So this is a painting by one Frank Budgen, a soldier/journalist/painter from Cornwall who was demonstrably one of James Joyce’s absolute best friends (click here to be taken to a book that boils down to “my name is Frank Budgen, and here are anecdotes from the many times I visited Joyce as he was writing Ulysses”).
This is a painting of Finnegans Wake. It’s a pretty abstract painting, and it’s done by one of the few people who actually had ongoing extensive conversations with Joyce about the book, thus arguably a valuable source for interpreting this baffling thing. But the thing is, scholars hadn’t ever seen this painting until, like, this previous decade? (Here is the issue of JJQuarterly that shows off this painting as “never before [...] assembled for the Joyce community.” The pertinent article is “Found: Frank Budgen’s Three Views of Finnegans Wake.” However, it’s on jstor, so you will need a free account to access any of the contents.)
So. I mean. I dunno, this is pretty neat in my opinion. It’s a rare sight, and as far as Wake studies go this is as close as it can get to finding some planned illustration from the book itself. And I went and upscaled it using my new favourite website, which didn’t really clear any details up but it’s at least less compressed.
I wanted to share it here, because it’s art. And it also gave me an opportunity to go fetch some links.
(As far as “what am I actually looking at here?” Uh, predictably that’s its own matter of interpretation, but some things are probable: This is a view of two banks of a river, though “we” are closer to one bank in particular. “Our” bank has a brick wall, a two-storey pub, four old men and their donkey, Shem and Shaun, a sailboat, and one of two washerwomen. The other bank has the other washerwoman, a possibly mummified corpse in the water, some hills, and a tree-- which means “our” bank probably has a stone somewhere. In the sky are the moon and a rainbow, at the end of which is Issy, flying/falling. Is there anything else hidden away? ....I legitimately can’t tell!)
