ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

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.

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.)

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).)