This post continues my discussion of The Mookse and the Gripes from the last post.

Nuvoletta appears. Her name means “little cloud” in Italian, and she’s a form of Issy, the young ALP. She’s another manifestation of the stream that would be river, and she will rain into that river by the parable’s end.

Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spunn of sisteen shimmers, was looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars and listening all she childishly could. How she was brightened when Shouldrups in his glaubering hochskied his welkinstuck and how she was overclused when Kneesknobs on his zwivvel was makeacting such a paulse of himshelp! She was alone. All her nubied companions were asleeping with the squirrels.

We get the image of a little girl leaning over the bannister to listen to her brothers fight downstairs. And also a cloud peering over the stars. She was happy to see the two of them, the believer and the doubter. Perhaps especially so because she was alone. “Paulse” suggests pulse, pause, Paul/Saul, and fool

She tries to get their attention but fails:

she tried all she tried to make the Mookse look up at her (but he was fore too adiaptotously farseeing) and to make the Gripes hear how coy she could be (though he was much too schystimatically auricular about his ens to heed her) but it was all mild’s vapour moist. Not even her feignt reflection, Nuvoluccia, could they toke their gnoses off for their minds with intrepifide fate and bungless curiasity, were conclaved with Heliogobbleus and Commodus and Enobarbarus and whatever the coordinal dickens they did

Not even with her reflection (the other temptress in the Park who felled HCE) can she get them to notice her.

She tried all the winsome wonsome ways her four winds had taught her. […] But, sweet madonine, she might fair as well have carried her daisy’s worth to Florida. For the Mookse, a dogmad Accanite, were not amoosed and the Gripes, a dubliboused Catalick, wis pinefully obliviscent.

…

I see, she sighed. There are menner.

Men, amiright?

So caught up in their stupid fight over…whatever nonsense…they can’t even look up and notice…women, nature, emotions, etc.

I also like the idea that Nuvoletta is a reference to nouvelles lettres, French for new literature (literally “new letters”).

If you’re so hung up on all the pointless stupid nonsense that religious and/or nationalist dopes are…you’re going to miss the possibilities for art. [One could also read this scene as Joyce mocking new literature by depicting it as a pathetic flirt who cannot get anyone intelligent to take it seriously. As ever in Finnegans Wake, it could be both at once: conflict over our silly little ideas can cause us to neglect the world around us and miss out on the potential for creativity, but perhaps many of the actual attempts made at new art by others might not be very good]

Although Shem/the Gripes is wiser in some ways than his brother, even he gets pulled into this fight and can’t see his way out.

Dusk falls, in a most exquisite passage:

The siss of the whisp of the sigh of the softzing at the stir of the ver grose O arundo of a long one in midias reeds: and shades began to glidder along the banks, greepsing, greepsing, duusk unto duusk, and it was as glooming as gloaming could be in the waste of all peacable worlds. […] The Mookse had a sound eyes right but he could not all hear. The Gripes had light ears left yet he could but ill see. He ceased. And he ceased, tung and trit, and it was neversoever so dusk of both of them. But still Moo thought on the deeps of the undths he would profoundth come the morrokse and still Gri feeled of the scripes he would escipe if by grice he had luck enoupes.

…

Oh, how it was duusk! From Vallee Maraia to Grasyaplaina, dormimust echo! Ah dew! Ah dew! It was so duusk that the tears of night began to fall, first by ones and twos, then by threes and fours, at last by fives and sixes of sevens, for the tired ones were wecking, as we weep now with them. O! O! O! Par la pluie!

Here again, as at the beginning of the parable, Joyce parodies the phrase the “best of all possible worlds.”

The Mookse had “sound eyes”; the Gripes had “light ears.” They’re two halves of the same person. The Mookse thinks; the Gripes feels. The Mookse thinks (that he thinks) deeply, profoundly. The Gripes feels about the scrapes/fights he would escape (cf. Shem in I.7) as well as the scripts/texts he would write if he were lucky. [“Enope” is Greek for earing — the Gripes is associated with ears. It makes me think of Jarl Van Hoother’s “come back to my earin” in the Prankquean episode]

“Midias reeds” is medias res, a Latin phrase meaning “in the middle of things,” which is traditionally the way epic poems begin (literalized by the Wake starting in the middle of a sentence). Joyce’s phrase also reminds me of the legend of King Midas: the gossip about his donkey ears emanates from reeds. Again, ears.

