JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 012 THIS RIVER I STEP IN
PAGE 53:7-58:22 | 2024-12-26
PODCAST AUDIO
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
[Music: Richard Harte sings “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” from Finnegans Wake]
Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty
How he fell with a roll and a rumble
And curled up like Lord Olofa Crumple
By the butt of the Magazine Wall
[Music fades out]
Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. In this episode, number 12, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor — and my good friend and colleague — Richard Harte performing pages 53 to 58 from Chapter 3 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear.
As I record this in the last days of 2024, One Little Goat Theatre Company, a registered charity in the United States and Canada, is fundraising so we can keep offering our programming. For over 20 years we have been producing poetic theatre of the highest calibre, which wouldn’t be possible without the generous support of individuals like you. We love producing these recordings and films of Finnegans Wake — at the same time, they require money to produce. So please, if you’re financially able, take a moment to donate through our website, www.OneLittleGoat.org, and click on “Contact & Donate.” All donations will receive an official tax receipt. Many many thanks to all of you who have already donated to One Little Goat — we really appreciate your support.
[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. And if monetary support is not an option, you can still help this podcast by rating and reviewing it and by spreading the word. 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]
“This river I step in is not the river I stand in” — Eldon Garnet sculpture (“Time: and a Clock” 1995), Queen Street East bridge over the Don River in Toronto. Still from One Little Goat’s “Finnegans Wake Chapter 1” film (2023).
Adam Seelig: “This river I step in is not the river I stand in.”
These words feature prominently across a bridge over Toronto’s Don River in a public art work by sculptor Eldon Garnet (“Time: and a Clock” 1995). The sculpted sentence, which you can see for yourself online in the opening montage of our Finnegans Wake Chapter 1 film, is a variation on the ancient aphorism of pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c.6th century BCE):
“No one ever steps in the same river twice.”
Heraclitus (detail) as depicted by Raphael in The School of Athens, c.1510.
It’s a fitting way to think of the Wake’s everflowing (and sometimes overflowing) riverrun of words, languages, dreams, time and of course Dublin’s river Liffey itself, which, by very definition of a river, always runs. Everything, after all, changes; or as I often hear said succinctly, change is constant; or if we jump back once more to Heraclitus for another of his evocative phrases: “everything flows.”
Becoming over being. Heraclitus and Finnegans Wake emphasize the former over the latter, favouring flow and process over fixed product. The very language of the Wake, with its seemingly endless evocations of meaning — and also, let’s be honest, confusions and opacities of meaning — enacts this process, this flow, this becoming, this riverrun on every page.
In Music at the Heart of Thinking, Vancouver poet and former Poet Laureate of Canada Fred Wah (b.1939) writes about the elusiveness of linguistic signification in a way that can help us hear, look at and ultimately experience the many meanings generated by the Wake.
As Wah describes, meaning is not predictable. “As a sure thing, it eludes us.” It won’t “stand still long enough to get caught.”
While this describes Wah’s own writing, it could just as easily describe a reader’s experience of Finnegans Wake, especially because it anticipates one of the most pervasive questions from new and experienced readers alike, namely: What does this mean? Here, if you will, is Wah’s answer:
To say: “I don’t understand what this means,” is, at least, to recognize that “this” means. The problem is that meaning is not a totality of sameness and predictability. Within each word, each sentence, meaning has slipped a little out of sight and all we have are traces, shadows, still warm ashes. The meaning available from language goes beyond the actual instance of this word, that word. A text is a place where a labyrinth of continually revealing meanings are available, a place that offers more possibility than we can be sure we know, sometimes more than we want to know. It isn’t a container, static and apparent. […] As a sure thing, it eludes us. It arouses us to attempt an understanding, to interpret. […] No single meaning is the right one because no “right ones” stand still long enough to get caught. But because we do not know does not mean we are lost. Something that’s strangely familiar, not quite what we expect, but familiar, is present. That quick little gasp in the daydream, a sudden sigh of recognition, a little sock of baby breath. [… Meaning] can only be found hiding between the words and lines and in a margin large enough for further thought, music at the heart of thinking, go ahead (1-2)
And that’s how Fred Wah’s opening entry to Music at the Heart of Thinking leaves off: open ended without a closing period.
Just as the riverrun-language of the Wake often “eludes us,” so too does the character of Earwicker in Chapter 3; or to put it the other way around, just as Earwicker often eludes us in Chapter 3, so too does the language that follows him, reminding us that form and content in Finnegans Wake are one. As Samuel Beckett insisted, Finnegans Wake “is not about something; it is that something itself.”
