Avoice from Afire

Tu Es Petrus (Matthew 16:18 : The Book of Kells)

The second paragraph of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake comprises seven clauses. The third of these was first drafted in October 1926:

nor avoice answered mishe mishe to tufftuff thouartpatrick. (Hayman 46)

This was revised to:

nor avoice redffire answered mishe chishe to tufftuff thouartpatrick. (Hayman 46)

By 15 November 1926, when Joyce included the latest draft of this passage in a letter to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, it was almost identical to the final, published version:

nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick; (Letters I 15 November 1926)

Why did Joyce replace mishe mishe with mishe chishe, before eventually restoring the second mishe? What does chishe mean? Christian female (as in Chi + She)? Or did Joyce intend to write _mishe chrishe_? This is supported by the letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, to which Joyce appended some explanatory notes. Among these is the following:

Mishe = I am (Irish) i.e. Christian (Letters I, 15 November 1926)

In an earlier article, I described how the clauses of this paragraph mark out seven stations or locations in the master bedroom of the Mullingar House, the pub in Chapelizod where Finnegans Wake is set. This particular clause is associated with the fireplace. The chimney flue connects the parents’ bedroom with their daughter Issy’s room, which is upstairs on the top floor of the house. Issy has a split personality, and conversations between her various identities are channelled down the chimney to the master bedroom, where they inform the dreams of her sleeping father.

This brief clause is one of the most pregnant in all of Finnegans Wake. In fewer than a dozen words Joyce alludes to three pivotal moments and three pivotal characters in the histories of Judaism, Christianity and Ireland:

The Burning Bush and the Call of Moses (Exodus 3)
The Founding of Christianity upon the Rock of St Peter (Matthew 16:18-19)
The Introduction of Christianity to Ireland by St Patrick

Whether any of these were actual historical events is irrelevant. In Finnegans Wake no distinction is made between myth and history, memory and imagination, or fact and fiction.

Moses and the Burning Bush

Moses and the Burning Bush

The famous story of the Burning Bush and the Call of Moses is familiar to most Christians. It is recorded in Exodus 3-4:

Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father in law, the priest of Midian: and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb. And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.

And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I. And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. Moreover he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God ...

And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you. (Exodus 3:1-6 ... 3:13-14)

A voice from a fire calls: Mosheh, Mosheh, which is the Hebrew for Moses. When Moses asks God what his name is, the voice replies, I am that I am. The Irish for I am is mise (pronounced misha). So Joyce’s mishe mishe echoes both names: Moses’ and God’s.

Christ Giving the Keys to Saint Peter

Thou Art Peter

Moving from the Old to the New Testament, we come to another familiar passage of Scripture:

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. (Matthew 16:18-19)

It is surely significant that the opening page of Finnegans Wake contains an allusion to the Biblical phrase, Thou art Peter, while the closing page echoes another phrase from the very same passage, I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven:

Lps. The keys to. Given! (RFW 493.06)

Also folded into this image is an allusion to Arrah-na-Pogue, a 19th-century play by Dion Boucicault, in which a woman helps a condemned man to escape from prison by passing him a secret message through a kiss. This melodrama is another of those key works that are essential reading for a proper understanding of Finnegans Wake.

It need hardly be pointed out that Christ’s words—Thou art Peter, and upon this rock—involve a pun on the Greek words Petros (Peter) and petra (rock). Is this the wellspring from which all the puns of Finnegans Wake flow? Lots of puns at Finnegans Wake.

