08 October 2022

Sport’s a Common Thing

Sport’s a Common Thing (RFW 041.32-042.20)

In this paragraph of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the Cad with a Pipe begins recounting his version of his encounter with HCE in the Phoenix Park. In the preceding paragraph, he was accosted by three youths, who asked him to tell them the story. Like almost every other paragraph in this chapter, the narrative is repeatedly interrupted by passages in parentheses. In the course of just twenty-nine lines of The Restored Finnegans Wake, there are no fewer than nine interpolations—or ten in thirty-three lines in the first edition.

First-Draft Version

The first draft of this section was part of the preceding paragraph and comprised three or four lines:

It was the Lord’s day and the request was put to the party as he sat for a smoke in his pastime of executing empty bottles. One sad circumstance the narrator mentioned which goes at once to the heart of things. He rose to his feet and told of it in the simplest of intensive language to this group of little caremakers. (Hayman 70)

In a footnote, Hayman points out that Joyce’s reshufflings are difficult to record here.

As usual, Joyce proceeded to expand what he had first written by adding several interpolations and recasting the first draft. It was only on rare occasions that he discarded some part of his first draft completely, but that is what has happened here. The sentence One sad circumstance the narrator mentioned which goes at once to the heart of things, has disappeared entirely from this passage. A few pages later, when the same story is being told yet again, we will read:

The scene, refreshed, reroused, was never to be forgotten ... for later in the century one of that puisne band of factferreters ... rehearsed it ... to a namecousin of the late archdeacon F. X. Preserved Coppinger ... in a pullwoman of our first transhibernian overground with one still sadder circumstance which is a dirkanddurk heartskewerer if ever to bring bounceye brimmers from marbled eyes. (RFW 044.27-37)

The Musick Hall, Dublin : George Frideric Handel

The most notable thing about the brief first draft is the way in which it identifies the Cad with HCE himself. When accosted by the three boys, the Cad is smoking and shooting a gun. In the original encounter in the park, the Cad was “armed” with a pipe, while HCE, unwishful as he felt of being hurled into eternity right then, plugged by a softnosed bullet from the sap, halted, quick on the draw, and, replyin that he was feelin tipstaff, cue, prodooced from his gunpocket his Jurgensen’s shrapnel waterbury (RFW 028.20-23).

The original encounter took place on the Ides of April (13 April—RFW 028.01). So why does this retelling of the event occur on the Lord’s Day, Sunday? In an earlier article in this series, I hypothesized that Finnegans Wake is set on 12-13 April 1924. In that year, the Ides of April fell on a Sunday. That’s why.

Bare Bones

Removing all nine parenthetical interpolations and some other extraneous matter, the bare bones of this paragraph amount to the following fairly transparent statement:

It was the Lord’s own day for damp and the request for a fully armed explanation was put to the porty as he paused at evenchime for some or so minutes amid the devil’s one duldrum for a fragrend calabash during his weekend pastime of executing with Anny Oakley deadliness empties which had not very long before contained Reid’s family stout. His Revenance rose to his feet and there his simple intensive curolent vocality called up before the triad of precoxious scaremakers the now to ushere mythical habiliments of Our Farfar and Arthor of our doyne. (RFW 041.32-042.20)

Let’s take a closer look at this paragraph, leaving the parenthetical remarks for later.

  • Sport’s a common thing This sounds like an extract from a newspaper article, continuing the journalism theme running through this chapter. In Finnegans Wake Notebook VI.B.31, Joyce originally wrote sport’s a curious thing.

  • Lord’s Lord’s Cricket Ground, London, where an important English sport is played.

  • damp Continuing the theme of bad weather and poor visibility, which also runs through this chapter.

  • fully armed explanation For all its ultimate harmlessness, the original encounter between HCE and the Cad was characterized at the time as a violent duel between two gunslingers.

