Pages covered: 70-76 (Book I, Chapters 3 and 4)
So, the big news from our February meeting is we cracked Chapter 4. We paused to marvel at the beautiful rain language at the end of Chapter 3 (p. 74), looked ahead a bit to what we might expect in the new chapter, and reflected on what we'd just finished.
In that vein, we'll go back to January to catch us up. The closing pages of Chapter 3 (69-72) situate HCE in a long line of invaders, violators, and malefactors. He is part of this history, but he is also subject to some very creative insults. We get HCE's "long list (now feared in part lost) to be kept on file of all abusive names he was called" (71.5), an encyclopedia, a litany, a travesty of Pseudo-Dionysius's list of the names of God and Adam's imperative to name (70.36). The list also reveals HCE's--what? paranoia? persecution complex? legitimate concern that people are out to get him? The list shows that people think he is a drunk, a Protestant, a lunatic, an artist, a murderer, a bigamist. Yet he does not respond: "Anarchistically respectsful of the liberties of the noninvasive individual, did not respond a solitary wedgeword beyond such sedentarity, though it was as easy as kissanywhere for the passive resistant in the booth he was in to reach for the hello gripes" (72.16-20). The Mookse and the Gripes are referenced here (and will feature in Chapter 6), as well as bit further down: "That more than considerably unpleasant bullocky before he rang off drunkishly pegged a few glatt stones, all of a size, by way of final mocks for his grapes, at the wicket in support of his words that he was not guilphy but, after he had so slaunga vollayed, reconnoitering through his semisubconscious the seriousness of what he might have done had he really polished off his terrible intentions finally caused him to change the bawling" (72.26-32).
The shifts from insults to the threats of physical force back to mocking, words, slangish volleys--all point to the relationship between naming, cursing, and violence. Odysseus ("nobodyatall") and the Cyclops ("Wholyphamous"--note also the contrast between being a nobody and being wholly famous, or even infamous, a contrast that characterizes HCE's experience of fame and shame) make an appearance, as does HCE's stutter ("cocoa come outside to Mockerloo"--Mockerloo again bringing together mocking/insults/violence through language and actual violence/warfare in Waterloo). Cursing is visible in gesture, too: "bit goodbyte to their thumb" (73.5-16). Throughout this passage, cursing, voices, language, "duff and demb institutions" appear (73.20): "Gog's curse to thim," "manjester's voice" (we liked that one), "(Et Cur Heli!)".
From these curses, there is a shift in tone at the end of page 73, one that resonates with history and stories of kingship. We realized that underlying pages 72-73, which formed the bulk of our discussion at the February meeting, is Macbeth: sound and fury signifying nothing. With the end of a king comes the end of civilization and its institutions, and the voice becomes a means for cursing. (Speaking of Shakespeare, you'd be right to hear Caliban here, too, and Prospero with his own complicated kingly role.)
As HCE is buried at the end of Chapter 3, silence falls among stones, quiet except for the sound of the rain: "so witness his chambered cairns a cloudletlitter silent" (73.39). Perhaps too this scene echoes "The Dead," with rain instead of snow: "A testament of the rocks from all the dead unto some of the living" (73.43). There are also allusions to resurrection, kings that will return--Finn MacCool, Arthur, Parnell--and the covenant that is part of such a promise--Abraham ("Allprohome": the patriarch and a reference to Home Rule--a lot of this too has to do with a people betrayed by its rulers, alluding to English colonial rule over Ireland, something that will come back with the William of Orange references in Chapter 4).
The drops falling on HCE under the stones at the end of Chapter 3 become the "teargarten" and the Nile of the beginning of Chapter 4. HCE dreams of the girls: "tots wearsense full a naggin twentyg...those lililiths undeveiled which had undone him." William of Orange is the dominant figure on page 75: Joyce uses a lot of Dutch here to conjure the "noninvasive individual."
And that's where we sdopped. Join us on 3/27!
