Perhaps the greatest page in the Book of Kells is the Chi-Rho page.
Joyce is almost certainly referring to it when he said: ‘some of the big initial letters which swing right
across a page have the essential quality of a chapter of Ulysses’
(Arthur Power From the old Waterford house, quoted, via Joseph Prescott, in W.S.
Stanford’s The Ulysses theme, p223).
‘Some of the letters’ is really a misdirection.
The Chi-Rho page, if one may judge by the 1974 Thames and Hudson edition,
which reproduces 126 colour plates and 75 monochrome, is the only page where the
letters sweep across. All the other
pages are Norman-looking, square and heavy.
The Chi-Rho page is a new spirit. Christ
is reborn in it.
The Chi-Rho page has one big letter.
It seems to be a letter-pun, for it is at once a Chi and a Rho, an X and
a P. It swings right across the
page in curves like a dancer in a leap. There
are nine large circles fitted around this Chi-Rho. Within these circles are
circles within circles within circles. I
calculate eighty-one circles in one of these nine large circles.
In addition, the page is ‘myriad’ with circles of many sizes,
spinning at different speeds (depending on the curves within them).
The effect is the most joyous page ever made, an exquisitely classic
expression of joy. This same Celtic capacity for detail and response to the
circle we find in Fw. Think what
character it is that takes a joy and expresses it in severe formal work.
This beautiful quotation, used as a printer’s type sample, makes the
point: ‘Devotion to detail
is the one test by which all talents can be judged.
It was the mark of the Old Masters;
it is still the essence of craftmanship.
Without it no standard of work can be achieved or maintained, for, where
there is no interest, there can be no incentive.
Devotion to detail distinguishes the professional from the amateur; it is that indefinable quality possessed only by those who
love their work,’ (Printing type
specimens, Masterprint Press, New Plymouth, New Zealand).
Certainly the Book of Kells is a world peak of devotion to detail;
of craftmanship, interest, incentive and love.
There is no doubt Joyce was one with this Celtic view when he espoused
the classical and denounced the romantic view of art in the Mangan essay.
Fw is all detail then, and yet all form.
It is all circles. And it is
all joy.
We have all had the experience of reading books that filled us with joy
or inspiration or energy. We have
all experienced that energy evaporating within a month. We might still recommend
the book to others, if we remember it, but we are conscious that the enthusiasm
engendered is a fragile, not often transferable thing.
The artistry of the Book of Kells and Fw - as of the Odyssey and the I ching -
is I suspect a more sure joy. They
do not want a commentary but a discovery. They
make themselves virtually inexhaustible because they are worthy of love.
Fw is not a linear book then. It
does not grow and swell and then die back down like an essay, a story or a
sonata. It is an endless repetition
of a very simple, ineffable and joyous theme.
Although it is the fruit and symptom of extreme striving, it has nothing
of the treadmill hell of ‘progress’, but the replete spirit of eternal
arrival, of a pitch so stretched, so high, it is self-creating and timeless.
The whole circle of Fw one will find appearing in paragraphs, in words,
in different colours, in different contexts.
In one paragraph we are studying the subject of the whole book.
One word may review the subject of a chapter. The moral of Fw is that every single thing - in life, in
dream, in every book, in Fw - is
the everything, the one thing that everything is, just as all the circles on the
Chi-Rho page are one circle, and through abundant and varied repetition, one
joy. The heavenly grain of sand.
There are millions of Supreme Gods, supreme joys, in every atom;
10 to the power 59 atoms in the universe;
and the universe is as one atom in your body.
‘In each atom a hundred suns are concealed...
The core in the centre of the heart is small, Yet the Lord of both worlds will enter there’, Shabistari,
TTW, p825.
Fw is so tightly packed with delights, there is more in one page of Fw
than in the whole book, because the whole book cannot be opened.
But each paragraph, and often a word, is the whole essential character of
the infinite worlds.
What is the reader letting herself in for in studying Fw?
The greatest agony. The most
testing initiation. The greatest
ecstasy. The greatest learning.
Take as motto and talisman the word of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:
‘But the fruit that can fall without shaking
Indeed is too mellow for me’, FQ.
Thoreau: ‘Books must
be read as deliberately and reservedly as they are written’, FQ.
The reward is that we may receive from the poet the ‘supreme fictions
without which we are unable to conceive of life', as Stevens puts it, FQ.
‘A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry’, Thoreau, FQ.
We wait on the poet, unwillingly perhaps but unavoidably, for a portrait
of the real. We see only life’s
fragments; the poet sees to a depth
where all things shape themselves into a whole. Until great poets assist, we know no more of life than a
sifter of shards knows of vases.
And let us remind ourselves at this beginning of the proper purpose of
the critical writer. ‘A... critic
ought to dwell... upon excellences..., discover the concealed beauties of a
writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their
observation’, Addison, FQ. ‘One
sees the critic as the... helper of the artist, the torchbearing outrider, the
interpreter, the brother’, Henry James, FQ.
‘The... critic... tells of his mind’s adventures among
masterpieces’, Anatole France, FQ. I hope I will be judged by these standards, and not
insignificant ones. At the same
time I hope it will be conceded that I can do the impossible only imperfectly at
best: Joyce invented a new
way of language, and a new way of reading, to do what I must attempt to discover
and communicate in mere prose.
