JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 016: REALITY WHILE WE SLEEP
PAGE 75:1-81:11 | START OF CHAPTER 4 | 2025-10-23
PODCAST AUDIO
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
[Music: Instrumental of “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” with Adam Seelig on piano and Brandon Bak on drums, from the film of Finnegans Wake Ch03. Music fades out]
Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. In this episode, number 16, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor — and my good friend and colleague — Richard Harte performing pages 75 to 81 to begin Chapter 4 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear.
Thanks to all of you lovely listeners in Canada, the US, Ireland, England, Germany, Australia and beyond who have written to One Little Goat Theatre Company by email and through our YouTube channel with enthusiastic comments on our Finnegans Wake film and podcast series. We really appreciate your eyes and ears and are delighted to be with you again with this new podcast episode.
The complete films of Finnegans Wake chapters 1 & 2 are available on One Little Goat’s website and YouTube channel, and more recently we released an album of music from our film series, available through streaming services (like Spotify, Apple, etc.) under the highly descriptive title “Finnegans Wake: Music from the Film Series,” which includes “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” and the 19th-century folk song that gave Finnegans Wake its title.
I have good news to share that in Tokyo, Japan on October 31st I’ll be screening and discussing excerpts from One Little Goat’s film series with Japanese Joyceans Yuta Imazeki and Kaori Hirashige. The event will be in both Japanese and English and will feature excerpts from the new Japanese translation of Finnegans Wake by Dublin-based Kenji Hayakawa. Kenji has just completed his translation of Book I Chapter 2 — an accomplishment that deserves a huge mazel tov to Kenji and his editor, Yuta. For details on this event in Tokyo, please visit One Little Goat’s website at www.OneLittleGoat.org.
And some sad news: Roland McHugh, whose Annotations to Finnegans Wake is hands down the book we turn to most for this project, died on October 9. His last home was in County Wicklow, not far from the Wicklow Mountains, the very source of the River Liffey that flows throughout Finnegans Wake.
American John Gordon, whose online annotations to Finnegans Wake build on Roland McHugh’s, paid tribute to McHugh in an email he sent to me. Gordon wrote, “One thing that keeps impressing me about Roland's Annotations is how tight it is — there's virtually nothing there that is wrong, or even might be wrong. Fritz Senn says that everything ever written about Joyce, from his birth certificate to his tombstone, contains at least one error, so probably there's a wrong date or something somewhere in the book, but one definitely learns to trust it.”
Thank you, Roland McHugh, for your indispensable Annotations, without which we could not interpret Finnegans Wake as we have — this episode is dedicated to you.
[Music: Adam Seelig plays piano]
Adam Seelig: Finnegans Wake is a production of One Little Goat Theatre Company. For the next five years, One Little Goat will film and record all 17 chapters (roughly 30 Hours) of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake before live audiences in various locations, screening and releasing them along along the way, with the aim of completing the entire book in time for its 90th birthday, May 4, 2029. One Little Goat Theatre Company is an official charity in Canada and the United States — if you’d like to support our work, please visit us online at www.OneLittleGoat.org to make a charitable donation. To get in touch, you’ll find our email address on the One Little Goat Theatre Company website and we’d love to hear from you.
[Music fades out]
Adam Seelig: A recent poem by Canadian Kaitlyn Perrin complements the end of Finnegans Wake Chapter 3, where we concluded our previous podcast episode (Ep015), with protagonist HCEarwicker sleeping deeply as rain falls on Dublin. The poem is titled “Rainmancer”:
Dreams are raindrops into
Other universes
And reality only leaks
While we're asleep
The fluidity of dreams not only reflects reality but, like every drop of rain, is a reality in itself. It’s as if Perrin’s poem, like Finnegans Wake, is building on William Blake’s celebrated line — “To see a world in a grain of sand” — by saying yes, and every grain of sand is a world.
Dreams mix and remix our realities, much as the dream novel that is the Wake is an extended remix of its central themes, elements and characters — hence the “recirculation” of the novel’s opening page overture.
