T o contact the master, hidden
somewhere
in the earth beneath the
vast slack body of Yawn, requires much preparation.
vast slack body of Yawn, requires much preparation.
re-joyce-a-burgess
.
with nurse Madge, my linkingclass, she s a fnght, poor old dutch, m her sleeptalking when I paint the
measles on her and mudstuskers to make her a man'. (She must
always have her mirror to turn herself into the two temptresses in th~ park. ) The episode th~ckens with Swift-Stella allusions. Jaun raIses hls chalIce and says: Esterelles, be not On your weeping what though Shaunathaun is in his fail! ' The holy cup is also a 'bridle's cup' filled with champagne bubbling with concupiscent connotations. 'So gullaby, me poor Isley! '
Issy-Izzy-Iseult is the Church he leaves behind, to be comforted
by 'Dave the Dancekerl' who 'will arrive incessantly in the fraction of a crust'. The Paraclete and the Eucharist appear in one image. Issy's name is changed to Julia Bride (Christ's bride, the Church) and Dave, the Holy Ghost, is introduced to her. But, if we are to prune away excess characters with Occam's razor, this Paraclete must be Shem, a~d, indeed, we hear: 'He's the mightiest penum- brella I ever flounshed on behond the shadow of a post! ' It is right that Shem, artlst, vessel of mSptratlOn, should play the descending dove. But Jaun-ChrlSt has to struggle with impulses of an old en-
mity-'We're as thick and thin now as two tubular jawballs. I hate him about his patent henesy, plasfh it, yet am I amorist. I love him.
1 In the year of the Irish potato famine Protestant evangelists made converts through the bnbe of potato soup. Hence potatoes have ever since been called 'protestants'.
A lot of them want him to retire on pension, but where is the money from ? He would be ready enough to turn back from glory
tocome . . . , ld ifhe could only find the girl of his heart, a teashop mppy, my a y
fL 't lookafterhim. Buthisdreamoftea-caddyhomehness,
oyons,a
t ted by the umbrella-saint James Hanway from the
b' Id 19 war ,
proec '1 ' . fV
. h t through with Swift-gm t- vafilty 0 anessy . . . peepe .
IS
sOH'
d'd k
tl tl' (Swift's little language: ppt). IS gran lOse reams ta eon
peepe ~ If he had money he would invest it in 'vestments of anewlorffi. . h 'd subdominal poteen at pri~ecost'; he IS, he says~the gogetter t at ,
make it pay like cash repsters as sure as there s a p~t on a pole. Rich, he would plant Izzy 'on the electnc ottoman m the lap of
2# 245
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
Shaun to Jaun to Yawn
I love his old portugal's nose'-and we are not surprised to find later that Jaun starts a grumbling programme of disparagement. It begms with a discussion about church music and Shem's vocal gift: '. . . he could be near a colonel with a voice like that'. Shcm becomes Stephen Dedalus-Joyce and Jaun becomes Buck Mulligan-? ogarty: 'The misery billyboots I used to lend hIm before we spht (we are back in the Martello Tower). The latter identification is a pregnant one when we remember Mulligan's mockery of the Mass, his ballad
about Joking Jesus. AB for the real Joyce behind these dream-masks,
he is there in the 'beurlads scael' (his first job in exile was as a teacher in the Berlitz School), placing 'the ocean between his and ours't trying to be 'as homely gauche as swif~'. The sacred spirit (Holy Ghost) is reduced to ('homely gauche) a mockmg, rather mept satirical sneerer. But-'my positively last at any stagel'-Jaun has done talking: ' 'tis time to be up and ambling'.
He is becoming, though big, vague and pitiable. He is 'Jaun the Boast' but the twenty-nine girls of St Bride's are prepared to accord him a hero's farewell. More, they will hymn this grotesque barrel of wind like the god Osiris, like a fertile tree or a spring in the desert:
Oasis cedarous esaltarshoming Leafboughnoon! Oisis,' coolpressus onrnountof Sighing!
. . . Pipetto, Pipetta has misery unnotIced t
Issy-Izzy-Iseult is there, Swiftian little language and all, now turned into Isis wife-sister of the god. Off, mourned, he goes down the river, '';ith a posse of tossing hankerwaves to his windwar~ ~ike seraph's summonses on the air . . . along the highroad of the nation, Traitor's Track', poor stuff compared WIth hIS father: But does he not seem to take on, in the distance, the mirage qualities of a true
god, fertiliser not mere dirt? His name becomes Haun.
The silent cock shall crow at last. The west shall shake the east awake. Walk while ye have the night for morn,lightbreakfastbringer, morroweth
whereon every past shall full fast sleep. Amain.
Sleep, though, is Shaun's meed from now on. In the next chapter, his own last he has become Yawn, a great swollen hulk, a torpId giant lying ;n a hill, a wretched parody of Finnegan. To him there come the eternal four- 'Shanator Gregory . . . Shanator Lyons . . . his Recordership, Dr Shunadure Tarpey . . . old Shunny Mac- Shunny, MacDougal the hiker, in the rere of them on the run' (Johnny MacDougal, last gospeller, also represents lJlster, behmd
the other Irish provinces in finding freedom from Bntlsh rule), and 246
with them is their donkey, the 'skygrey globetrotter'. They question Yawn, being assured that he is not dead but sleeping, and a kind of ventriloquial voice booms out at them in answer from the prostrate giant-form. What the four wish to know is Yawn's 'historical grouns': after all, he has been set up as their ruler. The voice of Yawn refers them back to the 'prehistoric barrow . . . the orangery' -in other words, the heap of dirt and orange-peel where the hen scratched up the letter. The questioners say that they have heard from their donkey that in Yawn there is no way to the better life, despite his big boastful kingly vocabulary: 'no moorhens cry'or mooner's plankgang . . . to lead us to hopenhaven'. Yawn's reply is evasive and in French: 'Moy jay trouvay la clee dang les champs. ' He found, like St Patrick, the key in the fields, the shamrock that is a figure of the Holy Trinity. But his attempt to identify himself with the saint is confused by the tones of guilty love (Swift was Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin): 'Trinathan partnick dieudonnay. Have you seen her? Typette, my tactile 0 l' Given by God (,dieudonnay') he is nevertheless 'partnick' (part the devil, part his brother): he lacks the solidity, the confident unity (despite the guilt) ofHCE.
