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Notes from Under- Ground Notes from Under- ground by David Rose Cryptogrammic Cryptogams: Fungi in Finnegans Wake There is a certain parallel between the collection of Myxomycetes and the exegesis of Finnegans Wake. In both cases the trick is to acquire an instinct for the potentially most profitable areas to search. – Roland McHugh, The Finnegans Wake Experience1 magine a book, written in English yet Anna Livia (ALP) is the River Liffey, the publication of Ulysses (1922), the incorporating dozens of languages, which flows through Dublin, Ireland. indubitable masterpiece of twentieth- whose constant demand of the reader The Wake takes place at night, and the century novels. Joyce once commented, Iis the need to look up the meaning of language strongly partakes of dream. “The demand that I make of my reader nearly every word. One may seem to So strongly that pausing to recover the is that he should devote his whole life to know the words; they are familiar…yet meanings embedded in each word and reading my works.”2 This is a bit more largely unfamiliar. Strange constructions sentence becomes much like trying devotion than most would care to award like hierarchitectitiptitoploftical and to remember the shred of a dream one author, even if he is James Joyce. But cryptoconchoidsiphonostomata erupt on the verge of its ebbing away from Ulysses and the Wake are extraordinary into this de-realized wordscape with memory. The Wake has been dismissed books, each requiring more careful unforgiving regularity. The words appeal as word salad, and its reputation as study than the typical reader ordinarily both to eye and to ear, but the overall linguistic gobbledygook has brought cares to make. The Wake, in particular, effect is one of befuddlement, hypnosis, forth as much scorn from detractors requires a relentless microanalysis and or perhaps delirium tremens. Welcome as passionate devotion from admirers. simultaneous encyclopedic telescoping to the world of Finnegans Wake. The Without question, Finnegans Wake is one for meaning that is dizzying in the story? If story there be, it involves of the most sublime and exasperating extreme when grappling with a text of an Irish barkeep named Humphrey adventures in reading, and anyone who such broad interconnectedness and deep Chimpden Earwicker, his wife Anna Livia enjoys the art of reading should try it on ambiguity. Finnegans Wake is circular: Plurabelle, their sons Shem and Shaun, for size. water flowing to the ocean and returning and their daughter Issy, the Rainbow Girl. James Joyce spent seventeen years to source. With meanings smeared Earwicker (coded as HCE) is Everyman. writing Finnegans Wake in the wake of polysemically across every word and FUNGI Volume 4:1 Winter 2011 23 sentence, the oceanic interconnectedness reader), it is tantalizing to mull over the episode were low-cost housing units of all and everything in the Wake fungal references therein to ask if Joyce (shaped like mushrooms, presumably) becomes a predominant key to making was really up to something, mycologically erected for the Dublin Artisans’ sense of it. Yet the operant structure of speaking. One writer has insisted that Dwellings located near Phoenix Park, the Wake is reminiscent of the internet the Wake is nothing more (or less) than which still holds claim to being the and of fungal mycelium – vast networks a treatise on fly-fishing – to everyone largest urban park in Europe.7 Phoenix of threadlike process lacking a center his own hobbyhorse. Murray Gell-Mann Park was once a royal deer park; to Joyce and leading everywhere. In fact, when pinched the word quark (383.01) from it was a large fungopark where a shrine the internet first reached a critical mass the Wake and revolutionized particle of Mount Mu (51.19-20) marked the of popularity in the mid-1990s, Joyceans physics with it, and John Cage re- spot at which the tumptytumtoes (3.21) were quick to realize the potential for circulated the Wake through his own of the giant Finnegan protruded like hyperlinking the text of Finnegans quarky mesostics in Writing through Ptychogaster from the roots of a Tumtum Wake in ways that would streamline Finnegans Wake and several aleatory tree. The telltale fungi of Finnegans Wake our probing its interconnectivity. Why? compositions. Cage’s Roaratorio, for indeed crop up at the very beginning Because Finnegans Wake was already example, might serve as the audiobook of of the book, and they are, significantly, hyperlinked! Rhizomatic Joyce had Finnegans Wake, and his Mushroom Book related to fermentation and decay: anticipated hypertext by seven decades. begins straight off by juxtaposing a recipe rot a peck of pa’s malt (3.12). Rotting Marshall McLuhan claimed the Wake for Polyporus frondosus with the voices and fermentation, two economically is a verbal universe where all technologies of Joyce’s ten thunderclaps, a reference important processes associated with and media merge, anticipating and to the ten “thunder