A visit from PQ

I'd be remiss if I didn't take time out from writing my extremely random blog posts about reading the Wake  to mention a visit from our roving correspondent Peter Quadrino to Santa Cruz last weekend. Peter and his fiancee Colleen were here in the greater Bay Area and so we gathered an impromptu group from among our regular Wake attendants at our usual hangout, The Poet and Patriot. The links between our cell of Wakers and Peter's Wake group in Austin, Texas are many, as several of our members here have relatives who have ended up in Austin for a time, and have attended Peter's Wake group while they were in residence.

Peter's group meets twice a month, once at a local bookstore called Malvern Books, and once at the Irish delegation. Here's an account of their first meeting at the latter. The Austin Wakers approach is somewhat different than ours, in that they tackle a page at a time, everyone reading two lines, after which they all have at it. They also have Peter's blog post outlining it, which he refers to as Finnegans Wake Treasure Map.

I first connected with Peter when this blog was new, and its whole point was really just to discover whether we here in Santa Cruz could discover other Wakeans out there. At that point, he was living and working in Southern California and managed to get to a well-established group in Marina del Rey, which he posted about HERE. Not long after that, he presented a paper on some connections  between Joyce and Salvador Dali he'd made for an annual James Joyce conference at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which he talks about a bit HERE. He had previously shared that paper with me and by extension other members of our group in order to get some feedback before giving his talk. I found it all quite interesting.

On moving to Austin, though, Peter decided to form his own Wake group, and initially held meetings at the public library. Not long after that, he decided that he really needed to start a blog just about Finnegans Wake, which could also serve as the home page for the group.

We were all interested to hear about a trip he and another Austin Waker had made to the International James Joyce Symposium in Antwerp, Belgium, where he presented a paper called, "The Pantheon of FINNEGANS WOKE" , which I thought I might have to summarize, but which Peter has published a version of HERE. In it, you will find some of the usual suspects you might already know about, like Marshall McLuhan and Norman O. Brown, but there are also some surprises. One that he mentioned to us at our gathering was William Melvin Kelley, a black writer in the Langston Hughes circle, who the OED credits with coming up with the term WOKE. As Peter puts it in his post, "which means every time you hear someone use the term "woke" it was originated by a Wake head.

Check out his two blogs, A Building Roam, which covers other things besides the Wake, including his other passions, baseball and rap music, and of course Finnegans, Wake! Both are consistently thought provoking.

William Melvin Kelly-WOKE

Succoth-bifurcations upon bifurcations, page 13

At the end of a passage on page 13, and after a list of  both Jewish calendar months and Latin numbers, the final word is (Succoth.)--the parentheses are Joyce's, not mine. Two members agreed at our most recent meeting that this was a reference to the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, also known as the Feast of Ingathering or the Feast of Booths, although they disagreed about the pronunciation. But it caught my attention because a Jewish friend had recently mentioned that she and friends would be honoring Sukkot (there are many spellings, as it is a transliteration from another alphabet) , in which Jews around the world build temporary houses as part of the festival, by phone banking and canvassing to build a new House--of Representatives.

Sukkah roofs by Yoninah

What is more immediately relevant to our Joyce group is that Sukkot this year actually starts tomorrow evening, September 23rd, at sunset. So we seem to be in a bit of synchronicity in our reading of the Wake at the moment. Of course, the real question is, can we ever not be?

But a word about different interpretations, both of spelling and other things. I've already mentioned that there is no one right spelling, except, I would guess, in the Hebrew alphabet. But the festival itself is two-pronged, and as my friend above suggests, also open to creative interpretation. It is a harvest festival, 'the feast of ingathering' mentioned in Exodus, as Wikipedia tells us. But it has a deeper religious significance, this time from Leviticus, where it is said to commemorate the Exodus and the dependence of Israel on the will of God.

The doubleness of the word, however, does not stop here. For the annotated Finnegans Wake website has this note: 

 Flood: Ireland, Its Saints and Scholars 10: 'King Niall of the Nine Hostages went on successive expeditions against the peoples of Gaul and Britain. Amongst the captives... was Succoth, a lad of sixteen... afterwards called Patricius, probably in allusion to his noble birth'.n to his noble birth'.

