Jauntyjogging on an Irish Visavis

Jauntyjogging on an Irish Visavis (RFW 043.03-043.27)

In the last paragraph we were told how the Cad conjured up for his audience—the triad of precoxious scaremakers—the scene of his encounter with HCE in the Phoenix Park. The next paragraph of Chapter I.3 (Humphriad II) of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake describes how the story became so well known that in afteryears it was repeated to visitors, the narrator pointing out the places featured in the tale: the oak trees, the Wellington Memorial, the fallow deer, the speckled church, etc.

This retelling of the tale was prophesied on the opening page of the book:

The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonn-thunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. (RFW 003.14-17)

First-Draft Version

In the first draft, this paragraph did not exist as such. It grew out of a handful of lines in a short paragraph that was subsequently split up, some of its lines being tagged onto the end of the previous paragraph (Television kills telephony ...) and the remainder becoming the seeds which germinated to give the present paragraph:

In words a bit duskish, he aptly described the scene, the monolith rising stark from the twilight pinebarren, the bellwether, the fallow doe belling softly her approach and how brightly outed his wallet and gives him a topping cheroot and says he was to suck that one and spend a half hour in Havana. (Hayman 70)

It is clear that originally this was to form part of the account of his meeting with HCE in the Phoenix Park which the Cad narrates to the three boys. Only later did Joyce decide to skip over the Cad’s actual narration, and instead describe the same story being recounted many years later by a jarvey to a couple of curious tourists in a jaunting car. Not surprisingly, the tale has altered in the telling. What had previously been a belligerent clash, as though between two gunslingers or duellists, is now a friendly encounter between two sociable citizens. HCE condescends to offer the Cad a cigar, who takes it subserviently, and, meeting HCE some time later on Lawrence O’Toole Street, bids him good morrow, bestowing upon him the blessings of God, Mary, St Brigid and St Patrick, and addressing him as Your Lordship.

An Irish Jaunting Car

Despite the alterations, however, many of the elements that were present in previous tellings of the encounter are rehearsed once again in this version. But note how this friendly encounter in the Phoenix Park is now followed by another in the street—Which is still another version of the event (Campbell & Robinson 67). The only significant thing missing from this paragraph is any trace of the journalism motif which runs through most of this chapter. Instead, this paragraph is replete with pairs of opposites—the verbal equivalent, if you like, of the Oedipal Encounter.

• jauntyjogging ... Irish visavis A jaunting car is an Irish form of the sprung cart, a light, horse-drawn, two-wheeled open vehicle, with seats placed lengthwise, so that the passengers ride either back to back (outside jaunting car) or face to face (inside jaunting car). It was a popular mode of transport in the 19th century. A vis-à-vis (French for face-to-face) is a carriage in which the passengers sit facing one another. This name, however, generally refers to a carriage in which the passengers sit facing the front and back of the carriage. Joyce’s Irish visavis, on the other hand, refers to an inside jaunting car, in which the passengers sit sideways. Note, however, the phrase shoulder to shoulder, which implies that the two passengers in the car are actually sitting side-by-side, as in the photo above. The phrase steadily shoulder to shoulder comes from the song The Old Brigade, which was composed in 1881 by the Irishman Edward Slater and set to words by the English lyricist Frederic Weatherley (the author of Danny Boy). Thanks to a recording by Peter Dawson, the song was popularized in 1926, around the time Joyce was preparing this passage for publication in transition (Issue 3, June 1927), but it appears that he only added this phrase when he revised the chapter in the early 1930s (James Joyce Digital Archive).

A Vis-à-Vis Carriage

• jaunty ... Irish ... car The Irish Jaunting Car is a popular song by the multi-talented popular entertainer of the 19th century Valentine Vousden, who was born on Moore Street, Dublin, in 1821. He wrote the song in the 1850s, shortly after Queen Victoria visited Ireland and, allegedly, rode in a jaunting car.

• Jehu ... Christianier ... saint to sage ... that fall and rise In II Kings 9:20, Jehu King of Israel is said to be a furious driver: the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously. Whence a jehu or Jehu is a fast or furious driver, or, simply—as here—any driver or coachman (OED). Note the Oedipal pairs of opposites: Jew and Christian, saint and sage (Ireland is traditionally the Land of Saints and Sages), rise and fall. Christiania, the old name for Oslo, takes up the Norse allusions of the previous paragraph (Kristansen ... tingmount).

• daisy winks at her pinker sister among the tussocks Chapter III.1 ends with the words: may the tussocks grow quickly under your trampthickets and the daisies trip lightly over your battercops. This is obviously a reference to the two girls in the foliage that HCE peeps on (ie his schizophrenic daughter Issy). Jorn Barger interprets pinker sister among the tussocks as a reference to Issy’s vagina Does daisy, then, refer to Issy’s anus? This makes sense, coming immediately after the ithyphallic reference to Humphrey’s fall and rise (ie detumescence and tumescence).

• copoll between the shafts Irish: capall, horse. This word also anticipates couple in the same line, though Irish jaunting cars are usually pulled by a single horse.

• And as your who may look like how on the owther side of his big belt The reference is to HCE personified by the Hill of Howth. A how is a small hill. After the reference to HCE’s phallus two lines above, we now move north of his belt (waist) to his fat paunch, which resembles a hill. In the first edition (1939), there was no space between belt try. The Great Belt is a strait in Denmark. In one of his notebooks, Joyce wrote: w & n at both / sides of the bigbelt (VI.B.46:42(f)). What does this mean? To the east of the Great Belt lies the Øresund. Although the Danish øre here refers to a gravelbank, it is also the Danish for ear, echoing the ear we hear in Christianier.

The Great Belt, Denmark

• try your tyrs and cloes your noes dry your tears and close your nose. Týr is the Norse god of war, whose name survives in Tuesday (Latin: Dies Martis, Mars’ Day). The spelling suggests an allusion to the philosophical and psychological term noesis: the sum total of the mental processes of a rational animal : cognition : the exercise of reason.

