Once More from the Top

The Master Bedroom in The Mullingar House

In the previous article in this series, we saw that the opening paragraph of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake can be read as a tour of the master bedroom in the Mullingar House—a tour with seven stops. The second paragraph of the book is a variation on that paragraph and takes us around the room for a second time.

Once again, we have a list of seven items:

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 themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time:
nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick:
not yet, though venisoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac:
not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe.
Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight
and rory end to the reggin-brow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.

These items can be associated with the same seven items of bedroom furniture that were featured in the opening paragraph. Some of these associations, I admit, are a little forced:

The faucet or tap: note the watery theme of the first item, with its reference to the short sea and an overseas invasion from North Armorica.
The sink: gorgios is glossed as Italian: gorgo, whirlpool, which alludes to the plughole or drain in the sink.
The fireplace: a voice from a fire makes this identification cast-iron.
The door: this is not initially obvious, but the text here alludes to the fraternal conflict between HCE and ALP’s twin sons Shem and Shaun. As we shall see, the bedroom door is a focal point in Finnegans Wake for this eternal conflict. The two brothers are spying on their parents’ lovemaking and trying to make sense of it. Shaun, with his good eyes, is peering through the keyhole, while Shem, with his good ear, is listening at the door.
The window: this too is not initially obvious, but just as the bedroom door is associated with the sons of HCE and ALP, so the bedroom window is associated with their daughter Issy, who is referred to in the text at this point (vanessy ... sosie sesthers). The fireplace is also associated with Issy—hers is the voice from the fire. But there the focus is on her relationship with her father HCE, whereas here her schizophrenic nature is the focal point. Issy’s split personality is typically represented by her reflection—as in the glass of the windowpane.
The commode: Pa’s rotten malt is HCE’s urine being recycled in the chamber pot, which is built into the commode. Water becomes wine|whiskey|stout becomes water again, and so on.
HCE in bed: Rory refers to Rory or Roderick O’Conor (Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair), the last High King of Ireland, and one of HCE’s personas in Finnegans Wake. The very first thing Joyce wrote after the publication of Ulysses was a short sketch in which Roderick O’Conor is portrayed as a publican getting drunk on the dregs left in his patrons’ glasses after closing time.

The Joyce Family in 1924

Time, Not Place

Unlike the first paragraph, in which the emphasis was on place, the second paragraph is concerned with time: the seven items listed here are seven salient events in Finnegans Wake that have not yet taken place. Identifying these events, however, and fitting them into the overarching scheme of the book is no easy task. I can’t claim to have reached the necessary level of understanding to do this.

John Gordon, Professor Emeritus of English at Connecticut College, whose interpretation of the opening paragraph I drew on in the previous article, believes he does know what these events are and how they fit into the large-scale pattern of the book. According to him, they refer to episodes in the family life of James Joyce, his wife Nora Barnacle and their two children, Giorgio and Lucia:

This is the master plan of the book, overlaying and complicating the four-stage Viconian sequence which Joyce advertised. (Gordon 104)

Very roughly, Gordon’s master plan is as follows (Gordon 97-104):

1904: James Joyce and Nora Barnacle elope to the Continent of Europe.
1905: Their son Giorgio is born.
1907: Their daughter Lucia is born.
1914-21: World War I, the Easter Rising and the Irish War of Independence, and Joyce’s chronic glaucoma.
1922: The Irish Civil War, and the publication of Ulysses.
1923-29: Work in Progress, Joyce works on Finnegans Wake.
1930-38: Joyce’s life after the Wall-Street Crash in 1929.

As I said in an earlier article, I don’t accept Gordon’s novelistic interpretation of Finnegans Wake. Joyce first drafted this particular paragraph in October-November 1926, so he could not possibly have been writing about the 1930s. Still, there is a common consensus that Finnegans Wake contains Joyce’s autobiography buried within it, so Gordon’s ideas are always worth bearing in mind.

John Gordon

Recently, on his Finnegans Wake blog, Gordon composed the following Annotator’s editorial for this paragraph:

This seven-stage sequence, summing up the dreamer’s life, may relate to the tradition, mentioned in Ulysses (Bloom in “Hades:” “See your whole life in a flash.”) that someone drowning has his life flash through his mind. On FW’s last page we were heading out to sea and frightened at the prospect (628.5 [RFW 492.37-38]: “Save me from those therrble prongs!”). Since this page is a continuation of that one, the past is prologue: the seven-stage sequence is both compressed memory and compressed prophecy. The seven stages are definitely repeated at 104.10-14 [RFW 083.08-12] and, I believe, also at 126.16-24 [RFW 100.14-21] and 589.20-590.3 [RFW 459.01-17].

The Number Seven Again

Unlike the first paragraph, whose sevenfold nature evolved gradually from an initial seed (Howth Castle & Environs), the earliest draft of the second paragraph comprised a list of seven items from the very beginning (Hayman 46):

Sir Tristram had not encore arrived from North Armorica,

nor stones exaggerated theirselves in Laurens county, Ga, doubling all the time,

nor a voice answered mishe mishe to tufftuff thouartpatrick.

Not yet had a kidson buttended an isaac

not yet had twin sesthers played siege to twone Jonathan.

Not a peck of malt had Shem and Son brewed

& bad luck to the regginbrew was to be seen on the waterface.

The associations with the seven items of bedroom furniture are not yet obvious, so that was probably not part of Joyce’s original concept. But what were his intentions when he drafted this passage? One online blogger, who goes by the name Tim Finnegan (I suspect he is Jorn Barger), has suggested that this list could be read as a sort of table of contents for the book:

Having opened with a short simple clear (half)paragraph, Joyce proceeds to turn on the terror with a distinct list of seven things that “haven’t happened yet”. We need to look at the puzzle of why just these seven before digging into the evolution towards the published version ... It might be the lost key to the whole structure of FW, the table of contents, the schema. Or it might be something as trivial as the seven days of the week, or the seven colors of the rainbow, or the seven deadly sins. But Joyce didn’t secondguess himself as to what the basic seven were, or what order they should be presented in.

