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| (pic source: By WD Hogan, Public Domain) |
The figure pictured above was a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary (R.I.C.) Auxiliary forces, a paramilitary unit sent into Ireland in 1920 as a counter-insurgency force to brutalize, intimidate, and murder Irish people. They brutally murdered one of Joyce's friends. The Royal Irish Constabulary (R.I.C.), their Auxiliary forces and the so-called Black and Tans are often conflated in historical accounts, and they all appear frequently in the pages of Finnegans Wake in various forms. These were notoriously violent, heavily armed militia troops, jaded WW1 veterans hired as constables to terrorize the Irish. The Black and Tans seem much like I.C.E. in the United States today. Poorly trained recruits from the army, even their attire unseemly, whereas ICE agents wear masks and plain-clothes gear, the Black and Tans got their nickname due to their makeshift attire, since the R.I.C. had a shortage of uniforms, these recruits wore black tunics and khaki pants. They were often recruited out of jails, the more psychotic and violent, the better. The RIC, their Auxiliary troops, and the Black and Tans creep up throughout Finnegans Wake, here are just a few examples:
Saw his black and tan man-o'-war. FW 46.14
Blech and tin soldies FW 563.31
mulattomilitiaman FW 354.10
la garde auxiliaire FW 471.30
Mr Black Atkins and you tanapanny troopertwos FW 588.18
R.I.C. Lipmasks FW 221.27
R.U.C's liaison officer FW 529.27
his exution with all the fluors of sparse in the royal Irish vocabulary FW 86.01
The Black and Tans were notorious for taking revenge on civilians, such as when they fired on a crowd at a football game in Croke Park in Dublin on Nov 21, 1920, fourteen people were killed including three children, it became known as Bloody Sunday. The shooting was reprisal for the IRA (Irish Republican Army) having assassinated several British intelligence agents and RIC officers that same morning. Bloody Sunday and the Croke Park massacre appear in FW, "Kroukaparka" (FW 176.33) and "croakpartridge" (FW 301.30), and "that surprisingly bludgeony Unity Sunday." (FW 176.20)
With the state-sponsored murders of two Americans by lawless ICE and Border Patrol agents earlier this year, and with my continuing reading and research of Joyce, this stuff has been on my mind lately. Two of Joyce's schoolmates were executed by British forces in Ireland during the Irish War for Independence (sometimes referred to as the "Black and Tan War").
One of Joyce's school friends was named George Clancy, he appears in Portrait as Davin, later he became the mayor of Limerick. He was the mayor when one night, the Black and Tans dragged him out of bed and summarily executed him in front of his family. This was in 1921. Joyce was remembering the shock of this almost 15 years later, in a letter to his son Giorgio 4 Feb 1935 he mentions"my poor friend George Clancy (Davin in Portrait). ... He was afterward Mayor of Limerick and was dragged out of bed by the Black and Tans in the night and shot in the presence of his wife." (Letters 1, Gilbert, p. 357) Read more about George Clancy and the Black and Tans.
Joyce's old friend Francis Sheehy-Skeffington was trying to be a peacemaker during the riots and looting that was occurring in the immediate aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916. In the midst of the chaos, Skeffington was arrested by the British military, taken to the Portobello barracks, and summarily executed by a firing squad. He was still breathing after the first round so they shot him again. They placed his body in a sack and buried him in the yard of the Portobello barracks and never informed his family who went around Dublin searching for him. This unjust killing eventually led to criminal charges of the commanding officer who would plead insanity as a defense.
Francis Sheehy-Skeffington (who put his wife's surname in front of his own) was a pacifist, feminist, vegetarian hippie with a beard. Joyce called him "Hairy Jaysus." A relentless activist, militant in spirit but anti-militarist in practice, Skeffington for much of his life was fiercely outspoken about the threat of British military force in Ireland. He also advocated for women's rights and equality, Joyce wrote him into Portrait as the character MacCann, and in Stephen Hero, he's introduced as "a serious young feminist." Joyce and Skeffington had collaborated to publish essays together in their university days, when Joyce wrote "The Day of the Rabblement."
A few interesting notes on Skeffington can be found in the annotations to FW: for example, Francis Skeffington had noted in his diary in 1903 that Joyce and others performed a charade of kaleidoscope as a collide-escape or "A collideorscape!" (FW 143.28) Seems the forces of state violence in Ireland in the first decades of the 20th century led some of its residents to collide or escape, and Skeffington collided while Joyce escaped.
Skeffington had given to Joyce the nickname Joacax because he was always a jokester. A version of this nickname appears on FW 433: "Words taken in triumph... from the sufferant pen of our jocosus inkerman militant of the reed behind the ear." Jocosus Inkerman Militant = the initials JIM identify Jim Joyce.
Writing to Mary Kettle (maiden name Sheehy, she was married to Joyce's friend Thomas Kettle who also died in the war, and also appears in FW), who was the sister-in-law of Mr. Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, in Sept 1916 after his friend was murdered, Joyce wrote:
I am grieved to hear that so many misfortunes have fallen on your family in these evil days. - Joyce (Letters 1, p. 96)
Skeffington wrote a novel called In Dark and Evil Days and, as noted by scholar Greg Winston, Joyce in his letter honored his friend with an allusion to the title of his book, "in these evil days." Skeffington's book was considered politically radical and it was seized by British soldiers when they violently forced their way into his house after he was murdered. The book was published posthumously.
Lots more information about all of this is available from the insightful book Joyce and Militarism (2012) by Greg Winston, see below:
* * *
"Dope in Canorian words we've made. Spish from the Doc."
This line appears as a footnote on FW 287 and I've never seen much about it in the various sources of annotations. But it interests me for a few reasons. The use of the word "dope" is pretty dope considering this book was published in 1939. The footnote is attached to the word "preteriti" in a paragraph of Latin, the word "preterite" is frequently used by Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow to refer to the marginalized masses. Here on FW 287 it's meant to call the attention of a crowd of listeners, to listen to a "Speech from the Dock" or "Spish from the Doc"---a reference to the last words spoken by Irish rebel Robert Emmet, who was executed by the British in 1803 after a failed uprising.
A quote from the end of Emmet's "Speech from the Dock":
"Let my character and my motives repose in obscurity and peace, till other times and other men can do them justice."
* * *
A marginal note on FW 306:
Enter the Cop and How.
Secures gubernant urbis terrorem.
The Latin translates to: axes govern the terror of the city. (Secures is the plural of securis, a hatchet or axe with sharp blade.) These are the axes carried by Lictors in Roman times---they carried the bundle of fasces with an axe, this is a reference to fascism, and a fascist police state. In "Ask Lictor Hackett" (FW 197.06) for example, Joyce compacted axe, hatchet, and the Lictor guardians carrying the ceremonial axe of authority. The bundled fasces with the axe represent the origins of Fascist symbolism.
Look at the below pic of the Roman lictor, guardian of the Roman magistrates, holding the fasces with an axe, symbolizing rule by force.
In the midst of the battle/war chapter of the Wake, somebody calls the other a Fascist:
"Fadgest-fudgist!" (FW 323.23)
Later on in that same chapter we read:
"We insurrectioned and...before he could tell pullyirragun to parrylewis, I shuttm" (FW 352)
I'm translating from his 5 August 1918 letter written in French (see Letters 1, p. 118), in which Joyce replied that he didn't write articles anymore, he was instead devoted to crafting his humble art ("ma pauvre invention"):
the problem of my race is so complex that one needs all the means of a flexible art to sketch it—without ever resolving it.... I am constrained to express it through the scenes and characters of my own humble art.
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