• paradigm maymay rererise in eren paradise may re-arise in Erin|Eden. The allusion to John Milton’s Paradise Regained complements that to Paradise Lost in the last paragraph: in an hour not for him solely evil (RFW 042.30) Note the presence of HCE’s guilty stutter. John Gordon suggests a possible allusion to Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, in which the birth of Christ, the Prince of Peace, takes place fittingly during the Pax Romana of the Augustan Era. This is confirmed by the words The augustan peacebetothem in line 10:

No war or battle’s sound

Was heard the world around;

The idle spear and shield were high uphung;

The hooked chariot stood

Unstain’d with hostile blood;

The trumpet spake not to the armed throng;

And kings sate still with awful eye,

As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.

• Follow we up his whip vindicative Follow Me Up to Carlow is an Irish folk song from the 16th-century. It commemorates the Battle of Glenmalure (1580) during the Second Desmond Rebellion, in which the native Irish defeated the invading English. In Finnegans Wake, the Oedipal Encounter is often depicted as a confrontation between a foreign invader and a native Irishman, though it is usually the native islander who comes off worst. The jarvey of the jaunting car is using his horse-whip to point out (indicate) various features of the landscape mentioned in the celebrated story of HCE and his encounter with the Cad with a Pipe. At a decisive moment during the original encounter, HCE pointed towards the Wellington Memorial (RFW 029.05-06).

Follow Me Up to Carlow

• Thurston’s! Continuing the Norse elements (Thor), this may also refer to Philly Thurnston, the layteacher to whom the Sodality Director blabbed about HCE and the Cad at Baldoyle Racecourse. But why? The name echoes Tristan, the Oedipal Figure. In one of his notebooks, Joyce wrote: Thurston (menhir) (VI.B.42: 32d). A menhir is a standing stone. Immediately before this, note 32c reads: Thor Thurstan Thornburn. Raphael Slepon of FWEET identifies Charlotte Yonge’s History of Christian Names as the source:

Thor had his ... bear, Thorbjorn ... doubtless the father of the family of Thorburn ... though Thor names are very rare in Anglo-Saxon history, we have many among our surnames, such as ... Tunstall and Tunstan from Thurstan, the Danish Thorstein, the proper form of Thor’s stone. (Yonge 301-302)

• La arboro, lo petrusu ... oaks, the monolith Latin: arbor, tree : petra, stone. This repeats the Tree|Stone Motif, where Tree = Shem (stem) and Stone = Shaun, while TreeStone (Tristan) = the Oedipal Figure who embodies both brothers. Note, though, that ALP’s initials are also present. There are many oak trees in the Phoenix Park. The monolith is, of course, the Wellington Memorial. Note also the Fair|Dark Motif in stark [dark] ... moonlit.

• fortitudinous ajaxious rowdinoisy tenuacity Latin: Fortitudo Eius Rhodum Tenuit, His Strength Held Rhodes. Often abbreviated to FERT, this is the motto of the House of Savoy. It pops up about nine times in Finnegans Wake, though Joyce generally replaces Rhodum with Rhodanum (the River Rhône). I have no idea what attracted Joyce to this motif. Perhaps the Latin: fert, he bears, implying a guilty burden? Does the sleeping landlord of the Mullingar House fart every time this motto is referenced? On this occasion, Joyce’s version of it forms the acrostic fart.

• the angelus hour with ditchers bent upon their farm usetensiles John Gordon suggests that this image was taken from Jean-François Millet’s painting The Angelus. The painting was one of the most widely reproduced religious painting in the 19th century. During Joyce’s lifetime, it was on display in the Louvre Museum. Its presence here harks back to HCE’s encounter with the Cad, which was interrupted by the ringing of the Angelus by the bellmaster Fox Goodman in the speckled church, wherever that is:

The Angelus

• fallow deers Several herds of wild fallow deer are still to be found in the Phoenix Park.

• (doerehmoose genuane!) ... (letate!) Instructions to the congregation during Good Friday Mass. Latin: oremus, let us pray : flectamus genua let us kneel : levate, rise. This the Fall|Rise Motif again. The musical element—do re mi—may be due to to the ringing of the Angelus. English: doe, female deer, German: Reh, roe deer, and moose are all members of the deer family. Note how genuine is contrasted with imitation two lines below—another Oedipal pair.

• the great tribune Daniel O’Connell, to whom HCE has been compared, was frequently described as the great tribune. However, Isaac Butt is referred to as the great Tribune in James Collins’ Life in Old Dublin, which is one of Joyce’s sources for this paragraph (see below). In 1877 Isaac Butt was ousted as President of the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain by Parnell—a version of the Oedipal Event that is alluded to on the very opening page of Finnegans Wake (a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac).

Fallow Deer in the Phoenix Park

• by Joshua HCE takes out his imitation sharkskin wallet and removes a cigar. But why is the gesture qualified by this Biblical interjection? According to Rose & O’Hanlon, it is linked to the famous passage in the Book of Joshua in which Joshua commands the Sun to stand still in the sky during his battle against the five kings of the Amorites. The source, however, was not the Bible but an article in The Irish Times:

SUMMER TIME. SOME OBJECTIONS TO THE MEASURE.

… Speaking of the objections to the proposal, on the ground that it was an interference with Divine Providence, and was contrary to the rule laid down in the Book of Joshua, Sir Kingsley Wood disclaimed any idea of standing as a presumptuous Joshua. It was far removed from his intention to say: “Sun, stand thou still upon Gideon, and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.” He did not propose to tamper with the dispensations of Providence, or with the movement of the heavenly bodies. (The Irish Times 12 April 1924)

Joyce simply noted: Joshua’s summertime (FW VI.B.16:35i). In my interpretation of Finnegans Wake, the novel begins—on the Nocturnal or First Plane of Narrative— at 11:32 pm on the night of 12 April 1924. Summertime officially began in the wee hours of the following morning (the Ides of April). If this is correct, it is only to be expected, then, than Joyce would have consulted the newspapers for that day.

As a backbencher during the Conservative Government of Andrew Bonar Law, Kingsley Wood successfully negotiated through Parliament the Summer Time Bill of 1924, which provided for a permanent annual summer time period of six months from the first Sunday in April to the first Sunday in October. In Ireland, summer time was provided for on a one-off basis by separate acts in 1923 and 1924, but in 1925 the Irish government followed the British example and passed a permanent Summer Time Act.

