(Stoop)

 

Stoop (RFW 014.38–015.40)

In The Finnegans Wake Experience, Roland McHugh recalls his first attempt to read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—in, as it happened, the year of my birth:

... it was not until June 1964 that I felt ready to look at Finnegans Wake, aware already of its reputed impenetrability.

Opening the book, I read slowly and mechanically as far as page 18, where I reached the line ‘(Stoop) ... to this claybook ... Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world?’ I closed it. I felt that I had made a respectable attempt and that I could not read its world. (McHugh 25)

McHugh was a pioneer in the field and most readers of Finnegans Wake who have followed in his footsteps have experienced the same sense of bewilderment and perplexity in the face of Joyce’s obscure text. In the summer of 1965 McHugh returned to Finnegans Wake for a second attempt. This time he persevered and completed the task two and a half years later:

Roland McHugh

Having initially read through any chapter I would spend a week or two repeating the process and then make a frontal assault with dictionaries ... I would take a dictionary and work through the chapter, looking up any word I thought suited the language in question. I soon learned that the most cryptic elements were often pure English. Grotesque orthography was often repeated verbatim in the Oxford English Dictionary ... As well as common words, thousands of personal names turn up, and I filled a notebook with an alphabetical list of these, which I then checked against the Dictionary of National Biography and several international biographical dictionaries. (McHugh 28-29)

McHugh’s diligence is to be commended—by his own admission he was not enjoying the process very much (McHugh 30)—as he blazed a trail for the rest of us. This time he found that he was slowly beginning to read the world of Finnegans Wake:

For instance, the original point on FW 18 where I had stopped the previous year coincides with a sudden change of context (which partly caused my stopping). Before this point, we have heard a dialogue between ‘Mutt’ and ‘Jute’ about a burial mound ... The words ‘thing mud’ [which end the Mutt & Jute Dialogue] suggesting the thingmote, the Viking assembly in ancient Dublin, which took place on a kind of conical mound. The next sentence is the one I quoted earlier, exhorting the reader to stoop to the ‘claybook’, and leads to a two-page account of the origins of the alphabet and of printing. I can now explain the transition by observing that the text adheres faithfully to its real subject, the container siglum □, but I had no conception of such things at this stage. (McHugh 30-31)

What McHugh means is that while the Mutt & Jute Dialogue concerns itself with HCE’s tomb, and the following paragraph concerns itself with the text of Finnegans Wake (and, of course, ALP’s Letter), they are both really talking about the same thing: containers of HCE, symbolized in Joyce’s notebooks by the square siglum □. The claybook is not only Finnegans Wake (French: clef, key) but also the strata of dirt (clay) which have accumulated beneath the city of Dublin and which an archaeologist can read like the leaves of a book. Both contain HCE: Finnegans Wake recounts his story, while the archaeological record recounts his history. He is present figuratively in the pages of the former, while his bones are present literally in the strata of the latter.

St Andrew’s Church, Site of the Dublin Thingmote

First-Draft Version

Joyce’s first-draft of this passage was much shorter than the published version. It makes clear the close connection between the two types of book we are reading, the literary and the stratigraphic:

What curios of signs, (stoop) a hatch, a celt, an earshare to cassay the earthcrust! Here are figurines billicoose arming and mounting. Mounting & arming bellicose figurines are there. And this little effingee is a fing called in flintgun. When a piece does for the whole we soon get used to an allforabit. Here are selveram cued little peas of quite a pecuniar interest inaslittle as they are the pellets that make payroll. Right are rocks and with these rocks rogues rangled rough & rightgoring. Wisha, wisha, whydidthe? This is for thorn that’s tuck in its toil like tom anger. Sss! See the snake worms everywhere our durst bin is sworming with sneaks! Subdivide and sumdolot and the tale comes out the same. One by one please one be three and one before. Two nursus one make free and idem behind. What a tale to unfurl & with what an end in view! And to say that we are all every tim mick & larry of us, sons of the sod, when we are not every sue, ciss & sally of us, dugters of Jan [Jor ?]. (Hayman 56-57)

The implication is clear: to understand a book like Finnegans Wake it is not enough to simply read the text : one must be prepared to delve beneath the surface in search of meaning : one must excavate.

Joyce later expanded this paragraph with allusions to a number of religious and cultural figures—Muhammad, Daniel, Buddha, St Patrick, Confucius—who are all associated with sacred texts. In the published text of 1939, this section comprised two paragraphs—the second beginning with Axe on thwacks on thracks, axenwise—but in The Restored Finnegans Wake, Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon have laid it out as a single unbroken paragraph.

(Stoop) if you are abcedminded

Source Texts

Finnegans Wake is unique among the world’s literary masterworks in that so much of its text was inspired by Joyce’s voracious reading of other works. As James Atherton succinctly remarked:

To put the whole matter briefly Finnegans Wake is based on two things: Joyce’s life, and Joyce’s reading. (Atherton 18)

Joyce himself once told his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver:

such an amount of reading seems to be necessary before my old flying machine grumbles up into the air. (Letters I, 16 February 1931)

In writing this particular section, he drew inspiration from several literary sources:

• Edward Clodd, The Story of the Alphabet: Joyce had written to Sylvia Beach, the publisher of Ulysses, asking her to order this book for him while he was on holiday in Belgium in August 1926 (Crispi & Slote 58, James Joyce Digital Archive). Clodd’s text is the source for abcedminded, claybook, allaphbed, Futhorc and balifuson.

