Searching for Stamina

Week 7, May 10-May 17, pages 80-92

Since we began this Finnegans Wake project, I’ve celebrated Easter, my wife’s birthday, and the birth of my second child. I’ve had not one, not two, but three bosses at work (don’t ask). My favorite television series of all time ended.

And Finnegans Wake rambles along. We are closing in on 100 pages, and I think it’s reasonable to say the question of stamina has been raised. How do you keep this project going when life elsewhere demands so much?  Stupid life.

JF has mentioned several times the importance of momentum.  FW is easy to read when you’re reading it. When you’re not reading, or haven’t for a couple of days, the book looks heavy, sitting there on the bedside table.  Like it might actually take some physical effort to lift the thing and peel back the pages to find the bookmark.

It’s during moments like these when you ask yourself, “Why?”  As in, “Why did I get myself into it?” Or, perhaps more frighteningly, “What am I getting out of it?”

Fair point, though. I’m still reading to the newborn, and we’ve already made our way through “The Dead,” a good chunk of Leaves of Grass (nods to JF), and about half of Salinger’s Nine Stories. I’ll be heading off on vacation next week, and I’m considering what I should read while poolside, but it’ll at least be something light with a generally agreed-upon plot.

I can tell you why I’m reading all of those things.  Either I’m going for escapism while on vacation, or I’m having a blast reading great literature to a four week old.

So what’s Finnegans Wake for?

Fear not, faithful blog reader, I’m not giving up. Because Finnegans Wake is its own reward. When I pick it up and work through a simple passage, or a few pages, it almost never lets me down. 

Why do people do thousand-piece puzzles? Is there anything to it other than putting the old noodle through a workout?

At a basic level, FW is a puzzle. If there were nothing else (and of course, there is always something else when it comes to Joyce), then the simple mental exercise of reading FW would make it all worthwhile.

From last week’s section, we have this section, page 88.21-25:

And with tumblerous legs, redipnomii-nated Helmingham Erchenwyne Rutter Egbert Crumwall Odin Maximus Esme Saxon Esa  Vercingetorix Ethelwulf Rupprecht Ydwalla Bentley Osmund Dysart Yggdrasselmann? Holy Saint Eiffel, the very phoenix!

OK, so I’m stumbling along, and I come to this long name. Hey, a capital “H”! I’m immediately on the look for HCE.  But the “E” is the second letter and again the fourth, and the “C” doesn’t show until the fifth the letter.  That’s not exactly HCE. But we’re definitely talking about HCE here. Those names are all names of royalty or rulers of men of some sort. We’re talking about HCE rising up.

Oh, it’s an acrostic!  The first letter of every name spells HERE COMES EVERYBODY.  I swear, I didn’t even care what else this section was about, I was just excited to figure that out. 

The little things keep us coming back!

Quiz: Is Reading Finnegans Wake for You?

Week 6, May 3-May 10, pages 68-80

Warning: there is a quiz at the end of this post.

Liverpoor? Sot a bit of it! His braynes coolt parritch, his pelt nassy, his heart's adrone, his bluidstreams acrawl, his puff but a piff, his extremeties extremely so: Fengless, Pawmbroke, Chilblaimend and Baldowl. Humph is in his doge. Words weigh no no more to him than raindrips to Rethfernhim. Which we all like. Rain. When we sleep. Drops. But wait until our sleeping. Drain. Sdops.

Finnegans Wake, 74.13-19

The preceding passage is the last paragraph of chapter three. Read it without context.  Don’t worry about what’s come before in the chapter. Why am I asking you to ignore context? Because chapter three is dense.  This is Finnegans Wake we’re talking about, so if I tell you it’s dense, you know it’s neutron-star dense.

But wait—would having read the 26.5 pages that come before in chapter three make these passage easier to understand? I’ll feel confident in saying “No” to that question. You would have a deeper and fuller understanding, perhaps, but that experience wouldn’t make these seven lines easier, in and of themselves.

Let’s see if I’m right about that.

Liverpoor? Sot a bit of it!

Liverpool is an English city that’s almost directly across the Irish Sea from Dublin.  A “liver poor” is what you have when you drink too much, and a “sot” is a drunk.

His braynes coolt parritch, his pelt nassy, his heart's adrone, his bluidstreams acrawl, his puff but a piff,

Who is the “he”? Well, a safe bet is that it’s our protagonist, our main male character, possibly the man dreaming the dream, HCE in one of his many guises.

What’s he doing? His brains are cold porridge, his skin is wet, his heart is droning, his blood slowly crawls through his veins, and his breath is quiet. Looks like he’s asleep. So far so good.

his extremeties extremely so: Fengless, Pawmbroke, Chilblaimend and Baldowl.

