Thin s merel recur old
promises
lookin like new: onl the forms : 'Yet is no bod'
resent here which was not there before.
resent here which was not there before.
re-joyce-a-burgess
that Gillia, the schismatical wife of Mag- ravius, is visited clandestinely by Barnabas, the advocate of Honuphrius, an immoral person who has been corrupted by Jeremias.
See, then, how the lawful lust ofHCE (Honuphrius) and the twitch of longing for his daughter, as well as his natural love for his sons, have opened up a hell of total sexual corruption. The above is only the mouth of hell. It proceeds with details so twisted and knotted, so intricate a net of debauchery, that one tries to catch at anything clean and innocent, and, seeing the names of the four old men, trans- muted to Gregorius, Leo, Vitellius and Macdugalius, one's heart momentarily lifts. But they are in it too. Sulla, 'an orthodox savage (and leader of a band of twelve mercenaries, the Sullivani)" is going to procure Felicia for them. Even the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England are debased to the 'thirtynine several man- ners' in which Honuphrius pretends to possess his 'conjunct . . . whenever he ha'i rendered himself impotent to consummate by subdolence' .
The legal question is; has Honuphrius hegemony and shall Anita
submit? The legal answer is: 'so long as there is a joint deposit account in the two names a mutual obligation is posited'. The financial position of the couple is reviewed, and we are led into a sort of ecclesiastical history in strictly commercial terms, full of bad cheques. We recall Samuel Butler's Musical Banks 'in Erewhon;
Since then the cheque, a good washable pink, embossed D you. D No. I I hundred and thirty 2, good for the figure and face, had been clrculatmg in the country for over thirty-nine years among holders o f Pango stock . . . though not one demonetised farthing h~d eve: s~un or fluctuated across the counter in the semblance of hard com or hquld cash.
A musical bank, indeed, without any music. The number DUD 1132
implies that there is neither real fall nor real resurrection; the cheque
itself is a condom. The Church of England is bogus, an illogical absurdity (remember what Stephen says at the end of A Portrait about Protestantism), infertile, its thirty-nine articles matched by a history that, in the long annals of Catholic Christianity, seems no longer than thirty-nine years. It stands, in this dream-mythology, for a sterile civilisation which cries out for a rieono, the wheel to turn and the thunder to startle us into belief again.
This interlude is horrific or vastly comic, just as we prefer (Mr Edmund Wilson finds it very funny). But we are glad to get back to the Earwicker bedroom, though we must first abide a prayer for them, delivered, in the absence of God, to 'Big Maester Finnykin',
256
who is 'Prospecto, projector' and boomooster giant builder of all
causeways woesoever'. A review of the imperfections of 'Humpfrey, cha,mpion emir' is bumblingly tolerant. He is, after all, our begetter, so let us . . . presently preposterose a snatchvote of thanksalot to the huskiest coaxing experimenter that ever gave his best hand into chancerisk'. And now let us all watch him and Anna in the 'third position of concord! Excellent view from front. Sidome. Female imperfectly masking male. ' They copulate:
The field is down, the race is their own. The galleonman jovial on his bulky brown nightmare. Bigrob dignagging his lylyputtana. One to one bore one! The datter, io, io, sleeps in peace, in peace. And the twilling- sons, ganymede, garrymore, turn in trot and trot. But old pairamere goes it a gallop, a gallop. Bossford and phospherine. One to one onl
Not only do we in the room watch, along with the Mamalujo bed- posts, but the whole world watches too, in shadows cast on the blind. 'The man in the street can see the coming event. Photoflashing it far too wide. It will be known through all Urania soon. ' It is to be thought of, vlrily, as a great creative act, but we know that HCE is wearing a condom; it is nothing more than a parody o f divine copula- tion, best described in tepid cricketing terms ('how's that? Nobal! , he carries his bat! ') while the first cock-true emblem of fertility, though also of betrayal-crows 'Cocorico! '
The act ends;
Withdraw your member! Closure. This chamber stands abjourned. Such precedent is largely a cause to lack of collective continencies among Donnelly's orchard as lifelong the shadyside to Fairbrother's field. Rumba lock your kekkle up! Anny, blow your wickle out! Tuck away the table. . : sheet! You never wet the tea! And you may go rightoway back to your Aunty Dilluvia, Humphrey, after that!
'You never wet the tea! ' There seems not even to have been an ejaculation. Sex between these two is coming to aa end. 'Others are as tired of themselves as you are. Let each one learn to bore himself. ' Ironical thanks are returned to all participants in this little play, including the mattress and the condom, 'while the dapplegray dawn drags nearing nigh for to wake all droners that drowse in Dublin'.
And here is the end ofHumphrey; '. . . ultimatehim, fell the crown- ing barleystraw, when an explosium of his distilleries deafadumped all his dry goods to his most favoured sinflute and dropped him, what remains of a heptark, leareyed and letterish, weeping worry- bound on his bankrump . . . That's his last tryon to march through
the grand tryomphal arch. His reignbolt's shot. Never again! '
And so to the fourth and last position, 'tableau final'. Dawn shines
257
? ? The Man-made Mountain
Bed and Ricorso
over 'our all honoured christmastyde easteredman', and, the couple
lying dozing, the third phase of the Viconian cycle comes to an end. We are ready for the Ricorso-Book IV, a single short chapter-a period of refreshment, renewal, readjustment, that the wheel may turn and life resume its dream.
