Finnegans Wake II.2 is the study chapter. After coming in from playing, the children are apparently doing their homework: it’s Joyce’s chance to parody school books, as he writes the chapter sort of like a textbook with marginal comments and footnotes.
This post focuses on the end of the chapter, where the brothers work on a math problem, and then Shaun punches Shem, only for the latter to forgive him.
Continue readingThe Children’s Hour (Finnegans Wake II.1) is a lovely little chapter.
The structure is simple: Shem and Shaun – under the guise of Glugg and Chuff – are playing a game with Issy, who appears as Izod and the Floras (the flower girls, the 28 girls who are aspects of her, a “month’s bunch of pretty maidens” – associated with the monthly, lunar cycle – which makes Issy the 29th, the leap year girl).
Continue reading…and the dumb speak.
Finnegans Wake is the closest I’ve ever seen to capturing on the page the very essence of what language is — in this book, arguably no one is speaking but language itself, to itself, unmasking the process by which language, the chattering river of the unconscious mind, produces selfhood.
The “quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoq” that ends Chapter 7 is, presumably, the speaking of the dumb. The “dumb” are all those who are unable to speak, but the word might also denote people who are not all that intelligent. Yet even people who lack intellectual accomplishments still, in terms of the Wake, embody the same Eternal story. And so the artist allows them to speak, through him.
Continue reading“Justice” is cruel authoritarianism when it’s not tempered by Mercy.
Mercy is wishy-washy weakness when it’s not balanced by Justice.
Thus the brothers, Shaun and Shem. At the end of Chapter I.7, Justius (Shaun) monologues, followed by Mercias (Shem).
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The Suspended Sentence 