Finnegans Wake Grappa discussion

I am been having this dIffi=cul=tea lately. I have been wanting am thinking of making a thread for my porpoises.

If you like celeb gossip ..... ; Zadie Smith's man-of-all-men, Nick Laird, participant'd in one of the circus shows @ release/promo of the Houyhnhnm Wake. There's a photo of him rede'ing from a penguin :: http://www.houyhnhnmpress.com/news

A Q with no direction ahead :

Joyce's hero=paar is HEC and ALP and their letters show up infamously frequently. Given that Joyce was free to choose their names and that their initials announce their ever=presence, what might he had done had he chosen their names such that their initials shared a letter? My assumption is that he intentionally chose to not have a shared letter. What if we had them -- HAC & ALP or HEC & ELP -- fer instants?

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "A Q with no direction ahead :

Joyce's hero=paar is HEC and ALP and their letters show up infamously frequently. Given that Joyce was free to choose their names and that their initials announce th..."

I haven't considered this, but I think then it would of course make everything much more knotted in the reading. Perhaps the deliberate choice of not having a shared letter is that a reader can more easily ascertain who is dominating or emerging in each section, for clarity's sake. But it would be interesting, if the names were more entwined, as a comment on the entwining nature of a marriage. Joyce was a family man in all aspects, in and out of art, and I wonder if he found it to be a natural separation, an insurmountable separation(?). That man and woman are one in marriage but still ever and ever distinct. Maybe only really one in the bodies of their children...

This is the BESTest Group on alle goodreads!

Call it serendipity and make savage claims about the stars connecting all of us and everything, but two things conjoin'd separately yesterday.

First, Ce Ce, she of the excellence of the Miss MacIntosh reading, sends me this Joyce article (to be posted here afore too long) which quotes the exact same words from Brother Stanislaus which I was reading in the Campbell intro just 3.2 minutes prior.

Second, I was Wake'ing and there was this knot of characters from Goethe's poem Reineke Fuchs or, Reynard the Fox. Not 11 tenths of an hour later I was Tub'ing along with Swift when I get History of Reynard the Fox with the following (guess who!) foottoe :: "The Author seems here to be mistaken, for I have seen a Latin edition of Reynard the Fox, above an hundred years old, which I take to be the original; for the rest it has been thought by many people to contain some satirical design in it."

lā ʾilāha ʾinnægan, j'ōyj'āms rasūlu-llāh.

As usual, William H. Gass says it better. From his A Temple of Texts: Fifty Literary Pillars:

"...Yet no song the sirens sang is as beguiling as the song Anna Livia Plurabelle sings while she rubs her wash clean on a rock by the Liffey. We literary snobs once dressed in FW as if it were the latest and most expensive and most extreme of fashion. Like Tristram Shandy, it is permanent member of the avant-garde, and immune to popularization. Graduate students will be forced to corrupt it, of course, and its music will fall into footnotes.

Joyce was recorded reading portions of this work, and his performance is unforgettable and wholly convincing. Passages linger in the memory. The conclusion of the Wake is among the most poignant I know, and the idea that it is a cold labor of anal obsessiveness is all-the-way-round wrong. FW is the high-water mark of Modernism, and not to have been fundamentally influenced by it as a writer is not to have lived in your time. Not to live in your time is a serious moral flaw. Although not to object to our time is an equal lapse in values and perception."

'Scuse me while I kiss this guy.


"There Must Be Some Misunderstanding: Unintelligible rock lyrics can teach us what we think" ::
http://chronicle.com/article/There-Mu...

Hmm...."'Well I’m not the world’s most masculine man / But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man / And so is Lola.' (Lola’s glad? Or Lola’s a man?)" (?) Shem getting his drag on?

And don't miss Carcass's "Fartword" :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7-Ol...

