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...

The Greatest Writer Ever?

I'll get around to last week's meeting soon, but meanwhile check out PQ's list of 16 Reasons Why James Joyce is the greatest writer ever.

I feel certain that Joyce could only agree...

Joyce and Svevo, among other things

Italo Svevo

Santa Cruz Waker A. has sent us all this link to this blog post she read after finishing Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose. It has a lot of thoughtful information in a short article.

p175-179

The Liffey Swim by Jack Yeats

After a gap, we covered quite a bit of ground this past Wednesday evening. I thought I'd start with the Shem/Shaun difference that came up and then see what else pops up from memory. Out of the text, it came up again that Shaun is related to space, while Shem is related to time. Frankly this is still one I have trouble getting my mind around--I mean, the whole space time thing generally. But C. said that we think of Shem, the artist, being 'in the moment', but actually the artist is the one who steps back and observes. So it's actually Shaun who is more the man grounded in the moment, or space, while Shem is not.

Which reminds that I have a great partial list that T. has been working on of the dualities of Shem and Shaun, but it was sent as an adobe file and I can't seem to unload the picture, so if anyone knows how to convert it to something Google can read, let me know...


We were unclear about what the whole Swithun's Day reference near the top of page 178 was, so originally I thought an easy place to start might be with that. Of course, there's easy and then there's Joyce. Turns out that St. Swithins's day, July 15th, is most famous in the British Isles for its Groundhog Day like quality.

'St. Swithin's day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St. Swithin's day if thou be fair
For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.'

This comes from a legend about the Saxon bishop of Winchester cathedral. The story goes that when he died, he wanted to be buried outside where he would be trodden and rained on. At first the monks complied, but after awhile they didn't think this was right so they arranged to move him inside to a beautiful shrine. That night, or maybe on the anniversary, there was a heavy rainstorm, which is said to be an expression of the bishop's disapproval.

So, as  a page or so back the Wake does mention 'One hailcannon night (for his departure was attended by a heavy downpour) as very recently as some thousand rains ago...'. Maybe this is a St. Swithun tie in. But there is another perhaps more pertinent reference. The main miracle that is cited in Swithun becoming a saint is that he met an old woman on a bridge who's basket of eggs was smashed by a rude workman. Swithun in some fashion made these eggs whole again. So of course, this ties into both Humpty Dumpty and Finnegans fall, and whatever else we've had about eggs that I'm currently forgetting. Also, the fact that it took place on a bridge connects to another word that had me in particular intrigued, because I'd thought I'd heard it elsewhere: lucalizod.

Chapelizod Village

Turns out I had not, because the word is Joyce's own. It is in fact, a bridge word. Chapelizod Bridge connected the Chapelizod Road and the Lucan Road. Chapelizod is an Irish village, preserved within the city of Dublin. It was the scene of the Dubliners story "A Painful Case" and it the site of the home and pub of HCE and ALP. It is not all that far from Phoenix Park, and Going back to an even deeper layer, Chapelizod means 'chapel of Iseault'. So in the made up word Lucalizod, we have all that history.

In looking into all this, I found an old article from the Virginia Quarterly Review, dated 1939. Nowadays, VQR is a prizewinning journal, and I expect it was well-thought of back then too. But the reason there was a reference to Lucalizod was because of this passage: 

 Joyce writes "lucalizod" for "localized" because his personal experience includes the names of two Irish villages of which the word "localized" reminds him. It makes no difference to him that the majority of his readers have never heard of the two villages. Since to him language is not social, any personal association between words is valid. It is a paradox that a man who thinks that he is creating a language of universal symbols should make constant use of associations of the most narrowly personal kind.

The article, which is worth reading, is here . I don't mean just in order to make fun of it--personally I think the professor, though he does sound a bit like the professor in the riddles section we just read,has some good points about how the Wake doesn't totally succeed as a suggestion of the night/dream state. But it also gives a good sense of how the 'shock of the new' struck an obviously literate and respected scholar of the time.

You might find it interesting to compare this to the latest entry over at A Building Roam , where PQ from his next  millennium perspective finds the 'news' of Joyce's day much more accessible, although in this case, he is talking more about Dali.

The Chapelizod bridge was renamed in  1982, in honor of Joyce's centennial. It is now called the Anna Livia Bridge.

And speaking of Anna Livia Plurabella, I can't resist linking to this recent article about her (eternal?) return.  I'm sure Joyce would have loved her nickname.
 

Uh, where were we?

It's been a few weeks since our meeting in which we went to see Tree of Life instead of discussing the book and a few more still since we actually engaged the text. Rather than dive in beforehand, I thought I'd just post a few things that pop to the surface of memory, rather than delve too deep.

