Thus, when we meet Humphrey
Chlmp~en
~arWlcker, we cannot be sure whether we are looking at a real hlstoncal figure (one who kept a pub in Chapelizod) or at a?
re-joyce-a-burgess
Joyce has committed himself to the exaltation of the common man, whose timeless saga Finnegans Wake is.
Deathless heroes and resurrected gods float through the b?
ok to the tunes of street-songs, fourth-form parodies of prayers, b,ts of scandal out of the Sunday papers.
Whatever Fmnegans Wake may be, it is not a highbrow book.
Or rather its highbrow elements float on the top like tea-leaves: the brew is all.
'95
194
Tim Finnegan lived in Walker Street,
An Irish gintleman, mighty odd.
He'd a bit of a brogue, so neat and sweet,
And to rise in the world, Tim carried a hod.
But Tim had a sort of tippling way: With a love of liquor Tim was born,
And to help him through his work each day,
Took a drop of the creature every morn.
Chorus:
Whack! Hurrool-now dance to your partner! Welt the flure, your trottrers shake;
Isn't it the truth I've told ye,
Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake?
One morning Tim was rather full,
His head felt heavy and it made him shake. He fell from the ladder and broke his skul~
So they carried him home, his corpse to wake. They tied him up in a nice clean sheet,
Aud laid him out upon the bed, Wid a gallon of whiskey at his feet,
And a barrel of porter at his head.
Bygmester Finnegan
? ? ? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
Bygmester Finnegan
The very term 'wake' is a suggestive one to a word-loving artist,
containing as it does the opposed theses ofdeath and life. In essence, Finnegans Wake is all about what happens while Finnegan lies, life suspended, on the bed, the twelve mourners all about him. In the great dream he is, inevitably, transmuted from a mere drunken bricklayer to an archetypal builder of ancient civilisations, whose fall is so loud that it becomes Vico's thunderclap (always easily recog- nisable as a word of exactly one hundred letters), who is identifiable with Ibsen's Masterbuilder (Bygmester in Dano-Norwegian), with the legendary Irish giant Finn MacCool, who was fifteen cubits high, and with Joyce's own mythical hero, HCE. This last identification may seem confusing: after all, Earwicker is supposed to replace Finnegan as a new heroic type-the family man as opposed to the fabulous giant. But we must constantly remember how small our cast is, and Earwicker, as father of the acting troupe, must take all the heavy parts.
Finnegan's fall, acted by HCE, opens the book, but only after Joyce has swiftly presented the story's main themes and symbols (as he presented all the musical subjects of the 'Sirens' episode in
Ulysses before actually striking up his fugue). Let us gulp back all our apprehensions and wade into this opening:
riverrun, past Eve an~ Ad~m's, fro1J0 swer. ve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodlUs VICUS of reclrculatlOD back to Howth Castle and
Environs.
Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passencore
rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his-penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themse1se to Lau~ens County's. gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the t1~e: nor aVOlce from afi. re bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatnck: nor yet, though vems- soon after had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in va~essy were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa's m~lt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to
the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on ttIe aquaface.
Difficult? Oh yes, difficult. But a certain difficulty is the small price
we must pay for excitement, richness, originality. And we must learn
to smile rather than frown: this is the world of 'Jabberwocky'. But
the dream is not Alice's. We are dreaming a mature dream, remem-
bering the past of mankind and the primal guilt that histoty hides but reveals. Yet the dream is a joke, as life itself may be.
That first sentence is the only one of the whole book that begins without a capital letter. Joyce tells us why in the word 'vicus' (Latin
196
for Vico) and also in 'recirculation'. We are not beginning; we are resuming. History ~s a circle, as Vico taught, and we have entered it in the middle of a sentence. If we want the start of that sentence, we have to look at the last line of the book, where we find 'A way a lone a last a loved a long the'-no full stop. Ideally, then, having finished the book we have to turn back again to the first page and ride with the cycle once more. Time may have a stop but history's wheel is in perpetual motion.
Joyce sets his book in Dublin. 'Eve and Adam's' refers primarily to Adam and Eve's Church, but it also implies the mythical begin- ning of human life: we are in the giant age of fable. The running river is the Liffey-Anna Livia-but also, as we shall learn, eternal woman. 'Howth Castle and Environs' is the first sounding of the HCE chord, one which, in many transformations, will hold us down to our hero throughout the book. The castle on Howth Head was built by a Sir Almeric Tristram (not the Tristram of the Arthurian legend, though we must accept a dream-identification of the two): it stands, as Finn MacCool stood, on the headland, vainly resisting invasion. HCE is both fortification and invader (as the true Dubliner is both Celt and Teuton).
Then we meet our double Tristram, though here in the aspect of guilty love. 'Violer d'amores' means both the musical instrument called the viola d'amore (suggesting minstrelsy and ideal love) and the violation of love and trust: Tristram came to Ireland to take Iseult to Cornwall, a bride for his uncle King Mark, but fell in love with her himself: we have been given two guilt-myths already in four lines-Adam and Tristram, both of whom fell through sin. 'Fr'over' is an archaic form of 'from over', but it suggests 'rover'. 'Passencore' starts off like 'passenger', though its main meaning (the French pas encore) is 'not yet'. 'Rearrived' means what it says: these events, like all the events of history, recur perpetually. 'Armorica' is Brittany but also America: the old world and the new subsist side by side in Joyce's mythology, and, by the stream Oconee in Laurens County, Georgia, there stands (check this with any gazetteer) another city of Dublin. As the Viconian cycle turns and turns, showing the essential impulses of history to be always the same, so any new world must re-enact the history of the old. Indeed, the new world is the old, Lawrence's County being the old Dublin by virtue of the name of its bishop-Lawrence O'Toole-at the time of the English invasion of Henry II, as also the name-change to Lawrence that Tristram (castle-builder, not lover of Iseult) effected when he
'97
? ? The Man-made Mountain
settled in Dublin. 'Topsawyer' refers us to 'Mark Twain-a second
King Mark, famous in the new world? as well as to To? , Saw;:er and Huckleberry Finn (a brotherly pm). Note Joyc~s spellmg of 'Georgia' as 'gorgios'- 'gorges', yes, as also the gtpsy word f~r 'young' (a young Dublin built across the seas), but also the author s own son Giorgio (though noW he calls hImself George). Joyce can never keep his family out, and why should he? World h,story IS family history, dreamt in a bedroom. Did he not first meet Nora Barnacle when she was a chambermaid in Finn's Hotel? Is not HCE
a sort ofJohn Joyce, roaring father? Are not Shem and ~haun(Jam~s
and John) really the two antithetical brothers James ( Sunny JIm)
and Stanislaus ('Brother John') Joyce? .
