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| Paul Horan (RFW 040.05-040.09) |
The opening paragraph of the Humphriad II—Book I, Chapter 3 of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—includes a set of obituaries. These are the death notices of Hosty and a number of his close contacts. In the last article we examined in minute detail the eleven lines of A’Hara’s obituary. In this article we are taking a close look at the five lines that make up the obituary of their colleague Paul Horan. In Chapter 2, this particular individual was introduced to us as:
... a small and stonybroke cashdraper’s ex-executive, Peter Cloran (discharged) (RFW 032.07-08).
The pairing of Saints Peter and Paul is common throughout Finnegans Wake. These names generally refer to Shem and Shaun—the twins sons of HCE and ALP—or to the Oedipal Figure who embodies both brothers in the one flesh. Its occurrence makes perfect sense here, as Hosty and his associates all represent this Oedipal Figure, the “enemy” (Latin: hostis) who challenges HCE and precipitates his fall from grace. We were actually told that Hosty’s Rann was composed by O. Gianni and A. Hames (RFW 035.20):
Italian: Gianni, Johnny = Shaun, from Seán, the Irish form of John.
Scots: Hamish, James = Shem, from Séamas, the Irish form of James.
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| The Kloran |
Cloran obviously alludes to the Kloran, the “sacred book” of the Ku Klux Klan. Concerning this name Adaline Glasheen had the following to say in A Second Census of Finnegans Wake:
Mongan, Roche—Mongan was a 7th century Irish hero, a reincarnation of Finn MacCool ... whose name doubtless refers to Stone Mountain, Georgia, traditional meeting-place of the Ku Klux Klan. Roche Mongan is first known as Peter Cloran ... and the Kloran is the sacred book of the KKK. St Roche is patron of the plague-stricken. (Glasheen 1965:178)
Mildew Lisa and Peter Cloran were referred to as Lisa O’Deavis and Roche Mongan at RFW 032.27-28, just eighteen lines after being introduced to us as Peter Cloran and O’Mara ... (locally known as Mildew Lisa)—and immediately after a reference to Lazarus, the patron saint of lepers. Does O’Deavis include an allusion to Dives, the rich man who appears in the same Biblical parable as Lazarus?
Shem and Shaun are often paired as Tree and Stone (or in combination as TreeStone = Tristan, one of the avatars of the Oedipal Figure). Significantly, Cloran is not just broke but stonybroke. And in the last chapter, he slept pillowed upon the stone of destiny (RFW 032.10-11).
Peter Cloran is also described as a cashdraper’s ex-executive. There is certainly an allusion here to Jonathan Swift’s Drapier’s Letters, a series of pamphlets Swift published anonymously to expose the debasement of Irish currency (cash) by the introduction of William Wood’s copper coinage in 1723—a scheme that could have made many Irish people stonybroke.
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| Halfpence & Farthings Coined by William Wood 1722 & 1723 |
Peter Cloran will be mentioned once more in Finnegans Wake—I.8, Anna Livia Plurabelle (RFW 166.18), along with Frisky Shorty and Treacle Tom.
First-Draft Version
Paul Horan’s is the shortest of the six obituaries. In David Hayman’s A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, it comprises little more than a single line:
Peter Cloran, at the suggestion of the Master in Lunacy, became an inmate of an asylum. (Hayman 69)
When he later revised this, Joyce for once managed to rein in his creative genius. Although he elaborated it, he added little that was new:
Poor old dear Paul Horan, to satisfy his literary as well as his criminal aspirations, at the suggestion thrown out by the doomster in loquacity, so says the Dublin Intelligence, was thrown into a Ridley’s for inmates in the northern counties. Under the name of Orani he may have been the utility man of the troupe capable of sustaining long parts at short notice. He was. (RFW 040.05-09
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| The Dublin Intelligence |
We have already seen how Hosty is described as poor Osti-Fosti and O’Mara as poor old A’Hara. In Finnegans Wake, HCE’s manservant Sackerson is Poor Old Joe (RFW 112.36), while ALP’s elderly maidservant Kate is the Wake’s Poor Old Woman (Shan Van Vocht). Why, then, does Joyce use these particular words to describe O’Mara and Cloran? John Gordon, Professor Emeritus of English at Connecticut College, sees Kate and Sackerson at the back of things, while Shem and Shaun are to the fore:
The pious Kate overhears [Sackerson’s] 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 twins. (Gordon 126-127)
Note the progression from poor through poor old to poor old dear. Joyce seems to regard Hosty, O’Mara and Horan as a triad. At RFW 034.16 they are referred to as the trio of whackfolthediddlers.
