We cannot chant a geometrical figure, an E on its back, or a hundred-letter thunder-word (paradoxically, it is only the eye that can
recognise
the thunder).
re-joyce-a-burgess
Only a leaf, just a leaf and then leaves.
The woods are fond always.
As were we their babes in.
And robins in crews so.
It is for me goolden wending.
Unless?
Away!
Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long!
She is, of course, not just the 'Leafy' (or Liffey). She is the leaves of the tree of life, now falling; she is any wife telling any husband (even though it is in the words of J. M. Synge) to get out of bed and start a new day. But, as the monologue develops, the river colours everything: 'The trout will be so fine at brookfisht. ' The rhythm broadens, the wifely complaining takes on a certain majesty:
A hundred cares, a tithe o f troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lathed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lathing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it's all!
As she approaches her great father, the sea, how alien from nobility,
how petty seems her husband the hill and the city:
I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You're only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You're but a puny. Home! My people were not their sort out beyond there so far as I can. For all the bold and bad and bleary they are blamed, the seahags. No! Nor for all our wild dances in all their wild din. I can see meself among them, aIlaniuvia pulchrabelled.
She foresees her becoming a cloud ('allaniuvia') rising in freshness
from the sea, borne in to the source where she will rise in youth, a
girl from the hills. But now she must lose herself in the vast hitter
waters:
262
And we are led on once more to suffer the sentence of life or which
. ,
IS the same thing, joyfully unwrap its 'crossmess parzeI'. And, when
Anna Livia promises the keys, she seems to fulfil that promise ('GivenI'), for a new lucidity seems to shine through the turning zoetrope: we reel that the 'hundred cares' of the artist, his 'tithe of troubles', have not been in vain: we are beginning to understand.
? ? ? ? 9: In the End 15 the Word
Finnegans Wake IS A WORK OF LITERA TURE AND HENCE, THEORETI-
cally at least, a subject for literary criticism. The trouble is that, though we may legislate for the literature of waking life, it is imc possible to lay dowILf,ules for books of dreams. In the foregoing chapters I have attempted to do little more than say ,;hat, as far ~s I can see, is going on in Earwicker's dream, and my VIew of what 15 going on is greatly conditioned by my desire to struggle out of the dream and pretend that we have all really been awake all the time. The language of simple exposition cannot cope with Joyce's ten-or- twelve-part counterpoint, and I have been forced to ignore much that is important-the metaphysics, for instance, that is personified in the characters; the vast array of historical personages that are dragged out of Mr Deasy's time and made to ride the Viconian cycle. T o attempt a critical appraisal would, at this stage of my own understanding of the book, be an impertinence. I have enough to do, and so has everybody else, in trying to comprehend Joyce's seventeen-year palimpsest.
What I must try to do here, though, is to attempt to confute Joyce's critics, meaning those who, failing totally to appreciate what Finnegans Wake is trying to do, attack it where, by ordinary literary standards, it seems most vulnerable. I had better start by saymg that there seems to be a great deal of dream-literature in existencc- the dream was a popular literary convention in the Middle Ages, for instance' two of the world's best-loved books, Pilgrim's Progress and the Alic~ diptych, recount dreams-but that there is usu~lly very little of the true dream about it. Bunyan's book is a waking allegory, as is The Pearl or The Vision ofPiers Plowman. Genuine dream-stuff is, before FinnegaltS Wake, to be found perhaps only in Alice, Clarence's big speech in Richard III, Kafka (though he presents less dream than sick hallucination), Dostoevsky, and the Bible. Joyce is the only author who has tried, in a work of literature as opposed to
264
In the End is the Word
a work ofscience, to demonstrate what a dream is really like without makmg any concessions at all to those who will accept a d;eam as a lIterary conventIOn, an intermission between waking states or a bit of fanciful garnishing, but not as the whole essence of a' work of epic proportions. Thus, when ;he classical critics turn on Finnegans Wake the beam~ of theIr bull s-eye lanterns, they see something
umque, unsubmlsslve to theIr waking rules, and hence to be con-
demned for what it does not pretend to be rather than appraised in
te~ms of what IS IS. They denounce night because the sun is not
~hmmg; they upbraid the eternal because their watches cannot time
It; they produce their foot-rules and protest that there is no space
to measure.
The: fi~st thing that conventional criticism cries out against in Joyce IS h,s alleg~dunintelligibility. Critics have always been howling about um. ntellIgIbIllty, though, If a difficult book has existed long enough (hke the Book of Revelation or Gargantua and Pantagruel or Trzstram Shandy or Blake's Milton) thev wilt not complain too loudly ofwhat they say they cannot full~understand. The moss that
attacks classical statues is. a wonderful mitigator of unintelligibility. The late, revered T. S. Ehot was once m the van of unintelligibility, but age and the Order of Ment enlIghtened a lot of his readers. No Important and difficult work of art is permanently unintelligible, smce great wnters create both the sensibility of the future and the language of the future, but there is a sense in which the author of Ftnnegans Wake must always murmur 'Mea culpa mea maJ. :ima
culpa' to the priests of clarity, since it is in the ve~ nature of his
subJect-matter to be elusive and difficult. For one who will say
'0 felix culpa' there are ninety-nine who will give no absolution.
But, before we go any further, let us be entirely clear in our minds
a~to what we mean when we say that a piece of writing is unintelli- gIble.
