13 February 2023

Thus the Unfacts


Thus the Unfacts (RFW 046.16-26)

Chapter I.3 of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the Humphriad II, is a journalistic investigation into the HCE affair, especially HCE’s memorable encounter in the Phoenix Park with the Cad with a Pipe. The last ten articles were concerned with the Cad’s Side of the Story, but now we turn to the people’s response to the affair. What does public opinion tell us about the case? The next three pages or so—046.16-049.20—comprise an episode known as the Plebiscite. This was actually drafted before the Cad’s Side of the Story. Some Joycean scholars think that it was the very first part of this chapter to be drafted, but I disagree. I believe that the Obituaries, which take up the first two pages or so of the chapter, were drafted first. Bill Cadbury, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oregon, believes that the Plebiscite was drafted before the Obituaries but concedes that the actual order is far from clear:

After his first revision of 2§2 [HCE & the Cad’s Encounter in the Park] Joyce drafted what eventually became the first section of chapter 3, though he did not draft the subunits of 3§1 in the order in which they were published. What becomes its final part is drafted first, the section usually called “the plebiscite” … in which we find public responses to the accusations made in the Rann that initially were planned immediately to precede them … But after writing it Joyce decided to precede the plebiscite on HCE with an account of the obscure fates of the first responders to him, the Rann- makers, and so he wrote what became [The Obituaries] [Endnote: It is possible that this subunit was composed before the plebiscite, and David Hayman notes that “it is difficult to ascertain which came first” …] (Crispi & Slote 69 … 90)

Structure of the Humphriad

The quotation from David Hayman is taken from page xi of Volume 45 of the James Joyce Archive. In the introduction to A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, however, Hayman sings a somewhat different tune:

I, iii (FW 48-74 [RFW 039-059]). Once he had revised the central section of I, ii, but before he wrote the “Ballad,” Joyce began work on this chapter, composing and revising its sections at different times and in different parts of his notebook. The fact that the second draft or fair copy was begun before all of these sections had been written only adds to the apparent confusion. However, the process of composition was relatively uninvolved. Joyce first wrote the chapter’s opening passage [The Obituaries] … which he then revised and recopied; next he wrote the closing pages [The Battery at the Gate] … which he copied over and perhaps revised before drafting the intermediary section [The Plebiscite] … Finally he inserted a version of [The Cad’s Side of the Story] … The first draft of the latter follows in sequence the additions appended to the second draft of the opening section. Later still he added the paragraphs needed to link more solidly the major parts. Transition was usually the author’s last concern. (Hayman 23)

The opening words of the earliest surviving draft of the Plebiscite—The data, did we possess them—sound more like a smooth continuation of the Cad’s Side of the Story than of Hosty’s Rann. On the other hand, the opening words of the earliest surviving draft of the Obituaries—A cloud of witnesses indeed!—is a natural continuation of the singing of the Rann by the people in the streets of Dublin.

David Hayman

First-Draft Version

This eleven-line paragraph (thirteen in the original edition) grew out of the first line or so of the earliest draft of the Plebiscite, which Joyce wrote in November 1923:

The data, did we possess them, are too few to warrant certitude, the testifiers too irreperible … (Hayman 71)

Between December 1923 and early 1927 Joyce expanded this slightly, before preparing a typescript of the entire chapter:

Thus the unfacts did we possess them are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude, the evidencegivers by legpoll too untrustworthily irreperible where the adjudgers are seemingly freak threes and the judicandees plainly minus twos … (James Joyce Digital Archive)

This is how it appeared on 1 June 1927, when an early draft of this chapter was published in Eugene Jolas & Elliot Paul’s literary journal transition:

transition 3 (Jolas & Paul 38)

It was only around 1930-33 that Joyce split this paragraph into four separate paragraphs and knocked them into their final shape, creating what Rose & O’Hanlon call draft level 8, 8+.

