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The House of Atreox (RFW 044.21-045.26) |
In James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake the same stories are told over and over again. In the present chapter—I.3, or the Humphriad II—the Cad and HCE repeat the story of their memorable encounter in the Phoenix Park. That encounter was itself a repetition of HCE’s encounter with the King on the road outside his tavern in Chapelizod. And that encounter was in its turn a repetition of the mysterious crime HCE is alleged to have committed in the Phoenix Park—his Original Sin.
In this article we will be looking at a long paragraph that continues the Cad’s Side of the Story by rehashing several elements drawn not only from those previous encounters but also from the Cad’s own retelling of those encounters in this very chapter. I say the Cad but I could just as easily say HCE as one can scarcely distinguish the one from the other in this chapter. In Finnegans Wake when Oedipus (ie the Cad) kills his father Laius (ie HCE) and steps into his shoes, he becomes the new Laius.
First-Draft Version
The first draft of this paragraph is not only much shorter than the published version but also much more transparent. It is, in fact, very close to being a perfect specimen of the King’s English:
The scene was never forgotten for later in the same century one of that little band of factferreters, then an ex civil servant retired under the sixtyfive act, rehearsed it to a cousin of the late archdeacon Coppinger in a pullman of the transhibernian with one still sadder circumstance which is a heartskewer if ever was. For when the archdeacon spoke of it by request all, hearing his cousin’s description of that fellowtraveller’s features, could really see themselves as listening to the cockshy shooter’s evensong evocation of the doomed liberator, his hand extended towards the monumental leadpencil which as the molyvdokondolin was to be his mausoleum, while over his exculpatory features the ghost of a resignation unveiled a spectral appealingness similar in origin and effect to a beam of sunlight upon a coffinplate. (Hayman 70-71)
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The Golden Arrow (All Pullman Train) |
The retentive reader will have noted several familiar echoes from earlier accounts:
scene Previously, the Cad aptly sketched ... the touching scene. In this chapter, Joyce makes much play on the distinction between what is seen and what is heard.
little band of factferreters The three schoolboys to whom the Cad tells his side of the story (RFW 041.23 ff). They represent Shem, Shaun and the Oedipal Figure. This chapter is all about ferreting out the facts.
ex civil servant One of Hosty’s associates, O’Mara, was an exprivate secretary of no fixed abode (RFW 032.08).
in a pullman of the transhibernian Just a few pages ago, the story was retold by a jarvey on an Irish visavis (ie in a Irish jaunting car). Now it is being retold in a pullman train carriage on the Irish equivalent of the Tran-Siberian Railway.
the cockshy shooter’s evensong evocation ... The Cad related his side of the story to the three schoolboys on a Sunday evening, while shooting at empty bottles in his garden (RFW 042.05 ff).
the doomed liberator Just a few pages ago HCE & the Cad’s Encounter was compared to the fatal duel between the Daniel O’Connell and John Norcot D’Esterre in 1815 (RFW 042.30 ff). O’Connell was popularly known as The Liberator after successfully agitating for the introduction of Catholic Emancipation. But in the duel it was D’Esterre who was doomed to die, not the Liberator. Is this another case of HCE and the Cad being confused with one another?
Daniel
O’Connell & John Norcot D’Esterre
his hand extended towards the monumental leadpencil At a crucial moment during the Encounter in the Park, HCE pointed towards the Wellington Monument, the overgrown milestone (RFW 029.06). The jarvey in the jaunting car also pointed towards this ithyphallic symbol with his whip (043.08 ff), and the same gesture was recalled in the paragraph immediately before the one we are now analysing (044.12).
the ghost The Oedipal encounter between HCE and the Cad has also been compared to Hamlet’s encounter with his father’s ghost—which Sigmund Freud analysed in terms of the Oedipus Complex (Freud & Brill 224-225). This is usually indicated by the evocation of the ghost’s List, O list, which Bloom also recalls in Ulysses (RFW 041.22, 043.34).