A writer may fail to be understood when he is either incompetent
or demented. No one will deny Joyce's competence and, as far as I koow, only Mr Evelyn W~ugh has asserted that Joyce went mad, and then, saId Mr Waugh, It was because certain influential Ameri- cans asked him to go mad. A writer may be unintelligible when he is
. ~_~~kiI? -. g a verbal equivalent for ~J~tf! Je o f mind not yet fll1Jy under_
sto~9 or a complex psychologicaL~,~P&ri,! ! ce that will not' yield to
ordm. . arv language. He WIll be u. . nint. el. . ligible when he is essayin~ extr~~e naturalIsm, ~rYI~g, for exampl~--,_j:o capture the quali;y 0 real~hfeJ. ? ,nguage whIch IS b~urred. . ~hrlL1,lgb distance, drink. sleep,
265
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
or II. ! "dness. He will be unintelligible when he is deliberately sepa~a- iing language from i~s. ! ~K~'! ! ! ! ~(t! . >. :. . ? bJects or concepts of real hre
~~~fIr~? ~i~gt:! ~~~~~i;t~~r~~~! e~~ei~~~\~~~ri~%rF~ ref! ! ,! ). ls. (usually a numbe;_. ~Lsecondary. ~ssociati". ns. t~~! . . cluster round the denotatio! }" QLd\<;Mnary defimtlO'lL\h~. t! ~~re~- ~om~~:be~1idi~~_~_~_q9$? ~EQL? ! ~. ,~~~! J. ~xi~Yreferent IS. Joyce,lf1i. i'is unintelligible at all, is unmtelhglb1e m all these non- pathological ways, and they seem, on ana1ysI~, to be all artIstIcally legitimate-in other words, they all seen: to aIm at ~ mode of com- munication rather than a wanton muffimg or quelhng of sense. Is the traditional critic, then, quite sure what he means when he accuses Joyce of unintelligibility? . . . .
Our educational tradition both m Bntam and Amenca, has con- ditioned us to look on words as mere counters which, ~ivena, ~ar- ticular context mean one thing and one thing only. This traditlOn, needless to sa~, is geared to the legalistic and commercial rather than to the aesthetic. When a word is ambiguous we are uneasy, and we are right to be uneasy when that word is s~t i? a contract ? r official directive. But the exp1aitation of the amb,gUl! y of a word IS, as Professor Em son has been ointin out for a 10n tIme one af
the LOYs of the literary art. Gerard Manley Hopkins says: ' rute beauty and valour and act . . . here buckle', and that word 'budde' conveys two opposed notions-the sense offastenmg a belt for action; the sense of becoming distorted and broken, as when we talk o~the buckling af a bicycle-wheel. Conflict is of the essence of H? pkms's
poems-glary and guilt, confidence and doubt-and, In thIS other great Catholic writer, we have the sa,;,e (though far more self- conscious) urge to convey opposed prmclples ofhf~slI~:lUltaneously, in one and the same word or expression. When hfe IS f:eed from the restrictions of time and spa~~~,itis in dreams. t~et? -~ndmakes kSSeftort to sort out contradictions. or gentler_ amblgUltles, and a 'Yo! ,,\. mgy ring fr~,. S;~;;a! iu:",,! ljFsharmonlcs~ThIS Iree rmgmg, 'in a zone of psychological expenence whlch has all the doors o~en,
may well set jangling all the phonetic and etymologIcal aSSOCIatIOns which the mind is capable of accammodatmg-fomgn languages not taught in public schoa1s, songs little known in the great world of singing, scraps o f conversation almost forgotten, ~ead sl? gan. s, posters long tarn from their w~lls. Joyce was psychologIcally nght m refusing to limit the assoclatlOn~. of dream-words . to what. some abstract image of a reader or cntlc could most eaSIly take m. In
266
In the End is the Word
throwing vocables of gr~at, though arbitrary, camp1exity at us he was being true to his principle of artistic communication. Paradoxi- cally, when an essential word or phrase in a book about a dream is least mtelliglble, then It may be most intelligible.
. Wakmg literature (that is, literature that bows to time and space) is the exp10itatian af a single language. Dream-literature, breaking down all . rna be more concerne~_,~ith the phenomenon of language in general. Living in the West, have little occasion to use Malay, a tongue I know at least as well as I know French. In dreams, I am no longer in the West; with the collapse of space, compass-points have no meaning. Hence English and Malay fre- quently dance together, merging, becoming not two languages con~ joined but an emblem of language in general. A better linguist than I may well make his dream-picture of language by mixing six or seven tongues. 1~Ve can only learn about dreams by introspection. I do not see how Joyce could have made his great piece of dream- literature without 1aaking into his own pa1yg10t mind.
It is the wealth of this mind that is most persistently attacked:
Joyce's great crime, apparently, is to know too much. Blows against Finnegans Wake are often oblique thrusts at Ulysses, another monster of erudition. Erudition was once Eliot's crime: since Wordsworth had done well enough without benefit of Sanskrit, it was un- forgivable to make the thunder af The Waste Land say 'Datta Dayadhvam Damyata'. But, as our world grows smaller, we become less satisfied with what an insular tradition can teach liS. We are English-speaking first, but we ignore at our peril what is enshrined in the phonemes and rhythms of Europe and the great (mostly untranslatable) religious monuments afthe East. Now, Eliot may be forgiven since his learning is apparently harnessed to an end of high seriousness; Joyce, on the other hand, seems to throw his library about to. promote frath (which is all a dream is) and facetiousness (what the Irish call wit). It would appear that, obscure or lucid, hecan- not win. We are still unwilling to concede profundity to the deeper places of the mind; we cannot quite forgive Christ for (as Joyce him- self put it) founding His Church on a pun. We have a lot to learn.