I had to look up those four names, and they are apparently plays on the names of four districts in Dublin. HCE, a man who may be Dublin itself, lies asleep with his four extremities spread across the city.

Humph is in his doge.

HCE (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker) is dosing. A doge was also the name for the ruler of many of the city-states in Renaissance-era Italy.

Words weigh no no more to him than raindrips to Rethfernhim.

Rethfernhim also refers to a Dublin suburbs. Words weigh less than raindrops.  As HCE sleeps, words become as slippery as water.

Which we all like. Rain. When we sleep. Drops. But wait until our sleeping. Drain. Sdops.

Ah, the joy of falling asleep. HCE’s sleeping brain stops.  He’s a sleeping puddle, isn’t he?

What’s the point of going through all that? I’ve been asked, “What’s it like reading Finnegans Wake?” I’d say reading Finnegans Wake is often like what we just did with this passage.  You read on, sometimes with a broader understanding of where you are, but more likely with only the text immediately at hand to help you. You’ve got to burrow in. Feel comfortable reading without context.

Then, you read it again. We’ve broken it all down, and understood at least some of it. So let’s read it again in its entirety. Let the words rush by.

Liverpoor? Sot a bit of it! His braynes coolt parritch, his pelt nassy, his heart's adrone, his bluidstreams acrawl, his puff but a piff, his extremeties extremely so: Fengless, Pawmbroke, Chilblaimend and Baldowl. Humph is in his doge. Words weigh no no more to him than raindrips to Rethfernhim. Which we all like. Rain. When we sleep. Drops. But wait until our sleeping. Drain. Sdops.

Here’s the quiz.

1. Did you enjoy that exercise?
2. Do you like this passage on its own, without feeling like you need to know more about what’s going on?
3. Could you imagine reading an almost endless number of these passages back to back, many of which are more difficult to understand than this one? 
4. Did you like going back and re-reading the passage a second time?

If you answered “Yes” to all four questions, I have good news for you: you should read Finnegans Wake.  And if you answered “No” to any of them, I have even better news: there’s still a chance you’re a normal person!

My Kid Story

OM had a random midweek blog post a few weeks ago.  (Cool Buckyball, btw.)  I'm probably not going to do that, ever.  It's hard enough for me to plow thru 12p of FW, then howevermany pages of Tindall, then blog about it all and sound coherent.  If I have passably intelligent insights between posts, I'm sure as shit gonna save them for next time.  I'm actually working one on Vico and Bruno for a week when I have nothing to say about the text or the guide.  This isn't that week.

Why?  Because I don't have my books, and I can't even read.  Ugh.  I'll spare you the details of my socalledlife, but I'm away from home every Wednesday.  Sucks.  This particular Wednesday, I had to work-work.  Actually, I've had to work during commutes and over weekends and at night for a few weeks.  At some point, I took FW and Tindall out of my backpack to make room for a pile of important papers.  That pile has gone back and forth with me every day this week, and didn't cough up its spot.  Or I didn't remember to put the books on top of the papers.  Which really sucks because I finished my work-work early enough to actually catch up tonight (OM is on a Sunday-Sunday schedule, and I've slipped to a Wednesday-Wednesday schedule - don't worry, O, I'm still here), and didn't remember that I flaked.  It was the bright spot I expected after a long, trying day, and it wasn't there.

Anyway.  I'll do 12p tomorrow, and, hopefully, get back here.  In the meantime (like anybody but you is reading, O, lol - kinda cute to frame things for an "audience"), no abstract title and no cool header image.  Here's my kid story, now that OM's done two.

My youngest son (8 y.o.) is fascinated by this book, and my older son (11 y.o.) is not.  I read them an excerpt (sort of inspired by Chabon's piece that I mentioned a few weeks ago) recently because they had noticed FW and Tindall on the dining room table, and asked what's up with that, and if I had finally quit on DFW's Infinite Jest (um, no).  Anyway, here's the somewhat edited exchange:

Me: Hardest book evah.  [I talk to them like bros - or, actually, like Mordecai and Rigby from the Regular Show - sometimes.]

11: What do you mean?  [He's thru the Hunger Games and almost thru the Harry Potter books, and page length is a major concern.]

8: Yeah, what do you mean?  [Echoing happens.]

Me: Hardest novel written in the English language, let's say.  Because it's not actually in English.

8: What??

11: Dad, read some to us!!

