Subject: Re: farewell to arms
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 24 2002 - 12:31:17 EDT
Yep, you're right about most or all your points about Joyce's FW. I know he
did go to a river to listen, I doubt it was the Liffey itself since I think he
was in Trieste near the end of his life and during the writing of FW (did I
put an apostrophe in the title?). He did return to Ireland once after
leaving, but that was early on, never later in life that I recall.
I thought I remembered the story about scholars arguing about the meaning for
300 years to apply to FW, not Ulysses, but I don't have my Ellmann or my
Maddox at hand either.
I never said FW wasn't incomprehensible, just that it demanded a different
kind of cognition or reading strategy. The loads of footnotes are necessary
if you want to translate it into a linear, Hemingwayesque kind of narrative
(what we're used to reading). Joyce's own unique language, I would argue, is
actually the aggregate of all the languages he picked up traveling around
Europe.
I hope you realize that we don't need footnotes for Hemingway and do for, say
Ulysses or the stories in Dubliners primarily because of cultural differences
and not because of the "timelessness" of Hemingway's prose. Someone living in
Mongolia would need equal numbers of footnotes for both :). Joyce's old
buddies in Dublin knew exactly who and what he was writing about when these
works were published ;).
Joyce said there wasn't a serious word in Ulysses -- just read that in the
Pound/Joyce letters. It confirmed to me my belief that the novel is a 700
page dirty joke on the entire human race :).
Jim
Tim O'Connor wrote:
> [Yikes, Will: You have opened an outpouring of words in response to
> your simple question, and Jim has added to it. So sorry for the
> length and breadth of this response, but I hope it helps clarify what
> I meant.]
>
> On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 10:47:18AM -0400, Will Hochman wrote:
>
> > Tim, before you go to sleep, would you mind telling me the straight
> > story of "Indian Camp." I've read that story often and think it is
> > one of my favorites, but I also think it subverts your point.
>
> I wondered if anyone would pick up on this, actually. You get a gold
> star for this....
>
> > You wrote " Nick and the doctor and Uncle George take the camp
> > rowboat to "Indian Camp," and we get the story straight. There isn't
> > much fiction that tells it as straight as that.
>
> Interestingly, this points to what I was saying about how difficult it
> is to communicate universally, even within this list!
>
> > What's the straight story? Who is the real father? In my reading,
> > this story seems to be straightforward, but I have doubts. Is Nick's
> > father a good doctor or a bad teacher? Is Uncle George the real
> > father of the baby? I think Salinger, like Hemingway, loved telling a
> > story that later makes us ask questions and re-read the story
> > differently...will
>
> This topic came up at great length on "heming-l," the Hemingway list
> to which I referred earlier. There were several people who dogmatically
> held to the view that Uncle George is the father of the baby, based on
> details such as how he hands out cigars to the men on the beach and
> how he stays behind when Nick and his father leave.
>
> (As for Nick's father, it is hard to say whether he is a good or bad
> doctor, because if he were coming from home with a jackknife and some
> fishing leader to do a C-section, that would be bad; if he were out
> camping without the ability to go home for his bag, and performed a
> minor miracle, it makes him a pretty good doctor in a pinch, as he
> himself comments in an aside to his brother George.)
>
> As a teacher, I think we see again and again that he's not too good
> (as Nick himself says in "Fathers and Sons," his father was not so
> reliable on certain matters dealing with sex, such as the definition
> of "a masher" or "bugger").
>
> Regardless of this, the point here is that Hemingway (like some of
> Salinger) gives us something to consider and debate WITHIN THE PARAMETERS
> OF THE STORY. You can read "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," like most
> of early Hemingway, without a glossary, and more or less all the debatable
> points are contained in the story from beginning to end, or they make more
> sense when the stories are arranged in a timeline. This is quite unlike
> Joyce, say, for whom you need to consult a half-dozen books to get the
> references, "Finnegans Wake" being the ultimate example.
