re here, we’re here, and we can all help each other, that is what life is all about.

and with proper motivation, any domain of knowledge can be made accessible and intriguing, we just need the proper guiding words. now, though an infinitude of options appear before us for how to proceed with this task, we pick one path and stick with it, illuminating this text with stories and relationships. if we can’t reach you here, that is okay, we leave it for another to try.

for this purpose, we allow some historical personage potentiated by this body here to pass through, momentarily reterritorialize and intensify into this Rafael now: i first checked out the book at a high school in El Paso, Texas; i was in 11th grade. Dubliners was on a reading list for AP Language (could’ve been AP Literature, either way, i ended up writing about Araby, i remember that) and i happened to look into James Joyce.

i was one of those students who always had at least 7 books checked out at once. i remember showing up early to school, going to the library, and finding the copy with greened middle and golden cover text (the 1982 Penguin edition). so i check it out but i didn’t get far with it. still, i was so intrigued by how it all looked. the language looked familiar but upon closer inspection, not much sense was made. striking of course was the opening of the book, as it starts in the middle of a sentence. go slowly with me: the beginning sentence is the latter half of a sentence that begins in the end of the book. so the book is syntactically circular, a type of never-ending cycle. very, very cool from that alone, for if the author took the time to make that play, then certainly everything inside will be just as intricate. still, i returned the book, didn’t even bother reading past the first thunder word because i had to study for 5 AP classes (yes, our historical Rafael is one of those nerds).

i remember at some point that year i bought a limited copy of Ulysses at Barnes and Noble because i had a feeling Joyce would remain around my life, but never read past chapter 4, i got caught up with school work and life. years later, well a decade later really (a couple months ago if you insist), suddenly i felt the urge to read fiction after spending too much time playing with political theory and philosophy, while trying to make sense of contemporary politics (that i say “playing” shouldn’t undermine it, there is a seriousness in playing too). so i went through my bookshelf in the basement and found Ulysses there, quietly waiting. i joyfully read it because it fell so beautifully on my fresh, returning eyes, so many incredible combinations of words within.

anyway, soon after i stopped reading Ulysses, because i remembered my previous encounter with Finnegans Wake, i decided to couple this organic suit to cyberspace, netsurfed my way to youtube and there i looked for anything about the Wake. on the third link was Terrence McKenna speaking about the book. now mind you, i have listened to tens of hours of McKenna, i rather enjoy his word salads sometimes (i have to be in a specific mood though) and i’m aware of his possible links to the alphabet soup agencies, so of course i listen with discernment. anyway, i play the video, and within the first 5 minutes McKenna compares the gap between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to the gap between algebra and partial differential equations. i’m hooked. PDEs? let’s fucking go.

while learning about the relationship between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, i found out that Ulysses is the book of the day (Anthony Burgess says this in his 1973 video “Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake”): it is the book about everything man can do in a day, on a particular day, June 16th. what is special about this day is never quite revealed in the text — and even to this day, the Irish Times every year publishes about Bloomday but never reveal why that day, so it remains a mystery to the casual reader and tourist. though it’s a special day indeed, most auspicious! i’ll tell you here because you should know: it has been revealed through the correspondence of Joyce that on that day he proposed to Nora to have sex with him, who refused, but offered him oral sex instead — this might have happened in a park, which would explain the use of Phoenix Park as the Garden of Eden, the site of innocence and sin. after the deed, Nora and Joyce go on a stroll; Joyce in glee, pure joy, cloud-surfing, i’m sure.

so whereas Ulysses is the book of this day, Finnegans Wake, which took Joyce about 17 years to complete, published on May 4, 1939, is the book of the night.

as the book of night, it is also the book of dreams, the “bluest book in baile’s annals.” and that it is the book of dreams is worth mentioning because of how boundaries are fuzzied by the mixing of many human myths and languages with the english language as the central structure, a mixing operation performed to represent all possible languages and myths — to break through the wall.

it is organized in 4 untitled books (labeled in roman numerals: I, II, III, IV) and 17 chapters: book I is composed of 8 chapters; book II of 4 chapters; book III of 4 chapter; and book IV is composed of only 1 chapter. it is loosely structured around a family or a barkeep falling asleep, beginning to dream the middle of some dream: “riverrun” it comes and goes. in the text is reflected dream-manifestation of external sounds, like the tapping of a tree branch on a window (the repetitive “Tip” in the museum story) and the sounds of the waking world marking the end of the book and the end of the dream, which contributes to the multiplication of portmanteaus.

