No More Learning

This chapter is a Rabelaisian triumph, though-in the true Joyce
manner-it uses laughter for a bitter end. Shem's 'lowness' is so
thoroughly celebrated that it takes on a kind of grandeur. It comes out first in his rejection of good plain food (that which fed the Irish literary Renaissance):
So low was he that he preferred Gibsen's teatime salmon tinned, as in- expensive as pleasing, to the plumpest roeheavy lax or the friskiest parr or smolt troutlet that ever was gaffed between Leixlip and Island Bridge and many was the time he repeated in his botulism that no junglegrown pine- apple ever smacked like the whoppers you shook out of Ananias' cans, Findlater and Gladstone's, Corner House, Englend. None of your inch- thick blueblooded Balac1ava fried-at-belief-stakes or juicejelly legs of the Grex's molten mutton or greasilygristly grunters' goupons or slice upon slab o f luscious goosebosom with lump after load of plumpudding stuffing all aswim in a swamp of bogoakgravy . . .
The rejected Irish salmon is that salmon of wisdom cooked by Finn MacCool; he will not belong to the native 'Grex' or flock. His art is nourished on poison ('his botulism'). If you want the good and wholesome you must go to his brother Shaun: 'Johns is a different butcher's . . . Feel his lambs! Ex! Feel how sheap! Exex! His liver too is great value, a spatiality! Exexex! COMMUNICATED. ' Shaun is revealed as the space-man, lord of solid objects, as well as the holy one who excommunicates the low artist. Shem's task is to capture the rhythm of time, draw inspiration from the creative mother-river.
A seedy Satan, rolled in the dirt, stinking, blasphemous, he has
committed the terrible crime of writing Ulysses, which not even he can understand: 'amid the inspissated grime of his glaucous den making believe to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles, edition de tenebres'. He is a pervert like the Jew of Eccles Street, putting out a filthy 'abortisement'-'Jymes wishes to hear from wearers of abandoned female costumes . . . to start city life together. His jymes is out of job, would sit and write. ' His house-'O'Shea or
21 5
? ? ? ,:
on- but our final impressIOn of overwhelmmg rIchness COUld. ~ot have been achieved by any other method than that of the RabelaiSIan catalogue. The washerwomen wonder what happened to the chil- dren but they ale on opposite banks of Anna LlVla herself and the river'is widening: it is hard to hear. 'Can't hear with the waters Of', they say. 'Can't hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. ' Of all 'Livia's daughtersons' only the names of Shem and Shaun remain. Hoarsely the voices call-for a tale of 'stem or stone'. We remember that this is what the Mookse and the Gripes became-an elm and a stone by the river. We end the chapter with those two images-the tree for change and life and creation; the stone for permanence, the deadness of the law. We are ready-'beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. N! ght! '-for the next epoch in the cycle, the world of the sons. But Anna LIVIa has
217
The Man-made Mountain
ALP and her Letter
O'Shame'-is called the Haunted Inkbottle, 'a stinksome inkenstink"
and there he makes ink out of the nasty excretions of his own body (too terrible for English, this is put in good clean Latin) and uses that body as paper (he is the spider of Swift's Battle of the Books). The vilification is all too quotable. Here is the libel to end all libels. There is nothing like it in all literature. And yet this 'sniffer of carrion, premature gravedigger, seeker of the nest of evil in the
bosom of a good word' is beloved of his mother ALP. Why? It is because he represents Mercy, while his brother only stands for justice. In his self-righteousness, JUSTIUS knows only how to sneer, threaten: 'I'll brune this bird or Brown Bess's bung's gone bandy. I'm the boy to bruise and braise. ' MERCIUS, speaking 'of hisself', is full of'agenbite of inwit' for 'my fault, his fault, a kingship through a fault'. Aware of the sins in himself, he is in no position to condemn others. Having reached the rock-bottom of wretchedness, he has a compensatory gift bestowed on him, the artist's gift: 'He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak. ' His mother is the creative
current that flows through the solid Shaun-run city. She is coming
now:
. , . little oldfashioned mummy, little wonderful mummy, ducking under bridges, bellhopping the weirs, dodging by a bit of bog, rapidshooting round the bends, by Tallaght's green hills and the pools of the phooka and a place they call it Blessington an~ slipping sly by Sallynoggin, as ha~py as the day is wet babbling, bubblmg, chattermg to herself, de100thenng the fields on thei; elbows leaning with the sloothering side of her, giddy- gaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia.
