Finnegans Wake, page 141 or Summon in the Housesweep Dinah

Close readers of this blog (and if you're not a close reader, what the heck are you interested in Finnegans Wake for?) will note that there has been not only a substantial lapse since the last post, but a few pages missed here as well. With 2/5ths of our group out of the country for awhile and some scheduling problems, we haven't met as regularly as we did, and for my part my mother's death at the end September has put blog posts a bit in the background. But we've been meeting and I will be posting. I thought I would just start where we picked up this last Wednesday, which was on Riddle 6, which is a short one, and then go back as things come to me.

For one thing, we decided not to get too far into the text this time, as our reading venue, The Poet and Patriot pub, was televising the National League playoffs, and some in the group were, uh, distracted by this fact. Although we agreed that Joyce probably wouldn't have minded sharing the spotlight, we thought it would be best to just review where we've been in between exciting plays. Since A. had been absent the time before, we, or at least I, took pleasure in making her guess what the answer to Riddle 4, What Irish capitol city ((a dea o dea!)of two syllables and six letters, with a deltic origin and a nuinous end, (ah dust oh dust!) was. What's fun about this part is that it isn't just Dublin, as we might complacently expect, but has been humorously stretched to mean Belfast, Cork and Galway as well. These are the capital cities of the four Irish provinces, Leinster, Ulster, Munster and Connacht. And I really liked the comment in the Campbell Skeleton Key that points out that the answer lies in not only guessing these, but in harmonizing them, which puts these separated entities under the blending influence of the riverlike ALP, who mixes all together into one and then separates things out again.

Another thing that came up in our catching up segment was that C. read a passage from one of our explanatory texts, whose author I can't remember just now, which cautioned that reading Finnegans Wake is not merely an associative process, where anything you think is right is right. It is a matter of context, tone and a few other factors that escape me. Although initially deflating, because with the Wake it helps to think that if you're getting anything, you're getting something. Apparently, though, what you might be getting is getting it wrong. 

However, ultimately, this is encouraging. The Wake is not a ragbag, after all. Something would be taken away from our aha moments if it was all just about projecting our own thoughts on to the text. And intuititvely, this strikes me as right as well. Joyce knows exactly what he's doing and he wants you to figure out just what that something is. 

Here's another point that we couldn't quite clear up for ourselves. We knew that HCE had been entombed, but we didn't actually remember him dying. We came across 'the death and resurrection of HCE' a couple of times in our secondary texts, but as far as we were concerned, there had only been the trial. Maybe that will become clearer to us at a later date. 

Anyway, on to this short riddle. Having been riddled about the the father, the mother, the home, the city and the manservant, we now come upon this one about the housemaid. Once again, I find  John P. Anderson's Finnegans Wake: the Curse of Kaballah very insightful. Of course, the title of the riddle is a pun on the old song, "Someone's in the Kitchen With Dinah". According to Anderson, Dinah is a housekeeper like Kate, and Dinah is also slang for "slave", perhaps because Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, was abducted and taken into captivity in the narrative of the Hebrew Bible. It does make me curious about the story behind our American song as well. 

...Hmm. I think I just did a bit of actual scholarship. I looked up "Someone's In the Kitchen With Dinah", and found this long but interesting thread about the song. Once you get past the theories that Dinah was 1.a locomotive, and 2. "dinnah", you discover that there was another minstrel song called Old Joe, which has a verse that goes, "Dere's someone in de house wid Dinah." That line rings more true to Joyce's riddle title, and this would make sense, as according to the thread, "Dinah" crossed over to England in about 1840, and the version quoted was collected in the Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads. What's interesting to me is that Riddle 5, about the houseman, is answered "Pore ole Joe!" For some reason, I had immediately thought of the American ballad "Old Black Joe" when I read that, and it turns out I was righter than I knew.

Well, I'd like to go over the tiks and toks of the riddle as well, but frankly, Mr. Anderson will do a better job of that than I ever can, and this post is getting a bit long. 

Also, I think the majority of the group would like me to end with:

Go Giants.  

      



Intermission

True, the post from the last meeting is lagging a bit, but how about this in the meantime? In case it's not clear, it features two of our members on their Irish and particularly Ulyssean journey.

Not me, unfortunately...