When Joyce, over the course of ten years, expanded this passage from a dozen or so lines to more than a page of text, he only strengthened these links. As usual, the final version is replete with parenthetical remarks—eleven principal and four nested—not to mention three other interpolations that are set off from the main text by en dashes. Stripped of all these incrustations, the gist of this paragraph is summarized in a few words by Raphael Slepon on FWEET:
the story is repeated in a train car—it is further vividly retold (FWEET)
The
House of Atreus
Prologue
In revising this paragraph, Joyce provided the early drafts with a prologue, which over the years grew from two to half-a-dozen lines:
The house of Atreox is fallen indeedust (Ilyam, Ilyum! Maeromor Mournomates!), averging on blight like the mundinbanks of Fennyana, but deeds bounds going arise again. Life, he himself said once (his biografiend, in fact, kills him verysoon, if yet not, after), is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our breadwinning lies the cropse of our seedfather—a phrase which the establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across the chestfront of all manorwombanborn.
The gist of this prologue is not too difficult to discern. It expresses one of the most fundamental motifs of Finnegans Wake: the Fall|Rise motif. Life is a cycle: we live, we die, and after our death a new generation rises up to take our place, continuing the cycle. On the preceding page, HCE’s epic story was referred to as the humphriad of that fall and rise (RFW 043.04-05). This Viconian Cycle is neatly summed up in the pun on crops and corpse:
HCE’s
Cyclical Rise and Fall
The house of Atreox The House of Atreus. In Greek mythology, this family began with Tantalus, who was cursed along with his descendants for testing the gods. Agamemnon, son of Atreus and greatgrandson of Tantalus, led the Greeks during the Trojan War, only to be murdered by his adulterous wife Clytemnestra upon his return home. John Gordon also suggests the presence of another hero of the Trojan War, Ajax, who took his own life after going mad. In Dublin, the House of Ajax would then be the jacks, or outhouse—the Museyroom (Gordon 55.3).
Latin: atrox, cruel.
Latin: Ilium, Troy.
Latin: Ilion, Ilion fatalis incestusque iudex et mulier peregrina vertit in pulverem, Ilium, Ilium the fatal and corrupt judge and the foreign woman turned to dust (Horace, Odes 3:3:18-21, Bennett 178-181). The allusion is to the The Judgment of Paris, the Trojan prince who declared Aphrodite the fairest of the gods, for which he was awarded the foreign woman Helen of Troy. Horace’s incestus means corrupt (Paris took a bribe), but HCE’s Original Sin always has a hint of incest about it.
Ilion, Ilion, dreamy Ilion, pillared Ilion, holy Ilion. The opening line of a bombastic poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Is it relevant? I suppose dreamy fits Finnegans Wake.
Ilya Muromets A major figure in the byliny of Kievan Rus. The byliny are epic Russian folktales collected in the 18th and 19th centuries. Like Vasily Buslayev of Novgorod (RFW 004.29), Ilya was a bogatyr or knight-errant.
Ilya
Muromets
Latin: maeror, mourning.
Miramare Castle A Habsburg castle near Trieste. Joyce lived in Trieste in 1905-06 and again in 1907-15. In his letters he spells this name in the Austrian manner, Miramar, which is closer to Maeromor.
Modern Greek: mourounomatês, having cod’s eyes. Obviously an echo of the opening line of the preceding paragraph: And, Cod, says he with mugger’s ears in his eyes. Because death leads to resurrection, one should mourn no mates.
averging on blight like the mundinbanks of Fennyana This alludes to one of Thomas Moore’s Irish melodies, Avenging and Bright, which was set to the traditional air known as Cruachan na Féinne (Crooghan a Venee) or The Fenian Mount. The song is concerned with the Irish myth of Deirdre of the Sorrows, which is essentially the same story as those of Tristan & Isolde, Diarmuid & Gráinne, and Helen of Troy. The Irish, like the House of Atreus, were blighted—potato blight was the root cause of the Great Famine.
