Haunted Ink: Live in El Centro

Yeah, yeah, I've been busy again and haven't posted for a while. You've heard it before. But I have been writing--or, to be more precise, researching. I'm researching James Joyce's wonderfully weird novel Finnegans Wake. I love the book in all its obscure glory; I probably also love the fact that few have the stomach to read the whole damn thing (heck, I know one person who wrote her dissertation on Joyce and on FW but never actually read it--give me $20 and I'll tell you who she is and where she has tenure).

So, anyways, here's the first page for my very exhaustive examination of Finnegans Wake I.7 (that's book one, chapter seven). The annotations below are just for the first sentence in the chapter. Yes, it's a complicated book. I could expand any one of these annotations into books, but for now I want to focus on annotating this one chapter, I.7, in order to understand and appreciate it for what it is. Then I can work on interpretation and conjecture and all the other stuff people who read books and write about them do.

Of course, like Joyce, I'm not doing this research alone. Heck, I'm mainly just culling together all the stuff that other people have been working on for the past 60 years. To this end, I have included a Works Cited at the end, in order to give full credit to all those people and their work. I'll be sure to do that for every entry I post here.

So here goes. First off, here's the line from Finnegans Wake, book I, chapter 7, page 169, line 1:

"Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is joky for Jacob."

• Shem: Noah's son, father of all Jews, where term "Semitic" comes from; in Hebrew, term means "renown, prosperity"
• Shemus: man in Yeats' Countess Cathleen who sells his soul to devil (McHugh)
• Jem: obscure form of the word "gem," which as a noun means a precious stone and as a verb means "to put forth buds" or "to adorn with gems." "Gem" is referenced at 159.24, during the Shaun Q/A in that chapter: "Darling gem! Darling smallfox!"
• Joky: "inclined to joke, jocular; or subject to jokes, ridicule." In the first draft, "joky" is spelled "jokey." Obviously, the extra "e" creates a "key" that was excised from the final draft; the "e" was gone by the second draft. Wonder why? In "Jeff Earwicker," author Thomas A. Cowan suggests that a third brother, Jeff, exists who parallels Noah's other son, Japet, and that this son is also connected to Jacob. "Joky" here would then be a reference to the other brother in contrast to Shem. I'm not sure how Jem fits into this, though (Cowan doesn't say).
• Jacob: son of Isaac; father of Israelites; has twin brother named Esau, with whom he fought while still in their mother Rebecca's womb; in Hebrew, Jacob means "holder of the heel" or "prince with God"; only person in Bible whom God said he "loved"; regarded as prophet in Islam; had 12 sons, who went on to found the 12 tribes of Israel.
• Jacobus, in Lower Latin, means James.
• -----
• From A First Draft Version of FW (MS 47471 b, 49 b):
• "Cain -- Ham (Shem) -- Esau -- Jim the Penman"
• Suggests that Shem is linked to the evil brothers in the bible. Cain killed his brother Abel; Ham saw his father naked (told his brothers about it, who then covered their eyes so they wouldn't see it); Esau fought with Jacob in the womb and came out first.
• Of course, this is all countered by the fact that the final draft actually suggests that Shem is connected to Jacob, not Esau, and that Shem, as Shem, is not his brother Ham.

Cowan, Thomas A. "Jeff Earwicker." A Wake Newslitter. X.5 (1973): 69-75.
Joyce, James. A first-draft version of Finnegans Wake. Ed. David Hayman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963.
---. Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin Books, 1939).
McHugh, Roland. Annotations to "Finnegans Wake." Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1991.