Stop Following Me, Wake

Week 3, April 12-19, pages 31-43

I imagine Joyce constructed Finnegans Wake as something of a reflective polyhedron. It's a many-sided shape, and it's surfaces bounce meanings back and forth from one side to another. Once you pick up on a possible meaning, you start to see its image flashing throughout the shape.

This shape may or may not be what Joyce
had in mind when he was writing the Wake

What happens to the reader is, you see something in a word or a phrase which suggests a particular line of thinking, and suddenly all the words on the page begin to light up with similar or related meanings.

Now, Joyce put a lot into the book.  A lot.  He put an encyclopedia's worth of information into it. But he also constructed it in a way that lets the reader add in her own thoughts and prejudices, and find within its pages validation for that point of view. There's something infectious about this way of thinking. Once you start looking at every word and seeing similar sounding words with subterranean connections of meaning, you can't stop. It seeps into your everyday thinking.

Living with a three year old, and his evolving sense of language, doesn't help. The other day my son, concerned I was not wearing my glasses, said to me, "Where are your guesses, your glasses?" As in, you need your glasses or you're just guessing at what you're seeing? And then, before he went down for bed, he said, "Sleep dreams, Daddy." He meant "sweet dreams," I think -- or maybe he didn't. Maybe he was hoping I'd get a good night's sleep and have plenty of "sleep dreams."

And then there's this: I was reading an article on the new sci-fi movie Ex Machina when I came to the following segment about the AI robot named Ava.

[Ava's] face is perfectly symmetrical, a flawless teardrop of flesh pasted onto a reflective chrome skull. Her body is rather unnecessarily female, considering that machine intelligence is ostensibly genderless. But in Ex Machina, femininity is a tactic; just as, a few years ago, in the real world, a chatbot “passed” the Turing test by tricking its interlocutors into believing it was a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy named Eugene. Ava’s girlish affectations are designed to destabilize Caleb and distract him from his task. And since her consciousness is written in the language of human networks, she is all the women of the human race at once. And not a woman at all. And both.

All the women of the human race at once? Is this Anna Livia Plurabelle, also know as ALP, the wife of HCE and the female presence that dominates large portions of Finnegans Wake?

What a rabbit hole...