FW pp. 519-59
Hi. Did you miss me? Yeah? Awesome. I missed you, too. I mean, I don't know you (except for OM), but I missed reading and writing about reading. I started this post more than a month ago, and just finished it tonight. The usual reason: Real life. Busy at home, busy at work. Too distracted to find the kind of attention that FW deserves. And, whoa, it doesn't just deserve it in Book II, it demands it. And then, after a few pages, it doesn't? JJ lets you off the hook in a weird way.
Wester's online dictionary defines "lollapalooza" as "one that is extraordinarily impressive" or "an outstanding example," states its origin is unknown, and dates its first use as 1896.
I saw the second Lollapalooza Music Festival twice (nice symmetry there) in 1992. Both shows were more enjoyable than Book II, Chapter I of FW, which includes the word lollapalooza - or JJ's version, "lollapaloosa." Here's the sentence, so you get a sense of what these weekly segments were like:
"Doth it not all come aft to you, purity snooper, in the television opes longtime ofter when Potollomuch Sotyr or Sourdanapplous the Lollapaloosa?"
If you're thinking that that lacks context to make it more comprehensible, then you're thinking wrong. There's a sliver of context there - the preceding sentence makes it clear that this is about HCE's indiscretion. But the entire chapter is a struggle through dreamspeak and its accompanying allusions. And fwiw, I'm pretty sure Perry Ferrell didn't snake the name of his cashcow from JJ. I should tweet him and ask. (Actually, I shouldn't because he'd probably file a trademark suit against the Joyce Estate.)
So. An aside. Like OM, I subscribe to The New Yorker. Which means, personally, I get the magazine in the mail every week and feel pressure to read it before the next one arrives. Which means, personally again, I get behind. Idk know if you guys read TNY. It's heady and cool, but not every article is interesting to me. So I skim the culture stuff, check out the lead piece in "Talk of the Town," check out the cartoons and most of the poems, and then dogear the articles that I want to revisit. My last issue came the other day, and I'm not reupping until I blast through the stack waiting.
Anyway, the other day [that is, sometime in August], I read a quasi-review of a Joan Didion biography in the Arts section. As TNY readers know, a book review is rarely a book review. They're usually a lot more - a review of the book, and a scan of the scholarship about the subject. J.D. was kind of an asshole, tbh. I loved her for her words and her Corvette, but now kinda hate her for voting for Barry Goldwater. Whatever. The reviewer, toward the end, got into something relevant to my journey through FW: close reading. I was a poli-sci major in college, I was a con-law geek in law school, and I'm a textualist by trade IRL. Close reading is what I do. It's gauche. Ha, I even didn't know. It's how I'm approaching FW, and I didn't know that lit crits think it's bullshit. Here's a blurb from the review:
"This makes her later work [of political events] seem a little more like literary criticism than like reporting. Didion was an English major at Berkeley at a time when close reading was the gold standard in literary analysis, and Daugherty [the biographer] suggests that those methods stuck with her. She has said as much herself.
There is a small but immitigable fallacy in the theory of close reading, though, and it applies to political journalism as well as to the reading of poetry [and prose]. The text doesn't reveal its secrets just by being stared at. It reveals its secrets to those who already pretty much know what secrets they expect to find. Texts are always packed, by the reader's prior knowledge and expectations, before they are unpacked. The teacher has already inserted into the hat the rabbit whose production in the classroom awes the undergraduates."
Huh? Two related points. (They might be the same point, but I don't have the energy or, frankly, the intellectual chops at this hour to parse or reconcile them.)
First, who's the teacher for me? Mild Bill Tindall? Ok, I get it. He's got an agenda. As do many of the people who have finished FW and want to school the noobs like OM and me who haven't. And I'm wowed by them. We had a weird, and fun, Twitter exchange a few weeks ago [again, sometime in August] with somebody who spent ten years reading this damn book and seemed to think that O's last post about dad jokes was...hm, how can I fairly characterize this?...insufficiently respectful of people who have devoted their lives to another person's 628-page creation. (A laudable path, for sure, but that long? A decade in the Wake? I couldn't do it.) Maybe it was? I know that he's tiring of this project. Shit, I am, too. But wouldn't JJ want a dad of two boys (OM), or two dads of two boys (us), to occasionally take a piss on his masterwork? Wouldn't he be into the entire FW blogosphere? Not to mention, e-communication, which is our collective nat-language?
Second, and more importantly, The Death of the Author. I've beaten this drum to death already, but it's a gotdam solid drum that defies death. The problem with close reading, as identified in that blurb, isn't really a problem. If the problem is that any reading is flawed because it's not definitive, so what? There's no definitive, and that's cool. We bring to this book what we bring to this book - intelligence, biases, etc. And we got out of it what we get out of it. You got that outta that, but I got this outta that. And neither one of us is wrong, or right, but neither one of us gets to decide who's closer to close.
