No More Learning

Ulysses, then, is a labyrinth which we can enter at any point, once we have satisfied ourselves as to its general plan and purpose. It is one of the very few books in existence that can be picked up at any time, enrichening any odd moment and-rather than a tome we have to engage strenuously at a library table-it is a book for the bedside. T o say that one has to live with it is not to utter a prejudiced, partisan claim but to state quite objectively that there is enough meat in it to last a lifetime. Its scope is deliberately encyclopaedic and its subtleties and puzzles require a sort of retired leisure for their working-out. One can never thoroughly understand any book (not even one's own), mainly because words are autonomous and have an endless range of possible meaning and because time itself, the flux that the author tries to trap, has a habit of opening up new significations in a book, shifting stresses, achieving new topicalities, suggesting fresh patterns of relationship with the rest of emergent literature. The paradox about Ulysses is that it remains, at any given time, more immediately intelligible than books that essay a greater lucidity: it does not wrest its meanings from here-and-now, it clamps down on time instead of riding with it. At the same time it invites further exploration and discovery, not of the answers to conundrums but of a greater richness of understanding of what is already well enough understood.
Let it join the bedside library, then, along with Joyce's other big book, Shakespeare, the Bible, Boswell, The Anatamy o f Melancholy, Rabelais, Nabokov's Pale Fire, Tristram Shandy, and other works which are more concerned with solid objects in space than with the illusory current o f mere time. And now let me attempt to sum up its qualities. I am wretchedly and impotently aware of my failure to celebrate tbese in the brief survey I bave just completed. There is
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the awful danger of solemnity, which turns readers as well as writers into bloody owls. Joyce wrote Ulysses to entertain, to enhance life, to give joy. It is all too easy to destroy the winged life, not by binding so much as by brooding.
First, then, Ulysses is a great comic novel. It is one of the very few books that can make one laugh aloud. Its humour is of an im- mense variety, ranging from stage Irish knockabout to the most rarefied wit. The humorous tradition in English literature has- since the Puritans slammed shut the doors of the playhouses in
,642-been somewhat limited, and the typical comic English book in the period on which Joyce supervened gained its effects by making sandwiches of farce and sentimentality. Jerome K. Jerome is more typical than Lewis Carroll, and the humour resident in the English language i\self-a language with two warring elements-has never been much exploited. Joyce is remarkable in that the vis comica operates consistently in his work, and that even the shocking and pathetic is presented in terms of comic bathos: the two apparitions of the 'Circe' episode, the ghosts of Stephen's mother and Bloom's son, owe all tbeir effectiveness to the deployment of a technique traditionally associated with laughter. Earnestness is always forbid- den, and even the raptures ofsex (which Lawrence taught us to take too seriously) are deflated to the near-grotesque. The laughter of Jonathan Swift turns all too easily into a snarl or a howl, but the saeva indignatio has no place in Ulysses, any more than that horrified fascination with the lowlier bodily functions that attests Swift's dementia. Joyce, like all Ireland, was washed by the Gulf Stream;
Swift cleansed himself with (Dr Johnson's words) 'Oriental scrupu- losity'. It is healthier to accept a bit of dirt-some would say there is more than a bit in Ulysses-than to go through the vain motions of washing out original sin. And so some of the satisfaction we obtain from the coarser jokes of Ulysses is not an aspect of the 'cloacal obsession' that Professor MacHugh attributes to the English: it is part of a total, cosmic, laughter that takes in drains, love, politics, and the deathless gods, and feels guilty about nothing.
One of Joyce's deatbless gods is language, and it is proper that he should find inherent comedy there. English is peculiar among the tongues of the world in that its two basic elements-Latin and Anglo-Saxon-are, though both derived from Indo-Germanic, differ- ent in genius, tugging opposite ways. The Anglo-Saxon favours the short word and the earthy denotation; Latin is more dignified, an intellectual language, happiest with orotundity and abstraction.