• Stanley Lane-Poole, The Speeches and Table-Talk of the Prophet Mohammad: “It must be remembered that the speeches of the Koran are all supposed to be the utterances of God in propriâ personâ, of whom Mohammad is only the mouthpiece … the reader must never forget it when he is perplexed by the “we” (God), and “thou” (Mohammad) and “ye” (the audience), of the Koran” (Lane-Poole xl). As we saw in the preceding article, Mutt and Jute has been read by John Gordon as Me and You.

• André-Ferdinand Herold, La Vie du Bouddha [The Life of Buddha]: This book supplied Joyce with the inspiration for that long and memorable concatenation of causes and effects (In the ignorance that implies impression ... of existentiality), and for the Buddha’s dream of a rush growing out of his navel. Ramasbatham may also contain an allusion to Kama, the Hindu god of love, to whom Buddha was compared (Hérold 48). Rama was the seventh avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. Buddha was considered by many Indian scholars to be the ninth avatar of Vishnu. Hérold mentions a celebrated hermit Rudraka, son of Rama, several times.

• Carl Crow, Master Kung: The Story of Confucius: This provided Joyce with the basis for a pair of sentences near the end of this section: Starting off with a big boaboa ... till allhorrors eve (Crow 49, 45, 43). Part I of Ulysses begins with the letter S, which looks like a boa constrictor. Part II begins with M, which has three legs in its lowercase form, m. Part III begins with P, and peas are green (ivargraine). Admittedly, this is a bit of a stretch—but have you anything better?

• Joseph Mary Flood, Ireland: Its Saints and Scholars: triangular Toucheaterre alludes to the phrase triangular Spain in this book (Flood 27, 30). Flood was quoting the Irish scholar Adamnan on the fame of St Colm Cille: “Though he lived in this small and remote island of the British Sea, his name not only became illustrious throughout the whole of his own Ireland and Britain, but reached even to triangular Spain and Gaul and Italy, and also to the city of Rome itself, the head of all cities.” Why did Adamnan describe Spain as triangular? I have no idea. Perhaps he failed geography.

• Thomas Francis O’Rahilly, A Miscellany of Irish Proverbs: “A fool’s remark is like a thorn concealed in mud, i.e. it stings one unexpectedly” (O’Rahilly 54, §197). Thorn is also a runic letter that looks a bit like a combination of a p and an inverted q. The P/Q or P/K Split, which affected Celtic languages, often crops up in Finnegans Wake.

• The Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, Volume 3: Belshazzar: The famous Writing on the Wall that interrupted Belshazzar’s feast is taken from the Book of Daniel in the Bible. It is not mentioned in Archibald Henry Sayce’s article in the encyclopaedia. This addition to the first draft was initially made on page 24 of Joyce’s copy of Issue 1 of transition, the literary journal that serialized early drafts of Books I and III of Finnegans Wake (or Work in Progress, as it was then called). Joyce considered calling Belshazzar balltosser (after Balthasar, an alternative form of Belshazzar) before settling on bottloggers.

The Writing on the Wall (Belshazzar’s Feast)

The Wild West

This section also contains some Americana:

• billycoose ... ptee ... balifuson: P T Barnum of Barnum & Bailey’s Circus.

• tomtummy’s ... thumfool’s: General Tom Thumb, a dwarf, who was exhibited by P T Barnum.

• whydidtha: Wichita, Kansas, a city of the Wild West associated with the lawman Wyatt Earp.

• wet prairie: Although there is such a thing as a wet prairie, here Joyce is clearly referring to the Atlantic Ocean as it might be called to Native Americans.

• garbagecans: Garbage can is an American commonplace, but in Ireland one says dustbin (durlbin).

• whosethere: Holster, an essential item of dress in the Wild West.

It is a common trope in Finnegans Wake that the history of the Old World is repeated in the New World. Giambattista Vico’s cycle of World History rolls on and on.

General Tom Thumb

1132 and Algebra

In the second episode of Ulysses—originally entitled Nestor—Stephen Dedalus assists one of his pupils with a problem in algebra:

Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by algebra that Shakespeare’s ghost is Hamlet’s grandfather ... Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes ... imps of fancy of the Moors. (Ulysses 28)

Given the significance of certain numbers in Finnegans Wake, it was inevitable that Joyce would introduce the concept of algebra into this section. Long before the Arabs discovered algebra, the ancient Jews, Greeks and Romans had been using alphabetic letters to represent numbers as well as linguistic sounds:

• Axe on thwacks on thracks, axenwise (x + x + x)(x + y). If x = 1 and y = 36, then this comes to 111, a significant number in Finnegans Wake. In Roman numerals, III is the number of children ALP and HCE have. And if we apply the ancient Greek counting system to the English alphabet, we get A (alpha) = 1, L (lambda) = 30, P (pi) = 80, making A + L + P = 111.

• One by one place one be three, dittoh, and one before One by one, place 1 by 3, then 2, and 1 before = 1132, the most important number in Finnegans Wake.