  • porty The emendation of the first draft’s party reinforces the identity of the Cad and HCE. In a later chapter of Finnegans Wake (III.4), HCE will appear as a respectable bourgeois gentleman called Mr Bartholomew Porter. Journalists use terms like party when the true identity of an individual has not yet been established. Porter is a form of beer brewed from hops and malt. Irish stout—eg Guinness—is a strong variety of porter.

  • at evenchime The original encounter in the park took place at midday. The sexton Fox Goodman could be heard ringing the bell in the speckled church for the Angelus. If, however, Finnegans Wake actually depicts a single night, beginning at 11:32 pm, then the encounter in the park happens—in the mind of the sleeper—at midnight. Here, however, 6 pm would be a much better fit.

  • some or so minutes In notebook VI.A (Scribbledehobble), Joyce originally wrote 10 or 15 min.

  • amid the devil’s one duldrum ... own doldrums. To be in the devil’s dumps is to be depressed or suffering from low spirits. Drunkenness—which follows the excessive consumption of low spirits—often brings on such melancholy. In earlier usage, the devil’s dumps were melancholy or elegiac dances, or the music accompanying such dances.

A mournful or plaintive melody or song; also, by extension, a tune in general; sometimes app. used for a kind of dance. Obs. (Oxford English Dictionary)

  • To be in the doldrums has the same meaning—the nautical sense came later. At least one scholar has suggested a Gaelic etymology for both doldrums and dumps:

Doldrums (Mackay 138)

Dumps (Mackay 150)

  • for a fragrend calabash for a smoke. Fragrant and fag-end (the butt of a smoked cigarette) are conflated here. A calabash is a tobacco-pipe with a bowl made from a calabash gourd. Rose & O’Hanlon have restored the original dictionary spelling of calabash. From the fifth draft on, this was replaced by culubosh.

  • executing with Anny Oakley deadliness shooting. Annie Oakley was an American woman who acquired fame as a sharpshooter in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Empty beer bottles are also known colloquially as dead men. Hence the Cad may originally have been executing the bottles by drinking their contents.

Annie Oakley

  • empties empty bottles.

  • Reid’s family ... stout Reid’s Family Stout was a real brand of stout. It was brewed in London between 1809 and the 1950s.

  • Irish: ruadh, red, ruddy, red-haired. This is the source of the Scottish name Reid.

  • read The relevance of this gloss (and the preceding one) is made clear by the parenthetical remark between family and stout (see The Seventh Parenthesis below).

Reid’s Family Stout

  • Having reprimed his repeater This phrase echoes the original encounter in the park, where HCE’s pocket watch was compared to a gun (prodooced from his gunpocket his Jurgensen’s shrapnel waterbury—RFW 028.23).

  • reprime to prime again, to load again (an old-fashioned firearm) with gunpowder.

  • repeater (1) a watch that chimes the hours and often minutes at the press of a button (2) a firearm capable of firing several shots in succession without being reloaded. In Finnegans Wake, history too is a repeater.

  • resiteroomed reset : resite : rest room. Also, German: Raum, space, outer space, room.

In the Wandering Rocks episode of Ulysses, Joyce tells us that Fr Conmee reset his smooth watch in his interior pocket. Here, he is playing with two meanings of reset: (1) to alter the time displayed on the face of the watch (2) to replace the watch in his fob pocket.

  • timespiece time-piece (watch) : time & space. The blending of space and time into Einstein’s (or Hermann Minkowski’s) spacetime occurs frequently in Finnegans Wake. In the previous chapter, the encounter in the park first took place on the Ides of April (time), before being repeated on the Heights of Abraham (space). Here both temporal and spatial coordinates are emphasized: the space of his occupancy of a world at a time.

  • His Revenance In the first edition, this read His Revenances. French: revenant, ghost, a person who returns after a long absence. This is always appropriate, given the cyclical nature of history: We are all ghosts. Remember also that in the preceding section of this chapter, the question was asked whether the reverend, the sodality director was the same person as the Cad who encountered HCE in the park. In ALP’s Letter, HCE is addressed as Revered.