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? ? ? The Lab)" ,irllh
The Bedside Labyrinth
Joyce does not attempt to make an easy digestible cocktail out of them; he tends rather to push each to its limits. Gerard Manley Hopkins overstressed the Anglo-Saxon in English, John Milton the Latin, and the aim of each was highly serious. Joyce does what both did but knows that both processes best serve a comic purpose. And so Stephen's remorse over his dead mother and decaying family is lifted to a comic-ironic region by being expressed as 'agenbite of inwit', and 'ineluctable modality of the visible'-especially as it comes immediately after 'through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins' - w i l l warn us not to take the earnest young Stephen too seriously. When parodies appear they are usually parodies of silly-pompous Latinate prose, but Anglo- Saxon can be pushed far enough to take the edge of earnestness off
even the most blood-chilling description: 'Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun. '
Mter humour, and cognate with it, humanity. Ulysses is one of the most humane novels ever written. There is no cruelty to any animal (not even to dogs, which Joyce feared), and there are no notable acts of violence. The Citizen hurls a biscuit-tin after Bloom but misses him: even if he had hit him no great damage would have been done. A more sensational writer would have been glad to send Bloom off to lick genuine wounds. But the violence is symbolic here, as it is in the 'Circe' episode when the soldiers knock down Stephen. Stephen is more drunk than hurt, and even the expressed intention of violence brings on the Black Mass and Armageddon, as though the normal order of things can barely sustain it. The Croppy Boy is hanged in song and hallucination, and the technique of hanging in general is discussed, but it is all cleansed to comedy. Ulysses may do violence to language, but never to people.
There is plenty of hate in the book, as there are plenty of the hateful, but Joyce's doctrine of stasis insists on the artful purgation of strong feeling. The Sinn Fein attitude to the English oppressor is a convention, like the legend of poor suffering Ireland, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Kathleen na-Houlihan, the Shan van Vocht. It is blown up, especially in the- 'Cyclops' chapter, to a pitch of absurdity, so that the oppressive English reader may even enjoy the hate. As for the hateful, these are, by definition almost, those characters who are inimical to Stephen and Bloom, and their author's only revenge on them is to make them gently ridiculous. It seems that Joyce's intention was that the reader should find Buck Mulligan
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more and more detestable on each appearance, but this never hap-
pens: he is always welcome because of his wit. As for the other Antinous, Blazes Boylan, he is doomed to be ridiculous from the very start of his adulterous journey to Eccles Street, and we end with pity rather than hate. If we are really anxious to find someone to dislike in Ulysses, we should look rather in the direction of its secondary hero, Stephen Dedalus-insolvent, bumptious, full of in- tellectual pride and irreligious bigotry, drunk, would-be lecher, poseur. But, of course, we need his weaknesses as we need Bloom's strength, and without an imperfect Stephen the book could have neither plot nor pattern. We end up, to our surprise, by looking for
the good in everyone and discounting faults (there is nothing that can be called evil) as so many shadows. '.
Joyce is no Wellsian optimist- he does not believe in the perfec- tability of man-but he accepts the world as it is and relishes man's creations (why, otherwise, glorify an art or science in every chapter except the last ? ). The greatest of man's achievements, after language, is the community, and Joyce's Dublin stands for every city-state that ever was. The impersonal conurbation, what Auden calls -the 'abstract civic space imposed upon the fields', has no place in this concept. T o Joyce, a community is men meeting,. drinki~g, ar~uing) recognising each other in the stree~s, and one of. hIs pecuhar ~Il1racl~s
is to make a real historical Dublm (the Dubhn that flOUrIshed m summer, 1904) an eternal pattern of human society, All men gain strength and even a certain nobility from belonging to It, and Bloom and Stephen are equally citizens of a blessed Imperfect CIty, despIte their intermittent sense of inner exile. They are Dubliners first and all else after.
But, beyond the city, lies the whole of Western civilisation, and Bloom's strength can be properly exhibited only m relatIOn to that. It strides through the book in many of its aspects-economics, politics literature architecture, music and the rest-trying to dwarf Bloom,'shout hirr: down, overawe him. But he comes through it all unscathed, the common man undiminished by the acts of uncom- mon men. More than that, the 'Laestrygonians' episode shows him (as the 'Nestor' episode shows Stephen) as aware of the true natu~e of the time-process all men must suffer that cIVIlIsat10n (which IS not the same as history) may be achieved. History is a mess, an imposition of the dead on the living, a nightmare from which one is always trying to awaken (Finnegans Wake is to demonstrate that
history is a sham); art and science and the wonder of the human ,81
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community are, nevertheless, distilled out of histoty. It is the old business of the opposition of time and space. In Ulysses civilisation, like civic statues and an opera-house, fills up a spacious city; time is cut down to its minimum-nine-hundred-odd pages and far less than twenty-four hours. The next task (reserved for Finnegans Wake) will be to get rid of time altogether.