Travesties

We have a longer than usual break in between meetings right now, so during the lull, I'll just mention that  my sister happened to tell me of going to see Travesties by Tom Stoppard recently. I like Stoppard, but hadn't seen this play, so was surprised that part of its plot involved James Joyce in Zurich, attempting to mount a production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.

Stoppard, Wilde, Joyce. Now that is a play I definitely have to see. (The illustrator of the poster, by the way, is Sam Webber.)

Pages 131-33 continued (well, actually, started)

All right. Enough for the copying things out, now for the hard part. I'll start with "his threefaced stone head  was found on a whitehorse hill and the print of his costellous feet is seen in the goat's grass circle". A. recalled seeing a sculpted one in the National Museum in Dublin, in which two heads faced away from each other, Janus style, but one smaller one was nestled in between. I wasn't able to find an image of it, but this article does mention it.

T. asked whether all these clauses have a kind of balanced "on the one hand, on the other hand" kind  of rhythm to them. The answer is no, but it is definitely one of the patterns:"figure right, he is hoisted by the scurve of his shaggy neck, figure left, he is rationed in isobaric patties among the crew". But another style is exemplified in: "harrier, marrier, terrier, tav".

Some clauses we especially liked: "passed for baabaa blacksheep till he grew white woo woo woolly" and "calls upon Allthing when he fails to appeal to Eachovos". And one I liked, but only after grasping the pun from someone else's commentary: "Has the most conical hodpiece of confucianist heronim and that chuchuffuous chinchin of his is like a footsey kungaloo around Taishanty land". One (though only one) way of reading this is, "he had the most comical headpiece of Confucianist "hair on him" and that Chufu chin of his is like Fu-Tse Kung, ie, Kung Fu-Tse, ie. Confucius around  the sacred mountain of Tai Shan.

A couple of things have come up around my researches on these pages. The first is that according to Grace Eckley in her First Question article, which is well worth reading, there is an actual person that brings some unity to this complex figure represented in these clauses, and that is a journalist that we haven't even heard of yet. His name was W. T. Stead, and in order to expose the white slave trade going on in London of 1885, he purchased a girl named Eliza from her mother for five pounds, and mixing it with the story of another stolen girl named Lily, he wrote an article called "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon". Although some praised him for his expose, many agreed with his arrest and his being brought before a judge for having "deluged London with a quantity of filth". So when we see Flood (or even flood) imagery in the Wake, we are to think of this flood of excrement as well. Much of the trial of HCE and his fallen role relates to this actual man's story. As Eckley has it, Joyce needed an  Everyman figure to play HCE/Finn McCool in contemporary, historical form and Stead provided that. But read the article, you'll see what she's getting at.

The other thing I've gathered is that we've been scanting the importance of Parnell to Joyce a bit. We know he's important, we just don't know how important. There's a good article here. We do know a bit about the fact of his adulterous affair with "Kitty" O'Shea, and how the revelation of this led to his final downfall. But I don't think it's come up yet that before this there was another scandal. In 1887, he was accused of having written letters in support of the murders of two British officials in Phoenix Park (!)in 1882. These letters were finally revealed to be the forgeries of Richard Piggott, "a disreputable anti-Parnellite rogue journalist", who was finally given away by his characteristic spelling of the word "hesitant" as "hesitent". And you will find evidence of Joyce's interest on page 133 in this clause of the riddle: "is unhesitent in his unionism and yet a piggotted nationalist". Now this delights me, because my eyes had run across that "unhesitent" earlier in the day and I wondered about the mispelling, knowing that with Joyce, it could not be accidental. I am just surprised that I was able to unearth the answer so fast.

Poor Richard Piggott, though. After he confessed, he went off to Madrid and killed himself. W.T. Stead, (who was apparently Parnell's opponent, though I have not been able to get to the bottom of his role at Parnell's trial) started a fund to take care of Piggott's children. Stead himself went down on the Titanic, strangely, after writing an article about the need for liners to have more lifeboats.

p131-133

We began our last meeting with a short reading from L. from a scholarly essay she had read in the interim. It comes from an essay by Brook Thomas called "Formal Re-creation: Re-reading and Re-joycing the Re-rightings of Ulysses" and can be found in a book called Critical Essays on James Joyce's Ulysses. I thought I'd put it in for the record, as it seemed to answer some of the questions brought up by our last meeting.