as previously mentioned, the text opens in the middle of a sentence that follows from the physical end of the book, in that sense, closing the book in a cycle. yet, this closure doesn’t totally close the book to knowledge-production because to this day there hasn’t been a univocal perspective on the book: Joyce wanted to create a book that would keep english teachers busy for generations to come, and so he did.

since there is no clear beginning, only middles, you could read the book starting on any chapter, read all the way through and back around up to the starting chapter, and it would make as much or as little sense as starting on the physical beginning of the text. within each part, the whole work is simulated such that an analysis of one part would reveal properties of the whole. as such, it is a linguistic fractal: each part simulates the whole so as you zoom in, the whole is reproduced. it is Joyce’s simulacrum of a quantum brain.

we could say Finnegans Wake has the dynamics of a dream, as it is free from the necessities of logic, which affords Joyce with space to compress all periods of history, all phases of individual and historical (racial, social, gender archetypes) and cosmic developments, into a circular design of which every part is beginning/middle/ending (in my terminology, developed in fuhkiuraborsense, every part is a middle-beginning… which henceforth i am going to represent as a middlebegiending).

having a dreamlike structure means that Finnegans Wake can be imagined during readings as a revolving stage, a gigantic wheeling rebus in which dim effigies rumple past us, the reader — the observer — and disappear into foggy horizons, replaced by other images, vague but half consciously familiar scenes; a stage on which mythological heroes and events of ancient history occupy the same spatiotemporal planes as modern personages and contemporary happenings.

it is what Joseph Campbell calls a monomyth but a multifaceted one: it is the nightmare of a Dublin citizen and the dreamlike saga of guilt-stained evolving humanity: as above, so below; as within, so without; as the universe, so the soul.

therefore in every line multiple meanings are present, interlocking allusions to certain words, weaving phrases like mycelial networks into the very pattern of the work.

Campbell says that Finnegans Wake tasks the imagination, exacts discipline (and hence punishment) and tenacity from those who dare dance with it. i agree, it’s a commitment and if you isolate every time you are thinking about it or engaged with it then paste it together into a continuous time series, we would observe a movie with irregular, long and short time intervals — and that nonlinearity is both representative of the work itself and of how life is, how the universe moves: such complexities, all the appearings and disappearings wherever they form and unform, couldn’t be faithfully represented by any linear mapping.

but these difficulties disappear as soon as we begin picking up a few compass clues and learn the language, finally understanding how to read it. the first 29 pages (the first chapter of the first book) are extremely dense in relation to other parts because it is the history of the parents of humanity of today (i use “humanity” here to represent the agglomerate of humans on earth and all their doings at this and every moment before and after as long as there is a Homo sapien). there is a condensation of history and its re-establishment, hence there is a language to learn.

eventually the vocabulary begins to more and more fall familiar on the accustomed ear — literally, as the participant must read aloud or listen to others read it. it is a communal activity that people engage with, an opera, as is life itself; and thanks to the internet (a mycelial network of sorts) we are able to watch and listen to people read aloud so we too can learn this language and participate in this ancient dance incanting Life.

so because it is a book that is meant to be read aloud, you will take much more out than silently reading with your eyes if you treat it like an opera — though the silent reading is also necessary. as you read aloud, you will feel aligned with the playfulness of the text when you are also playing with your voice, assuming different characters and roles as the passages unfold, not because you necessarily know what is going on, but just because it feels right by the way of his writing or yeah maybe it is because you’ve picked up enough clues to imagine right then and there what could be happening.

i believe it to be a spellbook: as you read, you are incanting Life and simultaneously becoming joyfully silly. when i read aloud, i say the words playfully as if the language of the Wake was meant to sound exactly like the english i learned in 6th grade (english is my second language), and not sound like some schizo variation of the Hiberno language. even better is when you read it, in all its joyful eccentricities, and also observe how you sound as you read aloud — it sounds so funny! think of it as a soundscape, it helps adjusting and letting go.

