Any Dog’s Life You List

 

Halley’s Comet & Westmoreland Street, Dublin (RFW 043.34-044.04)

We resume our analysis of the Cad’s Side of the Story, a retelling of HCE’s Oedipal Encounter in the Phoenix Park with the Cad. That encounter was itself a Viconian repetition of HCE’s earlier encounter with the King outside his tavern in Chapelizod (RFW 024.10 ff). That original encounter was concluded with the following passage in parenthesis:

(One still hears that pebblecrusted laughter, japijap cheerycherrily, among the roadside tree the lady Holmpatrick planted and still one feels the amossive silence of the cladstone allegibelling: Ive mies outs ide Bourn.) (RFW 025.18-21)

It can hardly be a coincidence, then, to learn in the present paragraph that you may still hear them. What we hear turns out to be a multilingual babble of voices engaged in small talk. Directions to the toilets, polite inquiries about the cost of using them, and some comments on their suitability bring to mind not only the Original Sin in the Park, which featured micturating maidens, but also the Museyroom Episode, in which HCE’s defecates.

• Ive mies outs ide Bourn Five miles outside Bourn. This is the sort of thing one might read on a milestone. In the encounter in the park, HCE points towards his duc de Fer’s overgrown milestone—ie the Wellington Memorial. And in the Cad’s Side of the Story, we had the augustan peacebetothem oaks and the monolith rising stark.

The Wellington Monument in the Phoenix Park

First-Draft Version

As we saw in the last article, Joyce’s first draft of this episode did not contain this paragraph or anything resembling it. Instead, the paragraph that ends with the sentence about spending a whole half hour in Havana was followed by a short passage that eventually became the paragraph on RFW 044 beginning And, Cod, says he. But when an early draft of this chapter appeared in the literary journal transition in June 1927, this paragraph was present, and in a form very close to the version that would be published in 1939:

Any dog’s life you list you may still hear them at it, ulemamen, sobranjewomen, storthingboys and dumagirls, as they pass its bleak and bronze portal of your Casaconcordia: Huru more Nee, minny frickans? Hwoorledes har Dee det? Losdoor onleft mladies, cue. Millecientotrigintadue scudi. Tippoty,kyrie, tippoty. Cha kai rotty kai makkar, sahib? Despenseme Usted, senhor, en son succo, sabez. O thaw bron orm, A’Cothraige, thinkinthou gaily? Lick-Pa-flai-hai-pa-Pa-li-si-lang-lang. Epi alo, ecou, Batiste, tuvavnr dans lptit boing coing. Ismeme de bumbac e meias de portocallie. O. O. Os pipos mios es demasiada gruarso por O piccolo pocchino. Wee fee? Ung duro. Kocshis, szabad? Mercy, and you? Gomagh, thak.) (Jolas & Paul 35-36)

The closing parenthesis is a relic of an interim version, in which this whole paragraph was parenthetical. The opening parenthesis before was subsequently erased, but its partner survived for several more drafts.

transition 3:35-36 (1 June 1927)

The transition version is already a marked advance on the actual first draft, which included several more multilingual remarks. The earliest drafts are preserved in a typescript dated by Rose & O’Hanlon December 1923‒early 1927. The following transcription conflates at least four different draft levels:

And any dog’s day you may hear them, ulemamen and sobranjewomen and stortingboys and [blank] as they pass the bleak bronze portal of our house of parliament. Et pia alors. Millecentotrentadue scudi. Semeron den didomen pisterin, aorion eukaristos. Tipote, Kyrie! Cha ke rotty ke makkar, sahib? Desculpe me, senhor, en son succo. O, thaw bron urm, Cothraige! Lick-Pa flaid-hai-pa-Palisi liang-liang! Et pia alors, écoute, batiste, vous allez venir dans le ptit coin! Ismene de bumbac! see meias ciorapi de portocalliu! O! O! Os pipos mios es por O piccolo pocchino! Accidempoli! Huru mor nee, minny frickens! Hvorledes har De det, Opvarter? Last door on left, medear, cue Eine läusige Gesellschaft. Bin so frei! Es def[??]gesmanado gruarso por la boquillas. Hvormegel? Un duro! Kocsis, szabad? Merci, and you? Alb, alb! Wie einst in Mai. Eine ganz gemeg Hurenpartie! Gomagh, thak.) (James Joyce Digital Archive)

According to Joseph Campbell & Henry Morton Robinson, the meaning of this paragraph is as follows:

Hear, for instance, this babel of tongues, these people of the world who legislate and converse in the very shadow of his tomb. Any day you list you may hear them all, as they pass the bleak and bronze portal of his Palace of Peace; men, boys, and girls, of the Moslem, Bulgarian, Norwegian, and Russian parliaments—chattering in their sundry tongues. You will recognize his accents in all they say. [Footnote: The pot au feu language of the text is difficult but finally decipherable. Ulema was the name of a Moslem theological body in the pre-War Turkish government. Storthing is the parliament of Norway; Duma, of Czarist Russia; Sobranje, of Bulgaria. The ten lines of conversation snatches are caught from the lips of a cosmopolitan passing crowd. (Campbell & Robinson 67 and fn)

The Irish House of Commons on 19 April 1780

In one version of HCE’s Original Sin in the Park, he was caught peeping at two girls relieving themselves amongst the foliage:

the charmful waterloose country and they two quitewhite villagettes who hear show of themselves so gigglesome minxt the follyages ... (RFW 006.40-007.01)

• Latin: minxit she urinated.

Listening to their chamber music aroused HCE. In Ulysses, Bloom imagines the sound of Molly pissing into the chamber pot to be a type of chamber music:

Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise. Because the acoustics, the resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law of falling water. Like those rhapsodies of Liszt’s, Hungarian, gipsyeyed. Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddle iddle addle addle oodle oodle. Hiss. (Ulysses 271)

In this paragraph we hear another species of chamber music: the wind music of blustering politicians in the lower chamber of the Houses of Parliament. The Houses of Parliament is an old euphemism for the toilets (as are The House of Lords and The House of Commons).

The Tower of Babel

Parliament

The word Parliament comes from the French: parler, to talk. A parliament is a talking shop. The original parliament was the Tower of Babel. Joyce’s parliamentarians are only identified by the general terms -men, -women, -boys, and -girls. I presume these embrace the usual dramatis personae of Finnegans Wake, particularly the Earwicker household.

Any dog’s life you list you may still hear them at it, like sixes and seventies, as eversure as Halley’s comet, ulemamen, sobranjewomen, storthingboys and dumagirls, as they pass its bleak and bronze portal of your Casaconcordia: (RFW 043.34-37)

• dog’s life a miserable or wretched existence. Joyce originally wrote dog’s day. The dog days are the hot, sultry days of summer, which followed the heliacal rising of Sirius, the Dog Star—or when the Sun was in Canis (Aristotle, Metaphysics). But Joyce may have had in mind the proverb Every dog has its day.

• list (1) like (2) listen. The latter harks back to two earlier passages. One in the opening chapter, and the other just a few pages before the present passage:

Hear? By the mausolime wall. Fimfim fimfim. With a grand funferall. Fumfum fumfum. ’Tis optophone which ontophanes. List! Wheatstone’s magic lyer! They will be tuggling foriver. They will be lichening for allof. They will be pretumbling forover. The harps-dischord shall be theirs for ollaves. (RFW 011.04-08)

Whence it is a slipperish matter, given the wet and low visibility ... to idendifine the individuone in scratch wig, squarecuts, stock, lavaleer, regattable oxeter, baggy pants and shufflers ... with already an incipience (lust!) in the direction of area baldness ... who was asked by free boardschool shirkers ... to tell them ... that fishabed ghoatstory ... (RFW 041.16-25)

In both cases, the allusion is to the Ghost in Hamlet, who enjoins his son to List, list, O, list! Hamlet meeting the ghost of his own father is one of the literary antecedents of the Oedipal Encounter in Finnegans Wake. Franz Liszt is also relevant in the passage with Wheatstone’s magic lyre. He is probably not relevant in the present passage, but it is interesting that Bloom invoked Liszt in his pun on chamber music.

