My father enjoyed finding errors in published books. He read a lot of books in retirement, many pertaining to history, and he was always thrilled to catch mistakes that slipped by the watchful eyes of authors and editors. I don’t know what pleased him so much about this — perhaps the feeling of being smarter than some egghead academic. I remember that when I handed him a copy of my own academic monograph, on Romantic-era epic literature, and I told him, “When you find errors in here, I need you not to tell me about them because I don’t think I can emotionally handle it.”
My amusing comment might even suggest a kind of Oedipal dynamic at work for me, where the father correcting the mistakes of the son is experienced as a threat, an echo of the energies that Freud finds in childhood and the unconscious mind.
But, since we all make mistakes, it doesn’t help to run from them. Errors are, Joyce tells us in Ulysses, “portals of discovery” for the “man of genius,” as I’ve written about here. I recently said in conversation that Stephen Dedalus is wrong when he says this, but I was overstating the case. What I meant was that Stephen desperately wants to believe this comment because he’s running from his mistakes. I’m not sure Stephen understands the best version of what his words might mean.
Mistakes are inevitable, so long as we have a human brain that must navigate the world by assembling a picture of it that is faulty to greater or lesser degrees. How can one embrace error, and accept fallibility, without unduly obsessing over one’s mistakes? Read on for a further discussion of the value of mistakes, and a discussion of my own embarrassing typographical errors in publication!
Chapter I.5 reviews the manuscript of ALP’s Letter. As I’ve discussed in other posts, the Letter is a document penned by Shem at the direction/dictation of ALP, simultaneously condemning and exonerating her husband, HCE, who sums up humanity itself (Here Comes Everybody). Her Letter represents all of literature, which deals with revealing and often accepting the flaws of humanity. In a narrower sense, it represents Finnegans Wake itself.
The Letter is therefore a kind of archetype, and we can take every book to be a manifestation of it, even my own book, or this blog. Of course, the specific actual text that Joyce has in mind is the Book of Kells, whose “Tunc Page” I have proudly framed in my bedroom (a section of this page adorns the top of this blog). Chapter I.5 is in part a parody of Sir Edward Sullivan’s The Book of Kells, with many sentences in the paragraph I will discuss below riffing on sentences in his study.
The paragraph I will focus on is constructed as a very long rhetorical question. That question begins, “who that scrutinising marvels at those indignant whiplooplashes; those so prudently bolted or blocked rounds; the touching reminiscence of an incompletet trail or dropped final; a round thousand whirligig glorioles….”
Most of the paragraph is a list of textual elements that the subject of the question “marvels” at. That is to say, the question begins along these lines: “If someone scrutinizing this document marvels at this part of the text, and that part of the text, and these markings, and this marking…..” And so on and so forth.
And the question ends, “…who thus at all this marvelling but will press on hotly to see the vaulting feminine libido of those interbranching ogham sex upandinsweeps sternly controlled and easily repersuaded by the uniform matteroffactness of a meandering male fist?”
Who will continue on from this marveling to discover the male and female aspects that created this document, the HCE and ALP forces in the psyche that are producing this very dream? They give rise to the archetype for all books, which is reflected in every document (and, as I suggest below, every mind).
The form of the paragraph is somewhat mimicked by the much longer question that opens I.6: each item in the list is complex, and is marked off from the others by a semicolon (which is a mark of punctuation used to divide lists if there is internal punctuation within the list. For example, if I were listing “my friend, whom I met in college; my brother, who is writing about F1 racing; and my blog’s editor, who is my future wife,” I would use a semicolon to divide elements of the list because each element has a comma in it).