We begin our final phase with a language older than the English of the Anglo-Irish or the Latin of the Church. Eliot's The Waste Land, with its call for renewal through purgation, interpreted the voice of the thunder in Sanskrit and ended with a threefold Shantih, word of peace. Joyce begins now with 'Sandhyas! Sandhyas! San- dhyas! '-a prayer-word, but nothing to do with the Catholic'Sanctus' \fSilggests. The sandhyas is the Hindu prayer that is said when time seems most pregnant with change-at dawn, at sunset, at noon, at midnight; the term itself means 'twilight, zone of change, the moment between one period and another'. The first pages of the Ricorso are crammed with punning Sanskrit. The little folk of that Dublin that is the world cry: 'Svadesia salve! We Durbalanars, theeadjure. ' They are calling not on the God of the Catholics but on the Hindu Svadesia who is the self-moved mover; Durbala means 'weak'.
'Calling all downs', we hear, and '0 rally, 0 rally, 0 rally! ' It is Perse O'Reilly, Earwicker, who is being told to wake to the new day, but also the spirits who will fe-make time are being summoned from above to be sent down to earth. 'Gud modning, have yous viewsed Piers' aube? '- have you washed off the dirt of the past, have you seen Earwicker's dawn? 'A hand from the cloud emerges, holding a chart expanded' -the clean new parchment of time asks to be written on. The branch of the tree of life taps at the window: 'Tep! . . . Top. ' But Earwicker sleeps on, despite the crow ofthe cock: 'Conk
a dook he'll doo. Svap' (svap is the Sanskrit for 'sleep'). 'So let him slap, the sap! Till they take down the shatter from his shap. ' All about him is past history, the creation of opposites: 'Death banes and the quick quoke. But life wends and the dombs spake! ' Space is summed up in the 'Hill of Hafid' and in the 'geoglyphy' of the river. We hear a 'friarbird' 'faraclacking' the tale of the comirig of sleeping HCE, but his time is now no more than a tale. His sound night's sleep 'is just about to rolywholyover . . . Every talk has h1s stay . . . and all-a-dreams perhapsing under lucksloop at last are through. Why? It is a sort of a swigswag, systomy, dystomy . . "
The rhythm oflife is the heart's rhythm, the 'swigswag' of a pendu- lum. The old tide goes out, the new t1de comes m.
258
'The torporature is returning to marnal'-morning dissolves the
torpor of the sleeper-and we see now why the prose is so drenched
in Hinduism and Sanskrit: we are looking eastwards-'Lotus spray'.
Like Omar Khayyam, we prefer a drink ('There's a tavarn in the tarn') to a congealed paragraph of dawn philosophy, and it is in the very potion that we hear the knock of life: 'Tip. Take Tamotimo's topical. Tip. Browne yet Noland. Tip. The drink, the dawn combine in an image of the pool of fertility, from which the new will emerge: '. . . the dart ofdesirehas gored the heart ofsecret waters . . . Bring about it to be brought about and it will be, loke, our lake lemanted . . . the citye of Is is issuant (atlanst! ), urban and orbal, through seep froms umber under wasseres o f Erie' - a drowned city but a re-emergent one-Ys, Atlantis, sacked and triumphant ('urbi et orbi') Rome.
Out of the waters now rises the new maker, son of Earwicker, but not the shameful son of the dream past. The time of decay will come, as it has for Earwicker himself, but now we see the dawn o f Christian
Ireland personified in the youthful saint Kevin. He is hymned joy-
ously in a 'clangalied' by the twenty-nine maidens of St Bride's,
themselves all promoted to sainthood (or rather to churches with
saint's names), punctually at the end our leap-year girl (,trema! un-
loud! ! pepet! ! ! ), as S. LoeHisotoelles. T h e old playfulness has become 'prayfulness'. Though the ass may prophesy the appearance one day of a certain 'Shoon the Puzt', greedy eater of his father's sub- stance, a 'smeoil like a grace o f backoning over his egglips . . . as royt as the mail and as fat as a fuddle', we must rejoice at this dawn- moment of 'Kevin, of increate God the servant, of the Lord Creator a filial fearer . . . in the search for love of knowledge through the comprehension of the unity in altruism through stupefaction. ' But, generally, and saints on one side, we must accept this new world of youth and hope. It is time 'for old Champelysied to seek the shades of his retirement and for young Chappielassies to tear a round and tease their partners loveoftfun at Finnegan's Wake . . . " And it's high tigh tigh. Titley hi ti ti' - a time to dance.
But, whether we will or not, we cannot conceive of the true dawn
of youth and hope as being secular. We move towards a theocratic re-birth, and this is best figured in the coming to Ireland of that man with whom Shaun-Yawn tried, in a distant dream of decay, to identify himself. The time has come to draw together many of our historical threads in a kind of fugal stretto: 'The while we, we are waiting, we are waiting for. Hymn. ' And here are two we have met
259
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
Bed ana Rtcorso
before-Mutt and Jute, Butt and Taff, perennial cross-talk comedians
now called Muta and Juva (their names stand for change and youth and help). They are looking at the lord of the land, the 'Dorminus master' who has already some sleep in him as the new order threa- tens. Already he is a 'diminussed aster', a diminished star, for who should be arriving now but 'the Chrystanthemlander with his porters ofbonzos, pompommy plonkyplonk, the ghariwallahs, moveyovering the cabrattlefield of slaine'-the ruler of an empire, but of what sort we cannot yet see. Still, it is one with hope in it. Surprisingly Muta and Juva leave their dog-Latin, pidgin and primitive cries to speak good clear waking language:
Muta: So that when we shall have acquired unification we shall pass on to diversity and when we shall have passed on to diversity we shall have acquired the instinct of combat and when we shall have. acquired the instinct of combat we shall pass back to the spirit of appeasement?
Juva: By the light of the bright reason which daysends to us from the high.
