Monday, 24 July 2017, Pages 394-396

(First of all, apologies for not posting anything last two weeks.)

Today we stopped at "... tails plus toop!" (396.18)

Must admit that we all had great fun reading these pages. Our imagination ran simply riot for quite a while! Whether we were successful in coming close to what Joyce meant is immaterial. For example, I was very sure that the words, "... Itself is Itself Alone..." (394.33) were taken out of the Upanishads. This guess was cemented by the words that followed as they sounded a la Madame Blavatsky, famous for her doctrines of Theosophy. BUT these words are said to be playing with the slogan 'Sinn Féin, Sinn Féin Amhàin' that means 'Ourselves, Ourselves Alone'! There goes the idea of Upanishads out of the window!

We still had fun because we could identify that the passages we read today really relates to the story of Tristan and Isolde (rather, Narsty and Idoless (395.2)) and King Mark. Let us recall that four old men are recalling what they had seen of Tristan and Isolde on the boat. Here there is talk of 'honeymoon cabins' (395.9) and of 'dear mester John' (395.3). It is all about some hanky panky going on in the honeymoon cabin! Between Isolde and Tristan. The 'dear mester John' is said to refer to the oeuvre of Dear John Letters which is written to a man by his wife or romantic partner to inform him their relationship is over because she has found another lover. Isolde found Tristan, and it was time for her to write  'Dear John Letter' to King Mark.

There are quite a few essays written on the theme of Tristan and Isolde in Finnegans Wake. (Search in Google giving the last six words as key words! It is a pity that many of these are not available freely.) An interesting article can be found here. An essay by G. Lernout is published the James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 38, No 1/2, Fall 2000 - Winter 2001.

Note: There is no reading next Monday, the 31st of July, due to the August Workshop at the Foundation. 

Monday, 26 June 2017, Pages 390-391

Note: There will be no reading of Finnegans Wake on Monday, the 3rd of July. 

We stopped at "... on stamped bronnanoleum, ..." (391.20)

We started today's reading with Marcus, and went on to read about the reminiscences of Lucas. Marcus starts with a nice sentence: "The good go and the wicked is left over." He also mentions in this connection (?) the holymaid of Kunut and the haryman of Koombe. 

Deciphering these turned out to be quite interesting, mainly thanks to the website www.finwake.org and the Wikipedia. The holymaid of Kunut was the 16th Century nun, Elizabeth Barton, who was also known among other things as The Holy Maid of Kent. She was popular for her prophecies, and had met Henry VIII (our haryman of Koombe). According to the above link, 'However, when the King began the process of obtaining an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and seizing control of the Church in England from Rome, she turned against him. Barton strongly opposed the English Reformation and, in around 1532, began prophesying that if Henry remarried, he would die within a few months. She said that she had even seen the place in Hell to which he would go (Henry actually lived for a further 15 years).' She was executed finally because of this prophecy. 

Lucas, whose turn is next is concerned at first about a woman, Dowager Justice, who in or around about 1132 or 1169 or 1768, dressed as a man (in wig and beard) when she appeared at the (Auctioneer's) court.  He refers to the year(s) as the year of buy in disgrace. My search in the internet led me to the following explanation of 1132, the year of buy in disgrace: Saint Malachy (1094 - 1148) was an Irish saint, who was made the Archbishop of Armagh in 1132. 'Owing to intrigues, he was unable to take possession of his see for two years; even then he had to purchase the Bachal Isu (Staff of Jesus) from Niall, the usurping lay-primate.'

Note that we meet again in two weeks, on 10th July. 

Monday, 19 June 2017, Pages 389-390

The reading stopped with "That old fellow knows milk though he's not used to it latterly." (390.28)

Ah, dearo, dear, are these pages dense! There was mention of the Trinity college (catholic) and four others (protestant). The number 1132 appeared again, this time along with 1169.  Anthony Burgess has a good explanation of the significance of the number 1132 here. (Even Fritz Senn says that nobody else has come up till now with a better explanation!). The number 1169 could refer to the year of the Norman invasion of Ireland.

The four old men - divorced, widowed (??) -, are still around, still narrating their recollection of Tristam and Isolde. 

Monday, 12 June 2017, Pages 387-389

We stopped at "... round their twelve tables, ...." (389.3)

After Johnny's monologue that we read partly last week, it is the turn of Marcus. (These two belong to that group of four old men. Monologues by the other two will follow later.) Each one is supposedly talking about what he observed about Tristan and Isolde, when they escape/elope.  That these monologues have to do with the story of King Mark, Tristan and Isolde is not always easy to identify but when one does identify the characters, it is fun. One such fun place starts with the sentence, "Eseunc throw a darras Kram of Llawnroc, ye gink guy, kirked into yord" (388.1). It is interesting to decode this sentence and the two that follow. Tip: Read the words - not all of them, of course - backwards!

