BOOKS
479
Dublin . The first world is predicated on a politics of mastery, order,
and "day's reasons"; the second is a place of anarchy and playfulness,
a great "thisorder ."
The logic of Bishop's argument, which seems to follow as night
the day, is that it doesn't matter where a reader enters
Finnegans Wake
or leaves it.
If
the story is only a nuisance, the reader is urged to get
along without it. Who was it who said that a film should have a
beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order?
Bishop wants us to read
Finnegans Wake
as an astrologer reads tea
leaves:
I have only been practicing on
Finnegans Wake
a kind of textually
self-endorsed
"Sorles Virginianai'
(281), where the phrase refers to
a traditionally long-standing if odd kind of reading procedure
called
"Sorles Virgilianae"
(Latin : "Virgilian fortune-telling"). A
Western version of the I Ching, Virgilian sortilege licenses the
eager reader who seeks light in personal affairs to open his Virgil
"at random" and - "volve the virgil page" (270) - begin inter–
preting whatever line he hits upon "ad lib" (302).
*
I don't know how seriously Bishop proposes sortilege or divina–
tion as the first analogy for reading
Finnegans Wake.
In a free country
I don't see any case for banning the procedure, but it incurs a dif–
ficulty . Sortilege is based on the conviction that there is indeed an
ascertainable meaning, but that you have to be an initiate to grasp
it; it is occult in any case and quite beyond the reach of an amateur.
Nobody practices sortilege by nature, you have to be learned in its
ways and probably inspired as well. But the only procedure Bishop
recommends is association, and there are no grounds for thinking
that an ascertainable meaning, a fortune inscribed in the stars or
other signs, is accessible by that too-easy route. Or rather: it's all
right if you're J ames Merrill and you find that by giving your days
and some of your nights to it you can write long poems. Besides, no
one has ever claimed that Joyce discovered anything about dreaming
that Freud or Havelock Ellis hadn't already divined.
I can see why Bishop, reacting against a strong acculturated
desire, wants to prise readers away from a clear narrative. I would
prefer to let the two worlds "tell each off the other ," without positing
"The page references are
to
Finnegans Wake.