The ultimate source of this paragraph can be found in a note Joyce made in notebook VI.B.10. This notebook, which is also known as Polyphemous and was possibly the first of all the Finnegans Wake notebooks, was compiled between October 1922 and the beginning of February 1923:

these data, did we / possess them, are too complex (VI.B.10.039i)

This has been identified as a quotation from Arthur Balfour’s The Foundations of Belief: Being Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology:

Nor is the comparative pettiness of the rôle thus played by reasoning in human affairs a matter for regret. Not merely because we are ignorant of the data required for the solution, even of very simple problems in organic and social life, are we called on to acquiesce in an arrangement which, to be sure, we have no power to disturb; nor yet because these data, did we possess them, are too complex to be dealt with by any rational calculus we possess or are ever likely to acquire; but because, in addition to these difficulties, reasoning is a force most apt to divide and disintegrate; and though division and disintegration may often be the necessary preliminaries of social development, still more necessary are the forces which bind and stiffen, without which there would be no society to develop. (Balfour 228-229, emphasis added)

Arthur James Balfour

Arthur James Balfour is best known today for his political rather than his academic achievements. He was Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1887 to 1891, and served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1902 to 1905. The Duke of Wellington, in whose honour he was named, was his godfather. If Rose & O’Hanlon are to be believed, Joyce took his quotation not from Balfour’s book itself but from an as yet untraced review.

The gist of this short paragraph as it appeared in the published edition of 1939 is not too difficult to discern:

The facts of the HCE case are too few and the witnesses too untrustworthy to enable us to get to the bottom of it. But there is an image of HCE with ALP, which may reveal something. It is unclear, however, whether this image is a waxwork effigy in Madame Tussauds or a photographic portrait in the National Gallery.

  • legpoll legpull: to pull someone’s leg is to play a trick on them. A poll is a survey of people’s opinions. Hence, a legpoll might be a poll conducted on foot. There may also be an allusion to the nautical expression to show a leg, by which sailors once proved that they were awake and ready to get out of bed.

  • irreperible Italian: irreperibile, untraceable, undiscoverable. English: irreparable.

  • semmingly seemingly. Hungarian: semmi, nothing.

  • freak threes The usual trio of HCE’s accusers: his sons Shem & Shaun, and the Oedipal Figure who embodies both of them. The reading victories anticipates victorienne in the last line of this paragraph.

  • his judicandees plainly minus twos The two young girls implicated in HCE’s Crime in the Park: as usual, these represent the two sides of his schizophrenic daughter Issy. In slang a judy is a woman or, especially, a prostitute.

Madame Tussauds Exhibition (Baker Street, London)

Madame Tussauds

Madame Tussauds is a wax museum in London. It was founded in 1838 by the French sculptor Marie Tussaud, but Madame Tussaud’s associations with Dublin and London go back much farther than this. As early as 1767, when she was only six years old and still known as Marie Grosholtz, she learned the art of sculpting in wax from the Swiss physician Philippe Curtius, who took her to Paris as his apprentice. In 1778 Marie created her first waxworks—effigies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, both of whom died that summer—after which she became art tutor to a sister of Louis XVI. She narrowly escaped the guillotine during the Terror. After the death of Curtius in 1794, she married François Tussaud, an engineer, and spent the next few years touring Europe and displaying her waxworks.

Madame Tussaud first exhibited her art in London in 1802. The Napoleonic Wars made it impossible for her to return to the Continent, and she spent the next few decades touring around Great Britain and Ireland. Between 1804 and 1808 she resided in Dublin—largely due to the strong anti-French feelings which were then prevalent in England. In 1804 she opened her first Dublin exhibition at Shakespeare’s Gallery on Exchequer Street. In addition to effigies of international figures, the collection included waxworks of prominent Irish politicians, such Henry Grattan

Exchequer Street, Dublin

Lewis Carroll

In A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joseph Campbell & Henry Morton Robinson briefly summarized this paragraph:

