Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

LOTS OF FUN AT FINNEGANS WAKE

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Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake Unravelling Universals

FINN FORDHAM

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  Finn Fordham 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–921586–7 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Max, Taddy, Cato, and Jason, with love

Acknowledgements Joyce’s last novel is often conceived as multi-authored, a ‘tissue of quotations’, a ‘social text’ of sorts, so I am particularly aware of the extensive roles others have played in the long compositional journey of my own—or I should say our —book. There are too many to thank if these acknowledgements are to be exhaustive: first of all there is the Leverhulme Trust and University College Northampton for generous funding; then my inspiring teachers Maud Ellmann, Steven Connor, and Peter Brooker for having spurred, supervised and supported my doctoral and postdoctoral research; the geneticists Sam Slote, Luca Crispi, Dirk van Hulle, Ingeborg Landuyt, Wim van Mierlo, Geert Lernout, and Daniel Ferrer who help form an exemplary network of mutually supportive scholars—a high five to all of them (simultaneously); the Charles Peake Ulysses reading group in London for its model exegetical practices, especially those of Andrew Gibson and Joe Brooker; the readers and Wakeans Patrick McCarthy, Sheldon Brivic, and Derek Attridge for invaluable suggestions regarding an earlier version of the manuscript; Andrew McNeillie, Rowena Anketell, and Lizzie Robottom at OUP for their grace and energy in publishing my work; Rohan Crowley for in dispensable help with the Index; Kasia Bazarnik and Zenon Fajfer, Carl and Agnieszka GinkoHumphreys, Jason Cato, Ann, and Milo Fordham, Ruth MacLennan and Robin Banerji for providing pleasure, critical stimulation, and a sense that Joyce can flourish outside academia; Christopher and Mary Warman and Max and Taddy Fordham for always cheerfully helping the homeless at various crucial moments; and last but not least, indeed, above all: Leo, Viola, and especially Caroline, without whom . . . As Joyce said to those around him with his book almost done: You have all written this book. Except, of course, any of its mistakes, for which I claim sole authorship.

Contents Abbreviations Note on the Transcriptions

viii ix

Introduction

1 PA RT I

A. Shem’s ‘Cyclewheeling History’ (185.27–186.10)

39

B. Anna Livia’s ‘very first time’ (203.17–204.05)

66

PA RT I I BUTT: ‘I Shuttm!’ (351.36–355.09)

89

PA RT I I I ‘Nircississies’ (526.20–528.24)

175

PA RT I V Revising Character: The Maggies and the Murphys Appendix Bibliography Index

217 245 247 259

Abbreviations EJS FW JJA JJQ JSA LI LII LIII

European Joyce Studies Finnegans Wake, 3rd edn. (London: Faber & Faber, 1975) James Joyce Archive, ed. Michael Groden et al. James Joyce Quarterly Joyce Studies Annual Letters of James Joyce, vol. i, ed. Stuart Gilbert Letters of James Joyce, vol. ii, ed. Richard Ellmann Letters of James Joyce, vol. iii, ed. Richard Ellmann

Note on the Transcriptions I have attempted to develop ways of presenting the manuscript text in a transcribed form so as to make the ‘base text’ and the changes relating to it as transparent as possible. I hope the results speak for themselves. Nonetheless, here are some of the principles and strategies I’ve made use of. There are two styles of transcription. The first (and most frequent) involves showing in bold new text relative to the previous draft (see, for example, p. 67). It is made in either one of two ways: by comparing one draft with the succeeding, extant draft, and then highlighting all the new material in bold. Or making a continuous text out of a ‘base text’ and the revisions made immediately onto that text. In either case the result is an eclectic text. The second style shows in adjacent columns the base text and the revisions (see, for example, p. 51). In two instances there’s a third column for revisions to the revisions made on the same manuscript (see pp. 59 and 69). I often ‘clean up’ a draft level of the overlay visible on the manuscript, removing any ensuing additions, substitutions, or cancellations, but also try to keep the rare effects of currente calamo when they happen. I have tried to use as few of the diacritical marks that are common to ‘genetic’ transcriptions as possible, and have translated Joyce’s ‘revise marks’ into numbers for ease of reference. Substitutions are also in bold. Occasionally the substituted element of text is retained and crossed through, but at other times it can only be registered with reference to the transcription of the previous draft. The commentary in any case attempts to register such substitutive changes. Occasionally—especially in the case of Parts II and III—I have combined three adjacent levels of revision as one level. This is because the revisions may be scanty and scattered over a lengthy passage, and it is not worth copying out the whole three times when only one or two words are being added.

The devil is in the detail (popular saying)

God is in the detail . . . Ludwig Wittgenstein and Mies van der Rohe

Introduction Finnegans Wake has been described and describes itself in many ways. Since it fell easily into making lists, here is an easily extendable reel of descriptions. It is . . . a sleep-story; the dreamlike saga of guilt-stained, evolving humanity; a protracted nightmare; a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind; a gigantic epiphany of mankind; an ark to contain all human myths and types; a chaosmos of Alle; a polyhedron of scripture; a meanderthalltale; this nonday diary, this allnight’s newseryreel; one of the boldest books ever written; one of the most entertaining books ever written; one of the greatest works of twentieth-century architecture; nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can be worth all [its] circumambient peripherization; enormous, mad, unreadable; a cold pudding of a book; a Wholesale Safety Pun factory; a dull mass of phony folklore; a divertissement philologique; literatured with . . . once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage; an Irish word ballet; like a little Negro dance; music; a collideorscape; a macroscope; a last judgement and genial proclamation of doom; a monstrous prophecy; a history of the future; a tragi-comedy; funferal and funferall; made out of nothing; a paroxysm of wroughtness; Wimmegame’s Fake; a big long wide high deep dense prosework; an encyclopedia of mythology; a postmodern encyclopedia . . . a parody of the eleventh Britannica; unprecedented; seen distantly and from without, like a darkened powerhouse on the skyline; a wheel . . . and it’s all square!; a flying machine; a time machine; a hypermnesiac machine; a cybernetic history machine; a simulacrum of the machinery of God’s creation; a millwheeling vicociclometer; the most profoundly antifascist book produced between the two wars; an engagement with the very matter of our being; a war on language; a wonderful game; most.¹

Finnegans Wake for Fritz Senn is what we do with it. But it is also what it does with us. We produce a wake by the way we steer, but we also steer by the Wake that we produce. ¹ See Appendix for a list of sources used in this text.

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How is it possible for a book of 628 pages to inspire so many different visions?² Because it consists of so many distinct but interrelated objects—that is to say words, of course, but they denote and evoke things—more things than there are words. Many of the words or formations appear nowhere else, and it is difficult to describe something so much of which you’re seeing for the first time. Its neologisms make it unencompassable, endlessly redefinable. The textual matter of Finnegans Wake developed over seventeen years, just as the meaning for its readers has developed over the seventyeight years since its first publication. The continual critical redefining of Finnegans Wake partly maps onto its many redefinitions of itself. Both have histories and the list above comprises jumbled fragments of them, concealing a deranged story of ever-shifting perceptions. During the seventeen years of its composition, composed in a manner unlike that used for any other novel, it was always growing. That is it was shifting, splitting, recombining, reconfiguring, restructuring, destructuring, decomposing, and recomposing. One of the things that Finnegans Wake is, is a strange object made in strange ways. By focusing on some of the ways it was made, we will in this book arrive at a further understanding of what it is. Through its continuously self-generating transformation, it is a text of modulation and becoming, flux and flow, an alternative classic of change to the I Ching. Written in a world which was heading towards a confident belief that it could locate, name, and describe anything (all organisms, subatomic particles, links of DNA, black holes), it produced something full of indescribable, unnamable parts. As an unencompassable unfathomable text it remains the best correlative for our unencompassable unfathomable times, changing in its meanings as swiftly as our world, through its feverish reproduction of reproductions. No first draft was ever allowed to settle in its primary state. Joyce returned to them all, and bombarded his writing with more writing. Most passages underwent copious levels of revision and layering. The text seems to be lacquered—though this turns out to be an inadequate metaphor, for in a method of supplementation like Joyce’s we actually get to see most of the material in the final text (though not the method or precise points where the material was added). This introduction to Finnegans Wake will recount certain acts of its making, peeling back the layers of specific passages to read Joyce’s acts of writing as much as the writing itself, and to come to an understanding ² All editions of Finnegans Wake have the same number of pages. I use the third edition published by Faber & Faber in 1975. This is a revised version of the 1950 second edition which incorporated Joyce’s corrections that he made in 1940 to the first edition of 1939. For a bibliographical account and a related discussion see my ‘The Corrections to Finnegans Wake: For ‘‘reading’’ read ‘‘readings’’ ’, in Dirk van Hulle (ed.), James Joyce: The Study of Languages (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2002).

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of the character of these acts. Every instant of making, it became something new. It was never left to settle until it went to press for the first edition (and even after that the leopard couldn’t change his spots and made small but substantive revisions). Halfway through its writing it was a ‘flying machine’.³ By the time Joyce was finishing it, reading a part for the whole, it was ‘a mighty mother . . . now at last making ready to take her slide into the unsuspecting sea’,⁴ the mighty work about to be cast adrift on the sea of the future carried along by an unknown readership. And before he actually started, he envisaged it as a ‘universal history’.⁵ How might you begin writing a universal history, if you were introducing the story of humanity to an alien? With Adam and Eve, perhaps. But that, paradoxically, is both too well known and too easily discredited. How about using the facts that archaeology unearths concerning the cultivation of grain or the earliest city? That’s more scientific but might lack drama. Couldn’t we have something to match the histrionics of Genesis? What about evolution, the discovery of fire, the wheel, or the lever, and the subsequent clash between tribes—Neanderthals and Homo sapiens? Stanley Kubrick used these elements in his film 2001, implying a history of the world through technological discoveries and it makes great drama, but it also produces a conflictual view of human nature: that we’re here to manipulate and fight, and that progress comes through the exercise of ever-improving power tools. One consideration in your choice, therefore, is that the beginning may determine the end and structure the narrative. Once you have started there is no going back. Since you do not know what happened, you might as well just make it up: choose a character and let it roll from there. But that hardly helps to limit your choice. So how would you begin? Joyce was probably thinking about this question of beginnings, planning his next book while finishing Ulysses and seeing it into print. Having written the deep history of a single day, Joyce was moving to this other extreme—a history of the world. He began to take notes for it in 1922, and by October 1923, he had drafted at least five sketches each one just a couple of pages long: Roderick O’Conor, Berkeley and Patrick, Tristan and Isolde, St Kevin, and Mamalujo.⁶ This world history was predominantly male and Irish, and drew on historical or mythical figures, rather than on technologies or social groupings. The treatment of history was fantasized, ahistorical, and comic. The first one, about King Roderic, the last King of all Ireland, who became a ³ To Weaver, 16 Feb. 1931, LI, 300. ⁴ To Carlow, 8 Sept. 1938, LIII, 427. ⁵ Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce’s World (London: Methuen, 1957), 140. ⁶ To this can be added a sketch about St Dympna which came to light amongst manuscripts purchased by the National Library of Ireland in March 2006. For further details see Sam Slote and Luca Crispi, How Joyce Wrote ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2006), 11.

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vassal to Henry II of England in 1175, is modernized into an innkeeper who, after his customers have gone, drinks everything they have left, then slumps onto his throne, singing a comic Edwardian song. This sketch of a proverbial loser would end up on page 380, not far after the middle of the book, as if everything grows out and towards it. He features again later, morphed into a new form: ‘Dodderick Ogonoch Wrack’.⁷ (Richard Brown thinks this middle is, in fact, the end of the novel.⁸) Roderick O’Conor, at the new work’s inception and at its positional centre, can be used on these grounds to answer that difficult question, what is Finnegans Wake ‘basically’ about? If one wants such a perspective, it is possible to say that, put simply, Joyce’s music-hall version of world history concerns the comic fall of a man who had once risen. Put simply. But the total work is complex and defies such reduction. Finnegans Wake can be all the other things described above, as well as a world history, and more. All the different ways of describing it indicate the way it has invited definition while defying it. The consequence is to give Finnegans Wake a high but ambivalent status. It has a high status because of its relation to Ulysses—the ‘greatest novel of the twentieth-century’ (not just ‘one of the greatest’)—and because of an experimentation with language that is so uncompromising, so dismissive of all that is derivative, it is emblematic of all avant-garde work in any media, not just the medium of literature. Because of this status, we have high expectations, and some are compelled to arrive at weighty interpretations of it, such as: ‘Joyce’s Finnegans Wake attempts to restructure the world, reinvent religion, and recreate God.’⁹ This may be because we would like to have an object in our world which profoundly addresses the problems of our culture. We would like a text to do this because of a nostalgia for a sacred book that will inform our beliefs: a New Old Testament, a New New Testament, a New Koran, a New Tao Te Ching, a new Confucius—all for a secular society which, by definition, doesn’t want a holy book. But like some gorgeously painted egg perched on a high shelf, it is conspicuous but vulnerable. These descriptions may actually be demands of it, and demands that it cannot fulfil. If we say it is x or y or z (a sacred text, the most profoundly anti-fascist book, a lesson in peace or human history, an ecocriticism, a 1000th generation computer), we are wanting it to be these things, not describing but prescribing it. In fact, we might realize that it cannot have the ability—or the remit—to do, to be, or to represent such grand things. At such moments of realization, those who find Finnegans Wake ⁷ Finnegans Wake, 498.23. ⁸ Richard Brown, James Joyce (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 106. ⁹ Albert Montesi, ‘Joyce’s Blue Guitar: Wallace Stevens and Finnegans Wake’, in John Harty III, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: A Casebook (New York: Garland, 1991), 99–111:107.

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trivial, excruciating, pointless, or frustrating are proved right: they’ve been led to believe that it has great power, only to find that it falls so short of these things that it might as well have none. It’s a con. The idea that it will somehow explain the structure of history, of hatred, of human division, and somehow provide solutions to the problems inherent in those structures, is exploded. Paul Léon, Joyce’s friend in his last few years and a man who knew Finnegans Wake extremely well because of the enormous assistance that he gave Joyce, was fascinated by his project. And yet he wrote just as Joyce was completing his work: I can easily understand how any person who is concerned with the grave social, political and economic problems of this oppressive period will be painfully affected by its colossal triviality, its accumulation of words, meaningless, I suppose, for the ordinary intelligent reader of today. For I cannot see anywhere the slightest attempt in it to face or still less to solve these pressing problems.¹⁰

The attacks on Finnegans Wake for its triviality might occur particularly in time of war, when texts are required to be politically engaged, ‘relevant’ in their concern with the pressing conflicts whose outcome will affect the lives of its readers. This reputation of importance, twinned with the disclosures of its impotence, is something, however, that Finnegans Wake actively contributes to itself. Through its experimentation with language, and the demands it makes on the reader, through its sheer concentrated effort, it seems to suggest there must be some profoundly meaningful justification to it all. But then by tipping into the abyss of meaninglessness and irrelevance, Joyce laughs at the presumptions of his own project to tell a ‘universal history’, and other projects with similar goals. This is another way of communicating its thematic preoccupation with the fall that is the fall of anything pompous. As we’ve seen with King Roderic, one of the basic shapes given to its manifold stories is a comedy of defeat, of collapse, of the fall, of a slapstick clown slipping over at the circus, and, perhaps self-consciously, getting up—if only to fall over again. This shape is a means of laughing at power’s mechanisms and representations of its upright self, its towers and rhetoric and laws, its everimproving technologies of transport and communication. Birds circling above us ‘shrillgleescreaming’ are chosen as emblems of this laughter. The power of laughter does not necessarily undo power itself, but it reminds us of the vulnerability and mortality of all forms that are made to embody power. Joyce suggests that power can morph into any form, in which case all forms are targets. Finnegans Wake is a comic critique of self-importance, and has to ¹⁰ Paul Léon to Weaver, 16 Dec. 1938 in Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson, Dear Miss Weaver: Harriet Shaw Weaver, 1876–1971 (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 372.

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involve a critique of its own self-importance in launching such a critique. That explains in part its difficulty, so that it always has the escape route which takes it from being profoundly meaningful to being superficially without meaning. Hearing the work out loud always illustrates this best, for then we hear its mix of recognizable language, and a nonsense, that goes close to music, as in such groups of words like ‘astoutsalliesemoutioun palms it off like commodity tokens against a cococancancacacanotioun’ (which I will interpret below in Part II). This is my foremost piece of advice to those coming to Finnegans Wake for the first time: read a page out loud—whisper, sing, or shout it. Get a feel for its rhythms, pause at the weirder suggestive words. Choose another page and repeat the process. Echoes may appear, even between passages chosen arbitrarily. The lines formed between these echoes are part of the narrative network which readers’ memories make. If they seem intriguing, find any old guide from a good library—Campbell, Tyndall, Glasheen, Benstock, Rose, Gordon—and see what they say about the plot, or simply follow the one below. Then try slowing down, reading in detail, not necessarily starting at the beginning. Work with a single page and deeply, chase up the references, use Roland McHugh’s Annotations but look beyond them. Try the various websites, in particular Jorn Barger’s, or one where the whole text can be searched. Give yourself time and be patient. Complex machines—cars, airplanes, spaceships, nuclear reactors—take time to master, design, and build, and to comprehend and operate. Two weeks, fairly full time, should be enough to get a good handle on it. The first impression of a mix of recognizable sense and incomprehensible nonsense will always return, however deeply immersed you get in the book. It is part of the risk that Joyce takes. He wishes to avoid the presumptions and self-righteousness that are his targets, though the means of hitting those targets might themselves border on the presumptuous. It was a risk Joyce spoke of to his friend Arthur Power: In writing one must create an endlessly changing surface, dictated by the mood and current impulse in contrast to the fixed mood of the classical style. The important thing is not what we write, but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously. . . . A book, in my opinion, should not be planned out beforehand, but as one writes it will form itself, subject, as I say, to the constant emotional promptings of one’s personality.¹¹

Joyce’s risk was to generate a new method of writing: not what, but how. This book will look at how Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake, as a way to interpret what ¹¹ Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce, ed. Clive Hart (London: Millington, 1974), 95.

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he wrote through a method I call ‘genetic exegesis’. Before illustrating this method, I will introduce several different approaches that Finnegans Wake has invited from readers and critics. I have divided them up into seven forms, but they are not necessarily in competition with each other, nor are they necessarily mutually exclusive. Indeed, I will be drawing on material from each of them in the readings that follow. In introducing and illustrating these approaches, I will be introducing Finnegans Wake itself. The seven approaches are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Structural Narrational Theoretical Inspirational Philological Genetic Exegetical

1 . S T RU C T U RA L A P P ROAC H : ‘ T H E BA R D’ S H I G H V I EW ’ These offer bird’s-eye views and provide skeletal outlines of the overall form: this commonly has recourse to the eighteenth-century Italian thinker Vico. Beckett displayed Vico’s significance in an essay that is required reading for students of Finnegans Wake called ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’. The strange uneven number of dots expresses the number of centuries (rounded up) between the writers’ births—a warning not to ignore detail, and to look out for re-encodings of the familar. Vico’s theory of history, where there is a stage called the ricorso, helps explain the cyclical tripartite structure of the novel, and the way each book represents a different age, though there are also cycles within cycles. Vico also explains the presence of certain motifs such as giants, thunder, and caves, and birth, marriage, and burial. The subsequent panoramic view finds that the work is structured coherently, and that there is a progressive evolution in its form. The Viconian tripartite structure prompted Clive Hart to propose ‘architectonic principles’, though he found a four-part mandala at work too.¹² A companion to this general overview is that the whole work is the endlessly repeating dream of a sleeping giant, an idea introduced by Joyce himself and promoted by Eugene Jolas, the editor of the journal transition in which ¹² Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in ‘Finnegans Wake’ (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), 4 and 76.

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Joyce serially published excerpts. This view coincides with elements of German Romanticism, popular with Jolas and endorsed by Joseph Campbell. Finnegans Wake resembles, for Campbell, Schopenhauer’s ‘dream of life’: ‘a vast dream, dreamed by a single being; but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Thus everything interlocks and harmonizes with everything else.’¹³ Harry Levin took up this view in his 1939 essay ‘The Dream of Everyman’, and Joyce seems to have concurred in remarks recorded in Ellmann’s biography. It has dominated views of the Wake, expounded recently with great force by John Bishop.¹⁴ The dream serves to explain why the language and plot are strange, why it is dark and obscure with sudden displacements, where the dead can speak, where humans are animals and vice versa, and where barriers around sexualities are apparently down. It gives a structure to the whole as a life dreamt by a human passing from this world to the next. The dream allows a trip away from the realm of reason to a region which Proust summarizes eloquently: Suddenly I fell asleep, plunged into that deep slumber in which vistas are opened to us of a return to childhood, the recapture of past years, and forgotten feelings, of disincarnation, the transmigration of souls, the evoking of the dead, the illusions of madness, retrogression towards the most elementary of the natural kingdoms (for we say that we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that almost always we are ourselves animals therein, deprived of that reasoning power which projects upon things the light of certainty; on the contrary we bring to bear on the spectacle of life only a dubious vision, extinguished anew every moment by oblivion, the former reality fading before that which follows it as one projection of a magic lantern fades before the next as we change the slide), all those mysteries which we imagine ourselves not to know and into which we are in reality initiated almost every night, as into the other great mystery of extinction and resurrection.¹⁵

This journey to the elementary is similar to the collective unconscious as evoked by Joyce’s friend Frank Budgen: We carry around with us in the unvisited yet still populous recesses of our minds signatures of a past infinitely more remote. From the dawn of life to the moment in which we live all experience is written in the structure and function of our

¹³ Schopenhauer quoted in Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, iv (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 344. ¹⁴ John Bishop, James Joyce’s Book of the Dark (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1986). For a full coverage of the ‘dream question’, see Derek Attridge, ‘Finnegans Awake, or the Dream of Interpretation’, in Joyce Effects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 133–55. ¹⁵ Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, ii. Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Vintage Classics, 1996), 460–1.

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bodies—all is preserved in the depths of our memories. This is the unknown country into which we are led when we begin to read Work in Progress.¹⁶

This view is ‘structural’ because it gives an overview and explains the way the narrative is fragmented and interlaced with symbolic but arbitrary elements. In this study, I will not be dwelling much on either Vico or dreams, both topics having provided dominant frameworks for interpreting Finnegans Wake, except to propose the following. A dream is being recounted explicitly at the start of Book III: ‘as I was dropping asleep . . . I heard . . . and as I was jogging along in a dream . . . methought broadtone was heard’ (403.23–404.04). The narrator recalling his dream continues to hold the perspective in the chapters of Shaun, and Jaun, then Yawn, which climaxes with ‘Haveth Childers Everywhere’ at the end of III.3. However, the dream does not end for this unnamed narrator—or for ourselves—with any ‘And then I woke up’ moment. So we never come out of it to return to the narrator’s wakeful point of view—which therefore simply dissolves. In III.4 where the point of view shifts, we are presented with a mother comforting a son after a nightmare: ‘You were dreamend dear. . . . Here are no phanthares in the room at all, avikkeen’ (564.18–20). Of course, we do not know if the ‘avikkeen’s’ nightmare is exactly the same as the dream the narrator had been recounting (and in which his point of view disappears). But it might well be and would be consistent with certain psychological dynamics, in which an artistic son (known as Shem or Jerry) is intimidated by his boastful father (known as HCE). What is interesting is the way that the narrator’s point of view dissolves, implying that while a dream had a beginning it has no end: we move from a narrated dream into a dream within a dream from which we never awake. Structural approaches may also provide us with an overview of the work’s ‘characters’, between whom the story weaves, and amongst whom its material is distributed. The plot and structure of Finnegans Wake may be difficult, but personalities are relatively easy to identify, for Finnegans Wake provides us with lists of them, first in a quiz (I.6) then in a dramatis personae (II.1), and in an inventory of the members of a house (III.4) and at other points, less explicitly, we swing between them. In the quiz, there are twelve questions, ten of which correspond to the characters, the other two to ‘the letter’ and the ‘city’. In his drafts Joyce gave them all symbols as if to indicate that they weren’t characters so much as ‘principles’: in order they are , , , , , , , , , , and . These symbols occasionally appear in the text as in the footnote on 299. In his Sigla of ‘Finnegans Wake’, Roland McHugh helps to identify the significance of these signs. ¹⁶ Frank Budgen, The Making of ‘Ulysses’ (London: Grayson & Grayson, 1934), 292.

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These characters provide the setting and structure for the family ‘saga’, where Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker ( ) is an innkeeper married to Anna Livia Plurabelle ( ), and they have three children between them (the twins Shem and Shaun, and the daughter Issy). There are also two servants at the pub—Kate and Sackerson. In the pub there are four old men, drinking in the corner, remembering and moralizing about the past. And there are twelve other customers who comment on the events of the story, discussing them like a jury. The twelve, or the Murphys, also represent all the characters together—a people unified (hence their siglum being a circle). There are also a gaggle of girls—the Maggies—who go to the local school which Issy attends. Their number varies—seven, twenty-eight, or twenty-nine. The customers and the girls seem like secondary characters, but we shall have more to say about them in part IV. HCE represents the powerful man falling from power and attempting resurrection, and his wife represents the spirit of life, but also a possibly misplaced loyalty that protects her husband. Shem and Shaun represent warring factions, or, less usually, cooperation. Issy, often found with her double before a mirror, is the temptress of both her brother and her father. Kate represents the downtrodden mass of working women, and someone with whom HCE may be unfaithful. Sackerson is ambivalent: the disgruntled put-upon servant, the policeman guarding HCE as prisoner, but also the spy or snake who tells the story about HCE, and the radical who, quoting Ibsen’s Tales of a Revolutionary, declares that, should the great deluge come, ‘with pleasure he will torpedo the ark’.¹⁷ If Shaun grows up to be HCE, Shem perhaps grows up to be Sackerson.

2 . NA R RAT I O NA L A P P ROAC H Structural and narrational approaches are similar in that they both give an overview, the latter uncovering a skeletal narrative that underpins everything. The model for this approach emerged in Joseph Campbell and Henry Robinson’s Skeleton Key, where they abbreviated the entire novel and translated it into ‘clear’ language, providing a thread of plot for readers to follow through the book. It has been frequently followed: general guides (such as Benstock’s, Tindall’s, Hart’s, Begnal and Eckley’s, and this one) usually incorporate a synopsis. Whole book-length guides to the narrative have also been written: Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon brought out Understanding ‘Finnegans Wake’ in 1982, ¹⁷ See Roland McHugh, Annotations to ‘Finnegans Wake’, 2nd edn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 530.32.

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and John Gordon wrote a Plot Summary in 1986. I call this general approach ‘commonsensical reductive’, and find it has uses but also severe limitations. Providing a synopsis, as Adaline Glasheen says, ‘omits Joyce’s fine nonsense and infinite variety; it renders abrupt and broken the ‘‘savage economy’’ of Joyce’s language; it misses or mangles the elegant and ingenious flow of Joyce’s variations on metamorphic experience’.¹⁸ Indeed, as a rough translation it lacks the poetry and the music, and in clearing things up it obscures the critical action that Joyce performs in smashing words together and mixing languages. It misses out on local and specific effects, pulls things back from ambiguity into neutralized territory and domesticates the language. It shows its weaknesses as it moves between set-piece episodes, which are often embedded in highly complex writings, muddled transitional moments. It is sometimes forced to link together what may be genuinely fragmented episodes into a coherent role. On the other hand we must recognize the usefulness of this approach as a positioning tool, a locating device for reorientation whenever the experience of disorientation becomes too much. The narrative structure is like the Homeric parallels in Ulysses that should be treated as a bridge, a means of crossing over into the main area, from which vantage point there is no need to return.¹⁹ A bridge is obviously useful to cross a river, so here it is in a rudimentary form: Chapter I.1, after an overture, opens with the funereal wake of a man, HCE, his corpse admired by the mourners. During this funeral, stories are told about how he fell from grace spying on two girls, himself spied on by three soldiers, but also how he managed to domesticate a mischievous and independent woman. Suddenly he wakes: but the mourners would prefer him out of their hair, so they ease him back into the sleep of death, reassuring him that someone respectable has taken his place. Chapters I.2– I.4 comprise a unit of sorts in that they concern various stories, rumours, and evidence about a once-powerful man, similar or identical to the man whose funeral we’ve just been attending. Most of the stories involve encounters between men, but the rumours are told by anyone. In Chapter I.2 we hear that HCE was given his curious surname by the king, and that he then gained a fortune and respectability. But he was rumoured at some point to have behaved badly before young women (and/or men) in a park. There was no evidence of guilt but one evening walking through the park, a suspect young man asked him the time. HCE, apropos of nothing, was so defensive that it seemed to profess his guilt instead. Promptly, and in a surreal fashion, rumours spread and eventually a popular ballad based on them is composed, demanding that he go to prison. ¹⁸ A. Glasheen, A Third Census of Finnegans Wake (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), p. xxiii. ¹⁹ Vladmir Nabokov was an early and passionate rejector of the Homeric parallels determining the novel’s structure or thematic content. See his Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), 287–8.

12

Introduction His reputation is reduced to shreds, but those who told the story, as we hear in Chapter I.3, all fade into obscurity. Nevertheless the story is distributed, retold, and still provokes responses, as a journalist reveals (58–61). Other versions of the encounter in the park develop over time: that HCE was threatened by a man with a pistol (62–4), that he was attracted to young women in a rather cute way (65). Another has him passively sitting in his house while being threatened from outside and carefully writing down all the abusive names he was called (69–72). HCE, having been the object of contempt, is becoming the object of sympathy, at least in the way he is treated by ‘History’. Chapter I.4 dwells on how he ran to ground, protected in a special underground space. Another story is woven in here: an encounter where there is a fight and a request for money (82). A trial follows (85) but the evidence is bizarre and one of the witnesses smells bad (92). Perhaps the letter written by his wife will clear things up (93). But where is it? The four judges argue about it all (96) and still, the gossip continues—is it true he’s dead? No, he’s alive, as smoke from his chimney shows, sheltered by the lady who wrote the letter. The letter then becomes the object of fascination and the whole of Chapter I.5 is devoted to it. But instead of hearing any precise content that might clear things up, we are told the various names under which it was known, its provenance, the type of paper and handwriting used, the distinguishing features (stains etc.), and who might have written it. Though perhaps only a modest thank-you letter from one woman to another, it is described in terms so overblown as to make it sound as worthy of close inspection as the Book of Kells. The chapter concludes that it was probably written by one of HCE’s sons: not Shaun, but Shem, who may have taken it down from dictation. Chapter I.6 represents a pause in the form of a quiz where we check what we’ve learnt from the confusion so far. In order, the answers indicate 1, HCE, the father; 2, ALP, the mother; 3, Dublin, the city; 4, Mamalujo, the four old men; 5, Ol’ Joe Sackerson, the servant; 6, Kate, the dishdrudge; 7, the Murphys—the jury or people; 8, The Maggies or (menstruating) women; 9, the letter; 10, Issy, the daughter; 11, Shaun the younger twin brother; 12, Shem, the elder twin brother. The longest answer, about Shaun, is modelled on Joyce’s acquaintance, the novelist and painter Wyndham Lewis, and has two episodes within it: the Mookse and the Gripes, and an analysis of the killing of Caesar.²⁰ The brief answer to question 12 is expanded in Chapter I.7, Shaun’s character assassination of his brother Shem, the letter writer/forger/artist. This constructs the anti-hero overwhelmingly in the guise of otherness. Despite being so low, Shem is protected by his mother, who appears at the end to come and defend her son. This leads into Chapter I.8, where we find out more about Anna Livia Plurabelle and her man HCE from two gossiping washerwomen. Scrubbing away

²⁰ Shaun is described by Joyce as being in ‘his know-all impressive role for which an ‘‘ever devoted friend’’ [that is, Lewis] unrequestedly consented to pose’. To Weaver, 14 Aug. 1927, LI, 257–8.

Introduction at his dirty clothes, they wonder about his wife, how they got married, and what her background was. ALP’s history is upbeat and libidinous, but beneath the energizing rhythms, her life appears full of trauma: abused as a child, raped as a young woman, she became a prostitute and a procuress for the very man—her own husband—who had raped her, bending over backwards to make him happy. As a river, the Liffey, consort of a rich man/land, she helps dispense civilization, but also all the ills that flesh is heir to. The washerwomen talk until the evening comes on, at which point they part company to go home. While the women at sundown turn away from the work, in Chapter II.1 Anna Livia’s children are playing in the streets. Or they are young people going out to dances to experience first love. ‘Nightgames’, as its known, involves the games of courtship that the young are inclined or induced to play. Joyce used the game ‘Angels and Devils’, where the child appointed to be devil has to guess the colour that the Angels have chosen—in this case the colour of their underwear. Shem is the devil, and when he fails, he goes off to sulk, during which the Angels, little girls or young women, admire Shaun for his purity. The children are able to play such risqué games because the father is having a rest before he has to work—in the pub—that night. But unfortunately they wake him, and their mother bundles them all up to take them inside. Once inside, they are disciplined with lessons and homework—the substance of Chapter II.2 or ‘Nightlessons’, which involve history, grammar, letter writing, a maths problem, and essay titles. Joyce replicates structures of education by having Shem scribble facetious notes, and Shaun annotate respectfully in the margins on either side of a central text, while their sister Issy writes more or less relevant subversions underneath. The chapter ends with the three children apparently united in a desire to overcome their parents. This threat takes us through to Chapter II.3, the longest in the book, which I call the ‘Nightbar’. It is structured around two stories told in the innkeeper’s tavern. The first concerns a hunchback who wants a suit but complains to the tailor when it doesn’t fit. The tailor replies that the problem is with him—if he doesn’t fit the suit he should go and get a new body! By analogy the suit is a marriage suit and the tailor’s daughter is being sold: she doesn’t fit (around what, one might wonder?). This covers another version of how a man and a woman fall into matrimony. The second story is a comic tale of shame and bravado—how an Irish soldier spied and shot a Russian General in the Crimean War, but only once he had overcome his embarrassment on seeing the man defecate. What allowed him to fire was his disgust at seeing the General clean himself on a clump of turf. HCE, the innkeeper, hears this story and identifies with it. He opens into a long semi-confession of his more intimate relations. It gets late, and the customers are forced to clear out. Once outside they insult him for several pages (a repeat of the end of I.4). Inside (as Roderick O’Conor) he drinks everything they’ve left and collapses in a heap. Chapter II.4, brief where II.3 was long, combines two of the early sketches mentioned above: Tristan and Isolde and the four old men, the latter spying

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Introduction on the adultery of the former. Above the kissing lovers, birds fly, spying and laughing at the cuckolded old Mark. His impotence seems analogous to the drunk old innkeeper we’ve just left. So while King Mark lies asleep, Tristan has his way with Isolde. While King Roderick is asleep, someone is having his way with a daughter he wanted to protect from the world. It is now night—midnight or later, and while everyone is sleeping we move into a dream world, or a dream within the larger dream of the whole novel (403–4). The narrator seems to be the ass who accompanies the four old men (‘but I poor ass’)—possibly Shem. Arguably his dream stretches over three chapters, having his brother Shaun as its focus, passing through three incarnations: Shaun, Jaun, and Yawn, one per chapter. In Chapter III.1, the dreamer encounters Shaun on his way to work, to deliver the post, which possibly includes the long-awaited letter. Questions are asked about why he does the job, where he works, why he’s painted the grass green (that is, why he’s an Irish republican) (411). To show off his morality, he tells the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper and, impressed by his skill at storytelling, his questioner gives him some ‘shemletters’—the letter perhaps—to see what he can make of them. Shaun is not impressed and, as in I.7, he attacks his brother Shem. He gets so worked up about this, especially the damage Shem might do in writing for or about his mother, that he topples over into the Liffey. The dreamer bids farewell to Shaun as he floats, dreamily, up river. In Chapter III.2, registering a shift in time and place, Shaun reappears as Jaun, an oversexed Don Juan, standing before his sister Izzy and her twenty-eight companions (the Maggies), to give a long and somewhat incestuous and yet moralistic lecture, to paraphrase Joyce.²¹ It resembles Laertes’ lecture to Ophelia before he leaves Elsinore for Paris in Hamlet. Izzy, after twenty-six pages of Jaun’s speech, finally gets a word in, passes him a letter, and promises to be faithful. Jaun responds with more fraternal moralistic advice, and then introduces his brother Shem in the form of Dave the Dancekerl who will take his place. Jaun departs, rather manically, with a great fanfare and a sense that he’ll go far: ‘Work your progress! Hold to! Now! Win out, ye divil ye!’ (473.21). But something seems to go wrong, for in Chapter III.3, his progress halted, Jaun (now Yawn) is lying asleep somewhere up a hill in the middle of Ireland. And in this position he is approached by four old men, Senators, who hold an inquiry into him. As they do so, Yawn turns into a medium, and dozens of voices come bubbling forth. The chapter becomes a cross-examination about the confused events of Book I. For Yawn, it is thought, may hold the key to the investigation from I.4, where their investigation of HCE had faltered. Yawn becomes everybody we’ve encountered, including the three people who composed and sang the ballad, Tristan who stole Isolde, ALP, Issy the temptress, Kate the drudge, Sackerson the servant, and finally HCE himself surges up, the principle of the civic hero. He announces himself as ‘Amtsadam’, tamer of nature ²¹ To Weaver, 12 June 1924. See BL Add. MSS 57347–104.

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and water (Amsterdam being the city of canals, New Amsterdam becoming the ‘capital of the world’, New York), and boasts of all that he’s achieved. The initially confident and verbose old men now cower, simply ejecting affirmative hiccups: ‘Hoke!’ This is HCE’s resurrection and signals Shaun’s transformation into a figure of power, his attainment of the father’s position. Joyce’s early sketch for the next section Chapter III.4 originally began with Shem waking from a nightmare about his giant father, and then his mother reassuring him back to sleep. Gradually as the chapter developed, this scene was embedded ten pages into the chapter (565), but we can still interpret it as an exit from the dream. This point of view provides us with images of a family, the Porters, similar in structure to the Earwickers, in their house at night. After the crying child is soothed, the parents go back to bed where Mr Porter tries to make love to his snickering wife (583). They are disturbed by the cock crowing. There is one last visit to the scene of the fall from the point of view of the three soldiers who saw his bad behaviour. Yes he did misbehave, but he made lots of money. How so? Through a series of insurance scams—though Lloyds will not insure him any more (590). That’s our modern hero, lying asleep in his pub in Dublin. Dawn comes in Book IV with the hopes of revelation, and the oft-mentioned letter, but ends with ALP’s death, as the river flowing out to sea. Before the narrative point of view is adopted by her, we encounter a hymn to dawn, by the servantmaid who lights the fire, the fire embodied as an early Christian missionary or an Eastern tyrant hero (594). We are told two stories about Irish Christian types—St Kevin becoming a recluse in Glendalough (604) and St Patrick, the missionary, having a victory over Paganism, embodied in Bishop Berkeley as visionary (607). Finally we are given the text of ‘the letter’ (614)—scarcely a revelation at all—just before the book announces its own farewell and ALP, long awaited, can announce hers, flowing, dying into the sea, in an unfinished move that signs us back to tune in to the interruptedly begun opening.

There is no denying that it is a strange story or rather set of stories, amassed gradually, with an underlying investigation into the nature of a human family and its culpable place on the planet, fragmented and glued together as if by an exploded and then resorted encyclopedia. Such accounts can easily be expanded, less easily reduced. But all such accounts only pave the way for further work. The form of Finnegans Wake is something that can be reduced, tidied, and shrunk in this way, only as a prelude to unpacking, unfolding, and unravelling it. Moreover, narrative is present just as much in the clashing encounter of one word or phrase or context with another as in any set of tales. As Derek Attridge says ‘a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase, or even a word can offer a mini-narrative to the reader’.²² We shall be showing that narratives abound, not just within the textual elements, but also in the genetic ²² Attridge, Joyce Effects, 129.

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intertextual material, where we can tell tales of the work’s composition and of Joyce’s engagement with the world he was reading—and rewriting.

3 . T H E O R E T I C A L A P P ROAC H E S For some, to uncover a transparent narrative in Finnegans Wake is to be untrue to its project of apparently undoing or reformulating storytelling conventions and everyday language. To trace a narrative is to be slave to the linear, and explaining the meaning of Finnegans Wake in commonsensical terms ignores Joyce’s experiment with language and the inexpressible. It forces into daylight something that lies hidden in the dark for a reason—because it likes it there. The concerns with narrative, linearity, language, interpeting the inexpressible and the ironic are engaged with recently in a lively way by Tim Conley in his Joyces Mistakes [sic]. They can be traced back to a number of thinkers who had emerged in France, coincidentally, around the time of the évènements of 1968. A series of essays in the journal Tel Quel promoted Finnegans Wake especially. Joyce and Finnegans Wake became emblematic of a set of critical practices which have come to be known, and to some extent fetishized, as ‘theory’, specifically, in this case, ‘post-structuralist theory’. Many of the writers who were eventually situated more or less within this category—Jacques Lacan, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Julia Kristeva—made references to Finnegans Wake in a series of works during the 1960s and 1970s. Their approaches were rarely intended to clarify specific elements—whether of narrative, character, structure, or allusion. Ihab Hassan, though by no means coming from the context of French post-structuralism, admits to something similar: ‘I am no deep reader of that book. I have little to say that will illumine its puns and patterns, its susurrus and sources.’²³ Nonetheless they were keen to speak generally of its radical project, to reflect in particular on its language and even to emulate, to some extent, its difficulty and complexity, its non-referentiality and non-communicability. All these writers toyed with neologisms and tangled syntax. For never had the ‘free play of the signifier’ seemed more amply illustrated than by Finnegans Wake. At times the challenging density of their writing is commensurate to, though never the same as, that of Finnegans Wake. This was part of an attack on ‘language’ in its commonsensical or, as Lacan would say, ‘Symbolic’ form, attacking language as a tool of instrumental reason, as a structure fixed to reality and natural phenomena. Feminism (of a kind), deconstruction, ²³ Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 100.

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and psychoanalysis each sharpened their tools using Joyce and the Wake as a whetstone. There is not the space here to examine their individual approaches. A detailed history of their contributions is available in Geert Lernout’s The French Joyce, though it is a partisan book and a concerted attack on the influence of ‘theory’, especially in so far as theory has detracted from the traditional philology that Lernout wishes to reinvigorate. More recently a history of it appears in Joseph Brooker’s Joyce’s Critics. It is fair to say that these writers say little about the construction and internal machinery of the book, but they also write with a style and rhetoric that are not only inspiring but seem to respond to something of the spirit of the Wake. Such approaches have inspired, among others, Margot Norris’s Decentered Universe of ‘Finnegans Wake’ (1976), and work on the Wake by Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe, Sheldon Brivic, Jean-Michel Rabaté, and, more recently, Joe Valente (see Bibliography). The notion that Finnegans Wake reflects and provokes the turn in twentieth-century philosophy towards language could well be developed via these writers. These theorists may offer a way in, but, for me at least, are not essential as means of exploring the Wake. As writers they are more limited than Joyce, less humorous and varied, and have an advanced but nonetheless bounded notion of complexity and structure. This may have to do with Joyce being more successfully embedded in the practice of fiction, to which these writers at times aspire, rather than in the practice of critical theory that emerges from, and is destined for, philosophy or literature courses within academia. Linguistic free play is something more easily accessible in fiction, but must often remain an unreached goal or at best an occasional practice in the writing of literary critics. The radical ideas of theory, spreading with great speed through American and English universities, became an orthodoxy to some extent and are not as fashionably groundbreaking now as they once were. In superficial terms of recent trends, there has been a turn towards history, a reaction to the apparently ahistorical elements of structuralist and post-structuralist thinking. This is reflected in two shifts in Wakean studies: an interest in historiography (the writing of history and the theory of the writing of history) and an increasing ‘diachronic’ focus on Joyce’s writing processes.²⁴ This ‘turn’ can be seen in the way Margot Norris wrote a structuralist analysis of Finnegans Wake in 1976, but later, in Joyce’s Web, felt she needed to explain her turn to history.²⁵ The study of Joyce’s relation to ‘historiography’ has been around since Beckett’s seminal essay of 1929, where the connection was made between Joyce and Vico’s ²⁴ Though, as we shall see, focus on the writing processes may, of course, come from a more theoretically inflected standpoint. ²⁵ Margot Norris, Joyce’s Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 3.

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programmatic account of history. But Joyce’s relation to Vico is now being more questioningly investigated, especially as the latter is widely perceived as reactionary, and as someone, who, perhaps along with Bruno, Joyce may not even have read in much detail. This field is still emerging and fluid. In part, it focuses on the troubled area of Irish history—in the work of James Fairhall, Tom Hofheinz, and Emer Nolan. Elsewhere, in essays by Andrew Treip and Wim van Mierlo, it works through Joyce’s relation to theories of history.²⁶ Some of this work overlaps with a ‘genetic’ approach, which we shall cover later. One important element in some of it is the turn away from the humanist assertion of Joyce’s—and especially the Wake’s—universalism, introduced by Eugene Jolas (if not Joyce himself), picked up by Harry Levin, cemented by Campbell and Robinson, and most casually asserted by Tindall: ‘Finnegans Wake is about anybody, anywhere, anytime.’²⁷ It is one of the most enduring universal myths about Finnegans Wake that it is about enduring universal myths. The myth survived, surprisingly perhaps, into Hassan, who calls it ‘this book of universals’ saying it ‘aspires to the conditions of a universal consciousness’.²⁸ The surprise is due to the idea that postmodernity, especially in Lyotard’s subsequent analysis, is supposed to affirm the dissolution of totalizing metanarratives—such as those that universal myths reinforce. The examinations of the specifics of history have begun to subvert this view.²⁹ Examining the specifics of textual history—as will the particular method in my work here—is aimed at continuing this subversion. Another theoretical approach might come from cultural studies, but a single study devoted to Finnegans Wake from this area has not yet appeared. Perhaps cultural studies are in a fluid state of relatively early development, or they form so productive and complex a field, with such diverse practitioners, that it would be difficult to match them all to the Wake. One problem here, as long as cultural studies are synonymous with the study of popular culture, is the perceived elitism of Finnegans Wake. It may be a ‘funferall’ and, as Harry Levin quoted optimistically in 1939, there may be ‘something for everyone’, but that does not mean that all of it is for everyone—or even anyone. Instead of pleasing all of the people some of the time, it has proved better at pleasing ²⁶ Wim van Mierlo, ‘Finnegans Wake and the Question of Histry!?’, in Sam Slote and Wim van Mierlo (eds.), European Joyce Studies, 9. Genetricksling Joyce (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 43–64; see also Andrew Treip, ‘ ‘‘As per periodicity’’: Vico, Freud and the Serial Awakening of book III chapter 4’, in Andrew Treip (ed.), European Joyce Studies, 4. ‘Finnegans Wake’: Teems of Times (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 21–40. ²⁷ William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 3. ²⁸ Hassan, Postmodern Turn, 100 and 113. ²⁹ A project Emer Nolan emphasizes in James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995), 140–1.

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hardly any of the people a fair amount of the time. That Joyce consumed and reproduced popular culture of his time has been frequently recognized, but his manner of reproducing it seems ambiguous. Is he creating a protective archive for cultural ephemera, or locking them into a context of obscurity which is alien to them, where, like fish out of water, they lack the oxygen of publicity and popularity and public consumption that allowed them to live in the first place? The answer to this is crucial for understanding how Joyce locates culture and history, but it has not been resolved and may not be resolvable. One of the paradoxes of the work, at least in my reading, is that while its complexity makes it a minority interest, it carries within it—as I argue in part IV—an assertion of the power of the populace. That branch of cultural studies interested in technology has produced interesting work through the notion of the Wake as a machine and an examination of writing technologies (Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Donald Theall, Louis Armand, and Steven Connor have responded to these issues). But relating it to the everyday or to the contemporary—part of the brief of cultural studies—has been less successfully carried out. This is more a fault of Wakeans failing to make it resound with contemporary and popular issues, to make it appear more actively critical of our culture and then more familiar through analogy with it. Joyce himself carried this out, in noting contemporary figures and texts as they emerged in his culture (such as Hitler, Mussolini, de Valera, Rutherford, Louis Armstrong), and weaving them into an evolving scheme, that was designed to evolve precisely by absorbing new material. The Wake should continue to absorb such new material by analogy. (For example, both Bill Clinton in the USA and Jeffrey Archer in the UK underwent inquiries into their sexual and financial malpractices, and are, as such, definitely ‘HCE’ figures.) This relevance to any time and any place may take us back to its universalism, its ‘universalization’. But, of course, it will actually have the effect of highlighting differences. So that unlike HCE, Bill Clinton did not have a particularly loyal or self-effacing wife, while Jeffrey Archer did not, at least in the short term, get away with his malpractices as HCE seems to. But there is a more sophisticated view which cultural studies have voiced and could take further: that Finnegans Wake is the most extreme picture to date of a culture supersaturated with representations, and illustrates symptoms of the constant barrage of capitalist commodity culture, with its adverts, posters, billboards, small-ads, personal-ads, programmes, news bulletins, websites, webcams, trash cans, soup cans, newsflashes, breaking news, gossip columns, bylines, headlines, catchphrases, celebrities, clothes and catwalks, bodies glimpsed, glossed over, and pored over. Finnegans Wake seems to register the plunging of a single consciousness into this modern urban condition, where the field of culture is so dense, rich, inescapable, and thick a

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bog—or blog—that it overwhelms everyone near it. Culture thus produces what Kenneth Gergen described as a ‘saturated self’, the result of information overload, overstimulation, and overchoice.³⁰ Kimberley Devlin gets close to diagnosing this delusional self-obsession when she says that Finnegans Wake is ‘the dream of an ordinary man who envisions himself as a mythic figure, the giant Finn MacCool’.³¹ But more than this it is the dream of anyone envisioning themselves as another on an illusory quest for an identity that is supposed to be discovered amongst the plethora of representations that culture provides for this quest. And it has set up this quest too, like a princess in some medieval courtly romance. Finally, a critical theory that has not yet attached itself to Finnegans Wake, but could, is ‘ecocriticism’, the new earnest and worthy application of concerns from the ecological lobby. For Finnegans Wake tells the story of the planet—of mountains, rivers, and the sky, and of the rubbish, the rivers and mountains of it.

4 . L I T E RA RY I N F LU E N C E As we have seen, Joyce and the Wake have clearly influenced different generations of literary critics. They have also influenced artists across different genres. Finnegans Wake is the biggest aesthetic risk any artist has ever taken and it stands out as such, even though not everyone thinks it paid off (including Ezra Pound and Vladimir Nabokov). A string of avant-garde experimental writers and musicians can trace some strain of their work back to Joyce and the Wake: Samuel Beckett, Thornton Wilder, Flann O’Brien, Georges Pérec, Anthony Burgess, Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Jeanette Winterson, to name a few, all share at least a passing knowledge of the Wake, enough for it to have a symbolic power in contemporary letters—as something to be studiously avoided or surreptitiously drawn on. Joyce has also influenced music: Luciano Berio worked through parts of Ulysses and John Cage composed an extraordinary homage called ‘Roaratorio’. More recently, Toru Takemitsu’s works ‘riverrun’, ‘Away alone’, and ‘Far Calls, Coming, Far!’ all bear the marks of Finnegans Wake. Studies of influence include David Hayman’s work on avant-garde writing (in the Wake of the Wake), and two ³⁰ See Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York: Basic Books, 1991). ³¹ Kimberly Devlin, Wandering and Return in ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 63.

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volumes about Joyce’s general reception in Europe reveal other engineers of the Wake’s powerful machinery. A study of Joyce’s influence on what authors people now read and how they are read—Bruno, Vico, Sterne, LeFanu, for instance—has not been carried out, but would be valuable.

5 . PH I LO LO G I C A L A P P ROAC H I use philological in the sense of a set of traditional practices, part of which annotates literary texts, chases allusions, elucidates obscurity, and clarifies intertextual reference. It typically provides helpful, if pedantic notes, at the bottom of students’ editions. Where the preceding systems provide a bird’s-eye view, this one gets its hands dirty, burrowing down into the work at ground or underground level. This is a game for literary truffle hounds and obsessive devotees, a game of hunting and questing, and also of research and reconstruction. At one level it celebrates the breadth of Finnegans Wake, and of the worlds to which Finnegans Wake refers; at another, it can be used to identify Joyce’s critical preoccupations with his world. The game takes place in libraries and archives, with reference books, dictionaries, histories, and biographies, with encyclopedias of anything: folk tales, religions, ship design, entomology, meteorology. It tracks down what Joyce read and reads it. It now happens in part on the internet, as some of the research for this book has. Glasheen is its founding mother, since she decided, for the ‘diversion of the thing’, to make a list of all the proper names she found and then investigate them. A Wake Newslitter had scores of contributors providing glosses for parts of the novel, and now much of it is available on CD.³² Book-length studies of particular interests began to emerge: there’s a Gaelic Lexicon (1967) and a Classical Lexicon (1977), there are fine ‘single topic’ studies of Shakespeare, the Victorian journalist William T. Stead, Blake and Alchemy, and work focusing on song and opera. A critical mass of information about details in the Wake developed, until one reader, Roland McHugh, arranged them all, page per page, for his impressive Annotations, now in its third edition. If there is one book to have by your side while reading Finnegans Wake, it is McHugh’s Annotations. The philological approach could adopt for a theological basis, if it wanted to, the notion expressed by such contemporaries of Joyce as Wittgenstein and Mies van der Rohe that ‘God is in the detail’. It could also respond to Joyce’s claim that he could justify every single letter in the book, that all was part of an ever-evolving plan and set of intentions. At its worst, it presents the ³² Available from Split Pea Press.

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Wake unquestioningly to be an Encyclopedia Joyceana—something Glasheen, indeed, described it as, where much of the world he lived in and read and wrote about worms its way into the whole. What may be lacking as a result is a synthesis of the many detailed parts which the approach furnishes, and readings of the contexts in which the several parts appear. It can elucidate an allusion, but not say why the allusion is there or how it relates to similar allusions elsewhere. Interpretation may be discouraged as not positivistic enough (an idea which is asserted by some proponents of the next approach). Nonetheless, Joyce glossed and annotated passages for his readers (such as Weaver, his patron, and his friends Stuart Gilbert and Frank Budgen), and in this Joyce seemed to sanction the philological approach.

6 . G E N E T I C A P P ROAC H This approach forms a large and growing part of a renewed philological practice. It involves leafing through Joyce’s manuscripts, with their notebooks, drafts, fair copies, printers’ copies and proofs of ‘Work in Progress’, all reproduced by the Garland Press in the sixty-three volumes of the James Joyce Archive. Discoveries can be used for reconstructing the sequence of composition, hunting down the sources of the notes, reading Joyce’s readings, working out a genealogy of themes, describing the creative processes. They can also be checked for editorial issues. The existence and nature of the Archive is almost as extraordinary as the novel itself. Joyce made gifts of many of his drafts, fair copies, galleys, and proofs to Harriet Shaw Weaver (and, as recent discoveries show, to his friend and helper Paul Léon), having written or checked them. Judging by the recent sale of a forty-eight-page notebook with an early draft of the Eumaeus chapter from Ulysses, the economic value of these pages is incalculable, astronomical. People might say that Joyce lived and worked as a parasite on the munificence of his self-denying patron, a generous spinster and highly principled Quaker. But this is forgetting the gifts he made of papers that he could have sold during his life, or earmarked for sale later in his will. Instead he sent them in the post to Weaver (or Léon) as recompense. In another act of generosity, and also of great sense, she left them all in her will to the British Library where they can, with difficulty at times, be seen. Another part of the Archive consists of the notebooks—dozens of small volumes that were filled with notes from Joyce’s readings, many of which ended up at Buffalo University Library. Paul Léon saved these notebooks from Joyce’s flat after Joyce had left occupied Paris in 1940. Other material that was found in the attic of the Léon family apartment of Paris was recently purchased by the National Library of Ireland.

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The Archive is extraordinary, partly for the survival of its contents but more centrally as an unprecedented set of witnesses illustrating the creative processes behind one of the most extraordinary texts ever conceived. In giving them to Weaver, making her an archivist of his work, Joyce hints that the processes and the pre-texts will be as interesting as the final product, will form one set of keys in opening parts of the work to interpretation. Genetic practice of a sort was already alive in the 1929 collection of essays Exagmination, where Robert Sage analysed how a short passage from Anna Livia (I.8) grew.³³ In the 1950s, David Hayman produced a first draft version of Finnegans Wake, a painstaking transcription of the earliest drafts so people could see the (usually) clearer writing that lay beneath parts of the completed book.³⁴ Since then there have been collections of smaller essays and single authored studies. A. Walton Litz devoted a substantial section of The Art of James Joyce to how the work on ‘Work in Progress’ progressed. In 1982 Colin MacCabe examined the drafts of a small passage of Shem the Penman sequentially to show its growth (I examine the same passage here). And in the same year Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon’s Understanding ‘Finnegans Wake’ told the narrative of the Wake by going back to the drafts. Having a strong ‘narrational’ quotient, this was quite distinct from the largely theoretical collection edited by Claude Jacquet called Genèse de Babel which came out in 1985. Hayman produced another book called The Wake in Transit that traced, among other things, the roots of the incest theme, and Danis Rose brought out The Textual Diaries of James Joyce in 1995. Rose concentrated on dating the notebooks, and how the full host of principal ‘characters’ emerged in the early years. He also constructed a narrative of the entire composition of Finnegans Wake that has a peculiar bias, similar to Litz’s views forty years before, against the latter stages. Rose detailed how throughout the composition and his writer’s blocks Joyce took copious notes, drafted sketches, and revised them by transferring notes from his notebooks onto the drafts. The writer Shem in Finnegans Wake is described as the ‘malestimated notesnatcher’, and it is now emerging how much Joyce was being just that—pointedly transcribing words that struck him for whatever reasons from multifarious sources, then selecting and inserting them into the text, in different contexts, far removed from the context of their original source. The notes were taken from his readings of hundreds of books and newspaper articles during the seventeen years of its composition, which included biographies (of Parnell, Buddha, Lewis Carroll), childrens’ maths tutors, histories of civilization, theories of ³³ Robert Sage, ‘Before Ulysses—And After’, in Samuel Beckett et al. (ed.), Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 164. ³⁴ See Hayman, ‘From Finnegans Wake: A Sentence in Progress’, PMLA 63 (1958), 136–54.

24

Introduction

language, psychoanalytic case studies, novels. In the notebooks, especially in the early days, he also assigned qualities to characters, and formulated plot outlines. Meanwhile he would quickly write out brief episodes, slowly transforming the dense texture. Typically, as we shall see in the studies to come, he would sketch drafts of short passages, revise them, copy them out, revising as he copied, and overlaying later with revisions when he reread them. Then—a sign that he had reached a certain stage—he wrote out a fair copy and sent it to be typed up. He revised it again, then had it retyped, and prepared for proof prior to publication; these proofs he would revise, and they would be prepared once again by a printer, proofed again, then published—but at first only as excerpts in serial form. The latter part of this process would often happen again for further ‘intermediary’ editions of certain passages. And all published versions would later be revised and typed up again for resetting, appearing as galley sheets, where they would be revised again and checked. The proofs would be checked, too. Through this process, as we shall see, drafts of originally brief episodes expanded enormously. The revisions would complicate the sense, and set up intertextual and intratextual webs of reference and allusion, evoking disparate parts of the text itself and of other texts. A slimmed-down version of the order in which episodes were written and published goes as follows:³⁵ In the beginning were episodes but no structure, written roughly in the following order: first, by autumn 1923, the six Irish sketches; Roderick O’Conor, St Kevin, St Dympna, St Patrick and Berkeley, Tristan and Isolde, then Mamalujo.³⁶ He described these as ‘not fragments but active elements and when they are more and a little older they will begin to fuse of themselves’.³⁷ At about the same time he developed a fictional character, with Anglo-Saxon rather than Irish roots, called Earwicker or HCE, with a questionable reputation. This sketch, unlike the others, immediately ran and ran. Out of him grew an encounter, a declaration of innocence, a trial, evidence of a letter, and a whole family—the Earwickers—with a wife whose letter it is, and rival sons who helped write and deliver it. The Earwicker sketches provided the skeleton for Book I, and characters for most of the book. Shaun, who is to deliver the letter, provided Joyce with another subject, and in March 1924 he sketched first an ‘interview’ with Shaun as he’s about to set off to to deliver the mail, and then a farewell sermon that Shaun gives to his sister Issy, who is developing strongly, growing out of Isolde from the earlier ‘Irish’ sketches. The Earwicker family and the Irish sketches were ³⁵ It leaves out, for example, some of the special editions Joyce made of excerpted episodes. ³⁶ Their order is disputed: see David Hayman, The ‘Wake’ in Transit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Danis Rose’s review article of the same in JJQ 28/4 (1991), 957–66; and Hayman’s reply in JJQ 29/2 (1992), 411–19. ³⁷ To Weaver, 9 Oct. 1923, LI, 204.

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two different blocks of writing that needed to be fused in some way. The solution was to turn Shaun into a medium, and in November 1924 Joyce drafted the seance around ‘Yawn’, following on from Shaun and Jaun. These three sections would become III.1, 2, and 3. ‘Yawn’ is like an echo chamber where fragments of all passages that had been written reappear, and where future sketches would be echoed again. This textual returning provided a model of interconnectedness that was repeated throughout the book. In July 1925 he wrote of his hope to ‘banish the whole Earwicker family from my mind’.³⁸ So in October 1925, Joyce drafted the next episode, a vision of the Porter family (a departure from, but still very much running parallel to, the Earwickers), asleep in their house just before dawn. Daniel Ferrer has shown that Joyce may well have been inspired for the ‘action’ in this chapter (a nightmare) by Freud’s case study of the Wolf Man.³⁹ Duly revised, fair-copied, and typed up, these four chapters of Shaun were a coherent whole, and he sent them off in June 1926 for publication to a relatively established experimental literary magazine The Dial. With it dispatched he could start on Book II, the section that would bridge or hold apart the Earwicker history (now Book I), and the watches of Shaun (Book III). He began in July 1926 with a sketch of two boys, Kevin and Jerry, (names of the Porter children, but like Shem and Shaun) attempting their homework—one problem being to construct an equilateral triangle. (Or it could involve finding out, literally, where they originally came from: the triangular entrance/exit from their mother’s womb.) But as he wrote it, he heard from The Dial that they would not accept his work. Joyce had received plenty of negative feedback about his work from readers close to him: his patron Weaver, his brother Stanislaus, and his former editor Ezra Pound. He tried sending the new sketch to his friend Wyndham Lewis, who wanted to start a new magazine. Now negative feedback from friends spelled further problems: despite his colossal reputation, Lewis also turned Joyce down. Joyce had done two years’ work, and now had no publishers. Teetering on a crisis, he asked for inspiration in the form of a commission from his patron Weaver. She sent him a postcard with a picture of a giant’s gravestone. This prompted him to write the overture—Chapter 1—which came tumbling out in the autumn of that year. Unfortunately Weaver did not like that either. He began to defend it in terms that have become well known, though taken out of their original context of defensiveness: ‘One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.’⁴⁰ Fortunately, Eugene and Maria Jolas, who came to hear Joyce reading from his work in December, said they would publish his work in instalments in their soon-to-belaunched magazine, transition. Joyce now had his work cut out for him, and he turned his drafts into thirteen episodes, eight for Book I, one for Book II, and four ³⁸ To Sylvia Beach, 31 July 1925, LIII, 123. ³⁹ Daniel Ferrer, ‘The Freudful Couchmare of d: Joyce’s Notes on Freud and the Composition of Chapter XVI of Finnegans Wake’, JJQ 22 (1985), 367–82. ⁴⁰ To Weaver, 24 Nov. 1926, LIII, 146.

26

Introduction for Book III. To expand Book I, he turned the overture into a separate chapter and inserted Chapter 6—the quiz, writing the latter to a deadline in the spring of 1927. He also wrote the story of the Ondt and the Gracehoper, and inserted it in Chapter III.2. This story formed in part a reply to Wyndham Lewis’s attack on Joyce in Time and Western Man. Joyce was spurred to respond by Lewis’s attack, and superimposed his relationship with Lewis onto the relations between the rival twins Shem and Shaun. With all the drafted sketches now published, it was October 1929 and Joyce said he felt a ‘sudden kind of drop’, as if reproducing the Fall theme of his book. He would need to rest before finishing off the remains of the book—the middle section and the end. But this rest turned into a long pause, during which several intermediary publications were produced, and then into a writer’s block as he struggled to get down to the middle of the book, cursorily sketched out in a notebook dated May–June 1926:⁴¹ night! Driftwood on . Trunkles. Contredanse. Hornies & Robbers. devil . angel . prisoner. The guess. (Pascal). Tug of love. falls. hide. beholds. chuchotant. picks up. Croon Nascera un melo. ab. & round dance. Mulberry Bush. Coln Maillard. blindfold. . vident. all in !

Interior of hotel. Paschal lambtable fights Studies tells story in bed to

(formerly)

(47482a–2: JJA 51: 3) Joyce found distraction, by turning his attention to promoting others: the singer John Sullivan and his own daughter Lucia. He even came up with an idea to have a friend, James Stephens, finish the book off for him. In November 1930 he finally got down to working on the Games, the section coming after Anna Livia. Joyce developed Issy, modelling her more intensively than before on Lucia, her dancing career and her faltering love life with the young men around like Samuel Beckett, Alexander Calder, and Alex Ponisovsky. He was pleased with what he’d written: ‘the gayest and lightest thing I have done’.⁴² Though he had overcome his block, Lucia was beginning to have severe attacks of nerves, having to stay in rest homes, trying out special cures. Work became slower and denser. While she was having ⁴¹ Danis Rose, The Textual Diaries of James Joyce (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1995), 111. ⁴² To Weaver, 22 Nov. 1930, LI, 295.

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treatment just outside Zurich with Carl Jung for a brief period, Joyce managed to think up the format for that chapter—with the central text squeezed between footnotes and margin notes. With this finished, he was also heavily revising all thirteen episodes of the book that had appeared in transition. Then, in 1936, he began the ‘tavern tales’, which spread rapidly, Joyce writing and rewriting quickly, packing it with material from the notebooks. Finally he prepared for the end. In the last few months of composition he recalled, as it were from retirement, those earliest (Irish) sketches that he’d written, one of which ( Tristan and Isolde) it seems, he’d forgotten about. But he weaved them in nonetheless, all grist to the mill. Three went next to each other in the middle, in Chapters II.3 and II.4, (Roderic; Mamalujo; Tristan and Isolde) and two into Book IV (St Kevin, and Berkeley and St Patrick). Galleys came out for the entire work, then page proofs, and at each stage Joyce continued to enlarge the whole, weaving a reticular network of motifs and phrases, so that the whole would appear, as he’d described it many years before, ‘all consecutive and interrelated’.⁴³

Like the synopsis of the whole, this account is ‘reductive commonsensical’, airbrushing away the tiny turns and moves that Joyce made as he wrote his way along. Just as the tales of the book can be examined in greater and greater microscopic detail, so can the narrative of its telling. My project in this book is to bring these micronarratives together: the details of what is written, when it is written, and how it is written. This narrative of the telling is just one result of genetic practice, for there are many genetic methods: tracking the sources down, theorizing Joyce’s use of them, tracing the chronology of how motifs were incorporated. A large project has just begun rolling out the result of considerable scholarly labour, an annotated edition of the Buffalo notebooks.⁴⁴ Another project just completed is an edited collection How Joyce wrote ‘Finnegans Wake’ which covers how the work grew chapter by chapter. Geneticists have a vast set of materials to work with, an unparalleled collection witnessing in an unprecedentedly complete way the processes of creation. There is much analysis to be done. This book will take a genetic approach by showing how a given passage, of a page or three in length, grows over its numerous drafts. Though the notebooks are part of the process of growth, this study will look almost exclusively at the drafts for two reasons, the first being simply a consideration of space. When interpreting Finnegans Wake you have to draw a line somewhere. Joyce’s processes of rewriting are so intensive, and the close reading so fruitful, that each level adds a new set of considerations. Going back to the sub-zero level of the notes creates a set of questions (What’s the source? Where else is that ⁴³ LIII, 193 n. 8. ⁴⁴ See The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo, ed. Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer, and Geert Lernout ( Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001– ).

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Introduction

source used? How is it transformed in draft usage? What does its use mean?) that could end up monopolizing any analysis of the passage around the note. Secondly, a great deal of work has been done on the notebooks, as mentioned above, while, apart from Hayman’s First Draft Version, the drafts, especially the later drafts, are relatively uncharted territory. Secondly, the focus on the notebooks, moreover, sometimes gives the impression that all the material in Finnegans Wake originated somewhere in a notebook and tends to privilege early material over later material. Litz for example wrote: Future revision of [Part I] may be classified as ‘secondary,’ consisting in the extension of major themes and the inclusion of dependent motifs . . . the number of cross-references added in revision became few, and were of less importance . . . the changes were almost entirely minor additions which enrich the narrative with secondary references but leave the original intent untouched. ⁴⁵ (my italics)

Thus Litz clearly privileged the earlier drafts as embodying an ‘original intent’, discounting the possibility that intent is withdrawn and redrawn in revision. Rose has also said that only when all the sources are provided can the text’s meaning be revealed, something Jean-Michel Rabaté called the ‘genetic fallacy’.⁴⁶ The notebooks could be compared to an artist’s palette, where potential material is placed—even mixed a little—for possible transfer onto the canvas. But the notebooks cannot tell you much about the methods of applying the materials within them. For that you have to look at the drafts. Moreover, Joyce’s manipulation of textual matter at a syntactic level is usually independent of notebook material. Many revisions are echoic forms of material already used—so the immediate source is the text itself. I envisage this book as a complement to the current excellent notebook work, in the hope that one probably quite distant day ahead they will be brought together, notebook material being compared with Joyce’s draft material, and his methods of composition examined as much as the sources for the material. As well as using a genetic approach, this book will be exegetical, the last of the seven ‘approaches’.

7. EXEGESIS Exegesis, or explication, is another established practice, carried out wherever there is doubt about the meaning or the form of a given text. Its most traditional roots—though not practices—are found in interpretations of the ⁴⁵ A. Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 89 and 93. ⁴⁶ Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘ ‘‘Eternest cittas, heil!’’ ’ in Michael Begnal (ed.), Joyce and the City (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press: 2002), 190.

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Bible. With Finnegans Wake exegesis is not just about glossing and covering allusions, processes which are more purely philological; it involves simple understanding and exposition, but then also a striking-out with interpretations, placing images in various contexts, and elucidating or questioning a set of motifs, networks, characters, events, intertextual critiques, parodies, word-games, and wordplay. Some influential critics have resisted this practice as if it were ‘clarifying’ the text, giving it meaning: ‘Joyce worked seventeen years to push it away from ‘‘meaning’’ adrift into language: nothing is to be gained by trying to push it back,’⁴⁷ a resistance similar to the dislike of narrative.⁴⁸ Nonetheless people have always carried out close readings of the Wake. It is the approach to the text it most obviously demands, one of the most enjoyable, especially in groups where everyone throws something in, where foreign words are translated by the polyglot members, allusions are pointed out, and associations pile up. These sometimes form patterned interconnections that relate to ‘central’ themes, and sometimes bring in surprising, funny, and incongruent matter. Joyce himself, whose close rewriting involved a close reading and rereading, performed exegeses on his own work, as illustrations of its machinery, often very freely. He did so for the opening page and for sentences on pages 23, 104, and 414–18.⁴⁹ As an example of how free his reading could be, for the sentence ‘L’Arcs en His Cieling Flee Chinx on the Flur’ (which became 104.13), Joyce glossed ‘flur’ as like ‘Flut’ and ‘Fluss’, flood and river.⁵⁰ Interchanging the last letter twice for a different consonant opens the ‘flood(Flut-)gates’ of meaning, as Fritz Senn pointed out.⁵¹ But that is partly the point: the context of a flood below and the rainbow and skylarks up above produces and reflects this free and unlimited movement of interpretation (where meaning performs microcosmic hi-jinx—like circus fleas). Joyce probably also helped his friend Stuart Gilbert in the close reading of the following passage that appeared in Exagmination. ‘Not all the green gold that the Indus contains would over hinduce them (o.p.) to steeplechange back to their ancient flash and crash habits of old Pales time ere beam slewed cable or Derzherr, live wire, fired Benjermine Funkling outa th’Empyre, sin right hand son . . .’ ⁴⁷ Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956), 304. ⁴⁸ Similar views can be found in Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (eds.), Post-Structuralist Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 10. ⁴⁹ According to McHugh, Annotations, 23 is glossed in a letter to Weaver on 26 July 1927 and 104 is glossed on 13 May 1927. For Joyce’s glosses on 414–18, see Stuart Gilbert, in Beckett et al. (eds.), Exagmination, 67–75. ⁵⁰ To Weaver, 26 July 1927, Selected Letters, 326. ⁵¹ Fritz Senn, ‘Linguistic Dissatisfaction at the Wake’, in Christine O’Neill (ed.), Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce (Dublin: Lilliput, 1995), 235.

30

Introduction The last words of this passage are built on an old musichall refrain, popular in those ‘good old days’ when the ‘Empire’ in Leicester Square was the happyhunting ground of the pretty ladies of London town: ‘There’s hair, like wire, coming out of the Empire.’ An electrical undercurrent traverses the whole of this passage, which alludes to the dawn of pre-history when Vico’s thunderclap came to rescue man from his wild estate; the ‘flash and crash days.’ ‘Beam slewed cable’ hints at the legend of Cain and Abel, which is frequently referred to in Work in Progress. ‘There’s hair’ has crystallized into ‘Derzherr’—Der Erzherr (arch lord)—with a sidethrust at the hairy God of illustrated bibles. He is a ‘live wire’—a bustling director. ‘Benjamin’ means literally ‘son of the right hand’; here the allusion is Lucifer (the favorite archangel till his rebellion), as well as to Benjamin Franklin, inventor of the lightning-conductor. The end of his name is written ‘-jermine,’ in tune with the German word Erzherr, which precedes, and ‘Funkling’ (a diminutive of the German funke—a spark), which follows. Also we can see in this word a clear, if colloquial, allusion to the angel’s panic flight before the fires of God. In the background of the passage a reference to the doom of Prometheus, the fire-bringer, is certainly latent. ‘Outa’—the Americanism recalls ‘live wire,’ as well as such associations as ‘outer darkness’—Lucifer’s exile in the void. ‘Empyre’ suggest Empyrean, highest heaven, the sphere of fire (from ‘pyr,’ the Latinized form of the Greek root ‘pur’—fire). Finally, sin implies at once the German possessive sein (his), and the archangel’s fall from grace.

Then Gilbert sums up, touching on the motivic structure: This passage illustrates the manner in which a motif foliates outwards through the surrounding text, beginning from a single word—here the ‘flash’ in ‘flash and crash’ has ‘electrified’ the words which follow, and a German formation has similarly ramified into the context. All through Work in Progress similar foliations may be traced, outspreading, overlapping enmeshed together; at last deciduous, as new and stronger motifs thrust upwards into the light.⁵²

Gilbert’s theorization is one of the earliest expressions of the Wake’s ‘organic’ structuring—that motifs ‘foliate’, and eventually work together, like the parts of a tree.⁵³ This is something we will see during this study, observing the process in progress like the sped-up film of a flower unfolding, as we reconstruct the sixteen-year draft stages, telescoping them into one or two hours’ reading. Motifs spread locally and more generally over the work as a whole. Gilbert has only done the second half of the passage, passing over the echo in the first phrase of ‘Indus’ and ‘hinduce’. But such work threatens to unfold indefinitely. Clive Hart described the extravagant practical fun of it as follows: ‘one can ⁵² Gilbert, in Beckett et al. (eds.), Exagmination, 59–60. ⁵³ Roland McHugh speaks of a parallel between the exegesis of Finnegans Wake and ‘the collection of myxomycetes’ (slime fungi). Roland McHugh, The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Experience (Dublin Irish Academic Press, 1981), 39.