Anyway, in 'doublin their mumpe~all the time' we. rec~gn~sethe spirit of growth, the perpetual bmldmg of new Dublms. Wlelder- fight' is wielding a weapon in battle but also fightmg agam and agam (German wieder as in AufWiedersehn). What kmd of fightmg? The 'penisolate' war can be one fought with the pems(the vIgorously randy Shaun-type brother) or with the pen in isolatlOn (that wIll do for Shem, the solitary artist); also it can refer to the Penmsular War
and the opposition of Wellington (Irish general) to Napoleon (foreigner, would-be invader, a kind of HCE). But let us not forget that we are dealing with early history: 'avoice from afire bellow~ed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick'. That voice IS God's saymg 'I am' twice in old Erse-it is also 5t Bridget's saying 'I am . a Christian" St Patrick is Ireland herself, the peat-rick; St Germam- cus, St P;trick's tutor, appropriately say~ 'Baptis~ baptise' (,tauf- tauf') in German. Soon we are led to the BIble. A kidscad buttended a bland old isaac. ' We should now be learmng the trIck of expandmg
such dream-compression into straight narrative. Jacob ~whose name' suggests James, or Shem) showed ~rtist's cunmng m dis- guising himself, the cadet but also cad, as hIS elder brother Esa,: by means of a kidskin thus dupmg h,S bland-bhnd old father Isaac mto giving him his ble;sing. (Here too, if we want ~im,we can ~nd,Isa~c Butt, whom Parnell trickily ousted from the IrIsh leadershIp. ) Sosle sesthers wroth' near-disguises Susannah, Esther and Ruth-all loved
by older men, as HCE loves Issy-but also brings i~ a :efere~ce to Swift's love for Stella and Vanessa (heralded by vemssoon, de- veloped further in 'all's fair i,: va~essy'). ,HCE is S. wift, fath~r-type desiring daughter-type, earnmg wroth: SWIft hlmsdf IS twone nathandjoe'-Nathan and Joseph (unYleldmg to sexual Importunltles of an unlawful kind) in one, anagrammatlsed Jonathan. We end WIth
198
Bygmester Finnegan
Shem and Shaun, the eternal brothers whom we shall meet in extenso later, now become a trio-Jhem and Shen: Shem, Ham and Japhet-superseding their father Noah, brewing under God's covenant-the 'regginbrow' or rainbow. The Teutonic motif, appro- prIate to the Scandinavian invader HCE, is there-Regenbogen-as also in 'ringsome' -circlewise, the cycle of God's promise, matching the cycle of his thunder.
The compression is extreme in these opening paragtaphs, but we
would be wrong to unravel everything at once. The deeper references
are there if we want them, but the general theme of the book floats, in something like sunlight, on the surface of the 'aquaface'. We are concerned with the cycle of history-the things that have both hap- pened and not yet happened -and with a Dublin that is everyplace. In this Dublin, the one in America as the one in Ireland, there is a father who is eternal rock with a castle on it, driven to a guilty fall by unlawful love of a younger woman, a girl, a daughter. In him there are two opposing elements, his sons. As the duality of God the Father and God the Son calls into being a third element to make a trinity, so these two sons can appear as a trio. Woman appears in two aspects-mother Eve and daughter Iseultor Stella or Vanessa or Ruth or Susannah or Esther (Stella's real name was Esther Johnson; Vanessa's real name was Esther Vanhomrigh-watch out for this latter surname, too). The two aspects are fused in the image of a river which, old with the accumulations of the life of a city, dies by mingling itself with the sea; clouds from the sea move in to the river's source, so that death is a kind of renewal of life: the fall of the rain is woman's fall, life-giving. As for man's fall, Finnegan's fall, that thunder brings no rain.
As time means nothing in Joyce's universal Dublin-centred chronicle, we must not be puzzled if, in the account of Finnegan's fall that now follows, we anticipate a great deal of the story of HCE. The fall itself is all falls, and its thunder sounds in many languages. It is mythical (Finnegan has a 'humptyhillhead') and it is yesterday ('wallstrait' echoes a financial crash in the thirties). What caused the fall we cannot exactly say, but drink brought Tim Finnegan low in the song, and Joyce's Finnegan is a sort of wine-god: 'Comeday morffi and, 0, you're vine! Sendday's eve and, ah, you're vinegar! ' A sexual sin is imposed on him by HCE himself ('Haroun Childeric Eggeberth') ana he has HCE's own guilty stutter ('Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand' . . . 'oftwhile balbulous' -and it was Balbus, whose name means 'Stutterer', who was always building
199
? ? The Man-made Mountain
a wall). The fall takes place prehistorically, but also at the time when the Pope, the Englishman Nicholas Breakspear,. granted the,rule of I r e l a n d t o H e n r y I I . H e n c e F i n n e g a n ' s b m l d m g h a s larro~s o'toolers clittering up and tombles a'buckets clottenng down- Lawrence O'Toole, a rising prelate; Thomas it Becket, a falhng one.
Dead Finnegan, really sleeping Finnegan, is mourned by twelve citizens but the feast is to be no mere matter of fish and ale and bread, {hough these are spread on the table: it is the flesh of the god himself that is to be sacramentally devoured. But, before thIS can happen, we are made to see the body of Finnegan as part of the Irish landscape. He is the giant Finn MacCool asleep. H,s he~d IS the Hill of Howth his feet are near Earwicker's pub at Chapehzod (or Iseult's chapel). His fall, we hear, hastaken ~lacein Dublin's Phoenix Park-a sort of Eden whc;:re a notOrIOUS pohtH::al murder was to herald Ireland's phoenix-resurrection. But this same park saw the fall of HCE whose vaaue sin involved two girls (his wife and daugh-
ter in disguise) and w:s witnessed by thr~esoldiers ,(his t~osons as a Ham-Shem-Japhet trio). But the mentIOn of sold,ers bnngs usto the theme of conflict. The bloody ructions that were to wake TIm Finnegan are swollen into a panorama of war in general. We go to the Wellington Memorial in Phoenix Park and are shown round It by an old woman (the eternal ageing wife who preserves fragments from the past as she gathers the smashed bits of the body of her dead lord, Humpty Dumpty, for transmission to the future). The Insh- man 'Willingdone', the battle of Waterloo, a couple? f c~valrymares who turn into female camp-followers and the two gIrlS m the park- these symbolise the conflict in HCE's sinning soul, but they also suggest how wafS are merely a vast projection of :amtlv confh~t.