And so to the closing chapter of this first section of the book. The two banshees that took away the Mockse and the Gripes have been changed into washerwomen, scrubbing away on the banks of the Liffey and, in prose splashing with river-names, they celebrate in rich dream-Dublinese the water-mother who bears us forward gemly to our next epoch of Vicanian history. The story they rehearse is that of Anna's marriage to HCE (Huges Caput Earlyfouler-a fusion of French Hugh Capet and German Henry the Fowler, both foreigners). They have little time for him-'Or whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park. He's an awful old reppe . . . And how long was he under loch and neagh ? '- but Anna Livia herself comes in for some censure: 'Do you know she was calling bakvandets sals from all around, nyumba noo, chamba chao, to go in till him, her erring cheef, and tickle the
pontiff aisy-oisy? '
216
Anna Livia is, after all, a river-yielding, dipped into by many, unpossessive herself, herself much possessed. She has had . much experience since she was 'just. a young thm pale soft shy slIm slIp of a thing'; it has taken her a long time to get to Dublin and HCE:
It was ages behind that when nullahs were now~ere, in c~uno/ Wicken- low, garden of Erin, before she ever. dreamt she d lave KIlbrIde an~ go foaming under Horsepass bridge, WIth the great southerwestern wmd- storming her traces and the midland's grainwaster asarch for her track, to wend her ways byandby, robecca or worse, to spin and to grind, to swab and to thrash, for all her golden lifey in the barleyfields and penny- lotts o f Humphrey'S fordofhurdlestown and lie with a landleaper 1 wel- lingtonorseher.
(,Fordofhurdlestown' = Baile . tha Cliath=Dublin. )? But our main
concern is with her widowed aspect, her scotching of the scandal
that was to put HCE under loch and neagh and leave the rule of the
world to his sons, the halves of himself. (She swore on croststyx nyne
wyndabouts she's be level with all the snags of them yet. ' She got a
' z a k b a g , a s h a m m y m a i l s a c k . . . o f f o n e o f h e r swapson~, ~haun t h e
Post', she dressed herself queenlily, 'Annushka Lutetlav! tch Puff-
lovah', and then 'with her mealiebag slang over her shuider, Anna
Livia oysterface forth of her bassein came'. In the bag were frag-
ment~ of the living substance of fier dead lord - 'a Christmas box
apiece for aisch and iveryone of her childer'. Her child. er are one
hundred and eleven in number ( I I I is the symbol of plemtude), and
their names and the presents she gave them fill two and a half pages.
Theyare of course dream-fantastical-'a Missa pro Messa for Taff
, , b ' d de Taff; Jill, the spoon of a girl, for Jack, the broth of a oy an
so
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
brought us to this phase, redeeming the rumoured shame of her
dead husband with the plurability of the gift of his gathered sub- stance, to be used and misused by the 'twins of his bosom'.
When we have doubts about the value of Finnegan, Wake-and doubts sometimes come upon us when we face its difficulties, the mad calculation of its experiments with language and time, the huge unclimbable mound of multiple myth-we have only to think of this wonderful final chapter of Book One for the doubts to be resolved. It remains one of the most astonishing pieces of audacity in the whole of world literature, and the audacity comes off. The language is cosmic, yet it is the homely speech of ordinary people. We seem to see a woman who is also a river and a man who is also a city. Time dissolves; we have a glimpse of eternity. And the eternal vision is made out of muddy water, old saws, half-remembered music-hall songs, gossip, and the stain on a pair of underpants. The heart bows down.
5: Brotherly Hate
W E ARE PRIMARIL Y IN A BED ABOVE A BAR IN
CHAPELIZOD,
in Feenichts Playhouse. (Bar and conveniences always open, Diddlem 2. 8 219
Dublin, on a Saturday night, with a dry branch tapping or tipping
at the window, and we must never let ourselves forget it. In -the
final section of Finnegan, Wake we are not allowed to forget it. The fact that we have to look at the near-end of the book to find out where the dreamer is dreaming does not imply that the whole thing is badly made or that Joyce is withholding something from us. Finnegans Wake is cyclical like a riverrun, and we can enter the river at any point we wish. I have already done this in order to help beginners who, brought up like all of us on ordinary books where you start at page ? and push on straight to the end, may think it cheating to treat Finnegans Wake in a different way. I t is not cheating, and we ought to be aware of the inward movement of the pattern. In the first section we were in Dublin, by the Hill of Howth and the Liffey, in the Phoenix Park-for the most part out of doors. In the second section we come to the Earwicker home to learn something about the play and education of the children as well as to witness the downfall of the father in his own bar. We are away from the big timeless landscape which is proper for myth; we are here and now, in an age dominated by the demagogue.
