Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Have I mentioned before that reading the crib about Chapter 10 in A Skeleton Key to “Finnegan’s Wake”: James Joyce’s Masterwork Revealed (by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson) was daunting?  That’s nothing!  This is what Tindall has to say about Chapter 11 in A Reader’s Guide to “Finnegans Wake” :

Earwicker’s apology in the third part and closing time in the fourth are clear enough – as simple as anything around here; but the stories in the first two parts are the obscurest part of the Wake. Joyce himself (Letters, III, 422) called his story of the tailor a “wordspiderweb”.  Nothing more intricate or more forbidding to assurance and comfortable reading.  The reader – if I may change metaphor in midweb – finds himself, in the tale of the sailor, all at sea, or when landed now and again, unable to see the wood for the trees or even the trees in the wood.  The causes of confusion are plain.  Now in the period of deepest sleep, we dream of drunks, whose exchanges, even in periods of lighter sleep, might tax our sobriety.  The problem is who among those drunks is telling the story of the sailor and who the story of the Russian General.  (Tindall, p.188)

Ok. Nicely discouraged, I took notes…

The chapter is set in the pub, with Earwicker presiding at the bar, and the radio is blaring. There are four parts:

1. The Sailor and the Tailor (twins of a sort) have a quarrel.
2. So do Buckley (Butt) and a Russian General.
3. Earwicker makes an apology and a boast.
4. It’s closing time at the pub: the drunks go home and Earwicker has a fall.

There are lots of interruptions, including calls for drink, pauses for giving change to the drinkers, visits to the urinal and gossip about the host.  There is Pidgin English (which Tindall reminds me is the language of business) and (apparently) the Days of the Week in Finnish ( never found them).  There are many refrains, including from Do Ye Ken John Peel, Take Off that White Hat and The Charge of the Light Brigade.  This is one example from p.334 in Penguin Kindle Edition, line breaks are mine:

Yes, we’ve conned thon print in its gloss so gay/how it came from Finndlader’s Yule to the day/
and it’s Hey Tallaght Hoe on the king’s highway/ with his hounds on the home at a turning.

[I didn’t mention, did I, that my computer’s CD player has *pout* died, and I can no longer play the Naxos recording of FW, to give me the rhyme and rhythm of refrains like this.  The Offspring was supposed to come this week and upgrade everything to Yikes! Windows 10 and all new architecture, but he has succumbed to the flu so I am bereft.]

Campbell is more helpful in this chapter.  He says, first of all that:

The setting is the tavern of HCE [ a.k.a. Earwicker].  The radio is blaring, and the customers are pushing each other about, swapping yarns, and drunkenly joking.  It becomes gradually apparent that all the yarns and radio broadcasts taken together add to something like the ancient story of the shame of HCE [i.e. the accusations of his indecent assault of the two girls in the earlier chapter].  The yarns cut across each other, and yet carry forward the inevitable tale. (Campbell, p195)

And he also says that there are nine interwoven strands which I’m paraphrasing and adding to here:

(A) A Tavern Brawl underlying the entire action;
(B) The story of a Norwegian Captain and his enquiries concerning a Tailor in the town and a suit that he’s ordered.
(C) A (very obscure, very grubby) radio skit of the brothers Butt and Taff with a punchup and then a reconciliation between them
(D) Butt’s tale of his shooting the Russian General (another manifestation of Earwicker) at the Battle of Sevastopol, which Tindall says is another representation of a son killing his father.

During the intermissions there are news reports:

(E) The Steeplechase
(F) A TV account of four Mullingar Events (but see below* re Tindall and the invention of TV)
(G) An account of the Annihilation of the Atom
(H) A radio review of the Dismemberment of a Hero, and

an endless Tale of a Tub recounted by the host himself.

Thus armed, I read the chapter. 58 pages of total confusion!

This is the first couple of paragraphs:

It may not or maybe a no concern of the Guinnesses but.

That the fright of his light in tribalbalbutience hides aback in the doom of the balk of the deaf but that the height of his life from a bride’s eye stammpunct is when a man that means a mountain barring his distance wades a lymph that plays the lazy winning she likes yet that pride that bogs the party begs the glory of a wake while the scheme is like your rumba round me garden, allatheses, with perhelps the prop of a prompt to them, was now or never in Etheria Deserta as in Grander Suburbia, with Finnfannfawners, ruric or cospolite, for much or moment indispute.

Whyfor had they, it is Hiberio-Miletians and Argloe-Noremen, donated him, birth of an otion that was breeder to sweatoslaves, as mysterbolder, forced in their waste, and as for Ibdullin what of Himana, that their tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler, as modern as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute, (hearing that anybody in that ruad duchy of Wollinstown schemed to halve the wrong type of date) equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas for distance, getting and connected by the magnetic links of a Bellini-Tosti coupling system with a vitaltone speaker, capable of capturing skybuddies, harbour craft emittences, key clickings, vaticum cleaners, due to woman formed mobile or man made static and bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegoturny marygoraumd, eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes.

 Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics Kindle Edition pp. 309-310).

All I can say about that is that I can make no sense at all of the second paragraph but that (primed by my pre-reading) I can see that the tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler with its supershielded umbrella antennas for distance is the radio blaring.  And that’s what a lot of my reading of this chapter was like: decoding small bits of it, but making no sense whatsoever of the plot or its sequences without the help of my trusty guides.  Here’s an example that got my attention because of its relevance to the present day, but I’d never have known it without the translation beforehand:

Campbell, p 223	Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics Kindle Edition p.346
How successful American businessmen are making resolutions never to grow old or raise salaries or become spiritually complicated or donate money to encourage philosophy.	How Old Yales boys is making rebolutions for the cunning New Yirls, never elding, still begidding, never to mate to lend, never to ate selleries and never to add soulleries and never to ant sulleries and never to aid silleries with sucharow with sotchyouroff as Burkeley’s Show’s a ructiongetherall.

There’s a six-page paragraph that doesn’t make it any easier either.

My admiration for the illustrator of the Folio edition grows, though he says entirely different things about this chapter because he’s chosen to illustrate the last part of it, possibly because it’s the easiest to interpret…

This is closing time in the tavern: the landlord, Earwicker, has drunk his customer’s leftovers, sucking up ‘whatever surplus rotgut… was left by the laze lousers in the different bottoms of the various different replenquished drinking utensils’.  Earwicker’s manservant, Sackerson, is holding the key to the tavern door: ‘Ere the sockson locked at the dure.  Which he would, shuttinshore.  And lave them to sture.’ Finally he calls out, ‘Tide, genmen, plays’ (‘Time, gentlemen, please’).  The group of customers ‘all pour forth’ from the tavern.  Each of the four singing old men (‘the fore olders’) are walking out of the frame in different directions: ‘North’, ‘Soother’, ‘Eats’ and ‘Washte’.

There is also a strip of sixteen composers’ portraits across the top of the illustration, brought into the text in the form of wordplay.  The first three, from left to right, are Rossini (‘rosescenery’), Haydn (‘haydyng’) and Meyerbeer (‘mere bare’). (John Vernon Lord, Notes to the Illustrations’ in the Folio edition of Finnegans Wake, p xxxiii).

Was Beethoven mentioned somewhere in this chapter?  I didn’t find it if he was…

Here’s the picture on Pinterest, though I can’t tell whether it’s a Folio Society Pinterest page or whether the person who posted it there has breached copyright.

PS There are two more of those 100-letter thunder claps.  (I think) Campbell says that this one (on p314 of the Penguin Kindle Edition) refers to HCE’s fall :

Bothallchoractorschumminaroundgansumuminarum
drumstrumtruminahumptadumpwaultopoofoolooderamaunsturnup!

and this one (on p332 of the Penguin Kindle Edition) takes place at the consummation of a marriage between Hanigan and Hunigan (I think!) but I have no idea who they are because as usual in FW identities are shifting all over the place.

Pappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmacmacmac
whackfalltherdebblenonthedubblandaddydoodled and

These thunderbolt words form the left and right hand frames of the illustration in the Folio edition, to see it, click the Pinterest link above.

*Far be it from me to argue with Tindall who has been so helpful, but I think he might be wrong about the timing of the invention of television.  He notes, on more than one page, that Joyce seems to be making allusions to “teilweisoned” broadcasts of programs and “verbivocovisual” TV which often offends eye and ear alike.  But Tindall says, there was no TV at the time of Earwicker’s dream or Joyce’s writing.  (p.197) I’m not so sure.  I don’t know exactly when Joyce wrote this chapter or exactly where he was in different years after he left Dublin for Europe, but I know that FW was first published in 1939 and Wikipedia tells me that the history of TV begins in the late 19th century, that there was a demonstration of a crude TV by Rignoux and Fourrier in Paris in 1909 and a more impressive demo by Baird at Selfridges in London in 1925.  Who’s to say that Joyce didn’t know about these demonstrations and decided to use the concept in FW, eh?

So on to Chapter 12 – and it had better be easier than this one!

*Any numbers when quoting from FW refer to line numbers in the text so that readers can find their way whichever edition they are using.

Sources:

A Reader’s Guide to “Finnegans Wake” by William York Tindall, Syracuse University Press, 1969; and

A Skeleton Key to “Finnegan’s Wake”: James Joyce’s Masterwork Revealed, by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, Collected Works Edition, New World Library, 2005

Finnegans Wake (Modern Classics) read by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan, Naxos AudioBooks 2009

Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics), introduction by Seamus Deane, Penguin, 2015.  (I’m using the Kindle edition ASIN B00XX0H95S, just to make quoting easier because typing the text is such a provocation to AutoCorrect).)

• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce (with help from Tindall and Campbell) #1 Getting started
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #2 Chapter 1
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #3 Chapter 2
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #4 Chapter 3
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #5 Chapter 4
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #6 Chapter 5
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #7 Chapter 6
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #8 Chapter 7
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #9 Chapter 8
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #10 Chapter 9
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #11 Chapter 10
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #12 Chapter 11
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #13 Chapter 12
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #14 Chapter 13
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #15 Chapter 14
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #16 Chapter 15
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #17 Chapter 16
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #18 Chapter 17

 

So, we come to Part II Chapter 10!

Small signs of progress: I am more than half way through A Reader’s Guide to “Finnegans Wake” by my trusty guide William York Tindall, and 45% through A Skeleton Key to “Finnegan’s Wake”: James Joyce’s Masterwork Revealed by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson.

But only 41% through the actual book I am reading, so I shall save the champagne for later.