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continue beating out the gold of individual words almost endlessly’.⁵⁴ The way exposition tends to expand is punned on when Issy exclaims to her brother Shaun: ‘How good you are in explosition’ (419.11). But this can become an obsession as Glasheen noted: ‘Finnegans Wake is for me just a thing it is more fun to think about than most other things. The energy that many a woman lavishes upon white dotted swiss curtains or the league of women voters I lavish on Finnegans Wake.’⁵⁵ Helen Vendler, an exponent of close reading, cautions against its excesses. When writing about Shakespeare’s Sonnets, she finds that some critics in ‘an effort to make lyrics more meaning-full . . . try to load every rift with ore, inventing and multiplying ambiguities, plural meanings, and puns as if in a desperate attempt to add adult interest to what they would otherwise regard as banal sentiment’.⁵⁶ This is what happens when we work on Finnegans Wake: the associations, puns, echoes, and meanings come pouring out, but without the desperate need to avoid the banal or the sense of it coming to a single point. The Wake seems to invite this and it has arguably played a significant role in the development of close reading in the twentieth century, being the ne plus ultra of textual exploration towards which critics take texts as a measure of the texts’ (and the critics’) over-meaning-full sophistication. And yet, where Vendler finds the piling up of ambiguities in Shakespeare’s text as self-consciously ‘adult’, detractors of the Wake find it trivial and tiresome, as it seems to lack a point. Exegesis is not necessarily clarification, but extension and accretion: ‘analysis of details in Finnegans Wake tends to be extraordinarily space-consuming’.⁵⁷ Moreover, because it can go so quickly in such a vast number of directions, you can risk going nowhere. Reading Finnegans Wake one is constantly tempted to apply the hermeneutics of suspicion—to doubt your own interpretation and then question the prejudices that have led you to them. It is a work which seems to contain its own opposite, so you can only ever say half-truths about it. One reason for applying a hermeneutics of suspicion is that it reflects a theme of its own stories—that of the fall: we pile up the consequences of our researches, our understandings, glosses, and interpretations, and then watch them crumble and fall to nothing in the face of some insuperable nonsense, of some irresolvable passage. This might seem to produce a relativism and subjectivism to interpretation. Where everything is in doubt, no certainties can establish any valued reading. ⁵⁴ Hart, Structure, 16. ⁵⁵ Quoted in Edward M. Burns and Joshua A. Gaylord (eds.), A Tour of the Darkling Plain (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2001), 47 n. ⁵⁶ Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), 13. ⁵⁷ Hart, Structure, 14.

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Introduction

But though we do inevitably bring prejudices to it, and sets of our own interests and concerns, we still negotiate with others working beside the text, as whetstones to sharpen our understandings, and to undermine our prejudices—making group reading an ethical practice. Moreover, doubts about meaning don’t necessarily take a reader to an unbounded zone of signification. Meaning may not be fixed but neither is it entirely unlimited. Joyce’s interpretations, and those of his followers, were free enough but not arbitrary or random. One limit here is to try applying Joyce’s idea that while there may be difficulty, ‘the thought is always simple’.⁵⁸ Or, as the twins find, before you can design anything, ‘you must in undivided reawlity draw a line somewhawre’ (292.31–2). Despite the limits we may impose, the speed with which interpretations spread explains in part why ‘the bulk of the long text of Finnegans Wake remains almost entirely unexplicated’ and this is still the case since Clive Hart first said this over forty years ago.⁵⁹ (Another reason is the resistance to exegesis we mentioned earlier, which is ongoing.⁶⁰ ) But this situation also makes exegesis a necessary practice, an ongoing obligation of readers of the Wake, boldly to suggest non-limiting explications about previously unvisited tracts of the text—however brief or obscure they may be. The practice may also feel necessary because, as Helen Vendler argues, exegesis, or at least close reading, is not a practice but an art, and an art whose ways are faltering: ‘The art of seeing drama in linguistic action proper is an art that has lapsed, even in interpreters whose criteria appear to be literary rather than political or psychological.’⁶¹ One reason for the lapse is that it demands a scrutiny of the text which is perceived as unfashionable, where there is a resistance to clarifying exposition. Sheldon Brivic, for instance, writes: ‘The attempt to read the Wake coherently is like the erection of a phallus in the face of flow.’⁶² Jeremy Lane similarly contends that ‘the effort to render the Wake a waking rather than a ‘‘wake’’-ful experience, clear, upstanding, fixed and centred in some singular concept or interpretation, is . . . misplaced’.⁶³ But Brivic’s phallophobia falsely opposes the phallus and coherence to flow. Coherence can flow, just as you can be clear without unduly fixing or centring something. Interpreting the elaborate verbal constructions of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Vendler writes: ⁵⁸ Budgen, Making, 291. ⁵⁹ Hart, Structure, 15. ⁶⁰ For an example of this resistance see Tim Conley, ‘ ‘‘Oh me none onsens!’’ Finnegans Wake and the Negation of Meaning’, JJQ 39/2 (2002), 233–50. ⁶¹ Vendler, Sonnets, 4. ⁶² Sheldon Brivic, Joyce’s Waking Women: An Introduction to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 28. ⁶³ Jeremy Lane, ‘Falling Asleep in the Wake: Reading as Hypnogogic Experience’, in John Brannigan, Geoff Ward, and Julian Wolfreys (eds.), Re: Joyce (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 177.

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I believe that the deepest insights into the . . . world of the poem, and into its constructive and deconstructive energies, come precisely from understanding it as a contraption made of ‘words,’ by which I mean not only the semantic units we call ‘words’ but all the language games in which we might wish to participate.⁶⁴

Finnegans Wake is obviously also such a ‘contraption’, and our participation in the word games through exegesis—which is part of the contraption—can bring about exactly what Vendler describes: insights into its ‘constructive and deconstructive energies’. Both the practice of close reading and the debates about hermeneutics can measure themselves against readings of Finnegans Wake. If the art of close reading is to be resuscitated, it could well do so by making Finnegans Wake and its making part of its raw material. For in so far as it is a dream, it is an exegete’s dream.

T RAC I N G T H E EVO LU T I O N O F M E A N I N G : G E N E T I C E X E G E S I S A N D U N RAV E L L I N G T H E U N I V E R S A L S My aim in this book is to introduce and reintroduce Finnegans Wake by making full use of the manuscripts. The structure for my method of reading is very simple: I take a short, relatively self-contained passage of between half a page to three pages, and trace how it grew from its earliest draft of perhaps just fifteen to twenty words, through the many draft levels, up to the form of its appearance in the final version, the third edition of 1975.⁶⁵ I have chosen four passages: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Shaun describing Shem’s ‘universal history’. (185.27–186.10)⁶⁶ ALP’s first kiss. (203.16–204.04) When Buckley shot the Russian General. (351.36–355.09) Issy’s speech to her mirror. (526.20–528.24)

The passages amount to less than ten pages of text in the Wake. This might give the impression of not being a proper general introduction, not covering sufficient ground. But can such a thing, within the limits of a book-length ⁶⁴ Vendler, Sonnets, 8. ⁶⁵ In this regard, I work as what Fritz Senn calls a ‘prequoter’rather than a ‘post-quoter’. See Senn, ‘Linguistic Dissatisfaction’, 229. ⁶⁶ In one relatively early ‘genetic’ treatments of the Wake, Colin MacCabe chose this passage, and carried out a detailed explication, saying however, that ‘this reading of a sentence . . . is not in any way exhaustive. . . . Finnegans Wake does not ask for an interpretation that will identify it but for another set of elements to continue its work’ (Colin MacCabe (ed.), James Joyce: New Perspectives (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982) 41).

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introduction, possibly exist? Both surface knowledge of the whole book (a bird’s-eye view), and deep knowledge of certain parts of the book (a mole’s ear’s sense) lead to an incomplete sense of the whole. All studies of Finnegans Wake are always, in both senses, partial. Nevertheless the two views are complementary, and I don’t by any means wish to exclude the latter. Indeed, the outlined synopsis above is an example of the bird’s-eye view. With a few exceptions, in my readings, I attempt to touch on every addition and revision, however small, in terms of what they allude to, of what locally and generally might have inspired their inclusion and of what they might say about the book as a whole. For this I make extensive use, and gratefully acknowledge, the exertions of the editors of the James Joyce Archive and of Roland McHugh’s Annotations—an essential companion for any serious would-be Wake scholar. At the same time, I draw on, and frequently overlap with, ideas that come from the critical approaches covered above, especially the branch of postmodern thinking that questions underlying ‘determining’ universal myths. ‘Exegesis’ is a method of reading used more or less intensively by all readers of a text, rather than an exclusive tool reserved for certain factions within contemporary critical theory. Propelled by a chronological and linear method I try to let Joyce’s assorted words determine the flow of my readings, though the influence of the several generations of Wake scholars, theorists, and interpreters inevitably filters into them. One consequence of this is that a multiplicity of different topics emerge that quickly reach a proliferation. The greater part of my work, in responding to the emergence of Joyce’s textual matter traced through his composition processes, therefore skips between many different fields. The writing may not seem to move conventionally through staged and sustained arguments, but the book nonetheless has conventional academic purposes: as the illustration of a method, as a guiding introduction to certain preoccupations in a given text, and as a not yet attempted reconstruction and interpretation of certain historical ‘events’ of the composition process. While its multiplying elements will not necessarily seem to tend towards a particular point or climax, I hope that the movement it has, partly reflects the organic form of Joyce’s novel as a whole. We all know that there is no single key to unlock Finnegans Wake, that its status as unlockable and resolvable should itself be in question anyway. Single subject works that aim at a key or a means of resolution (‘Joyce and X’ or ‘Finnegans Wake and Y’) may provide useful material but, as I have stressed above, cannot get round this problem. At one level Finnegans Wake may, in its intensely satisfying climax, a perfect pianissimo finish, have a particularly single end—and it is one of the finest closing passages written in fiction. But Finnegans Wake is also, like certain organic entities, an object of many endings and beginnings, of points of transition, transmutation, and transfer which, like

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a tree and its leaves, reaches out via multiple surfaces, each one feeding back into the whole. As Hilary Clark put it: ‘The reader must follow the branches and sub-branches, the infinitesimal ramifications, of knowledge.’⁶⁷ Imagine describing, one by one, the leaves of an extraordinary tree, where each leaf has a subtly different colour and shape and also a moment of emergence that affects and reflects the growth of the whole. The last leaves to emerge will not necessarily be the most striking, or sensational, but they constitute new material. My method will generally reflect this, covering diverse conclusions. The climax that this leads to, as I will conclude in Part IV, is that this spirit of diversity, divagation, and digression reflects an idealized social revolution, where an individualized mass runs riot over a monolithic institution. The method then reflects my concluding message: the proliferation of meanings and stories in and next to the Wake unravels universals—the universals that it seems to set up through its mythic coincidences and reproductive analogies. It does so because deviating detail overwhelms those unitary elements that attempt to secure strategies of totalization. In Part IV I argue that the elaborate character of Joyce’s writing methods is reflected in the elaborate characters of the writing themselves—Shem and Shaun, ALP, HCE, Issy, the Customers, etc. The principal characters represent principles of composition. This can be seen, in particular, in the character of lettristic and verbal detail as it emerges in composition. Letters, words, and phrases in continuous strategies of rewriting spread out over the primitive underlying forms of narrative or description. They are, in their escalation, correlatives for a popular mass uprising—to an extent idealized—which is implied in the title: Finnegans [do] Wake. Such uprisings resist those totalizing forms that attempt to ignore or suppress detailed differences among people. These primary ‘forms’ have an effect of limiting within their ‘frames’, the people as ‘types’. The print terminology is significant here, for print reproduces a sense of solidity which the (over)flow of rewriting and the disruption of redrafting destabilizes. The numerous levels of revision in Finnegans Wake finally produce pages that resemble the convoluted pre-Gutenberg manuscripts rather than anything printed—hence the analogy of the Book of Kells. The resistance comes through revision, through the rewriting of underlying structures. The subsequent intricate structures in revision take their forms not from the object being resisted, but from beyond that structure, from what the totalizing structures had not taken into account. One consequence of this argument is a vision in which we no longer view the ‘characters’ of Finnegans Wake as enduring mythic universal types. Instead we view them as inflated to bursting point, to the point of fragmentation, through the very expansion of identity that follows from engrained habits of ⁶⁷ Helen Clark, ‘Networking in Finnegans Wake’, JJQ 27/4 (1990), 745–58: 745.

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‘universalization’ in thought and belief. These universal types are now unravelling. ALP is not therefore mythic Earth Mother but a greatly abused figure, whose abuse has, however, over time been naturalized. Her metaphoric role as a river has been imagined to mythicalize and allude to woman’s perpetual ‘nature’. But it also serves to naturalize and normalize her many experiences of exploitation and her deference, based on not seeing through her husband, to the puffed up everyman-conquering-hero that he dreams of being. She is a figure whose time is—or should be—up, and she seems, too late, to realize this in her monologue. The circularity of the Wake is, then, a circularity which reaches back into itself, into its own past, rather than reaching forward into our future with some prophetic promise of extension, or some sinister proposal of an eternal return. The reawakening that is hoped for in the words—so frequently recycled in Wake criticism—‘The seim anew’ (215.23), should be revised and reimagined as a reawakening from this particularly absurd set of stock characters. As the insincere mourners of the dead mythic hero, Finn MacCool, say, addressing, as it were, his universalized form at the point when it threatens to reinform the world: ‘Aisy now . . . and lie quiet’ (27.22). By arguing for this correlative between composition and meaning, I aim to endorse a comic optimistic vision of Finnegans Wake, as a symbol for a secular collective—not divinely individual—Resurrection. The vision is enabled by studying its microscopic detailed self-elaboration within the very processes of its composition. Nodding to the principles of the allusion-hunting philologist, this study responds in its conclusion to two remarks Joyce made: that the book was about the uprising of the little people; and that every letter in his text could be justified.⁶⁸ It responds also to a remark Joyce’s contemporaries made, one with which Joyce might well have agreed: that God is in the detail. The latter two may invoke an unforgiving God of scholarship but, as Edmond Jabès writes: ‘We can’t approach the Whole except by way of the detail. We can only approach by little bits a certain totality which isn’t even a totality. We can become aware of the Whole only through the littlest bits.’⁶⁹ So, just as we find it said in Finnegans Wake, introducing a philosophical dispute about the nature of identity in the world, ‘here are the details’ (611.03). ⁶⁸ In an interview with Margaret Gardiner, Maria Jolas told her: ‘Joyce once said to me something that I’ve never heard him repeat about the title of Finnegans Wake, which was that the little people of the Erse will awaken. The Finnegans. Do wake up, you see. And it was almost a warning, if you want, to the people who regarded the Finnegans as non-essential and not worth taking into account. It’s very interesting.’ Unpublished interview, in my possession, with Margaret Gardiner. ⁶⁹ Edmond Jabès, ‘A Threshold Where We Are Afraid’, in Conversation with Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, trans. Annemarie Hamad and Scott Lerner (Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1993), 9.

Part I Shem’s ‘Cyclewheeling History’ and Anna Livia’s ‘very first time’

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A. Shem’s ‘Cyclewheeling History’ (185.27–186.10) Book I Chapter 7, known as ‘Shem the Penman’, describes ‘Shem-Ham-CainEgan etc and his penmanship’ according to Joyce.¹ I have chosen a passage from this chapter to start with, because its basic intentions are quite easily inferred: it is a Portrait of the Writer as an Inadequate Human drawn by his brother Shaun. The passage in question here offers us a vision of the writer’s project and, since the reader is led to suspect that Shem is James Joyce and the project is Finnegans Wake, we can trace the evolution of what seems to describe the project of the Wake itself.² The chapter was written—off and on—over some fourteen years, as the project itself shifted. It was first drafted in February 1924, redrafted and fair-copied by March; then in 1925 prepared for publication in a periodical This Quarter; then revised in preparation for transition in 1927. The same process was repeated by 1936 preparing for the galleys of the first edition, which were themselves revised once more some time before February 1938. It has been published, then, in three different versions, with intermediary drafts between each one. Shem and Shaun have one early origin in Cain and Abel. Indeed, their ‘sigla’, ‘ ’ and ‘ ’, as Ingeborg Landuyt has shown, correspond to their initial letters: C and A.³ Cain, the primal murderer, may be the primal villain in Genesis but in Finnegans Wake Joyce retells the story, inviting us to invert our sympathies. Shaun has consistently been viewed by critics as more suspect—a braggart, a bully, and a hypocritical sentimentalist—with Shem being the revolutionary artist anti-hero, the outcast with whom we commiserate. John Bishop reads Shem as the unconscious, the producer of dreams that trouble ¹ To Weaver, 16 Jan. 1924, LI, 208. ² For a genetic explication of the paragraph preceding our passage see Robert Boyle, SJ, ‘Finnegans Wake, page 185: An Explication’, JJQ 4/1 (1966), 3–16: 9. ³ The sigla first appeared in VI.B.4 and VI.B.1. See Ingeborg Landuyt, ‘Tale Told of Shem: Some Elements at the Inception of FW I.7’, in Slote and van Mierlo (eds.), European Joyce Studies, 9. 115–34: 116.

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Shaun, who is the censorious ordering censor.⁴ On the other hand, it can become very hard to tell who is who, especially in the case of a scene we will cover later, the shooting of the Russian General, which in its primality might be modelled on either Cain’s fratricide in killing Abel, or Oedipus’ patricide in killing Laius. In Joyce’s early draft conceptualizations, Shem is marked off as the author/forger/copyist of ALP’s all-important letter. Shaun, like a lawyer summing up in a trial, says his brother is the lowest imaginable human creature, as low as a snake; and in this respect resembles the man who, according to the first draft of ALP’s letter, was ‘a snake’ who spread lies about HCE. He stinks, is unpatriotic and egotistical, scarcely a real man, a lazy good-for-nothing with such undignified tastes as a liking for tinned salmon. But Shaun’s description backfires on him: it is so excessive that it seems pathological, an exaggerated parody of the attacks on Joyce after Ulysses. The Shem who is described stops seeming real; becoming a fantasized other and figment of Shaun’s fevered imagination. And so we sympathize with Shem’s plea for mercy. The commentator Tindall writes that ‘Shaun embodies all disapproval of Joyce—and there was plenty. Disapproving of disapproval of Joyce, Joyce approves of Joyce.’⁵ One extreme illustration reveals Shem, when forbidden paper and ink, doing something so unutterably disgusting that Shaun (like such psychopathologists as Krafft-Ebing in his Psychopathia Sexualis) has to shift into Latin, protecting those who cannot read Latin from reading it. Only the degraded get infected by potentially degrading material. The educated, socially ‘high’ who comprehend Latin, will not be degraded by reading it.

1 . E A R LY 1 9 2 4 : ‘ S LOW LY U N F O L D E D U N I V E R S A L H I S TO RY ’ What is it that Shem does that is so unspeakable? He mixes his excreta and urine to make ink. What does he do with it? Shaun reveals the worst, and returns to the vulgar comprehensible tongue to do so. Here is the first draft of our passage probably written early in 1924 in a large red-backed notebook: ⁴ Bishop, James Joyce’s Book of the Dark, 249–50. In the notebook VI.B.9, p. 12, Joyce noted ‘ inner man of ’ an idea written after this passage was first drafted, and that was to be incorporated in ‘Dave the Dancekerl’ (462.17 ff .). ⁵ Tindall, Reader’s Guide, 92.

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With this dye he wrote minutely, appropriately over every part of the only foolscap available, his own body, till integument slowly unfolded universal history & that self which he hid from the world grew darker & darker in outlook. (185.32–186.08 and 47471b–64; JJA 47: 359)⁶

Because he has no paper, he uses his own body as ‘foolscap’. The document produced may be Anna Livia’s letter but is described here as a ‘universal history’. As he writes it on his skin (one meaning for the word ‘integument’), his own self is ‘hid away from the world’. This chimes with a theory of writing poetry, which Joyce’s acquaintance T. S. Eliot propounded just five years earlier in his famous essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. And he may be on Joyce’s mind because just two or three months before Joyce wrote this passage, Eliot had written a glowing, if solemn, review of Ulysses. He was a supporter then but also a rival, since The Waste Land had stormed the literary world shortly after Ulysses came out. In his ‘Tradition’ essay, published in the same periodical where Joyce published A Portrait of the Artist and chapters of Ulysses, Eliot famously wrote that ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’⁷ To this snobbish notion of value (available only for a few) he added that ‘the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’.⁸ What Eliot’s theory and Shem’s practice share is the separation and disappearance of the self from the world. Eliot’s self, however, is surrendered, Shem’s secreted. Shirking sacrifice, his personality only appears to be extinguished, darkly concealing body and self beneath the cloak of the cloacal. His writing projects onto and into his being, generating a new bleak personality, and a bleak world view. Writing with excrement seems infantile or perverse, but it may be the last resort of a prisoner forbidden use of pen and paper, as Shem has been. Bobby Sands, the Republican hunger-striker, famously did so in the H-Blocks of Northern Ireland, and the film Quills, loosely treating the life of the Marquis de Sade, has him, after his tongue has been cut out as a punishment, irrepressibly using his own excrement to write on his walls.⁹ These last measures despite their desperation may seem disgusting, but Shem according ⁶ See Note on the Transcriptions, p. ix. ⁷ T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in The Sacred Wood (London: Faber & Faber, 1922), 52. ⁸ Ibid. 47. ⁹ For an account of Bobby Sands, see Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists (London: Virago, 1993). The script of the film Quills, which came out in 2000, directed by Philip Kaufman, was written by Doug Wright.

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to Shaun has gone further than these modern icons: Shem writes in excrement on his own body. In so doing we imagine he’s imprisoned or impoverished, forced to recycle his own waste and use his ‘integument’ as paper. Margot Norris has written that Shem ‘is actually politicalized in the chapter, to serve as trope of material extremity produced for the artist by the nexus of law and commerce in the early twentieth-century’.¹⁰ Integument is an archaic word, meaning covering, clothes, or a skin. The writing is a second skin to cover up his naked body. This suggests that the relation between the writer and the written is not one of reflection of the world around, but projective—that writing is a cover, a deception to wrap up the writer, a layer of muck that follows the contours of the body while hiding it. The second skin, a disguise, makes out that writing is secondary, a supplement to speech, an idea which can put Shem in a network with Derrida’s early writings.¹¹ The fact of him writing on his own body sullies the notion that, as a temple, the body is not to be dirtied or marked. As negative attitudes towards tattoos reveal, writing on the body degrades it. This is not just an attitude to the body, but, in Shaun’s world, to writing as well. Writing is grubby graffiti, dirty marks on the clean and natural surfaces of the world; it distances our appreciation of the original presence of being. It is a corruption, a sign of our fall from unity. Behind the equation of writing and filth is the feeling that writing, originally a dark liquid that the body helps produce, like sewage, has to be moved through proper channels, checked and treated, has to be recognized as a material which is as dangerous as excrement itself, since it too can spread diseases and must be controlled. Shaun, with his fear and hatred of writing, is graphophobic, and in his role as postman may control as much as carry the message. What Shaun dislikes about Shem’s writing is the damage it does to the originally pure body. Moreover, Shem’s work will not actually be distributable; Shaun will not be able to deliver it—in order to read it you will have to read him, so writing on his own body is a narcissistic and exhibitionistic act, a self-adornment and a self-display. As we shall see with Isolde in Part III, writing is make-up that makes up the self. The fact that Shem’s writing darkens the norm of the clean white body, betrays a racial distinction at work in Shaun’s graphophobia. The writing makes Shem darker and darker, blacker and blacker. And, indeed, Shem will ¹⁰ Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Structuralist Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 92. ¹¹ ‘I had the feeling that . . . one could have represented La Pharmacie de Platon as a sort of indirect reading of Finnegans Wake, which mimes . . . the whole scene of the pharmakos . . . [Th]e whole of La Pharmacie de Platon was only a reading of Finnegans Wake.’ Jacques Derrida, ‘Two words for Joyce’, in Attridge and Ferrer (eds.) Post-Structuralist Joyce (eds.), 145–59: 150.

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subsequently often be described as such.¹² Where Ulysses was the story of two races (the Irish and the Jewish), Finnegans Wake at one level, carries a story of ‘two races, swete and brack’ (17.24) where Shem is black, Shaun is white, opposed like the mixing tides of an estuary: the sweet river water and brackish sea water. In the paragraph following our passage, Shem is being guarded by one Sigurdsen (a version of Sackerson) who should (in the first draft) ‘save him from lynch law’ (186.22),¹³ a reference to blacks being lynched at the time in America by the Klu Klux Klan. We are told that Sigurdsen, the blond Saxon guard, comes, in a revision, from the ‘KruisKroon-Kraal’—indicating the Klan’s ‘KKK’ acronym. This has Dutch South African associations that are translatable as the ‘Corrale of the Cross and Crown’—a modest crusader’s castle.¹⁴ We can associate Sackerson, then, with boarish and Boerish racism, and picture Shem receiving the threats of racial violence. Shem is black, threatened perilously with lynching, and protected only by a Klansman policeman. Later Shaun cries out in a climax: ‘enough of such porterblack lowneess, too base for printink!’ (187.17). As Ruth Bauerle, Cheryl Herr, and Sheldon Brivic have stressed, Joyce had a taste for—or was keeping an eye out for—emerging Afro-American culture. He incorporated figures from the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes) and Ragtime and Jazz musicians (such as Scott Joplin and Louis Armstrong) and Paul Robeson (whom we will encounter in Part II).¹⁵ Shem’s body, as I’ve said, grows dark under this ‘dye’, but what also gets darker and darker is the ‘outlook’ of Shem’s philosophy and view of the world. This is the generation of a pessimistic vision, a ‘universal history’ which fails to affirm life. ‘Universal histories’, or world histories, are ambitious narratives that attempt to embrace the entire history of man on earth, and to perceive a pattern or development within it. They incorporate evidence from the Bible and, as the comparative study of religions increased, material from other religions. Versions of ‘history’ may be multifarious in the sense that there is no history, only histories, multifarious versions of events strung together in a multitude of ways. But, since we’re dealing with conflicting twins, we can arrange them, stereotypically—and over-briefly—between two opposing poles. One pole, the progressive version of history, had various expressions, especially during the nineteenth century. We gradually move towards some set of perfect goals: civilization, social stability, peace, harmony, a ‘world order’, ¹² See Finnegans Wake, 177.4, 185.8–186.18. ¹³ See 47471b, 53; JJA 47: 337. ¹⁴ Added in preparation for transition 7, 47474–78v; JJA 47: 477. ¹⁵ See Ruth Bauerle (ed.), Picking up Airs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Brivic, Joyce’s Waking Women; and Cheryl Herr, ‘Blue Notes: From Joyce to Jarman’, in Brannigan, Ward, and Wolfreys (eds.), Re: Joyce, 211–23.

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where one efficient and benign system emerges as dominant. A dominant expression of it, available if in a reduced form in universal histories told by Bossuet, Kant, Hegel, and Carlyle, is trumpeted by representatives of those in power, or in pursuit of power, as a justification for, and goal beyond, any immediate intervention in some conflict or other. We are moving towards a utopia and must continuously tweak events, laws, and international relations, so that one day, having amassed more enabling knowledge and power, we will be able simply to switch buttons and ensure the reign of peace. Our civic responsibility is to contribute to, or support, all changes that have this as their goal. Everything that power does will be a response to our equitable needs and our rationalized desires. This forms one techno-democratic and exaggeratedly optimistic horizon currently at work and informing social and political policy in the West. It is the offspring of the Christian notion of heaven on earth, available for those who follow the faith. And those who do follow the faith are more likely to be promised heaven than those who don’t. Marx forms a different revolutionary rather than evolutionary expression of this utopianism, with a proletariat rising up against the plutocrats, but the vision is similarly progressive. An alternative view is circular. All human institutions follow an underlying and predetermined pattern of construction, collapse, and reconstruction. Reading Vico crudely can produce such a vision. Joyce prompted his early readers to perceive such a structure as operating in his novel. A divine age is followed by a heroic age, then a human age, then an anarchic period which returns to a divine age, and round we go again. Nothing is new under the sun. Technologies might improve allowing us longer life and greater ease of movement, but human political institutions—justice, marriage, governments—are imperfect and have their demise written in their origin. Such a view keeps an eye on the fallen civilizations of the past, not to show how far we’ve come, but as visions of our destiny, memento mori for living civilizations. Though we don’t hear much detail for the moment, Shem’s world view, in Shaun’s eyes, belongs neither to the progressive nor the cyclical pole. It is regressive: the vision worsens, man deteriorates. Steeped in progressive Christian ideologies, it is difficult to imagine a world view like Shem’s becoming dominant. If we could, we would see decadence not just in our immediate surroundings but everywhere. Shem’s view is comparable to that of the notorious Degeneration by Max Nordau (1895), and the more contemporaneous Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918) or Decline of the West (translated in 1926) by Oswald Spengler. ‘Degenerationists’ were vulgar Darwinists, superficially taking the bleaker aspects of Darwin’s theories, and arguing that if there were a survival of the fittest there would be a failure of

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the weakest. This was an argument made specifically about Europe and the West as it sensed that its own Imperialist (and individualistic) practices had reached their peak and were now on their way down. Certain illnesses and forms of art could be pounced upon as symptoms of this degeneracy, hence the notion of ‘Decadence’ as an artistic movement and symptom in the 1890s. Shem’s view, however, is ‘universal’. Not only are different states, races, or nations involved in a vicious race with each other, but everybody is on the high road to hell. The decline of Europe, as seen by Nordau and Spengler, is just a form of moralizing auto-critique, a plea to prevent the downward turn or else the South American Catholics or the Japanese or Chinese will catch up. If everybody’s going downhill, however, transracially and internationally, then not only is the mass momentum too great to stop, but where is there an outside to appeal to? Shem himself must be this outside—the pessimistic moralizing prophet who spells the decline of the human universe. Not only is Shem’s ‘universal history’ rabidly pessimistic, it is also hubristic. According to Shaun, Shem says he’s bigger than Shakespeare (177.31). Why should this sham copywriter, this forger, know anything about something as huge and unencompassable as universal history? National histories are written for the nations concerned. So if it’s a history of the universe, is it a history for the universe? Does Shem imagine he’s writing it for everyone? For someone like Shaun, this view of history is itself a sign of degeneracy, something to repress, in order to maintain a set of civilized values. But it may also be a misrepresentation of what Shem/Joyce is really up to anyway. Joyce, indeed, defended Ulysses as representative of life itself: his aunt had said ‘it was not fit to read’; to which he replied ‘If Ulysses is not fit to read, life is not worth living.’¹⁶ In this early draft and the whole surrounding chapter, Joyce is not only characterizing his critics as they savaged him. He is also involved in self-critique, exteriorizing in Shaun the part of him that criticizes himself, a part that identifies with his own critics. With respect to his new work, the critics have not yet risen, since Joyce has not, in fact, yet made any of his new work public.

2 . R EV I S I N G : ‘ L I F E T RA N S AC C I D E N TAT E D’ Joyce rereads what he’s written, probably just shortly after its composition, and throws in a few little words; intensifiers and clarifiers.¹⁷ He makes the ¹⁶ Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce’s World (London: Methuen, 1957), 139; the anecdote is retold in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 537. ¹⁷ 47471b–64; JJA 47: 359.

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dye ‘double dye’. Double dying is simply dying twice, making the stains more intense and permanent, but it also speaks about the way Joyce is, at this point, developing an aesthetic and structuration of doubling. As we shall see, he never simply writes, he double writes, in a process that he comes to equate with his cross-eyed focus on Dublin (or ‘Dyoublong’ (13.04)). Shem and Shaun are twins, ALP (the river) will contemplate her inversion HCE (the city), and vice versa, Issy will be doubled by her mirror image, the Murphys and the Maggies will have each other opposite them. Think of one thing, it produces its other: the relation between them can be of opposition (man/woman), or self-identical (twins). Doubling is a major process of the way Joyce generated text, not along some linear structure but by returning to what he’d done and repeating what was already there, if in a slightly different way each time. Words, phrases, or narratives always grow into some related form. They have morphed versions of themselves making connections, either nearby or with distant echoes further away. This is something we shall recognize again and again as we work through the drafts. Joyce clears up some syntax, too, by adding ‘one’ before ‘integument’, making sure it would be read as a noun rather than an adverb describing how the history ‘unfolded’—as if it did so ‘in an integument’ way. But this ‘one’ also implies the unity and integrity that is conceptually present in the word ‘integument’. Most importantly, Joyce makes a substantial and complex revision, drafting it in the margin of the facing page, a gloss on the words ‘universal history’. If Finnegans Wake, in early 1924, is still a history of the world, then this is a special self-reflective reference in which Joyce describes, in a warped version, his own project and the process by which it is coming into being. This is something we should be suspicious of, since Joyce’s processes involved diversionary tactics, dodging and deferring some core explanation. The universal history is now defined as: the reflection from his person of lived life transaccidentated in the slow fire of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to all flesh, mortal only (185.03–06; 47471b–64v; JJA 47: 360 simplified)

Boiled down to its barest bones, Shem’s universal history is a transformation of life into chaos, a reverse of the divine creation. Whereas the Old Testament God created form in the universe and life for man out of chaos, Shem, we are told, transmutes an image of a living man into chaos. Moreover, Shem uses fire—something violent that God’s creation, requiring only his will and its embodiment in language, didn’t need. Though this process seems radically retrograde—going back to the world before the world—it also makes available

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something like the original conditions out of which creation was possible or necessary. It is a ‘dividual chaos’ meaning a chaos that is separable or divisible, capable therefore of rearrangement, reordering into a new form. ‘Chaos’ has been presented as a blueprint for the Wake as a whole—a muddle of everything-to-be before it has found its proper ordered place in Being—a state that is constantly deferred, however. Revising in 1936, Joyce proffers what seems to be a revisionary description of the whole work: ‘chaosmos of Alle’ (118.21). This has been read as self-referential, picked up as such by several commentators, including Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Umberto Eco, and Philip Kuberski.¹⁸ But this discounts the ambiguity of narrative voice or the ironized narrator. Through Shaun, as will become clear, we have a Satanized and in a sense sanitized vision of the Wake, which is no more accurate than its opposite. Chaos, paradoxically, may be too unified—too clean and tidy—a conception for so variegated an object as Finnegans Wake. Chaosmos, however, is an aptly disunified concept, voicing the word ‘chiasmus’, or ‘arch’, that symbol of structural harmony, and in itself a bridge, like many of the Wake words themselves, between chaos and cosmos. Shem performs his destructive act of transformation through writing. That Shaun conceives writing to have such powerfully negative potential is more evidence of Shaun’s graphophobia. But it is surely mistaken to consider writing as a force that literally transforms things in the same way that eating or burning things materialistically transform them. Nonetheless this is what Shem is described as doing. His writing processes involve a psychological scorching, as self-reflection passes through the ‘slow fire of consciousness’: a hellish toasting of thoughts in the forge of the mind. The form this transformation takes is quite specific—Joyce coins a verb ‘transaccidentated’ stemming from the jargonized ‘transaccidentation’, a concept that arose in theological debate in the thirteenth century about transubstantiation after Aquinas’s readings of Aristotle. This continued through to Luther.¹⁹ It comes from the separation of ‘accidents’ from ‘substance’, where substance is the inner essence or identity of a thing or class of things while ‘accidents’ are the superficial qualities immediate to sensory perception: the colour of an object, ¹⁸ See e.g. the ‘chaosmologists’: Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Paris: Minuit, 1981); Félix Guattari, Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée 1992); and Philip Kuberski, Chaosmos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). ¹⁹ In the 15th cent., Wyclif, for instance, thought transubstantiation logically demands transaccidentation, stating that the theory of transubstantiation in which the accidents remain while the substance changes is ‘grounded neither in holy writt ne reson ne wit but only taughte by newe hypocritis and cursed heretekis that magnyfyen there own fantasies and dremes’. See John D. Wyclif, ‘De Euch.’, in English Wyclif Tracts 1–3, ed. Conrad Lindberg (Oslo: Novus, 1991), iii. 520.

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the hardness of its surface, the softness of its flesh. In transubstantiation—of the communion wafer into Christ’s body, for instance—a thing’s essential substance is replaced with the essential substance of something else, but the accidents do not change. In transaccidentation (though few have gone into details about the process), a thing’s accidents are replaced (perhaps only in part) by the accidents of something else. Some people argued, sensibly enough perhaps, that substance cannot change without the accidents changing: that is, as an example, the wafer cannot become Christ without its accidents becoming the accidents of Christ. Changes in substance determine changes in the accidents, but this does not work the other way round. In any case to state this was heresy—something we know Joyce to have been fascinated by. However sympathetic we may be with the heretics, transaccidentation by itself may be odd if not fantastical, producing surreal objects, in an imaginary magic. A tree is not transaccidentated if it simply loses its leaves: a tree is transaccidentated if it takes on the exoskeleton of a lobster, or the funnels of an ocean-liner. The changes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, like Daphne turned into a laurel tree, might be kinds of ‘transaccidentations’, since the laurel tree still has the personality of Daphne within it. That is, it keeps its substance despite changing its non-essential ‘accidental’ qualities. Forms of disguise may be considered forms of ‘transaccidentation’. You assume another shape or form—with a false wig or moustache—but your substance or essence remains the same. In the case before us, the specific thing that is ‘transaccidentated’ into chaos is a ‘reflection from his person of lived life’. The terms here—reflection, person, life—are problematic in a way that may have prompted Joyce to nudge them about in revision. Thus he subsequently conjured up the phrase ‘varied reflection’, but then deleted ‘varied’ and put ‘progressive’. He put ‘individual’ before ‘person’ and he replaced ‘lived life’ with ‘life unlivable’. Cleaned up, the phrase would read: the progressive reflection from his individual person of life unlivable (186.03; 47471b–64v; JJA 47: 360)

In a rare case of fallout, ‘progressive’ doesn’t make it through to the next round of writing. The other additions, as we shall now see, point to inconsistencies in the very way we normally use the words. ‘Individual’ balances with ‘dividual’, but ‘individual person’ seems like a tautology. After all, a ‘person’ is defined as an individual (OED, 2nd edition, definitions 2 and 5), and ‘Individual’ means something that has qualities special to itself. Since every person has some attribute special to themselves, aren’t all persons ‘individual’ without having to say they are persons? Divide up matter into smaller and smaller units and you eventually get to a bit that is too small to be cut up—the

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atom (in its original conception). The concept of the individual presents each human being like each atom as indivisible, irreducible units. Joyce’s writing method might be viewed as the reverse process—a combination of ‘dividual’ components that, reconfigured, reintegrate into a whole. It brings together what might normally be conceived as separate and distinct entities. It treats linguistic textual units in the same way that disparate peoples are brought together in a city or on an international train. Joyce takes bits of language from anywhere, as small as a letter or as large as a story, and fuses them. More than any novel before, the novel plays with the novel’s form as something that oscillates between being unified (self-joining) and falling apart (self-dividing). As I shall say in Part IV, Joyce represents and examines the procedures of writing as paradigms of human behaviour: separating and isolating, for instance, or bringing together and fusing, and also reflecting, doubling, erasing, attacking, growing. When we say ‘individual’ we mean something essential to that person—not subject to changes like clothing. But, curiously, ‘person’ is ambiguous and can be divisible. For it can mean ‘the living body . . . regarded together with its clothing’ (OED, sense III.4 (b), but see (a) for a contradictory meaning). You might imagine a policeman saying ‘he had hidden the evidence about his person’. Clothes can then be part of our person, but if they can be separated from our bodies and worn by someone else, then our person in this sense is divisible. It is therefore strictly speaking not individual. For Shem’s ‘person’ to be ‘individual’ (as indivisible) he must be naked—something we know because he writes directly onto his naked skin, producing another skin, and extensions for his person, a covering—like clothes. The commonplace word ‘Life’ is revealed as a strange concept too by being called unlivable. An unlivable life is not worth living so Shem, by the standards imputed to him by Shaun, might as well die. It is a quick step, then, to the idea that the life of a being is expendable. Moreover, if we can describe life as ‘lived’ or ‘unlivable’ then it implies that life, like a song that is unsingable, or a book that is unreadable, a gift that is ungivable, is an object. This turns ‘life’ into something from which we are separated as the singer is separated from the song. It objectifies life as something separable from us, even though we are spread out within the very links of its chain, part of life’s continuum. It makes out that ‘life’ has certain qualities, in the absence of which there is no life, or at least a lack of it. These qualities are related to energy, vitality, and its expenditure. Life becomes something to which we are exhorted: ‘Look lively! Get a life!’ as if even though we are technically alive, we might still not ‘have’ a life. Life is one of the subjects of Finnegans Wake: it seems to be embodied in the flowing river, the Liffey, as the river of Life, equated with movement and quickness (hence riverrun as the first word) and survival. There is a definition

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of ‘life’: ‘Life . . . is a wake,’ (55.5–7), both awake, as energetic, and ‘a wake’, a consolatory celebration feeding off the rump of the dead. The objectification of life is built into the sense that we must achieve something in this life: that if we don’t we are not really alive. This is a partial and exaggerated concept of what life really is. For in a literal and simple sense, whatever we’re doing or not doing, as long as we’re breathing, as long as we are alive, then we live and have life. Treating ‘life’ as an object to which we are more or less adequate excises crucial elements from life just at the very time that we are living it: such elements as sleep, rest, laziness, and the absence of labour, energy, and work. To say that these kinds of stasis are not living is not only to limit the plurality of life but to make it lopsided, tipping it towards the stresses that we find in modernity’s cult of perpetual activity. Finnegans Wake’s view of life, I sense, shares this lack of balance. It is in his celebration of the energetic that Joyce is at his most Victorian—a quality which his modernism is supposed to efface. Joyce prefers Sterne to Swift, thinking their names should be swapped round: for Joyce admired swiftness in prose, using symptoms of paralysis to moralize cultural conditions in his most moralistic work Dubliners. In the cult of energy that appears in Molly, and carries on in Finnegans Wake, Joyce may seem to celebrate those life forms that survive traumatic or unfavourable social conditions. On the other hand there may be an allegory at work in the Wake, where ALP’s swansong at the end of the novel marks the death of a certain kind of life. ALP’s letter is that of a woman who will not believe the charges against her city-building man, a woman who forgives the violence of man, defends him against accusations of malpractice and respects his energy. When she dies she seems to realize her mistake: ‘I thought you the great in all things . . . You’re but a puny’ (627.23–4). There is, moreover, in this complex phrase something unclear and ambiguous, the tricky issue of a reflection that is ‘from’ one thing and ‘of’ another. Is a reflection of or from something? Is Joyce pointing out something strange in the way we talk about reflections? But, in fact, Joyce changed the structure when he copied it out, and cleared up this problem, as we shall see. The ‘reflection . . . of life’ we can call autobiography. What is it being transmuted into? ‘A dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to all flesh, mortal only’. This is a curious set of adjectives: perilous to whom? potent in what way? What is ‘common to all flesh, mortal only’? An answer to this might be the fact that all flesh must die. This potent and perilous chaos which is divisible (or shared out among a number of things), is perhaps mortality. It is a ‘chaos’, that which preceded divine creation, the original form of the matter of the universe. He is therefore transforming the stuff of his life into some powerful dangerous chaos like death, or chaos of death: a Satanic inverse creation as we’ve noted.

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3 . FA I R- C O P Y I N G F O R W E AV E R : ‘ E AC H WO R D T H AT WO U L D N OT PA S S AWAY ’ Such a bleak project for the ‘universal history’ must be Shaun’s denigratory gloss on Shem. But the language overall is unlike Shaun’s: it has a different weight and intelligence. It is difficult to tell whether it is weird jargon, or a serious reference to a Romantic theory of anti-creation, or both. Joyce’s subsequent revision turns it into Shem’s speech—reported, recorded indirect speech. The fair copy made for Weaver—not particularly fair, since Joyce continued to add things in the margin (on the right in the transcription below)—went like this:²⁰ With this double dye minutely, appropriately, he wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till one human integument slowly unfolded universal history F but with each word that would not pass away the self which he had hidden from the world grew darker and darker in its outlook.

nastily,

F

(thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated in through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal)

(185.31–186.08 and 47474–13; JJA 47: 372)

So, appearing on the right is reported speech of what Shem apparently said about his hubristic, pessimistic, and solipsistic processes, admitting to them all. It is now, according to Shaun, Shem’s actual description—‘he said . . .’. Joyce has changed other things, too. Inserting parentheses makes a unit of the words that can easily be passed over to assist our reading. ‘Mortal only’ has become ‘human only, mortal’. This means it is no longer necessarily death, since death is not ‘human only’, but common to all living things. It is instead some general powerful dangerous human chaos. The troublesome propositions earlier around ‘reflection from . . . of . . .’ have been tidied up. To make his universal history, he is now ‘reflecting life unlivable from his individual person’, an act of narcissistic projection. For this fair copy there were other small and as it were incidental additions. The word ‘nastily’ is added after ‘minutely’, Shaun stressing his low opinion of Shem. The integument is now a ‘human integument’, differentiating it from animal skin—more frequently used for parchment (though books made ²⁰ Material in bold indicates material that was added since the draft, analysed previously, had been finished. That means it appears during the process of fair-copying or, possibly, at some non-extant draft level. See Note on the Transcriptions, p. ix.

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of human skin do exist). ‘Human’ now appears twice in close proximity, an awkward chime that will be addressed in subsequent work. Joyce has also added a new phrase, a cliché of art: Shem is to write in words ‘that would not pass away’, that would not die, and that will be permanent, indelible, however much one scrubs away at them. If this is art’s highest compliment to itself, we must remember that what will not pass away here is, literally, his shit, as if somehow fossilized as part of his preserved body. As he turns life into death, he does so with shitty words that will not die. It is, then, the written form of words that have taken on the ‘accidents’ of death: that art-as-death is a permanent force. We can note also that earlier Shem ‘wrote . . . and his self grew darker’. Now he ‘wrote . . . but his self grew darker’. Growing darker is a negative unexpected consequence of the history he is writing, not simply a coincidental event.

4 . 1 9 2 5 : P R E PA R I N G F O R THIS QUARTER ‘THE ALSHEMIST’ This fair copy was typed up by Harriet Shaw Weaver in February 1924 and Joyce left it to incubate while he worked on ALP. In the spring of 1925 one Ernest Walsh, keen to set up a literary review, contacted Joyce asking for new work. Joyce thought his piece on Shem would do and began to revise it. He jabbed at the typescript, adding twenty-odd words in small phrases to the eighty words of our passage so far written. I have schematized the revisions to make them easier to follow. With this double dye1 minutely, nastily, appropriately, he2 wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till3 one human integument slowly unfolded universal history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal) but with each word that would not pass away the self 4 which he had hidden5 from the6 world grew darker and darker in its outlook.

1

through the bowels of his misery, the first and last shemist alshemist, 3 by its corrosive sublimation 2

4 5

squidself squirtscreened

6

crystalline

(185.22–186.08 and 47474–31v, 32; JJA 47: 416–17)²¹

Joyce continues his carnival of prepositions and phrasal verbs. It started with ‘over his body’; then came ‘from’, ‘through’, and ‘into’—now he adds ²¹ These revisions were made in Apr.–May 1925.

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‘through’ and ‘by’. Each one gives Shem’s writing procedures more and more dimensions and facets, intensifying and particularizing the whole process. The writing now comes ‘through the bowels of his misery’, de profundis, the internal source of his excremental ink, passing through it like excrement itself, producing a history mired in dark depression. And it now unfolds ‘by its corrosive sublimation’. Corrosive sublimate is another name for mercuric chloride, generally a poison but also used from the eighteenth century onwards in the treatment of syphilis. The double implication, then, is that Shem has syphilis which he’s trying to cure and that his own internal liquids, like those of Ridley Scott’s evil alien, are corrosive so that, if his history can be read, it can be read in the scars left by the corrosive cure or by the syphilis itself. The marks on his skin tell a story of the potential or actual decline of humanity, of ‘syphilization’. Earwicker is said to have suffered from ‘a vile disease’ (36.17), a euphemism for venereal disease, and Kathleen Ferris has argued that Joyce himself had syphilis.²² Finnegans Wake, with its sense of a secret sin, becomes a coded expression and veiled confession of this possibility. But mercuric chloride is an antiseptic and was also used, prior to its treatment for syphilis, by alchemists. ‘Sublimation’ is the transformation of something solid into vapour. The process in this case is corrosive. In revision 2, we see Joyce changing ‘shemist’ to ‘alshemist’ to underpin the alchemical reading of the corrosive. It also locates Shem outside the positivist practices of Western medicine, pushing him towards the hermetic tradition. In either case, Joyce is probably aware that alchemy had an Arabian provenance, contributing more evidence of how or why Shem is or becomes black, meddling moreover with the black arts of alchemy. As we have seen, in revision Joyce tends to qualify those big abstract words that, though overused, normally pass by underexamined in ordinary speech. So ‘Self’ and ‘world’ have been, up to this revision, large but unqualified concepts. Now the ‘self’ becomes a ‘squidself’, ‘hidden’ becomes ‘squirtscreened’, and the world is ‘crystalline’. Joyce has stepped from Shem to another animal whose ink courses through its body. The squid, squirting its ink defensively, hides itself from attack. So, too, Shem protects himself while writing the first and last lines of defence against a hostile world. Perhaps in ‘squid’ Joyce is hearing the ‘id’ as well—Freud’s component of the self that harbours all the repressed, deeply hidden, or screened elements and drives. Bernard Benstock viewed this concealment as an antisocial aesthetic screening from society, a mystification of the artist.²³ Margot Norris saw ‘the inky blur of ²² See Kathleen Ferris, James Joyce and the Burden of Disease (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995). ²³ Bernard Benstock, Joyce-again’s Wake (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), 55.

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the squid’ as an apt metaphor ‘for the unauthentic self, resembling those of modern psychoanalysis—the blank, the lie, the censored chapter of individual history’.²⁴ These take Shaun’s version at face value, when Shaun is objectifying Shem as a coward whose writing is a spineless obfuscation, a blind drawn down against (Shaun’s) investigation. Thus Shaun extends his suspicion of writing, rejecting any notion that writing (whether lucid or difficult) can actually communicate transparent visions and judgements of the world. Squids squirt their ink just as hypodermic syringes squirt their solutions and, when used to cure syphilis, mercuric chloride was itself injected. Mercuric chloride is ‘crystalline’, originating as white crystals. When heated, it becomes a vapour which then sublimates as a liquid. ‘Crystalline’ is also ‘bright, clear, brilliant’—the ideal and idyllic sunny world from which Shem is concealing himself in his dark inkcloud. It is quite likely that corrosion is here a reference to William Blake, whose writing used the corrosive techniques of etching—pouring acid on steel plates. Shem is elsewhere associated with Blake: under the name Jerry he is ‘of the sir Blake tribes bleak’ and ‘With pale blake I write tintingface’ (563.12–16). Joyce saw Blake as emblematic of the ‘idealist’ side of English literature, where Defoe represented the ‘realist’ side.²⁵ With these additions (and, of course, many others to the surrounding passages), Joyce had the whole episode typed out again in what was the second typescript for the episode. Further revisions were made in preparation for Walsh’s now stalling review between May and June of 1925: With this double dye1 through the bowels of his misery, minutely, nastily, appropriately, the first and last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one human2 integument slowly unfolded universal3 history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to all flesh, human only, mortal) but with each word that would not pass away the squidself which he had squirtscreened from the crystalline world grew darker and darker 4 in its outlook.

1

, gallic acid on iron ore,

2

one continuous present tense all manyvoiced moodmoulded cyclewheeling

3

4

waned chagreenold and doriangrayer

(185.32–186.08 and 47474–65; JJA 47: 443)

²⁴ Norris, Decentered Universe, 78–9. ²⁵ See The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann and Ellsworth Mason (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 214–22.

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In these revisions, Joyce qualifies the kind of ink Shem is using (revision 1), the nature of the history he’s writing (revisions 2 and 3), and the way his own self darkens as a result (revision 4). At this level of writing (the fifth since the first draft) Joyce’s writing has become both more allusive and ‘portmanteau-ed’, now employing foreign words and complex wordplay. Joyce has, indeed, embarked on his war on language, developing new methods in his arsenal. With ferric salts, gallic acid produces an insoluble, blue-black ferroso-ferric gallate: ‘gallic acid on iron ore’ describes quite literally the chemical make-up of black ink. What’s curious about this addition is that it takes Shem towards conventional ink, rather than the excrement and urine that were, according to Shaun previously, being used as his ink. This looks like a contradiction unless we sense that Shaun finds anything that darkens and stains is gross and equivalent to shit. In a later addition to the subsequent paragraph evidence presents itself, Shaun has to admit, that it was, in fact, probably just ink: ‘So perhaps . . . the blond cop who thought it was ink was . . . bright in the main.’ (186.10–18). Joyce cancels two words that are too large and ordinary as categories: ‘human’ and ‘universal’. They need to be whittled down to make a finer point, or transmuted into something less conventional. So the history that Shem is writing no longer unfolds as ‘one human integument’ (that is, one human skin) but unfolds as ‘one continuous present tense integument’. There are ambiguities in the words ‘tense’ and ‘present’ being at once adjectives and nouns. As an adjective meaning ‘taut’, tense describes the ‘integument’ as if it’s stretched out, as skin would be that is to become parchment. And this tense covering is ‘present’—that is ‘existing’ and ‘available’—just as it is lasting (‘continuous’). As a noun it describes the temporalities of action: the ‘continuous present’ is a tense which describes an act not yet completed: that is, ‘I am singing, I am walking.’ A history told in the present continuous tense would be very strange, resembling a fly-on-the-wall documentary or a sports’ commentary: ‘And now Napoleon is marching with his army towards Brussels . . . and Wellington is preparing to meet him at Waterloo . . . the battle is beginning . . . there is a struggle for La Haie Sainte . . . etc.’ Collapsing the past and the present it reflects a common view of Finnegans Wake, that the events in it are occurring simultaneously, and that it views world history as if from the subjective viewpoint of a continuously present Spirit observing history. Nothing can be in the past, everything is made immediate. This is how history seems to be seen, how it works, or how it is used in Finnegans Wake—continuous, still living, and blending all time as if all is present. Primeval history is present as an analogy for contemporary events and experiences, and—in the mythic humanist conception—it is present as part of the collective unconscious,

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from which our reflexes to the world emerge, however distant the modern world may seem. The past keeps returning, as Joyce’s writing procedures themselves involved returning to his past. The notion of a cyclical ‘continuous present tense’ surface as a form of history is a consequence of Joyce’s serial rewriting practices. Another big word—‘Universal’—describing the history is now replaced by ‘all manyvoiced moodmoulded cyclewheeling’. Cyclewheeling must send us towards Vico and his cyclical vision of history. ‘Moodmoulded’ sounds like it’s a subjective, expressionist, and emotionally crafted history, rather than anything objective—therefore, in Shaun’s view, too subjective and unreliable as history. If it’s ‘manyvoiced’ it describes something obvious about Finnegans Wake, that it is a polylogue blending different voices and accents and dialects as much as different languages. In one of his earliest notebooks Joyce associated a ‘polylogue’ with broadcasting—with one plurality in conversation with another.²⁶ One effect of tracing the progress of given sentences is that we see how they become polylogic, how the Bakhtinian carnivalesque is constructed. The multiple voices are a consequence—again—of the rewriting, each layer moulded by a different mood as Joyce returns alongside it. ‘Manyvoiced’ is also consistent with Shem’s condition as a forger, a mimic of styles, and an imitator of many voices. How close this ‘history’ is to Finnegans Wake is something one can only know by knowing Finnegans Wake. These may seem to objectify his goals, but Joyce is a long way from fulfilling them or other goals he may set up on the way—some fourteen years and thousands of pages of notes, drafts, fair copies, and redrafts to come. The fourth revision to our passage at this stage further describes the process of transformation, the effect of this writing on Shem’s body and soul. Earlier his ‘outlook’ grew darker and darker. Now ‘his squidself . . . waned chagreenold and doriangrayer’. Thick with autobiographical and literary allusion, this jam-packed pun marks a development in Joyce’s compressional games with language. As John Gordon noted, Joyce here alludes, as his vision ‘waned’, to his poor eyes irritated frequently by glaucoma.²⁷ In German, as Joyce said, the phrases green-star, grey-star, and black-star refer to three stages of blindness.²⁸ But perhaps the most instantly recognizable allusion is Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the young and beautiful Dorian Gray gives his soul to remain young and beautiful. A portrait is made of him which, however, ages and deteriorates as he would have done, and develops the revealing signs ²⁶ See VI.B.10.037 (e), JJA 31: 97. ²⁷ John Gordon, ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Plot Summary (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986), 162. ²⁸ To Weaver, 23 Oct. 1928, LI, 273–4.

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of his undetected crimes: when he murders someone, blood spots appear on the hands in the portrait. The work of art, which is supposed to be part and parcel of the deception, of maintaining the myth of youth and beauty, turns out to be moralistic, revelatory, incriminating. So Shem’s vision of the world gets ‘doriangrayer’—both darker and more revealing of his own moral degeneracy. Hearing the word ‘chagrin’ in ‘chagreenold’, we might recognize the story behind Wilde’s novel: Balzac’s novel Le Peau de Chagrin, or The Wild Ass’s Skin. This was about a magical piece of skin which, though granting every wish to its owner, had the singular drawback that with every wish fulfilled the skin of the wisher shrank, resulting in horrible agonies. The presence of the skin, moreover, becomes increasingly tense. Shaun’s original view of writing as a corruption of the body, is receiving further corroboration. Balzac’s tale is a Faustian fairy story about doing deals to satisfy desire. Shem’s outlook, then, is green old and grey, and it is suggested that his skin takes on these sickly colours. His own writing then engineers and reveals his own moral depravity. Part of his moral depravity is not even being original—that he steals his stories and situations from other people’s writings. This idea is contained within the little genealogy by which Balzac’s Le Peau de Chagrin became Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Turning ‘old and . . . grayer’, is another literary theft, in that it echoes Yeats’s famous poem that foresees the future of one who had once spurned the poet: ‘When you are old and grey and full of sleep’. Another typescript that included all these revisions was prepared for the printers of Walsh’s magazine This Quarter. One tiny change to this typescript was to replace ‘outlook’ with ‘dulledhead’,²⁹ a word that carries the Danish ‘dodhud’ meaning ‘dead skin’. This somehow became ‘dudhud’ when it came out in This Quarter and so it remained. Shem’s outlook, his philosophy, has been substituted by the physical notion of skin, not as living organ, however, but as dead surface matter—what skin is after all. Shem’s history relates and generates a loss of youth, optimism, and beauty. Writing, in Shaun’s view, is bad for the body. Joyce sent the typescripts off in July and looked forward to getting them back, as he said in a letter to Sylvia Beach on 31 July 1925: ‘I hope Walsh sends me the proof [of Shem] quickly as I want to banish the whole Earwicker family from my mind.’³⁰ However, the proofs didn’t come back until 20 October after which Joyce wrote: ‘I corrected it, rubbed on more boot polish and sent it back express.’ ³¹ No boot polish was required for our specific passage, presumably being dark enough for the moment. This Quarter finally came out, the fourth fragment that Joyce had published of his new work. ²⁹ See 47474–52; JJA 47: 463. ³⁰ To Sylvia Beach, 31 July 1925, LIII, 123. ³¹ To Weaver, 22 Oct. 1925, LI, 235).

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5 . 1 9 2 7 : P R E PA R I N G ‘O B S C E N E M AT T E R’ F O R T RA N S I T I O N Joyce would not return to the episode until it was scheduled a couple of years later in 1927 to appear in the journal transition, of which six instalments had already appeared. Before sending it to the printers Joyce carried out two sets of rewrites. In the first, made on pages of This Quarter, there were a few minor changes to our passage:³² ‘minutely’ was replaced with two strange adverbs ‘flashly, faithly’; ‘Manyvoiced’ became ‘marryvoicing’, the ‘n’ split into two ‘r’s, carrying ‘Marivaux’, a writer whose style in his time was criticized as being precious, stylized, and full of neologisms. Marivaux defended it as an attempt to create a new syntax which would more fully express the feelings of the heart (more fully than Molière’s, for instance). He drew on the linguistic differences up and down the social style. The many voices of Joyce’s polylogue have now married, as if voices are not just being piled indiscriminately but are being carefully brought together and till death does them part. He also added another nickname for Shem, ‘this esuan Menschavik’. The style of these additions continues the style from two years before—fused portmanteau neologisms, with complex webs of allusions. The last is interesting in its reference to the Russian revolutionary movement which split into two groups in 1903: the Bolsheviks, the revolutionary majority that followed Lenin, and the Mensheviks, the more moderate minority that didn’t. It makes out that Shem is a socialist loser and in the minority. ‘Menschavik’ combines ‘mensch’ (Yiddish for respectable upright man) and ‘avik’—a diminutive term in Irish. Thus Shaun patronizes Shem as a ‘respectable little loser’ with Jewish sympathies. ‘Esuan’ refers to Esau, elder brother of Jacob, both sons of Isaac in Genesis, fused easily onto Shem and Shaun, as Joyce had done in the first episode for the novel. Jacob is a successful opportunist, where Esau is impulsive and careless. As the eldest, Esau has ‘the birthright’: he takes precedence over his brothers, will become head of the family, and is due a larger share of the inheritance. But one day when he’s ravenously hungry, he sells all of this to Jacob just for a plate of lentil soup. Esau is the original if more desperate Faust figure, like Dorian Gray and Balzac’s Raphael. They sell something they think they don’t need but which in the long run they will want, for something they think they want which, in the long run, they don’t need. Esau, Shem, Faust, Raphael, Dorian, the Mensheviks: ambitious, but all losers. ³² All these changes were made on 47474–78v; JJA 47: 477.

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Esau also misses out when Jacob pretends to be Esau, and their dim-sighted father gives Jacob a powerful blessing that should have been Esau’s. Given that Jacob pretends to be Esau, this sends up a warning about whether we are right in seeing Shem during the novel—for he might be Shaun in disguise, like a blacked up minstrel, trying to steal the blessing of the readers. Blackness may be present in the important West African God, Esu, trickster and shape-changer. Joyce also distorted the cliché ‘first and last’ so it became ‘first till last’. The second set of revisions took place on the proofs for transition. One large clause—very large as revision units go—would now lead into the passage, extending the motivation by which Shem composed. And this clause was in turn revised. With1 this double dye, gallic acid on iron ore, through the bowels of his misery, flashly, faithly, nastily, appropriately, this esuan Menschavik and the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal) but with each word that would not pass away the squidself which he had squirtscreened from the crystalline world waned chagreenold and doriangrayer in its dudhud.

1

Then, pious Eneas, conformant to the fulminant firman which enjoins on the tremylose terrian that2 he shall produce 3 from his unheavenly body a no uncertain quantity of obscene matter not protected by copriright in the United Stars of Urania or4 bedood and5 bedung to him, with

2 3

, when the call comes, nichthemerically

4 5

bedeed and bedang and

(185.32–186.08)³³

Joyce’s addition here refers to the common charge that his writing was obscene. His alter ego Shem is the slavish but willing pornographer in the pay of some Oriental tyrant from beyond the limits of Christendom. He conforms to the ‘fulminant’ (thundering) ‘firman’ (a dictat issued by an Oriental ruler), which demands from him—a ‘tremylose terrian’, a quivering earth dweller, servile and shivering like a little terrier dog—to produce pornography (‘obscene ³³ 47474–97; JJA 47: 495 (simplified).

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matter’) or shit—though the two might be thought of as interchangeable, especially as fear at the thunder might make Shem shit himself in fear. Bursting on the scene here in this revision is the thunder motif which reverberates through the pages of Finnegans Wake to announce the fall, a turn in history, the sense of shame, and the desire to hide from judgement. There are ten unevenly spaced thunder words in Finnegans Wake, the first having been written in 1926 for the ‘overture’ (Chapter 1) of the book.³⁴ Having established this motif after he’d developed this passage, he is now returning to it and weaving it in—further embellishing a network of echoing motifs in the text. It is ‘the call’ which the skies, God’s realm, send down to man. The thunder, as it fuels fear, voices a tyrannical command to write, to which Shem is entirely subject. Shem will produce it ‘nichthemerically’, that is for twenty-four hours (since ‘nychthemeron’ means a period of twenty-four hours in Greek), toiling away like a slave, unnaturally, night and day. It also sounds like ‘not (nicht) homerically’. Ulysses, a Greek tale transferred to roughly twenty-four hours in Dublin, though based on the Homeric tales of Odysseus, was, for its critics, the opposite of Homeric, neither noble or dignified, but improper and degrading. What he writes is not protected by ‘copriright’—a portmanteau word combining ‘copyright’ with ‘kopri’ meaning shit in Greek. So Shem, with so little power, does not have rights, even over his own shit. If Shem has neither of these rights, there won’t be any returns for this cheap and impoverished writer—not that he deserves any, as Shaun presumably thinks. There are no rights in the ‘United Stars of Urania’, that is, in the powerful heavens (the meaning of Urania), the source of thunder, but also of course America, whose States feature on its flag, as stars united in serried ranks. Joyce was not protected by copyright in America, and this meant pirated versions of ‘Work in Progress’ had been appearing since September 1925 in Samuel Roth’s journal Two Worlds including this very episode.³⁵ Samuel Roth was also arrested for distributing pornography or ‘certain obscene’ books, as the affidavits had it.³⁶ Having always thought of this chapter as Joyce parodying his critics, might Joyce be adopting Shaun’s outraged pose as an opponent of Samuel Roth? For Shem was a sham appropriating the stuff of others. If Shem does not carry out this command, he is threatened with death: ‘or . . . bedood and bedung to him’, shot to shit, a plosive phrase doubled through revision to: ‘bedeed and bedood and bedang and bedung to him’, four shooting bullets, echoing the sound that kids make playing cops and ³⁴ They appear, not very evenly distributed, on the following pages: 3, 23, 44, 90, 113, 257, 314, 332, 414, 424. For the last third of the book, in fact, we hear no thunderclaps. ³⁵ To Weaver, 18 Aug. 1926, LI, 244. ³⁶ Jay A. Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), ch. 6 and see http://home.earthlink.net/∼jgertzma/booksite/rotharr.txt

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robbers, ‘ptow, ptang’, each bullet like a pellet of excrement (‘bedung’) that will pile up on him. Joyce may also be registering his awareness of writing to deadline—something that had now come upon him, he said, for the first time, as transition had taken over the publication in monthly instalments of ‘Work in Progress’.³⁷ ‘Pious Eneas’ is an ironic description for Shaun to apply to Shem, since pious Aeneas is the devout and holy hero of Virgil’s Roman Imperial epic. None of these are attributes that Shaun would find in Shem. Shaun, traveller, lover of his father, flirtatious sermonizer to women, sentimental departer, would-be founder of a new nation, is clearly more like Aeneas. But accompanying the irony is the weak tittering schoolboy pun here of ‘piss anus’. transition 7 came out in September 1927. Joyce didn’t return to this bit of his text until some time between 1933 and 1936 when, looking optimistically forward to a first edition coming out shortly, he revised all the early transitions, though the final text would not, in fact, appear for a good while. Joyce seems happy at this round of revisions, adding to this passage just one small innocuous phrase about the double dye: ‘brought to blood heat’ (185.32),³⁸ bringing a tightened focus on the body, and the careful calibratory processes of alchemy.

6 . P R E PA R I N G F O R FA B E R : ‘ DA B A L TA K E DA B NA L ! ’ From the transition revisions, the printers produced three sets of galleys. Joyce made some tiny adjustments on the first of these sets: ‘Urania’, for instance, became ‘Ourania’.³⁹ Then at the end of the excerpt, after ‘doriangrayer in its dudhud’, the dead greying skin upon which Shem’s ‘moodmoulded history’ has been written, Joyce writes the following obscure sentence, a paradigm of incomprehensibility: This exists that isists after having been said we know. And dabal take dabnal! And the dal dabal dab aldanabal! (185.08–10)⁴⁰

As gobbledegook this, I hazard, is a garbled reduction of, or parodied extract from, what Shem’s history finally amounted to. Or we hear Shaun ventriloquizing Shem’s view of his own work, in which case the second sentence resembles a desperate plea or a spell conjured up to damn his boss ³⁷ To Weaver, 26 July 1927, LIII, 163. ³⁸ 47475–159; JJA 47: 537. ³⁹ 47476a–112; JJA 49: 235. ⁴⁰ 47476a–255; JJA 49: 529.

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the devil, as Shem curses the Faustian pact which has sent him to a ruined condition of nonsense and obscurity. The best that can be said about this ‘cyclewheeling history’ is that it ‘exists’. Any reliable grammatical sense-giving structure is undone, however, through the strange word that follows: ‘isists’. To complicate things, when typed up it becomes ‘isits’, and thus it would appear in the 1939 edition. Neither ‘isists’ or ‘isits’ exist as words, but one challenge which Finnegans Wake offers readers who are not satisfied with nonsense-aspure-sound, is that they spin out definitions for such neologisms. I propose that ‘isists’, balancing ‘exists’, refers to an alternative kind of existence: not ex-istence, but is-istence. ‘Isists’ may code a sense of frustrated termination like ‘this exists and that is it!’, with ‘that is it!’ pluralized into ‘that is its!’, an insistent declaration that at least there’s something for all the effort, however measly, something, after all the failed attempts and the unfulfilled intentions, that is. The original ‘isists’ also carries ‘Isis’ and ‘is-is,’ a crucial motif we will meet again (in Part III where we meet Issy) which forms an obscure investigation on Joyce’s part of the nature of being (coincidentally an investigation occurring simultaneously in the writings of Heidegger, which have indirectly been so influential on the theorists who have written on Joyce). ‘Exist’ comes from ex-sistere, meaning ‘to stand out’ in Latin. Etymologically related, ‘insist’ (in an obsolete form) means something in opposition to this: ‘to lean upon’. Making a journey along this etymological route, there might be a suggestion that our category of Existence has favoured that which ‘stands out’—centrifugal independent phallic, over that which leans on—the centripetal, dependent, reliant. Autonomy is favoured as a mode of Being over dependence, the adult over the child, the gun over the mother. Such hierarchies might be inevitable in terms of power, but existence and being (as with ‘life’ earlier) should not be conceived on a sliding scale. A thing exists or it doesn’t. This neologism ‘isists’ (or ‘isits’ as it became) might suggest that we have underestimated the totality and nature of Being: that in terms of being, existence is only half the story and needs an opposite which is not non-existence, but is isistence. And what exists (what is) both exists (stands out) and also isists (leans on). Finnegans Wake exists (it stands out as being), but it also ‘isists’ (it leans into as being). This is only a proposed reading to give substance to a bit of writing that otherwise has little clear substance except as a curious alliterative pattern round the sound ‘-sts-’. Perhaps it doesn’t warrant it. But the strange riddling language of this book, beside a strong sense of purpose—unguessable though it is—pushes us towards new concepts, just as we make stabs at a difficult riddle. This is part of its attraction to philosophically/theoretically inclined critics. The book, however, cannot improve the hypothetical status of such readings into something more certain. As such, the meanings that we try to give the book rarely achieve an autonomous currency, but retreat back from

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where they came, leaning into their source. While the book continues to exist, such proposed meanings only ‘isist’.⁴¹ To explicate the strange phrase that follows, we need a brief history. At some time Joyce read Les Langues du Monde by Antoine Meillet and Marcel Cohen (first published 1924). From page 358 on he took notes about the Dravidian languages, spoken in Sri Lanka and southern India.⁴² Their word order, word formation, and grammatical structures differ from English and French. Meillet and Cohen say ‘one will notice the usage of the absolutive ‘‘after having been said’’ to render our ‘‘that’’ after a verb ‘‘speak’’ or ‘‘think’’ ’. As an example, where we say ‘I think that you’re right’, Dravidian speakers would in effect say (transliterated) ‘I think after-having-been-said you’re right’. Since ‘after-having-been-said’ means the pronoun ‘that’, we can substitute ‘that’ in our strange phrase: ‘This exists that isits—that we know’ and this confirms the reading above: ‘This exists and that is it: that we know’. Joyce’s code may have become highly obscure, but at least tenacious readers, contributing to each other, may track down some of the tricks at play in the meaning. Joyce—or Shem through Shaun—then breaks out into another language, Samtal or Santali, this time from north India, one of the ‘Munda’ languages. The exclamations seem like an exasperated splutter, carrying in their sounds the phrases: the ‘devil take the devil!’ and also something like ‘the dull double doub-le doneapple!’—but that hardly helps much, though the apple (in Eden) might be doing its doubly damnable deeds. The language, as it departs from clear and obvious sense, begins to sound purely percussive and rhythmic, its meaning communicated through sound. Again in Meillet and Cohen there is some assistance.⁴³ Santali is a language which uses ‘infixes’. English and European languages, in contrast, use a great deal of prefixes (such as ex-, in-, un-, non-, anti-, inter-) and suffixes (such as -ing, -ization, -ary, -ence). There are virtually no infixes, except, as an illustration, in such colloquialisms as ‘abso-bloomin’-lutely,’ or ‘un-bloody-believable’ (where the ‘bloomin’ and ‘bloody’ are infixes). In Santali, ‘Dal’ means ‘to hit’. With the infix ‘ap’ it doubles and comes to mean ‘to hit each other’. Then the added infix ‘n’ turns the verb into a noun, ‘Dapnal’. So ‘to hit each other’ comes to mean a ‘combat’. The last word of this phrase is ‘danapal’ meaning ‘finally covered up’, as if covering up every last scrap, as Joyce approaches the time of completion and closure. The exclamation, ‘And dabal take dabnal! And the dal dabal dab aldanabal!’, is a linguistic pile-up of infixes like the insertion of punches in a fight. It can be roughly translated from Santali, as ‘hit each other fight! fight hit each other ⁴¹ One word that has achieved currency is ‘quark’, taken from the Wake as a word to signify a tiny nuclear particle. One that is achieving currency is ‘chaosmos’ and possibly ‘riverrun’. ⁴² Paul Meillet and Marcel Cohen, Les Langues du monde (Paris: CNRS, 1952), 498. ⁴³ Ibid. 401.

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hit each other, finally covering!’ It is as if the writing, now nearing completion, has been like the relationship between Shem and Shaun, a fight with itself, a long haul, conflictual, one draft encountering the other, doubling itself, inserting textual matter into the text, distorting each other’s surfaces—just as the writing has been a fight with and over itself. The sources of these languages may themselves be symbolic, one from the North, one from the South of India, at opposite ends of the Indian sub-continent. We shall see Joyce incorporating the languages of non-white and colonized peoples again at a late stage in the next section. Language’s materiality is plain in the way we make new words out of the structures it gives to us, adding bits here and there, inserting other bits there. This can be considered as an analogy for the way Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake, tacking things on between bits of writing he’d already made. Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake with a series of infixes, insertions into words, phrases, sentences, sections, whole chapters, and parts. In the making of ‘isists’ and the use of Santali, Joyce takes the processes of morphology into his own hands. He thus acquired a style of composition—infixing—which he used more and more toward the end of the writing. That Joyce identifies his writing with an accelerated language change and an addiction to the rush this brings is not surprising. And this identification seems to be explicitly suggested in Book IV, which exclaims: ‘Nomomorphemy for me!’ (599.19). A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language that cannot be analysed to any smaller degree. Joyce has been turning to these units—affixes, prefixes, suffixes, and infixes—and morphing them into new words, displaying a ‘nomomorphology’—a concern with the laws (‘nomo’) of the units of language. Joyce’s game has been an addiction (as it were to ‘morphine’) and he’s now saying ‘No more morphemy for me!’ But addictions are hard to fight, and in the stated desire to stop can be heard the desire for more: ‘No! More, more for me, for me!’ The game and the addiction—the addictive game of addition—continue in the etymological unravelling that readers engage in. The game here has transformed a sentence that originally had forty-one words, to a long Proustian-style sentence of 177 words. The Shem whom Shaun hopes to discredit manages to escape Shaun’s hardest judgements, because Shaun only speaks, his words dispersing like smoke. The writer, on the other hand, someone like or unlike Shem, can record, write, and rewrite the words of someone like Shaun, playing with them behind his back as it were. It is the writer’s ability to return to his material that allows him the last word over the speaker. Thus the language of the Wake performs tricks that are outside the realm of Shaun’s crude graphophobic phonocentric and distorted vision of Shem. From beyond this vision the writing easily undermines Shaun’s attempt to construct the writer as the

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universal embodiment of the malevolent outcast, spawn of Cain. Shem can return and give himself the last word—as happens at the end of Chapter I. 7. Joyce as writer is able to do this continually with his own text. The writer is serially able to return to his material and transform it, resisting time in a way that the speaker can not. Shaun attempts to seal Shem’s fate in a series of judgements that seem to leave nowhere for Shem to find a way out to mercy. But writing, penmanship, always has the possibility of transformation within it, able to revise those judgements and defer their finality. This chapter becomes a means for Joyce to objectify that harsh criticism which hoped to prevent Joyce from moving on from Ulysses.

