04 March 2024

O, By the By

 

O, By the By (RFW 056.01–056.18)

The last ten pages of Chapter 3 of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake comprise an episode known as The Battery at the Gate. This paragraph opens the third and final section of the Battery, Herr Betreffender (RFW 055.01–059.28), in which HCE suffers an assault at the hands of an Austrian salesman on his summer holidays. As usual, this is just another retelling of the same old story of HCE’s roadside encounter with the King, which was also retold as an encounter in the Phoenix Park with the Cad with a Pipe.

First-Draft Version

This paragraph began life as a pair of sentences in the middle of a long paragraph, which Joyce later expanded to fill more than four pages of The Restored Finnegans Wake (RFW 055.19–059.28). Herr Betreffender was originally an unnamed travelling salesman, who was staying as a guest at HCE’s tavern. He attacks the gate―the Battery at the Gate―believing that HCE has robbed him of some cash and rifled the pockets of his overcoat:

It ought to be always remembered that there was a commercial stopping in the hotel and he missed six pounds fifteen and he found his overcoat disturbed. The gate business was all threats & abuse. ―Hayman 74

These details were inspired, once again, by a story Joyce read in one of his favourite newspapers, the Connacht Tribune:

FOND OF FINERIES Young Girl Returned for Trial

At Ballinasloe District Court on Saturday last, before Mr. J. H. Gallagher, D. J., was charged in custody with the alleged larceny of a purse containing 17s. 2d., and a pair of woolen gloves, the property of Miss Julia Burke, a teacher at the Convent of Mercy schools, Ballinasloe … Some time ago there was a gentlemen living in the house where accused was a servant, and he missed £75 … Miss Julia Burke’s deposition was to the effect that she was a teacher at the convent schools, and was in the classroom on November 14. Accused came there accompanied by a little girl. She said she had come for an overcoat belonging to a little girl of Mrs. Hills, Society St. She stated that the overcoat was left there by the child. Accused went into the classroom to get it and afterwards when she (Miss Burke) went in she found her coat, which was hanging on the wall, disturbed; the pocket lining was hanging out, and the purse and gloves were missing … Mrs. Hill deposed that when her little son arrived from school he said he had left his coat behind, and she was about to send him back again when accused came into the shop and on hearing her sending the child back for his coat, she volunteered to go with him. ―Connacht Tribune 24 November 1923, Page 6, Column 3

 

Convent of Mercy Schools (Society Street, Ballinasloe)

Why did Joyce alter £75 to six pounds fifteen (£6 15/- = 135 shillings = 1620 pence)? The same amount recurs in the following chapter, disguised as six victolios fifteen (RFW 065.34). Numbers are usually important in Finnegans Wake―note the familiar 1132 in this paragraph―but if these particular figures hold any significance, I am not aware of it.

In revising this section, Joyce made the protagonist an Austrian journalist, with the result that the final version is heavy with German words and grammatical constructions. But why Austrian? Perhaps Joyce simply wanted an excuse to use the German word Betreffender (person concerned), from the verb betreffen, which means both to encounter and to concern. This word also connects HCE’s attacker with the mysterious fender that figured earlier in this chapter in another version of the assault on HCE, and identifies Herr Betreffender as both offender and defender. HCE is both the attacker and the attacked: he is his own worst enemy.

German Elements

The prominence of an Austrian salesman and journalist has resulted in lending this paragraph a distinctly German flavour:

  • Betreffender German: Betreffender, person concerned

    • German: betreffend, concerning, regarding : in question, relevant
    • German: herbetreffend, aforementioned
    • zimmer holedigs summer holidays.
    • German: Zimmer, room.
    • Heinrich Zimmer: 19th century Celticist, author of Keltische Beiträge, a summary of which Joyce read : also his son, Indologist and linguist, author of Maya: Der Indische Mythos, which he sent to Joyce in 1938 with a dedication, and from which Joyce took some notes.
    • hole, dig. Bill Cadbury discerned a nice entombment echo here.
    • hole: small dingy lodgings
    • digs: lodgings

  • Kommerzial German: Kommerzialrat, Councillor of Commerce―a title awarded on an honorary basis to members of the business community who have served the Republic of Austria in a professional capacity.

