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Dr Tibbles’ Vi-Cocoa and the Edwards’ Desiccated Soup (RFW 021.13–021.40) |
This paragraph continues the dramatization of the Irish-American ballad Finnegan’s Wake, which has informed much of the opening chapter of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. This dramatization began on the second page of the novel (Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand ...), before being interrupted by a series of set pieces beginning with the Museyroom episode. The drama was resumed following the last of these set pieces, the Prankquean episode. In this context, the present paragraph can be read as more chatter at Tim Finnegan’s wake—chatter addressed to Tim’s “corpse”.
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| Hayman 60:12-31 |
First-Draft Version
The first draft of this passage comprised just three or four lines. These were part of a single fifteen-line paragraph that originally ran from And would again could whispering grassies wake him (RFW 019-18) to Finn no more! (RFW 023.02). In the final published text, these fifteen lines have been expanded to four-and-a-half pages (three-and-a-half in The Restored Finnegans Wake), spread over seven paragraphs:
Everything’s going on the same. Coal’s short but we’ve plenty of bog in the yard. And barley’s up again. The boys is attending school regular, sir. Hetty Jane’s a child of Mary. And Essie Shanahan has let down her skirts. ’Twould delight your heart to see. (Hayman 60)
To whom should we attribute these lines of dialogue? In the preceding article in this series, we saw that the lines that precede these are usually attributed to The Twelve, though The Four Old Men are probably also implicated. The line The menhere’s always talking of you makes sense if spoken by one of The Four in reference to The Twelve (the men here, and Dutch: meinherr, gentleman).
But it is undeniable that an earlier line—Anam a dhoul! did ye drink me doornail—is spoken by Tim Finnegan (HCE) himself. So we are not obliged to attribute every line in this paragraph to the same speaker or speakers. And these three lines in particular sound as though they are being spoken by ALP and addressed to HCE. The boys surely refers to their sons Shem and Shaun, while Hetty Jane and Essie Shanahan can only be their daughter Issy’s twin personalities—with a nod to Jonathan Swift’s lovers Esther Johnson (Stella) and Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa).
In previous articles, I have stated on more than one occasion that the opening chapter of Finnegans Wake is introductory in nature and foreshadows many later events in the book. As these lines are spoken by ALP and addressed to HCE, they are possibly a foreshadowing of ALP’s famous Letter, which plays a crucial role in the novel’s plot.
It is true that when we finally get to hear a version of the Letter—RFW 481.28–485.10—it does not resemble these three lines, or the twenty-eight line paragraph they eventually gave rise to. Nevertheless, it is hard not to read this paragraph without feeling that one is reading a gossipy letter, in which a garrulous woman is bringing her absent—ie dead—husband up to date on all that has happened at home during his absence.
In an earlier article in this series—The Gnarlybird—we took a broad look at ALP’s famous Letter. A quick revision would not be out of place here.
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| Joyce’s Siglum for ALP’s Letter |
The Letter
Finnegans Wake is a complex novel in which Joyce weaves an intricate tapestry out of just a handful of different threads. In order to keep track of the book’s various characters and motifs, he employed in his notes a series of signs—or sigla, as they are generally known to Wakean scholars. Some of these sigla even found their way into the published text (see, for example, RFW 230.F4). These sigla include the dramatis personae of the novel. HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun, Issy, the Four Old Men, the Twelve and Issy’s companions (the twenty-eight Rainbow Girls) all have their own sigla.
There are also a few sigla for abstract ideas or inanimate objects, and among these is one that represents ALP’s Letter. But it is important to understand that the Letter siglum represents an abstract concept that goes well beyond the physical piece of paper on which the Letter is written, or even the text that comprises the Letter. The Letter is just one manifestation of a much more complex amalgam, to borrow a phrase from Roland McHugh. In the opening chapter of his brief work The Finnegans Wake Experience, McHugh discusses the kitchen midden in the backyard of HCE’s inn (‘the burial mound’), where the hen—the gnarlybird—uncovers ALP’s Letter:
From numerous examples throughout the book, we can state definitively that the burial mound we have just discussed, and the letter which is unearthed from it, are both part of the same complex amalgam, which further includes all Wakean notions of buildings and cities. These things are ultimately containers of [HCE], and whether they are real containers of his body or verbal containers of his name they are indifferently represented in Joyce’s manuscripts by the siglum □. (McHugh 1981:18)
This is illuminating. Now it becomes clear how Joyce can use the same language to describe a mound of rubbish and a piece of writing. In Finnegans Wake, the kitchen midden is HCE’s burial mound, and the Letter is a text about HCE. Both, therefore, are containers of HCE. And so, in the dream world of Finnegans Wake they are identical. In fact, the siglum □ manifests in many different concrete forms throughout the book. Here are just a few examples:
The puzzle-quilt that covers the sleeping landlord of the Mullingar House
The four-poster bed, in which he sleeps
The square bedroom, in which the bed lies
The Mullingar House, in which the bedroom is located
Chapelizod, in which The Mullingar House is located
Dublin, in which Chapelizod is located
Ireland, in which Dublin is located
The coffin (RFW 053.24 ff) in which HCE is buried
Lough Neagh, in which the coffin is buried
The burial mound, in which HCE is also entombed
The kitchen midden behind the Mullingar House
ALP’s Letter
The Book of Kells
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Finnegans Wake itself
One is reminded of the young Stephen Dedalus’s address in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce 1916:11-12):
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe
In another valuable work of his, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake, McHugh adds:
[ALP’s] letter is ultimately all writings, particularly FW itself. If it is identical with the cosmic egg, we may perhaps include both concepts in the siglum □, which Joyce said ‘stands for the title but I do not wish to say it yet until the book has written more of itself.’ [Footnote: Letters I, 213.] (McHugh 1976:113)
As we shall subsequently see—especially in Chapter I.5, The Mamafesta—much of what Joyce writes concerning ALP’s Letter makes most sense when it is understood to be referring first and foremost to the text of Finnegans Wake itself. Indeed, the hen raking through the detritus of the kitchen midden—the spoils of war—in search of needful things is a metaphor for the reader sifting through the text of Finnegans Wake in search of meaning.
Over the past seventy years, many commentators have been quick to dismiss Finnegans Wake as literary rubbish. It is curious, then, to discover, that Joyce himself was the first to equate his crowning masterpiece with a pile of rubbish.
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The Dung Heap |
ALP’s Monologue
After presenting us with ALP’s Letter (or one version of it), Finnegans Wake concludes with ALP’s Monologue. Here, ALP, personifying the River Liffey, addresses HCE, personifying Dublin, as she flows through the city and into Dublin Bay. These are ALP’s dying words:
Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am Leafy speafing. Lfp! ... A way, a lone, a lost, a last a loved a long the (RFW 486.01–492.07)
It has been suggested that the concluding section of the opening chapter—including the passage we are currently studying—foreshadows not ALP’s Letter but, rather, her final Monologue. The former concludes the opening chapter of the book, while the latter concludes the final chapter. As Finn Fordham of the University of Nottingham puts it:
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Finn Fordham’s Schema (Crispi & Slote 471) |
Strictly speaking, we ought to say that ALP’s Monologue echoes the closing pages of the opening chapter, as the latter were drafted before the monologue:
Joyce is thought to have begun Leafy’s monologue in mid- or late-1938, once the structure of Book IV was well in place ... While material for Leafy’s monologue echo with many parts of the book, I wish here to point out correspondences to revisions specifically to the end of chapter 1. (Crispi & Slote 477)
The closing pages of I.1 were first drafted in November-December 1926 (Crispi & Slote 57-61, 485), almost a dozen years before Leafy’s Monologue.
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| River Liffey |
Letter or Monologue, the present paragraph also foreshadows a number of other events that are scattered throughout the text of Finnegans Wake. For example:
Coughings all over the sanctuary RFW 053.24, a description of the coffin in which HCE is buried.
Meat took a drop when Reilly-Parsons failed The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly (RFW 035.18–038.21), which lampoons HCE’s fall from grace.
The lads is attending school nessans regular, sir. Spelling beesknees with hathatansy and turning out tables by mudapplication Chapter II.2, Night Studies, or School Nessans, in which Dolph (Shem) and Kev (Shaun) study geometry and other subjects.
All for the books and never pegging smashers after Tom Bowe Glassarse or Timmy the Tosser RFW 072.22 ff, in which a character called Pegger Festy (Shaun?) denies pegging stones at HCE’s tavern.
Kevin’s just a doat with his cherub cheek and his little lamp and schoolbelt and bag of knicks, chalking oghres on walls and playing postman’s knock round the diggings Book III, The Four Watches of Shaun, which depicts Shaun as a postman travelling backwards through the night to deliver ALP’s Letter to the now-dead HCE. On the second page of Book III (RFW 314.04) Shaun’s belted lamp is mentioned.
But, laus sake, the devil does be in that knirps of a Jerry sometimes, the tarandtan plaidboy, making encostive inkum out of the last of his lavings and writing a blue streak over his bourseday shirt Chapter I.7, Shem the Pen, which describes Shem’s (ie Joyce’s) obscene literary productions. In Chapter II.1, Twilight Games, Glugg (Shem) is also identified as the author of some disreputable works and plays the devil to Chuffs (Shaun’s) angel.
And Essie Shanahan has let down her skirts. You remember Essie in Our Luna’s Convent? They called her Holly Merry her lips were so ruddy berry and Pia de Purebelle when the redminers’ riots was on about her. Chapter II.1, Twilight Games, in which the children play a game called Colours. Glugg (Shem) must guess the colour of Issy’s underwear, which are blood red, or heliotrope. The game is also called Angels and Devils, a schizophrenic contrast characterized also by Hetty Jane and Essie Shanahan (Ellmann 628).
And so on.
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)
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
Mrs A M Fraser, Katherine Strong: A Woman of Old Dublin, Dublin Historical Record, Volume 17, Number 4, Pages 143-146, Old Dublin Society, Dublin (1962)
David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1963)
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, B W Huebsch, New York (1916)
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)
Roland McHugh, The Finnegans Wake Experience, University of California Press, Berkeley, California (1981)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
Image Credits
Dr Tibble’s Vi-Cocoa: Copyright Unknown, Fair Use
Edwards’ Desiccated Soup: Pinterest, Copyright Unknown, Fair Use
The Dung Heap: Charles Gogin (artist), Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston upon Hull, Public Domain
River Liffey: Dave Meier (photographer), Public Domain
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