à conto

Seeing Arno Schmidt referred to as "the German Joyce" (a phrase everywhere) makes me think of the essential difference between Joyce's creation of Bloom or of anyone in Finnegans Wake, and Schmidt's attitude towards Kolderup, which is so detectably mindful and anxious as he places the importance of the character above that of the atmosphere – this character needing to have their completion as if they were a person who could deserve things. And the wordplay that Schmidt establishes refers back not so often to the deep history or myths that Joyce implicates in all human civilisation but to the desires of the characters, their bodies, or their behaviour, beholden to disgust, or lust, irritation, manners, itching, dripping, etc; Butt telling Kolderup that he is "smiling supersilliously" in Act Five, Scene Four, or a man getting "invulvd with all the duennas who run into=him, à conto his >well-larded doubull pouch" in Act Three, Scene Two. This is not to say that Joyce doesn't implicate bodies in his work, but Schmidt (and I may be wrong) seems to dwell more quick gratifications or itches than on settled habits of bodily preference such as kidneys for breakfast. The way he writes must be helping me with that impression: it's not relaxed. The bifurcating and reassembling of the words is being done to increase the amount of flesh in the book and make it superhumanly ridiculous. Joyce's bodies stay closer to the humanly ridiculous and don't go this far beyond it into the monstrous, smelly abundance of Atheists (Schmidt stresses smell a number of times …).

choose but hear

Hugh Kenner, mentioning the "peaked cap" that James Joyce gave to the character Frank, drew the reader's attention to a photograph of Joyce with his hands in his pockets on the streets of Dublin, and there, said Kenner, there on his head, was the peaked cap. I realised that I had never thought of real peaked caps as I was reading that story and if I wanted to be honest then the hat in the picture was not a hat that I would have described with the phrase "peaked cap," or not "peaked" because "cap" would have occurred to me; but not "peaked." On other pages in The Pound Era (1971) I was willing to believe that Kenner and myself were in correspondence but with this material evidence reproduced in front of me I could not go along with him and so I watched as the triumph of his discovery appeared to contract in upon him and draw him away from me into a state of distinct separation, like Mars, or like those Greek gods who come down to give you your impulses and problems before restoring themselves to the clouds or to Olympus. What is it about Coleridge that amazes me when I witness the machinery that is his fake friend who wrote the letter in the Literaria, and who was not his friend, and the letter was not a letter but a piece of writing in the same way that other chapters were pieces of writing (ie, written by Coleridge himself), and in fact this letter was replacing the actually nonexistent piece of writing that Coleridge told you he was suppressing in obedience to the opinions of the friend who wrote the letter? He asks you to imagine himself, the essayist, sacrificing his philosophical intelligence for the good of the public, when really he was happy and relieved -- for it was easy to promise a chapter about the theory of "esemplastic power" and then replace it with a letter, he said to his publisher in another letter; it "was written without taking my pen off the paper except to dip it in the inkstand," that panegyric dodge was the simplest and fastest thing to write in the whole book, the most natural thing, just as it was easier for the Ancient Mariner to chuck his stories off on strangers by pulling them up with eye-glittering stratagems than it was for him to establish a mutual conversation in an ordinary tone with sensitive and well-chosen questions about the other person's friends and family. He could have begun by telling the Guest that it was very interesting to hear that someone was getting married and he hoped the bride was nice and by the way here is a story about a bird he shot once; he hopes you don't like birds. (Trigger warning.)