La pluie is French for the rain, but it also sounds like a word for umbrella, a phallic implement carried by HCE. I take this, again, to be an (unconscious) indication that the Wholeness of the Father underlies the world of the children.

The washerwomen arrive:

Then there came down to the thither bank a woman of no appearance (I believe she was a Black with chills at her feet) and she gathered up his hoariness the Mookse motamourfully where he was spread and carried him away to her invisible dwelling, thats hights, Aquila Rapax, for he was the holy sacred solem and poshup spit of her boshop’s apron. So you see the Mookse he had reason as I knew and you knew and he knew all along. And there came down to the hither bank a woman to all important (though they say that she was comely, spite the cold in her heed) and, for he was as like it as blow it to a hawker’s hank, she plucked down the Gripes, torn panicky autotone, in angeu from his limb and cariad away its beotitubes with her to her unseen shieling, it is, De Rore Coeli. And so the poor Gripes got wrong; for that is always how a Gripes is, always was and always will be. And it was never so thoughtful of either of them. And there were left now an only elmtree and but a stone. Polled with pietrous, Sierre but saule. O! Yes! And Nuvoletta, a lass.

The narrator is on the side of the Mookse.

The end, with the stone and stem, anticipates the end of I.8. The references to Peter and Paul/Saul indicate the Brother Battle.

“A lass” not only sounds like “alas” — and echoes the “last” of the novel’s final sentence “A way a lone a last” — but sounds like Greek words meaning stone and salt (as in salt tears and the ocean, as in the end of the novel).

The finale:

Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream (for a thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her and she was stout and struck on dancing and her muddied name was Missisliffi) there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears (I mean for those crylove fables fans who are ‘keen’ on the prettypretty commonface sort of thing you meet by hopeharrods) for it was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh I’se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

This ending parallels the ending of Finnegans Wake — or, more precisely, the ending of IV.1, the last page of the book — in which ALP in the form of the River Liffey flows out to the sea. The “Weh, O weh” here anticipates the “A way” of the book’s final sentence: “A way a lone a last….” The “flowing” suggests the “riverrun” with which the book began, as well as crying or menstruation. It also suggests overflowing, as at the end of II.2, when the energy of the Mother Goddess erupts into manifestation: “Mawmaw, luk, your beeeftay’s fizzin over!”

The line that always moves me here is “But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook.”

“Lapping as though her heart was brook” can also be read as “laughing as though her heart was broke(n).”

I’m reminded that ALP is described early in the novel as “laffing through all plores for us.” Plores is French for tears, but it also sounds like plauds/plaudits, applause — as soon as The Mookse and the Gripes ends, the narrator asks his audience to hold their applause.

The line suggests that this mighty river, this old woman (a thousand of tears/years had gone beyond/eon her), is still a brook, a little girl, at heart. We carry the past with us, as all time is layered upon all other time (the “present tense integument” of I.7). It suggests that her water laps through all things, just like when she was young.

It suggests that she is laughing through the heartbreaks and joys of life.

And maybe “lapping” as in drinking them up.

I can’t read the line that she was “stuck on dancing” without recalling that Joyce’s daughter, Lucia Joyce, was a professional dancer.

The rhythm of the ending recalls the river’s first appearance in the parable, in which she sang, “My, my, my! Me and me! Little down dream, don’t I love thee!”

I recently discovered this is based on the song “Little Brown Jug,” which is about a drunk:

Ha, ha, ha!

You and me!

Little Brown Jug, don’t I love thee!

Perhaps the change in lyrics reflects the narcissism of the river, in love with itself and the dream of its life (reflecting the way we’re all in love with our own self-image and the stories we tell ourselves about our identities). It reminds me of Eve’s narcissism in Paradise Lost, falling in love with her own reflection.

The song is a real hoot. The singer says to the jug that if a cow gave milk like the jug, he’d milk it 40 times a day.

And then there’s this part of the song, which I think speaks to the ending of Joyce’s tale:

If all the folks in Adam’s race
Were gathered together in one place,
Then I’d prepare to shed a tear (I’d let them go without a tear)
Before I’d part from you, my dear.

The first time I read the Wake, 15 or so years ago, I was exhausted by the time I got to Chapter 6. But by my second and third reads, I found that I couldn’t get enough of The Mookse and the Gripes. It’s a microcosm of the whole novel.