If difficulty seems to. reside in Jayce's language rather than in the
reader's own brain, the reader may have a legitimate grouse when
he says that Joyce might at least explain a little and not seem to revel in the mystification. But was explanation in the form of notes or author's signposts really possible with Fi1lnegans Wake? A barrage of glosses, whether concentrated at the end, as with The Waste
267
? ? The Man-made Mountain
Land, or slily worked into the text wouid have made the whole book look even more fearsome than it looks already; moreover, it. would have impaired the artful spontaneity, rendered the dream less dream- like. And, like all good poets, Joyce aspires to be God rather than mere man; God sets His creations all about us, but He leaves the ! l! 2Fy of interpretation to fallible minds. ""'the ultimate meanmg of Finnegans Wake rests with ourselves; the communication of artists
is not the communication of government departments.
But Joyce, who died only two years after the publication of Finnegans Wake, had time to leave one clue. His book, he said, would come clear to the reader if the reader listened to Its music. Indeed, Joyce demonstrated how-potent this music is when lie made a recording of part of the end of Book I, the Anna Livia Plurabelle
section. But, alas, Finnegans Wake does not disclose a great deal of its music to a reader unschooled in interpretation of the artist's notation; the script is not phonetic, so that we are often unsure how to pronounce a word, and much of the richness and complexity is only revealed to the eye.
We cannot chant a geometrical figure, an E on its back, or a hundred-letter thunder-word (paradoxically, it is only the eye that can recognise the thunder). Many of the puns have a strong visual element, 'hesitancy' and 'hesitency' sound the same, and the whole point of the Shem-Shaun lesson is that we should imagine ourselves looking at a book with marginal glosses and foot- notes. But the appeal is ultimately to the auditory imagination, which is what Joyce probably meant, aDd the book is music perhaps in the sense that the orchestral score one reads in bed is music. A bad score-reader tackling, say, Wagner's Ring (which Finnegans Wake in some ways resembles) may not be able to hear much with his inner ear, but he may be able to recognise the recurrence of the Leitmotive by their configurations on the stave. So when we see an allomorph of the 'ppt' which Swift used when he wrote to Stella, we can be pretty sure that Iseult la Belle is s6mewhere around. When the great initials HCE' appeaF, often imperceptible when the
enshrining phrase is read aloud, we know that, however much we may seem to have modulated, we are really not very far from home. Sometimes, on the other hand, sheer sound triumphs. The bird that traditionally calls 'More pork' cries instead 'Moor Park', and we are with Swift, caged in the home of Sir William Temple. Hidden verse- rhythms only come out of the prose when hearing is switched on. In other words, we need two things for the full appreciation of the
1 HCE is a genuine musical phrase, incidentally; in Germany, H is B natural. 268
In the End is the Word texture ofFinnegans Wake-the printed book and the voice ofJoyce on long-playmg records: S? me day a gramophone company-re_ ~eeIIl1ng-lostopp~rtuflItlesm Joyce's lifetime-may receive an en-
hghtened subventIon from some cultural body b u t ' t ' .
fi d , l I S eaSIer to :' money than to find an actor who is willing to ruin his career by
Yl eldmg hIS total personality to a dead author. And does anybod hvmg possess a voice as miraculous? y
IE. finnegans Wake the char~s themselves have voices,. JJ. w; ~havehttle else. Th<:x. E. ~~! )'andre. sQg! )isablyand give their ~rE~. selv~s <l. ~aY,J? ~,~_. ~E~! ,e true s. elve. ~. tkn? ~~g_n~ithertime nor
JW~ec~~. -nto. :'y~! ~! _~? ~~dt? . ~iahseit. ! J! esh,)! 9IJt"y~aip'J(ctonlasm. canna see them and e t ( ~~-. "'
-~"--. ~. -"'-. ~:-~-"'. -. ' ,c~"? '~__;'h_,. ~""sannp see,. r! ~t! U? ;t~~rJJ0'L. . w. ell kno"'~I:>,::~I:ll)the settmg '11 which th~yact? Ih~,El! 'rg:in of ;ne c~a~acterlI;to another. the slm! :ll! . <ineous identification Qf~~l
~hfl i<:aL. with. ,thLDl)! l:bi. ,,,1. I:1! . ! ! . ,,ot,infact,beachieved WIt out eshlescness Mary M . , I . ~ "
. . . -,~. ~-,~,,~~,<<,-. , . anmng s very c ever dramatIsatIOn of Fm~e! ,a? s ~ake,whIch she calls The Voice ofShem,' is shocking and dlffilTIlshmg becau~e it fixes the personages in time and place and a'ppearance, ~educmg them to actors on a lighted stage? it
establishes (and thIS may be its main virtue) the danger of tryin~to turn Fznnegans Wake ir:to an experience for the visual imagination as opp~s~d to the readmg eye. But those critics who hate verbal amb'gU1t1es tend to love sharp visual images, and Joyce (not only in thIS book) has been repeatedly attacked for the low visibility of his
wntmg. . yet lIterature at ItS most ltterary (for instance when it ic
poetry) IS not weU bI t ~'. ~~-'--~ . ' . ' '" '-"N. ~. ,L. o. ! llak. e? . st,()nK~l? l"~. ! . o the ;/::e: visualisa-
tlOn~. sthe . 4e~! 1:! . . 2Ltm". . 1m%~o. m! kiJlk When we thmk ;;Of Hamlet wet mkofanactorplayingthepart;whenwereadHamlet'sspeeches we are, more strong! y aware of responses of smell taste feeling move;nent than of SIght. There is little to look at i~ Paradise Los,'
Blake s Jerusalem, Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, or Eliot's Fou; Quartets. Poetry may take fragments of visual experience but only for the purpose of combmmg them, of creating a complex that it is penlous to try to see clearly. 'Where the bus stops there shop l' says HCE from the dead, a~dvague visions of shopping and bussin~ are swallowed up m the httle joy of the parody. Finnegans Wake
does not depnve us of SIght (though It nearly deprived Joyce of it).
