I Walk Through Walls, I Float Down the Liffey

O

tell me all about

Anna Livia! I want to hear all

So begins Chapter 8 of Finnegans Wake. This is the final chapter of the Book I of the novel, and it's in this chapter that we cross the magical 200-page marker (ed. note -- there is nothing particularly magical about 200 pages). Chapter 8 is known as "Anna Livia Plurabelle," for it's in this chapter that the lens finally focuses on HCE's wife. 

Thanks, Google!

It's also perhaps the novel's most well-known chapter. When I typed "Finnegans Wake chap..." into Google, it appears as Google's fourth suggestion. Chapter 1 comes up first, but I guess that's due to all the English undergrads who've decided they're ready to take on the Wake, get to page 6, and then decide they better find out what the heck is happening in Chapter 1. Considering how many people bail on this after only a few pages, let's say that at least Chapter 8 is the second-most read chapter in the book.

So why do people care about so much about "Anna Livia Plurabelle"? For starters, the gimmick of the chapter is a neat one. Joyce worked in the names of over 350 rivers into the text. The character ALP is the river Liffey (aka the River Anna Liffey -- Abhainn na Life in Irish). Anna Livia Plurabelle is an important character, no doubt.  Heck, the novel begins with the word "riverrun." Now look back at the top -- the chapter opens with the Greek letter delta (Δ). Oh, hey, a river delta. Cool.

Statue of Anna Livia Plurabelle

The action here concerns two old washerwomen, wringing out laundry on the banks of the river. They chatter and gossip and tell the story of ALP.  One of the pervading ideas is that these two women are washing away the sins of the world ("the dneepers of wet and gangres of sin in it!"). In another sense, they are scrubbing at language, and Anna Livia is there to sweep everything away in her current. 

Perhaps another reason for its popularity? The entirety is around 20 pages long, making it fairly easy to excerpt and insert into whatever edition of "The Collected Works of James Joyce" or "The Essential Joyce" or "A Readers Guide to James Joyce" or what have you. Or maybe that's me being cynical.

For me, the best part may be the audio recording that exists of Joyce himself reading from the end of "Anna Livia Plurabelle." It was recorded in 1929 and gives a wonderful taste of how Joyce imagined the book to sound.  Hearing his sing-song Irish accent flow through the text is nothing short of glorious.

The video above has a slightly odd animation, but the audio is clear and the subtitles are a nice touch. You can sit back and listen to that recording without any context and, I think, enjoy the music of what you're hearing.

That gets to the heart of the matter, in fact. Finnegans Wake is a musical novel. I've written about it before, but reading it out loud is one of the best ways to attack the text. And because this chapter was written to flow like a river, it's develops a cadence that carries the reader along. 

Chapter 8 works quite well as a standalone piece of text, as long as you have a bit of context for what it's all about. In that sense, it's one of the pieces of FW that I'll likely return to after I've finished stabbing this beast with my steely knife sometime early next year. Well, I'm not going to immediately re-open the book to page 196, but perhaps I will  many years from now, when I want to remember what this project was all about.

And with that, I'll leave you with the final passage from "Anna Livia Plurabelle." Anna Livia has flooded her banks. The two gossiping washerwomen are fading from the story. One turns into a tree and one turns into a stone. It's quite beautiful. Listen to Joyce read it, or try it out loud for yourself. Either way, enjoy!

Can't hear with the waters of.  The chittering waters of.  Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk.  Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thoma Malone? Can't hear with the bawk of bats, all thim liffey-ing waters of.  Ho, talk save us!  My foos won't moos.  I feel as old as yonder elm.  A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia's daughter-sons.  Dark hawks hears us.  Night!  Night! My ho head halls.  I feel as heavy as yonder stone.  Tel me of John or Shaun?  Who were Shem and Suan the living sons and daughters of?  Night now!  Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm!  Night night!  Telmetale of stem or stone.  Beside the rivering waters of, highterandtithering waters of. Night!

Week 17 (JF) - Anna Livia Plurabelle

FW pp. 196-216

"Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be."

