White fogbow spans. The arch embattled. (FW65, No. 27 - II.4, 389-III.1, 403)

It feels surreal to be finished with book II, especially the really difficult II.3, and to be on to III. The dynamic of reading feels different now. Knowing the end is coming, it feels like it is going downhill and picking up speed (the prose is simply easier to read), or, to be more accurate, downstream, which is what III.1 is concerned with: Shaun beginning his backwards journey down the Liffey. The "backwards" element refers to Shaun's perspective on what has already happened in the dream, which he encounters in reverse order (as JJ himself said about book III). I think he is also backwards in his posture in the river: he is in a barrel (which can also be a pulpit, as well as a crucifix) and is facing upstream as the current takes him. At least that is what I have gathered from the different guides about the book ever since I started reading FW. I can perhaps see in a few isolated places in this chapter so far. We will see how this idea bears out in reading.

To risk being repetitious, I once again see a rainbow, at the beginning of this book, and am thinking about how it fits into the whole. It is in a significant place: after HCE was unable to see a rainbow when looking out of his ark/pub, but only saw the floodwaters maintaining their height (as I wrote about earlier), a rainbow now appears and is described by the narrator of the beginning of III.1 (more on which shortly). 

But it is not a rainbow itself that is being seen, rather a fog bow: "White fogbow spans. The arch embattled" (403.6). Unlike a rainbow, a fog bow is fainter, more white, and according to Wikipedia, shows only a weak red and blue on its edges. The finer droplets of the fog fail to render the white light in its full array: embattled. Perhaps the foggy vista and the muffled light signals the approach of dawn and a new beginning.

There is a faint rainbow buried in the words. A hint of each color, in Roy G. Biv order, can be found in the passage, but not each color is equally visible. One, I think, is only hinted at in the phrase "She has prayings in lowdelph": yellow is hidden in the "yi" and the "low." It is like the barely-visible rainbow at the beginning of the book, on p. 3.

I've been in the habit during this readthrough of marking where I see rainbows with my colored pencils. This is another piece of evidence admissible in the case where I am judged to be a bit off my rocker in the way I hold this book in my life. If I fill the book with annotations, as many people do, why not turn it into an artwork? It has already begun to color itself, but in a pitiful way of yellowing after 20+ years on my shelf. The paper is becoming hard and brittle. With its cover and first pages completely detached, and pages here and there too, I feel the need to compensate, to add ballast against its inevitable sinking into the oblivion of waste paper. Coloring my copy also reflects my desire to channel this book's overflowing bounty of creativity and beauty (and, if we are being honest, darkness) into my own creative powers. I color it as it colors me, in the exchange of reading and thinking which becomes hoping and creating. If I could I would make it as ornate as the Book of Kells...as long as I could keep reading it.

Colors of the rainbow, but rainbow-less (FW 403)

Returning to our passage. The text speaks with an "I," and I have to assume that it is the dreamer saying these things. The colors of the rainbow are faintly seen in two apparitions of HCE and ALP under a fog bow. When observing the former, the dreamer remarks "He am..." (403.8), a telling confusion of grammatical gender, the identify of the dreamer and the dreamed figure slipping through. HCE is made out through the fog in outline, but his "fixtures are mobiling so wobiling befear my remembrandts" (this is probably a reference to Rembrandt's painting The Night Watch). The dreamer is like a painter in rendering visible forms from his own memories and unconscious, but here there is a struggle to do so. I often wake up at night and see forms in the room where I am sleeping and try to put them together, but they seem to be wavering like dark leaves swaying in the watery currents of the thick night. ALP, and other forms emerge as well, but soon a harsh voice calls out: "Come not nere! Black! Switch out!" (403.17). These commands are disturbing and seem to be spoken not by the dreamer but from the dream itself. We return to darkness.

Another rainbow in Finnegans Wake, "heptarched span of peace"

[FW 403]

the residuance of a delugion (FW65, No. 25 - II.3, 367-377)

If the rainbow is the most important symbol in FW, the flood of Noah is equally important and productive as a metaphor for the transition from age to age, from waking to sleep, from life to death. [When typing "metaphor" earlier, I was thinking also about adding that it was productive, and ended up typing "productor"] I voiced my thoughts at the beginning of this series about the rainbow which is mentioned ("the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface," 3.12-14) on the first page of the book and which faintly imbues the book's first description of the "when not yet" world before HCE's fall. There, I suggested that, in the creation-story-like language of the opening paragraphs of the book, the rainbow was positioned as the symbol of creation, which means, in terms of the story of Genesis at least, inundation precedes creation. Thinking about this further, I would maybe go further and say that the flood and its aftermath, which the rainbow marks, plays the structural role of creation in the mythology of FW. 

A passage from II.3 has brought these ideas back up for me. After HCE has argued for his innocence by pleading that every human is equally guilty (the cause of the flood in Genesis!), we see the emergence of the four historians, Mamalujo, among the chaotic body of voices in the pub (367.8ff.). There is then a passage (367.20-36) which describes how "Jukoleon" (Deucalion, the survivor of the flood in Greek myth, also Napoleon, to whom HCE is often equated, and probably also "Juke" to represent how "Duke" would be pronounced, which means this figure includes the polar opposites of Napoleon and Wellington) released the birds after the flood to see if the waters receded, but saw only "the residuance of a delugion" (367.24). So the floodwaters still covering the globe are remain (Lat. residēre), though they may be just beginning to recede (Lat. residere). 

To be inundated is to be overwhelmed with guilt yet deluded ("delugion," delusion) that you are innocent. HCE has not yet experienced relief, and will continue to be the object of verbal mockery (as the rest of this chapter shows).

To be inundated is to be inebriated. As the story about Roderick O'Connor which ends this chapter makes explicit (subject of a future post), but as (I think) we glimpse in the final multi-page sequence of chatter about HCE preceding it, the pub's host is drunk, and maybe soon to pass out.

To be inundated is to sleep, and to die. The rainbow is the sign of awaking and of being born again. Instead of seeing dry land and the rainbow, Jukoleon gazes out over the waters and sees that they are still controlled by "the old thalassocrats of invisible empires, maskers of thewaterworld": the four men were summoned by the word "Mask" just above, and these forces are now seen by HCE to be "facing one way to another way and this way on that way," four directions. They embody "fourdimmansions," mansions or demesnes proper to feudal lords. 

The paragraph marks an important transition. No more do we here from HCE, but from voices talking about him and analyzing him. If I can be bold, I would suggest even that this is a moment where the sleeper himself attempts waking but morning has not yet arrived. That may be going to far. In addition to helping the scene in the pub transition to a scene in a ship, first docked on the Liffey then sailing towards Europe (a process started already in the story about the Norwegian sailor), this paragraph is the beginning of a series of water-focused episodes that ultimately brings the book to its final scene when ALP becomes the Liffey flowing into the ocean. 

[FW 367]

whereom is man, that old offender, nother man, while he is asame (FW65, No. 24 - II.3, 355-366)

HCE's response to the Butt and Taff teleplay of How Buckley Shot the Russian General is to make a plea for the universality of guilt. His first speech, beginning on 355.21, furthers the confusion of speaker and narrator in this chapter. I see a transition, shortly after HCE begins speaking, to a narrator's description. I'm transcoding it thus using our normal markers of quoted speech:

"That is too tootrue enough in Solidan's Island as in Moltern Giaourmany and from the Amelakins off to date back to land of engined Egypsians," assented [HCE] from this opening before his inlookers... (355.21-24)

It is worth pausing a moment and recalling that this is part of the poetics of FW: as much as there is an expansion of meaning in almost every word through wordplay, on the level of passages and paragraphs, there is a deliberate evacuation of context. The basic sense of English-sounding prose, which often grows so slight that it hangs over the words as insubstantially as wisps of smoke, is matched by the bare minimum use of things like em dashes and paragraph divisions to help the reader.  

After this passage, there then follows a series of epithets, treating HCE like a god, before he begins speaking again, again with no paratextual markers after the initial em dash that leads off the paragraph: "We all, for whole men is lepers, have been nobbut wonterers in that chill childerness which is our true name..." So HCE begins to reveal that, in pleading for the universality of sin, and implying that one can't be blamed for something everybody has (the "true name" of humanity), he is also going to plea for his own innocence.

