“Under Bryant Park” is a 2002 mural by Samm Kunce. Part of the MTA’s “Arts for Transit”  program, it can be seen when walking through the long corridor connecting the 7 to the other trains at the 5th Avenue – Bryant Park station.  Some background from the MTA site:

On the walls of the tunnel we see rock outcroppings, tree roots, pipes, animal burrows, and literary quotations. The artist based the project on the idea of systems. In her words, “People travel the subway system, water and other utility services are delivered by pipes, and plants and trees that provide grace and plants and trees that provide grace and softness against the city’s sharper edges find their way to water and nutrients underground through a system of roots. In a similar way, literature is shared by systems of learning and lending…”

Mad props to the artist for choosing Finnegans Wake. Enjoy the pictures!

I’ll be visiting Germany soon, so I thought I’d take a look at Joyce’s connection with Germany.

Joyce taught himself German when he was 19 years old in order to translate several of Gerhart Hauptmann’s plays into English.  Joyce tried to have the plays performed by the Irish Literary Theatre but his hopes were dashed by W.B. Yeats, who rejected his translations with the slightly snarky remark that “you are not a very good German scholar.”

Another German artist, Richard Wagner, had a tremendous influence on Joyce’s work. It’s certainly a curious relationship. Joyce was vocal in his dislike of Wagner’s music, and yet his personal library included over 15 books about or by Wagner. As a student Joyce claimed that music was “the least of Wagner” championing instead his importance as a dramatist and mythmaker.  Wagner’s music nonetheless had a profound effect on Joyce’s compositional style. In Ulysses, and especially in the Wake, Joyce deftly exploits the power of leitmotifs, a technique most often associated with Wagner. Wagner’s influence can also be seen in the mythic themes and characters populating the Wake:

Wagner and his work form the most important single opera presence in a book that, like Wagner’s Ring, is a tale of giants and river maidens, mortals and gods. Joyce also incorporated Wagner’s romantic pair, Tristan and Isolde, as protagonists. (Joyce’s Grand OPEROAR,101-102)

The Tristan and Isolde story is incredibly important to the genesis and evolution of the Wake, however that is a story for another day…

Joyce famously drew from over 70 languages in FW, sometimes punning in several different languages at the same time (show off!) Some people refer to the language of the book as “Wakese.” I consider it to be wholly, emphatically, resolutely English (again, a story for another post).  Here are several examples of German words found in the text* to illustrate some of the different way that Joyce works with language.

Words that are transparently foreign, with no English counterpart, often crop up in the text: “…mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick” (3.10) Tauftauf begins to make sense if you know that taufen is German for “to baptize. ” Without that knowledge it can easily be overlooked as nonsensical syllables.

Joyce gets even more creative in the following examples by playfully (and often covertly) translating German phrases into a strange new English: “Ja, Ja, Ja. Lieber Arthur, wir siegen. Wie geht’s deiner kleinen Frau?**” becomes “Yaw, yaw, yaw! Leaper Orthor. Fear siecken! Fieldgaze thy tiny frow” (9.4-5) in the Wake.  And on page 40, to return to Wagner and Tristan, we find “Mildew Lisa”, Joyce’s brilliant and cheeky pun on “mild und leise” the opening words from Isolde’s Liebestod, the final aria of Tristan und Isolde.

*from A Lexicon of the German in Finnegans Wake

**Yes, Yes, Yes. Dear Arthur, we conquer. How’s your little wife?

Iain Sinclair’s Edge of the Orison is one of the most perfect books ever written. It is a stunning work, psychogeography at its best. A book that captures all the mad beauty of the world.

Sinclair’s book  introduced me to the British “peasant poet” John Clare. Clare was born in 1793, two years before Keats, and died in 1864, fourteen years after Wordsworth. Clare’s long life gave him a rare perspective, enabling him to look back and comment on the reign of Romanticism…from the privileged vista of a madhouse. In 1841 Clare ran away from High Beach Asylum in Epping Forest, walking for over 3 days along the Great North Road in hopes of returning home to his childhood love, Mary Joyce. However, Mary had already been dead for three years (which Clare knew). Later that year Clare was committed to the Northampton Asylum, where he would spend his last 23 years.

