Finnegans Wake Is LSD On The Page (Or Something Like That)

Week 12, June 20, page 152

After my previous entry, I hit a wall.

Funny, isn’t it?  I was all fired up about Chapter V.  I really enjoyed the way the text folded in on itself. Talk about navel gazing, this was the navel looking at itself.

Then what happened?

Then I entered Chapter VI, and things began to grind. The chapter is presented in a series of questions and answers (sort of). The first question, focused on HCE, gobbled up an entire week’s worth of reading, and didn’t seem to offer up anything new.  At least, that’s how I felt.  I was understanding bits and pieces of the text, but it felt like ground maybe we’d already covered in some way. I wasn’t understanding anything more about HCE.  The edge was lost, and I was rubbing against a dull blade.

Even when the chapter moved on to other characters, bringing in ALP and Shem and Shaun, I struggled to find the spark from Chapter V.  I kept reading, but I was feeling a bit down, not sure what to blog about or why, or even how much more reading I could realistically do. I began to look longing at my book shelf, at all the books I hope to someday read.

But then I discovered this video on YouTube, which is really just an audio recording of Terence McKenna discussing Finnegans Wake (the image is a static picture of what appears to be an extra potent marijuana plant).

If you don’t know who Terrence McKenna is, let me quote from his Wikipedia page: “He was called the "Timothy Leary of the 90s", "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism", and the "intellectual voice of Rave culture".”

Just what I needed!  A different perspective on FW.  Could this guy be any further from Tindall? The lecture is from 1995, from a guy whose first three entries on his Wiki page are Early Life, Studying and Traveling, and Psilocybin Mushroom Cultivation.  Ha!

So what does McKenna have to say.  He says, “the reason I’m interested in it is because it’s two things: Finnegans Wake is psychedelic and it is apocalyptic/eschatological.”

Why is it psychedelic?  Because it gets rid of fixed meaning and a stable point of view. Identities are not fixed.  “Finnegans Wake is like you took the last thousand years of human history and dissolved all the boundaries.”  It’s like a trip, he says.

“The theme is always the same: the delivery of the Word, the misinterpretation of the Word, and the redemption of the Word at every level in all times and places.” (I don’t know if he wants you to capitalize “Word;” but it seems likely.)

“It’s about as close to LSD on the page as you can get,” McKenna opines.

OK, so it’s a far-out trip, man.  Why is it apocalyptic/eschatological?

Because the entire universe could be reconstructed from the pages of FW.  He calls this a “Talmudic idea, that somehow a book is the primary reality.”  It is a “philosopher’s stone of literary associations from which the universe can be manifested.”

For someone who is clearly so out there, McKenna speaks clearly and intelligently about his perspective on the text.  The book is “so rich that it is easy to make original discoveries. It’s easy to see and understand stuff that hasn’t been understood probably since James Joyce put it there.” Easy might be overstating things, Terence, but I can see where you’re going with it.

He goes on from there, and I'd recommend listening to the lecture, just for his specific POV on Joyce. I’m not going to agree with everything McKenna says, but he speaks with such obvious enthusiasm for Finnegans Wake that the feeling becomes contagious. I began to think, “Yeah, this book is pretty awesome, and I am still reading it! There are still a million ways to get something out of this beast!”

For the first time in a couple of weeks, I feel re-set, ready to approach the book with a fresh mind.  Let’s hope it lasts!

Week 11 (JF)

FW pp. 126-39

Chapter V ended with Shem.  Chapter VI starts with Shaun, like this:

"So?

Who do you no tonight, lazy and gentlemen?

The echo is where in the back of the wodes; callhim forth!"

Shem summons Shaun for his apparently nightly quiz.  (My brother and I never tried this, but maybe we should have?)  And JJ gives us that quiz, in twelve questions.  This post covers the first and longest question, which is about our protagonist, HCE - aka Finn McCool, or the most interesting man in the world.

(Imagine the Dos Equis ad: "When he [HCE] touches himself in front of two young girls, the greatest writer of the Twentieth Century abandons his own language and devotes an entire incomprehensible book to the indiscretion.")

Chapter V and VI both begin with lists,  or what Tindall unhelpfully calls "Rabelaisian catalogue[s]."  (I googled that a few ways and found nothing, sorry.  I'm gonna go ahead and assume that the Brit spelling means that Rabelais liked shopping for high-end home furnishings.)  The device is similar, but the two lists read quite differently - even though the voice is supposed to be Shem for both.  It's a matter of tone, I guess.  The ALP stuff in Chapter V is playful, and respectful; the HCE stuff in Chapter VI is almost scornful at times, but still respectful.  I'm looking for a modifier there - grudgingly respectful?  That's not quite it.  There seems to be a part of Shem that loves his father, a part that dislikes him, and part that recognizes that HCE is more than a father, and instead an "every person" figure, who's "larger than life, doughtier than death" and "calls upon Allthing when he fails to appeal to Eachovos."

