FW pp. 260-308
"If Chapter IX is denser than what preceded it, Chapter X should be densest; but Chapter XI is even denser. A more elaborate comparison of adjectives is called for. Lacking it, we must content ourselves with calling Chapters IX, X, and XI the densest part of the Wake."
That's Tindall at the beginning of his thing on Book II, Chapter II. (He calls it Chapter X. That's wrong. JJ didn't number his chapters, only his books, so Bishop's system of book-and-then-chapter numbering for reference seems more legit.) Mild Bill wasn't kidding about dense and denser. I told OM that I understood around ten percent. It was actually around five percent, and maybe less. I went with ten because I knew the meanings of at least that many words. How they fit together? Not so much.
Basically, this chapter sucked for me. I really disliked reading it. I know O's been hit-and-miss for the past few chapters (his phrase when he's not into this project is "determined reading"), but this is where I checked out. JJ is a great writer, and Ulysses is probably the greatest novel ever, but whatever he's selling here? Yeah, no thanks.
The initial version of this post got amusingly negative. I called this chapter literary masturbation, in which I choose not to participate posthumously. (One could argue that parts of DFW's posthumous quasi-novel The Pale King were sorta masturbatory, but they were at least comprehensible and often funny.) And I listed pithy examples of better things to do: fold laundry, chew tinfoil, suck on milk candy, babysit an infant with colic, watch a Jim Carey movie, and...slog through the second part of The Sound and the Fury. That's a pretty good reference. If you've ever read that novel, and not FW, the Quentin section and the beginning of Part II are dense in the same way.
Literary Modernism, go figure, right? I'm in over my head here, and the online sources that I just consulted for a quick thumbnail sketch of that period/movement were laughably superficial. Basically, Modernism spanned the late-19th to the mid?-20th Centuries, when the world was in a messy state of flux. Cars and planes? Whoa. Telephones? Whoa. A freaking world war? Whoa (a half-hearted, meta-level whoa, in which Joey Lawrence insists he's "so much more than that word" and we all remain unconvinced because (a) how can anyone be more than a word - can an apple be more than an orange?, and (b) how can JL be more than the word with which he's so closely associated? - "more" is so quantitative and JL is quality). For many reasons, artists and authors looked inside and decided that traditional forms of expression weren't sufficient to represent what they had experienced. The web's examples are Picasso and Braque, but Stravinsky and Varese are just as good. Everything just looked and sounded differently. And felt differently, and it's literature that documents changes in our feelings and our emotional responses, mediated by language and time.
(Yep. That's probably an internet first: Joey Lawrence and Edgard Varese in the same blog post. We transact in the post-modern here at AYITW. Who's got my #bitcoinwithJJsprofile?)
So there's weird-ass Erza Pound spouting off about making it new. There's Wild Bill Faulkner, in his fourth novel, dropping serious inner-monolog bombs. And there's JJ, who, after that Greek book, wanted to write a sleep book.
An aside, which is also my central point. When readers initially picked up The Sound and the Fury or FW, what did they think? I went into both with very little background - I still read the FW text before Tindall - and got/get lost too easily. How would a reader know that Part I of TSATF is Benji's inner voice and that Part II is Quentin's? How would a reader know that Part II, Chapter II of FW is a school lesson?
Well, they'd know because that chapter is written like a freaking textbook, that's how! Sarcastic punctuation. It's just not that obvious. It's obvious something is different; it's not obvious what, other than the appearance of the text. Wild Bill plays with italics in TSATF, but JJ ups him here by using a narrow column of text, italic comments on the left of that column, caps comments on the right, and footnotes. So, maybe this is JJ's take on the form of a scholarly essay or a textbook? How does form relate to modernism? That's an actual question, which is way more interesting than anything in this chapter. OM, anybody?
This chapter is a lesson. Shem is the italics on the left; Shaun is the caps on the right (until they switch half-way through the chapter); Issy is the footnotes. But how would I have ever known that myself without Mild Bill and various other sources? And who's the lecturer? JJ? And why, in the deepest hour of the night of this book is he talking about school? (Tindall doesn't touch that last question, really. It's all about seeing through the veil, not why the veil is pedagogically-shaped here.) This is a problem, my lack of understanding. It means that maybe JJ didn't care if anybody got it. And if he didn't care, why do we? Why isn't a "determined reading" of the words themselves enough? Why is a definitive reading better? Why authorial intent? The author is dead, right?
Right. He is. But here's the thing. When a book is this dense and difficult, this unwilling to acknowledge a reader outside the writer, piecing it apart becomes an academic exercise, in a pejorative sense. This isn't why I read (on that, later) - and it's why I don't want to read this particular book very much, tbh. (As usual, the blog is behind, so I'm well into the next chapter - and, wow, it's even more indecipherable.) I'm plowing through pages and pages, and getting zero out of them. What's the point?
Recently, I had a quick text exchange with OM about that, and he reminded me that I know the point. I took that to mean that the point was to finish the toughest book ever written in the English language during a calendar year. He then asked, "But is it worth it?" At this point, I just don't know. I can read what JJ wrote; I can read what others wrote about what JJ wrote. Both make me feel really dumb, and I can write about only the latter. So what's the point. You can do the same, and you're probably better at it. Me, I'm a lawyer, who's reading this book for "fun."
