Inn the Days of the Bygning (RFW 045.27-35)

This short section of Chapter I.3 of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake continues the Cad’s Side of the Story.

First-Draft Version

This paragraph was not part of the original draft of this chapter, which Joyce began in November 1923. An early version of it, however, was included in the draft that appeared in June 1927 in the third issue of Eugene Jolas & Elliott Paul’s literary journal transition:

Not olderwise Inn the days of the Bygning would our Traveller remote, unfriended, from van Demon’s Land, some lazy skald or maundering pote, lift wearywilly his slowcut snobsic eyes to the semisigns of his zooteac and lengthily lingering along flaskneck, cracket cup, downtrodden brogue, turfsod, wildbroom, cabbageblad, stockfisch, longingly learn that there at the Angel were herberged for him poteen and tea and praties and baccy and wine width woman wordth warbling: and informally quasi-begin to presquesm’ile to queasithin’ (Nonsense! There was not very much windy Nous blowing at the given moment through the hat of Mr Melancholy Slow!) (Jolas & Paul 37)

This is identical to the final version published in 1939—which is something one can hardly ever say of Joyce’s early drafts. Ever the tinkerer, Joyce could never leave well enough alone, but must always be adding more and more layers of obfuscation to his text. For once, however, it seems that he was happy with his first thoughts. In The Restored Finnegans Wake, however, Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon have made three minor emendations:

They inserted a comma after zooteac and.
They replaced cracket cup with cracketcup.
They replaced quasi-begin with quasibegin.

In each case, they restored what Joyce had first written. To be strictly accurate, what was published in transition in June 1927 was not quite the first draft. For that, see the James Joyce digital Archive, which includes the following passage from one of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake notebooks:

Not otherwise inn the days of the bygning did a traveller, some lazy skald or maundering pote, lift wearily his slowcut eyes to the signs of the auberge and, lengthily lingering over along flaskneck, cracktcup, trodden hoof, strawluft wet and stockfish, know that there herberged for him poteen & tea & praties tobacco & wine & woman & song & smile to think (VI.B.18:41a, slightly emended)

Parnell Gesturing towards the Wellington Monument

Meaning

The preceding paragraph concluded by rehearsing once again the crucial moment during HCE’s Oedipal Encounter with the Cad in the Phoenix Park when he pointed towards the Wellington Monument and swore that he was innocent of the crimes that were being laid at his door. As he did so, the ghost of a smile disfigured his face, similar to a beam of sunshine upon a coffinplate.

In the present paragraph this smile is compared to that which appears on the face of a benighted traveller—a wandering poet—as he looks up at the signs of the zodiac outside a tavern, and anticipates the pleasures that await him inside: wine, women and song.

I have never really understood why HCE’s gesture is so memorable. Recently, I noticed that the statue of Charles Stewart Parnell at the top of O’Connell Street is gesturing towards the west—in the general direction of the Wellington Monument in the Phoenix Park. There is not the ghost of a smile on Parnell’s dour face, and he is not really pointing. Nevertheless, it is an interesting coincidence.

Of course, there is much more to these nine lines than the simple picture of HCE gesturing towards the Wellington Monument, whatever that gesture means. So let’s take a closer look.

Map of the Parnell and Wellington Monuments

Danish: bygning building.
Traveller, remote, unfriended ... some lazy skald or maundering pote ... Mr Melancholy Slow The preceding paragraph included an allusion to a passage in Oliver Goldsmith’s brief biography of Thomas Parnell. The opening lines of this paragraph parody the first two lines of another of Goldsmith’s works, his philosophical poem The Traveller, or A Prospect of Society:

Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow, Or by the lazy Scheld, or wandering Po

van Demon’s land Van Diemen’s Land, the earlier name of Tasmania, after the Dutch explorer and colonial governor Anthony van Diemen. Joyce originally wrote our traveller from Nau Sealand, which was taken from a phrase in Thomas Macaulay’s essay Ranke’s History of the Popes. The passage is worth quoting at length, as the context is relevant to this paragraph:

The Papacy remains, not in decay, not mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigor. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustine, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which, a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s. (Macaulay 2-3).

Weary Willie & Tired Tim

skald A Scandinavian poet of the Viking age. In Annie Walsh’s Scandinavian Relations with Ireland during the Viking Period we read:

On the other hand, Icelandic sources mention at least three skálds who made their way to Ireland during the tenth century. (Walsh 71)

wearywilly Weary Willie was one of a pair of lazy tramps in the English comic-strip Weary Willie and Tired Tim, inspired by Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. They were created by Tom Browne) and first published by in 1896 by the newspaper magnate Alfred Harmsworth, a native of Chapelizod.
snobstick (slang) a scab, a worker who refuses to join a strike.

