Wake In Progress

Thanks for visiting

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 19:00:00 +0000

Hello! Thank you for visiting this site and checking out my project. If the only thing you love is James Joyce, then I have some unfortunate news. Unless an eccentric millionaire steps in as a benevolent patron for this project (could it be you?) my other commitments make it impossible for me to focus on Joyce-related illustration for the time being.

However! I am working on another project that I’d love for you to see. It’s an ongoing serialised comic called The City, produced in collaboration with Melanie Amaral. The City is a dark comedy about the collapse of civilisation, which follows the misadventures of a diverse but equally doomed cast of characters in the aftermath of World War I. Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men, called it “an elegant noir labyrinth constructed of proletarian dreams.”

You can see samples of The City at the website here, where you can also buy copies or download PDFs of both issues for as little as $0!

So I hope you’ll check it out. But if you’re here for Joyce, then welcome, and just scroll down and eat your fill.

Ulysses Chapter 1: Telemachus

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 18:33:00 +0000

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Ulysses Chapter 13: Nausicaa

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 20:38:00 +0000

And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!

Ulysses Chapter 6: Hades

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 21:20:00 +0000

Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland’s hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?

Ulysses Chapter 2: Nestor

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 18:57:00 +0000

—I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

Ulysses Chapter 12: Cyclops

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 14:29:00 +0000

And says he:
—Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.

Ulysses Chapter 8: Lestrygonians

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Mon, 15 Jun 2015 19:31:00 +0000

His heart astir he pushed in the door of the Burton restaurant. Stink gripped his trembling breath: pungent meatjuice, slush of greens. See the animals feed.

Obviously I’m not going to get through the book before tomorrow, but I’m enjoying myself, so I’ll keep going anyway.

Ulysses Chapter 4: Calypso

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Mon, 08 Jun 2015 20:19:00 +0000

—There’s a smell of burn, she said. Did you leave anything on the fire?
—The kidney! he cried suddenly.
He fitted the book roughly into his inner pocket and, stubbing his toes against the broken commode, hurried out towards the smell, stepping hastily down the stairs with a flurried stork’s legs.

Here’s another scene from Ulysses (featuring a surprisingly controversial kitchen door). I’m trying to develop a lot more looseness in the drawings than I usually manage, because Richard Thompson is amazing, and I want to be amazing.

Ulysses Chapter 9: Scylla and Charybdis

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 14:00:00 +0000

Here’s another Ulysses illustration, this one featuring Stephen again, plus AE, Buck Mulligan and a completely invented John Eglinton (I couldn’t find a photograph).

Ulysses chapter 3: Proteus

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Thu, 28 May 2015 21:29:00 +0000

I hope to have some big Finnegans Wake-related news ready for you next week, but in the meantime, I’ve started doing illustrations of Ulysses for this year’s Bloomsday. Will I finish every chapter in time? Let’s find out! Here’s my first attempt: chapter three, Proteus.

Mookse and Gripes: winsome wonsome ways

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Thu, 14 May 2015 18:56:00 +0000

I’m so close to finishing this!

Mookse and Gripes: Nuée! Nuée!

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Fri, 01 May 2015 19:44:00 +0000

A hundred thousand times welcome!

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 03:29:00 +0000

If you came here from the Guardian, thank you for dropping by! I hope you’ll take a look through the archive (on the left) or the index, maybe glance at the Finnegans Wake reading resources, and please leave a comment. I love comments.

I’ve got big plans in the near future involving a Mookse and a Gripes, so I do hope you’ll be back.

Also, are you a student or academic who has made use of this project? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

The Mookse and the Gripes: Moo and Gri

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 20:33:00 +0000

The Mookse and the Gripes: newwhere so airly

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 19:05:00 +0000

No Maps: Finnegans Wake and Fiction

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 17:48:00 +0000

Is Finnegans Wake a novel? This was the subject of a discussion I had a couple of weeks ago, and my initial response was perhaps a little weak: if it’s not a novel, what on earth is it?

It’s tempting to see the Wake as a complete literary outlier. I mean, let’s face it, it’s pretty weird. But it uses all the same techniques as any other novel; it’s only the way they’re applied that’s unique. That’s what makes it so fascinating. It’s like the Centre Pompidou: it’s a novel with its insides turned out.

* * *

The author Julian Barnes has said that the working title for his first novel, eventually called Metroland, was No Weather:

...because I was going to put absolutely no references to the weather into it, having long held a readerly prejudice about “significant” weather (storms, bright spells, rainbows) in fiction.