"What my example,which is by no means unusual, should make clear is that Joyce's process of writing, re-reading, and re-writing is potentially an endless one. Having once revised a passage Joyce would re-read his revisions, causing him to discover even more potential verbal connections, causing more re-writing, and so on. Thus, it is easy to see how Ulysses came to be more and more about its own creation. The book becomes reflexive because as Arnold Goldman claims, "By its fifteenth chapter, Ulysses has begun to provide its author enough in the way of material to become self-perpetuating." It also becomes reflexive because Joyce re-read every sentence he wrote in so many ways that each one required expansion and qualification. Or put another way, the material that the book has amassed is not only character, plot or details of a Dublin setting, but its own language. That language, as part of a language system without beginning or end, allows Joyce continually to create new meanings and and formal possibilities for his book. But in one sense, it is not really Joyce who is "creating" these meanings and potential forms. They are meanings and forms already available in a language which already exists prior to any one reader or writer of that language. It is Joyce's awareness of this potentiality of language that allows us to talk about the book writing itself and that makes Ulysses the perfect example of Valéry statement that "a work of art is never finished, only abandoned". My point is, however, that Ulysses has been abandoned only by Joyce, not by its readers, for each time a reader reads and re-reads Ulysses, he repeats with a difference the process by which Joyce created the book."

(In my case, the "difference" is that Joyce knew a hell of a lot more than I do.)

C. pointed out that this implied a lot of faith on Joyce's part, not just in language, but in life, and those of us who know his biography well (i.e., not me) spoke of his lack of anxiety, how he was always struggling for money and yet gave it away open-handedly when it came to him. And that of course, he always had  a lot of people mad at him, but didn't care. We agreed it was a good model for those of us who might be a bit more prone to the anxious side.

And all this before we'd even looked at the text!

To be Continued...

Pages 129-131--The Riddles Continue

So this post will probably be briefer than the last, as we will only have a week in between. We're packing the meetings in since some of our members are traveling these next few months. The good news is that part of their trip will be to Dublin. We will of course expect a full report...

What did Joyce know and when did he know it? This in some sense was the "riddle" we posed ourselves at our last meeting. It's basically the question that comes up in discussions of authors all the time. How much of this was conscious and how much of it was accidental? My own position is that Joyce was at the intentional end of the spectrum. There might be some 'found' pieces in there, there could even be a multitude of them, but my sense of this is that if we think of them and make the connections, Joyce probably thought of them first.

But to get to the text. First just an odd coincidence which anyone who's reading the Wake will surely find life to be full of. At the bottom of page 128, Joyce  writes "piles big pelium on little ossas like the pilluls of hirculeads" At the moment I happen to be reading Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi and have just come across this part:

"Katsimbalis would take me on his monologues to Mt. Athos, to Pelion and Ossa, to Leonidion and Monemvasia".

Pelion and Ossa are both famous Greek mountains, and it turns out that in Greek mythology, the Aloadae are supposed to have tried to pile Ossa on Pelion (or as above, the reverse)  in order to storm Mt. Olympus and kidnap some goddesses.

But on to some of the things we picked out this last time. We liked "seven dovecotes cooclaim to have been pigeonheim to this homer, Smerrnion, Rhoebok, Kolonsreagh, Seapoint, Quayhowth, Ashtown, Ratheny", especially after we realized that "homer" referred not just to this homing pigeon, but that the cities just mentioned (or their proper variants) all claim to be the birthplace of Homer. Think that's over? Here's a little chamber of commerce type thing from Izmir formerly Smyrna, in the present day:

The first and the greatest poet of history and the poet of the legendary works named Iliad and Odyssey, Homer was born in İzmir. There is no other poet like Homer, who lived between 750-700 B.C. and affected all civilizations in the world. Seven cities claimed that Homer is their countryman. These cities are Salamis, Argos, Athens, Rhodes, Chios, Kolophon, and Smyrna. It is impossible for him to be from Salamis, Argos, Athens or Rhodos since he wrote his legends with a mixture of Ionian-Aeolian style that are particularly Anatolian dialects. He is said to be exiled to Chios. For this reason there is a place called Homer Rocks on the particular island. Moreover, the most favourite nickname of Homer was ‘Melesigenes’ which means ‘Child of Meles Brook’. It becomes obvious that Homer was born in İzmir since Meles Brook is located within the territory of the city.

Obvious-- right. Wonder what Rhodes would have to say...

