No More Learning

We want further information about HCE. We hear the very title of that book about Work in Progress which was written by Joyce's twelve: 'Your exagmmatlOn round his factification far incaminatian of a warping process. Declaiml' We know that the eternal twelve are
here, bu: what is t~is. 'warping pr~cess'? It is an image of two op- posed thmgs-a bUlldmg-up (weavmg) and a breaking-down (twist- mg out of shape)-and we are not surprised to 'see the empire of HC. E honoured in a 'Dunker's durbar' and then, 'after his life over- lastmg . . . reduced to nothing'. And what is Work in Progress 1 It is anot~er. na~e f~r Fmnegans Wake. Here then he lies, the great man
on. hIs bIer. But, cry the voices, 'there's leps offlam in Funnycoon's WIck. The keyn has passed. Lung lift the keying . . . God save you king! Muster of the Hidden Life! ' It is only a vision, though. We have not yet reached the undying heart of HCE.
T o contact the master, hidden somewhere in the earth beneath the
vast slack body of Yawn, requires much preparation. First we have to hear strange voices out of the past, voices of war and love- 'Slog slagt and sluaghter! Rape the daughter! Choke the pope! . . . PIpette dear! Us! Us! Me! Me! . . . O! Mother of my tears! Believe for me! Fold thy son! '-and mixed up with these ancestral voices is t~e. n;etal. lic '~in' or 'Zinz. in' v:hich may be the tap o f a dry branch ( ,\IP ) WIth lIfe put back mto It. The enquirers, excited, cry: 'Now
we re gettm It. Tune m and pick up the forain counties! Hello! ' but
almost at once there is nothing but SILENCE. Still, the interred presence of HCE seems to be sending out shoots oflife and violence and we feel justified in setting the stage for his appearance at last; 'Act drop: Stand byI Blinders! Curtain up. Juice, please! Foots! ' But ~e stdl get nothmg but voices. At length, though, one voice descrIbes two objects we have already seen earlier in Anna Livia
Plurabelle's own chapter: "
- The flagstone. By tombs, deep and heavy. To the unaveiling memory of. Peacer the grave. .
- . . . There used to be a tree s~uck up? An overIisting eshtree?
- There used, sure enough. BeSIde the Annar. At the ford of Slivena- mand. Oakley Ashe's elm.
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain . .
th 1m were we remember, the manif~stat~on~ of
I~eston~~n~is~e~dlaw, a~dShem, with his living lI~SplratlOn. a,:::, WI h e melted into the father, and the tree ofhfe-round But e sons av iverse bur eons and plays-is the symbol of the
WhiCh af'i'i'~~und ALP W~look in the dense text for Yggdras! 1l,
~? ;Id-t,re~;t~No;th~:~:en~a~~~~:::;~~:~i:':l~
dIsguIsed: coe r~ l~SmUe 'ste ne of law' is 'tod' (German for
eggdrazzles for him. Th b' Y 'the form masculine. The gender 'd h') while the tree com illes '1
c eat . " We are getting closer to the great father and faml y-man. lemlmne . h'
But the huge fish takes some catc mg: .
-There's an old psalmsobbi~glax salmoner fogeyboren Herrtn Plunde-
h
Who ;:::floundering with/his b::~a::d1v:flrs~nb~:~:na~:~thand Leaping [reck after every ang
cleanliving man and, as a matter of fict, by my halfwife, I think how our public at large appreciates it most highly from me that I am as cleanliving as could be and that my game was a fair average since I perpetually kept my ouija ouija wicket up.