The next paragraph continues to report HCE's plea, but it all looks to be indirect discourse (356.05ff). The questions which the narrator says HCE was asking of his (probably bewildered, and definitely inebriated) customers, which I am going to look at in just a moment, are of the utmost seriousness. It is hard for me to put my finger on it exactly, but I find this extremely funny, funnier than if we heard HCE's own voice here. In distilling down what might have been a long series of convoluted questions (based on HCE's lengthy speeches to come) to their essence, there is instead a montage effect.

The core of this montage of questions reads:

...how comes ever a body in our taylorised world to selve out thishis, whither it gives a primeum nobilees for our notomise or naught, the farst wriggle from the ubivence, whereom is man, that old offender, nother man, wheile he is asame. (356.10-14)

First of all, read this in your best drunk voice if you want a chuckle. Montage though this may be, the ipsissima verba of the drunken questioner come through. 

This isn't a question (no question mark) but it wants to be; it is an indirect question (he wondered why such and such is the case) which does not have an answer. The first question doesn't seem to find its verb ("how comes...thishis") but devolves into subordinate clauses explaining...something. It is about the ever-changing nature of human nature, not just in general but of each human ("man" becoming "nother man"). With all this change, what is the principle that allows "man" to be "man," for each one to be "asame." Or...not the same (a-same, alpha privative). We certainly can hear through these words some significant drunken philosophizing.

What does this have to do with his sense of guilt? Why is he asking questions like these? Is he arguing that people change constantly, and the person who committed the transgression in the past is not the same as the one standing before the guilt in the future?

This identity and non-identity of humanity is the "first riddle of the universe," something like the first emergence of life, like the far-distant wriggling of the first worm ("farst wriggle") at the beginning of life itself, the "where" and "whence" ("ubivence") that could have been anywere (Lat. ubivis, any where you please). This is different, by the way, from Egyptian creation stories, which (you'll be shocked to hear) portrayed the first land to emerge at the dawn of the universe from the primeval waters as, you guessed it, Egypt.

[FW 355, 356]

the act of goth stepping the tolk of Doolin (FW65, No. 22 - II.2, 301-end, II.3, 323-334)

When I write I fear, whether beforehand or as I am in the midst of it or afterwards. Endless scrutiny awaits. As I am still perfecting how to write academically, to produce arguments in writing that are coherent and verifiable or contestable to a small group of interested readers who follow a narrow and only slowly evolving set of expectations, I get caught up in footnotes, making sure my claims are warranted, looking for the correct loci to cite...These are good instincts that can lead to good writing and maybe even recognition. I have to start, however, and once I do so, not get caught in the snare of substantiation. That can come. Revising is a pleasure. Once you have something down which is an approximation, even in a small degree, of an idea, there is something concrete that can grow and be built out. Contingency is actually king. There are infinite ways to say something. There may be a mot juste but not a sentence or paragraph. Anything that is particular & concrete can be the start of something.

Writing about FW could, on paper, help me with this: its opaqueness and high threshold of understanding, one which is equally challenging for everyone encountering it, means an start is good. An effort to say what you think, if it springs from a real encounter, can begin the process of deeper understanding (which will never end). Whatever comes of it in the future, that is what I am doing by writing about it here every day. Trying to simply put brick next to and on top of brick and see where it takes me.

*    *    *

As a narratologist I think constantly about discourse and story, narrative (or sjuzhet, a term used by Russian Formalist school) and fabula, the story we read versus the story we think about as we read. It is more challenging bringing this distinction to bear outside of the realm of story. Does argumentative prose, a class essay or a journal article or an academic monograph, have a deep structure, a fabula-like essence that the academic prose of the discourse elicits in the readers mind? 

If we think about this from the reader's perspective, an honest reader would grant to the author of the argument they are reading that it is fully formed, laying beneath the first words of the introduction (however formal or boilerplate), and drawing the argument-in-discourse to itself as it unfolds, ordering it. Thinking about this from the other side, instead of being a good storyteller, a critical writer (however we want to call this persona) has to be a good explainer. This however cannot rule the process, the encounter of the explainer and the blank page. I don't think there is a poetics of critical writing and argumentation. Contingency is king, and trusting that external thing which entered your thoughts, something which is not you, can foster the creation of something that has the required objectivity, yet also the inherent appeal of a natural or unique or thought-provoking, fresh, inspired way of looking at something, and stating it. The thing itself, but also its aura. 

*    *    *

Thinking about FW as a narratologist is thought provoking in a unique way. I see potential in FW's wild firework of a poetics and the way it severs, or at least decouples in various grades, what we normally take to hang together in the constructs that make up verbal art and our talk about it. Like the difference and cooperation of discourse and story.

In II.3, the story of Persse and the Norwegian captain is one of the unruliest narratives in modern literature. The idea of unruliness is from Brian Richardson's book A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives. The story has a trebling structure which is typical of much storytelling, and which would be associated in particular with oral narrative. As is usual, the third movement is the difference maker. The captain flees the tailor twice and sails around the world, but after his second return he is, instead, reconciled with the tailor by marrying his daughter. 

This reconciliation, the way it comes about, does not make the story make sense, as we would expect. There is resolution happening in the conflict between the two protagonists, and in a very typical way for fairytales or popular literature, by ending with a marriage and also with the celebration of those witnessing it. But the source of the tension that this marriage is supposed to reconcile (again, it feels like this reconciliation is happening, so we have to just go with it) is entirely unclear. It starts when the captain flees after he orders his new suit, and is called thereupon a thief, but no theft is reported. We don't know if he took the suit without paying, or if something else happened which angered the tailor and made the captain guilty. We don't know whence the guilt comes. The story is uninterested, driven only towards the resolution.

This lack of motivation is more remarkable given the many layers JJ has put into the story, with each character identifiable as others, with each other too, and able to split into two or three related personas. With all of this complication, there is still no driving force in the story itself, in its fabula. If fabula can be thought of as a hidden layer behind something visible, an an sich that we know is there and which logically has to be, but which is only present theoretically in the appearances, in this story, there is all surface and no depth, growth without ground, when it comes to the central motivation of its plot.

This kind of unruly narrative (growth without ground) anticipates the postmodern novel. In FW, the key  is the dream nature of the book. At the end, in the denouement, there is a tension which is left standing which, normally, would presage or transition to a new episode or book, or major phase in the story: HCE (for it is he) has a fault, but ALP still stands by him. ALP is in fact presented as the way that gossip about HCE and his humiliation can stop: their marriage is "the act of goth stepping the tolk of Doolin" (332.10). This connects to the major theme of HCE's guilt in the book, usually seen either in the incident with the cad or with the girls in Phoenix Park by the Magazine Wall. 

I think it is worth considering HCE's feeling of guilt (HCE being, or being from, the dreamer I assume?) as what motivates the story of Kersse and the captain. This connects to the surprising turn of the story to the marriage. HCE hopes ALP will forgive him, wash away his sin. If this guilt, the cause or outcome of the fall, can rightly be considered the driving force of the whole of FW, behind ALP's letter, the twins' rebellion, everything, then surely we can see it as the absent cause of motivation in this story. IT is worth reading it through again in this light, but I have half a book to finish in no too much time.

It is also worth thinking about the role that narrative plays in processing personal guilt, whether the guilt is just inherent to who we are, or is something particular (or both!). The idea that the dreamer devises the story as a response to (in however way) their guilt seems connected also to our inherent ability to follow and tell stories. After all, we dream constantly, and dreams are in a final analysis story. The story drive never leaves our psychic life. The guilt that drives it, that deep down instability in our own soul that imparts tension in all we think, see, and do, is ultimately as unknowable as we are to ourselves---knowable, able to be subjected to a process of knowing, of coming into knowledge, but never in a way where the desire of to know rests. The story will never end or find its resolution.

what a dustydust it razed aboriginally (FW65, No. 21 - II.2, 301-end, II.3, beginning-323)

Currently slowly, you could say "macheteing" my way through II.3, a long and really challenging chapter. I am still in the first part, which features the radio play about Kersse and the Norwegian captain. The complexity and layeredness of this story is well-known. What fascinates me is the blending of radio play and pub scene: of the characters listening and the story they are hearing. The narratee is never kept completely distinct from the inner world of the narrative. It is a more extreme mise-en-abyme.

