JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 011 RUNNING AWAY
PAGE 48:1-53:6 | 2024-12-12
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 11, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor — and my good friend and colleague — Richard Harte performing pages 48 to 53, to begin Chapter 3 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear.
I’m sharing the good news that One Little Goat Theatre Company recently released our film of “Finnegans Wake Chapter 1” online this fall. After several festival screenings last year, it’s now out for all to watch. You can find it on YouTube or through our website, and I’ll link to it in the podcast transcript, which is also on our website, www.OneLittleGoat.org. For the listeners who’ve enjoyed Richard reading Chapter 1 on our podcast, you can now enjoy seeing the face and body that go with the voice. The film also contains a handful of montages shot in Toronto, where the reading took place, thematically connecting some places in the city with some moments in the chapter. Happy watching and listening.
And some more good news that we recently wrapped our film shoot of “Finnegans Wake, Chapter 5,” shot with a wonderful live audience at the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library in Toronto. Surrounded by dozens of volumes related to Chapter 5 and the Wake, from an original King James Bible to Sir Edward Sullivan’s The Book of Kells, it was a special evening that will make for a terrific podcast and film in future. I want to extend a special thanks to the two regular podcast listeners who schlepped up from New Jersey and Massachusetts to join us for the reading — I’m delighted you were with us on that night.
And finally, as I record this in December of 2024, One Little Goat, 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 made by December 31 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]
Adam Seelig: Here we are at Chapter 3 of Finnegans Wake. I’m going touch on the chapter’s theme of fleeing, then highlight how the 19th-century Irish Nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell informs the character of Earwicker and the Wake, and then offer a quick synopsis of the five pages you’ll soon hear Richard Harte read. As I’ve said in previous episodes, if you’d like to jump straight to Richard’s performance, by all means skip ahead.
Chapter 1 served as an overture to Finnegans Wake, sounding out, among its many motifs, the cyclical fall and rise of humanity. Chapter 2 introduced us to Earwicker, or HCE, including his alleged sin in Phoenix Park and the wildfire rumours that consequently spread across Dublin and Ireland, culminating in the salacious and slanderous public performance of “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” by the muckraking street busker, Hosty.
In Chapter 3 we’ll find Earwicker trying to run and hide from all the earwigging gossip surrounding and hounding him. As a lyric from Bob Marley’s 1978 Kaya puts it,
”You’re running and you’re running and you’re running away
But you can't run away from yourself.”
Earwicker is not only running away, perhaps he’s running away from himself. As Joyce’s admirer and occasional amanuensis Samuel Beckett said of his own work, “perhaps” might be the most important word. Likewise with Finnegans Wake. Perhaps Chapter 3 is an evocation of Earwicker’s unconscious, his own dream state, and he’s not only being chased, but also the one doing the chasing through invented characters of his own imagining. In this way, in addition to the cyclical rise and fall at the core of the novel, which we can picture vertically as Tim Finnegan’s rise and fall from the ladder or Humpty Dumpty’s wall fall or the phoenix up from the ashes or Adam and Eve’s Biblical apple grab, Finnegans Wake adds a similar, cyclical loop, which we can picture horizontally as Earwicker running away, perhaps from himself, across Dublin.
Could Earwicker be his own worst enemy, chasing and biting his own tail, a self-persecuting ouroboros? Consider for a moment that Hosty’s caustic ballad, which utterly defames Earwicker at the end of Chapter 2, is titled “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly.” Perce-oreille is French for earwig, leading us to “The Ballad of Earwig” and by extension to “The Ballad of Earwicker,” which we can now hear in two ways: “The Ballad about Earwicker” and “The Ballad by Earwicker.” The title’s ingenious preposition, “of,” “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly,” allows us to hear and experience the song as a throwdown that could be simultaneously about and by Earwicker, the deliverer and recipient, the subject and object of the musical invective, with Hosty an invention of Earwicker’s own imagination. Perhaps. Regardless of whether Earwicker is persecuted by others or by himself, one thing is (perhaps!) for sure: Earwicker in Chapter 3 is “subjected to the horrors of the premier terror of Errorland. (perorhaps!)” (62:24-25).
