Neki vidovnjaci proriču da će tek ljudi 22. stoljeća razumjeti Joyceov Finnegans Wake. No Mary Ellen Bute snimila svoj san o Finneganovim snovima/bdijenjima. Vrlo hektopoetično, izobakterijalno i transvenerično.
Ovdje je inače verzija Finnegans Wakea s objašnjenjima mnogih riječi i fraza, bez kojih je možda i nemoguće početi čitati. No s druge strane, ovdje riječi ne "znače", nego šalju dimne signale - pa su važni dimni pejzaži, ne toliko same riječi.
Na kraju posta Anthony Burgess napokon zdravorazumski objašnjava o čemu se zapravo u Finnegans Wake radi.
- riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend
- of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to
- Howth Castle and Environs.
- Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen-
- core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy
- isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor
- had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse
- to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper
- all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to
- tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a
- kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in
- vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a
- peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory
- end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.
- The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-
- ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-
- nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later
- on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the
- offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan,
- erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends
- an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes:
- and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park
- where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev-
- linsfirst loved livvy.
-
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
Screenplay by Mary Manning, Cinematography by Ted Nemeth, Music by Elliot Kaplan
"Mary Ellen Bute (November 21, 1906—October 17, 1983) was a pioneer American film animator significant as one of the first female experimental filmmakers. Her specialty was visual music and, while working in New York between 1934 and 1953, made fourteen short, abstract musical films. Many of these were seen in regular movie theaters, such as Radio City Music Hall, usually preceding a prestigious film. Several of her later abstract films were categorized as part of her Seeing Sound series.
A native of Houston, Mary Ellen Bute studied painting in Texas and, subsequently, Philadelphia, then stage lighting at Yale University, focusing her primary interest on the tradition of color organs, as a means of painting with light. She worked with Leon Theremin and Thomas Wilfred and was also influenced by the abstract animated films of Oskar Fischinger.
Bute began her filmmaking career collaborating with Joseph Schillinger on the animation of visuals. Her later films were made in partnership with her cinematographer Ted Nemeth whom she married in 1940. Her final film, inspired by James Joyce, was Passages from Finnegans Wake, a live-action feature made over a nearly three-year period in 1965-67.
In the 1960s and 1970s Bute worked on two films which were never completed: an adaptation of Thornton Wilder's 1942 play The Skin of Our Teeth, and a film about Walt Whitman with the working title Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.
Bute was a founding member of the Women's Independent Film Exchange.
Mary Ellen Bute died of heart failure at New York City's Cabrini Medical Center. She was five weeks short of her 77th birthday. Six months earlier, on April 4, she received a special tribute and a retrospective of her films at the Museum of Modern Art.
An archive with some of Bute's personal papers is at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. A finding aid describes this collection. Film historian Cecile Starr has an extensive collection of Bute papers; another collection is at Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles. Several of her films are at the Yale Film Study Center, George Eastman House, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Anthology Film Archives, and a number of other institutions and archives. -- Wikipedia
One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by use of wide-awake language, cut-and-dry grammar and go-ahead plot. James Joyce
"Finnegans Wake deals with the nightworld, with the subconscious, and with dreams. Joyce felt that during the night man must redeem himself by means of a quest; must refresh his powers through sleep, which takes him beyond himself into a world without definition. Man's goal is lucidity, a fresh awakening. The quest carries him through all history, which seems to be a constant process of waking. It is some of this universal element which we have tried to capture in this first film based on any of Joyce's major work."
Finnegan - otherwise know as H. C. Earwicker, or Here Comes Everybody - has two sons, Shem and Shaun who are also conflicting parts of himself which invade him; and his daughter Iseult, who is a younger manifestation of his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), who is also his soul and the River Liffey. Finnegan must come to terms with these parts of himself, realize the dangers inherent in their extreme forms, and experience his "reunited selfdom" in order to "Wake" up.
Evo i samog Joycea kako čita iz Finnegana:
Finnegans Wake: What It' s All About
by Anthony Burgess
(i)
DRIVE westwards out or Dublin, keeping south or
Phoenix Park, and you will come to Chapelizod. The name means "Chapel or
Iseult", whom the Irish know as Isoilde and the Germans as Isolde-tragic
heroine or Wagner's opera. There is little that is romantic about Chapelizod
nowadays; if you want a minimal excitement you will have to go to the pubs, of
which the most interesting is purely fictional-the Bristol. Some will identify
this for you with the Dead Man, so called because customers would roll out of
it drunk to be run over by trams. It is important to us because its landlord is
the hero of Finnegans Wake. He is middle-aged, of Scandinavian stock and
Protestant upbringing, and he has a wife who seems to have some Russian blood
in her. His name is, as far as we can tell, Mr. Porter, appropriate for a man
who carries up crates of Guinness from the cellar, and he is the father of
three children -young twin boys called Kevin and Jerry, and a pretty little
daughter named Isobel.