  • with still a life or two to spare Empties, as we have seen, are also known as dead men—possibly because the spirit has gone out of them. Hence, the Cad still has one or two unopened bottles of Reid’s Family Stout. A note in VI.B.44, a life / bottle, may be relevant. In art, still life is a genre of painting in which inanimate objects are depicted. The term was borrowed from the Dutch school of stilleven. The Dutch artist Rembrandt is mentioned on the next page (RFW 043.29-30), though still life represented a fairly minor part of his oeuvre.

  • his occupancy of a world at a time Henry David Thoreau: “One world at a time”—spoken a few days before his death to a friend asking what he saw of the next world. John Gordon suggests an allusion to Bruno’s belief in the plurality of inhabited worlds, which raised the heretical possibility that there would have been multiple Jesuses, one for each peopled planet. (Gordon 52.8)

  • far from Tolkaheim The River Tolka, in Dublin. Norwegian: -heim, -home, found in many placenames. The Cad, as we learn in one of the parenthetical passages, has retired to Sussex, far from his native Dublin.

  • Whiddington Wild Annie Oakley worked for Buffalo Bill, who is often confused with Wild Bill Hickok. They were, in fact, friends and Hickok was briefly associated with Buffalo Bill’s troupe.

Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill

Note that this passage seems to imply that it is the quiet English garden that is now known as Whiddington Wild. Sam Slote, however, understands this to be the Cad’s subsequent name (Hayman & Slote 110). The clause where the joyshots rang no more is not in the first edition. Its restoration by Rose & O’Hanlon makes clear that Whiddington Wild is the name of the garden, where his gunshots are heard no more. It has to be said, though, that both versions are difficult to parse. Simplifying this sentence by removing all the parenthetical passages, we have:

His Revenance ... rose to his feet and there ... where the joyshots rang no more his simple intensive curolent vocality, my dearbraithers, my most dearbrathairs, ... called up before the triad of precoxious scaremakers ... the ... mythical habiliments of Our Farfar and Arthor of our doyne.

The main clause seems to be:

His Revenance rose to his feet and called up before the triad of precoxious scaremakers the mythical habiliments of Our Farfar and Arthor of our doyne.

But what exactly does where the joyshots rang no more his simple intensive curolent vocality mean? Should there be a comma after more, making his intensive curolent vocality the subject of called up? Or does rang ... his ... vocality mean something similar to ­rang ... his ... bell, recalling old Fox Goodman ringing the Angelus duering the original encounter in the Park?

  • Whiddington Wild Dick Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London, the Duke of Wellington (another Arthur), and Oscar Wilde may all be in the mix. The latter was involved in a number of scandals, involving actual criminal proceedings and incarceration, so his association with HCE’s crime (the Original Sin in the Park) is entirely justified. But why the other two?

  • curolent Latin: curolens, smelling of care, whatever that means (O’Hehir 34).

  • vocality Latin: vocalitas, euphony.

  • my dearbraithers, my most dearbrathairs Irish: dearbhráthair, brother, blood-brother. There is probably also an allusion to Fr Arnall’s sermons in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which he always addresses the boys as My dear little brother in Christ.

  • so is a supper as is a sipper German: Sippe, kin, family. Rose & O’Hanlon identify an allusion to Samuel Carlyle Hughes’ The Pre-Victorian Drama in Dublin, which Joyce has already drawn on in this chapter. But they give no page reference and my search of the text failed to turn up anything relevant.

  • he ... spake of the One and spoke of the Compassionate In Islam, the One and the Compassionate are epithets of Allah. There is also an allusion here to George Russell’s novel The Interpreter (emphasis added):

From the recess of the window Lavelle gazed into the night enveloping the monstrous fabric of the city. In an abeyance of will brought about by weariness he became oppressed by the melancholy which so often arises through contemplation of an external vastness in which humanity becomes dwarfed, and what seemed lofty in the heart shrivels to littleness by the measurement of the eye. Beyond the murky city shining seas were rolling by shadowy mountains, and over them heavens which lost themselves in their own depths, rumouring their own infinitudes, fainting and faltering in their speech, for light, though it be swiftest of all things, ere it has found a final resting-place or hamlet in the gloom, the worlds it spake of have long ceased to be. (Russell 174)

Richard Whittington, Arthur Wellesley, Oscar Wilde

  • precoxious precocious. Dementia praecox is an old name for schizophrenia, which is associated with Issy rather than her brothers.

