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| Hosty’s Rann (RFW 033.30-035.17) |
After wetting their whistles in the Old Sots’ Hole, Hosty and his three associates make their way to the city centre, where Hosty performs his new composition for the first time before a large audience representing every stratum of Dublin society. Hosty’s rann, The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly, is a huge hit. It is subsequently printed and circulated throughout the land, and soon everyone in the country is singing it to the detriment of HCE’s reputation.
First-Draft Version
In Joyce’s first draft, this episode occupied no more than three or four lines, but by the time Joyce was finished with it, so many details had been added that it filled almost two whole pages of The Restored Finnegans Wake:
This [Hosty’s ballad] on a slip of blue paper headed by a woodcut soon fluttered to the rose of the winds from lane to lattice and from mouth to ear, throughout the land of Ireland, and round the land his rann it ran and this is the rann that Hosty made: (Hayman 66)
The slip of blue paper headed by a woodcut alludes to a passage in Alfred Perceval Graves’ Irish Literary and Musical Studies concerning the Irish lyric poet William Allingham:
In the preface to The Music Master, published in 1855, Allingham states that five of the songs or ballads, namely. The Milkmaid, The Girl’s Lamentation, Lovely Mary Donnelly, Nanny’s Sailor Lad, and The Nobleman’s Wedding, have already had an Irish circulation as halfpenny ballads, and the first three were written for this purpose.
This statement is explained in Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham. In evening walks at Ballyshannon he would hear the Irish girls at their cottage doors singing old ballads which he would pick up. If they were broken or incomplete he would add to them or finish them; if they were improper he would refine them. He could not get them sung till he got the Dublin Catnach of that day to print them on long strips of blue paper, like old songs; and if about the sea, with the old rough woodcut of a ship at the top. He either gave them away or they were sold in the neighbourhood. Then, in his evening walks, he had at last the pleasure of hearing some of his own ballads sung at the cottage doors by the crooning lasses, who were quite unaware that it was the author who was passing by. This is exactly what Oliver Goldsmith had done a century before, when a student of Trinity College, Dublin, though the lanes in which he listened to his ballads were very other from those at beautiful Ballyshannon. (Graves 76-77, Hill xxiii-xxiv)
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| Compass Rose |
Rann and Wran
Hosty’s
street ballad is identified as a rann,
an Irish word for a very specific verse form. A rann
is a quatrain, or stave of precisely four lines. The
Ballad of Persse
O’Reilly, which is
printed on pages 35-38, is not a rann. It is, rather, a sequence of
fourteen ranns (and chorus). Patrick Dineen, however, gives a much broader definition of the term:
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| Rann (Dinneen 559) |
Hosty’s Rann is also a lampoon or pasquinade—a politically motivated satire—a dangerous weapon in the hands of an aggrieved file (professional poet) in ancient Ireland:
A rann is an ancient Celtic verse form. There are many stories of Irish poets who revenged themselves against ungenerous or brutal kings by composing satires against them; and frequently (or so they say) the kings literally died of the shame. (Campbell & Robinson 61-62 fn)
Joyce’s use of this word also alludes to the wran or wren, a species of bird that has long been regarded in European culture as the king of all birds. Even Aristotle acknowledges this tradition:
The wren lives in brakes and crevices; it is difficult to capture, keeps out of sight, is gentle of disposition, finds its food with ease, and is something of a mechanic. It goes by the nickname of ‘old man’ or ‘king’; and the story goes that for this reason the eagle is at war with him. (Barnes 2088, History of Animals 615 a 17 ff)
In his Moralia, Plutarch attributes the story of the wren outwitting the eagle to Aesop, though it is not found in any extant collections of Aesop’s Fables.
In parts of Ireland, wren is pronounced wran. This spelling is actually listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as a Scots or dialectical variant of wren.
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| The Wren Boys |
According to an old tradition, the first Christian martyr, Saint Stephen, was betrayed by a noisy wren while hiding from his enemies. St Stephen’s Day, 26 December, is commemorated by the tradition known as Wren Day, in which young wrenboys catch a wren and ritually parade it around town, as described in the traditional Wren Song:
A writer of the eighteenth century says that in Ireland the wren “is still hunted and killed by the peasants on Christmas Day, and on the following (St. Stephen’s Day) he is carried about, hung by the leg, in the centre of two hoops, crossing each other at right angles, and a procession made in every village, of men, women, and children, singing an Irish catch, importing him to be the king of all birds.” Down to the present time the “hunting of the wren” still takes place in parts of Leinster and Connaught. On Christmas Day or St. Stephen’s Day the boys hunt and kill the wren, fasten it in the middle of a mass of holly and ivy on the top of a broomstick, and on St. Stephen’s Day go about with it from house to house, singing:
“The wren, the wren, the king of all birds,
St. Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze;
Although he is little, his family’s great,
I pray you, good landlady, give us a treat.”
