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| Wheels Within Wheels |
In James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake, Book I, Chapters 2-4 were originally conceived as a self-contained unit, recounting in a mock-heroic style the story of HCE’s rise and fall. For this reason, this triad of chapters is sometimes referred to as the Humphriad (RFW 043.05).
Being the earliest part of the book to be drafted, these are unsurprisingly the most transparent chapters in Finnegans Wake. As Joyce worked his way into the book, he became increasingly adept at creating that dark speech for which Finnegans Wake is now notorious. Initially, however, his first drafts were written in a much simpler language, one that was almost indistinguishable from the wide-awake English with which we are all familiar. Only subsequently were these initial drafts transformed into something much more obscure. Joyce, as it were, put the language to sleep.
As a general rule, the first draft of a passage is the most comprehensible. Every time Joyce reworked an early draft, he not only expanded it, he also made it darker and more opaque. The earliest chapters were quite transparent to begin with, and the final, published versions are only a little less transparent. The first drafts of the book’s later chapters, however, are already quite obscure, and when Joyce reworked them, he made them almost impenetrable.
This is particularly true of the four chapters that comprise Book II. These were among the last chapters of Finnegans Wake to be drafted and they are widely acknowledged to be the most difficult. Scholars have surmised that Joyce had particular reasons for making this book more obscure than the other three, but I think the simple answer is that when he finally got around to drafting these chapters, he had had so much practice in framing the idiosyncratic speech of the Wake that he no longer needed to “translate” a plain text into Wakean. He could create—out of thin air, as it were—an initial draft that was already quite incomprehensible to the first-time reader. And subsequent drafts would veil his meaning with further layers of impenetrabilia.
It is no surprise, then, that the three chapters which make up the Humphriad are among the easiest to read and understand—and by extension, the most enjoyable. They are also among the shortest chapters in the book. Together they span fifty-nine pages of The Restored Finnegans Wake, making an average of fewer than twenty pages each. The fourteen remaining chapters of the book average about thirty-one pages each. The entire Humphriad, therefore, can even be read in a single sitting. And first-time readers have a real chance of understanding much of what they read. This is especially true of Chapter 2, which is the least opaque of the three:
The odd thing about this simple story is that it is almost simple enough for the simplest reader. Chapter II is one of the first that Joyce wrote. Maybe he did not have time, going over it, to complicate it according to his habit. (Tindall 56-57)
I sometimes wish that all of Finnegans Wake were as transparent and easy to read as this chapter. If that were the case, the book would undoubtedly be more popular and more frequently read than it can ever hope to be. But perhaps it would no longer be Finnegans Wake.
Vico Again
From Giambattista Vico Joyce learnt that there is nothing new under the sun. Generation follows generation, knitting history together in an endless round. Children are doomed to repeat the original sins of their parents:
Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be. (RFW 169.06-07)
In his System of Logic, John Stuart Mill captures the essence of Vico’s thesis quite well:
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| John Stuart Mill |
It is one of the characters, not absolutely peculiar to the sciences of human nature and society, but belonging to them in a peculiar degree, to be conversant with a subject-matter whose properties are changeable. I do not mean changeable from day to day, but from age to age; so that not only the qualities of individuals vary, but those of the majority are not the same in one age as in another.
The principal cause of this peculiarity is the extensive and constant reaction of the effects upon their causes. The circumstances in which mankind are placed, operating according to their own laws and to the laws of human nature, form the characters of the human beings; but the human beings, in their turn, mould and shape the circumstances for themselves and for those who come after them. From this reciprocal action there must necessarily result either a cycle or a progress. In astronomy also, every fact is at once effect and cause; the successive positions of the various heavenly bodies produce changes both in the direction and in the intensity of the forces by which those positions are determined. But in the case of the solar system, these mutual actions bring around again, after a certain number of changes, the former state of circumstances; which, of course, leads to the perpetual recurrence of the same series in an unvarying order. Those bodies, in short, revolve in orbits: but there are (or, conformably to the laws of astronomy, there might be) others which, instead of an orbit, describe a trajectory—a course not returning into itself. One or other of these must be the type to which human affairs must conform.
