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)?
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