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Entitled opinions, not for the faint of heart,
not for the socially mediated,
not for the mimic man,
not for the self-satisfied.
Out here on the perimeter, we crush on the unknown.
Out here we look out and realize we don't really know much of anything,
beyond the sheer weirdness of whatever we thought we knew.
Here were the pillars of Hercules marked the threshold of the un-peopleed world,
the moon draws nearer to earth than she was want and makes men mad.
The true and the life-surgeic are convertible.
Knowledge forged by hallucinations,
comrade Jambati Savikha, "ignorance is a mother of wonder
and made everything wondrous to men who were ignorant of everything."
James Joyce, "river run, past even atoms from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodious vikas of recirculation back to
the south castle and environs."
Thus begins Finnegan's wake in the very middle.
We begin in the middle and spend the rest of our lives trying to catch up with where it all started.
Stay tuned friends, we're going to float down the incomodious vikas of recirculation,
wherever it leads.
A show on James Joyce and Finnegan's wake coming up.
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Stole the macula.
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Today's show is a follow-up to the monologue on Jambati Savikha's new science that aired a couple of weeks ago on entitled opinions.
I'm joined in KZSU by Corey Danserow, a graduate student in Stanford's program of modern thought and literature,
who is finishing up an extravagant dissertation about James Joyce's Finnegan's wake,
and its influence on psychedelic literature and thought.
You can't write a dissertation about Finnegan's wake and not know something about Vico's new science,
which had a decisive influence on Joyce when he set out to write his super novel.
Corey Danserow is a longtime member of the entitled opinions brigade,
so let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.
Corey, welcome to the program.
Hi Robert, thanks so much for bringing me in.
So you're no stranger to the new science.
In fact, you were my teaching collaborator in the last two seminars that I've taught on Vico.
The first time was back in 2019, and then once again this past academic year.
So before we plunge into Joyce, could you tell our listeners what drew you to Vico in the first place?
Yes, what drew me to Vico is his legendary role in the composition of Finnegan's wake.
Joyce seems to know about this Vico connection, but few of them study the new science with a
dedication proportionate to its presence in Finnegan's wake.
So I felt lucky, privileged really, to have the opportunity to do that with you, Robert,
first in 2019, and again in 2020, would grab me right off the bat was because weirdness,
the first page of his autobiography, where he attributes his genius to a childhood school fracture.
Last week I fell headfirst from a window onto a bathroom floor in New York City,
and I instantaneously thought of Vico, and I wondered if I would emerge with a philosophical
golden bow like he did. Something similar happened to Jack Kerra back in the late 50s.
He fell down and entered what he called the golden eternity.
And maybe I'll mention that later.
But yes, what drew me further into Vico when I started reading the new science was its psychedelic
quality. It's extravagant shimmering, billowing prose, but also its content, which is nothing less
than a psychedelic science of man. I mean, a hallucinogenic theory of the origins of humankind.
At the time I was involved in some research and teaching in the psychiatry and behavioral science
department and reading authors like Argorton, Watson, Aldous Huxley, and Terrence McKenna,
each of whom advocated a version of the view that in the beginning was the drug.
For instance, Huxley, man was a dope head before he was a farmer, or a McKenna's so-called
"stone-to-ape theory" that changed in climatic conditions after the less ice age,
brought art distant ancestors into contact with psychoactive mushrooms, which broke them out of
their monkey egos, into proto-human, social consciousness, and behavior.
So in 2019, I was amazed to find that these fringe theories of anthropology are actually
variations on Vico's theory of harmonization. What do I mean by that? I'll assume our audience
is listening closely to your monologue on Vico, especially the part about the primitive religions.
Those lightning bolts that shock the giants are not what they seem. If we read closely, we
notice that they are not just a meteorological phenomenon, a perturbation of the sky that
discloses the sky, but also a technique of perturbing the mind, opening an inner sky,
and elicit science, he calls it, "an illicit science of inducing those first thoughts of divinity,
an inspiring divine speech." Vico writes that the theological poets perturbed themselves to
access with a view to the end of producing sublime poetry, elsewhere he says that they sang the
marvels wrought by sources, note the wording there. The song itself was the marvel, the product
of the sorcery. Vico continues in the same passage, this is to be explained by a hidden sense that
the nations have the omnipotence of God, the art or science of opening that occult sense, tuning
subjects to the invisible electric body of Joe, Enlio, Jupiter, etc., some highest institution of
every nation. Every nation then is born of hallucination. Indeed, the Gentile deities are hallucinations.