Semisigns in His Zooteac

The most striking thing in this paragraph is the short list of semisigns in his zooteac:

signs of the zodiac The twelve astrological signs corresponding to the twelve constellations of the night sky through which the Sun passes on its apparent annual journey around the Earth. Here it is unclear whether our Traveller is beholding the constellations in the night sky or looking at the images on a signboard hanging outside HCE’s tavern. As this is Finnegans Wake, the one does not exclude the other.
Ancient Greek: σῆμα [sēma], sign : omen, portent : barrow, tumulus, tomb : constellation. All these meanings are relevant.
Ancient Greek: ζῷον [zōon], animal : figure, image (not necessarily of an animal). All but one of the twelve signs of the zodiac depict animals. The exception is Libra, the Balance.
Irish: teach, house. A zooteach would then be an animal house. This could refer to Noah’s Ark as well as to an actual animal house in the nearby Dublin Zoo.
German: Herberge, inn, hostel.
Norwegian Bokmål & Nynorsk: herberge, hostel, lodging, shelter.
Danish, Dutch: herberg, inn, hostel, lodging.
French: auberge, inn, hostel. In the first draft, Joyce wrote signs of the auberge, before changing it to semisigns in his zooteac. The former reminds me of Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne, which were quite new in 1927.

The Constellations of the Zodiac

Only seven of the twelve signs of the zodiac are listed, which is significant in itself:

flaskneck, cracketcup, downtrodden brogue, turfsod, wildbroom, cabbageblad, stockfisch ...

This is followed by another list, which seems to mirror that of the semisigns:

poteen and tea and praties and baccy and wine width woman wordth warbling

Are there six or seven items in this second list? woman wordth warbling obviously means women worth celebrating in song (warble, to sing like a bird). But wordth could also be interpreted as with, which suggests that warbling is also a noun, the seventh item in the list: women with song. As we have seen, Joyce originally wrote: & wine & woman & song. This echoes the title of Johann Strauss’s waltz Wein, Weib und Gesang, which was taken from Johann Heinrich Voss (JJDA: 41(a))).

This short paragraph has attracted a lot of attention from Joycean scholars. Between 1976 and 1979 no less than four articles appeared in A Wake Newslitter devoted to the semisigns in his zooteac. Roland McHugh was the first to give it a crack:

56.24-5 [RFW 045.30-31] gives seven signs of the zodiac, some only of which belong in the zoohouse. Three appear as pictograms of the astrological sign, three as pictograms [of] the constellation and one by a reference to its meaning: (AWN 13:4:75)

AWN 13:4:75

Correspondences with the subsequent list of the Traveller’s interpretations of the signs become increasingly difficult to posit. (AWN 13:4:75)

Next up was Nathan Halper in August 1977:

Roland McHugh is almost certainly right. In AWN, XIII.4, 75, he tells us that ‘semisigns of his zooteac’ (56.23) is followed in the next two lines by seven of these signs. His list begins with Aries —as, indeed, it should. It continues: Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Aquarius, Pisces. That is, numbers 1-5 ... 11-12.

Some of the identifications seem a little tenuous. For example, the pictograph of the constellation Aquarius doesn’t look like a ‘cabbageblad’—a bit of cabbage. Maybe the reader does not see a fine point that McHugh is making. Or McHugh didn’t see an even finer point that Joyce himself is making. Or it may be that Joyce himself had to strain a little. None the less, enough of the suggested identifications are directly on target. So much so it seems more than likely that the other words in the passage refer to signs of the Zodiac.

As for ‘cabbageblad’—the order that McHugh gives is plausible. If Aquarius is the eleventh sign, it should follow that this word somehow represents Aquarius.

I suppose that we could force the identification. If that is what the order demands. we could play some ingenious verbal trick (as only we Joyceans can). But I would suggest a different order. 1-6 ... 12 is at least as possible. If so—the penultimate sign is not Aquarius but Virgo. The result is à la mode de Joyce.