What wish fulfilment is this for the author of the Ancient Mariner, "He cannot choose but hear," followed by a monologue that leaves the one on the receiving end a "sadder and a wiser man" without any of the reciprocation that might have given the poor Guest the satisfying sense that he, too, was an interesting human being in some way, and not just a sounding board, echo-cave, or inadvertent visitor to one of the haunted houses that the shopping centres around here were erecting in their carparks a week and a half ago? What's this gunslinger fantasy of the human amazement who bursts into the frame, shocks the world, then zooms off? The Guest has to make a little struggle before he can be subdued; so too the poet assumes a resistance on the part of the audience as he constructs his easy letter; he invents the "reader who, like myself [ie, the imaginary friend], is neither prepared nor perhaps calculated for the study of so abstruse a subject so abstrusely treated" and "will, as I have before hinted, be almost entitled to accuse you of a sort of imposition on him," "persons [...] who feel no interest in the subjects," and "many to whose unprepared minds your speculations on the esemplastic power would be utterly unintelligible," generally conjuring up the presence of an audience that needs Coleridge to repress his philosophical essay -- which nonetheless is a stunner, says the friend, who has read it, making him the only being in the entire history of the world who has done so, not excluding Coleridge himself.

do at present

Let me find a purpose for as many of these burdens as possible, says Joyce -- the nursery rhyme living like a fish in the subtle electricity of your head since you were two, here is a reason for you to have retained it, you can use it now, you can bring your mental light-beam to bear one bit of my book by remembering Mary had a Little Lamb, making the Wake a more magnified, diverse, and concentrated version of those works, poems, shows, whatever, that ask you to see them through the lens of some single piece of literature that came to you in your primordial young life, the television series Grimm half-arsedly hoping that you remember something about fairy tales, or even my own book (says Joyce) Ulysses, which if you compare it to Finnegans Wake, seems so undemanding -- oh reader, says the Wake -- without you to connect me together I am nothing, I am helpless, I am not even a proper language, your memory is my engine -- the most difficult book is also the most dependent.

When a member of the Victorian police force in Peter Temple's book The Broken Shore said the words "big boss-woman" I reacted as other readers who have lived in Victoria must have reacted, by picturing Christine Nixon, who was Chief Commissioner of the Victorian Police Force from 2001 to 2009, seeing her in my mind's eye, a phrase that I might have thought of just then because Joyce turns it into a pun that I can still remember. "I have them all, tame, deep and harried, in my mine's I".

I've come across a series of puns recently, first in Joyce, then by reading Les Murray's Taller When Prone and then finding a reprint of an 1873 pantomime called Australia Felix or Harlequin Laughing Jackass and the Magic Bat by a writer called Garnet Walch, whose name would have given me an instant set of associations if I had been alive in Melbourne and watching plays in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. He would have come to me through a hundred doorways, I would have watched his plays, I would have read about him in the newspapers, I would have talked about him to others and they might have said, "Walchie!" knowing him instantly because his work was popular, but now he arrives through only one doorway.

The setting: a room of demons

[Thunder and Lightning. Enter KANTANKEROS]

ALL: Our King! Behold him!

KAN: That will do at present,
Give me a whine that's not so effervescent.

SCO: Real, and not sham-pain.

They used to sell copies of the script with the jokes italicised so that you wouldn't miss them when they were said in front of you the first time and then so that you wouldn't forget them afterwards: one purchase and you were reinforced in both directions. There is the villain, Kantankeros, then there is a hero, Felix, there is his father, Old Australia with an Irish accent which the script spells out phonetically (and it phoneticises the elevated diction given to some words, which are accented not because the characters using them have accents but because the words have been used so many times on the stage that they have accents, independent of the characters, "kyalm" for "calm," "trr-r-aiter!" for "traitor," these accents that are in-jokes and footnotes, the possible depth of a written language seeming infinite, vertigo setting in when I think about it) -- there is a companion animal in the shape of a kookaburra and an evil companion animal in the shape of a Mosquito, rip-off of the human Spider act that Melbourne was loving at that moment; there are satirical representations of topical figures, there is an alluring city woman named Miss Collyns Treeter (Collins Streeter, she promenades on Collins Street), there is a troupe of monkeys defeated by a troupe of ladies on a jungle island, there is a painted canvas depicting The Silver Pavilion of Perfect Bliss by Mr A.C. Habbe, there is a little boy in a beard and moustache representing W.G. Grace who was visiting Melbourne with the English First Eleven, and nobody had to explain that Boblo, who wants to meet Kantankeros, was really Robert Lowe, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was hated in Australia for his law proposals, and in Britain as well -- one of them was this: he wanted to put a halfpenny tax on boxes of Lucifer matches. In the play he tells Kantankeros that he has made Britain miserable and now he wants to make Australia miserable too. Excellent, says Kantankeros, I am the demon of misery and I was going to do exactly that thing.