    • commercial: commercial traveller, travelling salesman : tramp, vagrant

  • Gorbotipacco Italian: Corpo di Bacco, By Jove! As FWEET notes, the confusion between voiced and unvoiced consonants is typical of German mispronunciation of Italian.

  • wreaking German: rauchen, to smoke

  • Zentral Oylrubber German: Zentraleuropa, Central Europe

  • Osterich German: Österreich, Austria. The name means Eastern Kingdom. John Gordon suggests that ostrich may be included, evoking Australia (Southern Land). In Finnegans Wake Australia is an infernal underworld associated with Shem.

  • mark German: Mark, mark, a unit of currency

    • German: Ostmark, Eastern March, the forerunner of Austria in the Middle Ages

  • Gosh these wholly romads This phrase possibly conceals a reference to the Goths and other German tribes, who roamed as nomads across eastern Europe and invaded the Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages is also meant.

  • Yuly German: Juli July : Jul, Yule, Christmastide

  • wheil German: weil, because

  • swishing German: zwischen, between

  • swopping Swiss German: Schwob, a German, a Swabian

  • myth German: mit, with

  • brockendootsch German: Der Brocken, The Brocken, the tallest peak in Germany’s Harz Mountains, and the scene of the Witches’ Sabbath (Walpurgisnacht) in Goethe’s Faust. It is also the site of the famous optical illusion known as the Brocken Spectre. The Scottish novelist James Hogg evokes the brocken spectre on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh in his novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which is alluded to on a number of occasions in Finnegans Wake.

    • German: Brocken, morsel, crumb, fragment
    • Heinrich von Kleist, Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug), an allegorical play about the Fall of Adam
    • German: gebrochenes Deutsch, broken German

 

The Brocken

  • German: Der Fall Adams, The Case of Adam, The Adam Affair : The Fall of Adam

  • Frankofurto Siding German: Frankfurter Zeitung, Frankfurt Times, a German newspaper (see below)

  • Fastland German: Festland, Continent, Mainland (Europe). Fastland is the Danish form.

  • er German: er, he

  • constated German: konstatieren, to state : to establish, verify : to detect

  • that one had … disturbed In German the past participle in such grammatical constructions is placed at the end of the clause, as here.

  • lammswolle German: Lammwolle lamb’s wool

  • and wider German: und weiter, and, further, moreover

    • and wider … other German: entweder … oder, either … or
    • German: wieder, again

  • he might the same zurichschicken In German the infinitive in such constructions is placed at the end of the clause.

  • zurichschicken German: zurückschicken, to send back

    • Zurich, where Joyce lived for several years.

 

Universitätsstrasse 38, Zurich: Joyce’s Home in 1918

  • he would … become Another example of German grammar, in which the infinitive is thrown to the end of the clause.

  • tosend and obertosend German: tausend und abertausend, thousands and thousands

    • German: tosen, to roar, to rage

  • tonnowatters, German: Donnerwetter!, Gosh! : thunderstorm

  • monkey’s damages German: Affenschande, crying shame (literally: monkey-shame)

    • Artificial German: Affenschaden, monkey-damage

  • become German: bekommen, to get

  • and after this sort Literal translation of German: und nach dieser Art, and of this kind.

Michael Joyce

Was Herr Betreffender, contributor to the Frankfurter Zeitung, based on a real person? Adaline Glasheen believes that this is possibly the case:

*Betreffender, Herr (German “beforementioned”)―probably refers to Michael Joyce, English writer whose story Vielleicht ein Traum [Perchance a Dream] appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung, 19 July 1931, and was attributed to James Joyce, who was pretty mad about it. See Letters, III, 224–32. ―Glasheen 30

 

Frankfurter Zeitung

In Letters III, we read Richard Ellmann’s footnote and translation of Joyce’s first letter about this story. The latter was in French and addressed to the poet Yvan Goll, whom Joyce had first met in Zurich:

The Frankfurter Zeitung published on 19 July 1931 a translation by Irene Kafka of a story, ‛Perchance a Dream,’ by Michael Joyce, originally published in the London Mercury. The newspaper attributed it to James instead of Michael Joyce, and to James Joyce the ‛error’ appeared disingenuous …