So is he purely victim or is he also victimizer? Who is Earwicker? As you’ll hear in today’s excerpt, the narrative of Chapter 3 pursues the answer by attempting to tease out the identity of our elusive protagonist from the scandalous fog that surrounds him, “given the wet and low visibility” and “the average human cloudyphiz” it’s a considerable challenge to “idendifine the individuone” (51:1-6).
In short, as Earwicker runs and hides, Chapter 3 will be asking not only where he is, but who.
An elusive protagonist hounded by scandal — this may serve as a description of Earwicker, but it could just as easily describe the 19th-century Irish nationalist, Charles Stewart Parnell. Earwicker is the talk of the town; Parnell was (and in many ways still is) the talk of the Irish nation. Since Parnell’s political rise and ignominious fall provide another facet for understanding Earwicker and the Wake, I’m going to share Adaline Glasheen’s brilliant entry on this larger-than-life figure of modern Irish history.
Charles Parnell (1846-1891) and Katherine O’Shea (1846-1921)
Charles Stewart Parnell, born in 1846, died in 1891 — betrayed Irish leader […] who haunts Joyce’s works […] just about everywhere. In [Joyce,] Parnell is not a character, but a presence, ghost, shade […] There was a legend that Parnell would return magically, like the Phoenix, Finn, Christ, or unmagically, like Ulysses, Tim Finnegan.
Parnell was an Anglo-Irish landowner, a skilled political boss who led the Irish nationalist party in the British Parliament. He frightened the British and they set out to destroy him; their first try, the Pigott affair, failed; but they succeeded when Captain William O’Shea sued his wife [Katherine, or Kitty, O’Shea, with whom Parnell had an affair and three children] for divorce. Parnell was revealed as an adulterer, a user of false names, a sneaker down fire-escapes or ladders. The rest [Glasheen writes] may be quoted from “The Shade of Parnell”:
“He was deposed in obedience to Gladstone’s orders. Of his 83 representatives only 8 remained faithful.... The high and low clergy entered the lists to finish him off. The Irish press emptied on him and the woman he loved the vials of their envy. The citizens of Castlecomer threw quicklime in his eyes. He went from county to county, from city to city, ‘like a hunted deer’, a spectral figure. . . within a year he died...’’ […]
[Glasheen goes on:] He was by no means innocent of forging his own destruction; whether from hubris or from not changing his wet socks, he died, and note all the “idol with feet of clay” jokes in Ulysses and FW. […]
Parnell pervades and appears in moments of intensity, but he is not, after all, often named in FW. Parnell’s presence is, then, indicated by indirection, by quoting, by recreating one of his scenes, by using certain words - e.g., treeshade, chief, Fox - which call him up, even when those words are used in ways that do not directly apply to him.
Parnell was elusive. He is elusive on Joyce’s pages. (222-23)
Chapter 3 opens with applause for Hosty’s “Ballad of Persse O’Reilly,” which closed Chapter 2, with particular praise for the street busker’s impressive “Chest Cee!”, a high-C sung by old-fashioned tenors. And indeed in my co-arrangement of the ballad with Richard in Chapter 2, when Richard, as Hosty, sings the song’s last word, “Cain,” he ultimately ends on a high concert C. (Aren’t we clever.) And since C can stand for Cain, Abel’s lethal brother, it may come as no surprise that issuing from the exhalation of that final Cain-charged chest C is a deadly, toxic cloud, “a poisoning volume of cloud barrage indeed.” (48:5)
Finnegans Wake: anticipating Covid?!
This fog, or spit-fog if you will, clouds the beginning of this chapter. It’s a fog so thick that even my regular trusted guides (Epstein, Tindall and company) seem to differ on what is happening here, so don’t worry in the least if we get a little lost as we try to discern a thing or two in the foggy and fascinating paragraphs ahead!
I’ll also quickly add that Chapter 3 opens with fog and closes with rain. I’ll come back to this drizzle that bookends Chapter 3 when we reach its conclusion in episode 15.