The only significant date in HCE’s version of history is 1132 A.D., and the significance is entirely symbolic: 11 stands for return or reinstatement or recovery or resumption (having counted up to ten on our fingers we have to start all over again for 11); 32 feet per second [per second] is the rate of acceleration of all falling bodies, and the number itself will remind us of the fall of Adam, Humpty Dumpty, Napoleon, Parnell, as also of HCE himself, who is all their reincarnations. (Burgess (ii))

As Bloom recalls in Ulysses, 32 feet per second per second is the acceleration due to gravity at the surface of the Earth (Ulysses 69). It is the numerical embodiment of the Law of Falling Bodies. In Finnegans Wake, 32 is the number of the Fall of Man.

And what does 1132 mean? Well, 32 (feet per second per second) lets us know there has been a fall, and 11 lets us know that there is a kind of resurrection. There is another aspect to this 1132 reference. One time when I was reading St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans ... I came across a passage that seemed to me to say just what Finnegans Wake was all about: “For God has consigned all men to disobedience that he may show his mercy to all” ... This is associated with the text we read in the Catholic Mass for Holy Saturday: “O felix culpa!” (“Oh happy fault!”), that is, the fall of Adam and Eve, the Original Sin which evoked the Savior. There would have been no Savior had there been no fall: “Oh happy fall!”. So when I read the passage in Paul’s Epistle that I thought was the key to Finnegans Wake, I wrote down the reference. And guess what it was: Romans 11:32. (Campbell 134)

According to some sources, Laurence O’Toole, the Patron Saint of Dublin, was born in 1132 (Webb 426, Eblana 11). And according to the Annals of the Four Masters, Finn MacCumhail died in 283 CE, which is one quarter of 1132 (O’Donovan 119).

• Two nursus one make a plausible free and idim behind 2 plus 1 makes 3 and the same [Latin: idem, the same] behind. I can’t make sense of this one. Answers on a postcard.

As I have mentioned countless times before, this opening chapter of Finnegans Wake foreshadows many things that will appear in later chapters. These few sentences anticipate II.2, School Nessans, in which Shem will try to teach Shaun an elementary problem—in geometry, however, not algebra.

Grammar

After algebra, we turn to grammar. The closing lines of this section contain a handful of grammatical terms:

• squattor and auntisquattor and postproneauntisquattor These sound like the conjugations of a deponent verb in Latin. The grammatical term pronoun may also be hidden there.

• usses Does this refer to the common ending of Latin nouns in the second-declension?

• Accusative ahnsire Accusative case.

• infinities Infinitives.

Original Sin

The last three sentences of this paragraph reiterate the Viconian notion that history repeats itself. Vico expresses this idea in terms of society as a whole, but in Finnegans Wake Joyce shows that it also applies to the family: children grow up to repeat the sins of their parents. We cannot escape our heritage: we are all sons of the sod (HCE) or daughters of Nan (Anna Livia Plurabelle).

• Accusative ahnsire! German: Ahn, ancestor + sire = our forefathers, whom we accuse of having to answer for our crimes.

• Damadam to infinities Damn Adam forever, the forebear of the human race from whom we have all inherited the taint of Original Sin.

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

Mutt and Jute

 

Mutt and Jeff (RFW 013.13–014.37)

The next sixty-four lines of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake present us with a short dialogue between a mismatched pair of characters called Mutt and Jute. This is the first of four such dialogues of varying lengths that are dispersed throughout the novel:

On several occasions throughout this series of articles, I have had occasion to mention how most of the episodes in this opening chapter of Finnegans Wake foreshadow salient events from future chapters. The dialogue of Mutt and Jute is an excellent example of this phenomenon, as it anticipates not one but three important moments in the novel. Of particular significance is the Butt and Taff episode in II.3 (The Scene in the Public), which recounts How Buckley Shot the Russian General. That tall tale, one of the showpieces of Finnegans Wake, is an epic re-enactment of the Oedipal Event, in which a mature HCE is challenged and defeated by a younger man, who embodies his two sons Shem and Shaun.

En passant, one might also note important parallels between the encounter between Mutt and Jute and the confrontation in IV.1 between the Archdruid of Ireland and St Patrick, which occurs immediately after the dialogue of Muta and Juva (RFW 478.01-479.02).

Dramatis Personae

Before we can hope to understand what is going on in the brief dialogue between Mutt and Jute, we need to identify the two speakers. Who exactly are Mutt and Jute?

Joyce adapted the names from those of two characters in an American comic strip Mutt and Jeff, which was created by Bud Fisher in 1907 and was still popular in the 1920s:

Mutt and Jeff or Mutt and Jute—males in an American comic strip, published as lately as 1971. In FW their episode is based partly on the meeting of Caliban and Stephano-Trinculo in The Tempest, partly on the meeting of Polyphemus and Ulysses. Mutt is seemingly the Man Servant. (Glasheen 202)

Mutt and Jeff Original Comic Strip

In the previous paragraph, we were introduced to HCE’s Man Servant (S, commonly known as Sackerson or Ole Joe). There, he was explicitly identified as a Jute:

’Tis a Jute! Let us swop hats and excheck a few strong verbs weak oach eather yapyazzard abast the blooty creeks. (RFW 013.11-12)

I believe the swopping of hats implies that in the following dialogue, S, although identified as a Jute, is now playing the rôle of Mutt, as Glasheen correctly surmises. This swopping of hats reflects the fact that Finnegans Wake is cyclical—like Giambattista Vico’s history. The native Irishman is at first a free man—a rather primitive and uncivilized one from the point of view of the native Englishman. The latter invades Ireland and enslaves the former, who becomes the servant of this new master.