So if Earwicker is on the lam in Chapter 3, the language is running away too. To borrow the words of Wah, the language will not “stand still long enough to get caught.” And perhaps there’s no better example of this in today’s excerpt than in the Casaconcordia paragraph on page 54, which presents such an extreme and obscene mashup of languages that it’s almost guaranteed to throw us off Earwicker’s trail. The Casaconcordia paragraph, as I promised at the end of last episode, presents Finnegans Wake at its polyglottal, ludicrous best.
“Casaconcordia” is a Joycean invention in Italian meaning “house of peace.” Edmund Epstein interprets it as a version of the United Nations (then known as the League of Nations); if so, this paragraph seems designed to take the piss out of the UN, figuratively and literally, as it starts off in a tearoom and ends up in the bathroom. The paragraph describes people at “sixes and seventies,” i.e. in disarray, and then invokes the parliaments of Bulgaria, Norway and Russia (the Sobranje, Storting and Duma, respectively, forgive my pronunciations), before entering the Casaconcordia/UN. Here’s how that setup sounds in Richard’s reading:
Any dog's life you list you may still hear them at it, like sixes
and seventies as eversure as Halley's comet, ulemamen, sobran-
jewomen, storthingboys and dumagirls, as they pass its bleak and
bronze portal of your Casaconcordia (54:7-10)
Once we are in the Casaconcordia, we encounter languages that strike me, contrary to the building’s harmonious name, as more discordant than concordant, a kind of Tower of Babel that might represent more of a Divided than United Nations. On the other hand, the people conversing here ultimately end their interactions politely with expressions of thanks, so maybe while the 17 different languages of this linguistic mashup don’t always agree with each other, the people expressing them sometimes do. In any event, you have to love Finnegans Wake for substituting and subverting the stately bronze doors that open onto the UN’s hallowed Assembly Hall with a “bleak… bronze portal” that eventually leads us to the toilet. The Wake is nothing if not irreverent. Here’s Richard reading the opening lines in this Tower of Babel / UN dialogue:
Huru more Nee, minny
frickans? Hwoorledes har Dee det? Losdoor onleft mladies, cue.
Millecientotrigintadue scudi. Tippoty, kyrie, tippoty. Cha kai
rotty kai makkar, sahib? (54:10-13)
Drawing on Swedish, Danish, English, Old English, Italian, Greek, Pan-Slavonic and Hindi, the phrases here are the kinds you might find in a guidebook for tourists , such as How are you?, or a phrase offering simple directions, or one asking about tea and teapots. Going on:
Despenseme Usted, senhor, en son suc-
co, sabez. O thaw bron orm, A'Cothraige, thinkinthou gaily?
Lick-Pa-flai-hai-pa-Pa-li-si-lang-lang. (54:13-15)
The first sentence here, which Epstein calls “a Romance language puzzle,” mentions “succo” or sugar, further suggesting a tearoom. This is followed by a question in pseudo-Irish that might translate into “O, I am sorry, Patrick, do you understand Gaelic?” (McHugh), which is followed by a possible riff on Hawaiian that could translate to “We took a long, long flight to Paris” (Epstein). Saving the best for last, here are the final phrases, taking us from tearoom to bathroom:
Epi alo, ecou, Batiste, tu-
vavnr dans Lptit boing going. Ismeme de bumbac e meias de por-
tocallie. O.O. Os pipos mios es demasiada gruarso por O pic-
colo pocchino. Wee fee? Ung duro. Kocshis, szabad? Mercy, and
you? Gomagh, thak. (54:15-19)
The first sentence here is something like, “Well then, listen, Baptiste, you’re going to go to the toilet.” The double ‘O’ that follows is the symbol for a toilet in parts of Europe, which is then followed by the sentence starting with “Os pipos mios…,” for which I’m going to turn to Epstein because he’s done an amazing job at decoding it. Here’s his interpretation:
A mixture of demotic Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, combining to make a truly outrageous phrase about fellatio: “My prick is much too big for your little mouth.” Os pipos mios is “my bird” in some Mediterranean languages, but the identification of the bird with the penis is a feature of Mediterranean culture from ancient times, probably going back at least as far as Aristophanes. Demasiado grueso is “much too thick” in Spanish; por o is Portuguese “for the”; piccolo pocchino is Italian for, literally, “little pocket,” but a similar word, bochino, also means, besides a cigarette holder, an act of fellatio. Has one of the tourists encountered a willing accomplice in one of the toilets of the League of Nations? (42)
So although Earwicker may be absent from the Casaconcordia paragraph with its welter of languages briefly shaking us off his trail, salacious acts and the scandalous rumours they can engender are never far away from our protagonist.
