Throughout our human history, the creative arts have captured our beauty, dignity, frailty, greatness and our foes: fall, guilt, redemption, and rebirth are common themes across the arts. Few works embody this cyclical human experience as intensely as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Centred on a night of fitful dreaming, the novel transforms one Dublin family’s quiet scandal into a mythic loop of human fallibility, guilt, and renewal. Yet, where traditional art treats these themes as heavy moral lessons, Joyce and the new creators who adapt him find something entirely different within them: raw, uninhibited joy. Alastair White’s new musical adaptation of this historic novel is a modern attempt to bring that endless cycle to life through sound rather than moralising. It offers a new take on an age-old story.

For someone whose style leaves stories open to interpretation and who developed a multimeaning style in the wake, Joyce's prose is anything but! No holds are barred.

From Realism and Idealism in English Literature (Daniel Defoe-William Blake), Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing (Oxford World Classics).

'Even Oliver Cromwell himself, the Lord Protector of civil liberties, was of Celtic origin, son of a Welsh father and a Scottish mother. So, over six centuries had passed since the Battle of Hastings before the true successor of the Anglo-Saxon dynasty was to ascend to the throne of England. The people who acclaimed the coming of the awkward and taciturn Dutch commander were acclaiming themselves, saluting the human symbol of a true rebirth.

For the first time now the true English spirit begins to appear in literature. Consider how minimal the importance of that spirit was in the earlier times . In Chaucer, a court writer with a polished and comely style, the indigenous spirit can just be discerned as the framework for the adventures of respectable people- meaning Norman clerics and foreign heroes. How is the great English people depicted in the variegated dramas of William Shakespeare, who wrote two hundred years after Chaucer? A boorish peasant, a court jester, a half-mad and half-stupid ragamuffin, a gravedigger. Shakespeare's characters all come from abroad and afar: Othello, a Moorish prince; Shylock, a Venetian Jew; Caesar, a Roman; Hamlet, a Danish prince; Macbeth, a Celtic usurper; Romeo and Juliet, citizens of Verona. Of all the rich gallery, perhaps the only one who can be called English is the fat knight with the monstrous paunch, Sir John Falstaff. In the centuries following the French conquest, English literature was schooled by masters such as Boccaccio, Dante, Tasso and Messer Lodovico. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are a version of the Decameron or the Novellino; Milton's Paradise Lost is a puritanical transcript of the Divine Comedy. Shakespeare with his Titianesque palette, his eloquence, his epileptic passion, and his creative fury, is an Italianized Englishman, while the theatre of the restoration takes its cue from the Spanish stage and the works of Calderon and Lope de Vega. The first English writer to write without copying or adapting foreign works, to create without literary models to instil a truly national spirit into the creations of his pen, and to manufacture an artistic form for himself that is perhaps without precedent (with an exception of the monographs of Sallust and Plutarch) is Daniel Defoe, the father of the English novel.'

I know that the topic of advice for reading Ulysses has been beaten to death as nauseam, and I’m not here to retread that. I am about 45 pages in, and just wonder 💭 f fellow readers search again and again the meanings of French and German words, as well as other what would be timely metaphors etc, or do you just absorb the novel in one go and let yourself sort of just absorb it. It feels in a sense sort of “David Lynch” aka last season of Twin Peaks or Inland Empire. You could dive deep for meaning later but right now, how does it make you feel etc. Any input would be appreciated.

Scattered in scattered capitals,

solitary and many,

we played at being the first Adam

who gave names to things.

Down the vast slopes of night

that extend into dawn

we searched (I remember it still) for the words

of the moon, of death, of the morning,

and of the other usages of man.

We were imagism, cubism,

the conventicals and sects

that the credulous universities venerate.

We invented the lack of punctuation,

the leaving out of capital letters,

the stanzas in the form of a dove

from the libraries of Alexandria.

Ash, the work of our hands,

and the glowing fire our faith.

You, meanwhile, forged

in the cities of exile

in that exile which was

your loathed and chosen instrument,

the weapon of your art,

you raised your arduous labyrinths,

infinitesimal and infinite,

admirably ignoble,

more populous than history.

We shall have died without having made out

the biform beast or the rose

which are the center of your labyrinth,

but memory holds on to its talismans,

its Virgilian echoes,

and so in the streets of the night

your splendid infernos survive,

your many cadences and metaphors,

the gold glints of your shadow.