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| The River Liffey near Newbridge, County Kildare |
muddy banks of fenny Anna In Finnegans Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle is identified with Dublin’s principal river, popularly known as Annie Liffey. This is usually interpreted as the Irish: abha or abhainn, river. But in an earlier article, we saw how Brendan O’Hehir suggested an alternative origin:
Whatever Gaelic-Irish origins can be posited for the tripartite name of the heroine of Finnegans Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle, must appear at first to be at once scanty, superficial, and obvious ... As for the name Anna, the received impression of its specifically Irish origin seems to be that “Anna Liffey” is a rendition of the phrase Abha na Life, “the River Liffey.” But this derivation is phonetically almost impossible, and if actual is probably unique ...
Analogy suggests rather that the name must derive either from Eanach-Life or Ath na Life, and must represent consequently either “Liffey-Fen” or “Liffey-Ford.” If, then, “Anna Liffey” means Liffey-Ford, the name is not really that of a river but of a city, and specifically of that city whose name is inextricably confused with the river: Baile Atha Cliath, town of the hurdle-ford (across the Liffey): Duibhlinn, the black pool (in the Liffey) ...
For the reader of Finnegans Wake this excursus into the probable true etymology of Anna might be pointless if James Joyce were ignorant of the relevant facts or if he shared the false impression that the name could adequately be derived from Abha na Life. (O’Hehir 158-160)
O’Hehir goes on to argue that Joyce was, in fact, aware that Anna derived from the Irish word eanach, meaning a watery place, pond, lake, marsh, swamp, fen. When I first read that, I doubted it, but O’Hehir’s opinion receives support from the phrase mundinbanks of Fennyana.
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| St Canice’s Abbey, Finglas |
deeds bounds going arise again Dese Bones G’wine Rise Again, an American Negro Spiritual that recounts the story of the expulsion of Adam & Eve from the Garden of Eden. The phrase also seems to include allusions to property deeds and boundaries (Gordon 55.5).
verysoon, if yet not, after A curious echo of the opening page of Finnegans Wake: not yet, though venisoon after (RFW 003.09-10), which precedes the reference to the Oedipal contest between Charles Stewart Parnell and Isaac Butt.
his biografiend, in fact, kills him This allusion was borrowed from an anonymous article on another of Dublin’s rivers, the Tolka, in the October 1853 issue of The Dublin University Magazine:
The ruin of the old church [in Finglas] is associated with one name which deserves more particular mention. It was originally built on its present site in the age of St.Canice; but the first chapel and monastic buildings had perished, and, in 1609, the church, of which the ruin is now standing, was rebuilt. Its original shape was a long rectangle. The visitor will observe another aisle at right-angles to the main portion of the building. In the days of the village’s prosperity, this limb was thrown into the church, which had become too small for its congregation; but it was originally separate, and was intended for a library, anil erected by the exertions of the poet Parnell, who ended his days as vicar of the parish. Through the interest principally of Swift, he was, in 1716, promoted to this living, at that time a handsome preferment. Goldsmith and Johnson, his biographers, kill the poet in the following July, 1717; but he lived for at least one year longer than they allow him, for there is an entry in the parish vestry book, dated April 12, 1718, and signed with Parnell’s name, in his own handwriting. He went to London shortly afterwards. His plan of founding a library was commenced, and resolutions of the vestry for completing it were forwarded to him there; but he died on his way back. (Anonymous 395, Goldsmith 3, Johnson 289)
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| Oliver Goldsmith & Samuel Johnson |
the establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across the chestfront This refers to another legendary detail from the biography of Confucius:
When the son was born, it is said that there was discovered written on his chest the phrase ‛established the world by law’. (Crow 45)
The phrase was written prenatally and preternaturally, and perhaps also pretty neatly.
manorwombanborn In Shakespeare, the Three Witches prophesy that none of woman born Shall harm Macbeth. Macduff, who kills Macbeth, was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped. Hamlet said of himself I am native here and to the manner born (Shakespeare 397, 235). Like Hamlet, Macbeth has often been interpreted along Oedipal lines—though not by Freud, who regarded childlessness as the dominant theme. Hamlet’s phrase is commonly parodied as to the manor born, meaning of the aristocracy.
The remainder of this paragraph fills an entire page of The Restored Finnegans Wake, which is too much to analyse in detail in this article. Instead, I will select some of the more salient points of interest to examine under our microscope.
