Pictures from Bloomsday and After

Last Thursday was Bloomsday. It was also the night that the winners of the Paris Literary Prize were announced at the Société des gens de lettres. And (as I’ve been repeating over and over like an excitable child) my work was exhibited at the event! Here are some pictures to prove that I didn’t make up the whole thing. Many thanks to Sylvia Whitman and everyone at Shakespeare’s, and to the de Groot Foundation, sponsors of the prize. Being invited to display my work at your event made me feel honoured to the point of discomfort (as I’m sure they could tell. If you think I’m self-deprecating on this site, you should see me in real life). And thank you, Haejin, foundation polyvalente, whose skills at matting and hanging are spoken of in hushed tones by primitive peoples who mistake them for magic. Congratulations also to the winner of the prize, Rosa Rankin-Gee, and the two runners-up, Adam Biles and Agustin Maes! I look forward to seeing your books in print! Afterwards, the pictures were taken to Shakespeare and Company bookstore, where they will be on display until June 30th. You can see some more pictures from the award ceremony and the reading on Friday here.

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I changed it again! Indecision is a curse.

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All of these foreign texts are somehow relevant to their context, by the way. However, I have no memory of what they say.

Bloomsday Show UPDATE

THE DETAILS ARE IN! From June 16th, Bloomsday, Wake in Progress will be on show at Shakespeare and Company bookstore, 37 rue de la Bûcherie, 75005. On Bloomsday itself, there’ll only be five pictures displayed. The rest are going to show at the awards ceremony for the Paris Literary Prize, which is sadly not open to the public! However, from Friday 17th, the rest of the pictures will go up at the store (covering as few of the books as possible) and remain on display for an undisclosed period. Until people decide they want to get at the books, I suppose.


ALSO! At 6pm on Friday 17th, the winner and two runners-up of the novella prize will be reading from their stories. I advise all of you to come, stare at my pictures in unique, non-pixelated form, and listen to extracts from some great novellas.

ALSO ALSO! I offer this solemn vow: that if there is nothing to drink at this event, I shall provide some.

My sincerest thanks go to Sylvia and everyone else at Shakespeare’s!

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Doing some spring cleaning for the show. I’ve completely gone off the traced look. Sorry, Henry.

Bloomsday Show

The debt I owe to historic Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company is utterly incalculable. Among so much else, without this institution some of my greatest friends, the most formative experiences of my life, and my wife would be unknown to me.

So when the owner, omnipotent goddess Sylvia Whitman, offered to host an exhibition of my Finnegans Wake illustrations, I knew it could only mean one thing: that she intended me to incur a moral debt so great that I should be forced to offer myself in indentured servitude, after the style of Man Friday.

But whatever the reason, I am very happy to announce that a selection from Wake in Progress will be on display on June 16th, to coincide with Bloomsday! Which all seems amazingly apt, since Shakespeare and Co. is named after the bookstore that published the first edition of Ulysses, and Sylvia is herself named after the owner, Sylvia Beach.

The venue and other details are not settled yet, so watch this space!

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Why Finnegans Wake is better than Ulysses

In a nod to the uniquely challenging nature of the book that I’m sacrificing my youth to, I thought it might be worthwhile to offer some reasons to bother with it. And so I present the purposely divisive first in a series:

Why Read Finnegans Wake?
Part One: Because it’s better than Ulysses

Among the sort of people who care to form opinions about this sort of thing, it seems quite fashionable to call Ulysses the pinnacle of James Joyce’s achievement, and Finnegans Wake merely the unreadable folly on which he squandered the last 12 17 years of his productive life. This opinion was most convincingly voiced by Vladimir Nabokov, who (in this interview) named Ulysses the greatest novel of the 20th Century, but compared the Wake to “a persistent snore in the next room.” But let’s get this straight: Ulysses is a remarkable book, but one with a serious structural imbalance. It’s telling that Nabokov’s own lecture notes on Ulysses recommend skipping huge chunks of it that he simply didn’t like. As the book trundles along for the first eight chapters or so, the logic behind it seems pretty clear: to recount a single day in the lives of two people in obsessively detailed realism, following the train of their thoughts through stream-of-consciousness style. Round about chapter nine, however, the style seems to break off like a mad horse, leaving the characters in the dust. Thus we get episodes like chapter 11 (“Sirens”) in which grammar is replaced with a pseudo-musical system of motifs (I can’t wait to see how they deal with that on Ulysses “Seen”), or the following chapter (“Cyclops”), in which an anecdote by a pub landlord is unaccountably intercut with increasingly hyperbolic interruptions in a variety of incongruous styles. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it’s not the same book. In my opinion, Joyce simply grew tired of his original idea. Although it seems crazy now, he’d spent much of his life obsessed with Henrik Ibsen (anyone who’s read Exiles will, I hope, agree what a mistake that was), and I think he conceived Ulysses as an Ibsenian novel, in which the greatest extreme of realism is combined with an