The spatial representation of the whole of Western culture-an heroic background for an advertising canvasser who is also a cuckold -calls for vast linguistic resources and justifies the stretching to the limit of the English language, the creation of new words and the resurrection ofold ones. The need to tell the truth about man's daily mind necessitates the fracture of syntax, the fusion and truncation of words, the phonetic transcription of vocables which are not properly words at all. No reader will find this linguistic display purely wanton, knowing Joyce's deeper aim. But he will be justified in being apprehensive about Joyce's next book. After the exploita- tion of the pre-verbal conscious mind, and even the odd trip to the borders of sleep, what can Joyce do next? He can only plunge straight into the unconscious mind and, for the purpose of des- cribing it, create something like a new language. We must take a deep breath before plunging with him. But, wherever we go and whatever we hear, we shall still be in Dublin listening to the speech of Dubliners, glorifying the family and the civic community, and tracing the adventures of a father, an exile, an unheroic hero.
PART THREE
THE MAN-MADE MOUNTAIN
? ? ? ? I: Big Night Music
STONES WERE THROWN AT STEPHEN, THE PROTOMARTYR. BY A miracle, he escaped hurt, kept the stones, and used them for building a labyrinth. Then, dissatisfied Daedalus, he broke up that all too merely superhuman structure and fused the stones into the first-ever fabricated mountain. The artist had been a metaphorical God-the- Father only; the time had come for him literally to rival the primal Creator by making something whose majesty and terror all men would perceive but which they would spend their lives trying to interpret. Finnegans Wake is as close to a work of nature as any artist ever got-massive, baffling, serving nothing but itself, suggesting a meaning but never quite yielding anything but a fraction of it, and yet (like a tree) desperately simple. Poems are made by fools like Blake, but only Joyce can make a Wake.
It took seventeen years to synthetise, starting after the launching
of Ulysses and reaching completion just before the outbreak of the second World War. It looked like a warning of the chaos to come; actually, so the interpreters found, it was all the bitterness of past time healed, Humpty Dumpty put together again, a secret guide to re'constituting any given chaos into a cosmos. None of this was clear during the long period of gestation: those who had given Joyce most support during the making of Ulysses were inclined to desert him as a man who was going further than was either sane or decent. But the fragments that appeared in the journal transition and the little pamphlets that came from Faber during the thirties-Anna Livia Plurabelle, Haveth Childers Everywhere, Tales Told ofShem and Shaun-seemed to us sixth-form boys merely charming:
o tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You'll die when you hear. Well, you know, when the old cheb went futt and did what you know. Yes, I la;low, go on. Wash quit and don't be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your
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Big Night Music
talktapes. And don't butt me-hike I-when you bend. Or whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park . . .
Everybody knew that these were substantial trailers of a big emer- gent book called, because the mystery-loving author would not divulge his ultimate title, Work in Progress. Something of the whole ambitious plan was revealed in a volume of essays called Our Exagmination round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, but it seemed possible to take the verbal fun of Anna Livia not too seriously, especially as Joyce himself had advertised it like this:
Buy a book in brown paper
From Faber & Faber
To see Annie Liffey trip, tumble and caper. Sevensinns in her singthings,
Plurabelle on her prose,
Seashell ebb music wayriver she flows.
What was it all but a more sophisticated 'Jabberwocky'? The derivation from Alice was pointed by the identification of the hero of Haveth Childers Everywhere with, though without his talent for semantic exegesis, Humpty Dumpty himself:
Humptydump Dublin squeaks through his norse, Humptydump Dublin hath a horrible vorse
And with all his kinks english
Plus his irismanx brogues
Humptydump Dublin's grandada of all rogues.
It was in an honoured English tradition-puns, portmanteau-words, teasing mystifications-but there were times when it seemed to go too far. How about all those names of rivers flashing like fish through the prose of babbling, bubbling, deloothering, giddygaddy, granny- rna, gossipaceous Anna Livia, water and woman?
Tell me the trent of it while I'm lathering hail out of Denis Florence MacCarthy's combies.
Is there irwell a lord of the manor or a knight of the shire at strike . . . ? . . . tapting a flank and tipting a jutty and palling in ana pietaring out
and clyding by on her eas! way.
Not where the Finn fits into the Mourne, not where the Nare takes lieve afBloem, not where the Braye divarts the Farer, nat where the May changez her minds twixt Cullin and Conn tween Cunn and Collin?