As the poisonous cloud spreads, we hear of how various scandal mongers who sang the toxic ballad ultimately expire, starting with Hosty, here described singsongily—or maybe amid all the fog sing-soggily?!—as “poor Osti-Frosti” (48:19). I don’t believe this series of men, from Hosty to “A’Hara” to “Paul Horan” to “Sordid Sam” and so on, dies as a result of having sung the ballad—the correlation strikes me as more coincidental than causal—but the association between the song and their deaths reminds me of Monty Python’s “Killer Joke” sketch, also known as “The Funniest Joke in the World,” which I would love to tell you but of course anyone who reads or hears the joke promptly dies from laughter, so I will prudently link to it online in this podcast’s transcript — enjoy at your own risk.
Ireland legalizes gay marriage in 2015.
There are a few choice phrases that I’d like to point out as you listen. “his husband” (49:2) always catches my ear — it’s not uncommon to hear these two words together today in Ireland and beyond where gay marriage is legal, but when Joyce combined them, “his husband” was unheard of and arguably ridiculous yet a century ahead of its time. “loquacity lunacy” (49:17) is another favourite phrase that seems to address this hyper verbal logomaniacal world in which we find ourselves. And we’ll hear a euphemistic description for a central theme of Finnegans Wake: gossip, that social phenomenon by which people like Earwicker and Parnell are “semiprivately convicted” (50:28).
Following this string of histrionic obituaries, we can discern within the fog a hazy remix of Earwicker’s confrontation in Phoenix Park from Chapter 2, a recurring event in the novel that plays out through different iterations of the Cad, the two girls, and the three soldiers, the male actors intimating violence, the females, temptation, and all suggesting the ambiguous sin committed, if committed at all, by Earwicker. Here the controversial contingent of 1 Cad, 2 girls and 3 soldiers will appear as “the Haberdasher, the two Curchies and the three Enkelchums” (51:9-10), the main initials of which, incidentally, form Earwicker’s monogram, HCE.
On the same page, page 51, the seven-items-of-clothing motif, which occurs in Chapters 1 and 2 as well, will invoke Earwicker, dressed “in scratch wig, squarecuts, stock, lavaleer, regattable oxeter, baggy pants and shufflers” (6-8).
In the paragraph beginning with, “Sport’s a common thing” (51:21), we will hear about Earwicker’s “regifugium persecutorum” (51:31), a term that provides a key to this chapter. Roland McHugh’s indispensable Annotations to Finnegans Wake breaks it down as follows:
regifugium is an ancient Roman ceremony celebrating the expulsion of kings that literally means ‘flight of the king’;
refugium peccatorum means ‘refuge of sinners’, from the Roman Catholic Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary; and
persecutorum means ‘of the persecuted’.
So Earwicker’s “regifugium persecutorum” represents his expulsion and his refuge, his sin and his persecution, his running and his hiding. Indeed by chapter’s end, we will find our protagonist holed up behind some fortification, seeking refuge from 111 expulsive, and expletive, insults hurled his way (that will be Ep015).
We then experience an early newsreel via television, still a young technology at the time of Joyce’s writing, and again we’ll encounter Earwicker in another seven articles of clothing, including “the refaced unmansionables of gingerine hue” (52:26), which sounds to me like his patched up, reddish underwear. The newsreel also briefly introduces the “brothers’ broil” that plays out between HCE and ALP’s oppositional sons, Shaun and Shem, in Chapter 6 onward.
Wyndham Lewis in 1929, photo by George Beresford.
One last note before we get to Richard’s reading: we have a heckler in the house, or at least in the text of Chapter 3. Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), the brilliant (Canadian-born) English modernist author and painter and foil of sorts to James Joyce, makes his first intrusions in today’s excerpt. (Lewis, incidentally, escaped during the Second World War to a regifugium persecutorum of his own in Canada, including a stint in my town of Toronto, which he considered, perhaps justifiably, a miserable backwater.) Lewis butts in throughout Chapter 3 (and can barely keep his mouth shut later on in Chapter 6). For today’s excerpt, he limits his contributions to two parenthetical monosyllabic insults, or what my kids would call ‘sick burns’: the first is “cogged!”, i.e. fraudulent, and the second, which also serves as the last word of today’s reading, is “Prigged!”, i.e. stolen.
