The Influence of Whitman on Joyce & Finnegans Wake

Books are to be call'd for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does.
- Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871)

Yes, this does read like an exhortation for an author like Joyce to bring forth books like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Whitman not only called for books "on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep" to wake a reader into a more fuller alertness, but to involve the reader in the construction of meaning in the work itself. In this way Whitman and Joyce seem to be in conversation, and Joyce did own a copy of Whitman's Democratic Vistas in his library. He was also inspired by Leaves of Grass ever since he was a young writer and he made references and allusions to Whitman repeatedly in his work, especially Finnegans Wake. That quote alone though, from a book Joyce owned, by an author he admired, could be an intriguing answer to the persistent question of why each of Joyce's books increasingly challenges the reader so much. It's worth thinking about, at least.

    Lately, I've been interested in Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and what impact he had on James Joyce (1882-1941), and this influence seems more significant than most commentators have tended to note. This interest sprung from time I've spent in the past year around south Jersey and Philadelphia areas where so many places are named for Whitman, who spent the final two decades of his life at a house in New Jersey recovering from a stroke. While I was driving across the Walt Whitman Bridge to enter into Philly from Jersey one day, I recalled the first time I encountered the impressive harp-shaped Samuel Beckett Bridge in Dublin and how impossible it seemed that there might be a prominent bridge named after a poet in the USA. The naming of the New Jersey bridge in honor of Whitman happened in the mid-1950s and sparked the local conservative Catholic community into an uproar, one person offering this critique in a letter: "As a thinker Walt Whitman possesses the depth of a saucer and enjoys a vision which extends about as far as his eyelids. A naturalist, a pantheist, a freethinker, a man whose ideas were destructive of usual ethical codes- is this a name we wish to preserve for posterity?" The Port Authority decided to keep the name, and a statue of Whitman stands near the bridge this day. Whitman once wrote "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." Joyce was an exile from Ireland for nearly four decades, yet his books concentrate entirely on Ireland. The initial reception of Joyce's work in his native country, though, was far harsher than any reactionary furor against Whitman. Each country has since affectionately absorbed its poet, Joyce is now celebrated in his native Ireland, just as Whitman is revered in America. The two authors are also among the prime literary heroes celebrated across the entire globe. Finnegans Wake has been translated into Japanese and its translation into Chinese was advertised on billboards in Shanghai. I was struck recently while traveling in Asia when I passed a huge bright colorful billboard in Bangkok that featured this quote: "Peace is always beautiful" - Walt Whitman.

    It's been interesting for me while reading Leaves of Grass alongside my ongoing reading of Finnegans Wake with different groups, and noticing how often there's a noticeable dialogue across eras between Whitman and Joyce. According to Stanislaus Joyce in My Brother's Keeper, James Joyce's interest in Whitman dates back at least to 1901. An early notebook Joyce wrote poems in around 1901-1902 was titled "Shine and Dark" the name derived from Whitman's line "Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river" from "Song of Myself." This would've been when Joyce was just turning 20 years old and yet consider how the images in that one Whitman line resonate with the mytho-cosmic river of life Joyce wrote about decades later in Finnegans Wake. The dual "shine and dark" opposites dominate the fabric of the Wake like opposite riverbanks, "mottling the tide" of the river, darkened by earth/mud, like "our turfbrown mummy" (FW 194.22) Anna Livia (the tidal river Liffey)---it's all there in that one line from "Song of Myself." Another indication of how Joyce felt about Whitman's poetry during these early years of his writing is found in the essay Joyce wrote in 1902 on the Irish poet James Clarence Mangan where his effusive praise for the Irish poet is tempered with "it does not attain the quality of Whitman." 

    In the winter of 1906 after having left Ireland and settled in Rome, Italy, the 24-year-old Irishman Joyce was working as a clerk in a bank trying to support his wife and newborn child. Joyce was miserable with his life at that point, he hated Rome and he had barely any leisure time thanks to the grueling demands of his clerk job which involved working 8:30am to 7:30pm handwriting hundreds of letters per day. He worried about how he could ever find the time and energy to read or write anything. The poems of Whitman fed his soul around this time, we know because on December 7th, 1906, in a letter to Stanislaus, he mentions: "Thanks for Whitman's poems. What long flowing lines he writes." You can just imagine the young writer struggling at that stage of his life and how he may have been impacted reading lines like these from Whitman's poems: 

"I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up" 

"Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes." 

