Three Quarks for Muster Mark

Finnegans Wake has long been a source of inspiration for creative minds, but a recent discovery (recent for me) that the word quark originated in Joyce's work came as a surprise. Murray Gell-Man, one of the two independent physicists who proposed the theory of quarks, was actually inspired by a passage from the Wake. Although Gell-Man first thought of the term as the sound made by ducks, he couldn't decide on the exact spelling. However, in 1963, he was flipping through Finnegan's Wake (apparently he often did this, suggesting a scientific mind appropriately attuned to the nonsense of the universe; no wonder he thought up quarks), when he came across the word quark on page 383. "Three quarks for Muster Mark!/Sure has not got much of a bark/And sure any he has it's all beside the mark" read the passage, enigmatically. Although, as Gell-Man points out in his book The Quark and the Jaguar, quark was obviously meant to rhyme with Mark and bark, he decided to pronounce it kwork. He was drawn to the idea that most words in the Wake have multiple meanings and sources. Another draw? Quarks appear in threes in nature as well. The website Indopedia suggests that this source for quark is "less than illuminating", but as usual, that's what makes Finnegans Wake both fascinating and frustrating. Today the word quark includes the following meanings: fresh unripened cheese; a punk song by Die Artze, a microkernel operating system, an American sci fi sitcom from the '70s, an American '70's science magazine, and perhaps most improbably, a last constituent of matter. For instance, protons are made of three quarks. Some of the varieties of quarks include up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. James Joyce would surely approve.

An Adaptation of Page 439

Finnegans Wake seems to inspire intriguing artistic creations. One of my recent favourites, which we played at our last meeting, is a reading/video montage that channels a lot of the surreal imagery of the novel, adding several contemporary pop culture twists. As usual, one page of Joycean text yields an insane number of ideas. The video is described as " a visual adaptation of page 439 of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Created in one week, as challenged, with the collaboration of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ronen V." Directed by Rian Johnson as a collaboration with Ronen V., the work features the fabulous Joseph Gordon-Levitt narrating beautifully. Just one more example of why the text should be read aloud.

http://vimeo.com/groups/388/videos/5575022

Page 439 from rcjohnso on Vimeo.

http://ts.vimeo.com.s3.amazonaws.com/187/671/18767149_200.jpg

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Introduction to a Strange Subject

" ... the ultimate state of the intelligent reader is certainly not bewilderment. Rather, it is admiration for the unifying insight, economy of means , and more-than-Rabelaisian humour which have miraculously quickened the stupendous mass of material..."

Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake is a revelation. As Edmund Wilson wrote in The New Yorker, the book gives readers a chance to explore the novel, one of the "few great intellectual and aesthetic treats that these last bad years have offered"; the praise holds true today. Although we have a copy floating around at our Finnegan's Wake reading sessions, it's great to have one to pour over at home (thanks Kim!). In its aptly titled "Introduction to a Strange Subject", the authors admit that "the vast scope and intricate structure of Finnegan's Wake give the book a forbidding aspect of impenetrability". An understatement to be sure, but it's somehow reassuring to realize that it has always been dense and somehow walled by its depth of knowledge, a "baffling jungle, trackless and overgrown with wanton perversities in form and language."

The authors' assertions that "complete understanding is not to be snatched at greedily in one session; indeed, it may never come" bodes well for our group, since we are moving at a rate of just over 3 pages a month, and often feel no closer to understanding anything than when we began. A Skeleton Key, in so much as it is possible, seeks to clarify, decode and generally open up all levels of the novel's meaning.

A 1939 Review of Finnegan's Wake

The following review appeared in the Guardian newspaper in 1939, one of the first 'reviews' of Finnegans Wake. The author felt incapable of "appraising it" at the time, suggesting he needed at least 20 years of intense study to comprehend it fully. This suggests just how difficult a text it continues to be.