II:
stand up tall, in your Y-fronts
Since this is a big subject and we are here to enjoy ourselves, let us
change tack, eutrapelia-wise, and take a quick look over Fw as a whole.
Actually, we cannot change tack in studying Fw, where the whole book,
each of the four books, each chapter, each paragraph and the 100,000 or so
multiwords are alternate verbal portraits or symphonies of the one subject, the
universal essence or substance, the indestructably united and quasi-infinitely
divided tree of being, life and consciousness, the universal-particular, that
nature that everything is, the ‘signatures of all things’ Stephen Dedalus,
in the Proteus chapter of Ulysses, feels he is here to read.
What we learn of the universal circle in one place, on one level, we can
overlay on what we learn of it in all other places in Fw.
The purpose of the quantity of Fw circles is to give us the energy of
that particularity to rocket us up to a higher level of abstraction, simplicity
and perspective than has ever been imagined in any of the greatest universities.
Hell is not being able to see the woods for the trees, not being able to
hear the Word for the words. Wholeness
is sanity. Hell is not being able
to feel the unity for the crashing of the leaves.
‘Conscience’, which Joyce, through Stephen, announces he wants to
give to ‘his race’, is a knowledge of all together, or the holistic science.
To experience even all the fragments of a vase is not even to begin to
experience a vase. Joyce willingly in the scientific spirit starts from scratch,
from ‘sensible things’ (literally) but does not stop till he reaches
a perspective height in which all is clear.
Joyce invented a new language mode to say what he wanted to say;
I have set myself the impossible task of trying to say it in prose mode
to make some sort of a bridge to Fw. To
do this impossible thing, I would, I said, state conclusions until (just before)
the reader was exasperated, alternating with facts until the reader was
surfeited and looking for direction. This
chapter is one of the chapters big on conclusions.
There will be plenty of data in other chapters to digest with the aid of
the Quickeze of the conclusions.
Fw is divided into four books of eight, four, four and one chapter.
Book I is father and mother. They
have four chapters each but they are united.
The next two books belong to Shem and Shaun, the divided sons, and the
last to Issy the daughter. The book
is thus divided into four parts of four chapters each and a clinching,
quincuncial chapter, which I suspect is also divided into four fours, and is a
miniature of the whole, is the seedwhole, the future whole.
The universal daughter is the womb of the future.
Fw can be seen as a trinity of books, with a seedbook to conclude, which
reviews or quintessentialises the trinity or foursome.
It can be seen as four fours and a central connector.
It can be seen as a quincunx, a five, the number of nature
(see Sir Thomas Browne, The garden
of Cyrus).
Joyce uses Vico’s analysis of history into a cycle of four ages,
theocratic, aristocratic, democratic and ricorso,
so the four books, and the four chapters of each quarter, make circles or
cycles. This cunning play with circles and numbers, making three,
four and five shift and be one another, is present on the Chi-Rho page to some
extent, where we have three circles around a smaller central circle, but the
larger circles have three circles within them whereas the central circle does
not, so that there are 3, 3 + 1, 9, 9 + 1, or 3 + 9 + 1, depending on what one
ignores. Then there are the circles
within those smaller circles, the large circle enclosing the system, the other
eight large circles and the other circles of all sizes and speeds.
The aesthetic moral seems to be structure without stricture.
This four that is sometimes three, less often five, exactly agrees with
Jung’s experience of the archetypes:
‘Among the various characteristics of the centre the one that struck me
from the beginning was the phenomenon of the quarternity.
[At this point Jung reproduces an illumination of the four evangelists
which contains at its centre the wheels of Ezekiel in a form like Joyce’s
central symbolic diagram on Fw293.] ...there
is often a competition between four and three.
There is also, but more rarely, a competition between four and five’.
See ‘Individual dream symbolism in relation to alchemy’ para. 327
(Collected works, v.12). (Four is a
natural, simple division of wholeness:
up, down, right, left; major,
minor, right, wrong; parents,
children, male, female; heaven,
earth, good, bad.)
Leaving aside Book IV, since it is the whole in miniature or in foetal
form, we have a trinity of books. This
trinity takes the shape of a Y, since the second and third books are offspring
standing in opposition. The parents
symbolise situations where the forces of unity exceed the forces of division,
the sons are the reverse, so we have love and war, mingling and separation,
multiplication and division, as the great theme of the great O of life.
Mingling and separation are inseparable. Life is the dynamic flux between the poles of love and hate,
peace and trouble, tolerance and prejudice, slowness and haste to judge.
So the great circle of Fw is inscribed with a Y, probably a Y with curved
arms as on the Chi-Rho page, giving a sense of whirling speed.
The three-armed form is the same as the symbol (the three-legged man) of
the significantly titled Isle of Man, which Joyce uses, on Fw29 at least, as
symbolic of a mediate state between warring England and Ireland.
The two-legged form, which also occurs, at least once, on the Chi-Rho
page, is the same as the Yin-Yang symbol, the circle inscribed with an S.
The four-legged form is essentially the same as the swastika, the ancient
Aryan symbol of energy, also known as the footprint of Buddha.
This Y is man, trunk dividing into legs - instantly macrocosmic and
microcosmic - and tree, the tree of life, the golden bough.
(Glance over Fw504-5.) It is
a principle of fertility: the
‘tree’ or root of man, the genitals, occur at the point of intersection.