In other words, the person we would come to know as St. Patrick. A website called Electric Scotland claims him as a Scotsman, and calls him Succat or Succath, but also thinks it might place his birth near an estate in Scotland currently called Succoth. And there is indeed a later historical figure called 
Ilay Campbell, Lord Succoth from the region:

Portrait by David Martin-wikipedia

And don't get me started on a more recent controversy as to whether St. Patrick was actually a slave or really a slave trader and tax collector. That might be a bridge too far even for this blog post. 

Anyway, all this blather is basically just to reaffirm that there is never just one path through the Wake or one meaning, or even always one pronunciation.

the museyroom, pages 7-11

We had eleven people at this Wednesday's Wake group, which I think is probably the largest yet, with the possible exception of a special Wake group some years back when a fellow Joycean enthusiast was in town. This time we welcomed several new or newish participants, and all the more familiar members happened to be back from their travels or not yet off on their travels and conflicting schedules, which is not likely to happen again for some time.

As we 'begin again' it was rather startling to me that one of the new attendees is not actually new to the Wake at all, but was,all unknowingly, one of the instigators of our attempt. Many years ago (the late seventies) several of our members, then college students, wandered into an all night dramatization of Finnegans Wake on campus, which was inspired by or maybe even presided over by the legendary Norman O. Brown, who was at that time teaching here, at UCSC. Although I wasn't one of those students, I have heard about this marvelous event several times over the years, including the tossing of various pages of Finnegans Wake into the air, but discovered that Tim had actually been one of the performers, in some sense connected to the 'character' of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, or HCE. There seemed a strange looping of time, that someone who was part of the catalyst should now become part of this new reading, which in some sense would not have happened without his original participation. Seemed very apt as we 'begin again'.

It's also interesting that Deidre, who in some ways could be termed our own Kate (though not elderly) and who was our original barkeep who had to take a break for health reasons, is now working Wednesday nights again. What pub have we really wandered into, I wonder?

As Kathe (Kate under a different name) guides us through the 'museyroom', saying "This is..." before its many artifacts, I get a sense that it wouldn't have been possible for me to have had on the first reading, which is that the whole show is being brought to life again, a 'revival' as they're sometimes called on Broadway. As Tom said last time about the first thunderclap, which we read aloud together, there was something of an incantation to it, something a little bit creepy. As Ed was saying this time, it's all brought to life out of the ruins, after great loss. In our current historical moment, which is no longer the same moment at which we started last time, though it was as recently as 2009, it is a little easier now to imagine what it would mean to be picking through the wreckage at some not too distant date, and beginning again.

I wasn't too successful in researching some of the things that interested me in this passage, such as whether Wellington (Willingdone) represented Shem and Napoleon (Lipoleum) Shaun or visa versa, and in fact, the little I could find actually thought of both as primarily HCE figures.

But as the hen knows, when you're picking through the dump, you come across other treasures. For instance, this article on "Bruno Vico and Finnegans Wake" by Eric Rosenbloom, which gives us some sense of their philosophies and why they were of interest to Joyce. I don't mind admitting that I could do with a refresher course, and especially since I find both these men very intriguing. And I could relate to this bit about how Joyce saw Vico:

Joyce, although often referring people to Vico, also asserted he did not “believe” Vico’s science, “but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung.” 

Contained within the article, though, was a theory that I hadn't heard before, and which I found moving.

Hugh Kenner has suggested that the dreamer does not want to wake up, that ALP is a widow resisting the conscious awareness that her husband — executed after the 1916 Easter uprising, he says — is no longer beside her. The hanging scaffold is suppressed by becoming Tim Finnegan’s building scaffold. Her tears become the river in which her dreams flow. The book of history assures us that life always rises from the ashes, but we also know that individual loss is unrecoverable. The incomplete sentence at the end of Finnegans Wake gives the reader a choice: Leave the book and return to life, or return to the book’s first words.

This of course can't be the only interpretation, but I do find it intriguing that the article goes on to say that Joyce himself had likened Finnegans Wake to St. John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul. 

On a MUCH lighter note, I  found a Tumbler site called "Notes on Finnegans Wake," which included this YouTube animation of the "museyroom"--in Italian. If you've recently read Joyce's English version you will be surprised how much you understand, even if you don't really speak Italian. As my professor Donald Nicholl reminded us, there is the Via Negativa that the Dark Night of the Soul represents, but there is also the Via Positiva. I have always been clear which one I'd choose if I had my druthers.