There's this show on public radio Sunday nights here in DC called The Big Broadcast, which plays golden-era radio shows, like Dragnet, Johnny Dollar, Gunsmoke, The Shadow, all those great old radio plays. I listen to it sometimes and have come to really enjoy the medium. Anyway, last night I was listening to it as I prepared dinner for the sig. Other, and in honor of the opening day of baseball (today), they replayed the classic Abbott & Costello "Who's on First" sketch. I've heard this before and really liked the quickfire dialogue and plays on words, but what struck me last night was just how damn Finneganean the whole thing is! The humor is largely based on mis-hearings and misinterpretations of names, or in taking the doubled meaning of words for the intended meaning, or slightly distorting meaning or apprehension and turning the misapprehension of language into a pun or joke, etc. Also, the rhythm of the whole thing as performed is very Wakemusical, and there is an interesting circular structure to the dialogue. I found the script and am attaching it. Just check out how they set up jokes in a very Joycean way. I'll add that it is much better heard than read:

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/humor...

Geoff wrote: "the classic Abbott & Costello "Who's on First" sketch. "

I grew up listening to this repeatedly over and over again and then againagain compulsively. I memorized much of it even before I had hear of Monty Python. It was on a cassette provided gratis by a pharmaceutical representative ; played on one of those old single=speaker monotone cassette playing machine devices.

What JJ does in The Wake is as old as the hill of Howth.

Nathan "N.R." wrote: " It was on a cassette provided gratis by a pharmaceutical representative ; played on one of those old single=speaker monotone cassette playing machine devices."

That is my idea of a Romantic vision.

I have a thesis brewing concerning Walter Benjamin's theory of history and the world-dream of the Wake. Stay tuned.

Geoff wrote: "I have a thesis brewing concerning Walter Benjamin's theory of history and the world-dream of the Wake. Stay tuned."

I can see it allready. It's gunna be great stuff!

I just love it when stuff is great!

I bwanna say this but its more Ulysses than Wake. Here's the thing ::

Ulysses is not written in stream-of-consciousness style/technique/however-its-called! There is a major final chapter which is s-o-c ; and for what my memory's worth there are other passages which are s-o-c. But, again, Memory and Me(!), much of the Stephen stuff is not s-o-c but rather interior monologue or some other thing. What I want to say, because the thing about Ulysses not being s-o-c is noncontroversial; is that Ulysses is nothing but an anticipation of what is fully developed in The Wake. What makes Ulysses great is not the s-o-c or the incredibly precise character study, but the immense materials of language brought into the construction of the novel as a piece of art built out of language scraps -- same as The Wake. What is it, the Proteus chapter(?) which most clearly demonstrates that what Joyce is interested in is language and it's full Bakhtinization!

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "What makes Ulysses great is not the s-o-c or the incredibly precise character study, but the immense materials of language brought into the construction of the novel as a piece of art built out of language scraps -- same as The Wake. What is it, the Proteus chapter(?) which most clearly demonstrates that what Joyce is interested in is language and it's full Bakhtinization!"

Exactly. Said wonderfully.

Anyway, about the anticipation, the great thing about following the line of Joyce's career is seeing this development, from the heightened, close-focus lyrical "realism" of Dubliners to the perfection of form of the Wake. Joyce did it all, and it all built on itself to its natural culmination and realization.

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Ulysses is not written in stream-of-consciousness style/technique/however-its-called! There is a major final chapter which is s-o-c ; and for what my memory's worth there are other passages which are s-o-c. But, again, Memory and Me(!), much of the Stephen stuff is not s-o-c but rather interior monologue or some other thing."

I think (!) s-o-c is interior monologue but interior monologue is not necessarily s-o-c. Both are found in Ulysses and in both Stephen's and Bloom's p.o.v chapters.
I think of interior monologue as the way Proust wrote: total respect for the rules of grammar but nevertheless able to leap from a conversation with someone to recollections on the part of the narrator about something entirely different.
So the difference between the two is in the rules of grammar which are respected in interior monologue but not in s-o-c. Woolf also does beautifully phrased interior monologue, and not so much s-o-c.
Sometimes in Ulysses, the interior monologue is perfectly phrased but sometimes gets chopped up into s-o-c: Glorious tone he has still. Cork air softer also their brogue. Silly man! Could have made oceans of money. Singing wrong words. Wore out his wife: now sings. But hard to tell. Only the two themselves. If he doesn't break down. Keep a trot for the avenue. His hands and feet song too. Drink. Nerves overstrung. Must be abstemious to sing. Jenny Lind soup: stock, sage, raw eggs, half pint of cream. For creamy dreamy.
That's what I think.