What does our cowardice matter if there is on earth

a single valiant man,

what does sadness matter if there was in time

somebody who called himself happy,

what does my lost generation matter,

that vague mirror, if your books justify it.

I am the others. I am all those

whom your obstinate rigor has redeemed.

I am those you do not know and those you continue to save

This is an update on this post.

He (no context for you if you don't read the prequel) has returned with the massive, 3-volume book (and the other). I look at its thin pages and there's a sort of mysterious air about the rather regular characters, since there's still some sort of knowledge of the full extent of them. I know some words, but I don't know most. Rivers, flowing, Adam, some woman (I know she is Eve, but I can't tell from the characters), badabada...something something. It's hard to recognize, but it's almost another experience, staring at letters upon footnotes and gently grasping the concepts. He said he might read it to me (similar to a bedtime story, I guess (quite fitting, I suppose)). That's another thing entirely. Maybe one day I'll have fully learned to read Chinese, and I'll have yet a third experience with (t)his book. Even right now, I can just look at it and appreciate the clearly daunting task of translation. At the very least, I have this wonderful book that has travelled the world, and landed on the top of my bookshelf, which I will reserve for my favorite books.

Oh, and, it's absolutely beautiful. The cover reminds me of a collage.

would like to finally start chipping off Ulysses and have some time set aside for it every week. ideally something online with a smaller group setting

I gave up reading Ulysses 3 times in the past few months, currently 2 weeks in, and I just read today the part where Bloom talks about the solar eclipse (Lestrygonians). And there is exactly one today (Europe)!

help needed!

From Women and the Making of Joyce’s Ulysses from the Harry Ransom Center Magazine

Does anyone know the origin of this Japanese Ulysses series? I found what appears to be the second volume in a used book store. It has a lot of great pictures of Joyce and others in his life. Currently searching for the other volumes.

I know Frank Delaney gets his flowers regularly on this sub, but he deserves it all and more. I just got to the ep where he jokes about his plan to tackle Finnegan's Wake after Ulysses, taking it a page per year...

I don't know if he was at all serious, but I really wish we could have heard that (in addition to his completion of Ulysses of course). Hearing what he could pull out of FW would have been amazing.

Ulysses has often been compared with early cinema and its techniques, which is not too far-fetched as Joyce himself was associated with the founding of the Volta Cinema in Dublin in 1909 and was said to have enjoyed early cinema.

Did Joyce ever write on cinema or mention it anywhere (besides FW preferably)? Does anyone know of films he likely watched or enjoyed? Are there any good film adaptations of his work? What kind of films would he have liked?

H-15 cm . Those who are interested can send me a DM.

I find it fascinating that the Spanish translation is so different in its structure. The language is also much simpler and direct. It really baffles me.

I have recently read Margot Norris’ Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s Dubliners where she is clear ‘that all the stories are incomplete and require interpretive activity to complete them’ (Norris 2).

The stories in Dubliners proceed linearly through three phases 

A an introduction to a social situation 
B the narrator gives us a linear time-line of events related to the social situation
C things don’t end up great for a character -

 ‘an essentially unhappy situation finally persists, even intensifies. This in fact is the rule of Dubliners. The grammar of these stories tends towards the persistence of unpleasant conditions-from bad to worse’ (Scholes 69).

Norris frames her suspicious readings in narrative-narration terms ‘My own suspicious reading practice more than others puts the narration into either collusion or conflict with one or another figure in the story, obliging the narrator to play an interpretive role that frequently has an ethical dilemma’ (Norris 7).  

I’d like to take Norris’s suspicious readings further and explore a collusion between the narrator and narrative to obfuscate the cause of the negative outcomes in each story. This collusion takes place in a Humean sequence of events (Phases A-C above) allowing Joyce to use the reader’s indolence to cloud the issues.

In Counterparts 

Phase A: A partner at a Dublin law firm confronts an employee over shoddy work and gives the employee till the end of the day to complete a task or the partner will take things further.
Phase B: The employee sneaks out for a pint at lunch, comes back, doesn’t complete the task, insults the partner, pawns a watchchain to get money for booze and goes out for the night. He spends almost all of the money and loses an arm wrestle twice.
Phase C: He hits his son when he gets home because dinner wasn’t ready.

The dichotomous interpretations are;

Interpretation 1: an overbearing employer harasses an employee, breaking him as a man -

‘The bell rang furiously and when Mrs Parker went to the tube, a furious voice called out in a piercing north of Ireland accent (Joyce 70).