Thus, the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude, and the evidence-givers too untrustworthy. Nevertheless, at Madame To-show-us’ [Tussaud’s] wax museum, he appears completely exposed. There he sits gowned about, in clerical habit, watching the bland sun slide into the nethermore, a maudlin tear about to corrugitate his mild-dewed cheek, [Footnote: Mild und leise, again. We are in the presence of a wax-museum portrait of Dean Swift, who is represented as musing on the love-death of his Vanessa.] the farewell note of a tiny victorienne, Alys, pressed by his limp hand. (Campbell & Robinson 69-70)

The Joycean scholar and Professor of English at Queen’s College, New York, Edmund L Epstein, who edited the 2005 reissue of A Skeleton Key, added an editorial correction to Campbell & Robinson’s footnote:

It is, more clearly, a portrait of Lewis Carroll. (Epstein 69)

It is curious that Campbell & Robinson should have made this mistake. There are, indeed, a couple of allusions in this paragraph that could be interpreted as referring to Jonathan Swift, but they are greatly outnumbered by the clear and obvious allusions to Lewis Carroll:

Tom Quad, Christ Church, Oxford

  • exposure … flashback Lewis Carroll became an enthusiastic amateur photographer when the art of photography was in its infancy. John Gordon reminds us that Milly Bloom is studying photography in Ulysses. In the opening episode, Mulligan discusses her with an acquaintance:

—Is the brother with you, Malachi? —Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons. —Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young thing down there. Photo girl he calls her. —Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure. (Ulysses 21)

Needless to remark, the sexual meaning of exposure is also relevant. HCE’s Crime in the Park usually involves some form of this—either HCE exposes himself to two young maidens or he peeps at them when they are at their toilet in the bushes, exposing themselves to him.

  • Tom Quad This is the popular name for the Great Quadrangle at Christ Church, Oxford, where Lewis Carroll spent most of his adult life. Carroll’s lodgings, now the Graduate Common Room, were on the first floor in the north-west corner of the quadrangle.

  • gowndabout, in clericalease habit As an Oxford don Lewis Carroll was entitled to wear a gown, the official robe of office. In 1861, when he was twenty-nine, Lewis Carroll was ordained a deacon in the Church of England. HCE’s initialism is in there too.

Lewis Carroll’s Study at Christ Church

  • slithe In his nonsense poem Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll coined numerous neologisms and portmanteau words—anticipating what Joyce would do in Finnegans Wake. One of these is slithy, which Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There: Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ ‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active.’ You see, it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word. (Carroll 250)

  • dodgesomely Lewis Carroll’s real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

  • nethermore Not only nevermore but also an allusion to the netherworld in which Alice’s adventures take place. The original title of Carroll’s most famous work was Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Curiously, Marion Hunter, the wife of Alfred Hunter—the alleged inspiration for Leopold Bloom—had a facsimile manuscript of this early draft of Alice. It was inscribed to her by Carroll himself. She was obliged to sell it in 1938 due to her straitened finances (James Joyce Online Notes).

  • maugdleness Magdalen College, Oxford. Lewis Carroll is closely associated with Christ Church, Oxford, so this allusion is doubtful. Among the characters prominent in Finnegans Wake, Oscar Wilde was educated at Magdalen College. Another Irishman, C S Lewis, who shares a name with Lewis Carroll, was a tutor there, but he was probably unknown to Joyce. Christ Church and Magdalen are only about 600 m apart.

  • Alys Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is Lewis Carroll’s most famous work. The name of the protagonist was taken from Alice Pleasance Liddell, the young daughter of one of Carroll’s colleagues at Oxford, Henry Liddell. She became for Joyce one of the models for both HCE’s wife Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP) and their daughter Issy. Note how Joyce spells Alice with an s and a y, both of which were borrowed from Issy. As Issy matures into a young woman, she come more and more to resemble the young ALP with whom HCE fell in love. Hence, as ALP ages and loses her looks, HCE finds himself becoming infatuated—at least on an unconscious level—with his daughter. This, I believe, is the ultimate source of his existential guilt.

