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.
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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.
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