in fact, William Tindall says that Finnegans Wake has to be read aloud, and Robert Anton Wilson says the best way to approach it is in a group: “it has to be stalked like a wild animal, so you need a hunting party.” the real secret to reading it though, as Wilson revealed in a lecture, is “with several six packs of Guinness on the table: the more Guinness you drink, the clearer the Wake gets.” indeed, Roger Guinness is one of the major characters of the Wake.

now, let us for a moment turn out attention to the title, Finnegans Wake (FW):

fin-negans wake ~ fin again wake ~ end and again wake

fin negans wake ~ fin negation wake ~ negating the end, wake (restart)

the name represents what it is: a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind, a compound of fables, a collection of mythos and logos, a set of envirobiological cybernetic programs that reproduce this exact World we live in, this precise collection of relationships we have and this precise history; yet still, it is as a symphony, or a nightmare, a dream saga.

there’s more to the title of course, a multitude of appearances.

Finnegan represents the name of Bygmester Finnegan, and because Finnegan suggests a fin, an ending, the work opens with a fall. we can consider a fall in equivalence relation with a rate of change in states (the end of one state, beginning of another) even if the state in consideration is only the state of position of the object that changes. in this sense, a fall is motion, so to be falling is to be in motion, and what happens in motion? the fructification of material senses with a soul personality — Life itself happens when there is motion!

the dream goes like this: at first there was barely something, and then suddenly, a thunder, the loudest of all. then there were explosions, then lots of smoke; then land then water then life then marshes and plains and mountains and forests and fishes and birds; then great apes and their fall from the trees, their rise onto two feet; then came tools and battles, bloodying the earth and the water; cries of anger and confusion and death polluting the air. then at some point there was Bygmester Finnegan, a drunk hod carrier climbing a ladder. he somehow fell (“may half been a missfired brick, as some say, or it mought have been due to a collupsus of his back promises, as others looked at it”) and was knocked out, becoming unconscious. his family and friends hold a deathwatch over his coffin, surrounded by Guinness beer and whisky. during the festivities of his wake, someone says the word “whisky” (“usqueadbaugham!”) at which point Finnegan comes to life again and threatens to rise and join the festivities that were already happening, planned without him (he began in the middle of it all). in other words, the whole structure of the new day has been founded on the fact of his demise, so the people soothe him back to the dead. by the end of the wake, Primeval Finnegan the giant has already been supplanted by the family man, Haroun Childeric Eggeberth (HCE), who has arrived by sea to set up family and shop.

thus, it is a fall that represents all the falls and since we are past Eve and Adam’s, we are far along with Christian minstrelsy, so is this not Lucifer’s fall? Adam’s fall? Fall of Rome? Wall Street fall? Humpty Dumpty’s fall? Fall of Newton’s apple? the irrigating shower of spring rain that falls on seeded fields? is it not every person’s daily recurring fall from grace?

there’s much more to this: at first, Finnegan the hod carrier is identifiable with Finn MacCool, captain for two hundred years of Ireland’s warrior-heroes. Finn typifies all heroes: he is Thor, Prometheus, Osiris, Christ, the Buddhas. it is by Finn’s coming again (by the reappearance of the hero) that strength and hope are provided for mankind.

by his death and coming back to life, hod carrier Finnegan comically refigures the solemn mystery of the hero-god whose flesh and blood furnish the human race with spirit-fructifying meat and drink.

at the wake of Finnegan, the watchers eat everything that belongs to the dead hero, including partaking of his very body like a Last Supper.

Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty, How he fell with a roll and a rumble, And curled up like Lord Olofa Crumple, By the butt of the Magazine Wall, (Chorus) Of the Magazine Wall, Hump, helmet and all? (FW45)

here too we have a fall, that of Humpty Dumpty the Egg, and though the shell of this Cosmic Egg shatters, the essential egg substance remains and is gathered by the All Mother and served for the nutriment of Her people, “sunny side up with care.”

all these fallings and risings cause a liberation of energy that keeps the universe turning, providing the dynamic which sets in motion the four-part cycle of universal history, a tetrad borrowed from Giambattista Vico’s La Scienza Nuova, his corso e recorso:

Theocratic → Aristocratic → Democratic → Chaotic

the Chaotic is our present age, marked by individualism, sterility (insert obligatory capitalist realism reference here), the nadir of man’s fall. and this Chaotic Age is terminated by a thunderclap that terrifies the whole human world and reawakens humans to the claims of the supernatural… and thus starts the cycle of history again (a transtory, not a pure repetition: a helix, not a circle), where the humans emerging from the chaos now reorganize according to theocratic principles, and again it all goes, but now with wisdom…

we note here that Joyce’s conceptualization of universal history is similar to that of Oswald Spengler’s, but Joyce’s actually retrace to Vico’s, whereas Spengler’s retrace to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s. in turn, their historicizing retraces to the Greek’s Four Ages, itself equivalent to the Hindu’s Yugas:

Gold ~ Krita ~ Theocratic

Silver ~ Treta ~ Aristocratic

Bronze ~ Dvāpara ~ Democratic

Iron ~ Kali ~ Chaotic

Robert Anton Wilson has called Joyce the greatest anthropologist who ever lived because of this book. it was through Joyce’s works that Joseph Campbell developed his unique approach to anthropology and developed the concept of the monomyth, the hero’s journey — on which movies and art that shaped US culture are founded on, notably influencing Disney (production teams study the monomyth). after writing The Skeleton Key, Campbell wrote The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which would’ve been impossible without the former, which would’ve been impossible without Joyce.

Joyce influenced many people, a few worth highlighting here though all of us are worthy of mention — shoutout to all the Joycepilled individuals reading this.

for instance, Murray Gell-Mann, 1969 Nobel prize winner in elementary particle physics, got his 3-quark model from Finnegans Wake: three quarks are the three major characters in FW, the Holy Trinity: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”

there we have the two twins who are opposite, and the third who was both twins combined and still a third independent character, by way of a Taoist or Buddhist logic (Madhyamaka), because the third is a superposition of the two.

this is the logic of the Sham-Ham-Japheth relationship in Finnegans Wake, which is also Bacon-Shakespeare-Raleigh, the Tom-Dick-Harry; and many other types of trilogies in the human mind, like Dogfather-Dogson-and-Co, which sounds like an English company but it’s actually Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll: the two twins who are opposite, Dodgson the logician and Carroll the fantasist, united in one body, Dogfather, who was part Dodgson and part Carroll. thus Dogfather-Dogson-and-Co is Dodgson divided into three parts, like the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son, and Coo! the Holy Pigeon.

let us keep going with this and consider the Bacon-Shakespeare example: Bacon is the rationalist, Shakespeare is the poet, but some people think they’re one, and so the two become three in unity — and that makes them isomorphic with the three sons of Noah, who are Joyce’s basic archetype of threeness — Shem, Japheth, and Ham — and this fits together because Ham and Bacon make a pun. a hidden unity is made because Shakespeare’s coat of arms had a boar’s head on it, and so you’ve got the boar, the ham, and the bacon, which has the Adonis theme in it (Adonis died by a wild boar sent by Artemis), thus linking the two trios together, as well as every other.

no wonder then that Jung was another person very much influenced by Joyce.

in fact, before the Wake, Jung highly regarded Ulysses, recommending it as a new bible for the europeans on the grounds that the Christian Bible had warped the development of western humanity in certain egoistic directions, and Jung thought the development of the true self, the higher self, required a dose of Oriental thinking and feeling — he said Joyce had brought that into Western literature with Ulysses.

Joyce and Jung met a few times but they didn’t like each other much. Joyce thought Jung had already diagnosed him; and Jung, who indeed had already diagnosed Joyce, thought Joyce was a man on the edge of schizophrenia who remained on the safe side through his art: if he lost his art he’d become insane. apparently in conversation Joyce shared details about his daughter and Jung diagnosed her with schizophrenia; but Joyce did not wish to believe his daughter was schizophrenic. Joyce said to Jung, “I’m doing the same experiments with language that she is.” to which Jung replied, “the difference is you are diving and she’s sinking.”

when the Wake began to appear (Joyce published a chapter titled “fragments from Work in Progress” in some Parisian literary journal in 1924), Jung wrote a comment on it in which he said that this is either mental illness or a degree of mental illness inconceivable to most people. Jung ended up siding with the latter opinion.

we note in passing that Jung’s works on synchronicity and the collective unconscious came after Finnegans Wake (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious was published in 1959, 20 years after FW).

