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| Edgar Quinet (RFW 012.08–012.24) |
This paragraph of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake contains one of the book’s most celebrated quotations: a parody of a passage taken from the works of Edgar Quinet.
Edgar Quinet was a French historian, poet, philosopher and politician. In 1824, when he was just 21 years old, he wrote an essay on the philosophy of history, Introduction à La Philosophie de l’Histoire de l’Humanité, in which he discusses the philosophies of history of Johann Gottfried Herder and Giambattista Vico. In the middle of this essay, Quinet contrasts the permanence and splendour of the natural world with the ephemeral and tumultuous nature of human civilizations:
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.]
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| Edgar Quinet as a Young Man |
Joyce could hardly have found a finer description of the Viconian cycle of human history, endlessly turning, endlessly repeating itself generation after generation. He liked this passage so much that he would often recite it from memory to his friends:
He recited a page from Quinet, which satisfied him completely, a description on which he embroidered for several pages in Work in Progress: the whole atmosphere of the Mediterranean is in it, he said, its ports, its flowers, the azure sky, the sun on the sea. In that passage he felt at home. (Mercanton 103)
The passage is parodied five times in Finnegans Wake (RFW 012, 093, 186-187, 274 and 481) and quoted verbatim once in II.2 (RFW 218):
He now applied himself to the tenth chapter, the children’s homework lesson, which makes the history of Dublin a universal one. In July [1933] he asked Paul Léon to find a passage in the notebooks left behind in Paris; it was Edgar Quinet’s beautiful sentence, which Joyce had once astounded John Sullivan by reciting as they walked by the cemetery on the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, and it recapitulated Joyce’s view of history without Vico’s apparatus. (Ellmann 664)
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| Boulevard Edgar-Quinet (Paris 1920s) |
One of the parodies of this passage occurs in II.1, Twilights Games (RFW 186.32-187.03), in which HCE and ALP’s three children are playing a game. In 1930, in a letter to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce explained the relevance of the famous sentence to this chapter:
The page enclosed is still another version of a beautiful sentence from Edgar Quinet which I already refashioned in transition part one beginning since the days of Hebear and Hairyman etc. E.Q. says that the wild flowers on the ruins of Carthage, Numancia etc have survived the political rises and falls of Empires. In this case the wild flowers are the lilts of children. (Letters I, 22 November 1930)
As we have just seen, the verbatim quotation—in French—occurs in the following chapter, II.2, School Nessans (Night Studies). Actually, this quotation is slightly inaccurate, which suggests that when Joyce copied it into one of his Finnegans Wake notebooks, he did not have Quinet’s original text to hand. It has, however, been noted that when the Russian geographer Léon Metchnikoff quoted the same passage in La Civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques, he too made a couple of mistakes, both of which Joyce would later make. Now, Joyce is known to have drawn upon Metchnikoff’s work while writing Finnegans Wake (Crispi & Slote 19-20). The inescapable conclusion is that Joyce copied the Quinet passage from Metchnikoff, inadvertently reproducing the latter’s two mistakes in the process, while introducing several more of his own:
There can be little doubt that Joyce found his Quinet sentence in Metchnikoff’s book: it is written down in the same notebook [FW VI.B.1] as the rest of the quotes from La civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques; the sentence occurs in Metchnikoff’s book as a quotation; Joyce identified his source (this is rare is the notebooks); and the quotation copies errors Metchnikoff had made: “au temps de Pline” instead of “aux jours de Pline” [and entrées instead of rentrées] ... When Joyce copied it from Metchnikoff, he made a number of transcription errors; he omitted the comma after the first word and after “Columelle,” and before “pendant.” He also omitted the semicolon after “Numance” and he capitalized “pervenche.” Joyce also made “temps” singular and “nom” plural; and dropped the circonflexe in “plaît,” “maîtres,” and “fraîches,” and the accents aigus in “générations.” (Landuyt & Lernout 112 ... 113)
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| Léon Metchnikoff |
When Clive Hart first drew attention to these errors, he suggested that they were almost certainly due to a faulty memory (Hart 183). Joyce’s memory did sometimes play him false—note how in his letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver he introduces Carthage, which is not mentioned by Quinet—but in this case Hart’s certainty was misplaced. Nevertheless, his analysis of Joyce’s use and treatment of this quotation is well worth reading.
Incidentally, Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon have corrected all of Joyce’s and Metchnikoff’s errors. So when the passage is quoted verbatim on page 218 of The Restored Finnegans Wake, it is exactly as Quinet wrote it—which, I suppose, is what Joyce would have wanted.