‛Dear Mr Goll: We have kept the postal receipt for the disc sent by registered mail. It has probably been stopped by the censorship and it is useless to send another. Now in Frankfurt, too, the Frankfurter Zeitung of 19 July has published a whole page of text by J. J., author of Ulysses, translated from the English manuscript by Irene Kafka. Who can she be ? Where has she found this manuscript which the newspaper attributes to me? I know nothing of it. I do not know her at all. I never wrote that silly story which is called Vielleicht ein Traum. I have never communicated with the Frankfurter Zeitung. Perchance a Dream but definitely an outrage. > Cordially yours James Joyce’ ―Letters III 30 July 1931 (Ellmann III:224)

Although Joyce had already made HCE’s attacker an Austrian commercial by June 1927, when a version of this chapter appeared in transition, the name Herr Betreffender and the references to the Frankfurter Zeitung date from the early 1930s, so Glasheen is probably correct in her analysis (JJDA).

 

David Spurr

I will conclude by quoting a lengthy paragraph from an article on this affair by David Spurr, Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature at the University of Geneva:

An example of the latter tendency [to querulous paranoia] in Joyce’s life as a writer emerges from his response to the publication in 1931 of a short story entitled “Vielleicht ein Traum” under the name of James Joyce in the prestigious Frankfurter Zeitung. In a curious coincidence of names, the publication was in fact the translation by one Irene Kafka “from the English manuscript” of a story entitled “Perchance to Dream” by a writer named Michael Joyce. From what can be gathered of the facts of this affair, it appears that Kafka, subject to her own lapse, mistakenly wrote “James” for “Michael” and the editors of the Frankfurter Zeitung thought they were publishing the translation of a minor work by the famous Irish writer. In any case, alerted to this publication by his German publisher, Joyce’s reaction was nothing less than hysterical. He embarked on a campaign to identify Irene Kafka and Michael Joyce, to denounce the Frankfurter Zeitung and to seek (unsuccessfully) damages of $5,000 (equivalent to the purchasing power of at least $70,400 in 2010 …). With the help of Sylvia Beach, Joyce’s Paris publisher, this essentially banal affair took on the proportions of an international literary scandal―this despite apologies from the newspaper, the author of the original story and the translator. Ursula Zeller has shown a list of letters written during the three-month period from July to September 1931, in which more than 20 figures in the literary world took an active role. These include such names as T.S. Eliot, Sean O’Casey, Harold Nicolson, Harriet Shaw Weaver, Adrienne Monnier, Philippe Soupault, Padraic Colum and Ernst Robert Curtius. During this period, Joyce was entirely distracted from his work on the manuscript of Work in Progress (later Finnegans Wake). The Frankfurter Zeitung affair nonetheless made its way into the Wake, with a reference to the “Francofurto Siding” (70.04) a play on the Italian franco furto, meaning “outright theft.” What we can make of this bizarre coincidence of another Joyce with another Kafka is that James Joyce exhibits a kind of paranoia of the signature―a fear of the other’s appropriation of his proper name―that far surpasses any material or moral harm that could have come to him had he let the matter drop in the beginning. He was indeed compelled to do so in the end, but only after drawing the attention of most of the European literary world to the imagined damage to his reputation, and to the existence of an otherwise totally obscure writer named Joyce. To paraphrase what Stephen says of Shakespeare ([Ulysses] 9.999), the notes of persecution, banishment and betrayal sound continually in the language of Joyce. Similarly, the idea of the artist as assigned to the sewer of an otherwise clean-smelling world of letters ranges throughout Joyce’s work, from the early satirical verses all the way through Finnegans Wake, where, for example, Shem the Penman, a Joycean alter ego on trial for indecent exposure, is addressed in court as “you and your gift of your gaft of your garbage” (93.19–20). In a later episode Shem’s house is described in indignant tones as the house of O’Shame, “known as the haunted inkbottle” (182.30–31), a dwelling that exceeds everything “even in our western playboyish world for pure mousefarm filth” (183.04) ―Spurr 182–183

 

Leixlip (1910)

Leixlip

Although Finnegans Wake is unambiguously set in the Mullingar House in Chapelizod, Joyce often conflates this village with two nearby villages further upstream: Lucan and Leixlip. I have elsewhere suggested that Lucan (on the right bank of the Liffey) and Chapelizod (on the left bank) might represent HCE’s rival sons Shaun & Shem, with Lucalizod representing the Oedipal Figure who embodies both brothers. But what about Leixlip? Does this village, which is higher upstream than the other two, represent HCE himself?

