Our Cad’s Bit of Strife

Our Cad’s Bit of Strife (RFW 030.20-031.15)

After the Oedipal Encounter between HCE and the Cad with a Pipe in the Phoenix Park, the Cad returns home and unwittingly sets in motion a series of Chinese W hispers, which will ultimately lead to HCE’s fall from grace. This is a replay of the events that led to HCE being publicly lampooned in the Gaiety Theatre in the play A Royal Divorce.

First-Draft Version

In Joyce’s first draft, this paragraph runs to half-a-dozen lines or so—approximately one sixth the length of the published version:

The next evening but one the cad’s wife spoke of the matter after [a] sodality meeting to the Reverend director, a fresh complexioned clergyman, and it was he in all human probability was overheard to repeat the words to a layteacher of natural science during a priestly flutter on the race course of Baldoyle [when] the Portmarnock plate was won by a full length by Captain Blount’s fresh colt Drummer Coxon at even money. (Hayman 64-65, James Joyce Digital Archive, slightly emended)

In the final version of this passage, it is made clear that the cad’s wife is actually HCE’s wife ALP, her daughter Issy, and her elderly maid Kate, while the clergyman to whom she blabs represents her sons Shem and Shaun.

ALP is indicated by her number 111. In Hebrew gematria, Aleph=1, Lamedh=30, and Pe=80.
Issy is indicated by the cluster of terms borrowed from Rhaeto-Romanc e, the language of the Alps. Issy’s room is under the pitched roof on the top floor of the Mullingar House.
Kate is indicated by her piety and the fact that she is always cleaning up (glaned up as usual).
Shem & Shaun are indicated by the mention of Browne & Nolan.

Browne and Nolan, a firm of booksellers in Dublin. It was they who backed the publication of Joyce’s youthful paper The Day of the Rabblement. Browne and Nolan play a major role in Finnegans Wake as representatives of the embattled brother pair.

In Joyce’s The Day of the Rabblement, Giordano Bruno of Nola was referred to as “Bruno the Nolan.” Bruno’s theory of the final identity of opposites underlies the brother play of Finnegans Wake. The words Bruno and Nolan easily combine with Browne and Nolan. Joyce plays with them continually. In the present passage we observe the splitting of a single cleric (Giordano Bruno himself, perhaps) into the brother opposites of “Bruno-Browne” and “Nolan.” (Campbell & Robinson 59, Footnote 6)

Sigla Arithmetic

John Gordon believes that the Cad’s principal personality is Sackerson, or Ole Joe, HCE’s elderly manservant. This makes sense, as Sackerson represents the former HCE, who has been displaced by the young invader and forced to serve him. In the Oedipal Encounter, HCE is attacked by the Oedipal Figure, who embodies his twin sons Shem and Shaun. Oedipus becomes the new HCE, and the old HCE becomes his servant Sackerson. The designation a cad with a pipe echoes Caddy and Primas (RFW 011.32-35, ), HCE’s sons. The word cadet means younger son (Shem), while Primas stands for the Latin Primus, or first-born (Shaun).

If the cad is primarily Sackerson, then his wife is primarily Kate:

Another reason that HCE finds Sackerson disturbing is that he owes him his wages. The encounter in the park was also taken as a demand for payment, for ‛Guinness’ as in ‛guineas’, hence a holdup. ‛Bradys’ signals Joe Brady, the Invincible; the cad will often be remembered as a holdup man ... Sackerson’s reaction to the payment is typical: he sits down at his customary hearthside to have his customary meal and becomes, as usual, drunk, but his newfound wealth leads him to get above himself and see castles in the air ... The pious Kate overhears his maunderings about their master, and the rumour is off—from Kate to her priest to his friend and so on. The gossipers are for the most part recognisable variants of HCE’s sons, especially Shem; here as elsewhere Sackerson has been the source of the sons. (Gordon 126-127)

Baldoyle Racecourse

Baldoyle Racecourse

Horse racing has been an important fixture of Ireland’s cultural environment for several centuries. In Ulysses, the Ascot Gold Cup—won by rank outsider Throwaway at long odds of 20/1—figures prominently. Finnegans Wake originally began with a foxhunt, the precursor of the steeplechase, and HCE read backwards spells ech, the Old Irish word for horse.

