November/December 2012 Report

Just because we haven't been blogging doesn't mean we haven't been meeting!  Too busy to blog, not too busy to meet.

So, to catch everyone up for 2013, here's where we are (pp. 126-132):

We've made it to Part I, Chapter 6:  the twelve-question "quiz show."  The end of Chapter 5 (p. 125) sets up our questioner, Shem the Penman: "that odious and still today insufficiently malestimated notesnatcher."  We get the gist of what Shem is like, as a son and a quizmaster:  "shoots off in a hiss, muddles up in a mussmass and his whole's a dismantled noondrunkard's son."  Shem is the writer and the joker, out to expose his father, here compared again to Noah, drunk at noon and discovered in shame by his sons.  The quiz in chapter 6 will parade the key characters and their qualities before us in all their multivarious forms.

In our meetings we've only gotten a bit into the first Q&A:  "What secondtonone myther rector and maximost bridgesmaker was the first to rise taler through his beanstale than the bluegum buaboababbaun or the giganteous Wellingtonia Sequoia; went nudiboots with trouters into a liffeyette when she was barely in her tricklies..." (126).  The answer, as we will see on p. 139 (eventually) is "Finn MacCool!", one of HCE's avatars.  Knowing the answers helps you understand the questions, as once you see that all of Q1 is about HCE you can pick out the qualities and traits and elements of his story his son chooses to highlight (not all of them flattering).  But let's back up...

The introduction to the quiz indicates our interlocutors, Shem and Shaun:  "Shaun MacIrewick" and "Jockit Mic Ereweak," sons of Earwicker (with some "Jhamieson" thrown in for good measure).  We can look for "twelve apostrophes," a dozen questions, one for each apostle.  Shem aims for "three of them" -- the three children -- and "free natural ripostes to four of them" -- the four old men/chroniclers, Mamalujo.  We can look for all of these figures to make an appearance in Chapter 6.

HCE is our myth-erector, myth-making and also perhaps erecting something of mythic proportions (you can take that as a dick joke), and we might read the bridgesmaker as a reference to Dublin, crossing both sides of the Liffey.  As we'll see throughout the quiz, HCE's body is connected to Dublin and European geography (map courtesy of robotwisdom.com):

More dick jokes: "first to rise taller through his beanstale."  And then an uncomfortable whiff of incest: "nudiboots with trouters [fish references abound, especially salmon further on, with their spawning/death/return associations] into a liffeyette when she was barely in her tricklies [menses]" -- this is a reference to Issy, the daughter of ALP, and thus a diminutive Liffey.

Once we move away from the family, a number of themes emerge in Q1:  old/new, East/West (with a smattering of Ezra Pound), pagan/Christian.  Homer and with him the pairing of Greek/Irish literature, history, culture (similar to the foundation of, of course, Ulysses); Norse history and epic; Irish history; pre-Christian pagan history -- all of which should be pointing us towards the epic origins of HCE, the connection of his story to foundational myths and legends crucial to the formation of Ireland (and Europe) itself.  Part of this bigger picture are questions of nationhood and identity, kingship, states, and empires.

"Between youlasses and yeladst glimse of Even":  Between Ulysses/Ulysses and the Iliad is a glimpse of Eden.  Homeric texts frame the prelapsarian world, and perhaps the homecoming that comes after the Iliad is itself a glimpse of Eden.  The Odyssey is sometimes considered a more "feminine" text and the Iliad more masculine (you lasses and ye lads), and Samuel Butler even had a theory that the Odyssey was written by a young woman (a theory Joyce was familiar with, as his Trieste library shows, documented by Michael Patrick Gillespie).

A Christian/liturgical view of time appears here, too, at the top of page 130:  Christienmas at Advent Lodge, lenty illness, Easterling of pentecostitis -- Christianity as illness, at any rate -- as well as the unpleasantness of church history:  "comminxed under articles but phoenished a borgiess" (articles of faith, Borgias).  From this background, Finn MacCool/HCE also "learned to speak from hand to mouth till he could talk earish with his eyes shut" -- something interesting here about speaking and sight, and the speaking from hand to mouth may be a reminder of the famine, which shows up elsewhere, too, in these pages, particularly with reference to emigration to the US.

Epic history conjoins with the recent past and the role emigration plays in Irish memory, and is connected to HCE spawning little Dublins throughout the world:  if he is Dublin, then his epic stature allows him to reproduce little Dublins in his image:  "twenty four or so cousins germinating in the United States of America and a namesake with an initial difference in the once kingdom of Poland" (24 different towns called Dublin in the US, plus Lublin in Poland; the reference to the "once kingdom" is noteworthy here, too, as the kingdom/country of Poland has disappeared and reappeared with almost tragic frequency depending on which more powerful country sought to absorb/destroy it, of particular importance as Joyce was writing in the 1930s, and chapter 6 was written later than most of the rest of the book, in the darkest days leading to the Second World War).  This spawning, though, came from death:  "stood his sharp assault of famine but grew girther, girther, and girther."  Cultivation leads to civilization, but also to colonization.

Page 131 brings us back to Dublin, with a list of the initials of Lord Mayors (including L. O. N., Laurence O'Neill, who served from 1917 to 1923 and saw, among other things, the First World War and the establishment of the Free State).  Unlike America, here "the streets were paved with cold," and "he felt his topperairy" -- referencing "It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary," a song from WWI.  Here HCE "learned how to fall," is "distinctly dirty but rather a dear" (Dear Dirty Dublin), and, of course, "haveth chieftains evrywehr [Wehrmacht], with morder."  He is the "first of the fenians" and the "roi des faineants," last of the kings.  But this page also has a number of references to Ossian, Ossian being Oisean and also Finn MacCool, but also being a literary hoax perpetrated by James McPherson, who claimed to have collected the tales of Ossian from oral sources.  Thus Ossian becomes another of HCE/Finn MacCool's avatars, but also a fraud.

Two other figures struck us as important on page 131:  the apostle Paul and Parnell.  Paul appears in the first third of the page:  "was struck out of his sittem when he rowed saulely to demask us and to our appauling predicament brought us plagues from Buddapest [Buddha/peste=plague]."  Saul was struck from his saddle on his way to Damascus, thus "demasking" us, revealing belief in Christ -- but this also does lead to the "appalling"/Pauline predicament of dealing with sin and salvation.  Parnell appears, as well, as the doomed "uncrowned king of Ireland":  "his Tiara of scones was held unfillable until one Liam Fail [William Gladstone] felled him in Westmunster [Westminster, but also West Munster/Briton]...we are pledged entirely to his green mantle" as opposed to the "vikelegal":  the Vikings who conquered Ireland first, and then the viceregals who ran the colonial administration under British rule.  Parnell is a "faulterer" [one who has faults, one who falls, adulterer] and so is HCE:  "we darkened for you, faulterer, in the year of mourning but we'll fidhil [fiddle; be faithful; fidelis] to the dimtwinklers when the streamy morvenlight calls up the sunbeam."