The above part is also fun because of two other reasons. First of all, we meet here again Martin Cunningham from Ulysses, in his new incarnation as Merkin Cornynghwham. Ulysses does not mention that Martin Cunningham is no more but here in Finnegans Wake we read that his widow is busy (widdy is giddy) by writing her memoirs (wreathing her murmoirs) for the Grocery Trader's Monthly, rather Manthly (387.33).

The second thing that is amusing is Joyce's mention of Mind mand gunfree (387.35). This refers to the book, My Man Godfrey by Eric Hatch, published in 1935, and made into a movie in 1936. (Finnegans Wake was published in 1939.) After decoding Mind mand gunfree, I could not help seeing parts of the movie in the sentences that followed!

Monday, 29 May 2017, Pages 385-387

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
There will be no reading on Monday, the 5th of June, as it is the Pentecost Monday. 

Today we stopped at "... no more of him." (387.32)

The four old men are lost in rambling reminiscence of their lost young days. Who are these four old men? Why four?

Anthony Burgess interprets the significance of the number 4 as follows: 
"There are four weeks in a lunar month, and these will give you the four old men who have so much to say, though what they have to say is rarely of much value - Matthew Gregory, Mark Lyons, Luke Tarpey, and Johnny MacDougal. They are the four gospellers, as well as the four provinces of Ireland, and they take off to impersonal regions where they represent the four points of the compass, the four elements, the four classical ages, and so on. They are always together, followed by their donkey, and it is in order to think of them as a single unit, their names truncated to Ma, Ma, Lu, and Jo and crushed together to make Mamalujo. They end up, in the fading of the dream, as four bedposts."
(Source: http://www.metaportal.com.br/jjoyce/burgess1.htm)

Plausible interpretation of what goes on on these pages is available here!

Remember though that this is all a dream, a nightmarish dream! Before the Fall of the Man.

We will continue with our reading of FW on 12th June.

Monday, 22 May 2017, Pages 384-385

Stopped at "... like a foremasters in the rolls, ..." (385.35)

Was this chapter not supposed to be about King Mark, Tristan and Isolde? Well, we did catch a whiff of their story. And we got confused, bewildered, puzzled, perplexed, muddled with how it all moved from "...  here now we are the four of us, ... there they were, ... all the four, ... when he was kidding and cuddling, .... onliest one of her choice, ... they all four remembored who made the world, .... " and so on.

In such a state of confusion, it is heartening to read what Anthony Burgess had to say about FW:
" Finnegans Wake is as close to a work of nature as any artist ever got - massive, baffling, serving nothing but itself, suggesting a meaning but never quite yielding anything but a fraction of it, and yet (like a tree) desperately simple. Poems are made by fools like Blake, but only Joyce can make a Wake."
(Here Comes Everybody by Anthony Burgess, Hamlyn Paperback, 1965, p.185)

If you want to know more of what Burgess wrote about Finnegans Wake, his essay, Finnegans Wake, What it's all about,  is a real pleasure to read and is an eye-opener about Joyce's work!

Monday, 15 May 2017, Pages 381-384

We read as far as "... now pass the fish for Christ sake, Amen: ..." (384.15)

That means we have started a new chapter - book 2, chapter 4. It is a short chapter of just 16 pages. The tavern scene is over. The drinks have been drunk, most of the customers have left.

Joseph Campbell says the following about this chapter in his 'A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake':

(By the way this is the only book I have found which lends lots - I mean real lots - of sense to Finnegans Wake.)

"(HCE's mind now sails forth, like a sea-wanderer returning to the bounding deep, on a ship of dream. What he is to dream will form the matter of the present chapter. It will be a dream of the honeymoon voyage of Tristram and Iseult. His body, helpless on the floor, will be the King Mark of the story; but his spirit, rejuvenated in the sonlike image of the successful lover, will know again the joys of youthful love. The honeymoon ship is surrounded by waves and gulls, and these become the presences of the Four* Old Men asleep. They had failed to quit the tavern with the departing company, and now bear witness to the dream of the broken master.)"

(A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, p. 245)

The chapter begins with a song, the first line of which - Three quarks for Muster Mark!' - is world famous because the Caltech physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, chose the word quark from the above line, to name the building blocks of protons and neutrons that he discovered. Discovery Magazine writes: "It sounds like "kwork" and got its spelling from a whimsical poem in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This highly scientific term is clever and jokey and gruff all at once, much like the man who coined it." For his discovery, Murray Gell-Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969.

* Today a question came up about the possible significance of the number 7 in Finnegans Wake. Trying to find plausible answers, I realised that Joyce used many numbers apart from 7 again and again. Some of these are 4, 28, 566, 1132, ... More about it another time. Meanwhile, if any of you have some insight into the use of these numbers in Finnegans Wake, would you please share it in the comments box below?