The one who has come is St Patrick, and the law he will supersede is represented by a character called variously Bulkily, Bookley and Balkelly, described as the 'archdruid of islish chinchinjoss'. He is the Buckley who shot the Russian general, he is also Berkeley the idealistic philosopher (things exist only as ideas, creations of the mind). Evidently he represents a doctrine of dreams, of appear- ances, while 'Same Patholic' stands for the 'petrificationibus' of the Church, its solidity, its hard sense and tangibility (is not the Church 'Tangos, Limited' ? ). The old and the new confront each other, while 'Uberking Leary' (High King Lughaire, pronounced 'Leary'- the monarch who reigned in Ireland when Patrick came) looks on.
Like H e E , like Finnegan, he has no essential stake in this epoch, so
he has laid bets (Muta and Juva tell us this) on both: 'Haven money on stablecert? . . . Tempt to worn Outsider! '
'Bilkilly-Belkelly' spouts sesquipedalian idealism which makes as much sense as blackfellow's gibberish. Patrick confutes him by pro- claiming the doctrine of the Trinity, helped by a 'handcaughtscheaf of synthetic shammyrag'. The crowd cheers: 'Good safe firelamp! ' All pray: 'Per ye comdoom doominoom noonstroom. Yeasome priestomes. Fullyhumtoowhoom. 'Thearchdruid,hearingthe 'skyfold high' re-echo those words ('Per eundem Dominum Nostrum
Jesum Christurn Filium Tuum'), accepts defeat. The Christian dawn has arrived.
We must remember, though, that we are not dealing with Mr Deasy's history, a road leading to the ultimate manifestation of the
260
.
godhead, but with the Viconian cycle. We have seen the coming of Patrick presented as a new thing, fresh as a shamrock, but nothing is new: that story belongs to A. D. 432.
Thin s merel recur old promises lookin like new: onl the forms : 'Yet is no bod'
resent here which was not there before. Onl is order othered.
tJoug t is nul e, . _ . Ult at. hat portmanteau-L;ti~;unslt'ill up: 'It was; let it happen! Forget not the cycle: 'Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer. ' Here the wheel (HCE ALPi PLA ECH) is seen turning: 'Have we cherished expectations? Are ~efor liberty of persuasiveness? . . . A plainplanned liffeyism assemble- ments Eblania's conglomerate horde. ' The present is past and the past is present, and all is hot, fresh. . . . cooked, 'as sure as herself pits hen to paper and there's scribings scrawled on eggs'.
Hen? Paper? We never really got to know what was in that letter the hen scratched up from the dirt-heap gilded with orange-peel. Here it is, then, with the final secret of life embedded in it. But if we expect some great revelation, angels chairing as the ultimate mystery unfolds, we shall be disappointed. The letter addresses the city and the whole earth-'Dear Dirtdump'-and says that 'we have frankly enjoyed more than anything these secret workings of natures (thanks ever for it, we humbly pray) and, well, was really so de- nighted of this lights time'. People have raked up muck to soil the name of a great man, but 'yon clouds will soon disappear looking forwards at a fine day'. Still, let all revilers be warned : 'Wriggling reptiles, take notice! Whereas we exgust all such sprinkling snigs. ' Ultimately, though, 'once you are balladproof you are unperceable to haily, icy and missile-throes'. For the rest, 'we are all at home in old Fintona, thank Danis . . . whool wheel be true unto lovesend so long as we has a pockle full of brass'. The opposites persist, but they change places with ease: 'Tomothy and Lorcan, the bucket Toolers, both are Timsons now they've changed their characticuls during their blackout. ' We shall have a funeral; we shall have a wake. In other words, there is no secret behind life: life is what it is and we push on with it. You can find this same letter in your own 'leather- box' ifyou look for it. And you can, with the rest ofus, thank 'Adam, ourformerfirstFinnlatter. . . forhisbeautiful~. That is what life is-a cQrnbination_of crossword puzzle and Christ- mas parcel. The letter ends with <l; reference to 'the hcrewaker of our
h. mefame . . . who will get himself up and erect, confident and heroic when but, young as of old, for my daily comfreshenall, a wee one woos'. It is signed: 'Alma Luvia, Pollabella. '
26,
? ? ? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
Bed and Ricorso
I am passing out. 0 bitter e~ding! I'll slip,away before t. hey're up. They'll never see. Nor know. Nor mISS me. And It s old and old It's sad and old it's sad and weary I go ba~k to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary. father, ull the ,near SIght of the mere size of him, the mayies and ~oyles of It, moananoanmg, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, mto your arms. . . . My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I'll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. ~arry n:e along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen hIm bearmg down on me under whitsspread wings like he'd come from Arkangels, I sink I'd die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup.
She has reached her father, who will tempestuously carry her through
the clamour of the waves to his bosom. But she has one word more
for her husband, the hill, the city, the 'humbly dumbly' egg of life, soon to fall again. And again, and again, for ever:
? A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, rnememorrnee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the
Start again. This is the end, but also the beginning. And so we turn back to the opening of Finnegans Wake to complete the sentence:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay brings us by a commodius vieus of recirculation back to Howth Castl~ and Environs.
'A wee one woos. ' HCE looks for a renewal of youth in the love of a young one, a daughter, but he will not find this in his own per- son, only in the life of the son who will take his place. He will cling to his deluded fancy, though, lying beside his ageing wife. His wife, however, is the eternal river; she has seen too much not to see clearly how man's life, with its city-building, its lechery and wars, is dream upon dream. Aware of growing old, she knows that only by entering the great renewing sea of personal death can she be re-born. \Ve come now to her great fin'a} monologue, the cry of the river as it
flows, the filth of man's city on its back, to the sea.
Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speaking. Lpf! Folty and folty all the
nights have faIled on to long my hair. Not a sound, falling. Lispn. No wind no word. Only a leaf, just a leaf and then leaves. The woods are fond always. As were we their babes in. And robins in crews so. It is for me goolden wending. Unless? Away! Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long!
