by Allan Adler (copyright Allan Adler 2000)
The second meeting of Mathematical Culture took place on May 22, 2000 at Barnes and Noble's cafe on Campbell Lane in Bowling Green, KY and was attended by four people, including myself, and I feel it went well. The main book we were concerned with was Finnegans Wake, with Abbott's classic Flatland as a second topic that we actually never got to. Hopefully we will have an opportunity to discuss it at the next meeting.
It is difficult to explain Finnegans Wake to someone with a sentence that begins, "Finnegans Wake is a ...", because there is no satisfactory way to end the sentence. Since one picture is worth a thousand words, I tried to illustrate what it is like to read Finnegans Wake by showing a transparency of the cover of the first issue of my sporadic journal Labyrinths.
The design on the cover of LABYRINTHS is a spiral spelling out the word "LABYRINTHS" over and over again, with the size of the letters increasing faster than the radius of the spiral. The result is that, far from the center, the design appears undifferentiated, while somewhat closer to the center one can pick out fragments of the word "LABYRINTHS" before getting lost. Finnegans Wake is similar in that here and there it appears to make some sense and then one gets lost. Scholars have written volumes on the little bits of sense it makes and the ways that the little bits of sense can be organized into larger points of view. They have found the most obscure references and delved into Joyce's own notebooks to find out what he had in mind. These scholarly publications are quite useful, but the beginner ought to resist the urge to plunge into them before making his/her own effort to study the book. One of the goals of this meeting was to explain how to do that and I would like to include here a few remarks about that.
Finnegans Wake begins, "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." If one looks at the last sentence of the book, one sees that it reads, "A way a lone a last a loved a long the". It might seem rude to end a book in the middle of a sentence, without even a punctuation mark, but let us put the first sentence at the end of the last sentence and see what happens. We get: "A way a lone a last a loved a long the 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." It sort of fits: the book literally goes in a circle!
Since a circle has no beginning and no end, any place in the book is as good a place to start as any other. Accordingly, you can open up the book wherever you like and try to make sense out of it. This is a pleasant activity that can be carried out with tiny investments of time and effort. Moreover, such investments are often rewarded with serendipitous discovery. Don't insist on understanding everything: merely understanding one little detail is a significant accomplishment. You can always go back for more later.
You don't ever have to try to read the book from cover to cover unless for some reason you want to, e.g. to prove you can or to consolidate what you have learned. Even if you get to the end, you will probably find it necessary to keep going, through the beginning again and onward. As you do, you'll understand it better, just as you understand LABYRINTHS pattern better as you follow the spiral into its center.
Since unreadable portions of Finnegans Wake are easy to find, let me draw your attention to a few of the more lucid portions (in some cases, I made up the names):
(1) Joyce's version of "The ant and the grasshopper", beginning on p.414
(2) The "Shem the Penman episode", beginning on p.169
(3) The dialogue of Mutt and Jute, beginning on p.16
(4) Jack and Buddhism, a fragment on p.18
(5) The Anna Livia Plurabelle episode, beginning on p.196
(6) Illicit relations among the Romans, beginning on p.572
(7) A legal case, beginning with the last two lines on p.573
(8) Syncretism, consisting of the first paragraph on p.104
Although there are references to mathematics sprinkled throughout the book, a concentration of them can be found starting on p.282 and on p.293. Especially striking is the diagram on p.293, which mathematically literate readers will recognize as the construction of an equilateral triangle, the first proposition in Book I of Euclid's Elements. Incidentally, an excellent edition of Euclid's Elements, edited by Thomas Heath, is in stock at Barnes and Noble. If you hunt through the first volume, you can find the relevant diagram.
Joyce not only has the diagram for the construction of an equilateral triangle, he also has an explanation of the construction in his own prose, starting on page 294, with lots of interruptions.
I would like to conclude these brief remarks by mentioning that, in order to prepare for this meeting, I made a serious attempt to read Finnegans Wake from cover to cover. I got as far as p.305 by the time of the meeting. As I write these minutes, I am on p.367 and I plan to continue until I have finished the book. As I read, I am taking notes of my observations, which I plan to record in more detail and make available to the public in a suitable medium.
Finally, let me mention two valuable electronic resources for people who wish to learn more about Finnegans Wake:
(1) there is an email discussion group for Finnegans Wake, in which they try to read one page a day. To subscribe, send the message:
subscribe FWREAD YOURNAME
to listproc@lists.utah.edu
(2) The following slightly obsolete website:Caveman's FAQ
To see the advertisement that was used for the second meeting, click on: