A Special Maybe Night conversation with author Eric Wagner by Bobby Campbell :)))
bc: Your highly anticipated new book on the influence of Finnegans Wake on Robert Anton Wilson, known colloquially as Straight Outta Dublin, has reportedly moved closer to official publication, and given that this is the most frequently asked question I receive about Maybe Night, I'm hoping you can tell us more about this tantalizing tome...
How did your book about James Joyce's influence on Robert Anton Wilson first develop?
EW: While working on An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, I asked Bob what he would like me to focus on. He said he'd like me to focus on Joyce's influence on his writing. While writing that book I also wrote my master's thesis on The Influence of Finnegans Wake on Robert Anton Wilson's Masks of the Illuminati. I took one of the appendices from my book and expanded it into my thesis.
bc: I'm assuming Bob Wilson was probably aware that you were working on this book, and perhaps even read an early draft, did he provide any direct feedback regarding Joyce's influence on his writing?
EW: Shortly after my book came out in December 2024, I sent Bob a list of possible topics for my next book, including the idea of expanding my master's thesis into a whole book on Wilson and Joyce. Bob liked that idea best.
bc: What's the latest news on the book's development?
EW: I've finished the book. I just need to make a few revisions. I find myself moving slowly, but I hope to finish before the Spring Equinox of 2025.
bc: This is a bit of a meandering question, so bare with me please!
Towards the end of his life, Bob Wilson seemed especially interested in the works of James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Two vanguards of modernism.
Similarly, the trio of James Joyce, Albert Einstein, and Aleister Crowley, all featured in Masks of the Illuminati, seemed particularly important to him. I believe he took them as emblematic of the discovery of relativity in each of their respective fields, literature, science, and religion. All having their epiphanies around the turn of the 20th century. Again, roughly congruent with the paradigm of modernism.
Does it seem safe to say that we still have not yet fully integrated the discoveries of modernism into our culture?
And might we find ourselves in something of a cultural stasis until we successfully do so?
Do the works of Robert Anton Wilson have anything to say about this?
EW: You might want to ask Michael Johnson this question. It does seem safe to say that most of us have not integrated the discoveries of modernism into our cultures. I saw a recent book on modernism that didn't even mention Ezra Pound. People see modernism in many different ways.
I don't see cultural stasis. We seem in a chaotic freefall in many ways, and modernism does not seem as relevant to me today as it did when Bob died in 2007. Of course, it seems reasonable to model modernism as relevant, but I don't find myself thinking in those terms too much any more.
Robert Anton Wilson's works say a ton about these matters. In fact, rereading Wilson helps me see the relevance of these figures to trying to decode our current world. I have struggled so much with Joyce, Pound, and Crowley since I started reading Wilson in 1982. I have deliberately left Crowley alone for the most part since 2005, I haven't really dealt with Pound since I stopped teaching his books in classes in 2020. I plan to have the final revisions of my book on Wilson and Joyce done for the Spring equinox, March 20, 2025. Working on that book for 23 plus years has made me a bit exhausted but exhilarated with Joyce.
bc: Having had a long and unique relationship with this material, what do you think Joyce hoped to accomplish with Finnegans Wake?
EW: Part of me, the Wilsonian part, thinks Joyce wanted to heal the world, wake the finnegans (the ordinary people). Joyce said he had written the book of day, Ulysses, and now he wanted to write the book of the night. John Bishop, in Joyce's Book of the Dark, contends that Joyce did not just mean dreams. I think Bishop saw dreams as one component of the night. Others see the Wake as basically a dream narrative. I just saw that Bishop died in 2020 as did Joycean Shelly Brivic. I got to participate with both of them in a Finnegans Wake session at the 2011 North American James Joyce Conference. (Bishop participated over the internet due to poor health.)
Bob Wilson contended that Joyce wrote the Wake in part to confound the censors. The difficulty of the language of the book made it possible for Joyce to slip in a lot of erotic and scatological content which would likely have gotten the censors upset had happened with his earlier books. I think the scatological material turned Ezra Pound off. He never warmed to the Wake.
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