Curiously, some items have colons between them. Maybe this choice is playing on the confusion between marks of punctuation (I just reviewed the proofs for a forthcoming publication of mine in a journal, and I found that a colon had been mistakenly swapped out for a semicolon). If we follow the punctuation strictly, this means that items connected with colons are all part of one big item — one single thing that the question’s subject is marveling at. Here, I’m going to focus on one such big item:
a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons: that absurdly bullsfooted bee declaring with an even plainer dummpshow than does the mute commoner with us how hard a thing it is to mpe mporn a gentlerman: and look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and puddenpadded, very like a whale’s egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia: all those red raddled obeli cayennepeppercast over the text, calling unnecessary attention to errors, omissions, repetitions and misalignments: that (probably local or personal) variant maggers for the more generally accepted majesty which is but a trifle and yet may quietly amuse: those superciliouslooking crisscrossed Greek ees awkwardlike perched there and here out of date like sick owls hawked back to Athens: and the geegees too, jesuistically formed at first but afterwards genuflected aggrily toewards the occident: the Ostrogothic kakography affected for certain phrases of Etruscan stabletalk and, in short, the learning betrayed at almost every line’s end: the headstrength (at least eleven men of thirtytwo palfrycraft) revealed by a constant labour to make a ghimel pass through the eye of an iota: this, for instance, utterly unexpected sinistrogyric return to one peculiar sore point in the past
If this were all one item, then all of it would be an elaboration of a word “cunningly hidden” in the book. I actually tried just now to see if this very passage contained an acrostic, but if it does, it’s beyond my simple mind. My initial thought upon hearing the phrase “cunningly hidden” is that it refers to a certain word of power that is important to the Wake, though the word itself does not occur anywhere in the text. It is concealed in the word “Tunc,” which marks the most significant page in the Book of Kells for Joyce. There is a certain way of arranging the letters of that word that reveals a sacred and powerful mystery. But this matter is too deep for a blog post. Let the profane believe that this is merely a dirty joke. Something truly extraordinary is hidden here.
Elements of this passage call back to earlier in the Wake, suggesting that the Letter is Finnegans Wake itself (or, I guess to say it more precisely, that the book Finnegans Wake is a manifestation of the archetype “ALP’s Letter,” just as every book is). “Bullsfoot” is a word from the Willingdone passage in I.1, a play on “bullshit.” The word “maggers” appeared in I.2, when HCE met the king (conflating that story with HCE’s encounter with the two girls, or “maggies” — and/or a confrontation with death and its maggots). The “mute commoner” might be HCE stuttering before the king or Mute from the Mute and Jute passage. The “dummpshow” might refer to Jute’s description of how HCE “dumptied the wholeborrow of rubbages on to soil here” (I’m just noticing that the wheelbarrow is spelled “wholeborrow” — it’s the goods he’s borrowed that he trashes and defecates into a dump mound, to fertilize the earth to become more things for the next HCE to borrow…and so the cycle turns). The word “funferal” is spelled “funferall” in I.1, the grand funeral that follows the wake, fun for all.
This manuscript contains mistakes that have been corrected in red:
all those red raddled obeli cayennepeppercast over the text, calling unnecessary attention to errors, omissions, repetitions and misalignments
“Obeli” is the plural of “obelus,” a mark made on a manuscript to indicate spurious passages or errors. Sullivan’s book specifically discusses a mistake in the text and says, “Attention is drawn to the error by four obeli in red.” Joyce himself, it should be noted, used crayons (including red) to write and correct parts of Finnegans Wake, writing large so that he could see the words with his diminishing eyesight.
The word “raddled” suggests to me “riddled” as well as “rattled,” which is how a writer can feel when his mistakes are pointed out. These obeli are “Cayennepeppercast,” strewn about the text like pepper flakes.
Perhaps correcting errors can be “hot” in some way (there are, after all, people who are aroused by discipline and other kinds of “correction” in erotic contexts), or maybe more generally, and platonically, something that “spices up” writing, making it more interesting by providing avenues for discovery.
Marking up a text is, in a sense, an act of defacing it, wounding it, punishing it. But out of destruction comes growth. Throughout my life, until I was well into my twenties, I never — ever — marked up or even underlined books. I didn’t want to disturb what I saw as the pristine beauty of the text.