Page 132 returns HCE to his place in Dublin again, not only as part of the landscape but connected to water, hearkening not exactly to ALP, his wife the Liffey, but to the seafaring/sea conquering past.  The name Costello, linked to the Spanish presence, shows up a few times; "burning body to aiger air on melting mountain in wooing wave"; "made a summer assault on our shores and begiddy got his sands full"; and with a reference to resurrection/death/spawning:  "as for the salmon he was coming up in him all life long."  Water is used here, too, similarly to the "Does it flow?" passage in "Ithaca"; Joyce quotes in full and verbatim the epitaph on the monument -- a fountain -- to Sir Philip Crampton, famous surgeon:  "the sparkle of his genial fancy, the depth of his calm sagacity, the clearness of his spotless honour, the flow of his boundless benevolence" (132).  It would seem, given some of the other things we know about HCE, that this is ironic, especially since it might also echo Phoenix Park and HCE's crime:  the crime may have been urinating in public, and "Phoenix" itself comes from Fionne Uisce, meaning clear water.  There was a fountain near the Viceregal (!) Lodge called Fionn-uisg, or "Feenisk."

Make sure to join us again in 2013, when we might actually finish another chapter or two!  Happy new year!

Report from August 2012 Meeting

Notes for the August meeting, pp. 120-123 

(picking up from the colon fourteen lines down the page, starting “all those red raddled…”

As noted from the July meeting, we are in the midst of navigating through Joyce’s “analogy / parody / play” of Sullivan’s analysis of the Book of Kells. What begins to manifest in this section is Joyce’s mockery of Sullivan’s analysis for its somewhat superficial qualities—that is, it appears to remark only about the style, and instead says nothing about the substance of the text. The Sullivan-like narrator of this section, furthermore, attempts to tell a story about the writer of this letter / book / text by knowingly casting judgments on other cultures based upon HOW the language is presented but not on WHAT is actually presented. 

Consider how Joyce’s narrator, here, insinuates characteristics of the writer based solely on the style—the “superciliouslooking crisscrossed Greek ees awkwardlike perched there and here out of date like sick owls hawked back to Athens: and the geegees too, jesuistically formed at first but afterwards genuflected aggrily toewards the occident” (FW 120.18-21)

Can “crisscrossed” [maybe also “Christ’s cross”] E’s demonstrate a “superciliousness” in Greek culture? They look as “awkward” and “out of date” today as “sick owls” [possibly an allusion to Egyptian hieroglyphics where the Owl represented the letter “m”—an inverted “E”] may have “hawked [looked] back to Athens.” Egypt, after all, to the Greeks was considered an especially backwards culture. The narrator continues with “gee-gees” “Gs” that may have been written by “jesuistically.” What judgments will lie in the future as texts are “aggrily [eagerly?] interpreted by those who bring them towards the Western World [the occident]. 

Joyce may tip his hand in this section to future readers and scholars (like ourselves) who study his strange and curious style in Finnegans Wake. Indeed, we are often attempting, with this book, to make interpretations “over the text, [by] calling unnecessary attention to errors, omissions, repetitions and misalignment” (FW 120.15-16). This may be Joyce anticipating scholars who pour over his Finnegans Wake drafts and notebooks—scrap-heaps that give clues to Joyce’s personal and writing history.  These often appear somewhat organized (as with the titled sections of his Scribbledehobble notebook) but are also littered with “red raddled obeli cayennepeppercast over the text” (120.14-15)—or “read riddled with red crayon marks [cayenne peppers = red, but also a reference to Joyce’s preferred use of “crayons” to mark edits, changes, or places he took material from in the notebooks] over the text”—our attempts to make sense of the fragmented knowledge left to us. 

Indeed, the narrator continues to move forward with the analysis of letter/language styles that judge the characteristics of those cultures: “Ostrogothic [Austrian gothic] kakography” [shit calligraphy or bad writing]; “Etruscan stabletalk” [ancient Italian attempts to “stabilize” language? but also filthy gossip—talk within the stables—the things behind closed doors]; the “constant labour to make” Jew and Greek pass as the same in one another’s eye [“ghimelpass [Jewish letter] through the eye of an iota [Greek letter]” / a theme within Ulysses “Jewgreek is Greekjew”], “and one peculiar sore point in the past; those throne [monarchy but also thrown] open doubleyous (of an early muddy terranean origin)” (FW 120.22-27) [“w” keeping with a developing pattern of “E” (Greek) “M” (Egyptian)”W” (Mediterranean)—the signs of HCE at various stages in human history—reminding us once again that it is history being interpreted, judged, misinterpreted, reinterpreted, and sometimes based on how the story/letters/language is presented, and not our understanding of what has been written]. It is “hornful digamma [di=2, gamma = C, but also dilemma] of your bornabarbar” (FW 120.34). Barbarians, here, is used in a definition similar to its Greek origin—anyone who is not of “our” culture. 

We did not get to talk much of the following section during the meeting (I was fumbling and bumbling what I wanted to say and unable to make the connections I wanted to make) —Feel free to skip what I have tried to develop here to make the connection I wanted to make when we did actually talk about this section:

To back up this claim—Joyce references one of his lesser known works—

“the Aranman ingperwhis through the hole of his hat, indicating that the words which

 follow may be taken in any order desired, hole of Aran man the hat through the

 whispering his ho” (FW 121.12-14).

The reference is to Joyce’s 1912 article he wrote while in Galway with Nora and their children, submitted for publication in the Il Piccolo della Sera newspaper in Trieste, Italy: “The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran: England’s Saftey Valve in Case of War” (Critical Writings 234-37). Within the article, Joyce comments on a British plan to build a new port in Galway—one that will connect Canada to the United Kingdom through Ireland—allowing for the flow of “granary,” “goods,” “passengers” “wealth” and “energy” into Galway and through to Dublin and Holyhead before making its way to London—a plan that would pump life “through this new artery of an Ireland drained of blood” (CW 235). 

This sentiment, Joyce writes, compares to the mirage of the poor fisherman of Aran—a mirage of independence—as “Up until a few years ago the village elected its own king, had its own mode of dress, passed its own laws and lived it itself. The wedding rings of the inhabitants are still decorated with the king’s crest: two joined hands supporting a crowned heart” (CW 234). This bliss of independence, a separateness from their “United Kingdom,” seemingly is the mirage of the fisherman’s life. It is the conflict that will come with the creation of this new port—a complete misunderstanding of a people, of a culture, of a way of life. 

Joyce and his companion are invited into the home of an old lady for tea and buttered bread [an act of hospitality contrasted to our earlier mention of barbarianism—“bornabarbar” (FW 120.34)]. The old lady’s son “sits near the fireplace and answers the questions of my companion in an embarrassed and humble manner”—answering questions that indicate he does not know his exact age—but that he’ll soon be old—and that he is unmarried because there are no women for him (CW 237). These things, Joyce insinuates, do not matter to these people. The man “confused and smiling” at the questions “remov[es] his hat from his head, [and] sinks his face in the soft wool” (CW 237), showing his embarrassment. “Aran,” Joyce writes, “is the strangest place in the world. A poor place, but no matter how poor it is, when my companion tries to pay, the old lady rejects the money almost angrily and asks us if we are trying to dishonour her house” (CW 237). 

Feel free to resume here!

