form.
This is another reason for the quantity of data:
like Darwin or Frazer, and in their spirit, quantity is proof.
One could easily assign animals (lion, hart, mouse, bull), for Joyce has
filled each part with character. An
important point is that it is only the bold soldier boy who gets the girl.
There were three men in him, ALP says of her husband HCE.
The three are Shaun, Shem and Ham. Tristan
is the fusion or balance of the three, the one who is capable of manhood, of the
fatal act which leads to consequences, namely the creation that eventually bites
the hand that made it, the new king of the grove who kills the old king, the cad
in the park who threatens the father with time.
Thus the girl (Issy) who rises up Saturday from under him, calls him Mick
(Shaun) Nick (Shem) the Maggot (Ham) or whatever your name is (Tristan).
Whatever your name is: HCE,
on Fw108, is three syllables less than his own surname, the three-syllable
Earwicker; thus, the Tao that cannot be named, the infinite and therefore
uncharacterisable unknown universal origin or Mother.
The three are of course the three who challenge and attack the father, in
chapter two.
Some language help: Anno
Domini, etc: Shaun is connected to organised religion - as worldly
as a bank. Braw bawbees is pretty
jewels. Prank thee is dress you
out. Brinabride queen... in her
curragh of shells is obviously Venus (as in Botticelli’s painting, for
instance). Sig Sloomysides is some
form of the father: Shem
objects on aesthetic grounds to the divine young lady living with an old man.
Cold meat is corpses. Balbriggan
surtout is a heavy warm overcoat. A
power of highsteppers is a large number of soldiers.
Tossed is jilted and also screwed. Goosegreasing
is the sexual act. Bohermore is
Gaelic: highway, so from the
barony of Bohermore is off the streets.
It is not hard to imagine why the girl goes for the last man.
The first is too bossy and repressive, the second too inactive and
uninvolved; the third puts himself
too low for a woman, I imagine. On
the other hand, they all bring agreeable qualities to the ‘rounded’ man: aggression and strength, intelligence and worship,
tenderness and heart.
It would be wrong to think this song was merely a patchwork of words
thrown together. It is more
accurate to think of it as a comic poem with the bonus of structural elegancies,
or as a neat meeting of graphic sense and decorative shape.
It is with patches that we have to do, yet it is the triumph of Harlequin
that we intend. In fact the style
of Fw points towards a balanced man, capable of putting into his work all
positive qualities: energy,
feeling and elegant form. The
‘new art’ of Fw allows Joyce to
be at once serious and funny,
competent and playful, profound and light.
Joseph Campbell makes a very welcome point, in his introduction to his
Primitive mythology, to the effect that mythology always borders on jest and
play. There are points in the
Bible, too, where one suspects a reading without humour will go wrong.
Fw may mark an advance in mythology to a lighter, less dangerous sort;
for are not wars and inquisitions a loss of humour?
The main point to take from this study of this song, - as of Fw - is:
what is its subject? In
fact, the subject is not so much four types of men, four modes of women, or four
seasons, but that ineffable universal pattern here bodied forth as four, which
is described through the examples of types of men, modes of women, seasons,
castes, etc, which give indication of the existence of this pattern (4, 3 + 1, 3
= 1, 3 + 0). The fact that we are
able to assign to parts of the song sets of four that are not included in the
song shows positively that we have a grasp of that pattern or idea or spirit
beyond the sets of four that describe it to us in the song. The subject is not types of men, but the pattern with which
they are stamped. We are seeing the
tree of the whole of life at the level where it is four. Fw is an elaborate net of examples of patterns and
description of patterns which interconnect into one universal pattern, the
Platonic Good, the signature of ‘the invisible human’ everywhere.
Joyce is Platonic and Aristotelian. His
character goes from one pole to the other.
I think Joyce was by nature Platonic, and had the very deep wisdom to
avoid being himself, as Platonic, and deliberately to embrace Aristotle and
Aquinas as an opposite of his inclination, so that he, dying to self, would be
resurrected a more universal man. His
acting ability, and especially his ability to reproduce conversational colour so
accurately, point toward this.
HCE is a symbol of that deep wisdom and faith to die and become Everyone.
‘All know that the drop merges with the ocean but few know that the
ocean merges into the drop’, Kabir, TTW, p826.
Joyce’s talent and art is the visible fruit of
his lovedeath, and the circularity of Fw, of this song, for instance, is the
‘silent expression’ of this new person ‘for all seasons’.
Who dies to the little self by
embracing the opposite acquires the brainpower of the anima
mundi, the collective unconscious. That
is the process we have described as being the essence of the story of Shem, and
of the contrast with Shaun. Shem
does enter the world, does make love with the world, does incarnate, does
‘fall’ and ‘sin’ and embrace life and die to God and respectability as
does Stephen, does enter multiplicity (Osiris hacked to pieces).
The paradox is that this is what ensures Shem’s life, purity and
goodness.
Shaun, who keeps himself out of the world, is the worse half of the
world. Out of a sterile goodness
comes only a stinking virtue, a cracked and leaking whited sepulchre, a wholly
corrupted self, like the brother who greeted the return of the prodigal son with
anger, like the man in Christ’s story who buried the money entrusted to him,
like those involved in the stoning of the adultress who would rather obey the
shell of the law than the golden thread in the law, and like anyone who puts
bureaucracy before human duty, the conceptual law before the love-law, the
letter before the spirit. ‘Mayhap
He opens to thee the door of obedience and does not open to thee the door of
acceptance and mayhap he ordains for thee sin, and it is an occasion for
realisation’, Ibn Ataillah, TTW, p60. Shaun does not have the realisations.
These are some of the large patterns we are free to explore and discover
in Fw.
The characters in Fw have separate identities only to merge.
Thus Issy is both soul or anima - eternal woman - and that which drags a
man down to sin. And what Shem
embraces is both his sister Issy and his brother Shaun.
