Notes from the July Meeting/Report from our Foreign Correspondent

Pages Covered: 53-56 (Book I, Chapter 3)

Beginning with the paragraph starting "And there oftafter...," we dove into the ongoing saga of HCE, but other characters made their appearance as well, particularly Shem and Shaun. We realized that the pages we talked about were playing out patterns that recur throughout FW: east v. west, versions of history (Roman, Viking, British colonial, Irish revolutionary) while also bringing in elements of popular culture (theater, advertising, radio) and different religious traditions. The paragraph on p. 53 is notable for its repetition, bringing to the fore HCE's stutter (a sign of his guilt) but also highlighting the structural and linguistic repetition that drives the book: visavis, shoulder to shoulder, maymay rererise in eren, sonsons grandsons. We also noted how syntactic moves, especially the use of parentheticals, point the reader to notice shifts in tone--even in mid-sentence. The parentheticals in this section also comment on the "narrative" as a whole: imitation! conventional! I tell you no story. We think this might be the combination of the HCE story with the presence of his sons, Shem and Shaun, and while the story is being told the brothers offer conflicting commentary, further highlighting the opposition between the two (like Jacob and Esau, Shem and Ham), and the tension between father and sons.

The next two paragraphs bring in Irish history and then different parliaments; the paragraph beginning "Any dog's life" on p. 54 especially uses a multitude of languages and has different political systems embedded in it. This is both a Babel reference, the beginning of history and the beginning of language, but plot-wise it is HCE overhearing tourists in his pub. We experience the languages the way he would: overheard, outside, fragmented.

The next paragraph, "And, Cod, says he with mugger's tears," we were able to pick out bits, but overall it left us bewildered, especially the enormous parenthetical towards the end that breaks up the word "globe": gllll (parenthetical) lobe. But we did think it might be looking ahead to the Nightlessons in Book II, Chapter II: "Maggis, nick your nightynovel!" (Nightynovel being also a reference to FW itself.)

Finally, the long paragraph from pp. 55-56 continues this self-referential motif by talking about how writing, especially writing a life, is a way of dying, of killing something off. The House of HCE, like the House of Agamemnon, is "fallen indeedust," and all that is left is for "biografiends" and "factferreters" to pick over it. There's also a lot of jokes about the pen and the phallus: "his manslayer's gunwielder protended towards that overgrown leadpencil which was soon, monumentally at least, to rise...". At the same time, though, the paragraph is full of references to HCE's resurrection, "phoenix in our woodlessness." Speaking of self-referentiality, there are a bunch of allusions to Ulysses here too, from Stephen's thinking of "manorwombanborn" ("Proteus") to Bloom's "limp father of thousands" ("Lotos Eaters") and the seedcake on Howth ("Lestrygonians"). Joyce is creator and destroyer, writing a world into being which is also part of watching it disappear.

There was also a lot of talk about urination and tall pointy monuments. ::snicker::

One observation was that Joyce takes things we naturally use to order our world--cycles, numbers--and appropriates them into structures to order the world of FW. So if you're used to seeing structures in your everyday life, in both the civilized and natural world, you will see those structures in the book as well--and the boundary between the civilized and natural world is always getting blurred. Which leads me to...

Report from our Foreign Correspondent

Who is me. (That last observation on structures was one I picked up in my travels: credit where credit is due.) A quick note to say that late June/early July is like carnival season for Joyce people, with symposia and summer schools in Trieste, Dublin, Zurich, and elsewhere. I had the opportunity to spend a week working on FW with Terence Killeen, focusing on Book I, Chapter 6, and I'm looking forward to bringing more of what I learned to the group. I also heard an excellent roundtable on the question of whether FW has "integrity": is it as fragmented as we think? as ordered and coherent as we suspect? both??

Please note our next meeting is August 12. You can also keep up with us by friending us on FB here.