"Something long preparing and formless is arrived and form'd in you,
    You are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes." 

(Whitman quotes are from the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass which seems most likely the one Joyce possessed.)

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Brian Fox's book James Joyce's America (2019) deals extensively with Joyce's view of Whitman. Fox shows how Whitman had gained great influence in the Irish literary world "since at least the 1870s" (Fox, 127). WB Yeats and John Eglinton (the real world Dublin librarian/author who appears as a character in Ulysses) were especially big enthusiasts of Whitman, but Fox argues the Irish republican nationalists "made him in their own idealized image" (Fox, 129) and in the process turned the radical poet into something conventional and orthodox. Fox tries to argue "that Joyce responds to this by turning Whitman against the orthodox ranks of his supporters"  (Fox, 128), who Fox repeatedly refers to as Whitmaniacs. James Joyce's America is full of hot takes and fresh readings, and in discussing Whitman and Joyce, Fox builds an argument that Joyce initially viewed the American poet as a model decolonized national poet, but Joyce's placement of Whitman in Ulysses is more nuanced, and that "it would appear that the significance Whitman had for the younger Joyce as a potential model for a national poet did not translate into the later work, particularly Finnegans Wake." (Fox, 135) On this last part I disagree with Fox. Even he himself documents the extensive presence of Whitman in Ulysses and he notes some (but not all) of his appearances in the Wake.

    Fox makes it seem like young Joyce was a huge fan of Whitman, he argues that in Ulysses he started to become more agnostic about the American poet, and then by the time of Finnegans Wake he has become practically hostile and mocking of Whitman. Reading this felt as if Fox wanted to fit Joyce's views on Whitman into something like the progressive structure of lyrical-epic-dramatic form (outlined in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), whereby once he gets to Finnegans Wake, Joyce has become an indifferent god paring his fingernails. Doesn't it make more sense, considering all the references to Whitman in the Wake, that the poet he had loved and was inspired by as a youth remained an influence throughout his life? Giordano Bruno is one good example of a figure the young Joyce adopted as his hero and maintained an interest in while working on the Wake. There are other examples (Dante, Shakespeare, Ibsen). Why make Whitman out to be an aberration? It's clearly documented that Joyce had an appreciation for Whitman as early as 1901 all the way thru the 1930s. Give Whitman that props. None of this is to disparage Fox's superb study of the meaningful American connections in Joyce's life and career, but I disagree with his framing of the Whitman influence.

    A good counterpoint to the assertion that Joyce no longer held Whitman in high esteem while working on the Wake comes from the story of when Sylvia Beach transformed Shakespeare & Co bookshop in Paris into a Whitman shrine one year. This was in 1926 when Joyce was fully immersed in crafting his Work in Progress that would become Finnegans Wake. Sylvia Beach was assisting Joyce with his manuscripts while also working on French translations of Whitman with Adrienne Monnier. That year, Sylvia Beach founded the Paris branch of the Walt Whitman Committee, to be headquartered at Shakespeare and Co. There's a whole chapter about this in the excellent book Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (1983) by Noel Riley Fitch. A party in the bookshop that February is described: "At the party for Ulysses's fourth birthday (the forty-fourth for Joyce), at which both author and publisher wore eye-patches, they talked of Sylvia's plans for the Whitman exhibit, and Joyce quoted some lines from Whitman's poetry." (Fitch, 228) Later that year, the bookshop was decked out for a celebration of Whitman, attended by the likes of Joyce, Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and other Paris literati. Beach recalled of that event: "Only Joyce and the French and I were old-fashioned enough to get along with Whitman." (232) So, clearly Joyce maintained his admiration for the American poet during the period while he was writing the Wake.

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The text of Finnegans Wake has a bunch of references to Whitman and Leaves of Grass. A quick rundown:

- FW 81.36 "the cradle rocking equally" etc alludes to Whitman's line "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking" from Leaves of Grass

- FW 263.09 "old Whiteman self" would be Whitman and his "Song of Myself" which Joyce alludes to most often. Reading thru the rest of this chapter you'll find lines that sound like Whitman, see for example 274.03 "The allriddle of it? That that is allruddy with us, ahead of schedule, which already is plan accomplished from and syne."