Summer Time 1924 (RFW 022.11-12)

• he tips uns a topping swank cheroot A cheroot is a cigar with both ends clipped. In the Cyclops episode of Ulysses, Bloom too was presented with a cigar. The Freudian symbolism of the cigar is too well known to require further comment. German: uns, us, has been emended from the first edition’s un. In his poem, Mandalay, Rudyard Kipling (kippers) mentions a whackin’ white cheroot.

• pluk to pluk and lekan for lukan cheek to cheek. Irish: pluc, cheek : leiceann, cheek. Lecan Castle in County Sligo was once the seat of MacFhirbhisigh, a family of hereditary historians who compiled two great manuscripts in the Middle Ages: The Great Book of Lecan and the Yellow Book of Lecan. But I don’t understand its relevance here. Lucan, a village on the Liffey a few kilometres upstream from Chapelizod, is often paired with the latter, but why it is here paired with Lecan I cannot say.

• suck that brown boyo, my son The homosexual overtones, carried over from the original encounter in the Park, are obvious. The vocative my son echoes Caesar’s assassination by Brutus. According to Suetonius, Caesar’s dying words were the Greek: Καὶ σύ, τέκνον [Kai su, teknon], And you, my son, adding an Oedipal context to the assassination. Plutarch tells us that Caesar suspected he was Brutus’s father, though he was only 15 when Brutus was born.

A Cigar Factory in Havana

• Havana The capital of Cuba is famous for its cigars, but it was once just as infamous for its homosexual prostitution.

Another Roadside Encounter

The last eight lines of this paragraph seem to describe yet another version of the encounter between HCE and the Cad with a Pipe. This one takes place on a public street in the city—HCE’s original Oedipal Encounter was a roadside meeting with a king. The Cad is now portrayed as subservient, while HCE clearly belongs to a higher social stratum. He is even referred to as Master. This casts the Cad in the rôle of Sackerson (S), HCE’s Manservant:

Sorer of the kreeksmen, would not thore be old high gothsprogue? Wherefore he met Master, he mean to say, he do, sire, bester of redpublicans, at Eagle Cock Hostel on Lorenzo Tooley Street and how he wished his Honour the bannocks of Gort and Morya and Bri Head and Puddyrick, yore Loudship, and a starchbox sitting in the pit of his St Tomach’s—a strange wish for you, my friend, and it would poleaxe your sonson’s grandson utterly though your own old sweatandswear floruerunts heaved it hoch many as the times when they were turrified be the hitz. (RFW 043.19-27)

• Sorer of the kreeksmen, would not thore be old high gothsprogue! This sentence continues the Norse character of this paragraph. Latin: soror, sister : Danish: krigsmænd, warriors : Thor Norse God of Thunder : sprog, language. Old High German and Gothic are extinct Germanic languages. Creeksman is a literal translation of the Old Norse word from which Viking is derived. The Latin, to my mind, is anomalous in the Norse context. Could sorer be Danish: Søren, Severin, a Scandinavian name? HCE’s Manservant Sackerson is often given Scandinavian names. In Danish, Søren is also used as a euphemism for Satan (dodging the curse). HCE’s Manservant is also identified with the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. Finally, in the tale How Kersse the Tailor Made a Suit of Clothes for the Norwegian Captain (yet another version of the Oedipal Encounter), HCE himself is a Norseman.

Louis Philippe

• bester of redpublicans The tavernkeeper HCE is described as the best of publicans. But this compliment is undercut by the Slang: bester, swindler and Danish: bedste, grandfather. Joyce’s note, Sire, best of republics (VI.B.46:52j) refers to a passage in Édouard Trogan’s Les Mots Historiques du Pays de France, which was also used as a source in the preceding paragraph:

Vous êtes la meilleure des Républiques.

[You are the best of Republics: Said, allegedly, by Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette to King Louis Philippe after the July Revolution of 1830.] (Trogan 75)

According to McHugh, it was the actually poet Alphonse de Lamartine who said it. Altering republicans to redpublicans again undermines the royal compliment, recasting HCE as a red (ie a socialist).

• Eagle Cock Hostel ECH. In the original encounter in the Phoenix Park, HCE’s initials were encoded in several phrases. There is no Eagle Cock Hostel in Dublin, but there was once an Eagle Tavern:

After amalgamation, the Corporation of Cooks and Vintners assembled at their Hall in the Eagle Tavern, Eustace Street. (Collins 108)

Site of the Eagle Tavern, Eustace Street

The Dublin branch of the [Society of United Irishmen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_United_Irishmen) was founded at the Eagle Tavern in 1791 (the original Belfast branch had also been founded in a tavern). It was, in fact, very popular with many clubs and associations, from the Hell-Fire Club to the Whigs of the Capital.

In his History of the City of Dublin, John Thomas Gilbert mentions The Cock and Punch-Bowl of Cork Hill and the Eagle Tavern of Eustace Street in the same sentence (Gilbert 14). Could this be the source of Joyce’s note: eagle & cock (VI.B.46:52t)? The initials, ECH, however, suggest that the Eagle Cock Tavern is HCE’s pub, the Mullingar House, in Chapelizod.

• Lorenzo Tooley Street Laurence O’Toole is the Patron Saint of Dublin. He was the city’s Archbishop in the 12th century, and was born, according to some sources, in 1132—a symbolic number in Finnegans Wake. There is no Laurence O’Toole Street in Dublin, but there is a St Laurence Road in Chapelizod. It is on the opposite bank of the River Liffey to the Mullingar House. Joyce’s note Tooley S. Olaf (VI.B.9:125b) refers to a passage in Ernest Weekley’s The Romance of Names:

When a name compounded with Saint begins with a vowel, we get such forms as Tedman, St. Edmund, Tobin, St. Aubyn, Toosey, St. Osith, Toomer, St. Omer, Tooley, St. Olave; cf. Tooley St. for St. Olave St. and tawdry from St. Audrey. When the saint’s name begins with a consonant, we get, instead of aphesis, a telescoped pronunciation, e.g. Selinger, St. Leger, Seymour, St. Maur, Sinclair, St. Clair, Semark, St. Mark, Semple, St. Paul, Simper, St. Pierre, Sidney, probably for St. Denis, with which we may compare the educated pronunciation of St. John. These names are all of local origin, from chapelries in Normandy or England (Weekley 34)

There is no St Olave Street in Dublin, but there was once a Saint Olaf’s Church, named for the King of Norway Olaf II. It was located on the right bank of the Liffey at the bottom of Fishamble Street.