In short, this reference suggests the powers at large impose their meanings, their values, onto others—in language, in culture, in life. The harbor is said to bring money to Galway—but the people, at least in this passage, do not value money, or recognize themselves as British—they had their own King, laws, customs. It is a meaning and life that is judged by a reader who imposes and privileges his values, and often without ever understanding the cultures that he prejudges—and it has happened over, and over, and again “(here keen again and begin again to make soundsense and sensesound kin again) (FW 121.14-16)”

More judgments are made against cultures and the style of the writing—“haughtypitched disdotted aiches [H’s]” “Jaywalking [J] eyes [I]” almost spelling out this text’s “sahib” [owner] giving us the “principial” [first], the “medial” [middle], but not the “final” letter [M]—which is “always jims in the jam” (FW 121.16-18). 

We begin to move away from letters (but not for long) as this paragraph continues (yes, this is all one paragraph—pp.119-123) and onto some of the illustrations—“that strange exotic serpentine, since so properly banished from our scripture” [possibly an allusion to St. Patrick removing the snakes form Ireland—but also a hint of the narrators own haughtiness—calling the symbol “exotic” and praising its “proper banishment” from “our” scripture]. What further makes this text inferior in the opinion of this narrator is its “studious omission of year number and era name from the date” mockingly calling this omission “the one and only time when our copyist seems at least [last] to have grasped the beauty of restraint” (FW 121.20-21; 28-30). 

He attempts to place it in history by noting the “lubricitous conjugation of the last with the first” only occurs in ”the Bootherbrowth family of MSS., Bb – Cod IV [4], Pap II [2 or 11], Brek XI [11], Lun III [3 or 111], Dinn XVII [17], Sup XXX [30], Fullup M D C X C [1690—year of the “Battle of the Boyne” [where Catholic supporters of King James ultimately fell at the hands of the Protestant forces of William of Orange] (FW 121.31-35). Whether he can place a time and date with this seemingly chaotic order of numbers, letters, and events seems impossible. 

The language begins to mirror pirate talk; the narrator begins to examine “those ars, rrrr! Those ars all bellical, the highpriest’s hieroglyph of kettletom and oddsbones  [skull and crossbones—Jolly Roger], wrasted redhandedly from our hallowed rubic prayer for truce with booty” (FW 122.06-09). The “booty” may be foreign texts translated into English—the interpretations being “stolen” or “pirated”—There is reference, here, to two texts from the orient that were translated for the first times in English in the mid 19^th and early 20^th centuries: the “quatrain of rubyjets” Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859) (FW 122.11) and “ars all bellical” (FW 122.07) the Art of War by Sun Tzu (translated in 1905). 

The examination of R’s leads to a potential examination of the brother’s battles, “O’Remus [Remus] pro Romulo [Romulus]” (FW 122.09) the twin brothers who fought over where to build a new city [Rome—as Romulus killed Remus in their fighting]. The battle that ensues here takes the form of drinking [“Roe’s Distillery,” “porter,” “firefill’d cup,” “jig jog jug” and a game of cards “pinnacle” [pinochle] (FW 122.09-13). The players take turns throwing their cards down with a “whang” (FW 122.13;15;16;17) in the backdrop of mannish parlor room talk where the “whangs” take on a sexual tone “and there she’s for you, sir, whang her, the fine [w]ooman, roughe to her lobster locks, the rosy, whang, God and O’Mara” (FW 122.14-16). 

But often this sexual innuendo appears more to do with card playing mixed with Irish history: “loyal six I lead [leading with a six—but also maybe the loyal six of unionist Northern Ireland]” and “spoil five of spuds’s trumps [Spade trump cards in pinochle, also “spuds” as potatoes and a reminder of famine in Ireland]” (FW 122.10-14). There is a punch thrown—“whang, whack on his pigsking’s Kisser” [punched in the mouth with a possible reference to the Festy King—the pigsking—the King accused of dressing in coal to escape after selling a stolen pig – and a possible “Shem” character: see notes from June 2011 meeting: Festy King!] (FW 122.14-15). Kisser leads to more confusion – basia / bastum [lip kisses] (122.16; 32) or osculua [osculum-a cheek kiss] (122.16) or suavium [tongue kisses] (122.32). 

How, though, did we get this far off topic?

Easy! Language/translation/interpretation, here, has become unstable—with words holding “toomuchness” of meaning “fartoomanyness” of those fourlegged ems [meanings] (FW 122-23)—too many meanings, it seems, for the narrator to keep track of in an organized way, as the paragraph drifts into a chaotic state of incongruence. The narrator instead begins again to study the images on the “plainly inspiring…Tunc page of the Book of Kells” (FW 122.18)—but even here there are discrepancies.  The text is “Then there were two thieves crucified with him” but the pictures don’t match the text. This is simply noted as a discrepancy by the Sullivanesque narrator, who can only describe images but not actually interpret or analyze.

The paragraph concludes (phew) with references to more questions of letters “why spell dear god with a big thick dhee [D] (why [Y], O why [Y], O Why [Y]): the cut and dry aks [X] and wise [Y]—the symbols of male and female chromosomes. But when “all is zed [Z and said] and done” (FW 123), Joyce seems to remind the readers of translations in his own work—Ulysses: A modern Odyssey told in “eighteenthly [18]” episodes of Homer’s “twentyfourthly [24]” episode original. He thanks the man who published Ulysses in Dijon, France in 1922--Maurice Darantière with a simple “thank Maurice” for having “penelopean patience” [Penelope—the conclusion of Ulysses, also the weaver and un-weaver which ties into our discussion of meaning] in publishing the “seven hundred and thirtytwo strokes” [732 page Ulysses] so that those willing to “press on” through the book can “marvel” at the “vaulting feminine libido…sternly controlled and easily repersuaded by the uniform matteroffactness of a meandering male fist?” (FW 123.01-10).  The question is to the reader and about the reader: “Who will continue reading this masturbatory drivel?” Why, we will!

If I were in Springfield with Homer Simpson, I might need a Duff-Muggli (FW 123.11) before I continue. Join us for Duff-Muggli talk as we press forward into the murky depths of Finnegans Wake. 

Report from the July 2012 Meeting

Pages 116-120 (Book I, Chapter 5)

We are well underway in the interpretation of ALP's letter, which she has dictated to her son Shem the Penman (Nick; Joyce) to be delivered by Shaun the Postman (Mick; Stanislaus Joyce), but then gets lost in a midden heap to be found again by a hen.  We just about got to the section where it is analogized to The Book of Kells (119-123).

It's worth pointing out that a midden heap is a pile of domestic waste -- food, bones, shells, etc, -- that can be of use to archaeologists learning something about everyday life in past societies.  I can't help thinking that this is an excellent analogy to keep in mind while reading and trying to understand Finnegans Wake.  The everyday is of crucial importance, especially if we zoom out into grand recits, archaeological or evolutionary time, the sweep of history -- and then zoom back in on the family, the married couple, the hen picking around the trash heap.  How do we understand -- how do we read -- the artifacts -- the art -- that people leave behind?  It is these shards that make up the language and patterns of Joyce's novel.  (By the way, for an excellent discussion of the Joycean everyday, hop over to the Modernist Versions Project for Michael Stevens' lecture on "Calypso" and the everyday here.)