Humans procreate by joining their central points of joining of unity and
duality. A tree - any tree, and the
tree of life - is a myriad of branchings or Ys. The human body is an emphatic overstatement of the
‘two-one-ness’ of being (‘twone’, Fw3), with its many pairs, symmetries
and assymmetries, which reiterately divide and join the body.
This Y is the mutual principle of idea-and-matter, of soul-and-body, of
essentiality-and-incarnation, of universal-and-particular, of one-and-many, of
Same-and-Other, of eternity-and-change, of white-and-colours, of reality-and-
unreality, of creator-and-creation, of perfection-and-individual.
It is interesting that Coleridge identifies this ‘balance or
reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’ with Imagination, Biographia
literaria, ch.14, FQ. Henry
James says: ‘No themes are
so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close
connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt,
so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy,
one face of which is somebody’s right and ease and the other somebody’s pain
and wrong’, FQ.
The poles of this idea flow into one another perpetually, they are
logically inseparable, they support one another.
They are one. It is the
trinity of duality and truth, of division (or separation and death), and union
(yoga, religion). God’s whole
being is to save, world’s whole being is to need to be saved:
a perfect fit. The
Israelite disobedience, perennial throughout the OT, is essential to the
functioning of god. Heraclitus: ‘The
opposite is beneficial; from things
that differ comes the fairest attunement; all
things are born through strife’, FQ.
Bad is inseparable from good, nothing is possible without them both, as
the man is a cripple without a right and a left leg, as the tree is doomed
without branches. Sir
Thomas Browne writes: ‘They
that endeavour to abolish vice, destroy also virtue;
for contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet the life of one
another’, Religio Medici, II,4, FQ.
Our experience bears this philosophy out, for the philosophy implicit in
Fw is an experiential philosophy, a philosophy appropriate to a poet, starting
and finishing with what is seen to be. Fw
stands beyond good and evil. It
accepts that a stew, Fw190, or a mixed bag, a mushroom soup, ‘mycoscoups’,
Fw300, is the price one has to pay for existence.
Joyce revels in this obvious, simple, yet endlessly subtle and elusive
point of view. As Pope said: Whatever is, is right.
The ‘man’ of the universe stands on two feet, on polarity.
Life is a sundering-uniting thing. There
is no picture without light and dark, without plurality of colour, and no comedy
without vicissitudes. Man’s
belief in the good in the bad is well indicated in the popularity of books on
‘nasty’ things: war,
murder, drugs, etc. ‘He that
wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill.
Our antagonist is our helper’, Edmund Burke, FQ.
The implied morality is anti-moral:
to pursue goodness is destructive, idealism is life-negative.
Shaun, the idealist, into ‘Meliorism in mass quantities’, Fw447, who
in one of his dream-transformations is St Kevin, who threw a woman off a cliff
for importuning him, becomes in his four chapters increasingly sterile, twisted
and desperate, hysterical, crazy and dead.
The golden mean requires moderation and avoidance of the extremes of
goodness as much as of badness. Set
is a necessary god. The Tao-te-ching
says: When morality abounds,
goodness is in decline. The Hindu
religion places goodness with passion and ignorance as conditions to be
transcended (Tamas-Rajas-Sattvas, Fw294).
Adam and Eve are out of paradise when they judge things to be good or
bad, when they pick and choose among the creator’s gifts, when they get picky.
God is neutral or bi-prejudiced:
‘I make peace and I make trouble’,
Isaiah 45,7. God (in Exodus)
steps in to harden Pharoah’s heart, so that Pharoah won’t let the Israelites
go, so that good may come from evil, even the showing off of the ‘glory’ of
the plagues.
Fw is an impassioned answer to the problem of evil:
evil is not a problem, it is part of the solution;
life is impossible without duality.
Nowhere in Fw does one find indignation or horror at what is. The battle
of Waterloo is a laugh, a joke, a trick successfully played on someone, even a
love-tease, Fw8-10. ‘The effort
really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the
constant force that makes for muddlement. The
great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of
the realities, that it also has colour and form and character, has often in fact
a broad and rich comicality’, Henry James, FQ.
Yet Joyce cared passionately. His
whole life, almost, was a passionate caring about the death of Parnell.
Joyce finds that morality, idealism, extreme devotion to ‘goodness’,
killed a beautiful, powerful and valuable man.
He also recognises that such error is essential to life’s existence,
the ‘pink of punk perfection’, Fw277.
However, we need not anticipate the study of the text.
Sufficient at this stage that we have suggested some of the large
implications of the Y, the triple circle within the larger circle of Fw.
This Y has a time aspect too. It
is spread over the Christian bimillenium. The
father and mother cover just over the first thousand years, Shem the
‘aristocratic’ son covers the medieval-renaissance period, Shaun the
‘democratic’ son the last 500 years. The
sons are born in 1132 AD, Fw14. This
gives the parents the larger share, as seems proper in some way, and it provides
a date significant of fulcrum point (11 is a number of renewal, beginning of a
new cycle of numbers; 32 a number
of fall, ft/sec2 gravity acceleration), and approximates the time that the
western world was beginning to divide - faith versus reason, authority versus
originality - as evidenced by the emergence of the universities.