Before we get to Richard’s reading, a quick synopsis of today’s excerpt.
“The Irish Jaunting Car” by Valentine Vousden, cover page for sheet music published in Dublin and London, 1854.
We begin with a Jehu driver, or coach driver, “jauntyjogging” through Dublin’s Phoenix Park, passing by Wellington’s Monument (Ep003), “the monolith rising stark from the moonlit pinebarren” (53:15-16).
The three aggressive cheers that follow, “Chee chee cheers” (53:36), conjure up the three fusiliers from Earwicker’s Cad confrontation in Phoenix Park (Ep008), which provoked the gossip and slander from which Earwicker is trying to escape; and when we hear the soldiers yell something that sounds like ‘Up and at him’ (54:1), it’s clear that Earwicker should run faster and further.
This is followed by the Casaconcordia paragraph, which is then followed by Earwicker offering a stuttering defense of his respectability [for more on the stuttering motif, visit Ep008].
Earwicker’s fall resulting from his alleged sin in the Park then adopts a tragic, epic tone: “The house of Atreox is fallen indeedust (Ilyam, Ilyum!” (55:2), but as with all falls in Finnegans Wake, “deeds bounds going arise again” (55:5), yet another cyclical fall and rise that honours the perpetually falling and rising mythical bird that gives Phoenix Park its name, and gives Finnegans Wake its main motion and theme.
You’ll then hear a sentence both light and profound on life, death and their cycles, which I’ll simply paraphrase as “life is a wake” and let you enjoy Richard’s reading of that wonderful passage (55:5-10).
A central question returns: Who exactly is Earwicker, our elusive protagonist? “Who was he to whom?” (56:32)
It’s clear we won’t have an answer soon as “the unfacts… are too imprecisely few” (57:16-17).
Alice Liddell, photo by Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), 1858 (at The Met, New York)
Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, whose proclivity for photographing nude children came up in Chapter 2 (Ep008), makes an appearance in an ingenious and appropriately disconcerting passage (57: 23-29) that suggests Earwicker’s “exposure” (the perfect word to couple sin with photography), his “maugdleness” (Dodgson taught at Oxford’s Magdalen College) and his fatherly—and by extension, incestuous—proximity to the adolescent Alice Liddell (1852-1934), muse and inspiration for Alice in Wonderland: “the tata of a tiny victorienne, Alys, pressed by his limper looser.”
Today’s excerpt closes with two opposing groups, the “strongers” versus the “softies” (58:16-17), the former inclined to judge Earwicker harshly based on the scandal that surrounds him, the latter preferring to excuse and condone. We will hear more from these characters in our next episode.
Now it’s time for Richard’s performance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, page 53 line 7 to page 58 line 22 for the continuation of Chapter 3. The performance was shot and recorded at my home in Toronto on October 2, 2023 with a live audience. The film premiered at the Toronto Irish Film Festival, European Union Film Festival, and Bloomsday Film Festival at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin. The brief opening music you’ll hear is my own arrangement of “The Irish Jaunting Car,” a 19th-century folk song referenced in the first sentence of today’s excerpt, with Brandon Bak on drums and Adam Seelig, yours truly, on piano.
[Richard Harte reads and sings Finnegans Wake 53:7-58:22.]