Tindall is super annoying here.  He says, "The catalogue of his selves and qualities offers no great obstacles to readers so experienced as we must be by now" (b.s.), but later adds, "The first question, for all the world like our world, remains - in spite of class, genus, species - a buzzing, blooming confusion."  (Did he even proofread his own book, or did he just riff and leave the hard work to his assistants, students, and editors?)  Tindall sees a whole lot of people in Shem's description of HCE - Gods and Kings, Mark Twain, even JJ himself in the word "babu," which is what his children called him.  I missed all or nearly all of that.

This was a very difficult, and somewhat enjoyable, segment, but I don't have alot more to say.  Just looking at my underlining in the text, I was more impressed with the wordplay - "flouts for forecasts, flairs for finds and the fun of the fray on the fairground" or "the gleam of the glow of the shine of the sun through the dearth of the dirth on the blush of the brick of the viled ville," for example - than the content.  Vico and his cycles show up because Shem acknowledges that HCE "moves in vicous circles yet remews the same."  He is "exalted and depressed, assembled and asundered."  He "acts active, peddles in passives and is a gorgon of selfridgeouseness."  He's "Timb" (Finnegan), fallen-but-waked to the pearly morning, and "Tomb" to the mourning night.

Anyway, I'm farther into Chapter VI, and struggling.  I'll finish soon, and post about the other questions - as well as the Ithaca episode of Ulysses.

JF

Weeks 9-10 (JF)

FW pp. 104-28

(This post is about Chapter V, though these two segments drifted into Chapter VI.)

So this is it, I thought, after reading OM's latest post.  The big reveal, where things start making sense, where JJ shows himself as a pre-post-modernist and things get meta, where the really difficult book becomes about a book about being a really difficult book.  Yes, and definitely no.

First, the no.  I really liked Chapters III and IV.  I sorta disliked Chapter V because I felt more in the dark.  Chapter V starts with an invocation to ALP, and proceeds to a three-page italicized list of all the names by which she (and her husband) have been/may be called.  The list is cool and weird, and includes alot of then-popculture references, as well as some naughty bits.  But the chapter itself isn't about either of them.  It's about a letter that she wrote to him, which was never delivered and made its way to the city dump, where it's picked at by a wise "lookmelittle likemelong" hen.  The letter and the hen have been mentioned before in the text, though, admittedly, I missed most of that.  (Tindall is helpful here - at least to the extent he tells me what I don't know and directs me to passages that I can reread.)  Text = text; letter = FW.  Got it.  But wait...Shem's the writer, not ALP, right?

Exactly. ALP dictated the letter to Shem (per Tindall), who, after the italicized list, takes over as our lit prof, our proto-Tindall, and guides us through an exegesis of what she/he wrote.  It gets confusing/exhausting pretty quickly.  The letter itself is in the text, says Tindall.  Have at it:

"The bird in the case was Belinda of the Dorans a more than quinquegintarian (Terziis prize with Serni medal, Cheepalizzy's Hane Exposition) and what she was scratching at the house of clicking twelve looked for all this zigzag world like a goodish-sized sheet of letter paper originating transhipt from Boston (Mass.) [hey, O] of the last of the first to Dear whom it proceeded to mention Maggy well & allathome's health well on the hate turned the mild on the van Houtens and the general's elections with a lovely face of some born gentlemen with a beautiful present of wedding cakes for dear thankyou Chriesty and with grand funferall of poor Father Michael don't forget unto life's & Muggy well how are you Maggy & hopes soon to hear well & must now close it with fondest to the twins with four cross kisses for holy paul holy corner holipoli whollyisland pee ess from (locust may eat all but this sign shall they never) affectionate large looking tache of tech.  The stain, and that a teastain (the overcautelousness of the master bilker here, as usual, signing the page away), marked it off on the spout of the moment as a genuine relique of ancient Irish pleasant pottery of that lydialike languishing class known as a hurry-me-o'er-the hazy."

Full disclousure?  I didn't know that was the gotdam letter when I read it.  Actually, I thought it was part of the letter, ("Dear" and "must now now close it with" tipped it), but not the whole thing.  Professor Shem then examines the letter as a piece of physical evidence.  How do we know ALP wrote it?  The letter may be unsigned, but its author is obvious.  "So why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, pen stroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own?"  One giveaway on the paperspace is the teastain.  I'm not sure why tea means ALP.

Another version of the letter appears a few pages later, after another thunderclap, only this time the letter is in Franglais.  "All schwants (schwrites) ischt tell the cock's trootabout him.  Kayak kapuk.  No minzies matter.  He had to see life foully the plak and the smut, (schwrites)."  All ALP wants, she writes, is to tell the truth about HCE's indiscretions back to him; he had to see the smut of his foul life.  Hm.  The letter isn't about anything divine; it's about something human, "as human a little story as paper could carry."  (That's me adding Vico to that passage - if my point is off base, don't blame Tindall, haha.)

JJ isn't too concerned about smooth transitions, but he follows the little human story line with a two-page riff on sex and pillow talk.  This is an absolutely amazing passage, imo.  Where would we be, JJ asks, if that language of love, "the lingo gasped between kicksheets," and "told in sounds in utter that, in signs so adds to, in universal, in polyglutteral, in each auxiliary neutral idiom," were appropriated by "wicker churchwardens and metaphysicians"?  (I chopped up alot of text there.)  Would sex be the same?  Would love be the same?  JJ?

