Re-membering Finnegan

So I finished Dr. Sexson’s article yesterday that was posted on Sam’s blog, and I must say that I enjoyed it quite a bit. It is another wonderful way for us to look at and approach Joyce without being as intimidated as we started off. Or at least that is a nice thought. I am still rather intimidated, but I am excited to discuss it and at least begin to be altered by the book itself rather than the other way around. Dr. Sexson wrote in the article that the journey itself through Joyce is itself the goal and not the ultimate goal is not to understand every minute detail.

I decided after reading this article I would just list some of my favorite quotes from it. I will blog about Finnegans Wake by Friday I promise. I am slowly making my way through it and I am finally working up to my first blog on this book of knowledge.

“…only in sleep do we begin to awaken to all we have forgotten.”

“…such material is tantamount not only to rebirth of wonder but an apotheosis, a translation of the human into the divine, of the mortal into the immortal…”

“…we all become artists when we sleep…”

“A reader of Finnegans Wake is more like a navigator moving experientially through simulacra, not with the intention of understanding what’s going to happen at the end, or of getting the “point,” but with the aim of experiencing a hallucinatory ride, “hanging out,” getting lost in fortuitous forks in the labyrinth, taking an ecstatic flight through the infinite caverns of memory in which the journey itself becomes the goal.”

“Knowledge, for example, should no longer be a commodity but closer to what Plato thought it was, an eroticized expression of the soul, a transformation.”

“It is here in, in this place that is not a place, at this moment of religious miracle and revelation when the phenomenal world metamorphoses into what Joyce calls the “funanimal” world, that we begin to learn how to read the unread and unreadable book.”

So thank you once again for this enlightening article. Similar to a Dr. Sexson lecture in all the information packed into a short period of time, and thoroughly enjoyable (missing the best part of lecture though, being there in person!). Informative and entertaining. The surefire way to lead your students to a successful semester and I thank you for that!