Anna Lizzia by Haele Wolfe
S: FW pps 143 – 148 presents us with Iseult la Belle’s Soliloquy – quite in the manner of Molly’s celebrated book-ending stream of consciousness — but we are now admitted to the consciousness (unconsciousness?) not of a full-Bloom woman, but of a budding maiden — HCE’s virgin daughter, Isabel/Issy. (And/or Joyce’s own daughter Lucia.) “All I hold secret from my world and in my underworld of nighties and naughties and all the other wonderwearlds!”
M: Sean’s courting Izzy in question 10; I’ll look at 11, the only way to attack this work is to divide, and if not conquer, at least assimilate, at best contribute to the flow — if only with our tears.
We meet Izzy by a different name here in the midst of a fable retold by a snotty schoolmaster, who seems a bit Stephen Dedalus (who knows his knot) and no small part Shem, so he’s surly Joyce, yes?. “As my explanations here are probably above your understanding.… I shall revert to a more expletive method…” (FW 152.4-7) Thank you.
A girl is rehearsing her role as a flirt, a temptress, a coquette. She’s chatting with her imaginary beau, she’s writing a coy love letter to the “lovely fellow of my dreams” She imagines a secret lovers’ language of pet names and baby talk, in which “nudge” means something more than “nudge.”
Her lover has brought her candy. “Thanks, pette, those are lovely, pitounette, delicious!”
He expects a reward. She promises, “I’ll nudge you in a minute!”
She teasingly accuses him of having another lover. “I know her. Slight me, would she? For every got I care!”
A “Mookse” and a “Gripes” on two sides of a river. The latter is presumably a portmanteau of “ripe” and “grapes,” which makes one wonder if the former isn’t less moose and more fox, a character who has been hiding in the underbrush for some time now and is presented as a student name at the end of the lesson.
(Worth noting, too, that a fox is the answer to an unguessable riddle posed by Stephen to his students in the Nestor chapter of Ulysses.)
She gives him reason to be jealous. A rugby player “is seeking an opening and means to be first with me as his belle alliance.” She then reassures him. “Why, what are they all, the mucky lot of them only? Sht! I wouldn’t pay three hairpins for them. Peppt!”
He makes his move. She demures. “What are you nudging for? No, I just thought you were.”
She changes the subject. “Listen, loviest! Of course it was too kind of you, miser, to re-member my sighs in shockings, my often expressed wish when you were wandering about my trousseaurs …”
Izzy as Nuvoletta appears “in her lightdress.… leaning over the bannistars and listening all she childishly could.” In this Wakean world of multiple names and meaning, how can we know it’s her, with the “sfumastelliacnous hair” (smoke, evaporation, stars)? Because “she smiled over herself like the beauty of the image of the pose of the daughter of the queen of the Emperour of Irelande and she sighed after herself as were she born to bride with Tristis Tristior Tristissumus.” If she’s born to bride with [Tristan], that must make her the princess Iseult.
(Which, yes, makes her Joyce’s daughter Lucia as well, as per 157.24 “her feignt reflection, Nuvoluccia”.)
She abruptly imagines a moment of real sexual intimacy: “Ha! O mind you poo tickly. Sall Ipuhim in momou. Mummum. Funny spot to have a fingey!”
She ends it, just as abruptly. “I’m terribly sorry, I swear to you I am!”
In her fantasy, she is alternately a pliant seductress and la belle dame sans merci.
“Yes, the buttercups told me, hug me, damn it all, and I’ll kiss you back to life, my peachest. I mean to make you suffer, meddlar, and I don’t care this fig for contempt of courting …. because, you pluckless lanka-loot, I hate the very thought of the thought of you. Move your mouth towards minth, more, preciousest, more on more!”
But the Mookse and the Gripes ignore her “I see, she sighed. There are menner.” For their obliviousness, they are taken away separately by two women who arrive at the shore, leaving “an only elmtree and but a stone.… And Nuvoletta, a lass.”
And here the lass makes her nature known. Nuvoletta (little cloud in Italian) cries “Nuée! Nuée!” (swarm, thick cloud, multitude in French) and in a multitude of rain drops, falls with other “tears.…into the river that had been a stream…” whose “muddied name was Missisliffi.” The “young reine” (reine=rain/queen, 64.16) Izzy becomes Anna. Girl becomes woman. Cloud becomes rain. Rain becomes river. And eventually cloud again. Anna is not just a river, not just the Liffey, but the entire water cycle, circular like the book itself.
She appears to surrender. “Misi misi! Tell me till my thrillme comes!”
And then she counter attacks, “But don’t! You want to be slap well slapped for that.”
In the end, she claims victory: “With my whiteness I thee woo and bind my silk breasths I thee bound! Always, Amory, amor andmore! Till always, thou lovest! Shshshsh!”
Yet, after all that fussing and sussing out — picking through Italian and French in the mutt of the riverbanks — I know I’m missing something.
sum mer de le wake 