Hamlet and the Ghost

• like sixes and seventies at sixes and sevens, an expression that means at loggerheads, in a state of dispute or disagreement. Joyce’s alteration alludes to the 76-year period of Halley’s Comet.

• as eversure as Halley’s comet EHC, the initials of HCE. Halley’s Comet has a period of about 76 years, as Joyce noted in VI.B.8.3b: Halley 76 yr. of BV. But what does BV mean? B Visibility? Rose & O’Hanlon include the following note on the astronomer for whom the comet is named. It is clearly based on the article in The Encyclopædia Britannica (Eleventh Edition), of which Joyce possessed a set:

Note: Edmund Halley, English astronomer, son of a distinguished and wealthy soapboiler of London. His mind was long concerned with the momentous problem of gravity, despite his achievements in the field of astronomy, and by August 1684 he had perceived that the central force of the solar system must decrease inversely as the square of the distance. He applied vainly to Wren and Hooke for further elucidation, and in August 1684 made a journey to Cambridge for the purpose of consulting Newton, which resulted in the publication of the Principia. The labour and expense of passing this great work through the press devolved upon Halley, who also wrote the prefixed hexameters. Among his many services to the British Navy, the provision of maps and suchlike, was the selection and fortifying the port of Trieste. Halley’s most notable scientific achievements were: his detection of the long inequality of Jupiter and Saturn, and of the acceleration of the moon’s mean motion (1693); his discovery of the proper motions of the fixed stars (1718); his theory of variation (1683), including the hypothesis of four magnetic poles and his suggestion of the magnetic origin of the aurora borealis; his calculation of the orbit of the 1682 comet (the first ever attempted), coupled with a prediction of its return, striking verified in 1759; and his indication (in 1679, and again in 1716) of a method extensively used in the 18th and 19th centuries for determining the solar parallax by means of the transit of Venus. (James Joyce Digital Archive)

Edmond Halley

• ulemamen In Islam, the ulama or ulema are the guardians of legal and religious tradition. Joyce noted in VI.B.10.35m: Ulema (Pers. parl), though the Ulema was not the Persian Parliament. His source was an article in The Irish Times:

The Ulema, the Council of holy men that directs the religious and educational activities of the Persian people, has demanded legislation to prohibit the sale of liquor and to close all places of public amusement. (The Irish Times 11 November 1922)

• sobranjewomen The Sobranje is the Bulgarian Parliament. Bulgarian: събрание [səbranie], assembly.

• storthingboys The Storthing is the Norwegian Parliament. Norwegian Nynorsk: Storting, Great Assembly. Also, stuttering boys. In Finnegans Wake, HCE’s stutter is a sign of his guilt.

• dumagirls The Duma is the Russian Parliament. The Imperial State Duma sat from 1905 until it was finally dissolved in 1917. The current State Duma only dates from 1993. Also, perhaps, dumb girls—though Issy rarely shuts up.

• bleak and bronze The Black & Tans were an irregular force of British men (mostly unemployed World War I veterans) recruited by the Royal Irish Constabulary during the Irish War of Independence (1920-1). They were notorious for their lawlessness, violence and brutality.

• portal A portal is a gateway or entrance. Latin: porta, gate, entrance, door. Later, in III.4 (The Fourth Watch of Shaun), HCE and ALP will appear as Mr and Mrs Bartholomew Porter.

• Casaconcordia Italian: casa di concordia, house of peace, house of concord.

Did Joyce have a particular building in mind, one with black and bronze portals? Louis Mink suggests the Palace of Peace in the Hague, Netherlands, which has housed the Permanent Court of Arbitration since 1913. A house of peace, certainly, but where are the black and bronze portals?

The Peace Palace (The Hague, Netherlands)

Parliament House in Dublin has a couple of large portals. One of them, on Westmoreland Street, is brown and wooden. The other, on Foster Place, is black and metallic:

Bleak and Bronze Portals (Parliament House, Dublin)

Babble of Voices

The remainder of this paragraph consists of seventeen questions or statements in a variety of different languages. As we have seen, Joyce drafted several more, but edited the passage for publication in 1927. Some of these would be appropriate if spoken by a waiter or a concierge in a hotel or restaurant. Some are concerned with the toilets and what one does there, which connects this passage with both HCE’s Original Sin in the Park and the Museyroom Episode. Finally, several references to the cost of spending a penny add a meretricious element to the proceedings.

Huru more Nee, minny frickans?

• Swedish: Huru mår ni, mina fröken? How are you, my young ladies? Huru is now archaic, the modern form being hur. Fröken is actually a singular form, but mina is plural.

John Gordon adds:

Hooray, more knee, my sweet young ladies? (Audience request at leg show: please lift the skirt higher above the knee.) (Gordon 54:10-11)

But would not this request make more sense coming from HCE as he spies on the two girls in the foliage?

The Can-Can

Hwoorledes har Dee det?

• Danish, Norwegian Bokmål: Hvorledes har De det? How do You do? This is now a rather archaic expression.

Losdoor onleft, mladies, cue!

• English: Last door on the left, m’ladies. Thank you. Directions to the Ladies—female toilets—outside of which there is a queue.

• Serbo-Croatian: mlad, young.

Millecientotrigintadue scudi!

• Italian: millecentotrentadue, 1132, a symbolic number in Finnegans Wake.

• Spanish: ciento, hundred.

• Latin: triginta, thirty.

• Italian: scudi, shields, five-lira coins (discontinued in 1918).

• Italian: scusi, excuse me.

An Italian Scudo

Tippoty, kyrie, tippoty!

• Modern Greek: τίποτε, κύριε, τίποτε [tipote, kyrie, tipote], nothing, sir, nothing, you’re welcome, don’t mention it.

• Ancient Greek: τί, κύριε, τί [ti, kyrie, ti?], Why, O Lord, why?

• Ancient Greek: πότε, κύριε, πότε [pote, kyrie, pote?], When, O Lord, when?

• tippoty teapot : potty (chamber pot).

Cha kai rotty kai makkar, sahib?

See Sudarshan Ramani’s “Tea, with Roti and Butter, Mister?” An Examination of a Single Phrase in a Sentence from Finnegans Wake for an Indian perspective on this phrase.

• Hindi: चाय की पत्ती [chāy kī pattī], tea leaf.

• Greek: και [kai], and.

• Hindi: रोटी [roṭī], bread : roti, chapati (an Indian unleavened flatbread).

• Hindi: मक्खन [makkhan], butter.

• Hindi: मक्कार [makkār], deceitful, two-faced.

• Hebrew: מכר [makār], acquaintance, friend.

• Hindi: साहिब [sāhib], sir, mister, lord. Also an Anglo-Indian term of respect for a white European or other person of rank in colonial India.

Buttered Roti

Despenseme Usted, senhor, en son succo, sabez!

• Spanish: dispénseme, excuse me.

• Spanish: usted, you.

• Portuguese: senhor, sir, mister.

• French: en son, in his, in its, in her, in their.

• Spanish: en son de, in, as (= in a certain manner, in the guise of)

• Italian: succo, juice : gist, pith, essence.

