I float down the Liffey/I'm not here/ This isn't happening

Came across a mention of what Joyce once said Finnegans wake was about:. That the Wake is a dream and that the dreamer isan old man dying by the Liffey. Sparked a little recognition is me, having just read some Beckett. The last two books of the "trilogy" seems to be the last sparks of a dying sentience. old men (or a head in a jar(!)) telling free form stories from the past. We know that Joycve and Beckett were friends, and both were interested in Jung. I wonder if they weren't both trying to explore the disintegration of a mind.

What's interesting about the thoughts of a dying old man anyway? This: Traditional walls between subjects and subjects, subjects and objects, objects and objects all begin to crumble, and the subjects and objects begin to spill over onto each other. An old man, with 70-80 years of awareness, from prelingual to post-, thoughts running like heavy rain in gutters, with old connections broken and new ones made every second. Traditional timeflow is dostorted: What happened when? Is it happening now? What came first, second, third?

For the reader who wants to be active, this stuff is great. The reader gets to decide who, what, when, and where, out of the nonauthoritative material on the page. Like a whodunit, sort of. So the reader is left to find what heshe wants in the text.

It's funny to look at the two different approaches (if that's what the Wake actually is. If it isn't, is the effect any different? hmm). Joyce with his baroque, multi-layered, punning prose v. Beckett with his pure economy of style. Wildly differring techniques leading to a similar endproduct. Ultimately writerly texts.