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HCE by Another Name
This version of the story is recounted in a train carriage by an ex-civil servant to a cousin of the late Archdeacon F. X. Preserved Coppinger, who later repeats the story to the Archdeacon, who in his turn repeats it to his fellow commuters on the same railway in the west of Ireland. As usual, these different versions of the tale and their different narrators blend into one another, so the Archdeacon’s account (RFW 045.04 ff) sounds suspiciously like the ex-civil servant’s (044.28 ff).
These characters are all versions of HCE, whose initials are encoded in the phrase the hen and crusader ever intermutuomergent. That the excivil is HCE is also made clear by the familiar list of HCE’s Seven Items of Clothing:
a dressy black modern style a black dress coat.
and wewere shiny tan burlingtons, wearing shiny tan shoes. As Roland McHugh notes in the Fourth Edition (2016) of his Annotations to Finnegans Wake, Joyce took this from an advertisement for Burlington shoes that was featured in The Strand Magazine in 1924. In Ulysses, Blazes Boylan wears smart tan shoes (Ulysses 254).
tam, Tam-o’-shanter, a Scottish tartan cap made of wool. Also Tom, from Tom, Dick and Harry, or Shem from Shem, Ham and Japhet.
homd German: Hemd, shirt. Also Harry from Tom, Dick and Harry, and Ham from Shem, Ham and Japhet.
and dicky, A dicky is a detachable shirt front. We had chestfront a few lines above, and during the Museyroom Episode (yet another version of the Oedipal Encounter), we had shortfront (RFW 007.33). Obviously Dick from Tom, Dick and Harry, who were also invoked during the Museyroom Episode (007.21). Also Japhet from Shem, Ham and Japhet.
quopriquos Latin: quid pro quo, something for something, hence a substitute or something given in exchange for something equivalent to it.
and peajagd and pea jacket, a sailor’s heavy overcoat made of wool. German: Jagd, hunt.
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| Walter Arthur Copinger |
F X Coppinger
In her Third Census of Finnegans Wake, Adaline Glasheen marks this entry with an asterisk to indicate that she does not know who this is:
*Coppinger, Archdeacon J.F.X.P.—most Coppinger references fasten on cradle-filling, so I wonder if he has to do with the incunabula man? There is a Coppinger Row in Dublin. There is a Coppinger reference I can’t make out in Letters, II, 215. Mr Ellmann guesses it has to do with the Playboy riots. I guess it has to do with a law case that reminded Joyce of Sir William Wilde’s (q.v.). Coppinger’s Court was a mansion (now ruined) in Co. Cork, built by Sir Walter Coppinger in 1610. Tradition says it had a chimney for every month, a door for every week, windows for every day of the year. (Glasheen 62)
The incunabula man is Walter ArthurCopinger, a bibliographer of early books. In Latin, incunabula means things of the cradle. This word is used to describe books printed before 1501, or during the infancy of printing. By profession, this Copinger (one p) was a conveyancer—a lawyer who specializes in real estate. Could this explain the deeds and bounds above? Copinger was also a member of the Catholic Apostolic Church, a Protestant sect with a Catholic name. This may account for his Catholic initials F. X., which in Ireland always stand for FrancisXavier, co-founder of the Jesuits. For further details, see Cohn & Petersen’s article, which makes a strong case for this Copinger.
John Gordon explains why F X Coppinger is Preserved and why he is described in the following parenthesis as a hot fellow:
“Preserved Coppinger (a hot fellow in his night, may the mouther of guard have mastic on him!):” preserved ginger—a popular kitchen commodity, hot in the mouth. Probable echo of “ginger will be hot in the mouth,” from Twelfth Night. “Mastic” as in “masticate.” Also as “mercy,” the gist being that for all his advertised devoutness—indeed, his being a man of the cloth—he’s still hot stuff in the bedroom, may God (and his blessed mother) forgive him. (Gordon 55.18-19)
Gordon’s opinion is vindicated when we recall the following parenthesis from the original Encounter in the Park, which explains why HCE’s breath was smoked sardinish:
(though this seems in some cumfusium with the chapstuck ginger which, as being of sours, acids, salts, sweets and bitters compompounded, we know him to have used as chawchaw for bone, muscle, blood, flesh and vimvitals) (RFW 028.30-33)
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| Cruel Coppinger |
Gordon also suggests another candidate for Coppinger:
55.19: “Coppinger:” to the list of possible Coppingers, I suggest adding the subject of the ballad “Cruel Coppinger:”
Will you hear of the cruel Coppinger?