Isa Bowman as Alice

  • limper looser The second element of this cryptic phrase may allude to Lewis. Roland McHugh identifies the phrase as an allusion to a passage in the memoirs of Isa Bowman, the young girl to whom Lewis Carroll dedicated his last novel Sylvie and Bruno (identified in the acrostic epigraph). Carroll first met her when she was twelve and playing Alice in a stage version of Alice in Wonderland. In her memoirs she remembers with fondness staying with Carroll at his holiday house in Eastbourne. Their afternoons were spent at nearby Beachy Head:

The summer afternoons on the great headland were very sweet and peaceful. I have never met a man so sensible to the influences of Nature as Lewis Carroll. Just as the sun was setting, and a cool breeze whispered round us, he would take off his hat and let the wind play with his hair, and he would look out to sea. Once I saw tears in his eyes, and when we turned to go he gripped my hand much tighter than usual. (Bowman 74 : McHugh 57)

When the first extracts from Work in Progress began to appear in transition several commentators pointed out how similar Joyce’s new language was to Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky. On 31 May 1927 Joyce wrote to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver about the impression made by the appearance of the first chapter, Riverrun, which had just been published in transition:

A writer in a review of it in Laurens County, Georgia, says: We and the Oconee river of all places are in it too. Why, Mr J. and his God alone know! Another writer: ‛He has determined to write as a lunatic for lunatics’. A young man called on me before I left Paris, knew a lot of it by heart, recites it to his friends and was very enthusiastic. I found that he did not understand many of the words. Another (or rather many) says he is imitating Lewis Carroll. I never read him till Mrs Nutting gave me a book, not Alice, a few weeks ago—though, of course, I heard bits and scraps. But then I never read Rabelais either though nobody will believe this. (31 May 1927, Letters I 254-255)

Lewis Carroll’s Holiday Home in Eastbourne

But Joyce was sufficiently intrigued and he immediately set about rectifying this gap in his erudition. He not only read some of Carroll’s novels—Sylvie and Bruno is arguably the most relevant to Finnegans Wake—but also studied the man’s life. He was delighted to discover that Carroll stammered and was infatuated with young girls. Ten months later he wrote again to Weaver:

I have been reading about the author of Alice. A few things about him are rather curious. He was born a few miles from Warrington (Daresbury), and he had a strong stutter and when he wrote he inverted his name like Tristan and Swift. His name was Charles Lutwidge of which he made Lewis (i.e. Ludwig) Carroll (i.e. Carolus). (28 March 1928, Letters III 174)

In his Books at the Wake, James Atherton refers to Carroll as The Unseen Precursor (Atherton 124). Swift is the only other writer to whom Atherton devotes an entire chapter of the book. Incidentally, Joyce created the character of Issy before he learnt of Isa Bowman. The similarity between the two names was just another of those serendipitous coincidences that frequently blessed the composition of Finnegans Wake.

In contrast to the clear allusions to Lewis Carroll in this paragraph, there is only one obvious allusion to Jonathan Swift, and another that is not so obvious:

The National Gallery of Ireland

  • notional gullery This reference to the National Gallery of Ireland might also conceal a hint of Gulliver’s Travels. A gull is a dupe or gullible person—someone whose leg has been pulled (legpoll).

Jonathan Swift was the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, so the phrase gowndabout, in clericalease habit could refer to him. But as Lewis Carroll was both a don and a cleric, this is not at all certain.

The Museyroom Revisited

In Finnegans Wake, Joyce tells the same stories over and over again, making this one of the most self-referential books ever written. One of the best known versions of HCE’s Crime in the Park—his Original Sin—is the Museyroom Episode, in which Kathe shows us around a museum devoted to Wellington’s campaigns. The present paragraph contains some unmistakeable echoes of that episode, suggesting that, on some level at least, Madame Tussauds, the National Gallery and the Museyroom are one and the same—and, furthermore, that HCE’s meeting with the Cad with a Pipe is yet another version of the same story.