A recent novel from Brooklynite Anna Moschovakis expands on this remixing and “recirculation” of dreams, providing us with a way of viewing Chapter 4 and the Wake as a whole. I’ll just add that it’s fitting to talk about Chapter 4 with the help of Moschovakis’s novel because I picked it up at Type Books on Queen Street West after the author’s Toronto reading and conversation with translator Claire Foster, and it’s at the very same bookstore that we filmed and recorded Chapter 4. Here’s the unnamed narrator of Moschovakis’s An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth (2024):
At some point I accepted as fact a theory I read once: it claimed that dreams take the experiences from our lives and disassemble them, then neutralize them through recombination. Through making them into new stories, like a montage of the scraps that would otherwise be left on the cutting-room floor. (I don’t know whose metaphor this is. Maybe it’s mine.)
The important thing is that the new stories don’t always displace the old ones, they just reduce their authority. They de-authorize them. By confusing the signal, the new stories can at least partially cancel the old ones out. The important thing is—according to my memory, though of course neither my memory nor the theory is sure to be trustworthy—that it doesn’t seem to matter if the new stories are, themselves, equally disturbing, or even if they are more disturbing than the experienced events they are attempting to replace. Their role isn’t to lighten things up; the work they do is only the work of dis-attachment, of insisting on multiplicity. (105-106)
Chapter 4, now deep in the dream of Finnegans Wake — and given the sleeping state of HCE, perhaps also deep in the dream of Earwicker himself — certainly insists on such multiplicity as it takes us from HCE’s surreal musings to Dublin’s Phoenix Park; to a bar brawl in which attacker and defender become hard to tell apart (the dream language fluid as ever); to a showy trial (or show trial?) complete with witnesses and cross-examination; to a brief and intriguing glance at the letter by ALP that might vindicate HCE; to a series of telecommunications about HCE where the signals certainly get confused; to a sex scene of ALP and HCE; to a closing description of Dublin’s River Liffey and invocation of the Biblical Psalm “By the rivers of Babylon.” Get ready, in other words, for some fun and fascinating stuff.
Lions of Qasr El Nil Bridge, the oldest bridge on the Nile, Egypt.
Chapter 4 ends with the rivers of Babylon and begins with the Nile. The opening sentence “asserts that, as the lion in the zoo may remember the waterlilies of the Nile, so the comatose HCE may have been dreaming of the temptresses of his past.” (Epstein 48) Or in the language of the Wake itself: “As the lion in our teargarten remembers the nenuphars of his Nile…” It helps to know that “Tiergarten” is German for zoo, here spelled like “tears” from one’s eyes.
Something I love in this opening paragraph is the repetition of the phrase “it may be” (75:3 & 11), firstly because it suggests that there may be other possibilities to consider, and possibility is the gateway to the multiplicity of dreams, and secondly because this is the kind of rhythmic motif we encounter on the opening page of Finnegans Wake with its repetition of the phrase “not yet” (3:10 & 11, Ep002), a phrase that similarly casts tantalizing doubt on the when and what of the narrative.
HCE imagines his posthumous reputation as a “distinguished dynasty” (75:24) and fantasizes for a moment that he is the head of a criminal family enterprise that can crack safes in addition to eggs. Somehow, though, he now finds himself in a glass-panelled coffin. A local “public [body]” (76:14) — think of them as a kind of Lions or Rotary Club — generously offers him the gift of a grave in which to bury that coffin, with HCE presumably inside. How thoughtful of them. But no, HCE blasts his way out of the unusual casket using TNT with a dynamism that would make characters known for getting into and out of tight jams, from Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner to MacGyver, proud.
We then find HCE living “all safeathomely the presenile days of his life of opulence,” (78:1-2) in solitude, surrounded by various tchotchkes.
He should get up, get out and go hunting, as survival often dictates, but instead finds himself living off “his own misplaced fat.” (79:13)
Shiva, 11th-century India, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.
Our favourite charwoman, Kate, from “the museyroom” of Chapter 1 (Ep003), makes an appearance on a pile of litter, described here as a “filthdump”, in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Then from the mundane and low-to-the-ground we move to the metaphysical and up-on-high when voices of gods emerge — “hear Allhighest sprack” (80:20) — including cameos by Krishna and Shiva. This is the low-to-high, down-to-up kind of motion we’ve experienced throughout the Wake, especially when it comes to Phoenix Park, named after the mythical bird that rises from its own fallen ashes. Lest the narrative fly too high, it reminds us, in the Wake’s indefatigably inventive way, that we are all mortal and of this earth: “every morphyl man of us, pome by pome, falls back into this terrine” (80:22-23).
