22 June 2023

We Seem to Us

 

We Seem to Us (RFW 050.19-050:35)

We continue our journalistic investigation into the HCE Affair. The last ten pages of Chapter 3 comprise an episode known as The Battery at the Gate. Following his condemnation in the court of public opinion―as expressed in the Plebiscite―HCE takes refuge within his tavern. But he continues to be abused both verbally and physically. In the chapter-by-chapter outline which Finn Fordham―Reader in 20th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London―prepared for the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Finnegans Wake (2012), the second half of this chapter is summarized thus:

61.28-64.24 HCE took refuge but experienced hostility and a battery at his gate; 64.25-66.9 and the girls? An interludic canoodling in a canoe of a young girl and an older man; conflict is universal; 66.10-67.6 and the letter or coffin (both containers)? 67.7-67.27 A police account in court of the encounter; 67.28-69.29 the two girls again and blackmail; the gate keeping him out of trouble; 69.30-73.27 ‛Battery at the Gate’: a German lodger abuses HCE because he won’t give out any drink; resisting peacefully, HCE simply lists the abusive names he’s called; 73.28-74 HCE has left his mark―now he rests. (Fordham xxxv-xxxvi)

As usual, the same stories are being retold over and over again. Each time new elements are added, but there is always enough to identify them as the old tales with which we are now familiar: HCE’s Oedipal Encounter, and his Crime in the Park. HCE was the offender in the latter, and the defender in the former.

 

A London Particular

In How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake Bill Cadbury, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oregon, has made a valiant effort to unravel Joyce’s complicated skein of narrative threads:

The second outrage … centers on an attack at the “gateway” … and this central section of chapter 3 also follows that attack with a defense concerning the girls in the parable … of “a fellow who calls on his skirt” … The core of each section, 3§2 [Be these meer marchant taylors’ fablings …] and 3§3 [Now to the obverse …], is a story of someone at a gate terrorizing HCE within, each derived―3§3 probably and 3§2 demonstrably―from newspaper accounts of criminal proceedings. The 3§2 account is a quite literal re-creation of a comical trial report in the Freeman’s Journal of 21 November 1923, which Vincent Deane has recently discovered and shown to be the origin of six notes in VI.B.11:146-47, from which Joyce crafted the anecdote. The point of the story is a defendant’s claim that he was banging on the gate of a store (which becomes the “Mullingcan Inn” …) in order to open a bottle of stout, a feeble explanation of what was no doubt an attempt to break in and burglarize the store. But Joyce introduced and blended that story with what seems to be a different attack, set somewhere else entirely: “A tall man of his build carrying a suspicious parcel …” … This seems to take place outdoors … and the episode seems designed to recall the cad encounter. (Crispi & Slote 73-74)

 

Bill Cadbury

Although the latter story was drafted after the Battery proper, it is recounted first―in the very paragraph we are now studying. On FWEET, Raphael Slepon identifies this as the second account of HCE’s Oedipal Encounter:

  • The Encounter in the Park with the Cad with a Pipe (RFW 027.37 ff)

  • The Barkiss Revolver Incident (RFW 050.19 ff)

  • The Herr Betreffender Incident (RFW 056.01 ff)

  • The Incident Hard by the Howe (RFW 064.39 ff))

I would identify it as the third. The first was actually:

  • HCE’s Roadside Encounter with the King (RFW 024.10)

But the references to Lotta Crabtree and Pomona Evelyn also recall the Crime in the Park―HCE’s Original Sin. Crab apple, tree, Pomona and Eve are obvious allusions to the Forbidden Fruit. John Evelyn was a 17th-century gardener. He is best remembered today as a diarist, but he also wrote Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber—appropriate, given the context of the Garden of Eden.

 

 Pomona

And if the composition of this section was a complicated affair, the resulting narrative is perhaps a little less so, as Joseph Campbell & Henry Morton Robinson argue in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake:

Abruptly, now, we are to break out of this tangle of suggestive but not quite clarifying exhibits, and for a while we shall follow a relatively direct narrative: the tale of an encounter, arrest, and incarceration. The encounter comes to us in two versions, and we must judge between them. The entire case resembles that of an American sugar-daddy and his peaches, and so we pause a moment to see a movie version of a love-nest scandal. And the history is complicated by a couple of mysterious episodes: namely, the posting of a certain letter, and the disappearance of a certain coffin. Finally, we shall follow the unhappy later histories of the two women in the case. Nevertheless, through all these complications, the narrative will proceed with relative smoothness, and we shall be able to study, step by step, the progress of the hero. (Campbell & Robinson 73)

In contrast, John Gordon finds the next seven pages quite disorienting (Gordon 133). I concur.

