Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake Quotes

“A clear Brunian ‘coincidence of contraries’ has surfaced again, for to be happy when miserable translates Bruno’s paradoxical motto which preceded his play Candelaio: ‘In tristitia hilaris: in hilaritate tristis’—in sad- ness, happiness and in happiness, sadness.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“His writing processes involve a psychological scorching, as self-reflection passes through the ‘slow fire of consciousness’: a hellish toasting of thoughts in the forge of the mind.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“Joyce saw perhaps what Wittgenstein felt—that ‘Colours spur us to philosophize. [. . . They] seem to present us with a riddle, a riddle that stimulates us — not one that disturbs us.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“More precisely, it is a stretching out and serial transformation of a single event until that event disappears, swallowed in allusions, as humanity is destined to be swallowed in the eternity of the universe.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“But ‘narcissistic’ may be a fair judgement of Finnegans Wake if we can see that narcissism can be productive. For it was Joyce’s reflective self-absorption that produced the text’s own dramatic writings, that assessed and reassessed itself, that kept putting on make-up, pushing itself towards a teasing perfection that reality could not match. And its narcissism results partly in a transformation into something rich and strange, that puts itself beyond total transmission and communication, escaping our hermeneutic clutches, slipping out, fading, fay, before our eyes.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“Issy is a male fantasy of a girl or young woman, but she is also a ‘real’ character who, though invaded and smothered by cultural stereotypes and analogies, retains a particularity. And this goes for all the Wake’s characters, in always being both dreamt and real, that have to contend with the inevitable constraints of culture’s approximate representations. Our readings may find themselves split, like Issy, between these worlds, the dream fantasy reflection and the mimetic realist novel.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“How is it possible for a book of 628 pages to inspire so many different visions?2 Because it consists of so many distinct but interrelated objects — that is to say words, of course, but they denote and evoke things—more things than there are words. Many of the words or formations appear nowhere else, and it is difficult to describe something so much of which you’re seeing for the first time. Its neologisms make it unencompassable, endlessly redefinable. The textual matter of Finnegans Wake developed over seventeen years, just as the meaning for its readers has developed over the seventy- eight years since its first publication. The continual critical redefining of Finnegans Wake partly maps onto its many redefinitions of itself. Both have histories and the list above comprises jumbled fragments of them, concealing a deranged story of ever-shifting perceptions. During the seventeen years of its composition, composed in a manner unlike that used for any other novel, it was always growing. That is it was shifting, splitting, recombining, reconfiguring, restructuring, destructuring, decomposing, and recomposing. One of the things that Finnegans Wake is, is a strange object made in strange ways. By focusing on some of the ways it was made, we will in this book arrive at a further understanding of what it is. Through its continuously self-generating transformation, it is a text of modulation and becoming, flux and flow, an alternative classic of change to the I Ching. Written in a world which was heading towards a confident belief that it could locate, name, and describe anything (all organisms, subatomic particles, links of DNA, black holes), it produced something full of indescribable, unnamable parts. As an unencompassable unfathomable text it remains the best correlative for our unencompassable unfathomable times, changing in its meanings as swiftly as our world, through its feverish reproduction of reproductions.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“Self-critique ends up in self-destruction; flow becomes glut; accretive construction becomes unwieldy exaggeration; self-reflection becomes a disappearance through petrification; gathering becomes obsessive hoarding; order becomes disorder; consumers become producers, as the audience turns on the show. Through excess, through writing being taken beyond reasonable limits of sense and on into an exuberant sense of fun, Joyce replicates the moment in the historical cycle of the ricorso, the extreme point of the historical process. He takes his writing to a distant place where it teeters through the last anarchic stage of Vico’s cycle, as it moves from one epoch to another.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“It brings us to a confrontation with that important perception of Finnegans Wake, that its apparent sense of affirmation, plurality, and multiplicity shades into or hides a stronger idea of nullity. From the infinitely meaningful, universally affirming, it is a short step to the opposite, to indifference, to voids of meaning and value.