13 August 2022

In the Museyroom

 

Panorama de la Bataille de Waterloo (RFW 007.06-008-39)

The Museyroom episode is one of the best known passages in Finnegans Wake. It is a polyphonic tour de force. There is probably no other excerpt that best illustrates the multilayered nature of the Finnegans Wake. As I pointed out in an earlier article, the Museyroom episode can be read on several different levels. It is simultaneously and at the same time:

  • A tour through a museum, like Jacob Von Falke’s visit to a waxworks museum in Dublin, in which he heard the “Freudian” joke about Wellington and his horse. Kate, the elderly slavey of the Mullingar House, is our guide (Von Falke 271, Freud 95).

  • A detailed account of the Battle of Waterloo, mixed up not only with salient moments in the careers of both Wellington and Napoleon but also with other battles, such as the Battle of the Boyne and the Battle of Clontarf. Kate is now more like Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage or Victor Hugo’s Monsieur Thénardier, a scavenger and camp follower, picking among the dead.

  • A description of HCE urinating, defecating and masturbating in the outhouse behind his pub, The Mullingar House, in Chapelizod.

  • A depiction of HCE and ALP making love—possibly the event in which Issy is conceived, and which their sons Shem and Shaun spy on. But does the hat HCE is wearing represent a condom?

  • A foreshadowing of the mock-epic tale How Buckley Shot the Russian General, which will be dramatized by Butt and Taff later in Finnegans Wake (in II.3, The Scene in the Public).

  • A version of the Oedipal Moment, in which HCE is challenged and overthrown by his sons. In this account of the Battle of Waterloo, Wellington (HCE) is defeated by Napoleon (Oedipus). As usual, the fall of HCE is presented as just retribution for his “crime” in the Park. The exact nature of this crime is obscure, but it appears to be sexual and involves a pair of temptresses identified with his daughter Issy.

The Museyroom itself is many things at once:

  • The Wellington Monument in the Phoenix Park—an obvious ithyphallic symbol.

  • The National Museum of Ireland (both the main section on Kildare Street and the Natural History Museum on Merrion Square, which is situated across the road from the Dublin residence of Wellington’s family and probable birthplace of the Duke). As museums are dedicated to the female Muses, this allows us to see the museyroom as a symbol of the female genitalia, in contrast to the Wellington Monument.

  • The Wellington Museum The Hotel du Musée was established at the foot of the Lion’s Mound near Mont St Jean by Sergeant-Major Edward Cotton of the 7th Hussars, who had taken part in the Battle of Waterloo under Wellington. The museum no longer exists—Cotton’s hotel later housed the Waterloo Waxworks Museum and is now a restaurant—but it was visited by Victor Hugo, whose account of the battle in Les Misérables (Chapters 60-78) is, I believe, an important source for Joyce’s description of the battle in the Museyroom episode. Cotton wrote an account of the battle, A Voice from Waterloo, in 1847.

  • The Wellington Museum A museum in Apsley House, 149 Piccadilly, Hyde Park Corner, London. This house was designed by Robert Adam (RFW 435.06: Adam’s mantel) between 1771-78. The Duke of Wellington bought it and enlarged it in 1817. The Wellington Gallery was built for his extensive collection of pictures, sculptures, furniture, silver, porcelain, caricatures, medals and memorabilia.

  • The Panorama of the Battle of Waterloo A small rotunda at the foot of the Lion’s Mound, on the Waterloo battlefield, which houses a panoramic painting of the battle by the French artist Louis Dumoulin.

  • The outhouse or jacks behind The Mullingar House in Chapelizod.

Also located in the back garden of The Mullingar House is the kitchen midden or rubbish tip (Tip), which actually represents the battlefield from an archaeologist’s point of view. It probably also represents the Lion’s Mound, a large conical artificial hill located on the battlefield near the place where a musket ball hit the shoulder of the Prince of Orange (the future William II of the Netherlands) and knocked him from his horse. In a later draft of this paragraph, Joyce emended national museum to Williamstown national museum, a possible allusion to William of Orange, victor at the Battle of the Boyne. (Williamstown is also the former name of a residential suburb of Dublin between Booterstown and Blackrock, but this village was named for the 18th-century Counsellor William Vavasour.)