The father aware of his failing sexual powers, WIll want to kill
younger m~n' the younger men -quarrel between themselves. We are brought b~ckto HCE's bedroom with the sound 'Tip'-a branch tapping on the window. History is here an~ now:
We leave the museum and, in the open alr ag. am, see . how the ? ld woman, eternal widow, has been transformed mto a blrd, peckmg up fragments of the past (and particularly of the smashed body of the dead hero) to feed us in the future:
How bootifull and how truetowife of her, when streng~y forebidden, to steal our historic presents from the past postprophetlca~s so as to will make us all lardy heirs and ladymaidesses of a pretty nIce kettle of
huit.
200
Bygmester FinneglUl
But we are concerned with Dublin-'Dyoublong? ' (Yes, we do. This is everybody's eternal city. ) 'Hush! Caution! Echoland! ' (There he is again - HCE. ) What we need is a guidebook, and we find one written by 'Mammon Lujius'- Mamalujo- Matthew, Mark, Luke andJohn, chroniclers of the past, four bedposts who look inward to the sleep of history, not outward to the emergent future. 'Four things . . . ne'er saIl fail', they say, 'til heathersmoke and cloudweed Eire's ile sail pall. ' These four things are a humped old man (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker); 'a shce on a puir old wobban' (Anna Livia Plurabelle, ALP, river, ageing wife), 'an auburn mayde, o'brine a'bride, to be desarted' (their daughter) and 'a penn no weightier nor a polepost' (the two sons-Shem with his pen and Shaun, who can write no word oftruth but can at least, like a postman, deliver it). These four eternals (Shem and Shaun are one, twin yolks of the father-egg) are then seen emerging at various phases of mock-
history: A. D. I I 3 2 produced the father; A. D. 566 the mother (a
woman is half a man). There is a pause, and then history goes round,
only backwards (history is only a wheel): A. D. 566 brought the daughter and A. D. I I32 the two sons Primas and Caddy-the man of action ('Primas was a santryman and drilled all decent people') and the poet ('Caddy went to Winehouse and wrote 0 peace a farce').
We look up from the book at the land again, and here is prehistoric Dublin. The two brothers seem to merge into a pair of comic primi- tive men, one the native Celt Mutt and the other the Scandinavian invader Jute. It is evident that there is a good deal of stuttering HCE in the latter: 'What a hauhauhauhaudibble thing, to be cause! ' But some play is made with the word 'hesitancy', and we recognise a reference to those forged letters with which Piggot tried to incrimi- nate Parnell (Piggot spelled the above word as 'hesitency' and thus trapped himself). 'Hasateney? ' says Mutt and also, to remind us of one of Parnell's reincarnations, 'hence, cool at ebb' (HCE). Jute, though, says 'Hasitancy'. Even in Ireland's prehistory the seeds of Ireland's later sorrows (the invader, the betrayal of the redeemer)
are being sown.
But there is another theme of treachery to be stated and developed. Joyce takes the historical character of Grace O'Malley who called at Howth Castle for a night's lodging and, because the family was at dinner, was refused entrance. In revenge she kidnapped the son of the Earl of Howth and kept him until the Earl promised never again to close the doors of the castle at mealtimes. Joyce makes the Earl
20I
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
into a Scandinavian-'Jarl van Hoother', a sort of HCE-and gives him two sons, Tristopher and Hilary, who are shown 'kickaheeling their dummy on the oil cloth flure of his homerigh, castle and earthenhouse' (HCE, also the father of Swift's Vanessa). The dum- my seems to be their sister, forbidden fruit the dream keeps shape- less and anonymous, especially as ('Dare! 0 dareI') we see 'the jiminy Toughertrees and the dummy . . . belove on the watercloth, kissing and spitting, and roguing and poghuing, like knavepaltry and naivebride and in their second infancy'. Grace O'Malley, who is called 'the prankquean', is twice refused 'a poss of PQrterpease' and, in revenge, kidnaps each son in turn, turning the 'jiminy' or twin Tristopher into a blackguard and Hilary into a Cromwellian. The third time she comes, the door is shut in her face with a thunderclap hundred-letter word. It is an allegory of HCE's inability to control the destinies of his children, his impotence in the face of a desired but forbidden relationship. The thunder is the noise of guilt.
But, says Joyce, '0 foenix culprit! ', parodying St Augustine's '0 felix culpa'- happy that sin of Adam which was to bring us a redeemer. The vague crime in Phoenix Park takes us back to the body of the giant Finnegan. A voice cries: 'Usqueadbaugham! ' which, among other things, means 'whiskey', and the great god awakens with 'Did ye drink me doornail l' But he is told to lie down again-'Now be aisy, good Mr Finnimore, sir. And take yourlaysure like a god on pension and don't be walking abroad. ' Life is going on well enough without Finnegan. Besides, 'there's already a big rody ram lad at random on the premises of his haunt of the hungred bordIcs, as it is told me':
. . . humphing his share of the showthers is senken on him he's such a grandfallar, with a pocked wife in pickle that's a flyfire and three lice nittle clinkers, two twilling bugs and one midget pucelle . . . Humme the Cheapner, Esc, overseen as we thought him, yet a worthy of the naym, carne at this timecoloured place where we live in our paroquial fermament one tide on another! with a bumrush in a hun of a wherry . . .
The Scandinavian successor to homegrown Finnegan has arrived by
water, and henceforth the tale is all his. 'Humile, -commune and ensectuous from his nature" it is he 'who will be ultimendly res- punchable for the hubbub caused in Edenborough'. In its sly way, that word 'ensectuous' tells us a great deal. When is a man an Ear- wicker or earwig 1 When he's an insect. When is he an insect 1 When his dream refuses to pronounce the word 'incest'. .
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3: Here Comes Everybody
LET US NOT BE TOO MUCH TEMPTED TO DRAG THE BIG DREAM UP
towards the light: shadowiness, confusion, the melting of One per-
sonage mto another, of youth into age, friend into enemy-these are of :he essence ~f the dream.