Money or food (bread, butter, eggs, etc.) were given them, upon which they feasted in the evening. (Frazer 622)
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| The Wren |
The Wind
In Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary, John Gordon, Professor Emeritus of English at Connecticut College, equates the dreamlike episode of Hosty’s Rann with a storm that batters the Mullingar House in Chapelizod. I have earlier expressed my reservations concerning Gordon’s novelistic approach to the book, but I do think that he is spot on when he draws a parallel between the hostile populace assailing HCE’s reputation from without and the hostile forces of nature assailing his castle:
Tracing this sequence adequately would take too long, but three influences should be briefly noted: the increasing chilliness ... the sleeper’s biliousness ... and the rising wind outside, which near the end of this section we hear as a ‛cremoaning’ fiddle.
... In the final section the storm outside grows fiercer: the wind’s fiddle is now a higher-pitched flute; the hail beats against the window (the windowboards have blown open) with a ‛felibrine trancoped’ metre; the mob’s murmur rises to a roar; the elm, whipping against the window, becomes a looming ‛woodmann.’ At the climax that tree breaks through with the sound of a thunderword crash; the hostile outside has come in. All this culminates in a ballad: as ALP later tells her husband, ‛Once you are balladproof you are unperceable to haily, icy, and missilethroes [RFW 483.07-08]. Like the aged Wellington, HCE has his windows attacked by a mob. (Gordon 127)
I believe that the breaking of the window—represented by the 100-letter Thunderword at RFW 035.16-17—is as much a part of the dreamworld of Finnegans Wake as Hosty and his Rann. Nevertheless, the storm without is possibly an oneiric exaggeration of a windy night. In Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Dr Stockmann’s windows are broken by the mob of townspeople (Gordon 44.19-20).
The elm tree might not actually come crashing through the window pane, but it is continually tapping on the glass throughout the long dark night of Finnegans Wake. The musical associations—think percussion and woodwind instruments—are entirely appropriate in the context of Hosty’s Rann. The Tree of Liberty—Eleutheriodendron—is also the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. HCE’s crime in the Phoenix Park is Adam’s Original Sin in the Garden.
French: Félibre, A member of Le Félibrige, a literary and cultural association founded by Frédéric Mistral and six other Provençal poets in 1854 to defend and promote the Provençal language (Occitan, Langue d’Oc) and its literature. In A Classical Lexicon for Finnegans Wake, Brendan O’Hehir glosses felibrine and trancoped thus:
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| O’Hehir 30-31 |
riau river basin
colo mountain
plumo pen
drole young boy
chat young boy
taiocebo earwig
casudo fall
Poulichinello Pulcinella (a hunchback, like HCE)
atahut bier, coffin
Handel’s Messiah
To convey the scale, excitement and historical significance of Hosty’s performance, Joyce draws upon one of the most important musical events in the history of Dublin: the World première of George Frederick Handel’s celebrated oratorio, Messiah:
... this longawaited Messiagh of roaratorios ... (RFW 033.08-09)
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| The Old Music Hall |
Every schoolchild in Dublin is taught how this piece of music received its first ever performance in Mr Neal’s Great Musick Hall, Fishamble Street, on 13 April 1742 (the Ides of April, the same date as HCE’s encounter with the Cad with a Pipe). So great was the press of people anticipated that gentlemen were requested to leave their swords at home, and ladies were advised not to wear hoops in their skirts. These extraordinary sartorial measures were not so much a response to the huge interest shown in the concert as a means of ensuring the largest possible revenue for the three charities benefiting from the performance. The men’s and boys’ choirs were provided by Dublin’s two cathedrals, St Patrick’s and Christ Church. The soprano and contralto parts were sung by Christina Maria Avoglio and Susannah Cibber respectively.
