Week 3 (JF)

FW pp. 30-42

Onto Chapter 2, and a quick note/open question.  The version of FW that O and I are reading has an outline of chapter contents (above), but who wrote that?  I'm guessing that if it's paginated with small romans and precedes the title page, it's Bishop?  Whatever, it's decidedly unhelpful, and I have no idea why it's there.  It's so cryptic and weird that I wish JJ wrote it.  Maybe he did.

So this week, we moved from a general introduction of HCE to a specific one.  This week's reading was somewhat readable at first.  I was feeling great about it for the first five pages or so, then I lost it.  Basically, this chapter contains background of an embarrassing event for HCE that creates inner conflict, and probably fuels his dreamscape.  He was walking through a park and encountered three Welsh soldiers watching two young Irish women pull their pants down and pee in the woods.  Whether HCE saw the soldiers (and was peeping on the peeping toms) first, or they saw him first, is unclear.  JJ talks about the event and its aftermath.  I got that.  Then he dives into deeper water.  That, I didn't get.

HCE meets "a cad with a pipe" after the incident.  The cad is young adult, and maybe a stand-in for Shem and Shaun?  Anyway, the rumor mill starts.  HCE owns a bar, I think?, and people in that neighborhood of Dublin start lining up for and against him.  The cad, somehow (I'm paraphrasing Tindall), beds ALP - figuratively.  I missed that completely, although I did catch her around the periphery of this segment.  And HCE becomes one of his worst detractors, a dude named "Hosty."  Hosty is, check this, HCE, Jesus (the eucharist or host), and Satan (Latin hostis or enemy) at the same time.  Tindall: "Never was Joyce's talent for concentration shown more happily."  Smh.     

Fave passages and words?

pp 32-33 (it's a really long, like Faulkner-long sentence, but at least Wild Bill seemed to wink at grammar):

"The great fact emerges that after that historic date all holographs so far exhumed initialed by Haromphrey bear the sigla H.C.E. and while he was only and long and always good Dook Umphrey for the hungerlean spalpeens of Lucalizod and Chimbers to his cronies it was equally certainly a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him as sense of those normative letters his nickname Here Comes Everybody.  An imposing everybody he always indeed looked, constantly the name as and equal to himself and magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalization...."

So HCE is an everyman.  Ok.

I liked the words "verbigracious" and "twitterlitter"  (p37, ll33,37) for their playfulness.  And I liked the word "ildiot" (p37, l14), and figured it had another meaning.  Tidal says the ildiot is T.S. Eliot, and his "secondmouth language" (p37, l15) is what TSE stole for The Waste Land from Ulysses.  Kinda interesting.

Finally, I wanted more from Tindall about this passage (p31, ll33-36):

"Comes the question are these the facts of his nominigentilisation as recorded and accelerated in both or either of collateral andrewpaulmurphyc narratives.  Are those their fata which we read in sibylline between the fas and its nefas?"

I like the flow, but don't understand the words.

Quick apology to O.  I'm sorry for the late blog post.  My week three reading of the text and the guide was off by a few days, so this is off, too.  I'll try to catch up by Sunday.

More soon.

Peace,

JF