Sinclair traces several other journeys as he follows Clare’s anguished footsteps from London to Northamptonshire.In an extraordinary confluence of literary history, 87 years after Clare’s death, a woman named Lucia Anna would enter the Northampton Asylum (later named St. Andrew’s Hospital.) She too would spend the rest of her days (over 30 years) there and is buried in a nearby cemetery, isolated from her parents and brother who are buried together in Zurich. She was James Joyce’s daughter and muse.

Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia and has kindled a fire in her brain.

Lucia will no doubt frequently appear in my posts. She haunts the Wake, and me. Reading Edge of the Orison was the catalyst for my most recent visit to London, in June 2008. I could no longer put off paying my respects to Lucia and built my plans around my own pilgrimage to Northampton.

The first stop was St. Andrew’s. I walked as much as I could toward the main entrance before losing my nerve. It is still an active psychiatric hospital so I really did not feel comfortable exploring the grounds. I did have a good laugh though when I noticed, shortly after taking the above picture, a dumpster next to a building that had “Phoenix” written along its side. Joyce would have very much appreciated that.

I then took the bus to Kingsthorpe cemetery. Prior to my trip I had tried to research the location of her grave, but did not have much luck. When I arrived there was a funeral in progress, and also honestly I couldn’t figure out a way to go up to someone and say “my favorite author’s daughter is buried here, help me” without coming across as a total loon. So I just walked. And walked. It was nearly an hour of me trying to keep to the paths (and softly whispering “excuse me…sorry” to the earth when I had to trek across graves.) I nearly gave up when I found myself smack in the middle of a cliché.

A shaft of bright sunlight made its way through the gray clouds. I saw a large tree and knew that I had found her. Sinclair was right. “The red Aberdeen granite stone for the daughter of James Joyce, more years in Northampton than Paris, is stark.”

I paid my respects with a small bunch of wild flowers and a note….

Nuée! Nuée!
A lightdress fluttered
She was gone. ~159.10

FW Lesson #2: Joyce doesn’t just play with letters in the text. Numbers also have a significant role to play, with 1132 being perhaps the most important number within the Wakean universe:

1132, 1132, 1132. It comes up as a day, as a legal code, as an address—32 West 11th Street (I tip my hat whenever I walk by that house)—and in many other ways. (Joseph Campbell, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce)

1132AD has some significance as a date in history. It is, for example, the year St. Laurence O’Toole, the patron saint of Dublin, was born. However, breaking 1132 down to 11 and 32 reveals just how exhilaratingly brilliant Joyce was (before the age of computers and google, no less!).

Why 32? As Leopold Bloom points out in the “Lotus Eaters” episode of Ulysses, 32 feet per second is the rate of acceleration of falling bodies:

Thirtytwo feet per second per second. Law of falling bodies: per second per second. They all fall to the ground. The earth. It’s the force of gravity of the earth is the weight. (5.44-46)

Another number that stalks Bloom throughout Ulysses is 11. Bloom’s son Rudy died when he was 11 days old, and would have turned 11 in 1904. Eleven, as Joseph Campbell suggests, is also a number of resurrection and renewal.  11 & 32 together as 1132 marks a paradoxical fusion of Falling and Redemption.

O felix culpa, Oh Fortunate Fall. Finnegans Wake is fundamentally a book about falling, both literally and figuratively. The Fall of Man, Tim Finnegan’s drunken fall from the ladder. 1132 thus becomes shorthand for the endless cycle of falling and phoenix-like rising from the ashes that is at the heart of FW.

