Happy Birthday, Jim the Penman!

James Joyce with Sylvia Beach

The S.C. Wakers had a rather exhilerating meeting last night and I should have a new post up before too long. But meanwhile, the day requires a tip of the hat to the master. Not only would Joyce himself have been 130 today, but his undisputed masterpiece (I call the Wake the disputed one) was published, or born 90 years ago. Two good pieces today--one from our roving correspondent, PQ, which is very well written and includes a link to Joyce reading from FW, and a tribute to Ulysses itself from none other than the Oxford University Press, which has a selection from the text.

In our group, we're used to thinking of Shem the Penman as something of a stand-in for Joyce, but last night our text actually referred to Jim the Penman, who was apparently a famous Victorian forger. I am sure that amused Joyce no end.

Finnegans Wake in Santa Cruz--a new year. Page 205-208ish

Though there was plenty to say from our last meeting in early December, which I may try to reconstruct at a later date, your blog host here has some time management issues and just couldn't squeeze a blog post in to the day. Our meet up on Wednesday night felt like a fresh gust of wind into our sails, and I thought I'd share some of our experiences of the evening.

After a brief catching up, we tried to remember where it was that we left off and Leslie, despite having been away in Hawaii, proved most adept at reconstructing where we actually were. She said that she knew we were on page 205, and she knew this because she remembered the paragraph ending "Garonne, Garonne." The Garonne is a river (like pretty much every other word in this section of the book) but it also in this context means, "go on, go on". As in one washerwoman saying to the other, "go on, tell me more about Anna Livia". But as Leslie was saying the words "Garonne, Garonne," in trying to find my place,  I had just randomly flipped open to page 239 and my eyes immediately caught another paragraph ending: "gyrogyrorondo".

Now whether this has anything to do with the whole "go on, go on" theme, it remains true that I was trying to read what she was saying into these words, and there was a feeling of synchronicity felt by all.  It is at least an echo of the sound, as well as paragraph placement.

This ended up setting the tone for the evening. Tom wondered if technology let us know more of the synchronicity of experience or not. In a certain sense, the synchronicity is all around us and it's more a case of whether we are tuned into it or not than whether it happens.

We made a brief diversion into all the 2012 prophecies, as some members are more tuned in than others to the whole Mayan calendar predictions. I don't know what Joyce would have thought, but I'm almost certain he would have exploited it.

We got into the actual reading, starting in the middle of 205: "Well, after it was put in the Mericy Cordial Mendicants' Sitterdag-Zindeh-Munaday Wakeschrift..." We read along for awhile and gradually it dawned on us that it was still two washerwomen washing on the shore, but at the same time they were rowing to the source (in the hills of Wicklow). Or the Source, which has no geographic location.

Manneken-Pis

We had another funny moment. Ann had had a disconcerting experience before coming into the group as she parked in the pub parking lot, when she realized that the man standing nearby was actually urinating. It was quite a surprise for her, but more of a surprise when our text referred to "might she passe of him for a minnikin", and the notes told us that part of this portmanteau word referred to the Manneken-Pis, which is a statue in Brussels of a small boy peeing. Suddenly we realized that the text right here was littered with pissing words--"a call to pay" "sprizzling" and further research reveals stalls in the next sentence as a reference to urinals, as well as  "Brie-on-Arrosa" contains the French "arrozer"-- "to water". We all realized simultaneously that the man pissing in the parking lot wasn't just an annoyance, but a Joycean figure, a gatekeeper. And as always with Joyce, a part about Anna Livia Plurabella, the Liffey, but as this section makes abundantly clear, all rivers everywhere, contains not just the high river, but also the low, a man--or a little boy--pissing.

And as if to emphasize the point, several of us had to "pay a call" pretty badly as the evening ended, but quite uncharacteristically, everyone else in the pub suddenly did too!

a random moment

I'm a bit frustrated, as I don't currently have a lot of time to devote to blogwriting. That should change before too long, and I hope I'll retain enough of our last two great meetings to make a record here. We're taking December off, so I should have time to get caught up.

In the meantime, though, I thought I'd share this random moment. I was glancing at Adbusters, a magazine that was Occupy Wall Street before there was Occupy Wall Street, and is certainly covering it intensively now.

In the middle of the magazine, the image of a hand  holding a pen coming out of a body of water and bending back to the water to write. The page bereft of words, except for this:

Take all keep all.

My soul walks with me

form of forms.

Written in the water and reflecting back, upside down, this:

                                                                                  --James Joyce

You can find it here, just push the page arrow till you get to page 16.