We liked one true riddle here: "his first's a young rose and his second's French-Egyptian and his whole means a slump at Christie's." This sorts it self out as a.) Bud, b.) Nile or Nil  and c.) Null bid, which, as I don't think we quite got to, turns out to be and anagram of "Dublin". Or, as is common with Joyce, sort of.

And I liked, "the gleam of the glow of the shine of the sun through the dearth of the dirth on the blush of the brick of the viled ville of Barnehulme has dust turned to brown"

Twas purely for the sound...

Here's an interesting short article which I just found on the First Question, when I was trying to figure out what Barnehulme was (a Danish island, as it happens.)

A new chapter--pages 126-128

 Okay, just to start off, I found two funny things in the course of finding a little background info. One was on a site where you could download The Wake, and it cautioned, "Do not spell-correct this document". (But wouldn't it be fun to try?) On the same site's sponsoring ads it promises, "Get Joyce's email address." I couldn't resist clicking through, but it was disappointing...

So we've now arrived in the sixth chapter of the first book. Whether reaching these milestones actually means anything, I don't know, but we always do feel a bit elated at having come so far. Also, we've apparently left the close discussion of ALP's letter and have now entered the realm of riddles. This chapter consists of twelve riddles, which are asked and answered. Supposedly, they give us more details of the life of both the major and minor characters of the novel.

We got into a brief discussion about riddles. I don't think any of us said that we particularly liked them, but we did remember how they show up in different classic tales as important--the Sphinx in Oedipus has a famous one, and L. recalled that Wotan has another in Wagner. The appeal of riddles, however, remains mysterious, at least to me. Kids' riddles are funny, at least the first time, but the kinds of riddles that turn up in literature tend to be very solemn and fateful, and often, as a modern reader or listener, we tend to quibble with the answers. Nevertheless, we all felt that that there must be some nugget at the heart of them, and Joseph Campbell in the Skeleton Key reminded us that the ancient gods often fought with riddles, not weapons.

We may have deprived ourselves of some suspense, though. We accidently looked ahead and learned the answer to the first one! And I'm going to tell it here too, but not till the end of this post. Still, with the Wake it may be as well to have the answer before starting out-- after all, there's not much certainty that you are going to  come to it on your own.

Having the Wake right here on another tab of the computer is a different experience of reading it. Not better or worse, just different. It makes me realize that we read it as if we are trying to get through something, rather than as if each fragment will disclose some meaning. It's hard to say that we read too fast by any other standards, but it may be true. And I don't mean because then we could succeed at picking apart every meaning, but because on some level it is actually poetry, such as this phrase that stands out to me now: "towers, an eddistoon amid the lampless, casting swannbeams on the deep".

But I should perhaps get to a few things we did pick out together. A phrase that caught our attention was, "like a heptagon crystal emprisoms trues and fauss for us", which we feel has something to do the way a prism captures true and false, but also 'phosphorus'. Oh, and just before that, a real 'riddly' part: "is too funny for a fish and has too much outside for an insect". We puzzled over the the acronym F.E.R.T., which our mysterious subject wrote on his buckler, and which the above photo demontrates. It turns out to be the motto of the House of Savoy, although it would seem to be a funny kind of motto, as no is absolutely sure of it's significance, although some theories are posted here. Personally, I like the parodic one, supposedly based on the Savoys' tendency to raid anyone showing the slightest vulnerability: Frappez, Entrez, Rompez Tout (French: "Strike, Enter, Break Everything") With it's vague suggestiveness of Here Come Everyone, I'm guessing Joyce might have liked it too.

We also liked this,

business, reading news-

paper, smoking cigar, arranging tumblers on table, eating meals,
pleasure, etcetera, etcetera, pleasure, eating meals, arranging tum-
blers on table, smoking cigar, reading newspaper, business; 
minerals, wash and brush up, local views, juju toffee, comic and
birthdays cards;

because it reminded us of Bloom doing his daily rounds in Ulysses.

And I personally liked "can dance the O'Bruin's polerpasse at Noolahn to his own orchistruss accompaniment" because of our previous introduction to the plays on both Bruno of Nola, or Giordano Bruno, and Brown and and Nolan, the booksellers who first published him in Dublin.


 
Wel, that's plenty long for this post, and I'm sorry for what I've already forgotten.
It was also fun reading about these particular pages here. He really packs it in, does our Jim Joyce. But by now, that's hardly surprising.

Oh, right. The answer to the first riddle is Finn McCool. Make of that what you will.