Succeeding questions strive to reach the old solidity that lies
somewhere beneath this soft, lumpish, decaying giant. What does Yawn know about the 'oxeyed man' who sailed from 'Daneland'? The initials we have missed for so many pages reappear, with most heroic associations: 'Ecce Hagios Chrismanl' (behold the saintly Christman); 'Hunkalus Childared Easterheld' (Easter hero); 'Hill- cloud encompass us. ' Yawn will not at first admit that HCE was his true father, since he wants no share in his guilt, but soon he utters a Nordic rune made out of the great initials:
- Hail him heathen, heal him holystone! Courser, Recourser, Changechild . . . . . . . . . ? Eld as endall, earth . . . . . . . . . '?
And then Yawn accepts that Original Sin that springs from his father: 'By him it was done bapka, by me it was gone into . . . ' And he states HCE's name as it appeared in Hasty's ballad: 'Me das has or oreils. Piercey, piercey, piercey, piercey! ' But there is something else there, too: 'Midas has (gold) ears-ass's ears': was not this another secret that soon, through the whispering of the reeds, spread abroad about another great ma~? HCE can transmute common things to gold, the all-father, but he is also part-animal (ass's ears). Yet the heroic wheel comes full circle when we remember that, in Finnegans Wake, Christ is identified with the ass he rode on.
247
/I? ? ? l
u
'I ,I
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
Shu-un to Jaun to Yawn
Mter the father, the twins. The four suspect that Shaun, though he represented himself as the originatOr of the Word, as well as Its deliverer, is hiding the truth, the fact that It was ~he? , who found the letter when the hen scratched it up: 'The gIst IS the gIst of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas' (ccho ofIsaac's words). Yawn is asked if he thinks Shem is a 'counterfeit Kevin' (it was St Kevin who was believed to be the wisest ofIreland's saints): 'have you reasonable hesitancy in your m! nd ~bouthim 1. ' Shaun-Yawn:s confusion affects his language, turnmg It to glbbensh, a macaromc mixture of tongues making it end as pidgin: 'Me no angly mo, me speakee Yellman's'lingas' and so on. 'Hell's Confuci~m and ~he Elements! ' cry the four. '. . . Thot's never the postal clerIC, checkmg chinchin chat with nipponnippers! ' And, pressed as to whether he is really St Patrick, Yawn will give no direct answer,. o,nly the riddling 'Quadrigue my yoke. Trtple my tryst. Tandem my SIre, whIch
hides the date of Patrick's coming to Ireland: 432 ('Quad . . . trtple . . . tandem'). Eventually it appears that th~reis no real ~uestionof establishing identity for Yawn at all, nor IS there for hIS brother. Shem and Shaun are 'alionola equal and OpposIte brUflOlpso, Id est, eternally provoking alio opposite equally as provoked as Br~no at being eternally opposed by Nola. Poor ommboose,smgalow smgle- arum . . . ' Bruno the Nolan has been once more mvoked to sho;; how opposites are reconciled under God. But the trouble here IS that there is no God: this is a phase of hIstory WIthout belIef. The brothers do not merge into their great positive father; they merely
cancel each other out. All they can do in their pathetic attempt to affirm identity is to borrow from their father, and all they can bor- row is the sin he committed in the park. Is the o~lyreal be~ng,then, HCE 1 No we must not forget the sexual polanty, a posItive thmg, unlike the' brother polarity, which is negative. We come now to ALP once more.
But ALP is not primarily concerned with talking about herself. Her voice comes from the depths, rehearsmg yet agam the tale of the scandal. HCE was wronged. He was blackmailed:
The said Sully, a barracker associated with tinkers. , t? e blackhan~,Shovel- lyvans, wreuter of annoyimgmost letters and sktrnless ball~:ts l! l. Par~ee Franch who is Magrath's thug and smells cheaply of Power s spmts, lIke a deepsea dibbler, and he is not fit enough to throw guts down to a
bear.
Magrath (the cad with the pipe 1) is the enemy. But while A L P as 'Your wife. Amn. Anm. Amm. Ann' is HCE's defender, she remams
248
an aspect. of the women he is said to have wronged, and we must not
be. surpnsed to hear tones of complaint from her. She is many
VOIces, the rIver of woman m many tributaries, but she ends up as
~he loyal ALP we know: nobody 'on allad the hold scurface of the Jorth would come next or nigh him, Mr Eelwhipper, seed and nursery man'.
We want further information about HCE. We hear the very title of that book about Work in Progress which was written by Joyce's twelve: 'Your exagmmatlOn round his factification far incaminatian of a warping process. Declaiml' We know that the eternal twelve are
here, bu: what is t~is. 'warping pr~cess'? It is an image of two op- posed thmgs-a bUlldmg-up (weavmg) and a breaking-down (twist- mg out of shape)-and we are not surprised to 'see the empire of HC. E honoured in a 'Dunker's durbar' and then, 'after his life over- lastmg . . . reduced to nothing'. And what is Work in Progress 1 It is anot~er. na~e f~r Fmnegans Wake. Here then he lies, the great man
on. hIs bIer. But, cry the voices, 'there's leps offlam in Funnycoon's WIck. The keyn has passed. Lung lift the keying . . . God save you king! Muster of the Hidden Life! ' It is only a vision, though. We have not yet reached the undying heart of HCE.