The name is of Old Norse origin, meaning salmon leap, which refers to a weir on the Liffey which salmon must leap over on their journey upstream to spawn. HCE’s daughter Issy was born on 29 February, making her the Wake’s leap-year girl. Does this draw her into the Leixlip mix?

HCE is often identified with the Salmon of Knowledge of Irish mythology, and with Finn MacCool, who tasted the salmon and received all its wisdom. Phonetic resemblances tie this Salmon to the Biblical wise man Solomon. These and other fishy connections were explored by Marion Cumpiano in an essay that appeared in the James Joyce Quarterly in 1977:

The New Bridge, which crosses the Liffey a few kilometres upstream from Leixlip, was mentioned earlier in this chapter (RFW 050.40). Originally comprising four arches, it was recently rebuilt with three to facilitate the development of the adjacent water reservoir and the Leixlip hydro-electric dam 2 km downstream, which was constructed in 1945. The development of the hydro-electric plant destroyed the historic salmon leap.

 

Newbridge, Leixlip

I like the idea that Leixlip, being closer to the source of the Liffey than either Lucan or Chapelizod, stands for HCE, the progenitor of Shaun & Shem.

Loose Ends

And finally, let’s wrap up some loose ends:

  • lets wee brag of praties The Wee Bag of Praties, an Irish folk tune in Charles Stanford’s Complete Collection of Irish Music as Noted by George Petrie. The title means small bag of potatoes.

  • northroomer Presumably this simply means that Herr Betreffender occupied a room on the north side of HCE’s hotel. North-facing rooms in the Mullingar House overlook the Phoenix Park, where HCE encountered the Cad. John Gordon comments:

69.32-6: “northrooomer … 32 … Kommerzial:” Shem-type and Shaun-type, as usual accompanied by numbers 3 and 2. (Will be followed by an 11 at 70.1.) ―John Gordon

  • the Sockeye Sammon were stopping at the time Irish salmon (grilse) return to Irish rivers to spawn throughout the summer, and spawn from autumn through spring. The sockeye salmon, however, is found in the North Pacific Ocean. The Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) is native to Ireland. O, by the by, there was a James Sammon, family grocer and wine merchant of 167 King Street, Dublin (Glasheen 254).

  • orange fasting ? Smoked salmon is orange, but cooked salmon is pink. Are the Sockeye Sammons eating nothing but oranges? In the late 18th and early 19th centuries Leixlip was the site of a popular health spa. Or are they Orangemen (Ulster Protestants)? Note the reference below to Holy Romans (Catholics).

 

Remains of the Leixlip Spa

  • to make a heart of glass to take heart to grass, a 17th-century corruption of to take heart of grace, meaning to take courage, to be courageous, to recover one’s courage, to take heart. Note the L/R Interchange, which is reversed below when laugh becomes raugh.

  • the game of gaze and bandstand butchery was merely a Patsy O’Strap Gazebos often double as public bandstands. There is one such structure in the Phoenix Park, and another in St Stephen’s Green. The Butchers’ March and Paddy O’Snap are two more tunes in Stanford’s Complete Collection of Irish Music. Butcher’s Wood in the Phoenix Park was the scene of the attack on Doctor Sturk in Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel The House by the Churchyard, a key text for Finnegans Wake. It was also the scene of the encounter between Joyce’s father and a tramp―the original seed from which HCE’s Encounter in the Park grew.

  • roebucks raugh at pinnacle’s peak The deer in the Phoenix Park are fallow deer, not roe deer. Joyce chooses Roebuck because there is a townland in Dublin of that name, and the word echoes Rubek, the hero of Henrik Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken, who dies on a mountain. In the next chapter, the attack on HCE will be rehearsed once more, but this time on a mountain. Of course, Lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake is also in there.

 

Fallow Deer in the Phoenix Park

Joycean Errata

Most of the 9000-odd emendations made to the text of Finnegans Wake by the editors of The Restored Finnegans Wake, are relatively minor. The majority consist of changes in orthography and punctuation which many readers would not even notice. But here and there Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon have corrected more significant mistakes that crept into the text over the course of the sixteen or seventeen it took Joyce to write the novel. The most egregious of these involve the omission of complete lines―usually due to eyeskip by a typesetter when the book was being prepared for final printing.

