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Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland (RFW 011.21–011.35) |
These fifteen lines of Finnegans Wake record the Annals of the Four Masters. In this context, the Four Masters are X, the Four Old Men, and the annals are both ALP’s Letter—Joyce is still foreshadowing I.5, The Mamafesta—and the text of Finnegans Wake itself.
First-Draft Version
In the first-draft version, this section reads:
1132 AC Men wondern as Wallfisch [and]. Bloaty wares.
566 A. C. On Bell of this year a crone that hadde a wickered kish for to hale turves from the bog lookit under the blay of her kish & found herself full of swalle shoon [and]. Bluchy works on Hurdlesford.
[Silent]
566 A.D. At that time it came to pass that many fair maidens grieved because their minions were ravished of them by an ogre Europeus Pius [and].
1132 A.D. Two sons at one time were born to a goodman & his wife. There were name Primas & Caddy. Prime was a gentleman & came of decent people. Caddy was to Winehouse & wrote a piece of fun. Blooty worse in Ballyaughacleeagh. (Hayman 53-54)
In the final version, Joyce tagged all four dates with A.D. In the following paragraph, these are translated as antediluvious and annadominant. In other words, the first two entries in the annals are antediluvian—before the Flood—while the last two belong to the Christian era, Anno Domini. The A.C. of the first draft must stand for Ante Calamitatem [Before the Catastrophe], or, possibly Ante Christum [Before Christ]. In Viconian terms, the first two entries record events that occurred in the previous cycle before the Flood, which is described in the concluding pages of Finnegans Wake. The final two entries, however, record events that belong to the present cycle.
The problem with this interpretation is that in the final version the second annal includes the phrase after deluge. Make of that what you will. Perhaps it simply reflects the fact that history in Finnegans Wake is cyclical, so that every event occurs both before and after the Deluge.
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Beached Blue Whale at Bean Hollow, California |
1132
We have come across this significant number before:
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. So, that’s another aspect to this 1132 motif. (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).
The first entry in the annals also draws upon The Annals of Dublin. These were a collection of annals collated from various sources by early Irish antiquaries (such as James Ware, his son Robert Ware, and his great-grandson-in-law Walter Harris) and appended to Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Among these annals, the following may be noted:
140 Eblana, supposed to be Dublin, noticed by Ptolemy, the geographer, as a famous city. It was called by the Irish, Athcliath, or Bally-Athcliath, “the town of hurdles,” from a ford across the Liffey, then constructed of hurdles.
1331 A great famine relieved by a prodigious shoal of fish, called Turlehydes, being cast on shore at the mouth of the Dodder. They were from 30 to 40 feet (10-12 m) long, and so thick that men standing on each side of one of them could not see those on the other. Upwards of 200 of them were killed by the people. (Thom & Co 2090, 2092)
These turlehydes were clearly beached whales. German: Walfisch, whale. The strange name is apparently a corruption of thurlhedis, which in turn is a variant of thurlhead:
Thurlhead. Obs. rare Alteration of thurlepolle, Thirlepoll, with head for poll.
Thirlepoll. ... [perh. f. Thirl sb.<sup>1</sup> + Poll sb.<sup>1</sup>, from the blowholes or nostrils in the head ...] A whale, or some species or kind of whale. (Murray et al 319)
Stephen Dedalus recalled this event in the third episode of Ulysses:
A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon, spouting, hobbling in the shallows. Then from the starving cagework city a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers’ knives, running, scaling, hacking in green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague and slaughters. Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves . (Ulysses 45)
It is hard not to associate this image with that of the Lilliputians swarming over the sleeping Gulliver on the shores of Lilliput—an image which also informs the whole of the opening chapter of Finnegans Wake.
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| Gulliver in Lilliput |
John Gordon equates this annal with Freud’s Primal Scene, in which the children spy on their parents having sex. Here the twins Shem and Shaun (men like to ants or emmets) observe HCE’s erect penis penetrating ALP’s vagina (a groot hwide Whallfisk which lay in a runnel) and wonder (wondern) what to make of it all. emmets, an archaic term for ants, evokes the Irish rebel Robert Emmet, which is appropriate, as Shem and Shaun are Oedipal rebels against their father’s authority.
