75 years of Finnegans Wake scholarship have successfully identified most of the meanings of most of the words in FW-- scholarship now mostly searchable at fweet.org.
Since Joyce's stated intent was "a history of the world" we should expect an encyclopedia's worth of allusions to most all the major events of that history, but reflecting Joyce's idiosyncratic analysis of which events were most important to him.
Most especially, Irish history gets a singular emphasis, with all other events measured against their Irish echoes.
Using Fweet, it's now practical to pick any topic, search for all allusions, and compose a brief overview of that topic through Joyce's Wakean eyes, illustrated with his quotes (currently following Fweet in using the standard pagination, with most pagenumbers linked to the Fweet page).
So this Annotated-FW edition will progress in two parallel streams: line-by-line but also major-topic by major-topic.
('Wakepedia' has 4 syllables like Wikipedia (or should it be Wækepædia?))
We can expect all the major topics to be introduced in the early pages, with increasingly-minor sub-topics being addressed later.
(It remains to be seen how these topic pages should be indexed. For now, use Blogger's 'archive' menu in the righthand margin-- those dates are all fictitious.)
Articles will progress thru various stages of completion, from empty placeholders, to simple fweet-links, to unsorted fweet-text dumps, to sorted and cleaned up fweet-dumps... (A lot of this can be done pretty mindlessly during otherwise wasted time.)
So far:
FW title song
Finn MacCool
Eve and Adam
poop
Howth
Tristan and Iseult
the St Lawrence family
Jesus
invasions
cardinal points (nsew)
Wellington
the 'Dublin' name
St Patrick
Jacob, Esau and Isaac
Parnell
Swift
Shakespeare
Scotland
Noah
alcohol
rainbows
Vico
thunder
Humpty Dumpty
orange
Phoenix Park
Ulysses
Ibsen
Guinness family
phallic and yonic symbols
Islam
Brian O'Linn
pee
Wales
astrology
WG Wills, Royal Divorce
cardinal numbers
LeFanu
Buddhism
Bruno
Hungarian
The parallel annotations will try to account for every letter of the drafts and published text.
Friday, October 31, 2014
Thursday, October 30, 2014
"I can justify every line of my book"
i wrote above that we've achieved "most of the meanings of most of the words in FW" but i think that may be too kind...
if joyce could justify every line, every word, every character and punctuationmark, we can't aim any lower... so finding a meaning (or two or three or four) that accounts for most of the letters in a passage isn't nearly enough-- we need to account for every letter.
so if there's a word like "pftjschute" and we've only got a good match for 'chute', i'll try to state this explicitly like 'why PFTJSchute?'
and this means that 'most of the letters of most of the words' could still leave ~one word/meaning for each missing letter.
if joyce could justify every line, every word, every character and punctuationmark, we can't aim any lower... so finding a meaning (or two or three or four) that accounts for most of the letters in a passage isn't nearly enough-- we need to account for every letter.
so if there's a word like "pftjschute" and we've only got a good match for 'chute', i'll try to state this explicitly like 'why PFTJSchute?'
and this means that 'most of the letters of most of the words' could still leave ~one word/meaning for each missing letter.
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