  • scaremakers The first draft had caremakers, which presumably means something like ones who cause anxiety, or sources of worry. Shem, Shaun and the Oedipal Figure are the triad of scaremakers. See below for the musical sense of triad.

  • ushere us here, with also the sense of ushering in. Space and time are once again yoked together in now ... here. That Uther Pendragon, the father of King Arthur, is also relevant is made clear by the proximity of Farfar and Arthor.

  • mythical habiliments clothes, from the French: habillements, clothing. In English, habiliments also refers to trappings, equipment, furnishings, etc.

  • Our Farfar Our Father. Danish: farfar, paternal grandfather, father’s father. Taking into account the prevalence of the time-space motif in this passage, I am tempted to treat farfar as a spatial counterpart to the Irish: fadó fadó, long long ago, or once upon a time. (A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ...)

  • Arthor of our doyne The obvious allusion is to the traditional Irish air Arthur of this Town, which was collected by George Petrie in the 19th century.

  • Doyne According to popular tradition, Major Richard Doyne was an Irishman who fought in the Crimean War and later erected an obelisk near Whitechurch, Rathfarnham, over the grave of the horse he rode in the campaign. Doyne did own the Hermitage, an estate in Rathfarnham now known as St Enda’s Park, between 1859 and 1866, so there may be some truth to the tale. Another version of the tail is related by Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake, in which Doyne is a veteran of Waterloo, but this would require his horse to be at least 45 years old at the time of its death. According to the National Archives, Doyne died on 3 October 1866. Nevertheless, the allies were led at Waterloo by Arthur Wellesley.

  • Author of Our Doom This may account for the -o- in Arthor without any need to bring Thor into the affair. Nevertheless, the Hermitage in Rathfarnham was originally called the Fields of Odin. And a few lines above, we had a quotation from Thoreau.

  • Author of our Days Suggested by John Gordon, and also in FWEET.

  • Our Farfar and Arthor of our Doyne Our Father, who art in Heaven.

  • Ardoyne A poor, working class Catholic suburb of central Belfast. It is hard not to hear this in **Arthor of our Doyne**, and McHugh added it to the third edition of his _Annotations to Finnegans Wake_ (2006), but I do not see the relevance. It is not listed in Louis O Mink’s _A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer_.

Glenard Drive (Holmdene Gardens), Ardoyne

First Parenthesis

The first of this paragraph’s nine parenthetical passages follows the Lord’s own day for damp:

(to wait for a postponed regatta’s eventualising is not of Battlecock Shettledore-Juxta-Mare only) (RFW 041.32-34)

  • regatta Thirteen lines above, the Cad’s (or HCE’s) seven items of clothing included a regattable oxeter, whatever that means. Presumably, the regatta referred to has been postponed till now.

  • Battlecock Shettledore Battledore and shuttlecock was the game from which badminton evolved. The original form was Battlecock Shottledore Juxta Mare.

  • Juxta-Mare Latin: iuxta mare, next to the sea. Several English placenames include this suffix, which is sometimes modernized as on-Sea: eg Bradwell-Juxta-Mare (Bradwell-on-Sea). A few of these are found in the southeast of England, but none seems especially relevant.

Second Parenthesis

The second, short, parenthetical remark follows the words the request for a fully armed explanation was put:

(in Loo of Pat) (RFW 041.34-35)

  • in lieu of instead of, in place of.

  • Lu Lu was an ancient Chinese kingdom, the home state of Confucius.

  • Pat In the final chapter of Finnegans Wake, St Patrick is portrayed as an invader from the Far East—albeit Japanese rather than Chinese. The word immediately before this parenthesis is put. Are we being told that put has been put in place of Pat? Does that even make any sense? Or does the parenthesis refer to the following words, to the porty: As Pat (HCE?) was not available, the request for an explanation was made to the porty (the Cad?) instead.