We need not worry overmuch about the fact that Earwicker was shoved under Lough Neagh in the first section and here is to be seen alive again, alive but decaying. This is dream-stuff, and easy resur- rection (going home from one's father's funeral to find him presiding over the cold ham and whiskified tea) is a dull commonplace of dreams. Besides, the twins-at play and at homework-need a family background in which the father is no longer a castle-crowned rock
. and the mother a river.
The play of the first chapter of Book Two is a real play, presented
'every evening at lighting up o'clock sharp and until further notice
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
l1rotherfy lfate
Club douncestears. ), It is called The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies and, when you come to think of it, is really a play within a pl~y. Earwicker's twin sons (whose waking names are Jerry and Kevm, but, as we shall see, only ifHCE's waking name is Mr Porter) play Shem and Shaun in the dream;. in the dream-play Mr Seumas McQ! lillad plays Glugg and Mr Sean O'Mailey plays Chuff. Those surnames ,are, of cou~se, nicknames or trade-names playing at being patronymlcs-Shem IS the lad 9f the quill or pen; Shaun delivers the post or mail: one writes the word and the other merely delivers it. The other actors are no strangers to us. ! zod is played by Miss Butys Pott, the self-loving Issy, 'a bewitching blonde who dimples dehghtfully and is approached in loveliness only by her grateful sister reflection in the mirror'. She is supported by The Floras, 'a month's bunch of pretty maidens' from St Bride's (St Bridget's) Finishing Establishment. The month of February is Joyce's birth- month, and it may be this fact that made him limit his 'month's bunch' to twenty-eight, with the elusive Issy as leap-year girl. The
. part of Ann (Miss Corrie Corriendo-riverrunner) is, as it were,
played by herself, as the part of Hump (Mr Makeall Gone-all- creator who dies) is played by Hump Earwicker. The St Bride's girls are more or less balanced by the alumni of St Patricius' Aca- demy for Grownup Gentlemen-the twelve customers of the pub. Kate is there ('kook-and-dishdrudge'), and the bar-help's name is revealed as Saunderson-'scherinsheiner and spoilcurate'.
What is the play about? It is a version of a game of Joyce's own childhood, in which angels fight devils. Glugg (Shem) is Old Nick, battered young Satan, 'the bold bad bleak boy of the storybooks',
and Chuff (Shaun) is Mick or the Archangel Michael, 'the fine frank fairhaired fellow of the fairytales' :
Chuffy was a nangel then and his soard fleshed light like likening. Fools topl Singty, sangty, meekly loose, defendy nous from prowlabouts. Make a shine on the curst. Emen.
Michael, as the prayer said at the end of Mass reminds us, is the
defender of the Church in the day of battle. This ties up with Shaun as the Mookse, head of the Church and imposer of Roman rule on Book-of-Kelly (has anybody here seen I) Ireland. Glugg-Shem is not a very fearsome devil, but, after all, he is only a child:
. . . the duvlin sulph was in Glugger, that lost-to-lurning. Punet. He was sbuffing and sputing, tussing like anisine, whipping his eyesoult and gnatsehing his teats over the brividies from existers and the outher liubbocks of life.
220
He is, we learn, loved of none of the month-girls, and Izod has jilted hIm, bemg now fatally fascinated by Chuff. But Glugg wants love, and not even ALP will give him anything more than pity: 'This poor Glugg! It was so said of him about of his old fontmouther. Truly deplurabel! ' The girls tease him; he chases them but can catch none. 'Not Rose, Sevilla nor Citronelle? not Esmeralde Pervinca nor Indra; not Viola even nor all of ;hem four theme~ over. ' The month-girls have become rainbow-girls (four days=one
colour).