"So hath bee, love: tis tis: and will be: till wears and tears and ages.  Thief us the night, steal we the air, shawl thiner liefest, mine!  Here, Ohere, insult the fair!  Traitor, bad hearer, brave!  The lightning look, the birding cry, awe from the grave, ever-flowing on the times.  Feueragusaria iordenwater; now godsun shine on menday's daughter; a good clap, a fore marriage, a bad wake, tell hell's well; such is manowife's lot of lose and win again, like he's gruen quhiskers on who's chin again, she placated them out but they grown in again.  So what are you going to do about it?  O dear!"

Indeed.  But JJ isn't done with that language, which he shorthands as "this oldworld epistola of their weatherings and their marryings and their buryings and their natural selections," and takes a step back from it to consider all language.  This is where he talks about FW.  And so...

Second, the yes.  As in, hell yes.  Remember Barthes?  The Death of the Author?  Whose interpretation of a text matters, the author's or the reader's?  JJ had an opinion.  Because of "that prestatute in our charter" (The Magna Charta?), we "may have our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense of the lot, the interpretation of any 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."  We might question what a phrase in a text means, but we shouldn't idly doubt the author's intent.  So sayeth the Author, eh?

Maybe I'm doing exactly what JJ is advising that I shouldn't be doing.  Maybe I'm reading too much into this passage, but he does mention the fruitlessness of overthinking, and the misunderstanding (or "intermisunderstanding") and just plain wrong-headed editing - "the innocent exhibitionism of those frank yet capricious underlinings," which calls "unnecessary attention to errors, omissions, repetitions and misalignments" - that results from it.  Tindall almost supports this.  Let's imagine that JJ predicted and threw shade at the cottage industry that would develop around reading/attempting to understand FW...of which this blog is part, a proud part.  (Can we say that, OM?  I'll be proud as punch when we finish.)

The end of these segments leads to the image above.  Have you ever heard of the Book of Kells?  Me, neither, but it's a big deal, and so pretty.   Basically, the Book of Kells is an illustrated version of the Gospels, where the biblical words shares space with really fantastic pictures.  (Vico: human = words; divine = symbols.)  The last few pages of Chapter V are super dense, and I didn't get much from them.  Tindall mentioned that the Book of Kells is a translation.  So is the letter.  Its translator?  "[T]hat odious and still today insufficiently malestimated notesnatcher," "Shem the Penman," where this chapter ends and the next chapter begins.

It's Sunday, and I'm behind, as usual.  Only fifteen pages, pfft.  I'll try to get current in the next few days, and blog accordingly.

More later,

JF

(Psst.  Hey, O.  It's just you and me here.  Our SOs checked out before we even started.  And our so-called friends can't be bothered.  So it's ok to say this project is grad-school grueling, and I'm not in my 20s anymore - back in the day, I was smart, or faked it better.  I'm doing this for two reasons: Sharing something heady with you, and being able to tell my kids that I finished the hardest book ever written in the English "nat" language.  Just so we're clear.

Oh, and I don't think I've pinpointed any page numbers for JJ passages since my Week 4 post.  Do you think I need to go back and do that?  Maybe, I will.)

Tindall's Intro (JF)

Queso.  (Inside joke with my best friend.  We used to say "Queso," instead of "K, so.")

Where are we?  Somewhere around the end of Chapter V?  Apparently, OM has developed a crush on ALP, and I'm still fighting through the Vico stuff.  Or, anyway, Tindall's take on Vico.  Inter alia.  This post was supposed to be about Weeks 9-10, but I haven't read those segments yet.  Hopefully, I'll get current in the next few days.

I did finish Tindall's intro, though.  Finally, and...hm.  Did you ever see Richard Linklater's Slacker?  If so, remember that part with the UT prof, where he randomly namedrops people you've never heard of?  Tindall's intro is like that, only with less guns and more people you've heard of.  Like famous people.  Bill Shakespeare?  Yeah, Bill Tindall (that's him above, looking sorta like a zoot suit Hemmingway, and Ernie probably leaned that way style-wise in the '40s - at least, I can't find a google images pic to link to prove otherwise - before he started bearding up and shooting stuff) is down with him.  Sam Beckett?  Sure.  Oh, and John Lennon, "the literate Beatle."  Whut.  Ok, gimme a break.  I've read more than a hundred pages of FW (knuckles, OM), and I can tell you, in no uncertain terms, that there is nothing in the book about Lennon or the Beatles, whose heyday postdated the book's publication by decades.

So I'm glad that I didn't finish Tindall's intro before I started reading the actual text because I wouldn't be reading it at all right now - the guy's tone and content are both sorta annoying in a snobby, Ivy League prof way.  "Oh, I didn't understand the Wake, and you couldn't possibly understand it."

