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?