03 October 2022

Sordid Sam - Part 2

 

Sordid Sam (RFW 040.10-040.27)

Dying Words

Taking up our study of Sordid Sam’s obituary where we set it down in the last article, we turn now to Sam’s enigmatic dying words, which bring these eighteen lines of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to a close:

Me drames, O Loughlins, has come through! Now let the centuple celves of my egourge, as Micholas de Cusack calls them, and of all of whose I in my hereinafter of course by recourse demission me, by the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that identity of undiscernibles where the Baxters and the Fleshmans may they cease to bidivil uns and ... this outandin brown candlestock melt Nolan’s into peese! (RFW 040.19-27)

Nicholas of Cusa

In the last chapter, where he was called Treacle Tom, Sordid Sam slept naked and drunk and dreamt about HCE’s Crime in the Park. Talking in his sleep, he was overheard by Peter Cloran (Paul Horan) and O’Mara (A’Hara). Now he is once again drunk (ebbrous), naked (in the state of nature) and dreaming (Me drames). His bedscrappers are now identified as a Northwegian and his mate. Perhaps Sam’s opaque dying words are addressed to these bedfellows.

These six lines are packed with philosophical allusions. The dominant concept is Nicholas of Cusa’s Coincidentia Oppositorum (Coincidence of Opposites). This idea was later adopted by Giordano Bruno of Nola (“The Nolan”), one of the “Patron Saints” of Finnegans Wake. Joyce himself once summarized this philosophical idea in the following words:

Every power in nature must evolve an opposite in order to realise itself and opposition brings reunion. (Letters I 27 January 1925)

In Finnegans Wake, the sibling rivalry between Shem and Shaun embodies this Identity of Opposites. The two brothers quarrel incessantly, but ultimately what they seek is reconciliation and reunion. Each son is only half the man their father is: Shem and Shaun are like the albumen and the yolk, while HCE is Humpty Dumpty, the whole egg. The Oedipal Figure embodies the union of Shem and Shaun.

Humpty Dumpty (Carroll 244, 248)

  • Me drames ... has come through My dreams have come true. Joyce originally wrote me fears. The spelling drames not only reflects a common Irish pronunciation of dreams but also incorporates the French: drames, dramas, plays. Treacle Tom’s dream, which was overheard by Hosty and his sidekicks, was a dramatization of HCE’s encounter with the Cad.

  • O Loughlins The Irish surname Ó Lochlainn, Anglicized as O’Loughlin, means Descendant of Scandinavian or Descendant of Viking. I presume Sam is addressing the Northwegian and his mate, on whose behalf he is being propelled into the afterlife.

The rest of Sam’s dying words seem to express two contradictory wishes: firstly, that the multiple personalities that inhabit his flesh be all re-integrated into a single Ego in the hereafter : and secondly, that these same personalities re-emerge, splitting off from his Ego, as his identity fractures into pieces. It is the conflict between these opposing tendencies that continues to perpetuate the endless cycle of human history, as described by Giambattista Vico, another of the Patron Saints of Finnegans Wake. The Coincidentia Oppositorum, which Joyce borrowed from Giordano Bruno, is the engine that turns Vico’s wheel. This idea was first expressed by Joyce in the fourth paragraph of the book, the one that mentions the oystrygods and the fishygods, with its clashes of wills and wonts.

  • the centuple celves of my egourge In the dictionary, centuple means hundredfold. This precise number is taken up in the following obituary, as we shall see in the next article. celves was originally spelt orthodoxly, so I don’t think there is any hidden meaning. But what of egourge?