We've gone back and forth figuring out the narrative voice -- who's talking -- over the course of Book I.  Sometimes we get the story in ALP's voice, sometimes the sons (who each have their own voices), sometimes a "common man" voice, sometimes a more scholarly voice.  This was the subject of where we left off on p. 116.  Pages 114-116 were giving us the family story.  The bottom of 116 strikes us as ALP's voice:  "So hath been, love: tis tis: and will be: till wears and tears and ages...a good clap, a fore marriage, a bad wake...such is manowife's lot of lose and win again."  Once we've heard the family story, we get the woman's perspective on cycles of life and history:  love, marriage, children, death.  Men might make decisions and wage wars, but women have to clean up the mess.  This perspective also connects with the larger pattern of the book as the paragraph ends with repetition evoking "The Ballad of Tim Finnegan": "lose and win again...who's chin again...grown in again."

There is another reference to the passage of life:  "If juness she saved! Ah ho! And if yulone he pouved!" -- If youth but knew! If age but could!  But ALP also "saves" "jeunesse" -- the youth of herself? her children? the life of her husband?  The hen -- "quiqui," or chicken -- finds the letter, "told in sounds in utter that, in signs so adds to, in universal, in polyglutteral, in each neutral idiom..."  The old world of Ireland is evoked with "spurtfire turf a'kind o'kindling when oft as the souffsouff blows her peaties up" (peat, turf, kindling).  This merges here and at the end of the paragraph with sexual innuendo (cf later, III.4, when the Porters are having sex and she accuses him of having never "wet the tea" -- slang for female satisfaction):  "claypot wet for thee," "ould cup on tay," "hottin me souser," "caldin your dutchy hovel" -- these conjure a bread and circuses, Shelagh Delaney-esque "a bit of love, a bit of lust, and there you are" in the dire circumstances of post-famine Ireland.

This paragraph also features key players like:  jambebatiste (John the Baptist and Giambattista Vico), brulobrulo (Bruno of Nolan who was "brule," or burned, at the stake), and of course ereperse, Persse O'Reilly, HCE -- who will show up again in a few different forms on page 119, just as he showed up in the "Ballad of Tim Finnegan" before.

Contrast this with the references to a new life in America, for that provides a contrast here -- the history of America is conjured in the move from Ireland to places like Boston and New York (like Woodside, Queens, our old stomping grounds, which still has a significant recent Irish immigrant population).  "Nozzy Nanette" (No No Nanette, a musical from the 20s) "tripped palmyways with Highho Harry" -- Harry Frazee was the person responsible for getting No No Nanette to Broadway, with, rumors had it, money from the sale of Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees.  New York figures here as "Nieuw Amsteldam" (along with "grape, vine, and brew").  These emigrants write home, "oldworld epistola of their weatherings and their marryings and their buryings."

Meanwhile, those left behind "in our wee free state, holding to that prestatute in our charter, may have our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense of the lot, the interpretation of any phrase in the whole, the meaning of every word of a phrase so far deciphered out of it, however unfettered our Irish daily independence, we must vaunt no idle dubiosity as to its genuine authorship and holusbolus authoritativeness."  Here authoritativeness -- conjured by authority and authorship -- is hocus pocus and of the hoi polloi, the people, and all at once (the meaning of "holus bolus," according to McHugh).  The interpretation of statutes, of charters, laws, letters, texts -- well, we have doubts AND we must vaunt no dubiosity.  Of course.  We have talked before about the importance of horses and bulls to Irish history, especially in the colonial context.  Of course history, and the Wake itself, is a cock-and-bull story:  "desultory horses," "bafflelost bull," "Coccolanius or Gallotaurus."  In addition to the Tristram Shandy-esque reference to "cock and bull," there are also numerous references to Gargantua and Pantragruel, especially with regard to horseriding and winedrinking -- again, literary figures who are larger than life, much like our own HCE.

But the focus here is not just on HCE but on the letter about him written by his wife, "anyhow, somehow and somewhere, before the bookflood or after her ebb, somebody mentioned by name in his telephone directory [cf Thom's Directory for the writing of Ulysses; note mention of telephone, technology for communicating, modernity]...wrote it, wrote it all, wrote it all down, and there you are, full stop.  O, undoubtedly yes, and very potably so, but one who deeper thinks will always bear in the baccbuccus [Bacchus] of his mind" -- written undoubtedly and potably, which makes me think of Finn Fordham's claim that the Wake is a drunken text.

The next paragraph continues the emphasis on writing, beginning with writing as sacred and then moving to the impossibility of an authoritative interpretation (although, would such a thing be desirable?  As a rabbinic teaching states, he who translates literally is a fraud).  We start with "Soferim Bebel" and "dormerwindow gossip," "soferim" being the Hebrew word for writers of sacred texts, and also "suffering," a reference to the Tower of Babel, and then gossip.  I also think of people leaning out their windows to hear the town cryer:  news or gossip?  (For a great discussion of the impact of news on modernist literature, especially Finnegans Wake, see David Rando's Modernist Fiction and News.)  The "shout in the street" leads to divine chaos, and also maybe even misunderstanding and lies, the crux of HCE's difficulty as he tries to clear his name: "every person, place and thing in the chasomos...moving and changing every part of the time: the traveling inkhorn...the pen and paper, the continually more or less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators, the as time went on as it will variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns."  This is one of those passages that seems to be commenting on itself, and the novel as a whole, our reading and our attempts to share what we get out of it.  Writing and history and interpretation are akin to both prophesy and gossip:  "writing on the wall," "hue and cry."  Yet writing is just as likely to be left on the midden heap:  jottings," "dried ink scrap of paper," "tare it or leaf it."  Are these artifacts to be left for history to figure out?  Or simply garbage?  The question of how things are to be written down, how they are to be delivered, and what they mean preoccupy Shem and Shaun as the focus shifts away from ALP, as does the narrative voice.  The question of how to read and what texts are worth to the interpreter or critical eye is made via a literary joke at the end of the paragraph at the top of page 119:  an allusion to Francis Jeffrey's famous review of Wordsworth's The Excursion in the Edinburgh Review:  "This will never do."  He almost certainly would have said the same thing about Joyce, who himself suffered at the hands of reviewers and critics (criticism and curation as cultural imperialism, as we discussed last time; see also Joyce's own "Gas From a Burner").

Text as object of interpretation and as holding a place or being defined by history moves into Joyce's analogy/parody/play on The Book of Kells.  According to McHugh, the paragraph starting on page 119 begins with the introduction by Sir Edward Sullivan to The Book of Kells.  Sullivan writes, "Its weird and commanding beauty; its subdued and goldless colouring; the baffling intricacy of its fearless designs...have raised this ancient Irish volume to a position of abiding preeminence among the illuminated manuscripts of the world" (see McHugh for the full quote).  Compare Joyce:  "whiplooplashes"; "bolted or blocked rounds"; "round thousand whirligig glorioles"; "illegible airy plumeflights, all tiberiously ambiembellishing the initials majuscule of Earwicker"; "the curt witty wotty dashes never quite just right at the trim trite truth letter"; "a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons."  Joyce actually conjures the visual quality of The Book of Kells, its flourishes and embellishments, all in the service of the sacred.  Does a book actually have mystical powers?  Where does its authority lie?  Note also that The Book of Kells is actually the four Gospels, which play a role here in the personae of Mamalujo, the four old men.