Fionnuala wrote: "So the difference between the two is in the rules of grammar which are respected in interior monologue but not in s-o-c. Woolf also does beautifully phrased interior monologue, and not so much s-o-c. "

I think I agree. The grammar is certainly a good indicator for detecting between the two. Here's what just occurred to me as a possibility for distinguishing:: interior monologue is a narrator looking into a mind and reporting the thoughts/experiences/impressions flowing through. So a second person (narrator) reporting on the first person pov ; or a consciousness reporting on its own processes, a self-consciousness, reflected. S-o-c on the other hand is as if the text is coming straight through the eyeballs (ie, consciousness) without the reflection of a narrator-presence, an immediacy towards its own self without the consciousness of self-consciousness, not reflecting back on its own processes. The Benji chapter (and the Molly in Ulysses) counts for me as one of the clearest instances of s-o-c, a technique which I think is incredibly rare ;; if I understand everything somewhat clearly.

Naturally, too you are correct (if I remember things correctly) that the IM of Stephen or Bloom is often interspersed/interrupted with s-o-c.

But a question ; in Proust, would Marcel, acting as narrator, count as being written as IM? I mean, he's narrating a book, first person, but his role of narrator would seem to preclude IM or s-o-c. Not sure. I guess I'm suggesting that a narrator is a consciousness within the text and takes up a certain kind of relation to the other consciousnesses in the text -- with IM and s-o-c displacing the narrator-consciousness of the text to near-zero-point.

Maybe I should dig out my Lit glossary(!)

Prepared dinner thinking about Proust and his narrator and whether the shift from straight narrative to the more meditative passages constitutes interior monologue. Truth is, dinner's eaten, wine drunk, dishes cleared away, and I'm none the wiser!

Perhaps using him was a bad example, and in any case very far from your original point which was that in Ulysses, Joyce was anticipating the direction he would take his writing in FW. That's clear.
So, is a third person narrator necessary for IM and s-o-c to be present?

Opened Ulysses at a random page - 376 Penguin (no chapter numbers or titles) - and, what's this? Bloom doing a first person narrative and slipping into IM and into s-o-c, all in the same chapter. I had forgotten completely that there was any first person narrative in the book.

And there's a great piece just before this chapter which I have to quote:
Must be the bur.
Fff. Oo. Rrpr.
'Nations of the earth.' No-one behind. Tram. Kran, kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I'm sure it's the burgund. Yes. One, two. 'Let my epitaph be'. Karaaaaaaa. 'Written. I have'.
Pprrpffrrppff.
'Done'.

Fionnuala wrote: "So, is a third person narrator necessary for IM and s-o-c to be present? "

The correlative question is whether an addressee is or is not present (Federman says he always needs to write to someone ; tell his story to someone ; someone he seems to always include within his novels). In Proust, Marcel is writing to someone (somehow), perhaps in a quasi-diary, but he seems to be writing to someone in so far as he is knowingly writing his novel all along. Molly on the other hand is not addressing anyone ; scarcely even (knowingly) addressing herself. The IM would seem to have at least a trace of this kind of talking to oneself, or perhaps addressing 'the world at large'.

Nathan "N.R." wrote: " Molly on the other hand is not addressing anyone ; scarcely even (knowingly) addressing herself. IM would seem to have at least a trace of this kind of talking to oneself, or perhaps addressing 'the world at large'."

Yes you may be right perhaps IM is the equivalent of a soliliquy on the stage spoken to oneself but meant to be heard but not sure will think more on this tomorrow perhaps yes..

Having finally read a few Wake for Dummies items -- OUP intro, that recently posted Burgess essay, and stuff like that and some other stuff -- I have come to understand that I have perhaps understood everything as its opposite if I've stood under anything a tall. Didn't know half the things I should know by the time I hadn't read the book yet until I'm ready to reread it again for the first time. Of course I've understood it! Shup is shown and doon is rup and I'm sitting on this here wall here.... where are the horsies and the men?

Mick's daughter Lizzy reads The Wake and Alice.
http://www.eonline.com/news/532215/tr...