Moreover, the portmanteau-words of 'Jabberwocky' play fair. Forms like 'brillig' and 'slithy' resolve themselves into simple
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English, but Joyce knows more languages than Alice (whose dream- poem, after all, 'Jabberwocky' really is) and his puns and portman- teaux seem to be the thin end of a wedge that, driven into English, will cause it to crack, collapse, and be capable of being put together again only under the auspices of UNO. Joyce's language is a weird sort of pan-European, Eurish (I thank Michael Frayn for that term) with Asiatic loan-words added. Pun-European, rather. 'If one knows many foreign languages well, it is difficult to keep them out of the pun-mixer. Not that any average reader would cavil at 'silvamoon- lake', where 'silva' is not only 'silver' but a Roman wood. But one needs a sliver of Slav to cope with Anna Livia's soothing words to her crying son (almost at the end of Finnegans Wake): 'Muy malinchily malchick! ' This is evidently a sleepy deformation of ,My cold and melancholy male chick' but it is also the Russian 'Mory maiJenki malchik'- 'my little boy'.
How far can word-play legitimately go? The foreign language I . know best is Malay, and were I writing a new Finnegans Wake, I might be tempted to produce a sentence like 'Lanky Suky! Seidlitz! Bear rna stout in! ' One has a dream-sensation of a headachy Negro or Scot calling his wife or servant for a seidlitz powder followed by a bottle of stout, but at the same time the caller is stating that he is now thoroughly settled in Malaya (Langkasuka-the old Indian name for the country; 'seidlitz' pronounced 'settlers'; bermastautin- Malay for a settler). Would Joyce be pleased with that? Probably not with the clumsiness, but he would approve the attempt at widening the linguistic resources available for the punning technique. His aim, as we shall see, is the creation ofa universal myth, to which all cultures and languages are relevant (Chinese would have to be soft-pedalled, though, since it is a tongue incapable of admitting puns). If we do not catch all the references, even on a twentieth reading, that does not matter: the references are there, waiting for when we shall
understand them. Finnegans Wake, like Eliot's The Waste Land, is a terminus for the author-all the trains of his learning end up there- but it is also a starting-point for the reader: catch this slow train for Upanishad country; this express goes to German metaphysics; here is the special for the Book ofKells. We must not attempt to under- stand everything at once: that way madness lies. But Finnegans Wake hides in its word-playa very great amount of world culture, as well as Dublin street-cries, music-hall songs, cowheel, tripe, and best- sellers, and it waits on our becoming as erudite as Joyce himself.
I Plust not, anywhere in this part of my book, give the impression 187
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that Finnegans Wake is a humourless monster crammed with learning and merely seasoned with a few puns. It is always funny where it is not touching and inspiring, and it is provocative ofloud laughter just as is Ulysses (Nora Joyce heard that laughter constantly comin~ out of her near-blind hard-working husband's work-in-progress- room). The book has already revivified language for us, so that we all accept 'c\applause', the 'abnihilisation of the etym' (which means, optimistically, the re-creation of meaning out of nothing), 'In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen' and a host of other felicities. The play extends beyond mere words and embraces music: A. D. and B. C. -the whole of history- are reduced to a tinkling tune; Shaun, one of Anna Livia's sons, has a GBD pipe in his face or FACE, thus turning himself into a treble stave. A ghastly sequence of world-history ends with a mar- ginal drawing of dry bones and a nose with fingers put to it. The initial of the hero, Earwicker, falls on its back or claws the ground with its three feet. Aona Livia Plurabelle is turned into an ALP. Fancy knows no limits.
A giant disports itself with all learning and all language, a terribly
irreverent giant. But no man writes a book of six hundred and
twenty-eight pages (especially a man with Joyce's lack of sight, wealth and encouragement) for the sake of pure play and sheer irreverence. The technique is in the service ofsomething important, and we must now consider what that something important is. Alice again gives us our first clue. Her two books were all about dreams, and so is Finnegans Wake-or rather it depicts one great dream, the dream which is life ('Ever drifting down the stream-Lingering in the golden gleam-Life,what is it but a dream? ': Lewis Carroll's
epilogue is also an epigraph). In dreams we are released from the limitations of the spatio-temporal world. That world insists on one event following another and on keeping identities distinct, so that A cannot occupy the same bit of time-space as B; nor can A ever become B. But a dream permits Jonathan Swift to be also the Tristram that fell in love with Iseult and, at one and the same time, Parnell. A dream permits one's wife to become confused with one's daughter. In a dream Napoleon can defeat Wellingron, and in the year A. D. II32 at that. Dreams represent, however feebly, the world we all yearn for, a world of infinite plasticity.