Bannock Bread

• the bannocks of Gort and Morya and Bri Head and Puddyrick Irish: Beannacht Dé agus Mhuire agus Brighid agus Phádraic, The Blessing of God, Mary, Bridget and Patrick. It is possible that the four Provinces of Ireland are also represented here by four mountains. Following FWEET, we have:

• Dart Mountain County Tyrone, Ulster

• Croaghanmoira County Wicklow, Leinster

• Bray Head Valentia Island, County Kerry, Munster

• Croagh Patrick (“The Reek”) County Mayo, Connacht

However, a note by Joyce reads Gort, County Galway (VI.B.9:30g), which spoils this neat symmetry. Identifying Gort with Dart Mountain is a bit of a stretch : McHugh identifies it with the town in Connacht. Following McHugh, we have:

• Gort Connacht

• Morya Ulster

• Bray Head Leinster or Munster

Morya is obviously Moira, the town in County Down. There are two Bray Heads in Ireland : but this leaves Puddyrick unaccounted for. If Bray Head represents Leinster (where the more famous Bray Head is located), then Puddyrick must stand for Munster. Could Puddyrick be an echo of MacGillycuddy’s Reeks, the famous mountain range in County Kerry?

RFW 043.22-23

• yore Loudship Whenever the four Provinces of Ireland—representing the Four Old Men—are present, we should always look out for Johnny MacDougal’s donkey. Is this him? It would explain, at least, why Lordship is thus altered. A donkey’s bray (Bray Head?) is notoriously loud. An earlier draft had year loudship, which might allude to the phrase donkey’s years. The final version pushes these events into the remote past—donkey’s years ago.

• bannocks Bannock is an unleavened flatbread made in a skillet with barley, wheat, or oatmeal. It probably originated in Scotland but was also popular in Ireland and northern England. Its presence here evokes the unleavened bread used as the Host in the Catholic Mass, which is taken up in the following lines.

Back in the Theatre

In the last chapter, another version of the Oedipal Encounter took place in the Gaiety Theatre, where HCE was described as a veritable Napoleon the nth and was satirized in a performance of A Royal Divorce. The following phrase revives this theatrical setting:

and a starchbox sitting in the pit of his St Tomach’s (RFW 043.23-24)

• starchbox A starch-box is a large wooden box for packing starch. It is similar to the traditional soapbox from which one might deliver an impromptu speech. Starch is used as a laundry stiffener—handy when washing HCE’s dirty linen in public—but it is also a complex carbohydrate found in bannocks and other breads, including the unleavened bread used to make communion wafers for the Catholic Mass.

A Starchbox

• sitting in the pit There is another borrowing here from Édouard Trogan’s Les Mots Historiques du Pays de France:

Malgré ses infirmités, Louis XVIII remplit jusqu’au bout les devoirs de sa charge. Le roi peut mourir, disait-il à M. de Villèle, son ministre, il ne doit pas être malade. Après sa mort, Charles X fît son entrée triomphale à Paris, et voulut qu’on laissât la foule approcher de lui. Point de hallebardes, dit-il. C’est lui qui, refusant de faire intervenir l’autorité royale dans une question dramatique, déclara: Au théâtre je n’ai que ma place au parterre.

[Despite his infirmities, Louis XVIII fulfilled the duties of his office to the end. The king can die, he said to M. de Villèle, his minister, he must not be ill. After his death, Charles X made his triumphal entry into Paris, and wanted the crowd to be allowed to approach him. No halberds, he said. It was he who, refusing to involve royal authority in a dramatic question, declared: In the theater I only have my seat in the pit.] (Trogan 72)

The dramatic question was an attempt by conservatives to have Victor Hugo’s controversial new play Hernani banned. Ironically, it was during Hernani’s initial run at the Comédie-Française in Paris that Charles X was overthrown by the July Revolution.

Thomas Aquinas & Thomas à Becket

• in the pit of his St Tomach’s in the pit of his stomach, where one traditionally feels fear, nervousness, anxiety, etc. The last two words obviously rehash the passage from Weekley’s The Romance of Names that informed Tooley Street above. After the reference to Laurence O’Toole, this Thomas can only be his English contemporary Saint Thomas à Becket. These two are paired with each other at least ten times in the course of Finnegans Wake. There was once a Saint Thomas’s Church in Dublin dedicated to this saint. It no longer exists, but it gave its name to Thomas Street, where it stood. Alternatively, St Thomas Aquinas was notoriously fat. In Ulysses, Stephen calls him tunbelly.

A Strange Wish

The last three lines of this paragraph are quite opaque:

a strange wish for you, my friend, and it would poleaxe your sonson’s grandson utterly though your own old sweatandswear floruerunts heaved it hoch many as the times when they were turrified be the hitz. (RFW 043.24-27)

In an earlier draft of this paragraph, which will be quoted below, this passage occurs as a parenthetical comment on the blessing which the Cad bestows on HCE when he wishes him good day. I think it is best read as a comment addressed to the Cad, pointing out how strange it is for him to wish HCE the blessings of God, Mary, Bridget and Patrick. But who utters this comment? Is it the jarvey in the jaunting car?

A Poleaxe (Venice, 15th Century)

• poleaxe fell with a poleaxe, an implement comprising an ax and a hammer, which is used to slaughter cattle. It is also a species of polearm, a long medieval weapon with an ax, a hammer and a pike. The halberds mentioned in Follow Me Up to Carlow are polearms. Gordon suggests please as an overtone, which inverts the meaning. McHugh suggests perplex.

• sonson’s grandson great-grandson. Swedish: sonson, son of a son.

