Viva Anna Livia!

M: Slander! Libel! Calumny in notion! Oh, the itch of these washerwitches…

Of no good repute themselves and questionable heritage — I heard one’s undocumented (“She’s an anchor, baby!”) and the other sat with a sleeping guv’nor — two washerwomen dare to speak ill of my Anna. Our Anna! They say S.H.E. is as bad as H.C.E., but I can’t see it. Perhaps it’s the spirochete of love so literate (Treponema pallivium plurabelle?) that it blinds this enamoreader.

S: Anna: In the Middle Ages the name became common among Western Christians due to veneration of Saint Anna (usually known as Saint Anne in English), the name traditionally assigned to the mother of the Virgin Mary. It is also the name of the main character in Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina (1877), a woman forced to choose between her son and her lover.

Livia: (58 or 59 BC – 29 AD) The wife of Emperor Caesar Augustus, she personified in the eyes of the Romans the perfect type of aristocratic great lady. She was the living example of all the virtues the Romans most cherished, a beloved wife and a heeded counselor to the head of the state. She was venerated for her virtue, nobility of birth, and the dignified beauty of her face and figure. She ignored her husband’s notorious womanizing, and so the historian Tacitus called her an “easy wife.”

Are they the same two women, one “of no appearance” (FW 158.25-26), the other “to all important” (158.32) who absconded separately with the Mookse and Gripes respectively? Are we to trust a Mookse booster? A Gripes swiper? They stand at the same water’s edge where young Nuvoletta — sweet Nuvoletta — first rained in the river when all others had gone. They make note of — and then turn into — “yonder elm” and “yonder stone” who watched silently as Izzyletta took the plunge two chapters back.

Anna Livia Plurabelle is the victim of rumor and smutty gossip, just like her slandered (?) husband HCE. And there’s no one like a washerwoman for airing the dirty linen. If a man did something naughty in a garden, they assume there’s a woman to blame. “Shyr she’s nearly as badher as him herself.” (FW 197.9)

Or — bear with me — are they Shem and Shaun? Dreg princesses speaking ill of mother? In a last paragraph that could be a primer on how to read the book, the morphing women mention “yonder elm,” now “Shaun or Shem,” then “yonder stone,” now “John or Shaun,” then “Shem and Shaun,” and finally “stem or stone.” The words are undergoing a metamorphosis even as the women are. Characters are always changing their roles.

ALP is, first of all, the River Liffey. Her biography begins in the Wicklow mountains, (FW 203. 1) where the river forms from many streamlets at Sally Gap “she sideslipped out by a gap in the Devil’s glen while Sally her nurse was fast asleep.” (FW 204, 14, 15).

The country girl travels, with many adventures, to the city, riverruning all the way to Howth, Dublin, where the Liffey flows into the Irish Sea “in county Wickenlow, garden of Erin, before she ever dreamt she’d lave Kilbride and go foaming under Horsepass bridge.” (FW 203 1, 2.)

Whoever it is beneath the skirts, they’re bitter, if you please. You might be too with a river who overspilled her banks and left you washing the brown (mud — get your mind out of the sewer) from the white all night. (FW 64, 16-21).

But just as Earwicker is Everybody, ALP is Everyriver and Everywoman — hundreds of names of the rivers of the planet are woven, punningly, into her life story.

The old scandal-monger on the banks tells the younger one how ALP first attracted HCE: “Throwing all the neiss little whores in the world at him! … To hug and hab haven in Humpy’s apron!” (FW 200. 29-32)

She alleges that ALP once wrote a letter declaring herself to be tired of her HCE. (FW 201. 5-20)

Here’s the frustration; I’m not sure what Anna’s done. (Maybe nothing. Sure she may be ‘as bad as he’ but I think the jury is still out on Earwicker, yes?) Near as I can tell, she got dressed up all nice, let her hair down to her feet, wove a garland, put on bangles and bracelets and then… gave out gifts? A second reading and I believe she sold off her children’s gifts and then showered gifts on others: “Out of the paunschaup on to the pyre.” (FW 209.31) A reason why her sons might be angry.

And how many children had this promiscuous woman? “I can’t rightly rede you that. Close only knows. Some say she had three figures to fill and confined herself to a hundred eleven, wan by wan bywan, making meanacuminamoyas.” (FW 201. 27-29)

They then discuss in prurient detail her youthful affairs and sexual encounters. “She had a flewmen of her owen.” (FW 202. 5) She can’t even remember her deflowering. “She sid herself she hardly knows whuon the annals her graveller was. (FW 202. 23.) And this was “before she had a hint of a hair at her fanny to hide or a bossom to tempt a birch canoedler.” (FW 204. 7, 8)

Lolita!

(Okay, it’s probably sex. Lots of it. With different people. The who, what, whore of babel on!)

ALP dissolves the virgin/whore dichotomy – she in virgin AND whore. Does the phrase Virgin Mother ring a (church) bell? ALP as Everywoman incorporates even her maiden daughter Issy, when the girl is called “Isid,” (FW 26,17) or “Isisglass” (FW 486, 24) is Isis, the Egyptian goddess, is the personification of the faithful wife and devoted mother, she whose tears for Osiris cause the Nile River to flood.

That’s all right, Mama. I suspect it’s the daughter I truly love anyway. Nuvoletta — pure Nuvoletta — who jumped from the bannister into the river and assumed the watery mantel. But the girl is the mother of the woman, yes? Joyce himself can’t even get them straight, nor could Tristram, to whom any Iseult was better than injury.

(“In the archetype triad of the triple goddess, Issy/ Isolde/ Issavan — an amalgam of Vanissa — is the daughter / maiden / bride. ALP is the sister / wife / mother / matron. Kathe/Kate is the crone / witch / wise woman / grandmother,” he said Gravesly.)

Perhaps after picking on shemself so much back in Chapter 7, Joyce cannot help spreading the blame. Why I’ll do the same to clear Anna Izzia’s name. Bring me a scape goat! Here’s one: Hircus Civis Eblanensis! (FW 215.27) The goat man of Dublin! With “buckgoat paps on him” —

A bronze monument to ALP by Éamonn O’Doherty, a long-haired young woman reclining on a slope in a fast-flowing fountain, was unveiled in 1988 on O’Connell Street. Dubliners nicknamed it “the Floozie in the Jacuzzi.” In 2001 it was moved to the Croppy Acre Memorial Park. A monument called the Spire of Dublin was erected in its place. The 393-foot spire is referred to as the “Stiffy on the Liffey.”

Ah, who am I kidding. I’ve known for a while she’s dirty, back when she was “ploring all over the plains, as mud as she cud be” (FW 64, 16-21). But many’s the man whose loved a dirty woman, and vico verso. (James, meet Nora; Nora, James.) Or who lovingly documents every dirty course of his homeland’s circulatory system with his blood, sweat and ouns. We love where we come from and tear up at the. Sight. The waves of grain, orange and. White! Still we love her. Right? But those gossipy washerwomen turning to stem and stone? Serves ‘em. Night!

The Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter is read brilliantly by actress Siobhan McKenna – available on YouTube