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| An Illuminated G in the Book of Kells (Folio 13r) |
The Book of Kells
One of James Joyce’s favourite works was the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript of the Four Gospels, which is now on display in the Old Library of Trinity College Dublin. This national treasure was created, it is thought, around the year 800, but its authorship and place of origin are still matters of scholarly debate.
In 1914 the Irish bibliophile and amateur bookbinder Edward Sullivan, 2nd Baronet of Garryduff, brought out an illustrated description of The Book of Kells, which included colour reproductions of twenty-four of the manuscript’s 339 folios. Sullivan’s accompanying essay—about fifty pages of interpretative text—places the manuscript and the colour plates in their historical context.
Joyce had a copy of Sullivan’s book, which he carried about with him wherever he went. In 1922 he presented a copy to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver for Christmas. He once revealed to the young art critic Arthur Power what this book meant to him:
In all the places I have been to, Rome, Zurich, Trieste, I have taken it about with me, and have pored over its workmanship for hours. It is the most purely Irish thing we have, and some of the big initial letters which swing right across a page have the essential quality of a chapter of Ulysses. Indeed, you can compare much of my work to the intricate illuminations. I would like it to be possible to pick up any page of my book and know at once what book it is. (Power 67, Ellmann 558-559)
The Book of Kells is the most famous of our medieval manuscripts, but it is not the most important. The following list of extant works is far from exhaustive:
The Book of the Dun Cow
The Book of Leinster
The Book of Ballymote
The Book of Lecan
The Yellow Book of Lecan
The Book of Fermoy
The Speckled Book
The Book of Lismore
The Book of Uí Maine
The Cathach of St Columba
The Yellow Book of the Ó Fearghuis
While none of these comes close to reproducing the skill and artistry of the Book of Kells, several of them more than make up for this in the priceless value of their contents. If it had not been for the anonymous scribes who authored and copied these works, and who took it upon themselves to preserve the history, literature and mythology of their nation, most of that heritage would undoubtedly have been lost.
Joyce as Medieval Scribe
It is no exaggeration to say that James Joyce saw himself as the literary heir of these scribes and scholars:
It was always the habit of the old Irish writers to state four circumstances concerning the composition of their works: the place at which they were written (or the locus of the work, according to the form here used) : the date : the name of the author : and the occasion or circumstances which suggested the undertaking. These forms were adhered to by writers using the native language down even to the time of the Four Masters. (O’Curry 47 fn 26)
This is a custom that Joyce respected. In all his published works he was careful to include his name, the locus and the date. Even the occasion of a book is sometimes worked into the text. In the case of Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s name appears on the title page : the purpose of the work, as we shall see, is stated in the opening four paragraphs : and the last words on the final page are:
Paris,
1922-39.
The same can also be said for Ulysses: authorship, locus and date are all carefully noted. There is even a moment in the Wandering Rocks when Buck Mulligan tells Haines that Stephen intends to write something in ten years—and there you have O’Curry’s occasion or circumstances which suggested the undertaking. Ulysses is set in 1904, and the date Joyce gives on the final page for the composition of the book is 1914-1921.
In Finnegans Wake, Ulysses is referred to as the Blue Book of Eccles (RFW 142.04—Curiously, Edward Sullivan grew up on Eccles Street, a stone’s throw from Leopold Bloom’s house). Ulysses also reproduces the ouroboros that encircles Folio 124r of the Book of Kells, the famous Tunc page (Matthew 27:38):
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| Folio 124r of the Book of Kells |
The image of a serpent swallowing its own tail has been used to symbolize the never-ending cycle of life and death—the central theme of Finnegans Wake—for millennia. It is no accident that Ulysses opens and closes with the letter S, which is not only the initial letter of the word Serpent, but also looks like a serpent and sounds like a serpent’s hiss. (Note also that the first word in Ulysses, Stately, ends with the letter y, while the last word in the book, Yes, begins with the same letter. Is this the serpent’s forked tongue? The fact that each of these words is spelled with a capital letter suggests that they are related.)
