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The Morning after the Battle of Waterloo (RFW 008.40) |
Before we take our leave of the museyroom, let’s wrap up a few loose ends.
In Parentheses
The Museyroom episode reads as a garrulous outpouring of descriptive narrative from the book’s resident old woman, Mistress Kathe (K). At four strategic moments in the text, however, Kate is interrupted by brief passages in parentheses:
(Bullsfoot! Fine!)
(Bullsear! Play!)
(Bullsrag! Foul!)
(Bullseye! Game!)
Who utters these phrases? What do they mean?
The bull anticipates another famous battle from Irish history: the Battle of Clontarf, which took place just outside Dublin on Good Friday 1014. Clontarf is Anglicized from the Irish Cluain Tarbh, or Bull’s Meadow. This battle lies behind the museyroom’s Waterloo. In the Mutt and Jute dialogue, which we will come to in just a few pages, this will be made manifest.
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| The Siege of Namur by Captain Shandy and Corporal Trim |
On one level, Waterloo is presented as a game between Wellington and Napoleon. Wellington is alleged to have once remarked that the battle was won on the playing fields of Eton. As we have seen, the battlefield is located behind The Mullingar House, where there was once a bowling green (Jolas 159). Is the game bowls? Is Bulls- meant to be an echo of bowls? We have also seen how, in Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy, Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim re-enact the Second Siege of Namur (1695) from the Nine Years’ War (also known as the War of the League of Augsburg) on the bowling green at Shandy Hall.
Bullsrag suggests that the contest is a bullfight. Wellington is the matador—or perhaps a picador, as he is on horseback. In the Museyroom episode, Wellington is more of a horse’s arse than an Irish bull. Before Waterloo, Wellington defeated the French in the Peninsular War in Iberia, the traditional home of bullfighting.
On the other hand, Bullseye suggests a game of darts, or an archery contest, both of which have English or Etonian associations.
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| Wellington and Napoleon |
HCE’s Seven Items of Clothing
We have already seen how Joyce often lets us know that a particular passage of Finnegans Wake is concerned with his protagonist Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker by simply working the initials of this Everyman, HCE, into the text. He did this for the first time in the opening paragraph of the novel:
Howth Castle & Environs. (RFW 003.03)
This triad of letters is like a musical leitmotif for the character, and later in the book, in III.4, it will be treated literally as a harmonic triad. Another common leitmotif that sounds the presence of HCE is the itemizing of his clothing. Here Joyce associates the character with the number seven:
This is the big Sraughter Willingdone, grand and magentic, in his goldtin spurs and his ironed dux and his quarterbrass woodyshoes and his magnate’s gharters and his bangkok’s best and goliar’s goloshes and his pulluponeasyan wartrews. (RFW 007.13-16)
Sir Arthur Wellington, grand and majestic, is wearing these seven items of clothing:
Golden spurs
Ironed tuxedo (or duck trousers)
Wooden shoes
Garters
Vest
Galoshes waterproof overshoes
Trews close-fitting tartan trousers
Joyce once said that the structure of Finnegans Wake was mathematical (Ellmann 614), and seven is clearly an important number in the book. On the very opening page, you may recall, there were seven stations in our tour of the master bedroom, where HCE—or, rather, his real-life counterpart, the landlord of The Mullingar House—is sleeping. In Finnegans Wake the rainbow is the symbol that is most obviously associated with the number seven:
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| Adaline Glasheen |
Seven a sacred, mystic number usually personified in FW by seven rainbow girls, whose dashings about remind me of Proust’s “Seascape with Frieze of Girls.” Some of these colors have individual significance ... At times, they are HCE’s seven whores and are opposed to Anna Livia’s unity; at other times, they are opposed to, or gathered up in, white light and are the subject of debate between St Patrick and the Archdruid ... HCE always wears seven garments, and sometimes these are the seven rainbow colors ... the rainbow and the gamut are occasionally linked ... Was Joyce imitating the color organ? Seven is certainly HCE’s number ... and his other number, 1132 , adds up to 7 ... Indeed, HCE is a “man in hue, all hues in his controlling” ... I do not know if HCE is to be considered God or Noah in his possession of the rainbow. Color, mathematics, music in FW are not understood by me. (Glasheen 259)
Nor by me!
However, as 32 represents the Fall of Man (the acceleration due to gravity at the surface of the Earth is approximately 32 feet per second per second) and 11 the resurrection (having counted up to ten on our fingers, we have to start all over again for 11), 1132 and its sum 7 seem to encapsulate the entire Viconian Cycle of rise and fall and rise again, ad nauseam et infinitum (Burgess (ii)).
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| Joyce’s Sketch of the Battle of Waterloo (Hayman 50) |
Sketching Waterloo
We also saw earlier that in his first-draft version of Finnegans Wake, David Hayman includes the editorial footnote:
Diagrams accompany the following: the narrative of the Battle of Waterloo. (Hayman 50)
How exactly does this diagram illustrate the Museyroom episode—or, for that matter, the Battle of Waterloo?
At the top, Joyce initially depicted the trio of Shaun, the Oedipal figure who comprises both Shem and Shaun, and Shem on one side of a line of ALPS (the crimealine), with their reflections on the other side. Unhappy with his failure to correctly invert the images of two of these, he crossed this out and started again. Anna Livia Plurabelle is an alp and a river. In both of these guises she represents a barrier between HCE and his sons. She protects the sons from the wrath of their father, while the sons are reflected in her—which means what, precisely? Is it a foreshadowing of the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter (I.8), in which Shem and Shaun will be depicted as two washerwomen on opposite banks of the Liffey—rivals?
crimealine reminds us of another conflict that figures prominently in Finnegans Wake: the Crimean War. It is well to remember that the entire Museyroom episode foreshadows How Buckley Shot the Russian General, the mock-epic Oedipal narrative that takes place during the Crimean War.
Below the crimealine, Joyce has sketched a figure in which HCE’s siglum (a square M) is associated with two copies of his daughter Issy’s siglum (an inverted T) and two of his manservant Joe or Sackerson’s siglum (S). In the centre is a siglum I am not familiar with. It resembles a humpback bridge. Perhaps it represents Mont St Jean, where Wellington was stationed during the battle. A dotted or wavy circle surrounds these sigla, with what appear to be arrows indicating a counterclockwise rotation. The dots or waves then proceed towards the southeast (the direction being again indicated by arrows), and Issy’s two sigla are depicted fleeing in this direction. These may correspond to the text:
This is jinnies rinning away to their ousterlists dowan a bunkersheels.
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| The Principal Sigla of Finnegans Wake |
There are also several other obscure symbols scattered about the page, none of which make any sense to me. Some of these are possibly meaningless doodles. Peter Chrisp identified the Tip right of centre.Finally, at the bottom of the page, we have the accompanying text (though I don't know what the purpose of the R is):
This is the bag lipoleum mordering the lipoleum beg. This is the Delian alps sheltershock[ing] the three lipoleums behind a crim[mealine]
John Gordon is Professor Emeritus of English at Connecticut College and the author of Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary. This is his interpretation of this sketch:
As in all Joycean victories and usurpations, Waterloo is a contest of two versions of one self, here as one figure seen from two ends of one telescope. It is as if the father were attacking himself—which of course in Oedipal terms is exactly what a man does when he has sons. One alternative self he is attacking is definitely his manservant, suspected cuckolder and sire of Issy, who in Joyce’s diagram of the battle shares the disputed Mont St Jean with the father, and whose presence is signalled by Willingdone’s horse ‘Cokenhape’—an allusion not only to the Scandinavian Copenhagen but to the Cape of Good Hope, off which sails the Flying Dutchman who is one of the father’s obsessive personifications of sexual usurpation. (Gordon 114)
In Finnegans Wake, S is often characterized as Scandinavian (McHugh 122 ff).
The telescope—its ithyphallic connotations are too obvious to warrant further comment—will also return in How Buckley Shot the Russian General, where the Oedipal figure Buckley will take aim at the general through the telescopic sight of his gun.
In Conclusion
There is no getting away from the fact that much of the meaning of the Museyroom episode is shrouded in the fog of war. There is much here that I still do not understand. Perhaps the best advice I could give to the first-time reader is to stand back and take in the big picture. The opening chapter of Finnegans Wake is preludial. As I said before, if Finnegans Wake were an opera, this chapter would be the overture that is played before the curtain rises. Everything in this chapter should be read as a foreshadowing of some salient moment that will take place in a future chapter. At its core, the Museyroom episode foreshadows How Buckley Shot the Russian General, which will form the centrepiece of The Scene in the Public (II.3).
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)
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake, University of California Press, Berkeley, California (1977)
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)
Maria Jolas, A James Joyce Yearbook, Transition Press, Paris (1949)
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)
Jonathan McCreedy, “Narrating Sigla”: The ‘Battle Diagram’ and Structuring Finnegans Wake, Chapter One, Emerging Perspectives, Volume 3, University College Dublin, Dublin (2012)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Derby & Jackson, New York (1857)
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
The Morning after the Battle of Waterloo: John Heaviside Clarke (artist), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, Wuselig (photographer), Public Domain
The Siege of Namur by Captain Shandy and Corporal Trim: Henry Bunbury (engraver), British Cartoon Collection, Library of Congress, Public Domain
Wellington: Thomas Lawrence (artist), Apsley House, London, Public Domain
Napoleon: Jacques-Louis David (artist), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Public Domain
Adaline Glasheen: Alexander Brook (artist), © Childs Gallery, Fair Use
Joyce’s Sketch of the Battle of Waterloo (Hayman 50): James Joyce (illustrator), British Museum, BM Add MS 47482 a, 91 b, Public Domain
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