The Cosmic Library: Recent Episodes
Adam Colman
The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights. Season three, titled Mosaic Mosaic and premiering on April 11, journeys through and beyond the Hebrew Bible.
It's not just the contradictions in the Hebrew Bible that puzzle and provoke readers—there are, throughout, passages of intense emotional or moral provocation. See, for instance, Ecclesiastes, which in the King James translation begins:
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
Ecclesiastes challenges familiar notions of what life is about, notions of meaning or usefulness. You have to respond to something like that. You have to think of your own answer to the book that declares: "There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after." Poetry often poses such challenges that can't be easily explained or resolved, but in return, these challenges might activate the mind. The poet and critic Elisa Gabbert says, "When I'm reading or when I'm writing, I'm just thinking better than I am at any other time."
The Hebrew Bible prompts you to figure things out on your own, with particular attention to language. As Peter Cole says: "At the very heart of this text, what do you have? You've got this ultimate transparency and ultimate opacity, which is the name of God, the four-letter name of God, which is unpronounceable, and no one really knows what it means." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From the book of Genesis on, the Hebrew Bible presents a struggle with language: a struggle to establish meaning, to figure out the right uses of words, to understand one's place in the world. The famous early scene of struggle in the Hebrew Bible, Jacob's wrestling match with the divine, goes as follows in the King James translation:
Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. And he said unto him, What is thy name?
As Peter Cole says, "The release from that one struggle, and the blessing, only comes with a knowledge of names." Even this physical wrestling match becomes a matter of language, then. Struggles with outright disaster generate language quests, too. Elisa Gabbert elaborates on disaster poetry in this episode, especially on the subject of W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts." She says: "It reminds you how much text there is in a poem. It's wild." And she describes a proliferating kind of irony that radiates possibilities in so many directions, to which poetry might grant access.
Find more from Elisa Gabbert on Auden’s poem here:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/06/books/auden-musee-des-beaux-arts.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Stuck in a lonely motel room, you have a good chance of finding a Bible, left for anyone similarly stuck in a strange interval between days. In this way, it’s yet another night book. The Bible also has famous night scenes, and dream scenes, too: Jacob's dream of angels, Joseph's dream of sheaves of wheat. So this chapter of “Mosaic Mosaic” explores dream interpretation and that foundational dream-interpreter Sigmund Freud, himself a close reader of the Hebrew Bible.
"Literature guides Freud's thinking all the way through," says Tom DeRose of the Freud Museum in London. And one effect of reading such a literary doctor is a literary, tragic awareness—what DeRose describes as awareness that every effort to "bring things to a better place will inherently contain its own destructiveness within it."
Other tensions between contraries exist within the dreams and dream-like passages of the Hebrew Bible. The novelist Joshua Cohen calls the dreams in the Bible "highly demonstrative and overly obvious." He says that "the dreams that are presented are so clear,” which suggests "a way of taming dream space, denying dream space its wildness." On the other hand, the poet Peter Cole finds something like that wildness in the Bible, finds "that porousness of consciousness where the boundary of self is blurred." And so, somehow encountering both blurred boundaries and demonstrative clarity, we’re thinking in this episode of what interpretation can make of it all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“We regulate each other’s nervous systems,” says the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett in this chapter of “Mosaic Mosaic.” “We are the caretakers of each other’s nervous systems.” So feeling—and thinking—and the regulations of law join together; the idea that laws exist apart from our nervous systems, our feelings, doesn’t quite work, in this sense. The poet Peter Cole here describes an emotional state associated with the language of rules and ritual in the Hebrew Bible, and in Leviticus particularly. He says, “I was just totally spellbound by the choreography of sacrifice.” And the novelist Joshua Cohen speaks of living law, a kind of vital legal system that emanates beyond the Torah, through commentary and debates ever after. Laws, rules, rituals: these, you’ll hear, are all alive with feeling. “Regulation doesn’t mean damping down,” Lisa Feldman Barrett says. “It just means coordinating and making something happen.” Poet and critic Elisa Gabbert describes poetry as “a vibration,” which in a way might match the nervous-system correspondence described by Lisa Feldman Barrett. In literature as in legal regulation, we learn in this chapter, language coordinates responses, and it participates in the merging of thought with emotion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This season, we're rambling through and beyond a book sacred in multiple traditions, a book that keeps generating debate and commentary and tangents. It's the Hebrew Bible, home to Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his Ark, David and Goliath, and prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel. Here, in a season we're calling "Mosaic Mosaic," it especially prompts conversations about the mysteries of thought and language.
