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.
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