This is ultimately HCE's story:  "that farmfrow's foul flaire for that flayfell foxfetor," "the initials majuscule of Earwicker," "his hes hecitency Hec."  The sigla for HCE and ALP appear (the rotated clockwise E and the delta, respectively), echoing The Book of Kells via the visual within the text.  It also hearkens back to the forged Piggott letters that brought down Parnell, with the misspelling of hesitancy, which reminds us that texts can be traitorous and any story can be a lie.

Report from the June 2012 Meeting

Welcome to the June 2012 report, and happy belated Bloomsday!  If you're following along at home, no, you didn't miss an installment: there was no May 2012 meeting (first one we've missed in like three years! It won't happen again!).

We meet on Wednesday evenings once a month for the rest of the summer; please get in touch if you'd like info on dates/times/venue.  Back to weekends starting in September.

A quick note of Joyce-related news:  the Modernist Versions Project hosted at University of Victoria is doing YoU: Year of Ulysses (#yearofulysses on Twitter).  From now until June 2013 they'll be releasing an episode every two weeks of their digitized first edition of the novel.  The "Telemachiad" was released on Bloomsday, followed by a Twitter chat for readers the following week.  "Calypso" will be released on July 6, followed by a chat on July 13, and so on until next Bloomsday (full schedule on their site).  In addition to the digital edition and chats, the MVP is creating a series of video lectures and podcasts by prominent Joyceans: the first installment is by Robert Spoo, Joyce estate and copyright expert (fittingly enough).  Check out the site for the Modernist Versions Project for more info, and to follow along over the course of YoU.

Onward...

Book I, Chapter 5, pp 113-116:

We saw these pages as bookended by discussion about language and writing, with a lot of stuff about the family drama (and incest) in the middle:  culture, written culture, shared culture, culture of the family (these would be from the paragraph beginning "Let us now" to the paragraph ending "under some sacking left on a coarse cart?").  The connection we saw was for Joyce, the family drama among parents, children, and siblings is an archetypal subject, a foundational story for many cultures; at the same time, many stories, many uses of language, are co-opted by hegemonic or imperialist structures like universities and museums:  teaching can be a form of curating, and curating can be a form of imperialism.  Why can't we all use language and stories like common, ordinary people?  This might seem to be at odds with the entire project of Finnegans Wake, but not really:  Joyce draws on archetypal stories and everyday language, refracting them through history, the unconscious, the dreamworld -- and he expects everyday people to come together and make sense of his text in everyday language.

So the first paragraph we looked at on page 113 is a truncated Psalm: "Let us now praise famous men" -- except our praising here is cut off by official business and interference: "weather, health, dangers, public orders and other circumstances permitting."  We noted a great deal of police presence here -- note the repeated use of forms of "police" on the bottom half of the page (we liked "You are a poorjoist, unctuous to polise nopebobbies," combining "nope" and "bobbies," and the reference to Joyce himself).  This connected, for us, to the surveillance culture of colonial Ireland, but we also started thinking of cultural gatekeepers as policing figures: teachers, curators, critics.  The references to Giordano Bruno/Bruno of Nolan (also the Dublin publisher Browne and Nolan) and to Mick and Nick (Shaun and Shem; Michael the Archangel and the Devil; cf later: "The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies) also allude to the policing of ideas: the burning of Bruno at the stake, censorship, belief/unbelief: "be we mikealls or nicholists...whether browned or nolensed [no-lensed, not able to see], find it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself [perhaps also references to Thomas the Doubter -- belief/knowledge/seeing?]."  The Latin echoes this, too, another quote from Psalms: "Eyes have they, but they see not. They have ears, but they hear not...They have hands, but they handle not." These could refer to reading, as well; what struck us was the reference to hands:  curators handle artifacts, but then also Thomas believed when he handled Christ's body.

The last paragraph at the bottom of page 113 starts with "I" and we wondered who the "I" was.  The I could be Shaun?: "I am a worker...You are a poorjoist [Shem?]", thus opening the way to talk about the siblings on pp. 114-115.  Shaun is giving his version of the story, from the point of view of the pragmatic brother: "a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace averyburies [place/please everybody/burial]."      The top of page 114 hints at brotherly conflict: "We cannot say aye to aye.  We cannot smile noes from noes."  The page becomes orderly as the "tombstone mason" speaks:  "One cannot help noticing that rather more than half the lines run north-south...while the others go west-east."  We thought of this as ruled paper, as the gridlines on a map, and also how we read:  Chinese or Japanese goes north-south, Indo-European languages go west-east.  These are the "cardinal points" for language, as "traced words" "run, march, halt, walk, stumble."  The paragraph situates language and writing in history with "incunabula" (pre-Gutenberg books) and "ruled barriers," not just language rules or ruled paper.  This might be "antechristian" -- predating Christianity but also anti.  Language is part of power and empire:  "the homeborn shillelagh as an aid to calligraphy" (reminds me of the old saw: a language is a dialect with an army).  The "advance from savagery to barbarism" could be a joke -- not an advance at all, because we haven't advanced as humanity -- but one of us pointed out it could be Viconian (Yeats got mentioned too) because we go through the cycle from savagery to civilization and then right back to barbarism again.  We also thought again that the language was distinctly curatorial.

We very much liked the end of the paragraph:  "But by writing thithaways end to end and turning, turning and end to end hithaways writing and with lines of litters slittering up and louds of latters slettering down, the old semetomyplace and jupetbackagain from tham Let Rise till Hum Lit.  Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?"  We heard echoes of Hamlet and Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare's wife, who was illiterate incidentally), also Yeats ("turning and turning in the widening gyre"), Chutes and Ladders (also known as Snakes and Ladders, an Indian game introduced to England during the Victorian period), letters and litter (the trash-heap where the hen finds the letter), and Eliot's The Wasteland.  "Semetomyplace" struck us as a portmanteau carrying "semiotics," "metonymy," and "cemetery" -- a neat word bringing together Shem the Penman with writing and Shaun the postman (here, tombstone mason).  And Hum Lit, the core general education programs of Oxford and Columbia,  also highlights the curatorial function of criticism, and the ways universities become graveyards for literature.

Pages 114-115 focus on the family drama, not just the relationship between Shem and Shaun but bringing in Issy the sister and possibly the incest taboo.  We talked a bit about Joyce's biography, particularly his relationship with his daughter Lucia (for a cool new take on this, see Mary Talbot's Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, a graphic memoir of her father James Atherton, author of Books at the Wake, which draws substantially on the Lucia story).  This turned into a general conversation about the role of the life in understanding the "identities in the writer complexus."  The top of page 115 turns to Shem and writing: "Say it with missiles then and thus arabesque the page...Why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own?"  Writing leads into "incestuish salacities among gerontophils, a word of warning about the tenderloined passion hinted at." We have prostituta in herba -- the inexperienced prostitute -- turning into the modest in verbos -- supposedly an echo of Horace but more interesting for the echoes of modesty and verbiage/language.  Because these pages are mainly concerned with language, we thought, the family drama is cast in terms of sexological discourse, scientia sexualis -- "yung and easily freudened in the penumbra of the procuring room" (consulting room becomes brothel) -- "father in such virgated contexts is not always that undemonstrative relative," "pudendascope," "neurasthene nympholept, endocrine-pineal typus, of inverted parentage with a prepossessing drauma present in her past and a priapic urge for congress with agnates before cognates fundamentally is feeling for under her lubricitous meiosis."  This is an amazing parody of sexology and psychoanalytic language.

