Eggzactly

Hump himself!

Well, folks, I just ran across this image on Wikipedia, and then I spotted the one thing that perfectly goes with it.  The Dubliners singing the "Ballad of Pierce O'Reilley".

Perfect for Easter!

Here's the passage we just read about HCE, who is a sort of slumbrous background presence during the childer's games.  (Don't forget they are his children and thus his offshoots.)  I added a few notes of a couple of things I found and line numbers...I know I am a meeting behind here, but the egg made me do it.

HUMP (Mr Makeall Gone

[yes, close your eyes, this is the sort of thing Bishop loves]

, read the sayings from Laxdalesaga [Of Ketill Flatnose and his Descendants, 9th Century A.D, Jorunn, "Men's Wit-breaker," ...one ofKetill's daughters. She was the mother of Ketill the Finn] 24

in the programme about King Ericus of Schweden [Swedes believed a miracle occurred at Eric's death: a fountain was said to have sprung from the earth where the king's head fell after being chopped off.] and the spirit's 25

whispers in his magical helmet, cap-a-pipe with watch and top- 26

per, coat, crest and supporters, the cause of all our grievances, 27

the whirl, the flash and the trouble[the world, the flesh and the devil], who, having partially re- 28

covered from a recent impeachment [ or im-poach-ment] due to egg everlasting, but 29

throughandthoroughly proconverted, propounded for cyclo- 30

logical [subconscious, sleep, logic of Vico], is, studding [stuttering(Cad with Pipe), scudding, setting] sail once more [of course, everynightly Vico cycle] , jibsheets [need I point out that every time he is the piratical Danish rover the sheets are also teh bedsheets?] and royals, [later on he'll be three sheets to the wind...]

Item

Readers of this blog who are expectantly waiting for details of the last meeting will have to forgive me if I get to one question that perplexed me in particular from our reading then. It has to do with the passage that begins on the very bottom of page 223 with the word "Item." I happened to notice that the paragraph repeated this word four more times, changing only the first letter to each of the other four vowels. I was curious what Joyce was driving at, but though we found that  that otem probably related to totem and atem at the end related to both breath and Atem, the Creator god in The Egyptian Book of the Dead, I was eager to figure out the broader purpose here.

Well, today I finally got around to this. A couple of my fall back resources didn't quite give me the results I wanted, but I finally stumbled on a piece in The Books at the Wake, by James S. Atherton, which has been recommended to me before. And what I learned there is that, though this may well be about the creator god of the Egyptians, what it's really about is Lewis Carroll.

I'll start by saying that Atherton mentions that that initial "item" is also slang for "hint". But Atherton reserves the rest of the answer for later. In between, he has quite a bit to say about Carroll, alias, of course for Lewis Dodgson. Atherton says that Joyce and Carroll were both very interested in wordplay, and seem to have invented several of the forms separately. Joyce only came upon Carroll after the fact. But he soon saw that Carroll was a perfect HCE figure, with his doubtful relations with little girls and with his double identities.

The Item...Otem...Etem...Utem...Atem chain is what's called a 'word ladder' and it's a form Carroll invented, and apparently the only one that Atherton thinks Joyce didn't come to on his own. It involves changing one letter per word, and Atherton maintains that wherever you find one of these in The Wake, the passage has something to do with Carroll.

In this instance, there is a lot about Carroll, as a creator, being connected with the creator god of Egypt, Atem (sometimes spelled Atum). Atem's story is that he created the people of the world by spitting on a primordial mudheap at Heliopolis, but there is also another story in which Atem peoples the world by "spilling his seed".So, in another place in the book where Joyce refers to "a spitter that can be depended on", that's Dodgson/Carroll/Atem we're looking at.

One sentence that I found in this chapter is, I think, worth quoting here. Atherton says that in Finnegans Wake, Joyce holds no bitterness against anyone:

"But the obsession with secret guilt remains, underlying all the oddities, and the scholarship, the wit and the poetry, and the lyric beauty of the Wake."

We've touched on this before in the group, but I think it's worth remembering that despite the fact of this being a comic novel, this is the ground note of the book. It's what makes the Wake something more than just brilliant wordplay. It's what makes the book speak to our condition.

The Beginning of Book Two

So we begin Book Two with the arrival of two new participants, both men, though whether one is a Shem figure and one a Shaun figure I would not dare to hazard a guess at this point. And a new outside connection to none other than Shem the Penman himself, or at least a commenter going by that pen name has written in to the last blog post, and though ahead of the Santa Cruz group, not by all that much. Anyway, welcome all!