For this purpose he will steal the Magic Bat which is a bat in the sense that it hits a cricket ball and not in the sense that it flies around like a mouse and eats all the mangoes.

Meanwhile the real Robert Lowe did several things one after the other, he became an Hon., he became sick, he published a book of poems (one of them in honour of Caroline Chisholm, one of them about the poverty of guano collectors); and died debilitated by his bad health in 1892.

But though they've deprived us of herds and of flocks
We can still steal the treasure that lies on the rocks,
Scraping, scraping, scraping guano --
Scraping, scraping, scraping.


(from The Gathering of Guano, in Poems of a Life, by Robert Lowe, pub.1885)

I look at that and it occurs to me that Guano is a poem so obscure that no one will probably ever want to cross-reference it or pun it or portmanteau it anywhere because an unfootnoted cross-reference would seem to point, in the minds of almost every reader, to a blank blasted howling spot where stillness dwells in the undisturbed grey dust, or if the writer cross-referenced it they would feel proud of the obscurity, not proud because they had given the reader an immediate passage into an idea: I could be the only person who has read it in years -- that's not impossible.

bark

And this book, Finnegans Wake, is so fully occupied by portmanteaus or sentences exquisitely corpsed together, that it never relaxes, there's no part of it that's not playing, nothing seems unconscious (even though the story happens through a programmed swamp of language-subconsciousness), the reader approaches this crossword puzzle for hundreds of pages without ever solving it (because it is so huge), and, considering this, I say it's not a book that wants to feed those associations and crossreferences that occur ad-hocishly, the inadvertent accidental links that live and die in a single person or a group of people, it closes them down, it seals them off, it presents you with its own hermeticism, which is the nature of every book, but this one explicitly and forcefully re-routes you back inside (back to words, I mean), not like Casino, my mind flying away from the movie frequently and thinking of the memoir-woman and her friends who lived in Robert De Niro's house by the golf course, my own connection, mine, worthless possession but I can't give it away, helpless owner, me, all condemned we are, to these pointless gifts or burdens.

Being here in the United States I pick up one thing or another thing that I would not have picked up in Australia, the sun coming up behind the palm trees down the road, the solitary soft luminous cloud shaped like a scimitar over the mountains to the west, then the clouds dissolving into milk, or, then, in another piece of scenery, the South American death-pottery with a hole in the bottom of the bowl so that the spirit can escape, this bowl kept in an archival bag behind the back wall of a museum, and behind that room there is a safe as big as a cupboard, kept shut with a lock like a steering wheel, and within that safe further ceramics, larger and more precious than the bowl, made up like shamans and monkeys, the shaman holding a spiked shell in both hands and smiling away from it in a way that the museum people interpret as ecstasy, these ancient rituals and sacrifices occurring while the participants were in hallucinogenic states, though perhaps not the llamas -- one of the ceramics is roofed with a diorama of five men stretching a llama out on its back like a trampoline mat so that it can be killed with a knife to the stomach -- and anyone who pours water into that vessel and tilts it will hear the clay give a whistle -- or, said one museum worker -- a scream --

But I might have picked up better samples if I had stayed at home, who knows, and thoughts like this make the world hard to judge; you have a faint sense of impossible complexity, you become indecisive, you sit making blog posts for an audience of about two people (hello ZMKC, hello Tom), or you find a magnifying glass for yourself, like the protagonist of Frederick Rolfe's Hadrian the Seventh (ZMKC, your recommendation), who sharpens his opinions of people through a set of temporal aesthetics, loving anything that he can call shapely, active, clean, noble, handsome, or otherwise reminiscent of Ancient Greece, and imagining or thinking that he can clarify his disgust at another character by telling you nothing more than that they are ugly, or they seem "conventional," or that they "bark" when they speak, and they are not like his idea of the Ancient Greeks, a group of people that Ruskin, who must have influenced Rolfe, and whose name he brings into the book, did not like: he liked the Gothic, and in his private journals (1848 - 1873, ed. Joan Evans and J.H. Whitehouse) he had no patience with people who venerated the older Ancients.