T o contact the master, hidden somewhere in the earth beneath the
vast slack body of Yawn, requires much preparation. First we have to hear strange voices out of the past, voices of war and love- 'Slog slagt and sluaghter! Rape the daughter! Choke the pope! . . . PIpette dear! Us! Us! Me! Me! . . . O! Mother of my tears! Believe for me! Fold thy son! '-and mixed up with these ancestral voices is t~e. n;etal. lic '~in' or 'Zinz. in' v:hich may be the tap o f a dry branch ( ,\IP ) WIth lIfe put back mto It. The enquirers, excited, cry: 'Now
we re gettm It. Tune m and pick up the forain counties! Hello! ' but
almost at once there is nothing but SILENCE. Still, the interred presence of HCE seems to be sending out shoots oflife and violence and we feel justified in setting the stage for his appearance at last; 'Act drop: Stand byI Blinders! Curtain up. Juice, please! Foots! ' But ~e stdl get nothmg but voices. At length, though, one voice descrIbes two objects we have already seen earlier in Anna Livia
Plurabelle's own chapter: "
- The flagstone. By tombs, deep and heavy. To the unaveiling memory of. Peacer the grave. .
- . . . There used to be a tree s~uck up? An overIisting eshtree?
- There used, sure enough. BeSIde the Annar. At the ford of Slivena- mand. Oakley Ashe's elm.
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain . .
th 1m were we remember, the manif~stat~on~ of
I~eston~~n~is~e~dlaw, a~dShem, with his living lI~SplratlOn. a,:::, WI h e melted into the father, and the tree ofhfe-round But e sons av iverse bur eons and plays-is the symbol of the
WhiCh af'i'i'~~und ALP W~look in the dense text for Yggdras! 1l,
~? ;Id-t,re~;t~No;th~:~:en~a~~~~:::;~~:~i:':l~
dIsguIsed: coe r~ l~SmUe 'ste ne of law' is 'tod' (German for
eggdrazzles for him. Th b' Y 'the form masculine. The gender 'd h') while the tree com illes '1
c eat . " We are getting closer to the great father and faml y-man. lemlmne . h'
But the huge fish takes some catc mg: .
-There's an old psalmsobbi~glax salmoner fogeyboren Herrtn Plunde-
h
Who ;:::floundering with/his b::~a::d1v:flrs~nb~:~:na~:~thand Leaping [reck after every ang
cleanliving man and, as a matter of fict, by my halfwife, I think how our public at large appreciates it most highly from me that I am as cleanliving as could be and that my game was a fair average since I perpetually kept my ouija ouija wicket up.
Here is the old stutter and the old desperate facetiousness in self- defence, though we become aware gradually (we are warned in 'ouija ouija') that HCE is speaking through a 'control' and that this is a seance. The drift of his statement is the fundamental harmless- ness of all his acts. He, in his position as innkeeper and solid citizen, could never afford 'to be guilty of crim crig con of malfeasance trespass against parson with the person of a youthful gigirl frifrif friend'. Anna is his 'bestpreserved wholewife'; he loves her dearly. There is not one 'teaspoonspill o f evidence at bottomlie t o my babad'; the libel that has spread all over the city, all over the world, must be laid at the door of the 'caca cad' with the pipe in the park. 'Hole affair is rotten muckswinish porcupig's draff. Enouch t'
Reception is bad. HCE becomes confused with another character,
perhaps the 'control', whose name is 'Whitehed'. But this name
changes to 'Whitehowth', and 'poor. Haveth Childers Everywhere' is dream-identified with Finnegan himself, the head of Howth. HCE is the hill, the castle, the city. Nobility starts through the comic bubbling. His history is not a history of shame but of achievement:
. . . here where my tenenure of office and my toils of domestication first began, with weight of woman my skat and skuld but Flukie of the Ravens as my sure piloter, famine with Englisch sweat and oppedemics, the twotoothed dragon worms with alIsort serpents, has compolitely seceded from this landleague of many nations and open and notorious naughty livers are found not on our rolls. This seat of our city it is of all sides pleasant, comfortable and wholesome. If you would traverse hills, they are not far off. If champain land, it Iieth of all parts. If you would be de1ited with fresh water, the famous river, called of Ptolemy the Libnia
Labia, runneth fast by. If you will take the view of the sea, it is at hand.
Give heed!
Give heed, in fact, to this tale of a fair city, a tale qualified with
wrongs and failures, but still a heartening chronicle. Here is the great boon of a life, drunk with variety, built (on me, your sleeping giant'. The hill-giant wed the woman-river; he 'knew her fleshly when all my bawdy did I her whorship, min bryllupswibe: Heaven, he haIl- thundered; Heydays, he flung blissforhers'. The very forces of the sky flashed and drummed their union. HCE fed, loved, dressed, glorified his spouse, planted Chesterfield elms and Kentish hops, a Q! leen's garden; 'I brewed for my alpine plurabel1e, wigwarming
25 I
Humbermouth.
Our Human Conger Eel!
.
. k arguments as to whether It
producillg-goo . d I',cate She talks to her ffilrror- I h . altemptressm up . .
Iseu t as t e pnm I . I h t the dreamer has been domg image and she tells us p aill y w a
with his dream: .
