Join us for our next meeting: Sunday, January 23, 4-6 p.m. at the Starbucks on 4th and South!
And now...here's your update.
Two major threads emerged from this meeting's discussion: the relationship among the siblings Shem, Shaun, and Issy and their parents/progenitors; and male/female authorship. Focusing on these two elements give us insight into plot, character, and theme, but they are also connected; Issy's female voice competes with those of her brothers, providing an alternative and disruptive model for authorship. Parenthood and authorship offer complementary and competing ways of thinking about creation.
Each of the siblings appears in their multiple forms here: the brothers are Cain and Abel, Mick and Nick, Mutt and Jute, pen and post. Issy is revealed in all the shapes she takes: snow, rain and cloud ("the Nivynubies' finery ball"); the girl who will become a woman; the daughter who turns into her mother. Issy is a temptress, and language around prostitution, adultery, and masturbation is used to talk about her: "Finding one day while dodging chores that she stripped teasily for binocular man and that her jambs were jimpjoyed to see each other, the nautchy girly soon found her fruitful hat too small for her and rapidly taking time look she rapidly took to necking, partying, and selling her spare favours in the haymow" (68). We noticed echoes of "Nausicaa" here too.
Similarly to that chapter in Ulysses, we thought about this section has having something to say about female voice and authorship: "(there are certain intimacies in all ladies' lavastories we just lease to imagination)" (68). As elsewhere in the text, parentheses are important for what they hide and reveal. Ladies' lavatories (recall Swift's Celia) hide intimacies that are part of the male imagination, but so do their love stories. Here we shift into something that more resembles Molly's chapter in Ulysses: a love story that can only be imagined.
This section then makes a familiar move: it goes from the microcosm of the sibling relationship, to the larger world of the family romance, to the cosmic vision of the family unit within history. We are brought out into the "dearmud" of Irish history, which is connected to the crime of HCE: "poor pucker packing to perdition, again and again, ay, and again sfidare him, tease fido, eh tease fido..." (68). We see here again the cycles of family/national/universal history as the parents and children are single and all: "A reine of the shee, a shebeen quean, a queen of pranks. A kingly man, of royal mien, regally robed" (68). HCE and ALP are king and queen, even in their fall.
Speaking of falling, our discussion concluded with Milton and Paradise Lost. HCE and ALP are king and queen, but they are also the fallen couple. Animals make an appearance on page 69, goats, hogs, kids, donkeys, goats (gout!), cats--humans have the power to name, to author, in Eden, a power that is taken away and granted again, over and over. So the garden is "triplepatlockt on him on purpose by his faithful poorters to keep him inside probably and possibly enaunter he felt like sticking out his chest too far and tempting gracious providence by a stroll on the peoplade's eggday" (69). Versions of HCE and his family let him in and expel him, raise him up and make him fall, in an endless cycle of pre/postlapsarianism. Temptation, fall, and resurrection comprise key themes in these passages, as elsewhere.