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| The Hill of Uisneach, Scene of Ancient Ireland’s Beltane Festival |
566 AD
566 is half of 1132 and twice 283. However, nothing significant to Finnegans Wake is recorded in the annals under 566 AD. In 566 BC, the first known Panathenaic Games were held in Athens, which may or may not be significant. The five lines that comprise this entry, however, are chock-full of allusions.
Baalfire’s night refers primarily to the ancient Celtic festival of Beltane, which took place on the eve of 1 May:
This festival, the most important ceremony of which in later centuries was the lighting of the bonfires known as “beltane fires”, is believed to represent the Druidical worship of the sun-god. The fuel was piled on a hill-top, and at the fire the beltane cake was cooked. This was divided into pieces corresponding to the number of those present, and one piece was blackened with charcoal. For these pieces lots were drawn, and he who had the misfortune to get the black bit became cailleach bealtaine (the beltane carline—a term of great reproach. He was pelted with egg-shells, and afterwards for some weeks was spoken of as dead ... As to the derivation of the word beltane there is considerable obscurity. Following Cormac, it has been usual to regard it as representing a combination of the name of the god Bel or Baal or Bil with the Celtic teine, fire. And on this etymology theories have been erected of the connexion of the Semitic Baal with Celtic mythology, and the identification of the beltane fires with the worship of this deity. (Chisholm 712)
The crone, or cailleach bealtaine, is clearly ALP. Following John Gordon’s analysis, the Primal Scene of the first annal leads to the conception of Issy: ALP finds herself to be pregnant with Goody Two-Shoes, or schizophrenic Issy. after deluge now takes on a sexual connotation (after HCE’s ejaculation). And as Issy is born in February, it is appropriate that she is conceived about nine months before in May.
Actually, Issy is usually associated with 29 February, so if she was conceived on 1 May, she must have been born after a gestation of ten months. John Gordon believes that Finnegans Wake is set on Monday 21 March 1938. I have discussed this date in earlier articles and explained why I cannot accept it, so I won’t go into the matter again. I do, however, believe that on one of its planes of narrative—the Diurnal Plane—the book is set on 21 March 1884, Nora Barnacle’s birthday. Nine months later brings us into December:
The birth of Issy, nine months later, on or around the time of St Lucy’s Day. (Gordon 82)
St Lucy’s Day falls on 13 December. St Lucy was, allegedly, a 3rd-century martyr, who brought food to Christians hiding in the catacombs during the persecution of Diocletian. She lit her way with a candle-lit wreath that she wore on her head so that her hands might remain free to carry as much food as possible. Her name derives from the Latin: lux, light. Joyce’s daughter, the principal model for Issy, was called Lucia. Joyce, who suffered for most of his adult life from iritis and other ailments of the eyes, had a special affection for St Lucy, patron of the blind, guardian of the eyes. However, I cannot see any allusions to St Lucy in this annal (unless Bluchy counts), whereas the allusion to Beltane is quite explicit.
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| Saint Lucy |
cowrie- ... -feige Cowrie shells and figs (German: Feige) are sometimes used to depict the female vulva, which they resemble in appearance.
kish ... sawl I don’t know why we have these allusions to the Israelite King Saul and his father Kish.
blay This is the name of a type of fish (continuing the fishy theme of this annal), but Joyce borrowed this unusual word from an advertisement in the Irish Independent (23 January 1924):
McGuires Great Sale Offers:
Unbleached Twill Sheets
1,500 pairs of Good Blay Sheets for Single Beds. Sale Price Each ... 2/3 (JJDA)
sackvulle Sackville Street, now O’Connell Street, Dublin’s principal thoroughfare.
goody quickenshoon The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, an anonymous eighteenth-century children’s story about a child who was so thrilled at receiving a pair of shoes that she would exhibit them to everyone while exclaiming Two shoes!. It is often attributed to the Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith.
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| Oliver Goldsmith |
Silent
In the following section (Somewhere parently ...) it is implied that this silence represents a lacuna or break in the annals. In a Viconian context, it could be interpreted as the ricorso or recurrence—the point where the two ends of the Viconian Cycle meet one another, as one cycle ends and the next begins, and history starts to repeat itself.