Mr. Porter and his family are asleep for the greater
part of the book. It has been a hard Saturday evening in the public bar, and
sleep prolongs itself some way into the peace of Sunday morning. Mr. Porter
dreams hard, and we are permitted to share his dream. In it various
preoccupations of his are fantasticated, and the chief of these is a complex
obsession to be expected in a man aware of ageing: his day is passing and the
new age belongs to his sons, particularly his favourite son Kevin; his wife no
longer attracts him, and he looks for a last sexual fling, or even a renewal of
the sexual impulse, in a younger woman. All this is innocent enough and should
give him no bad dreams, but it happens that his desires are fixed on his own
daughter. "Incest" is a terrible word, even though it means nothing
more than a loyal desire to keep sex in the family, and Mr. Porter's dream will
only admit the word in disguise-as "insect". Sleeping, he becomes a
remarkable mixture of guilty man, beast, and crawling thing, and he even takes
on a new and dreamily appropriate name-Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. There we
have the hump of sexual guilt he carries on his back (he is a different porter
now), a hint of the ape, and more than a hint of the insect. "Earwicker"
is dose to "earwig", and this, through the French perce-oreille, can
be Hibernicised into "Persse O'Reilly". Another preoccupation is a
desire to be accepted by the Irish people, as a leader or political
representative, but he remains aware of a foreignness that his dream-name too
well indicates, and "Persse O'Reilly" is there only for mockery or
execration.
In his dream HCE, as we shall now call him, tries to
make the whole of history swallow up his guilt for him. His initials are made
to stand for the generality of sinful man, and they are expanded into slogans
like "Here Comes Everybody" and "Haveth Childers
Everywhere". After all, sexual guilt presupposes a certain creative, or
procreative, vitality, and a fall only comes to those who are capable of an
erection. The unquenchable vitality appears in "our Human Conger Eel"
(despite the "down, wantons, down" of the eel-pie-maker in King
Lear); the erector of great structures is seen in "Howth Castle and
Environs". From the point of view of the ultimate dreamer of the dream,
though (the author himself), "HCE" has a structural task to perform.
As a chemical formula (H2CE3) or as a genuine vocable ("hec" or
"ech" or even "Hecech") it holds the dream down to its
hero, is sewn to it like a monogram-HCE: his dream. But HCE has, so deep is
his sleep, sunk to a level of dreaming in which he has become a collective
being rehearsing the collective guilt of man. Man falls, man rises so that he
can fall again; the sequence of falling and rising goes on till doomsday. The
record of this, expressed in the lives of great men, in the systems they make
and unmake and remake, is what we call history.
What Joyce is doing, then, is to make his hero re-live
the whole of history in a night’s sleep. This history is not what we learned at
school - a chronological treadmill of kings and ministers and wars and
revolutions. It is rather a special way of looking al history- less a parade of
historical facts than a pattern which seeks to explain those facts. The pattern
is loosely derived from the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico
(1668-1744) who wrote an important book called La Scienza Nuova, in which he
presented history not as a straight line but as a circular process of
recurrences. If we say that Finnegans Wake is based on this book we shall be
right, but only in the sense that we are right when we say that the same
author's Ulysses is based on Homer's Odyssey. Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
are primarily works of fiction, and Vico and Homer are enlisted only to help with
the telling of a story. Finnegans Wake is not an interpretation of Vico, and
Vico is not much of a key to the difficulties of Finnegans Wake. What Joyce
found in Vico was what every novelist needs when planning a long hook-a
scaffolding, a backbone.
The backbone of Finnegans Wake is easily filleted out.
History is a cycle divided into four arcs, and these four arcs will provide the
book with its lour sections. Each are, or phase of history, is characterised by
a particular form of government. In his earliest stage of development, man is
much concerned with the worship of gods. In fabulous pre-history the gods speak
in thunder or through oracles; the seed of the gods descends to earth to
produce giants and heroes. In true, though primitive, history, the divine word
is transmitted through patriarchs and prophets. This is the theocratic stage of
human history. The aristocratic stage follows, in which great men, fathers of
their communities, rule on their own initiative, not necessarily seeking divine
sanction for their laws. The third phase is democratic, and in it we observe a
certain debasement: our demagogues are feeble parodies of aristocracy and
certainly less than gods. At this point, in Yeats's words, "things fall
apart; the centre cannot hold": we suffer from anarchy and flounder in
chaos. The time has come for what Vico calls the ricorso or return. The divine
speaks in a clap of thunder, we come to our senses and resume worship of the
gods. We are back to the theocratic phase, and the cycle starts all over again.
This is the technique for viewing history which Joyce
imposes on the dreaming mind of his Chapelizod innkeeper, and at once the
reader wants to protest at the implausibility. HCE's dreaming mind may touch
archetypal levels, but it is not likely to embrace Vico or the fabulous and
historical data which must be used to exemplify the doctrine of the cycle. HCE
is, in fact, a very ordinary innkeeper. But Joyce knows what he is doing. He
obligingly falls into a trance himself and dreams a cunning dream which encloses
that of his hero, a dream which confers the author's own special knowledge on
the unlearned snorer, granting him the gift of tongues (this is universal
history, and hence polyglot) as well as such trifles as the ability to expound
the Cabala and the Tunc page of the Book of Kells. He goes further. When HCE
and his wife are awakened by the crying of one of the twins and when, after
quietening the child, they attempt intercourse, Joyce does all the dreaming
himself: the sleeping quality of the book must not be lost, the dream must
remain unbroken. The introduction of waking attitudes and waking language would
be an intolerable shock to the system and it would be an artistic sin to mix
two orders of reality.
