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.