this idea of the collective unconscious is played with in Finnegans Wake through his dance with dialectics, such that in FW events eventually refer back to the dying and resurrected gods — Adonis is one of the dying and resurrected gods, along with Christ, Tim Finnegan, Osiris, and so on. it is the collective cosmic unconscious, the schizophrenic beyond, that connects the whole work.

isomorphic to the dying and resurrection of gods is the movement of the fall and the rise. on the first page there is the Wall Street stock market crashing; and the fall of the Roman empire; and Adam and Eve falling because of the snake and the forbidden fruit; and Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall; and Tim Finnegan, from an old Irish drinking song from which the book takes its title, also falling off the wall; and the dream of falling asleep in the collective unconscious of the species; and below that there is the nonlocal consciousness of the entire cosmos, and all this falling is followed by a rising at the end in which the river turns into air molecules: the river turns, becomes one with the Irish sea, and the Irish sea becomes air molecules which become clouds which float over the Wicklow Hills, and they come down as rain, taking us back to the beginning of the book where this rain is River Liffey forming in the hills to flow from Dublin and go out to the sea — again, this cyclical rise-and-fall. 

in mentioning the nonlocal consciousness of the entire cosmos, through the way Joyce connects all these different myths, all the falls and rises (compressing all of this into a language he himself shapes, which reads almost intelligibly if read aloud, except the words are varied just enough to loose a fixed meaning yet retain enough of a central structure to guide us toward understanding the large category the word is representing), i find more and more that the symbolism contained within also suggests the fall of DNA on this planet, which is Fred Hoyle’s cosmological theory, that DNA didn’t happen by accident, it was propagated throughout the galaxy by higher intelligences. in a future essay we plan on writing about this and connecting it to the fact flowering plants became dominant after the K-Pg asteroid devastated the global environs and killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

so we also have the DNA falling on this planet and within this DNA, all these metamorphoses: the four stages of the insect (the egg, the larva, the pupa, and the adult insect); connected to this tetrad is also the Lords of the Four Quarters: Matt Gregory, Marcus Lyons, Luke Tarpey, and Johnny MacDougal (from FW) which are the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. it’s also the four chambers of the human heart, the four kings of the tarot deck, the four provinces of Ireland — there’s this basic four-part cycle there on the island which Joyce calls their weatherings, marryings, buryings, and their natural selections, which refer to all these insect and mammalian patterns.

with the topoi of Deleuze and Guattari, we could describe this Wakean chaosmos as molar-stable and molecular-unstable: hundreds of thousands of portmanteaus keep bifurcating into dialectical doubles, triples, “quodlibus”: HCE vs ALP, Celtic panpsychism vs technologically-generated spectacles; anthropocentric mythology vs posthuman ecology; human un/consciousness vs the cosmic quantum universe; the four-cycle universal development of matter (insect metamorphosis, general human evolution, particular human evolution, and so on). all of these schisms fall into the singularity that is Finnegans Wake, this holographic fractal chaosmos. it features a narrative structure that orbits the Earwickers, comprising of father HCE, mother ALP, and the three siblings Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy the Schizo Daughter; and gossips about HCE’s sin, his fall. on the microscopic (molecular) level, the illusion of stability evaporates as each schism is revealed in the All Father and the All Mother archetypes who represents subatomic quanta of action which differentiate into 2s or 3s or 4s or 5s or 6s or 7s or 8s upon observation.

Joyce commingles the evolution of plants, insects, and mammals into this structure, all of which are parts of the deepest collective unconscious that Joyce is exploring in the Wake. 

if we momentarily accept that DNA could’ve come from beyond the Earth or even this solar system, then here we would also have this cycle of the DNA being spread through the galaxy, indeed through the whole observable universe, falling on the Earth here, on another planet there; wherever conditions are suitable, matter and consciousness there form, passing through these primitive stages of evolution, only to rise up from the ground at the end to return to unity with the rest of the galaxy in the cosmos.

the four stages of evolution that Joyce keeps playing with connects on all these different levels. even the old Jacobite song, “Charley, oh my darling, my darling” that refers to Charley the Chimp, who was one of the denizens of the Phoenix Park Zoo when Joyce was one year old, appears in the Wake as “Charley, you’re my darling” which is a pun on Charles Darwin.