Just flicking through the pages of chapter X in my copy of FW, I notice some strange things:

• There are footnotes and marginalia left and right.  Not the editor’s, they are James Joyce commenting on his own chapter.  Some of the footnotes are very long, taking up over half the page.  I know enough about this book by now to know that they are not there to make anything clearer to me.
• There are slabs of text in what appears to be straightforward French (yay! I can read that) and Latin (well beyond the capacity of my experience in Form 2).
• There is a diagram like the ones we used to draw in secondary school geometry. I recognise the symbol π (pi).

So.  Consulting Tindall I learn that chapters IX, X and XI are the densest part of the Wake (which is both encouraging, and not) and he helpfully sorts out what Joyce means by the first lines:

As we there are where are we are we there (Finnegans Wake (Penguin Kindle Edition p.260)

À la Tindall, this becomes:

We are there.  Where are we?  Are we there? ( Tindall, p.170)

Hmmm… indeed.

Those who’ve read Ulysses will recognise what Joyce is doing in this chapter: he’s playing with form by mimicking text.  This time he is mimicking the children’s homework – Shem’s, Shaun’s and Isabel’s – and the footnotes and marginalia are a parody of  scholarship.  This chapter was apparently published in 1937 separately as Storiella as She is Syung, the title showing the importance of the footnotes at the bottom: they are the female’s i.e. Isabel’s and the marginalia are Shem’s and Shaun’s.  I use the Kindle Edition to quote FW here because it’s such a pain to copy Joyce’s games with spellings only to have auto-correct fix them – but the eBook has difficulty with the form, messing it up entirely.  This is a screenshot of what it looks like:

You can see Shem’s smart-aleck comments on the left, and Shaun’s pompous professorial ones on the right (in capital letters, which they’re not supposed to be), but (you’ll have to squint to see it), to see Isabel’s footnotes, you have to click that little ‘1’ (which ought by rights to be a ‘4’) after the word voylets (violets) and go out of the text to wherever Kindle has put the footnotes.  Wrong, wrong, wrong, they are footnotes not endnotes and the compositors who have fiddled with this obviously have no idea what they are doing.  It gets worse: later on in the chapter they turn these left and right marginalia into paragraph headings, differentiating between the two with italics and capitals, sticking them in where someone thinks they ought to go, a layout which destroys the whole point of Joyce setting it up like this.  Is it just the Kindle edition which does this, or the Penguin paperback edition too?  (BTW#1 unde et ubi is Latin for how and where, which despite the Latin is more comprehensible than imaginable itinerary through the particular universal, eh?) (BTW#2 Yes, I know they’re not called compositors.  But I don’t know what the digital arrangers of text are called. Feel free to enlighten me).

My indispensable Tindall tells me that, for these three commentators:

Their ostensible concern is with grammar, history and mathematics.  Their real concern is with their parents.  Through history they arrive at H.C.E. [their father a.k.a. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker  and a zillion other names besides] and through geometry at A.L.P. [their mother Anna Lavinia Plurabelle who is also the River Liffey and a zillion other things besides], who, working at home, created these little homeworkers. (Tindall, p.172)

Tindall also warns me that Shaun and Shem in their role as commentators literally shift sides of the page.  He then goes on to explain a whole lot of stuff which makes no sense until I have read the FW text but I read it anyway.  (My process, so far in reading FW is to read the Tindall, and then the Campbell, and then I remember some of it as I am reading FW, and sometimes I consult them again when I am totally confused. I usually find Tindall more helpful in the detail but Campbell often more illuminating.  Both are indispensable, and ha! if I ever read FW for a second time, I will get more out of these commentaries than now, a naïve newbie floundering through FW for the first time).

Anyway.  Now to Campbell, who is likewise discouraging with his bald assertion that this chapter is perhaps the most difficult in the book.  But he also helpfully says:

… [It] describes the course of events during the study hour of the children.  It amplifies the moment into an image of studenthood in general, and enlarges the little tasks into representations of the great scholarly tasks that have occupied mankind from the beginning.  The principle references are to the medieval studies of the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric) and Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, Astronomy) and to the esoteric doctrines of the Kabbala.

So.  I might be ok with grammar bits, maybe the logic, probably the music, rusty on the geometry and out-of-my-depth on the astronomy because our Australian skies are not the same as Joyce’s northern hemisphere skies.  As for the Kabbala(h), no chance because the Wikipedia page is way too long for me to be bothered reading it..  My cribs will have to suffice.

Campbell differs from Tindall in his assessment of who the commentators are, but is put right by editor Epstein who says the footnotes are by Issy, not Shem.  But there’s a nice summary that tells me where I’m going once I start to read:

[The narrative outline of this chapter is fairly simple, but obscured by the intricacies of the student problems.  The chapter opens with a review, in allegorical terms, of the process of creation; twenty-six pages (260-86) are devoted to the description of the descent of spirit into time and space.  First, the will to creates moves the world-father to beget the universe; then the world becomes possible, takes form, actually appears.  Man comes into being with his primitive lusts and taboos, and becomes localised in the tavern of HCE.  There is the nursery of the children, the entire human comedy presents itself in miniature.

[The last pages of the chapter (286-308) are centred in the nursery.  The boys are at their tasks, and their sister is musing over letters.  The good little boy, named Kev in this chapter, is having trouble with his geometry; bad little Dolph assists him, and in so doing teaches him something which elicits a blow from the indignant hero.  Dolph recovers from the knockout and the two are reconciled.  Then comes supper, and time for bed.  (A Skeleton Key to “Finnegan’s Wake”: James Joyce’s Masterwork Revealed, by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, Collected Works Edition, New World Library, 2005, p.164 )

Reading through the Campbell crib is extremely daunting.  Best to get started and see what I can make of it….

***

So much for all that!  But I have found some lovely snippets for your delectation.  Page refs are to the Penguin Kindle Edition:

Sweet-some auburn, cometh up as a selfreizing flower, that fragolance of the fraisey beds  (p. 265, fraise is French for strawberry)

Stew of the evening, booksyful stew. (p.268, an allusion to the Turtle Soup in Alice in Wonderland?  Soup of the evening, beautiful soup!

To me or not to me. Satis thy quest on (p.269).

There’s a split in the infinitive from to have to have been to will be (p.271)

This is the glider that gladdened the girl that list to the wind that lifted the leaves that folded the fruit that hung on the tree that grew in the garden Gough gave (p. 271, a twist on This is the House That Jack Built.  Neither Tindall nor Campbell have anything to say about this, so I remain mystified about who Gough might be).

And this, which all those of us who remember parsing will enjoy:

From gramma’s grammar she has it that if there is a third person, mascarine, phelinine or nuder, being spoken abad it moods prosodes from a person speaking to her second which is the direct object that has been spoken to, with and at. Take the dative with his oblative for, even if obsolete, it is always of interest, so spake gramma on the impetus of her imperative, only mind your genderous towards his reflexives such that I was to your grappa… (Finnegans Wake (Penguin Kindle Edition p. 268)

It comes as a relief to read the French segment: I’m intrigued as to why it is just straightforward French without any word games.

Finnegans Wake (Penguin Kindle Edition p. 281).

My translation (FWIW)

Aujourd’hui comme aux temps de Pline et de Columelle la jacinthe se plaît dans les Gaules, la pervenche en Illyrie, la marguerite sur les ruines de Numance et pendant qu’autour d’elles les villes ont changé de maîtres et de noms, que plusieurs sont entrées dans le néant, que les civilisations se sont choquées et brisées, leurs paisibles générations ont traverse les âges et sont arrives jusqu’à nous, fraîches et riantes comme aux jours des batailles.

Today, as in the times of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth pleases itself in Gaul, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numance, while all around them cities have changed masters and names.  Many (of these flowers) entered into oblivion while civilizations were shocked and broken, [but] peaceful generations [of flowers] have traversed the ages, and come [back] to us, fresh and smiling, as in the days of battles.

The section where the boys are doing their maths is often very funny, even if your memories of Fourth Form maths are ab-surd (Sorry, couldn’t resist that!):

Show that the median, hce che ech, interecting at royde angles the parilegs of a given obtuse one biscuts both the arcs that are in curveachord behind. Brickbaths. The family umbroglia. A Tullagrove pole to the Height of County Fearmanagh has a septain inclinaison and the graphplot for all the functions in Lower County Monachan, whereat samething is rivisible by nighttim, may be involted into the zeroic couplet, Nom denombres! The balbearians. palls pell inhis heventh glike noughty times ∞, find, if you are not literally cooefficient, how minney combinaisies and per-mutandies can be played on the international surd! (Penguin Kindle Edition pp. 284-285).

Here’s the Latin bit, (which makes an amusing contrast with using Google translation, but I’ll spare you that.)

Finnegans Wake (Penguin Kindle Edition p. 287).

Gilbert Highett’s translation in Tindall, p178

Venite, preteriti, sine mora dumque de entibus nascituris decentius in lingua romana 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 Jambapastae mentibus revolvamus sapientiam: totum tute fluvii modo mundo fluere, eadem quae ex aggere fututa fuere iterum inter alveum fore futura, quodlibet sese ipsum per aliudpiam agnoscere contrarium, omnem demun amnem ripis rivalibus amplecti

Come past, you people of the past (or you dead), without delay, and while in a little page in the manner of Livy an explanation is given rather gracefully in the Roman language of the dead, about the beings who are still to be born, sitting in joy (letitiae should be letitia) over pots of flesh, or rather looking at the site of Paris (lutetiae, a play on words that may justify letitiae) from which under favourable omens such great races of humanity are to arise, let us turn over in our minds the most ancient wisdom of both (amborium should be amborum) the priests Jordan and Jambaptista: that the whole universe flows safely like a river that the same things were poked (fututa is obscene) [Google translates it using another word beginning with ‘f”] from the heap of rubbish will again be inside the riverbed, that anything recognises itself through some contrary, and finally (demun should be demum) that the whole river is enfolded in the rival banks along its sides.

Well, that makes it clearer, eh?

And the diagram?  According to Tindall it is Shem’s mathematical representation of his mother.  The brothers, now renamed Kev and Dolph quarrel at this point because Dolph is supposed to be helping his brother but Kev has failed to understand any of it.  (Along with the rest of us).  They reconcile, it’s bedtime, there’s a sort of dialogue between all the great names of history from Alcibiades to Xenophon, and then there are ten monosyllables vertically down the page  – Aun Do Tri Cri Cush1 Shay Shockt OCkt Ni Geg – which Campbell explains like this, to my complete mystification:

Now comes a list of ten monosyllables which gear the circling wheels of Finnegans Wake into the Kabbalistic decade of the sephiroth.  This is the powerhouse of the book, with energy currents going to every page.  The syllables, each representing a number, fall into three groups of three, with one remaining.  They represent the descent of the all-highest One (Aun) down the ladder of the decade to union with Zero in order to form the number ten (Geg).  Each rung of the descent is matched by a marginal word corresponding to a phase of cosmic revolution. (Campbell, p 191, and he explains it all in great detail over the next two pages as well).