But the act of disturbing something that looks settled and beautiful might very well be a condition of growth. I eventually got over my hang up, and now I regularly mark my texts. I underline, circle, write notes, etc., and those markings almost seem to me like cutting openings into the body of the text, creating lacerations that are portals through which which I can enter and explore. Out of those markings — my physical desecration — arises my own creative engagement with the text.
There are plenty of errors in this Letter.The narrator finds a variant of the word “majesty,” out of date letter Es, bad handwriting or spelling (which is what cacography or “kakography” is), etc. I’m particularly struck by the “utterly unexpected sinistrogyric return to one peculiar sore point in the past.” “Sinistrogyric” meanings turning to the left, and to the sinister. Perhaps these are literal markings in the text that, swirling to the left, return to a certain spot on the page, but the phrasing also implies a consciousness continually returning to some past trauma or “sore point.” In fact, the whole passage could be read as a commentary on waking consciousness, which is full of misapprehensions, omissions, repetitions, and misalignments.
Most of us know that our conscious experience is being assembled by our minds based on the enormous amount of data flooding our senses. The world we perceive is how our mind presents the world to us, rather than how it really is. For example, when we read, we don’t proceed letter-by-letter. Our eyes run over a page, quickly scan the letters, and form an impression of what our mind expects to see there. That’s how, as the famous example goes, the mnid can raed a sntenece prfecetly well, as lnog as the frist and lsat lteter of ecah wrod saty the smae. That’s also why typos are so hard to catch. We quite literally see what we expect to see. The same is true of our consciousness engaging with all things. We do it also in our psychological projections and our tendency to see things in terms of our own ideas and our self-image.
I’ve suggested elsewhere that this Letter — alternately titled The Suspended Sentence in that long list of alternate titles at the beginning of I.5– is like consciousness itself, a long rambling sentence suspended in nothing, like Molly Bloom’s thoughts in Ulysses. Our minds too are riddled with errors, and riddles, and too often turn in sinister directions toward the past and toward our mistakes.
The part of the mind that corrects, crosses out, and seeks those “sore points” corresponds to Shaun, especially in his guises as the pedantic professor and judge. As a matter of fact, at the end of I.5, Shaun in the form of a “Brofessor” seems to create time and space — the mind’s perception of those things — by puncturing the Letter with a breakfast fork (as the Letter becomes the breakfast meal or feast at Finnegan’s wake). This is the equivalent of defacing the body of the text with markings to correct it.
This rational and critical (and criticizing) part of the mind is indispensable, allowing us to learn and discover things from our mistakes, and embrace our own fallible tendencies, which we are often tempted to connect to our weakness and mortality. But it can also go too far. In its worst aspects, this part of the mind can become the condemning, censorious “Justius” who attacks Shem. I’m captivated by the phrase “unnecessary attention to errors” — surely, we must attend to our mistakes in order to explore them in a manner that makes them our “portals of discovery.” But there is a way of giving them unnecessary attention, when we fetishize our mistakes and foibles, allowing them to consume our attention and paralyze us, instead of using them for a self-knowledge that inspires our future work.
I’m reminded of the question Shem faces in I.7, “whether true conciliation was forging ahead or falling back after the celestious intemperance.”
Permit me to quote myself from this post as a comment on this line:
So badly abused by others, he sought to find what “true conciliation” consisted of. Does one fall back into memory, nursing wounds (and holding grudges), or does one forge ahead to try to repair what has passed in what is to come (moving past the pain but risking to repress)?
[…]
Maybe the point here is that seeking to remedy the wounds of the past, which is a process that involves art, requires reliving that past, bringing it again into the present.
Perhaps it is a false choice between forging ahead and falling back: maybe the best choice is to embrace the present (the Now) as the palimpsest of all history containing — here, now, at this very moment — the wounds and the healing and both and neither — all at the same time.