Map of China during the Zhou Dynasty

Third Parenthesis

The third parenthesis is the longest of the nine, and is even interrupted by its own shorter parenthetical remark:

(a native of the sisterisle—Meathman or Meccan?—by his brogue, ex-race eyes, lokil calour and lucal odour which are said to have been average clownturkish ... who, the lesser pilgrimage accomplished, had made pats’ and pigs’ older inselt, the southeast bluffs of the stranger stepshore, a regifugium persecutorum, hence hindquarters) (RFW 041.35-042.01)

  • sisterisle Ireland. Both Ireland and Britain are traditionally personified as females, Hibernia and Britannia.

  • Meathman County Meath is Ireland’s Royal County, as it is the location of Tara, where the High Kings of Ireland were traditionally crowned.

  • Meccan Muslim. Rose & O’Hanlon give the following citation from Stanley Lane-Poole’s The Speeches and Table-Talk of the Prophet Mohammad:

Mohammad had by this time advanced from a mere inculcation of the doctrine of one all-powerful God to a plain attack upon the idolatry of the Mekkans ... (Lane-Poole xxxiii)

  • brogue a strong dialectical accent, particularly one that identifies a speaker of English as being of Irish origin.

  • ex-race eyes X-ray eyes. According to John Gordon, when Joyce visited Galway, he was referred to as “the man with the X-ray eyes” (on account of his thick spectacles). Joyce visited Galway in 1909 and 1912. In 1927, the American author William Carlos William (who had penned one of the essays in Our Exag) wrote an article on Joyce for transition (November 1927), in which he defended Joyce’s new avant-garde style:

Joyce discloses the Xray eyes of the confessional, we see among the clothes, witnessing the stripped back and loins, the naked soul. (Williams 153)

An early draft of the passage we are studying had appeared in transition 3 (June 1927), but did not include the allusion to ex-race eyes. That detail was added later.

  • lokil calour local colour. Loki was the Norse trickster god of disorder. Latin: calor, heat.

  • lucal odour local odour. Lucan, a village on the River Liffey, lies a few kilometres upstream of Chapelizod and on the opposite bank.

  • clownturkish Clonturk, a suburb of Dublin’s Northside. In Joyce’s day, the name included the area now known as Drumcondra. Joyce lived there briefly in 1894 at 2 Millbourne Avenue, which was demolished in 1998. German: türkisblau, turquoise blue.

2 Millbourne Avenue, Drumcondra

  • the lesser pilgrimage In Islam, the Lesser Pilgrimage, or Umrah, is a pilgrimage to the Holy City of Mecca. Unlike the Hajj, the Umrah is not compulsory and may be undertaken at any time of the year. The Umrah includes visits to the Kaaba and the Great Mosque, but not to Mount Arafat. As with so many of the Wake’s Islamic elements, Joyce’s sources was Stanley Lane-Poole’s The Speeches and Table-Talk of the Prophet Mohammad:

It was agreed that Mohammad and his people should perform the Lesser Pilgrimage. (Lane-Poole xlv)

  • lesser pilgrimage accomplished ALP’s initials are encoded here, albeit scrambled. Is this just a coincidence?

  • pats’ and pigs’ older inselt Britain. A note in one of the Finnegans Wake notebooks reads:

Pat Pig’s Other Island (N52 (VI.B.42): 66(a))

John Bull’s Other Island is a comedy about Ireland by George Bernard Shaw. John Bull is a common personification for England, named for the satirical character created by John Arbuthnot in 1712. John Bull’s island is Britain. Ireland is his other island. Pat Pig, I presume, is Joyce’s Irish equivalent. Pat is a common Irish name, after our Patron Saint. The family pig was once so ubiquitous in Ireland that it was whimsically referred to as the gentleman who pays the rent. There may also be a reference to the Irish: Muicinis, pig island, a traditional name for Ireland. According to the 17th-century historian Geoffrey Keating, the Milesians gave the island this name because when they first arrived offshore, the Druids of the native Tuatha Dé Danann cast a spell that made the island resemble a pig wallowing in the water (Keating 100-103).