RFW Thus the Unfacts In the Museyroom RFW
046.18 freak threes Figtreeyou! 008.01
046.18 judicandees jinnies 007.24
046.19 waxes wixy 008.26
046.20 (entrance, one kudos; exits, free) Penetrators are permitted into the museomound free. Welsh and the Paddy Patkinses, one shelenk 007.02-03

Portuguese Escudo

  • Ancient Greek: κῦδος [kudos], glory, renown (especially in war, which is relevant in the context of the Museyroom Episode).

  • escudo A Portuguese unit of currency, or a coin of this value.

  • -dos … free Spanish: dos, two … three, echoing the freak threes and judicandees plainly minus twos above.

In our discussions of the Museyroom Episode, we saw that one of the many strands woven into that story was a passage from one of Sigmund Freud’s lesser known works. James Joyce had an ambivalent attitude towards Freud. He could not ignore so influential a scholar of the unconscious mind, not to mention the author of the definitive investigation of the dreamworld—two subjects at the very heart of Finnegans Wake. On the other hand, he was repelled by Freudian psychoanalysis—which Joyce disparaged but found useful is Richard Ellmann’s comment (393)—being slightly more intrigued by Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. Nevertheless, there was surely some significance in the fact that Joyce and Freud shared the same name … sort of: Joyce comes from the Norman French Joyeux, which means joyous, while Freud comes from the German Freude, which means joy. A Wakean association, perhaps.

It is also curious that the account Joyce gave of How Buckley Shot the Russian General to his Triestine friend Ottocaro Weiss was prompted by Weiss’s comments on Sigmund Freud:

Ottocaro Weiss

One evening when Ottocaro Weiss had been discussing Freud’s theory that humor was the mind’s way of securing relief, through a short cut, for some repressed feeling … (Ellmann 398)

The work to which Weiss is alluding is Der Witz und seine Bezeihung zum Unbewußten [Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious], in which Freud briefly explores the psychological role played by jokes in human life. Among the many jokes analyzed by Freud in this short book are two that concern the Duke of Wellington, both recorded by the German historian of art and culture Jacob von Falke:

A joke of this sort is related by J. Falke (l. c.): “Is this the place where the Duke of Wellington spoke those words?” “Yes, this is the place; but he never spoke those words.” (Freud 80 fn)

… J. V. Falke’s Lebenserinnerungen an eine Reise nach Irland [Memoirs of a Visit to Ireland] (page 271) furnishes an exceptionally good example of “representation through the opposite” in which the use of words of a double meaning plays absolutely no part. The scene is laid in a wax figure museum, like Mme. Tussaud’s. A lecturer discourses on one figure after another to his audience, which is composed of old and young people. “This is the Duke of Wellington and his horse,” he says. Whereupon a young girl remarks, “Which is the duke and which is the horse?” “Just as you like, my pretty child,” is the reply. “You pay your money and you take your choice.” (Freud 95)

Sigmund Freud in 1905

The first of these jokes revolves around the “legend” that at a crucial point in the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke turned to the Foot Guards, whom he had been holding in reserve, and said: “Up, Guards, and at ’em!”. Both jokes are mined to exhaustion in Finnegans Wake. Even Freud’s farfetched analysis of the second joke is relevant to the Museyroom episode:

The reduction of this Irish joke would be: “It is gross impudence on the part of the museum’s management to offer such an exhibition to the public. It is impossible to distinguish between the horse and the rider (playful exaggeration), and it is for this exhibit that one pays one’s hard-earned money!” The indignant expression is now dramatized and applied to a trivial occurrence. In the place of the entire audience there appears one woman and the riding figure becomes individually determined. It is necessarily the Duke of Wellington, who is so very popular in Ireland. But the insolence of the museum proprietor or lecturer who takes money from the public and offers nothing in return is represented by the opposite, through a speech, in which he extols himself as a conscientious business man whose fondest desire is to respect the rights to which the public is entitled through the admission fee. One then realizes that the technique of this joke is not very simple. In so far as a way is found to allow the swindler to assert his scrupulosity it may be said that the joke is a case of “representation through the opposite.” The fact, however, that he does it on an occasion where something different is demanded of him, and the fact that he replies in terms of commercial integrity when he is expected to discuss the similarity of the figures, shows that it is a case of displacement. The technique of the joke lies in the combination of both technical means. (Freud 95-96)