It is very frustrating to find oneself saddled with an apparently insoluble puzzle just two paragraphs into the book! Nevertheless, the first-draft versions of these seven items do seem to refer to certain historical events (which I hope to examine in greater detail at a later date):

Sir Tristram had not encore arrived from North Armorica: 1177 The Anglo-Norman knight Sir Amory Tristram conquers Howth from the local Hiberno-Norse inhabitants.
nor stones exaggerated theirselves in Laurens county, Ga, doubling all the time: 1811 The city of Dublin is built in Laurens County, Georgia, on land donated by Irish immigrant Jonathan Sawyer (or Peter Sawyer, as Joyce incorrectly dubbed him).
nor a voice answered mishe mishe to tufftuff thouartpatrick: 432 The traditional date for the introduction of Christianity to Ireland by Saint Patrick.
Not yet had a kidson buttended an isaac: 1879-80 Charles Stewart Parnell becomes leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party following the death of the founder and former leader Isaac Butt.
not yet had twin sesthers played siege to twone Jonathan: 1707-23 The Dublin-born writer Jonathan Swift has a questionable relationship with two younger women, Esther Johnson (Stella) and Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa).
Not a peck of malt had Shem and Son brewed: 1759 Arthur Guinness founds Guinness’s Brewery at St James’s Gate in Dublin and 1810 John Jameson and Son Irish Whiskey Company is founded at Bow Street Distillery in Dublin.
& bad luck to the regginbrew was to be seen on the waterface: 1875 The Great Dublin Whiskey Flood. This one is not so clear. I only recently learned of this forgotten piece of Dublin’s history. If Joyce knew of it, he could hardly have ignored it: a Noachic Flood in Dublin with whiskey—from the Irish for water of life—in place of water!

Although they crop up frequently throughout Finnegans Wake, I have no idea why Joyce fixated on these in particular, and not on other historical events and characters that are also important in the novel (eg the Crimean War, the Battle of Waterloo, Grace O’Malley, or the Battle of Clontarf). Answers on a postcard, please.

A Double Rainbow over Dublin

The Rainbow

Note the allusion to the rainbow in the word regginbrew. In Finnegans Wake the rainbow is a powerful symbol of renewal. It characterizes the cyclical view of history that Giambattista Vico espoused. Joyce, of course, borrowed it from Genesis 9, where God places the rainbow in the sky at the beginning of the post-diluvial age:

And I will establish my covenant with you, neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. (Genesis 9:11-15)

In A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson contrasted the rainbow with the crack of thunder:

This rainbow, the sign of God’s promise and man’s hope, with its seven hues of beauty, is one of the dominant images of Finnegans Wake. It balances the thunderclap, the signal of God’s wrath and man’s fear. (Campbell & Robinson 31)

The American journalist Elliot Paul had already pointed out the significance of the rainbow in Mr Joyce’s Treatment of Plot, one of the twelve essays in the collection Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, which was first published in 1929:

Elliot Paul (Beckett et al 134-135)

The last two items in the second paragraph of Finnegans Wake are replete with allusions to Noah. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight refers to Noah’s drunkenness as well as to the Ark:

And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness. (Genesis 9:20-23)

The arclight refers to both Noah’s Ark and the rainbow: French: arc-en-ciel, rainbow. The regginbrow is also the rainbow: German: Regenbogen, rainbow.

Some of the colours of the rainbow have also been dropped into this paragraph:

red: rory end
yellow: bellowsed
violet: violer d’amores

The colours of this rainbow, however, run from violet to red—the familiar order has been reversed. Why? In a later chapter (RFW 179.08-25) Joyce will describe a double rainbow, in which the colours run from red to violet in one rainbow and from violet to red in the other.

Götterdämmerung: Earth is Destroyed by Water and Valhalla by Fire

The Flood

In Genesis, the rainbow is preceded by the Flood. Finnegans Wake ends with a Flood: the River Liffey overflows its banks and drowns the Irish landscape, cleansing it of sin and guilt, and leaving a tabula rasa, or blank slate, on which the next World Cycle can be impressed. Joyce borrowed this idea from Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, where the Rhine washes the landscape clean at the End of the World so that the World can begin again. Like Finnegans Wake, The Ring of the Nibelung is a cycle of four parts: Wagner had circled the square before Joyce.

In Götterdämmerung, the End of the World is wrought by both fire and water. In Finnegans Wake, only water is present. But the Dublin Whiskey Flood of 1875 was also the Dublin Whiskey Fire (because, you know, whiskey is flammable). And flames are generally red, like the rory end of the rainbow in this paragraph. So, perhaps—just perhaps—Joyce’s Noachic Flood also incorporates this local fiery flood of 1875.

Throughout the opening chapter of Finnegans Wake there are reminders of the recent Flood, the waters of which have not yet fully abated.

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

References

Samuel Beckett et al, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, Second Edition, New Directions Publishing Corporation, Norfolk CT (1962)
Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Harcourt, brace and Company, New York (1944)
John Gordon, Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York (1986)
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)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)

Image Credits

The Master Bedroom of the Mullingar House: Brendan Ward (designer), After John Gordon, Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary, Page 34, Kopimi
A Double Rainbow over Dublin: Copyright Unknown, Fair Use
Götterdämmerung: Earth is Destroyed by Water and Valhalla by Fire: Max Brückner (set designer), Otto Henning, Greiz (1894), Public Domain

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15 July 2022