I respect Barnes’ contempt for what he sees as an intolerable cliché. However, I’m fascinated by the phenomenon of significant weather, which I think demonstrates what the dream-world of Finnegans Wake shares with even the most apparently banal of realist fiction. A character is sad, and it rains. She becomes happy, and the sun comes out. The connection is obvious, but it’s worth spelling out. In a fictional story, even a so-called “realistic” one, the boundary between the physical and the psychological is a permeable membrane, in which the emotions of the story infect its characters’ external world.

A less meteorological example that always stuck with me was in The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. The protagonist, Nick, receives a postcard from Gerald, the man in whose house he lives:

He had a sign-off that could have been “Love” but could have been “Yours” or even, absurdly, “Hello” – so you didn’t quite know where you stood with him.

But Gerald has not purposefully developed an ambiguous way to sign off his letters. Nick’s anxiety about his relationship with Gerald has infected the postcard: his superficially realistic world is shaped by his own emotions. In a novel like this, it’s easy to overlook the proximity of fiction to dreams, but Finnegans Wake makes it impossible, because it breaks down the barrier between reality and emotion altogether, creating a fictional world in which nothing is stable and everything is significant.

The director Alfred Hitchcock famously coined the theory of the “MacGuffin”, an object of desire for the film’s protagonist, whose specific nature – state secrets, letters of transit, a mysterious briefcase – is arbitrary. The same law applies to all the other details of the fictional world: the setting, the period, the nature of the characters, and so on. Kazuo Ishiguro has talked about how he toyed with setting his new novel in Yugoslavia or post-war France before settling on a mythic Arthurian England. In conventional storytelling, we respect the accidental properties of the story’s reality as if they were both true and necessary. Readers of unaccountably popular nerd fiction go even further, fetishising those details in encyclopedic wikis and world maps as if they were the actual point of the story, and praising authors for their skill in “world-building.”

Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, plays delightedly with the arbitrariness of fictional details, frequently altering a thing’s incidental qualities from one paragraph to the next. Over the course of a few pages in chapter three, the narrator makes reference to a single object as, in turn, a bottle, a fender (or fireplace guard), a letter, a girl, and a coffin. Joyce the former Jesuit turns transubstantiation into a poetic device.

* * *

Personally, I’m not very interested in world-building. If I write a novel, its working title will be “No Maps.” For me, the most interesting fiction, whether it be experimental, genre, or realist, always treats its reality as something as malleable and subjective as a dream. Marilynne Robinson, whose excellent novels are strictly naturalistic, describes her writing this way:

When I write fiction, I suppose my attempt is to simulate the integrative work of a mind perceiving and reflecting, drawing upon a culture, memory, conscience, belief, or assumption, circumstance, fear, and desire – a mind shaping the moment of experience and response and then reshaping them both as narrative, holding one thought against another for the effect of affinity or contrast, evaluating and rationalizing, feeling compassion, taking offense.

It’s that second half of her process, “reshaping them both as narrative,” that unites Robinson and Joyce, revealing them as colleagues with a common purpose. A great story is never really like life. Reality is just the raw material for an intellectual-excitement engine whose first model is, as Finnegans Wake shows us, the dream.

The Mookse and the Gripes: efter thousand yaws

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 19:53:00 +0000

Finnegans Wake!

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Sat, 28 Feb 2015 22:44:00 +0000

Due to extreme stupidity on my part, the site was down for the last week or so, while I was on holiday. But normal service has been restored! Tell your friends!

Some more thoughts on reading Finnegans Wake

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Sat, 24 Jan 2015 19:32:00 +0000

How do you read Finnegans Wake? This has to be the single most troubling question of the whole book. In my last post I talked about the idea of “experiencing”it without necessarily understanding it, which is certainly an important aspect of Joyce’s composition, but it’s hardly a satisfying response to the question. After all, you’d have to be crazy to uncomprehendingly slog through a book of over 600 pages on the vague promise of some intangible psychic reward. So how do we read it? Or to aim a little lower, how do we define the appropriate attitude of a reader to this book in a way that I can summarise in a short blog post?

In his essay on Joyce’s as-yet-unfinished Work in Progress, Samuel Beckett suggested a different word for the process: “apprehending,” by which he meant reading not for the meaning of the words themselves but for the associations produced by their sounds:

It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself... When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep. (See the end of ‘Anna Livia’) When the sense is dancing, the words dance.

I recommend you read whole thing, where he gives a great example of drunk language producing the idea of drunkenness.

But there’s still something missing. There’s a certain passivity to Beckett’s description, less so than in my description of “experiencing,” but still much more than anyone who’s made a serious attempt to read the book would recognise. Trying to follow the flow of sounds feels less like following the current of a river, and more like tumbling down a waterfall. You have to slow down, and make your descent slowly at your own pace or you’ll be drowned.

