Joyce, Race and 'Finnegans Wake'

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JOYCE, RACE AND FINNEGANS WAKE

Len Platt charts a new approach through one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century literature. Using original archival research and detailed close readings, he outlines Joyce’s literary response to the racial discourse of twentieth-century politics. Platt’s account is the first to position Finnegans Wake in precise historical conditions and to explore Joyce’s engagement with European fascism. Race, Platt claims, is a central theme for Joyce, both in terms of the colonial and postcolonial conflicts between the Irish and the British, and in terms of its use by the extreme right. It is in this context that Joyce’s engagement with race, while certainly a product of colonial relations, also figures as a wider disputation with rationalism, capitalism and modernity. This political analysis of Finnegans Wake will change the way this key modernist text is read, and will provide a fresh and fascinating historical context for all scholars of Joyce and modernism. L E N P L A T T is Head of the Department of Professional and Community Education at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Joyce and the Anglo-Irish (1998), Aristocracies of Fiction (2001) and Musical Comedy on the West End Stage (2004).

JOYCE, RACE AND FINNEGANS WAKE LEN PLATT

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521868846 © Len Platt 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2007 ISBN-13 ISBN-10

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ISBN-13 ISBN-10

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Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To my brother, Stan Platt (1946–2004)

Contents

List of abbreviations

page viii

1 Joyce, race and racism: introduction

1

2 ‘No such race’: Finnegans Wake and the Aryan myth

14

3 Celt, Teuton and Aryan

42

4 ‘Our darling breed’: the Wake, social Darwinism and eugenics

69

5 Atlanta-Arya: theosophy, race and the Wake

95

6

‘Hung Chung Egglyfella’: staged race in Ulysses and the Wake

121

7 ‘And the prankquean pulled a rosy one’: filth, fascism and the family

146

8 Race and reading: conclusion

164

Notes Index

181 205

vii

Abbreviations

Works by James Joyce FW

U

Others Annotations EB IU JJA

MS: LCP

NBB

Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1964). References to Finnegans Wake appear in the standard form. The first number refers to the page and the second to the line number. Ulysses (The Corrected Text), ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (New York and London: Garland, 1984, 1986). References to Ulysses appear in the standard form. The first number refers to the chapter and the second to the line number. Roland McHugh, Annotations to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (1980; Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910–11). H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 2 vols. (1877; Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University Press, 1998). Michael Groden (gen. ed.), The James Joyce Archive (New York and London: Garland, 1977). In this referencing system ‘VI.B’ refers to the notebook series. The numbers following refer to volume and page number respectively. Manuscript – Lord Chamberlain’s Plays. These are unpublished playscripts held in the manuscript room of the British Library. Numbers following the title citation in endnotes refer to act and page number. Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer and Geert Lernout (gen. eds.), The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo viii

Abbreviations

NS

ix

(Turnout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001–). In the referencing system used for this and other editions of Joyce’s notebooks, ‘VI.B’ refers to the notebook series. The numbers following refer to volume and page number, with NBB using a letter for line number. Giambattista Vico, New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations, translated by David Marsh with an introduction by Anthony Grafton (1744; 3rd edn. London: Penguin, 1999).

CHAPTER

1

Joyce, race and racism: introduction

Race is the primary site of this account of the Wake, with race discourse, especially in its ‘scientific’ forms, featuring largely. Such an emphasis requires some explanation because although race is a familiar enough concern of Joyce studies, especially since Vincent Cheng’s landmark reading, Joyce, Race and Empire (1995), it is usually worked differently. Most typically it figures in the context of Irish history and postcolonial critical traditions. Here race is often understood in terms of the Derridean binary where the imperial Self becomes conditioned against the colonial Other and vice versa. In this framework the Joyce oeuvre is often formulated as a vigorous and developing engagement around colonial identities. Dubliners (1914) becomes a young man’s anatomising of a colonial subject too conditioned, weak or stupid to be extricated from the ‘native’ condition, but also exoticised in some ways as the romantic Other. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is a more mature and nuanced representation of Irish identity. Here Joyce’s prototype artist might declare his resistance to both nation and state, but he proclaims the end of his youth with a determination ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’.1 With this apparent contradiction, the question of what it means to be ‘Irish’ becomes considerably problematised. The ‘postcolonial’ phase of criticism has also maintained that race remains a major issue in the mature work of James Joyce. Ulysses (1922) in particular has been seen as a postcolonial endeavour, a text that not just by its representation of the colonial subject but, more crucially, by its appropriation of colonial and, indeed, Irish nationalist discourses formulates a complicated interrogation of ideologies of race and nationalism. Here episodes such as ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, ‘Oxen of the Sun’ and ‘Cyclops’ have become established illustrations of what is seen as a widespread engagement with English and Anglo-Irish cultural models. The latter episode often features in postcolonial accounts as the high point of a complex interaction with forms of cultural nationalism that is central to the Ulysses project as a whole.2 1

2

Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake

The current study is related to such work in various ways. Race is considered in terms of relations between England and Ireland; chapter 2 in particular discusses this dynamic with an emphasis on formulations of the ‘Celt’. The primary interest, however, is not in Irish, Anglo-Irish and British identities per se but in a race history that operates on a larger scale and thus places Joyce in a wider Western context, and a very different political environment. Here race remains important in terms of the romanticised identities of both decolonising radicals and the conservative centre, but also becomes disastrously positioned at the heart of the extreme right. It is in this context that Joyce’s engagement with race, certainly a product of colonial relations in many respects, also figures as a wider disputation with rationalism, capitalism and modernity. From this perspective Finnegans Wake (1939) features not as an Irishman’s assault on the English language, as a critic such as Declan Kiberd would claim, but rather as a very particular and specifically targeted response to the betrayal of progressive and humanist ideologies.3 These latter emerged from the Enlightenment as powerful doctrines of equality,4 only to be wrecked by consolidation and reaction as postrevolution Western culture began to circumscribe the limits of reform and, indeed, redefine the nature of reason and rationality.5 The central argument here is that the strangeness of Finnegans Wake – and it is, still, magnificently strange – can be read as an engagement with a culture that had itself made a huge investment in acculturating the bizarre. ‘Neo-grammarian’ historical linguistics plays a special part in this account as the ‘science’ that once opened the floodgates to what was constructed as knowledge about racial difference. As early as the 1650s, Justus Georg Schottel, the ‘chief grammarian of the period’ was articulating the language principle that was to form the foundation of European Aryanism:6 When the languages split up and mankind was dispersed across the world, Ashkenaz, the supreme head of the family, crossed Asia Minor and settled in Europe, where he made the land fertile and divided it . . . He was the ancestor of the Germans, and had brought from Babel the old Cimbric of German language . . . Today we still observe, everywhere in Europe, the presence of rootwords of a German language, though these differ from one another in consequence of all kinds of changes and confusions, having been deformed and damaged by the admixture of foreign words.7

On the back of linguistics, and the entirely false assumption that language is a racial characteristic, the Germanic idea became key to the Aryan myth. By the early nineteenth century, Schiller was defining the German people

Joyce, race and racism: introduction

3

as ‘the kernel of mankind, elected by the universal spirit to strive eternally for the human race’. He maintained the hope that the German language ‘might prevail throughout the whole world’.8 According to Jules Michelet, Germany was the powerhouse behind the entire European phenomenon. Germany ‘gave her Swabians to Switzerland and to Sweden; her Goths to Spain; her Lombards to Lombardy; her Anglo-Saxons to England, her Franks to France. She gave both a name and renewal to all the peoples of Europe.’9 Similarly, Johann Fichte was able to ascribe ‘all the peoples of Europe, excepting the Slavs, to Germanic stock; but drew a distinction between an ‘‘original race’’ (Urvolk), namely the Germans, and the ‘‘neoLatin peoples’’ who were deficient, de-Germanised and sterilised through the loss of the original language’.10 The argument here is that the Wake is centrally engaged with an academy that formulated such views in terms of rationality and reason. Linguistics had a central role in this respect, but hardly an exclusive one. By the late nineteenth century, scientific racism had become invigorated by the biological sciences and scarcely a single branch of social science or the humanities remained unaffected. Archaeology, anthropology, history, palaeoanthropology and sociology: all became crucially defined by race. Positioned in a framework provided by linguistics and Darwinism, such forms of knowledge worked in quite contradictory ways to ‘prove’ on the one hand the workings of ‘progress’ in the social as well as the natural world and yet, on the other hand, to identify a process of social and cultural ‘degeneration’ so powerful as to be thought potentially capable of throwing human history into reverse. This theoretical disposition led many Western intellectuals, at the fin de sie`cle and beyond, to understand modernity as a degradation of originary Enlightenment idealisms or, indeed, as a cultural condition that had been disastrously reared on flawed ideas of ‘natural rights’ and false principles of ‘equality’. The latter position was held by many of Joyce’s ‘modernist’ contemporaries, certainly those working in the field of literature – W. B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Percy Wyndham Lewis and D. H. Lawrence, all strongly identified with right-wing radicalism, and not simply as a matter of youthful experimentation. Yeats’s interest in eugenics was lifelong, as was his instinct for conservative landlordism; Madox Ford held a deep suspicion of ‘Parliaments in England, the Constituent Assemblies of France [. . . and] all the rules in the Constitution of the United States’. These were the implied wrong turning points of history, the usurping institutions of an ancien re´gime fondly reconstructed in Ford’s account as ‘the old feudalism and the old union

4

Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake

of Christendom beneath a spiritual headship’.11 Eliot was infamously appalled by ‘mass’ society, as was Pound, whose interest in Mussolini was to end so disastrously. Above all, Lewis, in some ways the most complex and interesting artist of this generation, gave credibility to absurd and dangerous right-wing ideas over a period of some fifty years. This account argues for a distinction between Joyce and such figures. Indeed, it sees the Wake’s well-known and pervasive attack on Lewis not as the local ‘spat’ of conventional literary history – the retaliation for Lewis’s assaults in Time and the Western Man (1927) and elsewhere – but as the signature of a much more fundamental clash of political and cultural ideas. Joyce, Race and ‘Finnegans Wake’ argues that it is substantially through the idea of race that Joyce, like so many of his contemporaries, takes a position on modernity in the Wake. At one level this involves the representation of race consciousness in everyday social and cultural life. Through the handling of ‘character’, if the notion has any meaning in the Wake, race becomes, however fluid and nebulous, nevertheless central to human identity and the sense of self. Contemporaneity is significantly constituted in terms of race consciousness in the Wake, a consciousness played out primarily in demotic forms, in the gossipy stories and everyday exchanges of ordinary life as well as in ‘popular’ culture. At the same time, Finnegans Wake takes a political position on race, and it is here that Joyce becomes much at odds with his writer contemporaries. For Joyce does not think of race as the essentialist condition sometimes mystified in modernist literature where ‘the Dark Demon’ is in eternal conflict with a ‘White spirit’ counterpart.12 Race in Joyce is a construct, the primary purpose of which is understood in terms of the maintenance of social cohesion and consent. Race identity here becomes not a matter of biology but of culture. This recognition means that the racism which typically disguised itself as the rational measurement and management of difference becomes exposed as an ideology, operating at the structural levels of culture and society as knowledge, authority and power. Such an identification of the wider politics of race is central to Finnegans Wake and involves the recognition that the scientific racism legitimised by such a politics was not an English, colonial aberration, but a European phenomenon closely linked to the rise of modernity, to myths and fantasies about the self and cultural identities that the European academy once privileged as advanced and precious human knowledge.13 Disagreement, refinement and the displacement of old paradigms were the familiar elements of that privileging, producing an intellectual culture that was extremely diverse and complex. It involved contradictions, fashions

Joyce, race and racism: introduction

5

and competing schools of thought, and it became, certainly by the late nineteenth century, entirely mainstream. It needs to be emphasised that however irrational and unacceptable scientific racism may appear now, in its day it was embedded in the major cultural institutions of Western intellectual life. This involved the exercise of vast resources over a long period of time and produced often contested versions of cultural and social truth, though whatever forms scientific racism took and however much it disputed with itself, it maintained as a first principle, and quite against the egalitarian orthodoxy of classical Enlightenment tradition, the belief in the theory of permanent racial types.14 This belief was entirely fallacious, though whether it was the simple product of ‘misunderstanding’ that some theorists have suggested must be doubtful.15 For Kenan Malik, the scientific demonstration of racial difference, often applied to national populations as well as to those ‘outside’, was a key mechanism in maintaining social control: ‘[t]he tendency to view social differences as natural became rationalised through the discourse of race. The concept of race emerged, therefore, as a means of reconciling the conflict between the ideology of equality and the reality of the persistence of inequality. Race accounted for social inequalities by attributing them to nature.’16 Writing from a different tradition, D. T. Goldberg implies a similarly structural level when he writes that ‘the spirit of modernity is to be found most centrally in its commitment to continuous progress: to material, moral, physical and political improvement and to the promotion and development of civilization and general standards for which the West took to be its own values universalised’.17 These points about the complexity, one-time authority and sheer cultural significance of scientific racism are well known and have been widely discussed, but they need emphasising here, because if we underestimate scientific racism, mistaking it for a fringe culture, or an unfortunate accident of modernity, then the Wake is substantially lost as a decisive and, indeed, courageous intervention. One of the basic principles of this account, then, is that in order to avoid a ‘presentist’ reading of the Wake it is necessary to disengage, as far as possible, from what Elazar Barkan describes as the postwar ‘retreat from scientific racism’.18 This is the cultural revisionism that not only thoroughly undermined the scientific basis on which racism was formally constructed, but which also involved a substantial reconfiguration of European intellectual history. Here the thinking behind an event such as the Holocaust could become marginalised as human aberration, a dark and evil corruption of the true Western intellectual tradition, rather than a logical and, to that extent, predictable

6

Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake

outcome of a 300-year-old European obsession with race classification. As historians such as Le´on Poliakov and sociologists such as Michael Banton, Zygmunt Bauman and Malik have shown, there is a very real sense in which for much of the modern period, ‘to think racially was to be modern and scientific’.19 From Linnaeus to Charles Darwin and beyond, reason and rationality were bound up with developing knowledge about the classification of human types. A second basic principle of scientific racism, that higher racial forms had progressively evolved and could likewise degenerate in adverse cultural conditions, was constructed as a key modern scientific reality, one which at times could take on supreme epistemological importance. Benjamin Disraeli’s ‘philosophy of history [which] might be summarised in the formula ‘‘All is race; there is no other truth’’’, resonated throughout the nineteenth and a good part of the twentieth century.20 This is not say, of course, that there was no contesting of scientific racism. From within the academy, the process of unravelling began as early as the 1860s and gained momentum through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1920s, however much race classification remained a reality in the public mind, it was clearly possible to think in terms of new versions of modernity where ideas of race and nation became deeply problematised. Joyce was predisposed towards these versions of liberalism well before he wrote Ulysses and the Wake. As a young man, he had already developed what became characteristic attitudes to race and racism and these were very much shaped by Irish cultural contexts – particularly, in my view, by his position as a member of the Irish Catholic middle class. This class was shaped by both nineteenth-century liberalism and a culture of radical dissent that English politicians from all sides attempted to contain. By the late nineteenth century, the Irish middle class had benefited in very obvious ways from a number of traditions that were progressive in nineteenth-century terms. Joyce could be ambiguous about precise forms of dissent and certainly angered by the slowness of reform, and what he often perceived as the hypocrisy of English Liberal politicians. It is well known that he despised William Gladstone and regarded the Liberal party in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a weapon that could be used against Ireland.21 But, in the broader sense, Joyce was a product of liberalising dynamics and it was from this foundation, and his attachment to a late modern, existential version of romanticism, that he separated out from conservative cultural nationalism and its counterpart race fantasies, adopting a ‘legal-rational’ approach to Irish politics, as opposed to one based on notions of Irish ‘cultural individuality’.22 In the early 1907 essay ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’, there

Joyce, race and racism: introduction

7

is evidence of an obvious exposure to nineteenth-century race discourse – in the ideas of ‘nordic aggressiveness’ and of the ‘virgin’ ‘thread’ which might theoretically designate a ‘pure’ culture. But the essential thrust dismisses race purity and the Celtic myth. It is recognisably ‘progressive’ and, for its time, radical on race: Our civilisation is a vast fabric, in which the most diverse elements are mingled, in which nordic aggressiveness and Roman law, the new bourgeois conventions and the remnant of a Syriac religion are reconciled. In such a fabric, it is useless to look for a thread that may have remained pure and virgin without having undergone the influence of a neighbouring thread. What race, or what language (if we accept the few whom a playful will seems to have preserved in ice, like the people of Iceland) can boast of being pure today? And no race has less right to utter such a boast than the race now living in Ireland . . . Do we not see that in Ireland, the Danes, the Firbolgs, the Milesians from Spain, the Norman invaders, and the Anglo-Saxon settlers have united to form a new entity, one might say under the influence of a local deity?23

This is not to say that Joyce was utterly and consistently detached from all and any forms of race consciousness. Clearly, being Irish always meant something terribly important to Joyce, and there were times, especially in the early years, when the sheer currency of race categorisation proved irresistible. Much of the 1912 lecture ‘Race and Realism in English Literature (Daniel Defoe–William Blake)’, for example, was based on an extended historical and cultural race historiography that has William III’s reign as a ‘crisis of race’, an ‘ethnic revenge’ taken by the German spirit because it had been usurped – ‘from the days of William the Conqueror onwards, no monarch of Germanic stock had wielded the English sceptre’. In a curious cultural dialectic, Joyce sees the emergence of Defoe, simultaneous with this Germanic ascendancy, as the appearance of ‘the true English spirit in literature’, a spirit of materialism contrasted conventionally, and following Matthew Arnold and Ernest Renan, against the Celtic. On Defoe’s attempt at a ‘spiritualist study’ in Duncan Campbell (1720), which is concerned with ‘an interesting case of clairvoyance in Scotland’, Joyce accounts for Defoe in the presence of Duncan as ‘the realist in the presence of the unknown . . . the Anglo-Saxon in the presence of the Celt’. Clearly, Joyce was not entirely immune to the temptations of race discourse, or to the soporific effects of ‘peatsmoke’.24 But he was enough of a new modern and a radical, even in 1907, a long time before he became an icon of modern literature, to recognise that national identities, let alone racial ones, were complex, often irrational and based on dubious ideas. The idea of race might have remained workable at times, but Joyce decisively

8

Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake

challenged the notion of purity of race and clearly distinguished it from the concept of ‘nationality’. Nationality might easily be a ‘convenient fiction’, and must ‘find its reason for being rooted in something that surpasses and transcends and informs changing things like blood and the human word’ (i.e. language).25 By the time Joyce came to write the Wake, it seems certain that this early radicalism had become hardened and even more sensitive to the constructionist nature of social and cultural knowledge about race and nationality – this in the contexts of both living in Europe and joining the very front frank of European artistic and intellectual life. The notebook evidence can be very suggestive here.26 It shows Joyce making many notes about race history and racial classification, especially in the earlier stages of Work in Progress. JJA, VI.B.5, 142 contains a table that indicates Joyce thinking about how race classification, far from being a matter of science, is culturally relative. Thus while in ‘France’ the Frank identity is notable for its ‘civic’ qualities, in ‘Ireland’ civicness becomes attached to the ‘English’. The notebooks also show that Joyce, certainly in the mid1920s, was particularly interested in both scientists and social scientists who wrote about race. Quite often, these were very much on the left, as was J. B. S. Haldane, for instance. Haldane’s futuristic, and optimistic, account of social and scientific development, Daedalus or the Science of the Future (1924), a source for the Wake, was later used to produce Aldous Huxley’s dystopia, Brave New World (1932) – an unfortunate usage in many ways because Haldane was a scientist who attacked the kind of naked social Darwinism that Huxley saw as being operated by the state of the future. Far from recommending eugenics, Haldane protested against those who ‘having discovered the existence of biology . . . attempted to apply it in its then very crude condition to the production of a race of supermen . . . They [eugenists] certainly succeeded in producing the most violent opposition and hatred amongst the classes whom they somewhat gratuitously regarded as undesirable parents.’27 His comment that ‘[i]t took man 250,000 years to transcend the hunting pack. It will not take him so long to transcend the nation’28 was noted by Joyce at NBB, VI.B.1, 61 (c) as ‘250,000 to transcend/hunting pack/ – nation’. More important still in this respect was Leon Metchnikoff’s La Civilisation et les grandes fleuves historiques (1899). Metchnikoff was a radical social scientist, associated with anarchism and important to Joyce because of his work on I.viii, the ALP and ‘rivers’ episode of the Wake. La Civilisation, which Joyce was reading in 1924, was a work that examined rivers in terms of their social and cultural influence. But Metchnikoff was also a vociferous opponent of scientific racism.

Joyce, race and racism: introduction

9

His book included a chapter entitled ‘Race’ (chapter four) which demolished ‘all possible arguments for racist theories by showing the inadequacies of classifications based on skin colour, on the form of the skull, or on language’.29 Some of the passages that interested Joyce were as follows. The first was noted at NBB, VI.B.1, 75 (a) as ‘races – hair/skull [hue]’: Depuis le sie`cle dernier, on a souvent essaye´ de se´parer le genre humain en groupes distincts et cate´goriquement de´finis. Certaines de ces tentatives se basaient sur la coloration de la peau, et, cependant, nul ne songerait a` de´terminer d’apre`s la nuance de son pelage a` quelle race appartient un chien ou un cheval; d’autres classent les hommes d’apre`s la section du cheveu [. . .]; d’autres encore d’apre`s la forme du craˆne. [Since the previous century, frequent attempts have been made to separate the human species into distinct and categorically defined groups. Some of these attempts were grounded on skin-colour and yet no one would dream of determining which race a dog or horse belonged to on the basis of their fur-coat. Others classed men according to the cut of their hair [. . .] yet others according to the shape of their skull.]30

This second was noted at NBB, VI.B.1, 75 (b) as ‘change language/ – marry. les races se sont divise´es, disperse´es, meˆle´es, croise´es en toutes proportions, en toutes directions, depuis des milliers de sie`cles; la plupart ont quitte´ leur langue pour celle des vainqueurs, puis l’ont abandonne´e, pour une troisie`me, sinon une quatrie`me [races were divided, dispersed, mixed and crossed in all proportions, in all directions, for thousands of centuries. Most of them abandoned their language for that of their conquerors only then to abandon that one for a third, if not a fourth.]

Notebook evidence is notoriously difficult to interpret, for many reasons. Not least, the nature of Joyce’s notes, usually taken without any comment or contextual information, makes it impossible to know whether approval, disapproval, or some entirely different mechanism is at work. At the very least, however, the notebooks confirm the importance of placing the Wake in a diversity of histories and, because of the many modern and European sources that Joyce utilised, help to develop a sensitivity to the fact that Finnegans Wake was constructed and published not just during a critical phase of Ireland’s colonial/postcolonial history but also at a turning point in the history of both the modernising project and of racism. The most grotesque manifestation of the modern spirit, the industrially organised death camp, occurred in close chronological proximity to the writing and publication of the Wake. Racial identity had never been more vital, nor the implications of being of the ‘wrong’ race more grave. As Poliakov puts it, ‘the most important differentiation between the inhabitants of Europe was that between Aryans and Semites: the former were permitted to live,

10

Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake

the latter condemned to die’.31 This polarisation affected Joyce in close and personal ways. It brought new urgencies to already difficult family circumstances, determining the final move from Paris to Zurich and compelling Joyce to explain at the Swiss border that he was not in fact ‘juif de Jude´e mais aryen d’Erin’. At least one of Joyce’s friends, Paul Le´on, was murdered by the Nazis for his race and, as is well known, Joyce used his contacts in Paris to help some sixteen Jews escape from the country he invariably referred to at this time as ‘Hitlerland’.32 Even without these personal dimensions, however, it is hard to imagine any significant cultural intervention of this period, let alone the book supposed to include everything, not taking position on the race issue in its most modern European form. It is unsurprising, then, that at one level illustration of the Wake’s engagement with race politics is a relatively straightforward matter. The Wake registers many references to German race pride and Nazism, almost all of them insulting – like ‘erst curst Hun’ at 76.32; ‘Achdung’ at 100.5; the reference to ‘Finn MacCool’ being ‘evacuated at the mere appearance of three germhuns’ (127.12–13), and the splendid mockery of the Nazi slogan (‘Heil Hitler! Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fu¨hrer’) at 191.7–8 – ‘heal helper! one gob, one gap, one gulp and gorger of all’. The Nazi salute is darkly mocked in ‘Seek hells’ (228.6); the Nazi leader cult diminished and made childish to the rhythm of ‘Ten Men Went to Mow’ in ‘hun men wend to raze a leader’ (278.21). Storm troopers, jackboots worn by Tim Finnegan, the Gestapo, the Strength Through Joy movement,33 Hitler’s road-building programme and so on, are all meted out a similar treatment. If the Wake’s participation in race politics was restricted to these lively insults, however, it would be of limited interest. The argument here is more complex and substantial. Far from being so self-referential as to be apolitical, the Wake locates ideas of racial origin and language classification in terms of the Western intellectual tradition and interrupts these with a subversion that is astonishingly original in its form. Notions of pure racial identity, for example, so much at the heart of scientific racism, are thoroughly disposed of in unique ways. Hilarious versions of race origin, race dispersal and race meeting – often seen as being somehow just Irish – become parodic assaults on an academy that for more than two hundred years had tried to establish race as an essential condition; to classify, scientifically, racial difference and similarity and to chart history in racial terms. In this kind of context, the treatment of race in the Wake cannot be limited to ‘allusiveness’ to the Nazis. On the contrary, it goes to the very heart of the Wake and the kind of radical cultural practice in which it

Joyce, race and racism: introduction

11

engages. Its merging of characters, for instance, for many readers since Adaeline Glasheen a key marker of the Wake text, becomes a hugely comic version of races merging, a ‘confusioning of human races’ (35.5), which has the effect of utterly destroying any notion of race purity and singularity of race origin. Language functions similarly. Joyce’s bizarre version of ‘babeling’ (6.31) completely undermines any idea of sorting out a confusion of tongues into a scientific order that can be linked to race identity.34 Chapters one and two of this study examine this race politics in terms of the Aryan myth. Already being challenged, Aryanism had nevertheless been at the centre of intellectual life for over a century and still had enormous cultural purchase through the 1920s and 1930s. It was without doubt one of the most compelling voices of unreason to emerge against Enlightenment traditions that had insisted on the common nature of humanity. Moreover, its variants – Germanism, Teutonism, AngloSaxonism and, later, Celticism – remained largely intact as cultural identities, and these had roots that went back well into the sixteenth century and were centrally connected to the rise of the modern state and Protestantism. Chapter one gives an overview of Joyce’s treatment of the Aryan myth, and also shows how his interest in Giambattista Vico was linked to the importance of New Science in terms of race theory history. In particular, it shows how New Science operated as an intervention against very early versions of Aryanism in the early eighteenth century – these sought separatist origins for European races in nonbiblical forms. It did so by insisting on the single origins of humanity and on the universality of social progress. Chapter two continues this discussion with a reading that understands both AngloSaxonism, a major English identity since the Henrican Reformation, and Celticism, a much later Anglo-Irish/Irish cultural formation, as being intimately related to the same Aryan myth. This chapter also shows how Irish republicanism, certainly in the De Valera formulation, became implicated with Aryanism, a development reflected in structural ways in the Wake, in its great cycles of possession and dispossession and, especially, in the movement that establishes Shaun as the Aryanist/republican who, from III.i to III.iv, displaces HCE and ALP. Chapter three of Joyce, Race and ‘Finnegans Wake’ returns to the intellectual establishment and the wide number of guises in which race discourse appeared as knowledge. It reconstructs a broad cultural environment where scientific racism shaped such disciplines as eugenics, sociology and anthropology, craniology and palaeontology, and shows how this culture is both reflected and refracted in the Wake. In particular, it demonstrates how the Wake chaos undermines the order of radical social

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Darwinism implicit in all these forms of knowledge. There is particular reference here, however, to palaeoanthropology and to eugenics, the latter being read, in part, through the American social science which produced the controversial studies of the ‘Jukes’ and the ‘Kallikaks’. On the face of it, chapter four, concerned with theosophy and the Wake, looks out of place because theosophy is usually taken to be very far removed from any version of reason and rationality. It is one thing to construct Aryanism as a form of knowledge that once had great authority, and to explore its relations with Celticism and the wider academy, but theosophy must always have had limited cultural purchase. With its interest in Hermeticism and the occult, it is typically understood as being at the very antithesis of the Enlightenment and can have little to do with scientific rationalism – indeed, it was the science establishment that was to expose Blavatsky and her colleagues as frauds. But while it is true that Madame Blavatsky, the leading theosophist, did excoriate the Enlightenment as a disastrous turning point in human history, she was nevertheless fascinated by both modern natural and social science, notably where they could be construed to confirm the superiority of the ‘ancients’. It was in this context that theosophy became so interested in race histories, and especially the Aryan race. Ironically, then, it is quite possible to understand theosophy as a species of rationality, albeit rationality gone bizarrely awry. This is the suggestion here – that the real significance of theosophy for Joyce is that, like Aryanism, it is emblematic of a modernity that in crucial ways diverted from its traditions to produce twisted versions of reason and rationality. Chapter five is an account of how nonwhite races are represented in the Wake, the emphasis being on the idea of ‘black’ races, and on Orientalism. Both feature in the Wake in highly theatricalised ways. ‘Black’ is most frequently linked to minstrel shows and to the Zip Coon and Jim Crow figures that were white impersonations of black life. Or it is similarly reconstituted from white versions of black America in other fictional or dramatic forms, as in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884) or Marc Connelly’s popular Broadway hit, and later Hollywood film, The Green Pastures (1936). The Oriental Other is, likewise, constructed in the Wake from theatrical versions, from Gilbert and Sullivan Japanoiserie, or, more typically, from the Orient as it was portrayed in West End musical comedies and pantomimes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Again, race becomes especially linked to the modern, though here in a rather different way. As well as being specifically undermined as a form of knowledge, as Aryanism is, Orientalism is also reproduced in the contexts of modern spectacle and the reproductive powers of popular culture.

Joyce, race and racism: introduction

13

Some of the main threads of this study are drawn together in the penultimate chapter, ‘Filth, fascism and the family’. This focuses on positioning the Wake in relation to fascism, the political ideology that most completely transformed scientific racism into state policy. The particular emphasis here is on reading the Wake against fascism through a consideration of the gender politics that surrounded fascist ideology and the racial state. It is argued that the entirely ‘dysfunctional’ Wake family is a devastating riposte to the idealisations propagandised in the ‘ideal Reich’. At the same time, this chapter seeks to establish the vulgar as a demotic articulation that is key to the Wake, not least because of the ways in which it operates on fascist ideology. Here its primary function is to puncture and deflate the hygenicism that characterised gender and race discourse in Nazi Germany. The final chapter of Joyce, Race and ‘Finnegans Wake’, by way of conclusion, involves strategies quite distinct from the ‘thematic’ approaches taken from chapters two to five. It is a discussion of how the idea of race impacts on key critical debates that have surrounded the Wake since the beginning – the issues of where the Wake can be placed, if anywhere, in terms of literary tradition, for example, and how to describe its ‘radicalism’ in both literary and wider cultural senses. For Joyce, Race and ‘Finnegans Wake’ is what Daniel Ferrer, in distinguishing between ‘genetic’ criticism and more critical work, has termed ‘a conceptualist approach’.35 It participates in these debates about the Wake and tradition at a fundamental level. A reading of the Wake that attempts to get behind the wider Wakean project, it intersects with the problem of where, and how, to delineate the Wake as an engagement with society and culture, seeking to read the Wake as an intervention that is, in the broadest sense, political. The aim here, then, is to conclude with an assessment of how such a political approach works against established ‘conceptualist’ traditions of Wake reading and the standard critical issues they have raised. Such an aim includes drawing attention to the ways in which the Joyce text has itself been racialised by conceptualist readers of the past and present.

CHAPTER

2

‘No such race’: Finnegans Wake and the Aryan myth

— Tallhell and Barbados wi ye and your Errian coprulation! Pelagiarist! . . . Y’are absexed, so y’are, with mackerglosia and mickroocyphyllicks James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 525.5–6

‘ARYANIA’ It could be argued that ideas of race have always been at the centre of the Western academy. The historian Le´on Poliakov would go even further. ‘The search for origins,’ he writes, ‘the attempt to find one’s identity through one’s ancestors, has always been the concern of human groups in every age and culture.’1 Such an idea, incidentally, has an obvious bearing on Ulysses, a ‘novel’ which in many critical traditions is understood precisely as a search for origins. Stephen Dedalus’s Japhetic search for a father, imaged in the contemplation of his navel as a direct link to Adam (see U, 3.39–44), is an initial frame for a narrative often described, certainly in older critical traditions, in terms of a ‘meeting’ between Stephen the son and Bloom the father.2 It could be argued that what Stephen expresses here, though individualised and acculturated as the identity crisis of a young man caught between Irish and English traditions, is more substantially suggestive of a generalised condition. This would involve a sense of identity more primal than individualised or ‘postcolonial’, one perhaps related to the kind of informalities often implicated in the Wake, ‘the sort of softball sucker motru used to tell us when we were all biribiyas or nippies and messas’ (114.26–28). It is clear, however, that the character of race discourses, and their status, has shifted dramatically over time and it is especially in this context that Poliakov’s notion of a universal drive for race identity must become much qualified by specific and precise historicisation. Most notably in recent times, the Holocaust proved a watershed separating the rise and full development of scientific racism from the sharp backpedalling that followed, both 14

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in the academy and culture more generally. Underpinning the inevitable shame and disgust of the postwar world, major intellectual developments fundamentally challenged the grand theory that had previously characterised the Western intellectual tradition. Shifts in philosophical paradigms, some would say the end of philosophy, made the progress historiographies so fundamental to scientific racism virtually unserviceable for post-1960s intellectual culture, with the corollary that connections between long-term modernising dynamics and racism became well established. One of the strategies in the post-1945 realignment with modernity was the dismantling of Aryanism, a process involving the recognition that what was once important knowledge about Aryan culture was now no more than myth. Aryanism became not just a laughable and wicked absurdity, but also an ideology central to the development of nationalism and the modern European state. Poliakov was an important figure here, with The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe (1971) setting new benchmarks for historical writing on the subject. Here, following Vico in some respects, Poliakov argued that European myths of origin, from a very early age, allowed ruling dynasties ‘to claim a distinct and superior descent’, and usually ‘showed a distinct preference for German blood’.3 The first part of The Aryan Myth traces the character and development of these myths in France, Britain, Italy, Spain and Germany, showing how in the latter, for example, autochtonic race histories were emerging as early as the seventeenth century. Writing of Grimmelshausen’s ‘German Michael’ (Teutschen Michael ), Poliakov sees the essential characteristics of a much later nationalism: The Germans [here] are a pure race; they have been settled in Europe since time immemorial, before the confusion of Babel; they subjected the whole of the West after overpowering the Roman eagles and they founded dynasties and aristocracies. The circle is completed with a eulogy of the language, this also being pure, ‘a language of heroes existing for and by itself ’, as distinct from the other ‘patched up’ languages which are like a ‘harlequins coat’.4

Such lines of descent, often articulated in myths, histories and genealogies that were every bit as complex and, indeed, bizarre, as their counterparts in the Wake, conflicted with the biblical myth of a common human descent from Adam, the universal father, or, rather, diverged from ‘monogenesis’ where all races were thought to derive from Adam. With ‘polygenesis’, it was argued that only the Jews descended directly from Adam, all other races deriving from Noah’s sons. According to Poliakov, who drew on rabbinical interpretation, this former Judaeo-Christian tradition – the

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one toyed with by Dedalus in the Telemachia – was antiracist and antinationalist, ‘intended to teach all men that they are in reality equal’. In Poliakov’s analysis modernity involved quite distinct traditions that attacked the ‘doctrine of the equality of the human race’, though, as he points out, this was an idea about which ‘people always had secret misgivings’. He finds evidence of modern racism much earlier than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – in Renaissance Spain, for example, where there were statutes relating to ‘the purity of blood’ brought about by segregation between old Christians and the ‘conversos’ who had converted from Islam to Christianity and whose ‘blood was tainted’.5 Poliakov’s point, however, is that with modernity, and despite the doctrines of eighteenthcentury egalitarianism, scientific racism began its inexorable rise. Poliakov understands the modern, as virtually all serious commentators do, as rationalist and scientific, but in its early forms the modern could hardly divorce itself from scriptural authority and expect to flourish. Rather than draw on creationist myths that were, in any case, unusable from the point of view of race separatists, Noarchic traditions were therefore utilised, as they had been many times before, in the service of a new rationalism.6 In the Renaissance it was to such issues as the size of Noah’s ark, or the logical difficulties involved in the idea of a universal flood that science and rationalism had been applied. Now the story of Noah and his three sons, Ham, Shem and Japhet, were commandeered in the service of scientific classification to underpin separatist accounts of origins based on perceived class or, more usually, race identities. William Jones’s discovery in 1786 of certain similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German and Celtic, and his postulation that there might be a common parentage for these languages, was thus both ‘Japhetic’ (Japhet usually being thought of as the father of the European races) and understood by Hegel to be ‘the discovery of a new world’.7 Bopp’s Comparative Grammar (1835) insisted that Zend, Slavonic, Albanian and Armenian must also be included in what he called ‘the Indo-German family of speech’, and this, too, was initially expressed in Japhetic terms, though the expressions ‘Indo-European’ and ‘Aryan’ later became more fashionable.8 In itself the ‘Indo-European’ idea of languages was indeed a hugely important discovery. According to one modern anthropologist, it ‘represents, perhaps, the greatest modern intellectual achievement in the humanities’.9 The problem was in the spread of Aryanism, initially to history and anthropology, where scientific racism was used not simply to analyse structure in language but to explain a highly racialised ‘world history’. Popularised in intellectual terms by such figures as Georges-Louis Buffon,

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Hume, Kant and Voltaire, such ideas helped to prepare ‘the ground for the racial hierarchies of the following century’. Here the Aryan theory became fully developed, elevated ‘to the main current of scientific progress’ and corroborated by leading and influential intellectuals of the century – Johann Herder, Joseph Gobineau, Hippolyte Taine, Louis Jacolliot, Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine, Arthur Schopenhauer, Jules Michelet, Max Mu¨ller, Max Stirner, and so on.10 Supported by Orientalists, Aryanism by the early nineteenth century opposed Jewish genealogy with the idea that history had its origins not in the Middle East but in the mountains of Asia, the Himalayas so much played on in the Wake as a place of origins/destinations. At 4.36–5.1, for instance, one of Finnegan’s buildings is ‘erigenating from next to nothing and celescalating the himals’, establishing the pun across ‘Himalayas’ and ‘himmel’, the German word for heaven, which recurs dozens of times in the Wake, at 12.20 for instance; 138.1 (‘hebrew set to himmeltones’); 191.34–36; 502.5; 566.29 (‘Hummels! That crag!’); 580.13 (‘himmertality’); 599.5 (‘oura vatars that arred in Himmal’), and so on. For some, ‘Arya’ was the birthplace of all human culture; for what became a much more influential brand of genealogy, however, ‘it was not the whole human race but one particular race – a white race which subsequently became Christian – which had descended from the mountains of Asia to colonise and populate the West’.11 With the discovery of connections between Sanskrit and many European languages, the idea of an original ‘Aryan’ language (the ‘ur sprogue’ at FW, 507.22 or ‘ursprogue’ – Danish for original language) became the ‘scientific’ centrepiece of Aryanism, leading all the anthropological and historical discourses that followed. Some have argued that the history of this dynamic has been miswritten in some ways (see, for example, Christopher Hutton’s view that ‘Gobineau has been cast as the villain of nineteenth-century Western thought whereas in fact race theory belonged as much to bourgeois, progressive liberals such as the linguist August Pott, and natural scientists such as Ernst Haeckel’). Few would dispute, however, that the broad outlines are established, including the centrality of linguistics – ‘ideas about an Indo-European (Indo-Germanic, Aryan) people (or race or tribe) derive from linguistics; race science took its lead from the study of language’.12 By 1860 ‘the division between Aryans and Semites was already part of the intellectual baggage of all cultivated Europeans’, though it was only a short while before the flimsiness of Aryanism began to be apparent.13 The general idea of a European race whose origins were distinct from that of the Jews

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proved tenacious, but the other plank of Aryanist thought, the notion of the Aryan migrations, of Europeans descending from Asia, was under attack as early as the late 1860s. Misgivings were developed by figures such as the cultural anthropologist Edward B. Tylor and in archaeology by such figures as Saloman Reinach. In 1892 the latter wrote that ‘[t]o speak of an Aryan race existing three thousand years ago is to put forward a gratuitous exercise; to speak about it as though it still existed today is quite simply nonsense’.14 The growing questioning of the Aryan myth, however, was marginal in terms of its wider impact outside the academy. The early decades of the twentieth century, far from dismantling the Aryan myth, saw the further development of Aryanism and anti-Semitism in popular culture. In more general terms, race remained a crucial and, for most, fixed category of identity, and Western triumphalism a defining characteristic of the ‘Age of Empire’. Kenan Malik writes that ‘[by] the end of the nineteenth-century, nationalism and racial thinking had ceased to be an e´lite ideology and became part of popular culture’.15 Although a fully developed history of the impact of Aryanism on popular culture in the West has yet to be written, its effects on popular literature, song, exhibitions, theatre, the press, and so on have been discussed in many accounts and are not difficult to visualise. Aryanism was implicated in new traditions of Christian militarism and militarist athleticism in schools, for instance – these being typically constructed in terms of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or other Germanic identities and contributing readily to the national rituals and political processes that were part of Western life. Both at the fin de sie`cle and between the wars, the cultural fabric of Europe was decisively shaped by Aryanism. It is against this context that race discourse becomes fundamental to Finnegans Wake. This is true of the detail in Joyce’s ‘book of breedings’ (410.1–2) and ‘fornicolopulation’ (557.17), where Tim Finnegan is a hodcarrying Celt and HCE, often seen in Anglo-Saxon, or Anglo-Irish terms, is also a ‘Ruddy blond, Armenian’. ALP at one point has a ‘Nubian shine’ (559.24–25/28). Shem is both a ‘pure blood Jebusite, centy procent Erserum spoking’ (240.28) and ‘a nogger among the blankards’ (188.13), and Wyndham Lewis’s notion of a dull, methodical Joyce, apparent in Time and the Western Man (1927) is reproduced in Shaun, the Aryanist who is also, by his own admission, a ‘slav to methodiousness’ (159.30–31). But race is also important to the wider scheme of things. Vincent Cheng has argued that standard strategies of racism are defeated by Wake aesthetics: ‘all attempts to assert the Self by denying the Other are problematised as unstable in the multipleness of Finnegans Wake’.16 Equally, the bizarre

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narratology obsessed with origins and characterised by the telling and retelling of the same stories images, and at the same time ridicules, the essential practices of Aryanism and scientific racism. Here the search for noble origins and teleological meaning is thoroughly undermined, not just by mixed and multiple identities but by the rigorous contamination of the vulgar and the mundane, by astonishing repetition and the complete failure of any kind of historical certainty – ‘the unfacts, did we possess them . . . [being] too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude’ (57.16–17). Thus ‘the purest kidooleyoon wherein our madernacerution of lour lore is rich’ (107.19–20) becomes the common currency of Finnegans Wake. The astonishing language strategies of Joyce’s text are also strongly involved here. Comprised of so many languages, Wake-speak17 (‘celtelleneteutoslavzendlatin soundscript’ – 219.17) is a sharply comic representation both of an ‘original’ language from which all other languages can be taken to have descended, and of language ‘contamination’ where a prototype language, spread through migrations and conquest, merges with the languages of the conquered, or assimilated, tribes and peoples. It images, in fantastically grotesque forms, the pure language of Aryanist eulogy, ‘a language of heroes existing for and by itself ’, but most obviously it is a comic, embracing version of the corrupted languages of Aryanist scorn, the ‘patched up’ languages which are like a ‘harlequins coat’. Indeed, the Joyce persona in the Wake features not just as the mock scholarly master of ‘patched up’ language, but also as its first serious poet. To put this idea in slightly different terms, the Wake makes a mess not just of English as is commonly maintained, but also of what was in many ways the science of the nineteenth century – the historical linguistics that tried to construct language in terms of historiography and racial order. Thus to talk about language and the Wake is not necessarily to focus on aesthetics; the subject, and politics, of language is also implied here. Now, Wake language is used for a vast range of purposes and it would be absurd to claim that language subversion in the Wake was singularly devoted to overturning the European drive to establish the historical reality of a ‘pure’ language. But there can be no question that precisely such an overturning is the effect of the Wake. Obsessed with all origins – the first building; the first city; the first act of sex; the first writing; ‘the first peace of illiterative porthery in all the flamend floody flatuous world’ (this being claimed of the prankquean tale at 23.9–10), and so on – the Wake is also famously concerned with originary language. But here the idea of the first ‘yew’ and ‘eye’ (23.36) is a matter of comic treatment rather than ‘science’. ‘Pure’ language is entirely compromised not just by the fact of cross-language

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puns and portmanteaus but inasmuch as the Wake revels so much in its own ‘contamination’. The genetic model of historical linguistics, which ignored what it constructed as irrelevancies or ‘unsystematic intrusions’ and focused on an essential ‘core’, is entirely undermined by the Wake.18 Any ideas of a true ‘development’ of language are wrecked by the impact of the accidental, the playful and the contrived. Similarly, the so-called ‘pidgins’ and ‘creoles’, ignored in traditional linguistics as irrelevancies to the main strand of language ‘development’, are massively deployed in the Wake. That there is a politics to this language intervention is made very clear in the Wake. ‘The war’ is very often ‘in words’ (98.34–35) and this is specifically contextualised in race history when the song sung by ‘rival teams of slowspiers’ (174.28) in I.vii refers to a time when ‘Not yet have the Sachsen and Judder on the Mound of a Word made Warre’ (175.12–13). In the age of nationalism and empire, when ‘lineage was what the politicians and intellectuals wanted’ and ‘lineage was what the model of historical linguistics, par excellence, provided’, language was very much proper grounds for dissent.19 Against this context, the anti-Aryanism of the Wake takes on wide dimensions, though, as usual in this text, it is quite often the small detail that points to the larger picture – the placement of ‘hyssop’, suggesting a word so much connected with Jewish life, directly next to the resonantly Germanic ‘Hock!’ for example (423.10) could be accidental, or could point to what in the 1930s would be an explosive consanguinity (see also the Donnerwetter allusion (‘tonnerwater’) at 368.7, which is linked to the deluge and followed by a reference to the wailing wall). There can be no doubt, however, about the ‘gttrdmmrng’ usage at 258.02. The Hebraicising of a word (Hebrew having no vowels) so definitively Germanic, and important to Aryanism, as ‘Go¨tterda¨mmerung’ can only be a decisive act of artistic warfare. Besides its status in language terms, the Wake is also famous as a text which exposes ‘the secrest of . . . soorcelossness’ (23.19), but it does so in the context of a joke passion for the idea of origins and lineage, for ‘hereditatis columna erecta’ (131.30) or ‘the lofty column of inheritance’20 and answers to such burning questions as, ‘What secondtonone myther rector and maximost bridgesmaker was the first to rise taller through his beanstale?’ (126.10–11). The mock obsession with origins is paralleled by equally compelling concerns around race identification, the drama of race meeting, when the ‘civilised’ meets the ‘barbarian’, race conflict and diaspora. It is argued here that these orientations, whatever else they may relate to, are substantially configured in terms of a central engagement with discourses

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that were once prestigious and dominant in the Western academy, and intimately connected with the rise of modernity. These discourses, designed to prove ‘scientifically’ and beyond all doubt the superiority of the West and its emergence from non-Semite beginnings in ancient ‘India’, visualised ‘Arya’ (or ‘Aryania’ as the Wake has it, 129.34) as a real place, the origin of the ‘stream’ by which the very best of civilisation spread. They also became crucial to the rationale that made anti-Semitism not just respectable but reasonable. The essential argument here is that the Wake assaults this kind of ‘reasoning’. Indeed, in terms of its specific response to Aryanism and its variants, it appropriates, conflates, confuses and complicates. Scientific racism is ridiculed, not just through ‘allusions’, but as a product of the Wake’s monstrous language, inveterate and hopelessly confused storytelling, the disastrously uncertain identification of its characters, and so on. The notorious difficulty of the Wake reflects outwards, so to speak, on the absurdities of ‘rationalism’ gone badly wrong at the fundamental level of culture, with the Wake becoming a vast comic parody of the European imperative to establish itself as the prototype society of the first race. In this sense the Wake is designed as a monstrous failure – a failure to concoct ‘pure’, original language, to find racial origins and to construct the dimensions of racial identity – which also means that the famous structure of the Wake, often noted for its apparent lyricism, also has a sharp satiric edge. The circularity of the Wake here does not, as in Yeats for instance, denote philosophical commitment to an essentialist, and mystical, conception of time, but is, rather, a disputation with a racialised idea of progress. It is especially for this reason, for its exposure of the absurdities at the heart of race discourse and the parallel discourses of such fin de sie`cle ‘sciences’ as criminology, eugenics, phrenology and craniology, that the Wake deserves to be read as a thoroughly politicised text of the interwar years. This chapter sets out to establish the case for reading the Wake in terms of the Aryan myth, first through a rereading of Vico and Joyce which shows how New Science (1744) was, at a fundamental level, concerned with the issue of race origins. Here Vico’s refusal to accept European myths of origin, and the wonderfully haughty manner in which he excoriated their perpetrators, becomes part of the great attraction for Joyce, and marks Joyce’s attachment to a progressive Enlightenment tradition. The second part of this argument, in chapter two, examines the English, Irish and European reception of Aryanism, the purpose being to reconstruct some dimensions of a cultural and political environment where Aryanism, far from being a generally despised ideology, as it is today, was actually

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respectable ‘knowledge’ for mainstream educated society across Europe – in the liberal heartlands, as well as on the more ‘spiritual’ Celtic fringes. It should be emphasised that the broader intention cuts across a more familiar tradition of Wake criticism, which generally insists on the postmodernity and utter contemporaneity of Joyce’s text, to go some way towards understanding an early to mid-twentieth-century context for reading Joyce’s last and most problematic work. ON VICO AND RACE THEORY

Everything we know about the ancient pagan nations . . . is completely uncertain. Giambattista Vico

Vico’s New Science is usually held to be central to Finnegans Wake, but our understanding of its significance has changed relatively little since the publication of Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress in 1929, and this despite the fact that a full-length study on Joyce and Vico has been produced as well as a collection of essays and many separate essays and articles.21 Among the most standard formulations regarding the Wake since that time has been that it embodies Vico’s theory of the development of human language, an idea that gets extended treatment in John Bishop’s Joyce’s Book of the Dark (1986),22 and that it repeats, both in its four-part structure and in countless details, a ‘cyclical’ view of history, a pattern of endlessly returning cycles. All of which makes Vico seem a curious influence on what is typically held to be the most selfconsciously modern text of all time, because New Science seems so unmodern and is often specifically antimodern. The notion that speech ‘was born in the mute age as a mental language’, or that spoken language emerged as sound in imitation of thunder – the voice of God – these are curiosities; they have little or no real meaning or relevance in modern terms (NS, 157). Nor does the idea of history as an eternal cycle planned by God down to the smallest detail seem very serviceable in any contemporary context. Neither Marxist nor post-Marxist generations can make much of the insistence that history is a product of divine providence. Indeed, in this respect it is hard to conceive of a historical imagination less meaningful to contemporaneity than Vico’s. It seems that Joyce has been entirely obtuse in terms of what is usually held to be the central intertextuality of the Wake. He has located his extraordinarily difficult work in terms of a text that does, indeed, demand to be taken as ‘modern’ and ‘scientific’, but actually

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appears to owe a great deal to premodern modes of antirationalist thinking. At first glance, New Science would seem to hold little or no relevance to any formulation of modernity, let alone postmodernity. Vico might provide some sort of structural underpinning for the Wake, and is the basis for an overload of verbal play – but beyond that, what is the point of Vico in the Wake? The general critical frustration with this issue is implied in Joyce and the Invention of Irish History (1995), where Thomas Hofheinz responds with the argument that the Wake is not actually contingent on New Science in the usual sense at all. On the contrary, here Vico, far from being centrally involved in the aesthetics, structure and language strategies of the Wake, becomes subject to a treatment that is fundamentally parodic, critical and, above all, political. The Wake dismantles Vico’s ‘patriarch paradigm’; it becomes an assault on what Hofheinz sees as ‘Vico’s primary axiomatic weakness . . . the purity of the transcendent patriarchy he portrayed, a purity absolutely necessary for any professedly orthodox Catholic interpretation of history’. Thus Vico sees ‘imperialism in the Christian era’ not as destructive and repressive but as ‘a divinely ordered corrective for nations filled with ‘‘liars, tricksters, calumniators, thieves, cowards and pretenders’’’. Hofheinz continues: ‘this could be the statement of an Englishman raised on evolutionary history by which the English authorized their development as nation and empire and justified their subjugation of Ireland’, a view which is highly suggestive of the problem with this account of New Science and the Wake.23 One wonders why Vico should feature as the arch conservative behind the Wake when there were so many figures, much closer in time to Joyce and the modern Irish plantation, who could have functioned similarly? Why, in the age of modern empire, imperialism and fascism, should Vico figure so prominently as a conservative ideologist, and, moreover, how can the idea of a thoroughgoing assault on New Science be squared with what has usually been taken to be Joyce’s admiration for Vico? It is not easy to reconcile Vico the reactionary with the figure who in Beckett’s account, an account that must have been approved by Joyce, is so lionised, not least for ‘the unqualified originality of his mind’.24 Vico could indeed be described as a conservative rationalist, attempting, as many others did, to reconcile orthodox Christianity with an objective method of studying the humanities and social sciences, as well as protecting both from what he saw as the wild excesses of a burgeoning romanticism. This in part explains Beckett’s insistence right at the beginning of ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’ that Vico, though having a reputation for

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being a ‘mystic’, was in fact ‘a practical roundheaded Neapolitan’, ‘an innovator’ and ‘scientific historian’ who rejected the ‘transcendental’ in favour of the ‘rational’.25 Vico, for all his allegiances to what now appears as myth, operated as a pragmatic humanist who insisted on common sense, as well as the rigorous application of method. It was entirely consistent with Joyce’s lifelong preference for the Aristotelian over the Platonic, with his famous ‘classicism’ and attraction to the ‘schoolmen’, that he should value Vico. But there was a further dimension to Joyce’s interest. Not only part of a rationalist tradition that Joyce generally admired, Vico was also a key figure in the history of race discourse. More to the point, his status as a rationalist was crucially determined, if somewhat problematically, by what he had to say about race and the ‘ouragan of spaces’ (FW, 504. 14). At a time when Germanic versions of racial origin were beginning to formulate around linguistics and history in a prototype Aryanism, New Science was centrally concerned with an attack on what Vico refers to as ‘the vanity of nations’ in constructing ‘illustrious origins’ for themselves’ (NS, 65). Against all the insistence of a new wave that was arguing for European as opposed to Semite histories of race, Vico’s work crucially maintained that the origin of humanity was singular, the same for all societies and cultures, as was its ‘development’. The central thesis of ‘my New Science’ was that ‘divine providence ordained the natural law of nations separately for each people, who recognised its universality only after they came into contact with other peoples’ (NS, 235). Vico’s key argument here is that there is a universal law underpinning the development of what only appeared to be diverse societies and cultures. Thus ‘human institutions’ have a common and essential nature. It is this that lies behind Vico’s notion of ‘a conceptual language’ common to all nations – a language that ‘uniformly grasps the substance of all the elements of human society, but expresses them differently according to their different aspects’ (NS, 84). From this basis, he roundly attacks the early Germanists of Scandinavia and Holland who were claiming to have discovered non-Semitic origins of language, culture and race: During the medieval return of barbarism, the conceit of nations caused Scandinavia to be called the womb of nations, vagina gentium, and to be considered the mother of all the other nations in the world. In their conceit as scholars, Johannes and Olaus Magnus fancied that the letters divinely invented by Adam had been preserved by the Goths since the beginning of the world. This illusion was derided by scholars everywhere. But that did not prevent Jan van Gorp from following and even surpassing their example. He claimed that his Dutch language, which is similar to the Low German of the Saxons, came from the earthly paradise

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of Eden and was the mother of all other tongues. Van Gorp’s opinion was mocked by Joseph Justus Scaliger, Philip Camerarius, Christian Becman, and Martin Schoock. Yet this conceit puffed itself up and burst in the Atlantica of Olof Rudbeck, who maintained that the letters of the Greek alphabet were derived from Norse runes. Supposedly, these runes were simply the Phoenician letters inverted, to which Cadmus later assigned an order and pronunciation similar to that of Hebrew letters, and which the Greeks eventually straightened and rounded out using a rule and compass. And since the Scandinavians call the inventor of letters Merkurssman, Rudbeck insists that the Mercury who invented the letters of the Egyptians was a Goth! (NS, 171–72)

Vico utterly ridicules such ‘far-fetched speculations about the origins of letters’ (NS, 172). National history, fundamentally concerned with myths of origin, becomes a twisted manipulation for the purposes of aggrandisement, or, as the Wake has it, ‘the national cursives [archives] . . . [are] envenomoloped in piggotry’ (99.18–19). ‘[W]hen nations first became aware of their origins,’ Vico writes, ‘and scholars first studied them, they judged them according to the enlightenment, refinement, and magnificence of their age, when in fact by their very nature these origins must rather have been small, crude and obscure.’ Vico approves Diodorus Siculus, who thought that ‘all the nations, both Greek and barbarian, think they were the very first to invent the comforts of human life, and that they preserve memories of their history from the beginning of the world’ (NS, 76). But the myths, legends, genealogies and histories used to substantiate these fantasies, all written after the events, are actually no more than ideological interventions. In reality all nations were barbaric in their beginnings. With considerable relish, Vico gives a great number of illustrations of ‘the vanity of nations’, showing not only how inaccurate their own ‘histories’ are, but also imagining how primitive and uncivilised these nations must once have been. In this account ancient Egyptians become entirely brutal and thoroughly unhospitable. What is usually taken to be among their greatest achievements is substantially diminished, ‘the magnificence of their obelisks and pyramids is the product of barbarism, which has an affinity for the colossal’ (NS, 40). The Greeks are ‘children’ in so far as they attempted to ‘trace their wisdom from illustrious origins in foreign antiquity’ (NS, 63); the Scythians ‘learned’, as indicated by ‘their practice of sticking a knife in the ground and worshipping it as a God’ (NS, 65). Earlier humanity still, far from being glorious and heroic as the romantics would have it, is pictured as being comprised of rough tribes of copulating giants, bearing ‘children whom they raised like beasts, lacking human customs and speech, and living in a brutish state’ (NS, 49). It could be argued that Vico’s

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most substantial and longlasting contribution to social science was, indeed, this insight and its development: that the cultural nationalism emerging in eighteenth-century Europe, and harking back to the Golden Age, or the Age of Heroes, far from constituting scientific historiography, was, in fact, an indulgence in highly romantic and potentially dangerous fantasies: In short, in an age when the ancient Germans were seeing the gods on earth, and the American tribes were too, and when the most ancient Scythians abounded in the many golden virtues we have heard praised by various authors – in this age, I say, all practised such inhuman humanity! Plautus calls all such sacrifices ‘Saturn’s victims’, Saturni hostiae, because they date from the age of Saturn, which our writers regard as the Golden Age of Latium. What a gentle, benign, moderate, tolerant, and moral age it was! (NS, 216)

This assault on national egoism strongly resonated with Joyce’s own attacks, fundamental to Ulysses, on the romantic excesses of Irish cultural nationalism.26 Far from being conservative, they could be easily appropriated by the left. In terms of twentieth-century Europe, they were absolutely consonant with any ambition to deflate modern nationalism – the surging jingoism that across the West honoured the ‘eirest race, the ourest nation, the airest place that erestationed’ – (FW, 514.36–515.1) and a German fascism that was crucially founded on scientific racism. Not least because the corollary to Vico’s concerted deflation of national mythologising was an affirmation of the biblical version of origin myths and this in turn entailed a defence of Judaism that goes to the heart of New Science. The Jews are identified as ‘the first people in the world’ and as descendants ‘of Adam who was created by the true God at the time of the world’s creation’ (NS, 44). Vico writes of ‘those divine truths’ which they learnt from ‘the true God’ (NS, 62). Biblical history becomes the one true history ‘for the Jews have preserved their traditions in great detail from the beginning of the world’ (NS, 85), the Jewish covenant with God remaining intact, in part because of their observance of God’s prohibition of divination. ‘The true God’, Vico writes, ‘founded Judaism on the prohibition of divination. By contrast, all the pagan nations sprang from divination. This axiom is one of the principal reasons why the world of ancient nations was divided into Jews and pagans’ (NS, 85). The Jewish nation, ‘the most ancient of all nations’, was and remains genuinely chosen, while the ‘impious races . . . descended from Noah’s three sons and lived in a brutish state for many years’ (NS, 91). They ‘gradually renounced the true religion of their common father Noah’ (NS, 139). In more recent times one-time pagan states are restored to God’s blessing and his divine providence, but the Jews retain their paramount status