The novelist Joshua Cohen explains in this episode that the Hebrew Bible poses fundamental questions about language. As he puts it: "Why are there letters, actually? Why do the letters form words? This is the most basic question of the Bible." There, language makes things happen on a grand scale. God creates the world by language, by declarations: "let there be light"—Cohen mentions the idea that "one could create life through the combination of letters." And in the Bible, after Adam comes to life, he gives names to things and thereby begins exploration of the world by language. Here's Robert Alter's translation of that scene in Genesis:
And the LORD God fashioned from the soil each beast of the field and each fowl of the heavens and brought each to the human to see what he would call it, and whatever the human called a living creature, that was its name.
The poet, translator, and MacArthur genius Peter Cole speaks of "the burden of the Bible," which he calls a "pain in the desk chair"; yet he adds that "everything is somehow in it, but only if you use it as a tool for reflection, or a prism, so that both you and the world end up in its pages somehow, refracted by the text." The written word can align past and present, or antiquity with you, the contemporary reader, and some sort of harmony might occasionally result. (Elisa Gabbert, speaking of poetry generally, describes in this show the experience of encountering a text that "feels like how you're feeling.")
At the end of our last season, on 1,001 Nights, radio host Hearty White recounted this realization: "When you're talking about Bible stories, you're not talking about Bible stories at all. It's an excuse to talk about other things. It's just a jumping off point." Along those lines: this season, we're starting with the Bible and jumping into explorations of language, the mind, emotions, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights. Season three, titled Mosaic Mosaic and premiering on April 11, journeys through and beyond the Hebrew Bible.
Guests for season three include: Peter Cole, the poet and MacArthur genius whose new book Draw Me After will be out this fall; Elisa Gabbert, poet and poetry columnist with the New York Times–her latest book is Normal Distance; Lisa Feldman Barrett, psychologist, neuroscientist, and author of books including How Emotions Are Made; Tom DeRose, curator at the Freud Museum in London; and Joshua Cohen, the novelist whose books include Book of Numbers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The 1,001 Nights are not typically about conclusions, but about the suggestion of more stories, more information passed from person to person, language to language. In this, the last episode of this season, Mazen Naous—a scholar whose specialties include the Nights—points out the implication of the phrase “thousand and one nights”: “There’s always one more story, always one more story to be told, the stories have no beginning and no end. That’s partly why the Nights still inspire rewrites and reinventions and adaptations to this day.”
“I think the book doesn’t end,” says Yasmine Seale, translator of the Nights, here. “The force of this work, and what’s so strange and uncomfortable about it, is that it’s a book without an end, without resolution, without conclusion.”
That openness makes the Nights a work in which you can ramble and find, maybe, anything. Hearty White, of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU, compares such reading to other sorts of study:
When you’re talking about Bible stories, you’re not talking about Bible stories at all. It’s an excuse to talk about other things. It’s just a jumping off point. And so what you do is go into excruciating minutiae as a way of opening up—it’s a key, and you use it to open up a tangent, and that tangent takes you to marvelous places. And then I found out you can literally do it with almost anything that’s complicated . . . And you just descend, infinitely, in between the words.
The Nights were compiled in a way that supports this kind of reading, this kind of thinking. They’ve been added to, changed, adapted in ways that obliterate any straightforward authenticity or moral simplicity. Reading the Nights, then—and talking about the Nights—means accepting something challenging: stories can exceed easy notions of an author, or a culture, or even history. Stories can, in short, let you participate in experiences far beyond them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1,001 Nights begins in horror: a king threatens to kill, and Shahrazad tells stories to keep the king from doing so. The ongoing nature of the stories, then, relies on a drive to live, manifesting the basic connection between our intuitive selves and imagination.
When stories really survive, there’s more to them than repetitive cliffhangers or excessively elaborated detail—something more than escapist entertainment, even if that’s there, too. Hearty White says in this episode, “I don’t care for the movies that are in mythical places. They’re ‘world-creating’? They’re world-limiting. Every time they add another character, another detail, they’re shutting off possibilities, they’re not creating them.” He describes, too, the films and TV shows to which he’s drawn, movies “where I’m shown something and go, ‘Why isn’t the camera moving? I’m getting a little uncomfortable, what am I supposed to look at? What’s my role now?’ Now you’re very conscious of the fact that you’re observing—you’re not on autopilot.”
So a vital possibility glows in stories that sustain your questioning, again and again and again. Katy Waldman describes how episodic stories can work by producing more of the same-but-not-the-same. We call it “now-what fiction” in this episode, a kind of story in which there’s “a mix of something enduring and going on and something . . . completely new and different.” In short: these are stories in which something persists or survives, inviting your questions continually, even if those questions are simply “now what?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The 1,001 Nights are full of patterns; the stories have formulas, and this too anticipates the world of television, comic books, video games. Yasmine Seale, translator of the Nights, says in this episode, “Formula is essential to the work. It draws it force from accumulation. It draws its meaning from pattern.” But formulaic narrative doesn’t necessarily mean mind-numbing sameness. It can mean the opposite. Hearty White, the host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU, talks in this episode about watching formulaic Three Stooges episodes, which don’t limit the viewer’s imagination. Instead, you get the sense that an artist like Hearty White is liberated by the formulaic, finds a field in which to play and invent within clichés or patterns. He says in this episode, of formulaic story: “I think what it does is, it frees you from the involuntary compulsive predicting that you have to do when you’re navigating your life. Maybe because the same thing is happening all the time you don’t have to guess.” For Katy Waldman, critic at The New Yorker, stories that serially, repeatedly suggest infinity also work with the sense that “things might end . . . but something will persist. And what on earth will that look like?” She describes a dystopian version of the liberating experience Hearty White finds in ongoing, repetitious story. Still, in either case, attention is repeatedly compelled to something beyond repetitions. We are, once more, in the world of night and the dreams that surpass the night. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The House of Wisdom was a center of learning in Baghdad of the Abbasid caliphate. Established in the eighth century, it sustained a golden age of science that coincided with the collection of early versions of the 1,001 Nights. In this episode, we hear about the science of the Nights, the science of the Abbasid age, and the history, more broadly, of science fiction. A similar exchange from culture to culture, language to language, made possible the scientific advances of this time and 1,001 Nights. The very frame narrative of Shahrazad is a Persian story, and leading figures associated with Baghdad’s House of Wisdom were Persian, as well. In this episode, Jim Al-Khalili, author of a book on the House of Wisdom, describes two Persian thinkers, Ibn Sina and al-Biruni: Both these guys were philosophers, scientists, polymaths—and they were having the sorts of debates about the nature of reality that would not seem out of place in modern physics . . . debating about: how does the light from the sun reach the Earth as it travels through space, are there many worlds, are there parallel universes? Stuff that you’d think, “How could they possibly be talking about that?” I just get the feeling that we didn’t invent cleverness in modern times. The Nights and scientific work have more in common than speculative thinking and reliance on cross-cultural communication, too. Both depend on ceaselessly driving toward something yet to be fully grasped—either through repetitive experiments or repetitive storytelling. Maybe it was inevitable, then, that the Nights would have a major part in the history of science fiction. You’ll hear in this episode how magnetism was a scientific preoccupation that became a source of adventure within the Nights—specifically, within the stories of “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” which also contain a link to a later monument of science fiction: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
You know Shahrazad, who tells a story every night in order to survive and save lives; you also know the collection of stories that results: 1,001 Nights. At least, you've felt the influence of those stories. On TV, in books, in comics—you’ve experienced things informed by the episodic narratives of Shahrazad. And in this season of The Cosmic Library, you’ll hear how the Nights opened paths to infinite story possibility within repetitive constraints. Even as the threat of death looms over Shahrazad in the Nights, her narrative inventions promise something that exceeds the power of a tyrant. And so, in this season (as in the last one, which was about Finnegans Wake) we’re once again talking about a night book that takes you beyond the night. Along the way, we’re hearing of a historical golden age, The Three Stooges, the art of literary survival, and possible worlds that emanate from even the worst situations. Such imaginative survival entails changes, some of which are well known: Shahrazad is familiar to many readers as Scheherazade, a transliteration that resulted from translation after translation, and alteration after alteration, across cultures. Yasmine Seale, translator of 1,001 Nights and guest on this season, writes to The Cosmic Library, “I like Shahrazad because it makes clear the name’s Persian origins. There are different theories about its etymology. One sees it as shahr, city, and the suffix zad, born. A child of the city. Shahrazad is an urban figure—worldly, streetwise, unshockable. The stories were about merchants and for merchants.” Meanwhile, the Scheherazade spelling, Seale writes, “is a bit of a monster. The ‘Sch’ smells German, the final ‘e’ is French. English puts the stress on a syllable which is silent in Persian and Arabic. It’s a spelling that tells us more about the various European readings and misreadings of the text, its many messy afterlives, than about the work itself.” This season thinks about classic stories that have had over-brimming afterlives through readings and misreadings, stories that have always suggested infinitely branching ideas, possibilities, and questions. Guests this season include a maker of fiction, a New Yorker critic, a theoretical physicist, a translator of the Nights, and a literary scholar. If our first volume, “Finnegan and Friends,” found creative revitalization in Finnegans Wake's evocation of night, let this second volume, “The Worlds of Scheherazade,” reveal the potential Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Cosmic Library follows tangents out of literary classics concerned with infinity. Building on Lit Hub’s five-part Finnegan and Friends podcast, this series explores the most unfathomable books in conversation with an eclectic cast of guests. The upcoming season, The Worlds of Scheherazade, plunges into and out of the 1,001 Nights with guests Katy Waldman, critic at The New Yorker; Yasmine Seale, translator of the 1,001 Nights; Jim Al-Khalili, theoretical physicist; Mazen Naous, professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; and Hearty White, host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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
Think of your most obscure, private, family chatter—some combination of baby-talk and nicknames and reiterations of the same concerns or jokes. It wouldn’t make sense to outsiders, but it makes a special kind of sense to you. It’s language that communicates in a highly local way, and not at all in other ways. And yet: everyone sort of knows how this language works. In Finnegans Wake, that private language converges, even, with broadly recognizable mythic language. We’re reading about a family—the patriarch HCE, the mother ALP, the sons Shem and Shaun, and daughter Issy—but they’re all associated with mythic figures: Aesop’s characters (the ant and grasshopper turn into the Shaun-like responsible Ondt and the Shem-like irresponsible Gracehoper), the HCE-like Humpty Dumpty, and, most Irishly, Finn MacCool. The Wake shows us how the super-local is also mythical, shared.
Wittgenstein framed the idea of private language as follows: “The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know—to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.” But in the Wake, the most inscrutably private language echoes beyond privacy. The cryptic HCE’s name at one point stands for Here Comes Everybody; characters flow into one another, mix together in their most private moments. Washerwomen gossiping about the private lives of ALP’s family are overcome by the river that is itself tied to ALP, swept up into the mystery rather than ejected from it.
The document that supposedly might reveal ALP’s family truth is the “mamafesta,” a manifesto of the mama. Joyce mocks usual methods of interpretation, Freudian and Marxist, of this document. Efforts to interpret that private language create epic resonances, of Greek language and grandiosity, useful in a story about the epic dimensions of everyday characters. You can see some of that here:
"that (probably local or personal) variant maggers for the more generally accepted majesty which is but a trifle and yet may quietly amuse: those superciliouslooking crisscrossed Greek ees awkwardlike perched there and here out of date like sick owls hawked back to Athens"
The most majestic connection to HCE would be the mythic Finn MacCool, the Irish hero linked to the fallen Finnegan in lines like, “Macool, Macool, orra whyi deed ye diie?” In this episode, the scholar Katherine O’Callaghan describes how HCE’s fall and rise recall the fall of the ancient Irish hero, the fall of “a sort of Finn” and “the old myths of the Fionna, a warrior tribe in Ireland in the first and second centuries, with Finn the leader.” O’Callaghan tells us that in the Wake, we find “the fallen Finn, but the idea of course in Finnegans Wake is that Finn himself might be woken in some way and come back out of his burial site and rise again.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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
James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake doesn’t work like other novels. It has lines like: “What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods!” In some ways, this makes the book almost impossible to read. H.G. Wells told Joyce, “You have turned your back on common men — on their elementary needs … What is the result? Vast riddles.” The Wake doesn’t have to be difficult, though; you don’t have to read it as a collection of unsolvable riddles. In Finnegan and Friends, we don’t regard the Wake as something to decode completely. Instead, we find in the book a well of inspiration for endless exploration.
When you accept that you can’t perfectly decipher this thing, you set yourself free to notice rather than solve, and you’ll start to notice a lot. You’ll notice, for one thing, that Finnegans Wake deals with basic, shared, elemental experiences—of dreams, of water, of private chitchat. And it does all this in its own dreamy, fluid language. As Samuel Beckett wrote, of Joyce and the Wake: “His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.”
Finnegans Wake also consoles. It’s the book of death giving way to life, of a fall that generates rebirth. The story, as much as it has one, draws connections between figures associated with a fall: the central, disgraced character HCE; Humpty Dumpty; and Finnegan (from the Irish song “Finnegan’s Wake,” about a guy who falls, is presumed dead, then turns out to be fine). There’s nothing total about such falling in this book, no complete catastrophe. The fall leads us into something much weirder. Here’s a sample from the Wake itself:
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.
In collapse and decline we find hints of rebirth to some ancient glory—the return of the ancient Irish heroism of Finn MacCool. (“Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you're going to be Mister Finnagain!”) So we’re reading a book of sadness that leads to joy, of hazy connections that exist beyond gloom, beyond logic, and sometimes just at the level of sound (between Finnegan and Finn, again), all of which intimates the promise of life that never never makes perfect sense.
Notice, too, that the title of the Wake lacks an apostrophe. You can read the title as an encouraging command, urging all Finnegans, all of us fallen and struggling people, to wake up into free-floating consciousness within our routine, elemental experiences. Episodes of Finnegan and Friends will trace this waking through one elemental experience at a time—of water, of dreams, of language—and each will be accompanied by notes like this one, on Joyce’s novel and on a related, Joycean life adventure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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