They perform a sOrt of phonetic mime of a colour and ask Glugg
to guess what the colour is ('Up tighty in the front'-heli? 'down again on the Ioose'-a; 'drim and drumming on her back'-~r' 'and a pop from her whistle' -ope). Glugg asks the four elements (th~four old men) for an answer, but they cannot help him. To increase his embarrassment, he seems to want to make water, and the rainbow girls, 'holding their noises', insinuate that he is making 'peace in his preaches and play with esteem'. These giggling girls dance round Chuff, 'for they are an angel's garland', but their 'rompride round in rout' spells R-A-I-N-B-O-W. This act of spelling (an act ful- filled m tIme) pushes them into the future, and we see them as they wIll be-. mature. ordmary women with age coming upon them. They dance wlddershms-W-O-B-N-I-A-R-and they are once again 'all
the flowers of the ancelles' garden'.
Glugg is enraged. He curses, blasphemes, swears that he will have his own back on all of them. He will turn himself into a sort of James Joyce, complete with 'carberry banishment' (exile), 'mum's for maxim' (silence), and . 'handy antics' (cunning). He will 'go in for scnbenery WIth the satIety of arthurs' and even write Ulysses. Some ofthe episodes of Ulysses are now mentioned, in appropriate dream- form: 'Ukalepe. Loathers' leave. Nemo in Patria. The Luncher Out. Skilly and Carubdish. A Wondering Wreck. From the Mermaids' Tavern. Bullyfamous. Naughtsycalves. Mother of Misery. Wal- purgas Nackt. ' But after his rage and threats to show up even his
own hovel-home he calms down: 'He threwed his fit up to his aers, rolled hIS poligone eyes, snivelled from his snose and blew the guff out of his hornypipe. ' As a seeming reward for his return to good, though diabolic, humour, he is given a letter from we-know-who: 'Stop up, mavrone, and sit in my lap, Pepette. ' There is a new riddle for him: 'Find the frenge for frocks and translace it into shocks of such as touch with show and show. ' He cannot answer it,
and so he is told: 'Get! ' .
221
? ? ? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
'And he did a get, their anayance, and slink his hook away, aleguere come alaguerre, like a chimista inchamisas, whom the harricana hurries and hots foots, zingo, zanga, segur.
He lies in filth while the flower-maidens dance around their angelic Chuff, chanting praises out of parodied prayers. But Glugg returns, 'shrivering, with his spittyful eyes and his whoozebecome woice', and says he will never sin again. But the sins he now confesses are not his own but his father's and also those of 'his fiery goosemother, laotsey taotsey, woman who did'.
The moon, rises, it grows dark, we are 'circumveiloped by obscuri-
tads'. The animals prepare for sleep. 'Witchman, watch of your nightl' Joyce's night-prose again triumphs: 'Darkpark's acoo with sucking loves. ' But on VieD Road, where 'vamp, vamp, vamp, the girls are merchand', the fight between Glugg and Chuff is ready to begin. And, indeed, Glugg makes a frightful dash at his adversary. A proffered prize for the conqueror, Issy-Iseult appears: 'Wink's the winning word. ' And, of course, she is for Chuff, as are all the girls. The whole twenty-nine of them rise against Glugg, taunting, teasing. He ceases then to be comic; he becomes identified with the assassin Macbeth:
For a burning would is come to dance inane.
Glarnours hath moidered's lieb and herefore Coldours must leap no more. Lack breath must leap no more.
Living evil, he must stay on his own wicked side of the street:
If you cross this rood as you roamed the rand I'm blessed but you'd feel him a blasting rod. Behind me, frees from evil smells! Perdition stinks before us.
This does not mean the Chuff-Glugg struggle is over. Glugg has been established as the enemy but, because of the Brunonian law. of merging opposites, there is a moment when we cannot be quite sure which twin is which: ' . . . trumpers are mixed up in duels and here's B. Rohan meets N. Ohlan for the prize of a thou. ' The girls 'are in such transfusion just to know twigst timidly twomeys, for gracious sake, who is artthoudux from whose heterotropic'. But Glugg is defeated. 'Creedless, croonless hangs his haughty. There end no moe red devil in the white of his eye. '
And yet the warring of these opposites has to remind us of the
great personage in whom thesis and antithesis are not presented in
battle but in harmony, composed to a synthesis-the all-father, 'an
l1rother? v }{ate
r \.
isaac jacquemin mauromormo milesian'. He
222
is
'Hocus
Crocus,
Esquilocus' but also 'Finnfinn the Faineant'. He sleeps now, he \ cannot be resurrected. He will reawaken, but not just yet. As for
sleeping it is time for the children to go home to bed. 'The play
thou schouwburgst, Game, here endeth. The curtain drops by deep
request. ' But the childrenare still ~oisyand quarrelsome. Only. when their father HCE slams the door III thunder and they are remmded of the voice of God will they turn to their night-prayers:
o Loud, hea. the wee heseech of thees of each of these thy unlitten
ones! Grant sleep in hour's time, 0 Loud1
That they take no chill. That they do ming no merder. That they shall
not gomeet madhowiatrees. . .
Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwme our arts WIth laughters. low !
One knows of no better prayer.
The next chapter is devoted to work, not play. The children must
prepare for the taking over of their father's world. They must s. tu~y the great book of life 'from tomtittot to teetootomtotahtanan- the origins of God and man, the arts and sciences. Joyce presents us with a dream-version of the all-including primer. There are mad footnotes which seem to be the work of irreverent Shem and which hardly ever seem to bear even the remotest relationship to the cor- responding parts of the text. In the right-hand margin Shaun has very serious, very pretentious, very learned gmdes to the . subJect- matter, always in upper-case letters. In the left-hand margm She,:, has rude, irrelevant, rebellious or nonsensical com~ents m Italic letters. About halfway through, the twins, remembenng Brown and Nolan, change sides. A good example of their respective attitudes to learning can be seen on the very first page. Shaun has 'UNDE ET UBI' and 'SIC' and 'IMAGINABLE ITINERARY THROUGH THE PARTICULAR UNIVERSAL. ' Shem has 'With h,s broad and hairy face to Ireland a disgrace' (presumably he means God), 'Men? V about peebles' and 'Dont retch meat fat salt lard sinks down (and out). ' The footnotes on the first page are as follows:
1 Rawmeash quoshe with her girlic teangue. If old Herod with the Cormwell's ec;ema was to go for me like he does Snuffler whatever about his blue canaries I'd do nine months for his beaver beard.
2 Mater Mary Mercerycordial of the Dripping Nipples, milk's a queer arrangement.
3 Real life behind the floodlights as shown hy the hest exponents of a
royal divorce.
Of course our first this-is-nonsense reaction to both footnotes and
Shem-m';ginal-comments tends to be modified after many readings. 2z3
? ? The Man-made Mountain
Brotherly Hate
These three footnotes, for instance, make a kind of pattern of father- hood and motherhood, revealed first in its divine aspects and then brought down to HCE and ALP (A Royal Divorce is Earwicker's favourite dramatic entertainment). As for Shaun's marginal poin- ters, these always, alas, make too much sense: they are the very voice of the student who plans great things for himself in the world. The right-hand ant toils away, the left-hand grasshopper chirps like a mad thing.
The text with its three-sided frame is very difficult to follow, but this is chiefly because it hides under its surface of dream Dublin chatter the strict doctrines of the ancient Cabbala. This makes much of the mystical significance of numbers. Thus, the Creator- 'Ainsoph' in the Cabbala-is represented by the number I. His heavenly consort is a (Joyce calls her 'Zeroine'). As he moves to- wards her, the numbers 2 to 9 are produced, and, when they achieve union, the great 10 comes about. The first thing the twins have to learn is the immanence of this divine creative force in the innumerable forms of the universe. Behind all the kinds of know- ledge, from history to music, lies the ultimate knowledge of the One. Joyce's achievement in setting forth all this lies, as it does throughout Finnegans Wake, in making the abstract not merely concrete but local, not merely local but comic. Unde ? -whence have we come?
Ubi ? -where are we? OUf 'imaginable itinerary through the particu- lar universal' is the path we take in order to find out:
Quick lunch by our left, wheel, to where. Long Livius Lane, mid Mezzo-
fanti Mall, diagnosing Lavatery Square, up Tycho Brache Crescent,
shouldering Berkeley Alley, querfixing Gainsborough Carfax, under <;Juido d'Arezzo's Gadeway, by New Livius Lane till where we whiled whIle we whithered. Old Vico Roundpoint.
These great names represent the seven main branches of knowledge,
beginning with Livy the ristorian and ending with him, old Vico
there too to remind us of the cyclical nature of our progress: history
does not, as Mr Deasy thought, lead to God's manifestation; God
is behind everything, unseen, unknowable:
Ainsoph, this upright one, with th~t naughty besighed him zeroine. To see in his horrorscup he is mehrkunos than saltz of sulphur. Terror of the noonstruck by day, cryptogam of each nightly bridable. B~t, to speak broken heaventalk, is he? Who is he? Whose is he? Why IS he? Howmuch is he? Which is he? When is he? Where is he? How is he?