 

John Evelyn

First-Draft Version

The first draft of what would in time become a paragraph of thirty lines―seventeen in The Restored Finnegans Wake―comprised only a single sentence in the middle of the long paragraph that opened with the words:

Can it be that so diversified outrages were planned and partly carried out against him … [RFW 049.31]

and ran on without interruption to the following line of dialogue:

―You are deeply mistaken sir, let me tell you, denied McPartland. [RFW 054.11]

The first draft reads as follows:

When returning late to the old spot a revolver was put to his face. (Hayman 72)

Here is the same sentence in its original context, with the closing words of what would in time become the preceding paragraph [RFW 050.15-18] and the opening words of what would later be the following paragraph [RFW 050.36]:

Business bred, Humphrey took no chances. Yet he was subject to terror. When returning late to the old spot a revolver was put to his face. But how untrue.

 

Lotta Crabtree

It is clear, then, that it is HCE who is held up at gunpoint. In the final version, Joyce has obscured the identity of the victim, describing him only as one tall man, humping a suspicious parcel. Perhaps humping gives Humphrey’s identity away, but I think Joyce wanted to emphasize that HCE is both offender and defender, assailant and assailed. As many Joyceans have remarked, HCE is his own worst enemy (collideorscape).

Over the next few years Joyce worked on this passage after his usual manner. In June 1927 a revised draft of this chapter was published in the third issue of Eugene Jolas & Elliot Paul’s literary journal transition. The two principal differences between the first draft and the version in transition are:

  • What would eventually become three separate paragraphs―We seem to us …, But how transparingly nontrue … and Fifthly …―have been set out as a single long paragraph. The first two of these paragraphs were still yoked together when the first edition of the novel was published in 1939, but they were separated by Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon for The Restored Finnegans Wake in 2010. According to the James Joyce Digital Archive, Joyce split this passage into three paragraphs during draft level 8, around 1930-1933.

  • The single line of the first draft has been expanded to twenty-two lines, and is actually very close to the version that would be published in 1939:

 

transition 3 (Jolas & Paul 41)

Between 1927 and 1939 Joyce made only a handful of minor emendations to this paragraph:

  • you’re shot” became you’re shot, major. Rose & O’Hanlon italicised this line of dialogue. Why does HCE’s assailant address him as major? In the last paragraph HCE changed clothes with a mayor: German: Bürgermeister (RFW 049.39). HCE was previously described as a lordmajor (RFW 023.05). FWEET also notes Ursa Major, the northern constellation of the Great Bear. I find neither of these convincing. In Chapter II.3, The Scene in the Public, HCE is a general when he is shot by Buckley. He must have been promoted.

  • He added two allusions to the Fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper, which is recounted by Shaun in III.1, The First Watch of Shaun, first drafted in February 1928: the crawsopper … the aunt. Note that the transition version already included the allusions to Cain (Kane’s) and Abel (able), whose sibling rivalry lies behind the fable.

  • He armed the assailant with a cutlass as well as a gun: in edition to Reade’s cutless centiblade. Read & Company were a Dublin firm of cutlers. Their first shop on Lower Exchange Street was established in 1670 by James Read, whose sister Elizabeth was the mother of Arthur Guinness. James’s nephew and successor John Read moved the business to Parliament Street (backing on Crane Lane) in 1750. In 1776 his son Thomas took over the firm, and Dublin’s oldest shop bore the name Thomas Read and Company until 1997, when it finally closed its doors. It is now a café and patisserie called House of Read. Why does Joyce spell Read with a final e? Several Wakean scholars also misspell the name.