This is the most complex example of emboxment (Einschacthelung; the story-within-a-story technique) that I have ever thought about. In some ways it is typical of the technique. There is a message in the emboxed story for the narratee: it is HCE hearing of his marginalization as he himself is an object of ridicule in his pub as he serves drinks and takes pratfalls (perhaps just one, but an important one, which echoes with a thunderword).

As complicated as it is with all its blurred boundaries, this might not have been particularly hard for JJ to create; or at least, the complexity inherent in the poetics of FW made it eminently possible. Through its layeredness, the technique of FW's prose almost removes entirely the difference between text and subtext. Perhaps the English baseline, at least when read aloud, keeps them ultimately distinct; but the two sides fall apart in a way more extreme than in any other work. Marking a paragraph as speech or not with a simple hyphen, allowing it to be ascribed to a character in the radio play, or its narrator, or HCE or his customers, helps. Some paragraphs have one where you don't expect it; others seem to need it but don't. Even the narrator of the episode at the highest diegetic level (whoever that is) is caught up in this. A character in one level can answer another. This, in one way, is not that different from the way an audience, in an in-person performance of a story can actively involve themselves in the telling, something which could lead to a sophisticated interpretive performance: the storyteller responds to the audience. 

But in FW II.3, the medium is distinct, not a live storyteller but an electric device coming from a device, some kind of magic radio, which is described in detail at the very beginning of the chapter and seems to be referenced here and there throughout. It seems to bridge the physical distance between speaker (teller) and listener by somehow embedding itself in the ears of the listeners (headphones, avant la lettre?).

*    *    *

On p.313-314, HCE climbs a ladder and falls down, causing laughter in the pub. The passage describing this itself is rather hilarious, and (if I may use this term) the free indirect speech of the narrator captures perfectly some kind of frustrating experience, and frustrating thoughts of the climber.

What I'm really interested now is in the follow up (after the three guffawing customers):

And forthemore let legend go lore of it that mortar scene so cwympty dwympty what a dustydust it razed aboriginally but, luck's leap to the lad at the top of the ladder, so sartor's risorted why the sinner the badder! Ho ho ho hoch! La la la lach! Hillary rillarry gibbous grist to our millery! A pushpull, qq: quiescence, pp: with extravent intervulve coupling. The savest lauf in the world... [it continues and stays interesting, but can't bite off too much here -JC] (II.3, 314.15-21)

This (the fall off the ladder) happens pretty much in the middle of the book; midway through the night. The use of a thunderword after it makes its pivotal role in the myth of HCE clear. I'd like to suggest this passage I've reproduced here which follows it makes it even more pivotal.

The narrator here says that what happened, a fall off a wall ("mortar scene") which has the implications of a "mortal sin"  is fairytale like in the way it represents something so connected to the mysteries of human existence yet expressed in such a simple image, like with Humpty Dumpty ("cwympty dwympty" is an annoying [sorry] use of Welsh taking advantage of the fact that the wlrd cwympt means "fall"). It will become a legend, in fact: it will "go lore," become lore, and also be legend "galore": even as it is told and retold it will not lose that original quality. 

The original event caused quite a stir, it kicked up lots of "dustydust" in the way it presented human mortality (from dust to dust). It caused a lot of laughter, and was "grist for the mill" of the people in the pub, the laughter reminding us of the description of Finnegan's heraldic crest in book I: "Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you're going to be Mister Finnagain!" (5.9-10).

I don't have any answers now for the "qq" and "pp." This is a transition to what looks like an advertisement for the machine in question. See a nice writeup of this and some other passages in another great FW blog. The machine being described (is it the radio?) has pushpull circuity which alternates from off, quiet, to on, when the coupling occurs. It is the cycle that runs (German Lauf, used for the cycle of washing machines and dishwashers) through history, based around sexual intercourse ("intervulve coupling"). The machine is a device that copes with the humiliation (and, perhaps it is implied, inhumation) of the fall off the ladder: the fall, its humiliation, and the way it brings up feelings of deeper guilt, can become a felix culpa, death can be reversed with new life.

Is the dreamer remembering something that happened to him that day (or maybe that almost happened...the ladder shaking as he was at the top, or a slight stumble that could have been much worse...), and which he now dreams about? Is this the source of the "fall" of FW, which is recalled at the book's very beginning? The laughter of the customers (something humiliating like this is grist for the mill of the dreaming mind) would have been the reason for the dream, the humiliating experience that echoes in the unconscious.

*    *    *

If FW is a dream, do we lose the illusion of immediacy and live-ness of a story told in a normal way? Dreams are new tellings of things already past, and they contain important messages which can be felt like solutions to the dreamer. They tell and satisfy, and in the act are the telling and the satisfying the same. As a reader of FW, do I pretend that I am stepping into that role of the teller and the hearer...who are identical in the case of the dreamer? Does the identity of the dreamer and the dream audience find a reflection in the confusion of diegetic levels in II.3? This seems to be a key for unlocking the revolutionary potential for representing narrative in FW.

In waking life, it is often difficult to abstract yourself from the world and tell yourself apart from it. In ordinary experience, when you reflect on it, you can come up with an aggregate of sensations and observations that seem to make up the you in distinction from everything else. But in a dream, the boundaries are clearer (if we could inhabit one and make this assessment personally while we experience it). My feeling is that everything in a dream is not you (it all goes back to what came to you from outside), but it is equally true that everything is at the same time you. The soul, which is all things, is opened to itself.

FW could be JJ's method of approximating or representing this identity in non-identity, in a work of art. Style is everything for JJ, and in this case the style achieves this quite directly.

It would be worth examining the depictions of FW in FW, when it is described as a device for perceiving or broadcasting: experiencing and then dreaming: if these things (like the collideroscape in I.7, or the radio in II.3) can be said to be FW, or perhaps more accurately, a concrete metaphor of the poetics. 

This touches on a question I am always left with when thinking through FW: can this be done again, differently? Can someone create poetry like this, and can be done without mimicking the specific techniques (the wordplay, in short)? 

Untimely sighs - Petrarch, Canzoniere, no. 12

The original Italian can be found here.

Translated a few months ago, with some changes added as I type it up here.

Petrarch, 12th poem in the Canzoniere

If bitter torment spared my life 
So long endured, and breathless spent,
That I can see, at world's end,
The tapered light, lady, of your eyes

The golden hair turned to white,
The garland put aside with robes of green,
The faded face, that would make me
Hesitate, though in pain, to cry:

Yet love would take away my fear
Of making clear that sacrifice
Performed in every hour, day, and year,

And if time with true desire vies,
At least that will give my tears
Succor for my untimely sighs.

I've been slowly reading through the Canzoniere using a Reclam paperback with parallel German translation. Not the most efficient way, when I don't really know Italian (although I know Latin and French and I use "these notes") and I'm still learning German. I've learned German words that I should in no way be using in everyday conversation, like Antlitz ("countenance"), but which I definitely do use. 

What speaks to me in this poem? Imagining a future where, instead of confessing your love to your beloved and living a life of happiness together, you portray yourself confessing not your love, but that you loved, and lived. Maybe this is too vulgar of an idea of poetry, but if you are producing a fantasy in verse, there is no real limit to what you can say, theoretically. You can imagine, and say, anything. But Petrarch has a limit, and it is revealed in a stark way here. He imagines surviving a life of love kept silent, and at the very end, revealing it, but after the flower of youth and the full torrent of adulthood. When even poetry is over ("The garland put aside"). For him, the fantasy is a "time" that "with true desire vies," which means, I think, that his desire has survived the fight with time, and is still intact as time is running out. That, even when he sees his beloved aged, it is not a love lost that is lamented, or a love that could have been won years ago but is now past its time, but a survival that, if not celebrated, is at least held up as something that can dull the pain. The signs remain, and are now untimely, but the tears that accompany them can be shed with the knowledge of this endurance, and, somehow, that can soothe. That might be the ultimate fantasy of this poem, that such a state of affairs would even take place.