— “every morphyl man of us”: mortal man, Irishman (as in, Murphy man), ever morphing into multiplicity through reality’s dream-like fluidity.
— “pome by pome”: apple by apple, a sure way, as we know from Adam and Eve, to fall; unless these pommes are pommes de terre, that is potatoes, already down in the dirt of Phoenix Park; or perhaps they’re poems eulogizing our lives and deaths.
— “falls back into this terrine”: ashes to ashes, apple by apple, potato by potato, poem by poem, we all fall down into this terrain, this terroir, this ‘large earthenware pot’ (which is the etymology of ‘terrine’) this ‘large earthenware pot’ known as planet earth, which can be at times delicious and at others, disgusting, depending on the ingredients.
“every morphyl man of us, pome by pome, falls back into this terrine”.
It’s just one of the many evocative and irreverent lines you’re about to hear.
Now it’s time for Richard’s performance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, page 75 line 1 to page 81 line 11 for the beginning of Chapter 4. The performance was filmed and recorded at Type Books on Queen Street West in Toronto on January 22nd, 2024 with a live audience.
[Richard Harte reads Finnegans Wake 75:1-81:11.]
[75] As the lion in our teargarten remembers the nenuphars of his
Nile (shall Ariuz forget Arioun or Boghas the baregams of the
Marmarazalles from Marmeniere?) it may be, tots wearsense full
a naggin in twentyg have sigilposted what in our brievingbust,
the besieged bedreamt him stil and solely of those lililiths un-
deveiled which had undone him, gone for age, and knew not
the watchful treachers at his wake, and theirs to stay. Fooi, fooi,
chamermissies! Zeepyzoepy, larcenlads! Zijnzijn Zijnzijn! It may
be, we moest ons hasten selves te declareer it, that he reglimmed?
presaw? the fields of heat and yields of wheat where corngold
Ysit? shamed and shone. It may be, we habben to upseek a bitty
door our good township's courants want we knew't, that with
his deepseeing insight (had not wishing oftebeen but good time
wasted), within his patriarchal shamanah, broadsteyne 'bove citie
(Twillby! Twillby!) he conscious of enemies, a kingbilly white-
horsed in a Finglas mill, prayed, as he sat on anxious seat, (kunt
ye neat gift mey toe bout a peer saft eyballds!) during that three
and a hellof hours' agony of silence, ex profundis malorum, and
bred with unfeigned charity that his wordwounder (an engles to
the teeth who, nomened Nash of Girahash, would go anyold where
in the weeping world on his mottled belly (the rab, the kreepons-
kneed!) for milk, music or married missusses) might, mercy to
providential benevolence's who hates prudencies' astuteness, un-
fold into the first of a distinguished dynasty of his posteriors,
[76] blackfaced connemaras not of the fold but elder children of his
household, his most besetting of ideas (pace his twolve predama-
nant passions) being the formation, as in more favoured climes,
where the Meadow of Honey is guestfriendly and the Mountain
of Joy receives, of a truly criminal stratum, Ham's cribcracking
yeggs, thereby at last eliminating from all classes and masses with
directly derivative decasualisation: sigarius (sic!) vindicat urbes
terrorum (sicker!): and so, to mark a bank taal she arter, the
obedience of the citizens elp the ealth of the ole.
Now gode. Let us leave theories there and return to here's here.
Now hear. 'Tis gode again. The teak coffin, Pughglasspanelfitted,
feets to the east, was to turn in later, and pitly patly near the
porpus, materially effecting the cause. And this, liever, is the
thinghowe. Any number of conservative public bodies, through
a number of select and other committees having power to add to
their number, before voting themselves and himself, town, port
and garrison, by a fit and proper resolution, following a koorts
order of the groundwet, once for all out of plotty existence, as
a forescut, so you maateskippey might to you cuttinrunner on a
neuw pack of klerds, made him, while his body still persisted,
their present of a protem grave in Moyelta of the best Lough
Neagh pattern, then as much in demand among misonesans as
the Isle of Man today among limniphobes. Wacht even! It was
in a fairly fishy kettlekerry, after the Fianna's foreman had taken
his handful, enriched with ancient woods and dear dutchy deep-
linns mid which were an old knoll and a troutbeck, vainyvain of
her osiery and a chatty sally with any Wilt or Walt who would
ongle her as Izaak did to the tickle of his rod and watch her
waters of her sillying waters of and there now brown peater
arripple (may their quilt gild lightly over his somnolulutent
form!) Whoforyou lies his last, by the wrath of Bog, like the
erst curst Hun in the bed of his treubleu Donawhu.