• Spanish, Portuguese: sabes, you know.

• French: savez, [you] know.

O thaw bron orm, A’Cothraige, thinkinthou gaily?

• Irish: Ó, tá brón orm, a Chothraige, an dtuigeann tú Gaedhealg? Oh, I’m sorry, St Patrick, do you understand Irish? St Patrick was a Briton, but if he did spend much of his youth as a slave in Ireland, he could probably speak Irish.

St Patrick

Lick-Pa-flai-hai-pa-Pa-li-si-lang-lang!

• Lick-Pa Like Pa, with a salacious element added.

• flai afraid (imitating Chinese Pidgin pronunciation).

• flai-hai fly high?

• Chinese: 害怕 [hàipà], to be afraid.

• pa-Pa Papa = HCE.

• Pa-li ALP.

• li-si Issy.

• si-lang so long.

• Chinese: 狼 [láng], wolf : pervert.

• Chinese: 郎 [láng], man, husband, father.

• Chinese: 浪 [làng], dissolute, dissipated, lascivious.

• Chinese: 两 [liǎng], two, some, few.

Chinese Glyph for Wolf

Epi alo, écou, Batiste, tuvavnr dans lptit boing coing!

• French: Et puis alors, écoute, Batiste, tu vas venir dans le petit bon coin! So, listen, Baptiste, you are going to come into this fine little place. Vico’s first name was Giambattista, or John the Baptist.

• Ancient Greek: ἐπί ἄλλο [epi allo], upon another thing. Strictly speaking, when ἐπί means on or upon, it takes the genitive case. As ἄλλο is in the accusative case, ἐπί ought to mean onto, to, against, or over. Joyce, however, was not a Greek scholar, so it is probably pointless to try and parse this expression.

• French: écu, écu (a gold or silver coin formerly used in France, with varying values), shield. Compare scudi above.

• Romanian: ecou, echo.

• French: batiste, cambric, a finely-woven fabric made from linen or cotton.

• Romanian: batiste, handkerchiefs.

• French: le petit coin, toilets, lavatory, water closet (literally little corner or little place). This continues the micturition motif, carried over from HCE’s Original Sin in the Park.

• French: bon coin, good corner, a common expression for a nice out-of-the-way restaurant.

A Silver Écu

Ismene de bumbac e meias de portocalliu!

• Romanian: izmene de bumbac, cotton drawers, cotton underpants. As worn, perhaps, by the two girls urinating in the foliage.

• Ismene The daughter and half-sister of Oedipus—clearly relevant, given the Oedipal associations of the Earwicker household.

• Portuguese: e meias de, and socks of.

• Romanian: portocaliu, orange (colour). Portocalii is the plural form. The fruit is called portocală. The colour was named after the fruit, the -ă with the adjectival suffix -iu. In the opening sentence of the previous chapter, the two urinating girls were names Iris Frees (or Trees) and Lily O’Rangans. The latter refers to the orange lily.

• Portugal.

O! O! Os pipos mios es demasiada gruarso por O piccolo pocchino!

• O! O! 00 is a common way of indicating public lavatories (WC or water closets) in Europe. The Germans still use the expression [Null-Null](https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Null-Null) for a WC.

A Sign for a Water Closet in Germany

• French: eau (pronounced [o]), water.

• Portuguese: os pipos, the pipes, the barrels.

• Spanish: míos, my (masculine plural).

• Spanish: es, is.

• Spanish, Portuguese: demasiada, too much, superfluous, excessive (feminine singular).

• Spanish: grueso, wide, fat, corpulent, bulky.

• gruarso arse—HCE’s big wide arse that featured prominently in the Museyroom Episode.

• Portuguese: por, for.

• Portuguese: o, the.

• Italian: piccolo, small.

• Italian: pochino, a little bit.

A Spanish Duro

Wee fee? Ung duro!

• Hypocorism: wee-wee, to urinate : an act of urination, micturition : penis.

• German: Wieviel, Wie viel? How much?. The former was the standard form in Joyce’s day.

• French: un, a, one. The form ung can actually be found in Middle French, but that is probably only a coincidence.

• Ung dung, continuing the water-closet motif.

• Ung duro One dollar—the L/R Interchange.

• Spanish (colloquial): duro, five pesetas, a five-peseta coin.

• Italian, Portuguese, Spanish: duro, hard (like an erect penis).

Kocshis, szabad?

• Hungarian: kocsis, szabad? coachman, are you free?

Mercy, and you?

• French: Merci, et vous? Thank you, and you? (in reply to someone asking you how you are).

Gomagh, thak!

• Irish: Go maith, fine, well (in reply to someone asking you how you are).

• Danish: tak, thanks.

Earwicker’s Guilt

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

Chee Chee Cheers for Upkingbilly

William III, Oliver Cromwell, The Duke of Wellington (RFW 043.28-043.33)

In our ongoing study of Chapter I.3, the Humphriad II, in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, we are currently examining the Cad’s side of the story. This is essentially a rehash of the infamous encounter between HCE and the Cad with a Pipe in the Phoenix Park. In the last article, we saw how a jarvey, who was recounting the tale to the passengers of his jaunting car, used his horsewhip to point out the Wellington Memorial. This is a typical Viconian example of history repeating itself. In the previous chapter, during the original encounter, HCE did something similar:

In greater support of his word ... the flaxen Gygas tapped his chronometrum drumdrum and, now standing full erect above the ambijacent floodplain, scene of its happenence, with one Berlin gauntlet chopstuck in the hough of his ellboge ... pointed at an angle of thirtytwo degrees towards his duc de Fer’s overgrown milestone as the fellow to his gage and after a readypresent pause averred with solemn emotion’s fire: (RFW 028.36-029.07)

The paragraph we are now studying is—among other things—a variation on the words HCE stuttered on that occasion:

Shsh shake, co-comeraid! Me only, them five ones, he is equal combat. I have won straight. Hence my no-nationwide hotel and creamery establishments which for the honours of our mewmew mutual daughters, credit me, I am woowoo willing to take my stand, sir, upon the monument, that sign of our ruru redemption, any hygienic day to this hour and to make my hoath to my dear sinnfinners, even if I get life for it, upon the Open Bible and befu before the Great Taskmaster’s eye (I lift my hat!) and in the Presence of the Deity Itself andwell of Bishop and Mrs Michan of High Church of England as of all such of said my immediate withdwellers and of every living sohole in every corner wheresoever of this globe in general which useth of my British to my backbone tongue and commutative justice that there is not one tittle of truth, allow me to tell you, in that purest of fibfib fabrications. (RFW 029.07-19)

A Jaunting Car by the Wellington Memorial in the Phoenix Park

A few details should be noted:

• HCE’s stutter—his hesitancy of speech, which is always a sign of his guilty conscience.

• I lift my hat In the last paragraph, it was the Cad who raised his hat in deference to HCE. This raising of the hat will also be echoed on the following page.

These details are prominent in the present paragraph. Several other details will reappear in the following two paragraphs (RFW 043.34-044.20), so we will be returning to this passage in future articles.

First-Draft Version

Nothing in Joyce’s first draft of this passage resembles the final published version of this short paragraph. Instead, the paragraph that ends with the passage about spending a whole half hour in Havana is followed by a short paragraph that eventually became the one on RFW 044 beginning And, Cod, says he. Nor is the present paragraph in the early version of this chapter that was published by Eugene Jolas & Elliot Paul in their literary journal transition in June 1927. It only made its first appearance at what Rose & O’Hanlon refer to as Draft Level 8, which Joyce made around 1930-33. There is little difference between that draft and the final published version:

Chee chee cheers for up Kingbilly and crow cru cromwell down a boo. Girls, Hup, boys, and hat him! See! Oilbeam they’re lost we’ve found rerembrandtses; their hours to date link link these heirs to morra but wowhere are those yours of Yestheirsdays? Farseeingetherich & Poolannagadherer, Carachthecuss & his Ann van Vocht. D.e.e.d? Edned, ended or sleeping soundlessly? Favour with your tongues! Intendite! (James Joyce Digital Archive)

transition (Issue 3, June 1927, Page 35)

The pairs of opposites that we noted in the preceding paragraph are also in evidence here:

• cheers ... boo

• up ... down

• Girls ... boys

• See! ... Intendite! (Medieval Latin: intendite, hear!)

• lost ... found

• to date ... to morra ... Yestheirsdays (today ... tomorrow ... yesterday)

• wo ... Yes (no ... yes)

• rich ... poor

As is pointed out in FWEET, this paragraph may be summed up thus:

remembrances of yesterday — listen! (FWEET)

Historical Portraits

In these few lines we are presented with portraits of at least half a dozen historical figures.

• Chee chee cheers HCE’s guilty stutter is obvious, but this phrase also conceals three cheers. In Finnegans Wake, the curtain goes up on the love-life of HCE and ALP with the words Three quarks (RFW 297.01) and is later rung down with the words Tiers, tiers and tiers (459.40). Remember that in the eyes of many Christian theologians the Original Sin of Adam and Eve was one of concupiscence, the eating of the Forbidden Fruit being a symbolic representation of sexual deviance. In Freudian psychoanalysis, the Primal Scene (German: Urszene) is the phenomenon of the child watching his parents copulate. In Finnegans Wake, HCE’s Original Sin is equated with Freud’s Primal Scene (Norris 45, 143 n5).

The Temptation and Fall of Eve

• Anglo-Indian: Chee-Chee, an ethnic slur against an Anglo-Indian or Eurasian half-caste; also a pejorative reference to the minced English spoken with a South Asian accent by Eurasians in India. Arthur Wellesley, the future 1st Duke of Wellington, began his military career in India.

• Upkingbilly and crow cru cramwells Downaboo! King Billy is still the popular name in Ireland for William III of Orange, the victor of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Cromwell also made a memorable mark on Irish history. His notorious cruelty explains cru, but why cram-? There is a surname Cramwell. It was introduced into England by the Normans in 1066, and later some members of the family settled in Ireland. Perhaps in the dreamworld of Finnegans Wake the dreaded name of Cromwell is simply being disguised—the Freudian censorship of dream displacement at work (Freud 283-288).

• Irish: Crom Cruach, a pagan god of ancient Ireland, propitiated by human sacrifice.

• Irish: Crom abú! Up Crom! Victory to Crom! the war cry of the Fitzgeralds.

• crow The first occurrence of the Three-Cheers Motif, just after the Museyroom Episode (RFW 009.11-13), featured The three of crows.

• Downaboo Not just down with! and boo! but also the whimsical Irish expression: An Dún abú!, Up Down!, referring to County Down.

Up, Guards, and at ’Em!

• Hup, boys, and hat him! Up, Guards, and at ’em! This command, allegedly given by Wellington to the 1st Foot Guards at a crucial point in the Battle of Waterloo, initiated the French rout. The actual words, as later reported by Captain Robert Batty of the Foot Guards, were Up, Guards, and at them again (Clarke 280), but Wellington himself could not recall what he had said. About one month after the battle, the 1st Foot Guards were renamed the Grenadier Guards, after Napoleon’s Mounted Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, who were disbanded shortly after their last stand at Waterloo.

• hat him! We have already noted the detail of the Cad tipping his hat to HCE (043.26). HCE also lifted his hat at a crucial moment during the original encounter in the Park (RFW 029.14).

• Oilbeam Albeit. After the reference to Wellington, does this conceal a reference to Napoleon, who was called Lipoleum in the Museyroom episode. Greek: λίπος [lipos], fat, lard, tallow, and Latin: oleum, oil, olive oil. And don’t forget the mysterious oilcloth flure (linoleum?) in the Prankquean episode.

• Oilbeam they’re lost we’ve found rerembrandtsers The sense seems to be that old oil paintings of HCE’s ancestors have faded over the years, but we still have fond remembrances of them. Rembrandt was famous for his portraits in oil—especially self-portraits. HCE is identified with his ancestors and his descendants, as history endlessly repeats itself. I am also reminded of the phrase from the opening chapter: a fadograph of a yestern scene (RFW 006.20).

Rembrandt van Rijn

• rerembrandtsers Remembrancer was a title borne by various officials of the British Exchequer or of the City of London. In Ireland, the Exchequer of Ireland was also staffed by remembrancers. Perhaps the sense is: Despite the passage of time and the lapse of memory, we have found remembrancers among our remote ancestors. Originally, the word remembrancer simply meant reminder. The persistence of memory is an abiding theme in all of Joyce’s works.

• hours to date ... wowhere The familiar Time|Space Motif. In Finnegans Wake, time & space comprise another pair of Shem|Shaun opposites, with Einstein’s (or Minkowski’s) spacetime representing the Oedipal Figure. German: wo, where and wowhere conceal the spatial here as well as the obvious nowhere. Note how the spatial no-where also conceals the temporal-spatial now-here. In the original edition, the presence of the Time|Space Motif was clearer: their hours to date link these heirs to here ...

• but wowhere are those yours of Yesthersdays? François Villon, Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis: Mais où sont les neiges d’antan? [The Ballad of Dead Ladies: But where are the snows of yester-year? (translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti).]

• Yestherdays Rose & O’Hanlon’s emendation of the first edition’s Yesterdays brings Swift’s Stella (Esther Johnson) & Vanessa (Esther Vanhomrigh) into the mix. They represent the victims of HCE’s Original Sin in the Park—identified with his daughter Issy.

Stella & Vanessa

HCE and ALP

The next passage names four people, but the reference is actually to HCE and ALP, the Adam and Eve whose coupling begat all those ancestors|descendants:

Farseeingetherich and Poolaulwoman, Charachthercuss and his Ann van Vogt. (RFW 043.31-32)

The comma after Poolaulwoman was missing in the first edition. John Gordon noted its absence:

There should probably be a pause between these names. Joyce is parsimonious with his commas. (Gordon 54.4)

• Farseeingetherich Vercingetorix (pronounced wer-king-GET-or-ix) was the leader of the Gallic revolt against Julius Caesar. He was finally defeated by Caesar at the Battle of Alesia in 52 BCE. Six years later, he was paraded and ritually sacrificed in the first of Caesar’s four triumphs.

Vercingetorix Casts His Arms at the Feet of Julius Caesar

• German: Fernsehgerät, television set (literally far-see device), echoing Television kills telephony in brothers’ broil on the previous page.

• Farsee...r John Gordon notes that this name reflects the etymology of Prometheus, the character in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gifted it to mankind: fore-seer. I’m not so sure.

• -rich This forms a pair of opposites with the following Pool- (poor, the L/R Interchange).

• -ich German: ich, I. VI.B.32.200e: Farseengetter ich. Joyce compiled this notebook in May-October 1930. Once again, HCE or the Cad (they are essentially the same) is identifying himself with his ancestors.

• Poolaulwoman Poor Old Woman, a poetic personification of Ireland.

• Characthercuss Caractacus was the King of the Catuvellauni, a British tribe which resisted the Roman Conquest of Britain under Claudius. Like Vercingetorix, he was eventually defeated and taken to Rome as a captive—presumably to be ritually sacrificed during a triumph. Unlike his Gallic predecessor, however, he was spared and allowed to live out his life in Rome.