. d n Of course it was downright verry wl~ed It's meem1y us two. , meme I, 0" d How me adores eatsother Simply
of him, reely rneetmg l! 1e ~lifj)seinhi; storm collar, as I leaned yestreen (Mon i~hebeau. l Ma rebne e e. ~ little porn got excited, when I turned
~i~~! ~:u~~s~:! ~amin~;ebustYandkissed him more. .
h h eared in this scene at theIr most The four old men. -w 0 a~v~~Plrttle more. The task of enquiry intelligent and dlgmfied-c 'We bright young chaps of
must be handed over t~,~~~;:;::::t~~dsare brisker. Mter a brief
. . h
ir:
s~~t~~~~e:it might not have been evil-
Reminiscence~of the
was really a Sl~a(~,Foenix Culpritl) lead at length to Issy-1zzy-
the brandnew bramtrus . ' g fKate wh0 questlOI'. m o . f' D
to say that HCE was frisky enough
seems .
croak, evildoer! ArIse, SIr g os s.
Fullacau's sake! '), the boys of the bram- ear' 'Fa Fe Fi Fo Fum! Ho, trust bid the bUrled sill~er-h:ron:~f~d at last we listen to the
for Sill (Fuddhug un or
genuine voice of HCE: . I . u I Eternest cittas, heil t Here we are agalJ?
I am - Amtsadam, SIr, to yo . 1 ct of dynasties long out of pnnt, the
bubub brouJlht up u'bder d(~:r;itOWll. ugh MacAuscullpth the Thord I), first of Shltnc Shllkan ~ar I known throughout the world . . . as a but, in pontofacts masslmust, am
250
Shaun to Jatln to Yawn
? ? The Man-made Mountain
wench . . . my granvilled brandold Dublin lin~ub, the free, the froh the frothy freshener. ' He laid down roads, nch with traffic, all for her pleasure. (We hear no stutter now. ) The voice of the giant, wine-god, city-maker, calls from beneath and beyond the crushed lump of the body of his failed successor, false redeemer. Trumpet his fame, four gospellers: 'Mattahah! Marahah! Luahah! Joahana- hanahana l'
8: Bed and Ricorso
SPRING DAWN, THE MASTER BEDROOM OF THE BRISTOL TAVERN,
a stirring out of sleep: 'What was thaas? Fog was whaas? Too mult sleepth. Let sleepth . . . But really now whenabouts? Expatiate then how much times we live in. Yes? ' Yes, indeed, for the decayed times are not just the decor of the dream of Earwicker; they are here and now, the gods and city-builders underground, love a travesty, faith dead. Our own dream of life, which sees the pair asleep or half- awake, twitching at the light, awaits the ricorso, the return to nobility and creativeness.
The twins, Kevin and Jerry, 'nicechild' and 'badbrat', sleep, watched over by 'kinderwardens', the Mamalujo bedposts and the ass that is Christ. Isobel, Saintette Isabelle, lies prettily, 'wild- wood's eyes and primarose hair . . . in mauves o f moss and daphne- dews . . . child of tree, like somelosthappy leaf, like blowing flower stilled. ' As for the parents-
in their bed of trial, on the bolster of hardship, by the glimmer of memory, under coverlets of cowardice, Albatrus Nyanzer with Vieta Nyanza, his mace of might mortified, her beautifell hung up on a nail, he, Mr of our fathers, she, our moddereen ru arue rue, they, ay, by the hodypoker and blazier, they are, as sure as dinny drops into the dyke . . .
A cry off.
The king arid queen (or queen and consort, Victoria and Albert, two great African lakes of sleep) are deposed to mere father and mother when they hear this cry. 'Where are we at all? and whenabouts in the name of space? ' They are in a house. They are in a bedroom which is a stage-set (is not ordinary life just one of our acts, a play we are condemned to I). We see now the provenance of some of the charaCters of the bigger play of sleep-'Adam's mantel . . . over mantelpiece picture of Michael, lance, slaying Satan, dragon with smoke . . . ' We see a man with a nightcap and a woman with curlpins.
253
? ? The Man-made Mountain
Bed and Ricorso
To our surprise we discover that it is not sleep which has been dis- turbed by the 'cry off' but the act of intercourse. We see this from the viewpoints oftheir own four bedposts-like Christ's life, reported by four cold gospellers, their uncreative act is blazoned to the world. At the end of the bedroom inventory comes 'man's gummy article, pink'.
The first gospeller describes the two with cold exactness-the man's 'beastly expression, fishy eyes', exhibiting rage. He is 'ruddy blond, Armenian bole, black patch, beer wig, gross build, episcopa- lian, any age'. She has a 'haggish expression, peaky nose, trekant mouth'; she is 'undersized, free kirk, no age'. These are not the HCE and ALP we have known. Soon they are designated as Mr and Mrs Porter. At last we learn their real names. 'Earwicker' is comic, romantic, better for a dream than for real life; 'Porter' is right for a stout-seller, one who carries burdens. But we will still call them by the names we have known longest.
Upstairs are the Porter babes-the Corsican brothers in one room; little pussy, whose 'pessname' is Buttercup, in the other. The parents enter the twins' room, where 'our bright bull b~be Frank Kevin' is happily asleep. 'Jerry Jehu', though, has had a nightmare, and it is his cry that disturbed the queasy dawn act of love. Shem the Penman to come, he has not yet made ink flow, but 'he has
pipettishly bespilled himself from his foundingpen as illspent from
inkinghorn'. An incontinent child.
