About two years ago, I was writing a piece where I wondered if my creativity had gone out. Perhaps, I speculated, I had become nothing more than a “keeper of the flame” that burned back in the day, editing my old pieces of writing, planning to publish my older work, etc.

But then I was struck by the thought that my creativity hadn’t left me at all. I was writing so many new, creative things still, especially when it came to explicating Finnegans Wake. Why couldn’t scholarly writing be considered creative as well?

I’m not tending a flame, I thought. I’m the kindling. The fire burns from inside me, not unlike a phoenix.

This post looks at this idea in HCE’s speech in II.3, where he defends the Russian General.

HCE begins:

A time. And a find time. Whenin aye was a kiddling. And the tarikies held sowansopper. Let there beam a frishfrey. And they sodhe gudhe rudhe brodhe wedhe swedhe medhe in the kanddledrum.

His opening with “A time” is a callback to his (and/or an earlier HCE’s) encounter with the Cad in I.2, in which he gives the time (alternatively, this is that same moment seen from a different angle).

I’ve always taken the bolded sentence above to mean “when I was a kid” (when he was the Cad in a previous cycle…cadet is French for younger son). But now it reminds me of “kindling” also.

The next sentence — “tariki” is Persian for “dark.” Campbell and Robinson gloss that sentence as “The darkies held a Samhain supper.” Samhain [pronounced sow-in] is the Celtic Halloween, the harvest festival.

This is another version of the feast after the fall of the old HCE/Finnegan, the wake. A bunch of people in the fallen world — who are as dark as Shem, who is called a “darky” in I.7 — are having a fish fry (frishfrey). And then…they soaked good red bread with sweet meat in the kettledrum.

“Sweet meat” is candy, and apparently “sweet bread” refers to certain kinds of meat like the pancreas or heart or stomach. (“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls”).

Speaking of a fish fry, I.1 states that ALP’s work of stealing our presents from the past will “make us all lordy heirs and ladymaidesses of a pretty nice kettle of fruit.” HCE is the fish, the salmon of knowledge — Christ, God become man become fish — who is sacrificed and fried up for us as the feast of existence. He tasted the forbidden fruit.

The kanddledrum reminds me not only of kettle but of candle and kindle. And it reminds me of a bit that I was surprised by in I.1, in a passage right after a discussion of the invention of moveable type and the printing of books:

the park’s so dark by kindlelight. But look what you have in your handself! The movibles are scrawling in motions, marching, all of them ago, in pitpat and zingzang for every busy eerie whig’s a bit of a torytale to tell.

It’s an amusing coincidence that the word “kindle” is associated with reading here. The light of literature — the light of our kindles — illuminates the Park, where all the stories of mankind’s scandals are told.

Look what you have in your hand, it says. That would be the book Finnegans Wake, where the words themselves are living things. But also, since Joyce’s book represents and contains all of literature, you are holding literature itself, the Eternal story of humanity.

That line also works as a masturbation joke: you’re holding yourself in your hand because we are all HCE committing a transgression in the Park. To hold literature is to hold yourself because it’s the story of all of us (and to study literature can also be to engage in intellectual masturbation).

I have never owned a kindle. I prefer physical books — and apparently, in the case of Finnegans Wake, reading it until it falls apart.