ItfE~:Su~frQID th~. b]! ! ~! ~o(havi! ! )L! R,J>! 2i~Lcoherentima~ ! he Imag1TIatl~eretI~~~. ~~,,~_~r. r0rmsz1:_/~elSisthe jOb that literatu~e
was bornto perform. --',' "'"'''". _-'-c<'"'''
,----~. -
1 Faber and Faber, 1958.
we may
? ? The Man-made Mountain
Only in one respect is Finnegans Wake morc solidly spatial than real dreams. I once dreamed of a plate. . . :whi. ch had ~even sh~es of bread and butteron"it- I t k __ ay three and six remamed. ThIS sort o' t mg never appens in Earwicker's dr~am. Joyce often spoke of his book as mathematical, and one thtng m It that the vast chaotiC dreaming mind never impairs is number. Halfof 1132 is always 566, and out of that basic figure of fall and recovery some of the sIgmfi- cant numbers of the book are made: 1 for HCE, 1 for ALP, 3 for the children, 2 for the sons. 1+1~2; 3 x2~6; 6 X 2 gives us the eternal twelve. 1+1+2 gives us the four old men. The sum ofthe four figures of II32 is 7 number of the rainbow gIrls. 4 x 7 grves the 28 days of February, ;he number of the St Bride's girls, divisible
by 4 to bring back therainbow. Every four years comes the leap-year girl. The two girls in the park and the three watchmg soldIers, HCE and his enemy-all are in the ricorso-and-fall number; the three and the two are always there to remind us that fallmg bodIes, whether of Finnegan, Parnell, HCE or Humpty Dumpty, go down at 32 feet per second per second. . .
It is this devotion to number which makes pznnegans Wake the long book it is. Joyce had enough of algebra, with its generalisi~g letters, in Ulysses; in Finnegans Wake he glor. lfieshumble anthmetIc, dwelling with a kind of awe on the nch multIphclty conveyed by the
number of ALP's children, for instance, so that each of the 111 IS fully named and the 1II gifts (fruit ofthefather) speCIfied. Even the mention o f Ulysses is enough to make Joyce . want to. dre~m-enumer- ate the chapters. Number is the reality behmd the IllUSlDn of name and appearance. Critics have spoken ? f the book's dIffuseness, but that seeming sprawl is really numerical exactness. The cQuntmg
fingers are at their work, however deep the sleep, and those thunder-
words always have exactly a hun~redletters, no ~ore,nO less. ThIS is not childishness; the profundIty of the meamng of number, set out seriously beneath the joke of the lesson-chapter, permeates the
whole book. .
If critics will accept the logic of Finnegans Wake, hIdden beneath
what seem to be mad words and intolerable length, they WIll stIll shy at the lack of what they call action. This, they say, IS presented to us as a novel, and in a novel things are supposed to happen. Very little muscle is exerted in either Finnegans Wake or Ulysses, but we have to avoid lamenting the fact that Joyce was never strong on action ofthe Sir Walter Scott kind, that, though he was drawn to epIC, he early rejected the bloody substance of epic. We have seen m hIS
270
In the End is the Word
work how even the least gesture of violence will provoke earthquakes or Armageddon, even shiver the universe to atoms-events too ~pocalyptical to be more than static, comic rites, final mockeries of action as the best-sellers know action. He did not reject such action as. a vulgarity, only as a property that might damage language by infl",~---. :t:-The representation of passiori-Orvrolence had best be limited to thought or speech, since tne thrust offist or phallus, being a physical cliche, seems to call for a verbal cliche in the recounting. The cliches ofDublin pub-talk or an advertising canvasser's interior monologue are mere naturalism; the frame of symbol and poetry is a new creation out of words and the rhythms of words, static rather than kinetic. 1:! I_e. . ! loyeL~hOJ1. ldJ! :mir"JQ-Shake~~ Shake. spearC:s stage-dir! ;. <li=.
But, of course, Joyce was a family-man, and the small events of the family day had far more meaning than the big passionate public events of the books on the sitting-room shelves. In both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake he attempts to cut history down to size, measure it against his son's cold or his daughter's toothache, his wife's plea for more housekeeping money and the broken dental plate he can- notafford to have repaired. He committed himself to glorifying the common man and his family, anointing them with a richer language than the romantics, whose eyes were full of the universe, ever gave themselves time myopically to amass. Examine that stain on the table-doth, the crescent of dirt in your thumb-nail, the delicacy of that frail cone of ash on your cheap cigar, the pattern on the stringy carpet, and see what words will most exactly and lovingly render them. The words that glorify the commonplace will tame the bluster of history. The moon is in a cup of cocoa and the Viconian cycle turns with the sleeper on the bed with the jangling springs. At the same time, take words as well as give them, so that eternal myths are expressed in exactly caught baby-talk, the slobbering of the crone in the jug-and-bottle, or a poor silly song on the radio. This is Joyce's art.
It is, finally, an art ofscrupulous rendering. I do not mean by this that Joyce's great achievement was solely to find the right word and the right rhythm for the thing that was already there, waiting in the DBC tea-shop where Parnell's brother 'translates a white bishop' or on the banks of Shakespeare's Thames where the pen is 'chivying her game of cygnets'. I mean rather that he set himself the task of creating exact and inevitable language for the conceivable as well as the actual, and that Finnegans Wake is an exercise in rendering the
271
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain .
almost inconceivable. From this point o f view. alone .