To represent a dream convincingly, one needs a plastic language, a language in which two objects or persons can subsist in one and the same word. More than that, one requires a technique for killing the
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! ime-element ~hat resides in all language. I say, in waking language, My ~orpse Will eventually fertilise the earth and help the crops to grow, and that spatial process loses. Its quality of miracle (from death comes hfe) because of the d! lutlOn caused by the time-bound verb and adverb. Joyce throws the whole structure overboard uses Simple metathesis: 'corpse' becomes 'cropse'. Could anythi~gbe more beautIful or legitimate? At the same time a dream is not to be regarded as primarily a revealer of identities which the space-time world (that world of phenomenon, not ultimate truth) seeks to hide from us. We hve primarily in a waking world, and we cannot be
expected to understand everything that takes place in the world of dream. Hence dream-language must often deliberately conceal things frem us: It must appear to us as strange, almost gibberish-a non- stop babble. which throws up images of the non-time-space-world -only mterffilttently. In reading Fi1tnegans Wake, we are sometimes ~hocked by a sudden appearance of what looks like waking sense, as m some of the.
footnotes to the long chapter that seems to satirise scholarly leammg: 'All the world loves a big gleaming jelly'-a fair enough teleV1SlOn commemal slogan; 'Real life behind the flood- 11ghts as shown by the best exponents of a royal divorce. ' It is a rehef to find that dream-logic kills the waking sense: we refer to the words ofthe text which these footnotes seem to gloss and find nothing but nonsense. The word 'brandnewburgher' in the text is defined in the footnotes as 'A viking vernacular expression still used in the Summe:hill distri~: for a jerryhatted man of forty who puts two ~ngers m. to hiS bOllmg soupplate and licks them in turn to find out If there IS enough mushroom catsup in the mutton broth. ' We would hke more word-play there, more of the look of nonsense. We becom~ used to the mad idiom as we become used to the dark- either m sleep or at the cinema-and to blink one's eyes in the light of a sentence capable of orthodox grammatical analysis (even if the total sense has httle to do With the real world) is somewhat painful. L. "t us have more of 'Tomley. The grown man. A butcher szewched him the bloughs and braches. I'm chary to see P. Shuter. '
Joyce, ~owever, in planning his work, did much of it in the light. It IS shocking :0see how much of the early drafts of Work in Progress m. a~es pedestnan sense. Here is the first version of part of the Anna L,VIa Plurabelle chapter, as published in Navire d'Argent, '925:
~e;l me, ~ell me, how could ~he cam through all h~r fellows, the dare- devil. Lmki~g one ~nd knockmg the next and polhng m and petering out and clydmg by in the eastway. Who was the first that ever burst?
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Big Night Music
? The Man-made Mountain
Big Night Music
Someone it was, whoever you are. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, Paul Pry or polishman. That's the thing I always want to know.
Two years later, in transition, it had become
Ten me, tell me, how could she cam through all her fellows, the neckar she was, the diveline? Linking one and knocking the next, tapping a flank and tipping a jutty and palling in and petering out and clyding by on her eastway. Wai-whou was the first that ever burst? Someone he was, whoever they were, in a tactic attack or in single combat. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, Paul Pryor polishman. That's the thing I always want to know.
The following year it had thickened to
Tell rIle tell me how cam she carolin through all her fellows, the neckar she was the diveli~e? Linking one and knocking the next, tapting a flank and tipting a jutty and palling in and pietaring out and cIyding by on her eastway. Waiwhou was the first thurever burst? Someone he was, whuebra they were, in a tactic attack. or in single c? mbat. ~inker, titar, souldrer,
salor, Pieman Peace or Pohstaman. That s the thmg I always want to know.
In the final version the thickening has gone further and, since Joyce never lived to prepare a revised edition, furthest:
Tell me tell me how cam she camlin through all her fellows, the neckar she was the diveli~e? Casting her perils before our swains from Fonte-in- Monte to Tidingtown ~nd from Tidin~to~ til~avet. Linkin~ OI~e and knocking the next, taptmg a flank and tlptmg a JUt! )' and pallmg m and pietaring out and cIyding by on her eastway. Watwhou was the first thurever burst? Someone he was, whuebra they wete, in a tactic attack or in single combat. Tinker, tilar, souldrer, salor, Pieman Peace or Polistaman. That's the thing I'm elwys on edge to esk.
That final sentence, you will agree, is a great improvement on the
first draft (retained, you will notice, in the next two versions), but I cannot help feeling that Joyce might have been happier if he had been able to revise 'in a tactic attack or in single combat'-painfully naked! - to something like 'in a tackstick tattack or in sinful wombat'.