Shem's marginal comments on God are very much those of
Stephen Dodalus: 'Swiney Tod, ye Daimon Barbar! Dig him in the 22~
rubsh! Ungodly old Ardrey, Cronwall beeswaxing the convulsion box. '
But it is not the God of the Irish Catholics, the butcher who kills
u~ like 'pigs (Swiney Tod~Schweinstod~pigsdeath), who is under
dIScussion. We are concerned with the cabbalistic One and Zero
the creation of the world of multiplicity which we can see as well
. ,
as anywhere, m HCE's pub and household (those famous initials are
never long out of the text-'Haud certo ergo', for instance; ALP is triply celebrated in 'Apis amat aram. Luna legit librum. Pulla petit pascua'). The Earwicker home is a tiny figure of the cosmos. Once, however, we examine this figure, we leave questions of theology and become preoccupied with the building of human societies. We enter HCE's house, climb 'from the murk of the mythelated' to civilisa-
tion. ' represented by 'Harington's invention', the we, and visit 'the clanence of the child light in the studiorium upsturts'. The twins in their nursery will enact the 'urges and widerurges' of primitive man. They will fight over a girl, even, while she 'with her tootpetty- pout of jemenfichue will sit and knit on solfa sofa'. (The footnote says: 'Let me blush to think of all those halfwayhoist pullovers. ') In the nursery, as in the greater world, the two great driving forces of cupidity and concupiscence will be at work-'early notions of acquired rights' and the 'pursuit o f panhysteric woman'. A t the same
time, the process of transmitting knowledge from one age to the
next proceeds: old granny teaches little Issy about man the winner and woman the loser, asking her to 'Note the Respectable Irish Distressed Ladies and the Merry Mustard Frothblowers of Hum- phreystown Associations. '
The right-hand margin now presents the nine principles of that bigger human history adumbrated in the nursery: 'CONCOMI- TANCE OF COURAGE, COUNSEL AND CONSTANCY. ORDINATION OF OMEN, ONUS AND OBIT. DISTRIBU- TION OF DANGER, DUTY AND DESTINY. POLAR PRIN- CIPLES. ' It seems to add up to C. O. D. -cash on delivery, a typi-
cally Shaunian summation: we expect the goods of life and we will
pay with the stoic virtues when we get them. When we Come to
Number lo-marriage of King One and QIeen Zero-we see that all life is based on the polar principle of sex. Can we really learn much from past history, then? (The notes BC and AD are played in the left- hand margin. ) 'Please stop if you're a B. C. minding missy, please do. But should you prefer A. D. stepplease. ' The completed Viconian
eras-the theocratic and aristocratic-have nothing to teach the
coming democratic age. Heroes like Humpty are done for ('By old 225
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
Brotherly Hate
Grumbledum's walls'); the rainbow of the future spreads ('Heil, heptarched span of peace! '-the footnote says: 'I'm blest if I can see') and now we are to have 'Impovernment of the booble by the bauble for the bubble'. Or look at it another way: the special things we were taught to look for in the past are not in the past at all; they are here, in the present: 'Number Thirty two West Eleventh streak looks on to that (may all in the tocoming of the sempereternal speel spry with it! ) datetree doloriferous' of past time: II32 is here and now.
Here, though, there seems to be a great philosophical paradox.
Present and past may be brought together because of recurring
archeJ:ypes, but we cannot doubt that the individual forms ofone age are never an exact reproduction of corresponding forms in another age. We accept the notion of new species-'one world burrowing on another . . . Standfest, our tapiocal sagan hero, or any other macotther, signs is on the bellyguds bastille back'-and the fact that the older world lies underneath the new world: 'THE MONGREL UNDER THE DUNGMOUND. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INFRALIMINAL INTELLIGENCE. ' It is in the darkness of the unconscious that the old hero Finnegan subsists:
Aught darks flou a duskness. Bats that? There peepeestrilling. At Bran- nan's on the moor. At Tam Fanagan's weak yat his still's going strang. And still here is noctules and Can tell things acommon on by that fluffy feeling.
'OFFRANDES' says the marginal note, and the text 'Dogs' vespers'. It may be that, as we propitiate the God of the heavens, so we must make offerings to our deeper, more primitive, natures. 'Keep the dog far hence', says T. S. Eliot-those animal forces inside us we fear so much. Perhaps we should bow down occasionally to that dog.