One of the protagonists of Shaw’s play, Tom Broadbent, shares a surname with the real-life landlord of the Mullingar House in Chapelizod, where Finnegans Wake is set. Another coincidence?

  • German: Insel, island. Insult and Iseult may also be intended. Has HCE abandoned ALP for Issy? Is he falling out of love with the aging ALP and in love with the younger Issy, who resembles the younger ALP?

  • the south-east bluffs These may refer to the White Cliffs of Dover or to Beachy Head. Both comprise white cliffs of chalk and both are found in the south-east of Britain, but Beachy Head is much closer to Bognor, where Joyce conceived the Humphriad.

  • stranger In Ireland, stranger was one of the pejorative names given to the English, as in Ulysses. There is also a relevant note:

enemy = stranger (N23 (VI.B.12): 15(h))

  • stepshore Above, Ireland was the sisterisle. Now, Britain is the step-sister: French: sœur, sister.

  • Latin: Regifugium, Flight of the King, an ancient Roman festival celebrating the expulsion of the last King of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus.

  • Latin: persecutorum, of persecutors.

  • Latin: Refugium Peccatorum, Refuge of Sinners, one of the many titles bestowed on Our Lady in the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary. HCE has fled from Dublin, where he was being persecuted, and has sought refuge in the south-east of Britain. When the Irish mob turned on Charles Stewart Parnell, he retreated to his home at 10 Walsingham Terrace, Hove, which lies in the south-east of Britain, roughly halfway between Bognor and Beachy Head.

  • hence hindquarters his headquarters. A note in the Finnegans Wake notebook known as Scribbledehobble reads:

made N. Y. his headquarters (Connolly 155)

9-10 Walsingham Terrace, Hove

Parenthesis within Parenthesis

The following one-and-a-half lines comprise a parenthetical remark within the current parenthesis. In the original edition of 1939, this interpolation was itself demarcated by round brackets, but in The Restored Finnegans Wake these have been replaced by em dashes:

—though the capelist’s voiced nasal liquids and the way he sneezed at zees haul us back to the craogs and bryns of the Silurian Ordovices—

Joyce’s source for the details in these lines was the article on Wales in the Eleventh Edition of The Encyclopædia Britannica, a full set of which Joyce possessed:

Bryn, a hill—Brynmawr, Penbryn ...

Capel, a corrupt form of the Latin “capella” applied to chapels, ancient and recent—Capel Dewi, Capel-issaf, Parc-y-capel ...

Craig, a rock or crag—Pen-y-graig ...

Before tracing the history of Welsh sounds, it will be convenient to give the values of the letters in the modern alphabet ...

Voiceless nasals: mh; nh; ngh.

Voiced nasals: m; n; ng.

Voiceless liquids: ll (unilateral voiceless l); rh (voiceless r).

Voiced liquids: l; r.

Sibilant: s (Welsh has no z) ...

At the time of the Roman invasion of Britain, 55 B.C., four distinct dominant tribes, or families, are enumerated west of the Severn, viz. the Decangi, owning the island of Anglesea (Ynys Fôn) and the Snowdonian district; the Ordovices, inhabiting the modern counties of Denbigh, Flint and Montgomery; the Dimetae, in the counties of Cardigan, Carmarthen and Pembroke; and the Silures, occupying the counties of Glamorgan, Brecknock, Radnor and Monmouth. It is interesting to note that the existing four Welsh sees of Bangor, St Asaph, St Davids and Llandaff correspond in the main with the limits of these four tribal divisions. (Chisholm 260, 268, 261)

  • Silurian Ordovices The Silures and the Ordivices, two Celtic tribes of ancient Wales, which have lent their names to two successive geological periods: the Silurian and the Ordovician Periods.