Best. This wastohavebeen underground heaven, or mole's
paradise which was probably also an inversion of a phallopharos,
intended to foster wheat crops and to ginger up tourist trade
(its architecht, Mgr Peurelachasse, having been obcaecated lest
[77] he should petrifake suchanevver while the contractors Messrs
T. A. Birkett and L. O. Tuohalls were made invulnerably vener-
able) first in the west, our misterbilder, Castlevillainous, openly
damned and blasted by means of a hydromine, system, Sowan and
Belting, exploded from a reinvented T.N.T. bombingpost up
ahoy of eleven and thirty wingrests (circiter) to sternbooard out
of his aerial thorpeto, Auton Dynamon, contacted with the ex-
pectant minefield by tins of improved ammonia lashed to her
shieldplated gunwale, and fused into tripupcables, slipping
through tholse and playing down from the conning tower into
the ground battery fuseboxes, all differing as clocks from keys
since nobody appeared to have the same time of beard, some
saying by their Oorlog it was Sygstryggs to nine, more holding
with the Ryan vogt it was Dane to pfife. He afterwards whaan-
ever his blaetther began to fail off him and his rough bark was
wholly husky and, stoop by stoop, he neared it (wouldmanspare!)
carefully lined the ferroconcrete result with rotproof bricks and
mortar, fassed to fossed, and retired beneath the heptarchy of
his towerettes, the beauchamp, byward, bull and lion, the white,
the wardrobe and bloodied, so encouraging (insteppen, alls als
hats beliefd!) additional useful councils public with hoofd off-
dealings which were welholden of ladykants te huur out such as the
Breeders' Union, the Guild of Merchants of the Staple et, a.u.c. to
present unto him with funebral pomp, over and above that, a stone
slab with the usual Mac Pelah address of velediction, a very fair-
worded instance of falsemeaning adamelegy: We have done ours
gohellt with you, Heer Herewhippit, overgiven it, skidoo!
But t'house and allaboardshoops! Show coffins, winding sheets,
goodbuy bierchepes, cinerary urns, liealoud blasses, snuffchests,
poteentubbs, lacrimal vases, hoodendoses, reekwaterbeckers,
breakmiddles, zootzaks for eatlust, including upyourhealthing
rookworst and meathewersoftened forkenpootsies and for that
matter, javel also, any kind of inhumationary bric au brac for
the adornment of his glasstone honophreum, would, met these
trein of konditiens, naturally follow, halas, in the ordinary course,
enabling that roundtheworlder wandelingswight, did suches pass
[78] him, to live all safeathomely the presenile days of his life of
opulence, ancient ere decrepitude, late lents last lenience, till
stuffering stage, whaling away the whole of the while (hypnos
chilia eonion!) lethelulled between explosion and reexplosion
(Donnaurwatteur! Hunderthunder!) from grosskopp to megapod,
embalmed, of grand age, rich in death anticipated.
But abide Zeit's sumonserving, rise afterfall. Blueblitzbolted
from there, knowing the hingeworms of the hallmirks of habita-
tionlesness, buried burrowing in Gehinnon, to proliferate through
all his Unterwealth, seam by seam, sheol om sheol, and revisit
our Uppercrust Sideria of Utilitarios, the divine one, the hoar-
der hidden propaguting his plutorpopular progeniem of pots and
pans and pokers and puns from biddenland to boughtenland, the
spearway fore the spoorway.
The other spring offensive on the heights of Abraham may
have come about all quite by accidence, Foughtarundser (for
Breedabrooda had at length presuaded him to have himself to be
as septuply buried as the murdered Cian in Finntown), had not
been three monads in his watery grave (what vigilantes and ridings
then and spuitwyne pledges with aardappel frittling!) when
portrifaction, dreyfussed as ever, began to ramp, ramp, ramp, the
boys are parching. A hoodenwinkle gave the signal and a bless-
ing paper freed the flood. Why did the patrizien make him scares
with his gruntens? Because the druiven were muskating at the
door. From both Celtiberian camps (granting at the onset for the
sake of argument that men on the two sides in New South Ire-
land and Vetera Uladh, bluemin and pillfaces, during the ferment
With the Pope or On the Pope, had, moors or letts, grant ideas,
grunted) all conditions, poor cons and dives mor, each, of course,
on the purely doffensive since the eternals were owlwise on their
side every time, were drawn toowards their Bellona's Black
Bottom, once Woolwhite's Waltz (Ohiboh, how becrimed,
becursekissed and bedumbtoit!) some for want of proper feeding
in youth, others already caught in the honourable act of slicing
careers for family and carvers in conjunction; and, if emaciated
nough, the person garrotted may have suggested to whomever he
[79] took the ham of, the plain being involved in darkness, low cirque
waggery, nay, even the first old wugger of himself in the flesh,
whiggissimus incarnadined, when falsesighted by the ifsuchhewas
bully on the hill for there had circulated freely fairly among his
opposition the feeling that in so hibernating Massa Ewacka, who,
previous to that demidetached life, had been known of barmi-
cidal days, cook said, between soups and savours, to get outside
his own length of rainbow trout and taerts atta tarn as no man
of woman born, nay could, like the great crested brebe, devour
his threescoreten of roach per lifeday, ay, and as many minnow a
minute (the big mix, may Gibbet choke him!) was, like the salmon
of his ladderleap all this time of totality secretly and by suckage
feeding on his own misplaced fat.
Ladies did not disdain those pagan ironed times of the first
city (called after the ugliest Danadune) when a frond was a friend
inneed to carry, as earwigs do their dead, their soil to the earth-
ball where indeeth we shall calm decline, our legacy unknown.
Venuses were gigglibly temptatrix, vulcans guffawably eruptious
and the whole wives' world frockful of fickles. Fact, any human
inyon you liked any erenoon or efter would take her bare godkin
out, or an even pair of hem, (lugod! lugodoo!) and prettily pray
with him (or with em even) everyhe to her taste, long for luck,
tapette and tape petter and take pettest of all. (Tip!) Wells she'd
woo and wills she's win but how the deer knowed where she'd
marry! Arbour, bucketroom, caravan, ditch? Coach, carriage,
wheelbarrow, dungcart?
Kate Strong, a widow (Tiptip!) — she pulls a lane picture for
us, in a dreariodreama setting, glowing and very vidual, of old
dumplan as she nosed it, a homelike cottage of elvanstone with
droppings of biddies, stinkend pusshies, moggies' duggies, rotten
witchawubbles, festering rubbages and beggars' bullets, if not
worse, sending salmofarious germs in gleefully through the
smithereen panes — Widow Strong, then, as her weaker had
turned him to the wall (Tiptiptip!), did most all the scavenging
from good King Hamlaugh's gulden dayne though her lean
besom cleaned but sparingly and her bare statement reads that
[80] there being no macadamised sidetracks on those old nekropolitan
nights in, barring a footbatter, Bryant's Causeway, bordered
with speedwell, white clover and sorrel a wood knows, which
left off, being beaten, where the plaintiff was struck, she
left down, as scavengers, who will be scavengers must, her
filthdump near the Serpentine in Phornix Park (at her time called
Finewell's Keepsacre but later tautaubapptossed Pat's Purge),
that dangerfield circling butcherswood where fireworker oh
flaherty engaged a nutter of castlemallards and ah for archer
stunned's turk, all over which fossil footprints, bootmarks,
fingersigns, elbowdints, breechbowls, a. s. o. were all succes-
sively traced of a most envolving description. What subtler
timeplace of the weald than such wolfsbelly castrament to will
hide a leabhar from Thursmen's brandihands or a loveletter,
lostfully hers, that would be lust on Ma, than then when ructions
ended, than here where race began: and by four hands of fore-
thought the first babe of reconcilement is laid in its last cradle
of hume sweet hume. Give over it! And no more of it! So pass
the pick for child sake! O men!
For hear Allhighest sprack for krischnians as for propagana
fidies and his nuptial eagles sharped their beaks of prey: and
every morphyl man of us, pome by pome, falls back into this
terrine: as it was let it be, says he! And it is as though where
Agni araflammed and Mithra monished and Shiva slew as maya-
mutras the obluvial waters of our noarchic memory withdrew,
windingly goharksome, to some hastyswasty timberman torch-
priest, flamenfan, the ward of the wind that lightened the fire that
lay in the wood that Jove bolt, at his rude word. Posidonius
O'Fluctuary! Lave that bloody stone as it is! What are you
doing your dirty minx and his big treeblock way up your path?
