Empty A E

I had thought I'd already typed this post but apparently not.  So apologies if this is a bit sketchy; I thought it up months ago and have probably forgotten some aspects of it.

In the Circe chapter of Ulysses, Stephen plays the piano.  "With two fingers he repeats once more the series of empty fifths."  I think it's because I'm a musician that I figured out the metaphor here.  (I also have a blog for music thoughts.)

In music, a fifth is a distance between two notes in a scale.  The distance between A and E in the A major scale (A, B, C#, D, E, F#, G#, A) is a fifth.  To get a chord, you have three notes - a tonic, a third (or a minor third), and a fifth.  A major is A, C#, E; A minor is A, C, E.  (My terrible music pun is that A minor is ace.)

But what's interesting about Stephen's playing the piano is that it's only fifths.  He's not playing a major third or a minor third in between the two notes.  That's what I think the "empty fifth" means.  The fifth is not colored by a major third or a minor third.  A major third would sound happy, and a minor third would sound sad.  This is neither; it's just empty.

I used the fifth from A to E to demonstrate all of this because I think Joyce wants the reader to notice that fifth specifically.  Earlier in the novel, the other characters talk about a poet called A. E.  They criticize his poetry for being dull and repetitive.  The empty fifths - without the happiness of a major third or the sadness of a minor third - reflect that.  A. E. the poet is boring; A to E the empty fifth is boring.

Rivers and Waters

This is the second of two posts about The Fault in Our Stars.  You can find the other one here.

A few days after I re-read The Fault in Our Stars for the second time (my third time reading it), I had already had the idea regarding the metaphorical and literal nature of the names.  In addition to what I had thought up, Hazel is explained in the novel as an in-between color, which reflects how Hazel is between life and death or even between health and incapacitating sickness.  So this got me thinking about the names, and I realized that one is never really explained:  Anna, the girl in An Imperial Affliction.

I figured that if there were metaphorical implications for both Augustus Waters' and Hazel's names, there had to be one for Anna's too.  Her context is what led me to figure it out.  An Imperial Affliction ends in the middle of a sentence, and, as far as I know, there is only one other book that ends in the middle of a sentence - James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.  I've not read Finnegans Wake yet, but we talked about it a little in the class I had on Joyce's Ulysses, so I know that the first and last sentences of the novel are the same sentence, which is just broken between the two ends.  Rivers are an important factor in the novel, and the last sentence is meant to flow back into the first one, much like a river.  Rivers are also prominent in Ulysses.  And I have read Ulysses, which is how I know that the main river in Dublin is sometimes called the Anna Liffey.  And one of the characters in Finnegans Wake is named Anna Livia, referring to the river.

So between the name Anna and the broken sentence, I'm pretty sure that the Anna in An Imperial Affliction is meant to have some connection via Finnegans Wake with rivers.  What I'm unsure of is what that connection means.

To some degree, it fits with "a desert blessing, and ocean curse."  An Imperial Affliction is one of the things that brings Hazel and Augustus closer to-gether, so it shares some responsibility in changing Hazel's view on relationships.  There's also the connection between rivers and water, as in Augustus Waters.

But I'm wondering if there isn't also a connection with life in general.  At one point, Hazel deconstructs her world and returns to "the beginning when there was the Word, and to live in that vacuous uncreated space alone with the Word."  John 1:1 explains that "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."  And in the beginning, "the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:2).  So God is connected to water.  There's also just the fact that water is necessary for life.  This works well because of the visual connection between life and Liffey.

I'm not sure what the connection means, but I'm pretty sure that Anna is connected with rivers - both via the interrupted sentence that resembles the interrupted yet flowing sentence of Finnegans Wake and via her nominal connection with the Anna Liffey river.

Lunar Weaving

James Joyce's Ulysses doesn't have very much in the way of plot, but it's certainly full of allusions.  When I read it, I think I placed more importance on figuring out the allusions than figuring out what was happening.  While writing my final paper for the class I had on it, I discovered something else interesting.

In the penultimate chapter, Molly is compared to the moon.  Among other things, the narrator mentions "her satellitic dependence:  her luminary reflection:  her constancy under all her phrases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning."  Molly is set up to be a figure who - in some respects - controls time.