Now it’s time for Richard’s performance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, page 48 line 1 to page 53 line 6 for the beginning 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 opening music for the chapter is my own arrangement of “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly,” with Brandon Bak on drums and yours truly on piano.
[Richard Harte reads and sings Finnegans Wake 48:1-53:6.]
[48] Chest Cee! 'Sdense! Corpo di barragio! you spoof of visibility
in a freakfog, of mixed sex cases among goats, hill cat and plain
mousey, Bigamy Bob and his old Shanvocht! The Blackfriars
treacle plaster outrage be liddled! Therewith was released in that
kingsrick of Humidia a poisoning volume of cloud barrage indeed.
Yet all they who heard or redelivered are now with that family
of bards and Vergobretas himself and the crowd of Caraculacticors
as much no more as be they not yet now or had they then not-
ever been. Canbe in some future we shall presently here amid
those zouave players of Inkermann the mime mumming the mick
and his nick miming their maggies, Hilton St Just (Mr Frank
Smith), Ivanne Ste Austelle (Mr J. F. Jones), Coleman of Lucan
taking four parts, a choir of the O'Daley O'Doyles doublesixing
the chorus in Fenn Mac Call and the Seven Feeries of Loch Neach,
Galloper Troppler and Hurleyquinn the zitherer of the past with his
merrymen all, zimzim, zimzim. Of the persins sin this Eyrawyg-
gla saga (which, thorough readable to int from and, is from tubb
to buttom all falsetissues, antilibellous and nonactionable and this
applies to its whole wholume) of poor Osti-Frosti, described as
quite a musical genius in a small way and the owner of an
exceedingly niced ear, with tenorist voice to match, not alone,
but a very major poet of the poorly meritary order (he began
Tuonisonian but worked his passage up as far as the we-all-
hang-together Animandovites) no one end is known. If they
[49] whistled him before he had curtains up they are whistling him
still after his curtain's doom's doom. Ei fù. His husband, poor old
A'Hara (Okaroff?) crestfallen by things and down at heels at the
time, they squeak, accepted the (Zassnoch!) ardree's shilling at
the conclusion of the Crimean war and, having flown his wild
geese, alohned in crowds to warnder on like Shuley Luney,
enlisted in Tyrone's horse, the Irish whites, and soldiered a bit
with Wolsey under the assumed name of Blanco Fusilovna Buck-
lovitch (spurious) after which the cawer and the marble halls
of Pump Court Columbarium, the home of the old seakings,
looked upon each other and queth their haven evermore for it
transpires that on the other side of the water it came about that on
the field of Vasileff's Cornix inauspiciously with his unit he
perished, saying, this papal leafless to old chap give, rawl chaw-
clates for mouther-in-louth. Booil. Poor old dear Paul Horan,
to satisfy his literary as well as his criminal aspirations, at the
suggestion thrown out by the doomster in loquacity lunacy, so
says the Dublin Intelligence, was thrown into a Ridley's for
inmates in the northern counties. Under the name of Orani he
may have been the utility man of the troupe capable of sustain-
ing long parts at short notice. He was. Sordid Sam, a dour decent
deblancer, the unwashed, haunted always by his ham, the unwished,
at a word from Israfel the Summoner, passed away painlessly
after life's upsomdowns one hallowe'en night, ebbrous and in
the state of nature, propelled from Behind into the great Beyond
by footblows coulinclouted upon his oyster and atlas on behanged
and behooved and behicked and behulked of his last fishandblood
bedscrappers, a Northwegian and his mate of the Sheawolving
class. Though the last straw glimt his baring this stage thunkhard
is said (the pitfallen gagged him as 'Promptboxer') to have
solemnly said — as had the brief thot but fell in till his head like
a bass dropt neck fust in till a bung crate (cogged!): Me drames,
O'Loughlins, has come through! Now let the centuple celves of
my egourge as Micholas de Cusack calls them, — of all of whose
I in my hereinafter of course by recourse demission me — by
the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that indentity
[50] of undiscernibles where the Baxters and the Fleshmans may
they cease to bidivil uns and (but at this poingt though the iron
thrust of his cockspurt start might have prepared us we are well-
nigh stinkpotthered by the mustardpunge in the tailend) this
outandin brown candlestock melt Nolan's into peese! Han var.