The beginning of Chapter 8

Washers at the Ford, by Heather Ryan Kelley

We meet again tomorrow, and though this will be a slapdash affair, I will try to put something down here, as a little jog to memory, as I have now failed to chronicle three meetings--one through absence and two through sheer sloth. I will just briefly mention that the meeting before this one ended our time on Chapter 7, the Shem chapter, and we were all struck by the beauty of the ending, which heralds in Anna Livia Pluribelum.

slipping sly by Sallynoggin, as happy as the day is wet, bab-
bling, bubbling, chattering to herself, deloothering the fields on
their elbows leaning with the sloothering slide of her, giddy-
gaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia.
    He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak.
    — Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq!
ALP is also the river and so these wet and watery images. It was a felicitous coincidence, as A. pointed out that we were treated to a downpour outside as we read. I credit to the Wake's shamanic poweres.

Chapter 8, which we began this last time begins with two washer women on the banks of the Liffey, which of course is always ALP. The chapter is sometimes referred to as The Washers at the Ford. We learned that the Irish name for Dublin is  Baile Átha Cliath, which means 'town of the hurdled ford', and I just now found out, though someone may have mentioned this already that there is a fairy of Gaelic legend called the bean nighe. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about this creature:

As the "Washer at the Ford" she wanders near deserted streams where she washes the blood from the grave-clothes of those who are about to die. It is said that mnathan nighe (the plural of bean nighe) are the spirits of women who died giving birth and are doomed to do this work until the day their lives would have normally ended.

At any rate, one is young and the other old, these aspects of the eternal feminine being already present elsewhere in the book. They are gossiping about Anna Livia:

                                O
                     tell me all about
               Anna Livia! I want to hear all
about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course,
we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You'll die
when you hear. 

As our newest member, Ch. was quick to point out, that O is circular and so represents the circular cycle of the book as a whole. Our Campbell companion mentions that the shape of the opening is a delta, which is also a female symbol.

The Shorter Finnegans Wake, which you can find in the sidebar and which I am referring to now, says that Joyce by his own count spent 1200 hours on this chapter and that a big chunk of that was working in the puns for the 350 river names which he has hidden in this part. (Come to think of it, a delta is also a river word.)

Let's see--we also got on to Anabaptists and abcedarians. Ch. was again helpful in informing us what abcedarians are, and I am reinforcing my memory here by looking it up and affirming that an abecedarian is a beginner in anything. But the Joyce word is antiabcedarian. My old standby, John  P. Anderson's Joyce's Finnegans Wake: the Curse of Kabbalah, he notes that the Abcedarian relief society was founded to bring relief to teachers and their families, so to be antiabcedarian would be to be against human connection.

We learned, for what purpose I do not recall that Anabaptists believed in making an adult confession of faith and so rejected infant baptism. Now I see, and vaguely remember from our discussion, that Abecedarian Anabaptists were a particular sect, who disdained all human knowledge, even that of learning to read, believing that God would provide all knowledge necessary. Not quite Joyce's method, I'm thinking.

We also have a lot of Old Testament associations here--Solomon and Sheba, camels. I took particular pleasyre from the mixing up the word Egypt as Igypt, which brings it in close proximity to the Irish way of saying idiot as eejit. (It comes up alot in Irish crime fiction.)

We also had some interesting thoughts about Adam and Eve appearing here, which takes us back to the beginning, not only of the human story, but also to the beginning of the Wake itself.

T. thinks that Joyce had the faith in language to trust it to tell the story rather than feeling he had to work out a plot--that it would come out of the language itself. Perhaps we'll talk more about that.

C. has also thought on a bigger scale about all this, which is that the book begins with the father myths of HCE, which are also our historical understanding of our place in life. The Shem/Shaun split is our contemporary here and now. Now we move on to the ALP themes which of course are about the work of the feminine, but also about the great reconcilement. Or so I suppose.

Both L. and A. had a response to this in subsequent email. A. has gotten deeply into the numerical meanings of the figures, and it got me interested enough at the time to look up this and I'll post this link so that anyone who actually has access to JStor can read the whole thing if they want. And here
is a piece by someone who really gets into the numbers theory of the book as well. I didn't read it.

(The picture comes from a blog discussing the Joycean influence on the artist's work.)

I'll close by saying do take a moment to read PQ's very Joycean tribute to an older friend of his who died recently. I think it's quite lovely.

Gertrude Stein and some questions about modernism

I found this article over at Truthout the other day, which poses some troubling questions about Gertrude Stein's relationship to the Vichy regime in Occupied France. Although not strictly relevant to a blog about Finnegans Wake, this seems to be yet another member of the modernist movement who was a little too unbothered with Fascist ideology. The quote that made me think of adding this here was from a Professor Barbara Will, who has a new book out called Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma:

The full story of the relationship of modernist writers to fascist and pro-fascist regimes is just beginning to be told and Stein offers a fascinating case study of this relationship.