It is also - things seeming to fall Joyce’s way to a remarkable degree
- the Romans chapter and verse number where Paul encapsulates the philosophy
espoused by Fw and stated in the - very ancient - symbol of the Y:
‘For God has given them all up to disobedience so that he could have
mercy upon all alike’. The
meaning of this is the same as the Felix
culpa (happy fault of original sin) formula Joyce alludes to many times in
Fw, the same as the Sweets of sin
element in Ulysses, and the same as
the story of the prodigal son. Shem
is the prodigal son who drinks life to the dregs, and becomes the true heir and
the father (Fw380-2), because he falls and goes the round and returns and
discovers the unconditionality of love, while Shaun is the son (part of us) that
will not brave the unconditionality of love, stays safe and sterile within the
letter of the Law (Dharma, Tao, Way) and becomes bitter and twisted, hating his
returning brother.
What is to be the chief archetype of this pan-story of humankind?
The family (which reduces to the individual, the human being).
What is to be the plot of this pan-story of humanity?
The great man - as all the great and little individuals of history -
comes into the world and is torn to pieces and eaten, as our fathers use
themselves up in our upbringing. His
death is our life. The flesh knows
him not, but life is saved. Unity
is divided, but increases our unity. We
feed him our ignorance, our malice, our dividedness, and he gives us his
knowledge, his love, his peace. The
Koran has this simple overall theme: that prophets have come, people have been saved, the
arrogant have missed the boat, and life has been saved.
He has been dirtied and we have been cleaned. Parnell, Socrates, Christ - and Joyce.
Consideration of the evidence makes it reasonable to guess that Joyce was
deeply personally shocked by the death of Parnell.
At the vulnerable age of 10, Joyce I think felt the death viscerally, as
an attack on himself. His father
would have been filling the highly susceptible boy’s spirit with strong
feelings of loyalty and nobility. We
know that James wrote a poem on Parnell at that time;
his broadside ‘Gas from a burner’ has a bitter reference to the Irish
in regard to Parnell, and he concluded with deep sarcasm in his Italian essay on
the Irish. An argument over Parnell
which presents the essential elements - love and prejudice, or love and non-love
- of the case, forms one of the pivotal episodes of Portrait. Parnell
actually saturates Stephen’s (and Joyce’s) life, for it is because of his
father’s loyalty to Parnell that the family fortunes suffer, that Stephen
encounters the ugliness of life, and takes up his mission to save humanity from
it, and himself to ‘fly by’ the nets of church and state that caught
Parnell. Joyce does the opposite of
labouring a point at all times, but ‘Ivy day in the committee room’ is, on
the subtlest, deepest level, a scathing satire on Dubliners’ incapacity for
loyalty; and Parnell is behind the
most tormented page of Fw, page 500.
The experience of the hatred directed towards Parnell, which Joyce felt
so strongly because he had identified with him so much, aided by temperamental
similarity and the powerful loyalty of his father, which ate away at him all his
life as the acid-potent form of the problem of evil, Joyce was able to
‘classicise’ by recognising it as a universal condition.
The constant humour of the attacks on HCE (the archetypal
man-god-father-faller of Fw) is the sign of a life-struggle to transcend the
horrible mystery of humanity’s destruction of the best, which is
‘celebrated’ in the worship of Attis, Osiris and others, is the marrow of
the problem of evil, and is what Joyce thought of first when he spoke of trying
to wake from the nightmare of history:
Finnegans wake. (It is also the
source of Joyce’s paranoia about things Irish.)
Chapter one of Fw is involved with the great man’s arrival.
With characteristic delicacy, Joyce avoids fanfare entirely.
He had not yet rearrived, Fw3; he
is already dead, Fw6; the battle is
long over, only a museum remains,
Fw8-10; his wife is about, Fw11;
a lad has taken his place, Fw28-9. He
is the one who has the power to be present in his absence - and that one can
only be love.
In chapter two, enters talk. He
is being talked about. Whatever is
said of a great man, it must be slander in some degree, even from the
best-intentioned, for he brings something original, something greater than they
can know. They do not suspect their ignorance, so they talk instead of
listening. On a simpler level, we
all know that people feel very free to sit on the neck of anyone who sticks
theirs out. ‘A tower is measured
by its shadow, and a great man [person] by his[her] detractors,’ Chinese
proverb.
The talk gathers momentum. What
this archetype does is make love. Whether
as God incarnating, as a Viking or Phoenician sailing up the Liffey, or as a
salmon entering a river like sperm battling up the vagina, or as the Easter
sun’s first rays entering the circle of Stonehenge, Fw594, he is
‘creating’ again. In the
archetype-logic of Fw, this making love is a battle, in which he dies as well as
lives. It is a fall, because he is
staining the white of pure self with the black, or rainbow, of other.
It is the life-act, because it is death for love, which renews life.
In chapter three, people are inclined to be charitable, but his enemy is
more determined. Bringing his energy or Word, he is bound to make a stir.
Every word they speak is a nail in his coffin because their word is death
as his is life. Energy or spirit is content to know he will keep them alive.
His arrival is his death. For
Joyce, marriage is the greatest adventure, because it is the death of the
(lesser) self in union with other; which
is why Joyce alludes so often to the Liebestod
(Lovedeath) of Tristan and Iseult.
In chapter four he is already coffined.
He has died, in all senses; in
the sense that the Irish say ‘I was kilt entirely’ and in the sense that
Benjamin Franklin said that nine out of ten people are suicides.
He suffers from ‘guilt’, which is perhaps separation from the body of
humanity. Defense and attack
continue, and the cycle of four is rounded off with talk after the trial, talk
which turns to the female in the case.