Disliken as he was to druriodrama, her wife Langley, the prophet,
and the decentest dozendest short of a frusker whoever stuck his
spickle through his spoke, disappeared, (in which toodooing he
has taken all the French leaves unveilable out of Calomne-
quiller's Pravities) from the sourface of this earth, that austral
plain he had transmaried himself to, so entirely spoorlessly (the
mother of the book with a dustwhisk tabularasing his obliteration
done upon her involucrum) as to tickle the speculative to all but
opine (since the Levey who might have been Langley may have
really been a redivivus of paganinism or a volunteer Vousden)
that the hobo (who possessed a large amount of the humoresque)
had transtuled his funster's latitat to its finsterest interrimost. Bhi
she. Again, if Father San Browne, tea and toaster to that quaint-
esttest of yarnspinners is Padre Don Bruno, treu and troster to
the queen of Iar-Spain, was the reverend, the sodality director,
that eupeptic viceflayer, a barefaced carmelite, to whose palpi-
tating pulpit (which of us but remembers the rarevalent and
hornerable Fratomistor Nawlanmore and Brawne.) sinning society
sirens (see the [Roman Catholic] presspassim) fortunately became
so enthusiastically attached and was an objectionable ass who very
occasionally cockaded a raffles ticket on his hat which he wore all
to one side like the hangle of his pan (if Her Elegance saw him
she'd have the canary!) and was semiprivately convicted of mal-
practices with his hotwashed tableknife (glossing over the cark
in his pocket) that same snob of the dunhill, fully several year-
schaums riper, encountered by the General on that redletter
morning or maynoon jovesday and were they? Fuitfuit.
When Phishlin Phil wants throws his lip 'tis pholly to be fortune
flonting and whoever's gone to mix Hotel by the salt say water
there's nix to nothing we can do for he's never again to sea. It
is nebuless an autodidact fact of the commonest that the shape of
[51] the average human cloudyphiz, whereas sallow has long daze
faded, frequently altered its ego with the possing of the showers
(Not original!). Whence it is a slopperish matter, given the wet
and low visibility (since in this scherzarade of one's thousand one
nightinesses that sword of certainty which would indentifide the
body never falls) to idendifine the individuone in scratch wig,
squarecuts, stock, lavaleer, regattable oxeter, baggy pants and
shufflers (he is often alluded to as Slypatrick, the llad in the llane)
with already an incipience (lust!) in the direction of area baldness
(one is continually firstmeeting with odd sorts of others at all
sorts of ages!) who was asked by free boardschool shirkers in
drenched coats overawall, Will, Conn and Otto, to tell them
overagait, Vol, Pov and Dev, that fishabed ghoatstory of the
haardly creditable edventyres of the Haberdasher, the two Cur-
chies and the three Enkelchums in their Bearskin ghoats! Girles
and jongers, but he has changed alok syne Thorkill's time! Ya, da,
tra, gathery, pimp, shesses, shossafat, okodeboko, nine! Those
many warts, those slummy patches, halfsinster wrinkles, (what
has come over the face on wholebroader E?), and (shrine of
Mount Mu save us!) the large fungopark he has grown! Drink!