The ouroboros is traditionally circular or subcircular, but it is also often identified with the mathematical symbol for infinity, ∞. It is no accident that Molly Bloom is associated with the number 8 throughout Ulysses: she was born on 8 September 1870 and married on 8 October 1888 : her final monologue comprises eight long sentences : as an opera singer, she is One Fat Lady. When she is lying in bed in the final episode of the book, her female figure of 8 literally becomes a recumbent ∞. Like ALP in Finnegans Wake, Molly Bloom represents Goethe’s Ewig-Weibliche, the Eternal Feminine or Ever Womanly.
Joyce actually alludes to the Tunc ouroboros in Finnegans Wake (RFW 095.10-11). And of course Finnegans Wake is itself another huge ouroboros, as Joyce himself revealed to Harriet Shaw Weaver in 1926:
The book really has no beginning or end. (Trade secret, registered at Stationers Hall.) It ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence. (Letters I 8 November 1926)
It might be more accurate to say that it begins with the end of a sentence and ends with the beginning of the same sentence. Either way, the book of Doublends Jined (RFW 016.19) is swallowing its own tail.
Incidentally, if the opening sentence of Finnegans Wake is really just the completion of the last sentence, then it could be argued that, on some level, Finnegans Wake really begins with the second sentence. This means that once again Joyce has written a book that begins and ends with the serpentine letter S:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle & 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: (RFW 003.01-06)
Scribal Abbreviations & Sigla
There is another common practice of Irish medieval scribes that Joyce was happy to adopt: the use of scribal abbreviations or contractions. Many Irish manuscripts were made of vellum, an expensive form of parchment, whose preparation was difficult and time-consuming. The use of conventional abbreviations saved not only time but also parchment:
The medieval abbreviation system goes back to the ancient Roman system of sigla, which are isolated letters that represent an entire word. It is also derived in part from the system of Tironian notes, a sort of shorthand that was employed in Roman times primarily to record public speeches. Considerable elements of both systems survive in the medieval system of abbreviation that flourished—particularly in Italy—from the 10th through the 15th centuries. (Capelli et al 622)
Adriano Cappelli’s Lexicon Abbreviaturarum of 1899, from which the above translation is taken, documents some 14,000 abbreviated forms that were used by medieval scribes in Italy and elsewhere. Many of these were adopted by Irish scribes, who also created their own abbreviations for certain Irish words and expressions. The commonest form of abbreviation found in Irish manuscripts is the contraction. You can see an example of this on Folio 45r of the Book of Kells, where the Latin word sanctificetur (hallowed be) in The Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9 ff) is contracted to scificetur. This contraction is flagged by the insertion of a short horizontal line over the c in the third line of the following image:
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| Folio 45r (Cropped) of the Book of Kells |
Note also how the end of this line of the Lord’s Prayer (-tur nomen tuum : be thy name) is placed above the beginning of the line (Pater noster qui es in caelis scifice- : Our father who art in heaven, hallow-) in order not to waste space. This expedient is flagged by an illustration of a man with one leg raised—at least, I hope that’s his leg!
Incidentally, a similar contraction to this one occurs in The Restored Finnegans Wake, RFW 098.22 (it is not in the earlier editions), where the letters -uat- have been omitted from punctuating.
Some sigla are still in common use today:
&
@
£
?
!
⁊ for the Irish: agus, and
The three Patron Saints of Finnegans Wake—Dante Alighieri, Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico—were all interested to some degree in symbolic language. It is possible, though, that the immediate source of Joyce’s interest in pictorial signs was his colleague Ezra Pound. Pound was one of the discoverers of Joyce, who moulded his reputation and helped facilitate the serialization of Ulysses in The Little Review. He later became disenchanted with Joyce’s linguistic and literary innovations and was unimpressed by Finnegans Wake.