(ii)
EVEN if we abandon the straight-line view of history,
starting at Julius Caesar, say, and ending with the late President Kennedy, we
cannot have a history-book, even a dream one, without a large cast of
characters. With the author's help HCE must people his sleeping world with a
vast number of personages, all of whom must exemplify the fall-rise-fall (or
rise-fall-rise) principle which is made to animate Vico's cycle. At the same
time, since this a work of art, certain rules of economy must be observed-rules
which true history, which is over-fecund of characters, chooses to ignore. What
HCE does in his sleep is to turn his family into a kind of amateur dramatic
society which, with help from customers, the cleaning-.woman, the pub handyman
and a few others, is prepared to impersonate, however unhandily, a whole corpus
of beings from myth and literature (including popular magazines, brainstorming
melodramas and doubtful street-ballads) as well as from history books. In a
dream it is proper for fictional characters and historical personages to occupy
the one zone of reality, as well as to mix their times and subsist happily
together on a kind of supra-temporal level: it is the most natural thing in the
dreamer's world to see Dr. Johnson and Falstaff, as well as the woman next
door, waiting on Charing Cross railway station. The only significant date in
HCE's version of history is 1132 A.D., and the significance is entirely
symbolic: 11 stands for return or
reinstatement or recovery or resumption (having counted up to ten on our
fingers we have to start all over again for 11); 32 feet per second is the rate
of acceleration of all falling bodies, and the number itself will remind us of
the fall of Adam, Humpty Dumpty, Napoleon, Parnell, as also of HCE himself, who
is all their reincarnations.
A knowledge of this easy symbolism is essential for an
understanding of Finnegans Wake, as is also the realisation of the importance
of number in general. You can build up the supporting dream-cast of the play by
abstracting numbers from the calendar that hangs on some wall or other in the
Bristol tavern. There are four weeks in a lunar month, and these will give you
the four old men who have so much to say, though what they have to say is
rarely of much value - Matthew Gregory, Mark Lyons, Luke Tarpey, and Johnny MacDougal.
They are the four gospellers, as well as the four provinces of Ireland, and
they take off to impersonal regions where they represent the four points of the
compass, the four elements, the four classical ages, and so on. They are always
together, followed by their donkey, and it is in order to think of them as a
single unit, their names truncated to Ma, Ma, Lu, and Jo and crushed together
to make Mamalujo. They end up, in the fading of the dream, as four bedposts.
There are twelve months in the year, and these will give us the twelve
Sullivans or Doyles, customers in HCE's bar but also twelve apostles and twelve
jurymen, always ready to give ponderous judgment in polysyllables ending in
"-ation". Their number, as with a jury, is more important than their
names, which are always changing: when we meet a catalogue of apparently new
characters, it is enough for us to take breath and count: we shall usually find
the same old twelve. The month of February (in which the author was born) has
sometimes twenty-eight days, sometimes twenty-nine. This provides Joyce with a
bevy of girls from the academy of St. Bride's (St. Bridget's, or Ireland
herself) with a separable special girl who usually turns out to be Isobel,
HCE's own daughter. Divide 28 by 4, and you are left with 7. The month maidens
sometimes form themselves into the seven colours of the rainbow-an important
emblem in Finnegans Wake, since it signifies God's covenant after the
Flood-hope of reinstatement after sin, 11 after 32.
One of the interesting things about Finnegans Wake is
the way in which number refuses to melt and become fantasticated. This dream
differs, then, from our own dreams, in which we take two slices of cake from a
plate holding twelve and find only seven left. When HCE's dream-wife gives
gifts to each of her one hundred and eleven children, there are (I have
counted) exactly one hundred and eleven, no more, no less. When the thunder of
man's fall sounds, or the thunder of God's wrath, we find this represented by a
word of exactly one hundred letters, no more, no less. 1 sometimes becomes 2,
but that is a natural process of cellular fission: the father has begotten two
sons, and the two sons together make up the parent body. This encourages Joyce
to present the one daughter Isobel as two girls-a split personality, a
temptress in love only with her mirror-image. But there is never any wanton
deformation of a significant number:
simple arithmetic is the very breath of this dream.
The four, the twelve, and the twenty-eight or twenty-nine
tend to stand outside history and comment on it. The hard work of participation
in the recurrent story of man's fall and resurrection rests on the shoulders of
HCE, his wife and family, and the old cleaning-woman Kate. The mythical,
literary, and historical characters who best exemplify the story are chosen out
of a fairly narrow field-mainly from Irish history, and mainly from those Irish
personages whose sin or fall best bodies forth HCE's own guilt. In other words,
we must expect to meet men who indulged in, or perhaps merely contemplated,
acts of illicit love-often with girls far younger than themselves. There must
be a tang of incestuous sin. After the general fall motif incarnated in the
figures of Adam and Humpty Dumpty, we come to particular identifications. HCE
plays the part of Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish leader whose love for
Kitty O'Shea led to his downfall. A symbol of guilt is taken from the letters
which the Irish journalist Piggot forged as part of the general campaign to
destroy Parnell. Piggot misspelled "hesitancy" as
"hesitency" and committed the same solecism when giving evidence
before the Parnell Commission. This led to his near-collapse in the witness-box
and, just after, the private confession of his crime. Changes are rung on the
misspelling throughout Finnegans Wake, and the word itself is especially
appropriate to HCE, since his guilt expresses itself in a speech -hesitation or
stutter. But there is an implication of betrayal and victimisation: a hearsay
sin (in the dream HCE's crime is no more than that) is swollen into an omnibus
accusation which leads to HCE's trial, incarceration, and burial. Parnell, who
only committed adultery, was turned by his enemies into the father of all sin.
