In The Finnegans Wake Experience, Roland McHugh recalls his first attempt to read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—in, as it happened, the year of my birth:
... it was not until June 1964 that I felt ready to look at Finnegans Wake, aware already of its reputed impenetrability.
Opening the book, I read slowly and mechanically as far as page 18, where I reached the line ‘(Stoop) ... to this claybook ... Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world?’ I closed it. I felt that I had made a respectable attempt and that I could not read its world. (McHugh 25)
McHugh was a pioneer in the field and most readers of Finnegans Wake who have followed in his footsteps have experienced the same sense of bewilderment and perplexity in the face of Joyce’s obscure text. In the summer of 1965 McHugh returned to Finnegans Wake for a second attempt. This time he persevered and completed the task two and a half years later:
Having initially read through any chapter I would spend a week or two repeating the process and then make a frontal assault with dictionaries ... I would take a dictionary and work through the chapter, looking up any word I thought suited the language in question. I soon learned that the most cryptic elements were often pure English. Grotesque orthography was often repeated verbatim in the Oxford English Dictionary ... As well as common words, thousands of personal names turn up, and I filled a notebook with an alphabetical list of these, which I then checked against the Dictionary of National Biography and several international biographical dictionaries. (McHugh 28-29)
McHugh’s diligence is to be commended—by his own admission he was not enjoying the process very much (McHugh 30)—as he blazed a trail for the rest of us. This time he found that he was slowly beginning to read the world of Finnegans Wake:
For instance, the original point on FW 18 where I had stopped the previous year coincides with a sudden change of context (which partly caused my stopping). Before this point, we have heard a dialogue between ‘Mutt’ and ‘Jute’ about a burial mound ... The words ‘thing mud’ [which end the Mutt & Jute Dialogue] suggesting the thingmote, the Viking assembly in ancient Dublin, which took place on a kind of conical mound. The next sentence is the one I quoted earlier, exhorting the reader to stoop to the ‘claybook’, and leads to a two-page account of the origins of the alphabet and of printing. I can now explain the transition by observing that the text adheres faithfully to its real subject, the container siglum □, but I had no conception of such things at this stage. (McHugh 30-31)
What McHugh means is that while the Mutt & Jute Dialogue concerns itself with HCE’s tomb, and the following paragraph concerns itself with the text of Finnegans Wake (and, of course, ALP’s Letter), they are both really talking about the same thing: containers of HCE, symbolized in Joyce’s notebooks by the square siglum □. The claybook is not only Finnegans Wake (French: clef, key) but also the strata of dirt (clay) which have accumulated beneath the city of Dublin and which an archaeologist can read like the leaves of a book. Both contain HCE: Finnegans Wake recounts his story, while the archaeological record recounts his history. He is present figuratively in the pages of the former, while his bones are present literally in the strata of the latter.
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| St Andrew’s Church, Site of the Dublin Thingmote |
First-Draft Version
Joyce’s first-draft of this passage was much shorter than the published version. It makes clear the close connection between the two types of book we are reading, the literary and the stratigraphic:
What curios of signs, (stoop) a hatch, a celt, an earshare to cassay the earthcrust! Here are figurines billicoose arming and mounting. Mounting & arming bellicose figurines are there. And this little effingee is a fing called in flintgun. When a piece does for the whole we soon get used to an allforabit. Here are selveram cued little peas of quite a pecuniar interest inaslittle as they are the pellets that make payroll. Right are rocks and with these rocks rogues rangled rough & rightgoring. Wisha, wisha, whydidthe? This is for thorn that’s tuck in its toil like tom anger. Sss! See the snake worms everywhere our durst bin is sworming with sneaks! Subdivide and sumdolot and the tale comes out the same. One by one please one be three and one before. Two nursus one make free and idem behind. What a tale to unfurl & with what an end in view! And to say that we are all every tim mick & larry of us, sons of the sod, when we are not every sue, ciss & sally of us, dugters of Jan [Jor ?]. (Hayman 56-57)
The implication is clear: to understand a book like Finnegans Wake it is not enough to simply read the text : one must be prepared to delve beneath the surface in search of meaning : one must excavate.
Joyce later expanded this paragraph with allusions to a number of religious and cultural figures—Muhammad, Daniel, Buddha, St Patrick, Confucius—who are all associated with sacred texts. In the published text of 1939, this section comprised two paragraphs—the second beginning with Axe on thwacks on thracks, axenwise—but in The Restored Finnegans Wake, Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon have laid it out as a single unbroken paragraph.
