Monday 8 May 2017

Monday, 8 May 2017, Pages 379-381

(First of all apologies for missing weeks of reading and posting on this blog about what was read. Now the blog goes on...)

Today we stopped at ",... that bothered he was from head to tail, ... (381.28)
(Note that the sentence is not yet complete.)

The paragraph we are currently at is said to be the first Joyce wrote when he started with Finnegans Wake. Perhaps because of that the language reads almost normal though it is still not easy to understand what it is all about. The section starts with mentioning King Roderick O'Conor the last king of Ireland.

We also read today these 'strange words': BENK, BUNK, BINK, BENK BANK BONK. Joseph Campbell explains them as follows:
"These capitalised syllables represents the fall of Finnegan, the rocking of a boat at the bottom of the sea of sleep, also a series of stiff punches that the prizefighters are throwing at each other, in sum, a combination suggesting the ultimate collapse and doom of HCE. (Mainly they represent the 'midnight Angelus' that announces the change of power in the family.)"
(A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, New World Library, P. 242, 2005) 


No comments:

Post a Comment