She is, of course, not just the 'Leafy' (or Liffey). She is the leaves of the tree of life, now falling; she is any wife telling any husband (even though it is in the words of J. M. Synge) to get out of bed and start a new day. But, as the monologue develops, the river colours everything: 'The trout will be so fine at brookfisht. ' The rhythm broadens, the wifely complaining takes on a certain majesty:
A hundred cares, a tithe o f troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lathed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lathing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it's all!
As she approaches her great father, the sea, how alien from nobility,
how petty seems her husband the hill and the city:
I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You're only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You're but a puny. Home! My people were not their sort out beyond there so far as I can. For all the bold and bad and bleary they are blamed, the seahags. No! Nor for all our wild dances in all their wild din. I can see meself among them, aIlaniuvia pulchrabelled.
She foresees her becoming a cloud ('allaniuvia') rising in freshness
from the sea, borne in to the source where she will rise in youth, a
girl from the hills. But now she must lose herself in the vast hitter
waters:
262
And we are led on once more to suffer the sentence of life or which
. ,
IS the same thing, joyfully unwrap its 'crossmess parzeI'. And, when
Anna Livia promises the keys, she seems to fulfil that promise ('GivenI'), for a new lucidity seems to shine through the turning zoetrope: we reel that the 'hundred cares' of the artist, his 'tithe of troubles', have not been in vain: we are beginning to understand.
? ? ? ? 9: In the End 15 the Word
Finnegans Wake IS A WORK OF LITERA TURE AND HENCE, THEORETI-
cally at least, a subject for literary criticism. The trouble is that, though we may legislate for the literature of waking life, it is imc possible to lay dowILf,ules for books of dreams. In the foregoing chapters I have attempted to do little more than say ,;hat, as far ~s I can see, is going on in Earwicker's dream, and my VIew of what 15 going on is greatly conditioned by my desire to struggle out of the dream and pretend that we have all really been awake all the time. The language of simple exposition cannot cope with Joyce's ten-or- twelve-part counterpoint, and I have been forced to ignore much that is important-the metaphysics, for instance, that is personified in the characters; the vast array of historical personages that are dragged out of Mr Deasy's time and made to ride the Viconian cycle. T o attempt a critical appraisal would, at this stage of my own understanding of the book, be an impertinence. I have enough to do, and so has everybody else, in trying to comprehend Joyce's seventeen-year palimpsest.
What I must try to do here, though, is to attempt to confute Joyce's critics, meaning those who, failing totally to appreciate what Finnegans Wake is trying to do, attack it where, by ordinary literary standards, it seems most vulnerable. I had better start by saymg that there seems to be a great deal of dream-literature in existencc- the dream was a popular literary convention in the Middle Ages, for instance' two of the world's best-loved books, Pilgrim's Progress and the Alic~ diptych, recount dreams-but that there is usu~lly very little of the true dream about it. Bunyan's book is a waking allegory, as is The Pearl or The Vision ofPiers Plowman. Genuine dream-stuff is, before FinnegaltS Wake, to be found perhaps only in Alice, Clarence's big speech in Richard III, Kafka (though he presents less dream than sick hallucination), Dostoevsky, and the Bible. Joyce is the only author who has tried, in a work of literature as opposed to
264
In the End is the Word
a work ofscience, to demonstrate what a dream is really like without makmg any concessions at all to those who will accept a d;eam as a lIterary conventIOn, an intermission between waking states or a bit of fanciful garnishing, but not as the whole essence of a' work of epic proportions. Thus, when ;he classical critics turn on Finnegans Wake the beam~ of theIr bull s-eye lanterns, they see something
umque, unsubmlsslve to theIr waking rules, and hence to be con-
demned for what it does not pretend to be rather than appraised in
te~ms of what IS IS. They denounce night because the sun is not
~hmmg; they upbraid the eternal because their watches cannot time
It; they produce their foot-rules and protest that there is no space
to measure.
The: fi~st thing that conventional criticism cries out against in Joyce IS h,s alleg~dunintelligibility. Critics have always been howling about um. ntellIgIbIllty, though, If a difficult book has existed long enough (hke the Book of Revelation or Gargantua and Pantagruel or Trzstram Shandy or Blake's Milton) thev wilt not complain too loudly ofwhat they say they cannot full~understand. The moss that
attacks classical statues is. a wonderful mitigator of unintelligibility. The late, revered T. S. Ehot was once m the van of unintelligibility, but age and the Order of Ment enlIghtened a lot of his readers. No Important and difficult work of art is permanently unintelligible, smce great wnters create both the sensibility of the future and the language of the future, but there is a sense in which the author of Ftnnegans Wake must always murmur 'Mea culpa mea maJ. :ima
culpa' to the priests of clarity, since it is in the ve~ nature of his
subJect-matter to be elusive and difficult. For one who will say
'0 felix culpa' there are ninety-nine who will give no absolution.
But, before we go any further, let us be entirely clear in our minds
a~to what we mean when we say that a piece of writing is unintelli- gIble.
A writer may fail to be understood when he is either incompetent
or demented. No one will deny Joyce's competence and, as far as I koow, only Mr Evelyn W~ugh has asserted that Joyce went mad, and then, saId Mr Waugh, It was because certain influential Ameri- cans asked him to go mad. A writer may be unintelligible when he is
. ~_~~kiI? -. g a verbal equivalent for ~J~tf! Je o f mind not yet fll1Jy under_
sto~9 or a complex psychologicaL~,~P&ri,! ! ce that will not' yield to
ordm. . arv language. He WIll be u. . nint. el. . ligible when he is essayin~ extr~~e naturalIsm, ~rYI~g, for exampl~--,_j:o capture the quali;y 0 real~hfeJ. ? ,nguage whIch IS b~urred. . ~hrlL1,lgb distance, drink. sleep,
265
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
or II. ! "dness. He will be unintelligible when he is deliberately sepa~a- iing language from i~s. ! ~K~'!