Caractacus at the Tribunal of Claudius at Rome

• Ann van Vogt Irish: Seanbhean Bhocht, Poor Old Woman. The Irish is traditionally Anglicized as The Shan Van Vocht, which was also the name of a nationalist ballad, a novel and a newspaper. Joseph Campbell & Henry Morton Robinson “translate” Charachthercuss and his Ann van Vogt as the Magistrate’s daughter Anne (Campbell & Robinson 67). In the opening lines of this chapter, there were allusions to his old Shanvocht and Caraculacticors, between which the word Vergobretas occurred. A vergobret was a magistrate in ancient Gaul. Ann is, of course, HCE’s wife ALP: Anna Livia Plurabelle.

• Vogt Lorenz Juhl Vogt, Dublin som Norsk By [Dublin as a Norse City], H Aschehoug & Co, Christiania (1896). Joyce listed this book in VI.B.7:177a. The author was a Norwegian historian and politician.

• German: Vogt, steward, governor, bailiff, reeve—not quite a remembrancer, or a magistrate, but a similar office.

• Dutch: vocht, fluid, liquid, moisture, which perhaps refers to the micturition of the two girls in the foliage, as HCE spies on them (RFW 006.40 ff).

• D.e.e.d Dead: Rossetti’s translation of Villon’s Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis had the title The Ballad of Dead Ladies. Note that this spelling brings the word one letter closer to Eden, the scene of HCE’s Original Scene, the deed that brought death into the world.

• Edned, ended E-D ‛n’ E-D? These two anagrams rearrange the letters from D.e.e.d and add an n. I presume Eden is also in there somewhere. The sense is: Paradise Lost.

• sleeping soundlessly sound asleep, meaning fast asleep, is the usual expression. Here sound means deep, heavy, profound, as well as unbroken, undisturbed (OED 468). This form of the word is related to the German: gesund, healthy. The word sound meaning noise is of a different etymology but is also relevant here.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

• Latin: favete linguis, favour with your tongues, be propitious with your tongues. During ancient Roman religious ceremonies, this phrase was used proverbially to enjoin silence, lest a careless word have ominous consequences: Keep sacred silence. Joyce’s source was probably his beloved Horace, Odes 3:1:2, though the phrase was also used in various forms by Cicero, Ovid, Seneca and Pliny the Elder.

• Medieval Latin: Intendite! Hear!, Pay attention! In the first chapter, we were similarly enjoined to silence: Hush! Caution! Echoland! (RFW 010.36). Will what we heard on that occasion be relevant to the following paragraph?

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

Jauntyjogging on an Irish Visavis

Jauntyjogging on an Irish Visavis (RFW 043.03-043.27)

In the last paragraph we were told how the Cad conjured up for his audience—the triad of precoxious scaremakers—the scene of his encounter with HCE in the Phoenix Park. The next paragraph of Chapter I.3 (Humphriad II) of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake describes how the story became so well known that in afteryears it was repeated to visitors, the narrator pointing out the places featured in the tale: the oak trees, the Wellington Memorial, the fallow deer, the speckled church, etc.

This retelling of the tale was prophesied on the opening page of the book:

The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonn-thunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. (RFW 003.14-17)

First-Draft Version

In the first draft, this paragraph did not exist as such. It grew out of a handful of lines in a short paragraph that was subsequently split up, some of its lines being tagged onto the end of the previous paragraph (Television kills telephony ...) and the remainder becoming the seeds which germinated to give the present paragraph:

In words a bit duskish, he aptly described the scene, the monolith rising stark from the twilight pinebarren, the bellwether, the fallow doe belling softly her approach and how brightly outed his wallet and gives him a topping cheroot and says he was to suck that one and spend a half hour in Havana. (Hayman 70)

It is clear that originally this was to form part of the account of his meeting with HCE in the Phoenix Park which the Cad narrates to the three boys. Only later did Joyce decide to skip over the Cad’s actual narration, and instead describe the same story being recounted many years later by a jarvey to a couple of curious tourists in a jaunting car. Not surprisingly, the tale has altered in the telling. What had previously been a belligerent clash, as though between two gunslingers or duellists, is now a friendly encounter between two sociable citizens. HCE condescends to offer the Cad a cigar, who takes it subserviently, and, meeting HCE some time later on Lawrence O’Toole Street, bids him good morrow, bestowing upon him the blessings of God, Mary, St Brigid and St Patrick, and addressing him as Your Lordship.

An Irish Jaunting Car

Despite the alterations, however, many of the elements that were present in previous tellings of the encounter are rehearsed once again in this version. But note how this friendly encounter in the Phoenix Park is now followed by another in the street—Which is still another version of the event (Campbell & Robinson 67). The only significant thing missing from this paragraph is any trace of the journalism motif which runs through most of this chapter. Instead, this paragraph is replete with pairs of opposites—the verbal equivalent, if you like, of the Oedipal Encounter.

• jauntyjogging ... Irish visavis A jaunting car is an Irish form of the sprung cart, a light, horse-drawn, two-wheeled open vehicle, with seats placed lengthwise, so that the passengers ride either back to back (outside jaunting car) or face to face (inside jaunting car). It was a popular mode of transport in the 19th century. A vis-à-vis (French for face-to-face) is a carriage in which the passengers sit facing one another. This name, however, generally refers to a carriage in which the passengers sit facing the front and back of the carriage. Joyce’s Irish visavis, on the other hand, refers to an inside jaunting car, in which the passengers sit sideways. Note, however, the phrase shoulder to shoulder, which implies that the two passengers in the car are actually sitting side-by-side, as in the photo above. The phrase steadily shoulder to shoulder comes from the song The Old Brigade, which was composed in 1881 by the Irishman Edward Slater and set to words by the English lyricist Frederic Weatherley (the author of Danny Boy). Thanks to a recording by Peter Dawson, the song was popularized in 1926, around the time Joyce was preparing this passage for publication in transition (Issue 3, June 1927), but it appears that he only added this phrase when he revised the chapter in the early 1930s (James Joyce Digital Archive).

A Vis-à-Vis Carriage

• jaunty ... Irish ... car The Irish Jaunting Car is a popular song by the multi-talented popular entertainer of the 19th century Valentine Vousden, who was born on Moore Street, Dublin, in 1821. He wrote the song in the 1850s, shortly after Queen Victoria visited Ireland and, allegedly, rode in a jaunting car.

• Jehu ... Christianier ... saint to sage ... that fall and rise In II Kings 9:20, Jehu King of Israel is said to be a furious driver: the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously. Whence a jehu or Jehu is a fast or furious driver, or, simply—as here—any driver or coachman (OED). Note the Oedipal pairs of opposites: Jew and Christian, saint and sage (Ireland is traditionally the Land of Saints and Sages), rise and fall. Christiania, the old name for Oslo, takes up the Norse allusions of the previous paragraph (Kristansen ... tingmount).

• daisy winks at her pinker sister among the tussocks Chapter III.1 ends with the words: may the tussocks grow quickly under your trampthickets and the daisies trip lightly over your battercops. This is obviously a reference to the two girls in the foliage that HCE peeps on (ie his schizophrenic daughter Issy). Jorn Barger interprets pinker sister among the tussocks as a reference to Issy’s vagina Does daisy, then, refer to Issy’s anus? This makes sense, coming immediately after the ithyphallic reference to Humphrey’s fall and rise (ie detumescence and tumescence).