Josh at the WordPress lit blog Original Positions has a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of FW. As a teacher, he internalized the difficulty of reading this chapter:
"[T]his chapter is mind-blowing nonsense. It took about two hours to read the 40 pages or so [fwiw, he read the next, longer chapter in three hours - it's taking me, ahem, somewhat longer], but all came together somehow, and made me see, in the most brutal manner possible, just what we really do to ourselves under the heading of 'education' - we try to compress centuries of received wisdom into arbitrarily-distinguished subjects, and then conclude, generation after generation, that 'these kids today' just can't do it."
Who's we? Educators (what level)? Parents/adults? Whatever "we" that we're talking about, do we really do all that? I don't think so. Interdisciplinary education is the jam for kids these days, no? You get reading in your math; you get math in your science? Etc. (That's how it's been presented at grade-school meet-the-teachers nights, in my experience.) And, anyway, JJ is the greatest compressor of received wisdom - not just in this chapter or this novel, but across his entire body of work - even if he's not the greatest distinguisher of subjects. To me, it's fishy to attribute a subjective epiphany, however personally interesting or meaningful, about education to JJ's unique style in a chapter nominally/formally about education, when that style is pretty consistent in other chapters about other stuff. I don't want to bash a fellow FW blogger, especially one who's obviously got more lit crit chops than me. (Are there FW bloggers with less than me? I'm gonna guess no.) Good on you, Josh, if you got something out of this chapter - I sure didn't. It just seems to me that there's a load of post hoc, ergo propter hoc logic threaded through so much of the commentary on FW. "I felt this way after I read that part, which must be because of JJ."
Deference to an assumed authorial intent here is weird. Quite clearly, there was some intent by JJ; his notes and letters show that. He just didn't give much of a shit if we understood anything, so why should we care? FW is just an empty vessel, a source where you can cheerleader-identify (gimme an H, gimme a C, gimme an E, what's that spell? pervert!) anything you want just by pointing to enough letters of enough words. And that's fine, that's great. Vive Barthes! Just don't give JJ even tacit credit for anything you come up with.
I felt dumb after I read this chapter, which must be because of JJ. Honestly, I don't read to feel smart. I read to learn how to write - how authors use words, how they adopt voices and tones, how I can adapt and appropriate those approaches in my own writing. And, to me, great books or Western Canon stuff has more to offer than popular fiction. But I don't read to feel dumb, either. And the fact that I am has been well and truly driven home. JJ isn't worried about words. He's worried about wack-ass nat-lang in the service of his Vico/Bruno concept. The difference (a difference) between FW and Ulysses is that the latter was based on a narrative, and the former is based on a couple of theories. Struggling through JJ in narrative mode is way more fulfilling than struggling through JJ in theory mode. (Imo, Wild Bill Faulkner was always in narrative mode; his style, usually difficult, varied based on the story he was telling. Compare Absalom, Absalom and The Reivers. Same guy, different style. There's probably a style/genre Bakhtin point lurking around here, but that's beyond my current rant.) I get it. I. Get. It. Fours/Vico and mirrors/Bruno, a lot of repetition, a subconscious version of English where every word is chock-full of allusions only some of which I'm supposed to catch. Do I really need to finish this book? Or is that all I'm gonna get out of it? If this all sounds like a long-winded defense of quitting, it might be. I haven't. At least, not yet.
Onto the text. This will be quick.
Tindall's description of the meta-level stuff sounds so cool to me that I really wish that I would have understood more. Basically, because this chapter is about the three Earwicker kids doing homework (history is FCE, and geometry is ALP), they're offering a running commentary on not only the text before them, but also FW and texts in general. I didn't get much of that. What I did get is the different tone from the different commentators. Shem's italics on the left are flaky and sorta poetic (e.g., "Will you carry my can and fight the fairies?"); Shaun's capital letters are categorical, like he's offering a study guide or outline (e.g., "EARLY NOTATIONS OF ACQUIRED RIGHTS AND THE INFLUENCE OF COLLECTIVE TRADITION UPON THE INDIVIDUAL"); Issy's footnotes are mostly readable or conversational, like she's taking notes and stream-of-consciousness riffing on the text or what her brothers are saying. Some of Issy's comments are deep - "If we each could always do all we ever did." Some are not - "Starnaked and bonedstiff. We vivvy soddy. All be dood." Some are indecipherable. Her longest footnote takes up most of p. 279.
Tidall calls pp. 268-70 "hilarious." That's probably a tad strong. He also called the geometry lesson given by Shem (Dolph) to Shaun (Kev) on "the heart of this chapter." I missed that - there's a "aquilittoral dryankle," I guess, and ALP is all over the place initials-wise. Anyway, Shem and Shaun switch sides page- and font-wise, and Issy offers a graphical representation of the family. They all love/hate each other, and nothing is very different than before. I could say more, but I'd only be cribbing Tindall. He's got this; you lot do, too.
Better stuff, to close. JJ published this chapter separately in 1937 as a little book titled Storiella as She is Syung. The first page, with an illustration by JJ's daughter Lucia, is the header image above - super pretty. And, apparently, someone wrote a whole book on this chapter. Gj. Finally, from our friends at Waywords and Meansigns, here's NYC author/artist Liz Longo and her daughter singing a passage from Book II, Chapter II.
More soon. And don't expect more to be much more. I don't have a lot to say about the next chapter other than it's denserest.
JF
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