in fact, through the all the fallings and risings, everything in the Wake simulates the Phoenix Park Zoo, which is Noah’s Ark, a structure that contains the whole history of evolution. it’s in the woods by the Phoenix Park Zoo that the dreamer gets into an embarrassing encounter with two teenage girls and three British soldiers, which, if you can follow all the clues in the dream, involve exhibitionism, voyeurism, masturbation, homosexuality, murder, cannibalism, and killing the king and the pope.

keep in mind the dreamer’s sense of guilt is somewhat exaggerated though: this HCE man is a middle-class protestant in Dublin which makes him kind of out-of-place and unpopular with the Irish, and yet he’s instilled with the catholic sexual horror of Ireland because he’s living there. that’s the middle level of the Wake, the Freudian level. 

below that, there’s the Jungian level of the collective unconscious: the dying and reborn gods, the great Triple Goddess, the maiden, the bride, the throne; the Moon Goddess; and the Lords of the Four Quarters, and the four Masonic offices in the Temple, the four Kings of playing-card, and so on. 

and below that, there’s the nonlocal level, in which the dreaming mind is entangled with the whole of the cosmos, past and present, implicating the whole history of the human species and all the other species throughout the galaxy. this idea of a nonlocal consciousness only relatively recently entered science: it came on stage in 1977 with Edward Harris Walker’s paper “The Complete Quantum Mechanical Anthropologist” in which he proposes a nonlocal theory of consciousness — but it’s there in the Wake already, just as Murray Gell-Mann found the three quarks and Campbell the monomyth and Jung the collective unconscious.

in between the first and last page is the middle, which is all there ever is, a middle. and there we find the story of how Buckley shot the Russian general. Buckley was a friend of Joyce’s father who served in the Crimean War, which for Joyce was a symbol of all wars because it had the word “crime” in it. Buckley saw a Russian general in the field and was going to shoot him, because the primary military rule is “always shoot the highest ranking officer of the enemy army.” as Buckley was about to shoot, the general took down his pants and squat down to take a shit in the field, and Buckley, telling the story in Dublin pubs in his old age, said “it made him look so human, i couldn’t shoot.” then the general finished, pulled his pants up, at which point he became an enemy officer again, and so Buckley shot the poor bastard.

to Joyce, this is the symbol of the fight or the predicament or the comedy of humanity: the general is human with his pants down and his ass sticking out, and he’s not human with the uniform on. in telling the story of how Buckley shot the Russian general, Joyce incorporates all the battles of human history — you can find every battle in every history book: the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854, and Brian Boru fighting the Danes at Clontarf in 1014, and the Peloponnesian Wars; there have been long commentaries on all the military histories that Joyce put into that one chapter, together with all the anal jokes which the english language is capable. 

Joyce seems to have shared Freud’s view that war is anal sadism, and mixed in with this is a running theme about the atoms and ifs (“We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we’re presurely destined to be odd’s without ends”), which goes back to the first sentence of the book, “riverrun past Adam and Eve’s” either of whom we are destined to be, Eve And Adam each representing the female and male archetypes that dominate the book and become all the different female and male combinations throughout. they’re like the Yin and the Yang in the I Ching; they’re also a river and a mountain — complementary cosmic principles. 

and while the “atoms and the ifs” is a pun on the “Adam’s and the Eve’s” as well as the basic Yin and Yang duality, it also refers to the uncertainty principle in atomic physics, atoms and if’s: everything is uncertain on the quantum level, so Joyce has all these quantum puns running through the chapter, not only atoms and ifs but also “blown to atoms,” which takes you back to Garden of Eden again; there’s a theme about the hunchbacked sailor cheating the tailor all through a chapter, and the sailor and the tailor are like the two twins changing places: the sailor is the tailor and the tailor is sailor, it’s just an s-t transformation, which is part of Einstein’s theory of relativity, the s-t Lorentzian transformations in the space-time equations.

then we have,

In the heliotropical noughttime following a fade of transformed Tuff and, pending its viseversion, a metenergic reglow of beaming Batt, the bairdboard bombardment screen, if tastefully taut guranium satin, tends to teleframe and step up to the charge of a light barricade. (FW349)

which refers to the two-hole experiment in quantum mechanics where light is both particle and wave, and that’s followed by a geranium curtain, which sounds like the flower the geranium but Joyce spells it with a ‘u’ so you’ve got uranium in there which is the trigger of the atom bomb.