Remember that in the real world, the backyard of the Mullingar House was laid out as a bowling green (Jolas 159). In Tristram Shandy by the Irish-born writer Laurence Sterne, Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim re-enact the Second Siege of Namur from the Nine Years’ War (the War of the League of Augsburg during the reign of William of Orange) on the bowling green at Shandy Hall. Many of the encounters of this war took place in the Spanish Netherlands, including the two sieges of Namur (1692 and 1695). Namur lies about 40 km to the southeast of Waterloo. Blücher had his headquarters here when the Waterloo Campaign opened (Chisholm 372).

Ireland was also an important theatre in the War of the League of Augsburg: the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 was one of the War’s largest battles.

The Lion’s Mound and Rotunda

First-Draft Version

Joyce’s first draft of this paragraph is very revealing. Although he added many details to future drafts, the first is in many ways complete in its own right:

This way to the mewseyroom. Mind your boot going in. Now yea are in the Willingdone mewseyroom. This is a Prooshian gun. This is a ffrinch. Tip. This is the flag-o’-the-prushian. This is a bullet that bing the flag-o’-the prooshian. This is the ffrinch that fire the bull that bang the flag-o’-the-prooshian. Tip. This the hat of lipoleum. Tip. Lipoleum hat. This is Willingdone on his harse. This Willingdone, this his big wide harse. Tip. This is the first in the ditch. This is the gay lipoleum boy that spy the Willingdone on his white harse. Tip. This is the jinnies making war oversides the Willingdone. This is the big Willingdone tallowscoop. Tip. This is the jinnies dispatch the Willingdone. Dear Awthur, field gates your tiny frow? They think to cotch the Willingdone. This the Willingdone dispatch. Cherry jinny, damn fairy ann, voutre, Willingdone. Pip. This is Prooshing balls. This the ffrinch! Tip. Guns, jinnies in blootchers, this is the frinches in the redditches. This is the Willingdone order, fire! Tonerre! This is lipoleum hennessy that spy the Willingdone on his big white harse. This is the three little lopoleums. This is the hinnessy that spy the Willingdone, this is the dooley that get the funk from the hinnessy. This is the hindoo Shim Shin between the dooleyboy & the hinnessy. Tip. This is the Willingdone, he laugh [at a] flag-o’-the-ffrinch lipoleums. This is the Willingdone hang the flag o’ the lipoleum on the tail of his big white harse. This the hindoo hattermad, he shoot the hat of lipoleums off the tail & the hat of lipoleum off of the back of the big wide harse. Tip. This way the mewseyroom. Mind your boots going out. (Hayman 49-52)

Hayman includes the editorial footnote:

Diagrams accompany the following: the narrative of the Battle of Waterloo.

Joyce’s Sketch of the Battle of Waterloo (Hayman 50)

Waterloo

Joyce spent September 1926 with his family in Belgium, where he studied Flemish and toured the site of the Battle of Waterloo (Ellmann 579-581, Norburn 125). This was before he had even conceived the Museyroom episode. By chance, the American writer Thomas Wolfe was in the same tour group as Joyce. He was familiar with Joyce and his writings and has left us a very revealing description of the day in a letter to his lover Aline Bernstein. The previous year, Bernstein had been a director, set designer and costume designer for an Off-Broadway production of Joyce’s only surviving stageplay Exiles at the Neighborhood Playhouse:

Thomas Wolfe (1920)

I took the day off and went to Waterloo in a bus—the first trip I’ve made. There were seven or eight of us—two or three English, two or three French, and your old friend James Joyce. He was with a woman about forty, and a young man, and a girl. I noticed him after we had descended at Waterloo—I had seen his picture only a day or two ago in a French publisher’s announcements: he was wearing a blind over one eye. He was very simply—even shabbily—dressed. We went into a little café where the bus stopped to look at the battle souvenirs and buy postcards: then we walked up what was once the Sunken Road to a huge circular building that had a panorama of the battle painted around the sides; then we ascended the several hundred steps up the great mound which supports the lion and looks out over the field. The young man, who wore horn-rim spectacles, and a light sporty-looking overcoat, looked very much like an American college boy: he began to talk to me going up the steps—I asked him if he knew the man with the eye blind. He said he did, and that it was Joyce. I commented briefly that I had seen Joyce’s picture and read his book; after this the young fellow joined me at every point.

