Mamafesta

 

Saturday afternoon is Finnegans Wake afternoon, you can feel it in the air. Zoom picks up after two o’clock and the participants pick up where we left off last month, at page 104 in the Penguin edition. It is Anna Livia Plurabelle, “the Bringer of Pluralities”, and “her untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest,” when in fact the mamafesta has gone by many names, or titles “at disjointed times.” The time is out of joint, Shakespeare peeking in at any moment, but recorded time is discontinuous, solved in this case by a list of titles that tell her story instead. That is Joyce’s procedure, tell the story through a three-page Rabelaisian list of titles playing on and punning upon titles the reader may recognise. One such title in the mamafesta is the book ‘For Ark See Zoo’. That’s true, the ark is a zoo, but then it’s The Zoo, it’s everything in creation in one ship in space. Then, note the A-Z nouns. This is the title of an encylopaedia of everything living. The title even makes good-natured mockery of an encyclopaedia’s limits, its cross-referencing system, as if to consolidate what’s going on. The Jewish myth in Genesis of remaking creation keeps moving in cyclic fashion: zoos are one outcome. And here’s a second of the 125 titles of the untitled mamafesta (manifesto, but not ‘man’, mama; also, a fiesta) under discussion on zoom this sunny afternoon: ‘The Log of Anny to the Base All’. Anny is Anna, but the mathematicians amongst us notice instantly that it’s a logarithm. But not just any logarithm, a logarithm that is off the charts, one that operates to the ‘Base All’, in other words that is not number-limited (even at this stage I have to believe what they’re saying) but is everything. This is not how logarithms are designed to work, which may itself be Joyce’s little joke on logarithms. In terms of flow, fluidity, river recreating existence, however, Joyce’s science is immense, especially as it’s all said in eight words that make no sense to the common reader, though something to a group of common readers on zoom on a Saturday afternoon. In the writing of Finnegans Wake, Joyce played a game with people for seventeen years of not disclosing the true name of what he called Work In Progress. All the titles on pages 104-107 are candidates for the title of his book. I like ‘Intimier Minnelisp of an Extoreor Monolothe’. Would this have sold x copies? Intimate mini-lisp of an exterior monologue. That’s a first translation. It describes my experience of reading this book. There are times when what I most value are the personal lines that speak to me in what is a big bull, a minotaur of a book at times, loved and maybe also loathed. I pick up threads that will get me out of the maze, little by little. Next month we finish the list of mamafesta titles, over three hours. Fun for some, in the sun.