Thus, when we meet Humphrey Chlmp~en ~arWlcker, we cannot be sure whether we are looking at a real hlstoncal figure (one who kept a pub in Chapelizod) or at a? sort of paradigm of humanity. Nor can we be sure whether we meet him first as a child or as Adam, fully grown gardener. His name may be Humphrey or it may be Harold; it may even be best to call hIm Haromphreyld. Where did he get his surname 1 The anecdote
about the sailor king talking to our 'Iobstertrapping honest blunt' hero On a 'sultry sabbath afterno~n'has the portentous emptiness of all dream-stones. We Can Imagme ourselves laughing heartily at
HCE's -'aw warjist a cotchin on thon bluggy earwuggers' and then, on wakmg, feehng foohsh about it. Anyway, there soon emerges a vague bIg NordIC father-figure-a 'folksforefather all of the time . . . havmg the entirety of his house about him, with the invariable broad~tretched kerchief cooling his whole neck, nape and shoulder- blades and then, WIth a sort of urgency, we have to consider the
nature of his primal ~dam-sin. Everything is hearsay, a matter of tales and ru~ours, lIke the whole of early history; indeed, the narrator of thiS part of the dream doubts whether there was a sin at all:
. '. ' To a~yone who kne~ and loved the christlikeness of the big clean- m~nded giant H. C. EarWI? ker thr? ughout his excellency long vicefreegal eXistence the ~ere sug~estIon of hIm as a lustsleuth nosing for trouble in a boobytrap rmgs partIcularly preposterous.
Nevertheless, the story has it that Earwicker 'behaved with on- gentilmensky immodus opposite a pair of dainty maidservants in the
203
? ? The Man-made Moulltain
swoolth of the rushy hollow whither . . . dame nature in all innocency had spontaneously and about the same hour of the eventide sent them both'. Whatever the 'ongentilrnensky immodus' was, three soldiers saw it.
The trouble starts when, 'ages and ages after the alleged mis-
demeanour', Earwicker meets a 'cad with a pipe' in the park. The word 'pipe' seems to suggest musical connotations: CAD is a musical phrase; later, Shaun is to have a GBD in his FACE. The cad asks Earwicker the time. Earwicker, quite unnecessarily, launches into a stuttering refutation ofthe alleged accusations against him: '. . . there is not one tittle of truth, allow me to tell you, in that purest of fibfib fabrications'. The cad goes home, brooding on this, tells his wife about it, and 'our cad's bit of strife . . . with a quick ear for spit- toons' tells a priest- 'her particular reverend' -that there is some- thing fishy about HCE. And so the poison starts to spread, despite the priest's promise that 'the gossiple so delivered in his epistolear . . . would go no further than his jesuit's cloth'.
It is at this point that Joyce introduces the names of the Dublin publishers Browne and Nolan. They are useful names, for 'Browne' can be ltalianised to 'Bruno', and the philosopher Bruno came from Nola (very early in his writing career Joyce called him 'the Nolan'). Bruno taught that, in a God-run universe, all opposites must even- tually merge. He thus provides Joyce with a metaphysical justifica- tion for uniting opposing characters in a single personage, as Shem and Shaun, warring brothers, are reconciled in the father HCE. Similarly, HCE's accusers can take on the qualities ofHCE himself. The tale-telling priest is called 'Mr Browne'; 'in his secondary per- sonality as a Nolan" he soon has slanders about our hero circulating among the Dublin layabouts, particularly Peter Cloran, Hosty ('an illstarred beachbusker' or penniless maker of scurrilous ballads), and O'Mara, 'an exprivate secretary of no fixed abode (locally known as Mildew Lisa)'. Take note of that parenthetical 'Mildew Lisa', since it hides the true nature of HCE's guilt. It is a deformation of the German 'Mild und leise', the opening words of the love-death aria that Isolde (Iseult) sings over dead Tristan (Tristram) in Wagner's oper,a.
The scandal culminates in 'The Ballad ofPersse O'Reilly', which- after a guilt-and-fall-symbolising thundred-Ietter word-Hosty sings to a tune that Joyce kindly gives us-literate, undistorted, in the key of A major. 'Persse O'Reilly' is a folk version of the French perce- oreilie, which means an earwig. Like Bloom, HCE is a foreigner-
204
Here Comes Everybody
any foreigner, all foreigners-with the vices of a foreigner. The song is delightful:
He was one time our King of the Castle
Now he's kicked about like a rotten old parsnip.
And from Green street he'll be sent by order of His Worship To the penal jail of Mountjoy
(Chorus) To the jail of Mountjoy! Jail him and joy.
In it, HCE is identified with the falling Humpty Dumpty, likened to 'Lord Olofa Crumple', accused ofanumber ofbizarre crimes, cursed as a black and tan and a 'brave son of Scandiknavery', and threa- tened with execution and burial:
And not all the king's men nor his horses Will resurrect his corpus
For there's no true spell in Connacht or hell
That's able to raise a Cain.
And so we come to the third and fourth chapters and the fulfil- ment of the threat. First, though, we have to go through the form of a trial. The trio Hasty, O'Hara or O'Mara, and Cloran-Horan- Moran (how the names melt and shift, dreamlike) are no more, and,
as far as the collecting of evidence is concerned, we have chiefly to
rely on the priest Father San Browne or Padre Don Bruno. But opposites (Browne and Nolan) fuse into each other, nothing is cer- tain, vast eras of time have confounded the issue: all that emerges from the murmurs and shouts is the fact of HCE's guilt. Still, he has his defenders:
. . . three tommix, soldiers free, cockaleak and cappapee, of the Coldstream Guard~ were walking in Montgomery Street . . . It was the first woman, ! hey ~ald, souped. him, that fatal wellesday, Lili Coninghams, by suggest- mg hIm they go In a field. Wrolh mod eldfar, ruth redd stilstand wrath wrackt wroth, confessed private Pat Marchison retro. '
The real facts of HCE's sexual guilt strive to reach the surface, but the girl he longs for is herself a temptress, a sort of prankquean. So Adam blamed Eve. But before Eve there was Lilith: the seducible maiden is turned into the seducing older woman.
Many voices, as in a series of television interviews, give opinions and m~ke judgements. It is we ourselves, we begin to recognise, who wIll soon be on trial: HCE means 'Here Olmes Everybody'. Solidities emerge-a letter written by HCE's own wife (at least, it is
signed 'A Laughable Party'-ALP-Anna Livia Plurabelle), and a 205
? ? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
Here Comes Everybody
coffin. This coffin has 'been removed from the hardware premises of Oetzmann and Nephew, a noted house of the gonemost west, which in the natural course of all things continues to supply funeral requisites of every needed description'. It is destined for HCE: he must be buried deep down, unable to rise again. Finnegan was an amoral giant, but Earwicker is a man, and man must be cast into the bottomless depths for his primal sin. There is, as yet, no redeemer.