B. Anna Livia’s ‘very first time’ (203.17–204.05) The first draft of ‘Shem the penman’ ended, as would the final version, with Shem announcing the presence of ‘little oldfashioned mummy’ (194.32–34). Joyce had previously drafted the woman’s letter that attempts to defend HCE, and now, after drafting Shem, he developed the signatory of the letter herself: ALP, HCE’s wife and mother of the twins we just encountered. Any naturalistic provenance she had is fused to make her a mythical and environmental figure, the river Liffey that flows through Dublin, ironically dignified and Italianized into Anna Livia Plurabelle. This was a momentous decision, providing a geological or elemental level for the work: HCE, in all his rising grandeur, became a mountain; Shem, a tree; Shaun a stone. Issy (not developed in draft at this point except as Isolde) would become a cloud and the early stages of the water cycle. Joyce was simply not content with realist ‘characters’, but wanted to draw on the ancient mythic narratives about natural forces and then merge them, in an unprecedented move for modern fiction, with naturalistic characters. The strategy of multiple levels of significance—so that human, environmental, animal, entomological, and metaphysical levels could all be laid together in parallel—could develop out of this. It might seem that the geological level provides a frame for the others, but the levels are dynamic. Each level provides a frame which the other levels occupy, fill, expand, spill out from and submerge, then reform as another frame: frames and framed swap places. Our readings always oscillate between these levels, uncertain which has the upper hand at any point. The river and the meteorological cyclical narrative of water contribute to the circular structure of the book. ALP’s character grew and was mediated just as HCE’s was, through gossip and rumour. Hearsay provides an essentially dramatic form to the work and thus a detachment for the author from the action and dialogue, just as a playwright is able to appear detached from the views of the characters.

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1 . F E B RUA RY 1 9 2 4 : ‘ T H E V E RY F I R S T T I M E ’ FOR THE FIRST TIME The passage we will now work through is one of the yarns spun about ALP’s youth by the more authoritative washerwoman.¹ It is part of ‘a search backwards to the source of her sexual awakening’ and an explanation of how she came to have 111 children.² Written early in 1924, it grew as a response to the following appeal: ‘Tell me where the very first time!’—that is, the first kiss or something more . . . There was a holy hermit there near Luggelaw one day in July and so young & shy and [space] she looked he put his two hands in her flowing hair, that was rich red like the brown bog and he couldn’t help [sic], thirst was too hot for him, he cooled his lips time after time again at Anna Livia’s freckled cheek. Why was she freckled? How long was her hair? O go on, go on, go on! I mean about what you know. I know what you mean. I’m going on. Where did I stop? Don’t stop. Go on, go on. (203.17–205.15 and 47471b–76; JJA 48: 7)³

Joyce revised the whole surrounding section of four or five notebook pages, replacing some words, filling gaps he’d purposefully left, and making interlineations and marginal additions. The sexual experiences of Anna’s youth went up from one incident to three. He then copied it out till our passage looked, as a second draft, as follows (stopping short of the two newly inserted incidents): Tell me where, the very first time! I will if you listen. You know the glen of Luggelaw? Well once there once dwelt a hermit and one day in warm June so young and shy & so limber she looked he plunged both of his blessed hands up to his wrists in her flowing hair that was rich red like the brown bog. And he couldn’t help it, thirst was too hot for him, he cooled his lips kiss after kiss on Anna Livia’s freckled cheek. O, wasn’t he the bold priest! And wasn’t she the naughty Livvy! (203.16–204.05 and 47471b–83; JJA 48: 23)⁴

On the one hand here is a priest slaking his thirst at a stream, naturally enough; on the other here is a priest unable to restrain kissing a girl, partly ¹ For a generalized genetic treatment of the whole chapter, see Claude Jacquet’s ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle ou Les Métamorphoses du Texte’, in Daniel Ferrer, Claude Jacquet (eds.), Genèse de Babel: Joyce et la Création, (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1985), 93–154 and Fred Higginson, Anna Livia Plurabelle: The Making of a Chapter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960). ² Gordon, Plot Summary, 166. ³ This transcription is ‘cleaned’ of revisions. In the margins he wrote ‘plunged both of his’ and ‘O wasn’t he the bold priest! O wasn’t she the naughty Livia?’ and ‘kiss after kiss’. ⁴ This is a tidied-up transcription with new material relative to the first draft before overlay in bold.

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because she is ‘so young’—reason enough for a social outcry. The stream is anthropomorphized so we understand it as a forbidden sexual encounter, in which the stream is, in fact, an attractive red-haired girl with whom the pious hermit is breaking his priestly vows. As a recollection of pleasurable sexuality and the stupidly breakable vows men make and in its idiomatic demotic flow, it has a source in Molly’s interior monologue but now split, as it were, into an interior dialogue. Shame and excuses surround the event (‘he couldn’t help it’). The expected moral position towards this quasi-paedophilia, would portray the priest as exploiting the unequal power relations between himself and the girl, but the washerwoman refrains from taking sides, describing the priest as ‘bold’ and the girl as ‘naughty’. The girl is as much to blame. Rather than moralize, their gossiping finds the situation comic, forgivable, natural. On the other hand Joyce is perhaps taking a moral stance, detached from these gossips. Readers may feel they have to choose the Joyce they want: the moralist or the comic, or perhaps place them together in a coincidence of opposites. The relationship between an older man and a younger girl is a perennial source of tension and comedy in Finnegans Wake, which Robert Polhemus has called the ‘Lot Complex’.⁵ The seed was sown in the older King Mark’s relation to the young Isolde (383–4), and then sprouted in Earwicker’s ‘exposure’ before the young women in the park (34), and then again in the story of Daddy Browning—a New York real estate tycoon, notorious for his taste in young children, which produced a wonderfully comic passage (65). These variations on a theme had been drafted during the previous four months, as if Joyce is developing a preoccupation for his novel. Now the story receives its fourth outing, in combination with the sketch of the hermit St Kevin who had rowed up a river to find a nice secluded spot where he could baptismally and hermetically bathe—bearing a resemblance to this hermit’s upriver drink. Beyond this version another will branch out—where a curate lifts up a girl who has fallen off her bicycle asking ‘where were you chaste my child?’ (115.20). What seems like a preoccupation for Joyce with infantile sexuality, especially that of girls, may be a reflection of what he saw as an obsession for psychoanalysts: ‘grisly old Sykos’ (115.21), as they are called in a later one of these versions. Joyce had already scorned the vow to celibacy twenty years earlier in ‘A Painful Case’, and with it goes an entire attitude towards the same vows taken by the priesthood. Not only is it a repression of a natural instinct, but it might exclude them from understanding how people (their parishioners) relate to their sexual life. The pattern also applies itself prophetically to a sore point in recent years for the Church—one that burst into the open ⁵ Robert M. Polhemus, ‘Dantellising Peaches and Miching Daddy, the Gushy Old Goof: The Browning Case and Finnegans Wake’, JSA (1994), 75–103.

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in Ireland in the 1990s, with revelations about Fathers Sean Fortune and Brendan Smyth. Cardinal Daly, Primate of all Ireland, had to address the issue in newspaper articles, and interviews on television at the time. As a result there was a debate about how the Catholic Church needed to reform itself in order to remain in touch with Irish people.⁶ Joyce was delving into a taboo that would take over sixty years to be publicly addressed, identifying an unacknowledged tangle at the heart of Irish Catholicism, which Ireland—and the wider Catholic community—is only beginning to unpick. On the other hand, before giving Joyce this prophetically moral power, we should recall the ambivalence of the representation—an ambivalence which will increase over time as the passage is rewritten. There is no hand-wringing about the event, and subsequent stories about ALP defy notions that such events are necessarily traumatic. It has been ‘naturalized’—sexual desire is equated with thirst. To satisfy that thirst involves no interference of any moral order. But this cuts both ways—not simply making the libidinous act innocent, but making the natural reflex seem corrupt, an unavoidable consequence of the fallen condition.

2 . P R E PA R I N G A N D R EV I S I N G T H E FA I R C O P Y A N D T H E T Y PE S C R I P T: ‘S M O OT H I N G H E R D OW N ’ Joyce revises this second draft, easing open the passage for new material at several points: I will if you listen. You know the glen 1 of Luggelaw? Well there once dwelt a 2 hermit 3 and one day in warm June so young and shy & so limber she looked 4 he plunged both of his blessed 5 hands up to his wrists in her flowing hair that was rich red like the brown bog. And he couldn’t help it, 6 thirst was too hot for him, he cooled his lips 7 kiss after kiss on Anna Livia’s freckled cheek. O wasn’t he the bold priest And wasn’t she the naughty Livvy!

1 2

hazel dell local 3 named Michael Ireland Newireland Ereleinster Orkney

4

the kind 8 you simply can’t stop feeling 5 anointed

8

of curves

6

he had to forget the monk in the man 7 in smiling mood

(203.15–204.17 and 47471b–82v, 83; JJA 48: 22, and 23) ⁶ See Moore, Chris, Betrayal of Trust: the Father Brendan Smyth Affair and the Catholic Church (Dublin: Marino, 1995)

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I shall analyse these changes once I’ve shown their incorporation in the fair copy, but, in passing, we might notice Joyce in a rare moment toiling over a single element, trying out three surnames before he gets finally to ‘Orkney’, moving on from the blunt identification of ‘Ireland’ to a more remote island altogether not associated with Ireland. So Joyce makes a fair copy and as he does so he sometimes adds, sometimes erases and replaces. Then, rereading it, he makes further additions, which I’ve put in the right-hand column below. This fair copy of the whole he sent to Harriet Shaw Weaver on 7 March 1924, describing it as ‘a chattering dialogue’.⁷ Well, there once dwelt a local hermit, Michael Orkney, they say was his name, and one day in warm burning June so young and shy sweet and so fresh and so limber she looked, the kind of curves you simply can’t stop feeling, he plunged both of his blessed anointed hands up to his wrists in her flowing the 1 streams of her hair 2 , that was rich deep red and ample like the brown bog at sundown. And he couldn’t help it himself, thirst was too hot for him, he had to forget the monk in the man and 3 cooled his lips in smiling mood kiss after kiss on Anna Livia’s freckled cheek forehead. O, wasn’t he the bold priest? And wasn’t she the naughty Livvy?

1 2

bright and saffron , parting them and soothing her and mingling it, rubbing her up and smoothing her down,

3,

rubbing her up and smoothing her down, he

(203.17–204.05; 47474–119, 120; JJA 48: 44–5)⁸

Altogether the passage has almost doubled in length (from sixty-seven to 122 words). Yet the language is nowhere close to the Wake language of portmanteau neologisms and obscure allusion. Through poeticized orality, Joyce is aiming at sensuality in content and form, intensifying sensual elements—colour, carnality, desire, and rhythm, crafting what Suzette Henke observed as ‘tantalizing, lubricious prose’ which Claude Jacquet described as ‘souple, liquide et dansant’.⁹ The priest is given a name, ‘Michael Orkney’, though the washerwoman places authority for this elsewhere: ‘they say was his name’. Michael, or Mick, is twinned against the bad angel ‘Nick’, so ⁷ To Weaver, 7 Mar. 1924, LI, 213. ⁸ Cancellations of material in the previous draft (JJA 48: 23) are shown here as crossed through. So this is an eclectic text combining material from two levels (see Note on the Transcriptions, p. ix). ⁹ Suzette Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire (London: Routledge, 1990), 178; and ‘Anna Livia’, Jacquet, 111.

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the name ‘Michael’ signals him as a ‘virtuous’ angel, a Shaun/Kevin type. The name Orkney, chosen over Ireland, intensifies his status as a hermit, since the Orkneys are islands with monastic outposts of Christianity. His virtuous priestliness and blessedness are intensified with ‘anointed’; ‘warm’ is sharpened into ‘burning,’ a note of hellish perdition now playing over the not-so-innocent scene. ‘So young and shy’, with its judgement about ALP’s innocence, is softened to ‘so sweet and so fresh’, sounding more forward and like an advertisement for bottled spring water—and, of course, it concerns the river near its source. Her desirability is doubled in her sinuous ‘curves’ which ‘you simply can’t stop feeling’, thus giving the priest another excuse. ‘You can’t stop’ obviously means you can’t hold back but, if taken literally, implies something perpetual like some curse where an initial pleasure becomes an eternal affliction, like the Fall as something which is repeated in every action of the postlapsarian world. This literal sense is not perhaps intended at this point, where the book has not been conceived structurally as a repeating cyclical text, but that structure will retrospectively affect every event—as it is compelled to come round again and be repeated. The way Joyce composed involved an unremitting and compulsive return to his text, and to particular narratives which, like musical themes, he kept varying. As further self-justification, the hermit has ‘to forget the monk in the man’, giving psychological content to him as well, as he represses his repressive element. The river and the woman commingle in the ‘flowing hair’. The river Liffey, Abha na Life is a woman: Anna Livia. Hair, with its waves and its flowing curves, is water and vice versa. This image becomes a special focus in Joyce’s transformation during the subsequent drafts: this ‘flowing hair’ is changed to ‘the streams of her hair’; then to ‘the bright and saffron streams of her hair’, with more sibilant alliteration and the curvy letters marking Issy. In a subsequent draft, as we shall see, the ‘s’s are intensified to ‘singing saffron streams of her hair’, which also changes the visible (the ‘bright’) to the audible (‘singing’). The blending of river and woman is thus producing a surrealism where hair can sing. In his last alteration of this phrase, Joyce obscures it by mixing in the names of rivers—a particular technique he carried out in this chapter—making it ‘her singimari saffron struman of hair’. The Struma may be a river, and it may mean a swelling, but it also evokes ‘strumming’—the caressing movements when playing a stringed instrument, with its strings like taut hair. Joyce claimed to have taken the name of his heroine from Livia Schmitz, the wife of his friend Italo Svevo, and also had her deep red hair in mind.¹⁰ He honoured her with a letter at the end of his writing: ‘Dear Signora: I have at last finished finishing my book. For three lustra [fifteen years] I ¹⁰ Ellmann, James Joyce, 5 and LI 211, to Svevo, 20 Feb. 1924.

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have been combing and recombing the locks of Anna Livia.’¹¹ What this also suggests is that hair is like text—undulating strands that issue from the head. Combing and recombing is like writing and rewriting, perfecting and making smooth, so it might flow as a unity. Joyce dwells on the colour of her hair: ‘Rich red like the brown bog’ becomes ‘deep red and ample like the brown bog at sundown’, extended subsequently to ‘bright and saffron’. Joyce is incorporating several shades at the orange/red end of the spectrum, and drawing on the stereotype of the red-headed Irish girl as well as the colour of his wife’s hair. For such a supposedly dark book, as John Bishop has stressed, Finnegans Wake is intensely coloured. Joyce prepared the terrain for an investigation of colour in his earliest sketches, one of which was a debate between a pagan visionary (embodied in Bishop Berkeley) and a commonsensical Christian (embodied in St Patrick) about colour. Joyce saw perhaps what Wittgenstein felt—that ‘Colours spur us to philosophize. [. . . They] seem to present us with a riddle, a riddle that stimulates us—not one that disturbs us.’¹² Like the Kevin sketch, the Berkeley and Patrick debate is incorporated finally into Book IV, but not until 1938. Before that the rainbow as a motif was developed with all its post-deluge symbolism of peace processes and promises—the complement to the antediluvian threatening thunder. It is then woven through the book: on the first page (second paragraph), where its seven clauses correspond to the seven colours; and in II.1 where Issy (as Izod) is accompanied by the ‘rainbow girls’—seven colours that result from the splitting of white light. The rainbow is about to be projected into this increasingly coloured passage too. The behaviour of the monk becomes more sensual but also ambiguous in a way that carries sinister innuendo. Pronouns shift in the phrase ‘parting them and soothing her and mingling it’, like multiple perspectives combined—cubistically—as if from one point of view. Hair is plural and singular, and it/they are part of her. But the ambiguity signals that we may no longer be dealing just with hair, but with other parts of the body or other hair, suggesting more intimate actions. Saffron consists of tiny threads, for instance, so there may be a suggestion of pubes here. Yet more intimate sexual action is suggested in the phrases ‘rubbing her up and smoothing her down’. But the suggestion of sex is given a way out if we imagine here the simple gestures performed when someone has fallen over: rubbing the sore part, smoothing ruffled hair and clothes. Nonetheless innuendo and imperfectly definable actions hover over the actions of the hermit. ¹¹ Ellmann, James Joyce, 714. ¹² Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 66e–67e.

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The revisions are as careful with rhythm as with sonic chimes, whether consonantal or alliterative. This is writing that mimics musical speech. The three present participles (‘parting, soothing, mingling’) contribute to six trochees. The next two (‘rubbing . . . smoothing’) extend the rhythm of the words drafted previously and speed up the flow—technically speaking—into two amphibrachic dimeters with docked final syllables / / he had to forget / / the monk in the man / / so, rubbing her up / / and smoothing her down

Participles are a means of extending the flow of a sentence without breaking it up into smaller sentences. Joyce alternates extended rhythmic flow with staccato interruption in this chapter as a whole. In prose more can be done with variations in the poetic line as revision may intensify, extend, or interrupt rhythm. No one has done a thorough account of the variety of rhythms in the Wake, or Joyce’s transformations of rhythm as he writes, but they could start with this chapter, the most persistently rhythmic of all. This was all then typed up by Joyce’s typist, Lily Bolach, and then retyped incorporating some more additions, so our passage has now become: Well, there once dwelt a local hermit, Michael Orkney Arklow was his name, and one day in burning June so sweet and so fresh and so limber she looked, the kind of curves you simply can’t stop feeling, he plunged both of his blessed anointed hands up to his wrists in the bright and singing saffron streams of her hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it, that was deepred and ample like the brown bog at sundown. And he couln’t [sic] help himself, thirst was too hot for him, he had to forget the monk in the man so, rubbing her up and smoothing her down, he cooled his lips in smiling mood, kiss after kiss, (as he warned her never to, never to, never) on Anna Liva’s freckled forehead. O wasn’t he the bold priest? And wasn’t she the naughty Livvy? (203.17–204.05; 47474–129; JJA 48: 63)

The Caledonian name Orkney is Hibernicized into ‘Arklow’, a town in County Wicklow near where the river Liffey has its source. The washerwoman has taken back more confident authority for this name (even though for Joyce it’s the fifth and last version in the evolving series). Joyce introduces a parenthesis that makes the hermit seem hypocritical: ‘ (as he warned her

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never to, never to, never)’.¹³ The warning is an echo of a passage which Joyce had just been drafting—Shaun’s advice to his sister, which would eventually be over 200 pages distant in III.2: ‘Never miss your lostsomewhere mass . . . Never hate mere pork . . . Never let a hog of the howth trample underfoot your linen. . . . Never play lady’s game for the Lord’s stake . . .’ (433.10–14). We now see, with voices tunnelling up from far away, how the ‘marryvoiced’ history that Shem was planning in our previous chapter is under construction.

3 . S U M M E R 1 9 2 5 : P R E PA R I N G F O R T H E CALENDAR, ‘O N E V E N U S D E RG’ Joyce returned to this passage in the summer of 1925 when he was planning to publish Anna Livia in the Calendar of Modern Letters. Joyce added some tiny elements:¹⁴ hermit becomes ‘heremite’ (203.17), an obsolete Middle English word for a hermit, taking us back closer to the early Middle Ages, and Ireland’s golden age of Saints and Scholars. With other obsolete words scattered over the book, Joyce ensures his text reaches back through and across former times. Perhaps it is a coincidence, but Langland uses ‘heremite’ at the beginning of Piers Plowman: I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were In habite as an heremite unholy of wekes, Wente wide in this world wonderes to here . . . As I lay and lenede and loked on the watres, I slombred into a slepying, it sweyed so murye. Thanne gan I meten a merveillous swevene That I was in a wilderness, wiste I nevere where.

Langland’s ‘heremite’ looks in the waters and begins to dream. If it is more than a coincidence, Joyce’s allusion is subtly developing the idea, intertextually, that the book is the dream of someone lying by the river Liffey, an idea that Joyce used in the difficult task of describing the whole book as he looked back over its deep wide waters. However, Langland doesn’t appear anywhere else in the novel to help corroborate this allusion, as far as I know. Joyce also adds the parenthetical phrase ‘(with many a sigh I aspersed his lavabibs!)’ (203.18) reminding us of the speaker’s business as a washerwoman.¹⁵ She recalls sighs of disapproving despair at the filth she finds. Her recollection reveals yet more intimate acquaintance with the subject of her ¹³ 47474–127; JJA 48: 63.

¹⁴ 47474–148; JJA 48: 105.

¹⁵ 47474–148; JJA 48: 105.

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gossip. Generally Joyce tightens the mutual knowledge of the characters in Finnegans Wake, until there is a dense network of wide social interaction, something I shall refer to as ‘incestuous characterization’ in Part III.¹⁶ The phrase points in part towards Catholic water rituals: priests asperse a celebrant with holy water using the ‘aspersorium’, while the ‘lavabo’ is the towel (or basin) used in washing a celebrant’s hands during the offertory (a service where gifts are offered). On the other hand, asperse means something quite opposed: to spread malignant reports. The two opposing activities of purifying and sullying the reputations (generally of men) exist in an equilibrium in the washerwomen, twinned elegantly in the word here, ‘aspersed’. ‘Lavabibs’ make him sound like a mucky baby, mushy stuff coming out of his mouth and onto his bib—a reference to Shaun’s eating habits (405–7) which Joyce had just been drafting. In the next version Joyce begins wilful obscurification.¹⁷ One of the easier looking phrases—‘one day in burning June’—becomes ‘one venusderg in junojuly’ (203.19), so it’s still summer, but now the goddesses Juno, famous for her curvaciousness, and Venus, famous for beauty, appear at once. Venusberg is Venus’ town where Wagner’s Tannhäuser is set, an idyllic pastoral zone, which the hero Tannhäuser, however, weary of sex on tap (like Ulysses on Calypso’s island), wishes to leave, the figure of the husband tired of his young mistress. A temporal marker—day (sounded in ‘darg’, through German ‘dag’)—has been combined with a spatial marker—a town (‘berg’). The day may be a Friday, from the Low Latin ‘dies Veneris’, love day, a day heard in the French vendredi. Joyce also changes ‘thirst’ to ‘thurst’ (203.33) the name of a river. And there’s a little change of ‘too hot for him’ to ‘too hot on him’, giving perhaps a slightly a more Hiberno-English inflection to the language (as in ‘I’ve a terrible throat on me’), defamiliarizing the English.

4 . S E P T E M B E R 1 9 2 5 , CALENDAR P R I N T E R S R E F U S E : ‘ I N T H E S I L E N C E O F T H E S YC O M O R E S’ A typescript was made, and sent to the printers around the end of July. A month or so later Joyce was sent a letter from the Calendar saying their printers were unwilling to prepare the piece for publication, and had stopped setting type for the galley proofs. They found the following scene about Anna Livia’s youthful sexual experiences (which follows immediately after ours) too troublesome: ¹⁶ See below p. 177–8.

¹⁷ 47474–173; JJA 48: 123.

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Part I Two lads in their breeches went through her before that . . . before she had a hint of a hair at her fanny to hide and ere that again she was licked by a hound while poing her pee, pure and simple. (204.05–13; 47474–192; JJA 48: 142)

Clearly not pure and simple enough. After some wrangling, Joyce found another magazine—Le Navire d’argent —and Anna Livia showed herself complete by October 1925, author and publisher capitalizing to some extent on the reputation Joyce had as a censored author. In the interim he took the opportunity to make some more additions on the proofs provided by the little magazine: Well there once dwelt a local heremite Michael Arklow was his 1 name (with many a sigh I aspersed his lavabibs!) and one day in burning June so sweet and so fresh and so limber she looked, 2 the kind of curves you simply can’t stop feeling, he plunged both of his blessed anointed hands up to his wrists in the singing saffron streams of her hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it, that was deepred 3 and ample like the brown bog at sundown. And he couldn’t 4 help himself, thurst was too hot on him, he had to forget the monk in the man so, rubbing her up and smoothing her down, he cooled his lips in smiling mood, kiss after kiss (as he warned her never to, never to, never) on Anna Livia’s 5 freckled forehead. O wasn’t he the bold priest? And wasn’t she the naughty Livvy?

1

riverend

2

in the silence, of the sycomores, all listening,

3

deepdark cuddle not

4

5

-na-Poghue of the

(203.17–204.05; Yale 6.2–66; JJA 48: 164)

Michael Arklow is now titled as the ‘riverend’, the ‘reverend’, of course, but, through the tiny effacing of an ‘e’ with an ‘i’, it carries the idea that he is the priest of this end of the river, up near its source. It may also signal the threat that he will attempt to put an end to the free flow of the river with stern but hypocritical moralism. For the other expansion (numbers 2–4), Joyce draws entirely from an earlier sketch ‘Mamalujo’ which he had already published in Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic review (1.4) and which would eventually appear in II.4 (383–99). Four sinister old men, spies sent by King Mark to check on Isolde, hide behind trees and watch: ‘when it was dark . . . all listening . . . to the solans and the sycamores, . . . all very wrong and . . . improper and cuddling her and kissing her . . . with his poghue like Arrah-na-Poghue’ (383.19–384.34, my underlinings). ‘Mamalujo’ may be somewhat senile, but they always rise up during the act of love, as if no sexual act is allowed to happen without their spying eyes. They mark Joyce’s dislike of censors nosing their way

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moralistically, and also his interest in voyeurism. Spying voyeuristically on youth, they are voyeurs of their own youths, detached from both, from one in space, from the other in time. ‘Mamalujo’ are the four drunk old men in the pub, the gospellers, Matthew Mark Luke and John, the historians who wrote the annals of Ulster, and four judges of the Four Courts in Dublin. Their sign is the cross and they spread their nets in order to catch the slippery identity of their quarry. Fascinatingly Joyce told his daughter-in-law Helen Fleischmann, that they were his family: Nora (mama), Lucia (lu), and Giorgio (jo).¹⁸ We shall encounter them more fully in Part III, where Issy is interrogated by them. Weaving them in here marks Joyce’s method of using motifs to build bridges or tunnels between different parts of the text. This ensures auto-intertextuality, or intratextuality, an ‘echoland’ as the book seems to describe itself (13.05).¹⁹ Their use here is probably because he has just used them to structure the enquiry of Shaun that became Chapter III.3.

5 . 1 9 2 7 : P R E PA R I N G ‘ T H E N I X I E ’ F O R  Joyce returned to Anna Livia, preparing the Navire pages for transition: ‘Here is 2 MS and typescript’.²⁰ To the section under consideration Joyce added just five words revealing nicknames for the young Anna Livia. She had been described as sweet, fresh, and limber, so we know a bit about how she looked. Now Joyce inserts some new nicknames for her, stretching her significance through history, in that increasingly familiar ‘universalizing’ process, as Joyce finds examples of her through history: so limber she looked, Nance the Nixie, Nanon L’Escaut, in the silence of the sycomores, all listening (203.21; Yale 6.1–65; JJA 48: 178)

The nixie in the fairy story by the brothers Grimm, makes a deal with a man in which she will give him a ‘treasure’ if he promises to give her ‘the newest object in the house’. He is happy with this deal, thinking the object will be something innocuous, but, in fact, she has tricked him: the youngest thing is a child and later she returns to claim it. The nixie is a version of a woman Joyce had just incorporated recently into the book—the prankquean (possibly a younger ALP) who takes HCE’s children away because of his inhospitable behaviour (21–3). ¹⁸ See correspondence from Adaline Glasheen to Thornton Wilder in Edward M. Burns and Joshua A. Gaylord (eds.), A Tour of the Darkling Plain (Dublin: UCD Press, 2001), 405. ¹⁹ See my essay ‘Mapping Echoland’, JSA (2000), 167–201. ²⁰ To Weaver, 26 Sept. 1926, LIII, 142.

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‘Nanon L’Escaut’ comprises a dense triple reference to French female celebrity. It includes Ninon de L’Enclos, ‘the most beautiful woman of the seventeenth century’ who wrote celebrated letters in which she unveiled ‘the most carefully hidden mysteries of femininity’.²¹ Seeing the inequality of sexual relations, she decided it would be best to behave like a man. This introduces cross-dressing in ALP’s depiction. Here also is a version of Manon Lescaut (1731), the most popular French novel ever written (significantly here by a priest—the Abbé Prevost) about a bewitching demi-mondaine and her destructive relationship with a wealthy aristocrat. It was made into an opera three times in the nineteenth century (by Auber, Massenet, and Puccini). Joyce is possibly weaving in another notoriously bewitching character from French fiction, Zola’s Nana. The three women come from three consecutive centuries. Nance and Escaut are, moreover, both rivers, with which Joyce is now flooding his text. He is also now developing his allusive portmanteau densifications, familiar from the last chapter, and operating here almost at their most extreme. The multiple alliterative ‘n’s’ (nan- nix- na-non), make her seem to be a force of negation, saying ‘no’, to men, taunting naughtily. They might also be evoking the flapper musical of the Twenties, ‘No, No, Nanette’. The printers for transition produced galley proofs in 1927, then page proofs. Joyce revised the galleys heavily, though to our passage he only adds some more river names: the ‘Maass!’ (coinciding with the Catholic ‘mass’, perhaps) and, with the river Kiso, he doubles up the kissing, pecking the surface, so ‘kiss after kiss’ becomes ‘kiss akiss after kisokiss’.²² On the page proofs, he makes both sensual and riverine changes. Most extremely, Father Michael no longer ‘cooled’ but ‘baised’ his lips—lowering them and kissing or, indeed (from the French), fucking with them. It coincides, moreover, with the river Baïse. The sense of ‘cooled’ is not lost but reinserted, as ‘fresh’ is replaced by ‘cool’. ‘Wrists’ is cancelled for ‘pulse’, homing in more minutely and intimately on the body, getting under the skin. Joyce replaces ‘thurst was’ with the river ‘thurso’.²³ Some of these revisions did not get through to transition. So after it came out, he wrote them in again on a copy, unable to resist adding yet more in the process, partly in preparation for a reading performance he was to give of the chapter. As he said, ‘the stream is now rising to flood point but I find she can carry almost anything, adding’ 152 rivernames ‘over the episode.²⁴ ‘‘So’’ became ‘‘Oso’’, her lips became ‘‘lippes’’ (both rivers)’, the ‘singing’ hair became ‘her singimari saffron strumans’ that we encountered earlier and into ‘kisokiss’ the river Kush now flows so it becomes the ‘kisokushk’. The ‘pulse’ is ²¹ http://www.aelliott.com/reading/ninon/introduction/intro from book.htm. ²² 47474–215; JJA 48: 195. ²³ 47474–234; JJA 48: 210. ²⁴ To Weaver, 29 Oct. and 9 Nov. 1927, LI, 260 and 261.

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translated into the softer Irish word to become ‘cushlas’, setting up the Kush as an echo. He also added a complex sentence: ‘While you’d parse secheressa she hielt her souf’ (204.01–02), which takes us to a new level of obscurity.²⁵ Perhaps it implies that while his dryness (‘secheresse’) is slaked with a caress, she for her part just holds both her self and her breath. The restraint holds something back as if to deal with potential trauma and thus she ‘healed her self’. An entirely different reading of this passage is provided by Suzette Henke who thinks ALP ‘panted in ecstasy’ experiencing ‘the erotic delights of polymorphous perversity that characterize infantile sexual experiments’.²⁶ While it is possible to see things the other way—towards ALP receiving a series of abuses at the hands of men, abuses which are obscured by the indifference of both washer women to abuses of male power—it is easy to recognize the ambiguity that the necessity of exegesis so frequently engenders. In this ambiguity the text keeps something back—holds its breath, as it were. We, along with the other washerwoman, are being addressed, seduced into the telling. To ‘parse’, indeed, is to work out the syntactic structure of a phrase or sentence, so while we’re busy with the laws of grammar, and dryly analysing the rivery textual object, she keeps something to herself, absorbed in her own subjectivity, as an act of self-preservation. With these additions done he wrote in a letter: ‘it is now final as it will appear in the book’. But this turns out to be an inaccurate prophecy. The book changes direction and all the transition episodes will be substantially revised. In the same letter he wrote of a curious dream, representing the state of his book. I had a strange dream the other night. I was looking at a Turk seated in a bazaar. He had a framework on his knees and on one side he had a jumble of all shades of red and yellow skeins and on the other a jumble of greens and blues of all shades. He was picking from right and left very calmly and weaving away. It is evidently a split rainbow and also Parts I and III.²⁷

He is deferring Book II, a passage from which we shall encounter in the next part.

6 . D E LU X E E D I T I O N F O R C RO S B Y G A I G E : ‘ R E I G N B E AU ’ S H E AV E NA RC H E S O RA N G E D A RO N G E D’ Having come out in transition, Anna Livia’s next appearance would be as a limited edition (just 800 copies) for a dealer and publisher called Crosby ²⁵ These revisions were all made on Yale 7.7–24; JJA 48: 222. ²⁶ To Weaver, 9 Nov. 1927, LI, 261. ²⁷ Henke, Politics, 178–9.

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Gaige. This eventually came out a year after transition in October 1928. The above additions were incorporated, and set in type for sets of galley sheets. To the second set he made many additions to the chapter as a whole. The longest addition of all was made to this passage, as we shall see.²⁸ And there were others: ‘Up to his cushlas’, is alliterated to become ‘up to the core of his cushlas’, getting closer to the heart (cœur/core) of the matter (203.23–4). A transmissional departure (‘struman’) is corrected (to ‘strumans’), and something that was sharp becomes more impressionistic: so ‘the kind of curves’ becomes ‘the kindling curves’, evoking that small material gathered for its inflammatory power, rather than that innocence—despite the presence of innocence in ‘kinde’ meaning children. Where previously little Anna had held her ‘souf’ now she holds her ‘souff’ ’ (204.02), an indication of Joyce working with the tiniest of effects, a new level of Joyce’s tinkering exactitude. It takes it away from what might be heard as ‘south’, and intensifies the fricative sound made when the teeth are left on the lip and then breath, held in until then, is let out slowly. And another tiny detail: the inverted comma after ‘f’ is worth noticing, indicating the absent part of the rest of the word (the—lé of soufflé, perhaps), as if holding the word in before it finishes. Holding it in, she gets bigger, like a balloon, as this addition indicates: ‘But she ruz two feet high hire in her aisne aestumation. And steppes on stilts ever since’ (204.02). Pleased with this confirmation of her attractiveness, with pride she swells, like a soufflé goes through a growth spurt, rises as a river in flood, or as it rises at its estuary (in Latin ‘aestuarium’) when the tide turns. The waters are stirred up and begin to undulate (in Latin ‘aestus’). The val de Ruz is a beautiful valley amongst the Swiss alps: the humble Liffey proudly moving up from the Wicklow hills towards some Alpine sublimity. And she has reached a new stage she never goes back from, producing the surreal image of a river on stilts. We can turn now to explicate the longest addition made at this stage. Joyce’s ‘mature’ style has evolved, where he is no longer writing clear language that is subsequently darkened, but laying it down obscurely at its first level. The addition in question is extremely dense, thick with complex puns and allusion, as we’ve seen at earlier levels, but now incorporated fluently over a longish passage, having presumably been composed mentally before committing it to paper. The density, at this late stage of the work, results in a huge number of instantaneous connections, as if we are at a compact busy cosmopolitan mainline station. The intensity of these connections reflects a moment in the narrative—where perception incites desire. It is inserted after the colourful ‘red bog at sundown’, and just ²⁸ The following additions were made on 47474–263; JJA 48: 259.

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before the priest gives in to temptation (‘he cuddle not help himself’). It has been a point of tension before and will be again. Text, once composed, can potentially open up, or be effaced anywhere: it has what Daniel Ferrer described as the ‘potentiality of potentiality’.²⁹ The points of revision mark points of tension where the pressures of rereading produce fault-lines in the material, which then has to divide or be erased to receive new material. One important value for the study of revision is precisely to bring to the reader’s perception these points of tension in the text that become concealed in the printed form. The revision happens then at the moment between perceiving the beauty of the river and feeling an uncontrollable desire, along the fault-line of enticement: . . . like the brown bog at sundown. By that Vale Vowclose’s lucydlac, the reignbeau’s heavenarches aranged oranged her. Afrothdizzying gab galbs, her enamelled eyes indergoading him on to the vierge violetian. Wish a wish! Why a why? Mavro! Letty Lerck’s lafing light throw those laurals now on her daphdaph teasesong petrock Maass! He cuddle not help himself . . . (203.26–32; 47474–263; JJA 48: 259)

We can reduce the passage to: ‘By the spring of Vaucluse, light playing in arched rainbows round her, her sexy blue eyes goaded him on to the verge of violating her virginity. Swish! Make a wish! Why, oh why? A little light passes through the laurel bushes falling on this daft poet of hers, teasing.’ Vaucluse is where Petrarch (‘petrock’), the fourteenth-century poet and promoter of classical Latin writers, retreated and where he wrote a sequence of sonnets (little songs, song-ets, or invertedly ‘teasesong’) to his loved one, whose name ‘Laura’ he concealed in amongst them as Joyce conceals it here in ‘laurals’. Fusing poet with priest introduces the artist Shem into the passage, formerly dominated by the hermit Shaun. Joyce read Petrarch when young but considered him simply an aesthete with no great intellect.³⁰ We are, indeed, under the rule of the pretty (the ‘reign beau’). At Vaucluse is a freshwater spring—a ‘lucid lake’ of sorts. Light and splashing water passing through each other can produce rainbows; the seven colours kitschly ‘arranged around’ her, like the arching sky of heaven, now tinged with the orange bars of clouds at sunset. Petrarch, moreover, when he ran out of ink, had to write in orange ink made from saffron. The presence of ‘Lucy’ and the rainbow pre-empts the focus on Joyce’s daughter Lucia and the colour spectrum which will significantly form parts of Nightgames (II.1), drafted some three years ²⁹ In a paper Daniel Ferrer delivered entitled ‘The potential of potentiality’ at the Joyce Symposium in Trieste, 2002. ³⁰ According to a page on Jorn Barger’s website: www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/reading.html

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later.³¹ Like Laura’s name in Petrarch’s sonnets, her name too is hidden (in ‘lucydlac’), though with relative transparency—as if through the lucid waters in this romantic Vale. Joyce intensifies the drama of enticement. The swirling froth in the stream is dizzying for the viewer. Joyce seems here to be playing with a Roman emperor as described in Suetonius’ history. Galba’s father was a hunchback (a trait of HCE) who, significantly, married Livia (formerly the wife of Augustus). Suetonius described him as having blue eyes: so it’s the watery blue eyes which are aphrodisiac his mouth (‘gab’) frothing. In this giddy state the reverend is goaded on by her dark blue (indigo/violet) and enamoured eyes. But these eyes are rather ‘enamelled’, as if she is a sculpture and he an artist who has fallen in love, as Pygmalion did, with the object he had made—not the model on which it was based. One of the girls in the park is rumoured to have ended up stripping: ‘she stripped teasily’ (68.01). In his sermon Shaun advises against becoming a model for some disreputable decadent painter, in a marvellous mockery of the Great Masters of what might just as well be soft porn: now reappears Autist Algy, . . . asking with whispered offers . . . won’t you be an artist’s moral and pose in your nudies as a local esthetic before voluble old masters, introducing you, left to right the party comprises, to hogarths like Bottisilly and Titteretto . . . (434.35–435.08)

Here the loved one is transformed and objectified into art by the priest-poet, drunk on the vision. The art becomes the love object, attended to, worshipped and gradually richly dressed up. From red and orange, we now move to the other, darker end of the spectrum and also to the darker end of sexuality where violet and violation reveal their root in the word ‘viol’, the rape, and beyond that in the power of desire and will present in ‘volition’ (from latin ‘volo’). With ‘Indergoading him on to the vierge violetian’, we are on the verge, the edge, and on the edge of the virgin (la vièrge), whose virginity is defined by a verge that has to be intact—the hymen. This move inverts the sequence of colour on the first page where we move from ‘violer’ and end with the orange of the sun going down. Below we shall see again how the first page of the novel appears in this little ‘Ovidian’ addition. Traditionally, when you see a rainbow, as when you cut a cake, you make a wish—innocently enough. But here the wish is by another tradition, less innocent—a desire that is a lust, a surprise interjection into the innocent ³¹ See Finn Fordham, ‘James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Lucia Joyce’s Breakdown’ (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1997), ch. 5.

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flow. We are perhaps hearing the voice of the girl, teasing the priest by saying ‘make a wish!’ as a bewitching figure might in a fairy story. Agency, in this moment of temptation, is handed over to the girl—reducing the responsibility of the priest. The tradition, however, is questioned: ‘Why a why?’, or is it the latent desire being questioned—Why must there be such a troublesome wish? Or why should there be a question about it—Why a ‘why’? Exclamation and answer reminds us that we are in a dialogue—and maybe the other washerwomen listening to the story is interjecting now. The question is formed on a cross-current flowing in from thirty pages earlier: ‘But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh!’ (159.16–17), written just a few months earlier (in August 1927) for I.6. The meditation on Petrarch and his muse Laura sends Joyce where the Ovidian Petrarch had been before: to the transformation of the nymph Daphne into a laurel tree, most famously told in Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Apollo falls in love with Daphne, praises her passionately, and she promptly runs away. Apollo pursues her and catches her up. As he is breathing down her neck she calls on her father (the river Peneus) to save her. He does so by dehumanizing her, turning her into a tree: the laurel. She undergoes the process we encountered in the previous section—‘transaccidentation’. This myth flows beneath what seems to be an expression of the play of dappled light coming through low trees, embodied in the gaze of a laughing girl full of little larks (‘Letty Lerck’). Once transformed into a laurel, Daphne felt sorry for the grieving Apollo and lowered her branches to him. He cut and wore some as a memento. So perhaps she throws the laurels on Petrarch, honouring him with the wreath that marks him as a poet (hence the idea of a laureate). The phrase with Daphne and Petrarch in it—‘daphdaph teasesong petrock’—is also an echo of the phrase on the first page of the book: ‘tauftauf thuartpeatrick’ (3.10). Joyce had helpfully provided a key to these words, that it ‘evokes the response of the peatfire of faith to the windy words of the apostle’, and the flame of Christianity being kindled by St Patrick against royal orders.³² ‘Daphdaph’, like ‘Tauftauf’, evokes the puffing sounds of breath and the latter evokes baptism (from German ‘taufen’ to baptize). ‘Teasesong petrock’, like ‘thuartpeatrick’, evokes the founding of the Church on a pun Christ made, since Peter means Rock: ‘You are Rock and upon this rock . . .’. Petrock is a Cornish equivalent for Patrick. The peatfire motif, which recurs often in the novel, in its combination signals a Promethean defiance of the established law, but also the establishing of a new and lasting institution. In this context, the laws being defied are vows of chastity, and those laws against the rape or ³² To Weaver, 15 Nov. 1926, LI, 248.

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molestation of minors. Their defiance, it suggests, establishes a new order, an aesthetic order, where the conflict generates a poetic object. The presence of Daphne also produces an association with Mavrodaphne, a Greek wine, suitably of an amber-orangey colour. Perhaps this is the hermit’s sly tipple, hence the pre-emptive interruption of ‘Mavro!’ from the Greek mavres meaning black, the colour of the berries that appear on Daphne’s tree. Faber & Faber, who had by now agreed to publish the book as a whole, also decided to publish the ALP episode. Joyce made hardly any changes for their edition. But later, revising the Faber pages in the mid-1930s for the printers of Finnegans Wake, he tweaked the priestly injunctions of ‘never to, never to, never’ to ‘niver to, niver, nevar’³³ making the ‘nevers’ more rivery with the Russian river Neva in there just as he was thinking about the Russian general being shot—as we shall see in Part II.

7 . A F T E R c. 1 9 3 6 , R EV I S I N G  : ‘ T H E M AG I K WAV U S’ The printers produced galleys and Joyce made some insertions, using languages from parts of the world colonized by Europeans—and the British in particular. We saw him do this with Shem, taking us through Dravidian and Santali, from Southern to Northern India. Now he takes us to Eastern Africa through the Bantu language Kiswahili. In 1938 Joyce compiled a notebook of words (known as the ‘Index Notebook’) taken from various languages (many marginal and/or non-Indo-European ones such as Romansch, Basque, Burmese, Bulgarian, Ruthenian, Kiswahili) and from specific topics with headings such as ‘Army’, ‘Insects’, ‘Slave Trade’, ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Huck Finn’, ‘Television’, ‘Buddha’.³⁴ The headings usefully reflect Joyce’s thematic concerns and point to ‘la problématique de Babel’ in the Wake.³⁵ Selecting from these notes he scattered them liberally and unevenly around ‘Work in Progress’ in its closing stages, setting up complex webs of echoes—as we shall see in Parts II and III. For example, on the second and last set of galleys for this passage the following appears: ‘That was kissuahealing with bantur for balm!’ which draws from the notebook to embellish the effect of her proudly getting bigger, when she ‘ruz ³³ 47475–82; JJA 48: 353. ³⁴ The original, labelled VI.B.46, is with the other notebooks at the Manuscripts Library at the State University of New York, Buffalo. It has been transcribed and annotated by Danis Rose as The Index Manuscript: ‘Finnegans Wake’ Holograph Workbook VI.B.46 (Colchester: ‘A wake Newslitter’ Press, 1978). ³⁵ See Laurent Milesi, ‘L’diome babélien de Finnegans Wake’, in Ferrer and Jacquet (eds.), Genèse de Babel, 156.

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two feet hire’.³⁶ This is a healing through kissing, through banter and with a soothing balm. The mention of Kiswahili is a clue that this language is being used nearby—and, indeed, it appears in the following, a murky revision that Joyce had inserted on the previous page: . . . teasesong petrock. Maass! But the majik wavus has elfun anon meshes. And Simba the Slayer of his Oga is slewd. He cuddle not help himself . . . (203.31–2; 47476a–266; JJA 49: 551)

Maji, wavu, and simba are Kiswahili for water, net, and lion. We might translate it as: ‘the watery net is a complex web, and the powerful lion (the slayer of the ogre) is overcome’. But this is hardly adequate. The context for the additions is once again the point of tension, where the priest is just about to give into temptation. He has been caught up in the elven magic of an unknown name of the overlapping ripples, meshed elaborately with 111 (eleven and one) or 1,001 (‘elfun’ is Kiswahili for 1,000) networks or grids. This recalls the dream Joyce had of the Turk weaving many colours together. ‘1,001’ is a motif in Finnegans Wake, evoking the Arabian Nights, of course, itself a powerhouse of stories, adventures, comedies, and the erotic.³⁷ Near the opening of the book we are told about the number of versions of ‘what brought about . . . this . . . sin business’ (5.13–14) for which ‘there extand by now one thousand and one stories, all told, of the same’ (5.28–9). It represents not just multiplicity, but complexity and obscurity as every question is made to have 1,001 answers, or routes out of it. We spoke before of how the young stream is objectified as a work of art, as a sculpture with enamelled eyes. If ALP is the river of writing, then here we find the artist, the priest of the imagination, falling in love with his young creation, and getting caught up in its own growing complex web. The kisses, the kiss after kiss, are the little additional attentions paid to the text: hence it growing as a result. The Thousand and One Nights take us easily to one of their heroes, Sinbad the Sailor, killer of giants or ogres. Here he is elaborately combined with both ´ Simba (the lion), and with Siva the Slayer, the Hindu god of violence. The cleansing slayer is like the sworded St Michael fighting the devil, St George beating his dragon, or Patrick banishing the snakes from Ireland. Allusion to these primal elemental figures are also typical of the late Joyce—something being developed, in particular, in Book IV, as mythic depth and cosmic breadth are layered over the work. Oga is an ogre, an evil giant but also a river, and it means ‘bath’ in Kiswahili: he is the slayer of the sinuous river, especially insofar as the river snakes. This turns out to be a theme in the book: the control of ³⁶ 47476a–267; JJA 49: 553. ³⁷ See Aida Yaved ‘Joyce’s Sources: Sir Richard F. Burton’s Terminal Essay in Finnegans Wake’, in Joyce Studies Annual (2000): 124–66. See below, p. 101.

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water as part of the construction of urban environments. The strong man in history helps build the city by a river, constructs embankments, channels water for sewers, etc. HCE boasts of being such a man in the conclusion of III.3. And St Kevin in Book IV ‘exorcised his holy sister water’ (605.36–606.01). But despite this possibility, this man is ‘slewd’—drunk (slewed) and obscene (lewd), about to give in to temptation. On the other hand the syntax is ambiguous: it could be read: ‘Simba the Slayer has been slewd by his Oga’, using an archaic construction ‘to be slain (slewd) of someone’. This is possible because without commas there is no indication that the sentence be read ‘Simba [the slayer of his ogre] is slewd’ or ‘Simba . . . of his Oga is slewd’. This puts agency and potency back in the hands of the river-Oga bath-ogre implying that she has conquered the man, making him twist about (the original meaning of slew that lies behind ‘being drunk’). The ambiguity about who has overcome whom, whether we should blame the ‘boldness’ of the priest or the ‘naughtiness’ of the young ALP, is maintained right through all the riverisions, down to this point, the story of ALP’s first seduction, now complete. Joyce had become enmeshed in his rivery book, but has also managed to overcome it in its completion. Becoming absorbed and trying to detach himself from the linguistic objects he kept encountering and rearranging were things Joyce felt he had to do. Towards the end of writing, as we’ve seen, he described what he’d done for fifteen years as ‘combing and recombing the locks of Anna Livia’.³⁸ It was so beautiful, playful, sensual: he couldn’t help himself. ³⁸ To Livia Svevo, Jan. 1939, LIII, 435.

Part II BUTT: ‘I Shuttm’

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BUTT: ‘I Shuttm!’ (351.36–355.09) 1 . 1 . P RO LO G U E : ‘ EV E RY S C H O O LG I R L K N OWS T H AT I T WA S BU C K L EY . . .’ ‘How Buckley Shot the Russian General’ is a story told over twenty pages in II.3 just after the midpoint of the novel (338–55). It is one of the densest pieces of writing in one of the densest darkest parts of one of the densest darkest novels, and so though there are several general readings of it, close commentaries are on the thin side. As Tindall remarked, ‘to identify all the allusions that clot the dialogue of Butt and Taff would require more space than at my disposal’.¹ Nevertheless I shall attempt that here, even if with just a fraction of it. Joyce had already completed the revisions to books I and III, had composed the Nightlessons chapter and another story for II.3 about a tailor and a sailor, when he began writing it early in 1937. He thought this signalled the closing stages of his composition, believing he could see the end in sight and wanting the whole book to be finished by February 1938. It was the last section of ‘Work in Progress’ to be published in transition, and is one extreme end of Joyce’s project of obscurification, before he surfaces to the relative light of Liffey’s closing monologue. But it was probably one of the stepping stones that Joyce had projected earlier; an advance party that would help him get across the whole thing. Joyce had toyed with Buckley as a structure in one of the earliest notebooks: Crimea War (Buckley) Arabesque of Buckley . . . So buckley shot the Russian general but Who shot B (VI.B.3.081(a)–082(a); JJA 29: 220–1)

And the story surfaced in 1924 in Joyce’s early drafts that would eventually turn up in I.4: ¹ Tindall, Reader’s Guide, 199.

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Part II . . . and who shot Buckley though every schoolgirl knows that it was Buckley who shot and the Russian general and not Buckley who was shot? (101.10–22; 47471b–29; JJA 46: 49)

But it also appears in a notesheet Joyce made for Ulysses: ‘Buckley & Russian general (bloody boy).’² It had an earlier source still as a tale told by Joyce’s father, a story which Joyce used to rehearse to friends. Buckley, an Irish soldier in the Crimean War fighting against the Russians in 1854, caught sight of a Russian General off guard. He took aim to shoot, but was inhibited by the splendour of his uniform, and lowered his gun. Then he got hold of himself, recalling his duty. Buckley got the general back in his sights, but was put off again this time because the General lowered his trousers, squatted, and began to relieve himself. Buckley paused out of compassion, letting him have one last moment of pleasure—it would hardly have been a dignified way for so dignified a man to go. Then as he watched and waited, he saw the General do something unforgivable, disgusting, and demeaning—the general used a lump of earth to wipe himself clean. Buckley shot him at once.³ Joyce decided to have this story told as a dialogue between Butt and Taff, ‘a pair of radio comics presenting their skit’.⁴ It is assumed they are versions of Shem and Shaun, though which is which is hard to tell and critics have disagreed.⁵ It has often been understood as a dialogue that is taking place on television but, though there are many allusions to TV, even that does not seem clear. The dialogue from which our passage is taken was written and revised during the year 1937, while Joyce was busy with other sections of the book, layering motivic echoes and drafting the end. The dialogue consists of three kinds of material: (a) the speeches in the dialogue, (b) the character descriptions, and (c) the ‘interruptions’ or stage directions. The revision process is intense and the passage expands as rapidly as any other section of the book, though rates of textual expansion form a field that genetic scholars have not yet worked on. Joyce first drafted the dialogue and revised it, then redrafted it and revised it again, then made a fair copy for his typist. But before sending it to the typist he revised it—twice, the second time by drafting character descriptions (parentheses which directed the actors, as it were, how to perform, specifying their roles), then he redrafted them, subjoining them to the fair-copy revisions ² ‘Cyclops’ 8. 38, in Phillip Herring, Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ Notesheets in the British Museum (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 18 and 114. ³ Adapted from Ellmann, James Joyce, 398. ⁴ Bernard Benstock, Wake, 242. ⁵ e.g. ‘Shem, the laughing drinker and predecessor of Buckley, the young man who will shoot the old Russian General,’ (Tindall, Reader’s Guide, 38) versus ‘There are four proofs that Shaun-Butt shot the Russian General,’ in Michael Begnal and Grace Eckley, Narrator and Character in ‘Finnegans Wake’ (London: Associated University Presses, 1976), 215.

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so far made. Now it was ready to be turned into a typescript, incorporating all this material. Two more substantial levels of revision were made: first the typescript was heavily revised, so a second typescript had to be produced incorporating the revisions. Joyce revised these too. He also drafted the squarebracketed ‘interruptions’ and the concluding speech to the dialogue, Butt and Taff raising a toast in unison. These were themselves all revised, and therefore needed redrafting. These large redrafted additions were carefully keyed into the second typescript, so that the whole could be typed up again, making the third typescript for the printers of transition. But before sending it on, he still touched it up. From it galley proofs for transition were made, which are missing. Joyce was clearly not just checking for errors, but still tweaking the language here and there. In April 1938, after this process, so full of obsessive but undecipherable intention, transition 27, the last one with Eugene Jolas as editor, finally came out with the Butt and Taff dialogue. The journal had lasted eleven years, a long stretch in the history of small magazines. It would be continued after the Second World War with Georges Bataille as editor. Despite a few more little additions, the Butt and Taff dialogue was now pretty much in its final form as we read it in the first edition on 338–55. Originally two pages of loose handwritten text, it became twenty pages of packed print. The section under consideration grew by a factor of a hundred to 1,100 words or so from the following eleven: Butt— . . . Till I shutthim. Taff—Now or never? Butt—Rawskin general. (352.14–33 and see 47480–3; JJA 55: 5)

It is this growth, at a central climactic point of the novel, that we’ll be tracing and interpreting here, explaining how Joyce shot Butt’s version of Buckley: that is, shot as in ‘filmed’ and shot as in ‘blasted’, in processes of making and unmaking that continually contributed to each other. Once it had appeared in transition, he joked about it: ‘I am offering prizes of 5/–2/6 and 1/3 for the three best solutions but am not competing myself as I do not think I am at present capable of winning the fourth prize of 7 1/2 d.’⁶ Unless he was keeping it secret, Joyce no longer knew what his own work was about and thought any answer would be almost worthless. He had developed a language that was now controlling itself, and was in the situation of the sorcerer’s apprentice, the caretaker of automata that have developed lives of their own. While undermining his position as the controlling author, this does not necessarily ⁶ To Carlow, 3 June 1938, LIII, 423.

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hand control over to readers who are equally uncertain. As much as anywhere else in Finnegans Wake here a story is untold in its telling, a paradigm for the book’s apparent destruction of narrative and language. As John Bishop says, he is ‘blowing away the ‘‘black and white’’ of lexical English’.⁷ More precisely, it is a stretching out and serial transformation of a single event until that event disappears, swallowed in allusions, as humanity is destined to be swallowed in the eternity of the universe. ‘The passage may be read’, as Margaret Solomon said with a disarming or naive simplicity, ‘in several ways.’⁸ It is, indeed, a metaphorical zone for the myth of all conflictual transformation, great and small, political and social, natural and familial, for the revolution, for the death or murder of God, for the splitting of the atom, for the emergence of language, for the original murder where Cain kills Abel, for the chopping of a tree, for a paparazzo catching a celebrity in an awkward position and publishing the details the next day, for the assassination of Michael Collins and, most insistently—embracing them all—for the Oedipal killing of the father.⁹ But a question may be raised about the dominance of the family structure, as criticism has it, in Finnegans Wake. Freudian readings have dominated interpretations of the Wake, analysing its troubled dreams and the rotating structure of the family romance, but must we place the familial frame, rather than other social or environmental frames, as the ultimate and constraining casing? Must all double acts necessarily link the subjects as brothers? Must the two girls be HCE’s daughter and her mirror image? Is the target, at some ‘base line’, Butt’s actual father? Joyce had already put paternity radically into doubt in Ulysses; he had also expressed weariness of the Earwicker family as early as 1925. Perhaps we should recall Joyce’s dislike of Freud, and place it next to such a critique of Freud as is found in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, attacking the family-centred-ness of Oedipalized Freudian theory.¹⁰ To do so might be to allow richer investigations into the non-familial institutions that feature in the Wake: the people, law, the media, ⁷ Bishop, Book of the Dark, 50. ⁸ Margaret Solomon, The Eternal Geomater; the Sexual Universe of ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 141. ⁹ Margot Norris, for instance, is most insistent about the Oedipal dimension: ‘The sons’ buggery and parricide of the father are, therefore, erotic/aggressive versions of the same act, the same sin, that is the father’s anal impalement’, and later: ‘The father signifies the semantic function of language, . . . then the fall of the father . . . signifies that severing of words from their referents which creates a linguistic freeplay. . . . The ‘‘etym’’ or word, is also ‘‘etymon,’’ which, as the primary word from which a derivative is formed, corresponds to father.’ Norris, Decentered Universe, 63 and 124. ¹⁰ ‘Wasn’t something else sacrificed to Oedipus . . . on the one hand, the direct confrontation between desiring-production and social production . . . and on the other hand, the repression that the social machine exercises on desiring-machines, and the relationship of psychic repres sion with social repression. This will all be lost . . . with the establishment of a sovereign

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finance, labour, advertising, property, police, the state. Better still, it might allow the institutions of family and society to be placed in contexts with each other. The shooting has been read as the exciting revolutionary moment, where an old order is being threatened by the new, but the fact of this transformation can be seen mythically as part of a tediously repeating old historical pattern. Likewise, Joyce could just as much be subverting the cult of revolutionary violence while apparently celebrating its radical impact. This ambivalence was perfectly expressed in his remarks recorded by Georges Borach: As an artist I am against every state. Of course I must recognize it, since indeed in all my dealings I come into contact with its institutions. . . . Naturally I can’t approve of the act of the revolutionary who tosses a bomb in a theatre to destroy the King and his children. On the other hand, have these states behaved any better which have drowned the world in a blood bath?¹¹

But two interpretations that have not come forward are the extent of Butt’s boasting and that the assassination, unlike that in the original story, is, in fact, botched.

1 . 2 . E A R L I E S T D RA F T S : ‘ N OW O R N EV E R ? ’ At ‘zero’ level Taff wants to hear Butt’s version of how he shot the Russian general. Butt eventually gets through it and, when the show is over, the pub landlord responds, interpreting it as a universal myth—just as many critics have. Here is a cleaned-up version of an extract from the earliest draft, the seed whose growth we shall trace. Butt has been struggling to tell the story but, losing himself in memories of the Crimean War, he has gone backwards instead of forwards. Taff has to prompt him: Taff—Say your piece! Buckle to! Butt—It was in Crimealian war. . . . Them were helcyown days. Till I shutthim. Taff—Now or never? Butt—Rawskin general. —That is true the landlord assented, of more than one of us. (346.20–356.21, and see 47480–2, 3; JJA 55: 3 and 5 simplified) Oedipus.’ See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (London: Athlone Press, 1984), 54. ¹¹ Ellmann, James Joyce, 446.

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It’s now or never that Butt must tell the story, or name the person he shot. Just as many close to Joyce (Weaver, the Jolas’s, Paul Léon) were urging him to finish, so Taff is urging Butt. It is thirteen years since Joyce first anticipated Buckley’s tale, and it is time to get on with it. Joyce’s revisions to this level are extremely dense and impacted, and when he came to redraft it he added and substituted yet more things as he went along. The order of the dialogue changes and some elements drop out. Joyce also pulls up short before continuing the landlord’s response, which he has clearly decided will need separate treatment. For the moment he will concentrate on Butt and Taff, the story and the shooting. To sharpen the focus, before it grows out of hand, I will also cut off the beginning of the preceding passage and how it developed, since all of it grew and stretched massively. Instead I will hone in on how Butt embellishes the context of those original words ‘I shutthim’, how Taff responds, and eventually how they wind up the story conjointly. So here is how the dialogue looked at the next level—once a round of overlay to the previous dialogue has been untangled and copied out. Butt—Till I seen his offensive. And by the splunthers of colt, I shuttim. Taff—Humme to your muskets? The grand old spider? Butt—Bloodymuddymuzzle, the fourstar Ruisshakruschem cannumdaruminchaff. Taff—In sobber sooth? You shattomaviek? Sharpshooter? Butt—Shurenoff. Shutmup. And if he sung dumb in his glass darkly spark lit face to face on all around. (352.04–355.09, and see 47480–150, 52; JJA 55: 13 and 15)

It is transformed considerably, losing Taff’s impatience. A provocation and motivation behind Butt’s shooting is now included and the identity of his target questioned. Butt saw the Russian General’s ‘offensive’ in the sense of a military attack, but it also sounds like an adjective without its noun: ‘his offensive something’—act or appearance or something too rude to spell out, unspeakable. In John Joyce’s version it was the offensive wiping of the General’s arse on a lump of earth that prompted Butt to shoot: his offensive act was an offence against decency. Being a soldier, Butt swears like a trooper, emphatically using the oath ‘by the splendours of God’, combining it with a Colt gun and with the phrase ‘splinters of Cork’, already sounded in I.1 (9.23) during the Museyroom battle of Waterloo (8–10). This is a fairly precise echo from over half the book away, burrowing a sonic route between the two passages, both sharing the context of a nineteenth-century battle. The battle of Balaclava is the terrible farce that doubles the high drama of Waterloo. As

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the Wake retells them, both battles contain versions of an exposure and fall of HCE. Butt confesses and boasts: ‘I shuttim’, not quite shot but ‘shut’, so the General is being shut in. And, dropping the softener ‘h’, it’s no longer ‘him’ but ‘tim’, Tim, the first name of Mr Finnegan, builder: ‘I shut tim’. But ‘tim’ is also an abbreviated form of ‘time’, so we have a metaphysical sense of putting an end to a curtailed time. This can have a mythical sense in Zeus’ conflict with his father Chronos, and an everyday sense of ‘killing time’, twiddling our thumbs as we wait for the next event. He is also performing ‘closing time’, just as Sackerson, pub servant, is to do in a few pages after the Landlord’s response to this story. Butt, hero of his own story, boasts about doing all these colossally mythic, and passively trivial, things: ‘I killed time!’ Given the Russian context we have to be alive to Russian words: ‘Shuttim’, suitably, means ‘we’re joking’. Holding these contradictions together is a challenge that Joyce’s novel confronts us with: that, in this case, twiddling one’s thumbs, aiming to kill somebody in authority, and telling a joke all run in parallel, form a surreal composite or even amount to the same thing. In reality, such interrelationships are by no means impossible: failing to lift one’s fingers can result in murder; indolence can subvert the authority of the work ethic; laughing at somebody can, as it ruins a reputation, be metaphorically tantamount to an assassination. In any case, Taff in reply is amazed and disbelieving and has to check who exactly Butt means—guessing ‘the grand old spider?’ This was Parnell’s nickname for Gladstone, coding a sinister controller at the centre of power’s web. It implies that Gladstone has been shot down. Taff also uses a phrase ‘humme to your muskets?’ (home to your muskets?) which fell out in the subsequent draft. Butt replies with an exclamation that the mouth (muzzle) of his target has become bloody and muddy—from hitting the dust. (The word ‘bloody’ is too conventional and later becomes ‘bluddy’ for the first typescript.¹²) Overexcited, he qualifies Taff’s guess, and exaggerates who he has shot: ‘the fourstar Ruisshakruschem cannumdaruminchaff’, a dizzying amalgam that includes: ‘a fourstar . . . commander’ (evoking the highest rank in the US army at the time of writing); a Russian Comander-in-chief ; a Rosicrucian (a member of a religious set, some of whom were alchemists—like Shem—searching for the philosopher’s stone); a ‘conundrum chief’—a principal problem poser; durum chaff—the waste from thrashing wheat. The first two military roles attached to two expansionist empires (the US and Russia) are consistent with Shaun-as-Mookse (152–9) who is attracted to the military and to spaciousness, but the latter two ‘alternative’ types—alchemist ¹² See 47480–17; JJA 55: 37.

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and riddler—make him seem like Shem. Indeed, Joyce summons up the twin Shem at the end of the word ‘Ruisshakruschem’. Many critics think HCE is a grown up version of Shaun, but there are ways in which HCE can be like Shem too—in particular when, like now, it is assumed that he has done something wrong, and when he’s being hunted, the underdog target of an exaggerated assault. Taff’s guess of a single subject has been supplanted by this incomprehensible hybrid monster. Not surprisingly, Taff remains disbelieving and shoots out three questions: ‘Really? You shot him, my son?’ using the Irish mo mhic (pronounced ‘moveek’), meaning ‘my son’, and adding ‘you a sharp shooter?’ This brings into view a discussion between two Irish rebels—or mercenaries, for that matter—with Taff as father, listening to his son Butt’s story of bravado (doubling and troubling the notion that they’re supposed to be brothers in this dialogue). ‘Shattomaviek’ may also carry ‘shadow moving/movies’, a reminder that a television is apparently playing in the pub, and is the last in a long line of representations that takes us far from the original event: a tale that is retold, then scripted, filmed, and then redescribed. All of this mediation means Taff’s question ‘in truth?’ (a sober and tearful ‘sobber’ sooth), is framed within frames within frames of representation that take us further from any truth that Butt might try to assert. Nonetheless, Butt affirms confidently: ‘Sure enough!’, giving it the inflection of the Russian name suffix: ‘ov’. ‘Off’ also describes the end of the story: the characters moving off, the television switched off. The end is marked by a rejigging of one of the most famous passages from the New Testament: ‘For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face’ (1 Corinthians 13: 12), which itself marks an ending, as a transformation through death. ‘Now’ is this world, the world of one’s life prior to death, a dim world of reflected images, of Platonic shadows. ‘Then’ is the other world, the world after life in heaven, when all is clear and immediate. It is traditionally one of the most heavily interpreted passages too and Joyce joins in the exegetical fray, glossing something glossed. But Joyce does not make secondary commentary, detached from the text; he gets under the skin of the language. There is an economy of language at work here, where ‘text’ and ‘commentary’ are packed into one text. In this case Joyce’s ‘gloss’ is coloured by the pub context: ‘And if he sung dumb in his glass, the spark lit face to face on all around.’ While he was quiet looking down into his glass, everyone around was lit up in the glow of the story. Butt, silent, is probably finishing off his pint, but it may be the illusion of the ventriloquist with a dummy singing as he drinks (‘he sung dumb’), while everyone glows with laughter. There is darkness and silence now that the show is over, but the story has been illuminating.

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1 . 3 . E X PA N D I N G D I A LO G U E F O R T H E FA I R C O P Y: ‘ M Y O R E L A N D F O R A RO L I V E R’ Joyce made many revisions to this draft, more than doubling its length, with a hundred words added to the sixty-two above. Peering through the mess of the drafts, he integrated the material into a fair copy of the whole sketch, now running to thirteen pages. What follows is a version of this fair copy, cleaned up of its subsequent revisions, showing that is, how it appeared before Joyce returned to his ‘pen-assault wars’. Butt—. . . till up come stumblebum with the same old domstoole story (whitesides do his beard!) and I seen his offensive (odious!) and, my oreland for a roliver, by the splunthers of colt and bung goes the enemay I insurrectioned and I shuttm. Tumbleheaver! Taff—I’m believer. And bullyclaver of ye, bragadore-gunneral. The grand old spider! You were shutter reshottus and sieger besieged. Butt—Bloodymuddymuzzle! Kaptan (backsights to his bared!), His Embulence the frustrate fourstar Russkacruscan, Allaf O’Khorwan, connunderumcheff. Taff—And the name of the most marsiful, the gragious one! In sobber sooth and in sauber civiles? And to the dirtiment of the curtailment of his lower man? Butt—In sabre tooth and sombre saviles! With my bow on armer and hits leg an arrow cockshock hoodrobin. Taff—Shattamovick? Butt—Shurenoff. Shutmup. And bud did down well right. And if he sung dumb in his glass darkly speech lit face to face on all around. (352.04–355.09 and 47480–15, 15v, 16; JJA 55: 29 and 31)

Each part of the dialogue is being stretched considerably. Butt details the approach and appearance of HCE, and describes him as a clumsy person (‘stumblebum’), telling the same old ‘damfool’ Tom Fool story that he’d told in the courts of justice (Danish domstole). This refers us back to the trial in I.4, when a rustic character called Festy King gives evidence in a case about a pig. He is laughed at for letting fly a fart (93.08), the equivalent of the Russian General excreting in the field. The courtroom context is emphasized in the parenthesis ‘(whitesides do his beard!)’, since James Whiteside (1804–76) was a lawyer who defended such great Irish Catholic leaders as O’Connell and Smith O’Brien. This sounds like a plea for some great lawyer to prosecute, that is, ‘do his beard’. Beards signal the patriarchal HCE and he is mocked for having one, his beard somehow reprehensible. The ‘offensive’ is now ‘(odious!)’, a more intense double of the adjective. Bracketed off, it seems to conceal some odious word beneath it—‘shit’ or ‘arsewipe’, perhaps.

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Joyce stretches out the lead-up to the shooting with the phrase ‘my oreland for a roliver’. This phrase toys brilliantly with exchange—linguistic and material—and it echoes with the desperate plea that Shakespeare gives Richard III, mid-battle: ‘my kingdom for a horse!’ (V. iv. 7). It also grows out of ‘Roland for an Oliver’, a now fallow cliché meaning at once equality in friendship and, roughly, ‘tit for tat’. Roland and Oliver, knights of Charlemagne (according to the epic Song of Roland), were military heroes of equal stature, and when they finally met in single combat, they fought for five days, stretching it out, just as Butt stretches his version. Joyce has also exchanged ‘R’ and ‘O’. What this transferal introduces is the whole problem of linguistic exchange: the phrase assumes there are equals in the world, that two things can be alike. But one of the aims of Finnegans Wake is in its bid to make something that could not be equalled, and beyond that to code a world of difference, to which the categories and forms of language and their ever-evolving combinations may aspire, but against which it is always inadequate. There is also a problem, then, of exegesis and translation: there is no equivalent in translating or explaining ‘my oreland for a roliver’, no matter how many glosses or translations one supplies. The phrase cannot be neatly exchanged for another; there is no tit for tat. No exegesis, as it spills over the page, can mimic the density and originality of the original. Orlando is the Italian for Roland, but here Oreland, with an ‘e’ left in, holds a suggestion of Ireland. It is as though ‘Ireland’ (the Ireland of the past) is to be exchanged for a ‘Roliver’, a roll-over, a revolution, or a revolver (a word which later drafts will emphasize). Butt boasts that he could give up an Ireland and a heroic figure like Orlando for a gun to bring about his ‘roll-over’, his ‘ricorso’, the revolution. The revolutionary transformation may in part be a Faustian exchange therefore: one’s home and one’s fellow man are given for a gun, for some change in fortune. Butt’s narrative now seems to jump the gun as he exclaims ‘bung goes the enemay I insurrectioned’, before the actual shooting. It craftily combines ‘bang goes the enemy’ with ‘bung’ and ‘enema’, execution with a foiled excretion. It marks the moment of this purgative act as like a ‘bunging’ with an enema. Butt bungs up HCE with his ‘enema’, and shoots. If we don’t interpret a literal but allegorical shooting then we have an analogy for buggery.¹³ We are then toying with the homosexual version of the fall, for which Joyce drew on Oscar Wilde’s experience of betrayal by one who knew of his homosexual leanings. In this allegorical treatment, the traitor is Butt whose name, of course, suddenly takes on a new meaning.¹⁴ Joyce could also be drawing on his story in Dubliners, ¹³ Norris, Decentered Universe, 63. ¹⁴ Taff, like Butt, also alludes to a ‘rear end’, evoking the taffrail found at the stern of a ship.

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‘An Encounter’, where a sinister old man recounts with pleasure a fantasy of punishing a boy. When Joyce writes ‘enemy’ we can interpret Satan but also Wyndham Lewis, the artist and, briefly, friend of Joyce’s, who produced the one-man review The Enemy between 1927 and 1929. The friendship, rivalry, and eventually antagonisms, between Joyce and Wyndham Lewis provided them both with material for their work. As we know, Joyce appears in Lewis’s Time and Western Man and in The Childermass.¹⁵ In response, Lewis appears in Finnegans Wake, especially in the ‘Mookse and the Gripes’ and the ‘Ondt and the Gracehoper’ episodes. He may play a large role here, given that Joyce toyed with Lewis’s Welshness. Taff or Taffy is a stereotyped name for a Welshman, as Pat or Paddy is for an Irishman. Joyce has Butt turning a noun, ‘insurrection’, into a verb, boasting, as a literary revolutionary, that he ‘insurrectioned’ and shot his man. Now he exclaims ‘Tumbleheaver!’ as he recalls watching ‘the unbeliever’, ‘tumble over!’ The one falling here may also be the heaver of tumblers—HCE’s manservant in the pub, Sackerson. Joyce revised Taff’s apparently admiring reply adding: ‘And bullyclaver of ye, bragadore-gunneral’; ‘very clever, down at Balaclava, you boasting bragging gun-toter’, but it’s pointed too: ‘you bully with a cleaver, general of the braggarts, afflicted with gonorrhoea’. And then he inserted before it ‘I’m believer’, echoing Butt’s previous exclamation, a declaration of conversion and faith. This is a typical Mutt and Jeff mode of mishearing and misquoting in their dialogues as ‘tumbleheaver’ bounces back in ‘I’m believer’. As we’ll see in Part III, it is one of the ways the book reproduces and extends itself, taking its own elements and morphing them in a pretended process of mishearing: it’s the Chinese whisper’s law of serial misheard transformation, a textual version of Noah’s generative law of going forth and multiplying. Taff interprets the scene: ‘You were shutter reshottus and sieger besieged’, signifying an ironic reversal of fortunes: the stitcher stitched and the conqueror conquered. The stitcher stitched derives from Thomas Carlyle’s 1831 Sartor Resartus, a novel about a German philosopher who develops a philosophy of clothes—that is, of appearance. Its use echoes with the preceding story about Kersse, the hunchback and the tailor, who makes a suit (badly) for Kersse. But for ‘Sartor’ Joyce writes ‘shutter’ (originally ‘shooter’¹⁶), someone closing a door or the shutter on a camera. For it’s not just a gun that is shooting, but a camera. A photo of a celebrity is being taken, presumably for blackmail. The one with the ‘shutter’ (the ‘shooter’) is Butt, and yet the ‘shitter’ is the Russian General. Butt and HCE, Buckley and the General, are indistinguishably ¹⁵ Dennis Brown, Intertextual Dynamics with in the Literary Group of Joyce, Lewis, Pound and Eliot (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 95–7 and 111–18. ¹⁶ 47480–7v; JJA 55: 14.

