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.
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