Vico insists that there are projections of juvenile egos who mistake their imagination for reality
and disseminate their self-deception to others, forming a collective mental space, a nation.
Maloy, a political scientist and our latest seminar, coined the phrase "hallucinatory political theory"
In your monologue, you said that Vico had reason to worry about running foul of the Inquisition, and indeed,
he almost seems to be advocating kind of atheism, saying that all gods or hallucinations accept
that he maintains a distinction between the Gentiles' pseudo-divine hallucinations and the
Judo-Christian revelation. The course run by Gentile nations is in every case a long strange
trip away from a hallucinatory origin, a depressive fall, out of a super-energetic poetic ecstasy
or mania passing through an intermediate phase, which heroic efforts are made to realize, can serve,
and extend the manic visions finally ending in the ambiguous completion and disenchantment of the
human age. History is an end-static process by which I mean a process wherein things move
from a state of ecstatic inflation back into what they really are. For in the beginning,
men mistook their egos for a supernatural cosmic order. By the third age, imagination has dried
up in sober reason prevailed and it becomes clear that the gods were just human projections
and everyone's really human. Metaphorical poetic language resolves into generic,
prosaic language. One of the practical question for Vico is how to treat the depressive symptoms
of all two human ages without opening the floodgates to delusional and destructive manias,
what he calls chaos of the metaphysical poets. I call this historical therapy,
that is, the work of healing history itself rejuvenating without rebistializing.
All of this is what captivated me about Vico even put me in a frenzy as Misha Lei put it.
On the one hand, I felt that I had landed on a secret subterranean continent on which all
modern psychedelic thought and culture should rest. I'll be it later. I discovered that the CIA
were under the influence of Vico when they planned to turn America onto LSD. On the other hand,
Vico's therapeutic product gave me a lens for understanding Fennigan's wake, not least,
understanding Joyce's own complicated perspective on revivals of ancient religion and
pharmacotheology already underway in his time. And we could certainly use some kind of lens
on Fennigan's wake. As it says somewhere, the further back we managed to wiggle the more we
need the loan of a lens to see what the hand saw and by the way, the hand is always
upon on Ta-Hen, the metaphysical one, the Greek word for the one.
Partly the interruption, Corey, I just want to ask a question about Fennigan's wake and psychedelics
and your perception of what's going on in Fennigan's wake. Does one have to be on psychedelics
in order to understand Fennigan's wake and notoriously difficult, if not illegible, work?
Does one need to have taken psychedelics or even currently beyond one in order to understand the
wake? Probably not. Marshall McLuhan reported that acid has claimed Fennigan's wake is just
like LSD, but McLuhan himself had never tripped yet. He read the wake religiously,
Same with Joseph Campbell, whose wake inspired mono-myth guide at so many trips without himself
ever having tripped. He got there just by reading reading as he put it.
Timothy Leary, for his part, said Joyce's prose prepared him to take psychedelics,
made him desire them even before he knew they existed, and gave him the idea of a side
clotron, a mental Adam Smasher. When he first started running drug experiments at Harvard,
there was a sensationally popular lecture on Fennigan's wake that same semester, and I think Leary's
concept of psychedelic experience as the death of the mind harkens to the opening pages of
Fennigan's wake, where the hero embarks to Amnti, an a mental place. Fennigan's wake is about what
goes on in the mind's absence, and the prose demonstrates this. This raw data mashing without
stable concepts and underworld, where order is provided not by transcendental intellect, but by
imminent feelings of terror and fascination. Maybe psychedel can help attune us to this style,
but really the only way to make headway at all is with a high degree of clear-headed focus,
what you in your recent episode on Ammar Moon, we call it "Lamplight Love" and a good set of annotations.
To reapproach your question in a different way though, I think Fennigan's wake can be
elucidated by a psychedelic lens, a psychedelic in Viconian. I mean, it's very concretely.