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combined in this phrase. ‘Sieger besiegt’ (originally ‘Sieger besieged’¹⁷) echoes ‘shutter reshottus’ and means the ‘conqueror conquered’ in German. National Socialists at this time were chanting ‘Sieg Heil’ en masse. ‘Caesar’ is voiced too—Emperor of Rome and, as Julius, the archetypal European military leader, assassinee, and another version of the Russian General. Butt’s reply now extends his description of his target: Butt—Bloodymuddymuzzle! Kaptan (backsights to his bared!), His Embulence the frustrate fourstar Russkacruscan, Allaf O’Khorwan, connunderumcheff. (352.29–34 and 47480–15; JJA 55: 29 and 31)

HCE has become a Captain, with a bared backside, whose bare back Butt has his sights aimed at. This ‘backsights . . . bared’ inverts and jostles ‘whitesides . . . beard’ from earlier. A ‘backsight’ is a term used in surveying and mapping to calculate the elevation of a rough piece of inclined ground. Looking back from a rod in a new position at a rod in a former position produces an angle—the slope’s inclination. Backsights tell you, physically, where you are in relation to where you’ve been, how much higher or lower. Birthdays, metaphorically, are temporal personal ‘backsights’, points determined by an earlier event (your birth and other birthdays), distributed serially over the slopes of your life, from which you can look back to see how far you’ve come, risen, or fallen. Here it describes Butt the sniper’s view and focus on his target, the General’s backside, as he looks back at his own past below him. Butt gives the Russian General further embellishing descriptions: Joyce takes eminence, then fuses it with ambulance and embolism. The presence of embolism is fascinating here. It means insert or intercalate, from the Greek meaning to ‘throw in’. It frequently carries negative connotations, as in the occlusion of a blood vessel that can produce sudden unconsciousness and paralysis. These are things HCE is heading for, as a bullet is heading for him, which will insert itself as an embolism. An embolism can also be constructive and corrective—it is a period of time entered into the calendar to bring the regular calendar in line with the solar calendar (whose cycle does not have a perfect number of days). The insertion of February the twenty-ninth to make a leap year, and so tidy up the solar calendar is an embolism. We might say an earwig, piercing the ear, is an embolism. As an embolism, or rather ‘embulence’, HCE is therefore an insertion into Butt’s field of view and world view. As ‘embulence’, a verbal embolism has been inserted into the word, obstructing one and reconstructing another. Indeed, though we think that words in Finnegans Wake consist of ‘portmanteau’ combinations, the language is also ‘embolitic’, containing words or letters thrown into the midst of other ¹⁷ 47480–7v; JJA 55: 14.

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words, pushing them out of their customary situation. This pathological term proves to be more suitable than the polite domestic associations of Carroll’s notion of the ‘portmanteau’. If HCE is being represented by a misspelled ambulance, despite being linguistically battered, he is carrying or destined to carry the wounded. Butt’s attack, then, is cruel, breaking conventions of war that would respect, for instance, the work of the Red Cross. The ‘fourstar’ commander is now also ‘frustrate’, very nearly an anagram of fourstar, which sounds like both ‘first-rate’ and ‘free state’. The first ‘free state’ commander in chief of Ireland was Michael Collins, the most powerful figure in the IRA as it emerged in 1919 and who helped negotiate the Anglo-Irish treaty with the British in 1921. The IRA subsequently split over this treaty into the Irish Free State army (led by Collins) and the Irregulars (led by de Valera), and a civil war ensued. Collins, frustrated at the time in his hopes for the Free State, was assassinated in an ambush during the civil war. No-one quite knows which side fired the gun. In this context, Joyce seems to be imagining the sniper owning up to—or taking credit for—this crime, relating a clandestine tale that had never been adequately told. At this stage, Joyce also adds a number of Islamic names, mixing them with disparate material, reflecting perhaps that the Crimean conflict originated in a dispute between Turkey and Russia, a Muslim and a Christian state.¹⁸ In ‘Allaf O’Khorwan’, Allah, God, joins with Olaf, a representative Nordic man, to become ‘Allaf’, a laugh of sorts. The Koran, the core-one, the crown, and the surname O’Coran are all sounded in ‘O’Khorwan’. Butt’s target is like the court jester, the laugh of the King. Taff, replying to Butt, picks up on this imagery: Taff—And the name of the most marsiful, the gragious one! In sobber sooth and in sauber civiles? And to the dirtiment of the curtailment of his lower man? (353.03–05 and see 47480–15; JJA 55: 29)

Allah, in the Bismillah, is most merciful, but this ‘connunderumcheff’ (note that the vowels have changed since the previous draft) is the opposite: ‘marsiful’, Mars-like, martial, and military. Allah may be gracious, but here the term is combined with Russian ‘graze’ meaning stormy, a word transferred ¹⁸ Atherton offers an intriguing reading of the Christian–Muslim conflict, in a reading of Taff ’s ‘mockery’ of the Bismillah, here. It presents Joyce leaping into battle on the side of the Christians: ‘On the literary level Joyce has accepted the challenge involved in the work of Mohammed and Mallarmé and has defeated them. Joyce is setting himself up as the Christian champion, defeating Mohammed.’ (James Atherton, Books at the Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1960), 214). Is this ironic? It should certainly be provocation enough to prompt investigation into Joyce’s use of Islam and Islamic culture. But investigatory analysis has rarely got much beyond the philological. For a fine example of the latter see Aida Yared, ‘Joyce’s Sources: Sir Richard F. Burton’s Terminal Essay in Finnegans Wake’, JSA (2000), 124–66.

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from the Index Notebook (VI.B.46) which we encountered in Part I.¹⁹ It may therefore also carry ‘Oragious’, stormy. The usual placidity of grace is overturned by the storm—injecting violence as a potential component of grace. Taff’s disbelieving ‘in sooth?’ also extends now, through the law of doubling, so ‘sobber sooth?’ generates ‘in sauber civiles?’ Through ‘sauber’, German for clean, this means he’s done the deed under cover of clean civilian clothes, so Butt may not be a military man at all. The three questions in this speech have transformed the three questions in the previous draft. ‘Sharpshooter?’ has fallen out, though it will return in the next draft. Taff’s next words, arranged in the question ‘to the dirtiment of the curtailment of his lower man?’ are difficult. ‘Curtailment’ suggests censorship.²⁰ Working backwards might help: the ‘lower man’ may be the savage Shem, since Shaun continually described him as ‘low’, and wishes to curtail him. ‘Lower’ human impulses signify uncontrolled animal acts relating to the body and its fluids: excreta, urine, semen, sweat, etc. Our story concerns the sighting of a ‘higher’ man, a General, whose behaviour turns out, however, to be that of a lower man. The ‘curtailment’, the cutting off or suppression of this ‘primitive’ behaviour, in the cliché of Freudian theory, is a means of civilization being able to proceed and progress. Civilization is continually predicated on acts of cleaning up and censorship, at specifically personal and at broader cultural levels. It happens through the ‘curtailment of the lower man’. ‘Dirtiment’, meanwhile, can be glossed as the detriment and damage done through dirt—spoiling the process of cleansing. So the ‘dirtiment of curtailment of . . .’ is the degrading of the civilizing/censoring drives. If censorship hopes to conceal, cancel, prevent, or curtail ‘dirty’ acts in culture, then for censored culture to succeed in soiling censorship is a revenge, a revenge of dirt against the forces of social and cultural cleansing. Joyce was involved in just this revenge when the drive to censor Ulysses lost its case. The act of censorship is dirtied in its own failure; the censor gets mud thrown in his face. Butt, in a new speech, dispels Taff’s doubting questions by reasserting the facts: Butt—In sabre toothe and sombre saviles! With my bow on armer and hits leg an arrow cockshock hoodrobin. (353.09–21 and 47480–16; JJA 55: 31)

‘Sobber sooth’ and ‘sauber civiles’ are echoed in ‘sabre toothe and sombre saviles’, sharp truths from the sharpshooter, and all in a smart dark suit from ¹⁹ See above, p. 84 ²⁰ The phrase appears in III.3 during HCE’s speech: ‘I . . . devaleurised the base fellows for the curtailment of their lower man’ (543.02–03).

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Saville Row (but whether the shooter or the shot is wearing these, is not clear). He also expands on how he shot him: ‘with my bow on armer and hits leg an arrow cockshock hoodrobin’. We may unfold this concertina-ed sentence: with my bow on my arm, in armour, and it hits his leg, like an arrow, I shot Cock Robin/Robin Hood. Behind this phrase is a garbled version of the famous nursery rhyme: Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the sparrow, With my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin.

Joyce had already used the last verse of this rhyme in one of the earliest sketches for the novel back in 1923. Compare the following: All the birds of the sea they trolled out rightbold when they smacked the big kuss of Trustan with Usolde. (383.17–18, my rearrangement into verse)²¹

with its source: All the birds of the air Fell a-sighing and a-sobbing When they heard the bell toll for poor Cock Robin.

Joyce had exchanged the air with the sea, a murder with a kiss, loud sighing with bold singing, tragedy with comedy. At the eleventh hour he is returning to this folk song first parodied fourteen years before, so it becomes a framing motif for the whole novel’s. The nursery rhyme used as a source here is a piece of folklore, a bleak murder trial, an ecological tragedy, a solemn manual for the preparation of ritualistic sacrifice and burial. Separated from its origins, it is unclear whether it evokes a pagan ritual, or a political allegory relating to the assassination of William II of England.²² It was used alleogrically for the fall of Robert Walpole’s ministry in 1742. It remains a riddle, because, though it has many questions and they are all answered, it fails to ask or answer what the motive was behind killing the robin. The processes that follow, all firmly in place, seem to create the original need. The apparently motiveless glee in ²¹ 47481–98v; JJA 56: 18. ²² See Jean Harrowven, Origins of Rhymes, Songs and Sayings (London: Kaye and Ward, 1977), 92–5; and Peter Opie and Iona Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 151–6.

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destruction and murder was famously picked up by Byron after Keats’s death: ‘Who killed John Keats? | I said the quarterly, | So savage and Tartarly; | ’Twas one of my feats.’ There were also versions in the 1880s: ‘Who killed Home Rule?’ and ‘Who killed Gladstone?’²³ In any case, Joyce’s first rewrite has the birds spying on adultery, observers rather than actors in the ‘crime’, and he also turns away from ritual sacrifice to the ritual of adultery. Now in this second rewrite he has returned to the rhyme’s theme of murder. As he rewrites, Joyce shifts and inverts word order and introduces alien associations: ‘I shot Cock Robin’ becomes ‘Cockshock hoodrobin’. Cock Robin has been traditionally associated with Robin Hood, as Joyce seems to have known. In joining with this association Joyce makes the crime far from a triumphant destruction of tyranny. Butt boasts of destroying a popular outlaw hero, and/or the robin, a vulnerable innocent little bird. Joyce adds one more sentence to the tale’s conclusion, where an audience seems to comment: ‘And bud did down well right.’ Butt did damn well right, and he downed his drink right down. This little paragraph will remain like this right through to the first publication—so we shall not be returning to see how it changes.

1 . 4 . D RA F T I N G C H A RAC T E R D E S C R I P T I O N S A N D R EV I S I O N S F O R T H E F I R S T T Y PE S C R I P T: ‘ T H E O G O N I E S O F T H E D O M M E D’ As outlined above, Joyce worked in new material for the speeches onto the fair copy, then began work on the ‘character descriptions’ for Butt and Taff, which tell a story of their own not yet related in critical commentaries. They were roughly drafted on notesheets;²⁴ and then redrafted onto the facing pages of the fair copy we’ve just been looking at.²⁵ These were then integrated for the next typescript. Over the whole sketch (now some thirteen draft pages, with Butt and Taff exchanging dialogue seventeen times) he adds ‘character directions’ before each speech. These and several interruptive stage directions (one of which we shall analyse in detail later) are all, I would argue, a nod to Joyce’s compatriot and dramatist George Bernard Shaw, who inserted huge descriptions of his ²³ Respectively in The People (1886) and The Pall Mall Gazette (1886), quoted in Harrowven, Origins of Rhymes, 94. ²⁴ 47480–18, –20, –19, –36; JJA 55: 28, 30, 35, 36 (the latter is a page titled by Joyce ‘extras for Buckley’). ²⁵ 47480–14v, 15v; JJA 55: 28 and 30.

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characters and onstage action, sometimes digressing wildly from the dramatic action with material normally irrelevant to an actor, filling in histories of the characters, as if they were characters in a novel, constituting separate essays by themselves.²⁶ Shaw’s interference is the opposite of Shakespeare’s restraint in this area—and signals Shaw’s constraining involvement over his productions, his unironic involvement and visibility as artist. This aesthetic of authorial presence and making explicit is quite alien to the detachment associated with Joyce, though he filled out his characters in his play Exiles. Joyce had the additions typed, and our passage looks like this: Butt . . . till up come stumblebum with the same old domstoole story (whitesides do his beard!) and I seen his offensive (odious!) and, my oreland for a roliver, by the splunthers of colt and bung goes the enemay the Percy rally got me, sir. I insurrectioned and I shuttm. Tumbleheaver! Taff (too wellbred not to ignore the unzemlianess of the preceedings, in an effort towards autosotorisation, effaces himself in favour of the idiology alwise behounding his bump off homosodalism)—I’m believer. And ballyclaver of ye, bragadore-gunneral. The grand old spider! You were shutter reshottus and sieger besieged. A race of fiercemarchands countre a nation of shorpshoopers. Butt (miraculising into the Dann Deafir warcry as he shouts his thump and foul fingures up the heighohs of their ahs!)—Bluddymuddymuzzle! Kaptan (backsights to his bared!), His Embulence the frustrate fourstar Russkakruscan, Dom Allaf O’Khorwan, connunderumcheff. Taff (who has been sulphuring to himself all the pungataries of sin praktice in failing to furrow theogonies of the dommed)—And the name of the most marsiful, the gragious one! In sobber sooth and in souber civiles? And to the dirtiment of the curtailment of his lower man? Butt (deturbaned but he will be after making a bashman’s haloday out of his die and be diademmed)—In sabre tooth and sombre saviles! That he leaves nyet is my grafe. With my bow on armer and hits leg an arrow cockshock hoodrobin. Taff (his wool gatherings all over cromlim what with the birstol boys artheynes and is it her tour)—Shattamovick? Butt (pulling alast stark daniel while painfully the issue of his mouth diminuendoing, he becomes faint)— Shurenoff. Shutmup. And bud did down well right. And if he sung dumb in his glass darkly speech lit face to face on all around. (352.04–355.09, 47480–34, 35, and 181; JJA 55: 65, 67, and 69)

Butt now declares how he was coerced into doing the deed, or that he was himself hit—‘the Percy rally got me, sir’. This sounds like ‘Pierce O’Reilly’ ²⁶ Martha Black covers Joyce’s relation to Shaw in Shaw and Joyce: The Last word on Stolentelling (Gainesvillle: University of Florida Press, 1995), and though illustrations of the indebtedness of Joyce to Shaw are extensive (and at times forced), Black does not note this parallel theatrical technique in the Butt and Taff dialogue.

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the name for Earwicker morphed into French for the ballad that pours scorn on HCE at the end of I.2 (44–7). It is as if H. C. Earwicker made him shoot H. C. Earwicker. The ‘rally’ in here might well signal the mass rallies that were occurring at this time for Fascists in Europe: so it was the rally, with its hypnotic show of power, which coerced him into his quest to assassinate the ‘enemy’. Otherwise there is no change to this part of Butt’s speech. Taff, formerly without much character except as a listener and exclaimer, is filled out somewhat, given a psychology, actions, motives: Taff (too wellbred not to ignore the unzemlianess of the preceedings, in an effort towards autosotorisation, effaces himself in favour of the idiology alwise behounding his bump off homosodalism) (352.17–20 and 47480–34; JJA 55: 65)

He ‘effaces himself’ for several reasons: because he is ‘wellbred’; because he cannot ignore the ‘unzemlianess’, that is the unseemliness of what has come before and its unearthiness (from zemlya, Russian meaning land or earth); because he wants authorization for himself, a state that will save himself (‘auto-sotor’ is made-up Greek for self-saver); and because he prefers that something will stand in for him, ‘in favour of the idiology always behounding his bump off homosodalism’. The syntax is more resistant to elucidation than specific neologisms. Taff, unsettled by Butt’s story with its dirty and/or violent and/or revolutionary and/or homosexual elements, wants to make himself scarce. He wants to be substituted by something (by the ‘idiology’), which usually (‘alwise’) keeps something else ‘hounded’ at bay and out of sight, ‘behind’ (‘behounding’). This something else is ‘his bump off homosodalism’. ‘Homosodalism’, of course, makes a coy glance at the words ‘homosexual’ and ‘sodomy’, half veiling half unveiling both together. Since ‘sodality’ is a brotherhood, ‘Homosodalism’ could be translated literally as the ‘brotherhood of man’ or ‘brotherhood of the same’—a principle in Masonic theory, a hope to unite or bring together people across religions into its secret fraternity. Taff may, then, be a Mason. In the word ‘homosodalism’, combining, as it does, unities of men at different levels of intimacy (homosocial and homosexual), occurs Joyce’s joke about the blurred boundaries between different ‘homosocial’ relations. And so it is tempting to read Taff as having homosexual impulses, which he normally represses, that are appearing now during the tale, as a ‘bump’ (a bulge perhaps) that he hopes to ‘bump off’—to destroy. He plans to do this by talking through a language which he has developed for that very purpose, taking attention away from his all-tooexpressive body. This language is his ‘idiology’. This skews ‘ideology’ (as it had

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appeared in the first draft²⁷), just as ‘sodalism’ is a skewing of ‘socialism’, both words have other roots from which their new meanings can now generate: ‘idio-’ and ‘sodality’. Peculiar bodily desires are hidden behind this peculiar language. ‘Idiology’ is Joyce’s simple neologism, ten years before the word ‘idiolect’ was first used, though I suggest that Joyce imagined a similar meaning. An ‘idiolect’ is a ‘linguistic system differing in some details from that of all other speakers of the same dialect or language’ (OED, first cited 1948). A discourse peculiar to an individual because of certain elements unique to it, chimes well as a description of the language of Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s use of the suffix ‘-ology’ onto the previous ‘idio-’ can take the word in two directions: to something similar to ‘idiolect’ (that is, ‘odd-language’) or something different, the study, as a discipline, of the ‘idio-’, of the separate and distinct. Finnegans Wake is surely an ‘idiological’ investigation in both senses. No one has ever reused this striking neologism since Joyce’s coinage, as the language of Finnegans Wake, with its uncharted depths, does not make a bid to be inserted into academic discourse, something the language of academic writing is, of course, keen to do, coining new terms or applying new concepts. Not absorbed, Finnegans Wake’s ‘idiology’, its study of the strange, retains its ‘idiological’ status as ‘odd speech’. It does not attempt to be a universal language but a language of particularity. Languages evolve through the emergence and then absorption of linguistic systems that differ from the systems in which they emerge: Dante’s Divine Comedy was written in a language that had not yet been written, but then became absorbed and evolved into the main language of Italy. Spoken dialect becomes written idiolect which becomes written dialect, a national literature. But Finnegans Wake always retains its ‘idiolectic’ status as peculiar, odd, and as a study of its own peculiarities. It will not become the language of Ireland or Europe. It does not mark, then, the inauguration—found in epic—of a language for a nation, but it might constitute the inauguration—as found in comedy—of a style. Rather than defining a nation and its destiny, this style represents an approach to language that could be transnational, from everywhere and nowhere. Effacing himself in favour of his idiology, Taff is like those Modernist writers who extinguish themselves in the process of writing their strange and obscure works, effacing their role of being representational for a nation. Taff may be like Joyce composing Finnegans Wake. Taff has more to say about Butt’s exploits and the combat. It concerns ‘A race of fiercemarchands countre a nation of shorpshoopers’, marking the

²⁷ See 47480–18; JJA 55: 32.

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return of ‘sharp shooter’ from the earlier draft. This envisions the conflict as multilayered, representative of conflicts between any combination of the following:

A race of

fierce merchants marchers (French) field marshals fishmongers

contre versus country

a nation of

shopkeepers (English) sharpshooters sheeplike shoppers

By having a ‘race’ against (contre) or countering a ‘nation’ and with the term ‘country’ hovering here too, Joyce undercuts the terms used to describe groups of people. Do the Irish, French, Russian, and English belong to a country, a race, or a nation? If a war takes place, is it between races, nations, or countries? Such terms help turn groups of disparate individuals into a single massive identity. Taff’s comment is performing the reverse: the individual entities of the General and Buckley are turned into allegories of national entities. The categories here are ambivalent—the dualities of good and bad, underdog and favourite are not clearly assigned. Butt may be a ‘sharpshooter’ against a ‘field marshal’ so he’s an underdog David against an odds-on Goliath. He may be a ‘shopper’ separated from a ‘fierce merchant’ by only a ‘counter’. But is he more of a ‘merchand’ (French trader—during British embargoes, perhaps) competing with the ‘shopkeepers’ (as Englishman were described by Napoleon)? Is he a fierce and unrooted tradesman working in the competitive marketplace against the property-owning bourgeoisie? If so this reverses the former assignment, being one of the first groups against the second. Taff’s words can be taken either way, as with ‘shotter reshottus’. Taff’s observations may be ambivalent because he doesn’t know whose side he’s on. He may be hedging his bets, unable now to answer who is the better man: tyrant turned victim, or rebel turned victimizer. Butt’s character direction fills him out, shouting enthusiastically: Butt—(miraculising into the Dann Deafir warcry as he shouts his thump and foul fingures up the heighohs of their ahs!) (352.27–9 and 47480–36; JJA 55: 67)

While Taff effaced himself, Butt openly displays himself and his body: ‘miraculising’, appearing and transforming miraculously, performing transformational miracles. He cries out with a warcry as he ‘shoves his thumb and four fingers’ and/or his ‘ugly face’ [foul figure] ‘up the full height of his arse’. But the graphic coding of ‘arse’ is concealed behind the quiet and tired sighs: ‘heigho’ and ‘ah’. Butt’s aggression is that of the noisy against the quiet. He carries out his act quickly (‘dean deifir’ means ‘hurry up!’ in Irish). And he doesn’t just shout and thump, he ‘shouts his thump’, as someone might

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‘throw his voice’. ‘Shout’ is transformed into a transitive verb, with an object on which it acts: he performs his violence orally. Joyce will recycle this phrase in the ‘Berkeley and Patrick’ section in Book IV which he is on the point of rewriting, preparing for its inclusion: ‘As he shuck his thumping fore features apt the hoyhop of His Ards’ (612.34–5). This strengthens the links between these episodes as Shem/Shaun conflicts, and means Berkeley and his philosophy leak into Buckley the sniper. The Berkeley and Patrick sketch is a climax of their conflict, a sign of domination between men, as one is sodomized by another. To be buggered may register metaphorically as a defeat, to have another win over you. The remarkable thing is that the desire to penetrate during anal sex is a sign here of machismo, not an un-heterosexual emasculating urge: the desire is turned into a weapon of vengeance. Sodomy is constructed as perverse, effeminate, decadent, and pathological on the one hand, but on the other as an aggressive assertion of competitive vengeful masculinity. One representative of this kind of masculinity, in whom homosexuality is utterly taboo, is Rudyard Kipling. Butt’s war cry is ‘Dann Deafir’—with an allusion to ‘Danny Deever’, the eponymous soldier of one of Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. This strongly resembles Butt’s tale of Buckley, since it concerns a dialogue between two soldiers about a soldier—Deever—being shot, executed for killing a sleeping comrade. Unlike Butt, Deever voices no war cry, though his soul after his execution ‘whimpers over’ead’ as it passes through the air. ‘Deafir’ codes a separate quiet little comedy here on top, as he shouts loudly because he’s talking to or about someone with a ‘deaf ear’—possibly Taff whose name might sound like ‘deaf’, especially if you were deaf. ‘Dom’ an echo of ‘Dann’, both of which evoke ‘lord’, is inserted in Butt’s speech to make ‘Dom Allaf O’Khorwan’, distantly sounding ‘Daniel O’Connell’, the visionary political leader of Irish Catholics in the nineteenth century. Butt is coming across now as a boaster, a braggart, a loud mouth, a show-off, thrilled at having destroyed a composite of promising Irish political figures: Daniel O’Connell and Michael Collins. The heroism of assassinating a tyrant or some powerful enemy is being heavily qualified. Joyce’s revisions are compromising the possible glorification of the rebellious killing. For Taff’s reply Joyce inserts the following description: Taff (who has been sulphuring to himself all the pungataries of sin praktice in failing to furrow theogonies of the dommed) (352.35–353.01 and 47480–36; JJA 55: 67)

As before, where Joyce gave Taff several reasons simultaneously for ‘effacing’ himself, Joyce here piles on simultaneous activities for him: ‘sulphuring to himself . . . in failing to furrow . . .’. It seems that Taff is trying, but failing,

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to interpret specific theological problems. Taff is Butt’s audience as we are Joyce’s—furrowing through his work. Saint Patrick’s Purgatory is a name frequently given to caves and large holes in the ground, as though entrances to Underworlds, which were often sites of pilgrimage in Ireland. Taff can be imagined as Dante journeying and suffering in hell, in its sulphurous pong, observing and picturing to himself the consequences of the varieties of ‘sin practice’ and the agonies of the damned. He does this as a consequence of failing (‘in failing’) to ‘furrow’—to follow with furrowed brow—‘theogonies of the dommed’. Hesiod, an ancient Greek poet, wrote about the gods and their origin in a work known as the ‘Theogeny’, literally how the gods were generated. Taff has been trying to understand their origin insofar as the gods are ‘dommed’, dumb and damned, and have power invested in them: ‘domed’. What is the origin of the sinful and doomed gods, he wonders, as he hears of their ultimate destruction? Taff, giving himself difficult unsolvable problems to consider is more introverted and thoughtful than Butt. Butt’s new character description describes him as determined to honour future anniversaries of his act: Butt (deturbaned but he will be after making a bashman’s haloday out of his die and be diademmed) (353.06–08 and 47480–36; JJA 55: 67)

The music-hall mimic is converting his headgear: taking off a turban and hoping for a halo to be his diadem (a small arching crown). On this day of conversion, he is determined to make something special of the event of the killing, make an anniversary, a holiday, a halo-day, for the bashing, the assassination of a man. His die-ing will form the shape of that day, as a die is used to impress forms on steel, whether as sheet or bolts. Consequently Butt will be crowned, ‘diademmed’, echoing with Taff’s ‘the dommed’, and both echoing with ‘damned’. This crowning will bind securely (from diadoumenos, Greek for bound on both sides²⁸). He will do it and be damned! It won’t be a genuine holiday, just a ‘busman’s holiday’. For the busman, travelling somewhere on holiday is like any other day since his job involves travelling. A ‘bashman’s’ holiday would presumably involve lots of fighting. Butt is determined that every day will be a day of conflict. Joyce extends Butt’s boasts, adding the words: ‘that he leaves nyet is my grafe’, that he lives not is my doing (‘grafe’ means work (like ‘graft’) and ‘nyet’, of course, is Russian for ‘no’. But the strange word ‘grafe’ echoes with ‘grave’, too. So the fact that he doesn’t live may also signal Butt’s death—a punishment of Butt may be looming, an execution like that of Danny Deever. ²⁸ Rose, Index, 119. VI.B.46, 59.

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But is death the outcome? Might we not read: ‘That he lives yet —that he still lives—is my grief’? Indeed, the word in the first draft was ‘grief’.²⁹ Butt has missed or succeeded in hitting but not killing someone—they live yet. These contradictory outcomes are linked by Butt’s eagerness to have his goal accomplished: egotistically boasting when he succeeds, self-indulgently grieving when he fails. Joyce spins parallel lines of narration with disunified outcomes. Hermeneutic cruxes result in which multiple readings alternate, engendering different stories, blending the different emotions that can be produced as responses to a single event. Taff’s next speech gets the following new character description: Taff (his wool gatherings all over cromlim what with the birstol boys artheynes and is it her tour)—Shattamovick? (353.34–354.02 and 47480–35; JJA 55: 67)

Taff, before his one-word question, is ‘woolgathering’, in a crisis of idle dreaming, of pursuing a foolish design. It is the end of a decline for Taff from the previous character descriptions where he wished first to efface himself, then suffered within himself, now loses it completely. There is a sense of dispersal—everything that he’s gathered has been scattered ‘all over Crumlin’ a part of Dublin. Oliver Cromwell and the Kremlin are joined to signify Russian and English revolutions, and the confusion and turmoil that can instigate and put an end to certain artistic or political dreams, or metaphysical questioning. This reflects the moment of Butt’s narrative, with its king-killing fiction, and the moment of Joyce’s telling, as 1937–8 sees the impending military violence of Europe disrupting the dreams of several dreamers—both political and artistic. Taff is bothered by the children: by brutal ‘borstal boys’ from Bristol (the city to which Dublin was granted by Henry II), by the wrestling twins, Shem and Shaun. And he’s bothered by Isolde, Iseut (‘Is it her’), and the ‘tour’ she’s on, roaming freely, endangered. Taff, distinct from the children, bothered by the forces that represent them, is like the father here, like the very character in Butt’s story who has been shot (or missed). Taff is identifying with the victim, and so Butt is shading into his frightening enemy. Butt rounds off the story, and a closing character description is drafted: Butt (pulling alast stark daniel while painfully the issue of his mouth diminuendoing, he becomes faint)— Shurenoff. (355.03–05 and see 47480–35; JJA 55: 67)

Butt’s simple climax is to take a last drink (a ‘daniel’ being a glass of O’Connell’s Ale) and then his voice, alas, like Alice’s body, shrinks (with a faint innuendo), ²⁹ 47480–36; JJA 55: 36.

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gets quieter, fainter, begins to pass away, in an ending where the word ‘alast’ pre-echoes the last line of the book. His becoming faint is like the soldier who manages to tell his story, hand over the message just before dying, like the runner who brought the news about the battle of Marathon, or the ‘bloody man’ in the first scene of Macbeth. Life is equated with narration: our story ends when we stop telling it. We are at the Butt end of Butt’s life. He will merge with, and resurrect within, Taff.

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2 . 1 . R EV I S I N G T H E F I R S T T Y PE S C R I P T: ‘ P R RO N TO ! . . . S PA R RO ! ’ Joyce made considerable changes to the first typescript, both interlineations and extensive changes on separate pages being keyed to the typescript. Many came from the Index Notebook, from notes under headings such as White Slave, Army, Easter 1916, Bolshevism, Insects, and the languages of Russian, Armenian, Greek, Bulgarian, Polish. They were then integrated for the second typescript (where, just as I have left them below, the speakers’ names were underlined). Here is Butt’s first speech, leading up to the shooting: Butt . . . till . . . up come stumblebum (ye olde cottemptable!), his urssian gemenal, in his scutt’s rudes unreformed with the same old domstoole story and his upleave the fallener as is greatly to be petted (whitesides do his beard!) and I seen his brichashert offensive vise a vise them scharlot runners (odious the flurtation of it! Just maddeling he was!) and, my oreland for a rolvevor, by the splunthers of colt and bung goes the enemay the Percy rally got me, sir. And after meath the dulwich. We I insurrectioned and, be the procuratress of the hory synotts, I shuttm, missus, like a wide sleever! Hump to dump! Tumbleheaver! (351.34–352.15 and 47480–33v, 34; JJA 55: 64–5 and 47480–56; JJA 55: 113–15)

Most of the additions here are about prostitution and the British military appearing together in the first parenthesis: the Old Contemptibles was the name for the British Expeditionary Force fighting in France during the First World War. By calling them ‘ye olde’ Butt mocks the cliché of self-proclaimed English conservatism (as in ‘ye olde coffee shoppe’). But Joyce has changed this nickname for certain British forces to ‘cottemptable’—translatable as ‘cradle snatcher’: temptable by the cot. The rest of the prostitution references may not refer to children, nevertheless child prostitution can be inferred. There is a source-clue in this passage in the words ‘wide sleever’, or ‘white slaver’. A study entitled The White Slave Market came out in 1912 from which Joyce took much of the material added here; Scott’s Road (‘Scutt’s rudes’) was the red light district in Shanghai, a prostitute a fallen woman may be known as, a scarlet woman, a harlot or a ‘magdalene’ (‘maddeling’), words which all echo here. A runner touts for a brothel, a procuratress procures girls for it, a white slaver is a big-time pimp, a petted whore is kept by a pimp for himself, and a missus is a Madame. Being taken out to Shanghai they were coerced into flirtation with young Britishers to blackmail them.³⁰ Everyone involved is a ‘hoary sinner’. ³⁰ See Rose, Index, 123.

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Grace Eckley finds in these allusions to the trade in girls signposts to the story of William T. Stead, a journalist and social reformer who unveiled child prostitution in London in 1885.³¹ He proved that 13-year-old virgins were available by procuring one himself. In so doing, he was himself found guilty of abduction under a Criminal Law Act, which he had promoted only a few years before. Eckley’s equation of HCE with Stead is a classic case of overstating identification, but the comic irony of a righteous reformer falling by trying to lift the fallen (note ‘unreformed’) speaks to the heart of the ambivalent fall in Finnegans Wake. In the HCE-as-Stead context, Butt’s sighting now seems like police-state surveillance, spying on someone who is trying to reveal some awful practice and attack forms of established power. Butt is now boasting about it, disbelieving the hero’s alternative ‘story’ turning him into a villain, as the establishment did with Stead. His alternative is about ‘lifting a fallen woman who is greatly to be pitied’. But the one to be ‘pitied’ is, in fact, ‘petted’—from ‘pet’, a pimp’s favourite. This puts the same slant on HCE’s activities as the courts did after arresting Stead for ‘procuring’ a young girl. They disbelieved his ‘vice ring’ story ‘vis-à-vis’ the white slave trade. Uplifting a fallen woman is linked in with the original fall—through the word ‘upleave’, which echoes with Eve and her apple, for which she reaches up through the leaves. The British military accompanies all this prostitution.³² Joyce combines it with notes from the previous index. It’s in his clothes: breeches and his shirt combined in ‘brichashert’ that carries ‘Britisher’ in it. He’s in uniform (‘unreformed’) that, rude and Scottish, might include a kilt—currently being hoisted. Britishness is there in its militia, battling with their Russian opponents in the Crimea. Opponents of this sort are twins: the British are the ‘urssian gemenal’, the twin of the Russian bear (‘ursa’) and Russia itself, now renamed the ‘USSR’, is rejigged as ‘urss’. The British commander in chief was Lord Raglan; the coat he sported and made popular, known as a Raglan, for its ‘wide sleeves’. To General Scarlet, in charge of the Light Brigade, Raglan sent a messenger (a ‘scharlot runner’) with a message which, misinterpreted, led to the Charge of the Light Brigade, a real and mythicalized encounter that represented folly, sacrifice, and an ambivalent outcome: a version of Butt’s shooting of his target. Elements of the charge are scattered throughout the surrounding episode in such phrases nearby as ‘the charge of a light barricade’ (349.10). Butt’s revolutionary act may be signalled in ‘après nous le déluge!’ a scarcely visible phrase concealed in ‘After meath the dulwich’. The self-important cry, ³¹ See Grace Eckley, The Steadfast ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Lanham: University Press of America, 1994). ³² Joyce was transferring notes he’d taken from John Brophy’s Songs and Slang of the British Soldier: 1914–1918 (London: Scholartis Press, 1930). See Rose, Index, 222.

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for those who think they represent the height of a decadent civilization, marks a the turning point. Without them, disaster will strike and everyone, should they survive, will have to begin again. It is a premonition of political and social collapse, made by those who believe their immediate entourage are essential to the system’s survival. It is thought Madame de Pompadour, the mistress and procuress (see ‘procuratress’ above) of Louis XV, coined the phrase. Though Butt thinks he’s a revolutionary, his vision is undercut by a subconscious aspiration for conventional social mobility. He wishes to move from ‘Meath’ (rural Ireland) to ‘Dulwich’—a suburb of London developed in the 1890s along fashionable ideas of the garden suburb. His revolutionary act will carry him from provincial obscurity to suburban prosperity (where obscurity will stay with him). With this revision ‘I’ is also changed to ‘We’, as Butt becomes a spokesman of a movement, more than a solitary sniper. The oath ‘by the procuratress of the hoary synotts’ evokes the ‘Procurator of the Holy Synod’, the title of the most powerful figure in the Russian Church. He was a lay figure appointed by the Tsar, frequently an army chief, and an emblem signifying that the Russian Church was virtually an arm of the State. His position, quite as much as the Tsar’s, would have been under threat from the anti-Tsarist anti-Church policies of the Communist Revolutionaries. In 1917 the revolutionary government appointed their own procurator. Joyce maintains the whole Russian context and the context of a Russian figure of power, and has Butt swearing by one in power and involved in prostitution. One suggestion of this twinning is to unveil the processes of prostitution at the heart of power—that power appoints people who procure others to prostitute themselves for that power. Having brought low this figure of power, Butt can now climax with a cry: ‘Hump to Dump!’ sending the hump-backed Humphrey, the Humpty Dumpty who talks suggestively to young girls in order to steel them into prostitution, to the dump, the tip, to earth. To dump is also the act of shitting, which Hump just thought he was innocently finishing. Joyce extends Taff’s character, working through the Russian Revolution, mostly in the character descriptions: Taff (camelsensing that the volkar boastsung is heading to sea vermelhion but too wellbred not to ignore the unzemlianess of the preceedings, in an effort towards autosotorisation, effaces himself in favour of the idiology alwise behounding his lumpy bump off homosodalism which means that if he has lain amain to lolly his liking he may pops lilly a young one to his herth) (352.16–352.22 and 47480–33v; JJA 55: 64 and 47480–56; JJA 55: 115)

Taff now senses that the ‘Volga boatsong’ and the vulgar bosun, the people’s (volk) bosun, the boasting song is ‘heading to sea vermelhion’, pushing out to sea, to the red sea, to the internationalism of communism, and going to see

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red, to get furious—giving Taff another reason to efface himself. The ‘Volga Boatsong’ is the effortful macho bass number that stirred the workers of the Russian Revolution, and was later recorded by Paul Robeson, a great bass of the 1930s, activist for Negro identity, a singer Joyce was undoubtedly aware of as we know from the other songs he made famous that appear, transformed, in this chapter, such as ‘Go Down Moses’ (314.05) and ‘Ole’ Man River’ (363.11).³³ In addition, Robeson became a supporter of the Soviet system, visiting it three times in the mid-thirties and voicing favourable opinions about it, thus heading to the ‘red sea’.³⁴ Joyce’s whole novel is also nearing its own end—as the river of the projected narrative structure moves through its estuary towards its own sea ending. Taff is that part of Joyce that listens to, questions, and comments on the story told by the writer part of him, the Butt. The song is heading from Russia across the Pacific to America, to the Gulf of California (the Vermilion Sea). Taff is ‘camelsensing’ all of this, using a transformed ‘horse sense’, a natural/animal common sense beneath a form determined by Butt saying ‘hump’ earlier. As a camel it’s as though he’s crossing the desert towards the red sea. Taff’s earlier camel-like ‘bump’ is revised to ‘lumpy bump’ just a few lines later. The character direction also offers an interpretation of Taff’s motives for effacing himself, which we saw earlier had something to do with his homosexual tendencies. (. . . which means that if he has lain amain to lolly his liking he may pops lilly a young one to his herth) (352.20–2 and JJA: 64 and 115)

This is tricky, undermining the simple ‘which means that if . . .’ at the beginning. If Taff does x in order to do y then he may perhaps do z. What are x, y, and z? It’s difficult, because in x Joyce has given us an oxymoron: ‘lain amain’ meaning literally ‘lying with all force’. In y and z, Joyce has made verbs out of two nouns: lolly (to ice-cream?) and lilly (to flower-like-a-lily?). To lolly may also be to ‘make like an ice-cream’, be made for licking. In y ‘Lolly his liking’ inverts ‘lick his lolly’, which might indicate making the one he likes or who resembles him (another meaning for ‘liking’) available to lick. Or it means giving a lolly to one he likes. But doubts about his sensual tendencies are undercut by a more innocent discourse taken from carol singing: ‘Lullay his liking’ is a sixteenth-century carol about the baby Jesus, the opposite type of song to Butt’s ‘Volga Boatsong’. To ‘lilly’ may be to flower, to make like a lily, or to make like a flower, to make homosexual. ‘Pops lilly’ suggests ³³ ‘Godeown moseys and skeep thy beeble bee!’ (313.05) and ‘Almayne Rogers . . . Heat wives rasing. They jest keeps rosing. He jumps leaps rizing. Howlong!’ (363.8–11). ³⁴ e.g. ‘In Russia you feel the vitality of a people who are building a new world.’ See Philip S. Foner (ed.), Paul Robeson Speaks (London: Quartet Books, 1978), 103.

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the bursting of a maidenhead: deflowering by popping a flower. The ‘herth’ indicates that he may lure a young one home. Taff seems to have all these sensuous deviant tendencies: if he indulges in licking (of what exactly we can only guess), or giving out sweets, then he is likely to be a paedophile. It is not surprising that he wants to efface himself, as Butt tells a story of shooting someone suspected of homosexuality and paedophilia. So if Taff is the sort who lies with all force (‘amain’), strenuously avoiding making any effort, he may perhaps lure a young one to his home. If he has some homosexual or narcissistic tendencies (lollying his liking, lying in bed), then he’ll probably grow into a paedophile. This is a diagnosis of decadence: that one piece of bad behaviour leads inevitably to another, and we’re all taken down with them. Joyce also makes small adjustments to Taff’s impressed speech, and to Butt’s character descriptions: Taff . . . —Oholy rasher, I’m believer! And Oho bullyclaver of ye, bragadoregunneral. The grand ohold spider! You were shutter reshottus and sieger besieged. Aha race of fiercemarchands countre a nation counterination of shorpshoopers. Butt (miraculising into the Dann Deafir warcry as, his bigotes bristling he shouts his thump and feeh fauh foul fingures up the heighohs of their ahs!)—Bluddymuddymuzzle! Kaptan (backsights to his bared!), His Cumbulent Embulence the frustate fourstar Russkakruscan, Dom Allaf O’Khorwan, connunderumchuff. (352.22–34 and 47480–34v, 35; JJA 55: 66–7 with 47480–56, 57; JJA 55: 115 and 117)

Taff laughs or sighs weakly: ‘oho . . . oho . . . oho . . . aha’ or stutters nervously to help him through his speech. As a pre-echo it prepares the ground for the ‘heighohs of their ahs!’ in Butt’s character description (see above), made up of the high ‘O’s’ and holes that indicate HCE’s hole, the holes for the shit and the shot. But it’s also the ‘O-o heave ho’ that makes up the chorus of the ‘Volga Boatsong’. O Holy Russia! is sounded in ‘holy rasher’—as of bacon. The target is now shot as if he’s a pig, Butt having him for breakfast as a rasher (so-called because it cooks quickly). A rasher is also a fish, the vermilion rockfish. Now, we have just been heading out to the ‘Vermilion Sea’—off Western America, in which a fish called the rasher or vermilion rockfish is found. The rockfish has a Latin name sebastes, and ‘Seabeastius’ is a word used elsewhere in the Wake (104.06). It signals the name that Oscar Wilde gave to himself after coming out of prison and moving to Paris: Sebastian Melmoth. So the relation is as follows: ‘rasher’ is a fish, whose scientific name bears a resemblance to the nickname Wilde gave himself. This is to say that the ‘rasher’ is, at a remove of three of four translations, Oscar Wilde. He is so far removed that he is hardly there, a near-total metamorphosis through an associative chain of nominal

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effacement. Taff declares that Butt has caught one hell of a big fish—a sacred fish—a ‘holy rasher’, a sea-beast—Oscar Wilde—one who rashly went too quickly to court and lost.³⁵ In Butt’s reply, Joyce gives him a moustache which bristles, a clichéd trait in a warlike figure, all the bigots within him bristling. (Joyce takes bigodes—Portuguese for moustache—from the Index Notebook.) His ‘foul fingures’, being thrust up HCE’s ‘ahs’, are now ‘feeh fauh foul fingures’, with an echo of that little ogrish ditty ‘Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman/iridzman, be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.’ Joyce adds the word ‘Cumbulent’ to produce an HCE acronym, which also echoes with ‘Cumberland’, that is, the Duke of Cumberland, the notorious military leader known as the ‘butcher’, who massacred the Scots at Culloden in 1746. A few words are added to Taff’s next speech, where, as we may recall, the character description had him wondering about the ‘theogonies’ of the damned: Taff (who, asbestas can, has been sulphuring to himself himsalves all the pungataries of sin praktice in failing to furrow theogonies of the dommed)—And the name of the most marsiful, the gragious one! In sobber sooth and in souber civiles? And to the dirtiment of the curtailment of his lower all of man? Notshoh? (352.35–353.05 and 47480–34v, 35; JJA 55: 66–7 with 47480–57; JJA 55: 117)

‘Asbestas can’, codes a fireproof asbestos container, Taff wrapping himself in it against the fires of Butt’s speech and those that torment the ‘dommed’/‘damned’. He is making an effort at working things out as best as he can. ‘Himself’ is too transparent a word, so Joyce turns it into ‘himsalves’, pluralizing it and inserting salv-ation into his period in the ‘purgatories’ of ‘sin practice’. ‘Lower man’ is universalized to become ‘lower all of man’. Taff’s query voices ‘not so?’ But why it is ‘shoh’ we can only guess, a drunken sound perhaps (‘shome mishtake shurely’), or possibly the catastrophe of a ‘Shoah’, prior to its current application as a word signalling the Jewish Holocaust. Just as ‘self’ above became ‘salves’, ‘he’ becomes ‘thems’ in the following additions to Butt: Butt (maoment scoffin, but apoxyomenously deturbaned but he thems bleaching banes will be after making a bashman’s haloday out of the euphorions hagiohygiecynicism his die and be diademmed)—Yastsar! In sabre tooth and sombre saviles! Senonnevero! That he leaves nyet is my grafe. For when ³⁵ For Joyce’s early incorporation of Wilde material into the Wake see Sam Slote, ‘Wilde Thing: Concerning the Eccentricities of a Figure of Decadence in Finnegans Wake’, in David Hayman and Sam Slote (eds.), European Joyce Studies, 5. Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 101–23.

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meseemim beheaving up that sob of turv for to weepimself. Prronto! With my bow on armer and hits leg an arrow cockshock hoodrobin rockrogn sparro! (353.06–21; 47480–34v, 35; JJA 55: 66–7 with 47480–57, 58; JJA 55: 117, 119)

The revisions to his character descriptions combine Greek elements with morbid imagery. Butt is ‘momentarily coughing/scoffing’, gruesomely reminding us of the coffin. He is determined ‘apoxyomenously’—a real obstacle of a word. Is it approximately or pointedly ominous, since ‘apoxy’ means pointed in Greek? Or is Joyce chiefly giving Butt the Greek word apaxioumenos, which means ‘to disclaim as unworthy’?³⁶ Such is Butt’s concluding attitude to his target HCE, who has done something that pushes him to being disclaimed as unworthy. Joyce revised ‘he’ (which had referred to Butt himself) and substituted ‘thems bleaching banes’, with an echo of the Afro-American spiritual song ‘them bones, them bones them dry bones’ with a source in the Old Testament where God commands Ezekiel to prophecy to bones and thus bring them to life, as Shem does at the end of Chapter 7: ‘He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak’ (195.05). The bones are white, purified by bleach but as ‘banes’ (poisons or a curse) they’re actively ‘bleaching’ since bleach is a poison. Forces that purify and poison, and that Butt is determined will help make a holy-day, as we saw earlier, belong to those religious purity movements that try to bleach society of its ‘dirtier’ activities and pleasures. Butt’s dislike of HCE’s improper arse-wiping puts Butt in the purist camp. The presence of these forces appear in the word ‘hagiohygiecynicism’, which shunts the Greek words for ‘holy’ and for ‘health’ or ‘sanitation’ (Hygeia is the goddess of medicine) onto the philosophy of the Cynics, with its fault-finding contempt for the enjoyments of life. Righteous cleansing disdain for life is part of a purism that Joyce’s writings seem continually to militate against. This ‘cynicism’ is described as ‘euphorious’,³⁷ a portmanteau of euphoric (fecund, healthy, cheerful, and optimistic) and euphonious (pleasant sounding). Together in a reduced form they seem like a contradiction in terms: ‘cheerful contempt’. The parts of this neologism may be analysable as such, but what it does in its context is harder to grasp. Its syntax will be changed in the next typescript so it reads the ‘hagiohygiecynicism of his die’. But the ‘. . . cynicism of his die’ is a strange phrase, and why it should be euphoric/euphonious is difficult to answer. Tentatively I suggest that the clash of words represents a clash of ideologies, classical Greek encountering the Christian Orthodox Greek. ³⁶ Rose, Index, 119. ³⁷ Typed up incorrectly as ‘euphorions’, then corrected in the next draft, 47480–100; JJA 55: 185.

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Turning to Butt’s triumphant speech, he now confirms his action gaily: ‘Yastsar!’ ‘Yes, sir! Yes, tsar!’ The tsar is now food (from the Russian yastua) for the worms, for his conqueror. When he then exclaims ‘Senonnevero!’ Butt is trying to cover his tracks about the possible inauthenticity of his tale with the Italian phrase Se non è vero è ben trovato. If it’s not true at least it’s well told. Statements of it being true and sharp—‘in sabre tooth’ and a ‘sober truth’—are now undermined by this exclamation. Joyce also inserts an element explicitly describing something from the original story, but which has been deferred until now: ‘For when meseemim beheaving up that sob of turv for to weepimself’, ‘when I saw him picking up that sod of turf to wipe himself . . . .’. This mixes in words associated with lamentation, spattering the sentence: ‘heaving, sob, weeping, wiping [tears]’. Perhaps the figure in his sights is crying, releasing a tearful load during a confession. Is Butt boasting of this as sufficient reason to shoot someone, kicking a man when he’s down? At this point, indeed, he shouts ‘Prronto!’, ‘Ready!’, drum-rolling his ‘r’s. The ‘sob of turv’ also carries ‘sod of turf’, and thence ‘the Old Sod’, a denigrating euphemism for Ireland. The cock robin and Robin Hood in revision are now hidden slightly: ‘hoodrobin’ becomes ‘rockrogn sparro!’. ‘Sparro!’ close to ‘sparo’, meaning ‘he shot’ or ‘Fire!’ in Italian, follows sequentially from ‘Prronto!’, in the staged orders of an execution. ‘Mirrdo!’ or ‘aim!’ will be added in the next draft. ‘Sparro!’ also evokes, of course, the robin’s less eye-catching relation and folk-legend assailant, the sparrow. ‘Ragnarok’, the Old Norse myth of the destruction and downfall of the gods, the ultimate revolution, the great unmaking and overturning, is itself unmade and overturned to make the word ‘Rockrogn’. Formation—not form so much—reflects content. But does the inversion indicate a reassertion of a new hierarchy for the gods? Butt claims to be overturning the whole world, as Eugene Jolas announced to the world that Joyce was doing as the leading ‘revolutionary of the word’.³⁸ Taff is amazed: Taff (skimperskamper, his wools gatherings all over cromlin what with the birstol boys artheynes and is it her tour and the crackery of the fivefirerms and the crockery of their domn chambers)—Whatall thubulbs uptheaires? Shattamovick? (353.33–354.02; 47480–35; JJA 55: 67 with 47480–58; JJA 55: 119)

But like us readers he is confused, distracted for several reasons, especially now with the noise, the ‘crackery’ and ‘crockery’ of the fire and the ‘firearms’, all five of them, a five-strong shooting squad, not Butt alone, when the ‘chambers’ of ³⁸ See transition 16–17 ( June 1929), ‘The Revolution of the Word’, in Eugene Jolas and Elliot Paul (eds.), transition (New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1967), 15–17: 13.

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the guns empty themselves, with the ‘domn’ damn thunder. We hear sounds of destruction: several boughs (arms) of fir trees snapping like the cracks of gunshot, church domes cracking like crockery and toppling in a massive storm and apocalyptic crack of doom. This violence is madness, crackers, the violence of the madhouse: Dympna is the Irish patron saint of the mad, here raving in their chambers.³⁹ One of the incarnations of the setting for the Wake is a madhouse, in a damned dormitory of which in Book IV—the ‘domnatory of Defmut’ (593.21)—the mad seem to wake to a false dawn of a cure. With all this noise, the shy Taff is now almost scurrying away, ‘skimperskampering’ like a mouse. He wonders aloud whether all the bulbs (normally buried in the ground) are in the air/upstairs. What are they doing up there? he asks in amazement—everything’s the wrong way round for Taff, astounded and perplexed. Where Butt, still finishing off his story, as we know, takes a drink and ‘becomes faint’, Joyce pours in more detail: Butt (pulling alast stark daniel with alest doog at doorak while too greater than pardon painfully the issue of his mouth diminuendoing, vility of vilities, he becomes allasvitally faint)—Shurenoff. Like Faun MacGhoul. (354.03–06; 47480–34v, 35, 181; JJA 55: 66–9 with 47480–58; JJA 55: 119)

Now with a last ‘deoch an dorais’, a parting drink in Irish, combined with a dog at the door (like the Citizen standing by the pubdoor and his dog Garryowen barking after Bloom in ‘Cyclops’), and with the Russian ‘spirit’ and ‘fool’ (‘doog & doorak,’ in the Index Notebook⁴⁰), Butt begins to disappear. In the character description, his crime is coloured with the first crime: Cain’s killing of Abel, which Cain knew afterwards was ‘too greater than pardon’.⁴¹ Thus it is not just a father–son conflict, but a brother–brother conflict. This first of crimes is the worst of crimes: cheap vility, vileness of vileness, all is vileness. This reference to ‘vanity, vanity all is vanity’, the preacher’s judgement of the human action from the Old Testament, looks forward to the preacher’s judgement of perception in the New Testament—seeing through a glass darkly—looking in a mirror, indulging in the vain hope that this life reflects a life to come. In ‘allasvitally’, vanity, already rejigged as ‘vility’, is pushed on again and reconstrued as ‘vitally’. In another oxymoron (such as ‘lain amain’ and ‘euphorious . . . cynicism’ already encountered) he vigorously becomes faint. Vitalism, the doctrine that there is a spirit of life independent of matter, is appearing at a moment of death. ³⁹ For an excellent account of the Dympna legend, see Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995), 335–41 and see p. 3 n. 6 above. ⁴⁰ VI.B.46, 37 (16); Rose, Index, 80. ⁴¹ VI.B.46, 33 (6); Rose, Index, 61.

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As he becomes faint, he has some final words in which he comes up with another—yet another—comparison: ‘Like Faun MacGhoul’, Finn MacCool supposedly being the archetypal form lying under HCE (that is, the Mr Finnegan of I.1 and the answer to question 1 in I.6). But it is ambiguous whether the comparison has Butt or HCE as subject: for Finn MacCool was an assassin but was himself assassinated. Finn killed Goll, as revenge for Goll’s killing his father Cumhall, but was killed in a battle against a rival tribe. In any case, he’s something less tough—a little deer (a ‘faun’), and a ghost (a ‘ghoul’), or son of a ghost. Contradiction, oxymoron, and paradox suffuses this event: both winner and loser have been executed at this moment. There is no reason for either a celebration or commiseration. In the mass of contradiction, elements cancel themselves out as if nothing really happens.

2 . 2 . R EV I S I N G T H E S E C O N D T Y PE S C R I P T: ‘ T H E A B N I H I L I S AT I O N O F T H E E T Y M ’ The revisions were incorporated in the second typescript, and then Joyce heavily reworked it with much overlay. He added a great deal to the speeches and drafted a whole new speech for Butt and Taff, a chorus in unison at the close of the dialogue. He also inserted throughout the sketch an entirely different kind of material: the ‘stage direction’ or ‘interruption’. Generically they are similar to the interruptions which George Bernard Shaw, once again, inserted in the middle of his play-scripts. There were five of these over the entire section, two within our passage. After Butt says he fired (‘Sparro!’), the climax of the tale, Joyce inserted a passage which has become one of the most famous in the novel, because it seems to predict an atomic explosion. Its incorporation registers the fact that here is what we’ve called a textual fault-line, an epicentre for disruptive revision: [The abnihilisation of the etym by the first lord of Hurtreford expolodotonates with an ivanmorinthorrorumble fragoromboassity amidwhiches are perceivable moletons skaping with muleheels while coventry plumpkins fairlygosmotherthemselves in the Landaunelegants of Pinkadindy. Similar scenate are projectilised from Hullolullu, Bawlawayo, empyreal Raum and mordern Atems. It is precisely the twelve of clocks, noon minutes, none seconds. At someseat of Oldanelang’s Konguerrig, by dawnybreak in Aira] (353.22–32 and 47480–65; JJA 55: 121)

Before pursuing this, it is worth noting that there are no extant preceding drafts for this passage. It is quite likely, then, that Joyce was composing such

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passages in his head before putting them down on paper. What this illustrates, again, is that Joyce is compressing knowledge into new sophisticated linguistic forms without the aid of a pen, mentally composing. His night language is not being made on paper, but is already being constructed in his head—even as thought. Joyce might also be thinking one thing and writing another, a metamorphosed version of it as it passes from head to pen on page. The underlying structure then is Joyce’s thought, but, unrecoverable, it arrives on the page transformed, ornamented, and obscured through the act of writing. To get an immediate handle on the passage, in reduced form, we can rewrite the passage as follows: ‘The first big event, launched by the lord mayor, went off with a huge bang and while it lasted you could see all the little ones running about, while those up from the country wrapped themselves tight in their newly purchased clothes. Similar scenes are predicted all round the world, and round the clock. At midday, midnight, sunset and sunrise.’ Every element of this picturesque party, this reportage of millennial festivities—the event, the mayor, the bang, the audience, the little ones that run away and hide, where they hide, where and when it happens—can be interpreted at several different levels and we shall weave our narration through these levels. First, the event clearly corresponds to Butt’s gun firing, the shooting of the bird and the General, the ‘Sparro!’ that we’ve just witnessed. It sounds a little like ‘the annihilation of the atom’, and has been read accordingly as a prophecy of the atomic bomb being detonated with an explosion which marks a midnight in history, through which the world is propelled from the industrial to the atomic age.⁴² In this military context and the context of the prophecy of God’s decline, of a doomsday, of the event occurring on a worldwide scale, this is absolutely striking. It looks forward to the Millennial, to controlled and uncontrolled midnight fireworks going off at ‘twelve of clocks, noon minutes, none seconds’. But it looks backward and around itself just as much as forward, to those critical discoveries about the nature of radioactivity and atomic decay that would lead to the atomic bomb. Many of these were made by Ernest Rutherford, the man known for ‘splitting the atom’, dividing the supposedly indivisible. He had been made a lord in 1931, and had died in 1937, perhaps while Joyce was drafting just this section, so Joyce is picking up on contemporaneous—perhaps simultaneous—events. Rutherford’s name is itself broken up and recombined, fissured, and re-fused, and this process echoes an old name for Dublin—Baile atha Cliath, meaning the Town of the Ford of the Hurdles, or Hurdleford. Hence the anagram of ⁴² e.g. ‘ ‘‘Conventry,’’ ‘‘Pinkadindy’’ and ‘‘Hullulullu’’ predict the bombing of those cities. . . . Joyce, who with some reason thought himself a prophet, predicted these disasters’, Tindall, Reader’s Guide, 200.

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Rutherford in ‘Hurtreford’. Rutherford’s methods, suited to the context, were in principle aggressive, since they included the bombardment of extremely thin gold foil with alpha particles. In 1911 he noticed that although almost all of them went through the gold, one in eight thousand would bounce (that is, scatter) back. Amazed, Rutherford commented that it was ‘as if you fired a 15-inch naval shell at a piece of tissue paper and the shell came right back and hit you’.⁴³ From this Rutherford hypothesized a superdense nucleus, with the power to deflect the alpha particles within the atom. Though it might be coincidence, Butt tells his story of shooting, yet fades away in the process: his target may fall over, but is essentially indestructible, and seems to bring about Butt’s own demise. This story of atomic research continues through the words ‘moletons’ (from Russian moleta for atom) and ‘mordern Atems’, and through the idea of these moletons ‘skaping’ in different directions, all being ‘projectilised’, in the ‘aira’—of the cloud chamber, as it were. During a later experiment in 1919, again involving a bombardment with alpha particles, this time of nitrogen atoms, Rutherford produced a different element; oxygen. It was the equivalent of a transmutation, the kind of transformation that alchemists had been pursuing for centuries. The experiment had split the nucleus, and provided a new conception of atomic structure. But the splitting of the atom and its ‘annihilation’, the word we identified earlier, are two very different things. The annihilation of the atomic, of matter itself, is a dream of total destruction, as fantastical as anything science ever dreams of.⁴⁴ Materialism proposes that matter simply reproduces itself in different forms, knowing no death. To annihilate the basic component of matter is beyond science, however much its discoveries may contribute to the annihilation of people, and things and places. The desire to destroy un-annihilatable matter is an analogy for Butt’s vain dreamwish to annihilate power, to destroy the universe. As an aggressive dream, the use of ‘atomic warfare’, though mocked by physicists at the time, was forecast by H. G. Wells in The World Set Free of 1914. But ‘annihilation’ is merely a distant echo of the actual word, the source word, which turns out to imply its opposite, describing the process of something emerging from nothing, ab nihil —thus referring to the act of originary creation not of ultimate destruction (a fantasy perhaps more easy to imagine). The ⁴³ Ernest Rutherford, ‘The Development of the Theory of Atomic Structure’, in J. Needham and W. Pagel (eds.), Background to Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 68. ⁴⁴ McHugh offers this reading: ‘HCE . . . is matter destroyed in the atomic Ragnarok by the immaterialism of Berkeley.’ Roland McHugh, The Sigla of ‘Finnegans Wake’ (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), 86.

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transliteration of Joyce’s neologisms often—helpfully—narrows our options. So we might arrive at ‘The from-nothingization of the first word’. This looks back to the origin of the universe, and may be responding to Georges Lemaître’s theory of the ‘primeval atom’ propounded in the 1920s. This theory was itself a source for the ‘expanding universe’ model, and the big bang theory proposed by George Gamov in 1948.⁴⁵ But creation from nothing is heretical to religious faith and counter-intuitive for scientific rationalism—there has to have been something in the beginning, whether it was God or a tiny superdense ball of matter, the size of a small bullet. But—another but—this passage does not concern the original creation of the material or spiritual universe, but the original creation from nothing of the linguistic universe, of the first word, of the root of all subsequent words. What is ‘abnihilized’ is not the atom but ‘the etym’, a rare word (interchangeable with ‘etymon’) meaning the ‘literal sense of a word from its origin’.⁴⁶ Such an origin of the linguistic universe is present in John’s Gospel where he announces that ‘In the beginning was the word and the word was God’. In John the word is the divine factor in the creation of the universe: word and God are co-determiners for the universe. Joyce’s is a comic bathetic version, where God is a Dublin mayor and a physicist, producing the word and world ‘out of nothing’, not out of his own divinity, as if suddenly shouting ‘Let the fireworks begin!’ There is an equivalent version in Hindu myth: the world came into being through the utterance of the Sanskrit word Vas or Vack which is an expression of wonder and also means speech, language, word, or voice. It appears amongst other Sanskrit words at the beginning of Book IV which Joyce was drafting at around this time: ‘Vah! Suvarn Sah!’ (594.01) which might translate as ‘Speak, Golden-voiced!’ One difference in these creation myths from the Christian version is that the word existed before it was uttered, so that it pre-dated God. These versions imply that it is easier to imagine the emergence of the first word, the primal application of significance, as it gets attached to the reflexive sounds and grunts of animal man, than it is to imagine the appearance of matter from nothingness. We are asked to imagine the first sound heard and interpreted, somewhere, sometime, at some transformative moment, producing the first word, the primal meaningful scream, the root of all words ⁴⁵ I am grateful to Patrick McCarthy for pointing out these coincidences and possible allusions. ⁴⁶ Donald Theall wrote: ‘For Joyce, TV’s annihilating the etym is also very important, for it alters the relationship of memory with the root language. . . . [it] is as significant in the realm of culture as the potentiality of destroying the atom in the physical world’, Beyond the Word (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 14. This is a powerful reading but it bypasses the sense of ‘abnihilization’ where the word is not being annihilated but emerging from nothing.

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and of meaning itself. Here the appearance of the first word is run in parallel to the assassination of a powerful figure, as if both are, potentially, equally violent and liberating. This pairing of violent desire with the emergence of meaning seems to coincide with Lacan’s theory that meaning—the symbolic realm—is enforced on the child at the point that incestuous and parricidal desire is blocked, delegitimized, and made taboo by the father through the Law of the Name of the Father.⁴⁷ And yet we might notice a subtle but profound distinction in these narratives. It is with the enactment or the attempted enactment of a desire (that of killing the father) with which Joyce pairs the emergence of meaning and truth—not its blockage. Thus doing something, and not being prevented from doing it, enables the possibility of the instituting of meaning or the symbolic, as Lacan would call it. In the Wake version, therefore, identity, whether false or authentic, issues from action, not, as in Lacan, from its deterrence. Lacan’s notion of identity’s emergence is based in guilt, in the formational concept of a desire being wrong. In the Wake, as I read it, identity’s emergence is based in action, in the formational concept of a desire being performed. The etym, strictly speaking, is the sense of a word insofar as it is governed by the meaning of the word from which it derives: an eye for the wind is the etymon or etym of ‘window’ (from its origin ‘windaugh’). In etymology, the original meaning is the truth as source, everything else is supplementary. Since you cannot go beyond the origin, truth as origin is seen to come out of nothing. But another version of the etymology of ‘etym’ traces it to ‘es’, the Old Aryan word for ‘to be’. Being or truth is the etym of etym (from Greek etymos). At around the same time as drafting these passages, Joyce redrafts the dawn chorus at the end of his novel and inserts: ‘Be! Verb umprincipiant!’ (594.02) shortly after the Vah! mentioned above, thus equating the emergence of being after a night of becoming with the rising sun. Here, in a glass darkly, is a mirror reflection of that distant moment, some 260 pages away.⁴⁸ It is this event, this appearance of language, like a bomb exploding, which is announced in this stage direction or commentary. Further, it is an ‘abnihilisation’ by somebody, that somebody being the ‘lord of hurtreford’—Rutherford, as we know, but also the mayor (‘lord’) of Dublin (‘Hurdleford’). It explodes (‘expolodotonates’) and detonates (‘expolodotonates’). Usually an explosion follows from a detonation, but here these processes are both reversed and blended, as the explosion comes first and the detonation follows, inserting ⁴⁷ ‘It must be admitted that the Name-of the-Father reduplicates . . . the signifier itself of the symbolic triad, in that it constitutes the law of the signifier.’ See Jacques Lacan, ‘On the possible treatment of psychosis’, in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977), 217. ⁴⁸ For an illustration of playful free-play with etymological genealogies, see Bishop, Book of the Dark, 186, 200, 204, 292.

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itself into the explosive event. The verb marks a premature explosion, a botched detonation, inverting cause and effect or coding a simultaneity which the notion of causality cannot unpick. Outside the flat in Paris where Joyce was living in 1937 they staged the world ‘Expo’, a ‘world exhibition’, something Joyce said made him feel ‘edificidal’.⁴⁹ Perhaps it is such a pompous show of extravagance and racism that is launched with fireworks at midnight. Joyce gives this ‘expolodotonation’ a quality. It goes off ‘with an ivanmorinthorrorumble fragoromboassity’, a great big noun with a great big adjective, a pompous thunder of heavily laden language. The adjective is easy: it communicates the thundering of a tyrant like ‘Ivan the terrible’ and an ‘even-more-than-Thor’s-horror-rumble’, the letters of these words overlapping, compressed like the air round an explosion. The noun is harder: fragor is an obscure word meaning a loud crashing noise and smell (as in fragrance)—signalling a thunderous fart to accompany the General’s shit and Butt’s shot. Hence the word rombazzo, Italian for uproar. But the suffix ‘omboassity’ needs more work. Perhaps it distantly evokes the feeling attached to this great big smelly oompah from his ‘ass’: an embarrassment, with the nonce word ‘embaracity’ as a noun. At the same time, meanwhile, ‘amidwhiches are perceivable moletons’.⁵⁰ That is, we see Russian atoms, even though atoms are not perceivable to the naked eye. Here also, with one of its particles—‘n’—turned upside down, are ‘molotovs’. Molotov was Stalin’s henchman, made prime minister of the USSR in 1930, and through this allusion we might read Stalin in Ivan the Terrible. It is unlikely that the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact of 1938 (promising Russia’s non-interference should Germany invade Poland) and impossible that Molotov cocktails are being referred to here, neat as that would be. The latter makeshift explosive was used by the Finns against the Russian army invading in 1939. But Molotov was a rising star, and we know Joyce has his eye on Russia and on contemporaneous as much as historical events of Russian history. Molotov, as Stalin’s second, would have been busy running around for him during the Terror of 1937–8, which, it is conceivable, Joyce knew about since his closest helper at the time, Paul Léon, was a Russian émigré, a potential informer to Joyce of Russian affairs. As much as Molotov, it is molecules involved in this act of ‘skaping’/creating. Thus these ‘moletons’ are ‘skaping with muleheels’—not just escaping, running away, and showing their donkey’s (mule) heels, but skaping in the sense of creating and making, from Norwegian skape (as in such words as ‘landscape’—how the land has been ⁴⁹ To Budgen, 29 Sept. 1937, LI, 397. ⁵⁰ On 47480–65; JJA 55: 121, ‘perceivable’ looks like ‘perceirable’, but I’ve opted for the former reading.

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‘shaped’). If the big bang has divided things up, the ‘skaping,’ their reshaping, is already taking place. A theory of matter seems to emerge at this point of formation which we might relate to Bergson’s vitalism in which the vital life force can be found in ‘inert’ matter as well as ‘animal’ matter. As the ‘fragoromboassity’ is a thunderclap, these little molecules, ‘shaping/escaping’ from the ‘aira’ (of Rutherford’s cloud chamber), are electron-dense lightning streaks. And they are the tiny particles of excrement that make up the material in a thunderous fart. This first word has an explosive and globally allusive power. It is the antediluvian thunderclap, the thumping shout of God judging mankind, which consequently runs around frightened below: while coventry plumpkins fairlygosmotherthemselves in the Landaunelegants of Pinkadindy. (353.26–8 and 47480–65; JJA 55: 121)

Comic mayhem ensues: Vico’s humanity runs out of the rain and hides away from the thunder and lightning. Humanity in this case is patronized as ‘coventry plumpkins’, the country bumpkins, or the patronized provincials up from Coventry, or those who’d been ‘sent to Coventry’—dumb and silenced humanity—and/or the plump little convent girls, and/or the prostitutes from around Covent Garden—all pretty much go and smother themselves. ‘Smother’ is there as a fulcrum joining the commonplaces of children’s folklore: the ‘fairy God mother’ and ‘Mother Goose’, pantomime figures, like Cinderella. It’s as if, while the war rages, they go and see a panto in the West End, where the beautiful Cinderella jumps into her carriage as it turns into a pumpkin at midnight. Here, however, the people have become pumpkins as they jump into the safety of their carriages. They cross themselves, saying a Hail Mary perhaps, the women of the convent ‘mother of God themselves’. ‘Smother’ has a troubled ambivalence, carrying an innocent ‘subdue’ or a ‘wrap up warm’ but also a sinister ‘suffocate’. They calm themselves or kill themselves: they occupy the point at which one relaxes so much that you no longer have any of the tension that indicates life. Where does this suicidal therapy reveal itself ? ‘In the Laundaunelegants of Pinkadindy’. They ease their fear and feelings of insecurity, forget and smother themselves with a touch of retail therapy, in some high-level shopping. But the arcades of Piccadilly hide the ‘Pinkindindies’, a notorious eighteenth-century Dublin gang who ‘pinked’ people with sword points that stuck out through sheaths whose ends had been cut off for that purpose. Perhaps it simply forms a coincidence, but the Piccadilly reference might—at a stretch—allude to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Her novel, heavily influenced by Ulysses, opens near Piccadilly, where a luxurious limousine appears but explosively backfires.

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Such explosions remind the shell-shocked ex-soldier, Septimus Smith, of his trench experiences. The second half of this stage direction expands away from the particular locale of the event, showing what will ensue on the world-as-stage. The movement from the local to the general need not be understood as a move from the particular to the universal, but about how conflict can spread, how the age of world wars had been ushered in, how they could start from one little explosion and spread to ‘similar scenes’ all round the world, a consequence of the first global empire (the British) collapsing. Similar scenate are projectilised from Hullolullu, Bawlawayo, empyreal Raum and mordern Atems. It is precisely the twelve of clocks, noon minutes, none seconds. At someseat of Oldanelang’s Konguerrig, by dawnybreak in Aira] (353.29–33 and 47480–65; JJA 55: 121)

Similar scenes will be repeated all over the world, and from times in the past, from Hawaii and South Africa, imperial Rome and modern Athens (a name given to Edinburgh in the nineteenth century). It will fill the airspace, the ‘empyreal Raum’ (from raum, German for space), fill experienced empirical reality and also burrow underground—Morden being the southernmost stop on the Northern line of the London Underground. The two great wars in Europe are thought to be in part a consequence of Lebensraum, literally ‘living space’, a German policy which expressed a national need for an empire, literally room to live, or at least expand. Joyce works with this in the words ‘Raum’ and ‘Atem’, signalling in German ‘space’ for ‘breath’. These visions of Butt’s fireworks of war will be ‘projectilised’—that is, projected like a film, but the verb is made up from the noun projectile. Butt’s bullet is transformed into a film, his film into a missile. The audience will be bombarded by the weapons of propaganda, bringing news from the world war in words. This is no longer just a stage direction but a section of a film script that specifies an intercutting of ‘similar scenes’ from all over the world, as the violent millennial celebration spreads. It will be like modern art (if we move the ‘r’ in ‘mordern Atem’), bombarding and blasting its audiences with its revolutionary new forms. This theatre of war or film or performance will be noisy: there will be a hullabaloo, and everyone bawling away. Singers project their voices and they need a large breathing space. It will be like Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box, a notorious play turned into a film and an opera, that told the story of Lulu (‘hullo Lulu’), and featured child prostitutes, guns, and murders (mörder is German for murderer), materials that have all surfaced in this section. Lulu is an anima figure, a femme fatale, a prankquean like Issy. As the singers bawl, Lulu plays pranks (from bulavayu, Russian for ‘I play pranks’). Berg’s work had been forbidden in Germany 1935

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as entartete Musik—degenerate music. So, though unfinished at his death, it had to appear in Zurich, coming out in 1937, around the time Joyce was writing these revisions. In the same year, Hitler had an exhibition organized to denounce modern art. Stifling creative art is the equivalent of murdering creative artists. As Atherton pointed out, ‘Atem’ is the Egyptian name for the original creator, and to Atem we can add ‘Ra’ the sun-god present in part of ‘Raum’.⁵¹ As Joyce said, the expression is complicated but the thoughts are simple: revolutions find their way into modern art, but war and the threats of war destroy creativity. Nonetheless this ‘stage direction’ defiantly boasts of the power of the media, as total culture communicates total war. Apocalyptic doomsday is projected into every living room: ‘War breaks out around the world, brought to you live by satellite.’ The signal for this mighty event is radio blips announcing midnight, twelve clocks synchronized for the explosion. As we know, the twelve represent the people en masse—in the round, in general. In this section this is their moment to appear. Twelve o’ clock, twelve of the clock signifies the middle of things, the visible beginning of the sun’s decline (midday), the hidden beginning of the sun’s rise (midnight). In ordinary usage, the clock is always single: we don’t ask ‘what o’clocks is it?’ because time must be singular, synchronized, unifying. But here the normally single is wilfully pluralized, with twelve of ‘the clocks’, reflecting the fact that ‘worldtime’ is never single, that there are twenty-four different times of day round the datelined globe. As on the walls of international banks, twenty-four clocks on the wall can tell you the time in different cities: whether Hawaii, Zimbabwe, Athens, Rome, or Edinburgh. Half of this world is always in the light of the sun; at one moving edge of this half it is always sunset, ‘someseat’, while on the opposite edge it is always dawn break, ‘dawnybreak’. Between them there is a perpetual day moving round the earth, under which it is Oldanelang, all day long, and an old long day. In terms of solar time, it is always any time of the day somewhere. Directly under the eye of the sun, it is always noon—Masonic time. If noon represents the sharpest conditions, it is the optimum moment for rational observation. Through the eye of the sun the world lies in the glare of the sun’s own sharply distinguishing reason. Time as progression, as change, is annihilated. ‘Etym’ is an anagram of ‘tyme’, rewritten in a process where the end of the word ‘tyme’ (an obsolete or, suitably, annihilated form of the word ‘time’) is brought round to its beginning. This looks like the annihilation of ‘the etym’, of thee tym. The end of the old tyme is ushered in by a new time of language. Butt and his audience think that he has killed the old time and brought in the new. But, of course, it’s not the ‘annihilation’ but the ‘abnihilisation’, not the ‘brought to nothing’ but ‘rising from nothing’ ⁵¹ Atherton, Books at the Wake, 196.

