Dropping and Drowning in Finnegans Wake

I read Book One of Finnegans Wake and was lost most of the time. I picked up curious little impressionistic bits in the overall flow but couldn’t string them together into anything coherent. I suspect this is, in part, the effect Joyce was shooting for. This suspicion was confirmed upon hearing John Cage’s “Roaratoria: A Circus on Finnegans Wake,” which captures that experience perfectly – a hypnotic flow of musical bits and half-heard words and melodies impressionistically breaking to the surface of a rich but unintelligible tide of sound.

I did get some general themes about the book from commentaries – the recurrent references to archetypal gods and heroes, and to that great archetypal event, the Fall. I could glimpse how the deepest archetypal nodes were being reworked through fragments of Irish culture and Irish characters. But much more than that I could not get, as far as reconstructing any kind of coherent narrative. It seems almost as if Joyce set it up so that external commentary would be integral to the fabric of the novel, with obscure references, misleading phonetic spellings in multiple languages, flows of language that follow no discernible logic, etc. If so, it is an interesting twist on the porous nature of the literary work, but with that gained interest is a loss, as I suspect I am not the only reader who had a hard time staying engaged. (I was fully engaged by the John Cage composition, though, where the surface incoherence did not hinder but actually enhanced the feeling of something going on at the archetypal depths. Go figure.)

One thing I did notice that I did not see in the commentaries, so maybe a Joyce scholar (or a Finnegans Wake fan) can weigh in. The invisible symbolic center of the work seemed to be a hidden stain of guilt. The commentaries did mention how Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, or HCE (as much the main character as anyone else), was accused of exposing himself to girls in a park, but to me this element – both the accusation (and we don’t know if it was true, just the accusation itself is sufficient to create a symbolic center of hidden guilt) and other apparently unrelated hints at unspoken guilt – seemed more haunting in the text than in the commentaries. The idea of buried unconscious guilt as the symbolic center resonates both with the recurring motif of the Fall archetype and with Freud, whose ideas hung over the literature of the day. (Virginia Woolf’s press was offered Joyce’s Ulysses and was printing translations of Freud’s work as soon as they came out – one can see Freud’s ideas, e.g., all over page one of To the Lighthouse.) Indeed, the basic style of Finnegans Wake can be seen as an enormous amount of incoherent clutter designed to obfuscate some hidden guilt at the center, which is a perfect literary expression of Freud’s ideas of displacement, condensation, and screen memories, all of which are designed to obfuscate and plaster over some hidden trauma or guilt that the subject cannot face. In Joyce’s case, the obsession with lists, with doubling and tripling of names, with malapropisms and misheard words – what better way to enact displacement, condensation, and screen memories into a literary landscape? At the very least, this would explain the difficulties posed to the reader as intentional, since the whole point is to continually conceal the hidden meaning, as in a cups and balls performance.

To tie back to the John Cage composition, the difficulty in Finnegans Wake seems related to a kind of sonic entropy. Language normally carries meaning and sentiment. In Finnegans Wake, language and words still have a residue of meaning and sentiment but are always deteriorating into sculptures of pure sound. The reader’s anxiety about meaning is built into that entropy, but for the luckiest of readers the sculpture of pure sound remains as an aesthetic marvel in its own right. I am not so lucky, but my new (unpublished) poetry collection, The Day We Met in Earthly Time, is organized into groups of thirteen, is anchored to a poem called “Finnegans Luck,” and is haunted by the idea that all the heavy emotion and intimacy of the collection is in constant danger of disintegrating into sculptures of sound and vanishing memories of sentiment. If you think that sounds interesting, hold your breath and buy my previous collection, Schematics and Assemblies of the Cosmic Heart. Go ahead. Do it. Bring me luck.

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Oregon Community Radio: Gary talks “Love’s Ragged Claws” and more

Friends, lovers, vagabond spirits!

Below is last week’s interview for Love’s Ragged Claws and my other novels on Eartheart Radio (Oregon Community Radio). Derek, Eartheart host and a good brother to all, has interviewed all manner of characters from Wavy Gravy and Squeaky Fromme to Bhagavan Das (Baba Ram Dass’s first guide in India, as chronicled in Be Here Now). You might want to follow Derek’s weekly Eartheart shows on KSKQ Oregon. Or at least show some love in clicks and comments below the YouTube post of the program.

For what it’s worth, I was paired for my segment with one of the principal deities in the Hindu pantheon, Lord Brahma.

Interview at 1:45-19:35 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0UnCCmsJNA

(The audio connection wasn’t perfect, but the chat was full and friendly.)

Click HERE for Eartheart’s YouTube home.

Click the cover below to link to Love’s Ragged Claws (a 55-page novella).

Shortlisted for the Faulkner-Wisdom Prize  
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08RSNTR2B/
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/BooksByGaryGautier

Other fine books by Gary Gautier (clickable covers):

                

Gary

web: www.garygautier.com

Gender Complications in Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse”

Those of you who are not predisposed to read gender according to the preconceived ideas you learned in college might note that Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are each a mixed bag from page one. The whole book is framed by their opening answers to little James’s request to go to the lighthouse tomorrow. Mrs. Ramsay’s “Yes” is supportive and kind, but factually false. Mr. Ramsay’s “No” (the weather won’t be fine) is factually correct but emotionally hollow. To his credit, his expressed intention is to teach the kids the value of “truth” and the “courage” to face “uncompromising facts.” But little James, not yet initiated into the world of cold, hard facts, only recognizes the generosity of “yes” and the tyranny of “no.”