 

Dublin’s Oldest Shop

Freeman’s Journal

Joyce was a passionate reader of newspapers and drew upon them extensively when gathering material for Finnegans Wake. The Freeman’s Journal was one of the papers he regularly read in the early 1920s, when he was living in Paris and at work on his new novel. The prolific Joycean sleuth Vincent Deane discovered the ultimate source of the Battery at the Gate in an article that appeared in the Journal in November 1923:

Richard Whitely, Patrick Farrell, and William Hannon were found guilty at the Commission, charged with having at an early hour of the morning of Sunday, October 7, attempted to break into Pickford’s Store, 6 Upper Sheriff street, with intent to steal goods. It was stated by P.C. Sutton that he and another constable saw the three prisoners at the gate of the store. Hannon was pushing the gate with his shoulder and the others were standing by. When they saw witness they moved to a dark doorway. Whitely was carrying a fender. When witness asked where he got the fender one of the men said “that is for you to find out.” Whitely speaking from the dock, said they were only trying to open a bottle of stout by hammering it against the gate … (Freeman’s Journal 21 November 1923)

The nature of the fender―presumably the source of the suspicious parcel HCE is humping―is never clarified. To me, a fender is a low metal framework in front of a fireplace, but it is hard to imagine a criminal arming himself with such a weapon:

 

A Fender around a Hearth

But a fender is also anything that serves to fend or keep off something else. Throughout the rest of the Humphriad the nature of this mysterious object metamorphoses. Peter Quadrino, of the Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin, Texas, summarizes all these changes in the following passage from his blog Finnegans, Wake!

The attacker at the gate wields a “fender” or some type of a cudgel weapon that morphs and changes appearance throughout chapters 3-4. Details of the story keep changing―there was an attacker banging a bottle at the locked gate, or it was an encounter in the streets with the legless strangler Billy-in-the-Bowl, or there was a no-holds-barred wrestling match with an armed burglar. Joyce intertwines random details from various real-world contemporary newspaper accounts of crimes and trials. Witness accounts vary, “our mutual friends the fender and the bottle at the gate seem to be implicitly in the same bateau” [RFW 052.40 f] it says at one point, while earlier a witness declares “No such parson. No such fender. No such lumber.” [RFW 050.37]. On [RFW 065], the object is made to appear like a crowbar that a burglar and his victim wrestle over: “catching holst of an oblong bar he had and with which he usually broke furnitures he rose the stick at him” [RFW 065.15-16]. On the next page the object could be a Webley revolver pistol, when, in the middle of their “collidabanter” it says “a woden affair in the shape of a webley” [RFW 065.37] falls out of the burglar’s pocket. On [RFW 67 it’s a “humoral hurlbat,” a bat used in the Irish sport of hurling. Later on [RFW 78] the weapon evolves again through rumors and kaleidoscopic views, “Batty believes a baton while Hogan hears a hod yet Heer prefers a punsil shapner and Cope and Bull go cup and ball.” The presence of bat and ball suggest cricket and/or baseball references here, but more on that in a moment.

As discussed in my last post, in the book Wake Rites, George Cinclair Gibson describes the “Batter at the Gate” confrontation as paralleling certain rituals of the ancient Irish druids. One of these rituals, which were designed to divest the old king of his powers, apparently included a hostile druid confronting the king at a doorway while aggressively wielding the wooden “shamanistic device” known as a bull-roarer. Gibson gives a good argument for the mysterious wooden object in this part of the Wake being a bull-roarer (see Wake Rites, p. 88-90 [Page 109]) and notes that J.S. Atherton in his Books at the Wake observed that Joyce definitely knew about this druid device. (Finnegans, Wake!)

 

Freeman’s Journal & Connacht Tribune

Fender could also be an abbreviation. In the Oxford English Dictionary, fender is given as a synonym for defender, though this is flagged as Obsolete except dialectal (OED). But fender could just as easily be short for offender. Joyce revels in the ambiguity. HCE is both offender and defender.

Connacht Tribune

Another of Joyce’s favourite newspapers in the early 1920s was the Connacht Tribune. It was in the edition for 17 May 1924 that he borrowed the incident with the revolver, which will be revisited in the next chapter (RFW 064.39 ff). The incident referred to occurred in Galway in 1923. The following passage is relevant to the paragraph we are now studying:

John Keogh in the Dock … Another Killimore Raid. Another charge of raiding Killimore barracks on 18th October, 1923, when the guards’ uniforms and bicycles were carried away and Sergeant Keely and other guards were beaten, was next proceeded with. Sergeant Keely, describing the raid, said he remembered the morning of the 18th. He heard knocking at the door and he asked who was there. The reply came, “The boys.” He opened the door and he was forced back with two revolvers by Jack Downey and Jack Keogh … Keogh … pointed a revolver at Guard Temple saying, “You’re shot,” firing at the same time, and the bullet went through the bedroom window. (Connacht Tribune 17 May 1924)

In Ireland the boys commonly refers to members of the IRA.

