Description
Navigating between philosophy and literature towards an ecological way of being, this talk explores the philosophical art of Irish author James Joyce, focusing mostly on his last work, Finnegans Wake (1939). Undoubtedly one of literature’s most daunting artefacts, Finnegans Wake is a deeply materialist and mystical experience and performance of both the word and void in human existence joined as ‘woid’. Joyce’s previous masterpiece, the book of a single day, Ulysses (1922), saw history as a nightmare and attempted to capture space and time within the confines of literature. Finnegans Wake, as the book of a single night, the ‘book of the dark’, approaches history as a sham/shame/history of naming and interpretation - where the nightmare becomes a ‘nightmaze’, and the book a primary reality and ever-present poetics of itself. Halfway through Finnegans Wake, Joyce inserts the words ‘In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance’, transforming the opening sentence from The Gospel of Saint John from the past into the present tense, and modifying ‘beginning’ with a ‘bug’ (a small insect or bacteria, a hidden microphone, and/or the verb ‘to annoy’). Instead of ‘middle’, we are thrown into the ‘muddle’ which suggests confusion and/or dark moist earth. Finally, Joyce’s philosophical prose-poem should be approached as a ‘sounddance’, where the mutating words contain multiple meanings and become the notes for our voices to speak aloud. As Joyce writes in Finnegans Wake: ‘Do you hear what I’m seeing?’| Period | 10 Jan 2024 |
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| Held at | Goa University, India |
| Degree of Recognition | International |