"the toomuchness, the fartoomanyness of all those fourlegged ems"

(121.16-123.29)  Today's post will likely be one of my shorter ones because, well, this passage is mostly a continuation of yesterday's "Book of Kells" passage, and I don't have much to add to what I wrote yesterday because, well, Finnegans Wake is hard.

The Book of Kells gets explicitly mentioned here when the narrator claims that ALP's letter predates and prefigures that ancient Irish manuscript.  After pointing out the "cruciform postscript" of the letter, the narrator explains that this is "plainly inspiring the tenebrous Tunc page of the Book of Kells."  This explicit reference to The Book of Kells is closely followed by implicit references to Joyce's Ulysses.  "[E]ighteenthly or twentyfourthly," the narrator says, referencing the 18 chapters of Ulysses and the 24 parts of The Odyssey, is "the penelopean patience of its last paraphe, a colophon of no fewer than seven hundred and thirtytwo strokes tailed by a leaping lasso."  This references the last chapter of Ulysses -- "Penelope" -- which consists of a long monologue delivered by Molly Bloom (the Penelope figure of Joyce's novel) and provides great rewards to the patient reader.  It also references the 732 pages of the original published version of Ulysses.  Joyce, then, is incorporating Ulysses into the Wake and using Molly Bloom as another manifestation of ALP.

The four-page "Book of Kells" paragraph ends with an interesting reversal of the feminist-leaning theme of this chapter:

who thus at all this marvelling but will press on hotly to see the vaulting feminine libido of those interbranching ogham sex upandinsweeps sternly controlled and easily repersuaded by the uniform matteroffactness of a meandering male fist?

Is the narrator (or Joyce, I suppose) saying here that it's futile for women to express themselves as artists because their viewpoint will ultimately be overpowered by the dominant male narrative?  I don't know . . . .

Today's passage ends with a paragraph referencing the work of one "Duff-Muggli," who apparently is a scholar of ALP's letter.  Duff-Muggli seems to have highlighted the "perplex" underlying literary analysis, and perhaps even literature itself.  This, once again, is that different individuals will inevitably read the same text differently and, furthermore, have different tastes.  For example, The Odyssey (and Ulysses) can be viewed both as "a Punic admiralty report" (detailing the wanderings of one individual as a type of news story or historical study) and "a dodecanesian baedeker of the every-tale-a-treat-in-itself variety which could hope satisfactorily to tickle me gander as game as your goose" (giving an exciting glimpse at an exotic destination).  Which is the Wake?  Probably both, and more.