“Finnegans Wake: What It’s All About” — Anthony Burgess

Read Anthony Burgess’s essay on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. From said essay—

In his dream HCE, as we shall now call him, tries to make the whole of history swallow up his guilt for him. His initials are made to stand for the generality of sinful man, and they are expanded into slogans like “Here Comes Everybody” and “Haveth Childers Everywhere”. After all, sexual guilt presupposes a certain creative, or procreative, vitality, and a fall only comes to those who are capable of an erection. The unquenchable vitality appears in “our Human Conger Eel” (despite the “down, wantons, down” of the eel-pie-maker in King Lear); the erector of great structures is seen in “Howth Castle and Environs”. From the point of view of the ultimate dreamer of the dream, though (the author himself), “HCE” has a structural task to perform. As a chemical formula (H2CE3) or as a genuine vocable (“hec” or “ech” or even “Hecech”) it holds the dream down to its hero, is sewn to it like a mono­gram-HCE: his dream. But HCE has, so deep is his sleep, sunk to a level of dreaming in which he has become a collective being rehearsing the collective guilt of man. Man falls, man rises so that he can fall again; the sequence of falling and rising goes on till doomsday. The record of this, expressed in the lives of great men, in the systems they make and unmake and remake, is what we call history.

2 thoughts on ““Finnegans Wake: What It’s All About” — Anthony Burgess”

  1. https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/story/10185/

    See the two Extracts, here’s the first:

    //Goodness is a matter of common sense, something required by the community, but truth and beauty remain values – totally useless and the only totally human things we’re capable of pursuing. This is the great age of communications, but what the hell are we trying to communicate about? Certainly not reality. The pleasures and diversions of the flesh are delightful, and, if God had anything to do with them, I’d thank God for them. The organization of societies is fascinating. Sport is thrilling. But none of these has anything to do with reality. What man must recognize as a human duty is the pursuit of what, behind the mess of phenomenon and delusion and multiplicity, really and ultimately exists – the final monad, the intellectual intimation that there is a God, the bare and bony idea with no nonsense about benevolence and justice. And, through the pursuit of beauty, he may gain not an intimation that God exists (which is for the scientific or philosophical intellect), but an indirect experience of the quiddity or whatness of God. This is what education should prepare us for. Unfortunately it doesn’t. And the television programmes and the films and the Daily Mirror are in the service of unreality, the hiding of the nature of the human duty and the doling out of anodynes as a substitute. If I wanted to use the term “evil”, I’d say that that kind of smothering is evil. If you want Christian language, I’d almost say that to discourage the seeking after reality is to commit the sin against the Holy Ghost.//

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