He's right.  I don't understand it.  But, at this point, I've hitched my wagon to his, so I have no choice except trail along.  Unlike OM, I wasn't an English major.  I was a PoliSci major, and now I'm a lawyer who ghostwrites.  I'm ok with words, but I'm shite with symbols.  (Actually, JJ isn't a super symbol-y writer, tbh.  He's almost ur-symbolic.  He writes the words he wants to write, and means to write, and they mean what he imagines they mean.  If you don't get them, it's not because there's a veil.  It's because, well, you're not JJ, and you don't have his particular/peculiar upbringing, education, and life experience.)  And almost all of FW is not words, or "nat language."

Beckett, who did ok for himself when he stopped being JJ's expat toadie, was ok with that.  And his piece is something I need to read soon.  I promised to delve into that, and more into Vico, but that's not happening.  I want to talk about a few things Tindall mentioned, and leave Sammy B. for another time.

Tindall talks alot about Vico and Bruno.  Here's the breakdown: Vico = ages of human history (divine age, heroic age, human age, ricorso [repeat]); Bruno = everything is its opposite (Shem and Shaun, e.g., as opposed aspects of HCE.)  The Bruno shit controls the flow; the Vico shit controls the structure.  Vico posited history in three parts.  JJ turned that into four because he considered the repeat another part, so the book has four parts.  Bruno posited something about duality, so the book splits the main characters in half.  Blah x3.  I'm just not sure any more detail on these Italian guys is very interesting to you, or very helpful to me.  Knowing they're there in FW is enough, I guess.  JJ agrees because he wrote in a Wake-period letter, "I would not pay overmuch attention to these theories beyond using them for all they are worth."

(The Vico stuff is actually more important because there are four ages and four parts in FW, but each of those parts has four subparts.  Tindall is good on that, until he riffs on shapes and drops this gem: "As Joyce, squaring the circle, circled the square, so he cubed the sphere or sphered the cube, by incubation."  I don't even begin to understand that.  It's annoying.  Whatever.)

Tindall is readable, but I wanted to roll my eyes, even when I agreed with him.  Yes!  FW is "a method of allegorical generality."  But do you have to get into Aquinas, and call his view "Thomistic"?  Maybe you do.  "In the Wake, as in the world, we get the same things over and over, the same things repeated with variety, to be sure, but the same old things."  For sure.  But then "Rabelaisian catalogues" and "Walter Pater in his essay on Giorgione" and I'm out.  Tindall's point, at some point, is that FW is not really a novel in any way most people would define a novel.  There's no plot, there's sketchy characterization, etc.  It's musical, and sui generis, because JJ wanted to write like people dream.  Another Wake-period letter: "One great part of every human existence is passed in a state state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot."

Tindall calls it "a verbal formula for the effect of dreaming," then describes why it's so difficult: (1) JJ messes with words in many languages; (2) JJ uses allusions that only he grasped (Vico, Bruno, Ireland, Roman Catholicism, his life experience); (3) JJ was a weirdo, with an "impefect, scattered, and peculiar learning."  (All three are the same?)  I'm gonna save Tindall's really nice little turn into Beckett for when I deal with his essay, but it's great, and makes me pissed that wasted time in government classes, instead of learning shit like the difference between modernism (FW, Faulkner) and post-modernism (Waiting for Godot, Barthelme, Pynchon, Barth, and later DFW).

Tindall closes with a mea culpa that approaches sweet.  He didn't do this alone; he assembled an A-Team of grad students, over thirty years, with different things to offer in unlocking the secrets of FW. Wow.  I'll cut the guy some slack.  He's invested in this wack-ass book.  And he's "a text man, concerned less with Joyce than with what he wrote" - meaning, he's ok with "The Death of the Author" stuff that gets me off.  (O, was there an American version of French Deconstructionism?  New Crit or something like that?  My poet friend in Seattle mentioned it once, years ago, and I never pieced everything together myself.)  "After all," says Tindall, "what authority on the Wake knows the half of it?"  I'm certainly no authority, but that strangely makes me feel fine about flippantly grinding through my twelve pages a week.  Or, you know, thirty-six pages a week when I get behind, like I will be if I don't get my ass in gear before Sunday.

More soon.

JF

In Which I'm Blown Away by Chapter V of Finnegans Wake

Week 9, May 31, page 116

Week 10, June 7, page 128

Instead of sticking to any one 12-page segment, I want to address Chapter V of Finnegans Wake.  Chapter V happens to start on page 104, so it nicely matches up with our reading schedule. But once I began the chapter, I had to take it in as a whole (it runs through page 125, which makes it close to two weeks’ reading).

As I mentioned in our latest virtual book club conversation, I’ve begun to wonder about the usefulness of thinking of FW as a dream.  Or, more accurately, as just a dream.  Clearly, we are inhabiting a dreamworld, but this is so much more than one man’s night of sleep. It has to be. 

I was thinking about this issue, about FW-as-a-dream, as I began Chapter V. At first, I thought the chapter was starting to provide some essential clues to answering my concerns, and it does.  But it also becomes what is, hands down, my favorite chapter of the book.  Yes, it relates to what’s going on in the dream, but Chapter V is first and foremost Joyce’s impassioned defense of his own novel, of Finnegans Wake. So I had to put aside the larger question and really dig into what’s going on with the chapter on its own. We shall leave the issue of the dream for another day.

