Navigating

This seems really remedial, but I'm going to use this post just to document what I can figure out in terms of bare basics.

The first paragraph locates us. It's also reminding us of the circular nature of the novel ("a commodius vicus of recirculation") and then it lands us at Howth Castle and Environs. I wonder if Sir Tristram may be a protagonist of sorts? I think perhaps Sir Tristram is arriving from North America to Ireland ("the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor"). "The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man..." We're dealing with a wake, so is this an announcement? The announcement of his death? I love the words in this sentence:

The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the w

est in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.

If I had to translate this - knowing nothing so far, and so probably completely wrong - I might say it's about a notice of some sort that entails the death ("pftjschute") of Finnegan, who was in life a solid man, but his death ("the humptyhillhead of humself," like a gravestone?) promptly sends someone on a journey to the west looking for him, and where he lies is in a grave "where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green."

So we have someone who has died and someone who is going to the wake now.

Maybe?

Whew. It's taken me an hour to get this far, and I have absolutely no idea if I'm anywhere near the zip code, let

alone the mark.

Many of the words are just flat out made up, of course, and onomatopeia must play a large role here. "The fall (bababadalgharaghtakammionarronnkonnbronn...thurnuk!)" - surely this is the sound of a fall!

I looked up "violer d'am

ores" on Google Translate, and it had trouble with it. "Violer" means "rape." I presume "d'amores" has something to do with love. May ask my French teacher friends. Of course Joyce could be created French words, in the same way he's making up English words, and so maybe it just means "violator of loves."

On page 4, we get our first description of Finnegan:

Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen's maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in his rushlit toofarback for messuages before joshuan judges had given us numbers of Helviticus committed deuteronomy (one yeastyday he sternely struxk his tete in a tub for to watsch the future of his fates but ere he swiftly stook it out again, by the might of moses, the very water was eviparated and all the guenneses had met their exodus so that ought to show you what a pentschanjeuchy chap he was!) and during might odd years this man of hod, cement and edifices in Toper's Thorp piled buildung supra buildung pon the banks for the livers by the Soangso.

Other than the fact that

my head is now pounding, there are some small shoots of understanding emerging here. I think as long as I can anchor myself in the subject and verb of each sentence, the adjectives and adverbs can become background noise. Of course, they are important too (and for me are both the most interesting and most distracting parts), but what's most difficult here is that the text doesn't feel like it has a foreground. As I read this section, just identifying subject-verb-object and letting the rest wash over me seems to help.

I do wonder, however, how this book was edited. It will be really interesting to look that up when I'm done. I love words like "hierarchitectitiptitoploftical," which (aside from driving the spellcheck crazy) looks at first like a word you want to skip over. But then you see the roots in there. Hierarchical, with "architect" and "tip top loft" embedded inside it. This now reminds me of e.e. cummings. One of my favorite poems of his is this one:

If you haven't seen this poem before, stare at it for a few minutes. The method here is the same - embedding words within words. Of course, the length of the cummings poem rewards effort with a quick sense of satisfaction, which is so far missing from the Joyce for me. And it takes a long time to work these things out, which explains why I'm only on page 5 so far (the book starts on page 3), and haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what may be at work here.

But each little pin-prick makes me feel like I have some small chance of entering in. I'm not navigating yet, but I feel like the compass arrow is starting to settle down.