Pound studied Chinese and applied what he called the ideogrammic method to his own literary productions. He included ideograms in his poetry, and for a time was even fond of signing his surname £ (Nadel 92).
The Sigla of Finnegans Wake
Whatever the source of his inspiration, on 24 March 1924 Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver:
In making notes I used signs for the chief characters. It may amuse you to see them so I shall write them on the back of this. (Letters I 24 March 1924)
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| Joyce’s List of Sigla |
Several of these sigla, as they are now known in Wakean circles, even turn up in the final text of Finnegans Wake. For example, they represent the members of the Doodles family in one of Issy’s footnotes in Night Studies, II.2 (RFW 230.F4):
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| The Restored Finnegans Wake 230 |
Joyce never referred to these signs as sigla in his correspondence, and at least one scholar, Danis Rose, has objected to the use of this name to denote these signs:
Roland McHugh has written a short, still useful book on the signs (which he erroneously calls “sigla”—“sigla” are acronyms, as in “the sigla HCE”) entitled The Sigla of Finnegans Wake (London, 1976). (Rose 1995:44)
Rose, I believe, is in error: sigla include symbols as well as acronyms, so McHugh is justified in referring to these iconic signs as sigla. What’s more, in the text of Finnegans Wake the very word sigla is even used on one occasion in connection with HCE’s sign, or a reorientation of it:
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| The Restored Finnegans Wake 094 |
Whatever we call them (I’ll stick with sigla), Joyce experimented with these signs over a period of several years, but he never settled upon a final list. Consequently, there is some residual inconsistency in the system: redundancy, in the sense that two or more sigla were devised for the same character : and omission, in the sense that there are some characters for whom no siglum was ever devised. Moreover, the tendency of characters in Finnegans Wake to meld together—remember Joyce’s admission that there is really only one character in the book?—defeats the purpose of assigning sigla in the first place.
As we have just seen, one of the early Wakean scholars, Roland McHugh, published a pioneering study of these signs, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake, in 1976. This work can be read at The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection on the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s website. It is an excellent, if a little dated, introduction not only to the sigla of Finnegans Wake but also to the book as a whole. This is how McHugh introduces his readers to Joyce’s sigla:
The distinguishing feature of my approach to FW is my concern with Joyce’s sigla. These marks appear in the author’s manuscripts and letters as abbreviations for certain characters or conceptual patterns underlying the book’s fabric. The only extended treatment of sigla so far by any other exegete appears in Mrs Glasheen’s Census, as a table “Who is Who when Everybody is Somebody Else”. This however deals almost entirely with five sigla, and being tabular can posit correspondences but cannot discuss them. I propose to deal with fourteen sigla, and to describe each in relation to the gross structure of FW. I hope thereby to establish a series of pathways between the chapters which should facilitate their penetration. (McHugh 3)
Ambitious. Note that some sigla represent concepts rather than characters.
Here are the fourteen sigla that McHugh discusses (note that Issy is assigned a pair of sigla):
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| The Principal Sigla of Finnegans Wake |
A few other sigla may also be noted:
As foreign invaders, Tristan and St Patrick play the same Oedipal role in Finnegans Wake as the Cad, so Joyce dropped the Tristan and Patrick sigla. He played around with various inversions or rotations of Tristan’s T for Issy before settling on the pair of mirror images.
Joyce’s application of some of these sigla is clear and uncontroversial, though his reasons for choosing one particular design rather than another are sometimes puzzling. He sometimes altered a siglum to reflect some change the relevant character has undergone.
The Principal Sigla of Finnegans Wake
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| One Example of the Masonic Pigpen Cipher |
Note also that the square shape of Shem’s siglum resembles HCE’s siglum, while the quasi-triangular appearance of Shaun’s resembles ALP’s. Does this mean that Shem is closer to his father than he is to his mother, and vice versa for Shaun? Or that Shem is HCE manqué (castrated?) while Shaun is ALP manqué?