Here is the old stutter and the old desperate facetiousness in self- defence, though we become aware gradually (we are warned in 'ouija ouija') that HCE is speaking through a 'control' and that this is a seance. The drift of his statement is the fundamental harmless- ness of all his acts. He, in his position as innkeeper and solid citizen, could never afford 'to be guilty of crim crig con of malfeasance trespass against parson with the person of a youthful gigirl frifrif friend'. Anna is his 'bestpreserved wholewife'; he loves her dearly. There is not one 'teaspoonspill o f evidence at bottomlie t o my babad'; the libel that has spread all over the city, all over the world, must be laid at the door of the 'caca cad' with the pipe in the park. 'Hole affair is rotten muckswinish porcupig's draff. Enouch t'
Reception is bad. HCE becomes confused with another character,
perhaps the 'control', whose name is 'Whitehed'. But this name
changes to 'Whitehowth', and 'poor. Haveth Childers Everywhere' is dream-identified with Finnegan himself, the head of Howth. HCE is the hill, the castle, the city. Nobility starts through the comic bubbling. His history is not a history of shame but of achievement:
. . . here where my tenenure of office and my toils of domestication first began, with weight of woman my skat and skuld but Flukie of the Ravens as my sure piloter, famine with Englisch sweat and oppedemics, the twotoothed dragon worms with alIsort serpents, has compolitely seceded from this landleague of many nations and open and notorious naughty livers are found not on our rolls. This seat of our city it is of all sides pleasant, comfortable and wholesome. If you would traverse hills, they are not far off. If champain land, it Iieth of all parts. If you would be de1ited with fresh water, the famous river, called of Ptolemy the Libnia
Labia, runneth fast by. If you will take the view of the sea, it is at hand.
Give heed!
Give heed, in fact, to this tale of a fair city, a tale qualified with
wrongs and failures, but still a heartening chronicle. Here is the great boon of a life, drunk with variety, built (on me, your sleeping giant'. The hill-giant wed the woman-river; he 'knew her fleshly when all my bawdy did I her whorship, min bryllupswibe: Heaven, he haIl- thundered; Heydays, he flung blissforhers'. The very forces of the sky flashed and drummed their union. HCE fed, loved, dressed, glorified his spouse, planted Chesterfield elms and Kentish hops, a Q! leen's garden; 'I brewed for my alpine plurabel1e, wigwarming
25 I
Humbermouth.
Our Human Conger Eel!
.
. k arguments as to whether It
producillg-goo . d I',cate She talks to her ffilrror- I h . altemptressm up . .
Iseu t as t e pnm I . I h t the dreamer has been domg image and she tells us p aill y w a
with his dream: .
. d n Of course it was downright verry wl~ed It's meem1y us two. , meme I, 0" d How me adores eatsother Simply
of him, reely rneetmg l! 1e ~lifj)seinhi; storm collar, as I leaned yestreen (Mon i~hebeau. l Ma rebne e e. ~ little porn got excited, when I turned
~i~~! ~:u~~s~:! ~amin~;ebustYandkissed him more. .
h h eared in this scene at theIr most The four old men. -w 0 a~v~~Plrttle more. The task of enquiry intelligent and dlgmfied-c 'We bright young chaps of
must be handed over t~,~~~;:;::::t~~dsare brisker. Mter a brief
. . h
ir:
s~~t~~~~e:it might not have been evil-
Reminiscence~of the
was really a Sl~a(~,Foenix Culpritl) lead at length to Issy-1zzy-
the brandnew bramtrus . ' g fKate wh0 questlOI'. m o . f' D
to say that HCE was frisky enough
seems .
croak, evildoer! ArIse, SIr g os s.
Fullacau's sake! '), the boys of the bram- ear' 'Fa Fe Fi Fo Fum! Ho, trust bid the bUrled sill~er-h:ron:~f~d at last we listen to the
for Sill (Fuddhug un or
genuine voice of HCE: . I . u I Eternest cittas, heil t Here we are agalJ?
