Part 3 Comment c'est/How It Is

Just wrote up the overview of the next chapter of The Myth of Modernism...

Part 3

Tootoological [1]

Or

latrinal scissarous frenzy[2]

Having first briefly examined parts 1 and 2 of Comment c’est/How It Is, through the dual prism of first Giambattista Vico and James Joyce, seeing correspondences, whether deliberate or not, we now move onto the final part of the text, part 3 apres Pim, and just as parts 1 & 2 corresponded in our reading of the book to Vico’s first and second age, as in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, so divine and heroic periods, in part 3 apres Pim, the theme is human reason. This is indicated in the first part of title above, again taken from Finnegans Wake. This essay is perhaps, along with essay 1 je la dit comme elle vient – Invocation and the Appearance of the Homeric Muse in Comment c’est/How It Is, the most ambitious reading of the text, and so also possibly the most complex. As it will entail firstly an appraisal of Vico’s third age, before then moving onto how Joyce treated it in Finnegans Wake. In order to do so, I will be invoking the fabulists Aesop and Jean de la Fontaine, which Joyce treats in part 1 of Book 3. Before moving onto part 2 of the same Book, in which he treats Shakespeare’s play Hamlet through the figures of Polinius, Hamlet and Ophelia, the couple mirrored by Joyce throughthe characters Juan/Shaun and his sister Issy. This quartet suitably introducing us then to the many other pseudo-couples which Beckett brings into his novel, while treating the same Viconean theme in Comment c’est/How It Is. So from Joyce’s reading of Shakespeare, in this reading, we pass onto Beckett’s reading of Plato’s Symposium, and particularly the speech on Love by Aristophanes, as this is crucial to understand the very predominant notion of scissiparity, which is so critical to our appreciation  of Beckett’s text, at least in this reading. But also, we will be looking also at the notion of satyr play in ancient Greece, using Euripides Cyclops, in order to attempt to tease out the origin of the savage humour in Comment c’est/How It Is, before finally throwing cursory nods to both Hegel, Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze.    

---

[1]  Joyce, James: Finnegans Wake, With an Introduction by  Len Platt, Wordsworth Classics, London, 2012, p.468.

[2] Beckett, Samuel: How It Is, Faber & Faber, London, 2009, p.98.