Pharaoh with fairy, two lie, let them! (FW65, No. 41 - III.4, 578-584)

Tomorrow we are leaving for Ireland. The original plan was to finish the book tonight, but being sick for a few weeks made that goal difficult. I was reading 13-15 pages a day for a few weeks to try and catch up, but that became a bit hard to sustain. Towards the end, when it became easier, as the book straightened out a bit in III, I realized that I wanted to preserve the original idea of blogging through the book, and having written something for every handful of pages. So in the past week or so I've been doing six pages a day, and will keep up that pace. Right now, I'm planning on finishing Sunday or Monday, six or seven days from now. I do not want to take time away from being with my family, so I will do this at night, or maybe wake up early in the morning. I will not be bringing my computer, and doubtful I will be writing posts on my phone, but I am bringing my notebook and will write there, and type everything up when I get back (and will back date everything to correspond to the day it was written).

Finishing this while in Dublin is going to be a memorable experience. I hope that I find some inspiration to write differently. Being in the midst of III.3 as we pack and begin our journey, with its focus on the relationship of HCE and ALP, is constantly bringing to mind my own relationship with my partner. The chapter bases itself around the mundane occurrence of almost every night when sleeping in a house with a partner and with young children. The narrator does not merely describe them checking on a crying child and walking back down the stairs and climbing back in their bed, but sees the history of the whole human race it seems. As Adam and Eve, what they do effects everyone who comes after them. Their story is universal and also interminable: see the verbs, one after another, describing their history together on pp. 579-580. It feels that way in a relationship with someone, when you fall in love, marry, have children, have difficulties with each other and with other family members, try to be there for friends, take on responsibilities outside the home...After all that they have been through, they have still "left off leaving off and kept on keeping on" (580.8-9) and celebrated. 

There is absolutely something comic about the gigantism (to borrow a term from Joyce's poetics in the "Cyclops" chapter of Ulysses) of this chapter, making the couple tiptoeing in their house into something so grand, distilling down the events of a chronicle into a few paragraphs, to cover the space of going from the room upstairs to the bed down below. But I think this also mimics the gigantic feeling that I experience in the mundane moments of life with my partner and with children. In small moments you feel like a light is cast on your entire history. It is the kind of thing I would like to be able to express. You feel like you are bearing your past in every moment. As they fall into bed, the narrator exclaims, "Pharaoh with fairy, two lie, let them!" (570.12-13). An odd couple it seems (HCE is described as a large man, barrel-chested, and ALP as a petite woman) but they lie together. The description mimics the principle parts of the Latin verb fero, ferre, tuli, latum: "to bear." Something like principle parts, which you repeat to yourself so much when learning a language, and point to in your brain when reading a passage, is something that will never leave your brain and becomes part of you. You rehearse the words that don't have meaning of their own (you aren't speaking to anyone or saying a sentence that makes any sense), but making sure you have the ability to understand something you will hear or read. It is second nature, like falling into bed and laying next to your wife, but inside those words, those motions, and other like it, is what lets you think, speak, listen, share, confess, question, recall a past, live in a present, and face a future.

[FW 579-580]

hovering dreamwings, folding around (FW65, No. 40 - III.4, 572-578)

The scenes in III.4 of the parents hurrying into the child's room, and the mother comforting and singing lullabies, are touching, and present some temporarily sure ground to stand on, like when you feel the sandy sea floor briefly under your foot as you are swimming towards the shore and testing the depth. Of course, it also confuses me, which shouldn't be surprising. 

In another version, this chapter could have represented inside and outside the dream simultaneously: the frame breaks momentarily to hear the mother's soothing words. This doesn't seem to be the case. The mother's voice is not given after an em-dash, not represented explicitly as quoted speech. More strangely, on p. 576, it is surrounded by five brief quotations marked in this way, which could be read as the four evangelists making comments about what they see, but which, for me, are the mother and father sleepily talking about what to do when their child is clearly not sleeping deeply yet. (Of course it could be both.) This positions the mother's speech as in line with the bulk of the text of FW, visually indistinct from the different narrators, both identified, implied, and not, throughout the book. 