See, then, how the lawful lust ofHCE (Honuphrius) and the twitch of longing for his daughter, as well as his natural love for his sons, have opened up a hell of total sexual corruption. The above is only the mouth of hell. It proceeds with details so twisted and knotted, so intricate a net of debauchery, that one tries to catch at anything clean and innocent, and, seeing the names of the four old men, trans- muted to Gregorius, Leo, Vitellius and Macdugalius, one's heart momentarily lifts. But they are in it too. Sulla, 'an orthodox savage (and leader of a band of twelve mercenaries, the Sullivani)" is going to procure Felicia for them. Even the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England are debased to the 'thirtynine several man- ners' in which Honuphrius pretends to possess his 'conjunct . . . whenever he ha'i rendered himself impotent to consummate by subdolence' .
The legal question is; has Honuphrius hegemony and shall Anita
submit? The legal answer is: 'so long as there is a joint deposit account in the two names a mutual obligation is posited'. The financial position of the couple is reviewed, and we are led into a sort of ecclesiastical history in strictly commercial terms, full of bad cheques. We recall Samuel Butler's Musical Banks 'in Erewhon;
Since then the cheque, a good washable pink, embossed D you. D No. I I hundred and thirty 2, good for the figure and face, had been clrculatmg in the country for over thirty-nine years among holders o f Pango stock . . . though not one demonetised farthing h~d eve: s~un or fluctuated across the counter in the semblance of hard com or hquld cash.
A musical bank, indeed, without any music. The number DUD 1132
implies that there is neither real fall nor real resurrection; the cheque
itself is a condom. The Church of England is bogus, an illogical absurdity (remember what Stephen says at the end of A Portrait about Protestantism), infertile, its thirty-nine articles matched by a history that, in the long annals of Catholic Christianity, seems no longer than thirty-nine years. It stands, in this dream-mythology, for a sterile civilisation which cries out for a rieono, the wheel to turn and the thunder to startle us into belief again.
This interlude is horrific or vastly comic, just as we prefer (Mr Edmund Wilson finds it very funny). But we are glad to get back to the Earwicker bedroom, though we must first abide a prayer for them, delivered, in the absence of God, to 'Big Maester Finnykin',
256
who is 'Prospecto, projector' and boomooster giant builder of all
causeways woesoever'. A review of the imperfections of 'Humpfrey, cha,mpion emir' is bumblingly tolerant. He is, after all, our begetter, so let us . . . presently preposterose a snatchvote of thanksalot to the huskiest coaxing experimenter that ever gave his best hand into chancerisk'. And now let us all watch him and Anna in the 'third position of concord! Excellent view from front. Sidome. Female imperfectly masking male. ' They copulate:
The field is down, the race is their own. The galleonman jovial on his bulky brown nightmare. Bigrob dignagging his lylyputtana. One to one bore one! The datter, io, io, sleeps in peace, in peace. And the twilling- sons, ganymede, garrymore, turn in trot and trot. But old pairamere goes it a gallop, a gallop. Bossford and phospherine. One to one onl
Not only do we in the room watch, along with the Mamalujo bed- posts, but the whole world watches too, in shadows cast on the blind. 'The man in the street can see the coming event. Photoflashing it far too wide. It will be known through all Urania soon. ' It is to be thought of, vlrily, as a great creative act, but we know that HCE is wearing a condom; it is nothing more than a parody o f divine copula- tion, best described in tepid cricketing terms ('how's that? Nobal! , he carries his bat! ') while the first cock-true emblem of fertility, though also of betrayal-crows 'Cocorico! '
The act ends;
Withdraw your member! Closure. This chamber stands abjourned. Such precedent is largely a cause to lack of collective continencies among Donnelly's orchard as lifelong the shadyside to Fairbrother's field. Rumba lock your kekkle up! Anny, blow your wickle out! Tuck away the table. . : sheet! You never wet the tea! And you may go rightoway back to your Aunty Dilluvia, Humphrey, after that!
'You never wet the tea! ' There seems not even to have been an ejaculation. Sex between these two is coming to aa end. 'Others are as tired of themselves as you are. Let each one learn to bore himself. ' Ironical thanks are returned to all participants in this little play, including the mattress and the condom, 'while the dapplegray dawn drags nearing nigh for to wake all droners that drowse in Dublin'.
And here is the end ofHumphrey; '. . . ultimatehim, fell the crown- ing barleystraw, when an explosium of his distilleries deafadumped all his dry goods to his most favoured sinflute and dropped him, what remains of a heptark, leareyed and letterish, weeping worry- bound on his bankrump . . . That's his last tryon to march through
the grand tryomphal arch. His reignbolt's shot. Never again! '
And so to the fourth and last position, 'tableau final'. Dawn shines
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Bed and Ricorso
over 'our all honoured christmastyde easteredman', and, the couple
lying dozing, the third phase of the Viconian cycle comes to an end. We are ready for the Ricorso-Book IV, a single short chapter-a period of refreshment, renewal, readjustment, that the wheel may turn and life resume its dream.
We begin our final phase with a language older than the English of the Anglo-Irish or the Latin of the Church. Eliot's The Waste Land, with its call for renewal through purgation, interpreted the voice of the thunder in Sanskrit and ended with a threefold Shantih, word of peace. Joyce begins now with 'Sandhyas! Sandhyas! San- dhyas! '-a prayer-word, but nothing to do with the Catholic'Sanctus' \fSilggests. The sandhyas is the Hindu prayer that is said when time seems most pregnant with change-at dawn, at sunset, at noon, at midnight; the term itself means 'twilight, zone of change, the moment between one period and another'. The first pages of the Ricorso are crammed with punning Sanskrit. The little folk of that Dublin that is the world cry: 'Svadesia salve! We Durbalanars, theeadjure. ' They are calling not on the God of the Catholics but on the Hindu Svadesia who is the self-moved mover; Durbala means 'weak'.