When we chatted over dinner after our movie outing, A. had a lot to chime in with after tackling Lucia Joyce, the hefty volume by Carol Schloss detailing the relationship between Joyce and his troubled daughter. She concluded that this relationship may have stepped over some boundary, leading to the question of whether this matters in the question of Joyce's genius, and whether his personal history altered that.

T. brought up the idea at some point that Joyce basically swiped everything for the book. We would read it wrongly as original in some other sense than the way he managed to frame and structure everything.

L. mentioned the fact that she has been listening to Frank Delaney's podcasts on Ulysses, which inspired me to do the same, though frankly, I haven't gotten to them.

I have been noting Shem/Shaun relationships everywhere I look. My mind seems to be stuck on a little bit in the part we recently read a time or two ago, where Joyce acknowledges his own hopelessness as an upstanding citizen, noting that Shem did not even have the decency to drown himself in the Liffey when things got beyond the pale.

Very cursory I know. Hope to do better next time.

Tree of Life

I am a blog post behind, but thought I would mention our Bloomsday celebration here. Due to various conflicts, we had to have our Bloomsday celebration the following week and we chose to do so by going to see the new Terrence Malick movie The Tree of Life. Although others may disagree, I am not sure that it really has that much connection to Joyce, except the fact that it is similarly ambitious.We were all interested to see it however, and that probably comes out of the same motives that drew us together into a Finnegans Wake group in the first place. It's also true that John P. Anderson has written a multivolume work called Joyce's Finnegans Wake: the Curse of Kabbalah, which reads the Wake through the perspective of Kabbalah, and is full of Tree of Life references. 

The Tree of Life is a visually very beautiful film and I thought the smaller story of the family in 1950s Waco, Texas was excellently done. We argued a bit, though argued is too strong a word here, about whether the cosmological aspect was wholly necessary. I think in a way the cosmic scope of the setting helped make the smaller familial story stand out more. And as C. also said, I liked the dinosaurs.

What seems to have stuck with me as something to gnaw on, though, was the opening quotation which is from the Book of Job. "Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation...while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"

This, if you're a little rusty on your Bible reading is the beginning of God's answer to Job. God and Satan have had a little side bet going in which Satan has said, sure Job honors you, but if you took away all that he is thankful for, it would be another story. So Job is tested. His friends come around to comfort him, but largely do so by saying it must have been Job's own fault somehow. Job protests his innocence. Eventually God speaks, essentially saying, Just who do you think you are, Job? And goes on to show that Job's demand for justice aren't really in keeping with the vast scale of God's creation. In the end, Job is silenced by God's reply.

Now I have to say that the story of Job has been in my life for a long time. When I was in fourth grade, I even wrote a story which had a horse trainer named Job, although I have to admit that I thought it was pronounced 'job' as in 'work' until my teacher read it aloud. Of course, there were no biblical allusions then--I just thought it sounded like a cool name.

When I was in college, one of the first lectures that I found at all interesting was my professor John Lynch's on Job, and since then the story has stood me in good stead as a response to much California new age philosophy, in which you somehow bring all your troubles on yourself.

However, from the moment this movie started, I thought, God really shouldn't have been let off the hook so easily. We have to remember that God does not stay at the level of incomprehensible and remote creator, but starts out the tale engaging in a very anthropomorphic bet with someone he shouldn't be consorting with. If Satan can provoke him into taking such a bet, then why shouldn't humans have a word in? It's kind of hard to have it both ways.

I think that the movie, with it's vast cosmic setting left me feeling very much the opposite of what I was intended to feel, because it made me realize that, day to day, we don't really live in the universe in this way. We live the little life, not the cosmic one, and much as we love the fantastic views of the universe that we now can have, it doesn't really change our mind about anything. The realms of infinite space are more like a dream or a movie. We contemplate it briefly and then go about trying to sort out our little lives, which may be trivial from a universal perspective, but never feel that way to us.

Unfortunately, in the movie, the 'how dare you presume to question me, the Creator?' argument of God is all too closely echoed by the father of the family, who also moves in mysterious ways, though not often noble ones. All parents present a larger context than their young children can hope to understand, but to reduce the kids to silence is not these days seen as a virtue.

"Shock and awe" have become a little suspect as a way of communicating with living things, post-Millennium. As witness Baghdad. Or Afghanistan. It works for awhile, but always the little question of 'why?' comes back, in a whisper, unbidden.

(Oh, and just so that this post will reflect something a little more Joycean than Job, do check out PQ's blog post about his time at the Southern California Joyce Conference last week, where he read his paper, very felicitously on Bloomsday. I was lucky enough to read it in advance and am not surprised to learn that it was a hit.)

    

Happy Bloomsday!