But really:  "'Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry" (bottom of page 115).  Page 116 goes on with the human story, the little story, which is the story of the Wake:  Buckley and the Russian General at the magazine wall, which is an avatar of HCE the father whose sons want to kill him.  The human family story is embedded in wider human history -- this is why the father HCE also has an avatar as the Russian General, as well as being a Viking and the city of Dublin himself.  We are drawn into the Bolshevik Revolution ("Bulsklivism...this red time of the white terror", could also be Wars of the Roses in England); the "social revolution," "the froggy jew" = l'affaire Dreyfus.  "We are not corknered yet dead hand!" -- one of several references to Ireland in the passage, fair city and coasts, but the dead hand, or mortmain, refers to the constraints placed on the living by the dead in a last will and testament.  We may be living in the present but we always have limits placed on us by history, and we always have sin.

Finally, what if we got away from the language of science, of curators and critics, of professors and police, and just used "lingo" that is "basically English"?:  "For if the lingo gasped between kicksheets...were to be preached from the mouths of wickerchurchwardens and metaphysicians in the row and advokaatoes, allvoyous, demivoyelles, languoaths, lesbiels, dentelles, gutterhowls and furtz, where would their practice be or where the human race itself were the Pythagorean sesquipedalia of the panepistemion...grunted and gromwelled...under some sacking left in a coarse cart?"  All of these refer to linguistic terms (vowels, demivowels, labials, dentals, etc) -- what if we got out of the panepistemion -- the place where we think we know everything -- and talked like regular people who live and die in the real world?

Report from April 2012 Meeting

Thanks to Jen!

pp. 111-113

We began on page 111 with the question “Why then how?” and a description of a melted negative of a picture of a horse, which is reminiscent of the first picture taken of a subject in motion: a horse with all four legs off the ground. The narration here is in a pompous voice, perhaps that of a lecturer. The distortion of the negative ties in with the misinterpretations of the letter. When ALP’s letter was pulled out by the chicken, it was accompanied by a distorted photo. The partially melted negative of a horse is a reminder of horses melted down into glue, and also brings to mind the idea that the negative could have been distorted from the heat produced by a trash heap or compost pile, out of which the letter was picked by the hen.  Chris (I think?) noted that horses appear in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Mr. Deasy’s office where he has a print of Great Horses of History.

[Janine adds:  One thing of interest to me here too is the nature of the artifact: the negative, the letter.  The thing we're trying to interpret has a materiality, a form, and a maker. The matter of meaning v. the physical matter of the artifact.  The other thing we've noticed generally is the clearest language in the Wake is often the language being used to clarify the unclarifiable.  In other words:  the parts we see as being easiest to read and decipher are the parts explaining something we'd struggled with for a half-hour.]

We discussed how there are multiple levels of distortion in every story as it evolves from the original through the varying interpretations and repetitions of the story. Joyce also uses the word “targum” to reference the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew bible. This led to discussion of the four gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Even the stories of the Old Testament are transformed and given new meaning and significance by the New Testament. Later in the same paragraph, Joyce refers to “Zingari shoolerim,” Gypsy scholars whose interpretations of the gospels changed the original meaning of the Old Testament.

The final line in this same paragraph uses the phrase “auld hensyne,” which is reminiscent of auld lang syne. We discussed  “auld” meaning gold or golden, and “hensyne” referring to hen speak, hen scratchings, or simply hearsay. [Janine adds: There's also the "Tip" throughout, which hearkens us back to Kate, p. 79.] That would place importance on the hen digging up ALP’s letter and on what the letter has to say.

It seems that the more the letter is discussed in this section, the more convoluted it becomes. The more opinions added to the mix, and the more interpretations offered, the more difficult it becomes to navigate back to the actual meaning or topic at hand. This led us to discuss the chicken and the egg and how that idea contributes to our understanding of history.  In this case, which came first: the story or the letter? Joyce refers to the hen in terms of “her genesic field,” leading us to believe that the hen is where this story originated.

On page 112, Joyce writes, “…but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne.” The use of the phrase “pick a peck” led us back to the tongue twister “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” The tongue twister itself is nonsense: if a pepper is pickled, then it’s already been picked. [Janine adds: Again, chicken/egg.] Therefore, the wordplay becomes more important than the meaning. Perhaps Joyce is hinting at the idea that what is said in the letter is nonsense or of no importance; rather, the interpretations and varying iterations of the letter’s story are what is truly important here. [Janine adds: wordplay came up again on p. 113 with "No minzies matter." We heard echoes of Lewis Carroll here: "All mimsy were the borogroves." Wordplay/nonsense don't matter -- don't signify -- except in and of themselves.]

Also, the action being taken in “pick a peck of kindlings” is to choose a shard or fragment from a larger pile of many such pieces. In spreading gossip, frequently we choose just the parts that are of interest to us personally, or just the parts we find most compromising or scandalous for the others involved. Likewise, we choose what we remember. Just as the gospels are four retellings of overlapping events, our memories are different versions of what happened according to individual people. [Janine adds: p. 112: "It is not a hear or say of some anomorous letter" -- amorous, anonymous, recall Woolf's "Anon."]

Janine picks up here for a bit:

We also saw pp. 112-113 cycling back to the family story.  The hen, scratching out her letter, "was kind of born to lay and love eggs (trust her to propagate the species and hoosh her fluff balls safe through din and danger!)."  We've talked in the past about feminine discourse, feminine writing, and we saw this at work in the paragraph beginning "Lead, kindly fowl!" -- which opens the door to said feminine discourse.  Possibly also androgyny: "she is ladylike in everything she does and plays the gentleman's part every time."  Acting?  Taking the gentleman's part, ie, supporting/defending him?  She not only writes but reads: "Biddy Doran looked ad literature."

Female reading continues on page 113, and we saw the end of the paragraph (continuing from 112) as hearkening back to the family.  "She is not out to dizzledazzle"; unlike "adamologists" (in the beginning was the word, naming, adamantine, male) "she feel plain plate one flat fact thing."  The thunderword ("Thingcrook etc. -- we saw thing, lex -- light, reading -- pasture, him around her, kin) brings us back to the family, and to HCE: "He had to see life foully the plak and the smut"; "There were three men in him" (testicles etc. but also the two sons within the father); "apple harlottes" and "little mollvogels"; "Treestone with one Ysold."  Again -- after the thunderword, we're reminded of the main plot, and offered a bit of clarity as plot moves ahead of interpretation.

