No More Learning

And so to the trial. Long Lally Tobkids, 'the special', gives evi- dence in which HCE appears as a sort of drunken butcher (he de- livers 'mattonchepps and meatjutes'-we are back with Mutt and Jute, foreigner-hating native and invading Teuton). But a certain MackPartland defends HCE: 'these camelback excesses are thought to have been instigated by one or either of the causing causes of all, those rushy hollow heroines in their skirtsleeves'. And, he adds, 'has not levy of black mail from the times the fairies were in it, and fain for wilde erthe blothoms followed an impressive private reputation for whispered sins I' HCE, like Parnell, is suffering for his greatness. As for the accused himself, he has shut himself away from it all with his Swiftian guilt: 'And let oggs be good old gaggles and Isther Estarr play Yesther Asterr'-there is Esther; there is (,EstaIT') Stella. But he has an unsolicited visitor- 'Davy or Titus, on a burgley's clan march from the middle west, a hikely excellent crude man about road who knew his Bullfoost Mountains like a starling bierd. ' The new world of America has to ha~e its say-
. . . weathering against him in mooxed metaphores from eleven thirty to two in the afternoon without even a luncheonette interval for House, son of Clod, to come out, you jewbeggar, to be executed Amen.
(Note the significant period of. time-I! . 30 to 2. 0, which can be telescoped into the only real date in the whole book: 1132. )
Poor Earwicker has compiled a long list of 'all abusive names he
was called'. Some are dream-nonsense; others make all too much
sense- Unworthy of the Homely Protestant Religion, I Divorce Thee Husband, Cumberer ofLord's Holy Ground, Dirt, Miching Daddy, Guilteypig's Bastard, and so on. The people are against him, even though the trial went in his favour. And so, 'playing on the least change of his manjester's voice, the first heroic couplet from the fuguall tropicall, Opus Elf, Thortytoe: My schemes into obeyance for This time has had to fall' (II32 again), he goes off to 'the duff and demb institutions' and we bid him 'Adyoe! ' He is not yet to die, but he is to shut himself away from all communication with men:
206
'Humph is in his doge. Words weigh no no more to him than rain-
drips to Rethfernhim. ' His death and resurrection are reserved to Joyce's next chapter.
This man 'Devoyd of the Commoner Characteristics of an Irish Nature' remembers, in his incarceration (like 'the lion in our tear- garden' remembering 'the nenuphars ofhis Nile'), those two 'lililiths' who undid him, combining as they do in 'corngold Ysit', desired daughter. But the time has come for an indignant people to shove him, guilt and all, in that stolen teak coffin and then bury him deep under Lough Neagh. The making of 'this wastohavebeen under- ground heaven, or mole's paradise which was probably also an inver- sion of a phallopharos, intended to foster wheat crops and to ginger up tourist trade' is a big civilised job, involving blasting with T. N. T. , but HCE remains a primitive hero, whose buried corpse is-despite the lack of a redeemer-a potential source of new life: 'abide Zeit's sumonserving, rise afterfall'. Even in the ground (or, rather, in his watery grave) HCE seems to send out shoots of chaotic energy-
h~htmng and flood abound. He becomes as legendary as sleeping Fmnegan, 'all this time of totality secretly and by suckage feeing on his own misplaced fat'. And the times, too, we see, are legendary- 'pagan ironed times of the first city (called after the ugliest Dana-
. dune)'.
Lest we should think all this some remote fairy tale, however, we
are dragged back to the Earwicker bedroom to hear the tapping of t h e d e a d b r a n c h o n t h e w i n d o w - p a n e : ' T i p 1T i p t i p 1T i p t i p t i p l ' T h e sleeping mind picks on Kate, the Earwickers' cleaning-woman, to take on the role of eternal widow, gatherer of the scattered fragments ofher dead lord, to paint a p! cture for us, 'in a dreariodreama setting, glowing and very vidual, of old dumplan as she nosed it'. We see that she is a very old aspect of ALP, as Issy or Iseult is a very young one. She recalls the mythical past, ending up, as we must always end up, in the park with HCE's fall. We ought really to reconsider that sin, the trial, the incarceration and burial, but the sinner-victim is long dead. All we can do is to call on his two sons, Shern and Shaun, to. re-e~act the whole affair. Shaun plays a ~haracter called Festy King- of a famIly long and honourably assoctated with the tar and feather industries'. But, though it is he who is arraigned on various
charges, there is a great deal of confusion caused by the fact that the chief witness for the prosecution is his twin brother, Shern. The verdict of the four judges (Mamalujo, the four old men who praise the past, the four bedposts) is 'Nolans Brurnans'. This (Bruno the
207
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Nolan with his doctrine of the identity of opposites, is hidden in . the m~ck-Latin) encapsulates the defence of Shaun ('Show'm the Posed'). The twins are-
o ? ? equals of opposites, evolved by a onesame power of natu:e or orspirit, iste as the sole condition and means of its himundher marufestat;lOl! and pol~rised for reunion by the symphysis of their antipathies. Dlstmctly different were their duasdestinies.