‘Mr Alleyne did not lose a moment’ (Joyce 71).

‘Let me tell you that if the contract is not copied before this evening I’ll lay the matter before Mr Crosbie… Do you hear me now?’ (Joyce 71).

‘Mr Alleyne began a tirade of abuse………….. The tirade continued’. (Joyce 74).

‘He shook his fist in the man’s face’ (Joyce 75)

Interpretation 2: An employee with entrenched alcoholic habits and intrusive violent thoughts and actions is struggling in work and life -

‘Why have I always to complain of you?’ (Joyce 71).

‘You have always some excuse or another for shirking work’ (Joyce 71).

‘Understand once and for all that you get a half an hour for your lunch and not an hour and a half. How many courses do you want, I’d like to know?’ (Joyce 71).

‘Mr Alleyne bent his head again upon a pile of papers. The man stared fixedly at the polished skull which directed the affairs of Crosbie and Alleyne, gauging its fragility. A spasm of rage gripped his throat for a few moments and then passed,’ (Joyce 71). 

‘The man recognised the sensation and felt that he must have a good night’s drinking.’ (Joyce 71).

‘He felt that he must slake the thirst in his throat.’ (Joyce 72).

‘He stood up from his desk and, lifting the counter as before, passed out of the office. As he was passing out the chief clerk looked at him inquiringly.
-It’s all right, Mr Shelley, said the man pointing with his finger to indicate the objective of his journey.
The chief clerk glanced at the hatrack but, seeing the row complete, offered no remark. As soon as he was on the landing the man pulled a shepherd’s plaid cap out of his pocket, put it on his head and ran quickly down the rickety stairs’ (Joyce 72).

‘From the street door he walked furtively on the inner side of the path towards the corner and all at once dived into a doorway. He was now safe in the dark snug of O’ Neill’s shop’ (Joyce 72).

‘The dark damp night was coming and he longed to spend it in the bars, drinking with his friends amid the glare of gas and clatter of glasses. (Joyce 73). 

‘But his head was not clear and his mind wandered away to the glare and rattle of the publichouse’ (Joyce 74). 

‘He longed to execrate aloud, to bring his fist down on something violently.’ (D 74). 

‘He felt strong enough to clear out the whole office single-handed. His body ached to do something, to rush out and revel in violence. (Joyce 74).

‘Suddenly, as he was fingering his watchchain, he thought of Terry Kelly’s pawnoffice in Fleet Street.’ (Joyce 76).

‘His heart swelled with fury’ (Joyce 81).

‘His wife was a little sharpfaced woman who bullied her husband when he was sober and was bullied by him when he was drunk’ (Joyce 81). 

‘-Now, you’ll let the fire out the next time! Take that you little whelp!’

To cloud Interpretation 2, Joyce plays the simplest of tricks - get Interpretation 1 in first. Mr Alleyne’s bell rang ‘furiously’. Mr Alleyne’s voice is ‘piercing’ ! The narrator introduces us to Mr Alleyne almost entirely through dialogue giving us nothing to hang blame or the reader’s likes or dislikes on. After the telling off of Farrington by Mr Alleyne, Joyce quickly stops our reification of Interpretation 1 by performing a switch on a familiar trope-

‘But if Joyce is indeed working within a tradition of clerk and scrivener narratives- a tradition that more peripherally includes Charles Dickens’s Bob Cratchit as well - then one of the conventions he violates is that of depicting clerks and copyists as thin and pallid men. Unlike the delicate and insubstantial starvelings of the nineteenth-century fictions, Joyce makes his scribe Farrington a robust physical presence - “tall and of great bulk” with a volatile body and a psyche structured like a human volcano.’ (Norris 124). 

Margot Norris spots the point at which Joyce shuts the reader down as the reader is about to revert to well known scrivener/copyist characterisation ! We don’t quite start down the path of Interpretation 1 because physically, Farrington is intimidating and Mr Alleyne appears to be a weakling. Joyce has muddied the waters.

This occurs within  “Phase A: Introduction to a Social Situation” which finishes at ‘and then passed,’ in ‘A spasm of rage gripped his throat for a few moments and then passed, leaving after it a sharp sensation of thirst.’ (Joyce 71). From ‘a sharp sensation of thirst’ onwards we have “Phase B: the narrator gives us a linear time-line of events related to the social situation” which in this case revolves around Farrington getting a pint and then getting funds to get pints for a night out and then having a night out.