'Calling all downs', we hear, and '0 rally, 0 rally, 0 rally! ' It is Perse O'Reilly, Earwicker, who is being told to wake to the new day, but also the spirits who will fe-make time are being summoned from above to be sent down to earth. 'Gud modning, have yous viewsed Piers' aube? '- have you washed off the dirt of the past, have you seen Earwicker's dawn? 'A hand from the cloud emerges, holding a chart expanded' -the clean new parchment of time asks to be written on. The branch of the tree of life taps at the window: 'Tep! . . . Top. ' But Earwicker sleeps on, despite the crow ofthe cock: 'Conk
a dook he'll doo. Svap' (svap is the Sanskrit for 'sleep'). 'So let him slap, the sap! Till they take down the shatter from his shap. ' All about him is past history, the creation of opposites: 'Death banes and the quick quoke. But life wends and the dombs spake! ' Space is summed up in the 'Hill of Hafid' and in the 'geoglyphy' of the river. We hear a 'friarbird' 'faraclacking' the tale of the comirig of sleeping HCE, but his time is now no more than a tale. His sound night's sleep 'is just about to rolywholyover . . . Every talk has h1s stay . . . and all-a-dreams perhapsing under lucksloop at last are through. Why? It is a sort of a swigswag, systomy, dystomy . . "
The rhythm oflife is the heart's rhythm, the 'swigswag' of a pendu- lum. The old tide goes out, the new t1de comes m.
258
'The torporature is returning to marnal'-morning dissolves the
torpor of the sleeper-and we see now why the prose is so drenched
in Hinduism and Sanskrit: we are looking eastwards-'Lotus spray'.
Like Omar Khayyam, we prefer a drink ('There's a tavarn in the tarn') to a congealed paragraph of dawn philosophy, and it is in the very potion that we hear the knock of life: 'Tip. Take Tamotimo's topical. Tip. Browne yet Noland. Tip. The drink, the dawn combine in an image of the pool of fertility, from which the new will emerge: '. . . the dart ofdesirehas gored the heart ofsecret waters . . . Bring about it to be brought about and it will be, loke, our lake lemanted . . . the citye of Is is issuant (atlanst! ), urban and orbal, through seep froms umber under wasseres o f Erie' - a drowned city but a re-emergent one-Ys, Atlantis, sacked and triumphant ('urbi et orbi') Rome.
Out of the waters now rises the new maker, son of Earwicker, but not the shameful son of the dream past. The time of decay will come, as it has for Earwicker himself, but now we see the dawn o f Christian
Ireland personified in the youthful saint Kevin. He is hymned joy-
ously in a 'clangalied' by the twenty-nine maidens of St Bride's,
themselves all promoted to sainthood (or rather to churches with
saint's names), punctually at the end our leap-year girl (,trema! un-
loud! ! pepet! ! ! ), as S. LoeHisotoelles. T h e old playfulness has become 'prayfulness'. Though the ass may prophesy the appearance one day of a certain 'Shoon the Puzt', greedy eater of his father's sub- stance, a 'smeoil like a grace o f backoning over his egglips . . . as royt as the mail and as fat as a fuddle', we must rejoice at this dawn- moment of 'Kevin, of increate God the servant, of the Lord Creator a filial fearer . . . in the search for love of knowledge through the comprehension of the unity in altruism through stupefaction. ' But, generally, and saints on one side, we must accept this new world of youth and hope. It is time 'for old Champelysied to seek the shades of his retirement and for young Chappielassies to tear a round and tease their partners loveoftfun at Finnegan's Wake . . . " And it's high tigh tigh. Titley hi ti ti' - a time to dance.
But, whether we will or not, we cannot conceive of the true dawn
of youth and hope as being secular. We move towards a theocratic re-birth, and this is best figured in the coming to Ireland of that man with whom Shaun-Yawn tried, in a distant dream of decay, to identify himself. The time has come to draw together many of our historical threads in a kind of fugal stretto: 'The while we, we are waiting, we are waiting for. Hymn. ' And here are two we have met
259
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
Bed ana Rtcorso
before-Mutt and Jute, Butt and Taff, perennial cross-talk comedians
now called Muta and Juva (their names stand for change and youth and help). They are looking at the lord of the land, the 'Dorminus master' who has already some sleep in him as the new order threa- tens. Already he is a 'diminussed aster', a diminished star, for who should be arriving now but 'the Chrystanthemlander with his porters ofbonzos, pompommy plonkyplonk, the ghariwallahs, moveyovering the cabrattlefield of slaine'-the ruler of an empire, but of what sort we cannot yet see. Still, it is one with hope in it. Surprisingly Muta and Juva leave their dog-Latin, pidgin and primitive cries to speak good clear waking language:
Muta: So that when we shall have acquired unification we shall pass on to diversity and when we shall have passed on to diversity we shall have acquired the instinct of combat and when we shall have. acquired the instinct of combat we shall pass back to the spirit of appeasement?
Juva: By the light of the bright reason which daysends to us from the high.
The one who has come is St Patrick, and the law he will supersede is represented by a character called variously Bulkily, Bookley and Balkelly, described as the 'archdruid of islish chinchinjoss'. He is the Buckley who shot the Russian general, he is also Berkeley the idealistic philosopher (things exist only as ideas, creations of the mind). Evidently he represents a doctrine of dreams, of appear- ances, while 'Same Patholic' stands for the 'petrificationibus' of the Church, its solidity, its hard sense and tangibility (is not the Church 'Tangos, Limited' ? ). The old and the new confront each other, while 'Uberking Leary' (High King Lughaire, pronounced 'Leary'- the monarch who reigned in Ireland when Patrick came) looks on.