One such errant line has been restored to the present paragraph:

a Kommerzial (Gorbotipacco, he was wreaking like Zentral Oylrubber) from Osterich, the U.S.E., paying (Gaul save the mark!) 11/- in the week (Gosh, these wholly romads!) and he missed a soft felt and, take this in, six quid fifteen of conscience money in the first deal of Yuly …

When this passage was first published in transition in 1927, it read:

a Kommerzial (Gorbotipacco, he was wreaking like Zentral Oylrubber) from Osterich, the U.S.E., paying (Gaul save the mark!) 11/- in the week (Gosh, these wholly romads!) of conscience money in the first deal of Yuly …

The line and he missed a soft felt and, take this in, six quid fifteen was overlooked by one of the typesetters for transition. Apparently, the line disappeared at draft Level 6, the first set of galleys for transition, in 1927:

At FW 70.02, the first transition galley proof, Level 6, lacks a full typed line from the typescript which was its model, Level 5, “and he missed a soft felt and, take this in, six quid fifteen”, and the loss is never repaired. Because it is such a common type of error, to skip from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line but one, I believe this is a transmissional departure rather than intentional change at what there is much evidence to believe was a now missing Level 5+* which was the typesetter’s actual model. ―Cadbury, Lost and Found

Rose & O’Hanlon have also restored the paragraph break after and after this sort. In the published version this paragraph ran on continuously all the way to Adyoe! (RFW 059.39).

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

References

  • Bill Cadbury et al, Genetic Joyce Studies, Centre for Manuscript Genetics, University of Antwerp, Antwerp (1999 ff)
  • Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York (1944)
  • Marion W Cumpiano, The Salmon and Its Leaps in “Finnegans Wake”, James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 14, Number 3, Pages 255–273, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1977)
  • Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake, University of California Press, Berkeley, California (1977)
  • David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1963)
  • James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, London (1824)
  • 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)
  • Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
  • David Spurr, Paranoid Modernism in Joyce and Kafka, Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 34, Number 2, Pages 178–191, Indian Universiny Press, Bloomington, Indiana (2011)
  • Charles Stanford, Complete Collection of Irish Music as Noted by George Petrie, Parts I,–III, Irish Literary Society of London, Boosey & Co, London (1902–1905)

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01 March 2024

Now, By Memory Inspired

 

Now, By Memory Inspired (RFW 055.19–055.40)

The last ten pages of Chapter 3 of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake comprise an episode known as The Battery at the Gate. This paragraph concludes Camelback Excesses (RFW 054.16–055.40), the second of the three subsections into which the Battery can be divided. An embattled HCE is placed under house arrest.

First-Draft Version

This paragraph, which takes up half a page in The Restored Finnegans Wake, began life as a single sentence, describing the incarceration of HCE for his own safety―an idea that will be elaborated in the following chapter:

First, there was a gateway for the suroptimist had bought and enlarged that shack to grow old & happy in and when everything was got up for the purpose he put a gate on the place and the gate was locked to keep HCE in, in case he felt like tempting providence. ―Hayman 74

In subsequent drafts the shack is identified―I think―with the outhouse behind HCE’s tavern:

  • in loo thereof In Ireland loo is still a common name for a lavatory or WC.

  • if he strikes a lousaforitch It is commonly believed that lighting a match in the WC can mask the smell of faeces. A lucifer is a self-igniting match.

  • the iron gape … was triplepatlockt on him Remember how we had to apply to the janitrix, the Mistress Kathe for her passkey to the locked Museyroom. As John Gordon notes, the outhouse in Finnegans Wake is often locked. See, for example, RFW 404.04–31, which has many points in common with the present paragraph. triplepatlockt alludes to the trio of HCE’s enemies: Shem, Shaun & the Oedipal Figure. There is clearly an allusion here to The Tripartite Life of St Patrick. There may also be an allusion to the Norse trickster god Loki―Valhalla, Odin and the Eddas are mentioned a few lines above.

  • the jags In Dublin, jacks is the common form of jakes, English slang for toilet or WC.