So Mr. Ramsay is never quite likable, but he is drawn by Woolf with remarkable sensitivity and compassion. He rightly surmises that he would have written better philosophy books had he not married. And yet he loves his family and thinks he is a brute to even have that thought (69). His life, like all lives in Woolf, is a jumble of successes, sacrifices, and irretrievable losses. He thinks that Mrs. Ramsay, even at age 50, is the most beautiful woman in the world (123), and yet his excessive neediness prevents us from quite liking him for the sentiment. On one level Mrs. Ramsay finds comfort in his “truthfulness,” in “the admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way and that, like iron girders spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world, so that she could trust herself to it utterly” (106). And although his initial “no” showed no malice but a cold adherence to fact, it is poignant that years later when he finally takes James to the lighthouse, fulfilling the promise of Mrs. Ramsay and perhaps trying to atone for his own earlier failure, James responds with almost pure hatred of the old man.

Mrs. Ramsay is the archetypal mother, the Magna Mater, presiding over the domestic rituals that bind abstract individuals into community. Where Mr. Ramsay clings (perhaps desperately) to philosophy and Truth as an anchor of meaning (his lighthouse), Mrs. Ramsay clings (perhaps less desperately because less aware of the limitations of her world view) to domesticity and family feeling. She plays the role of Magna Mater magnificently, presiding over her intersubjective world with precision, as beautifully expressed in the scene with her family and dinner guests:

“At the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up, hanging, trembling” (87).

Her role as Magna Mater, though, has problematic implications for her both as a person and as a social force. As a person, she has had to sacrifice her individuality. Between all her serving and doing, there are flickering moments where she asks, “What have I done with my life?” (82), or allows herself to linger on the thought for a full few seconds, as when she senses “something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband, a sort of transaction … in which she was on one side, and life was on the other, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her” (59).

Furthermore, Lily, a shrewd observer and perhaps the closest character to Woolf’s point of view, sees the dynamic of Mr. Ramsay’s neediness and Mrs. Ramsay’s giving him pity differently than Mrs. Ramsay sees it. To Mrs. Ramsay, he is needy and she doesn’t mind giving him pity because he is more important than her and it’s a generous thing for her to do even if she finds it draining at times. But Lily suspects “that all this desire of hers to give, to help, was vanity. For her own self-satisfaction … that people might … need her and send for her and admire her” (41). There is a little bit of Ayn Rand’s Ellsworth Toohey in Mrs. Ramsay. She exposes this in the first few pages in her vision of life at the lighthouse, as she fantasizes misery in order to pity it (5). Or a few pages later, why does she suddenly say of the sullen Tansley, “She liked him warmly, at the moment” (11)? It seems inexplicable but go back a few lines and you’ll see that he exposed himself as in need of pity. This is what made her suddenly warm up to him. And her need to pity men in general approaches delusions of grandeur: “She had the whole of the other sex under her protection” (6). This is certainly not the whole Mrs. Ramsay, but it is one onion skin in the fabric of her identity.

As a social force, Mrs. Ramsay is actively complicit in the traditional gender scheme. She pities men for their inability to “feel” things right but she admires and is grateful for their competence in public affairs. But everyone’s first duty is to get married and have a family. Paul and Minta must get married (they do and it turns to disaster). Lily and Mr. Bankes must get married (luckily they never do). But in Mrs. Ramsay’s vision, there is no other option: “People must marry; people must have children” (60). It is deliciously ironic that perhaps the most powerful and attractive character in all of Woolf’s corpus, the darling of so many feminists, is also a tremendous gravitational force pulling people back into traditional gender norms. This is expressed most succinctly in a scene at the dinner where Lily toys with the idea of violating the gender code but one knowing glance from Mrs. Ramsay and Lily “had to renounce the experiment” (92).

Lily, by contrast, plays a more “feminist” role. She is the artist who chooses not to marry. But her consciousness too is conflicted and multi-layered. She feels the full weight of what Mrs. Ramsay represents, the Great Mother towering over the ages, very powerful, very beautiful, very instrumental in human community. And she feels very insignificant by comparison. And yet she sees that marriage would be a trap for her and chooses artistic creation over procreation, almost as an absurd hero chooses moral action, knowing in advance the futility of doing so. In a nutshell, Mrs. Ramsay in the window is the very picture of the Beautiful Woman, the Great Mother, the cosmic procreative power, but she is also the picture of a woman trapped in, framed by, and complicit in the deadening Victorian gender norms of a dying age. This is why the first of the three books is called “The Window,” and this is why it takes Lily so long to get her painting of Mrs. Ramsay, and all that Mrs. Ramsay represents, just right.

Overall, one might see Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay both tangled up in the double-binds of Victorian gender norms. Mrs. Ramsay must be the great Magna Mater but must also be self-sacrificing, self-negating, insignificant relative to the Husband. To succeed at one task is to fail at the other. Mr. Ramsay has one foot in philosophy and one in family, unable to complete himself in either. The Victorian code enjoins the stoical, factual male of the public sphere but also glorifies the Family. Men and women are both trapped in these codes. I’d say that Mr. Ramsay is more aware of the trap than Mrs. Ramsay, but this frees Mrs. Ramsay to show that the age that is passing away is more than just a trap – it is also something archetypal, eternally beautiful, something with a transcendental as well as a material frame of reference. It is up to Lily’s painting (of Mrs. Ramsay in the window) to capture the full beauty, the shimmering transcendental glow of that age, so that we can let it go and move on.

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