equally obsessive system of semi-mystical symbolism. But eventually he simply outgrew Ibsen, and began to fully develop the style that he’s now best remembered for: that in which style itself takes centre-stage, so that, for example, a chapter about birth might start in Chaucerian English and develop through to present day slang, or one about miscommunication be written entirely in clichés. In Finnegans Wake, style oustrips not just the characters and the setting, but even the language itself. Style becomes fluid in a way that you will not experience in any other book, shifting from the complex syntax of classical history through fairy tales, to the pedantic diction of a science lecture, all of it suffused with poetry and irony in equal measure. More than that, it has the structural integrity that Ulysses lacks, a precise system of repetition and cyclical development that carries it from beginning to end. Far from being a self-indulgent imitation, Finnegans Wake feels in a lot of ways like the perfection of an idea for which Ulysses was merely the trial run. (Which is not to say that it isn’t self-indulgent.) So perhaps Finnegans Wake isn’t “better” than Ulysses. I suppose it really depends what you mean by “better”. It may not be the perfect book; it isn’t even my favourite book; but it is the most perfectly Joycean book, the pinnacle of his style, his vision and his temperament, and no one can claim to love Joyce without at least respecting it. No matter what Vladimir Nabokov might tell you.

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I’ve been putting this one off for a while. I’m still not entirely happy with it, but I just feel like I have to keep moving right now.

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The Passion of Earwicker

Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, and today the first day of Lent. As all good Christians know, this period marks the beginning of 40 days of fasting in memory of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, to prepare believers for the celebration of Easter. BUT, according to James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, the carnival of Shrove Tuesday and the period of fasting that follows have their roots in Pagan festivals to honour the god of vegetation. The corn god had to die every year in order to be reborn with the youth and vigour required to bring an end to winter for an agricultural people. These ceremonies in turn had their roots in even older rituals in which a priest-king, thought to have personal power over the elements, is killed, mourned for a period, and finally replaced by a younger candidate. Our Mr. Earwicker, the god of an urban people, in his present iteration is perhaps most simply summarised as a statesman whose character is assassinated so that his people may live. But like Jesus (and through Jesus), he has his origins in these ancient tales of blood sacrifice and natural revivification. So as I (painfully slowly) illuminate his “fishabed ghoatstory”, and as leaves and blossoms return to the trees, remember to give a thought to the Passion of Mr. Earwicker.

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Chapter Three

You may have noticed that the previous chapter had a fairly high level of narrative drive. Well, I hope you enjoyed it, because it’s over now. With chapter three we take a sudden plunge into extreme obscurity (“S’dense!”, as the first line says). I’ve been scratching my head over it for two weeks now, and I hope you won’t be too disappointed with the results.

Partially, at least, chapter three continues Mr. Earwicker’s story, but mostly it repeats and revises it. We begin by learnng of the final ends of many of the supporting characters from the previous chapter, all of them slightly altered, so that Hosty becomes “Osti-Fosti,” and the Cad with a pipe becomes “the snob of the dunhill.” After that comes the first (and, I think, the most confusing) of a number of retellings of Earwicker’s encounter with the Cad. An Irishman (Joyce himself, according to one source) exiled on the English coast tells the “fishabed ghoatstory” of HCE at the request of three schoolboys.

As I said, clarity is scarce, but the tale appears to concern the transformation of chapter two’s mundane encounter into the stuff of myth and religious ritual. A man is offered a cigar (“pluggy well suck that brown boyo, my son, and spend a whole half hour in Havana”), which appears to lead to his meeting “Master,” the “bester of redpublicans” at the Eagle Cock Hostel (the action having permanently moved from Dublin’s Phoenix Park to HCE’s pub). Their conversation is a comically mangled variation on the original, punctuated by the Irishman’s instruction to the schoolboys to follow his example (his own, or HCE’s, or both, I have no idea).

The story, we’re told, is never forgotten. Years later, one of the boys, now an old man, “rehearses” the story to a “namecousin” of an archdeacon. This cousin apparently repeats it to his relative, for we’re told that every time the archdeacon “reads the part”, his listeners, hearing his imitation of the performance given his cousin, feel themselves “timesported” back to the English coastline, watching the Irishman’s interpretation of the part originally played by Mr. Earwicker. All clear?

After a cock-and-bull story like that, it’s reassuring for the narrator to admit that he’s no less confused than we are. What are the facts? But the further we search for the truth, the further it appears to drift away. A crowd of “evidencegivers” is gathered “by legpoll” to offer their opinions, most of which are laughable, paradoxical or incomprehensible. Finally, a written record appears to be discovered, in the form of a police report recounting the second variation on the meeting with the Cad. A tall man, ”humping a suspicious parcel,” is held up by an “unknowable assailant” with whom he had fought over one of two women. But this evidence too is questioned in every particular: that the man was not tall, that he carried not a fender (a fireguard) but a bottle of stout, which he claimed to be attempting to open by banging it against a gate, although the sound he made was more like the end of days.