[…]
The Moment of artistic inspiration — like Blake’s Moment in which the poet’s work is complete — is where the past and future meet, where the act of creation can free us from holding grudges over the past and having anxiety over the future. In the Moment of artistic creation, we construct the self anew, find new ways to narrate our story of the self.
Our consciousness pulls us into the past, to mope over our errors, others’ offenses against us, and various “falls” of all sorts. It pushes us to imagine various futures, and we become anxious over them. But right here and now, in the Moment, exist at once all mistakes — and the Fall itself — and the way to (at least begin to) rectify them. We have to learn one of the lessons of Finnegans Wake: to accept and forgive not only the transgressions of others against us, but the tendency we ourselves have to err. And when the critical parts of our mind cross out and call attention to our errors, unsettling us, we must let them do so, and embrace those mistakes and corrections — those gashes in the text of our consciousness — to enter the portals of discovery. In that journey, we escape from the Selfhood/ego, and both the egotistical, ideal images it imposes on us and its drive to fetishize those mistakes and punish us for them.
*
The immediate occasion for my thoughts in this post is a review of my monograph that pointed out some of its typographical errors. I should say that overall, I’m very pleased with the reviews my book has received, including a really great write-up in the Times Literary Supplement that called my work a “considerable achievement of scholarship and criticism.” Another, also positive, review in an academic journal had previously noted that some errors exist in my book, but the reviewer characterized these, correctly, as the sorts of problems that arise with any complicated project carried out over long periods of time. The review that occasioned my post here was, on the whole, positive, constructively critical, and thoughtful, but it ended with a paragraph that catalogues specific errors. These include my misnaming of Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets as “Ecclesiastic Sonnets” and my substitution of an “o” for a “u” in the French name of Wordsworth’s friend whom I briefly mention. I feel fortunate that such errors, annoying as they are to me, do not in any way change the substance of my argument, which yet another reviewer called “convincing and well-evidenced.” The errors just make me look dumb.
But the error that tears at my heart is my misquotation in the epigraph that ornaments the opening of my book. There, I quote from the end of Wordsworth’s Prelude , and I managed to type the word “impression” where it should be “inspiration.” From one perspective, this is mortifying. It cuts into my self-image in a way that reminds me of epiphanies in Dubliners; it defaces the pristine and perfect ideal image I have of my book. But from another perspective, this is pretty funny (what’s that old saying about comedy being a tragic event seen from a different point of view?). And from yet another perspective, it is deeply revelatory. I have a distinct memory of double-checking that epigraph — I was worried I would get the punctuation wrong, ha — and my mind simply could not perceive that the word was “inspiration.”
My inability to see “inspiration” is a highly symbolic. “Inspiration” is exactly what poets invoke from muses at the beginning of an epic. It is as if my mind, at the start of my major work, needed on some level to deny that Wordsworth was an inspiration for me. The literary critic Harold Bloom famously proposes that writers suffer from an “anxiety of influence” in which they need to deny, minimize, and/or misinterpret or reinvent (“misprison”) the work of those writers who most influence them. Interestingly, Bloom puts this in Freudian terms. Each writer is tempted to rebel against his sources of inspiration, as the son rebels against the father.
So did my mind want to seize from Wordsworth an inspiration that I fear makes him greater than I am? Did I try to reinvent this incredible poet, or recreate him in my image, as I attempted to surpass him with my own epic argument about his literary period? Did I alter his words to transform them into my own art, announcing my creative synthesis of various poems into a new, unique work?
Maybe. The alternate interpretation is best summed up by Tony Soprano, talking about his son: “He could just be a fuckin’ idiot. Historically, that’s been the case.”
Anyway, Mea Culpa Maxima for any errors. I consider myself a lifelong student, still learning and improving. I can only say, as Blake did, “Dear Reader, forgive what you do not approve, & love me for this energetic exertion of my talent.” Let’s hope I got that quote right (I didn’t).
