02 March 2023

Yet Certes One Is

 
Yet Certes One Is (RFW 046.27-33)

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. We continue our study of the episode known as the Plebiscite—RFW 046.16-049.29—which documents the people’s response to the affair. What does public opinion say?

The people’s reaction to the case and their subsequent reappraisal of HCE’s reputation is an important part of what I call the Oedipal Cycle: HCE’s endless rise and fall. In the original account of the Oedipal Event—Harold or Humphrey Chimpden’s roadside encounter with the King at the beginning of Chapter I.2—HCE’s initial rise in the world following the encounter was reflected in his triumphal reception in the Gaiety Theatre (king’s treat house), where he presided over the performance from the viceregal booth like a veritable Napoleon the Nth. But this triumph soon turned to dust, when the curtain rose and this particular Napoleon was shown to be the butt of the satirical piece being shown: A Royal Divorce. Unlike Lincoln, HCE was not literally assassinated in the theatre—but his character was.

In the short paragraph we are now studying this public reassessment of HCE is presented as a criminal trial in a court of law—another sort of theatrical performance. This anticipates the final episode in the Humphriad, The Trial (RFW 068.12-076.40). In one sense or another, HCE is always on trial. These public inquiries, however, take many different forms throughout Finnegans Wake. In Chapter 1.8 (Anna Livia Plurabelle), for example, HCE’s dirty linen is washed and aired in public—literally. In Chapter 3.3 (The Third Watch of Shaun, or Yawn), his son and heir is interrogated by the Four Old Men, who hold their sworn starchamber quiry on him.

 

The Oedipal Cycle

A First-Draft Version

This paragraph began life as three or four lines in the middle of a large paragraph, which was later expanded and broken up into several shorter paragraphs:

... but certain it is that ere winter turned the leaves of the book of nature the shade of the great outlander had stood at the bar of the hundred tribunals, here condemned before trial with Jedburgh justice, there acquitted against evidence with benefit of clergy. (Hayman 71)

Note how the passage of time is conveyed by a portmanteau metaphor:

  • Before winter has literally turned the colour of nature’s literal leaves from their normal shade of green to an autumnal red.
  • Before winter has figuratively turned over the pages of the book of nature.
  • leaves Both leaves on trees and pages in a book.
  • shade Both colour (of the leaves) and ghost (of HCE or the Cad).

This metaphor was suggested by an article that appeared in The Irish Times on 21 November 1922 (James Joyce Digital Archive).

This paragraph and the following two were printed as one long paragraph of twenty-nine lines in the first edition of Finnegans Wake (1939). The final version is about twice as long as the first draft, but the gist remains the same:

One thing is certain: HCE was repeatedly tried.

 

transition 3 (Jolas & Paul 38)

An intermediate draft was published on 1 June 1927 in Eugene Jolas & Elliot Paul’s literary journal transition.

Time and Place

This paragraph begins with the composition of time and place:

Yet certes one is. Eher the following winter had overed the pages of nature’s book and till Ceadurbar-atta-Cleath became Dablena Tertia ...

  • Archaic English: certes, certainly, indeed, assuredly. This word is an adverb, but Joyce’s use of it is adjectival.
  • ere before.
  • German ehe, ere, before.
  • German: eher, earlier, sooner.
  • overed turned over : overread : covered : painted over in red (like green leaves turning red in autumn). There is an archaic transitive verb to over, but it means to jump over (as a fence).
  • Ceadurbar-atta-Cleath Irish: Áth Cliath, Ford of Hurdles, Hurdlesford, an Irish name for Dublin, though strictly speaking it refers to an ancient village on the Liffey that was absorbed by the growing Norse settlement of Dubhlinn.