So far in the book, HCE has been accused of a crime, stammered his way through his self-defense, and been incriminated and shamed by a parade of characters across Dublin. Now, his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle, comes to his defense. She writes a letter, which is known as her manifesto, or, in Joyce’s feminization of the word, her “mamafesta.” The letter, and the interpretation of the letter, evolves into a consideration of literature and the criticism of literature. At the center of that consideration is Finnegans Wake itself.

Here’s how the chapter begins:

In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!

Clearly, we have a play on the Lord’s Prayer, but as a prayer to something feminine: Eve, the original woman, the source of all life.  This strikes me as a particularly beautiful introduction to ALP. Then comes a long list of names given to her “mamafesta.”

And then, the Wake begins to turn on itself.

“The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture,” is the first line following the three pages of names. From here, I think it’s safe to read everything as both a comment on ALP’s letter and on Finnegans Wake.  They are constantly changing (“proteiform”) and many sided (“polyhedron”).

From here, well, my copy is now covered in black ink, as I attempted to underline or make a notation whenever the chapter looks inward.  Just a few tastes:

 Who in hallhagal wrote the durn thing anyway?

OK, that’s easy enough.  But how about this passage, where Joyce riffs on criticism of just the sort of writing he’s engaging in. Are you looking just at content? Or do you realize that vital importance of the envelope (the form), as well?

Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is just as hurtful to sound sense (and let it be added to the truest taste) as were some fellow in the act of perhaps getting an intro from another fellow turning out to be a friend in need of his, say, to a lady of the latter's acquaintance, engaged in performing the elaborative antecistral ceremony of upstheres, straightaway to run off and vision her plump and plain in her natural altogether, preferring to close his blinkhard's eyes to the ethiquethical fact that she was, after all, wearing for the space of the time being some definite articles of evolutionary clothing, inharmonious creations, a captious critic might describe them as, or not strictly necessary or a trifle irritating here and there, but for all that suddenly full of local colour and personal perfume and suggestive, too, of so very much more and capable of being stretched, filled out, if need or wish were, of having their surprisingly like coincidental parts separated don't they now, for better survey by the deft hand of an expert, don't you know?

And there’s more, so much more!  Because look at this:

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?

And then, the ultimate description of everyone’s favorite funferal, Finnegans Wake:

look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and pudden-padded, very like a whale's egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia

OK, OK, that’s enough.  I might as well simply copy/paste that whole chapter here.  Yes, this is about ALP and her shaky defense of her husband, but let’s be honest: it’s about Finnegans Wake.

As I alluded to in a previous post, the book is its own reward.  Hell, I even said, “Is there anything to it other than putting the old noodle through a workout?”  And here comes Joyce, telling me that I need to read his book a trillion until my noodle sinks or swims.

I’ll repeat what I said at the beginning—this was my favorite chapter so far, by a long shot. Perhaps that’s because it’s relatively accessible if approached in the right way, or because I’m getting better at reading this beast, or because I’ll enjoy every section about Anna Livia Plurabelle.  I can’t say for sure. But I was pretty well blown away.

Conversation #2: Tales Told of Shem and Shaun

JF: I don't know where to start this conversation. I guess with a question: Do you see HCE's sons in FW? Tindall does, all over the place, and I definitely don't.

We can leave Isabel for another time. She hasn't been in the book much, from what I gather, except as she's reflected in the two young girls (mostly age-wise?) from the park.

OM: I've seen bits and pieces, but only because I've read enough essays and general criticism to know the basics. Shem and Shaun are HCE's twin sons. Shem the Penman is the writer, the artist, the creator. Shaun the Postman is the worker, the carrier, the man of industry. I get the two sides of the two characters, and so I've seen them appear in flickers so far.

Having said that, Tindall writes in a way that sometimes makes it feel like you're missing the obvious. And I don't really agree with him all the time. I'm sure Shem and Shaun pop up a lot, but they way he presents it makes seem that their appearances are more obvious than they are.

Here's a typical passage from Tindall:

"Pegger as Shaun is the witness against Earwicker, and the Wet Pinter is the attorney for the defense. (A West Pointer is a cadet or a Cad from the New World, and a Wet Pinter is a drunk--or Shem.) But Shaun, giving a 'hilariohoot,' has changed places with Hilary-Shem; and Shem's 'tristitone' shows that he has become Tristopher-Shaun."

I don't know what the heck he's talking about, and it makes the passage to which he's referring more difficult, not less. I'm more comfortable carrying my broad views of the duality of Shem/Shaun with me into the text, and making what I can whenever I encounter them.

I've also read that the twins begin to play a much more prominent role in the text very soon.

JF: I've probably read many of the same essays as you, and I rarely, if ever, see the twins.

HCE is pretty easy to spot, obviously. Even without JJ's letter-clues, it's a safe bet that most of time when there's an important male character, it's him to some degree. ALP is harder to spot, if only because she's less incarnate than HCE and more likely to be represented by, say, water.

The Cad is one of the twins, right? Break down their characteristics a bit more, please. I glossed on that a few blog posts back, but I'd like your take.