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27

as the prototype race of civilisation, whose religion ‘is more ancient than the religions on which the pagan nations were founded’ and at the same time, somewhat strangely, ‘confirms the truth of the Christian religion’ (NS, 7). In short, Vico did not simply subscribe to the Old Testament’s affirmation of the common descent of all mankind – there is, apparently, a Talmudic saying which states that ‘the common ancestry of all mankind should edify all its Members, for none could say to another ‘‘My father is greater than thine.’’’27 His aim was to counter those who were attempting to formulate a separatist myth of origins for Europe, precisely by utilising the evolving methods of eighteenth-century rationality and scientific method. Thus the primary objective of New Science was to prove the biblical version of the common origin of man as fact, objectively. In today’s terms this may seem like a species of conservative fundamentalism which should have been of little interest to Joyce, but in fact the agenda in its entirety belonged to a radical Enlightenment tradition. It made Vico ‘among the first to embrace the idea of social progress explicitly’, a progress that was universal, as was its reversal in a cycle of decline also formulated in Vico.28 As historians of anthropology have pointed out, embedded in such schemas was a notion that was anathema to the race theorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.29 In place of their sense of races that had branched off as failed offshoots to the main development of human history, Vico insisted on the idea of a history to which all humans were subject. There was an explicit democratising and egalitarian tendency here, albeit one compromised by patriarchal ideology, and, less fundamentally but equally tellingly, by Vico’s devotion to all things Roman. His ruthless countering of scientific racism on its own terms; his wonderfully savage irony; his entirely modern understanding of the politics of race discourse: all this was more than serviceable. Joyce utilised it not only at the structural levels of the Wake but also in the detail. At the beginning of I.ii, for example, a broadly ethnographic discourse tries to trace the origins of HCE’s name ‘in the presurnames prodromarith period’. It insists that there will be a ‘discarding once for all those theories from older sources which would link him back with such pivotal ancestors as the Glues, the Gravys, the Northeasts, the Ankers and the Earwickers’ (30.5–7). As in Vico, the nation of Germanic origins linking HCE with the Vikings is rejected here for ‘the best authenticated version’, namely ‘the Dumlat’ (Talmud backwards) (30.10), which means that HCE becomes linked to Vico’s common ancestry of mankind. Joyceans may have traditionally understood Vico in terms of the formal dimensions of the Wake, which is consistent with some traditions that

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imagine Joyce as an aesthete, totally dedicated to his art and ‘heroicially’ indifferent to the world, but, in fact, the Wake’s entirely signalled devotion to Vico was itself a cultural and political statement of some significance between the wars, as was its thoroughgoing exploitation of Noarchic traditions of race origins. Far from being outmoded and irrelevant to the state of the world in the 1920s and 1930s, Vico provided Joyce with a strong, powerful retort to the tradition that was to lead to scientific racism. What he said, however conservative it might seem to a secular age, was dynamite in terms of the challenge to early eighteenth-century romanticism. It was even more so in the 1920s and 1930s when the full implications of Vico’s warnings about the ‘vanity of nations’ and the myth of Aryan origins were finally made manifest. THE

‘CONFUSIONING

OF HUMAN RACES’

The Wake engages with the Aryan myth and Germanism in a great many ways, some of which have already been suggested. The most obvious markers in some respects are the alignments made between Ireland and Arya which produces the ‘Eirenesians’ (25.17) and the ‘Arioun’ race (75.2) who migrate in Aryan fashion from the ‘himals’ (the Himalayas of the Aryan myth), albeit in a direction reversed from the usual account of things – ‘craching eastuards, they are in surgence’ (17.25).30 Similar references have been alluded to above and are contextualised and discussed more fully in the following chapter. There are also the many insults to Nazism. To the examples already given might be added the Wake’s version of a Germanised/Anglicised Lord’s Prayer at 536.34–36 (‘Haar Faagher, wild heart in Homelan; Harrod’s be the naun. Mine kinder come, mine wohl be won’); and the allusion to the Gestapo which gets at the masculinist imagemaking dimensions of the Nazi identity (‘Gestapose’ at 332.7). There is a reference to ‘gothakrauts’ at 550.11 and at 565.9–10 HCE is frightened into ‘tremblotting . . . like a verry jerry’; swastikas becomes ‘swampstakers’ (514.30), a ‘swabsister’ (566.10) and a ‘swaystick’ (569.19). The references to ‘huns’ are suggestive of a similar territory. HCE is said to have Germanic origins, for, in one account, he was born at ‘Urgothland . . . New Hunshire’ (197.9–10) and he is a ‘coerogenal hun’ at 616.20. In ALP’s history lesson in II.ii, there is a reference to a period when ‘hun tried to kill ham’ (275.21–22). At 78.5 the idea of HCE’s resurrection is understood in terms of Germanic noise – ‘Donnaurwatteur! Hunderthunder!’; Buckley is a ‘handpicked hunsbend’ (364.36); the lineage of the English royal family is militarised and racialised, as well as ridiculed via the association set up

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29

between ‘horse’ and ‘arse’,31 in ‘whuite hourse of Hunover’ – (388.16–17), and ‘hunnish familiarities’ are tempting at 392.5. Such interventions occur throughout the Wake and are quite opportunistic. There are, however, more structural relations with race discourse and Aryanism, as the Wake’s use of Noarchic traditions demonstrates. Although the Wake refers to many myths of origin, there is an obvious emphasis on the Judaeo-Christian myths that once formed the basis of all European versions of race beginnings. The most thorough exploitation here is of the Noah traditions so much associated with separatist versions of race origin. The interest in ‘noarch and a chopwife’ (20.29), and their sons Shem, Ham and Japhet, runs deep in the Wake, circumscribing family and class identities. For the most part, however, the references to the Noah myths concern race identity and race dispersal – thus the many references to the flood, a key event in traditional myths of race dispersal.32 In the Wake ‘the length of the land lies under liquidation’ (12.7). At 13.36 the Wake is situated ‘after deluge’, but at 14.16–17 it is ‘antediluvious’. Events are placed ‘above the ambijacent floodplane’ at 36.14–15 and at 51.21 there is a complaint about the weather – it was the ‘Lord’s own day for damp’; Shem’s departure in I.vii is ‘attended by a heavy downpour’ and took place ‘as very recently as some thousand rains ago’ (174.22–23); the Norwegian sea captain sails for ‘Farety days and fearty nights’ (312.9–10); Buckley’s shooting of the Russian General occurs in ‘wraimy wetter’ (347.7), and so on. The flood is a general and commonly used reference point, often connected with contradictory and utterly unreliable historical dating. In this respect the Wake echoes historiographical tradition, which is presumably the meaning of the note at NBB, VI.B.6, 2 (b) ‘floods reveal/history’. Emily Lawless’s Ireland, a known notebook source, begins with a quote that reflects this tradition, ‘‘‘It seems certain’’, says the Abbe´ Geoghegan, ‘‘that Ireland continued uninhabited from the Creation to the Deluge.’’ ’33 An earlier account, Peter Parley’s Tales About Ireland, also known to Joyce, stated more or less precisely that Ireland ‘was first inhabited about 322 years after the flood’ by ‘Partholanus, the son of Scaree’.34 This referencing characteristic is more notable in the early books of the Wake, though examples can be found throughout.35 There are also dozens of references to the name Noah, and even more to Shem, Ham and Japhet.36 As with the references to Germanism and Nazism, these, too, run through the Wake, with no obvious concentrations, though, as one would expect, the figures of HCE, Shaun and Shem provoke most usage of the biblical identities. Shaun is strongly linked to Japhet, by tradition the forefather of white Europe, and Shem is a

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composite of both Shem and Ham (see ‘Mr Himmyshimmy’ at 173.27). The latter figure, subject of a curse, typically featured as the progenitor of the ‘black’ race. In the Wake ‘Sham’ is aligned with a range of outcast racial configurations (including Irish), most aggressively so in I.vii where ‘this disinterestingly low human type’ (179.12–13) is racialised by his ‘white’ brother as ‘a nogger amongst the blankards of this dastard century’ (188.13–14). He is ‘one remove from an unwashed savage’ (191.11) and at 423.29–30 ‘forbidden tomate’. Shem’s primary identity as the penman connects him also with the medieval tradition that regarded the Shem figure as the first clerk and thus ancestor to all clerks that followed.37 As Adaline Glasheen pointed out some years ago, then, it is not simply that there are an extraordinary number of Wake references to Noah, his family and the flood. These become core identities, and enough by themselves to establish just how much the idea of race and race origins penetrates the Wake.38 Such traditions are the primary means by which history in the Wake is associated with race identity. The stories told in the Wake – and storytelling is legion here – are to a large extent marked out as tales about race and race dispersal by the many references to Noah and his sons, though patriarchal genealogy is far from limited to Judaeo-Christian myths. Europe’s challenging of that tradition with new Germanised myths of race origin is also incorporated into the Wake. There are allusions to Childeric, for example, reputed to have started the German diaspora; Magog, the mythical son of Japhet and involved in so many European origin myths, including British ones;39 Olaf, founder of Dublin; Horsa and Hengest, legendary founders of the Anglo-Saxon race in England;40 ‘Hebear and Hairyman’ (Heber and Heremon, mythical fathers of the Irish race, or, at least, ur-fathers to ‘all the kings of Ireland down to the English conquest’, 14.35–36), and so on.41 Firmly fixed ‘Inn the Byggning’ (17.22), at the first pub, ‘here where race began’ (80.16) in the ‘garden of Erin’ (203.1), the Wake and its people are driven by the search for origins, but within the great range of potential ur-stories the fact is that no single version has any more, or less, reliability than any other.42 As so often in the Wake, the effect of overdoing is to cancel out. In these ways Joyce’s ‘universal history’ constructs itself in race terms, both reflecting a culture where race and concerns about race origin are vital realities, but also, through its overdone working, reproducing ‘race’ in terms of a colossal and bizarre entanglement. At the same time, the Wake’s insistence on the Noarchic traditions serves as a decisive challenge to a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science establishment that was attempting to separate race out from Judaeo-Christian traditions. As

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31

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the English racist and adviser to Hitler was to observe, ‘[a] theory of race that is useful and can be taken seriously cannot be constructed on the tale of Sem, Cham and Japhet . . . but only on a thorough and comprehensive knowledge of natural science’.43 The point about Joyce’s use of this myth in the Wake is that it features precisely as a constant reminder of the mythological basis and, indeed, ideological history to which race discourse belonged as culture. This latter ambition to destabilise scientific racism and undermine its status as knowledge is greatly facilitated by the fact that all race identities set up in the Wake, however prestigious they may or may not be, are in any case thoroughly undermined. It might be possible to talk about HCE as Noah, Shaun as Japhet and Shem as Shem/Ham, but, equally, it is impossible to do so. HCE, for instance, as well as being placed in terms of biblical genealogy is also typically connected with English or Anglo-Irish identities. In I.ii he is a vassal of the English monarch and ‘British to my backbone’ (36.32) – a landlordist/planter who changes ‘cane sugar into sethulose starch’ (29.28). A visitor/stranger, he arrives in Ireland by ‘this archipelago’s first visiting schooner’ (29.22–23) and is held to be ‘ultimendly respunchable for the hubbub caused in Edenborough’ (29.35–36; see also 220.27 where HCE is ‘the cause of all our grievances’). Connected with a real nineteenth-century moderate imperialist, Hugh Culling Eardsley Childers, he is loyal to the ‘ethnarch’ (30.20), that is, a governor of a people or province, who is an English king.44 HCE, the ‘famous eld duke alien’ (197.3) is conflated with ‘Ironsides’ (Cromwell) at 35.9 and is ‘as unclish [English] ams they make oom’ (376.16). He is an admired Lord Lieutenant ‘throughout his excellancy long vicefreegal existence’ (33.30–1). At NBB, VI.B.14 35(q), there is the note ‘He is CE’ (i.e. HCE is Church of England), a joke which never made it to the Wake proper, though HCE does own a ‘Norman court at boundary of the ville’ which has, of course, a ‘creepered tower of a church of Ereland’ (264.29–31). This Anglicised identity is extremely important in the Wake. Through it, HCE is separated out from the Tim Finnegan who is mock-lionised as the ‘authentic’ Celtic hero in the early parts of the Wake. Yet for all the relative stability of HCE’s Anglicised status, this, like all other race identities in the Wake, is highly qualified and subject to huge amounts of slippage. At 24.7–8 ‘our ancestor most worshipful’ has what appears to be a cod-African (or aboriginal?) identity as ‘Unfru-ChikdaUru-Wukru’ (see also HCE as ‘El Negro’ at 198.13). He is Gaelicised as ‘Fionn Earwicker’ (108.21–22), though at his murder he becomes ‘The

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unnamed non nonirishblooder’ (378.10–11). Hebraicised at 30.4, he is also subject to Germanicisation at 532.6–11, for instance when resurrected as ‘Amtsadam . . . Eternest cittas, heil . . . known throughout the world wherever my good Allenglisches Angleslachsen is spoken’. He is Africanised again at 198.13, and at 215.14–15 he becomes ‘foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills. Gammer and gaffer we’re all their gangsters’. At 577.7 he is ‘norsebloodheartened’ (in II.iii there is an extended version of HCE the Norwegian when he is configured as the Norwegian sea captain or ‘the rude hunnerable Humphrey’, 325.27–28) and at 481.20–35 he becomes ‘Ouer Tad’ who ‘could be all your and my das, the brodar of the founder of the father of the finder of the pfander of the pfunder of the furst man in Ranelagh’; in pantomime he is again Germanised as ‘the pantymammy’s Vulking Corsergoth’ (626.27–28), and so on. It is sometimes said that each central ‘character’ in the Wake has a specific racial identity.45 In fact, they have something like a speculative or assumed racial identity which then invariably becomes subject to a thorough undermining or dismantling – usually by the gossip and insults of others, as when Shaun accuses HCE of being a ‘welshtbreton’ (491.32–33), rather than by self-designation. The partial exceptions are the servant identity, Sackerson, who is invariably configured as an Anglo-Saxon and, indeed, Shaun himself, the character most fixed in Japhetic terms as a white Germanist and the only one of the five master identities of the Wake to ‘speak’ consistently in an unmediated way; the others – HCE, ALP, Shem and Issy – are more usually subjects, endlessly referred to and talked about, but not nearly as manifestly exposed as Shaun. In both I.vi and I.vii he ‘talks’ directly, both in answer to questions and also as a monologist who is an Aryan supremacist. As a Shaun/Wyndham Lewis composite in I.vi, he is asked whether if he met a ‘poor acheseyeld from Ailing . . . maundered in misliness’ (148.33–36), he could redeem this outcast in some way. He replies, ‘No, blank ye! So you think I have impulsivism’ (glossed in Annotations as ‘bolshevism’) (149.11). The full significance of this rejection is clear from I.vii, a section more demotic than I.vi, where Shaun vilifies Shem/Ham in racist terms. There may have been ‘[a] few toughnecks’ who pretended that Shem ‘aboriginally . . . was of respectable stemming’, which means connected to Germanic/Celtic ancestors, ‘Ragonar Blaubarb and Horrild Hairwire’ and ‘the Hon. and Rev. Mr Bbyrdwood de Trop Blogg’ (169.1–4), but actually the ‘mental and moral defective’ (177.16), ‘namely coon’ (187.16), is a stink to the Aryan nose, for ‘Angles aftanon browsing’ at Shem’s house (‘The house O’Shea’, 182.30), ‘thought not Edam reeked more rare’ (183.7–8). He is a ‘Nigerian’ (181.13), ‘nate Hamis’ (born Ham,

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33

181.36). Accused of ‘lowdown blackguardism’, it ‘woolies’ Shaun ‘to think over it’ (180.32–33). But think he does. His brother is no ‘decent son of an Albiogenselman’ (173.13). A squealing Jew, ‘he squealed the topsquall im Deal Lil Shemlockup Yellin (geewhiz, jew ear that far . . .)’ (180.5–6); he has no respect for his ancestors, whom he has abused (see 173.20), which in part means that Shem has not bothered to learn about Aryanist tradition. This is why Shaun poses the question whether Shem has ‘[e]ver read of that greatgrand landfather of our visionbuilders, Baaboo, the bourgeoismeister, who thought to touch both himmels at the punt of his risen stiffstaff ?’ (191.34–36). The idea of Shaun as an Aryanist, and an unmediated voice of the contemporary, is clearly important. It helps to explain why Shaun has such status in Finnegans Wake – apart from providing narrative voices in I.vi and I.vii, he also takes a leading role in II.i and II.ii and dominates book three. Unlike ALP and HCE, essentially connected with the past and tradition, and Shem and Issy, who more typically feature in terms of Shaun’s own jealousies, insecurities and desires, Shaun is the conspicuous now identity, the voice of the modern world. To the extent that the Wake is Shaun’s book, then, it is the book of an Aryanist, an idea discussed more fully in chapter three. This Shaun-centredness, however, and his sense of his own singular race identity, does not alter the Wake’s basic disposition towards race and race discourse. Shaun’s Aryanism is, of course, a cultural construction of his own and others, not an epistemological status subscribed to by the Wake. Indeed, Shaun will also be thoroughly dismantled as the Wake progresses and subject to the same comic contradictions and complexities in race terms as everyone else. He is at various times English, Irish (indeed, as the emigrant/postman delivering ALP’s letter and an Irish saint returning to Ireland, he is ‘quintessentially’ Irish) and ‘half Norawain’ (452.36).46 All these designations would be compatible with his racialisation as a white European, but at 404.12 his dark complexion is drawn attention to and, by his own account, his brother is a ‘negertop, negertoe, negertoby, negrunter’ who ‘went into the society of jewses’ (423.33–36), and so, presumably, is Shaun himself. In this kind of context, where ALP is often constructed in mock essentialist terms as being beyond culture, but equally appearing as a ‘Hebrewer’, a ‘Britononess’ (104.12–15),47 and, according to Jaun, a ‘saffronbreathing mongoloid’ (550.17), no racial identity can be fixed.48 Indeed, the Wake is the racist’s (and thus Shaun’s) worst nightmare at a number of different levels. Not only is it an awesome manifestation of commonplace Aryanist and eugenicist predictions about the effects of ‘[m]iscegenations on miscegenations’ (18.20), it is also fundamentally comically disposed. It does not accept the idea of racial purity and so cannot be roused about the corollary notion. So-called

34

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racial impurity, ‘our mixed racings’ (117.22), becomes nothing less than the human condition in the Wake and with that the unnatural disorder of Aryanist discourse is unpicked to become just ‘life’. The Wake text, then, acknowledges the absurdity of racial classification in its dramatic failure to characterise racially. Its large capacity for making portmanteau and punning racial conglomerations works in a similar way. One of the historical titles given to ALP’s letter is ‘Inglo-Andean Medoleys from Tomanny Moohr’, a mixture of English, South American, Irish, Indian, Romany and Moor (106.8). ‘[C]ymtrymanx’ features at 85.36 and there is also ‘Gallwegian’ (89.7); ‘germogall (176.20); ‘Daneygaul’ (237.18); ‘ostrogothic and ottomanic’ (263.10); ‘grekish and romanos’ (564.9) and ‘blackinwhitepaddynger’ (612.18). There are many plays on Galls, Gauls and Gaels, as in ‘furst of gielgaulgalls’ (326.8–9) or ‘gaeilish gall’ (63.6), and some obvious cod versions of race mix-ups, as in the Chinese Welshman who becomes ‘chinchin Taffyd’ (34.17). By no means all these terms and terminologies, however, are Joyce’s inventions. Some, like the ‘Ostrogothic’ used to describe the ‘kakography’ (shit writing) of the Wake letter (120.22–23) are taken from the discourses of scientific racism itself. The Gall, Gaul and Gael confusion, too, reflects conflicts and uncertainties in anthropology and ethnology over these terms. ‘Hispano-Cathayan-Euxine, Castilian-Emeratic-Hebridian, Espanol-Cymric-Helleniky’ (263.13–15), among the most ‘complex’ (or meaningless) racial designations in the Wake, is a pastiche of technical terms. ‘Celtiberian’, a term used at 78.25 in a context that is quite dense in terms of race identity, might be thought a portmanteau which refers to myths about the Celtic/Spanish origins of the Irish but it was a real designation, used in EB 11 to identify French Celts who apparently migrated to Spain, a ‘population henceforward . . . called Celtiberian’ (vol. v, 612). The general point here, however, whatever the origins of these classifications, is to mock the procedures of scientific racism. Thus there are many occasions where the Wake, just as it is most exploitative of the apparent precision of race science, is forced to give up under the weight of its own perverse logic. At 263.13–15, for instance, after that extraordinary attempt at racial and period specificity, there is the admission that it ‘was all so long ago . . . Pastimes are past times. Now let bygones be bei Gunne’s ’(263.12–18). RACE, THE ACADEMY AND WYNDHAM LEWIS

The undermining of scientific racism is substantially a result of the wider aesthetics of the Wake, deriving from its handling of ‘character’, narrative

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35

and language. But it is also present in terms of a direct assault on the academy that produced scientific racism. The Wake’s treatment of an intellectual establishment dominated by ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘degeneration’ is discussed in detail in chapter three. In the interest of establishing an early overview, however, some preliminary observations on this general issue, and the particular role of Wyndham Lewis in this respect, are made here. Interactions with an intellectual establishment obsessed by racial category occur throughout the Wake, but there are some areas of concentration which are most telling in terms of establishing the broad orientation. In I.v, for example, the letter from the dump, ALP’s ‘untitled mamafesta’ which ‘has gone by many names at disjointed times’ (104.4–5), is subjected to the scrutiny of imagined experts. These include ‘the hardily curiosing entomophilust’ (107.12–13) and a figure imagined by the I.v narrator as an ‘ornery josser, flat-chested fortyish, faintly flatulent and given to ratiocination by syncopation in the elucidation of complications, of his greatest Fung Yang dynasdescendanced’ (109.3–6). An attempt is made to relate the letter to a respectable national history, as opposed to ‘the purest kidooleyoon wherein our madernacerution of lour lore is rich’ (107.19–20). This history must be subject to the strictest laws of evidence, and is understood in terms of race and lineage. Hence the excitement that the letter might be ‘our protoparent’s ipsissima verba’ (very own words) (121.8–9) and the obsession with precise dating and specific geographic identification. At 120 analysis focuses on racial connections which exploit both classical and Germanic origins. The letter is said to contain ‘Greek ees’ (19); the ‘kakography’ is ‘Ostrogothic . . . affected for certain phrases of Etruscan stabletalk’ (22–23). The letter’s ‘throne open doubleyous’ are apparently of ‘an early muddy terranean origin’ (28–29), though the reference to ‘blue – face’ (30) is suggestive of Celtic or Pictish body painting, as well as to other forms of face painting, like the black face of minstrelsy and music hall. Linguistics and racialised biology become absurdly entwined with the notion that HCE, ‘our great ascendant’, might be found ‘properly speaking three syllables less than his own surname (yes, yes, less!)’ (108.20–21). In his introduction to NBB, VI.B.6, Vincent Deane has suggested that the main source for this intervention is Jules Crepieux-Jamin’s Les ´ele´ments de l’e´criture des canailles (The Features of the Handwriting of Scoundrels) (1923) and that I.v is ‘a mock scholarly examination combining palaeography with graphology’. The same source, he suggests, ‘fuels the denunciation of Shem’ (7) in I.vii because Joyce takes some of his insults from Crepieux-Jamin’s comments on the handwriting of criminals and the ‘backward’ (NBB, VI.B.6, 7). In fact, the origins of both ‘analysis’ in I.v

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and personal attack in I.vii belong to a wider culture of which CrepieuxJamin’s text is symptomatic rather than originary. In I.v it is a broader sense of scientism, as in the ‘Ithaca’ section of Ulysses, which produces a joke idiom sometimes emptied of all serious meaning (‘The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture’, 107.8). So I.v, then, is above all cod intellectual and technocratic, but with terminologies that often migrate in unexpected ways from one discipline area to another. Thus the identification of ALP as ‘a neurasthene nympholept, endocrine-pineal typus, of inverted parentage with a prepossessing drauma present in her past and a priapic urge for congress with agnates before cognates’ (115.30–33). But this already complex idiom also combines with romantic rhetoric, as in the elevation of the nation that refers to ‘[w]e who live under heaven, we of the clovery kingdom, we middlesins people have often watched the sky overreaching the land. We suddenly have. Our isle is Sainge’ (110.4–6). There are, in other words, and as the narrator of I.v points out, various kinds of ‘cant to the questy’ (quest/question, 109.1) and this, too, is highly characteristic of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century race discourse, especially in its Aryanist forms. Michelet, alluded to in I.v along with his colleague and rival Edgar Quinet (see 117.12), was a nineteenth-century academy historian who, nevertheless, did not always observe objective method. Indeed his most popular books, heavily influenced by Herder and romanticism, were more ‘organic’ than scientific, ‘born in the full light of the sun among our forefathers, the sons of light – Aryans, Indians, Persians and Greeks’.49 Ernest Renan, already a recognised scientific authority when the Life of Jesus (1863) was published, also wrote in highly rhetorical terms, and completely unscientifically, of ‘the sacred summits [of the Himalayas] where the great races, which carried the future of humanity in their hearts, contemplated infinity for the first time and introduced two categories which changed the face of the world, morality and reason’.50 In the following, where Georges Vacher de Lapouge, a French anthropologist, analyses the French Revolution in terms of craniology, science-sounding diction is, as in the Wake, weirdly mixed with fantasies of cultural nationalism: The brachycephalics gained power by the Revolution and, as a result of democratic development, this power tends to be concentrated in the lower classes, those which are most brachycephalic. The Aryan, as I have defined him, is something quite different. He is Homo Europeus, a race which made France great, the members of which are rare among us today, indeed almost extinct.51

The Wake’s I.v echoes this hybridity and compounds it even further with, for instance, American idiomatic (‘who in hallhagal wrote the durn thing

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anyhow?’) (107.36–108.1) and the hilarious vulgarity that is one of the most consistent and, sadly, least considered elements of the Wake – ‘that last labiolingual basium might be read as a suavium if whoever the embracer then was wrote with a tongue in his (or perhaps her) cheek as the case may have been’ (122.32–33). It needs to be emphasised, however, that for all the general notion of ‘science’ being ridiculed and wrecked here, the specific procedures and discourses of genealogical scientism, of the ‘adamologists’ (113.4) who were once everywhere active in social science and the humanities and at the disposal of race science have a particularly high profile. It is on this basis that I.v places such forms of knowledge as linguistics, phrenology and sexology together in a common tradition: ‘The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture. There was a time when naif alphabetters would have written it down the tracing of a purely deliquescent recidivist, possibly ambidextrous, snubnosed probably and presenting a strangely profound rainbowl in his (or her) occiput. To the . . . entomophilist then it has shown a very sexmosaic of nymphosis’ (107.8–14). There are further attacks on the academy and the intelligentsia in the Wake: I.vi, for example, convenes ‘this nightly quisquiquock’ (quiz show) (126.6). The last question of the series, question 11, asked at 148–49, evokes a long response in cod academic discourse – ‘I need not anthrapologise for any obintentional (I must here correct all that school of neoitalian or paleoparisien schola of tinkers and spanglers who say I’m wrong parcequeue out of revolscian from romanitis I want to be) down-trodding on my foes’ (151.7–11). Joyceans have usually identified the specific assault here as being on Wyndham Lewis and there are indeed many references to Lewis in this section, as there are throughout the Wake – so many, in fact, that Glasheen, a hugely resourceful and patient compiler, gave up under the strain of accommodating them all. The list she gave in The Third Census was ‘badly cut’, she explains with some frustration, ‘because there is just too bloody much of them’.52 But Lewis is not the sole target here. He is specifically positioned in an intellectual community of anthropologists and philosophers much concerned with ideas of race theory and the decline of the West, as the reference to Spengler at 151.9 suggests. This wider context is further represented by such figures as ‘Dr’s Het Ubeleeft’ and ‘Gedankje of Stoutgirth’ (150.9–11); the Italian ‘Professor Ciondolone’ and his ‘too frequently hypothecated Bettlermensch’ (bettler meaning ‘beggar’ in German, ¨ bermensch, 161.2–3); so this is an ironic version of the Nietzschean U ‘Professor Ebahi-Ahuri of Philadespoinis’ (165.27–28); and the anthropologist ‘Professor Loewy-Brueller’ (150.15), who gets particularly entwined with

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Lewis. The latter (Le´vy-Bruhl) is remembered almost exclusively now for his work on race and what he called the ‘primitive’ mind.53 At first sight this might seem an odd way to construct Lewis, as a representative intellectual, because he himself was so insistent that his place was outsiderly – his most typical pose was as the ‘Enemy’. But then the theft of such a status would appeal to Joyce. This is the point about the many associations made between Lewis and figures such as Henri Bergson, Gertrude Stein, Charlie Chaplin and Marcel Proust. The Wake text not only ridicules through parody the astonishing attack made in Time and the Western Man on the ‘aestheticisation’ of reality – it also effects a kind of contamination of the author of that work. In attacking ‘the sophology of Bitchson’ (Bergson) and the ‘where’s hair theorics of Winestain’ (Einstein) (149.20, 28), the Lewis/Shaun figure becomes locked into modernist discourse and a modernist world he excoriated, just as Lewis was himself. Similarly with the associations between relatively minor figures of ‘bourgeois-bohemia’ – these place Lewis precisely within the academy he so despised. In this way the pose of the outsider and the heroic iconoclast is stripped away to be replaced by something much smaller, and very much less romantic. But there is another way of looking at Joyce’s placement of Lewis at the orthodox centre. If on the one hand this involves a sharp and telling twist of perspective, it also reflects reality in more direct ways, because there clearly were senses in which Lewis, for all the violence of his rhetoric, was at the intellectual centre and was espousing what were once quite mainstream ideas. The writing of Hitler might now place Lewis beyond the pale, but this was less true when the work was published in 1931 and certainly earlier ‘sociological’ and ‘philosophical’54 writings were almost all focused not at some extremity but on the characteristic fin de sie`cle obsession with cultural, social and biological degeneration. Far from isolating him, the positions he took on such issues aligned Lewis with masculinist conservatism, where he was fully recognised. Paleface, for example, published just two years before Hitler, was praised by The Times for its hard values, hailed as ‘strong, brilliant and splendid stuff’ and its views on race were not too far removed from those expressed in the latter publication.55 Paleface is an attack on Western idealisations of the primitive, an account of the shrinkage of the ‘White Spirit’ that attempts to discourage the tendency of ‘White capitulation and self criticism’ and ‘especially tendencies to invite the White Man to learn and to adopt the primitive communism (real or imaginary), nihilistic mysticism, and so on, of the primitive Indian or the Black’. Even if Western culture is the real subject of this book, as apologists have claimed,56 the reliance on race categories is obvious and

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emphatic and ‘the opposition Lewis sets up between ‘‘our white skin’’ and ‘‘The White Man’s Burden’’ is clearly a racist one’.57 The Lion and the Fox (1927) was similarly steeped in race discourse, arguing that ‘a man’s race is the most interesting thing about him’, for example, though developing the suspicion ‘that very strong race-characteristics in an individual, in their face, gait or mental disposition, probably means, at all events to-day, that they are not the highest examples of their kind’.58 Hitler developed out of such discourses to formulate a virtually complete acceptance of Nazi race theory, embracing ‘blood-feeling’ and the whole paraphernalia of ‘organic’ race consciousness. Even the idea of the ‘Aryan’, acknowledged as ‘ethnographically indefensible . . . conveys something that is well-defined enough, for me at all events’.59 The assault on Lewis in I.vi, then, needs to be read as much more than personal rivalry, as Joyce makes quite transparent. Although often seen in exclusively literary terms, their conflict actually involved completely opposed conceptions of the very nature of human society and human history – indeed, it is not too fanciful to understand Joyce’s encounter with Lewis in terms of Joyce’s war – his conflict with the modernist as fascist.60 Hence the purposeful connection of Lewis to the S.S (‘down inside his loose Eating S.S. collar’ – 292.29) and to ‘nasty’ Nazis at 536.36–537.1. Such interventions involve a reading of Lewis’s politics where the post-Nietzschean perspective on order, discipline and hierarchy – the construction of the ‘causes of European decay’ in terms of ‘the notion of individual freedom as opposed to the greater solidarity of a community ‘‘working together’’ under a centralised consciousness and despotic, or at all events, very powerful control’ – led to unqualified support for Hitler.61 It is certainly this Lewis, arguably the most interesting fascist of his day, who objected to the modernisms of Ulysses and the Wake, and who is so exposed in I.vi. Here he features consumed by parodic versions of the aristocratic virtues that Lewis espoused in reality, and by a fierce antagonism towards the racial Other. At 168 the Shaun/Lewis composite furiously rejects the ‘stranger’ who is his brother; or Japhet, the father of the European races, denies Ham, the progenitor of the outcasts and especially the black ‘races’: ‘if he came to my preach, a proud pursebroken ranger, when the heavens were welling the spite of their spout, to beg for a bite in our bark Noisdanger, would meself and Mac Jeffet, four-in-hand foot him out? – ay! – were he my own breastbrother, my doubled withd love and my singlebiassed hate . . . still I’d fear I’d hate to say’ (168.3–12). Joyce apparently thought Lewis ‘his best hostile critic and ten per cent right about . . . his works’.62 He also felt somehow ‘related’ to Lewis, and

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to Pound, presumably in the sense that between them they represented a public constituency of modernists, where Joyce sometimes took the joke role of the elder uncle observing with a critical eye the antics of his dangerous young nephews. In July 1934 he wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver that he was afraid that ‘poor Mr Hitler-Missler will soon have few admirers in Europe apart from your nieces and my nephews, Masters W, Lewis and E. Pound’.63 For all the implied intimacy of such responses, however, there can be no doubt that there was a serious separation between these figures. Lewis in particular was not simply a brilliant mind who produced some exceptionally ugly rhetoric, but a powerful signification of the new radical politics of the 1920s and 1930s. His status as Japhet/Shaun in the Wake places him firmly in terms of Joyce’s engagement with Aryanism and its discourses. Such are some of the key dimensions of the Wake’s hugely inventive handling of race discourse and race identity, its ‘confusioning of the human races’ (35.5), though it should be emphasised again that for all its innovation it was working on a destabilisation already apparent from within the culture of scientific racism itself. These doubts were only in part the product of ‘better’ science. More substantially, they were the result of an unravelling as ‘science’, whatever its achievements in the field of linguistics, was appropriated by a bewildering range of social, cultural and political ideologies. This produced astonishing complexities as scientific racism struggled to make sense of its internal contradictions. Ironically, the more it proclaimed itself to be objective and scientific, the more uncertain it was forced to become. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, a hugely important source book for the Wake, is an interesting site of this difficulty, though there is no history, anthropology or linguistics of this period that does not illustrate the same dynamic. It devotes many entries and many pages to the European races, but struggles to pin down any real ‘knowledge’. It is not only the term ‘Aryan’ that causes problems. The race entries are almost all riddled with doubts and uncertainties. ‘Anglo-Saxon’ here refers not to a race at all but is a relative ‘term’, used ‘to distinguish the Teutonic inhabitants of Britain from the Old Saxons of the continent’ (vol. ii, 38). The term ‘Hun’ is ‘given to at least four peoples, whose identity cannot be regarded as certain’ (vol. xi, 932). The Gauls similarly cannot be identified, though the geographical region associated with them can. Like the name ‘Pict’, ‘Gaul’ appears here again as a relative term used by Romans to identify the ‘them’, the Celtic-speaking others who lived in a particular region (see vol. xi, 532). The Goths are said to have migrated from Sweden, but the tone of what should be a most authoritative voice in

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Western culture remains deeply uncertain: ‘it has been observed with truth that so many populous nations can hardly have sprung from the Scandinavian peninsula’ (vol. xii, 272). Similar problems surround debates over the Picts and Scots. It may be certain that the Scots (actually ‘Irish’) were ‘a Gaelic speaking people’, but ‘that the Picts were Teutons (Pinkerton) is no longer believed. That they were non-Aryan, the theory of Sir John King, seems improbable’ (vol. xxiv, 429). Finally, the Britannica admits that ‘all questions of race are dim, for such a thing as a European people of pure unmixed blood is probably unknown in experience’ (vol. xxiv, 429). For all these doubts, however, the Britannica has many pages devoted to these Germanic races, with no less than forty pages of small type, double-column print devoted solely to the ‘Celt’ entry, though, once again, the text struggles with the difficulty of defining exactly what a Celt is and is deeply concerned about confusions between the terms ‘Celtic’ and ‘Gaelic’. One respect in which it does seem certain is the distinction it insists on making between the tall, blond, blue-eyed authentic Celts and the smaller ‘Gaelic speaking dark race of Britain and Ireland and in spite of the usage it must be understood that it is strictly misleading to apply the term Celtic to the latter language’ (vol. v, 612). But, of course, this particular certainty only refers us back to the politics of race, because it is particularly ideological. Far from being a ‘fact’, this is a position that now could not be accepted by any linguist or anthropologist. Indeed, for many anthropologists now the ‘Celt’ as a race designation has no historical reality whatsoever.64 As Michael Chapman puts it, ‘the continuity of the Celts is not derived from anything intrinsic to these people, but instead derives from a particular kind of culture-meeting – a meeting between a selfconsciously civilising, powerful centralising culture, which produces written records, and a much less powerful culture which leaves no or few written records’.65 In other words, the Celt, like the ‘Saxon’ and the ‘Teuton’, has become a kind of Here Comes Everybody who is, in fact, nobody at all.

CHAPTER

3

Celt, Teuton and Aryan

Why should we wish to make Ireland more Celtic than it is – why should we de-Anglicise it at all? . . . [because] our Gaelic past . . . is really at the bottom of the Irish heart. Douglas Hyde, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’ (1894)1

Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as a twilight of the reason. J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘English and Welsh’ (1963)2

PRECURSOR

–

A CYCLOPEAN PERSPECTIVE

The origins of the term ‘Celt’ are in classical literature, though its usage there had little to do with modern notions of race. In Michael Chapman’s account The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (1992), the Celtic identity in classical literature is understood not as a product of any biological or even cultural reality but in terms of the rationalising that a more powerful culture makes about a much weaker one.3 Thus the term ‘Celt’ meant something like ‘non-Greek speaking uncivilised barbarian in the north and west’ and the disappearance of the ‘Celt’ became the result not of massacre and destruction, but of assimilation where ‘the clear distinction between civilised Greek and Rome and the barbarian’ disappeared. It is for this reason, according to Chapman, that between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries, and with a few ‘fantastic scholarly exceptions’, no one ‘called themselves or anybody else Celts’. From the eighteenth century onwards, however, the Celtic identity was resurrected and became ‘tied up in a discourse of race, language and culture’. Like the Anglo-Saxon, the Teuton and the Aryan, the ‘Celt’ was formulated by ethnologists, linguists and folklorists as a ‘race’ that emerged, according to ‘archaeological evidence’, in central Europe ‘sometime in the first millennium’. There was ‘an immense body of scholarship devoted to the archaeological and linguistic aspects of Celtic origins’ which, for all its concerns about 42

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‘profound obscurity’, testified to the reality of the Celt.4 In this way the idea of the Celt became a scientific reality, and of great cultural significance. It was confidently commandeered by a number of nationalisms, but, most importantly for the present account, in English and Irish contexts. Here two related genealogies emerged and these were to have profound significance. Firstly, the English intelligentsia used the idea of the Celt to delineate a romantic but wild and often ‘primitive’ Irish identity. A key text here was Matthew Arnold’s The Study of Celtic Literature, which identified the ‘Celtic Irish’5 in traditionally racist terms as ‘undisciplinable, anarchical and turbulent by nature’, ‘ineffectual in politics’ and ‘poor, slovenly and half barbarous’, but which also detected an eloquence and delicacy in Celtic literature indicative of an ardent aspiration ‘after life, light and emotion, to be expansive, adventurous and gay’.6 According to Arnold, this instinct for ‘spontaneity’ and ‘imagination’ stood in stark contrast to the materialism of Victorian England, and connected the Celt to the ‘Hellenic’, the hugely prestigious culture apparently characterised by its heightened perception of ‘things in their essence and beauty’.7 Secondly, Irish nationalists, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, made strong identification with an imagined heroic culture that they also termed ‘Celtic’. Here Arnold’s identification of Celtic ‘lightness’ and gaiety was dismissed as ‘a degradation of classical morality’ and replaced by the more martial and Nietzschean qualities of action, energy, heroism and valour.8 In other respects, however, Irish cultural nationalism drew on the key cultural analyses formulated in Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) and later in The Study of Celtic Literature (1867). Revivalist cultural historiography exploited Arnold’s concerns about the materialism of modern England to develop a thoroughly racialised ‘Anglophobia’. One of the key features distinguishing the national identity, in both Protestant and Catholic versions of Irish cultural nationalism, was its Celtic ‘spirituality’, which was positioned against the materialist, aggressively assimilative Anglo-Saxon or RomanBriton. Irish revivalism also appropriated Arnold’s conception of the Hellenistic antidote to modern (i.e. English) materialism. Strongly identifying with Arnold’s privileging of tradition and continuity over change, the Anglo-Irish intellectuals of revivalism made routine alignments between Celtic and Greek culture. In his crucial ‘discovery’ of Celtic historical epic, Standish O’Grady, for instance, disinterred a rough but passionate core, not just correspondent with but actually surpassing classical Greece, and could not

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help regarding this age and the great personages moving therein as incomparably higher in intrinsic worth than the corresponding ages of Greece. In Homer, Hesiod, and the Attic poets there is polish and artistic form, absent in the existing monuments of Irish heroic thought, but the gold, the ore itself, is here massier and more pure, the sentiment deeper and more tender, the audacity and freedom more exhilarating, the reach of the imagination more sublime, the depth and the power of the human soul more fully exhibit themselves.9

In its more extreme moments, O’Grady’s articulation of correspondence appeared to exploit the biological theories of scientific racism: ‘In the times of which Homer sung, the Greek nobles had yellow hair and blue eyes. At the time when the heroic literature of Ireland was composed, the Irish nobles had yellow hair and blue eyes.’10 From O’Grady onwards, this correspondence between Ireland and Ancient Greece became a standard feature of revivalist rhetoric. In populist histories the Ancient Greeks actually discovered Ireland, and deified it. The ‘imaginative Greeks’, a thousand years before Christ, carried out an expedition to ‘the Sacred Isle . . . yielding to that clinging belief in some blessedness as yet unattained, which, too easily attracted by earth, droops its wearied head towards any spot that is hallowed by distance, [for they] conceived that here were situated the Elysian fields’.11 The playwright Edward Martyn, who had studied Greek, included passages in both The Heather Field (1909) and Maeve (1909) which proclaimed, just as Arnold did, a ‘brotherhood’ between the Greek and Celtic races. Maeve in the latter play asserts that the Greeks discovered an ‘unreal beauty’ which has its only parallel in Celtic culture.12 In the 1890s Florence Farr and W. B. Yeats tried to link Greek and Irish oral culture by a ‘rediscovery’ of how verse was spoken to music;13 and in Yeats’s view ‘the Greek [had] the same perceptive, emotional temperament as the Celt’.14 Finnegans Wake is, of course, entirely intimate with these cultural histories. It insists on constructing England in materialist and ‘AngloSaxon’ terms, usually from a mock critical perspective, though there is an intriguing note at NBB, VI.B.14, 12 which reads ‘neo-Saxon (JJ)’, suggesting an unusual association, but one quite consistent with Joyce’s sense of the interconnection between English and Irish culture, and the provisional, not to say constructionist, nature of all race identity. More typically, though, the Anglo-Saxon in the Wake is associated with militarism, authority and theft. At 58.24, for example, the Coldstream Guards are connected with ‘saxonlootie’ (see also ‘Saxolooter’ at 379.8 and ‘saxy luters’ at 492.14–15); Sigerson (or Sistersen) of the KKK is configured as ‘patrolman Seekersenn’ (586.28) and lock-up at the inn in II.iii must take place

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‘Ere the sockson locked at the dure’ (371.16). Sigerson, or ‘Comestipple Sacksoun’ (15.35), is particularly defined in terms of aggressive policing and ultraright politics. There are also the familiar connections between the House of Hanover and Germanism, where Hanover becomes ‘Hunover’ (388.17), while at 411 Shaun in republican guise proudly admits to painting the postboxes green and cries, ‘Down with the Saozon ruze!’ (30). The reproduction of Celtic Ireland, in all its versions, is even more embedded and fundamental to the Wake. Indeed, the title of the Wake is at one level a clarion call, a renewal of the Celtic identity – an Irish version of the return of the king. Finnegan is a Celtic hero, albeit one conflated with the more modern identity of the Irishman as navvy. In book one he is worshipped as a Celtic god, his grave tended by ‘fenians’ who, they say, will ‘rake your gravel and [be] bringing you presents’, and monumentalised: ‘The menhere’s always talking of you sitting around on the pig’s cheeks under the sacred rooftree . . . And admiring to our supershillelagh where the palmsweat on high is the mark of your manument. All the toethpicks ever Eirenesians chewed on are chips chepped from that battery block’ (24.36–25.18). As that passage indicates, Celticism figures largely, and comically, in the Wake’s representation of the human need for noble origins, the prototypes that shape our sense of identity. It also dominates the early part of the Wake as a strange prehistory and a mysterious landscape of mounds, ‘merhere’s’, dolmens and ‘granite cromlech setts’ (61.14) – though, as Joyce knew, this archaeology was not in fact Celtic – and the Celtic identity operates as a kind of historical archetype, shaping the presentation of not just the Finnegan identity but also that of such figures as Finn MacCool, Brian Boru, Roderick O’Conor and St Patrick, the latter in as much as he features as a modernising spirit engaging with ‘Celtic’ primitivism. Something of this general significance of Celticism to the Wake can be seen from the notebooks. NBB, VI.B.14, for instance, compiled between early July and early September 1924 when the Joyce family were on holiday in Brittany, is full of things Celtic. The first item Joyce appears to have looked at seriously in the Municipal Library of St Malo was a booklet about Breton legends, and although he thought Irish a language far superior to Breton,15 he also became interested in the late eighteenth-century ‘Celtomanes’. This was a group responsible for the revival of Celtic studies in France, who asserted ‘that Breton was the origin of all tongues, proving this by all sorts of fantastic derivations, and they even believed that Breton was the garden of Eden’.16 All this appears in NBB, VI.B.14 reproduced in a sequence of notes – ‘Keltomanic (le Brigant)’ (101 (f )); ‘Celts change

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colour’ (106 (f )); ‘Celts with handles’ (121 (k)); ‘celtiform’ (125 (g)); ‘utterly Irish’ (125 (h)); and so on. But, as Daniel Ferrer, the editor of NBB, VI.B.14, points out, for all this activity Joyce was hardly the usual Celtophile. Ignoring the tourist hotspots, the classic sites of ‘Celtic’ culture – Karnac, to take the obvious example – Joyce focused instead on the more intimate pleasures of Celticism in the public library and here it was the modern pamphlets on local legends that were apparently more engaging and of far more use to Work in Progress than the academy tomes. Joyce was certainly fascinated by Celticism as a cultural construct, but whether this involved any serious scholarly interest in Celtic romanticism is another matter. Moreover, it was extremely unlikely, given Joyce’s representation of Celticism in the pre-Wake fictions, that the Wake would authorise any conventional support of Celticism as a romantic ideology. There are signs of Joyce’s distance from Celtic ‘enthusiasms’ everywhere, in the Joyce identities where the modern, the urban and the sophisticated have such prestige, and, for example, in the early fiction and critical writings. In ‘A Little Cloud’, for instance, the Celticism so fundamental to both Douglas Hyde’s and W. B. Yeats’s versions of Ireland is diminished as the fashionable tone that Little Chandler hopes to strike in his poems and thereby impress an English readership; in ‘A Mother’ it is meaningless cultural dressing for an otherwise materialist bourgeoisie. Of the later writing, Ulysses is of particular and obvious relevance in terms of Joyce’s assault on Celtic romanticism. It reproduces Celticism in Anglicised forms as the cultural faddism of an Englishman, Haines, and of an Anglo-Irish elite; it also subjects Celticism in all its modern forms – literary, historical, archaeological, and so on – to the extended ridicule of ‘Cyclops’, such a detailed, precise and rollicking treatment of the Celtic that it is worth looking at in some detail. Quite apart from its intrinsic interest, ‘Cyclops’ is also highly suggestive of how Joyce’s more general response to race identity may have been shaped by his critical engagement with the cultural phenomenon that was (and still is) Celticism.17 ‘Cyclops’ is comprised of a double narrative that images culture operating at varied social levels. It reproduces both a written culture authenticated by publication and an oral, demotic culture. Far from these cultures articulating between ‘high’ and ‘low’ and, by implication, the intelligentsia and the people, they are comically at odds. The juxtaposition of discourses in this episode insists not so much on common cultural identity, or even on cultural traffic between these zones, as on a kind of collision. Although the satire of ‘Cyclops’ derives in part from the inherent characteristics of the

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parodic ‘interpolations’ themselves, it is also a product of the grotesque dissonances generated by this bi-narrative. It is this fractured frame that shapes the engagement of ‘Cyclops’ with Celticism, configured here in its Anglicised, Victorian form as modern revivalism, and the target of the ‘Cyclops’ satire. Of the thirty-one ‘giganticist’ interpolations, thirteen are obviously parodic of the Celtic, reproducing and often outdoing the essential characteristics of Celticist literary and historiographical practice. Thus entire passages of ‘Cyclops’ are comprised of ‘a composite mockbardic set of styles and devices’.18 The exaggerations of size, the double epithets, the lists or ‘runs’, the dindsenchas: all directly exploit Anglo-Irish versions of the bardic tales, as in ‘[a] pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the gurnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the dab, the brill, the flounder, the pollock, the mixed coarse fish generally, and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to be enumerated’ (U.12, 70–75). This ‘fish-run’ is typical of parody in ‘Cyclops’, in the exaggerated Celticism which works on some of the stylistics of early Irish literature edited out by nineteenth-century translators as outlandish or vulgar, but also in the overexposure of Anglicisation which echoes in antiheroic Englishisms such as ‘denizens of the aqueous kingdom’ or ‘too numerous to be mentioned’ and in the poeticism ‘in sooth’. Far from being a reclamation of the authentic, then, such passages are hopelessly and hilariously contaminated. The list of ‘Irish’ heroes in the fourth interpolation, for instance, includes ‘the Last of the Mohicans’, ‘Dick Turpin’ and ‘Ludwig Beethoven’ (see U.12, 168–205). Most of these parodies of Celticism occur in the first part of ‘Cyclops’. They are continuous from the second to the tenth interpolation, Joyce clearly wanting to establish Celticism as central to the episode. Thereafter, the periodic returns to the romance literature of the Celtic revival are interspersed with parodies of contemporary journalese (sports reportage, travel journalism, gossip pages, and so on). But these latter interpolations are also substantially implicated in Celtic culture. Sports reportage, for instance, is concerned with the ‘resuscitation of the ancient Gaelic sports and pastimes, practised morning and evening by Finn MacCool’ (909–10). One of two interpolations which parody legal discourse involves ‘sir Frederick the Falconer’ administering ‘the law of the brehons’ (1122–23). Indeed, there are only six interpolations that are not in some way connected with Celticist culture. The initial concentration and the later filtration of romance styles and revivalist concerns into press and magazine culture, then, is a design feature of the episode, which, apart from anything

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else, implies a process whereby Celticism spreads its influence into more populist cultural forms. Thus the thirteenth interpolation (712–47), which reports the verse-speaking achievement of the Citizen’s dog, is an absurd amalgam of sensationalist press and language revival linguistics. But the cultural process implied is, of course, a long way from the revivalist mission. Far from exorcising the Otherness of Anglicisation, this travel into modernity becomes a joke aggregation, an ironic assemblage which mixes elements, but never blends them, so that the components are obviously, even blatantly, on display. There are further and equally fundamental interactions between ‘Cyclops’ and the Celt. Both the ‘technic’ of gigantism and the device of interpolation are themselves imported from revivalist historiographical practices, drawing particularly on the enterprising narratives of the most influential popular historian of the late nineteenth century, Standish O’Grady. His two volumes of the History of Ireland: The Heroic Period (1878–80) were ostensibly written to ‘express the whole nature of a race or nation’, to ‘recover’ from a mythic past ‘the gigantic conceptions of heroism and strength with which the forefront of Irish history is thronged’ and which ‘prove the great future of this race and land’ – a version of cultural nationalism that was to have a major influence on the revivalists of Yeats’s circle. ‘Giganticism’, the art of ‘Cyclops’, is directly appropriated from this kind of Celticist romance historiography which dismissed virtually the whole of Irish history from St Patrick onwards as discontinuous with Ireland’s heroic destiny, and so are the time shifts that Joyce exploits in his interpolations.19 O’Grady’s history-making, and indeed revivalist culture generally, insisted on the immanence of the past. ‘Entrelacement’, whereby ‘the reader moves from the present to a more ancient past and back again’, typifies the revivalist historical imagination. In O’Grady’s histories and in the versions of the Red Branch or Ulster Cycle groups of stories which he wrote for children, ‘a sequence of events, the present, is set off with its own day-to-day consciousness, then suddenly it intersects with another sequence of events, the past, with a consciousness that understands it even though the present had no knowledge of the other’s existence’.20 This reasonably describes Joyce’s own version of ‘entrelacement’; except, of course, that in Joyce’s interpolations past and present are hardly continuous. On the contrary, in ‘Cyclops’ the Celtic past collides with contemporaneity to produce comic incongruity, contradiction and radical discord. The relationship between the life at ‘the back of the courthouse’ and in ‘the land of holy Michan’ is a ridiculous one, as is the relationship between Bloom and ‘O’Bloom, the son of Rory’, ‘the prudent soul’ who is

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‘Impervious to fear’ (U.12, 215–17). The inflation of ‘Little Alf Bergan . . . squeezed up with the laughing’ into the grandiose O’Bergan ‘godlike messenger . . . radiant as the eye of heaven’ (249–50 and 244–45) is patently absurd, as is the gigantic transformation of ‘that bloody old pantaloon Denis Breen’ into ‘an elder of noble gait and countenance, bearing the sacred scrolls of law’ (253, 246–47); or the transformation of Paddy Dignam, the Dublin burgher who in death becomes a national myth – ‘Fleet was his foot on the bracken: Patrick of the beamy brow. Wail, Banba, with your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your whirlwind’ (374–76). ‘Cyclops’ sabotages the Celticist’s elevation of a national culture. It is a withering exposure of Celtic romanticism to the life and culture of the street. The angle at which ‘gigantic’ interpolation meets realist I-narrative produces a range of effects, but the most obvious result of, for instance, the transformation of the citizen’s handkerchief into ‘[t]he muchtreasured and intricately embroidered ancient Irish facecloth attributed to Solomon of Droma and Manus Tomaltach og MacDonogh’ (U.12, 1438–40) is a hilarious disposal of Celticist romantics. Certainly, Celticism is presented as a hugely prolific culture which has influenced fashion writing, travel writing, sports reportage, and so on, but the comic distance between the two narratives of ‘Cyclops’ insists on the irrelevancy of epic Celticism to modern Ireland. At the basis of this attack on Celticism in ‘Cyclops’ is an acute sensitivity to the constructionist nature of the Celtic identity, and the ambition to expose and mock its conservative, romantic dimensions. This helps with some aspects of the Wake – indeed, at least one section of the Wake, the question set by ‘Jockit Mic Ereweak’ (126.7) regarding Finn MacCool and articulated over thirteen pages from 126–39, owes a great deal to the gigantism of ‘Cyclops’ and continues the assault on Celticism in similar terms. It explains also why the Celtic Twilight should be reconfigured in the Wake as ‘cultic twalette’ (FW, 344.12), which draws on ‘cult’, ‘twaddle’ and ‘toilet’, and why the word ‘gael’ is so frequently linked with ‘gale’, suggesting rhetorical wind, and ‘gall’, suggesting the splenetic disposition so associated with Celticism in Ulysses. At 43.27 there is ‘the blew of the gaels’; 63.6 refers to ‘gaeilish gall’; 134.22 to ‘gale of his gall’; 267.7 to ‘gael, gillie, gall’; 339.13 to ‘gaelstorms’; 510.15–16 features ‘the Gaelers’ Gall’; at 515.7 there is a question about ‘A gael galled by scheme of scorn?’; 567.14 notes the ‘fury of the gales’; and so on. ‘Cyclops’ also goes some way towards explaining why, despite the fact that Irish culture is thought to be fundamental to the Wake, the Celtic identity has no unique currency there. Like all other such racial forms, and especially Aryanism, Celticism is

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forced to struggle for survival in the general fabric of the Wake where it has a cultural presence in terms of language and certainly a historiographical significance, but one which is no stronger or weaker than any number of alternative cultural presences. Woefully integrated, assimilated, contaminated and vandalised, the Celt, like the Frank, the Gaul, the Anglo-Saxon and all the other race identities in the Wake, is both there and not there. It exists, but only as a cultural construction. A further, rather more specific, and perhaps unexpected, characteristic of the Wake’s handling of Celtic identity is the very frequent associations made between Celtic Ireland and Aryanism. Finn MacCool, for example, the classic Celtic hero, becomes in I.vi ‘the oldest creater in Aryania’ (129.34) who ‘laid out lashings of laveries to hunt down his family ancestors’ (134.2–3) and is eulogised as the ‘Dutchlord, Dutchlord’ who ‘overawes us’ (‘Deutschland, Deutschland u¨ber alles’) (135.8–9) – ‘his suns the huns, his dartars the tartars, are plenty here today’ (135.23–24); the welcome resurrection of HCE and ALP, the prototype progenitors in the Wake, will be celebrated in an ‘aryan jubilarian’ (567.22). Sanskrit (‘sinscript’ at 421.18) is emphatically related to Celtic at 215.26–27, which images a progression ‘out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan’. ‘The house of O’Shea’, Shem’s Irish home, is both demonised and Aryanised as ‘Haunted Inkbottle, no number Brimstone Walk, Asia in Ireland’ (182.30–31). Celticism was, of course, intimately related to Irish republicanism – it has been estimated that 69 per cent of the postindependence political elite of Ireland passed through the Gaelic League before entering revolutionary politics.21 That association is invoked in the image of ‘Freestouters’ who swear their ‘threaties on the Cymylaya Mountains’ (329.31–33). In this context it is also worth noting that the word ‘origin’ in the Wake is more than once conflated with ‘Erin’ to produce ‘erigenate’, or some such variant. Germanised origin myths, more usually applied in the context of English identity, are here associated with Irish origins, so that the originary floodlands at 12.9 are owned by ‘Herrschuft Whaterwelter’. At 17.19 Mutt shows Jute ‘ye plaine of my Elters’ which is ‘hunfree and ours’, but elsewhere Irish and Aryan are almost interchangeable terms, producing conflations such as ‘Eirenesians’ (25.17); ‘Aaarlund’ (69.8); ‘Airyanna’ (275.14); ‘grain oils of Aerin’ (338.36); ‘Ayerland’ (347.11); ‘dawnybreak in Aira’ (353.31–32); ‘Eironesia’ (411.12); ‘gan greyne Eireann’ (503.23); and ‘Eryan’s isles’ (580.34). This association between the Celtic and Aryan identity penetrates the Wake at a number of levels, not least at a narrative level. Before examining Celtic/Aryan myths as stories reproduced in the Wake, however, it is necessary to establish that while the strength of these parallels and their

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comic manipulation helps to position the radical politics of the Wake text and should be understood in terms of a highly individualist political aesthetic, the linkage of Aryanism with Celticism was not Joyce’s invention. Indeed, such cultural connections were commonly made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and left their traces on the institutionalised version of republicanism made manifest in De Valera’s Gaeltacht. They were, in short, part of the cultural environment that shaped Joyce’s fundamental scepticism about race identity and thus determined how he would proceed to reproduce race in fiction. ENGLAND, IRELAND AND THE ARYAN MYTH

It has been shown above how by the mid-nineteenth century Vico’s defence of Judaeo-Christian origin myths had collapsed and been replaced by new versions of scientific rationalism that were utterly devoted to Aryanism. By 1850 the division between Aryans and Semites was widely accepted as indisputable scientific fact. True, it did not take long for the emptiness of Aryanism to become apparent. In 1890 Isaac Taylor, the English philologist and anthropologist, was able to nominate Theodor Benfey as the figure who had demonstrated (in a work published as early as 1868) that from ‘immemorial times’ Europe had been ‘the abode of man’. With this ‘the whole of the arguments which have been adduced in favour of the migration of the Aryans from Asia fall to the ground’. More importantly, Taylor contested the all-important connections commonly assumed to exist between race and language. ‘Identity of speech’, he wrote, ‘does not imply identity of race . . . There is no such thing as an Aryan race in the same sense that there is an Aryan language.’22 By 1911 the Encyclopaedia Britannica was having obvious difficulty in constructing any meaning around the idea of ‘Aryan’, other than a philological one, and recorded Max Mu¨ller’s frantic backpedalling of 1888. Mu¨ller, the philologist and Orientalist often credited with the invention of the term ‘Aryan’, was now writing of his own use of ‘Aryas’ as signifying ‘neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language . . . To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or brachycephalic grammar.’23 It has also been suggested above how this questioning of the Aryan myth was, however, marginal in terms of registration on popular culture. It came at a time when the political manipulation of Aryanism and associated idealist ideologies was at its height. Thus the early decades of the twentieth

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century, far from dismantling the Aryan myth, saw the further development of Aryanism and anti-Semitism in popular culture. Modern European historiographies and cultural identities were centrally determined by the imperative to take a position within a fantasy of descent from a nonbiblical first man and his ur-culture. This produced a hugely inflated Germanism and versions of reason and rationality that stretched the most creative of minds. Ornate lineages of great complexity continued to shape the new ‘sciences’ and coloured the older and most prestigious knowledge forms – the essential aim being to construct nothing less than an explanation of the formation of the modern world founded not on biblical myth but on the best of modern science. The broader phenomenon, Germanism or ‘Teutonism’, however, was far from being a nineteenth-century invention. Indeed, in England it can be traced at least as far back as the sixteenth century and the Reformation. Here the demand for a new English Church threatened radical discontinuity. The Henrican Church would, it was thought, struggle to take root unless it could be linked to a firm historical base. The required foundation was found in Anglo-Saxon, pre-Norman England where origins for both political and religious institutions became located.24 Until that time race discourse in England, as elsewhere, had traditionally sought racial origins in biblical genealogy, though, unlike the rest of Europe, English tradition claimed descent from Shem, the eldest of Noah’s sons, rather than Japhet; a tradition not, as far as I am aware, exploited in the Wake. In the Bible myth Shem had received Noah’s special blessing. Thus to be descended from Shem was, in England at any rate, taken as belonging ‘to a royal, sacerdotal and divine lineage and was a way of guaranteeing, and of translating into Christian terms of reference, the divine ancestry claimed by English kings’.25 This Hebrew ancestry and the status it conferred was combined with the ‘British’ origin myths that from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of England (c. 1136) to the Reformation dominated British cultural life. Here Brutus, grandson of Aeneas of Troy and son of Venus, became the first to land on Albion, which he renamed ‘Britain’ (at FW 568.8 ‘Britus and Gothius shall no more joustle’). After defeating the race of giants that lived there, he established a line of kingship which included such figures as Cadwaller and, crucially, Arthur ‘a hero of a composite people uniting Britons, Saxons and Normans’.26 That particular race myth is referred to many times in Finnegans Wake, usually with Arthur the Briton becoming conflated with Arthur Guinness/HCE, perhaps most notably at IV.i where HCE’s resurrection is a matter of ‘Arcthuris comeing’ (594.2) and at II.ii where ALP delivers a history lesson. Here the return of

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Arthur again shapes the return of HCE, as ALP reminds her children that ‘We drames our dreams [an associating of dreaming, drama and drinking] tell Bappy returns. And Sein annews. We will not say it shall not be, this passing of order and order’s coming, but in the herbest country and in the country around Blath as in that city self of legionds they look for its being ever yet. So shuttle the pipers done’ (277.17–23). But although the basis here may be British myth – there are echoes of Sir Thomas Malory and Layamon, and a reference to Arthur’s last battle against the Saxons, said to be sited around Bath – there are the typical group of conflations, with Gaelic (through echoes of Irish words, ‘blath’ meaning ‘flower’, for example) and German (through German diction, ‘sein’ being German for ‘being’ and ‘herbst’ German for ‘autumn’). In this Britonist context Anglo-Saxonism was an innovation, though by the Civil War it had become so well established that patriotism, the appeal to parliamentary institutions (typically explained in terms of the Saxon institution ‘witenagemot’) and Teutonism were virtually interchangeable terms. So it was, well before the House of Hanover and the Glorious Revolution, that Anglo-Saxonism became central to English identity: The English descend from the people of Germany which were called Saxons. These by good Authors were esteemed the strongest and valiantist of its Nations, and are reported to have inlarged their bounds further than any other particular nation did in Germany, and carried the terror of their Arms into all parts that lay about them; but especially to have lorded it on the Seas. In a word, they were dreaded for their Arms and commended for their extraordinary Chastity: so that the English derive from a most noble and pure Fountain, being the off-spring of so valiant and chaste a people.27

With modern rationalism in France relegating biblical genealogy to the realm of myth, English race articulation, too, was in the process of modernising. After 1688, the Germanic origins of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity became even more firmly institutionalised and from that time most writers regarded the British constitutional system, a key marker of racial identity for contemporaries, ‘as the embodiment of liberties derived from Germanic or Gothic sources’.28 Indeed, because England had been invaded by Danes, Anglo-Saxons and Normans (who were held to be Frankish, and thus Germanic), the English could construct themselves as embodying a particular synthesis of German blood. Since all the invaders had been ‘German’, the English identity, ironically enough, was taken to constitute a real thoroughbred of Aryanism and in this way a cultural identity to match the economic superiority of England could be developed and maintained. The corollary to all this was

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the construction of the antithetical Other, the denigration of the ‘original inhabitants’ of Britain – David Hume’s ‘degenerate’ and ‘abject Britons’, who were pushed to the edges as ‘Celts’.29 Thus from the eighteenth century the ‘Celts’, along with ‘blacks’ and other ‘marginals’, were stigmatised as the uncivilised ‘rabble’, and from here the traditional English snobberies regarding the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh took on their modern dimensions. This frankly ideological race history was situated at the mainstream of English culture. Key figures in the English culture establishment – Hume, Edward Gibbon, and later Thomas Babington Macaulay, Thomas Carlyle, Anthony Froude and Rudyard Kipling, – were among those central to its articulation. Charles Kingsley, also a key exponent of English Teutonism, gave a series of lectures to the University of Cambridge in 1875 that was illustrative in this respect. Drawing on all the public school romanticism now beginning to be associated with the English mission, he eulogised ‘our Teutonic race’ and explained why it had ‘destroyed Rome’. These so-called barbarians, who included Franks, Goths, Visigoths and Saxons in Kingsley’s analysis, were absurdly romanticised and thoroughly Anglicised as ‘great boys; very noble; very often very naughty boys – as boys with the strength of men might be’. They were also distinguished, crucially, from any idea of the noble savage. Although at the time primitive, the Teutons were distinct from, say, the ‘Red Indians’, a ‘decreasing race . . . ever since we have known them’. The Teutons, on the other hand, have been ‘a rapidly increasing one’ – a fact presumably connected to social Darwinism, but also to fate and divine providence, this being the race destined to be ‘the ruling race of the world’.30 Such ideas, though mainstream, did not go uncontested. At the turn of the seventeenth century, Defoe, whom Joyce famously claimed to have read completely, was attacking Anglo-Saxonism, both in the implied anthropology of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and the fake travel journals, Madagascar: Robert Drury’s Journal (1729), for instance, but even more directly in ‘The True Born Englishman’ (1701). This was a full-bloodied satire on the idea that the English were a single race of superior origin: The Romans first with Julius Caesar came, Including all the nations of that name, Gauls, Greeks, and Lombards; and by computation Auxiliaries or slaves of every nation. With Hengist, Saxons; Danes with Sueno came, In search of plunder, not in search of fame.