‘Cabbage’ is the female pudenda. (See Partridge, Dictionary of Slang.) ‘Virgin’ suggests something that is young, something not yet ripe. ‘Cabbageblad’—a bit of female pudenda. (AWN 14:4:61)

Roland McHugh & Petr Škrabánek

In December 1977, Petr Škrabánek had a go:

Nathan Halper (AWN, XIV, 4, 61) suggests that cabbageblad (56.25) is ‘a bit of female pudenda’, ergo Virgo. Roland McHugh AWN, XIII, 4, 75), on the other hand, identified cabbageblad as Aquarius. I believe that McHugh is right for wrong reasons. It is true, as Halper points out, that the constellation of Aquarius does not look at all as cabbageblad. However, the symbol of Aquarius is two wavy lines which look very much like a crumpled cabbageleaf. In Ireland children are not brought by stork but they are found under a cabbage leaf. Joyce was born under a sign of Aquarius. True, he was born through the female pudenda but he was also told that he was found under a cabbageleaf. These two statements are not contradictory. On the contrary, they are perhaps the key to the slang meaning of ‘cabbage’. The symbol of Aquarius represents prophetically the stream of water, i.e. FW. And Joyce is the waterbaby. Don’t you know he was kaldt a bairn of the brine, Wasserbourne the waterbaby? (198.07). He is the Waterman the Brayned (104.13). Naturally, these expressions also refer to Noah with whom Joyce identified himself (Letters, III, 364). The zooteach is also Noah’s ark and the seven signs of zodiac allude to the seven colours of iris which the weeping exiled Joyce Traveller (maundering pote with snobsic eyes) sees through his teary glaucomatous eyes. (AWN 14:6:98)

McHugh returned to the subject three years after his first foray into the field:

In my account of 56.24-5 (AWN XIII.4,75) I stated that ‘Correspondences with the subsequent list of the Traveller’s interpretations of the signs become increasingly difficult to posit’. I now see that the key to these correspondences lies in recognizing the items in the first list as inn signs advertising those in the second list. That this was Joyce’s logic becomes evident on examining the following deleted passage in notebook VI.B.6.154:

innsigns bottleneck = poteen broken cup = tea old shoe on pole = ? [Joyce’s question mark] wisp of straw = bed broom = whiskey sod of turf = tobacco (AWN 16:4:62)

With the help of these equations and the two lists in the published text we can construct a table of possible correspondences:

Poteen (illicitly distilled spirits) comes in bottles.

Taurus begins with T, while tea comes in cups.

Shoes—like Gemini, the Twins—come in pairs. But praties (ie potatoes)?

Was it known in Joyce’s day that tobacco causes cancer? In 1912 Isaac Adler.jpg) theorized that smoking might be to blame for the growing incidence of lung cancer (Proctor 87).

Lions are wild. Wild Broom, Cytisus scoparius, is also known as Scotch Broom—hence the whisky.

The equation of cabbageblad = Aquarius is still a little problematic. It is certainly not obvious why a cabbage leaf should be associated with the Water Carrier.

German Stockfisch, dried cod (or similar fish), stockfish. John Gordon notes that “stockfish” has a rich history of signifying either old cunt or old cock, but I don’t see how this is relevant to Pisces or warbling (Gordon 56.25).

Echoes

This passage echoes a line or two from the opening pages of the book (Inn the days of the Bygning ... quasibegin):

O here here how hoth sprowled met the duskt the father of fornicationists but (O my shining stars and body!) how hath fanespanned most high heaven the skysign of soft advertisement!

With the advantage of hindsight, we can now see that this mysterious passage was hinting at a confrontation (met) between the Devil (the father of fornicationists) and a celestial creature, like the Egyptian goddess Nut), whose star-spotted body—tattooed with the signs of the zodiac—spans the heavens:

Nut

This could be a foreshadowing of the children’s game Devils & Angels in II.1, The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies. It may also allude to the original Oedipal Encounter, between Oedipus and his father, Laius. The father bit the dust, while the son became a fornicator.

hoth Howth, which is a peninsula. French: presqu’île, peninsula.
the skysign of soft advertisement This is usually understood to be a reference to the rainbow that appeared in the sky after Noah’s Flood (Genesis 9:13). The Noachic allusions in the present paragraph are striking enough to explain why only seven signs of the zodiac are mentioned. This skysign also refers to an advertisement on the roof a building, so constructed that its letters stand out against the sky, as well as an advertisement in sky-writing (FWEET).

Whenever a list of seven items occurs in Finnegans Wake, one always suspects that it represents the familiar laundry list of HCE’s Seven Items of Clothing. John Gordon suggests that the seven items in this zodiacal list are not so much items of clothing as accoutrements a traveller might carry:

With some leeway, all plausibly items that might be on the person of a traveler, although “item” is not quite the word for the last three. See notes to 56.24-5, 56.25. As for the second-to-last, “cabbageblad” (Danish cabbage leaf), perhaps the down-and-out equivalent of a fig leaf. For “turfsod,” see “Grace:” “There was many a good man went to the penny-a-week school with a sod of turf under his oxter.” (Gordon 56.24-5)

Finally, the phallic overtones of the passage

Phall if you but will, rise you must: (RFW 004.06-07)

may also be echoed in wearywilly ... lengthily lingering. Perhaps Gordon’s “stockfish” remark is relevant after all.

