[ExI] Joyce

[Damien Broderick]

At 06:07 PM 1/29/2008 -0500, John K Philistine wrote:

> >How do you feel about Bach's Cantata 140, "Sleepers wake"?
>
>I feel that 200 years ago English grammar was not a field of paramount
>importance to Bach, music was.

You jest messin' wit' me, right?

On the off-chance that you're not:

It's an injunction in Bach, an imperative that heedless sleepers must 
rouse themselves. It's that, also, in FINNEGANS WAKE, with the 
double-image proleptic sense of a report on what the mythic Finnegan 
(Finn, again) family are doing in response to that imperative: 
they're waking up from the cosmogonic dream that is the novel... but 
get pulled down to resubmerge in the collective unconscious in the final words

"A way a lone a last a loved a long the"

that takes us back into the opening partial sentence:

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay"

(Anyone interested can sampling the damned thing online: 
<http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/jjoyce/fw-3.htm> )

But hey, whatever.

Damien Broderick