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Scots, Picts and Irish from the Hibernian shore: And Conquering William brought the Normans O’er. All these their barbarous offspring left behind, The dregs of armies, they of all mankind; Blended with Britains, who before were here, Of whom the Welch ha’ blest the character. From this Amphibious Ill-born mob began That vain ill-natured thing an Englishman.31

Unsurprisingly, given the absolute identification between Anglo-Saxonism and Protestantism, there was also Catholic resistance to the idea of English racial superiority. John Henry Newman, writing at the height of English jingoism, marvelled at the country that seemed in ‘a dream, being drugged with this fallacious notion of its superiority to other countries and times’.32 In Ireland itself, both Catholic and Protestant cultural nationalists in the late nineteenth century were also disputing English race history, displacing English Anglo-Saxon myths of origin with a historiography that often emphasised Rome and its invasion of England. Here materialist Rome became the true progenitor of Englishness; thus Professor McHugh’s culture of ‘Cloacae: sewers . . . The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession’ (U, 7.489–93).33 In a new polarisation of the Irish and English national identities, the culture of brute force and materialist order was countered with antithetical notions of Irish ‘spirituality’. It might be assumed from all this that the new ‘Celtic’ formulation in Ireland was very far removed from Germanism, thus rendering Joyce’s association between the Celt and the Aryan completely idiosyncratic, but in fact this was not the case at all. Indeed, English racial myths and their implications for Ireland were challenged not least by prominent members of the German academy, by figures who were important in the articulation of Germanism and presumably identified with an Irish struggle for national identity that in some ways could be seen to parallel the dramatic emergence of ‘Germany’ in the nineteenth century. These were taken to heart by revivalists, so that a key text of Irish cultural revivalism, such as Hyde’s ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicisation’ (1894) for instance, was grounded on the intellectual authority of Germanicist linguists.34 The community of interest that linked Irish Celticism to Germanism, no doubt assisted by the kind of Anglophobia that was later to produce Roger Casement’s belief that ‘50,000 German troops were a sine qua non for insurrection’, marked the beginning of a lengthy relationship between Irish and German nationalisms.35

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The tradition of German scholarship in Irish was part of this relationship and dated from the early nineteenth century, reaching a high point with the publication in 1853 of Johann Kaspar Zeuss’s authoritative Grammatica Celtica. It included ‘champion ethnicist’(s) (FW, 570.12) well known to Joyce, such as Heinrich Zimmer, one-time Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Greitswald and later of Celtic Philology at Berlin, and his colleague Julius Pokorny. Referred to by Haines in Ulysses as the Celticist who can find ‘no trace of hell in ancient Irish myth’36 (U, 10.1082), Pokorny succeeded Kuno Meyer as the Professor of Celtic at the University of Berlin, a post which he held until early 1933 when he fell victim to the race theories of the Nazi regime and was suspended, though he was himself an Aryanist. The former figure, Zimmer, was the author of Maya der indische Mythos, a book possessed by Joyce and heavily annotated.37 He figures in the Wake at 69.32, as ‘Herr Betreffender, out for his zimmer holedigs’, an archaeologist/philologist who is found ‘swobbing broguen eeriesh myth brockendootsch, making his reporterage on Der Fall Adams’ (70.4–5). He appears again at 349.4 in ‘zimmerminnes’; and at 502.5 where his Aryanism is combined with his name to make ‘zimalayars’. He also features in a number of notebook references.38 The key challenge for these academics was the demonstration that the Celtic language was Indo-European and thus Aryan. An account of the long and complex discussions associated with this demonstration is given by Myles Dillon in Celts and Aryans (1975).39 Here Dillon shows how James Cowles Pritchard first tried to demonstrate that Celtic was Indo-European in 1831. August Pott took him to task in 1836 and Adolphe Pictet entered the fray in 1837 with De l’affinite´ des langages celtiques avec le Sanskrit.40 It was Pictet, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition) records, who tried to show the derivation of the word ‘Erin’ from ‘ira’, the Sanskirt word for earth, a claim shown to be quite false in 1891 – had it been proven, of course, the implications for Celticists everywhere would have been enormous.41 Even more contentious, however, was the linguists’ attempt at an ethnography which tried to break any alignment of the Irish with an inferior indigenous race of ‘dark skinned’ and ‘dark haired’ natives. They did so quite simply by asserting that Ireland represented the Western limits of an original Aryan migration. Far from being a barbarous race, the Irish included elements of the Aryan spirit at its most adventurous, powerful and creative. It is this ‘fact’ that explains for Zimmer how such ‘a great civilizing influence’ was wielded by ‘the small Irish state on the West Coast of North

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Britain [the creation of the so-called Scots from Antrim who colonised West Scotland sometime in the early fifth century] . . . over a much more extensive Pictish state of North Britain’.42 Similarly, in a controversial lecture delivered to what must have been a predominantly nationalist audience at University College, Dublin in 1909, Pokorny challenged the English version of Ireland’s racial origins by placing the Celtic invasion of Ireland much earlier than was originally thought. In a written version of this lecture, he approved of ‘the English sense of nationality’ and of what he saw as ‘their sexual aloofness from lower races’, but nevertheless attacked the English version of Irish history which ‘has usually been nothing but the history of the English settlers in Ireland, and this only in as far as there were records of it in the English language’.43 Armed with what he takes to be linguistic and archaeological evidence, he argues the case for a first wave of Celts that would have conquered a non-Aryan aboriginal race, a ‘small, dark-haired, long-headed people’.44 These frontier men and women ‘were, in race and speech, a branch of the Western group of Aryans. We meet them at the beginning of history, a race of tall, long-haired aristocratic conquerers, with fair hair, blue eyes and light skins and a culture not very different from that of the ancient Teutons. They called themselves Keltoi – ‘‘the high ones’’ – a word related to the Latin celsus.’45 Here, then, Ireland becomes much more closely associated with the Aryan origin of things. This kind of material would have found a receptive audience among the Catholic students of University College in the early twentieth century, but it is worth emphasising that the kind of race fantasies deployed by people like Zimmer and Pokorny in the early twentieth century were not new. With Mu¨ller’s work on Sanskrit and Aryanism well established and popularised by the 1860s, the implications for Irish cultural nationalism were already being worked out, certainly in the 1870s. As early as 1876 the Reverend Ulick J. Bourke had published The Aryan Origin of the Gaelic Race and Language. Dedicated to the Archibishop of Tuam, this book asserts that ‘the Gaels were the first who came westward from the ancient Aryan region in Asia’ and sees Gaelic (or ‘Keltic’) as a dialect of ‘Aryan’. Thus ‘Irish holds on the tree of early human speech a position next after the eastern and classic off-shoots of the great Aryan tongue’ and ‘the primary result of the study of the language of ancient Ireland as a branch of the study of philology, is to lead the student to the conviction, that the first immigrants who made Eire their home had come from the East; and that the language which they spoke was Aryan’. The connection between

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Aryanism, Gaelic and cultural revivalism was thus firmly established, though from a Catholic perspective it was necessary to make at least some attempt at reconciling older orthodoxies, which Bourke does: The revived language could well be styled Japhetic, or, the tongue spoken by the descendants of Japhet, in contradistinction to the Semitic spoken by the children of Sem, and which is the mother tongue of Hebrew, Chaldaic, Syriac, Arabic, Samaritan, Ethiopic, and old Phenician; while the Aryan or Japhetic is the parent tongue of Sanskrit, Keltic, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Slavonic, nigh every dialect in Europe, and in parts of Asia, where the descendants of Japhet took up their abode.46

It was from this linguistic base that the myth of Ireland’s Aryan origins became a standard configuration popularised in a range of contexts from children’s literature to political rhetoric. It was presented as fact in the standard histories. Emily Lawless, whose Ireland makes a particular investment in race discourse, began her account of Irish history with reference to Aryanism.47 At what precise period what is known as the Scoto-Celtic branch of the great Aryan stock broke away from its parent tree, by what route its migrants travelled, in what degree of consanguinity it stood to the equally Celtic race or races of Britain, what sort of people inhabited Ireland previous to the first Aryan invasions – all this is to the last degree uncertain.48

W. A. O’Conor’s earlier account, History of the Irish People (1886) took more poetic licence and was insistent on a Celtic–Aryan/Teuton–Aryan split, though he agreed with the fantasy that the first settlers of Ireland were followed by the Aryans: who, issuing still from the east, and travelling by some intermediate route so that they did not suffer transformation into Kelt or German by the way, brought with them their arts, their customs, and their religion. The region of unshadowed skies and vast horizons is suggestive of one infinite Deity by the homogeneousness of the sphere which an intuition of the soul conceives to be His dwelling place. The Aryans worshipped light, the HeavenFather. This sublime primitive creed degenerated into gloomy and cruel rites as it slowly filtered through the dark and savage scenery of the north, and the God of light was changed into or associated with the god of thunder and tempest. No such depravation took place in Ireland. As the earth rolls its plains and mountains towards the dawn, so rose the spirit of the western isle from the mists of the far Atlantic, to greet the message from a brighter clime. The west embraced and enshrined in all its kindling splendour the promise of the east. The fact symbolises, if it has not helped to shape, the story of our land. While other nations have lowered religion to the meanness of their desires, Ireland through all the rigours of fortune has preserved the ideal of her youth, and with unmatched fidelity has scornfully turned from the taunting challenge with which her jealous enemies would tempt her from her grand devotion.49

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Here the contours of a very familiar and highly romanticised version of Ireland, where the victimised land embodies a culture of youth and spirituality, derive exclusively from an undiluted Aryanist ‘history’ that, in this fantastic account, bypassed Germany altogether. This was more than the ‘high’ European academy ever argued, though it did reflect traditions in more mainstream culture that aligned Galls, Gaels and Celts, distinguishing all three from the Teutons.50 The strategy of constructing an outsiderly form of Celticism on the margins of modernity, then, was appropriated by a cultural nationalism which talked in terms of restoring ‘spirituality’ to Ireland and insisted on the essential Otherness of materialism and modern culture. If in other parts of the West race politics were spliced to liberalism, conservatism and, indeed, socialism, in Ireland they were appropriated both by cultural nationalism and later by liberationist republicanism, where they took on an obvious revolutionary dimension. By 1901 the state was receiving alarming reports about this dynamic mix and its potential for subversion – ‘the Gaelic League educates the brain, and the Gaelic Athletic Association trains the body and inculcates those ideas of military discipline which would be very dangerous in a revolutionary crisis’.51 No doubt there were strong elements of paranoia in such reports. They reflected a culture that saw itself as being under siege, not just from Ireland, but across the empire. It is clear, however, that Irish republicanism, especially under the nationalist extremity of figures like Padraic Pearse, crucially conscripted the Celtic body and soul in defence of the Irish homeland. Subsumed also by an ultraconservative Catholic Church, Celticism was later enshrined in the formal constitution of the republic. The Irish State’s defence of ‘traditional and Catholic familial and social values’ was racialised, inextricable from what many historians have seen as ‘a rising Celtic fundamentalism’.52 In R. F. Foster’s view, Gaelicising the new state was, at the very least, a ‘preoccupation’. More forcefully, he argues that the Free State, highly sensitive to notions that it had sold out, was later to develop an ‘obsession with enforcing public modes of ‘‘Irishness’’’. Although ‘liberal rights were ostensibly guarded in the constitution, the new government was authoritarian; the new regime showed its derivation from Sinn Fe´in, never unduly fastidious about democratic procedure . . . [it] believed in ‘‘strong’’, not to say ruthless government’.53 It is easy to imagine, especially from the perspective of the 1920s and 1930s, how the new Irish State’s formulation of a radical folk politics, and its decisively rightist intervention in such areas as divorce, pornography, contraception and the censorship of films and books, could have been seen in familial relationship to the volk politics of German fascism.54

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Joyce would have met Aryanism in many other contexts and across a wide cultural spectrum. Many contemporary European intellectuals that we know Joyce read were Aryanists. Ernest Renan, for instance, was the ‘chief [French] scientific sponsor of the Aryan myth’, second only to Mu¨ller himself as a late nineteenth-century propagandist of Aryanism. A one-time Catholic, who had been crucially influenced by German philology and philosophy, he held complete ‘contempt for the coloured or ‘‘savage peoples’’’,55 and regarded Judaism as retired in a cultural sense. ‘The Semites have nothing further to do that is essential . . . let us remain Germans and Celts.’56 Otto Weininger was himself Jewish and hardly anti-Semitic, but his ide´e fixe bore the tragic mark of its time with Weininger insisting, in the infamous Sex and Character (1903), on a Manichean contrast between women identified with Jews on the one hand and men identified with Aryans on the other. Shortly after writing the book, he committed suicide, a fact viewed with awful irony by Hitler, who regarded Weininger as ‘the only Jew fit to live’.57 It is clear, however, that Joyce’s engagement with the Aryan myth predated his life in Europe and his exposure to the broad sweep of European fascism as a popular culture infused by the Aryan myth. As a young Irish writer he could hardly have failed to notice how the Irish Literary Revival, for example, was implicated here. As early as 1889 and Crossways, Yeats was reconstructing a ‘Golden Age’ of Arya in the East in precisely the same terms as his version of the Celtic Age of Heroes.58 Clearly influenced by the Aryan myth and its spiritualisation under theosophy, he was imagining ‘sacred Himalay’ as the cradle of spirituality and thus as the precursor of the ‘organic’ culture the Literary Revival claimed to serve.59 As important as revivalism was for the young Joyce, however, it was no more than symptomatic of a much wider cultural environment in this respect. The Irish Celt and the English Anglo-Saxon were cultural identities that went far beyond the immediate terms of the Literary Revival. Both were fundamental to Joyce’s world, and both, ironically enough, were entirely linked by a shared dynamic with myths of Aryanism. SHAUN THE POST

(AND ‘MAY

THE FIREPLUG OF FILIALITY

REINSURE YOUR BUNGHOLE’)

The many puns across ‘Erin’ and ‘Aryan’ in the Wake draw on a very precise historical background. Responding to a history of cultural naturalism and republicanism in which Celticism and Germanism were imbricated, they feature as direct and comically literalist displacements of the lyrical and often mystical pieties that more conventionally accompanied

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such associations. That is to say, a pun like ‘Eryan’s isles’ (580.34) is both pointed and deconstructive, especially in the context of Europe in the 1930s. Far from inventing connections between Ireland and Aryanism, Joyce is here responding to what was once a commonplace identification in ways that generate particular and powerful effects. The designation of Ireland as Arya in such bold terms is at once comic, alarming and shocking, and it would become even more so in the late 1940s and 1950s. Joyce’s intervention in Celtic/Aryan genealogies, however, is not limited to verbal play of this kind, where the Republic becomes ‘I’m-free-Down-in-Easia’ (482.29–30). The history of Irish nationalism’s flirtation with the Aryan identity is also exploited in more structural elements of the Wake. The great joke cycles, for example, deploy the same Erin/Aryan parallelism. Here the ‘garden of Erin’ (203.1), the beginning of human (i.e. Irish) culture, becomes inextricable from the Aryan myth of origins, so that Finnegan’s originary skyscraper is understood as ‘erigenating from next to nothing and celescalating the himals’ (4.36–5.1). The association is particularly evident in IV.i, which evokes the ‘pfath . . . pfunded’ by ‘oura vatars thar arred in Himmal’ (599.4–5) and visualises a restoration of the pure-blood Celt when ‘[k]ilt by kelt shell kithagain with kinagain’ (594.3–4). This absurd version of eugenics, so radical as to be entirely dysgenic, is framed by both the rising of Finnegan in the East ‘a wick weak woking from ennemberable Ashias’ (608.30–31) and, at the very ‘end’ of the Wake, a new imagined coupling which has ALP sensing a change – ‘Yes, you’re changing, sonhusband, and you’re turning, I can feel you, for a daughterwife from the hills again. Imlamaya. And she is coming. Swimming in my hindmoist’ (627.1–3). Not surprisingly, the place where the end meets the beginning is constructed in thoroughly recognisable Aryanist terms – ‘In that earopean end meets Ind’ (598.15). The dynamo behind this overriding cyclical movement where the European end finds the Aryan beginning, the Teutonic heaven on earth imagined in Hitler’s ‘strength towards joyance’ (598.24–25), is Shaun – the voice of Aryanism in Finnegans Wake, as we have seen, though that is not his only designation. Indeed, in the Shaun identity the complex concatenation of Aryanism and fascism with Celticism and Irish republicanism becomes particularly focused, and the political aesthetics of the Wake spreads from the cultural strategics of its linguistics to recognisable versions of ‘character’ and ‘plot’. Thus whatever his variants, in terms of size for example, which shifts incredibly, and in terms of a status moving from swaddled baby-man to defiant hero, there are consistencies to Shaun. He is typically characterised throughout the latter stages of the Wake by his love of country and the emphasis he places on ‘blood’. He is responsible

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for defending the national borders, and the womenfolk (which amounts to the same thing in book three of the Wake), from ‘the black fremdling’ (442.1) – ‘fremdling’ being German for ‘stranger’ – and it is he who draws on republican tradition to advocate incest as a way of protecting the purity of the race. Here, for example, he manipulates the Young Ireland movement and, in particular, the motto of its mouthpiece The Nation, which was ‘racy of the soil’: ‘The racist to the racy, rossy. The soil is for the self alone. Be ownkind. Be kithkinish. Be bloodysibby. Be irish’ (465.30–31).60 Typically, he challenges his questioners in III.iii by insulting their ‘blood’ – they are ‘broons quadroons’ (i.e. in race science, one-quarter black) (522.34). A bookburner who tells Issy that he will ‘burn the books that grieve you’, he plans to ‘instate’ a presumably populist and conservative ‘Weekly Standerd, our verile organ that is ethelred by all pressdom’ (439.34–440.1), and also figures as the eugenicist who insists that Shaun, a ‘negertop’ and a Jew, is ‘forbidden tomate’ (423.29–36). Much of Shaun’s Aryanist invective is directed at his brother, the diseased reprobate who has ‘a lowsense for the production of consumption and dalickey cyphalos on his brach premises where he can purge his contempt and dejeunerate into a skillyton’ (422.6–9). The significance of such insults, however, goes well beyond the psychodynamics of sibling rivalry, just as the Wake itself hugely outstrips family history. Shaun is a cultural force, and centred in the historical cycles of the Wake where the great turning point is the murder of HCE and his replacement by the hero/villain son. As the above associations between Shaun, Sinn Fe´in and ‘racy of the soil’ suggest, alongside these Aryanist dimensions and hopelessly conflated with them, there are also strong identifications between Shaun and a Celticised form of republicanism – in his incarnation as Chuff he is the ‘chief celtech chappy’ (237.20). At the most obvious level, his status as a postman puts him at the very heart of the Irish Rebellion and postwar Irish radicalism (see 409.6 and ‘phost of a nation!’). Quite apart from the fact that the postal system was emblematic of colonial administration, which is why the republican government painted red postboxes green in the 1920s (see, again, 411.24 where Shaun proudly admits to painting ‘our town a wearing greenridinghued’), O’Connell Street General Post Office was, of course, the literal and symbolic centre of the 1916 Rebellion. Moreover, after the Rebellion, Michael Collins famously made a point of establishing his own agents in the Post Office – Royal Mail wagons were used by the IRA for lines of communication and for moving arms and there are contemporary photographs of Black and Tans searching them. In this context it is significant that Shaun’s permit to be a postman comes ‘from on high out

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of the book of breedings’ and is ‘hairydittary’ (see 409.10 and 410.1–2). He appears at the beginning of book three sporting emblems of republicanism, ‘a starspangled zephyr . . . with his motto through dear life embrothred over it in peas, rice, and yeggyyolk’ (404.27–29) – green, orange and white being the colours of the new Irish state. Shortly after, he eats a gargantuan meal which includes ‘in their green free state a clister of peas’ (406.19), as well as ‘gaulusch gravy and pumpernickel’ (406.6). The ‘Lettrechaun’ (419.17) who is called by ‘Sireland’ (428.7), Shaun is, certainly in his own mind, the modern Cuchulain figure foreseen by Yeats (see 455.33 where Shaun, like Cuchulain, is made to eat a griddle) and he is, of course, utterly devoted to country (‘Oh Kosmos! Ah Ireland!’ – 456.7), but a particular kind of country where the priority is to use the ‘punch’ of the ‘Gaa’ to ‘Gaelicise’, with ‘impulsory irelitz’ (421.27), and create the ‘eirest race, the ourest nation’ (514.33–36). All this operates alongside specifically Germanic associations, where anti-English slogans are appropriated from Germany – Shaun’s ‘cold strafe illglands’, for instance, suggests the German anti-English slogan ‘God punish England’ (451.4) (strafe being German for punish). At his most energised he resorts to an invective which draws on the German language and Hitleresque rhetorical styles to produce an anti-Shemitic roar – ‘Thunderweather, khyber schinker escapa sansa pagar!’ (464.10–11). Most suggestively, Shaun’s Aryanist/Celticist/Republican identity is treated in the narrative sweep that takes place across books one and three. The turning point here is when HCE, a figure from an older colonial world, is murdered and usurped by his sons, though it is clear that Shaun, the ‘One bully son’ (375.17), takes the lead in this patricide/regicide. At the end of II.iii, HCE, allegedly the ‘nonirishblooder’ (378.11) who ‘can’t impose on frayshouters like os’ (378.26), is shot (‘Bring forth your deed! Bang! Till is the right time! Bang!’, 378.17–18) and from this moment, until the further turning point in III.iv when Shaun’s racial politics are thoroughly exorcised and HCE returns in the form of the waking dead, the centre of gravity of the Wake shifts. Now Shaun the post, as opposed to HCE and ALP, becomes the focal point of things. He has ‘the vote of the Irish’ (407.13–14) and by book three has become configured in hugely elevated terms. Renowned for all his ‘deeds of goodness’, he is, according to the four masters who question him in III.i, a ‘walking saint’, fit to join the pantheon of Irish heroes – ‘you were, tootoo too stayer, the graced of gods and pittites and the salus of the wake’ (427.24–29). With ‘halluxes so splendid, through Ireland untranscended’, Shaun is nothing short of divine. Tellingly accompanied by ‘comestabulish Sigurdsen’ (‘a butter-blond

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warden of the peace’, 429.17–19), and doffing his hat ‘with a reinforced crown’, he looks ‘a young chapplie of sixtine’, but one with a macho edge (and a sizable penis) for it is clear from his ‘manhood that he was just the killingest ladykiller all by kindness’ (430.17–33).61 His position at a new cultural and even spiritual centre seems unassailable in III.ii where he stakes his unassailable claim on Issy, ‘the mainsay of our erigenal house’ (431.34–35), and the other dancing girls who collectively represent Ireland, the nation – the potential prize of the new alpha male who has, albeit temporarily, displaced HCE. By III.ii, then, Shaun, from being the disaffected and largely impotent son of II.ii has risen to eminence and it is here that he attempts to stamp his puritanist authority over the twenty-nine girls, warning them about the dangers of modernity, demanding their modesty and insisting on the importance of tradition and the national culture. At 431, now ‘the most purely human being that ever was called man’ (11), he is asking the girls, ‘twentynine hedge daughters out of Benent Saint Berched’s national nightschool’ (430.1–2), whether they have ‘read Irish legginds’ and ‘reproving one that the ham of her hom could be seen below her hem’ (431.4–6). He warns them about going on the stage ‘playing breeches parts for Bessy Sudlow in flesh-coloured pantos’ (434.8–9) and about posing ‘in your nudies’ (435.5), advising instead that they should be ‘earthing down in the coalhole trying to boil the big gun’s dinner’ (434.9–10). Above all they should, apparently, respect family life: ‘Especially beware please of being at a party to any demoralizing home life. That saps a chap. Keep cool faith in the firm, have warm hoep in the house and begin frem athome to be chary of charity’ (433.36–434.3). The echoes of De Valera’s new Free State are obvious, as are the terms of Joyce’s ruthless undermining of its credentials. For behind ‘Jaunty’ Jaun’s insistence on righteousness and moral purity there is a great deal of slippage and ambiguity, indicative of the dark underbelly of his status as ‘a martyr to the dischurch of all duty’ (431.25–26). The driving irony here is that the episode heralding the victory of tradition, family values and moralism should also be so thoroughly spoiled by the vulgarities of an almost uncontrollable innuendo. In a book where the possibilities of multiple meaning know no bounds, III.ii certainly contains some of the liveliest ambiguities, with Jaun issuing warnings about ‘how you dare of wet cocktails in Kildare’ (436.30–31) and against the ‘fickling intentions’ (439.1–2) of a ‘rogues’ gallery ‘of nightbirds and bitchfanciers’ (438.34–35). ‘Make a strong point’, he insists, ‘of never kicking up your rumpus over the scroll end of sofas’ (433.15–16); ‘Never let the promising hand usemake free of

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your oncemaid sacral’ (433.27–28) (one of many warnings against masturbation in this section); and ‘Never slip the silver key though your gate of golden age’ (433.31–32). But at the same time, do ‘[s]lip your oval out of touch’ (‘oval’ suggesting rugby ball but also being slang for vagina) (435.18) or you will fall victim to the lusts of ‘hogarths like Bottisilly and Titteretto’ (435.7–8) or, worst of all, ‘Ramrod, the meaty hunter, always jaeger for a thrust’ (435.13–14). The Jaun identity is hardly immune to the implications of this forceful rhetoric and its variant baby talk (‘Dress the pussy for her nighty and follow her piggytails up their way to Winkyland’, 435.24–25) and it is, of course, his own mounting lust that generates the dynamics of the discourse here. Under the guise of patriarchal protection, the warnings to the twenty-nine girls take on the dimensions of erotic hysteria. Friendly advice (‘look before you leak’, 433.34) becomes the father’s vice of spying on peeing girls. Behind the imperative to ‘never lay bare your breast secret’ is the exposed bare breast itself, just as behind the order to ‘sit still face to face’ is the idea of the welcome mischief that produces an accidental disrobing, ‘shorht of your skorth falls down to his knees’ (434.26–27 and 32–33). As in Foucault’s famous inversion of Victorian prudery, all this talk of purity is simply the reverse side of an overwhelming lust. Similarly, behind the so-called ‘scientism’ of Shaun’s health advice is a whole series of highly unsavoury voyeuristic interests in sweat, female defecation and bouncing female bodies. Insisting that the girls steer clear of the all too revealing and dangerous business of bicycle riding – too much for the ‘fads of your weak abdominal wall’ – Shaun advises that ‘should you feel, in shorts, as though you needed healthy physicking exorcise to flush your kidneys, you understand, and move that twelffinger bowel and threadworm inhibitating it, lassy, and perspire freely, lict your lector in the lobby and why out you go by the ostiary on to the dirt track and skip!’ (437.10–16). The punishment that Shaun threatens should the girls fall from these high standards is indicative of his own mounting sexual emotions, which lean heavily towards the sadistic – any ‘brainy notion to raise cancan and rouse commotion I’ll be apt to flail that tail for you till it’s borning . . . Holy gun, I’ll give it you, hot, high and heavy before you can say sedro!’ (436.35–437.1 and 439.5–6). Thus III.ii attacks Jaun’s newly cleansed world at a most vulnerable spot. Just where it claims to be most moral, most pure and most manly, in its ‘protection’ of racialised womanhood, Joyce reveals it to be actually most corrupt, hypocritical and downright dirty. Behind Jaun’s articulation of morality, family values and community lies a devious, macho and egoistic

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sexuality, a corrupted will to power. The implications of this in terms of De Valera’s Free State are all too clear, but it is important to emphasise again that it is a specific version of republicanism and nationalism that is being attacked here, rather than republicanism and nationalism per se. The idea of Irish independence was utterly compelling for Joyce, but De Valera’s Ireland, famously reconvened in the Wake as a ‘devil era’ (473.08), was quite simply not independent in Joyce’s terms. It represented the victory of a repressive culture of tradition and conformity. To put it rather differently, the Wake’s encounter with the Irish Free State in III.ii and elsewhere is not simply an Irish argument – indeed, to view it as such moves close to the familiar stereotyping of the Irish as being eternally conflictual, and confines the Wake to a much smaller political world than it actually inhabits. The Wake is fundamentally conditioned by the fact that Joyce was writing from the perspective of two decades dominated by the rise of fascism. From here Joyce saw the Ireland that emerged in the 1920s, a fulfilment of parochialism, revivalism and Catholicism, in a particularly dark light. The siege mentality fostered by the Republic not only helped the flourishing of all the things Joyce found most objectionable about Ireland, but also appeared to join forces with the most dangerous ideologies that had emerged in modern times. It is in this context that one must read the parallels he makes between Ireland/Germany and, especially, Aryanism/Celticism. For all the specificity of the Wake, then, Joyce’s broader target is wider than De Valera’s Ireland. All forms of authority that cultivate inflated pride and unreasonable fear are involved here, a target that would implicate most if not all states, but which had a special importance in the 1930s when totalitarianism, with some justification, assumed a position at the very end of ideology. From a 1939 perspective, it was not inconceivable that fascism might fulfil its promise and become indeed the universal reality. Finnegan’s Wake, however, does not accept that position. Its function, far from elevating the extreme right, is to diminish it. One of the ways it does so is through the great cyclical structure which refutes the teleology of the Third Reich. Through Shaun’s story the Wake does indeed configure Aryanism, Anglo-Saxonism and Celticism as the cultural contexts in which the world becomes increasingly framed. Following post-1918 world history in its inexorable drive towards Shaun’s narrow vision of exclusion and repression, the Wake mimics the rise of totalitarianism. But it utterly refutes closure. It might rest for a while at Shaun’s peak, but it does not remain there. One of the very healthiest things in a healthy book is the insistence that Shaun and his vision will be diminished, deflated and finally

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displaced – which is what happens at the end of III.iii when the myth of race science is finally exploded in a fit of angry impatience: ‘Tallhell and Barbados wi ye and your Errian coprulation! Pelagiarist! . . . Y’are absexed, so y’are, with mackerglosia and mickroocyphyllicks’ (525.6–9).62 From here ‘Things are not as they were’ (540.13), the ‘arianautic sappertillery’ (530.18) are vanished away, and the Wake makes its inexorable move backwards towards reconciliation with ALP and HCE. A number of important dimensions converge in Joyce’s handling of the Aryan myth. These are Irish and European, postcolonial and global, political and cultural, historical and contemporary to the 1920s and 1930s. It is not possible to say how much of the Wake can be ‘explained’ in terms of the Aryan myth, but, clearly, the encounter with Aryanism and its variants is important to the Wake at a number of levels. It shapes Wake identities and influences the structure of the Wake. It also figures centrally in the Wake’s extraordinary aesthetics, and especially in the cavalier vitality with which it ‘corrupts’ language. Configuring Germanism as the ‘hundering blundering dunderfunder of plundersundered manhood’ (596.2–3), Joyce identifies its most radical manifestation in the Aryan myth as a European fascination both ridiculous and dangerous. This becomes fundamental to the politics of the Wake, producing among many other effects a comic rhetoric that damns ‘Errian coprulation’ and an erasure of the race science that divides, like ‘Aerian’s [Hadrian’s] Wall’ (379.11). Through this aesthetics the Wake realises the madness of an ideology that leaves ‘Shivering William’ having ‘his teeth . . . shaken out of their suckets by the wrang dog, for having 5 pints 73 of none Eryen blood in him abaft the seam level’ (507.35–508.3). It has been emphasised here that the Wake was not the first to unravel the Aryan myth and that in taking on race science Joyce joined forces with a number of traditions. Vico was crucial for Joyce in this respect, the early eighteenth-century exponent of a virtuous rationalism that operated essentially through scientific method and reached something of a crossroads with Sigmund Freud. It was Freud who in the 1930 preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo proclaimed his complete estrangement ‘from the religion of his fathers’ and inability to share in nationalist ideals. At the same time, he knew the mysterious pull of race and national identity, as Joyce did. He felt ‘in his essential nature a Jew’ and expressed ‘the conviction that unprejudiced science cannot remain a stranger to the spirit of the new Jewry’.63 His book, though not devoted to race, did deal with origins, the origins of religion and morality, and here it made the key arguments about a commonalty between the ‘civilised’ and the

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‘primitive’.64 These existed not at some imagined margins, but at the heart of things, both in cultural terms and in terms of the psychological landscape of the individual. Implicitly, this was an exposure of the absurdity, and invidiousness, of scientific racism. Far from isolating him, Joyce’s assault on Aryanism connected up with prestigious cultural figures and traditions, even if these were traditions not shared by all his fellow moderns. Especially in the field of literature, high culture returned to ideas of hierarchy and distinction with a new force in the early decades of the twentieth century, and neither Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis nor T. S. Eliot, or from an early generation, Joseph Conrad or Ford Madox Ford, shared Joyce’s radical sensitivity to the absurdity of race science. In other areas of intellectual life, however, Joyce would have found kindred spirits. What really separated him out were not the ideas of the Wake in this respect but, of course, the manner in which they were expressed. This was and remains extraordinary, involving aesthetic practices so defamiliarising that they render the Wake almost audienceless. Written across 628 pages of the most dense prose, this incredibly rich and inventive overplay of reason gone wrong is effectively, even now, generally quite unreadable for most readers. But, placed against the context of a collapsing Enlightenment project, Joyce’s diversions from ‘reason’ do not exist in a cultural void. Indeed, this is a central point to the argument being developed here. Rather than understanding the Wake as a flawed aesthetic project that exposes the wider divide between the intellectuals and the masses,65 it becomes possible to see in the very difficulty and strangeness of the Wake ironic discourses that exist in clear reflective relationship to European culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Such a perspective does not imply the existence of a ‘key’ to the Wake; it does not necessarily make the Wake any easier – but it might allow us to make claims about its importance in new ways.

CHAPTER

4

‘Our darling breed’: the Wake, social Darwinism and eugenics

Scientific racism was at the centre of Aryanism, but it was quite possible to be a scientific racist without specific commitment to the Aryan myth – the middle-class progressive subscribing to eugenics as the race science of the future was once an entirely familiar phenomenon. As late as 1936 Julian Huxley, by no means a reactionary, was arguing that ‘once the full implications of evolutionary biology are grasped, eugenics will inevitably become part of the religion of the future, or whatever complex of sentiments may in the future take the place of organised religion’.1 This seeming paradox was due to an extraordinary cultural convergence at the turn of the nineteenth century. Once reliant on an increasingly discredited appropriation of linguistics and the deployment of highly romantic historiographies, by the end of the century the science of race had become hugely reinforced and greatly sophisticated. Now liberals, progressives and conservatives alike were subject to what were perceived to be the hard facts and inexorable logic of Lamarckian and Darwinian biological science.2 And yet, as Peter Bowler, an eminent historian of evolution, has argued, there was no necessary connection between Darwinism and progressivism. Indeed, divergent evolution alone should have led Darwin and Darwinists to reject progressivist teleology. But Darwin wrote for a public ‘already conditioned to think of evolution as the unfolding of a purposeful trend towards a morally significant good’.3 This cultural conditioning led to what Bowler regards as a central contradiction, ‘the radical aspects of Darwin’s thinking so important to modern biologists were embedded in a conceptual framework that was in many ways quite conventional’. While Darwin himself is to be distinguished from the outright social Darwinists – Herbert Spencer, for example, and Ernst Haeckel, the German race theorist whose quasi-religious philosophy of ‘monism’ can be directly linked to Nazism4 – he did accept, despite the compelling evidence for ‘open-ended’ evolution, what most of his contemporaries accepted: that natural selection would ‘in the long run produce higher levels of organisation’.5 69

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There is a sense, though, in which fixing Darwin in such terms, as interesting as it might be in terms of the history of ideas, is quite irrelevant to the issue of the real relationship between Darwinism and social Darwinism and the significance of both in terms of scientific racism, for once published, On the Origin of Species (1859) existed quite outside of Darwin’s own beliefs and difficulties. It became a figurehead text for progressivists everywhere, irrespective of Darwin’s views on the issue and even where there was disagreement, as there was. Darwinism was appropriated in a wide range of cultural contexts which had ‘progress’ in common and ‘progress’ was the developmental episteme par excellence, represented most simply by the image of the ladder, with ‘advance’ being explained in terms of ‘a linear hierarchy . . . The linear system played a major role in the life sciences and linked strongly to the model of embryological development and the recapitulation theory.’ The race dimension here was clear and emphatic. ‘Primitive’ cultures were thought to be analogous to children while white, bourgeois Europe embodied the fullyfledged and mature adult; and just as the body of an animal ‘recapitulated’ the biological record, so with these highly racialised versions of humans and human society. Parallels to linear progressivism in the biological sciences, then, emerged among sociologists, anthropologists and archaeologists who were ‘convinced that history revealed stages of social development culminating in Western culture’.6 Thus supported by evolutionary theory and racial anthropology, both the rise of the West and its perceived degeneration could be understood scientifically. The explanation for the obvious inferiority of the primitive races, and the astonishing success of industrial culture, was no longer dependent on any historical extrapolation from linguistics, or divine favour, but could be finely positioned in terms of progressive and evolutionary schemas underpinned by hard science. Similarly, the ‘degeneration’ apparent in the West’s populations, where families like the Wake’s Jukes and Kallikaks gave rise to fearful predictions, was rationally grasped. The process which allowed ‘European elites to proclaim their superiority over non-European peoples also revealed an inferiority of the masses within their own nations’.7 The working classes represented in the work of early sociologists such as Seebohm Rowntree and Charles Booth, like their counterparts in the anthropological tradition, were marginalised, and exoticised. Augustin Morel, the French founder of the science of degeneration, made the obvious connections in a particularly nuanced way, indicating just how fundamentally the degenerate masses, as opposed to the primitive races of the Third World, were responsible for producing the

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really important issues facing modernity. ‘Between the intellectual state of the wildest Bosjenian’, he wrote, ‘and that of the most civilized European there is less difference than between the intellectual state of the same European and that of the degenerate being.’8 The ladder model worked for the early progressivists who visualised a universal linear dynamic governing human history, but it was to prove quite inadequate to the task of representing the growing complexity of social Darwinism (‘the strangle for love and the sowiveall of the prettiest’, FW, 145.26–27), and the radical formulation that hardened into eugenics by the early twentieth century. Eugenics in particular drew on the work of anthropologists such as W. Boyd Dawkins in the 1880s, and, twenty years later, of the Oxford geologist W. J. Sollas and the palaeoanthropologist Sir Arthur King, all of whom had developed theories of cyclical or discontinuous evolution. These displaced the earlier linear progressivism with historiographies where sudden stoppage and critical divergence became the characteristic and symptomatic markers of development.9 The diagrammatic typically favoured here was adapted from antiquity and centred on the tree, an image which postulated a mainstream racial development, culminating again in the achievements of white Europe, but with many offshoots, illustrative of the blind alleys, as it were, the discarded experiments, in the newly dramatised history of human development. There is a usage of this schema in the Wake at III.iii, which, to the extent that it mocks Shaun’s hysterical concerns about the future of humanity, is highly suggestive of the wider position taken on social Darwinism in Joyce’s text. Here Shaun in the Yawn identity is being questioned, once more about the origin of things and about whether he is ‘derevatov of it yourself in any way? The true tree I mean? Let’s hear what science has to say, pundit-the-next-best-king. Splanck!’ (505.26–28). The tree becomes literalised as an actual living thing, ‘our sovereign beanstalk’ described by a Yawn now in new mystic guise as follows: There’s tuodore queensmaids and Idahore shopgirls and they woody babies growing upon her and bird flamingans sweenyswinging fuglewards on the tipmast and Orania epples playing hopptociel bommptaterre and Tyburn fenians snoring in his quickenbole and crossbones strewing its holy floor and culprines of Erasmus Smith’s burstall boys with their underhand leadpencils climbing to her crotch for the origin of spices and charlotte darlings with silk blue askmes chattering in dissent to them, gibbonses and gobbenses, guelfing and ghibbering . . . hermits of the desert barking their infernal shins over her triliteral roots . . . and each and all of their branches meeting and shaking twisty hands all over again in their new world through the germination of its gemination from Ond’s outset till Odd’s end. And encircle him circuly. Evovae! (FW, 504.21–505.13)

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Ingredients deployed by scientific racism – Darwin’s Origin of the Species with its key principle of natural selection, for instance, and the human application in The Descent of Man (1871) – are much in evidence in this passage but they are placed in a carnivalesque context where the genealogical diagrammatic is brought to life, sexualised and conflated with early myths, so that it figures as Yggdrasil (the world tree in Scandinavian mythology), as well as the tree of Eden and the hangman’s tree. Again, as with Joyce’s handling of Aryanism, there is the suggestion here of ‘new’ science being little more than old myth repackaged. Far from configuring human history into evolving races and social order, the tree schema is transformed into a strange confabulation which has no place at all for authentic, pure ‘blood’. Shopgirls mix with ‘queensmaids’, criminalised Fenians, T. S. Eliot’s massman ‘Sweeney’, borstal boys and monkeys. ‘Each and all’ of the tree’s branches are ‘meeting and shaking twisty hands’ in the ‘melting pot’ of the New World. Thus the last word of this passage evokes ‘evolution’, but of a totally compromised kind; the allusion to ‘Evoe!’, a cry of the Bacchantes, imagines a wild, raucous kind of dynamic and a wanton world that is a very long way indeed from the ordered rationality of social Darwinism. This chapter is concerned with the extension of scientific racism into the biological and social sciences and how the Wake responds to that extension. At one level this involves a return to some of the bigger issues already raised in earlier chapters. Just as they wreck ideas of racial and linguistic purity, the larger design and aesthetic principles of the Wake are also fundamentally incapable of subscribing to notions of biological linearity and progress historiography. But the assault on social Darwinism and its later formulations also means looking at race from different perspectives, where scientific racism and its attendant discourses appear not so much as a species of knowledge in its own right, but as a perspective, or series of perspectives, that had a major impact right across the academy and, through that, into the mainstream of Western culture generally. The aim here, then, is both to continue with an analysis of the detail of the Wake’s engagement with race discourse but at the same time to widen our sense of what was at stake in this extraordinary interrogation. In order to pursue both these aims it is necessary first to understand something of the process by which social Darwinism, originally a Victorian liberal ideology, developed into high conservatism by the turn of the century, achieving, for all the liberal and even socialist appropriation, its fullest institutionalisation as fascist ideology.

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THEORY NONE TOO RECTILINE OF THE EVOLUATION O F H U M A N S O C I E T Y ’: F R O M S O C I A L DARWINISM TO EUGENICS

The most familiar social Darwinism is almost certainly the least extreme version, that which emerged in the Victorian period as a philosophical support for laissez-faire. Its key exponents, Herbert Spencer and his followers, strongly supported by the American academy, were writing from the early 1850s – Spencer’s The Man versus State (1851) was one of the earliest formulations of a liberal individualism constructed as the prerequisite for social and economic progress. It outlined the connection between ‘freedom’ and ‘progress’, establishing the means by which ‘all individuals would be brought into harmony with developments in society’: Spencer insisted that the state should concern itself solely with external affairs; internally it had no business trying to regulate the lives and activities of the people. There should be no state control of health care, education or relief of the poor – many of the activities taken for granted today. Anyone who wished to set himself up as a doctor or a teacher, for instance, should be free to do so and would be successful as long as he could persuade people to pay for his services. If he was no good at his profession, he would fail, after a few incautious customers burnt their fingers in trying him out. It was no more the state’s responsibility to protect the public in such cases than it was to shield the failures from the misery brought on by their own inefficiency.10

There was a race dimension to such arguments – this was a justification of Victorian capitalism and in that sense a vindication of the superiority of the West and thus of white European races. Early social Darwinism, however, was expressed primarily and distinctively in individualist terms, not too far removed from the more populist articulation of similar ideas by Samuel Smiles in his self-help mission, and these tended to underplay the race dimensions. Or, to put it differently, there was a less urgent need for the articulation of such ideas in race terms in the mid-nineteenth century because social Darwinism at that time was founded on a confident social order. Here a rising bourgeoisie, outstripping and outclassing a declining landed aristocracy, was perceived to have already substantially fulfilled its social (i.e. ‘natural’) destiny. Men such as Darwin, Dickens and Huxley, hugely important in Victorian public life, not only helped to theorise this new social order, they embodied it in their own astonishing rise to eminence from relatively ordinary backgrounds.

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Social Darwinism by the turn of the century, however, was a very different thing. By the 1890s Spencer was already becoming unpopular, displaced to some degree by Walter Bagehot’s application of science to nation in Physics and Politics (1872), a text which illustrated the degree to which social Darwinism was being almost totally reshaped against its original formulation. Now Darwinism in the social world was being visualised not in terms of a vibrant and creative competition between individuals, but, rather, as a life or death struggle between biological races and conflictual nations. This critical transformation responded to a complex nexus of cultural dynamics, although one familiar enough to be summarised quite briefly here. Crucially, the new cultural orientation of social Darwinism responded to the rise of nationalism in central Europe and elsewhere. This development, supported by romantic notions of the ‘organic’ nation, was to have a profound influence on how race and culture were perceived in the later nineteenth century. Supported and developed by such figures as Kant and Herder, romanticism mystified the individual through a new kind of collective which was the expression not of individual needs and desires but of an organic whole – the nation or the community. Such ideas separated out nations and races, transforming the theoretical emphasis that the Enlightenment had once placed on a common, universal human nature with a new cult of the group bound by blood and language. Similarly, the Enlightenment’s focus on the ‘rights of man’, once expressed in terms of the ‘individual’, gave way to a destiny that was emphatically collective and ‘transcendent’ of the person. ‘Let us follow our own path’, as Herder put it, ‘let men speak well or ill of our nation, our literature, our language: they are ours, they are ourselves and let that be enough.’11 Secondly, towards the end of the nineteenth century there was an invigoration of imperialism as ‘social imperialism’, initially in Bismarckian Germany and then across Europe. If many of the old empires were crumbling in terms of economic viability, the new ones were keenly valued not least for the social cohesion that their acquisition was perceived to generate in combustible domestic populations. Bismarck was entirely mindful of this link between colonies and stability at home. His interest in ‘Egyptian affairs’, for instance, was indirect ‘yet because of reasons of domestic policy the colonial problem is a vital question for us . . . At present public opinion emphasises colonial policy so strongly in Germany that the position of the Government within Germany depends on its success.’12 Ten years later,

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in a speech to the Reichstag, Prince Hohenloe confirmed the rationale behind this policy: The colonial movement is also a national one. It has its origins in a strengthened national feeling, which after the foundations of the Reich looked for a field for its activity; it has bolstered up the feeling of unity and no government can and will miss this new and firm element which links the different tribes of the nation as well as the different social classes of the population.13

This new ‘Age of Imperialism’ and its characteristic territorial ‘scrambles’ produced a framework for the jingoism that many historians have seen as being entirely typical of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the revitalised patriotism that fed on, and in turn was fed by, intellectual cultures of scientific racism. Perhaps above all, however, race discourse at the end of the century was shaped by the fact that late modernism now routinely understood itself in terms of decline. Of course, it is easy to over stress the importance of degeneration theory and to understate the case for optimistic reform agendas that for many historians are just as significant of the period. However, there can be no doubt that ‘the decline of the West’ was a real and in many ways decisive cultural orientation, perhaps especially in Britain where the obvious parallels between the Roman and British empires were commonly drawn. For many, ‘authentic’ culture was perceived to have reached a turning point. Its dangerous usurper was ‘mass society’, often characterised in terms of uniform and brutalising lifestyles, debased culture, apparently collapsing social and political structures, and so on. At its most extreme, this perspective constructed for the declining West a suicidal character that was typically positioned in race terms. Robert Reid Rentoul wrote in his work on cultural degeneration how ‘[d]ay by day, hour by hour, year after year we add diseased humanity – the children begotten by the diseased, idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, the insane . . . Does any one contend that such a schema of pollution works for race culture? Rather I contend that it works for race suicide.’14 Eugenics was the science that set out to reverse the descent, and, again, it was a specifically racialised science, in part because loyalty to race was understood to be one of the few forces powerful enough to persuade people into eugenic practice, but more substantially because eugenicists simply thought in racialised terms – indeed, race and eugenics were inseparable discourses. Improving the stock meant improving the racial stock. Eugenic literature was littered with such phrases as ‘the traditions of the race’, ‘racial instinct’ and ‘race regeneration’. C. W. Saleeby would routinely refer to dysgenic practices in racial

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terms, where alcohol, for example, became ‘racial’ poison, and Francis Galton made a particular plea for associations between eugenics and the English race. ‘To no nation’, he wrote, ‘is a high human breed more necessary than our own, for we plant stock all over the world and lay the foundations of the dispositions and capacities of future millions of the human race.’15 Leonard Darwin constructed eugenics almost entirely in terms of ‘racial progress’,16 as did Karl Pearson: You will see that my view – and I think it may be called the scientific view – is that of an organised whole kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by ensuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest chiefly by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the struggle for trade routes, and for the sources of raw material and of food supply.17

Against this background of a highly radicalised social Darwinism, Finnegans Wake’s aesthetic of cycles and endless repetition, sometimes misunderstood as universalism, takes on very specific cultural meanings. The recycling, which takes place at every level, from the endless repetitions of individual words, names and motifs to the great narrative cycles which end where they begin, is an acute and absolute refutation of the linear idea so important to social Darwinism and, later, eugenics. It becomes highly significant, again, that Joyce should locate this subversion in terms of Viconian cycles, for these were, and still are, understood as belonging to an Enlightenment tradition that in the idealist version was deeply suspicious of progressivist ideologists, especially where these conflicted with notions of a common humanity and the perceived rights of the individual.18 Vico’s cyclical views of history were in fact ‘the very opposite of progress’, which is one reason why his influence in the nineteenth century, the century of progressivist orthodoxy, was relatively limited and precisely why he was of such importance to Joyce.19 From the perspective of late modernism, where social Darwinism had corrupted so fundamentally, Viconian ‘cycles’, while they could not be accepted as ‘science’ or the workings of divine providence, took on a different meaning. The kind of social universe they envisaged, profoundly ordered but completely without teleological meaning, represented something liberating which could be commandeered into a potentially humane and comic reproduction of the modern world. At the same time as being embedded in the larger structures of the Wake, this engagement with ‘progress’ can also, again, be seen in the detail of things where the ‘marryings’ and ‘buryings’ of the Wake people become the

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product of ‘their natural selections’ (117.27–28). Thus there are many precise interactions with the symptomatic sciences of ‘progress’ in the Wake. The ‘paleologic scene’ itself (73.1), fundamental to social Darwinism, is reproduced as ‘footprinse on the Megacene’ (137.16–17), and the spread of palaeology into social sciences and the wider culture is laughed at in I.vi where Shaun as Wyndham Lewis constructs margarine as an evolutionary advance on butter and cheese. He pursues ‘Burrus and Caseous for a rung or two up their isocelating biangle’ to arrive at ‘my goulache of Marge’. Simultaneously, evolution is implied as a context for the painting of women, again suggesting an orientation towards Lewis, for ‘[t]his genre of portraiture of changes of mind in order to be truly torse should evoke the bush soul of females’ and, to go back further into the evolutionary record, ‘a wallopy bound or, should the zulugical zealot prefer it, a congorool teal’ (165.12–21). Fashion is also placed in the evolutionary scheme of things, albeit in a reversed kind of way: The hatboxes which composed Rhomba, lady Trabezond (Marge in her excelsis), also comprised the climactogram up which B and C may fondly be imagined ascending and are suggestive of gentleman’s spring modes, these modes carrying us back to the superimposed claylayers of eocene and pleastoseen formation and the gradual morphological changes in our body politic which Professor Ebahi-Ahuri of Philadespoinus (Ill) . . . neatly names a boˆıte a` surprises. (165.21–30)

Here Joyce mocks the spread of social Darwinism and its currency in the intellectual world by placing it in absurd contexts where it was not usually applied, as far as one is aware. Elsewhere, the disciplines that did utilise social Darwinism – such disciplines as craniology, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, and so on – are also implicated. The archaeology of HCE’s ‘chambered cairns’ for example, which are ‘at browse up hill and down coombe and on eolithhostroton, at Howth or at Coolock or even at Enniskerry’, seem to point to the future, for they ‘leave [lead] to many a door beside of Oxmanswold’ [of the later Viking invasions] . . . a theory none too rectiline of the evoluation of human society and a testament of the rocks from all the dead unto some the living’ (73.28–33). As we have seen, craniometry, ‘where the skulls of the higher and lower races are compared’ and ‘various sub-racial types such as the dark and fair Europeans are brought together for the purposes of comparison and contrast’ (EB 11, vol. vii, 372–73), is involved in Shaun’s excoriation of his brother at 422. Here, in a kind of ‘backwoodsman’ stereotype, skull size is associated with home brewing. Shem has ‘a lowsense for the production of consumption and dalickey cyphalos on his brach premises where he can

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purge his contempt and dejeunerate into a skillyton’ (422.6–9). The precise reference here is to Anders Retzius’s ‘cephalic’ (with a play in Joyce’s version on ‘syphillis’) or breadth index which measured the greatest width of a skull expressed as a percentage of the greatest length. Shem appears to his brother to be ‘Negroid’, or ‘dolichocephalic’ (‘dalicky’), as well as ‘Samoyed’ or ‘brachycephalic’. The cephalic index of the former, incidentally, was 70 and of the latter 85; the ideal European skull sat in the middle with an index of 75 (see EB 11, vol. vii, 372). Again, Joyce uses Jules Crepieux-Jamin’s version of graphology, where handwriting becomes a signifier of ‘defects’, ‘glaring deficiencies and vices of character’ and thus an indicator not just of individual moral decline but also a more general degeneration.20 In I.v ‘the fatal droopadwindle slope of the blamed scrawl’ of the ALP letter is ‘a sure sign of imperfectible moral blindness’ (122.34–36) and is seen by ‘naif alphabetters’ as the work of ‘a purely deliquescent recidivist, possibly ambidextrous, snubnosed probably and presenting a strangely profound rainbowl in his (or her) occiput’ (107.9–12). Here social Darwinism enters intellectual culture as handwriting, but also as phrenology, sociology, genetics and, indeed, sexology because the ‘backward’ author of this note is understood in terms of a ‘sexmosaic of nymphosis’ (107.13–14). This kind of engagement with the conservative intellectual culture is clear in its implications. There is, in all instances, a very obvious comic usage; an impulse for parody, play and ridicule that leaves little or no space for the pieties of an establishment represented crucially, if somewhat idiosyncratically, by Lewis – an avant-gardist, but one famous for his radical appropriation of social Darwinist and eugenicist thinking and deeply concerned with the issue of order and hierarchy in society. One obvious area where the Wake tackles this wider academy in a fairly extended way is its treatment of palaeoanthropology – the study of fossil hominoids – and it is no coincidence that this was once a most charged discipline in terms of its relationship with social Darwinism. THE

‘MEANDERTALE

O F H E A D - I N - C L O U D S ’: T H E W A K E A N D

PALAEOANTHROPOLOGY

Palaeoanthropology was expected to reveal how progress shaped society and culture through evolutionary changes in the human body, and for this reason was crucially involved in race discourses, as Peter Bowler has shown. ‘In an age of self-conscious imperialism’, he writes, ‘conservative and racist values were incorporated both into paleoanthropology and