Shaun is a mere shadow of his father HCE. He is incapable of guilt, and he revels in the admiration of'the maidies ofthe bar" the twenty- eight girls who flutter and flatter around him. There is a twenty- ninth girl, ~or Leap-year Ca lovelookmg leapglrl ), who IS eVIdently a manifestation of 155y: she too adores him. He IS made for sexu~l success, the unworthy demagogic successor of his fathe:, though, his time is not yet. As for Shem ('Shun the Punman! '), he IS recogmsed as the enemy, the real betrayer of the father who, presumed dead and made mythical, is no longer a sinner but a saint. Hard words are spoken to Shern: 'You and your gift of your gaft of your garbage abaht our Farvver! and gaingridando: Hon! Verg! Nau! Putor! Skarn! Scharns! Shames! ' The artist, truth-seeker, is always reviled.
The four old men, judges, bedposts, gospellers, provinces of Ire- land drone on among themselves about the gloriou8 past. But the truth is surely not to be found in old men's drivellings but in that letter from ALP we all heard about before. Anyway, what happened to HCE? Previously he was presented to us (among so many things) as John Peel, the hunter, complete with hor~ in the mornmg, ~ut now it seems that he is running up and down hke a fox, a quarry hke poor Parnell ('But the spoil of hesitants, the spell of hesitency'). Or else 'he had laid violent hands on hImself . . . lam down, all lll, fagged out, with equally melancholy death'. It i~ best to assume that
he is gone, his successor elected, a new pope ( the pnsoner of that
sacred edifice'). We must turn now to his widow, ALP, the brave
little woman, cleanser of the reputation of her dea~ lord, always ready 'to crush the slander's head'. She is the river by. which we
mourn his death, the water which will purify him into samthood:
. . . For we, we have taken our sheet ~pon her st~)fies where we have hanged our hearts in her tress; and we 11st, as she bIbs us, by the waters of bab. long.
The next few chapters of Finnegans Wake will be all about Anna Livia.
~o8
4: ALP and her Letter
I SHALL TRY NOW TO SAY SOMETHING USEFUL ABOUT THE NEXT four chapters ofFinnegans Wake. We are still on the first great seclion of the book, which deals mainly with the coming of the archetypal family man after the fall of the primitive god-giant, and this section divides itself about equally into an account of Earwicker's fall, trial, . death and burial (though his substance is spread, like a great spilt egg, all about the world) and his wife Anna's life and letter-that hidden letter which tells the truth about HCE and thus, in a cryptic way, explains the universe. There are eight chapters in all-four chapters for the man-hill, four chapters for the woman-river. Nowt then, we come to Anna Livia Plurabelle-the river Anna Liffey, a plurality of femininity and beauty. She is hymned at the outset, however, as if she were God the Father:
In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, un- hemmed as it is uneven!
But, of course, she reflects the eternal father, she bore his sons, she is the custodian ofthe truth about him. She deserves divine honours. First, though, we are concerned with her famous letter.