>
> To phrase it more carefully, I would say that "Indian Camp" is a good
> self-contained narrative that stands without the need of footnotes
> roughly 75 years after it was written. That is the timeless quality
> which I called a "straight story," much as is the opening of "A
> Farewell to Arms." Sure -- there are images in the opening vista of
> "Farewell" that echo what will happen in the novel, such as the lovely
> bit about the soldiers in the rain keeping dry what they are carrying,
> like (forgive the paraphrase, but I have no book handy and must do this
> from memory) "a woman [eight?] months gone with child." Again, these
> visual elements allow us to extrapolate meaning from image, and see
> shadows of what will happen in the novel -- but I argue that the
> narrative can be both "straight" and open to creative interpretation. I
> don't think one precludes the other.
>
> Within "Dubliners," in, say, "The Dead" or "Araby," Joyce writes a
> narrative that is as coherent and forceful as anything Hemingway might
> write (in, as Jim Rovira says, Joyce's own way). But you can get by
> with a sprinkling of contextual footnotes and little more explanation
> in the stories -- unlike either "Ulysses" or "Finnegans Wake."
>
> (Not to be picky, but to indicate the complexity of the language, Jim:
> there is no apostrophe in the title: "Finnegans Wake" = the "Finns Again
> Wake" pun = the circularity of the narrative, which has no beginning nor
> end but which loops upon itself; as far as a timeline, and Joyce's
> listening to the rhythm of the Liffey, I can't say it definitively without
> my huge Ellman bio, but I am fairly sure that Joyce never went back to
> Dublin during the many years spent writing what was then called
> "Work-in-Progress" and was ultimately published as "Finnegans Wake." If
> I'm not mistaken, Joyce traveled to London several times, but after bad
> experiences in Dublin with the Volta Theatre and a scheme to import Irish
> tweed to Trieste, he stayed away. Nora and the kids went to Galway in, I
> think, 1923, only to be caught in rebel crossfire and forced to huddle on
> the floor of their train en route home. As for the 17 languages you
> mention, there is also the matter of the Joyce-invented language itself,
> for which he, as it appears in the 3-volume set of collected letters,
> offers a couple of keys for deciphering, line-by-line and word-by-word,
> certain tiny passages. I'm talking about virtually a page of decryption
> for a paragraph of prose. It may be that the "Wake" has the secrets of
> mankind locked in it; or it may be the ultimate loss of perspective by a
> writer who falls into his own vortex. I know that for me, and for many
> friends and contemporaries of Joyce, and even for his brother, who was a
> perceptive reader of James's work, the "Wake" was incoherent except to the
> pre-tutored. Perhaps you get out of it what you put into it, but
> then there is the possibly apocryphal story in which Stanislaus asked
> his brother why he would write something nobody could read. And the
> answer was, supposedly, "I spent my life writing it, they can spend
> their lives reading it." I believe he was also said to have commented
> on "Ulysses" that he was writing to keep all the English professors
> busy. I cannot attest to the accuracy of these comments, which I've
> heard over the years, but regrettably can't cite. Certainly an
> important part about "Ulysses" is that each chapter is written in a
> deliberately different style, allowing Joyce to explore language as
> surely as Bloom and Dedalus explore Dublin. And for the "Wake," it was
> said by Joyce to be in the nighttime language of dreams, which makes
> sense after you read his explications of passages, or hear him read
> from "Anna Livia Plurabelle.")
>
> Whew.
>
> Will, I hope I addressed your issue of "straightness" and the issue of
> a story being told directly yet still open to interpretation!
>
> And Jim, I touched on all those clarifications not to be a nitpicker,
> but to emphasize the nature of the linguistic complexity of the last
> two Joyce books. He had a rationale. It's taken the rest of us
> sixty years or more to catch up, and still the debate rages on. Oh,
> and yes: open your Hemingway and enjoy the invigorating prose of the
> stories and at least his first two novels. Nothing like it.
>
> --tim
>
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