She is, of course, not just the 'Leafy' (or Liffey). She is the leaves of the tree of life, now falling; she is any wife telling any husband (even though it is in the words of J. M. Synge) to get out of bed and start a new day. But, as the monologue develops, the river colours everything: 'The trout will be so fine at brookfisht. ' The rhythm broadens, the wifely complaining takes on a certain majesty:
A hundred cares, a tithe o f troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lathed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lathing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it's all!
As she approaches her great father, the sea, how alien from nobility,
how petty seems her husband the hill and the city:
I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You're only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You're but a puny. Home! My people were not their sort out beyond there so far as I can. For all the bold and bad and bleary they are blamed, the seahags. No! Nor for all our wild dances in all their wild din. I can see meself among them, aIlaniuvia pulchrabelled.
She foresees her becoming a cloud ('allaniuvia') rising in freshness
from the sea, borne in to the source where she will rise in youth, a
girl from the hills. But now she must lose herself in the vast hitter
waters:
262
And we are led on once more to suffer the sentence of life or which
. ,
IS the same thing, joyfully unwrap its 'crossmess parzeI'. And, when
Anna Livia promises the keys, she seems to fulfil that promise ('GivenI'), for a new lucidity seems to shine through the turning zoetrope: we reel that the 'hundred cares' of the artist, his 'tithe of troubles', have not been in vain: we are beginning to understand.
? ? ? ? 9: In the End 15 the Word
Finnegans Wake IS A WORK OF LITERA TURE AND HENCE, THEORETI-
cally at least, a subject for literary criticism. The trouble is that, though we may legislate for the literature of waking life, it is imc possible to lay dowILf,ules for books of dreams. In the foregoing chapters I have attempted to do little more than say ,;hat, as far ~s I can see, is going on in Earwicker's dream, and my VIew of what 15 going on is greatly conditioned by my desire to struggle out of the dream and pretend that we have all really been awake all the time. The language of simple exposition cannot cope with Joyce's ten-or- twelve-part counterpoint, and I have been forced to ignore much that is important-the metaphysics, for instance, that is personified in the characters; the vast array of historical personages that are dragged out of Mr Deasy's time and made to ride the Viconian cycle. T o attempt a critical appraisal would, at this stage of my own understanding of the book, be an impertinence. I have enough to do, and so has everybody else, in trying to comprehend Joyce's seventeen-year palimpsest.
What I must try to do here, though, is to attempt to confute Joyce's critics, meaning those who, failing totally to appreciate what Finnegans Wake is trying to do, attack it where, by ordinary literary standards, it seems most vulnerable. I had better start by saymg that there seems to be a great deal of dream-literature in existencc- the dream was a popular literary convention in the Middle Ages, for instance' two of the world's best-loved books, Pilgrim's Progress and the Alic~ diptych, recount dreams-but that there is usu~lly very little of the true dream about it. Bunyan's book is a waking allegory, as is The Pearl or The Vision ofPiers Plowman. Genuine dream-stuff is, before FinnegaltS Wake, to be found perhaps only in Alice, Clarence's big speech in Richard III, Kafka (though he presents less dream than sick hallucination), Dostoevsky, and the Bible. Joyce is the only author who has tried, in a work of literature as opposed to
264
In the End is the Word
a work ofscience, to demonstrate what a dream is really like without makmg any concessions at all to those who will accept a d;eam as a lIterary conventIOn, an intermission between waking states or a bit of fanciful garnishing, but not as the whole essence of a' work of epic proportions. Thus, when ;he classical critics turn on Finnegans Wake the beam~ of theIr bull s-eye lanterns, they see something
umque, unsubmlsslve to theIr waking rules, and hence to be con-
demned for what it does not pretend to be rather than appraised in
te~ms of what IS IS. They denounce night because the sun is not
~hmmg; they upbraid the eternal because their watches cannot time
It; they produce their foot-rules and protest that there is no space
to measure.
The: fi~st thing that conventional criticism cries out against in Joyce IS h,s alleg~dunintelligibility. Critics have always been howling about um. ntellIgIbIllty, though, If a difficult book has existed long enough (hke the Book of Revelation or Gargantua and Pantagruel or Trzstram Shandy or Blake's Milton) thev wilt not complain too loudly ofwhat they say they cannot full~understand. The moss that
attacks classical statues is. a wonderful mitigator of unintelligibility. The late, revered T. S. Ehot was once m the van of unintelligibility, but age and the Order of Ment enlIghtened a lot of his readers. No Important and difficult work of art is permanently unintelligible, smce great wnters create both the sensibility of the future and the language of the future, but there is a sense in which the author of Ftnnegans Wake must always murmur 'Mea culpa mea maJ. :ima
culpa' to the priests of clarity, since it is in the ve~ nature of his
subJect-matter to be elusive and difficult. For one who will say
'0 felix culpa' there are ninety-nine who will give no absolution.
But, before we go any further, let us be entirely clear in our minds
a~to what we mean when we say that a piece of writing is unintelli- gIble.