I am - Amtsadam, SIr, to yo . 1 ct of dynasties long out of pnnt, the
bubub brouJlht up u'bder d(~:r;itOWll. ugh MacAuscullpth the Thord I), first of Shltnc Shllkan ~ar I known throughout the world . . . as a but, in pontofacts masslmust, am
250
Shaun to Jatln to Yawn
? ? The Man-made Mountain
wench . . . my granvilled brandold Dublin lin~ub, the free, the froh the frothy freshener. ' He laid down roads, nch with traffic, all for her pleasure. (We hear no stutter now. ) The voice of the giant, wine-god, city-maker, calls from beneath and beyond the crushed lump of the body of his failed successor, false redeemer. Trumpet his fame, four gospellers: 'Mattahah! Marahah! Luahah! Joahana- hanahana l'
8: Bed and Ricorso
SPRING DAWN, THE MASTER BEDROOM OF THE BRISTOL TAVERN,
a stirring out of sleep: 'What was thaas? Fog was whaas? Too mult sleepth. Let sleepth . . . But really now whenabouts? Expatiate then how much times we live in. Yes? ' Yes, indeed, for the decayed times are not just the decor of the dream of Earwicker; they are here and now, the gods and city-builders underground, love a travesty, faith dead. Our own dream of life, which sees the pair asleep or half- awake, twitching at the light, awaits the ricorso, the return to nobility and creativeness.
The twins, Kevin and Jerry, 'nicechild' and 'badbrat', sleep, watched over by 'kinderwardens', the Mamalujo bedposts and the ass that is Christ. Isobel, Saintette Isabelle, lies prettily, 'wild- wood's eyes and primarose hair . . . in mauves o f moss and daphne- dews . . . child of tree, like somelosthappy leaf, like blowing flower stilled. ' As for the parents-
in their bed of trial, on the bolster of hardship, by the glimmer of memory, under coverlets of cowardice, Albatrus Nyanzer with Vieta Nyanza, his mace of might mortified, her beautifell hung up on a nail, he, Mr of our fathers, she, our moddereen ru arue rue, they, ay, by the hodypoker and blazier, they are, as sure as dinny drops into the dyke . . .
A cry off.
The king arid queen (or queen and consort, Victoria and Albert, two great African lakes of sleep) are deposed to mere father and mother when they hear this cry. 'Where are we at all? and whenabouts in the name of space? ' They are in a house. They are in a bedroom which is a stage-set (is not ordinary life just one of our acts, a play we are condemned to I). We see now the provenance of some of the charaCters of the bigger play of sleep-'Adam's mantel . . . over mantelpiece picture of Michael, lance, slaying Satan, dragon with smoke . . . ' We see a man with a nightcap and a woman with curlpins.
253
? ? The Man-made Mountain
Bed and Ricorso
To our surprise we discover that it is not sleep which has been dis- turbed by the 'cry off' but the act of intercourse.
We see this from the viewpoints oftheir own four bedposts-like Christ's life, reported by four cold gospellers, their uncreative act is blazoned to the world. At the end of the bedroom inventory comes 'man's gummy article, pink'.
The first gospeller describes the two with cold exactness-the man's 'beastly expression, fishy eyes', exhibiting rage. He is 'ruddy blond, Armenian bole, black patch, beer wig, gross build, episcopa- lian, any age'. She has a 'haggish expression, peaky nose, trekant mouth'; she is 'undersized, free kirk, no age'. These are not the HCE and ALP we have known. Soon they are designated as Mr and Mrs Porter. At last we learn their real names. 'Earwicker' is comic, romantic, better for a dream than for real life; 'Porter' is right for a stout-seller, one who carries burdens. But we will still call them by the names we have known longest.
Upstairs are the Porter babes-the Corsican brothers in one room; little pussy, whose 'pessname' is Buttercup, in the other. The parents enter the twins' room, where 'our bright bull b~be Frank Kevin' is happily asleep. 'Jerry Jehu', though, has had a nightmare, and it is his cry that disturbed the queasy dawn act of love. Shem the Penman to come, he has not yet made ink flow, but 'he has
pipettishly bespilled himself from his foundingpen as illspent from
inkinghorn'. An incontinent child.