I have a lot of sympathy for Ruskin's love of smaller, hidden things, which I can find even here, where the sky, so free of clouds on most days, is one undifferentiated detail, where the mountains are so bare from a distance, and the casinos on the horizon so large and blunt (but Steve Wynn of the Wynn is in love with tassels, as anyone can see when they walk into his current casino, and also the old one, sold by him years ago, the Bellagio -- the interior of the Wynn is decorated with tassels and butterflies -- and a frog on a rainbow waterfall singing Low Rider -- this is known as the Lake of Dreams --).

slowguard

So I'm remembering the spectacle of Finnegans Wake, a book that digests other books, as all books do, and it digests language-outside-books as well as all books do, ok, though weirdly it likes to prove that it has digested them, it shows off its bones or makes them up: the skeleton of other books the author has read become the book, nice gift for investigators I'd think if I considered it hypothetically, for imagine what it would be like if the Bible had been written by people who decided to put all their references in, but I know he hasn't used all of his references, and how many has he decided to leave out, how many thousands have been left aside, no, he says to himself in the mid-1930s, this didn't work, no, I don't want to put that in he decides, squinting through his round mushroom glasses which are being worn at the same time, in other photographs, by Himmler, blindness, blindness; the book of references that didn't make their way into the Wake would be larger than the Wake, the mind dealing with the composition as it deals with the presents the senses give it, a piece of the scenery, a puddle of smells: notice that, discard that, winnow, winnow, and conclude.

The conclusion not total or passive; it streams out now toward the reader.

One hand-picked set of influences has been placed in this book, and on purpose they are left recognisable, or, not left, made recognisable; the rug of dirt is wiped diligently off the top of this graveyard, fluorescent arrows applied to some of the bones, the knob of a thigh protrudes, the top of a skull is visible, and some of the skeletons are trying to sit up and talk, but the book could have been different, the author could have tried to write a family saga with the inspiration concealed and only a faint trace of someone else's accent sticking through to guide the reader to the spot (I put down Nicola Barker's Behindlings once because it would not stop shouting, "Cowper Powys, John Cowper Powys" in my mind's ear), graveyard covered over, the earth almost flat, the moss quiet, the stones upright, the rabbits running between the stones as they do in the Williamstown cemetery in Victoria, dying sometimes and the entrails hauled up tautly by the crows, stringing the sails of this fur ship on the green sea of the lawn and sailing away into port.

Exposure is part of an author's arsenal and Joyce's way is one way to do it, not by having a character talk to the reader, not by killing off the plot suddenly to remind the reader that there is this thing here known as plot, but by pretending to only half-digest his elemental matter; this book a multisonic multidirectional amplification of the occasional direct homages that books pay directly and openly to their beloveds; it glances at Steven Carroll in the last volume of the Glenroy trilogy as he names a character's girlfriend Madeleine.