- FW 329.18 "The soul of everyelsesbody rolled into its olesoleself" captures the essence of the pancosmic perspective in "Song of Myself" where Whitman contains and embodies everything and everyone. This line in the Wake also describes the Here Comes Everybody character at the center of the book. HCE definitely comes across as a version of the self in Whitman who declares, "I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I an encloser of things to be." 

- FW 469.25 "this panromain apological which Watllwewhistlem sang" again refers to "Song of Myself" and its author "Watllwewhistlem" with the capitalized W making for a whimsical Wakean transformation of Whitman's name.

- Virtually the entire Yawn chapter (III.3) and especially the section known as Haveth Childers Everywhere (on pgs 535-554) bears considerable Whitman influence. Adaline Glasheen was the first to point this out in her Census of Finnegans Wake. J.S. Atherton confirms this in his Books at the Wake: "The similarities do in fact suggest that Joyce had Whitman's work in mind when he wrote these passages." (p. 288) Donald Theall in his Joyce's Techno-Poetics also discusses this at length. When HCE begins his monologue the text says "Old Whitehowth is speaking again" (FW 535.26). This section in Finnegans Wake is the rare moment when the central figure HCE speaks at length and it is here where Joyce most clearly links his everyman character HCE with Whitman. 

- A general point of comparison between texts: Whitman, who worked as a printer and self published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, went pretty far off the rails with using exclamation points in Leaves. The final omnibus 1892 edition of 334 pages has by my count at least 2.2 exclamation points per page. Finnegans Wake is as exhortative as any book, the title can be read as an exhortation (finnegans, wake!) and it far exceeds Leaves with more than 5.4 exclamation points per page! 

*****

"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy," wrote Nietzsche. This idea is prominent in both Leaves of Grass and Finnegans Wake. Each celebrates the biological body as a living artifact of all that came before it, a pinnacle of all that led to the production of this physical being, from the birth of the universe and the formation of cells and the earth to the development of living organisms and the survival of species through millennia. All of that is inside of us. The sleeping body at the heart of Finnegans Wake is known as Here Comes Everybody and his descent into the deepest primordial sleep comes across in a fabric made of more than 70 languages. ("Human bodies are words, myriads of words," Whitman wrote.) The concept of time melts into one single rippling pan-cosmic plane and somehow it seems the Wake contains all that ever was, is, or shall be. Yet on one level the main character of the book is a middle-aged pub owner asleep with his family in their house in Chapelizod, outside Dublin. 

    In Leaves of Grass, Whitman addresses you the reader directly, whoever you are, and celebrates your existence. 

"Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid and liquid,
You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky,
For none more than you are the present and the past,
For none more than you is immortality."

Even the tiniest most insignificant life forms are the source of infinite glories. "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars... And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels," Whitman wrote. There are many passages in Leaves of Grass which resonate with what Joyce was trying to do with the Wake. And whereas the Wake's language is obscure, dense, difficult to comprehend---and we've already touched on the influence Whitman might've had on those linguistic pyrotechnics---when you notice how often Joyce alludes to Leaves of Grass you might begin to read and interpret Leaves of Grass as a guide to Finnegans Wake, in less opaque language. 

"Immense have been the preparations for me,
 Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me.

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care."    
(Leaves of Grass)

When trying to make sense of how, in Finnegans Wake, the inner experience of a dreaming Irish publican could be so expansive and all-encompassing, it is this type of poetic perspective of Whitman's concerning the hidden histories reflected inside of every living soul which might begin to explain things. 