Have you ever had a world famous intellectual stare you down with a mix of bewildered confusion and annoyance? I have. It looks exactly like the above picture, just change the setting from a nondescript library to a book signing at the 92^nd Street Y.

I deliberately put my dog-eared copy of the Wake in my bag the morning of 6 June 2005, knowing that I would be attending a reading with Umberto Eco later that day at the Y (to promote his most recent novel at the time, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana). I never thought I would actually go through with my vaguely thought out, not to mention entirely insane, plan. But I did.

Eco is a brilliant novelist and scholar, and his debt to Joyce can be seen throughout his works. Eco has also written some of the most intriguing and insightful literary criticism on Joyce.  The Aesthetics of Chaosmos—based on the notion that Joyce is “the node where the Middle Ages and the avant-garde meet”—is key to my never-to-be-written-and-yet-constantly-thought-about-and-vaguely-researched-thesis.

I was towards the end of the book signing line. I had purchased a copy of Queen Loana for him to sign for my sister. Ahead of me were people carrying huge piles of books for him to sign. Granted I’m prone to exaggeration, but there honestly were a number of people in front of me with easily a half dozen or more books for him to sign. I thought that was rude and impersonal. I was certain they were getting the books signed in order to turn around and sell on ebay. Surely no one could know that many people who would appreciate an autographed Eco novel. I, personally, can count that number on one hand and still have fingers left over. Naturally, by the time I reached the table I had convinced myself that after all of those fake interactions, he would appreciate my truly heart-felt request. After he signed his novel, I somehow managed to blurt out

Um, Mr. Eco, I-know-you-are-such-a-huge-fan-of-james-joyce-and-I-love-joyce-too-and-your-essays-on-joyce-too-and-i-thought-it-would-be-so-special-for-you-to-sign-my-copy-of-finnegans-wake.

{cricket cricket}

Umberto Eco, Italian medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, literary critic and novelist, just stares at me. At first he thought that I wanted him to sign the book as Joyce. I made Umberto Eco believe that I wanted him to channel James Joyce’s signature. This, in and of itself, is awesome on so many levels.  After much awkward stammering, trying to explain that I had simply wanted him to sign the book as himself, he finally spoke these words to me:

OK. I will sign but only if I can inscribe it as a gift from me to you.

This is the only recording of Joyce reading from the Wake. He does a mean washerwoman impersonation.

O, my back, my back, my bach!
I’d want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! ~213.18

I get many questions when I wear this necklace.* I am always amazed, and touched, when people ask if it is scripture. Yes and no. It is the first line of Finnegans Wake, a very special text that I have loved since I was 16 (the story of my first encounter coming up in a future post.) I hesitate to call it sacred writing, but its pretty darn close. The book is a wonderful puzzle that never ceases to confuse and delight me. It is a book I will continue to discover for the rest of my life, a fantastic lifelong reading experience that few other books can offer.

I have decided to create this blog for several reasons:

A part of me is incredibly sad that I will most likely not have the opportunity to write my MA dissertation (on Chaucer & Joyce.) Life for the past few years has been a very stressful juggling act. Attempting a second master’s degree in my “spare” time was perhaps an insane decision. Being a hypercritical perfectionist when it comes to writing has not helped matters. Taking time off from school is necessary, but it’s also made me blue. I miss the joy of researching and writing, the awesome buzz of making creative connections and the pleasure of crafting a really perfect sentence.

I also get annoyed with myself when people ask me about FW: why I’m obsessed with it, what the hell was Joyce trying to do here, etc. I never am happy with my answers.

So this is a place for me to write, share, question, and dream, etc. There will be plenty of crap writing and nonsense, and I certainly don’t expect many to read these rambling posts. It’s primarily a chance for me to get back into writing and engage with Joyce’s work on a regular basis.

And so…

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s,

from swerve of shore to bend of bay,

brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation

back to Howth Castle and Environs.

*awesome find on Etsy, courtesy of Brooklyn-based artist Tilly Bloom.

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