"and remember patience is the great thing"

(107.8-109.36)  Today's reading continues with the discussion of the letter, transitioning from its various names to its author, contents, and essence.  Interestingly enough, these pages, which take on a scholarly tone, contain the fewest number of annotations in McHugh's Annotations to Finnegans Wake that I've come across thus far.  This doesn't mean that the material is any less dense or challenging, though.  It's almost as if there's fewer puns and references because the language already carries a number of levels of meaning without them.

Really, it's not exaggerating (and perhaps it's a bit of an understatement) to say, simply, that this is brilliant writing.  Amazing, brilliant stuff.  I absolutely love it, and it's possible to write a book-length analysis of these three pages alone.  This is the narrator discussing the letter, Joyce discussing the Wake, Joyce lampooning literary criticism, and Joyce offering his own method of literary criticism, all at once.  The passage begins with the sentence, "The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture."  Like the Wake, the letter is a fluid, almost living, document, many-sided, mystic, and of utmost significance.  Once, certain "naif alphabetters" would have dismissed the document/book as the product of a warped mind, but those of us who are willing to put a little time into it know better.  There's "a multiplicity of personalities inflicted on the documents or document" and the brave will uncover "some prevision of virtual crime or crimes . . . before any suitable occasion for it or them had so far managed to happen along."  "[U]nder the closed eyes of the inspectors" (perhaps the real-life censors and/or harsh critics Joyce butted heads with), the various elements combine to form "one stable somebody" who experiences "a jolting series of prearranged disappointments, down the long lane of . . . generations, more generations and still more generations."  This paragraph provides a key for understanding the Wake's use of archetypes and exploration of the cyclical nature of human existence/experience, and it tells us that we will be rewarded for paying close attention to the book.

The narrator brings up the question of who authored the letter, but fails to answer it at this point.  Instead, the narrator raises any number of possibilities, including a thinly-veiled Joycean figure:  "a too pained whittlewit laden with the loot of learning."  Moving on, the narrator, and Joyce, implore us to be patient, for "patience is the great thing, and above all things else we must avoid anything like being or becoming out of patience."  (That's a good rallying cry for me and this blog.)  It may happen that "after years upon years of delving in ditches dark" some authority might try to say this is all a lot less complicated than it seems, but the narrator and Joyce imply that that person isn't around anywhere yet.

After all, the narrator and Joyce say, readers of the letter and the Wake can't jump to any conclusions based on what they don't see in the text.  It might be there -- we might just be looking in the wrong places.  Or maybe we're looking for the wrong thing in the right places.  This leads into the masterful paragraph that takes up the whole of page 109.

Really, I almost don't want to write anything about that paragraph on page 109.  It's as funny as it is fascinating, and what it says can't be said better in any other way.  This page should be required reading for any student of English literature, or really any student of literature.  To put it too-simply, Joyce says that you can't judge a book by its cover, but you need to remember that the cover is a critical part of the book.  He uses the examples of an envelope containing a letter and the clothes worn by a woman.  It's the letter and the woman that are important, but the envelope and the clothes are essential to our understanding of them, just as the essence or whatness behind the letter and the woman is deeply significant.

I could go on.  Like I said, I absolutely love this passage.  But it's best if you read it on your own.  Seriously, if you haven't read any of the Wake, read this passage.  Catching the references isn't as important or necessary here as in other passages, and it easily stands by itself (even though it fits perfectly with and informs the rest of the book).  Read it, now!