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| Sigla Algebra |
In A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joseph Campbell & Henry Robinson summarize these lines in the following words:
Paul Horan [i.e. Moran] ended up in a lunatic asylum. (Campbell & Robinson 64)
As we have seen, Paul Horan was introduced in the preceding chapter as Peter Cloran. So who is this Moran? Horan and Moran are genuine Irish surnames. A James Horan was Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1784-85. In one of the intermediate drafts of the Chinese Whispers (RFW 031.28-0033.29), Joyce referred to Peter Cloran as Roche Moran before changing this to Roche Mongan (RFW 032.28). Another, earlier draft has Peter Doran. But these early drafts were unknown to Campbell & Robinson.
We also have the Czech: hora, mountain, which preserves the stony associations of the Kloran.
Master in Lunacy
In the first draft, Peter Cloran is committed to an asylum at the suggestion of the Master in Lunacy. In the final draft, Paul Horan is committed at the suggestion thrown out by the doomster in loquacity. In the version published in 1939 the phrase was doomster in loquacity lunacy, but in The Restored Finnegans Wake Rose & O’Hanlon have emended this to doomster in loquacity.
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| The Four Courts, Dublin |
In Dublin’s Four Courts, there was once a Lunacy Department, with a Registrar in Lunacy and a Chief Clerk in Lunacy. There were also Commissioners in Lunacy for Ireland, charged with supervising the management of asylums and protecting the rights of the mentally ill. This body was established by the Lunacy (Ireland) Act 1821: An Act to make more effectual Provision for the Establishment of Asylums for the Lunatic Poor, and for the Custody of Insane Persons charged with Offences in Ireland. At the time, there were only two lunatic asylums in the country—the Eglinton Asylum in Cork and the Richmond Lunatic Asylum in Dublin—but this act provided for the establishment of a network of district lunatic asylums across the island. The Eglinton and Richmond asylums were incorporated into this system as District Lunatic Asylums in 1830 and 1845 respectively, by which time several regional asylums had been created.
The Commission originally consisted of four doctors and four lay members. Seven of these were also governors of the Richmond Asylum. In England and Wales, the corresponding Commissioners in Lunacy were restyled Masters in Lunacy after 1845 (Jones 223). A similarly styled office was also established in Australia, but there was never any such role in Ireland.
Why did Joyce change Master in Lunacy to doomster in loquacity?
doomster 1. A judge, doomer. arch. [archaic.] (Oxford English Dictionary)
In Scottish Law, a doomster, or deemster, was a public executioner charged with formally pronouncing sentence. In the 18th century, this came to be seen as a barbarous custom and was abolished by the Act of Adjournal (1773).
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| Doomster (Oxford English Dictionary 3:601) |
loquacity The condition or quality of being loquacious; talkativeness.
Finnegans Wake is certainly a loquacious book, but I don’t think that is why Joyce introduced this particular phrase. The answer, perhaps, is provided by Bernard Benstock, in his 1965 study Joyce-Again’s Wake: An Analysis of Finnegans Wake:
Peter Cloran (40.16 [RFW 032.07]), the scoundrel who divulged the news of the incident, has died in jail as Paul Horan (49.15 [RFW 040.05])—born as St. Peter, he dies as St. Paul, representing the duality of self in the Wake. (Benstock 194-195)
In other words, Paul Horan has been committed to an asylum not on account of his lunacy but on account of his loquacity: he blabbed across town about HCE’s encounter in the Park with the Cad with a Pipe, to the lasting humiliation of HCE. This is his crime.
The form which his account of the infamous encounter took was, of course, Hosty’s Rann—a work of art. Hence, his committal was to satisfy his literary as well as his criminal aspirations.
Ridley’s was a nickname for the Richmond District Lunatic Asylum in Grangegorman, Dublin, which is now St Brendan’s Hospital. The name, I presume, was suggested by the initials RDLA. In Dublin slang it came to mean any insane asylum or psychiatric ward. In the opening episode of Ulysses, Buck Mulligan refers to the same institution as Dottyville (Ulysses 6).
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| The Richmond General Penitentiary (The Clocktower Building) |
The Dublin Intelligence was an early 18th-century newspaper cited in The Pre-Victorian Drama in Dublin, one of Joyce’s sources for this passage (Hughes 5).
Joyce took the reference to Horan as the utility man of the troupe capable of sustaining long parts at short notice from Levey & O’Rorke’s Annals of the Theatre Royal:
Madame Lemaire, Signor Ciampi, Signer Bossi (a capital basso profondo), and Casaboni, the most useful of “utility men,” contributed much to the general effect of the very beautiful concerted pieces ... In consequence of the accidental absence of Titiens, by missing a train, the young soprana, at a short notice, sustained the part of “Lucia.” (Levey & O’Rorke 211 ... 219).
The troupe harks back to the Zouave Theatre at Inkerman, in the Crimea, which was mentioned on the previous page. Horan’s Italianate stage name of Orani is in keeping with a common practice of the time. Hosty too was given an Italian pseudonym, Osti-Fosti. There may even be an allusion here to the similarly sounding Conrado Borrani, stage name of the English bass-baritone Conrad Boisragon, who created the role of Count Arnheim in The Bohemian Girl by the Irish composer Michael William Balfe.