If this is correct, then perhaps the four annals can be interpreted as representing the three Viconian Ages (Theocracy, Aristocracy and Democracy) followed by a collapse into Chaos, from which the New World Order of the next cycle will emerge:
Theocratic Age of Gods and Giants the ogre Puropeus Pious
Aristocratic Age of Heroes Caddy and Primas
Democratic Age of Men Men like to ants or emmets
Collapse into Chaos Fire and deluge, dead turves
Admittedly, this is a bit of a stretch. Perhaps I am trying too hard.
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| Eithne |
566 AD
If John Gordon’s analysis is correct, then the third annal must be recording the birth of Issy. Note the presence of the Irish: solas, light:
‘Puppette’ echoes Swift’s nickname of ‘Ppt’ for Stella, hence Issy. (Gordon 89)
ogre Joyce’s source for this word was a French translation of the German term Kinderfresser, which literally means Devourer of Children:
Ces figures antiques ne sont cependant que les membres les plus connus d’une grande famille d’épouvantails ou de croquemitaines dont on trouve des représentants à toutes les étapes de la civilisation: … Klapperböcke et Butzemänner de la croyance populaire germanique, tel, par exemple, ce Kinderfresser (ogre) qui, taillé en bois et peint de couleurs voyantes, orne dans sa grotesque laideur l’une des plus jolies fontaines de Berne. NOTE. in text with Irish tir na n-óg: the (mythical, alas) land of eternal youth.
These ancient figures are however only the best known members of a large family of spectres or bogeymen whom one finds represented in all stages of civilization: … Klapperböcke and Butzemänner of popular German belief, like, for example, that Kinderfresser (ogre) who, carved from wood and painted in bright colours, adorns with its grotesque ugliness one of the prettiest fountains in Berne. NOTE. in text with Irish tir na n-óg: the (mythical, alas) land of eternal youth. (Hirn 9, JJDA)
The author of this, Yrjö Hirn, was a Finnish professor of aesthetics and modern literature at the university of Helsinki. Joyce used this reference again in III.3, The Third Watch of Shaun: Tear-nan-Ogre (RFW 371.40). In Irish mythology, Tír na nÓg [The Land of the Young People] is associated with Niamh of the Golden Locks (brazenlockt), who carries Finn Mac Cumhail’s son Oisín off to dwell with her in eternal youth.
But brazenlockt also conjures up images of a damsel imprisoned in a brass tower. In Greek mythology, Acrisius King of Argos incarcerates his daughter Danaë in such a tower to prevent her from conceiving a son fated to kill Acrisius. Zeus, however, visits Danaë in a Shower of Gold and she conceives Perseus. In Irish mythology, Balor of the Evil Eye incarcerates his daughter Eithne in a Glass Tower for a similar reason, but she begets triplets. Balor takes the three children from her and sends them to be drowned in a whirlpool. But one of the triplets is saved and grows up to become Lugh of the Long Arm, who kills Balor.
The phrase Puropeous Pious, coming immediately before a reference to Bloody wars, echoes Giambattista Vico’s Latin phrase pura et pia bella [pure and pious wars], which refers to the religious wars of European history:
§ 958 From the practice of these [divine] judgments in private affairs, the peoples went forth to wage wars which were called pure and pious, pura et pia bella, and they waged them pro aris et focis, “for altar and hearth”; that is, for civil concerns both public and private, for they regarded all human things as divine. Hence the heroic wars were all wars of religion. (Vico 318)
When history repeats itself following the Viconian ricorso (recurrence), these wars returned as the familiar Crusades and Wars of Religion of the late Middle Ages and early modern period:
§ 1049 Thus there was a return in truth of what were called pure and pious wars—pura et pia bella—of the heroic peoples, and hence all Christian powers still bear on the globe surmounting their crowns the cross which they had earlier displayed on their banners when they waged the wars called crusades. (Vico 358)
Puropeous Pious also echoes the Latin: puerperus, bearing young.
1132 AD
This annal clearly describes the births of the twins Shem and Shaun to HCE and ALP. This is somewhat surprising, as Shem and Shaun have already been described peeping at their parents having sex, which would make them older than Issy. Perhaps this is, once again, the cyclical nature of history confusing matters.
