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!

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.