The 'second position of discordance' describes Earwicker, who
'partially eclipses the femecovert', from the back. His hairy bottom becomes Phoenix Park ('how the nature in all frisko is enlivened by gentlemen's seaG'), and we become dimly aware that perhaps all the history that has been enacted there throughout Finnegans Wake has come about because a man dropped his trousers or lifted his night- shirt. Is history all ordure-'hystoricalleavesdroppings'? Was the fall, with dropping leaves, initiated not with the tree oTknowledge but with the removal of figleaf aprons? We must leave such questions because the wife is now soothing her crying child in a kind ofRussian (Anna is of Russian stock. We have met hints before). Joyce soothes
us as well, who have cried sometimes at the nightmare of his book: 'Tis jest jibberweek's joke', pure 'Jabberwocky'. The crying child may be more than Joyce's readers, though: 'Sonly all in your imagination, dim.
measles on her and mudstuskers to make her a man'. (She must
always have her mirror to turn herself into the two temptresses in th~ park. ) The episode th~ckens with Swift-Stella allusions. Jaun raIses hls chalIce and says: Esterelles, be not On your weeping what though Shaunathaun is in his fail! ' The holy cup is also a 'bridle's cup' filled with champagne bubbling with concupiscent connotations. 'So gullaby, me poor Isley! '
Issy-Izzy-Iseult is the Church he leaves behind, to be comforted
by 'Dave the Dancekerl' who 'will arrive incessantly in the fraction of a crust'. The Paraclete and the Eucharist appear in one image. Issy's name is changed to Julia Bride (Christ's bride, the Church) and Dave, the Holy Ghost, is introduced to her. But, if we are to prune away excess characters with Occam's razor, this Paraclete must be Shem, a~d, indeed, we hear: 'He's the mightiest penum- brella I ever flounshed on behond the shadow of a post! ' It is right that Shem, artlst, vessel of mSptratlOn, should play the descending dove. But Jaun-ChrlSt has to struggle with impulses of an old en-
mity-'We're as thick and thin now as two tubular jawballs. I hate him about his patent henesy, plasfh it, yet am I amorist. I love him.
1 In the year of the Irish potato famine Protestant evangelists made converts through the bnbe of potato soup. Hence potatoes have ever since been called 'protestants'.
A lot of them want him to retire on pension, but where is the money from ? He would be ready enough to turn back from glory
tocome . . . , ld ifhe could only find the girl of his heart, a teashop mppy, my a y
fL 't lookafterhim. Buthisdreamoftea-caddyhomehness,
oyons,a
t ted by the umbrella-saint James Hanway from the
b' Id 19 war ,
proec '1 ' . fV
. h t through with Swift-gm t- vafilty 0 anessy . . . peepe .
IS
sOH'
d'd k
tl tl' (Swift's little language: ppt). IS gran lOse reams ta eon
peepe ~ If he had money he would invest it in 'vestments of anewlorffi. . h 'd subdominal poteen at pri~ecost'; he IS, he says~the gogetter t at ,
make it pay like cash repsters as sure as there s a p~t on a pole. Rich, he would plant Izzy 'on the electnc ottoman m the lap of
2# 245
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
Shaun to Jaun to Yawn
I love his old portugal's nose'-and we are not surprised to find later that Jaun starts a grumbling programme of disparagement. It begms with a discussion about church music and Shem's vocal gift: '. . . he could be near a colonel with a voice like that'. Shcm becomes Stephen Dedalus-Joyce and Jaun becomes Buck Mulligan-? ogarty: 'The misery billyboots I used to lend hIm before we spht (we are back in the Martello Tower). The latter identification is a pregnant one when we remember Mulligan's mockery of the Mass, his ballad
about Joking Jesus. AB for the real Joyce behind these dream-masks,
he is there in the 'beurlads scael' (his first job in exile was as a teacher in the Berlitz School), placing 'the ocean between his and ours't trying to be 'as homely gauche as swif~'. The sacred spirit (Holy Ghost) is reduced to ('homely gauche) a mockmg, rather mept satirical sneerer. But-'my positively last at any stagel'-Jaun has done talking: ' 'tis time to be up and ambling'.
He is becoming, though big, vague and pitiable. He is 'Jaun the Boast' but the twenty-nine girls of St Bride's are prepared to accord him a hero's farewell. More, they will hymn this grotesque barrel of wind like the god Osiris, like a fertile tree or a spring in the desert:
Oasis cedarous esaltarshoming Leafboughnoon! Oisis,' coolpressus onrnountof Sighing!
. . . Pipetto, Pipetta has misery unnotIced t
Issy-Izzy-Iseult is there, Swiftian little language and all, now turned into Isis wife-sister of the god. Off, mourned, he goes down the river, '';ith a posse of tossing hankerwaves to his windwar~ ~ike seraph's summonses on the air . . . along the highroad of the nation, Traitor's Track', poor stuff compared WIth hIS father: But does he not seem to take on, in the distance, the mirage qualities of a true
god, fertiliser not mere dirt? His name becomes Haun.
The silent cock shall crow at last. The west shall shake the east awake. Walk while ye have the night for morn,lightbreakfastbringer, morroweth
whereon every past shall full fast sleep. Amain.
Sleep, though, is Shaun's meed from now on. In the next chapter, his own last he has become Yawn, a great swollen hulk, a torpId giant lying ;n a hill, a wretched parody of Finnegan. To him there come the eternal four- 'Shanator Gregory . . . Shanator Lyons . . . his Recordership, Dr Shunadure Tarpey . . . old Shunny Mac- Shunny, MacDougal the hiker, in the rere of them on the run' (Johnny MacDougal, last gospeller, also represents lJlster, behmd
the other Irish provinces in finding freedom from Bntlsh rule), and 246
with them is their donkey, the 'skygrey globetrotter'. They question Yawn, being assured that he is not dead but sleeping, and a kind of ventriloquial voice booms out at them in answer from the prostrate giant-form. What the four wish to know is Yawn's 'historical grouns': after all, he has been set up as their ruler. The voice of Yawn refers them back to the 'prehistoric barrow . . . the orangery' -in other words, the heap of dirt and orange-peel where the hen scratched up the letter. The questioners say that they have heard from their donkey that in Yawn there is no way to the better life, despite his big boastful kingly vocabulary: 'no moorhens cry'or mooner's plankgang . . . to lead us to hopenhaven'. Yawn's reply is evasive and in French: 'Moy jay trouvay la clee dang les champs. ' He found, like St Patrick, the key in the fields, the shamrock that is a figure of the Holy Trinity. But his attempt to identify himself with the saint is confused by the tones of guilty love (Swift was Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin): 'Trinathan partnick dieudonnay. Have you seen her? Typette, my tactile 0 l' Given by God (,dieudonnay') he is nevertheless 'partnick' (part the devil, part his brother): he lacks the solidity, the confident unity (despite the guilt) ofHCE.