We read aloud alot, various stuff (right now it's this and this), so I did.  Just a paragraph, using the best phonetic pronunciation I could for JJ's words.  11 tuned out, which is fine and cool and age-appropriate; 8 freaked out, which is also fine and cool and something besides age-appropriate.  11 is a reader, and loves fiction.  8 is a self-described non-fiction guy, ha.  And hearing what JJ did to the language that he fought so hard to learn - tbh, not that many years ago - blew his shiny mind.  Not necessarily in a good way.  It's kid-specific, I guess.  But he said that he wants to read "a few pages" soon.  Go for it, kid.  You might understand more than me.

Peace, 

JF

Reading (Or Not Reading) Finnegans Wake to a Newborn

Week 5, April 27-May 3, pages 56-68

When my first child was born a little over three years ago, I was given the advice: "Read to him as much as possible, even if he's just lying there asleep." So I read Moby-Dick aloud during the no-longer-so-quiet hours of the night, as he struggled and fussed with a sensitive tummy. We had a lot of fun -- or I had fun, at least. The little guy thought Melville when on a bit too long about the different types of whales, but he enjoyed the story.

Baby #2 arrived last week, and to continue the tradition I began reading Finnegans Wake to him. Just as quickly, I abandoned that idea. I mean, the kid needs to work up to FW. The word salad was a tad too much for his baby ears. 

We shifted gears and I picked up Dubliners, flipping right to "The Dead." For the little one, the words and cadence were more his speed, and if you ignore the heavy thematic content, it's good for napping.

For Dad, though, the Wake bubbled beneath the surface. It's no secret that the major works of Joyce overlap. Characters, major and minor, appear in multiple stories. And early 20th-century Dublin, down to the smallest detail, is the heart of it all.

It's in the geography of the city that those faint echoes ring. But for one who is as neck deep in FW as I, the sounds are unmistakable. Aunt Julia sings in the choir at Adam and Eve's, the church that's name-checked in FW's very first sentence. The Wellington Monument is mentioned, reminding us of the Willingdone Museyroom episode of 1.1. Finally, we hear of Phoenix Park, the literal scene of FW's crime.

No, there's no mention of HCE or ALP, but there's a thread that connects. And for a sleep-deprived dad, that's enough for this week.

As for my own reading, FW continues as a steady pace. I'm enjoying it as much as ever, and look forward to getting deep into the nitty gritty in coming weeks.

But for now, it's nap time.

Week 4 (JF)

FW pp. 42-54

This week's segment spanned the end of Chapter 2 and the beginning of Chapter 3.  I struggled with the Chapter 2 material not because it was really tough, but because it was tough to pick up where I left off (momentum definitely helps with this book).  And I struggled with the Chapter 3 material because it actually was really tough.

As OM mentioned in our last conversation, Chapter 2 contains some of the earliest stuff that JJ wrote for FW.  As such, it's probably easier to read, relatively speaking - closer to Ulysses-level incomprehensibility.  Essentially, Chapter 2 lays out the whole plot (I think), to the extent this book has a plot.  HCE sees the young women peeing, gets busted by the soldiers, tells lies...and a rumor spreads all over Dublin.  The fact that the rumor is spread by "a cad with the pipe" and that shady dude Hosty, who's HCE, Jesus, and Satan at the same time?  Well, that's just JJ being JJ.

Chapter 2 is fun.  After a while, it becomes a pub-crawl with "a few good souls" (I thought of Pynchon's Benny Profane and his "whole sick crew" from V.) following/passing the rumor, now a "wararrow" that "flutter[s] its secret on white highway and brown byway to the rose of the winds and the blew of the gaels, from archway to lattice and from black hand to pink ear, village crying to village"  (p43, ll26-29).  The rumor morphs into a song, an actual song with music notes and lyrics, called "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly."  Here it is written (in FW, only the first verse appears in staff lines), and here it is performed by Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange).  Yeah, super weird.  Anyway.

Persse O'Reilly sounds like an Irish name, right?  Perce (short for Percy) O'Riley?  Sure.  Nope.  Remember, JJ is living in Paris while writing FW.  And perce-oreille is French for earwig.  Earwig, Earwicker.  Duh.  The Ballad of HCE, where Hosty pretty much skewers him.     

And here's something that I wish I would have thought of myself, but T.S. Eliot - last week, I mentioned how JJ dogged him for stealing part of Ulysses - beat me to it: Joyce was going blind.  He had iritis (inflammation of the irises), glaucoma, and cataracts, and underwent surgery and various other treatments to save his eyes.  Ultimately, they failed him, but his ears never did.  By the time he wrote FW, sight was less important to him than sound.  (The book is so lyrical at times, it almost asks to be read aloud for the sheer fun of hearing the not-quite words.)  The point is this: Ear, earwig, Earwicker.  Duh.  And, unrelated, earwigs are gross.  Once, while folding up a tent, I got bit in the neck by one.  That sucked.