Consider how open, impartial, undisgusted Joyce has to be to get inside
Shaun’s (divided) soul to give us the Shaun chapters. The Pharisees, hypocrites that angered Christ, Joyce gives us
a closer view of, and they seem only funny and sad, inconsistent, self-divided,
anxious, baseless, peaceless, disorganised, their power only the impulse of
desperation, of a mind in flight.
Thus Fw is not just the invention of a brilliant mind, but the courage
and faith and lifelong action of a great - perhaps the greatest - man.
Joyce, like the Christ of the Aquarian gospel, is showing the
possibilities of man to man. The
greatness of Fw lies not just in the display or portrait of a network of
Platonic Ideas - though that goes beyond what Plato or anyone after him
attempted or even conceived, with the exceptions of Bruno, with his decans and
his Memory Theatre, and the master of the Tarot, and few others - but also in
its identification with an Aristotelian world of practical colourful particulars
- a portrait of the Supreme Sacrifice, self sacrificed for greater self. The
portrait of the artist in the second verse of our song is (gently) satirical,
the artist of the Celtic Twilight, the narrower, earlier undeveloped Shem, the
Stephen of the villanelle, before he knew certainly, like Aucassin and Nicolette
(see Pater’s essay ‘Two Early French stories’ in The
Renaissance) that it was better to go to hell with the good guys (and gals)
than go to heaven with the enemies of life (and lovedeath).
Notice the antagonism to the father, Sig Sloomysides, in parallel with
Shaun’s lack of respect for the mother (and daughter) in verse one.
The father is the Self, the female is the Other.
Stephen-Shem is steeled in the school of Aquinas and Bloom for
inheritance, Tristanhood. The song
we have looked at contains nothing but character and colour.
There is nothing abstract about it.
Yet one can abstract a great deal of pattern from it.
It must have given Joyce great satisfaction to have taken two such great
steps - the organization of ‘the 10,000 things’ and the ‘colourization’
of the white of eternity and essence - for humanity.
One can imagine how a daughter’s insanity, and an ulcer - which must
have hurt long before it killed him - could fail to weaken his relentless drive.
We can imagine how it must have felt to have such a project ahead of him
- or even behind him, and unknown - the enormous task, the more-than-mammoth
task. It gives us new respect for
those four or five passages that he wrote at the beginning of his cyclopean
labour, that acted as perennial springs for his invention, and as islands of
rest and recreation in the muddle of his ‘disigraible game’, as his soul
laughs at himself on Fw301.
IV:
rosy hues endless
I at one stage began to copy the data available on Fw into my copy. I
worked at this for six months, and by that time had copied in perhaps half of
the data accumulated in 50-something years.
This resulted in about 10 items per page, hardly one of which immediately
helped. I guessed that on average
the data necessary was of the order of 400 items per page, that is, two
explanations needed for every second word.
At the present rate we will reach a level of 400 data per page after 2 x
10 x 50 or 1000 years. Joyce talked of keeping the professors busy for 300 years.
In fact, when I completed exhaustive studies of three pages over twelve
years, I found that the actual quantity of necessary data per page to be much
higher than 400 items, more of the order of
4000.
After twelve years of study - pick up, put down, frustration, try again,
abyss and surge ahead - I am confident I have a fairly complete grasp of three
(3) pages; however, through them an
entrance into the whole life and greatness of Fw.
Drilling for
‘the dinkum oil’, Fw108, has been exquisitely exciting, abundantly
successful where the fruit of over fifty years of digging by various authors has
not. Copying in available data has
had all the minor charms of studying the blue threads then all the gold threads
in a tapestry; concentrating on one passage has had the thrill of finding
the whole design in one small part of a very large design.
I did not anticipate such a happy result;
I stumbled upon it when I decided that if I could not read the book in a
thousand years, I could read one page. Studying
Fw by building up a library of the X in Fw, where X is French, Shakespeare,
songs etc, is like studying hemoglobin by building up a library on the iron and
other elements ‘in’ hemoglobin. On
the other hand, the whole of blood may be studied in one small sample.
A book of the Russian in Fw is just a Russian dictionary with few words,
and too little, for Fw purposes, on each entry.
For it is the ‘quantity of quality’, Fw278, the cultural information
implied in the relationships among the words of the fullest dictionary entry,
that Joyce has included the word for. The
whole of Fw is in the search and discovery of each ‘drop of blood’ Joyce has
created or found.
For our fourth and last introductory perspective on Fw, I wish first to
take a relatively brief - and therefore I hope not too daunting - close survey
of one of those three pages, Fw594, which I have explained in my first Fw book, Dawn,
and then - hopefully, when the reader is coming down from the shock of learning
how unbelievably concentrated Fw is - an exhaustive and I hope exciting study of
paragraph 300-302, the study of which was begun in Dawn.
Fw594 is the second page of the last chapter of Fw, which chapter is to
some extent a second first chapter, or the beginning of another cycle.
At least Mutt and Jute, Fw16-18, are recycled here as Muta and Juva,
Fw609-10. Paragraph 594-5 seems to
be the new-cycle version of the first complete paragraph of Fw, which is
structured as a rainbow. The two
paragraphs seem to be the two node points for the whole of Fw.
Seven great elements of Fw are summarised in them.
The first of the seven divisions of Fw594-5 is divided into three
sections, to do with, respectively, the god, the goddess intermediating between
heaven and earth, who knows both, and a representative androgynous
practical-heroic man. The first of
the three sections is divided into seven subsections, structured 3-1-3.
Fw594’s basic narrative scene is the greeting of the sun
on Easter morning, with a rekindling of the new year’s fire on a Henge
altarstone. The time is dawn of
history/early 20th century/any time of hope and new beginning.
The place is Stonehenge/Dublin/London/your breakfast room.
Pu Nuseht (obviously an Egyptian priest;
and ‘The Sun-up’ backwards) speaks.
Vah! Suvarn Sur! A forceful and powerful greeting to the sungod.