Sigmund Freud

There is an obvious allusion to Sigmund Freud’s theory of the Ego, which was first adumbrated around 1895 in Studies in Hysteria: Case Histories, which Freud wrote with his mentor Josef Beuer:

Neurotics, in whose self-feeling we seldom fail to find a strain of depression or anxious expectation, form greater numbers of these antithetic ideas than normal people, or perceive them more easily; and they regard them as of more importance. In our patient’s state of exhaustion the antithetic idea, which was normally rejected, proved itself the stronger. It is this idea which put itself into effect and which, to the patient’s horror, actually produced the noise she dreaded. In order to explain the whole process it may further be assumed that her exhaustion was only a partial one; it affected, to use the terminology of Janet and his followers, only her ‛primary’ ego and did not result in a weakening of the antithetic idea as well. (Breuer & Freud 92)

Pierre Janet was the pioneering French psychologist who introduced the concepts of dissociation and the unconscious to the field of psychoanalysis. He was two years older than Freud, and anticipated him in the use of the Latin pronoun ego [I] to refer to various self-conscious aspects of the mind. Freud’s mature views on this subject were elaborated in his 1923 treatise The Ego and the Id, in which he analysed the mind into three agents: the Ego, the Id, and the Super-Ego. The Ego he defined thus:

The division of mental life into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premise on which psycho-analysis is based ... In the further course of psycho-analytic work, however, even these distinctions have proved to be inadequate and, for practical purposes, insufficient. This has become clear in more ways than one; but the decisive instance is as follows. We have formulated the idea that in every individual there is a coherent organization of mental processes, which we call his ego. This ego includes consciousness and it controls the approaches to motility (Freud 1927:9 ... 15)

The Monster from the Id (Forbidden Planet)

The Id (Latin for it or that) is the instinctual part of the mind, an amoral force driven by a desire to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Freud’s clearest definition of the Id is given in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), which is particularly appropriate in our context:

You must not expect me to tell you much that is new about the id, except its name. It is the obscure inaccessible part of our personality; the little we know about it we have learnt from the study of dream-work and the formation of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a negative character, and can only be described as being all that the ego is not. We can come nearer to the id with images, and call it a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement. We suppose that it is somewhere in direct contact with somatic processes, and takes over from them instinctual needs and gives them mental expression, but we cannot say in what substratum this contact is made. These instincts fill it with energy, but it has no organisation and no unified will, only an impulsion to obtain satisfaction for the instinctual needs, in accordance with the pleasure-principle. The laws of logic—above all, the law of contradiction—do not hold for processes in the id. Contradictory impulses exist side by side without neutralising each other or drawing apart; at most they combine in compromise formations under the overpowering economic pressure towards discharging their energy. (Freud 1933:103-104)

The Super-Ego is the part of the mind that passes judgment on our behaviour. It is opposed to the Id’s selfishness and seeks instead to be socially acceptable. Unlike the Id, which is innate, the Super-Ego is constructed through nurture and upbringing, and is superimposed upon the other two. It represents the internalization of the moral and cultural precepts which our parents inculcate in us:

The rôle, which the super-ego undertakes later in life, is at first played by an external power, by parental authority. The influence of the parents dominates the child by granting proofs of affection and by threats of punishment, which, to the child, mean loss of love, and which must also be feared on their own account. This objective anxiety is the forerunner of the later moral anxiety; so long as the former is dominant one need not speak of super-ego or of conscience. It is only later that the secondary situation arises, which we are far too ready to regard as the normal state of affairs; the external restrictions are introjected, so that the super-ego takes the place of the parental function, and thenceforward observes, guides and threatens the ego in just the same way as the parents acted to the child before. (Freud 1933:89)

Joyce did use some of Freud’s writings as sources for Finnegans Wake. For example, Chapter III.4 draws on several of Freud’s case studies, and the importance of The Interpretation of Dreams to Finnegans Wake cannot be overstated—though Joyce always downplayed his debt to Freud. Nevertheless, I have not found any overt references to the Id or the Super-Ego, and even the Ego only puts in a few very brief appearances. Nevertheless, the popular concept of the Id and the Super-Ego as respectively a devil and an angel on the shoulders of the Ego reflects the same dynamic as the Shem-Shaun-Oedipus trio in Finnegans Wake:

Popular Conception of the Ego, the Id, and the Super-Ego

Latin: ego, I. This accounts for the phrase all of whose I. Demission means an act of giving up, dropping, letting fall. Here, it appears to have become a transitive verb—like decommission. The subject of this verb is all of whose I: my hundredfold personalities, all of whose egos in the hereafter cast me off, ... The main clause reads: Now let the centuple celves ... reamalgamerge, where the last word means both re-emerge and re-amalgamate. The subordinate clause originally read: My centuple selves all of whose I hereby demission. Why did Joyce insert another of before all of whose? Is this a typo? It is present in both the original edition of 1939 and The Restored Finnegans Wake of 2010, but its presence prevents me from parsing this sentence.

Does the word egourge allude to the Demiurge of Platonic philosophy? In Plato’s Timaeus, the demiurge is the divine “craftsman” who fashions the material world out of chaos? Sam’s egourge, then, would be the creator of his multiple personalities.

  • Micholas de Cusack This not only references Nicholas of Cusa but even embodies the coincidence of contraries by combining Mick and Nick (Michael the Archangel and Old Nick the Devil) in the one character—the Super-Ego and the Id again. There is also an obvious allusion to Michael Cusack, Joyce’s principal model for the Citizen in the Cyclops Episode of Ulysses—but why? More than thirty years ago, Richard Beckman of Temple University, Philadelphia, thought that Sordid Sam’s fervid language identifies him as Shaun, whose blustering justifies the allusion to the bigoted Citizen (Beckman 520). As we have seen, Shaun is but one element of this character.

Michael Cusack

The Identity of Indiscernibles is a philosophical principle related to the Coincidence of Contraries. It is usually attributed to the German polymath Gottfried Leibniz.

Nursery Rhymes

The remaining lines of Sordid Sam’s dying words contain allusions to two nursery rhymes:

where the Baxters and the Fleshmans may they cease to bidivil uns and ... this outandin brown candlestock melt Nolan’s into peese! (RFW 040.23-24 ... 26-27)

The popular nursery rhyme Rub-A-Dub-Dub depicts respectable members of society—the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker— in a disrespectable light, with lascivious overtones. This is precisely what Hosty’s Rann does to HCE. The trio of Butcher, Baker and Candlestick-Maker may represent Shaun & Shem, and the Oedipal Figure who embodies them both (Halper 13-14).

Baxter is an obsolete term for baker, originally a female baker. Fleshmans is from German: Fleischer, butcher, but this too has a female side to it. Marthe Fleischmann was a young Swiss woman with whom Joyce was enamoured in 1919 (Ellmann 449 ff). She was one of the models for Gerty MacDowell and Martha Clifford in Ulysses. An unrelated Helen Fleischman was Joyce’s daughter-in-law (Ellmann 611).

Rub-A-Dub-Dub

One of Giordano Bruno’s plays is called Candelaio (literally The Candlemaker or The Candle-Bearer, but also slang for Pederast). It features three protagonists: a candlemaker, an alchemist and a grammarian. Bruno means Brown, and he was known as the Nolan after his place of birth. Hence the brown candlestock melt Nolan’s into peese. In Finnegans Wake the pairing of Brown and Nolan—Browne & Nolan was a prominent Dublin bookseller—represents the sibling rivalry between Shem & Shaun. In the Prankquean Episode, the motto with which Bruno prefaced his comedy (and which embodies the coincidence of opposites) is parodied: In Tristitia Hilaris : In Hilaritate Tristis [Cheerful in the Midst of Sadness : Sad in the Midst of Cheerfulness]. Finally, Candelaio was dedicated to a Signora Morgana, or Lady Morgan! See Moliterno for further comment.