[53] And there oftafter, jauntyjogging, on an Irish visavis, instea-
dily with shoulder to shoulder Jehu will tell to Christianier, saint
to sage, the humphriad of that fall and rise while daisy winks at
her pinker sister among the tussocks and the copoll between the
shafts mocks the couple on the car. And as your who may look
like how on the owther side of his big belttry your tyrs and cloes
your noes and paradigm maymay rererise in eren. Follow we up
his whip vindicative. Thurston's! Lo bebold! La arboro, lo
petrusu. The augustan peacebetothem oaks, the monolith rising
stark from the moonlit pinebarren. In all fortitudinous ajaxious
rowdinoisy tenuacity. The angelus hour with ditchers bent upon
their farm usetensiles, the soft belling of the fallow deers (doereh-
moose genuane!) advertising their milky approach as midnight
was striking the hours (letate!), and how brightly the great tri-
bune outed the sharkskin smokewallet (imitation!) from his
frock, kippers, and by Joshua, he tips un a topping swank
cheroot, none of your swellish soide, quoit the reverse, and how
manfally he says, pluk to pluk and lekan for lukan, he was to just
pluggy well suck that brown boyo, my son, and spend a whole
half hour in Havana. Sorer of the kreeksmen, would not thore be
old high gothsprogue! Wherefore he met Master, he mean to say,
he do, sire, bester of redpublicans, at Eagle Cock Hostel on
Lorenzo Tooley street and how he wished his Honour the ban-
nocks of Gort and Morya and Bri Head and Puddyrick, yore
Loudship, and a starchboxsitting in the pit of his St Tomach's,
— a strange wish for you, my friend, and it would poleaxe your
sonson's grandson utterly though your own old sweatandswear
floruerunts heaved it hoch many as the times, when they were
turrified by the hitz.
Chee chee cheers for Upkingbilly and crow cru cramwells
[54] Downaboo! Hup, boys, and hat him! See! Oilbeam they're lost
we've fount rerembrandtsers, their hours to date link these heirs
to here but wowhere are those yours of Yestersdays? Farseeinge-
therich and Poolaulwoman Charachthercuss and his Ann van
Vogt. D.e.e.d! Edned, ended or sleeping soundlessly? Favour
with your tongues! Intendite!
Any dog's life you list you may still hear them at it, like sixes
and seventies as eversure as Halley's comet, ulemamen, sobran-
jewomen, storthingboys and dumagirls, as they pass its bleak and
bronze portal of your Casaconcordia: Huru more Nee, minny
frickans? Hwoorledes har Dee det? Losdoor onleft mladies, cue.
Millecientotrigintadue scudi. Tippoty, kyrie, tippoty. Cha kai
rotty kai makkar, sahib? Despenseme Usted, senhor, en son suc-
co, sabez. O thaw bron orm, A'Cothraige, thinkinthou gaily?
Lick-Pa-flai-hai-pa-Pa-li-si-lang-lang. Epi alo, ecou, Batiste, tu-
vavnr dans Lptit boing going. Ismeme de bumbac e meias de por-
tocallie. O.O. Os pipos mios es demasiada gruarso por O pic-
colo pocchino. Wee fee? Ung duro. Kocshis, szabad? Mercy, and
you? Gomagh, thak.
And, Cod, says he with mugger's tears: Would you care to
know the prise of a liard? Maggis, nick your nightynovel! Mass
Tavener's at the mike again! And that bag belly is the buck
to goat it! Meggeg, m'gay chapjappy fellow, I call our univalse
to witness, as sicker as moyliffey eggs is known by our good
househalters from yorehunderts of mamooth to be which they
commercially are in ahoy high British quarters (conventional!)
my guesthouse and cowhaendel credits will immediately stand
ohoh open as straight as that neighbouring monument's fabrica-
tion before the hygienic gllll (this was where the reverent sab-
both and bottlebreaker with firbalk forthstretched touched upon
his tricoloured boater, which he uplifted by its pickledhoopy (he
gave Stetson one and a penny for it) whileas oleaginosity of an-
cestralolosis sgocciolated down the both pendencies of his mut-
sohito liptails (Sencapetulo, a more modestuous conciliabulite
never curled a torn pocketmouth), cordially inwiting the adul-
lescence who he was wising up to do in like manner what all did
[55] so as he was able to add) lobe before the Great Schoolmaster's.
(I tell you no story.) Smile!