A writer may fail to be understood when he is either incompetent
or demented. No one will deny Joyce's competence and, as far as I koow, only Mr Evelyn W~ugh has asserted that Joyce went mad, and then, saId Mr Waugh, It was because certain influential Ameri- cans asked him to go mad. A writer may be unintelligible when he is
. ~_~~kiI? -. g a verbal equivalent for ~J~tf! Je o f mind not yet fll1Jy under_
sto~9 or a complex psychologicaL~,~P&ri,! ! ce that will not' yield to
ordm. . arv language. He WIll be u. . nint. el. . ligible when he is essayin~ extr~~e naturalIsm, ~rYI~g, for exampl~--,_j:o capture the quali;y 0 real~hfeJ. ? ,nguage whIch IS b~urred. . ~hrlL1,lgb distance, drink. sleep,
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or II. ! "dness. He will be unintelligible when he is deliberately sepa~a- iing language from i~s. ! ~K~'! ! ! ! ~(t! . >. :. . ? bJects or concepts of real hre
~~~fIr~? ~i~gt:! ~~~~~i;t~~r~~~! e~~ei~~~\~~~ri~%rF~ ref! ! ,! ). ls. (usually a numbe;_. ~Lsecondary. ~ssociati". ns. t~~! . . cluster round the denotatio! }" QLd\<;Mnary defimtlO'lL\h~. t! ~~re~- ~om~~:be~1idi~~_~_~_q9$? ~EQL? ! ~. ,~~~! J. ~xi~Yreferent IS. Joyce,lf1i. i'is unintelligible at all, is unmtelhglb1e m all these non- pathological ways, and they seem, on ana1ysI~, to be all artIstIcally legitimate-in other words, they all seen: to aIm at ~ mode of com- munication rather than a wanton muffimg or quelhng of sense. Is the traditional critic, then, quite sure what he means when he accuses Joyce of unintelligibility? . . . .
Our educational tradition both m Bntam and Amenca, has con- ditioned us to look on words as mere counters which, ~ivena, ~ar- ticular context mean one thing and one thing only. This traditlOn, needless to sa~, is geared to the legalistic and commercial rather than to the aesthetic. When a word is ambiguous we are uneasy, and we are right to be uneasy when that word is s~t i? a contract ? r official directive. But the exp1aitation of the amb,gUl! y of a word IS, as Professor Em son has been ointin out for a 10n tIme one af
the LOYs of the literary art. Gerard Manley Hopkins says: ' rute beauty and valour and act . . . here buckle', and that word 'budde' conveys two opposed notions-the sense offastenmg a belt for action; the sense of becoming distorted and broken, as when we talk o~the buckling af a bicycle-wheel. Conflict is of the essence of H? pkms's
poems-glary and guilt, confidence and doubt-and, In thIS other great Catholic writer, we have the sa,;,e (though far more self- conscious) urge to convey opposed prmclples ofhf~slI~:lUltaneously, in one and the same word or expression. When hfe IS f:eed from the restrictions of time and spa~~~,itis in dreams. t~et? -~ndmakes kSSeftort to sort out contradictions. or gentler_ amblgUltles, and a 'Yo! ,,\. mgy ring fr~,. S;~;;a! iu:",,! ljFsharmonlcs~ThIS Iree rmgmg, 'in a zone of psychological expenence whlch has all the doors o~en,
may well set jangling all the phonetic and etymologIcal aSSOCIatIOns which the mind is capable of accammodatmg-fomgn languages not taught in public schoa1s, songs little known in the great world of singing, scraps o f conversation almost forgotten, ~ead sl? gan. s, posters long tarn from their w~lls. Joyce was psychologIcally nght m refusing to limit the assoclatlOn~. of dream-words . to what. some abstract image of a reader or cntlc could most eaSIly take m. In
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In the End is the Word
throwing vocables of gr~at, though arbitrary, camp1exity at us he was being true to his principle of artistic communication. Paradoxi- cally, when an essential word or phrase in a book about a dream is least mtelliglble, then It may be most intelligible.
. Wakmg literature (that is, literature that bows to time and space) is the exp10itatian af a single language. Dream-literature, breaking down all . rna be more concerne~_,~ith the phenomenon of language in general. Living in the West, have little occasion to use Malay, a tongue I know at least as well as I know French. In dreams, I am no longer in the West; with the collapse of space, compass-points have no meaning. Hence English and Malay fre- quently dance together, merging, becoming not two languages con~ joined but an emblem of language in general. A better linguist than I may well make his dream-picture of language by mixing six or seven tongues. 1~Ve can only learn about dreams by introspection. I do not see how Joyce could have made his great piece of dream- literature without 1aaking into his own pa1yg10t mind.
It is the wealth of this mind that is most persistently attacked:
Joyce's great crime, apparently, is to know too much. Blows against Finnegans Wake are often oblique thrusts at Ulysses, another monster of erudition. Erudition was once Eliot's crime: since Wordsworth had done well enough without benefit of Sanskrit, it was un- forgivable to make the thunder af The Waste Land say 'Datta Dayadhvam Damyata'. But, as our world grows smaller, we become less satisfied with what an insular tradition can teach liS. We are English-speaking first, but we ignore at our peril what is enshrined in the phonemes and rhythms of Europe and the great (mostly untranslatable) religious monuments afthe East. Now, Eliot may be forgiven since his learning is apparently harnessed to an end of high seriousness; Joyce, on the other hand, seems to throw his library about to. promote frath (which is all a dream is) and facetiousness (what the Irish call wit). It would appear that, obscure or lucid, hecan- not win. We are still unwilling to concede profundity to the deeper places of the mind; we cannot quite forgive Christ for (as Joyce him- self put it) founding His Church on a pun. We have a lot to learn.