Clive Hart

Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake

In 1962 the Australian scholar Clive Hart published his classic study of Finnegans Wake. As we have seen, he would later repudiate much of what he wrote in Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, but in my opinion this is still one of the most elucidating analyses of Joyce’s masterpiece. In Chapter Four, Spatial Cycles I: The Circle, Hart theorizes that Shem and Shaun, the two sons of HCE, circle the globe in Finnegans Wake: Shaun travels from east to west between Dublin and America, while Shem travels from north to south between Dublin and Australia. Shaun is the Angel, and the US is his Heaven, the Promised Land. Shem is the Devil, and Australia is his Hell, the Underworld:

... in Ulysses, as everyone now takes for granted, the pattern is that of the labyrinthine city, on the plan of which line after line is traced until the miniature Odyssey is complete; in Finnegans Wake, as we should expect of an essentially archetypal book, though all these patterns and more are subsumed, the underlying structure is simpler, even if surface details sometimes tend to obscure it. The two main spatial configurations governing its shape are those which have always had pre-eminence in western symbology—the circle and the cross, together with their combination in a three-dimensional figure consisting of two circles intersecting on the surface of a sphere. [See Figure III, below.]

Circle and Cross (Hart 117, Figure III)

The importance that Joyce attached to these structural symbols may be judged from the fact that he assigned the mandala symbol

The Mandala: Joyce’s Siglum for the Viconian Cycle

to the key passage in I.6 dealing with the pattern of cycles in Finnegans Wake (question 9 [RFW 143]) . The intersecting circles are of course also represented in the two-dimensional diagram on page 293 [RFW 226]. (Hart 110)

The Vesica Piscis, or Euclid 1:1 (RFW 226)

Within this world neither Shem nor Shaun does any travelling at all outside Chapelizod, but at higher symbolic levels the ‛circumcentric megacycles’ of their respective journeys take in, first the whole of Ireland—‛from the antidulibnium onto the serostaatarean’ (310.07 [RFW 238.28])—then Europe, the globe, and finally the heavenly spheres ... Their orbits, like those of Plato’s Same and Other, are inclined to each other. Shaun follows an east-west trajectory, while Shem prefers to travel north-south, passing through the antipodes. (Hart 111 ... 112-113)

For my own part, I have hypothesized that in the “real world” of Finnegans Wake—assuming there is such a thing—the landlord of the Mullingar House in Chapelizod has two sons, one of whom has emigrated to America, the other to Australia. But this is pure speculation on my part. En passant, one might also recall the Celtic Cross, which consists of a circle (possibly representing the Celtic Sun God) superimposed on a cross (possibly representing the Celtic Earth Goddess).

Like the Tsar in Stephen Hero, Shaun is a ‛besotted Christ’ (SH 112), a holy idiot and scapegoat-Mediator incapable of grasping even the truth about himself. As a ‛deliverer of softmissives’ it is his job to voyage ‛round the world in forty mails’ (237.14 [RFW 187.18-19]). His travels take him along one arm of the cross of the cardinal points of the compass, symbolised by the Christian cross and the Church which is built in its image. The representative of a worn-out Age, Shaun moves westward to the bottom end of this cross where, a sun-god sinking below the horizon, he will rejoin the mute earth from which he sprang. (Hart 114)

Celtic Cross, Glendalough

In Book III, Shaun’s trajectory will be reversed, as he is depicted floating eastwards down the Liffey towards Dublin City in a Guinness barrel.

While Shaun’s east-west journey is quasi-horizontal, Shem’s displacement is in the vertical north-south direction. Shem is the thinker, the artist who plumbs the depths and loses his soul in the process ... A Miltonic Satan, though less attractive, Shem finds his Pandemonium in the hot and hellish antipodes of Australia—‛down under’, as it is popularly called. (Hart 116 ... 117)

Shem’s and Shaun’s cycles intersect in the first place in Dublin, where a conflict between the two always takes place, just as Christ and Satan find common ground on earth, midway between Heaven and Hell. This pattern is roughly reflected in Joyce’s own experience. His several trips back to Dublin after his initial flight always brought him into conflict with the Shaun-figures of that city, and a number of those Shauns, notably Byrne and Gogarty, did in fact go to the United States. (Hart 117-118)

In the present paragraph, our Traveller, like Shem, is a poet (skald ... pote) from the Hell of down under (van Demon’s land). The tavern he visits is called the Angel, which brings Shaun into the mix. This confrontation between Devil and Angel anticipates the children’s game in II.1, The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies. This allows us to identify the woman wordth warbling as their sister Issy, who stands at the apex of the brothers’ isosceles love triangle.