Vah is a peculiarly forceful and ceremonial exclamation;
also ‘go!’ One is
reminded of this when one sees Christopher Morley’s:
‘April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go’,
1931, FQ. Did Joyce lift it? Suvarna Sura is Sanskrit:
golden hero, shining Lord. Sovran Sir!
Scatter brand to the reneweller of
the sky, thou who agnitest! Scatter
fire to the renewer of the sky, thou who ignitest!
Brand is fire, sword, flaming torch, mark.
Sword and torch stand for divine power.
Mark is distinction. The
creator makes things distinct, as light and dark, Cain and Abel.
The renewer of the sky is the Divine Mother and the earth.
Agni, the god of fire. Agnite
is remember, recognise. The god is
a rememberer, restoring the great truths we weaker beings lose sight of.
Sky is also Danish: fear,
awe, reverence, so: renewer
of reverence (riverruns), the beginning of wisdom.
Dah! Arcthuris comeing! Dah!
Arthur is coming! Dah is a more
‘doomy’ exclamation than vah. Arthur
is the particular-universal rearriver, avatar, restorer of order;
for Arthur, read Messiah/Ghengis Khan.
Arcturus is a symbol of duality, for hunter and bear pursue each other
around the pole star. Bears in folk practice were worshipped and praised and killed
and eaten, so the bear expresses the fear of the return of the killed and eaten
lord. Dah is Persian for trouble.
The return of the sun has happy and fearful implications.
Is Arthur the same word as Arcturus:
the wellknown Irish th for t, the loss of the k sound and the us?
Exactly like Latin auctor, English author.)
Be! Verb umprincipiant through the
trancitive spaces! Divine word everbeginning through the spaces between!
Verbum is Word of God. In
principio: In the beginning was the Word.
Principiant is originating, primary.
Verb... transitive: having
an object; the connection of love
and grammar, as on Fw268-270, is a Persian literary conceit.
Links between the Middle East and Ireland are a theme of this page.
Trance is suspense between life (sun, day) and death (earth, night).
Kilt by kelt shell kithagain with
kinagain. Rich beside poor
shall mix again with kinagain. Dead
by alive shall greet kin again. Love
beside hate shall mix with kin again. ‘Poor
old Michael Finnigan begin again!’ The
song implies cyclicity and the sentence, a return to an original lack of
barriers. The k’s express
explosion (shell). The sentence has
an x-shape. It links the divine
three above with the earthly three below. The
word shell stands at the centre of the four k’s.
Shell equates barrier and breaking of barriers.
In ‘shell’, the centre of the x, the divine triangle or pyramid
touches the earthly threesome or hill.
We elect for thee, Tirtangel.
We elect you/ we, the elect, are for you, angel.
Tintagel, Arthur’s seat. Tir,
god of energy. The tangle of life.
Tintagel is on a promontory, so shares the yang phallic energy of scraggy
isthmus, the hill of Howth, HCE.
Svadesia, salve!
Svadesia, the slogan of Indian independence.
Hail! Save!
Independence! The ‘Surrection!’
Fw593, of India and Ireland are emblematic and symptomatic of a larger
dawning and the eternal dawning.
We Durbalanars, theeadjure.
We Dubliners, thee adjure. Durbala
nars is Sanskrit: weak men.
Durbal anar is Persian: faithless,
insincere, ugly, bad. Dur is Irish: hard, obstinate, withered, hardened. Anar is Irish: wretchedness,
needy.
The first three groups of sentences are a divine trinity, the last three
groups a human trinity from the elect to the masses.
Between them lies the ‘kilt by kelt’ sentence, shaped like an X,
binding them together. The whole
seven make a male yang spirit marked by exclamation marks.
The following section, largely in one sinuous subtle sentence, is female.
A way, the Margan, from our
astamite, through dimdom done till light kindling light has led we hopas but
hunt me the journeyon, iteritinerant, the kal his course, amid the semitary of
Somnionia. Even unto Heliotropolis,
the castellated, the enchanting. There
is a way, called the Margan, from our estimate of how things are, through the
kingdom of past ignorance, till Providential light, kindling light in us, has
led we hopers/recoilers - but hunt for me, who is the journeying-on, you re-traveller
- in the callous course of time, amid the seminary/cemetery of the land of dream
and sleep. Even unto the city of
light, beautiful in sight and sound.
Marga is Sanskrit: way,
course, seeking, hunting. Margan is
a Welsh goddess of life and death, of the way (a goddess who separates the soul
from the body, therefore a Thoth-Hermes guide through the ‘night’).
Margan is Ancient Persian: pearl,
giver of life, according to Harold Bayley (whose books Joyce uses ‘for all
they are worth’, which may be not much by modern standards).
Margan is also the largest species of the most successful flower in the
world, the daisy: a symbol and an example of the goddess’s fertility,
her knowledge of the way to live.
In the context (Arthur, kelt, Tintagel, Lugh, cromlech, Edar, etc),
Morgan, Arthur’s magical fairy sister, another healer Mother Goddess
transformation, is present. Persian mughan, meaning Magus, is phonetically very close to
Morgan, a common Welsh name, and the Persian or Middle East/Ireland connection
is strong on this page. The fusing
of the senses is the point: the
Way, the Goddess who Thoth-Hermes-like shows the Way, and the flower that best
knows the Way (shown in fertility, abundance, success) have a common root,
symbolised in the sound.
In ‘hopas’, Joyce seems to enjoy a little dig at priestcraft, at the
same time that it serves the wider purpose, for it means ‘cassock, sack of the
executed’ in Spanish. Given that the Spanish revolution was in the papers, that
Spanish revolution was always anticlerical, that Fw594 is revolutionary, and
that Joyce is anticlerical - if calling the Irish priestridden, calling Ireland
the sow that eats its farrow, wanting to fly by the nets of church and state,
and to get ‘outside the outermost rim of Catholicism’ by commiting the sin
against the holy ghost, be anticlerical (but these were all in youth) -
then ‘hopas’ is a reference to 20thC Spanish revolutionary
anticlericalism, is Joyce shipping out an opinion of his own under the authority
of the millions of Spanish who found the conjunction of those two meanings in
one word unodd.