This game of musical chairs played with historical rôles recurs throughout Finnegans Wake. For example, Charles Stewart Parnell (the Oedipal figure) invades the Irish Parliamentary Party and overthrows its leader Isaac Butt (HCE). Parnell thereby becomes the new HCE and Butt is forced to serve him. But subsequently a new Oedipal figure, Tim Healy, invades, overthrows Parnell and becomes the next HCE. And so on ad infinitum et ad nauseam.

S was once an Irish Mutt but now he is a British Jute. He plays the rôle of Mutt in the dialogue as this dialogue is re-enacting the Oedipal Moment, when the Jute invaded and enslaved Mutt. Mutt, therefore, is the native Irishman, primitive but free. Jute is the foreign invader—the Angles, Saxons and Jutes were the three Germanic peoples who invaded Britain and became the English nation—who conquers and enslaves him. Mutt then adopts the English tongue and begins to ape his masters. He becomes a Jute—ie a West Brit.

One can also see S as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, who reigned supreme before the creation of Adam. But now he creeps in the dust and is trod upon by his new master. The latter, however, fears him, as the serpent still has his fangs and will always be dangerous. Masters do not sleep easy: they live in dread of the slave revolt.

Note that the common assumption that Mutt and Jute are Shem and Shaun may be misleading. It is probably true that there is something of Shem in Mutt (Man Servant) and something of Shaun in Jute (Oedipal Figure), but the converse is also probably true. Mutt has difficulty hearing Jute, while Jute has difficulty seeing Mutt : in Finnegans Wake, Shem has good hearing but poor eyesight, while the opposite is true for Shaun:

The first half of the [opening] chapter ends with a meeting between two characters, Mutt and Jute, and their mutual misunderstandings. These two characters exemplify not only the problematic communication after Babel but at the same time the rivalry between two suitors of the same woman, two inhabitants of the same city or land, and all the enemy brothers of the book. Mutt and Jute are the prehistorical prototypes of antagonistic Shem and Shaun ... but also the washerwomen at the end of I.8 [Anna Livia Plurabelle] who have trouble hearing each other. (Crispi & Slote 57 ... 59)

John Gordon notes that Mutt and Jute may mean simply Me and You (Gordon 117). But he also sees this episode as a foreshadowing of II.2 (School Nessans), in which Shem is hard pressed to explain things to his dimmer brother Shaun (Gordon 86).

Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo in The Tempest

The Tempest

Adaline Glasheen’s observation that the encounter of Mutt and Jute was inspired by a scene in William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest is worth investigating. In Act II Scene 2, the primitive brute Caliban encounters the King of Naples’ butler Stephano and his jester Trinculo. In the Dramatis Personae of the First Folio of 1623, Caliban is described as a savage and deformed slave. He is a monstrous uncivilized brute and indigenous to the island. This certainly sounds like Mutt, the primitive Irish aborigine enslaved by the foreign invader. But what of Stephano and Trinculo? The former is described as a drunken butler, the latter as a Jester.

Caliban swears to abandon his master Prospero and worship Stephano instead. Later in the play, this ill-matched trio will raise an unsuccessful coup against Prospero, after which Caliban returns to his old master. But speaking of Prospero, it is he who arrives on the island and enslaves Caliban. And it is against him that the slaves revolt. Surely Prospero would be the Jute to Caliban’s Mutt? Stephano and Trinculo do not invade the island: they are shipwrecked on it. Nevertheless, Caliban does become Stephano’s servant. On the other hand, HCE’s Manservant is certainly a drunken butler.

Ulysses and Polyphemus

The Odyssey

Adaline Glasheen also identified the encounter between Polyphemus the Cyclops and Ulysses (Odysseus) as another inspiration for the encounter between Mutt and Jute in Finnegans Wake. Joyce had already drawn on this memorable scene from Homer’s Odyssey for the Cyclops episode in Ulysses. Homer describes the Cyclopes as:

an overweening and lawless folk, who, trusting in the immortal gods, plant nothing with their hands nor plough; but all these things spring up for them without sowing or ploughing ... Neither assemblies for council have they, nor appointed laws, but they dwell on the peaks of lofty mountains in hollow caves, and each one is lawgiver to his children and his wives, and they reck nothing one of another. (Murray 311)

There are certainly parallels here with Caliban and Mutt. Ulysses’ rôle in the story is similar in some respects to Stephano’s and Trinculo’s. Like them, he is a shipwrecked mariner rather than a foreign invader. And he does not enslave Polyphemus. On the contrary, he is imprisoned by Polyphemus, who hopes to eat him. But Ulysses eventually tricks and blinds him, and makes good his escape—though some of his men are not so lucky.

On the whole, I am do not find Glasheen’s hypothesis particularly convincing.