Jonathan Swift had an obscure relationship with two
girls Esther Johnson and Esther Vanhomrigh, better known as Stella and
Vanessa. A father in God (Swift was, of course, the Dean of St. Patrick's in
Dublin) evinced a somewhat unfatherly interest in two of his spiritual
daughters, and these two young women are conjoined in Finnegans Wake in the
personality of HCE's daughter Isobel. Two girls with one Christian name, two
girls representing one temptation-it is no wonder that the dream-Isobel so
easily splits herself into two. Here, anyway, is another guilt-pattern from
history, and, like that "hesitency-hesitancy", it can be alluded to
in a single word: Isobel's endearment "ppt", and all its allomorphs,
comes straight from the "little language" or Swift's Journal to
Stella.
Another legend with strong Irish associations is
teased, in this dream, out of Isobel's own name. Isobel is Iseult-la-Belle, and
Chapelizod is her secular shrine. Tristram of Lyonesse came to Ireland to
convey Iseult, chosen bride, to his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall. But Tristram
and Iseult fell in love, and a train of subterfuge, guilt, and disloyalty was
started. Both HCE's preoccupations find potent expression here-aged Mark, too
old for love, superseded by a younger man; the agonising sweetness of a
forbidden relationship. But we can go further. Sir Armory Tristram (Tristram of
Armorica, or Brittany) founded the St. Lawrence family of Howth in Dublin and
built Howth Castle: a dream-identification of the two Tristrams is inevitable.
For that matter, we have two Iseults who, like the two Esthers, belong to the
one legend-King Mark's bride and the Iseult of the White Hands whom Tristram
and Lyonesse eventually married. These are, naturally, both contained in
Isobel, and a further justification for the splitting of her identity is
provided. We have a verbal leitmotif for Parnell and for Swift; we have one for
Tristram too, and Joyce 1.lkcs it from Wagner's version of the legend-his
music-drama Tristan und Isolde. The opening line of Isolde's aria over the body
of slain Tristan is "Mild und leise" ("soft and gentle"):
this becomes distorted in Finnegans Wake to the grotesque nickname "Mildew
Lisa".
We can find other identifications with Irish legend
and history, some of which creep away from the fall-theme and elevate HCE to
the role of proud and guiltless leader-Brian Boru, Finn MacCool, King Laoghair
(or Leary). But, though the foreground of the dream is Dublin, HCE is a
universal father-figure, and we must not be surprised if he plays the parts of
Noah, Julius Caesar, a Russian general, Harold the Saxon, a Norwegian captain,
and so on. Scandinavian roles, though, are particularly appropriate, since HCE
is of Nordic stock, and the most appropriate identification of all is literary,
not historical. Joyce's youthful literary god was Ibsen, and his play The
Masterbuilder provides perhaps the most potent guilty father-figure of them
all-Halvard Solness, who climbs a tower he has built at the request of a young
woman he loves and, struck by the God he defies and figuratively rivals, falls
from it to his death. An essential lesson of Finnegans Wake, if we can talk
about "lessons" in connection with so undidactic a work, is that sin
and creation go together, and that 11, which complements 32, stands not only
for rising but for raising. HCE has sinned, as have all men, but the sin has
driven him out of the Garden of Eden only to plant in him the urge to create
Eden- substitutes-cities and civilisations. The fall is, paradoxically, a happy
one: "O felix culpa", said St. Augustine. Joyce, planting HCE's sin
in Phoenix Park, puns on this with his "O Phoenix culprit."
Broadly speaking, then, HCE plays man the father and
creator, Bygmester or Masterbuilder. Ultimately he is identified with what he
creates-the city itself. But the creator needs nature as his inspiration and
consort, and cities are built on rivers. This brings us to the dream-function
of HCE's wife, Ann, whose dream-name is Anna Livia Plurabelle-the Anna Liffey
(only feminine river in Europe) on which Dublin stands. The "Plurabelle"
indicates her beauty and plurality (she contains all women). ALP conveys her
natural majesty (she is bigger than any tower the Bygmester can raise), and the
roughly triangular configuration of a mountain turns her into a piece of
eternal geometry-she is our "geomater", or earth mother. A triangle
ALP suggests her triune form. She is wife, she is widow, but she is also
daughter. Isobel is contained in her, as is Kate the cleaning woman, praiser of
days gone by, , but HCE's dream assigns to her chiefly the part of living
mother and wife, protectress of her children and of the reputation of her
reviled and traduced husband. Though she flows, she is a symbol of the
unchanging, while her lord, like all men, is capable of assuming many forms.
Her mystery is the mystery of all rivers-the spring is different from the mouth
that opens to the ocean, but both are the same water, and it is from the
river's death in the sea that the reality of new birth in the hills (the
renewing rain-clouds blown inland from the coast) is derived for ever and ever.
As for the twin sons, they illustrate a sort of
tragi-comic dialectic which owes a good deal to the Italian philosopher
Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), the heretic from Nola who (in the words of Stephen
Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) was "terribly
burned". Bruno the Nolan taught that opposite principles are eventually
reconciled, in heaven if not on earth, and much of Finnegans Wake deals with
the clash of two brothers unconsciously endeavouring to be made one, to flow
back into the unifying father who begot their opposed natures. Joyce
Hibernicises Bruno the Nolan into "Browne and Nolan", the names of
the Dublin printers who published his first piece of juvenilia, and he
contrives other punning tropes to allude to the Brunonian theory-"Father
San Browne . . . Padre Don Bruno"; "Bruno Nowlan"; "B.