A person can read Carroll's books without paying attention to the allusion, it doesn't matter, you can understand The Time We Have Taken and you don't have to think of Proust gently moistening his crumbs, but in the Wake your ignorance is publicised inside the relationship between reader and book -- the book knows; Carroll's book doesn't have to know, both parties can stay politely mum -- but Joyce's book does not remain mum about your ignorance, it is not so nice and mannerly, it says, "I would like you to know what I am referring to when I say, Goat to the Endth, thou slowguard. Where else do I give you to go besides knowledge and singing?"

of Alle

But why have I mentioned those portmanteaus I wonder, looking back at my last post, when you already know about them, you can pick up Finnegans Wake tomorrow and see them, you can work it out for yourself by page twenty, or it is mentioned in every overview, it is mentioned every time the Wake is mentioned, "Joyce uses portmanteaus," they say very casually in newspaper articles, "in Finnegans Wake AS WE ALL KNOW," and not only in articles about the Wake itself but in traffic reports and news of the world; weather announcers tell you that we are expecting a cold front from the north over the next few days and also that James Joyce uses portmanteaus in Finnegans Wake, it is mentioned by very tiny children, it is mentioned by intoxicateds in gutters, it is mentioned by tourists who come to Las Vegas from Phoenix and commit domestic violence in hotel corridors, it is mentioned by the people who drown in Lake Mead where the descending pillow of the water has left a ring of bathtub chalk on the rocks, it is probably well known by the homeless man who tells me he is planning to write a paper on Marxism as soon as his back stops hurting him; so there was no reason to describe it; but any criticism is fanfiction with a non- in front of the fiction, it is a nonfiction fanfiction and sometimes there are these compulsions to spell things out again and again, impressed with your own urge to state the obvious because the obvious happens to be the thing that has occurred to you (if it has occurred to thousands of other people as well then that's not your fault, you didn't force them), and for you you can read I, meaning me, you do not have to understand this word to refer to your own self (meaning I to you) if you prefer to resist statements of the obvious in your own works, or even if you do something else, which very politely I will allow that you do or may do or not do as it pleases you perhaps, amen and thank you.

So someone might have thought at some point in say the last two or five seconds or so, "Therefore fanfiction is also criticism, ipso facto, kew ee dee," which, again, is obvious, like everything else in this post so far, it is as obvious as the sun in the sky, which is clear here, as usual, very blue, fairly hot, good beach weather but no beach, different locations cutting nature in different ways, sand but no sea if you're in Nevada, sea but no sand if you're far away on a ship, and chaos too, writes Elizabeth Grosz in her book Chaos, Territory, Art, is cut across in different ways by different artworks or ideas, a common material but a different slice, steaks and chops from the same butchered animal, all cuts partaking of the nature of meat but not identical; chaosmos, says Joyce somewhere in the Wake: "Chaosmos of Alle," which I then saw again as a description of Hélène Cixous' Neuter.

my neighbour’s fire

There are children's rhymes represented in Finnegans Wake too, and songs, and other unliterary language, so that the reader's attention is out of the book as well as inside, the brain detects the type of language being used, it is swollen with the scenery around that language (a tender raised spot with material underneath, like a pimple), it re-senses the idea of a playground as it has understood the word before, perhaps it is haunted briefly by the absence of an actual playground (it was not aware before, now it is aware that it is not in a playground), or it feels a sea shanty and senses an atmosphere of sailors who are not there, it experiences the ability of the book to utilise a word it has seen before (but now it is in a new setting), it sees "wisden" "grace" "bails" close together in one paragraph about sex and it intuits an atmosphere around the word "cricket," even though the writing does not announce in so many strict and informative words, "Now I am going to talk about the sport known as cricket, which you are not watching because you are reading my book but which once upon a time you watched or experienced; however I have taken it into myself now as a part of my own essence" (the book would turn everything into a dream of the past if it had that power; that is the power it is trying to exert, a power that would expel the rest of the universe) or, another scenario, the mind does not recognise the rhyme, it does not recognise the shanty, it does not know bails or Wisden, and then the pimple that the writer must have imagined himself producing in the reader's mind does not appear, the brain is calm and mild, it goes on as if nothing has been said, there is no wound or mark, nothing will burst.

And any book can make a reference to the outside world, saying, "cat," and suggesting in this abbreviated way that you might summon up some sort of rough mental silhouette of living cats-slash-cat-associations, or "house" and reminding you of houses, but in this instance it is different, it is the reference within language to another form of itself, it is as though you saw a gum tree refer to an apple tree by growing an apple; the Wake grows an apple, it grows a pear, it grows the frond of a fern, and so, I ask myself, Joyce the straddling ringmaster, how does he maintain his own presence in that orchestra?