Chapter VIII, which closes Book I, is about ALP.  Actually, lit scholars refer to this chapter as simply "Anna Livia Plurabelle."  ALP is often symbolized as water or a river, and JJ mentions plenty (according to Tindall, hundreds) of rivers here, but the most important one is the Liffey, which runs through Dublin.  According to Annala Rioghachta Eireann (Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland), a 1851 book by Cucogry O'Clery, the river was originally called Abhainn Liphthe in Gaelic, and became Anna-Liffey (check out the header image) in English.  Anna-Liffey became, in Joycenglish, Anna Livia.  Anna means river.  Livia means life - liv is Danish for life, and the Danish were ancient rulers of Ireland.  Plurabelle, I'm not sure.  A website that popped up on a quick search posited that "plurabelle" was Italian for most beautiful, but Google Translate doesn't support that.  Bella is Italian for beautiful, but I couldn't get a hit for anything in that language beginning with plur.  ALP is many faceted/peopled, though, so I'll guess that plura is somehow related to plural.  (JJ, after playing with numbers and mentioning "she had three figures to fill [Shem, Shaun, Issy] and confined herself to a hundred eleven," says, "They did her well to rechristen her Pluhurabelle.")  ALP, the multiply beautiful river of life.

River...river...river...hm.  Hasn't there been a river mentioned in FW before?  Well, yeah.  Chapter I starts with the word "riverrun."  And Chapter VIII ends with the line, "Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!"  Remember Giambattista Vico, the 18th Century Italian philosopher, whose ideas about the cyclical nature of history influenced JJ?  It doesn't get much more cyclical than starting and ending like that.  Also, the Mookse and the Gripes episode.  Those guys were by a river at some point, hanging out with washerwomen, right?  The washerwomen return, and, together from opposite banks, they gossip about ALP.

I know that I've described certain parts of FW as lyrical or singsong-y or even poetic, but this chapter is full-on poetry without the annoyingly helpful line breaks.  Tindall says it resembles one of T.S. Eliot's longer poems, "a triumph of sequence, rhythm, and sound," and, because it's directed to the ear, it calls for reading aloud.  It's framed by (and, unlike much of the book so far, tethered to some narrative ground by) a conversation between these two women.  One knows more than the other, so the phrase "tell me" recurs frequently: "Onon! Onon! tell me more.  Tell me every tiny teign.  I want to know ever single ingul."  I thought about Bakhtin/Volosinov, and whether JJ is working some sort of indirect speech angle.  Nope.  Aside from the women addressing each other, there's not much speech at all.  It's pure third-person storytelling, which is interesting in itself because JJ, forging this high-modern dream-speak nat-language, almost entirely abandons traditional interlocution between characters for something both less and more (think Greek drama, or even Homer/The Odyssey) traditional, something collective or choral.

I liked this chapter a lot, if that's not obvious so far.  I was over my head (as usual) with the references (Tindall helped a little bit), but comfortable with the flow.  (River, flow?  Get it?  Rimshot.  I'll be here all year.  Please try the veal.)  Anyway.  According to Tindall, this chapter has three loosely-marked parts.

The first part is short.  It's about ALP and HCE, and their marriage, as the washerwomen clean his/their now-familiar dirty laundry.  Tindall is great here on the links to Ulysses.  HCE's "wee follyo" (because wee = oui, or yes in French) is Ulysses - that book ends with Molly Bloom's famous "yes."

The second part is longer.  It begins around a second, and way different, version of ALP's letter found by the hen in the park ("trouved [trouvé is 'found' in French] by a poule [poulet is 'chicken' in French, and poule is 'slut' in French] in the parco").  Per Tindall, it's about the hen and a knapsack in which she has presents for her many (1,001) children.  I got the gifts - a huge list (pp. 210-12) that mentions all three kids, as well as Kate, the ALP stand-in from the museum tour much earlier.  But I got more from this part, which Tindall glosses over.  He's all about the hen and the presents and the children, and whom the children represent.  Meh.  What comes before the list is better, and - hey, I've been reading this book for months, so lemme go off for a sec - more important than Wild Bill makes it seem.  In this part, you get the washerwoman's view of ALP as a young woman, before she was married: "She must have been a gadabout in her day, so she must, more than most," with "a flewmen of her owen."  (Ohai, OM, lol.)  She was "just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing, then, sauntering, by silvamoonlake," who was "oso sweet and so limber" or "the wiggly livvly."  I need to reread this part to set it still in my head, but I feel like this is ALP's sexual history, which kicks off with her losing her virginity to a priest?  Then she meets HCE, "Her Chuff Exquire," and it's all over.

There are two passages that I loved in this part: The descriptions of ALP on pp. 206-07 - "First she let her hair fal and down it flussed to her feet its teviots winding coils" - and on p. 208 - "She wore a ploughboy's nail studded clogs."  I haven't spent enough time with either of them, tbh (the lead-ins are both dense af), but there's something incredibly beautiful, sad, weird, lost-soul - "Everyone that saw her said the dowce little delia looked a bit queer" - about both.  The former, I don't understand at all, and the latter?  Is that her on her wedding day?  Tindall?  Completely useless to me on this.  (OM, I'd love to hear your take on pp. 202-09.  Fwiw, I may update this post, if I dig into this part, or I may just press ahead.)