 

Killimore, County Galway

Killimor, or Killimore, is a town in the east of County Galway:

The Barracks: According to both the 1901 and the 1911 census this was originally a dwelling house with nine rooms and owned by the Rudden family. Matthew Rudden was an RIC [Royal Irish Constabulary] pensioner and his daughter, Clarry Rudden, married John Taylor, an auctioneer, in Portumna. The building was then used as a barracks by the Garda Síochána until the construction of the new barracks. It was then bought by members of the Cunniffe family. (Killimor Town in the Past)

Note that the present paragraph opens with We seem to us … to be reading, which implies that the following account of the assault is a written report of some kind―such as one might come across in a newspaper.

Locations

Although Joyce based the assault on an incident that took place in Killimore, County Galway, he sets it elsewhere:

… after the show at Wednesbury … returning late amid a dense particular … from the second house of the Boore and Burgess Christy Menestrels by the old spot, Roy’s Corner …

 

Bridge Street, Wednesbury

Wednesbury is a market town in Staffordshire, England. Why did Joyce choose this particular place? Was it because the name incorporates both space and time―Wednesday? Note that HCE later addresses his assailant as Midweeks. German: Mittwoch, Wednesday (literally: Midweek). Louis O Mink notes that Wednesbury was the site of a battle between the Saxons and Britons in 592 CE. This is taken from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but the identity of Woden’s Barrow is disputed (Mink 535 : Swanton 20 and fn 4). According to FWEET, Joyce’s source for Wednesbury was Alfred Robbins’ Parnell: The Last Five Years:

But, in addition to Campbell, there was a source of Information special to myself In the person of Philip Stanhope, long afterwards Lord Weardale, the Radical member of a Conservative family―brother of Salisbury’s Secretary for War at the very time―who was then sitting for Wednesbury. (Robbins 171)

Joyce is unlikely to have known about the alleged battle between the Saxons and Britons. Even if he looked up Wednesbury in the Encyclopædia Britannica he would not have found any mention of this battle.

 

Scene of the Murder of Percy Thompson in Ilford, London

The dense particular suggests that the scene is set somewhere in London. The Bywaters Affair, which inspired the HCE Affair, took place in Ilford, in the northeast of London. Percy Thompson was murdered by Frederick Bywaters when he and his wife were returning home from a show at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly. In the present situation, however, the show is a minstrel show. In this genre Moore & Burgess were rivals of Christy’s Minstrels. Joyce’s notes suggest that the second house is Israel, or the period of Jewish history when the Second Temple stood. Presumably Joyce is drawing parallels between HCE’s persecution and historical instances of the persecution of Blacks and Jews.

The old spot is surely the scene of HCE’s Crime in the Park. It is a commonplace that criminals always return to the scene of the crime. Does the phrase also recall the Old Sots’ Hole [RFW 033.12], the pub where Hosty and his mates wet their whistles before launching Hosty’s Rann on the unsuspecting populace of Dublin?

Roy’s Corner (French: roi, king) reminds us that HCE’s first Oedipal Encounter in the Humphriad was his meeting with the King on the road outside his tavern (RFW 024.10 ff). In A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer, Louis O Mink comments:

ROY’S CORNER This sounds like a real name in Dublin popular usage, but no one seems to remember it. In the later 19th century, George Roy’s fish stores were at the corner of George’s St, East, and George’s Quay, Upper. The name might be a pun on “King’s Corner,” and W King, printer and stationer, was at the corner of Charles St and Ormond Quay, Upper. (Mink 471)

 

The Judgement of the Dead in Amenti

The Book of the Dead

In The Books at the Wake, James Atherton identifies the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead as one of the sacred books of Finnegans Wake. He devotes an entire chapter―ten pages―to it, noting that Joyce’s friend Frank Budgen was the first to identify it as an important source for Finnegans Wake (Atherton 191-200):