Rohan . . . N. Ohlan"; "brownesberrow in nolandsland";
"Bruin and Noselong". The tragedy of HCE's two sons lies in the fact
that each on his own is only half the man his father was: neither is fit to
supersede the father in the task of ruling the community. They appear usually
as Shem the Penman and Shaun the Post: the first writes the Word, the second
delivers it-generally in a distorted and debased form. Shem is the artist, and
his most typical manifestation is as James Joyce himself ("Shem" is
the Irish form of "James")-the man who can make the dead speak but is
totally incapable of coming to terms with the living, the exile who is cut off
from action. Shaun (who owes a little to James Joyce's brother Stanislaus) is a
born demagogue and missionary, a kind of sham Christ, at home in the world of
action but aware that he lacks the creative spark that is needed to fire the
engine of rule. They hate each other, but their fights are really a vain
attempt to become synthetised into a whole capable of bearing the burden of
government. Anything either does tends to be cancelled out by the action of the
other: when Shaun is accused of his father's crime, Shem bears false witness
against him, and the four Judges, remembering the Brunonian thesis, return a
verdict of 'Nolans Brumans" - the
accused goes scot-free. The struggles of Shem and Shaun find an eternal
archetype in the war between Lucifer and Michael the Archangel ("Mick
versus Nick"), but we are not inclined, despite the pressure of
orthodoxy, to take sides. Neither is lovable, both are pitiable. Their
dissonance sounds only that our ears may long for the unison of the father. On
the plane of symbolic botany, Shem may have a little life in him, since he is
sometimes presented as a "stem", but this cannot compare with the
huge world-tree that grows out of HCE and ALP. As for Shaun, he is not even
alive- a mere stone on the river-bank. In Shaun, the father's authority is
debased to a set of fossilised maxims, whereas Shem, drawn to the mother,
drinks in a little of her flowing life. If we are going to prefer one to the
other, we had better opt for Shem. After all, Shem wrote the book.
These, then, are the main characters of Finnegans
Wake. HCE names the play, and the casting is automatic. If he, the heavy lead,
is Adam, Shaun must be Abel and Shem Cain, and ALP must be Mother Eve. If HCE
is King Leary, Shaun must be the missionary St. Patrick, Shem his archdruid opponent,
and Isobel St. Bridget. Not all the characters need be employed at the same
time: HCE is out of the troupe for a great part of the book, and then his
guilt, as well as his authority, can be transferred wholly to the sons. Shaun
can be Parnell, Shem Piggot, and Isobel Kitty O'Shea. On the whole, ALP has
little time for acting: being a river is very nearly a full-time job. But now,
having presented the actors, we must see how they fit into the vast single
drama which encloses so many lesser ones: we must enter the Viconian
amphitheatre.
( iii)
WE HAVE mentioned everyone except Finnegan, and yet it
is his wake that gives a title to the book. Now we must speak not of Finnegans
Wake, however, but of "Finnegan's Wake", a different title
altogether, though the difference cannot be made apparent to the ear.
"Finnegan's Wake" is a New York Irish ballad which tells of the death
of Tim Finnegan, a builder's labourer who, fond of the bottle, falls drunk from
his ladder at too great a height. His wife and family and friends sit mourning
and drinking round his laid-out corpse, but soon a fight breaks out:
Micky Maloney raised his head,
When a gallon of whiskey flew at him;
It missed, and falling on the bed
The liquor scattered over Tim.
"Och, he revives! See how he raises!"
And Timothy, jumping up from bed,
Sez, "Whirl your liquor around like blazes
Souls to the devil! D'ye think I'm dead?"
This ballad may be taken as demotic resurrection myth
and one can see why, with its core of profundity wrapped round with the
language of ordinary people, it appealed so much to Joyce. His book begins with
this story, but Tim Finnegan is elevated to the rank of divine masterbuilder, a
fabulous prehistoric hero hardly separable from Finn MacCool, giant leader of
the Fenians under King Cormac, mighty subject of Ossianic epic poetry. Fallen,
his head is the Head of Howth, his body lies under the city of Dublin, and his
feet may be located near Chapelizod. In the dream-drama there is only one man
to play him, and that of course is HCE, but we must not, at this stage, confuse
a performance with an identification. Finnegan dies, his wake is held, and
during the wake we are given a survey of his mythical world, but also of the
new world of true history which is to come after him. In other words, Finnegans
stands for the first phase of the Viconian cycle, the rule of gods-and-heroes,
but with his thunderous fall and death, we must look forward to the coming of
an age of purely human rule-we expect the arrival of an unheroic family man,
somebody like Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. When Finnegan, that the legend may
be fulfilled, wakes up to the spilling of the whiskey, he is told to lie down
again: arrangements have been made for the second phase of the Viconian cycle,
and Finnegan would only disrupt that pattern. Let him sleep then until the
wheel comes full circle and the thunder kettledrums in a return of theocratic
rule.