This 'untitled mamafesta' has had many names (Joyce gives us three full pages of these, from The Augusta Angustissimost for Old Seabeastius' Salvation to First and Last Only True Account all about the Honorary Mirsu Earwicker, L. S. D. , and the Snake (Nuggets 1) by a Woman ofthe World who only can Tell Naked Truths about a Dear Matl and all his Conspirators how they all Tried to Fall him Putting it all around Lucalizod about Privates Earwicker atld a Pair o f Sloppy
Sluts plainly Showing all the Unmentionabikty falsely Accusing about the Raincoats). There is a learned scholar at work here who, before he plunges into the depths of a lecture about the letter, tells us (and this is also Joyce telling us): 'Now, patience; and remember patience
2 0 9
? ? The Man-made Mountain
ALP and her Letter
is the great thing, and above all things else we must avoid anything like being or becoming out of patience. ' We need patience, wading through abstract theory before we learn anything about the prove- nance of the letter. At length we are told how a clever little hen called Belinda scratched up 'a goodish-sized sheet ofletterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass. ), from a mud-mound flavoured with bits of orange-peel. The letter mentions wedding cakes and the 'grand funferall of poor Father Michael' (Michael Finnegan? ) and sends love to the twins. It is tea-stained and unsigned. (Think of the Boston Tea Party, the release from ancient bondage and the start of a new epoch in history. Marriage, family life have replaced the old theocratic but unfruitful paternalism. And the Orange shall decay, says the Shan Van Vocht. ) As for interpreting this old page offamily gossip, is it not evident that ALP sees no great fault in HCE: 'Dancings (schwrites) was his only ttoo feebles. With apple har-
lottes' ?
The letter (there is a strong element of parody of pedantry in this chapter) is accorded the reverence given to the Book ofKells (that ancient Irish psalter, magnificently illuminated, that was buried to protect it from the invading Danes). Indeed, it is stated roundly that the letter plainly inspired 'the tenebrous Tunc page' of the Book of Kells-the page which has written, in a mass of magnificent illumina- tion, the words 'Tunc crucifixerunt X P I cum eo duos latrones'-'Then they crucified Christ and with him two thieves', the 'XPI' (first three letters of the Greek word Christos) being an interpolation. This stained old hen-grubbed scrawl is marvelled at; marginal por- traits are descried in it; niceties of punctuation are gravely discussed. But beneath the dream-satire there is seriousness ofa dreaming sort, since the principle of family-finding expression in a half-literate bit of chat-underlies all civilisation. The archetypes of the crucified triumvirate (the Son who is also the Father in the middle, the thieves of his substance on either side) are to be found in HCE and the twins.
We have the letter, then, but can we be sure that it is really the
letter that ALP wrote? Of course not: dreams do not disclose their hidden truths so easily. But this missive from Boston may be taken as a palimpcestuous precis of Finnegans Wake itself, and what fol- lows in the next chapter is a pretty full presentation of its main characters (all ofwhom are allegedly mentioned in the letter) through the medium of a mad quiz. This is apparently conducted by the hor- rible four- 'old Jeromesolem, old Huffsnuff, old Andy Cox, old Ole-
210
casandrum'-and it begins with a fatuous-seeming salutation: 'Who do you no tonigh, lazy and gentleman? ' The lazy one is probably Shem, and the gentleman undoubtedly Shaun, prize quiz-kid, who 'rated one hundrick and thin per storehundred on this nightly quis- quiquock of the twelve apostrophes, set by Jockit Mic Ereweak'. Who is 'Jockit'-Shaun (John, Jack, Jock) or Shem (Jacob)? The confusion is, as always, deliberate.
The 'twelve apostrophes' begin with a gigantic question (thirteen pages long) that seeks the identity of a 'maximost bridgesmaker' who stutters 'fore he falls and goes mad entirely when he's waked; is Timb to the pearly morn and Tomb to the mourning night', and so on. The answer is 'Finn MacCooll'-one of the manifestations of Finnegan-HCE. The next question, 'Does your mutter know your mike? ', is apparently addressed to Shaun, since he appears later as Mike or Mick or the Archangel Michael, would-be destroyer of the devilish Nick or Shem. 'Ann alive, the lisp of her' is part of the answer. So far, then, we have the father and mother. Then comes a dream version of the motto on the arms of the city of Dublin: 'Thine obesity, 0 civilian, hits the felicitude of our orb ! " This stands above the little orb, or world, of a fat and happy home. But this home is only a part of all Ireland, and the next question asks about Ireland's four main cities (of special interest to the four old men, who repre- sent the four provinces whose capitals these cities are). The answers are suitably disguised: Delfas; Dorhqk; Nublid; Dalway. I need not translate. Qyestions 5 and 6 refer to Earwicker's bartender, 'Pore ole JoeI', and cleaning-woman (,Summon In The Housesweep Dinah'-adeformationofasongin Ulysses-'There'ssomeoneinthe house with Dinah'). The old woman herself is heard, grumbling: '. . . who bruk the dandleass and who seen the blackcullen jam for Tomorrha's pickneck I hope it'll pour. '
The Twelve are now mentioned. They stand for the whole of human society and they have lowly but bizarre trades-'the doorboy, the cleaner, the sojer, the crook, the squeezer, the lounger, the curman, the tourabout, the mussroomsniffer, the bleakablue tramp, the funpowtherplother, the chrisrymansboxer'. We are told their names and places of origin and even given a specimen of their characteristic way of speaking:
. . . are the porters of the passions in virtue of retroratiocination, and, contributing their confljngent controversies of differentiation, unify their voxes in a vote of vaticination, who crunch the crusts of comfort due to
