Finnegans Wake Grappa discussion

"(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations."

Much to say about this passage - which tells us how to read the Wake.

I particularly love (and he uses it often) the play of "rede" being both "read" and "speech" - as the language of the Wake hovers between both. It is a very simple example of the power of his technique. It hints at fragility too - the reed buffeted by the wind and so easily broken.

And miscegnations being from Latin "miscēre" to mix + "genus" race - the history of our species and of our words and our Being.

Interesting that we must "stoop" - I read that as a sort of humility, a humbling. And then we are begged, pleaded with to do so (and are these parenthetic comments not usually intrusions from the "outside"?). Something also of the old wo/man, something of time and of the animal perhaps..

...what thinkest thou?

Grrroovy. How do you scan "allaphbed"? Alphabet/Aleph (first in Hebrew syllabary?) + bed = ?

Gregsamsa wrote: "Grrroovy. How do you scan "allaphbed"? Alphabet/Aleph (first in Hebrew syllabary?) + bed = ?"

yes - also "bed" as in flower bed and associated "growth" "birth" etc imagery. There are many references to Hebrew around these pages too so we are certainly in that territory.

I read it as an evocation of the pre-historic bed of language. Reading emeshed in, subsumed within, the past...