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
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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
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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.
'95
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Tim Finnegan lived in Walker Street,
An Irish gintleman, mighty odd.
He'd a bit of a brogue, so neat and sweet,
And to rise in the world, Tim carried a hod.
But Tim had a sort of tippling way: With a love of liquor Tim was born,
And to help him through his work each day,
Took a drop of the creature every morn.
Chorus:
Whack! Hurrool-now dance to your partner! Welt the flure, your trottrers shake;
Isn't it the truth I've told ye,
Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake?
One morning Tim was rather full,
His head felt heavy and it made him shake. He fell from the ladder and broke his skul~
So they carried him home, his corpse to wake. They tied him up in a nice clean sheet,
Aud laid him out upon the bed, Wid a gallon of whiskey at his feet,
And a barrel of porter at his head.
Bygmester Finnegan
? ? ? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
Bygmester Finnegan
The very term 'wake' is a suggestive one to a word-loving artist,
containing as it does the opposed theses ofdeath and life. In essence, Finnegans Wake is all about what happens while Finnegan lies, life suspended, on the bed, the twelve mourners all about him. In the great dream he is, inevitably, transmuted from a mere drunken bricklayer to an archetypal builder of ancient civilisations, whose fall is so loud that it becomes Vico's thunderclap (always easily recog- nisable as a word of exactly one hundred letters), who is identifiable with Ibsen's Masterbuilder (Bygmester in Dano-Norwegian), with the legendary Irish giant Finn MacCool, who was fifteen cubits high, and with Joyce's own mythical hero, HCE. This last identification may seem confusing: after all, Earwicker is supposed to replace Finnegan as a new heroic type-the family man as opposed to the fabulous giant. But we must constantly remember how small our cast is, and Earwicker, as father of the acting troupe, must take all the heavy parts.
Finnegan's fall, acted by HCE, opens the book, but only after Joyce has swiftly presented the story's main themes and symbols (as he presented all the musical subjects of the 'Sirens' episode in
Ulysses before actually striking up his fugue). Let us gulp back all our apprehensions and wade into this opening:
riverrun, past Eve an~ Ad~m's, fro1J0 swer. ve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodlUs VICUS of reclrculatlOD back to Howth Castle and
Environs.
Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passencore
rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his-penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themse1se to Lau~ens County's. gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the t1~e: nor aVOlce from afi. re bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatnck: nor yet, though vems- soon after had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in va~essy were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa's m~lt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to
the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on ttIe aquaface.
Difficult? Oh yes, difficult. But a certain difficulty is the small price
we must pay for excitement, richness, originality. And we must learn
to smile rather than frown: this is the world of 'Jabberwocky'. But
the dream is not Alice's. We are dreaming a mature dream, remem-
bering the past of mankind and the primal guilt that histoty hides but reveals. Yet the dream is a joke, as life itself may be.
That first sentence is the only one of the whole book that begins without a capital letter. Joyce tells us why in the word 'vicus' (Latin
196
for Vico) and also in 'recirculation'. We are not beginning; we are resuming. History ~s a circle, as Vico taught, and we have entered it in the middle of a sentence. If we want the start of that sentence, we have to look at the last line of the book, where we find 'A way a lone a last a loved a long the'-no full stop. Ideally, then, having finished the book we have to turn back again to the first page and ride with the cycle once more. Time may have a stop but history's wheel is in perpetual motion.
Joyce sets his book in Dublin. 'Eve and Adam's' refers primarily to Adam and Eve's Church, but it also implies the mythical begin- ning of human life: we are in the giant age of fable. The running river is the Liffey-Anna Livia-but also, as we shall learn, eternal woman. 'Howth Castle and Environs' is the first sounding of the HCE chord, one which, in many transformations, will hold us down to our hero throughout the book. The castle on Howth Head was built by a Sir Almeric Tristram (not the Tristram of the Arthurian legend, though we must accept a dream-identification of the two): it stands, as Finn MacCool stood, on the headland, vainly resisting invasion. HCE is both fortification and invader (as the true Dubliner is both Celt and Teuton).
Then we meet our double Tristram, though here in the aspect of guilty love. 'Violer d'amores' means both the musical instrument called the viola d'amore (suggesting minstrelsy and ideal love) and the violation of love and trust: Tristram came to Ireland to take Iseult to Cornwall, a bride for his uncle King Mark, but fell in love with her himself: we have been given two guilt-myths already in four lines-Adam and Tristram, both of whom fell through sin. 'Fr'over' is an archaic form of 'from over', but it suggests 'rover'. 'Passencore' starts off like 'passenger', though its main meaning (the French pas encore) is 'not yet'. 'Rearrived' means what it says: these events, like all the events of history, recur perpetually. 'Armorica' is Brittany but also America: the old world and the new subsist side by side in Joyce's mythology, and, by the stream Oconee in Laurens County, Georgia, there stands (check this with any gazetteer) another city of Dublin. As the Viconian cycle turns and turns, showing the essential impulses of history to be always the same, so any new world must re-enact the history of the old. Indeed, the new world is the old, Lawrence's County being the old Dublin by virtue of the name of its bishop-Lawrence O'Toole-at the time of the English invasion of Henry II, as also the name-change to Lawrence that Tristram (castle-builder, not lover of Iseult) effected when he
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settled in Dublin. 'Topsawyer' refers us to 'Mark Twain-a second
King Mark, famous in the new world? as well as to To? , Saw;:er and Huckleberry Finn (a brotherly pm). Note Joyc~s spellmg of 'Georgia' as 'gorgios'- 'gorges', yes, as also the gtpsy word f~r 'young' (a young Dublin built across the seas), but also the author s own son Giorgio (though noW he calls hImself George). Joyce can never keep his family out, and why should he? World h,story IS family history, dreamt in a bedroom. Did he not first meet Nora Barnacle when she was a chambermaid in Finn's Hotel? Is not HCE
a sort ofJohn Joyce, roaring father? Are not Shem and ~haun(Jam~s
and John) really the two antithetical brothers James ( Sunny JIm)
and Stanislaus ('Brother John') Joyce? .