"List close my scholars dear,
Doctrines, politics and civilization exurge from you,
Sculpture and monuments and any thing inscribed anywhere are tallied in you,
The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records
reach is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same,
If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they all be?
The most renown’d poems would be ashes, orations and plays would be vacuums."
(Leaves of Grass)

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There are not many people who've ever lived about whom it could be said they were ascribed the quality of cosmic consciousness, especially not modern figures, but among those few are Walt Whitman and James Joyce. Richard Maurice Bucke, who wrote the book Cosmic Consciousness in 1901, was a personal friend of Whitman, was Whitman's first biographer, and a big part of his inspiration to write a study of people throughout history who seemed to be suffused with a cosmic consciousness was because of his experiences hanging out with Whitman who he perceived as some kind of demigod. A vast, limitless cosmic perspective is evident across Leaves of Grass, where the poet wrote, "The clock indicates the moment--but what does eternity indicate? We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers, There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them." & "A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient, They are but parts, any thing is but a part."

    As unscientific as all this might be (and come on, we're talking about the minds of poets here), the same level of cosmic consciousness has been ascribed to Joyce---in Philip K. Dick's novel The Divine Invasion (1981) he wrote, "I'm going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn't exist until centuries after James Joyce's era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work." (underline added)

    I want to add to this that reading these two works together, Whitman (in Leaves) and Joyce (in the Wake) could be said to have possessed what I will call an "earth consciousness" as well. One of the great sections of Leaves of Grass is entitled "A Song of the Rolling Earth" wherein Whitman celebrates the miraculous mysterious globe that is our only home, this rolling round orb of earth. 

"I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those of the earth,
There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the theory of the earth,
No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account, unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude of the earth."

How could Joyce have read this and not have been inspired to respond to this in his work? Indeed, on one level, Finnegans Wake can be read as an ode to the earth. I've touched on this before in various blog posts, including likening the Wake to a simulacrum of the globe. Go back again to that line from Whitman which inspired the title of Joyce's 1902 notebook of poems, it begins "Earth of shine and dark." Writing in the middle of the 19th century, Whitman really had an incredible perspective of planet Earth as a round rotating orb for someone who never got to witness the images of the blue planet we've become used to in modern times. I think this could also be said about Joyce who rounded the whole "orb terrestrial" (FW 263.28) into his spherical text. The more I have dug into this subject, I'm convinced the phrase from Whitman "this broad earth of ours" (from Leaves of Grass) inspired "This ourth of years" (this earth of ours) from FW18.04. Our earth of years, the deep geological time undergirding everything, the vast cycles and timespans that led to our present existence.
    The last thing Joyce wrote before he began Finnegans Wake was the end of Ulysses, the Penelope episode, and when describing his approach to that chapter, he told a friend, "It turns like the huge earth ball slowly surely and evenly round and round spinning..." and to his patron he explained, "In conception and technique I tried to depict the earth which is prehuman and presumably posthuman." (see Selected Letters p. 285, 289) 

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In his very good book The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (2007), the author Lewis Hyde has a chapter on Walt Whitman where he offers an interesting theory on the origins of Leaves of Grass. Sometime in 1855, Whitman came across a huge exhibit in New York City that featured etchings of Egyptian hieroglyphs and tomb carvings that had been assembled by an Italian archeologist 15 years prior, including an etching of the resurrection of the dead god Osiris showing a figure pouring a libation onto Osiris' coffin and long stalks of wheat growing out. This was right around the time Whitman wrote the first edition of Leaves of Grass and also when he published the poem “A Poem of Wonder at The Resurrection of The Wheat” which was included in the final 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass under the title "This Compost." 

    This directly relates to Finnegans Wake where the Egyptian myths of the resurrection of the dead god Osiris are a recurrent motif in the text, and this image of wheat growing out of the casket of Osiris is alluded to several times, as in "the cropse of our seedfather" (FW 55.08) and "your hair grows wheater beside the Liffey that's in Heaven!" (FW 26.08) There may not be a more important theme in the Wake than that of renewal/resurrection which is evident in the title Finnegans Wake, taken from an Irish American ballad about a corpse who wakes up at his own funeral (notably, after a libation splashes on him). 
    The renewal/resurrection theme is also extremely prominent in Leaves of Grass, a book that constantly confronts death---"And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me"---while highlighting the resilient forces of vegetation growing out of decay, "It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions." In the aforementioned book The Gift, while discussing the inspiration Whitman took from the Osiris etching, Lewis Hyde emphasizes that Whitman's image of the grass was originally conceived as "the grass of graves" a metaphor which is explored variously throughout Leaves of Grass, as for instance in picturing grass as "the beautiful uncut hair of graves."
    We can tie this directly to the Wake when considering some of the ways grass appears in Joyce's text, for instance: on pg 24 we are in the middle of Finnegan's funeral and there's an emphasis on the resurrection, the reawakening, the phoenix bird rising from the ashes, the idea that Finnegan can be rejuvenated in a number of ways including, "And would again could whispring grassies wake him and may again when the fiery bird disembers." (FW 24.11) The "whispring grassies" comes up later in the closing lines of the book (FW 628.12) "We pass through grass behush the bush. Whish!" With that image in mind now notice the whispering effect in this bit from Leaves of Grass: 