Report from the March 2012 Meeting

pp. 110-111

We picked up at the top of p.110. “Here…” we are advised by another lawyer type narrator to “…let a few artifacts fend in their own favour” (110.01), one of which we explored in this meeting – “About that original hen” (110.22) who is said to be “Belinda of the Dorans” (111.05). But right away, this narrator’s introduction to these “artifacts” read as artificial or arti-fiction more than anything capable of fending in its own favor. This narrator’s introduction appears influenced by folklore and myth, and eventually collapses into a form of paradoxical double-talk filled with qualifiers which lead to no clear meaning:

“The river felt she wanted salt [From: Story of Confucious, Master Kung by Carl Crow (1940)]. That was just when Brien [Brian Boru, First High King of Ireland (10^th century) and founder of the Brien dynasty] came in. The country asked for bearspaw for dindin! [Story of Confucious, Master Kung + dinner] And boundin aboundin it got it surly. We who live in heaven [the gods?], we of the clover kingdom [Ireland? Or China—the “Flowery Kingdom”], we middlesins [Milesian – Mythological inhabitants of Ireland who conquered the Tuatha Dé Danann + middle-sin (i.e. Purgatory)] people have often watched the sky overreaching land” (110.01-06).

As the paragraph continues there are several allusions to Irish writers and historians. Joyce inserts himself here with a reference to his 1907 critical writing, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages” [from Critical Writings, a text that also creates a narrative for Irish pre-history]. The reference to this text is created by Joyce combining Saint” and “Sage into “Our isle of Sainge” (110.06).  However Sainge could also be J.M. “Sainge” [Synge], whose earlier works, like “Riders to the Sea,” focused on Irish-Gaelic peasants on the Aran Islands. There is also a “stern chuckler” [Laurence Sterne] and a reference to “Mayhappy” [Trinity College Dublin historian/classicist/mentor to Oscar Wilde, and famed Dublin-curmudgeon [perhaps a play on “happy”], John Pentland Mahaffy], whose one-liner “in Ireland the inevitable never happens and the unexpected constantly occurs” appears later in the paragraph as “where the possible was the impossible and the improbable the inevitable” (110.06-07; 110.11-12).

            There are also, as we discovered, none-Irish literary references as well—particularly to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”: “me ken or no me ken Zot is the Quiztune” [Zot is German for obscene, Dutch for Fool, Albanian for God, Hebrew for That. + …to be or not to be, that is the question…]; Hamlet’s lady-friend, Ophilia, also appears in the “Drainophilias” [maybe Drown Ophilia, or maybe Joyce prophesizing a “love of Drain-o”]. There is also Voltaire, or from Christian scripture a reference to the “vaal [Veil] of tares [tears]” (110.09-15), Pha, child of Apollo, who rode the Chariot of Fire, “Phaiton parks his car” (110.10), Aristotle, “Harrystotalies [Ar-ee-stot-uh-lees] and the vivle [Bible]” (110.17). With reference to all these forms of writing, the paragraph ends by unweaving any discernible information in a somewhat clear prose of double-talk, suggesting all of these texts may be infinitely interpretable [as with ALPs letter] because:

“…nobody after having grubbed up a lock of cwold cworn [cold corn] aboove his subject […] will go out of his way to applaud him on the [unbiased] back of his remark for utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be” (110.16-21).

The paragraph concludes with “Ahahn!” which, likewise, cannot fend for itself as Joyce presents it in this paragraph. It may be read as “Ahem” as with someone clearing their throat, “Amen” as with the close of a Christian prayer, “Aha!” as with Eureka; Ahab, in reference to nautical and water references from the paragraph, or “A hen” or “a hahn” [German for  rooster] which leads us to our next paragraph, “About that original hen.” (110.21-22).

Yes, what about that original hen? [“hen” or “sin”]. We start with a reminder of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” “April is the cruelest month.” In this paragraph we find that after the rot and waste of “Midwinter” comes the “Premver” [Primavera or Spring] and the “promise of a pril [April – the cruelest month]” (110.23), or the promise of the renewal of life. Whether this renewal is part of “life’s old sahatsong [sad song / sweet song / shat-shit song] we are left unsure.  We discussed whether this section may refer back to the hen’s [biddies – slang for domestic fowl (79.30)] found at Kate Strong trash-heap of “rotten witchawubbles” (79.30-31), here in the form of a “cold fowl behaviourising strangely” [a hen behaves strangely, a hen strangely rising] atop the “fatal midden [a dungheap] […] its limon […] fragments of orangepeel, the last remains of an outdoor meal […] and raw raw reeraw puteteurs [raw potatoes] (110.25-111.01)] to possibly plucks the letter from the trash-heap.

The son of a “strandlooper” [a beach bird], appears to have “trouved” [found or taken] this artifact in the form of “the Ardagh chalice” [a two-handed Irish metal cup from early Christian-time found by a child in a potato field in Ardagh, Co. Limerick, in 1868]. This child, “keepy little Kevin” (110.32) may be a Shaun character (Kevin Porter, Book III) due to Kevin’s proximity to jute (110.26) (Mutt and Jute, Book I—pp.16-18). “Keepy little Kevin” however, could also stand in as 18 year old Kevin Barry, the first post-Easter Rebellion Irish Republican executed by the British government (in 1920), who kept his secrets through torture until his execution.  Here is an excerpt from “The Ballad of Kevin Barry”:

British soldiers tortured Barry
Just because he would not tell

The names of his brave comrades
And other things they wished to know
"Turn informer or we'll kill you"
Kevin Barry answered "No"

This Kevin, the narrator seems to insinuate, may have served his own self interests.  It appears as though the narrator presents the possibility that Kevin usurped this “patchpurple” [flowerly, ornate writing] (111.02) artifact from another child, “an iceclad shiverer” (110.24). Kevin saw (or found) in the artifact “a motive for future saintity [sanity or Saint-hood] and by euchring [tricks (or the Eucharist)]” this other “heily innocent and beachwalker”  child, [Holy-innocent or wholly innocent beachwalker] (110.33-35) with“pious clamour” as Kevin was trying to “wheedle” (110.36) raw potatoes out of Now Sealand.  The “massacre” appears like another brother battle: “a dual [twin concepts] a duel [a battle] to die [death] to day [new dawn – life], goddam and biggod [a curse (or giant dam) and a Big God (the giant-hero HCE?), sticks and stanks [material for dams, more painful than words], of most of the Jacobiters [a series of conflicts with the ambition to restore the (usurped?) Stuart dynasty into the British monarchy” (111.02-04).  

The narrator does not delve further into the discussion of Kevin, but instead returns for now on page 111 to a discussion of “the hen” or “the bird” from the previous page. “The bird in the case was Belinda [Belinda / Biddie?] of the Doran’s,” (111.05-06), who won  “Terziis [third] prize with Serni medal [silver – generally for second place] (111.06). HCE appears in the form of the contest or expo: “Cheepalizzy’s Hane [possibly hen (female) or haan (male), Dutch for rooster] Exposition” (111.06-07). Furthermore, the new matter at hand appears to be “what she was scratching [looking for] at the hour of klokking twelve [hour o’clock-ing twelve + clucking] looked for all this zogzag [whole-wide] world like a goodishsized sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass.)” (111.07-11).