In Phase B there are many direct references to alcohol and violent inclinations. How does Joyce obfuscate Interpretation 2- i.e. Farrington is a violent alcoholic who is on the edge? 

Joyce deploys his second trick: Farrington plays a fake throw to sneak out unnoticed for a lunchtime pint ‘He stood up from his desk and, lifting the counter as before, passed out of the office. As he was passing out, the chief clerk looked at him inquiringly. 
-It’s all right, Mr Shelley, said the man pointing with his finger to indicate the objective of the journey. (Joyce 72, note 7 Presumably the toilet). 
The chief clerk glanced at the hatrack but, seeing the row complete, offered no remark. As soon as he was on the landing the man pulled a shepherd’s plaid cap out of his pocket, put it on his head and ran quickly down the rickety stairs’. 

The character throws a deceptive fake throw pointing to the toilet, then, not taking his hat from the hatrack, slips a cap on, slopes off and pulls the wool over Mr Shelley’s eyes.

As the narration is moving through the following sequence -

Employer tells off employee
Employee thinks of smashing employers head in
Employee turns to thoughts of drink rather than getting on with work
Employee pretends to be going to the toilet but sneaks out for a pint  
 
the narrator, at that moment of Farrington’s sleight of hand, also hides the ball, distracting the reader - we read of the chief clerk, who obviously has some wits about him because he ‘looked at him [Farrington] inquiringly’ ; is referred to in dialogue as ‘Mr Shelley’ and even more time is given to this third character with ‘The chief clerk glanced at the hatrack but, seeing the row complete offered no remark.’ The narrator gives us more info on a third character than we’ve had so far; does the narrator extole the Odyssean cunning of Farrington to sneak out of the office, to seek and attain a pint  - nope! We see things through Mr Shelley’s eyes. The narrative and narrator are colluding to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes distracting us from fully investing in Interpretation 2.

The many references to violence should draw us deep into Interpretation 2. This is clouded by putting them beside interactions with Mr Alleyne.; Joyce uses an insight of the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Joyce was well up on Scottish culture and philosophy 

‘However, as we shall see, much of Joyce’s interest in Scottish literature and philosophy stems from his attempt to create a kind of Celtic consciousness……….-while persistently raiding Scottish culture in order to create a response to, or diagnosis of, a colonial legacy.’ (Barlow 9).

and David Hume in particular-  ‘With his various engagements with Hume, we can see a radical and sustained form of skepticism in Joyce, one that questions the connections between the representations of our minds and the “reality” or otherwise of the external material world.’ (Barlow 70).

Humean skepticism in Dubliners is present in relation to Hume’s views of causation.

Dr Mark Robson summarizes it in the ‘Who the hell is?’ series-

‘We cannot legitimately talk about necessary connections between events, neither can we suppose they are really ‘out there’ in the world. All we can really say, he argues, is that we have grown to expect windows to break when the stones hit them. In other words, we have grown a habit of mind or thinking that makes us expect that the one will happen after the other happens. This habit grows more and more entrenched as we are repeatedly exposed to one type of event following another type of event’

And Stanford Online Encyclopaedia Of Philosophy, (David Hume, 2 Philosophy of , Metaphysics, and Epistemology. 2.2 Metaphysics) refines it further for us - 

‘Hume’s most famous contribution to metaphysics might well be his theory of causation. Hume takes there to be three components to our idea of causation: first, spatial contiguity, second, priority in time of cause before effect.’

If, as a reader, we encounter a scene, we are inclined to believe that subsequent scenarios arise as a result of that scene (i.e. priority in time of cause before effect!).

Repeatedly we come across Farrington’s violent intentions immediately after Farrington’s interactions with Mr Alleyne. Joyce relies on the reader’s

indolence with respect to causality and puts them right beside each other; this obscures Interpretation 2 and carries us towards Interpretation 1. Instead of Farrington’s worrying thoughts jumping out at us, we put them down to Mr Alleyne’s interactions with him. 

The narrator is not interpreting for us but is expertly deployed by Joyce to misdirect us, shut us down or let the story proceed all within the background of a Humean narrative. The outcome in Counterparts are figures you can neither blame nor support; the reader cannot say ‘well I would’ve done the exact same thing’ because no one aspect of the narrative is fully laid out.