So now HCE, playing himself, arrives from overseas,
and the vague mixed tale of his fall is told. It seems that three soldiers saw
him in Phoenix Park, apparently exhibiting himself to two innocent Irish girls
(Isobel in her dual form, mixed up with the two colleens on the arms of the
city of Dublin). A caddish pipe-smoking man named, apparently, Magrath passes
on, greatly garbled and expanded, the story of HCE's misdemeanour to his wife;
she tells it, further expanded, to a priest; soon it is all over Dublin, and a
bard called Hosty makes a scurrilous ballad about poor HCE, now christened
Persse O'Reilly. He is accused of every sin in the calendar and is eventually
brought to trial. Locked up in prison, reviled by a visiting American (so that
he shall appear a disgrace to the New World as well as the Old), he is at
length shoved into a coffin and buried deep under Lough Neagh.
All this is told in hints and rumours: HCE's fall is
as ancient as Adam's, Among the rumours is one about a letter written by HCE's
wife ALP (she signed the letter "A Laughable Party"), in which his
defence is set out at length: he had enemies, his crime was greatly exaggerated,
he was a good husband and father. Meanwhile, as with Parnell, King Arthur, and
Finn MacCool himself, it is whispered abroad that HCE is not really dead, that
his indomitable spirit is uncontainable by any grave, however deep and watery.
He thrusts up shoots of energy: there are quarrels; wars break out. The theme
of the opposed brothers now makes its first full-length appearance. HCE's guilt
has become a matter of living moment once more, and it seems to attach to Shaun
(called now, for some obscure reason, Festy King). But the trial is a far less
massive affair than HCE's, and the appearance of Shem as a witness
discreditable and discredited-makes the whole issue fizzle out. We are asked to
forget about the brothers for a brief space and to concentrate on ALP's letter-in
other words, to continue to concern ourselves with the big HCE legend.
The letter, scratched up from a midden-heap by a hen
called Belinda, becomes the object of mock-scholarship. Certain people and
places are mentioned in it, and a chapter is devoted to a quiz of twelve
questions on these. Shaun now reveals himself as a clever quiz-kid quick to
turn himself into a voluble schoolmaster. He gives a lengthy lecture on the
theme of fraternal opposition, illustrating this with certain parables. Shaun himself
appears in the first of them disguised as Pope Adrian IV -the only English
pope, who gave his blessing to Henry II's annexation of Ireland, since this
would bring the old Irish Church under the wing of Rome. Shem stands for the
old faith, embodied in St. Lawrence O'Toole, bishop of Dublin at the time of
the English conquest. We have, in fact, two forms of the Christian faith which
the domineering spirit of Shaun will not suffer to live peaceably side by side:
one has to overcome the other. A more homely parable concerns Burrus and
Caseous (butter and cheese), both products of the same substance, the paternal
milk, who are rivals for the love of Margareen. The conclusion is that
reconciliation between the brothers is not possible, that, to Shaun, Shem must
stand accursed, unloved, unprotected.
We are then presented with a full-length portrait of
Shem and at the same time introduced to the big food-theme which plays so
important a part in the story. At that wake of Finnegan, the flesh to be
devoured was that of the dead hero; with the coming of the brothers, it is the
substance of the father HCE which must nourish the new rulers. Shem eats all
the wrong food: he will not take the Irish salmon of Finn MacCool, for
instance, but prefers some foreign muck out of a tin. Shem is low, un-Irish,
writer of nasty books, but he flourishes the lifewand, makes the dead speak.
He stands for living mercy, while Shaun is all dead justice. It is through Shem
that we are able to approach ALP, the living mother: she composed the letter,
but Shem penned it. And so we move to the final chapter of the first section,
in which Anna Livia Plurabelle's love-story is told, and in which she
distributes the spoils of the battle which destroyed her lord's reputation in
the form of gifts to her III children, thus sweetening memory and allaying the
residue of his guilt.
The second section of the book is concerned mainly
with the children of HCE and ALP, who prepare for the great work ahead in games
and study. Shaun is now called Chuff and Shem is called Glugg. Chuff is an
angel and Glugg is a devil, and they fight bitterly, while the twenty-nine
girls (who all love Chuff and hate Glugg) look on, dancing, singing, teasing
Glugg with unanswerable riddles. After play comes lesson-time, and a whole
chapter is arranged to accommodate the text of the boys' lessons, with
footnotes and marginal comments. The substance of the lessons is comprehensive,
covering the secret doctrines of the Cabala, as well as the subjects of the
mediaeval trivium and quadrivium. At the end of it all, the children fly off to
the New World, whence they send a letter of greetings to the old decaying world
which they have superseded.
But now, surprisingly, and in a chapter of great
length, we come face to face with HCE again, this time in his capacity as
innkeeper. His customers-the twelve and the four very prominent-represent the
entire human community, whose purpose it is to discredit HCE in all sorts of
oblique ways through tales in which he obscurely figures, through a television
programme, through accounts of imperialistic wars. Even his alleged sin in
Phoenix Park is sniggeringly hinted at, and HCE is forced to defend himself, pointing
out that all men are sinners. But he is reviled and rent, and the sound of a
mob coming to lynch him, led by Hosty singing a threatening rann, makes him
clear the bar and lock the doors. But it is all revealed as depressed
hallucination-a dream within a dream-and HCE, alone in his bar save for the
four old men, who lurk in the shadows, drinks up the dregs from the abandoned
pots and glasses and collapses, in a stupor, on the floor. He dreams of himself
as King Mark, whose destined bride Tristram has taken, an old spent man who
must hand over the future to his son.