Molly's parallel in The Odyssey - Penelope - also controls time in a way.  She delays her suitors by weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus' father Laertes.  They agree to wait until she's finished, but she unweaves her work at the end of the day, which extends the completion for a few years.

So both Molly and Penelope are presented as figures who aren't under the strict progression of time.  Penelope is able to delay the inevitable by unweaving her shroud, and Molly is described as constant "under all her phases."  Furthermore, in the section from her perspective, specific times are not seen.  Things are relative or vaguely described.  Where both Bloom and Stephen would probably be very specific about times, Molly just says "it was 1/4 after 3."

But the connexions between Molly and Penelope do not end there.  Also significant is that they are women, which means that they can weave.  The weaving is seen literally in the case of Penelope's weaving the shroud, but the weaving is also a metaphor for creating and sustaining life.  "As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image.  ...  the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time."

Molly resembles Penelope through her distance from time and her ability as a woman to metaphorically weave and create life.

Recursive and Allusive Fathers and Sons

I finally started re-reading Hamlet this week.  I've been meaning to get to it for a couple of months since Hamlet plays a big rôle in a chapter of Ulysses, which I just had a class on.  I had a notion of reading both The Odyssey and Hamlet so that it would be easier to understand what was going on in Ulysses (allusion-wise), but I made it through only The Odyssey.  So now since school's over, I decided to re-read Hamlet.  The last time I read the whole thing (which was also the first time I read the whole thing) was the summer in between my sophomore and junior years of high school, which was about five years ago.  (I was supposed to have read the whole thing in my introductory English class during my freshman year of university, but I got the act and scene numbers mixed up and didn't read as much as I should have, and I never felt bad enough to go back and finish it.)

Before I actually got to start the play, I read all of the introductory material in the front of the book.  That's where I learned that Hamnet Shakespeare - Shakespeare's son whose death in some way inspired Hamlet - was born on 2 February.  Things clicked to-gether in my brain, and I actually had to stop reading because I got so excited about this.

James Joyce's birthday is 2 February.  Supposedly, so is Stephen Dedalus' - one of the main characters in Ulysses.  But what was really interesting about learning this was the whole author/book and father/son relationship combining.

In the Hamlet-centric chapter of Ulysses, Mr Best makes a pun about Hamlet and Shakespeare in French.  Hamlet is "un pièce du Shakespeare."  The play is a piece of Shakespeare in the same way that Hamnet is a piece of Shakespeare.  This involves the ideas of consubstantiality between father and son and metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls) that are central to Ulysses.  (And which I wrote my final paper about.)  Different father/son relationships are constituted by a variety of means:

• Leopold Bloom and Rudy (actual father and son) - like Hamnet, Rudy died
• Simon Dedalus and Stephen (actual father and son) - a big deal is made of their eyes' being the same, which is one of the main examples of father/son consubstantiality
• Bloom and Stephen - Bloom sort of adopts Stephen as a replacement son for Rudy; they are also described in the same way by a cabman; and Ulysses incorporates their rôles as Odysseus (Bloom) and Telemachus (Stephen) - a relationship which also resembles King Hamlet and Prince Hamlet in terms of heredity and royalty
• Paddy Dignam and Paddy Dignam (actual father and son) - this also plays with the Hamlet paradigm as both father and son have the same name and the elder of the pair dies shortly before the main action

In the paper I wrote for my class, I had intended to tie all of this father/son, consubstantiality, and metempsychosis stuff back to literature itself, but it got confusing and I never attempted it.  But from the relationship among Shakespeare, Hamnet, and Hamlet, one can see that literature acts as either a substitute or a continuation of father/son relationships.  This same type of idea is presented in The Divine Comedy, which Ulysses has many allusions to.  Virgil the poet acts as a guide to Dante.  Depending on how one looks at it, Dante could be guided by an actual person - a mentor - or he could be guided by literature itself.  Ulysses has that same idea:  people and literature can play similar rôles.

But learning that Joyce's birthday was the same as Hamnet's takes this all a step further.  Shakespeare's creation of Hamlet to - in a way - replace Hamnet is mirrored by Joyce's creation of Ulysses.  Shakespeare creates his progeny in literature because his real son has died, and then Joyce - who shares Hamnet's birthday - writes about father/son relationships and their replacement in literature.

This is the type of recursive and allusive paradigm that makes Ulysses both great fun to read and really frustrating.