There is, however, an interplay between the child being comforted and the subject of the surrounding dream.

While hovering dreamwings, folding around, will hide from fears my wee mee mannikin, keep by big wig long strong manomen, guard my bairn, mon beau (FW 576.14-16).

Like on p. 565-566, the mother believes the child is having a nightmare. There, she says that the big man won't hurt him; here, she calls him a big man himself (he is growing; the child is becoming the father), although the "fear" that she is protecting him from hide fear (Ir. "man"). She speaks about him not only as her little son (Eng/Ir bairn) but her beau, her handsome man. 

Just earlier, the dream focused on the trail of a man accused of incest, the presentation of evidence against him, the attempt of his wife to exonerate him, and the inconclusive ending (the case seems to be thrown out because a corpse has no right to property). The dreamer being comforted does seem to be reflected in this dream. But what follows does not seem to be the continuation of the dream, but an elaborate prayer (back in FW's usual dream language dialect) for the parents' safe return to their bed. 

We could say that this is Mamalujo speaking, watching what is happening, but I'm not so sure. If FW is not simply the dreams of a person, from falling asleep to waking (with some interruption), there may not be a simple way to explain it in a basic communicative understanding of how narrative works. It is "about" the night, "represents" dreams, mimics them, and even, in III.4, evokes the difference between waking and sleeping, but that does not mean that we are in the thoughts of one or more dreamers, and that the dream speech is coherent with a bedrock real world "reality conceit" as I have called it (I think that is still a thing, but it does not have to ground the dream in the way I am describing here). I am still searching for the way to describe this. 

They arise from a clear springwell (FW65, No. 39 - III.4, 566-571)

The reading is continuing at a good pace, but the writing is becoming labored. I am not doing it under the most ideal circumstances, of course. Occasionally I have time to write during the day, sometimes in my paper journal, and that night I'll copy it out into the blog. More and more now I find myself reading with pleasure, taken along by the book, constantly amused and surprised and moved, and not wanting to write about it.

There is even a perfect passage for tonight. A rainbow glimpsed in a vision of a king's visit to the city, a future of promise. A debate by the observers if they should go for a walk outside (perhaps to take a piss) but confronted with the uncertainties of the staticky night. Echoes of the Book of the Dead; glimpses of Egyptian words and names of gods. The heart at risk of being swallowed and lost. Malevolent entities walking about; sheets of fire that impose. But also glimpses at the limpid waters flowing which "arise from a clear springwell" (571). A moment of peace and of being at peace, with the shimmering words and sentences of this book that is coming to an end soon.

The peace in the book, the thought, the experience, the moment, does not always lead to the will to write. When you are spending time with someone in conversation, you would not stop and begin to write: you are doing it right then, you are speaking and expressing. That is how I feel in moments like tonight (they are frequent). There is a charter and a desire to write that I quietly re-up throughout the day and when I read, but it happens that I'm having a conversation with this book and I can't be rude. The communication is happening. Is it lost? If I re-read, re-start the conversation (play it over in my mind in a sense) to that part where the unity was felt the deepest, I can recapture it, drink again from the springwell. If I keep staying right here, on this porch, in this cafe, in this apartment, the conversation could keep going and never die. What about that charter? Is anyone else listening? Do I need to speak to them as well?

What was thass? (FW65, No. 36 - III.3, 545-III.4, 555)

I am thinking about chapter divisions in FW. In a moment, I'll explain why it is relevant at the end of III.3 and beginning of III.4. The use of chapters in general is not a natural way to organize a story, or at least something necessary, but a convention with an interesting history. If you read Robinson Crusoe, often said to be the first modern novel (published in 1719), you will see that it is one long, unbroken narrative with no artificial chapter divisions. This technique is prevalent, even second nature now, but it is not very old in the grand scheme of things. Chapter divisions are artificial, not part of a text but paratext. 

For novels and other long written stories, chapter divisions present no problem because we accept the fact that the narrative is artificial, something created by the author and not a continuous record of reality. We all know that a story does not, nor need to cover a continuous flow of events, but is judicious in how it strings them together. Uninteresting parts, or parts that would tax the story's audience and distract it, is set between chapters, if you will, and if necessary summarized in exposition elsewhere.