We accept the language of dream, then, and the author's laying on of thicker and thicker blankets of dark (with holes in to let in a little light), but now we must ask what the dream is about. Life, yes, . but whose life? The answer IS: the hfe of the whole human race-Ill a word history. Stephen Dedalus, like Bloom, was oppressed by that night;"are from which he was trying to awake: is he now submitting to the nightmare, settling down to a long sleep the better to be frightened by it? No, because he has rejected Mr Deasy's vision of history as a long line of events leading to the emergence of God.
Time remains the enemy; history must be spatialised. How? By
seeing it as a circle, a wheel perpetually turning, the same events recurring again and again. In that 'Nestor' episode of Ulysses there is a reference to Vico Road, Dalkey, and it is the Italian historio- grapher, Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744), who shows the way to the wheel.
Joyce took to the 'roundheaded Neapolitan', and was particularly interested in the fact that he seemed to have feared thunderstorms, just like himself. 'It is almost unknown to the male Italians I have met', he said. Thunder plays a big part in the scheme of history presented in the Scienza Nuova: it starts off, a terrible voice of God, each of the four segments into which Vico divides his circle-the theocratic age, the aristocratic age, the democratic age, the ricorso or retnrn to the beginning again. It is the thunder which drives men to change their social organisations (they run into shelters, which foster the building of communities, to escape from it). Language is an attempt to present in human vocables the noise which the thunder makes. Thunder-which is only heard, like God, as a noise from the street in Urysses-becomes part ofthe very fabric ofthe sound-stream that is Finnegans Wake.
Joyce did not borrow from Vico's theory consistently. It fired his imagination; he especially liked Vico's insistence on the importance of mythology and etymology in the interpretation of history and his granting to mere events a ? secondary role. But he did not take the cyclical theory as chronologically true: it was rather in the field of the human psyche that the awareness of repetition and retnrn could be best exploited. Joyce's pseudo-Viconian pattern starts off with the cult of the giant, the colossal hero who is too big to be true. When he dies, he can all too easily wake again, but he must be kept asleep so that the truly human ruler can come along-the father- . figure who has a wife and begets sons and daughters. A son will debase the doctrines of the father, leading a so-called people's state which has the elements of decay in it because the ancient laws which make for stability have been ill-remembered or falsely interpreted. There has to be a ricorso-a retnin to the rule of the gigantic hero, and the cycle starts all over again, for ever and ever, allmen. In
Joyce, the thunder is not so much the voice of God as the noise of a fall-the fall of the primal hero, the fall of man-and its dynamic charges the wheel and makes it turn. All history (at least, as it ap- pears in a dream) is the story? of falling and-through the force of that fall which makes the wheel go round-retnrning. Time as we
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Big Night Music
the book as Kevin and Jerry, but they sustain major roles throughout the dream mainly as Shem and Shaun).
The dreamer Joyce dreams of a Saturday night in which-between
rumbustious carousal and Sabbath peace-Earwicker is dreaming in
bed, his wife beside him. The five of the family have to act the whole of human history in dream, and this is a difficult task, necessitating a great deal of doubling, trebling and so on to the figure rI. But support is obtainable from the bar-help and the cleaning-woman, and even a picture on the wall-the Archangel Michael quelling Satan-will assist with the mythology. The four corners of the bed
can be Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (fused into Mamalujo), and
a. calendar could originate the seven rainbow girls, the twenty-eight
gIrls who follow Issy, and the ponderous twelve who (like the twelve
contnbutors to Our Exagmination round His Factification for? In- camination of Work in Progress) give judgement in -ation-ending polysyllables. And, of course, these characters can have their origin III some of the pub-customers. Human history, this bed thy centre IS, these walls thy sphere.
Alice is the centre of her dreams, but she originates none of the action: she is the driven, not the driver. Earwicker has to have a deep unconscious motive for re-enacting man's perpetual fall and resur- rection -an in-built guilt which starts history off and keeps the wheel turnmg. T. his g~iltis never far to seek in a man who, himself ageing, has an agemg WIfe and a nubile daughter. He seeks his youth again, he looks for the wife he once courted. An incestuous longing for his daughter is a pathetic attempt to remain loyal to his wife while
indulging the last spurt of desire for a body comely and sweet as cmnamon. This longing is too terrible to be revealed nakedly in dreams: it becomes a sin as vague as Adam's-something that was done in a park, the guilt of it making HCE (the initials are more Important than the name) indulge in Freudian self-defence, usually WIth a stutter. It identifies him with all guilty lovers, from Tristram t~ Parnell, and even with the great god-giant Finnegan, whose pre-
hls;orIC fall stIll has the whole world (Dublin, that is) rumbling. It
IS tIme for us to meet Finnegan. Mter all, this is his wake.