Walking back down the road to the café, I asked him if Joyce’s sight was better—he said it had greatly improved. He said that Joyce was working on a new book, but thought it impossible to say when it was finished. We went back to the café—they sat down at a table and had tea—the young man seemed about to ask me to join them, and I took a seat quickly at another table, calling for two beers. They all spoke French together—he told them all about it, and they peeked furtively at me from time to time—the great man himself taking an occasional crafty shot at me with his good eye. As they had tea, they all wrote postcards. As they got up to go into the bus, the young man bowed somewhat grandly to me—I don’t blame him; I’d be pleased too. I judge the people are Joyce’s family—he is a man in his middle forties—old enough to have a son and a daughter like these. The woman had the appearance of a thousand middle class French women I’ve known—a vulgar, rather loose mouth; not very intelligent looking. The young man spoke English well, but with a foreign accent. It was tragic to see Joyce—one of the gods at the moment—speaking not one word of the language his fame is based on. The girl was rather pretty—I thought at first she was an American flapper.

Joyce was very simple, very nice. He walked next to the old guide who showed us around, listening with apparent interest to his harangue delivered in broken English, and asking him questions. We came home to Brussels through a magnificent forest, miles in extent—Joyce sat with the driver on the front seat, asked a great many questions. I sat alone on the back seat—it was a huge coach; the woman sat in front of me, the girl in front of her, the young man on one side. Queer arrangement, eh?

Joyce got a bit stagey on the way home, draping his overcoat poetically around his shoulders. But I liked Joyce’s looks—not extraordinary at first sight, but growing. His face was highly colored, slightly concave—his mouth thin, not delicate, but extraordinarily humorous. He had a large powerful straight nose—redder than his face, somewhat pitted with scars and boils.

When we got back to Brussels, and stopped in front of the bus office. the young man and two women made a little group, while Joyce went inside. The young man was looking at me, and I was swimming in beer. I made a dive for the nearest place, which was under a monument: they are more respectable here than in Paris.

Anyhow it was too good to spoil: the idea of Joyce and me being at Waterloo at the same time, and aboard a sight-seeing bus, struck me as insanely funny. I sat on the back seat making idiot noises in my throat, and crooning all the way back through the forest.

I think they really might have been a little grand about it if they had known they were discovered. But they were just like common people out sight-seeing. (Nowell 114-115)

Panorama of the Battle of Waterloo (Sunken Road)

The Architecture of the Museyroom

There is so much going on in this crazy fugue that it is difficult to single out one voice as the principal line. But let us leave the details to one side for the moment and see if we can tease out the overarching structure of the Museyroom episode. Although the episode is presented as one garrulous outpouring from Mistress Kathe (K), Joyce breaks up the flow of her narration by strategically inserting into it a number of repeated motifs:

  • 10 Tips

  • 6 Triple Ejaculations (and 1 Double Ejaculation)

  • 6 Harses

  • 4 Bulls in Parentheses

(Structure of the Museyroom Episode)

Note that the first-draft version also has ten Tips (although one of them is actually spelt Pip). This suggests that from its very conception the episode was intended to have an underlying elevenfold structure. It also happens that the Butt and Taff episode in II.3, which the Museyroom episode foreshadows, is divided into eleven sections. Is this by chance or by design? In Finnegans Wake, eleven is one of the magic numbers that crops up again and again. It has been interpreted by some scholars as symbolizing the Viconian ricorso, the return to the beginning, where the end of one historical cycle flows into the opening of the next cycle:

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))

This notion of openings and closings, of births and deaths, underlies the Museyroom. We enter head first (Mind your hats goan in!), as one is born, but we are carried out feet first (Mind your boots goan out!), as a corpse is carried from the church. Mistress Kathe is the janitrix, which echoes not only the word matrix (womb, uterus, mother) but also the two-faced Roman god Janus, who presided over openings and closings, including the opening and closing of the year (January is named for him).