If difficulty seems to. reside in Jayce's language rather than in the
reader's own brain, the reader may have a legitimate grouse when
he says that Joyce might at least explain a little and not seem to revel in the mystification. But was explanation in the form of notes or author's signposts really possible with Fi1lnegans Wake? A barrage of glosses, whether concentrated at the end, as with The Waste
267
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Land, or slily worked into the text wouid have made the whole book look even more fearsome than it looks already; moreover, it. would have impaired the artful spontaneity, rendered the dream less dream- like. And, like all good poets, Joyce aspires to be God rather than mere man; God sets His creations all about us, but He leaves the ! l! 2Fy of interpretation to fallible minds. ""'the ultimate meanmg of Finnegans Wake rests with ourselves; the communication of artists
is not the communication of government departments.
But Joyce, who died only two years after the publication of Finnegans Wake, had time to leave one clue. His book, he said, would come clear to the reader if the reader listened to Its music. Indeed, Joyce demonstrated how-potent this music is when lie made a recording of part of the end of Book I, the Anna Livia Plurabelle
section. But, alas, Finnegans Wake does not disclose a great deal of its music to a reader unschooled in interpretation of the artist's notation; the script is not phonetic, so that we are often unsure how to pronounce a word, and much of the richness and complexity is only revealed to the eye.
We cannot chant a geometrical figure, an E on its back, or a hundred-letter thunder-word (paradoxically, it is only the eye that can recognise the thunder). Many of the puns have a strong visual element, 'hesitancy' and 'hesitency' sound the same, and the whole point of the Shem-Shaun lesson is that we should imagine ourselves looking at a book with marginal glosses and foot- notes. But the appeal is ultimately to the auditory imagination, which is what Joyce probably meant, aDd the book is music perhaps in the sense that the orchestral score one reads in bed is music. A bad score-reader tackling, say, Wagner's Ring (which Finnegans Wake in some ways resembles) may not be able to hear much with his inner ear, but he may be able to recognise the recurrence of the Leitmotive by their configurations on the stave. So when we see an allomorph of the 'ppt' which Swift used when he wrote to Stella, we can be pretty sure that Iseult la Belle is s6mewhere around. When the great initials HCE' appeaF, often imperceptible when the
enshrining phrase is read aloud, we know that, however much we may seem to have modulated, we are really not very far from home. Sometimes, on the other hand, sheer sound triumphs. The bird that traditionally calls 'More pork' cries instead 'Moor Park', and we are with Swift, caged in the home of Sir William Temple. Hidden verse- rhythms only come out of the prose when hearing is switched on. In other words, we need two things for the full appreciation of the
1 HCE is a genuine musical phrase, incidentally; in Germany, H is B natural. 268
In the End is the Word texture ofFinnegans Wake-the printed book and the voice ofJoyce on long-playmg records: S? me day a gramophone company-re_ ~eeIIl1ng-lostopp~rtuflItlesm Joyce's lifetime-may receive an en-
hghtened subventIon from some cultural body b u t ' t ' .
fi d , l I S eaSIer to :' money than to find an actor who is willing to ruin his career by
Yl eldmg hIS total personality to a dead author. And does anybod hvmg possess a voice as miraculous? y
IE. finnegans Wake the char~s themselves have voices,. JJ. w; ~havehttle else. Th<:x. E. ~~! )'andre. sQg! )isablyand give their ~rE~. selv~s <l. ~aY,J? ~,~_. ~E~! ,e true s. elve. ~. tkn? ~~g_n~ithertime nor
JW~ec~~. -nto. :'y~! ~! _~? ~~dt? . ~iahseit. ! J! esh,)! 9IJt"y~aip'J(ctonlasm. canna see them and e t ( ~~-. "'
-~"--. ~. -"'-. ~:-~-"'. -. ' ,c~"? '~__;'h_,. ~""sannp see,. r! ~t! U? ;t~~rJJ0'L. . w. ell kno"'~I:>,::~I:ll)the settmg '11 which th~yact? Ih~,El! 'rg:in of ;ne c~a~acterlI;to another. the slm! :ll! . <ineous identification Qf~~l
~hfl i<:aL. with. ,thLDl)! l:bi. ,,,1. I:1! . ! ! . ,,ot,infact,beachieved WIt out eshlescness Mary M . , I . ~ "
. . . -,~. ~-,~,,~~,<<,-. , . anmng s very c ever dramatIsatIOn of Fm~e! ,a? s ~ake,whIch she calls The Voice ofShem,' is shocking and dlffilTIlshmg becau~e it fixes the personages in time and place and a'ppearance, ~educmg them to actors on a lighted stage? it
establishes (and thIS may be its main virtue) the danger of tryin~to turn Fznnegans Wake ir:to an experience for the visual imagination as opp~s~d to the readmg eye. But those critics who hate verbal amb'gU1t1es tend to love sharp visual images, and Joyce (not only in thIS book) has been repeatedly attacked for the low visibility of his
wntmg. . yet lIterature at ItS most ltterary (for instance when it ic
poetry) IS not weU bI t ~'. ~~-'--~ . ' . ' '" '-"N. ~. ,L. o. ! llak. e? . st,()nK~l? l"~. ! . o the ;/::e: visualisa-
tlOn~. sthe . 4e~! 1:! . . 2Ltm". . 1m%~o. m! kiJlk When we thmk ;;Of Hamlet wet mkofanactorplayingthepart;whenwereadHamlet'sspeeches we are, more strong! y aware of responses of smell taste feeling move;nent than of SIght. There is little to look at i~ Paradise Los,'
Blake s Jerusalem, Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, or Eliot's Fou; Quartets. Poetry may take fragments of visual experience but only for the purpose of combmmg them, of creating a complex that it is penlous to try to see clearly. 'Where the bus stops there shop l' says HCE from the dead, a~dvague visions of shopping and bussin~ are swallowed up m the httle joy of the parody. Finnegans Wake
does not depnve us of SIght (though It nearly deprived Joyce of it).