we could easily historicize the 17 years during which Joyce wrote this book with the development of quantum theory. the scientific breakthroughs in probing the abyss of the infinitely small drew the media’s attention, and Joyce, like Anna Livia Plurabelle who “enjoyed more than anything these secret workings of natures,” incorporated the ontological and epistemological implications of the subatomic realm into his work.

for example, like Schrodinger’s cat, “Bygmester Finnegan” is both dead and alive in a quantum state of superposition. similarly, within the “cropse of our seedfather” is pure virtuality, since “cropse” functions as a fecund corpse that contains the concentrated energy of crops.

and that the acronym HCE is repeated throughout the text, e.g.

“Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker”

“Here Comes Everybody”

“Howth Castle and Environs”

“Haroun Childeric Eggeberth”

and so on,

indicates the subatomic structure intrinsic to sentient beings, inorganic objects, and spacetime itself in which all things exist: “the sameold gamebold adomic structure, highly charged with electrons” (FW615). of course, being the nerds we are, we know that: h = Planck’s constant; c = speed of light; e = electron charge. imagine our reaction when we discovered this! all of these fundamental constants are related through the fine structure constant: as a dimensionless, numerical quantity, this fine structure constant is labeled as alpha and is precisely approximated to be 1/137.

in passing, we note here that if this number were any different, larger or smaller in magnitude, the universe would not exist as it does. we note too that the denominator (‘137’) becomes ‘2’ under a numerological reduction (137 → 1 + 3 + 7 = 11 → 1 + 1 = 2), giving us 1/2, which for us relates to the fundamental division of the material universe into binaries (halves).

there is also play with quantum entanglement, which is basically the idea that two particles’ quantum states are so linked that observation (measurement) of one “instantaneously” influences the other no matter how far they are apart. Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance.” in the context of the Wake, pieces of information contained in one portmanteau are essential for the determination of other textual particles far removed from it.

this isn’t us reading too much into it just for clickbait value — Joyce explicitly connects his work to quantum physics:

The abnihilisation of the etym by the grisning of the grosning of the grinder of the grunder of the first lord of the Hurtreford expolodotonates through Parsuralia with an ivanmorinthorrorumble fragoromboassity amidwhiches general uttermosts confussion are perceivable moletons skaping with mulicules while coventry plumpkins fairlygosmotherthemselves in the Landaunelegants of Pinkadindy. Similar scenatas are projectilised from Hullulullu, Bawlawayo, empyreal Raum and mordern Atems. (FW353)

this of course alludes to the splitting of the atom by Ernest Rutherford in Manchester. as we can see here, Joyce’s Rutherford is decomposed (deterritorialized) and recomposed (reterritorialized) into Hutreford, which puns on a french verb heurter (“to strike”).

we can look for many such puns and relationships and spend a lifetime studying this, but the true radicalness wasn’t so much that he was able to represent these scientific developments in his work, but rather that Joyce actually places the observer (reader) in a textual simulacrum of the atomic world where we can no longer rely on every day syntactic/Newtonian/classical laws to cope with a flux of unactualized potentialities.

in this sense, each reading of a portmanteau resembles an observation or measurement of a wave function which causes it to collapse precisely to the state of your interpretation and use at that particular time: we never read one word with same self twice.

so there we have it!

there is so much more that can be said, so many ways to organize this exposition, so many ways to try to reel in new players, but we hope this has been a sufficient consideration.

it takes courage to willingly submerge yourself in the chaotic unconscious, to encounter shadows and nonhuman desiring-machines without fear.

though at first a window through which we observe senseless chaos unfold, we hope the information we have gathered here will transform the book into a door you will fearlessly walk through and join this asymmetric dance, on beat and off time.

Joyce’s beautifully wild chaosmos embraces the unknowable things-in-us, the unconscious mind that behaves like spectral atomic particles as long as “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s,” like a flux of virtuality that runs past even atoms, storying visually and auditorily.

so gather ‘round!

pick up a copy by the door, a brew or six, and silly yourself with us!