The third part is about the washerwomen themselves and the river.  Tindall calls it "a hymn to renewal, the fall of night, death, and the living river."  It read, to me, as more frame-y - the same way that the last verses of Bob Dylan's "Black Diamond Bay" and the Grateful Dead's "Wharf Rat" is frame-y.  We told you somebody else's story, and now we'll talk about our view, so you can see who and where we are.  

Sometimes, though not often enough, Tindall nails it.  He posits, "Maybe Joyce is the Wake's only reader and, though other readers dare other readings, the only reader's guide."  And the best part?  You can listen for yourself.  Here's JJ in 1929 reading the end of Chapter VIII.  Wow.  "[E]very telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it."  Yep.  The washerwomen smack the clothes against the banks, and their conversation trails off - tbc in Chapter X, apparently.

I'm caught up, and we're 1/3 of the way through this thing.  Gj, O, and gl, us.  The next segment is gonna suck.

More soon.

Week 16 (JF) - Shaun on Shem

FW pp. 187-95

The end of Chapter VII is sort of a drag.  Shaun takes over, and he seems like a real dick, even moreso than he was in the previous chapter.  Remember that the Earwicker boys are twins, but Shaun acts more mature - older and smarter (he's definitely not the latter).  And he isn't afraid to lecture his brother about how his conduct has affected the family.

Shaun starts out his #rant with a pedantic grammar check, reminiscent of his overly formal response to the question about the drunk guy.  "Stand forth," Shem commands, "for no longer will I follow you obliquelike through the inspired form of the third person singular and the moods and hesitancies of the deponent but address myself to you, with the empirative of my vendettative, provocative and out direct."  "Stand forth," he repeats,

"come boldly, jolly me, move me, zwilling though I am, to laughter in your true colors ere you be back forever till I give you your talkingto!  Shem Macadamson [probably a reference to HCE, somehow] , you know me and I know you and all your shemeries.  Where have you been in the uterim [uterus + interim], enjoying yourself all the morning since your last wetbed confession?  I advise you to conceal yourself, my little friend [they're twins], as I have said a moment ago and have a nightlong homely little confiteor [confession, I think?] about things.  Let me see.  It is looking pretty black against you, we suggest, Sheem avick [not sure what avick means - maybe Irish slang].  You will need all the elements in the river [ALP, just wait] to clean you over it all and a fortifine popepriestpower bull of attender to booth."

Thanksgiving at the House of HCE sounds like a blast.  Dad's still in trouble with Mom about "that thing in the park they don't talk about."  Shem humblebrags, Shaun holyrolls, and Issy's a shapeshifting goth, who's probably into cutting.  (Jk.  We don't know much about her at this point.  She could be really sweet.)

There's not a lot in this segment to decipher.  I didn't get many of the references, but I did get the tone.  It's clear that Shaun hates/resents and, somewhere deep down damnit, loves Shem and his cosmopolitan lifestyle.  Maybe the hatred and resentment is directed less at Shem than at his choices, which took away the brother/twin that he needed and still needs.  I got a prodigal son vibe (hence, the header image - a Google image search score from a Bible study website, where bad choices look kinda fly), which I'm not sure is there.  I could make a case, though.  One brother leaves, one brother stays?

Oh, didn't JJ have a brother, too?  He sure did, Stanislaus, who...had a love-hate relationship with JJ.  Imagine that, pretty autobiographical.  Per that Wikipedia link, Stanislaus followed JJ to Italy (pre-FW) and bailed him out of financial shit several times.  Stanislaus eventually became a teacher, or lecturer, there, and commented later about his older brother, "It seems to me little short of a miracle that anyone should have striven to cultivate poetry or cared to get in touch with the current of European thought while living in a household such as ours, typical as it was of the squalor of a drunken generation."  What a drip, right?  Reminds me of another Stanis.  Tindall backs me up on this, fwiw, but he's mostly unhelpful and covers 12 pages of the Wake in record time - not without mentioning some Australian aboriginal device called the "deathbone."  Yeah, the word is in the text, and maybe that's what JJ meant, but still.  Shaun points the device at Shem, and turns over the conversation not to Shem, but to ALP?

