(13.5-15.28) I was out of the Wake for three days (I wasn't quite resting in a lifeboat . . . more like I got caught up following a school of fish and it took me a while to get back behind Joyce's boat), but now I'm back. The overall goal is to finish Finnegans Wake within a year, so there's some wiggle room built into this where I can miss a day of reading every week or so. But I don't intend to miss three days in a row again. I guess this is a little like the baseball season, where there's more off days than usual built in to the early part of the schedule on account of April's inclement weather. And just like the baseball season, I'm bound to have some days where there's doubleheaders to make up for rainouts. It looks like today will be one of those days . . .
But, anyway, back to the reading. Having looked ahead, I tackled a slightly longer passage in anticipation of reading the entire upcoming Jute & Mutt dialogue next. There's a lot going on here. Picking up of the survey of "Dyoublong," we are given a quick warning -- "Hush! Caution! Echoland!" -- before the virtues of Echoland's capital are extolled: "How charmingly exquisite!" This doubl(in)ed H-C-E pattern reminds us that we're still focusing in on the book's central figure, and we once again hear the music accompanying the wake of HCE/Finnegan.
After we're reminded that this "funferall" will going on "foriver," we get a formal introduction to the four wise men (for lack of a better phrase at this early stage in the book) who will feature prominently throughout the Wake. They're introduced as our "herodatory" historians, "Mammon Lujius" (in one sense deriving from the authors of the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). We're told that their book contains four things that "ne'er sall fail" as long as the sun shines over Ireland. These four things are the four entities that form the family of HCE (and in the broadest sense the human race): the hunchbacked alderman HCE (the father); the "puir old wobban"ALP (the mother); the unfortunate "auburn mayde," their daughter; and finally their diametrically opposed twin sons.
On the pages of this book -- whose "leaves of the living in the boke of the deeds" are Finnegans Wake itself -- we read about episodes featuring the four units of the family in two separate timelines of human existence, one featuring the parents and one featuring the children, separated by an epochal silence. During this silence, the scribe who composed this history was apparently frightened away from his task, and a couple of possible culprits are listed. We then look up from the book to see beautiful pastoral Ireland. A listing of its flora and fauna blends into a catalog of the island's various invading and warring tribes, and it's noted how these ostensibly civilizing forces transformed the peaceful countryside into a Land of Babel. Nevertheless, Ireland's flora and fauna -- and its human inhabitants -- still propagate amidst the confusion, and we're accordingly left with an image of HCE as a whale in a "whillbarrow" washed upon the shores of Dublin to provide sustenance to its inhabitants.
This quick synopsis of the slightly less than three pages of this passage demonstrates how dense the Wake is. I was able to digest a decent amount of the text, but it was a lot to chew on. With that in mind, I think I'll try to keep my pass(ag)es right around the two-page mark for the foreseeable future. There's no reason to rush through such a rewarding and . . . exciting . . . endeavor.
Love the word "harpsdischord."
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