luka

Well-known member

'Number is an enigma that God deciphers. Along with Beckett, a small red-haired Irishman and my great friend, I have discovered the important of numbers in life and history. Dante was obsessed by the number three. He divided his poem into three parts, each with thirty-three cantos, written in terza rima. And why always the arrangement of four – four legs of a table, four legs of a horse, four seasons of the year, four provinces of Ireland? Why are there twelve tables of the law, twelve apostles, twelve months, and twelve Napoeon's marshals?'
 

woops

is not like other people

'Number is an enigma that God deciphers. Along with Beckett, a small red-haired Irishman and my great friend, I have discovered the important of numbers in life and history. Dante was obsessed by the number three. He divided his poem into three parts, each with thirty-three cantos, written in terza rima. And why always the arrangement of four – four legs of a table, four legs of a horse, four seasons of the year, four provinces of Ireland? Why are there twelve tables of the law, twelve apostles, twelve months, and twelve Napoeon's marshals?'
Freud had 12 disciples gave each of them a ring.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I only recently realised that there are 9 members of the fellowship of the ring to match the 9 nazgul.

coincidence?
 

luka

Well-known member
im reading marcuses attack on norman o brown (love mystified a critique) which happens to be a pretty decent rundown of some of the ideas in finnegans wake (a book brown loved) partiuarly as regards fathers sons and the foundation of the state
 

version

Well-known member
This is intriguing re: Joyce and Dracula/Bram Stoker, from whoever that person was posting on 4chan people thought may have been Pynchon;
Oh, all I was going to say was....well, have you ever thought what it must be like to be James Joyce? Living as a poor Catholic in a country that is occupied by wealthy Protestants from an island next door? We live 100 years later now, and Protestant and Catholic are mostly just All Theists to the intellectual class, or to people who read Joyce. Yet imagine being Joyce. Imagine you hear that a Bureaucrat who works for the British Government shuffling papers to keep the Irish in their place---and if you're a Bureaucrat working for the British Civil Service in Dublin Castle, chances are you're a Protestant---has just published his first novel. And you're James Joyce and you read it and you see that this novel is full of clichés about the Wild Untamed Irish Natives of the West Coast of Ireland, and is just badly-written horseshit from beginning to end.

And you ask around to find out about the author of this book and you find out he is a Bureaucrat whose only previous published work is a manual for British Bureaucrats called "The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland". And suddenly he thinks he can write a novel....

And so you (James Joyce) pick up the Bureaucrat's novel, because it is set in the Wilds of Western Ireland, and it's entitled "The Snake's Pass" even though any fecking Irish Catholic knows there are no snakes in Ireland, St Patrick chased them out, so this Bureaucrat is clearly a complete incompetent.

And you read the book and you realize the heroine is named "Norah Joyce". Because she is. (Although James Joyce hadn't met Nora Barnacle yet when this badly-written novel was published.)

And then seven years later the Bureaucrat becomes world-famous for publishing a novel you probably have heard of, although it's not much better written than The Snake's Pass. It's called Dracula.

What would James Joyce do?

Well, I'll tell you one thing. There's only one reference to Bram Stoker or Dracula in all of Finnegans Wake. (And you can trust me on this, I've read the whole damn thing, so you wouldn't have to.) Page 145 in the Viking edition:

"Let's root out Brimstoker and give him the thrall of our lives. It's Dracula's nightout"

And yet....Finnegans Wake is about a man who comes back from the dead. Tim Finnegan is undead, you might say. So is Dracula.

But do you think there's any chance that James Joyce HAD read The Snake's Pass by Bram Stoker the way I described it, and saw the cliché Irish stereotype heroine written by a Protestant Bureaucrat Servant of the Brutish Vempire named Norah Joyce, and thought of that when Nora Barnacle gave him a handjob on Bloomsday?

It's possible. Although nobody in the thriving Joyce industry has ever mentioned it.

Bram's brother Thornley Stoker even pops up as a character in Ulysses. So who knows?

But there, I've given you a reason to take an interest in Finnegans Wake. It might be (as Gogarty suggested) the most colossal leg-pull in literary history. Or it might just be the Catholic's response to the Protestant Dracula. After all, Dracula literally drinks blood. Which--if you believe as Catholics do in the doctrine of Transubstantiation--is exactly why Protestants are afraid of Catholics in the first place.

Yet I've never seen any of this mentioned in Joyce criticism, because Joyce critics are mostly interested in holding on to their teaching jobs rather than trying to think: What would it be like to be James Joyce?
 
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yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind

what happened to dublin to become like this? has anyone ever been there over a longer period of time and can tell if this is true? it sounds dystopian.
 

sus

Well-known member
Also he's (grapejuice) talking about this 108 years cycle thing again, specifically 1904 -2012, this is why he's obsessed with the 2012 Olympics, as the ritual to make something new.
2012 was a big turning point but it had nothing to do with the Olympics

It was that Mitt Romney lost to Obama
 

sus

Well-known member
2012 was a big turning point but it had nothing to do with the Olympics

It was that Mitt Romney lost to Obama

HEre's McKenna
The most direct link between the Wake and 2012 comes out in the thought of Terence McKenna. McKenna's notorious Timewave theory was originally calculated to zero out in mid-November of 2012... Terence came up with the Nov. 2012 end date by counting forward 24,576 days (384x64) from the dropping of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima on Aug. 6th, 1945.
 

sus

Well-known member
15/ I reread various passages, thumbed through McHugh, and all I could think about was the pain and poverty and sadness of Joyce’s life: all the eye operations and physical suffering. The alcoholism, the untreated syphilis, the constant money-seeking and white wine spritzers.

16/ It hit me that writing is a technology that allows humans to escape the constraints of their bodies. Maybe it was because my own body was broken and I was looking for a file and saw myself. But the Wake made a lot of sense to me as an escape attempt.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Tried reading a bit of this last night. Could make neither head nor tail of it. I think if it was say 50 pages long I might give it a go.
 
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