The contents of this letter do not appear to be all that interesting – it appears as a letter written about home. “Dear whom” does not give any information as to whom the letter is addressed to, though “it proceded to mention Maggy [who is Maggy?] well & allathome’s [all at home’s] health well” (111.10-11).  There is indirect mention of a wedding “some born gentleman with a beautiful present of wedding cakes for dear thankyou Chriesty” (111.13-14), and mention of a “grand funferall” [funeral - fun-for-all] for “poor Father Michael” (111.14-15), followed by general talk of “how are you Maggy & hopes soon to hear well & must not close it with fondest to the twoinns [twins – Shem & Shaun] with four crosskisses [xoxoxoxo] for holy paul [Paul - the letter writer in the Bible], holey corner [HCE?], holipoli [the many + holy city], whollyisland [?]” followed by a “pee ess [postscript-P.S.]” (111.16-18).

While the contents of the P.S. do not appear to be clear, as the talk transitions to locust who eat everything but a sign (maybe one of the plagues on Egypt?), and the taking of tea “tache of tch” (111.20) it appears as though “The stain” of “the overcautelousness [overcautiousness] of the masterpilker [bilker – a cheat, but also Ibsen’s The Master Builder, or the stains of a masterbator] here, as usual, signing the page away” (111.20-21), “marked it off on the spout [spot + spur] of the moment as a genuine relique of ancient Irish pleasant pottery of that lydialike [ladylike] languishing class known as a hurry-me-o’er-the-hazy [a note to self].

            “Why then how?” (111.25).

            It appears we have only more questions that we hope you will help us to answer 

Report from the February 2012 Meeting

February meeting

106-108

We continued making our way through the list of names for ALP's "mamafesta."  We returned to an idea that has come up in the past:  what does the story look like when told from the woman's point of view?  How is the female writing/rewriting different?  With ALP's letter, it is woman's writing that saves the day, and here ALP overwrites the epic/history/legend we have already been through.  

A few titles that leapt out to us:  I'm the Stitch in the Backside You'd be Nought Without Mom, He Perssed Me Here with the Ardour of a Tonnoburkes, The Mimic of Meg Neg and the Mackeys, The Suspended Sentence, Fine's Fault Was No Felon, His is the House that Malt Made, A Tree is Quick and Stone is White So is My Washing Done by Night.  There are a number of titles that include the ALP/HCE initial letter combination.  Several titles, such as The Mimic.. and The Suspended Sentence refer to the Wake itself.  Fine's Fault and The House that Malt Made refer to the fall of HCE, including his appearance as Mr. Porter, another one of his avatars.  A Tree is Quick and Stone is White… could refer to the two myths of Daphne, turned into a tree to elude Apollo and whose leaves came to serve as crowns, and Niobe, turned to stone by the deaths of her children (7 girls and 7 boys).  As Adeline Glasheen points out, too, the tree/stone combination refers also to Shem and Shaun and life and death; the washing hearkens us forward to ALP and the washerwomen at the end of Book I.

The end of the list of titles is actually completely straightforward, almost as though ALP is tired of all this monkeying around and wants some good common sense to reign in the story of her husband and his indictment:  First and Last Only True Account all about the Honorary Mirsu Earwicker, L.S.D. (pounds shillings pence), and the Snake (Nuggets!) by a Woman of the World who only can Tell Naked Truths about a Dear Man and all his Conspirators how they all Tried to Fall him Putting it all around Lucalizod about Privates Earwicker and a Pair of Sloppy Sluts plainly Showing all the Unmentionability falsely Accusing about the Raincoats.  This is straightforward, slangy, irritable, and serves as the wife's riposte to the gossip about her husband, while also taking his side ("first and last only true account," "naked truths," "dear man," "conspirators," "tried to fall him," "putting it all around," "falsely accusing").  It also conveys the idea that the crime is sexual:  naked truths, sloppy sluts, raincoats (condoms).  

[America (the West) also figures somewhat prominently:  Thonderbalt Captain Smeth and La Belle Sauvage Pocahonteuse (the French for "shame" making its way in there), The Last of the Fingallians.  It reminded us of Donne:  O my America!]

The insertion of the commonsense approach at the end of the list struck us as a kind of puncturing:  no longer about epic or grand narrative.  This is a wife with a particular perspective ("a woman of the world"), not a collective looking for a scapegoat.  This is a defense.  Then the voice/tone shifts again, in response to the mamafesta --

With "the proteiform graph" and the "polyhedron of scripture" on page 107, the book becomes almost three-dimensional; it exists in multiple kinds of spaces, prewriting, prehistory, then beyond the time when "naif alphabetters would have written it down".  The forms of writing are shifting, hybrid, fluid:  "proteiform," "ambidextrous," "his (or her)."  And if we want to find sex here, we will:  "To the hardily cruising entomophilust then it has shown a very sexmosaic of nymphosis in which the eternal chimerahunter…bewilderblissed by their night effluvia with guns like drums and fondlers like forceps persequestellates his vanessas from flore to flore."  The "vanessas" are a reference to Swift's love, as is "stella," and it would seem that the "chimerahunter" is pursuing sexual desire from flower to flower (for deflowering?).  But this might also be a general comment on misreading, or overriding:  as Wordsworth writes in "Simon Lee," "It is no tale/but should you think/perhaps a tale you'll make it."

And so "we must grope on" in a "kitchernott darkness," where a "multiplicity of personalities inflicted on the documents or document and some prevision of virtual crime or crimes might be made by anyone unwary enough before any suitable occasion for it or them had so far managed to happen along."  We inflict multiple readings through prevision, unwary, seeing what we want to see in anticipation of what we think we'll find -- while at the same time refusing to see contrarieties except as elements to be smoothed out, eliminated.  The sheer explicitness of the end of the mamafesta would seem to render interpretation unnecessary, and yet…

As we continue, we encounter "a jolting series of prearranged disappointments, down the long lane of (it's as semper as oxhousehumper!) generations, more generations, and still more generations."  Genre disappoints by not living up to our expectations, and so do our parents.  It's as simple, and as semper (always) as ABC, or aleph beth gimel (the ideograms for the first three letters of the Hebrew alphabet).  

We are interrupted by an interlocutor at the bottom of page 107/top of page 108 who would ask "who in hallhagal wrote the durn thing anyhow?…by the use of quill or style…interrupted by visit of seer to scribe or of scribe to site…laden with the loot of learning?"  Was this written the same way anything else would be written?  Were there scribes and seers?  Is it learned?  These questions are deferred:  "Now, patience; and remember patience is a great thing."  Could be advice to readers of the Wake itself: we need patience as we return again and again to "this radiooscillating epiepistle."

At the bottom of page 108, in response to "the loot of learning" -- the stealing of stories, plagiarist's booty -- our interlocutor addresses "naysayers."  To say that the page "cannot ever have been a penproduct of a man or woman" is an "unlookedfor conclusion leaped at" -- again, we are accused of misinterpreting, when really it is the author who is "constitutionally incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others" by using quotation marks.  Even the signifier of accuracy -- quotation marks -- is a kind of stealing (and a joke at Joyce, who always refused to use them).  Anything that makes its way into the text is evidence of the inevitability of literary symbiosis (to use David Cowart's term), and it's all there for the taking.