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
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