Further details and lecture audio can be found at https://soundcloud.com/zak-kell/the-canonical-comedy-of-james

1. ‘Denti Alligator’ and ‘the humours of
Milltown’: The canonical comedy of
James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

2. Declan Kiberd – Ulysses and Us
Working late into the night, Joyce often woke his partner Nora
Barnacle with guffaws at his own prose. Like his Gaelic
forerunners, he felt himself working in a mainly oral tradition.
If anyone couldn’t understand a passage, they should just try
reading it aloud; and if that didn’t work, they should change
their drink. Ulysses, although its author never overtly said so, is
part of the literature of the Gaelic revival, which Joyce saw as
a return to a vibrant medieval world in which sacred and
obscene stood side by side. The medieval was the true spirit
of Europe, he maintained. Even Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was
a rewrite of Boccaccio’s Decameron, as Milton’s Paradise Lost
was a ‘Puritan transcript’ of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and
Shakespeare’s plays the work of ‘an Italianate Englishman’.

3. Frank Kermode – The Sense of an Ending
Men, like poets, rush ‘into the middest,’ in medias
res, when they are born; they also die in mediis
rebus, and to make sense of their span they need
fictive concords with origins and ends, such as
give meaning to lives and to poems. The End
they imagine will reflect their irreducibly
intermediary preoccupations. They fear it, and as
far as we can see have always done so; the End is
a figure for their own deaths.

4. Inferno [I. 1-3]
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
[Half way along the road we have to go,
I found myself obscured in a great forest,
Bewildered, and I knew I had lost the way.]

5. Paradise Lost I. 1-5
OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,

6. Finnegans Wake 3.1-3
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of
shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius
vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and
Environs.

7. Finnegans Wake 628.15-16
A way a lone a last a loved a long the

8. Harold Bloom – The Western Canon
Beatrice is Dante’s knowing, according to Charles Williams, who
had no sympathy for Gnosticism. By knowing he meant the
way from Dante the knower to God the known. Yet Dante did
not intend Beatrice to be his knowing alone. His poem argues
not that each of us is to find a solitary knowing, but that
Beatrice is to play a universal role for all who can find
her, since presumably her intervention for Dante, via Virgil, is
to be unique. The myth of Beatrice, though it is Dante’s
central invention, exists only within his poetry. Its strangeness
cannot truly be seen, because we know of no figure
comparable to Beatrice. Milton’s Urania, his heavenly muse in
Paradise Lost, is not a person, and Milton qualifies her with the
warning remark that it is the meaning, not the name he calls.

9. Paradiso V 1-18
«S’io ti fiammeggio nel caldo d’amore
di là dal modo che ’n terra si vede,
sì che del viso tuo vinco il valore,
non ti maravigliar, ché ciò procede
da perfetto veder, che, come apprende,
così nel bene appreso move il piede.
Io veggio ben sì come già resplende
ne l’intelletto tuo l’etterna luce,
che, vista, sola e sempre amore accende;
e s’altra cosa vostro amor seduce,10
non è se non di quella alcun vestigio,
mal conosciuto, che quivi traluce.
Tu vuo’ saper se con altro servigio,
per manco voto, si può render tanto
che l’anima sicuri di letigio».
Sì cominciò Beatrice questo canto;
e sì com’ uom che suo parlar non spezza,
continüò così ’l processo santo:

10. Paradise V 1-18
[‘If I shine on you in the warmth of love,
So beyond what is to be seen on earth
That I am beyond the strength your eyes can bear,
Do not wonder: it comes from the perfection
Of my sight which, as it apprehends,
And if any other thing seduces your love,
Advances in the apprehended good.
It is nothing other than some trace of that,
Ill-perceived, and shining through that thing.
I see well how the eternal light
Is already glowing in your intellect;
You want to know whether, by some other
service
The sight of it alone sets love burning:
In place of broken vows, such reparation
Can be made that the soul is safe from mischief.’
So Beatrice at the beginning of the canto;
And like one who proceeds without interruption
Continued in this manner the sacred discourse:]

11. Finnegans Wake 196.1-5
O
Tell me all about
Anna Livia! I want to hear all
About Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia?
Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all.
Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear.

12. Finnegans Wake 518.2-7
Language this allsfare for the loathe of Marses
ambiviolent about it. Will you swear all the same
you saw their shadows a hundred foot
later, struggling diabolically over this, that and
the other, their virtues pro and his principality
con, near the Ruins, Drogheda Street, and kicking
up the devil’s own dust for the Milesian wind?

13. Conclusion