In chapter five we are straight into the All-mother’s document of
defense of the All-father. This is all literature that tries to justify life to
humanity, including Fw, including the world, which is the Divine Mother’s
dress. (‘Cosmos’ and ‘mundus’ are both ‘world’ and ‘woman’s
dress and ornament.’) ‘I was a
hidden treasure and I wanted to be known, so I created the world’, Muhummad,
TTW, p49. The creation, mixed bag of mortal fighting goods and bads,
the legs of the Y, are the opposites through which - and only through which -
his immortal harmony can be published. Blackness
of multiplicity, of duality, of trouble, is the ink that publishes by contrast
the white of Isis, of Tao. All literature, and the dunghill from which it is scratched,
Fw110-11, and all other heaps - buildings, erections, ziggurats and phalluses,
cromleches, cairns and gnomons - conflate into alternate expressions of human
aspiration to divinity, of the ‘penisolate’ war on sublime reality’s
determined irresolution. Incarnation
is synonymous with multiplication and division:
the Word is the synthesis of the words.
In the deepest analysis, the letter is the spirit. ALP is the letter, is
HCE. Yin is yang. This document is endlessly fascinating: this much clearly emerges from the chapter.
Chapters six and seven are characterised by Shaun and Shem respectively,
still in the womb of ALP (for each member of this family is the Whole, not a
part). In chapter six, Shem,
perhaps, sets quiz questions for Shaun to answer.
In chapter seven Shaun discourses freely on the character of his brother. These form two forms of documentation, the objective and the
subjective, the impersonal and the personal.
The twelve questions in chapter six cover the elements of the story - the
man, the woman, the house, the town, the manservant, the womanservant, the
citizens or ‘the lads’, the women or ‘the girls’, the kaleidoscope of
life, the girl, the brother, and finally - it can’t be the brother or Shem
again - it must be the self, the Self, the Same, the One.
These two brothers form the poles, are rivals, opposite banks of the
mother, who is the river of time and grace and divine love.
They will emerge from the womb of the mother to be separate books
themselves.
In chapter eight, Shem and Shaun exist as washerwomen talking about the
great man and the great woman. Their
story rolls on like a river. It may
be too easily taken for granted that here is a charming and lovable portrait of
the All-father and All-mother. I
can think of no other such enthusiastic portrait of the beauty and charm of
life. The expostulations of mystics
seem thin if not insincere alongside this happy portrait.
‘I know of no one with a faith like mine’, Joyce wrote to Lady
Gregory, Ellmann, p107. I can think
of no one in world literature with such buoyant faith.
It is surely the first time that humanity has been able to find humour in
the relationship between man and life. None
of the biblical patriarchs could love the Lord lightly.
Lightness of the heart was the criterion for admission to heaven with the
Egyptians and, as we shall see, there is reason to believe Joyce felt himself
linked racially to that culture. In
Joyce, the relationship finds wings, has a faith to de-solemnise the
relationship, to feel free. ‘Wearing
all that weight Of learning lightly
like a flower’, Tennyson, FQ.
Of course there must have been others before who felt it, but Joyce seems
to be the first, or one of the rare all-seeing ones - perhaps the author of Monkey
was one - who felt free to be funny about the whole of life with a pen.
The theme of Book II is knowledge in all senses and applications:
knowledge of sex, of woman, of the soul, of the mother, of the Maya, of
life. Shem is the seeker.
His brother is a bewildered audience, a force without the ‘necessary’
to participate. The pattern of
three or four in Fw also takes the content birth-marriage-death-beginning, so
Book II is tied to marriage - including union and copulation.
Any encounter with Other is a kind of death to the Self, also a kind of
birth, so the three are one.
In the first chapter of Book II, Shem is trying to guess the girl’s
colour, that is, know what she is like. It
is a stage of confusion and humiliation. It
is presented as children playing a game in the street at dusk, but, as in a
dream or a poem, this is the outer form or vehicle, the best shape in which the
essence can be felt or epiphanised. (Issy’s
‘colour’ is heliotrope, which suggests sun-worship and hence adoration of
love. The virgin has traditionally
stood for the soul. The colours of
the florets of heliotrope range from white to purple.
Purple, containing red and blue, might be taken to summarise the rainbow,
and therefore the heliotrope to symbolise the Y, the identity of Heaven and
Earth, the highest mystical unity or Form.)
One underlying thought in this chapter is that humiliation is the
beginning of knowledge. Shaun mocks Shem in chapter 7 for being low but lowness has
an upside. It is the door to
insight. Shaun will never risk it.
He will not bury his soul in life’s dirt.
The second chapter is the second chapter in the second book, therefore
doubly concerned with marriage, union, conception and the beginning of the end,
the fall, the trap, the wolves, the death.
It is also the tenth chapter, and so the union of the one (male) with the
zero (female). Ten is X, and again, X is ‘crossing’, as in cross-fertilisation.
Facts playing into Joyce’s hands to a remarkable degree again, the
tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet is the Yod or Y.
This is a central chapter, and is constructed symmetrically, with a
central interlude piece. Just after
the interlude is a diagram (Fw293) which repeats the spirit of the Y and the X,
showing two worlds half mingled, retaining difference and sharing the same,
moderate polarity and moderate mingling. It
might be a symbol of contentment, of perfect wisdom.