Even in Ulysses, which is meant to tell the story of a single day in its fullness, divides up into chapters, including the stream of consciousness chapters, which purport to be the record of thought and experience. It is OK to have an artificial stopping of the thought process, to tie it up neatly as an artistic whole. We could also say that the maintenance of chapter divisions in a forward-thinking work like Ulysses is done due to its imitation of the epic and episodic storytelling of the Odyssey. The sequentialized and episodic form of works like this, including the picaresque novel, are standard for representing a period in a hero's life time, even a single day thanks to Ulysses.

I cannot yet make any general statements or suggestions about chapter divisions and book structure in FW yet, but the transition from III.3 to 5 raises some issues worth thinking about.

Just like sounds from the outside world can enter into a dream through the ear and impact its course of events, I read the end of III.3 as a dream diverted, or at least colored by, the sound of a horse on the street outside the bedroom window: dawn is approaching, and a cab driver may be getting ready for the day; or the watchman Sackerson, whom we know to be present in the current reality conceit, is accompanied by a horse. 

This would account for two things: the (perhaps unexpected?) focus on HCE riding horses with a delighted ALP at the end of III.3, and the final exclamation ending that chapter:

Mattahah! Marahah! Luahah! Joahanahanahana!

This is a horse's neigh repeated four times and colored each time by the name of one of hte evangelists. 

As often happens with loud sounds to the dreamer, the dream coloring can be overrode by the sheer loudness, and the dreamer is awakened, which is what we have at the beginning of III.4:

What was thass? Fog was whaas? Too mult sleepth. Let sleepth.

 If this reading is at least plausible, then we are confronted with the arbitrariness of chapter divisions in FW. JJ's reasons for introducing a chapter division here, between the sound and the awakening, were, I'm sure, manifold. We certainly have a shift of conceit, from the séance to the (eventual) four-part telescript observing the Porter family. Just like with Ulysses, however, this reminds me that FW is not simply a dream. I don't think dreams have chapters, but rather smooth transitions between segments...perhaps what we have in the terminal parts of FW's chapters? It is not a dream but a representation of one (and things, and parts of things, can be represented in infinitely many ways) that is meant to take the form of a book, or more specifically a novel, or even epic.

The usual understanding of FW's book and chapter division is Viconian, but similar to my earlier discussion about "Silence." in III.3, I think this can be rethought. Vico is only part of the story for FW. THe books are labelled, simply, not with a name but just an (archaic) numbering, I II III IV. The chapters are only marked by white space; the numbers and folk titles and section headings are completely extraneous to the text of JJ. Maybe chapter divisions aren't even what we have in the book. The white space arguably corresponds to nothing in the text/dream, but is simply something for readers, like the paragraph divisions, marked by simple spaces, in the medieval Masoretic bibles.

His thoughts that wouldbe words, his livings that havebeen deeds (FW65, No. 35 - III.3, 531-545)

The reality conceit (a new phrase? could be helpful for analyzing FW) in III.3 is the interview (already discussed), but it amounts to Yawn being contacted through means partly radio, partly necromancy. Yawn is pure potential for the interviewer: his "thoughts" are "wouldbewords"; and his words are about deeds already in the past, the life he leads, "his livings," are "havebeen deeds" (532.31-32). Through Yawn, different familiar voices emerge, and he even speaks as Issy and HCE, at the end of the chapter, for quite some time. The topic, naturally, is what happened with HCE. In many ways, it reads like a who's who and what's what of the entire book, or at least the events spoken about in book I. The more I think about the narrative versus the events they are about, the more disoriented I feel. I started off trying to make sense of it all in a way that reduces it or transcodes it to an understanding which is, alas, foreign and not authentic.

Not only here, but all over FW, it is more about the telling than the tale. When there is a straightforward story, it usually is framed in some way, as a moral lesson or a radio play. Most (all?) of the book is assigned a speaker, with the most omniscient narrator-like figure probably meant to be the voice of a historian, specifically, Mamalujo. We (me, and commentators, and possibly all readers, and hopefully you as well) look for the reality conceit for each chapter or section, and in our reading, anchor the stream of words in a narrative putting a fundamental story (fabula) into words, the story that precedes the narrative. IF we are to talk about the fabula of FW as a whole, it would consist in large part of the impropriety of HCE in the park and the reaction to it. There is also the concrete event settings of the Nightlessons chapter (II.2) or the pub (II.3) or the farewell discourse of Jawn (III.2).

So, given all of this, with reference to III.3, is Yawn telling or retelling the story of FW? Is is another version?

It may be better not to think in terms of events (as we usually do when talking about stories, at least I do) but the characters. Each, in their full, ideal form, is yoked to, maybe not a series of events, but an event cluster that they contribute to. Any time one talks about these characters, the events come out, are told. If, for example, in in the world of the book which is overhung with the heavy branches and knotted vines of this world and its characters, some play is staged (i.e. II.1), or a tale told, these archetypical characters and their inherent event dynamic bleed through in appropriate ways. The same when one character talks about another. The bleedthrough is so intense that the speakers themselves, like a saint receiving the stigmata, become marked by them as if they are the character themselves. In this analysis, Yawn/Shem is not telling the story of FW again, but is becoming transparent in varying degrees to its characters and all that entails. Called Yawn (he is sleepy, he is on the verge of the other, non-waking state, sleep/death), Shaun is particularly prone to this bleeding through. The walls of his personality (which, as the previous chapters show, are well-kept like a hedge) are at their most vulnerable. 

SILENCE. (FW65, No. 34 - III.3, 500-531)

On p.501 comes what, to me, the more I think about it, is a profound and even disturbing silence. Mamalujo has been interrogating/interviewing Yawn from beyond, and all the voices speaking through him. The voices grew more crowded, shouting over each other and not making much sense (like a more out-of-control version of the end of I.8). Then, whitespace and the all-caps message:

SILENCE.

This is like the period of silence in the annals read in I.1, although there the gap in the record was stated to be "Silent." by the tour-guide-historian-narrator. The records and the scribe taking them down stopped; perhaps, as FW interpreters like to think, this corresponds to a gap of the ages in history, a space between the epochs, when things are about to start again, after the Viconian notion of cyclical history. Maybe so. 

It is different in III.3, however. We have here 

SILENCE.

This states directly what was in the hearing of Mamalujo: nothing, no more voice speaking or responding, after so many.

If we can picture the séance (John Bishop's word for what is happening in III.3) of Mamlujo as an archaeological excavation, and Yawn as the stratified remains of generations (eons) of human settlements which are the events and characters of FW, the silence would be the virgin soil you reach, beneath and before the first human traces. Or, if a radio telescope, it is the cosmic background radiation, or maybe the darkness preceding the Big Bang. Maybe we can think of it narratologically as a slowing down of the narration to a crawl, going so slowly in fact that it can't even capture the thoughts and actions of its human subjects and longer. The storytelling tool, the lens of observation, has been overcalibrated, is too fine-grained to let anything pass through and be observed and told about.

I feel like I am reading through the text into the pages themselves and down through the back cover to let the light (or darkness) in.

To bring us a little closer to the reading, what I find to be the disturbing part of this is the way that the text of FW itself (it is implied here) knows its own limits, that the voices brought together into the interviewer's hearing, which theoretically can pick up any figure whatsoever in the book's universe, emerge out of darkness and, it is implied, return to it. 

This is, in fact, how I read the book's final and first sentence. While I think that the common wisdom about them/it is basically right (that they are two halves of the same sentence, implying that the book never ends), what comes after the last "the" is silence  in the first analysis, even if you immediately turn back to page 3. The sentence is unfinished, and this is made noticeable by ending with the one word in English which is the most demanding in its need to be followed and fulfilled by something, whose very existence is to assert the existence of what follows. The silence couldn't be more noticeable.