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paleontology.’21 Ignoring the ‘open-ended model of divergent evolution’ suggested by Darwin, which removes evolution from teleology by relating adaptation purely to circumstance rather than any notion of design, both disciplines were strongly influenced by linear progression. After 1900, however, there was a decisive shift, especially in palaeoanthropology, where universal linear progression was replaced by ideas of evolution being driven by cultural responses to environmental challenge, and these were particularly suggestive in racial terms. By 1915 a figure such as Sir Arthur Keith, one-time exponent of the linear pattern of human development, had changed his position dramatically. Now Cromagnons were not perceived to have evolved from Neanderthals – indeed, the latter had no ancestral connection with the modern human race at all. Like ‘primitives’ branded as ancient ‘types’ with no ‘close relationship to the whites who had advanced further up the scale of mental development’, Neanderthals were reconstructed as an inferior species who had come into contact with a more ‘virile’ race.22 While the outcome of contact between Neanderthals and Cromagnons could not be proven, Keith made his suspicions clear. ‘What happened at the end of the Mousterian period [to displace Neanderthals] we can only guess, but those who observe the fate of the aboriginal races of America and Australia will have no difficulty in accounting for the disappearance of Homo neanderthalensis. A more virile form extinguished him.’23 It is easy to see how serviceable such views were in terms of the Aryan myth. In many accounts the Cromagnons, not ‘lurching subhumans’ but ‘men like us’,24 were constructed as early Aryans and usually split into two groups, the ‘Iberians’ and ‘the Nordic Bodyburning people’, the latter being protected by the former ‘from close contact with the African or Asiatic species until well into the historical period’.25 In this way the palaeoanthropological record became crucial testimony, of progressivism, but also of evolution in its most racialised form. It is clear that Joyce was interested in palaeoanthropological schema. They appear in a number of notebooks, in NBB VI.B.1 at 050 for example, which contains the short list ‘Cro-Magnon; paleolithic flint tools; Piltdown man/Sussex’ and later, at 173, a longer version which follows standard developmental accounts of the history of man: ‘Pithecanthropus erectus; 250,000/Java; Heidelbergman; 150,000 Piltdown Sussex; Neanderthal R hand/neck not look up/Cro Magnon Man, Redskin/Grimaldi Negro’.26 A list in VI.B.14 implies a similar ordering, though here distinct racial derivations from different ape families – so-called ‘parallel evolution’ – are also noted.27 None of these schemas appears in any unmediated form

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in the Wake as schemas, but there are many allusions to palaeoanthropology, especially in the earlier parts of the Wake where the first version of the first people visualises a culture of ‘camibalistics’, ‘Assiegates and boomeringstroms’, the conflicts of ‘Sod’s brood’ (4.5–6) and the tribal ‘plethora of ululation’ (6.16–17). It is from this outset that Joyce makes a unique contribution to one of the great debates that distinguished palaeoanthropology. This concerned the question of where the earliest human remains would be found, and thus where the origin of the species would eventually be placed – a hugely controversial issue precisely because of the implication for race history. The discovery of Neanderthal remains in Europe in 1864, for example, so much threatened Western conceptions of human origins that for many years it was claimed that these remains were nonhuman or belonged to a diseased or disfigured creature. Darwin’s favouring of Africa as the most likely place where earliest remains would be found was understated similarly, because it would be so hugely problematic for race history; responses to its implications included Ernst Haeckel’s Aryanist speculation that endorsed the case for Asia. Joyce’s contribution to the issue is a radical one, and one that completely undermines the seriousness with which such issues were approached and encoded by the establishment. With one eye on the Victorian propaganda that produced cartoon versions of the dim-witted and unruly Irish as apes, he positions the origin of the species in Ireland itself – and does considerably better than any professional palaeontologist by identifying the actual prototype person individually. He is Tim Finnegan, a giant of ‘brontoichthyan form’ (7.20) who belongs as much to the animal record as he does the human, but not in ways predicted by Darwin. Apart from this partial – because always entirely compromised – consonance of the early parts of the Wake with the early history of man, there are references throughout the Wake to palaeoanthropology and some of its key figures. Darwin, of course, is referred to several times; Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (1901) is dismissed as ‘[t]he first and last rittlerattle of the anniverse’ – (607.10–11). Gustav Schwalbe, the anatomist and disciple of Haeckel who published a series of books at the turn of the century confirming that a ‘sequence of intermediate stages linking the ape to the human stages of development’ would constitute an explanation of the origins of mankind, figures in III.iii, where a resurrected HCE draws on paleoanthropology, incorporating it in a thoroughly corrupted and cavalier way into yet another version of ‘events’.28 At one point in his story, HCE made, or so he claims, ‘preharfeast upon acorpolous and fastbroke down in Neederthorpe’ (suggesting an Anglicised version of the Neanderthal)

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and is intimidated when ‘from gorges in the east came the strife of ourangoontangues’ (541.24–25, 33–34). Later, he uses ‘schwalby words’ which, like Schwalbe’s own controversial theories, ‘set . . . pokeys and botchbons afume’ (542.21–22). There are also references in the Wake to the fossil types once considered to represent stages in human development, as well as some invented ones – HCE as ‘Homo Capite Erectus’ for instance (101.12–13). ‘[P]iltdowns’ appear at 10.30; Neanderthals feature in ‘meanderthal’ (18.22) and ‘meanderthalltale’ (19.25); and there is a ‘cromagnom charter’ at 20.7. Java man or Pithecanthropus erectus, discovered by Eugene Dubois in 1891/2 and sparking off another controversy about the human fossil record,29 is referred to several times in the Wake (see 59.26 and 254.25) and Heidelberg man, discovered in 1907 and thought to be pre-Neanderthal and displaying cranial elements of both primitive and modern man, plays a part in the meeting of HCE and the cad when ‘Gaping Gill’ (the cad) identifies HCE as ‘a markedly postpuberal hypertituitary type of Heidelberg mannleich’, 36.36–37.1). ‘Preausteric man’ (266, right margin note) is much in evidence, though in no particular sequence, as are the periodisations invented by archaeologists to denote the stages in human progress, again in no order. The Magdalenian phase of Palaeolithic culture, characterised by ‘the improved production of bone and horn tools and weapons and . . . degeneration of the production and technology of stone tools and weapons’, features at 153.36 where it combines with Whiggish history and Magdelen College to produce the Gripes’s ‘wherry whiggy maudelenian woice’.30 Similarly, Mutt, ‘this carl on the kopje’ possessed of a ‘pigmaid hoagshead’, has ‘mammamuscles most mousterious’, suggesting origins in the Mousterian phase of Palaeolithic culture (15.29–33), which was especially linked with the Neanderthals. In III.iv the antiquity and archetypal nature of the Porters is comically dealt with in their naming as ‘neoliffic smith and magdalenian jinnyjones’ (576.36). The notebooks show Joyce recording the stages of human development as they were generally formulated in the 1920s, but the actual usage they get in the Wake is very different and shows once again just how much care must be taken with the notebook material – the presence of a list in the notebooks has nothing to do with any value judgement on Joyce’s part. Indeed, in this case the reverse appears to be the case. If Joyce wants to get the record straight, so to speak, in the notebooks, this is only to violate such order in the Wake itself, where any idea of ‘progress’ is wildly problematised by conflations and repetitions of all kinds – cultural, historiographical, linguistic, and so on. Against this background of momentous meetings

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of races, the critical and violent moment that in scientific racism images a further progressivist turn in history, prefiguring the crucial improvement of the ‘gene pool’, is both comically trivialised and yet humanised. The meeting of a Neanderthaloid Mutt and Jute, which takes places on the edge of ‘fire defences and these kraals of slitsucked marrogbones (Cave!)’ (16.2–3) is a cartoon version of race meeting where hats are swapped and ‘a few strong verbs’ exchanged (16.8) as a homely preamble to the inevitable pattern of the tale which is ‘the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations. Tieckle. They lived und laughed ant loved end left’ (18.19–21). JUKES AND KALLIKAKS

–

EUGENICS AND RACE

DEGENERATION

Joyce’s engagement with eugenics precedes the Wake considerably. In the Portrait, for instance, Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetics are in part formulated out of resistance to a ‘dreary’ eugenical world where ‘every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connection with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species’. This ‘leads to eugenics rather than to esthetic. It leads you out of the maze into a new gaudy lectureroom where McCann, with one hand on The Origin of the Species and the other hand on the new testament, tells you that you admired the great flanks of Venus because you felt that she would bear you burly offspring and admired her great breasts because you felt that she would give good milk to her children and yours’ (P 208–09).31 Ulysses extends the range of this engagement much further. As Andrew Gibson has suggested, eugenics shapes the versions of ‘womanhood’ available to Gerty McDowell in ‘Nausicaa’, and also underpins the Anglicised science of ‘Ithaca’.32 Even more substantially, it is implicated in ‘Oxen of the Sun’, where the language and agendas of sexology and eugenics frequently surface in the drunken debates which punctuate the episode.33 Lynch argues, for instance, that unexplained infant deaths are likely to be ‘in the long run beneficial to the race in general in securing thereby the survival of the fittest’ (U.14, 1284–85); and the general climate of eugenics is evoked in talk about ‘monstrous births’ (U.14, 974) and in the debate about whether the mother or baby should be saved when the lives of both are threatened during childbirth (a positive eugenics would require the saving of the mother). There is also the ridiculously dysgenic plan proposed by Mulligan. Taking the standard degeneration line that there has been a ‘fallingoff in the calibre of the race’ (U.14, 1250), he suggests the creation

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of ‘a national fertilising farm to be named Omphalos’. He offers to provide himself ‘dutiful yeoman services for the fecundation of any female of what grade of life soever’ (U.14, 685–87). Significantly, the plan has a very aristocratic flavour to it and, indeed, a distinctly Anglo-Irish frame of reference. In order to locate his project geographically, Mulligan resolves to ‘purchase in fee simple for ever the freehold of Lambay island from its holder, lord Talbot de Malahide, a Tory gentleman of note much in favour with our ascendancy party’ (U.14, 682–84). This joke stud farm,34 like the mock-lionisation of the prolific Purefoys, is obviously designed in part to deflate the eugenics seriously championed both by English race theorists and by Irish cultural nationalists as part of a romantic revivalism.35 Joyceans have tended to understand this engagement in Catholic/ Protestant and Irish-English terms, with good reason. Eugenics was, to a significant degree, a product of England and had obvious implications for Irish-English relations in their racialised forms. Among its intellectual progenitors, Darwin would have to figure largely. The crucial biometrical formulations also centrally belong to the English academy, led in this respect by Galton and Pearson. Eugenics was put to the service of imperial design and was considerably institutionalised in English society, especially in the Edwardian period. Such legislation as the Alien Immigration Act (1905) and the Mental Deficiency Act (1913) responded to the eugenicist climate, as did the widespread concern over ‘national efficiency’ and the condition of the English Army recruit as exposed by the Report of the Physical Deterioration Committee (1904). Above all, eugenics had a profound impact on English intellectual life. G. R. Searle has shown how virtually the whole of the British biology establishment had joined the Eugenics Education Society by 1909, and how ‘pathologists and experts in mental deficiency and abnormality’ were much active on its behalf. Similarly, infant British sociology ‘seemed taken over entirely by eugenicists’ and there was strong representation among psychologists and the religious establishment. Cambridge University had its own Eugenics Society and in 1913 the Oxford University Union carried by 105 votes to 66 a motion that ‘this house approves of the principles of eugenics’.36 Given this degree of embedding, and the obvious resonance of eugenics as an English science used to underpin very traditional racisms, it is easy to see how the comic derision that Joyce extends to this subject must have been shaped in terms of an Irish perspective. At the same time, eugenics for Joyce raised wider issues about the West and modernity. However much England may have signified here, the Wake implies a broader, more diverse and, in many ways, more complex world,

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where once more the kind of epistemological view underpinning eugenics is linked to larger debates frequently contextualised in terms of Enlightenment historiography. Part of the very self-conscious modernising of Joyce’s territory in the Wake – a process much exemplified by the cultural contemporaneity of references to figures such as Peggy Lee, Paul Robeson, Mickey Rooney, Ivor Novello, Dutch Schultz, and so on, and by the strong investment in new cultural forms, television, radio and film – is this location in the wider European and, indeed, world scene.37 Significantly, then, eugenics in the Wake is Europeanised, as the references to figures such as Andre´ Retzius, Crepieux-Jamin, Gustav Schwalbe and Lucien Le´vy-Bruhl suggest, and Americanised. The most frequently used signifier of eugenics in the Wake is precisely located in New World social science and its study of the two families of ‘degenerates’, the Jukes and the Kallikaks.38 In fact, neither of these families, the Jukes and the Kallikaks, existed. The names were invented and, in any case, the problems of individual families were not the focus of interest here. The ‘science’, or ‘moral science’, on which the two studies were based was pointing not to any isolated case of ‘degeneracy’ but to a perceived widespread social condition. R. L. Dugdale, author of The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity, also Further Studies of Criminals (1877; revised in 1915), emphasised that ‘there was not one ‘‘Jukes’’ family alone in the state – . . . the Jukes family is the type of a great class’.39 Likewise, Henry Herbert Goddard’s The Kallikak Family – A Study of the Heredity of FeebleMindedness (1912) warned that ‘there are Kallikak families all about us’. Both accounts were, actually, classically eugenicist. They used a combination of statistics, Lamarckian biology and ‘careful observation’ to ‘prove’ how criminality, ‘harlotry’ and ‘feeble-mindedness’ were inherited characteristics. In the case of the Kallikaks, it was shown how the original family were of ‘good stock’, until in the late eighteenth century one Martin Kallikak, at the age of fifteen and in an unguarded moment, had sex with a ‘feeble-minded’ girl who became pregnant. Martin never married the girl, but she gave her child the Kallikak name and from there a ‘bad’ Kallikak line began. The result, according to Goddard, was 480 direct descendants – thirty-six were illegitimate; thirty-one ‘sexually immoral persons, mostly prostitutes’ with a further eight keeping ‘houses of ill-fame’; twenty-four were ‘confined alcoholics’; three were epileptics; and eighty-two died in infancy. Many more were ‘indeterminate’ – that is to say, Dugdale’s field workers knew that they were not ‘normal’, but could not ascertain whether they carried the bad ‘germplasm’ which would mark them out as

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‘feeble-minded’.40 The history of the Jukes told the same sorry tale, with the family becoming ‘so despised by the reputable community that their family name had come to be used generally as a term of reproach’. Again, ‘fornication’ was focused on as the engine, so to speak, of degeneration, an association of sex and immorality implied in the Wake’s tale of the ant and the grasshopper where the ‘Ondt’, ‘spizzing all over him like thingsumanything in formicolation’ (417.26–27) is ‘jucking Vespatilla jukely by the chimiche’ (417.30–31). The Jukes ‘lived in log or stone cabins similar to slave-hovels, all ages and sexes, relations and strangers ‘‘bunking’’ indiscriminately’.41 A classic biological determinism made the idea of any liberal social intervention into the lives of the Jukes and the Kallikaks utterly pointless. According to Goddard, ‘If all the slum districts of our cities were removed tomorrow and model tenements built in their places, we would still have the same slums in a week’s time, because we have these mental defective people who can never be taught to live otherwise than they are living.’ The Kallikaks and those like them formed a separate species or type and the racial implications were emphatic. Thus the ‘idiot’ was not ‘our greatest problem’ because he rarely bred, but the ‘moron type’ was different, because he continued ‘the race with a line of children like himself’. Chillingly, the ‘lethal chamber’ was ruled out as a reasonable solution, but only because modern sensibilities would not allow such a course of action – ‘humanity is steadily tending away from the possibility of that method’. Goddard considered sterilisation as a possible response, but, in the end, recommended education so that men like Martin Kallikak could be persuaded to realise the ‘consequence of their immorality’; for the existent ‘defectives’ he advocated ‘segregation and colonisation’.42 This kind of material is incorporated into the Wake in a variety of ways. According to his detractors, themselves eugenically unsound as members of ‘an imperfectly warmblooded race’, HCE is ‘a great white caterpillar’ (a homosexual, this being the phrase that Lady Campbell used to describe Oscar Wilde), ‘capable of any and every enormity in the calendar recorded to the discredit of the Juke and Kellikek families’ (33.22–25). Interestingly, there are certain ‘wisecrackers’ who believe him to be suffering ‘from a vile disease’, a statement ‘which ought not to be’ (33.17–20). The associations between syphilis, homosexuality and eugenics – all contextualised in the hysteria of a paranoid mob – constitute a clear indictment of the Juke and Kallikak material, one that is missed in an annotative literature which simply lists the Jukes and Kallikaks as ‘degenerate American families’. But the associations between the Earwickers and Jukes/Kallikaks does not

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stop at I.iii and Earwicker’s ‘crime’. Shem’s contruction as a ‘mental and moral defective’ (177.16), a ‘hybrid’ made up of ‘an adze of a skull, an eight of a larkseye, the whoel of a nose’ and ‘one numb arm up a sleeve’ (169.11–12), is clearly shaped by eugenicist literature of the Juke/Kallikak kind, as is the suggestion that his activities, if allowed to continue unchecked, would have the effect of wiping every ‘english spooker . . . off the face of the erse’ (178.6–7). Besides Shem, other members of the Earwickers are so associated. Indeed, at II.ii the whole family become Kallikaks and Jukes, with ALP visualised sewing up the torn clothing of ‘big Kapitayn Killykook and the Jukes of Kelleiney’ (295 fn 1). In some ways the Earwickers, like the Jukes and Kallikaks, are scapegoated (see 375.3–4 – ‘And kick kick killykick for the house that juke built’), but with the crucial difference that they are also centralised, not as the freaks and misfits of the modern world, but rather as the mock prototypes/ stereotypes. This is the real point about the association, that with it the condition of the Jukes and the Kallikaks becomes not ‘their’ condition, but ours. In this context it is hard to tell the ‘defectives’ from the ‘heroes’, presumably the point about the many associations between ‘Dook Weltington’ (371.36) or the ‘artful Juke of Wilysly’ (137.11) and the Jukes and of other similar conflations that seem otherwise incomprehensible – like those between Cuchulain and the Kallikaks at 137.12 (‘Kukkuk Kallikak’) and the Jukes and Napoleon (see ‘Jukoleon’ at 367.20). One of the relatively minor but highly symptomatic transformations of Finnegans Wake is that here the outcasts and rejects of contemporary social science get so profoundly repositioned, not just at the cultural centre but at new margins of myth, history and romanticism. There are many further contexts where eugenics is utilised by Joyce, almost always with the effect of ridicule. The beginning of I.iv, for instance, articulates HCE’s ‘most besetting of ideas’ – the elimination of crime ‘from all classes and masses’ by breeding out the offending gene into a specific ‘criminal stratum’, thereby producing ‘a distinguished dynasty of his posteriors, blackfaced connemaras not of the fold’ (75.24–76.6). The eugenicist pose of civic responsibility is laughed at in the idea that HCE’s new burial chamber will include rooms for ‘useful councils public’ where such bodies as ‘the Breeders Union’ can meet (77.23). The great eulogy to Finn MacCool in I.vi refers to his clearing out of ‘three hundred sixty five idles to set up one all khalassal for henwives hoping to have males’ (128.31–33), a programme that possibly links eugenics with Haeckel’s quasireligious philosophy of monism. Shem’s failure to fulfil the ‘wious pish’ of his ‘cogodparents’ that he should ‘repopulate the land of your birth and

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count up your progeny by the hungered head and the angered thousand’ is also contextualised in eugenics, in part by the intervention of his godparents, who present him at his birth with the ‘handsome present of a selfraising syringe and twin feeders’ (188.29–189.1). Yaun’s proprietorial stand on Issy and the twenty-nine dancing girls is riddled with eugenicist discourse, sometimes advocating eugenic practice, as in the exhortation to ‘Hold, flay, grill, fire that laney feeling for kosenkissing disgenically’ (436.9–10), but elsewhere speaking quite to the contrary, advocating both incest and buggery – ‘Love through the usual channels, cisternbrothelly, when properly disinfected and taken neat in the generable way upon retiring to roost in the company of a husband-in-law or other respectable relative of an apposite sex, not love that leads by the nose as I foresmellt but canalised love, you understand, does a felon good’ (436.14–19). Above all, however, III.ii takes its eugenicist dimensions from Yaun’s protection of the race from ‘the black fremdling’ and other ‘strangers’, as we have seen (442.1). Finally, in III.iv HCE and ALP’s last fuck is, again, contextualised by eugenics, not just by the references to birth control which, as Mary Lowe-Evans has shown,43 conflate with ideas about ‘population’, but also by the sporting metaphor which takes the eugenicists’ obsession with race discourse and literalises it in a variety of ways:44 ‘By the queer quick twist of her mobcap and the lift of her shift at random and the rate of her gate of going the pace, she thinks at a time, her country I’m proud of. The field is down, the race is their own’ (583.5–8). This much, even so, does not constitute the limit of the Wake’s comic disposal of eugenicist thinking – there are many further examples – but it does indicate just how much the work is involved in debunking this most modern version of much older prejudices. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition) points out quite curtly in a short entry, eugenics was not new in itself but, rather, a contemporary reformulation, ‘the modern name given to the science which deals with the influences which improve the inborn qualities of a race, but more particularly with those which develop them to the utmost advantage, and which generally serves to disseminate knowledge and encourage action in the direction of perpetuating a higher racial standard’ (vol. ix, 885). The Britannica was surely right to insist on a containment of what often appeared to be an upstart, pretentious and derivative project. But equally, it is a mistake to imagine, as some Joyceans have, that eugenics was just ‘population studies’ revisited, a traditional extension of regulation into the family. It was political in other ways, too, most obviously in terms of how it constructed class and race as ‘natural’ realities, and social and cultural life as a conflict where the old biblical

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antipathies of good and evil became transferred into ‘scientific’ terms. The Wake is fully alive to these meanings of eugenics, and, for all its allegedly infinite open-endedness, absolute in terms of where it positions itself in relation to them.

´ VY-BRUHL A NOTE ON LE The Wake is not so intimate with anthropology as it is with palaeoanthropology and eugenics. Relatively few detailed references to the anthropological establishment, to anthropologists and their works, have been accounted for so far, though popular anthropology emerges in a great many forms and there is incidental evidence to suggest that Joyce was familiar with some of the key contemporary anthropological debates, as the following will suggest. One exception here, however, is the well-known, early claim – one that has never been challenged to my knowledge – that Finnegans Wake is much indebted to the work of one particular philosopher turned anthropologist. This is Lucien Le´vy-Bruhl, an important establishment figure, whose anthropological work, not produced until he was in his mid-forties, had considerable impact and still figures in historicised accounts of the anthropological tradition.45 His highly problematic reputation is based primarily on this later work, which was almost entirely concerned with what he saw as the essential difference between ‘primitive’ races and the civilised. At a time when anthropology was in the process of reforming itself, replacing comparative perspectives, where ‘native’ cultures were traditionally seen as inferior and at ‘lower stages’ of ‘evolution’, with more relativist and structuralist perspectives, Le´vy-Bruhl was attempting to find ways of revitalising the comparative approach. He was not, it should be emphasised, an Aryanist. Indeed, in some ways he could be seen, and certainly saw himself, as a cultural relativist whose work constituted an appreciation of the primitive mind, or rather, of the collective culture that produced the primitive mind. But in works such as How Primitives Think (1926), where he exalted the imaginative, mystical, nonrational capacities of the ‘primitives’, contrasting this against the ordered systemising of Western man, his primary achievement was not to expose the ‘true’ collective mind of the ‘primitive’ but, rather, to preserve the essential Otherness of nonwhite, non-European culture, the sense of organic difference that underlies so many modern racisms. Thus Le´vy-Bruhl focused on dramatic differentiation, asserting, for instance, that ‘the primitive mentality considers and at the same time feels all beings and objects to be homogenous, that is, he regards them all as . . . either in the same essential

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nature, or in the same ensemble of qualities’.46 Elsewhere he explained how ‘the mental processes of ‘‘primitives’’ do not coincide with those which we have . . . described in men of our own type’.47 It might be worth mentioning in this context that Le´vy-Bruhl – against the trend of the new anthropology of the early twentieth century – never undertook any fieldwork and so all his knowledge of tribal life was literary and secondhand. Joyce had two books by Le´vy-Bruhl in his library, L’Ame primitif (1927) and L’Expe´rience mystique et les symboles chez les primitifs (1935), and it is on the basis of these that large claims were once made about the impact of this figure on the Wake – an old issue this, then, but one worth revisiting because it has continued to make an impact well beyond the 1960s. Perhaps the first suggestion of a fundamental link between the Wake and the anthropologist appeared in 1947, in one of the earliest ‘conceptual’ accounts of the Wake, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to ‘Finnegans Wake’. This asserted, albeit in a footnote, that Le´vy-Bruhl’s theories were ‘immensely helpful’ to the reader of Finnegans Wake, a claim not substantiated and presumably derived from Campbell’s particular interest in myth archetypes and their apparent survival in ‘civilised’ cultures (see his well-known 1969 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces).48 Later, in a classic of Wake criticism, The Books at the Wake (1959), James Atherton took up this idea, insisting that Le´vy-Bruhl’s works were of ‘structural’ significance to the Wake, among those handful of books from which ‘Joyce took not only words but ideas, ideas which he embodied in Finnegans Wake’. At an early stage of his book, Atherton claimed that the ‘eclectic logic underlying FW ’ was constructed from a kind of amalgam of Vico’s New Science and Le´vy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think, or ‘at least, if it is assumed that his [Le´vy-Bruhl’s] theories are being used, certain aspects of the Wake become less obscure’.49 The idea was repeated in The Books at the Wake, that the ‘logic’ of Finnegans Wake came from Le´vy-Bruhl, the implication being that Joyce had somehow found a way to reproduce the nonrational, mystical, intuitive collective mind ascribed by Le´vy-Bruhl to ‘natives’, and presumably was doing so as part of an interaction with Western rationalism. Here, then, was a signature, a small but significant detail that could help to reposition the Joyce rebellion within particular romanticist traditions and in highly suggestive ways. Indeed, if Atherton were right about the native logic of the Wake, this might be one basis for constructing the work as a kind of universalist coda to the anatomising, ironising and entirely relativising dynamics of the preWake fictions. Like the dreamer identity supposed in some accounts to be a centralising force in the Wake, the existence of a premodern mind would

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put us all in touch with Joyce’s last work, since the Wake was apparently ‘digging down’ to some fundamental bedrock of the human condition where all our histories meet. Such a powerful resonance is presumably why connections between the Wake and the ‘primitive’ have continued to be asserted. In 1982, for instance, Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon made the same analogies between the tribal, the unconscious and the Wake when they insisted that ‘the book had to be a dream’, albeit a ‘big dream: one for the tribe’.50 John Bishop makes a similar point, arguing that in the ‘savage mind’, Joyce found ‘much more than the primitive reasoning of the dream which so compelled the attention of Vico, Freud, Le´vy-Bruhl’.51 The evidence for Atherton’s assumption, however, was and is, to put it mildly, weak. He thought there was a sign of Le´vy-Bruhl’s influence in the Wake’s apparent interest in mystical number. This interest, according to Atherton, was derived from Le´vy-Bruhl’s notion that the primitive mind had no capacity for number in the mathematical sense and, indeed, for the most part, ‘primitive’ cultures had only ‘two numbers: one and more than one’.52 There are two problems here. Firstly, Le´vy-Bruhl’s argument was false, and there is good reason to believe that Joyce would have known it to be so. Secondly, Joyce’s handling of number, while it may be ‘mystical’ in ironic senses, is not somehow ‘outside of number’, as the ‘primitive’ mind is said to be in How Natives Think. In fact, number in the Wake owes much more to theosophy than to Le´vy-Bruhl and the former, far from being divorced from mathematical thought, is actually insistent on its foundation in mathematics, a configuration discussed in the next chapter. Atherton also speculated that the Wake’s interest in names and naming might have something to do with Le´vy-Bruhl’s account of a principle that now sounds more like cod-anthropology rather than the real thing, as, indeed, it would have done in some quarters in the 1920s. Atherton, however, does not see this difficulty. He points out how the ‘principle’ is almost universal among primitive people . . . They believe that there is a real and material connection between a man and his name; and many peoples are confused as to the difference between a name and a thing. ‘I know’, said one man, ‘that this man put many of our buffaloes into his book, for I was with him, and we have had no buffaloes since to eat, it is true.’ It is not impossible that Joyce himself had some such idea in mind, indeed he frequently claimed that to be mentioned in his book had an effect on the people named that was often drastic and sometimes fatal.53

This was the limit of illustration. Not only is there no real evidence to support Atherton’s view about Le´vy-Bruhl and the Wake, what evidence

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there is actually contradicts him. There is, for example, the difficulty that Joyce, who met Le´vy-Bruhl, did not seem to hold him in much esteem. One of the two presentation copies he received from Le´vy-Bruhl, of L’Ame primitive, was, according to Thomas E. Connolly, never opened: ‘Though machine-cut there are hundreds of pages still attached to the upper right hand corner.’54 Atherton glosses this problem by suggesting that Joyce had probably already read the books ‘and never bothered to reread them in his presentation copies’. It seems more likely, given the widespread condemnation that Le´vy-Bruhl’s views received among serious anthropologists, that Joyce simply did not much bother beyond a superficial glance. The greater difficulty, however, is that there is only one place where Le´vy-Bruhl is obviously identifiable in the Wake, and here, far from being acknowledged for his apparently key influence, he is ridiculed. This is at I.vi where Le´vy-Bruhl is suggestively conflated with Wyndham Lewis to produce a pompous, self-important and thoroughly out-of-date figure who uses old-fashioned language and old-fashioned equipment and, as Atherton himself pointed out, is configured in terms of the old joke about the professor who was so forgetful that he makes breakfast by boiling his watch and holding ‘the egg in his hand’55 – ‘Professor Levi-Brullo, F. D. of Sexe-Weiman-Eitelnaky finds, from experiments made by hinn with his Nuremberg eggs in the one hands and the watches cunldron apan the oven’ (151.11–14). Why is it, if this figure is so important to the Wake, that there is only this one direct reference, and, moreover, why is he so ridiculed? Atherton suggested that the nature of the representation simply reflected the more generalised ‘ambivalence’ of the Wake, but, of course, in reality the Wake is not ambivalent here.56 Joyce does not subscribe to the work of this figure at all; his influence on the Wake is entirely marginal. Nor does Joyce embody in Wake-writing the mystical, irrational, ‘organic’ quality that Le´vy-Bruhl and others have ascribed to ‘natives’. To suggest that he does is, surely, to engage in some old-fashioned and highly suspect ideas, not only about the racial Other (including the Irish), but also about writers and the intuitive, ‘organic’ nature of genius. It is also entirely to miss the positioning of the Wake in some key cultural and political senses. This is the further reason why the case of Le´vy-Bruhl has been treated here at some length. For Le´vy-Bruhl’s absurd notions about the ‘native’ were being thoroughly demolished by other intellectuals besides Joyce in the 1920s. Modern commentators suggest that Le´vy-Bruhl, in his day and since, was ‘largely known . . . as a laughable example of . . . incorrect views’.57 In the developing and highly influential British school that was rethinking anthropology,

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E. E. Evans-Pritchard was implicitly critical, while Bronislaw Malinowski was openly hostile towards theories that saw ‘preliterate people’ as being ‘hopelessly and completely immersed in a mystical frame of mind’. He ‘refused to believe that preliterate people were ‘‘incurably superstitious’’ or were immersed in a prelogical mentality. Such theories, he stressed, may make us feel civilized and superior, but they are completely contrary to the facts. You must discard the notion, he wrote, that ‘‘the savage is a child or a fool, a mystic or a nincompoop’’.’58 In so misreading the Wake in terms of Le´vy-Bruhl, Atherton’s influential study effected a highly significant skewing. This reversed Joyce’s affiliations and completely misread his intentions in some key respects. Like many other early Joyceans influenced by postwar literary hermeneutics, and perhaps the romanticism of some of Stephen Dedalus’s responses to the ‘primitive’ mind in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he entirely misplaced the Wake in a mystical, atavistic and ahistorical world. In fact, there is no such positioning. The Wake is a modern work, and one that shows nothing of the predisposition of a Gauguin, a Lawrence, or, for that matter, a Yeats, to fantasise about primitivism. Indeed, and as might be expected from the nature of its engagement with race science and race history, there is no attempt to reproduce seriously or otherwise appropriate the so-called ‘primitive’ cultures at all in the Wake. The only existence that ‘primitive’ culture has here is in terms of the vague, shadowy and entirely unreliable ‘history’ or ‘prehistory’ of the West itself. Just to emphasise the point, the Wake is not, of course, motivated by the anthropological instinct, so often understood as the instinct of the West for positioning itself in relational terms; indeed, it functions quite to the contrary. This may in part explain why the anthropologist is himself a shadowy figure in the Wake, limited to the one comic cameo where he features as the confused academic who cannot tell his egg from his watch. As should be clear from earlier chapters and the above account of Le´vyBruhl in the Wake, Joyce’s assault on social Darwinism and scientific racism was emphatic and extraordinary in many respects, but it did not make him a heroically isolated figure in the world. The extremities of social Darwinism may have been entirely normalised in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, but within a few years of the Wake’s publication the ‘science’ of race would be thoroughly marginalised, pushed to the very edges of human culture. The speed of this shift was, to a large degree, a product of the concentration camp, but there were much earlier signs that scientific racism, for all its resonance in terms of end-of-century zeitgeist, was under pressure – from political and social quarters in the wider sense,

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but also from within the academy. Quite apart from Freud’s displacement of progress historiography in Totem and Taboo and elsewhere, Emile Durkheim’s formulation of a functionalist sociology understood societies as synchronic but separate systems – a theoretical position, incidentally, that Le´vy-Bruhl attempted to acknowledge, albeit in a highly ambiguous way. ‘Collective representations’ (i.e. culture) in ‘the inferior races’, he wrote, have their own laws which ‘cannot be discovered by studying the adult, civilised white man’. However, the reverse case was, in Le´vy-Bruhl’s view, possible – ‘the study of the collective representations and their connections in uncivilised people’ can ‘throw some light upon the genesis of our own categories and our logical principles’.59 The more usual application of Durkheim was different and more radical. Under Durkheim’s influence, the most influential anthropologists of the 1920s and 1930s, Franz Boas in America and Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe Brown in England, were shifting anthropology away from comparative methodologies, towards a ‘culturalism’ where structuralist critical perspectives were used to study not myths and symbols as leftovers from a past world but, rather, organisations and institutions which operated according to culturally specific rationales in the present.60 Just as Ferdinand de Saussure had broken the link between linguistics and teleology through ‘structuralism’, so with Durkheim’s intervention in sociology and anthropology. There is no evidence to say whether Joyce read Durkheim or Saussure, but there can be no doubt that the Wake is embedded in the highly complex environment they worked in, where scientific racism was both a landmark feature of common European culture and, at the same time, part of a collapsing system of thinking. The science of race clearly was an orthodoxy, but concurrently part of an outgoing culture and in this sense primed, so to speak, for the astonishing treatment that it receives in Joyce’s last work. The fabric and detail of the Wake is involved in that intervention and so is its ‘cyclical’ vision. The latter reproduces and at the same time ridicules race science and degeneration theory as cultural obsession. Through his comedy of cycles, Joyce is able to embody and displace the right-wing fantasies of the social engineers and the degeneration mania of figures such as Oswald Spengler, Otto Weininger, Max Nordau and Rentoul. In their place he insists on a comic articulation that is able to embrace and celebrate inefficiency, waste and decadence, or, to put it in more traditional terms, sin, and it is from this position that the Wake’s ridicule of ‘scientific’ versions of social evolution is launched. This, surely, is part of the point about Tim Finnegan. It is highly suggestive of Joyce’s deep distrust of

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social progressivism that the Wake should begin with that story, the story of a master builder. This much-loved and mysterious figure is in the process of building ‘a waalworth of a skyerscape of most eyeful hoyth entowerly, erigenating from next to nothing’, but even before the Wake can get properly underway, he tumbles from his breaking ladder. Tragically, he will die, but, at the same time, fall into mythology (4.35–5.1).

CHAPTER

5

Atlanta-Arya: theosophy, race and the Wake

THEOSOPHY AND THE DUBLIN CONNECTION

It has always been recognised that theosophy was of interest to Joyce, in part because of the well-known local connection. Theosophy was practised by key figures in the Irish Literary Revival. Charles Johnson, under W. B. Yeats’s influence, met A. P. Sinnett and formed the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society in 1885, an organisation which according to Edward Boyd, one of the earliest historians of Irish revivalism, was ‘as vital a factor in the evolution of Anglo-Irish literature as the publication of Standish O’Grady’s History of Ireland, the two events being complementary to any complete understanding of the literature of the revival. The Theosophical Movement provided a literary, artistic and intellectual centre from which radiated influences whose effect was felt even by those that did not belong to it.’1 Yeats, George Russell and John Eglinton, all key figures in the Irish Literary Revival, joined the Society at various times. Both Russell and Yeats knew Madame Blavatsky, its co-founder, personally and both were deeply influenced by her. For seven years Russell was a member of the ‘Household’, a group of theosophists who lived together and formed the nucleus staff of The Irish Theosophist, launched in 1892.2 This influential journal remained in publication until 1897 when it was replaced by The Internationalist, for which Eglinton wrote a great deal. Thereafter the Irish theosophy movement, in parallel with the wider international movement, went through a number of breaks and schisms. Yet Russell, in particular, despite the upheavals, remained committed and active – latterly as head of the Hermetic Society – until he left Ireland in 1933, just two years before his death.3 There were Dublin lodges and Dublin-based theosophical publications from the mid-1880s right through to the early 1930s and Joyce knew this environment quite well. He read some of the theosophical literature as a student, including Sinnett’s The Occult World (1881) and Esoteric 95

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Buddhism (1883), and, according to C. P. Curran, was distinctly unimpressed, though Stuart Gilbert implied differently.4 Very much later, in 1931 he read and made a series of notes (NBB, VI.B.33) on Arthur Edward Waites’s The Occult Sciences (1891), which had a chapter on theosophy. Few of these notes ended up in the Wake, but there was, in any case, an established fictional treatment of the subject which demonstrated an interest that was more than passing. Theosophy is mocked in Ulysses as a cranky absurdity practised by a trendy elite, and it was to receive considerably worse treatment in the Wake.5 Early Wakeans identified a substantial number of Wake allusions to some of the key figures in theosophy – Annie Besant, Colonel Olcott, Sinnett and, especially Blavatsky – with Adaline Glasheen in particular showing how Joyce ridiculed the latter, in part through the repeated play on her maiden (or ‘mudhen’) name. This was von Hahn (and ‘hahn’ is German for ‘cock’); thus any allusion to ‘hen’ is likely to implicate Blavatsky. Glasheen argues that the Wake letter picked over by the hen/Kate figure in I.v is like Blavatsky’s works in that ‘the letter is nothing, but to the idiot female it seems an important statement about the condition of man’.6 It should be added here that in Blavatsky’s work the egg, both ‘spiritual’ and ‘mundane’, is of special significance – ‘an emblem of eternity, infinitude, regeneration and rejuvenation’ (see Joyce’s ‘recent impeachment due to egg everlasting’ at FW, 220.29).7 This means that a complete explication of Blavatsky’s significance in the Wake would need to consider not just the hen/Hahn connection, but also the many references to ‘egg’. Besides the biographical allusions to Blavatsky and co., James Atherton, like Clive Hart and, later, Roland McHugh, found a few allusions to Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877) but implies that the real significance of this massive work might run deeper. He suggests, rightly in my view, that much of the Wake material alluding to Hinduism and Sanskrit is likely to have come from Isis Unveiled and The Mahatma Letters (1923), rather than original religious texts like The Upanishads. The half-dozen or so allusions to ‘Maya’ in the Wake, for instance, need not indicate any serious familiarity with Hindu philosophy and could easily have been generated by Isis Unveiled. This has many references to Maya, and defines it quite neatly – ‘everything that bears a shape was created, and thus must sooner or later perish i.e., change that shape; therefore, as something temporary, but seeming to be permanent, it is but an illusion, Maya’ (IU I, 290). Atherton is also less certain than Glasheen about Joyce’s general attitude towards theosophy, noting that Joyce’s bookshelves were full of texts devoted to the arcane, the esoteric – what we might now refer to as ‘the

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alternative’ or, in a different idiom, the ‘spooky’. Atherton explains this, not very convincingly, as a taste resulting from Joyce’s retreat from Catholicism – which apparently left him with an appetite for the superstitious.8 Quite apart from the evidence of the texts, which are uniformly mocking of theosophy, it is now established that Joyce was reading anthropological theorisations of magic, taking notes from W. J. Perry’s The Origin of Magic and Religion (1923) in NBB, VI.B.14 for example.9 This is suggestive of a more controlled and modern approach to theosophy than Atherton’s rather stereotyping view allows. This basically represents the limit of Joycean explication on Joyce and theosophy, although there has been a great deal of work done on areas which are contingent to theosophy – the Wake and Egyptology, the Wake and the Hermetic tradition, the Wake and Scandinavian mythology, and so on. The aim of this chapter is to develop this sense of intertextuality between the Wake and theosophy, with particular reference to Isis Unveiled, the theosophical work which Joyce appears to have used most for the Wake. Its title is invoked at 214.31 (‘Icis on us!’), 601.5 and 620.30, and at other places where the word ‘veil’, or its variants occurs, such as at 50.9 (‘unveilable’); 75.5–6 (‘lililiths undeveiled’); or 247.30–31 (‘Lift the blank ve veered as heil’).10 The central argument is that Joyce understood theosophy not just as an insignificant absurdity that had a curious currency among Dublin’s Protestant intellectuals, but in a wider cultural context and as a symptomatic discourse of modernity. In this respect theosophy, like the race discourses with which it can be closely identified, demonstrated the irrationality of the modern, and the turn that contemporaneity had taken away from the originary egalitarian instincts of a progressive order. The point being not to deny the importance of the Irish context – clearly, the involvement of the Dublin crowd with theosophy was central to Joyce’s analysis of Irish revivalism as a faddist and conservative culture11 – but, rather, to recognise that Joyce’s engagement with theosophy was also part of a bigger and more complex engagement with modernity and the ‘Enlightenment project’. It is against this wider backdrop that theosophy becomes of particular importance to the Wake. THEOSOPHY, MODERNITY AND SCIENTIFIC RACISM

At first sight this might seem an odd claim, and for a number of reasons. Firstly, it could be argued that theosophy was quite simply too marginal, too fringe, to carry such weight and significance. One would simply point out here that although theosophy was indeed a minority interest, its

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influence was much greater than is sometimes suggested and it was highly symptomatic of fin de sie`cle culture in many ways. Founded in 1875 in New York following a surge of American interest in spiritualism,12 the Theosophical Society was the single most influential occult group of the nineteenth century. In the East it played a direct and serious part in twentieth-century postcolonial politics and the revival of Buddhism, especially in Sri Lanka where Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (‘my respeaktoble medams culonelle’, 351.31–32), one of the founders of theosophy, remained a revered figure into the 1960s.13 In the West it was key to the introduction of Asian religious ideas. Quite apart from the influence on the Irish Revival, theosophy influenced other important cultural figures, such as the mystic Jiddu Krishnamurti and artist Wassily Kandinsky (and thus ‘abstract expressionism’), and was directly responsible for such educational experiments as the Alice Bailey Arcane School and Rudolph Steiner’s controversial vision of education.14 Its originators, the mysterious Russian Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (or ‘H. P. B.’ as she became known) and the American lawyer Olcott, achieved celebrity status in their day, as both activists and proselytisers. This celebrity status was itself of a modern character because it was so much associated, partly through the many scandals surrounding Blavatsky and theosophy, with media image. Sensational claims of spirit activity were investigated and publicly exposed as trickery; questions were raised about the financial mismanagement of the society, and Blavatsky herself was accused, quite rightly, of plagiarising in Isis Unveiled.15 Perhaps the biggest scandal surrounding theosophy, however, had to do with its claim that the source of its knowledge was the mysterious Mahatmas, variously termed ‘Adepts, Masters of Wisdom, Masters of Compassion, or Elder Brothers’. These were not exactly spirits, but, rather, highly evolved men, ‘greatsouled ones’, said to reside chiefly in Tibet and ‘thought to be part of a Great White Brotherhood or White Lodge, who watch over and guide the evolution of humanity and who preserve the truths of the ageless wisdom’ – this much-emphasised whiteness of the Brotherhood is not without significance and reinforced the close links that existed between Aryanism and theosophy.16 By the same token, the word ‘Brotherhood’ was problematic for theosophy’s leading lights in terms of establishing the wider cultural and political context in which they wished theosophy to be placed. Sinnett explains how in the early days theosophy was expressed in terms of ‘the formation of a nucleus of universal brotherhood . . . People whose political sympathies took the colouring of ultra-democracy and socialism imagined that the Society was mainly inspired with sympathies of that order.’ Sinnett

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felt obliged to set the record straight and wrote an article which explained that ‘[t]he gross democratic meaning attached to the term Brotherhood is an insult to Theosophical learning’.17 The two masters most usually associated with theosophy were Koot Hoomi (also spelled Kuthurmi) and Morya (referred to in the Wake at 316.21 and 53.30). It is from ‘K. H.’ and ‘Master M.’ that Blavatsky and Sinnett purported to have received knowledge of the ‘secret doctrine’, this being published in the so-called Mahatma Letters, though it soon became clear that the letters from Tibet, which they claimed had dropped mysteriously from the sky or arrived in other fantastic ways, were actually written by Blavatsky herself (see FW, 242.27) and often ‘materialised’ by virtue of a special cupboard constructed with a secret panel. Emma Coulomb, a staff member at Blavatsky’s Indian headquarters in Adgar, revealed that her husband, a handyman, had built this object (see ‘Madame CooleyCouley, spawife to laird of manna’ at 242.36). Quite apart from that, the ‘knowledge’ the letters contained added little to the material already published voluminously by Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled, though they did allegedly reveal the astonishing cosmogony or ‘anthropogenesis’ that Blavatsky and Sinnett describe in their respective publications The Secret Doctrine (1888) and Esoteric Buddhism.18 As Atherton points out, at least one account of the masters’ scandal – and there were several – is referred to in Finnegans Wake – Who Wrote the Mahatma Letters by H. E. Hare and William Loftus.19 An investigation into ‘phenomena connected with the Theosophical Society’ produced a report submitted to the Society for Psychical Research which suggested that Blavatsky was actually a Russian spy and concluded with what became a well-known sentence. This was widely quoted, though not in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which does refer, however, to the report: ‘[F]or our own part, we regard her neither as a mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious impostors in history.’20 This is part of the general significance of Blavatsky for Joyce. By any standards she was an extraordinary character. She plugged into some of the great obsessions of the fin de sie`cle, notably the search for spiritual meaning in the age of science and materialism, and did so with a distinctly postmodern flair for self-promotion and the cult of personality. Along with James Macpherson, Richard Piggot, George S. Belaney (who pretended to be an Amerindian and wrote under the name ‘Grey Owl’), James Townsend Savard the forger, Yeats as the ‘interpreter’ of A Vision, and all the other fakers implicated so centrally in the

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Wake, including Joyce himself in some sense,21 she seems to stand not just for the idea of personal duplicity, but also that of cultural forgery on a larger and more interesting scale. A second and perhaps more serious objection to understanding theosophy as being representative of modernity is that it was clearly outside of modern discourse in important ways. It expressed belief in phenomena for which science, in the late nineteenth century as now, has found no evidence – telekinesis (see, for example, FW 198.21); spirit manifestation (see ‘Polthergeistkotzdondherhoploits’ at 187.15); divination (‘providential divining’, 599.13); automatic handwriting (see II.ii, which is the most theosophically influenced section of the Wake and has many references to A Vision (1938) – this being the book which, Yeats claimed, was a product of automatic handwriting), and so on. It was also specifically constructed against modernity, ‘the bastard progeny of the French revolution’ (IU I, xlv) as Blavatsky put it with some flair, and utterly dedicated to undermining its cultural value. Like many fin de sie`cle cultures, theosophy was quite at odds with progressivist history and intensely backward-looking. The essential occult position involved the assertion that ‘[m]an’s history was not an evolution from primitive animal origins through ever growing complexity or progress’, but on the contrary, a search for the return to ‘ancient wisdom’ and a literal return to a Godhead that is nonmatter and pervasive as the ultimate reality. The past, then, ‘was always better than the present, and progress was revival, rebirth, renaissance of antiquity’.22 History became, as in Vico, a matter of cycles ‘during each of which mankind gradually reached the culminating point of highest civilisation and gradually relapsed into abject barbarism’ (IU I, 5). The corollary to this cyclical historiography, at least in Blavatsky’s version, was the elevation of those ancient civilisations which had peaked – not the classical cultures of Greece or Rome, held to be derivative by Blavatsky, nor the Judaic, seen to be minor and underdeveloped outside of Kabbalistic traditions, but, most typically, the ancient cultures of Egypt and India. Despite this retreat from modernity, however, the text of theosophy, particularly as represented by Blavatsky and especially in Isis Unveiled, was crucially indebted to the modern, to scientific rationalism and the empirical method. True, it did present the most bizarre ideas as facts – that Christ was a freemason (IU II, 393); that the ‘first races of men were spiritual, and their protoplastic bodies were not composed of the gross and material substances of which we see them composed now-a-day’ (IU II, 276); that the ‘whole Darwinian theory of natural selection is included in the first six chapters of the Book of Genesis’ (IU I, 303); that any ‘Kabbalist well

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acquainted with the Pythagorean system of numerals and geometry can demonstrate that the metaphysical views of Plato were based upon the strictest mathematical principles’ (IU I, 6); that ‘the symbols of all the mythologies have a scientific foundation and substance’ (IU I, 23), and so on for, literally, a thousand pages and more. But part of the fun of this text is that such information is conveyed not as inspiration, but precisely as fact, albeit arcane fact hidden and protected over the centuries as secret knowledge. Isis Unveiled presents itself, not in the tradition of revelation but as the product of reason, in part because, for Blavatsky, the theosophical universe reveals itself to reason (‘[t]he universe is the combination of a thousand elements, and yet the expression of a single spirit – a chaos to the sense, a cosmos to the reason’, IU I, xvi). This is ostensibly why this enormous book of two volumes and some 1,400 pages is presented as an academic text in the tradition of modern academic literature – and avails itself so much of the modern ‘sciences’ of philology, anthropology and comparative religion. Accompanied by copious footnotes throughout, a huge index and an additional ‘bibliographical index’ that is itself twentythree pages in length, it is an impressive, if definitively strange, testimony to what Blavatsky understands as superior reason.23 Besides adopting the appearance of an academic work, Isis Unveiled also adopts rationalist procedures and modes of argument. It insists, for example, that modern natural science tends to be poor science, in part because it has separated out from religious truth, but also because it is deficient in its own terms – characteristically loose in argument, and weak in rationality as well as in scientific imagination. This ‘insight’ produces endless expose´s of the ‘strange logic’ and ‘curious reasoning’ (IU I, 525) of conventional scientism. Here, for example, Blavatsky takes T. H. Huxley to task for his limited understanding of ‘the physical basis of life’: If we accept Darwin’s theory of the development of species, we find that his starting-point is placed in front of an open door . . . Not so with Professor Huxley’s theory of the ‘Physical Basis of Life’. Regardless of the formidable majority of ‘nays’ from his German brother-scientists, he creates a universal protoplasm and appoints its cells to become henceforth the sacred founts of the principle of all life. By making the latter identical in living man, ‘dead mutton’, a nettle-sting, and a lobster; by shutting in, in the molecular cell of the protoplasm, the life-principle, and by shutting out from it the divine influx which comes with subsequent evolution, he closes every door against any possible escape. Like an able tactician he converts his ‘laws and facts’ into sentries whom he causes to mount guard over every issue. The standard under which he rallies them is inscribed with the word ‘necessity’; but hardly is it unfurled when he mocks the legend and calls it ‘an empty shadow of my own imagination’. (IU I, 14–15)

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The source of dissent from Huxley’s views here is Blavatsky’s belief in reincarnation and her sense of a single living intelligence that inscribes the cosmos and its evolutionary character. But what is presented in this extract (and it is entirely characteristic of Isis Unveiled ) is not so much a religious alternative to rationalism as an engagement which confronts scientific explanations head-on, with at least the appearance of scientific understanding – Huxley’s imagination is limited; he is inconsistent; he is challenged by his own colleagues in the science establishment, and so on. In this sense Blavatsky, for all her antimodern diatribe, becomes implicated in the modern and subject to its characteristic operative modes and idioms, and not only by virtue of her usage of science discourse. ‘EVROPEAHAHN

CHIECH HOUS . . . AHDAHM THIS WAY’

–

THEOSOPHY AND ARYANISM

All the legends of the creation, the fall of man, and the resultant deluge, belong to universal history, and are no more the property of the Israelites than of any other nation. (IU II, 469)

Blavatsky used, then, the traditions and procedures of scientific rationalism against scientific rationalism. But the academy was not monolithic for her. If it produced some of the greatest materialist enemies of esoteric religion, it also threw up some important allies. While many of Blavatsky’s heroes came from antiquity and the Hermetic traditions of the Renaissance, others belonged to the modern intelligentsia. Many such figures were drawn, especially, from developing nineteenth-century disciplines. It was hardly surprising that Aryanist views were implicated here, with Berlin receiving special praise as ‘one of the great seats of learning’ and being applauded for its ‘professors of modern exact sciences’ (IU I, x). Max Mu¨ller, the most eminent Aryanist of the period, was described by Blavatsky as ‘a man of . . . immense and rare erudition’ (IU I, 548). Indeed, Mu¨ller, who moved from Germany to England to become the Taylor Professor of Modern Languages at Oxford, warranted some fifty references in Isis Unveiled. Surprisingly, Hegel, who held that ‘linguistic proof was a scientifically valid test of the origins of nations’24 was virtually left out of things, though The Secret Doctrine made up for this deficiency by including many references to the ‘great German thinker’25 and demonstrating a full understanding of his significance in terms of the development of scientific racism – clearly, Blavatsky read, or was made aware of the importance of, Hegel between writing the two books. Kant, on the other hand, who

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was key to the identification between ‘blood’ and ‘race’,26 was honoured by Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled as one of the modern-day philosophers who fully appreciated the illusory nature of the material universe (see IU II, 158). Johann Herder criticised some aspects of race theory, but he attacked the biblical version of race origin, arguing that ‘the firm central point of the largest quarter of the Globe, the primitive mountains of Asia, prepared the first abode of the human race’,27 and it is on this basis that he was also applauded in Isis Unveiled (see IU II, 30). Likewise Jules Michelet and Louis Jacolliot. The latter, once a popular Orientalist, was a standard Blavatsky reference point, elevated by her as an innovator and described as a figure much misunderstood. A prolific writer, it was Jacolliot who produced in 1868 Bible dans l’inde, a salute to ‘India, the birthplace of the human race and ageless mother with bountiful breasts’. This insisted that the Old Testament was no more than ‘a collection of superstitions’. The Jews became ‘a degraded and stupid people’, and Moses a ‘fanatical slave charitably educated at the court of Pharaohs’.28 Figures from these and related traditions were appropriated in Blavatsky’s version of theosophy and helped to locate it firmly in the intellectual environment of the day. Ernest Renan, for example, was revered as a ‘ripe’ and ‘eminent scholar’ (IU II, 328), responsible for revealing that ‘nearly everything in Christianity is mere baggage brought from the Pagan Mysteries’.29 Blavatsky, in spite of the generally antimodern dynamic of theosophy, was able to enlist a cohort of apparent fellow travellers from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth, from prestigious sections of the European academy. This association became part of the essential character of Isis Unveiled and symptomatic of its fundamental strangeness. Notwithstanding its claims of universalism and reduction of modernity to an empty illusion, the Maya of Hinduism, Isis Unveiled was able to find much to admire in the modern world, especially in terms of modern European scholarship. This is why, of course, Blavatsky’s work can figure so largely, and in such rich ways, as an emblem of rationalism gone wrong and explains in part why it can move so freely between antiquity and modernity, as, indeed, does Finnegans Wake. It purports to trace a tradition of ‘truth’ that leaves its mark on all ages. In terms of the connections between Aryanism and theosophy, it needs to be stressed that this was no random appropriation on the part of the latter – one of the early editions of Isis Unveiled (1919) was published by a theosophical publishing house in California which called itself the ‘Aryan Philosophical Press’, and Sinnett’s lecture before the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society was specifically concerned with ‘the Aryan period’

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and ‘our Aryan race’.30 The first volume of The International Theosophist, whose contributors included figures well known to Joyce readers (Eglinton, W. Q. Judge and D. N. Dunlop for instance) as well as Mu¨ller, included many articles which demonstrated the very close link between theosophy and Aryanism. One was entitled ‘The German Paradise’ and was an Aryan idyll complete with a string of Wagnerian references. Another was entitled ‘The Nibelungen Hoard and the Holy Grail’ and refers to ‘[t]he legend of an ur-old town or castle built by the earliest human races’.31 As the institutional assimilation suggests, theosophy was specifically and definitively Aryanist, the adaptation of the Aryanist myth being placed right at the heart of theosophical thinking. This is hardly surprising. Confirming theosophy’s belief that ancient wisdom originated in the East and was brought to a barbaric West in antiquity, the Aryan idea visualised a true civilisation, all but destroyed by an unholy alliance of science and Christianity. This was taken by theosophy to be the great rediscovery of modern social sciences. Thus early in book two of Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky confirmed ‘Comparative Mythology and Philology’ in their combined role as the serious threat to ‘The Roman Catholic Church’, the latter being the great historical enemy of ‘truth’ in occultist tradition, as in Aryanism. These were the disciplines that uncovered the Aryan secret, and this was the real contribution of the modern academy. ‘A conclusive opinion is furnished by too many scholars to doubt the fact that India was the Alma-Mater, not only of civilisation, arts, and sciences but also of all the great religions of antiquity; Judaism, and hence Christianity included. Herder places the cradle of humanity in India, and shows Moses as a clever and relatively modern compiler of the ancient Brahmanical traditions’ (IU II, 30). Aryanism, according to Blavatsky, demonstrated how the Western tradition began to appreciate at least part of the great truth of theosophy, by recognising the importance of the pre-Vedic culture of ‘Thibet, Mongolia, and Great Tartary . . . those places which science now fully concedes to have been the cradle of humanity’ (IU I, 589). The case of Aryanism suggested a dynamic commonly illustrated in Isis Unveiled, where laborious Western culture finally caught up with esoteric wisdom. But it is important to realise that Blavatsky’s version of theosophy, for all its appreciation of the contemporary academy, did more than simply seek some sort of alignment between old and ‘new’. It also extended the significance of the Aryan myth far beyond anything intended by formal scholarship. Thus race became fundamental to theosophy and essentialist in truly extraordinary ways. Not only were historical cycles, as was standard in Aryanism, a matter of race histories – ‘[t]he coming races will be but

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the reproductions of races long bygone; as we, perhaps, are the images of those who lived a hundred centuries ago’ (IU I, 51) – physics and creationism belonged to the same racialised cosmos. ‘Demokritus of Abdera shows us space crammed with atoms, and our contemporary astronomers allow us to see how these atoms form into worlds, and afterwards into races, our own included, which people them’ (IU I, 402). Here was a most bizarre example of the absolute centrality of race to theosophy, which later took the shape of a full-blown cosmology described in terms of the ‘progress’ of ‘seven root-races’. The first was formed out of an interaction of ‘higher forms’ with matter, the second (the hypoboreans) forming out of itself. With the third (Lemurian) and fourth (Atlantean) root-races, spiritual means of reproduction were superseded by sexual ones. The fifth rootrace was ‘our own’, the Aryan, which ‘took rise in northern Asia and spread south and west’. More precisely, the Anglo-Saxon race was designated ‘the fifth of seven subraces of the Aryan root-race . . . [a]fter the appearance of the final two root-races, humanity will have reached the end of its allotted cycle of evolution, and the life impulse will withdraw from our globe’, though it remained on other planets until the full ‘round’ was complete, only to then restart (‘racesround’ at FW, 277.4 may be a reference to this strange cosmology).32 Here, then, was a body of thought that placed race (and the Indo-European Aryans) absolutely at the centre of the universe. It revealed how fundamental the category of race could appear at the fin de sie`cle – to the extent that it enabled the production of what was quite literally race religion.33 To put it mildly, such ideas now appear, as they must have done in the 1890s, decidedly peculiar. It would be misleading, however, to dismiss Blavatsky as a mere crank. Her books reveal a mind practised in Hermetic traditions, comparative religion and philology, as well as race discourse of both the biblical and ‘scientific’ kinds. This kind of material was entirely familiar to her as both mystical tradition and fin de sie`cle intellectual culture. Her manipulation of it established Blavatsky’s status as a kind of bohemian popularist with a real flair for synthesis, as well as an instinct for the zeitgeist. The latter was particularly evident in her general sense of the West’s degeneration and her assault on Jews and Jewish culture, this latter being the inevitable corollary to the Aryanism of her work. In Blavatsky’s view, the Jews were ‘idolatrous’ (IU II, 269). She applauded Professor W. B. Carpenter and his Manchester lecture on Egypt for showing that ‘the Jewish book of Genesis is nothing more than an expression of the early Jewish ideas, based upon the pictorial records of the Egyptians among whom they lived’ (UI 1, 440) and made the claim that ‘all the light that