"And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)

I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,
O suns—O grass of graves—O perpetual transfers and promotions,
If you do not say any thing how can I say any thing?"
(Leaves of Grass)

As I mentioned above, Lewis Hyde argues that the poem which appears under the title "This Compost" in Leaves of Grass is foundational to Whitman's whole project. "Behold this compost! behold it well!" Whitman declares. He marvels at how the earth can receive the most diseased corpses and somehow cleanse and transform all that death and disease into sprouting spears of green grass, that the earth "gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last." In Finnegans Wake, this process is embodied in the midden-heap, a giant garbage mound containing all the scattered detritus of history, the "Compost liffe in Dufblin" (FW 447.23). Once you start to draw these parallels, they spring up everywhere you look in these two texts. Not much can be said to be clear about Finnegans Wake, but when read alongside Whitman's Leaves of Grass, clearly there is an important link there. By reading the Wake through an interpretation of Whitman we might begin to gain a better appreciation for the gifts these artists gave to us.

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- Peter Quadrino

Notes on Ulysses, Pomes Penyeach, and Textual Materiality in Finnegans Wake

It's evident that by the time he got to Finnegans Wake Joyce's unit of attention had narrowed to the single letter. He had fully absorbed the great lesson of his seven years with Ulysses, that what he was engaged in day after day was not "telling stories," no, but formulating minute instructions for printers, whose habit of attention goes letter-by-letter likewise. - Hugh Kenner, "Shem the Textman" from p. 38 of Finnegans Wake: A Casebook

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Ever since the big Joyce birthday this past February 2nd of 2022, which was also the centennial of Ulysses (1922) being published, I've been thinking about the richness of Joyce's own descriptions of Ulysses provided in the meta-textual-commentaries within Finnegans Wake (1939). These meta-commentaries show how much Joyce emphasized the material qualities of these texts. In a previous post I touched on scholarly work I was reading showing Joyce's intricate intentions for the final textual product of his books. With the first edition of Ulysses, to give one example, there were specific words referring to specific numbers set to appear on corresponding page numbers. These subtle quirks were lost when pagination was changed in subsequent editions. With Finnegans Wake, mercifully the pagination tends to be fairly consistent across different editions. But material quirks reign across its pages, the whole thing is made of puzzling epiphanic typos, "prepestered crusswords in postpositions" (FW 178.03-4), the reader is continually compelled to "Stop and Think" (FW 88.01) and the book has an entire chapter that serves as a metatextual primer on the appearance of the text itself (Book I, chapter 5). Within that chapter are also fascinating insights about Ulysses from Joyce's perspective, including on its material qualities. 

Taking a look at the Letter chapter (I.5), starting on page 122 we get this commentary about Ulysses:

the toomuchness, the fartoomanyness...the cut and dry aks and wise form of the semifinal; and, eighteenthly or twentyfourthly, but at least, thank Maurice, lastly when all is zed and done, the penelopean patience of its last paraphe, a colophon of no fewer than seven hundred and thirtytwo strokes tailed by a leaping lasso (FW 122.36-123.06)

How better to describe the blizzard of verbal information confronting a reader of one of Joyce's big novels than "the toomuchness, the fartoomanyness"? Overflowing and excessive, too much information packed into too many digressions, unsolvable riddles, and obscure jokes. Within that outlandish approach is a dynamic mixing of different styles, as with the penultimate or "semifinal" chapter of Ulysses, "Ithaca" which overflows with precise mathematical details, or Xs and Ys, in a cut-and-dry unadorned Q&A fashion, described here as "the cut and dry aks and wise form of the semifinal" (ask and whys or x and y's). "Ithaca" is the 17th or "semifinal" chapter of Ulysses but since he had already completed the 18th and final episode, this was actually the last chapter that Joyce was trying to complete before the final typesetting of the text. (In addition to that, Joyce mentioned to his patron Miss Weaver in a letter from Oct. 1921: "Ithaca is in reality the end as Penelope has no beginning, middle, or end.")

