Joyce's Finnegans Wake: The Curse of Kabbalah

Volume 2

by John P. Anderson

Share/Bookmark

View First 25 Pages: (free download)

Synopsis

This second volume continues this non-academic author's ground-breaking word-by-word analysis of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Joyce's last blessing on mankind. In chapters 1.3 and 1.4, which are covered by this volume, the Kabbalah-based analysis peers into the darkness of the Egyptian Land of the Dead and corresponding Book of the Dead. These chapters are joined at the hip by Egyptian death-obsessed theosophy and increase the font on Joyce’s principal subject matter—the loss of human potential to fear and dependency. Joyce finds Kabbalah-cursed paralysis in ancient Egyptian religion as part of his effort to show the same paralysis in nearly all religions and to champion the independent individual.

In these chapters, the search for meaning in the god/mankind relationship serves up several father and son stories. This selection is based on the fundamental importance in Egyptian religion of the story of father Osiris and son Horus, and the corresponding importance in Christian religion of Jesus as

About the Author

This non-academic author, a retired lawyer and lifelong Joyce reader, brings new approaches in an attempt to find the deep meaning of each of Joyce's episodes and the novel as a whole. The intended scope of this effort, the complete Joyce, is unique in an area monopolized by more narrowly-focused academics. "I found that the best way to understand these novels deeply was to write about them, so I have since 1995 been communing with these novels and writing literary analysis books about them as art forms, how they work as art."