A Bird’s-Eye View of the Humphriad

The Phoenix Park, Dublin

Before resuming our page-by-page analysis of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, let us take another look at the structure of Book I, Chapters 2-4—a self-contained narrative unit known familiarly as the Humphriad (RFW 043.05). In an earlier article in this series, I made the point that the Humphriad recounts the same story over and over again: the rise and fall of Joyce’s Everyman, HCE. The details of this story vary continually, but the essentials remain the same:

A guilt-ridden and socially discredited HCE, who is in a state of sin, encounters a younger Oedipal Figure, who is in a state of grace.
The Oedipal Figure displaces HCE, becoming in turn the new HCE.
The new HCE initially rises in the world on the coat-tails of his triumphal encounter with the old HCE. This is sometimes presented as the public’s initial appraisal of this encounter to HCE’s credit.
The new HCE is led—through hubris?—to commit an Original Sin of an ambiguously sexual nature. This is sometimes presented as the public’s reappraisal of HCE’s initial encounter, now to his discredit.
This precipitates the new HCE’s fall from grace in the eyes of the public, and burdens him with guilt and remorse.
A guilty and socially discredited HCE encounters a younger Oedipal Figure ...

And so on ad infinitum et ad nauseam. Squaring the circle—a feat that Leopold Bloom thought might enrich him—is impossible, but Joyce once claimed to have circled the square in Finnegans Wake:

I am making an engine with only one wheel. No spokes of course. The wheel is a perfect square ... it’s a wheel, I tell the world. And it’s all square. (Postcard to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Letters I, 16 April 1927)

The repeating cycle of HCE’s rise and fall mimics the quadratic structure of Finnegans Wake as a whole insomuch as it too has four constituent parts:

The Oedipal Cycle

Rise The Oedipal Encounter brings about the rise of HCE. This represents, in a way, the birth of HCE.
Zenith HCE’s Oedipal Encounter is celebrated by the community as a heroic triumph. HCE is now the King (Oedipus Rex).
Fall HCE’s Oedipal Encounter is reappraised by the public to his discredit. It is now characterized as a crime in the park—or the Original Sin—leading to HCE’s fall from grace.
Nadir HCE’s fall from grace and his loss of public support leads to another Oedipal Encounter. This represents, in a way, his death.

In the same article, I suggested the following triadic analysis of the Humphriad:

The Humphriad

As I pointed out, this analysis is somewhat artificial. Joyce did not construct the Humphriad as a series of triads. In fact, he had no overarching plan when he began to expand the vignette Here Comes Everybody into a larger narrative. His method of proceeding—as Bill Cadbury, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oregon, describes it in How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake (Crispi & Slote 66-97)—was actually quite chaotic and disorganized. But this triadic analysis is a useful fiction, as the fourth part of each Oedipal cycle corresponds to the first part of the next cycle. It also highlights the parallels between the different sections of the Humphriad.

For example, HCE’s initial encounter with the Oedipal figure—RFW 024.10-025.21—takes place during a foxhunt. In this iteration, the Oedipal Figure is played by a king. Compare this with the final telling of the tale—RFW 077.01–079.24—in which HCE is compared to a hunted fox. We realize that the initial encounter was not the chance meeting that it had first appeared to be. On some telestic level, HCE was always the king’s true quarry. We could note, further, that Charles Stewart Parnell—“the Uncrowned King of Ireland”—sometimes adopted the pseudonym Mr Fox as a code name when conducting his illicit affair with Kitty O’Shea. And it is hardly a coincidence that another iteration of the tale features characters called Festy King and Pegger King.

Charles Stewart Parnell

Again, the second iteration takes place on the Ides of April (RFW 028.01), while the fifth takes place on the Heights of Abraham (RFW 062.28). This is not a coincidence. Nor is it a coincidence that I.2 and I.4 end with songs (Hosty’s Rann and a variation on At Trinity Church I Met My Doom) while I.3 has a similar italicized passage near its end:

The climax of chapter 2 had always been intended to be the Rann, a satirical poem on the past of the Scandinavian immigrant HCE that emphasizes the crimes in the park. In the preparation of the typescripts for transition, for the ending of chapter 4 Joyce added the equally satirical poem “Sold him her lease” ... in which HCE, as fish, swims in ALP’s river ... But the catalog of epithets that the “wordwounder” pegs at HCE at the end of chapter 3 [RFW 057.07-058.01] is a structural analog to the satiric poems that end chapters 2 and 4. (Crispi & Slote 89)

Throughout the Humphriad, Joyce has carefully arranged many such parallelisms, which help to knit together the different episodes of this mock-heroic epic.

Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham

ALP and The Letter

ALP’s Letter, which figures prominently throughout the text of Finnegans Wake, is at once a defence of and an attack on HCE. On some level, it represents both the initial positive appraisal of HCE and the subsequent negative reappraisal. As such, it is an integral element in the cycle of HCE’s rise and fall. In fact, it was Joyce’s original intention to place the Letter immediately after the trial of Festy King in I.4:

In the first drafts the trial is followed by the “Letter” from his wife, ALP, to and concerning HCE, and this is yet another attack—in effect, a fall like the other verbal attacks such as the poem that concludes chapter 2, “The Rann” ... —in that it purports to defend HCE but in fact accuses him of various of the sins of which he seems always already guilty. Planned initially as the centerpiece of what will become chapter 5, the Letter will be moved in 1938 to Book IV, where its text thus follows rather than precedes its delivery. (Crispi & Slote 66)

The Letter came to play a crucial role in the structure of Finnegans Wake. I.5 is devoted entirely to its description. I.7 is a portrait of Shem, who indites it. I.8 is a portrait of ALP, who begets it. And all four chapters of Book III are devoted to its delivery by Shaun.

We can now see why the Museyroom Episode in the opening chapter was followed by the Gnarlybird Episode. The Museyroom Episode foreshadows the Oedipal Encounters of the Humphriad in I.2-4, and the Gnarlybird Episode foreshadows the introduction of ALP and The Letter in I.5.

The Letter should always be kept in mind when one is reading the Humphriad.

The Murder of Laius by Oedipus

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

References

Luca Crispi & Sam Slote (editors), How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin (2007)
James Joyce, Ulysses, Shakespeare and Company, Paris (1922)
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)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939, 1949)
James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
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)

Image Credits

Charles Stewart Parnell: Matthew Benjamin Brady (photographer), Brady-Handy Photographic Collection, Library of Congress, Public Domain
Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham: Charles Rathborne Low, The Great Battles of the British Army, Page 186, George Routledge and Sons, London (1885), Public Domain
The Murder of Laius by Oedipus: Paul-Joseph Blanc (artist), École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, VladoubidoOo (photographer), Public Domain

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15 September 2022