Slip around, you, by the rare of the ministers'! And, you, take
that barrel back where you got it, Mac Shane's, and go the way
your old one went, Hatchettsbury Road! And gish! how they
gushed away, the pennyfares, a whole school for scamper, with
their sashes flying sish behind them, all the little pirlypettes!
Issy-la-Chapelle! Any lucans, please?
[81] Yes, the viability of vicinals if invisible is invincible. And we
are not trespassing on his corns either. Look at all the plotsch!
Fluminian! If this was Hannibal's walk it was Hercules' work.
And a hungried thousand of the unemancipated slaved the way.
The mausoleum lies behind us (O Adgigasta, multipopulipater!)
and there are milestones in their cheadmilias faultering along
the tramestrack by Brahm and Anton Hermes! Per omnibus
secular seekalarum. Amain. But the past has made us this present
of a rhedarhoad. So more boher O'Connell! Though rainy-
hidden, you're rhinohide. And if he's not a Romeo you may
scallop your hat. Wereupunder in the fane of Saint Fiacre! Halte!
[End of excerpt]
Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading the beginning of Finnegans Wake Chapter 4, recorded live at Type Books on Queen Street West in Toronto on January 22nd, 2024. Join us for Episode 17 in a fortnight when Richard continues Chapter 4 of Finnegans Wake. In the meantime, to be sure you don’t miss the episode, why not follow or subscribe to this podcast?
[Music: Instrumental of “Roll, Jordan, Roll” with Adam Seelig on piano and Brandon Bak on drums, from the film of Finnegans Wake Ch03.]
For more on One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake project, including transcripts of this podcast and the complete films of Chapters 1 and 2, visit our website at OneLittleGoat.org. And to hear about upcoming performances and screenings, join our mailing list, also on our website. One Little Goat Theatre Company is a nonprofit, artist-driven, registered charity in the United States and Canada that depends on donations from individuals to make our productions, including this one, possible. If you’re able, please make a tax-deductible donation through our website, www.OneLittleGoat.org
Finnegans Wake is made possible by Friends of One Little Goat Theatre Company and the Emigrant Support Programme of the government of Ireland. Thank you for your support! And thank you to the artists for this episode: Richard Harte; Sound by William Bembridge; Stage Management by Sandi Becker; Directed by yours truly, Adam Seelig. A big thanks to Claire Foster and the staff and owners of Type Books, as well as to our wonderful live audience. Thank you to everyone at the Irish Consulate in Toronto. And thank you to Production Consultants Cathy Murphy, Andrew Moodie and Shai Rotbard-Seelig.
Thank you for listening!
[Music fades out]
[End of Ep016]
Mentioned: New Japanese translation of Finnegans Wake by Kenji Hayakawa edited by Yuta Imazeki, One Little Goat Wake screening in Tokyo, Roland McHugh (1945-2025), John Gordon, Kaitlyn Perrin’s rain-and-dreams poem “Rainmancer”, dream theory of narrator in Anna Moschovakis novel, dreams yield multiplicity, overview of Chapter 4, opening sentence of Chapter 4, repetition of “it may be”, HCE’s posthumous reputation, HCE blasting out of coffin, HCE living in opulence, Kate in Phoenix Park, voices of gods, a gloss on “every morphyl man of us, pome by pome, falls back into this terrine”, synopsis.
Resources: Transcript for this episode, including the text of Finnegans Wake.
Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce: there are many free copies of FW to read online or download, e.g. finwake.com
James Joyce Digital Archive, “Chicken Guide” to Finnegans Wake provides a ‘plain English’ paraphrase of each chapter by Danis Rose.
Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1982.
Edmund Epstein, A Guide through Finnegans Wake. University Press of Florida, 2009.
Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake: An Index of the Characters and Their Roles, University of California Press, 1977.
John Gordon’s annotations on his Finnegans Wake blog.
Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (4th edition). Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
Raphael Slepon, fweet.org
William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake. Syracuse University Press, 1996.
Cited: Kaitlyn Perrin. “Rainmancer”. Calgary, The Blasted Tree, 2023.
William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” (1863): “To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43650/auguries-of-innocence
Anna Moschovakis. An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth: A Novel. New York, Soft Skull, 2024.