_TSW_ and Joyce; spelling

[Julian.West@mac.dartmouth.edu]

IED writes:
>     First, a sincere and warm thankyou to Julian West

You are most welcome.

> IED, who owns the Penguin edition, had searched
>in vain for "Chapter  11" yesterday (the original chapter headings are
>not included in that edition, it turns out),

Actually, the "original" chapter headings are not included in _any_ edition.
Joyce edited them out of the final galleys.  This is probably the single most
obfuscatory deliberate act of his entire life.  They are so useful, however,
that every Joyce critic makes free reference to them.
   I have already apologized for referring to chapter 11 when I meant chapter
8.

>     It occurs to IED that Kate _might_ be drawing partially, or even
>possibly in toto, from the recent film _James_Joyce's_Women_, which
>starred Fionula Flanagan as Molly Bloom,

She might indeed!  I hadn't thought of that.  I remember when the film was in
the theatres, but it was late in the academic year and I didn't get a chance
to see it before it moved on.  I suppose it is available on video tape?
   Since there seems to be nothing in the song which cannot be placed firmly
in Molly's final monologue, it is entirely possible that the film was the
direct source.  There is probably no positive test for this short of a direct
quote from Kate herself.  As a negative test, we could try to find some
material in the song which did not make it into the movie (eg, _flower_of_the_
mountain_).  As a partial positive test, we could try to find a reference
which was stressed in the film but merely glancing in the book, which then
made it into the song (eg, _big_wheels_, which I still don't understand).
   A similar question is whether Kate was in any way influenced by
Stephen Albert's musical setting of the same episode,
_Flower_of_the_Mountain_.
Again, we won't get any strictly textual confirmation.  But one possibility
would be to listen for a _musical_ reference to the piece.  It would not be
out of character for Kate; see for example the Rolf Harris reference in _TD_.

>>"down on the peach".  Molly uses the word "peach" once, in the phrase
>     Nevertheless it makes perfect sense in this context. You must
>have hit on the correct reference (p. 770).

Not necessarily.  Kate might be using "peach" independently as a sexual
metaphor.  Molly's "peach" reference is over 10 pages from the end of 
the book, where the bulk of Kate's source material lies. 

[ Steve Bloch writes:
 >>"down on the peach".  Molly uses the word "peach" once, in the phrase
 >>"soft like a peach" in reference to female sexual organs

 >As does Tom Robbins, in either _Still_Life_with_Woodpecker_ or
 >_Even_Cowgirls_Get_the_Blues_, I don't remember which.  But we're
 >talking Joyce here, I guess. ]

So does William Blake in "I asked a thief..".  So what?  It's a very
well established metaphor.

>     As Greg O'Rear noted already, Kate is saying "Like a Machiavellian
>girl" here. Thanks, Greg.

Yes, good work Greg.  Now, anybody: why?  It isn't a word _I_ would use
in reference to Molly.  Also, it doesn't appear anywhere in _Ulysses_.
   While I was on the blind alley of "mad ??? girl" I looked up all
references of "mad" in _Ulysses_.  There are 20, and it was interesting
to discover that 12 -- over half -- were in the final, Molly, chapter.
(Needless to say, none modified a word anything like "Coralean.")

>IED really doesn't think the Croft-Cooke
>books have much to do with _TSW_. It's probably just a co-incidence.

Nevertheless, it would be nice to track them down and have a look.  Has
IED or anyone else seen a copy?

>our present social order, ... actually views bad English as a virtue, and the
>consciousness of error as a sin.

Hear, hear.

> By all means, correct IED's spelling whenever and wherever it occurs!

Wherever your _spelling_ occurs, IED?   :-)

>>These are not the first Joycean references in Kate's work.

Okay, I was being a little over-enthusiastic here.  Actually, I can only think
of one-and-a-half.  The genuine one is the song "My Lagan Love".  The dubious
one is Stephen's reference to "every ninth, breaking, plashing, from far,
from farther out, waves and waves" in the third chapter (Penguin p.38 line
40).
Kate and Joyce might simply be independently aware of the same bit of 
folk wisdom however.  The Tennyson quote on the jacket of _TNW_ puts this
further in doubt. 

The reason I was pushing the Joyce connection was that I thought some people
might be dubious about the "seedcake" connection before I had gone and done
my homework properly.  Even though I didn't need any more convincing myself,
even after that one word, I thought that stressing the plausibility of the
connection might convince others.

I think there is a general Joycean feel to Kate's work, both in its Irishness
and in the overall level of its detail and the richness and diversity of its
reference.
 
[ Larry deLuca writes:
  >	Counter Person:  What number did you call?  Did it begin with	491?
  >	Larry:  No, it was 225-9700.  Do you have a store with that
number? ]
 
  If you had been awake at that point in your day, Larry, you might have 
noticed that companies beginning with an "MIT dormline" prefix are often
located near MIT, and never in Harvard square.  :-) I'm just jealous.

IED also writes:
>our present social order, ... actually views bad English as a virtue, and the
>consciousness of error as a sin.

Hear, hear.

> By all means, correct IED's spelling whenever and wherever it occurs!

Wherever your _spelling_ occurs, IED?   :-)

|>oug replies:
> As a means of communication, [language] can
>be used well, or it can be used poorly.  But it can't in any real
>sense be used "correctly" or "incorrectly".
>If your audience is only a subset of the English-speaking populace (e.g.
>inner-city blacks), then the prose that will communicate the best
>might stray significantly from Standard Written English.

Arguing for the legitimization of the so-called "New Englishes" is
completely different from granting the right to abuse the old one.
They are separate issues.  If you wish to tie them together, I could
make the counter-argument that if we are accepting (say) Jamaican
English as an acceptable language (and why not?) which has its own
legitimate rules of grammar, we are _de_facto_ accepting the notion
of grammatic rules.  It is _only_ its grammar, vocabulary and
orthography which distinguish Jamaican (or Bangladeshi) English
from our own.  If we are to throw out our own (and their own) rules
of spelling and grammar, what distinguishes the regional Englishes
from one another.

>Regarding "correct" spelling, there was not even such a thing as
>correct spelling in English until the invention of the printing press.

But the European invention of the printing press was 500 years ago.
Are we that far behind the times?  We might as well say that "there was
no such thing as English as recently as the 6th century" is a convincing
argument for reverting to Sanskrit.

Doug, for someone who insists that "|>oug" is good spelling while
"!>oug" "?>oug" and "|}oug" are not, you are on very shaky ground.

You also lost a lot of credibility with your absurd claim that Kate's
alleged reference to "Nice to Swallow" was obviously a joke and not
a typist's error.  If it was a joke, it would fly right by the average
reader of that magazine, and I suspect this level of subtlety to be
beyond its editors.  When you did track down the reference, you should
have read it twice and apologized to IED _yourself_ with some dignity.

 
                                              Julian
                                      "Ga ga ga ga Gara. Klook Klook Klook."