Welsh Tribes at the Time of the Roman Conquest

Fourth Parenthesis

The fourth parenthesis follows the clause as he paused at evenchime for some or so minutes:

(Hit the pipe, dannyboy! Time to won, barmon. I’ll take ten to win.) (RFW 042.02-03)

  • pipe The Cad with a Pipe is giving his side of the story.

  • dannyboy The traditional melody known as the Derry Air, or the Londonderry Air, is usually sung today to the ballad Danny Boy, which was written by the English songwriter Frederic Weatherly in 1913. In the 1870s, however, the Anglo-Irish poet Alfred Percival Graves set the air to the words Would I Were Erin’s Apple-Blossom o’er You, which are alluded to in the following parenthesis. The lyrics of Danny Boy include the line: The pipes, the pipes are calling.

  • Time to won, barmon At the racecourse, if a bookie cries “ten-to-one, bar one,” he is telling the punters that he will give odds of 10/1 against every horse in the race except the favourite.

  • Ten to one, barman 12:50 am is long after the barman should have called “Time!” Perhaps it’s only 12:50 pm in the afternoon. But have we not been told it’s evenchime? Barmen often double as bookies for their customers.

Fifth Parenthesis

The fifth parenthesis follows hard on the heels of the fourth, coming after the words amid the devil’s one duldrum:

(Apples by her blossom window and Charlottes at her tosspanomancy his sole admirers, his only tearts in store) (RFW 042.03-05)

These lines describe two young women—Issy?—who are admiring the Cad at their windows:

2 W in window (N52 (VI.B.42): 17(d))

This tableau, of course, echoes the Original Sin, or Crime in the Park, one version of which involves HCE exposing himself to two young maidens.

  • Apples ALP. The order APL suggests Lewis Carroll’s young friend Alice Pleasance Liddell, who inspired Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Note how the apostrophes have been dropped, as in the title Finnegan’s Wake: Apple’s at the window and Charlotte’s practising tosspanomancy.

  • Apples by her blossom As we have seen, Alfred P Graves set the Derry Air to the words Would I Were Erin’s Apple-Blossom o’er You in the 1870s. In 1894, the Irish poet Katharine Tynan set the same air to her Irish Love Song, which opened with the words: Would God I were the tender apple blossom ...

  • Charlottes Charlotte is a common girl’s name. A charlotte is a type of baked dessert made of tart apples and stale bread.

A Traditional Apple Charlotte

  • panomancy divination by bread. Joyce’s coinage, apparently. In A Classical Lexicon for Finnegans Wake, Brendan O’Hehir suggests:

[Greek] *pantomanteia—divination by all things

[Late or Low Latin] *panimantia—divination by bread

(O’Hehir 34)

The asterisks indicate that these words are not actually attested in the surviving corpus of Greek and Latin (O’Hehir xxi).

  • topomancy divination by the contours or shape of the land. This is an actual word, but O’Hehir does not acknowledge it. Perhaps it is post-Joycean.

  • tearts tarts, referring pejoratively to the two young women or to the apple charlottes, which are also tarts and which are made with tart apples. Also a contraction of sweethearts, which probably accounts for the e.

Sixth Parenthesis

The sixth parenthesis follows the words with Anny Oakley deadliness. It seems to be referring to the same two admirers as Apple and Charlotte, now referred to as Lili and Tutu, but transformed into the last two empty bottles:

(the consummatory pairs of provocatives, of which remained provokingly but two, the ones he fell for, Lili and Tutu, cork em!) (RFW 042.06-08)

  • consummatory pairs of provocatives Schizophrenic Issy in her role as temptress—HCE fell for her. The sexual overtones are obvious.

  • Lili and Tutu Issy’s two personalities. Note the double i, with its pair of eyes—a common marker of Issy in Finnegans Wake. The lily is white, and therefore innocent. The tutu, a garment worn by a ballet dancer, is also usually white, but its revealing nature lent it a scandalous reputation when it was first introduced in the 19th century. That Lili and Tutu also represent two bottles (cork ’em) is proved by a note in one of Joyce’s notebooks:

lili & tutu / 2 lost bottles (N42 (VI.B.31): 265(b))

Why?