We were missing a couple of our founding members last time, so it was just as well to fill out the ranks a bit. I won't use last names here, but first names seem random enough so I'll say that Ed has been through the Wake a few times on his own, while John hasn't read it yet, but is a big Ulysses enthusiast. Both seem to have a lot to offer the discussion.

Having been through the Wake a few times now, Ed understandably has more of an overview of the book. He recommends John Bishop's Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake, which has come up before in the group. Bishop's book is a bit more thematically organized than some of the detail or chapter oriented works we've looked at previously. This time it led us to talk about the Wake as  speaking the language of dreams, rather than fitting the dream into the form of a story, as we attempt to do when we talk about it. In some ways, this reminds me of my own attempts here to squeeze the free flowing nature of our discussions into the narrow parameters of a blog.

But as I can do no more than do precisely that, I'll continue. In relation to this, Ed made us aware that as it is a book about a dreamer dreaming, it is good to note the rhythyms of consciousness going down to deeper states and rising again. For me, at least, it is good to be aware that the Wake doesn't just chart one level of consciousness.

The basic set up of this Chapter is that of  a children's game. Joyce himself described it to Harriet Weaver like this:

 "The scheme of the piece... is the game we used to call Angels and Devils or colours. The Angels, girls, are grouped behind the Angel, Shawn, and the Devil has to come over three times and ask for a colour. If the colour he asks for has been chosen by any girl she has to run and he tries to catch her... The piece is full of rhythms taken from English singing games..."

It was interesting to me to know, though, that according to the online shorter Finnegans Wake , this was a period in Joyce's life when he almost abandoned the Wake entirely. A month after beginning the draft of this chapter, he complained to Weaver that " it had been squeezed out "like drops of blood" because of family worries, and for the next two years he did almost nothing. His enthusiasm was (barely) revived in August 1932 by Eugene Jolas's request to resume publication in transition."

Personally, though I am always impressed that Joyce was somehow able to conceive of the Wake and pull it off, I don't always think of him suffering to do so.

At any rate, we do have a basic structure of Shem being this devil and Shawn being the angel, which we've all understood pretty well from our earlier impressions of the two. Izzy (Isolde), the sister and third corner of this triangle, we were pleased to discover was the Leap Year Girl, among other things, as our own leap year had just passed. What leap year means in this set up we didn't get into, but in any case, it is an extra day.  

In that Curse of Kaballah book I am always referring to, there is some idea that this represents an extra day of fertility. Well, we shall see.

We read in a rapid round a list of the cast of characters, which is written up to look like a play itself. Thinking along here, I'm just realizing that here at the very beginning we have a play on play and play. The cast of characters are Glugg, who is a Shem stand-in, the Floras, who are the other girls in the game and who represent different colors of the rainbow, Izzy, who they are irritated by, but whom they also protect, Chuff, the angel or Shawn "the fine frank fairhaired fellow of the fairytales", Ann, who is Anna Livia "their poor little old mother-in-lieu", playing opposite of Hump, and I think we can all guess who he is.

Then we have the customers, who I think were sort of the jury of peers in the trial sequence and Kate the charwoman who we have met before. Saunderson is the barman. So it's basically the same dramatis personae we've run across before.

We then have all the behind the scenes personnel and John, having caught on to the line "Dances arranged by Harley Quinn and Coolimbeina." had thought to bring along the image of a poster of Harlequin and Columbine in some kind of vaudeville or sideshow act, which gave us the atmosphere nicely.

Not the picture he brought, but 'twill do.

   


We talked a bit about what Joyce may have expected a reader to get from reading the Wake. Ed said that like dreams, he thought that some of the ideas were overdetermined, so that if we don't grasp them in one place, we will catch them in another. I think this is our general experience of the book so far, in that we struggle (happily with the details), but that the larger sense of it hasn't eluded us.  

Another interesting point Ed made was that the four cycles of Vico, which Joyce used as the schema for this work were not historical so much as psychological, and that Vico was trying to come up with an early psychological system. Othe members may disagree with this having nothing to do with historical cycles, as we've had plenty of discussions about what exactly is this new era that Joyce was in many ways foreshadowing, but I see no reason why it can't be both.

After all, it's Joyce we're talking about here... 

The End of Book One

Although we met last Wednesday, I've been kind of holding off on writing up the meeting (or can pretend this was the reason, anyway) to see if Leslie would have time before her Arctic Lights tour to put up her blog post of the dinner she so deliciously put together for us. And just as I was thinking that I should get a few other items out of the way, lo, it has come to pass! So hie thee on over to eat.sing.ride to get the recipe of that fine repast. You can also get a sense of the group members as three of them are photographed there. (Not me, fortunately.)

