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.
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.
re-joyce-a-burgess
' 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
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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
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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.
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
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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
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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
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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.
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'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
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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. '
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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.