St Patrick Lights the Paschal Fire on the Hill of Slane

Saint Patrick

In Finnegans Wake, one of Joyce’s principal sources for information on the country’s patron saint, Patrick, was John Bagnell Bury’s The Life of St Patrick and His Place in History (Atherton 239). Here is Bury’s account of how St Patrick lit the Paschal fire in 433 CE in defiance of the pagan High King of Ireland Lóegaire mac Néill (King Leary):

The bitter hostility of the Druids and the relations of Loigaire to Patrick were worked up by Irish imagination into a legend which ushers in the saint upon the scene of his work with great spectacular effect. The story represents him as resolving to celebrate the first Easter after his landing in Ireland on the hill of Slane, which rises high above the left bank of the Boyne at about twelve miles from its mouth. On the night of Easter eve he and his companions lit the Paschal fire, and on that selfsame night it so chanced that the King of Ireland held a high and solemn festival in his palace at Tara where the kings and nobles of the land gathered together. It was the custom that on that night of the year no fire should be lit until a fire had been kindled with solemn ritual in the royal house. Suddenly the company assembled at Tara saw a light shining across the plain of Breg from the hill of Slane. King Loigaire, in surprise and alarm, consulted his magicians, and they said, “O king, unless this fire which you see be quenched this same night, it will never be quenched; and the kindler of it will overcome us all and seduce all the folk of your realm.” ... But afterwards [Loigaire] bade Patrick to him, purposing to slay him; but Patrick knew his thoughts, and he went before the king with his eight companions, one of whom was a boy. But as the king counted them, lo! they were no longer there, but he saw in the distance eight deer and a fawn making for the wilds. And the king returned in the morning twilight to Tara, disheartened and ashamed. (Bury 104 ... 106)

According to tradition, Patrick was consecrated a bishop by Germanus of Auxerre (Bury 59) and sent to Ireland to baptize the pagans. Hence, the German: taufen, to baptize.

A bellows is an instrument used to encourage a fire. There is probably one in the master bedroom of the Mullingar House. Joyce glossed his use of this word thus:

bellowed [sic] = the response of the peatfire of faith to the windy words of the apostle (Letters I 15 November 1926)

Joyce’s Siglum for the Oedipal Figure

In Finnegans Wake, St Patrick is yet another foreign invader, who arrives from across the water to displace HCE (the Archdruid of pagan Ireland). Like Sir Tristram, he is the Oedipal character, represented in Joyce’s notes and drafts by the siglum depicted above. This three-legged sign is a conflation of the sigla for Shem and Shaun, HCE’s sons, because the Oedipal figure embodies both brothers.

Patrick is a foreign—Roman—name, so Joyce Irished it up by adding allusions to turf (peat) and haystacks (ricks):

This saint baptizes (tauftauf) the peat rick, Ireland; (Campbell & Robinson 29)

Is there also a play on Pete trick, suggesting that Patrick’s Christianity is all a fraud? It is interesting that one of the most prominent representatives of the Catholic Church in Ulysses is called Father Conmee. Subtlety was never Joyce’s strong suit.

John Henry Newman

A Voice from Afar

There may also be an allusion in this passage to the poem A Voice from Afar by Cardinal John Henry Newman. A Protestant convert to Catholicism, Newman was instrumental in founding Dublin’s Catholic University (now University College Dublin), where Joyce was educated. In 1829, when Newman was at his summer retreat in Horspath, he wrote the following meditation on death:

Weep not for me;—

Be blithe as wont, nor tinge with gloom

The stream of love that circles home,

Light hearts and free!

Joy in the gifts Heaven’s bounty lends;

Nor miss my face, dear friends!

I still am near;—

Watching the smiles I prized on earth,

Your converse mild, your blameless mirth;

Now too I hear

Of whisper’d sounds the tale complete,

Low prayers, and musings sweet.

A sea before

The Throne is spread;—its pure still glass

Pictures all earth-scenes as they pass.

We, on its shore,

Share, in the bosom of our rest,

God’s knowledge, and are blest.

