(217-218) Yesterday's reading marked the end of the first of the four books of the Wake. Since there's two blank pages in between books (well, one page does have the "II" signifying that the next book's coming up, but you get the point), I figured I'd spend today's Wake time taking a step back and doing a quick survey of where we've been.
Book I has eight chapters. In the first, we got the introduction for the entire Wake, setting forth Finnegan as the precursor/parallel of HCE. The second chapter in a sense presented HCE's origin story, telling us about his background and how he fell, ultimately culminating in "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly." Chapter three picks up where the previous chapter left off, detailing the fallout surrounding HCE's public disgrace and ending with HCE asleep in his "doge." In the fourth chapter, we see HCE's burial and learn about what has happened following his demise. As many commentators have explained, these four chapters fit nicely into Vico's cycle of human existence: The first chapter deals Finnegan, the prehistoric god (the age of gods), the second with HCE and his exploits (the age of kings), the third with society's handling of HCE (the age of democracy), and the fourth with the resulting vaccum and return to the beginning (the age of chaos, or the ricorso).
The second half of Book I shifts the focus away from HCE and toward his family. Chapter five provides the full introduction to ALP. Chapter six delves into all of the primary characters of the Wake in a question-and-answer format. Shem (and by implication, his brother Shaun) is the focus of the seventh chapter, and the eighth chapter returns to the subject of ALP and the family in general.
And so, tomorrow we'll move forward, and embark on our journey through Book II of Finnegans Wake. I'm psyched.
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