One of the thinkers who earliest conceived the succession of historical events as subject to fixed laws, and endeavored to discover these laws by an analytical survey of history, Vico, the celebrated author of the Scienza Nuova, adopted the former of these opinions. He conceived the phenomena of human society as revolving in an orbit; as going through periodically the same series of changes. Though there were not wanting circumstances tending to give some plausibility to this view, it would not bear a close scrutiny: and those who have succeeded Vico in this kind of speculations have universally adopted the idea of a trajectory or progress, in lieu of an orbit or cycle. (Mill 506-507)
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| Giambattista Vico |
Joyce is unlikely to have read Mill’s System of Logic, though Finnegans Wake does contain allusions to The Subjugation of Women and On Liberty (Atherton 267). Joyce was happy to use Vico as his literary crutch just as he had leant on Homer when writing Ulysses, but like Mill he recognized that Vico’s views did not bear close scrutiny:
I do not know if Vico has been translated. I would not pay overmuch attention to these theories, beyond using them for all they are worth, but they have gradually forced themselves on me through circumstances of my own life. (Letters I, 21 May 1926)
Joyce’s use of Vico’s cyclical philosophy of history informs Finnegans Wake on many levels. The impact on the book’s structure is particularly significant: Finnegans Wake is a fractal work.
In mathematics, a fractal is a self-similar geometric figure. That is to say, it is structurally identical on all levels. It looks the same whether you examine it through a microscope or a telescope. The overall Viconian architecture of Finnegans Wake is repeated on a smaller scale in the structure of each of the four books, and on an even smaller scale in the structure of each of the seventeen chapters. The same Viconian pattern is repeated on individual pages, in individual paragraphs, and even in individual sentences. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce tells us the same story over and over again: the history of the world is the story of the family writ large.
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| The Barnsley Fern, A Fractal Design |
The Humphriad is an excellent example of this fractal structure. Taken as a whole, it can be analysed as one great Viconian cycle, encapsulating all of Finnegans Wake in its fifty-nine pages. But there are wheels within wheels. Embedded within the Humphriad there are smaller Viconian cycles, and within these even smaller ones. The events which are narrated in the opening few pages of I.2 are recycled over and over again throughout the remainder of the Humphriad—and, to a large extent, throughout the remainder of Finnegans Wake.
Wheels Within Wheels
The Humphriad can be characterized in just a few short sentences:
Chapters 2-4, the first part of the Wake to be drafted, make up a self-contained narrative unit that presents the nature and history of the book’s hero, HCE. It served as the beginning of the Wake until 1926, when Joyce drafted what would become chapter 1. Joyce’s composition of the unit began in August 1923 with the drafting and revising of the “vignette” usually called “Here Comes Everybody,” which was to take its place as the first section of chapter 2 [RFW 024.01–027.32]. Then in the fall and winter of 1923-24 he drafted the rest of chapter 2 and chapters 3 and 4, though the separation into the final chapter units only came later, to meet the requirements of serial publication. The vignette introduces HCE and gives his early history, and the rest describes a series of attacks on HCE both physical and verbal, in each of which he falls only to rise again. The final attack, in the first-draft version of chapter 4, is the courtroom trial involving Festy King, who ever more clearly throughout the revisions comes to seem ambiguously to be both HCE’s attacker and HCE himself. The trial ends in comical disarray with Festy’s acquittal, which is itself an instance of HCE’s resurrection. (Crispi & Slote 66)
The
identification of Festy King with both HCE and HCE’s attacker is
consistent with the Viconian pattern of history. The Oedipal Figure
who confronts HCE and precipitates his fall in one Viconian cycle,
takes his place and becomes the HCE of a new Viconian cycle, only to
be confronted in his turn by a new Oedipal Figure.