The Books at the Wake
James Atherton was the first scholar to identify Quinet’s essay as the source of this passage, though he only recognized two genuine parodies of it:
It may have been the interest they shared in Vico that caused Joyce to be attracted to the work of Edgar Quinet. The sentence which is quoted in full [218.08-13] and twice parodied at full length [012.14-24 and 186.32-187.03] has not, to my knowledge, been previously traced in Quinet’s works. It comes from his Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire de l’humanité. In this essay Quinet discusses history as it is presented by Vico and Herder.
“Nous touchons aux premières limites de l’histoire ; nous quittons les phénomènes physiques pour entrer dans le dédale des révolutions qui marquent la vie de l’humanité ... Le moindre grain de sable battu des vents a en lui plus d’élements de durée que la fortune de Rome ou de Sparte.” [“We have reached the outer boundary of history; we have left physical phenomena behind and entered the labyrinth of the revolutions that punctuate the life of mankind ... The smallest grain of sand, buffeted by the winds, has within it more marks of longevity than all the wealth of Rome or Sparta.”]
Joyce uses the same idea: “A hatch, a celt, an earshare .... When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit” [RFW 015.09-16]. All history is to be deduced from any part of the created universe. Yet it is found most completely in the mind of any human being.
“L’histoire,” writes Quinet, “telle qu’elle est réfléchie et écrite dans le fond de nos âmes, en sorte que celui qui se rendrait veritablement attentif à ses mouvements intérieurs, retrouverait la série entière des siècles comme ensevelie dans sa pensée ... J’aperçus, pour la première fois ... le nombre presque infini d’êtres semblables à moi, qui m’avaient précédé ... Chaque empire avait envoyé jusqu’à moi la loi, l’idée, l’essence des phénomènes dont s’est composée sa destinée. À mon insu, la vieille Chaldée, la Phénicie, Babylone ... s’etaient résumées dans l’éducation de ma pensée et se mouvaient en moi. Ce m’était un spectacle étrange d’y retrouver leurs ruines vivantes, et de sentir s’agiter dans mon sein ... l’âme que mon être a recueillie comme un son lointain apporté d’échos [en échos] jusqu’à lui.” [“History, as it is reflected and inscribed in the depths of our souls, in such a way that one who could be truly attentive to his inner movements could recover the entire series of ages as though buried in his mind ... I noticed, for the first time ... the almost infinite number of beings similar to me who had preceded me ... Every empire had transmitted to me the law, the idea, the essence of the phenomena comprising its destiny. Without my being aware of it, ancient Chaldaea, Phoenicia, Babylon ... had been summed up in the education of my mind and moved within me. To me, it was a strange sight to discover their ruins living within me, and to feel tossing within my breast ... the soul which my being heard like a distant sound echoing down through the ages.”]
This is the way in which Joyce is writing his “ideal eternal history”, for Finnegans Wake can be taken as being the story of one man, or one family, or of one city or country, or of all humanity and the entire course of history, since all these are progressive expansions of one story. (Atherton 34-35)
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| Finnegans Wake in a Nutshell |
Glossary
Gaius Plinius Secundus, or Pliny the Elder, and Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella were Roman encyclopaedists of the 1st century. Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (Natural History) and Columella’s De Re Rustica (On Agriculture) are both extant. Pliny’s work comprises thirty-seven books, Columella’s twelve. Pliny’s nephew, Pliny the Younger, is elsewhere associated in Finnegans Wake with Columella, though Quinet was referring to the elder of the two, who mentions the hyacinth and the periwinkle in Book 21 of his Natural History.
Gaul and Illyria were territories that were incorporated into the Roman Republic. Gaul comprised most of modern France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Northern Italy. Illyria covered the western part of the Balkan Peninsula. Numantia was a Celtiberian city in northern Spain. In 133 BCE, the inhabitants burned the city down rather than surrender it to the besieging Roman general Scipio Africanus. Many of the Numantians committed suicide rather than submit to servitude. When Quinet penned his famous sentence, the exact location of Numantia was still unknown. The ruins were only rediscovered in 1860 by the Spanish archaeologist Eduarda Saavedra. Curiously, he shared a surname with Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, whose best known play, La Numancia, is a dramatization of the siege.
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| The Ruins of Numantia |
The hyacinth pops up regularly throughout the text of Finnegans Wake. As a given name, it was once quite popular in Ireland, though it is rarely found today. The feminine form, Jacintha, however, is still in common use. Hyacinth also describes the bluish violet colour of the petals of the blue hyacinth.