Succeeding questions strive to reach the old solidity that lies
somewhere beneath this soft, lumpish, decaying giant. What does Yawn know about the 'oxeyed man' who sailed from 'Daneland'? The initials we have missed for so many pages reappear, with most heroic associations: 'Ecce Hagios Chrismanl' (behold the saintly Christman); 'Hunkalus Childared Easterheld' (Easter hero); 'Hill- cloud encompass us. ' Yawn will not at first admit that HCE was his true father, since he wants no share in his guilt, but soon he utters a Nordic rune made out of the great initials:
- Hail him heathen, heal him holystone! Courser, Recourser, Changechild . . . . . . . . . ? Eld as endall, earth . . . . . . . . . '?
And then Yawn accepts that Original Sin that springs from his father: 'By him it was done bapka, by me it was gone into . . . ' And he states HCE's name as it appeared in Hasty's ballad: 'Me das has or oreils. Piercey, piercey, piercey, piercey! ' But there is something else there, too: 'Midas has (gold) ears-ass's ears': was not this another secret that soon, through the whispering of the reeds, spread abroad about another great ma~? HCE can transmute common things to gold, the all-father, but he is also part-animal (ass's ears). Yet the heroic wheel comes full circle when we remember that, in Finnegans Wake, Christ is identified with the ass he rode on.
247
/I? ? ? l
u
'I ,I
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain
Shu-un to Jaun to Yawn
Mter the father, the twins. The four suspect that Shaun, though he represented himself as the originatOr of the Word, as well as Its deliverer, is hiding the truth, the fact that It was ~he? , who found the letter when the hen scratched it up: 'The gIst IS the gIst of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas' (ccho ofIsaac's words). Yawn is asked if he thinks Shem is a 'counterfeit Kevin' (it was St Kevin who was believed to be the wisest ofIreland's saints): 'have you reasonable hesitancy in your m! nd ~bouthim 1. ' Shaun-Yawn:s confusion affects his language, turnmg It to glbbensh, a macaromc mixture of tongues making it end as pidgin: 'Me no angly mo, me speakee Yellman's'lingas' and so on. 'Hell's Confuci~m and ~he Elements! ' cry the four. '. . . Thot's never the postal clerIC, checkmg chinchin chat with nipponnippers! ' And, pressed as to whether he is really St Patrick, Yawn will give no direct answer,. o,nly the riddling 'Quadrigue my yoke. Trtple my tryst. Tandem my SIre, whIch
hides the date of Patrick's coming to Ireland: 432 ('Quad . . . trtple . . . tandem'). Eventually it appears that th~reis no real ~uestionof establishing identity for Yawn at all, nor IS there for hIS brother. Shem and Shaun are 'alionola equal and OpposIte brUflOlpso, Id est, eternally provoking alio opposite equally as provoked as Br~no at being eternally opposed by Nola. Poor ommboose,smgalow smgle- arum . . . ' Bruno the Nolan has been once more mvoked to sho;; how opposites are reconciled under God. But the trouble here IS that there is no God: this is a phase of hIstory WIthout belIef. The brothers do not merge into their great positive father; they merely
cancel each other out. All they can do in their pathetic attempt to affirm identity is to borrow from their father, and all they can bor- row is the sin he committed in the park. Is the o~lyreal be~ng,then, HCE 1 No we must not forget the sexual polanty, a posItive thmg, unlike the' brother polarity, which is negative. We come now to ALP once more.
But ALP is not primarily concerned with talking about herself. Her voice comes from the depths, rehearsmg yet agam the tale of the scandal. HCE was wronged. He was blackmailed:
The said Sully, a barracker associated with tinkers. , t? e blackhan~,Shovel- lyvans, wreuter of annoyimgmost letters and sktrnless ball~:ts l! l. Par~ee Franch who is Magrath's thug and smells cheaply of Power s spmts, lIke a deepsea dibbler, and he is not fit enough to throw guts down to a
bear.
Magrath (the cad with the pipe 1) is the enemy. But while A L P as 'Your wife. Amn. Anm. Amm. Ann' is HCE's defender, she remams
248
an aspect. of the women he is said to have wronged, and we must not
be. surpnsed to hear tones of complaint from her. She is many
VOIces, the rIver of woman m many tributaries, but she ends up as
~he loyal ALP we know: nobody 'on allad the hold scurface of the Jorth would come next or nigh him, Mr Eelwhipper, seed and nursery man'.
We want further information about HCE. We hear the very title of that book about Work in Progress which was written by Joyce's twelve: 'Your exagmmatlOn round his factification far incaminatian of a warping process. Declaiml' We know that the eternal twelve are
here, bu: what is t~is. 'warping pr~cess'? It is an image of two op- posed thmgs-a bUlldmg-up (weavmg) and a breaking-down (twist- mg out of shape)-and we are not surprised to 'see the empire of HC. E honoured in a 'Dunker's durbar' and then, 'after his life over- lastmg . . . reduced to nothing'. And what is Work in Progress 1 It is anot~er. na~e f~r Fmnegans Wake. Here then he lies, the great man
on. hIs bIer. But, cry the voices, 'there's leps offlam in Funnycoon's WIck. The keyn has passed. Lung lift the keying . . . God save you king! Muster of the Hidden Life! ' It is only a vision, though. We have not yet reached the undying heart of HCE.