Issy The Wake’s repository of life and death, innocence and experience, guilt and rejuvenation. Joyce played around with Issy’s sigla before settling on a definitive form. Initially, Issy was simply denoted by her initial I. In March 1924, however, Joyce represented Tristan and Isolde as mirror images of each other: Tristan was denoted by his initial T and Isolde by an inverted T (McHugh 7). Later, Joyce looked more closely at this Issy siglum and asked himself what it resembled. The answer is preserved in one of the Finnegans Wake notebooks:
girl lying on causeway with one leg heavenwards, lacing her shoe (VI.B.8.145a)
Rotating this siglum to the left and to the right generates the two standard Issy sigla, which probably represent her opposed personalities, often alluded to in the text as dove and raven.
The Oedipal Figure (The Cad) In late 1924, Joyce began to generate new sigla by combining extant sigla in various ways. Most of these only appear once or twice in the notebooks and can be largely ignored. One, however, survived to become one of the fourteen principal sigla that McHugh discusses. This siglum is obviously a combination of the Shem and Shaun sigla. Following the Brunonian paradigm of the coincidentia oppositorum, Shem and Shaun represent opposites that are in continual conflict, but whose ultimate goal is not their mutual destruction but their reconciliation. The Shem-Shaun siglum represents this reconciled figure.
Throughout Finnegans Wake this figure plays the Oedipal role of the younger man who rises up to confront HCE, precipitates his fall, and subsequently becomes the new HCE, so that the Viconian cycle may continue. The encounter in the Phoenix Park between HCE and the Cad with a Pipe was Joyce’s first description of this Oedipal Event.
If it is true that Tristan is another incarnation of the Wake’s Oedipal figure, then this siglum should supplant Tristan’s T siglum (McHugh 9, 125). I would also argue that the figure of St Patrick confronting the Archdruid of pagan Ireland in the final chapter of the book (IV.1) is yet another depiction of the Oedipal moment in Finnegans Wake. So Patrick’s P siglum can also be set aside in favour of the Cad siglum (McHugh 125).
Mamalujo The Four Old Men, historians and narrators of the book. An X has four arms pointing in four different directions, and the Four Old Men do represent space in Finnegans Wake (among other things). But why did Joyce not use the plus sign +, which seems a better representation of the four cardinal directions? X suggests the Roman numeral ten, not four. I am not aware of any particular association between Mamalujo and the number ten. The four-poster bed in the master bedroom of the Mullingar House—the setting for Finnegans Wake—is aligned not with the cardinal directions of N, S, E and W, but with the intermediate directions of NE, SE, SW and NW. Connecting these four directions, we get an X. That’s the only reason I can give.
Joe or Sackerson HCE’s barman and manservant. This siglum is simply the letter S, the familiar old serpent that opened and closed Ulysses. As the aboriginal native who has been conquered by the foreign invader, S is identified with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and this is the source of his siglum. The Snake siglum was initially angular—like the mirror image of a Z—but it later came to resemble an S, and this is how it is usually depicted by Joycean scholars.
Kate ALP’s maid-of-all-work, the female counterpart of S. As we saw in an earlier article, her inspiration was an historical figure in the history of Dublin: Kate Strong, a corrupt widower who ran an excise racket in the 17th century, while neglecting her duty to keep the streets of the city clean. Her siglum is obviously her initial K.
The Maggies Issy’s classmates, and an extension of her personality. In Finnegans Wake the 28 Maggies are often divided into 4 groups of 7, and thereby come to symbolize the rainbow, which is used throughout Finnegans Wake to denote rejuvenation, or the start of a new Viconian cycle. Their siglum, which looks like an ellipse, actually represents a rainbow and its reflection in the receding waters of the Flood. As the Maggies represent Issy’s multiple personality disorder, it is only right that their siglum should repeat the mirror-like symmetry of Issy’s siglum.
The Letter ALP’s love-letter to HCE, and her apology for his behaviour. You may have noticed that Joyce initially identified this siglum as the title of the book. By metonymy—or is it synecdoche?—the title also stands for the entire book. In fact, any document—ALP’s letter, Finnegans Wake, the Book of Kells—can be regarded as an incarnation of this siglum. Roland McHugh noted that ALP’s letter and Finnegans Wake contain HCE. He concluded that the Letter siglum represents anything that contains HCE, whether physically (his bed, his coffin, a boat) or metaphorically (a piece of writing about him, his photograph, a song that mentions him).
The square shape of this siglum reflects the fact that Finnegans Wake has four parts. It also resembles a box—a container. It is also quite a good representation of a sheet of paper. Ultimately, it is also the quilt or bedsheet beneath which the elderly landlord of the Mullingar House sleeps throughout the long dark night of Finnegans Wake.
The Mandala The endless Viconian cycle that keeps the world and Finnegans Wake turning. This siglum represents a wheel. Joyce liked to think that in Finnegans Wake he had succeeded in squaring the circle, a problem which Bloom had failed to solve: Finnegans Wake has four parts like a square, but it is circular like the ouroboros. The mandala siglum—which is referred to by name at RFW 449.31—encapsulates this idea. Traditional mandalas of ancient India typically combined these two basic shapes. They were representations of the cosmos, used as objects of contemplation during meditation. Joyce, however, makes his mandala a wheel by adding four spokes (Hart 77). It also resembles the crosshairs, or reticle, found in the eyepiece of telescopes, microscopes and guns—objects which are similarly used to focus the mind on something.
They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh
In 1953 the Book of Kells was rebound in four volumes, two of which are always on display at Trinity College. One wonders what Joyce would have made of this act of sacrilege, which was perpetrated, one is assured, purely for conservation reasons. We do know, however, that he would not have countenanced a similar act of vandalism being executed on Finnegans Wake:
So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined (may his forehead be darkened with mud who would sunder!) till Daleth, mahomahouma, who oped it, closeth thereof the. Dor. (RFW 016.17-21)
And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.
References
Adriano Cappelli, David Heimann (translator), Richard Kay (translator), The Elements of Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography, Translated from the Introduction to Lexicon Abbreviaturarum: Dizionario di abbreviature latine ed italine, University of Kansas Libraries, Kansas (1982)
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois (1962)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939, 1949)
James Joyce, Stuart Gilbert (editor) & Richard Ellmann (editor), The Letters of James Joyce, Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Viking Press, New York
James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
Jonathan McCreedy, “Everyword for oneself but Code for us all!”: The Shapes of Sigla in Finnegans Wake, Genetic Joyce Studies, Issue 10, University of Antwerp, Antwerp (2010)
Roland McHugh, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1976)
Ira B Nadel, The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2007)
Eugene O’Curry, Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History, James Duffy, Dublin (1861)
Arthur Power, From the Old Waterford House, Carthage Press, Waterford (1940)
Danis Rose, The Textual Diaries of James Joyce, The Lilliput Press, Dublin (1995)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
Image Credits
An Illuminated G in the Book of Kells (Folio 13r): © 2012 The Board of Trinity College Dublin, Fair Use
Folio 124r of the Book of Kells: © 2012 The Board of Trinity College Dublin, Fair Use
Folio 45r (Cropped) of the Book of Kells: © 2012 The Board of Trinity College Dublin, Fair Use
The Restored Finnegans Wake 230: © 2010 Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon, Fair Use
The Restored Finnegans Wake 094: © 2010 Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon, Fair Use
One Example of the Masonic Pigpen Cipher: Slide 17, Copyright Unknown, Fair Use
Useful Resources
The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection
The James Joyce Digital Archive
From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay
John Gordon’s Finnegans Wake Blog
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