In his excellent book on Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, John Bishop describes reading it in very different terms from Beckett: not as a poem, but “as a rebus, a crossword puzzle,” a dense series of interconnected riddles to be solved through a combination of research and free association. “Everything manifest on the printed page of the Wake points to a second, concealed text.” (To which I would only add that one concealed text might be a conservative estimate.)

So which is it: do we experience, apprehend, or decipher? Well, obviously, it’s all three, isn’t it? (And probably more that I haven’t even thought of.) As Bishop exhaustively argues, Finnegans Wake is a “nightynovel,” addressed not to our conscious waking minds, but to the unconscious mind that wakes when we’re asleep. At the same time, it’s a myth, addressed not to the rational minds of sophisticated tea-drinking newspaper readers, but to the primitive consciousness of prehistoric humans. (Joyce, following Giambattista Vico, believed the two to be equal: that before the invention of reason, our waking minds were ruled by the same emotional drives that direct our dreams.)

Reading Finnegans Wake means learning to read – and more importantly to think – in a new way, in a way that’s both alien and deeply human. It isn’t, like a cryptic crossword, a hollow intellectual exercise, but an arduous and rewarding exercise in empathy, which challenges us to understand at the same time an important but nigh-incomprehensible aspect of our own mental life, and a vast and forgotten portion of our intellectual history as human beings.

Why understand when you can reenact?

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 20:50:00 +0000

In Joyce’s day, the Catholic mass that he attended as a child – and occasionally as an adult, for aesthetic appreciation – was given in Latin. You can read part of the rite of the Eucharist at the beginning of Ulysses: “Introibo ad altare Dei,” says Buck Mulligan, as he pretends to bless his shaving soap. In theory, everyone who had done their catechism should have learnt the parts of the mass and their meanings. But, in practice, I wonder how many congregants really understood what was going on, and how many simply memorised when to stand and when to kneel?

When we read a book – or a newspaper, or a post-it note, for that matter – there’s one question that always occurs first in our minds. “What does it mean?” Depending on the complexity of what we’re reading, we might not even have time to form the question in our minds before it’s answered. When we read Finnegans Wake, we might grow tired of the sound of our own voices saying it. But in the history of human thought and writing and speaking and singing, there is a vast and rarely thought-about tradition of ritual storytelling, in which understanding is the last thing on anyone’s mind.

The myth of Osiris was a story about a god with a name and a family, who experiences certain events, dies and comes back to life. So far, so much like Harry Potter. But we know the story of Osiris because it was written down not as an entertainment, but as a model, or a series of stage directions. As the god of the dead, Osiris was the archetype of all dead people, and his story was written by the ancient Egyptians again and again and again, not as his story, but as that of each individual corpse, who, simply by virtue of being dead, partook of his name and identity. In the Book of the Dead written for a scribe named Ani, he is referrred to as “The Osiris Ani”, and the story of Osiris’ journey to the Underworld is Ani’s story.

Countless ancient myths operated in this way, but the best known today must be that same rite of the Eucharist from the Christian mass. The priest recites the story of Jesus’ Last Supper while reenacting Jesus’ actions: blessing the bread and the wine and giving it to his apostles, “that you may enjoy everlasting life.” The priest becomes Jesus and his congregation the apostles. The purpose of the story is not to be understood, but to facilitate the blessing, an essentially magical operation that the priest conducts by channelling Jesus.

This approach to reading was certainly on Joyce’s mind during the writing of Finnegans Wake, and can go some way to accounting for its difficulty: that it’s meant primarily not to be understood, but to be experienced. I don’t know if that’s a helpful way to look at it, but I encourage you to give it a try, and to think about what “magical” operation you might be conducting when you channel the life and dreams of Here Comes Everybody.

Page 34: a pair of dainty maidservants

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 20:49:00 +0000

Page 33: annoying welsh fusiliers

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 22:12:00 +0000

Page 38: our cad's bit of strife

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 20:23:00 +0000

Page 37: ere the hour of the twattering of bards

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 06:44:00 +0000

A cry for help

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Crowe) — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 20:14:00 +0000

I’ve been working on this project for a while, at home by myself, when I should be doing work that pays or playing with my son... and I’ve been thinking for some time now about the possibility of turning this project into some kind of graduate project, but I’ve held back from applying anywhere due to a debilitating combination of inertia and fear.

But that ends now! So I’m asking for help.

I know I get a lot of visitors from many college campuses; I don’t know why, possibly my work has been mentioned in an influential psychiatric textbook. Are you, yes YOU, an academic? Do you have any advice you’d like to give me? Have you ever used my work in an academic context that you’d like to tell me about? I want to hear it! Please email me at stephen (at) invisibledot.net! And thanks.