After a number of digressions, we finally return to Earwicker’s house, and to the third version of his encounter. Earwicker’s home is sealed by a gate both to lock others out and to lock him in. In the middle of the night, he is woken by a man issuing threats from beyond the gate if he (Earwicker) failed to give him drink. After delivering a torrent of abuse (which Earwicker greets with Christlike silence) the offender throws a few stones and finally retreats. And so Earwicker returns to bed. But is he sleeping? Is he imprisoned? Is he dead? As usual, nothing is clear, but the chapter ends with a prophecy that like King Arthur, “he skall wake from earthsleep.”

I hope this is helpful. I tried to strike a balance between sufficient explanation and overexplanation, but if anyone has questions, clarifications or corrections, I’d love to hear them!

CHAPTER THREE INDEX

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UPDATE: I really wasn’t happy with the effects I had on this one, so I just redid it a little bit.

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Concerning Puns

All right-thinking people hate puns. And our hearts all share the same image of the wretched punster, a characterless character afflicted by a surplus of education which has left him bereft of humour, save for the heaving chortles that belch forth from his unkempt beard as he repeats to some hapless, cornered victim – in the office Christmas party or the line for the post office – his discovery of two different words that happen to sound the same. James Joyce was, apparently, exactly this sort of person. According to his biographer, Richard Ellmann, the young Jim not only collected puns, but worse yet, he would reel them off at parties. And so it makes sense that some people might dismiss Finnegans Wake, as Martin Amis did in an article on the novel, as a book written in puns, a “reader-hostile, reader-nuking immolation.” But regardless of whatever regrettable behaviour might have marred Joyce’s personal life, the wordplay of Finnegans Wake is completely different from that of newspaper headlines and your pedantic uncle. It is a book that you cannot read without reorganising your approach to finding meaning.

In a normal sentence, ideas are connected in a logical structure to create a more or less coherent message. But in phrases like “the fall of a once wallstrait oldparr,” and “the length of the land lies under liquidation” (an eerily fitting description of Ireland today), the reader is adrift in a sea of ambiguous meanings. The banal abuts the divine, pleas of innocence turn into confessions and sermons into seductions. As communication goes, it’s perhaps a little inefficient. But once you get into it, it has a wonderfully disorienting effect on your brain. I could be wrong, of course. Possibly the greatest effect that reading Finnegans Wake has on the brain is that of forcing you to rationalise the time spent reading it...

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This style is not playing to my strengths, I’m afraid. Roll on chapter three!

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Chapter Two

f all the techniques that Joyce used to write Finnegans Wake, the most useful to the poor hapless reader must be that of repetition. Every story told through the course of the book essentially reiterates a single sequence of events. So the rise and fall of the great Finnegan which dominated chapter one was the primeval, mythic expression of a story that will recur again and again throughout the rest of the book. And so we come to chapter two, one of the most approachable sequences of the whole book, which begins the story of Finnegan’s replacement, alluded to at the end of the previous chapter. This is Mr. H.C. Earwicker, part-publican, part-politician, all-round eminent Dublin gentleman, popularly known as Here Comes Everybody (“constantly the same as and equal to himself and magnificently well worthy of and all such universalisation”). But no sooner has Earwicker’s tenure begun than does he begin to relive the sorry fate of his predecessor, assailed by enemies both real and imagined. Despite his good breeding and heroic reputation, Mr. Earwicker is plagued by rumours of a mysterious crime that supposedly took place in Dublin’s conveniently-named Phoenix Park, possibly involving two urinating young women, or three soldiers, or perhaps all five together.

It remains unclear exactly what this crime was, as well as whether HCE actually did it, although he certainly seems to feel guilty about something. When he is confronted in the park by a young “cad with a pipe” who asks him the time, he unaccountably takes the question as a threat, and launches into a confused defense of his character. This eccentric performance proves his downfall, however. Later that day, the cad tells his wife of his encounter. The next day, she tells her priest, who tells a professor at the races. Before long, the entire town is spreading the gossip. When it reaches the ears of a disreputable type of poetic tendencies named Hosty, he loses no time in penning and publishing a satirical song at Earwicker’s expense. Entitled “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly”, it’s an instant hit, it seems to spell the end for our hero. WHATEVER WILL HAPPEN NEXT?! I know, I know, it’s a nailbiter. But you’ll just have to wait. CHAPTER TWO INDEX

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Update

It’s been intolerably quiet around here of late, but not for no reason, I promise. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m planning something a little different for the next few chapters. Because chapters two to four tell a fairly linear and even rather intelligible story, I want to use a consistent style to match it. Unfortunately, that means I have to at least roughly plot out the next 73 pages before I begin, and I’ve had a few false starts. But on the plus side, once I’ve worked out what I’m doing, it should hopefully go a lot faster.

In other news, I have joined Twitter, although I’m still not really sure what it’s for. Anyone who cares to can find me as @invisibledot.

I’d also like to thank all the blogs that mentioned this project in the past few weeks! It’s really gratifying to see that people are interested in it!

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