He came from a foreign kind;
He was brought to us by the salt water,
He was carried away by the wind.
This Coppinger, anyway, is certifiably a “hot fellow”—a Viking or Viking type who seized part of the Cornish coast and was usually represented as carrying a whip. You can read about him in Dickens’ All the Year Round, Vol. XVI, number 399 (December 15, 1866), pp. 537-40. Although he was married—said to have regularly tied his wife to a bedpost, in fact—I’m not aware of any tradition of multiple children. Coppinger also appears as a character in The Roar of the Sea by S. Baring-Gould, 1892. A Cornish wrecker, he is still being called “Cruel Coppinger.” (Gordon 55.19)
For other possible candidates, see Walter Arthur Copinger’s History of the Copingers or Coppingers of the County of Cork, Ireland, and the Counties of Suffolk and Kent, England. The author is uncertain whether the Irish Copingers came from England or the English from Ireland, but he is certain that both were ultimately of Danish stock.
The Archdeacon, of course, can only be Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral. Both dean and deacon come from the Latin: decanus, a chief of ten, one set over ten persons.
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| Giambattista Vico |
Cycling with Vico
As the tale is told, the passengers gaze out the window and behold the cycle of the seasons, which symbolizes for us GiambattistaVico’s) cycle of human history. Note how the description of passengers on a train becomes confused with the earlier description of passengers sitting in an Irish jaunting car. There the jaunting car was a visavis, or inside jaunting car, where the passengers sit facing each other. Here it is an outside jaunting car, where they sit back to back:
Cycloptically through the windowdisks and with eddying awes the round eyes of the rundreisers, back to back, buck to bucker, on their airish chaunting car, beheld with intouristing anterestedness the clad pursue the bare, the bare the green, the green the frore, the frore the cladagain, as their convoy wheeled encirculingly abound the gigantig’s lifetree, our fireleaved loverlucky blomsterbohm, phoenix in our woodlessness, haughty, cacuminal, erubescent (repetition!), whose roots they be asches with lustres of peins. (RFW 044.37-045.04)
Cycloptically Cyclically : with one eye, like a cyclops.
German: Fensterscheibe, windowpane (literally window-disk).
German: Rundreise, tour.
pursue the bear Exit, pursued by a bear—a famous stage direction from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
Sackerson Loose clad ... bare ... green ... frore Obviously these refer to the four seasons. FWEET suggests the following equations:
clad autumn (clouded).
bare summer (unclouded).
green spring (lush).
frore winter (frozen). Frore is an archaic word meaning frozen, very cold.
I, however, assumed that clad and bare referred to the leaves on the trees. But the correct temporal order is frore–green–bare–clad and frore is definitely winter, so FWEET is probably correct.
the gigantig’s lifetree This passage blends together some notable trees:
Yggdrasil The world ash tree in Norse mythology and Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
The Tree of Life in Genesis.
phoenix in our woodlessness The Phoenix Monument in the Phoenix Park depicts the Phoenix rising from its fiery ashes atop a tall column: fireleaved ... asches. Like the Wellington Monument, it is clearly ithyphallic. The woodlessness reminds us of John Wyse’s comment in Ulysses: As treeless as Portugal we’ll be soon (Ulysses 313).
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| The Phoenix Monument, Dublin |
haughty, cacuminal, erubescent HCE. cacuminal means pointed, which fits the Wellington Monument, as haughty fits the Duke himself. But erubescent means growing red, or blushing. Thomas Lawrence gave the Duke rosy cheeks in his famous portrait of 1815-16, but perhaps this refers to the fiery Phoenix.