The next section is all about Shaun. In the first
chapter he presents himself to the people-sly, demagogic, totally
untrustworthy, obsessed with hatred for his brother and ready with another
parable to figure forth the enmity-a charming tale called "The Ondt and
the Gracehoper", in which he himself is the industrious insect, while
Shem, the irresponsible artist, fritters the hours away in the sunshine. But
Shaun is more ready to admit to himself now that his own extrovert philosophy
is insufficient, that the life of the "gracehoper" has its points.
Shaun can rule over space, but he cannot, like the artist, "beat
time". Sooner or later, when Shaun's rule collapses, we shall be forced
to move back to the father, in whom both dimensions meet and make a rounded
world. Shaun rolls off in the form of a barrel: he has filled himself with the
food that is his father, but it has not nourished him; he is becoming a big
bloated emptiness.
But, his name changed to Jaun, he is ready to appear
as a kind of seedy Christ to the twenty-nine girls of St. Bride's, reeling off
questionable homilies to them, eventually-sensing that the time for his
departure is not far off-summoning the Holy Ghost (Shem) to act as proxy
bridegroom to his consort the Church, who is, course, Isobel. The daughters of
Erin weep over him as over the dead god Osiris. His third chapter shows him as
a pathetic wreck, vast, inflated, lying supine on a hill rightly re-christened
Yawn. The four old men question him, but they are not interested in his own
essence, only in that great primal essence from which he derives: they ask
about HCE and his ancient sin, the work he did, the world he built. But Yawn is
evasive, and the task of inquisition is handed over to four bright young
transatlantic brains-trusters. Eventually, through a spiritualistic medium and
crackling with static, the authentic voice of HCE comes through. He confesses
his sin, but affirms his deathless love for his consort ALP, whom he has
adorned with a city. And so the dream seems to come to an end, or rather the
dream in the bedroom over the public bar dissolves and, through the dreaming
eyes of the author, we see the decadent times which Shaun's rule has brought
about figured in the sterile rituals of marital sex. Mr. and Mrs. Porter
copulate, their shadows on the blind flash the act to the world, but it brings
no message of renewed fertility. These are the bad times: we, the readers, are
living in them. It is time for the ricorso, the crack of divine thunder which
will bring us to our knees to contemplate the return of a theocracy.
In the final section, a single chapter, Sunday morning
comes and we turn our eyes to the East, looking for hope in an alien order of
wisdom. The innkeeper goes to sleep again, and he dreams of his son Shaun as he
may be, an agent of theocracy, a bringer of the word of God. The boy Kevin
appears as St Kevin, and we are led back to the one genuine historical year in
the whole chronicle-432 A.D., the year of the coming of St Patrick. He refutes
the messed-up idealism of the Archdruid (who is also Bishop Berkeley) and
speaks out the Christian message in a main voice. But the last word is neither
God's nor man's: it is woman's. We are given at last the full text of ALP's
letter, and she herself, all river now, dreams herself on to her death and
consummation in her father the sea. Her day is done. She was once the young
bride from the hills, a role passed on to her daughter; now, with the filth of
man's city on her back, she must seek renewal through annihilation; she will
return at length to her source in rain-clouds blown in from the sea. The hope
of re-birth, for the world as well as the river, is at once fulfilled. The last
sentence of the book is incomplete: to finish it we must turn back to the
beginning again. And then we are led on to pursue the great cycle once more,
the neverending history of man, sinner and creator.
(iv)
SO MUCH for the story of Finnegans Wake, but the story
is inseparable from the language in which Joyce tells it. It is the language,
not the theme, which makes for difficulty, and the difficulty is intentional.
The purpose of a dream is to obscure truth, not reveal it: reality comes in
flashes of lightning out of dark clouds of fantasy, but it is the fantasy which
it is the author's duty to record. Joyce is presenting us with a dream, not
with a piece of Freudian or Jungian dream-exegesis. Interpretation is up to us:
he makes up the riddles, not the answers. But, as with so much of Joyce, a key
to the language awaits us in popular literature: the verbal technique comes
straight out of Lewis Carroll. HCE is identified with that great faller Humpty
Dumpty, and it is Humpty Dumpty who explains the dream-language of
"Jabberwocky". What Humpty Dumpty calls "portmanteau-words"
-like "slithy", which means "sly" and "lithe" and
"slimy" and "slippery" all at the same time are a very
legitimate device for rendering the quality of dreams. In dreams, identities
shift and combine, and words ought to mirror this. Waking life tells us that
out of a buried body new life will spring, but it is our custom to work out the
life-death cycle in terms of a logical proposition. The language of Finnegans
Wake takes a short cut in the rendering of such notions, and the word
"cropse" sums up in one syllable a whole resurrection-sermon. Waking
language is made out of time and space, the gaps between the substances that
occupy the one and the events that occupy the other; in dreams there are no
gaps.
The technique of Finnegans Wake represents a sort of
glorification of the pun, the ambiguity which makes us see a fundamental, but
normally disregarded, identification in a burst of laughter or a nod of awe.
The very title is a complex pun, one missed by printers and editors who restore
the apostrophe which Joyce deliberately left out. The primary meaning is one
with an apostrophe-"the wake of Finnegan"-but, as we read the book,
we find a secondary meaning assuming a greater and greater part in the semantic
complex: "The Finnegans wake up, the cycle is renewed". The very name
contains the opposed notions of completion and renewal: ''fin'' or ''fine''
(French, Italian) and "again". Once we understand the title, we are
already beginning to understand the book.