• copoll between the shafts Irish: capall, horse. This word also anticipates couple in the same line, though Irish jaunting cars are usually pulled by a single horse.

• And as your who may look like how on the owther side of his big belt The reference is to HCE personified by the Hill of Howth. A how is a small hill. After the reference to HCE’s phallus two lines above, we now move north of his belt (waist) to his fat paunch, which resembles a hill. In the first edition (1939), there was no space between belt try. The Great Belt is a strait in Denmark. In one of his notebooks, Joyce wrote: w & n at both / sides of the bigbelt (VI.B.46:42(f)). What does this mean? To the east of the Great Belt lies the Øresund. Although the Danish øre here refers to a gravelbank, it is also the Danish for ear, echoing the ear we hear in Christianier.

The Great Belt, Denmark

• try your tyrs and cloes your noes dry your tears and close your nose. Týr is the Norse god of war, whose name survives in Tuesday (Latin: Dies Martis, Mars’ Day). The spelling suggests an allusion to the philosophical and psychological term noesis: the sum total of the mental processes of a rational animal : cognition : the exercise of reason.

• paradigm maymay rererise in eren paradise may re-arise in Erin|Eden. The allusion to John Milton’s Paradise Regained complements that to Paradise Lost in the last paragraph: in an hour not for him solely evil (RFW 042.30) Note the presence of HCE’s guilty stutter. John Gordon suggests a possible allusion to Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, in which the birth of Christ, the Prince of Peace, takes place fittingly during the Pax Romana of the Augustan Era. This is confirmed by the words The augustan peacebetothem in line 10:

No war or battle’s sound

Was heard the world around;

The idle spear and shield were high uphung;

The hooked chariot stood

Unstain’d with hostile blood;

The trumpet spake not to the armed throng;

And kings sate still with awful eye,

As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.

• Follow we up his whip vindicative Follow Me Up to Carlow is an Irish folk song from the 16th-century. It commemorates the Battle of Glenmalure (1580) during the Second Desmond Rebellion, in which the native Irish defeated the invading English. In Finnegans Wake, the Oedipal Encounter is often depicted as a confrontation between a foreign invader and a native Irishman, though it is usually the native islander who comes off worst. The jarvey of the jaunting car is using his horse-whip to point out (indicate) various features of the landscape mentioned in the celebrated story of HCE and his encounter with the Cad with a Pipe. At a decisive moment during the original encounter, HCE pointed towards the Wellington Memorial (RFW 029.05-06).

Follow Me Up to Carlow

• Thurston’s! Continuing the Norse elements (Thor), this may also refer to Philly Thurnston, the layteacher to whom the Sodality Director blabbed about HCE and the Cad at Baldoyle Racecourse. But why? The name echoes Tristan, the Oedipal Figure. In one of his notebooks, Joyce wrote: Thurston (menhir) (VI.B.42: 32d). A menhir is a standing stone. Immediately before this, note 32c reads: Thor Thurstan Thornburn. Raphael Slepon of FWEET identifies Charlotte Yonge’s History of Christian Names as the source:

Thor had his ... bear, Thorbjorn ... doubtless the father of the family of Thorburn ... though Thor names are very rare in Anglo-Saxon history, we have many among our surnames, such as ... Tunstall and Tunstan from Thurstan, the Danish Thorstein, the proper form of Thor’s stone. (Yonge 301-302)

• La arboro, lo petrusu ... oaks, the monolith Latin: arbor, tree : petra, stone. This repeats the Tree|Stone Motif, where Tree = Shem (stem) and Stone = Shaun, while TreeStone (Tristan) = the Oedipal Figure who embodies both brothers. Note, though, that ALP’s initials are also present. There are many oak trees in the Phoenix Park. The monolith is, of course, the Wellington Memorial. Note also the Fair|Dark Motif in stark [dark] ... moonlit.

• fortitudinous ajaxious rowdinoisy tenuacity Latin: Fortitudo Eius Rhodum Tenuit, His Strength Held Rhodes. Often abbreviated to FERT, this is the motto of the House of Savoy. It pops up about nine times in Finnegans Wake, though Joyce generally replaces Rhodum with Rhodanum (the River Rhône). I have no idea what attracted Joyce to this motif. Perhaps the Latin: fert, he bears, implying a guilty burden? Does the sleeping landlord of the Mullingar House fart every time this motto is referenced? On this occasion, Joyce’s version of it forms the acrostic fart.

• the angelus hour with ditchers bent upon their farm usetensiles John Gordon suggests that this image was taken from Jean-François Millet’s painting The Angelus. The painting was one of the most widely reproduced religious painting in the 19th century. During Joyce’s lifetime, it was on display in the Louvre Museum. Its presence here harks back to HCE’s encounter with the Cad, which was interrupted by the ringing of the Angelus by the bellmaster Fox Goodman in the speckled church, wherever that is:

The Angelus

• fallow deers Several herds of wild fallow deer are still to be found in the Phoenix Park.

• (doerehmoose genuane!) ... (letate!) Instructions to the congregation during Good Friday Mass. Latin: oremus, let us pray : flectamus genua let us kneel : levate, rise. This the Fall|Rise Motif again. The musical element—do re mi—may be due to to the ringing of the Angelus. English: doe, female deer, German: Reh, roe deer, and moose are all members of the deer family. Note how genuine is contrasted with imitation two lines below—another Oedipal pair.

• the great tribune Daniel O’Connell, to whom HCE has been compared, was frequently described as the great tribune. However, Isaac Butt is referred to as the great Tribune in James Collins’ Life in Old Dublin, which is one of Joyce’s sources for this paragraph (see below). In 1877 Isaac Butt was ousted as President of the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain by Parnell—a version of the Oedipal Event that is alluded to on the very opening page of Finnegans Wake (a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac).

Fallow Deer in the Phoenix Park

• by Joshua HCE takes out his imitation sharkskin wallet and removes a cigar. But why is the gesture qualified by this Biblical interjection? According to Rose & O’Hanlon, it is linked to the famous passage in the Book of Joshua in which Joshua commands the Sun to stand still in the sky during his battle against the five kings of the Amorites. The source, however, was not the Bible but an article in The Irish Times:

SUMMER TIME. SOME OBJECTIONS TO THE MEASURE.

… Speaking of the objections to the proposal, on the ground that it was an interference with Divine Providence, and was contrary to the rule laid down in the Book of Joshua, Sir Kingsley Wood disclaimed any idea of standing as a presumptuous Joshua. It was far removed from his intention to say: “Sun, stand thou still upon Gideon, and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.” He did not propose to tamper with the dispensations of Providence, or with the movement of the heavenly bodies. (The Irish Times 12 April 1924)

Joyce simply noted: Joshua’s summertime (FW VI.B.16:35i). In my interpretation of Finnegans Wake, the novel begins—on the Nocturnal or First Plane of Narrative— at 11:32 pm on the night of 12 April 1924. Summertime officially began in the wee hours of the following morning (the Ides of April). If this is correct, it is only to be expected, then, than Joyce would have consulted the newspapers for that day.

As a backbencher during the Conservative Government of Andrew Bonar Law, Kingsley Wood successfully negotiated through Parliament the Summer Time Bill of 1924, which provided for a permanent annual summer time period of six months from the first Sunday in April to the first Sunday in October. In Ireland, summer time was provided for on a one-off basis by separate acts in 1923 and 1924, but in 1925 the Irish government followed the British example and passed a permanent Summer Time Act.