Uh, ok.

Do not get the impression from this post that I understand anything more than scraps of this chapter: without Tindall and Campbell, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea what this chapter is about, and I’d be giving up if not for their advice that I’ve now ‘read’ two of the three most difficult chapters in the book.

So on to Chapter 11!

*Numbers when quoting from FW refer to line numbers in the text so that readers can find their way whichever edition they are using).

Sources:

A Reader’s Guide to “Finnegans Wake” by William York Tindall, Syracuse University Press, 1969; and

A Skeleton Key to “Finnegan’s Wake”: James Joyce’s Masterwork Revealed, by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, Collected Works Edition, New World Library, 2005

Finnegans Wake (Modern Classics) read by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan, Naxos AudioBooks 2009

Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics), introduction by Seamus Deane, Penguin, 2015.  (I’m using the Kindle edition ASIN B00XX0H95S, just to make quoting easier because typing the text is such a provocation to AutoCorrect).)

• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce (with help from Tindall and Campbell) #1 Getting started
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #2 Chapter 1
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #3 Chapter 2
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #4 Chapter 3
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #5 Chapter 4
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #6 Chapter 5
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #7 Chapter 6
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #8 Chapter 7
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #9 Chapter 8
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #10 Chapter 9
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #11 Chapter 10
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #12 Chapter 11
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #13 Chapter 12
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #14 Chapter 13
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #15 Chapter 14
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #16 Chapter 15
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #17 Chapter 16
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #18 Chapter 17

 

So, we come to Part II Chapter 9!

And here is the warning from my guide William York Tindall:

If almost every word of the first eight chapters of “the book of Doubleends Jines” (two ends joined and Dublin’s giant) carries three or four meanings, almost every word of this chapter carries “three score and ten toptypsical” meanings (20.15-16*) or more.  “Than this,” we say, scratching our heads, “nothing is denser.” Such density that Joyce must have had more of a later time on his hands. Indeed, he wrote Part II when, after hitting his stride “where the hand of man has never set foot” (203.15-16), he had finished Parts I and III.  To explain all of Chapter IX – as one would if one could – would require a book and a big book too.  I shall have to be contented, according to my space, time, and capacity, with bits and pieces.

(A Reader’s Guide to “Finnegans Wake” by William York Tindall, Syracuse University Press, 1969, p.153)

I shall have to be contented with that too, Mr Tindall…

What happens, is not so complicated (though I needed to read both Tindall and Campbell to get the gist of it).  Night falls, and Earwicker’s children, Shem, Shaun, Isabel and the 28 friends, put on a play for their parents.  There is a guessing game like the one that Shem inflicted on Shaun in Chapter VI. But this time it’s Shaun who has to answer the impossible questions, and he fails three times to win the admiration of the girls so he goes off sulking and swearing revenge in a most moraculous jeerymyhead. [A Jeremiad, i.e. a long literary lament about the state of society and its morals]. He will avenge himself by writing, he bawls.  He will spill all the secrets of his ma and pa and [as we say here in Australia] have a good old whinge about how hard done by his is.  But proceedings come to a halt because their mother (A.L.P. i.e. Anna Lavinia Plurabelle) is making dinner while H.C.E. (Here Comes Everybody i.e. Earwicker) is nearby at the pub.  He commands them indoors with one of Joyce’s 100-letter words…

Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertooryzooysphalnabortansport-haokansakroidverjkapakkapuk.

Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics,Kindle Edition p. 257.

[Lukkedoer apparently means shut the door in Danish, and so do the phonetic representations  unanddurras in Gaelic and fermoyporte in French – which I might have recognised as fermez la porte but didn’t].

… and so the fooling around comes to an end and everyone goes home.

The chapter starts with the playbill for the performance at the Feenichts [Phoenix] Playhouse. (Bar and conveniences always open, Diddlem Club douncestears.)  [Do children still do this?  We did in my family, writing and performing our own plays, with carefully crafted playbills to entice an audience].  The FW playbill introduces the artistes, who include Glugg (a.k.a. Shem), and Chuff (a.k.a his brother and rival Shaun) and also

THE FLORAS (Girl Scouts from St. Bride’s Finishing Establishment, demand acidulateds), a month’s bunch of pretty maidens who, while they pick on her, their pet peeve, form with valkyrienne licence the guard for

IZOD (Miss Butys Pott, ask the attendantess for a leaflet),

Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics Kindle edition) (p. 220).

but also this character whose role is incomprehensible to me:

ANN (Miss Corrie Corriendo, Grischun scoula, bring the babes, Pieder, Poder and Turtey, she mistributes mandamus monies, after perdunamento, hendrud aloven entrees, pulcinellis must not miss our national rooster’s rag), their poor little old mother-in-lieu, who is woman of the house, playing opposite to

HUMP (Mr. Makeall Gone, read the sayings from Laxdalesaga in the programme about King Ericus of Schweden and the spirit’s whispers in his magical helmet)…. (ibid, p. 220)

(I put that bit in just to show what I’ve been struggling with.  The only words I can conjure with are mistributes monies which is sheer genius for ‘mishandling the money’ –  and  pulcinellis which is reminiscent of the Latin word for girls and the French plural feminine pronoun elles meaning they or them.)

But strange as this is, there are words and phrases I’ve fallen in love with:

• reveiling (revealing and re-veiling)
• Tiffsdays off (a handy expression for a day off work when you’re fed up with the toxic workmates)
• baschfellors (bashful bachelors)
• Cinderynelly (Nelly/Ella)
• novembrance (Remembrance Day in November)
• Psing a psalm of psexpeans (demonstrating how ludicrous English spelling is, and same below)
• gmere gnomes of gmountains
• justickulating (gesticulating)
• our funnaminal world (fundamental-animal)

And what about this?  (I do love the accidental music providentially arranged)

With futurist one-horse balletbattle pictures and the Pageant of Past History worked up with animal variations amid ever-glaning mangrovemazes and beorbtracktors by Messrs. Thud and Blunder. Shadows by the film folk, masses by the good people. Promptings by Elanio Vitale. Longshots, upcloses, outblacks and stagetolets by Hexenschuss, Coachmaher, Incubone and Rocknarrag. Creations tastefully designed by Madame Berthe Delamode. Dances arranged by Harley Quinn and Coollimbeina. Jests, jokes, jigs and jorums for the Wake lent from the properties of the late cemented Mr. T. M. Finnegan R.I.C. Lipmasks and hairwigs by Ouida Nooikke. Limes and Floods by Crooker and Toll. Kopay pibe by Kappa Pedersen. Hoed Pine hat with twentyfour ventholes by Morgen. Bosse and stringbag from Heteroditheroe’s and All Ladies’ presents. Tree taken for grafted. Rock rent. Phenecian blends and Sourdanian doofpoosts by Shauvesourishe and Wohntbedarft. The oakmulberryeke with silktrick twomesh from Shop-Sowry, seedsmanchap. Grabstone beg from General Orders Mailed. The crack (that’s Cork!) by a smoker from the gods. The interjection (Buckley!) by the firement in the pit. Accidental music providentially arranged by L’Archet and Laccorde. Melodiotiosities in purefusion by the score.

Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics Kindle Edition) (pp. 221-222).

Tindall has a good explanation for what’s going on in the density of word play:

Joyce accounts for density by three words and a reference: “monthage” (223.8), “portemanteau (240.36), “Calembaurnus” (240.21) and Wagner (229.34; 230.12-13).  Montage, a moving picture technique developed by Joyce’s friend Sergei Eisenstein, is the juxtaposition or superimposition of things to create a third thing.  The verbal combinations that make this chapter readable and unreadable can be thought of as montage by superimposition. A “portmanteau word”, defined by Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, carries like any portmanteau, several things at once. Since a calembour is a pun, ‘Saint Calembaurnus” must be the patron of punning.  Double talk accounts in part for a density improved by Wagnerian motifs. (p.155).

(An example of a portmanteau word that I found online, is podcast, a word made up from iPod and broadcast.  And an example of one leitmotif amongst others which recur often in FW, says Tindall, is tea: it carries its usual meanings of home, marriage (“Tea for Two”), urine and peace after conflict).

Tindall worries that Joyce is losing his readers with this chapter, but I don’t think so.   I especially liked the sequence that Campbell explains as a sequence of Roman Catholic sacraments:

[Glugg] ran amuck against seven good little boys (the seven sacraments) who were playing with the company: dove his head into Wat Murrey (baptism), gave Stewart Ryall a puck on the plexus (confirmation), wrestled a hurry-come-union with the Gillie Bed (eucharist), wiped all his sense, martial and menial, out of Shrove Sundy MacFearsome (penance), excremunccted as freely as any froth-blower into MacIsaac (extreme unction), had a belting bout, chaste to chaste, with McAdoo about nothing (matrimony), and inbraced himself (228) with what hung over from the MacSiccaries of the Breeks (Holy Orders).

(A Skeleton Key to “Finnegan’s Wake”: James Joyce’s Masterwork Revealed, by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, Collected Works Edition, New World Library, 2005, p.148, quoting FW in the Penguin Kindle edition P.227-8 )

*Numbers refer to line numbers in the text so that readers can find their way whichever edition they are using).

So on to Chapter 10!

Sources:

A Reader’s Guide to “Finnegans Wake” by William York Tindall, Syracuse University Press, 1969; and

A Skeleton Key to “Finnegan’s Wake”: James Joyce’s Masterwork Revealed, by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, Collected Works Edition, New World Library, 2005

Finnegans Wake (Modern Classics) read by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan, Naxos AudioBooks 2009

Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics), introduction by Seamus Deane, Penguin, 2015.  (I’m using the Kindle edition ASIN B00XX0H95S, just to make quoting easier because typing the text is such a provocation to AutoCorrect).)

• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce (with help from Tindall and Campbell) #1 Getting started
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #2 Chapter 1
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #3 Chapter 2
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #4 Chapter 3
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #5 Chapter 4
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #6 Chapter 5
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #7 Chapter 6
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #8 Chapter 7
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #9 Chapter 8
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #10 Chapter 9
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #11 Chapter 10
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #12 Chapter 11
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #13 Chapter 12
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #14 Chapter 13
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #15 Chapter 14
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #16 Chapter 15
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #17 Chapter 16
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #18 Chapter 17

 

Well, I’m back on track with Finnegans Wake and here’s my once-weekly ramblings about the latest instalment…

As usual, I started my reading with my trusty guides Tindall and Campbell so that I know what to look for, and thus came to a delightful discovery: there is actually a recording of Joyce reading part of this chapter!  Well, of course, I cast aside Tindall and went straight to Google which responded to my search for ‘James Joyce reading Finnegans Wake’ with multiple sites with the reading and this explanatory snippet from  FinnegansWake.org

In August 1929, Joyce was in London to consult an ophthalmologist. While he was there, he met with his friend and admirer, C.K. Ogden, an authority on the influence of language upon thought and the founder of the Orthological Institute.  Ogden persuaded Joyce to come to the Institute to record the last pages of the Anna Livia chapter. The text had been prepared for Joyce in half-inch-high letters, but the lighting in the studio was so poor that he still could not read it easily. The recording was done nevertheless, with Joyce prompted in a whisper throughout.  To our knowledge this is the only recording of Joyce reading from the Wake.   (http://finneganswake.org/joycereading.shtml)

Fans of the Wake at YouTube have uploaded an animation of this recording along with subtitles. 

Quite apart from the thrill of hearing Joyce read his masterpiece, this video is really useful for showing how words which seem incomprehensible in print are often just accurate reproductions of Joyce’s accent. ‘Hurd thum’ is just ‘heard them’.  ‘A manzinahurries off Bachelor’s Walk’ is just a bloke who’s in a rush! (Phwat is phthat? Try it aloud and see).

OTOH there are also the usual words which are #understatement difficult. Tindall tells me that much of this chapter uses Danish, not a language with which many of us have any familiarity, right?  But I am ahead of myself… back to the beginning…

Tindall and Campbell both agree that this chapter is ‘about’ Anna Livinia Plurabelle (ALP), Shem’s mother (see Chapter 7) and Earwicker’s wife, and she is represented by the River Liffey where two washerwomen are gossiping about Earwicker’s dirty linen, i.e. the crime against the girl/s of which he stands accused in the court of public opinion.  These two really enjoy themselves with a lot of smutty talk, identifying what folks get up to by the stains on their laundry.  The washerwomen tell us that ALP diverts her children’s attention from the scandal by giving them gifts, which gives Joyce the opportunity to do one of his splendid catalogues, this one lasting the best part of two pages, including these that I’ve selected from numerous others. (ALP seems to have hundreds of children).

• for Sam Dash a false step;
• snakes in clover, picked and scotched, and a vaticanned viper catcher’s visa for Patsy Presbys [my favourite]
• scruboak beads [a rosary] for beatified Biddy;
• a pretty box of Pettyfib’s Powder for Eileen Aruna to whiten her teeth and outflash Helen Arhone;
• for Will-of-the-Wisp and Barny-the-Bark two mangolds noble to sweeden their bitters; [Tindall calls this a bitter comment on the Nobel for Shaw, Yeats and Mann]
• a praises be and spare me days for Brian the Bravo;
• penteplenty of pity with lubilashings of lust for Olona Lena Magdalena;
• for Dora Riparia Hopeandwater a cooling douche and a warmingpan;
• a hairpin slatepencil for Elsie Oram to scratch her toby, doing her best with her volgar fractions;
• an old age pension for Betty Bellezza;
• a letter to last a lifetime for Maggi beyond by the ashpit; and
• a stonecold shoulder for Donn Joe Vance;

  (Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics, Kindle Edition, p.209-211)

Wardha bagful, indeed! A bakereen’s dusind with a tithe of tillies to boot. That’s what you may call a tale of a tub! (Penguin p.211)).  It’s a clever pun on the washerwomen’s tub and Swift’s novel of the same name, but that was the only allusion to Swift that I noticed, alas.  There are references to other works too, some of which I know, but others which eluded me:

Foul strips of his chinook’s bible I do be reading, dodwell disgustered but chickled with chuckles at the tittles is drawn on the tattle-page. Senior ga dito: Faciasi Omo! E omo fu fo. Ho! Ho! Senior ga dito: Faciasi Hidamo! Hidamo se ga facessà. Ha! Ha! And Die Windermere Dichter and Lefanu (Sheridan’s) Old House by the Coachyard and Mill (J.) On Woman with Ditto on the Floss.

(Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics, Kindle Edition pp. 212-213).

That last one is The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, and before that The House by the Churchyard (1863) by Sheridan Le Fanu, an Irish writer of Gothic tales whose name I know because he’s listed in 1001 Books and one of his books is called Uncle Silas (which leads to Eliot’s Silas Marner).  Die Windermere Dichter (thank-you Google Translate) means The Windermere Poets, which is a reference to The Lake Poets – but what that has to do with anything I have no idea…

(And I should point out that the preceding gobbledygook senior ga dito etc was identified by Google Translate as Japanese.  Make of that what you will).

One thing I realised from listening to the recording was that (as Tindall says) there are many references to rivers from all over the world in this chapter, but the way that Joyce uses them is to tweak their names to mean something else, as in my Garry come back from the Indes or so firth and forth, an allusion to the Firth of Forth in Scotland.

At the end the two women metamorphose into stone and elm:

Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk, talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughter-sons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics, Kindle Edition pp. 215-216).

So on to Chapter 9!

Sources:

• A Reader’s Guide to “Finnegans Wake” by William York Tindall, Syracuse University Press, 1969; and
• A Skeleton Key to “Finnegan’s Wake”: James Joyce’s Masterwork Revealed, by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, Collected Works Edition, New World Library, 2005
• Finnegans Wake (Modern Classics) read by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan, Naxos AudioBooks 2009
• Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics), introduction by Seamus Deane, Penguin, 2015.  (I’m using the Kindle edition ASIN B00XX0H95S, just to make quoting easier because typing the text is such a provocation to AutoCorrect).)

• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce (with help from Tindall and Campbell) #1 Getting started
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #2 Chapter 1
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #3 Chapter 2
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #4 Chapter 3
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #5 Chapter 4
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #6 Chapter 5
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #7 Chapter 6
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #8 Chapter 7
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #9 Chapter 8
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #10 Chapter 9
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #11 Chapter 10
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #12 Chapter 11
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #13 Chapter 12
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #14 Chapter 13
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #15 Chapter 14
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #16 Chapter 15
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #17 Chapter 16
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #18 Chapter 17

 

Well, you won’t be surprised to learn that I skipped reading a chapter of Finnegans Wake while hosting Indigenous Literature Week here on the blog and attending Rare Books Week events and a launch or two (a NAIDOC week art exhibition and The Last Man in Europe by Dennis Glover at the Bookshop At Queenscliff.  But now I’m back on track, and up to chapter 7.

As usual, I have consulted my trusty guides Tindall and Campbell, only to come away a tad discouraged.  Tindall says that this chapter is little more than the author’s apology and his boast:

Shem the Penman, the exiled author of Ulysses and the Wake is a problem.  Joyce was always composing portraits of himself, but most of them, differing in kind from this portrait of Joyce-Shem, are distanced and controlled by irony or other device.  So distanced, Stephen is nothing like Shem.  Bloom and Earwicker, also self-projections, are objective and independent.  The heavy – almost painful -jocularity with which Joyce handles Shem, no substitute for irony or comedy, fails to separate the embracing author from his embraced creation.  (Tindall, p. 131)

Campbell, OTOH, hammers home the point that Shem is a lowlife, and goes into considerable and somewhat unedifying details from the text, which – given Joyce’s often incomprehensible language, I probably would not have understood and might have preferred it that way.  Still, with the peace and quiet of the house around me, I ventured forth, and as with previous chapters found bit and pieces to make me laugh and plenty to puzzle over.

Shem is not a prepossessing fellow:

Shem’s bodily getup, it seems, included an adze of a skull, an eight of a larkseye, the whoel of a nose, one numb arm up a sleeve, fortytwo hairs off his uncrown, eighteen to his mock lip, a trio of barbels from his megageg chin (sowman’s son), the wrong shoulder higher than the right, all ears, an artificial tongue with a natural curl, not a foot to stand on, a handful of thumbs, a blind stomach, a deaf heart, a loose liver, two fifths of two buttocks, one gleetsteen avoirdupoider for him, a manroot of all evil, a salmonkelt’s thinskin, eelsblood in his cold toes, a bladder tristended, so much so that young Master Shemmy on his very first debouch at the very dawn of protohistory seeing himself such and such, when playing with thistlewords in their garden nursery, Griefotrofio, at Phig Streat III, Shuvlin, Old Hoeland, (would we go back there now for sounds, pillings and sense? would we now for annas and annas? Would we for fullscore eight and a liretta? for twelve blocks one bob? for four testers one groat? not for a dinar! not for jo!) dictited to of all his little brothron and sweestureens the first riddle of the universe: asking, when is a man not a man?

Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics Kindle Edition, pp. 169-170).

In John Vernon Lord’s collage illustration of this chapter, we see the torso of this poor specimen, starkers (but with his modesty retained with the judicial placement of a sort of mandala featured a woman in medieval getup), with just a few stray whiskers showing on what we can see of his chin.  And there is print all over his body, with ink made in a method I’d rather not describe.  His mouth, drawn separately to the rest of his body, shows a quill in place of a tongue (an artificial tongue with a natural curl) because of the quotation Lingua mea calamus scribae velociter scribentus from Psalm 45:1, ‘My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.’  Well, yes, but IMO it has a double meaning.  Joyce as an exile in Ireland, was also speaking a tongue that was artificial for him and no doubt he retained the curl of his Irish brogue.

And what was the answer to the first riddle of the universe?  …  When is a man not a man?  The answer is … when he is a Sham.

Now Shem was a sham and a low sham and his lowness creeped out first via foodstuffs.  Shame on him, he prefers tinned salmon to roeheavy lax (caviar); and his preference for tinned over fresh extends to pineapples.  He’d rather muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland’s split little pea. 

Not only does his sell his birthright by eating the wrong foods, he’s also a drug and drunkery addict growing megalomane of a loose past, and he’s a coward.  He abuses his deceased ancestors wherever the sods were and he’s always in debt.  (This section, according to Tindall, has many references to Swift, but the only one I recognised an allusion to gulliber’s travels.  So much for having waded through A Tale of a Tub).  But there was an allusion I pounced on:

[with] a litany of septuncial lettertrumpets honorific, highpitched, erudite, neoclassical which he so loved as patricianly to manuscribe after his name. It would have diverted if ever seen the shuddersome spectacle of this semidemented zany amid the inspissated grime of his glaucous den making believe to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles.

Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics Kindle Edition, p. 179).

My ‘desert-island’ book Ulysses unreadable?  Does Joyce really think so, or is he having a go at his critics, in readiness for what was to come over the publication of Finnegans Wake?

Poor Shem.  He’s up against it.

… what with the murky light, the botchy print, the tattered cover, the jigjagged page, the fumbling fingers, the foxtrotting fleas, the lieabed lice, the scum on his tongue, the drop in his eye, the lump in his throat, the drink in his pottle, the itch in his palm, the wail of his wind, the grief from his breath, the fog of his mindfag, the buzz in his braintree, the tic of his conscience, the height up his rage, the gush down his fundament, the fire in his gorge, the tickle of his tail, the bane in his bullugs, the squince in his suil, the rot in his eater, the ycho in his earer, the totters of his toes, the tetters on his tumtytum, the rats in his garret, the bats in his belfry, the budgerigars and bumbosolom beaubirds, the hullabaloo and the dust in his ears since it took him a month to steal a march he was hardset to mumorise more than a word a week.

Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics Kindle Edition, p. 180).

There is a splendid catalogue which seems to be a description of an author’s lair which might make authors reading this sigh with recognition:

My wud! The warped flooring of the lair and soundconducting walls thereof, to say nothing of the uprights and imposts, were persianly literatured with burst loveletters, telltale stories, stickyback snaps, doubtful eggshells, bouchers, flints, borers, puffers, amygdaloid almonds, rindless raisins, alphybettyformed verbage, vivlical viasses, ompiter dictas, visus umbique, ahems and ahahs, imeffible tries at speech unasyllabled, you owe mes, eyoldhyms, fluefoul smut, fallen lucifers, vestas which had served, showered ornaments, borrowed brogues, reversibles jackets, blackeye lenses, family jars, falsehair shirts, Godforsaken scapulars, neverworn breeches, cutthroat ties, counterfeit franks, best intentions, curried notes, upset latten tintacks, unused mill and stumpling stones, twisted quills, painful digests, magnifying wineglasses, solid objects cast at goblins, once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage, unquestionable issue papers, seedy ejaculations, limerick damns, crocodile tears, spilt ink, blasphematory spits, stale shestnuts, schoolgirl’s, young ladies’ milkmaids’, washerwomen’s, shopkeepers’ wives, merry widows’, ex nuns’, vice abbess’s, pro virgins’, super whores’, silent sisters’, Charleys’ aunts’, grandmothers’, mothers’-in-law, fostermothers’, godmothers’ garters, tress clippings from right, lift and cintrum, worms of snot, toothsome pickings, cans of Swiss condensed bilk, highbrow lotions, kisses from the antipodes, presents from pickpockets, borrowed plumes, relaxable handgrips, princess promises, lees of whine, deoxodised carbons, convertible collars, diviliouker doffers, broken wafers, unloosed shoe latchets, crooked strait waistcoats, fresh horrors from Hades, globules of mercury, undeleted glete, glass eyes for an eye, gloss teeth for a tooth, war moans, special sighs, longsufferings of longstanding, ahs ohs ous sis jas jos gias neys thaws sos yeses and yeses and yeses, to which, if one has the stomach to add the breakages, upheavals distortions, inversions of all this chambermade music one stands, given a grain of goodwill, a fair chance of actually seeing the whirling dervish, Tumult, son of Thunder, self exiled in upon his ego a nightlong a shaking betwixtween white or reddr hawrors, noondayterrorised to skin and bone by an ineluctable phantom (may the Shaper have mercery on him!) writing the mystery of himsel in furniture.

Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics Kindle Edition pp. 183-184)

My favourite of these are alphybettyformed verbage; best intentions; quashed quotatoes and longsufferings of longstanding.

These struggles of Shem the writer in writing his Wake go on to refer to stories resembling the stories in Joyce’s Dubliners, and the difficulty he had in finding a publisher for them.

Tindall reminds me at the end of his chapter about FW’s chapter 7 that it represents Vico’s ‘human age’ because it proves great Joyce to be as human as the rest of us, but I’d forgotten all about Vico long ago.  (See my post from Chapter 1 if you are keen). I think I’ll save adventures with Vico for if I ever read FW for a second time.

So on to Chapter 8!

Sources:

• A Reader’s Guide to “Finnegans Wake” by William York Tindall, Syracuse University Press, 1969; and
• A Skeleton Key to “Finnegan’s Wake”: James Joyce’s Masterwork Revealed, by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, Collected Works Edition, New World Library, 2005
• Finnegans Wake (Modern Classics) read by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan, Naxos AudioBooks 2009
• Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics), introduction by Seamus Deane, Penguin, 2015.  (I’m using the Kindle edition ASIN B00XX0H95S)

• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce (with help from Tindall and Campbell) #1 Getting started
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #2 Chapter 1
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #3 Chapter 2
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #4 Chapter 3
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #5 Chapter 4
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #6 Chapter 5
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #7 Chapter 6
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #8 Chapter 7
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #9 Chapter 8
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #10 Chapter 9
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #11 Chapter 10
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #12 Chapter 11
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #13 Chapter 12
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #14 Chapter 13
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #15 Chapter 14
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #16 Chapter 15
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #17 Chapter 16
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #18 Chapter 17

 

Well, there’s been a bit of a break since my last post about Finnegans Wake – but I’ve been busy – re-reading what I’ve read so far, making links with what has gone before …

And now we’re up to Chapter 6.  And straight away I am reminded of those bizarre ABC quiz programs where only the nerdiest of nerds could possibly know the answer.   There are twelve riddles set by Jockit Mic Ereweak and Shaun (son of Earwicker and Anna Livia Plurabelle) misunderstands three and gets four right:

Shaun Mac Irewick, briefdragger, for the concern of Messrs. Jhon Jhamieson and Song, rated one hundrick and thin per storehundred on this nightly quisquiquock of the twelve apostrophes, set by Jockit Mic Ereweak. He misunderstruck and aim for am olio of number three of them and left his free natural ripostes to four of them in their own fine artful disorder.    (Finnegans Wake, Penguin Modern Classics Kindle Edition p. 126)

As far as I can tell this chapter doesn’t advance the trial of Earwicker but just tells us more about some of the characters.  In considerable and comic detail…

Joyce plays with the ancient form of the riddle by going into overdrive.

You know what you are looking at here?

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These ten pages (twelve in the Penguin edition) are the first riddle.   Here’s a little bit of it:

I. What secondtonone myther rector and maximost bridges-maker was the first to rise taller through his beanstale than the bluegum buaboababbaun or the giganteous Wellingtonia Sequoia; went nudiboots with trouters into a liffeyette when she was barely in her tricklies; was well known to claud a conciliation cap onto the esker of his hooth; sports a chainganger’s albert solemenly over his hullender’s epulence; thought he weighed a new ton when there felled his first lapapple; gave the heinousness of choice to everyknight betwixt yesterdicks and twomaries; had sevenal successivecoloured serebanmaids on the same big white drawringroam horthrug; is a Willbeforce to this hour at house as he was in heather; pumped the catholick wartrey and shocked the prodestung boyne; killed his own hungery self in anger as a young man; found fodder for five when allmarken rose goflooded;   (Penguin Modern Classics Kindle Edition p. 126).

It’s a great long catalogue of comings and goings, deeds both minor and major, and the answer, when it finally comes is Finn MacCool. But it’s also HCE because (it seems to me) the default character is HCE.  If you can’t work out who someone is, it’s probably HCE hounded become hunter; hunter become fox; harrier. marrier, terrier, tav.  But why should we feel he is Vespasian yet … think of him as Aurelius?  Aurelius (as in Marcus Aurelius Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180) is my favourite Emperor, and I like to read his Meditations at bedtime, as some people might read The Bible.  Vespasian was a military man, not a thinker.  Neither Campbell nor Tindall enlighten me on this point…

There are parts that one simply must read aloud:

… die king was in his cornerwall melking mark so murry, the queen was steep in armbour feeling fain and furry, the mayds was midst the hawthorns shoeing up their hose, out pimps the back guards (pomp!) and pump gun they goes;  (Penguin Modern Classics Kindle) (p. 134-5).

see attribution below

The king was in his counting house,
Counting out his money;
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes,
When down came a blackbird
And pecked off her nose.

Other bits are just plain incomprehensible: the cryptoconchoidsiphonostomata in his exprussians.  Oh well…

I think that one of the riddles that Shaun solved was No 4 because I guessed it too:

4. What Irish capitol city (a dea o dea!) of two syllables and six letters, with a deltic origin and a nuinous end, (ah dust oh dust!) can boost of having a) the most extensive public park in the world, b) the most expensive brewing industry in the world, c) the most expansive peopling thoroughfare in the world, d) the most phillohippuc theobibbous paùpulation in the world: and harmonise your abecedeed responses?   (Penguin Modern Classics Kindle Edition p. 140).

Well, the answer is Dublin, but Joyce plays games with this too, with four old men naming (in obscurantist ways)  the four cities (Belfast,  Cork, Dublin and Galway) of their four provinces Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaught.  (This is where it helps to have familiarity with the Irish accent: only saying it aloud transforms Dorhqk into Cork, eh?)

Riddle No 10 is mainly a very long answer, given by Isabel, sister to Shaun and daughter of Earwicker and Anna Livia Plurabelle.  Isabel seems to be having a light-hearted incestuous relationship with her brother.  She also seems to be an airhead.

Riddle 11 is in verse, and it’s answered in a long-winded roundabout way by a pedantic schoolmaster, who digresses every now and again to tick off his students.

As my explanations here are probably above your understandings, lattlebrattons, though as augmentatively uncomparisoned as Cadwan, Cadwallon and Cadwalloner, I shall revert to a more expletive method which I frequently use when I have to sermo with muddlecrass pupils. Imagine for my purpose that you are a squad of urchins, snifflynosed, goslingnecked, clothyheaded, tangled in your lacings, tingled in your pants, etsitaraw etcicero. And you, Bruno Nowlan, take your tongue out of your inkpot! As none of you knows Javanese I will give all my easyfree translation of the old fabulist’s parable. Allaboy Minor, take your head out of your satchel! Audi, Joe Peters! Exaudi facts! (Penguin Modern Classics Kindle Edition) (p. 152).