• your own old sweatandswear floruerunts your own Scandinavian ancestors. I think Sweden is one of the components of sweatandswear. Joyce originally wrote sweating, which is even closer. Latin: floruerunt, they flourished.

• heaved it hoch many as the times raised it high many a time. German: hoch, high. Primarily, the phrase is referring to the Cad raising his hat in deference to HCE. The sense seems to be: Your descendants would be ashamed to have for an ancestor such a subservient person as you, even though your own ancestors were just as subservient. However, in the neighbourhood of bannocks and starch there may also be a reference to the priest raising the Host (ie the communion wafer) during the Catholic Mass. Perhaps, then, the phrase also means: Your Protestant descendants would be ashamed to have a Mass-going Roman Catholic like you for an ancestor, even though your own ancestors were Mass-going Roman Catholics. FWEET suggests the presence of both the Scots: Hogmanay, New Year’s Eve (and its bibulous celebration, which perhaps anticipates the toast and three cheers in the following paragraph), and the German: Hochzeit, wedding (literally high-time).

• many as the times when they were turrified be the hitz many is the times when they were terrified by the heat. Latin: turris, tower. German: Hitze, heat. I understand the sense of someone taking off their hat on account of the heat, but why should they terrified? Has it something to do with the fires of Hell? And what is the significance of the tower? The Tower of Babel?

The Elevation of the Host

Emendations

According to Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Third Edition), the concluding passage Wherefore he met Master ... turrified be the hitz was originally inserted between the words and & how in the passage: (letate!) and how brightly the great tribune ... old high gothsprogue, with an extra and tagged on at the end. This is one of the so-called transmissional variants, that is, items that appear to have been accidentally corrupted during the redrafting process which McHugh collated from Erik Bindervoet & Robbert-Jan Henkes’ Dutch translation (or Dutchification, as they call it) of Finnegans Wake (2002). Most of these transmissional variants were independently incorporated into the text of Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon’s The Restored Finnegans Wake (2010). But this is one case where Rose & O’Hanlon have left the text as it was when the first edition of Finnegans Wake was published in 1939—other than a few minor emendations, such as Street for street in line 22, or be the hitz for by the hitz in line 27.

An early draft of this version can be seen on the James Joyce Digital Archive:

among lesser items of passing interest, the monolith rising stark from the twilit pinebarren, the angelus hour with ditchers bent upon their farm implements, the soft bell of the fallow doe advertising her milky approach as the hour was late. How he met his honour on Lorenzo Tooley Street and he wished his honour the bannocks of Gort and Morya and Bri Head and Puddyrick, year loudship, — a strange wish for you, my friend, though your own old floruerunts heaved it oddtimes and it would poleaxe your sonsonsgrandnephew utterly — and how brightly the great tribune outed his smokewallet from his frock and he gives him a topping swank cheroot, none of yere swellish soide, and he says he was to just bluggy well suck that brown boyo, my son, and spend a whole half hour in Havana. (MS British Library 47472 146-156, edited)

In this version, HCE gives the cigar to the Cad on Lorenzo Tooley Street. In the published version, this occurs in the Phoenix Park during the original encounter. But it is pointless to try and sort out the precise order of events. The whole point of this passage is that history, in the retelling, is constantly changing, as each narrator adds his own embellishments to the original story—whatever that might have been—making it ultimately impossible to recover the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

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

Television Kills Telephony in Brothers’ Broil

Brothers’ Broil (RFW 042.21-043.02)

Chapter I.3, the Humphriad II, of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is an investigation into the Earwicker affair—the rise and subsequent fall of HCE. Its style and structure evoke the organs of the mainstream media that were popular in Joyce’s day: newspapers and newsreels. The opening two pages presented us with a series of obituaries, as though taken from the death notices of a newspaper. After these, attention turned to a character (the Cad, or HCE himself?) who was asked by three boys (Shem & Shaun, and the Oedipal Figure who embodies them) to recount his version of the encounter in the Phoenix Park between HCE and the Cad with a Pipe. In the present paragraph, the scene is being set for this narration.

The opening line of this paragraph is in keeping with this overarching theme. It reads like the headline of a newspaper article: Television kills telephony in brothers’ broil.

First-Draft Version

As David Hayman points out in a footnote in A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, the evolution of this section was complicated and is difficult to trace. Joyce was not only adding new material but constantly reshuffling and refashioning what he had already written. From the first draft all that truly belongs to this paragraph is the following fragment, which can still be discerned in the middle of the published version (RFW 42.12-16):

In words a bit duskish he aptly described the scene ... (Hayman 70)

Daniel O’Connell

If we include some of Joyce’s earliest elaborations and the end of the previous paragraph—and engage in a bit of creative editing—we arrive at something like the following:

He rose to his feet and told of the great mythical figure in the widewinged hat, the four-in-hand cravat and the gauntlet upon the hand which had struck down Destrelle.

In befitting words a bit duskish, flavoured with a smile, seeing that his thoughts consisted of the cheery, he aptly described the scene, among other things of passing interest ... (Hayman 70)

The final version is significantly different from this, but at least we can easily discern that the narrator is referring to the infamous encounter in the Phoenix Park between HCE and the Cad with a Pipe (RFW 027.39-029.33). But who is retelling the tale? Is it HCE or the Cad? The answer is: Probably both. The melding of two or more characters into one another is a common cause of confusion in Finnegans Wake, one we have had occasion to note on numerous previous occasions. Ultimately, it reflects the fact that the story Joyce is telling is cyclical: the Oedipal Figure who confronts HCE becomes the new HCE, while HCE becomes his servant (Sackerson, S). On some level, then, HCE and the Cad are one and the same.

As usual, Joyce also added a few parenthetical remarks—just four in this case.

Margot Norris

Brothers’ Broil

The encounter in the Phoenix Park between HCE and the Cad with a Pipe was a re-enactment of the Oedipal Event. But this retelling of that event is introduced as a brothers’ broil. This refers, of course, to the sibling rivalry between HCE’s sons, Shem & Shaun. What is going on here? Are we to infer that just as HCE and the Cad are reflections of one another, so the Oedipal Event and the Sibling Rivalry are essentially one and the same struggle?