Several passages in the overture evoke the scenario of a shamanic initiation, a pharmaceutical
vision quest, or what Peter Kingsley calls "incubation." This folds together with Vico's philosophical
quest, as I described earlier, a descent out of these civilized nature of ours back into the
Arcana of psychohistory, the heroic and divine ages, in search of a restorative power for a
senile into press nation, a kind of controlled recorso whereby a resurrection or
refreshment will hopefully occur. Very late in Fennigan's wake there, indications that we're
coming down back into the present concrete world and voice says, "We have enjoyed the secret
workings of nature. Nature here must be heard in the Viconian sense of birth, the Nashimento of a
nation leaving aside from another question of what nation?" If you look at the back of Fennigan's wake
or listen to most commentators on it, you'll hear that it is about sleep. I think that's too narrow
in the ballad, Fennigan's wake, the young Tim Fennigan has fallen down while deeply intoxicated and
so unconscious that he seems to be dead. He isn't asleep. In letters Joyce referred to Tim Fennigan as
that shying toad, a German word for suspended animation or a trance-like state. Joyceans will declare
things like, "Though little is agreed upon about the wake, it is universally agreed that it begins
where Ulysses ends with Leopold going to bed, Leopold bloom that is. But it's just as possible, I think,
to say that the wake begins with the climax of Ulysses were Stephen Daedalus, whom the Theosophist
medic, Bach Mulligan has dosed with an ancient Greek sacrament, collapses at the peak of a philosophical
frenzy. His stream of consciousness drops out for fifty pages. I think the wake brings us into that
concealed, liminal state, a state of suspense of ex-animation, a revelatory near-death experience.
Joyce also sometimes cites Thomas de Quincy at key moments of Fennigan's wake, and I think the
book should be conceived less in terms of sleep and dreaming than of a kind of epiphenic flash,
de Quincy attributes to opium or near-death experiences, in which all encompassing visions of life
in the hidden structures of the cosmos were revealed. And again, for Joyce this folds together with
the vaconian therapeutic mission into the Arcana of Mental History, a controlled
recourse so to rejuvenate a terminal human age. As the rational humanist subject goes down,
archaic, magical theological archetypes swing up, the theological poet, the patriarch, the founder
of nations, and Vico, these are three aspects of a single figure, but Joyce defracts them into
three characters. A father, known by his initials HCE, and his two sons, one of whom is a writer,
Shem the Penman, and the other a civil servant, Shem the Post. You could say that HCE represents the
divine age, Shem the heroic age, Shem the human age. Shem after all is a universalist philosopher,
Bolschovic, maybe involved in a plot to tear down his father HCE. Shem is a mediator between his father
and his brother, a conformist who scorns Shem, but nevertheless wants to learn something from him.
But we'll get into trouble if we try to hold these distinctions, that's true of the wake in general,
any attempt to separate things out in unstable concepts will come to grief. I'm more confident that
the father and each of the sons reflect an aspect of the first age, a divine archetype trying to
revive itself in restore spirit and meaning in an all too human age. With the danger of returning to
gigantic, the patriarch HCE is introduced as a capitalist, Freemason, colligialist, submerging his
head in alcohol and hallucinating celestial architecture. Throughout the book he's being investigated
and or scapegoated as a powerful, theo-political conspirator and pedophile who flashed young girls in the
park. The poet's son, the metaphysician, Shem the Penman, the chapter about him is styled as an
expose by a scandalized, populist press. He takes mushrooms and flies like a reindeer by the light
fantastic of his noses glow, noses spelled with a G. He's infected with various diseases and
including Europikolas, a disease related to the hallucinogenic fungus Ergot. His infections are
always also secret initiations. He's the sole contracted son of the secret cell and he's writing a
baconian book that fuses all cycle-wealing history in a single present tense. In another chapter,
his story is told in the first person and it's overlaid with Dr. Jackles saga with transcendental
medication. Finally, Sean, the older brother is a civic figure, a doctor, a hygienist and
eugenist and a hierarchy and a shady power structure. He's the wakes equivalent of Buck Mulligan
from Ulysses, but he also corresponds to Joyce's real-life childhood friend, Selzger Gunn, who had
become the vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation. The opening pages, Finn and Zwick,
depict the poet and the doctor, statesman, locked in a magical duel on a boat on a river to the
underworld. And one aspect of the book's shamanic initiatory plot structure is that Gunn is being
initiated into a medical, magical, or magical cult out of ancient Egypt. Tracking Gunn throughout the
book gives a picture of reminiscent of Tacitus' theme of the Arkana in Peery, the mysteries,
or secrets of empire, and anticipate the joycy and conspiracy fictions of Thomas Pinchon.
Joyce's paranoid fascination with Rockefeller human science projects,
narco-capitalist machinations. The Sandos Farm-Sudical Company, which made LSD,
global electronic media, and Gnostic Apocolipticism. All of these come together in the
fantastic image in Book II, Chapter 1, of the Global Theater operated by Selzger Gunn,
showing the radium wedding of night and morning, and peace, perfect pure and perpetual.