Chapter 3 is less fun.  Alot less.  Even Tindall warns that it is "dream entirely or almost entirely."  He continues (and I almost decide to go ropeless like O), "This chapter our incubus, and we its succubi.  Yet cheerfulness breaks through."  I have no idea what the fuck that even means.  Tbh, he's less than helpful here, where I could have used a boost.  What I understand from the guide is that this chapter is HCE's version of the story.  The chapter is pretty long, and I'm only six pages into it.  Not much stood out, except the word "reamalgamerge" - a mash-up of reemerge and amalgamate, I guess.  Pretty awesome.

Like last week, I'm a few days behind this week.  I hope to catch up over the weekend, and stick more to a Sunday-to-Sunday schedule like O.  Btw, congrats, buddy.

Peace,

JF

Conversation #1: Parachuting without a parachute?

The following is an email conversation involving two men -- let's call them Mutt (OM) and Jute (JF) -- discussing Finnegans Wake. 

OM: So I just checked out your last blog post.  First of all, I completely agree that the first five pages of chapter two were downright readable. Apparently it's one of the earliest sections he wrote. Of course, it doesn't stay readable for long.  After the cad with the pipe shows up, and HCE stutters through a needless defense of his crime, things shift and twist, and it's hard to track all the movements.

I mentioned this a bit in my last post, but it feels like this is an area where Tindall isn't all that helpful.  His close reading here doesn't work for me.  I'm not saying he's wrong in his interpretations, necessarily, but he presents them as actual occurrences in the book.

E.g., the cad with the pipe, he takes HCE's wife to bed?  Really? I'm reading this section as a lot of sexually charged, pent-up guilt. I can certainly see HCE feeling threatened that another, younger man would sleep with his wife, but is the cad's wife ALP? I don't know. But what feels more important to me is that the cad tells the HCE rumor to his wife, who tells it to her priest, and it expands from there.

My point is, it's a tricky thing Tindall's trying to do.  He wants to explain, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, a section that is really about establishing a sense of HCE's guilt for an unspecified crime, the rumor of which is spreading and changing as it moves across Dublin from one gossiper to the next. The associations are so fluid that isolating and identifying every one becomes so messy.

Another example that you mention: "Hosty." This is God, Satan, and the host of pub. It's HCE, who already is every man anyway. The cup overfloweth. Is Tindall making things clearer here?

Just curious how you felt about that.  Would you prefer general chapter summaries to the word-by-word breakdown you get from Tindall?

JF: I'm not sure what I expected from Tindall, but I'm sorta over- and underwhelmed by the guide at this point.

The over has to do with the text of FW itself.  It's so dense, so filled with external and internal associations beyond my education or experience that line-by-line, much less paragraph-to-paragraph, I have trouble following anything like character or plot.  Character is unique in this book b/c it's not fixed - HCE and ALP and the kids are a lot of people at the same time, but never fully sketched - the way people often are in dreams.  Plot is nonexistent - the way, again, it often is in dreams.  Those qualities make general chapter summaries, aside from the cryptic ones I mentioned last week, difficult.  So the guide helps tether me to something close to meaning, albeit Tindall's meaning, which is several steps away JJ's meaning, which (see my Week 0 post) isn't definitive.  Without that rope, I'd be spinning my wheels more than I already am, and not getting much of anything out of this endeavor.

Curious.  Did you use a guide for Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow?  I did for both, and found them quite helpful in giving me some sense of the authors' culturally contextualized references that I would have otherwise missed.  But those are different novels, right?  Tindall, as you say, is in a tougher position, trying to manage the references on a baseline level and apply them on a higher level, up where JJ uses them.

I do like the microscopic attention that Tindall gives the text.  If I'm underwhelmed, it's b/c I'd like a little more depth to some of what he's saying.  He hits the points that he deems important, and that he thinks serve the bigger picture.  Sometimes there are sentences or even phrases that I'd like him to cover, and he doesn't.  Maybe it comes down to style.  Sometimes it seems like he's speed talking.  I guess I'd like him to slow down, so he can break it down more clearly.

OM: I used a guide for Gravity's Rainbow, but I read Ulysses in college, so I had a professor and a class of English major undergrads all reading along together.

But the biggest difference between those novels and Finnegans Wake is this: both GR and Ulysses can be difficult to follow, can be disorienting, can be overwhelming in the depth and scope of their references and allusions.  And yet, you can read them. Most sentences make sense on their own. You may be unsure how it fits into the larger whole, or you may be unsure what place and time you're inhabiting, or you may not even be able to tell if it's a dream or reality.