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(Stoop) if you are abcedminded |
Source Texts
Finnegans Wake is unique among the world’s literary masterworks in that so much of its text was inspired by Joyce’s voracious reading of other works. As James Atherton succinctly remarked:
To put the whole matter briefly Finnegans Wake is based on two things: Joyce’s life, and Joyce’s reading. (Atherton 18)
Joyce himself once told his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver:
such an amount of reading seems to be necessary before my old flying machine grumbles up into the air. (Letters I, 16 February 1931)
In writing this particular section, he drew inspiration from several literary sources:
Edward Clodd, The Story of the Alphabet: Joyce had written to Sylvia Beach, the publisher of Ulysses, asking her to order this book for him while he was on holiday in Belgium in August 1926 (Crispi & Slote 58, James Joyce Digital Archive). Clodd’s text is the source for abcedminded, claybook, allaphbed, Futhorc and balifuson.
Stanley Lane-Poole, The Speeches and Table-Talk of the Prophet Mohammad: “It must be remembered that the speeches of the Koran are all supposed to be the utterances of God in propriâ personâ, of whom Mohammad is only the mouthpiece … the reader must never forget it when he is perplexed by the “we” (God), and “thou” (Mohammad) and “ye” (the audience), of the Koran” (Lane-Poole xl). As we saw in the preceding article, Mutt and Jute has been read by John Gordon as Me and You.
André-Ferdinand Herold, La Vie du Bouddha [The Life of Buddha]: This book supplied Joyce with the inspiration for that long and memorable concatenation of causes and effects (In the ignorance that implies impression ... of existentiality), and for the Buddha’s dream of a rush growing out of his navel. Ramasbatham may also contain an allusion to Kama, the Hindu god of love, to whom Buddha was compared (Hérold 48). Rama was the seventh avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. Buddha was considered by many Indian scholars to be the ninth avatar of Vishnu. Hérold mentions a celebrated hermit Rudraka, son of Rama, several times.
Carl Crow, Master Kung: The Story of Confucius: This provided Joyce with the basis for a pair of sentences near the end of this section: Starting off with a big boaboa ... till allhorrors eve (Crow 49, 45, 43). Part I of Ulysses begins with the letter S, which looks like a boa constrictor. Part II begins with M, which has three legs in its lowercase form, m. Part III begins with P, and peas are green (ivargraine). Admittedly, this is a bit of a stretch—but have you anything better?
Joseph Mary Flood, Ireland: Its Saints and Scholars: triangular Toucheaterre alludes to the phrase triangular Spain in this book (Flood 27, 30). Flood was quoting the Irish scholar Adamnan on the fame of St Colm Cille: “Though he lived in this small and remote island of the British Sea, his name not only became illustrious throughout the whole of his own Ireland and Britain, but reached even to triangular Spain and Gaul and Italy, and also to the city of Rome itself, the head of all cities.” Why did Adamnan describe Spain as triangular? I have no idea. Perhaps he failed geography.
Thomas Francis O’Rahilly, A Miscellany of Irish Proverbs: “A fool’s remark is like a thorn concealed in mud, i.e. it stings one unexpectedly” (O’Rahilly 54, §197). Thorn is also a runic letter that looks a bit like a combination of a p and an inverted q. The P/Q or P/K Split, which affected Celtic languages, often crops up in Finnegans Wake.
The Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, Volume 3: Belshazzar: The famous Writing on the Wall that interrupted Belshazzar’s feast is taken from the Book of Daniel in the Bible. It is not mentioned in Archibald Henry Sayce’s article in the encyclopaedia. This addition to the first draft was initially made on page 24 of Joyce’s copy of Issue 1 of transition, the literary journal that serialized early drafts of Books I and III of Finnegans Wake (or Work in Progress, as it was then called). Joyce considered calling Belshazzar balltosser (after Balthasar, an alternative form of Belshazzar) before settling on bottloggers.
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| The Writing on the Wall (Belshazzar’s Feast) |
The Wild West
This section also contains some Americana:
billycoose ... ptee ... balifuson: P T Barnum of Barnum & Bailey’s Circus.
tomtummy’s ... thumfool’s: General Tom Thumb, a dwarf, who was exhibited by P T Barnum.
whydidtha: Wichita, Kansas, a city of the Wild West associated with the lawman Wyatt Earp.
wet prairie: Although there is such a thing as a wet prairie, here Joyce is clearly referring to the Atlantic Ocean as it might be called to Native Americans.
garbagecans: Garbage can is an American commonplace, but in Ireland one says dustbin (durlbin).
whosethere: Holster, an essential item of dress in the Wild West.
It is a common trope in Finnegans Wake that the history of the Old World is repeated in the New World. Giambattista Vico’s cycle of World History rolls on and on.
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| General Tom Thumb |
1132 and Algebra
In the second episode of Ulysses—originally entitled Nestor—Stephen Dedalus assists one of his pupils with a problem in algebra:
Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by algebra that Shakespeare’s ghost is Hamlet’s grandfather ... Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes ... imps of fancy of the Moors. (Ulysses 28)
Given the significance of certain numbers in Finnegans Wake, it was inevitable that Joyce would introduce the concept of algebra into this section. Long before the Arabs discovered algebra, the ancient Jews, Greeks and Romans had been using alphabetic letters to represent numbers as well as linguistic sounds:
Axe on thwacks on thracks, axenwise (x + x + x)(x + y). If x = 1 and y = 36, then this comes to 111, a significant number in Finnegans Wake. In Roman numerals, III is the number of children ALP and HCE have. And if we apply the ancient Greek counting system to the English alphabet, we get A (alpha) = 1, L (lambda) = 30, P (pi) = 80, making A + L + P = 111.
One by one place one be three, dittoh, and one before One by one, place 1 by 3, then 2, and 1 before = 1132, the most important number in Finnegans Wake.
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. (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).
Two nursus one make a plausible free and idim behind 2 plus 1 makes 3 and the same [Latin: idem, the same] behind. I can’t make sense of this one. Answers on a postcard.
As I have mentioned countless times before, this opening chapter of Finnegans Wake foreshadows many things that will appear in later chapters. These few sentences anticipate II.2, School Nessans, in which Shem will try to teach Shaun an elementary problem—in geometry, however, not algebra.
Grammar
After algebra, we turn to grammar. The closing lines of this section contain a handful of grammatical terms:
squattor and auntisquattor and postproneauntisquattor These sound like the conjugations of a deponent verb in Latin. The grammatical term pronoun may also be hidden there.
usses Does this refer to the common ending of Latin nouns in the second-declension?
Accusative ahnsire Accusative case.
infinities Infinitives.
Original Sin
The last three sentences of this paragraph reiterate the Viconian notion that history repeats itself. Vico expresses this idea in terms of society as a whole, but in Finnegans Wake Joyce shows that it also applies to the family: children grow up to repeat the sins of their parents. We cannot escape our heritage: we are all sons of the sod (HCE) or daughters of Nan (Anna Livia Plurabelle).
Accusative ahnsire! German: Ahn, ancestor + sire = our forefathers, whom we accuse of having to answer for our crimes.
Damadam to infinities Damn Adam forever, the forebear of the human race from whom we have all inherited the taint of Original Sin.
And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.
References
James S Atherton, The Books at the Wake: A Study of the Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, The Viking Press, New York (1960)
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)
Edward Clodd, The Story of the Alphabet, George Newnes, Limited, London (1900)
Carl Crow, Master Kung: The Story of Confucius, Tudor Publishing Company, New York (1937)
Eblana (Teresa J Rooney), St Laurence O’Toole and His Contemporaries, M H Gill & Son, Dublin (1881)
Joseph Mary Flood, Ireland: Its Saints and Scholars, The Talbot Press Ltd, Dublin (1882)
David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1963)
André-Ferdinand Hérold, La Vie du Bouddha, d’après les textes de l'Inde ancienne, H Piazza, Paris (1926)
André-Ferdinand Hérold, Paul C Blum (translator), The Life of Buddha According to the Legends of Ancient India, A & C Boni, New York (1927)
Eugene Jolas & Elliot Paul (editors), transition, Number 1, Shakespeare and Co, Paris (1927)
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)
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)
Stanley Lane-Poole, The Speeches and Table-Talk of the Prophet Mohammad, Macmillan and Co, London (1882)
Roland McHugh, The Finnegans Wake Experience, University of California Press, Berkeley, California (1981)
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)
Thomas Francis O’Rahilly, A Miscellany of Irish Proverbs, The Talbot Press Limited, Dublin (1922)
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)
Alfred Webb, A Compendium of Irish Biography, M H Gill & Son, Dublin (1878)
Image Credits
Stoop: © Stephen Crowe (artist), Fair Use
Roland McHugh: © Roland McHugh, Fair Use
St Andrew’s Church, Site of the Dublin Thingmote: © The Irish Times, Fair Use
(Stoop) if you are abcedminded: © Carol Wade (artist), Fair Use
The Writing on the Wall (Belshazzar’s Feast): Rembrandt (artist), National Gallery, London, Public Domain
General Tom Thumb: Charles Baugniet (lithographer), Wellcome Images, Public Domain
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