It must be conceded, though, that the first draft of the Butt & Taff episode did not have an elevenfold structure. It was simply sketched as a dramatic dialogue comprising sixteen speeches (Hayman 182-183, 186). So perhaps I am reading too much into this.

Napoleon & Marengo at Waterloo and Wellington & Copenhagen

The Language of the Birds

As in Ulysses, Joyce here deploys two of his favourite symbols, the horse and the hat: Wellington is synonymous with his big white horse Copenhagen and Napoleon is synonymous with his familiar bicorne hat. Copenhagen was actually chestnut, while Napoleon’s horse Marengo was a grey. Another of HCE’s avatars, William of Orange, is traditionally depicted riding a white charger. However, according to James Atherton, Copenhagen was played by a white horse when W G Wills’s play A Royal Divorce was staged in Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre:

The play is about Napoleon’s divorce from Josephine and marriage to Marie Louise ... The other thing which Joyce remembered and used was a scene without words. A backcloth showing the scene of Waterloo was pierced with holes which were intermittently lit up to represent the firing of cannon. In front of this models of cavalrymen were wound forward on glass runners while ‘Pepper ghosts’ (214.16; 460,6) of cuirassiers produced by a sort of magic lantern, fell dramatically to their death in the clouds of white smoke that filled the stage. In the foreground on a big white horse, rode Napoleon, or sometimes—apparently when [the leading actor] Mr. Kelly wanted a rest—Wellington. It made no difference to the play who was on the horse as nothing was said, but Joyce makes great play with this interchangeability of the opposed generals (Atherton 162)

If Wellington is HCE, then Napoleon represents his sons Shem and Shaun. The two corners of the bicorne capture this duality nicely. But as we have seen in earlier articles, individually Shem and Shaun are each only half the man their father is. In order to defeat him and takes his place, they need to put aside their differences and become reconciled with each other. In Finnegans Wake, the Oedipal figure is this reconciled Shem-Shaun character. In the book he appears most frequently as Tristan and St Patrick, but in the Museyroom episode he is called Shimar Shin (ie Shem or Shaun). Together with Shem and Shaun he creates a triplet of Napoleons (the three lipoleum boyne). Perhaps this Napoleon should be fitted with the older 17th-century tricorne (the triplewon hat of Lipoleum ... the threefoiled hat of lipoleums), which was worn by many of the combatants at the Battle of the Boyne. In his re-enactment of the Siege of Namur, Uncle Toby sports a tricorne.

A Royal Divorce

The Oedipal Conflict

I confess I cannot make any real sense out of the Museyroom episode. Individually, each phrase or sentence can be interpreted in the context of Finnegans Wake, but putting them all together to tell a coherent story is beyond me. Perhaps Joyce was trying to portray the fog of war in this episode. If that was his intention, he succeeded. The dramatis personae in this story are:

Museyroom Episode: Dramatis Personae

Campbell & Robinson note:

The reader begins to recognize through all the shooting-gallery noises and the smoke-confused scenes of battle the omnipresent story of a great man, two temptresses, and three soldiers. (Campbell & Robinson 41)

In Finnegans Wake, Joyce tells the same stories over and over again. Bear this in mind and many an obscure passage will suddenly start to sound familiar and make some sense. Here we can see that Willingdone is HCE, the jinnies are the two temptresses to whom he exposed himself or at whom he peeped while they were at their toilet in the Park, and the three Lipoleums are the three soldiers who ambush HCE and bring about his fall. Belchum certainly sounds like Belgium, where Waterloo is located, but this character appears to be playing the role of the elderly Prussian Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, whose late arrival on the battlefield proved decisive.