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| The Zouave Theatre at Inkerman |
As we have seen, Joyce was a passionate devourer of newspapers. Trivial details in newspaper columns often became grist to his mill. The Connacht Tribune was a regional Irish newspaper that he regularly read even while living in Paris. FWEET records almost fifty allusions in Finnegans Wake that were lifted from this journal. The first of these was inspired by a story of a marital dispute trial in Dunmore District Court (County Galway) which appeared in the Connacht Tribune on Saturday 19 July 1924 (pages 3-4). The story bore the heading:
An Unhappy Alliance. Wife Seeks Maintenance Allowance.
... His wife took every copper he had, and then shoved him into the asylum, and when he came out everything in the house was sold. The house was bare and ...
Having read this, Joyce recorded the following in one of his Finnegans Wake notebooks:
shoved him into asylum (N11 (VI.B.5): 150(j))
It never ceases to amaze me how the most unremarkable and mundane phrases in Finnegans Wake often have literary genealogies that can be traced back to other works. But it is not uncommon for the final draft of such a phrase to be almost unrecognizable from its original form—as is the case here, where shoved him into the asylum eventually became was thrown into a Ridley’s.
Why is the asylum into which Horan is shoved for inmates in the northern counties? In the next chapter, HCE will be buried at the bottom of Lough Neagh, in the northern counties. The first District Asylum set up under the 1821 legislation was the Armagh District Lunatic Asylum, or St Luke’s Hospital, which was established in 1825. It served Counties Donegal, Tyrone, Armagh, Fermanagh and Monaghan—five of the nine northern counties that make up Ulster.
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| Front Elevation of the Armagh District Lunatic Asylum |
He Was
Each of the six death notices in this passage ends with the expression He was in one of six different languages. Paul Horan’s is in English:
English: He was
Paul Horan is associated with the northern counties (ie Northern Ireland), so his death is commemorated with the King’s English. James Horan was the Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1784-85. Another Lord Mayor of Dublin, Peter Paul MacSwiney (1864), shares forenames with both Peter Cloran and Paul Horan.
According to Rose & O’Hanlon, this motif was inspired by a passage in Edward Sullivan’s The Book of Kells:
The “Qui fuit” pages Five pages are then occupied with the Genealogy of Christ, each line beginning with “Qui fuit” as illustrated in Plates XV., XVI. and / XVII. (Sullivan 20)
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| The Book of Kells 200r (Sullivan Plate XV) |
And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.
References
Bernard Benstock, Joyce-Again’s Wake: An Analysis of Finnegans Wake, University of Washington Press, Seattle, Washington (1965)
Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York (1944)
Adaline Glasheen, A Second Census of Finnegans Wake, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois (1963)
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)
Samuel Carlyle Hughes, The Pre-Victorian Drama in Dublin, Hodges, Figgis, & Co, Ltd, Dublin (1904)
Kathleen Jones, The Sociology of Mental Health: Lunacy, Law and Conscience, 1744-1845: The Social History of the Care of the Insane, Routledge, London (1998)
James Joyce, Ulysses, Shakespeare and Company, Paris (1922)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939, 1949)
James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
Richard Michael Levey, J O’Rorke, Annals of the Theatre Royal, Joseph Dollard, Dublin (1880)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
Edward Sullivan, The Book of Kells: Described by Sir Edward Sullivan, Bart., and Illustrated with Twenty-Four Plates in Colour, Second Edition, “The Studio” Limited, London (1920)
Jonathan Swift, The Drapier’s Letters, The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, DD, Volume VI, Edited by Temple Scott, George Bell & Sons, London (1903)
Image Credits
Armagh District Lunatic Asylum: The Hill Building, St Luke’s Hospital, Armagh, © Southern Health and Social Care Trust, Fair Use
The Kloran: Kloran, Fifth Edition, W J Simmons, Atlanta, GA (1916), © Amistad Research Center (photograph), New Orleans, Fair Use
Halfpence & Farthings Coined by William Wood 1722 & 1723: Temple Scott (editor), The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, DD, Volume VI, Facing Page 1, Public Domain
The Dublin Intelligence: British Newspaper Archive, Public Domain
The Four Courts, Dublin: Alphonse Dousseau (artist), National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Public Domain
The Richmond General Penitentiary (The Clocktower Building): © Quasihuman (photographer), Creative Commons License
The Zouave Theatre at Inkerman: Theatrical Entertainment by Zouaves at Sevastopol, Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper, London (1855), Public Domain
Front Elevation of the Armagh District Lunatic Asylum: Francis Johnston (architect and designer), Irish Arcitectural Archive, Murray Collection, Numbers 63-73, Dublin, Public Domain
The Book of Kells 200r (Sullivan Plate XV): The Book of Kells, Folio 200r, The Library of Trinity College Dublin, IE TCD MS 58, Public Domain
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