[FW 501]

My heart, my coming forth of darkness! (FW65, No. 33 - III.3, 490-500)

The "Prankquean refrain" appears in this chapter, originally found in I.1 during the short story centered on the figure of the same name, who poses a riddle to the Jarl von Hoother and steals his children when he fails to answer. There, it reads, "why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease?" 

The meaning is, of course, opaque, but I am interested in its role in an interesting section of the long dialogue of III.3, where it is ensconced in an exchange which draws on Egyptian Book of the Dead language:

—Let Eivin bemember for Gates of Gold for their fadeless suns berayed her. Irise, Osirises! Be thy mouth given unto thee! For why do you lack a link of luck to poise a pont of perfect, peace? On the vignetto is a ragingoos. The overseer of the house of the oversire of the seas, Nu-Men, triumphant, sayeth: Fly as the hawk, cry as the corncrake, Ani Latch of the postern is they name; shout!

—My, heart, my mother! My heart, my coming forth of darkness! They know not my heart, O coolun dearest! Mon gloomerie! Mon glamourie! What a surprise, dear Mr Preacher, I to hear from your strawnummical modesty! Yes, there was that skew arch of chrome sweet home, floodlit up above the flabberghosted farmament and bump where the camel got the needle. Talk about iridecencies! Ruby and beryl and chrysolite, jade, sapphire, jasper and lazul. (FW 493-494)

My sense is that the first voice is Mamlujo, and the responder is Yawn. 

The basic meaning of the Prankquean refrain is relatively easy to discern. Pretending that we did not know that this was a version of that riddle, the statement here is a question put to Yawn who is imagined to soon to be an Osiris awakening in the underworld...but not yet. The question asks, why are you not presently able to erect ("poise") a bridge ("pont") for safe passage to the realm of perfect peace? Yawn is not yet dead, is still on the journey through darkness towards light, and is stopping for this interview.

The speaker seems to be looking at a copy of the Book of the Dead and notes that the accompanying vignette shows a goose (transformation into different animals, like birds, is a common theme in the Book of the Dead). Most curiously, Yawn may even be identified with ALP: though "Ani" invokes the owner of the most famous BD scroll (published by Budge and known by JJ), Any, it sounds like Annie. There was also apparently a tea in Dublin made by Anne Lynch & Co. As a part of a gate or portal, the postern here invokes another prominent part of BD spells: knowing the names of the gates, and their demon guardians, which lead deeper into the sacred realm of the beyond, each requiring an "open sesame"-type utterance to proceed. The speaker, then, is uttering a spell over Yawn and urging him to shout the right name: he is trying to protect his entry into the afterlife, as a transformed bird, even as ALP (remember: Shaun has been floating down the Liffey in a barrel...).

The Prankquean refrain is transformed, not a riddle to trick an HCE figure, but an earnest question to see whether the entrant into the beyond is ready. Shaun, perhaps, is being prepared to face the task of being confronted by the Prankquean in his next life, after he goes forth by day, and becomes HCE. Accordingly, Yawn reads from another spell of the Book of the Dead, no. 30B, which implores one's heart, tenderly referred to as "heart of my mother" (the heart that your mother knit for you in the womb) not to speak anything false. If it were to, then this could lead to a second death, annihilation, whether in the court of justice where the heart is weighed, or at any point during the treacherous journey. 

Yawn's identification with ALP comes through with his brief address to the preacher, reminding of the beginning of the letter ("Dear Reverend..."). I think he is continuing to speak as her when he notes (to the preacher still?) that he did, indeed, see "that skew arch of chrome sweet chrome" in the sky. As made of chromium, which is a shiny silver color, this could be the fog bow seen in the previous book. But it is also a fantastic and beautiful archway built in what is possibly the realm of the dead ("where the camel got the needle"), made, like the city described in Revelations, of fabulous flashing jewels. I'm not sure if these seven jewels all match up perfectly to ROYGBIV, but they at least evoke it. Characteristically, it begins with red, and you can also see violet at its end; but beryl seems to be able to occur in almost any color. The rainbow after the flood has not come yet, but Yawn imagines it while still "coming forth of darkness," even imperfectly, to exist.

[FW 493]