The schoolmaster’s lecture, says Campbell, is in three phases:

1. discussion in abstract terms of the general principles involved
2. a fable, The Mookse and the Gripes, translated from the Javanese and quoted by the professor to illustrate the main drift of his argument
3. a more complex classroom illustration, the story of Burrus, Caseous, and the cowrymaid Margareen, to clarify the more abstruse of the professor’s implications and to carry the argument forward to its main point. (Campbell, p109)

The introduction to my Folio edition says that Joyce claimed not to have read Lewis Carroll, but I thought of Alice and the Mock Turtle and the Griffin straight away when I came to the crazy logic of the Mookse and the Gripes. The illustration shows Pope Adrian IV  (the Mookse, and also Shaun) sitting on a stone, while the overripe gripes (grapes, and also Shaun’s brother Shem) are winding around a tree by the side of a stream (the River Liffey) while Nuvoletta is looking down on them from a balcony (and being ignored).  This sequence is about the old conflict between the authority of the Catholic church and those who reject it.  The argument descends into a volley of insults, as sibling arguments do, and the scene ends, apparently, with them metamorphosing into an apron and a hankie, but I couldn’t identify the part where that happens!

So on to Chapter 7!

Sources:

Sing a Song of Sixpence image: Downloaded from http://www.randolphcaldecott.org.uk/rhymes.htm Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by EuTuga., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10102568

• • A Reader’s Guide to “Finnegans Wake” by William York Tindall, Syracuse University Press, 1969; and
  • A Skeleton Key to “Finnegan’s Wake”: James Joyce’s Masterwork Revealed, by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, Collected Works Edition, New World Library, 2005
  • Finnegans Wake (Modern Classics) read by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan, Naxos AudioBooks 2009
  • Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics), introduction by Seamus Deane, Penguin, 2015.  (I’m using the Kindle edition ASIN B00XX0H95S)

• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce (with help from Tindall and Campbell) #1 Getting started
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #2 Chapter 1
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #3 Chapter 2
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #4 Chapter 3
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #5 Chapter 4
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #6 Chapter 5
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #7 Chapter 6
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #8 Chapter 7
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #9 Chapter 8
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #10 Chapter 9
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #11 Chapter 10
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #12 Chapter 11
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #13 Chapter 12
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #14 Chapter 13
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #15 Chapter 14
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #16 Chapter 15
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #17 Chapter 16
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #18 Chapter 17

 

I didn’t mention it in my previous post (because to mention everything would make this too tortuous a project) but there was a puzzling reference to the theft of a coffin in Chapter 4.

Always and ever till Cox’s wife, twice Mrs. Hahn, pokes her beak into the matter with Owen K. after her, to see whawa smutter after, will this kiribis pouch filled with litterish fragments lurk dormant in the paunch of that halpbrother of a herm, a pillarbox? The coffin, a triumph of the illusionist’s art, at first blench naturally taken for a handharp (it is handwarp to tristinguish jubabe from jabule or either from tubote when all three have just been invened) had been removed from the hardware premises of Oetzmann and Nephew, a noted house of the gonemost west, which in the natural course of all things continues to supply funeral requisites of every needed description.  (Penguin Modern Classics Kindle edition (p. 66, Loc 1873).

I assumed that this was the coffin that would have been used for Finnegan’s body had he not been resurrected by a splash of Guinness in Chapter One.  I should have known better.  Campbell tells me that this coffin alludes to the prehistory of HCE (Earwicker).

Like the Finnegan of the vaudeville song, he suffered a fall, was laid out for dead, and remained in a heavy coma while a noisy quarrel raged among the survivors.  He may be expected to revive.  (Campbell, p81)

Needless to say I am still mystified. It is a relief to know that Campbell says this is the conclusion of the prehistory of HCE, and he goes on to neatly summarise the rest of the chapter:

It falls into three distinct sections.  The first (79-81) publishes the recollections of an old woman, Kate, who professes to be the widow of the great man.  The second (81-96) presents the evidence of a posthumous trial, in which there appeared, as witness and accused respectively, two young men betraying the traits not of HCE himself but of his sons, Shem and Shaun.  Here, for the first time, appear the patterns which are later to become characteristic of these two.  Since the boys enter the stage with a court scene, in which the old history of their father is rehearsed, it is clear that they have inherited not only fractions of the character but even something of the life history and guilt of the fallen patriarch.  The final section of this chapter (96-103) deals with the problem of the disappearance of the body from the grave, its possible reappearance anywhere, and the condition of the plucky little widow, ALP).

Already I have forgotten who ALP is, and I have to look her up in the introduction.  She is the ever-changing Anna Livia Plurabelle. who since her husband Earwicker (HCE) is struggling with Original Sin, and metamorphoses into Adam, Noah, Lord nelson, mountain or a tree she is at different times going to show up as Eve, Isis, Iseult, a passing cloud or a flowing stream.  She apparently gets her say in Chapter 5, so I’d better not forget about her again.

BTW#1 It is mildly annoying that my Folio edition – because of the generous size of its pages – has departed from the page numbering that everyone else apparently uses.  My Chapter 4 starts on page 60, all the others start on page 75.

Tindall’s Guide refers back to the structure from the Viconian Divine Age (see my notes re Chapter One).  He says there are six parts:

… first, a brief introduction (75-76), second, a long meditation on death and burial (76-80), third another story of the Cad (81-86), fourth Earwicker’s trial before four judges (86-96), a fox hunt and flight into exile (96-101) and last, a hymn to A.L.P. and the river (101-02).

From these conflicting summaries, you wouldn’t know that Campbell and Tindall are reading the same book, eh? More usefully, Tindall goes on to talk about the reversals that are everywhere, signifying renewal.

Crowbar” becomes “Rabworc” (86.8, 13); sleeping and dawn become “the dorming of the mawn” (91.24); 1132 becomes 3211 (95.14); and as true as there’s a tail on a cat becomes “as ture as there’s an ital. on atac” (89.35).

Clearly my efforts to solve the anagrams in cryptic crosswords seem now not to have been wasted time!  I must remember that HCE becomes ECH as well…

I am starting to like Tindall’s Guide better than Campbell’s because he so often, so honestly, admits to being baffled. Discussing the tesseract, (a tessera is a curvilinear rectangle and a tesseract is an octahedroid) and Joyce’s claim that his symbol for the Wake is a square or a cube, Tindall says Make of this what you can.  I make little or nothing – but as Samuel Beckett says, nothing is better than nothing. (p. 93)

Tindall is also helpfully straightforward in examples like this:

Though comparatively rational, the constable’s evidence suits the irrational trial that follows.  Of a kind with Bloom’s trial in the Circe episode of Ulysses, Earwicker’s trial is from dream itself.  Evidence makes no more sense that that of the trial in Alice in Wonderland.  The charge is no more certain that that against Kafka’s K.  What is worse, the witness, the lawyer, and the prisoner at his bar, a shifty lot, unaccountably merge and, after merging separate.

By now I don’t have any doubt that if I were not reading the relevant chapters of both Tindall and Campbell before reading the chapter in FW, I would be floundering, not least because the Naxos audio book has for some reason omitted all of Chapter 4.  Just listening to the text in an Irish accent on this audio book has made many words much more comprehensible.  ‘Rowmish devowtion’ immediately makes sense if you hear the ‘ow’ in ‘Rowmish’ pronounced not as ‘how’ but as in Romish i.e. devotion to the Church of Rome, eh?  But alas, I’m on my own in Chapter 4, though #HappyDance I did work out ‘rhumanasant’ as ‘reminiscent’ by myself.

And I discover that Earwicker’s coffin – wastohavebeen underground heaven, or mole’s paradise – was an indestructible edifice indeed!

carefully lined the ferroconcrete result with rotproof bricks and mortat, fassed to fossed, and retired beneath the heptarchy of his towerettes, the beauchamp, byward, bull and lion, the white, the wardrobe and bloodied, so encouraging (insteppen, alls als hats beliefd!) additional useful councils public with hoofd off-dealings which were welholden of ladykants te huur out such as the Breeders’ Union, the Guild of Merchants of the Staple et, a.u.c. to present unto him with funebral pomp, over and above that a stone slab with the usual Mac Pelah address of velediction, a very fair-worded instance of falsemeaning adamelegy.  (Pengguin Modern Classics Kindle edition) (p. 77, Loc 2032).

Coffin or no coffin, Kate Strong finishes her meandering tale and the trial (which Campbell says is posthumous) takes place.

The prisoner, soaked in methylated, appeared in dry dock, appatently ambrosiaurealised, like Kersse’s Korduroy Karikature, wearing, besides stains, rents and patches, his fight shirt, straw braces, souwester and a policeman’s corkscrew trowswers, all out of the true (as he had purposely torn up all his cymtrymanx bespokes in the mamertime), deposing for his exution with all the fluors of sparse in the royal Irish vocabulary. (Penguin Modern Classics Kindle edition (pp. 85, loc 2155).

There seems to be some evidence that in disguise he attempted an escape but was ambushed – but Tindall reminds us not to believe a word of this, and the cross-examination barked at the witness is hilarious. Referring to the two young women who led Earwicker to his alleged downfall, there’s another 100-letter word using lots of different languages to form ‘prostitute’.   And then it’s all over and the four judges, Untius, Muncius, Puchus and Pylax retire to mull things over and chat about a bunch of other cases, as weird and wonderful as this one was.

BTW#2 Did I mention that I have started learning Irish using Duolingo, naïvely perhaps, to help with decoding FW?  I still can’t speak a word of Irish, but I may have learned something useful already. There is a Celtic feature called Eclipsis which involves adding one or two letters before a word in some situations… for example, the letter ‘g’ can be added before a word beginning with ‘c’ to form ‘gcailín (the possessive adjective form of ‘cailín’ which means ‘a girl’).  They do this with some prepositions + the definite article too, with some words starting with a vowel and after the numbers 7 – 10.  I wonder if this can account for the way Joyce adds seemingly irrelevant letters to words all over the place?

So on to Chapter 5!