The text which is cut or written on figures from the XIIth dynasty onwards explains quite clearly the purpose the figures were intended to serve, for in it the figure is called upon, in the name of the deceased person written upon it, to perform whatever labours he might be adjudged to do in the other world [Budge 216]. The sixth chapter is mentioned later in ‛We seem to us (the real us!) to be reading our Amenti in the sixth sealed chapter of the going forth by black’ [RFW 050.19-20]. One meaning of this is that we are being sentenced to an eternity of punishment or labour as Shabti figures. ‛Amenti’ is an Egyptian word meaning both the World of the Dead and the West. Perhaps ‛the sixth sealed’ is also an allusion to the six seals which were found on the tomb of Tutankhamen, to which much publicity was given between 1922 and 1927. Joyce uses the phrase ‛Us, the real Us’ twice [RFW 050.19 and 346.37]; it translates nuk per nuk, ‛I, even I’, in the royal plural as it was used by the Pharaohs in their inscriptions. (Atherton 194-195)

 

I, Even I

Joyce’s source for the details he uses in the present paragraph was Tom Tit Tot: An Essay on Savage Philosophy in Folk-Tale, by the English anthropologist Edward Clodd. In a chapter entitled Words of Power, under the heading Passwords, we read:

The famous Word of Power, ‘Open, Sesame,’ pales before the passwords given in the Book of the Dead, or, more correctly, The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day. This oldest of sacred literature, venerable four thousand years B.C., contains the hymns, prayers, and magic phrases to be used by Osiris (the common name given to the immortal counterpart of the mummy) in his journey to Amenti, the underworld that led to the Fields of the Blessed. (Clodd 205)

Joyce borrows from this book on at least nine occasions in the course of Finnegans Wake: FWEET.

 

Edward Clodd

Barking Mad

The innocent word barkiss is full of meaning and is a good example of how many layers of subtext Joyce can squeeze into a single word:

  • Barkiss This is a genuine surname, but I don’t think Joyce had any particular Barkiss in mind. The name does not appear in Adaline Glasheen’s A Third Census of Finnegans Wake.

  • Slang: barker, pistol.

  • Mr Barkis A character in Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield, who constantly informs his beloved Clara Peggotty that Barkis is willin’ (ie willing to marry her). The phrase has become proverbial as an indication of a person’s willingness to do something. In this case, the assailant is willing to kill HCE.

  • Burgess Moore & Burgess Minstrels are alluded to in the previous line.

  • Berkeley The Irish philosopher and clergyman George Berkeley. In the final chapter of Finnegans Wake he will appear as the Archdruid of Ireland, who suffers an Oedipal Encounter with the invader St Patrick.

  • Burke Edmund Burke, the Irish Parliamentarian, who once quoted King Lear in the House of Commons: See, they bark at me (Benjamin 675).

  • Buckley The sniper who assassinates HCE during the Crimean War, as recounted in How Buckley Shot the Russian General (RFW 260.32 ff). This is yet another re-enactment of HCE’s Oedipal Encounter with the Cad.

  • Barkey An Anthony Barkey was Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1717-1718.

  • Barkers A department store in Kensington, London (1870-2006), though I doubt they ever sold revolvers.

 

Humping a Suspicious Parcel

Weather

To conclude, note the changeability of the weather, which is a recurring motif in this chapter. Bad weather and poor visibility are metaphors for the difficulty of separating fact from fiction:

going forth by black … amid a dense particular … hailing … gaelish … blizzard’s … sultry … showery …

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

References

  • James S Atherton, The Books at the Wake: A Study of the Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, The Viking Press, New York (1960)
  • Roy Benjamin, Noirse-Made-Earsy: Noise in Finnegans Wake, Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 50, Number 4, Pages 670-687, Penn State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania (2013)
  • Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York (1944)
  • Edward Clodd, Tom Tit Tot: An Essay on Savage Philosophy in Folk-Tale, Duckworth and Co, London (1898)
  • Finn Fordham (editor), Chapter by Chapter Outline, Finnegans Wake, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2012)
  • George Cinclair Gibson, Wake Rites: The Ancient Irish Rituals of Finnegans Wakes, University Press of Florida, Gainesville (2005)
  • John Gordon, Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York (1986)
  • 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 & 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)
  • Terence Killeen, The Boarder Incident Prerepeated Itself: A Study in Conflict, Aurora Piñeiro (coordinator), Rewriting Traditions: Contemporary Irish Fiction, Pages 61-75, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City (2021)
  • Louis O Mink, A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana (1978)
  • Alfred Robbins, Parnell: The Last Five Years, Thornton Butterworth, Ltd, London (1926)
  • Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
  • Michael J Swanton (translator & editor, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Routledge, New York (1998)

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