In Finnegans Wake, though, most sentences do not make sense without digging deeper and picking up on the references. You need to know these things or you don't have any ground on which to stand. You can't just plod along and hope to pick up the thread later.

That's why I keep saying that reading FW is as much about reading the existing criticism as it is about reading the novel itself.

JF: Agreed on U and GR.  The words (definitionally) and the sentences (syntactically - is that the right word?) make sense most of the time.  Neither is true for FW.

I do find myself in plod-and-hope mode quite a bit.  Then again, I'm not rereading as much as you are.  I'll go back to the text if Tindall mentions something that I just didn't see at all, or if I underlined something to revisit.  But I usually enjoy the weird weightlessness of reading the text.  The art and the craft of what JJ is doing is pretty amazing to me.

If I miss a lot, and if Tindall is less than helpful, that's ok.  I'm gonna stick with him.

OM: I'm considering going forward from here without a guide.  Is that madness?  Is that parachuting without a parachute?

JF: You're like the lit-snob version of those insane dudes who free-climbed El Capitan.  That huge granite rock face?  It's called Finnegans Wake.

OM: Pfft, those guys used ropes?

JF: It was more like twine.  Or maybe a really thick string.  And it was for talking, mostly, into paper cups connected by the string.

Uh.  I just realized that I'm at the other end of your string.  You're totally screwed.  I got the gear (or the guide), but I don't know what I'm doing.

Week 3 (JF)

FW pp. 30-42

Onto Chapter 2, and a quick note/open question.  The version of FW that O and I are reading has an outline of chapter contents (above), but who wrote that?  I'm guessing that if it's paginated with small romans and precedes the title page, it's Bishop?  Whatever, it's decidedly unhelpful, and I have no idea why it's there.  It's so cryptic and weird that I wish JJ wrote it.  Maybe he did.

So this week, we moved from a general introduction of HCE to a specific one.  This week's reading was somewhat readable at first.  I was feeling great about it for the first five pages or so, then I lost it.  Basically, this chapter contains background of an embarrassing event for HCE that creates inner conflict, and probably fuels his dreamscape.  He was walking through a park and encountered three Welsh soldiers watching two young Irish women pull their pants down and pee in the woods.  Whether HCE saw the soldiers (and was peeping on the peeping toms) first, or they saw him first, is unclear.  JJ talks about the event and its aftermath.  I got that.  Then he dives into deeper water.  That, I didn't get.

HCE meets "a cad with a pipe" after the incident.  The cad is young adult, and maybe a stand-in for Shem and Shaun?  Anyway, the rumor mill starts.  HCE owns a bar, I think?, and people in that neighborhood of Dublin start lining up for and against him.  The cad, somehow (I'm paraphrasing Tindall), beds ALP - figuratively.  I missed that completely, although I did catch her around the periphery of this segment.  And HCE becomes one of his worst detractors, a dude named "Hosty."  Hosty is, check this, HCE, Jesus (the eucharist or host), and Satan (Latin hostis or enemy) at the same time.  Tindall: "Never was Joyce's talent for concentration shown more happily."  Smh.     

Fave passages and words?

pp 32-33 (it's a really long, like Faulkner-long sentence, but at least Wild Bill seemed to wink at grammar):

"The great fact emerges that after that historic date all holographs so far exhumed initialed by Haromphrey bear the sigla H.C.E. and while he was only and long and always good Dook Umphrey for the hungerlean spalpeens of Lucalizod and Chimbers to his cronies it was equally certainly a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him as sense of those normative letters his nickname Here Comes Everybody.  An imposing everybody he always indeed looked, constantly the name as and equal to himself and magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalization...."

So HCE is an everyman.  Ok.

I liked the words "verbigracious" and "twitterlitter"  (p37, ll33,37) for their playfulness.  And I liked the word "ildiot" (p37, l14), and figured it had another meaning.  Tidal says the ildiot is T.S. Eliot, and his "secondmouth language" (p37, l15) is what TSE stole for The Waste Land from Ulysses.  Kinda interesting.

Finally, I wanted more from Tindall about this passage (p31, ll33-36):

"Comes the question are these the facts of his nominigentilisation as recorded and accelerated in both or either of collateral andrewpaulmurphyc narratives.  Are those their fata which we read in sibylline between the fas and its nefas?"

I like the flow, but don't understand the words.

Quick apology to O.  I'm sorry for the late blog post.  My week three reading of the text and the guide was off by a few days, so this is off, too.  I'll try to catch up by Sunday.

More soon.

Peace,

JF