The Fall and Rise of Douglas Noel Adams

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy...."












I: Have you found any prophecies which would be prophetic to us at this point?

RAW: 

Let’s see, the major theme of FW is 

The Fall and The Rise.  

On the first page you’ve got 

The Wall Street stock market crashing 

and 

The Fall of The Roman Empire 

and 

Adam and Eve falling because of the forbidden fruit, 

and 

Humpty Dumpty falling off The Wall, 

and 

Tim Finnegan falling off The Wall, 

and

 The old Irish drinking song from which the book takes its title, 

and 

The Dreamer falling asleep to The Collective Unconscious of The Species, 

and below that into 

The Non-Local consciousness of The Entire Cosmos.

And all this falling is followed by a rising at the end in which The River turns into air molecules.  

The River turns, becomes one with The Sea, and the Irish Sea, and the Irish Sea becomes air molecules which become clouds which float over the Wicklow Hills, and they come down as rain, and you’re back at the beginning of the book where this rain is The River Liffey forming in the hills to flow from Dublin and go out to The Sea.  

So you’ve got this cyclical rise-and-fall.  

And I find more and more that the symbolism of the thing suggests 

The Fall of The DNA to This Planet

which is Fred Hoyle’s cosmological theory, that DNA didn’t happen by accident, it was propagated throughout the galaxy by higher intelligences.  

You’ve got The DNA falling on this planet, and FW has all these metamorphoses, you’ve got the four stages of the insect: 

The Egg, The Chrysalis, The Larva, The Adult

I’ve got them slightly out of order I think; I’m not an entomologist.  

And then you’ve got The Lords of The Four Quarters: 

Matt Gregory, Marcus Lyons, Luke Tar-pey, and Johnny MacDougal

 which are 

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

plus the bed that I lie on, 

an old children’s prayer, but it’s also 

The Four Chambers of The Human Heart, 

the four kings of the tarot deck, 

the four provinces of Ireland, 

but it’s this basic four part cycle there which Joyce calls 

their weatherings and their marryings 

and their buryings and their natural selection, 

which refers to all these insect and mammalian patterns, the parallels that Joyce keeps drawing.  

He manages to combine the evolution of plants, insects, and mammals into this structure, and it’s all part of - the deepest part of the collective unconscious that Joyce is exploring in FW.  

And there’s this cycle of the DNA being spread through the galaxy, falling onto the Earth, going through these primitive stages of evolution, and then rising up from the Earth at the end to return to union with the rest of the galaxy.  

I think Joyce is prophesying The Space Age that we are now entering.

Perfect-10 : 

I'm going to die. 

WILF:

Well, so am I, one day. 

Perfect-10 : 

Don't You Dare. 

WILF: 

All right, I'll try not to. 

Perfect-10 : 

But I was told. 

'He Will Knock Four Times.' 

That was The Prophecy. 

Knock four times, and then —

WILF: 

Yeah, but I thought, when I saw you before, 

you said your people could change, like, your whole body. 

Perfect-10 : 

I can still Die. 

If I'm killed before regeneration, then I'm Dead. 

Even then, even if I change, it feels like dying. 

Everything I am Dies. 

Some New Man goes sauntering away, and I'm Dead.