Unsurprisingly, there are numerous allusions throughout this chapter of Finnegans Wake not only to this famous performance but also to other important musical events:
To the added strains (so peacifold) of his majesty the flute, that onecrooned king of inscrewments, Piggott’s purest, ciello alsoliuto Handel directed the concert from the organ—the King of Instruments, as Mozart (and, before him, Guillaume de Machaut) once called it. Here, though, Joyce makes the flute—Mozart’s The Magic Flute?—the uncrowned king of instruments. In the field of politics, Charles Stewart Parnell was the Uncrowned King of Ireland. Piggott alludes to the forger Richard Pigott, who tried unsuccessfully to implicate Parnell in the Phoenix Park Assassinations. Pigott’s was also a prominent music store in Dublin from 1823, and the name of an eminent violoncellist of the 19th century, who was for a time the leader of the cello section in the pit at Dublin’s Theatre Royal (Levey & O’Rorke 83).
which Mr Delaney (Delacey?), horn, anticipating a perfect downpour of plaudits among the rapsods, piped out of his decentsoort hat, looking still more like his purseyful namesake as men of Gaul noted Joyce may be alluding here to an incident that is alleged to have taken place during the première of Messiah. The Chancellor of St Patrick’s Cathedral, the Reverend Patrick Delany, was so affected by Susanna Cibber’s performance of He Was Despiséd that he leapt to his feet at the conclusion of the aria and cried out: “Woman, for this be all thy sins forgiven thee!” Cibber was at the time mired in a scandalous divorce suit, involving another man with whom she had a daughter out of wedlock. Another Patrick Delaney was released from life imprisonment for being an accessory to the Phoenix Park Assassinations after he gave evidence against Parnell at the Parnell Commission. Parsifal (peacifold, purseyful), the eponymous hero of Richard Wagner’s final opera, is described in the opera as the pure fool [der reine Tor]. A percival is a type of hunting horn, named for its inventor Thomas Percival.
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| Theatre Royal, Hawkins Street |
“Ductor” Joyce has taken some of the details in this episode from Richard Michael Levey and J O’Rorke’s Annals of the Theatre Royal:
Richard Powell was well-known as a flautist of first-rate capabilities. He was, indeed, the best local performer on the flute that Dublin, to that period, had “turned out”—a diligent and conscientious student. He possessed a beautiful tone, perfect intonation, and finished execution. He frequently practised from eight to ten hours a-day, never allowing a difficulty to conquer him. He would persevere at a few bars for weeks, to make them perfect. He was the first to perform in Dublin the beautiful flute obligato in the charming three-eight “Ranz de Vache” movement in the overture to “William Tell” at the Anacreontic Society. He served his apprenticeship to a well-known musician in Dublin, familiarly called “Tommy Robinson,” and sometimes “The Doctor;” for although he had never obtained the degree of Mus. Doc., his friends considered him worthy of the title.
Richard Powell was also a fair organist, having obtained his knowledge of the king of instruments from “The Doctor,” who was organist of Bride’s Church. Powell was also a perfect French scholar, speaking the language with fluency. He was professor of that language in Edinburgh. Mazzocchi was oboist of the Theatre Royal—a thorough master of his difficult instrument. (Levey & O’Rorke 85)
Why is “Doctor” Robinson called “Ductor” Hitchcock? I have no idea. The Dublin-born movie director Rex Ingram was a Hitchcock, but I do not see how he is relevant to this passage of Finnegans Wake.
Handel’s Messiah was first performed on Fishamble Street, but what about Hosty’s Rann?
under the shadow of the monument of the shouldhavebeen legislator (Eleutheriodendron! Spare, woodmann, spare!) (RFW 033.31-33)
FWEET identifies this monument as the statue of Gladstone which was intended to be erected somewhere in the Phoenix Park after the death of the former British Prime Minister, but which ended up at Hawarden in Wales. Gladstone was fond of chopping down trees, so the passage in parentheses—Woodman, Spare that Tree of Liberty!—would be entirely appropriate if his monument is intended.
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| Gladstone, O’Connell, and Parnell |
42.19-20: “monument of the shouldhavebeen legislator (Eleutheriodendron! Spare, woodmann, spare!):” could plausibly be either the statue of O’Connell at one end of O’Connell Street or the statue of Parnell at the other, but the tree and woodcutter motives indicate the latter, especially since Gladstone has recently appeared (41.35)—Gladstone was popularly represented as chopping down trees, here an Irish liberty tree, and Joyce considered him to have been one of Parnell’s primary betrayers. Since Parnell was for a time literally a legislator, in Parliament, the expression here may owe something to Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators:” Parnell would have fulfilled the function in a higher, visionary, sense. (On the other hand, O’Connell was the one with the “singleminded supercrowd”s (.22).) (Gordon)
The expression shouldhavebeen legislator may also echo the common perception of Parnell as the Uncrowned King of Ireland. It makes more sense that Hosty should have premiered his ballad on O’Connell Street, in the city centre, rather than out in the Phoenix Park, where Gladstone’s statue was to be erected. And since that statue was never actually erected, it would be difficult for Hosty to perform under its shadow—but, then again, this is a dreamworld.
Joyce’s Failing Eyesight
As John Gordon notes, Joyce also connects the attack from without on HCE with his own failing eyesight. Joyce suffered from chronic glaucoma, iritis, and cataracts throughout the 1920s and ’30s, and underwent numerous operations. As he toiled to turn Work in Progress into Finnegans Wake, he was going blind:
The disaster revives memories of an attack of glaucoma’s blinding flood, caused by ‛an overflow meeting of all the nations in Lenster [my italics] fullyfilling the visional area’, as a result of which we soon meet the blind Joyce as ‛Caoch O’Leary’. (Gordon 127)
Caoch O’Leary is a blind piper in a sentimental poem by the Irish balladeer John Keegan. The poem echoes the famous passage in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus finally returns home and the only one who recognizes him is his old dog Argos.
In Irish, caoch means blind or dim-eyed. In the Mutt & Jute Dialogue of Chapter 1, which took place after the Battle of Clontarf, Mutt suffered a black eye (One eyegonblack). In the present episode, the phrase The wararrow went round was borrowed by Joyce from Emily Lawless’s The Story of Ireland, where it refers to the mustering of the Norsemen to engage Brian Ború’s forces at Clontarf:
The War-arrow had been industriously sent round to all the neighbouring shores, peopled largely at that time with men of Norse blood. (Lawless 67)
A war-arrow is an arrow that has been split into segments, which are sent out by a chief to his allies as a call to arms (Bradley et al W:81). This is an ancient Norse custom.
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| The Battle of Clontarf |
Gordon connects this one eye gone black to the closing of the shutter on a camera when a photograph is taken (or to the shutting of one eye as the photographer squints to the viewfinder):
The incriminating photograph of HCE is also here, hewn from the tree and blown around, like a leaf, by the wind: ‛an excessively rough and red woodcut, privately printed at the rimepress of Delville, soon fluttered its secret on white highway and brown byway to the rose of the winds to the blew of the gaels’. The source of this image is those bloody ‛thin red’ wounds from ‛excessively rough and red’ lovemaking, on HCE’s skin. Mutt, we recall, suffered an ‛eyegonblack’ at that encounter, a blacked-out eye in the augenblick of a camera’s shutter opening and closing, and the ‛shutter’ of HCE’s room has now just blown open, exposing the ‛Lens’ of his window. (Gordon 127)
The existence of an incriminating photograph of HCE was posited by Gordon in his analysis of the Museyroom Episode:
Also, the unexpected burst of fire or lightning is the popping of a flashbulb, recording the damning image of the father. Throughout the Wake there will be many reminders of this picture-taking; in particular the word ‛snap’ ... usually seems to recall an incriminating snapshot. (Gordon 85)
In Ulysses, Milly Bloom is studying photography in Mullingar, and Bloom’s forebears in Hungary were photographers. Just saying.
Joyce’s Dream
In June 1967, Adaline Glasheen wrote a short article for A Wake Newslitter which casts further light on this passage:
After the publication of Ulysses Joyce had a dream in which Molly Bloom, become slightly gray and looking like Duse, threw a little black coffin at her husband and said, “I’ve done with you.” Joyce remonstrated, explained Ulysses to her. She “picked up a tiny snuffbox, in the form of a little black coffin and tossed it towards me, saying, ‘And I have done with you, too, Mr. Joyce’.”
Joyce then wrote a song, lamenting that Molly should have left him for a host of suitors, i.e. the male readers of Ulysses. The last verse reads:
My left eye is awash and his neighbour full of water, man,
I cannot see the lass I limned for Ireland’s gamest daughter, man ...
But if I cling like a child to the clouds that are your petticoats,
O Molly, handsome Molly, sure you won’t let me die? (Ellmann, 549-550)
The song is echoed at FW 43.18-21 [RFW 034.22-24]. Here Joyce is describing a crowd come to hear the grand recital of “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly”—a ballad of rejection and casting off. In the crowd is:
... a half sire from the weaver’s almshouse who clings and clings and chatchatchat clings to her, a wholedam’s cloudhued pittycoat, as child ... as Caoch O’Leary.
Joyce is the half sir (half a man, not quite a gentleman) who is blind like Caoch O’Leary (see Census). The weaver’s almshouse signifies that he is supported by the money of Miss Harriet Weaver and the money earned by Penelope the weaver who is Molly Bloom, a whole woman. (Glasheen 56-57)
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| Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce’s Patron |
Thunderword
The climax of this episode gives us the third of Joyce’s ten Thunderwords. The first nine of these have 100 letters each. The tenth has 101 letters, making a grand total of 1001—a nod to the Arabian Nights. This thunderword represents a theatrical Glass crash:
Glass Crash. — A quantity of broken glass emptied from a bucket on to a piece of sheet iron used to give the illusion of breaking glass. (Fay 16)
Although it represents the breaking of a window—and, of course, the thunderous voice of God in Giambattista Vico’s philosophy of history—this particular thunderword is comprised of words relating to the thunderous applause Hosty’s performance garners:
French: cliquer, to make a short sharp noise
French: claque, clap
Russian: khlopat, clap
German: Klatsch, clap, applaud
Italian: battere, to clap
Ancient Greek: κροτέω [kroteō], I clap
Irish: greadadh, clapping
English: applaud
Swedish: applådera, to applaud, to clap
The remaining elements—semmihsammihnouith ... pkonpkot—have yet to be deciphered. In his first-draft of this thunderword, Joyce may have written:
>semmihsammihnouihpkoupkor! (Cadbury 164)
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| Cadbury 164 |
Perhaps the last letter is an s? I’m still none the wiser.
And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.
References
Jonathan Barnes (editor), The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 2, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey (1984)
Henry Bradley, W A Craigie, C T Onions (editors), A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles: Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society, Volume Volume 10, Part 2, The Clarendon Press, Oxford (1928)
Bill Cadbury, Sequence and Authority in Some “transition” Typescripts and Proofs, European Joyce Studies, Volume 9, Genitricksling Joyce, Pages 159-184, Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands (1999)
Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York (1944)
Patrick S Dinneen, An Irish-English Dictionary, M H Gill & Son Ltd, Dublin (1904)
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
William George Fay, A Short Glossary of Theatrical Terms, Samuel French, New York (1929)
James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, One Volume Abridged Edition, The Macmillan Company, New York (1951)
Adaline Glasheen, http://www.riverrun.org.uk/joycetools.html Molly and FW, A Wake Newslitter, New Series, Volume 4, Number 3, Pages 56-57, University of Essex, English Department, Colchester (1967)
John Gordon, Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York (1986)
Alfred Perceval Graves, Irish Literary and Musical Studies, Elkin Mathews, London (1913)
David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1963)
George Birkbeck Hill, Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 1854-1870, T Fisher Unwin, London (1897)
Henrik Ibsen, Eleanor Marx-Aveling (translator), An Enemy of the People, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York (1912)
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)
Emily Lawless, The Story of Ireland, G P Putnam’s Sons, New York (1900)
Richard Michael Levey, J O’Rorke, Annals of the Theatre Royal, Joseph Dollard, Dublin (1880)
Brendan O’Hehir, A Classical Lexicon for Finnegans Wake, University of California Press, Berkeley, California (1977)
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
Hosty’s Rann: © Stephen Crowe (artist), Fair Use
Compass Rose: © Judy Merrell (artist), Fair Use
The Wren Boys: Jack Butler Yeats (artist), Cuala Press, Public Domain
The Wren: © Roaring Water Journal, Fair Use
The Old Music Hall: F W Fairholt (artist), Gerald Coke Handel Collection, The Foundling Museum, London, Public Domain
Theatre Royal, Hawkins Street: Eason Photographic Collection, National Library of Ireland, Dublin, Public Domain
Gladstone: © DM Photography, Fair Use
O’Connell: © Rodhullandemu, Creative Commons License
Parnell Monument, Dublin: © Ralf Houven (photographer), Creative Commons License
The Battle of Clontarf: Hugh Frazer (artist), Isaacs Arts Center, Waimea (Kamuela), Hawaii, Public Domain
Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce’s Patron: Anonymous Photograph (1907), Public Domain
Video Credits
Adam Harvey, DON'T PANIC: It’s Only Finnegans Wake ‒ Thunderword #3, Fair Use
Useful Resources
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