The Archicadenus
The remaining twenty-odd lines of this paragraph describe the effect the Archdeacon has on his listeners when he, in his turn, rehearses the familiar story. He not only evokes that salient moment when HCE solemnly points towards the Wellington Monument and swears that he is innocent of the crimes laid at his door, just as the sexton Fox Goodman is ringing the Angelus bell, but also the scene in the English garden when the Cad retells the tale to the three schoolboys on a Sunday evening, while shooting at empty stout bottles. The Archdeacon’s retelling is theatrical and dramatic, like an actor’s performance on the stage.
These lines are replete with echoes of words and phrases that were included in earlier versions of the story. Let’s take a look at them.
For as often as the Archicadenus Cadenus, an anagram of the Latin: decanus, dean, was the pseudonym Jonathan Swift bestowed upon himself in his poem Cadenus and Vanessa, which concerns his affair with Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa). But, of course, Archicadenus also includes an allusion to the Cad with a pipe (RFW 028.08).
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| Cadenus & Vanessa |
pleacing aside his Irish Field The Irish for field is páirc, as in Páirc an Fhionnusice, the Irish name for the Phoenix Park. So, in a sense, the Phoenix Park is an Irish Field. The Irish Field and Gentleman’s Gazette was published in Dublin between 1894 and 1933, written for gentlemen by gentlemen (Leo Powell).
hearing in this new reading of the part The account of HCE’s Oedipal Encounter with the King outside his tavern in Chapter I.2 was described as the Reading of Hofed-ben-Edar (RFW 024.09-10).
seasiders HCE’s refuge from his persecutors was on the southeast bluffs of the stranger stepshore (RFW 041.40 f).
the cockshyshooter’s The Cad retells the story to the three schoolboys while shooting with Annie Oakley deadliness at empty stout bottles. A cockshy was originally a blood sport in which weighted sticks were thrown at a rooster tied to a stake. A later, harmless variant, known as the coconut shy, was a fair game in which participants threw balls at coconuts in an attempt to knock them them off their stands. The original Encounter in the Park was depicted as a shoot-out between two gunslingers in the Wild West (RFW 028.20 ff).
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| The Cockshy |
evensong The Cad’s retelling took place on at evenchime (RFW 042.02). Evensong is a Protestant religious service that takes place in the early hours of the evening.
evocation of the doomed but always ventriloquent Agitator As we have seen above, HCE & the Cad’s Encounter was compared to the fatal duel between the Daniel O’Connell and John Norcot D’Esterre in 1815. O’Connell agitated successfully for Catholic Emancipation and unsuccessfully for the Repeal of the Union, for which he acquired the nickname The Agitator—especially in the hostile British press. When Catholic Emancipation was granted in 1829 by the British Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, O’Connell became known as The Liberator.
the billows In the Encounter in the Park, we first met HCE as he was billowing across the wide expanse of our greatest park (RFW 028.05-06).
aginsst the dusk of skumring In the original Encounter in the Park, HCE hears the Angelus being rung above the skirling of harsh Mother East (ie above the shrill sound of the harsh east wind). Danish: skumring, dusk. Sound has been replaced by sight, but note the -ring, which evokes the sound of the Angelus bells.
(would that fane be Saint Muezzin’s calling No, it is actually the speckled church in which Fox Goodman, the bellmaster is ringing the Angelus (RFW 028.25-27). A fane is a temple. The muezzin is the man who calls Muslims to prayer from atop a minaret. Joyce borrowed the speckled church from the Gaelic name for Falkirk in Scotland, but if he also had in mind a specific church close to the Phoenix Park, it has never been identified. We are told it lay over the wastes to south, which could place it anywhere south of the Phoenix Park.
