MFS Modern Fiction Studies

At the juncture of the "mime" and the "lessons," the children's vocal call to their "Mummum" (FW 259.10) fades over into the grammatical muddle opening James Joyce's Finnegans Wake II.2. This metaphorical expression of their topographical wanderings and hesitancies, "UNDE ET UBI." as the didactic right(eous) margin pompously glosses in Latin, finds its translation in the central text at FW 260.08-09: "Whence [. . .] where." In the meantime, the reader is faced with further grammatical confusion, which the sedulous pupil dismisses with a curt "SIC." (260.R2): "Whom will comes over. Who to caps ever." (1. 4). The impersonal verbal form becomes a third-person singular in a central column constantly threatened, dispossessed, and reappropriated by an other, the lesson of the authority waiting to be mastered by the twins and daughter, "three squads of candidates [. . .] awaiting their turn in the marginal panels of Columkiller" (122.24-26). The central text as the repository of the Law mimes its questioning and supposed defeat by the sons, the column killers who will decapitalize and sever it,¹ and much of this paper will be concerned [End Page 569] with the thwarted elaboration of a female way out of this battle for sexual/textual paternity that the inaugural lines and their marginal responses spatially dramatize. Below the interplay between main text and marginalia, Issy's florid footnote gives vent to her desire to be seduced by the Patriarch but also bears the germs of a subversive female enunciation to oppose the grammar of the Verb: "quoshe" (260.F1) not only marks her desire for union with the verb (quoth|she → quoshe) but also shows the irruption of a purely female voice of discourse in a new assertive third-person singular form. This yet underlying theme of female grammar and sexuality will be examined in its later outcroppings in the central textbook of II.2, especially in the "Storiella" section (266.20-275.02), and in the light of the reshuffle of the whole chapter and integration of an -oriented "Storiella" before male geometry. An "in-side" will occasionally be provided by Joyce's notetaking on grammatical labels and clear-cut categories as it obliquely shows how the tension between form and function in established canons of grammar could be turned into a subversive weapon to destabilize ideological boundaries in a phallic dominant model of language and sexuality.