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| A Baser Meaning (RFW 026.28-027.36) |
As we saw in the last article, HCE’s fall from grace, which begins in the Gaiety Theatre on South King Street, sees the reframing of his Oedipal Encounter with the King on the highway as something much more sinister: an Original Sin of concupiscence or sexual deviancy. This Crime in the Park figures prominently in HCE’s biography throughout Finnegans Wake. His two female victims represent his schizophrenic daughter Issy, while the three soldiers who witness his crime represent his sons Shem and Shaun (the third soldier being the Oedipal Figure, who embodies both sons and who will in turn displace HCE).
First-Draft Version
In Joyce’s first draft, this passage ran to a dozen or so lines, or one quarter the length of the final version. The transformation in the eyes of the public of HCE’s Oedipal Encounter into the Sin in the Park was already present in this draft, which comprises the closing section of the vignette Here Comes Everybody. Joyce wrote this vignette in Paris in August 1923. Finnegans Wake, you may recall, began life as an expansion of this sketch:
A baser meaning has been read into these letters, the literal sense of which decency can but touch. It has been suggested that he suffered from a vile disease. To such a suggestion the only selfrespecting answer is to affirm that there are certain statements which ought not to be, and one would like to be able to add, ought not to be allowed to be made. Nor have his detractors mended their case by insinuating that he was at one time under the imputation of annoying soldiers in the park. To anyone who knew and loved H-C-E- the suggestion is preposterous. Slander, let it do its worst, has never been able to convict that good and great man of any greater misdemeanour than that of an incautious exposure and partial at that in the presence of certain nursemaids whose testimony is, if not dubious, at any rate slightly divergent. (Hayman 63)
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| HCE’s Oedipal Anacyclesis |
In an earlier article—Concerning the Genesis of HCE—we saw that one of Joyce’s sources for the foxhunting details in Here Comes Everybody was Douglas Gordon’s article Reynard the Fox in Volume 238 of The Quarterly Review. This issue also included a disparaging review of Ulysses by the Anglo-Irish writer and critic Shane Leslie. Leslie’s review was no slight dismissal of Joyce’s masterpiece. It ran to fifteen pages and may even have been instrumental in getting the book banned in the United Kingdom (Casado 479-508).
As Richard Ellmann once noted, Joyce was not above lampooning his critics and paying off old scores in his writings (Ellmann 16, 725). Leslie’s prudish review provided him with plenty of ammunition in this regard, but the following passage proved irresistible:
The practice of introducing the names of real people into circumstances of monstrous and ludicrous fiction seems to us to touch the lowest depth of Rabelaisian realism. When we are given the details of the skin disease of an Irish peer, famous for his benefactions, we feel a genuine dislike of the writer. There are some things which cannot and, we should like to be able to say, shall not be done. (Deming 209)
In Lotus Eaters, the fifth episode of Ulysses, Bloom recalls that Lord Ardilaun, a great-grandson and heir of Arthur Guinness, suffered from some skin disease:
Still the other brother lord Ardilaun has to change his shirt four times a day, they say. Skin breeds lice or vermin. (Ulysses 76)
Like so many of Bloom’s titbits of information, this particular rumour appears to have no foundation in fact. Nevertheless, it provided Joyce with the idea that HCE too was alleged to suffer from a vile disease.
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| Oedipus Separating from Jocasta |
Incest
In Greek mythology, Oedipus committed incest with his own mother and fathered children on her.