The voice from afar that disturbs the sleeping innkeeper in Finnegans Wake is the voice of his daughter, Issy, transmitted via the chimney flue from her room upstairs. But in Finnegans Wake, there is often a blending of characters and of time, so the voice of Issy is also the voice of his late wife—a voice from the afterlife, like Newman’s voice from afar. As I pointed out in an earlier article—A Working Hypothesis—I believe that Finnegans Wake is set at different times, depending on which level of narrative you are following. These are the two most important of these:

As a depiction of a single night, Finnegans Wake opens at 11:32 pm on Saturday 12 April 1924 and ends the following morning. The sleeper is the seventy-year-old landlord of the Mullingar House. He is a widower and his daughter Issy is married and has left home. On this level, there is no one in the room upstairs and the voice from afar can only be his late wife’s voice coming to him from the afterlife (though surely not from the fires of Hell).
As a depiction of a single day, Finnegans Wake begins at 11:32 am on the morning of Friday 21 March 1884 and it ends at 11:32 am the following morning. 21 March 1884 was the birthdate of Joyce’s wife Nora Barnacle. Note that Nora’s name is encoded in the phrase: Nor avoice from afire. On this narrative level, the landlord is only thirty-years-old, and his daughter Issy is a young girl who sleeps upstairs and talks to herself incessantly.

The chimney flue is like a telegraph that allows Issy to communicate secretly with her father. Mishe mishe to tauftauf sounds like the greeting a child might make on a walkie-talkie or tin can telephone. The word telephone is comprised of the Greek words for a voice and afar and was coined by Alexander Graham Bell (bellowsed?). Did the Mullingar House have a telephone in the 1920s?

Station Island, Lough Derg: Site of St Patrick’s Purgatory

And Finally

There are more secrets locked up in these ten words than can be explored in one short article. The diligent reader can discover them for himself using the Useful Resources listed below. I will, however, briefly mention two important ones before signing off.

St Brigid, the Mary of the Gael, was the female equivalent of St Patrick. But she was really a pagan goddess, who was euhemerized by the Christians. She was associated with an eternal fire in Kildare (Giraldus Cambrensis et al 96-98). In Finnegans Wake Brigid is one of Issy’s roles.
The association of St Patrick and the fireplace also reminds one of St Patrick’s Purgatory, a popular place of pilgrimage in Ireland where the saint is said to have been given a vision of Purgatory in order to convince the skeptics among his converts. It is located on an island in Lough Derg, county Donegal. The lake is possibly named for Dá Derga, “the red god” (Old Irish: derg, red), a pagan god identified with the rising and setting sun. Once again, paganism and Christianity are co-existing.

And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.

References

John S Atherton, The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, The Viking Press, New York (1960)
John S Atherton, The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Revised and Expanded Edition, Paul P Appel, Mamaroneck, New York (1979)
John Bagnell Bury, The Life of St. Patrick and His Place in History, Macmillan & Co Ltd, London (1905)
Dion Boucicault, Deirdre McFeely (editor), Arrah-na-Pogue; or The Wicklow Wedding, Clare Press, The Burren, County Clare (2017)
Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York (1944)
Giraldus Cambrensis, Thomas Forester (translator), Thomas Wright (editor), The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, H G Bohn, London (1863)
David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1963)
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)
John Henry Newman, Frederic Chapman (editor), The Poems of John Henry Newman, John Lane Company, London (1905)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)

Image Credits

Moses and the Burning Bush: Arnold Friberg (artist), Cecil B DeMille, The Ten Commandments, © The Estate of Arnold Friberg, Fair Use
Christ Giving the Keys to Saint Peter: Pietro Perugino (artist), Sistine Chapel, Rome, Public Domain
St Patrick Lights the Paschal Fire: Richard King (artist), Church of St Peter and Paul, Athlone, Roaringwater Journal, © Finola Finlay (photographer), Fair Use
Joyce’s Oedipal Siglum: Brendan Ward (designer), After Joyce’s Siglum for the Oedipal Figure in Finnegans Wake, British Museum Add MS 47482 a, 91b, Kopimi
John Henry Newman: Jane Fortescue Seymour (artist), Public Domain

Finnegans Wake - A Prescriptive Guide

19 July 2022