 

Artist’s Impression of Dublin’s Ford of Hurdle’s

  • Irish: céad, hundred : first. Dublin is Ireland’s first city, so the other meaning may not be relevant.
  • Latin: urbs city.
  • German: urbar, arable.
  • Dablena Dublin. In Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography, a city he calls Eblana has often been identified with Dublin.
  • Latin: tertia, third. One scholar suggests that this passage is a mixture of Irish, English, and Latin, meaning that the first city Áth Cliath became Dublin thirdly, having been named Eblana in the interim by Ptolemy (Garvin 270).

Person

In the final version, the shade of the great outlander has become the shadow of the great outlander:

... the shadow of the huge outlander, maladik, multvult, magnoperous ...

 

Gulliver in Lilliput

  • outlander foreigner : outsider, stranger.
  • Latin: maladictus, slandered : cursed
  • French: maladif, sickly.
  • Czech: mladík, youngster, male teenager.
  • Dutch: dik, fat, thick.
  • Latin: multi vultus, many faces, many expressions.
  • Latin: multum vult, he wills much.
  • Latin: magnopere, very much, greatly, exceedingly : earnestly.
  • Latin: magnum opus, great work, especially an artist or writer’s finest work.

Court

The court of public opinion that tries HCE takes many forms:

... had bulked at the bar of a rota of tribunals, in manor hall as in thieves’ kitchen, mid pillow talk and chithouse chat, on Marlborough Green as through Molesworth Fields, here sentenced pro tried with Jedburgh justice, there acquitted con testimony with benefit of clergy.

 

The Thieves’ Kitchen in Oliver Twist

  • bulked at balked at, stopped short of, pulled up at (especially used of a horse that refuses to leap over an obstacle). Joyce originally wrote stood.
  • bulked presented an appearance of great size or bulk, or of importance : loomed large.
  • the bar lawyers, the legal profession : the railing surrounding the part of a courtroom occupied by the judges, lawyers, defendants, and witnesses. Of course, HCE runs another sort of bar.
  • Rota the highest appellate tribunal of the Roman Catholic Church. It was named after the rotunda, or round room, in which it sat during the Babylonish Captivity of the Papacy at Avignon. Joyce originally wrote the bar of the hundred tribunals.
  • Latin: rota, wheel. No doubt, there is an allusion here to the Viconian Cycle. Note the reference to Greatwheel Dunlop in the following paragraph.
  • manor hall In the James Joyce Digital Archive, Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon associate this with a note Joyce made in VI.B.11: manorhouse. The source of this note has been traced to William Carrigan’s The History and Antiquities of the Diocese of Ossory, in a section about Kells, County Kilkenny:

Soon after the Anglo-Norman Invasion the earthen rampart surrounding the enclosure was partially levelled, and a strong high wall of stone and mortar, heptagonal in shape and for the most part still in fair preservation, erected in its place; at the same time the old Irish residence within the enclosed area was replaced by a new structure known as the castle, or manor house, of Kells. (Carrigan 52)

Kells, County Kilkenny

  • Slang: thieves’ kitchen, law courts—literally, a place inhabited by thieves or other criminals.
  • pillow talk The Irish national epic Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) opens with the pillow-talk of Ailill and Medb, the King and Queen of Connacht.
  • chithouse chat shit house (remember the Museyroom, the outhouse behind HCE’s tavern in Chapelizod?) : chit-chat. Joseph Campbell & Henry Morton Robinson interpret this as the gossip of the commoners (Campbell & Robinson 70).
  • Marlborough Green In 18th-century Dublin there was a bowling green and pleasure gardens known as Marlborough Bowling Green in the vicinity of today’s Marlborough Place—about 200 m east of the Spire. Joyce’s source for this toponym has been identified as Ada Peter’s Dublin Fragments:

What a row of sedan chairs made their way to the various pleasure gardens at Marlborough Green, Ranelagh, and in later times by other vehicles to those at Portobello. (Peter 9)

The Pleasure Gardens at Marlborough Green were popular with the wealthy in the first half of the 18th century, but they fell out of favour following the death of Richard Nugent, Lord Delvin, in a duel in 1761. In Joyce’s day, there was a bowling green behind the Mullingar House, where Finnegans Wake is set.