Joyce's puns are more complicated than those of Lewis
Carroll, and they tend to a sort of progressive transformation which, though
baffling, is shown to be quite logical in a dreaming way. On the first page of
the book we meet the expression "tauftauf". The German word for
"baptise" is "taufen" ; the tutor of St. Patrick was St.
Germanicus, and it is dreamily appropriate that the patron saint of Ireland
should use the German to point to the continuity, as well as the supra-national
essence, of Christian evangelism. But later on "tauftauf" becomes a
name-"Toffy Tough"- and finally (appropriate for baptism) it turns to
"douche douche"; very little of the original is left, and only the
surface-meaning and the reduplication show us that this is meant to be a pun at
all. The use of a German word is bound, by the way, to disturb those readers
who can accept puns but only know them in English. Joyce was a great linguist,
at home in most of the tongues of Europe, and his word-play is multilingual,
ranging from Erse to Sanskrit, though rarely further East. The language of
Finnegans Wake has been aptly called "Eurish"-a basis of
Irish-English with a superstructure of Aryan loan-words. This is not sheer
wantonness: the dream is, so to speak, a Caucasian one, and the hero HCE is a
type of all westward-migrating conquerors. As all rivers flow into Anna Livia
Plurabelle, so all Aryans-peaking races enrich the blood of her husband. The
language of his dream has to show this.
Joyce parodies where he does not pun ("Where the
bus stops there shop I"), and where he does neither he still contrives to
lend his language an extra dimension of meaning. Most of the devices he uses
are demonstrated in the opening of the book, a sort of overture crammed with
themes destined for strenuous development once the story starts. Thus, the
"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's" is a bit of pure topography on one
level (the river is the Liffey, Adam and Eve's is the church on its bank), but
on another level it is the beginning of human history, the first hint of the
fall of man and the polarity of the sexes. "Sir Tristram, violer
d'amores" is both the Tristram of Arthurian legend and the Sir Almeric
Tristram who founded the St Lawrence family and built Howth Castle; he plays
love-songs on the viola d'amore, he violates both Iseult and his honour.
"Wielderfight" means "fight again" (German
"wieder" means "again") and also "wield weapons in
wild fight". The "penisolate war" is the war of the pen in
isolation (Shem, artist in exile), the sexual war, with its thrust of the
penis, and the Peninsular War which (Wellington and Napoleon) is a type of the
struggle of brothers locked in mutual hate. The reference to the
"doublin" on the river Oconee in Laurens County, Georgia, is an
accurate piece of geographical information: there is a town called Dublin on
that stream and in that county, and Joyce is concerned with hinting that the
events of history repeat themselves, not only in time but in space as well:
what happens in the Old World happens also in the New; (The gypsy word
"gorgio" means "youngster", implying that the American
Dublin is a child of the Irish one, as Shaun, founder of new worlds, is a child
of HCE), "Mishe mishe" is the Erse for "I am, Iam" -St.
Bridget, as mother of Ireland, affirming her immortality.
"Thuartpeatrick" is "Thou art Patrick", echoing "Thou
art Peter", and also an identification of Ireland's father-saint with the
"peat rick" of the land itself. "Not yet, though venissoon
after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac" is crammed with layers
of meaning. Isaac Butt was ousted from the leadership of the Irish National
Party by Parnell (the wheel turns; one leader supersedes another). The cadet,
or younger son, Jacob, disguised in kidskin as hairier Esau, dupes his blind
father Isaac, makes him the butt of his deceit. "Venissoon" is
"very soon" but also "venison" (appropriate in the
Biblical context of goats and burnt offerings), and it modulates the harmony to
Swift and Stella and Vanessa. "Not yet, though all's fair in vanessy, were
sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe." The last word is an anagram
of Swift's Christian name, Jonathan, presenting him as Nathan (wise) and Joseph
(untemptable)-two in one ("twone"). Susannah, Esther and Ruth are the
"sosie sesthers wroth" all in the Bible, all young girls champed at
by old men's passion, but also ("in vanessy" is
"Inverness") three sisters who tempt and enchant, as the three weird
sisters tempted and enchanted Macbeth. As two girls can be three as well as one
(all are summed up in HCE's daughter), so Ham, Shem, and Japhet can be Jhem and
Shen, Noah's sons brewing by "arclight" (rainbow light, arc de ciel
or Regenbogen) the liquor which will make Noah drunk and naked (protectionless)
before them.
Need one go so far in digging out strata of meaning?
Only if one wishes to; Finnegans Wake is a puzzle, just as a dream is a puzzle,
but the puzzle element is less important than the thrust of the narrative and
the shadowy majesty of the characters. We can get along very well with 'a few
key;-words and the general drift, and when our eyes grow bewildered with
strange roots and incredible compunds, why, then we can switch on our ears. It
is astonishing how much of the meaning is conveyed through music: the art of
dim-sighted Joyce is, like that of Milton, mainly auditory. But if we are still
disposed to curse the book as breaking those laws of intelligibility subscribed
to by Nevil Shute and Ian Fleming, we ought to remind ourselves that a book
about a dream would be false to itself if it made everything as clear as
daylight. If it woke up and became rational it would no longer be Finnegans
Wake. To complain that it is mixed-up, over-fluid, maddeningly complex,
bursting at the seams with symbols, is to say that it resembles a dream-not a
derogation but a compliment. Whether we want dreams or not is another matter,
but we seem to, since we willingly spend a third of our lives in sleep.
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