I am unsure if this is the place to post this but I think a new topics about Thunderwords should be added. There may already be such a topic but I couldn't find it.
Also, McHugh in the Sigla swears by the fact that Books I and III are mirror images of themselves. For instances, much of what is found in I.7 & I.8 can also be found though usually in a distorted way in III.1.
I think it is more like a fun house that reflects a twisted or warped version of what stands before it.
Taking this theory further I think it is a well known fact while most books are a journey The Wake is a round trip. It only makes sense that we would have to double-back to find our way out of the labyrinth again and while we retrace our steps it is fairly logical that we would see some of the things we saw on the way in a second time, though since we are viewing them from a different angle they would appear differently.
I have looked for some things that are repeated in Books I & III and have found many.
Long story short a topic for listing parallels between the books would be handy.

Harry wrote: "Thunderwords!!!!!!!!!!"

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Harry wrote: "Also, McHugh in the Sigla swears by the fact that Books I and III are mirror images of themselves. For instances, much of what is found in I.7 & I.8 can also be found though usually in a distorted way in III.1."

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I'd really like to read the rest of this ::


"‘Ulysses’ and Its Wake"
Tom McCarthy, LRB, Vol. 36 No. 12 · 19 June 2014

"How do you write after Ulysses? It isn’t just that Joyce writes better than anyone else (although he does), it’s the sense that Ulysses’s publication represents a kind of rapture for literature, an event that’s both ecstatic and catastrophic, perhaps even apocalyptic. A certain naive realism is no longer possible after it, and every alternative, every avant-garde manoeuvre imaginable has been anticipated and exhausted by it too. As though that weren’t enough, Joyce returns to the scene of his own crime, arriving not incognito (in the manner of his shady non-character McIntosh), but brazenly assuming the role of principal mourner. Just as Ulysses was initially conceived as an extra story in Dubliners, Finnegans Wake gestated as a 19th episode of Ulysses. The three are part of a continuum, and Ulysses is a work whose own wake, and perhaps that of the novel tout court, is already at work in it. What new patterning, what ploughing of the sea, could a writer envisage outside the ripple-field already sent out by Joyce? Derrida complains of Finnegans Wake’s relentless ‘hypermnesia’, which ‘a priori indebts you, inscribes you in advance in the book you are reading’. ‘The future,’ he says, ‘is reserved in it.’"

See, the opening question up there is precisely the question which created the thing we call Postmodern Fiction (cf John Barth). Made me chuckle just a little a little while=ago when Gregsamsa recently pointed out that Barth writes as if the 19th century didn't happen because Barth's complaint is against those writers who write as if Joyce hadn't written. Which Not=Happening is more important to a given=reader just might delineate between those pro=Moore and those anti=Moore.

Not sure if this is the place for the request or if it has been filled but a place to discuss Gordon's Plot Summary would be nice. If you haven't read it you should. Although his theories might not be inline with any of the others they are extremely interesting.

Harry wrote: "Gordon's Plot Summary"

I don't think I'm familiar with this. Point me to it and I'll put a thread in place.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...

It is quite and interesting take he has on things and he does go into much more detail than either Campbell/Morgan or Tindall on how the Wake connects to Joyce's real life.
Before his chapter breakdowns of the Wake itself he has a few chapters on where things take place and when and who is exactly doing what.

Harry wrote: "It is quite and interesting take he has on things and he does go into much more detail than either Campbell/Morgan or Tindall on how the Wake connects to Joyce's real life..."

That's interesting as I'm currently reading the section - around page 180 - where Joyce speaks about his own life, as jymes, and talks of the time when he was writing Ulysses and the reception it received and how that affected him in his inkbottle house in Glasnevin - I love the bit where he pictures himself as a latter day Aneas, reduced to concocting his own ink - and how! - and then writing on his own body!

Harry wrote: "Not sure if this is the place for the request or if it has been filled but a place to discuss Gordon's Plot Summary would be nice. If you haven't read it you should. Although his theories might n..."

Done!

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I'm not sure if there is a section for this but I thought an interesting topic would be to curate a close read of a particularly difficult/beautiful/poignant passage and any one who wished to could contribute their own personal take. I think everyone here would have something different to contribute and the end result would be an incredibly indepth and collective understanding of a small slice of Joyce flavored by the unique qualities of the members of this group.

I like that idea a lot.
Perhaps it could be a weekly thing with a different passage every week.