Through dimdom done: the
heavenly kingdom is within the search for it within the dark kingdom.
Darkness is the mother of light.
Kal his: Kali:
goddess as time, death, change, nature. Kal, Hindi:
time, death, change, is a good example of how Joyce’s wordgame can help
us put the worldpuzzle together: we
think of these three concepts as quite distinct, but seeing them here as
meanings of one word makes us look for connections.
Changelessness is timelessness. Death
is a big change. A change is a
little death. Thus we begin to see
the larger idea that is the sum of these three. The fragments of life start to fit themselves together.
We start to go on a great journey, the great journey, the ultimate
journey from all the leaves of the tree of life and knowledge down all the
twigs, all the branches towards the great unity.
Without leaving behind the beautiful colourful world.
Coleridge gives as the most general definition of beauty:
Multeity in Unity. The
marriage of the One and the Many.
Richard Chevenix Trench was a favourite author of Joyce.
In his On the study of words
(Macmillan, 18th rev. ed, 1882), p211, Trench praises ‘comprehensive words’,
that allow us to say in one word what would take many otherwise. ‘By the cutting short of lengthy explanations and tedious
circuits of language, they facilitate mental processes, such as would be nearly
or quite impossible without them’. Joyce
seems to have adapted this to his program of raising consciousness.
On p313, Trench recommends just the exercise we have performed with kal:
‘when you thus fall in with a word employed in these two or more senses
so far removed from one another, accustom yourselves to seek out the bond which
there certainly is between these several uses.
This tracing of that which is common to and connects all its meanings can
only be done by getting to its centre and heart, to the seminal meaning from
which, as from a fruitful seed, all the others unfold themselves.’
Seminary, meaning seedplace, hence birth in a cemetery.
Compare Guant grey ghostly gossips growing grubber in the glow, Fw594.
Heliotropolis is Heliopolis, City of the sun (a utopia), City of the
heliotrope (Issy’s flower, therefore City of Issy, the soul) and City of
turning to the sun. Castellated,
enchanting: stella, chant;
that is: star, song;
radiant light and sound.
After a yang speech and a yin speech, this trinity is completed with a
down-to-earth speech. After Lords and heroes, goddesses and flowers, we have
dialect, cleaning a baby’s bottom, Leverhulme’s sunshine incarnate in a
successful soap.
Now if soomone felched a twoel and soomonelses warmet watter we could,
while you was saying Morkret Miry or Smud, Brunt and Rubbinsen, make sunlike
sylp om this warful dune’s battam. Now if someone fetched a towel and someone else warm water we
could, while you was saying Margaret Mary or Smith, Brown and Robinson (before
you could say Jack R.), make sunlight soap on this awful Dane’s bottom.
Make sun shine out of this war-full blackarse world.
Joyce seems to have taken towel and soap from, and in allusion to, a
passage from an admired author, fellow in sorrow at the historical nightmare,
Mark Twain: ‘I bring you
the stately matron named Christendom, returning... from pirate-raids in Kiao-Chow,
Manchuria, South Africa and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her
pocket full of boodle and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies.
Give her soap and a towel but hide the lookingglass.’
A salutation-speech from the 19thC to the 20th C. The world hides the lookingglass by less often publishing and
less often reading the tougher Twain. Joyce
talks in the Mangan essay of the danger of the artist imposing a ‘far harder
tyranny’ by being angry. Joyce
uses his Hermetic language to cool his passionate sorrow.
Note also ‘stately’ in this quote of Twain, the word Joyce uses to
open Ulysses and to introduce the
usurper Mulligan. (The word,
incidentally, contains the final holy yes, backwards as in Black Mass, and
interrupted by ‘tatl’. Love is
shown by attention to detail.)
Yet clarify begins at.
Yet charity begins at home: the
blackarse world is the only ground for charity and clarification, so why clean
it?
Whither the spot for? Whence
the hour by? To where
hurries the place, from where comes the time for clarification?
Is this a cryptic allusion to Robert Ingersoll’s ‘Every cradle asks
us Whence? and every coffin Whither?’ If
it is, Joyce probably approved the continuation:
‘The poor barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions
as intelligently as the robed priest of the most authentic creed’.
See but! Lever hulme!
Take in. Just
look! Dear home!
Take in. Look around you. Right here. What
you experience - dimdom done, the journey, the limit, the kal his course, the
semitary of Somnionia, the warful Dane’s bottom - is the ground from whence
springs the graceful shining flower of the Way, the heavenly city.
Respassers should be pursaccoutred.
If you open your eyes, you will see that barriers are a fact of life.
Res is Latin: things,
affairs, matters. Res passers. People
who pass things by instead of taking them in, being hospitable to the world,
should be persecuted: this is
a law of life. To see all is to
conquer all.
Qui stabat Meins quantum qui stabat Peins. Who holds out against mercy and love as much as who holds
out against trouble and sorrow. Should
be prosecuted. Who sides with force
as much as who sides with suffering. In
other words, balance before all else. Pein
is Gaelic, German, Scottish: pain,
suffering, trouble. Interestingly,
it is also (Gaelic): self.
Mein is Gaelic: love,
tenderness, beauty, energy, character; German:
crime, sacrilege; and Middle English:
power, force, military strength. In
Scottish, Mein is pledge or pawn, and Pein is possessions.
As of yours. We annew.
I
don’t really understand these two sentences.
As of yores, as of former times. We
and you. We anew. Vision, perception, facing reality, not recoiling from dirt (hopa,
Icelandic: recoil) was and will
ever be our renewal.
