Some interim odds and ends

We still have another week or so before our next group meeting, and I thought I'd post some links to various things that have come up in the meantime.

First, hot on the heels of my last post, T. sent a  link  to this very interesting article on Giordano Bruno, Marshall McLuhan and their great mediator, Jimmy Joyce.

Then, C. sent out felicitations of the day of Mr. Joyce's birth, which frankly, I hadn't known the date of. This was followed by a post from our itinerant, intermittant correspondant, PQ, who also wanted to celebrate the day, but was stuck driving across that vast, barely comprehended territory known as Texas.

Within his post, you will find a link to the novelist Frank Delaney's blog(who I, rightly or wrongly, think of as the James Michener of Ireland) about Ulysses. This latest entry is a birthday rap about Joyce. It's maybe not a very good rap as raps go, but all the same it is a very nice tribute.

Finally, we have an aside, which is fellow blogger Kathleen Kirk's mention that while others were watching the Superbowl, she was in fact reading Shakespeare and Company, the memoir of Sylvia Beach. Says Kathleen:

I learned lots about book biz & publishing biz in this little book, and more about James Joyce, who seems a charming, shy, lovable, quirky guy afraid of dogs and bad about keeping track of money but good about spending it. Yes, I will probably have to go ahead and read his book Ulysses, that no one would publish (except Sylvia) and that kept getting banned, confiscated, and pirated, so that neither she nor he could benefit from the demand for it. Or maybe I won't. I'm glad it's out there, and that I have the choice.

Indeed.

McLuhan--page 155-56

We had a very stimulating discussion this evening and I thought I would post in a more impromptu way while my thoughts are fresh, with less desire for mastery or completeness or whatever causes me to baulk at chronicling than I usually do.

We didn't get very far tonight. Although we would all like to be done with the riddles in some way, in another way, there is nowhere to get, except perhaps, and provisionally, to go deeper. Our discussion was influenced from the get go by the fact that a new book has come out on Marshall McLuhan and two of us happened to catch the cover story of the New York Times Book Review on it. One of us (not me) went on to do a bit more research on McLuhan, and found that McLuhan was a proselytizer for Joyce in a big way. According to T., McLuhan wanted all of us to be able to see reality as Joyce had seen it. (Never forget that if I was in a novel, I would be the unreliable narrator, so you can't totally trust me to have gotten the idea across.)

Add to this, the recent posting  by PQ about his latest trip up to see the Venice group of Wakers, who are also McLuhan followers in a big way. Although I was happy to hear of a vital group going in California, being me, I kind of sluffed off the McLuhan aspect without thinking much about it. But now I at least get a glimmer that one of the places that Finnegans Wake, which frankly doesn't seem to have a lot of literary children or grandchildren (though of course, I'm happy to be challenged or even corrected on this), may have led to developments in other spheres. Joseph Campbell's treating it as myth is another take on it.

T. brought out the idea that we struggled with for much of the night. He talked about FW as being Joyce's attempt to speak in one language. As I didn't really understand this idea, we continued on this thread, and got talking about one of McLuhan's tenets that "the medium is the message".  We started talking about media, well, mediating reality, and how Joyce's goal was, or at least may have been to take us beyond language in some way, to see through it. That the novel's goal was in some way to break through the constraints of language to the ground of reality. This reminded me of a quote I read on PQ's blog recently,

"One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams." - Salvador Dali

 We talked about whether everything Joyce wrote was artfully crafted into a unity, or if, in fact, as A. had it, within his bigger structure, he was fond of taking "excursions" into all kinds of things. Or was it both? We came back to something that C. had brought to our attention, which was that Joyce himself had thought that for a genius, there was no possiblity of mistake, because the mistakes become incorporated into the process. I hadn't understood this at the time, but feel closer to it now. It is the process of thought itself that is the medium. Following Joyce's thought, even when we don't understand it too well, we are still involved in a process that will help us see through the medium itself. I had this strange hope by the end of the evening that by the time I finish Finnegans Wake, I will lose the illusion that I am in a small room and discover I am in a much larger, perhaps even a  boundless one.

Perhaps I will say more about this evening before our next meeting.

The Mookse and the Gripes--p152-...

Well, it's been awhile since I've done a regular blog post here, which makes it hard to keep up the rhythm of the thing. We've only had a couple of meetings over December and January, but though we've slowed down the pace a bit, we haven't faltered in our intention to carry on. We were down to three members last time, as one of us is off to Hawaii for six months and so with one other member absent, we're down to a kind of bare bones operation. Fruitful, though, all the same.