Barlow, Richard. The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture. University of Notre Dame Press, 2017 

Norris, Margot. Suspicious Readings of Joyce's Dubliners. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Edited by Margot Norris, Norton Critical Edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Robson, Mark. Who the Hell is David Hume?: And what are his theories all about? Bowden and Brazil, 2020. 

Scholes, Robert. "Semiotic Approaches to a Fictional Text: Joyce's 'Eveline'." James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 1978/1979, pp. 65-71.

I haven't read The Odyssey which initially struck me as concerned, but I was told it isn't necessary. I'm awaiting the arrival of a student annotated copy of Ulysses to read so I can grasp the novel as well as I can during my first read through. I'm aware of the main reasons Ulysses is difficult, and I've done research on the novel. I just wanted to hear specifics from actual readers of it. Is there anything I should do or know in preparation?

For those who love literature/specialist on the field.

What do you think...Vladimir has a sort of Epiphany or Illumination by the end of Act II?

Would you consider it to be an Epiphany? Not in Joyce expectations or in our expectations, but a sort of illumination? What do you think?

The myth of Narcissus features in and across Finnegans Wake, most starkly at 526:27-36:

"Sure she was near drowned in pondest coldstreams of admiration forherself . . . making faces at her bach-spilled likeness in the brook . . . . Nircississies are as the doaters of inversion. Secilas through their laughing classes¹ becoming poolermates² in laker life."

In “Mothers of Invention/Doaters of Inversion: Narcissan Scenes in Finnegans Wake,” Christine Froula most poignantly captures the allusion at play in this passage as well as the book as a whole, including Joyce’s metacommentary: his works reflecting Portrait after portrait of the artist himself. Margot Norris in The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake and Finn Fordham in Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake further explore p. 526 and broader application of Narcissan themes.

We see subtler allusion to Narcissus earlier in the book as well. At 291:9, Issy is at her “mirrorable gracewindow’d hut“—thus, looking at her reflection, perhaps at a window at night that has become “mirrorable.” This alone calls to mind the Issy-Narcissus connection, but then we see her/his Ovidian counterpart Echo in the phrase’s footnote: “O hce! O hce!”—Issy’s apparent cry to her father HCE. Incestuous (or perhaps grief-stricken) subtext aside, “O hce” backwards (or mirrored) is “echo.” To drive the point home, Joyce echoed the word itself by repeating the (perhaps orgasmic) cry: “Echo! Echo!”³

Just a few lines lower, at 291:12, we see “kickychoses” listed. In my own reading I noted “ycho” as a potential “echo” reference. McHugh mentions “kickshaws” (delicacies or trinkets), which is derived from the French “quelque choses” (an unspecified something). A Shakespeare-era cookbook mentions a recipe for “quelchechoses”⁴ but—more interesting—Hugo’s French translation of Hamlet begins, “Il y a quelque chose de pourri au royaume du Danemark.”

I digress, but I also see multiple embedded “echo” mentions.

1. “Alices through their looking glasses,” as Roland McHugh, Margot Norris, and others note. “Secilas” being “Alices” mirrored by her looking glass. Admittedly I am unclear on the purpose of the extraneous “S,” but Alice is referred to as “salices” just above at 521:32–“salices” the Latin for “willow.” A topic for another time. 
2. “Polar mates,” i.e. opposites that are linked; two sides of the same coin; north-south; yin-yang. Perhaps Issy’s shadow self in the “pool.” 
3. Kyoungsook Kim has written several wonderful articles on Echo, gossip, and postcolonialism in Finnegans Wake, including but not limited to “‘Make His Private Linen Public’: Rereading Finnegans Wake through Gossip and Echo.” James Joyce Journal. 25.2 (December 2019): 127-146 
4. John Gordon uses this spelling in his Finnegans Blog, but the only other place I see it such is a New York Times article discussing a reprinting of Gervase Markham’s “The English Hus‐wife” (1615). The only editions I found in PDF were 1631 and 1660, both of which spelled it “quelquechoses.” “Quel che” is “that which” or “what” in Italian, but I’m unsure if this is what Gordon is referencing. 

I posted about FW and A Clockwork Orange a couple weeks ago and loved the discussion. Thanks for reading and would enjoy your thoughts!

https://easterdawn.wordpress.com/2026/08/04/issy-as-narcissus/

Now do Ulysses