It is the sign for the secret of Ulysses: two things, different in accidents, the same in
essence, publishing the invisible through their parallelism. It is equally the sign of the Fw technique of joining two
words to signify their common universal element.
On Fw307 Joyce has ‘When is a Pun not a Pun?’, the answer being:
when the two things represented by the pun are seen to be profoundly the
same. Boehme writes:
‘The Being of all beings is but one only Being, but in its generation
it separates itself into two principles, namely into light and darkness, into
joy and sorrow, into love and anger, into fire and light, and out of these two
eternal beginnings or principles into the third beginning, namely into the
creation, into its own loveplay and melody, according to the property of both
eternal desires’, TTW, p37.
So the universe is a tree-pun, in which every one of the ‘10,000
things’, the innumerable species of existence, are, through essentiality,
joined as one thing.
In the first half of the chapter, the tone is ‘objective’, a Shaun
look over the field of knowledge, ranging from subject to subject, as in chapter
6 of Book I. In the second half, a
Shem character imposes a vivid symbol and myth or story or scene as in a dream,
from perceptive and penetrating intuition, thus accomplishing a real union of
seeker with mystery.
Shem and Shaun, as readers of the homework study material, change margin
sides halfway through. In the first half, solemn academic Shaun notes occur at
the beginning of each paragraph in capitals on the right hand side, chirpy
irreverent Shem notes inter alia in italics on the left.
In the second half, Shem’s chirpy voice is heard at the beginning of
each paragraph in capitals on the right, Shaun’s solemn notes inter
alia in italics on the left. Which
simply adds up to the rivals suffering an exchange, scribing an X.
The central section with the two contrasting halves make a Y. The number of repetitions of the
‘signatures of all things’ is the index of their universality and of
grace-with-Joyce.
The third chapter is one of the more complex, dense and opaque chapters.
The scene is a pub, a story is told and an exchange between two comedians
is seen or heard on television or radio. In
the story, a sailor steals the daughter of a tailor and tricks the tailor, and a
judgement is passed on the sailor by the bods in the pub.
The publican feels it as a judgement on himself - perhaps he was the
sailor or the tailor. The business on the television concerns a war instead of
love, but it is the same on the deeper level:
the ‘doing down’ of an older man by one of the next generation.
The two comedians merge at the end:
as a man matures he mellows, that is, he becomes less extreme, he picks
up some of the character of his opposite. The
accepting some of the character of his opposite or rival, in the dream of man -
that is, in reality, in depth - is synonymous with relationship with the
opposite sex.
The publican is seeing himself through the other end of the tube:
he accepts the death implied for himself because he was Buckley, he shot
the Russian general, he ran off with the tailor’s daughter.
The sailor is a Shem-type, quick, witty and laughing.
The man who shoots the Russian general at stool is a duty-bound, honour-bound,
loyalty-bound Shaun. To kill the father we love - the Self - is true for both
poles of types.
In the end, the publican swallows the poison, as did Socrates.
He drinks life to the dregs. He
drinks himself to death. He stole
the torch of life from the older generation and now passes it on.
This passage, man drinking his cup to the dregs, Fw380-382, is one of the
seminal passages from which Fw flowed, one of the springs of deepest meaning at
which Joyce refreshed himself. It
is - in spirit - identical to Stephen’s rejection of the priesthood and
affirmation of fall. Fw of course
has the structure of a person’s life, namely birth, and then a generation
later, getting together with another, and, a further generation or so later,
death. Simultaneously, of course, one generation’s birth is the older
generation’s getting together with another and an older generation’s death.
Draining life’s cup is the same as marriage.
In the fourth chapter of this book of getting together, the young couple
sail out as Tristan and Iseult; the
older generation is played as King Mark, left lonely, and an even older
generation as four historians, old peeping toms, nostalgic Elders.
Book III. Shaun plays Set to Shem’s Osiris; postman to Shem’s letter-writer;
sterility and chastity and purity to Shem’s fall and union and
fertility; ignorance and falseness
to Shem’s knowledge and truth; death
to Shem’s embracing life, sin, woman and soul;
the seed not falling into the dirty ground and dying, to Shem’s death
to self which leads to resurrection and triumphant growth.
Shaun’s age is the democratic age, the degenerate age prior to renewal
and a new beginning, the 500-odd years before the re-Christ slouches towards
Bethlehem.
Chapter thirteen shows Shaun full of himself and uncharitable towards his
brother. He does not realise his
brother is having a great game at his expense as his questioner, leading Shaun
on in his uncharity, for Shem at this stage has conquered himself.
The truth has made him free, and his brother’s ‘darkness’ cannot
touch him. Shem has gone from
antithesis to synthesis. He can
play with his enemy, having united with him.
Chapter fourteen shows Shaun patronising the ladies, a moral monstrosity,
still full of an unjustifiable self-confidence, pretending to affection for his
brother, pushing his sister and brother (soul and artist) together;
(on the historical level, this is church patronage of art, especially
post-Reformation patronage).
Does Shaun ever actually go? Is
he a postman or a post? Shem is the
journeyer, the circulator. Shaun is
the dreamer, the spiritually unrealistic, the non-starter:
the prodigal son’s brother. Shaun
is winter. At the beginning of
chapter 14: ‘Jaunty Jaun...
halted to fetch a breath, the first... leg of his nightstride being pulled
through’, Fw429. After a chapter,
he has only got one of his legs through his pants, and if they are nightstrides,
they are pyjamas. At the end of
chapter 14, he finally does go off (forced into it by his own boasting) but is
next seen flat out on a hill, where he stays through chapter 15.
