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.