Thursday, May 27, 2010

Finnegans Wake, pages 117-119


Behind, as usual. Luckily for me, we've got a larger than usual hiatus. Unluckily for me, I will now have to reconstruct a meeting of two whole weeks ago. I think I'll stick to the beginning here, and in a moment explain why.



Yes, as Joyce presciently muses, "we in our wee free state...may have our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense of the lot, the interpretation of any phrase in the whole, the meaning of every word of a phrase so far deciphered out of it". I believe we decided that he was referring to the ever present letter, which in some sense is the book itself and in some sense is  the particular missive of Anna Livia Pluribelle or ALP, the feminine principle of the book. Anyway, we found this passage comforting, as this is our constant state in relation to the Wake. Reading it is a great emotional roller coaster, is what it is.

I really like what follows about our knowing of the past or indeed anything (I've taken out some of Joyce's allusions and word play to make the sense clearer, but you have the page numbers, people--go look up what's missing if you want): "On the face of it...the affair is a thing once for all done and there you are somewhere and finished in a certain time...Anyhow, somehow and somewhere...somebody mentioned by name in his telephone directory...wrote it, wrote it all, wrote it all down, and there you are, full stop. O, undoubtably yes, and potably so, but...one who deeper thinks will always bear in the [back] of his mind that this downright there you are and there it is is only in the eye. Why?"

Because, Soferim Bebel [yes, I'll get to that]...every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle...was moving and changing every part of the time.".."He cites "the continually more and less misunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators, and "the variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherewise spelled, changably meaning vocable scriptsigns". With all this flux, he goes on to say "and, sure, we ought really to rest thankful that at this deleted hour of dungflies dawning we have even a written on with dried ink scrap of paper at all to show for ourselves". And indeed we ought.

I have left out almost all of what makes Joyce most Joycean, ie, the word play, just to get the simpler points across. But I did leave in Soferim Bebel, because I happened to find a small passage on that here. Basically, though, the pun is on suffering Babel, and has to do with the destruction of the tower and chaotic world we find ourselves in its aftermath, where all is diffuse and changing and transient, both in ourselves, but also in our language. And that seems a particularly Joycean  way of looking at things.

I'll also note in passing that "Soferim" refers in at least one meaning to a Talmudic treatise on rules on preparing the holy books, as well as rules governing the reading of them. Not so accidental a pun in a book such as this one, I'm thinking.

While looking around for this, I came across this blog entry, which happens to talk about this very passage. What's a bit odd about it is that the author seems to have had high hopes of making an occasional thing, much like this post, but this was one of the only posts of his that I found.



From here, Joyce goes on to obliquely relate things to the Book of Kells, and as there is quite a bit of interplay going on between these two great literary works of Ireland, I thought I'd better do another post around that. (Also, it will give me a bit of time to actually learn a bit more about the famous ancient manuscript.)

7 comments:

  1. I think this quote from the Boldrini book you link to is key:

    "The aphasia, or loss of language (at Babel and each night as we fall asleep) takes the form of the general amnesia which led necessarily to reinvention of new idioms, to having to give new names (inevitably misnomers) to things, each of them a progressive slip away from the original language and further into oblivion."

    By the way, I've been thinking more about the title, and it occurs to me (and maybe this is obvious, and you already discussed it while I was in Hilo) that "Finnegans wake" also refers to the fact that it is only while in the dream state that the mythology, the uber-consciousness of human-kind, if you will--i.e., the Finnegans--awaken in the human mind.

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  2. Uh, nothing, nothing and nothing is obvious to me, and even if I grasp it once, I lose it almost at once so any thoughts and clarifications are most welcome.

    So you were able to log on, then? Great. Hope the others can too if they want. As I've said before, I'll post anyone's thoughts as separate, attributed 'guest' posts if they want.

    No, I don't think we quite got to the uber-consciousness of sleep yet. I am still only intermittantly registering that this is a book of the night and so of dreams and that this is a kind of associative dream language that's being spoken.

    I think that's a great point you make and well worth contemplating--that our waking language is a kind of general amnesia and exile from the common language of Babel before the fall.

    It's funny that when I woke up this morning--and perhaps I should write this "woke up"-- I was thinking about the part of that same book that spoke of the importance of exile to Joyce's life and work. I hadn't thought of Joyce and Dante as brothers in exile before. I also hadn't thought about Trieste, which I've been to, in relation to either Joyce or all this Babel of languages, nestling as it does on the Adriatic Sea and neighboring so closely on the former Yugoslavia.

    And I like this: "For Joyce, as for Dante, the solution is not in going back to the irrecoverable, pre-Babelian (Celtic)language, nor in quietly accepting the present one, but in taking advantage of the differences and making the most of them."

    Actually, I think that book might be pretty interesting.

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  3. Soferim would be the people who prepared the treatises of the kind you described (singular form: sofer). That makes the name even more intriguing, I think.
    ==============
    Detectives Beyond Borders
    “Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home”
    http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

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  4. By the way, the editor of the Tamil pulp fiction collection about which I have been writing studied at UC Santa Cruz.
    ==========================
    Detectives Beyond Borders
    "Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
    http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

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  5. Thanks, Peter. I have to admit that there seemed to be a lot of different definitions of "Soferim" and I was starting to get bogged down.

    What's so interesting about Joyce is that even a word can be so packed with meaning and allusion.

    I'll check out that Tamil pulp post. Doubt I know the person but you never know.

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  6. His name is Rakesh Khanna, and he'd have studied mathematics, music or both, perhaps up until about 1998.
    ==========================
    Detectives Beyond Borders
    "Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
    http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

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  7. Thanks. No, I don't know him, but it's cool that he studied here. There's kind of a nice Indian connection to Santa Cruz, which, being me, I don't know enough about to be informative about.

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