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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mattahah! Marahah! Luahah! Joahanahanahana!

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

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

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

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

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