The 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).
Continue reading“Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is jokey for Jacob.”
Thus begins James Joyce’s parody of himself, which is an exploration of how “Shem the Penman” is a gross, smelly weirdo whom no one likes.
Shem is one half of HCE, the introverted and artistic side of human nature. His brother, Shaun, is the extroverted and practical side.
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The Suspended Sentence 