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.
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