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