Making a Holiday and Holyday & Ben's Lecture, Notes 1/25

Class Notes 1/25/2010

HW

-choose one page of Finnegans Wake to own/work with

-memorize about 30 words from the page, go to Brianne's blog to get some tips on memorizing

Talked briefly about Bloomsday in class. Bloomsday is June 16, 1904 and it is the single day in which James Joyce's Ulysses takes place. Underlying the plot of Ulysses is Joyce's way of commemorating the first day spent with his wife, Nora Barnacle (incidentally, the most ordinary, boring, uneducated of all women you could ever not hope to meet which thusly attracted Jamesy to Nora). Ulysses, in its grander perspective, is the glorification, the immortalization, the singing, of an ordinary day. Leopold Bloom does things such as go to the butcher's, a funeral, the bar, and the brothel; but all of these normal, ordinary things are made great in that they are played to the tune of Homer's Odyssey and Bloom, the sad and often pathetic protagonist, is made heroic in the fashion of Odysseus.

James Joyce's birthday is Feburary 2nd. In addition, February 2nd is also the Aztec New Year (and the last one, so enjoy it), the Purification of the Virgin, a very special wedding anniversary, and Groundhog's Day. We will remember Bill Murray's classic role supported by the beautiful Andie MacDowell in Groundhog's Day the movie. Bill plays tv reporter Phil Conners and he absolutely hates having to go to Punxsutawney (not to be confused with Yoknapatawpha) on assignment to cover the event. But when he realizes that he's going to have to relive this most boring day every day, he finds ways to make it special amidst a culture that has so apparently reduced holiday to ordinary. Punxsutawney becomes his "memory theater" (which we can use to memorize F.W.) and he begins to orchestrate the day so that Groundhog's Day becomes adventurous and romantic in the same way the Ulysses made June 16th an Irish holiday where everybody gets rip roaring drunk and follows the path of Poldy Bloom starting at #7 Eccles Street.

There are ten thunderclaps in Finnegans Wake--the first thunderclap is Henry Chimpden Earwicker (Here Comes Everybody, Humpty Dumpty) taking a nasty spill from a ladder. Each thunderclap (Joyce was terribly frightened by thunder) signifies life and death, having come full circle and ending up right where you started. It expresses, like the Aztecan calendar, cyclical time. This idea is called the Myth of the Eternal Return and it is struck upon by nearly every author worth reading. Dostoevsky uses it in the Brothers Karamazov, chapter 5 of The Wind in the Willows is titled Dulce Domum (to arrive where we started) and Nietzsche notes that "we must will endless repetition". Phil Conners figures out that by dropping a toaster in the bathtub or driving off of a cliff into the quarry he too can cause a thunderclap and will the endless repetition that is so imperative to making the ordinary extraordinary. Here is a link to a philosophy blog based out of Berkely that I found that might also be of interest: http://whooshup.blogspot.com/2009/02/groundhog-day.html

Ben's Finnegans Wake Lecture:

his FW book from 2004 is very worn, duct tape holding it together and colorful with lots of writing.

The Eternal Recurrence, Ben's favorite definition for this is from Nietzsche,

'The closest approximation of becoming to being'

the recurring theme in FW: a letter buried within chaos, nonsense, book, that explains what happened at Phoenix park, the macrocosm

forms aligned with being, fragments aligned with becoming, rendering of the two infinitesimal

Our idea of life (in the west) and reading a book is linear X----------------X

However, FW is not linear, it is cyclical, the start and the end are indeterminate, the book ends and begins again, Finnegan.

Looking at Egyptian Mythology, Book of the Dead, Sun journeys through the sky, and then at night it journeys through the underworld before it rises again.

the idea is that our lives mirror this cycle

this idea also key to understanding Finnegans Wake

constantly in a state of becoming, approximation of being.....

a journey through the underworld between 'riverrun' and 'a long the' akin to eternity, the space bar on our keyboard.

think about the book as a river, Going from source to the ocean, evaporates, travels in the clouds across the sky (underworld), rains and returns to the river.

We cannot approach Finnegans Wake the ways we approach other texts, as if it is a cumbersome thing, FW is not a code we are meant to break.

the letter buried in the book is just a fragment

so one might ask, "How are we supposed to read Finnegans Wake?"

Need to understand the shape and existence of FW as a book is incidental, it is a deceptive appearance of a book that we are supposed to read. The idea is to let the book impose its force and form and nature on you!

It makes more sense to 'read' FW in a group to dissolve the ego, also helps to have people in your group who speak different languages. Reading in a collective sense.

Decoding vs. Finding the meaning

Ben met once a week for an hour and a half with about 15 (smart) people when he was at Boston College and they would work through about half a page per meeting. Equals about 10 pages per semester.

Let the page recondition the way you think language works.

page 474 Lucan - lucid - Lucifer

like Tim Finnegan, Humpty Dumpty, Adam, Lucifer, they all have fallen, fallen bodies.

page 104 prayer, combination of prayers, plurability of prayers
allmaziful - maze, intricate, labyrinth
mamafesta - manifesto, replacing the patriarch

let the language exert its own will with a hilarity of puns

page 104-5 titles or names, shards of ourselves, figures in the novel are shape shifting, figures in history

think of when you dream, one person of face metamorphoses into another, melting into each other, same happens with words, what isn't to say that this metamorphosing isn't the true character of things?

George Luis Borges: we have all been each other

Finnegans Wake is an Intellectuals parlor game. Approach this book with recklessness & a sense of abandon......perhaps with some wine.......or whiskey......or maybe some Guinness.

Passage that we approach on Wednesday: page 613

look and see what you can't see.