Summer Time 1924 (RFW 022.11-12)

• he tips uns a topping swank cheroot A cheroot is a cigar with both ends clipped. In the Cyclops episode of Ulysses, Bloom too was presented with a cigar. The Freudian symbolism of the cigar is too well known to require further comment. German: uns, us, has been emended from the first edition’s un. In his poem, Mandalay, Rudyard Kipling (kippers) mentions a whackin’ white cheroot.

• pluk to pluk and lekan for lukan cheek to cheek. Irish: pluc, cheek : leiceann, cheek. Lecan Castle in County Sligo was once the seat of MacFhirbhisigh, a family of hereditary historians who compiled two great manuscripts in the Middle Ages: The Great Book of Lecan and the Yellow Book of Lecan. But I don’t understand its relevance here. Lucan, a village on the Liffey a few kilometres upstream from Chapelizod, is often paired with the latter, but why it is here paired with Lecan I cannot say.

• suck that brown boyo, my son The homosexual overtones, carried over from the original encounter in the Park, are obvious. The vocative my son echoes Caesar’s assassination by Brutus. According to Suetonius, Caesar’s dying words were the Greek: Καὶ σύ, τέκνον [Kai su, teknon], And you, my son, adding an Oedipal context to the assassination. Plutarch tells us that Caesar suspected he was Brutus’s father, though he was only 15 when Brutus was born.

A Cigar Factory in Havana

• Havana The capital of Cuba is famous for its cigars, but it was once just as infamous for its homosexual prostitution.

Another Roadside Encounter

The last eight lines of this paragraph seem to describe yet another version of the encounter between HCE and the Cad with a Pipe. This one takes place on a public street in the city—HCE’s original Oedipal Encounter was a roadside meeting with a king. The Cad is now portrayed as subservient, while HCE clearly belongs to a higher social stratum. He is even referred to as Master. This casts the Cad in the rôle of Sackerson (S), HCE’s Manservant:

Sorer of the kreeksmen, would not thore be old high gothsprogue? Wherefore he met Master, he mean to say, he do, sire, bester of redpublicans, at Eagle Cock Hostel on Lorenzo Tooley Street and how he wished his Honour the bannocks of Gort and Morya and Bri Head and Puddyrick, yore Loudship, and a starchbox sitting in the pit of his St Tomach’s—a strange wish for you, my friend, and it would poleaxe your sonson’s grandson utterly though your own old sweatandswear floruerunts heaved it hoch many as the times when they were turrified be the hitz. (RFW 043.19-27)

• Sorer of the kreeksmen, would not thore be old high gothsprogue! This sentence continues the Norse character of this paragraph. Latin: soror, sister : Danish: krigsmænd, warriors : Thor Norse God of Thunder : sprog, language. Old High German and Gothic are extinct Germanic languages. Creeksman is a literal translation of the Old Norse word from which Viking is derived. The Latin, to my mind, is anomalous in the Norse context. Could sorer be Danish: Søren, Severin, a Scandinavian name? HCE’s Manservant Sackerson is often given Scandinavian names. In Danish, Søren is also used as a euphemism for Satan (dodging the curse). HCE’s Manservant is also identified with the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. Finally, in the tale How Kersse the Tailor Made a Suit of Clothes for the Norwegian Captain (yet another version of the Oedipal Encounter), HCE himself is a Norseman.

Louis Philippe

• bester of redpublicans The tavernkeeper HCE is described as the best of publicans. But this compliment is undercut by the Slang: bester, swindler and Danish: bedste, grandfather. Joyce’s note, Sire, best of republics (VI.B.46:52j) refers to a passage in Édouard Trogan’s Les Mots Historiques du Pays de France, which was also used as a source in the preceding paragraph:

Vous êtes la meilleure des Républiques.

[You are the best of Republics: Said, allegedly, by Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette to King Louis Philippe after the July Revolution of 1830.] (Trogan 75)

According to McHugh, it was the actually poet Alphonse de Lamartine who said it. Altering republicans to redpublicans again undermines the royal compliment, recasting HCE as a red (ie a socialist).

• Eagle Cock Hostel ECH. In the original encounter in the Phoenix Park, HCE’s initials were encoded in several phrases. There is no Eagle Cock Hostel in Dublin, but there was once an Eagle Tavern:

After amalgamation, the Corporation of Cooks and Vintners assembled at their Hall in the Eagle Tavern, Eustace Street. (Collins 108)

Site of the Eagle Tavern, Eustace Street

The Dublin branch of the [Society of United Irishmen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_United_Irishmen) was founded at the Eagle Tavern in 1791 (the original Belfast branch had also been founded in a tavern). It was, in fact, very popular with many clubs and associations, from the Hell-Fire Club to the Whigs of the Capital.

In his History of the City of Dublin, John Thomas Gilbert mentions The Cock and Punch-Bowl of Cork Hill and the Eagle Tavern of Eustace Street in the same sentence (Gilbert 14). Could this be the source of Joyce’s note: eagle & cock (VI.B.46:52t)? The initials, ECH, however, suggest that the Eagle Cock Tavern is HCE’s pub, the Mullingar House, in Chapelizod.

• Lorenzo Tooley Street Laurence O’Toole is the Patron Saint of Dublin. He was the city’s Archbishop in the 12th century, and was born, according to some sources, in 1132—a symbolic number in Finnegans Wake. There is no Laurence O’Toole Street in Dublin, but there is a St Laurence Road in Chapelizod. It is on the opposite bank of the River Liffey to the Mullingar House. Joyce’s note Tooley S. Olaf (VI.B.9:125b) refers to a passage in Ernest Weekley’s The Romance of Names:

When a name compounded with Saint begins with a vowel, we get such forms as Tedman, St. Edmund, Tobin, St. Aubyn, Toosey, St. Osith, Toomer, St. Omer, Tooley, St. Olave; cf. Tooley St. for St. Olave St. and tawdry from St. Audrey. When the saint’s name begins with a consonant, we get, instead of aphesis, a telescoped pronunciation, e.g. Selinger, St. Leger, Seymour, St. Maur, Sinclair, St. Clair, Semark, St. Mark, Semple, St. Paul, Simper, St. Pierre, Sidney, probably for St. Denis, with which we may compare the educated pronunciation of St. John. These names are all of local origin, from chapelries in Normandy or England (Weekley 34)

There is no St Olave Street in Dublin, but there was once a Saint Olaf’s Church, named for the King of Norway Olaf II. It was located on the right bank of the Liffey at the bottom of Fishamble Street.

Bannock Bread

• the bannocks of Gort and Morya and Bri Head and Puddyrick Irish: Beannacht Dé agus Mhuire agus Brighid agus Phádraic, The Blessing of God, Mary, Bridget and Patrick. It is possible that the four Provinces of Ireland are also represented here by four mountains. Following FWEET, we have:

• Dart Mountain County Tyrone, Ulster

• Croaghanmoira County Wicklow, Leinster

• Bray Head Valentia Island, County Kerry, Munster

• Croagh Patrick (“The Reek”) County Mayo, Connacht

However, a note by Joyce reads Gort, County Galway (VI.B.9:30g), which spoils this neat symmetry. Identifying Gort with Dart Mountain is a bit of a stretch : McHugh identifies it with the town in Connacht. Following McHugh, we have:

• Gort Connacht

• Morya Ulster

• Bray Head Leinster or Munster

Morya is obviously Moira, the town in County Down. There are two Bray Heads in Ireland : but this leaves Puddyrick unaccounted for. If Bray Head represents Leinster (where the more famous Bray Head is located), then Puddyrick must stand for Munster. Could Puddyrick be an echo of MacGillycuddy’s Reeks, the famous mountain range in County Kerry?