And so on ad
infinitum et ad nauseam. (Note: Adaline Glasheen sees Festy King as one of Shem's roles (Glasheen 156).)
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| The Stirrup Cup |
The structure of the Humphriad is summarized in the following table. Like Ulysses, the Humphriad can be broken down into a succession of triads. Admittedly, this analysis is a little artificial in places. There is no compelling evidence that Joyce was consciously thinking in terms of threes. The Humphriad evolved more by happenstance than according to any preconceived plan. Nevertheless, it is a useful fiction:
In musical terms, the Humphriad, is essentially a set of variations on the cyclical theme of HCE’s rise, fall and resurrection. Each variation is underpinned by the same ground bass:
A guilt-ridden and socially discredited HCE encounters a younger Oedipal Figure.
The Oedipal Figure displaces HCE, becoming in turn the new HCE.
The new HCE initially rises in the world on the coat-tails of his triumphal encounter with the old HCE.
The new HCE is led—through hubris?—to commit an original sin of an ambiguously sexual nature.
This precipitates the new HCE’s fall from grace in the eyes of the public, and burdens him with remorse.
A guilty and socially discredited HCE encounters a younger Oedipal Figure ...
I believe that when HCE has his Oedipal encounter, he is already damaged goods in the eyes of the community. He has already committed his original sin, and it is because he is now guilt-ridden that he is vulnerable to attack. The Oedipal Figure, then, is like a fresh new HCE: one who is initially cleansed of sin and in a state of grace. Consequently, this new HCE rises in the world. But like the Oedipus of ancient myth, his change of fortune only tempts him to sin. This causes him to fall from grace in the eyes of the people and to be overcome with his own sense of guilt. And while he is in this state of original sin, he is dispatched by a younger Oedipal Figure. And so the Viconian cycle continues.
In the initial Oedipal event—Humphrey Chimpden’s roadside encounter with the King (RFW 024.10-025.21)—Joyce does not make it clear whether Humphrey is already guilt-ridden or not. We are told that he comes running from a garden in prefall paradise, which suggests that he has not yet committed his original sin. But we are also told that he was following his plough for rootles—ie earning his food by the sweat of his brow (Genesis 3:19), which suggests that he has already fallen from grace. The latter is more consilient with HCE’s subsequent encounters.
The narrative of the Humphriad I is linear and quite easy to follow. In Parts II and III, however, it is repeatedly interrupted by digressions and interludes, which makes it more difficult to follow the thread of the story. In Part I the focus is on space. Part II can be seen as the evolution of HCE’s history through time. Perhaps in Part III, where HCE is dead and buried, we transcend space and time and enter the infinite.
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| RFW 059.13-28 (Clinton Cahill) |
References
James S Atherton, The Books at the Wake: A Study of the Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, The Viking Press, New York (1960)
Luca Crispi & Sam Slote (editors), How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin (2007)
Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake, University of California Press, Berkeley, California (1977)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939, 1949)
James Joyce, Stuart Gilbert (editor) & Richard Ellmann (editor), The Letters of James Joyce, Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Viking Press, New York (1957, 1966)
James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
John Stuart Mill, System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, Volume 2, Longman’s, Green, and Co, London (1865)
Danis Rose, The Textual Diaries of James Joyce, The Lilliput Press, Dublin (1995)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York (1969)
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
Wheels Within Wheels: © Stephen Crowe (artist), Fair Use
John Stuart Mill: London Stereoscopic Company (photographers), Samuel Saenger, John Stuart Mill: Sein Leben und Lebenswerk, Fr Frommanns Verlag, Stuttgart (1901), Public Domain
Giambattista Vico: Francesco Jerace (sculptor), Castel Nuova, Naples, Marie-Lan Nguyen (photographer), Public Domain
The Barnsley Fern (A Fractal Design): © Laug, Creative Commons License
The Stirrup Cup: Heywood Hardy (artist), Private Collection, Public Domain
RFW 059.13-28 (Chris Cahill): © Clinton Cahill (artist), The James Joyce Centre, Fair Use
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