 

Totum tute fluvi modo mundo fluere (FW65, No. 20 - II.2, 286-300)

I have been amusing myself today over a little passage in Latin on p. 287. FW is full of languages though its base language, most of the time, is English (so long as you read it out loud). There are some passages in other languages (with some of the expected Wakean wordplay, but far less concentrated), in French, Latin, and probably others. 

I'm a native English speaker and have been living in Germany for almost three years. I could read German OK before moving here, with ample dictionary work. But I've been learning and am OK at basic speaking proficiency. My two older children are fluent, having learned through pure immersion and only a modicum of direct tutoring in public school (and were at least at a very good level 6 months in). I have taken classes, though lately learning the schreckliche Sprache has formally taken a back seat to some urgent work deadlines. We don't know how long we are staying here. Assuming that, this summer, we are relatively certain we are here for another year or two, I plan on getting more serious about learning it.

Nevertheless, I dream in German. Like FW, the basic language is English, but I find myself dreaming about myself living in Germany and trying to talk to people. This is a constant anxiety of mine: not only not knowing the right words for the occasion (doctor's office? looking for an innertube for a tire? ordering five ice cream cones to different specifications?), but being constantly aware that, as a fairly proficient and, if I might say so, adept speaker of English, and someone who enjoys communicating and sharing with others, that I cannot truly express myself, that the wellspring of my deepest thoughts and desires is running through the night in the town square with nobody to draw from it or listen to its gurgle. It's definitely for the best, in terms of what is usually appropriate in conversation in this land; I have learned the virtue of standard phrases and dialogues that allow you to be kind and to communicate but to keep your true self guarded. I suppose it's better to do this, but the spring is still running and sometimes I fear it is overflowing.

Even though I am much better at German than I was initially, and can go into everyday situations (asking for help at the pharmacy, dropping off one of my kids at a play date) without flipping through my dictionary or asking my phone frantically as I walk up to my destination, the anxiety is there. I think the German I speak in my dreams is OK, and I even occasionally remember a few words (usually words I was not sure of in the dream, which I spoke with hesitation) when I woke up, and can look them up later. Sometimes they are comically off, but often they are right. 

I wonder if this anxiety about language is present in FW, about expression in general. Certainly JJ references the confused and often hostile reception of his Work in Progress, it seems at least once in every chapter of FW. As I am in the midst of II.2 and reading how the twins are at pains to find the secrets implicit in double triangles and bisected circles, trying to reveal the secrets of their mother and father, with hints and hopes about the coming dawn growing, it seems, ever more frequent, I wonder if the true mystery of the book that promises to be revealed, is that the mystery is ever deepening and, since it is ultimately about itself, cannot be found outside of it, but through a constant "cycling through" of its extent.

*    *    *

Here is the passage in Latin, on p.287:

venite, preteriti, sine mora dumque de entibus nascituris decentius in lingua romanana mortuorum parva chartula liviana ostenditur, sedentes in letitiae super ollas carnium, spectantes immo situm lutetiae unde auspiciis secundis tantae consurgent humanae stirpes, antiquissimam flaminum amborium Jordani et Jambaptistae mentibus revolvamus sapientiam: totum tute fluvii modo mundo fluere, eadem quae ex aggere fututa iterum inter alveum fore futura, quodlibet sese ipsum per aliudpiam agnoscere contrarium, omnem demun amnem ripis rivalibus amplecti

Certainly if you are really interested you can find better translations and commentaries out there other than me, but here is how I would translate, trying to sound archaic and even keeping to the syntax:

Come, ye passed by, without delay, while the little Livian letter of entities to be born is displayed more fittingly in the Roman language of the deceased, you seated in happiness over the fleshpots, yea, watching the seat of muddiness whence, according to the omens, the races of people rise, so that we might turn over in the mind the most ancient wisdom of the two priests of Jordan and Jambaptista: that the entirety flows safely in the world in the manner of a river, the same one which was fucked from the mound will again be about to come to be among the riverbed, that any thing whatsoever knows itself through any other contrary thing, that, finally, every river is embraced by the banks of its rivals.

Words to live by! Another tantalizing glimpse, perhaps of ALP's letter, although it does not say that these are its contents; indeed this doesn't seem so (but the twins did seem to copy a version of it earlier, or at least a template that was also used by ALP/Shem).

The phrase totum tute fluvii modo mundo fluere is, I think, brilliant and beautiful. This kind of balanced phrase is typical of Latin aphorisms that turn on similar sounding and difficult words. The one that is most memorable to me is the one uttered by Schopenhauer when his mother-in-law, who was the bane of his life, died after falling down stairs: anus obit onus abit, "The old lady is deceased, the burden is gone." I have some difficulty with mundo: modo appears to be a postpositive preposition going with fluvii, leaving mundo in dative or ablative. With no other word to connect to, I take it alone as an ablative of place. 

Some notes: 

pretereiti. Literally means "those who have passed by," are in the past, but I like how it sounds like "passerby" (at least in translation, not sure what Latin epigraphs would have said here), like an address to the living from a tomb.

liviana: This could refer to Livy (the twins were reading about Roman history earlier), and besides the obvious reference to ALP, it could also be a reference to a type of letter or small type of writing named for Livia, the wife of Augustus. But it isn't capitalized here, as is Jordani and Jambaptistae. 

lutitiae, "muddy." You'll see "Paris" in the commentaries, but luteus means "muddy" and sim. Mud was just mentioned in the narrative before this interruption, when Shem instructed Shaun to fill a cup of mud to try and solve the geometry problem which they were struggling through. Technically the word Lutetia only means the town which would become Paris, but I prefer to see JJ inventing a 1st declension abstract noun from the adjective luteus. The "seat of muddiness," given the next sentence, would be the river bed.

flaminum: Looks like a mistake for fluminum, "rivers," as the names Jordan and "Jambaptista" (John the Baptist). These names evoke Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico. There is a lot out there on the importance of these two figures for FW.

eadem quae. Translations of this take this as a neuter plural but I think it is a feminine singular.

If you are not literally cooefficient (FW65, No. 19 - II.2, 273-286)

In book I, HCE was known through rumors, legends, myths, court cases, letters. He was thought to lie in an ancient chambered tomb whose outlines were still visible as an ancient mound. He was in the world and in history, and was made present by communication.

In book II, there is a different mode of knowledge. First of all, with the narrative continuity, something like a story with a narrator and not a series of discourses, a figure that is suggested to be HCE, the father of the children who works at a pub in Chapelizod, is described much like a character in a normal story. On the other hand, HCE is an object of mystical knowledge. There is a decoupling. On p.283-284, a practice problem from a textbook is read out, asking its student to produce a geometric figure that involves sides labeled "h," "c," and "e," to produce a shape which is the "family umbrogila": an insignia that represents an imbroglio which falls under a shadow (umbra). The problem seems meant for those who are "not literally cooefficient": it solves with math and geometry what, perhaps, can be discovered through philology and grammar, the skills which Issy seems interested in. 

The twins, at first, do not follow what their textbook is telling them ("Can you nei do her, numb? asks Dolph, suspecting the answer know. Oikkont, ken you, ninny? asks Kev, expecting the answer guess," 286.25-28). They start to work it out in another way, and end up producing a diagram much like the one described (this is from tomorrow's text, however).

Before the textbook is studied, the narrator describes the surroundings of the Earwickers' (is this their last name?) house in Chapelizod, and here is a further decoupling of HCE from the father figure: "At Tam Fanagan's weak yat his still's going strang" (276.21-22). Right now, the father is not the same as Finnegan. As the description of the drunken revelry going on into the night continues into p.277, we hear how Anna (Earwicker's wife) "was at the beginning lives yet and will return after great deap sleap rereising" (277.11-12). It is easy to read this in the context of the "big picture" of ALP, but I think more concretely here she is serving food at the wake, is planning on getting some sleep, and will wake up again after a while to return to her job.

*    *    *

It isn't lost on me how what I am doing with II.2 (and FW as a whole) is mirrored in the very form of this chapter, a running, difficult text with comments in each margin by the three children studying or present. I've always liked this chapter, but never understood it well until this time around, where I feel like I am getting a better grasp. But it's form still eludes me. I'm not sure what I am reading. Above, I suggested that part of the text is the textbook, and part is the reaction of the twins. There is narration and an external perspective in about the first half (the narrator(s) describing Chapelizod and the family as they approach the house, thinking about what the three children are or would be doing, and then observing them), with the second half (I think; will need to verify tomorrow and the next day) focused on Kev and Dolph leading each other through the exercises. Did the children get a hold of the text we are reading and add their comments? This seems too reductive and simplistic. Running out of steam as I write. This is an important topic that I've been thinking about for days and thought I had more to say. More tomorrow.