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of time—the dawn and birth of Chronos—old Time. Chronos’s rise to power came through the castration of his father Uranus, just as the latter was about to make love to Gaea—that is the sky making love to the earth. The cosmic analogy then for our story is that the figure excreting is Uranus (complete with bad schoolchild’s pun as we heard in ‘stars of Ourania’ in Part I), about to discharge on Gaea—the earth-mother. But Chronos—or Butt—intervenes and ‘disempowers’ him. Chronos, of course, is in turn overthrown by his son Zeus. This is a perpetual midnight for the Gods. Despite his own victory his own techniques will bounce back, like Rutherford’s alpha particles, to defeat him. Coming back to earth, we should remember that we’re in a pub and that the Innkeeper has just called time. It may not be a stage direction so much as an interruption from beyond the stage. The overturning of time and of commonplace views of it is accompanied by the specification in revision of a fantasized space: [ . . . At someseat of Oldanelang’s Konguerrig, by dawnybreak in Aira] (353.22–32 and 47480–65; JJA 55: 121)

The opposition of sunset and dawn may be carried in the places hidden here: Somerset in England, old England, and Donnybrook in Eire. It is also ‘some seat’: the seat being the back of a pair of trousers, and slang for buttocks. Near Somerset, moreover, in Wiltshire, stands Stonehenge, where at midsummer dawn breaks through the rings of stones and alights on an altar (some seat of a sort), where ritual sacrifice is supposed to have taken place. The circle of Stonehenge is the ring of the twelve now encircling the fallen figure, which is trapped in their ring, ritually murdered. They are the audience of the pub, watching the dying dialogue of Butt and Taff. A ‘seat’ is also a country house, some grand place like Howth Castle, the ‘seat’ of the St Laurence family. So this all happens in an estate of the conquering warring (guerre) Kingdom of Old England, or of the ‘Old Dane’. For a moment the kingdom is Denmark, the seat, Elsinore Castle, scene of another king-killing and the destruction of two entire families (Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s).

2 . 3 . R EV I S I N G ‘ T H E A B N I H I L I S AT I O N ’ : ‘ T H E G R I N D E R O F T H E G RU N D E R’ Before having it typed out, Joyce made minor revisions to this explosive interruption. He added two new ‘units’ and revised another two. [The abnihilisation of the etym by the grivning of the grovning of the grinder of the grunder of the first lord of hurtreford expolodotonates through Parsuralia

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with an ivanmorinthorrorumble fragoromboassity amidwhiches are perceivable moletons skaping with muleheels mulicules which coventry plumpkins fairlygosmotherthemselves in the Landaunelegants of Pinkadindy. Similar scenatas are projectilised from Hullulullu, Bawlawayo, empyreal Raum and mordern Atems. It is They were precisely the twelves of clocks, noon minutes, none seconds. At someseat of Oldanelang’s Konguerrig, by dawnybreak in Aira.] (353.22–353.32)⁵²

The first addition is rhythmical: ‘by the grivning of the grovning of the grinder of the grunder’, and resembles one of those serial nursery rhymes like ‘the flea on the hair of the dog of the wild man of Borneo’, or ‘the feather of the wing of the bird on the twig of the branch of the tree in the bog down in the valley-o’. These ‘chain’ songs picture historical sequence or spatial relations. They are also gratuitous mnemonics, celebrating organically generative series. Analysis of historical sequences may try to show how one thing leads to another, getting back to an origin. Since this interruption is about a process which sets in motion the origin of meaning or of matter, this chain is there to indicate an attempt to link things up to that beginning, the original ‘fromnothing-ization’ that we analysed earlier, especially since the word Grunder, German for founder, reflects this. Grinders (as in flour mills—which produce the durum chaff that we encountered long ago in the first draft) also make a horrendous thunderous groaning noise, a sound that is an amplified version of a longed-for death-rattle of an oppressive tyrant. Joyce also provides a place for the event, using the soundshape of a land like Australia, ‘Parsuralia’, an imagined ‘Persse O’Reilly’ land, not a real place but a distant nowhere, past the Urals, a utopia. It also sounds like Pharsalia, a long Latin poem by Lucan that describes Caesar’s militaristic exploits. Caesar, though the hero of the poem, is also the arch-enemy, the tyrant, and thus a fine candidate for the Russian General, here. Lucan planned that it would end with Caesar’s defeat, but he didn’t finish it, leaving an imperfect representation of an assassination, reflecting Butt’s representation of an imperfect assassination. For the third typescript the syntax and meaning has changed: previously the ‘etym’ had been ‘of the first lord’: but now it is ‘by the first lord’ introducing a process—a chain of events—by which the ‘abnihilisation’ comes about. The ‘first lord’ is now an agent of this and his relation to the ‘etym’ is no longer one of possession but of production. ⁵² 47480–62v, –65; JJA 55: 120–1 compared with 47480–101, 187.

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3 . 1 . D RA F T I N G B U T T A N D TA F F I N U N I S O N : ‘A H U R D LYG U R D LY C O N C E RTO N E ’ As well as this crucial interruption, Joyce—in a similar hand—also drafted a long interpolation designed to bring the dialogue to a close. This is Butt and Taff’s unison speech probably drafted in early 1938 and labelled in the Archive as section 5 of II.3. Joyce for the first time is making them sing in unison, something not evident as climax in the early draft, though possibly planned all along, since and do become . Though Shem and Shaun have met many times, only once before—when they are joint signatories along with Issy of the Nightletter at the end of II.2—has there been this clear sense of cooperative simultaneity. This is one of the clearest and therefore representative instances of them as oppositional forces coming together, a co-joining near the middle of the book, where the first and second halves of the book meet and meld. ‘The uniting of Butt and Taff’, as Bernard Benstock writes, is an example of Bruno’s synthesis of opposites: a personification of the dialectical theory according to which the ultimate truth, although perhaps unobtainable, is to be sought for in the interaction of opposites. To most moderns the idea will probably suggest Karl Marx. For Joyce it was associated with Giordano Bruno.⁵³

Dialectics might also suggest Hegel—a presence in the Wake that has scarcely been touched on critically, despite Joyce’s pairing of Hegel’s and Vico’s ‘theory of history’ in a letter to Weaver about the early Mamalujo sketch.⁵⁴ Benstock goes on to stress the importance of Marx, saying: ‘The political climate of Finnegans Wake owes as much to fundamental Marxian dialectics as its psychological climate is dependent upon Freud and Jung.’⁵⁵ But as we are seeing, this unity of opposites is not particularly rosy, or longlasting. Though they have been fading, they now seem to come back to life in this final duet. Their character description occurs in relatively lucid language, but their chorus—far less so: Butt and Taff (umbraged by the shadow of the mythical militiaman as he falls by Goll’s gillie but heartened by the circuminsistence of the Parke O’Rarely’s in hurdlygurdly concertone, they shake everybothy’s hands and pugnate the ⁵³ Benstock, Joyce-again’s Wake, 246. ⁵⁴ To Weaver, 9 Oct. 1923, LI, 204. ⁵⁵ So keen was Benstock on the notion of different classes uniting in a Marxian revolution, that he forced a mistaken reading of this passage: ‘Butt and Taff . . . finally merge in Buckley to shoot the Earwickerian Russian General’ (Joyce Again’s Wake, 18). But, in fact, Butt is clearly taking sole credit for the act, and Taff was not even there. Margaret Solomon made the same mistake in Eternal Geomater, 46. They do merge, however, to celebrate the ‘event’ of the shooting.

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pledge of fiamaship by an oacha commonturm oatchd in which stoutsally iesemoutiaoun palms it off with cuncuncacacaoutioun) Forfife and formicular allonall and in particular till budly shoots the rising germinal badly (354.07–21 and 47480–68; JJA 55: 129)

Butt and Taff, now rounding off together, are disturbed and encouraged. They are annoyed (‘umbraged’) at being in the shadow, the ‘umbra’, of the falling military man, in the shadow of their own guilt embodied in his death. ‘Goll’s gillie’, beside which he collapses—or by whom he is felled—are words Joyce took from a 1902 translation of The Exploits of Fionn from the seventeenth-century Gaelic into ‘modern Irish’ by David Comyn. ‘Goll’ is a giant that Finn MacCool killed and a gillie is a servant. If he is being felled by the servant of Goll, this is another turn in the cycle of revenge. This exaggerates by evoking some vast mythic encounter, a Roland meeting an Oliver, the giant Finn murdered, having killed the giant Goll. Despite being put out, the pair are ‘heartened’ by the presence of a ‘hurdygurdy concert’: perhaps the gurgling death rattle coming out of the dead giant. It seems more likely that after the event they go and mingle with a crowd listening to a little concert (a ‘concertone’) of some popular folk music played on a mechanical instrument—a hurdy gurdy or its relative the concertina—as distinct from the complex musical drama Lulu that was sounding earlier. They turn with relief from the exclusive and elitist complexities of Modernism, or High Art generally, to the more easily assimilated popular folksy product. There’s a park band playing called the ‘Parke O’Rarely’s’, playing ‘rarely’, that is, finely. It’s the ballad of Persse O’Reilly again—sung by Hosty and his cronies at the end of I.2 that celebrates the fall of a notorious man. Once they are in amongst the people, there is a great show of friendship, of handshaking, of pledges and of oaths. The forces become a brotherhood—like the brotherhood of the Fianna, Finn’s army. The word ‘fiama’ joins the twin ‘n’s of ‘Fianna’ into the ‘m’ of ‘fiama’, approximating the Italian for flame (fiamma). They kindle the warm fires of friendship, lighting up with the job done. The revolutionary forces are uniting, in a ‘common turn’ of society, or into a ‘Comintern’, a neologism made from the words communist and international, an organization set up by Lenin in 1919 to join together all the Communist parties in the world. We can see Joyce going back on himself with a better idea, inserting ‘comintern’ after a little back track. It is as if we hear Joyce thinking ‘oath—no, comintern oath’, an oath which integrates disparate people. In this second thought Joyce is transferring material from the Index Notebook, a rare instance of doing so as he writes, rather than in subsequent revisions. ‘All as stout allies’, they sign up to this pledge, a promise of peace. Palms are raised as a sign of trust and struck together in applause, uniting everybody in a long chain, like the arm-linked

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dancers of a cancan. A ‘concatenation’ is a state of being tied together, whether in narrative descriptions of events or in groups of unified people. But this utopic vision of brotherhood or sisterhood, of comradeship or of an audience united in appreciation, is undercut by the idea that something or someone is being ‘palmed off’ and tricked: ‘stoutsallyiesemoutiaoun palms it off with cuncuncacacaoutioun’. All the friends (‘tous alliés’) get together and trick themselves into believing that a victory of a sort is theirs, that they’re all one, with their great big dance (the cancan) and a party (commotion). But another issue is hidden through the Armenian words which surface here: asdouadz meaning God and Khaghaghout’iun meaning peace. God palms it off with peace? God tricks his people? That the Judaeo-Christian God might be thought of as vengeful and vain in exacting worship, even petty and resentful, is an idea that events in the Bible can be said to support—but a trickster? This may be a less common, more blasphemous charge, but didn’t God, indeed, betray the world after his post-deluge rainbow promise of peace? Given that the text has just described a huge storm of explosive thunder and lightning, and here God and peace are linked together, we may well be at the moment of the post-diluvian rainbow, the covenant marking God’s pledge/promise/oath of friendship to the world that he won’t destroy it again. Such a peace occurs for the Armenians after the end of the ‘war to end all wars’, as the First World War became known. What use is a promise like that to a people suffering from flood, war, famine, earthquake, plague—or genocide—as these several horsemen go on their perpetual apocalyptic rounds? And Armenian is here perhaps for this reason. Not only did Armenians experience an ‘atrocity’—what is now referred to as a genocide—but they were tricked of their independence, sold down the river by their own Allies in the famously botched 1920 treaty of Sèvres. The treaty demanded that the defeated Ottoman Empire promise to recognize the new Armenian Republic and relinquish much ‘occupied’ land to them, but it was not ratified, the promises not kept. Ataturk and Lenin ganged up, and towards the end of 1920, simply divided Armenia between them. The Allies (‘stout allies’), who had promised to assist the Armenians, also broke their promise. The Armenians were palmed off with promises within peace treaties that were ultimately botched. Ararat, where God announced his promise, is Turkish when it might have ended up being Armenian. The Armenians under the Ottomans are a version of the Irish under the British—going in a direction that Ireland might have gone in. The Armenian dance of peace, the ‘cancan-Khaghaghout’iun’, falters towards a concrete rudeness (‘cun’ and ‘caca’ indicating arse and shit in French), but finally manages to arrive at a Latinate abstraction, a ‘caution’.

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With this botched oath, these broken promises as backdrop to the new era that Butt has been instrumental in bringing about, how does this pair wind up the story? Their words lurch in this first draft and seem to raise a toast: Forfife and formicular allonall and in particular till budly shoots the rising germinal badly (354.07–21 and 47480–68; JJA 55: 129)

It is as if they raise their glasses for the ‘fife’—a musical and military pipe, to accompany their danced march of liberation, perhaps—but also for ‘all in all’, for everyone and everything in general. ‘Allonal’ was a hypnotic barbiturate discovered in 1921, used for several purposes—in particular, treating hysteria, hypersensitiveness, and insomnia from pain and war wounds. Lucia Joyce was prescribed ‘veronal’ in the 1930s, a barbiturate similarly used as a tranquillizer.⁵⁶ ‘[F]ormicular’ may combine ‘funicular’ (taking them up the mountain of glory?) or ‘formic’ like the acid that ants spray, helping the allusion to allonal—an acidic compound. Chiefly though ‘Formicular’ carries ‘vermicular’ or worm-like, an allusion that will be strengthened in subsequent revisions. It balances ‘in particular’ in the next clause. But as we shall see, these words will actually fall out in the subsequent draft as Joyce rejects this faltering draft of a faltering toast. The next few words, however, do remain. As they raise their toasts they will celebrate until the next time it happens all over again. They drink for something, and till something: ‘till budly shoots the rising germinal badly’. This clause can have ‘the rising germinal’ as the subject which ‘shoots forth’ like a bud (‘budly’) or ‘the rising germinal’ is the object shot by ‘budly’. In either case, whatever happens happens ‘badly’. ‘Germinal’—echoing with ‘gemenal’ and ‘general’ and the twin of the Russian bear we encountered earlier—is the name that the revolutionary French republic gave as the spring month that follows the equinox of 21 March, part of a radical attempt to rationalize the calendar for a new era, an innovation which was, however, soon dropped, in favour of the old Roman system. This suggests that the revolutionary spring is flawed—it emerges badly, or it is prevented from emerging properly. The novelist Zola used the word for his novel Germinal about the various revolutionary possibilities amongst striking coal-miners in the North of France. At its close Zola senses an imminent uprising, a ‘springing forth, a black avenging army, germinating slowly in the furrows . . . and this germination would soon overturn the earth’.⁵⁷ Shortly after the middle of the novel, famished wives of some of the strikers become a furious mob and mutilate the dead body of a fat but stingy ⁵⁶ Carol Shloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 341. ⁵⁷ Émile Zola, Germinal, trans. Havelock Ellis (London: Dent, 1933), 422.

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grocer who had traded food for sexual favours. As he tries to escape, he falls from a roof into their clutches. They mutilate him by castration, his ‘bud’ prevented from ever shooting forth again. Zola’s episode seems to suggest that such violence, though it follows inexorably from the conditions, compromises the revolutionary righteousness of the mob.

3 . 2 . R EV I S I N G B U T T A N D TA F F I N U N I S O N : ‘ N OW T WO O N E A N D T H E S A M E PE R S O N ’ The passage of speaking in unison marked an ending and part of a transitional sequence, so it needed special attention to climax properly and to mesh. Thus Joyce revised the character descriptions and added heavily to the closing choric speech itself. In addition, when redrafting, he added a stage direction at the end which is especially difficult. Because it requires particularly effortful and spacious hermeneutic operations, I must defer interpreting it here. What follows is the fair copy so I am leaping over one level of revision. I have included forward slashes to indicate the end of one revision unit and the beginning of another, thus showing the size of fragments that Joyce was working with. Butt and Taff: (desprot slave wager and foeman feodal unsheckled,/ now one and the same person,/ their fight upheld to right for a wee while being baffled and tottered,/ umbraged by the shadow of Old Erssia’s/ magisquammythical mulattomilitiaman,/ the living by owning over the surfers of the glebe/ whose sway craven minnions had caused to revile,/ as, too foul for hell, /under boiling Mauses’ burning brand,/ he falls by Goll’s gillie, but keenheartened by the circuminsistence of the Parkes O’Rarelys in a hurdly gurdly Cicilian concertone /of their fonnfeena barney brawl,/ shaken everybothy’s hands, /while S. E. Morehampton makes leave to E. N. Sheilmartin after Meetinghouse Lanigan has embaraced Vergemout Hall, and, without falter or mormor or blatherhoot of sophsterliness, pugnate the pledge of fiannaship, with a commonturn oadchd of fest man and best man astoutsalliesemoutioun palms it off against like commodity tokens against a cococancancacacanotioun). (354.07–21 and 47480–193v, 68, 66; JJA 55: 128–30.)⁵⁸

Most of the revisions to this passage are taken from notes on Communist propaganda which Joyce drew up under the title ‘Bolshevism’, and also notes ⁵⁸ This transcription includes three writing stages at once: one set of overlay drafted onto the first draft (see above), the next set keyed to it on a separate page, and the third set added while turning the draft and its revisions into a fair copy. Because of considerations of space, these cannot be analysed chronologically at each of the separate levels when they were added.

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from a cheap publication called ‘Songs of the Easter Rising’. This pairs the rhetorics of popular resistance with the revolutions at the extreme longitudes of Europe’s peninsula (Ireland and Russia twinned in ‘Igorladns’ here), while the European war raged within these limits. There is more of the former discourse, though the latter is probably more familiar, through terms that have survived like ‘wage slaves’, ‘feudal’, ‘despot’, and the somewhat less familiar ‘commodity token’. And we have already seen ‘Comintern’ in this passage, the first transferal from the ‘Bolshevism’ notes. The character description also echoes with tiny snatches from half a dozen passionate songs written in response to the Easter Rising: ‘The Brave Volunteers’, ‘Dublin’, ‘Ireland to the British Empire’, ‘The Soldier’s Song’, ‘Erin-go-Bragh’, ‘We Shall Rise Again’, and ‘Who Fears to Speak of Easter Week?’ They echo in this passage, though without them being anywhere quoted precisely or acknowledged explicitly in any way. So Joyce now describes Butt and Taff as ‘desprot slave wager and foeman feodal unsheckled’, without specifying clearly which is which. Benstock reads this as mapping onto Marxian dialectics, in which the ‘petty bourgeois is destined to become a part of the proletariat’ hence ‘the wage slave and the foreman essentially are now one and the same person’. ⁵⁹ Close reading produces more subjects for integration. One, let’s say Butt, seems to be a desperate slave, a wage slave, a ‘wager’ (a mercenary soldier), who’s just laid a desperate wager (a gamble). At the same time, there’s a shadowed sense that he’s desperately becoming a despot (‘desprot’). As slave and despot he is both of the characters which ‘Ireland’, in their national anthem, ‘The Soldier’s Song’, declares it shall no longer shelter. I would argue that this song, as with all songs in the Wake, needs to be heard in the reading here. Like most anthems the tune is pompous and, with its roots in American Civil war tunes, not distinctly Irish. Here’s the verse being drawn on: Soldiers are we whose lives are pledged to Ireland Some have come from a land beyond the waves Sworn to be free, no more our ancient sire land Shall shelter the despot or the slave. Tonight we man the gap of danger In Erin’s cause, come woe or weal Mid cannons’ roar and rifles peal We’ll chant a soldier’s song.

The other subject, let’s say Taff, meanwhile, is a ‘foeman feodal’—a feudal enemy—and, as foreman and superintendent, he’s the ‘foe’ of the workers. He is unshackled, liberated, unlike the captive slave Butt. Then again he is ⁵⁹ Benstock, Joyce-again’s Wake, 248.

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‘unsheckled’, has no money, no power, no nothing. Not yet emerged, he is as good as ‘feotal’. And like a poor Jew he has no sheckles. Though a ‘feeman’ he cannot give the ‘fees’, which under the feudal system, would secure homage and service from an inferior worker. He is the once powerful but now falling figure, whereas Butt is the once impotent figure now heading for power. Joyce’s engagement with the terms of Communist propaganda is timed suitably with the moment in the novel when the men are becoming one, so it appears to be a climax of labour or different classes unifying. It is the workers’ revolution, as they lose their chains and unite: hence their being ‘one and the same person’. ‘He’s one and the same person’ is a cliché that confirms the continuation of a stable identity: ‘He’s just the same as he was.’ Originally Joyce had ‘two and the same person’, a Siamese twinnish idea that he revised to its current form, making it more striking in this context. Two (different) people are coalescing to become one and the same, as if superimposed, in perfect choric agreement with each other. After the phrase ‘two and the same person’, Joyce had inserted ‘the fight for the right for a wee while being over’, which takes a little snatch (‘for a wee while’) from the song ‘The Brave Volunteers’. Readings of the phrase produce overwhelmingly complex ambiguity. Is the ‘fight for the right’ over because the right (the right wing fighting for the ‘Reich’ and for what is ‘right’) is now victorious? Or is the fight over for the right because they’ve lost, because (after the fight against the tyranny of the right) the left are in power? In either case, the conflict may be over but only briefly, only for a ‘wee while’. There may be yet another way of reading the syntax: they have been fighting for ‘the right for a wee’, to urinate when their work is ‘over’, or when they are ‘over the limit’, or fallen over. Butt during the telling of his tale has been drinking consistently, and may be desperate in this sense. Joyce revises this revision, weaving in a series of words which work on the idea of instability and stability. ‘Over’ is taken out and with it different ambiguities enter, for it now reads: ‘their fight upheld to right for a wee while being baffled and tottered’. Joyce here incorporates words (‘upheld the right’) that form the climax to a 1916 song called ‘Bishop O’Dwyer and Maxwell’. The British General and Overall Commander, Sir John ‘butcher’ Maxwell, who condoned the execution of soldiers after the Easter Rising, called on Dr O’Dwyer, Bishop of Limerick, to punish priests who had been helping the IRA. But O’Dwyer refused and was subsequently honoured in republican song. The first, penultimate, and last verses of the song are as follows: ‘Come join me in my dirty work,’ Wrote England’s butcher bold; ‘You’ve rebel priests within your See

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Part II That love us not, I’m told. Remove those men where never more They’ll threaten England’s sway, And England’s love and gratitude Shall be your own for aye.’

After several verses, O’Dwyer replies: ‘Do you think that I forget My country’s martyred dead; The brave, the pure, the high-souled lads Whose blood you foully shed? Then here’s your answer; I may share The fate of those who died, But I’ll not be the first O’Dwyer To take the tyrant’s side.’ And, oh! thank God that there are men To speak with love and pride Of those who lie in prison cells And those who nobly died And where the glorious tale is told, Of Ireland’s latest fight, In letters golden shall be writ: O’DWYER UPHELD THE RIGHT!⁶⁰

Joyce changed ‘the right’, a noun, into a verb ‘to right’, which means to make stable, as does ‘uphold’, maintaining as secure. The words rise in opposition to ‘baffled and tottered’ (words which semi-spoonerize ‘Taff and Butt’). While the conflicts of Butcher Maxwell and Bishop O’Dwyer are concealed in a hidden intertextual game behind the text, Joyce is inserting another conflict: a fight to remain upright in order to have a pee, while actually being unstable because drunk. Being ‘upheld’ is being supported, held up, and ‘to right’ is to balance, to set level, all of which are aimed at overcoming the state of ‘being tottered’. It’s as though they are confused (‘baffled’) students or shaken soldiers, desperate to relieve themselves (desperate ‘for a wee’), or they are workers trying to secure rights for tea-breaks and pee-breaks during their work—a classic dispute between workers and imperious management. At the end of an evening, having a pee, they are like Bloom and Stephen at the end of Ulysses (Bloom having been supporting Stephen in his drunken state), silently united in urination. ⁶⁰ For this and for the words from other songs I am extremeley grateful for the help of Liesbeth van Gool.

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Joyce also extends his description of the fallen figure, formerly a ‘mythical militiaman’. He becomes, in a little scattering of ‘m’ words, ‘old Erssia’s magisquammythical mulattomilitiaman’, big pompous words for the big pompous man of old Russia or of Ireland where Erse was spoken. He was a ‘magus’ (a wise man), and ‘more-than-mythical’. If being mythical is somehow being beyond reality in the realm of the fantastical, then to be ‘more than mythical’ is to be beyond myth, unimagined, unimaginable, unnameable, outside all stories. He is a mulatto-militiaman, with parents of mixed race, a description which coincides with General André Rigaud, a mulatto leader in the civil war in Haiti in the 1790s, defeated by Toussaint L’Ouverture, a freed slave and soldier—like Butt, thus enabling an identification of Butt as Shem.⁶¹ Rigaud, moreover, had later tried to start a colony based on a concept of mulatto racial supremacy. We have encountered Shem (and ALP) as black and Shaun (and HCE) as white. Does this indicate that Butt has shot someone who is a mixture of the two, a reflection of Shem and Shaun mixed together? The anti-capitalist propaganda theme is strengthened by an extraordinary description of the fallen ‘mulattomilitiaman’, as an embodiment of ‘the living by owning over the surfers of the glebe’. ‘Living by owning’ is a description in Communist propaganda of how capitalist society functions. Joyce doesn’t only invent single words, he coins phrasal verbs, too. Like ruling over or writing over, HCE is ‘owning over’ things. He is a sur-owner, an uber-owner, owning over the entire ‘surface of the globe’. And this surface is largely worked over by ‘serfs’, the massive labour force, off whose work the Russian aristocracy who had owned them had lived. But they are ‘surfers’—the swell and breaking waves of the sea. So ruling over the ‘surfers’ (a word Joyce is coining prior to its official first use, according to the OED, in 1952) is, of course, like the British Empire ruling the waves. And they are not of the ‘globe’ but of the ‘glebe’—the fertile bit of the earth’s soil. HCE is also described, in grandiose Movietone speech, as someone ‘whose sway craven minnions had caused to revile’. The meaning of ‘sway’ is pushed by the earlier words (‘upheld’, ‘to right’, and ‘tottering’) so that it means wavering and instability as much as masterful authority; the unstable sway of the waves, the surfers, after all. As before, Joyce snatches and transforms words—‘craven’ and ‘cause to revile’—from a 1916 song, this time ‘The Brave Volunteers’. Joyce throws a spanner in the grammatical works with a single ‘d’. It could read ‘whose sway craven minnions had cause to revile’—that is, the ‘minnions’ had good reason to despise the power of something. But with ‘caused’, an object is required: the minnions (or mini-ones) had caused something to revile something. ‘Sway’ is in there, but whose sway? The sway ⁶¹ In 1936 C. L. R. James wrote a play Toussaint L’Ouverture. Robeson starred in the title role.

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of the ‘glebe’? The toppling militiaman? Or the surfers (that is, the waves)? Reordering the words, we read either ‘the minnions had caused the sway [of the surfers or the glebe] to revile [something—that is missing]’ or ‘the minnions had caused [something—which is missing] to revile the [surfers’ or the glebe’s] sway’. There aren’t enough nouns to go round for the verbs. Grammatical consistency, accurate quotation, and precise sense seem to be sacrificed for something—but what exactly, it is hard to say. Perhaps it is for a state where the subject in language and as agent is dissolved. But is it enough to say that in a war on language, grammar, and syntax—the frames of language—must cave in? This happens less often in Finnegans Wake than one may be led to think. It may then be tempting to identify malicious leg-pulling traps set up by Joyce to wind up the obsessive reader, but that reading seems suspicious, and in any case prevents the games from being as disruptively fun as they were intended. Not for the first time, bamboozled, we withdraw defeated, saying that this is a point where grammar, ‘correct’ citation, and allusion fall to pieces in this passage, accompanying the collapse of the man, who, more-than-mythical, is beyond the reach of narrative and language. As HCE falls, he is Lucifer plummeting into the pits of hell, though he is ‘too foul for hell’. This excessive concept comes from the first verse of the Easter Rising song ‘Dublin’, stirred up by the times: You poured your spies upon her streets, You ringed her round with steel; For three most hideous centuries She lay beneath your heel. You kept your forces round her gates, And built your barracks well, And in your Castle’s heart devised Foul deeds—too foul for hell.

And the Russian General falls ‘under boiling Mauses’ burning brand’, under the bullet of a Mauser, a German brand of rifle, thousands of which were smuggled in for the Easter Rising, while many thousand more were uncovered, so the rising, in fact, went off at half-cock. As the song ‘Erin-go-Bragh’ witnesses in the third of its six verses: One brave English captain was ranting that day Saying, ‘Give me one hour and I’ll blow you away.’ But a big Mauser bullet got stuck in his craw, And he died of lead poisoning in Erin-go-Bragh.

But, in a typical tweak, it’s not a Mauser’s brand but a ‘Mauses’ brand’, transforming the large weapon into the absurdity of a little mouse (German Mause) which, moreover, is boiling. For this revision unit, Joyce has also taken

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words from ‘Ireland to the British Empire’—a song of vengeance written to curse the latter: Then curséd be with gun and sabre, And curséd be with sword and pen; On the sides of the lonely mountains, ’Midst the bustle and the throng of men; Accursed be with lead and burning, With boiling lead and brands Snatched from the fires of nations By the bravest of many lands.

Rather than boiling lead—that weapon of medieval sieges and torture in hell—Joyce has the brands boiling, even though brands are usually placed in fire in order to burn and do not boil. The imagery is carried away by its own hellish excess into a fantasy where liquids and solids are exchanged, not unlike Milton’s surreal image of Satan being ‘chained to the burning lake’ in Book I of Paradise Lost. As we may remember, Butt and Taff’s destination after the telling of their story is to go to a ‘hurdy gurdy concert’. This is perhaps where the songs that accompanied the Rising are played. It is now expanded to become a ‘Cicilian concertone of their fonnfeena barney brawl’. Cicilian sounds like Sicilian (like the Italian accordion player in Dubliners’ ‘Eveline’), while Cecilia is the patron saint of music. But ‘Cicilia’ is actually an area in the Eastern Mediterranean, once part of the Armenian empire in the sixteenth century when, at its largest, it stretched to the Mediterranean. This is a fore-echo of the Armenian references waiting in the wings. The spirit of music therefore resurrects a dream of a once large empire, just as all these songs fire up the idea of an independent Ireland, built on an idealized past prior to English interference. ‘Fonnfeena’ sounds the Irish for Soldier’s Song encountered earlier, and bearna baoghail, meaning ‘gap of danger’, from the same song, is here echoed as a ‘barney brawl’. Butt and Taff are annoyed by the dark shadow of the fallen hero, but are ‘keenheartened’ by the song, taking solace in it. The heavy presence of the Easter Rising is perhaps undercut by these words which contain a ‘barn brawl’, as if that’s all it was, a small-scale conflict, smaller than originally planned, which led to heavy repressive responses by the British, a fatal error for them, in that it turned Ireland—and Dublin in particular—all the more determinedly against them. Dublin’s reaction against the British perhaps explains the next addition, another obscure set of allusions: ‘while S. E. Morehampton makes leave to E. N. Sheilmartin after Meetinghouse Lanigan has embaraced Vergemont Hall’. They are all places in Dublin, anthropomorphized, behaving like people,

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as one ‘makes love’ to another, or takes leave from another, or ‘embraced or embarrassed’ somebody else. They might be electoral wards, which, in elections, become anthropomorphized through the people voting within them. It thus signals the way normally separate parts of a city can come together, and that a social revolution unsettles the fixed areas of city space. Butt and Taff’s pledge of fiery ‘fiamaship’ becomes ‘Fianna’, marking more explicitly the forces fighting for Irish independence. They pledge individualism or corporatism, hoping to function ‘without falter or mormor or blatherhoot of sophsterliness’, without father or mother or brotherhood or sisterliness—separated from their families and from gender roles, declaring allegiance to each other, united as comrades in arms, automata for their cause. In their speech in unison there seems to be a pledge to action: they will not hesitate or grumble, talk no blather or specious reasoning (no ‘sophistry’, practised by ‘sophisters’—final year students at Trinity College Dublin). The addition grows out of two words ‘without falter’, taken from the song ‘We Shall Rise Again’, a ballad written after the Easter Rising. They came from the following verse (one of eight): They came forth to fight for the cause that was banned, When freedom and liberty called, for their land; In the ardour of youth, in the Spring of the year, They came without falter, they fought without fear.

This and the last revision are paired by having four items in each one, signalling MaMaLuJo, the four, whose obsessions are memory, memorializing and moralizing the past. Butt’s story—an oral history, a long-drawn-out joke—has bypassed institutional accredited history. It is not sanctioned as a true historical event, but exists as ‘alternative’ history. The four are stepping in, perhaps, to ensure that a clear account can be produced of the events. As they swear their oath of allegiance and their friendship, they do so quoting the Rising song ‘Who Fears to Speak of Easter Week?’, in which appears the phrase ‘great men & straight men’. Who fears to speak of Easter Week? Who dares its fate deplore? The red gold flame of Eire’s name Confronts the world once more! Oh! Irishmen, remember then, And raise your heads with pride, For great men and straight men Have fought for you and died.

The song itself is built, like the title of Finnegans Wake, out of another song, ‘Who Fears to Speak of ’98?’ a song to shame and incite those who do not take

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up arms, and who have forgotten motives for vengeance. The climax of both is signalled in the music by ponderous stresses on the words in the penultimate lines: ‘For GREAAAAT men, and STRAAAAIGHT men . . .’. Joyce’s reworking is ‘fest man and best man’ and for an instant we’re whisked off to a different pledge made at a Swedish wedding, with a fiancé (fästman in Swedish) standing (fast) next to his ‘best man’ who is to give him away: so it’s a great turn, a big step in a man’s life. In Basque, to add to the coincidences, ‘besta = fiesta’, as Joyce noted in the Index Notebook. These two men, together at this turning point (after which they will be separated again), are engaged in exchange: their ‘oath’ has been ‘palmed off’, like ‘commodity tokens’. Commodity tokens are alternative money systems with a limited use, exchangeable only in certain places and only for certain commodities. They were popular with cooperative institutions, where workers were paid in tokens that they could exchange for the commodities they had made—employers ensuring a market for the goods their employees have made. There is a repeated moment of exchange in this novel between Shem and Shaun (whether as Mutt and Jute or Muta and Juva). They exchange words, information, money (16), insults (I.6), punches (303), places (462), pens or pans (610). This may well engage with theories of exchange and of economics generally, of the symbolic value of money, of labour, the value of value, but if so, it is not clear what it is, at least not to me yet. Few have written about it, dazzled by the complexity of it all, drawn away from these materialist considerations by the density and apparently unmaterialistic context of Finnegans Wake.⁶² After all, nothing really adds up in the Wake. Because the form of everything changes so rapidly, it does not seem like the monetary world where the value of objects relies on a measure of constancy or predictability. Circulation of something whose form should be recognizable and authenticated (such as a coin or a note) seems impossible in the Wake. The economics of Finnegans Wake might boil down to something simple and silly, where Joyce passes off his own book as a fake, when, in fact, it’s real, a fake of a fake. Nonetheless, the economic issue remains a relatively unmined area in the Wake. The commodity tokens and cooperative societies that use them take Joyce towards the morpheme ‘co-’, a prefix (from Latin com-) meaning ‘together’, ‘jointly’, ‘equal’, et al. He shunts it on to the start of the word ‘concatenation’. It is the morpheme that symbolizes the dramatic moment, a ‘co-moment,’ as Butt and Taff are co-coming to be equal co-companions. The ‘co’ is stuttered so ⁶² Those who have, include Paul St Amour who, in an as yet unpublished conference paper at the Joyce Symposium in Rome 2000, indicated important issues about indebtedness and textual ownership, and Sam Slote who makes use of John Maynard Keynes as a point of reference for issues of debt. See Sam Slote’s ‘The Prolific and the Devouring in ‘‘The Ondt and the Gracehoper’’ ’, JSA (2000), 49–123.

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we have a ‘co-co-moment’, evoking the drink of cocoa that Stephen and Bloom share in Ulysses when they come together. The Armenian ‘Khaghaghoutioun’ is like a stuttered word itself, and with ‘cancan’ before it and now ‘coco’ before that, it lengthens precariously, deferring its completion. The word mimics the sense—with pairs of morphemes linked in a chain, coco, cancan, caca, two by two, coinciding, cohering, collaborating, colliding. But this may mean that ‘the peace’ (the hand-shaking moment during Mass) is long and drawn out, slow, imperfect, and uncertain. Moving on from the parenthetical character description, we can now see how Joyce changed Butt and Taff’s speech. In the first version we encountered a pledge to heroic comradeship, as the three musteteers might have said: ‘all for one and one for all, until the new age begins’ that came out as complex verbiage. In the second version Joyce transforms this into a yet deeper verbiage: When old the wormd was a gadden opter and apter were twummily twims and if fieforlife fells farforficular allonall’s not too particular so till budly shoots the rising germinal let bodly chew the fat of his auger and badley bite the dustice of the piece. (354.22–36 and 47480–67; JJA 55: 131)

Can we abstract a general idea here? The syntax is difficult, with clauses beginning but not closed off: there’s a ‘when’, an ‘if’, and a ‘so’. But the ‘if’ has no ‘then’ and the ‘so’ follows on from neither. It’s a jumbled thesis that might be made to conform to the following structure: when a was b, and x’s were y’s, and if c fells d, [then] e is indifferent so until f , let p do r and q do s. But that’s tenuous, even with the ‘then’ added. I will have to defer reading this passage until we see its next draft, where there are substantial changes that make it slightly easier to understand, and pull myself back from Joyce’s collisions of language which make it teeter into opaque tangled nonsense. There we shall see that the real spanner in the works—the iffy ‘fieforlife fells farforficular’—is aborted, and along with it the murderous syntax. Such clarifying rejections of material—rather than obscuring embellishments—are very rare in Joyce’s drafts, and therefore important to note. They indicate that Joyce has stumbled into one of those fault-lines which is particularly tricky, too complex and obscure even for his own system, from which he then withdraws in order to redraw it. The reach for hyper-complexity and massive disruption of syntax is an indication of the climax that this moment represents. It is as though Joyce is having trouble with the idea of Butt and Taff having become one-and-the-same-person and speaking simultaneously, trouble with the very idea of the camaraderie that his narrative is demanding. Having two people speaking the same words

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is in strong opposition to a principle of the novel, which is invaded by so many different voices that speak against each other and break up any concept of a unified voice. The deferral of this climax of coalition indicates the same thing—that Joyce had a problem with two entities becoming unified, differences dissolved.

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4 . 1 . R EV I S I N G T H E S PE E C H E S F O R T H E T H I R D T Y P E S C R I P T: ‘ M I R R D O ! ’ As well as inserting these important new additions analysed above (the ‘abnihilisation’ stage direction and Butt and Taff in unison), Joyce had also heavily revised the rest of the passage, possibly prior to drafting the excerpts we have just been reading. It is difficult to know—Joyce is working on many fronts at this moment and at great speed. We will turn to them now as they appear integrated into the third typescript.⁶³ Butt’s speech at this level looks like this: Butt . . . till . . . up come stumblebum (ye olde cottemptable!), his urssian gemenal, in his scutt’s rudes unreformed and he went before him with the same old domstoole story and his upleave the fallener as is greatly to be petted (whitesides do his beard!) and I seen his brichashert offensive and his boortholomas vadnhammaggs vise a vise them scharlot runners and how they gave love to him and how he took the ward from us (odious the fly fly flurtation of his him and hers! Just mairmaid maddeling it was it he was!) and, my oreland for a rolvever, sord, by the splunthers of colt and bung goes the enemay the Percy rally got me, messger, (as true as theirs an Almagnian Gothabobus!) to blow the grand off his aceupper. Thistake, it’s meest! And after meath the dulwich. We insurrectioned and, be the procuratress of the hory synnotts, before he could tell pullyirragun to parrylewis, I shuttm, missus, like a wide sleever! Hump to dump! Tumbleheaver! (351.35–352.15 and see 47480–98; JJA 55: 183 with 47480–55v, 6; JJA 55: 114–15)

Butt’s speech is expanded with added reasons for executing the Russian General, with more swearing, and with an observation about the point at which he does it. As well as his ‘brichasherts offensive’, Butt now sees the general’s ‘boortholomas vadnhammaggs’ joining ‘ham and eggs’ and Bortolo (a character we will encounter in Part III) to Bartholomew Van Homrigh, the Lord Mayor of Dublin and father of Esther the young lady who fell in love with her tutor Jonathan Swift. When she found out there was another woman in Swift’s life, she was furious and wrote to the other woman, Esther Johnson—another Esther. When Swift found this out he chose never to speak to Miss van Homrigh again. Joyce draws on Swift’s life story a great deal: ‘sosie sesthers’ on the first page refer to these two Esthers in his life, and we will meet ⁶³ In so doing, I have skipped one level of notesheets (see 47480–151 and 162; JJA 55: 123 and 124), from which Joyce selected material and keyed it onto the second typescript. I skip this level in order to arrive at a point where the whole section has been revised and integrated. The analysis would otherwise be of material that is so disparate that it would take up too much space.

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them again in Part III. But why the target should be Esther’s father it is harder to see, except that, as mayor of Dublin, his position of authority brings him into the sights of Butt’s target. The two girls, as ‘scharlot runners’, ‘gave love to him’, while he, on the other hand, ‘took the ward from us’. As running harlots, they are like the ‘jinnies’ who run away from HCE in the Waterloo story in Chapter 1. Joyce takes the twee archaism ‘gave love’ from Comyn’s translation of the Youthful Exploits of Fionn, where characters often ‘give love’ to others, presumably meaning ‘make love’—a coy euphemism in an antiquated manner.⁶⁴ If he ‘took the ward from us’, then, since wards are often young dependent girls, we’re with the William T. Stead story of the 1880s, in which the journalist abducted a young girl. But if he took the ‘word’ from us, he’s a plagiarist, a notesnatcher, as Shaun describes Shem. The normal phrases of ‘making love’ and ‘taking someone’s word’ are being wrenched out of their clichéd forms. While they ‘gave love’ to him, Swift/Stead ‘fl-fl-flirted’ with the two women, it was all m-m-maddening, it was! Butt is now being made to stutter more than before, perhaps because he is aping his subject or his own outrage is disrupting his speech. The stutters introduce inadvertent meanings. The flirtation is dextrous (‘fly’) and nimble; ‘maddeling’ is now ‘mairmade’, introducing two legendary heroines—a mermaid and Maid Marian. The latter looks back and reinvokes the erased ‘robin hood’ reference, an echo of a source that would no longer resound in this context of the book when it appears. Maid Marian is also slang for a whore, linking to the other images of prostitution in here. Butt makes three oaths: a little aside, ‘sord’, possibly Irish for ‘pure or bright’, and balancing it with the word ‘messger’—an obscure word Joyce transferred from his list of Bulgarian, though its meaning has not been identified.⁶⁵ It sounds like ‘messenger’, Butt addressing Taff, perhaps, but it impedes information more than it carries it. The third oath is a dense and fascinating set of words: ‘as true as theirs an Almagnian Gothabobus!’ The immediate exclamation being worked-over here is ‘as true as there is an Almighty God above us!’ But the ‘Almagnian Gothabobus’ can be imagined as some great wild hybrid creature, exotically named like the Jabberwocky. Swearing that something is true by such a mythical beast never before named, compromises the oath, however. Declarations of the truth in Finnegans Wake are continually compromised in this manner. Within this hybrid truth-defying beast we can first note the many German details. God has become ‘Goth’, and almighty has been wedded with Allemagne, French for Germany. The almighty German at the time was Hitler. Hitler’s presence is strengthened by the insertion at this level of the writer Lewis (in ‘parrylewis’), the one-time friend ⁶⁴ See above, p. 134.

⁶⁵ Rose, Index, 139–41.

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of Joyce’s who had been writing admiringly of Hitler in 1931.⁶⁶ But together they also hide the Almanach de Gotha, an annual published in Germany and which, since 1764, has listed the genealogies of the courtly families in Europe, culminating with lists of all the highest ranking members of the world’s aristocracy. It includes an appendix which listed the sovereigns in the Western world, in order of age, date of accession, etc., etc. It was and to some extent remains a powerful tool of social hierarchy, helping to establish precedence, the people, that is, who are ‘abobus’, ‘above us’ (or below us). It became a massive publication of over a thousand pages, like Burke’s Peerage. Already, at the time Joyce uses it here, it was faltering, for the German and Russian empires had collapsed during the First World War, taking with them many of those who had helped to form entries in the volume. If Butt is swearing on this disreputable book of social hierarchy it represents his deference to rank, but also his blindness to the fact that the importance of the entrants is fading. Yet it’s not their existence which is being sworn by. Joyce has wilfully misspelled the words ‘as true as there’s’ to ‘as true as theirs’, turning an affirmation of existence into an affirmation of possession. To make grammatical sense we have to rejig the phrase into: ‘as true as the Almighty God above us [is] theirs’, so the ‘Gothabobus’ is not ours but theirs. Nations, on opposite sides of a military conflict, will always claim that ‘God is on their side’, and would never admit that the God above belongs to the other side, is actually theirs. This sense seeps through here to this godless or atheist speaker. This is also an Armenian God—a God who, as we have seen, the Armenian Christians might have felt had forsaken them during the atrocity, and in the subsequent peace deal which was promptly reneged. The almighty God above them certainly seems to be on the other side: as true as God is theirs, belongs to them. Not sharing the same God, there is no need to respect or honour them. In the previous draft, Butt said ‘the Percy rally got me’. Now he describes what it is he’s been made to do: ‘blow the grand off the aceupper’, that is, reduce his greatness, as if in a gambling den, by losing a thousand pounds on the turning up of an ace. Joyce follows this with a phrase ‘Thistake, it’s meest!’ which dimly but definitely echoes ‘L’état c’est moi’, Louis XIV’s declaration of autocratic power. It is inspired by—and neatly inserted before—the reworking of Mme de Pompadour’s phrase we encountered above. Here Louis’s words are turned into an appreciation of nicely turned meat: ‘this stake it’s moist’. It is also a superlative me, ‘most me’, Butt’s expansive ego filling out language into forms that suit it. Butt boasts that his target didn’t have time to react, to ‘tell pullyirragun to parrylewis’. The Russian General could not call on his ‘bullet’ (Russian ⁶⁶ Wyndham Lewis, Hitler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931).

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pulya) from his own gun (or is it his servant Paul O’Regan?), could not get his elaborate thing (Greek polyergon) to ‘parry’, to ward off the Lewis gun, a machine gun used in various wars: the First World War, the Irish War of Independence, and the Irish Civil War. Parrying is what you might do with a sword when fencing. But you can’t really parry a machine gun—so the Russian general has little chance. Joyce didn’t have time to ‘parry Lewis’, to fend him off, before Lewis launched a surprise attack on him in Time and Western Man. In Finnegans Wake, Lewis is figured as the ‘ant’ opposite to Joyce the ‘grasshopper’, and a ‘polyergus’ is an ant that keeps slaves. Taff’s speech and stage description expand by about a quarter: TAFF (camelsensing that sonce they have given bron a nuhlan the volkar boastsung is heading to sea vermelhion but too wellbred not to ignore the umzemlianess of his rifal’s preceedings, in an effort towards autosotorisation, effaces himself in favour of the idiology alwise behounding his lumpy bump off homosodalism which means that if he has lain amain to lolly his liking—cabronne!—he may pops lilly a young one to his herth—combrune—)—Oholy rasher, I’m believer! And Oho bullyclaver of ye, bragadore-gunneral! The grand ohold spider! It is a name to call to him Umsturdum Vonn! Ah, you were shutter reshottus and sieger besieged. Aha race of fiercemarchands counterination oho of shorpshoopers. (352.16–26; 47480–99; JJA 55: 184 with 47480–55v; JJA 55: 114)

In the previous version Taff was sensing a historical shift in which ‘the volgar boatsong’ was heading out to the ‘red sea’. Now he senses this because (‘sonce’—since and sons) ‘they have given bron a nuhlan’, composed with words from a list of Polish which Joyce had drawn up, bron meaning a gun and an Uhlan being a renowned Polish lancer. So the phrase contains ‘giving a weapon to a soldier’, arming for an approaching war. A little further down another weapon is added, ‘his rifal’, coding Taff’s view of Butt as both rival and rifle, enemy and weapon. Browne and Nolan is a Dublin bookseller, a motif in the Wake that alludes to Bruno of Nola, the heretic philosopher of the sixteenth century who was burned in Rome (and therefore became ‘brown’). Bruno, a vital figure in the Wake, helps supply the notion of the identity of opposites or ‘coincidence of contraries’.⁶⁷ The conflation of Bruno, a notorious and controversial philosopher with Browne and Nolan’s, a bookshop in a provincial capital, seems like a private joke for Joyce, a gratuitous ⁶⁷ Joyce was clearly fascinated by Bruno’s heretical views and complex paradoxical vision of the universe. A single monograph on Joyce and Bruno has yet to appear, but recent valuable doctoral work has been carried out in this area by Steven Morrison and Gareth Downes. See the former’s ‘Heresy, Heretics and Heresiarchs in the Work of James Joyce’ (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 2000) and the latter’s ‘James Joyce, Catholicism and Heresy: With Specific Reference to Giordano Bruno’, (Ph.D. diss., University of St Andrews, 2001). See also Gareth Downes, ‘The Heretical Auctoritas of Giordano Bruno’, JSA (2003), 37–73.

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generation of daft wordplay. Or it may serve to illustrate Bruno’s notion of the coincidence of opposites (the heroically heretical with the quotidian commercial) in a way that in itself mocks the philosophy of such coincidence. The description of Taff is coloured by two twin words: ‘cabronne’ and ‘combrune’, both sounding like ‘Kaboom!’ and ‘comprends!’ What we are to understand is ‘Shit!’ or ‘Merde!’, the word shouted famously by the French general Cambronne when facing defeat at Waterloo, and which subsequently became known as le mot de Cambronne. Cambronne also appears in the thunder word on page three (bababadalgharaghtakaminarronkonnbronntonner . . .), and then a little later during the Museyroom battle of Waterloo: ‘Brum! Brum! Cumbrum!’ (9.26–7). The myth of this word was passed down in part through Hugo’s magnificent version of it in Les Misérables (II.i.xiv–xv). British officers demanded Cambronne’s surrender at the end of the battle. Hugo expatiates (in the following translation, filtering the expansive rhetoric) as follows. To speak that word, and then to die, what could be more grand! . . . The man who won the battle of Waterloo is not Napoleon put to rout; nor Wellington giving way at four o’clock, desperate at five; nor Blucher, who did not fight. The man who won the battle of Waterloo was Cambronne. To fulminate such a word at the thunderbolt which kills you is victory. To make this answer to disaster, to say this to destiny, to give this base for the future lion, to fling down this reply at the rain of the previous night, . . . to be ironical in the sepulchre, to act so as to remain upright after one shall have fallen, to drown in two syllables the European coalition . . . to make the last of words the first, . . . to close Waterloo insolently with Mardigras, to finish Léonidas by Rabelais, to sum up this victory in a supreme word which cannot be pronounced, to lose the field, and to preserve history, after this carnage to have the laugh on his side, is immense! It is an insult to the thunderbolt. . . . This word of Cambronne’s gives the effect of a fracture. . . . This Cambronne, this passer at the last hour, this unknown soldier, this infinitesimal of war. . . . He will protest. Then he seeks for a word as one seeks for a sword. He froths at the mouth, and this froth is the word. . . . he suffers the victory’s enormity, but establishes its nothingness; . . . and overwhelmed in numbers and material strength he finds in the soul an expression—‘Shit!’ We repeat it, to say that, to do that to find that, is to be the conqueror. Cambronne . . . throws it down to the past in the name of the Revolution.⁶⁸

This provides a brilliant context, whether Joyce had read it or not. Hugo’s inversion of victor/vanquished perfectly suits our passage where we cannot ⁶⁸ Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Charles E. Wilbour (London: David Campbell, 1998), II.i.xv, 298–9. Wilbour rendered Cambronne’s ‘Merde!’ as ‘ordure’, and I have taken the liberty here to retranslate it.

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tell who is the underdog, or who wins—whose side to be on, in fact, whether language and revolution are the targets or the weapons. But Hugo’s rhetorical hyperbole is another example of working too hard for this end, trying heroically to shoot down the heroisms around Waterloo (Napoleon, Wellington, Blücher) as Tolstoy belittled Napoleon in War and Peace and asserted the overlooked people—rather than the customary heroic individual—as the motor of history. Moreover, in Joyce’s reworking the word cabron—a Spanish insult thrown at a cuckold—is hidden. Does its presence say anything about Taff? They both interrupt the description of what we identified as Taff’s leaning towards vice, ‘to lolly his liking’ and ‘lilly a young one to his herth’. In the speech itself, the phrase ‘it is a name to call him’ is another quaint archaism taken from the Youthful Exploits of Fionn. In ‘Umsturdum Vonn’ are distantly sounded the lovers Deimne and Fionn, blended into the name of Amsterdam, a city with which HCE is associated (see ‘Amtsadam’ (532.06)). And within the word is the focus of the surrounding episode, a ‘turd’ appearing in the middle of it. Where before Joyce scattered some ‘Ohos’, now he scatters some ‘ahas’, As and Os being a pair used via Alpha and Omega, to signal both beginning and end, and an upheaval in the cycles of events. Hence: ‘A . . . . . . . . . . . . ! / ? . . . . . . . . . . . . O!’ (94.21–2) and ‘O tell me all about Anna’ (196.1–3). Butt’s reply to Taff, confirming the identity of his target, also expands: BUTT (miraculising into the Dann Deafir warcry as, his bigotes bristling, as, jittinju triggity shittery pet, he shouts his thump and feeh fauh foul finngures up the heighohs of their ahs!) Bluddymuddymuzzle! The buckbeshottered! He’ll umbozzle no more graves nor horne nor haunder, lou garou, for gayl geselles in dead men’s hills! Kaptan (backsights to his bared!), His Cumbulent Embulence, the frustate fourstar Russkakruscan, Dom Allaf O’Khorwan, connundurumdhuff. (352.27–35 from: 47480–56v, 57; JJA 55: 116–17 with 47480–99, 100; JJA 55: 184–5)

In this character description, counting systems have been mixed in, four words that combine the Shepherd’s numbers for one to five—yan, tan, tetherer, metherer, pet —with the Slavic version of the same—yeden, dveh, tsrze, chetery, pyet. The two look related anyway. These five numbers (with one and two compressed into one word—suitable for Butt and Taff’s imminent blending) correspond to the five digits of Butt’s hand, all thrust up into the Russian general’s ‘ahs!’, in the midst of his cries of agony and his arse, making them ‘shitty’. Or they signal the five bullets he shoots, with the third finger pulling the ‘trigger’. The next longish addition contains hunting material, as if to say ‘his hunting days are over’. Joyce first added ‘buckbeshottered!’, and

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then the rest. The Russian General is ‘buckbeshottered!’ shot by buckshot, shot from behind, his back has been shattered. The Chief Secretary of Ireland from 1880 to 1882—when there was agrarian agitation relating to Land League Reform—was W. E. Forster, known as ‘Buckshot Forster’ because he accepted the use of buckshot to deal with the agitation. Forster resigned when Parnell was let out of prison where he’d been for a year. But Forster was also the original target for the Phoenix Park murderers who, because of protection around Forster, had to settle for Thomas Henry Burke, the Undersecretary, instead. Forster becomes yet another candidate for being HCE, an enemy of Irish Home Rulers, though earlier HCE was the progressive Liberal Gladstone, the ‘Grand Old Spider’ and supporter of Home Rule. Pellets of buckshot are often used in hunting: they spray to hit a wider target (the same principle as the Lewis machine gun). It is named after what it kills—the buck, or young deer, and we note here another specific kind of deer, a gazelle. The shooting puts an end to him: he’ll drink no more, ‘unbottle no more Graves’ (a French wine), and no longer will he ‘open up graves’ to pick over the dead bodies (as wolves scavenge dead animals). Nor will he ‘embezzle’ them, making profit from somebody else’s material. Picking over graves in this way makes him seem like a resurrectionist, like Frankenstein. ‘Lou Garou’ sounds like Loup garou, French for a werewolf, and Kayl is Armenian for wolf. He won’t be allowed to call his dogs home (‘nor horne no hounds’) with which to pursue happy little girls and innocent little deer as companions: gazelles, giselles, gay gells (Geselle is companion in German). The werewolf, a man who changes shape into a dangerous and lusty beast, a serial rapist, terrorizes a community which may then attempt to turn on him and hunt him down. There seems to have been a pursuit here, and a successful pursuit using horn and hounds. Stories about a community’s revenge on an individual, both those about werewolves and Frankenstein, are coded here. Butt feels no sympathy for an animal—a wolf—providing for his own companions, but boasts that he’s put an end to this evil, victorious that there’s an end to such a bastard. He boasts just as the ladies who’d castrated Maigrat in Germinal: ‘you won’t fill our daughters any more! . . . We shan’t any more have to offer a backside in return for a loaf.’⁶⁹ Joyce, as Butt, might also be observing the rise and demise of a magazine which had run since 1927 called Hound and Horn that stopped in 1934. Joyce was always alive to what his acquaintances were up to, indeed, in the lines of Finnegans Wake is concealed a diary, a form of critique of the cultural scene around him. Taff now replies, as we’ve seen, amazed, needing to reaffirm Butt’s confirmation: ⁶⁹ Zola, Germinal, 294.

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TAFF (who, asbestas can, wiz the healps of gosh and his bluzzid maikar has been sulphuring to himsalves all the pungataries of sin praktice in failing to furrow theogonies of the dommed)—Trisseme, the mangoat! And the name of the most marsiful, the aweghost, the gragious one! In sobber sooth and in souber civiles? And to the dirtiment of the curtailment of his all of man? Notshoh? (352.35–353.05 and 47480–56v–57 with JJA 55: 116–17 and 47480–100; JJA 55: 185)

Joyce expands Taff’s character description in which Taff is trying to understand what it is like for the damned in sulphurous Hell. He now does so piously: ‘wiz the healps of gosh and his bluzzid maikar’. Taff exclaims ‘gosh!’ heaps of times, like a true Brit. He’s a goody-goody and mother’s boy, putting trust in the sheer largeness—the ‘heaps’—of God and his ‘blessed mother’ and in his ‘maker’ and God’s role as the cold overarching sky, the source and maker of blizzards. Joyce is using Bulgarian (‘blazhen maika’ means ‘blessed mother’ and ‘trisseme’ comes from trizse me, meaning I tremble⁷⁰) and so, for an instant, the narrator embraces Butt and Taff in a Bulgarian context. An ally of the Central Powers during the First World War, Bulgaria was a serious loser, punished with crippling war reparations and experiencing a coup, then an uprising in 1923. But the presence of Bulgaria may chiefly be as part of the Orthodox faith: the Christianity in Armenia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Russia is Orthodox—something Russia hoped to unite and imperialistically be head of. We have also had Polish, however, so the languages are being chosen because of their relation as neighbours to Russia. But the religious linkage is especially relevant when we see the play on the Trinity in this material: for Taff adds the term ‘Aweghost’ to his description of the fallen hero—awe-inspiring like the holy ghost of the Trinity, fiery like high summer (August). HCE now has three qualities, like the Trinity godhead, but they mangle such divine essences as being merciful, august, and gracious. The Trinity theme is there in the strange word ‘trisseme’, which almost sounds like the exclamation ‘bless me!’ It may more convincingly refer to early ‘semiotics’ where ‘seme’ means sign, and a trisseme would be the three parts of a sign. Joyce was, not surprisingly, interested in linguistic theory, drawing from Jespersen and Mauthner and probably aware of Saussure and Peirce.⁷¹ In the Wake’s worlds of multiple interpretation, I suggest that Peirce’s triadic theory of the sign, or ‘seme’, is present. Seme is a word regenerated by Peirce for his theory of meaning which is quite distinct from Saussure’s. HCE is a ‘seme’, a triply significant thing. ⁷⁰ VI.B.46, 71 (12); Rose, Index, 139. ⁷¹ C. K. Ogden, a fairly good acquaintance of Joyce, wrote of Peirce in The Meaning of Meaning (London: Kegan Paul, 1923). This state-of-the-art 1923 survey of linguistic theory appears in the Wake as as the ‘Maymeaminning of maimoomeining’ (267.03).

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Joyce might have been intrigued by the coincidence of Peirce’s name with one version of Earwicker—Persse O’Reilly. Taff’s exclamations indicate a different understanding of Butt’s target: Butt has killed a trembling ‘mangoat’ and man of God, linguistically an inversion of a Goatman, or satyr, the musical god Pan—a figure more usually associated with the capering Shem than with HCE. Butt says he’s killed a type of person who resembles the mighty HCE, but Taff wonders if that person is more Shem like, more like himself. As a satyr, a goatman is depicted with the legs of a goat and the head of a man, a mythical sexually powerful and intelligent animal. A ‘mangoat’, then, presumably has the legs and sexuality of a man but the head and the brains of a goat: a laughable hybridity like Bottom (a name that evokes Butt and Butt’s vision of his victim), with a donkey’s head in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Butt’s speech, in which he says he saw HCE wipe himself, now includes excuses in an infantile pleading, then lists witnesses of his great act building up to another overexcited climax: BUTT . . . Yastsar! In sabre tooth and sombre saviles! Senonnevero! That he leaves nyet is my grafe. He deared me to it and he dared me do it, and bedattle I didaredonit as Cocksnark of Killtork can tell and Ussur Ursussen of the viktaurious onrushwith all the rattles in his arctic! As bold and as madhouse a bull in a meadows. Knout Knittrick Kinkypeard! (353.9–353.14 and 47480–56v; JJA 55: 116 and 47480–100; JJA 55: 185)⁷²

Joyce wrote this longish addition in three parts. He first wrote: ‘He deared me to it and he dared me do it as bold and as madhouse a bull in a meadows.’ Butt declares that somebody, presumably the victim himself, challenged and seduced him into doing the deed, just as a rapist declares that short skirts on a woman are a keen invitation to rape. The victim or the tormenter are like a ‘bull in a meadow’, bold and mad, reflections of each other—just at the point of shooting—locked in their own mad power fantasies, both in a madhouse. Into this fairly lucid phrase Joyce inserted before the metaphor the long clause (‘and bedattle I didaredonit . . . arctic’), in which Butt, swearing again—‘bedad’, by Dad and by the battle itself—declares his witnesses in an alliterative pile up of ‘d’s and ‘t’s, signalling a machine gun stuttering its rapid rattle. Butt’s ⁷² Joyce’s immediate source for many of these additions are taken from rejected drafts of dialogue, appearing first in the Archive on 47480–151–152; JJA 55: 123–4. They originally constituted a retelling of the climax, but Joyce aborted them, broke them up, and redistributed them as additions to the third typescript. This is an increasingly common technique for Joyce in the closing stages of composition. He does it with Issy’s letter in II.2, and with the Tristan and Isolde sketch, which he breaks up and mixes in with the Mamalujo sketch to make II.4. In the transcription here I have corrected one transmissional error Joyce made and himself then corrected: ‘as’ was typed up as ‘us’ then corrected for transition.

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allies, who ‘can tell’ and back up his story, nevertheless seem a disreputable pair, like Hosty’s soldier mates in I.2 (40): ‘Cocksnark of Killtork . . . and Ussur Ursussen.’ ‘Cocksnark’, is cocking a snook, putting thumb to nose. His name indicates the kind of guy who gets involved in quests of discovery and destruction, as in Carroll’s extraordinary nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark, which satirizes the combined fantasies of exploration carried out by naturalist and colonialist—searching for something not understood except as a risk, for a form of knowledge which proves fatal if known. And he’s a Cock’s Nark, a spy for God, a man from Kilturk (a common place name in Ireland) who has killed a Turk, an opponent of the Russians in the Crimea, a mercenary assassin, like Butt perhaps. Ussur is an anagram of ‘ursus’ and ‘russu’, and contains the USSR, signalling the Russian Bear again. ‘Ursussen’ (also sounding assassin) quasi-translates ‘bear’s son’ or ‘Bjørnson’ the Norwegian dramatist and Ibsen’s rival, perceived as the socialized extrovert, as opposed to Ibsen’s introverted misanthrope. He is ‘of the viktaurious onrush’, one of the victorious, Viking (‘Vik’) bull-like (‘taurus’) hordes as they rush on. The phrase ‘victorious onrush’ featured in a 1922 booklet called War Sites of the 1914–1918 Campaign which was sold, as its cover says, ‘for the disabled soldiers’ and war orphans’ funds’.⁷³ It being a proud recollection of conflict explains its presence in Butt’s remembered narrative. Hoping to heal war trauma, it stirs up Belgian patriotism in several ways, including the use of these words to describe the moment of the German retreat from Belgium: Throughout the second phase, the Belgian Army clustered on the Yser, is mounting a sacred guard, repulsing with a dogged determination all the foe’s attempts of breaking through, and that right up to the last and victorious onrush of September 1918.

‘Russian’ into ‘onrush’ involves a syllable inversion, a technique of distortion which, as we’ll see in Part III, signals homosexuality, or the concealment, of some ‘questionable’ behaviour. Joyce was intrigued that both Tristan and Charles Dodgson inverted their names to Tantris and Lewis Carroll, showing an interest perhaps in self-concealment and projecting the self inversely as other. What with the ‘rats in his attic’, the rattling attic, his empty head full of riddles, ‘Ussur’, moreover, is mad. He is alone and cold in his arctic garret, the arctic being the empty upstairs space of the world partly shared between Russia and Norway. It is these two disreputable fellow comrades-in-arms who will bear witness for Butt. Joyce makes another addition at the end of Butt’s speech: ‘Knout Knittrick Kinkypeard!’ This may provide yet another nickname for the target he has hit. ⁷³ Another title, which McHugh gives in his updated Annotations (p. 353), is The Operations of the Belgian Army, 1914–1918.

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But it also looks like Butt announcing a title for himself and his two comrades: K K and K, a band of merry mercenary knights, members of the Ku Klux Klan, knotted and knitted together as one, keen to wipe out the mulattomilitiaman for his mixed blood. Such a threesome, represent the commonplace of threesomes between whom power is shared or fought for, like Shakespeare’s triumvirate in Julius Caesar, Dumas’s Three Musketeers, and Kipling’s Soldiers Three, not forgetting the Holy Trinity itself. Patrick is sounded in ‘trick’ and ‘peard’, so they’re fighters for Christ and converting missionaries. Amongst these three is Sitric Silkenbeard, the Viking leader of Norse Dublin in 1014, when indigenous insurgents under Brian Boru rose against and defeated the Vikings at the battle of Clontarf. There is also King Cnut, a warrior king of England, who vainly attempted battling against the seas. Butt uses history to evoke two non-Irish losers. But here he is a ‘knittrick’, and Sitric’s beard is a ‘peard’ and not silken, but ‘kinky’. Joyce also enlarges Butt’s description in this speech of the precise context of the shooting: For when meseemim, and tolfoklokken rolland out allover ourloud’s lande, beheaving up that sob of tunf for to claimhis, for to weepimself wollpimsolff, puddywhuck. At that illstunt to instullt to Igorlunds. Igorladns! Prronto! I gave one doublenotch and I ups with my crozzier. Mirrdo! With my bow on armer and hits leg an arrow cockshock rockrogn. Sparro! (353.15–21 and 47480–58; JJA 55: 118 with 47480–101; JJA 55: 187)

This has some straightforward elements, in that it twins the Irish and the Russian revolutionary wars in a place called ‘Igorladns!’—Ireland and the land of Igors. We can unpack this new climax to produce the following: When I saw him, and it was the auspicious time of 12 o’clock, the thick of the night, the danger clock ringing in the cathedral [like the ‘Klokke Roeland’ in Ghent which rings at the approach of trouble], ringing out over all our land, Ireland’s land, loud signalling the fight of a Roland and an Oliver, . . . when I saw him lifting up that turf to claim it as his own, to clean his . . . to wipe himself off, to wipe his—[cue the euphemism] paddywhack! At that insult to the land of suppression and the yoke [igo in Russian], to the ego-lads trying to emerge as independent [mentioning the Oedipal drama], I said good night to him [dobra noc] and I lifted my pastoral staff, [righteous like a bishop, symbol of the authority by which I rule my flock] and I took aim, and—Shit man!—recording it with a double notch in my stick, scoring two for this mighty deed . . . Goddammit—I fired!

Joyce wrote that the Irish priesthood chasing the British out were, ‘barbarians armed with crucifixes’.⁷⁴ This is the first time Butt’s shooting has been with the ⁷⁴ Ellmann, James Joyce, 304.

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Church’s backing (in his symbolic weaponry of the ‘Crozzier’), but the idea has been brewing with the references to Patrick. Something the Church dislikes is the exhibition of a lewd act in public or in print, an act which should be hidden away, and confessed only in private. Excretion is such an act, representative of it, to be maintained as a taboo, an initial step in associating the body with shame. The source for the worked-over phrase ‘instullt to Igorladns’, is almost certainly Beckett, who told Ellmann how he had interpreted the Russian General story to Joyce. Wiping himself on a ‘sod of turf’⁷⁵ was interpreted by Beckett as ‘another insult to Ireland’.⁷⁶ This illustrates not only the obvious continuous concern with Irish nationalism and identity in the Wake, but also how Joyce’s compositional role was one of prompter, gatherer, and arranger of views that were ‘not his’, making the ultimate ‘polyvocal’, ‘intertextual’, dialogic text. Joyce’s mosaic style of composing in fragments, is easily able to absorb the words of others (before, in most cases, transforming them). Their transformation (Beckett’s ‘insult’ becomes Joyce’s ‘instullt’) seems like a way of making a claim on them having appropriated them. The drafts, then, seem to provide evidence for Beckett’s anecdote, something they haven’t done (yet) with the famous ‘Come in!’ story, which goes as follows: Beckett is taking down draft material from dictation and there’s a knock at the door he doesn’t hear. Joyce says come in and Beckett writes it down, not realizing there is a person at the door. Later, when Beckett reads the material back to Joyce, they come across the words ‘Come in’, seemingly disconnected. Working out what must have happened, Joyce decided to let it stay. It seems possible that Beckett made this up as a piece of myth-making, and as a means of illustrating his own sense of the interruptive, improvised, and contingent mode of Joyce’s composition. It illustrates how the text receives almost random unplanned material into its form. But even if this anecdote were true, our genetic exegesis shows something quite different if related happening at nearly every step: the text may be constantly interrupted—but not by accident, only after the careful choice, gathering, and selection of material. It is at this point of the text that Joyce had chosen to insert the ‘abnihilisation of the etym’. We move from the climax of an execution, to the appearance of something—a word—out of nothing. To the rest of the speeches from our sequence, there are just two small additions at this level, both within Taff’s character description: TAFF (skimperskamper, his wools gatherings all over cromlin what with the birstol boys artheynes and is it her tour and the crackery of the fullfour fivefirerms and ⁷⁵ As Nathan Halper pointed out in A Wake Newslitter (Dec. 1968), Ellmann recording ‘piece of turf ’ is probably inaccurate, since the phrase should be ‘sod of turf ’. ⁷⁶ Ellmann, James Joyce, 398.

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the crockery of their damdam domdom chumbers). Wharall thubulbs uptheaires! Shattamovick? (353.43–354.02 and 47480–58; JJA 55: 118 with 47480–120; JJA 55: 188)

Earlier, Taff had been ‘wool gathering’, idly imagining great schemes, shying away from the descriptions of battle (see section 1.4 above, p. 111). The ‘firerms’ are now expanded to ‘fullfour fivefirerms’ and the ‘dom chambers’ expanded to ‘damdam domdom chumbers’. Two ‘F’ syllables are doubled, giving pace and stuttering speed, while one ‘domn’ sound quadruples into four percussive plosive sounds. A symmetry of numbers is maintained while echoes of a father’s mortality are sounded from The Tempest: ‘Full fathom five thy father lies’ as if burbled inaccurately, bubbling up through the depths of the sea. The dumb chambers become the echoing chambers of the dead, like the chambers of the Marabar caves in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). Given Buckshot Forster’s presence earlier, this may be more than a fanciful coincidence, for Forster’s scene at the Marabar caves formed the central climax of a well-known post-First World War novel that foreshadowed a likely end to Britain’s presence in India, the same manner of ending which this shooting can represent. And Joyce was certainly aware of the Bloomsbury network of the Woolfs, Sackville-Wests, Eliots, and Forster. Inside the empty chambers of the cave, the character Mrs Moore hears: a terrifying echo . . . entirely devoid of distinction. Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies . . . ‘Boum’ is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it, or ‘bou-oum,’ or ‘ou-boum’—utterly dull. . . . if several people talk at once, an overlapping howling noise begins, echoes generate echoes . . .⁷⁷

It fills Mrs Moore with a sense of nihilism, which causes her, like Butt and Taff, to become faint, ultimately to fade away: she dies on her return passage to England. It brings us to a confrontation with that important perception of Finnegans Wake, that its apparent sense of affirmation, plurality, and multiplicity shades into or hides a stronger idea of nullity. From the infinitely meaningful, universally affirming, it is a short step to the opposite, to indifference, to voids of meaning and value. Mrs Moore interpreted the echo sound in this way. It began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. . . . [I]t had managed to murmur: ‘. . . Everything exists, nothing has value.’ . . . it robbed the infinity and eternity of their vastness, . . . she knew that all [Christianity’s] divine words from ‘Let there be light’ to ‘It is finished’ only amount to ‘boum.’ . . . [T]he universe, never comprehensible to her intellect, offered no repose to her soul;⁷⁸ ⁷⁷ E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 158–9. ⁷⁸ Ibid. 160–1.

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The incomprehensibility of Finnegans Wake seems to be close to this but only in opposing associations—there is a repeated sameness in the underlying story of the fall, and superficially a sameness in the sheer difficulty of the whole, but the noises it makes are in no way monotonous—echoes do generate echoes, and yet each one is distinct from the source, never a blunting blurriness but a sharpened shifting. Each element generates a double which separates miotically from what produced it, and often re-emerges at a distance, the sign that a series has begun. So in I.1, there is a serial voyage through variations on the word Dublin: ‘doubling . . . devlins . . . dalppling . . . Dobbelin . . . Dyoublong . . . Dbln . . . Dublin . . . dabblin . . . d’of Linn . . . durlbin . . . Doublends . . . delvin . . . Devlin . . . dimpling . . . Dybbling’.⁷⁹ We never return to the same port. Distance prevents precise recurrences being oppressively similar. Any repetitive sameness that adheres to them is an illusion easily dispelled by the reader’s experience of surprise, or the way recollection of repetition turns out to be a misremembering. The overlapping noises of the Wake are not a hollow booming howling but a low babbling, chords of rich music, harmonic and disharmonic. The ‘divine words’ that Mrs Moore thinks of are certainly frequently shifted and made to amount to something less divine in Finnegans Wake— like the ‘glass’ of 1 Corinthians 13: 12 that becomes Butt’s pint glass of beer. But this is more like a displacement to something comic and bathetic, rather than a reduction to a dull ‘boum’. In Finnegans Wake the diversity of life, or the world, or history, is being presented by someone who seems to have apprehended its compression, breadth, and irreducibility as much as any poet, scientist, or historian before him. This diversity is not something which, when presented as incomprehensible, leads to an existential anxiety. It does not code valueless existence so much as the incalculable value of existence due its transformations, as its manifestations move between positive being and nothingness, as they move in and out of life and death, wakefulness and sleepiness. The phrase ‘damdam domdom’ having never existed before as meaningful words are emerging into being. As sounds, of course, they may have been uttered thousands of times, as people lull themselves to sleep, for instance, or ‘lilt’ quietly along with a tune. But they are brought into existence each time they are read and reread through interpretation. For in Finnegans Wake linguistic worlds rise out of multiple sounds: an actual world is not, as in Forster’s caves, simply reduced to a single sound. And while Forster describes an experience that tears away the veil of apparent meaning to reveal nothingness and meaninglessness, Joyce creates for his readers the conditions in which meaning—historical meaning—can emerge ⁷⁹ See Finnegans Wake, 3.10, 3.23, 7.2, 7.12, 13.4, 13.14, 14.15, 16.35, 17.12, 19.12, 20.16, 21.6, 24.25, 28.19, 29.22.

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from apparent meaninglessness. For the meaningless ‘tumtitum’ nonsense of ‘damdam domdom’ has hovering around it the notorious ‘dumdum’ bullets developed in the Indian town of Dumdum in the 1890s, banned by the Hague convention in 1899 because of their vicious tearing effect on impact with skin, but used nevertheless by the Black and Tans in Dublin in 1920. Again, if this should seem fanciful, we may recall that Butt’s speech has been scattered with allusions to weapons, projectiles, and to nineteenth-century British Imperial policies and personalities.

