Friday, April 18, 2014

A Finnegans Wake moment

Here's a moment in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake that I like--it really calls to mind True Detective's type of Southern gothic and that idea of Faulkner's, combined with a feeling of Poe, I think. And the elegance of Mads Mikkelsen on the Hannibal series.

Isn't part of their beauty the beginning decay in the heat of oppressive summer, the slow cool and winding down of autumn, the approaching ominous chill in the air? This passage has that sense as well. It's a kind of prose-poetry that I sometimes enjoy, despite usually being old fashioned in my taste.

It's from book III, page 410 I believe, read more here:
[...]
 Almost might I say of myself, while keeping out of crime,
I am now becoming about fed up be going circulating about them
new hikler's highways like them nameless souls, ercked and skorned
and grizzild all over, till it's rusty October in this bleak forest
and was veribally complussed by thinking of the crater of some
noted volcano or the Dublin river or the catchalot trouth subsi-
dity as away out or to isolate i from my multiple Mes on the
spits of Lumbage Island or bury meself,
[...]

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