Complementing the lascivious nature of the nursery rhyme, is an obscene joke alluded to by Buck Mulligan in the opening episode of Ulysses:

—I’m melting, he said, as the candle remarked when... But hush. Not a word more on that subject. (Ulysses 12)

This accounts for melt, and also explains why outstanding has become the coital outandin.

The phrase cease to bidivil uns is taken from the Bible: “Cease to do evil, Learn to do well” (Isaiah 1:16-17). It was the motto over the door of a 19th-century prison, the Richmond Bridewell, on Dublin’s South Circular Road, where Daniel O’Connell and other prominent Irish nationalist leaders were detained. In 1893 it became the Wellington Barracks, and in 1922 the Griffith Barracks. In Ulysses the motto is linked to the sexual act in which Bloom’s son Rudy is conceived:

Richmond Bridewell, Dublin

Must have been that morning in Raymond terrace she was at the window, watching the two dogs at it by the wall of the cease to do evil. And the sergeant grinning up. She had that cream gown on with the rip she never stitched. Give us a touch, Poldy. God, I’m dying for it. How life begins. (Ulysses 86)

German: uns, us. The cluster of German terms may be due to the presence of Leibniz. Note how bedevil has been altered to bidivil, because the prefixes bi- and di- both mean two-, double-. Of course, divil is a common Irish pronunciation of devil.

The other nursery rhyme alluded to in these lines is Pease Porridge Hot. Only a single word—peese—is quoted, so the allusion is not obvious. FWEET fails to acknowledge it. Pease Porridge Hot and Pease Porridge Cold are another pair of opposites, which become one as Pease Porridge in the Pot. The simple word peese has multiple and contradictory meanings in this passage:

  • peace An end to the sibling rivalry between Shem & Shaun. Peace comes when the two brothers have become reunited in the Oedipal Figure. The related concept of appeasement may also be relevant.

  • pieces The fracturing of Sordid Sam’s mind into multiple personalities, and the splitting of the Oedipal Figure back into Shem & Shaun.

  • peas Shem and Shaun are like two peas in a pod. For all their differences, they are ultimately one and the same—indiscernible, and therefore identical—and seek reintegration.

  • pease The nursery rhyme, Pease Porridge Hot, made its first appearance in the Prankquean Episode of Chapter I.1, where it took the form of the riddle the Prankquean (ALP) asks Jarl van Hoother (HCE). In Chapter II.1, the sibling rivalry between Shem and Shaun takes the form of a children’s game in which Glugg (Shem) is challenged by Chuff (Shaun) to solve a similar riddle. Pease porridge or pudding is a savoury dish made of boiled peas.

Pease Porridge Hot

In Parentheses

Sordid Sam’s dying words are interrupted by a couple of passages in parentheses:

(but at this poingt though the iron thrust of his cockspurt start might have prepared us we are wellnigh stinkpotthered by the mustardpunge in the tailend) (RFW 040.24-26)

The ithyphallic overtones—“point ... iron thrust ... cock... spurt ... tail”—are obvious, but the principal allusion is to a story Joyce came across in Carl Crow’s Master Kung: The Story of Confucius. This book was only published in 1937. Joyce entered a brief aide-mémoire in a notebook—N54 (VI.B.45)—that he compiled in January and February 1938, when he was in Paris, Lausanne and Zurich (Norburn 180-181). The passage in Crow concerns a rivalry between three baronial families in the vassal state of Lu during the Zhou Dynasty:

The three-cornered feud with its many ramifications had been smouldering secretly for some time and broke out into open flame very shortly after the return of [Confucius and his disciples] from Loyang. The immediate occasion which brought the secret rivalries and animosities into the open was a hotly-contested cock-fight in which the backers of each bird had cheated ... The cocks of the Chi family and of the How family were in the habit of fighting ... Baron Ping of Chi concealed freshly ground mustard in the feathers of his bird, disposing the irritant so as partially to blind the other bird when he buried his beak in the neck of his adversary preparatory to delivering the fatal thrust with his spurs ... In some way the head of the How family heard about the unsportsmanlike stratagem and in retaliation he sheathed the spurs of his bird with razor-sharp metal spurs. (Crow 115)

The three-cornered rivalry is entirely appropriate in this context, in which the triangular relationship between Shem, Shaun and the Oedipal Figure takes centre stage.

