Books: Kaleidoscopic Recamera

TALES TOLD OF SHEM AND SHAUN— James Joyce—Black Sun Press (Paris) ($20).

A male Circe, Author James Joyce transforms upstanding, understood words into nightmarish, subconscious semblances; his latest book cannot be read, it. must be puzzled over. In his famed Ulysses, this Jabberwocky manner cropped out only in occasional shoals and semi-submerged reefs; most of it was plain sailing. But Ulysses, describing the events of one Dublin day, was a daybook. Work in Progress, of which Tales Told of Shem and Shaim are three disconnected fragments, describes the thoughts of one Dublin dreamer, is a night-book. He who runs will not be able to read; he will have to slow down to a walk, perhaps stop altogether, look long and wonderingly.

The Story. The three "tales" in this little book are called: The Mookse and the Gripes, The Muddest Thick That Was Ever Heard Dump, The Ondt and the Gracehoper. So far, only Parts I and II of Work in Progress have been printed: in transition, experimentalist quarterly published in Paris. Say those who profess to understand the design of the whole: Hero H. C. Earwicker, onetime postman, hotelkeeper, shopkeeper, now working in Guinness's brewery, is a Dublin citizen, but a native of Norway. He is married, has children; but his past is not blameless. A girl named Anna Livia haunts his slumbers; he has been guilty of various misdeeds, brawls and shortcomings. The story opens with Earwicker just lapsing into drowsy slumber, continues through the night, through sleep that is now restless, now deep, visited by dreams, nightmares, confused recollections of the past day, of the past years. It is a stream of subconsciousness.

The Language. Introducer C. K. Ogden (author of The Meaning of Meaning) compares Joyce's language to Eskimo, which Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson called the most difficult but most efficient language invented by man. In Eskimo, IGLUPAKULIA means: "The big house which he built for himself and still possesses and which is no longer as good as formerly." Speaking of Joyce's language, says Ogden: "The intensive, compressive, reverberative infixation; the sly, meaty, oneiric logorrhoea, polymathic, polyperverse; even the clangorous calembour, irresponsible and irrepressible, all conjure us to penetrate the night mind of man, that kaleidoscopic recamera of an hypothecated Unconscious, jolted by some logophilous Birth-trauma into chronic serial extension." Example from Joyce: ''The Ondt was a welltall fellow, raumybult and abelboobied, bynear saw altitudinous wee a schelling in kopfers. He was sair sair sullemn and chairmanlooking when he was not making spaces in his psyche, but, laus! when he wore making spaces on his ikey, he ware mouche mothst secred and muravyingly wisechairmanlooking. Now whim the sillybilly of a Gracehoper had jingled through a jungle of love and debts and jangled through a jumble of life in doubts afterworse, wetting with the bim-blebeaks, drikking with nautonects, bilking with durrydunglecks and horing after ladybirdies (ichnehmon diagelegenaitoikon) he fell joust as sieck as a sexton and tantoo pooveroo quant a churchprince, and wheer the midges to wend hemsylph or vosch to sirch for grub for his corapusse or to find a hospes. alick, he wist gnit!"