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| 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)
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
References
Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians: or, Studies in Egyptian Magic, Volume 2, The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago (1904)
Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake, University of California Press, Berkeley, California (1977)
David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1963)
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)
Roland McHugh, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1976)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
Giambattista Vico, Goddard Bergin (translator), Max Harold Fisch (translator), The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Third Edition (1744), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York (1948)
Arthur Edward Waite, The Doctrine and Literature of the Kabalah, The Theosophical Publishing Society, London (1902)
Arthur Edward Waite, The Secret Doctrine in Israel: A Study of the Zohar and Its Connections, Occult Research Press, New York (1913)
Image Credits
Le Moustier Neanderthals: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Le_Moustier.jpg Charles Robert Knight (artist), Public Domain
Apep Confronts Ra: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apep_2.jpg Thebes, Tomb of Inher-kha, James B Pritchard, The Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament, Second Edition, Page 218, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey (1969), Public Domain
The Angel Michael Binding Satan: William Blake (artist), Harvard Art Museums, Fogg Museum, Gift of W A White, Public Domain
Elizabethan Bear-Baiting: Cassell’s Illustrated History of England, New and Revised Edition, Volume 2, Page 486, Cassell, Petter & Galpin, London (1865), Public Domain
Useful Resources
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