(Agreed on Tindall, btw. I'm getting increasingly less out of the guide each week. I wouldn't say it's useless, but its use is maybe above my understanding? And often, I don't find what I'm looking for there. Which guide did you use for GR? The one I used was very thorough in detailing even passing cultural allusions. Tindall seems to have more of his own agenda than his readers' in mind. And what's up with his list of shit at the end of every chapter? Not helpful at all.)

OM: Shem is the introverted artist who creates the message. Shaun is the postman who delivers that message to the world. Shaun is also economically successful and is something of a politician. Shem is Irish for James, and is more closely related with what we think of the writer James Joyce. Although, of course, Shem/Shaun are also two halves of one personality, so it's also about the two sides of a man's personality.

I'm sure there's a lot more to it, but that's how I think about them broadly.

So basically, my approach is to look for those personality aspects in the text, and when I see them, I project Shem or Shaun onto whatever is going on at that point. By doing that, I don't worry as about all the different names you get for Shem and Shaun: Kevin and Mutt and whoknowswhoelse.

Re: the Cad, I have forgotten about him, since that cad with a pipe episode.

JF: The Cad was on the periphery of Chapter III in some gossip. And he's in Chapter IV, too. I didn't see either, fwiw.

Your description of the twins jives with what Bishop says: Shem is "an extrasocial rebel and artist," and Shaun is "the model son and heir."

OM: Are the twins just HCE projections? I know that they're supposed to act as stand-ins for the two sides of HCE, in some senses, but we're still supposed to understand them as distinct characters, even if they are warped by the sleeping mind of their father, right? Like, HCE, when he's awake, has two sons.

For me, this is where things get really difficult, even more so than struggling through the "nat language" of Finnegans Wake on a word-by-word basis. Every character is represented by every other character, and also by that character's opposite (and ten more from history and myth). That gets awfully frustrating. Every word means so much that it eventually doesn't mean anything at all.

We all recognize that experience of a dream where identities merge or overlap. "In my dream last night, I was in my high school cafeteria with Bill Clinton, who was actually my dad, but still Bill Clinton." But even the weirdest dreams hold some kind of sense while you're dreaming them, right? It's usually when you wake up and try to remember the dream that everything looks a mess.

And now I'm getting to the point where I want to ask: "Is Finnegans Wake really a dream?" But that might be a month's worth of posts all to itself.

JF: And who's the dreamer? I think I alluded to that in my Week 0 post. Bishop seems to think it's HCE, but others seem to think it's a nameless person and that HCE is that person's dream projection.

Or maybe the dreamer is JJ?

That's a great point about dream identity overlap - one person as two people, but still a/the main one planted in your subconscious. And I agree with you on the difficulty and frustration of everybody (HCE = Here Comes Everybody) being everybody else within the (can we even call it a loose?) narrative, but also countless figures throughout world history. It's overwhelming, which is why I tend to look for HCE as HCE the Dublin bar owner and leave the other stuff for Tindall, if he chooses to cover it.

I think the Shem and Shaun stuff will become more apparent as we move into Book II, but we're still a ways off that. I'm a few days behind on reading - need to start Chapter V (ALP) - and posting.

OM: I am going to continue to work under the assumption that HCE is the dreamer. Perhaps he has another name in his waking life, but since the book doesn't seem concerned with that side of things, I'm not going to worry too much. If we continue to assume that FW really is a dream, then I'll stick with my main man, HCE.

Tindall says somewhere that Chapter V shifts focus onto ALP, and Chapters VI and VII began to bring the twins to the fore. Apparently Chapter VII is all about Shaun making fun of Shem. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

Weeks 7-8 (JF)

FW pp. 78-103

Ok, so. I know that I promised last time to dig into Vico and Beckett, particularly Beckett on Vico.  I'll talk a little bit about Vico, and leave Beckett for another post.

Vico is Giambattista Vico, an 18th Century Italian philosopher, whose major work was 1725's Principi di Scienza Nuova (Principles of New Science), or simply The New Science. There, Vico apparently says a lot of things about a lot of things, as philosophers tend to do, but two stand out.  First, Vico offers an early response to Descartes, answering cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) with verum esse ipsum factum (truth is itself fact - my trans, with help from several sources).  The dichotomy there is sorta interesting - truth as provable only through reason versus truth as beyond the need for proof - and but sorta irrelevant to FW, as far as I can discern.  Second, Vico broke down the process of history into a cycle of three ages - the divine, the heroic, and the human - and a period of chaos, or ricourso, after which the cycle begins again.  (Mostly a straight-up crib of material from the two wiki pages linked above. I was a poli-sci major in college, so I'm in deep water quickly here.)

3 + 1 = 4.  There are four books in FW.  And pretty much everyone seems to agree that Vico's four-part cycle was at least an influence on JJ's structure.  But what does that mean?  What, aside from a number and a wheel, did JJ take from Vico?  And why?

