The Collective Unconscious reviews Ulysses

I know that this blog is supposed to be about one great work and not the other, but I just came across this "review" over on GoodReads of Ulysses. I perhaps should say to people who are not acquainted with GoodReads, or for that matter Amazon, I believe this is compilation of one star reviews and not a reflection of the reviewer's own sense of the book...All I can say is, let them read Wake.

Easter Proclamation of 1916

Certainly a thunderword.




1966.

Nelson's Pillar Destroyed. Known as Operation Humpty Dumpty, Irish Republican supporters blow up the Nelson Pillar in Dublin to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising.



Grunt unto us, I pray, your foreboden article in our own deas dockandoilish introducing the death of Nelson with coloraturas! (FW 466.22-24)
And... wait... there's more:


“The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” itself, the name, according to McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake, refers simultaneously to “Pearse & O’Rahilly,” figures in Dublin’s Easter Rising against the British in 1916, and to the French word perce-oreille, “earwig,”-...[f]olklore has it that earwigs can enter the head through an ear and feed on the brain.

http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/anastasi/anastasi4.html

Fabulous New Illustrations for Finnegans Wake

Collaging Imagery from the Delirious Confusion of Finnegans Wake:

“bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawn

skawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!” It doesn’t get easier from there. Illustrator John Vernon Lord has valiantly distilled the imagery of the highly experimental literary experience into a gorgeous new edition from the Folio Society.

The Folio Society has come out with an illustrated version of Finnegans Wake:
http://www.foliosociety.com/book/FNG/finnegans-wake-joyce

'via Blog this'

Let's not forget sylvia....

"On this day in 1887, Sylvia Beach, owner of the Paris-based bookstore Shakespeare and Company Bookshop, was born in Baltimore. Beach moved to Paris at the age of 14, when her father, a Presbyterian minister, was sent to France. She fell in love with the city. In 1919, she opened her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, which became a gathering place for American writers in Paris in the 1920s, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. 

Beach was a strong supporter of writer James Joyce, who lived in Paris from 1920 to 1940. The Irish writer had achieved fame with his 1915 novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and had started publishing his masterwork Ulysses in serial form in an American magazine called the Little Review. However, the serialization was halted in December 1920, after the U.S. Post Office brought a charge of obscenity against Joyce's work. Beach published the book herself in July 1922. It wasn't until 1933 that a U.S. judge permitted Ulysses to be distributed in the U.S."

-- Posting by the James Joyce fan page on FB, source unknown

In the beginning.

On this day in 1923, James Joyce wrote to his patron, Harriet Weaver, that he had just begun "Work in Progress"...March 11, 1923....

http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=3/11/1923

Finnegans Wake and the Schizophenic English language.

This is my happy birthday post.  So first of all, Happy Birthday James Joyce!

I just wanted to jot down a few thoughts I recently had about the English language and Finnegans Wake.  

I was once discussing English and German with a young German woman, in a variety of broken phrases in each other's languages, that really, our languages were just not that pretty compared to French and Italian. English indeed lacks the elaborate social kabuki theater of Japanese, or the maddeningly complex case structure of Lithuanian, or even the arguably better structure for explaining the theory of relativity in Navaho.  It's not even that easy to spell.  And we know that when Joyce wished to relax he chose to speak Italian in his own home.

What marks off this particular language though, is the abundance of borrowings from other languages, and the rapidity with which it has changed over time.  It is a kind of Viconian embedment of human historical experience inside language.  And this has led to the curious characteristic that this is embedded into individual words themselves, and a much larger vocabulary than most other languages.  There are many different synonyms for the same word for almost anything.  Joyce took this one step further: the colonized Irishman decolonized the language of the conqueror by parodying and exaggerating its salient characteristics.

English was profoundly affected by the Norman conquest, which flooded the English vocabulary with a Romance vocabulary, but leaving the Germanic base vocabulary and grammar somewhat intact.  The Saxon words are perceived as blunt, coarse.  The Romance language words are perceived as classy, nuanced.  Joyce uses shifts of vocabularies, and shifting the dominant roots of words between different languages to create or suggest invasion, cultural confrontation, or assimilation.  The courtship of HCE for ALP, takes on connotations of invasion and plunder of Ireland by the seafaring Vikings and Anglo-Saxon English.

This brings us to ALP and HCE.  It has perhaps not escaped notice that Joyce uses leitmotifs for his different characters, each getting a different use of language.  But these two have the most profound differences when they appear in focus.  In the case of ALP, the language is smooth, flowing, dominated by liquids and vowels.  In the case of HCE the language is jumpy, dominated by consonants, especially awkward consonant blends.

For ALP we have a name dominated by vowels and splashy consonants
a,i,u,e,
n,l,v,pl,r,b...

For HCE we have fewer and less pure vowels, and the consonants
h, n, r, and the ungainly  mphr,ch,mpd...

The actual names themselves contain the two dominant strains of English.

For ALP, we have
anna (latin)
livy, livia (latin)
plur-,plural (French)
belle (French)

For HCE we have
hump (Dutch)
free, frei (OE,Germanic)
chip (OE, Germanic)
den (OE, Germanic)
ear (OE, Germanic)
wick, wicked, wiccan (OE, Germanic).

I leave the final word to the birthday boy himself:

"When morning comes of course everything will be clear again [...] I'll give them back their English language. I'm not destroying it for good."  (Quote from Ellman, James Joyce.)

February 2nd

Happy birthday, James Joyce. I take no credit for remembering the day, but was reminded by the better memory of PQ, who wrote a fine celebratory and informative post over at Finnegans, Wake! complete with links to some other fans' Joyce related blog posts. Check them all out.