We are nearing the end of the riddles, and I think all are happy to be seeing an end in sight to this portion, though I'm not sure exactly why. We're still in the last long riddle of the section, Number 11, the twelfth being quite short. We have just come upon the fable of the Mookse and the Gripes, which is Joyce's retelling of The Fox and the Grapes, or really, his appropriation of same for his own ends. We've puzzled out with a bit of help that the Mookse is a Shaun figure, also Pope Adrian, who, once upon a time, was attempting to bring the Irish Catholic church either back into harmony, or back under the control of Rome. And we have the Gripes, who is the Shem figure, or the Irish themselves. The Mookse encounters the Gripes, who is obsequious and flattering, but ultimately resistant. He does not see the Mookse as the Mookse would wish him to see him.

One thing that's interesting to me as I go back over these things with some other online resources is that sometimes just seeing a sentence or portion of a sentence framed outside of the long, dense text that is the Wake makes it suddenly comprehensible. We have plenty of these little flashes of understanding as we go along as well, but there is something about seeing pieces of text separated out that gives other clues. I don't think I really saw the punnyness of this, for example:

Is this space of our couple of hours too dimensional for you, temporiser? It's one of the many sentences of this portion that plays around with time and space in this section. I hadn't noticed till now that too dimensional is a pun on two-dimensional. 

We learned through our notes of Joyce's quarrel with Wyndham Lewis, who wrote a critique of him in his book of essays, Time and Western Man. As the Shorter Finnegans Wake has it, "The references to space and time are Joyce's parody of a mild recent attack on Ulysses by his friend Wyndham Lewis, who called Joyce middleclass." It's interesting to note then, that in the section right before the story starts, Joyce has the professor, a Shaun figure, refer to "muddlecrass pupils". I would think that in Joyce's schema, Lewis is more or less a Shaun to Joyce's Shem.  I also liked this understanding in the Shorter Finnegans Wake, when the Mooksie comes upon the Gripes, sitting in a tree branch, and sits down across the river from him on a stone:

"Shaun sits on a stone (his lifeless symbol, to Shem's green treebranch)."

And of course, with all the Pope stuff going on here, there can't help but be a reference to St. Peter, the rock on which Christ builds his church.   

Well, I could go on, of course, but I think at this point it's better to post something than strive for some illusory completeness, which with Joyce more than most would seem to be impossible.

Michael Wood on Finnegans Wake--or, a lot of initials

The ever adventurous PQ sent me a link to this excellent Michael Wood's essay on FinnegansWake, celebrating a new edition in the LRB.

Thanks, PQ.

Shem and Shaun

Sorry to report that I missed writing up a few pages here. I could get back to them, as I did take notes, but tonight I thought I'd mention a kind of understanding that swept through our little group as we read some of the words of Joseph Campbell on the meaning of Shem and Shaun, the twin sons of HCE and ALP. We have all along had to try to think of tricks to tell the two apart, but suddenly it seems easier.

It came out of our reading of Riddle Number 11 on page148, which begins: "If you met on the binge a poor acheseyeld from Ailing..." After realizing that acheseyeld is a pun on exiled, and then seeing reference later in the question to the blind blighter, we began to understand that the reference is in some ways to Joyce himself. And Jimmy Joyce is also always in some aspect Shem the Penman.

Somehow this led to my finding Campbell's words on the differences between Shem the Penman and Shaun the Postman, which we may even have read before,but seemed more illuminating at this point in the journey. Shem is the introvert, the wounded writer who digs deep into the pysche of mankind and Shaun is the extravert, who delivers that message to the world. It was interesting to us that Campbell portrays Shaun as a writer also, but as a writer of bestsellers. As C. said at our meeting, Shem is the one who reports things as he sees them, and Shaun is the politician who puts the spin on that.

In a more charitable light, Shaun is the one who, not having done the delving himself, is doomed to misunderstand the message. I find myself wondering if even within Joyce himself there isn't an element of both, because I would think that the deepest discoveries are essentially inarticulable--that everything in effect is a kind of translation that is sure to be partly wrong.

We also got another (surely temporary) grasp on  the mythic structure of the book, where HCE is the unity, Shem and Shaun the splitting of that unity into two, and ALP the timeless river that simply flows on and on. It can't hurt to remind ourselves yet again that the story is about an endless cycle and any moment is simply a snapshot of something that ultimately can't be stopped or fixed in space or time.      

( The photo, by the way, is of a bronze sculpture by John Coll, from an exhibit once at the Kenny Gallery called The Light Behind the Written Word which is worth taking a look at.)   

A Wake in Progress

PQ of A Building Roam has just let me know of a website by graphic artist Stephen Crowe called A Wake in Progress, in which Mr. Crowe is illustrating the Wake, one page at a time. It looks great, and you can get there through the A Building Roam link above if you're interested, as really, if you're reading this at all, you should be.

We've had to postpone our next meeting till next week, but this is a great reminder that there is really no reason to wait for the next meeting to contemplate the book.

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.