4 . 2 . R EV I S I N G T H E T H I R D T Y PE S C R I P T: ‘G E N E RA L UTTERMOSTS CONFUSSION’ Over the episode as a whole the third typescript was hardly revised at all, except for Butt and Taff’s unison speech which continued to prove troublesome and was reworked considerably. In the rest of our passage there were just three small phrases added, and a couple of letters exchanged. The appearance of Butt’s target is qualified: ‘and he went before him with in that nemcon enchelonce with the same old domstoole story’,⁸⁰ exhibiting the blasé indifference and nonchalance of a non-com, a non-commissioned officer. Joyce also extends Butt’s disgust at seeing HCE take down his trousers, reveal his arse and now sound off: For when meseemim, and tolfoklokken rolland allover ourloud’s lande, beheaving up that sob of tunf for to claimhis, for to wollpimsolff, puddywhuck. Ay, and untuoning his culothone in an exitous erseroyal Deo Jupto. At that instullt to Igorladns! (353.16–20 and see 47480–147; JJA 55: 261)

Joyce mixes the sacred and the profane, a mixture which takes the section under consideration to its most irreverent form. HCE is undoing his culottes, thundering (tuoni) from out of his arse (cul), intoning a gross version of something, out of tune—untuning. In its first extant drafting there had been a ‘culophone’—a telephonic arse producing fart noise.⁸¹ It is a musical accompaniment to what turns out to be a version of the Pilgrim’s Psalm (113 in the Vulgate, 114 in the King James Bible) which begins In exitu Israel de Aegypto (‘When Israel came out of Egypt’). Is Joyce comparing the escape and liberation of Israel from out of Egypt with the exit of excretion? Are we watching an exodus as an ek-shit-us? According to Dante, the psalm is sung by ⁸⁰ 47480–97v; JJA 55: 182.

⁸¹ 47480–107; JJA 55: 199

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those who, as they cross the lake, are taken over to Purgatory. One verse of the original remembers a magical time when ‘the mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs’, referring presumably to the earthquake that helped the Red Sea retire and let Moses and the Israelites cross, a revolutionary moment, where the earth itself is in revolt to help those pursued by tyrannous forces. The earthquake can be mythically imagined as a war of the underworld against the earth’s surface, throwing the earth’s crust into the air, as earth fountains when struck by a shell, and so Taff wonders: ‘Wharall thubulbs uptheaires’. Joyce has transformed, as if blasphemously, the psalm’s words: ‘Exitous’ is close to the word exitus, which, though obsolete, means ruinous and destructive. ‘Israel’ becomes ‘erseroyal’—both Irish royal, or Royal Arse (like the ‘Royal Irish Arse’ in Ulysses 7.990); and de Aegypto is rewritten as Deo Jupto, the God Jupiter, and Deo Justo, the righteous God. So we can translate roughly ‘a ruinous royal arse, of the God Jupiter’. Jupiter’s war is from the upperworld against the earth’s surface—as he throws his excrement down on humanity. Joyce also revises the great ‘abnihilisation’ paragraph. In the ‘grivning of the grovning’, ‘v’s are swapped for ‘s’s, so it becomes the ‘grisning of the grosning,’ evoking another margin of the Russian empire, Grosny, the capital of Chechnia, and prophetically sounding by coincidence its near-annihilation in the Russian air-raids of 1994. He also makes one small but extraordinarily potent addition, adding to the following phrase the two words in bold: ‘with an ivanmorinthorrorumble fragoromboassity amidwhiches generaluttermosts confussion are perceivable moletons . . .’.⁸² In transition, the first of these words would be split into ‘general uttermosts’ and so it would remain for the first edition. ‘General confusion’ is a term used in stage directions to get actors running around in all directions, falling over, screaming, etc., what citizens might do at the sound of an air raid, and what could describe the behaviour of molecules when scattering in a cloud chamber. But the word, subtly, is ‘confussion’ with an extra ‘s’, so, hearing the ‘u’ as an ‘e’, it’s a short step to confession. A general confession ( Joyce had noted ‘general’s confession’)⁸³ is a confession of all your sins, something done before a major change in life, like a conversion (as evoked, again, in 1 Corinthians 12:13), or a long journey or a marriage. It’s also the name given to the rites of absolution before death, explaining why it’s ‘uttermost’ here, the most remote point, and indicating perhaps that Butt is relating his story before some final journey. ‘Uttermosts’ has an ‘s’ to indicate a possessive, that is, this is the confession of General Uttermost, the one who talks more than anyone. To ‘utter most’, of course, is to speak more than anyone else: which Butt has been doing throughout the ⁸² 47480–100v; JJA 55: 186

⁸³ Rose, Index, 169.

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dialogue, and which HCE is about to do (in a confession, moreover) after the story finishes. Since we’re changing the ‘u’ to ‘e’ we can easily turn a blind eye to the ‘con’ and see in ‘fussion’ a word which brilliantly fuses ‘fusion’ and ‘fission’, words with opposing senses, since one signals the action of splitting, the other of blending, processes that chime strongly with Joyce’s manipulation of language. They are also simple processes that science explores, and at the base of scientific experiment, splitting to separate and extract, and bringing together to combine and meld. Despite the subatomic context, Joyce cannot quite be referring to precise nuclear processes, if only because neither term had yet been used in that context, though it was very close indeed. According to the OED (which may be mistaken) the term ‘nuclear fission’ first appeared in February 1939, and ‘nuclear fusion’ conceived in 1942. Joyce would, however, know the words from his strong knowledge of Latin and perhaps of biology, which was already using them intensively in its observations of how cells underwent fusion and fission. In context the word ‘confussion’ helps to describe the general splitting and combining that is going on subsequent to the appearance of the ‘etym’, Joyce’s experimentation with language attempting a ‘mimesis’ of the processes of nature, imitating the processes of natural growth and change. And yet the contention is possible that Joyce is predicting their use in physics, in advance of the naming of processes, though not in the precise observation and description of them. He foreshadows their possibility before their recognition in culture. It is as if he knows they will come along, and that there will be an action to match the name. On the other hand, Joyce is anyway more interested in creating a different idea from what atomic physics will come up with, one that combines and con-fuses the oppositions fusion and fission, splitting and blending in the same phonemes, thus making ‘fussion’. It’s partly an economical act, but indicates Joyce’s critique of language that it is inadequate in describing paradoxical things and self-contradictory processes, inadequate in fusing as a unity the things and processes made fissile by representation. There is a further interesting problem in why it is that Joyce is bringing together in his pun around confession and confusion two simple words that describe much of the content and form of Finnegans Wake. Why are these two being fused, or why have they been fissured, it seems to ask? In what ways is a confession a splitting and a fusing? Confessing, putting a remembered event into words, like telling a secret or telling a story, splits the memory source from being solely within the subject, and doubles it as some external linguistic utterance. The confession splits off from the experience and the memory, but it fuses with the consciousness of an audience. The audience is confessor, confussor, being fused with the general quasi-confession of the writing.

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Now we can turn to how Joyce worked over Butt and Taff’s closing speech, extending it considerably. He began revising it on the typescript, but it needed so much reworking and extending that he began again, writing it out. Its many new elements are in bold: When old the wormd was a gadden and Anthea first unfoiled her limbs wanderloot was the way the wold wagged and opter and apter were samuraised twines. They had their mutthering ivies and their murdhering idies and their mouldhering iries in that muskat grove but there’ll be bright penny flowers in Calomella’s cool bowers when the magpyre’s babble towers scorching and screeching from the ravenindove. If thees liked the sex of his head and mees ates the seeps of his traublers he’s dancing figgies to the spittle side and shoving out the soord: he’ll be buying buys and gulling gells with his carne, silk and honey while myandthys playing lancifer lucifug and what’s duff as a bettle for usses makes cosyn corallines’ moues weeter to wee. So till butagain budly etc. budly shoots thon rising germinal let bodley chew the fatt of his anger and badley bide the toil of his tubb (354.22–354.36; 47480–67; JJA 55: 131 with 47480–105; JJA 55: 193 )

This is a huge addition, tripling the length of the speech. The first chunk of additions (from ‘Anthea’ to ‘ravenindove’) is, in fact, three uneven and unevenly rhyming quatrains of tetrameters, and it helps exegetically to see them as such: When old the wormd was a gadden and Anthea first unfoiled her limbs wanderloot was the way the wold wagged and opter and apter were samuraised twines. They had their mutthering ivies and their murdhering idies and their mouldhering iries in that muskat grove but there’ll be bright penny flowers in Calomella’s cool bowers when the magpyre’s babble towers scorching and screeching from the ravenindove. (354.22–8)

‘When all the world was a garden’ or when ‘all the worms were gadding about’ like snakes (gad means snake in pan-Slavonic), when the world was the worm’s, at that wonderful time the flower-goddess Anthea unfolded and uncoiled her limbs. Butt and Taff seem to be remembering some Edenic springtime of easy sexual encounters when the legs, even of goddesses, uncovered (un-foiled) and spread themselves (unfold, unfurled, uncoiled) invitingly. The world

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then was a wonderland, of a time when men could rid themselves of their wanderlust without any problems, a place free for wandering and looting, with its gently rolling terrain (like a wold)—in a sinister comparison—as around Waterloo after the battle. It was a time of magical unity, when separated things that were only slightly different (like ‘opter and apter’, whatever they are—peter/pater, often/after, opt/apt) were not separate but as closely bound together like Plato’s vision in the Symposium of original hermaphroditism, fused like Siamese twins, ‘samuraised’, before Jupiter cut them in two.⁸⁴ They were raised in the same way, as Samurai are, treated identically as members of a crack militia group. At that time the twined twins had their poison ivy, their murderous ideas, their mouldy festering irises, their declining eyes, their imagined days of wrath (‘dies . . . ires’), while hanging out in the garden, beneath the vine. That is, in the good old days, they may have harboured syphilis, or other Sexually Transmitted Disease, and the desire for revenge. The vine may be of sweet ‘muscat’ grapes, but it’s also a ‘musket’ garden. Perhaps we are near the Magazine, an arsenal for firearms in Phoenix Park and where, in the ballad, Humpty Dumpty fell—‘by the butt of the Magazine Wall’ (45.04) . There they brew murderous ideas (like that of the Phoenix Park murders). Such violence may have been spoiling the paradise past, but the future holds bright possibilities: there’ll be a time when everything in the garden is lovely, with flowery pinafores, in the cool bowers designed by Columella (a first-century Roman specialist in gardens). This prophecy of flowers rising through the dark imagination of the male draws on ‘the Quinet motif’, the longest direct quote from another author in the Wake that appears on 285 and which evokes the survival of the pretty and delicate natural world as it outlives the ruins of grandiose human schemes. But there is another turn back in the final image towards the sinister, violent, and surreal: ‘when the magpyre’s babble towers scorching and screeching from the ravenindove’, with images of auguries from watching the birds. Birds screech, fire scorches, and both rise into the air babbling. As they rise into the sky, they tower above the scene, language reduced to nonsense. The imagery is phantasmagorical: flames scorch the bird, or a magpie and a dove are in a fight. The dove, contrary to its symbolic role representing peace, is ravening, rabid, mad, rapaciously pursuing the magpie. Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a raven is hidden inside the dove (‘raven in dove’). The word unites the opposites of the black and the white, and a carrion bird with the bird of ⁸⁴ ‘Every human being was round, the back and the sides being circularly joined, and each had four arms and as many legs; two faces fixed upon a round neck, exactly like each other; one head between the two faces; four ears, and two organs of generation and everything else as from such proportions it is easy to conjecture.’ The Symposium of Plato, trans. P. B. Shelley (South Bend, Indiana: St Augustine’s Press, 2002). 27.

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peace. On the other hand the ‘babble’ of the ‘pyre’, a special fire built to burn a corpse or execute a witch, rises into the sky, scorching the ‘ravenindove’, the trapped innocent bird, caught and now being burned, like some Joan of Arc, perceived as concealing evil within, though she had once claimed to be filled with the holy spirit—the dove. There seems to be an execution or a sacrifice occurring, a sacrifice of birds, of young women. So the men come together and fantasize a rape, one of the common events in warfare as soldiers, in their pent-up or over-satiated violence and the uncontrollable stress of combat, release their stress on the females unable to escape their clutches. This seems to be about women in a war zone caught, in the perceptions of common soldiers, between being idealized cheap prostitutes (‘bright penny flowers’) or raped (‘screeching from the’ ravening’ rapists). The words pile up further into a Pentecostal vision where the Holy Spirit, traditionally a dove, descends on the disciples of Christ in the form of tongues of fire, giving them the power to speak in tongues and providing access to universal communication, a reversal of the punishment of the falling tower of Babel. The birds—magpies, doves, ravens—fly from the flaming tower (as in the Tarot card of ‘The Tower’), struck down by the Lord’s thunderbolts for the presumption of being raised to the heavens. As the Babel tower falls, God curses us into fragmented mutually uncomprehending groups, the end of unity. Butt and Taff’s speech seems to draw on the images that ‘all will be at peace, when the Spirit descends upon us’ and that ‘everything will seem rosy when we hear the birds calling’. But, in fact, the prediction foretells more destruction and violence, and the executions of innocents that may follow a revolution. Staying with this theme of prostitution and female sacrifice, Butt and Taff seem also to consider what would have happened if they had been divided and what HCE will do if they just play silly games. This may be seen—though with some difficulty—in the following: If thees liked the sex of his head and mees ates the seeps of his traublers he’s dancing figgies to the spittle side and shoving out the soord: he’ll be buying buys and gulling gells with his carne, silk and honey while myandthys playing lancifer lucifug and what’s duff as a bettle for usses makes cosyn corallines’ moues weeter to wee. (354.28–34 and 47480–105; JJA 55: 193)

The obscure allusions here are to the world of insects, an index for which Joyce made in the Index Notebook. A quick version could produce the following surreal content: ‘If you liked the shape of his head, and I hated the seat of his trousers then he’ll be dancing with all the females and brandishing his phallic sword: he’ll lure boys and girls with his sweets while me and you play angels

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and devils and what is just a meaningless battle/beetle could make the mouths of girls sweeter.’ The borders that keep identities defined and separated have broken down here in respect to number, gender and species. With Butt and Taff speaking together, conventional pronouns go out of the window. In ‘thees’ and ‘mees’ they riff on pluralized singulars, while ‘We’, ‘to us’, and ‘our’ are transformed into ‘usses’ ‘to wee’, and ‘myandthys’. Their pronouns sound loopy, but they follow a curious logic. For in a group everyone is a ‘thee’ or ‘me’ to everyone else, so there are plural ‘thees’ and ‘mees’. This is a symptom of their tenuous unison, their attempt to make new categories to designate the radical transformations of their identity through a profound integration. To complicate gender identities, Joyce draws on entomology: Butt and Taff speak of ‘the sex of her head’ and ‘the seep of his traublers’, describing an androgynous ‘chimera’ or ‘mosaic’ insect, where one half (the top) is female, and the other (the bottom) is male.⁸⁵ If Butt and Taff have come together, then as a male and a female, they have produced this sex mosaic. We can note that it’s not the ‘seat’ of his ‘trousers’ but the ‘seep’, a seepage implying incontinence. And it’s not trousers either, but ‘traublers’, a word combining ‘trouble’ and the German for grapes (echoing with the muscat earlier): squashed into grape juice, they seep into wine. ‘One hates the way juice comes out of his grapes!’ Most German wine is white, and grapes being slang for testicles, the image of incontinence—sexual or urinary—is further emphasized.⁸⁶ In transsexual formulations, one of them (they both claim), adores the mother within him and the other, they both claim, hates the incontinent father within her. In liking and hating (‘likes’ and ‘ates’), they are divided and so he—HCE—is able to dance, to cut ‘figures’, to shake his figs or testicles, on the ‘spindle’ side (that is, the female line), while getting rid of the male line (the ‘spear-side’ indicated by the ‘soord’) who are also deaf: sourd. ‘Spittle’ is matter produced by certain insects—the male scorpion fly, for instance—and fed to his mate so that she doesn’t eat the spermatophore (the sac of sperm—the potential offspring). Joyce had already visited the sex life of insects in the episode about the Ant and the Grasshopper. It is a parallel but exclusive world, the incorporation of which compromises the centrality of human roles in narrative. Spittle is also a word for ‘hospital’ and it is just possible Joyce is referring to himself and his offspring here. On the female side, Lucia (sounded perhaps in some words just coming up), whom Joyce danced with when he visited her, was in hospital. On the male line George ⁸⁵ See Rose, Index, 252; and VI.B.46, 106 and 107. ⁸⁶ And see Ellmann, James Joyce, 455, for Joyce’s jokey association of the colour of a certain white wine with the urine of an archduchess.

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(as St George with his sword) is ‘shoved out’—living in America, no longer at home. Butt and Taff predict a similar future if they don’t remain vigilant. HCE will ‘be buying boys’ (as slaves) and fooling (‘gulling’) girls with all his luxurious products like carmine, ‘silk and honey’ (all products derived from insects) while we mess about playing angels and demons or calling up demons. ‘Lancifer’, a word which means spike-bearing and is applied in descriptions of the non-human world (for beetles, cacti, crayfish, and others), could, in this context, refer to a sword carrier like the Archangel Michael. And ‘lucifug’ is St Michael’s opposite, a demon Lucifuge Rofocale, from the Grand Grimoire, the magnum opus of black magic. Lucifuge is called up with the help of ‘Solomon’s Rod’—by one bearing a spike, therefore. Messing with black magic allows the tyrant to carry on unheeded, making luxurious goods from exploiting all the little hard-working insects. Butt and Taff conclude with the present: ‘what’s duff as a bettle for usses makes cosyn corallines’ moues weeter to wee’, ‘what’s deaf as a beetle (for us) makes cousin Caroline’s mouth water, wetter, and her pout more sweet (to we)’. A beetle that makes someone’s mouth water sounds close to the aphrodisiac Spanish fly. A beetle which makes a pout (moue in French) sweeter is the cochineal beetle that helps make the carmine used in lipstick. ‘Coralline’ looks like Caroline or Coriolanus, but, as so often with Joyce, there’s a real word here: ‘corallines’ are organisms that resemble the elaborate finial forms of coral, whether seaweed, lichen, or moss. ‘Coralline’ also describes the frequently red colour of coral. Butt and Taff’s chorus has ended with a passage packed with the polymorphous perversity of insects and the uses of their dead bodies—as if after the epic events of killing time, the Tsar, Michael Collins, booting out the British, producing meaning—what we’ve ultimately witnessed is the squashing of an insect. Joyce now arrives at the final version of Butt and Taff’s climax as together they conclude their little speech. As we’ve only discussed the presence of ‘germinal’ in this we shall run through it again: So till butagain budly . . . shoots thon rising germinal let bodley chew the fatt of his anger and badley bide the toil of his tubb. (354.34–6 and 47480–105; JJA 55: 193)

Joyce has cancelled ‘badley bite the dustice of the piece’, implying Butt/badley’s death, since to bite the dust is, of course, to be dead. To be biting the justice of the peace, meanwhile, is an unlikely way to persuade a magistrate to show clemency. Now Joyce has inserted a semi-inversion of Butt (Tubb) to balance the semi-inversion of Taff (Fatt), evoking simultaneously Swift’s Tale of a Tub. A sense of the whole might be: so, until

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what’s just happened happens again, until the big fish, the tuna (thon) rising up, is shot by ‘butagain budly’, or until the bud shoots forth, until spring returns, until we come full circle, let ‘bodley’ (Taff–Fatt) stew in his juice, chewing the fat, angry, and let ‘badley’ (Butt–Tubb) wait for a boat (tub) so he can work his passage away. For such an eventuality, these revolutionaries will have to wait, to lie in wait, reduced—once again—to killing.

4 . 3 . F I NA L TO U C H E S : ‘ D O O K TO D O O K ’ Joyce received the transition proofs in 1938. Most of these are missing, but in any case our passage received hardly any changes. On 20 January 1938, Joyce wrote to his daughter-in-law that he had finished his piece for transition. But after transition, there were still a few little changes on the galleys: ‘Olefoh, the sourd of foemoe times! Unknun!’ (353.15) is added after ‘Knout Knittrick Kinkypeard’, carrying on the Anglo-Saxon sounds of ‘kn’ and sounding ‘unknown!’ ‘For the sword of former times’ is a song by Thomas Moore, for which the tune (or ‘air’) is unknown. And so in being unknown it exclaims at the last minute that the target, the old foe, Olaf, useless like an old sword, useless because deaf (French sourd) is now blasted into oblivion, into the unknown. Joyce also added a little double, ‘dook to dook’ (354.19), echoing with ‘back to back’, deoch to deoch (drink to drink), fist to fist (duke being a boxing term for a clenched fist) and Duke to Duke—an Oliver facing a Roland, the meeting of self-identical forces, equal and opposite, a little symbol of Joyce’s interchangeable and self-identifying twins. Language forces different subjects to be made equal by being given the same name or title while, by contrast, society divides similar subjects from each other through the specializations that society requires. During 1937, Joyce finally managed to bring onto his textual stage, and direct, a story that had long been deferred, waiting in the wings since 1924. But the certainty that ‘every schoolgirl knows that it was Buckley who shot the Russian General’ is far away in time and space, and the assumed knowledge as a myth, undermined. Written during a single year, Joyce compressed and intensified his usual composition techniques of drafting and gradual redrafting, using his ‘late’ style of heavy notebook use, with rich but obscure allusions, nearly always transforming the fragments in the notebooks as he transferred them into his drafts. Joyce intensively wove in references to folklore (Robin Hood), myth (time as Chronos), contemporaneous science

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(Rutherford) and contemporaneous culture (Lulu and Robeson), the history of the Irish and Russian Revolutions (Igorladns), and insects. These are all layered over each other, not to produce a universal Oedipal myth of an Execution, but symbolically to execute singularity, in the exposure, fragmentation, and the consequent multiplication of the original unitary event.

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Part III ‘Nircississies’

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‘Nircississies’ (526.20–528.24) 1 . 1 . 1 9 2 4 : E A R LY D RA F T S : ‘ L I S T E N , M E M E D E A R E S T ’ The character known as Issy has her source in the story of Tristan and Isolde. As we know, Isolde and Tristan had formed one of the early sketches Joyce made in 1923. He then developed her as Izzy, late in 1924, one of the audience being subjected to the ‘long Lentern sermon’ delivered by her brother Shaun prior to his setting out to ‘post the post’. Izzy, also called Tizzy, attempts to tempt her brother with a funny long sibilant speech (457–60) that begins: ‘Listen, drawher nearest . . . I know . . . But listen. I want to whisper my wish.’¹ The next episode Joyce drafted opens with Shaun, having failed to deliver the mail, turned into Yawn, lying asleep on a hill. It develops into an inquiry and investigation into the diverse incoherent events and characters that have already featured, and all he can deliver are various ventriloquized speeches about them. Fortunately for the investigators, he becomes a medium through whom different witnesses—versions of characters encountered in the book so far—are able to emerge. The investigators, garnering the incoherent information, are the four old men—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—whose functional identities themselves shift between being Senators, psychiatrists, psychic investigators, detectives, councillors, members of a think tank.² Issy appears in the chapter as an object of desire for Yawn (as Tristram) and then as a speaking subject, on pp. 526–8. The whole of Book III, apart from a few ‘set pieces’, was written roughly speaking in three broad stages: 1. 1924–6, a series of drafts from which Joyce made a typescript which he sent to The Dial. 2. 1927–9, revised for Eugene Jolas’s magazine transition. 3. 1933–9, revised and expanded for the Faber printers of Finnegans Wake. ¹ 47483–27; JJA 57: 153, drafted late in 1924. ² Joyce described them to Weaver as ‘the four eminent annalists’, 9 Oct. 1923, LI, 204.

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As Joyce first drafted the investigation of Shaun, towards the end of 1924, it became a recycling of what had already been written, just as evidence at a trial retails the events of a crime in order to reconstruct them. The four old men turn out to be overwhelmed by the nonsensical, inconsistent, and bizarre evidence that comes flooding out from Yawn’s mouth. Passing through several metamorphoses, he ends in a composite form of an extremely voluble self-congratulating HCE, as if, under examination, he has grown into the role of the father. Having begun with vigorous determination, the investigation of the four judges stalls, and they end as if drunk and inarticulate, capable only of a non-committal group hiccup: ‘- Hoke!—Hoke!—Hoke!—Hoke!’ (552.31–4) Among the several voices ventriloquized through Yawn is that of the girl (or girls) who HCE had apparently offended with a ‘partial exposure’ in the park—a vital witness, therefore. In the course of the evidence from the preceding witness, one of the judges is surprised to hear that there were three men involved. Talking like a policeman gossiping in the pub, he has clearly picked up rumours, just as we have in Book I, about ‘a pair of dainty maidservants in the . . . rushy hollow’ (34.19–20), ‘those rushy hollow heroines’ (67.31), or, as one title of Anna Livia’s letter calls them, ‘a Pair of Sloppy Sluts plainly Showing all’ (107.06). His description summons her into being, onto the stage, into the courtroom. Her subsequent performance is bamboozling: — . . . Ah, God, sure I thought he was larking with two girls somewhere. I was given to understand there was a pair of them mad gone on him. Sure she near drowned herself admiring herself in the stream after, so she was. —Listen, meme dearest. Of course I know you’re a wicked girl. Still you look lovely. O you do. Listen meme sweety. There’s only the two of us. Of course it was very wicked of him really it was. Still, listen, me and you will make it up so as nobody will ever know. So be free to me and listen, youyou beauty, we’ll be true to you. —How’s that, at all? Is she by herself? (526.22–528.25 and 47482b–89; JJA 58: 53)

Being a first draft, it is fairly lucid, with a coherent use of stage Irish for the Senator, ‘Ah, God, sure . . . sure she . . . so she was’, but there is also some intertextual punning and allusive play. One of the girls, the Senator recalls, was ‘mad gone on him’. Joyce had already used this phrase in the draft of the early sketch of Mamalujo, first written in 1923 and eventually used in II.4. ‘Mad gone’ may mean literally ‘crazy about’, but in the context it makes a bad pun on Maud Gonne, the Irish activist—politically and culturally—whom W. B. Yeats, in fact, came to be ‘mad gone’ on, proposing several times to her, but

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each time turned down. Yeats, unable to get the mother, eventually proposed to Maud’s daughter, Iseult, in 1917. ‘Larking with two girls’ sounds like a poor but not too distant allusion, then, to Yeats’s curious behaviour. Joyce was probably aware of this gossip through his acquaintance Ezra Pound—who had also had an affair with Iseult Gonne, and was later best man at Yeats’s wedding, thus setting up a tight knot, figuratively speaking, of quasi-incestuous relations between people Joyce knew fairly well. The references mark this off as more than just coincidence, though Joyce anyway had been absorbed by an account of the different contemporaneous treatments of the Tristan and Isolde story.³ Here, however, the idea of a man unmanfully infatuated by a woman is exchanged for its reverse: a girl mad about a man, making any sympathy we might have for her more vulnerable. The questioner proceeds to give a quick character assassination of the girl like Shaun’s of Shem. She was vain, ‘admiring’ her reflection in the mirrory surface of a stream where she nearly ‘drowned’ in self-love. She is like both Narcissus and Ophelia. She does this ‘after’ something unspecified: the event in the park, perhaps, the crime they are hoping to solve. As if in response to the description, and conforming to it, the girl’s voice surges up through Yawn’s body. She seems to be addressing someone, ‘meme’, her self, ‘me, me’ and her ‘mˆeme’, or equal (in French). Her first incarnation is as the tubercular girl Mimi, for whom the impoverished poet Rodolpho in La Bohème falls. Faced by her double, the girl is talking to her mirror image. The cadence and specific words echo closely that of Shaun’s sister Tizzy in the passage quoted above. ‘Listen, drawher nearest . . . I know . . . But listen. I want to whisper my wish.’(457.26–30)⁴ Listen to Issy’s hissy sibillance. An immediate and crucial function of this passage, when drafted, is to tie in Shaun’s sister Izzy or Tizzy from the previous chapter with the two maidservant slutty heroines from Book I. Issy and her reflection are melded, at this point, with the seductive misses in Phoenix Park. Since Earwicker is supposed to have exposed himself before the two girls, and since Earwicker is Issy’s father, then the exposure is now taking on a new incestuous edge, already there between brother and sister, and now inserted between father and daughter. This marks also an incestuous process of composition, as Joyce brings two disparate, though related, parts into closer, overlapping relation to each other: the two girls are Issy and her reflection. The ‘investigation’ becomes more complicated as a result. Stephen Dedalus defined incest (via Aquinas) as an ‘avarice of the emotions’ (Ulysses 9: 781), and here we have an ‘avarice’ of characterization, ³ Andrew Norris recognized that notes in Joyce’s notebook VI.B.10 were taken from an article by Sturge Moore on ‘The Story of Tristram and Isolt in Modern Poetry’, in the first issue of the Criterion. See ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo, ed. Deane et al. VI.B.10, 5. ⁴ See n. 1, above.

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an incestuous writing. Rather than develop new characters for the purposes of complicating or enriching the plot, incestuous writing confuses these characters into versions of each other, economizing on plot and confusing it. Issy’s language, while relatively lucid, is thoroughly enigmatic, and in that sense seductive. ‘Listen’, insisted four times, like a whispering conspirator, calls for intimate attention, for an ear to be placed close to the speaker’s lips, to share a secret. She may admit that ‘It was very wicked of him’, and resolve that ‘we will make it up’. But we don’t know what ‘it’ is in either case—neither the event nor the false alibi that will cover it up. Her addressee, ‘meme’, seems to be silent, or Issy projects replies on her to make a dialogue. Kimberly Devlin reads this as self-sufficiency, that she ‘becomes the . . . young girl who uses her double as a plaything to ward off loneliness and desire’.⁵ But ‘meme’ might occupy the voice too, as they take turns to address each other. In any case she talks away from the audience of the old men. They are forced into the role of detached audience, and are unable to engage with her, as she refuses or is unable to engage directly with them. This keeps happening to them during the entire episode and they cannot grasp their slippery interviewees, an inability that, cumulatively, by the end of the chapter kicks them into touch. Issy’s speech is shot through with ambivalence, reflecting that the reflections are opposing as well as equal: her sister image is dear and wicked and lovely. Being beloved, depraved, and beautiful conforms to the Bible’s stereotypes of dangerous temptresses: Eve, Delilah, Judith, or Salomé. Shari Benstock thinks that in the Wake ‘the most fundamental and pervasive structure is rooted in the concept of duality’, and that Issy is ‘the single embodiment of her father’s desire and fears . . . which manifest themselves in his mirror images of her’. ⁶ The dualism of Issy is a projection of the male view of woman as either virgin or whore. ‘It may not be Issy who is ‘‘split,’’ but rather the father’s image of her which divides itself.’⁷ Joyce had already decided that the two sluts in the park would go off in opposite directions, one suicidally leaving the world (she ‘drank carbolic’ (67.34) ), the other all too readily joining it as a prostitute (‘selling her spare favours in the haymow . . . for a bit of soft coal’ (68.5–9) ). But Issy is not a special case. All ‘characters’ in Finnegans Wake are projections, whether of HCE’s dream, or the narrators’ dream, or of other characters’ visions within that dream, or of Joyce’s dream vision. But can they also have a life beyond these projections? I sense the Wake will, as in most things, have it both ways: characters are both dreamt projected fantasies and they are independent subjects, both composite constructs and free agents, subjects having to deal with the constraints of the projections, ⁵ Devlin Wandering and Return, 143. ⁶ Shari Benstock, ‘The Genuine Christine’, 192 and 169.

⁷ Ibid. 172.

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and projections that seem to grow into subjects. This correlates to the way that, as individuals, we have to negotiate the roles that culture creates and society expects us to fill. Issy is a male fantasy of a girl or young woman, but she is also a ‘real’ character who, though invaded and smothered by cultural stereotypes and analogies, retains a particularity. And this goes for all the Wake’s characters, in always being both dreamt and real, that have to contend with the inevitable constraints of culture’s approximate representations. Our readings may find themselves split, like Issy, between these worlds, the dream fantasy reflection and the mimetic realist novel. Just as Issy is split between herself and her reflection, Issy’s view of her other is split. Her reflection reflects back the split in her own self: and the voice speaks out of the gap that has opened up between them all. This is a fruitful area for Lacanian readings incorporating terms like the mirror stage, and the gaze, etc. In this gap, Issy’s identity, not constrained by either form, shifts its shape. Her voice, as a source of identity, is rooted in neither of her appearances. However, the split selves do seem to come together at the end of the speech where she promises, or rather they promise, ‘we’ll be true’ (528.12). Telling secrets to her self, she is caught up in a curious economy of knowledge, where a secret may be revealed but only to oneself—someone who knows it anyway. The whispered ‘listens’, there being ‘only two of us’, and the secrets that ‘nobody will ever know’ all contribute to a conspiratorial air and a cover-up of some deed that was ‘really wicked of him’ to do. Issy’s speech, however, does not reveal what or who these things were: a secret it remains. She is willing to be part of a cover-up, feeling no outrage at the deed, and even implicates her own reflection by calling her self ‘wicked’ too. This implies she played an active role in the crime, as a kiss-and-tell prostitute, say. On the other hand, this treats her over-rationally and ignores what look like symptoms of a form of hysteria. All these elements—a girl talking to her mirror image, a paranoid conspiracy, self-contradiction and self-blame—indicate, for classic psychoanalytic theory, some trauma which has induced shame and guilt. Beyond that, of course, is the surreal context of the hypnotized medium. Such a reading of Issy has emerged that rightly links Joyce with the classic case studies and problems in psychoanalytic theory: of childhood abuse, of recovered memory, and of false memory syndrome. In this very episode, Joyce refers to Freud’s dream of his hysterical patient Irma, analysed in the Interpretation of Dreams, as we see when one of the four old men sarcastically admires Yawn’s colourful evidence: ‘Again am I deliciated by the picaresqueness of your irmages’ (486.34). She asks her own double ‘youyou’, to ‘be free to me’, that is, reveal everything she knows. Finnegans Wake frequently combines the quest for knowledge with sexual experiences, so that for characters to reveal what they know is like

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revealing their hidden flesh. ‘Be free to me’ is a toned down way of saying ‘be free with me’. Taking your own reflection as a lover is, moreover, another piece of prudent economy—for after all it costs nothing. The request also attempts to tempt someone with a deal: ‘Be free to me, and I’ll be true to you’—the kind of promise a rake might make; sleep with me and I’ll take care of you for ever. At this point Issy, addressing herself, becomes the seducer addressing the seduced. This indicates conflict, as much as a conspiracy, between them. But the identities of herself and her addressee are multiplying and mutually destabilizing, for Issy may be addressing her brother as much as her reflection. Nonetheless, familial relations are to some extent mirror images, your common genetic inheritance perceived beneath the superficial differences. Issy as seducer is like HCE enacting his partial exposure, and trying to lure her away into confinement and secrecy. Or another voice is coming through the mediated voice: Shaun hushing up the rumours of their farewell kiss. The father or brother use childish speech in order to disarm her and seem closer to her nature. Issy has absorbed from her seducer the necessity of keeping a secret. The language she speaks in may have been adopted from the disarming seducer’s pseudo-innocent childish voice. Though the language is relatively clear, the questioner, like readers, is confused specifically by this problem of address: who is she speaking to and why if she is by herself? As Joyce writes—or while rereading shortly after—he makes several marginal additions. The girls HCE had been larking with are now ‘fine young girls’ and Issy, according to the questioner, was admiring herself while ‘making faces at her likeness’, but was also ‘all tossed’ into the stream. ‘Tossed’ is another echo from the Mamalujo sketch which had ‘mad gone’ in it: I tossed that one long before anyone. It was of a wet good Friday too she was ironing and, as I’m given now to understand, she was always mad gone on me. (399.20, my underlinings)

Joyce is recycling and strengthening the link with Isolde’s earlier passage, moving back and forth between textual units and sounding echoes between them.⁸ Issy’s speech is enlarged with a subtle series of intensifiers, giving her a stronger street-talking idiom: ‘You look lovely’ becomes ‘You do look lovely’, ‘Oh, you do’ becomes ‘My, you do!’, ‘very wicked’ becomes ‘downright wicked’. And the theme of doubling is carefully doubled: near where she had addressed herself/other as ‘youyou beauty’, she now also says ‘meme mearest’, ⁸ Indicating, incidentally, that Joyce did not simply leave his early pieces aside and forget about them, as Danis Rose has argued (Rose, Textual Diaries 115 and 120), but in fact plundered them for material as he wrote.

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so to herself she is both me and you, and the nearest to and most like herself. The response from the questioning old man is also intensified as Joyce rereads and rewrites. He becomes more impatient, now saying: —One moment. How’s that, at all at all? Is she this young lady by herself. What exactly is she doing with herself? (528.15–25 from 47482b–89; JJA 58: 53)

We notice Joyce doubling up ‘at all at all’, stressing the stage Irish speaker of Mark from Munster, though as we shall see this was dropped and, suppressing but still echoing the idiom, ‘with herself’ doubled instead. Following the usual process, Joyce produces a redraft of the revised draft material. As he does, he makes further revisions,⁹ though none to this Issy passage. He then makes a fair copy of the whole for his typist, Lily Bolach, which he sends off shortly after 18 January 1925.¹⁰ During this fair-copying, some tiny changes occur which include Issy’s ‘likeness’ becoming a ‘crystal likeness’, both lucid and a name for reflective glass. Mark now wonders: ‘Is she having a dual with herself with herself?’, introducing the idea of a conflict between Issy and her reflection.¹¹ This is a question that is never resolved in the passage, or in any that follow.

1 . 2 . 1 9 2 6 , R EV I S I N G F O R THE DIAL: ‘ T H I N K OF A MAIDEN’ Typing up the fair copy, Lily Bolach produced a top copy and a carbon and on one of them our passage is heavily reworked.¹² The revisions to the whole of abcd (now Book III), were finished by 17 April 1926 and Joyce had these typed out by Lily Bolach during May.¹³ Here’s how the questioner’s speech looks, with the new material marked as usual in bold: Ah, God, and Yes, sure I thought it was larking in the clover with two stripping baremaids he was that time. I was given to understand there was that one that was always mad gone on him, her first king of cloves, in Carrick-on-Shannon, county Leitrim. Sure she was near drowned in coldstreams admiration for herself, making faces at her crystal likeness in the brook after, all tossed, as she was, the playactress. (526.22–33 from 47484a–50; JJA 58: 192 with 47484a–112; JJA 58: 232) ⁹ On 47482b–103, 73–4. ¹⁰ To Lily Bolach, LIII, 113. ¹¹ Both additions made on 47484a–23; JJA 58: 124. ¹² See 47484a–50; JJA 58: 192. ¹³ See letters to Lily Bolach, 16 May 1926 and 7 June 1926, LIII, 141.

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Joyce tinkers with the questioner’s voice, so that ‘Ah, God, and sure’ becomes a less stagy ‘Yes, sure’. The innocent ‘fine young girls’ have become more specifically daringly ‘stripping baremaids’, and been given the profession of being barmaids, but they’re also stripped bare, about to dip into the lake, or are bare at a strip tease in a bar. ‘He’ is also now specified, a king of ‘cloves’, clubs—a macho playing card, and a king of loves. McHugh also hears ‘Clovis’, the first Christian king of Gaul, so a primal hero of sorts. He is also the king of clover, the weed that symbolizes Patrick’s illustration of the Trinity and the conversion of Ireland. Her ‘admiration’ now has the adjective ‘coldstreams’, referring to her watery mirror. Issy, in relation to ALP as river, is the Liffey as a little stream. As Coldstream guards, a British regiment, the streams could refer to the gaze of the three soldiers who observed the exposure of HCE before the two young women. An idea hovers that she is the regiment’s girl. She is also now a ‘playactress’, another profession associated with prostitution. Issy’s speech at this level of revision more than doubles its length, seventyone words becoming 150. —Listen, meme mearest! So sorry you lost him, poor lamb! Of course I know you’re a very wicked girl and it was a very wrong thing to do. Still you do look lovely with the cold cream I always use in the wards and derive the greatest benefit! My you do! Simply adorable! The way they taper! Only my hands arms are whiter, dear. Whitehands, idler. Fairhair, frail one. Listen, meme sweety. It’s only us two, meme. Of course it was downright wicked of him, really it was. Perfectly appalling! How he adored me simply! Still me and you, you poor child, with [sic] make it up with a lie between us, so as nobody in the convent, of course, need ever know. So, meme nearest, be free to me and, listen, youyou beauty, I’ll be true to who knows you while I lie with warm lips on the Tolka. (527.03–528.13; 47484a–50; JJA 58: 192 with 47484a–112; JJA 58: 232)

Issy’s relation to her reflection is becoming more complex—mixed with sentiment, condescension, appreciation, and competitiveness. She admires her own image, but wants to retain a superiority to it. She voices the feelings of Ulysses’ Gerty in her sentimental commiseration: ‘so sorry you lost him, poor lamb!’, infantilizing her addressee as a Little Bo Peep who loses her sheep. The ‘lost’ one might be Shaun himself who fell into the river in the previous chapter. Or he’s Tristan, since the Tristan story appears in the allusion to ‘Whitehands’. In one version of the Tristan legend, which Joyce absorbed from Bédier’s transmission of it, the Irish Isolde had a ‘double’ in Brittany, called Isolde Blanchemain. The banished Tristan ends up marrying the latter, though he always loved Isolde ‘la belle’ of Ireland, and hoped to see her again one day.¹⁴ ¹⁴ At this level, earlier in this episode, Joyce inserted a vision for Yawn as Tristan, induced by having a strange instrument placed on his lip: ‘I feel a fine lady . . . floating on a stream of

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Isolde Blanchemain, perhaps with a touch of schadenfreude, commiserates with her namesake across the water. Whitehands seems to be the speaker, and Fairhair the addressee. McHugh, however, writes that Blanchemain or ‘I ’, is ‘obviously an unreal or virtual image, perpetually carried about by I as part of her definition’.¹⁵ If this is the case, it suggests that an idealized voice—belonging to a fantasy projected in the mirror—is being ventriloquized by the gazing subject. Whitehands is the fantasized speaker and Fairhair is the actual speaker, but suppressing her subjectivity and becoming addressee. The fantasy, an Ego ideal, scolds but forgives the actual Ego. She compares her distinctive features with those of her reflection, like the cliché of mutually admiring women in changing rooms on a shopping spree: ‘Oh I wish I had your figure’, ‘Oh, but you’ve got such lovely ankles’. Issy has recourse to some old wives’ superstitions about white hands signifying laziness (since a working girl would be exposed to the elements), while Fairhair indicates weakness. These old wives’ tales are the sort that appear in girl’s magazines. Like Gerty, Issy is caught up frequently in such superstitions. Blanchemain, now with Tristan, and more robust, is generally coming off better than La Belle. It is into this ideal that we will see the real falling, fading, followed eventually by a fading of the ideal itself. As well as this ‘self–other’ comparison, the variety of contradictions are increased: she says what he did ‘was wicked’, now adding that he ‘adored me simply’, as if she’s found the attraction of this wicked man pleasant. Their cover-up will involve a ‘lie between us’, capitalizing on the classic pun in English where to ‘lie’ is to sleep with and to be untrue, so all lying marks sexual infidelity. They will share the lie between them in a conspiracy that will hold them together, but an untruth will come between them and keep them apart. It reflects the way relationships are maintained: partly through each person being true to the other, while also holding truths back. The lie that they will concoct between them, they will ‘make up’, and ‘make-up’ is applied, of course, before a mirror. Hence her admiration of the ‘cold cream’ which her reflection uses, a vanishing cream that will help her, in later revisions, to fade and vanish. She uses this in the ‘wards’, when she’s in the hospital, as a nurse, or a patient. This extends the contexts for Issy’s situation, as does the reference to the convent. But this does not make her any less lewd. And Joyce strengthens the euphemisms and mysteries being used, so ‘who knows you’ is an inversion of ‘you-know-who’, a euphemism for a taboo subject. It isisglass. . . . with gold hair to the bed and white arms to Venus the stars twinklars . . . O la la!’ See 47484a–42; JJA 58: 177. Yawn’s vision is a prevision of Issy, while this revision to Issy is an echo responding to Yawn’s vision. ¹⁵ McHugh, Sigla, 51.

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is particularly tantalizing for the old men to hear this, because their whole purpose is to be in the know. She will now ‘lie with warm lips on the Tolka’, a lesser river than the Liffey, flowing through north Dublin, as if this is the particular stream in which she admires herself. The Tolka may also be the talker, herself or the windbag Shaun: she kisses her own reflection, imagining that she kisses her lover, a foreplay of self-love. To recap: Joyce’s revisions have elaborated her as a narcissistic/Ophelia type and as a legendary Celtic princess, and have let her grow from a barlady into an actress, a nurse or patient, and a convent girl, all in just a few lines and deft strokes of the pen. She is rather a composite of male fantasies, different forms of a man’s desire projected onto a particular girl who, like models posing for porn magazines (baremaids), are asked to adopt such different roles. In this projection and objectification her particularity is being hidden and threatened. As I said in the Introduction, it has been argued in humanist readings of the Wake that each character represents a universal type: that HCE, known as ‘Everybody’, and ‘worthy of any and all such universalisation’ is Everyman. Shem and Shaun are ‘any and all’ warring factions in world history; Issy is any young woman,¹⁶ and ALP the universal mother. But the characters are more like the consequence of such a goal of ‘universalisation’, a goal shared by humanist psychology to reduce the world to a set of standard, and therefore manipulable, types into which the world’s multiple forms are supposed to fit. From the universal we move to the composite—not a solution to identity, but an exacerbation of its problems and a reductio ad absurdum of the pursuit of universal identities. Issy, like other characters, becomes a disjointed composite of these things, an awkward aggregate, and a wreckage of detritus. In the revisions to the Senator’s response, we see this aggregate growing: she is not just a ‘lady’ but a ‘barlady’, one of the ‘Sirens’ in Ulysses, in a pub or ballet school, a ballerina stretching at the bar before a mirror. These multiplying roles she could fill pose a problem for the old men, and for Issy herself. If she can be anything, she might be nothing. Her identity is a problem to be solved and the questioner’s replies have a new set of words woven into them that draw from a commonplace mathematical conundrum: —How is this at all at all? Think of a maiden. Double her. Take your first thoughts away from her. This young barlady what exactly? Is she having a dual act with herself with herself ? (529.15–25 and 47484a–50; JJA 58: 192 and 47484a–112, 3; JJA 58: 232) ¹⁶ As Frank Budgen wrote: ‘Sister Iseult is all the fascinating ingenues that ever lived, from the girls we met in the Land of Nod to the latest platinum blonde out of Hollywood.’ Budgen, Making of ‘Ulysses’, 300.

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Think of a number, double it, take away the number you first thought of: three stages that bring you back to the beginning. It is as if the Senator is trying to get back some notion of control over his slippery witness. But his desire to solve her as a problem, and control her through an explanation, is twinned with an impulse to fantasize about her. ‘Take your first thoughts away from her’ comically implies that the first thoughts, the instincts, are impure, that they need to be taken away—repressed or revised. The conundrum is turned into a reflection of how the composition of Finnegans Wake developed: ‘Think of a maiden’ (Isolde), ‘Double her’ (the two heroines, or mirror girls). It doubles, but also destroys in its revisionary transformations. Hence ‘take away the first thoughts’. It also indicates just what we’ve said—that she is an imagined, dreamt-up figment of somebody’s imagination. She issues forth from a medium and, sceptically speaking, is at best a projection of that medium’s personality. Joyce made a fair copy of these scrawled additions.¹⁷ There is another typescript made that incorporates these revisions, but it is missing. He sent them off in July 1926 for consideration by The Dial, a prominent periodical, probably recommended originally by Pound who had been its theatre reviewer.¹⁸ They asked for it to be cut by one-third, but Joyce refused and withdrew it.¹⁹ Joyce began scouring round for publishers, as he had done when the printers for The Calendar had refused to typeset passages of Shem. He sent the drafts to Pound, his acquaintance and literary impresario, in early November 1926. Darkly, Pound wrote back: ‘I make nothing of it whatever. Nothing so far as I make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization’ adding, with words that sound like those the four old men would use, ‘I don’t see what which has to do with where.’²⁰ Fortunately, after some well-arranged readings to small groups, and some strings pulled somewhere, Eugene Jolas met Joyce and stepped in to save the project shortly after. ¹⁷ 47484a–112–13; JJA 58: 232–3. ¹⁸ To Weaver, 25 July 1926, LI, 243. ¹⁹ Comparing it with the first copy after the missing copy, we can see that no additions were made. ²⁰ Ezra Pound to James Joyce, 15 Nov. 1926, LIII, 146.

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2 . 1 . D E C E M B E R 1 9 2 8 : P R E PA R I N G F O R T , ‘ L A N G U I S H I N G H YS T E R I A ? ’ Having published all eight instalments of Book I during 1927, one from Book II, and the first two of Book III in Jolas’s transition, Joyce began working on c (or III.3) for transition 15 from December 1928 to January 1929. Joyce was plagued by eye trouble, pleading in January 1929 that he needed another week’s sight to finish the episode.²¹ A description of his working procedures at this stage is illuminating: I had them retype in legal size, twice or three times this, with triple spacing, section three of Shaun, and this . . . I shall try to memorize as to pages etc (there are nearly a hundred) and so hope to be able to find the places where I can insert from the twenty notebooks which I have filled up since I wrote this section.²²

The first round of additions is intensive, dense, and difficult to read. Here are the old man’s now expanded preliminary comments about the witness: —Yes, sure I thought it was larking in the clover of the furry glinnds glans with two stripping baremaids Stilla Underwood and Moth McGarry, he was, hand to dagger, that time and their mother a rawkneepudsfrowse, I was given to understand, begum, there was that one that was always mad gone on him, her first king of cloves, in Carrick-on-Shannon, county Leitrim. Sure she was near drowned in coldstreams admiration for herself, making faces at her crystal likeness in the brook after, all tossed as she was, the playactrix! (526.22–33 from 47484a–227, 228 with 282, 282v; JJA 58: 385–7 with 464)

These additions work in material from different areas, with no coherent grouping. The ‘larking’ (of HCE with the baremaids) now has a specific location, happening in the ‘furry glans’. This combines The Furry Glen—a lake in the west of Phoenix Park near the exit to Chapelizod—with ‘glans’, either of the penis, or clitoris, or of certain plants likely to be found in the park. The first version carrying ‘glands’, is less vegetal and sexual. The baremaids, too, now receive names, ‘Stilla’ and ‘Moth’, and since many moths are known as Vanessas, we have a reference to Swift’s two loves, the two Esthers swift renamed Stella and Vanessa, whom we encountered in Part II and will encounter again. Swift slots easily into the pattern of the older man and the younger girls, a theme we found with Michael Arklow and the young ALP, emphasized for the appearances in transition. The two Esthers map on to the two Isoldes as well, since one was married, the other left on the shelf. Stella ²¹ To Weaver, 10 Jan. 1929, LIII, 186.

²² To Weaver, 2 Dec. 1928, LI, 276.

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Underwood is also specifically a character from a sentimental Victorian saga called The Pillars of the House by Charlotte M. Yonge (1873), which concerns a family of thirteen children, who lose their parents. The beautiful Stella and her twin Theodore are the youngest, but Stella (also known as ‘Princess Fair-Star’) makes a good marriage—as Blanchemain does. HCE is now described as having ‘hand to dagger’, which could carry sexual innuendo, but also echoes with the cliché from Macbeth, where Macbeth, haunted by his imminent crime, sees a dagger before him ‘handle towards my hand’. We’re also told about the girls’ mother, a ‘rawkneepudsfrowse’, implying for the first time what we may have sensed already: that they’re sisters. ALP’s ‘lower’ version is Kate, kitchen drudge, signalled here as the wife (in Gipsy rawnie), getting raw knees from scrubbing the floor as a charwoman (in German Putzfrau). As working girls they are daughters of the working class. ‘Begum’ is just a throwaway oath, like ‘by Gum’ or ‘by Golly’. Turning to Issy’s speech, it is again heavily revised, more extensively than at any point during its composition, and more extensively than most passages in the book as a whole. Work remains to be done on the relation between the quantity, intensity, and speed of revision, and the subject matter being revised. Issy’s appearance, it would seem, tends to invite many rounds of intense revision, a character whose personality being relatively unplanned, is more liable to develop than any others. From 150 words our passage expands to 400, so for exegesis I will break it up into three sections. Here is the first third: —Listen, meme mearest! So sorry you lost him, poor lamb! Of course I know you are a very wicked girl and it was a very wrong thing to do, dare old Grandpassia! and your soreful miseries first come on you. Still everybody knows you do look lovely, Eulogia, a perfect apposition with the coldcream, Assoluta, from Boileau’s I always use in the wards after I am burned a rich egg and derive the greatest benefit, sign of the cause. My you do! Simply adorable! The way they taper under new nue charmeen cuffs, I am more divine like that when I’ve two of everything. Handsome in a way, only my arms are whiter, dear. Whitehands, idler. Fairhair, frail one. Listen! meme sweety. O be joyfillfold! My veil will save it undyeing from his etnernal fire! It’s only meemly us two, meme, idoll. (527.03–24 from 47484a–282 and 282v; JJA 58: 387 with 47484a–228; JJA 58: 464)

Issy continues to upbraid her reflection, who seems to have dared dear old grandpa, a Pasha to boot, with a grand passion. But she can be forgiven because of her notorious (‘as everybody knows’) loveliness. Fame and beauty absolve her. The forgiveness of whatever bad things she carried out is strong here, and Joyce, drawing perhaps on the ‘convent’ reference which popped up in the previous draft level, now incorporates several elements of Christian piety and

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ritual. There are references to the Eucharist (Eulogia), absolution (Assoluta), and the three parts of the rosary: ‘sorrowful, joyful and glorious mysteries’, echoing in ‘soreful miseries’, ‘joyfold’, and, as we’ll see, ‘glorious’. There is also the sign of the cross, ‘sign of the cause’. In the words ‘Eulogia’ and ‘Assoluta’ are also half-sounded the name ‘Lucia’. After ‘Eulogia’, which also means praise (literally ‘good speech’), Joyce added ‘a perfect apposition’, the fact of two things being placed next to each other, or ‘application’. Issy’s reflection and herself, she and her make-up, are different appositions. In rhetoric and grammar, a word or phrase is in apposition if it is added in parallel as an explanation or illustration.²³ Finnegans Wake is clearly built up in part through principles of apposition, self-generating through such parallelism. Indeed, this brings the text close to the fact of its own self-reflection, and it is possible to introduce Issy as a principle of composition: of reflection, doubling, addressing, and make-up, of transformation by reflection and apposition. Issy’s cause, her purpose, is to look beautiful, to protect her skin with a cream which contributes to a self-cleansing, a secular absolution. Earthly beauty will bring her earthly paradise. Her arms and hands are beautifully white, under her ‘charming’ cuffs—the wide sleeves of a novitiate nun, but also the cuffs of ‘Charmian’, one of Cleopatra’s handmaids.²⁴ In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra Charmian is an inferior double for Cleopatra, beautiful, quick-witted, flighty, offering quick ripostes in conversation, almost a fool. She chooses to die with her mistress. With the Egyptian context, ‘new’ is changed to ‘nue’ carrying Nu, the term in Egyptian creation myths for the primal chaos of water, from which everything is formed: as a chaotic body, this suggest an inversion of the nicely turned out charming Charmian. Issy declares her acquisitive ambitions, saying that she’s ‘more divine like that when I’ve two of everything’. But there is only one ‘everything’, insofar as it is the infinite universe. Wanting ‘two of everything’ is a self-contradicting ambition, like wanting two infinities, unless it holds the affirmation of a parallel universe. It also reflects, of course, on the fact of her own reflection, her own two-ness. As such, she embodies the self-reflexive dualisms that generate so much of the Wake itself, an aspect of her that assists my sense that she embodies one of the book’s compositional principles. In the self-reflexion there is criticism and self-criticism: Blanchemain now damns Fairhair by faint praise, calling her ‘handsome in a way’. Vain about her whiteness, and like a nun, she wears a veil, saving it from the ‘eternal’ fires of the sun or of hell, spelled ‘etnernal’, so they’re the fires of the volcano Etna, too, the site of Empedocles’ mythic ²³ e.g. ‘Let me kiss your hand, your beautiful hand’. Where ‘beautiful hand’ is in apposition to ‘hand’. ²⁴ Typing up the handwritten revisions this unit was placed one sentance too early ofter ‘taper’ rather than ‘dear’ (see JJA 58: 387).

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suicide, an entrance to a hellish underworld of perdition, a fiery inversion of the watery surface she kisses. In the next part of Issy’s speech, Issy reflects on her tryst with Tristan, or whoever it was who came in disguise. It is heavily expanded, Joyce building additions up in small ‘units’, mostly transferred from his notebooks, as described above. Joyce had bad eye trouble at the time, which makes the revisions very involved and spidery, and there are mistakes, it seems, when it comes to making a typed up version. I have inserted forward slashes to indicate the breaks between these revision units. Of course it was downright wicked of him, reelly, meeting me disguised./ Bortolo mio/ peerfectly appealling, D.V., with my lovebirds, my columbinas./ Their sinsitives shrinked./ Even Netta and Linda our seeyfu tities / and they’ve sin sumtim, tankus! How he me adoreds me eacheatsother simply, mon ishebeau! ma reinebelle! / in his storm collar, /as I leaned yestreen from his muskished lips,/ even my little pom gets excited, /when I turned his head on his same manly bust and kissed him more./ Only he might speak to a person, lord, / taking up my worths ill wrong!/May I introduce! This is my / futuous lips and looks / loveliast! (527.24–35 from 47484a–283; JJA 58: 388 and 47484a–228; JJA 58: 464)

The man ‘disguised’ might be Tristan, who at one time came in disguise to see Isolde. In Rossini’s Barber of Seville, Dr ‘Bartolo’ is an old man, guardian of a desirable young Rosina, an Issy type. In the story, Bartolo wants to marry Rosina, his own ward, though she’s in love with Count Almaviva who has visited her in various disguises, just as Tristan visits Isolde. ‘Bortolo mio’, also sounds like Bartholdy, the middle name of Felix Mendelssohn, an organplaying Shaun type, whose corny wedding march is to be invoked in the next section we’ll be covering. Three words, ‘really, perfectly and appalling’, have ‘e’s strategically added to them, giving Issy a strange and unevenly accented voice. With one of the ‘e’s, we encounter an instance of the identity of opposites, of opposites being unified, an oxymoron being coined. ‘Appalling’ is disguised as ‘appealling’, and the quality of the tryst with Tristan, previously attractive, is now horrendous at the same time. ‘Perfect’ is made imperfect as ‘peerfect’, invoking a ‘peer’ in this passage of extended and appealing gazes. As gracious young ladies are supposed to be, Issy is properly attended by birds and flowers, her ‘lovebirds’—columbines and doves. These birds—or her companion classmates known as the Maggies—being sensitive, ‘shrinked’ at the approach of the wicked person, shy and retiring. ‘Sensitives’ are plants (such as Mimosa), which literally shrink when touched. In Italian, ‘linda’ and ‘netta’ both mean clean, so even the cleaner ones were shocked, and they’ve seen something in their time, and/or they’ve sinned some time, thank you very

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much. But the appeal to an outside you is introverted to a self-address—hence ‘tankus’. ‘Sin’ has leaked into the words ‘sensitive’ and ‘seen’, as if looking and sensation are sinful. Perhaps what’s been seen are their breasts revealed through a nightdress, hence ‘see a few titties’ (though ‘seefyu’ finally becomes ‘seeyu’). One of these revisions obscures one of the more lucid statements, and helps to develop a crucial preoccupation in the book’s game with identity. As with the idiom ‘thank you’ turned to ‘tankus’, Issy is turned further in on herself, distorting the very basis of identification: ‘How he adored me’, a simple subject-verb-object clause evolves into a self-reflexive ‘how me adores me’, then ‘how me adores each . . .’ and, before Joyce could complete the clause with the expected ‘other’, he inserts ‘eatsother’ over ‘each’, to create the phrase ‘how me adores eatsother’. Joyce is ‘complexifying’, shifting his text from a simple description of a girl proclaiming the adoration of a man to that of a self-absorbed narcissism, and beyond that into an autophagy, a self-consumption where the reflected self and the reflecting subject eat each other, the separation between subject and object gradually being destroyed in their mutual consumption. Could this reflect on the way the text is turning in on itself for its own pleasures? That the one taking most care over the text is Joyce himself, adoring and adorning it, consuming and being consumed by it? Issy addresses her own beauty, but now through an imagined dialogue, as they seduce and consume each other, in masculine and feminine terms: ‘mon ishebeau, ma reinebelle’. She seems to recall the mutual address of two lovers, as she says to him ‘mon ishebeau’ (my ‘is-he-nice’) and he, imagined, replies ‘ma reinebelle’ (‘my beautyqueen’). The light reflects between them in an idyllic bell-shaped arching rainbow. The sounds of the words Isabelle and Rainbow divide and exchange their syllables, now resonating with ‘Isabow’ and ‘Rainbell’. ‘Ishebeau’ and ‘Reinebelle’ carry allusions to two young women who inspired quite different audiences. ‘La belle’ Isabeau Vincent, a girl living in seventeenth-century anti-Protestant France, burst into glossolalic sermonizing and prophecies, thus becoming the child prophet of the Camisards, a Protestant sect, leading them to hope for liberation from the persecution of the Catholics in France. Isabeau’s reputation spread through Europe and inspired copycat prophetesses. Issy’s cultural analogue is, for the first time, a politically powerful woman. The other inspiring young woman here—less public—is Isa Bowman, a friend of Lewis Carroll, who took on the lead role in a dramatization of Alice in Wonderland in the late 1880s. Whatever he called her, she ‘learned only the night before’, ‘leaned yestreen’, leaning close, and straight from his lips, lips which are ‘muskished’: moustached, much-kissed, and smelling of the sexual scent of musk. The moustache goes with the storm collar, in marking him off as a storm-defying macho sailor. Sexual arousal is signalled as her ‘little Pom gets excited’, though it could be an

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innocent pet puppy or kitten: sexual taboo and cutesy sentimentality vie for control of the phrase. The whole sexual world is being tightened up to a pitch, but it is fraught with curious contradictions about reality and representation. She ‘kissed him’, but it was on his ‘manly bust’, as if it was just a sculptured head, inverting the Pygmalion story. She ‘turned his head’—so he comes alive. The ‘bust’ may not be a marble statue. A man is allowed to have a breast but not breasts, and certainly not a bust, hence the awkward qualification ‘manly’. She is worried that he might reveal what happened between them, and that he might misquote her, undervalue her, getting her ‘worths ill wrong’. Perhaps she adopts his voice now, mocking his formal speech as a host presents performers, a ventriloquy to bypass the egotism of self-announcement: ‘May I introduce . . . this is my lovely lass, my loveliest, lovely-assed lass, my last.’ Issy’s wish-fulfilling mimicry of Tristan speaking is expanded to include words which again flirt with sexual content: ‘This is my futuous lips and looks loveliast!’ As part of the introduction this seems to say ‘this is my future bride’. But ‘futuo’ means copulate, and this sense is joined with ‘fatuous’, stupid lips and looks. Tristan’s words are harsh, profane in amongst the aesthetically sacred: ‘here is my stupid fuckable good looking bride’. The fulfilment of the wish contains an inversion where the mirror reflection (Blanchemain) again mocks the object outside the mirror (Fairhair), in a narcissistic masochism, a perversion of depression that would wound the most loved self. From recalling her encounter with this macho man, she returns to address her reflection and their need for an alibi to explain their absence: Still me with you, you poor chilled ! will make it up with Mother Concepcion and a glorious lie between us, sweetness, so as nobody not a novene in all the convent for mercy’s sake of course need ever know what passed our lips or. Yes sir we’ll will. /Clothe-the wind! Fee o fie! Covey us niced! Bansh the dread! / Alitten’s looking, /low him lovly. /Make me feel good in the moontime. (527.35–528–05 from 47484a–282v, 283; JJA 58: 389–9 and 47484a–228, 229; JJA 58: 464–5)

They will now make it up (lie and resolve) with ‘mother concepcion’, the mother superior of the convent, and birth mother of the novel ALP, getting her to forgive them. And ‘not a novene . . . need ever know’, they’ll keep it quiet from the other novices. A ‘novene’ describes a set of nine elements, used by the Roman Catholic Church chiefly to nominate a special nine-day period of prayers and services. So not even during this devout period will the secret be confessed. Her reflection, formerly ‘child’, is now ‘chilled’, as if cold from being in the water, Issy’s pitiful ‘Icy’ double. Her sentence ends with an ellipse, ‘what passed our lips or’, her lips closing over the words and the sentence closing over a secret. We know there’s a secret, without knowing what it is, and

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must remain tantalized. Her rambling thoughts fill the space with dramatic changes of tack. A submissive assent from the marriage ceremony, weirdly pluralized ‘Yes, sir, we’ll will’, then moves to a demand for comfort: take away the wind, cover us up nicely, banish the dead (but fear the banshee). Having reassured her reflection that ‘mother concepcion’, the mother superior of a nunnery or the madam of a brothel, will not know what’s happened, she now senses that another mother is involved: ‘Alitten’s looking’, referring to the Babylonian mother-goddess Alitta, and consort, prior to Islam, of Allah, also an alternative to the Catholic Virgin Mary. If she’s looking she has to take precautions—‘low him’ suggests that she’s lowering some man out of sight, just as she loves him (with a double ‘v’). ²⁵ Having to wait for her wedding, ‘in the meantime’ she’ll have to feel good in the ‘moontime’, some romantic moment, or less romantically during the time of her period (signalled by the moon). She’s waiting for a possible wedding with her beau ideal, a wedding we’ll encounter in the revisions to the next subsection. Joyce’s composition of Issy is maturing, just as his daughter grows—now come of age. Again, the slashes I’ve inserted show how Joyce added the phrases for the most part as small units, made up of notes transferred from the notebooks. It will all be take place bloss as oranged/ at St Audiens rose and rosan chocolate chapelry /with my diamants blickfeast at minne owne hos and Father Blesius Mindelsinn will give us his behelping hand beminding haaand hand. /Kyrielle elation! Crystal Elation! Kyrielle elation! Elation Immaense! Sing to us, sing to us, sing to us! Amam! Amam! So meme mearest . . . (528.06–10 from 47484a–282v, 283; JJA 58: 388–9 and 47484a–229; JJA 58: 465)²⁶

Issy’s speech now has a fragmented staccato sound in its broken phrases and exclamations. Her wedding fantasy now blossoms around a promise: ‘it will all take place’, but ‘bloss’ means naked so the wedding night, as much as the wedding ceremony, is being fantasized. Beside this bedroom image there are wedding clichés, all morphed one way or another. The Wake’s language is at the stage where Joyce is morphing it before it is written out. Bloss and ‘oranged’ vaguely suggest orange blossom, confetti for the wedding. There is a ‘Roman Catholic’ chapel turned brilliantly into the romantic Valentine cliché ²⁵ ‘low him lovly’ typed on 47484a–229 had appeared as ‘Lowe him! Lowe him! in the preceding draft. Heavy revision is resulting in many transmissional changes. ²⁶ The transcription here is an eclectic text incorporating words from both levels, showing some that were substituted in the typing up (such as ‘haaand’ which became ‘hand’) crossed through. I have also included ‘give us’ which fell out in the transmission when typed up. Joyce’s solution was to adapt the resulting asyntactic form by inserting a ‘be’. What might have read ‘and Father Blesius will give us his behelping hand’ became ‘and Father Blesius Mindelsinn will be beminding hand’. See Note on the Transcriptions, ix.

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of ‘roses and chocolates’, and sprinkled, in the next phrase, with diamonds, a girl’s best friend, which she’ll see, like an engagement present, at ‘breakfast’. The chapel is St Audoen’s in Dublin, turned into ‘Audiens’ or ‘hearing’, the audience at the wedding. The diamonds are ‘di-amants’, double lovers, reminding us that there are two Issys talking with each other. This fantasized wedding scenario will be repeated at the end of II.3, where we hear that the ‘the brideen Alannah is lost in her diamindwaiting’ (377.19–20). A ‘blickfeast’ may be a meal of glances and looks (from German Blick), a feast for lovers that will happen at ‘my own house’. But the antiquated phrase ‘mine own host’ is there, too, the host being HCE, the innkeeper, while ‘Minne’ means love. The Wedding March by Mendelssohn will accompany her down the aisle, a blessed father lending a hand as he gives her away, and the church choir will sing the mass: ‘Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison’. But this is turned away from their plea for mercy on poor sinners, towards an exclamation of ecstasy (‘elation immense!’). The choir ‘sings to us’ a Sanctus and an Amen. The Amen is turned into ‘Amam!’, and echoed as if by the congregation though this echo drops out in transmission to the typescript. It is a version, and distorted inversion, of the ‘meme’ theme which appeared in the first draft above, itself linked crucially to the ‘mishe mishe’ theme of ‘I am I am’ set up on the first page of the book. It might also carry the idea of being ‘A mam’, a double, once wedded, of her mother. With mothers looking on at the wedding/rehearsal, we are being transferred at one level to the Dubliners story ‘A Mother’. This story concerns the entrapment of a young man for marriage, with a wedding to take place beyond the margins of the story. Another hidden story might be that her wedding is to take place soon, because she is soon to be a mother. Issy closes her speech, turning to remember her reflection, who she now addresses as ‘languished hister’: So meme nearest, languished hister, be free to me! And, listen, you, you beauty, esster, I’ll be true clue to who knows you, pray Magda, Marthe with Luz and Joan, while I lie with warm lips lisp on the Tolka. (528.10–13 from 47484a–282v, 283; JJA 58: 388–9 and 47484a–229; JJA 58: 465)

A hister is a beetle that lives in decaying animal and vegetal matter, a parasite living off dying material. One level of Joyce’s work is as an epic of animals, especially insects, where humans are insects and vice versa. The beetle—though not known for extreme psychological states—is here ‘languished’: languishing and anguished. But ‘hister’ chimes perfectly with hyster, of course, and also rhymes cleanly enough with sister. Reflecting on her internal self, she sees her future in her womb, whether it will fill or remain empty or be emptied. Hister is close

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to Hester, the girl Molly hugged tight in bed when a child in Gibraltar, an apparently chaste hug, though it has tempted readings of lesbianism²⁷—now corroborated, as Joyce recalls his own writings, and pre-empts or pre-tempts such readings. Hister has a half-rhyme, a near double in ‘esster’, two lines later: Swift’s two Esthers, again. The father of the Irish Isolde was ‘Anguish’ who features here. This suggests again that the speaker is the Bretagne princess who gets Tristan, and that the reflection, dumb in the water, a parasitical entity, is the Irish one. Her promise of being ‘true to who knows you’ is now changed radically, so that she becomes ‘clue to who knows you’. From having been someone who will be faithful, she’s now potentially about to reveal her connection, by being a ‘clue’. Joyce feminizes the four old masters and they become ‘Magda, Marthe, Luz and Joan’, prayed to for protection. In these names are characters from the Gospels—Mary and Martha, sisters whom Jesus addressed, favouring them unequally, just as Isolde Blanchemain and Isolde of Dublin are dealt different destinies. Joyce makes one more change, the word ‘lips’ becoming ‘lisp’, a reminder of voice, and an increased sensualization of this talker, lying by the Tolka. The response of the old man, still confused, is revised and scattered with startled exclamations and questions, echoing Issy’s new words: —Eusapia! Fallo Fais-le, tout-tait! Languishing hysteria? The clou historique? How is this at all at all? Alicious through alluring glass or alas in jumboland? Think of a maiden, Presentacion. Double her, Annupciacion. Take your first thoughts away from her, Immacolacion. Knock and it shall appall unto you. This young barlady what exactly euphemiasly? Is she having an ambidual act herself in apparition with herself? (528.14–25 from 47484a–282v, 283; JJA 58: 388–9 with 47484a–229; JJA 58: 465)

He seems amazed, confused, or outraged, repeating words that Issy has used, though getting them wrong in transmission, and elaborating the Virgin Mary reference in ‘concepcion’. He exclaims that they must be dealing with a female medium, such as the Italian peasant Eusapia Palladino, a notorious psychic medium who, between 1890 and 1910, travelled the world, leading seances, during which she caused levitations and materializations of ghostly apparitions. She was tested frequently for fraud (always by men, including Cesare Lombroso) with mixed results, and was considered voluptuous and erotic as she threw herself into the arms of attending males.²⁸ The next words, ²⁷ Margot Norris suggested this reading in her Plenary Lecture ‘Risky Reading of Risky Writing’ at the Joyce Trieste Symposium in 2002. ²⁸ See various websites including http://www.fst.org/lodge.htm and www.survivalafterdeath. org/articles barrett/palladino.htm

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in French, mean ‘do it! Quiet everybody!’ but they conceal ‘elle tait tout’ meaning ‘she is silent about everything’. We can assume a note of frustration in Mark’s voice. His questions try to pin her down as a hysteric, or one in whom hysteria is languishing and waiting to pounce. She might also be a ‘clou’ in the history, a nail, or linchpin around which everything rotates as Joyce described Molly Bloom’s monologue.²⁹ It is tempting to see in this a prediction of Lucia’s own breakdown, which most clearly came to the surface some three years later. But its gradual approach may well have been observable at the time, so for the moment it is ‘languishing’, a dormant hysteria before a fuller eruption. Lucia’s name is half-sounded in ‘languishing’ and in ‘alicious’. Joyce has for a while been playing with Lucia’s name in the text, as in the early drafts to II.2 (where ‘Looksyhere’ is revised to ‘Lucihere’ (295.34),³⁰ and the two girls from Chapter 2 had taken on the names ‘Lupita Lorette’ and ‘Luperca Latouche’ (67.32 and 67.36). Mark wonders whether they’re dealing with an Alice type, since Carroll’s two Alice books, Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass both appear here. Each book is made to represent the different Issy types—one is delicious and alluring, the other ‘lass’ a tragic figure, ‘alas’, in a big world too big for her (‘jumboland’). Jumbo was a celebrated African elephant, exported first to London zoo then to America for P. T. Barnum’s spectacular circus.³¹ His mate Alice was eventually shipped over, too, a sentimental little story that caught the imagination of animal-loving Victorians, and which Joyce uses to mock the word love in Ulysses: Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly . . . Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant . . . You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everbody. (‘Cyclops’, ll. 1493–501)

Is she an alluring prostitute, or one who retreats from the world: a whore or a virgin? Has she disappeared through her reflection in the water, or passed over the water to become a celebrity in America? Three words strengthen the connection with the Virgin Mary as the stages of her life are distributed amongst the three stages of the maths riddle—‘Think of a maiden, Presentacion. Double her, Annupciacion. Take your first thoughts away from her, Immacolacion.’ In the Apocryphal gospel of St James there is a ‘presentation’ in the Temple of the Virgin Mary, when she’s just 3 years old. The ‘annunciation’—that tells her she is with child, happens when married to ²⁹ LI, 170. ³⁰ See 47482a–67v; JJA 53: 5. ³¹ To Budgen, 16 Aug. 1921, See Sebastian Knowles, ‘The True Story of Jumbo the Elephant’, in Ellen Carol Jones and Morris Beja (eds.), Twenty-First Joyce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 97–111.