 

Marlborough Bowling Green

  • Molesworth Fields Molesworth Street, opposite Leinster House, takes its name from a member of the Molesworth family, who owned the Molesworth Fields in the vicinity (M’Cready 69). This toponym was also taken from Ada Peter:

So, too, who can recall the Molesworth Fields and remember that a lane, which we now call Grafton Street, ran from the College up to the Green area of St. Stephen, so noted from the leper hospital close by? (Peter 6)

Note that Marlborough Green was on the Northside of Dublin, while Molesworth’s Fields were on the Southside.

  • Jedburgh justice Jedburgh is a town in southern Scotland, also known to the inhabitants as Jethart or Jeddart. Jedburgh Justice (also Jethart Justice and Jeddart Justice) is a proverbial name for the practice of first hanging a man and only then trying him:

“Jethart or Jeddart justice,” according to which a man was hanged first and tried afterwards, seems to have been a hasty generalization from a solitary fact—the summary execution in James VI’s reign of a gang of rogues at the instance of Sir George Home, 1st Earl of Dunbar, but has nevertheless passed into a proverb. (Chisholm 300)

 

George Home, 1st Earl of Dunbar

  • pro tried ... con testimony pro and con, from Latin: pro, for and contra, against : Latin: pro, before, meaning in front of rather than earlier than, but the presence of Jedburgh justice implies that the latter is meant. HCE is sentenced before being tried—pre-trial. The original draft read before trial. Late drafts have contestimony and in the original edition con, which occurs at the end of a line, is linked to testimony by a hyphen. Rose & O’Hanlon have restored the original form. This has the virtue of agreeing with the pair pro tried, which Joyce never yoked together into a single word (see also Cadbury 175).
  • benefit of clergy In English law, benefit of clergy, or privilegium clericale, was a provision whereby clergymen accused of a crime could claim that they were beyond the jurisdiction of the secular courts and should be tried instead by an ecclesiastical court under canon law. Eligibility for benefit of clergy was sometimes demonstrated by a literacy test, which required the accused to read a passage of the Scriptures in Latin. This provided a loophole for literate lay men to also claim benefit of clergy. Over the course of time, benefit of clergy was granted to lay people—male and female—if the crime they were accused of was considered clergyable (ie not serious) or if the accused was a first-time offender. Benefit of clergy was formally abolished in 1827.

Lewis Carroll, who was featured in the preceding paragraph, was a clergyman and has often been accused of pedophilia—but he was born in 1832, five years after benefit of clergy was abolished.

 

Benefit of Clergy (Hazlitt 45)

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

---

References

  • Bill Cadbury, Sequence and Authority in Some “transition” Typescripts and Proofs, European Joyce Studies, Volume 9, Genitricksling Joyce, Page 159-184, Brill, Leiden (1999)
  • Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York (1944)
  • William Carrigan, The History and Antiquities of the Diocese of Ossory, Volume 4, Sealy, Bryers & Walker, Dublin (1905)
  • Henry Chisholm (editor), The Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, Volume 15, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1911)
  • John Garvin, Some Irish and Anglo: Irish Allusions in “Finnegans Wake”, James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 11, Number 3, Pages 266-278, The University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1974)
  • David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1963)
  • William Carew Hazlitt, Faiths and Folklore: A Dictionary of National Beliefs, Superstitions and Popular Customs, Past and Current, with Their Classical and Foreign Analogues, Reeves and Turner, London (1905)
  • Eugene Jolas & Elliot Paul (editors), transition, Number 3, Shakespeare & Co, Paris (1927)
  • James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, The Viking Press, New York (1958, 1966)
  • James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
  • Christopher Teeling M’Cready, Dublin Street Names, Dated and Explained, Hodges, Figgis and Co, Dublin (1892)
  • Ada Peter, Dublin Fragments: Social and Historic, Hodges Figgis and Co, Dublin (1925)
  • Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)

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