Incest lies at the heart of Finnegans Wake. HCE’s relationship with his daughter, however innocent it may be in reality, is always painted as something shameful and incestuous. This is the ultimate source of HCE’s guilt. But this incest is rarely stated explicitly. It is merely hinted at through wordplay. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud contends that the unconscious mind must conform to the censorship imposed upon it by the conscious mind by disguising its inacceptable ideas in various ways. The most familiar of these is the distortion to which dreams are subjected:
The correspondence between the phenomena of the censor and those of dream distortion, which may be traced in detail, justifies us in assuming similar conditions for both. We should then assume in each human being, as the primary cause of dream formation, two psychic forces (streams, systems), of which one constitutes the wish expressed by the dream, while the other acts as a censor upon this dream wish, and by means of this censoring forces a distortion of its expression. (Freud 121)
In his New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud assigns the role of internal censor to the super-ego (Über Ich):
As you will learn presently, we have been forced to assume the existence in the mind of a special criticising and forbidding function which we call the super-ego. Since we have now recognised the dream-censorship as an activity of this function, we have been led to consider the part which the super-ego plays in dream-formation in greater detail. (Freud 43)
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| Sigmund Freud |
In Finnegans Wake, HCE is regularly compared to insects—usually the earwig, but also, in this section, the caterpillar. It is no coincidence that insect is an anagram of incest. It is by means of such wordplay that the unconscious mind evades the censorship of the superego and hides its true meaning behind a mask of harmless images. In 2013, Stéphane Jousni, Director of Studies at the Centre for Irish Studies in the University of Rennes, wrote a paper on this very subject:
My contention in this paper is that the link is quintessential between censorship as a notion and Finnegans Wake. Censorship, at least in literature, indeed confronts the taboo and the word. The confrontation may lead to the physical act of deleting the offensive items, including by—literally—crossing out or blackening passages, from one single word to whole segments, so as to render them illegible. In letters, for example, this is a common practice of military censorship during wars. Precisely, what Joyce does with Finnegans Wake is question the word, in the sense of challenging its very notion. My use of the term “word” here obviously refers both to the linguistic notion and its numinous value. These form the two lines of argument of my paper; they are based on two elements that no longer have to be proven: firstly, the poetics of Finnegans Wake is the poetics of the pun; secondly, Finnegans Wake’s major—maybe only—topic is incest. And that which represents the utmost transgression in all cultures is essentially referred to by means of a mysterious letter, always-already evoked, never shown, in other words always-already censored ...
So far, we have been dealing with sex. Yet the Wake is not concerned so much with sex per se as with incestuous sex. This remark applies first and foremost to the love affair between Tristan and Isolde, since most researchers in Celtic studies make Tristan Mark’s son rather than his nephew. Some theories even make Tristan the son Mark had with his own sister, which would turn the triangular relationship between Mark, Tristan and Isolde into “a tragedy of double incest”. The word incest as such never appears: the closest the text goes to the naming of the thing is the use of the word insect, which reads both as paronomasia and anagram. Though not particularly recurrent, it is literally omnipresent, mainly through the various forms taken by the reference to the earwig after which Earwicker, the hero, the Father—aka HCE, for Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker—is called. One of these forms is the pleasantly Hibernicized version of its French translation “perce oreille”, which leads to Persse O’Reilly, one of Earwicker’s avatars. (Jousni 8 ... 16)
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| Ulster County, New York |
The Jukes and Kallikaks
In 1877, Richard Louis Dugdale, a sociologist working for the Prison Association of New York, published a study on the influence of environment and heredity on an extended family in Ulster County, New York. Entitled The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity, this pioneering work argued that environmental changes—eg penal reform and improvements in public health, education and child-care—could correct the inherited physiological disorders, which were in Dugdale’s opinion the principal causes of social disorder. The Jukes—a pseudonym coined by Dugdale to protect the identities of the people involved—actually comprised 709 individuals (of which 540 were related by blood) and forty-two different surnames.
Thirty-five years later, at a time when sociology in America was dominated by the new science of genetics, the psychologist Henry Herbert Goddard published a similar study of another extended family, entitled The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. The name Kallikak, a pseudonym coined by Goddard, was derived from the Greek words for good (καλός) and bad (κακός)—a Joycean touch. Goddard claimed that the members of this family were all descended from a single man, Martin Kallikak, who fathered a bastard on a “feeble-minded” barmaid before raising a family with a respectable Quaker. He argued that the barmaid’s descendants were feeble-minded degenerates, while the Quaker’s descendants were “wholesome.” Goddard, a eugenicist, drew the following predictable conclusion:
The Kallikak family presents a natural experiment in heredity. A young man of good family becomes through two different women the ancestor of two lines of descendants, the one characterized by thoroughly good, respectable, normal citizenship, with almost no exceptions; the other being equally characterized by mental defect in every generation. This defect was transmitted through the father in the first generation. In later generations, more defect was brought in from other families through marriage. In the last generation it was transmitted through the mother, so that we have here all combinations of transmission, which again proves the truly hereditary character of the defect.
We find on the good side of the family prominent people in all walks of life and nearly all of the 496 descendants owners of land or proprietors. On the bad side we find paupers, criminals, prostitutes, drunkards, and examples of all forms of social pest with which modern society is burdened.
From this we conclude that feeble-mindedness is largely responsible for these social sores. Feeble-mindedness is hereditary and transmitted as surely as any other character. We cannot successfully cope with these conditions until we recognize feeble-mindedness and its hereditary nature, recognize it early, and take care of it.
In considering the question of care, segregation through colonization seems in the present state of our knowledge to be the ideal and perfectly satisfactory method. Sterilization may be accepted as a makeshift, as a help to solve this problem because the conditions have become so intolerable. But this must at present be regarded only as a makeshift and temporary, for before it can be extensively practiced, a great deal must be learned about the effects of the operation and about the laws of human inheritance. (Goddard 116-117)
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| Martin Kallikak’s Pedigree |
In 1916, in the wake of Goddard’s work, Arthur Howard Estabrook of the Eugenics Records Office published The Jukes in 1915, a reappraisal of Dugdale’s study. Estabrook rejected Dugdale’s environmentalist position and argued that genetics and heredity were the paramount and inalterable causes of criminality among the Jukes:
The natural question which arises in the reader’s mind is, “What can be done to prevent the breeding of these defectives?” Two practical solutions of this problem are apparent. One of these is the permanent custodial care of the feeble-minded men and all feeble-minded women of child-bearing age. The other is the sterilization of those whose germ-plasm contains the defects which society wishes to eliminate. (Estabrook 85)
There is no evidence that Joyce read any of these books. James Atherton does not mention them in The Books at the Wake and they do not figure in either of Joyce’s libraries: the one he left behind in Trieste when he and his family relocated to Paris in June 1920 : or the one he compiled in Paris between 1920 and 1939. If he had read Goddard’s book, he would surely have adopted the barmaid and the Quaker as incarnations of Issy’s split personality.
In the early 1920s, when Joyce was writing Finnegans Wake, eugenics was in the air, and the Jukes and Kallikaks were often cited as evidence for the degenerate consequences of incest and inbreeding. It has even been suggested that the two pseudonyms reminded Joyce of Jews and Catholics (Vincenti 34).
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| Oscar Wilde and Lady Colin Campbell |
The great white caterpillar to which HCE is compared in this paragraph is a reference to Oscar Wilde. The phrase is taken from My Memories of Oscar Wilde by Wilde’s fellow Dubliner George Bernard Shaw, which is included as an appendix to Frank Harris’s biography of Wilde:
Now Oscar was an overgrown man, with something not quite normal about his bigness—something that made Lady Colin Campbell, who hated him, describe him as “that great white caterpillar” ... I have always maintained that Oscar was a giant in the pathological sense, and that this explains a good deal of his weakness. (Harris 334)
Lady Colin Campbell, the Irish lady of letters to whom Shaw attributes the caterpillar metaphor, actually compared Wilde to a great white slug (Weintraub 244-245).
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| The House by the Churchyard, Chapelizod |
The House by the Churchyard
In this series of articles, we have already had occasion to take note of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel The House by the Churchyard, which is one of the key texts for Finnegans Wake:
We know that Joyce used a copy while he was writing the Wake; or, to be accurate, we know that he used two copies, for he wrote to Frank Budgen asking him to ‛Bring with you or send me Lefanu’s book. I want to see something in it. My own copy is in the gardemeuble [storage unit].’ In another letter to Budgen written just four years later, Joyce asks a lot of questions about The House by the Churchyard and says that ‛the encounter between my father and a tramp (the basis of my book) actually took place at that part of the park’. He is referring to a spot in Phoenix Park where a man named Sturk is stunned and left as dead by Charles Archer, alias Dangerfield, the villain of the book. Sturk is ‛resurrected’ by an operation performed by Black Dillon and, though he dies later, is able to name his murderer. This ‛Crime in the Park’ is one example of the Fall and Resurrection, or Redemption, of Man. The Park is also a symbol of Eden ... All the action at this spot recalls the real ‛Crime in the Park’: the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish and his friend by the ‛Invincibles’. (Atherton 111)
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| The Phoenix Park Murders |
The Phoenix Park Murders, which took place just three months after the birth of James Joyce, cast a long shadow over Irish politics and figure prominently in Joyce’s work. The encounter between John Stanislaus Joyce and the tramp took place—allegedly—when he and his young family were living in Bray in 1887. John Joyce was working as a rates collector at the time:
The [Collector-General’s] office had heard a sad story from John of a misadventure that had befallen him in the Phoenix Park, near Chapelizod. Apparently, crossing it one evening he had a strange meeting with a ‛cad with a pipe’, some sort of ne’er-do-well, who relieved him of his satchel with the municipal rates in it. It was unfortunate that he still had the money with him after the day’s work. A more heroic version of the incident—probably the one told to the family—claims that John saved the day by valiantly fighting off no fewer than two vicious assailants with only the aid of his trusty shillelagh. Whatever it was that happened to him in the Park, if anything did at all, the business later became for James Joyce a farcical rerun of the Phoenix Park Murders and an elemental anticipation of the Wake. In 1937 Joyce remarked to Frank Budgen that ‛the encounter between my father and a tramp (the basis of my book) actually took place at that part of the Park’. (Jackson & Costello 141)
The authors of John Stanislaus Joyce’s biography believe, erroneuosly, that when Joyce told Budgen that his father’s encounter took place _at that part of the Park_, he was referring to the Phoenix Park Murders. In LeFanu’s novel, Dangerfield assaults Sturk in the Butcher’s Wood, an area immediately to the south of the Castleknock Gate. The Phoenix Park Murders took place about 2 km southeast of the Butcher’s Wood, on Chesterfield Avenue, opposite the Viceregal Lodge (now Áran an Uachtaráin). As Atherton correctly points out, however, Joyce was actually talking about Lefanu (Budgen 330).
The same event is also alluded to briefly in Richard Ellmann’s biography of the son:
The bravery he had once displayed in defending his collector’s pouch against an assailant in the Phoenix Park was forgotten, to be remembered only in Finnegans Wake. (Ellmann 34)
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| Scene of the Phoenix Park Murders |
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)
Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‛Ulysses’ and Other Writings, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1972)
Carmelo Medina Casado, Sifting through Censorship: The British Home Office “Ulysses” Files (1922-1936), James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 37, Number 3/4, Joyce and the Law, Pages 479-508, The University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma (2000)
Robert H Deming, James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, Volume 1, Vikas Publications, Delhi (1970)
Richard Louis Dugdale, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity, Third Edition Revised, G P Putnam’s Sons, New York (1877)
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
Arthur Howard Estabrook, The Jukes in 1915, The Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC (1916)
Sigmund Freud, Abraham Arden Brill (translator), The Interpretation of Dreams, Third Edition, The Macmillan Company, New York (1913)
Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Carlton House, New York (1933)
Henry Herbert Goddard, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Hereditary of Feeble-Mindedness, The Macmillan Company, New York (1913)
Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde: Including My Memories of Oscar Wilde by George Bernard Shaw, Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, Michigan (1959)
David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1963)
John Wyse Jackson & Peter Costello, John Stanislaus Joyce: The Voluminous Life and Genius of James Joyce’s Father, St Martin’s Press, New York (1998)
Stéphane Jousni, Incest, Lit(t)erally: How Joyce Censored The Wake, Revue LISA/LISA e-journal, Volume 11, Number 3, En Ligne (2013)
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)
Sidney Lee (editor), Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 28, Macmillan and Co, New York (1891)
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, The House by the Churchyard, Third Edition, Macmillan and Co, Limited, London (1899)
Shane Leslie, James Joyce: Ulysses, The Quarterly Review, Volume 238, Number 473, Pages 219-234, John Murray, London (1922)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
Giovanna Vincenti, The Discourse of Madness in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Samuel Beckett’s Early English Prose, Doctoral Thesis, University of Reading (2018)
Stanley Weintraub, Shaw’s Goddess: Lady Colin Campbell, Shaw, Volume 25, Pages 241-256, Penn State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania (2005)
Image Credits
Martin Kallikak: Henry Edward Garrett, General Psychology, Page 65, American Book Company, New York (1955), Public Domain
The Hollow, Phoenix Park: © William Murphy (photographer), Creative Commons License
Oscar Wilde: Max Beerbohn (caricaturist), Public Domain
Oedipus Separating from Jocasta: Alexandre Cabanel (artist), Musée Comtadin-Duplessis, Carpentras, Vaucluse, Public Domain
Sigmund Freud: Max Halberstadt (photographer), Public Domain
Ulster County, New York: Frederick W Beers (lithographer), County Atlas of Ulster, New York, From Recent and Actual Surveys and Records, Walker & Jewett, New York (1875)
Martin Kallikak’s Pedigree: Henry Herbert Goddard, The Kallikak Family, Chart 2, Page 37, Public Domain
Oscar Wilde: Napoleon Sarony (photographer), Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Public Domain
Lady Colin Campbell: James Russell & Sons (photographers), The Sketch, Volume 3, Number 32, 6 September 1893, Cover Illustration, National Portrait Gallery, London, Public Domain
The House by the Churchyard, Chapelizod: Anonymous Photograph, Public Domain
The Phoenix Park Murders: The Illustrated London News, Volume 80, Number 2245, Saturday 13 May 1882, Page 449, Public Domain
Scene of the Phoenix Park Murders: _The Illustrated London News_, Volume 80, Number 2246, 20 May 1882, Page 489, Public Domain
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