For some unfathomable reason, I feel a pressing need for some James Joyce right now. Not any James Joyce, some Finnegans Wake, if truth be told. Thus:
“Lead, kindly fowl! They always did: ask the ages.What bird has done yesterday man may do next year, be it fly, be it moult, be it hatch, be it agreement in the nest. For her socioscientific sense is sound as a bell, sir, her volucrine automutativeness right on normalcy: she knows, she just feels she was kind of born to lay and love eggs (trust her to propagate the species and hooch her fluff balls safe through din and danger!); lastly but mostly, in her genesic field it is all game and no gammon; she is ladylike in everything she does and plays the gentleman’s part every time. Let us auspice it! Yes, before all this has time to end the golden age must return with its vengeance. Man will become dirigible, Ague will be rejuvenated, woman with her ridiculous white burden will reach by one step sublime incubation, the mane wanting human lioness with her discerned discipular man ram will lie down together publicly flank upon fleece. No, assuredly, they are not justified, those gloom pourers who grouse that letters have never been quite their old selves again since that weird weekday in bleak Janiveer (yet how palmy date in a waste’s oasis!) when to the shock of both, Biddy Doran looked at literature.”
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, on p. 110 of the Faber and Faber 1975 edition.
There. That’s better.
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I will need a text explanation on that one… My Uni days are long gone… Something about age???
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Steph: I’ll be happy to provide ‘my’ explication de texte – unauthorized by any university whatsoever. Sometimes, I just enjoy Joyce’s total play with language for the way it shakes up everything – grammar, vocabulary, predictable flow – everything. Loosens up the possibilities when one’s own writing starts feeling cramped. Plus, the first two sentences put me in a good mood – always a big plus. “Lead, kindly fowl! They always did: ask the ages.” (To me, it reads like a take-off on the famous question: what came first, the chicken or the egg.) That said, good week teaching English of another variety and see you no later than tomorrow night para cantar
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‘Lead kindly fowl! etc Or la référence est à l’hymne fameux de Newman Lead, kindly light! dans lequel le futur cardinal annonce le commencement de sa conversion à l’église catholique. Le type qui correspond selon moi le plus exactement à Newman, quoique sa conversion füt dans la direction opposée, est Renan qui de son cöté annonce cette conversion vers l’hellénisme préchrétien dans sa fameuse prière sur l’Acropole’ (Letters 1.305). As well as ‘Lead, kindly fowl!’ (Finnegans Wake 112.9) there is a faint but clear echo of the hymn in Portrait: ‘A dusk like that of the outer world obscured his mind…. The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart’ (Portrait, 67), repeated forty pages later: ‘no vision… of kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence upon him now’ (105).
The Renan reference would be a pedagogic means of making Newman known to the French such as his addressee Adrienne Monnier. To Harriet Shaw Weaver he writes, in 1935: ‘As usual I am in a minority of one. If I tell people that no tenor voice like Sullivan’s has been heard in the world for 50 years or that Zaporoyetz, the Russian basso, make Chaliapin sound like a cheap whistle or that nobody ha ever written English prose that can be compared with that of a tiresome footling little Anglican parson who afterwards became a prince of the only true church they listen in silence. These names mean nothing to them. And when I have stumbled out of the room no doubt they tap their foreheads and sigh’ (Letters 1.365).
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