Children Observing A Cockfight

Of course, there are a host of other allusions packed into these two lines:

  • poingt French: poing, fist. It also includes Baron Ping’s name.

  • Harry Hotspur Sir Henry Percy, a 14th-century English nobleman, who appears in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1. He played a significant role in the rivalry between Richard II and Henry Bolingbroke, and was instrumental in the former’s deposition and the latter’s accession to the throne as Henry IV. He later rebelled against Henry and died in the ensuing Battle of Shrewsbury. Roland McHugh includes this allusion in his Annotations to Finnegans Wake, but I am not sure that it is relevant. Adaline Glasheen does not mention Harry Hotspur in her Third Census to Finnegans Wake.

  • Saint Patrick This allusion to Ireland’s Patron Saint echoes a similar one in the opening chapter—somepotreek (RFW 010.20)—so it is not in doubt. But I can’t say that I understand his relevance to this passage. In Finnegans Wake, St Patrick is the Oedipal Figure—the foreign invader who challenges HCE’s authority and supplants him, but who ultimately becomes more Irish than the Irish themselves. In Book IV of Finnegans Wake, a Japanese St Patrick confronts the Archdruid of pagan Ireland, played by the Protestant philosopher and clergyman George Berkeley (RFW 478-479). Here, though, St Patrick is paired with mustardpunge, ie Mister Punch. The hunchbacked Punch is certainly HCE, but I don’t see how he is related to St Patrick. The presence of Punch may be related to the nearby French: poing, fist.

St Patrick and the Druid

  • pother choking smoke : commotion, turmoil.

  • bothered deafened : annoyed : confused. This word, like pother, is believed to be of Irish origin, possibly deriving from the Irish: bodhar, deaf.

  • tailend Sordid Sam’s unwashed Behind? Also, the end of Sam’s tale.

In conclusion, Sordid Sam’s dying words can perhaps be paraphrased thus:

My dreams of HCE, O Norwegians, have come true. Now let my multiple personalities—butcher, baker and candlestick-maker—merge once more into a single Ego, only to split again into pieces, as Vico’s cycle of course and recourse turns without end, propelled ever onwards by the conflict between opposite forces.

Although Sam is at the point of death, his dying words envisage the act of sexual congress, in which two people of the opposite sex come together to make a single beast with two backs in order to create new life.

The Book of Kells 200r (Sullivan Plate XV)

He Was

Each of the six death notices in this passage ends with the expression He was in one of six different languages. Sordid Sam’s is in Danish:

  • Danish (Norwegian Bokmål or Dano-Norwegian): Han var Sordid Sam (ie Treacle Tom) is propelled in the afterlife by a Northwegian, who represents the Norwegian Captain from the mock-epic tale How Kersse the Tailor Made a Suit of Clothes for the Norwegian Captain (Chapter II.3, The Scene in the Public).

According to Rose & O’Hanlon, this He Was 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” [Latin: Who was] as illustrated in Plates XV., XVI. and / XVII. (Sullivan 20)

Emendations

There are several differences between this passage as it appears in Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon’s The Restored Finnegans Wake (2010) and the corresponding passage in the first edition of the novel (1939).

The Restored Finnegans Wake (FWEET)

In the first edition of 1939, Sordid Sam was described as a dour decent deblancer. Rose & O’Hanlon’s emended form was the original version. It was added to Sam’s obituary at a very late stage in the composition, when Joyce was proofreading the first set of galleys—March 1937 to February 1938. Rose & O’Hanlon identify this as Draft Level 9 for Chapter I.3. It is easy to see how an e might have been misread as a c by the typesetter.

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

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