The Murder of Laius by Oedipus

The Oedipal Event

The encounter between Mutt and Jute is better seen as a re-enactment of the Oedipal Event, which is central to the plot of Finnegans Wake. The replacement of the man in possession by a younger version of himself is a vicissitude that befalls many of us at one point or another in our lives. It is also a common trope in works of art and literature. The most important of these with respect to Finnegans Wake are:

• The Original Greek Myth Oedipus unwittingly kills and replaces his father Laius.

• Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung Siegfried confronts his grandfather Wotan and shatters his spear with the sword Nothung.

• The Oedipus Complex A psychoanalytic theory developed by Sigmund Freud and formally introduced in 1899 in The Interpretation of Dreams.

• William Shakespeare’s Hamlet This play has been interpreted by some critics in the light of Freud’s theories. Freud himself applied the Oedipus Complex to Hamlet, originally believing that the death of Shakespeare’s father in 1601 was crucial to the writing of the play (Freud 743). Freud later came to question the authorship of the play, endorsing J Thomas Looney’s theory that the true author of the Shakespeare canon was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (Freud 1949:96).

Oedipus (The Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition)

The Battle of Clontarf

Earlier in this opening chapter—in one of the best known episodes in Finnegans Wake, The Museyroom—we were treated to, among other things, a re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo. The following section, which featured the gnarlybird, took place on the deserted battlefield, which had become the burial mound of the war dead. Shortly after this, we had the famous quotation from Edgar Quinet concerning the flowers that continue to grow on battlefields long after the battles have taken place:

Aujourd’hui, comme aux jours de Pline et de Columelle, la jacinthe se plaît dans les Gaules, la pervenche en Illyrie, la marguerite sur les ruines de Numance ; et pendant qu’autour d’elles les villes ont changé de maîtres et de nom, que plusieurs sont rentrées dans le néant, que les civilisations se sont choquées et brisées, leurs paisibles générations ont traversé les âges, et se sont succédé l’une à l’autre jusqu’à nous, fraîches et riantes comme aux jours des batailles. (Quinet 367-368)

Today, as in the days of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth disports itself in Gaul, the periwinkle in Illyria, the ox-eye daisy on the ruins of Numantia; and while the surrounding cities have acquired new masters and new names, while many others have ceased to exist, and while civilizations have clashed with one another and been destroyed, their peaceful generations have endured throughout the ages in an unbroken succession, as fresh and cheerful as on the days of the battles.

The dialogue between Mutt and Jute also takes place on a battlefield. In this case it is the Battle of Clontarf that has recently taken place. In The Gnarlybird, I suggested that the Battle of Clontarf also lay behind the Museyroom episode. Incidentally, this battlefield aspect of the dialogue foreshadows the Butt and Taff episode, which takes place during the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War.

The Battle of Clontarf

The Battle of Clontarf was a seminal event in Irish history, one which has often been misrepresented by unreliable narrators for political reasons. It took place just outside Dublin on Good Friday 1014. The battle was the culminating event in a civil war in which the sovereignty of the reigning High King of Ireland Brian Ború, a usurper, was challenged by a coalition of Irish and Hiberno-Norse leaders led by the King of Leinster Máel Mórdha and the King of Dublin Sitric Silkenbeard. The latter were aided by two contingents of foreign Norse mercenaries led by the Earl of Orkney, Sigurd the Stout, and Brodir, a warlord based in the Isle of Man. Of these five leaders, only Sitric survived the battle—mainly because he did not actually participate in it, preferring to remain safely ensconced within the wooden walls of Dublin.

Because of the presence of overseas Norsemen, the Battle of Clontarf has often been presented as the battle in which Brian Ború nobly gave his life to save Christian Ireland from the Pagan Vikings. I remember being taught this lie in school as late as the 1970s. This rewriting of history is based on a political tract of the 12th century known as Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib, or The War of the Irish with the Foreigners. This bombastic piece of propaganda has effectively mythologized the Battle and beatified Brian, who is martyred at the climax by Brodir—but whom he still manages to fatally wound.

The toponym Clontarf is Anglicized from the Irish: Cluain Tarbh, Bulls’ Meadow. This not only ties the battle to the Museyroom episode, which abounds in bulls, but also serves to remind us that much of recorded history is, ultimately, bullshit (Dungtarf).

First-Draft Version

Joyce’s first draft of the Mutt and Jute dialogue is considerably shorter than the final, published version, but the references to the Battle of Clontarf are clear from the outset:

Jute — Are you Jeff?

Mutt — Someward.

Jute — You are not a jeffmute?

Mutt — No, only an utterer.

Jute — What is the mutter with you?

Mutt — I became a stummer.

Jute — What turrurrurrurrible thing to because! How?

Mutt — Aput the buttle.

Jute — Whose Poddle? Wherein?

Mutt — The Inns of Dungtarf.

Jute — You are almost inedible to me. Become a little wiseable.

Mutt — Boohooros! I trumple in my mines when I rememmerem.

Jute — Let me cross your qualm with gilt. Here is coyne, a piece of oake.

Mutt — How I know it! It is him. He was poached on that eggtentical spot by the liveries. There where the missers mooney.

Jute — Simply because he dumptied the wholebarrow of rubbages on to soil?

Mutt — Just a puddingstone at a riverpool.

Jute — Lord a marshy! With what for a noise like?

Mutt — Somular to a bull in a Clompturf. I could snore with my owth by the neck I am sutton on O’FIynn.