In chapter 16, we seem to be deep in his subconscious, so no go there
either.
In chapter fifteen, the twice-dead chapter of Fw, Shaun as history - dead
time - is subjected to scrutiny by historians, the four, past-it, deaf elders.
All history passes in review, including the death of Parnell, but the
pathos and the pity as well as the deepest meaning, love, is missed, by the
elders; as it is by us when we read
- and write - and live - history. (History
is alive in Fw. Fw’s language
mode has a way of getting to the point that no prose or poetry has.)
In chapter sixteen, we get something more positive, as befitting the
chapter that marks the end of the age of death and immediately precedes the
dawning of a new cycle. This chapter I feel corresponds to the chapter of Bloom and
Stephen’s contact over cocoa, where all the complexities, all the rush of
events, are reduced to their basic human value, the undivine, unpoetical and
alloyed loving service which is, in the deepest perception, divine, perfectly
poetical and unalloyed.
Mother and father getting up in the night to comfort their children,
rising above the currents of conflicting feelings, rising above all doubts
before those doubts are conquered, is an epiphany of that human compassion that
does exist in far greater quantity than sadism and cruelty.
Despite the thousands we starve to death daily for lack of desire to lose
our small change, there are five billion who survive on the world’s collective
compassion.
Joyce said that with him the thought is always simple.
A chapter and the book is like the Chi-Rho page:
it has one simple great thought sweeping over the whole.
Beyond that, one can explore the detail as much or as little as one
likes.
Book IV marks the birth of the new age (as male, sun) and the death of
the old time (as female, river). Between
these two, the whole story passes in review, in formats revamped and
‘hyperised’ and, almost for the first time, in unmasked metaphysical
statement.
To give some sort of contemporary perspective to this subject, I would
say that in a world where Woody Allen’s films are the closest popular
encounter with the problem, Fw presents the philosophic solution, a solution
which perhaps cannot be presented in common language.
Does humanity have the wit to believe in unwrapping Joyce’s hardwon
treasure?
We can see from this brief glance that each chapter in Fw can be read as
one word, a word which itself is the whole and part of the larger word of its
book, and of the whole of Fw. Fw is
the Y of human being, of fertility in infinite variety, size and celebration.
Since Joyce is so conscious of the mythopoetic potency of numbers, we may
wonder what significance the number of chapters might have.
Seventeen is an unusual number. For
years I have been noting occurences of the number seventeen (as well as of
things that happened or began in 1882). I
seem to have hit paydirt with details of an Orphic sacramental bowl described in
Joseph Campbell’s Creative mythology (Chap. 1, Figs. 3 & 4).
If Joyce is identifying himself with Orphism, the identification agrees
with his calling one of his heroes Dedalus, with his talk with his friend
Gogarty about Hellenizing Ireland and with his regarding Julian ‘the
Apostate’ as a mentor (perhaps via Ibsen).
It also agrees with Shem’s links with an underground spiritual church
(in contrast to Shaun’s worldly, Pharisaical, persecuting church) which runs
through the ancient University of Athens, Emperor Julian, Thrace/Bulgaria,
troubadour culture, medieval romances and Reformation.
In any case, the Orphic bowl portrays a universal archetype, the
initiation. Joyce said he was, in
Fw, portraying the dark night of the soul.
Fw is a night piece and a dream piece.
In the present time, at the end of Shaun’s time, time of the
‘letter’ (in the nonliteral sense), when we take things literally, that is,
without its relations or family, the word night evokes little immediately -
unless we are Shemlike. In the
mythopoetic imagination, night means: night-death-evil-dream-spirits-ignorance-mystery-otherworld-underworld-confusion-loss-fear-danger-disgrace-shame-earth-soil-lowness-terror-moon
etc. If we could read every word in
Fw mythopoetically, Fw would be utterly clear - as clear as day.
And so would every dream. And
every poem would resonate with eternal truths.
We are all in night - every day. Fw
is a retraining in mythopoetic consciousness:
Finnegans wake.
On this bowl, the seventeenth is the central Goddess figure.
She ‘equals’ the sixteen stages of the initiate’s progress
portrayed around the circle, and is the culmination of the progress through
life. This agrees with Fw Book IV being the daughter, the Virgin
Goddess. The sixteen divide (a
little approximately) into four fours. The
first four are introductory, introducing the Saviour-God and the neophyte to
‘death’. Likewise in the first
four chapters of Fw is portrayed the fall and death of the individual, as male.
The female, the Goddess, comes ‘early’ on the bowl, at stage four,
but she appears positively at stage five, as the Great Goddess, as in Fw, and
stays till stage eight, as in Fw. Stage
seven portrays the initiate, as Fw chapter seven portrays Shem.
Book II in Fw is Shem’s book, the book of knowledge in all senses,
mystical to sexual. In Campbell’s
description of the bowl, stages 9-11 are:
the God of good fortune, the Lord of the abyss, and the Mystes, fully
initiate, whose belly indicates pregnancy, union with the feminine (which
symbolises the missing piece, the other or opposite);
just as in Fw. 12 and 13
show two young men facing each other, and chapter
thirteen is the beginning of Book III. Campbell identifies these two with Castor and Pollux, just as
Joyce identifies Shem and Shaun. Stage
16 is called Apollo, which fits the fact that Shaun is Apollonian to Shem’s
Dionysus-Hermes. Shaun’s book
corresponds to winter and to the period from midnight to dawn in the circle of
Fw, it would seem, because Apollo-Shaun, god of the sun and therefore of day, is
god of the conscious life, of practical, mundane and worldly things, of power
and pelf, and therefore of spiritual darkness and winter.
