08 September 2022

I’ve an Eye on Queer Behan and Old Kate

 


King arthur’s Hall (RFW 022.09–023.02)

The penultimate paragraph of the opening chapter of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is an important and revealing one. Filling more than a whole page in the original edition, it looks forward to the very end of the novel—Zee End—and casts some light on HCE’s complicated relationships with both his wife ALP and his daughter Issy. It also hints at the actual date on which Finnegans Wake takes place.


Hayman 60:12-31

First-Draft Version

The first draft of this paragraph comprised just four or five lines. These were originally part of a single fifteen-line paragraph that 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 had grown to four-and-a-half pages (three-and-a-half in The Restored Finnegans Wake), spread over seven paragraphs. The seventh paragraph, the one we are now studying, runs to thirty-four lines—about eight times its original length:

I’ve an eye on queer Behan and Old Kate and the milk, trust me. And we put on your clock again, sir, for you. And it’s herself that’s fine too, don’t be talking, and fond of the concertina of an evening: Her hair’s as brown as ever it was. And wivvy and wavy. Repose you now! Finn no more! (Hayman 60)

Once again we must ask ourselves: Who speaks these lines? Or, perhaps, we should be asking who speak these lines, as there may be multiple narrators in this paragraph.

Behan and Kate are surely S and K, HCE’s elderly manservant and ALP’s elderly maid-of-all-work, so neither of them speaks the opening sentence (Glasheen 27). Could the speaker here be HCE or ALP, concerned that their servants are stealing milk?

Queer is a slang term for drunk—appropriate for S— and Joyce later emended milk to butter. This suggests a connection with Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations:

Here’s the cook lying insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease! (Dickens 73)

It may be easier to tease out the different lines of dialogue in the final, expanded draft.

Whose hair is as brown as ever it was, ALP’s or Issy’s? Probably both are meant. HCE fell in love with ALP when she was young and beautiful. Now that she is old and losing her looks, he is falling in love with his daughter, who is coming to resemble the young ALP more and more. In this paragraph, the young ALP is conflated with Issy. Against this, however, must be weighed those passages in which it is implied that ALP’s hair is auburn and Issy’s blonde:

ALP’s hair, having been set aflame by her lover’s ‘flightening’ eyes (and singed by her recent ‘permanent’), is a fire-coloured ‘auburnt’ ... Aside from her voice, the two most solidly established facts about Issy’s appearance are that she wears cosmetics and has blonde hair. But even these details fade under scrutiny ... As for her blonde hair, it seems at times to have been another of the dreamer’s conjurations. (Gordon 63 ... 77 ... 78)

The River Liffey is brown as it flows through the city of Dublin. This is the ultimate source of the brown colour of ALP’s and Issy’s hair.


The River Liffey, Dublin

Who Said What?

There’s a lot to unpack in this long paragraph, so let’s see if we can make some sense of it.

I’ve an eye on queer Behan and old Kate and the butter, trust me. She’ll do no jugglywuggly with her war souvenir postcards to help to build me murial. Tippers, I’ll trip your traps! Assure a sure there!

The phrase build me murial (ie build my memorial) suggests that these lines are spoken by the deceased HCE. Tippers brings to mind the rubbish tip behind the Mullingar House, which is often identified with HCE’s burial mound. In the Museyroom Episode, Kate repeatedly said Tip! Her war souvenir postcards may be mementos she sells to visitors, who are the Tippers addressed by HCE in the next sentence. These are, I presume, HCE’s sons Shem and Shaun, who would like to tip their father into the rubbish tip and step into his shoes. But HCE does not intend to make things easy for them.

The following lines seem to be spoken mainly by K and S, who are addressing HCE:

K And we put on your clock again, sir, for you.

HCE Did or didn’t we, sharestutterers?

S So you won’t be up a stump entirely.

K Nor shed your remnants.

S The sternwheel’s crawling strong.

K I seen your missus in the hall. Like queenoveire.

I will discuss the significance of the clock shortly. Throughout Finnegans Wake, HCE’s stutter is a sign of his guilty conscience, but who are his sharestutterers (ie those who share his stutter)? I surmise that HCE speaks this line, addressing K and S as his fellow-stutterers? But who knows?

Kate sees ALP in the hall and is impressed by her appearance. She is like King Arthur’s consort Guinevere, or the Queen of Éire. Is Kate reporting an apparition of ALP’s ghost in the hall? On one level of Finnegans Wake ALP dies and HCE is left a widower, while on another level it is HCE who dies, leaving his wife a widow. Later, at RFW 433.17 ff, Kate sees HCE’s ghost on the stairs.

There is a cluster of quotations here from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Why?

I suspect that the next sentence is spoken by the ghost of ALP in the hall and overheard by Kate. She is speaking about Issy—or, possibly, the young ALP of the distant past—who is the focus of attention for much of this paragraph:

Arrah, it’s herself that’s fine, sure, don’t be talking!

Issy is a constant chatterer. She is the Scheherazade of Finnegans Wake, the incessant spinner of yarns. Is she the speaker of the following lines?

Shirksends? You storyan Harry chap longa me Harry chap storyan grass woman plelthy good trout. Shakeshands.

In this exchange, Joyce makes use of Bêche-la-Mar, a Melanesian Pidgin language, dialects of which are still spoken in Vanuatu (Bislama), the Solomon Islands (Pijin) and Papua Guinea (Tok Pisin). On the James Joyce Digital Archive, Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon describe it thus:


Solomon Islanders in Battle Dress

Note: Bêche-la-Mar is a simple patois developed to ease communication between the natives of the Melanesian islands and the Europeans they encountered while trading. Its name, also given as Sandalwood English, derives from two commodities traded—sandalwood, a fragrant wood from the tree Santalum album, and Bêche-le-mer (from the Portuguese bicho do mar, or ‘worm of the sea’), a sea slug highly prized by the Chinese as a delicacy. The vocabulary is simplistic, of necessity, and in the main English, while the syntax is almost comical.

I have no idea what the import of this exchange is. The image of two hairy chaps trying to communicate with one another reminds me of the Mutt & Jute Dialogue. Should they shake hands (friends) or shake spears (enemies)? In Bêche-la-Mar, Harry means trader, as Joyce noted in one of his Finnegans Wake notebooks (VI.B.46.025e). In Shakespearean English, chapman also means a merchant or trader.

Shirksends is what Finnegans Wake does, being a circular novel with no real beginning or ending. The two ends of the book shake hands.

The grass woman must be ALP, a grass widow deserted by her husband. But what’s with the plenty of healthy good trout? Is there a reference here to the Salmon of Knowledge of Irish mythology? In the next line, lex suggests the Old Norse: lax, salmon.

Issy is the Wake’s storyan (historian), I suppose, but she is usually associated with Rhaeto-Romanic (Romansch), not Bêche-la-Mar. The word grass, however, does mean fat in Rhaeto-Romanic, so there’s that.

Dibble a hayfork’s wrong with her only her lex’s salig.

Anglo-Irish: devil a hap’orth, nothing. Tybalt is a kinsman of the Capulets in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The Lex Salica, or Salic Law, was a Frankish lawbook which excluded females from the line of succession. It features in the plot of Shakespeare’s Henry V. King Henry V was previously known as Prince Harry. So we have Shakespeare, Tybalt, Prince Harry, the Lex Salica, the Devil and his pitchfork, the Salmon of Knowledge. What do these have in common? I’m afraid I am still none the wiser.


Decoying More Nesters

Bald Tib does be yawning and smirking cats’ hours on the Pollockses’ woolly round tabouret cushion watching her sewing a dream together, the tailor’s daughter, stitch to her last. Or, while waiting for winter to fire the enchantment, decoying more nesters to fall down the flue. It’s an allavalonche that blows nopussy food.

In the first edition of Finnegans Wake, Issy’s cat is called Boald Tib, conflating Bold and Bald, but in The Restored Finnegans Wake, Rose & O’Hanlon have emended this to Bald. Like Dibble, there is an allusion to Romeo & Juliet’s Tybalt, who is mocked in the play as Prince of Cats. The proverbial phrase, Ill blows the wind that profits nobody, occurs in another of Shakespeare’s plays, Henry VI, Part 3 (2:5:55).

I don’t understand the significance of the reference to Castor and Pollux (cats’ hours ... Pollockses’), twin brothers of Helen of Troy. I Presume they represent Shem and Shaun, while Helen is Issy. In Euripides’ play Helen, there are two Helens: the real Helen spends the Trojan War in Egypt, while a phantom Helen (an (eidolon, εἴδωλον) is in Troy.

The tailor’s daughter—Issy or the young ALP—features in How Kersse the Tailor Made a Suit of Clothes for the Norwegian Captain, one of the mock-heroic tales in Chapter II.3, The Scene in the Public.

If you only were there to explain the meaning, best of men, and talk to her nice of guldenselver. The lips would moisten once again. As when you drove with her to Findrinny Fair. What with reins here and ribbons there all your hands were employed so she never knew was she on land or at sea or swooped through the blue like Airwinger’s bride. She was flirtsome then and she’s fluttersome yet.

ALP is now addressing the absent HCE. The memory of HCE driving with the young ALP|Issy to Findrinny Fair seems to be based on Joyce’s elopement with Nora Barnacle on 8 October 1904 (Norburn 23):

On 16 October 1934 James Joyce wrote to his son Giorgio and said, among other things, “A 30-year wedding should be called a ‘findrinny’ one. Findrinny is a kind of white gold mixed with silver”. Subtract thirty years from 1934 and you get 1904, the year in which Joyce met his Nora Barnacle and consummated what he regarded as his marriage to her. Like nearly everything else, the word was put into Finnegans Wake, and again between gold and silver. (Donoghue 125, Letters I, 348)

The following lines describe the young ALP or Issy in some detail:

She can second a song and adores a scandal when the last post’s gone by. Fond of a concertina and pairs passing when she’s had her forty winks for supper after kanekannan and abbely dimpling and is in her merlin chair assotted, reading her Evening World. To see is it smarts, full lengths or swaggers. News, news, all the news. Death, a leopard, kills fellah in Fez. Angry scenes at Stormount. Stilla Star with her lucky in goingaways. Opportunity fair with the China floods and we hear these rosy rumours.

The prevalence of Arthurian themes—Guinevere (queenoveire), Avalon (allavalonche), Round Table (round tabouret), Merlin (merlin chair)—is appropriate here. Of all the characters in Finnegans Wake, Issy is the one most besotted with Medieval Romances.

The Merlin chair was an early type of self-propelled wheelchair, designed by Jean-Joseph Merlin, an 18th-century inventor from Liège. It was primarily designed for sufferers of gout. Why would Issy or the young ALP require such a chair? Is Issy lame, like Gerty MacDowell in Ulysses? Is that why she spends all her time in her bedroom?


Merlin Chair

The Evening World was a New York newspaper published between 1887 and 1931. Of course, Finnegans Wake is itself a depiction of the evening world.

The recurrence of Harry chap suggests that the following line is spoken by Issy:

Ding Tams he noise about all same Harry chap. [Damn thing he knows about ...]

The next seven lines resume the portrait of young ALP|Issy:

She’s seeking her way, a chickle a chuckle, in and out of their serial story, Les Loves of Selskar et Pervenche, freely adopted to The Novvergin’s Viv. There’ll be bluebells blowing in salty sepulchres the night she signs her final tear. Zee End. But that’s a world of ways away. Till track laws time. No silver ash or switches for that one! While flattering candles flare. Anna Stacey’s how are you! Worther waist in the noblest, says Adams and Sons, the wouldpay actionneers. Her hair’s as brown as ever it was. And wivvy and wavy.

This passage foreshadows not only the mock-heroic tale of How Kersse the Tailor Made a Suit of Clothes for the Norwegian Captain but also the very end of Finnegans Wake, in which ALP finally passes away. But that’s a long way off yet. When we finally reach The End, we will have lost track of time.

The final words, addressed by ALP to the deceased HCE, repeat the injunction to lie down:

Repose you now! Finn no more!

French: reposez-vous, lie down! Those last three words, however, tell us that HCE is no longer the giant Finn MacCool interred in the Irish landscape, whose image has informed much of this introductory chapter. Joyce is now preparing the way for the following chapter—I.2, Humphriad I—in which HCE will be portrayed as a bourgeois citizen of modern Dublin.


Waterbury Pocket Watch

Time of Day

In an earlier article in this series, I laid out the hypothesis that Finnegans Wake is a multilayered work, with several different planes of narrative. We have it on Joyce’s own authority that the book is to be read and understood on more than one level:


James Joyce

I might easily have written this story in the traditional manner. Every novelist knows the recipe. It is not very difficult to follow a simple, chronological scheme which the critics will understand. But I, after all, am trying to tell the story of this Chapelizod family in a new way. Time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of my book. Yet the elements are exactly what every novelist might use: man and woman, birth, childhood, night, sleep, marriage, prayer, death. There is nothing paradoxical about all this. Only I am trying to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose. Did you ever read Laurence Sterne? (Givens 11-12, Ellmann 554)

A reminder of what I had to say about the first of those layers would not be amiss here:

I choose to take Joyce at his word: there are several planes of narrative in Finnegans Wake. But how many?

Four. That, at least, is how many there are in my working hypothesis as it currently stands. Perhaps there are more, perhaps fewer, but let us not complicate matters. I can discern four—just about—and that is more than enough to be getting on with.

I believe that each of these planes of narrative can be located in space and time.

A Joycean Template

Joyce’s earlier epic, Ulysses, is a good place to begin. Everyone knows that Ulysses tells the story of a single day in Dublin. Joyce even provided his readers with a pair of schemata to help them find their way through his labyrinthine text:


Joyce’s Linati Schema for Ulysses

Although there are some discrepancies between these two schemata, it is not disputed that Ulysses takes place in Dublin, that it begins at approximately 8 am on Thursday 16 June 1904, and that it ends in the small hours of the following morning. We can also pin down many of the incidents in the novel to specific points in space and time. For example, when Leopold Bloom hears the bells of George’s church chiming 8:45 am, he is standing in the back garden of his house at 7 Eccles Street. At precisely the same moment, Stephen Dedalus is walking along the upwardcurving path at the Forty Foot in Sandycove.

There is clearly a plane of narrative in which the events of Bloom’s and Stephen’s lives on this particular day and in this particular city are located. In Ulysses, Bloom and Stephen are real people. They are of course fictional characters in a novel, but in the Universe of that novel they are just as real as you and me. They really do have breakfast, feed the cat, teach history, go to a funeral, get drunk, etc.


Ulysses

But not everything in Ulysses is as real as this. Some of the things attributed to Bloom only occur in his imagination, or in his unconscious. For instance, Bloom does not really become pregnant and give birth to eight male yellow and white children, as is narrated in the Circe episode. And the ghost of Stephen’s mother does not really confront him in the same episode. Nor do the Royal and Grand Canals really swap places, as is implied in the Wandering Rocks episode. These events are located on another plane of narrative.

The First Plane of Narrative – Nocturnal

Is there a narrative plane in Finnegans Wake that corresponds to the real world, the world of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus? I believe there is. This is the plane Joyce was referring to when he made the following statement to Ole Vinding in Copenhagen in 1936:


Ole Vinding

There are, so to say, no individual people in the book—it is as in a dream, the style gliding and unreal as is the way in dreams. If one were to speak of a person in the book, it would have to be of an old man, but even his relationship to reality is doubtful. (Vinding et al 180-181)

While Ulysses is populated with dozens of real people, there is only one truly real person in Finnegans Wake—an old man—and even he is not quite as real as Bloom and Dedalus. Who is this old man, and what do we know about him?

  • He is the landlord—retired?—of the Mullingar House in Chapelizod.

  • He is seventy years old.

  • He is a widower.

  • He has three grown-up children: two sons and a daughter.

On the opening page of the book he falls asleep in the four-poster bed in the master bedroom on the first floor at the rear of the Mullingar House. The precise moment he falls asleep—punctuated by the word fall (RFW 003.14)—is 11:32 pm on Saturday 12 April 1924. He sleeps, more or less soundly, for about eight hours and wakes up the following morning on the last page of the book. The precise moment of his awakening is punctuated by the words a way (RFW 493.07).

Remember that all of this is highly conjectural. It is just my working hypothesis. But there are many scraps of circumstantial evidence to back it up—some internal and some external.

In addition to the comments quoted above, Joyce said numerous other things that confirm the nocturnal nature of Finnegans Wake. Most of these were made late in the process of composition to men like Jacques Mercanton and Ole Vinding, so they represent Joyce’s mature reflections on the book.

I reconstruct the nocturnal life. (Mercanton & Parks 704)

I want to describe the night itself. Ulysses is related to this book as the day is to the night. Otherwise there is no connection between the two books. (Vinding et al 180)

In the final chapter of the book itself, a very revealing statement is made:

You mean to see we have been hadding a sound night’s sleep? (RFW 466.06)

In the course of the book, we learn various things about the protagonist:

[He] owns the bulgiest bungbarrel that ever was tiptapped in the privace of the Mullingar Inn ... (RFW 109.29-31)

[He] came at this timecoloured place where we live ... and has been repreaching himself like a fishmummer these sixtyten years ever since ... (RFW 023.20-26)

... in his windower’s house ... (RFW 019.17)

... he’s such a granfallar, with a pocked wife in pickle that’s a flyfire and three lice nittle clinkers, two twilling bugs and one midgit pucelle. (RFW 023.09-11)

The number 1132 pops up all over Finnegans Wake ... Clive Hart was the first—I believe—to suggest that the book begins at 11:32:

The whole book ... begins at the magical hour of 11.32 a.m. ... (Hart 71)

Hart’s analysis here is relevant to my second plane of narrative, which I believe begins at 11:32 in the morning. But what I have been calling the first plane of narrative begins at 11:32 at night.

As for the date—Saturday 12|Sunday 13 April 1924—there are several pieces of evidence scattered throughout the final text and Joyce’s notebooks in support of this. In the Roman calendar 13 April was the ides of April:

They tell the story ... how one happy-go-gusty Ides-of-April morning ... (RFW 027.39-028.01)

The other spring offensive on the heights of Abraham ... (RFW 062.28)

One of the oft-recurring motifs in Finnegans Wake is ALP’s Letter. As we have seen, this document frequently symbolizes the entire book itself. For example, when the Letter is referred to as The Suspended Sentence (RFW 084.30-31) we are to understand that this also applies to Finnegans Wake itself:

The book really has no beginning or end. (Trade secret, registered at Stationers Hall.) It ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence. (Letters I, 8 November 1926)

During the lengthy and piecemeal drafting of the book, Joyce first conceived of the Letter as a postcard, as we learn from the following note in one of the earliest of the Finnegans Wake notebooks, Scribbledehobble (VI.A):

on the N.E. slope of the dunghill the slanteyed hen of the Grogans scrutinised a clayed p.c. from Boston (Mass) of the 12th of the 4th to dearest Elly from her loving sister with 4½ kisses ([VI.A: 271, Connolly 75)

It is true that the final version of this passage speaks not of a postcard dated 12th April, but of:

a goodishsized sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass.) of the last of the first ... (RFW 088.20-21)

But I am going to assume that Joyce changed the date from the actual one to a symbolic one (So the last shall be first and the first last—Matthew 20:16) because he did not want to make things easy for the reader.

There is one last point about the date I wish to make, as it is relevant to the paragraph we are now studying:

And we put on your clock again, sir, for you. (RFW 022.11-12)

On Sunday 13 April 1924, at 2 am in the morning, the clocks went forward one hour as Irish summer time began:

SUMMER TIME ACT, 1924 ... For the purpose of this Act, the period of summer time for the year 1924 shall be taken to be the period beginning at two o’clock, West-European time, in the morning of the 13th day of April, in the year 1924, and ending at two o’clock, West-European time, in the morning of the 21st day of September, in the year 1924 (Achtanna an Oireachtais, Number 12 of 1924)

Personal dates were important to Joyce. He set Ulysses on the day of his first date with Nora Barnacle, and took pains to have it published on 2 February 1922, his own fortieth birthday. 13 April turns up more than once in the Joycean canon. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one of Stephen’s entries in his diary is dated 13 April:

13 April: That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other! (Joyce 1916:297)

Handel’s Messiah had its world première in Dublin on 13 April 1742, and Catholic Emancipation was passed into law on 13 April 1829, when a Dubliner, the Duke of Wellington, was Prime Minister.

But if this particular date held any special significance for Joyce, I am not aware of it.

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

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