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Joseph, blended here with ‘nuptials’, to indicate the marriage. Contemplating the Virgin must always be with clean thoughts: in taking away your first thoughts you make the vision immaculate. This continues the game with Spanish that was introduced with ‘mother concepcion’ in Issy’s speech. The Spanish forms are most likely linked to the Barber of Seville allusions earlier, but it may also signal, given the status of the old men, the Spanish Inquisition. Mary’s appearance is strengthened by the reference to her apparition in 1879 at Knock in Co. Mayo, a town whose name is combined with the open invitation to believe from Matthew 7: 7, you only have to wish it: ‘Knock and you shall enter.’ This, indicating that Matthew not Mark is speaking, is, however, transformed into a Gothic nightmare, ‘Knock, and it shall appall’: open a door to find some awful malpractice, a horror movie scene. This is a scenario that had been sown in ALP’s original letter, drafted long before in December 1923, and it might also provide a source for Issy’s relation to her mirror: ‘I only wish he [McGrath, the slanderer of HCE] wd look in through his letterbox some day . . . . He wd be surprised to see her [McGrath’s wife] & Mr Brophy quite effectionate together kissing & looking into a mirror.’³² Joyce changes ‘exactly’ into ‘euphemiasly’, another word from religious ritual, meaning praise, and twinning back with the word ‘eulogia’ earlier. All these words for praise are, perhaps, part of Issy’s self-admiration. McHugh notes that the great mathematician Pascal had a sister called Euphemia. Her original name was, in fact, Jacqueline, but she took the name Euphemia when she became a nun, like the convent girl here, from which moment she urged her more worldly brother to renounce the world. The prefix ‘Eu-’ has become a feature of this part of the passage: ‘Eulogia . . . Eusapia . . . Euphemia.’ One last change is in doubling the duality, as ‘dual’ becomes ‘ambidual’. A ‘dual’ act is a double act, and ‘ambi-’ means ‘both’, so ‘ambidual’ means both-are-double. Where we thought we had a speaker and her reflection, it now seems they each have doubles, as if there are four. A girl split in two looks at the reflection of these two. She is talking to her own ‘apparition’, her own ghost, as it might appear at a seance. These additions are typed up and further additions made, but the pages for these excerpts were purchased in 2002 by the National Library of Ireland, and permission to make copies is difficult to obtain. ³² 47471b, 33; JJA 46. 259. This passage, after several drafts, was revised in 1938 for Book IV, and changes seem to have been made in the light of the Issy passages. Originally a question of improper adulterous relations between a man and a woman, it became shot through with lesbian relations: ‘Only look through your leatherbox one day . . . to be surprised to see under the grand piano Lily on the sofa (and a lady!) pulling a low and then he’d begin to jump a little bit to find out what goes on when love walks in besides the solicitous bussness by kissing and looking into a mirror’ (618.12–19).

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2 . 2 . 1 9 2 9 ,  PAG E P RO O F S : ‘ S O F T AG LO - I R I S O F T H E VA L S’ Shortly after, Joyce received the second set of proofs for transition, probably at the start of 1929, with the revisions above incorporated. He could not resist adding a few last touches, some corrections and a round of tiny changes, with thirty or so extra words for the 548 words of our passage so far but nonetheless with some significant additions. The revisions were received by the printers by the end of January 1929. Having spoken about her doves and the pure sensitive flower-girls Netta and Linda, Issy now speaks of odours in a sensuous sentence: ‘they’ve sin sumtim, tankus! My rillies were liebeneaus, my aftscents embre. How me adores eatsother.’³³ Rills are small streams, ‘Marillies’ are apricots, and an amaryllis a lily. These natural forms ‘were liebeneaus’, sounding ‘Libanus’ (incense), Lebanon, and, using German and French, it evokes water-lovers, or a lovely ‘nose’. But it also echoes with ‘aftscents’, the smells left in her wake, after she passes, lingering like the light from glowing embers. She describes her speech, too, as ‘sombre accents’, a dark way of talking. The whole reworks fragments from the Song of Songs: ‘the rarest essences are yours: with all the incense bearing trees . . . well of living water, streams flowing down from Lebanon, . . . your nose is like a tower of Lebanon’. But the dialogue between lover and beloved in the original Song of Songs is here exchanged for self-address. Three full sentences are added to Mark’s response who, having alluded to the Virgin Mary, adds: — . . . Knock and it shall appall unto you. Who shone yet shimmers will be e’er scheining. Cluse her, voil her hild her hindly. /After liryc and themodius soft aglo-iris of the vals. This young barlady what, euphemiasly . . . (528.21–4 from 47484b–328; JJA 59: 34)

The three sentences in bold are highly compressed. The first two suggest ‘the one who shines . . . must be hidden’. This is the desire of an anxious, possessive guardian, to keep his beautiful ward out of reach of society (like Dr Bartolo in the Barber of Seville). Closer reading of the first sentence suggests a chain of causal determiners—she who (once) shone, but still gleams, will shine for ever—expressing a hope about one whose beauty may have begun to pass: a woman ageing, a star fading. The sentence also echoes with Shaun (who shines) and Shem (who shimmies), and with the idea they will perhaps come ³³ 47484b–327; JJA 59: 33.

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together as an apparition (like Bloom and Stephen whose reflections become Shakespeare in the ‘Circe’ chapter of Ulysses). The speaker has already been wondering if he has been seeing an apparition, and this is now strengthened in a pun on the German for it: ‘Erscheinung’. Drawing on the Platonic distinction between appearance and reality, this is also Kant’s term for phenomenon, physical matter as it appears to the senses, distinct from noumenon, the conceptual matter present in the mind. Issy’s destiny appears to the old men to be nothing but surface and appearance: she finds absolution in a face cream, admires her own surface in the surface of the stream. She is absent of mind and absence of mind, struck by the play of light on the surface of the world, purely by its phenomena. The second sentence is thick with secreting: close, veil, hide her. Her sudden stellar value makes her precious, and she must be ensnared (Danish hilde), chased like a hind (a female red deer) and hidden behind ‘hindly’. ‘Cluse’ may refer to Vaucluse in Provence, where the poet Petrarch, exiled from Italy, wrote sonnets, many to Laura whose name he distributed within his poems. This addition is made shortly after the Petrarch addition that we saw in Part I and, while separated by 300 pages, they are echoes of each other. ‘C-luse’ also carries another small echo of Joyce’s daughter Lucia. So Joyce again mimics Petrarch’s concealment of his loved one, by concealing his own beloved daughter amongst the words. But the spelling also sounds like ‘Losing’ her: a consequence of all-too-successful concealment is to lose the object, even from the concealer. In his vale, Petrarch wrote lyrics, alluded to in the third sentence, ‘After liryc and themodius soft aglo-iris of the vals.’ But the key to this phrase is that elements of it can be read backwards, as in a mirror: ‘Liryc’ and ‘vals’ produce Cyril and Slav, ‘themodius’ produces Methodius, and ‘aglo’ produces ‘Olga’. Cyril, with his brother Methodius, provided a written script for the Slavs whom they were converting to Christianity during the ninth century. The script was named ‘Cyrillic’ after him. Princess Olga was the first Russian woman to be converted. Issy, from the previous sentence, is to be veiled ‘after’—or behind—them. Being brothers, Cyril and Methodius are Shem (a lyric poet) and Shaun (a singer of melodies). Issy is to be hidden behind Shem and Shaun, therefore, in the valleys, just a little ‘lily of the valley’ (the iris being a lily), in images that smack of the Celtic Twilight, where she’ll speak her soft Anglo-Irish (whisht, acushla, slainte, etc.), and her eyes will gently gleam (her soft iris a-glow). But these lilies are ‘themodius’, ‘them odious’, odorous flowers—not scented with incense, but festering, alluding perhaps to Shakespeare, Sonnet 94: ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.’ The Anglo-Irish lily of the valley linked with the saints of the Eastern Church, might refer to the idea of bringing literacy to an oral culture, converting it

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from a spoken to a scripted one. This maps onto a strong theme within the book as a whole concerning the relation of women to literacy, spelled out most clearly in the Letter itself, and the phrase ‘when Biddy Doran first looked at literature’ (112.27). It relates to Issy, too, who in II.2 is being taught how to write letters, but seems resistant to the process. transition came out in February, and Joyce would not return to revise these pages until much later in the first wave of preparations for completing the book.

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3 . 1 . 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 3 6 , R EV I S I N G F O R FA B E R : ‘S A L I C E S . . . I N V E R S I O N . . . S E C I L A S’ This was a stretched-out process, begun possibly in late 1933 and completed, according to Joyce’s note, on 1 July 1936. During this period he was also getting on with the stalled Book II, so currents from that work flow into the revisions. The revisions, at least to this excerpt, are considerable, but not made at as high a rate as we have seen. The passage grows to 738 words—increasing by a quarter, from the 575 words that appeared in transition. The initial question about Issy (spoken, it seems, by the gospeller John) now appears as follows (it has a new beginning, but in the commentary we will pass over that for consideration of space): —Naif Cruachan! Woe on woe, says Warden Daly. Woman will water the wild world over. Sure I thought it was larking in the clover trefoll of the furry glans with two stripping baremaids, Stilla Underwood and Moth McGarry, he was, hand to dagger, that time and their mother a rawkneepudsfrowse, I was given to understand, with superflowvius heirs begum, there was that one that was always mad gone on him, her first king of cloves and the most broadcussed man, in Carrick-on-Shannon, county Leitrim. Sure she was near drowned in lakest pondest coldstreams of admiration forherself making faces at her bachspilled likeness in the brook and cooling herself in the element after, she pleasing it, she praising it, with salices and weidowywehls, all tossed, as she was, the playactric. (526.20–33 from 47486a–111, 111v; JJA 61: 83–4)

The clover is now the ‘trefoll’, just a trifle, or ‘très folle’ ‘very mad’, and the trefoil Patrick used to illustrate the Trinity. The mother is more strongly associated with ALP, since she has ‘superflowvious heirs’: part of a ‘superflow’, having a thick head of flowing hair, and a superfluity of children (‘heirs’), like the old woman who lived in a shoe. They get under her feet as her overlong hair gets into her eyes. The man that Issy was ‘mad gone on’ is now ‘the most broadcussed’, the most widely insulted man. Issy’s self-admiration is expanded. Her ‘likeness’ is ‘bachspilled’, a brook spilling down the hillside, indicating that things may be spelled backwards. The composer Bach, whose name translates as ‘brook’, wrote undulating pieces, some of which could be played backwards, like his ‘Musical Offering’. Issy, now a water nymph, a Rhine maiden, cools herself, hanging over and slightly submerged in the water like willows and water-wheels (salices and weide mean willow in Latin and German), stroking its surface, praising and pleasing it. Or is she throwing herself in? For the willows are signs of grief, weepers, wailing, as Desdemona’s song in Othello signals. Perhaps she wears widow’s weeds or veils. This is the

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first time that Issy has been grieving in this passage, though elsewhere she has been associated with tears. In a passage written back in 1927, for instance: ‘Nuvoletta reflected for the last time . . . . And into the river . . . there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears . . . for it was a leaptear’ (159.6–16). Nuvoletta and Issy are like Ophelia falling ‘into the weeping brook’, by which a willow grows, as Hamlet’s mother Gertrude witnesses, in which Ophelia sings, ‘like a creature native and indued unto that element’ words echoed here: ‘cooling herself in the element’. Moreover, Issy is in part modelled on Lucia, so Joyce may be incorporating his own and Lucia’s grief over her breakdown. When she broke out of her hospital near Geneva (Les Prangins), and tried swimming across the enormous Lac Leman, she was thought to be attempting suicide.³⁴ The narcissism of her self-admiration is now spelled out in one of the most striking additions to our passage. It is given to a new speaker, another one of the old men, throwing in his tuppence worth about this vital witness who has just spoken: —Nircessissies are as the doaters of intension inversion, sSecilas through their laughing classes becombing poolermates in laker life. —It seems to same with Iscappellas. (526.34–527.01 from 47486a–111, 111v; JJA 61: 83)

The classical myth of Narcissus is superimposed with a classic moral: ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’, producing a sibilant ‘nircessissies’, Issys as cissies and nurses. These are further professions for a young woman to add to the actress, the convent schoolgirl, and the barlady that have already featured. But, in addition, there is evidence that Lucia made advances to female friends of hers and would have wanted a brief lesbian fling with one of her nurses, a friend of Sylvia Beach (herself a lesbian), while she was being looked after.³⁵ Joyce turns ‘mother’, into its contrasting ‘daughters’, obviously because the Issys are daughters, just as they are ‘doters’, self-admiring in their enamoured narcissistic state. Joyce changes ‘invention’ first into ‘intention’, but quickly replaces this with ‘inversion’, an improvement, since inversion suits the mirrory context of reflection and, in the nineteenth century, meant homosexuality. The old man is trying out some moral-psychological laws: not only is necessity the mother of invention (so creativity only occurs where there is some clear need for it), but narcissists are drawn to homosexuality and to homosexuals, reflections of each other, both being drawn to kinds of sameness. ³⁴ LIII, 323. ³⁵ See my ‘James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Lucia Joyce’s Breakdown’ (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1997), 19 and 32.

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In his 1914 ‘On Narcissism’, Freud pointed out that homosexuals ‘in the later choice of love-objects . . . have taken as a model not their mother but their own selves’.³⁶ There is good reason to find in Freud one incarnation of one of the investigators-as-analysts. So is there a logic behind Joyce’s suggestive punning of narcissism with necessity? Might necessity be the mother of sexual invention? Certain homosexual acts and masturbatory narcissism can be presented as a consequence of the absence of people of the opposite sex (in prisons, for example, or people on ships, in convents, monasteries, single-sex schools, etc.), or the absence of people in general. Inversion and narcissism are, then, necessary inventions in certain given circumstances. Issy, denied access to suitable males, turns inventively enough to her own reflection, the ideal projection whom she scolds, shares secrets with, and with whom she wishes to merge. As the willows reflect in the water below, so the word ‘salices’ (Latin for willows) above is inverted to form the word ‘Secilas’ (in the line) below. Joyce originally writes ‘secilas’, but capitalized the word and turned it into a proper name. The word thus evokes two young stage heroines: Cecily (in Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest) and, less directly, Celia (in Shakespeare’s As You Like It). Indeed, Joyce seems to indicate Shakespeare’s comedy of gender- and name-changing as a source for Wilde. Both Cecily and Celia are sidekick comic companions to other women (Gwendolyn and Rosalind, respectively) and, between these pairs, lesbianism has been suggested.³⁷ Joyce is picking up on Wilde’s vision of homosexuality in Shakespeare, and both ³⁶ Sigmund Freud xiv ‘On Narcissism’, in Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, xiv trans. James Strachey (London: Routledge, 1966), 73–102: 88. Margot Norris quoted a different part of Freud for the same passage explaining why Issy is attractive because of her narcissism: such women have the greatest fascination for men, not only for aesthetic reasons, since as a rule they are the most beautiful, but also because of certain interesting psychological constellations. It seems very evident that one person’s narcissism has a great attraction for those others who have renounced part of their own narcissism and are seeking after object-love; the charm of a child lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self-sufficiency and inaccessibility . . . (quoted in Norris, Decentered Universe, 54). Issy at this point, however, is not particularly attractive to men: the four old men are not seduced, only curious and frustrated by her strangeness. Issy’s attempts at seduction—in III.2, I.6, and II.2—seem to fall on deaf ears. If HCE is supposed to be seduced or tempted by Issy, we might recall that this is largely gossip. On the evidence of this speech, it is hard to see how anyone could find her—or her narcissism—particularly attractive. Failure, and the deferral of consummation, may underlie the comedy of Finnegans Wake. Issy, in such a case, would be a failed temptress, overdoing the seduction routine. Moreover, if HCE was attracted to Issy, it would not be in line with Freud’s reasoning—for he is self-absorbed, self-aggrandizingly narcissistic (see II.3, 355–8 and 363–8, and III.3, 532–end). Joyce may not be following a Freudian line in Issy, but working through something else about narcissisism and inversion. ³⁷ See Rictor Norton, The Homosexual Literary Tradition (New York: Revisionist Press, 1974).

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Joyce and Wilde (and Shakespeare for that matter) are in advance of Queer Theory in looking out for the possibilities of innuendo and narratives at work in same-sex friendship. Cecily, taught by Miss Prism, is an Alice-type, having to negotiate educationalists during ‘laughing classes’. And the largely middle-class audience seeing didactic comedy at the theatre is being schooled as members of the ‘laughing classes’. This also feels the currents of II.2, the Nightlessons, where Issy has been resisting education while scrawling facetious footnotes and giggling, as it were, at the back—and bottom—of the class. But there is a warning here, too, from the pedagogic old analyst: if you laugh in class, you are likely not to succeed, and may become a ‘parlourmaid’ in later life, reduced to ‘combing’ the mistress’s hair, having to straighten things out for the big mother who had so many children (with her ‘superflowvius heirs’). The suggestion is that Cecily types may end up simply combing the surface of the water of life, pool or lake, lazily lying in a canoe, idly playing with their hair. They may become ‘poolermates’, drawn ‘later’ dangerously towards ‘lake life’, enamoured of the pool’s reflective surface like Narcissus or like Ophelia, drowned in a brook by which willows ‘grow aslant’. Towards this moral position, one of the men throws his own observation about her: —It seems to same with Iscappellas. (527.01)

A simple idea (‘She seems to resemble Isabel’) is obscured with a strange grammatical formulation, where the adverb ‘same’ is turned into a phrasal verb ‘to same with’, as if the speaker hasn’t mastered English and translates it into his own idiom. It could signify the process whereby two things come to resemble each other, as if one could then make sentences like ‘I same with you’, ‘This sames with that’. Many elements of Joyce’s Wakese are always on the point of seeming to same with other elements of Wakese, reflecting on each other, though never quite being identical, for they are disturbed by ripples, mixed with elements flowing in from elsewhere. In a process of revision that is itself self-reflective, Joyce moulds language for purposes we cannot grasp, leaving us to guess at how to bring these strange words towards meaning, at how they might ‘same with’ other words. This game with language seems purely experimental, toying with fixed rules of language, but it also reflects on the common processes of language change and variation—such as the way new phrasal verbs, expressions, and grammatical structure emerge (and fade) continually. It compresses and makes these processes explicit, while taking them to an extreme, continually stressing the materiality of language and suggests that we can, if we wish, do what we like with it. Joyce refuses to lag behind those changes that occur to language in its everyday

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use, wishing instead to embody the spirit of the transformation of expression. We are familiar with the more obvious games—the portmanteau words, the big composite hundred-letter words, but Joyce’s games include these little morphemic shifts, where the adverb ‘same’ becomes a verb, and he coins a phrasal verb ‘to same with’. It—the auditory vision before the old men—resembles, we are told, ‘Iscapellas’, an echo of Isolde’s chapel—where the wedding might happen—or Chapelizod, the suburb to the west of Dublin, on the Liffey, translated into Italian to chime with Isabel. After typing up these revisions, Joyce penned the two words ‘Ys? Gotellus!’ (527.01) another echo of the neighbouring words ‘Iscapellas’. ‘Ys?’ being Welsh for ‘it is?’, suggests the old man cannot believe that it really is ‘Is’, that the girl and her reflection by the lake, the two ‘sluts’ who tempted HCE, are, in fact, Issy and her reflection. ‘Go [on], tell us another one!’ His disbelief is like that of someone told about ‘Ys’, the mythical Breton town swallowed by floods and now lying beneath the waves in the Golfe of Douarnez off Finisterre. ‘Is it Is who’s the daughter? Surely it’s mother earth!’ (Gea-tellus). Five smallish additions are made to Issy’s now lengthy speech. Joyce transferred notes from his workbooks onto worksheets, and many of Issy’s additions—but not all—come from there. The units vary in length, from one to thirteen words, but there are no long revision units. The ‘wrong thing’ happened, we are now told, during the ‘dark flush of night’ (527.07). A flush usually brings colour to cheeks, so a dark flush is a mild oxymoron, like a dark light, and is all the more suggestive, since the dark flush of night is probably an erotically charged flush. One effect of the ‘wrong thing’ is to get gossip going; hence the addition ‘The boys on the corner were talking too’ (527.09–10), which could be either Shem and Shaun, or the three soldiers. Into ‘Still, everybody knows’, Joyce inserted after ‘still’, ‘to forgive it’s divine and’ (527.10–11), Issy drawing on the commonplace phrase to err is human, forgive divine. And into this, after ‘divine’, Joyce hoped to insert the words ‘my lickle wiffey’ (527.11), a small (trans-gendering) vocative.³⁸ The whole in context should have read ‘And your soreful miseries first come on you. Still, to forgive it’s divine, my lickle wiffey, and everybody knows . . .’. However, it is typed up differently, signalling a transmissional error. It comes to read: ‘still to forgive it, divine my lickle wiffey, and’³⁹ because the ‘s’ has been misread for a comma. It can still be construed—just—and works in the context: her addressee—her ‘little wifey’—has to work out, to guess, ‘divine’ what it is that needs to be forgiven, another enigmatic address to her self as audience, and audience as self, to work out the responsibilities behind the event in the park. ³⁸ 47486a–111; JJA 61: 83.

³⁹ 47486a–174; JJA 61: 247.

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The typist has had a part to play, then, in this error, an error which by Joyce’s acceptance of it in his subsequent draft becomes part of an ‘authorized’ text, a ‘volitional’ error. In revision, Issy’s attention to her body is stressed. Again she flatters her reflection that she looks lovely ‘in your invinsibles’ (527.12), presumably invisible stockings. Her fascination is shot through with prohibited desire: ‘Could I but pass my hands some, my hands through, thine hair!’ (527.15–16), relating to the ‘combing’ the old man mentioned as the fate of Issy (what she might becomb). It is, moreover, what a lover would desire, and in one context, taboo homosexuality. It might also endanger the apparition: if she touches her own reflection in the water she will vanish. In another addition she speaks to her reflection as if it were a mannequin, or little puckering doll, whom she now instructs into society: ‘O Fronces, say howdy do, Dotty! Chic hands’ (527.17). She is to shake her ‘chic’ hands, like fronds or leaves at her extremity, admiring her own beautiful ‘whitehands’, supplanted at this level with ‘Blanchemain’ (527.21), Frenchified for the Brittany Isolde. She also now wears ‘boyproof knicks’ (527.19–20), a modern version, I suppose, of a chastity belt. The parodied Virgin Mary theme is strengthened with warped extracts, as Atherton points out, from the litany of Loretto.⁴⁰ ‘Mirror of justice . . . tower of ivory . . . ark of the covenant . . . house of gold’ are distorted into ‘Mirror do justice, taper of ivory, heart of the conavent, hoops of gold’ (527.22–3). She prays for her mirror to ‘do justice’, show how beautiful she is, just as the queen in Snow White asks her mirror: ‘Who is the fairest one of all?’ The ‘taper of ivory’ refers to one of those candles often found in churches used to accompany a prayer, long, slim, smooth, and white, like her role model’s arms. Stephen, in A Portrait, had already made the connection between the Tower of Ivory and the young girl Eileen’s beautiful arms or fingers. In the perversity of the deep-night dreams and fantasies, could this be a candle to be used as a sex aid in the convent? The ‘heart of the’ convent is Issy herself, the most beautiful girl there, as sacred and secret and powerful as the ark of the precious covenant. On the original Ark (a box two foot square and five foot long) there were two angels facing each other—another correspondence for the two Issys. The last in the list, the hoops of gold, are the wedding rings, a wedding being a fantasy of this young woman, this bride, potentially, of a dead man—Christ, or a living hunk—Tristan. The wedding, we know, is planned at ‘St Audiens’, and ‘after’, a feast at the house, ‘for all the catclub to go cryzy’ (528.07). The Catclub was a fashionable London dance club in the 1920s, (where ‘crazy’ might be pronounced with a Cockney accent ‘cryzy’). It also combines cry and Izzy (Issy in the previous chapter). ⁴⁰ Atherton, Books at the Wake, 130.

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The punters at the ‘catclub’ are identifiable as Issy’s twenty-eight companions (the ‘Maggies’), since in his worksheets Joyce marked the catclub with their siglum, a hoop, tilted like a halo, a hoop of gold above divine beings (see Introduction p. 9–10 and Part IV, p. 235). Joyce now signals the end of Issy’s speech with the words ‘(I’m fading)’ and beyond that ‘(I’m fay)’, as if she fades before completing her word, identifying in a moment of lucidity her own fay, capricious, flighty, pixieness (528.11–13). Joyce is inserting mini-endings that are proleptic of the novel’s end where, mixed with her daughter, ALP will fade out into silence: ‘For I feel I could near to faint away’ (626.01). To this speech, the excitable Mark responds with more exclamations and a new set of deictic indicators (‘this, that, here, these, those’), carefully trying to locate Issy in space, still hoping to pin her down. Previously Joyce had made a pun involving Kant’s ‘Erscheinung’ and something ‘ever shining’, the aura of appearance. This now inspires Joyce to make more references to Kant, as Mark asks, bewildered, ‘Is dads the thing in such or are tits the that?’ (528.15–16). Is that the thing itself, the ding-an-sich, or is this the that? Other alternatives here are male and female ‘dads’ and ‘tits’. Or they are alternative psychoanalytic theories of a girl’s sexual development, Joyce doing shorthand parody of the preoccupations of psychoanalysis: ‘Is it fathers that are important in such cases, or breasts?’ Then there is the philosophical issue of identity that hovers here: ‘Is that really the thing in itself, the intrinsic identity (that fathers forth all other qualities), or is it to be equated with something other than itself, having no intrinsic identity?’ Issy, as ‘is’, is being linked here to the philosophical problems of the nature of being, of ‘is-ness’ and identity. The question ‘What is Issy?’ becomes ‘What is is, what is to be?’ This is a problem for the old men—a problem which comes to recur throughout the book, insofar as Finnegans Wake, having arrested language, is, at least for readers like the four old men, an unending investigation into, and interrogation of, being—the nature of life, existence, language, and destiny and the relations between them all. There is a sense that the nature of being is to be understood as like ‘Is’. She is an embodiment, a caricature, if you like, of a conception of present being: flighty, split, phenomenal, fading, fay, naughty, beautiful, passing through and between everything, linking all together, but unencompassable and ungraspable. Mark, responding to Issy’s speech, tries to focus his understanding of what he’s just heard: ‘Hear we here her first poseproem of suora unto suora.’ (528.16–17).⁴¹ ‘Hear’ and ‘here’ are distorted doubles, reflections, again, of each other. The prose-poem is a hybrid form, a usually brief piece of prose, crafted with the intensity of poetry, which gained wide recognition with ⁴¹ From ‘Is there a poem of / sister to sister’ VI.B.3.79 (c), Deane et al. (eds.), ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo (VI.B.3), 66.

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Baudelaire’s ‘Petits Poèmes en Prose’, and was then taken up by Symbolists (including Mallarmé and Rimbaud) and such Modernists as Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot. Joyce inverts the first sounds of the two words in a spoonerism to make a ‘proem’, which is also literally a prelude or preamble before a longer piece of writing, and it is a ‘pose’, since we can imagine Issy posing before her reflection. But can we hear Poe’s proem here? For, in fact, Edgar Allen Poe published a work in 1848, shortly before his death, called ‘Eureka, A Prose Poem: Or the Physical and Metaphysical Universe’, a lengthy visionary account of the Cosmos, some 140 pages long. Baudelaire, translator of Poe, must have known of this, which explains why Baudelaire’s own ‘poèmes en prose’ were ‘Petits’, small in comparison with their original model by Poe. But given that it was one of the last things Poe wrote, it was not a ‘proem’ at all—leading on to something else—more like an epilogue, even an epitaph. In suggesting a comparison between Issy’s speech and Poe’s prose-poem, there is perhaps a sense of both of them being incomprehensible babble. Issy’s speech has been addressed from one sister to another, using the Italian suora which can itself twin with the words ‘soarer’ and soarer, Issy and her double as angels on the Ark, or Noah’s two birds—the raven and the dove soaring in search for land. They are birds singing to each other as they soar, fleeing as they fly and fade into the blue. Mark Lyons’s response, through another revision, now seems to contain a taunt:⁴² ‘Ding Dong! Where’s your pal in silks alustre?’ (528.19), where’s your friend in her illustrious lustrous silks (her see-through silk stockings, perhaps)? The pal, as friend, could be ALP. So, where’s your mother, now you need her? But we can’t be sure to whom or of whom he’s speaking—it could be her man now the wedding bells are ringing—leaving her in the lurch. The bell also rings to signal Sechselauten the spring festival in Zurich where Joyce lived during the First World War. At the festival, city Guilds parade through the streets and Bögg, a giant snowman representing winter, is placed on a pyre where eventually he explodes: an exaggerated compressed version of the fall plot of Finnegans Wake. One last revision is made to round off Mark’s speech: ‘Is she having an ambidual act herself in apparition with herself? As Consuelas to Sonia’s may?’⁴³ Consuelo was a novel George Sand brought out in 1843, notorious for its scenes of free sexuality and even lesbianism. The ‘ambidual act’ is code for lesbianism, dreamt of as she kisses her mirror, referring back to the ‘inversion’ of the other speaker. These hints and queries about lesbianism, however, are a symptom of the interrogator’s desperation to understand Issy’s strange words and behaviour. Joyce had another set of transition pages for Book III, to which he could add more revisions. His method involved the transfer of hundreds of notes, ⁴² 47486a–111v; JJA 61: 84. Typed up on JJA 61: 248.

⁴³ See 47486a–175, JJA 61: 248

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presumably from his notebooks, onto forty-odd loose sheets.⁴⁴ He went through these notes and began to distribute them around the transition pages. For our passage, only one note seemed to be right for transfer.⁴⁵ It seems to concern the location of the crime: ‘I know you are a very wicked girl to go in the deep place and it was a very wrong thing to do.’⁴⁶ It echoes with the ‘furry glans’ (Furry Glen) that we encountered earlier, like the rushy hollow, near the lake in Phoenix Park. It is full of dark sinister and gothic vagueness—the ‘deep’ place may be the subconscious, the sea, history, or all of these. It may be the book itself, the layering of which, as it is serially revised, gives each passage a verticality, and a sense of stratigraphy, or buried language, the reading of which (especially using the Archive) is like an archaeological excavation. One last set of revisions were made around late 1936, prior to the galleys being printed.⁴⁷ He added to Issy’s speech the phrase, ‘So vickyvicky veritiny!’, about the hair she wishes to pass her hands through (526.17). He also weaves the words ‘twinstreams twinestrains’, after ‘Alicious’ in Mark’s phrase ‘Alicious through alluring glass’ (528.17). Alice passes through the water, into her reflection, alas, in a movement like two streams joining together or like strands of twine strained together. The words, however, introduce this idea impressionistically without, that is, any syntactic support, a lack which makes them enigmatic, included for their sonic coincidence, as much as for their sense. The words themselves are twins, near-identical but non-identical. They flow together easily or are bound together, straining. Streams and the twine suggest flowing or taut lines—of verse, hair, or water. They may, I suggest, relate to Joyce’s hopes for his composition, straining to bring together nearand non-identical elements, and twining disparate parts into a unity. The ‘twine’ also introduces an echo of the story about the tailor’s daughter told in II.3, which Joyce had been writing at this time.

3 . 2 . AU T U M N 1 9 3 7 , R EV I S I N G T H E G A L L EYS : ‘C O M E , R E S T ’ The galleys are now produced in three sets, the first of which Joyce worked on probably in the autumn of 1937, and the second at the start of 1938, when he began pulling the whole together for completion. On the two levels Joyce adds about nine units, for the most part morphing song titles by Thomas Moore and female music-hall performers. Rather than break them down, galley by galley, I’ve included revisions from all three sets on the one transcription and ⁴⁴ See 47486a–183–223; JJA 61: 258, 298. ⁴⁶ Added on 47486b–475; JJA 61: 485.

⁴⁵ On 47486a–192; JJA 61: 266. ⁴⁷ See 47486b–497; JJA 61: 654.

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am indicating which level they came in at with the small superscript numbers: 1 being the first set, 2 the second, and 3 the third set of (non-extant) proofs.⁴⁸ This brings us very near the final version of our passage. —Naif Cruachan! Woe on woe, says Wardeb Daly. Woman will water the wild world over. And the maid of the folley will go where glory.2 Sure I thought it was larking in the trefoll of the furry glans with two stripping baremaids, Stilla Underwood and Moth MacGarry, he was, hand to dagger, that time and their mother, a rawkneepudsfrowse, I was given to understand, with superflowvius heirs, begum. There was that one that was always mad gone on him, her first king of cloves and the most broadcussed man in Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim. Sure she was near drowned in pondest coldstreams of admiration forherself, as bad as my Tarpeyan cousin, Vesta Tully,1 making faces at her bachspilled likeness in the brook after and cooling herself in the element, she pleasing it, she praising it, with salices and weidowwehls, all tossed, as she was, the playactrix, Lough Shieling’s love!2 —Nircississies are as the doaters of inversion. Secilas through their laughing classes becoming poolermates in laker life. —It seems to same with Iscappellas? Ys? Gotellus! A tickey for tie taughts!1 (526.20–527.02)⁴⁹

‘The maid of the valley’ is an air for which Thomas Moore wrote the song ‘Go where glory waits thee’. In turning valley into ‘folley’, Joyce refers to the madness, not just of John’s view of Issy, but also now of Lucia, housed in an asylum for over two years by that time, and showing little sign of recovery. A folly is also a piece of gratuitous, functionless architecture, like entrance-less towers in the middle of an aristocrat’s park. There is an ‘Isolde’s Tower’ in Chapelizod which is a folly. If the Wake is a building it is surely a folly, elaborate but of uncertain function, if any. The maid of the folly is Issy. She will follow wherever glory . . . waits, goes, or dies? The sentence cannot be finished because the status of glory for Joyce is uncertain or, in being lost for sure, is a sore point, taboo for his pride. The speaker John compares this maid with her ‘cousin Vesta Tulley’, thus holding on to gender ambivalence and the frequent setting of the Wake in the 1890s, since Vesta Tilley was the greatest male impersonator in British music hall from the 1890s on. Being ‘Tarpeyan’ she evokes the Tarpeian rocks, from which traitors were thrown down into the sea, so she is like a kiss-and-tell betrayer, about to hide for shame under the water. The presence of an 1890s actress and suicide distantly evokes the ⁴⁸ Revisions were made on the first set of galleys (47487–84v –85; JJA 62: 164–5), the second set (47487–222v –223; JJA 62: 414–15) and on a non-extant 3rd set (which we can tell by comparing it with the first edition). ⁴⁹ See preceding note for the Archive location of these revisions.

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character Sybil Vane in Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. She is ‘Lough Shieling’s Love’, the name of another air by Thomas Moore, with a sounding of Lucia (in ‘Lou—Shie’), too. As a Narcissus type, she is the beloved and the lover of the lough/lake itself. The four old men want to hear Issy’s evidence, of course, and ask: ‘a penny for thy thoughts’, though they want more and are prepared to give a ‘Tickey’, a little more, a ticklish threepence. In their speech the ‘th’s’ are hardened into ‘t’s,’ as in certain Irish accents. ‘Thy’ is ‘tie’, thoughts become ‘taughts’, that is, her teachings, or her taut things, her stockings pulled tight—an education for someone. Issy’s speech receives additions but only at its beginning, as if Joyce having extended it for some twelve years, grew weary of extending it further. —Listenest, meme mearest! Come, rest in this bosom!2 So sorry you lost him, poor lamb! Of course I know you are a viry vikid1 girl to go in the deep placedreemplace and at that time of the draym2 and it was a very wrong thing to do, even under the dark flush of night, dare all grandpassia! He’s gone on his bombashaw. Through geesing and so pleasing at Strip Teasy up the stairs.1 The boys on the corner were talking too. And your soreful miseries first come on you. (528.03–10)⁵⁰

There’s a strong new note of seductive invitation early on in Issy’s speech: ‘Come, rest . . .’. This picks up again on the Thomas Moore allusions, with another of his songs, sung to the air of ‘Lough Sheeling’. Joyce made a substitution, changing ‘deep place’ to ‘dreem place’, the deeps and dreams being interchangeable, as it were; so the Furry Glen in Phoenix Park becomes the site of dreams; and the context for the novel becomes the mind and imagination of a sleeping being. These two words are condensed into one when they next appear. Both revision and original version are invisible in the printed text, but the change confirms the idea one has of the Wake as a whole, that its events are not real but imagined. What is interesting is that this was a consequence of overlay, that bit by bit Joyce weaved psychical language onto topographical language, strengthening the dream context of the novel. Issy’s upbraiding of her sister is the upbraiding of one dream-spirit to another, for naughtily inserting herself ‘at the wrong time’ of day (twilight, after which girls should be in doors), and at the wrong time of the dream: hence ‘draym’. Isolde’s reflection has interrupted and invaded the dream, an event analogous to the way Lucia’s insanity interrupted the dream of writing the Wake. That Issy thinks her reflection can enter a dream puts her in line with the superstitions about entering someone else’s mind. The idea ⁵⁰ See n., above, for the Archive location of these revisions.

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of entering a dream is contrary to rational explanations of dreams, relying on notions of telepathy, shape-shifting, spirits, etc. That the dead might appear in dreams gives rise to the idea of a life after death, and that the spirits of the dead live on, visiting our dreams. Satan entered the dream of Eve, and Morgana the dream of King Arthur. We realize we have been listening to a dead person speaking through the medium of a sleeptalking, daydreaming Shaun. Issy laughs about ‘Grandpapa’ who has ‘gone on his bombashaw’, a subtle reference to what Joyce had just been writing—How Buckley Shot the Russian General. As we know, that ‘story’ involved the sighting of a bottom (bum-show), belonging to a high-ranking officer (a pashaw), resulting in his destruction (by bullet—or bomb), all in the word ‘bombashaw’. In being ‘gone on’, he’s obsessed by what he’s been doing. Not only is he revealing himself, he’s doing so ‘Through geesing and so pleasing at Strip Teasy up the stairs’ (528.09), as a result of gazing at another revealing herself, in a striptease up the stairs. The stripper is Tizzy from the previous chapter, who announces to her brother Jaun that ‘last at night’ while he’s away ‘I’ll strip straight after devotions before his fondstare’ (461.21–2). This distinguishes the Issy speaking here from the Issy up there—Blanchemain speaking of the stripper upstairs as if she’s someone else. But if Blanchemain and Tizzy are part of the same Issy, this is a good example of her being a multiple personality. However, occasional allusions to Morton Prince’s famous study of multiple personality do not necessarily make Issy a multiple personality, any more than the allusion to Eusapia makes her a medium. She is fascinating, ineffable, drawing in analysis and representation, for a number of different reasons. HCE is himself drawn in, is ‘geesing’, from ‘goosing’, perhaps—slang for heavy foreplay—and, more shame to him, enjoying it (‘pleasing’). On the page proofs Joyce made three small revisions for our passage. ‘Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim’, the place in an earlier draft where her ‘king of cloves’ came from, is now morphed into ‘Corrack-on Sharon, County Rosecarmon’ (526.28), taking us from a real town over the border into ‘Rosscommon,’ re-imagined as a town painted red (‘rose and carmine’). The place name now carries the Rose of Sharon from the Song of Songs—a biblical text we’ve already heard in the bride’s description with her sweet scents of both incense and lilies. The old man who described the girls as Nircississies now picks up and echoes the title of the air just voiced by the previous old man: ‘Lough Sheeling’s love’. They seem to be joining in a rendition of it: ‘—O, add shielsome bridelittle! All of her own!3 ’ (526.34).⁵¹ This contains the Danish for ‘she’s an odd little bride’. Being odd, she’s single, on her own, and ‘of her own’—belonging to ⁵¹ 47488–235; JJA 62: 513.

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no one other than herself. This has been read as self-sufficient—part of her charm and inner strength. But the address to a reflection could be a refuge of sorts. For one half of her is a disappointed bride, waiting at the altar, like Miss Haversham in Dickens’s Great Expectations, left to reflect on—or repress—her own isolation. The disappointed wedding, or the girl caught in the intermediary phase of being a bride, between being girl and wife, is perhaps the fate of Isolde being expressed at this point. As John Bishop says, she ‘lies suspended between . . . two forces’.⁵² She seems, indeed, caught between one world and another, between an undesirable husband (Mark), and an unobtainable love ( Tristan), squeezed out to move towards the celibate fate of a nun. This fate, or stage in her fate, seems to be confirmed at the end of II.3, where Issy is described as ‘in her diamindwaiting’ (377.20). Waiting for a wedding, after all these years (the diamond symbolizing fifty years) in a split mind state, she needs another one: ‘O, add . . . .!.’ This sounds like an imperative that the text addresses to its author, continually wanting more, joining one more phrase to another—but only producing a text the future reception of which is as uncertain as this bride’s. But this is only a stage in her fate, one event of many. A different event takes place here, and that is her dissolution, her disappearance. Issy’s reply, however, is not bothered by these tragic visions but opens her speech with an opinion—perhaps delicate, perhaps robust, a case where how we voice something is crucial to its interpretation: ‘They were harrowd, those finweeds!’ (527.03).⁵³ A ‘finweed’ is a field-shrub, also known as rest-harrow because it stops the flow of a harrow when soil is being tilled. Getting in the way, they are horrid, ugly things. Issy is distancing her perception of her graceful ethereal beauty from these tough rooty objects (‘finweeds’ could be the offspring of Finn—his sons, the twins). However, here they have been harrow’d, successfully dug up, so the soil is clear for sowing. This may signal a self-reflexive moment for Joyce about overcoming the difficulties of composition, of rooting out the very problems he had sown into his original conception, or that had grown as he wrote. On the other hand, they have not been rooted out but have taken root, are there for a reason, to prevent the reader from too easily ploughing through the material of the book. Through this self-alluding moment we can return to the earlier point about Issy—that she can be seen to represent a set of composition principles: reflection, doubling, inverting, apposition, cosmetic transformation, makeup and making-up, self-address, inventing encounters with other selves imaged in one’s own textual reflection. To judge this set as narcissistic, and representative of the way Finnegans Wake turns in on itself negatively, away ⁵² Bishop, Book of the Dark, 243.

⁵³ 47488–235; JJA 62: 513.

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from communication, is to judge in the way that the moralistic old men do, desperate to understand this feminine principle and contain its play under the title ‘feminine’. But ‘narcissistic’ may be a fair judgement of Finnegans Wake if we can see that narcissism can be productive. For it was Joyce’s reflective self-absorption that produced the text’s own dramatic writings, that assessed and reassessed itself, that kept putting on make-up, pushing itself towards a teasing perfection that reality could not match. And its narcissism results partly in a transformation into something rich and strange, that puts itself beyond total transmission and communication, escaping our hermeneutic clutches, slipping out, fading, fay, before our eyes.

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Part IV Revising Character: The Maggies and the Murphys

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Revising Character: The Maggies and the Murphys ‘Staring you larrikins on the postface . . . whirled without end to end’ (582.19–21)

Every study of Finnegans Wake supplies something like a snapshot of a carnival, a map of a single path through what is a deep, dense forest. Whether tracing a theme or a plot, developing an argument or a theory, each study will pass along a line of allusions from one textual point to the next, limited in relation to the surrounding or intermediary spaces that remain unexplored. This study has taken local areas of the textual forest (about two per cent of the whole), and has microscopically traced how they expanded from their earliest emergence to their fully grown final form. There remain huge tracts of text whose growth can be explored, and there are different methods of observing textual transformation. The passages and the method I’ve chosen might appear to be strong on character: Shaun describes Shem’s project; a washerwoman describes ALP’s youthful encounter with a lustful cleric; Butt boasts to Taff of his great achievement—shooting the Russian General; and finally Issy speaks of and to herself, surrounded by four curious old men. I will continue this focus on character in this part by tracing the genetic development of the ‘people’ embodied in the ‘Maggies’ and the ‘Murphys’. I could have chosen other kinds of material: like a description of action (Shaun falling into the river at the end of III.1), a lengthy list (the clues of Finn MacCool in I.6), analytical sections (describing the Mamafesta in I.5), or brief self-contained tales (the Prankquean). The focus on character, however, serves as a means to characterize Joyce’s manner of composition: for Joyce’s characters can be seen to embody principles of the various processes of writing and rewriting. This might suggest that Finnegans Wake is based in character, and thus position Joyce in line with a central set of novelistic conventions, rather than as a writer undermining them. Joyce, as with everything in his book of doubles,

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however, has it both ways. Novelistic characters can be defined as entities, with sets of qualities and roles and actions attached to them that are embodied in a unity via a name. Authors arrange, delimit, and exclude clear-cut qualities, which all help to make specific destinies to character plausible. These are more or less determined by their social context, which is more or less fully sketched in. The most extreme view that affirms naturalistic character in the Wake is expounded by John Gordon, convinced of a basic realist level to the novel, precisely locating the dreamer and his family within specific sets of environmental and social determinants. But the contexts that determine character within the ‘naturalist’ movement of fiction, out of which Joyce’s earlier writing can be said to grow, contexts defined by Émile Zola as heredity, historical moment, and social milieu, are never consistently, or trustfully, provided in Finnegans Wake. The slightest movement which would destabilize the fixity of these contexts is possible in any direction—through time, space, social class, or the family. As they occur, these little shifts create inconsistencies of backdrop. Any change, as Chaos theory shows, makes a huge difference in the determination of any subsequent result. A gentler affirmation of character emerges in Eugene Jolas’s description of Joyce’s compositional ‘system’: He had invented an intricate system of symbols permitting him to pick out the new words and paragraphs he had been writing down for years, and which referred to the multiple characters in his creation.¹

Though he did, indeed, use these symbols, Joyce also asserted that ‘there are, so to say, no individual people in the book . . . if one were to speak of a person in the book, it would have to be of an old man, but even his relationship to reality is doubtful’.² These were remarks that Joyce made towards the end of composing his work, so it may be a position towards which he moved in order to provide a simple conceptual frame for a whole work, the meaning of which was, as we saw in Part II, developing beyond his control. It is, moreover, a projection, since his own hold on the reality beyond his book had—especially with his daughter’s worsening condition—become questionable. Nonetheless, Joyce having said this coincided with the vision of personality and identity that Stephen Dedalus expressed in his talk on Shakespeare in Ulysses. There, Stephen contended that the apparently different selves in the world are merely reflections and refractions of our own self. Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every ¹ Eugene Jolas, ‘My friend James Joyce’, in Givens (ed.), Two Decades of Criticism, 7. ² Quoted in Attridge, Joyce Effects, 144.

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life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves. . . . The lord of things as they are . . . is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher. (‘Scylla and Charybdis’, 9. 1042–6)

Whoever we meet, we meet ourselves. The world is our reflection, our dream, our subjective construction. All the characters of the Wake can be seen, then, as projected figments of a single man’s imagination. And if it is any single person’s dream, with determining contexts round that person, it is the dream of James Joyce, dreaming, perhaps of the version of himself he might have become, his other life passing before him, interred not far from the river Liffey, maybe something like his father. As a dream in which these projected selves appear, it seems to have an internal subjective source rather than anything external and objective. Joyce was, indeed, absorbed in his writing: ‘Since 1922 my book [Finnegans Wake, then called Work in Progress] has been a greater reality for me than reality,—everything led to it and everything outside it was insurmountable difficulties.’³ It is as if it had become a tyrant—like HCE in his worst form, or a river in flood like the ever-rising ALP, before either of which everything cowers and retreats. In such circumstances the reality of the book becomes its own subject, and the reality of constructing that reality comes to be greater than reality. Beckett wrote (now notoriously) of ‘Work in Progress’, that ‘it is not about something, it is that something itself ’;⁴ Tindall revised this idea, saying ‘Finnegans Wake is about Finnegans Wake’,⁵ and we can refine this further: ‘in part Finnegans Wake is about the writing of Finnegans Wake’. For Joyce, who had ‘a hundred worlds to create’,⁶ its reality came to be more insistent than the reality of the world. And so it became concerned with its struggles with planning and projection, deformation and reformation—with gathering, selecting, arranging, shifting, bombarding, inserting, melding, fusing, rearranging, until these struggles are coded as character and event. In reflecting on the processes of its making and unmaking, it returns to its engagement with the world around it, especially insofar as the world is something we are ourselves engaged in making and unmaking. These struggles take place in order to mould a unique object, open and indefinable enough to ensure a wealth of descriptions such as we encountered in our Introduction, and such as no doubt will keep growing in the future. The focus on its own creative processes sharpened as its own evolution became more absorbing, problematic, and far-reaching. ³ William T. Noon, ‘James Joyce: Unfacts, Fiction, and Facts’, PMLA 76/3 (1961), 254–76: 258. ⁴ Beckett in Beckett et al. (eds.), Exagmination, 14. ⁵ Tindall, Reader’s Guide, 237. ⁶ Ellmann, James Joyce, 664.

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The radical unravelling of character is a consequence of Joyce’s rewriting procedures. Initially, Joyce drafted particular characters that are peculiar in being dehistoricized, their social contexts unspecified, as a rule absurd, with an inconsistent mixing of historical allusion. They are carriers of Joyce’s exercises in style, rather than self-consistent entities. They have neither clear origins nor destinies, and float out of the scriptural ether like the ventriloquized voices that issue from the medium Yawn. Over time, rather than becoming more specific, they proliferate, change name, sex, nation, class, period. Any clue to a naturalistic context that might be provided—such as their form of employment, for instance (writer, alchemist, postman, Madame of a brothel, striptease artist, mercenary, innkeeper, General, tailor, policeman)—is quickly qualified and elaborated rapidly in revision, by incorporating some element from another conflicting historical framework. The consequent multiplication of temporal and spatial contexts means that the delineating limits of character blur. It is through revision that character is refracted and multiplied, stretched across incompatible and incongruous realms. Characters begin to overlap. The incongruities produce the comic surrealism of the text, its fast-moving encyclopedism and, by reaching across and embracing wide fields of reference, provide the base to interpret Finnegans Wake as an all-encompassing ‘universal’ myth. But the effects of Joyce’s revisions and the characterization of his revisions also undo this universal myth and explode universality. This will become clear when we examine the characters already encountered—Shem, Shaun, ALP, Issy, and HCE—in terms of what creative principles they might be said to represent, and the effect of revision on them. And having examined a resistance in critical history to Joyce’s revision practices, we will extend our examination to the characters of ‘the people’—the Murphys and the Maggies, ‘the 12’ and ‘the 28’—in order to propose the principle of composition they represent: the principle of energetic revision itself, containing all other modes of revision and of character, unifying and pluralizing the processes of rewriting. They serve also to introduce and reflect a popular socialist vision in composing his work, which we might frame as a resuscitation and a return to life of something Joyce had expressed when he was aged 22 in his unpublished essay ‘A Portrait of the Artist’. Joyce concluded that essay with: ‘Already the messages of citizens were flashed along the wires of the world. . . . To those multitudes, not as yet in the wombs of humanity but surely engenderable there, he would give the word: Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come, the lightening of your masses in travail.’⁷ Thirty-five years later, this is rejigged and placed in a utopian frame of the language of the ⁷ Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings, ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John WhittierFerguson (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 218. I have here incorporated Scholes and Kain’s

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Wake, utopian because it is an ideal language from no place, a ‘no placelike’ (609.02), a home nonetheless for an ideal. Our study began with Shaun’s harsh verdict on Shem and his writing. For this sketch Joyce adopted and exaggerated the language of those critics who responded negatively to Ulysses, thought him a filthy pornographer, and wanted his novel banned. Shem has often been taken as a portrait of the author but it could be a screen: a view from Shaun’s perspective, not Joyce’s unmediated presentation of the author of Finnegans Wake. In its exaggeration, Joyce defined what he was not through the mistaken assessments of what he was considered to be. In parody, he revised these misjudgements, thus criticizing his critics. On the other hand the relation between Shem and Shaun is like that between two parts of his own self: the visionary artist who conceives forms, reflects, and creates; and the revisionary critic who chides, reproaches, denigrates, and even slanders. There is an interchangeability in these inseparable twins: at the end of that chapter Shaun is Justius who speaks ‘to himother’, while Shem is Mercius who speaks ‘of hisself’ (187.24 and 193.31). The possessive pronouns ‘him’ and ‘his’ have been swapped. An artist’s resistance to hostile criticism may come from the way the critics’ views are absorbed by the internal critical faculty of the writer, and may overwhelm the compositional faculty. Shem may be the caricature that Shaunish critics would have us believe Joyce the artist is, but as long as there are elements in which Shem overlaps with James, it is tempting to read the one for the other. Shem is what Joyce doesn’t want to be, neither in the eyes of others, nor in his own. In this, Shaun’s attack on Shem is partly Joyce’s self-critique, objectifying the self that criticizes and reformulates his very writing, according to opposing principles. Artists are the first critics of their own work. Self-judgement which predicts criticism may be a painful part of the creative process. The opposition of Shem and Shaun is a means for producing the identity of opposites in the work, something produced by revision, and a correlative for auto-critique. They are like the word ‘appalling’ changed to ‘appealling’ as we saw in Issy’s speech in Part III. Taken to an extreme, this can become self-destructive, and something like this may be diagnosed in Joyce’s writer’s block—he had left himself no role to fill. ALP’s character is flow and translation, movement and transportation. She carries things down to the city, a free road to a free port, tolerant of content, bringing as a result many troublesome, distracting presents. As ‘plurabelle’ she represents plurality and procreation, reflected in her numerous offsping. As a creative principle she is inspired rhythmic sensual writing in full flood. But suggestion that where Joyce originally wrote ‘lightning’ he intended ‘lightening’. Their suggestion is noted in Shorter Writings, 285 n. 80.

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in excess, she is flooding, muddying, obscuring, and erases distinctions in the linguistic landscape or ‘langscape’ (595.04). The priest whom she encountered is the writer who gets caught up in this idealized form of creation, a Pygmalion falling in love with his own production, attending to it obsessionally, but trapped in it too. HCE, whom we have encountered chiefly as the Russian General in Part II, is the builder. He designs and plans, subdues the flux of existence, constructs and proclaims himself as ‘big altoogooder’ (358.16)—altogether, too good, a do-gooder: a single self-consistent entirety, and the responsible planner of society whose philanthropic work makes up for, and attempts to conceal, some act of which he is ashamed. He forces disparate sections together, makes associative links between them, piles them up centrally with a preordained structure, justifies procedure. Taken to extremes, the elements of his building (his book) become unwieldy, totter, threaten to collapse, and the concealed act threatens to appear through the cracks. Issy, meanwhile, is the principle of reflection, the crucial self-analytical, self-admiring, and self-admonishing part of creating. Issy before her mirror is girlish, but there’s no need to leave her within this particular gender. Stephen, after all, stares at himself in his mother’s mirror in A Portrait after he has written his first poem. The subject admires and patronizes itself, becomes its own object, and, self-absorbed, spins material out from within. But in extremis this gazing subject is split and, divorced from reality, it disappears. Engrossed in self-admiration she is swallowed up by the surface that reflects her. So characters correlate to sets of compositional principles, and this includes characters we haven’t covered here: the Four, Sackerson, Kate, the Maggies and Murphys. Kate, for instance, can be seen as ‘gatherer’ and storekeeper; the Maggies as rhythmic and ordered movement; the Murphys as an assembled critical audience. We will return to these last two soon. In addition, the fact of revision extends these creative principles to their breaking point. The characters and the writing that forms them, multiplied and inflated at the tiniest ‘subatomic’ levels, lead to their own undoing. Self-critique ends up in self-destruction; flow becomes glut; accretive construction becomes unwieldy exaggeration; self-reflection becomes a disappearance through petrification; gathering becomes obsessive hoarding; order becomes disorder; consumers become producers, as the audience turns on the show. Through excess, through writing being taken beyond reasonable limits of sense and on into an exuberant sense of fun, Joyce replicates the moment in the historical cycle of the ricorso, the extreme point of the historical process. He takes his writing to a distant place where it teeters through the last anarchic stage of Vico’s cycle, as it moves from one epoch to another. The ricorso in Book IV is signalled when everything ‘is just about to rolywholyover’ (597.03), but every moment

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of writing the book has involved a textual ricorso, every part of the text has witnessed several returns to itself, each return ensuring that word, phrase or section is poised between two opposing states. There has been a critical tendency not to tolerate Joyce’s ‘extreme’ experimentation (its ‘desperate esperanto’ as Christopher Ricks called it),⁸ embodied in the fun of his elaborations. The tendency reveals a failure to understand any motivation behind the experimentation. It expresses itself by seeing Ulysses as a more lucid, and therefore better, work than the Wake, or by comparing favourably the episodes in transition with the later reworked material. In early manuscriptural work by A. Walton Litz, Joyce’s obsessive elaboration was criticized. Many have followed Litz’s lead, most recently Danis Rose, who regrets that at certain moments of composition Joyce ‘let everything go to pieces’.⁹ The emphasis laid on the Buffalo Notebooks in the new Brepols editions of them, though an excellent project in itself, also inadvertently places the elaboration of the language on the drafts as secondary.¹⁰ Litz wished: That Joyce had halted his revision of Anna Livia sooner, before his emphasis on ‘expressive’ form became disproportionate to the effect that he actually achieved.¹¹

Litz went on to apply classical principles of ‘great art’ from Henry James: Beyond a certain point the process of revision ceases to enrich the basic text and begins to obscure it. The method leads to inclusiveness rather than that ‘discrimination and selection’—the phrase is Henry James’s—which produces the greatest art.¹²

But is Henry James the most suitable touchstone in this context? Litz thought the point of revision was to ‘enrich the basic text’, but missed the fact that the revisions may exist in an intentional conflict with the ‘basic text’, a conflict which forms part of Joyce’s anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism. Litz was also unaware of the extent of discrimination and selection that was taking place during Joyce’s composition practices in and around the notebooks. Moreover, the revisions themselves become ‘basic text’, potential loci of future enrichment or conflict. Joyce may return to linguistic roots—to ‘etyms’, as we saw in Part II—but he does so in order to reform language from those points and assault the mythic notion of a single underlying base and its ⁸ Christopher Ricks, Reviewery (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 32. ⁹ Rose, Index, 118. ¹⁰ See my essay ‘Sigla in Revision’, in Slote and van Mierlo (eds.), European Joyce Studies, 9. 44–62. Dirk van Hulle’s work is correcting this bias, especially with his aim to edit one of the ‘red-backed notebooks’ (BM Add MS: 47471b), where Joyce drafted and redrafted some of the earliest sketches for Book I. ¹¹ Litz, Art, 114. ¹² Ibid.

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inevitable return in an identical form, and authorized as such. Joyce, for Litz, also ‘neglected the rational structure of his language’.¹³ But there is reason to believe that Joyce both continued his rational use of apparent nonsense, while also turning towards, and welcoming, a deconstruction of reason through irrational deployments of sense and narrative. This latter process reflects the element in any political or artistic revolution that may botch the reconstruction subsequent to a revolution. This reflection is not interested in producing ‘the greatest art’ along the lines of Henry James, in turning out a piece of cogent, deceitfully rounded-off perfection, but rather in representing the space between the purely perfect (the ‘made through’) and the imperfect. This is a mimetic act correlating again to the ricorso, the turning between two sequential historical epochs. The Wake takes us back and forth between them, and performs oscillating shifts, enacted by the writing itself as it turned away from and returned to itself. Rewriting embodies the ricorso, the return: not, however, to a former state, but to something that has grown each time, or shifted since the departure writing took from itself. Edmund Wilson also criticized the excesses of revision, specifically for having certain negative consequences: The result still seems unsatisfactory, the thing has not quite come out right. Instead of the myths’ growing out of Earwicker, Earwicker seems swamped in the myths.¹⁴

Wilson was looking for the same effect that T. S. Eliot thought he had found in Ulysses, as described in his influential essay ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’. Using the myth . . . is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history . . . It is . . . a step forward in making the modern world possible for art. ¹⁵

Later readers, such as Campbell and Robinson, would say they had found an underlying myth for the Wake. Wilson, Campbell, and Robinson, Tindall, and others, as mentioned in the Introduction, needed a reassuring myth for their troubled times, to rise up and recast world anarchy as world order. For them, Joyce would provide a universally applicable myth that could assist both in the unifying and hegemonic desire of the new post-war World Order and also its gentle standard-bearer, humanism. But what Wilson noticed and criticized—that Earwicker is swamped in myths—is precisely a crucial ¹³ Litz, Art, 114. ¹⁴ Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1941), 259. ¹⁵ See T. S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, Review of Ulysses in The Dial, 75/5 (Nov. 1923), 480–3.

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part of the Wake’s meaning and power. Earwicker—and character itself—is smothered under myth, insofar as, following Roland Barthes in Mythologies, we define myth as language and the whole barrage of other representations that form culture. Definition and self-definition are scarcely available under such a barrage. Seamus Deane has defined the Wake as the fall of man into language—designating both the writer’s and the reader’s fall.¹⁶ As an elaboration of this, we may add that one of the Wakean falls is the fall of the human, or the idea of the human, under language and culture, under their proliferating representations. As this is a goal achieved through the method of intensive rewriting, to criticize elaboration is to miss the degree and the target of the critique. Joyce is not purely aspiring in ‘this book of universals . . . to the conditions of a universal consciousness’, as Hassan has argued,¹⁷ but is intrigued by its opposite and complement, the split essence of modernity, by the part defined by Baudelaire as ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’.¹⁸ And Joyce is interested in the relationship between these two halves of art, and their relative position. For it is under these ephemeral fugitive contingent elements, under modernity, that the eternal is to be swamped. Joyce is not putting them side by side, but placing the ephemeral on top of the universal. His methods of intense rewriting, where he conjures up superimpositions, composite figures, and analogues, are themselves analogous to the way culture’s myths rewrite us and force us to return to our visions of ourselves and our world, and to revise and reassess those visions. The supposedly universal myths may well be available through intensive archaeology, but such quests will only produce the ‘early drafts’ of culture, fragmented and increasingly disparate, the further back you go. This might sound like the tracing of a judgemental moralizing role for Finnegans Wake that highlights a modern tragedy in which self-identity has come undone. Such a role would alert us to all those representations that threaten to undermine and reformulate personal identity, carrying a critique of, say, capitalist commodity culture. But Joyce proclaimed his vision as comic, seeing himself as ‘red-nosed’, not ‘blue-jawed’. Of an international catastrophe, he said, with apparent flippancy: ‘Now they’re bombing Spain—isn’t it better that I’m making a colossal joke instead?’¹⁹ The tragic stance needs, therefore, ¹⁶ Seamus Deane, ‘Introduction’ to Finnegans Wake, repr. of 1st edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. ix. ¹⁷ Hassan, Postmodern Turn, 100 and 113. ¹⁸ Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in F. Frascina, and Charles Harrison (eds.), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1982), 23–7: 23. ¹⁹ Ellmann, James Joyce, p. xx.

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to be balanced by its opposite—the comic gesture, where laughter is the weapon in the assault on forms of power: the shifting about of the lassies, the tug of love of their lads ending with a great deal of merriment, hoots, screams, scarf drill, cap fecking, ejaculations of aurinos, reechoable mirthpeals and general thumbtonosery (253.25–8)

Rather than a tragedy about a mighty protagonist, the autonomous subject looming scarily and then being felled, it is a comedy about some notorious figure, the autonomous subject who has overreached himself: the Wake is more Falstaff than King Lear. When HCE makes an elaborate confession, identifying with the Russian General in Butt’s tale, he says, ‘Fall stuff’ (366.30). In its simplest and most naive form, this comic optimism is coded through an assortment of rebellions, of resurrection and insurrection (‘Array! Surrection!’ (593.02)), of the struggle of the little over the large (General Tom Thumb and ‘general thumbtonosery’), the young over the old, the plural and diminutive overcoming the singular and vast. ‘Joyce once said to me’, as Maria Jolas remembered: something that I’ve never heard him repeat about the title of Finnegans Wake, which was that the little people of the Erse will awaken. The Finnegans. Do wake up, you see. And it was almost a warning, if you want, to the people who regarded the Finnegans as non-essential and not worth taking into account.²⁰

Joyce perhaps expressed a naive romanticization of popular uprising and found a willing ear in Maria Jolas—especially as the book seems to view the populace in as satiric a light as the other characters, and is not a book that could ever itself be popular, at least in space at any given time (though over time it will have a wide readership). But the uprising is reflected in the revolutions of the words themselves, as a plethora of midget details unite to ensnare a subtext as giant totality. Harry Levin wrote that ‘The plethora of Joyce’s detail is a last exuberant outpouring of naturalism.’²¹ But this diffusion of detail floods naturalism, and any originary myth of the natural as determining character. What Wilson saw as Earwicker (the one) swamped under myth (multiple narratives brought on through revision) is, in fact, the rationale behind Joyce’s intensive revision. Joyce’s language—words, letters, grammar—has an activism that Beckett noticed: ‘They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear.’²² In this comic context the ‘universal everyman’—whose expression has for so long been perceived as the dominant rationale underlying Joyce’s ²⁰ Interview between Maria Jolas and Margaret Gardiner, a transcript of which is in my possession. I am grateful to Margaret Gardiner for providing me with a copy of this. ²¹ Levin, Critical Introduction, 217. ²² Beckett, in Beckett et al. (eds.), Exagmination, 16.

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composition—can here be seen as a dominant presence to be overcome. He is like the possessive boasting pantomime king, that is to be cuckolded by the young lovers, or unveiled by his more modest subjects and revealed as unstable, not ‘altogether’, but—as the song goes—‘in the altogether —as naked as can be’. It is a case not of the Emperor’s but of the Everyman’s New Clothes. But the task of having to overcome these archetypal universal forms—seeing through the illusory veils that form their identities—seems at times impossible. Here is the depressed expression of it in III.4, the penultimate chapter: We have to had them whether we’ll like it or not. They’ll have to have us now then we’re here on theirspot. Scant hope theirs or ours to escape life’s high carnage of semperidentity by subsisting peasemeal upon variables. Bloody certainly have we got to see to it ere smellful demise surprends us on this concrete that down the gullies of the eras we may catch ourselves looking forward to what will in no time be staring you larrikins on the postface in that multimirror megaron of returningties, whirled without end to end. (582.12–21)

With all this riddling complexity, in which we are whirled between different times by the illogical tenses, and the pronouns (‘they, we, you’) lack points of reference, we need some clarifying exegesis. ‘Them’ and ‘they’, from the preceding paragraph, are ‘him and his famblings’; ‘We’ are the people or customers, and ‘you’, the addressees, are the future readers of the book—a reflection of ‘we the people’ in the book. Before we continue our reading, a rationalization of the sub-clauses might help also: We have to had them whether we’ll like it or not. They’ll have to have us now [that we’re here]. Scant hope [for us or them] to escape life’s high carnage of semperidentity. . . . Certainly have we got to see to it . . . that . . . we may . . . look forward to what will . . . be staring you . . . on the postface (582.15–21)

We, the people, have to put up with the presence of them, the archetypal forms of the father and his family, ‘whether we like it or not’ (or rather, in a glum prophecy, ‘whether we’ll like it or not’). The third sentence (beginning ‘Scant hope’) stresses this pessimism. ‘There’s not much hope,’ it seems to say, ‘that the inevitable ‘‘high carnage’’ of life and its unchanging essence—its ‘‘semperidentity’’, and the self-perpetuating presence of violence—will be avoided by our consumption of lots of little things moving around, by us living off peas’ (‘subsisting peasemeal upon variables’). This latter phrase suggests something like the consumption or reading of the agglomerated mobile fragments of Finnegans Wake, itself a homage to the variability of particularity. But it can also suggest its production and its writing, if we read the phrase as ‘changeable things added slowly in instalments’ (‘variables . . . piecemeal’).

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This grim vision is countered by the determined optimism in the following sentence which, paraphrased and translated, implies: ‘we must look forward to the thing that will be staring at you, larrikins, after all, in the face’. The hoped-for ‘thing’ is, in my analogy, the finished text of Finnegans Wake, whose readers are ‘you larrikins’, substituing us as the addressees of this narrator. Put more clearly still: ‘despite the eternal perpetuating forms that threaten to obstruct our work’s final appearance, we’ll make sure that what we make will endure, especially in having it read by you’. This sounds like an artist’s impulse for his work to be preserved, in spite of those other more insistent cultural forms that perpetually bring about the ‘high carnage’ of life. Joyce expresses a determination to secure an audience that will look into and read Finnegans Wake, his ‘postface’ not his earlier literary ‘prefaces’, that part of his identity (face) that will be delivered after (post) his life of writing. The desired audience characterized here as ‘you larrikins’ are little larkers, little people both put upon by, and in mischievous revolt against, the ‘semperidentities’, the large, enduring tyrannical forms, producing ‘life’s high carnage’. The ‘larrikins’ are one idealized version of the ‘little people of the Erse’, whose uprising Joyce hoped to be predicting and reflecting on through his novel. I’ll now trace these ‘little people’ in a genetic survey, in order to see the principles of composition they help inform—the mass of differentiated detail overrunning any unified base structure, the excess of revisions themselves. This implies their close correlation with Joyce’s utopian vision of a popular uprising and brings them into a more central position than they have had in critical tradition, which has concentrated on the individuals in the family.

T H E M AG G I E S A N D T H E M U R PH YS We might find the ‘little people’ of which Joyce spoke to Maria Jolas characterized in two ‘entities’ that we have already encountered: the Murphys and the Maggies. They seem to be in opposition—male and female, adult and child, work and play, shouting and singing—but their circular sigla, and the fact that they are both plural, indicate a close and parallel relation, as if they are two sides of the same coin. I’d like to suggest that they can be seen coming together as a crowd of differentiated elements at certain moments of the book. And in such cross-gendered, intergenerational ‘togethering’ (601.01) they constitute an image that joins in as it embraces the crowded dance of writing that both produced and represents Finnegans Wake, especially if read as a wake—a gathering. As I’ll argue, the people reflect the creative principle that is detailed disruptive revision in general. Here is an approximate chronology of their

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appearances in the draft sequence. It is selective, because in revision Joyce came to scatter ‘the people’ throughout the text. 1923

1924

1924/5

1925

1927–9 1931–5 1935–8

1938

The ‘populace’ give HCE his nickname ‘Here Comes Everybody’ (1.2, 33), the ‘singleminded supercrowd’ (42.22) gather to hear the ballad, they provide vox pop views on HCE (1.3, 58–61), the letters in ALP’s ‘mamafesta’ (104.04) are comparable to a radicalized people (1.5, 119–123), impoverished Dubliners, they receive gifts from ALP (1.8), Jaun addresses schoolgirls—twenty-nine of them (III.2), the people (now well-off and internationalized) descend on ‘Doddering O’Comick Wreck’²³ (III.3, 498.23–4) and celebrate his demise, the ‘grandest tree’ is overrun by many people (III.3, 504), the schoolgirls are described like a school of herring (III.3, 524), the sigla are formed for the Murphys ‘O’ and the Maggies ‘ ’ (III.4, 557–8) (all ‘o’s now potentially carry their presence), the mourners at the wake are a crowd of men and women (I.1, 6–7), preparing Book I for transition. The Murphys and Maggies are carefully woven in . . . . . . to, for instance, the quiz (I.6, 142–3) and Jaun (III.2, 470), the Nightgames: the Maggies are developed as proliferating versions of Issy. Composing II.3 and revising books I and III: the Murphys climax as they hound HCE, signs of the Maggies and Murphys are woven throughout the text. Book IV—the Murphys, it appears, wake to nothing (593 & 595), the Maggies as ‘Chappielassies’, however, do appear to rise up to something.

I will now illustrate this in more detail.

BEFORE RECEIVING SIGLA Initially, the ‘people’ are crucial for HCE’s identity, scattered all over the large red-backed notebook. As the ‘populace’ they give him the universal hero ²³ Revised to ‘Dodderick Ogonoch Wreck’ on and after 47482b, 81v; JJA 57, 38.

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nickname (32.17–19)²⁴ but as an ‘overflow meeting representative of every section of the Irish people’ they applaud Hosty’s ‘Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’ (45–8).²⁵ Already they build him up and knock him down, constructing a projected doppelgänger for the book and its reception. In a sketch drafted shortly after, there are different opinions listed about Earwicker, the form of which Joyce copied from contemporary newspaper reports that gathered vox populi views (see I.3, 58.23–61.27).²⁶ The plethora of views represents both the scale, but also the fragmentation of Earwicker’s reputation. In a subsequent passage, the voice of the people splits along gender lines: ‘And men spoke murmured . . . And women wondered’ (97.28 and 101.01).²⁷ By January 1924, the crowd then seem to have become the very letters scrawled to make up ALP’s letter. Where they had been detached choric observers, they now have a more independent energy, described as ‘indignant whiplashloops [sic], the bolted blocked rounds . . . the gossipy threadreels, the whirligig glorioles which ambiembellish the majuscule’ (119.12–16).²⁸ With this energy they are associated with the feminine and the circular and yet neither their siglum nor their gendered ‘labels’ have been assigned. In the next sketch, this energy of the letters-as-people and people-as-letters seems to be transferred to the letter-composer herself, an energy which she then distributes (or returns) to ‘every one of her childer’ (208.35).²⁹ There then follows another expandable list of numerous individuated people (209.18–212.19).³⁰ Less positively, when drafting Anna Livia, a subsection of the people (‘a gang of surfacemen’), think ALP has gone crazy: ‘Alp has doped!’ and is a living nightmare (from German alpsdrück) (209.9).³¹ Establishing (among other things) the cyclical recurrence of the populace, who feature as producers, recipients, and consumers of gossip, news, and goods, Joyce turned to develop the deliverer of the letter, the individual hero, Shaun, via a series of four watches. These ‘watches’ got going in 1924. In the second of them, Jaun launches a lengthy farewell sermon to an audience that is young and female: ‘There were several 29 daughters there attracted . . . who were paddling with their feet in charming concert . . .’ (430.01–11).³² Specific characteristics are developed for these girls that resemble qualities found earlier in ALP—water, play, and ²⁴ See 47472–97v; JJA 45: 3. ²⁵ See 47471b–1v; JJA 45: 26. ²⁶ See 4741b–3; JJA 45: 29. The particular reports related to the famous Bywaters murder trial. See Vincent Deane, ‘Bywaters and the Original Crime’, in Andrew Treip (ed.), European Joyce Studies, 4. ‘Finnegans Wake’: Teems of Times (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 165–204. ²⁷ See 47471b–34 and 36, JJA 46: 51 and 53. This was revised to ‘Assembly men murmured. . . . Dispersal women wondered’ (97.28 and 101.01)—to underline the binaries of centrifugal and centripetal forces that the Maggies and Murphys are being made to represent. ²⁸ See 47471b–41v; JJA 46: 298 ²⁹ See 47471b–87; JJA 48: 31. ³⁰ See 47471b–87; JJA 48: 31. ³¹ See 47471b–86v; JJA 48: 30. ³² See 47482b–6; JJA 57: 13.

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music. As an audience they are quite distinct from the ‘overflow meeting’. The effect of Jaun’s presence on the figuring of the girls is profound. They seem to be at a summer camp, working away at pedal-boats, learning the accomplishments of the piano, and the typewriter. In such a condition of an enforced playfulness, they are drawn to the sermonizing Jaun, ‘making a tremendous girlsfuss over him’ (430.21–2), while he flirtatiously calls them his ‘galaxy girls’ (432.05). This is quite a shift from the keen consumers of satire or disruptive letters already introduced. Their devotion to the tiresome Jaun seems like an empty-headed attraction, a sadomasochistic desire to fall in with a boastful patriarchal wannabe. But they are also later characterized as fickle and inconsistent: ‘prepared to cheer him should he leap or to curse him should he fall’ (469.33).³³ And while this inconsistency may seem like a further frailty, it actually shows a certain indifference to Jaun’s fate. It also introduces an association with the Brunian ‘coincidence of contraries’, with which the girls become associated. The sadomasochism in their attraction for patriarchy may be a Brunian ethics or Brunian sexuality. Late in 1924, first drafting the next watch, the people, or an embodied plurality, feature in what is genetically the first appearance of the wake itself. A great number (largely male) comes to celebrate the fall of a leader: ‘arrah, weren’t they arriving in their centuries for to pay their respects to . . . Grand old MacGuiness Mor . . . for to nobble a bit of him, poor old Dodderich O’Comick Wreck, lying high & reduced to nothing’ (497.4–499.3).³⁴ For this celebratory image, recognizing a turn in the people’s fortunes, Joyce seems to have incorporated material from recollections told by his father about the electoral victory for the Liberals over the Tories in 1880.³⁵ This can be read, indeed, as an idealized moment of a popular victory for Irish political goals. In revising it, they become more business class than political class, however. In the same section, the girls we met listening to Jaun now morph into a sexualized ‘school of herring’; quick-moving, fluid, vivid, and libidinous: a school of herring . . . as gladful as kippers could well be considering, . . . flipping their little coppingers . . . the fresh little flirties, the dirty little gillybrighteners, pickle their spratties, the little smolty gallockers, . . . them little salty populators . . . all of them little upanddowndippers they was all of a wriggolo doodah in testimonial to their early bisexualism. (524.20–36 and see 47482b–101, –102; JJA 58: 71–2)

Both the ‘school of’ and ‘flirties’ allude to the girls who had been Jaun’s audience. Just the thought of them—especially with a fishy sexuality that ³³ See 47486b–426; JJA 61: 399. This was added in the early 1930s. ³⁴ See 47482b–82v and 81v; JJA 58: 40 and 38. ³⁵ See Ellmann, James Joyce, 16–17.