The 'second position of discordance' describes Earwicker, who
'partially eclipses the femecovert', from the back. His hairy bottom becomes Phoenix Park ('how the nature in all frisko is enlivened by gentlemen's seaG'), and we become dimly aware that perhaps all the history that has been enacted there throughout Finnegans Wake has come about because a man dropped his trousers or lifted his night- shirt. Is history all ordure-'hystoricalleavesdroppings'? Was the fall, with dropping leaves, initiated not with the tree oTknowledge but with the removal of figleaf aprons? We must leave such questions because the wife is now soothing her crying child in a kind ofRussian (Anna is of Russian stock. We have met hints before). Joyce soothes
us as well, who have cried sometimes at the nightmare of his book: 'Tis jest jibberweek's joke', pure 'Jabberwocky'. The crying child may be more than Joyce's readers, though: 'Sonly all in your imagination, dim. Poor little brittle magic nation, dim of mind! ' Is Jerry Ireland? It is no comfort to know that history's nightmare will clear with the coming of Kevin-Shaun: 'While elvery stream winds
254
seling on for to keep this barrel of bounty rolling and the nightmail
afarfrom morning nears. '
The c~urt, says the evangeli~t, is to go 'into half morning'. An
act remams to be completed. Then the court to come in to full morning. Herein see ye fail not! ' In a kind of Esperanto we Jearn th~tboth children can see their father's erection: :Vidu, p~rkego! lit Vt "gardas. Re~urnu, porkego. Ma. ldelikato l' It is not decent. The
sight of the 'stark pointing pole' starts Joyce off on a fantasy of flags bells, fireworks: ' 'Tis holyyear's day! Juin jully we may! ' The sexual ecstasy that promises can best be figured in such festival terms. It is
time to seek it, back in the master bedroom:
-He is quieter now.
- Legalentitled. Accesstopartnuzz. Notwildebeetsch. Byrightofaptz. Twainbeonerflsh. Haveandholdpp.
-S! Let us go. Make anoise. Slee . . .
-Q,Ii . . . The gir . . .
There is an ec~o of marriage~vows, as though intercourse is a duty or form or entItlement, nothmg more. The real love-urge is gone. And the young are making ready to show how strong and lusty they are, how eager to take over from their elders; they 'will be soon heart- pocking on their betters' doornoggers'. But back to bed.
And now Joyce attacks us yet again with the unexpected. Instead of entermg the bedroom we plunge into a cold and legalistic vision . of the horror of a world in which the sexual act is divorced from the desire of fertility, in which every p<;rversion is calmly accepted and suscept,ble of d,scusslOn m utlhtanan terms. What has religion to say about the death of sexual morality? The two main Christian churches of the kingdom-the Catholic and the Anglican-have
become as cold as their defecting members, mere firms called
respectively, Tangos, Li~. tedand Pango Ca rival concern'). Readini the folloWlng, m alllG fngld c1anty, one longs to be folded back into dream-language again:
. HOl:~phrius is a conc~piscen~ exservicemajor who makes dishonest pro- P? Slt~ons t. o all. . He l~ . consl. dered . t? have committed, invoking droit d oretller, slI~. ple1. nfidehnes. WIth FelICIa, ~virgin, and to be practising for unnatura~ COlts W. l~ EugenI~s and JeremIas, two or three philadelphians. Honuphnus, Feh~la, Euge~lIus and Jeremias are consanguineous to the lowest degree: Amta the WIfe of. Honuphrius, has been told by her tire- woman, FOrtlSS~, that Honuphrlus has blasphemously confessed under
voluntary ch~tJ. sement that ? e has instructed his slave, Mauritius, to urge . Magrav1U~, a co~m~rc~al, emulous of Honuphrius, to solicit the chastIty of Anita. Amta IS mformed by some illegitimate children of
255
? ? ? I
\
The Man-made Mountain
Bed and Rieorso
Fortissa with Mauritius . . . 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.