ItfE~:Su~frQID th~. b]! ! ~! ~o(havi! ! )L! R,J>! 2i~Lcoherentima~ ! he Imag1TIatl~eretI~~~. ~~,,~_~r. r0rmsz1:_/~elSisthe jOb that literatu~e
was bornto perform. --',' "'"'''". _-'-c<'"'''
,----~. -
1 Faber and Faber, 1958.
we may
? ? The Man-made Mountain
Only in one respect is Finnegans Wake morc solidly spatial than real dreams. I once dreamed of a plate. . . :whi. ch had ~even sh~es of bread and butteron"it- I t k __ ay three and six remamed. ThIS sort o' t mg never appens in Earwicker's dr~am. Joyce often spoke of his book as mathematical, and one thtng m It that the vast chaotiC dreaming mind never impairs is number. Halfof 1132 is always 566, and out of that basic figure of fall and recovery some of the sIgmfi- cant numbers of the book are made: 1 for HCE, 1 for ALP, 3 for the children, 2 for the sons. 1+1~2; 3 x2~6; 6 X 2 gives us the eternal twelve. 1+1+2 gives us the four old men. The sum ofthe four figures of II32 is 7 number of the rainbow gIrls. 4 x 7 grves the 28 days of February, ;he number of the St Bride's girls, divisible
by 4 to bring back therainbow. Every four years comes the leap-year girl. The two girls in the park and the three watchmg soldIers, HCE and his enemy-all are in the ricorso-and-fall number; the three and the two are always there to remind us that fallmg bodIes, whether of Finnegan, Parnell, HCE or Humpty Dumpty, go down at 32 feet per second per second. . .
It is this devotion to number which makes pznnegans Wake the long book it is. Joyce had enough of algebra, with its generalisi~g letters, in Ulysses; in Finnegans Wake he glor. lfieshumble anthmetIc, dwelling with a kind of awe on the nch multIphclty conveyed by the
number of ALP's children, for instance, so that each of the 111 IS fully named and the 1II gifts (fruit ofthefather) speCIfied. Even the mention o f Ulysses is enough to make Joyce . want to. dre~m-enumer- ate the chapters. Number is the reality behmd the IllUSlDn of name and appearance. Critics have spoken ? f the book's dIffuseness, but that seeming sprawl is really numerical exactness. The cQuntmg
fingers are at their work, however deep the sleep, and those thunder-
words always have exactly a hun~redletters, no ~ore,nO less. ThIS is not childishness; the profundIty of the meamng of number, set out seriously beneath the joke of the lesson-chapter, permeates the
whole book. .
If critics will accept the logic of Finnegans Wake, hIdden beneath
what seem to be mad words and intolerable length, they WIll stIll shy at the lack of what they call action. This, they say, IS presented to us as a novel, and in a novel things are supposed to happen. Very little muscle is exerted in either Finnegans Wake or Ulysses, but we have to avoid lamenting the fact that Joyce was never strong on action ofthe Sir Walter Scott kind, that, though he was drawn to epIC, he early rejected the bloody substance of epic. We have seen m hIS
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In the End is the Word
work how even the least gesture of violence will provoke earthquakes or Armageddon, even shiver the universe to atoms-events too ~pocalyptical to be more than static, comic rites, final mockeries of action as the best-sellers know action. He did not reject such action as. a vulgarity, only as a property that might damage language by infl",~---. :t:-The representation of passiori-Orvrolence had best be limited to thought or speech, since tne thrust offist or phallus, being a physical cliche, seems to call for a verbal cliche in the recounting. The cliches ofDublin pub-talk or an advertising canvasser's interior monologue are mere naturalism; the frame of symbol and poetry is a new creation out of words and the rhythms of words, static rather than kinetic. 1:! I_e. . ! loyeL~hOJ1. ldJ! :mir"JQ-Shake~~ Shake. spearC:s stage-dir! ;. <li=.
But, of course, Joyce was a family-man, and the small events of the family day had far more meaning than the big passionate public events of the books on the sitting-room shelves. In both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake he attempts to cut history down to size, measure it against his son's cold or his daughter's toothache, his wife's plea for more housekeeping money and the broken dental plate he can- notafford to have repaired. He committed himself to glorifying the common man and his family, anointing them with a richer language than the romantics, whose eyes were full of the universe, ever gave themselves time myopically to amass. Examine that stain on the table-doth, the crescent of dirt in your thumb-nail, the delicacy of that frail cone of ash on your cheap cigar, the pattern on the stringy carpet, and see what words will most exactly and lovingly render them. The words that glorify the commonplace will tame the bluster of history. The moon is in a cup of cocoa and the Viconian cycle turns with the sleeper on the bed with the jangling springs. At the same time, take words as well as give them, so that eternal myths are expressed in exactly caught baby-talk, the slobbering of the crone in the jug-and-bottle, or a poor silly song on the radio. This is Joyce's art.
It is, finally, an art ofscrupulous rendering. I do not mean by this that Joyce's great achievement was solely to find the right word and the right rhythm for the thing that was already there, waiting in the DBC tea-shop where Parnell's brother 'translates a white bishop' or on the banks of Shakespeare's Thames where the pen is 'chivying her game of cygnets'. I mean rather that he set himself the task of creating exact and inevitable language for the conceivable as well as the actual, and that Finnegans Wake is an exercise in rendering the
271
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almost inconceivable. From this point o f view. alone .
