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!
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