Sources:

• • A Reader’s Guide to “Finnegans Wake” by William York Tindall, Syracuse University Press, 1969; and
  • A Skeleton Key to “Finnegan’s Wake”: James Joyce’s Masterwork Revealed, by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, Collected Works Edition, New World Library, 2005
  • Finnegans Wake (Modern Classics) read by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan, Naxos AudioBooks 2009
  • Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics), introduction by Seamus Deane, Penguin, 2015.  (I’m using the Kindle edition ASIN B00XX0H95S)

• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce (with help from Tindall and Campbell) #1 Getting started
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #2 Chapter 1
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #3 Chapter 2
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #4 Chapter 3
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #5 Chapter 4
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #6 Chapter 5
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #7 Chapter 6
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #8 Chapter 7
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #9 Chapter 8
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #10 Chapter 9
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #11 Chapter 10
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #12 Chapter 11
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #13 Chapter 12
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #14 Chapter 13
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #15 Chapter 14
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #16 Chapter 15
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #17 Chapter 16
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #18 Chapter 17

 

Chest Cee! ’Sdense! Corpo di barragio! you spoof of visibility in a freakfog, of mixed sex cases among goats, hill cat and plain mousey, Bigamy Bob and his old Shanvocht! The Blackfriars treacle plaster outrage be liddled! Therewith was released in that kingsrick of Humidia a poisoning volume of cloud barrage indeed. Yet all they who heard or redelivered are now with that family of bards and Vergobretas himself and the crowd of Caraculacticors as much no more as be they not yet now or had they then not-ever been. Canbe in some future we shall presently here amid those zouave players of Inkermann the mime mumming the mick and his nick miming their maggies, Hilton St Just (Mr. Frank Smith), Ivanne Ste Austelle (Mr. J. F. Jones), Coleman of Lucan taking four parts, a choir of the O’Daley O’Doyles doublesixing the chorus in Fenn Mac Call and the Serven Feeries of Loch Neach, Galloper Troppler and Hurleyquinn the zitherer of the past with his merrymen all, zimzim, zimzim. Of the persins sin this Eyrawyggla saga (which, thorough readable to int from and, is from tubb to buttom all falsetissues, antilibellous and nonactionable and this applies to its whole wholume) of poor Osti-Fosti described as quite a musical genius in a small way and the owner of an exceedingly niced ear, with tenorist voice to match, not alone, but a very major poet of the poorly meritary order (he began Tuonisonian but worked his passage up as far as the we-all-hang-together Animandovites) no one end is known.

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (Penguin Modern Classics) (p. 48). Penguin UK. Kindle Edition.

Gasp! Who are all these people?  Have I forgotten them already from chapters 1 & 2?

It seems probably not, though Osti-Fosti was in chapter 2.  According to my trusty guides Tindall and Campbell, chapter 3 is notoriously hard and Campbell says that Joyce takes nine pages to drive this fact home – the characters of our piece are very hard to fix and distinguish from one another.  

Throughout the remainder of Finnegans Wake, the reader must watch sharply for incoherent shifts of scene and character; a deluge of gossip has confused the evidence, mixing this story with many another, splitting personalities and recompounding them, mixing centuries, countries, heroes, villains, and tenses, in a great broth.  (Campbell, p. 65)

So really, we come back again to why, why would we want to read this most difficult of difficult books? I don’t have a good answer – I’m just intrigued, and I want to see if I am smart enough to make any sense of it by myself.  I want to test my instincts too: if Joyce deliberately wrote a muddle of characters in a muddle of time frames, then they must not really matter as individuals, right?  They must be symbols of this and that, and maybe at surface level these names are just like a crowd of people in a pub: some you might know, some you might confuse for someone else, some breeze in and out – here today and gone the next.  And if you were asked to testify as to their presence or otherwise in some court case about the guilt or innocence of a person, you’d be hard-pressed to say who was actually there and when.  This jumble of characters are the gossips spreading the rumour about the ruination of Earwicker, and Joyce tells us right at the beginning of this chapter not to take any notice of them:

Of the persins sin this Eyrawyggla saga (which, thorough readable to int from and, is from tubb to buttom all falsetissues, antilibellous and nonactionable).

Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics) (p. 48). Penguin UK. Kindle Edition.

But of course his readers, me included, take no notice.  Warned not to listen to these gossips, we do it anyway. And everything to do with the facts has changed, though that doesn’t stop everyone from lord and lady to drab and dustman having an opinion anyway. This is supposed to be HCE’s trial but it’s a shambles. (But in an era of fake news, who are we to complain about unfacts).

BTW#1 You will have noticed that while I am reading the Folio Edition, I am quoting my Penguin UK Kindle edition using copy-and-paste.  This is because it’s very hard work to type up excerpts from FW because auto correct keeps wanting to fix it).

Campbell offers a piece of IMO unnecessary advice about reading the passage introducing The Four Old Chroniclers and their donkey. One is from Ulster, one from Munster, one from Leinster and the last from Connaught, and they are counterparts of the Four Zoas of the later visions of William Blake.  These pages, says Campbell, demand strict attention and slow reading.  I can’t imagine anyone trying to read them any other way, though of course it’s more than possible that no amount of strict attention and slow reading is going to be enough.

I can’t remember now which of Tindall or Campbell it was that said he did not know any other languages besides English.  I think that must make reading FW even more difficult, since as well as using languages in common usage amongst educated people (i.e. Latin, French, German, Italian and Spanish) Joyce warns us again that he is messing about with all kinds of not-very-well-known languages:

Will whatever will be written in lappish language [i.e. Lappish, from Lapland] with inbursts of maggyer [i.e. Magyar, which is Hungarian]always seem semposed, black looking white and white guarding black, in that siamixed twoatalk used twist stern swift and jolly roger?

Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics) (p. 66). Penguin UK. Kindle Edition.

BTW#2 I knew that Magyar is Hungarian from my stamp-collecting days.  How strange are the ways that we learn odd scraps of knowledge!

Unlike early readers of FW, today we can enlist Google Translate in the search for meaning, though you still need to allow for idiosyncratic spelling (often approximating an Irish accent) and for tweaking the words apart or together as the case may be.   Here’s an excerpt where the Spanish word Usted alerted me to the possibilities of using it:

Any dog’s life you list you may still hear them at it, like sixes and seventies as eversure as Halley’s comet, ulemamen, sobran-jewomen, storthingboys and dumagirls, as they pass its bleak and bronze portal of your Casaconcordia: Huru more Nee, minny frickans? Hwoorledes har Dee det? Losdoor onleft mladies, cue. Millecientotrigintadue scudi. Tippoty, kyrie, tippoty. Cha kai rotty kai makkar, sahib? Despenseme Usted, senhor, en son succo, sabez. O thaw bron orm, A’Cothraige, thinkinthou gaily? Lick-Pa-flai-hai-pa-Pa-li-si-lang-lang. Epi alo, ecou, Batiste, tuvavnr dans Lptit boing going. Ismeme de bumbac e meias de portocallie. O.O. Os pipos mios es demasiada gruarso por O piccolo pocchino. Wee fee? Ung duro. Kocshis, szabad? Mercy, and you? Gomagh, thak.

Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics) (p. 54). Penguin UK. Kindle Edition.

GT helped me with ulemamen: drop the ‘men’ off the end and lo! ulema is a body of Muslim scholars recognized as having specialist knowledge of Islamic sacred law and theology.  Sobran is a conjugation of the Spanish sobrar meaning to remain so the Jew women are still there.  I wouldn’t have guessed storthingboys as being MPs from the Irish parliament at Stormont if I hadn’t recognised the Russian legislative body called the duma in dumagirls.   Once I had that sorted, it was easy to split Casaconcordia into Casa Concordia to get House of Peace, or House of Agreement or Harmony.  But the rest of it?  I only recognise scraps here and there, and am not willing to invest too much time in it because, alas, ultimately none of it makes sense:

• Huru more Nee, minny frickans baffles me, until I get the disembodied voice of Google Translate to read it aloud, and bizarrely, it sounds a bit like a greeting, more Nee sounding like morning and minny sounds like ‘many’.
• Hwoorledes har Dee det, according to GT is Norwegian, and it means ‘hence, Dee has it’.  Has what??
• Mille-ciento- triginta-due scudi is Italian but I’m not sure where the syllables divide and so, huh? I can only get 1000 – 100 -??? – shields
• The middle word in Tippoty, kyrie, tippoty is Latin: I remember the translation of kyrie is ‘Lord’ from A Portrait of the Artist and Stephen Daedalus in that book was mocking the offering in the communion service.
• Cha kai rotty kai makkar, sahib? has to be Hindi.  Cha = tea (I think) , and Rotty = roti i.e. flatbread.  Sahib = master.  GT says makkar is ‘tricksy’.  Indeed, yes.
• Despenseme Usted, senhor, en son succo, sabez must be Spanish because Usted is the formal word for ‘you’; senhor is obvious and sabez means ‘you know’. Google Translate offers ‘have lunch’ for despenseme, which might follow on with some sort of logic from the Hindi food and drink that preceded it, but I am tempted to translate it as ‘dispense with you’ as if this whole passage is a curse of some sort.
• O thaw bron orm, A’Cothraige, thinkinthou gaily? is Gaelic, and is asking if we think-in it.
• Epi alo, ecou, Batiste, tuvavnr dans Lptit is, GT tells me, Romanian, and so is Ismeme de bumbac e meias de portocallie, but it doesn’t tell me what it means.  Oh well…

But sometimes, it’s just easy: when the Coldstream Guards (three tommix = three Tommies, WW1 slang for English soldiers) were walking in Montgomery Street, pardonnez-leur, je vous en prie is straightforward French for forgive them, I beg you.  And what they say seems straightforward too, that one of the girls accusing Earwicker actually invited him to go into the field with her – and we might believe it if we hadn’t been warned not to because this whole chapter is from tubb to buttom all falsetissues, antilibellous and nonactionable.

Sometimes, I just love the word play:

• ’tis pholly to be fortuneflouting
• unprecise unfacts (how relevant, Mr President!)
• stenk and kitteney phie in a hashoush

And I like the splendid long list (now feared in part lost) to be kept on file of all the abusive names Earwicker has been called.  It goes for almost a whole page in my Folio edition, which means it must go for two pages or more in an ordinary paperback!

BTW#3 I discovered two new sources today.

• First up is a blog called Original Positions, which blogged progress chapter by chapter back in 2013.  I was interested to read this one after I’d finished my struggle through the chapter, and found it more comprehensible than either Tindall or Campbell, but it is less detailed.
• The other is at Project Gutenberg and it has summaries and analysis.  I didn’t read this one, I’m just noting it here in case I want it one day.

So on to Chapter 4!