The Soroptimist International is a women’s volunteer service founded in 1921. Why HCE is described as a suroptimist I cannot say. The prefix sur means super, so perhaps HCE is being unrealistically optimistic in thinking that he will be allowed to grow old and happy in his shack without being further troubled by the local populace.

 

Violet Richardson Ward, Founding President of the Soroptimist International

The first draft was written in November 1923. By June 1927, when a later draft of this chapter appeared in Eugene Jolas & Elliot Paul’s literary journal transition, Joyce had expanded it to nineteen lines. Note that there is still no paragraph break before the following section, which begins with O, by the by …:

Now turn wheel again to the whole of the wall. There was once upon a wall and a hooghoog wall a was and such o wallhole did exist. A stonehinged gate then was for another thing while the suroptimist had bought and enlarged that shack under fair rental of one yearlyng sheep, (prime) value of sixpence, and one small yearlyng goat (cadet) value of eightpence, to grow old and happy (hogg it and kidd him) for the reminants of his years; and when everything was got up for the purpose he put a gate on the place by no means as some pretext a bedstead in loo thereof to keep out donkeys (the pigdirt hanging from the jags to this hour makes that clear) and just thenabouts the iron gape, by old custom left open to prevent the cats from getting at the gout, was triplepatlockt on him on purpose by his faithful poorters to keep him inside probably and possibly in case he felt like sticking out his chest too far and tempting gracious providence by a stroll on the nation’s eggday, unused as he was yet to being freely clodded. ―Jolas & Paul 46–47

When Joyce later revised this section he slightly elaborated what he had written and inserted half a dozen lines of new material before the mention of the stonehinged gate. As we shall see, this new material draws parallels between HCE’s current predicament and both his Oedipal Encounter with the Cad and his domestic relationship with his daughter, Issy.

 

The Wellington Monument

Back to the Phoenix Park

The opening lines of this paragraph hark back to HCE’s encounter in the Phoenix Park with the Cad with a Pipe.

  • by memory inspired HCE’s current situation recalls his earlier one. One could say that the whole of Finnegans Wake is by memory inspired. This phrase is the title of an anonymous Irish ballad celebrating the heroes of several Irish rebellions and political movements. It was included in Padraic Colum’s Anthology of Irish Verse, which was published in 1922.

  • turn wheel again to the whole of the wall The Hole in the Wall was a nickname for the Black Horse Tavern, Nancy Hand’s pub on Blackhorse Avenue, Dublin. This public house was located next to a pedestrian turnstile in the outer wall of the Phoenix Park. The turning of the wheel has obvious Viconian connotations. The Battery at the Gate is another case of history repeating itself.

 

The Hole in the Wall

  • Gyant Blyant fronts Peannlueamoore In the Phoenix Park Encounter HCE was described as the flaxen Gygas when he was pointing at the Wellington Monument.

    • Greek: gigas, giant.

    • In Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur Lancelot, having gone insane, is held captive for his own safety by Sir Blyaunte.

    • During the Cad Encounter the Wellington Monument was referred to as his duc de Fer’s overgrown milestone, but later, when this episode was being recounted to a namecousin of the late archdeacon F. X. Preserved Coppinger, it was called that overgrown leadpencil.

    • Irish: peann luaidhe mór, big lead pencil. I don’t understand the apparent allusion to Thomas Moore. The ballad By Memory Inspired is not one of his. Perhaps the writer George Moore is meant. Louis Mór is an Irish translation of the French: Louis le Grand, Louis XIV, but I don’t see the relevance.

    • Danish: blyant, pencil.

  • a garthen of Odin and the lost paladays when all the eddams ended with aves It need hardly be remarked that the Phoenix Park does duty as the Garden of Eden. HCE’s Crime in the Park is Finnegans Wake’s Original Sin. Note the allusions to John Milton’s Paradise Lost and to Adam and Eve. Odin and the Eddas add a Scandinavian dimension―always appropriate, considering that Dublin was originally a Norse settlement. John Gordon suggests an allusion also to the Paladins, the Twelve Peers of Charlemagne, who die heroically at the Pass of Roncevaux in the Chanson de Roland. Unlikely, but paladin does occur before the end of this chapter (RFW 059.11).

  • if he strikes a lousaforitch The Cad with a Pipe was called the luciferant, which not only identifies him with the Devil―the serpent in the Garden of Eden―but also refers to his striking a match to light his pipe.