Communication in the divine age is primitive - gestures and grunts between giant mutes (Mutt & Jute), like the wordless thunder that appears in Chapter I and later, and signs, like hieroglyphs and coats of arms.  Communication in the heroic age is poetic and metaphoric.  Communication in the human age is both vulgar and abstract.  All of that is from Tindall, and the picture above is actually pretty sweet.  For FW, tho, I'm not sure what any of it means.  Admittedly, I bailed on Tindall's intro, so I should probably finish that before I get too much farther down the rabbit hole of post-Renaissance/pre-Enlightenment Italian Philosophy, much less dabble in that Beckett piece, which was written while JJ was still drafting FW and deals with Vico, as well as Dante and some other dude named Bruno.

Moving onto the two segments for this post...basically, Chapter IV.  Per Tindall, and it became obvious only when I read his commentary, this chapter "consists of six movements or strophes [really? they're not strophe-like at all, imo]--like those of a musical suite or of a long poem." Why didn't JJ make the parts of the so-called suite more apparent? Art. Musey. Poesy. You know. Because he was JMFNJ, duh. And because a lack of markers or transitions is more dreamlike.  Tindall: "Sudden juxtapositions of incompatibles and sudden shifts of rhythm and tone are what he needed for his designed effect."  Shrug, ok.  The six parts are (1) "a brief introduction," (2) "a long meditation on death and burial," (3)"another story of the Cad," (4) "Earwicker's trial before four judges," (5) "a fox hunt and flight into exile," and (6) "a hymn to A.L.P. and the river."

Remember that my Week 4 reading spilled from Chapter III into Chapter IV, so I didn't understand much of the beginning of the latter - part 1 and most of part 2 - because I wasn't aware of the suite thing.  These segments were fairly readable with that in mind.  An actual earwig shows up in part 2, as does (maybe?) Mr. Finnegan in the line, "[A]nd every morphyl man of us, pome by pome, falls back into this terrine: as it was let it be, says he!"  (He isn't God, because it's not capped?)

Part 3 is about the Cad?  Well, I didn't really understand the first Cad encounter back in Chapter II, so I didn't see this one.  But a passage - a parenthetical, actually - that seems like a famous one among FW wonks, stuck out: "in the Nichtian glossary which purveys aprioric roots for apostiorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse of the world."  That's part of a longer passage that's a really fun read for its flow and some weird references to Marx ("marx my word fort" and "remarxing") and ending in a complement to German grit.  Of course, I'd like more from Tindall, but he can't be bothered - onto the next few pages without any help.  Fwiw, I didn't underline much of those pages.

Part 4, I liked quite a bit, and not only because I saw my name (even though I didn't know what "Hokey jasons, then in pigeegeeses?" meant).  It's sort of a longer do-over of the trial from Chapter III, just without the colorful characters, and with four judges.  At the end of the trial - at least, I thought it was the end because JJ said, "And so it all ended" - there's a nice passage:

"The letter! The litter! And the soother the bitther! [the sooner the better] Of eyebrow penciled, by lipstipple penned.  Borrowing a word and begging the question and stealing tinder and slipping like soap."

Tindall goes off on how, since Chapter I, there's been a pattern developing of dump/litter/letter/letters, and that ALP is actually the younger self of the museum janitor Kate, who digs through trash (the evidence from the trial), to find a letter that will renew life and art.  And how the hell do we know that, Tinda??  Oh, because Kate begins with a K, and K is the eleventh letter, which "means renewal--as we learned from Mr. Bloom's 'K.11.' "  Fuck that.  I read that and almost quit this whole damn project.

The letter is important, I feel, but I don't have a good grasp on it yet.  The next segment (or two, because I'm behind) gets into Chapter V, which is about ALP.  Hopefully, some of this clears up there, but before that, Chapter IV ends with what Tindall calls a hymn to Anna.  The whole part is short, but JJ's transition into it is amazing: "Do tell us all about.  As we want to hear allabout.  So tells tellas allabouter."  And he does.  In his cool Q&A style, at first, then more lyrical, until he says, "But there's a little lady waiting and her name is A.L.P.  And you'll agree.  She must me she."  True to herself?  The river wasn't around as much as water was.

More soon.

Weeks 5-6 (JF)

FW pp. 54-78

Hi. Long time no blog. Like OM kvetched in his last post, FW doesn't always fit into real life - the daily grind of work, commutes, chores, quality time with partners and children, and just plain "down time" to listen to music or watch tv or space off about whatever. This book is difficult to read, for sure, but it's maybe even more difficult to describe in a coherent way. Generally, I can get through twelve pages a week and whatever Tindall has to say about those pages, but I can't get through this without significant effort.

Which kinda begs the question of why.  Why this blog? Why not read the damn book and email OM, particularly if he's the only one here, and quit clogging up the internet with pointless musings? We have an unspoken deal. Read and stay as current as you can (I'm a few days behind, but considering my last month, that's great), then write. If the latter suffers because of the former, or because of other, more important things, that's ok. Well, it's ok, and it's not ok. In a weird way, the blog helps me understand the book - I have to go back and review and partially cement my thoughts enough to at least document this wack thing I'm doing with my friend.  Because, as old fuckers, tipping virtual beers together over dad-rock (promise me, O, that Wilco will still be making music when we're old and grey, even if it's Spencer taking over for Jeff, Menudo-style), we'll share a laugh about good ol' JJ and HCE's peccadilloes.