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know it from the calendars and the history-books has no place here. If we want a perpetual patient current, underlying all the thumping falls and painfur resurrections of man, we had best look for It ~n woman, who carries sin (Eve) but does not herself sm (the V1rgI~ Mary) who is spatial and solid but also fluid, renewed as a nver IS renew~d, and not through the thunderous dynamism. of a fall. As for dates in our dream-history, let these have very lIttle chrono- logical significance. The big year of Finnegans Wake is II32. Falling bodies (we are back with Leopold Bloom) drop at the speed of 32 feet per second per second; I I is the figure of return-we have finished counting on our ten fingers and must start all. over ag~m: 32 is for Adam and Parnell and Humpty Dumpty. II IS. for domg what the king's horses and men could not do, what the Insh people did not wish to do and what Christ alone was able to do. But, m a dream where Chri~tjoins the other dead and resurrected gods, it is left to woman to gather the broken fragments of the eg~ and, 'sunny side up with care' transmit them to the next generatIOn, enablmg old Parhumptyada~-myportmanteau-name, no. tJoyce's-to live on, through met him pike hoses, in the flesh and spmt ~fothers.
Soon we Qlust plunge into thIS dream of hIstory Wlt~ great tea-or- whiskey-or-Guinness-fortified couiage. But a very pertment questIOn now is: who, in Finnegans Wake, dreams the dream? The obvIOUS answer is: Joyce himself, since only Joyce knows all that Joyce knows. Similarly, those briefer summer and wmter dreams are dreamed by Lewis Carroll. But Carroll has Alice as hIS dreamer-wlthm-the- dream while he dreams on the outside. Joyce must have his dreamer, too. N~wFinnegans Wake is ceasing to be merely hist? ry ridden on a cycle'doWll a road of portmanteau-word cobbles; It IS becommg a
novel. bl' .
joyce's hero is a common ~an, lik~ Bloom: He is a pu lc~n In Chapelizod, a suburb of DublIn, a~d hIS name IS Humphrey Chlmp- den Earwicker. This is no very Insh name, and we learn, through the devious mists of dream-language, that Earwicker is in fact a foreiguer, just like Bloom. But he is ~ota Jew: his race is Scandi- navian and his religion Protestant ChrIstIan. He . thus belongs to the stock of the conquering Teutons-Danes, EnglIsh-w~o tookover Dublin and whom Dublin is likely to resent. Because he IS a forelguer he is turned-by a malevolent xenophobic citizenr! -into all fOreI~n- ers; host of an inn, he is the uneasy guest of a City. He has a w~fe, Anna and three children-Isabel (or Issy, or Izzy) and boy-tWIns whos~ real names are never made clear (they appear at the end of
192
f,
? ? ? 2: Bygmester Finnegan
A LARGE NUMBER OF THE LITERATE, INCLUDING CRITICS AND literary historians, insist on punctuating Joyce's title for him, be- lieving that-through inadvertency or ignorance-he left out an apos- trophe in Finnegans. Their pedantry destroys a pregnant ambiguity. Finnegans Wake fuses two opposed notions-the wake, or funeral feast, of Finnegan; the waking up of all Finnegans. In the very name Finnegan the whole of Vico's ricorso is summed up: we finish (fin, fine, finn) and we start egan or again.
There is, however, a piece of folk-literature called 'Finnegan's Wake', complete with apostrophe-an Irish-American comic song that goes like this:
His friends assembled at his wake. Missus Finnegan called out for lunch:
And first they laid in tay and cake,
Then pipes and tobaccy and whiskey punch.
Miss Biddy Moriarty began to cry:
'Such a purty corpse did yez ever see? Arrah, Tim rnavourneen, an' why did ye die? '
'Hold yer gob,' sez Judy Magee.
Then Peggy O'Connor took up the job.
'Arrah, Biddy,' sez she, eyer wrong, I'm sure. '
But Biddy gave her a belt in the gob
And laid her sprawling on the flure. Each side in war did soon engage;
'Twas woman to woman and man to man;
Shillelah law was all the rage
And a bloody ruction soon began.
Mickey Maloney raised his head,
When a gallon o f whiskey flew at him j
It missed and, falling on the bed, The liquor scattered over Tim.
'Och, he revives! See how he raises! ' And Timothy, jumping up from bed,
Sez, 'Whirl your liquor around like bIazes- Souls to the devil! D'ye think I'm dead? '
. Chorus:
Whack! Hurroo! - now dance t o your partner!
