Saturday, July 19, 2014

Page 319

Assigned reading (000 pars [] plus 000 notes) [secondary] [McH] [*]


synopsis: ''








fdv: ""


mysteries:



[00:00]

II.3: 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382

[the wakean blues]

"I detest Punningans Wake in which a cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory... I am indifferent to Finnegans Wake as I am to all regional literature written in dialect..." VN


Here in 1934 he seems to be piling on old notes with almost no connective tissue (trying to get a dry engine restarted?)

I find I've started thinking of Joyce's technique in FW as 'adding barnacles' to hide the meaning, and too often in the later years it seems like 'barnacles for the sake of barnacles'.

eg: 283.29-.32 "Give you the fantods, seemed to him. They ought to told you every last word first stead of trying every which way to kinder smear it out poison long."
These barnacles have all been traced to Huckleberry Finn:
'they always give me the fan-tods'
'seemed to me'
'I ought to told her father'
'every last word'
'every which way'
'to kinder'
'pison long'

(I may start calling those passages that seem like barnacles-for-the-sake-of-barnacles 'syphilitic', not because I believe that faddish trashtalk, but as a way of confronting the unspoken fears.)


(unrelated but also-depressing: all newbies to fw will find themselves tempted to imitate its style, but be warned: any such experiments that you publish you will eventually regret. it looks easy but it's not.)