1 The motto of the city of Dublin is Ohediemia civium urhisJelidtas.
21I
? ? The Man-made Mountain
ALP and her Letter
depredat~on, drain ~he ~ea~ for, misery to incur intoxication, condone every eVIl by practIcal JusttficatIon and condam any good to its own gratification. . . ~
But, when asked who they really are, the answerer says: 'The Mor-
phlOS1' . T h e twelve citizens are sleepers, deliberating on life in
pretentlOus polysyllables but letting life pass them by-as, in fact, it has passed by the four old men, the quizzers.
. Next come the 'maggies', the girls in the park who melt into one gtrl, a daughter, a temptress ('yeth cometh elope year, coach and four, Sweet Peck-at-my-Heart picks one man more'). Mter that, Number 9, comes a description of the big dream itself and of this very book that enshrines it-'a collideorscape' (lovely and exact word): Qyestion IO is important, since-'What bitter's love but YUIning, what' sour lovemutch but a bref burning till shee that drawes doth smoake retouIne? '-it ushers in an answer from the primal temptress, Issy or Iseult, herself, all in Swiftian 'little lan- guage', coy girly-wirly talk, ghastly but fascinating:
'. ' . Now open, pet, your lips, pepette, like I used my sweet parted bpsabuss WIth I? an Holohan of facetious memory taught me after the flannel dance, WIth the proof of love, up Smock Alley the first night he smelled pouder and I coloured beneath my fan pipetta mia when you learned me the lingua to melt. "
She is all woman, but not in the ALP sense (mature mother trans-
mitter of life and her dead lord's good name): ogling, inflaming
paSSIOn but \vithholding its satisfaction, she loves her mirror best
and provides another explanation for her appearance as a duo in the
s~nful park. '\~lith my whiteness I thee woo,' she says, 'and bind my sIlk breasths I thee bound! Always, Amory, amor andmore. Till always, thou lovest! ' She is, of course, quite irresistible.
The penultimate question calls for a twenty-page answer. It is addressed to Shaun, whose name is changed to Jones for the occasion and who takes on rather petulant professorial qualities, and it con-:- cerns fraternal charity. The rhythm of the question derives from Thomas Moore's poem about the Exile of Erin, and it beats most pathetically when set out as verse:
or wringing his handcuffs for peace, the poor blighter,
praying Dieuf and Domb Nostrums foh thomethinks to eath;
if he weapt while he leapt and guffalled quith a quhimper,
made cold blood a blue mundy and no bones without flech, taking kiss, kake or kick with a suck, sigh or simper,
a difile to larn and a dibble to Iech;
if the fain shinner pegged you to shave his irnmartial,
wee skillmustered shaul with his ooh, hoodoodoo! braking wind that to wiles, woemaid sin he was partial,
we don't think, Jones, we'd care to this evening, would you?
The drunken, ailing, eye-aching exile is, of course, Joyce himself, poor'artist seeking succour and soul's salvation from a better endowed brother (or Buck Mulligan, with whom Shaun is sometimes identi- fied in his real-life form of Oliver St John Gogarty). Shaun will give no help, but, after his 'No, blank ye 1', he finds it necessary to indulge in lengthy explanations of his attitude. He wants 'to conclusively confute this begging question' (he is embarrassed, though: he says
'hasitate') by referring to the 'dimecash problem' and expatiating on 'talis qualis'.