He glues puns, portmanteaus and riddles in and between all the styles he picks, this is his style, the in-packed-style, tucking a word that belongs to one style into the language of another style, and that tucking and portmanteauing and in-bridging is his continuity, in other words knots with different-textured strings or cords; if this action of knotting and craftwork went away then I would be in a different book, but as long as I feel as if I'm doing a crossword puzzle I can keep my composure, I have not suddenly begun reading another book, I am still looking at Finnegans Wake.

The author is this knitting action, that is how he has chosen to be, and in other books chose differently but here in Finnegans Wake he is a knit, and it occurs to me that he does not celebrate or frame the other styles so much as eat them. (You may light a candle at your neighbour's fire, says Jonathan Swift in his Letter of Advice to a Young Poet (1721), but the candle is still your own; though it is not always easy, as Geoffrey Hill once pointed out, to know when Swift is serious.)

So every style supports his style and is linked to every other style by his style.

all her engauzements

"Where is the mark," I asked myself, still thinking of Wole Soyinka's absent acute accent over the e, "it is putting its emphasis in a spot, planting one thing there, it is in French, it is in another language, it is next door, it is with the neighbours, it is the compressive slanting finger that removes the need for a footnote or for Carol C. Harter (with three buildings named after her on the UNLV campus) pronouncing "wol-ay" after years of me imagining "hole," it is the behaviour of Joyce in Finnegans Wake, which is a poem or pun or puzzle or compressive act and a monument of thoughtful battle or mimickry of long playtime, the sustainment of its compressive effort to fuse the foetal and the adult words at once (burning parts off and melting the remains together), the words in the book are recognisable as their adult forms but other words have been grafted on to them and they grow together (all the warm soil around, which sustains them in that form, the landscape built for them, the stubborn, isolated and enclosed terrarium world) into this hybrid -- and here is one example from the middle of the book, 'engauzements' instead of 'engagements,' 'she cancelled all her engauzements,' writes Joyce -- she is not engaged any longer and her mind is not misted over either, the engagements were light and gauze, the gauze like a veil has been dismissed from her eyes, she sees what she must do and throws herself over a bridge I think it is, in the next sentence, being in a gauzy environment or in the middle of romantic questing novel prose just there, which drives her to accept dramatic acts when they occur to her, or so you can assume, for the brief time that you know her, which is about a page or so (pretending for one moment that she is a person --).

'You draw that conclusion" I told myself, "because the romantic-dramatic language says, 'She is likely to do this,' even before it says, 'She is doing this,' and meanwhile it is also saying, 'The presence of this specific and taxonomically more or less identifiable language means that she could be quickly constructed by the speaker, she is not built up in the slow way that someone in a realism-novel is built up, by acts reported and observed (being created as she proceeds through the time of the reader's reading, which is the way people come to me in life, appearing in the world and becoming a character through their acts or reported acts), but her history is inside this short box of romance-prose which exists within the larger box of Finnegans Wake.'

'It is the history of a form of language that prophesises her behaviour for me and not the imitated history of a person, she is the expression of a language and not of a species that is time-borne and made of meat, she is not a person as I am a person even though someone has disguised her with a name, as a different person once did me, either my mother or my father, I have not actually asked and what a gap in my development is represented here.

'The language itself is throwing her over the bridge; she would not have done it if she had been in the middle of a more ruthless passage. Slang would have saved her."

(And I felt that all those among us are stricken with unnecessary suffering, and so her as well, and so she is a person in that aspect of herself, though almost anything can be a person in one or more aspects of itself, even trees can be people in one aspect of themselves, the presence of skinlike coatings for example, or a habit of what could be called breathing which is conducted by the tree on a regular basis in order to sustain life; and people can be trees by a reverse process; by this argument we are all characters in books.)