I didn't get that on my initial read, tbh.  I thought it was Shem or HCE, but it's very clearly ALP.    She opens by admitting that she's cursed her womb that bore Shem and her husband, whom she "sometimes sucked."  (Fairly graphic, but that's on page 193, and what censor back then read that far?)  Then there's a confusing (and great, if I'm right about it) passage, where she understands that Shem has been haunted by a "convulsionary sense of not having been or being all that I might have been of you meant to becoming," of letting her down, and also understands that she's done the same to him, with good reason: Life.  "The days of youyouth," she says, "are evermixed with mimine."  He left from her, he laughed at her, and now he's forgetting her.  But parents are people, too, and their emotions are as valid, and their experiences are as memorable, as those of their children.  And their pain over the inevitable jump from the nest is visceral.  We birthed and raised you, and now you have the audacity to leave?  With a smirk on your beautiful face, like you know everything?  Sigh.  You'll see, if you're lucky enough to be a parent.

JJ closes this chapter with a really pretty pan back from ALP as she walks down the street, with her springy step and her curly hair.  "[A]s happy as the day is wet, babbling, bubbling, chattering to herself, ... giddgaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia."

Who just happens to be the focus of Chapter VIII.  Imagine that.  Progress-wise, I'm a few pages behind, but I want to read the next chapter as a whole - it's 20 pages, instead of the usual 12.  No big deal.  I haven't dived in yet, but I'm looking forward to more about OM's fictional gf.

More soon.

Conversation #3: In which our tired, but unbowed, correspondents congratulate each other on finishing Chapter VI, and seal a perhaps foolhardy deal to continue...with a Don Draper handshake

[This email chain happened a few segments ago, when we were both bogged down in Chapter VI.  The specifics are past tense now, but the general stuff is still relevant.]

OM: Tbh, this whole chapter has been a slog.  But I will readily admit that much of that has been my attitude.  I've been struggling to find a reason to continue reading.  And reading something that you don't want to read anymore kinda sucks. 

But it was good to get through a new post.  Felt like I was back on the horse.

JF: Dude, you and I can both read 12 pages of just about anything in a week.  Sure, it helps to actually want to read it, but whatever.  I've had issues reading for years - still do.  There are just very few opportunities time/space-wise for me to read/write.  So I'm actually ok with the slog aspect of this project.  I'm not getting a ton out of it, but I'm still going, and to me that's pretty important.

I generally try to read enough, so I can write about it on Wednesday nights.  If I don't read before then, it's tough to read FW, then read Tindall, then write a blogpost.  And this chapter really sucked, in a lot of ways.

The thing that sucks is that you're right, tho.  Now that I have some taste and interest in reading again - for the first time in years!! - I'd rather be reading almost anything else, ha.  There's a new-ish Bolano that I got last fall staring at me from the top shelf lately.  And Infinite Jest is just so pissed off at me that I stopped less then 200 pages from the end; I carry it in my backpack every day as penance.

OM: You're right, it's not that I can't read FW.  I can, and have for 12 straight weeks or whatever it is.  But I feel like I get it now.  I don't mean I get the whole thing, but I see what Joyce is doing with language, I have learned how to approach the text to extract what meaning I can, and I have broad ideas about what the book is about.  Are my understandings going to grow or change over the next 450 pages? That's the part that is disheartening.  I don't read as much as I'd like to, so why read something that is such a slog when I do have some time?

None of this is to say I've given up.  I haven't.  I think what I've realized, though, is that the blog is important.  It forces me to find something worthwhile in this endeavor.

JF: Same.

That's the thing, bigger picture.  How do we fit heady endeavors - there's probably a better millennial-speak term for a "for its own sake" or "because it's there" thing like reading FW that doesn't carry the perjorative weight of "heady" - into lives already chock full with work and home responsibilities?  I often struggle with that balance, and almost always err on the side of work/home.  That's might not be the best default, but it might be the easiest.  I'd rather be helpful around the house than useless because my head is lost on a page.

And the calculus gets messier for this particular book.  It's not really very "fun" to read.  Yeah, sure, it's challenging, and there's some fun in that, I guess.  But beyond that, it's pretty tough.  And you and I are doing this alone, with no support.  We're outside the academy (Tindall doesn't count - he's dead and annoying) and apart from our families and friends, who, for better or worse, just don't give a shit about JJ or FW.
 

I mean, here's a thumbnail of the text:

FW is a really long book written written mostly in unconventional English about a really long dream by an Irish bar owner who gets caught masturbating in the park by two young women messing around with three soldiers, which includes references to the guy's family - wife, twin sons, daughter - and various people and events in the history of Western Civilization.

And that makes it sound better than it is.  No wonder nobody reads our blog, haha.

OM: Hey, our blog has over 1200 pageviews.  Fame and fortune are sure to follow. I feel like that's pretty damn good, considering only a few people ever have actually read FW.  I'm not sure if this number is accurate, but I think we are the 63rd and 64th people in history to pass the 100-page mark in FW.

