In II.1, Shem runs off each time he is rejected by the girls. He writes and creates, coming and going three times like the Prankquean — with echoes of and references to that episode. The third time, he returns to battle his extrovert brother.

The third time, Issy — caught between the battling boys and trying to choose between them — has a fantasy that Shem becomes her tutor, teaching her all about the “book of the dark.” This short post will look briefly at this moment.

Actually, it’s not totally clear to me who’s having this fantasy. It could be Shem’s, but I think I’ve always taken it to be Issy’s:

Still he’d be good tutor two in his big armschair lerningstoel and she be waxen in his hands. Turning up and fingering over the most dantellising peaches in the lingerous longerous book of the dark.

The “book of the dark” is Finnegans Wake itself. It’s all of literature. It’s the books of human knowledge.

But I like to think of it also as the human mind itself, in all of its darkness and horror and glory. The untraveled country of the unconscious mind.

He will guide her through the dark.

She thinks he’ll be her guide, not unlike Virgil to Dante (“dantellising”). “Dan” is furthermore the word “give” in many romance languages. The word mixes the ideas of give, tell, tantalize. In fingering the peaches, Shem reiterates the crime HCE, that Fall that accompanies knowledge.

Knowledge and self-exploration and tutelage are all equated with eroticism, and all connected to the Fall.

’Twas ever so in monitorology since Headmaster Adam became Eva Harte’s toucher, in omnibus moribus et temporibus, with man’s mischief in his mind whilst her pupils swimmed too heavenlies, let his be exaspirated, letters be blowed! I is a femaline person. O, of provocative gender. U unisingular case.

Adam was Eve’s tutor as well. The torments of love and jealousy are produced by the Fall, as always associated with capitalist getting and spending…IOU (Shem’s house in I.7 is filled with “you-owe-mes”).

The Fall is often represented in Finnegans Wake as a fall into language: the separation between subject and object produced by the mind acquiring consciousness requires us to communicate, which leads us to develop ways of representing reality. The Tower of Babel — at which humanity’s language were confused — is a symbol of the Fall throughout the babbling, confusing Wake, starting with the first syllables of the first thunderword on the first page.

The association between grammar, specifically, and the Fall also continues throughout the book, as in this excerpt from II.2, in which Issy is instructed by her grandmother (the older ALP) in the art of love:

From gramma’s grammar she has it that if there is a third person, mascarine, phelinine or nuder, being spoken abad it moods prosodes from a person speaking to her second which is the direct object that has been spoken to, with and at.

Grammar will be the subject of other posts, and I may need to write another post reflecting on the relationship between these two different scenes of instruction.