I have only come across a single commentator who has considered this possible overlap. In the introduction to The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake: A Structuralist Analysis, Margot Norris writes (emphasis added):

Joyce’s reference to Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in Finnegans Wake (338.29 [RFW 261.17]) is supported by ample evidence that he read the book with care and applied the techniques of dream-work to the Wake. Virtually every one of the “typical dreams” described by Freud constitutes a major theme in Finnegans Wake. “Embarrassing Dreams of Being Naked,” which often find the subject naked before strangers, are reflected in the voyeurism of the three anonymous soldiers in the Phoenix Park incident. Freud points out that frequently the strangers in such dreams represent familiar persons: the Wake’s soldiers represent HCE’s sons, who view their father much as the sons of Noah viewed their father. Explaining dreams about the death of beloved persons, Freud discusses both sibling rivalry and the simultaneous incestuous and murderous feelings between parents and children. All of these taboos are at issue in the mysterious sin in Finnegans Wake. In fact, Freud reports a dream that contains a cluster of the elements found in the Phoenix Park incident. It shows “two boys struggling,” like the Wake’s enemy twins, with one of them fleeing for protection to a maternal woman, like ALP hiding the “lipoleums” under her skirt hoop to “sheltershock” (8.30 [RFW 007.24]) them. Freud interprets the woman as representing both an incestuous and a voyeuristic object for the boy. (Norris 6)

Sigmund Freud

Eyes and Ears

As we have seen, this chapter of Finnegans Wake is replete with journalistic devices. But another theme also runs through it: poor visibility, usually denoted by bad weather. Peering back into the mists of time and trying to separate fact from fiction is like trying to find one’s bearings in a dense fog. While writing Finnegans Wake, Joyce suffered from serious and chronic diseases of the eyes—iritis, glaucoma, and cataracts. He was in fact steadily going blind and was advised by various ophthalmologists on more than one occasion to stop working and rest his eyes (Ellmann 657-658, 663-664).

Television trumps the telephone. The Cad does not simply tell the three boys what happened: he sketches the scene (seene) for them, like a landscape painting or an embroidered tapestry (Arras). In perfect silence—one might hear a pin fall—he mimes and images (mimage) the event.

In Finnegans Wake, Shem, like Joyce, has a good ear but poor eyesight, while Shaun is the reverse. As one anonymous online commentator put it, this brothers’ broil is the civil war of the senses. The world of the eye and the world of the ear are very different. As Stephen mused in the Proteus episode of Ulysses:

Sandymount Strand

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. (Ulysses 37)

The ear analyzes the world in time, one thing after another—German: nacheinander, consecutively. The eye, however, takes in everything in a single Gestalt glance—German: nebeneinander, simultaneously. As a result, Shem understands the connections between things—cause and effect—and must explain them to Shaun, who inhabits a mosaic world of disconnected events. Underlying the eye|ear motif is the space|time motif (FWEET).

Wyndham Lewis (1929) and James Joyce (1926)

This conflict between television and telephony anticipates the Butt & Taff Episode in Chapter II.3, The Scene in the Public:

In the mid-1930s, when revising the sheets of transition in which episodes of Finnegans Wake had already been appearing, Joyce made an addition to the third chapter (I.3), in which television provides a gloss on the ‘ear/eye’ binary, a binary that operates throughout the book and is projected onto Shem versus Shaun, music versus painting and Joyce versus Lewis. The context for the revision is as follows:

Arthor of our doyne. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen! (Joyce 1927: 34)

Before the first assertive plea here for vision (after ‘Doyne’), Joyce inserted the following sentence: ‘Television kills telephony in brothers’ broil’ (47472–229 and 52.18). This resembles a newspaper headline, enforcing our eyes’ engagement; but at the same time its alliterative form calls on the attention of our ears. Joyce seems to be prophetically conjuring a somewhat typical domestic altercation in which one brother, watching television, wants the other, who is speaking on the phone, to shut up. Either one technology gains the upper hand over the other (the conversation is cut short and the phone put back on its receiver, so watching the TV show can continue), or, through metonymy, we actually have one brother killing the other. Alternatively, reading it literally and in the context of a history of media arts, visual culture destroys aural culture. If this is the case, then our own reading—which combines ear and eye—ironically qualifies this very news. In any case, the revision is preparing the ground for a stronger link between television and conflict, which will take place in II.3 [How Buckley Shot the Russian General] and is the centrepiece of our discussion. (Fordham 44-45)

Finn Fordham in Trieste

HCE’s Laundry List

In every retelling of the Oedipal Event, HCE is depicted wearing seven items of clothing. Sometimes these garments are also associated with the seven colours of the rainbow. In Finnegans Wake, seven is the number that symbolizes the Fall and Resurrection of Man:

• The First Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden is preceded by the Seven Days of Creation.

• The Second Fall of Man in the Flood is followed by the appearance of the rainbow, which ushers in the Post-Diluvian World.

• The Third Fall of Man was the Confusion of the Tongues at the Tower of Babel. According to many commentators, the inspiration for the Tower of Babel was Etemenanki [Chaldaean for House of the Foundation of Heaven on Earth] in Babylon, a ziggurat comprised of seven terraces.

Etemenanki

• latitudinous baver with puggaree behind a broad beaver with a puggaree at the back. A beaver is a hat made from the fur of the beaver. A puggaree, or puggree, is a strip of cloth wound around the upper portion of a hat or helmet—especially a pith helmet—and falling down behind to act as a shade for the back of the neck. John Gordon suggests that puggaree also alludes to pigtail, which explains the Chinese allusions in the following parenthesis—Kung the Tall was Confucius’ father (Gordon 52.24).

• his fourinhand bow A four-in-hand cravat is a type of long necktie tied in a loose slip-knot with dangling ends (ie a regular modern business tie). A four-in-hand bow is a type of short necktie tied in a bow-knot (ie a regular modern bow-tie).

• his elbaroom surtout A surtout—a man’s overcoat—with plenty of elbow room. Perhaps like the coat Napoleon wore on Elba. French: surtout: above all.