T o contact the master, hidden somewhere in the earth beneath the
vast slack body of Yawn, requires much preparation. First we have to hear strange voices out of the past, voices of war and love- 'Slog slagt and sluaghter! Rape the daughter! Choke the pope! . . . PIpette dear! Us! Us! Me! Me! . . . O! Mother of my tears! Believe for me! Fold thy son! '-and mixed up with these ancestral voices is t~e. n;etal. lic '~in' or 'Zinz. in' v:hich may be the tap o f a dry branch ( ,\IP ) WIth lIfe put back mto It. The enquirers, excited, cry: 'Now
we re gettm It. Tune m and pick up the forain counties! Hello! ' but
almost at once there is nothing but SILENCE. Still, the interred presence of HCE seems to be sending out shoots oflife and violence and we feel justified in setting the stage for his appearance at last; 'Act drop: Stand byI Blinders! Curtain up. Juice, please! Foots! ' But ~e stdl get nothmg but voices. At length, though, one voice descrIbes two objects we have already seen earlier in Anna Livia
Plurabelle's own chapter: "
- The flagstone. By tombs, deep and heavy. To the unaveiling memory of. Peacer the grave. .
- . . . There used to be a tree s~uck up? An overIisting eshtree?
- There used, sure enough. BeSIde the Annar. At the ford of Slivena- mand. Oakley Ashe's elm.
? ? ? The Man-made Mountain . .
th 1m were we remember, the manif~stat~on~ of
I~eston~~n~is~e~dlaw, a~dShem, with his living lI~SplratlOn. a,:::, WI h e melted into the father, and the tree ofhfe-round But e sons av iverse bur eons and plays-is the symbol of the
WhiCh af'i'i'~~und ALP W~look in the dense text for Yggdras! 1l,
~? ;Id-t,re~;t~No;th~:~:en~a~~~~:::;~~:~i:':l~
dIsguIsed: coe r~ l~SmUe 'ste ne of law' is 'tod' (German for
eggdrazzles for him. Th b' Y 'the form masculine. The gender 'd h') while the tree com illes '1
c eat . " We are getting closer to the great father and faml y-man. lemlmne . h'
But the huge fish takes some catc mg: .
-There's an old psalmsobbi~glax salmoner fogeyboren Herrtn Plunde-
h
Who ;:::floundering with/his b::~a::d1v:flrs~nb~:~:na~:~thand Leaping [reck after every ang
cleanliving man and, as a matter of fict, by my halfwife, I think how our public at large appreciates it most highly from me that I am as cleanliving as could be and that my game was a fair average since I perpetually kept my ouija ouija wicket up.
Here is the old stutter and the old desperate facetiousness in self- defence, though we become aware gradually (we are warned in 'ouija ouija') that HCE is speaking through a 'control' and that this is a seance. The drift of his statement is the fundamental harmless- ness of all his acts. He, in his position as innkeeper and solid citizen, could never afford 'to be guilty of crim crig con of malfeasance trespass against parson with the person of a youthful gigirl frifrif friend'. Anna is his 'bestpreserved wholewife'; he loves her dearly. There is not one 'teaspoonspill o f evidence at bottomlie t o my babad'; the libel that has spread all over the city, all over the world, must be laid at the door of the 'caca cad' with the pipe in the park. 'Hole affair is rotten muckswinish porcupig's draff. Enouch t'
Reception is bad. HCE becomes confused with another character,
perhaps the 'control', whose name is 'Whitehed'. But this name
changes to 'Whitehowth', and 'poor. Haveth Childers Everywhere' is dream-identified with Finnegan himself, the head of Howth. HCE is the hill, the castle, the city. Nobility starts through the comic bubbling. His history is not a history of shame but of achievement:
. . . here where my tenenure of office and my toils of domestication first began, with weight of woman my skat and skuld but Flukie of the Ravens as my sure piloter, famine with Englisch sweat and oppedemics, the twotoothed dragon worms with alIsort serpents, has compolitely seceded from this landleague of many nations and open and notorious naughty livers are found not on our rolls. This seat of our city it is of all sides pleasant, comfortable and wholesome. If you would traverse hills, they are not far off. If champain land, it Iieth of all parts. If you would be de1ited with fresh water, the famous river, called of Ptolemy the Libnia
Labia, runneth fast by. If you will take the view of the sea, it is at hand.
Give heed!
Give heed, in fact, to this tale of a fair city, a tale qualified with
wrongs and failures, but still a heartening chronicle. Here is the great boon of a life, drunk with variety, built (on me, your sleeping giant'. The hill-giant wed the woman-river; he 'knew her fleshly when all my bawdy did I her whorship, min bryllupswibe: Heaven, he haIl- thundered; Heydays, he flung blissforhers'. The very forces of the sky flashed and drummed their union. HCE fed, loved, dressed, glorified his spouse, planted Chesterfield elms and Kentish hops, a Q! leen's garden; 'I brewed for my alpine plurabel1e, wigwarming
25 I
Humbermouth.
Our Human Conger Eel!
.
. k arguments as to whether It
producillg-goo . d I',cate She talks to her ffilrror- I h . altemptressm up . .
Iseu t as t e pnm I . I h t the dreamer has been domg image and she tells us p aill y w a
with his dream: .
. d n Of course it was downright verry wl~ed It's meem1y us two. , meme I, 0" d How me adores eatsother Simply
of him, reely rneetmg l! 1e ~lifj)seinhi; storm collar, as I leaned yestreen (Mon i~hebeau. l Ma rebne e e. ~ little porn got excited, when I turned
~i~~! ~:u~~s~:! ~amin~;ebustYandkissed him more. .
h h eared in this scene at theIr most The four old men. -w 0 a~v~~Plrttle more. The task of enquiry intelligent and dlgmfied-c 'We bright young chaps of
must be handed over t~,~~~;:;::::t~~dsare brisker. Mter a brief
. . h
ir:
s~~t~~~~e:it might not have been evil-
Reminiscence~of the
was really a Sl~a(~,Foenix Culpritl) lead at length to Issy-1zzy-
the brandnew bramtrus . ' g fKate wh0 questlOI'. m o . f' D
to say that HCE was frisky enough
seems .
croak, evildoer! ArIse, SIr g os s.