In the present passage, Fr Browne is overheard at Baldoyle Racecourse repeating the Cad’s wife’s account of her husband’s encounter in the Phoenix Park. Did Joyce choose this particular location because he wished to draw a parallel with the foxhunt that led to HCE’s first Oedipal Encounter, the one with the King on the highway outside his tavern? HCE’s second encounter, the one with the Cad, took place in the Phoenix Park, in which there was once yet another racecourse.

Baldoyle is a small village on the north-eastern outskirts of Dublin. It was first established as a Danish settlement around 898 CE. Horseracing was first associated with this area in 1730, more than a century before the creation of a dedicated enclosed racecourse (Hurley 65). Baldoyle Racecourse was opened in 1874 and remained in use for almost a century. It was forced to close in 1972 due to financial difficulties (Hurley 67-73). It is now a public park.

Baldoyle Racecourse Park

Philly Thurnston

The next link in the chain of Chinese Whispers is the lay teacher Philly Thurnston, with whom Fr Browne converses. That’s an interesting name. Philly suggests both filly (a young female horse) and Philip, a name of Greek origin, meaning fond of horses. His surname was originally Thornton. The emended form suggests Thor’s Town, an appropriate name for a village founded by Scandinavians.

Fr Browne is said to pierce the rubiend aurellam of one Philly Thurnston. Perce oreille is the French for earwig. In Finnegans Wake, Pierce O’Reilly is another of HCE’s avatars. Thurnston teaches orthophonethics, or speech therapy (French: orthophonie), a would-be cure for HCE’s perpetual stammer. Because guilt lies at the root of HCE’s stammer, his speech therapy also includes ethics.

Joyce actually researched the medical science of stammering for Finnegans Wake. His principal source was Bégaiement et autres maladies fonctionelles de la parole [Stammering and Other Speech Defects] by Arthur Chevrin, Director of the Paris Institute for Stammerers, which he co-founded with his father Claudius Chervin in 1867. Joyce read this work carefully and compiled many notes from it in Finnegans Wake Buffalo Notebook VI.B.17. These have been edited and collated by Daniel Ferrer:

[Chervin’s Bégaiement ...] is the longest, and arguably the most interesting of the sources in this notebook. It is possible that Joyce did not stumble upon it by chance. In the notebook, it follows closely the Parnell sequence and it must be remembered that, in “The Shade of Parnell”, Parnell is described as “lisping” and compared to Moses. One of the first things that is noted in Chervin is “Moses bègue 5 ans” ... The momentous word “hesitency” is also recalled ... Arthur Chervin (1850-1921) was the son of a provincial schoolmaster who had invented a method for the cure of stammering. He followed in the footsteps of his father, embraced the medical profession and became a respected and versatile scholar. On the title page of the book, we are told that he was “Directeur de l’Institut des bègues de Paris, Président de la Société d’anthropologie, Membre du Conseil Supérieur de statistique, etc.” It is this versatility that makes his book such an entertaining read. Stammering and other speech defects are considered not only from historical, medical and orthophonic perspectives, but also from the point of view of ethnolinguistics and anthropology. (Ferrer 23-24)

Joe Widger

Winny Widger

The jockey who goes through the card—ie wins every race on the programme—at Baldoyle is actually based on two real Irish jockeys, the brothers Joe and Tom Widger. Joe, the youngest of five sons of a horse-dealer from Waterford, was the most famous member of this family of horse breeders and dealers. In 1895 he won the Aintree Grand National riding Wild Man from Borneo, a horse registered in the name of another of his brothers, John.

Curiously, the word widge is an obsolete dialectical term for a steed or horse, though the surname Widger is unrelated to this word:

Widge (Bradley, Craigie, Onions 112)

Joyce has conflated the two brothers—Shem + Shaun = Oedipus— into a single jockey, to whom he has given the horsey name of Winny, which was obviously suggested by the whinny of a horse. In her Third Census of Finnegans Wake, Adaline Glasheen failed to identify the historical Widger. Assuming that Winny was a girl’s name, she surmised that W. W. was ALP, rather than her sons Shem & Shaun:

Widger (Glasheen 306)

The Widgers of Waterford are still active in the horse trade today. Joe’s grandnephew Robert was successful as both an amateur jockey and a point-to-point trainer. Do they know that their family is mentioned in Finnegans Wake?

North Dublin

Throughout this paragraph Joyce has scattered the names of several places located in the northeast of County Dublin:

Baldoyle
roe hinny = Raheny
Saint Dalough = St Doolaghs
Portmarnock (mentioned in the first draft, but dropped in later drafts)

St Doulagh’s Church

Volapük

In its final form, this paragraph contains a cluster of words and phrases borrowed from Volapük. This is an artificial language constructed by a German Catholic priest, Johann Martin Schleyer, in 1879 and 1880. Unlike Esperanto, which is spoken as a first or second language by tens of thousands of people, Volapük is now estimated to be spoken by little more than a dozen people worldwide.

Joyce first introduced some Volapük words into Finnegans Wake a few pages earlier:

We can’t do without them. Wives, rush to the restgowns! Ofman will toman while led is the lol. Zessid’s our kadem, villapleach, vollapluck. Fikup, for flesh Nellij, el mundo nov, ole flen! If she’s a lilyth, pull early! Pauline, allow! And malers abushed, keep black, keep black! (RFW 027.33-36)

Joyce’s source for these words was Otto Jespersen’s brief description of the language in An International Language:

the stem [of Volapük words] itself must always begin and end with a consonant. Accordingly Academy becomes kadem. R is avoided: fire is fil, and red led. As s is the sign of the plural, no word may end in s: rose is made into lol. As ne is the negative, such a word as necessity is clipped of its initial syllable, and becomes zesüd. Not even proper names get off scot-free: Italy is Täl and England Nelij (j is pronounced sh). Europe is Yulop, and the other continents ... are made into Melop [America], Silop [Asia], Fikop [Africa] and Talop [Australia] respectively. (Jespersen 34)

In the present paragraph, we have the following:

ek some
nek none
evelo ever
nevelo never

None of these, however, are in Jespersen’s book. What was Joyce’s source for them?

Johann Martin Schleyer

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

---

References

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)
Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York (1944)
Arthur Chervin, Bégaiement et autres maladies fonctionnelles de la parole, Société d’Éditions Scientifiques, Paris (1902)
Arthur Chervin, Stammering and Its Treatment, Translated from Du bégaiement et de son traitement (Paris 1879), Institution des Bègues de Paris, Paris (1880)
Daniel Ferrer, VI.B.17: A Reconstruction and Some Sources, Genetic Joyce Studies, Issue 15, Centre for Manuscript Genetics, University of Antwerp (2015)
Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake, University of California Press, Berkeley, California (1977)
John Gordon, Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York (1986)
David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1963)
Michael J Hurley, Baldoyle as a Racecourse Village, Dublin Historical Record, Volume 59, Number 1, Pages 65-80, Old Dublin Society, Dublin (2006)
Otto Jespersen, An International Language, Allen & Unwin, London (1928)
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)

Image Credits

Baldoyle Racecourse: Anonymous Photograph (1956), Thomas Cosgrave (source), Fair Use
Joe Widger: Anonymous Photograph, John Griffiths (source), Public Domain
St Doulagh’s Church: Karora (photographer), Public Domain
Johann Martin Schleyer: Theodor Mayerhofer (lithographer), Sigmund Spielmann, Volapük-Almanach für 1888, Eduard Heinrich Mayer, Leipzig (1888), Public Domain

Finnegans Wake - A Prescriptive Guide

21 September 2022