Like H e E , like Finnegan, he has no essential stake in this epoch, so
he has laid bets (Muta and Juva tell us this) on both: 'Haven money on stablecert? . . . Tempt to worn Outsider! '
'Bilkilly-Belkelly' spouts sesquipedalian idealism which makes as much sense as blackfellow's gibberish. Patrick confutes him by pro- claiming the doctrine of the Trinity, helped by a 'handcaughtscheaf of synthetic shammyrag'. The crowd cheers: 'Good safe firelamp! ' All pray: 'Per ye comdoom doominoom noonstroom. Yeasome priestomes. Fullyhumtoowhoom. 'Thearchdruid,hearingthe 'skyfold high' re-echo those words ('Per eundem Dominum Nostrum
Jesum Christurn Filium Tuum'), accepts defeat. The Christian dawn has arrived.
We must remember, though, that we are not dealing with Mr Deasy's history, a road leading to the ultimate manifestation of the
260
.
godhead, but with the Viconian cycle. We have seen the coming of Patrick presented as a new thing, fresh as a shamrock, but nothing is new: that story belongs to A. D. 432.
Thin s merel recur old promises lookin like new: onl the forms : 'Yet is no bod'
resent here which was not there before. Onl is order othered.
tJoug t is nul e, . _ . Ult at. hat portmanteau-L;ti~;unslt'ill up: 'It was; let it happen! Forget not the cycle: 'Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer. ' Here the wheel (HCE ALPi PLA ECH) is seen turning: 'Have we cherished expectations? Are ~efor liberty of persuasiveness? . . . A plainplanned liffeyism assemble- ments Eblania's conglomerate horde. ' The present is past and the past is present, and all is hot, fresh. . . . cooked, 'as sure as herself pits hen to paper and there's scribings scrawled on eggs'.
Hen? Paper? We never really got to know what was in that letter the hen scratched up from the dirt-heap gilded with orange-peel. Here it is, then, with the final secret of life embedded in it. But if we expect some great revelation, angels chairing as the ultimate mystery unfolds, we shall be disappointed. The letter addresses the city and the whole earth-'Dear Dirtdump'-and says that 'we have frankly enjoyed more than anything these secret workings of natures (thanks ever for it, we humbly pray) and, well, was really so de- nighted of this lights time'. People have raked up muck to soil the name of a great man, but 'yon clouds will soon disappear looking forwards at a fine day'. Still, let all revilers be warned : 'Wriggling reptiles, take notice! Whereas we exgust all such sprinkling snigs. ' Ultimately, though, 'once you are balladproof you are unperceable to haily, icy and missile-throes'. For the rest, 'we are all at home in old Fintona, thank Danis . . . whool wheel be true unto lovesend so long as we has a pockle full of brass'. The opposites persist, but they change places with ease: 'Tomothy and Lorcan, the bucket Toolers, both are Timsons now they've changed their characticuls during their blackout. ' We shall have a funeral; we shall have a wake. In other words, there is no secret behind life: life is what it is and we push on with it. You can find this same letter in your own 'leather- box' ifyou look for it. And you can, with the rest ofus, thank 'Adam, ourformerfirstFinnlatter. . . forhisbeautiful~. That is what life is-a cQrnbination_of crossword puzzle and Christ- mas parcel. The letter ends with <l; reference to 'the hcrewaker of our
h. mefame . . . who will get himself up and erect, confident and heroic when but, young as of old, for my daily comfreshenall, a wee one woos'. It is signed: 'Alma Luvia, Pollabella. '
26,
? ? ? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
Bed and Ricorso
I am passing out. 0 bitter e~ding! I'll slip,away before t. hey're up. They'll never see. Nor know. Nor mISS me. And It s old and old It's sad and old it's sad and weary I go ba~k to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary. father, ull the ,near SIght of the mere size of him, the mayies and ~oyles of It, moananoanmg, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, mto your arms. . . . My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I'll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. ~arry n:e along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen hIm bearmg down on me under whitsspread wings like he'd come from Arkangels, I sink I'd die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup.
She has reached her father, who will tempestuously carry her through
the clamour of the waves to his bosom. But she has one word more
for her husband, the hill, the city, the 'humbly dumbly' egg of life, soon to fall again. And again, and again, for ever:
? A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, rnememorrnee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the
Start again. This is the end, but also the beginning. And so we turn back to the opening of Finnegans Wake to complete the sentence:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay brings us by a commodius vieus of recirculation back to Howth Castl~ and Environs.
'A wee one woos. ' HCE looks for a renewal of youth in the love of a young one, a daughter, but he will not find this in his own per- son, only in the life of the son who will take his place. He will cling to his deluded fancy, though, lying beside his ageing wife. His wife, however, is the eternal river; she has seen too much not to see clearly how man's life, with its city-building, its lechery and wars, is dream upon dream. Aware of growing old, she knows that only by entering the great renewing sea of personal death can she be re-born. \Ve come now to her great fin'a} monologue, the cry of the river as it
flows, the filth of man's city on its back, to the sea.
Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speaking. Lpf! Folty and folty all the
nights have faIled on to long my hair. Not a sound, falling. Lispn. No wind no word. Only a leaf, just a leaf and then leaves. The woods are fond always. As were we their babes in. And robins in crews so. It is for me goolden wending. Unless? Away! Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long!