The periwinkle, not to be confused with the shellfish of the same name, is a flowering plant whose petals are of a similar colour to those of the blue hyacinth. Like hyacinth, the word periwinkle also describes this colour.
Quinet’s marguerite is the ox-eye daisy, a common flowering plant. Like Hyacinth, Marguerite (or Margaret) is also used as a personal name, one that crops up quite a bit in Finnegans Wake in the form Maggy (or pluralized as maggies). The name comes from the Ancient Greek: μαργαρίτης [margaritēs], pearl.
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| The Hyacinth : The Periwinkle : The Ox-Eye Daisy |
Though Joyce’s reworkings of Quinet are called parodies, I prefer Clive Hart’s description of them as “free translations into various dialects of Djoytsch”. In rewriting Quinet here, Joyce changed the setting from classical antiquity to Dublin. Rush, Knockmaroon, Goatstown, Ballymun and Little Green Market are all places in and around Dublin.
In Pliny and Columella, he saw his warring twins, Shem and Shaun. He also made Quinet’s flowers female temptresses—seizing on the contrast between masculine and feminine forces in Quinet’s sentence ... “masters” are masculine. The peaceful flowers are feminine in the French (“la jacinthe ... la pervenche ... la marguerite”). Girls are often flowers in Finnegans Wake. (Peter Chrisp)
Joyce may also have had in mind the seductive Flowermaidens (Blumenmädchen) from Richard Wagner’s last opera Parsifal.
First-Draft Version
In the first-draft of this paragraph, the parody of the passage from Quinet is introduced by a single short sentence, which Joyce later expanded to six-and-a-half lines:
Peaceably eirinical in grayquiet, selfstretches this freedland’s plain. Since the times of Hebear and Hairyman the tulipair amass themselves at Rush, the cornflowers have been staying at Ballymun, the dogrose has chosen out Goatstown crossroads, the place for twilights, and whitethorn and redthorn have fairygayed the valleys of Knockmaroon and though, for rings round them during a hundred thousand yeargangs, the Formoreans have brittled the Tooath of the Danes and the Oxmen have been pestered by the Firebugs & the Joynts have given up wallmaking & Little on the Green is childsfather of the city, their paxsealing buttonholes have quadrilled across the centuries and here now whiff to us fresh & maid-of-all-smiles as on the day of combat. (Hayman 54)
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| Joyce’s First Draft (RFW 012.08–012.24) |
History
This paragraph begins with an allusion to the Four Masters, those four old men who preserved Irish history and transmitted it through the ages down to our time:
farfatch’d Fearfeasa Ó Maol Chonaire (Farfassa O’Mulconry)
peregrine Cú Choigcríche Ó Cléirigh (Peregrine O’Clery)
duignant Cú Choigríche Ó Duibhgeannáin (Peregrine O’Duignan)
clere Mícheál Ó Cléirigh (Michael O’Clery)
The Liber Lividus evokes the Roman historian Titus Livius, or Livy. But the literal translation of this Latin phrase is Blue Book, which recalls the bluest book in baile’s annals from the previous page. That, you may recall, was a loosely disguised allusion to Joyce’s own Ulysses, which was first published in a distinctive blue dust jacket.
The phrase paisibly eirenical anticipates the Quinet passage, which describes the flowery generations as paisibles (peaceful). Possibly is also present as an overtone. eirenical is actually a real word, an alternative spelling of irenical, which means the same thing as the French paisible. It comes from the Ancient Greek: εἰρηνικός [eirēnikos], peaceful. Needless to remark, it also contains ironical and the Irish: Éire, Ireland. Greek, Roman, French or Irish—all history is essentially the same and can be boiled down to the same thing.
The parenthetical interjection toh! is Italian for look! It comes immediately after an allusion to an Italian historian, so there is, as usual, some method to Joyce’s madness.
Pastoral
In a charming prelude to the first parody ... the basic materials of the sentence are presented in a pastoral setting. The polar principles underlying the scene of battles, death and regrowth, are to be found ‘neath stone pine’ where the ‘pastor lies with his crook’. [Footnote 1: The crook is Eve, made from Adam’s bent rib.] (Hart 192)
It is made clear at the outset that this universal history is the story of a family:
the pastor HCE
his crook ALP
young pricket by pricket’s sister Issy, with her split personality
the herb trinity Shem & Shaun, and the Oedipal figure who comprises both of them
But the opening allusion to the Four Masters reminds us that this history is also the history of Ireland. Hence, these four phrases and a subsequent one can be taken to refer to the five historical provinces of Ireland in the time of St Patrick:
the pastor Ulster, burial place of Ireland’s pastor St Patrick
his crook Connacht. I believe this is an allusion to Croagh Patrick, the famous pilgrimage mountain in Connacht, which is closely associated with St Patrick.