RFW 043.22-23

• yore Loudship Whenever the four Provinces of Ireland—representing the Four Old Men—are present, we should always look out for Johnny MacDougal’s donkey. Is this him? It would explain, at least, why Lordship is thus altered. A donkey’s bray (Bray Head?) is notoriously loud. An earlier draft had year loudship, which might allude to the phrase donkey’s years. The final version pushes these events into the remote past—donkey’s years ago.

• bannocks Bannock is an unleavened flatbread made in a skillet with barley, wheat, or oatmeal. It probably originated in Scotland but was also popular in Ireland and northern England. Its presence here evokes the unleavened bread used as the Host in the Catholic Mass, which is taken up in the following lines.

Back in the Theatre

In the last chapter, another version of the Oedipal Encounter took place in the Gaiety Theatre, where HCE was described as a veritable Napoleon the nth and was satirized in a performance of A Royal Divorce. The following phrase revives this theatrical setting:

and a starchbox sitting in the pit of his St Tomach’s (RFW 043.23-24)

• starchbox A starch-box is a large wooden box for packing starch. It is similar to the traditional soapbox from which one might deliver an impromptu speech. Starch is used as a laundry stiffener—handy when washing HCE’s dirty linen in public—but it is also a complex carbohydrate found in bannocks and other breads, including the unleavened bread used to make communion wafers for the Catholic Mass.

A Starchbox

• sitting in the pit There is another borrowing here from Édouard Trogan’s Les Mots Historiques du Pays de France:

Malgré ses infirmités, Louis XVIII remplit jusqu’au bout les devoirs de sa charge. Le roi peut mourir, disait-il à M. de Villèle, son ministre, il ne doit pas être malade. Après sa mort, Charles X fît son entrée triomphale à Paris, et voulut qu’on laissât la foule approcher de lui. Point de hallebardes, dit-il. C’est lui qui, refusant de faire intervenir l’autorité royale dans une question dramatique, déclara: Au théâtre je n’ai que ma place au parterre.

[Despite his infirmities, Louis XVIII fulfilled the duties of his office to the end. The king can die, he said to M. de Villèle, his minister, he must not be ill. After his death, Charles X made his triumphal entry into Paris, and wanted the crowd to be allowed to approach him. No halberds, he said. It was he who, refusing to involve royal authority in a dramatic question, declared: In the theater I only have my seat in the pit.] (Trogan 72)

The dramatic question was an attempt by conservatives to have Victor Hugo’s controversial new play Hernani banned. Ironically, it was during Hernani’s initial run at the Comédie-Française in Paris that Charles X was overthrown by the July Revolution.

Thomas Aquinas & Thomas à Becket

• in the pit of his St Tomach’s in the pit of his stomach, where one traditionally feels fear, nervousness, anxiety, etc. The last two words obviously rehash the passage from Weekley’s The Romance of Names that informed Tooley Street above. After the reference to Laurence O’Toole, this Thomas can only be his English contemporary Saint Thomas à Becket. These two are paired with each other at least ten times in the course of Finnegans Wake. There was once a Saint Thomas’s Church in Dublin dedicated to this saint. It no longer exists, but it gave its name to Thomas Street, where it stood. Alternatively, St Thomas Aquinas was notoriously fat. In Ulysses, Stephen calls him tunbelly.

A Strange Wish

The last three lines of this paragraph are quite opaque:

a strange wish for you, my friend, and it would poleaxe your sonson’s grandson utterly though your own old sweatandswear floruerunts heaved it hoch many as the times when they were turrified be the hitz. (RFW 043.24-27)

In an earlier draft of this paragraph, which will be quoted below, this passage occurs as a parenthetical comment on the blessing which the Cad bestows on HCE when he wishes him good day. I think it is best read as a comment addressed to the Cad, pointing out how strange it is for him to wish HCE the blessings of God, Mary, Bridget and Patrick. But who utters this comment? Is it the jarvey in the jaunting car?

A Poleaxe (Venice, 15th Century)

• poleaxe fell with a poleaxe, an implement comprising an ax and a hammer, which is used to slaughter cattle. It is also a species of polearm, a long medieval weapon with an ax, a hammer and a pike. The halberds mentioned in Follow Me Up to Carlow are polearms. Gordon suggests please as an overtone, which inverts the meaning. McHugh suggests perplex.

• sonson’s grandson great-grandson. Swedish: sonson, son of a son.

• your own old sweatandswear floruerunts your own Scandinavian ancestors. I think Sweden is one of the components of sweatandswear. Joyce originally wrote sweating, which is even closer. Latin: floruerunt, they flourished.

• heaved it hoch many as the times raised it high many a time. German: hoch, high. Primarily, the phrase is referring to the Cad raising his hat in deference to HCE. The sense seems to be: Your descendants would be ashamed to have for an ancestor such a subservient person as you, even though your own ancestors were just as subservient. However, in the neighbourhood of bannocks and starch there may also be a reference to the priest raising the Host (ie the communion wafer) during the Catholic Mass. Perhaps, then, the phrase also means: Your Protestant descendants would be ashamed to have a Mass-going Roman Catholic like you for an ancestor, even though your own ancestors were Mass-going Roman Catholics. FWEET suggests the presence of both the Scots: Hogmanay, New Year’s Eve (and its bibulous celebration, which perhaps anticipates the toast and three cheers in the following paragraph), and the German: Hochzeit, wedding (literally high-time).

• many as the times when they were turrified be the hitz many is the times when they were terrified by the heat. Latin: turris, tower. German: Hitze, heat. I understand the sense of someone taking off their hat on account of the heat, but why should they terrified? Has it something to do with the fires of Hell? And what is the significance of the tower? The Tower of Babel?

The Elevation of the Host

Emendations

According to Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Third Edition), the concluding passage Wherefore he met Master ... turrified be the hitz was originally inserted between the words and & how in the passage: (letate!) and how brightly the great tribune ... old high gothsprogue, with an extra and tagged on at the end. This is one of the so-called transmissional variants, that is, items that appear to have been accidentally corrupted during the redrafting process which McHugh collated from Erik Bindervoet & Robbert-Jan Henkes’ Dutch translation (or Dutchification, as they call it) of Finnegans Wake (2002). Most of these transmissional variants were independently incorporated into the text of Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon’s The Restored Finnegans Wake (2010). But this is one case where Rose & O’Hanlon have left the text as it was when the first edition of Finnegans Wake was published in 1939—other than a few minor emendations, such as Street for street in line 22, or be the hitz for by the hitz in line 27.

An early draft of this version can be seen on the James Joyce Digital Archive:

among lesser items of passing interest, the monolith rising stark from the twilit pinebarren, the angelus hour with ditchers bent upon their farm implements, the soft bell of the fallow doe advertising her milky approach as the hour was late. How he met his honour on Lorenzo Tooley Street and he wished his honour the bannocks of Gort and Morya and Bri Head and Puddyrick, year loudship, — a strange wish for you, my friend, though your own old floruerunts heaved it oddtimes and it would poleaxe your sonsonsgrandnephew utterly — and how brightly the great tribune outed his smokewallet from his frock and he gives him a topping swank cheroot, none of yere swellish soide, and he says he was to just bluggy well suck that brown boyo, my son, and spend a whole half hour in Havana. (MS British Library 47472 146-156, edited)

In this version, HCE gives the cigar to the Cad on Lorenzo Tooley Street. In the published version, this occurs in the Phoenix Park during the original encounter. But it is pointless to try and sort out the precise order of events. The whole point of this passage is that history, in the retelling, is constantly changing, as each narrator adds his own embellishments to the original story—whatever that might have been—making it ultimately impossible to recover the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

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