You Really Got to Get into The Flow of The River.

“You really get into the flow of The River.  The River runs all through the book.  It’s on many levels, and on one level, Joyce seems to have used as the setting an inn and chapel, and that inn is right next to the river Liffey, so the dreamer is an innkeeper, and his house in the dream, his inn, is right next to the river, so the river runs all through the dream very realistically.  It’s getting into his brain.  As Joyce said, you close your eyes when you sleep, but you don’t close your ears.  So all the sounds of the night get into the dream - the thunder strikes ten times, the rain falls twice, the river runs all through it, the church bells chime the hours, and one part of the brain is registering all those external realities while another part is reliving the life of Confucius in China, and another part is still back in Phoenix Park explaining he didn’t hike down his pants to expose himself to the girls (laughs!).

Interviewer: Phoenix Park - you know, when we did get to Phoenix Park, it didn’t look like what I thought it was supposed to look like.  It’s so big, first of all!

RAW: It’s the biggest enclosed park in Europe.

Interviewer: It’s just like getting the great outdoors there, and putting a big fence around it.

RAW: Most of the animals were donated by the Guinness family.  The Guinness’s are a very central part of FW.  “Guinness” comes from the old Gaelic “MacAngus”, which means son of Angus.  Angus was the father of Isolda and the whole Tristan and Isolde and King Mark theme runs all through FW.  And Guinness creates the Porter which the dreamer sells at his bar all day long, which explains the recurrent question throughout the dream, “why do I am a look a like a poss of Porter piece?”, which is, “why do my two sons look as like as two peas in a pod?”, or “why are there two sides to me?”, and it’s also the dream memory of the refrain all day all long, of one customer after another saying, “A pint of porter, please!”. 

I: Peas parge hob.

RAW: Oh yeah, peas parge hob is in there too.  Sometimes I get high enough on this stuff, I think I hear Joe McCarthy in there saying, “Point of order! Point of order!”.