Lily and Tutu

Seventh Parenthesis

The seventh parenthesis interrupts the reference to Reid’s family (...) stout:

(you ruad that before, soaky, but all the bottles in soddemd histry will not soften your bloodathirst!) (RFW 042.09-10)

  • you ruad that before you read that before. A note in VI.B.12 reads: we read that before. Both phrases could be applied to multiple passages in Finnegans Wake, which recounts the same stories over and over again.

  • Irish: ruadh, red, red-haired, brown.

  • soaky This literally means soaking wet, but here it is clearly meant as a pejorative form of address applied to an alcoholic.

  • All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand: Shakespeare, Macbeth 5:1.

  • soddemd Goddamned. Sodom was damned by God.

  • soddemd Soddened. Like soaky, a dig at the Cad’s penchant for a tipple of the strong stuff. In the preceding chapter, the Cad recounted his encounter with HCE in the Park over a bottle of Phenice-Bruerie ’98, followed for second nuptials by a Piessporter, Grand Cru, of both of which ... he obdurately sniffed the cobwebcrusted corks (RFW 030.16-19).

  • soddemd Sodom. The sexual connotations are relevant as well as the sinful.

  • histry history, but why this spelling?

  • bloodathirst bloodthirst, an eagerness for bloodshed. Again, why this particular spelling? FWEET suggests bloody thirst. John Gordon also suggests Russian: blud, lechery, which fits Sodom.

The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah

Eighth Parenthesis

The eighth parenthesis consists of just a single word, a comment on a quiet English garden:

(commonplace!) (RFW 042.13-14)

Taken together, they suggest common-or-garden, which means the same as commonplace.

Ninth Parenthesis

The final interpolation follows the triad of precoxious scaremakers, and is largely in Esperanto. Although it is taken from one of the Finnegans Wake notebooks (VI.B.46:137(e)), it was only added to the text at a very late stage, when Joyce was supposedly “correcting” the galley proofs:

(scoretaking: Spegulo ne helpas al malbellulo, Mi kredas ke vi estas prava, Via dote la vizago rispondas fraulino) (RFW 042.18-19)

  • scoretaking A printed score is a copy of a piece of music. A triad is a musical chord composed of three harmonic notes. The following passage in Esperanto alludes to a song. How these musical elements are to be interpreted, however, remains a mystery to me. In the opening chapter of Finnegans Wake, three Scandinavian Kings of Dublin—Ivor, Olaf and Sitric, representing Shem, Shaun and the Oedipal Figure—were treated as a musical triad (RFW 010.26-29).

  • Esperanto: Spegulo ne helpas al malbelulo. Mi kredas ke vi estas prava, Via doto la vizago, respondas fraulino, A mirror doesn’t help an ugly person. I believe that you are right, Your dowry [is] your face, replies a young lady. Joyce slightly altered the Esperanto: malbellulo for malbelulo, dote for doto, and rispondas for respondas. These may simply be mistakes on his part due to his poor eyesight. Originally, the final word was devlino, not fraulino. Devlino is not Esperanto. Perhaps it is Joyce’s coinage for Dubliner.

  • My face is my fortune This phrase comes from the song My Pretty Maid, in which a mercenary gentleman attempts to seduce a young farm girl.

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

References

Image Credits

Useful Resources



at
Labels: , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

To Proceed

  To Proceed (RFW 053.37–054.15) The last ten pages of Chapter 3 of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake comprise an episode known as The Battery...

  • To Proceed
      To Proceed (RFW 053.37–054.15) The last ten pages of Chapter 3 of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake comprise an episode known as The Battery...
  • In the Scriptorium
      An Illuminated G in the Book of Kells (Folio 13r) The Book of Kells One of James Joyce’s favourite works was the Book of K...
  • Finnegan's Wake - The Lyrics
    Finnegan Wakes (The Dubliners) In the two preceding articles in this serious, I attempted to trace the ballad Finnegan’s Wake back to it...