Where flash becomes word (FW65, No. 18 - II.2, 260-273)

Much of the first half or so of this chapter (II.2) is the slow approach of the narrators to the upper room itself, present to the children at their study. What kind of narrator not only tells about their subject but enters into their presence? The text is difficult to follow since, at times, they seem to speak of Shem, Shaun, and Issy as if they are there, witnessing what they are doing, and even reflecting their thoughts, but then make it clear that they are still approaching. For example, on p.267-68, the talk about Issy seems to imply presence, observation, but the verbs are future ("will preen her for...soon...will cudgel about...will sit and knit..."). It is as if the narrator (which commentators tell me is taking shape slowly as the voice of the four annalist masters, i.e. Mamalujo) is anticipating the arrival and dreaming about it. We aren't, yet, seeing the children on their own, hearing from them.

The narrator even anticipates the dawn, looking at a streetlamp ("Belisha beacon, beckon bright!"). If you search for this online you'll see that they are orange/yellow globular lamps hovering above crosswalks: the sun rising. They are walking towards the house in Chapelizod, they naturally encounter these and beseech them for safe voyage. 

A Belisha beacon in the UK. It flashes when a pedestrian will cross. It also looks like the rising sun, or maybe better a full moon just above the horizon. Source: flickr.

The streetlight "waves us to yonder...Where flash becomes word and silents selfloud" (267.13-16). I love the inversion of et Verbum caro factum est. "Selfloud" sounds like German Selbstlaut, which is an older term for "vowel" but literally "makes sound on its own." There is a lot of talk, in this paragraph focalizing Issy, about vowels and syllables and their secret meanings: "So mag this sybilette be our shibboleth that we may syllable her well" (267.20-21). I'm not sure if there is such a desire on its/their part for speaking rightly of Shem or Shaun.

Where flesh becomes word: the art of narration put concisely. As flash it accompanies thunder, even can be said to be thunder, which we know can speak all languages. Silents selfloud: if the last phrase was a simple, if metaphorical statement about what narrative does, this is an impossible dream: the silence begins speaking of its own accord? The "silents" i.e. the ones who are silent (persons, places, things...words!) begin speaking by themselves? The story tells itself? The reader is unnecessary? The "where" of this primeval uttering is the upstairs study room, the destination of the narrator (he will not arrive for some pages yet). The children are not merely studying but interpreting the thunder, reading for signs of their parents. Pursuing a perfect act of interpretation where the interpreter acts in such a way that the signs themselves come alive on their own (like the mystic macrocosmos signs at the beginning of Faust) and interpret themselves. It is all there in the words, in the thunder. That, at least, is a claim made by this speaker on this page.

Jehosophat, what doom is here! (FW65, No. 17 - II.1, 250-end)

Alternate post title: "What the thunder said."

This chapter opened with a description of how the children's games at dusk would be broadcast across the world. I suggested that the means of transmission was thunder (see my earlier post), which we know from FW to speak in many languages, 100 letters at a time. And we also learned that the game, described as a play with actors, would be followed by an "afterenactment" that is a Magnificent Transformation Scene of the marriage of day and night in a dawn of peace.

So what happens at the end of the book? Do we get our M.T.S.?

The appearance of the father after the final unsuccessful guess of Glugg is arguably where the scene begins. It is part of the play however, or at least the ongoing drama: his appearance is noted by the narrator as Issy's girls are celebrating their win ("reechoable mirthpeals and general thumbtonosery," 253.27-28), but not as the father, but (the implication of course being HCE) as a "longsuffering laird of Lucanhof" (253.32). He is also implied to be deus ex machina: a "god of all machineries" is invoked by the narrator (253.33) who is (feigning, I think) surprise at his appearance, playing along with the play. The children's game, which is the play itself, is over with Glugg's final failure, but the drama continues, and the scene is set for the transformation scene. So, do we get it?

After speculation about this figure's identity, and talk about his consort as well, the play itself is interrupted: notice the interesting typography at the end of 255.11, where the sentence is cut off with "---!" and a new paragraph begins, "Jehosophat, what doom is here!" I see this as the actual appearance of the father, outside of the play, the fourth wall definitively fallen down, the Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Maggies over, and the Great Transformation Scene which started to take shape cut short. There will be no such thing. It is not even completely dark yet.

The father is here, but the mother brings the children home, upstairs over the pub to begin their period of studying. Issy follows somberly. The door is closed and thunders: 

Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertooryzooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk. (257.27-28)

The commentators say this thunderword is full of variations of "shut the door" in Danish, Irish, German, French, and other languages. This is the first time we hear the thunder in book II. It was promised as the vehicle of the radio play at the beginning of II.1, but now it happens extradiegetically, outside of the play, which was abruptly stopped short before catharsis could be achieved. 

Now the curtain falls and the play is applauded. So the audience saw the play of the children's game, and its interruption, seeing the children brought home and shut into their upper chamber...and applauded it all, as if the play was the whole.

We are eager for dawn but we know that, even if the kids could pull off the Magnificent Transformation Scene, that dawn would only have been depicted as a false unity of opposites (day and night), an empty infinity. To me, the promise of a false or empty reconciliation at the end is made up for by the strange unity (this is Derrida's phrase) of the play and its dismantling. The Great Transformation Scene was meant to be its supplement and, like a satyr play maybe, to bring a sense of ending. Something else ended up supplementing it, and, perhaps by some subterfuge, gave the audience that feeling (after all, their applause is noted three times and louder each time, over pp.257-58). The curtain falls but the night rolls on.

*    *    *

I have no desire to go academic here, but this idea of "strange unity" is something I've been working through as I'm trying to chart out some next steps for my day-job research. I discovered its usefulness for my reading of the end of II.1 as I was writing this post. I do often write down notes during the day to flesh out formally when I sit down in the late evenings to write here, but the clear and resolved object of observation and my description of it usually comes out in the moment. I want to sit with this idea of "strange unity" a bit more, because it can be confessional. 

What value does my normally finegrained discussion (alternating with broad characterizations and sweeping generalizations, I'll admit) of difficult passages in a book that, until recently, I was mostly embarrassed to admit I read, have for anyone who might read it? Outside of fellow enthusiasts? I think I write for them and for myself; I said at the beginning of this writing project that I wanted to find my voice and even my own self while reading FW and writing about it. 

I think my life is a strange unity, and it is OK. I don't really mean my entire life, my being-for-others and for-myself, me as a spouse and a parent. Fully aware that I am extremely lucky to have the luxury to do this, I am only thinking about my intellectual endeavors, which encompasses my job and my hobby, how I find and make meaning in my own time, and how I spend a significant amount of time with the loved ones in my family...loving art and beauty, and the self, teaching my children what that means, finding it all together; what you could call my spiritual life (but not in a Catholic way)? Today at a music recital at my daughters' school the principal gave a short speech at the end thanking the children and encouraging them to continue playing their instruments, and said that it is good for the Geist (pointing to her head) as well as the Herz (pointed to her heart). I immediately thought, isn't Geist both? It is "mind" but if the mind is always growing and does so while on the highway of despair (I'm a desperate Hegelian unfortunately), I think that "heart" is equally involved in the process.

[This was a bit of a sidetrack. I've left sentences unfinished, extra spaces followed by lonely periods waiting for thoughts to be completed. I knew what they would be, but I didn't want to forget the next ideas, which would have made perfect sense, so I skipped ahead. But as I go back to fill in the blanks I'm left wondering what I was thinking, and wishing I could write and think linearly, write as fast as I think, or vice versa. I'll fill them in...you won't guess which ones...but I'll try to be better.]

