Finnegans Wake: Chest Cee!

Facing a work this rich, this enigmatic, a work that has both given careers to academics and baffled readers for generations, it's a rough pitch for a casual and fun reading group.

Why tackle a work as famously complex as Finnegans Wake? Because it is in wrestling with the most challenging texts that we find the greatest rewards. Joyce’s masterpiece is not just a book to be read; it is a riddle to be unraveled, a dream to be deciphered, and a feast of language to be savored. This paragraph was generated by GPT4o, I would never...

How? In order to tackle the chaos, we'll go chapter by chapter. At the meetup we'll collaborate our best attempt at a summary & weave something together. Then we'll go through and unweave and de-pun and take closer looks, etc.

A̶n̶d̶ d̶o̶n̶'t̶ f̶e̶e̶l̶ l̶i̶k̶e̶ y̶o̶u̶ h̶a̶v̶e̶ t̶o̶ r̶e̶a̶d̶ a̶l̶l̶ o̶r̶ a̶n̶y̶ o̶f̶ t̶h̶e̶ a̶n̶n̶o̶t̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ o̶r̶ h̶a̶v̶e̶ a̶ t̶o̶t̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ f̶i̶r̶m̶ g̶r̶i̶p̶ o̶n̶ a̶n̶y̶ o̶f̶ i̶t̶.

For the third meeting we'll be discussing the third episode of Finnegans Wake which has no official name. The chapter is around 27 pages long in most editions. Since it's not always clear where the chapters begin and end, here is a breakdown:

Part I Chapter 3 begins on page 48 with "Chest Cee! 'Sdense! Corpo di barragio!" and ends with "Drain. Sdops." on page 74.

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Here are some extra links if you are interested in going deeper:

Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury (a searchable collection of 97,063 notes on FW):
http://fweet.org/pages/fw_smap.php

Using this link format the number will correspond to the page in the book:
http://fweet.org/sim.pl?048

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riverrun.org.uk (has archives of A Wake Newslitter (ACN) + A Finnegans Wake Circular (AFWC) + much more):
https://www.riverrun.org.uk/joycetools.html

This fweet page has a list of interesting AWN + AFWC articles you can find at riverrun: http://fweet.org/pages/fw_clst.php

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The James Joyce Digital Archive (Drafts—May be useful for getting a better understanding)
https://jjda.ie/f/fwhome.htm

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Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom (only exists on an archive of his old blog site—there is no better resource for Joyce): https://web.archive.org/web/20080924064902/http://robotwisdom.com/jaj/fwake/

General Joyce Portal: https://web.archive.org/web/20110606054055/http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/index.html

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Green’s Dictionary of Slang (the largest historical dictionary of English slang):
https://greensdictofslang.com/browse/

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Some books that might be helpful:

Third Census of Finnegans Wake - Adaline Glasheen - pdf is downloadable here: https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/AXDQ4VQC3DV5T28D

Annotations to Finnegans Wake - Roland McHugh - Keyed to most editions. Only the Wordsworth appears to be out of sync.

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake - Joseph Campbell & Henry Morton Robinson - Very early attempt at summarizing and glossing.