The story begins with an encounter between the French and the Prussians in which the Prussian flag gets the worst of it. This may be an allusion to the Battle of Ligny, which took place two days before Waterloo. In this battle Napoleon defeated Blücher but failed to follow up his victory. Blücher was seriously injured in the battle when his horse was shot and fell on him. He lay trapped beneath the animal’s carcass for several hours and was repeatedly ridden over by French cavalry, who failed to recognize him.

In the next section, Wellington and Napoleon confront each other. The three Lipoleums take shelter in a ditch, where they are protected from HCE’s wrath by ALP. According to one of Joyce’s principal sources, the Eleventh Edition of The Encyclopædia Britannica, when Napoleon returned to Paris from Elba prior to the Waterloo Campaign, “He deliberately chose the difficult route over the French Alps because he recognized that his opponents would neither expect him by this route nor be able to concert combined operations in time to thwart him” (Chisholm 371).

At this point the jinnies enter. In the context of Waterloo, the jinnies may simply represent the left and right flanks of Napoleon’s army. There is also the obvious reference to Dear Jenny, as we saw in an earlier article. To repeat myself, this young woman was the subject of a legendary quote of the Duke’s. Wikiquote has it that it was this way:

Publish and be damned.

[Wellington’s] response in 1824 to John Joseph Stockdale who threatened to publish anecdotes of Wellington and his mistress Harriette Wilson, as quoted in Wellington—The Years of the Sword (1969) by Elizabeth Longford (Longford 209-214). This has commonly been recounted as a response made to Wilson herself, in response to a threat to publish her memoirs and his letters. This account of events seems to have started with Confessions of Julia Johnstone in Contradiction to the Fables of Harriette Wilson (1825), where she makes such an accusation, and states that his reply had been “write and be damned” (Johnstone 300). (Wikiquote)

But Joyce prefers the version George Bernard Shaw deploys in his early play Mrs Warren’s Profession:

“The old Iron Duke didnt throw away £50—not he. He just wrote: “My dear Jenny: Publish and be damned! Yours affectionately, Wellington.’.” (Shaw 175)

Mrs Warren’s Profession was prostitution (remember that while Penetrators are permitted into the museomound free, others must pay one shelenk). I don’t know where Shaw found the name Jenny (perhaps it’s an allusion to Jenny Patterson, the older woman who took his own virginity on his twenty-ninth birthday) but it is curiously appropriate in this context: a jenny is a female donkey, and Jennifer is derived from Guinevere, the name of King Arthur’s adulterous wife. Wellington was never a king, but his given name was Arthur!

So Wellington’s domestic affairs become part of the battle. Two dispatches are exchanged across the battlefield in the manner of telegrams. Jenny taunts Wellington by asking him (in German): “How’s the wife?” This is the traditional way of teasing a soldier, the implication being that while he is away campaigning, his wife back home is being unfaithful to him. Wellington replies (in French): “Dear Jenny, Madame ne fait rien [My wife is not doing anything].” But why does Jenny sign her dispatch Nap?

The remainder of the story is lost on me in the fog of war. Blücher’s deployments are described: he seems to desert Wellington and defect to the jinnies. Wellington drives the jinnies from the field. Enter the three lipoleums. Wellington retrieves half of lipoleum’s hat from the battlefield and hangs it from Copenhagen’s tail (cf the Russian general wiping his arse with the sod of turf in How Bucklef Shot the Russian General). Wellington tenders his matchbox to Shimar Shin, who then lights the fuse and blows up Copenhagen, putting an end to HCE. Roland McHugh’s comment on this event is instructive:

Joyce’s Waterloo culminates when [HCE] tenders his matchbox to Shimar Shin, who lights a fuse and blows [HCE] off his horse. This caricatures the sabotage of King Billy’s equestrian statue on College Green just after midnight on 7 April 1836 (Sir John Gilbert, A History of the City of Dublin III, 55). The rider was blown several feet into the air. It was pretty appropriate, because William III’s death in 1702 had been caused by a fall from his horse. I think a valid parallel exists between this and Buckley’s shooting of [HCE], and that we can therefore see in Buckley the conglomerate of [HCE’s] sons, threatening him. (McHugh 83)

Arthur Wellesley at the Battle of Assaye

India and Iberia

Wellington had his first taste of battle in the Napoleonic Wars in 1794, when he faced Jean-Charles Pichegru in the Battle of Boxtel in the Netherlands, but it was in India that he earned his spurs as a military commander.