It all remains a strange unity. In a very practical way, first of all: I didn't pursue a PhD in the spiritual matters I always felt the most deeply about: poetry, James Joyce, Vergil...for practical reasons maybe? I'm a literature guy, and sure, what I do professionally is that. The connections are manifold and I gain on each side of the divide. I read James Joyce at night and I struggle through a draft of a book about ancient novellas during the day. But I could never have done a dissertation on Joyce, for example, or published academic articles. I probably could now, twenty years later, after learning the trade and realizing that some distance is good; that strange unity means heterogeneity, which spurs growth. But it only is a possibility because of that strange unity of myself across the things I love and I like. To find a way to be good at the things I like (Hebrew and Egyptian philology, narratology) and to make a living in pursuit of them, researching and teaching, discovering things, preserving a small part of the record of humanity. It's all very good and I like it; I'm dedicated to it, devoted even. I hope that I can continue to do it and make a living. I've sacrificed a lot to get here and am highly skilled and specialized, and belong. I deserve it, even though it may not materialize.

But there's the negative side, a surfacing of that deeper drive whose name we don't want to say. It's why I have two blogs, this one, and an official one for updates about my research...which one am I writing on the most? It's clear. Or why, the more work I have to do in the day job, the more time I'm spending with FW: I am finishing my first book with a goal to have a complete draft by mid April (it's going well and according to schedule), but I'm also...reading FW in 65 days and blogging about it every day (and re-committing myself to that goal, I promise!). Don't tell my supervisor. The strange unity is fragile and can be problematic but it keeps me me.

(Challenge) Live out my life of strange unity; absolutely. But the sense of a deeper unity beyond the strange remains. Or, putting it another way, the strangeness wants to have a payoff beyond the two terms kept adjacent but never blended. Derrida argues that what is supplementary, by a certain logic, ends up being more essential than the core thing itself. Something in my life that brings them together is what I am doing right (write) now---now. This is the only place it can happen.  

It darkles (tinct tinct!) all this our funnaminal world (FW65, No. 16 - 2.1, 240-250)

It darkles (tinct tint!) all this our funnaminal world...We are circumveiloped by obscuritads. Man and belves frieren. There is a wish on them to be not doing or anything. (244.13-16)

What is it mean to have a book about the night, written in dream language, to feature a scene with growing evening twilight and the onset of night itself? This is the second so far (to the best of my knowledge): here, and at the end of I.8. Book IV is the coming of dawn for the first time (something which is spoken about often, and even dramatically, throughout FW), but night falls often in FW. Is the growing darkness of I.8 the same as II.1, the same as the night when the children study above the pub in II.2, and deep into which the inn keeper and guests drink and listen to stories in II.3? There is a narrative continuity in II.1-3 (and possibly beyond, still thinking through it), and it could reach back into book I, but I'm inclined to divide them, something I'm planning on sharing more thoughts about as I write.

To return to the original question: what about FW and its dramatization of nightfall (however many times)? There is a difference between the world growing dark and the end of the diurnal cycle that affects everyone: people go to sleep at different times, animals too, as is memorably narrated in this passage (which Joyce called a "Phoenix Park Nocturne" when he published it on its own). The question of the dream language of the book aside (and who the dreamer is), a book about the night does not only have to be about sleeping and dreams. 

The night, by which I mean what is not day, daylight, when people are awake and working and busy and obligated, is long and goes through stages: twilight, onset of darkness, the quiet evening by the lamp when the children are in bed, the time of dozing off and on through the middle of the night when the clock is at its highest (I mean the arms) and after which it is all downhill...towards the dawn, but before that, the time when the child cries or comes into your bed, or when you stir from a dream or go to the bathroom, or are awakened by your partner coming to bed late. Then the part we often skip and dream through, the intempesta nox, the untimely hours when, if you are awake, you are beset by worries and anxious about a future, distant or near. When you half awaken and are deceived by your very eyes as you try and make sense out of forms, shadows, and distant lights. Or if, when you are lucky to be sleeping, you sleep the deepest and have the deepest dreams. And even when dawn is rising you fall in and out of sleep, try to prolong it, keep the day at bay. Some eat in the evening, or work or study, or travel home. Nighttime can be a time alone in a diner or a neighborhood walk under streetlights and darkening windows with shades drawn. 

Night is the opposite of the where all cows are black, as Hegel memorably describes: the phaenomenal world maintains its phaenomena but now becomes phenomenal (how does a word meaning "what appears in the most basic way to human perception considered in virtue of that way it appears" also take on the meaning of "what appears to be the most extraordinary thing"?). It is the opposite of monotonous, abstract, bloodless, it is realistic: night is not uniformity but a dark rainbow of sights and sounds. It is sparkles ("darkles") in its darkness, and the darkness itself changes and changes with it.

I am also reminding myself that these lines are about children having to come inside after playing into the twilight as long as they can, fetched and brought home by their parents carrying a flashlight (here's a rare moment where I'll admit I prefer the British English: torch). Their "world" of play and imagination is "funnaminal," it is fun and it is tied to the magic world of appearances which, for a child, are never just what they seem, nurtured by the sparkling play of ever-darkening twilight, the changing lights of the houses and streets and the jewels of the sky.

For me, the night (in all the senses just described, all the phases) is alluring and challenging. It is often when my senses come the most alive, or my spirit stirs with the most urgency. It is probably why I am so desperately intertwined with FW. But is also when there is "a wish to be not doing anything." The one side (guess) usually wins out. This has been made ever more detrimental with shrinking screens and high speed internet. I sense that, if I want to rescue myself from the oblivion of doing nothing and being only for myself (when my being-for-others is put to rest, after the children are sleeping, my emails answered...before the untimely hours creep in and mix everything up) in the only time that (at least now) I have to myself, that I have to dance, even with tired limbs, into the night. Even through the motions. Hence this blog. 

The whole thugogmagog (FW65, No. 15 - 2.1, 219-239)

So we finally finish book I and start with book II. Something odd I realized yesterday: my copy of the book (the 1999 Penguin paperback with the Book of Kells on the front) does not have a page that labels book I (as here, in the copy of the book on archive.org, which happens to be Marshall McLuhan's personal copy), although it does for books II-IV. Not sure if that is an error in the edition or not; I haven't found another one to compare, and the copies I can find online on "those" websites are .epubs and not .pdfs. It might have fallen out; I bought my copy in 2001 and it has seen better days. 

Strict exegesis tonight.

*    *    *

This is a chapter of children's games where the conflict between Shem (Glugg here) and Shaun (Chuff) over Issy (Izod) picks up steam, the two boys competing for her, and her 28 girls' (the Maggies), attentions in an elaborate children's game based around a challenge of whether they can guess the color of her underwear. The answer: heliotrope, which is a pinkish purple. It is so named because of the heliotrope flower, which has this color, and which was thought to turn its flowers towards the sun; in Ovid, the nymph Clytie is turned into one after she is rejected by Helios, destined to always incline fruitlessly towards her beloved (discussed a bit more below). 

The basic meaning in terms of the "plot" of the book, if there is such a thing, is that the children are playing outside in the streets of Chapelizod on the margins of Phoenix Park at dusk, and are eventually found and brought home by their parents (Hump and Ann, who are you-know-who). According to the Playbill-like description in the first pages, this is not simply a narration of their games, but a radio play:

...wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. (219.16-17)

Transmitted by wireless radio, the audio of the play is released to as wide an audience as possible. Not an ordinary radio transmission, this story seems to be carried on the back of thunder ("crowdblast" = cloud-blast), and thereby heard by people everywhere the sky rumbles. No special receiver is apparently needed.

The broadest possible transmission and reception of the play is also enabled by its unique script, a combination of at least five, including Celtic, Teutonic, Slavic, Zend (Avestan?), and Latin. Eurocentric admittedly. The description of the script comes across like a short version of the 100-letter thunderwords (it is 39 characters long, I counted; does not seem significant). 

I note a disjunction in the substance of the transmission versus its medium. The transmission, like any radio signal, carries sound, but the in script. In II.3, we have a play transmitted via television. Perhaps this is anticipating that, but instead of transmitting picture and sound, a small visual approximation of the play in miniature, this transmission is textual: the "words" that are "loosed."

The play is performed "Every evening at lighting up o'clock sharp," but is it broadcast every night? Seems so. There is a "nightly redistribution of parts and players." Is there a typical performance? Broadcast plays like this (including the aforementioned example in II.3) may play the role in this book that ALP's letter played in book I. Can the play of II.1 be read as a version of FW itself? 