Van Diemen’s Land

Hart’s comments on the present paragraph are apt:

The facts of life, as we know, played into Joyce’s hands with astonishing frequency: in addition to the general aura of death and damnation associated with ‛New Holland’ there was the original name of the island-state of Tasmania—‛van Diemen’s Land’—which so easily and so inevitably becomes ‛van Demon’s Land’ (56.21 [RFW 045.28]). This is Shem's spiritual home; it is from here, as a Goldsmithian Traveller (‛some lazy skald or maundering pote’—the Devil is traditionally a wanderer), that he comes to Ireland, ‛Inn the days of the Bygning’, just as Satan made his way from Hell to tempt Eve. According to certain ‛toughnecks’ quoted by Shaun (169.02 [134.01-02]), Shem is in fact a black Australian ‛aboriginal’. If he was there from the beginning, he is evidently a Manichean co-eternal Satan, which is a sorry thing for Shaun’s vanity to have to admit. (Hart 118-119)

Chapter Four of Hart’s Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake is well wordth reading in full.

Joyce and Wyndham Lewis

We never learn what the maundering pote quasi-thinks, because the rest of this paragraph is missing. Instead, the narrative is interrupted by a short parenthetical passage:

queasithin’ ... (Nonsense! There was not very much windy Nous blowing at the given moment through the hat of Mr Melancholy Slow!)

The windy noise that blows when Mr Melancholy Slow is talking through his hat could simply refer back to the skirling of harsh Mother East—the shrill sound of the east wind—that almost drowned out the ringing of the Angelus during HCE and the Cad’s Encounter in the Park (RFW 028.25). On the first page of Chapter Four of his book, however, Clive Hart invokes the writer Wyndham Lewis:

Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis chided Joyce for being time-centred rather than space-centred and there is a sense in which his argument is valid, but, as Joyce asked Frank Budgen, ‛is it more than ten per cent of the truth?’ In so far as he consistently organises his creations according to almost visible spatial patterns, Joyce is surely one of the most spatially conscious of writers. (Hart 109)

Wyndham Lewis was a British author and artist, an insufferable snob who went out of his way to belittle Joyce the writer. In an earlier article we read Richard Ellmann’s account of Joyce’s first meeting with Lewis and T S Eliot in Paris in 1920. That was taken, for the most part, from Lewis’s book Blasting and Bombardiering, which devotes a short chapter to his First Meeting with James Joyce. Joyce entertained the two men during their brief stay in Paris, always insisting on paying their cab fairs and restaurant bills:

Eliot and myself remained in Paris for some days ... All of our time was passed in the hospitable company of James Joyce ... Except for our hotel bill—which he made no attempt, as far as I know, to settle—we lived free of charge ...

‛I find our friend,’ said I, ‛very affable and easy don’t you, if a shade stilted?’ But Eliot found him definitely burdensome, and arrogant.

‛I do not think he is arrogant,’ I said, astonished at this description of Pound’s proud protégé, who seemed to me to be a civil, unassuming man enough, of agreeable and accommodating manners, except for his obsession regarding economic independence, which was harmless after all ...

T S Eliot

‛He may not seem so!’ Eliot answered, in his grim Bostonian growl. ‛He may not seem arrogant, no.’

‛You think he is as proud as Lucifer?’

‛I would not say Lucifer!’ Eliot was on his guard at once, at this loose use of the surname of the Evil Principle.

‛You would not say Lucifer? Well, I daresay he may be under the impression that he is being “as proud as Lucifer,” or some bogtrotting humbug of that order. What provincials they are, bless their beastly brogues!”

‛Provincials—yes!’ Eliot agreed with contemptuous unction. ‛Provincials.’

‛However he is most polite.’

‛He is polite.’

‛I have never succeeded in getting out of the door behind him, have you? He is very You First. He is very After you!”

‛Oh yes. He is polite, he is polite enough. But he is exceedingly arrogant. Underneath. That is why he is so polite. I should be better pleased if he were less polite.’ Eliot was very grim.

‛I personally don’t care if he is arrogant—all I ask, in the words of the New England literary chanty, is “a little god-darned seevility and not much of that!” But I should be surprised if he is really arrogant,’

‛No-o?’ Eliot was impressed by my persistence. ‛You may of course be right. It doesn’t matter.’ (Lewis 1967:296-297)

Joyce, Lewis & Eliot

Lewis was never more than begrudging in his praise of Joyce’s art:

I cannot see that any work of Joyce—except Ulysses—is very significant. It was about six or seven years ago that I first became acquainted with his writing. The Portrait of the Artist seemed to me a rather cold and priggish book. It was well done, like the Dubliners, which I have just read; and that was all that I could discover. Chamber Music would certainly not have secured its author a place ‘among the english poets,’—it would hardly even have set the Liffey on fire for five minutes. No writing of his before Ulysses would have given him anything but an honourable position as the inevitable naturalist-french-influenced member of the romantic Irish Revival—a Maupassant of Dublin, But without the sinister force of Flaubert’s disciple.