And this in Book's Kant, of course, but "nied" means envy in German. This is another of the
underappreciated themes of Finn and Gensweik. This proto-Girardian investigation of envy.
Gunn is often depicted manipulating people and indeed taking over the world using the green worm of
envy. The ethical plot of the book is that the giant poet, Shem, or Joyce, is watching and
judging the giant statesman, Sean, or Gunn. As they both traverse the underworld, the poet's pen interlocked
with a medic's syringe, the poet trying to master the medic, such that he finally shapes up into
illegitimate monarch rather than an occult and our co-tyrant, which for Vico is the only non-catastrophic
outcome of the human age. Corey, you're starting to sound to me like lucky and Beckett's
waiting for Goudo? Well, that's very interesting to say that, Robert, because when lucky gives
that Finn against Wagestyle speech, I think Beckett is giving a depiction of the relation between
Joyce and Susqueh Ghan, who I just mentioned. Lucky is a slave and a kind of court fool to
Potsso in a curious power wielder who's playing God. He speaks at Potsso's behest, and though he
doesn't address anyone in particular, it's Potsso who understands him. Indeed, Potsso is violently
affected by the speech and finally forces Lucky to stop. To me, it's clear that lucky speech mimics
and satirizes Potsso's claim to mastery of the world. And I think this is Beckett's microscopic
representation of Finn against Wagislich, which he helped Joyce to write. Like Lucky, Joyce is speaking
to know and in particular, speaking to anyone speaking into the ether, but also speaking to the
ruling intelligentsia, who funded him and who will read him in the universities for the next 300 years.
But also more immediately, he's addressed some gun, the social medical commissar of the Rockefeller
Foundation, whose quasi metaphysical ambition to heal and control the world, Joyce,
Mox and Wake.
Corey, I'm going to interrupt you again and ask, because I mentioned at the beginning that your
dissertation is not just about Finn against Wake, but it's about its reception among a number of
American protagonists. And I would like before we run out of time or energy here for you to say
something about that.
Yes, as far as Joyce's reception in America, very early on, we have Eric Fogel and who frequent
Shakespeare in co-imparison, eagerly read Joyce's work in progress as it emerged. John Cage
bought Finn against Wake in Seattle the year it was released 1939. Then of course there's
Joseph Campbell and Henry Robinson whose skeleton key to Finn against Wake was a heroic effort
of condensation and summary, heroic and sheer speed, appearing on the five years after the publication
of the Wake, overhasteed perhaps, and perhaps it's significant to lay more in announcing the
arrival of Campbell himself. In any case, the skeleton key was crucial to the Wake's reception
in America, especially when it was republished to the turn of the 60s and I'll return to that.
Marshall McLuhan, his early essays on Joyce before McLuhan was famous, are quite amazing and strange.
I recommend especially the essay Joyce Aquinas and the poetic process. He begins by quoting
an early poem by Joyce in which he scoffs at other writers, souls who lack the strength that
mine has, steeled in the school of old Aquinas, including thanks Joyce's epiphanic streams of
consciousness are a rigorous application of Aquinas's theory of the stages of cognition. McLuhan
likes to refer to this as a vivisection of the mind in action. In turn, he refers Aquinas's
theory to the Aleucinian mysteries, but I'm not going to talk about that. Before moving on to the
Joyce and writers of the beat, movement and psychedelic counterculture, I want to mention that Campbell
and McLuhan collaborated on a social science project at the turn of the 60s, an attempted design
and mythology that would inspire America and bring on a new age of global culture. The leader of
the project was the Harvard social psychologist, Henry Murray, who tapped Campbell and McLuhan for
his 1959 edition of "Deadless Magazine," before discussing that issue of "Deadless a Little
Vaconian Backstory" as an order. Murray was a "America's Leading Psychologist," he wrote in an extraordinary
literary style that drew comparisons to William James. He was also a leading Melville scholar, pivotal in
the canonization of Melville. During the war, he was recruited by William Donovan to be the chief
professor and selector of intelligence agencies for the Office of Strategic Services, the
precursor to the CIA that could continue to succeed from the early in the future, following the
demonstration of the comic power in 1945. Murray, "Sennon Sonomati, non-Levaljama," I'm Robert Harrison for
entitled "Pinience."
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