The Cosmic Library

Some of Finnegans Wake’s canniest readers, like guest Olwen Fouéré, don’t read the whole thing. That makes sense, too, considering that the book is itself incomplete: the last line doesn’t end, has no period. You’re left with a book that cannot conclude itself, that avoids coherence. So what are all these words doing, if not communicating? In part, they’re making music. They’re an experiment with language’s sounds.Joyce obsessed over such sounds, including the sound linkages that connect meanings in ways impossible to track consistently. The scholar Joseph Nugent says in this episode, “Joyce does things very frequently for the fun of it, or because of some coincidence that was inside his own head that the rest of us have no access to whatsoever. We give up after a while imagining that we’re going to make entire sense of this book.”Some of the sound connections are easier to make than others, especially when we think of the book’s music. The book alludes often to the song “Finnegan’s Wake,” but it also echoes the song about poor old Michael Finnegan, which has lyrics—“poor old Michael Finnegan, begin again”—about restarting.When you read the book with songs in mind, you can end up noticing glorious constellations that scholars have catalogued for decades. Consider the closing lines, with their patterns of iambs and rhyme and alliteration, their music that carries you along with the rising and falling of waves:"We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the"You, reader or listener, have to figure out where you go from here. But the Wake gives you rhythms and sensations to encourage those next steps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Exploring the intricate private language in 'Finnegans Wake' that merges with mythic characters like Humpty Dumpty and Finn MacCool. Wittgenstein's concept of private language expands to shared experiences in the Wake, blurring the line between personal and universal narratives. The podcast delves into James Joyce's use of language to convey Irish identity, folklore, and the interplay between Dublin's linguistic dynamics.

The “wake” in Finnegans Wake means both a joyous funereal gathering (here Joyce invented the word “funferal”) and a rising from sleep. But it also suggests the wake that follows movement through water. The book’s language, while dreamy and ceremonial, is also material, and often watery. This is appropriate, because like dreams, water brings us into an ongoing process of expansive life. Cosmically expansive, even. Alok Jha says in this episode that while we’re mostly water-beings on a planet covered in water, “all of those molecules of water came not from the Earth; the Earth’s water comes from space,” from the bombardment of meteorites that carried water to us. And in Finnegans Wake, water links characters to new forms, via the river that runs through the book’s first word (“riverrun”) and to the final unfinished sentence from Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), the wife of the central figure, HCE.Joyce relates ALP to the River Liffey, the river that flows through Dublin. He plays with sonic affinities between Livia/livvy/Liffey, and writes, of ALP, “haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run” (recalling, with this running rill, that rivverrun of the book’s first line). Along the River Liffey, in one passage, washerwomen gossip about ALP, until they’re turned into a stone and a tree, overwhelmed by the mystery of ALP’s family and by the river itself:"Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughter-sons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Tellmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!"Shem and Shaun, the two sons of HCE and ALP, might be sons or daughters here. A fluidity of identity allows them to shift forms throughout the book, too, into other pairings (like the Ondt and the Gracehoper, who represent responsibility and play much as Shem and Shaun do—Shem the mischievous penman, Shaun the responsible postman). And it’s not just a metaphorical fluidity. Real wateriness, the riverrun, overcomes the washerwomen, who, like us, want to know more but are riverrun by the Wake’s liffeying waters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Finnegans Wake—a book of rebirth and reawakening—finds its engine for rejuvenation in dreaminess. This matches what neuroscientists tell us: sleeping and dreaming are regenerative, intellectually and physiologically. Dr. Jade Wu, a sleep specialist at Duke University, tells us in this episode, “Sleeping is actually a very very active state of the brain, and there’s a lot of life-affirming things happening. For example, the growth hormones are being released . . . your brain is literally refreshing itself when you sleep. So in a way you’re not so much dying as getting maybe a little younger in a way, or getting a little healthier.” She says that “sleeping is almost like a tiny bit of reversal of death.” In other words, sleep gives us something close to the plot of Finnegans Wake.We can’t say for certain that Joyce’s whole book is set within a dreamer’s mind, but James Joyce himself maintained it was his book of dreams and “nocturnal life.” And John Bishop’s classic study, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, charts the dream logic of the novel, and it makes a lot of sense. Still, whether or not the whole book is a dream, it’s often dream-like: illogical, obsessive, anxious. Joshua Cohen in this episode relates the dreaminess to the drunkenness of a wake, the drunkenness at the pub run by main-character HCE. Almost halfway through the book, we find HCE in his pub, drinking whatever’s left over in empty bottles. And at that moment, Cohen observes, one might consider the Wake “a kind of drunken dream-book.” Here’s the scene:"he finalised by lowering his woolly throat with the wonderful midnight thirst was on him, as keen as mustard, he could not tell what he did ale, that bothered he was from head to tail, and, wishawishawish, leave it, what the Irish, boys, can do, if he did’nt go, sliggymaglooral reemyround and suck up, sure enough, like a Trojan, in some particular cases with the assistance of his venerated tongue, whatever surplus rotgut, sorra much, was left by the lazy lousers of maltknights and beerchurls in the different bottoms of the various different replenquished drinking utensils left there behind them on the premisses by that whole hogsheaded firkin family, the departed honourable homegoers and other sly-grogging suburbanites"Is the groggy slygrogging mood one of drunkenness or of sleep? Or is it both at once, a mood of dreaming and wakefulness? (The “multiple things at once” approach will often carry you through Finnegans Wake; never rule it out.)Consider “replenquished” in the passage above, too. It’s an unreal word, describing the empty bottles. It must mean the fullness of replenishment (there’s still something in those bottles for HCE to drink) but it also tells us of a vanquished (emptied, defeated, “quished”) state. A fallen thing, an empty bottle, becomes a source for replenquishment, for bizarre fullness. Joyce’s word has the dreary desperation of our waking days (wherein we find emptiness and defeat and vanquishing and deserted pubs) along with the hope of our dreams (wherein we find compensatory fullness in that emptiness).Emptiness/fullness, or falling/rising: these opposites merge throughout Joyce’s book. Joshua Cohen says in this episode that the Wake, a book about an old man, is also “a book of second youth, maybe.” An old man falling asleep or drunkenly stumbling about drifts into the youthful play of dreams, or at least dreamy language, from which come novelty and rebirth. “Maybe that’s what night is,” Cohen says, “second youth.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The podcast delves into the complex and enchanting world of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, highlighting its dreamy language, themes of rebirth, and connections to basic human experiences. It emphasizes exploring the text rather than decoding it, drawing parallels to fall and rise symbolism in the story.

Prepare for our five-part series about the most mystifying book ever written: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. With a range of guests—including a novelist, an actor, a sleep specialist, a philosopher, and several Joyce scholars—Finnegan and Friends follows tangents inspired by Joyce’s novel of dreamy strangeness. We discover, along the way, that the Wake’s infinite complexity comes from attention to our most simple, elemental experiences (of dreams, of water, of local and familiar language). This show celebrates the wonders of the basic stuff of life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices