In Conversation with Matthew Leporati – Recording

00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:17.000  

Well, I want to thank the global Blake Network for organising this event and Jason and Annie for their help. 

00:00:17.001 --> 00:00:25.000

I'd also like to thank Lindsey Weinberg for her help in preparing my presentation and for her useful comments on early draughts with of this. 

00:00:25.001 --> 00:00:46.000

So my first book is out on epic poetry in the romantic era. This that I wrote may become part of a project on Blake and Joyce at some point in the future, but for now it's a talk. I'll just begin, Lots of Blake in Finnegan's Wake. 

00:00:46.001 --> 00:01:06.000

James Joyce gave a lecture on William Blake in 1912. His previous lectures at an Italian university in 1911 had concerned Irish politics, but in 1912 his topic was realism and idealism in English literature. In this talk, he discussed Daniel Defoe 

00:01:06.001 --> 00:01:20.000

as a representative of the former realism and William Blake of the latter. What strikes me in the fragment of this lecture that remains is the extent to which Joyce sees realism and idealism as interwoven. 

00:01:20.001 --> 00:01:45.000

He speaks at one point of the spiritual origins of realism and of a prophetic sense in Defoe's realistic art, not just representing reality, but offering through its symbols; the finished artistic expression of this prophetic sense, Joyce says, is Robinson Crusoe, whom Joyce takes to be a true symbol of British conquest, the prototype of the British colonist. 

00:01:45.001 --> 00:02:02.000

Obviously Blake also has a prophetic sentence, but his is broader than Defoe's, consisting of what Joyce calls a divine humanity partially inspired by Emmanuel Swedenborg's vision of heaven in the form of a man. 

00:02:02.001 --> 00:02:16.000

So obviously, Blake has a prophetic sense consisting of Emmanuel Swedenborg's vision of heaven in the form of a man, Joyce and his talk emphasises how Blake's visionary work is inseparable from the mundane details of his life. 

00:02:16.001 --> 00:02:31.000

In one part of the lecture, he describes Blake, as rising after a night of inspired art to make tea and breakfast for Catherine Blake as she lay under the covers of their bed, a curious anticipation of Leopold Bloom's first appearance in Ulysses. 

00:02:31.001 --> 00:02:46.000

The ending of Joyce's lecture is lost, but the last sentence of the remaining text begins at the bottom of that slide, "And although he based his art on such idealist premises, convinced that eternity was in love with the products of time", 

00:02:46.001 --> 00:03:06.000

the although clause makes it seem likely that Joyce was about to pivot into synthesising idealism and realism, or rather, arguing explicitly that these two artistic impulses can be complementary, an idea that resonates with Joyce's own approach to art, culminating in his final novel, Finnegan's Wake. 

00:03:06.001 --> 00:03:14.000

Critics have long noted that there are a number of similarities in the structure of Finnegan's Wake and Blake's final long poem, Jerusalem. 

00:03:14.001 --> 00:03:39.000

For example, both works have four parts, both concern a fallen dead and Oregon sleeping giant, who represents all humanity and whose various aspects acquire their own individualities, including female aspects and emanations, parts of the psyche that battle with each other before reconciling that the sleeping giant may arise into new life. 

00:03:39.001 --> 00:04:10.000

The similarities between the world of Finnegan's Wake and Blake's mythology were noted among early commentators by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, who in their 1944 study of Finnegan's Wake in 1944, is just five years after the novel was published. They compare Blakes Albion in his long poems to Joyce's HCE, the slumbering giant whose initials signify, among other things, Here Comes Everybody. HCE. 

00:04:10.001 --> 00:04:34.000

And they write Joyce's image of a fundamental sleeping individuality, Albion around whom revolve the figures of the four zoas, and whose emanation is the symbolic Jerusalem, and who will not awake from his universal dream until the last judgement is precisely HCE, and my talk today I'm going to argue that Joyce, in fact, draws upon Blake in ways that critics have not fully appreciated. 

00:04:34.001 --> 00:04:43.000

I will argue that Joyce extends Blake's subversive transformation of the epic tradition in his long poems, especially Jerusalem. 

00:04:43.001 --> 00:05:05.000

While Ulysses is typically regarded as Joyce's major engagement with epic literature, I argue that Finnegan's Wake more radically engages it by adapting Blakes Jerusalem into a postmodern, postcolonial reflection on empires, a fragmentation of the world and on the possibility of creating global unity. 

00:05:05.001 --> 00:05:24.000

Blake's appeal to epic tradition was influenced by the epic revival of his day. At the time Blake was writing Milton and Jerusalem, more epics were written than at any other time in history - and this is the period between 1790 and 1820. 

00:05:24.001 --> 00:05:30.000

A great deal of these poems were, to use Blake's terminology, fabled by the daughters of memory. 

00:05:30.001 --> 00:05:54.000

While some writers recruited the genre for progressive ends, a great many were dull, imitative poems that aped the classical and Miltonic epics, and in the process often advocated a jingoistic nationalism and tyrannical imperialism, enslaving the minds of readers to the sword no less than the works of the Greeks and the Romans that served as their models. 

00:05:54.001 --> 00:06:13.000

As critics have argued, Neoclassicism was used to support nationalism and advocate the concept of duty to state. From Blake's perspective, the epic revival of the Romantic period helped create the mind forged manacles that promoted global injustice. 

00:06:13.001 --> 00:06:26.000

Epic is a notoriously difficult genre to define, and critics have suggested that its ambiguities account for its enduring popularity and the tension of its form. 

00:06:26.001 --> 00:06:35.000

Many works throughout history have been labelled epics while varying in length, subject matter, devices with seemingly little to link all of them together. 

00:06:35.001 --> 00:06:43.000

Some critics have argued that epic can be defined by a spirit of grandeur, an attempt to sum up the world in encyclopaedic ways. 

00:06:43.001 --> 00:06:55.000

Others hold that epic should be thought of less as a genre than a tradition in which poems claim membership by reiterating its tropes. So invocation extended simile and so on.

00:06:55.001 --> 00:07:17.000

Each epic could therefore be conceived as a a kind of collaboration with tradition, but it is a tense collaboration that frequently descends into competition. Critics have noted that epics often vie against their own tradition, repeating its conventions while insisting on the superiority of their own age, themes and values. 

00:07:17.001 --> 00:07:32.000

The lack of a clear set of rules for epic poetry, coupled with the tendency for rivalry among epic poets, renders the genre at a destabilised space, a battlefield of ancient tropes and modern ideas. 

00:07:32.001 --> 00:07:38.000

This instability and tension made it a useful tool to respond to the turbulent politics of the romantic era. 

00:07:38.001 --> 00:07:51.000

It's noteworthy that the epic genre has also traditionally been associated with ideas of stability, unity, and national identity concepts that would have been appealing to writers in the wake of the French Revolution. 

00:07:51.001 --> 00:08:06.000

A common critical narrative is that the writing of epic poems declined as the aristocracy waned after the 17th century and then in the 19th century and beyond, epics and poetry in general were displaced by the novel. 

00:08:06.001 --> 00:08:17.000

And yet this critical narrative is at least incomplete because the 19th century was full of epic poems, densest in the romantic period, poems that spoke to the condition of their world, 

00:08:17.001 --> 00:08:35.000

accustomed to thinking of romantic epic in terms of unconventional poems and fragments, yet canonical romantic epics were the exceptions rather than the rule. A great many complete and conventional poems bearing the name epic poured from the presses during the romantic period.  

00:08:35.001 --> 00:08:49.000

In fact the annual, called Poetical Register and Repository of Fugitive Poetry during the first decade of the 19th century divided its reviews between epic and heroic poems and miscellaneous. 

00:08:49.001 --> 00:09:10.000

Many romantic era epics promoted forms of nationalism, supported the goals of empire, and worked in part to affirm a stable, unified British identity framed against savage others around the world who needed to be civilised, conquered, and or converted. These poems include Henry James Pyes Alfred, Robert Southey's Madoc, 

00:09:10.001 --> 00:09:22.000

John Ogilvie's Britannia and a host of even lesser known poems. They didn't survive as part of the literary cannon, but the world Blake moved in was awash in them. 

00:09:22.001 --> 00:09:45.000

Blake's long poems both do and do not fit with conventional ideas of epic poetry. They indeed embody a grand scope, and they do reiterate aspects of the epic lineage while partially repudiating it. Consider Blake's use of invocations, catalogues, lengthy similes, allusions to classical and Miltonic poems, and so on. 

00:09:45.001 --> 00:10:08.000

Blake worked at the epicentre of the Epic revival. His patron and friend/antagonist, William Hayley, played a key role in igniting the revival with his seminal and influential Essay on Epic Poetry, a 1782 verse epistle that encouraged English poets to take up the genre to address national subjects. 

00:10:08.001 --> 00:10:20.000

Blake's long poems concerning the rise and fall of Albion seem like an answer to that call. Haley and Blake even read the Iliad together in 1801. 

00:10:20.001 --> 00:10:37.000 

And as the author of a popular biography of Milton, Ellie was responsible for a resurgence of interest in the writer that the English considered their greatest epic poet, one who lived through a turbulent revolutionary time that many people saw mirrored in the age of the French Revolution. 

00:10:37.001 --> 00:10:59.000

Blake's poems make frequent use of Miltonic language, imagery, and tropes down to making John Milton himself the hero of one of his poems. The romantic epic revival was, in a sense, returning Milton to Earth by trying to mimic him, writers sought to copy his religious epic or or write the national epic he considered but never penned. 

00:10:59.001 --> 00:11:17.000

Seeing Milton revived for the purpose of shoring up nationalism and imperialism, Blake returns him to Earth to combat those forces. It would seem reasonable to conclude that Blake's long poems are indeed epics, which he composed as the popularity of the genre grew during the romantic era. 

00:11:17.001 --> 00:11:39.000

Yet these long poems also subvert expectations. Readers would have of epic poetry. Although epics are typically associated with unity, stability, and national identity, Blakes long poems often strike readers as disunified, unstable and critical of conventional conceptions of identity. 

00:11:39.001 --> 00:11:52.000

While several other canonical poems of the period are incomplete or fragmentary in a variety of ways, and for a variety of reasons, owing to the exigencies of revision, publication, etcetera, 

00:11:52.001 --> 00:12:05.000

Blake's epics embrace fragmentation. They're produced in such a way that each plate could stand on its own as a separate work of art. Each copy of Milton and Jerusalem is unique as no two extent copies are identical. 

00:12:05.001 --> 00:12:25.000

Blake's epics thus not only defy the idea of, going back to Aristotle, that an epic poem should be unified, they actively undermine it. And in terms of content, Blake repeatedly invokes epic tradition in his long poems, explicitly framing his work as an as an antagonistic response to the classical tradition. 

00:12:25.001 --> 00:12:39.000

References to classical epic often symbolise the forces of restriction and imperialism against which he strives. In short, Blake adopts aspects of the epic genre, but rather than creating a cohesive unified work

00:12:39.001 --> 00:12:51.000

he embraces fragmentation and subverts the unifying and totalizing tendencies of epics. He attacks, by extension, the unifying and totalizing energies of the empire. 

00:12:51.001 --> 00:13:00.000

He rejects the conservative respect for tradition and he further assaults the discursive categories that underwrite empire. 

00:13:00.001 --> 00:13:13.000

In addition to undermining the epic genres claim to unity and homeless, Blake's embrace of fragmentation challenges the idea of a stable British identity that could be neatly contrasted with a savage other. 

00:13:13.001 --> 00:13:21.000

Everywhere in Blake's long poems, the categories of self and other are deeply unstable, as characters blend into each other. 

00:13:21.001 --> 00:13:34.000

When the Speaker of Jerusalem declares at the beginning of the poem, I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine, it not only announces a key theme of Blake's poem, it causes us to wonder who exactly is speaking.

00:13:34.001 --> 00:13:54.000

It may be not only the poem's speaker, but William Blake, the author, the artist-prophet Los, the Fallen, Albion, the fallen Jerusalem, or God himself, or all of them at once. I want to look at one particular part of Jerusalem to serve as an example of Blake's dynamic and subversive engagement with epic.  

00:13:54.001 --> 00:14:20.000 

Early in Jerusalem he portrays Los surveying the world like Adam at the end of Paradise Lost, who beholds all of salvation history at once. Los sees Blake's entire mythological world, including all of fallen time before him. Plates 12 to 16 function as an epic catalogue detailing the Blakey and Cosmos, and Lose's creative endeavours. 

00:14:20.001 --> 00:14:36.000 

Traditionally catalogues create a sense of epic as a unifying, totalizing, almost encyclopaedic form, and Blake both generates this sense and undermines it by framing and interrupting his catalogue with illustrations. 

00:14:36.001 --> 00:14:46.000 

This is no straightforward list of warriors attacking Troy in book two of the Iliad, or the Roman emperors marching in the underworld in Book six of the Aenid. 

00:14:46.001 --> 00:15:11.000

Both of those famous examples are encyclopaedic listings that support war and conquest and imperial power. Blake reinvents the device of the catalogue to stress how inspired art should resist the totalizing energies of epic and empire - of the plates performs its content. 

00:15:11.001 --> 00:15:20.000

On these plates, Los perceives the divided state of the world and works to rectify it by entering it through his artistic productions. 

00:15:20.001 --> 00:15:29.000

The first two plates with marginal ornamentations are followed by two plates with illustrations that take up the bottom third of each. 

00:15:29.001 --> 00:15:40.000

That is, as the catalogue wears on, Blake's image has become more prominent and interrupts the catalogue at the same time as Los beholds the effects of the fall. 

00:15:40.001 --> 00:16:05.000

On these plates, the language repeats. He views... he views... Los beheld... Los beheld. I turn my eyes, I see. He also sees the past, present and future all at once. See in the second stanza there third line from the bottom of that second stanza. Los looks and sees the past, present, future all at once, again like Adam in Paradise Lost 

00:16:05.001 --> 00:16:33.000

Los sees the effects of English imperialism growing into a polypus that extends from Albion to the entire Earth. It is as if the act of an inspired artist, seeing clearly the conditions of the fallen world, begins a process of resistance to empire, a process signalled by the increasing intrusion of images into the catalogue.

00:16:33.001 --> 00:16:47.000

Catalogue culminates in plate 16, where now the images disappear entirely and Blake gives us the busiest plate thus far in the poem, 69 lines squeezed into a wall of words. 

00:16:47.001 --> 00:17:02.000

On this plate, Los moves from beholding the effects of the fall and begins to act. The words, "Here Los fixed" described the central action and these words are positioned close to the centre of the plate. 

00:17:02.001 --> 00:17:14.000

He fixes down on this plate. Los fixes down the counties of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, giving definite form to the countries joined by the 1801 Act of Union. 

00:17:14.001 --> 00:17:29.000

Los's work here partially consists of tracing the effects of the fall. The active union was part of the construction of what Blake calls Albion Spectre, part of the imperialist polypus that spreads dominion across the globe. 

00:17:29.001 --> 00:17:48.000

But Lose's work is also a creative gesture that begins to rectify that fall. The plate traces imaginary correspondences between these counties and the tribes of Israel, suggesting that apparently distinct nations are not as distinct as the fallen mind would have it. 

00:17:48.001 --> 00:18:03.000

The business of this plate 16, so busy and so full of seemingly pointless details, as if almost to parity, the device of epic catalogue used in warlike Imperial epic,

00:18:03.001 --> 00:18:23.000

underscores how lost more fully enters the fallen world through his work, much as art must manifest in the world to influence it. Los, in a sense, enters the world of empires totalizing Dominion, signalled by the lengthy catalogue. The movement of these plates, again from divided catalogue 

00:18:23.001 --> 00:18:40.000

to near parity of a catalogue, mirrors how Blake's art embodies fragmentation but strives toward unity. Yet Blake seeks in his art not an imperial unity, which depends on a hierarchy in which self is exalted over 

00:18:40.001 --> 00:18:59.000

other, but a mutual exchange where I am in you and you and me, where there are no fixed self hoods, but the acts of continually building and continually decaying, continually capable of reinventing nations themselves through art. 

00:18:59.001 --> 00:19:23.000

That idea of continually refreshing the world through art appears at the end of the catalogue part of the survey of the Universe. On these plates Blake stresses how the events of history are not lost to the creative imagination, which, when it is fully realised, is not bound by history. 

00:19:23.001 --> 00:19:32.000

For Blake, all possibilities, all potentials are real and can be perceived by the imagination. 

00:19:32.001 --> 00:19:56.000

These possibilities include that subset that has actually transpired, which we call history, but to a fallen mind, the events of history are the only things that are real. They seem the only substances the third to last line on that slide. 

00:19:56.001 --> 00:20:03.000

Such individuals in their fallen state are closed to the potential that an artist can access. 

00:20:03.001 --> 00:20:12.000

These possibilities are embodied by the sculptures in the halls of Los. I'll read this whole thing: 

00:20:12.001 --> 00:20:21.000

All things acted on Earth are seen in the bright Sculptures of Los's halls, & every aAge renews its powers from these Works 

00:20:21.001 --> 00:20:30.000

With every pathetic story possible to happen from Hate or Wayward Love, & every sorrow & distress is carved here. Every affinity of Parents, Marriages and Friendships are here  

00:20:30.001 --> 00:20:39.000

In all their various combinations wrought with wondrous Art. All that can happen to Man in his pilgrimage of seventy years. 

00:20:39.001 --> 00:20:45.000

Blake is essentially describing archetypes images that recur in art and in life. 

00:20:45.001 --> 00:21:00.000

These statues in the halls of lows sum up all human possibilities and the ability to perceive them and open to their influence. And creativity is part of Los's creative work that acts as an antidote to empire. 

00:21:00.001 --> 00:21:09.000

As the artistic creations of a divine being, these statues resemble divine craftsmanship. In a famous episode of Epic tradition, 

00:21:09.001 --> 00:21:30.000 

the images on the shield of Achilles in The Iliad, Book 18, the gods deliver New armour to Achilles, including a shield decorated with images that encapsulate the universe, the Sun, Moon, Ocean, a city at war, and a city at peace, marriages and funerals work and celebration. 

00:21:30.001 --> 00:21:38.000

In Blake's vision of the world and history in Jerusalem, he extends not only Milton, with the panorama view of history, 

00:21:38.001 --> 00:21:55.000 

but also Homer, Blake's hero Los does not carry representations of archetypes into battle. The hero of Blake's poems is the force that creates these archetypes that produces and manifests possibility. 

00:21:55.001 --> 00:22:13.000

As Blake gives a stunning survey of his mythological world, he represents the forces of oppression. Like the serpents that opposed the priest Laocoon in the sculpture based on Virgil's Aeneid - the last two lines there. Reasonings like serpents and fold around my limbs.  

00:22:13.001 --> 00:22:19.000

Blake's own version of the Laocoon, produced in 1826. 

00:22:19.001 --> 00:22:40.000 

shows how he appropriated classical art for his own purposes. He surrounds the classical statue with Blakean aphorisms winding around the figures like serpents of his own. In these aphorisms. Blake asserts that classical art misunderstood poetic truth, essentially misunderstood those archetypes in the halls of Los. 

00:22:40.001 --> 00:22:48.000

Classical art misunderstood them as literal history, reducing the story of the fall to the Natural History of ilium. 

00:22:48.001 --> 00:23:06.000 

The implication of those lines in Jerusalem, where Blake sees his opposition as serpents winding around him like around the Laocoon, is that the destruction of Troy, which the Laocoon anticipates,

00:23:06.001 --> 00:23:11.000 

the destruction of Troy is a parallel to the attempted destruction of Jerusalem. 

00:23:11.001 --> 00:23:11.000 

But where Vergil's Aeneid addresses what the Romans believed to be historical fact, 

00:23:17.001 --> 00:23:38.000 

that a hero salvaged Trojan civilization to live again as the glory of Rome, Blake imaginatively appropriates classical imagery to defend his concept of liberty or Jerusalem. Blake's idea of Jerusalem runs counter to the imperialism represented by Rome and perpetuated into Blake's day by the British Empire. 

00:23:38.001 --> 00:23:44.000 

But the British Empire looms large on these plates of Jerusalem,

00:23:44.001 --> 00:24:02.000 

extending through the globe. Those minds trapped in the fallen world are at the mercy of this polypus, but Blake suggests it is possible to break free of the hold of what he calls selfhood and embrace imaginative potential. 

00:24:02.001 --> 00:24:22.000

To be clear, I don't think one needs to believe in the supernatural or be a dualist to find this idea powerful, and for the purpose of this talk, I'm going to set aside a long digression I wrote about whether or not Blake is a dualist. Suffice it to say, the fall described by Blake could simply refer to our minds' tendencies 

00:24:22.001 --> 00:24:25.000  

to be caught in limiting ideas of ourselves and the world, 

00:24:25.001 --> 00:24:37.000 

Our tendencies to acquiesce to impoverished ideas of personal national, racial, and imperial identity that are shaped by the discursive systems of imperialism 

00:24:37.001 --> 00:24:59.000  

that divide the globe into nations, into oppositional groups, into imperial subjects and exotic others, to see the events of history as the only substances is to be locked into such restricted views of oneself in the world, blind to broader ways of thinking about them. 

00:24:59.001 --> 00:25:13.000 

Blake suggests that art is a way of broadening one's ability to conceive of the self and world, and Blake's unique art blending text and image and adopting and reframing and subverting aspects of the epic tradition, 

00:25:13.001 --> 00:25:17.000

challenges and disrupts our normal process of reading. 

00:25:17.001 --> 00:25:28.000

This disruption, I would argue, parallels the way that Blake seeks to disrupt our everyday ways of reading or interpreting ourselves in the world. 

00:25:28.001 --> 00:25:34.000

I take James Joyce's art in much the same way. 

00:25:34.001 --> 00:25:55.000

Though he doesn't literally illustrate Finnegan's Wake, except of course, for the Blakean diagram in the the centre of the book. He compares the Wake in several key places to the Irish Book of Kells, a 9th century illuminated gospel manuscript whose wild designs call to mind Blakes visual inventiveness. 

00:25:55.001 --> 00:26:15.000

Joyce himself noted to Arthur Power that, quote, you can compare much of my work to the intricate illuminations of that book, and the wildness of Finnegan's Wake, the inventive mashing together of words, recalls the Book of Kells, much as it does Blake's work. 

00:26:15.001 --> 00:26:25.000

Like Blake, Joyce draws on epic tradition in creating a work that summarises the world in encyclopaedic fashion and stirs a sense of grandeur. 

00:26:25.001 --> 00:26:53.000

Joseph Campbell puts it like this: if our society should go smash tomorrow, one could find all the pieces together with the forces that broke them in Finnegan's Wake. And like Blake Joyce matches the form of his epic to its content, recalling Milton's dismissal of rhyme as a bondage in poetry, Blake notes that blank verse could be as much a bondage as rhyme itself. 

00:26:53.001 --> 00:27:08.000 

Instead, he sought in Jerusalem to put every word - this is from the beginning of Jerusalem - he sought to put every word and every letter into its fit place. This is terrific numbers for terrific parts, mild numbers for mild parts. 

00:27:08.001 --> 00:27:19.000

Joyce similarly claimed to fit every word and letter of his text to the content. He said that he was seeking to allow water to speak like water, 

00:27:19.001 --> 00:27:36.000 

birds to chirp in the language of birds, and Samuel Beckett famously argued that Joyce's words aren't about something, but are the thing itself. When Joyce writes about sleep, for instance, the words don't report sleep, the words go to sleep. 

00:27:36.001 --> 00:27:50.000

Both Joyce and Blake pushed the limits of artistic representation to match form and content as they try to encapsulate the universe and attempt that links their work with Epic tradition. 

00:27:50.001 --> 00:28:08.000

Like broadly as an adaptation of Jerusalem, a work in four parts, it treats history as the dream of a fallen giant who possesses four major aspects. Joyce calls them at one point the Four Zoans,

00:28:08.001 --> 00:28:22.000 

who are the equivalent of Blakes four zoos? But here the word mixes them with zones, making explicit how Blake's characters function not just as individuals, but as locations and world. 

00:28:22.001 --> 00:28:22.000 

And by putting on the word "koans", a word that refers to a paradoxical riddle in the Zen Buddhist tradition, whose purpose is to baffle the rational mind and induce enlightenment, he emphasises how these constituent parts of the sleeping humanity are psychological states that can be pathways to enlightenment. 

00:28:43.001 --> 00:29:00.000 

And much as Jerusalem centres on the artistic efforts of Los to push back against the forces of restriction that produce in the fallen world prudish morality, tyranny, and imperialism, Finnegan's Wake is presented as the artistic creation of a character called Shem the Penman, 

00:29:00.001 --> 00:29:14.000 

the imaginative side of humanity, which is denounced and oppressed by the overly rational, literal minded, nationalistic and violent aspects of humanity. 

00:29:14.001 --> 00:28:31.000 

Finnegan's Wake itself is represented in the text as a letter written by Shem, who, it turns out, was actually collaborating with, and in fact, taking dictation from his mother, the emanation of H.C.E called A.L.P, and Anna Livia Plurabelle. 

00:29:31.001 --> 00:29:51.000 

For sure there are many differences between the works. As an obvious example, Joyce gives more agency to his emanation figure, and he never denounces the female will in the way that Blake does. But both works fundamentally concern the fall of humanity away from a state of harmony and creativity into war 

00:29:51.001 --> 00:30:13.000 

and division, love and jealousy, and especially into imperialism and injustice, and both posit as a cure for the fall creativity, the work of the artist, and ultimately a surrender of the idea of the self as separate from the universe. 

00:30:13.001 --> 00:30:29.000

Finnegan's Wake not only broadly adapts Jerusalem, it develops Blake's attack on three interrelated phenomena: the epic genre, the totalizing narratives of empire and limited notions of human identity. 

00:30:29.001 --> 00:30:47.000

Joyce expands on Blake's generic and formal innovations to produce a postmodern, postcolonial epic whose embrace of fragmentation speaks to the fragmenting of European empires and the nationalisms that precipitated the world wars. 

00:30:47.001 --> 00:31:04.000

Joyce knew Blake, primarily through William Butler Yeats's and Edwin John Ellis's 1893 edition of his poetry, and this edition contains reproductions of the plates of Milton and Jerusalem. So Joyce was familiar with Blake's artistic style and with the layouts of the plates. 

00:31:04.001 --> 00:31:14.000

This edition also contains a preparatory essay that gives an interpretation of Blakes system of symbols, so Joyce was likely influenced by that as well. 

00:31:14.001 --> 00:31:21.000

Finnegan's Wake is less a novel in the way we would normally think than it is a language experiment. 

00:31:21.001 --> 00:31:14.000

The book is written in a babbling language of puns, one whose syntax and appearance is what Joyce calls basically English, 

00:31:30.001 --> 00:31:38.000

but which plays on words from dozens of languages, often meaning several things, including contradictory things simultaneously. 

00:31:38.001 --> 00:31:43.000

The premise of the Wake is that it is a dream, not unlike the dream of Albion Blake. 

00:31:43.001 --> 00:32:03.000

Its strange language mimics the meandering motion of a dreaming mind. It is a stream of unconsciousness, as it were. It is apparently the dream of a Dublin citizen who acts as an every man, hence his initials, HCE. He's compared to the character Tim Finnegan from the Irish vaudeville song,

00:32:03.001 --> 00:32:03.000

Finnegan's Wake, who is a hod carrier, a construction worker who drunkenly falls from a ladder and dies at his wake. A brawl breaks out among the mourners, and in the confusion a bottle of whiskey is spilled on his corpse. 

00:32:17.001 --> 00:32:37.000

In Irish, the word for whiskey means water of life. So Tim rises from the dead and begins to dance. In Joyce's hands, this silly song becomes an allegory for the fall and resurrection of humanity, which links it to biblical tradition. So the dreamer, entering sleep and rising into waking consciousness 

00:32:37.001 --> 00:32:52.000

At the end of the night is to Finnegan falling off his ladder and rising from the dead is to each person, each of us falling into what Blake would call selfhood, and each of us suffering guilt from personal transgression, 

00:32:52.001 --> 00:32:59.000

and each of us rising into a new life of self acceptance, forgiveness and embrace of imaginative possibility. 

00:32:59.001 --> 00:33:10.000

However, the text never arrives at waking. It famously ends back at the beginning, concluding in the middle of a sentence and beginning in the middle of the same sentence. 

00:33:10.001 --> 00:33:25.000

Drawing on John Baptiste Vico and on Nietzsche, Joyce suggests that history is cyclical. History is, to borrow a phrase from Blake, ever building and ever decaying, moving toward an end that never arrives. 

00:33:25.001 --> 00:33:35.000

The Wake not only describes, but embodies the way that archetypes manifest through mythology, literature, and everyday life. 

00:33:35.001 --> 00:33:52.000

Here, Joyce develops epic tradition in the Homeric epic. The archetypal images were ornamentations on a shield that a hero carried into battle. Blake makes his hero the creator of the archetypes, the artist Prophet, who represents the imagination in each of us. 

00:33:52.001 --> 00:33:59.000

Joyce's Finnegan's weight goes a step further: his heroes are the archetypal images themselves. 

00:33:59.001 --> 00:34:19.000

The adventures of the Sleeping Giant and his dream avatars appear as a kind of eternal story whose various aspects recur through all of art, literature, and mythology, and history. The fall of Finnegan off the ladder recurs as Adam in the Garden of Eden, as Napoleon, defeated by Wellington as literary characters like Heathcliff 

00:34:19.001 --> 00:34:30.000

Becoming a villain and Withering Heights as the dying and reborn gods of multiple world myths and as the average Dubliner plagued by guilt over fantasies and indescretions.

00:34:30.001 --> 00:34:44.000

HCE - here comes everybody - is an archetype that emerges in all of those stories, all of which appear in various parts of Finnegan's Wake and other aspects of the dream, or serve as other archetypes. 

00:34:44.001 --> 00:34:56.000

Throughout the book, Joyce draws upon epic tradition. For instance, the book opens literally in medias res in the middle of a sentence, and the first page functions as a kind of invocation. 

00:34:56.001 --> 00:35:19.000

The structure of the book, delving into the dreamers unconscious mind resembles the epic device of Underworld descent - databases, it's called, and it frequently draws on illusions to cast itself as a kind of epic, one that transforms its tradition by radical innovation. Among these references, the fall of HCE is linked consistently to the fall of Troy. 

00:35:19.001 --> 00:35:41.000

Our common critical narrative is that the modernist period could only approach epic with a self-conscious sense of the belatedness of modernity. So writers like Joyce engage with epic, primarily through parody and mock heroism, embodying not the Monologic voice of the classical epic, but the polygonal voice of modernity expressed in the text.

00:35:41.001 --> 00:36:03.000

Yet in Ulysses, Joyce does not merely poke fun at modernity through epic comparison, he also elevates the commonplace in the everyday. And I would argue that Finnegan's weight carries this technique further by suggesting that all experience and all consciousness part takes of those archetypes that Blake calls the statues of Los. 

00:36:03.001 --> 00:36:16.000

For Blake, this cosmic vision explodes traditional conceptions of identity promoted by imperialism and by the various nationalisms that precipitated the world wars of the 20th century. 

00:36:16.001 --> 00:36:30.000

Like Blake, Joyce is advocating A broader conception of the self, encouraging each of us to read reality differently and dare to narrate the story of ourselves to ourselves differently than we do. Not as oppositional members of warring tribes, but as part of a dynamic global community. 

00:36:36.001 --> 00:37:00.000

Some critics have suggested that the bizarre language of Finnegan's way, puns that operate in multiple languages at once, combining different syllables from words of various tongues, are ways of advocating a mixing of nations and cultures. Joyces Shem the penman, his parody of himself, and a rough equivalent to Blakes Los, is mocked by his brother as a Europe Asianism, 

00:37:00.001 --> 00:37:07.000

mixing together the influences of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. 

00:37:07.001 --> 00:37:26.000

While a full reading of Finnegan's Wake is outside the scope of this talk, and I would say outside the scope of a human lifetime, I'd like to look briefly at how Joyce transforms the device of the epic catalogue in a moment to Finnegan's Wake that parodies traditional instruction in the humanities. 

00:37:26.001 --> 00:37:32.000

You probably - it doesn't really matter that you can't read the words of that. It's the appearance of it that counts. 

00:37:32.001 --> 00:37:53.000

It's the layout in book two, Chapter 2, the sons of HCE, Sean and Shem, who represent the extroverted and introverted aspects of humanity, do their homework before bed. The chapter is written in a style that resembles a school book with marginal annotations and footnotes. The annotations on each side of the page are attributed to the two 

00:37:53.001 --> 00:38:07.000

brothers, the footnotes to their sister, and altogether the entire the entirety of the text represents the dreamer at the end of the chapter, a summary of the lessons appears as a catalogue of great figures throughout history. 

00:38:07.001 --> 00:38:17.000

The marginal annotations on the left name the individual while the main text alludes to that individual in some capacity, as in Blake, the catalogue is fragmented. 

00:38:17.001 --> 00:38:26.000

The device of the catalogue summons the idea of unity and encyclopaedic completion, but its depiction on the page here underscores division. 

00:38:26.001 --> 00:38:42.000

At times, it's challenging to keep track of which name matches with which parts of the text. Through this fractured catalogue, weave the novels archetypal characters in various historical guises. For instance, when Homer is listed in the margins. 

00:38:42.001 --> 00:38:53.000

He corresponds to part of the text that reads describe in homely, Anglian monosyllables the wreck of the Hesperus, the footnote reads Abel Siemens caution. 

00:38:53.001 --> 00:39:03.000

Like much of Finnegan's Wake almost every word and phrase could be seen as having the effect of an epic simile joining together disparate parts of the world. 

00:39:03.001 --> 00:39:14.000

In these handful of words, Homer joins Longfellow, Odysseus and the biblical able together with a sex joke punning on the word Sean. 

00:39:14.001 --> 00:39:27.000

It's interesting that this catalogue is one of, if not the longest, sustained sections of standard English words in the entire novel, with few amalgamations of English and foreign words. 

00:39:27.001 --> 00:39:38.000

It is as if the language of the British Empire is here used to sum up a catalogue of the great figures that Western culture, including the British Empire, claims in its lineage. 

00:39:38.001 --> 00:39:52.000

But even as Joyce represents this unity, its depiction on the page calls attention to division, pointing to fractures of that empire and looking forward to the fracturing of the world in the post colonial period. 

00:39:52.001 --> 00:40:12.000

Like this catalogue suggests that the archetypes weave their way through history in other places, and the way characters who embody certain archetypes seem to have epiphanies where they realise that the universe is much vaster than their limited perspectives. An example of this occurs in book two, Chapter 3, where a Tavern keeper, or a version of HCE, 

00:40:12.001 --> 00:40:20.000

defends an earlier version of himself, whose story has just played over the radio in the bar in this speech. 

00:40:20.001 --> 00:40:38.000

He describes his unnamed transgression, his version of the fall from the Garden of Eden as Copo di Dido, recalling the wrongdoing of Dido, Queen of Carthage, in seducing the Roman hero Aeneus, who had fled from the fallen Troy. 

00:40:38.001 --> 00:40:45.000

So, as happens elsewhere in Finnegan's Wake, the fall of humanity is associated with the destruction of Troy. 

00:40:45.001 --> 00:41:05.000

This phrase is also a garbled version of Corpo Dio body of God. An explanation as well as a declaration of the divinity of HCC slash humanity. Here, as elsewhere, Joyce plays with the idea of the fortunate fall, the notion that the fall was ultimately positive because it brought about the greater good of redemption. 

00:41:05.001 --> 00:41:15.000

In his rambling speech here, the Tavern keeper describes turning through the pages of a suppressed book, probably Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake itself, 

00:41:15.001 --> 00:41:37.000

and receiving from it the sense that there is more to the universe than meets the eye. The syntax is more so than elsewhere in the book, peppered by qualifications and asides, such that a reader easily loses track of which clause modifies which the syntax becomes as muddled as the character as he searches for a defence of himself. 

00:41:37.001 --> 00:41:58.000

He has a dim impression that he is the bolded part catching haps, knots of distended relations. He's not just taking snapshots, he's catching perhaps knots, other possibilities for himself in other lifetimes or incarnations, which are figured as his distant self. 

00:41:58.001 --> 00:42:20.000

The idea perhaps and perhaps not calls to mind the ways that the terms possible and probable taken from Aristotle's Echo all over the way they are most clearly expressed in a wonderful sentence from Chapter 5, where the dreamscape of the novel is described as a place where the possible is the improbable, and the improbable the inevitable. 

00:42:20.001 --> 00:42:25.000

Everything that is possible will come to pass, no matter how improbable. 

00:42:25.001 --> 00:42:45.000

The haps knots are not are not merely distant relations, but distant nations where the story of humanity continues to play itself out all over the globe. In all the nations that have distended from HCE, zone, giant body, much as the nations of the world fled from the limbs of Albion in Blake's myth. 

00:42:45.001 --> 00:43:03.000

Through the Copo de Dido, HCE has the opportunity to catch a glimpse of these perhaps knots, the possibilities, the end of the speech weaves references to Columbus, Magellan, capitalist contract law and the idea of contracting back together. 

00:43:03.001 --> 00:43:26.000

Following the fall and the imperialist nightmare of history ushered in by the age of Exploration, HCE is altogether but also the last word all too good. This is the fortunate fall, translated into historical terms, the nightmare of history, the empire that Blake depicts as a polypus was necessary to inspire the greater good of true cooperation. 

00:43:26.001 --> 00:43:46.000

The ability of the creative imagination to make contact with those possibilities. I'm almost done here. This is the very conclusion is expressed in a moment where Shem the penman is called Pius Aeneus, the hero who carried the civilization of the fallen Troy to found a mighty empire. But here the artist draws on the energy of the fall 

00:43:46.001 --> 00:44:14.000

To attempt to reverse its effects in this passage, Shem creates his art by writing all over his body. The only foolscap available to him by its corrosive sublimation, continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded, all merry voicing, mood moulded cycle Wheeling history. This corrosive sublimation of his art and recalls the way Blake describes his art working 

00:44:14.001 --> 00:44:23.000

like corrosion in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the slow fires of consciousness further recall the furnaces of Los. 

00:44:23.001 --> 00:44:45.000

through his art, time melts away. The covering of what Blake calls the self hood and opens a path to making contact with the revolving archetypes of the creative imagination. The archetypes that continually manifest in life and and in art, and through which, as Blake puts it, every age renews its powers. 

00:44:45.001 --> 00:44:55.000

Richard Ellman pointed out in his biography of Joyce that, like Blake, Joyce insisted on the minds supremacy over all it surveyed, 

00:44:55.001 --> 00:45:07.000

and I think that includes finding the universal in the particular, the archetypal in its everyday manifestation, the permanence of every sigh and tear in the human imagination, 

00:45:07.001 --> 00:45:22.000

but also the ability of the imagination to move beyond what has been and create new ideas in the world, new ideas, new worlds, new art, and to continually refresh the world with art. 

00:45:22.001 --> 00:45:35.000

I think overall Joyce uses Blake as much more than a handful of surface level references and is much more than a rough framework on which to perform his literary acrobatics. 

00:45:35.001 --> 00:45:50.000

I think Joyce was a perceptive reader of Blake and adapted his work into a kind of verbal composite art that saw it like Blake's long poems to challenge our limited perceptions of ourselves and the world. 

00:45:50.001 --> 00:46:02.000

Perhaps if the anxiety of influence is true, or true of Joyce, at least he couldn't acknowledge the influence of Blake too directly, or perhaps couldn't fully acknowledge it even to himself. 

00:46:02.001 --> 00:46:10.000

But what I find in in Finnegan's Wake is a development of Blakes transgressive style and a development of the epic tradition. 

00:46:10.001 --> 00:46:26.000

Like Blake, Joyce responds to a world ruled over by empire, but also containing great divisions and fissures, a world in which individuals are caught by limitations, encouraged to think of themselves in relation to the nightmare of history, 

00:46:26.001 --> 00:46:38.000 

but like Blake's art, Joyce has the power to disrupt readers' normal patterns of thought and lead them closer to waking from that nightmare. 

00:46:38.001 --> 00:46:40.000

Thank you.