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ever shone on the Israelites came to them from . . . [the] far East, passing first through the Chaldeans and Egyptians’ (IU I, 566), a view, incidentally, shared with Giordano Bruno, who wrote in Spacia della bestia triofante (1588) that it should not be supposed ‘that the sufficiency of the Chaldaic magic derived from the Cabala of the Jews; for the Jews are without doubt the excrements of Egypt, and no-one could ever pretend with any degree of probability that the Egyptians borrowed one principle, good or bad, from the Jews’.34 In a similar vein, at IU II, 361 Blavatsky writes that ‘[a]ll that the Jews learned, they had from nations older than themselves’ and at II, 426 she proclaims that ‘[t]he Aryans, and especially the Brahmans, never borrowed anything at all from the Semitists’. She notes the irony of Christianity choosing for its guidance the national records and scriptures of a people perhaps the least spiritual of the human family – the Semitic. A branch that has never been able to develop out of its numerous tongues a language capable of embodying ideas of a moral and intellectual world; whose form of expression and drift of thought could never soar higher than the purely sensual and terrestrial figures of speech; whose literature has left nothing original, nothing that was not borrowed from the Aryan thought; and whose science and philosophy are utterly wanting in those noble features which characterize the highly spiritual and metaphysical systems of the Indo-European (Japetic) races. (IU II, 434–35)

Even with this highly offensive material, however, Blavatsky remains an interesting and even engaging character in some respects. Her books, though tedious in the extreme, in part because of their extraordinary length and monstrous capacity for repetition, are fascinating in terms of the historical record and are at least more readable than Sinnett’s, with whom she is sometimes unfavourably compared – though this may be faint praise of the damning kind. Certainly, there is a great deal of material in Blavatsky so absurd that it can only be laughed at, but, just to emphasise the point, it would be quite inadequate to understand her simply as a ridiculous figure positioned at the very margins of culture and society. She was in touch with the times in all sorts of ways, and very much in tune with some of its most typical and dangerous obsessions. ‘THE

REGENERATIONS OF THE INCARNATIONS OF THE

EMANATIONS OF THE APPARENTIATIONS OF FUNN AND NIN IN CLEETHABALA’

–

THEOSOPHY IN THE WAKE

As with Aryanist discourse, theosophy is embedded in the detail of the Wake. There are at least a hundred references to Blavatsky and other key theosophists, such as Besant, Olcott and Sinnett (Yeats, Russell and Eglinton,

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certainly theosophists but important to Joyce for other reasons besides, are excluded from this reckoning). Often such allusions will involve the controversial events of the early history of theosophy and become associated with fraud and duplicity, which is one of the means by which the Wake mocks theosophy. It is, as Glasheen says, a fake culture that claims self-importance but which is actually so much ‘litter’. The vast majority of theosophical reference points, however, are not personal or connected with the anecdotal in this way. These could be thought of as ‘general’ usages, where theosophical practice or discourse is invoked without any specific reference to the stormy history of the theosophist movement or to theosophical texts, as at 27.24–30 where Finnegan’s resurrection takes on obvious cod-‘spooky’ dimensions. ‘It’s our warm spirits, boys, he’s spooring . . . Where misties swaddlum, where miches lodge none, where mystries pour kind on, O sleepy! So be yet!’ Theosophical branches, like their Masonic counterparts, were called ‘lodges’. ‘Spirits’ and ‘mystries’ are also suggestive of a theosophical context, as is Finnegan’s resurrection more generally (there is a page heading in Isis Unveiled which reads ‘When are the ‘‘Dead’’ Dead’; see IU I, 479). There is a further example of this kind of usage at I.v when the Wake letter is subjected, as we have seen, to a mockscientific analysis. Linguistics is particularly evoked as the narrative voice tries, utterly unsuccessfully, to ascribe a racial identity to the letter which is ‘Greek’, ‘Ostrogothic’ and ‘Etruscan’ (120.19–23). More or less finally, ‘the original document’ turns out to be ‘in what is known as Hanno O’Nonhanno’s unbrookable script . . . it showed no signs of punctuation of any sort. Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world’s oldest light’ (123.31–36). The allusion to Hahn, and to a book of codes that requires the ‘oldest light’ to reveal its secrets invokes Blavatsky and her works very clearly. The absence of punctuation places the letter, and Blavatsky, who was frequently accused of being a poor writer and of both ignoring and misusing conventions, in terms of a version of gendered expression, familiar, of course, from the ‘Penelope’ episode in Ulysses. Here, however, there is no suggestion of any elevation of the ‘female mind’, which, as many readings of that episode show, ‘Penelope’ can support. On the contrary, the Wake’s ridiculing of theosophy in this instance seems partly on the basis of its status as an example of ‘girl’s thinking’. Many of the references to theosophy, however, are more closely related to theosophical texts, and it is here that one gets a stronger sense of Joyce working very precisely with theosophical material. At 261.23 for example,

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in II.ii, an episode especially involved in theosophy, there is a reference to HCE as ‘Ainsoph, this upright one’ with ALP ‘that noughty besighed him zeroine’ (see also 355.32 where Joyce produces a feminised version in ‘An-Lyph’, and 189.1 where there is a degendered version in ‘soph’).35 AinSoph is the first principle in theosophy, not the ultimate originator whose name is never revealed, but the first ‘emanation’ of the creative spirit. Thus there are many references to Ain-Soph in Isis Unveiled, though what Joyce probably has most in mind here is Isis Unveiled, I, 292 where Ain-Soph is zeroised as ‘no-thing’. The references to mercury, salt and sulphur on FW, 261, establish a further theosophical context at this point. All these substances are indexed in IU. Similarly, at 263.20–27, where ‘since primal made alter in garden of Idem. The tasks above are as the flasks below, saith the emerald canticle of Hermes and all’s loth and pleasestir, are we told, on excellent inkbottle authority, solarsystemised, seriolcosmically, in a more and almighty expanding universe under one, there is rhymeless reason to believe, original sun.’ This is perhaps the closest that Finnegans Wake comes to an expression of the key theosophical doctrines – ‘primal’ and ‘alter’ are suggestive of the Latin for first and second and therefore related to the theosophist formulation of the monad producing the duad at the origin of creation. The reference to Hermes Trismegistos and The Emerald Table alludes to the central theosophical idea of ‘correspondence’ between the heavens and the earth. Sun worship is also fundamental to theosophy, as is the idea of an expanding universe, the breath of God that exhales in creation and will inhale in a return to the original void. References and allusions of this kind are spread throughout the Wake, often used quite opportunistically and without extended context. At 32.4 the reader is addressed as ‘son of Hokmah’, Hokmah being the active male intelligence according to Blavatsky, for no obvious reason. In the tale of the Mookse and the Gripes, ‘Nuvoletta in her lightdress’ finds herself alone. Her ‘nubied companions’ are asleep and her mother and father have left the house. She tries to attract the Mookse and the Gripes, only to find ‘the heavenly one with his constellatria and emanations’ standing between (FW, 157.8–19). The term ‘emanation’ has a particular importance in theosophy which seems of relevance here – it refers to ‘an ancient doctrine’ and involves ‘the general formula of unity in multiplicity, the one evolving the many and pervading the many’ (IU I, xvi) – but there is no further reinforcement at this point of the Wake text. Similarly, the first riddle in I.vi involves naming a mock-heroic identity (Finn MacCool) whose ‘number in arithmosophy is the stars of the plough’ (134.14–15), which points to the arithmetical and astrological basis of theosophy, combining that with

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the plough and stars flag used by Irish republicans. This linkage between mysticism, hero-worship and nationalism is, of course, entirely familiar in the Wake, and elsewhere in Joyce, but, again, there is no textual reinforcement at this point.36 Again, in the hiatus before Shaun’s final (wrong) answer to the riddle of the twenty-nine girls, the question ‘God es El?’ (246.6) seems to be an isolated reference to IU II, 213, where Blavatsky refers to ‘[t]his triad emanated Hesed . . . or Mercy, a masculine active potency also called El’. Incidentally, much later the twenty-nine girls are referred to as ‘henservants’ (432.6), which carries the suggestion that they are devotees of Blavatsky. There are, however, concentrations of theosophical material and it is here that the ironic disposition is often most explicit. One obvious illustration would be the well-known passage in I.vii where Shem is formulated by his brother as a magi or the ‘first till last alshemist’ (185.34–35) whose writing is a magic art. Shem chants his ‘cantraps’ (a ‘cantrip’ being a necromantic spell) of ‘fermented words, abracadabra culubra culorum’ over a bubbling ‘athanor’ (a furnace used by alchemists) (184.18–26; see IU II, 648). Ignoring the true teaching of the four masters, he submits to ‘[h]is costive Satan’s antimonian manganese limolitmious nature’. When the authorities, ‘Robber and Mumsell’ (184.36–185.02), suggesting the publisher George Roberts of Maunsels, clamp down on his dark activities, prohibiting his access to paper and ink, Shem devises a spell that transforms his own shit into paper and his piss into ink.37 Finally, Shem announces that when the ‘call comes’, he shall ‘produce nichthemerically from his unheavenly body a no uncertain quantity of obscene matter not protected by copriright in the United Stars of Ourania’ (185.28–31). Here the working of theosophical references is entirely shaped by the wider interests of the text and based around the joke that writing is in magic ‘correspondance’ to the disposal of bodily waste. Far from suggesting any deference to what for Blavatsky and co. was the highly serious art of the magi, this is a comic appropriation and in that sense highly suggestive of the Wake’s more general use of theosophy.38 The night lessons section, II.ii, has another concentration of theosophical material, though this is more extended and complex than the alchemy of I.vii. Quite apart from the references to Ain-Soph and to key theosophical principles, both of which occur at the beginning, II.ii also opens with a reference to ‘decans’, the thirty-six divisions of ten degrees into which the 360 degrees of the circle of the zodiac are divided, each with its own image (261.31). The references to ‘GNOSIS’ (secret knowledge of spiritual mysteries; see the right-hand margin note at 262.20); ‘typtology’

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(spirit-tapping) in ‘archetypt’ (263.30); and ‘Petra’ (264.12.) again are connected to theosophy. The latter, meaning ‘stone’ in Latin, is particularly taken up in Isis Unveiled, via connections made between Peter, stone and rock, and, bizarrely, freemasonry. Blavatsky writes that ‘[h]enceforth he [Christ] could, as a Master builder . . . erect a temple of wisdom on the rock of Petra, for himself; and having laid a sure foundation, let ‘‘another build thereon’’’ (IU II, 392; see also 30, 91 and 139). There are further references – to astrology, a theosophical composite, ‘Adamman’ (267.18), Bruno, Hermes Trismegistus, ‘Black and White Wenchcraft’ (269 fn 4); hocus-pocus, in a German version; the Kabbalistic version of Eve in ‘Heva’ (271.25) – all within a few pages of the opening of II.ii. This orientation continues through the episode, and is particularly connected with a devilish Shem who casts a spell (at 287.18) and completely outshines the slower Shaun who cannot himself write and must suffer the indignity of his brother’s ‘assistance’ and his mysterious ‘autocratic [automatic] writings of paraboles of famellicurbs and meddlied muddlingisms’ (303.19–20). It is Shem, of course (as Kevin), who composes the final letter wishing ‘youlldied greedings’ to ‘Pep and Memmy and the old folkers below’ and ‘wishing them all very merry Incarnations’ (308.17–20). These are more than disconnected allusions. They circumscribe a section that in its design, which has the pupils (Shem, Shaun and Issy) responding to what purports to be an educative text, echoes Hermetic treatises. These often took the form of a dialogue between master and pupil, culminating in a kind of ecstasy where the adept becomes illuminated; in Joyce’s version, which, again, is a mock-version, the responses, especially from Shem and Issy, show little or no deference to teaching or learning and nothing in the way of revelation. More than this, however, knowledge in II.ii is ironically constructed as ‘aristmystic’ (293.18; see also ‘mythametical’ at 286.23 and ‘Aletheometry’ at 370.13), which links the whole dynamic of II.ii to theosophy. Many branches of learning are alluded to in this episode, from grammar to history, but the key epistemological framework, just as it is in Blavatsky and theosophy generally, is mystical knowledge founded on the basis of mathematical systems, where ‘apexojesus will be a point of order’ (296.10–11). In this way II.ii becomes a ludicrous working of the idea that ‘all systems of religious mysticism are based on numerals’ (IU I, xv–xvii). Thus the drawing of ‘an equoangular trillitter’ is asked for ‘[o]n the name of the tizzer and off the tongs and off the mythametical tripods’ (286.21–24). Here geometry is creationist, so the making of ‘ann aquilittoral dryankle’ requires ‘[f]irst mull a mugfull of mud, son’ (286.31). In this context it is significant that when Shaun counts on his fingers ‘the

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fonder fell he of his null four lovedroyd curdinals, his element curdinal numen’ (‘numen’, whatever its further associations, meaning holy spirit, 282.19–21). This mathematical basis did not make theosophy ‘materialist’ in the usual sense; it demonstrated the order at the centre of the universe, the divine logic, and combined with a conception of the universe which was pantheistic and highly sexualised.39 For Blavatsky, all religious systems imaged the sexual nature of the cosmos, not just in the ‘phallic stones’ of so-called ‘indecent heathens’ but also in the ‘steeples, turrets, domes, and Christian temples’, which reproduce the ‘the primitive idea of the lithos, the upright phallus’. She continued: ‘neither Catholics nor Protestants have a right to talk of the ‘‘indecent forms’’ of heathen monuments so long as they ornament their own churches with the symbols of the Lingham and Yoni, and even write the laws of their God upon them’ (IU II, 5). In this way theology involved knowledge and discipline, but in relation to a vital and sexualised cosmos. It is these materials that become combined hilariously when Shaun is eventually defeated by geometry, the most important branch of mathematics in theosophy and fundamental to knowledge of the natural (spiritual) world. His helpful brother, posing as a master of geometric form, invites Shaun to observe, then, a living equilateral triangle. Crawling under ALP’s skirts, helped by a match to illuminate his way, Shaun is treated to the sight of his mother’s ‘muddy old triagonal delta . . . first of all usquiluteral threeingles’, an unveiling of the ‘Divine Mother’ that stirs Shaun to panic and horror. He responds with a fearful ‘Waaaaaa. Tch! Sluice!’ She may be ‘Mahamewetma, pride of the province’, but ‘why wouldn’t she sit cressloggedlike the lass that lured a tailor?’ (297.17–30). Material of this kind indicates how deeply suspect the idea of Joyce owing any kind of allegiance to magic and the arcane must be. Far from being suggestive of any deep-seated superstition, II.ii responds to theosophy with unqualified hilarity. This is not sympathetic interest but, rather, a decisive dismissal of theosophical ‘knowledge’. The similar concentration at III.iii supports such a reading. Here Yawn is transformed into a god, ‘His bellyvoid of nebulose with his neverstop navel. Paloola!!!!!! And his veins shooting melanite phosphor, his creamtocustard cometshair and his asteroid knuckles, ribs and members. Ooridiminy!!!!!!! His electrolatiginous twisted entrails belt’ (475.13–17). The theosophical cosmos is always in a state of ‘becoming’, with man, who is God, passing through stages of development as he returns to merge with absolute infinitude, as it were (see 481.23–24 where Yawn refers to ‘every at man like myself ’. Atman is ‘the spiritual self recognized as God’ – IU II, 648).

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This whole idea is mocked at III.iii where Yawn is reconfigured as a great cosmic lump the size of Ireland, although, far from being omnipotent, he is defenceless and dependent, ‘a gargantuan and angelic baby’ according to Glasheen (see The Third Census, lxii). The metamorphosis is surrounded by allusions to theosophical figures, Blavatsky of course, and heroes of theosophy (Bruno is in abundance); there are also references to Theophrastus and Mesmer, and so on. Such precise references, whether concentrated or not, indicate just how deeply theosophy has penetrated the Wake, but they do not represent the limits of intertextuality between the Wake, theosophy and, most particularly, Isis Unveiled. There are also the broader parallels, where Joyce seems to appropriate the wider dimensions of Blavatsky’s procedures, practices and ideas. It is here that the argument for reading Isis Unveiled as having ‘structural’ significance on the Wake, and certainly as being consonant with some of the basic Wake principles, though always in ironic ways, becomes engaged. For instance, Blavatsky was not only a great appropriator (and plagiarist), she was also an assimilator of considerable inventiveness. Partly as a result of her assertion that there is only one great knowledge from which all other versions of knowledge derive, she routinely merged one cultural identity with another, or, indeed, many others. Thus ‘David is the Israelitish King Arthur’ (IU II, 439); ‘Siva, Jehovah and Osiris’ were aligned as ‘all symbols of the active principle in nature par excellence’ (IU II, 402); ‘the Jews were similar or identical with the ancient Phoenicians’ (IU I, 566), and ‘Siva and the Palentinian Baal, or Moloch, and Saturn are identical . . . Abraham and Israel were names of Saturn’ (IU I, 578). Indeed, the searching out of ‘correspondences’ is one of the characteristic strategies of Isis Unveiled, designed to show not just the interrelatedness of things but, more importantly, to register the single identity at the centre. On Isis Unveiled II, 170 ‘[t]he First Great Cause as the One, the primordial germ’ is systematised in the Indian, Chaldean and Ophite ‘systems’. On 227 in the same volume Hindu, Egyptian and ‘Nazarene’ triads of Father/Mother/Son figures are brought into correspondence. IU II, 537 tabulates the legends of the three saviours (‘Christna’, Gautama-Buddha and ‘Jesus of Nazareth’). On 209 there is a similar table that would surely have had particular interest for Joyce. Here Blavatsky purports to show how Catholicism was ‘so little gifted with originality’ by making parallels between Hindu, Egyptian and Catholic systems. Nari of Hinduism becomes Isis becomes Mary; womb of gold in Hinduism becomes sistrum of gold (Egyptian) becomes house of gold; celestial light (Hindu) becomes Astarte (Egyptian) becomes morning star, and so on.

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Of course, this kind of treatment was a feature of all comparative religion, an extremely high-profile discipline, especially at the fin de sie`cle. But nowhere was the urge to conflate and assimilate quite so dramatic and creative as in Blavatsky, apart, that is, from in the Wake itself, which took the whole business to new levels but, clearly, not in a vacuum. Here, then, we have a prototype, however crude, for some of the basic principles of Finnegans Wake: the conflation of identities, which makes it impossible to know ‘who is who when everybody is someone else’, and the ubiquitous use of correspondence at all levels.40 In Finnegans Wake this latter operates in a hugely accelerated way between characters, where HCE, for instance, is configured as Howth Head, Adam Kadmon, Arthur Guinness, Noah, Moses, Masterbuilder Solness, Roderick O’Conor, Strongbow, Sir Amory Tristram, Mark of Cornwall, the Duke of Wellington, Lewis Carroll, Oliver Cromwell, Charles Stewart Parnell, William I, Oscar Wilde, Osiris, and so on. As the above implies, identity merging also operates at the level of cultural systems, as it does in Blavatsky. Just to emphasise the point, there is a very well-known passage on page 4 where an Irish/Celtic Tim Finnegan is Germanised as ‘Bygmester Finnegan’ (4.18); Hebraicised as a ‘pentschanjeuchy chap’ (4.25); both Orientalised and made Frankish as ‘Haroun Childeric Eggeberth’ and Romanised as someone who would ‘caligulate’ (4.32). Most fundamentally, however – and this is Joyce’s most unique contribution – correspondence operates in linguistic terms in as much as a pun, particularly where a pun crosses languages, depends on a kind of correspondence. Correspondence, and the merging of identities, is also connected to Blavatsky’s circular view of history. This is archetypal and specifically related to the flood, ‘[a]s the beds of the ocean are displaced, at the end of every decimillennium and about one neros, a semi-universal deluge like the Noachian deluge is brought about’ (IU I, 31). This climatic circularity is only part of a much wider dynamic, however. As in Yeats’s A Vision, human character itself is a matter of types and cycles – ‘all those great characters who tower like giants in the history of mankind . . . were but reflexed images of human types which had existed ten thousand years before . . . There is no prominent character in all the annals of sacred or profane history whose prototype we cannot find in the half-fictitious and half-real traditions of bygone religions and mythologies’ (IU I, 34–35). Indeed, like a fin de sie`cle version of Vico, Blavatsky imagines a universal pattern to history that governs all processes. The Wake’s endless rhythms of rise and fall, birth and death, death and resurrection are positioned against many traditions of universalism, but in terms of a modern version struggling with modernising

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dynamics, Isis Unveiled stands out as a source text for the Wake, with Blavatsky often seeming strikingly familiar as a kind of serious alter ego, or straight woman, to Joyce’s rollicking comic genius. Here, for instance, she expounds a historiography echoed often in the Wake – in Kate Strong’s homespun historiography in I.i, which tells a tale which ‘is the same told of all’ (18.19–20), as in the historiographical defeatism of II.ii where everything happened so repeatedly and ‘all so long ago’ (263.12–13) that a particular, if disregarded, plea is made for living in the present: Cycle succeeded cycle, by imperceptible transitions; highly civilized flourishing nations, waxed in power, attained the climax of development, waned, and became extinct, and mankind, when the end of the lower cyclic arc was reached, was replunged into barbarism as at the start. Kingdoms have crumbled and nation succeeded nation from the beginning until our day, the races alternately mounting to the highest and descending to the lowest points of development. (IU I, 294)

Blavatsky also (and again like Vico) argued that the world had once been inhabited by a prehistoric race of giants. In IU I she quotes from an article published in the Kansas City Times concerning one Judge E. P. West who apparently discovered ‘a number of conical shaped mounds in the forests of West Missouri’.41 These were excavated and found to contain the prehistoric skeletons of a giant race, the lower jaw of one skeleton being ‘double the size of the jaw of a civilised person’ (IU I, 304). Like the giant ancestors of antediluvian days whom Yawn is questioned about in III.iii (‘Just how grand in cardinal rounders is this preeminent giant, sir Arber?’, 504.14–16), these are the figures, Blavatsky believes, who became mythologised in the ‘Age of Heroes’. ‘Pon˜t Lama’, the author of the preface to the 1919 edition of Isis Unveiled, explains such historiographical orientations in terms that are highly suggestive of ideas that are the subject of routine comic exploitation in the Wake: She insisted that before the present ‘Aryan’ or Fifth Root-Race of humanity peopled the earth, our globe was populated by the Fourth or Atlantean Race . . . Every nation of past history has had traditions of this mighty civilisation, of the wisdom which it imparted to its successors, and of the cataclysms by which continents rose and sank at the turning point of the two races. Hence the Deluge stories and the traditions of divine or heroic ancestors everywhere found . . . So called ‘heroic myths’ were no myths at all but records of actual fact.42

The division of ‘the interminable periods of human existence on this planet into cycles, during each of which mankind gradually reached the culminating point of highest civilization and gradually relapsed into abject barbarism’ (IU I, 5) is mocked in the Wake, which ‘shows a distinct advance from savagery to barbarism’ (FW, 114.13). The circular view of history, imaged by

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the serpent with the tail in its mouth and familiar enough to Wake readers as the very emblem of Joyce’s book, may also owe something to Blavatsky, who wrote of ‘the serpent’ representing ‘eternity and immortality, it encircles the world, biting its tail, and thus offering no solution of continuity. It then becomes the astral light’ (IU I, 257; see also 251). There are further parallels of this order. Blavatsky was insistent that ancient knowledge was superior to modern knowledge and, indeed, that many technologies taken to be emblematic of the modern world – electricity for instance – were perfectly well known to ancient cultures. Thus ancient Egyptians are ‘those sons of the Land of Chemistry’ (IU I, 226); steam power was invented, not in late eighteenth-century industrial England, but in Alexandria, a hundred years BC (IU I, 241); electricity was ‘astral light’ and always known (IU, 234–35), certainly to ‘Norse legend-makers’ (IU I, 161), and so on. ‘No subsequent people’, she writes, ‘has been so proficient in geometry as the builders of the Pyramids and other Titanic monuments, antediluvian and postdiluvian’ (IU I, 22). The effect here is the disruption of usual historical chronology – a displacement of contemporaneity and a merging of the present with the past. This is everywhere not just echoed but absurdly outdone in the Wake, where, as in Blavatsky, mysterious monumental buildings, especially Phoenix Park buildings, belong as much to the deep past as to the present. At 3.18, for instance, the fall of man is associated with late nineteenth-century music hall and the black-and-white minstrels; at 9.23–24 the flood is conflated with the fourteenth-century Battle of Bannockburn and the sixteenth-century Battle of Flodden; the antiquity of the dump letter is evidenced by the fact that ‘somebody mentioned by name’ in a ‘telephone directory’ wrote it (118.12–13); Roderick O’Conor is ‘the last preelectric king of Ireland’ (380.12–13), and so on throughout the 628 pages of the Wake. One final parallel between theosophy and the Wake that may be worth pointing out: theosophy, above all, relished the enigmatic and the secretive. Its aim was to protect a secret and universal knowledge from the modern world. ‘Our task’, Blavastky writes, ‘will have been ill-performed if [it has not been demonstrated] that Judaism, earlier and later Gnosticism, Christianity, and even Christian Masonry, have all been erected upon identical cosmical myths, symbols, and allegories, whose full comprehension is possible only to those who have inherited the key from their inventors’ (IU II, 405). This sense of secrecy runs throughout Isis Unveiled, a work that endlessly teases with the promise of revelation, but, in the end, can reveal only a tiny part of the secret knowledge. What else, after all, could be expected in the context of general readership and the

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j

j

public at large? Once the secret is revealed, the knowledge is no longer ‘esoteric’ but, rather, part of mass culture. Such a gnosticism is certainly reflected back from Finnegans Wake, which presents itself as an ironic book of codes and secrets. It is in this respect that numerology in the Wake, the endless plays on 432 and 1132 for instance, owes something to Isis Unveiled and theosophy. Its numerology, however complex in its working, is not, of course, a matter of true codes linked to any secret form of knowledge. The astonishing complexities of number in the Wake are jokes – often splendidly vulgar jokes, as in the case of the ALP equilateral triangle. The diagrammatic mystery at FW, 293, a combination of Euclid’s first proposition with mystical figures common in Hermetics and theosophy (there are similar diagrams in Isis Unveiled)43 is a parody, an overdone parody of what in theosophical terms would be a straight code. They convey no meaning, either about an unseen universe or, I would suggest, about the Wake itself. On the contrary, Joyce’s working of numerology is part of the more general rationalist assault on modern irrationality, rather than expressive of any real interest in natural mysteries. Similarly with the ‘sigla’ of Finnegans Wake. These have generated great interest every since their discovery in the notebooks and Roland McHugh’s early work on them published in 1976 as The Sigla of ‘Finnegans Wake’. They provide a convenient shorthand (especially for Joyce in the notebook and drafting stages) for characters, their conditions, and sometimes their relations with each other. It seems entirely improbable, however, that these will be connected with the exposure of any further meaning in the Wake. The sigla do specifically invite deciphering. They appear as codes and, largely because of their ubiquity in the Wake and the notebooks, they raise expectancies about the potential reality of ‘breaking’ Joyce’s book. But the Wake is set up precisely to prevent any such ‘decoding’. The sense that we might be able to find a secret meaning is part of the fun of the Wake, part of its joke world, but not part of a serious critical agenda. In this context it seems that we can afford to be more cavalier about the sigla – indeed, the joke versions of sigla in I.v (119) constitute specific incitement here – and less pious about how they work. It is entirely possible that they relate not to any serious aesthetic agenda, but, like so much of the Wake, are lifted from the disposable ephemera of culture and society. In this case they may well owe something to the secret ciphers ‘exposed’ in IU, II. In the ‘cipher of the S P R C’, for example, the letters of the alphabet are given symbols that bear a similarity to Joyce’s sigla, as do the characters of the Royal Arch cipher. In the latter Joyce could have found the sigla used for Shem (j is ‘f ’ in the Royal Arch cipher) and Shaun (^, ‘u’ in the cipher). The Isolde symbol (?) features as ‘k’ in the

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S P R C cipher. Incidentally, as so often in Isis Unveiled whenever something dark and devious is involved, the Jesuits supposedly had a hand in the world of secret ciphers. The ‘signs of the French masons’ evidently derived from those under ‘the tuition of their accomplished masters – the Jesuits’. These latter were regarded by Blavatsky with particular hatred and animosity. Describing them as ‘crafty, learned, conscienceless’, she wrote of the Jesuits as ‘the hidden enemy that would-be reformers must encounter and overcome’. With an echo of the invective that is directed against Shem in FW, I.vii, she held them responsible ‘for more moral harm in this world than all the fiendish armies of the mythical Satan’ (IU II, 352). As so often with the Wake, it is important neither to underestimate nor to overestimate the interconnectedness and multiplicity of things. There clearly is a sense in which this text is designed against reading and interpretation. In the past this has been taken to mean that the Wake encourages all readings in the play of endlessly ‘open’ signifiers. But there could be a different dynamic operating here, one that works quite specifically to defeat all readings. The Wake may be the ultimate setter of reader traps, and in that context one would want to emphasise again that there were, of course, many places where Joyce would have been exposed to the kind of stuff that goes to make up Isis Unveiled. But that is the point about Isis Unveiled in many ways. It is a receptacle for a whole range of fin de sie`cle culture reproduced in what we now term the ‘alternative’. Wakean allusions to universal histories; the Edda myth which has the serpent consuming its own tail; Hermetic traditions and the Aryan myth could, and did, derive from a huge range of sources. Isis Unveiled, however, was one favoured place where all this material converged and was reproduced in particularly interesting rationalist terms. This is the real importance of Blavatsky for the Wake. She sat so oddly in modernity – even though she understood fame and the media in modern ways – and it was precisely her incongruity in this respect that so endeared her to the conservatives of Ireland’s Irish Renaissance. For the likes of Eglinton, Russell and Yeats, she featured as a compelling riposte to what they perceived as the disasters of a materialist modernity. To Joyce, however, she was something quite different – a figure whose truly bizarre beliefs made her entirely emblematic of the modern retreat from any meaningful version of Enlightenment idealism. A SPECULATION ON BRUNO OF NOLAN

Before leaving the issue of the impact of theosophy on the Wake, it is necessary to comment on Bruno and Hermeticism, in part for the general

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reason that this helps to clarify the sort of cultural phenomenon that theosophy was, but primarily because Bruno poses a potential difficulty for what has been the more general argument of this chapter. It has been argued here that Joyce’s general response to theosophy in the Wake is clear and unambiguous – most typically he subjects ‘psychic espousals’ (129.3) to ridicule. He does so in the wider context of an engagement with modernity and forms of knowledge that once had high and sometimes popular status in modernity. His handling of Bruno, however, seems to problematise what is otherwise a relatively straightforward treatment. For Bruno of Nolan was a Hermeticist who features as a key figure in theosophical historiography. Equally, he seems to have been one of Joyce’s heroes. As Atherton points out, Bruno’s name is ‘mentioned over a hundred times in the Wake, much more often than any other philosopher’s’.44 Many of these references are comic and, of course, connected to the happy coincidence that Dublin had a bookshop/stationers called Browne and Nolan, but they are far from derisive. On the contrary, it is usually argued that Bruno’s ideas, notably the idea of the ‘coincidence of contraries’, are embraced by Finnegans Wake, though very little work has been done to substantiate such a view. Irrespective of the role of such ideas in the Wake, however, the more immediate difficulty here is clear: how to reconcile Joyce’s apparent approval of Bruno with his mockery of a theosophy that claims Bruno as one of its own? The origins of theosophy, as suggested above, were complex. It developed in response to deep cultural contexts – a modern historian of the movement explains it in terms of an antipathy to religious organisation and to Christianity and sees its American development as ‘a movement away from Puritan Christianity, which has been termed the revolt against Calvinism’. For some, especially the intelligentsia, it would have involved an interest in transcendentalism, a movement which itself drew on ‘European idealistic philosophy and the romantic movement’ as well as ‘Oriental religion’. At the same time as developing a connection to the East, theosophy was also centrally influenced by the Western occult. Indeed, as propagandised by Blavatsky, theosophy involved a thoroughgoing assimilation of the occult, the esoteric knowledge ‘felt to contain secrets known to ancient civilisations but subsequently forgotten’ – it was partly this return to ancient glories that made theosophy so consonant with Irish revivalism and the literary revival in particular.45 It is also here especially that theosophy has so many intersections with Joyce and the Wake, for theosophy was an appropriation of some of the important Renaissance Hermetics: Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, Nicholas de Cusa and, most centrally, Bruno.

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Such figures, who have always been important to Wakeans, were probably first known to Joyce not in terms of theosophy and the occult at all – indeed, the full history of Bruno’s commitment to Hermeticism has only relatively recently been clearly understood.46 Joyce’s exposure, then, would firstly have been through a tradition of Church heresy and, particularly in the case of Bruno, through mainstream traditions of liberalism. It was not as a theorist and practitioner of the dark arts, but, rather, as ‘the enlightened defender of the Copernican theory’ that Bruno would have first featured as a figure in the Joyce drama.47 Francis Yates uses Cena de le cenari (1584), especially dialogue 1, to illustrate the kind of passage that ‘used to throw the nineteenth-century liberals into ecstasies as the cry of the advanced scientific thinker breaking out of medieval shackles’ – ‘[b]ehold now, standing before you, the man who has pierced the air and penetrated the sky . . . By the light of sense and reason with the key of most diligent enquiry, he has thrown wide those gates of truth.’48 It is easy to imagine how such passages, which Yates understands as the cry of the magi, might have appealed to the heroic, and hubristic, inclinations of a young Joyce, especially given Bruno’s conflicts with both the Catholic hierarchy and the Tudor establishment in England. It may have been that there were always contradictions in Joyce’s responses to Bruno.49 Bruno was, for instance, an anti-Aristotleian and not simply ‘an enlightened defender of the Copernican theory against the hide-bound Aristotelianism of the Middle Ages’. Bruno understood Aristotle as a pedant and hated all ‘pedants’ and ‘grammarians’ as ‘smallminded’; his ‘use of language’, like his mind, is described as ‘trivial and superficial and without magical and incantatory power’.50 But certainly Joyce’s difficulties with Bruno would have become more marked as he became aware of Bruno in terms of magic and the occult, as he clearly did – there are, of course, many associations between Bruno and theosophy in the Wake. In fact, it is quite unusual to find extended references to theosophy without Bruno’s appearance. The suspicion is that this would have been a later development and quite possibly a result of Joyce’s reading of Isis Unveiled (Bruno plays little or no part in Sinnett’s work, which Joyce would have read earlier). It is interesting to note in this context that Samuel Beckett’s contribution to Our Exagmination, while it acknowledges Bruno in its title, actually says very little about Bruno – apart from in the title itself, there is only one reference to him in the whole piece, which takes up about half a page, whereas Dante and Vico both receive more extended treatment.51 It may be, of course, that Beckett simply knew less about Bruno, though it seems possible that something quite different is at work

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here – that Bruno had become subject to some kind of revisionism which would have involved a downplaying of his significance for the Wake, at least in terms appropriate to Our Exagmination. If this is indeed the case, then the issue of Bruno and the Wake becomes important precisely for what is implied about Joyce and Enlightenment traditions. For here is a figure who in one cultural context was appropriated by liberal traditions as a hero of the early Enlightenment and in another featured as a key figure in the antithetical traditions of mysticism and the occult. Joyce’s sensitivity to that issue implies the wider sensitivity to what we are thoroughly used to conceptualising now as ‘the Enlightenment project’.

CHAPTER

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‘Hung Chung Egglyfella’: staged race in Ulysses and the Wake

A fascination with racial identity is both configured and undermined in the Wake, where a pervasive desire for storytelling is obsessed with origins but endlessly defeated. The Western identity is manifest not least through the astonishing exercise of this genealogical imperative, and its decisive failure to ‘find’ itself in terms of beginnings. Outside of white Europe, however, has no such representation, in the Wake or elsewhere in Joyce’s fiction. Although the racialisation of his work in terms of its ‘Irishness’, or engagement with England and Europe, has been standard in critical tradition since the earliest days of Joyce criticism, constructing the ‘black’ Wake or the ‘Oriental’ Wake would seem to be an unlikely critical objective, because Africa, the ‘East’ and their respective diasporas do not feature as subject formations in Joyce’s fiction. The idea of the racial Other is clearly important, as is the idea of the exoticised ‘East’. From the Dubliners story ‘Araby’ to the Wake, the latter is, indeed, a highly significant locus for Joyce, denoting, among other things, romantic escape.1 But representation here is invariably framed in terms of fantasy and the alterities by which the centre attempts to define itself. This is so even in the complex case of Leopold Bloom where stinginess, strangeness, outsider status, and so on are characteristics ascribed to him by other Dubliners, not essentialist markers of his ‘race’. These fantasies of Otherness are more important to Joyce’s reproduction of Western culture than to any notions of the real East or the real Africa. Significantly, black and Oriental identities, in both Ulysses (1922) and the Wake, are specifically and emphatically removed from any pretence of the authentic or ‘organic’ by being placed almost without exception in the world of play-acting and make-believe. Africa, China, India, Japan, and so on exist only in the mind of the West and, with a consistency that has received relatively little critical attention, allusions to the peoples and cultures of these exoticised places are contextualised in the world of theatre and performance. In this sense the racial Other becomes a product of 121

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popular culture, where race was, as it was largely in the academy, a matter of fabrication and appropriation. Almost alone among the ‘high’ moderns, Joyce was intimate with the popular culture where this race representation flourished. This distinguishes him from modernist contemporaries – such as T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf and, to a lesser degree, Ezra Pound – who in response to such products as Leslie Stuart’s 1899 show Florodora, Nat Emmet and his Performing Goats or the White-Eyed Kaffir most typically adopt a position of appalled distance. Joyce’s texts, on the other hand, are full of references to magazines, novelettes, parlour songs, music hall, fashion and advertising. It is important to emphasise, however, that Joyce was not simply a curator of popular culture, a collector who assimilated the disposable material of his time in the service of a wider encyclopaedism. Since Cheryl Herr’s Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (1986), Joyce’s treatment of the newspaper industry, music hall, the religious sermon, and so on has been recognised for its political resonance. For all the limitations of its understanding of early twentieth-century popular culture, and theoretical confusions, the central point of Herr’s account remains important. While it may be that Joyce’s ‘works do not explicitly advance a theory of culture’, Herr advances the idea, raised by many others, including Theodor Adorno, that they are nonetheless acutely sensitive to popular culture in its social and political dimensions.2 Ulysses and the Wake in particular realise the dynamics behind cultural commodification, the powerful mixture of pleasure, spectacle and utopianism – sometimes constructed as ‘escapism’ in cultural theory – that is so important, not least as social cement.3 It is here that popular culture becomes significant, in part because it produces its own unique versions of race representation, important in their own right, but also because it reflects the society that it springs from in this respect. As well as being part of the historical and cultural ‘fabric’, popular culture operates reflexively as an expression of society’s sense of its own life and values – including, of course, its values concerning racial identity. MUSICAL THEATRE AND MODERNITY

Popular theatre and race representation are related zones, entwined in various ways in Joyce’s fiction as they were in reality. Before that relationship can be fully explored, however, it is necessary to establish clearly and in a more general sense how popular theatre operated in culture and society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to address the issue of the kind of ‘popular’ to which it appealed. For in many accounts, including

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those in Joyce criticism, the popular stage of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has often been misrepresented and thus misunderstood. It has tended to be conceptualised in terms of assumed origins usually located much earlier – in the early nineteenth century or even eighteenth century. From this perspective such forms as pantomime, the minstrel show, burlesque and, especially, music hall appear as quaint and small scale, and as being much more closely linked to the demotic and ‘folk’ culture than was actually the case. Positioned in this way, music theatre is often romanticised in anti-establishment terms as a challenge from below. In fact, this was not the case at all. Music theatre in the early twentieth century, whether in the shape of professional pantomime or that of music hall, may have continued to present itself as a carnivalesque and subversive spirit, but, in reality, it had become part of the modern culture industry, positioned at the centre and highly protective of its status as ‘safe pleasure’.4 All versions of popular theatre were stimulated by commercialisation and modernisation in the late nineteenth century, though the form most characteristic here – and most neglected in terms of Joyce’s criticism – was West End musical comedy. This developed fastest, to the point where it quickly became the most popular licensed theatre of the day.5 By 1900 it had almost entirely subsumed such genres as pantomime and the minstrel show, both in the West End and on Broadway stages but also on a wider stage as musical comedy shows began to be exported around the world on tours, notably tours of the Empire. This spread and popularity registered in musical comedy’s most obvious and defining characteristic – its celebration of the modern as pleasure, excitement and vitality. The welcoming disposition towards modernity was seen everywhere in musical comedy. Images it exploited were typically chosen because they were representative of new technologies and what was constructed as a ‘new times’ zeitgeist. The telephone, the Kodak camera, the aeroplane, film, typewriters, the lift, revolving doors, department stores, motor cars – innovations such as these took on iconic status in this new theatre and the idea of technological change was frequently used to establish the keynote of things. The Arcadians (1909), for instance, the quintessential Edwardian musical comedy, opened with an ‘airship’ descending into a Utopia previously untouched by modernity. It went on to dramatise the relations between the timeless idyll and the exciting new. Shows such as The Shop Girl (1894), The Girl from Kay’s (1902), The Girl Behind the Counter (1906) and Our Miss Gibbs (1909) began with what was once taken to be the busy glamour of the new department store, complete with ‘lifts up and down’ to represent ‘time

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saving luxury’, as the stage directions of Our Miss Gibbs have it.6 Similarly, The Girl on the Film (1913) began in the offices of a busy filmmaker and the opening routine celebrated the ‘bright biograph picture screen’ and ‘cinemagic’.7 Scene Two of The Schoolgirl (1903) opened in a new Stock Exchange amid telephones, ‘tickers’ and typewriters. The opening song was a celebration of ‘new times’ culture: The art of stockbroking-de-luxe, With its air of refinement and polish, Is brought to a pitch Of modernity which Must needs old-fashioned methods abolish.8

Staging of this kind, often at the outset of a show, implied an embracing of a deeply ideological modernity formulated in terms of energy, excitement and inventiveness. It may now appear old-fashioned and innocent, but in its heyday musical comedy had a very different registration, one that resonated with important cultural concepts – especially with the idea of modernity in many of its key fin de sie`cle formations. This term, commonly used to represent Europe in the 1890s, is often conjured by certain key descriptors that include, as Rhonda Garelick and many others have shown, the industrialisation of culture – ‘the fascination with the public commercialized personality; the great rise of mass-produced entertainment; and a concomitant concern for the decay of high culture’.9 Musical comedy involved all these elements. An important prototype ‘mass’ culture, it was one of the earliest ‘star’ vehicles. It utilised the most modern forms of technology, distribution and marketing available, and was intensely consumerist in its design, execution and general orientation. A cultural commodity of considerable importance, it was a market winner whose rise was concurrent with and responsive to rising standards of living and changed expectancies about the quality of modern life. A new awareness of consumerism was essential here, with musical comedy producing theatrical extravaganzas that transformed the late Victorian and Edwardian stage into a great celebration of fashion and shopping. It was for this reason that musical comedy had such intimate relations with the wider modern marketplace. The most eminent clothes designers of the day and the elite department stores of the West End collaborated closely with the musical comedy stage in part because it was one of the first important platforms for product placement on a serious and increasingly spectacular scale, a commercial linkage overdone in the programme of the Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies where ‘Lipmasks and

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hairwigs’ are by ‘Ouida Nooikke . . . Kopay pibe by Kappa Pedersen. Hoed Pine hat with twentyfour ventholes by Morgen. Bosse and stringbag from Heteroditheroe’s and All Ladies’ presents . . . Phenecian blends and Sourdanian doofpoosts by Shauvesourishe and Wohntbedarft . . . Grabstone beg from General Orders Mailed’ (221.27–35).10 Musical comedy had a highly developed capacity for responding to and formulating the fashionable and the mainstream, its character in this respect being centrally shaped and determined by the maintenance of a delicate balancing act between exuberance and respectability. It presented itself as a risque´ culture and sought alignments with versions of bohemian licence – in Finnegans Wake III.ii ‘Jaun’ warns Issy and ‘the twentynine hedge daughters’ about the dangers of being ‘an artist’s moral’ and posing ‘in your nudies’ (435.5), the reference here being to one of the great blockbusters of the early days of musical comedy, An Artist’s Model. But in reality it was more substantially a product of the commercialisation of a cleaned-up West End stage.11 A borderline culture positioned somewhere beyond, but never entirely outside, the ‘Victorian’, musical comedy was very much the ‘latest thing’ of the late 1890s and 1900s. At the same time, it was decisively reflexive of national, masculinist and bourgeois identities that had strong continuities with the past. In these respects and others, musical comedy remained an insider culture, although with an instinct for adventure. The new musical theatre presented itself, and was largely accepted, as a respectable, mainstream culture, a breadth of appeal reproduced in Ulysses, where musical comedy is known to such luminaries as Martin Cunningham’s wife, remembered by Bloom for singing a drunken version of ‘The Jewel of Asia’ (which becomes ‘Dual of Ayessha’ in the Wake at 105.20) from The Geisha (1896); and familiar to a more bohemian Mulligan who associates ‘Chin Chin Chinaman’, a song from the same show, with John Eglinton. Miss Douce, from a quite different social position, is also a fan and intimate with at least one song from Florodora, which she makes her own in various ways, not least by changing or ‘misremembering’ the lyric. It may have developed from a much more heterogeneous and possibly demotic Victorian theatre – origins that have often been theorised in terms of power relations where the seedier side of Victorian theatre can appear quite subversive.12 It is important, however, to distinguish musical comedy from this background. In its West End formulation, it was organised, industrial and professional. Most importantly, it also made a self-conscious push for the middle ground, and this was the real sign of its character and ambition. The flirtation with the high establishment was important as a

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signifier of status – royalty, both domestic and overseas, often attended musical comedy shows (the London Gaiety being Edward VII’s favourite theatre) as did the rest of aristocratic society.13 But it was the more sustained courtship developed with the theatregoing mainstream that determined the viability of musical comedy. Its hardcore audience came from the middle and lower-middle classes. Joyceans have made little of the form, often confusing it with operetta, or simply ignoring it altogether as Herr does, though it was certainly well known to Joyce.14 During the late 1890s and early 1900s, virtually all the big West End musical comedy productions came to Dublin, sometimes more than once – they usually played a week either at the Dublin Gaiety or the Theatre Royal – and, as the reviews suggest, they were well received. The Freeman’s Journal review of the Our Miss Gibbs tour of 1910, for example, described the show as ‘a pleasant and agreeable evening’s enjoyment. Charming costumes, pretty girls, fancy dancing, and a general air of abandonment and wild Bohemianism.’15 Floradora played to ‘a crowded house’ in 190616 and The Girl from Kay’s was thoroughly recommended to those ‘who go to the theatre to be amused, to listen to fascinating music sung by fascinating singers, and to admire artistic settings’.17 Even outside this Dublin context, however, musical comedy would have been familiar to Joyce, through song sheets, the press and the postcard culture that grew up around its stars. By any standards musical comedy was an important phenomenon of its day, a modern cultural product that quite self-consciously associated itself with the ‘modern’. Ulysses makes considerable play with two classic musical comedy shows: The Geisha, which followed Gilbert and Sullivan in its ‘japanning’ and helped to produce a new fashion for japanoiserie, and the hugely popular Florodora. The latter is particularly important in the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses, where the song ‘In the Shade of the Palm’ runs throughout, firstly as a tune sung by the barmaid Miss Douce, but then taken up by the narrative itself and associated with wider dimensions of the episode. Both these and several other shows are also referred to in the Wake: An Artist’s Model (1895) (435.4); San Toy (1899) (‘santoys play’ at 58.32–33); Madame Sherry (1903) (‘Marienne Sherry’ – 625.1); The Schoolgirl (1903), another Leslie Stuart show (226.33); Ve´ronique (1904) (at 458.14 – ‘just a spell of floralora so you’ll mind your veronique’); and the musical comedy/revue By Jingo If We Do (1914) (‘bejimboed if ye do’ – 238.18). There are also many references to Chu Chin Chow (1916) and, more speculatively, to High Jinks (1916) at 94.29 (‘highajinks’), and at 376.35 to The Merry Widow (1907) (‘Merryvirgin’), a show which began life as an operetta, but succumbed to

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the musical comedy treatment in its West End incarnation.18 At the same time, both the cod-Oriental discourse and the ‘coon talk’ of Finnegans Wake are also connected to musical comedy and its assimilation of other music theatre forms, a process realised in the Wake when Chu Chin Chow conflates with pantomime at 224.30–31: ‘Cinderynelly angled her slipper; it was cho chiny yet braught her a groom.’ The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies, though frequently referenced to pantomime in Joyce criticism, is also modern musical theatre, with ‘Accidental music’, ‘Melodiotiosities in purefusion’, a ‘chorale in canon’ and ‘Songs betune the acts’ (222.1–6). It is linked specifically to musical comedy and revue by the references to The Schoolgirl and By Jingo If We Do and also by the dancing girl ‘troupe’ ‘THE FLORAS’ (220.3), a name evoking both Florodora and the 1918 show Flora. The Floras are connected to the experimental dance groups that Joyce’s daughter Lucia was interested in and, indeed, performed with in the 1920s, but they also resonate against the more mainstream chorus lines that were at one time synonymous with musical comedy: the Gibson Girls, the Bath Buns, the Sandow Girls and, most famous of all, the Gaiety Girls. These latter, developed by the Gaiety producer George Edwardes, quickly became new-century icons of the West End stage. Within a few years they signified ‘to London precisely what the Ziegfeld Girls of a later generation would be to Broadway’.19 In the Wake the dress and dance style of the Floras echoes the routines of the Gaiety Girls, combined with the children’s game described in Annotations as ‘Lubin’: ‘Pennyfair caps on pinnyfore frocks and a ring on her fomefing finger. And they leap so looply, looply as they link to light’ (226.25–27). The homely, rural associations here are typical of an Edwardian return to the rustic celebrated in such shows as A Country Girl (1902), The Quaker Girl (1910) and The Arcadians (1909) and later identified by Noe¨l Coward as the ‘excessively rural’ quality that often typified musical comedy and its chorus lines.20 FLORODORA AND

‘SIRENS’

But the Joyce text does not simply register musical theatre. It is more accurately an engagement that responds quite emphatically to the conservative agendas that often lie behind the ‘gaiety’ and exuberance of this cultural form. This response is very different from the more familiar disposition of an intelligentsia that typically excoriated mass culture, responding to bestselling novels and the popular press as well as popular music theatre in terms of their exemplification of cultural decline and

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responsibility for moral and even racial degeneration. Joyce did not see the ‘popular’ in such apocalyptic terms. He was more amused by it and almost certainly more disposed to be entertained, responses that can appear to position him with ‘the masses’. Such alignments, however, would be misleading and extremely partial. As well as the interest, and scepticism about its impact on ‘decline’, Joyce’s understanding of the culture industry and how it worked in the world was penetrating and critical. There are many places in his writing where such an understanding has been shown to be operating, in ‘An Encounter’ in Dubliners, for example, with its usage of popular boy’s literature; the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses, with its working of women’s magazines and romance literature; the ‘Cyclops’ episode with its reproduction of how Celticism filtered down through popular culture, and so on. The handling of popular music in ‘Sirens’ is a further case in point, one of particular relevance here because it involves a quite extended use of a particular musical comedy, Florodora. This was a show which, like all such shows, was light, fluffy and fun, but the key ideas it handled were hardly so. Indeed, one of the distinguishing things about Florodora was its capacity for resonating in the serious world. It gave the musical comedy treatment to important issues – modern science in the shape of eugenics and phrenology, and modern industry and marketing, for instance. Above all, it dispensed ‘gaiety’ to a modernity in which colonialism became finally aligned with universal largesse, and what might be termed ‘race relations’ was resolved through the usual metonym of romance. These latter narratives made it of particular interest to Joyce. It has long been recognised that ‘In the Shade of the Palm’, a song from Florodora, provides one of the musical motifs that runs through ‘Sirens’. The song appears in the overture of the episode as ‘Trilling, trilling: Idolores’ (U.11, 9), and features at the beginning proper of the episode where Miss Douce repeats the ‘mistake’ of substituting ‘Idolores’ for ‘Dolores’, the actual name of the romantic heroine in the show.21 This is intentional play, rather than an error on Joyce’s part, suggesting identification between Miss Douce and the native girl (I, Dolores). Thus when Boylan quits the bar, leaving Miss Douce feeling rejected, the proper name is restored. ‘They pined in depth of ocean shadow, gold by the beerpull, bronze by maraschino, thoughtful all two. Mina Kennedy, 4 Lismore terrace, Drumcondra with Idolores, a queen, Dolores, silent’ (11.516–18). Later, the romantic Dolores identity is passed like a baton as a now Bloomcentred narrative imagines Molly Bloom in the role of ‘Dolores shedolores’ (11.734), and later still the word ‘Dolores’ is worked for its association with pain and pity. In this way a song from West End musical comedy gets

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caught up with a famous nationalist lament, ‘The Croppy Boy’: ‘At Geneva barrack that young man died. At Passage was his body laid. Dolor! Oh, he dolores! The voice of the mournful chanter called to dolorous prayer’ (11.1131–33). But these beautifully insinuative interventions only scratch the surface of the Florodora intertextuality with Ulysses. ‘In the Shade of the Palm’ is not just any popular song, used, say, to establish Miss Douce’s cultural background and ironically played against her romantic inclinations. The song, sung at the end of Act One by an impoverished aristocrat to the native girl of his dreams, has a particular resonance in the Ulysses context, as does the show it comes from. Florodora has an extremely suggestive narratology, which intersects with the Joyce text in quite obvious ways. In the first place, it is a myth of colonialism, an escapist version of empire building that has good and bad versions of both colonial and modernising authorities – the ‘good’, of course, wins out. Secondly, the conflict between these two – one version (the ‘bad’) is racialised as American, the other as English – involves a usurpation dynamic. Cyrus Gilfrain, the American capitalist, has stolen the Pacific island and its source of wealth from Dolores and her father, the native occupiers; he also usurps Lord Frank Abercoed, not just by attempting to marry Dolores, but also by buying up Frank’s family estate (another island, this one Celticised because it is positioned ‘off Wales’). Frank’s task is to redress this balance of power. Thirdly, as the usurpation theme might suggest, Florodora is distinctly Homeric. In the last act Frank returns to his estates as an ‘old Welsh Harper’. Eventually he reoccupies his former domain and marries the islander girl, Dolores. In this way old authority is restored to the world, and, metaphorically, the bad colonialism of the New World taught a lesson by more humane, and experienced, tradition. There are a number of ironies in Miss Douce’s identification with this show and the particular song, all of them compounded by the fact that she delivers her rendition at precisely the moment when the vice-regal cavalcade, symbol of Empire rule, is passing by the Ormond Street Hotel. Thus she sings the song of the island girl who in the show will marry the lord of the manor, against an empire spectacle the very purpose of which is to affirm the impossible distance between ruler and ruled. In this way popular culture is explicitly politicised as romanticism and conservative escapism, a point emphasised with great subtlety in a further ‘error’ in Miss Douce’s version of ‘In the Shade of the Palm’. Her variant on the line ‘Fair one of Eden’ is ‘Fair one of Egypt’, a shift that draws on the parallels, commonly made in Irish nationalism, between modern Ireland under England and the biblical Jews under Egypt. Such parallels have little to do with Miss Douce,

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in the sense that they point to realities she would prefer to avoid, but they do reinforce the point about how popular culture usually works in ‘utopian’ and escapist ways. The implication, which has particular importance here, is that Florodora represents a metropolitan culture, one that displaces the ugly realities of real colonialism, replacing them with an anodyne romantic fantasy. The fact that this show, like so many others, not only had an empire theme but was also an export to the Empire gives such an implication considerable material weight. MUSICAL THEATRE, RACE AND EMPIRE

Indeed, musical comedy was generally a product of the centre and the shows it produced, after their runs in London, would invariably go on extensive tours to Broadway and beyond. A largely forgotten show such as Chu Chin Chow, repeatedly referred in the Wake – where it figures in, for example, ‘chin Ted, chin Tam, chinchin Taffyd’ (34.17); ‘chew-chin-grin’ (82.12); ‘cho chiny’ (224.30–31); ‘chinchinatibus’ (367.4); ‘lichee chewchow’ (474.10); and ‘ching chang chap’ (608.19–20) – was performed no less than 2,235 times in London’s West End. Over its four-year run at Daly’s, this spectacular piece of ‘Wardour Street Orientalism’ would have been seen by well over two million people.22 It then went on tour, firstly to America and then to all corners of the Empire, including Australia and beyond, a range shared with the Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies which is ‘wordloosed over seven seas’ (219.16). In this way musical comedy became an ambassador for a particular version of modernity. Indeed, this particular show was hailed by The Times precisely as a product of the modern. Using terminology more usually reserved for ‘high’ culture, the reviewer found in this curious extravaganza ‘fantastic, polyphonic, polychromatic Orientalism . . . everything is by turns and nothing long – a kaleidoscopic series of scenes now romantic, now realistic, now Futurist or Vorticist but always beautiful’.23 Chu Chin Chow and many other shows of the genre celebrated modern technology, modern culture and modern society as, again, the Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies does by presenting stage spectacle in modernist terms – ‘With futurist onehorse balletbattle pictures and the Pageant of Past History worked up with animal variations amid everglaning mangrovemazes and beorbtracktors’ (221.18–20). The European, American and world tours were emblematic of what was widely taken to be a key indicator of the unstoppable march of modernisation – its sheer dominion. Granville Bantock and F. G. Aflalo tell an interesting story that is of relevance here. Writing about their experiences on the Gaiety

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company tour of 1894, in the very early days of musical comedy, they explain how they docked at Honolulu in Hawaii, to be welcomed by a ‘native’ band. Conducted by a Professor Berger, the band played ‘an admirable selection from A Gaiety Girl followed by ‘‘Auld Lang Syne’’ and the National Anthem. Where’, the authors comment, ‘is civilization going to stay its hand?’24 This civilising mission is crucial to understanding the importance of musical theatre in Joyce’s day, and its treatment in his fiction. Far from being a folk culture, it was an export of the metropolis and its modernity, fashionability and sophisticated technical wizardry made important statements about the cultural centre, often in very direct ways. Among the most popular shows of the period were a string that claimed to replicate other cultures and which dramatised colonial relations between the ‘centre’ and the exotic ‘margins’. In shows such as The Belle of Cairo (1896), The Geisha, Florodora, San Toy, The Messenger Boy (1900), A Chinese Honeymoon (1901), The Blue Moon (1904), The Cingalee (1904), Havana (1908), My Mimosa Maid (1908), The Mousme´ (1911) and Chu Chin Chow, the exotic Other was represented in glamorous reproductions that typically mixed spectacle with quasi-scientific, anthropological positions. A hierarchical ethnology was constructed and combined with ‘the perennial attractions of the pseudoeducational’.25 This anthropological approach, standard in end-of-century Orientalism, was typified in the ‘Japanning’ of The Geisha. The creation of Japan for this show was entrusted in part to Arthur Diosy, founder and vice-chairman of the Japan Society and an eminent figure to have presiding.26 It also involved the dance arranger Willie Warde, who studied Japanese dance at the Japanese exhibition village in London in order to produce dances ‘executed on the Japanese lines, but just sufficiently Anglicized for those who want amusement rather than instruction’.27 Authentic Japanese instrumentation was interpolated into the score and the clothes for this show were ‘all worked by hand’ and ‘exported from Japan’. An image of ‘mighty Fujiyama’ dominated the Act One backdrop and a teahouse exterior complete with chrysanthemum gardens and carp ponds was constructed for the opening set. With this the producers aimed at (and succeeded, according to many reviewers) ‘capturing’ ‘the spirit of Japan’, albeit a Japan transposed by ‘a couleur-de-rose air’. Those in the anthropological know were able to point out that not all the details were strictly correct. As one reviewer explained, the Japanese do not, in fact, marry in teahouses.28 But this kind of ‘license’ was taken to be allowable for the sake of an entertainment that effected ‘a vision of Japan, very delightful and most alluring’.29

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For all these claims of authenticity, however, a show like The Geisha was, of course, theatrical contrivance. The Geisha was a highly romanticised version of things and thoroughly mediated by nationalist and modernising ideologies. Reproducing the Oriental was particularly implicated with issues of British identity and British status in the world. Theatrical reproduction took on obvious parallels with colonial appropriation. The ‘marvels’ of modern staging became emblematic of the modernising dynamic that was so frequently used as justification for empire. For all these reasons, the staging of India and China implied an ideological space where the imperative to reproduce ‘likeness’ was not, then, really suggestive of the desire to know. Rather, it was startling confirmation of the dissembling and reproductive power of the modernised Western world. The Geisha performed the trick of image manufacture. The celebration in these pastiches was not of the ‘real’ Burma, Ceylon, China or Japan, but of the metropolitan culture that could apparently reproduce the world’s diversity so splendidly. It was the transforming power of the modern British stage that was applauded, and in this respect the spectacle of the Other was a modern version of the same appropriative instincts that lie behind blackface minstrelsy. The facsimile made the real impression, which is why so much review space was devoted to praise of what were significantly termed ‘stage pictures’. The copy was marvelled at as copy. The actress ‘Miss Mary Collete’ in the same play attracted special attention because she gave, the reviewer claimed, ‘the most perfect imitation of a Jap girl’. She might have ‘popped out of a teahouse at Miyanoshita or Atami’. Making manifest the truth behind the old primitive fear of the photograph that steals the soul, the actress in The Geisha, however, had done something greater, apparently becoming ‘the Jap to the very life’.30 Against this background, the contrast between something like The Geisha and the poor, not to say absurd, approximations of the East that figure in Joyce’s fiction takes on significant dimensions. Mrs Cunningham’s attempt at bringing the ‘Jap’ to life in Ulysses for example, far from creating a seamless transposition, becomes a grotesque parody, of both Japan and its professional reproduction. Appearing in ‘Circe’, confused as to which show she should be appearing in, The Merry Widow or The Geisha – ‘in merry widow hat and kimono gown. She glides sidling and bowing, twirling japanesily’ – she sings, ironically enough, one of the hit songs from the show, ‘And They Call Me the Jewel of Asia!’, thereby producing the performance described by Martin Cunningham as ‘Immense! Most bloody awful demirep’ (U, 15.3857–3863). It is, of course, a ridiculously flawed ‘translation’, one that is paralleled by Molly Bloom’s performance in the same episode.