The whole thugogmagog, including the portions understood to be oddmitted as the results of the respective titulars reglecting to produce themselves, to be wound up for an afterenactment by a Magnificent Transformation Scene showing the Radium Wedding of Neid and Morning and the Dawn of Peace, Pure, Perfect and Perpetual, Waking the Weary of the World. (222.14-20)

The content of ALP's letter has stayed largely hidden (perhaps it was quoted from or paraphrased earlier). We witness the entirety of the evening's play in II.1, but it is set up as only an imperfect realization. The play itself is not able to effect the transformation (to wake the sleeper, to resurrect the dead); the artificial, deus ex machina mime that follows it merely depicts it. The language here reminds me of the beginning of book IV, but I do not want to glance ahead just yet.

Neid reminds me of naiad, or water nymph, and thus of Clytie who, according to myth, was in love with Helios the sun god, who was caused by Aphrodite to cheat on her with a princess named Leucothoe ("white swiftness"). After unsuccessfully trying to win Helios, she is never loved again by him, but is left starting at him on the bare rocks of a cliff, eventually turning into the heliotrope flower, which always inclines its pinkish purple blooms towards the sun, ever unrequited. Heliotrope plays an important role in this chapter as the color of Issy's underwear and, in bigger view, the secret password or cryptic leitmotif of the game itself. Perhaps its obscurity to Shem is the same thing as the inability of the play to "marry night and day" and effect the transformation, the waking of HCE.

hitherandthithering (FW65, No. 14 - I.8, 206-end)

Some chapters in FW are dominated, all or in the greater part, by a single voice (I.7), by voices in dialogue or formal response (I.6), by multiple voices taking turns (III.3), or by a mixture (I.1). The Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter (I.8) is an interesting combination. It is perhaps the most consistent chapter in the book in terms of voicing. It is a dialogue between two washerwomen on the banks of a river. At the same time, it is meant to be a river itself speaking, perhaps every river, since the chapter is famously filled with hundreds of names of rivers from all over the world. (The river that flows outside of my office at the university is on p.198, l.4-5: "her bulls they were ruhring, surfed with spree"). 

There are other voices too ("Other voices inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?") in this text. It is something I've been aware of, but I noticed it consciously for the first time today, as I thought about what it meant for---as JJ said about this chapter---its prose to reflect the sound of a river, especially towards the chapter's end, where the river, growing ever wider, and flowing ever faster, puts an ever greater distance between the two women, who have to shout to be heard by each other.

But first, the cadence of the river, of its flowing water. Such a thing seems easy to recognize, for example in the way that dactyls take the place of iambs or alternate with spondees: "Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you..." "We'll meet again, we'll part once more. The spot I'll seek if the hour you'll find." Just like the names of rivers add a shimmer to the words of the chapter, which are icons of the human convention of language, this flowing and modulating rhythm [I'm proud to report I spelled that word correct at the first go for maybe the first time in my life] is an icon of a natural sound. Or is at least meant to be.

We don't just hear the two women, or the sound of a river (two ways of voicing the text that are not mutually exclusive but are co-extensive). In yesterday's post, I wrote about how JJ listened to the Seine, apparently to verify whether he approximated the cadence of river flow in the cadence of the prose of I.8. I think JJ was listening not just for the water, but for the river and everything in it: ducks, boats, people walking along the embankments singing arm in arm. The sounds coming from of a river flowing through the midst of a city at night. As I.8 comes to an end, we hear: the womens' laundry being quickly folded and flipped ("Flip!"); the sound of a distant church bell ("Pingpong!"); birds ("Allalivial! Allaluvial!"); and the women, not only speaking in their flowing cadence, but hollering at each other across the stream ("Ho!" "Night!"). The women complain that the sound of bats (their wings flapping in the air as they dart and fly awkwardly in a way that is instantly recognizable as not the way that birds fly and dive) and the river itself is growing louder. They say the waters are "chittering" and "liffeying" and "hitherandthithering." The sentences are cut off ("Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of") and interrupting each other, spliced together on the page ("Night now! Tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone."). It is not so much the sound of a river flowing that JJ is capturing, but its soundscape dramatized.

*    *    *

As some of my posts here have shown, I am always interested in trying to account for the voices of a text. In this way, the poetics and paratext of I.8 resembles the ancient literature I study, where speakers in the text are not always differentiated from each other and from narrators. Some texts which are dramatic monologues of a single speaker (like Isaiah 40ff., in the Hebrew Bible) still include other voices, in quotations or paraphrases or recapitulations. Finding these, reading the text outloud, comparing different potential realizations, makes the text real to me, and reminds me that it is at the same time inaccessible. It seems to be no coincidence that, as I continue to work out my own voice in my writing, and struggle doing so, I find satisfaction and respite in finding the voice of another. Because I can bring my voice to bear on it, without committing myself to saying something of myself and from myself. By giving a voice, however temporary and provisional, to a text, especially a difficult one, I can speak without saying anything, and have the experience of seeking and the temporary satisfaction that comes with finding something that I know is not the final thing to find, only a worthy yet temporary substitution for the own voice that I know, once found and spoken, will bring some kind of peace, but which seems to require everything.

Tell me every tiny teign. I want to know every single ingul. (FW65, No. 13 - I.8, 196-206)

I have a personal connection to today's text, the "Anna Livia Plurabelle" chapter (I.8) which concludes the first book. Travelling to Paris in October 2022 for a conference, I had about 8 hours to myself on a Sunday before needing to head to Gare de l'Est to catch my train back to Berlin. The only real sightseeing I did was visit Les Invalides, but besides that I spent the day wandering the streets and tracking down as many of Joyce's old apartments and favorite restaurants as I could. I got a lot of my information from the wonderful FW blog of Peter Chrisp (see esp. this post). Joyce finished both Ulysses and FW here, and moved on what seems like an almost yearly basis. Such was our life for a few years during graduate school in Dallas and Chicago...

Looking east down (up?) the Seine from the Pont de l'Alma in Paris. See more from my Paris trip, with lots of photos of former Joyce residences. This picture admittedly isn't much; it was a grey day. I'm also not the best photographer, just a very amateur enthusiast.

The most memorable part of my big walk around the 5th (where I was staying, in the Latin Quarter), 6th, 7th, and finally 1st arrondissements was walking across the Pont de l'Alma. This bridge was near Joyce's residence as he was finishing FW (here is the apartment building). It was his favorite bridge over the river. He came here the night he finished writing chapter I.8 to listen to it and convince himself that he had captured its voice (the voice of every river). The bridge has been rebuilt since his time, but the river and its embankments are much the same if you look at old photographs. I didn't have the chance to stand there at night however (although is it ever really still and quiet there?).

In my travels around Europe since moving here in 2022, these kinds of self-guided walking tours based around where people I look up to lived are pretty typical for me. I want to feel like I am tracing footsteps, catching sight of everyday scenes they took for granted. In London, I did this for Marx and Engels' homes (and walked from Marx's final home to his grave). I don't think I've fallen prey to a biographical fallacy. These experiences are meaningful for me, and I am glad I have done them, but they were also fleeting. In the moment, standing on the Pont de l'Alma, I imagine I felt something profound, but I am sure I was also extremely tired (I was heading to catch a glimpse of l'Arc de Triomphe before heading to the Metro for the last time). I don't remember what my thoughts were. Probably thinking about how the world of Joyce, his labored, slow, agglutinative writing of Finnegans Wake, through failing eyesight and with the doubts of his friends and the interested literati growing louder, is gone, more so than the hithering-thithering waters of the Seine are from moment to moment. Besides my love for FW, it is his process of composition that fascinates me. Not just the aesthetic of the work, which I've written about in this blog, but the way to live a life of composition and to build up towards something new, beautiful, and personal from scraps of paper, from reading and having conversations and listening and watching (I'm thinking here of Shaun's caricature of Shem's writing process in I.7). Today, as I read through I.8, I felt the courage to find a connection to myself in those pages, and remembering that I felt that urge to create and to live a life where I am giving myself fullest expression.

Me standing before 6 Rue Blaise Desgoffe, where JJ wrote parts of FW. All of these apartment buildings look the same and blur together in my mind.

Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq! (FW65, No. 12 - I.6, 152-1.7, end)

I am a bit off of schedule. Not with reading the book: still on pace to finish on April 15th. But I skipped most of a week because I was sick, and have been reading a bit more every day to make up. The past few chapters have also been much easier reading, to the point that, though I'm writing now about I.7, I have actually finished I.8, having read it all yesterday in one go. The book is going to get much more difficult, so I am going to slow down and stick to 10 pages a day, and not try to surpass that.

It is hard coming up with something to write about every day. I've let myself slip a bit by keeping up with the reading but not posting here every day, but I am going to try earnestly to go back to the original design and write something about FW every day. Even if it is just a little commentary on something I find interesting.

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He points the deathbone and the quick are still. Insomnia, somnia somniorum. Awmawm. (193.29-30)
...
He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak. 
--- Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq! (195.5-6)

I.7 is mostly (except for a few pages at the end) the figure of Shaun talking about Shem and painting him in a very harsh light. Shem responds near the end. 

These two statements are spoken by a narrator (no identity can really be discerned) describing what Shaun and then Shem does with their magic wands. They are then each followed by a response. 

In the first, the narrator describes the effect of Shaun's wand: those he enchants fall asleep, and the presence of sleep is invoked in a chant which parodies the common Catholic Latin refrain. This kind of solemn, churchy pronunciation seems to be characteristic of Shaun. The narrator himself seems to be overtaken by the sleep, since his "Amen" is said while yawning. Also evoked in "Awmawm" is the sacred syllable "Om" and maybe "mom," anticipating ALP's coming.

Sleep being equated with death is nothing new. When I think about it in terms of FW itself, the connection is striking, since this is a book about sleep. It is also about resurrection, for which death is a prerequisite. I don't think that Shaun is actually putting anyone to sleep. It might simply be the result of listening to him lecture for an entire book (and beyond, if we go back to I.6, which is mostly him as well, including him assuming lecture mode before the Mookse and Gripes fable). 

Shaun's action is the opposite of a miracle, which is ironic given his harsh criticism of Shem's apostasy. This is why I think we see a narrator (again, who?) straightforwardly assessing the meaning of Shaun's action.

But could it be Shem doing this? Just before this statement, Shaun is apoplectically calling out Shaun and demanding he answer. Is Shem silencing him? Shaun's final statement seems to show Shem standing before him in anger: "Sh! You are mad!" Before that, he swore that he would go silent if he was speaking wrongly of Shem: "That a cross may crush me if I refuse to believe in it. That I may rock anchor through the ages if I hope it's not true. That the host may choke me if I beneighbor you without my charity!"

Shem would then wave his wand (his pen...Shaun does not seem to be associated with a wand-like object) and silence Shaun.

Does he fall asleep? Or just silent? Somnia somniorum not only mimics saecula saeculorum in sound but in sense as well. This is a superlative construction (which is ultimately something in Hebrew that is carried over into Greek then Latin translations of the Bible), like the book of the "Song of Songs" (shir hashirim) which means "the most exquisite song." So Shem can make Shaun sleep the deepest of all sleeps. But it is not just in somnia (in + accusative of motion towards: the enchanted enter sleep), but insomnia: sleeplessness. The sentence also says: "sleeplessness is the most exquisite of sleeps," or "sleeplessness is the dream of sleeps," that is, wishing that one could sleep. The earnestness of this prayer requires an "Amen"...and the prayer seems already to be working, since it is said through a yawn.

If Shem is pointing the deathbone, then he might be saying Insomnia..., and if so, it would mock Shaun's pious religious disposition (Shaun can also speak in extenso in Latin, as demonstrated earlier in this chapter).

A further result of reading this way: when Shem (surely it is he doing the action at the chapter's end) "lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak," the dumb could refer back to Shaun, and it would then be Shaun (and others?) saying "Quoiquoiquoi..." 

What is saying "Quoiquoi etc.", if not Shaun, or in addition to Shaun...or who has Shaun joined...or who is Shaun speaking as, or like what? It sounds like ducks to me, on the river that is ALP that has flowed onto the scene; note especially how it ends "quoiq" (like quack) and not "quoi." It also sounds like the gurgling of a stream. "Quoi" means "what" in French. I see substance itself coming alive, the lifewand a pen that gives voice to what was previously silent and allow its quidditas ("whatness") to emerge. In its own voice. Waving the lifewand is an act of poetic creation. This is so different from Shaun's description of Shem's debased kind of creativity throughout the chapter (to the point that he describes him creating ink from his own feces and writing illegible texts all over his body). 

It is as if Shaun's damaging act of vituperation is countered by Shem's silencing. Shem is then only able to give voice to the voiceless (the recently fallen dumb) because he is standing at the river his mother. It may even be that the mother is the one given the voice as well, just as Shem is the scribe for ALP's letter in I.4.

A collideorscape! (FW65, No. 11 - I.6, 126-152)

Question 9 in I.6, presented like a radio show interview where a figure like Shem asks Shaun a series of questions, each focusing on a different persona or space within FW, stopped me in my tracks. I read it and was overwhelmed. I had to put the book down, being almost confused why a paragraph made so much sense to me and spoke to me on such a deep level (I've given it, as printed in my copy of the book, below). It seems to me to include an entire aesthetic, a way to bundle up the artistic and linguistic achievement of FW and offer it as a way of understanding the world, compressed into the image of the kaleidoscope. What can I do with it?

The collideorscape (FW 143.3-28) [source]

There is so much happening in this passage but at the same time such a single vision and thought process that I would like to do a detailed commentary, but larger thoughts about what this means and what it can mean for me are more urgent and are desperate to come out now, so I will save that for another post.

First I have to express my understanding and work it out through writing about it. I think it is important to clarify at the outset how it is different from a normal kaleidoscope. That is what strikes me first. A kaleidoscope is a lens to view the world through which gathers its light, splits it into different shapes, and sets them in motion. In a real kaleidoscope, what you see is in the viewer itself, and what you see it do is caused by your hand turning the barrel. The only external presence in the viewer is the light taken in from the external world. 

A view through a kaleidoscope. By Albarubescens - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 [link]

The kaleidoscope of FW, which JJ calls a "collideorscape," is, on the contrary, true to what enters through its aperture, a prism that gathers everything that it sees and brings it together in its diversity. Like a real kaleidoscope, everything appears saturated with all colors of the rainbow, with the fundamental components of the natural light we see with our own eyes. But instead of resolving what it sees into a single crystal vision foreign to what enters the viewer, it shows the truth of everything and presents them next to each other. It is like a particle collider, but everything is held together, the simple substance of what you see and the component parts, arranged next to each other in a landscape: a collideor-scape. The cyclical motion around the unmoving center as the barrel turns could be present in the thing itself as well.

For this to work, there has to be a fundamental sympathy, even ultimate identity, between the instrument of viewing and the object being viewed. I think this just has to be an article of faith. The author or artist has to finetune this, has to search for deeper meanings in reality, history, and the human heart, and has to learn to exert more control over the means of expression. I wonder if this belief can be espoused apart from the actual practice. Is the purpose of the theory not observational accuracy (adaequatio intellectus ad rem) and lucid reporting, but the production of radiant objects? What am I doing in delineating it, in recognizing it?

It can be, at least, an aspiration: to strive to see everything in this way, to unfocus your eyes and transcend time and space, but at the same time preserve it. It is also a belief that the art can be adequate to the world in all its diversity. 

In simple terms, developing this "collideorscape" device is what JJ did in writing FW and devising the language and style that is both able to be simply expressive of the basic substance of English words and sentences, and at the same time radiating outwards into larger meanings. Though printed with a standard letter press, anchored on the English language, using the Latin alphabet and the conventions of the left-to-write book of lines, pages, paragraphs, chapters, the words in their truth, if they are read aloud, read repeatedly, and held next to each other in the mind, they are prismated. Like the simple meaning of the sentences of FW in sequence, which is (in one analysis, an oversimplifying one, but a valid one nevertheless) one story and one series of speeches of different kinds about certain topics, it is also many stories, possibly every story, and discourses about fundamental natures and the depths of the heart. 

Or, better yet, and to be more precise, is a claim to be such, and a claim that such a thing is possible.