i wrote above that we've achieved "most of the meanings of most of the words in FW" but i think that may be too kind...
if joyce could justify every line, every word, every character and punctuationmark, we can't aim any lower... so finding a meaning (or two or three or four) that accounts for most of the letters in a passage isn't nearly enough-- we need to account for every letter.
so if there's a word like "pftjschute" and we've only got a good match for 'chute', i'll try to state this explicitly like 'why PFTJSchute?'
and this means that 'most of the letters of most of the words' could still leave ~one word/meaning for each missing letter.
The pft is completely obvious if you ever read Ulysses. When Bloom has the farts, he keeps farting in front of the girls, and this is the prrffftrr in Ulysses, and the pftschute here is just Finnegans fart-tunnel, the guts, the fart-chute, which are mushed up all over, because the great fall mushes him so that he's as big as the city. It's obvious as day, and I can't believe a Wake reader is confused on this.
ReplyDeleteIts onomatopoeia. The pftj is the rush of the wind around him as he falls. Your mind latches on to strange details in a dream, and your memory enhances things like the sound of a fall but no one says the world fall.
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