Welt the flure, your trotters shake; Isn't it the truth I've told ye,
Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake?
Joyce, writing one of the most difficult books of all time, at least bases it on very lowly material. He takes his theme of death and resurrection from a vaudeville song and, working out his theme, makes more references to popular art than to the best that has ever been thought and said. This is in conformity with the dream- maker's technique of building his elaborate structures out of shreds and patches (who ever dreamt through even a page of The Critique of Pure Reason I), but it is also the consummation of that fateful cocoa-session in NO. 7 Eccles Street. Joyce has committed himself to the exaltation of the common man, whose timeless saga Finnegans Wake is. Deathless heroes and resurrected gods float through the b? ok to the tunes of street-songs, fourth-form parodies of prayers, b,ts of scandal out of the Sunday papers. Whatever Fmnegans Wake may be, it is not a highbrow book. Or rather its highbrow elements float on the top like tea-leaves: the brew is all.
'95
194
Tim Finnegan lived in Walker Street,
An Irish gintleman, mighty odd.
He'd a bit of a brogue, so neat and sweet,
And to rise in the world, Tim carried a hod.
But Tim had a sort of tippling way: With a love of liquor Tim was born,
And to help him through his work each day,
Took a drop of the creature every morn.
Chorus:
Whack! Hurrool-now dance to your partner! Welt the flure, your trottrers shake;
Isn't it the truth I've told ye,
Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake?
One morning Tim was rather full,
His head felt heavy and it made him shake. He fell from the ladder and broke his skul~
So they carried him home, his corpse to wake. They tied him up in a nice clean sheet,
Aud laid him out upon the bed, Wid a gallon of whiskey at his feet,
And a barrel of porter at his head.
Bygmester Finnegan
? ? ? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
Bygmester Finnegan
The very term 'wake' is a suggestive one to a word-loving artist,
containing as it does the opposed theses ofdeath and life. In essence, Finnegans Wake is all about what happens while Finnegan lies, life suspended, on the bed, the twelve mourners all about him. In the great dream he is, inevitably, transmuted from a mere drunken bricklayer to an archetypal builder of ancient civilisations, whose fall is so loud that it becomes Vico's thunderclap (always easily recog- nisable as a word of exactly one hundred letters), who is identifiable with Ibsen's Masterbuilder (Bygmester in Dano-Norwegian), with the legendary Irish giant Finn MacCool, who was fifteen cubits high, and with Joyce's own mythical hero, HCE. This last identification may seem confusing: after all, Earwicker is supposed to replace Finnegan as a new heroic type-the family man as opposed to the fabulous giant. But we must constantly remember how small our cast is, and Earwicker, as father of the acting troupe, must take all the heavy parts.
Finnegan's fall, acted by HCE, opens the book, but only after Joyce has swiftly presented the story's main themes and symbols (as he presented all the musical subjects of the 'Sirens' episode in
Ulysses before actually striking up his fugue). Let us gulp back all our apprehensions and wade into this opening:
riverrun, past Eve an~ Ad~m's, fro1J0 swer. ve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodlUs VICUS of reclrculatlOD back to Howth Castle and
Environs.
Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passencore
rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his-penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themse1se to Lau~ens County's. gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the t1~e: nor aVOlce from afi. re bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatnck: nor yet, though vems- soon after had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in va~essy were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa's m~lt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to
the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on ttIe aquaface.
Difficult? Oh yes, difficult. But a certain difficulty is the small price
we must pay for excitement, richness, originality. And we must learn
to smile rather than frown: this is the world of 'Jabberwocky'. But
the dream is not Alice's. We are dreaming a mature dream, remem-
bering the past of mankind and the primal guilt that histoty hides but reveals. Yet the dream is a joke, as life itself may be.
That first sentence is the only one of the whole book that begins without a capital letter. Joyce tells us why in the word 'vicus' (Latin
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for Vico) and also in 'recirculation'. We are not beginning; we are resuming. History ~s a circle, as Vico taught, and we have entered it in the middle of a sentence. If we want the start of that sentence, we have to look at the last line of the book, where we find 'A way a lone a last a loved a long the'-no full stop. Ideally, then, having finished the book we have to turn back again to the first page and ride with the cycle once more. Time may have a stop but history's wheel is in perpetual motion.
Joyce sets his book in Dublin. 'Eve and Adam's' refers primarily to Adam and Eve's Church, but it also implies the mythical begin- ning of human life: we are in the giant age of fable.