Anyway, in 'doublin their mumpe~all the time' we. rec~gn~sethe spirit of growth, the perpetual bmldmg of new Dublms. Wlelder- fight' is wielding a weapon in battle but also fightmg agam and agam (German wieder as in AufWiedersehn). What kmd of fightmg? The 'penisolate' war can be one fought with the pems(the vIgorously randy Shaun-type brother) or with the pen in isolatlOn (that wIll do for Shem, the solitary artist); also it can refer to the Penmsular War
and the opposition of Wellington (Irish general) to Napoleon (foreigner, would-be invader, a kind of HCE). But let us not forget that we are dealing with early history: 'avoice from afire bellow~ed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick'. That voice IS God's saymg 'I am' twice in old Erse-it is also 5t Bridget's saying 'I am . a Christian" St Patrick is Ireland herself, the peat-rick; St Germam- cus, St P;trick's tutor, appropriately say~ 'Baptis~ baptise' (,tauf- tauf') in German. Soon we are led to the BIble. A kidscad buttended a bland old isaac. ' We should now be learmng the trIck of expandmg
such dream-compression into straight narrative. Jacob ~whose name' suggests James, or Shem) showed ~rtist's cunmng m dis- guising himself, the cadet but also cad, as hIS elder brother Esa,: by means of a kidskin thus dupmg h,S bland-bhnd old father Isaac mto giving him his ble;sing. (Here too, if we want ~im,we can ~nd,Isa~c Butt, whom Parnell trickily ousted from the IrIsh leadershIp. ) Sosle sesthers wroth' near-disguises Susannah, Esther and Ruth-all loved
by older men, as HCE loves Issy-but also brings i~ a :efere~ce to Swift's love for Stella and Vanessa (heralded by vemssoon, de- veloped further in 'all's fair i,: va~essy'). ,HCE is S. wift, fath~r-type desiring daughter-type, earnmg wroth: SWIft hlmsdf IS twone nathandjoe'-Nathan and Joseph (unYleldmg to sexual Importunltles of an unlawful kind) in one, anagrammatlsed Jonathan. We end WIth
198
Bygmester Finnegan
Shem and Shaun, the eternal brothers whom we shall meet in extenso later, now become a trio-Jhem and Shen: Shem, Ham and Japhet-superseding their father Noah, brewing under God's covenant-the 'regginbrow' or rainbow. The Teutonic motif, appro- prIate to the Scandinavian invader HCE, is there-Regenbogen-as also in 'ringsome' -circlewise, the cycle of God's promise, matching the cycle of his thunder.
The compression is extreme in these opening paragtaphs, but we
would be wrong to unravel everything at once. The deeper references
are there if we want them, but the general theme of the book floats, in something like sunlight, on the surface of the 'aquaface'. We are concerned with the cycle of history-the things that have both hap- pened and not yet happened -and with a Dublin that is everyplace. In this Dublin, the one in America as the one in Ireland, there is a father who is eternal rock with a castle on it, driven to a guilty fall by unlawful love of a younger woman, a girl, a daughter. In him there are two opposing elements, his sons. As the duality of God the Father and God the Son calls into being a third element to make a trinity, so these two sons can appear as a trio. Woman appears in two aspects-mother Eve and daughter Iseultor Stella or Vanessa or Ruth or Susannah or Esther (Stella's real name was Esther Johnson; Vanessa's real name was Esther Vanhomrigh-watch out for this latter surname, too). The two aspects are fused in the image of a river which, old with the accumulations of the life of a city, dies by mingling itself with the sea; clouds from the sea move in to the river's source, so that death is a kind of renewal of life: the fall of the rain is woman's fall, life-giving. As for man's fall, Finnegan's fall, that thunder brings no rain.
As time means nothing in Joyce's universal Dublin-centred chronicle, we must not be puzzled if, in the account of Finnegan's fall that now follows, we anticipate a great deal of the story of HCE. The fall itself is all falls, and its thunder sounds in many languages. It is mythical (Finnegan has a 'humptyhillhead') and it is yesterday ('wallstrait' echoes a financial crash in the thirties). What caused the fall we cannot exactly say, but drink brought Tim Finnegan low in the song, and Joyce's Finnegan is a sort of wine-god: 'Comeday morffi and, 0, you're vine! Sendday's eve and, ah, you're vinegar! ' A sexual sin is imposed on him by HCE himself ('Haroun Childeric Eggeberth') ana he has HCE's own guilty stutter ('Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand' . . . 'oftwhile balbulous' -and it was Balbus, whose name means 'Stutterer', who was always building
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a wall). The fall takes place prehistorically, but also at the time when the Pope, the Englishman Nicholas Breakspear,. granted the,rule of I r e l a n d t o H e n r y I I . H e n c e F i n n e g a n ' s b m l d m g h a s larro~s o'toolers clittering up and tombles a'buckets clottenng down- Lawrence O'Toole, a rising prelate; Thomas it Becket, a falhng one.
Dead Finnegan, really sleeping Finnegan, is mourned by twelve citizens but the feast is to be no mere matter of fish and ale and bread, {hough these are spread on the table: it is the flesh of the god himself that is to be sacramentally devoured. But, before thIS can happen, we are made to see the body of Finnegan as part of the Irish landscape. He is the giant Finn MacCool asleep. H,s he~d IS the Hill of Howth his feet are near Earwicker's pub at Chapehzod (or Iseult's chapel). His fall, we hear, hastaken ~lacein Dublin's Phoenix Park-a sort of Eden whc;:re a notOrIOUS pohtH::al murder was to herald Ireland's phoenix-resurrection. But this same park saw the fall of HCE whose vaaue sin involved two girls (his wife and daugh-
ter in disguise) and w:s witnessed by thr~esoldiers ,(his t~osons as a Ham-Shem-Japhet trio). But the mentIOn of sold,ers bnngs usto the theme of conflict. The bloody ructions that were to wake TIm Finnegan are swollen into a panorama of war in general. We go to the Wellington Memorial in Phoenix Park and are shown round It by an old woman (the eternal ageing wife who preserves fragments from the past as she gathers the smashed bits of the body of her dead lord, Humpty Dumpty, for transmission to the future). The Insh- man 'Willingdone', the battle of Waterloo, a couple? f c~valrymares who turn into female camp-followers and the two gIrlS m the park- these symbolise the conflict in HCE's sinning soul, but they also suggest how wafS are merely a vast projection of :amtlv confh~t.