young pricket by pricket’s sister Leinster, after Prickette’s Tower in Dublin’s old city walls. Continuing the St Patrick motif, pricket reminds us of a passage on the opening page of Finnegans Wake, in which St Patrick is called peatrick. A pricket is also a young deer, which recalls the story of how St Patrick defied the High King by lighting the Paschal Fire before the royal fire at Tara had been lit. When the incensed king subsequently sent men to ambush and slay Patrick and eight of his companions, all they find are eight deer and a fawn (Stokes 47). This traditional story was also alluded on the opening page with the word venisoon.
the herb trinity Munster. This phrase describes the provincial flag, a green background (amid its rocking grasses) with three crowns (trinity). Rocking grasses could also refer to the Rock of Cashel, the ancient seat of the Kings of Munster and, after 1101, an important ecclesiastical site. Of course, the main allusion here is to the shamrock, which St Patrick is alleged to have used to explain the Holy Trinity to the pagan Irish.
donkey’s years Meath, the Royal Province. While the Four Old Men represent the four modern provinces of Ireland, Johnny MacDougal’s donkey always stands in for the lost fifth province. But I don’t see any connection to St Patrick.
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| Croagh Patrick |
Say It in Irish
As Peter Chrisp pointed out above, the Quinet passage is “translated” into Irish, with references to figures from Irish history and mythology. I won’t list them all, as they are easily discerned. See FinnegansWiki and FWEET for details.
The remark in parentheses—Year! Year! And laughtears!—echoes similar asides (Hear! Hear! Laughter.) in Hansard, the official transcripts of British Parliamentary debates. It also anticipates the three cheers and rounds of applause at the conclusion of Book III (which also ends in tears):
Tiers, tiers and tiers. Rounds. (RFW 459.40)
A timely reminder that the opening chapter of Finnegans Wake is preludial.
And
that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.
References
Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, On Agriculture, Volume 1, Harrison Boyd Ash (translator), Loeb Classical Library L361, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1960)
Luca Crispi & Sam Slote (editors), How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin (2007)
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois (1962)
David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1963)
James Joyce, Stuart Gilbert (editor) & Richard Ellmann (editor), The Letters of James Joyce, Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Viking Press, New York (1957, 1966)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939, 1949)
James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
Inge Landuyt, Geert Lernout, Joyce’s Sources: Les grands fleuves historiques, Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 6, Summer 1995, The University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1995)
Jacques Mercanton, Lloyd C Parks (translator), The Hours of James Joyce, Part 2, The Kenyon Review, Volume 25, Number 1, Pages 93-118, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio (1962)
Léon Metchnikoff, La Civilisation et les Grands Fleuves Historiques, Librairie Hachette et Compagnie, Paris (1889)
Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Volume 1, H Rackham (translator), Loeb Classical Library L330, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1967)
Edgar Quinet, Introduction à La Philosophie de l’Histoire de l’Humanité, Œuvres Complètes de Edgar Quinet, Volume 2, Librairie Germer-Baillière et Compagnie, Paris (1876)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
Whitley Stokes (editor & translator), The Tripartite Life of Patrick: With Other Documents Relating to that Saint, Part 1, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, Rolls Series, London (1887)
Giambattista Vico, Goddard Bergin (translator), Max Harold Fisch (translator), The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Third Edition (1744), Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY (1948)
Image Credits
Edgar Quinet: Sébastien-Melchior Cornu (artist), Musée Carnavalet, Paris, Public Domain
Edgar Quinet as a Young Man: Edgar Quinet, Lettres à sa Mère, Volume 2, Librairie Honoré Champion, Paris (1998), Public Domain
Boulevard Edgar-Quinet (Paris 1920s): Albert Harlingue (photographer), Roger-Viollet, Public Domain
Léon Metchnikoff: Anonymous Photograph (1880), Public Domain
The Ruins of Numantia: Ruinas de Numancia, José Moreno Carbonero (artist), Museum of Fine Arts of Córdoba, Spain, Public Domain
Hyacinth: © The wub (photographer), Creative Commons License
Periwinkle: © AnRo0002 (photographer), Creative Commons License
Ox-Eye Daisy: © Tony Wills (photographer), Creative Commons License
Joyce’s First Draft (RFW 012.08–012.24): Michael Groden (general editor), The James Joyce Archive, Volume 29, Garland Publishing, New York (1977-80), Fair Use
Croagh Patrick: © Bart Horeman (photographer), Creative Commons License
Useful Resources
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