Joshua wrote: "a close read of a particularly difficult/beautiful/poignant passage"

That can be done! The Folder I call "Wake Reeding" would be the place (where's the time?). Pick a passage and spin a thread. The only difficulty will by prodding lazy sleeping drunk Finnegans out of their collectovated stupor long enough to discover coherent speechification. But, it could happen. But whatever passage you choose of whatever length you would like (from one word to One Chapter to the Whole Book (whyknot)) just threadify it in your machination of threadification of close=readingification (my vacation?) For instance, too, there is an instancification of such close=readingification in the beginningification of the Campbellification of a Keyification, a Reeding (a Caning!) of those first four Difficult paragraphs -- but of course that's a mere Campbellification and not a full-blood'd Grappafication!

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...

Joshua wrote: "I'm not sure if there is a section for this but I thought an interesting topic would be to curate a close read of a particularly difficult/beautiful/poignant passage and any one who wished to could..."

Good idea, Joshua - and I like your emphasis on coherent speechification, Nathan...

On another topic - the Pranqueen.
The 13th great-grandson of Granuaile or Grace O'Malley, Jeremy Ulick Brown, died last week. He was related to her through the de Burgh family - one of Grace's husbands was a de Burgh or Burke - she married him in 1566.

Hi fellow Wakeans! I'm dropping in on our mass group hibernation to say that 2015 will involve, for myself, a reaWakening, a rearriving at Howth Castle 'n 'Nvirons-- because the Wake never leaves you alone dammit! It plagues the dreams! As would be natural. I will immerse myself in the Great Waters again... until then, happy Wakening, childers everywhere~!

Geoff wrote: "a reaWakening, a rearriving at Howth Castle 'n 'Nvirons"

I'll be redundant and say I'll be redoing it two. Jan's day the first of our lords twenty and fifteen! The very day's first light! I'll be there, spot on Howth's nose.

I'll this time be flying (metafour shift) on Fionnuala Air, sans notes and annatations and guidos, just me and Flim=Flam Finn! Fun!

So begins the commodious recirculation of Nraff and Geott!

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "sans notes and annatations and guidos"

And when I say that I mean that I'll also (at some undetermined time) pick up Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake. For a pleasure reead.

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "I'll this time be flying (metafour shift) on Fionnuala Air, sans notes and annatations and guidos, just me and Flim=Flam Finn! Fun!"

Exactly- FinnFun! and winging it.

But the 1st of Janvier is too early for me-- I have 7 RURD's to contend with starting on Christmas morn.

Joshua wrote: "So begins the commodious recirculation of Nraff and Geott!"

I'm gunna bring Namredef along too! And Moinous! And the whole Feather de Plume crew! And my Friend, Mark Exclamation(!)! And Sam (both man and dog!)!

Joshua wrote: "So begins the commodious recirculation of Nraff and Geott!"

Shem and sham and butt and taff and the rooshian gen'ral too!

Geoff wrote: "But the 1st of Janvier is too early for me"

It'll be more of a ritual, a rite, of that sacred day, the Reading of the Four Paragraphs. Probably. Overture! There's three hundred sixty odd more for the rest.

My next go around will be 2016 as part of the point of my "year of modernism" in 2015 is to do the run up to FW. I will be re-reading Ulysses et al (and, God help me, Stein) and want to see how all that affects my Waking

Jonathan wrote: "I will be re-reading Ulysses"

Fantastic!

"and, God help me, Stein"

Oh dear! Maybe she'll be kinder to you than she was to me.

Geoff wrote: "Jonathan wrote: "I will be re-reading Ulysses"

Fantastic!

"and, God help me, Stein"

Oh dear! Maybe she'll be kinder to you than she was to me."

Yeah. I really want to find a way to appreciate Making of Americans...But we shall have to see!

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "I'm gunna bring Namredef along too! And Moinous! And the whole Feather de Plume crew! And my Friend, Mark Exclamation(!)! And Sam (both man and dog!)!"

In other words, here comes everybody!

Isle defiantly be joyning in on the Finn but I'll strut in the moiddle, cause that's how I am (and how far I am).

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "..I'll this time be flying (metafour shift) on Fionnuala Air, sans notes and annatations and guidos, just me and Flim=Flam Finn! Fun! ."

Almost missed this feathery Flim=Flam - I've been in exile over the Sea of Moyle - all, all, alonely...