Not bad, my friend.  Not bad at all.

JF: The title of this post is totally gonna be "In which our tired but unbowed correspondents congratulate each other on passing the century mark, and seal a deal to continue... with a Don Draper handshake."

Yeah, I have no idea if 1,200 page views is good or not.  It's certainly a lot more than my other lame blogs have ever gotten.  But we only have one follower to the blog itself?  How does that work?

63 & 64, huh?  We should get jerseys with JJ's face on the front and those numbers on the backs.  You can be 63 because I'm pretty sure you got there first.

But what do you think about the point I made earlier?  Finding time for this stuff?  It's frustrating sometimes to me, but then I realize how silly that is.  Hobbies should be fulfilling, not frustrating.  Idk.  I feel like producing content - via the blog, via whatever - is important, as important sometimes as passive reading.  That's probably another point altogether.

OM: That is the title.  Good stuff. 1,200 is a lot more than I thought we'd get for the the entire life of this blog, so yeah, it's good.

I don't have a problem with finding time for reading and writing about literature in a general sense.  But I don't want to read a book that I don't enjoy or that I'm not feeling rewarded by. It's not a matter of reading or doing something else.  The equation for me is "read this" or "read that."  I will die before I read all the books I want to read in this life, so I don't like giving away precious reading time to something that doesn't deserve it.

This goes for any book I pick up. I'm not singling out FW.  I usually make a determination somewhere between pages 50 and 100 of any novel I'm reading.  "Is this worth my time?  If not, why continue reading when there is a world of literature out there to explore?"

JF: I do have a problem with finding time for reading and writing - in a general sense, and in a specific sense with FW.  I just have trouble finding the time/space.  I will die before I read, or write, all the books I want to, and for a few years my response to that has been a resigned shrug to ward off being pissed off.

Funny that I picked this book/project to get back into things.  When you proposed this project, I was like, eh, what the hell, I can read 12 pages of anything in a week, O's a great friend, this will be fun to share together.  I dove in, moved ahead, got behind, caught up, etc.  And looked around and you weren't here for a while, for legit reasons.  But what I realized then is that this isn't just about me doing something to share with you.  It's about doing something almost impossibly difficult, largely alone (reading isn't really a team sport like blogging), for myself.  To prove to myself that I can, that all the things I learned in college and grad school may not matter on a day to day basis, but matter in some other sense of self-worth.  I tell my kids sometimes when they bitch about homework that they're lucky because what I've been best at in my whole life is going to school and learning, and I don't get to do that anymore.

Actually, I do.  I'd say thanks, but I kinda came to this epiphany on my own.  What I'm grateful for, as far as you're concerned, is helping me find the opportunity to have that epiphany and to continue learning and growning my brain.

Weeks 14-15 (JF) - A Portrait of the Artist as Shem

FW pp. 169-87

Chapter VII is about Shem.  That's him up there.

Wait, you're thinking, isn't that JJ?  Yep.  James Augustine Aloysius Joyce in 1934, still a few years away from publishing Finnegans Wake.  But isn't HCE supposed to be a stand-in for JJ?  Yep.  So is Shem.  Shem's a writer, after all - and, like his creator after Ulysses and its obscenity trial, not well-liked, or even liked at all in some circles.  (OM's recent post about FW as autobiography is particularly relevant here.)

This chapter (the first half of it anyway) is a flame session, in which JJ torches both Shem and himself.  It's mostly written, in a vague authorial third person voice, as a sort of catalog of characteristics and anecdotes, beginning with "the first riddle of the universe" that Shem asked his childhood peers.

Q: "[W]hen is a man not a man?"
A: "[W]hen he is a ... Sham."

Shem, Sham.  Sham = fake.  Fiction is fake - not only made-up, but borrowed/stolen and later bent from stories as old as we are.

This material, though, isn't simply JJ painting an unflattering picture of Shem and, therefore, himself.  It's not self-loathing, but rather the opposite - what Tindall calls "[d]efensive jocularity," or "the author's apology and his boast."  Tindall is crap for most of these two twelve-page segments (or, more precisely, focused on things about which I didn't care and not on those about which I did), but he's right when he says this chapter starts with a "caricature so unfavorable that, reacting to it, the reader may find it favorable."  JJ hated his haters, and so loved himself.  Meta af, and completely badass.