The dialect is Northern England, home of Leverhulme, child of a fertile
area (rain, iron, coal, industry) whose very name is rich in fertility
associations (hare, watery land; a
joining of his and his wife’s name), an incarnate god of fertility, who
created much wealth in the dirty, Danish bottom (middle) of Britain.
The differences between Leverhulme and Margan are specious.
Their identity/difference is the Y-spirit.
Joyce seems to show himself to be something of a Margan, or Magus, in
finding this intense network of connections, serendipities or synchronicities:
both lever and hulme are local, Danish names, both symbolise fertility;
the westerly weather piles up the ‘dunes’ and, with the mountains,
brings the rain that, with the dunes, makes the ‘watery places’, that hares
love to live in, and which brought industrial wealth to the North.
This much of the page concludes the first of seven sections,
corresponding to the first of the seven sections in the whole paragraph of Fw3,
the rearriver. The first third of
this section is the divine principle, the second third is the trancitive spaces,
the merciful mother translating the Word to us, the third third of the section
is the object, the receiver. All
three together make up the reality of life, the reality of a rearrival.
Leverhulme is just as divine, as a receiver of divine inspiration, as the
giver. Sunlight soap is just
as much a good as sunshine; it is
made from a yellow oil from sundrenched black Nigeria.
The second section dwells on races, as the second section on Fw3 dwells
on population (‘doubling their mumper’).
Our shades of minglings mengle
them and help help horizons. Minglings
on ‘our’ side help minglings on ‘their’ side and minglings help enlarge
people’s horizons. The other side is another race, or the dead, the spirits, the
shades, the originary principles.
A flasch and, rasch, it shall come to pasch, as hearth by hearth leaps
live. Pasch,
paschal. The Easter resurrection of
the heart (courage) can happen in a flash, as people rekindle their hearth-fires
from the new holy fire brought from the sacred hill.
For the tanderest stock with the rosinost top Ahlen Hill’s, clubpubber,
in general stores and. For the gentlest stock with the wildest top, Ireland is the
place, Allen Hill’s pub, convivial and rough.
‘We marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock’
A winter’s tale,
IViii92. For the tenderest
meat with the reddest flesh, Allen Hill’s meat, (available) in general stores
and (elsewhere). (A radio ad
switched off? Compare ‘we shall
plesently heal… channel’, Fw595.) There
is reference to the Ahlen area in Germany as a settled coal and iron mining and
weapon-making area of the warlike Celts, to the Hill of Allen as the home of the
former races of Ireland, to clubs and pubs of the convivial fighting Irish, and
to Noah, redfaced from shame, from drink and from anger, ancestor of the Irish
race. The Irish race seems to have
mingled descendants of all three of Noah’s sons, from the gentle, easygoing,
music-loving Hamitic to the grim warlike Japhetic Celts.
Hamitic races have been most tanned (‘tanderest’) by the sun and by
the sun-father, Noah, who cursed Ham, and by man.
This has made them tenderest steak (tander:
Norwegian, ‘gentle, tender’).
There is a reference to the Irish and the Irish cattle, both slaughtered
like cattle, sold like butcher’s meat. This
blackest wickedest race, pressured like coal for a long time, has great
potential as fuel, great energy, fire, spirit.
Store is: armed
conflict, especially a fight with death or a struggle with pain or adversity,
violent, stern, surly, stubborn. And
is: enmity, hatred, animus.
For the race with the most contrasts, the most mingled, the most
potential. There seems to be a
suggestion of a node of energy in India long ago, exploding west in white, brown
and black races (north, middle and south) coming together in Ireland in the
present age.
Atriathroughwards, Lugh the
Brathwacker will be the listened after and he larruping sparks out of his teiney
ones. The atrium, the
forecourt, hall or entrance room, was originally the hearth and core of the
home, seat of the ancestors, the spirit of the family, where portraits were
hung. Lugh the Celtic sungod, god
of life and death, living in hills. Brat
is child, brother. Brath is
violence, destruction, betrayal. The
just sungod is destroyer of destruction. His
children are so hardened that sparks (spirit) fly out of them.
Teine is Gaelic: fire. In
the matter of creating enduring values that will bring order to life, it is
suffering that will do.
In the seven subsections of sections one and two we have the seven
virtues (hopas, clarify etc) following Dante’s introduction of them at Easter
in Paradiso.
In the third section that follows, it appears from the third section
of the sevenfold ‘not-yet’ paragraph on Fw3 that fire and water, and
religion versus truth, are the main elements.
The spearspid of dawnfire totouches ain the tablestoane ath the centre of
the great circle of the macroliths of Helusbelus in the boshiman brush on this
our peneplain by Fangaluvu Bight whence the horned cairns erge, stanserstanded,
to floran frohn, idols of isthmians. The
very first draft of this whole paragraph was:
‘Scatter fire to
of the sky. The spearpoint
of dawnlight touches the tablestone in the centre of the circle of macroliths. We understand how recent research has gone to prove that
successive generation has been. Buried hearts rest here.’
Thus the paragraph is devoted to the ceremonial emotion (already mixed
and complex in the first draft) of a new beginning, the point of order that
sustains and re-initiates the continuity of life.
It is a very fine emotion: ‘we
seem to understand’, Fw595, says it all.
We seem to understand that life is fatal and life is endless and cannot
be denied. (Three drafts passed before Joyce created the female ‘reneweller’,
full of feminine consonants, inserted in the midst of those yang s’s, t’s,
k’s and !’s.) It is then as
though Joyce has, once he has got his bee, laboured to preserve it in an amber
of related, secondary and hidden meanings.
The phallic point of the paragraph is buried in the female darkness of
myriad interconnecting ramifications - to ensure fertility of conscience, of
course.
The setting is London, Stonehenge, the Kalahari, the Irish shore, the
Australian outback. Helusbelus is Heliopolis plus hell’s bells plus holusbolus.
Heliopolis is Egyptian sun-city, and Campanella’s utopia.
Hell’s bells is cockney, therefore London.