But Shaun-Jones finds the only way to keep his audience awake is to give them a couple of fables, both of which work out the brother-opposition theme. Bruno Nolan is told to take his tongue out of the inkpot, and then the professor translates from the Javanese the story of the Mookse and the Gripes, beginning formally: 'Gentes and laitymen, fullstoppers and semicolonials, hybreds and lub- berds! ' The tale combines Aesop's Fox and Grapes and Lewis Carroll's Mock Turtle and Griffon, but it soon becomes clear that the Mookse is English Pope Adrian ('Bragspear') and the Gripes the
Irish people and the old Irish Church of the Book of Kells (more Byzantine than Roman). The bull Laudabiiiter is worked into the Mookse's threats-'That is quite about what I came on my missions with my intentions laudabiliter to settle with you, barbarousse'- and we remember that it was with the blessing of that bull that Henry II annexed Ireland, thus bringing Ireland into the Roman fold as well as under the English crown. With British bragging and 'poposity" the Mookse wades into the 'poor little sowsieved sub- squashed Gripes', and the battling sons of the one Mother Church (Anna Livia is subtly invoked in 'Amnis Limina Permanent') fail to notice that a little girl is looking down on them from the 'bannistars'. This is Nuvoletta, the little cloud, who is both Issy-Iseult and ALP in her source-capacity. The stupid quarrel blinds the Mookse and the Gripes to the permanent fact of their one river-mother (who
21 3
212
If you met on the bin. ge a poor acheseyeld from Ailing, when the tune of hIS tremble shook shimmy on shin
while his countrary rageci in the weak of his wailing like a rugilant pugilant Lyon O'Lynn;
, ,
if he maundered in misliness, plaining his plight or played fox and lice, pricking and dropping hips teeth,
11
I:
? ? ? ? ? ? The Man-made Mounta? n
ALP ;md hrt ["tier
flows along quietly all this while); the fighting brothers ('Bullfolly answered volleyball') miss the proffered beauty of 'the daughter of the queen of the Emperour of Irelande'. Two women-Valkyries or banshees-gather up severally the Mookse and the Gripes on the river-bank, and nothing is left but an elm-tree and a stone. The big theme of the Shem-Shaun antipathy has been expounded. 'Nolan Browne, you may now leave the classroom. '
But Professor Jones has another, more privy, story to tell. This concerns Caseous and Burrus (Cassius and Brutus, but also Cheese and Butter). These come from the same mothering milk, and in Burrus we see Shaun Ca genuine prime, the real choice, full of natural greace') and in Caseous ('a hole or two, the highstinks afore- felt and anygo prigging worms') Shem's less sunny properties. We arc asked to 'pursue Burrus and Caseous for a rung or two up their isocelating biangle', and in this figure we see ALP (Joyce's symbol for her is, in fact, an isosceles triangle). The whole tragedy of Shem and Shaun-whatever form Or fancy dress they put on-lies in their twinhood. The successor ofHCE should be the 'genuine prime', the first-born, and there is no first-born. I f Shaun is daddy's favourite, Shem must be mummy's, but a natural bequest to the father's favourite son is not only the right of rule but the monopoly of the mother. The sexual struggles between Shem and Shaun ironically get in the way of sexual conquest. In this present fable both Burrus and Caseous love Margareen ('J cream for thee, Sweet Margareen'), but she, eternal woman, wants ~either:
A c1eopatrician in her own right she at once complicates the position while Burrus and Caseous are contending for her misstery by implicating her- self with an elusive Antonius, a wop who would appear to hug a personal interest in refined chees of all chades at the same time as he wags an antomine art of being rude like the boor.
Whenever the brothers quarrel and fight, they seem to call into being a third personage (the third soldier /) like this Antonius who, 'a wop', possibly Antonio with his ice-cream cart, is also the dreamer's own tentative image of himself.
Margareen, or whatever her name is, is the desired incestuous bride of the father and brothers alike.
The conclusion Of Shaun-Jones's long lecture is unequivocal. If
the 'proud pursebroken ranger' came to him 'to beg for a bite in our
bark Noisdanger', he would-'were we tucked in the one bed and bit by the one flea' - have no hesitation in footing him out. The last question of all asks 'Saar estol', in which the Latin saar means both 'blest' and 'accursed'-here, undoubtedly, the latter only: 'Will
214
you be accursed? ' The answer COmes from Shem: 'Semus sumusf'- 'Shem we are! ' And now-'Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is joky for Jacob'-we are ready for a very entertaining and yet shock- ing chapter, in which mother's-boy Shem is revealed all too candidly as James Joyce ('Shame's voice')-the exiled artist, reviled by the sanctimonious, finding his salvation in being a sewer (back to 'The Holy Office'), perverse, 'a sham and a low sham', but still the scribe who penned his mother's letter, a hated but feared 'greekenhearted yude' like Bloom himself.
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.