There's so much JJ, so much "meeingseeing," here that even I caught it.  (Per Tidall, there's a lot of Jonathan Swift, too, but I obviously missed that except for the reference to "gullible's travels," ha.  O, why do we care about Swift again?)  At one point, the narrator talks about how Shem testified at HCE's court-of-public-opinion trial, but what he said sounds a lot like FW, to me, with him "unconsciously [dream-stuff] explaining, for inkstands, with a meticulosity bordering on the insane, the various meanings of all the different foreign parts of speech he misused and cuttlefishing every lie unshrinkable about all the other people in the story."

Later, Shem flees Dublin for the Continent/Paris, as JJ did, anchoring his "Inkbottle" near the "beerlitz" (or Berlitz) school, as JJ did, where he wrote a "usylessly unreadable" book or "an epical forged cheque" from "his plagiarist pen," each page of which he told himself with "aisling vision" was "more gorgeous than the one before."  The amazing passage on page 180, lines 17-30, too long to type out here, seems in my imagination what JJ's life at that time was like.  Later, he describes he (Shem) "scrabbled and scratched and scriobbled and skrevened nameless shamelessness about everybody ever he met" (Tindall says that's Ulysses) in "alphybettyformed verbage" and "imeffable tries at speech unasyllabled" (Tindall says that's FW).  Tindall even finds Chamber Music ("chambermade music"), A Portrait of the Artist and - wow, I was kinda blown away by this - every story in Dubliners in a passage that spans pages 186-87.

JJ's fake hate/real love for Shem and himself ends when the voice changes from "the inspired form of the third person singular" to the first person plural and Shaun enters to debate his brother.  That's next the beginning of the next segment, and the next post.

Oh, to close, how about this line: "bad cad dad fad sad mad nad vanhaty bear."  Pretty sure that inspired Dr. Suess to write Hop on Pop.

More soon.

Finnegans Wake: An Autobiography?

Reading too much of an author’s life into his work is now generally accepted as one of the cardinal sins of literary criticism. Readers sometimes assume they understand the life of J.D. Salinger, for example, because they’re well-read on the Glass family.  But fiction doesn’t always work that way. Yes, authors fictionalize their own lives, but jumping to conclusions about an author based solely on a fictional text is a shortcut to misreadings, bad grades and eventual social ostracism.

I say all this while knowing that Finnegans Wake is a different monster altogether. The regular rules don’t apply to this sui generis text. With so many challenges inherent in Joyce’s masterwork, looking to his personal life provides an obvious foothold.  Simply put, when deciphering Finnegans Wake, you take what you can get from wherever you can get it.

Joyce doesn’t exactly discourage an autobiographical reading, either.  He peppers the text with allusions to his real life.  On the very first page, he works in this line: “nor avoice from afire bellowed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick.” Read it phonetically, and we can understand this as, “Nora voice from afar,” as in, his wife, Nora Barnacle. Perhaps she was calling to him from the next room and, chuckling to himself, Joyce worked that into his writing.

Or maybe he didn’t do that intentionally.  It doesn’t matter.  Finnegans Wake at its core is about the multiplicity of meanings exploding through our human language. Joyce implores us to make every connection available.

It’s not hard to find more of these examples in Finnegans Wake. Here’s a not-subtle Ulysses reference from page 179: "It would have diverted if ever seen the shuddersome spectacle of this semidemented zany amid the inspissated grime of his glaucous den making believe to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles.”

That’s a pretty blatant signal that in the world of Finnegans Wake, there exists James Joyce, the author of Ulysses. Or that Finnegans Wake exists in our world. In all our worlds. Whatever, you get it.

In chapters VI and VII we get more of Shaun and  Shem, the latter of whom acts as a clear Joyce stand-in much of the time.  Joyce uses Shem to anticipate and respond to criticism of his work, of Finnegans Wake, and of himself.

Then there is James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia. Back in 2003, a Joyce scholar named Carol Loeb Shloss published a book called Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake. Although I haven’t read the book myself, according to just about every online review I’ve encountered, Shloss takes some incredible liberties to recreate the relationship between James and Lucia. Partly this is because most of the letters that existed between the two were destroyed after James Joyce passed away.  You see, Lucia spent the majority of her life in asylums, having been diagnosed and re-diagnosed with a litany of mental disorders. This was embarrassing to some, and Lucia’s presence was blurred (if not entirely stricken) from the record.

Shloss seems to be invested in reclaiming Lucia from the easy characterization of “mad daughter of genius author.” Shloss explores Lucia’s own career as a dancer, and imagines that the relationship between genius-author-father and genius-dancer-daughter is splashed across the pages of the Wake.

Lucia Joyce

Maybe so, maybe not. But knowing a little bit more about Lucia does open some possibilities in Finnegans Wake. She was a dancer who studied ballet, she had a relationship with Samuel Beckett, and she suffered from (probably) schizophrenia.  Carl Jung took her on as a patient (from page 115 of the Wake we have this little nugget: “they were yung and easily freudened”).  In fact, Jung said that James and Lucia were quite similar, “like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving.” Jung was referring to Joyce’s experiments with language, suggesting something similar but without the safety line of artistic genius was occurring in Lucia’s mind. Perhaps that was one of the many reasons James Joyce decided that Jung wasn’t the best fit as a doctor.  (Also, there’s another blog post in there, looking at schizophrenia and the destabilization of meaning in language—another day, however).

And so, that brings back to Finnegans Wake. In chapter VI, we meet Nuvoletta.  This is Issy, HCE’s daughter. On page 159: “O!  Yes!  And Nuvoletta, a lass. Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one.”

It’s hard not to look for Lucia Joyce in this figure.  Issy grows in prominence in future chapters, or so I am led to believe. So I’ll be on the lookout, for dancing and daughters and a father who is concerned for his daughter’s mental well-being. I don’t really expect to come to the conclusion that Lucia Joyce was the secret inspiration for Finnegans Wake—I’ve read too much to accept any one interpretation.  But could there be some clues? I certainly think so.

Weeks 12-13 (JF) - The Fox and the Gripes

FW pp. 139-68.

This post covers the second through twelfth questions of Shem's quiz for Shaun.

I didn't like most of this chapter.  And I really didn't like Tindall on most of this chapter.  I usually have a header image in mind when I get done with the text.  For this segment/these segments, I didn't, and instead fell back on what somebody else said my favorite passage was about (more on that below).

The Q&A form was interesting - I really loved the Ithaca episode of Ulysses, so I expected to enjoy this chapter, too, but its presentation was just too coded, too JJ-being-JJ.  The Q's involved topics that he wanted to address, and the A's addressed people, places, and things that he wanted to explain (or with whom he had an axe to grind, like T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats).  In a FW kind of way.  After weeks in the Wake, I can say this: Sometimes the text is more open; sometimes it's more closed.  This time it was the latter.

So this is basically a summary of what I didn't understand.  Questions 2-10 were chock full of JJ riffage.  I'll break them down, leaning on Tindall because I was mostly lost here.

2.  Shem asks Shaun, "Does your mutter know your mike?"  Tindall offers three readings of that question.  From the answer, I thought Shaun was talking about ALP and HCE, but I'm not sure why HCE is "Mike" here.

3.  Shem asks Shaun about HCE's bar and its motto.  The motto is apparently the motto of Dublin.  To JJ, "The obedience of citizens is the happiness of a city" becomes "Thine obesity, O civilian, hits the felicitude of our orb!"

4.  Shem asks Shaun about Dublin, in four parts, and Shaun answers him about Dublin, in four parts.  I didn't get anything from that one.

5.  Shem asks Shaun about a handyman, and whether he will do certain things.   The handyman is "Pore ole Joe!"  Joe was a friend of Kate (the museum guide) from Chapter II, and he answers himself?  Smh.

6.  Shem asks Shaun about another bar motto.  Tindall says that Kate answers herself, but I didn't sense that.

7.  Shem asks Shaun about twelve customers of the bar, their jobs, and their origins.  All of that is in the question, and nothing in the answer, which is simply "The Morphios!"  Tindall says that name combines Murphy, the most common surname in Ireland, with Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep.

8.  Shem asks Shaun about "maggies," maybe Isabel's friends.  How "war" they?  Here's the whole answer, and it's great:

"They war loving, they love laughing, the laugh weeping, they week smiling, they smell smiling, they smile hating, they hate thinking, they think feeling, they feel tempting, they tempt daring, they dare waiting, they wait taking, they take thanking, they thank seeking, as born for lorn in lore of love to live and wive by wife and rile by true of ruse ' reacted rose and hose hol'd home, yet cometh elope year, coach and four, Sweet-Peck-at my Heart picks one man more."

9.  Shem asks Shaun about what would happen if a "human being duly fatigued by his dayety in the snooty," and having plenty of time, used "the panaroma of all flores of speech."  Tindall says this is essentially about FW.  I can't disagree.

10.  Shem asks Shaun, "What bitter's love but yearning, what' sour lovemuch but a bref burning until till she that drawes do the smoake retourne?"