Holusbolus is the bolus of the whole we have to swallow to get to
Joyce’s utopia. There must
be a reference here to Shelley’s ‘Hell is a city much like London,
A populous and smoky city’. Boshiman:
bushman. Fangaluvu seems -
incredibly, if it weren’t for that reference to the bushman nearby to give us
courage - to be Zulu, Fa nga lu vu: dying
on the sweetsapped nourishing thorntree, the Lamb.
Fanga is Spanish and Italian: mud,
alluvial, mire, clay, trouble, person of low class, vile, abject, corrupted
ruined material, decadence, great material misery, squalor, sin, dishonour.
Joyce would seem to intend a marriage of the Spanish-Italian and the Zulu
meanings, once again tirelessly (obsessively?
beatifically?) saying Heaven is close at hand, no castle stands on air,
the most beautiful rose has dirty roots. (Fang
in Chinese is founding, place, house, neighbourhood, etc.)
Horned cairns are found in every part of Ireland, according to Frank
Gallagher, The indivisible island,
1957, p11. Some cairns are two
hundred feet in diameter and seventy feet high and are royal tombs.
Erge is Italian rise. Stanser
is Danish stamping. Standed:
that is, made to stand. Stanserstanded
brings down - stamp - the rise of erge. A
drophammer that brands the year. Flor,
German: blossom time, prosperity.
Froh, German: merry.
Flora, Roman goddess of Spring, fertility and Nature.
Floran, French: a
pulping trough in papermaking. Floran,
English: discreet tin ore.
Frohn, obsolete German: holy,
august, lordly; service, servitude,
slavery, subjection, government, rule, dominion.
The cairns stand for all building, all institution, all establishment,
all law. These things bring
prosperity and also subjection, sexual, political
and literary pounding. If the cairn
stands against chaos it also weighs down the spirit, Fw72-4, making the hard
‘teiney’ ‘coal’ of ‘Durbalanars’.
Prosperity and rule, these are the idols of man on the ‘isthmus of this
middle state’, Pope, Essay
on man. Erge is used once in
the Divine comedy, in the context of
proud Farinata: a cairn, any
erection stands ‘proud’. A rise
before a fall. All erections,
mental and physical, are idols.
Overwhere. Gaunt grey
ghostly gossips growing grubber in the glow.
Over there: a song of the
Potato Famine: ‘O the
potatoes they grow small, over there’. Over
there: another song, one with
which WWI is always identified. Hodgart
and Worthington found ‘John Brown’s body lies amouldering in the grave’
(but his soul goes marching on) in ‘Gaunt grey...’, I don’t know how.
So we have the dead of the American Civil War, WWI and the potato plague.
Grub is Serbo-Croatian: coarse,
gross, rude, nasty, ugly, dirty; and
Polish: large.
Impregnated by the sun, the earth is bringing forth grubby souls in the
glow of dawn.
Past now pulls. Cur one
beast, even Dane the Great, may treadspath with sniffer he snout impursuant to
byelegs.
The effect of the sun has been to bring light, but with little delay, the
past, the earth, the ancestors, start to have their effect too.
If God had wanted humans not to sin, he would have better not made them
of clay. Cur, Latin, why. Which is why the one cur or beast, even a king among men and
dogs, may trespass with his sniffing snout in pursuit of females (bi-legs;
men have a middle leg), disregarding bylaws.
Edar’s chuckal humuristic. Which makes old Howth (HCE) laugh. Howth, formerly Edar, was a burial place for Irish royalty.
But why pit the cur afore the noxe?
Cur is English and Welsh: care,
anxiety. Noxe is Old French:
damage, injury, wrong, error, fault, etc. Why put the worry before the harm?
The section preceding, section four, sees the appearance of the cur,
Fw38, the young puppy who is going to nip at his heels and replace him;
section four on Fw3 refers to Parnell’s ousting of Isaac Butt.
Let shrill their duan Gallus, han, and she, hou the Sassqueehenna, makes
ducksruns at crooked. Let
crow their don cock prince and meanwhile she, empress the sassy queen hen, makes
clumsy sexual advances towards Mr Wrong. Duan
is Gaelic and Persian: poem,
and English and Persian: Prime
Minister, treasurer, etc. Duan is
Chinese: cut, etc, make perfect, etc and origin, etc, which
meanings together form one of Joyce’s - people’s - key themes, the
castration of the little self in the matter of becoming perfect and original.
Gallus is a priest of Cybele, whose priests used to castrate themselves.
The word goes back to Babylon, Assyria and Sumeria and forward through
Rome, Gaul (national symbol a cock) into Gaelic, Welsh and English, with a
meaning range: priest, cock,
penis, energy, spirit. HCE, all
poems, are made by ‘cutting’. Fw
is the most ‘cut’ book. Han is
Danish: he, English: hen. He seems to
be androgynous, which is of course the (symbolic) purpose of castration.
Hou is Chinese: empress, etc; Dutch:
loyal, and English-Scottish: care,
anxiety, trouble, etc, and Middle English:
hill, valley and house. Thus
HCE is made also female (hen), and ALP is made also male (hill).
The Susquehanna tribe was virtually wiped out by the English.
Legbyes, ducksruns, and crooked are sexual cricket references, see
ALP’s and HCE’s crickety sex on Fw583-4.
The cockcrow of the sexual-political struggle of dominant and weaker goes
forward, inseparable from sunshine; let
it happen, though it brings the night (nox) of castration (ox) by the worrying
cur of the younger generation that sex generates.
(If the weak are not there to drain the yang, the male is left anxious
about being superceded.)
Once for the chantermale, twoce for the pother and one twoce threece for
the waither. One crow for
the self, the singer; the first and
second crow for the Other, the trouble, the duality, the suffering;
and all three crows for the outlaw, wanderer, hunter, who by his fall and
rise, his departure and return to the Way, validates the self, the other and
himself. Felix culpa, the prodigal
son. God locks himself out and
Himself comes (the Margan, the Christ, the intermediary, the son) to unlock the
door to himself (the waither, waiter, finite self).