The father aware of his failing sexual powers, WIll want to kill
younger m~n' the younger men -quarrel between themselves. We are brought b~ckto HCE's bedroom with the sound 'Tip'-a branch tapping on the window. History is here an~ now:
We leave the museum and, in the open alr ag. am, see . how the ? ld woman, eternal widow, has been transformed mto a blrd, peckmg up fragments of the past (and particularly of the smashed body of the dead hero) to feed us in the future:
How bootifull and how truetowife of her, when streng~y forebidden, to steal our historic presents from the past postprophetlca~s so as to will make us all lardy heirs and ladymaidesses of a pretty nIce kettle of
huit.
200
Bygmester FinneglUl
But we are concerned with Dublin-'Dyoublong? ' (Yes, we do. This is everybody's eternal city. ) 'Hush! Caution! Echoland! ' (There he is again - HCE. ) What we need is a guidebook, and we find one written by 'Mammon Lujius'- Mamalujo- Matthew, Mark, Luke andJohn, chroniclers of the past, four bedposts who look inward to the sleep of history, not outward to the emergent future. 'Four things . . . ne'er saIl fail', they say, 'til heathersmoke and cloudweed Eire's ile sail pall. ' These four things are a humped old man (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker); 'a shce on a puir old wobban' (Anna Livia Plurabelle, ALP, river, ageing wife), 'an auburn mayde, o'brine a'bride, to be desarted' (their daughter) and 'a penn no weightier nor a polepost' (the two sons-Shem with his pen and Shaun, who can write no word oftruth but can at least, like a postman, deliver it). These four eternals (Shem and Shaun are one, twin yolks of the father-egg) are then seen emerging at various phases of mock-
history: A. D. I I 3 2 produced the father; A. D. 566 the mother (a
woman is half a man). There is a pause, and then history goes round,
only backwards (history is only a wheel): A. D. 566 brought the daughter and A. D. I I32 the two sons Primas and Caddy-the man of action ('Primas was a santryman and drilled all decent people') and the poet ('Caddy went to Winehouse and wrote 0 peace a farce').
We look up from the book at the land again, and here is prehistoric Dublin. The two brothers seem to merge into a pair of comic primi- tive men, one the native Celt Mutt and the other the Scandinavian invader Jute. It is evident that there is a good deal of stuttering HCE in the latter: 'What a hauhauhauhaudibble thing, to be cause! ' But some play is made with the word 'hesitancy', and we recognise a reference to those forged letters with which Piggot tried to incrimi- nate Parnell (Piggot spelled the above word as 'hesitency' and thus trapped himself). 'Hasateney? ' says Mutt and also, to remind us of one of Parnell's reincarnations, 'hence, cool at ebb' (HCE). Jute, though, says 'Hasitancy'. Even in Ireland's prehistory the seeds of Ireland's later sorrows (the invader, the betrayal of the redeemer)
are being sown.
But there is another theme of treachery to be stated and developed. Joyce takes the historical character of Grace O'Malley who called at Howth Castle for a night's lodging and, because the family was at dinner, was refused entrance. In revenge she kidnapped the son of the Earl of Howth and kept him until the Earl promised never again to close the doors of the castle at mealtimes. Joyce makes the Earl
20I
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
into a Scandinavian-'Jarl van Hoother', a sort of HCE-and gives him two sons, Tristopher and Hilary, who are shown 'kickaheeling their dummy on the oil cloth flure of his homerigh, castle and earthenhouse' (HCE, also the father of Swift's Vanessa). The dum- my seems to be their sister, forbidden fruit the dream keeps shape- less and anonymous, especially as ('Dare! 0 dareI') we see 'the jiminy Toughertrees and the dummy . . . belove on the watercloth, kissing and spitting, and roguing and poghuing, like knavepaltry and naivebride and in their second infancy'. Grace O'Malley, who is called 'the prankquean', is twice refused 'a poss of PQrterpease' and, in revenge, kidnaps each son in turn, turning the 'jiminy' or twin Tristopher into a blackguard and Hilary into a Cromwellian. The third time she comes, the door is shut in her face with a thunderclap hundred-letter word. It is an allegory of HCE's inability to control the destinies of his children, his impotence in the face of a desired but forbidden relationship. The thunder is the noise of guilt.
But, says Joyce, '0 foenix culprit! ', parodying St Augustine's '0 felix culpa'- happy that sin of Adam which was to bring us a redeemer. The vague crime in Phoenix Park takes us back to the body of the giant Finnegan. A voice cries: 'Usqueadbaugham! ' which, among other things, means 'whiskey', and the great god awakens with 'Did ye drink me doornail l' But he is told to lie down again-'Now be aisy, good Mr Finnimore, sir. And take yourlaysure like a god on pension and don't be walking abroad. ' Life is going on well enough without Finnegan. Besides, 'there's already a big rody ram lad at random on the premises of his haunt of the hungred bordIcs, as it is told me':
. . . humphing his share of the showthers is senken on him he's such a grandfallar, with a pocked wife in pickle that's a flyfire and three lice nittle clinkers, two twilling bugs and one midget pucelle . . . Humme the Cheapner, Esc, overseen as we thought him, yet a worthy of the naym, carne at this timecoloured place where we live in our paroquial fermament one tide on another! with a bumrush in a hun of a wherry . . .
The Scandinavian successor to homegrown Finnegan has arrived by
water, and henceforth the tale is all his. 'Humile, -commune and ensectuous from his nature" it is he 'who will be ultimendly res- punchable for the hubbub caused in Edenborough'. In its sly way, that word 'ensectuous' tells us a great deal. When is a man an Ear- wicker or earwig 1 When he's an insect. When is he an insect 1 When his dream refuses to pronounce the word 'incest'. .
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3: Here Comes Everybody
LET US NOT BE TOO MUCH TEMPTED TO DRAG THE BIG DREAM UP
towards the light: shadowiness, confusion, the melting of One per-
sonage mto another, of youth into age, friend into enemy-these are of :he essence ~f the dream.