She is, of course, not just the 'Leafy' (or Liffey). She is the leaves of the tree of life, now falling; she is any wife telling any husband (even though it is in the words of J. M. Synge) to get out of bed and start a new day. But, as the monologue develops, the river colours everything: 'The trout will be so fine at brookfisht. ' The rhythm broadens, the wifely complaining takes on a certain majesty:
A hundred cares, a tithe o f troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lathed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lathing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it's all!
As she approaches her great father, the sea, how alien from nobility,
how petty seems her husband the hill and the city:
I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You're only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You're but a puny. Home! My people were not their sort out beyond there so far as I can. For all the bold and bad and bleary they are blamed, the seahags. No! Nor for all our wild dances in all their wild din. I can see meself among them, aIlaniuvia pulchrabelled.
She foresees her becoming a cloud ('allaniuvia') rising in freshness
from the sea, borne in to the source where she will rise in youth, a
girl from the hills. But now she must lose herself in the vast hitter
waters:
262
And we are led on once more to suffer the sentence of life or which
. ,
IS the same thing, joyfully unwrap its 'crossmess parzeI'. And, when
Anna Livia promises the keys, she seems to fulfil that promise ('GivenI'), for a new lucidity seems to shine through the turning zoetrope: we reel that the 'hundred cares' of the artist, his 'tithe of troubles', have not been in vain: we are beginning to understand.
? ? ? ? 9: In the End 15 the Word
Finnegans Wake IS A WORK OF LITERA TURE AND HENCE, THEORETI-
cally at least, a subject for literary criticism. The trouble is that, though we may legislate for the literature of waking life, it is imc possible to lay dowILf,ules for books of dreams. In the foregoing chapters I have attempted to do little more than say ,;hat, as far ~s I can see, is going on in Earwicker's dream, and my VIew of what 15 going on is greatly conditioned by my desire to struggle out of the dream and pretend that we have all really been awake all the time. The language of simple exposition cannot cope with Joyce's ten-or- twelve-part counterpoint, and I have been forced to ignore much that is important-the metaphysics, for instance, that is personified in the characters; the vast array of historical personages that are dragged out of Mr Deasy's time and made to ride the Viconian cycle. T o attempt a critical appraisal would, at this stage of my own understanding of the book, be an impertinence. I have enough to do, and so has everybody else, in trying to comprehend Joyce's seventeen-year palimpsest.
What I must try to do here, though, is to attempt to confute Joyce's critics, meaning those who, failing totally to appreciate what Finnegans Wake is trying to do, attack it where, by ordinary literary standards, it seems most vulnerable. I had better start by saymg that there seems to be a great deal of dream-literature in existencc- the dream was a popular literary convention in the Middle Ages, for instance' two of the world's best-loved books, Pilgrim's Progress and the Alic~ diptych, recount dreams-but that there is usu~lly very little of the true dream about it. Bunyan's book is a waking allegory, as is The Pearl or The Vision ofPiers Plowman. Genuine dream-stuff is, before FinnegaltS Wake, to be found perhaps only in Alice, Clarence's big speech in Richard III, Kafka (though he presents less dream than sick hallucination), Dostoevsky, and the Bible. Joyce is the only author who has tried, in a work of literature as opposed to
264
In the End is the Word
a work ofscience, to demonstrate what a dream is really like without makmg any concessions at all to those who will accept a d;eam as a lIterary conventIOn, an intermission between waking states or a bit of fanciful garnishing, but not as the whole essence of a' work of epic proportions. Thus, when ;he classical critics turn on Finnegans Wake the beam~ of theIr bull s-eye lanterns, they see something
umque, unsubmlsslve to theIr waking rules, and hence to be con-
demned for what it does not pretend to be rather than appraised in
te~ms of what IS IS. They denounce night because the sun is not
~hmmg; they upbraid the eternal because their watches cannot time
It; they produce their foot-rules and protest that there is no space
to measure.
The: fi~st thing that conventional criticism cries out against in Joyce IS h,s alleg~dunintelligibility. Critics have always been howling about um. ntellIgIbIllty, though, If a difficult book has existed long enough (hke the Book of Revelation or Gargantua and Pantagruel or Trzstram Shandy or Blake's Milton) thev wilt not complain too loudly ofwhat they say they cannot full~understand. The moss that
attacks classical statues is. a wonderful mitigator of unintelligibility. The late, revered T. S. Ehot was once m the van of unintelligibility, but age and the Order of Ment enlIghtened a lot of his readers. No Important and difficult work of art is permanently unintelligible, smce great wnters create both the sensibility of the future and the language of the future, but there is a sense in which the author of Ftnnegans Wake must always murmur 'Mea culpa mea maJ. :ima
culpa' to the priests of clarity, since it is in the ve~ nature of his
subJect-matter to be elusive and difficult. For one who will say
'0 felix culpa' there are ninety-nine who will give no absolution.
But, before we go any further, let us be entirely clear in our minds
a~to what we mean when we say that a piece of writing is unintelli- gIble.
A writer may fail to be understood when he is either incompetent
or demented. No one will deny Joyce's competence and, as far as I koow, only Mr Evelyn W~ugh has asserted that Joyce went mad, and then, saId Mr Waugh, It was because certain influential Ameri- cans asked him to go mad. A writer may be unintelligible when he is
. ~_~~kiI? -. g a verbal equivalent for ~J~tf! Je o f mind not yet fll1Jy under_
sto~9 or a complex psychologicaL~,~P&ri,! ! ce that will not' yield to
ordm. . arv language. He WIll be u. . nint. el. . ligible when he is essayin~ extr~~e naturalIsm, ~rYI~g, for exampl~--,_j:o capture the quali;y 0 real~hfeJ. ? ,nguage whIch IS b~urred. . ~hrlL1,lgb distance, drink. sleep,
265
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
or II. ! "dness. He will be unintelligible when he is deliberately sepa~a- iing language from i~s. ! ~K~'!