Highly uninformed though I am, even I have heard about Ezra Pound's links to Fascism, and in a recent article in the New Yorker article, Louis Menand mentions that T.S. Eliot may have had a little too much interest in Fascism for his own good. I find myself wondering a bit about how I'm supposed to view their artistic work in this light, and whether this susceptibility might not be a flaw in the Modernist approach itself.

However, I'm reassured about Joyce by this article . Since I'm not a member of a qualified institution, I can't read the whole article--though perhaps some readers here might have different means. In any case, the abstract  itself pits Joyce against the likes of Wyndham Lewis and others in their misguided support for this thoroughly discredited system of government.

Yeah, I'm behind--not just with posting but with the book  itself. I'll try to correct that soon, but meanwhile, a longtime friend sent this message to me today. He's been reading The Sidelong Glances of a Pigeon Kicker, by David Boyer, and says:

One of my favorite passages occurs when the protagonist, a young, disillusioned former teacher is reading a western novel while he dries his sheets @ the laundromat. A young woman comes in to the laundromat and unloads her clothes from a guitar case:
When her clothes were in the washing machine she took Finnegans Wake from the case, crossed her booted legs, and began reading it. I snuck the western into my laundry bag. The girl was about halfway through the book and appeared unpuzzled by what she read. A page took her on the average of 45 sconds, which wasn't much more than what a page of the western took me. This was a remarkable girl. I decided that it would be worthwhile to marry her just so I coud watch her read Finnegans Wake with such style. I walked up to her, pointed at a washing machine, and said, "Riverruns circlesudsingly, don't you think?"
She looked at me blankly. "In the washing machine," I explained. She continued to look at me blankly and didn't say anything. I said, "It's sort of a bewilderfusing book, isn't it?"
She said, "Why don't you go back to your western?" and began to read again, humming.
I said, "If you're going to be so darned pretentious, at least you could be friendly."
"Go back to your western, little man."

p181-185

I missed a beat here, but will start anew with last night's meeting. We had a guest, a friend of two of our members, who was visiting from out of town. She was only able to stay for a short while, but she seemed to enjoy getting into the multifaceted description of Shems' home "The house of O'Shea or O'Shame,  Quivapieno, known as the Haunted Inkbottle, no number Brimstone Walk, Asia in Ireland".

Her visit made me reflect that we have had several short term guests over our time together, and I think on  the whole it's been a good experience for everyone.  I wouldn't have thought before starting reading the Wake together, that randomly dropping in at page 181 would be very fun, but in fact, the pleasures of the density of the book, and the lack of what I at least would call a plot, means that everyone stands in the same place in relation to it no matter where they enter in. We are all students, or disciples or anti-disciples when it comes to Joyce.  We do not come in as his superiors.

Okay, someone might. I haven't met them.
Although we picked up on a lot of eggs, a lot of gin, and a lot of yeses, I thought for the time being I would take up a couple of questions that came up in the course of our conversation. First, the portmanteau word 'pelagarist'. It quite obviously relates to plagiarism, but it also relates to the Pelagian heresy. We knew that, but we were scratching our heads about what that heresy consisted of, even though we sort of thought it had come up before.

The Pelegian heresy--or point of view, if you look at it another way--is the belief that we are not under the sway of Original Sin, but that human beings are still capable of choosing between good and evil without divine help. In this view, we are influenced by example, and while Adam set a bad example, Jesus overrode this later by setting a good example.

I would say that we live in a very Pelegian age. I have no idea how this relates to Joyce's own thoughts, though.

The other lighter thing was that Joyce mentions the 'light phantastic'. Without getting into what Joyce meant here, we did wonder a bit about that phrase and wonder where it came from. I always thought of 'tripping the light fantastic' as basically revue actors and dancers on stage before the spotlights. Others thought it had something to do with dance. We had all heard it, and formed our own impressions.

Although there is a reference in Shakespeare's Tempest to 'each one tripping on his toe', the reference from more the same era that seems closer is from Milton's L'Allegro:

Come, and trip it as ye go,

On the light fantastick toe.

I am rather surprised to see that pretty much across the board, the light refers to lightness of foot, not lightness of, well, light.

We did note a reference to "Broken Hill stranded estate" and I thought it would be fun to look that one up as well. Still don't know what it meant to Joyce, but it is a mining community, as we learned in Australia. It's located in the outback of New South Wales, and is isolated in the desert. It's Australia's longest lived mining community. The  is one of the biggest  silver-lead-zinc deposits. The ore is in the shape of a boomerang with the ends below ground and the middle cropping up above the desert floor in the middle. Ironically, due to extensive mining, the Broken Hill itself no longer exists.

Broken Hill, Australia

Don't know what Joyce would make of that.

I may return before our next meeting, and if I do , I hope to try to delve a bit into the mysteries of  writing oneself in furniture...