OM has bagged on Tindall. I haven't. And that's b/c I know, as a reader, there are huge gaps in my understanding. JJ wasn't a fool. He was a brilliant, and frustrating, writer. Anybody who can help me approach his level is a well-appreciated friend. This chapter more than ever so far, which brings me back to my intro. JJ lets you/me/us off the hook here. This chapter is JJ writing for himself, and not caring if we tag along. [The next chapter is worse, in that way, imo.] Get out of it what you get out of it, he challenges, and see you a few hours closer to morning.
Onto the close reading bs...
This chapter was very difficult. I finished it without peeking at Tindall or anything else until afterwards. I figured that was probably a mistake, but even Mild Bill admits that this is a headscratcher and that "nothing is denser." Great. Later, he claims that it's "[d]ense and allusive maybe, but pleasing." It's definitely the former.
Apparently, the overarching structure is provided by a group of children playing in front of HCE's pub as night falls. I missed that initially, but it's there. They're sort of performing a play called The Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Maggies. JJ offers a cast of characters, including Glugg (Shem because he's played by Seumas McQuillad), Izod (or Issy, played by Mis Butys Pot, who, having jilted Shem, has turned her attention to Shaun), Chuff (Shaun because he's played by Sean O'Mailey), Ann (or ALP), Hump (or HCE, played by Mr. Makeall Gone), and Kate from the museum, along with the Floras (Issy's girlfriends) and some bar customers. According to Tindall, this play is less a frame or vehicle for JJ than a metaphor for children playing. It takes place in the "pressant," but its list of (theater?) support staff opens with references to the future and the past. Cyclical, Wake-ian? Sure. And the main action is Issy asking a riddle that Shem tries several times without success to answer.
This is parroting Tindall a lot for two reasons: First, I read these segments several weeks ago, started this post, and forgot what I understood about them; second, what I understood about them was extremely limited. My usual markings in the text are infrequent here, limited to an underlined name or letter or a few references to ALP ("Truly deplurabel!" p. 224). There were several pages where I was completely lost. (Tindall: "Nothing much happens in the interlude of several pages that follow[].") Shem leaves for France, again, and Issy seems bummed, but she's ok later when he's around to whiff on more of her really tiresome, extended-riddle gag.
JJ's brother Stanislaus shows up at "Stainusless" (ouch) as an iteration of Shaun, whom the girls all love, and HCE, who rises (like Tim Finnegan, or because he's sexually aroused - "[w]ith his tumescinquinance on the thight of his tumstull") and becomes Shem. I saw a couple of HCE references - "Howarden's Castle, Englandwales," "Hulker's cieclest elbownurse" - before "Housefather calls enthreateningly" for the children to end the/their play.
Then there's more riddle, ugh. Tindal calls Issy "the incestuous girl," who hates to quit Shem. I caught a lot of sex stuff here. "If you nude her in her prime, make sure you find her complementary or, ... she'll prick you where you're proudest with her unsatt speagle eye." "[W]ill ye na pick them in their pink of panties. You can color up till you're prawn while I go squirt with any cockle." And "She's her sex, for certain." None of those lines made complete sense to me, but I sort of felt like it was about Issy and Shem. There's a passage on p. 249 - the "In the house of breathings" paragraph, if you're one of those close-reading losers or, better, one of those following-along-at-home winners - that's quite beautiful, and too long to quote here, but which indicates that the stuff between them is mutual.
The Lollapalossa line is near the end of this chapter. And there's this prayer to the playing children:
"Till tree from tree, tree among trees, tree over tree become stone to stone, stone between stones, stone under stone for ever.
O Loud, hear the wee beseech of thees of each of these thy unlitten ones! Grant they sleep in hour's time, O Loud!
That they take no chill. That they do ming no merder. That they shall not gomeet madhowiatrees.
Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low!
Ha he hi ho hu.
Muumuu."
That's pretty. I'm happy for reading that, and for reading the rest of this book, even if I'm really just shooting for getting ten percent of it right now.
Tindall mentions that JJ wrote Books I and III before he wrote Book II, so when he got to Book II, he was just hitting his stride with this new way of writing and ready to cut loose. That's obvious. Also obvious? Repetition. JJ is a literary cubist, at times. If Picasso in that period was interested in every facet of a face from every angle, Joyce is interested in every facet of a person from every other person's angle - how they appear to not only their closest others and the public, but their own subconscious.
That's what OM and I have been talking about lately. Repetition. He's done with the next chapter, I'm almost done with it. We're both bogged down in this project and wishing we could move to more enjoyable books. A convo about that, and another multi-week post soon. Sorry for the long gap.
JF
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