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This latter may be slightly more approximate, but obvious cracks remain in the appropriation. Thus the authentic-sounding scolding of her camel in ‘Moorish’ becomes thoroughly comprised by the satirical tone that has a very different cultural registration – ‘Has poor little hubby cold feet waiting so long?’ (U, 15.306). In bizarre cameos such as these, where comic misalignment exposes disastrous gaps between the subject culture and its copy, the ‘anthropological’ designs so common in popular culture are undermined and their deeply condescending nature implied. Theatre is only one of a number of cultural forms that performed this trick of racial reproduction, but it did have a special significance in this respect. As J. S. Bratton et al., have shown in Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage 1790–1930 (1991), it provided a public forum where the reproductive and assimilative powers of the West could be celebrated, a performance which fostered and encouraged patriotism and almost always involved representations that were demeaning of other cultures. Plays and shows patronised the ‘charming’ innocence and picturesque spectacle of other worlds, as well as warning of their underlying dangers. The stage Oriental or the stage black, invariably a white appropriation or disguise, encompassed both the bumbling confusion of Jim Crow – or Mr Chambhuddy Ram, the native aspirant of The Cingalee who ‘copies’ everything English – and the dangerous vitality of Zip Coon, or Imari the licentious local ruler in The Geisha who has a penchant for European women. At the same time, the theatre was a framed space where an approximation of the forbidden delights of ‘a sun-burnt damsel of the Far East’ could be safely appreciated by the Western gaze, often in the context of narratologies which conflated colonial and sexual possession.31 In the 1899 musical comedy San Toy for example, the female lead, San Toy, chooses the blond-haired, blue-eyed Englishman over her countryman, the vile Fo Hop. The latter is appalled to discover that she should prefer ‘the uncivilized Englishman to a Chinese student’. For her part, San Toy challenges Fo Hop’s suggestion that she must be sick of the invader with the assertion that she has not had enough of foreign ways, ‘very much not enough!’32 With this she becomes complicit in an empire dynamic, one of the ‘gratefully oppressed’,33 for ‘Bobbie’ will always be her ‘master’.34 Not only has the best man won, so has the correct disposition of the racial Other towards the modernising colonial power. That show played in Dublin, incidentally, at the Gaiety, in May 1901. The Freeman’s Journal reviewer recorded that on the opening night ‘the Gaiety theatre was densely crowded by an audience anxious to see and hear the musical comedy associated with a Chinese title and subject San Toy’.35

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In the same vein, there were the familiar assumptions about the nature of the foreign character. The Seymour Hicks and Harry Nichols play A Runaway Girl (1898), for all its songs and ‘gaiety’, has a serious undertone. It is a warning to young English girls that there are dangers in following romantic instincts abroad. Alice, the runaway of the title, is attracted to the life of a band of wandering Corsican gypsies. But these romantic songsters turn out to be false. It soon becomes clear that they are not only attractively dark and mysterious but also genuinely dangerous. By the end of the play, the English runaway, so initially enamoured of the exotic Other, learns to be afraid and returns to ‘her own kind’. Elsewhere, foreign power, authority and culture were undermined and ridiculed. San Toy exposes a Japanese political power that is arbitrary, corrupt and brutal. The Geisha finds the idea of a ‘civilized Japan’ a contradiction in terms. Japanese culture authorises ‘outrages’ that ‘we wouldn’t allow in England’.36 This show thereafter becomes significantly devoted to the exposure of ‘Oriental injustice’. Chinese sculpture is mocked, again in San Toy, where Dudley (an English maid) is appalled by ‘these hideous figures they put up all over the place’.37 Chinese tea-drinking styles were laughed at, as was Chinese tea (‘Pooh! What is it flavoured with?’).38 In The Cingalee the idea of chewing betel produces a similarly disgusted response, and so on.39 The corollary to all this ridicule of the racial Other was the affirmation of the white character. In a contrast that included all the usual moral, ethical and physical dimensions, images of ‘the chaff and trickery of Japanese officials and artful John Chinaman’ were played off against those of ‘the gallant naval English officers with countesses in yachts’.40 English men were portrayed as strong, broad-shouldered, courageous and loyal; the Oriental was sly, small and cowardly. A parallel contrast, equally emphatic, separated the female roles. In The Geisha ‘the merry little pattering and laughing Japs [were] well contrasted with some splendid examples of womanhood [i.e. English womanhood] headed by Maud Hobson and Miss Hetty Hamer’.41 Other critics also commented on ‘the piquant contrast’ between the ‘rustic little Japanese’ and the ‘imposingly handsome’ presence of white women power-dressed in ‘extreme modes of the moment’.42 The eugenic implication was entirely transparent: ‘[as] a fine contrast to these bowing and scraping little dollies, these playthings of women, came the commanding presence, the assertive dignity of the Anglo-Saxon represented by Maud Hobson, Miss Blanche Massey, and Miss Hetty Hamer’.43 A similar contrast is set up in the Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies where Chuff (Shaun) is a ‘fine frank fairhaired fellow’ – ‘frank’ suggesting the most aristocratic of

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French race identities – who wrestles with a blacked-up Glugg (Shem). The latter is ‘the bold bad bleak boy’ (220.12–13).44 A popular theatre that was becoming increasingly sophisticated in terms of its technological resources was also able to reproduce the extraordinary ritual of empire. In The Messenger Boy for instance, which played at the Dublin Gaiety in March 1902 after a successful West End run, a last scene reproduced the glories of Lord Punchestown’s imperial palace.45 The opening chorus of that scene is a hymn to Queen and Empire: Let the trumpets and the drums, As they blare and roll and rattle, Greet the Governor that comes Not to war and not to battle. For the tyranny is ended As a vision that has been And the land shall yet be splendid For the Queen! For the Queen! Round the world blow her banners, Night and morning hear her bugle call, And the royal road shall run between; Here is to Her Majesty, God bless her, To the Queen.

At this point a ‘chief ’ of the region emerges to pay homage and bear witness to the benevolent humanitarianism of a progressive Empire: Where my tribe once had its village By the Nile Lay the desert void of tillage Mile on Mile Now the water wheels are heard And the fields again are green; At the bidding and the word Of the Queen.46

This is only one Empire staging of many, but it indicates just how fundamentally popular theatre was implicated in the widespread appropriation of other cultures, commandeering them to the cause of a triumphant modernity in ways that clearly engaged in the ‘politics of imperialism’, but which also exposed the insecurities inherent in notions of racialised superiority. Here, as much as anywhere, the tensions and insecurities that surrounded racial identity were exposed. Ideological complicity became entirely explicit, with theatre operating in precisely the way that colonial pavilions worked in the same period.47 As Eric Hobsbawm

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has put it, ‘the idea of superiority to, and domination over, a world of dark skins in remote places was genuinely popular, and thus benefited the politics of imperialism’, a politics specifically structured in terms of social cohesion and consent. He goes on to show how colonial exhibits were a ‘hit’ in Britain and a wider Europe because they touched a public nerve. British jubilees, royal funerals and coronations were all the more impressive because, like Ancient Roman triumphs, they displayed submissive maharajahs in jewelled robes – freely loyal rather than captive. Military parades were all the more colourful because they contained turbaned Sikhs, moustached Rajputs, smiling and implacable Gurkahs, Spahis and tall black Senegalese: the world of what was considered barbarism at the service of civilization.48

More conventional forms of popular theatre also worked in this way, especially as represented by the many Oriental shows of the early musical comedy tradition, a usage reflected in both the Wake and Ulysses, both of which make connections between ceremonial performance and power relations, where the racial Other is humbled. In the latter, as we have seen, this is famously signified by the street theatre of the vice-regal cavalcade in ‘Wandering Rocks’. This spectacle of empire opulence may not keep all the natives in awe, but it is sufficient to catch the attention of some – Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy, for instance, who ‘watched and admired’ (U, 10.1199). In the Wake, when ALP postulates a visit to ‘the Old Lord’, the imagined event is constructed in terms of a racialised and highly theatrical ceremony, with references to minstrelsy (‘Remember to take off your white hat, ech?’, 623.9) and a sustained deployment of cod-Chinese. Here ALP knows the position to adopt and assumes, too, the correct language form: ‘And I’ll drop my graciast kertssey too. If the Ming Tung no go bo to me homage me hamege kow bow tow to the Mong Tang. Ceremonialness to stand lowest place be!’ (623.11–14). Similarly, HCE’s ‘five hundredth and sixtysixth borthday’ is, according to Yawn, an opportunity for patriotism, for confirming race hierarchies and the celebration of empire splendour. In the ‘licensed boosiness primises of his delhightful bazar’ (497.24–26), the following assembly takes place: the grand old Magennis Mor, Persee and Rahli, taker of the tributes, their Rinseky Poppakork and Piowtor the Grape, holding Dunker’s durbar, boot kings and indiarubber empires and shawhs from paisley and muftis in muslim and sultana reiseines and jordan almonders and a row of jam sahibs and a odd principeza in her pettedcoat and the queen of knight’s clubs and the claddagh ringleaders and the two salaames and the Halfa Ham and the Hanzas Khan with two fat Maharashers. (497.27–34)

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Joyce’s version draws on and involves a number of associations, conflations and ellipses, many of which make links between race, trade, empire and consumption, but, above all, the ease with which Yawn’s story of HCE’s birthday celebration slips into jingoistic ceremony indicates how far exoticised representations of the racial Other and reproductions of empire splendour were common currency. Indeed, these were among the most frequently visited themes and dispositions of popular culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which might explain why ‘[e]very third man has a chink in his conscience and every other woman has a jape in her mind’ (486.11–12). ‘PLAYING

ON DE OLE BANJO’

It is this modern, industrial and ideologically charged culture that frames the many references to music theatre in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, a culture closer to our own in many ways than to the local and demotic stages for ‘working-class’ audiences often imagined in Joyce criticism.49 Again, in both texts the connection between theatre and race representation is emphatic. Black and Oriental race identities are almost always related to performance and thus invariably realised as appropriation, and in terms of master-servant relations. As we have seen, the musical comedies which most interest Joyce are precisely Oriental shows and shows that reenact empire fantasies, such as The Geisha, Florodora and Chu Chin Chow. Similarly with pantomime: in both Ulysses and the Wake, Turko the Terrible figures as an Orientalised show, and when Shaun asserts his newfound authority at FW, III.ii he adopts the guise of Aladdin ‘vigorously rubbing his magic lantern to a glow of fullconsciousness’ (421.22–23). Even more suggestively, the Wake in particular has a fascination with the minstrel show. There are more references to this version of musical theatre than to any other, with the possible exception of pantomime. These include the many allusions to the Christy minstrels and to the Moore and Burgess minstrels – the latter’s catchphrase ‘Take off that white hat’ recurs, often in connection with HCE, who is asked to ‘Take off that white hat!’ by theatregoers ‘in front’ (32.22–23); to ‘Teak off that wise head!’ (607.3); and to ‘Tuck upp those wide shorts’ (614.14).50 Minstrel songs, such as ‘Poor Old Joe’ (141.27), ‘I’ve been Working on the Railroad’ (141.28–29) and ‘Old Folks at Home’ (289.1–2), are utilised, as are the standard ‘coon’ and minstrel identities – Zip Coon, Jim Crow and also Mr Bones and Mr Tambo (see 292.19–20), the ‘corner men’ who played the tambourine and bones, or spoons, at either end of the minstrel line. There

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are minstrel performances, often conflated with other events – street fights, morris dancing, and so on – and at one point the Wake itself becomes a minstrel show entitled ‘Funnycoon’s Wick’ (499.13). This sheer weight of references to the minstrel show is no mere reflection of cultural reality. Minstrelsy was common enough in the 1920s, but it was already retro. Well past its heyday in terms of popularity, it was being both displaced and incorporated by newer forms of popular theatre, first burlesque then musical comedy and revue. This is not to say, however, that the prominence of the minstrel show in the Wake is indicative of an interest in the quaint and marginal on Joyce’s part. The minstrel show may have begun life as an obscure and indeed working-class culture in the 1820s, but it rose to prominence in America in the 1840s and dominated American musical theatre until the 1880s, making a major contribution to the Americanisation of the musical generally.51 Like all other forms of music theatre, it had become incorporated into the modern culture industry by the end of the nineteenth century. Thus positioned, minstrel shows and minstrel acts, much theorised now in terms of race fears and the theft of identity,52 were entirely suggestive of a cultural disposition that stretched far beyond the form itself, and it is this range of significance that the Wake draws upon. Blackface becomes symptomatic of the general association of theatre and race representation and is specifically connected to wider social fears and fantasies. It functions, for example, in contexts where the community asserts itself against a perceived outsider. In I.viii the systematic ragging of HCE, which provokes ALP’s revenge, her dispensation of a ‘pison plague’ (212.24), is theatricalised with reference to the minstrel show: ‘wherever you scoured the countryside . . . you found his ikom etsched tipside down or the cornerboys cammocking his guy and Morris the Man, with the role of a royss in his turgos the turrible . . . reeling and railing round the local as the peihos piped and ubanjees twanged’ (205.25–33). The Orientalism of Turko the Terrible collides here with minstrel shows, and the folk cultures suggested by the skimmington ride, morris dancing and Guy Fawkes, all becoming part of an image which, however complex and subtle in its entirety, makes obvious connections between race, the scapegoat and collective punishment.53 Minstrelsy, with other popular cultural forms, is precisely located in terms of cultures of racism, as it is in I.vii when Shaun tells the story of how Shem almost came to grief ‘One hailcannon night’ (174.22), when he met ‘rival teams of slowspiers counter quicklimers’. (174.28). The onlookers anticipated with pleasure ‘a roll in the dirt’, but Shem, with his appalling capacity for

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ingratiation, managed to confuse the issue and escape – he ‘sank alowing till he stank out of sight’. That disappearing trick, however disappointing in some respects, is constructed as a victory, indeed nothing short of a defeat of the Satanic – ‘All Saints beat Belial! Mickil Goals to Nichil! Notpossible! Already?’ (175.2–6). The event is commemorated in a version of ‘the Ballatt of Perce-Oreille’ (175.27–28) and further mythologised in a mix of boxing commentary and minstrelsy: O fortunous casualitas! Lefty takes the cherubcake while Rights cloves his hoof. Darkies never done tug that coon out to play non-excretory, anti-sexuous, misoxenetic, gaasy pure, flesh and blood games, written and composed and sung and danced by Niscemus Nemom, same as piccaninnies play all day, those old (none of your honeys and rubbers!) games for fun and element we used to play with Diana and old Joe kicking her behind and before and the yellow girl kicking him behind old Joe. (175.29–36)

Shaun’s attack on Shem, then, is not just racialised. It is acculturated as theatrical representation, sports reportage and children’s games. Here it becomes normalised and thus made innocent. It is also a story told by Shaun, rather than a direct event, existing in a precise, if extremely complex, narrative frame. As so often in the Wake, musical theatre has a particular place alongside storytelling in the broadest context of significance where culture tells tales about itself. In a text obsessed with stories, it is significant that Finnegan’s fall becomes a tale told ‘down through all christian minstrelsy’ (3.18) and that later in the Wake, when Jaun is being questioned about the events in I.ii and I.iv, the Four Old Men attempt to encourage him by turning the trial/inquest into a show. Jaun becomes ‘my tristy minstrel’ (521.22) and ‘christie’ (515.29): ‘– Ah, go on now, Masta Bones, a gig for a gag . . . You were ever the gentle poet, dove from Haywarden. Pitcher cup, patcher cap, pratey man? Be nice about it, Bones Minor!’ (515.32–36). Here race disguise and performance, conjoined with the romanticism and nursery rhymes, are opportunities for licence. Through the assumption of his black mask, the hope is that Jaun will find the dispensation to tell everything – how it was from the beginning, ‘Once upon a grass and a hopping high grass it was’ (516.1–2). A similar association between race disguise and licence is made at 374 where HCE as ‘Hung Chung Egglyfella now speak he tell numptywumpty topsawys belongahim pidgin. Secret things other persons place there covered not. How you fell from story to story like a sagasound to lie’ (374.34–375.1). Joyce’s handling of race representation is opportunistic and always subject to aesthetic rationales, but it is also critically charged. This is particularly so in terms of the understanding of what has been widely

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theorised as a characteristic ambiguity in Western responses to the marginalised world – the strange and uneasy mix of admiration and scorn, attraction and disgust, fascination and indifference often manifest in eroticised contexts. Finnegans Wake is implicated here – see, for example, the reference at 236.15–16, ‘O you longtailed blackman, polk it up behind me!’, a possible song reference which draws on white fears and fantasies about black sexual prowess – as are the references to minstrel shows and pantomime in Ulysses. Molly’s appearance in ‘Circe’ as an Oriental ‘Marion’, for instance, involves eroticised mystery – ‘a handsome woman in Turkish costume stands before him [Bloom]. Opulent curves fill out her scarlet trousers and jacket, slashed with gold. A wide yellow cummerbund girdles her. A white yasmak, violet in the night, covers her face, leaving free only her large dark eyes and raven hair.’ She is constructed as a potent mix of power and compliance; thus the reference to her ankles being ‘linked by slender fetterchain’ (U, 15.297–302–13). Even more suggestive in this respect, however, is Bloom’s belief that Molly, as well as posing in Oriental guise, is herself attracted to the racialised Other, ‘The exotic, you see. Negro servant in livery’ and again the minstrelsy connection is emphatic. ‘Othello black brute. Eugene Stratton. Even the bones and cornerman at the Livermore christies. Bohee brothers.’ Here the disguise is enough to prompt the stimulation; even a ‘Sweep for that matter’ would be sufficiently suggestive. At which point the Bohee minstrels materialise: Tom and Sam Bohee, coloured coons in white duck suits, scarlet socks, upstarched Sambo chokers and large scarlet asters in their buttonhole, leap out. Each has his banjo slung. Their paler smaller negroid hands jingle the twingtwang wires. Flashing white kaffir eyes and tusks they rattle through a breakdown in clumsy clogs, twining swinging, back to back, toe heel, heel toe, with smackfatclacking nigger lips. (U, 15.408–18)

The point about this representation is that it images not black life, of course, but a white version of black life, one which is characterised by notions of ‘natural’ rhythm, crude musicality and energy and also by the ambiguity of disgusted attraction explicit in the idea of ‘smackfatclacking nigger lips’. With this the Joyce text penetrates to some of the deepest and most problematic levels of the stage representation of the Other.54 The connection between musical theatre and race representation has specific language dimensions. Oriental language in particular was sometimes indicated on the stage by ‘comic’ approximate sounds, ‘Pure chingchong idiotism’ (FW, 299 fn 3), though even more routinely the comic Other was an aspirant attempting, and failing, to master English language and English style. The gap between ‘proper’ English and the ‘broken’

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English of the foreigner was a measurement of the distance between authentic civilisation and its cheap imitation, part of the double bind that imagined Other culture as primitivist and reactionary and yet laughed at its attempt to modernise and be like the West. The ‘comic mainstay’ of The Cingalee, for instance, is a character called Chambhuddy Ram, played originally by a blacked-up Huntley Wright. Like the musical theatre itself, Chambhuddy is an imitator, a native aspirant who ‘copies’ everything, in his case everything English. Here, though, the reproduction is an absurd failure. Chambhuddy is laughed at for his language errors, such gaffes as ‘you have got the wrong purse by the sow’s ear’, and for his ridiculous appropriation of Western dress.55 He is the butt of just about every piece of comic business in the show, and his first appearance ‘dressed in what he considers the height of English fashion’ sets the tone. ‘He carries every possible accessory such as key, chain etc and an elaborate umbrella.’56 Such representations appeared in a number of cultural forms, in literature and in Hollywood films for instance. They were absolutely standard on the stages of musical theatre. The exposure of the foreigner’s ignorance through ‘broken’ English was a usual piece of comic business and ‘coon’ and Oriental songs often featured, not necessarily as part of any theme or plot but just because they formed an expected part of the ritual. ‘Coon’ songs in particular were often interpolated quite randomly, without any reference to characterisation or cultural setting, into musical comedy shows. Act Two of the musical comedy A Runaway Girl, for example, involves a scene where two white characters suddenly appear dressed up as ‘piccaninnies’ for a Venetian ball in Venice. In this disguise they dance and sing as piccaninnies do: ‘When de twilight’s falling an’ de stars a-peepin out,/When de night begins, when de night begins!/Is de time our Mammy says de Bogey-man’s about,/And de gobble-ins, and de gobble-ins.’57 Finnegans Wake gets some mileage from the insult potential of codlanguage; I.iv, for instance, includes a ‘boarder incident’ (81.32–33) between a ‘native’ ‘cropatkin’ and a foreign ‘Adversary’. The former is mocked in ‘vermicular’ – ‘Was six victolios fifteen pigeon takee offa you, tell he me, stlongfela, by picky-pocky ten to foul months behindsaside?’ (82.12–14). The purpose here is to ridicule the ‘cropatkin’ by a mock-appropriation of language, a principle that was entirely familiar to musical comedy audiences. Complete with comic names, one suggestive of stupidity and the other of femininity, Professor Phunckwitz and Count Marie de Lafleur here become the absurd foreigners rendered speechless in the predictable way.

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PHUNK :

I vill talk to Hooker, don’t it? Je suis Franc¸ais. Can I not talk? PHUNK : Yah! You talk but vat is in him – mit your English is broken so. LAFLEUR : Oui – I break all e English I can. Revenge! 58 PHUNCK : I vas spoke the English like a nature – ain’t it? LAFLEUR :

Joyce’s term ‘cropatkin’, incidentally, is an ingenious combination of anarchism, via Kropatkin, with primitive man (Cromagnon) and a relative of Pat; in this way it gets to some particularly English stereotypes of the violent, barbaric Irish. But while the Wake can reflect such usages, it can hardly subscribe to them in any serious way, because one of the most obvious things about this text is its studied failure to maintain any serious distinction between standard and nonstandard English. The Wake systematically destroys such ideas, with the effect of moving ‘bastard’ or ‘pidgin’ versions of language to a new centre. Far from being marginalised and discredited, ‘errors’ and variants become the norms. There are dozens of occasions, then, when the Wake falls into Orientalised English of the ‘Chin Chin Chinaman’ variety and ‘coon’ talk, as when HCE insists that his wife has ‘the smallest shoenumber outside chinatins. They are jolly dainty, spekin tluly’ (533.5–6). But without the reference point of standard English, the value judgement typically associated with such usages collapses. Comic effects are achieved, certainly, but the cheap laughs at racial ineptitude are no longer possible, and quite often, as we have seen, they are turned round to form quite different critical perspectives. This is so even where the specific usage is slight and seemingly gratuitous. There are, for example, several references to HCE as ‘Massa’ and ‘Baas’, sometimes in the context of the plantation and idealised minstrel representations of the plantation. Typically these are sarcastic and serve to mock and undermine HCE’s authority (usually Shaun is implicated as the originator of the slurs). But this racialisation of power relations, however seemingly innocent and even comic, always carries a critical edge which reflects back on the stereotyping nature of the standard representations. Thus black identity is invariably connected to servitude. In I.vi the family servant who would ‘retten smuttyflesks’ and ‘emptout old mans’ (141.8–9), for example, is sentimentalised as ‘Pore ole Joe!’ (141.27), the ‘Poor Old Joe’ of the Stephen Foster minstrel song. The description of HCE’s ‘chuchuffuous chinchin’ works in the same way. This is part of a more general enthusiasm for size (‘he’s as globeful as a gasometer of lithium’ (131.34–36), but it is probable that stereotypes of Oriental fatness are also being mocked here (see, for

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example, the Chu Chin Chow song which begins ‘Behold! Behold!/Dancers ripened by the sun,/Quick with passion, vigour, fun/Slender virgins everyone/Others weighing half a ton’).59 Similarly in the race encounter at 311.26, where the newly arrived Norwegian captain asks where he can get a new suit of clothes made and the ‘ship’s husband’ strikes the deal with Kersse the tailor in cod-Chinese, ‘chunk pulley muchy chink topside numpa one sellafella’. This slippage seems quite random, but there is a point to it in the context of standard connections made between the racial Other, shady street business and the famous Far Eastern tailoring trade. There are many further instances of this kind of usage, where ‘pidgin’ reflects back on race stereotyping. In III.i, for example, Shaun, recounting Shem’s alleged ill-treatment of ALP, is at first furious: ‘I will commission to the flames any incendiarist whosoever or ahriman howsoclever who would endeavour to set ever annyma roner moother of mine on fire’ (426.2–4). Then he breaks down, and, then finally, he falls into an impotent, childlike resignation. It is here that the racial stereotype materialises once more, this time in the context of a pitiful emotionalism, which functions as a ploy to gain sympathy rather than a real expression of sorrow. Here Shaun becomes a joke version of the untrustworthy and manipulative ‘native Johnny’: ‘he dished allarmes away and laughed it off with a wipe at his pudgies and a gulp apologetic, healing his tare be the smeyle of his oye, oogling around. Him belly no belong sollow mole pigeon. Ally bully. Fu Li’s gulpa’ (426.13–17). Later in III.ii, now in the Yawn identity, Shaun faces tough questioning from the four old men and begins to respond once again in the guise of the Other. A different set of stereotypes comes into play here, with Yawn performing a mock-version of the cowardly, fawning, foreigner: ‘– Me no angly mo, me speakee Yellman’s lingas. Nicey Doc Mistel Lu, please! Me no pigey ludiments all same numpa one Topside Telmastoly fella. Me pigey savvy a singasong anothel time’ (485.29–32). The Wake is substantially an attack on scientific racism as it operates at the level of the academy and the intelligentsia. But as these handlings of cod-language suggest, it also positions the institution of racism in a much wider cultural context. In part this realises an intellectual centre that, while being intensely protective of its own exclusivity, was also related to ‘popular’ culture and the society it entertained. Thus popular culture was constructed in particular ways as folk art (as in the case of the ‘litter’) and the academy was itself reconstituted in popular terms, as in the ‘museomound’ where the natives (‘Welsh and Paddy Patkinses’) are charged a particular, and differently racialised, high price (‘one shelenk!’) to view what turns out to be the utterly compromised glories of a thoroughly

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Anglicised, and Germanised, historical culture (8.5–6). The quiz show of I.vi – which sounds like a radio show – works similarly, as a public version of the ‘science’ that maps out origins. In this chapter it has been shown how popular theatre is part of this dynamic – how pantomime, minstrel shows, music hall and musical comedy are reproduced in the Wake where they replicate and reinforce the academy’s scientific racism. In all these instances performance is much realised as fakery and the stereotypes explicitly materialise as cod-versions. The anthropological veracity often claimed by exhibition culture and musical theatre is undermined to the extent that it is always clear in the Wake that these theatrical versions of race identity are precisely that, roles assumed, or appropriated, by the players – the Earwicker family and their entourage. It is not the racial Other that is being laughed at – the ‘Oriental’ or the ‘black’ has no real cultural presence here – but rather the cultural insecurities that produce such usages as ‘coon’ talk and ‘pidgin’ Chinese. These become both released and subject to the Wake’s scrutiny. In all these ways the Wake insists on positioning scientific racism and its discourses in the wider cultural context – not that it is always possible to distinguish with clarity between the voice of the academy and its popular culture versions in the Wake. Indeed, the insistence on a crosscontamination, where what seems to be high intellectual material is thoroughly compromised by the demotic and vulgar and vice versa, is part of the Wake’s subversive strategy. This chapter has also insisted on popular music culture as an important contemporary site of an engagement between Finnegans Wake and the modern. That culture was not, as some have suggested, quaintly folkish, and nor is Joyce’s intention in working it so thoroughly simply to preserve. Ulysses and the Wake enter into dialogue with music theatre; they do not simply catalogue in the spirit of encyclopaedia. The instinct here is not for inclusivity, but for analysis and dissection. In this sense music theatre joins with Aryanism, theosophy, anthropology, and so on as a culture of modernity subjected to the critical energy of the Wake. The text that emerges from all this, far from being primitivist, ‘occulted’60 or romantically demotic, as some traditions have maintained, reads very differently. Not only is it contemporary, engaged and politicised in very specific ways, it is also distanced from some of the key terms which in the past have been marshalled to authorise organicist and totalising readings. Like the Wake that ridicules the quest for noble racial origins and the romantic fetishising of the ‘primitive’, the Wake that takes musical comedy, minstrelsy and pantomime seriously as culture industry sits uneasily against those traditions that have constructed its author as a more traditional modernist, a

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benign genius of the unconscious who, apparently, joins ranks with other major twentieth-century figures as an existentialist, and sometimes surrealist, ‘thinker’ – the philosopher-writer who ‘contemplate[s] seriously the related properties of aboriginality, prehistory, unconsciousness and nothingness’.61 Such a distinction between Joyce, Race and ‘Finnegans Wake’ and more familiar amounts of the Wake need not be entirely exclusive – it may be possible that the role of poet of the unconscious combined in Joyce with an engaged social and political position – but it does, at the very least, suggest that the orthodoxies are limited in various ways. A consideration of that issue – how the treatment of race as politics engages with the ‘conceptualist’ literature that has previously attempted to define the Wake – forms the subject of the final, concluding chapter, but before that discussion there is another possible source of the demotic that may be important to the Wake. If the example of musical theatre is anything to go by, it seems unlikely that ‘popular culture’ connects the Wake with a source of any real popular vitality and creativity. Joyce does not excoriate popular culture in the manner which links high moderns to culture industry theorists, but he does recognise its ‘industrial’ dimensions and presents it in critical and analytical terms. However, even more important to Finnegans Wake than formalised popular culture – the institutionally produced films, books, magazines, and so on of everyday life – there is the very informal language of the everyday which exists outside of institutional formations and is most obviously represented by innuendo, and the ‘vulgar’ – what is constructed discursively in the following chapter as ‘filth’. There is, as the next chapter makes clear, an astonishing amount of this kind of material in the Wake. Is it possible that it brings the Wake any closer to the ‘people’ and if so, how does that resonate against a political reading that focuses on ‘race’ in the Wake?

CHAPTER

7

‘And the prankquean pulled a rosy one’: filth, fascism and the family

This is not a concluding chapter, but, rather, a drawing together of strands that have been explored in what has been a ‘vertical’ approach to the Wake, organised primarily around ‘themes’ as opposed to reading horizontally from I.i to IV.i. The synthesising develops here around the issues of ‘filth’, or the vulgar, and the Wake’s construction of ‘family’. More precisely, the aim is to find a way of presenting ideas about the Wake in terms of its relationship to fascism, an ideology which belonged to nineteenth-century traditions in many ways but which also formulated itself as something profoundly energised and new, this being just one of many contradictions within fascism. It was traditional, yet modern; forward-looking, but deeply retrospective; decisively ‘volkish’, but crucially dependent on capitalism, and so on. Indeed, for some historians this is the essential quality of fascism – the heavily circumscribed indeterminacy that made its appeal across conventional social divisions and stratifications. Why is it necessary to formulate the Wake in these terms, particularly when there is so much material in the work to suggest its general antagonism to fascism? In the first place, for the obvious reason that race was fundamental to fascism. All fascisms are powered by race consciousness, though most historians would want to distinguish German fascism on the grounds of its determination to ‘eliminate’ both the racially ‘inferior’ and the racially ‘damaged’. If the Wake engages with race and racism as this study has claimed, it must also position itself in relation to the political ideology that turned racism into state policy so completely. Such a positioning, one would think, should consist of rather more than scattered allusions to the Nazis and Hitler. It would be more fundamental, even ‘structural’, as opposed to being subsumed in Western race fantasies about the Aryan identity, though fascism did emerge in crucial ways from such traditions. It clearly is the case that the Wake’s assault on Aryanism and its associated race identities assaults fascism, but, for all that, one would expect to see the singularity of fascist culture refracted more substantially in the 146

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pages of the Wake. That consideration leads to a second and perhaps more important point. Fascism was the most powerful and extreme manifestation of rightwing political ideology to emerge in the modern history of the West. If Joyce, and the Joyce text, really are politically engaged and shaped by ‘history’, as this study maintains, it must be that the engagement with fascism is somewhere at the centre of the Wake’s agenda. This is not to dispute the fact that historicising the Wake, or, rather, defining its historical dimensions, is a slippery business. Many ‘histories’ are evoked by the Wake – Irish histories, French histories, British histories, ‘Prooshian’ histories, and so on. At the same time, its ‘periodisation’ is, at one level, nonexistent. It is just as appropriate, or inappropriate, to articulate the Wake in terms of its ‘medievalist’ dimensions as it is to recover it as eighteenth-century, or designate the prehistorical fabric – the Wake maintains a condition which is not just multilayered but utterly crosscontaminated, where historical periods are conflated and hybridised as a matter of course. This is presumably one reason why some critics have thought of the Wake in universalist terms. But these multiple histories and ‘times’ reconvened in the Wake in such playful ways are the product of aesthetic design. The history of the 1920s and 1930s was singular in that these decades constituted Joyce’s lived experience during the writing of the Wake; they formed the only reality for which he could be held ‘responsible’. To put it simply, whether Joyce takes a position on Bonapartism, or sides in the English Civil War, or on a myriad other historical ‘issues’ is of no necessary importance to the question of what used to be called ‘Joyce’s politics’ or, in an even earlier critical tradition, to the idea of the writer’s ‘commitment’.1 The issue of where he is positioned in relation to fascism, on the other hand, is hugely significant. Indeed, it is difficult to see how Joyce can hold any serious status as a radical writer, politically engaged with his society and culture, if he ignores or is ‘indifferent’ to fascism. This means that fascism is really central to almost all the agendas operating in this study – to the argument that race and racism is important to the Wake, but also to the general understanding of a literature that is ‘political’ and crucially influenced by historical contexts. There is one further dimension to this concern with fascism, one which, on the face of it, has little to do with race, politics or history, but, rather, comes out of a quite different and distinct range of questions and ideas. These circulate around an attempt to arrive at some understanding of the purpose(s) behind the truly astonishing amount of ‘filth’ and ‘vulgarity’

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in the Wake. At which point a brief digression from the ‘historical’ is probably necessary by way of explanation. ‘I’M

NOT SO DYING TO TAKE MY RISE OUT OF YOU’

‘FILTH’

–

AND THE WAKE

My interest in ‘filth’ in the Wake grew out of and is related to what was a very methodical regime of work. During the course of preparing for this study, I set myself a target of handling a minimum of ten pages of Finnegans Wake every day, proceeding in strict order – reading Joyce’s book from cover to cover and restarting at the beginning once the end was reached. My reading was also accompanied by strict note-taking rules. Irrespective of the infamous ‘open-endedness’ of this text, only Wake material that might be useful in terms of my subject matter was noted; no sidelines or diversions were permitted – with one significant exception. I found myself noting, for whatever prurient reason and because they are hilarious and so much part of reading the Wake generally, all examples of innuendo, vulgarity and filth – finding the right term for such material is not easy, as Katherine Mullin has pointed out in her work in this area.2 Part of the problem is the great range involved in what one wants to get to here. There is really no term to cover adequately everything from the saucy to the downright toe-curling. And there is, again, the further problem, raised in an acute form by this issue, of ‘presentism’. What was once ‘near the knuckle’ or even downright obscene is unlikely to be so now, which is why such terms as ‘titillating’, ‘shameful’ or the more extreme ‘shocking’, denote, paradoxically enough, both highly subjective responses and also culturally relative and historically specific ones – though it should be emphasised that Finnegans Wake has actually aged extremely well here. The boundaries pushed by Joyce in the earlier work, including Ulysses, now have to struggle quite hard to maintain their edge against muchshifted senses of the acceptable, whereas the Wake, never far from ‘the verge of selfabyss’ (40.23), still feels contemporary in this respect. Its continued viability here is partly a matter of the willingness to embrace such excesses as ‘Three creamings a day’ (144.2–3). The Wake also alludes to, and enacts, activities still difficult in some modern contexts, like cock sucking (‘Sall I puhim in momou. Mummum’ – 144.34–35) and such embarrassments as the smell of ‘stinkend pusshies’ (79.30); and then there is the indignity of ‘Old King Cnut’ (139.5). There is also the sheer inventiveness with which Joyce plays with such material. At 66.8–9, for example, he produces a complex acrostic based on the latin futuere (to fuck)

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and at 162.15–16 puns on the latin ostia (entrances) at the same time as evoking the Ostiak Vogul district of Siberia to arrive at ‘Ostiak della Vogul Marina’, the vagina of the virgin Mary.3 That kind of manipulation means that ‘filth’ is assimilated to the Wake’s wider notorious difficulty, where it generates ‘significance’ alongside its actual power to shock. While the Wake remains difficult, there is a sense in which its ‘filth’ will remain interesting. Above all, however, ‘vulgarity’ in the Wake retains its strength in contemporaneity quite simply because there is so much of it, which means that ‘filth’ is linked to the Wake’s sheer strangeness as well as to its general inexplicability as a cultural product. Whereas Ulysses has a moderate corner reserved for language play that turns on sex and bodily functions, Finnegans Wake, built on multiple meaning, is nothing short of devoted to such ambiguities. There is a genuinely grotesque volume to things here that renders indulgence in dirt and double entendre part of the Wake’s epic status. This has the further effect of making the reading of the Wake contingent on the reader being tuned in to ‘filth’ – a fact that works in quite complex ways. Not only is the Wake made dirtier by this relationship; ‘filth’ is made cleaner, one would think, given the high cultural status that Finnegans Wake enjoys. A brief survey across some sections of the Wake will indicate the general dimensions of the point being made here. Section I.ii, for instance (I.i is discussed below in these terms, as is I.vi, I.vii and I.viii) is one of the least ‘vulgar’ episodes in the Wake, but even here there are many references to ‘selfabyss’ (40.23) and ‘tossing’ (see 40.25), and to father as ‘fata’ (31.35); and there is a nice evocation of the sexual politics of empire where the ‘Seaforths’ (referring to the regiment) are ‘making the colleenbawl’ (39.22–23). Section I.iii returns to the more usual Wake standards in terms of sheer ubiquity, range and weight of reference. HCE’s names include ‘Stodge Arschmann’ (71.34) and ‘Twitchbratschballs’ (72.2). The ‘perpendicular person’ is eroticised as ‘a brut! But a magnificent brut’ (60.25–26) and HCE has a ‘cockspurt start’ (50.3). The references to the latter’s preference for young girls are full in this section, and related to the scandal of ‘Peaches’ and ‘Daddy’ Browning. Section I.iv continues with casual ‘vulgarities’, but also includes two concentrations, at page 90, where there are many references to prostitutes and red-light districts as part of the indictment against HCE, and at 95.27 to 96.25 where the story of the ‘fourbottle men, the analists’ is almost entirely comprised of innuendo. In I.v ALP’s titles include ‘He Perssed Me Here with the Ardour of a Tonnoburkes’ (106.5–6) and ‘I Knew I’d Got it in Me’ (106.15). There is a good deal of academic discourse here which is characterised by the

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scientisation of sex (see the references to ‘gerontophils’, for example, at 115.12 and ‘the pudendascope’ at 115.30), but this is constantly being undermined by the more demotic discourse that produces ‘sweet tarts’ (116.23); ‘furtz’ (farts, at 116.29); ‘tis tis’ (testes, at 116.36); ‘peehole’ (120.31); ‘kak’, being Dutch for ‘shit’ (125.22), and so on. Section I.vi distinguishes itself as one of the richest sites for the filthy and the vulgar. Some of these elements are discussed below. For the time being it is noted here that there is a romantic/erotic concentration at 140 and a much more developed one at 143–48. This latter involves the voices of both Shaun (‘you were wandering about my trousseaurs’, 144.22, and ‘Let me finger their eurhythmytic’, 147.8) and Issy (‘the first night he smelled pouder and I coloured beneath my fan’, 147.32–33). ‘Poudor’ (suggestive of pudenda?) is Latin for ‘shame’, and the colouring beneath the ‘fan’, as well as indicating embarrassment, suggests something about sexual activity making the participants red and possibly sore. The ‘Mookse and Gripes’ story, also in this section, is likewise a rich source of vulgarity and innuendo, as is the response to question eleven. Shaun/Wyndham Lewis is ‘mandaboutwoman’ (151.6) (‘manda’ is apparently Russian for cunt);4 understanding of ‘siderodromites’ (160.21); and promises a surprise – ‘cluse her eyes and aiopen her oath and see what spice I may send her’ (165.4–5). Shifting to II.iii, this, too, is a rich site for such material (though probably no more so than II.i and II.ii). Conservatively, there are some 150 ‘vulgar’ references to sexual practices and to pissing, shitting and farting just in this one, admittedly long (73 pages), section. Some of these are framed by the two stories told here. ‘The Norwegian Captain’ is, as might be expected, generally ‘salty’ (‘who the bullocks brought you here’ – 337.30–31) and there is a nautical flavour to its ‘bad’ and erotic language, as in the ‘lumbsmall of his hawsehole’ (323.6) and the breasts that are ‘of the younging fruits, tenderosed like an atalantic’s breastswells’ (336.26–27). ‘How Buckley Shot the Russian General’, a soldier’s tale, is similarly ‘earthy’ and again, as would be expected in a story about shooting a man who is wiping himself following defecation, there is a great concentration of material around shitting here – see, for example, ‘a shote of excramation’ (342.19); the preliminary wind ‘haftara having afterhis brokeforths’ (343.33); the scent of the quarry as Buckley ‘caught the pfierce tsmell of his [the Russian General’s] aurals’ (344.25–26); and, finally, the shot – ‘bung goes the enemay’ (352.10). This section also involves voyeurism and exhibitionism (see ‘peeptomine up all our colombinations!’, 361.1, and ‘Missmolly showed her pear too’, 360.28–29); incest and prostitution

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(‘Begetting a wife which begame his niece by pouring her youngthings into skintighs’ – 373.26–27); and HCE’s well-known penchant for watching girls pee (‘inherdfoff trisspass through minxmingled hair’, 363.26). It also has the distinction of containing the page with the most plays on ‘cunt’ in the whole of the Wake; 357 has ‘sangnificant’ (15), ‘fombly fongered freequuntly’ (14); ‘Kunstful ’ (16) and ‘Cunstuntonopolies’ (30). As I said, this survey is brief and really only scratches the surface of the vulgar in the Wake, but it is illustrative. Barely a page, paragraph or even sentence goes by without some such usage. It is, indeed, as if ‘me ask and can could speak’ (141.32–33). The point about this proliferation being that it makes ‘filth’ not incidental to the Wake or an optional by-way, one of many multifarious delights, but, on the contrary, entirely central to the kind of book this is – a fact that has yet to be fully taken on board by Wakeans. For the most part, there has been a relative quietism about what may well be one of the more meaningful ‘keys’ to this text – and, at the same time, an understandable keenness to place sex and sexuality, particularly, in terms of frameworks where they can be rendered safely and in a relatively cleaned-up form. Few Joyceans have taken much trouble over the idea that the Wake, whatever else it may be, is truly rude and not shy about declaring itself as such, which means that we have little idea of why the Wake makes the investment that it does in ‘filth’. Unless we want to argue that ‘filth’ in the Wake is a matter of infinite parapraxes reflecting the hidden workings of the unconscious, the slurry in the mind of the infamous sleeper identity sometimes thought to be at the centre of the Wake 5 – or that this is a ‘kink in his arts’ (490.5), the product of a much-awake mind that is itself very dirty indeed. ‘FROM

TOMTITOT TO TEETOOTOTALITARIAN’

–

FASCIST

PURITY AND THE FAMILY

At the time of noting such usages, I did not expect to be deploying them in any concerted way in Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake – indeed, I had some vague notion that they could be used differently, in, perhaps, a separate publication. ‘A Lexicon of ‘‘Filth’’ in Finnegans Wake’, for example, seemed a possibility. However, as this study progressed I realised to a much greater extent than at its outset not just how fundamental ‘filth’ is to Finnegans Wake, but how much it serves to puncture and deflate discourses of racism. The connections between the vulgar and racism are perhaps not immediately obvious, but, suggestively for our purposes here, they become so when the question is raised of how ‘filth’ sits against the ideas of racial hygiene

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that so characterised public discourses around sexuality from the 1860s onwards. As almost every stage of this study has indicated, in the great age of nationalism there were intimate connections between discourses of race, gender and sexuality. These were formulated in every Western country and across the political spectrum. Indeed, the crucial cultural construction for the nineteenth-century nation state was the manufacture of what Jeffrey Weeks has called the ‘sacramental family’ and of the roles of men and women within it.6 The precise sense in which the family evolved in such close relationship with wider society is a matter of considerable sociological and historical controversy, but there can be no doubting the powerful relationships that existed across the nexus of family, race health and nation building. The process of identification was quite self-conscious, even a matter of state legislation, embedded not only in laws regulating marriage but also in property laws, laws controlling advertising, laws against homosexuality and abortion, and so on. Culture – be it legal, religious, educational, medical or literary culture – insisted on a moral, biological and spiritual identification of the family with race and the state. According to George L. Mosse in Nationalism and Sexuality, ‘the prevailing sentiment was that the family was a cheap and efficient surrogate for the state, controlling the passions at their source. Clearly, the family was the policeman on the beat, an indispensable agent of social control as directed by physicians (more often than not the family doctor), educators, and the nation itself.’7 Gender, defined by differentiation, itself became a state resource. In late nineteenth-century England a new emphasis on sport and militaristic training in public schools created a cult of maleness, enshrining, with obvious racial and imperial undertones, ‘the separation of boys from the world of women’.8 Men embodied order, efficiency, progress, civilisation and culture. Divorced from the dynamic world of empire building by a perceived physical inferiority that was evidenced on the authority of science, women were idealised in terms of refinement, continuity and belonging to nature. As Lord Roseberry put it for Edwardian England, ‘an empire such as ours requires as its first condition an imperial race’, and a conservative genderising to produce that race.9 In a republican France which had the ‘longest history of fertility decline in all modern Europe’, similar racial concerns were compounded by fears about the size of the neighbouring German population and that of Russia.10 Here eugenics and ‘familism’11 combined with pronatalism to produce a conservative and antimodern political culture where the ‘fecund father’ was honoured with tax relief and ‘public praise’.12 Following Hitler’s

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reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, Edouard Daladier, the republic’s premier, responded to increased pronatalist pressure with the promise of a ‘comprehensive family-based population policy whose goal was demographic increment through social and moral reform’.13 This culminated in 1939 with the Code de la Famille. As Karen Offen has shown, the Code ‘privileged a prescriptive family model, explicitly depicted in terms of a male breadwinner and stay-at-home wife with three children and a first born within two years after marriage’.14 It entailed repressive anti-abortion measures and birth premiums and devoted ‘many pages to measures designed to combat the adverse effects of modern industrial society on the diminishing birth rate’.15 But the extension of the corporate state into the private sphere of sexuality and the family reached its ideological fullness with fascism, especially in the ‘ideal Reich’. As Foucault put it in The History of Sexuality (1978), ‘Nazism was doubtless the most cunning and the most na¨ıve (and the former because of the latter) combination of the fantasies of blood and the paroxysms of a disciplinary power.’16 Thus there is considerable irony in the fact that republican France attempted to use such an ideology against Nazi Germany. Not only was this much too little much too late, it marshalled a political sequence of ideas that lay at the very heart of German fascism. These involved, on the one hand, radical pronatalism. Hitler declared in 1933 that ‘in my State the mother is the most important citizen’,17 a view endorsed by Goebbels, who spoke of ‘a woman’s primary, rightful, and appropriate place’ as being ‘in the family, and the most wonderful task that she can perform [being] to present her country and people with children’.18 A whole series of illiberal and paternalist laws forced women out of work, especially prestigious work in the professions, and into the family where there was overwhelming social pressure to breed, as well as economic incentive. Under the Law for the Reduction of Unemployment of 1 June 1933, single persons were taxed in order to finance interest-free loans: The loans, which were conditional upon the wife giving up work, took the form of vouchers which could be redeemed in the form of household goods and furniture, thus stimulating employment in these sectors. They were to be repaid at the rate of 1 per cent per month, with 25 per cent being cancelled and payment suspended for a year on the birth of each child. In popular parlance this became known as ‘paying off with children’.19

Divorce laws were amended ‘in the interests of terminating unproductive marriages. Alongside adultery, the Marriage Law of 1938 included refusal to

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conceive, abortion, and irretrievable marital breakdown reflected in threeyear separation as grounds for divorce.’20 Deeply conservative measures such as these applied, however, only to the promotion of the ‘racially valuable’. Their counterpart was formulated in policies and systems designed to prevent the birth of the ‘racially unfit’, the ‘antinatalism’21 that defined Nazi population policy as ‘racially qualified’ demographic growth. ‘Aryans’ were called upon to have large families, but there was also a unique determination to prevent ‘non-Aryans’ from breeding and thus eliminate what were seen as ‘racial’ defects. As many historiographical traditions have insisted, parallels to Germany’s treatments of the ‘racially unfit’, or ‘unclean’ existed, but nowhere else was there such a sustained, organised and brutal appropriation of human dignity and human life in the pursuit of racial, or ‘blood’, purity.22 A vast scheme of selective breeding was driven by a fanatical devotion to ideology, to ‘a set of ideas and goals which assumed the mystical character of religious doctrines’. The ‘totalitarian aim was to recreate man and woman in their [i.e. the Nazis] own image . . . to fabricate a new species by abolishing ‘‘the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings’’’.23 It is possible to imagine the fantastic complexity and monstrous indeterminacy of the Wake as an assault on this ‘cunning’ and ‘na¨ıve’ ideology at almost every level – not least and most directly through the astonishing representation of the Earwicker family. This family is clearly designed at some level in universalist terms to represent ‘us’, but it is also wonderfully anatomised as ‘them’ and its dramas are enacted against a relativising historical context that surely impacts on the overblown dimensions. One effect of this complex perspective, where we both identify with and are astonished by the Earwickers, is the absolute demolition of the idealised ‘sacramental’ family represented at its most extreme in Nazi propaganda. The family of fascist ideology, a unity bounded not just by ‘blood’ and ‘property’ but by ‘everything that [exists] . . . spiritually and psychically as a living patrimony’24 is subject to devastating critical scrutiny in the Wake. Here, far from imaging the hygienic state, the family unit is a hotbed of jealousy and desire, with territorial insecurities and incestuous instincts becoming normalised as part of the psychological landscape of everyday family life. Against this background, stereotypes of gender roles within families become hugely distorted – to the point where Finnegan the patriarch is a literal country; HCE, ‘folkenfather of familyans’ (382.18), a literal state, and ALP, again, literally turned to nature as a river. Such stereotypes are also hilariously undermined in other ways. As the proud protector of family and

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race, HCE is a monstrous national disaster – a rogue, a drunk, incompetent and, not least, impotent. ALP is similarly entirely transgressive of idealised gender roles. Section I.viii in particular is an assault on romantic versions of femininity that is largely, and not incidentally, dependent for its delivery on the demotic and the vulgar. The two old washerwomen tell how ALP, even as an older woman who has done her female duty to the state, is still a highly sexual creature. A long way from the Spartan-like puritanism of Nazi ideology, which positioned fascist feminine beauty in terms of sport where ‘the javelin and the springboard are more useful than lipstick in promoting health’,25 ALP is peacock-proud of her appearance and invariably festooned in fashion. She teaches her seven girls how to tempt a man while/by ‘puffing her old dudheen’ (200.18), and herself desires a new man, or at least wants HCE to wake up ‘and bore me down like he used to’ (201.11–12). In a long section that starts at page 202, the washerwomen famously gossip about ALP’s infamous sexual life. She had ‘aflewmen of her owen’ (202.5–6). There was ‘Simba the Slayer’, ‘rubbing her up and smoothing her down’ (203.32, 34), and even before that the ‘Two lads’ who ‘went through her . . . before she had a hint of a hair at her fanny to hide or a bossom to tempt a birch canoedler’ (204.5–9). Even before that she was ‘licked by a hound . . . while poing her pee’ (204.11–12). This ALP, then, breaks the stereotypes of virgin, mother and whore by combining all three identities simultaneously and finding room for more – perhaps one of the most compelling images in I.viii is of ALP as avenger, the cunning figure who, affronted by insults to her husband, enters the village as the bearer of poisoned gifts, including ‘a reiz every morning for Standfast Dick (210.28); a ‘cooling douche and a warmingpan’ (211.10–11); and ‘a hairpin slatepencil for Elsie Oram to scratch her toby’ (211.12) – ‘toby’ being slang for arse. Sections II.i and II.ii are also obvious sites of the Wake’s engagement here, not least because they are so much concerned with youth, at play and study. As Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann and others have demonstrated, nowhere was the effectiveness of the racial state more challenged than in its impact on the young ‘[t]here was scarcely another problem with which Hitler dealt so intensively or, to use one of his favourite words, ‘‘fanatically’’, as policy towards youth’. Mein Kampf deals extensively with the issue, calling for ‘a balance between intellectual instruction and physical training’ and insisting that young people should receive physical education for ‘at least an hour each morning and evening’. Boxing was particularly important for boys, as a developer of discipline and aggression, but also because Hitler thought that it prevented

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‘the premature onset of sexual imaginings’. This latter was dangerous not least because it might lead to consorting with prostitutes and to the threat of syphilis, racialised as a Jewish disease. The priority was to ‘nip these evils in the bud; it was essential that ‘‘through sport and gymnastics . . . boys should be hardened like iron’’, to prevent them from succumbing to the need to satisfy their senses’.26 In the middle sections of the Wake, Shem and Shaun are differently hardened. In II.ii, as we have seen, education most specifically circulates around the arcane and the sexual – the climax of the episode being Shaun’s terrified encounter with his mother’s exposed genitals, a further overblown and hugely deconstructive treatment of the woman as earth mother fantasy, as well as one of many adventures in incest. In II.i, for example, Shem and Shaun are much engaged by an erotically charged game in which the colour of their sister’s underwear has to be guessed. This game is the context for an intense rivalry between the brothers and an expert display of teasing entertainingly provided by Issy. One characteristic of the subsequent positioning is, once more, a great outpouring of erotic ambiguities where a riddle becomes ‘my middle I ope before you’ (248.11–12); flower games get caught up in ‘deflowering’ (see Glugg’s hope to be ‘cutting up with a pair of sissers and to be buytings of their maidens and spitting their heads into their facepails’ [my emphasis] – 250.8–9) and other fantasies (Issy ‘has a lovestalk onto herself and the tot of all the tits of their understamens is as open as he can posably she’ – 236.34–35), and so on. What is particularly interesting for our primary purpose here is just how much the critical perspective of such episodes is dependent on vulgarity for its delivery. In this sense the vulgar is much more than just demotic ‘expression’. Apart from anything else, it frames a reality that is profoundly at odds with the fascist world vision. Here, as elsewhere in the Wake, ‘filth’ and the vulgar remain prurient in some senses but they are also made to work, to function in association with serious critical attitudes. It is for this reason that the term ‘filth’ becomes so suggestive, indicative of agendas which are key to the Wake. It resonates against a demotic culture with which the Wake identifies; it also features as a most powerful weapon, enabling a deeply serious comedy to puncture and ruin powerful discourses of state. In a very real sense, ‘filth’ denotes not just the manner in which the Wake takes a critical perspective, but also the grounds on which it does so. Nowhere is this more evident than where the ‘filth’ of the Wake directly addresses the sexual hygienics, or ‘carnal hygiene’ (573.21), of the racial state.

Filth, fascism and the family ‘THE

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SECRET EMPIRE OF THE SNAKE’: SEX AND THE RACIAL STATE

Since the very early days of Wake criticism, connections between discourses of race and sexuality have been framed by Irish cultural contexts. Adaline Glasheen, for example, noted the complex interweaving that the Wake makes between the Tristan and Isolde story, in which Tristan steals an Irish princess, and other ‘folk’ traditions which similarly conceptualised Ireland as a beautiful woman stolen by ‘the ‘invader’ or the ‘stranger’. ‘Joyce’, she writes, was ‘always aware of the hurt of the Irish male at the sexual success of the conquering stranger.’27 Actually, Joyce, who himself stole away with a ‘country’ girl, was more distanced from the romantic iconography of Irish cultural nationalism than this might suggest. I have indicated elsewhere just how much Ulysses is penetrated by a comic interference with the nationalist ‘imagology’ that cultural revivalism took so seriously.28 Finnegans Wake joins in with this disruption, but it also responds to a darker context, where connections between love and devotion to the nation take on a much harder edge. I want to argue that this responds to European population politics of the 1920 and 1930s. Here the medievalist fantasies of the male devotee worshipping at the shrine of a feminised nation still carried considerable currency, not least in Ireland itself. By the later period, however, such fantasies were cohabiting weirdly with the brutally material discourses of scientific racism. By the end of the 1940s, a transformation had become fully rendered. Romantic cultural nationalism became widely associated with highly dubious racial attitudes and illiberalism, a process which is configured in several ways in the Wake, as narrative for example, but also in terms of the deployment of nationalist iconography. From the very beginning of the Wake, the closeness of cultural nationalism to the obsessional discourses of the masculinised racial state is clear. The opening landscape clearly does invoke the wandering crone and the lost sons of Ireland, but this set of icons is invigorated by a newer system of signs focused more especially on the male body – thus the many references to erections, or failed erections, especially in I.i, which are closely connected with the rise and fall of states and nations (see ‘Gricks may rise and Troysirs fall’, 11.35–36). Hysteria about the decline of the racial stock is laughed at through the landscape of the reclining giant and his flaccid penis which contextualises the exhortations to ‘rise up’ in the name of the nation. There are frequent calls to the men and women of the Wake to come to the rescue of the state by fulfilling their reproductive duty, but to no

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avail – thus there is much ‘condomnation of his totomptation and for the duration till his repepulation’ (362.3–4). The initial excursion, then, is into a range of signification that seems to have as much in common with European population politics – and with the realities that made pronatalist policies so notoriously unworkable – as with the genderised symbols of a specifically Irish cultural nationalism. It echoes with the call to the citizen to multiply, but, equally, configures a much more complex sexual world where sexuality refuses to be confined to the reproductive function. In this the Wake images both the racial state and its defeat as purist discourses drown in a mess of innuendo and vulgarity and sexual practices slide into realms that have nothing to do with reproduction. The many references to oral sex (see, for example, ‘Amoricas Champius, with one aragan throust, druve the massive virilvigtoury flshpst the both lines of forwards (Eburnea’s down, boys!) rightjingbangshot into the goal of her gullet’, 395.35–396.2); anal sex, or a bit ‘of brown’ (394.9); incest, voyeurism, and so on, constitute a sexual menu that simply did not figure in the purist world of sexual hygiene. They represent a more private and individuated world of sexual desire and fantasy that was entirely inconsistent with reproductive sexuality for the state or race – they draw attention, in short, to the contradictions between ‘lawanorder on loveinardor’ (374.16). Masturbation is of particular relevance here, as the cluster of allusions to male masturbation in I.i demonstrates. Here, too, nonreproductive sexual practice and vulgarity are ironically connected to ideas about the nation’s health. Katherine Strong extols the virtues of a city life where females outnumber men to the tune of ‘sytty maids per man’, but, echoing the concerns of degeneration theorists everywhere, sees a modern generation of men who would rather play with themselves, ‘look what you have in your handself’ (20.19–21). Not that early generations are much better in this respect. Although ‘Bygmester Finnegan’ has ‘a gamier cock than Pete, Jake or Martin’ (26.5), he is also famously ‘of the Stuttering Hand’ (4.18), and at 21.10–11 Jarl van Hoother in the story of the prankquean lays ‘cold hands on himself’. A few lines later, the temperature has changed but not much else for he is still ‘shaking warm hands with himself’ (36). Section I.vi proves one of the richest seams to mine for ‘filth’, and once more there are strong connections between race, state and nation. The first question here designates a figure whose heroic status depends on him being a ‘futter of magd’ (129.4), which in turn implicates a ceremony of state and empire possession, for Finn MacCool, in an interesting conflation of ‘Celtic’ and British race fantasies, ‘had sevenal successive coloured serebanmaids on the same big white drawringroam horthrug’ (126.19–20).