The process of typesetting Ulysses was hectic, not least because the text contains so many idiosyncrasies and the printer Maurice Darantiere ("thank Maurice") was a Frenchman who didn't speak English, but also Joyce kept jotting in more lines to be added into the text.

I recently got to view some of the typescript pages of "Ithaca" and they are filled with these "whiplooplashes" (FW 119), these long curvy lines indicating new blocks of text to insert. This could be in the reference here to "a leaping lasso" the rope-like lines lassoing in new bits to add into the final text. I think it's fascinating that Joyce, within Finnegans Wake, here comments not only on the materiality of his previous book Ulysses (including describing the first edition page count of "seven hundred and thirtytwo") but also the process of its creation, thanking the printer Maurice for his "penelopean patience" in dealing with the frantic final stages of composition.

From Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript (1975).

The "last paraphe" "when all is zed and done" could refer to a number of things that appear at the end of Ulysses: "paraphe" means initials or signature, a final flourish, which could be the "Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921" at the end of the text; or it could refer to the last long paragraph of the Penelope chapter; the word "paraphe" also is immediately followed by "a colophon" which means a printer's emblem at the end of a book, so the expression "thank Maurice" might actually be an allusion to the final page at the end of the first edition of Ulysses, the printer's emblem.

from the Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: 1922 Text with Essays and Notes (2022).

One other more remote possibility for the final "paraphe" at the end of Ulysses could be that mysterious black dot at the very end of the Ithaca episode: since this was the last chapter Joyce wrote, that concluding black dot might be Joyce's final flourish in writing that work (before moving on to his next book where all the characters have become typographical icons, "the Doodles family" or "Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies" FW 299.F05, FW 20.13).  At an exhibit on "Women and the Making of Joyce's Ulysses" at the Harry Ransom Center here in Austin, I got to witness up close one of the typescript pages for the end of Ithaca where Joyce added in the final question "Where?" and the famous black dot. The typescript page had handwritten instructions in pencil (too faint to see below) in French, specifically addressing Maurice Darantiere about the final dot—"ne pas oublier le point final" ("don't forget the final point") and "imprimer SVP" ("please print"). Having known about this infamous black dot for years, it was incredible to witness the handwritten notes up close. 

Typescript for Ithaca with Joyce's handwritten notes.
(Harry Ransom Center, Univ. of Texas at Austin.)

Continuing with the meta-commentary from the Letter chapter (I.5):

the ulykkhean or tetrachiric or quadrumane or ducks and drakes or debts and dishes perplex... in the case of the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner... a Punic admiralty report... had been cleverly capsized and saucily republished as a dodecanesian baedeker of the every-tale-a-treat-in-itself variety... (FW 123)

It seems the word "ulykkhean" is the closest thing to Ulysses that appears in the Wake, besides "his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles" (on FW 179.27). Perhaps it's fitting that the Danish word ulykke which means misfortune or accident, is echoed here. Not only is the story of the Odyssey about a series of misfortunes at sea, in Ulysses mistakes become portals of discovery, and there are several noteworthy "accidents" both large and small throughout the book. My sense is that Joyce is actually conflating Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in this passage, that word "ulykkhean" meaning accidents or mistakes could refer to the Wake where essentially every word is a mistake, a typo.