I do not find John Gordon’s analysis of this entry as convincing as his analyses of the first three entries:
Shaun (Primas) and Shem (Caddy) split into two polar opposites and head off for Windsor (‘Winehouse’) and Santry. They are now two warring factions, in this case English and Irish, as elsewhere they divide into north and south. (Gordon 89)
Note that Shaun is the elder brother (Latin: primus, first-born) and Shem the younger (cadet, a younger brother). But just as Jacob robs Esau of his birthright, so Shem seeks to supplant Shaun as their father’s heir. Is this what lies behind the sibling rivalry between the caddish Shem and the prim Shaun?
Louis O Mink has identified the phrase Caddy went to Winehouse with Joyce’s impecunious trip to Paris in 1903 (Mink 438). John Gordon defends his interpretation—Windsor—by citing John Kelleher’s Notes on Finnegans Wake, but I have not been able to lay my hands on a copy of this. The Analyst is well overdue for a republication.
The description of Caddy writing Blotty words for Dublin sounds like a reference to Joyce finishing Ulysses in Paris in 1921.
Bloody Wars in Dublin
All four annalistic entries conclude with the phrase Bloody wars in Dublin, or some variant thereof. Bloody wars! was once a common oath in Dublin. It occurs in Ulysses, spoken by the anonymous narrator of the Cyclops episode (Ulysses 328).
The conjunction of sexual themes and bloody wars reminds one of Thersites’ remark in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida:
Lechery, lechery! Still wars and lechery! Nothing else holds fashion. A burning devil take them! (The History of Troilus and Cressida, Act 5, Scene 2)
According to Richard Ellmann, Joyce privately identified the anonymous narrator of Cyclops with Shakespeare’s Thersites:
There is another kind of deflation, a malign one, which is inspired by meanness rather than by honesty. One of the two narrators of Cyclops—the one who carries the burden of the narrative—is a man of this kind, a man never named, but privately identified by Joyce with Thersites, the meanest-spirited man in the Greek host at Troy. (Ellmann 110)
And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.
References
Anthony Burgess, A Shorter Finnegans Wake, The Viking Press, New York (1967)
Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York (1944)
Joseph Campbell, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce, Edited by Edmund L Epstein, Harper Collins, New York (1993)
Hugh Chisholm (editor), The Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, Volume 3, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1911)
Eblana (Teresa J Rooney), St Laurence O’Toole and His Contemporaries, M H Gill & Son, Dublin (1881)
Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey, Faber and Faber, London (1974)
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)
Yrjö Hirn, Les Jeux d’Enfants [Children’s Games], Translated from the Swedish by T Hammar, Delamain et Boutelleau, Paris (1926)
James Joyce, Ulysses, Shakespeare and Company, Paris (1922)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939, 1949)
James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
John Kelleher, Notes on Finnegans Wake, The Analyst, Number 12, Pages 9-15, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois (1957)
Louis O Mink, A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana (1978)
James A H Murray, Henry Bradley, W A Craigie, C T Onions (editors), A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles: Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society, Volume Volume 9, Part 2, The Clarendon Press, Oxford (1919)
John O’Donovan (translator, editor), Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, Second Edition, Volume 1, The Four Masters, Hodges, Smith, and Co, Dublin (1856)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, William Heinemann, London (1904)
Alexander Thom & Co, Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for the Year 1904, Alexander Thom & Co, Dublin (1904)
Giambattista Vico, Goddard Bergin (translator), Max Harold Fisch (translator), The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Third Edition (1744), Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY (1948)
Alfred Webb, A Compendium of Irish Biography, M H Gill & Son, Dublin (1878)
Image Credits
Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland: The Four Masters, John O’Donovan (translator & editor), Public Domain
Beached Blue Whale at Bean Hollow (California): © Robyn (photographer), Fair Use
Gulliver in Lilliput: Thomas Morten (engraver), Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World, Edited by Thomas Minard Balliet, D C Heath & Co, Boston 1901, Public Domain
The Hill of Uisneach, Scene of Ancient Ireland’s Beltane Festival: The Stone of Divisions on the Hill of Uisneach, Monumental Ireland, Copyright Unknown, Fair Use
Saint Lucy: Domenico di Pace Beccafumi (artist), Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, Public Domain
Oliver Goldsmith: Joshua Reynolds (artist), National Portrait Gallery, London, Public Domain
Eithne: Tory Island, © Jim Fitzpatrick (artist), Fair Use
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