Colonel Wellesley, as he was then, arrived in India on 17 February 1797. The following year he took part in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War (1798-99) against Tipu Sultan, the ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore in the southwest of the subcontinent. The conflict culminated in the Battle of Seringapatam, in which Tipu was killed. Wellesley’s 33rd regiment took part in an unsuccessful attack on the fortress’s outposts on the first day of the siege, but they were not directly involved in the successful storming of the place a month later.

Wellesley spent the following few years maintaining order in Mysore. His next major conflict was the Second Anglo-Maratha War (1803-05) against the Maratha Kingdom of central India. Wellesley secured the first important victory of his military career at Assaye, one which he considered his finest accomplishment on the battlefield (including Waterloo). This was followed by another victory in the Battle of Argaon and the subsequent Capture of Gawilghur.

Several of these engagements are alluded to in the Museyroom episode.

Wellesley returned to Europe in March 1805, after having served in India for eight years. He spent two years as Chief Secretary of Ireland (1807-09). During this time he took part in the Second Battle of Copenhagen. Wellesley’s horse, Copenhagen, which he rode at Waterloo, was foaled the following year and named in honour of this unprovoked attack.

Upon his return to the British Isles, Wellesley turned his attention to Spain, where a change of dynasty and a subsequent uprising against Napoleon’s older brother Joseph presented the British with the opportunity of opening a new front against the French. Wellesley was given command of a force of 9000 men and on 12 July 1808 his fleet sailed from Cork to A Coruña. In the subsequent Peninsular War, Wellesley secured many famous victories that helped to cement his reputation as a formidable military tactician: Vimeiro, Talavera, Bussaco, Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, Vitoria, San Sebastián, the Battle of the Pyrenees. Having driven the French forces out of Iberia, Wellesley crossed the Pyrenees into France and dealt them a final blow in the Battle of Toulouse on 10 April 1814. This battle took place one day before the abdication of Napoleon.

On 3 May 1814 Wellesley became the First Duke of Wellington. the following month, he returned to Britain a hero. His journey from Dover to London has been described as a triumphal progress (Lee 188). In London, his carriage was drawn by his well-wishers from Westminster Bridge to his residence in Hamilton Place.

Leaving the Museyroom

Perhaps the most concise summary of this complicated episode is the one John C Sherwood gave almost fifty years ago, when Wakean scholarship was still in its infancy:

Let us look once more at the Museyroom episode. Here Waterloo is made to suggest other battles—and of what kind? There is a block of other English victories over the French—Agincourt, Salamanca, Talavera, Torres Vedras, Almeida, but there is also one French victory—Fontenoy—as well as references to the Crimean War and First World War, in which the French and English were successfully allied. There is a block vaguely suggestive of kindred or civil war: Boyne, Flodden, Bannackburn, Bunker Hill, Hastings (and note references to Cromwell, Stonewell Jackson and Harold). English campaigns in India are also present, as well as events such as Marathon and the Peloponnesian War, which serve to suggest that something more than England is involved. But the Museyroom is not simply the archetypal battle. it is at one point a family quarrel in which the children must shelter under the mother’s skirts (“This is the crimealine of the alps hooping to sheltershock the three lipoleums”), it is clearly the Phoenix Park episode, and at the end Buckley as the furious hinndoo seeboy [Shimar] Shin shoots the Russian general as Willingdone (the fatally insulting green turf transformed into Napoleon’s hat). Out of this tangle of overlappings, it would be hard to prove any overt hostility to any person or institution. At one moment Wellington and Waterloo seem to sink down to the level of a stammering public-house keeper involved in a petty scandal; at the next they seem to swell into mighty archetypes of Everyman and universal human experience. (Sherwood 361-362)

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

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