Fullacau's sake! '), the boys of the bram- ear' 'Fa Fe Fi Fo Fum! Ho, trust bid the bUrled sill~er-h:ron:~f~d at last we listen to the
for Sill (Fuddhug un or
genuine voice of HCE: . I . u I Eternest cittas, heil t Here we are agalJ?
I am - Amtsadam, SIr, to yo . 1 ct of dynasties long out of pnnt, the
bubub brouJlht up u'bder d(~:r;itOWll. ugh MacAuscullpth the Thord I), first of Shltnc Shllkan ~ar I known throughout the world . . . as a but, in pontofacts masslmust, am
250
Shaun to Jatln to Yawn
? ? The Man-made Mountain
wench . . . my granvilled brandold Dublin lin~ub, the free, the froh the frothy freshener. ' He laid down roads, nch with traffic, all for her pleasure. (We hear no stutter now. ) The voice of the giant, wine-god, city-maker, calls from beneath and beyond the crushed lump of the body of his failed successor, false redeemer. Trumpet his fame, four gospellers: 'Mattahah! Marahah! Luahah! Joahana- hanahana l'
8: Bed and Ricorso
SPRING DAWN, THE MASTER BEDROOM OF THE BRISTOL TAVERN,
a stirring out of sleep: 'What was thaas? Fog was whaas? Too mult sleepth. Let sleepth . . . But really now whenabouts? Expatiate then how much times we live in. Yes? ' Yes, indeed, for the decayed times are not just the decor of the dream of Earwicker; they are here and now, the gods and city-builders underground, love a travesty, faith dead. Our own dream of life, which sees the pair asleep or half- awake, twitching at the light, awaits the ricorso, the return to nobility and creativeness.
The twins, Kevin and Jerry, 'nicechild' and 'badbrat', sleep, watched over by 'kinderwardens', the Mamalujo bedposts and the ass that is Christ. Isobel, Saintette Isabelle, lies prettily, 'wild- wood's eyes and primarose hair . . . in mauves o f moss and daphne- dews . . . child of tree, like somelosthappy leaf, like blowing flower stilled. ' As for the parents-
in their bed of trial, on the bolster of hardship, by the glimmer of memory, under coverlets of cowardice, Albatrus Nyanzer with Vieta Nyanza, his mace of might mortified, her beautifell hung up on a nail, he, Mr of our fathers, she, our moddereen ru arue rue, they, ay, by the hodypoker and blazier, they are, as sure as dinny drops into the dyke . . .
A cry off.
The king arid queen (or queen and consort, Victoria and Albert, two great African lakes of sleep) are deposed to mere father and mother when they hear this cry. 'Where are we at all? and whenabouts in the name of space? ' They are in a house. They are in a bedroom which is a stage-set (is not ordinary life just one of our acts, a play we are condemned to I). We see now the provenance of some of the charaCters of the bigger play of sleep-'Adam's mantel . . . over mantelpiece picture of Michael, lance, slaying Satan, dragon with smoke . . . ' We see a man with a nightcap and a woman with curlpins.
253
? ? The Man-made Mountain
Bed and Ricorso
To our surprise we discover that it is not sleep which has been dis- turbed by the 'cry off' but the act of intercourse. We see this from the viewpoints oftheir own four bedposts-like Christ's life, reported by four cold gospellers, their uncreative act is blazoned to the world. At the end of the bedroom inventory comes 'man's gummy article, pink'.
The first gospeller describes the two with cold exactness-the man's 'beastly expression, fishy eyes', exhibiting rage. He is 'ruddy blond, Armenian bole, black patch, beer wig, gross build, episcopa- lian, any age'. She has a 'haggish expression, peaky nose, trekant mouth'; she is 'undersized, free kirk, no age'. These are not the HCE and ALP we have known. Soon they are designated as Mr and Mrs Porter. At last we learn their real names. 'Earwicker' is comic, romantic, better for a dream than for real life; 'Porter' is right for a stout-seller, one who carries burdens. But we will still call them by the names we have known longest.
Upstairs are the Porter babes-the Corsican brothers in one room; little pussy, whose 'pessname' is Buttercup, in the other. The parents enter the twins' room, where 'our bright bull b~be Frank Kevin' is happily asleep. 'Jerry Jehu', though, has had a nightmare, and it is his cry that disturbed the queasy dawn act of love. Shem the Penman to come, he has not yet made ink flow, but 'he has
pipettishly bespilled himself from his foundingpen as illspent from
inkinghorn'. An incontinent child.
The 'second position of discordance' describes Earwicker, who
'partially eclipses the femecovert', from the back. His hairy bottom becomes Phoenix Park ('how the nature in all frisko is enlivened by gentlemen's seaG'), and we become dimly aware that perhaps all the history that has been enacted there throughout Finnegans Wake has come about because a man dropped his trousers or lifted his night- shirt. Is history all ordure-'hystoricalleavesdroppings'? Was the fall, with dropping leaves, initiated not with the tree oTknowledge but with the removal of figleaf aprons? We must leave such questions because the wife is now soothing her crying child in a kind ofRussian (Anna is of Russian stock. We have met hints before). Joyce soothes
us as well, who have cried sometimes at the nightmare of his book: 'Tis jest jibberweek's joke', pure 'Jabberwocky'. The crying child may be more than Joyce's readers, though: 'Sonly all in your imagination, dim.
