I have a personal connection to today's text, the "Anna Livia Plurabelle" chapter (I.8) which concludes the first book. Travelling to Paris in October 2022 for a conference, I had about 8 hours to myself on a Sunday before needing to head to Gare de l'Est to catch my train back to Berlin. The only real sightseeing I did was visit Les Invalides, but besides that I spent the day wandering the streets and tracking down as many of Joyce's old apartments and favorite restaurants as I could. I got a lot of my information from the wonderful FW blog of Peter Chrisp (see esp. this post). Joyce finished both Ulysses and FW here, and moved on what seems like an almost yearly basis. Such was our life for a few years during graduate school in Dallas and Chicago...
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| Looking east down (up?) the Seine from the Pont de l'Alma in Paris. See more from my Paris trip, with lots of photos of former Joyce residences. This picture admittedly isn't much; it was a grey day. I'm also not the best photographer, just a very amateur enthusiast. |
The most memorable part of my big walk around the 5th (where I was staying, in the Latin Quarter), 6th, 7th, and finally 1st arrondissements was walking across the Pont de l'Alma. This bridge was near Joyce's residence as he was finishing FW (here is the apartment building). It was his favorite bridge over the river. He came here the night he finished writing chapter I.8 to listen to it and convince himself that he had captured its voice (the voice of every river). The bridge has been rebuilt since his time, but the river and its embankments are much the same if you look at old photographs. I didn't have the chance to stand there at night however (although is it ever really still and quiet there?).
In my travels around Europe since moving here in 2022, these kinds of self-guided walking tours based around where people I look up to lived are pretty typical for me. I want to feel like I am tracing footsteps, catching sight of everyday scenes they took for granted. In London, I did this for Marx and Engels' homes (and walked from Marx's final home to his grave). I don't think I've fallen prey to a biographical fallacy. These experiences are meaningful for me, and I am glad I have done them, but they were also fleeting. In the moment, standing on the Pont de l'Alma, I imagine I felt something profound, but I am sure I was also extremely tired (I was heading to catch a glimpse of l'Arc de Triomphe before heading to the Metro for the last time). I don't remember what my thoughts were. Probably thinking about how the world of Joyce, his labored, slow, agglutinative writing of Finnegans Wake, through failing eyesight and with the doubts of his friends and the interested literati growing louder, is gone, more so than the hithering-thithering waters of the Seine are from moment to moment. Besides my love for FW, it is his process of composition that fascinates me. Not just the aesthetic of the work, which I've written about in this blog, but the way to live a life of composition and to build up towards something new, beautiful, and personal from scraps of paper, from reading and having conversations and listening and watching (I'm thinking here of Shaun's caricature of Shem's writing process in I.7). Today, as I read through I.8, I felt the courage to find a connection to myself in those pages, and remembering that I felt that urge to create and to live a life where I am giving myself fullest expression.
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| Me standing before 6 Rue Blaise Desgoffe, where JJ wrote parts of FW. All of these apartment buildings look the same and blur together in my mind. |
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