Jute — Boiledoil for me if I can forestand you norse noise as you make out of it.

Mutt — Rest a while. Half a look onward you will see. Thousand & one livestories netherfellen here. They are tombed to the mound. This earth is not but brickdust. He who runes may read it. But speak siftly. (Hayman 55-56)

The principal change Joyce made when he revised this episode was to append about thirty lines of new material to the end, which almost doubled the length of the dialogue. The burden of this appendix is the Viconian philosophy that history endlessly repeats itself. This is simply an elaboration of Mutt’s closing speech in the first-draft version, in which he informs us that 1001 tales have retold the same old story as the Battle of Clontarf.

Mutt and Jute

Analysis

In their opening exchanges, Mutt and Jute have difficulty communicating with each other. Communication lies at the heart of Finnegans Wake, especially that between Joyce and his reader. Historically, the native Irishman would have spoken a Celtic language, and the invading Jute a Germanic one. In this context, however, the same idea is conveyed by Mutt’s stutter and his hearing difficulty. Stuttering is usually associated in Finnegans Wake with HCE’s guilt. I take this to mean that Mutt is the current HCE, who is about to be replaced by the new HCE. His partial deafness is another trait he shares with HCE, whose surname, Earwicker, suggests that his ear is weaker.

As the conversation turns—at random, it seems—to the Battle of Clontarf, Mutt becomes patriotic and belligerent. He strikes Jute, giving him a black eye (One eyegonblack—Odysseus putting out Polyphemus’s eye?), after which Jute offers Mutt some money (McHugh 109). Is this a bribe? Or is he paying his new servant his wages? The coins are stamped with the image of Sitric Silkenbeard (Cedric Silkyshag):

Coin Minted by Sitric Silkenbeard

The concluding section of Mutt and Jute’s dialogue looks forward to the building of the city of Dublin and its history. Mutt now seems to have regressed to a prehistoric time long before Clontarf—like the Neanderthal carl on the kopje of the preceding paragraph. This passage may be foreshadowing another of Finnegans Wake’s set pieces: Haveth Childers Everywhere, which occurs at the climax of III.3, The Third Watch of Shaun [RFW 413.34-431.13], and in which HCE, channelled through his son Shaun, boasts about Dublin’s history.

Loose Ends

• coyne ... liveries Coyne and livery: there grew up by degrees that class of armed retainers—kerns and gallowglasses, they were called in later times—who surrounded every important chief, whether of English or Irish descent, and were by them quarantined forcibly in war time upon others, and so there grew up that system of “coyne and livery,” or forced entertainment for horse and men, which is to be met with again and again throughout Irish history (Lawless 29).

• He was poached on in that eggtentical spot The fall of HCE dramatized as the fall of Humpty Dumpty.

• missers moony Mrs Mooney, a character in The Boarding House, one of the short stories in Joyce’s collection Dubliners. She is also the subject of malicious gossip in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses. A butcher’s daughter, she runs a boarding house in Hardwicke Street. I don’t know what relevance she has here. In the story, Mrs Mooney tries to trap a husband for her daughter Polly by, essentially, pimping out her daughter among her lodgers. Glasheen notes that at one point in the story Polly waits upstairs while argument rages (Glasheen 199). Make of that what you will.

• Taciturn Tacitus, the Roman historian and annalist. He mentions Ireland briefly in his Life of Agricola (Tacitus 1:24). He was known for his concise—but hardly taciturn—style. His brief account of Ireland includes two abiding themes in Irish history and mythology: (1) the dispossessed ruler who is driven into exile, only to return triumphantly at a later date to reclaim his patrimony : (2) domestic strife among the Irish, who were easily subjugated by a succession of foreign invaders because they were always fighting among themselves (fissiparous is the native historian’s favoured term to describe this national failing).

• Minnikin Passe Manneken Pis, a well-known statue and fountain of a young boy urinating in Brussels (brookcells), Belgium. This links the Battle of Clontarf with the Battle of Waterloo, and the Mutt and Jute episode with the Museyroom episode. The earlier Louee, louee may also include an allusion to Louis XVIII who was restored to the throne after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. There is also, of course, an allusion to the Louis d’or, a French coin.

Manneken Pis

• Meldundleise! German: Mild und leise, Mildly and gently, the opening words of Isolde’s Liebestod (Swansong) in Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. Tristan is one of the principal incarnations of the Oedipal figure in Finnegans Wake. The HCE he overthrows is King Mark of Cornwall, who is also alluded to in this episode (Monomark).

• thing mud! Thingmote, the “Parliament” or Norse assembly in Scandinavian Dublin. It took place on a hill between the modern streets of St Andrew’s Street, Suffolk Street and Wicklow Street. The Norse Kings of Dublin were also buried here (viceking’s graab).

The Mutt and Jute episode is another of those set pieces in Finnegans Wake that one could spend a lifetime analysing and exploring. In these sixty-odd lines Joyce has piled layer upon layer of meaning, creating a stratigraphy of buried arcana for literary archaeologists to excavate at their leisure. But it’s time to press on. I leave the reader to pursue his own excavations at his own leisure.