The shock of the new
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce - in lieu of review, the Guardian, May 12 1939

Mr Joyce's Finnegans Wake, parts of which have been published as "Work in Progress", does not admit of review. In 20 years' time, with sufficient study and with the aid of the commentary that will doubtless arise, one might be ready for an attempt to appraise it.

The work is not written in English, or in any other language, as language is commonly known. I can detect words made up out of some eight or nine languages, but this must be only a part of the equipment employed. This polyglot element is only a minor difficulty, for Mr Joyce is using language in a new way.

A random example will illustrate: "Margaritomancy! Hyacinthous pervinciveness! Flowers. A cloud. But Bruto and Cassio are ware only of trifid tongues the whispered wilfulness ('tis demonal!) and shadows shadows multiplicating (il folsoletto nel falsoletto col fazzolotto dal fuzzolezzo), totients quotients, they tackle their quarrel."

The easiest way to deal with the book would be to become "clever" and satirical or to write off Mr Joyce's latest volume as the work of a charlatan. But the author is obviously not a charlatan, but an artist of very considerable proportions. I prefer to suspend judgment. If I had had to review Blake's Prophetic Books when they first appeared I would have been forced to a similar decision.

What Mr Joyce is attempting, I imagine, is to employ language as a new medium, breaking down all grammatical usages, all time space values, all ordinary conceptions of context. Compared with this, Ulysses is a first-form primer. In this volume the theme is the language and the language the theme, and a language where every association of sound and free association is exploited. In one of the more lucid passages Mr Joyce appears to be discussing language: "has any usual sort of ornery josser, flat-chested, fortyish, faintly flatulent and given to ratiocination... ever looked sufficiently longly at a quite everyday looking stamped addressed envelope?"

What, it may be asked, is the book about? That, I imagine, is a question which Mr Joyce would not admit. This book is nothing apart from its form, and one might as easily describe in words the theme of a Beethoven symphony.

The clearest object in time in the book is the Liffey, Anna Livia, Dublin's legendary stream, and the most continuous character is HC Earwicker, "Here Comes Everybody": the Liffey as the moment in time and space, and everything, everybody, all time as the terms of reference, back to Adam or Humpty Dumpty, but never away from Dublin.

This seems the suggestion of the musical half-sentence with which the work begins: "River run, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

Who, it may be asked, was Finnegan? Again, I should have been unable to tell, unaided, from Mr Joyce's book. But I gather that there is an Irish story of a contractor who fell and was stretched out for dead. When his friends toasted him he rose at the word "whiskey" and drank with them. In a book where all is considered, this legend, too, has its relevance.

One concluding note. Mr Joyce in a parody of Jung and Freud ("Tung-Toyd") mentioned "Schizo-phrenia". One might imagine that Mr Joyce had used his great powers deliberately to show the language of a schizophrenic mind. He alone could explain his book and, I suppose, he alone review it.
·

Finnegans Wake on Film

Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

Check out the film here:

http://www.ubu.com/film/joyce_wake.html

This 1965 film by Mary Ellen Bute pulses with surrealistic imagery and selected passages from Joyce's text. This was the first attempt to cinematize Finnegans Wake, and was loosely based on a stage version. Bute was considered a pioneer in the field of abstract and animated film. In this adaptation, a television reporter becomes the narrator, and images of nuclear explosions and cavemen are intercut with the wake itself. We discovered it on UbuWeb and projected it on a wall before one of our readings. Often hilarious, it actually brought the words to life in sometimes ingenious ways. To even attempt to make visual sense of Finnegans Wake, Mary Bute should be commended. As a compendium to an oral recitation, the film provides an interesting angle.

This diagram is found in Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's book "Vision in Motion", though was not actually sketched by him. It offers a visual representation of the various levels and cycles present in Finnegans Wake. Since the novel is so complex and multi-layered, the diagram clarifies some of what Joyce is exploring. It shows just how vast and ambitious the book is, allowing a reader to trace the patterns.