Sport's a common thing. It was the Lord's own day for damp
(to wait for a postponed regatta's eventualising is not of Battlecock
Shettledore - Juxta - Mare only) and the request for a fully
armed explanation was put (in Loo of Pat) to the porty (a native
of the sisterisle — Meathman or Meccan? — by his brogue, ex-
race eyes, lokil calour and lucal odour which are said to have
been average clownturkish (though the capelist's voiced nasal
liquids and the way he sneezed at zees haul us back to the craogs
and bryns of the Silurian Ordovices) who, the lesser pilgrimage
accomplished, had made, pats' and pigs' older inselt, the south-
east bluffs of the stranger stepshore, a regifugium persecutorum,
hence hindquarters) as he paused at evenchime for some or so
minutes (hit the pipe dannyboy! Time to won, barmon. I'll take
ten to win.) amid the devil's one duldrum (Apple by her blossom
window and Charlotte at her toss panomancy his sole admirers,
his only tearts in store) for a fragrend culubosh during his week-
[52] end pastime of executing with Anny Oakley deadliness (the con-
summatory pairs of provocatives, of which remained provokingly
but two, the ones he fell for, Lili and Tutu, cork em!) empties
which had not very long before contained Reid's family (you ruad
that before, soaky, but all the bottles in sodemd histry will not
soften your bloodathirst!) stout. Having reprimed his repeater
and resiteroomed his timespiece His Revenances, with still a life
or two to spare for the space of his occupancy of a world at a time,
rose to his feet and there, far from Tolkaheim, in a quiet English
garden (commonplace!), since known as Whiddington Wild, his
simple intensive curolent vocality, my dearbraithers, my most
dearbrathairs, as he, so is a supper as is a sipper, spake of the
One and told of the Compassionate, called up before the triad of
precoxious scaremakers (scoretaking: Spegulo ne helpas al mal-
bellulo, Mi Kredas ke vi estas prava, Via dote la vizago rispondas
fraulino) the now to ushere mythical habiliments of Our Farfar
and Arthor of our doyne.
Television kills telephony in brothers' broil. Our eyes de-
mand their turn. Let them be seen! And wolfbone balefires blaze
the trailmost if only that Mary Nothing may burst her bibby
buckshee. When they set fire then she's got to glow so we may
stand some chances of warming to what every soorkabatcha,
tum or hum, would like to know. The first Humphrey's latitu-
dinous baver with puggaree behind, (calaboose belong bigboss
belong Kang the Toll) his fourinhand bow, his elbaroom surtout,
the refaced unmansionables of gingerine hue, the state slate
umbrella, his gruff woolselywellesly with the finndrinn knopfs
and the gauntlet upon the hand which in an hour not for him
solely evil had struck down the might he mighthavebeen d'Est-
erre of whom his nation seemed almost already to be about to
have need. Then, stealing his thunder, but in the befitting le-
gomena of the smaller country, (probable words, possibly said, of
field family gleaming) a bit duskish and flavoured with a smile,
seein as ow his thoughts consisted chiefly of the cheerio, he aptly
sketched for our soontobe second parents (sukand see whybe!)
the touching seene. The solence of that stilling! Here one might
[53] a fin fell. Boomster rombombonant! It scenes like a landescape
from Wildu Picturescu or some seem on some dimb Arras, dumb
as Mum's mutyness, this mimage of the seventyseventh kusin of
kristansen is odable to os across the wineless Ere no oedor nor
mere eerie nor liss potent of suggestion than in the tales of the
tingmount. (Prigged!)
[End of excerpt]
Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading the beginning of Chapter 3 from Finnegans Wake, pages 48 to 53, recorded live in Toronto on October 2nd, 2023.
Join us for Episode 12 in a fortnight when Richard continues with the next five pages of Chapter 3, including the “Casaconcordia” paragraph, one of my favourites, which features Finnegans Wake at its polyglottally ludicrous best. 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, and trailers for others, 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 and wishing you happy holidays!
[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 Ep011]
Mentioned: Earwicker running and hiding from gossip, Bob Marley’s “Running Away,” “perhaps,” vertical and horizontal cycles, Earwicker as his own worst enemy, “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” possibly both about and by Earwicker, where and who is Earwicker, Irish nationalist Charles Parnell, “Chest Cee!”, poisonous cloud, ‘spit-fog,’ Monty Python’s “Killer Joke,” “his husband” and other phrases, Cad confrontation redux, seven-items-of-clothing motif, regifugium persecutorum, TV newsreel, Wyndham Lewis, 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.
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.
William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake. Syracuse University Press, 1996.
Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (4th edition). Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
John Gordon’s annotations on his Finnegans Wake blog.
Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1982.
Cited: “Running Away,” Bob Marley and the Wailers, Kaya, Island Studios, London, 1978.
“The Funniest Joke in the World,” Monty Python’s Flying Circus, BBC, 1969.