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

In the Name of Anem

 

Le Moustier Neanderthals (RFW 012.39–013.12)

This paragraph of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake introduces us to one of the book’s principal characters, an individual significant enough to have his own siglum: S. Perhaps, then, the best place to start our research into this character is Roland McHugh’s 1976 study The Sigla of Finnegans Wake, which devotes half a chapter to S:

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. (McHugh 3)

Joyce chose S as this character’s siglum because, on some level, this character represents the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, just as, on some level, HCE and ALP represent Adam and Eve:

Joyce’s original definition of the siglum was ‘S Snake’. (McHugh 125)

This may also refer to the serpent god Apep in Egyptian mythology:

Sir E. A. Wallis Budge lists four alternative versions of the personified conflict of night and day in Egyptian mythology. Three of these involve Set as the incarnation of darkness, matching him either against Osiris, the elder Horus or the younger Horus. Set is the incubistic [HCE] of II.3 [The Scene in the Public] as we have seen. The fourth version comes closer to S: as the serpent god Apep he wages war on the solar deity Ra. (McHugh 125)

Apep Confronts Ra (in Feline Form)

But S goes well beyond his Biblical and Egyptian rôles. In the familial context of the book, he is the Mullingar House’s elderly manservant and general factotum:

In the British Museum manuscripts the siglum S pertains to I.6.5 [ie Question 5 in The Quiz, RFW 112.20-36] ... S is [HCE]’s servant or barman: passages discussing him frequently exhibit words derived from Scandinavian tongues ... To the children S is a bogeyman ... S frequently appears as a menacing police officer ... We can often recognize S in names echoic of ‘Sackerson’, such as Saunderson and Sistersen. Another example is ‘Comestipple Sacksoun’ at 015.35 [RFW 013.04], who becomes the Jute. If we take the hint of VI.B.4.183, ‘S = Robot’, we may also find S involved in the prosecution case in the I.4 [Humphriad III] trial as ‘P. C. Robort’ (086.07 [RFW 068.32-33]), acting for the crown. (McHugh 122-123)

In the answer to I.6.5, he is called Pore ole Joe, but it is never made clear what his true name is. In addition to the cluster of Sackerson-like names, there are also clusters of Mahan-like and Behan-like names associated with him.

John Gordon

In Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary, John Gordon, Professor Emeritus of English at Connecticut University, gives us the following portrait of S:

Sackerson, [HCE’s] manservant, down on the ground floor by the fire, under HCE’s room ... His most distinctive features are his black beard and blonde air ... along with his blue eyes a sign of his Scandinavian origins ... he has the look of a downtrodden supernumerary ... I am convinced that he is the book’s hunchback ... He dresses in blue serge ... he is often compared to a black slave ... he is apparently an old man ... His attendant emblems are fire ... a bottle, the knives which it is his job to grind ... and, since he is the pub’s handyman, various tools, especially a hammer ... he is sometimes suspected of having rebellious thoughts ... he harbours unvoiced desires ... He is ... as the pub’s bouncer, the one who has to shut up shop and throw out stragglers ... Menace: that is the constant ... he is what the dreamer fears. (Gordon 52-55)

Gordon suggests that S has cuckolded HCE and is Issy’s true father:

HCE’s greatest fear is usurpation ... Sackerson is blonde, and so is Issy. (Gordon 55)

In Ulysses, Bloom too fears that he is not Milly’s biological father:

What other infantile memories had he of her?

15 June 1889. A querulous newborn female infant crying to cause and lessen congestion. A child renamed Padney Socks she shook with shocks her moneybox: counted his three free moneypenny buttons one, tloo, tlee: a doll, a boy, a sailor she cast away: blond, born of two dark, she had blond ancestry, remote, a violation, Herr Hauptmann Hainau, Austrian army, proximate, ahallucination, lieutenant Mulvey, British navy. (Ulysses 646)

The idea receives some support from the Kabbalah, which McHugh alludes to:

The concept of Lucifer is totally absent from the Zohar, where the devil is the unsympathetic personality Samaël. When Eve was tempted, ‘the serpent—meaning Samaël—had “criminal relations” with her and injected his defilement into her, Adam not being affected until she communicated in turn to him. She cohabited with Samaël, who corrupted her and by him she became with child, bringing forth Cain. It is obvious that this is in clear contradiction to the text of Scripture, which says: “And Adam knew his wife Eve; and she conceived, and bare Cain.” But the anomaly is so glaring that it must be assuredly of set purpose, or, in other words, that to develop the sexual nature of the Fall the history on which it is founded is ignored at need. (McHugh 126)

Adaline Glasheen

In her Third Census of Finnegans Wake, Adaline Glasheen provides the following summary for S:

Man Servant ... my understanding of him is too wavery and intermittent for summary. He is a nasty, old, drunk, abased handyman at the inn, “curate” at the bar. By times, he represents the dark usurped races—Utah Indian ... Moor as Maurice, brown as bear or Mahan, black as Jo, Behan, Beham (see also Ham, Black Man), or Mutt as racial mongrel.

At other times, (by what mechanism?) he is “buttenblond” Constable Sacksoun, also old, drunk, abased, nasty, and a policeman and informer, hateful and hating, who does his masters’ moral dirty work, as the black does his physical dirty work.