words” of Finnegans fungi, appear together in this, the third encompassing the effects of media in the Wake that intimates a folkloristic theory sentence of the Wake. Serpula lacrimans, 21st century. By capturing the psychic of the origin of fungi (thunder causes or dry rot, also known as the “house and social dynamics of all media, the the fruiting of mushrooms) found fungus,” destroys timber and wooden Wake replicates the sensory effect in Robert Gordon Wasson.4 So, too, structures even in the absence of water. of media environments. Imagine the the enterprising Parallel Mycologist Another, Coniophora puteana (wet rot) totality of television, radio, and digital will find here an “autonomous event spreads like a sheet over moist wood. In signals (electronic streams of image and system” where twoodstools (40.23) and a general sense, rot is associated with discourse) passing unperceived through holocryptogams (546.13) are emergent various forms of decay and by extension one’s personal space at any instant; and signposts to the evolutionary history refers to the universe of wood-decaying imagine human consciousness replicated of the fifth kingdom.5 One may study and parasitic fungi. Joyce returns to this on the internet at millions of computer evidence of mushrooms in the woods, in introductory theme a few lines later: terminals, from millions of servers. the archives, on Mushroom Observer, in oranges have been laid to rust upon The Wake’s verbivocovisual (341.18) the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; why the green (3.23) a reference to plant environment approximates the effect of not in the Wake? Admittedly, this may at diseases caused by parasitic fungi of capturing these streams at one stroke and first seem like reading Alexander Smith’s the order Uredinales: rusts that destroy fixing them in language, in a language Mushrooms in their Natural Habitat to cereal grasses, conifers, and ferns. The that is recombinant like DNA, where tease out all the Joyce references. Less fungi, subvisible but dangerous, lurk at words are encoded with the semantic flux a foray into the high-brow canon of center stage in the vast midden heap of of all the echoing multi-transmissions (as yesterday than an exercise in crypto- civilization. well as all the static, discontinuities, and taxonomy, our devotions may bring us Fermentation is the phenomenon glitches) at every moment in and through to either the Holy Grail of Mycology or that truly captured Joyce’s imagination. time, all while seeming to tell a regular a simulacrum of smoaked maitake. And, It captured his duodenum, too – he story.3 Some have wondered whether as we drift toward the foggy bottom of was an ardent drinker of ardent spirits, a story gets told at all and protest the Wake’s turbid river-sentences, we particularly a Swiss white wine known the tendentious belief that Finnegans might witness the sexual conjugation of as Fendant de Sion that he affectionately Wake has virtually anticipated digital Achlya or overhear the busy buzztrack called the “arch-duchess’s urine.” The media, like an exponential expansion of of antediluvian myxomycetes streaming influence of Guinness & Company and Wikipedia re-routed through vaudeville oozefully in the bituminous muck in the John Jameson & Son in Irish history and via string theory understood from the “depths of the Cambrian fen.”6 in Finnegans Wake is pervasive, and Joyce perspective of the Egyptian Book of In Ulysses, Joyce contextualized the suggests that his polyglot manipulations the Dead. Exploring this masterwork is display of commercial mushrooms with of language are tantamount to the rather like calculating the square root his characteristic historical accuracy: processes of brewing and distilling. In of God. Finnegans Wake has been called “punnets of mushrooms” in the Dublin a passage where Shem (a self-parody Joyce’s summa semiotica. The Wake is the Corporation Fruit, Vegetable, and of Joyce) cooks eggs in his kitchen, terminal book. Fish Market are flanked by “flaskets fermented words (184.26) refer to the Joyce’s inoculation with the of cauliflowers, floats of spinach, … language of Finnegans Wake itself. mycological spore may at first seem sub- pomellated apples and chips of Fermentation has a host of implications clinical. Yet since the Wake encompasses strawberries.” Punnets are baskets for in the Wake, from Noah’s drunkenness all and everything, including a coded collecting berries and fruit. “Kerwan’s to breweries, alehouses, and famous reference to your name (yes, you, the mushroom houses” in the Lestrygonians Irish malt products like Guinness stout. 24 FUNGI Volume 4:1 Winter 2011 The fermentation of alcohol occurs Those many warts, those compared the Vedic and Irish literature to when yeasts (unicellular fungi in the slummy patches, halfsinster postulate that an Amanita muscaria cult genus Saccharomyces) break down wrinkles, (what has come over the may have existed in prehistoric Ireland.
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