Quotes from Finn Fordham

Mad gone' may mean literally 'crazy about', but in the context it makes a bad pun on Maud Gonne, the Irish activist—politically and culturally—whom W. B. Yeats, in fact, came to be 'mad gone' on, proposing several times to her, but each time turned down. Yeats, unable to get the mother, eventually proposed to Maud's daughter, Iseult, in 1917.

Taking your own reflection as a lover is, moreover, another piece of prudent economy—for after all it costs nothing.

More precisely, it is a stretching out and serial transformation of a single event until that event disappears, swallowed in allusions, as humanity is destined to be swallowed in the eternity of the universe.

Seamus Deane has defined the Wake as the fall of man into language—designating both the writer's and the reader's fall.16 As an elaboration of this, we may add that one of the Wakean falls is the fall of the human, or the idea of the human, under language and culture, under their proliferating representations.

But Joyce proclaimed his vision as comic, seeing himself as 'red-nosed', not 'blue-jawed'. Of an international catastrophe, he said, with apparent flippancy: 'Now they're bombing Spain—isn't it better that I'm making a colossal joke instead?

It is a case not of the Emperor's but of the Everyman's New Clothes.

Treating 'life' as an object to which we are more or less adequate excises crucial elements from life just at the very time that we are living it: such elements as sleep, rest, laziness, and the absence of labour, energy, and work. To say that these kinds of stasis are not living is not only to limit the plurality of life but to make it lopsided, tipping it towards the stresses that we find in modernity's cult of perpetual activity.

Joyce saw perhaps what Wittgenstein felt—that 'Colours spur us to philosophize. [. . . They] seem to present us with a riddle, a riddle that stimulates us — not one that disturbs us.

Nonetheless innuendo and imperfectly definable actions hover over the actions of the hermit.

Chaosmos, however, is an aptly disunified concept, voicing the word 'chiasmus', or 'arch', that symbol of structural harmony, and in itself a bridge, like many of the Wake words themselves, between chaos and cosmos.

His writing processes involve a psychological scorching, as self-reflection passes through the 'slow fire of consciousness': a hellish toasting of thoughts in the forge of the mind.

The 'wrong thing' happened, we are now told, during the 'dark flush of night' (527.07). A flush usually brings colour to cheeks, so a dark flush is a mild oxymoron, like a dark light, and is all the more suggestive, since the dark flush of night is probably an erotically charged flush.

Already the messages of citizens were flashed along the wires of the world. . . . To those multitudes, not as yet in the wombs of humanity but surely engenderable there, he would give the word: Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come, the lightening of your masses in travail.

the kind of curves you simply can't stop feeling

It brings us to a confrontation with that important perception of Finnegans Wake, that its apparent sense of affirmation, plurality, and multiplicity shades into or hides a stronger idea of nullity. From the infinitely meaningful, universally affirming, it is a short step to the opposite, to indifference, to voids of meaning and value.

A clear Brunian 'coincidence of contraries' has surfaced again, for to be happy when miserable translates Bruno's paradoxical motto which preceded his play Candelaio: 'In tristitia hilaris: in hilaritate tristis'—in sad- ness, happiness and in happiness, sadness.