The Man Servant “most mousterian” (i.e., Neanderthal) is also the usurped, our dead ancestors (see Java Jane, Lizzyboy), or he is a living primitive—Stone Age man of Africa, Nazi, or American redneck. He is also our ancestors, the animals, especially extinct animals like dragons, snakes-in-Ireland, baited bears (see Hunks, Sackerson), mastodon and Behemoth ... Perhaps the Man Servant is the old age of Milton’s Satan. (Glasheen 184-185)

It is curious that Glasheen identifies S with Mutt, while McHugh identifies him with Jute.

Elizabethan Bear-Baiting

Glasheen also points out that Sackerson was the name of a famous bear that performed in the Southwark bear-pit in Shakespeare’s time. He is allegedly the creature alluded to by the famous stage direction in The Winter’s Tale:

Exit, pursued by a bear.

Hunks was another, blind baited bear of Shakespeare’s day. As Glasheen comments:

Bear—and a lot of beer-bear-boar-boer-boor references are to the Man Servant, whose name is sometimes Mahan, Behan. (Glasheen 25)

The Irish surname MacMahon means “Son of the Bear”. Gordon also notes that there is a bearskin rug in the master bedroom of the Mullingar House (Gordon 27). Behan derives from the Irish: beach, bee. When we first meet S, he is depicted as another winged insect: a flea, or possibly a louse.

The Angel Michael Binding Satan

In the Bible, the dragon and the serpent are equated, and spoken of as something terrible that has now been tamed but which will one day break out in rebellion again:

And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season. (Revelation 20:2-3)

In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea. (Isaiah 27:1)

The draconian aspect of S explains the reference to the Pillars of Hercules. To quote Giambattista Vico:

§ 540 From this labor, the greatest and most glorious of all [the heroes], the [ poetic] character of Hercules sprang up, reflecting great glory on Juno who set this task for the nourishment of the families. And, in other metaphors both beautiful and necessary, they imagined the earth in the aspect of a great dragon, covered with scales and spines (the thorns and briers), bearing wings (for the lands belonged to the heroes), always awake and vigilant (thickly grown in every direction). This dragon they made the guardian of the golden apples in the garden of the Hesperides. Because of the wetness from the waters of the flood, the dragon was later believed to have been born in the water. Under another aspect they imagined the earth as a hydra (also from hydōr, “water”), which, when any of its heads were cut off, always grew others in their place. It was of three alternating colors: black (the burnt-over land), green (the leaf), and gold (the ripe grain). These are the three colors of the serpent’s skin, which, when it grows old, is sloughed off for a fresh one. Finally, under the aspect of its fierceness in resisting cultivation, the earth was also imagined as a most powerful beast, the Nemean lion (whence later the name lion was given to the most powerful of the animals); which philologists hold to have been a monstrous serpent. All these beasts vomit forth fire, which is the fire set to the forests by Hercules. (Vico 168-169)

Sackerson and Shem

Perhaps one of the most confusing aspects of S is his relationship to Shem:

If S in book I is the harasser of [Shem], book III reverses the alignment ... In book I he opposes [Shem]; in book III he is identified with [Shem]. In this light Mrs Glasheen’s suggestion that he is the ass or donkey belonging to X [the Four Old Men] is most appealing. (McHugh 123-124)

S, then, is also compared to wild animals once native to Ireland, but which have now been either domesticated (like donkeys and bees) or exterminated (like bears and snakes).

In conclusion, S is who HCE becomes when he is overthrown by the Oedipal figure. S is the former patriarch. He is the previous HCE, who must now serve the conquering invader, or new HCE. He is the native Irishman turned West Brit, a loyal and servile subject of his British masters. The prominent Scandinavian elements in S’s make-up probably reflect the fact that Dublin was a Scandinavian city for more than three centuries before it was conquered by the Anglo-Normans in 1172. Two prominent Norse factions mentioned in our annals are the Fingaill (Fair-Haired Foreigners) and the Dubhgaill (Black-Haired Foreigners). Hence, S’s black beard and blonde hair. He is a former Viking or pirate (Blackbeard), who has been tamed and domesticated. But HCE, like the ancient Spartans and Romans, lives in continual fear of a slave uprising.

Once again, Joyce is using this opening, preludial chapter of Finnegans Wake to foreshadow a later episode in the book. In this case it is the mock-epic tale How Kersse the Tailor Made a Suit of Clothes for the Norwegian Captain, which will be featured in II.3, The Scene in the Public. In that chapter the story of how Dublin’s Norse invader evolved from predatory pirate to bourgeois businessman is told in detail and at great length. It is the story of how the Oedipal figure became HCE became S.

First-Draft Version

Joyce’s first draft of this paragraph began with a false start, which he abandoned before he had completed the second sentence:

Excuse us, Lictor. Can you direct one to the (Hayman 54)

A lictor was a magistrate’s bodyguard in ancient Rome—S is HCE’s bouncer. He later replaced this with something closer to the final version:

Scuse me, guy. You tollerday donsk? N. you talkatiff Scowegian? you spigotty angliss? You Phonio Saxo? Nnnn. ’Tis clear all so. Tis a Jute. Let us swop hats. (Hayman 55)

These lines are only slightly elaborated in the final version, but Joyce precedes them with ten or eleven new lines, which describe S in some detail. The emphasis is placed upon his primitive aspects.

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