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“the kind of curves you simply can’t stop feeling”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“After all, nothing really adds up in the Wake. Because the form of everything changes so rapidly, it does not seem like the monetary world where the value of objects relies on a measure of constancy or predictability. Circulation of something whose form should be recognizable and authenticated (such as a coin or a note) seems impossible in the Wake. The economics of Finnegans Wake might boil down to something simple and silly, where Joyce passes off his own book as a fake, when, in fact, it’s real, a fake of a fake. Nonetheless, the economic issue remains a relatively unmined area in the Wake.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“But my method nonetheless embodies a thesis: the details and the counter-narratives revealed in this genetic micro-focus constitute an attack on ‘semperidentity’, on ‘always-sameness’. Such continuous identity is supposed to lie—as ideologies of mythic monologic thinking would have us believe—archetypally within us all. The amplificatory character of Joyce’s writing, as traced in this study, reflects the comic theme of an idealized popular resurrection.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“Already the messages of citizens were flashed along the wires of the world. . . . To those multitudes, not as yet in the wombs of humanity but surely engenderable there, he would give the word: Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come, the lightening of your masses in travail.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“The ‘wrong thing’ happened, we are now told, during the ‘dark flush of night’ (527.07). A flush usually brings colour to cheeks, so a dark flush is a mild oxymoron, like a dark light, and is all the more suggestive, since the dark flush of night is probably an erotically charged flush.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“In context the word ‘confussion’ helps to describe the general splitting and combining that is going on subsequent to the appearance of the ‘etym’, Joyce’s experimentation with language attempting a ‘mimesis’ of the processes of nature, imitating the processes of natural growth and change. And yet the contention is possible that Joyce is predicting their use in physics, in advance of the naming of processes, though not in the precise observation and description of them. He foreshadows their possibility before their recognition in culture. It is as if he knows they will come along, and that there will be an action to match the name. On the other hand, Joyce is anyway more interested in creating a different idea from what atomic physics will come up with, one that combines and con-fuses the oppositions fusion and fission, splitting and blending in the same phonemes, thus making ‘fussion’. It’s partly an economical act, but indicates Joyce’s critique of language that it is inadequate in describing paradoxical things and self-contradictory processes, inadequate in fusing as a unity the things and processes made fissile by representation.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“Joyce was, indeed, absorbed in his writing: ‘Since 1922 my book [Finnegans Wake, then called Work in Progress] has been a greater reality for me than reality,—everything led to it and everything outside it was insurmountable difficulties.’3 It is as if it had become a tyrant—like HCE in his worst form, or a river in flood like the ever-rising ALP, before either of which everything cowers and retreats. In such circumstances the reality of the book becomes its own subject, and the reality of constructing that reality comes to be greater than reality. Beckett wrote (now notoriously) of ‘Work in Progress’, that ‘it is not about something, it is that something itself ’; Tindall revised this idea, saying ‘Finnegans Wake is about Finnegans Wake’, and we can refine this further: ‘in part Finnegans Wake is about the writing of Finnegans Wake’.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“Chaosmos, however, is an aptly disunified concept, voicing the word ‘chiasmus’, or ‘arch’, that symbol of structural harmony, and in itself a bridge, like many of the Wake words themselves, between chaos and cosmos.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“Nonetheless innuendo and imperfectly definable actions hover over the actions of the hermit.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“Treating ‘life’ as an object to which we are more or less adequate excises crucial elements from life just at the very time that we are living it: such elements as sleep, rest, laziness, and the absence of labour, energy, and work. To say that these kinds of stasis are not living is not only to limit the plurality of life but to make it lopsided, tipping it towards the stresses that we find in modernity’s cult of perpetual activity.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“It is a case not of the Emperor’s but of the Everyman’s New Clothes.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“But Joyce proclaimed his vision as comic, seeing himself as ‘red-nosed’, not ‘blue-jawed’. Of an international catastrophe, he said, with apparent flippancy: ‘Now they’re bombing Spain—isn’t it better that I’m making a colossal joke instead?”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“Joyce is not purely aspiring in ‘this book of universals . . . to the conditions of a universal consciousness’, as Hassan has argued, but is intrigued by its opposite and complement, the split essence of modernity, by the part defined by Baudelaire as ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’.18 And Joyce is interested in the relationship between these two halves of art, and their relative position. For it is under these ephemeral fugitive contingent elements, under modernity, that the eternal is to be swamped. Joyce is not putting them side by side, but placing the ephemeral on top of the universal. His methods of intense rewriting, where he conjures up superimpositions, composite figures, and analogues, are themselves analogous to the way culture’s myths rewrite us and force us to return to our visions of ourselves and our world, and to revise and reassess those visions. The supposedly universal myths may well be available through intensive archaeology, but such quests will only produce the ‘early drafts’ of culture, fragmented and increasingly disparate, the further back you go.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“Seamus Deane has defined the Wake as the fall of man into language—designating both the writer’s and the reader’s fall.16 As an elaboration of this, we may add that one of the Wakean falls is the fall of the human, or the idea of the human, under language and culture, under their proliferating representations.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“It is, indeed, a metaphorical zone for the myth of all conflictual transformation, great and small, political and social, natural and familial, for the revolution, for the death or murder of God, for the splitting of the atom, for the emergence of language, for the original murder where Cain kills Abel, for the chopping of a tree, for a paparazzo catching a celebrity in an awkward position and publishing the details the next day, for the assassination of Michael Collins and, most insistently—embracing them all — for the Oedipal killing of the father.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“Finnegans Wake is not a programme for revolution but, through its very form, a symbol of it, of moments of revolution in general and also of particular revolutionary moments. It may have seemed like a ‘genial proclamation of doom’, as Levin called it, on its first appearance but it reminds us also of the unremarked and even unremarkable but continuous revolts in being. There may be something idealistic about such an illustration of a revolution against tyranny, but such utopian and comic visions have something idealistic about them. In its visions, Finnegans Wake is neither normative nor prescriptive; it does not indicate how a utopian state can be brought about. But we imagine with it that at certain moments of history, and through certain ways of perceiving the world, a successful revolution can be thought of as something that does at least sometimes happen.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“Taking your own reflection as a lover is, moreover, another piece of prudent economy—for after all it costs nothing.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“The incomprehensibility of Finnegans Wake seems to be close to this but only in opposing associations—there is a repeated sameness in the underlying story of the fall, and superficially a sameness in the sheer difficulty of the whole, but the noises it makes are in no way monotonous—echoes do generate echoes, and yet each one is distinct from the source, never a blunting blurriness but a sharpened shifting. Each element generates a double which separates miotically from what produced it, and often re-emerges at a distance, the sign that a series has begun.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“The radical unravelling of character is a consequence of Joyce’s rewriting procedures. Initially, Joyce drafted particular characters that are peculiar in being dehistoricized, their social contexts unspecified, as a rule absurd, with an inconsistent mixing of historical allusion. They are carriers of Joyce’s exercises in style, rather than self-consistent entities. They have neither clear origins nor destinies, and float out of the scriptural ether like the ventriloquized voices that issue from the medium Yawn. Over time, rather than becoming more specific, they proliferate, change name, sex, nation, class, period. Any clue to a naturalistic context that might be provided—such as their form of employment, for instance (writer, alchemist, postman, Madame of a brothel, striptease artist, mercenary, innkeeper, General, tailor, policeman) — is quickly qualified and elaborated rapidly in revision, by incorporating some element from another conflicting historical framework. The consequent multiplication of temporal and spatial contexts means that the delineating limits of character blur. It is through revision that character is refracted and multiplied, stretched across incompatible and incongruous realms. Characters begin to overlap. The incongruities produce the comic surrealism of the text, its fast-moving encyclopedism and, by reaching across and embracing wide fields of reference, provide the base to interpret Finnegans Wake as an all-encompassing ‘universal’ myth. But the effects of Joyce’s revisions and the characterization of his revisions also undo this universal myth and explode universality.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“Mad gone’ may mean literally ‘crazy about’, but in the context it makes a bad pun on Maud Gonne, the Irish activist—politically and culturally—whom W. B. Yeats, in fact, came to be ‘mad gone’ on, proposing several times to her, but each time turned down. Yeats, unable to get the mother, eventually proposed to Maud’s daughter, Iseult, in 1917.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals