01 September 2022

No Lumpend Papeer

 


Printing the Quran (RFW 016.01–016.21)

This paragraph of James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake continues the argument of the preceding passage. Ostensibly an account of the evolving sophistication of written and printed texts—especially sacred texts such as the Bible and the Koran—it is clearly also a description of the text of Finnegans Wake itself, one of the most self-referential books ever committed to paper. It foreshadows Chapter I.5, The Mamafesta, which is devoted to ALP’s Letter—another obvious analogue for Finnegans Wake.

First-Draft Version

The first draft of this chapter dates from November 1926. Before writing it, Joyce revised what he had already written of this chapter, adding both the Mutt & Jute Dialogue and the Annals:

True there was no paper in the waste and the mountain pen still groaned for the micies to deliver him. You gave me a boot and I ate the wind. I tipped you a quid and you went to quod. But the world, mind, is, was & will be writing its own runes on all matters that fall under the ban of our senses. A bone, a pebble, a ramskin: chip them, chop them, cut them allways: leave them in the slow of their oven: and the day of magnum charter we must one way dawn else there is no virtue more in alcohoran. For that is what paper is made of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till we finally (though not yet for all) meet with Mr Typ, Mrs Top and all the little typtoppies—Fillstop. So you need hardly tell me that every word will carry 3 score & ten readings through the book of life till Daleth, who opened it, closes the door. (Hayman 57)

The final version differs only slightly from this. Everything has been elaborated, but nothing substantial has been added.


James Joyce and Sylvia Beach (1921)

Interpretation

This paragraph should not present the diligent reader with too much difficulty, but there are a few baffling biographical details that are worth pursuing.

There was ... no ... papeer in the waste ... You gave me a boot ... and I ate the wind. I quizzed you a quid ... and you went to the quod.

T S Eliot’s seminal poem The Waste Land was published in 1922, the same year as Joyce’s seminal novel Ulysses. These two writers first met in Paris in 1920. Richard Ellmann’s description of this encounter of two literary Titans is worth quoting at length:

In mid-August Joyce received his first direct communication from T. S. Eliot, whose shape Ezra Pound had been limning for seven years. Eliot wrote from London that Pound had entrusted to his keeping a package for Joyce, which he would bring with him on August 15 to the Hotel de l’Elysée. “I hope you can dine with me that evening. Please,” he said graciously, and added, “You won’t have time to answer. But please come.” Actually Eliot was not traveling alone, but with Wyndham Lewis, whose book Tarr, published like A Portrait [of the Artist as a Young Man] by the Egoist Press, Joyce had read in Zurich, and whose story Cantleman’s Spring Mate had earned the Little Review its only suppression that was not caused by Joyce’s Ulysses. Lewis’s work had impressed Joyce, but he was still dubious of Eliot’s verse.

Eliot and Lewis duly arrived at their hotel, Eliot having lugged Pound’s clumsy parcel on train, boat, and train again. Joyce, accompanied by [his son] Giorgio, came over to see them, and the presence of Lewis startled and pleased him. He offered his hand with his customary limpness. Lewis’s admirable description reveals that Joyce had at last shed his tennis shoes: “I found an oddity, in patent-leather shoes, large powerful spectacles, and a small gingerbread beard; speaking half in voluble Italian to a scowling schoolboy; playing the Irishman a little overmuch perhaps, but in amusingly mannered technique.” For the moment Joyce seemed more manner than man. The meeting proceeded with a dignity befitting an encounter of Titans, but undercut by Pound’s gift. As Lewis recounts,


Wyndham Lewis

We all then sat down. But only for a moment. Joyce lay back in the stiff chair he had taken from behind him, crossed his leg, the lifted leg laid out horizontally upon the one in support like an artificial limb, an arm flung back over the summit of the sumptuous chair. He dangled negligently his straw hat, a regulation “boater.” We were on either side of the table, the visitors and ourselves, upon which stood the enigmatical parcel.

Eliot now rose to his feet. He approached the table, and with one eyebrow drawn up, and a finger pointing, announced to James Joyce that this was that parcel, to which he had referred in his wire, and which had been given into his care, and he formally delivered it, thus acquitting himself of his commission.

“Ah! Is this the parcel you mentioned in your note?” enquired Joyce, overcoming the elegant reluctance of a certain undisguised fatigue in his person. And Eliot admitted that it was, and resumed his seat ...

James Joyce was by now attempting to untie the crafty housewifely knots of the cunning old Ezra. After a little he asked his son crossly in Italian for a penknife. Still more crossly his son informed him that he had no penknife. But Eliot got up, saying “You want a knife? I have not got a knife, I think!” We were able, ultimately, to provide a pair of nail scissors.

At last the strings were cut. A little gingerly Joyce unrolled the slovenly swaddlings of damp British brown paper in which the good-hearted American had packed up what he had put inside. Thereupon, along with some nondescript garments for the trunk—there were no trousers I believe—a fairly presentable pair of old brown shoes stood revealed, in the centre of the bourgeois French table ...

James Joyce, exclaiming very faintly “Oh!” looked up, and we all gazed at the old shoes for a moment. “Oh!” I echoed and laughed, and Joyce left the shoes where they were, disclosed as the matrix of the disturbed leaves of the parcel. He turned away and sat down again, placing his left ankle upon his right knee, and squeezing, and then releasing, the horizontal limb.

With a smile even slower in materializing than his still-trailing Bostonian voice (a handsome young United States President, to give you an idea—adding a Gioconda smile to the other charms of this office) Eliot asked our visitor if he would have dinner with us. Joyce turned to his son, and speaking very rapidly in Italian, the language always employed by him, so it seemed, in his family circle, he told him to go home: he would inform his mother that his father would not be home to dinner after all. Yes, his father had accepted an invitation to dinner, and would not be back after all, for the evening meal! Did he understand? To tell his mother that his father—. But the son very hotly answered his father back, at this, after but a moment’s hesitation on account of the company: evidently he did not by any means relish being entrusted with messages. It was, however, with greater hotness, in yet more resonant Italian, that the son expressed his rebellious sensations when the imperturbable Jimmie handed him the parcel of disreputable footwear. That was the last straw—this revolting, this unbecoming packet. Having exchanged a good number of stormy words, in a series of passionate asides—in a good imitation of an altercation between a couple of neapolitan touts, of the better order—Joyce, père et fils, separated, the latter rushing away with the shoes beneath his arm, his face crimson and his eyes blazing with a truly southern ferocity—first having mastered himself for a moment sufficiently to bow to me from the hips, and to shake hands with heroic punctilio. This scene took place as we were about to leave the small hotel.


T S Eliot (1923)

Joyce proposed to Lewis and Eliot that they dine at a restaurant he knew nearby, and from that moment he became their host. When they sat down at the table he had selected for them, he remarked, “It appears that I have the melancholy advantage of being the eldest of the band.” He then ordered an excellent dinner and wines, and paid for it afterwards, tipping munificently. His hospitality continued during the rest of their visit. As Lewis says, “If we were in a taxicab with James Joyce, out he would spring in front of us. And before even we reached the pavement the fare was settled and the cabman was pocketing a disproportionately massive tip: whereas in a café no beer or coffee, whoever had ordered it, was ever paid for by anyone but the eminent recipient of the parcel of “old shoes.”

Towards Eliot Joyce acted with “a punctilious reserve.” In conversation with Lewis he referred to him as “Your friend Mr. Eliot,” and Eliot remarked to Lewis with some amusement, “He does not take much notice of me.” Joyce’s “grand talk” pleased Eliot, but awoke reservations, too. Alone together, Lewis said,

I find our friend ... very affable and easy don’t you, if a shade stilted?” But Eliot found him definitely burdensome, and arrogant ... “I do not think he is arrogant,” I said ... “He may not seem so!” Eliot answered, in his grim Bostonian growl. “He may not seem arrogant, no.”

“You think he is as proud as Lucifer?”

“I would not say Lucifer!” Eliot was on his guard at once, at this loose use of the surname of the Evil Principle.

“You would not say Lucifer? Well, I daresay he may be under the impression that he is being ‘as proud as Lucifer,’ or some bogtrotting humbug of that order. What provincials they are, bless their beastly brogues!”

“Provincials—yes!” Eliot agreed with contemptuous unction. “Provincials.”

“However he is most polite.”

“He is polite.”

“I have never succeeded in getting out of the door behind him, have you? He is very You First. He is very After you!”

“Oh yes. He is polite, he is polite enough. But he is exceedingly arrogant. Underneath. That is why he is so polite. I should be better pleased if he were less polite.”

To be Irish was to be too Irish for Lewis’s taste. But Eliot was making in 1920 the same criticism of Joyce’s politeness that Stanislaus Joyce had made in 1903, when he accused him of insincerity. Politeness had become one of Joyce’s principal social defenses, and one he resorted to constantly in Paris. Nevertheless, the three men became, after their fashion, friends. Eliot had to continue in a somewhat inferior role because Joyce gave almost no indication of having read a line of his verse. Only once did he allow himself to say, “I was at the Jardin des Plantes today and paid my respects to your friend the hippopotamus.” (In a notebook he called Eliot “Bishop of Hippo.”) But after reading The Waste Land, he remarked to a friend, “I had never realized that Eliot was a poet.” She replied, “I liked it too but I couldn’t understand it,” and Joyce retorted with the question that Eliot might himself have asked, “Do you have to understand it?” He objected to the notes to the poem for the same reason. Later he parodied The Waste Land in a letter and then in Finnegans Wake, and in a notebook he wrote, “T. S. Eliot ends idea of poetry for ladies,” a sentence which suggests that he perceived more affinity than he acknowledged. As for Lewis, he was on cordial terms with Joyce until late in the ’twenties, and for several years he, like Eliot, always looked up Joyce in Paris. He smarted a bit, however, at Joyce’s concentration on Joyce and at what he took for condescension towards the work of contemporaries, including himself. (Ellmann 492-495)


Ezra Pound

So, does You gave me a boot ... I quizzed you a quid refer to this incident? A quid is one pound sterling—Ezra Pound sometimes signed his name as £—while in the waste suggests Eliot’s The Waste Land.

But other biographical incidents are also being alluded to here. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus wears boots that he borrowed from Buck Mulligan:

My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs. (Ulysses 37)

Stephen is in debt to several benefactors, but it is Mulligan who asks him for a pound:

His head disappeared and reappeared.

—I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it’s very clever. Touch him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean.

—I get paid this morning, Stephen said.

—The school kip? Buck Mulligan said. How much? Four quid? Lend us one.

—If you want it, Stephen said.

—Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. We’ll have a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent sovereigns. (Ulysses 11)


Oliver St John Gogarty

Buck Mulligan is based loosely on Oliver St John Gogarty. Joyce first became acquainted with Gogarty in 1903, but in 1904 Gogarty returned to Oxford: you went to the quod (ie the quadrangle). According to Ellmann, Gogarty sent Joyce a pound in 1903 while the latter was living beyond his means in Paris:

These activities freshened his financial anxieties. Joe Casey lent him small sums, and Patrice too; a man named Chown lent him a few shillings; Gogarty, appealed to, sent him a pound. (Ellmann 127)

So the phrase I quizzed you a quid ... and you went to the quod seems to be referring primarily to the relationship between Joyce and Gogarty, while the phrase you gave me a boot ... and I ate the wind is referring to Joyce’s relationship with Pound.

But how does the phrase I ate the wind fit into this? It echoes Hamlet’s I eat the air, which, in Shakespeare’s day, could have sounded like I hate the heir (Hamlet 3.2.99)—Hamlet is speaking to Claudius, heir to his father’s throne. This passage contains other allusions to Shakespeare: moor (Othello), charmian (Anthony and Cleopatra), ancientry (Much Ado About Nothing). Cleopatra was Queen of Egypt, the land of papyrus (papyr), which gave us our word paper (papeer).

The package Pound sent with Eliot also included a suit. Joyce later wrote to Pound:

It fits well except for the shoulders which are rather tight ... I shall be glad of it in the winter as it seems to be wool. I hate the cold. (Ellmann 493 fn)

Does I ate the wind echo I hate the cold?

The poet W B Yeats once described his muse Maud Gonne as being Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind (Among School Children). This poem was written in June 1926, four months before Joyce drafted this paragraph, but it was first published in The London Mercury in August 1927, so Joyce cannot be alluding to it (Yeats 127).

Why does Joyce recall these particular incidents from his life at this particular point in Finnegans Wake? The previous paragraph alluded to algebra and grammar, which Joyce learnt as a young boy at school. Now, in this paragraph, he is a young man embarking on his career. That’s the best I can do.


Stanley Lane-Poole

Islam

In this paragraph, Joyce also draws upon Stanley Lane-Poole’s The Speeches and Table-Talk of the Prophet Mohammad and Joseph-Charles Mardrus’s Le Koran: Traduction Littérale et Complète des Sourates Essentiales. Lane-Poole was Professor of Arabic Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, between 1897 and 1903:

  • The poems [of the Arabs] are full of instances of the courtly respect, “full of state and ancientry”, [Much Ado About Nothing] displayed by the heroes of the desert towards defenceless maidens, and the mere existence of so general an ideal of conduct in the poems is a strong argument for Arab chivalry. (Lane-Poole xvi)

  • The hospitality of the Arab is a proverb, but unlike many proverbs it is strictly true. The last milch-camel must be killed rather than the duties of the host neglected. (Lane-Poole xiv)

  • Fine long arched eyebrows [of Mohammad] were divided by a vein, which throbbed visibly in moments of passion. (Lane-Poole xxvii)

  • The great majority [of Arabs] believed in no future life, nor in a reckoning day of good and evil. If a few tied camels to the graves of the dead that the corpse might ride mounted to the judgment-seat, they must have done so more by force of superstitious habit than anything else. (Lane-Poole xxiii)

  • Beyond this shepherd life and his later and more adventurous trade of camel-driver to the Syrian caravans of his rich cousin, Khadija, whom he presently married at the age of twenty-five, there is little that can be positively asserted of Mohammad’s youth. (Lane-Poole xxvi-xxvii)

  • His ordinary food was dates and water, or barley bread; milk and honey were luxuries of which he was fond, but which he rarely allowed himself. (Lane-Poole xxx)

  • The day of judgment is a stern reality to Mohammad. It is never out of his thoughts, and he says himself that if men realised what that day was, they would weep much and laugh little. He is never tired of depicting its terrors, and cannot find names enough to describe it. He calls it the Hour, the Mighty Day, the great Calamity, the Inevitable Fact, the Smiting, the Overwhelming, the Hard Day, the Promised Day, the Day of Decision. (Lane-Poole xxxix)

  • Le Prophète ... retenait sans effort les versets divins ... et pouvait ... les dicter à ses secrétaires... Ceux-ci les inscrivaient ... sur feuilles de palmier, cailloux plats, peaux et omoplates de moutons. [The Prophet ... effortlessly retained the divine verses in memory ... and could ... dictate them to his secretaries ... These wrote them down ... on palm leaves, flat pebbles, skins and shoulder blades of sheep.] (Mardrus 13)

  • O thou who art wrapped, rise up and warn! (Lane-Poole xxxi)

  • It must be remembered that the speeches of the Koran are all supposed to be the utterances of God in propriâ personâ [in person], of whom Mohammad is only the mouthpiece. The apparent vindications and laudations of the prophet himself are explicable from this point of view; and the reader must never forget it when he is perplexed by the “we” (God), and “thou” (Mohammad), and “ye” (the audience), of the Koran. (Lane-Poole xl)

  • L’exégèse musulmane admet que chaque mot du Livre possède soixante-dix significations. [Muslim exegesis accepts that every word of the Book possesses seventy meanings.] (Mardrus 22)

  • The worst expression he ever made use of in conversation was, ‘What has come to him? May his forehead be darkened with mud!’ (Lane-Poole xxix)

The term alcohoran is of course derived from the Arabic name of the Koran, Al Qu’ran, which means The Recitation. But it also includes alcohol, which is expressly prohibited by Islam.

Finally, the word mahomahouma alludes to Mohammad. But it also refers to a mahamanvantara, or “great age of Manu”. In Hinduism, a manvantara is 306,720,000 human years. The concept of a mahamanvantara, however, was taken by Joyce from the occult doctrine of Theosophy, which was in vogue in Dublin when Joyce was a young man. The Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who promoted this new-age religion across the globe, met and influenced Yeats in London in 1887:


Helen Petrovna Blavatsky

There were several “great ages” mentioned by the ancients. In India it embraced the whole Maha-manvantara, the “age of Brahmâ,” each “Day” of which represents the life cycle of a chain—i.e., it embraces a period of seven Rounds. (See Esoteric Buddhism, by A. P. Sinnett.) Thus while a “Day” and a “Night” represent, as Manvantara and Pralaya, 8,640,000,000 years, an “age” lasts through a period of 311,040,000,000,000 years; after which the Pralaya, or dissolution of the universe, becomes universal. With the Egyptian and Greeks the “great age” referred only to the tropical, or sidereal year, the duration of which is 25,868 solar years. Of the complete age—that of the gods—they say nothing, as it was a matter to be discussed and divulged only at the Mysteries, during the initiation ceremonies. The “great age” of the Chaldees was the same in figures as that of the Hindus. (Blavatsky 129)

Stephen misuses the term in the Proteus episode of Ulysses:

Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. (Ulysses 41)

Daleth and Delta

Daleth is the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It is the forerunner of the Greek letter delta (Δ) and the Roman letter D. Its name means door, and it is thought to derive from an Egyptian hieroglyph that depicts a door (O31). It represents the sounds [d] and [ð], and the numeral 4. Daleth also symbolizes death—the door representing the portal between this world and the next. In Finnegans Wake, 4 is the number of the Four Old Men, who are at death’s door.

The twenty-second and final letter of the Hebrew alphabet is Taw. This letter is the forerunner of the Greek letter tau (Τ) and the Roman letter T. Unlike daleth, taw actually resembles a door, though its original hieroglyphic form consists of two crossed sticks (Z9). It represents the sounds [t] and [θ], and the numeral 400. In Greek, Θ (theta) symbolized death, being the first letter in the Greek: Θανατος [Thanatos], death. In Finnegans Wake, the Four Old Men are symbolized by a siglum that is identical to hieroglyph Z9: X.


Daleth and Taw

The final word in Finnegans Wake is the. In Ancient Hebrew, which did not have letters for vowels, that sound would be spelt with a single isolated daleth.

In Finnegans Wake, delta is the siglum that generally represents ALP. When Joyce first drafted this paragraph, he scribbled the following design in the margin of his manuscript (Hayman 57):


ALP Doodle

The first draft of the opening chapter of Finnegans Wake began:

Howth Castle & Environs. (Hayman 46)

So, originally Finnegans Wake opened with HCE and ended with ALP, the union of the two—both physical and spiritual—being the bond that held the two ends of the book together.

dor not only encodes the door at the end of Finnegans Wake through which we pass to begin another Viconian cycle or mahamanvantara (mahomahouma) but also the idea of sleep (French: dormir, to sleep)—the death of each day’s life, as Macbeth calls it. In Hebrew, dor [דּוֹר] signifies generation.

The shutting of doors is a motif that frequently recurs throughout Finnegans Wake.

Although Finnegans Wake “ends” with the word the, there is no fullstop [Fillstup], as the final sentence runs straight on into the opening sentence of the book. It is for this reason that the opening word, riverrun, does not begin with a capital letter. It is also for this reason that Joyce refers to Finnegans Wake as the book of Doublends Jined—double-ends joined as well as Dublin’s Giant. The fullstop which Joyce inserts after the in the paragraph we are now studying could be seen as the one which should have concluded the book.

In fact, this is not the only place where Joyce has inserted an unnecessary fullstop after a the. After revising this paragraph, he went through the entire text and inserted redundant periods after three specific instances of the. Rose & O’Hanlon have emended one of these to an ellipsis, though Joyce explicitly required that a “stop” be inserted here (FW 257.27):

Wold Forrester Farley who, in deesperation of deispiration at the diasporation of his diesparation, was found of the round of the sound of the lound of the...

Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertooryzooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk. (RFW 203.20-24)

So the katey’s came and the katey’s game. As so gangs sludgenose. And that henchwench what hopped it dunneth there duft the. Duras. (RFW 258.08-09)

Of manifest ’tis obedience and the. Flute! (RFW 265.28-29)

The first two of these are followed by expressions involving doors (Irish: dún an doras, shut the door). The third doesn’t explicitly mention any doors, but it is clearly a parody of the opening line of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which describes how Adam & Eve are turned out of the Garden of Eden—given the boot!—so it is not entirely out of place here. We might also note that the closing lines of Finnegans Wake refer to the keys to Heaven (The keys to. Given!), which open the gates of Paradise—Paradise Regained.


Gulliver in Lilliput

Some Loose Threads

  • in nilloh’s dieybos Latin: in illis diebus, in those days, a common expression in the Bible.

  • mightmountain Penn still groaned for the micies to let flee Horace, Ars Poetica 139: The mountains are in labour, a ridiculous little mouse is born : Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu, or The Conspiracy: The pen is mightier than the sword. In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the Lilliputians refer to Gulliver as Quinbus Flestrin, which means Man-Mountain. According to Richard Ellmann, W B Yeats’s first impression of Joyce was: Such a colossal self-conceit with such a Lilliputian literary genius I never saw combined in one person (Ellmann 101). William Penn, Quaker and founder of Pennsylvania, is also referred to here, though why I cannot say.

  • Gutenmorg Johannes Gutenberg, who introduced the printing press to Europe. His name means Good mountain. One of the first books he printed was the Gutenberg Bible, an edition of the Vulgate, St Jerome’s Latin translation. This paragraph contains several other terms connected with printing: Tintenfass, Great Primer, Rubrication, Omnibus, Printing Press, Misprints, Typos, Fullstop, Spelling, Book Bindings, Reading.

  • Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies In one of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake notebooks we read: Mrs Doesbe & all the little Dobes (VI.B.3.119). This occurs among several notes taken from O Henry’s collection of short stories The Four Million. One of these stories, The Furnished Room, includes the following line, spoken by a Mrs. McCool: You do be a wonder for rentin’ rooms of that kind.

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

References

Image Credits

  • Printing the Qur’an: © Cornell University Library, Fair Use

  • James Joyce and Sylvia Beach (1921): Shakespeare & Company, Rue Dupruyten, Paris (1921), Bettmann Archive, Public Domain

  • Wyndham Lewis: George Charles Beresford (photographer), National Portrait Gallery, London, Public Domain

  • T S Eliot (1923): Lady Ottoline Morrell (photographer), National Portrait Gallery, London, Public Domain

  • Ezra Pound: United States Passport Photo, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Public Domain

  • Oliver St John Gogarty: Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1982), Plate IX, Courtesy of Oliver Duane Gogarty, Public Domain

  • Stanley Lane-Poole: © True Islam Ireland, Fair Use

  • Helena Petrovna Blavatsky: The Blavatsky Archives, Blavatsky Study Center, Public Domain

  • Daleth and Taw: Copyleft Stefano Vittori & Gabriele Primavera (designers), Creative Commons License

  • Gulliver in Lilliput: Thomas Morten (engraver), Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World, Edited by Thomas Minard Balliet, D C Heath & Co, Boston (1901), Public Domain

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