Thus, when we meet Humphrey Chlmp~en ~arWlcker, we cannot be sure whether we are looking at a real hlstoncal figure (one who kept a pub in Chapelizod) or at a? sort of paradigm of humanity. Nor can we be sure whether we meet him first as a child or as Adam, fully grown gardener. His name may be Humphrey or it may be Harold; it may even be best to call hIm Haromphreyld. Where did he get his surname 1 The anecdote
about the sailor king talking to our 'Iobstertrapping honest blunt' hero On a 'sultry sabbath afterno~n'has the portentous emptiness of all dream-stones. We Can Imagme ourselves laughing heartily at
HCE's -'aw warjist a cotchin on thon bluggy earwuggers' and then, on wakmg, feehng foohsh about it. Anyway, there soon emerges a vague bIg NordIC father-figure-a 'folksforefather all of the time . . . havmg the entirety of his house about him, with the invariable broad~tretched kerchief cooling his whole neck, nape and shoulder- blades and then, WIth a sort of urgency, we have to consider the
nature of his primal ~dam-sin. Everything is hearsay, a matter of tales and ru~ours, lIke the whole of early history; indeed, the narrator of thiS part of the dream doubts whether there was a sin at all:
. '. ' To a~yone who kne~ and loved the christlikeness of the big clean- m~nded giant H. C. EarWI? ker thr? ughout his excellency long vicefreegal eXistence the ~ere sug~estIon of hIm as a lustsleuth nosing for trouble in a boobytrap rmgs partIcularly preposterous.
Nevertheless, the story has it that Earwicker 'behaved with on- gentilmensky immodus opposite a pair of dainty maidservants in the
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swoolth of the rushy hollow whither . . . dame nature in all innocency had spontaneously and about the same hour of the eventide sent them both'. Whatever the 'ongentilrnensky immodus' was, three soldiers saw it.
The trouble starts when, 'ages and ages after the alleged mis-
demeanour', Earwicker meets a 'cad with a pipe' in the park. The word 'pipe' seems to suggest musical connotations: CAD is a musical phrase; later, Shaun is to have a GBD in his FACE. The cad asks Earwicker the time. Earwicker, quite unnecessarily, launches into a stuttering refutation ofthe alleged accusations against him: '. . . there is not one tittle of truth, allow me to tell you, in that purest of fibfib fabrications'. The cad goes home, brooding on this, tells his wife about it, and 'our cad's bit of strife . . . with a quick ear for spit- toons' tells a priest- 'her particular reverend' -that there is some- thing fishy about HCE. And so the poison starts to spread, despite the priest's promise that 'the gossiple so delivered in his epistolear . . . would go no further than his jesuit's cloth'.
It is at this point that Joyce introduces the names of the Dublin publishers Browne and Nolan. They are useful names, for 'Browne' can be ltalianised to 'Bruno', and the philosopher Bruno came from Nola (very early in his writing career Joyce called him 'the Nolan'). Bruno taught that, in a God-run universe, all opposites must even- tually merge. He thus provides Joyce with a metaphysical justifica- tion for uniting opposing characters in a single personage, as Shem and Shaun, warring brothers, are reconciled in the father HCE. Similarly, HCE's accusers can take on the qualities ofHCE himself. The tale-telling priest is called 'Mr Browne'; 'in his secondary per- sonality as a Nolan" he soon has slanders about our hero circulating among the Dublin layabouts, particularly Peter Cloran, Hosty ('an illstarred beachbusker' or penniless maker of scurrilous ballads), and O'Mara, 'an exprivate secretary of no fixed abode (locally known as Mildew Lisa)'. Take note of that parenthetical 'Mildew Lisa', since it hides the true nature of HCE's guilt. It is a deformation of the German 'Mild und leise', the opening words of the love-death aria that Isolde (Iseult) sings over dead Tristan (Tristram) in Wagner's oper,a.
The scandal culminates in 'The Ballad ofPersse O'Reilly', which- after a guilt-and-fall-symbolising thundred-Ietter word-Hosty sings to a tune that Joyce kindly gives us-literate, undistorted, in the key of A major. 'Persse O'Reilly' is a folk version of the French perce- oreilie, which means an earwig. Like Bloom, HCE is a foreigner-
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Here Comes Everybody
any foreigner, all foreigners-with the vices of a foreigner. The song is delightful:
He was one time our King of the Castle
Now he's kicked about like a rotten old parsnip.
And from Green street he'll be sent by order of His Worship To the penal jail of Mountjoy
(Chorus) To the jail of Mountjoy! Jail him and joy.
In it, HCE is identified with the falling Humpty Dumpty, likened to 'Lord Olofa Crumple', accused ofanumber ofbizarre crimes, cursed as a black and tan and a 'brave son of Scandiknavery', and threa- tened with execution and burial:
And not all the king's men nor his horses Will resurrect his corpus
For there's no true spell in Connacht or hell
That's able to raise a Cain.
And so we come to the third and fourth chapters and the fulfil- ment of the threat. First, though, we have to go through the form of a trial. The trio Hasty, O'Hara or O'Mara, and Cloran-Horan- Moran (how the names melt and shift, dreamlike) are no more, and,
as far as the collecting of evidence is concerned, we have chiefly to
rely on the priest Father San Browne or Padre Don Bruno. But opposites (Browne and Nolan) fuse into each other, nothing is cer- tain, vast eras of time have confounded the issue: all that emerges from the murmurs and shouts is the fact of HCE's guilt. Still, he has his defenders:
. . . three tommix, soldiers free, cockaleak and cappapee, of the Coldstream Guard~ were walking in Montgomery Street . . . It was the first woman, ! hey ~ald, souped. him, that fatal wellesday, Lili Coninghams, by suggest- mg hIm they go In a field. Wrolh mod eldfar, ruth redd stilstand wrath wrackt wroth, confessed private Pat Marchison retro. '
The real facts of HCE's sexual guilt strive to reach the surface, but the girl he longs for is herself a temptress, a sort of prankquean. So Adam blamed Eve. But before Eve there was Lilith: the seducible maiden is turned into the seducing older woman.
Many voices, as in a series of television interviews, give opinions and m~ke judgements. It is we ourselves, we begin to recognise, who wIll soon be on trial: HCE means 'Here Olmes Everybody'. Solidities emerge-a letter written by HCE's own wife (at least, it is
signed 'A Laughable Party'-ALP-Anna Livia Plurabelle), and a 205
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Here Comes Everybody
coffin. This coffin has 'been removed from the hardware premises of Oetzmann and Nephew, a noted house of the gonemost west, which in the natural course of all things continues to supply funeral requisites of every needed description'. It is destined for HCE: he must be buried deep down, unable to rise again. Finnegan was an amoral giant, but Earwicker is a man, and man must be cast into the bottomless depths for his primal sin. There is, as yet, no redeemer.
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
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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
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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.