III: the culprit
10,000; alias
one
I have said that Fw is full of circles, as full of circles as the Chi-Rho
page of the Book of Kells. The
intelligent reader may feel somewhere in her mind a lack of immediate reverence
for the fact. Circles may likely lack the power to immediately inspire awe,
reverence or respect.
If I quote Laurens van der Post:
‘Heaven is... man restored to all four of his seasons, rounded for
eternity’, the reader may begin to ponder, which may lead to recognition of
the mana, the poetry of circles.
Or there is Herrick’s: ‘Love
is a circle’. And Robert
Frost’s: ‘We dance around
in a ring and suppose But the secret sits in the middle and knows.’
And Black Elk’s: ‘Everything
an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the world always
works in circles, and everything tries to be round.’
Joyce does not labour a point as I am doomed by prose to do, but Fw lays
tripwires in the world so that I am bound to wake when I encounter one of the
things, like the circle, that carries heart knowledge.
One finds that thoughtful people are writing justifications or
commentaries on Fw in many places. I
quoted Van der Post. Again, a
reader may feel, well, humour is fine, but is it important?
Does it make a book greater? Peter
Ustinov calls laughter the most civilised music in the world. I am taking quotations from
dictionaries of quotations so these quotations have already been admired by
humanity. They have already been
stamped as striking a chord. Fw is
full of laughter and music, is a kind of selective resonator, tending to
increase the volume of correct chords. For
we who live in a world drowning in noise, this is no small matter.
Even in a dictionary of quotations, there is much ‘noise’.
Fw is a touchstone, even a philosopher’s stone, and an Ariadne’s
thread amidst the roar of the Minotaur.
It is time we began to touch the text of Fw.
For our first essay, I choose a short, free-standing piece in which we
may take a relatively quick and relatively easy taste of its particular joys.
Some readers may find it simply tiresome, at least at first.
I can imagine readers who will not feel comfortable with a style so
contrived. There are great passages
in Fw of great spontaneity, as for instance, the closing pages, which must have
been a great joy to Joyce to have written, but I also respect, in
a writer of such resonance and truth, passages which appear contrived and
which may yet have a resonant and profound ‘spring’.
The piece is a song coming at the end of the Shem book.
At least I take it to be a song. In
Appendix II, I offer to readers a song setting of these four verses, which
certainly makes more evident the excellence of its writing.
It might be called ‘The four ways of wooing’, for it reviews the
relationship of the sexes. Coming
at the end of Shem’s book, after Tristan and Iseult have sailed away, it may
be seen as a toy, a light piece, celebrating their union with a review of the
fortunes of man with woman.
Shem-become-Tristan, as seeding man of the future, has been through all
the four phases of the song. The
song allows us to see a different side of the men and women of the four phases
than the ones we were given in the four chapters of Book II.
Each verse displays a type of man and a mode of woman.
The males are, respectively: choleric,
melancholy, phlegmatic and sanguine; rich man, poor man, beggar man and thief of hearts;
Shaun, Shem, Ham and Tristan.
Lavater’s aphorism no. 609 states:
‘Venerate four characters: the
sanguine who has checked volatility and the rage for pleasure;
the choleric who has subdued passion and pride;
the phlegmatic emerged from indolence;
and the melancholy who has dismissed avarice, suspicion and asperity’,
FQ. In this song, the choleric and
the sanguine have failed, the melancholy and the phlegmatic have succeeded.
The women are virgin/mother, bride/goddess, widow/lover and
bedmate/prostitute; and one can see in this series the pattern:
birth, marriage, death and conception.
To each verse are assigned seasons, in the order:
summer, autumn, winter and spring; and
metals - and ages - gold, silver, copper and iron.
One can see appropriate cross-correspondences, gold for summer, winter
for death, melancholy for autumn, spring for conception.
One can work out a number of connections, even where the evidence is not
present. From ‘bowels’
(passions, anger, hence choleric) in the first part, for instance, we can guess
that the fourth part is loins. The second and third would seem to be head and heart
respectively, from the known characters of Shem (artist, intellectual, thinker,
‘brainbox’) and Ham (the third - missing - brother, the one cursed and sent
forth, the black races that seem to have a knack for songs of the heart and
soul). There is ‘brow’ in verse
two and ‘acushla’ (‘pulse’, hence heart) in verse three to support it.
One can assign castes to the set, thus merchant class (buying and
selling, the social bowels, the physical maintenance of the body), brahmin or
brain class (professors, professionals, poets, inventors, geniuses, etc.),
working and serving class, and protection class (soldier, policeman, fireman
etc.).
There is not only a cycle of one year, but also of a week:
Sunday is mentioned at the beginning,
‘middle of next week’ in the third verse, and Friday and Saturday at
the end. We can probably assume day, evening, night and dawn, from
‘snore’ in the third part and ‘rising up... in the twilight’ in the
fourth part. We can detect a
pattern: arrogant, gentle,
humble, rough.