Ulysses was in a sense a different thing altogether. How far that is an effect of a merely technical order, resulting from stylistic complications and intensified display, with a Dubliners basis unchanged, or, further, a question of scale, and mechanical heaping up of detail, I should have only partly to decide here. But it places him—on that point every one is in agreement—very high in contemporary letters. (Lewis 1927:91)

It must have galled Wyndham Lewis to behold this Provincial with his beastly brogue being lauded as a great writer after the publication of Ulysses in 1922. Five years later Lewis published Time and Western Man, in which he turned his critical pen against his fellow modernists: Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and others.

First published in 1927, this is Wyndham Lewis’s most important book of criticism and philosophy. He turns against his fellow modernists, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, to show how they have unconsciously turned their supposedly revolutionary writing into a vehicle for ideologies that undermine real human creativity and progress. The heart of this critique is a devastating assault on metaphysical doctrines that, Lewis believed, robbed the human mind of its creative power and handed that power over to time as a vital principle animating matter. In some of Lewis’s most vivid writing, Bergson, Whitehead, Russell and William James are all mercilessly attacked for their implicit fatalism. (Goodreads)

Time and Western Man

Almost forty pages of Time and Western Man are devoted to Joyce. In contrast, only seventeen pages are devoted to Pound and eleven to Stein. Lewis cannot deny that Ulysses places Joyce very high in contemporary letters, but that is as far as his praise extends. The remainder of his chapter on Joyce is hostile.

Joyce is the poet of the shabby-genteel, impoverished intellectualism of Dublin. His world is the small middle-class one, decorated with a little futile ‘culture,’ of the supper and dance-party in The Dead. Wilde, more brilliantly situated, was an extremely metropolitan personage, a man of the great social world, a great lion of the London drawing-room. Joyce is steeped in the sadness and the shabbiness of the pathetic gentility of the upper shopkeeping class, slumbering at the bottom of a neglected province; never far, in its snobbishly circumscribed despair, from the pawn-shop and the ‘pub.’ (Lewis 1927:93)

The thesis of Time and Western Man is a curious one. Lewis condemns his fellow modernists for being time-centred rather than space-centred—for setting time up as a fourth dimension, as real and as existential as the three dimensions of space. What does that even mean? It is certainly a most original reason for condemning any writer.

I regard Ulysses as a time-book; and by that I mean that it lays its emphasis upon, for choice manipulates, and in a doctrinaire manner, the self-conscious time-sense, that has now been erected into a universal philosophy. This it does beneath the spell of a similar creative impulse to that by which Proust worked. The classical unities of time and place are buried beneath its scale, however, and in this All-life-in-a-day scheme there is small place for them. Yet at the outset they are solemnly insisted on as a guiding principle to be fanatically observed. And certainly some barbarous version of the classical formula is at work throughout, like a concerted daimon attending the author, to keep him obsessionally faithful to the time-place, or space-time, programme ... (Lewis 1927:100)

So he collected like a cistern in his youth the last stagnant pumpings of Victorian anglo-irish life. This he held steadfastly intact for fifteen years or more—then when he was ripe, as it were, he discharged it, in a dense mass, to his eternal glory. That was Ulysses ... (Lewis 1927:109)

So though Joyce has written a time-book, he has done it, I believe, to some extent, by accident. Proust, on the contrary, was stimulated to all his efforts precisely, by the thought of compassing a specifically time-creation—the Recherche du Temps Perdu. The unconscious artist has, in this case, the best of it, to my mind. Proust, on the other hand, romanticizes his Past, where Joyce (whose Present it is) does not ... (Lewis 1927:109-110)

The craftsman, pure and simple, is at the bottom of his work ... In Ulysses, if you strip away the technical complexities that envelop it, the surprises of style and unconventional attitudes that prevail in it, the figures underneath are of a remarkable simplicity, and of the most orthodoxly comic outline. Indeed, it is not too much to say that they are, most of them, walking clichés. (Lewis 1927:112)

James Joyce by Wyndham Lewis

The following passage probably informed the maundering pote of Finnegans Wake:

But if they are clichés, Stephan Dedalus is a worse or a far more glaring one. He is the really wooden figure. He is ‛the poet’ to an uncomfortable, a dismal, a ridiculous, even a pulverizing degree. His movements in the Martello-tower, his theatrical ‘bitterness,’ his cheerless, priggish stateliness, his gazings into the blue distance, his Irish Accent, his exquisite sensitiveness, his ‘pride’ that is so crude as to be almost indecent, the incredible slowness with which he gets about from place to place, up the stairs, down the stairs, like a funereal stage-king; the time required for him to move his neck, how he raises his hand, passes it over his aching eyes, or his damp brow, even more wearily drops it, closes his dismal little shutters against his rollicking irish-type of a friend (in his capacity of a type-poet), and remains sententiously secluded, shut up in his own personal Martello-tower (Lewis 113-114)

Joyce read Time and the Western Man carefully and took its criticisms seriously. In a letter to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, he acknowledged that Lewis’s hostile criticism is by far the best that has appeared (Letters III, 22 July 1932). He discussed that criticism with his English friend Frank Budgen, who later recollected the following remark:

I have commented elsewhere on Joyce’s reactions to the criticisms of Clutton Brock and H. G. Wells, but his remark when I mentioned Wyndham Lewis’s criticism of Ulysses is worth recording: ‛Allowing that the whole of what Lewis says about my book is true, is it more than ten per cent of the truth?’ (Budgen 359)

Adaline Glasheen

Joyce took Lewis’s criticisms seriously enough to respond to them in the pages of Finnegans Wake itself. In Adaline Glasheen’s Third Census of Finnegans Wake the entry for Lewis takes up more than a page—most entries in the Census comprise no more than two or three lines. Glasheen claims that Lewis’s chapter on Joyce, An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce, had appeared previously in Lewis’s literary journal Blast. This is not quite true. Only two issues of Blast were ever published—the first in June 1914 and the second in July 1915—both long before Ulysses saw the light of day. Glasheen has confused Blast with another of Lewis’s shortlived journals, The Enemy: A Review of Art and Literature, three numbers of which were published between 1927 and 1929. Curiously, Glasheen correctly identifies this as the original source for An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce in her entry on the similarly named D B Wyndham Lewis, a British humorist, who was not related to his more famous namesake.

Glasheen’s assessment of Wyndham Lewis is memorable:

W. L. seems to me to have been a clever, dirty infighter, spasmodically brilliant, a nasty piece of goods with detestable ideas (virulent anti-feminism, antisemitism, anti-nigger, anti-children, anti-anything-small), a perfectly splendid piece of literary copy. (Glasheen 166)

In her entry on the Jewish philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Glasheen links him with Lewis:

I have often read Time and Western Man without finding out what Wyndham Lewis means by “time,” but I am clear that Lewis hated Jews, primitives, children, and anything small, and said Joyce was all these things. So, I take it, Joyce teases Lewis by joining him to Lévy-Bruhl. (Glasheen 166)

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

Joyce’s response to Lewis’s criticism was that time-honoured recourse of Irish bards, the lampoon:

Joyce retaliated (see Goldsmith) in FW (then a work in progress) by using W. L. (it was a kind of afterthought) as the principal model for Shaun, especially Shaun as Professor Jones, a teacher of little boys who imagines himself pope (see Adrian IV, Mookse) ... W. L. then attacked Joyce and his works in the first part of The Childermass ... Joyce attacks W. L. not only in “No. 11” but as Brutus, Ondt, Enemy, Hound, Henry Carr, Lewis Carroll, Alice and—W. L. being Joyce’s identical opposite—he is frequently linked to Dedalus. W. L. is indicated by just about all permutations of “wind” and “nous” (see also Aeolus) and of “time” and “space.” The mutual savaging or flyting of Joyce and Lewis is extended, specific, detailed, and badly needs to be studied. Who won the flyting—I mean the real-life fighting, not the picture of it in the writing of Joyce and Lewis? I think that, for sheer nastiness and a fine instinct for his opponent’s jugular vein, Lewis won hands down; I think that, as the better literary artist, Joyce came out of the fight with a masterly picture of the Enemy. (Glasheen 166-167)

Lewis’s novel The Childermass, which was first published in 1928, parodies Joyce’s Work in Progress—early drafts of chapters of Finnegans Wake that had been appearing regularly in Eugene Jolas & Elliott Paul’s transition. As Glasheen points out, Lewis renews his attack on Joyce in the characters of Bailiff, Belcanto, Pullman, Sattersthwaite, and a moulting Phoenix. For example:

BAILIFF. ‘Ant add narfter thort wilt? nope one mild one just this dear Shaun as ever was comminxed wid Shem Hamp ant Japhet for luck (for he’s a great mixer is Master Joys of Potluck, Joys of Jingles, whom men call Crossword-Joys for his apt circumsohitions but whom the gods call just Joys or Shimmy, shut and short.—“Sure and oi will bighorror!” sez the dedalan Sham-up-to-date with a most genteelest soft-budding gem of a hipcbugh. “Oh solvite me”—bolshing in ers fist most mannerly—“Parn pardoner tis the cratur that causes me to bolshie and all and sure I partook a drop over the nine impransus for ther lardner’s empty save for the glassy skin of the cratur—short commons is short shrift and short weight ensues shortly upon the heels of Famine and the wind rises in voluntary in vacuo for we come like Irish and like wind we—arrah we’re born in a thdrop of bogjuice and we pops off in a splutter of shamfiz or sham pain.” (Lewis 1965:174-175)

The Childermass was the first part of a trilogy, Lewis’s masterpiece The Human Age. This was intended to be his Ulysses, but he abandoned it after completing the first part. He returned to it at the end of his life, completing parts two and three in 1955.

The Human Age

In the present paragraph, Joyce’s parting parenthesis

(Nonsense! There was not very much windy Nous blowing at the given moment through the hat of Mr Melancholy Slow!)

is a parody of the closing lines of the following passage from Time and Western Man:

Yet that the time-sense is really exasperated in Joyce in the fashion that it is in Proust, Dada, Pound or Miss Stein, may be doubted. He has a very keen preoccupation with the Past, it is certain; he does lay things down side by side, carefully dated; and added to that, he has some rather loosely and romantically held notion of periodicity. But I believe that all these things amount to with him is this: as a careful, even meticulous, craftsman, with a long training of doctrinaire naturalism, the detail—the time-detail as much as anything else—assumes an exaggerated importance for him. And I am sure that he would be put to his trumps to say how he came by much of the time-machinery that he possesses. Until he was told, I dare say that he did not know he had it, even; for he is ‘an instinctive,’ like Pound, in that respect; there is not very much reflection going on at any time inside the head of Mr. James Joyce. That is indeed the characteristic condition of the craftsman, pure and simple. (Lewis 1927:106)

Peter Chrisp has an excellent overview of the relevance of Wyndham Lewis to Finnegans Wake on his blog From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay. I heartily recommend it.

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

References

Frank Budgen, Further Recollections of James Joyce, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1972)
Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York (1944)
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake, University of California Press, Berkeley, California (1977)
Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller, John Sharpe, London (1827)
Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois (1962)
David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1963)
Eugene Jolas & Elliot Paul (editors), transition, Number 3, Shakespeare and Co, Paris (1927)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, The Viking Press, New York (1958, 1966)
James Joyce, Stuart Gilbert (editor) & Richard Ellmann (editor), The Letters of James Joyce, Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Viking Press, New York (1957, 1966)
James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Chatto and Windus, London (1927)
Wyndham Lewis, The Childermass, John Calder, London (1965)
Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, Calder and Boyars Ltd, London (1967)
Wyndham Lewis, An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce, The Enemy, Volume 1, Frank Cass and Company Limited, London (1968)
Thomas Macaulay, The Complete Writings of Lord Macaulay, Volume 15, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston (1900)
Robert N Proctor, The History of the Discovery of the Cigarette–Lung Cancer Link: Evidentiary Traditions, Corporate Denial, Global Toll, Tobacco Control, Volume 21, Issue 2, Pages 87-91, British Medical Association, London (2012)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
Annie Walsh, Scandinavian Relations with Ireland during the Viking Period, The Talbot Press Limited, Dublin (1922)

Image Credits

Weary Willie & Tired Tim: Percy Cocking (artist), Illustrated Chips, Amalgamated Press, Public Domain
Petr Škrabánek: Copyright Unknown, Fair Use
Van Diemen’s Land: W Belch and J Phelps, London (1822), Public Domain
Wyndham Lewis: George Charles Beresford (photographer), National Portrait Gallery, London, Public Domain
T S Eliot (1923): Lady Ottoline Morrell (photographer), National Portrait Gallery, London, Public Domain
James Joyce by Wyndham Lewis: Wyndham Lewis (artist), © The Estate of Wyndham Lewis, National Gallery of Ireland, Fair Use
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl: Anonymous Photograph (1920), Public Domain

Finnegans Wake - A Prescriptive Guide

22 January 2023

Inn the Days of the Bygning

First-Draft Version

Meaning

Semisigns in His Zooteac

Echoes

Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake

Joyce and Wyndham Lewis

References

Image Credits

Useful Resources

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