• the refaced unmansionables of gingerine hue Unmentionables is a polite name for undergarments. HCE’s are orange—or are they shit-stained?

• the vertebrated slate umbrella Not literally an item of clothing, but an indispensable accessory for a gentleman. Curiously, its colour—slate grey—is not one of the colours of the rainbow. The first edition reads the state slate umbrella. In one of his notebooks, VI.B.31.100a, Joyce wrote: state umbrella. Umbrellas have ribs—but vertebrae?

• his gruff woolselywellesly with the finndrinny knopfs his rough linsey-woolsey with gold-silver buttons. Linsey-woolsey is a fabric woven from a mixture of linen and wool, or a garment made of this fabric. Findrinny is a precious metallic alloy of uncertain nature. Joyce, however, believed it was an alloy of gold and silver:

>A 30-year wedding should be called a ‛findrinny’ one. Findrinny is a kind of white gold mixed with silver. (Letters I, 16 October 1934)

• Remember 022.23 ... 24: guldenselver ... Findrinny Fair?

• German: Knopf: button.

• and the gauntlet upon the hand A gauntlet is a glove, but to throw down the gauntlet is to issue a challenge to someone, or to challenge them to a duel—reminding us of the Oedipal aspect of the encounter in the Park.

Bishopscourt House

Daniel O’Connell and John Norcot D’Esterre

The following phrase alludes to an historical event:

the gauntlet upon the hand which in an hour not for him solely evil had struck down the mighthe mighthavebeen D’Esterre of whom his nation seemed almost already to be about to have need.

Daniel O’Connell, popularly known as The Liberator in recognition of his successful efforts in favour of Catholic Emancipation, was one of the most influential men in Ireland in the first half of the 19th century. A lawyer, a politician and an orator of extraordinary passion, O’Connell was a modern Pericles. In his day he was internationally recognized as one of the leading men of the age. In 1844, three years before his death, the French novelist Honoré de Balzac wrote to his future wife Ewelina Hańska:

En somme, voici le jeu que je joue, quatre hommes auront eu une vie immense : Napoléon, Cuvier, O’Connell, et je veux être le quatrième. Le premier a vécu de la vie de l’Europe ; il s’est inoculé des armes ! Le second a épousé le globe. Le troisième s’est incarné un peuple, moi, j’aurai porté une société toute entière dans ma tête.

[In short, here is the game that I play. Four men will have lived immense lives: Napoleon, Cuvier, O’Connell, and I want to be the fourth. The first lived the life of Europe; he inoculated himself with weapons! The second married the globe. The third embodied a people; as for me, I will have carried an entire society in my head.] (Balzac 374)

The Royal Exchange (City Hall, Dublin)

In his relentless campaign for Catholic Emancipation, O’Connell made many enemies. In 1815, this was to have tragic consequences for one man:

It is not surprising that his language at times exceeded the bounds of decorum. But it is difficult to understand how, except on the supposition that it had been determined by the Castle party to pick a quarrel with him, his application of such an epithet as ‛beggarly’ to the corporation of Dublin should have been construed by any member of it into a personal insult. But D’Esterre, one of the guild of merchants, regarded it in that light. After in vain trying to make O’Connell the challenger, D’Esterre sent him a message, which O’Connell accepted. On Wednesday, 1 Feb. 1816, O’Connell and D’Esterre met at Bishopscourt, near Naas, about twelve miles from Dublin. O’Connell won the choice of ground. Both parties fired almost simultaneously, D’Esterre slightly the first. O’Connell fired low, and struck D’Esterre fatally in the hip. After D’Esterre’s death the courtesy of his second, Sir Edward Stanley, relieved O’Connell from fear of legal proceedings, and he, on his part, behaved with thoughtful generosity to D’Esterre’s family. To O’Connell’s personal friends the result of the duel was highly satisfactory, especially as the patching up of a former affair of honour between him and a brother barrister had given his enemies cause to sneer at his courage. (Lee 375)

Some sources give the date as 2 February, Joyce’s birthday (albeit 67 years before he would be born).

The Temptation and Fall of Eve

The reference to this event includes two other possible allusions:

• in an hour not for him solely evil This has been compared to two lines from Book 9 of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (780-781), in which Eve plucks the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and eats of it (see also 043.08 for an allusion to Paradise Regained):

So saying, her rash hand in evil hour

Forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluck’d, she eat :

• of whom his nation seemed almost already to be about to have need This sounds like a typical Joycean parody of a piece of bathetic oratory—High falutin stuff—but I have not been able to source it.

China, Ireland, Australia

The following few lines have an international flavour:

And wolfbone balefires blaze the trailmost if only that Mary Nothing may burst her bibby buckshee. When they set fire then she’s got to glow so we may stand some chances of warming to what every soorkabatcha, tum or hum, would like to know.

King Yu Wang of Zhou

A number of disparate sources are relevant here. First, a historical anecdote from Carl Crow’s Master Kung: The Story of Confucius:

King Yu Wang, who came to the throne in the eighth century before Christ was hopelessly weak and sacrificed the state to please a whimsical court beauty. At her instigation he deposed his legitimate queen and dispossessed the legitimate heir. The beauty had strange and expensive tastes. She enjoyed the brittle sound of torn silk and for her pleasure the store-houses of silk sent as gifts to the king were torn to shreds. In a fit of boredom she did not smile for a week and in order to amuse her the king ordered to be lighted on the hilltops the flares of wolf bones which served as a signal to the vassal princes to rally in force to repel an attack by the barbarians. As a practical joke which brought a smile to the lips of the queen this ruse was eminently successful but it was followed by the inevitable sequel. A few months later there was an actual attack by barbarians, aided by the father of the deposed queen. The signal beacons were lit again but the princes feared another practical joke and did not respond. The king was killed and the whimsical mistress taken captive. (Crow 86-87)

Another historical anecdote, this one from early Christian Ireland:

The bitter hostility of the Druids and the relations of Loigaire to Patrick were worked up by Irish imagination into a legend which ushers in the saint upon the scene of his work with great spectacular effect. The story represents him as resolving to celebrate the first Easter after his landing in Ireland on the hill of Slane, which rises high above the left bank of the Boyne at about twelve miles from its mouth. On the night of Easter eve he and his companions lit the Paschal fire, and on that selfsame night it so chanced that the King of Ireland held a high and solemn festival in his palace at Tara where the kings and nobles of the land gathered together. It was the custom that on that night of the year no fire should be lit until a fire had been kindled with solemn ritual in the royal house. Suddenly the company assembled at Tara saw a light shining across the plain of Breg from the hill of Slane. King Loigaire, in surprise and alarm, consulted his magicians, and they said, “O king, unless this fire which you see be quenched this same night, it will never be quenched; and the kindler of it will overcome us all and seduce all the folk of your realm.” ... But afterwards [Loigaire] bade Patrick to him, purposing to slay him; but Patrick knew his thoughts, and he went before the king with his eight companions, one of whom was a boy. But as the king counted them, lo! they were no longer there, but he saw in the distance eight deer and a fawn making for the wilds. And the king returned in the morning twilight to Tara, disheartened and ashamed. (Bury 104 ... 106)

The Hill of Slane

• Balefires blaze This refers primarily to the ancient Celtic festival of Beltane, which took place on the eve of 1 May:

This festival, the most important ceremony of which in later centuries was the lighting of the bonfires known as “beltane fires”, is believed to represent the Druidical worship of the sun-god. The fuel was piled on a hill-top, and at the fire the beltane cake was cooked. This was divided into pieces corresponding to the number of those present, and one piece was blackened with charcoal. For these pieces lots were drawn, and he who had the misfortune to get the black bit became cailleach bealtaine (the beltane carline—a term of great reproach. He was pelted with egg-shells, and afterwards for some weeks was spoken of as dead ... As to the derivation of the word beltane there is considerable obscurity. Following Cormac, it has been usual to regard it as representing a combination of the name of the god Bel or Baal or Bil with the Celtic teine, fire. And on this etymology theories have been erected of the connexion of the Semitic Baal with Celtic mythology, and the identification of the beltane fires with the worship of this deity. (Chisholm 712)

Finally, there are several bits of slang here, which Joyce lifted from W H Downing’s Digger Dialects: A Collection of Slang Phrases used by the Australian Soldiers on Active Service:

• MARY—Woman

• MARY NOTHING—A term of approbium [sic]

• BURST—A flurry of fire.

• BIBBY—Woman

• BUCKSHEE—Alms; for nothing; ‘‘I got this Buckshee.”

• SOORKABATCHA—Son of a pig

• TUM—You

• HUM—I; me

Walter Hubert Downing

The first two are classed as Pidgin English from Papua, the third as General, and the last five as Hindustani, as spoken by Australian Troops in Mesopotamia. They were all added to the text in 1938, just months before Finnegans Wake was published. There are a few more in the first parenthesis in this paragraph, and more than a hundred scattered throughout the rest of the book. See FWEET and MacArthur & Lernout. Raphael Slepon of FWEET, however, rejects burst as a borrowing from Downing on two unimpeachable grounds (private email):

• All the other borrowings from Downing in this passage are from pages 56-60, whereas BURST is listed on page 14.

• In Downing, BURST is a noun, but in this paragraph burst is a verb.

• soorka- The Irish girl’s name Sorcha means bright, radiant—appropriate, given the fiery context, but hardly enlightening.

As usual, none of this actually explains what Joyce is saying here.

Dollymount Strand

Self-Parody

The closing lines of this paragraph parody a passage from Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

... some seem om some dimb Arras, dumb as Mum’s mutyness, this mimage of the seventyseventh kusin of Kristansen is odable to os across the wineless Ere no oedor nor mere eerie nor liss potent of suggestion than in the tales of the tingmount. (RFW 042.39-043.02)

A veiled sunlight lit up faintly the grey sheet of water where the river was embayed. In the distance along the course of the slowflowing Liffey slender masts flecked the sky and, more distant still, the dim fabric of the city lay prone in haze. Like a scene on some vague arras, old as man's weariness, the image of the seventh city of Christendom was visible to him across the timeless air, no older nor more weary nor less patient of subjection than in the days of the thingmote. (Joyce 1916:194)

The parenthetical comment—Prigged!—is slang for stolen.

It is shortly after this passage that Stephen Dedalus experiences an epiphany when he beholds a young woman wading in the shallow water on Dollymount Strand and gazing out to sea. Filled with joy, Stephen recognizes that it is his fate to become an artist, and he embraces it.

Matinée de septembre (September Morning)

Loose Ends

Finally, let’s tie up a few loose ends.

• Ancient Greek: λεγόμενα, things said, words.

• German: suchen Sie das Weib, cherchez la femme, find the woman (as the root of all man’s woes, starting with Eve in the Garden of Eden).

• (probable words, possibly said, of field family gleaning) Another book that makes its début here as a source for about two dozen allusions in Finnegans Wake is Édouard Trogan’s Les Mots Historiques du Pays de France:

Nous croyons, en effet, que pour avoir droit à être cité, — excusez le paradoxe! — il suffit qu’un mot historique soit non pas historiquement vrai, mais historiquement vraisemblable ... Cependant, nous n’avons pu que glaner, dans notre champ national, et nous prévoyons que nos lecteurs regretteront tel ou tel mot que nous n’avons ni oublié ni méconnu, mais simplement ajourné ... Il n’est pas de famille qui n’ait quelques souvenirs d’hier ou d’autrefois transmis aux enfants comme un précieux héritage. (Trogan 5 ... 6)

[We believe, indeed, that in order to have the right to be cited, - excuse the paradox! - it suffices that a historical word be not historically true, but historically plausible ... However, we could only glean, in our national field, and we foresee that our readers will miss such-and-such a word that we have neither forgotten nor ignored, but simply postponed ... There is no family that does not have some memories of yesterday or a former time to pass on to its children as a precious heritage.]

• gleaming or gleaning The first edition of Finnegans Wake had gleaming, but Rose & O’Hanlon have restored the original gleaning.

• Wildu Picturescu Obviously a nod to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, but why the -escu, which is a common suffix of Romanian surnames?

The Picture of Dorian Gray

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