So Leslie was inspired to make stew, Cathy was inspired to make blancmange for dessert--this was partly due to the not so Irish Downton Abbey, but also to the fact that she learned the Irish also make blancmange from an Irish seaweed called carrageen moss. I had first thought that she had found this as one of the gifts in the section we just finished, but in fact it was due to her own research into the matter. She duely found some of this stuff in town, popular here because it is a vegetarian thickener that can be used instead of gelatin, and proceeded to make a light and delicious dessert. (I should mention that not out of diligence, but in a hunt to remember where she had got this idea, I can attest that both blancmange and carrageen moss can be found within the universe that is Finnegans Wake.)

And I got a blog post for another blog I do on what was one of the gifts--pig iron , though Joyce has it as one word. "A brazen nose and pigiron mittens for Johnny Walker Beg".

Many gifts to us, then, and let us hope that these are not so ruinous and indicative of destiny as ALPs to her children. I asked in this meeting if we had talked the last time about ALP as Pandora, and no we hadn't--although we had talked about HCE as Gulliver. In any case, the feminine that looses the troubles of the world on us is also one of Anna Livia's aspects, according to one of the online sources I use here.

The 'official' part of the meeting began with Tom reading to us from a letter Jung wrote Joyce about Ulysses, congratulating and thanking him for it, while at the same time saying what a cursed struggle he'd had with it. It was not so much a damning with faint praise as it was a praising with faint damns.

And an  amusing and encouraging thing for  me was a rare quote he had from Nora Joyce, "Oh, Jim never understood women at all." This is a statement I tend to concur with.

We had only one short passage to read before we were able to have the rare treat of the master reading his own work, an audio recording that had been set to a strange youtube, dug up by the ever resourceful PQ of A Building Roam . I'll add the video here:



PQ also has a very meaty post on Robert Anton Wilson as his latest entry--which of course has some passing reference to Joyce as well.

As to the recording, we found among other things that it was easier to differentiate the two washerwomen in Joyce's reading of the conversation. It was actually very beautiful.

We finished up our evening with Tom reading Joseph Campbell's synopsis of the first book, with some recognition and some puzzlement on our parts. The general consensus is that we are getting better at this as we go along.

Let's hope so...

page 208-?

That's right--it's almost two weeks since our meeting and I have no idea where we left off. I have a handful of almost indecipherable notes, which I am hoping will be some kind of clue to memory. Luckily I also have an annotated online version of the text, which should help jog a few thing out of the closets.

Oh, yeah. So where we are is that the washerwomen are commenting to each other about the spectacle of Anna Livia Plurabella, bedecking herself to leave the house--and HCE--to face the public on his behalf. One of the ingenious things that Joyce does here is to make ALP both a woman and river, and who better to comment on both than the washerwomen on the shores of the Liffey?

An example is couple of short sentences: "In whelk of her  mouths? Was her naze alight?" A whelk is both a pimple and a mollusk. Which of her mouths refers to her deltas, in the river sense but also presumably in a sexual sense, but also "in which of her mouths" may refer to at that time not entirely sanctioned sexual practices--if I read the footnotes right. As to the second sentence, a naze is a headland and "alight" makes it illuminated. But it also refers to the human Anna Livia, and is simply the question Is  her nose all right?

Anyway. Anna Livia has come out to distribute gifts to her children. In the section we read, they are listed. Most were somewhat opaque to us. As we came to realize that these gifts were not so much gifts so much as destinies, we wondered, do they get what they want, or what they need?

We got very involved in thinking about what Joyce was doing with language. As Tom pointed out, pretty much every word has  at least one other meaning, and all these words function as a portal to synchronicity. (We speculated on what would happen to us if we went through the book a few times-- that we would probably end up getting caught up contemplating each word, somewhat stoned by it, I suppose, thereby rendering ourselves unable to communicate with anybody other than other group members.) We also talked about language as that which gives us the possibility of memory and how language is a limit to the realization that everything is contemporaneous. And Joyce's attempt was to break through that limit.

I mentioned a scene from Philip Roth's American Pastoral, where something so slight happens that then brings up incestuous guilt in the mind of the narrator, even though anyone outside himself would view it as innocent. But the problem blossoms from this odd half innocent, half guilty moment, and I think we all got suddenly that this was also HCE's dilemma, and why he is not entirely able to fend off the accusations of the town's people. And yet, the event that happened is already gone, and only exists imperfectly in memory. And we pondered awhile on the waves that sprang out from that memory.

All of space and time, really, I'll add now. 

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!