 

Four-Poster Bed with Robert Adam Fireplace

The Fireplace

It is surely significant that both the Cad with a Pipe and HCE’s daughter Issy are associated with fire. When HCE was a younger man, Issy slept in the room above the Mullingar House’s master bedroom. Whenever she talked in her sleep, her voice was transmitted down the chimney flue to invade the night thoughts of HCE―avoice from afire. As John Gordon notes, the first line of this paragraph alludes to the fireplace as the whole of the wall:

The ‛whole of the wall’ to which HCE now ‛turn[s]’ has a triple meaning at least: he is a dying man turning his face to the wall, the enamoured father/lover turning his attention to the fireplace hole in the wall from which Issy’s voice comes, and that fellow who some time ago roused himself to see to the hole punched in his wall by hail, tree, and wind, anthropomorphised as rock-throwing balladeers. ―Gordon 135

  • ore Danish: øre, ear.

  • Aaarlund Dutch: aar, ear (of corn, grain, etc).

The ear is the organ through which Issy poisons HCE’s mind. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Claudius assassinated Hamlet’s father by pouring poison into his ear as he slept.

  • Isther Estarr play Yesther Asterr Jonathan Swift’s close friends Esther Johnson (Stella) and Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa) represent Issy in Finnegans Wake. In the present context, in which a gate is constructed and locked to keep HCE in and his enemies out, there may be an allusion to Babylon’s famous Ishtar Gate (see Finnegans, Wake!).

 

The Murder of Hamlet’s Father

Armenia

This paragraph includes a foliation of Armenian terms. They are all to be found in half-a-dozen lines that Joyce added in 1938, about one year before the finished novel was published―Galleys 2nd set, May 1938, I.3 draft level 10, JJDA. Like all the other Armenian clusters in Finnegans Wake, Joyce flags this one by including a distortion of the word Armenian (here as Armen, which is also German for the poor):

Ere ore or ire in Aaarlund. Or you Dair’s Hair or you Diggin Mosses or your horde of orts and oriorts to garble a garthen of Odin and the lost paladays when all the eddams ended with aves. Armen. The doun is theirs and still to see for menags if he strikes a lousaforitch and we’ll come to those baregazed shoeshines if you just shoodov a second. And let oggs be good old goggles and Isther Estarr play Yesther Asterr. In the drema of Sorestost Areas, Diseased. ―RFW 055.21–28

  • ôre ôr, day by day

  • der, Mr, sir (form of address to secular clergy)

  • hayr, Father (form of address to regular clergy)

  • digin, Mrs

  • orti, son : young man

  • ôriort, young woman

  • doun, house

  • menag, solitary, alone

  • Lousavorich, Illuminator (title given to Saint Gregory, first patriarch of Armenia)

  • barekeadz, living a good life

  • shoushan, lily : Lily, Susan (girl’s name)

  • shoudov, hastily, quickly

  • ogi, spirit

 

A Map of the Terrestrial Paradise

The Garden of Eden is traditionally located in Armenia, near the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. It is hardly a coincidence that this foliation of Armenian words occurs in a passage that mentions the garthen of Odin, lost paladays, and eddams & aves. Most of the Armenian terms in Finnegans Wake are associated with the Garden of Eden (Halper 19–24).

Joyce’s spelling of these words in the Finnegans Wake notebooks appears to be phonetic, which suggests that his source was someone who spoke Armenian rather than a dictionary or other written text.

Some Loose Ends

And finally, let us tie up some loose ends.

  • There was once upon a wall and a hooghoog wall a was This clause echoes the opening line of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Once upon a time and a very good time it was …

    • Dutch: hoog, high

  • There was once upon a wall … and let oggs be good old gaggles … Estarr … on the peoplade’s eggday The People’s Eggday is Easter Sunday, the Day of the Resurrection―with all its Viconian connotations―but the principle eggy allusion here is surely to Humpty Dumpty on his wall.

    • Old Irish: og, egg

    • French: peuplade, tribe, people

 

Humpty Dumpty

  • Sorestost Areas, Diseased Irish: Saorstát Éireann, Irish Free State. This was the official name of the 26-county state between 1922 and 1937, when Joyce was writing Finnegans Wake. Diseased possibly alludes to Hamlet’s There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.