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| Trinity Church, Falkirk |
his manslayer’s gunwielder protended towards that overgrown leadpencil HCE pointing towards the Wellington Monument: pointed at an angle of thirtytwo degrees towards his duc de Fer’s overgrown milestone (RFW 029.05-06).
ollover ... Roland A Roland for an Oliver—from the equally matched heroes of French Arthurian romances, Roland and Olivier—means tit for tat, getting as good as you give. It is more or less the same as the Latin phrase quid pro quo, which was parodied just a few lines earlier: quoquipros (RFW 044.32).
as Roland rung Here, Roland is the name of the alarm bell in the Belfry of Ghent. It is mentioned in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Belfry of Bruges, but Joyce may have known of it from other sources. Fox Goodman’s bell is not named: the ten ton tonuant thunderous tenor toller (RFW 028.26-27).
ollover his exculpatory features ... a wee dropeen of grief about to sillonise his jouejous In the previous paragraph, oily sweat ran down the ends of HCE’s moustache: oleaginosity of ancestralolosis sgocciolated down the both pendencies of his mutsohito liptails (RFW 044.15-17). French: sillon, furrow : joue, cheek.
the ghost of resignation diffused a spectral Echoes several allusions to the ghost of Hamlet’s father, as we have seen above.
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| Hamlet and the Ghost |
appealingness Another echo of the peal of Fox Goodman’s bell. It also anticipates the allusion to Robert Peel two lines below. The familiar L/R Interchange once again blends sight (appearing) and sound (a pealing).
Ocean Voyages
On the face of it, this retelling of the familiar story takes place in a train carriage, but there are a number of words and expressions in this paragraph that paint the scene in decidedly nautical colours:
with a dignified bow bow?
mastic mast?
brimmers brim (obsolete for sea, ocean)?
Cycloptically through the windowdisks portholes? “We are looking through a (porthole-shaped) window as if it were a single large eye” (Gordon 55.22-3).
eddying awes eddying waves?
convoy one or more merchant ships sailing in company under the protection of naval vessels.
timesported acorss the yawning (abyss) transported across the yawning abyss.
seasiders
plangorpound plangent, the sound of waves breaking on the shore.
billows
Thounawahallya Irish: tonn a’ mhaith sháile, wave of the good salt-sea.
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| Valhalla |
Reef
whalrosmightiadd German: Walross, walrus.
skum- scum, seafoam, bubbles.
holy places holy blazes = St Elmo’s Fire?
drowm ... gloat drown ... float.
the fate of his waters the face of the waters.
If any of this was intentional—many of these are, admittedly, long shots—the passage may be an anticipation of the mock-epic tale in II.3: How Kersse the Tailor Made a Suit of Clothes for the Norwegian Captain, which is yet another retelling of the familiar Oedipal Encounter. There, HCE plays the rôle of a Viking pirate. There is also the story of Tristan and Isolde in II.4, which is set on a ship sailing between Ireland and Cornwall.
Miscellaneous Matters
There are so many allusions packed into this paragraph that it would take several articles to examine them all. Instead, I will conclude this article by mentioning just a few outstanding details.
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| The Castlebar Races |
the bump at Castlebar The rout of the English before an invading French army in County Mayo during the 1798 United Irishmen’s Rebellion was dubbed the Castlebar Races. This may be an echo of the Baldoyle races, during which Treacle Tom and Frisky Shorty overheard the Sodality Director retelling the familiar story to Philly Thurnston (RFW 031.02 ff). Also, as John Anderson notes, the Prankquean was barred from the Castle (Anderson 106).
(mat and far!) This parenthesis qualifies Castlebar, with which it rhymes, but I do not understand the allusion. Is it a Wakean form of metaphor, meaning that the bump at Castlebar is to be interpreted figuratively as an allusion to the Castlebar Races? In Vico’s Scienza Nuova, metaphor is the most necessary and frequent of the four poetic tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (Vico 116 ff).
to a beam of sunshine upon a coffinplate Allegedly, the Irish politician and orator John Philpot Curran once compared someone’s smile to a silver plate on a coffin. On 26 February 1835, during a debate in the British House of Commons, Daniel O’Connell quoted Curran, referring to Lord Stanley’s smile, but somehow the phrase came to be mistakenly applied to Robert Peel, who is also mentioned by O’Connell in the same speech. According to the independent researcher S Ball, Curran’s remark was directed against a solemn friend called Hoare, and the actual phrase Curran used was like tin clasps on an oaken coffin. But I’m sure Joyce knew none of this and assumed, like everyone else, that Daniel O’Connell minted the quote and applied it to Peel.
And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.