So an inedible yellowmeat turns out the invasable blackth.
So an inaudible, inedible but very visible yellow stuff, like breakfast
eggyolk, like sunlight, which is yet food for us, expels/turns out to be, the
invisible/invadible blackness of death, despair and sorrow.
(‘Suvarn Sur… through the trancitive spaces’:
meat is meatus, channel.)
The above, section five, corresponds to the sexual lovewar:
‘not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth
with twone nathanjoe’, Fw3.
What follows corresponds to the sixth section, which is expanded from
drink on Fw3 to drink and flight from reality here.
Kwhat serves to rob with Alliman, saelior, a turnkeyed trot to Seapoint,
pierrotettes, means Noel’s Bar and Julepunsch, by Joge, if you’ve tippertaps
in your head or starting kursses, tailour, you’re silenced at Henge Ceolleges,
Exmooth, Ostbys for ost, boys, each and one?
What serves it to steal your life along with the common man, sailor;
a turncoat trot to seaside holidays, little female pierrots (1920s
beachbunnies), means drinking and fighting at home and pub - by St George, if
you’ve the pitch of passion in your head or if you’re starting cursing,
tailor, you’re silenced when souls sing through pain - Osttowns for ostmen,
lads? Shall we return, each
individual and all of us of one mind?
Sailor and tailor are man in his poles as traveller, wanderer and seeker,
and settled, comfortable and safe. Mooth
is hot, stuffy, comfortable, soft; Ex
is: out of.
Quot serves, tot hostes: more
servants, more enemies: getting
richer only means more enemies. Turkey
trot: an early 20thC,
‘liberated’ dance. James
Stephens, head ‘centre’ was betrayed, jailed, rescued; he
rode through Dublin in an open carriage, betrayed (turncoat) his lieutenants,
dressed up as a woman, and escaped through a seaside resort with help from a
turnkey’s daughter (trot). Stephen
and Bloom both think of him. Pierrot: an idealist, a
dreamer, an escapist. Pierrot
outfits were popular on the beach in the 1920’s.
Noah, inventor of drink, the great escape; in the morality plays, a convivial toper, and an ancestor of
the English Punch, in whom we are entertained by ourselves-without-conscience.
Henge, Finnish: life, spirit, soul.
Hengen, Anglo-Saxon: hanging,
gallows, prison, cross, torture, etc. Ceol,
Gaelic: music, singing,
sprightliness. Ostmen:
Danish and Norse settlers in Ireland.
The Danish landed at Exmouth in 1001 AD.
Tristan sails away, too, and returns, knighted, ‘Sir Tristram’, Fw3.
Leaving comfort for noble tasks is a constant theme of the medieval
romances.
Death comes and the living croak. But
life wends and even stones speak! Wake
up? Hill of Howth gives relief to
the landscape as he stretches his song unto-upon gazelle channel and his
daughter, the bride of the sea, is dottier than ever for a dance with her
father. We may presently hear
geography’s twentynine ways of saying goodbye and see you soon, love.
It’s a long long way to New Ireland’s beginning.
For Cork, for... (leaving for the different parts of Ireland after the
great ceremony). Come lead,
cromlech! Wisely for us Old Bruton
has withdrawn his theory. You are
absolutely right! Absolummmm.
But this is ...ing you perhaps? Not
at all. Sure it’s not ... your
...? Am sure!
Good then. We seem to
understand, upon Wellington Monument, Iron Duke, among horse-shoes, charioteers
and etceterogenious bargainbarrows, over and under, since, evenif or although,
in double preposition as in triple conjunction, how the modern research in the
rat’s nest that was Egypt has gone to prove that while a successive generation
has been in the deep deep deeps of deeper eras, buried hearts rest here.
It is apt to be confusing, that HCE for instance is a dog, then a cock,
then a hill. (What is it that we
can see equally in those three? - for that is HCE.)
It is as though Joyce can see his thread of meaning writeable in a number
of terms, in dog terms, in cock-terms, in terms of geography, obviously because
he has his eye or rather ear on the
spirit, and so he jumps from one to the other at convenience, he writes his
general thread in whatever particular terms seem most epiphanic or most punny.
One has to be thrilled and overwhelmed with joy and admiration at the
breadth and quickness of Joyce’s consciousness.
If he was dedicated to forge a conscience for his race (and I believe by
‘race’ he meant the human rather than merely the Irish;
after all, he left Ireland to become European), he certainly had plenty
of material in his own consciousness from which to forge it. His horizons are so wide.
He has enlarged on the semiglobal perspective of Blake.
We cannot say we have reconstructed his thought for ourselves:
we will not have done so until we can follow the line of thought
simultaneously in every one of those terminology-threads we spoke of before. We have only (barely) kept one thread intact, sprinting from
one terminology to another.
I have gone through this paragraph as briefly as possible, and there is
much left out. However, we can look at its basic simple thought, in this
case more sublime than simple.
The sun ignites the sacred fire and this new year’s fire is taken by
his tiny ones, his children into all their home districts, (korps, streamfish,
etc) to rekindle their hearthfires - and hearts.
The last sentence has great beauty.
It has a lovely long cadential form and finale, which perfectly expresses
the (ambiguous) peace it speaks of. Joyce
punctuates the melody’s long notes at the climax:
‘and though it’s a long long way to Tipperary.
My heart’s. Still
there!’ Again, a classic song of WWI.
It starts to emerge just what the underlying thought is.
The creator is doing his ‘creating’, and the text explores some of
the implications of that. The
paragraph seems to go in three waves:
the first begins in the high enthusiasm of Vah!
and winds down and trails off mumbling in the complexities - and
‘tangentialities’ - of Ahlen Hill’s.
It lifts its head in the next sentence and receives a new burst of energy
and to-the-pointedness at ‘spearspid’ before winding down into the achingly
manyfaceted discussion at ‘Kwhat serves...’