  • he put an applegate on the place by no means as some pretend a bedstead The detail of the use of a bedstead―the framework that supports a bed―as a gate was taken from All on the Irish Shore: Irish Sketches by Somerville & Ross. This particular sketch, A Grand Filly, describes a foxhunt:

It was pretty to see the yellow horse jump. Nothing came amiss to him, and he didn’t seem able to make a mistake. There was a stone stile out of a bohireen that stopped every one, and he changed feet on the flag on top and went down by the steps on the other side. No one need believe this unless they like, but I saw him do it. The country boys were most exhilarating. How they got there I don’t know, but they seemed to spring up before us wherever we went. They cheered every jump, they pulled away the astounding obstacles that served as gates (such as the end of an iron bedstead, a broken harrow, or a couple of cartwheels), and their power of seeing the fox through a stone wall or a hill could only be equalled by the Röntgen rays. We fought our way through the oak wood, and out over a boggy bounds ditch into open country at last. ―Somerville & Ross 121

  • applegate The Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden is traditionally identified as an apple.

  • the iron gape, by old custom left open to prevent the cat from getting at the gout Another borrowing from one of Joyce’s favourite newspapers, the Connacht Tribune:

House Burning … Dead Goat Precautions. At Galway Quarter Sessions on Tuesday, before the Recorder, Judge Doyle, K.C., Mrs. H. Connelly, Moycullen, sought compensation for the destruction of a dwellinghouse and its contents … The door of witness’s sister’s house had been hasped. ―“Why was it?” inquired the Recorder. ―Witness: We had killed a goat, and the door was hasped in order to prevent the cat getting at the goat (laughter). ―Connacht Tribune 16 February 1924 5/3

Rose & O’Hanlon believe that Joyce made the note door hasped to prevent the cat getting at goat (VI.B.1:1p), but when he later came to use this note he misread it as door open to prevent the cat getting at goat (JJDA). gape conveys the notions of both a barrier (gate) and a gaping hole.

  • by old custom left open A callback to the Prankquean Episode, which was based on an incident in the life of Grace O’Malley, the Pirate Queen. As a result of an altercation between her and the Earl of Howth, the doors of Howth Castle were by custom always left open at dinner time and an extra place was set at table (Gordon 69.24).

  • his faithful poorters The Four Old Men are also the four posts which support HCE’s four-poster bed and resemble the bars of a cage. In the opening chapter of the book they advise Tim Finnegan not to rise during his wake (RFW 019.24 ff). Later, they physically restrain him (Hold him there, Ezekiel Irons … ―RFW 022.03), which may be echoed in iron gape. The Latin: porta, gate, door, is also present. In the context of Stonehenge (stonehinged), there may also be an echo of portal dolmen, an ancient Celtic tomb that resembles a stone doorway (to the afterlife?). Joyce visited Stonehenge in August 1931, during a brief trip to Salisbury (Ellmann 639 : Norburn 150). Megalithic monuments were once believed to be the graves of giants.

Significantly, Joyce uses Dutch words here―in Dutch means in trouble. This phrase has even been traced to the Irish word duais (also duabhais and duadhas), meaning toil, trouble, difficulty, labour (Cassidy 138 : Dineen 373).

  • Dutch: poort, gate : poorters, citizens, burghers

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

References

  • Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York (1944)
  • Daniel Cassidy, How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads, CounterPunch, Petrolia, California (2007)
  • Padraic Colum, Anthology of Irish Verse, Boni and Liveright, New York (1922)
  • Patrick S Dinneen, An Irish-English Dictionary, New Edition, Revised and Greatly Enlarged, Irish Texts Society, Dublin (1927)
  • Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
  • John Gordon, Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York (1986)
  • Nathan Halper, Armenian, A Wake Newslitter, New Series, Volume 16, Number 2, Pages 19–24, University of Essex, English Department, Colchester (1979)
  • 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, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, B W Huebsch, New York (1916)
  • James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, The Viking Press, New York (1958, 1966)
  • James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
  • Roger Norburn, A James Joyce Chronology, Palgrave Macmillan, London (2004)
  • Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
  • Edith Œnone Somerville & Martin Ross, All on the Irish Shore: Irish Sketches, Longmans, Green, and Co, London (1903)

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