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needs to be netted—is disrupting for this narrator. Hence the response of the inquisitor Mark: ‘Ta hell wi’ye and yer coprulation! . . . Y’are absexed, so y’are’ (525.06–08).³⁶ The school-(of-herring)-girls are objectified by one who is both clearly attracted and shocked by them. The energetic disapproval in the language encodes an imperfectly supressed desire, like the charged language of the old josser in ‘An Encounter’ from Dubliners. For this chapter Joyce also drafted the description of ‘the grandest tree in all the world’, a tree which is itself overrun by people, both male and female. It is at one point described as a ‘beanstalk’, later revised to a ‘beingstalk’. We shall return to this passage in our final section. Preparing for Shaun’s next watch, d, in part a scrutiny of all the characters while they’re asleep, the sigla for both the Maggies and the Murphys are at last formed, almost the last to be formed, one of Joyce’s systems for the Wake rounding itself off. At the end of one notebook, compiled specifically for the section, appears the following: d , , , (end of VI.B.8)³⁷

T H E M U R PH YS A F T E R T H E S I G L A The circular siglum in line four, which is later labelled ‘the Morphios’ (or Murphys), represents a whole in itself, all the twelve ‘entities’ brought together in one sum. They are a unified singularity, and reflect the book’s circularity. But paradoxically they are also just a part of the whole, since ‘the people’ are only one mythic construct among many. As a jury, for instance—their first manifestation—they are ranged up alongside judges, the accused, and the witnesses. The tracing of their appearances that follows will continue to be necersarily selective. (It is a tracing which, indeed, should be taken up in more detail within a more general study of Joyce’s figurings of ‘the people’ and ‘the masses’.) In their first draft appearance after their siglum is formed they are a meanspirited jury: ‘twelve good men & true . . . tried him over in their minds & found him guilty on the imputation of fornication’ (557.17).³⁸ The moment of their conceptual solidification in late 1925 coincides with the intensification of ³⁶ See 47482b–88; JJA 58: 51. ³⁷ See Rose, Index, 84. ³⁸ See 47482a–27v, 41v; JJA 136–7.

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negative associations for them (and the same trend occurs with the Maggies). Joyce, I would argue, is developing the characteristic conditions from which they need to awake. As with the girls who became focused on Jaun, they are defined by their focused and oppositional relationship to HCE. As well as the number twelve, Latinate nouns of action will, from this point on, indicate their presence. As a motif this will be woven in frequently.³⁹ The title given to the twelve essays featuring Beckett’s famous essay reflects this in its awkward mouthful: Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. In the same chapter they feature as ‘12 chief barons’ (566.12)⁴⁰ and as ‘a band of twelve mercenaries, the Sullivani’, in the account of a Roman legal trial (573.06–07),⁴¹ out to assist in HCE’s destruction. They also feature as the jury of this trial too, but they seem corrupt and impotent, their sentence overruled by a judge who—like them—is called ‘Doyle’ (574.09–574.32).⁴² The name ‘Doyle’ alludes to the Irish parliament, ‘the Dáil’, that set up the seventy-three Sinn F´ein MPs who, in 1919, refused to go to Westminster, strengthening their symbolic weight as representative or an embodiment of ‘the people’. This is the same chapter where the ‘larrikins’, who we’ve encountered, are mentioned. Their aim may be subversive of ‘the one power’, but like the Maggies, they need to awake from this outward looking obsession with a singly identified authority. Joyce’s next substantial sketch, the wake itself, became I.1, in which the people are no longer instrumental in the fall but are mourning subsequent to it: ‘all the hoolivans of the nation, prostrated in their consternation in their duodecimally profusive plethora of ululation’ (6.16).⁴³ At this stage they are likened to insects, crawling through the overlooked gutters of history: ‘1132 A.D. Men like to ants or emmets wondern upon a groot wide Whallfisch which lay in a Runnel’ (18.33–6).⁴⁴ With this status they are less in sum than the fallen giant heroic figure whom they have overcome but are in a sense becoming. A late revision made early in 1936 implies this grandeur: ‘you could fell an elmstree twelve urchins couldn’t ring round’ (25.30).⁴⁵ The next sketch, the quiz, I.6, was written to fill an issue of transition in 1927 and responded to readers’ bewilderment about the text. But the perplexing answers it gives to incomprehensible questions simply leave even more things unanswered. We encounter them at one of their lowest points, the slavish ‘Morphios’, forces of ³⁹ For an example of how motifs are woven into the text see my ‘Mapping Echoland’ in JSA (2000), 167–201. ⁴⁰ See 47482a–56v; JJA 60: 281. ⁴¹ See 47485–14; JJA 60: 264. ⁴² See 47485–37; JJA 60: 265. ⁴³ See 47471a–5v; JJA 44: 50 ⁴⁴ See 47482a–102v and 47471a–24; JJA 44: 37 and 69. ⁴⁵ See 47475–13v; JJA 44: 252.

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passivity and sleep, ‘ruled, roped, duped and driven’ by their feudal masters (142.23), who are identifiable as the four—any institutional authority—the Church, Medicine, the Law, History. In I.7, when revised, they feature as the credulous people celebrating the end of life, characterized as a perpetual conflict, ‘stonestepping . . . across the sevenspan ponte dei colori set up over the slop after the war-to-end war’ (178.23–5). They cross from a fake Mount Purgatory into a fraudulent ‘perpetual’ peace, crossing the bridge over the muddy trenches, heading ‘over the top’ only towards another demise. Then, in revising Jaun’s sermon for transition, the people, just as the Maggies seemed to be too, are excited by the heroic potential in Jaun: . . . there are a dozen of folks still unclaimed by the death angel in this country of ours today, humble indivisibles in this grand continuum, overlorded by fate and interlarded with accidence, who . . . will fervently pray to the spirit above that they may never depart this earth of theirs till . . . on that day that belongs to joyful Ireland, after decades of longsuffering . . . their Janyouare Fibyouare wins true from Sylvester . . . comes marching ahome on the summer crust of the flagway. (472.28–473.05 from 47483–203; JJA 57: 397)

And on the galleys after May 1937 Joyce glossed these ‘folks’ as ‘the people that is of all time, the old old oldest, the young young youngest’ (472.36).⁴⁶ The narrator here is glossing the people as an eternal force, perpetually hopeful for a figure who will come back to them, just as midwinter is followed by late winter. But it is from being ‘indivisibles . . . overlorded’ that they need to awake. Joyce’s focus after seeing Books I and III published in transition was to fill out the bulk of Book II which he did in the 1930s. The twelve feature in II.1 as the ‘CUSTOMERS’, climbing up the social scale (‘civics, each inn quest of outings’ (221.04)), looking forward to their days off and to drinking holidays (‘inn quest’), which implies some disposable income. But this is also the trial they’re expecting, the ‘inquest’. In II.2, during the mathematics problem, the power of large numbers is communicated to the twins, whose minds are becoming filled with the possibility of a revolution. Thus the spawning and sprawling potential is emphasized. They are referred to in the many different ways of arranging twelve letters, the letters of the word ‘pthwndxrclzp!’ that is 12 factorial or 12! (284.14). With the possibility of power in numbers now awoken, they find a voice at the end of II.3, and with malicious glee over several pages they insult the innkeeper who has locked them out, aiming to extricate ⁴⁶ Added at 47487–184v; JJA 62: 338.

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him and get him into a house of correction: ‘And it’s all us rangers you’ll be facing in the box before the twelfth correctional. . . . You’ll have loss of fame from Wimmegame’s fake. . . . Let him have another between the spindlers’ (375.10–22). In the triumphant abuse as it piles up, the figure of HCE may undergo an immense pressure, but the tight focus on him as the bearer of all the qualities mythicalizes rather than dissolves him. Their identity is built on judging the identity of another, and, outward-looking as they are, they have little self-reflection or self-sufficiency. This aggressive wakeful climax for the people as they abuse the innkeeper was one of the last things Joyce composed. Before doing so, he was drafting the awakening of that very people at the far end of the book in Book IV. On its opening page the sun is shown to call on them: ‘The eversower of the seeds of light to the cowld owld sowls that are in the domnatory of Defmut . . . speaketh’ (593). The implication is that this announces a shift in their fortunes. But the twelve hardly feature at this awakening, as if the sun turns out to announce a false dawn. In fact, they awaken to something quite unexpected, a need for a rest, a statement of their buried condition: ‘while . . . a generation’, (we are told to the tune of the nostalgic ‘Tipperary’,) ‘has been in the deep deep deeps of Deepereras. Buried hearts. Rest here’ (595.27). With their waking to a rest, Book IV seems to predict, moreover, a more feminized future: ALP predicts this in her closing letter: ‘Femelles will be preadaminant as from twentyeight to twelve’ (617.23–24). With this in mind we can turn to the development of the Maggies, returning to the moment of their siglum appearing at the end of notebook VI.B.8.

T H E M AG G I E S A F T E R T H E S I G L A The ellipse, , signals the schoolgirls, and from late 1925 on it features often in notes, drafts and notesheets. In the draft of d, the ambiguity and self-contradiction of the girls are emphasized: ‘nine & twenty Leixlip yearlings . . . were never happier than when they were miserable’ (558.21–25).⁴⁷ A clear Brunian ‘coincidence of contraries’ has surfaced again, for to be happy when miserable translates Bruno’s paradoxical motto which preceded his play Candelaio: ‘In tristitia hilaris: in hilaritate tristis’—in sadness, happiness and in happiness, sadness. It also indicates a settling down of their associations and the beginning of their conceptual containment. The associations will now be distributed all around the book in many places as ⁴⁷ See 47482a–60v; JJA 60: 141.

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the book grows, a variety of forms spreading to create its hyper-reticular structure.⁴⁸ As we have noted Joyce’s next sketch, after III.4, formed the bulk of what became Chapter 1. Into it he wove a parody of an excerpt from the historian Edgar Quinet, which describes little flowers rising up through the ruins of past cities, a reminder to present-day civilizations of their mortality. The sentence, parodied several times, is quoted in full on 281.04–13 of the Wake, but in its first incorporation it is indirect: ‘these paxsealing buttonholes have quadrilled across the centuries and whiff now whafft to us, fresh and made-of-all-smiles as on the Eve of Killallwho’ (15.11). Having featured as letters, as summer-camp girls, and—not to forget—as fish, the girls become flowers and dancers, persistent overtones for them from now on. Despite these stereotypical feminine traits, it also associates them with an organic breaking up and smothering of inorganic material—forces of transformative revision. The Maggies are linked here too to a peace accord, being ‘paxsealing buttonholes’, like poppies on Armistice Sunday and the satsifying completion of a letter, sealed with wax, buttoning separated parts together. In the next piece to be sketched, the quiz, the girls receive the tag we’re using to denote them: the Maggies. In the answer to their question (‘how wore your maggies?’ (142.30)) we see their ambiguity stressed again. Opposing verbs are linked, tripping along in a chiasmic rhetorical chain of fourteen clauses (which make twenty-eight Qualities): ‘They war loving, they love laughing, they laugh weeping, they weep smelling, . . . they hate thinking, they think feeling, they feel tempting . . .’ etc. (142.31–4). These verbs emphasize the Maggies’ liveliness and sensuality, while the contradictory—again Brunian—pairings make them tricky to pin down. Yet this answer presents elements of negative stereotyping of girls: ‘they hate thinking . . . they feel tempting’, as if all that matters to them is a superficial seductiveness. In the late 1920s, as we’ve seen, Joyce was generally revising work he’d developed earlier, mostly for transition and in the process he made substantial additions. Lists of things with twenty-eight or twenty-nine elements were written to evoke the Maggies’ presence. Just when Jaun is waving at his departure (470.36–471.05 in III.2),⁴⁹ a revision has them crying out ‘Peace’ in twenty-nine languages. This links them back to the ‘paxsealing buttonholes’ of Chapter 1. Of the peace chorus, Joyce wrote that it was ‘actually sighed around the world in that way in 1918’.⁵⁰ So in their various languages the girls seem to be a snapshot of the book itself, in its international multilingualism, producing ⁴⁸ e.g. ‘every schoolgirl by now knows how it was Buckley who struck and the Russian general . . . who was struck’ (47481b–36; JJA 46: 55 simplified), becomes in around 1926 ‘every schoolfilly of sevenscore moons or so . . . has learnt to know . . .’ (47472–162; JJA 46: 63). ⁴⁹ See 47483–210v, –211; JJA 57: 414–15. ⁵⁰ LI, 264.

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a harmony that smooths over the ruffled world of its post-Babelian confusion. In the next draft for the same section, the Maggies, a ‘leapyear chorus’ as Joyce called them, sing a curious ‘threnody’ made of twenty-nine words, that lament Jaun’s passing: Oasis, cedarous esaltarshoming Leafboughnoon! Oisis, coolpressus onmountof Sighing! Oasis, palmost . . . [etc.] (470.15–21)⁵¹

In its exotic and ritualistic straitjacket of formalized and overwrought verse, the Maggies are now a long way from the ‘whirligig glorioles’—or the bisexual herrings, for that matter. To Shaun’s next watch (Yawn—III.3) Joyce also added a list of twenty-nine exclamations, this time meaning ‘woe!’ or ‘death!’ (499). Rather than celebrants of peace they have swiftly become their opposite, mourners moaning at a wake, ‘tripping’ in a dance of death. As in III.4 and I.6, the Maggies follow on immediately after the Murphys, indicating their parallel and adjacent relationship. With both these revisions there is a sense of the emptiness of their choric reiterations. Each exclamation brings no movement from the previous word—there is only a seeming difference which fails to conceal an underlying uniformity of a conventional utterance. In Chapter II.1, which was begun in the early 1930s as Joyce overcame his writer’s block, the Maggies take their most developed form, featuring clearly as the ‘FLORAS’, Issy’s companions—or versions of Issy’s fragmented self. They are the stars coming out: those first girly stirs, with zitterings of flight released and twinglings of twitchbells in rondel after, with waverings that made shimmershake rather naightily all the duskcended airs. (222.33–4)

And in the pantomime they dance, but with Dionysian tendencies: they leap so looply, looply, as they link to light. And they look so loovely, loovelit, noosed in a nuptious night. Withasly glints in. Andecoy glants out. They ramp it a little, a lessle, a lissle. Then rompride round in rout. (226.26–9)

In Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert goes to an artful high-school play that he thinks was ‘lifted’ from ‘a passage in James Joyce’—clearly from this chapter.⁵² We’ve seen how letters were associated with the dance. Now ⁵¹ And see LI, 264 ⁵² Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 220–1, and see my ‘Censorship in the Wake of the Wake: Nabokov, Burgess and Rushdie’, in Katarzyna Bazarnik and Finn Fordham (eds.), Wokol Jamesa Joyce’a (Krakow: Universitas, 1999), 157–72.

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dancers become letters and colours (247.35–248.02). As young women, they seem driven by a desire or need to find a mate in a competition, but whether for sexual or financial reasons is, not surprisingly, not exactly clear. They sing a hymn to their ideal mate, ‘Chuff’ (a Shaun figure), which resembles their earlier devotions to Jaun. But towards the end of the chapter they seem released—or awakened—from this and their role in the novel as the dance of writing is spelled out once again. They are small things moving at speed, making patterned samples: running about their ways, going and coming, now at rhimba rhomba, now in trippiza trappaza, pleating a pattern Gran Geamatron showed them of gracehoppers, auntskippers and coneyfarm leppers, they jeerilied along . . . (257.03–06)

At the end of the chapter, they are taken indoors out of circulation and up to bed, prior to the ‘Nightlessons’ chapter. The rest of Book II (260–382), which in large part Joyce wrote during the 1930s, features only rare appearances from the Maggies, since it is a male-dominated part of the work. In this selective genetic survey of the Maggies’ appearances, we can see they are by no means always subversive presences. The Maggies on the one hand appear to be hypnotized by Jaun the patriarch-to-be and feature as hired performers for public ceremonies, while on the other hand they are innocently pleasure-seeking and creatively energetic. In these dual guises they appear in Book IV, drafted in late 1937, where they are made to flank either side of Joyce’s sketch of the ascetic priest St Kevin, as if in attendance on his myth.⁵³ Before Kevin’s story begins, they announce him in the guise of early morning church bells ringing ‘tingued togethering’ through twenty-six Dublin churches. This is their conventional aspect. But with Kevin’s tale completed (606.12), they soon return in what I suggest is their climax and, indeed, in a culminating moment of the book, since it is the revelation of the title, and signals an ending of one strand of ‘Work in Progress’—the riddle of its name, a name that stands for the whole. And so: It is their segnall for old Champelysied to seek the shades of his retirement and for young Chappielassies to tear a round and tease their partners lovesoftfun at Finnegan’s Wake. (607.14–16)

As ‘chappielassies’, the girls are now chaps and lasses, evoking the earlier ‘bisexualism’ of the herrings, or, indeed, a transsexualism. I would suggest that the twenty-nine have thus absorbed a rejuvenated populace, who are usually ⁵³ See 47488–13; JJA 63: 17.

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figured in the work as male. This, moreover, evokes the more disruptive elements of the active populace before they split into their ‘sigla-ed’ forms and are contained by their category.

D E TA I L S A N D T H E ‘ B E I N G S TA L K ’ The Maggies, or Floras, are more dominant in the revolutionary moment, as I’m characterizing it, than the Murphys. But in this climax they lure the Murphys away (‘tease their partners’) from their aggressive men-only roles, and, brought together, incorporate their power. The combination of men and women is the climactic moment in which detail overruns some gigantic thing, a thing the identity of which consequently splits, crumbles, and is absorbed by those scrambling over it. One pre-eminent symbol of this moment is not just the dancers and brawlers at the wake, but ‘the tree . . . an overlisting eshtree’ (505), mentioned earlier overrun by myriad forms. This can be read as a potent symbol of the book itself, as an organic mass of accretive detail. As ‘eshtree,’ it is an S-shaped tree, snaking like the snake that curls up Eden’s Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, a generational family tree of life. While this is an upright phallic ashtree, and tree of trees and can be associated with HCE, you can also hear an ‘estuary’, another snaking accumulative form, horizontal this time, shifting its shape and its content with the tides themselves, one we can associate with ALP, flowing towards the sea which flows into her. This tree is described in terms of the plentiful smaller forms who populate, grow out of, and exploit it. Yawn, in III.3, is asked to give his ‘bard’s highview’ by the four old men: —There used to be a tree stuck up? An overlisting eshtree? . . . I would like to hear . . . what you know about our sovereign beingstalk, Tonans Tomazeus. O dite! —. . . Your Ominence, Your Imminence and delicted fraternitrees! 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 ghiberring proferring praydews to their anatolies and blighting findblasts on their catastripes and the killmaimthem pensioners chucking overthrown milestones up to her to fall her cranberries and her pommes annettes for their unnatural refection and handpainted hoydens plucking husbands of him and cock robins muchmore

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hatching most out of his missado eggdrazzles for him, the sun and moon pegging honeysuckle and white heather down and timtits tapping resin there and tomahawks watching tar elsewhere, creatures of the wold approaching him, hollow mid ivy, for to claw and rub, hermits of the desert barking their infernal shins over her triliteral roots and his acorns and pinecorns shooting wide all sides out of him, plantitude outsends of plenty to thousands, after the truants of the utmostfear and her downslyder in that snakedst-tu-naughsy whimmering woman’t seeleib such a fashionaping sathinous dress out of that exquisitive creation and her leaves, my darling dearest, sinsinsinning since the night of time 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! —Is it so exaltated, eximious, extraoldandairy and excelssiorising? —Amengst menlike trees walking or trees like angels weeping nobirdy aviar soar anywing to eagle it! . . . —. . . The form masculine. The gender feminine. (504.20–505.25)

Boundaries between singular and plural, masculine and femine, habitation and inhabitants, human and animal, are blurred here. The tree is like a ‘beanstalk’, whose toppling enables the fall of the giant in the fairy story. But it is, in fact, introduced as a ‘beingstalk’ (504.18), a mere ‘stalk of being’, but also the entire ‘talk of beings’, which is made up of the many voices of many, a heteroglossia. The abundant masses produce a sublime identity, the many overwhelming and melding with the one. A huge number—twenty-two thousands of 22,000 (‘plantitude outsends of plenty to thousands’)—is evoked and widely distributed (plentitude sending out plenty to thousands), and it occurs within yet another of those lists into which Joyce’s composition fell so easily. In our allegory of creative principles, the twelve and the twenty-eight/twenty-nine in their ideal forms join together and ‘encircle him circuly’ (505.13), to become the spinning body of accretive detail, sprawling like multifarious life-forms over and through a tree which, ‘overlisting’, is about to fall, ‘hollow mid ivy’, aggressive like men pummelling at the palace gates, noisy like children running in a park, or spinning like tipsy guests at a party or a wake, all gathering like elated crowds after a political victory. They correlate, ideally, to the people of Ireland finally achieving a republican independence, even though Joyce’s approval of this was short-lived. But also, in a more commonplace image, to the people, in a rejuvenated form, like the young having sensual fun after some bleak old moralist has cleared off and gone to bed. This is the revolution which transforms without toppling, where there is uprising without bloodshed. It is not a ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, signalling the resurrection of an unwanted power, but the moment when Finnegans wake, an

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uprising which comes eventually but inevitably. However botched it may end up being—and we have seen how Butt’s shooting is a reminder of a botched revolt—the tyrant passes and men and women dance in the streets. Finnegans Wake is not a programme for revolution but, through its very form, a symbol of it, of moments of revolution in general and also of particular revolutionary moments. It may have seemed like a ‘genial proclamation of doom’, as Levin called it, on its first appearance but it reminds us also of the unremarked and even unremarkable but continuous revolts in being. There may be something idealistic about such an illustration of a revolution against tyranny, but such utopian and comic visions have something idealistic about them. In its visions, Finnegans Wake is neither normative nor prescriptive; it does not indicate how a utopian state can be brought about. But we imagine with it that at certain moments of history, and through certain ways of perceiving the world, a successful revolution can be thought of as something that does at least sometimes happen.⁵⁴ One way this can be imagined is through an analysis of its making, through which we can explore how formation informs content. This study has attempted such an understanding by deploying a microscopic focus on details, on the multiple and diminutive elements of Joyce’s processes of revision and rewriting. It has aimed to give voice to the details, as far as possible, from within their specificity, and as they move out towards their object, catching things on the way. Bakhtin, writing at the same time as Joyce, in works that seem at times to be commentaries on his work, beautifully theorized and imagined this potential for meaning in language: The way in which the word conceptualizes its object is a complex act—all objects, open to dispute and overlain as they are with qualifications, are from one side highlighted while from the other side dimmed by heteroglot social opinion, by an alien word about them. The way in which the word conceives its object is complicated by a dialogic interaction within the object between various aspects of its socio-verbal intelligibility. And an artistic representation, an ‘image’ of the object, may be penetrated by this dialogic play of verbal intentions that meet and are interwoven in it; such an image need not stifle these forces, but on the contrary may activate and organize them. If we imagine the intention of such a word . . . in the form of a ray of light, then the living and unrepeatable play of colours and light on the facets of the image that it constructs can be explained ⁵⁴ I do not have the space here to discuss how these moments can appear to resemble and to be distinct from those visions we are invited to entertain in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude, but using these texts to examine each other could be an extremely rewarding study. In their work they present the ways in which a ‘postmodern revolution of the multitude looks forward, beyond imperial sovereignty’. Michael, Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005), p. xvii.

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as the spectral dispersion of the ray-word, . . . as its spectral dispersion in an atmosphere filled with the alien words, value judgements and accents through which the ray passes on its way to its object; the social atmosphere of the word, the atmosphere that surrrounds the object, makes the facets of the image sparkle. . . . Such is the image in artistic prose and the image of novelistic prose in particular.⁵⁵

Like Joyce’s country, Bakhtin’s also witnessed republican revolutions, and the popular movements behind them help form the context that forms the ‘social atmosphere’ which ‘makes the image sparkle’, and is the image itself in Joyce’s last work. An intention can be ascribed to Joyce’s composition processes, as I map and trace these processes. Intention produces processes, and as these processes develop new intentions are produced. My method has not been attached to a specific topic or theme, the appearance of which I have then traced through the novel. It has instead been attached to specific textual excerpts, in the way that reading groups of Finnegans Wake often are, and these excerpts have then been read using a ‘genetic linearity’. This linear approach, in the dialogic proliferation of allusion and detail that it throws up, communicates the non-linearity of the text more compellingly, I would argue, than a non-linear approach that is thematic and which stays within the limits of its theme—even should the theme itself be ‘non-linearity’. My method disperses any unitary subject, insofar as such a subject might become embodied in a carefully staged thesis. But my method nonetheless embodies a thesis: the details and the counter-narratives revealed in this genetic micro-focus constitute an attack on ‘semperidentity’, on ‘always-sameness’. Such continuous identity is supposed to lie—as ideologies of mythic monologic thinking would have us believe—archetypally within us all. The amplificatory character of Joyce’s writing, as traced in this study, reflects the comic theme of an idealized popular resurrection. Retaining their differences, the mass overwhelm the large and simple supposedly potent idea, shooting down and breaking up any General Unified Theory—more effectively than Butt’s conventional recourse to machismo, prowess, and bluster. HCE, Here Comes Everybody, falls because of his dream that he can be universal, all things to all men, a surveyor of all knowledge of the world and of himself, a dream that humanism adopts in order to present a reflection of itself to itself as mankind, and then to operate scientifically on such a ‘collective’ man. The sprawling revisions are the reflection and consequence of the ideal of Everyman, made to absorb the details of the universe into himself and consuming them until, surfeiting, he sickens and—like Monty Python’s Mr Creosote in The Meaning of Life—explodes. In ⁵⁵ M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’ in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 277–8.

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modernity, data increases with all the increases in population, technologies, and specializations. They are progressively and increasingly far in excess of anything any one person could ever have, or reflect in their person. So the common qualities that might provide the chance of universalizing gestures become a smaller and smaller part of our identities. Once, we imagine, this was easier: primitive experience was less fragmented and universal myths were easier to construct and absorb. Finnegans Wake gestures to the end of such efforts towards universalization, as we see by following its whirling formation through to its many ends, ‘whirled without end to end’ (582.20). The earliest drafts are the primitive oldest forms, perceived as the progenitor, the forefather of the subsequent texts, those texts attempting to dictate and determine the content of the rest. Joyce’s final workings, his nth level drafts, are equivalent to the flourishing descendants, the people embodied in ‘the twelve’ and the girls embodied in ‘the 28/29’, whose sigla are completed circles and figures for the idealized book as a finished ring. They are the differentiated mass of details. The pluralized people—not the Devil or God—are therefore in the detail. Once awoken, they proliferate and spread over the antecedent forms, inserting themselves awkwardly, superseding, breaking up and dispersing what has gone before. Each reworking, moreover, does not derive simply and directly from what came before. Each one has some external source lying outside the internal source of the text to which it is added. The details do not derive from that to which they bring themselves. They are ‘moodmoulded’, as Joyce responds to the moods changing in him and the world changing around him. Each one represents the supplement of a different narrative, creating in sum a mass of half-concealed stories of difference. We can be alive to these stories and bring them alive by pursuing work on the detail of those processes, tracing them through the many levels of Joyce’s drafts, gradually releasing the contents of the work of the Wake as revealed in the Archive. For ‘here are the details’ (611.03). And for further details apply within.

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Appendix Lines 1–4 Jeremy Lane, ‘Falling Asleep in the Wake: Readings as Hypnogogic Experience’ in John Brannigan, Geoff Ward, and Julian Wolfreys (eds.), Re: Joyce (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 163–81: 165. Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (London: Faber & Faber, 1947), 13. Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), 38. Campbell and Robinson, Skeleton Key, 13. Richard M. Kain, ‘Some Thoughts on Finnegans Wake Twenty Five Years Later’, in Jack Dalton and Clive Hart (eds.), Twelve and a Tilly (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 91–8: 92. Hélène Cixous, quoted in Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 116. Finnegans Wake, 118.21. Finnegans Wake, 107.08. Finnegans Wake, 19.25.

Lines 5–8 Finnegans Wake, 489.35. Edmund Wilson, ‘The Dream of H.C. Earwicker’, in Seon Givens (ed.), James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism (New York: Vanguard Press, 1963), 319–42: 328. Anthony Burgess, Here Comes Everybody: (London: Faber, 1969), 188. Bernard Tschumi, quoted in Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: the (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. ix. Ezra Pound, quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 584. Jenny Turner, ‘Reasons for Liking Tolkein’, in London Review of Books (15 Nov. 2001), 15. Turner compares Finnegans Wake to Tolkein’s The Silmarillion, in these terms.

Lines 9–12 Vladmir, Nabokov, Strong ‘Opinions’ (New York: Vintage, 1990), 71. Weaver to Joyce, 4 February 1927, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, 590. Nabokov, Opinions, 71. Val´ery Larbaud, quoted in Dougald McMillan, ‘transition’: The History of a Literary Era: 1927–1938 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1975), 180. Finnegans Wake, 183.10–23.

Lines 13–16 Harry Levin, Critical Introduction, 121. Hassan, Postmodern Turn, 99. Cheryl Herr, ‘Ireland from the Outside’, JJQ 28/4 (1991), 777–90: 779. See my ‘Lightning Becomes Electra: Violence, Inspiration and Lucia Joyce in Finnegans Wake’, JJQ 39/3 (2002), 655–78: 664. Finnegans Wake 120.10 and 13.15. Ellmann, James Joyce, Ellmann archives in Tulsa: 3, Beckett: interview with Richard Ellmann. Finnegans Wake, 375.16. To Giorgio, 1 June 1934, LIII, 306. Hélène Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, trans. Sally Purcell (London: John Calder, 1976), p. ix.

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Richard Brown, James Joyce: A Post-culturalist Perspective (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 111. Robert Sage, ‘Before Ulysses—And After’ in Beckett et al. (eds.), Exagmination, 149–170: 156. Roland McHugh, The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Experience (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981), 1. To Weaver, 16 April 1927, LI, 251. To Weaver, 16 February 1931, LI, 300. Levin, Critical Introduction, 144. Jacques Derrida, ‘Two Words for Joyce’, in Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (eds.), Post-Structuralist Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge Unviersity Press, 1984), 145–59: 147. Cheryl Herr, ‘Ireland from the Outside’, 784.

Lines 21–24 A. Glasheen, A Third Census of ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), p. xi. Finnegans Wake, 614.27. Philippe Sollers, quoted in Geert Lernout, The French Joyce (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 129. Colin MacCabe (ed.), James Joyce: New Perspectives (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), 33. To Weaver, 11 November 1925, LI, 237. Levin, Critical Introduction, 177. Fritz Senn, ‘Linguistic Dissatisfaction at the ‘‘Wake’’ ’ in Christine O’Neill (ed.), Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1995), 226–37: 227.

Bibliography Primary Sources Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake, 3rd edn. (London: Faber & Faber, 1975). —— The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo, ed. Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer, and Geert Lernout ( Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001– ). —— The Index Manuscript: ‘Finnegans Wake’ Holograph Workbook VI.B.46 ed. Danis Rose (Colchester: ‘A Wake Newslitter’ Press, 1978). —— The James Joyce Archive, ed. Michael Groden, vols. 28–63, Manuscripts for ‘Finnegans Wake’, ed. Danis Rose and David Hayman (New York: Garland Press, 1978). —— The Letters of James Joyce, 3 vols., ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann (London: Faber & Faber, 1957–66). Manuscript Sources University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library Special Collections, Richard Ellmann Papers. Secondary Sources Anon., War Sites of the 1914–1918 Campaign Belgian Army (Brussels: War Office Department, 1922). Atherton, James, The Books at the Wake: A study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1960). Attridge, Derek, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London: Methuen, 1988). —— Joyce Effects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Aubert, Jacques, Joyce avec Lacan (Paris: Navarin Éditeur, 1987). Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). Baudelaire, Charles, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in F. Frascina and Charles Harrison (eds.), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1982). Bauerle, Ruth (ed.), Picking up Airs: Hearing the Music in Joyce’s Text (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). Beckett, Samuel, ‘Dante. . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’, in Samuel Beckett et al. (eds.), Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of ‘Work in Progress’ (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 1–22. —— et al. (eds.), Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of ‘Work in Progress’ (London: Faber & Faberl, 1972). Begnal, Michael (ed.), Joyce and the City: The Significance of Place (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002).

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Index Abel 30, 40, 92, 121; Shaun as 39 absolution 163, 188 Adam 3 adultery 14, 104, 183, 196 Aeneas 61 Africa 43, 59, 84–5, 86, 129, 130, 195 alchemy 53, 61, 95–6, 124, 220 Allah 101, 192 allegory 50, 98, 103, 108, 240 Almanach de Gotha 150 ALP: as river Liffey 13, 35, 46, 66, 71, 182; as river of writing 85; author of letter 12, 24; background of 12–13; family of 10; gossip about (see under gossip); hair of 68, 71–2, 86; Italianized name of 66, 71–2; monologue of 36, 50, 89; nicknames for 77; sexual awakening of 67 Amen 193 America 43, 60, 117, 169, 195 Amsterdam 12–5, 153 angels 30, 70–1, 169, 205; see also under games Anna Livia (river) 71; see also Liffey ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ (I.8) 23, 26, 223, 230: and St Kevin sketch 68; gossip in 66, 68, 75; Kiswahili in 84–5; prepared for Calendar of Modern Letters 74–6, 185; publication in Le Navire d’argent 76, 77; publication in transition 77–8, 79–80, 84; published by Crosby Gaige (1928) 79–80; published by Faber (1930) 84; relationship to Mamalujo sketch 76–7; rhythm of 73; river allusions in 71, 75, 78, 84, 85; washerwomen in (see washerwomen) Annals of the Four Masters 77, 175 n. 2 Apollo 83 apostles 83 apple 63, 114; see also Eve Arabian Nights 85 Archer, Jeffrey 19 Aristotle 47 Armenia 135, 143, 150, 155; see also under languages in FW Armstrong, Louis 19, 43 Arthur (king) 211

asbestos 118 ash tree 239 ass (character) 14 Athens 129, 130 Atherton, James (The Books at the Wake) 101 n. 18, 130, 205 atoms and subatomic particles 2, 48–9, 124, 125, 127, 164; splitting of 92, 122–4 Attridge, Derek (Joyce Effects) 8 n. 14, 15, 218 Australia 132 autobiography 50, 56 autumn 24, 25, 208 Babel, Tower of 167, 237 Bach, Johann Sebastian 200 Bakhtin, Mikhail 56, 241–2 ballads 138, 139–40, 142–3, 144–5 ‘Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’ (I.2) 11, 14, 105–6, 132, 134, 156, 166, 229, 230 de Balzac, Honor´e (Le Peau du Chagrin) 57, 58 baptism 68, 75, 83 Barger, Jorn 6, 81 n. 29 barmaids 182, 186 Barnum, Phineas Taylor 195 Bataille, Georges 91 Baudelaire, Charles 207, 225 Beach, Sylvia 201 Beckett, Samuel 20, 25, 159; ‘Dante. . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’ 7, 17, 219, 228, 233 B´edier, Joseph 182 beanstalk 229, 232, 240 beer 161 beetles 168, 169, 193 being 7, 46, 47, 62, 125, 126, 161, 206, 239–41 Bergson, Henri 128 Berkeley, George 3, 15, 24, 27, 72, 124 n. 45, 109 Bible 3, 28–9, 39, 43, 58, 96, 135, 161, 162, 163; New Testament 4, 96, 121; Old Testament 4, 46, 119, 121; see also gospellers bicycle 68

260 biography 8, 21, 23–4; see also autobiography birds 5, 14, 103–4, 123, 167, 167, 207; see also individual bird species; ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ birth 7, 100, 131 birthdays 100 birthright 58 Bishop, John (Joyce’s Book of the Dark) 8, 39–40, 72, 92, 126 n. 49, 212 bishops 139–40; see also Berkeley, George Black and Tans 162 blackmail 99, 113 Blake, William 21, 54 blasphemy 135, 163 blood 57, 61, 90, 93, 95, 100, 112, 118, 158 Bloom, Molly 50, 68, 193–4, 195 Bloom, Leopold 121, 140, 146, 198 boasting: see under Butt; HCE; Shaun Boers 43 Bolach, Lily 73, 181 The Book of Kells 12, 35 Borach, Georges 93 Bowman, Isa 190 Bristol 111 British Library 22 Brivic, Sheldon (Joyce’s Waking Women) 17, 32, 43 broadcasting 56; see also radio; television Brooker, Joseph (Joyce’s Critics) 17 Brown, Richard (James Joyce) 4, 246 Browne and Nolan 151 Browning, Edward ‘Daddy’ 68 Bruno, Giordano 18, 21, 133, 151–2, 231, 235, 236 Buckley (character) 90, 108, 109, 170; see also Butt Bulgaria 155; see also under languages in FW burial 7, 103, 121, 208, 219, 235 Burke, Thomas Henry 154 Burke’s Peerage 150 Buddha 23, 84 Budgen, Frank 22, 127; (The Making of ‘Ulysses’) 8–9, 32, 184 n. 16 Buffalo University 22 Burgess, Anthony 20, 245 Butt (character): as Buckley 99–100; as photographer 91, 99, 129; as Shem 141; as Taff’s son 96; as victim of the shoorting 105; as writer aspect of Joyce 116; boasting of 93, 95, 98, 99, 104, 109–10, 114, 120, 150, 154,

Index 217; claims to have shot 98, 103, 104, 120, 150, 156; drinking 96, 111, 121, 161; stutters 145–6, 149; swears 94, 148, 150; urinates 139, 140; war cry of 108–9 ‘Butt and Taff’ skit (II.3): appearance in transition (27) 89, 91, 163, 170; atomic explosion passage 122, 123, 124–5, 126–7; audience for 96, 104, 110, 130, 131, 164; Bulgarian context of 153; early vestiges of 91; Greek elements of 119; interpretations of 92, 93; on television 90; stage directions in 90, 104–5, 108, 116, 122, 131, 163; toasting in 91, 136; union of Butt and Taff in 122, 133–4, 138, 144, 145–7, 153, 162, 168 Byron (George Gordon) 104 Caesar, Julius 12, 100, 132 Cage, John (‘Roaratorio’) 20 Cain 30, 40, 65, 92, 121; relation to Shem 39 calendar 100, 136 Calendar of Modern Letters 74–6, 185 Calypso 75 Cambronne, Pierre 152 camel 116 Campbell, Joseph 8; (A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake) 6, 10, 18, 224, 245 cards 25, 167, 182 Carlyle, Thomas 44, 99 carnival 53, 56, 217 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Dodgson) 23–4, 157, 190, 195 Catholic Church 45, 69, 75, 78, 97, 109, 190, 191, 192; see also priests; individual sacraments caves 7, 110, 160, 161 celebrities 19, 78, 92, 99, 195 celibacy 68, 83 Celtic Twilight 198 censors and censorship 40, 76, 102 chaos 46–7, 48, 50, 51, 188 Chaos theory 218 Chapelizod 186, 204, 209 Chechnia 163 China 45 Chronos 95, 131, 170 Cinderella 128 circus 5, 29, 195 cities: symbol of 9; HCE and 14–15, 46, 50, 86, 153, 222 Cixous, H´el`ene 16, 245

Index clich´e 52, 59, 98, 102, 113, 139, 149, 183, 201–2, 204; non-linguistic 118, 187, 192 Clinton, Bill 19 clothes 12–13, 19, 42, 49, 72, 114, 123, 227; philosophy of 99; see also washerwomen cloud 54, 66, 81 cloud chamber 124, 128, 163 clover 182, 200 Cnut (king) 158 cockerel 15 Cohen, Marcel (Les Langues du monde) 63 coincidence 16, 35, 68, 156; Brunian 151–2, 231, 235 (see also Bruno, Giordano) Collins, Michael 92, 101, 109, 169 colour: as ‘accident’ 47; black 55, 56, 84, 166; blue 81, 82; dancers as 238; green 14, 29, 56, 57, 79; in ‘Angels and Devils’ 13; Joyce dreams about 85; of ALP’s hair 68, 71–2; of Shaun’s skin 43, 141; of Shem’s skin 42–3, 52, 53, 57, 141; of wines 84, 168; orange 72, 81, 82, 84, 192; philosophizing about 72; red 68, 71–2, 79, 82, 113, 115–16, 169, 204, 211; yellow 79; violet 82; white 42, 54, 72, 119, 166, 168, 182– 3, 188, 205; see also rainbow Communism 58, 115–16, 134, 137, 141 computers 4 Comyn, David (Youthful Exploits of Fionn) 134, 149, 153 confession 53, 95, 120; of HCE 13, 226; as sacrament 159, 163–4 Confucius 4 Conley, Tim (Joyces Mistakes) 16 copyright 60, 196 cowardice 15, 54, 219 crime 57, 101, 104, 121, 176, 177, 187, 208 the crime in the park 11, 68, 82, 176, 177, 178, 180, 182, 186, 204 Crimean War 13, 89, 90, 93, 101, 157; Balaclava 94, 99; Charge of the Light Brigade 114 Criterion 177 n. 3 crown 43, 101, 110 crucifix 158 crystals 53, 54, 181 cuckolds 14, 153, 227; see also adultery cultural studies 18–20 Cyrillic alphabet 198

261 D´ail 233 Dante (Divine Comedy) 107, 110, 162–3; see also under Beckett, Samuel Darwin, Charles 44 Dave the Dancekerl (character) 14 ‘Dave the Dancekerl’ (III.2) 40 n. 4 dawn 8, 15, 25, 30, 126, 130, 131, 235 deafness 109, 168, 169, 170 death 11, 15, 50, 52, 60, 96, 211; Joyce adds word to FW 237; of Butt 110–11; of giant Goll 134; of Keats 104 Deane, Seamus 225 Deane, Vincent 230 n. 26 Dedalus, Stephen 140, 146, 177, 198, 205, 218–19, 222 Deleuze, Gilles 16, 47; Anti-Oedipus 92 Derrida, Jacques 16, 19, 42, 246 desert 116 the devil 62, 63, 70, 85, 99, 143, 211, 243; as Lucifer 30, 142; see also under games The Dial 25, 175, 181, 185, 224 dialogue: in Kipling’s ‘Danny Deever’ 109; of Butt and Taff 90, 91, 99, 122; of Issy 178, 190, 197; of washerwomen 68, 70, 83 Dickens, Charles (Great Expectations) 21 disease 42, 53, 54, 166 disguises 42, 48, 59, 189 dove 166–7, 189, 197, 207 dreams: see under Finnegans Wake the dreamer 14, 111, 218 drunkenness 14, 77, 86, 118, 140, 176 Dublin: and U 60; churches of 193, 238; granting of to Bristol 111; in the quiz 12; mayors of 125, 126, 148–9; names for 46, 123–4, 161; Norse 158; placenames in 111, 131, 143, 204; rivers flowing through 66, 184; see also Chapelizod; Liffey Dubliners 50; ‘An Encounter’ 98–9, 232; ‘Eveline’ 143; ‘A Painful Case’ 68; ‘A Mother’ 193 dye and dying 43, 45–6, 61 earwig 100 Earwicker, Humphrey Chimpden: see HCE Easter 15 Easter Rising 84, 113, 138, 139–40, 142–3, 144–5 eating 47, 75, 120, 137, 168, 190 echoes 160; see also under Finnegans Wake Eco, Umberto 19, 20, 47 ecocriticism 20

262 Eden 63, 165, 239 Edinburgh 129, 130 eggs 4, 148 The Egoist 41 Egypt and Egyptian 130, 162, 163, 188 Eliot, T. S. 41, 160, 207, 224 Ellmann, Richard (James Joyce) 71–2, 93, 158, 159, 168 n.86, 219, 225, 231, 245 elm 233 de L’Enclos, Anne ‘Ninon’ 78 encyclopedia 15, 21, 22 The Enemy 99 England and English: as colonizers 84, 143; collapse of empire 129; grammar of language 63; literature of 54 (see also individual authors); relationship with Ireland 101, 138, 139, 143, 169; place names in 131 epiphany 1 equinox 136 error: see under Finnegans Wake Esau 39, 58–9 estuary 43, 80, 116, 239 Eucharist 47–8, 188 Europe 21, 44–5, 63, 84, 100, 106, 111, 138, 190 Eve 3, 112, 178, 211 Everyman: see under myths exaggeration 40, 44, 50, 95, 96, 134, 207, 221, 222 excess 40, 222, 224, 228 Exiles 105 eyes: colour of 81, 82; Joyce’s problems with 56, 186, 189 Ezekiel 119 family 92, 218, 227, 228, 239; Earwickers 10, 15, 24–5, 57, 92; Joyces 77; Porters 15, 25; see also individual family members Le Fanu, Sheridan 21 fascism 4, 106; see also Mussolini, Benito Faust 57, 58, 62, 98 Ferrer, Daniel 25, 81 Fianna 134, 144 Finnegan, Tim 95, 122 ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ (ballad) 144, 151 Finnegans Wake: as confession of syphilis 53; as dream 7, 8, 14, 20, 33, 74, 178, 210, 219; as story of two races 43; as tree 30, 34–5; as universal history (see ‘universal history’); dream within 9, 14, 15; errors of transmission

Index in 48, 57, 62, 163, 189, 204–5; first word of 49; incestuous writing in 177–8; intratextuality in 6, 24, 25, 28, 73–4, 77, 83, 94, 99, 109, 112, 176, 180, 198; Joyce justifies every letter of 21–2, 36; language of as embolism 100–1; narcissism and 212–13; title of 238; thunder words in 60, 152, 204; universal myth and 18, 220, 224; see also individual sections and subsections The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo 27, 28, 177 n. 3, 223; see also under ‘Work in Progress’ fir tree 121 fire 3, 15, 30, 46, 118, 134, 143, 166, 167, 188 firearms 12, 62, 90, 94, 98, 99, 120–1, 142, 151, 154, 156, 166 fireworks 123, 125, 127, 129 fish 117–18, 170, 231, 236 flatulence 97, 127, 128, 162 floods 29, 80, 135, 204, 219, 221–2 Ford, Ford Madox 76 forgery 12, 40, 45, 56 Forster, E. M. (A Passage to India) 160, 161 Forster, William Edward ‘Buckshot’ 154, 160 The Four: see Mamalujo (characters) Franklin, Benjamin 30 Freud, Sigmund: 25, 53, 92, 102, 133, 179; ‘On Narcissism’ 202 funeral 11 Gaea 35, 131, 204 games: ‘Angels and Devils’ 13, 167–8, 169; cops and robbers 60–1; with language 29, 32–3, 56, 204; see also ‘Nightgames’ genetic criticism 7, 18, 22–4, 27–8, 33 Germans and Germany 8, 99, 100, 127, 129–30, 142, 149–50, 157, 168; see also under languages in FW ghosts 122, 194, 196, 219 giants 7, 15, 20, 25, 85, 86, 134, 207, 219, 233, 240 gifts and presents 22, 75, 193, 221, 229 Gilbert, Stuart 22, 29–30 the girls and the soldiers; see under the crime in the park Gladstone, William 95, 104, 154 Glasheen, Adaline 6, 11, 21, 31, 246 glosses 21, 22, 29, 31, 96, 98, 234

Index God x, 4, 30, 46, 92, 119, 125, 135, 150, 155, 167 Gonne, Iseult 177 Gonne, Maud 176–7 Gordon, John (Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary) 6, 11, 56, 218 gospellers 77, 175, 195; see also Mamalujo (characters) gossip 19, 204, 230; about ALP 12–13, 66, 68, 75; about HCE 11–12, 40, 202 n. 34; about the girls in the park 82, 176; about W. B. Yeats 177 graffiti 42 graves 25, 110, 154 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 77 Guattari, F´elix 47; Anti-Oedipus 92 halo 110, 206 Hart, Clive (Structure and Motif in ‘Finnegans Wake’) 7, 10, 30, 32 Hassan, Ihab (The Postmodern Turn) 16, 18, 225, 245 Hawaii 129, 130 Hayman, David 20, 23, 28 ‘Haveth Childers Everywhere’ (III.3) 9, 14–15, 86, 102 n. 20, 202 n.34 HCE: acronyms from 118; and Finn MacCool 122; anus of 98, 117, 118; as builder of cities 14–15, 46, 50, 86, 153, 222; as dreamer 178; as Everyman 184, 242; as innkeeper 4, 10, 13, 131, 193, 234, 235; as mountain 66; as Roderick O’Conor 13; boasting of 9, 15, 86, 227; contemporary figures of 19; equation of with William T. Stead 114; hunchbacked 82; in quiz (I.6) 12; fall of 10, 11, 95, 242; origin of name 11; seduced by Issy 202 n. 34, 204; Yawn becomes 176; see also ‘Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’; the crime in the park; the Russian General heaven 30, 44, 60, 81, 96, 167 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 44, 133 Heidegger, Martin 62 Henry II (king) 4, 111 heresy 47 n. 19, 48, 125; see also Giordano Bruno hermaphroditism 166, 168 herrings 229, 231, 232, 237, 238 Hesiod 110 Higginson, Fred (Anna Livia Plurabelle: The Making of a Chapter) 67 n.1

263 history: theories of (see Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Vico, Giambattista); versions of 43–5 Hitler, Adolf 19, 130, 149–50 Holy Spirit 155, 167 Home Rule 104, 154 Homer 11, 60 homosexuality 98, 106, 109, 157, 201, 205; lesbianism 194, 196 n. 30, 201–2, 207; narcissism and 201, 202; see also under Taff Hosty (character) 134, 157, 230 ‘How Buckley Shot the Russian General’ tale: as story of John Joyce’s 90; early vestiges of 89–90; failure of assassination 93, 111; narrative of story 90; on notesheets for U 90; see also ‘Butt and Taff’ skit hubris: see pride Hugo, Victor 152–3 Humpty Dumpty 115, 166 hunchback 13, 82, 99 hysteria 136, 179, 193, 195 I Ching 2 Ibsen, Henrik 10, 157 incest 14, 23, 75, 126, 177–8 incontinence 60, 168 Index Notebook: see under Rose, Danis; ‘Work in Progress’ India 63–4, 84, 160, 162 ink 81; see also under Shem insects 84, 113, 167–8, 169, 171, 193, 233 interior monologue 68 invisibility 205, 210 Ireland, places in: Arklow 73; Carrick-on-Shannon 211; Cork 94; Glendalough 15; Kilturk 157; Leitrim 211; Limerick 139; Meath 115; Munster 181; Roscommon 211; Ulster 77; Wicklow 73, 80; see also Dublin Irish national anthem 138, 143 Isaac 58, 59 Islam 4, 101, 192; see also Allah Israel 162, 163 Isolde 66, 68, 76, 111, 177, 182, 185, 189, 194, 209, 210, 212; see also under kisses; ‘Work in Progress’ Isolde Blanchemain 182–3, 187, 188, 191, 194, 205, 211 Issy (character): applies make-up 183, 188, 212, 213; as cloud 66; as Izzy 14, 175,

264 Issy (character): applies make-up (cont.) 177, 205; as Nuvoletta 201; as temptress 10, 14, 129; as Tizzy 175, 177, 211; before her mirror 10, 46, 177, 182, 183, 196, 205, 207, 222; classmate of the Maggies 10, 14, 189, 206, 237; conflict with reflection 180, 181; dialogue with herself 178, 190, 197; modelled on Lucia 26 (see also Joyce, Lucia); narcissism of 177, 184, 190, 191, 201; reflection in water 182, 189, 194, 195, 200, 205, 208; secrets of 178, 179, 180, 191, 202; seduces HCE 202 n. 34, 204; sibilance of 71, 175, 177, 201; writes 13, 133, 156 n.72 ivy 166, 240 Jacob 58, 59 The James Joyce Archive 22–3, 34; material not in the Archive 22; see also National Library of Ireland James, Henry 223–4 Japan 45 Jerry Porter (character) 9, 25, 54; see also Shem Jespersen, Otto 155 Jesus Christ 116, 194, 205; tells a joke 83; see also Eucharist Jews and Judaism 43, 58, 118 Johnson, Esther (Stella) 148–9, 186, 194 Jolas, Eugene 7–8, 18, 25, 91, 94, 120, 175, 185, 186, 218 Jolas, Maria 25, 36 n. 68, 94, 226, 228 Joplin, Scott 43 Joyce, Giorgio 77, 168–9 Joyce, Helen (n´ee Fleischmann) 77 Joyce, James: as censored author 76; can justify every letter of FW 21–2, 36; describes working procedures 186; eye trouble of 56, 186, 189; interest in Afro-American culture 43; jokes about ‘Butt and Taff’ skit 91; memory of 186, 180 n. 8; Victorian attitude of 50; writer’s block of 23, 26, 221, 237; writing to deadlines 26, 61 Joyce, John Stanislaus 90 Joyce, Lucia 26–7, 77, 136, 168, 201, 209, 210; name in FW 81–2, 188, 198, 210 Joyce, Nora 72, 77 Joyce, Stanislaus 25 Jumbo the elephant 195

Index Jung, Carl 27, 133 Juno 75 Jupiter (mythology) 163, 166 Kant, Immanuel 44, 198, 206 Kate (character) 10, 12, 14, 15, 187, 222 Keats, John 104 Kersse (character): see ‘The Norwegian Captain and the Tailor’ Kevin Porter (character) 25, 71; see also Shaun King, Festy (character) 97 Kipling, Rudyard 109, 158 kisses and kissing: ALP’s first 67, 78, 85; of Isolde and her mirror 184, 189, 196, 207; of Tristan and Isolde 14, 76, 103, 189, 190–1 Klu Klux Klan 43, 158 Koran 4, 101 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von (Psychopathia Sexualis) 40 Kristeva, Julia 16 Kubrick, Stanley (2001) 3 Lacan, Jacques 16, 126, 179 Landuyt, Ingeborg 39 Langland, William (Piers Plowman) 74 language: and Babel 84, 167, 237; infixes 63, 64 languages and dialects in FW: Armenian 113, 135, 146, 154; Anglo-Saxon 170; archaicisms 42, 62, 74, 86, 127, 130, 149, 153, 163; Basque 84, 145; Bulgarian 84, 113, 149, 155; Burmese 84; Cockney 205; Cornish 83; Danish 57, 97, 198, 211; Dravidian 63, 84; Dutch 43; Egyptian 130, 188; French 78, 105–6, 108, 135, 149, 152, 154, 169, 170, 177, 194, 197, 205; Gaelic (Irish) 21, 134; German 30, 56, 75, 83, 100, 102, 129, 132, 142, 149, 154, 168, 187, 193, 197, 198, 200, 230; Gipsy 187; Greek 30, 60, 84, 100, 106, 110, 113, 119, 126, 151; Hiberno–English 75, 176, 181; Italian 66, 98, 120, 127, 134, 189, 204, 207; Kiswahili 84–5; Latin 30, 40, 62, 75, 80, 82, 135, 145, 164, 200, 202, 233; Norwegian 127–8; pan-Slavonic 165; Polish 113, 151, 155; Portuguese 118; Romansch 84; Russian 84, 95, 96, 101, 106, 110, 113, 114, 120, 121, 124, 129, 150–1, 157, 158; Ruthenian 84;

Index Sanskrit 125; Santali 63; Slavic 153; Welsh 204 Larbaud, Val´ery 245 laughter 5, 14, 83, 95, 96, 97, 101, 203, 226 laurel 48, 81, 83, 84 laziness 40, 50, 183, 203 Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) 58, 134, 135 L´eon, Paul 5, 22, 94, 127 Lernout, Geert (The French Joyce) 17, 246 lesbianism: see homosexuality the letter 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 24, 40, 41, 50, 66, 176, 196; authorship of 12, 13, 14, 24, 40, 41; delivery of 14, 24, 230; writing of 12, 13; ‘The Revered Letter’ (IV) 15, 199, 235 Levin, Harry 226, 241, 245, 246; ‘The Dream of Everyman’ 8, 18 Lewis, Wyndham: The Enemy 99; in FW 12, 99, 149–51; rejects Book III 25; Time and Western Man 26, 99, 151 Liffey: ALP as 13, 35, 46, 66, 71, 182; as location of FW 74; as river of life 49, 71; Shaun falls into 14, 182, 217; source of 71, 73, 80 linguistics 107, 155–6 Litz, A. Walton (The Art of James Joyce) 23, 28, 223–4 London 29–30, 114, 115, 128, 129, 195, 205 Louis XIV 150 Louis XV 115 Lucan (Pharsalia) 132 Lucifer: see the devil Luther, Martin 47 lying 183 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois 18 MacCool, Finn 20, 36, 122, 134, 217; see also giants McHugh, Roland: Annotations to ‘Finnegans Wake’ 6, 21, 34, 182, 196; The Sigla of ‘Finnegans Wake’ 9, 124 n. 45, 183 make-up 42, 183, 188, 212, 213 the Maggies (character): appearances in FW 229; as a double 46; as the people 217; classmates of Issy 10, 14, 189, 206, 237; in the quiz (I.6) 12, 229, 236; number of 10, 14, 220, 236, 237; relation to the Murphys 228, 237, 239; relationship to Jaun 229, 230–1, 233, 234, 236, 237, 238; see also under sigla

265 magic 48, 57, 85, 163, 166, 169 magpie 166, 167 Maid Marian 149 Mallarm´e, St´ephane 101 n. 18, 207 Mamalujo (characters): as Senators 14, 175, 176, 184, 185; feminized 194; John 200, 209; Mark 181, 194–5, 196, 197, 206, 207, 208, 232; Matthew 196; obsession with memory 144; see also gospellers; voyeurism mandala 7 Mark (king) 14, 68, 76, 212 de Marivaux, Pierre 58 marriage 7, 13, 44, 163, 187, 193; see also weddings Marx, Karl and Marxism 44, 133, 138 mathematics 184–5, 196, 234 Mauthner, Fritz 155 Maxwell, John 139–40 Meillet, Antoine (Les Langues du monde) 63 memory 6, 9, 93, 144, 164; false 179; of Joyce 186 Mendelssohn, Felix 189, 193 menstruation 12, 192 Michael Arklow (character) 70–1, 76, 78, 186 Milton, John (Paradise Lost) 143 misquotation 99, 191; see also under Finnegans Wake Modernism 50, 107, 134, 207 Mohammed 101 n. 18 Moli`ere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 58 Molotov, Vyacheslav 127 money 12, 15, 139, 145, 210 monologue: interior 68; of ALP (see under ALP) ‘The Mookse and the Gripes’ (I.6) 12, 95, 99 Moore, Thomas 170, 208, 209, 210 Moore, Thomas Sturge 177 n. 3 Morgana 211 moustache 48, 118, 190 mouth 75, 82, 95, 109, 169, 176 murder 39, 57, 92, 95, 103–4, 129–30, 131; in Phoenix Park 154, 166 the Murphys (character): appearances throughout FW 229; as all FW characters 10, 12; as audience 222; ‘–ation’ words of 233; relation to the Maggies 228, 237, 239; see also under sigla Murray, Josephine 45

266 music 6, 20, 43, 73, 129–30, 143, 156; see also Moore, Thomas; singing; songs; individual composers and musicians music-hall 4, 110, 208, 209 Museyroom battle 94, 152 Mussolini, Benito 19 myth: Hindu 125; Norse 120; of Everyman 36, 184, 226–7, 242; universality of 18, 34, 35, 93, 171, 184, 220, 224, 225, 243 Nabokov, Vladimir 11 n. 19, 20, 245; Lolita 237 Napoleon 55, 108, 152, 153 Narcissus 177, 201, 203, 210 narcissism: Freud and 51, 202; FW as 212–13; homosexuality and 201, 202; of Issy 177, 184, 190, 191, 201; of Taff 117; Shem’s writing as 42 Le Navire d’argent 76, 77 Nazism 100, 106; see also Hitler, Adolf neologisms and coinages 2, 16, 58, 62, 107, 115, 125 New York 15, 68 newspapers 23, 69, 230 ‘Nightgames’ (II.1) 13, 26, 81, 229 ‘Nightlessons’ (II.2) 13, 89, 133, 195, 199, 203, 234, 238 Noah 99, 207 Nordau, Max (Degeneration) 44, 45 Norris, Margot (The Decentered Universe of ‘Finnegans Wake’) 17, 42, 54, 92 n. 9, 202 n. 34 ‘The Norwegian Captain and the Tailor’ story (II.3) 13, 89, 99, 208 numbers: 4 (see Mamalujo); 12 (see the Murphys); 28/29 (see the Maggies); 111 67, 85; 1,001 85; counting systems 153; games with 184–5 nursery rhymes 103, 132 obscenity 59–60, 86 obscurity and obscuring 8, 12, 62, 223; of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ 71, 75, 79, 80, 85; of ‘How Buckley Shot the Russian General’ 89, 123, 143; of Issy in ‘Yawn’ 190, 203; simplification 146 O’Connell, Daniel 97, 109, 111 O’Conor, Roderick 3–4, 13–14 O’Dwyer, Edward Thomas 139–40 OED 48, 49, 107, 141, 164 Oedipus 40, 92, 158, 171

Index Ogden, Charles Kay (The Meaning of Meaning) 155 n. 71 O’Hanlon, John (Understanding ‘Finnegans Wake’) 6, 10–11, 23 ‘The Ondt and the Gracehoper’ (III.1) 14, 26, 99, 151, 168 O’Reilly, Persse (character): see ‘Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’ Orient 59 original sin 114 the Orkneys (islands) 70, 71 Orthodox Church 115, 119, 155 Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress 23, 29–30, 233; see also under Beckett, Samuel Ovid (Metamorphoses) 48, 82, 83 paedophiles and paedophilia 67–9, 83–4, 114, 117 painting 14, 82, 211 Palladino, Eusapia 194, 211 Pan 156 Parnell, Charles Stewart 23, 95, 154 paralysis 50, 100 Paris 14, 22–3, 117, 127 Peirce, Charles 155–6 Pentecost 167 pessemism 43, 45, 51, 227 Petrarch 81–2, 83, 198 Phoenix Park 166, 186, 208, 210; murders 154, 166; exposure in (see the crime in the park) photography 99 plagiarism 149 Plurabelle, Anna Livia: see ALP Poe, Edgar Allan 207 poets and poetry 41, 57, 81–2, 83–4, 110, 132, 157, 177, 198, 206–7, 222 poison 53, 119, 166 police and policing 10, 43, 49, 93, 114, 176, 220 polylogue 56, 58 de Pompadour, Madame (Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson) 115, 150 popes 83 pornography 59–60, 82, 184, 221 Porter family: see under family ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ (essay) 220 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 41, 205, 222 postmodernism 18, 34, 245

Index Pound, Ezra 177; attitude to FW 20, 25, 185, 245 Power, Arthur (Conversations with James Joyce) 6 Prankquean 77, 217 prayer 128, 191, 194, 205 Pr´evost, Abb´e (Manon Lescaut) 78 priest 69, 75, 78, 85, 139, 158, 222; see also Michael Arklow Prince, Morton (Dissociation of a Personality) 211 pride 45, 51, 80, 84, 157, 209; see also boasting Prince, Morton 211 prison 10, 11, 41–2, 117, 154, 202 procuress 13, 113, 115, 192, 220 Prometheus 30, 83 prostitution 13, 113–14, 115, 128, 149, 167, 178, 179, 182, 195 Protestantism 190 Proust, Marcel 8, 64 psychoanalysis 17, 24, 54, 68, 179, 206; see also Freud, Sigmund Puccini, Giacomo: La Boh`eme 177; Manon Lescaut 78 Pygmalion 82, 191, 222 the quiz (I.6) 9, 12, 26, 229, 233, 236 Quinet, Edgar 166, 236 Rabat´e, Jean-Michel 17, 28 Rabelais, Franc¸ois 152 radio 56, 90, 130 Ragtime 43 rainbow 29, 72, 79, 81, 82, 135, 190 rainbow girls (character) 72; see also the Maggies rape 13, 82, 83–4, 156, 167 raven 166, 167, 207 the Red Cross 101 reflection 8–13; writing as 222, (see also under Issy) repetition: textual (see under Finnegans Wake) repression 45, 53, 68, 71, 92 n. 10, 106, 18, 212; see also the crime in the park; Freud, Sigmund Rhine 200 riddles 62, 72, 96, 103, 157, 184–5, 195, 227, 238 Rimbaud, Arthur 207 rivers 20, 29, 43; allusions to in ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ 71, 75, 78, 84, 85;

267 contribute to structure of FW 66, 116; see also individual rivers Robeson, Paul 43, 116, 141 n. 62, 171 robin 103–4, 120 Robin Hood 103–4, 120, 149, 170; see also ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ Robinson, Henry Morton (A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake) 6, 10, 18, 224, 245 Romanticism 7–8, 51 Rome 100, 129, 130, 151 rosary 188 Rose, Danis: The Index Manuscript 84 n. 33, 114 n. 32, 180 n. 8, 223; The Textual Diaries of James Joyce 23, 26, 28; Understanding Finnegans Wake 6, 10–11, 23 Rossini, Gioachino (Barber of Seville) 189, 196, 197 Roth, Samuel 60 Russia 58, 90, 95, 101, 111, 115–16, 127, 141, 155, 157, 163, 198; see also under languages in FW the Russian General (character): as Shem and Shaun 141; defecates 90, 97, 99, 102, 127; rank of 95; wipes himself clean 90, 95, 120, 156, 159; see also ‘Butt and Taff’ skit (II.3); Butt rumour: see gossip Rutherford, Ernest 19, 123–4, 126, 128, 131, 171 Sackerson (character) 10, 12, 14, 43, 95, 99, 222 de Sade, Marquis 41 sailor: see ‘The Norwegian Captain and the Tailor’ saints: Aquinas 47, 177; Audoen 193; Cecilia 143; Cyril 198; Dympna 3 n. 6, 24, 121; George 85, 168–9; James 195; John 77, 125, 175 (see also Mamalujo); Kevin 15, 86 (see also under ‘Work in Progress’); Luke 77, 175; Mark 77, 125 (see also Mamalujo); Matthew 77, 175, 196; Methodius 198; Michael Archangel 70–1, 85, 169; Olga 198; O’Toole, Laurence 131; Patrick 15, 83, 109, 110, 158, 159, 182, 200 (see also under ‘Work in Progress’); Peter 83; Sebastian 117 salmon 40 Sand, George (Consuela) 207 Sands, Robert ‘Bobby’ 41

268 de Saussure, Ferdinand 155–6 Schmitz, Livia 71, 86 Schopenhauer, Arthur 8 Sechselauten 207 secrets 41, 53, 91, 164; of Issy 178, 179, 180, 191, 202 self 41 Senators: see under Mamalujo (characters) Senn, Fritz 1, 29, 246 sex and sexuality 8, 136–7, 168, 207, 220, 231; bi- 237, 238; of ALP 67–8, 69, 72; of Issy 179, 183, 190–1, 206; see also celibacy; homosexuality; kisses; rape; syphilis shadows 96, 134, 143 Shakespeare, William 21, 45, 105, 198, 218; Antony and Cleopatra 188; As You Like It 202; Falstaff 226; Hamlet 14, 131, 177, 184, 201, 203; Julius Caesar 158; Lear 226; Macbeth 187; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 156; Othello 200; Richard III 98; sonnets of 31, 32, 198; The Tempest 160 shame 13, 60, 68, 144, 159, 179, 209, 211, 222 shamrock 182, 200 Shaun: as Abel 39; as censor 40; as Chuff 238; as deliverer of the letter 14, 24, 230; as hermit 81; as Jaun 9, 14, 211, 229, 230–1, 233, 234, 237, 238; as Jute/Juva 99, 145; as Kevin 25, 71; as postman 14, 42, 175; as stone 66; as Yawn 9, 14, 25, 175–6, 177, 220, 237, 239; boasting of 39, 231; colour of skin 43, 141; falls into Liffey 14, 182, 217; watches of 25, 230 Shaw, George Bernard 104–5, 122 Shem: as alchemist 53, 95; as Dave the Dancekerl 14, 40 n. 4; as devil in ‘Angels and Devils’ 13; as Joyce 39; as tree 66; as Cain 39; as forger 12, 40, 45, 56; as Jerry 9, 25, 54; as Mutt/Muta 99, 145; as the unconscious 39–40; author of the letter 13, 14, 40, 41; bigger than Shakespeare 45; colour of skin 42–3, 52, 53, 57, 141; laziness of 40; making ink 40, 41, 53–4, 55; writes on own body 41, 42, 46, 49, 52, 55, 56, 57, 61; writing by as narcissism 42 ‘Shem the Penman’ (I.7): published in This Quarter 39,52, 54, 57, 58; published in transition (7) 39, 43, 58–61

Index shit: and the Russian General 90, 97, 99, 102, 127; le mot de Cambronne as 152; Shem’s ink as 40, 53, 55; writing with 41 (see also under Shem) sigla 9–10, 26, 133, 218; circular 206, 228, 229, 230, 232, 235, 239, 243; Shem and Shaun sigla origins 39 Sinbad 85 Sinn F´ein 233 skin 183, 188; see also under Shaun; Shem slaves and slavery 59, 60, 84, 113–14, 138, 141, 151, 169, 235 smoke 12, 64 snakes 10, 40, 85, 165, 239 Snow White 205 ‘Soft Morning City’ (IV): see under ALP socialism 35, 58, 107, 220 Solomon, Margaret (Eternal Geomater) 92, 133 n. 56 singing: by birds 207; by Desdemona 200; by hair 71, 78; by HCE 4; by Ophelia 201; by the Maggies 228, 237, 238; by the Murphys (see ‘Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’) songs: carols 116; Irish national anthem 138, 143; of the Easter Rising 138, 139–40, 141, 142–3, 144–5; ‘Volga Boatsong’ 115–16, 117; Wedding March 193; ‘Who Fears to Speak of ’98?’ 144–5; see also ‘Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’; ‘Finnegan’s Wake’; Moore, Thomas; ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ soup 19, 58 space 77, 129, 206, 218 Spengler, Oswald (Decline of the West) 44, 45 spring (season) 26, 52, 136, 165, 170, 207 springs 71, 81 squid 53–4 stains 12, 46, 55 Stalin, Joseph 127 stars 56, 60, 95, 101, 131, 187, 197, 237 Stead, William T. 21, 114, 149 Stein, Gertrude 207 Stephens, James 26 Sterne, Laurence 21, 50 Stonehenge 131 stuttering 117, 145–6, 149, 156, 160 sublimation 53, 54 Suetonis 82 suicide 128, 178, 188–9, 201, 209 Sullivan, John 26

Index summer 74, 75, 131, 155, 231, 236 sunset 81, 123, 130, 131 Swift, Jonathan, 50, 148–9, 169, 186, 194 syphilis 53, 54, 166 Taff (character): as Butt’s father 96; as Dante 110; as Freemason 106; as Shem 156; as Welshman 99; developed through stage directions 106; deviant sexuality of 98, 116–17, 153; incredulity of 95, 96, 102, 154–5; narcissism of 117; stutters 117; see also ‘Butt and Taff’ skit tailor: see ‘The Norwegian Captain and the Tailor’ Tao Te Ching 4 Tarot 167 the Tarpeian rocks 209 tattoo 42 technology 3, 5, 19, 44, 242–3 Tel Quel 16 telepathy 211 telephone 162 television 69, 84, 90, 96, 125 n. 47 theatre 93, 203, 157, 190; stage directions 90, 104–5, 108, 116, 122, 131, 163 thirst 67, 69, 75 This Quarter 39, 52, 54, 57, 58 Thousand and One Nights 85 thunder 7, 60, 72, 121, 127, 128, 135; see also under Finnegans Wake tide 43, 80, 239 Tilley, Vesta (Matilda Alice Powles) 209 time 50, 55, 77, 95, 99, 130–1, 151, 210, 218 Tindall, William York (A Reader’s Guide to ‘Finnegans Wake’) 10, 18, 40, 89, 90 n. 5, 219, 224 Tolka (river) 184, 194 Tolstoy, Leo (War and Peace) 153 towers 166, 167, 205, 209 transatlantic review 76 transition 7–8, 25, 223, 236; book III in 175, 186, 207–8, 234; revised for first edition 27, 61, 78, 79, 199; transition (6) 233; transition (7) 39, 43, 58–61; transition (8) 77–8, 79–80, 84; transition (13) 234; transition (15) 186, 197–9, 200; transition (16) 120; transition (17) 120; transition (27) 89, 91, 163, 170 trees 48 , 76, 92; FW as 30, 34–5; of

269 Knowledge 239; Shem as 66; see also ash; beanstalk; elm; fir; ivy; laurel trials 40, 103, 176, 233, 234; of Bywaters 230 n. 26; of Festy King 12, 24, 97; of U 102 Trinity 155, 158, 182, 200 Trinity College Dublin 144 Tristan 14, 157, 175, 177, 182–3, 189, 191, 205, 212; see also under ‘Work in Progress’ Tsar 115, 120, 169 turf 13, 120; and nickname for Ireland 120, 159 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens) 84 the Twelve (character): see the Murphys the twenty-eight girls: see the Maggies twins 10, 12, 26, 43, 46, 70, 111, 187, 221; Siamese 139, 166 Two Worlds 60 typing: Lily Bolach 73, 181; errors made during 62, 204–5 Ulysses 75 Ulysses 3, 4, 42, 92, 223; as story of two races 43; Buckley in 90; censorship of 102; criticism of 40, 41, 65, 221, 224; influence of 20, 183; notes for 90; see also main characters —episodes of: ‘Aeolus’ 163; ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ 177, 218–19; ‘Sirens’ 184; ‘Cyclops’ 90 n. 2, 121, 195; ‘Nausicaa’ 182; ‘Circe’ 198; ‘Eumaeus’ 22; ‘Ithaca’ 140, 146 unconscious 8, 39–40, 55–6, 100 underwear 13 Uranus (mythology) 131 ‘universal history’ 3, 5, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 51, 56 universality: see under myths urination 102, 139, 140, 168; and Shem’s ink 40, 55 utopia 44, 132, 221, 228, 241 de Valera, Eamon 19, 101 Van Homrigh, Bartholomew 148 Van Homrigh, Esther (Vanessa) 148–9, 186, 194 Van Hulle, Dirk 223 n. 10 Van Mierlo, Wim 18 Vaucluse 81, 198 ventriloquy 61, 96, 175, 176, 183, 191, 220 Venus (mythology) 75

270 Vico, Giambattista 7, 18, 21, 30, 44, 56, 128, 133, 222 Vikings 157, 158 Vincent, Isabeau 190 the Virgin Mary 192, 194, 195–6, 197, 205; Hail Mary 128 virgins 81, 82, 114, 116–17, 178, 195 Virgil (Aeneid) 61 vowels 76, 98, 101, 153, 163–4, 189 voyeurism 76–7, 90 Wagner, Richard 75 A Wake Newslitter 21 waking 9, 25, 36 n. 68, 50, 67, 226, 235 Walpole, Robert 103 Walsh, Ernest 52, 57 washerwomen (characters) 12–13, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74–5, 79, 83, 217 water 43, 66, 71, 75, 81–2, 188; control of 14–15, 85–6; reflection in 182, 189, 194, 195, 200, 202, 205, 208 Waterloo 55, 94, 149, 152–3, 166 Weaver, Harriet Shaw 22, 23, 25, 94, 245, 246; and composition of FW 25, 51, 52, 70 weddings 145, 177, 189, 192–3, 204, 205, 207, 212 Wedekind, Frank (Pandora’s Box) 129 Wellington (Arthur Wellesley) 55, 152, 153 Wells, H. G. (The World Set Free) 124 whispering 99, 175, 177, 178, 179; see also secrets Whiteside, James 97 ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ 97, 103–4, 120 wigs 48 wine 84, 154, 168; see also Eucharist

Index winter 207, 234 Wilde, Oscar 98, 117–18; The Importance of Being Earnest 202–3; The Picture of Dorian Gray 56–7, 209–10 Wilder, Thorton 20, 77 n. 18 Wilson, Edmund (The Wound and the Bow) 224, 226 wishes and wishing 57, 81, 82–3, 124, 191 Wittgenstein, Ludwig x, 21, 72 Woolf, Virginia 128–9, 160 ‘Work in Progress’: notebooks for 22–4, 27–8, 186, 189, 204, 207–8, 223; Buffalo VI.B.3 89, 206 n. 39; VI.B.8 232, 235; VI.B.9 40 n. 4; Buffalo VI.B.10 56, 177 n. 3; VI.B.46 (Index Notebook) 84, 101–2, 113, 118, 121, 167, 134, 145 —early sketches for 3, 24–25, 27; Berkeley and St Patrick 24, 72; Mamalujo 13–14, 76, 133, 156 n.72, 175, 180; Roderick O’Conor 13–14; St Dympna 3 n. 6, 24; St Kevin 24, 68, 72, 86, 238; Tristan and Isolde 13–14, 103, 156 n. 72, 175 World War I 135, 150, 151, 155, 160, 207 World War II 91 Yeats, William Butler 57, 176–7 Yonge Charlotte M. (The Pillars of the House) 187 Ys (town) 204 Zeus 95, 131 ´ Zola, Emile 218; Germinal 136–7; Nana 78 zoos 195 Zurich 27, 130, 207