The house of Atreox is fallen indeedust (Ilyam, Ilyum! Mae-
romor Mournomates !) averging on blight like the mundibanks of
Fennyana, but deeds bounds going arise again. Life, he himself
said once, (his biografiend, in fact, kills him verysoon, if yet not,
after) is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our bread-
winning lies the cropse of our seedfather, a phrase which the
establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across
the chestfront of all manorwombanborn. The scene, refreshed,
reroused, was never to be forgotten, the hen and crusader ever-
intermutuomergent, for later in the century one of that puisne
band of factferreters, (then an excivily (out of the custom huts)
(retired), (hurt), under the sixtyfives act) in a dressy black modern
style and wewere shiny tan burlingtons, (tam, homd and dicky,
quopriquos and peajagd) rehearsed it, pippa pointing, with a
dignified (copied) bow to a namecousin of the late archdeacon
F. X. Preserved Coppinger (a hot fellow in his night, may the
mouther of guard have mastic on him!) in a pullwoman of our
first transhibernian with one still sadder circumstance which is a
dirkandurk heartskewerer if ever to bring bouncing brimmers
from marbled eyes. Cycloptically through the windowdisks and
with eddying awes the round eyes of the rundreisers, back to back,
buck to bucker, on their airish chaunting car, beheld with in-
touristing anterestedness the clad pursue the bare, the bare the
green, the green the frore, the frore the cladagain, as their convoy
wheeled encirculingly abound the gigantig's lifetree, our fire-
leaved loverlucky blomsterbohm, phoenix in our woodlessness,
haughty, cacuminal, erubescent (repetition!) whose roots they be
asches with lustres of peins. For as often as the Archicadenus,
pleacing aside his Irish Field and craving their auriculars to re-
cepticle particulars before they got the bump at Castlebar (mat
and far!) spoke of it by request all, hearing in this new reading
of the part whereby, because of Dyas in his machina, the new
garrickson's grimacing grimaldism hypostasised by substintua-
tion the axiomatic orerotundity of that once grand old elrington
[56] bawl, the copycus's description of that fellowcommuter's play
upon countenants, could simply imagine themselves in their bo-
som's inmost core, as pro tem locums, timesported acorss the yawn-
ing (abyss), as once they were seasiders, listening to the cockshy-
shooter's evensong evocation of the doomed but always ventri-
loquent Agitator, (nonot more plangorpound the billows o'er
Thounawahallya Reef!) silkhouatted, a whallrhosmightiadd, a-
ginsst the dusk of skumring, (would that fane be Saint Muezzin's
calling — holy places! — and this fez brimless as brow of faithful
toucher of the ground, did wish it were — blessed be the bones!
— the ghazi, power of his sword.) his manslayer's gunwielder
protended towards that overgrown leadpencil which was soon,
monumentally at least, to rise as Molyvdokondylon to, to be, to
be his mausoleum (O'dan stod tillsteyne at meisies aye skould
show pon) while olover his exculpatory features, as Roland rung,
a wee dropeen of grief about to sillonise his jouejous, the ghost
of resignation diffused a spectral appealingness, as a young man's
drown o'er the fate of his waters may gloat, similar in origin and
akkurat in effective to a beam of sunshine upon a coffin plate.
Not olderwise Inn the days of the Bygning would our Travel-
ler remote, unfriended, from van Demon's Land, some lazy
skald or maundering pote, lift wearywilly his slowcut snobsic
eyes to the semisigns of his zooteac and lengthily lingering along
flaskneck, cracket cup, downtrodden brogue, turfsod, wild-
broom, cabbageblad, stockfisch, longingly learn that there at the
Angel were herberged for him poteen and tea and praties and
baccy and wine width woman wordth warbling: and informally
quasi-begin to presquesm'ile to queasithin' (Nonsense! There
was not very much windy Nous blowing at the given moment
through the hat of Mr Melancholy Slow!)
But in the pragma what formal cause made a smile of that to-
think? Who was he to whom? (O'Breen's not his name nor the
brown one his maid.) Whose are the placewheres? Kiwasti, kis-
ker, kither, kitnabudja? Tal the tem of the tumulum. Giv the gav
of the grube. Be it cudgelplayers' country, orfishfellows' town or
leeklickers' land or panbpanungopovengreskey. What regnans
[57] raised the rains have levelled but we hear the pointers and can
gauge their compass for the melos yields the mode and the mode
the manners plicyman, plansiman, plousiman, plab. Tsin tsin tsin
tsin! The forefarther folkers for a prize of two peaches with
Ming, Ching and Shunny on the lie low lea. We'll sit down on
the hope of the ghouly ghost for the titheman troubleth but his
hantitat hies not here. They answer from their Zoans; Hear the
four of them! Hark torroar of them! I, says Armagh, and a'm
proud o'it. I, says Clonakilty, God help us! I, says Deansgrange,
and say nothing. I, says Barna, and whatabout it? Hee haw! Be-
fore he fell hill he filled heaven: a stream, alplapping streamlet,
coyly coiled um, cool of her curls: We were but thermites then,
wee, wee. Our antheap we sensed as a Hill of Allen, the Barrow
for an People, one Jotnursfjaell: and it was a grummelung amung
the porktroop that wonderstruck us as a thunder, yunder.
Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely
few to warrant our certitude, the evidencegivers by legpoll too
untrustworthily irreperible where his adjugers are semmingly
freak threes but his judicandees plainly minus twos. Neverthe-
less Madam's Toshowus waxes largely more lifeliked (entrance,
one kudos; exits, free) and our notional gullery is now com-
pletely complacent, an exegious monument, aerily perennious.
Oblige with your blackthorns; gamps, degrace! And there many
have paused before that exposure of him by old Tom Quad, a
flashback in which he sits sated, gowndabout, in clericalease ha-
bit, watching bland sol slithe dodgsomely into the nethermore,
a globule of maugdleness about to corrugitate his mild dewed
cheek and the tata of a tiny victorienne, Alys, pressed by his
limper looser.
Yet certes one is. Eher the following winter had overed the
pages of nature's book and till Ceadurbar-atta-Cleath became
Dablena Tertia, the shadow of the huge outlander, maladik, mult-
vult, magnoperous, had bulked at the bar of a rota of tribunals in
manor hall as in thieves' kitchen, mid pillow talk and chithouse
chat, on Marlborough Green as through Molesworth Fields, here
sentenced pro tried with Jedburgh justice, there acquitted con-
[58] testimony with benefit of clergy. His Thing Mod have undone
him: and his madthing has done him man. His beneficiaries are
legion in the part he created: they number up his years. Greatwheel
Dunlop was the name was on him: behung, all we are his bisaacles.
As hollyday in his house so was he priest and king to that: ulvy
came, envy saw, ivy conquered. Lou! Lou! They have waved his
green boughs o'er him as they have torn him limb from lamb.
For his muertification and uxpiration and dumnation and annu-
hulation. With schreis and grida, deprofound souspirs. Steady,
sullivans! Mannequins pause! Longtong's breach is fallen down
but Graunya's spreed's abroad. Ahdostay, feedailyones, and feel
the Flucher's bawls for the total of your flouts is not fit to fan his
fettle, O! Have a ring and sing wohl! Chin, chin! Chin, chin!
And of course all chimed din width the eatmost boviality. Swip-
ing rums and beaunes and sherries and ciders and negus and cit-
ronnades too. The strongers. Oho, oho, Mester Begge, you're
about to be bagged in the bog again. Bugge. But softsies seuf-
sighed: Eheu, for gassies! But, lo! lo! by the threnning gods,
human, erring and condonable, what the statues of our kuo, who
is the messchef be our kuang, ashu ashure there, the unforgettable
treeshade looms up behind the jostling judgements of those, as
all should owe, malrecapturable days.
[End of excerpt]
Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading pages 53 to 58 of Chapter 3 from Finnegans Wake, recorded live in Toronto on October 2nd, 2023.
Join us for Episode 13 in a fortnight when Richard continues with the next five pages of Chapter 3, including a terrific, multi-character reportage-like section in search of our protagonist, Earwicker. To be sure you don’t miss the episode, why not follow or subscribe to this podcast? For more on One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake project, including transcripts of this podcast, the complete film of Chapter 1, 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
See you in two weeks — wishing you happy holidays and a healthy new year!
[Music: Adam Seelig plays piano]
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; Podcast production by Sean Rasmussen; Stage Management by Sandi Becker; Directed by yours truly, Adam Seelig; Music arranged and performed on the piano by me, with Brandon Bak on drums, and recorded at Sound Department in Toronto. A big thanks to our wonderful live audience of Sandi Becker, David Mackett, Andrew Moodie, Cathy Murphy, Nomi Rotbard, Arlo Rotbard-Seelig, Adam Seelig, Aaron Tucker and Catherine Vaneri. Thank you to everyone at the Irish Consulate in Toronto. Thank you to Production Consultants Cathy Murphy and Andrew Moodie and to Music Consultants Warwick Harte and Kevin Kennedy. Thank you for listening!
[Music fades out]
[End of Ep012]
Mentioned: Eldon Garnet sculpture on Don River Toronto, Heraclitus river aphorism, becoming, Fred Wah on elusive meaning, Earwicker and language running away, Casaconcordia, League of Nations, United Nations, polyglotism, Babel, “Irish Jaunting Car,” Phoenix Park, Cad confrontation, who is Earwicker?, Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, “strongers” vs. “softies,” synopsis.
Resources: Transcript for this episode, including the text of Finnegans Wake pages 48-53.
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: Fred Wah, Music at the Heart of Thinking. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 2020.