Copenhagen: The Duke of Wellington’s Horse at Waterloo

Throughout the Museyroom episode there is a conflation of the Duke of Wellington and his horse Copenhagen. The Big White Horse becomes Wellington’s Big Wide Arse, as though the Duke is a horse’s arse. Another legendary “quote” from the Duke is relevant here:

If a gentleman happens to be born in a stable, it does not follow that he should be called a horse.

As quoted in Genetic Studies in Joyce (1995) by David Hayman and Sam Slote. Though such remarks have often been quoted as Wellington’s response on being called Irish, the earliest published sources yet found for similar comments are those about him attributed to an Irish politician:

“The poor old Duke! What shall I say of him? To be sure he was born in Ireland, but being born in a stable does not make a man a horse.” Daniel O’Connell, in a speech (16 October 1843), as quoted in Shaw’s Authenticated Report of the Irish State Trials (1844), p. 93. Wikiquote

Whoever said it, Joyce makes free use of it throughout Finnegans Wake. It is particularly piquant as it includes not only an insult to Ireland—cf Beckett’s comment on the Russian General’s use of the sod of turf (Ellmann 398 fn)—but also suggests that the Duke of Wellington may be a new Christ, another not-horse who was reputedly born in stable. Incidentally, one might recall how prominent our equine friends were in Ulysses, from the Wooden Horse of Troy to Throwaway to Stephen’s Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. It is also fortuitous that Napoleon’s commander in the field at the Battle of Waterloo was Marshal Ney—get it?

The Wellington Monument in the Phoenix Park

Loose Ends

And finally, let us tie up some loose ends.

an exegious monument, aerily perennious

This is a parody of a line by the Roman poet Horace, one of Joyce’s favourites. It is the opening line of the thirtieth and final ode in Book 3 of his Odes:

Exegi monumentum aere perennius

My work is done, the memorial more enduring than brass (Horace, Odes III.30.1)

Oblige with your blackthorns; gamps, degrace!

On 13 April 1742, George Frederick Handel’s most celebrated work, Messiah, was given its world première at Neale’s Musick Hall on Fishamble Street, Dublin. As every schoolchild in Dublin still learns, gentlemen attending the performance were asked not to wear their swords and ladies not to wear hoops in their skirts. The performance was being held for the benefit of three charities and it was hoped that these measures would allow for the admission of a larger number of patrons:

The Stewards of the Charitable Musical Society request the Favour of the ladies not to come with Hoops this day to the Musick Hall in Fishamble Street. The Gentlemen are desired to come without their Swords. (The Dublin Journal, 13 April 1742 : Townsend 87-88)

Neale’s Musick Hall, Fishamble Street

  • blackthorns Shillelaghs, Irish cudgels made from the blackthorn tree. The shillelagh was a popular substitute for a sword in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Irish-American ballad Finnegan’s Wake includes the line: Shillelagh law did all engage.

  • gamps umbrellas, named for Sarah Gamp, an alcoholic midwife in Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit. She is rarely seen without her large black umbrella. An open umbrella does resemble a hooped skirt.

  • French: de grâce! please!, for pity’s sake!

bland Sol

  • Latin: sol blandus, the pleasant sun. Perhaps, like complacent, another allusion to Alice Pleasance Liddell. In the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Paul—Saul of Tarsus—was struck blind by a bright flash from heaven on the road to Damascus. Was God taking a photo? The phrase may also echo the passage quoted above from Isa Bowman, which began Just as the sun was setting …

  • mild dewed … looser German: Mild und leise, softly and gently, the opening words of Isolde’s Liebestod (Love-Death, ie Swansong) in Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde.

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

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