And now 'INCIPIT INTERMISSIO'. We rest from our studies a little, and the temptress Issy, who has already been thrusting her way into the footnotes ('Pipette. I can almost feed their sweetness at my lisplips'), fills three-quarters of a page with a footnote letter which seduces us to a mood of temporary languor. We have not yet learned much about sex. Issy turns herself into a love-goddess:
Wasn't it just divining that dog of a dag in Skokholme as I sat astrid uppon their Drewitt's altar, as cooledas as culcumbre, slapping my straights till the sloping ruins, postillion, postallion, a swinge a swank, with you offering me clouts of illscents and them homers stagstruck on the leasward!
226
Cities fall, broken in war, but still the flowers remain, fresh and
smiling as in the days of old battles (Joyce tells us this not in his own dream-words but in the undistorted French of Edgar Q! linet). Flowers of love beckon, but the boys 'totient quotients', 'Bruto and Cassio', are more concerned with the manlier matter of their eternal opposition. They get down then to doing their sums, inscribingnrst 'At maturing daily gloryaims' (the Jesuit Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam) at the head of their paper. Every theme of the book obscurely ap- pears as a mathematical problem, and we become aware of how large a part number has so far played in it. The boys' names are now given as Dolph (Shern) and Kev (Shaun)-'singlebarrelled names for doubleparalleled twixtytwins'-and it is Kev who comes to his brother for help. The problem they are going to work out is evidently important-'Concoct an equoangular trillitter' -for Joyce, in Latin, invites the spirits of the dead to come and watch: 'Venite,
preteriti. ' Apparently, though, young Dolph-Shern has some obscene purpose in mind, for - both the sets of marginal comments disa ppear- i n g - w e have a lengthy piece o f confused moralising, alluding much to the Tristram-Iseult legend and, addressing the two lovers by their Irish names- Diarmait and Grainne distorted to 'diarmuee and gran- you', saying: 'if that is what lamoor . . . seems circling toward out yondest heaven help his hindmost'. When the marginal comments are resumed, we see that Shaun has his grave pointers in italic, at the left, and Shem's irreverence, in the dignity of capitals, is on the right.
The letters ALP are now seen as the points of the isosceles triangle (the fertile delta) which is Anna Livia's own sign. In a diagram made up of two interlocking circles and two isosceles triangles with a common base (ALP and alpha lambda pi), Dolph- Shem finds his thesis, an obscurely obscene exposition of his own sexual curiosity, while Kev-Shaun makes learned but ingenuous comments in the margin:
Outer serpumstance. s being ekewilled, we carefully, if she pleats, lift by -her seam hem and jabote at the spidsiest of her trickkikant (like thou- sands done before since fillies calpered. Ocone! Ocone! ) the maidsapron of our A. L. P. , fearfully! till its nether nadir is vortically where (allow me aright to two cute winkles) its naval's napex will have to beandbe. You must proach near mear for at is dark. Lob. And light your mech. Jeldy!
The whole process of learning, of scientific investigation and the
hugging of secret knowledge, is revealed as mere curiosity about
what lies up our mothers' skirts. Kev-Shaun is slow in realising his 227
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
brother's drift but when he does he turns on him, and the fraternal battle is resu:Ued- Michael versus Old Nick. The footnote says 'Picking on Nickagain, Pikey Mikey /' The archangel calls Satan 'the divver's own smart gossoon, aequal to yourseH and wamgel to anglyother, so you are, hoax! You know, you'll be dampned, so you will one of these invernal days . . . '
The real point is, I think, that Shem, with all his tenden~ to make game of learning, has more understandmg of ~he mystIcal significance of signs and letters (he is, after all, an artist) than has his twin, despite the earnestness of hiS a~phcatlOn. Both boys, bemg the father split into two, are incomplete m themselves, a~dthere are times when their recognition of this makes them turn m anger on each other. It is now a matter of 'Christ's Church varses Bellial! ' But the narrator (being himself an artist and hence on the Side of Dolph-Shem-Glugg-Nick) celebrates Irish literature as a sort of
divine body-organs listed in the margin, names garbled m the text: 'Steal, Barke, Starn, Swhipt, Wiles, Pshaw, Doubbhnbbayyates. ' This does not prevent Shaun from delivering a blow to Shem's mortalbody-'Wincewan'swon! Rip! '(footnote: 'Abyebyebmgbang boys I See you Nutcracker Sunday! '). . .
But, surprisingly when we conSIder that.