The lack of an apostrophe in Finnegans Wake is intended; it is the story of Humanity (‘Finnegan’ is ‘EveryPerson’) waking up, or coming to consciousness.

 

 

Some quotes about Finnegans Wake:

 

 “If the world burned down, the history of human consciousness could be reconstructed from a single copy of Finnegans Wake.”  - Mythologist Joseph Campbell

 

“I’m going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool, based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until centuries after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work.”         - Science fiction writer Philip K Dick

 

“LSD is the lazy-man’s Finnegans Wake.”  - Philosopher Marshal McLuhan

 

 

“An understanding of Finnegans Wake is not in any way exhaustive… Finnegans Wake involves the reader in a complicated network of signification which is never completed. Finnegans Wake does not ask for an interpretation that will identify it but for another set of elements to continue its work.” – Prof. Colin McCabe

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"If our society should go to smash tomorrow (which, as Joyce implies, it may) one could find all the pieces, together with the forces that broke them, in Finnegans Wake. The book is a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programmes, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the past millenium. And here, too, we will find the love that reanimates this debris ... Through notes that finally become tuneable to our ears, we hear James Joyce uttering his resilient, all-enjoying, all-animating 'Yes', the Yes of things to come, a Yes from beyond every zone of disillusionment, such as few have had the heart to utter."

-A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joseph Campbell

 

 

 The Finnegan Wakes Film Project

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The goal of this project is “to continue the Work” of Finnegans Wake.  This is where Joyce intended Wake's ultimate meaning to be found – to ignite the creative and artistic instinct in humanity in its search for wholeness.  He also, urged for the book not to be read, but to be listened to being read aloud, and to “listen for the lyric” he carefully embedded in the prose.

 

 

The Finnegan Wakes Project seeks to set the entire 628 pages of Joyce’s epic to film. The goal is to make Wake’s Word flesh again - accessible and alive for Everybody.

 

The format is to invite anyone and everyone to perform a page of Wake, accompanied by THE piece of music that has most impacted upon the reader’s life.  When sufficient performances are filmed for a chapter, it will be edited and published here on our homepage.

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This will culminate in a 17-episode serialized version of Wake (one per chapter) where one and all can watch the masterpiece, and listen to it come alive to music - as Joyce prescribed.

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As the project progresses, there will be an interactive website where everybody, anywhere in the "Chaosmos", can themselves perform a page to music and upload it, staking their starring role in the greatest story of all!

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Finnegan Wakes’ grande design is to set in motion a never-ending, ever-evolving, living, breathing, pulsating, interactive portal to Wake. New performances will replace older ones in the online edition of the film.

 

It’s an invitation to frivolously drop a toe on the daunting Wake terrain, and have fun doing so while also birthing an utterly unique piece of art. And it is an opportunity to partake in the most improbable: Finnegan Wakes – The Film.

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Welcome.