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He has simultaneously fulfilled and compromised his obligations to secure the future of his race by ‘sas seed enough for a semination’, but still enjoys what is apparently even more forbidden fruit and ‘sues skivvies on the sly’ (130.17–18). Most obviously, Shaun’s attacks on Shem in I.vi and I.vii exploit heightened fears of sexual contamination and degeneration that belong more to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s than to Ireland or Britain at the fin de sie`cle. Indeed, as much as anything they echo fascist propaganda. The extended demolition of Shem in I.vii in particular is fascistic and again produces a further great crop of the vulgar. Much of it is associated with Shaun’s apparent disgust at dysgenic sexual practices, where sex is removed from social purpose and the national or racial good. As in the hysterics of eugenic literature where the ‘backward’, the racially inferior or the degenerate, threatened the state of the nation, Shaun’s Shem is both a ‘mental and moral defective’ (177.16). His alleged ‘feeblemindedness’ is matched by a disorderly, filthy life – his home being littered with ‘burst loveletters’ (183.11) and other ‘seedy ejaculations’ (183.23). An ‘unhealthy’, ‘immoral’ and ‘nonproductive’ sexuality, however, is the deepest signature of Shem’s status as a ‘degenerate’. He is a bachelor who actively pursues ‘violent abuse of self and others’ (183.2–3), a ‘self valeter by choice’ (184.11) whose marital status is ‘Handmarried ’ (176.13). This passion for self-pleasure, however, is only one of several reasons why Shem fails to ‘repopulate the land of . . . [his] birth’ (188.35). Quite apart from the use of condoms, Shem swims in ‘the pool of Sodom’ (188.23–24). If he has a girlfriend, she is not some ‘nice girl’, conscious of her duties as mother to the race, but ‘somewhure’, one of the ‘bearded jezebelles’ who also ‘[o]ft in the smelly night will . . . wallow for a clutch of the famished hand’ (192.23–25). A fetishist ‘Jymes who wishes to hear from wearers of abandoned female costumes’ (181.27–28), Shaun’s Shem constitutes a comedy caricature of the nightmare degenerate – the ubiquitous profligate who seriously stalked the pages of a huge Western literature on sexual hygiene, social reform and racial purity. He figures largely, for example, in Mein Kampf: With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and is the Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardisation, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.29

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There is, I would argue, a great deal to be understood about the Wake by placing it against such discourses – certainly about such episodes as I.vi, I.vii and III.ii. The latter has been discussed elsewhere in this study in terms of the Wake narrative where Shaun in fascist guise displaces not just his father but the older world configured in him. It is unnecessary to repeat just how much this implicates fascist discourse and ideology, but, at the same time, impossible to ignore III.ii in a discussion of vulgarity in the Wake. This is the episode that, above all others, anatomises the brutality of fascism, displacing its self-proclaimed ‘hardness’ and ‘fanaticism’ with the small and grubby psychological motivations of masculinist insecurities. Not surprisingly, this is also the single most vulgar section in the whole of the Wake. In its forty-five pages there are hundreds of innuendoes and double entendres – those already referred to in Chapter Three nowhere near exhaust the possibilities. From the beginning, where an inflated Jaun has the girls ‘feeling his full fat pouch for him so tactily and jingaling his jellybags’ (430.30–31), through his alarming ‘teat-a-teat’ with ‘viragos intactas’ (432.11), to the final incestuous orgy of ‘reverse positions’ (‘Lets have a fuchu all round, courting cousins! . . . Shuck her! Let him! What’s he good for! Shuck her more!’, 466.4–16), this is truly a wild ‘indecores of estreme voyoulence’ (432.31). Behind the paternalist poses and the talk of health and efficiency and moral purity, there is an uncontrollable and pathological lust. Not simply a configuration of the ‘dirty old bigger’ (444.14), this is clearly something very much darker. Sitting in the ‘lap of lechery’ (451.30–31), the ‘Magnaffica’ (463.06 – a ‘magnafica’ in Italian slang is a ‘cunt-eater’) at the heart of the chapter is a vicious brutalist: Snap! I’ll tear up your limpshades and lock all your trotters in the closet, I will, and cut your silkskin into garters. You’ll give up your ask unbrodhel ways when I make you reely smart. So skelp your budd and kiss the hurt! . . . There’s a lot of lecit pleasure coming bangslanging your way, Miss Pinpernelly satin. For your own good, you understand, for the man who lifts his pud to a woman is saving the way for kindness . . . For I’ll just draw my prancer and give you one splitpuck in the crupper, you understand . . . Lights out now (bouf!), tight and sleep on it. And that’s how I’ll bottle your greedypuss beautibus for ye, me bullin heifer, for ’tis I that have the peer of arrams that carry a wallop. Between them. (445.4–25)

In the references to lampshades and skinning there is a mind-bending reminder of Derrida’s strange notion that Ulysses and the Wake could entail the future – not that one would want to attempt any development of that idea.30 Apart from anything else, it is unnecessary to the more serious observation that with this collation of lying paternalism and brutal masculinism, Joyce is placing us close to the fascist mind.

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The essential propaganda battle fought by German fascism was over the substantiation of Nazism as a force for moral good. As opposed to the situation in Italy where Mussolini was ‘acclaimed’ by conservative forces in what was effectively a power vacuum, the NSPAD had a much stronger electoral presence. This meant that German fascism had to be sold and bought, as well as enforced. Typically it presented itself as a profoundly moral and deeply ‘spiritual’ ideology, although its morals and puritanism were of a ‘modern’ kind to the extent that both were shaped by the ‘science’ that normalised anodyne versions of sexual behaviour and constructed race identity as biological reality. This surely is what Foucault means when he refers to the ‘na¨ıvety’ and ‘cunning’ of fascism, its absurd insistence on a virtuous sexuality divorced from ambiguity, transgression, lust and insecurity, and on race and ‘blood’ as both the essential spirit and material of modern culture and society. From such positions Nazism defined itself against what was propagandised as the decadence of the republic it displaced – Weimar was thus anathematised as being communist, degenerate and alien (i.e. Jewish) – and centred its own distinctive moral vision on the concept of racial health. Here the naked Aryan body idealised in Nazi painting and sculpture was neither the object of shame and embarrassment, nor the product of a lustful imagination – it was just beauty, realistically depicted and justifiably venerated. Adolf Ziegler’s triptych The Four Elements, a painting depicting four naked women sitting on what looks like a long office desk, an emblem of the masculinist state presumably, is suggestive here of Nazi propaganda as a whole. In part this is because the painting is so iconic, but there is also the fact that it enjoyed such a suggestive situational privilege. Created by the President of the Reich Chamber of Art, this work was not, in the end, put on display for public edification at all. Indeed, for all its potential power as a propagandist piece, it was removed from the public view and repositioned above the fireplace in the living room of the Fu¨hrer’s Munich residence. Here it fulfilled its function, in private. The ‘na¨ıvety’ of such representations and of their signification was indeed ‘cunning’. It rested on a stock of commonsense, ‘simplistic’ notions, and was supported by impermeable discourses operating across the range of culture. Every bit as unbelievable as the ‘realist’ painting on Hitler’s wall, these were characterised by the same set of markers denoting the purity, whiteness, healthiness and ‘raciality’ of the fascist state. How best to dispose of such nonsense? I want to suggest finally that the Wake’s use of filth and vulgarity is helpful here, even where it is not specifically concerned with such issues as the family, the race and the state. By its very

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nature, the vulgar breaks through the racial state, even in the absence of any precise point of reference. As a comic dispersal of what in nationalist discourse is handled with such reverence, it is disruptive and deflating, a product of the private sphere that nevertheless spills over in the public world in highly subversive ways. In this connection it is worth emphasising that the dark undercurrents of III.ii constitute a violent and dangerous perversion of a more ‘everyday’ interest in the dirty and the grubby. Shaun’s vicious outburst has a precise historical location and the slow burning out of the Shaun identity is accompanied by a different and more familiar register of ‘filth’. His retreat does not produce a cleaned-up language environment, but one which is vulgar in a more familiar way. In their way III.iii, III.iv and IV.i are every bit as loaded with innuendo and double entendre as the earlier episodes. Thus the return of HCE in III.iii, announced with a recognition of the new political order (‘Eternest cittas, heil’, 532.6), does not bring any diminution in the sheer relative volume of vulgarity. HCE might have been ‘away’, but he proudly claims that in the land of the deceased, ‘I perpetually kept my ouija ouija wicket up’ (532.17–18) and remains as ‘cleanliving as could be’ (532.16) – though there was the ‘youthful gigirl frifrif friend . . . I would touch to her dot and feel most greenily of her unripe ones’ (532.20–23). From here to the end of III.iii there is a great surge of slipperiness which exposes HCE’s and ALP’s intimate secrets, all their ‘crimes’, once again – how the latter ‘spoiled her undines’ (547.8); how HCE would ‘[i]n spect of her beavers’ (537.32); and how he ‘did raft her flumingworthily’ (547.16); ‘she chauffed her fuesies at my Wigan’s jewels’ (551.3); and ‘peddled freely in the scrub’ (551.9–10); and HCE ‘did upreized my magicianer’s puntpole’ (547.23). Clearly, the darker usages in III.ii do not render the Wake moralistic in any straightforward way. They anatomise a particularly ugly politics, but that does not, of course, undermine the essentially comic disposition of the Wake, which continues through to its ‘end’ and remains much attached to ‘filth’. In short, the general handling of filth and vulgarity is crucially related to both the Wake’s comedic and its political status – and to be offended by it, as some readers clearly have been, is a serious disadvantage. The Wake is funny precisely because it is so vulgar. With that comedy the ‘na¨ıve cunning’ of the authoritarian state collapses. At the same time as it renders certain kinds of politics ‘unreasonable’, the vulgar also takes a cultural position. For the vulgar belongs in crucial ways to the demotic and the everyday. It is not simply a language of the streets, but it does belong to informality, to private realms or to public environments where the private

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still holds court to some degree. Oddly, and for all the complexity of the Wake’s play with vulgarity and ‘filth’, this is the one place where ‘strangeness’ is much moderated by the everyday. We do not need a concordance or a Joyce expert to explicate when the Wake refers to an ‘algas bumgalowre’ (496.13), or to appreciate ‘the man and his outstanding attraction’ (530.7–8). The drift of ‘Excellent view from front. Sidome. Female imperfectly masking male’ (582.30–31) is clear and even more complex sets seem to be rendered more manageable by the vulgar, as in ‘Tipatonguing him on in her pigeony linguish, with a flick at the bails for lubrication’ (584.3–4) and the action which ‘repeals an act of union to unite in bonds of schismacy . . . Withdraw your member!’ (585.25–26). Quite a few critics have argued that the idea of the Wake ‘communicating’ is no more than a disastrous fantasy on Joyce’s part; I just make the point here that, for all its difficulties, the Wake actually involves a great deal of commonplace experience and a great deal of that is dependent for its reproduction on languages of demotic, everyday life.

CHAPTER

8

Race and reading: conclusion

The structuring principle behind this account has been to take vertical slices through Finnegans Wake. In part this approach was suggested by the nature of the material, which seemed suited to thematising, but it also responded to concerns about the implications of attempting a horizontal reading. With the latter the temptation is to account for the Wake not necessarily in its entirety, but as an entirety, a whole that is constructed according to structural principles in the way that Ulysses is. If such principles exist, however, they would not just link the Wake back to Ulysses. Inevitably the discovery of a coherent structure and a reading that rendered the Wake ‘whole’ would establish a position for the Wake in the widest contexts of literary and aesthetic tradition. In particular, the horizontalist reading, with its focus on a centralised, unfolding and ‘developing’ narratology, would imply a predisposition for formalist positions – if the Wake ‘makes sense’ as a linear text, then its essential, or perhaps primary, signification would derive from its own internal dynamics, as opposed to any engagement with wider society and culture. None of these positions, however, is established for the Wake. It is not simply that there are no agreed readings for this text, a position easily accommodated and, indeed, positively encouraged by literary criticism. The Wake throws the very idea of a ‘whole’ reading into utter confusion, with the result that the most basic principles behind ‘reading’ literature become entirely destabilised. Joyce, Race and ‘Finnegans Wake’ accepts that state of play, presenting itself not as a whole reading, or even a partial version of that possibility, but rather as a particular engagement with particular aspects of the Wake text. This account, then, does not fundamentally challenge the Wake’s unfortunate but justifiable reputation for unreadability with the recovery of a new master meaning, nor can its concluding chapter synthesise the whole reading that, in all probability, does not exist. Instead, it concentrates and draws out some of the implications that have been made about the ‘radicalism’ of the Wake in preceding 164

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chapters, contributing to the broad debate of how Finnegans Wake can be read in terms of its relationship with traditions of literary criticism. Not to be confused with the theoretical positioning that often occurs in introductions to books of this kind, the chapter is primarily concerned with a refocusing on the politics of race in the Wake, this time from a perspective of critical tradition, in order to position the current study against readings that have been formulated in the past. It is part of the process of pursuing such an aim to consider the issue of how critical traditions might themselves have been shaped by race identities and race discourse. INTEGRATED READINGS

Some of the problems associated with ‘conceptualist’ readings of the Wake, and they affect all such readings, including this one, are neatly demonstrated by one of the very early accounts. This is Frances Boldereff ’s Reading ‘Finnegans Wake’ (1959) which begins with an astonishing gambit that lays the cards on the table and folds the game at the very same time. ‘Why did Joyce write the book the way he did?’, she asks. ‘Why did he make his book so difficult that no one can read it? How can he be a great writer if no one understands him? The simple answer to these questions is that Joyce was an Irishman, writing in a method established a thousand years before in Ireland.’1 Drawing on Daniel Corkery’s hugely contested concept of the ‘hidden Ireland’, she then goes on to argue the case for the ‘secrecy’ of the Wake.2 There are two points that are of interest here. Firstly, there is the point concerning Ireland, which is not simply that Finnegans Wake is crucially ‘about’ or ‘of’ Ireland, but that, in Boldereff’s view, its difficulties in particular somehow belong to Ireland. In the case of Reading ‘Finnegans Wake’, they are a product of secret languages and lost cultures. Behind Boldereff ’s comment, of course, is a set of romantic responses formulated as Joyce’s authentic culture – in her account the Wake is a ‘recovery’ of that culture. Elsewhere, and in much more sophisticated readings, Ireland is constructed differently. In Thomas Hofheinz’s Joyce and the Invention of History, for example, it features as a patriarchy, a tired and failed masculinity of the colonial and postcolonial world. HCE, acculturated and politicised as ‘Anglo-Irish’, here becomes ‘a twentiethcentury male subject disintegrating amidst its own dream, reflecting the fragmentation of Irish history in the neural trauma of alcoholic sleep’.3 I make no comparison between Boldereff’s unfortunate sortie and Hofheinz’s useful and, in many ways, convincing contribution, other than this one – that both turn the monstrosity of the Wake into a thoroughly

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racialised event. The first does so in relation to a romanticised culture, the other to a pathologised (i.e. drink-ridden and masculinised) one, and in both there is a reminder, if one were needed, that the category of race is an important registration not only in the Joyce text itself, but also in readings of the Joyce text. Joyce, Race and ‘Finnegans Wake’ has no issue with accounts that contextualise the Wake in Ireland; indeed, it seeks to make a contribution in this respect. But it does point to instances where readings of ‘Joyce’s Ireland’ have proved problematic, reliant in some ways on stereotypes of the Irish and, in some cases, distortive of how the Wake really works. I have also made a case for a European reading of the Wake, not, as in an earlier critical tradition, in order to aestheticise the texts and sign them up to a European modernism, but, on the contrary, to contribute to a fuller politicising of the Joyce text. The politics of the Wake in this account, however much they make sense and resonate in Irish terms, do belong to a wider European context, one where race was not simply crucial in the articulation of political position, but an issue of life and death importance. The second and perhaps more fundamental point about Boldereff’s statement is that it makes a dramatic, exaggerated, play for the complete reading of the Wake, one that will expose the frameworks and reveal the essentials. This is characteristic of all conceptual readings to some degree. However much they may recognise the complexity and difficulty of the Wake, and even its irreducibility, the fact is that a conceptual reading stands or falls by how much of the Wake it lays bare and so there is always a movement towards the totalising position, which in theoretical terms means that conceptual readings tend towards the broadly conservative where the Wake, for all its innovation, becomes readable in recognisable ways. John Bishop’s Joyce’s Book of the Dark, one of the most remarkable conceptual readings of the Wake, is a case in point. It begins with a long recognition of the sheer difficulty of the Wake, one that in its final rendering of the virtues of the complex approaches the lyrical. The impossibleness of the Wake is a result of its wild ambition – to somehow reconvene the night, the dream, the unconscious and the primal; even to attempt to reduce it down is to miss the point entirely. ‘Had Joyce made Finnegans Wake less obscure than it is, he would have annihilated everything about his material that is most essential, most engaging, funniest and most profound . . . The obscurity of Finnegans Wake is its essence and glory.’4 Quite so, and one would think that such a position would make any ‘completist’ critical reading impossible, but, in fact, the next

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almost-400 pages of Bishop’s account are dedicated to a precise articulation not of a meaning of the Wake, but of something like its primary meaning. While Bishop acknowledges that ‘if one operates on the premise that Finnegans Wake reconstructs the night, the first preoccupation to abandon wholesale is that it ought to read anything at all like narrative or make sense as a continuous whole’,5 his entire study works to the contrary. The aim is precisely to make sense of the Wake, not to read in part or throw light on some particularly obscure corner, but to explicate ‘the whole’. Thus Finnegans Wake is determinedly reconstructed as a dream and its centralising consciousness is an unconscious dreamer. Freud is key here as one of the figures that makes the Wake ‘possible’, with even the obvious objections – that the Wake, however much it might evoke the parapraxes of a guilt-ridden conscious, is actually not guilty at all, for example – being glossed or simply ignored.6 The unconscious mind revealed in Joyce’s text, however, is not the mind of an individual, but of a primitive/modern everybody and the language, as well as building on parapraxes, is also a product of Joyce’s reading of Vico. The working of this latter is at the heart of Bishop’s account, for through the reading of Vico, Bishop claims the Holy Grail of Wake readings by ‘accounting’ for its ‘language’. He argues that all of Vico’s . . . humanity begins in an unconsciousness whose dynamic is revealed in the evolution of language and whose deep structure is yielded by etymology. Complementarily, Vico discovers that the etymological unlayering of modern languages, and the consciousness they make possible, allows the reconstruction of the unconscious mind out of which . . . humanity arose. By drawing on the etymons of Western language, Joyce could accordingly represent a human mind returned, in sleep, to equivalent unconsciousness.7

This is one of the key ideas of Bishop’s study and it rests on the assumption that the language ‘distortion’ of Finnegans Wake is actually no distortion at all, in the sense that Joyce’s ‘puns’ play across the history of words where meanings change, through the etymons (‘the ‘‘true’’ or primitive form of a word’), as it were.8 Vico, always the key source for the Wake, is tied in to language, and the unconscious and the historicising dynamics of the Wake. Here then is something close to a framework that will allow for a complete reading of the Wake (it had a strong influence on Hofheinz, incidentally, who takes the same ingredients and works them through ‘Irish history’ instead of through Vico and language) and it operates in analogy to familiar literary concepts. A narrator is provided by the sleeper, a narrative by dream/primitive logic, and an aesthetic/discourse by Joyce’s application of Vico’s linguistic theories.

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A number of critics have attacked this whole-reading position, notably in the 1980s and from deconstructive allegiances. In 1989 Derek Attridge’s essay ‘Finnegans Awake: The Dream of Interpretation’ famously drew attention to the faulty evidence on which ‘dream’ readings of the Wake, like Bishop’s, were based. He pointed, for example, to a very serious problem in Bishop’s methodology, ‘his manipulation of the text in order to make it appear that one strand of thematic concerns – those relating to night, darkness, and the sleeping body – is more prominent than all the others’. Attridge continues: ‘he achieves this by weaving together in his own sentences fragments from widely diverse parts of the book, and by privileging one out of many meanings of a portmanteau when this one alone suits his argument’.9 The more fundamental objection, however, was to what Attridge sees as nothing more than theoretical assumptions on Bishop’s part. While acknowledging that such strategies as creating the dreamer subject might be necessary in order for ‘conventional’ criticism to achieve any kind of purchase on the Wake and, indeed, had been ‘productive’, there can be no doubting the wider implications behind this controversial piece. For Attridge, the dream idea was no more than a reassuring ‘interpretative frame’, and in that sense it represented an ‘inadequate’ and ‘conservative’ position. Attridge was surely correct, in his criticism of both methodology and his assessment of the cultural politics behind Bishop’s account. Here, however, I want briefly to draw attention to a further difficulty with Joyce’s Book of the Dark – with its view of the linguistic basis of the Wake and Vico’s part in it. This idea is certainly as important as Bishop’s reliance on the dreamer subject and is equally problematic, because whatever else the language ‘distortions’ are in the Wake, it is entirely certain that there is no singular principle behind them. As any page of the Wake will demonstrate, the vast majority of the words that go to make up this text quite simply do not depend on punning through etymons, and with this, Bishop’s idea about Wake language falls apart. Take, for example, these words taken quite randomly from an equally randomly picked page, which is 584 – towards the end of III.iii: Declare to ashes and teste his metch! Three for two will do for me and he for thee and she for you. Goeasyyosey, for the grace of the fields, or hooley pooley, cuppy, and we’ll both be bye and by caught in the slips for fear he’d tyre and burst his dunlops and waken her bornybabies making his boobybabies. The game old merrimynn, square to leg, with his lolleywide towelhat and his hobbsy socks and his wisden’s bosse and his norsery pinafore and his gentleman’s grip and his playaboy’s plunge and his flannelly feelyfooling, treading her hump and

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hambledown like a maiden wellheld, ovalled over, with her crease where the pads of her punishments ought to be womanish rights when, keek, the hen in the doran’s shantyqueer began in kikkery kek to laugh it off, yeigh, yeigh, neigh neigh, the way she was wuck to doodle-doo by her gallows bird (how’s that? Noball, he carries his bat!) nine hundred and dirty too not out . . . (584.9–24)

A great many bits and pieces go towards producing this, though it should be emphasised that many of the individual word units are not actually ‘composite’ at all or in any way distorted – the same is true of all the grammar. There clearly are conventions to the Wake, so much so that the idea of Wake-speak constituting a ‘new’ language that must be accounted for in terms of a specific theory seems to miss the point. This passage does, however, involve lots of verbal play, particularly derived from cricket, which is the primary metaphor for sexual practice and performance and, since cricket is the British Empire game par excellence, it seems quite likely that we are once more in the realms of race and gender discourse. There are plays generated from popular culture also – popular songs (‘Tea for Two’) and singers (Gracie Fields) are twisted into Wake sound. The Kallikaks feature, as does Madame Blavatsky, nursery talk, and so on. What there is not, however, is a single ‘distortion’ that depends on, or even evokes, etymon. It is clearly not a historical order of linguistics that underpins the subversions of this text but, on the contrary, a much more interesting and demotic form of chaos. Were Bishop’s version of things true, of course, it would actually place Joyce close to the techniques, if not the agendas, of historical linguistics, an idea which is clearly not supported by this current reading. The point being that the ‘whole-reading’ approach to the Wake has often involved a degree of desperation, a ‘going for broke’ syndrome that Joyce, Race and ‘Finnegans Wake’ has tried to avoid, in part by taking a vertical approach through ‘themes’ rather than a horizontal reading from I.i to VI.i. The latter, frankly, would encourage precisely the kind of totalising that has produced so many problematic interpretations of the Wake in the past. It may be tempting to think of Wake language, in its entirety, in terms of an assault on historical linguistics and the Aryan myth, or to read the narrative of HCE’s dispossession by Shaun as the ‘key’ Wake narrative. Similarly, one could make great claims about the centrality of Joyce’s resistance to the corruption of a ‘good’ Enlightenment tradition embodied by ideas of ‘lebriety, frothearnity and quality’ (133.31–32). The implications of the idea that the language of the Wake, far from representing dream logic, or, indeed, other kinds of prerational and ‘primitive’ modes of thinking, is actually formulated out of various kinds of antireason posing as reason,

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could be advanced well beyond the claims made here, as could the suggestion that the Wake writes itself against fascism. But such temptations have been resisted, partly out of caution and scepticism, but also from more theoretical and politicised considerations. For as Attridge pointed out in the ‘final proposition’ of his 1989 essay, it is not a ‘disinterested’ academia that has produced conceptual accounts of the Wake. ‘The question of the relative usefulness of these approaches’, he writes, ‘cannot be separated from the cultural history from which they arise and in which they are, and always will be, embedded.’10 Certainly the most committed conceptual accounts are often linked to conservative agendas, to romantic and elitist ideologies of such categories as ‘literature’ and ‘author’, but also to even wider cultural politics. To the extent that conceptual studies have been a product of the American academy, the brand of universalism they traditionally detect in the Joyce text has also been one that could loosely be described as an American one. Here, it could be argued, Wake criticism has been shaped by a still prevalent grandmaster version of modern American history. Key to such a view would be the identification of an ‘end of ideology’ optimism, associated with the 1950s and often theorised in terms of the universalisation of American values and culture. The collapse of this ‘consensus’ into post-Vietnam fragmentation provides a kind of backdrop against which the Wake’s sad but comic and all-embracing ‘tale’ has been convened in American interpretation as a postmodern myth of eternal rise and fall, a lyrical epic that depicts ‘a heroic and foolish humanity as it tries to tell its way through the nightmare of history’.11 More importantly, however, for this account, conceptualism has also often proved most committed to universalist readings where the kind of historical and political readings undertaken in Joyce, Race and ‘Finnegans Wake’ are relegated to an entirely secondary, if not negligible, position. THE DEPOLITICISED WAKE

There are a number of contexts to the depoliticising of the Wake. One early expression was linked to ideas about Joyce’s growing ‘maturity’ and ‘acceptance’ of life. Here, just as ‘The Dead’ is sometimes seen as a partial reconciliation with Dublin, so the Wake was realised as a kind of rapprochement with the world. In the 1966 collection Twelve and a Tilly, edited by Jack P. Dalton and Clive Hart, Fredrick J. Hoffman expressed such a view, explaining how if ‘Joyce began his early career hating and fearful of the flux, chaos and disorder, he ended it, and Finnegans Wake, by making

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a virtue of the reality of flux’. Hence the Wake became ‘an immense ‘‘accommodation’’ of the many . . . It is not so much that Joyce has simply ‘‘got over’’ his rebellion, but rather that the distance . . . which maturity put at his disposal helped him immeasurably in assessing the actual depth and value of the noise and vibration of human ambience.’12 This kind of approach shaded off into the more standard view of the universalist Wake, positioned above the contamination of specific history and politics. In a recent essay Finn Fordham has traced the broad outlines of this ‘universalist’ tradition: One of the most enduring universal myths about Finnegans Wake is that it constructs a myth of enduring universals. It is not hard to trace how this myth grew in selective critical responses. Seeds of the idea were sown in transition by Eugene Jolas, then nurtured in Frank Budgen’s The Making of Ulysses, to emerge prominently in Levin’s humanist and Joseph Campbell’s mythographical responses. Ellmann drew on it for his biography . . . we might read the myth as a seemingly benign attempt to push Joyce’s last novel out of the shadows of its curious eccentric unreadable particularity and towards a universally absorbable relevance and importance, to make it a secular bible for a nuclear world which needs figures of the universal for its post-war transnational institutions and for the intercultural world of globalized trade. Whether in Dublin, Ga. (alluded to on FW, page 3) or Chechnya’s capital Grozny (alluded to on page 353), we are all supposed to identify the universal hero of this myth, rising and falling, and even identify with him as he falls and rises within us. We can therefore feel what the universally human is and what universal man is, together comprising the grail of humanist knowledge; ‘we’ being that tiny minority of people in the world who have read Finnegans Wake, or at least know by repute of its universal status.13

This did not necessarily mean that the Joyce text was taken to be nonpolitical, or apolitical, but, more usually, that its politics were subsumed in a wider universe. Here the depth of its radicalism was assured, but the terms in which it engaged were entirely obscure. To return briefly to Joyce’s Book of the Dark, which is certainly one of the most distinguished of universalist approaches to the Wake, Bishop does indeed delineate a political dimension to the Wake. ‘Far from marking a withdrawal from a civilisation in crisis’, he writes, ‘Finnegans Wake in an odd way crystallizes that crisis and not least through its assault on the institution of language through which all the other institutions of a patriarchal culture are transmitted from parent to child and from generation to generation, over and over again ‘‘the seim anew’’.’ The conflicts ‘assailing the ‘‘perpendicular person’’ shown snoring away . . . the head of a household and a beleaguered patriarch in fact – are representative of larger crises agitating the social world of which he is a negligibly small but nonetheless formative part’.14

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What is noticeable here, and particularly so in an account that is otherwise so scholarly and impressively thorough, is the curious emptiness surrounding such terms as ‘crisis’. The only real clue as to what kind of ‘conflict’ Joyce addresses in the Wake is perhaps implied in the word ‘patriarch’. But the dehistoricising of the Wake was by no means solely the product of liberalist traditions, as Fordham acknowledges. It spread over into what would appear to be quite contrary critical approaches. Indeed, the ascendancy of ‘theory’ in the 1970s had this in common with what it necessarily conjured as the old establishment: it, too, had no real interest in textual readings that were precisely historical and political. This is not to say that nothing separated deconstruction from, say, Northrop Frye’s version of ‘structure’; they were, of course, quite oppositional in most respects, fundamentally so in terms of the strategies, linguistic and epistemological, with which they approached literature. The point, however, is that for all this difference they were both cavalier, if not downright hostile, towards culturalism and the historically specific. Writing in 1996, Margot Norris, one of the central figures in deconstructive readings of the Wake, gives a concise analysis of this development and its effect on Joyce studies, highlighting some interesting continuities between early and later Joyce criticism, again through the figure of Jolas: Texts like Finnegans Wake, with a foregrounded poetics of linguistic self-absorption, tend to be turned in upon themselves by their critics, with the result that their ‘political’ potential takes chiefly a metaphysical rather than a historicized form; ‘The Revolution of the Word’ to which Eugene Jolas assimilates ‘Work in Progress’ in the 1920s refers to the philosophical proto deconstructions of avant-garde art minus the historical politics. Jolas thus inaugurates the vexing problematising of the ‘political’ in avant-garde art and theory that, in Wake criticism of the 1970s and the 1980s, uses language as the field and paradigm for the play of power operative in the nonmaterialist social realm conceptualised as the symbolic order. Finnegans Wake thus came to be read politically with relatively little reference to ‘history’ conceptualised as a moment of temporality.15

There was never much question about the radicalism of the Joyce text – this was a given, essential to almost all accounts that argued for the cultural significance of Joyce’s last work – but the terms of reference contextualizing its engagement were, as Norris says, very vague, and it was on this basis, and probably only this basis, that quite oppositional schools of Wake criticism resonated familiarly against each other. Thus Derrida insisted on the promise of a transgressive Wake that targeted nothing less than rationality, progress and modernity. The ‘most powerful project for programming

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over the centuries the totality of research in the onto-logico-encylopedicfield’ (i.e. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake), Derrida wrote, both encompasses the ‘onto-logico-encyclopedic field’ (i.e. the Enlightenment project) and exposes its ambiguities, gaps and inconsistencies. The mature Joyce text is both an encyclopaedic configuration of the Enlightenment and a performance of its deconstruction.16 But, as with Bishop’s account of the transgressive, it is difficult to know exactly what is involved here. Surely Derrida could not have intended to position Joyce entirely outside of the Enlightenment, extricated from all complicity with the Western intellectual tradition? However much he may have been sensitive to the inconsistencies of reason and rationality, to say nothing of the failure of its idealisms and its downright hypocrisies, Joyce was attached to the modern world in all kinds of ways, just as, Foucault tells us, we all must be – indeed, by comparison with the modernist intelligentsia generally, Joyce positively embraced urban modern life. There were elements of the Nietszchean iconoclast about him, but he was also, and famously, a subject of the Enlightenment, neither totally ‘for’ or ‘against’ it, nor engaged in a purely ‘dialectical’ engagement with its ‘good’ and ‘bad’ elements, but, rather, ambiguously positioned within what Foucault at his most brilliant calls ‘the contemporary limits of the necessary’, where the key dynamic is exercised not so much by cool logic as by our sense of ‘what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects’.17 Ironically enough, ‘radical’ interpretative criticism was accounting for the ‘radicalism’ of the Wake with the kind of generality also deployed in ‘conservative’ conceptualist accounts of the Wake. In both there was the same practical effect of removing Joyce from any precise politics or precise history. In one tradition the radical position of the Wake text seemed vaguely constituted by a serio-comic expression of a downcast humanity, and, in the other, by a pointlessly endless play of open meaning. Joyce, Race and ‘Finnegans Wake’ very specifically addresses such vagueness and generality and constructs a particular history and politics in which the Wake is inserted, but it hardly does so in a vacuum. On the contrary, this particular study comes at a time when ‘Joyce and History’ has become a fully formed division of the Joyce establishment. Between Norris’s plea for the ‘material’ study of Joyce in 1996 and the present time, a great deal of work has been dedicated precisely to that end, so much so that it is quite possible to argue that ‘Joyce and History’, along with its variant ‘Joyce and Ireland’ – which sometimes features as ‘Joyce, Britain and Ireland’ – has become the new Joyce orthodoxy.

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Joyceans have also always been interested in historical contexts to Joyce, especially Irish contexts, but in the 1990s what had been something of a marginal activity moved much closer to the centre with a series of books carrying such titles as James Joyce and The Question of History (James Fairhall, 1993) and James Joyce and the Language of History (Robert Spoo, 1994). It should be said, though, that not all of this work responded to Norris’s concern about the abstraction and self-referential nature of academy Joyce criticism. Indeed, much of it was confirming in this respect. For some Joyceans, the turn towards ‘Joyce and History’ has involved reading Joyce as an intellectual engaged with the subject of history – that is, with history as historiography – rather than as a historical subject himself positioned in society and culture. Thus in the former study, Fairhall’s, Joyce’s fiction becomes not so much a text formulated out of and constitutive of historical culture but, rather, a ‘contribution’ to a debate often seen as critical in terms of the Western intellectual tradition and involving the question ‘What is history?’18 Even critics linked to postcolonial traditions, and thus concerned with more immediate political and cultural contexts, have warmed to this idea of history in the abstract. Perhaps the most suggestive reading here, especially for Wake readers, is again Hofheinz’s Joyce and the Invention of Irish History, a study which does indeed invoke an Irish cultural locus, but which insists on locating the Wake’s primary meaning elsewhere. However suggestive Hofheinz may find the Irish ‘perspective’, it is not, I would argue, fundamentally explored in terms of the Joyce subject or the Joyce text. More substantially, Ireland remains ‘background’, utilised for the apparent angle it provides in terms of an assumed philosophical view on the nature of a more universalised history. Thus the central understanding in Joyce and the Invention of Irish History is postmodern. It also owes something to deconstruction, reproducing the Wake as a staging of ‘humanity’s attempts to account for its own experience by presenting history as invention, a game of improvisation predicated on both the power of explanatory meaning and the abysmal uncertainty which makes explanation meaningful’.19 What Norris and others had in mind in the mid-1990s was less ‘philosophically’ geared and more implicated with lived experience. ‘The Wake’s self-reflexivity’, she wrote, should be given ‘a historical turn towards a materialist, social and geopolitical specificity’, dependent on the material fabric of Joyce’s ‘life and times’, a fabric used not to find footnotes to the Joyce text but in order to formulate readings

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of the central Joycean agendas.20 By constructing a curiously scholarly Joyce, critics like Fairhall and Spoo have tended to work against such a criticism. Their analyses, often revealing and even compelling, nevertheless underplay the place of the phenomenological world in Joyce’s fiction; they have also had the effect of displacing the passion and humour of his work with a kind of superior contemplation about ‘history’, which usually says more about fantasies of academic culture than it does about the Joyce text. Elsewhere, however, historical and political readings have taken on a more human form, and it is here that the idea of race and Joyce studies has become both important and controversial, especially in the context of the Irish academy. This is hardly the place to do any serious justice to the work of such figures as Seamus Deane, Luke Gibbons, Declan Kiberd and David Lloyd.21 Enough to say that the complex cultural controversies that they and their colleagues have been working through have been producing important work since the mid-1980s. While the output of conceptual work directly on Joyce, and especially the Wake, has been quite limited from this quarter, all studies of Joyce must now take place in the context of such key texts as Deane’s Celtic Revivals (1987) and Gibbons’s Transformations in Irish Culture (1996), for these have been responsible for the steady dismantling of romantic and often na¨ıve versions of Irish culture and its historical development. Revisionist versions of Joyce have been part of this process, with the result that the ‘most secure assumptions about his [Joyce’s] life and work’, that he rejected both ‘British and Roman imperialism’ and ‘Irish nationalism and literature . . . turned away from his early commitment to socialism and devoted himself instead to a highly apolitical and wonderfully arcane practice of writing’, have been decisively challenged. Deane’s sense that ‘[i]t is seriously misleading to view Joyce in this way’22 has been crucial to Joyceans, as Vincent Cheng acknowledged in the introduction to his 1995 study, Joyce, Race and Empire: To regard Joyce merely as another icon in the Great Tradition of English Literature, without paying significant attention to the specific historical contexts and ideological contents of his work, is to act as if there were no difference between an Irish-Catholic writer from Dublin who (it is ironic to recall) spent much of his artistic energy trying to debunk both English ‘history’ and English literature (not to speak of dogmatic religious authority) – and, say, Lord Tennyson or Matthew Arnold.

Cheng goes on to discuss the political engagement of Joyce’s early writing: ‘[a] quick glance through the essays, speeches and newspaper articles he wrote as a young man reveals an intellect intensely concerned and pointedly thoughtful about the Irish ‘‘race,’’ the ‘‘Irish Question,’’ and imperial

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England’.23 From this position some of the most interesting accounts to date have focused, for very good reasons, on the Irish dimension, or, rather, the question of ‘Joyce and History’ has been formulated to a very considerable degree in terms related, however problematically, to colonial and postcolonial frameworks. Various points about such an orientation have been made throughout this study, and I want to return to them once more by emphasising that this influential incarnation of ‘Joyce and History’ is informed by insights into the treatment of race in Joyce’s text. It also constitutes a racialising of the Joyce text as ‘Irish’, usually in antithesis to more traditional notions of the ‘modern’ and ‘European’ Joyce. This has been a necessary and, in many ways, constructive ‘repossession’, but no one could imagine that it has been unproblematic, particularly where the imperative to construct a more singular narrative of risorgimento collides with what many would regard as the bifurcated and deeply conflictual forces of Irish, and English, history and culture. The rationale for such a positioning may be understandable and has been supported by fascinating engagements with theories of nationalism, but its articulation has brought about obvious difficulties.24 As I have argued elsewhere,25 Kiberd’s account of early modern Irish revivalism in the influential Inventing Ireland (1995) is revealing in this respect. Kiberd sees ‘Yeats’s generation’ as an agency which was somehow fated to transform the idea of nation into a fact of materiality. ‘That enterprise’, he writes, achieved nothing less than a renovation of Irish consciousness and a new understanding of politics, economics, philosophy, sport, language and culture in its widest sense. It was the grand destiny of Yeats’s generation to make Ireland once again interesting to the Irish, after centuries of enforced provincialism following the collapse of the Gaelic order in 1601. No generation before or since lived with such conscious national intensity or left such an inspiring (and, in some ways, intimidating) legacy. Though they could be fractious, its members set themselves the highest standards of imaginative integrity and personal generosity. Imbued with republican and democratic ideals, they committed themselves in no spirit of chauvinism, but in the conviction that the Irish risorgimento might expand the expressive freedoms of all individuals: that is the link between thinkers as disparate as Douglas Hyde and James Connolly, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and James Joyce.26

Such a statement can only be highly controversial. That revivalism had an important impact on ‘economics, philosophy, sport, language and culture’ may be incontrovertible, but the idea that this amounted to a transformation of ‘Irish consciousness’, effecting a cultural and political watershed,

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must surely be arguable. For all the revisionism of the past twenty years, many historians still maintain that this period remains characterised as much by continuities as transformation. It is, that is to say, as much postParnell, bourgeois and early modern as it is revolutionary and postcolonial. The suggestion that the revivalist achievement was to ‘make Ireland once again interesting’ again may be understandable, but it encodes a particularly ‘literary’ response to the social world that seems indifferent to a whole range of devastating problems that Ireland faced in the early twentieth century. At a time when government estimates conservatively identified more than 27,000 Dubliners living in houses unfit for human habitation, it might reasonably be asked whether the business of making Ireland ‘interesting’ constituted a destiny as grand as Kiberd suggests. Above all, however, it is the assertion of a single continuous tradition of revivalism, Kiberd’s ‘Irish risorgimento’, that is so problematic. His list of disparate yet representative thinkers might at least have included the architect of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revivalism. But, of course, it is not easy to identify Yeats, to say nothing of Standish O’Grady, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, with the democratic idealism of Connolly, and this is where the attempt to represent a syncretic culture of nationalism, marred only by a degree of fractiousness among an otherwise rosy ‘generosity’, replicates the conservative ideology of the Literary Revival. One result of this kind of simplification about a culture discursively constructed as ‘Irish’ is that the Joyce text can become seriously distorted as attempts are made to square it against particular versions of cultural history. Emer Nolan’s Joyce and Nationalism (1995), an interesting account that moved Joyce studies on in significant ways, is a good example. Here the ‘realism’ of Dubliners, usually understood in terms of the ‘healthy opposite to the national myth’, and seen in the context of European models, has to be reconfigured (following Jean-Paul Riquelme) in ‘Irish’ terms of the persistence of the ‘pre-realist (folktale)’ which persists in ‘postrealist (naturalistic) forms’. In this account the thoroughness with which Dubliners displaces revivalist aesthetics and assaults commonplace Celticist representations of the Irish identity is sacrificed for a more nativist reading which relies heavily on just two pages of ‘The Dead’ – the two final pages, of course, which have been the subject of more controversy than anything in the whole collection. Even more problematic is Nolan’s version of Ulysses 11, in many ways the crux of her book because it handles material that so obviously damages her version of a continuity of Irish culture. Here the hilarious and brutal satires of ‘Cyclops’ are occluded by the insistence that ‘it is impossible to say whether parody elevates or ridicules

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any particular style, as each blends with the text in a frenzy of textual play’.27 Clearly, it is more than possible to say so, but only by wrecking the argument that Nolan wants to make about Joyce and what she constructs as the ‘modernising’ force of Irish cultural nationalism. In reality Joyce perceived the revivalism so symptomatic of that form of nationalism to be deeply retrospective and politically reactionary. Such ingenious but deeply problematic responses are highly suggestive of the wider agendas that shape interpretation. The irony is that such agendas belong so much to a postwar world where race identity, no longer viably based on biology, has, however, received new leases of life on the basis of ‘culture’. The retreat from scientific racism discussed at the beginning of this study has not been universal, but it is a very real cultural phenomenon of great importance. This is not to argue, of course, that what has been a major volte face of the West has produced the end of racism. Indeed, ‘in the turbulent political waters of the post-Cold War era there is greater pressure than ever before on Western politicians to articulate a coherent and singular national identity’. In this context pluralism has become a key institutionalised disposition, positioned to discredit racial theory and apparently celebrate ‘diversity’ but also worked very powerfully in the defence of quite different agendas, by the dispossessed margins, the conservative centre and the intelligentsias that support such positions. A ‘rising cult of ethnicity’ has responded to disillusionment and frustration over continued inequalities and the failure of social change; ‘minority groups turned inwards, seeking to find in their particular histories and identities that which they had failed to gain from the ideology of equality’.28 At the same time, this very same ‘multiculturalism’ has become a powerful weapon in the hands of the radical right, especially in countries that were and are in actual or perceived decline. In Western Europe figures on the right from Enoch Powell through Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s and 1980s to Jean-Marie Le Pen today have routinely used arguments about ‘cultural inheritance’ in the defence of a conservative order of nation, state and social identity. From this perspective culture ‘inherits the role of race in the nineteenth century, and history the power of biology’.29 As Paul Gilroy has put it, ‘we increasingly face a racism which avoids being recognised as such because it is able to link ‘‘race’’ with nationhood, patriotism and nationality, a racism which has taken a necessary distance from the crude ideas of biological inferiority and superiority and now seems to present an imaginary definition of the nation as a unified cultural community’.30 These complex developments in relationships between ‘race’, history and culture would have been both familiar and unfamiliar to Joyce, which

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means that the distinction between racisms that Gilroy makes here, however useful, may be too absolute. The linkage between race and nationhood was certainly not an invention of the postwar period – ‘Cyclops’ is obvious testimony to the fact, if any were needed. But it is certain that Joyce’s engagement with the idea of race, however ‘relevant’ it might now be, is not best viewed from the perspective of twenty-first century Europe where scientific racism is largely removed from the agenda and yet cultural identities remain so much imbricated with the race dimension, from all sides. This, indeed, is one of the central points articulated in Joyce, Race and ‘Finnegans Wake’, that the Wake can be fully appreciated only in terms of its engagement with race politics from a perspective generated by historical method. Viewed in this way, Joyce’s interaction in this respect is not a matter of abstract philosophical disputation, nor framed by romanticised notions of national destiny. It is, however, very much a political affair – political in ways that now have to be contextualised, because our current everyday notions of the political world are so different from what they were in the 1930s. Here Joyce’s politics are shaped by a cultural background which gave him every reason to identify with the emancipatory project of the originary Enlightenment, and equally, every reason to struggle against the twisted hijacking of ‘equality’ and ‘progress’ that was to culminate in National Socialism. The egalitarian, anti-authoritarian instincts that once led him towards socialism and anarchism, and positioned him so firmly against romantic cultural nationalism and its attendant racisms, were powerfully engaged in the Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, and ultimately released, in essentially comic forms, in Ulysses and the Wake. The comedy of the Wake’s grotesque reconfiguration of race theory, is one of its many strengths, in my view. It enables the Wake to achieve great penetration and purchase, without resorting to anything that takes rhetoric and diatribe seriously; it allows for a reconvening where racisms and race discourse are allowed to roam free and thus expose their own absurdity. At the same time, there may be a sense in which Joyce’s comic treatment is one further factor that might stand between the Wake and a contemporary readership. It is impossible to know, of course, exactly how much Joyce actually knew about the persecution of the Jews before the publication of the Wake, but the consideration of such an idea does lead one to wonder whether a text so comic in its engagement with scientific racism could have been written in full knowledge. If so, there might be a new question to ask about the Wake, not about its difficulty, but about its taste and, indeed, what used to be called in radical literary circles its ‘commitment’. My suspicion, however, is, as so often in issues around reading the Wake,

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that we have a further problem of ‘presentism’ here, and a serious one. The point being that we in 2006 are determinedly post-Holocaust; we are also after Stalin, and Amin and Pol Pot; Saddam Hussein’s attempts to ‘eradicate’ the Kurds are part of our territory, as is racial cleansing in parts of Africa, Bosnia, and so on. The distance between ourselves and Joyce is really quite an important one in this respect; it means that we have very little direct knowledge, and probably limited understanding, of a time when laughter might have been not just a reasonable reaction to antireason, but, actually, a meaningful response.

Notes

1 1 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ‘Text, Criticism and Notes’, ed. Chester G. Anderson (1916; New York: Viking, 1968), 253. 2 For full-length studies here, see Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in ‘Ulysses’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995); and Len Platt, Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998). 3 ‘The moment when Joyce wrote in English, he felt himself performing a humiliating translation of a split language choice. In his writings he seeks to express that sundering; and, eventually, in Finnegans Wake he would weave the absent texts in the space between standard Irish and standard English.’ Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 332. 4 Given the associations now automatically made between the Enlightenment and ‘conservative’ epistemologies and teleologies, it is perhaps necessary to be reminded of the alternative orthodoxy that ‘[a]ll progressive, rationalist and humanist ideologies are implicit in it [the Enlightenment] and come out of it’. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 (1962; London: Sphere, 1973), 38. 5 For a lively account of how scientific racism developed from contradictions between idealist ideologies of equality and requirements to maintain the new social order, see Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). 6 Le´on Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard (London: Sussex University Press in association with Heinemann, 1974), 93. 7 Julius Georg Schottel, Teutsche Sprachkunst (Brunswick, 1650), cited in Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 93. 8 Ibid., 98. 9 Jules Michelet, The History of France (Paris, 1856–66) cited in The Aryan Myth, 33. 10 Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 99. 181

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11 Ford Madox Ford, Henry James (New York: Albert and Charles Boll, 1915), 47. 12 Wyndham Lewis, Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting Pot (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929), 147. 13 Over the past thirty years, a large literature has grown up which examines the intimacy that once existed (and still does) between long-term modernising dynamics and racism. D. T. Goldberg, for example, has shown how ‘racial thinking and racist articulation have become increasingly normalized and naturalized throughout modernity’, that is, from ‘the sixteenth century in the historical formation of . . . the West’. D. T. Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 1–2. 14 Most historians of ideas would accept this idea, at least up to a point. Malik, for example, who wants to emphasise the egalitarian tradition, argues that ‘compared to writing both before and after, eighteenth-century works show a remarkable disdain for racial arguments’. He goes on: ‘the categories of Enlightenment discourse were not imbricated with racial ideology. On the contrary, the Enlightenment helped to establish for the first time, in theory at least, the possibility of human emancipation’ (The Meaning of Race, 51 and 68). 15 Michael Banton, Racial Theories (1987; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. 16 Malik, The Meaning of Race, 6. 17 Goldberg, Racist Culture, 3. 18 Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 19 Banton, Racial Theories, 4. 20 Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 232. 21 See Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (eds.), The Critical Writings of James Joyce (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 195. 22 This distinction is crucial to an understanding of Irish politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See J. Hutchinson’s account, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 1–15. 23 Mason and Ellmann, The Critical Writings, 165–66. 24 James Joyce, Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry, Italian trans. Conor Deane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 163, 171. 25 Mason and Ellmann (eds.), The Critical Writings, 166. 26 Notebook evidence is usually used in the ‘genetic criticism’ now so associated with the Wake, and responsible for some of the most interesting recent Wake work. Concerned with excavating the Wake from what is perceived as its notebook origins, these ‘archaeological’ critics are celebrated in the recent Brepols edition of The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo. It should be stressed, however, that the idea of a single school of genetic criticism is something of a simplification. Although all genetic critics use similar methods, Geert Lernout argues that there are at least three versions of genetic criticism, each with quite distinct cultural agendas and each with different expectations

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as to what genetic criticism can achieve. For a fascinating account, see Lernout’s ‘The Finnegans Wake Notebooks and Radical Philology’, in David Hayman and Sam Slote (eds.), Genetic Studies in Joyce (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995). This present account, incidentally, has used the results of genetic criticism, but, as will be obvious, belongs to quite different traditions which are ‘historical’ and derive from cultural studies. 27 J. B. S. Haldane, Daedalus, or the Science of the Future (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trebner, 1924), 57–58. For an account of Joyce’s usage of this text in the notebooks, see Geert Lernout (ed.), NBB, VI.B.1, 5–6. 28 Haldane, Daedalus, 84–85. 29 See Geert Lernout’s introduction to NBB, VI.B.1, 7. 30 The translations in this and the following extract are Lernout’s. 31 Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 1. 32 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959; Oxford: Oxford University Press, new and revised edn., 1983), 736, 708. 33 See Fritz Senn’s note on Joyce’s use of this slogan in A Wake Newslitter, new series, vol. 3, June 1966, 62. 34 Along with the Flood, the Tower of Babel featured as a key event in myths of race dispersal where it was used to explain language difference. See FW, 15.12 (‘babbelers’); 64.9–10 (‘battering babel’); 118.18; 224.12; 467.16; 499.34; 523.32, and so on. 35 Daniel Ferrer (ed.), introduction to NBB, VI.B.14, 11–12. Here Ferrer is commenting on his disappointment that so few of the many notes that Joyce took on St Patrick in VI.B.14 made it into the Wake itself. For the genetic critic, who works exclusively with the notebooks and their sources, there would be no more to be said. A ‘conceptualist’, as Ferrer points out, ‘would discuss possible sources in terms of their general affinity with Joyce’s project’.

2 1 Le´on Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard (London: Sussex University Press in association with Heinemann, 1974), 326. 2 See also the note at NBB, VI.B.6, 109(i) – ‘Cain has no navel.’ 3 Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 326. 4 Ibid., 92. 5 Ibid., 327, 13. 6 See Cameron Allen, ‘The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Arts, Science, and Letters’, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 33:3–4 (1949). 7 Quoted without reference in Isaac Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans: An Account of the Prehistoric Ethnology and Civilisation of Europe (1890; London: Walter Scott, 1906), 1. 8 Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans, 2. 9 Malcolm Chapman, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 14.

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Notes to pages 17–29

10 Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 327. 11 Ibid., 188. 12 Christopher Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-Tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language (London: Routledge, 1999), 3. 13 Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 255. 14 Saloman Reinach, L’Origine des Aryens, Histoire d’une controverse (Paris, 1892), cited in The Aryan Myth, 267. 15 Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 116. 16 Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 269. 17 It is worth pointing out that the Wake has much more unity of consistency than has, say, Ulysses. The latter is famously comprised of ‘styles’, Joyce’s ‘technics’. Finnegans Wake has just one overriding ‘style’ to which all ‘materials’ are subjected. 18 Chapman, The Celts, 71. 19 Ibid., 74. 20 The translation is Roland McHugh’s. See Annotations, 131. 21 See Phillip Verene, Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s ‘New Science’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), and Verene (ed.), Vico and Joyce (New York: State University of New York Press, 1987). Of particular interest in the latter is Peter Hughes, ‘From Allusion to Implosion. Vico. Michelet. Joyce. Beckett’, 84–97. See Thomas Hofheinz’s account in chapter five of Joyce and the Invention of Irish History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 22 See chapter seven of John Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark: ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 174–215. 23 Hofheinz, Joyce and the Invention of Irish History, 141, 144, 156. 24 Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’, in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929; London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 5. 25 Ibid., 4–7. 26 For a discussion of this interaction, see Len Platt, Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998). 27 Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 7. 28 Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen, A History of Anthropology (London: Pluto, 2001), 10. 29 Ibid. 30 See, for example, ‘the Celts had continually moved westwards’ (EB 11, vol. v, 612). 31 For a full discussion of these associations, see Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire, 251–77. 32 See IU II, 465: ‘So also, Noah (Pisces) who appears in the generations as the twelfth patriarch, counting Cain and Abel, is Adam again under another name, for he is the forefather of a new race of mankind.’

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33 Emily Lawless, Ireland and the Irish (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), 2. For comment on Joyce’s use of this source, see Deane (ed.) NBB, VI.B.6, 5. 34 Peter Parley, Peter Parley’s Tales About Ireland (London: Darton, 1843), 13. 35 There is a fascinating note in the James Joyce Archive at VI.B.4, 186, which reads ‘17 March/Deluge/Entry into Ark’. 36 There are difficulties in accounting for the number of references to Shem, Ham and Japhet, because any reference to Shaun or Shem might be counted here. 37 In medieval tradition Shem, Ham and Japhet were formulated as being the ancestors of three social orders – clerks, serfs and nobles respectively. See Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 7. There was also a tradition that connected Shem with Asian races. 38 See Adaline Glasheen, The Third Census of ‘Finnegans Wake’: An Index of the Characters and Their Roles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 114–15, 263. 39 See FW, 6.19, ‘Agog and magog’. EB 11, vol. xii gives Gog as a synonym for barbarian (190). See also ‘Magogagog’ at FW, 71.26. 40 In the Germanic version of English identity, the history of ‘England’ proper was commonly understood to start with the landing of these two brothers at Kent in AD449. In very close parallel to the Irish invasion story, where invaders are invited at the behest of O’Ruark, Horsa and Hengest were invited to England by Vortigern, who had fallen in love with Renwien, Hengest’s daughter. See FW, 143.22–23 (‘Heng’s got a bit of Horsa’s nose’); 214.12; 272.16–17 (here both Shem and Shaun are Germanised by their mother as ‘the Blitzenkopfs! . . . Hengegst and Horsesauce’; 325.17; 355.28; 565.12 (‘Vortigern’), and so on. 41 Parley, Peter Parley’s Tales About Ireland, 17. 42 The version of the start of things at page 80 is accompanied by a string of Sanskrit words and other Hindu references. It is particularly evocative of the Aryan myth. 43 Cited without reference in Georg Luka´cs, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Robert Palmer (London: Merlin, 1980), 84. 44 For a discussion of Childers, see Finn Fordham, ‘The Universalisation of Finnegans Wake and the Real H.C.E.’, in Andrew Gibson and Len Platt (eds.), Joyce, Ireland, Britain (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, forthcoming). 45 Glasheen implied as much in The Third Census. Although she was mistaken in this respect, she was one of the few Joyceans to have commented on the Wake’s engagement with race history and the race dimensions of the Noah story as used by Joyce. The first that I know of to have identified Shaun as ‘Japheth the aryan-supremacist’, she also showed how ‘Shem is outcast and identified by his Aryan brother with Ham (called Shane or Sham), whose very name is that of a meat insulting to Jews. Shem, then, is any Jew of the Dispersion, prey of emperors, popes, German dictators, reviled by their inquisitors’ (Glasheen, The Third Census, xli–xlii). 46 For a discussion of this identity, see Wim Van Mierlo, ‘The Greater Ireland Beyond the Sea: James Joyce, Exile and Irish Emigration’, in Gibson and Platt (eds.), Joyce, Ireland, Britain.

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47 An interesting note in Deane (ed.) NBB, VI.B.33, 36 (d) reads ‘ his nationality’. The editor points out that this comes from a law textbook: ‘Women Under English Law 32: According to English Law on marriage a woman acquires her husband’s nationality and domicile (58).’ The note was transferred to the C series of notebooks but does not appear in the Wake. 48 As with all ‘characters’ in the Wake, Shaun’s identity is highly changeable. His name is part of this shifting world, appearing as Shaun, Jaun, Yaun and Yawn. 49 Jules Michelet, Bible de l’humanite´ (Paris, 1864), cited in Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 208. 50 Ernest Renan, Histoire ge´ne´rale et syste`me compare´ des langues se´mitiques (Paris, 1847–55), cited in Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 205. 51 Georges Vacher de Lapouge, L’Aryen, son roˆle social (Paris, 1899), cited in Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 269. 52 Glasheen, The Third Census, 167. 53 For a discussion of Lucien Le´vy-Bruhl, see pages 88–94. 54 These are the terms used in the introduction to Wyndham Lewis: An Anthology of his Prose, ed. with an introduction by E. W. F. Tomlin (London: Methuen, 1969), 21. 55 Cited in Tomlin (ed.), Wyndham Lewis: An Anthology of his Prose, 25. 56 Ibid., 64. For an apologist view of Paleface, see Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 382. Anna Freud Loewenstein, on the other hand, writes of the ‘blatant and virulent racism’ of Paleface. See her Loathesome Jews and Engulfing Women: Metaphors of Projection in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams and Graham Greene (New York and London: New York University Press, 1993), 151. 57 Trevor Brent, ‘Wyndham Lewis and the Body’ (Goldsmiths College, University of London, unpublished PhD thesis, 2006). 58 Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox (1927; London: Methuen, 1955), 295–97. 59 Wyndham Lewis, Hitler (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), 108. 60 Glasheen, for example, insisted on the essentially local, personal and aesthetic terms of what she saw as a ‘flyting’, a form of verbal combat that takes place in a highly circumscribed literary context (see The Third Census, 167). 61 Tomlin (ed.), Wyndham Lewis: An Anthology of his Prose, 109. 62 Reported in Glasheen, The Third Census, 166. 63 James Joyce, Letters III, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966), 311. Ellmann points out that Joyce sometimes feigned mock support for some aspects of Hitler’s polices himself, one suspects for the pleasure of ‘winding up’ Nora. He reports Nora warning Joyce off in this respect. She was, apparently, aghast at any expression of support for the German dictator, even circumspect or joke ones. When Joyce spoke of Hitler as a phenomenon, ‘‘‘Think of getting a whole people behind you’’, Nora picked up a knife and said, ‘‘You stop that, Jim.’’’ See Ellmann, James Joyce, 709. 64 Interestingly, Wyndham Lewis came to the same conclusion. Towards the end of Paleface, he refers the reader to The Lion and the Fox where there is a

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discussion of the ‘Saxon’ and the ‘Celt’. The latter Lewis finds a ‘complete myth’. Lewis goes on to point out that Ireland was ‘colonised, especially in the East, by the Norsemen, Norwegian being spoken in Dublin, as it was in Bristol until the fourteenth century’. He goes on to recall how in The Lion and the Fox he had described seeing both English and Irish people demonstrating against ‘the martyrdom of the Mayor of Cork’, and reports being unable to spot any difference (i.e. racial difference) between them. See Tomlin, Wyndham Lewis: An Anthology of his Prose, 79–80. 65 Chapman, The Celts, 3.

3 1 Douglas Hyde, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, in Sir Charles Gavin Duffy, George Sigerson and Douglas Hyde, The Revival of Irish Literature (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894), 121. 2 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘English and Welsh’, in Angles and Britons – The O’Dowell Lectures (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1963), 30. 3 See Malcolm Chapman, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 3. 4 Ibid., 53–54, 201, 20, 6. 5 Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature and Other Essays (1867; London: J. M. Dent, 1910), 86. 6 Ibid., 84, 81. 7 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 54. 8 W. B. Yeats, Memoirs: Autobiography – First Draft Journal, transcribed and edited by Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972), 169. 9 Standish O’Grady, History: Critical and Philosophical (London: Sampson Low, 1881), 201. 10 Standish O’Grady, History of Ireland: The Heroic Period, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1878–80) I, 18. 11 W. A. O’Conor, History of the Irish People (London and Manchester: Thomas Heywood, 1886), 5. 12 Edward Martyn, The Heather Field and Maeve (London: Duckworth, 1909), 105–06. 13 See James W. Flannery, W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early Abbey Theatre in Theory and Practice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 196. 14 Yeats, Memoirs: Autobiography – First Draft Journal, 169. 15 See James Joyce, Letters I, ed. Stuart Gilbert (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 218. 16 Daniel Ferrer (ed.), introduction to NBB, VI.B.14, 14. 17 This material on ‘Cyclops’ has been revised and adapted from Len Platt, Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A study of Joyce and the Literary Revival (AmsterdamAtlanta: Rodopi, 1998), 144–48. 18 Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in ‘Ulysses’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 115. Gibson reads the chapter as ‘a

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sustained assault on revivalist historiographies and constructions of Irish history, and the aesthetics and politics implicit in them’ (107). 19 O’ Grady, History: Critical and Philosophical, 5, 58, 7. 20 W. I. Thompson, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916 – A Study of an Ideological Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 22–23. 21 See J. Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Free State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 292. 22 Isaac Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans – An Account of the Ethnology and Civilisation of Europe (1890; London: Walter Scott, 1906), 7. 23 From Biographies of Words and the Home of Aryas (1888), cited in EB 11, vol. ii, 711. 24 For an account of the rise of Anglo-Saxonism in England, see Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons and AngloSaxons (Montreal: Harvest House, 1982), 7–50. 25 Le´on Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard (London: Sussex University Press in association with Heinemann, 1974), 42. 26 MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History, 13. 27 Richard Hawkins, A Discourse of the Nationall Excellencies of England (1658), 15. 28 Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 49. 29 David Hume, History of England (London, 1754–62) cited in Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 49–50. 30 Charles Kingsley, The Roman and the Teuton (1864; London: Macmillan, 1889), 5–8. 31 Daniel Defoe, The Earlier Life and Works of Daniel Defoe, ed. Henry Morley (London: Routledge, 1889), 189–90. 32 John Henry Newman, letter to J. F. Wood, 4 September 1836, Personal Collection, The Oratory, Edgbaston, Birmingham. 33 See also the note at NBB, VI.B.6, 177 (d), ‘Irish & Scans untouched/by Rome’. 34 See Douglas Hyde, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, 117–61, especially 139. 35 R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 480. 36 Madame Blavatsky is suggestive here. She thinks that the ‘Aryan race has no devil’ and attributes this discovery to Mu¨ller. See IU II, 10. 37 Three pages of notes regarding this text were apparently written by ‘one of Joyce’s readers designed to point out passages of interest to Joyce’. See Thomas E. Connolly, The Personal Library of James Joyce, University of Buffalo Studies, Monographs in English 6 (Buffalo, NY: University of Buffalo Press, 1955), 42–47. 38 At NBB, VI.B.14, 142 (i) there is the note ‘Palladius¼ Sucratus/warlike’. This has been traced to Appendix II of Abbe´ Riguet, Saint Patrice (1911) and the sentence ‘Zimmer regarde le mot Palladius comme la traduction latine du nom de Patrice, Sucatus (belliqueux).’ See also in the same notebook at 154 (e) ‘Pelagius in Irland/Zimmer 1901’. This refers to Zimmer’s book Pelagius in Ireland (Berlin, 1901).

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39 Myles Dillon, Celts and Aryans: Survivals of Indo-European Speech and Society (Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1975). Dillon was the grandson of John Blake Dillon. His own career, as a linguist who first studied classical languages at University College, Dublin but then switched to Celtic, becoming, finally, a Professor in Celtic at Edinburgh, demonstrates the important connections once made between Celticism and Aryanism. 40 Joyce was reading Pictet while on holiday in Brittany in 1924. Pictet’s book, Le myste`re des bardes de l’ˆıle de Bretagne ou de la doctrine des bardes gallois du moyen (1859) was part of Joyce’s ‘Celtic’ reading on this trip. See NBB, VI.B.14, especially 5–6. 41 See EB 11, vol. ii, 711. 42 Heinrich Zimmer, ‘Zimmer on Pictish Matriarchy’, published with George Henderson, Leabher Nan Gleann – The Book of the Glens (Edinburgh: Norman Macleod, 1898), 9. 43 Julius Pokorny, A History of Ireland (Dublin and Cork: Talbot, 1916), 6. 44 Ibid., 16. Pokorny speculates, lamely, that the use of skin boots and traces of other ‘Arctic cultural influences’ in Ireland suggests that the earliest Irish race may have been Eskimos. 45 Ibid., 18. 46 Ulick J. Bourke, The Aryan Origin of the Gaelic Race and Language (London: Longman, 1876), ix, 109, 17. 47 See, for example, Lawless’s account of the Firbolgs ‘who overran the country, and appear to have been of a somewhat higher ethnological grade, although, like the Fomorians, short, dark and swarthy’ (Emily Lawless, Ireland (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), 6). 48 Ibid., 2. 49 O’Conor, History of the Irish People, 4–5. 50 See Dillon, Celts and Aryans, 22–23. 51 A 1901 police report quoted in Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, 290. 52 Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, 317. 53 Foster, Modern Ireland, 518–19. 54 See ibid., 521, where Foster considers the idea of how far the Irish state was directly ‘influenced by the current of thought affecting other irredentist states’. 55 Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 207. 56 Ernest Renan, L‘Avenir religieux des socie´te´s modernes (Paris: 1860), cited in Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 207. 57 Adolf Hitler, Table Talk, trans. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens (1953; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 141. 58 See W. B. Yeats, ‘Anashuya and Vijaya’, in Collected Poems (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977), 10. 59 Ibid., 13. 60 See Mary Lowe-Evans’s reading of this episode in Crimes Against Fecundity: Joyce and Population Control (Syracuse, KS: Syracuse University Press, 1989). She writes that ‘[t]he perfect stranger becomes Jaun himself (he is all

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62 63 64

65

Notes to pages 64–71

‘‘eye’’ or ‘‘I’’) and will multiply with his own kind (the ‘‘Aerwinger’’ of the Earwicker family), even, it would seem, to the extinction of other breeds and races’ (86). Sigurdsen the Anglo-Saxon is usually connected with England and the English. His continued presence in the company of Shaun the arch republican might reflect on the continuities between colonial forms of rule and the new republican government that many historians have commented on. In Modern Ireland, for example, Foster shows how for all the public Gaelicism of De Valera’s state, there were notable ‘continuities from the days of British rule’ (522). These were clustered around, in particular, civil service personnel, the legal system and economic systems and ideologies. ‘[M]ickroocyphyllicks’ suggests ‘microcephalic’ or small-headed and thus the discourses of eugenics, phrenology and craniology. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913; London: Routledge, 2002), xiii–xiv. Lucien Le´vy-Bruhl, the anthropologist who contrasted the primitive and the civilised is relevant here. Two of his books were in Joyce’s library. For a discussion of this figure in Finnegans Wake, see pages 88–94. This would be the view of a critic such as John Carey – see his The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1890–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992) – but it is also commonplace even among Joyceans. In his recent account Sean Latham writes of the ‘catastrophic density’ of Finnegans Wake. See Am I A Snob? Modernism and the Novel (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 216.

4 1 Julian Huxley, ‘Eugenics and Society’, Eugenics Review 20:1 (1936), 11. 2 Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin were, in fact, critically at odds. The former argued that acquired characteristics could be inherited, a notion rejected by neo-Darwinists, especially after the appearance of August Weismann’s ‘germ plasm’ theories and the development of Mendelian biology. Despite such distinctions, race theorists used both Lamarck, who crucially underpinned eugenics, and Darwin. For a recent account of the contentious issue of Darwin and race theory, see Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics and Racism in Germany (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003). 3 Peter Bowler, Biology and Social Thought 1850–1914 (Berkeley: Office for the History of Science and Technology, University of California at Berkeley, 1993), 12. 4 Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (1983; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 290. 5 Bowler, Biology and Social Thought, 14. 6 Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, 276. 7 Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 82. 8 Augustin Benedict Morel cited in Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder 1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 51.

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9 See W. Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain and his Place in the Tertiary Period (London: Macmillan, 1880), and the account in Bowler, Biology and Social Thought, 53–60. 10 Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, 287. 11 Cited in Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 182. 12 A letter from Bismarck to Count Munster, 25 January 1885, cited in H. P. von Strandmann, ‘The Domestic Origins of Germany’s Colonial Expansion Under Bismarck’, Past and Present 42 (1969), 140. 13 Cited in von Strandmann, ‘The Domestic Origins’, 143. 14 Robert Reid Rentoul, Race Culture or Race Suicide: A Plea for the Unborn (1906: New York and London: Garland, 1984), 7–8. 15 Francis Galton, Essays in Eugenics (London: The Eugenics Education Society, 1909), 34. 16 Leonard Darwin, ‘The Field of Eugenic Reform’, in Eugenics in Race and State, The Second International Conference of Eugenics (1921; New York and London: Garland, 1985), 189–202 (190). 17 Karl Pearson, National Life from the Standpoint of Science (London: A. & C. Black, 1901), 43–44. 18 There is a further factor here. Because they ‘mistrusted Christianity, Enlightenment historians were convinced that the medieval period represented a collapse into barbarism’ (Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, 97). They also had the evidence of the fall of Greece and Rome, which worked against progress historiography. For a full account of the Enlightenment and ‘progress’, see Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, 50–106. 19 Ibid., 97. 20 Jules Crepieux-Jamin, Les ´ele´ments de l’e´criture des canailles (Paris: 1923), cited in Vincent Deame (ed.), NBB, VI.B.6, 5. 21 Bowler, Biology and Social Thought, 60. 22 Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, 283. 23 Sir Arthur Keith, The Antiquity of Man (London: Williams and Norgate, 1915), 144. 24 Donald C. Johanson and Maitland A. Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (London: Granada, 1982), 33. 25 These comments are taken from a pamphlet, Roy Pearson, Essays on Eugenics and Race (1959; Coventry: Northern Work, 1980), 7–9. 26 The Piltdown fraud was not discovered as such until 1950, and so features here as part of the authentic fossil record. See FW, 10.30, ‘awalt’zaround the piltdowns’. 27 The list, which is at 136, reads ‘classical imbecile; semetic; chazar/(mongols of/ Judaism); orang (of Asia); Mongol; orang (Asia ape); mongoloid; Aryan; Negro; gorrilla; Ethiotic’. See also the next page, 137, which has ‘Man CroMagnon; Ape Chancelade; idiot Grimaldi’. 28 Bowler, Biology and Social Thought, 52. 29 Ernst Haeckel, the leading German philosopher and biologist, endorsed the view that Pithecanthropus and the Neanderthals were the main stages

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intermediate between the great apes and humans. Others dismissed Pithecanthropus as an ape, while Dubois himself, acknowledging the relatively late date of the find, thought it possibly a sideline of human development rather than ‘being on the direct line leading to modern humanity’. See Bowler, Biology and Social Thought, 50–53. 30 Vratislav Maza´k, Prehistoric Man with illustrations by Zdeneˆk Burian (London: Hamlyn, 1980), 175. 31 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Text, Criticism and Notes), ed. Chester G. Anderson (1916; New York: Viking, 1968), 208–09. Donald Childs, Modernism and Eugenics – Woolf, Eliot, Yeats and the Culture of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) draws attention to this passage (11–12). 32 Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in ‘Ulysses’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 131, 231–32. 33 For an account of this treatment, see Len Platt, Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), 214–22. 34 Mulligan’s idea may have originated with George Bernard Shaw, who advocated ‘a State Department of Evolution to pay women for their child-rearing services’, and if necessary to regulate a ‘joint-stock human stud farm’. See Geoffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1880 (Harlow: Longman, 1981), 134. 35 For Yeats’s involvement with mainstream eugenics – his correspondence with the Eugenics Society, for example, and his championing of Raymond B. Cattell’s The Fight for Our National Intelligence (1937), see Paul Scott Stanfield, Yeats and Politics in the 1930s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 145–83. 36 G. R. Searle, Eugenics and Politics in Britain 1900–1914 (Leyden: Noordhoff International Publishing, 1976), 12–13. 37 See Thomas Hofheinz’s Joyce and the Invention of Irish History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), which refers to ‘Joyce’s internationalization of Ireland in Ulysses . . . [paving] the way for a more radical effort in Finnegans Wake’, 42. 38 It is possible that Joyce knew the books about these ‘families’, but this is not actually known. NBB VI.B.10 states at 108 that a note here about the Jukes ‘presumably has its source in an article [discussing Goddard’s book] which appeared in 1913’, but there is no indication as to why this view is held. 39 R. L. Dugdale, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity, also Further Studies of Criminals (1877; London: G. P. Putnam, 1895), viii. In Edward Larson’s Sex, Race and Science – Eugenics in the Deep South (London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), Dugdale is described as a pioneer ‘in the genealogy of degeneracy’ (19). 40 Henry Herbert Goddard, The Kallikak Family – A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 71, 55, 18. 41 Dugdale, The Jukes, 13, 8.

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42 Goddard, The Kallikak Family, 101–03, 70–71. Goddard was an important figure in American eugenics. In Larson’s Sex, Race and Science, he is referred to as the ‘architect’ of plans to segregate the ‘feeble-minded’ (26). 43 Mary Lowe-Evans, Crimes Against Fecundity: Joyce and Population Control (Syracuse, KS: Syracuse University Press, 1989), 90–99. 44 This is one of many associations made in the Wake between race as human classification and the idea of competition. See, for example, 80.16 (‘here where race began’); 330.15–16; 341.21. See also 547.27 (‘her maidan race’); 566.1 (‘race pound race’); and 614.11 (‘the fittest surviva’). 45 See, for example, Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 182–86. 46 Lucien Le´vy-Bruhl, The Soul of the Primitive (London: Allen and Unwin, 1928), 19. 47 Lucien Le´vy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, trans. Lilian A. Clare (London: Allen and Unwin, 1926), 14. 48 Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (London: Faber and Faber, 1947), 95 fn. 49 James S. Atherton, Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’, expanded and corrected edn. (1959; New York: Paul P. Appel, 1979), 27, 20, 53. 50 Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon, Understanding ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Guide to the Narrative of James Joyce’s Masterpiece (New York: Garland, 1982), x, xx. 51 John Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark: ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 63. 52 Atherton, The Books at the Wake, 44. 53 Ibid., 45. The Le´vy-Bruhl citation is from How Natives Think, 47. 54 Thomas E. Connolly, The Personal Library of James Joyce, University of Buffalo Studies, Monographs in English 6 (Buffalo, NY: University of Buffalo Press, 1955), 24. 55 Atherton, The Books at the Wake, 43, 44. 56 Ibid. 57 Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen, A History of Anthropology (London: Pluto, 2001), 50. This account shows how contemporaries were ‘almost universally critical’ of Le´vy-Bruhl’s theories. 58 Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion, 147. The Malinowski citation is not referenced. 59 Le´vy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 13–14. 60 At one level this culturalism is presented as a liberal resistance to racism; it objectively observed rather than compared and judged other societies. More recent critical perspectives, however, have sensed some valorisation that actually cloaks the more insidious effect of the ‘revolutions’ in sociology and anthropology. This was to reproduce the ‘difference’ model explicit in scientific racism, but now in terms that were acceptable to a liberal consciousness. See Malik, The Meaning of Race. Paul Gilroy’s work is also important here. See his There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987; London: Routledge, 2002).

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Notes to pages 95–98 5

1 Ernest Boyd, Ireland’s Literary Renaissance (New York: Knopf, 1922), 214–15. 2 Yeats seems to have been asked to leave this group. See W. B. Yeats, Memoirs (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1972), 23–24. 3 For a brief history of Dublin theosophy, see Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 165–69. 4 See C. P. Curran, James Joyce Remembered (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 32. Stuart Gilbert recalls talking to Joyce about Sinnett and reading Esoteric Buddhism and Growth of the Soul on Joyce’s advice. See Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (1930; London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 11. 5 See, for instance, U, 9.279–88. 6 Adaline Glasheen, The Third Census of ‘Finnegans Wake’: An Index of the Characters and Their Roles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 33. 7 H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, 2 vols. (1888; Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1999), I, 65. 8 See James S. Atherton, Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’, expanded and corrected edn. (1974; New York: Paul P. Appel, 1979), 288 and 45–46. 9 Perry was a reader in cultural anthropology at University College, London. 10 See also ‘Fummuccumul with a graneen aveiled’ (375.29). 11 See Len Platt, Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), 171. 12 Bruce F. Campbell suggests that theosophy evolved from American spiritualism at a time when traditional religion was under assault from scientific rationalism and failing to adapt to the modern urban context. It is estimated that by 1855, at a time when the population of America was about twentyfive million, somewhere between one and two million Americans participated at some level in spiritualism. See Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived, 8–10. 13 On the fiftieth anniversary of Olcott’s death in 1967, Sri Lanka’s prime minister, Dudley Senanyake, said, ‘Colonel Olcott can be considered one of the heroes in the struggle for our independence and a pioneer of the present religious, national and cultural revival. Colonel Olcott’s visit to this country [in 1880] is a landmark in the history of Buddhism in Ceylon.’ Cited in Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived, 84. 14 Not coincidentally, there have been serious attempts to link Steiner, and indeed theosophy generally, with Nazism. The internet is probably the best place to access this kind of material in its raw forms. 15 See Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived, 23–24. The most serious charge came from William Emmette Coleman, himself a spiritualist who spent three years studying Isis Unveiled. He showed that far from being based on thousands of original texts, as Blavatsky claimed, Isis Unveiled was based on about a hundred

Notes to pages 98–103

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nineteenth-century books on occultism. He found some two thousand examples of plagiarism. 16 Ibid., 53–54. 17 A. P. Sinnett, The Early Days of Theosophy in Europe (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1922), 12–14, 16. 18 In The Early Days of Theosophy, Sinnett claims that he obtained ‘masses of information’ from the Masters on ‘reincarnation, Karma, the planetary chains, the succession of root races, the sub-races and so on’ (28). 19 See Atherton, Books at the Wake, 254. 20 Society for Psychical Research, ‘First Report of the Committee of the Society for Psychical Research, Appointed to Investigate the Evidence for Marvellous Phenomena Offered by Certain Members of the Theosophical Society’ (privately circulated, December 1884), 207, cited in Ancient Wisdom Revived, 93. 21 See, for instance, Rose and O’Hanlon, who state that much of the Wake ‘was copied from many hundreds of books, newspaper articles and the like . . . Instead of using his own words . . . Joyce worked in fragments of other men’s compositions.’ Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon, Understanding ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Guide to the Narrative of James Joyce’s Masterpiece (New York: Garland, 1982), ix–x. 22 Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 1964, 1. Yates begins her brilliant study by pointing out that ‘the great forward movements of the Renaissance all derive their vigour, their emotional impulse, from looking backwards. The cyclic view of time as perpetual movement from pristine golden ages of purity and truth through successive bronze and iron ages still held sway and the search for truth was thus of necessity a search for the early, the ancient, the original gold from which the base metals of the present and the immediate past were corrupt degenerations’ (1). 23 Blavatsky’s 1888 tome, The Secret Doctrine, which is comprised, like Isis Unveiled, of two massive volumes, differs from the latter in this respect. It remains ostensibly ‘academic’, has footnotes and is indexed, but it is based on the ‘Stanzas of Dzyan’ a mysterious religious text previously (and subsequently) unknown to scholarship. Although Blavatsky never quite loses her taste for ‘rational’ engagement, it is the case that The Secret Doctrine is more devotional than ‘academic’ in tone. 24 See Le´on Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard (London: Sussex University Press in association with Heinemann, 1974), 196. 25 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, I, 106. 26 See Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 172. 27 J. G. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill, 2 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1803), II, 34. 28 Louis Jacolliot, La Bible dans l’Inde, Vie de Iezeus Christna (Paris, 1873), cited in Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 209.

196

Notes to pages 103–13

29 Attributed to Renan without fuller reference in IU II, 334. 30 Transactions of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society 31 (February 1897, no publisher), 3. 31 The International Theosophist (Dublin, London and New York: no publisher, 1898–99), I, 204–05. 32 Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived, 44–45. This race cosmology is indicated in Isis Unveiled, but the full working out is left to The Secret Doctrine, especially to volume two of this work entitled, intriguingly, ‘anthropogenesis’. 33 It may have been that Blavatsky and Sinnett worked out this absurd race cosmology (which they claimed was secret knowledge from the Masters) together, though it seems more probable that Sinnett was the real initiator here. Most of the detail about races and ‘rounds’ had been expounded by Sinnett in Esoteric Buddhism (1883). This was after Isis Unveiled (1877), which is thin on the specifics of cosmic history, and before The Secret Doctrine (1888), which is full of it. See also the Transactions of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society 31 (February 1897), where Sinnett treats his audience to a lecture on ‘the Aryan period’ and ‘our own Aryan ancestry’ (3). 34 Giordano Bruno, Spacia della bestia triofante, dialogue 3 (1588), 799–80, cited in Yates, Giordano Bruno, 223. 35 There is a puzzling footnote to ‘Ainsoph’ at FW, 261 fn 3. ‘Groupname for grapejuice’ seems to suggest that God is somehow related to the vine. IU II, 561 may help here. Blavatsky writes that ‘Jesus in his Oriental phraseology, constantly assimilated himself to the true vine . . . Furthermore, the hierophant, the discloser of the Petroma, was called ‘‘Father.’’ When Jesus says, ‘‘Drink . . . this is my blood,’’ what else was meant, it was simply a metaphorical assimilation of himself to the vine, which bears the grape, whose juice is its blood – wine. It was a hint that as he had himself been initiated by the ‘‘Father,’’ so he desired to initiate others.’ 36 See, for example, ‘the deprofundity of multimathematical immaterialities wherebejubers in the pancosmic urge the allimmanence of that which Itself is Itself Alone (hear, O hear Caller Errin!)’ (FW, 394.31–34). 37 Joyce had a long battle with Maunsels, who agreed to publish Dubliners but after three years of prevarication finally withdrew. 38 For an extended discussion of alchemy in I.vii, see Barbara Di Bernard, Alchemy and ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980), 126–37. 39 See, for instance, IU I, 161, where Blavatsky writes with some energy about ‘[t]he pointed iron pole’ of Thor’s chariot, the two rams which ‘serve as his coursers’ and the silver bridles which apparently ‘typify the female spirit . . . Therefore in the ram and his bridle we see combined the active and passive principles of nature in opposition, one rushing forward, and the other restraining . . . With the electricity supplying the impulse, and the male and female principles combining and recombining in endless correlation, the result is – evolution of visible nature.’ This would have been racy stuff in the late 1870s. 40 Glasheen, The Third Census, lxxii.

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41 Blavatsky quotes the article at length, but no publication details are given. 42 H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 2 vols. (Pasadena, CA: Aryan Philosophical Press, 1919), I, 5. 43 See for examples IU II between pages 264 and 265. 44 Atherton, Books at the Wake, 36. 45 Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived, 9–10. 46 See Yates, Giordano Bruno. 47 Ibid., 251. 48 Quoted in Yates, Giordano Bruno, 237. 49 See R. J. Hollindale, ‘A Note on Joyce and Bruno’, in A Wake Newslitter 1, (March 1963). He writes that ‘Joyce’s admiration for Giordano Bruno . . . has always seemed to me ambiguous’ (4). 50 See Yates, Giordano Bruno, 253. 51 See Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929; London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 6.

6 1 See Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially chapter three, entitled ‘Dubliners: The exoticised and Orientalised Other’. 2 Cheryl Herr, Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 12. See also R. B. Kershner’s interesting essay ‘The Culture of Ulysses’, in Vincent J. Cheng, Kimberley J. Devlin and Margot Norris (eds.), Joycean Cultures/Culturing Joyce (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 149–62. Kershner discusses Adorno’s admiration for Ulysses and especially his sense of its importance as a ‘negative epic’, an ‘inspiring portrayal of a society alienated almost beyond redemption’ (156). 3 For a discussion of escapism and utopianism in popular culture, see Richard Dyer, ‘Entertainment and Utopia’, Movie 24 (Spring 1977). 4 This process is now well understood by theatre historians. See, for example, Michael R. Booth and Joel H. Kaplan (eds.), The Edwardian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Peter Bailey, ‘Theatre of Entertainment/Spaces of Modernity: Rethinking the British Popular Stage, 1890–1914’, in Nineteenth-Century Theatre 26 (1998). For the idea of ‘safe pleasure’ and the associated ‘conservative modernism’, see Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). 5 Of the forty-nine productions that exceeded 350 performances in the West End between 1900 and 1914, twenty-two were musical comedies and four were revues. In addition there were eleven comedies, eight ‘plays’, two musical entertainments, one melodrama and one farce. 6 James T. Tanner, Our Miss Gibbs (MS: LCP, 1909), 1:1.

198

Notes to pages 124–26

7 At the same time, this opening mocks the ‘skills’ of the new film artistes. See the song where the actors and actresses of the studio sing the following lines: ‘It is fine/Quite Unique/Not a line/Need we speak.’ James T. Tanner, The Girl on the Film (MS: LCP, 1913), 1:1. 8 Henry Hamilton and P. Potter, The Schoolgirl (MS: LCP, 1903), 2:2. 9 Rhonda K. Garelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender and Performance in the Fin de Sie`cle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 5. 10 See Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 178–206. Rappaport shows how Gordon Selfridge and Richard Burbidge of Harrod’s ‘financed plays that championed their shops and their understanding of shopping’ (179). See also Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell, Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 11 See Michael Booth, ‘The Metropolis on Stage’, in H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds.), The Victorian City: Images and Realities, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), I. According to Booth, ‘the most significant fact of English theatrical history in the second half of the nineteenth century is the slow but sure upper-middle-class takeover of both the theatre and the drama, and the steady rise of middle-class respectability that it is even now trying so hard to shake off’ (224). 12 See, for example, J. S. Bratton’s fascinating account of Emmaline Ethardo’s act – an act that involved cross-dressing, quick change and joint dislocation – as a carnivalesque ‘manipulation of the masks of the stereotype’. ‘Irrational Dress’, in Viv Gardner and Susan Rutherford (eds.), The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre, 1850–1914 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 77–91. For the theorisation of cultural subversion from below, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 2–3. 13 See also the attendance of Alfonso and Ena, the King and Queen of Spain, at a performance of The Beauty of Bath in 1906. This latter is recorded in Ellaline Terriss, Just a Little Bit of String (London: Hutchinson, 1955), 195. 14 Herr’s Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture makes no reference to the genre or to the specific musical comedy shows that Joyce invokes. The concordance tradition of Joyce studies is not much more helpful in this respect. Where the ‘allusions’ have been picked up, the contextualising is invariably misleading. Thus Weldon Thornton’s Allusions to ‘Ulysses’ (1968; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), describes Florodora and The Geisha as ‘light operettas’ (94), which they were not. Indeed, these shows were very selfconsciously constructed against the conventions of operetta to form a modern and mainstream alternative, a respectable popularising that, at the same time, avoided some of the seedier associations of traditional music hall. 15 Freeman’s Journal, 4 April 1910, 4. 16 Ibid., 16 April 1906, 6. 17 Daily Express, 2 April 1904, 6.

Notes to pages 127–35

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18 For a discussion of this transformation, see Len Platt, Musical Comedy on the West End Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 61–62. The discussion of musical comedy in this chapter draws on this study, especially on chapter three, which is concerned with musical comedy and the representation of the racialised Other. 19 Sheridan Morley, Spread a Little Happiness: The First Hundred Years of the British Musical (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 20. 20 See Noe¨l Coward, Cavalcade in Play Parade (New York: Doubleday and Doran, 1932), 132. 21 In Florodora ‘The Shade of the Palm’ is sung at the end of the first act when the romantic lead Frank Abercoed (in reality a lord, a lost aristocrat who has been dispossessed) is leaving an island paradise and the love of his life Dolores (a native girl). 22 Ernest A. Randal, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, in the licence for Chu Chin Chow (MS: LCP, 1914). 23 Quoted in Kurt Ganzl, The British Musical Theatre, 2 vols. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), II, 32–33. 24 Granville Bantock and F. G. Aflalo, Round the World with a Gaiety Girl (London: John McQueen, 1896), 91. 25 J. S. Bratton, Richard Allen Cave, Breandan Gregory, Heide J. Holder and Michael Pickering, Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 3–4. 26 See D. Forbes-Winslow’s account in Daly’s: The Biography of a Theatre (London: W. H. Allen, 1944), 22. 27 The People, 26 April 1896, np. 28 Illustrated London News, 2 May 1896, 572. 29 Daily Telegraph, 24 April 1896, np. 30 Ibid. 31 Illustrated London News, 2 Sept 1905, np. 32 Edward Morton, San Toy (MS: LCP, 1899) 1:48. 33 ‘After the Race’, in James Joyce Dubliners: The Corrected Text with an Explanatory Note by Robert Scholes (1914; London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 44. 34 Morton, San Toy, 1:31. 35 Freeman’s Journal, 1 May 1900, 6. 36 Owen Hall, The Geisha (MS: LCP, 1896), 1:29. 37 J. T. Tanner, The Cingalee (MS: LCP, 1904), 2:16. 38 Ibid., 2:22. 39 Ibid., 1:61. 40 Daily Telegraph, 24 April 1896, np. 41 Illustrated London News, 2 May 1896, 572. 42 Sketch, 29 April 1896, 42. 43 Daily Telegraph, 24 April 1896, np. 44 In race history the Frank, though Germanic, was a free and enfranchised figure (and thus aristocratic – in EB 11, vol. xi the Franks are described as ‘redoubtable warriors . . . generally of great stature’, 36). They were often set against the

200

Notes to pages 135–38

Gauls, constructed as the indigenous race of France; see Le´on Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard (London: Sussex University Press in association with Heinemann, 1974), 17–36. See also FW, 127.29 (‘the brain of the franks’); 134.26 (‘frankeyed boys’); 183.19 (‘counterfeit franks’); 220.12 (where Chuff is described as ‘a fine frankhaired fellow’); 282.8; 315.36; 557.19–20; 606.20, and so on. 45 It seems that this last scene was changed for the Dublin audience, presumably because the empire politics were just too strong. The Daily Express (Dublin) reviewer pointed out that ‘this sparkling musical comedy has been practically re-written and brought up-to-date in its patriotic, and humorous references. The scene of the last act has been changed from Egypt to the Paris Exhibition’ (Daily Express, 18 March 1902, 6). 46 T. Tanner and Alfred Murray, The Messenger Boy (MS: LCP, 1900), 2: 132–34. 47 For an account of the staging of the India Exhibition in London in 1895 and of Imre Kiralfy’s production India (1895–96), see Breandan Gregory, ‘Staging British India’, in Bratton et al., Acts of Supremacy, 150–78. Apparently, one and a half million people saw this spectacular at the 6,000-seat Empress theatre in London. 48 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 70–71. 49 There are, of course, many references to popular cultures even more contemporary with the Wake than musical comedy – to radio, television, cinema and cultural forms that were to displace West End musical comedy more immediately, the modern American musical, for example. 50 E. P. Christy founded the original Christy minstrels in New York in 1846, but many other groups adopted the name, including the Matthews Brothers who formed ‘Christy’s Coloured Comedians’, a British troupe who were rivals of Moore and Burgess. The latter were based at St James’s Hall in Piccadilly. They were founded by the American George Washington ‘Pony’ Moore. Frederick Burgess was the business manager and Eugene Stratton one of the cast members. 51 For an account of this process, see David Walsh and Len Platt, Musical Theatre and American Culture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 21–29. 52 Most accounts see minstrel shows in terms of an offensive appropriation by white society and culture, though there have been some attempts at partial revisionism. Eric Lott, for example, sees ambiguity here and writes about a ‘love and theft’ axis where blackface acts and the minstrel show entail an investiture in black bodies. This seems to try on the accents of blackness and so demonstrate the permeability of the colour line, while simultaneously, and decisively, rejecting the reality of actual black culture. See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Walsh and Platt, Musical Theater and American Culture, 21–29. 53 The skimmington ride was apparently practised throughout rural England. It involved the parading in effigy of those thought guilty of adultery or fornication outside marriage. There is a famous example in chapter thirty-nine of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886).

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54 The fact that the Bohee Brothers were black performers does not alter things. There was a long tradition of black performers in minstrel shows who blacked up, as white performers did, and sang the standard minstrel songs, largely in a standard way. 55 Tanner, The Cingalee, 1:38. 56 Ibid., 1:36. 57 Seymour Hicks and Harry Nicholls, A Runaway Girl (MS: LCP, 1898). 58 Tanner and Murray, The Messenger Boy, 1.2:77. 59 Oscar Asche, Chu Chin Chow (MS: LCP, 1917), 1:37. 60 This term is used by Thomas Hofheinz in Joyce and The Invention of Irish History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) to mean, I think, invested with mystery. See, for example, the beginning of chapter four where Hofheinz argues that the four ‘Irish historical and hagiographic sketches of Roderick O’Conor, Tristam and Isolde, St Patrick and the druid and ‘‘Kevin’s Orisons’’ constellate a carefully occulted but systematic treatment of the five hundred year period of Irish history, between the Norman invasion and the treaty of Kinsale’, 120–21. John Bishop, in Joyce’s Book of the Dark: ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), clearly a great influence on Hofheinz, also uses the term in this way. Inevitably, one wonders how far the usage harks back to Atherton and the idea that Joyce, the lapsed Catholic, bought into the occult in some way. 61 Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, 63.

7 1 The issue of Joyce’s politics was handled in Dominic Manganiellos’s book of that name, Joyce’s Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). 2 See Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 3 See Annotations, 162. 4 Ibid., 151. 5 This is not the view held here. See the following chapter for a discussion of the sleeper identity. 6 See Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (1981; London and New York: Longman, 1989), chapter 3. 7 George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (London and Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1976), 20. 8 Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, 40. 9 The Earl of Roseberry, Miscellanies. Literary and Historical, 2 vols., ed. John Buchan (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925), II, 250. 10 Maria Sophia Quine, Population Politics in Twentieth-Century Europe (London: Routledge, 1996), 53.

202

Notes to pages 152–54

11 This useful term is coined by Quine to denote a ‘pronatalist ideology advocating that families be given special social, economic and citizen rights’. See Population Politics, 55. 12 Quine sees pronatalism in France as ‘an organized reaction against the modernization which threatened the interests of family agriculture and peasant proprietorship, the symbols of order and stability for successive generations of French populationists’ (ibid., 85). 13 Ibid., 82. 14 Karen Offen, ‘Body Politics: Women, Work and the Politics of Motherhood in France, 1922–1950’, in G. Bock and P. Thane (eds.), Maternity and Gender Politics: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 150. 15 Quine, Population Politics, 83. 16 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols., trans. Robert Hurley (1976; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), I, 149. 17 Hitler’s speech to the N-S Frauenschaft on 8 September 1934, quoted in Max Domarus (ed.), Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945, 2 vols. (Munich: Neustadt, 1965), I, 449–52. 18 Cited in Renate Wiggershausen, Frauen unterm Nationalsozialism (Wuppertal: 1984), 15. 19 Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 250. 20 Ibid., 253. 21 ‘Antinatalism’ was a term coined by Gisela Bock to describe the policies of Nazi race hygiene that aimed at ‘purifying’ German ‘blood’ of ‘contaminants’. See Bock, ‘Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization and the State’, in R. Bridenthal, A. Grossman and M. Kaplan (eds.), When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984). 22 The ‘antinatalist’ programme, characterised by sterilisation, euthanasia, medical experimentation on human specimens and genocide, was not invented by Hitler. Indeed, the public and private apparatus of Germany’s ‘Welfare State’ was already becoming devoted to race hygiene in the 1920s. Before the fascists came to power, for example, there was a growing acceptance of sterilisation on eugenic grounds: ‘[t]he growing popularity of right-wing policies on population and race was a bitter condemnation of the principles of social justice and equal rights encoded in the Weimar constitution’ (Quine, Population Politics, 110). This partly explains why some historians have argued that Hitler’s ‘initial responsibility may well have consisted in lending the authority of a charismatic and popular dictator to pre-existing scientific, political and publicistic forays into an ethical void’ (Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State, 42–43). 23 Quine, Population Politics, 90. Her citation refers to Hannah Arendt’s classic study, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962), 438.

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24 Ludwig Leonhardt, Heirat und Rassenplege: Ein Berater fu¨r Eheanwa¨rter (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1934), cited in George Mosse, Nazi Culture: A Documentary History (1966; New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 34. 25 From the Frankfurter Zeitung, 1 June 1937, cited in Mosse, Nazi Culture, 43. 26 Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State, 201–02. The citations are from Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim with an introduction by D. C. Watt (1933; London: Hutchinson, 1969). 27 Adaline Glasheen, The Third Census of ‘Finnegans Wake’: An Index of the Characters and Their Roles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), lvii. 28 Len Platt, Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), 203–33. For ‘imagology’, see Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fı´or-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality (Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field Day, 1996), 6–14. 29 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 295. 30 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses’ Gramophone HEAR SAY YES IN JOYCE’, in Derek Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), 286. Here Derrida talks of both Ulysses and the Wake ‘including traces of the future. Yes, everything that has happened to us with Ulysses and has been signed in advance by Joyce.’

8 1 Frances Motz Boldereff, Reading ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Pennsylvania: Classic NonFiction Library, 1959), 2. 2 Daniel Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century was first published in 1925. For a revisionist account, see Louis Cullen, The Hidden Ireland: Reassessment of a Concept (1969; Lilliput: Mullingar, 1988). 3 Thomas Hofheinz, Joyce and the Invention of Irish History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 121. 4 John Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark: ‘Finneagans Wake’ (Madison: University of Wiscons in Press, 1986), 10. 5 Ibid., 27. 6 Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon are also among those many Joyceans who have positioned Freud at the centre of the Wake. In Understanding ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Guide to the Narrative of James Joyce’s Masterpiece (New York: Garland, 1982) they assert that the Wake is written ‘in the language of the unconscious’ (x). 7 Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, 196. 8 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), I, 686. 9 Derek Attridge, ‘Finnegans Awake: The Dream of Interpretation’, James Joyce Quarterly 27:1 (1989), 24, 27 fn 7. 10 Ibid., 26. 11 Hofheinz, Joyce and the Invention of Irish History, 24.

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Notes to pages 171–78

12 Frederick J. Hoffman, ‘‘‘The Seim Anew’’: Flux and Family in Finnegans Wake’, in Jack P. Dalton and Clive Hart (eds.), Twelve and a Tilly (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 16, 22–23. 13 Finn Fordham, ‘The Universalisation of Finnegans Wake and the Real H. C. E.’, in Andrew Gibson and Len Platt (eds.), Joyce, Ireland, Britain (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, forthcoming). 14 Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, 169. 15 Margot Norris, ‘The Critical History of Finnegans Wake and the Finnegans Wake of Historical Criticism’, in Mark A. Wollaeger, Victor Luftig and Robert Spoo (eds.), Joyce and the Subject of History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 178. 16 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses’ Gramophone HEAR SAY YES IN JOYCE’, in Derek Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), especially 281. 17 See Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment? (Was ist Aufkla¨rung?)’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 43. See also the remark that ‘[w]e must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment’ (43). 18 See James Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), especially 1–10. 19 Hofheinz, Joyce and the Invention of Irish History, 3. 20 Norris, ‘The Critical History of Finnegans Wake’, 181. 21 The literature here includes Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980 (London: Faber and Faber, 1985); Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996); Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995) and David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993). 22 Deane, Celtic Revivals, 92. 23 Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2, 4. 24 For an early attack on the alleged ‘logocentrism’ of historians – such as Hobsbawm – who have identified ‘authentic’ nationalism with the emergence of the nation state, see Luke Gibbons’s chapter ‘Identity Without a Cause: Allegory, History and Irish Nationalism’, in Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, 134–47. 25 Len Platt, Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A study of Joyce and the Literary Revival (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), 128–29. 26 See Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 3. 27 Emer Nolan, Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995), 28, 31 and 56. 28 Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 179–80. 29 Ibid., 186. 30 Paul Gilroy, ‘The End of Antiracism’, in Wendy Ball and John Solomos (eds.), Race and Local Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 196.

Index

Adorno, Theodor 122, 197 Aflalo, F. G. 130–31 Alien Immigration Act (1905) 83 ALP (a ‘character’ in the Wake) 8, 11, 28, 32, 33, 61, 67, 86, 108, 136, 138, 149–50, 154, 162 ALP’s letter 35–37, 107 exposed to her sons 111, 116 racial designations of 18, 33 sexuality and 155 Amin, Idi 180 ancien re´gime 3 Anglo-Ireland 1, 2, 47 Anglo-Saxonism 11, 18, 40, 42, 43, 52–55, 105, 185 in the Wake 32, 44–45, 50, 190 anthropology 88–93 anti-Semitism 18, 103, 105–06, 156, 161 archaeology 77 Aristotle 119 Arnold, Matthew 7, 43 Culture and Anarchy 43 Study of Celtic Literature 43 Arthurian legend 52–53 Aryanism 11, 12, 14–41, 42, 49, 79, 146–47, 185 in Britain 11, 21–22 dismantling of 18, 40, 51 historical linguistics and 2, 16–17, 51 in Ireland 11, 21–22, 50–51, 55–59 rise of nationalism and 15 theosophy and 98, 102–06 in the Wake 11, 17, 18–22, 28–34, 50, 60–61, 67–68, 146–47, 169 Atherton, James S. 96–97, 99, 118, 201 The Books at the Wake 89–92 Attridge, Derek ‘Finnegans Wake: The Dream of Interpretation’ 168 Bagehot, Walter Physics and Politics 74 Bailey, Peter 197 Bantock, Granville 130–31

Banton, Michael 6 Barkan, Elazar 5 Bauman, Zygmunt 6 Beckett, Samuel 22 ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’ 23–24, 119–20 Belaney, George S. (‘Grey Owl’) 99 Benfey, Theodor 51 Bergson, Henri 38 Besant, Annie 96, 106 Bishop, John 90 Joyce’s Book of the Dark 22, 90, 166–69, 171–72, 201 Bismarck, Otto von 74–75 Black and Tans, 62 blackface (in music theatre) 35 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna (Madame) 12, 95, 96, 98–120, 169, 188 Isis Unveiled 96, 97, 98–120, 195, 196, 197 Secret Doctrine 99, 102, 195, 196 in the Wake 96, 106–17, 196 see also theosophy Boas, Franz 93 Bock, Gisela 202 Bolderoff, Frances 166 Reading ‘Finnegans Wake’ 165–66 Booth, Charles 70 Booth, Michael 198 Bopp, Franz Comparative Grammar 16 Boru, Brian 45 Bourke, Ulick J., Reverend Aryan Origin of the Gaelic Race and Language 57–58 Bowler, Peter 69, 78–79 Boyd, Edward 95 Bratton, J. S. 133, 198 Bruno, Giordano 117–20 Spacia della bestia triofante, 106 in the Wake 110, 117–20 Budgen, Frank 171 Buffon, Georges-Louis 16

205

206

Index

‘Buckley and the Russian General’ (a ‘story’ in the Wake) 29, 150–51 Burleigh, Michael 155 burlesque 123 Campbell, Bruce F. 118, 194 Campbell, Joseph 89, 171 Carey, John 190 Carlyle, Thomas 54 Casement, Roger 55 Catholicism 59, 104, 112 Celticism 2, 7, 11, 12, 41, 42–68 in/and classical culture 42, 43–44 in the Wake 31, 34, 35, 45 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 31 Chaplin, Charlie 38 Chapman, Michael 41, 42 Cheng, Vincent 1, 18, 175–76, 181, 197 Childers, Hugh Culling Eardsley 31 Collins, Michael 62 ‘conceptualist’ approaches to the Wake 13, 145, 165–70, 173, 183 Connelly, Marc 12 Connolly, James 177 Connolly, Thomas E. 91 Conrad, Joseph 68 Corkery, Daniel 165 Coulomb, Emma 99 Coward, Noe¨l 127 craniology (craniometry) 77–78 in the Wake 11, 21, 36, 190 Crepieux-Jamin, Jules 78, 84 Les ´ele´ments de l’e´criture des canailles 35–36 cricket 169 criminology 21 Cromwell, Oliver 31 Curran, C. P. 96 Daladier, Edouard 153 Dalton, Jack P. 170 Dante, Alighieri 119 Darwin, Charles 3, 6, 69–70, 73, 79, 80, 83, 100, 190 Descent of Man 72 On the Origin of Species 70, 72 in the Wake 80 Darwin, Leonard 76 Dawkins, W. Boyd 71 Deane, Seamus 175 Deane, Vincent 35, 186 Defoe, Daniel 7, 54 Duncan Campbell 7 ‘True Born Englishman’ 54 degeneration theory 3–4, 37, 38, 70–71, 75, 93, 158, 159 Derrida, Jacques 1, 160, 172–73, 203

De Valera, Eamon 11, 51, 64, 66 Dickens, Charles 73 Dillon, Myles 56, 189 Diosy, Arthur 131 Disraeli, Benjamin 6 Dubliners 1, 177, 196 ‘After the Race’ 133 ‘Araby’ 121 ‘The Dead’ 170, 177 ‘An Encounter’ 128 ‘A Little Cloud’ 46 ‘A Mother’ 46 Dublin Gaiety (theatre) 126, 133, 135 Dubois, Eugene 81, 192 Dugdale, R. F. 84–85, 192 Dunlop, D. N. 104 Durkheim, Emile 93 Dyer, Richard 197 Edwardes, George 127 Eglinton, John 95, 104, 106, 117, 125 Einstein, Albert 38 Eliot, T. S. 3–4, 68, 72, 122 Ellmann, Richard 171, 186 Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911 edn.) 40–41, 51, 56, 77–78, 87, 99, 185 in the Wake 40–41 Enlightenment 2, 3, 11, 27, 74, 84, 120, 173, 179, 181, 191 race and 5, 16, 182 theosophy and 12, 97 in the Wake 2, 3, 68, 169 eugenics 8, 11, 21, 69, 71, 82–88, 134, 152 race and 75–76 in the Wake 61, 62, 85–88, 190 Eugenics Education Society 83 Eugenics Society 83 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 92 Fairhall, James 174, 175 ‘familism’ 146, 152–54 gender politics and 152–54, 155 in England 152 in France 152–53 in Germany 153–54 and the Wake 154–55 Farr, Florence 44 fascism 66, 146–47 in the Wake 13, 146–47, 159, 160, 170 Ferrer, Daniel 13, 46, 183 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 3 Ficino, Marsilio 118 Fields, Gracie 169 Finnegan, Tim (a ‘character’ in the Wake) 18, 31, 45, 61, 80, 93–94, 107, 113, 139, 154, 158

Index Ford Madox Ford 3–4, 68 Fordham, Finn 171, 172 Foster, R. F. 59, 189, 190 Foster, Stephen 142 Foucault, Michel 65, 153, 161, 173, 204 Franks 53, 200 in the Wake 50, 200 Freeman’s Journal 126, 133 freemasonry 107, 110 French Revolution 36 Freud, Sigmund 167, 204 Totem and Taboo 67–68, 93 Froude, Anthony James 54 Frye, Northrop 172 Gaelic language 41 Gaelic Athletics Association 59 Gaelic League 59 Gaels 59 in the Wake 34 Gaiety Girls 127 Galls 59 in the Wake 34 Galton, Sir Francis 76, 83 Garelick, Rhonda 124 Gauguin, Paul 92 Gauls 40 in the Wake 34, 50 genetic criticism 13, 182–83 Geoffrey of Monmouth 52 Gibbon, Edward 54 Gibbons, Luke 175, 204 Gibson, Andrew 82 Gilbert, Stuart 96, 194 Gilbert, W. S and A. Sullivan 12, 126 Gilroy, Paul 178–79, 193 Glasheen, Adaline 30, 96, 107, 157 The Third Census 37, 112, 185 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de 17 Goddard, Henry Herbert 84–85, 193 Goebbels, Joseph 153 Goldberg, D. T. 5, 182 Goths 40–41 graphology 78 Gregory, Breandan 200 Gregory, Lady Augusta 177 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jacob von 15 Haekel, Ernst 17, 69, 80, 86, 191 Riddle of the Universe 80 Haldane, J. B. S Daedalus or the Science of the Future 8 Hardy, Thomas 200 Hart, Clive 96, 170

207

HCE (a ‘character’ in the Wake) 27, 29, 32, 33, 35, 108, 137, 138, 142, 154–55 his breeding programme 86 his configurations 32, 113 and the Cad 81 displacement by Shaun 11, 63, 67, 169 racial designations of 18, 28, 31–32, 139, 142 resurrected 80–81, 162 sexuality and 85, 149, 151, 154–55 Hegel, G. W. F. 16, 102 Herder, Johann Gottfried 17, 36, 74, 103 Hermetic Society 95 Hermeticism 12, 102, 105, 116, 117–20 Herr, Cheryl 126 Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture 122, 198 Hicks, Seymour 134 historical approaches to Joyce studies 174–80 historical linguistics 2–3, 16, 20, 24 in the Wake 19–20, 37 Hitler, Adolf 10, 31, 39, 60, 63, 146, 152, 153, 155–56, 161, 202 Mein Kampf 155–56, 159–60 Hobsbawm, Eric 135–36, 181, 204 Hoffman, Frederick J. 170 Hofheinz, Thomas 167 Joyce and the Invention of Irish History 23, 165–66, 174, 192, 201 Holocaust 5, 14, 179 Hume, David 17, 54 ‘Huns’ 40 in the Wake 45 Hussein, Saddam 180 Hutton, Christopher 17 Huxley, Aldous Brave New World 8 Huxley, Julian 69 Huxley, T. H. 73, 101–02 Hyde, Douglas 42 ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicisation’ 55 Internationalist 95 International Theosophist 104 ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’ (essay by Joyce) 6–7 Irish mythology 45, 47, 49, 50, 63, 86, 108, 158 Irish nationalism 1, 2, 43–44 Irish republicanism 50, 59 in the Wake 11, 50, 108–09 Irish revivalism 2, 43–44, 60, 97, 117, 157, 176–77 literary revivalism 95, 118, 176–77 and racism 44 Irish Theosophist 95 Issy (a ‘character’ in the Wake) 32, 33, 62, 64, 110, 150, 156

208 Jacolliot, Louis 17, 103 Johnson, Charles 95 Jolas, Eugene 171, 172 Jones, William 16 Joyce, James Celtic identity and 7, 45–46 (‘Celtomanes’) comment on Hitler 186 engagement with scientific racism 8–9 English liberalism and 6 idea of nationality and 8 Irish Free State and 66 politics and 147 popular culture and 128 relation to the Irish middle class 6 race consciousness and 6–10, 44, 60 theosophy and 95–96 views on Wyndham Lewis 39–40 Joyce, Lucia 127 Joyce, Nora 186 Judge, W. Q. 104 Jukes and Kallikaks 12, 70, 84–85, 169 in the Wake 85–86 Kant, Emmanuel 17, 74, 102–03 Kandinsky, Wassily 98 Keith, Sir Arthur 71, 79 Kershner, R. B. 197 Kiberd, Declan 2, 175 Inventing Ireland 176–77 Kingsley, Charles 54 Kipling, Rudyard 54 Krishnamurti, Jiddu 98 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 69, 84, 190 Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis de 17 Latham, Sean 190 Lawless, Emily Ireland 29, 58, 189 Lawrence, D. H. 3, 92 Lee, Peggy 84 Le´on, Paul 10 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 178 Lernout, Geert 182–83 Levin, Harry 171 Le´vy-Bruhl, Lucien 38, 88–93, 190, 193 L’Ame primitif 89 L’Expe´rience mystique et les symboles chez les primitifs 89 How Natives Think 88, 89, 90 Lewis, Percy Wyndham 3–4, 68, 122, 186–87 Hitler 38, 39 The Lion and the Fox 39, 186–87 Paleface 38–39, 186–87 Time and the Western Man 4, 38 in the Wake 18, 32, 35, 37–40, 77, 78, 91

Index Light, Alison 198 Linnaeus, Carolus 6 Lloyd, David 175 Lott, Eric 200 Lowe-Evans, Mary 87, 189–90 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 54 Macpherson, James 99 McHugh, Roland 32, 96, 116 Malik, Kenan 5, 6, 18, 181, 182, 193 Malinowski, Bronislaw 92, 93 Martyn, Edward 44 The Heather Field 44 Maeve 44 Marxism 22 Mahatma Letters 96, 99 Mendel, Gregor 190 Mentel Deficiency Act (1913), the 83 Mesmer, F. A. 112 Metchnikoff, Leon 8 La civilisation et les grandes fleuves historiques 8–9 Michelet, Jules 3, 17, 36, 103 Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies (in the Wake 2.1) 124–25, 127, 130, 134–35 minstrel show 12, 35, 123, 133, 138, 144, 200 Bohee Brothers 140, 201 Christy minstrels 137, 200 Moore and Burgess minstrels 137, 200 in the Wake 136, 137–40, 142 modernity the Wake and 2, 4, 8–9, 38, 118, 144–45 monogenesis 15–16 Giambattista Vico and 24 Mookse and the Gripes (a ‘story’ in the Wake) 81, 108, 150 Morel, Augustin 70–71 morris dancing 138 Mosse, George 152 Mu¨ller, Max 17, 51, 57, 60, 102, 104 Mullin, Katherine 148 musical comedy 12, 123–25, 144 (main shows referred to) The Arcadians 123, 127 An Artist’s Model 125, 126 By Jingo If We Do 126, 127 Chu Chin Chow 126, 127, 130, 131, 137, 143 The Cingalee 131, 133, 134, 141 A Country Girl 127 Flora 127 Floradora 122, 125, 126, 127–30, 131, 137, 199 The Geisha 125, 126, 131–32, 133, 134, 137 The Girl from Kay’s 123, 126 The Girl on the Film 124, 198 High Jinks 126

Index Madame Sherry 126 The Merry Widow 126–27 The Messenger Boy 131, 135, 200 Our Miss Gibbs 123–24, 126 The Quaker Girl 127 A Runaway Girl 134, 141 San Toy 126, 131, 133, 134 The Schoolgirl 124, 126, 127 Ve´ronique 126 in the Wake 125, 126–27, 130, 134–35 music hall 35, 123, 144 Mussolini, Benito 4, 161 Mutt and Jute (‘figures’ in the Wake) 81, 82 ‘national efficiency’ (in Edwardian England) 83 National Socialism (NSPAD) 26, 66, 146, 153–54, 155, 161, 179, 194, 202–03 Law for the Reduction of Unemployment (1933) 153 Marriage Law (1938) 153–54 in the Wake 10, 13, 20, 28, 61, 66 Newman, John Henry 55 Nicholas de Cusa 118 Nichols, Harry 134 Nietzsche, Friedrich 43, 173 Noarchic traditions 52, 58, 113, 185 in the Wake 29–30, 31, 52 Nolan, Emer Joyce and Nationalism 177–78 Nordau, Max 93 Norris, Margot 172, 173, 174 Norwegian captain (‘story’ in the Wake) 29, 32, 143, 150 Novello, Ivor 84 numerology 116 O’Conor, Roderick 45, 115 O’Conor, W. A. 58–59 Offen, Karen 153 O’Grady, Standish 43–44, 48, 95, 177 O’Hanlon, John 90, 195, 203 Olcott, Henry Steel 96, 98, 106, 194 Ondt and the gracehoper (‘story’ in the Wake) 85 Orientalism 17, 131–32, 133–36 in the Wake 12, 121–22, 136–37, 140, 142, 144 Oxford University Union 83 palaeoanthropology 3, 11, 78–82 in the Wake 78, 80–82 palaeology 77 pantomime 12, 123, 144 Turko the Terrible 137, 138 Parnell, Charles Stewart 177 Pearse, Padraic 59

209

Pearson, Karl 76, 83 Peter Parley’s Tales about Ireland 29 phrenology 21 in the Wake 37, 190 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 118 Pictet, Adolphe 189 De l’affinite´ des langages celtiques avec le Sanskrit 56 Picts and Scots 41 Piggot, Richard 99 Piltdown man 191 Pokorny, Julius 56, 57, 189 Poliakov, Le´on 6, 8, 9, 14, 15–16 Pol Pot 180 polygenesis 15 popular culture 51–52, 121–45 in the Wake 4, 12, 124–27, 130, 134, 136, 137–45, 169, 200 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1, 82 postcolonial criticism 1 Pott, August 17, 56 Pound, Ezra 3–4, 40, 68, 122 Powell, Enoch 178 prankquean tale, the (‘story’ in the Wake) 19, 158 progress historiography 70 in the Wake 21 Proust, Marcel 38 Quine, Maria 202 Quinet, Edgar 36 ‘Race and Realism in English Literature’ (essay by Joyce) 7 race representation in popular culture 12, 121–201 racism and social class 5, 70–71 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 93 Rappaport, Erika Diane 198 rationalism in the Wake 2 Reformation 52 Reinach, Saloman 18 Renan, Ernest 7, 36, 60, 103 Life of Jesus 36 Rentoul, Robert Reid 75, 93 Report of the Physical Deterioration Committee (1904) 83 Retzius, Andre´ 78, 84 Roberts, George 109 Robeson, Paul 84 Robinson, Henry Morton 89 Rooney, Mickey 84 Rose, Danis 90, 195, 203 Rowntree, Seebohm 70 Russell, George (AE) 95, 106, 117

210

Index

St Patrick 45, 48 St Peter 110 Saleeby, C. W. 75 Saussure, Ferdinand de 93 Savard, James Townsend 99 Schiller, Friedrich von 2 Schopenhauer, Arthur 17 Schottel, Justus Georg 2 Schultz, ‘Dutch’ 84 Schwalbe, Gustav 80–81, 84 scientific racism 1, 3, 4–6, 11, 26, 40–41, 69, 82, 143, 144, 157, 181 biology and 70 historical linguistics and 2, 16–18 Noarchic traditions and 15, 16, 28 in Renaissance Spain 16 retreat from 5–6, 14–15, 92–94, 178, 179 in the Wake 4–6, 10–11, 18–22, 30–31, 34–41, 71–72, 92–94 sexology 82 in the Wake 36, 37 Searle, G. R. 83 Shaun (a ‘character’ in the Wake) 29–30, 38, 39, 45, 61–66, 109, 143, 150, 156 as Aryanist 11, 18, 32–33, 61–66 as Jaun 61–67, 160, 162 in ‘Night Lessons’ (the Wake II.ii) 110–12, 156 racial designations of 29–30 as Yaun (Yawn) 32, 61–67, 71, 112, 114, 136–37, 139 Shaw, George Bernard 192 Shem (a ‘character’ in the Wake) 29, 32, 109, 117, 156 as ‘Kevin’ 110 in ‘Night Lessons’ (the Wake II.ii) 110, 111–12 racial designations 18, 29–30 Shem according to Shaun 29–30, 32–33, 77–78, 86–87, 109, 138–39, 159 Siculus, Diodorus 25 sigla 116–17 Sinn Fe´in 59 Sinnett, A. P. 95, 96, 98–99, 103–04, 106, 119, 194 Early Days of Theosophy 195 Esoteric Buddhism 95, 99, 194, 196 Growth of the Soul 194 Occult World 95 Smiles, Samuel 73 social Darwinism 11, 54, 70, 71, 73–76 nationalism and 74–75 its radicalisation 74–76 in the Wake 71–72, 76–78, 92–94 social imperialism 74–75

Sollas, W. J. 71 Spencer, Herbert 69, 73, 74 Spengler, Oswald 93 Spoo, Robert 174, 175 Stalin, Josef 180 Stein, Gertrude 38 Stirner, Max 17 Stuart, Leslie 122 Synge, J. M. 177 Taine, Hippolyte 17 Taylor, Isaac 51 Teutonism (Germanism) 42, 52–53, 59, 67 Thatcher, Margaret 178 theosophy 12, 95–120 the Aryan myth and 12 as a modern discourse 97–102 in the Wake 12, 100, 105, 106–17 Theosophical Society 98, 103 Dublin branch 95 Theatre Royal, Dublin 126 Thornton, Weldon 198 The Times 38, 130 Tolkien, J. R. R. 42 Trismegistos, Hermes 110 Emerald Table 108 Tristan and Isolde 157 Twain, Mark Huckleberry Finn, 12 Tylor, Edward B. 18 Ulysses 1, 6, 14, 96, 121, 122, 125, 126, 137, 148, 149, 160, 164 ‘Aeolus’ 55 ‘Circe’ 132–33, 140 ‘Cyclops’ 46–49, 128, 177–78, 179 ‘Ithaca’ 36, 82 ‘Nausicaa’ 82, 128 ‘Oxen of the Sun’ 82–83 ‘Penelope’ 107 ‘Sirens’ 126, 127–30 ‘Wandering Rocks’ 136 nationalist discourses and 1, 26, 46–49, 157 styles of compared to the Wake 184 universalist approaches to the Wake 170–73 Upanishads 96 Vacher de Lapouge, Georges 36 Vico, Giambattista 11, 15, 51, 67, 76, 100, 113, 114, 119, 167, 168 New Science 11, 21, 22–28, 89 in the Wake 21, 22–28

Index Voltaire 17 vulgarity (‘filth’) in the Wake 13, 37, 146–63

Wilde, Oscar 85 Wippermann, Wolfgang 155 Woolf, Virginia 122

Wake notebooks 29, 31, 35, 45–46, 81, 96, 97, 182, 185, 188, 192 race classification and 8–9, 44, 79, 186, 191 Warde, Willie 131 Weaver, Harriet Shaw 40 Weeks, Jeffrey 152 Weimar Republic, 161 Weininger, Otto 60, 93 Sex and Character 60 Weismann, August 190

Yates, Francis 119, 195 Yeats, W. B. 3, 44, 48, 63, 92, 95, 106, 117, 176, 177, 192, 194 Crossways 60 Vision 99, 100, 113 Zeuss, Johann Kaspar Grammatica Celtica 56 Ziegler, Adolf 161 Zimmer, Heinrich 56–57, 188 Maya der indische Mythos 56

211