And Shaun and Isabel answer together?  That's what Tindall says.  This one was tough.  It seems like the answer is about love and/or sex.  My initial impression was that ALP was talking about HCE, then that HCE was talking about ALP.   Then I got confused.  Is there more than one person in Shaun's answer?  There's an obvious back-and-forth.  But it's not the parents, it's the kids?  So it's sort of about incest?  (Ulysses caught some sensor-flack, but I'm not sure about FW.  Did people just give up because it was so indecipherable?)  Remember, I guess, that this is a dream.  Remember also that everybody has at least one mirror.  So Isabel is some aspect of ALP, and Shaun is some aspect of HCE, as there's an aspect of all parents in their children - to the extent it's relevant, the reflection is gender-specific.  I haven't seen much, if any, of ALP in the twins, or much, if any, of HCE in Isabel.

(O, what's up with Jonathan Swift?  And Eliot and Yeats?  Can we talk about them in our next convo?  I'm over my head on the lit references.)

11.  The question itself is short, but the answer is long - more than twenty pages, so longer than Question 1.  It's what Tindall calls "the climax of this chapter."  Remember that Shem was the prof in Chapter V?  Well, Shaun is the prof here, in the guise of somebody named Jones (Jones = son of John; John = Swift; Swift = HCE), who wants to talk about his brother.  The question asks, essentially, if a drunk guy like Shem showed up, would Shaun help him?  It's phrased differently, not in the second person (would you help him), but in the third person plural, and negative (we wouldn't help him, would we).  Tindall claims this question, and especially its answer, is about space and time, like quantum physics-y because "Winestain" is a reference to Einstein.  That wasn't obvious to me while reading, but there are plenty of clues in the text that JJ is onto something scientific.

What was obvious?  Shaun is a pretty shitty lecturer, tbh.  The opening of his answer is couched in really formal language that somebody who wants to sound smart might use.  Check it out:

"To put it all the more plumbsily.  The speech form is a mere surrogate.  Whilst the quality and tality (I shall explex what you ought to mean by this with its proper when and where and why and how in the subsequent sentence) are alternativomentally harrogate and arrogate, as the gates [case] may be."

Several pages went over my head (Tindall, always helpful: "There is a lot going on here"), but then JJ/Shaun dropped into a fable - a remake of Aesop's "The Fox and the Grapes," that doesn't track the fable that we all know and love.  JJ called the latter the Gripes and the former Mookse.  Gripes, grapes, that makes sense.  But Mookse is a reference to A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, whose first sentence links a moocow with a fox (it doesn't explicitly - actually, it doesn't at all).  Mookse sees, but can't hear; Gripes hears, but doesn't see. Mookse is Shem; Gripes is Shaun?  And they chat for a while on the banks of a river, before Nuvoletta/Isabel shows up.

It gets good, really good, here, in what Tindall calls "one of the most moving passages of the Wake," as JJ describes the fall of night and dew.

"The siss of the whip of the sigh of the softening at the stir of the ver grose O arundo of a long one in midias reeds: and shades began to glidder along the banks, greasing, greasing, duusk unto duusk, and it was glooming as gloaming could be in the waste of all preacable worlds.  ***

Oh, how it was duusk!  From Vallee Maraia to Grasyaplaina, dormimust echo!  Ah dew!  Ah dew!  It was so duusk that the tears of night began to fall, first by ones and twos, then by threes and fours, at last by fives and sixes and sevens, for the tired ones were wecking, as we weep now with them.  O!  O!  O!  Par la pluie!"

That fable turns into another fable, that of Burrus and Caseous.  This is no longer Aesop, but JJ himself.  And the rest of the answer is pretty difficult and not at all fun to read.  I underlined a few things, just to keep myself engaged, but I didn't get much, or as much as Tindall, from this part of the answer.  Burrus and Caseous are two angles of a triangle; Margareena (Isabel) introduces them to Antoninus, the third angle.  Triangles are feminine, per Tindall, so ALP is implicated in what he labels "this dream geometry."  He also says that neither fable was in JJ's first draft of FW.  There are also some references to JJ's poetry collection, Chamber Music.  I haven't read that, so I didn't see it in the text.

The answer ends bluntly.  If Shaun saw a drunk guy like Shem, he wouldn't help him.

12.  It's in Latin, I think, and it's about Shem, who returns in Chapter VII.

Progress-wise, I'm behind, but not by much.  I think the next segment goes to page 177, and I'm on page 168.  Not bad after this long - figured I would've lost the pace before now, lol.  Oh, and fwiw, Tindall says that Nathan Halper, "one of the greatest authorities on the Wake," pegged Saturday-Sunday, March 18-19, 1922, as the night of HCE's dream.  Don't ask how, but that'll sorta coincide with the end of this project.  Pretty cool.

More soon.