Those peccas are the topic this time. Here's Bishop's intro (I still think it's him, and not JJ, until OM tells me otherwise) on Chapter III:

"Earwicker's version of the story, filmed, televised and broadcast -- HCE's wake --Reports of HCE's crime and flight -- Court inquiries -- HCE reviled -- HCE remains silent and sleeps -- Finn's resurrection foreshadowed"

Mud clear, right? Actually, Chapter III has been the most enjoyable part of FW for me, so far. Last time, I sorta bitched about how the beginning of the chapter made no sense. It got better, way better, as my underlining and highlighting of the text shows. I mean, six lines into this segment, I got a chuckle out of this line: "Losdoor onleft ladies, cue."  Last door on the left, my ladies, form a queue. That's pretty fun/funny, and the rest continues like that.

Chapter III, as you may or may not have gathered from Bishop's shite intro, is about the public's reaction to HCE and his waka-jawaka in front of the two girls and three soldiers (those numbers are apparently significant, but I haven't grasped that yet). Earwicker is a bar owner, and the rumour mill starts working. Imagine, hm, The Iceman Cometh, which I've seen, but haven't read, only more amusing and pulpy/less angsty and Denehey'd and Lane'd, where a cast of barflies--"evidence givers by legpoll"--testifies about what they know, or what they think they know, about the bar owner's indiscretions. The cast of characters is long and colorful, full of bright voices and viewpoints, too many to list. (Actually, I intended to that, but finishing this post takes precedence over finishing it properly. Tindall does a great job in that regard, detailing 20 people.)

There are those critical, but not, of HCE, like "Missioner Ida Wombwell, the seventeenyearold revivalist," who "said concerning the coincident of infizzing the grenadines [soliders] and other respectable and disgusted peersons [peers to Ida, so young girls] using the park: That perpendicular person [HCE, with a boner] is a brut! But a magnificent brut!" (Tindall says that Ida is a stand-in for HCE's daughter, Isabel, so gross. Again, I missed that completely, as I miss completely most references to his sons.)

And there are those sympathetic, but not, to him, like "Sylvia Silence, the girl detective," who 

"when supplied with informations as to the several facets of the case in her cozy-dozy bachelure's flat [like the flat is a lure for bachelors, duh] ... leaned back in her really truly easy chair to query restfully through her vowelheaded sylabelles [she has a lisp]: Have you evew thought, wepowtew, that sheew greatness was his twagedy? Nevewtheless according to my considewed attitudes row this act he should pay the full penalty, pending pursuance, as pew Subsec. 32, section 11, of the C.L.A. act of 1885, anything in this act to the contwawy notwithstanding."

After the testimony/evidence, there's, per Tindall, another thing about the Cad from Chapter II. I didn't get that. (The Cad is one of the sons?) But some of JJ's style is alot like the Q&A in the penultimate chapter of Ulysses, where he asks questions just to answer them himself. Looking back at the text right now, I have so much underlined and highlighted. Clearly, I liked this part. I thought it moved forward the whole inquiry into HCE's alleged misdeeds, and, at points, the wordplay is incredible. Ever shop at "a men's wear store" called "One Life One Suit"? Me, neither, and I have two, but one doesn't really fit. Who needs more than that? Ask Mr. Finnegan.  "[T]he curter the club the sorer the savage"?  Yep. And what HCE did? Happens all the time, right, JJ?

"[T]here is in fact no use in putting a tooth in a sniper of that sort the amount of all those of things which has been going on onceaday in and twiceaday out every other nachtistag [nightly day?] among all kinds of promiscious [not promiscuous] individuals at all ages in private homes and reeboos publikiss and allover all and elsewhere throughout secular sequence the country over and overabroad has been particularly stupendous."

And the Lupita Lorette/Luperca Latouche passage was great, because, no shit, "it is a horrible thing to have to say to say to day but one delilah."

The Prankqueen from Chapter II (ALP, I think?) reappears, and, by that point, I was checking out.  Chapter III ends with an italicized catalog of all 111 (significant for some reason) names the Cad (who's he again? one of the sons?) called HCE, including, "Man Devoyd of the Commoner Characteristics of an Irish Nature." I'm thinking of Leopold Bloom, but that asshole Tindall doesn't back me up on that.

Chapter III ends with this paragraph:

"Liverpoor? Sot a bit of it! His braynes [spellcheck gave me "brains," so yeah] coolt parrich, his pelt nasty, his heart's drone, his bluidsteams ascrawl, his puff but a pig, his extremities extremely so: Fengless, Pawmbroke, Chilbaimend and Baldowl. Humph is in his doge. Words weigh no no more to him than raindrips to Rethfernhim. Which we all like. Rain. When we sleep. Drops. But wait until our sleeping. Drain. Sdops."

Rain, water.  Water, river. The river is ALP. Nice passage, nice image.

Week 6 took me to page 78, and into Chapter IV. At the end of his comments on Chapter III, Tindall talked a bit about Vico and Samuel Beckett, and I googled an essay the latter wrote in 1929 about FW and Vico, so I'll shoot for something about that.

More soon.

JF