Sources:

• • A Reader’s Guide to “Finnegans Wake” by William York Tindall, Syracuse University Press, 1969; and
  • A Skeleton Key to “Finnegan’s Wake”: James Joyce’s Masterwork Revealed, by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, Collected Works Edition, New World Library, 2005
  • Finnegans Wake (Modern Classics) read by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan, Naxos AudioBooks 2009

• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce (with help from Tindall and Campbell) #1 Getting started
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #2 Chapter 1
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #3 Chapter 2
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #4 Chapter 3
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #5 Chapter 4
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #6 Chapter 5
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #7 Chapter 6
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #8 Chapter 7
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #9 Chapter 8
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #10 Chapter 9
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #11 Chapter 10
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #12 Chapter 11
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #13 Chapter 12
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #14 Chapter 13
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #15 Chapter 14
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #16 Chapter 15
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #17 Chapter 16
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #18 Chapter 17

 

It’s quite extraordinary, the sense of triumph I feel at having completed Chapter One of Finnegans Wake.  It’s daft, too, because there’s no way anyone can ‘complete’ Finnegans Wake.  Already I know that to do that I would need to take a course in Irish history, locate and read and internalise a Roman Catholic Mass missal, and learn half a dozen more languages than I’ve already toyed with.  Tindall in A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake says FW is tough if you only have one language (like he does) because the text is liberally sprinkled with Latin, French, German, Italian, Gaelic and Danish, plus ‘a little’ Russian, Czech, Finnish and Hebrew.  Oh, yes, and I should be familiar with the James Joyce bio as well.

And should I accomplish all that, even then, my Senior’s vintage memory will let me down… I was quite miffed to read in Campbell’s  A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake, Unlocking James Joyce’s Masterwork that:

Every reader of Ulysses will recall the ‘thirty-two feet per second, per second.  Law of falling bodies,’ which ran through Bloom’s thoughts of the entire day.  (Campbell, p.44)

Well, no, I’ve read Ulysses four times, most recently not so very long ago, and this snippet and its significance has passed me by.  I fear Joyce’s number games will pass me by in FW too, though Campbell has warned me that:

The number is now to run through the entire night of Finnegans Wake, usually in combination with eleven, the number of restart after finish.  (The old decade having run out with ten, eleven initiates the new.  See our discussion of the Kabbalistic decade for Bk II, chap 3).

Yes, it’s easy to feel intimidated by Campbell, and equally so by Tindall, but I am not discouraged yet.  Tindall, after all, had help.  He set up a bunch of graduate students to read it with him and to collaborate by sharing their languages and knowledge.  And Campbell, well, Campbell was just a genius.

I started off reading the text accompanied by the Finnegans Web wiki, but before long it departed from the words in front of me.  It was irrelevant to me whether this is because the wiki version is abridged, or just a different edition to the ‘restored’ Folio edition, (though I was surprised to see how that this site doesn’t seem to acknowledge which edition they’re using nor who their narrator is).  I gave up, and read the chapter out loud, myself.  Fortunately my library is soundproofed, or The Spouse might have thought that my incomprehensible babble presaged a stroke and sent for an ambulance…

From my pre-reading I already knew the outline of events. FW starts at Howth Castle and Sir Tristram (the invading Englishman who founded the castle) is returning from over the short sea to wage war.  There is a thunderclap signalled by a word with 100 letters (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhoun-awnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) This is the Word of God and it signals the restarting of history and the fall – of Finnegan the hod-carrier off his ladder, and the Fall of Man.  There is a wake, where a splash of Guinness brings Finnegan back from the dead.   But resurrection notwithstanding, the wake continues on anyway, following Finnegan (representing Everyman) throughout history and the landscape.

BTW There is an amusing page at Wiktionary about the thunderclap.  It correctly notes that the word is created from words meaning thunder in lots of different languages, but there is high level indignation about whether it should be included at Wiktionary as a word.  One of the complainants had never heard of Finnegans Wake and it seems that he and his pals were successful in having the entry deleted.  But the discussion has been archived, and *happy dance* it includes a list of the other 100-letter words from FW (though it incorrectly ascribes them to Ulysses).  I have copied these words here for fun and in case somebody deletes them from Wiktionary. BTW the last word has 101 letters.

• Thunder: [[bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntro-varrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk]]
• Thunder: [[perkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayorgromgremmitghundhurthruma-thunaradidillifaititillibumullunukkunun]]
• Clap: [[klikkaklakkaklaskaklopatzklatschabattacreppycrottygraddaghsemmihsammi-hnouithappluddyappladdypkonpkot]]
• Whore: [[bladyughfoulmoecklenburgwhurawhorascortastrumpapornanennykocksap-astippatappatupperstrippuckputtanach]]
• [[thingcrooklyexineverypasturesixdixlikencehimaroundhersthemaggerbykinkinkankan-withdownmindlookingated]]
• Shut the door: [[lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertooryzooysphaln-abortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk]]
• [[bothallchoractorschumminaroundgansumuminarumdrumstrumtruminahumptadump-waultopoofoolooderamaunsturnup]]
• [[pappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmacmacmacwhackfallther-debblenonthedubblandaddydoodled]]
• Cough: [[husstenhasstencaffincoffintussemtossemdamandamnacosaghcusaghhobix-hatouxpeswchbechoscashlcarcarcaract]]
• Norse gods: [[ullhodturdenweirmudgaardgringnirurdrmolnirfenrirlukkilokkibaugim-andodrrerinsurtkrinmgernrackinarockar]]

Yes, I digress…

Anyway…

Strangely, from page 4 Bygmester Finnegan has a coat of arms, and a different name: he is now Wassaily Booslaeugh of Riesengeborg, and he’s a giant.  This makes no sense until I remember the introductory stuff about the framing Joyce used.  Just as Ulysses is framed by Homer, FW is framed by a text from 1725 called La Scienza Nuova [The New Science] by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico.  His philosophy of history “proves” that man’s history, created under the laws of divine providence, proceeds cyclically through three ages, the divine, the heroic and human.  (Tindall, p. 8)  Part I of FW (8 chapters) is framed around the Viconian Divine Age, and Finnegan a.k.a. Wassaily Booslaeugh in this part of the book conforms to its characteristics.

(Mind you, it’s a whole lot easier to recognise Homer when you see him, than it is to recognise the meanderings of some Italian chap from 1725.  Even if you haven’t read Ulysses, you’ve heard at least some of the stories, especially if you play video games).

#PressingOn.  This is my summary of the three Viconian ages, with Campbell’s names for them in brackets:

• The Divine Age (theocratic) (Eden, Egypt and the darkness after the Fall of Rome) is signified by the language of mutes (grunts, gestures, hieroglyphs, coats of arms and fables).  Thunder announces it, and it produces religion and family.  It’s Part I of FW.
• The Heroic Age (aristocratic) is signified by lords and vassals, wars and duels.  Its language is alphabets, metaphors and proverbs.  It produces marriage. It’s Part II of FW.
• The Human Age (democratic) is signified by burial.  It produces cities, laws, civil obedience and eventually popular government.  Its language is vulgar speech, abstract discourse, and (in FW) radio and TV.  It’s Part III of FW.

A ricorso (chaotic) (period of confusion) occurs after the third age has destroyed itself until like a phoenix, it rises again.  It’s Part IV of FW.

My first laugh-out-loud moment came when it dawned on me that the ‘mourners’ were in a museyroom (i.e. a museum) dedicated to Wellington.  (Dublin has a massive obelisk dedicated to Wellington, in Phoenix Park.  This museyroom is a combination of the Magazine Fort and the monument).  An old woman is doing the guided tour, and she refers to Napoleon as Lipoleum, distorted by female lip and flooring, to be walked on by Wellington boots.  This excerpt is best read aloud, with the most authentic approximation of an Irish accent that you can manage.

This the way to the museyroom.  Mind your hats goan in.  Now yiz in the Willingdone Museyroom.  This is a Prooshious gunn.  This is the bullet that byng the flag of the Prooshious.  This is the ffrinch that fire on the Bull that bang the flag of the Prooshious.  Saloos the Crossgunn!  Up with your pike and fork! Tip.  (Bullsfoot! Fine!) This is the triplewon hat of Lipoleum.  Tip.  Lipoleumhat.  This is the Willingdone on his same white harse, the Cokenhape.  This is the big Sraughter Willingdone, grand and magnetic, in his goldtin spurs and his ironed dux and his quarterbrass woodyshoes and his magnate’s gharters and his Bangkok’s best and goliar’s galoshes and his pulluponeasyan wartrews.  This is his big wide hrase. Tip.  (p.7)

Things you need to know to get the joke:

• the Prussians fought against Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo (1815) too.
• Napoleon had a two-cornered hat, not a tricorne, but he won power three times, by rigged plebiscite in 1799, by coronation in 1804 and by popular acclaim in 1815 when he returned from Elba.
• Wellington had a horse called Copenhagen.
• There is a bull on the Prussian coat of arms.
• Wellington was a man who was willing and a man who got things done.  His nickname was the Iron Duke.
• The repeated word ‘tip’ suggests that this old junk might just as well be taken to the dump.

Goliar?  Well, the Brits took all the credit for the victory at Waterloo but perhaps an Irishman might want to give the credit to the Prussians who turned up at the last minute and saved the day?

Another clever name play is Cromcruwell.  Well, he was cruel, especially in Ireland…

This made me chuckle too: junipery or febrewery, marracks or alebrill.  (Juniper is what gin is made from; and arrack is a kind of booze).

Some jokes are just plain provocative:  Having plodded through pages and pages of sentences with mostly made up words, there is a moment of relief for the reader when there appears to be one where every word is almost a real word.  But hmpf! it doesn’t make sense either:

In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality.  (p.15)

The rhythm and the nested relative clauses of this sentence reminds me of the old English nursery rhyme:

This is the house that Jack built.

This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the cat that killed the rat
That ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.  And so on….

I’ve read this chapter twice, and some bits of it three and four times, and  know I could read this chapter again and again and again… but I’ll never finish at that rate, so on to Chapter 2!

Sources:

• • A Reader’s Guide to “Finnegans Wake” by William York Tindall, Syracuse University Press, 1969; and
  • A Skeleton Key to “Finnegan’s Wake”: James Joyce’s Masterwork Revealed, by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, Collected Works Edition, New World Library, 2005
  • Finnegans Wake (Modern Classics) read by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan, Naxos AudioBooks 2009

• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce (with help from Tindall and Campbell) #1 Getting started
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #2 Chapter 1
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #3 Chapter 2
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #4 Chapter 3
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #5 Chapter 4
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #6 Chapter 5
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #7 Chapter 6
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #8 Chapter 7
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #9 Chapter 8
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #10 Chapter 9
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #11 Chapter 10
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #12 Chapter 11
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #13 Chapter 12
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #14 Chapter 13 
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #15 Chapter 14
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #16 Chapter 15
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #17 Chapter 16
• Finnegans Wake, (Folio Edition) by James Joyce #18 Chapter 17