A third burst of energy comes at ‘dombs spake!’
which winds down to end cadentially at the paragraph’s end.
I might almost think I see a hope, faith and charity pattern here for Vah!
Suvarn Sur! is certainly full of hope and so is ‘Now... we could
make’. Faith is perhaps suggested
at ‘But why pit...?, Let shrill their duan Gallus, han...’ (and faith might
explain the turn to dog terminology - Fido) but lastly, I feel strongly it is
charity one hears in ‘For korps, for streamfish...’, and in ‘We seem to
understand...’ I mention
this possibility partly as an example of the endless explorability of Joyce.
His expression of feeling, so very deep and unsentimental, is all the
more worthwhile. It is like an
iceblock; one has to warm it up
with licking to begin to get the flavour - but it is worth it.
Someone once suggested to Joyce that he was a very cold person;
Joyce was surprised. I think
we can perhaps guess that Joyce was so full of feeling and so true that it all
simply had to be buried under (‘Buried hearts’) cairns of ‘wordage’.
As I see this paragraph now with this new insight after thirteen years of
savouring, it seems struck through with the pity and terror of the act of new
creation. What begins with such
energy in Vah! cannot help winding down to an agonised contemplation of the
suffering of the Irish race. After
a new start at ‘spearspid’, more quickly this time, it contemplates the
dead, the waste of lives. I find
this triple image of millions dead in three modern times in three countries
fearfully compelling; and what
strikes one is the depth of compassion, of sight,
of Voidness, of ‘indifference’ (the dramatic god paring his fingernails),
that was able to contemplate them together.
Finally, it is only in the third burst, in charity, that the mingled hope
and pity, faith and terror come to some resolution.
‘Buried hearts. Rest here’ seems to be ambiguous, depending whether
one places the emphatic interpretation on ‘buried’ or on ‘rest’: Hearts lie frustrated underground here, or Hearts find rest
from frustration here. This
ambiguity Joyce has at the end of the other node paragraph, too: the sentence on Fw3 reads both ‘rory end... was’
and ‘Rot [not] a... rory end... was’.
We have taken a quick look over the 594-5 paragraph, and encountered some
of its curious features, notably Joyce’s abrupt and spacious thought
processes. We have skimmed over
many elements in the interests of reader sobriety, although one suspects
Joyce’s prose-or-poetry is supposed to be heady.
Richness is wrought up to the extreme limit.
It is not just the heavy load of language items the language train is
made to bear, but also the syntax. Who
for instance writes ‘Skyhighwards, the queen bee flies her deed’?
Yet we have something syntactically like that in ‘Atriathroughwards,
Lugh the Brathwacker shall be the listened after...’
I have mumbled some of these lines a thousand times, and been rewarded by
thinking it was obvious once I got it.
I hope the reader is not at this stage badly bewildered or suffering from
‘Joyce shock’, because I would like our survey so far to be some sort of
comforting base for our further study, which may clear up certain questions
raised in the reader’s mind, but which may just as well or just as often dash
rapidly from one point to any other point in the whole ‘unified field’ of Fw.
I have chewed over things in Fw so many times I was struck by the
description of a Druid practice, of lying, arms folded across the chest (in a
rather Egyptian posture) and chewing a piece of raw meat - which would have
acted as chewing gum - for a long time, as part of a memory technique.
Joyce’s sentences are our pieces of raw meat which we chew over
(ruminate on) and they do have an effect on memory.
Remember that Joyce said the only way to ensure immortality these days
was to keep the professors busy for 300 years - it only now occurs to me to take
it that he may have meant not immortality for his sake but immortality for our
sake. Remember too the discussion
in Plato between Thamous and Thoth, where the view is put forward that writing
will weaken memory. The Druids and
the New Zealand Maori are two cultures that preserved wonderful memory power by
not writing. (Both races
incidentally also have possible connections with Egypt, with which place Joyce
seems to connect himself.) Joyce
clearly was serious about the problem of memory.
Frances Yates writes on Bruno’s attempts to create a memory theatre,
and in Portrait we can see signs that
Stephen was using Dublin as a memory theatre.
The stonemason’s reminds him of Ibsen, for instance.
(What did he associate Browne and Nolan’s stationery shop with?)
It will be one of the greater justifications of Joyce’s style that it
has a power to work its way deep into human consciousness, forging that
consciousness into something stronger, a weapon of self-salvation. Awareness is all. An
improved faculty of memory might save the future Parnells from being wasted.
To see one’s drama is to be liberated from it.
Having taken a quick look over the field, we will now descend into the
jungle to look at some of the highly energetic and mobile elements.
This is rather like looking at one of those Celtic traceries that wind in
and out, under and over themselves. (Does
Joyce have this in mind in ‘We seem to understand [in the writings of]
vellumtomes ... ofver and umnder’? ‘Over
and under’ I only just now see is an elaboration of ‘over and over’.)
In all the 1000-odd languages of the world, there are of course bound to
be combinations of letters that occur more frequently.
There are bound to be letter combinations that have greater quantities
and ranges of meanings than others. I
did not anticipate it, but it is ‘normal’.
It is to be expected too that more than one language will on occasion
participate in a range of meanings. It
is natural that Joyce would be interested in them.
It seemed to me at one stage that they might be difficult to use:
how could Joyce control what meanings they had?
However, Joyce does use them and it is very difficult to draw a line
between used and unused meanings; further,
some of the letter combinations that occur in the largest number of languages
and have the most meanings seem to be gathered in this paragraph on Fw594.
As well, these monster family words seem to ‘write’ parts of Fw.
It is as though Joyce came to Fw through deep cogitation on the contents
of especially these huge words, until he grasped the very simple thoughts
implied in the meanings that group in a letter combination.
Thus his mythology has the authority of the collective unconscious as
recorded in (big) dictionaries, in the manifold meaning relations among the
words under each entry.