The Wake is also a book of dots and dashes or a "debts and dishes perplex" and the cryptic words "tetrachiric" and "quadrumane" here both mean "having four hands" which could refer to the four book structure of the Wake, the four stages of the Viconian cycle, the annals of the four masters (medieval history of Ireland), or the four provinces of Ireland (compare pg 325.32 "our quadrupede island"). We are clearly focused on Ulysses when reading of "the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner… a Punic admiralty report" which gives strong emphasis to the Homeric parallels with Joyce's book. The word "periplic" refers either to circumnavigation or to a sailor's documentation of the ports, coasts, and routes on a voyage. The Punic wars, referred to here, took place in the Mediterranean Sea where the wanderings of Odysseus would have occurred. Every part of this passage is interesting, but for Joyce to describe Ulysses as "the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner" is especially funny, combining "littleknown" with a popular best-seller or best-teller since Homer was an oral poet. At the time Joyce was writing this passage (late 1920s), Ulysses was stuck in that in-between stage where it was still pretty difficult for a reader to acquire a copy, yet it was also popular, or rather it was notorious. 

This is where I think he conflates Ulysses with the Wake: this popular book about the mariner "had been cleverly capsized and saucily republished as a dodecanesian baedeker of the every-tale-a-treat-in-itself variety" so it sounds like he flipped that book upside down in some clever way, as if the Wake is a capsized version of Ulysses. It also could be saying the original Odyssey was capsized and turned into the "dodecanesian" twelve Bloom-focused episodes at the heart of Ulysses (more about that shortly), but I think that word "dodecanesian" also echoes dodecahedron the "polydron of scripture" that is the Wake, a book with a geometry lesson in its center (II.2). 

Going further into the Wake, looking at Book II.1 has some interesting stuff about Ulysses as well. In that chapter, the Joyce-based character Shem the Penman is now named Glugg. Glugg gets rejected by the girls in a kid's game and runs off into exile where he then composes his art. The text has become weirder and more opaque at this stage of the book, but the annotations suggest references to the events and context surrounding Joyce's composition of Ulysses. Looking on page 228, the densely constructed lines include several puns on World War I trench-digger dialect (Joyce was writing Ulysses in the middle of the war). Then TS Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) which took inspiration from the early serialized episodes of Ulysses (Joyce responded in kind by borrowing inspiration from The Waste Land in the Wake), seems to be present in "He do big squeal like holy Trichepatte" (FW 228.06) because the original title for Eliot's Waste Land was actually "He Do the Police in Different Voices" (taken from a line in Dickens). And most relevantly, the page mentions "ban's for's book" and "banishment care of Pencylmania, Bretish Armerica" because Ulysses was banned in America and England. Returning to the materiality of the book, we then get this encoded allusion to the final words at the end of Ulysses:

quit to hail a hurry laracor and catch the Paname-Turricum and regain that absendee tarryeasty, his citta immediata, by an alley and detour with farecard (FW 228.22)

"Paname-Turricum" with "tarryeasty" becomes a reversal of "Trieste-Zurich-Paris" which appears after the final “Yes” from Molly to conclude Ulysses. These are the cities Joyce lived in during the composition of Ulysses. "Paname" is a nickname for Paris (apparently from Panama hats, which are mentioned several times throughout Ulysses), "Turricum" is the old name for the settlement that became Zurich (the name is actually Turicum with one r, the double-r here brings in turret a tower like the Martello Tower where Ulysses opens), and "tarryeasty" would be the city of Trieste, but also John Gordon suggests Tara for Ireland of the east. I think it could even be a subtle reference to the Irish name of the city of Dublin, Dubh Linn, meaning "black pool" (hence "tarry") on the east coast of Ireland. I think "regain that absendee tarryeasty" also involves regaining his absentee city starting with the letter D, Dublin which Joyce was exiled from but mentally immersed in while he lived in Trieste, "his citta immediata." McHugh suggests there's also subtle reference to Swift here with "quick, hurry" followed by Laracor which is a city in county Meath, Ireland where Swift was a vicar. Also involved here, one of many Irish authors alluded to in this section is the 19th century Irish author Charles Lever, who wrote the novel The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer hence "hurry laracor." Lever was from Dublin, but he actually died in Trieste where he was living on assignment as British consul. This passage in the Wake centralizes train travel, perhaps recalling Joyce's odyssey across Europe in his years of exile, as he tried to avoid the destruction and turmoil upon the outbreak of the Great War, "detour with farecard." The train ticket could also be a metaphor for Joyce's constantly returning to Dublin inside his head while living abroad.

On the following page is where the names of the middle episodes of Ulysses are presented in the form of distorted Wakese:

Ukalepe. Loathers' leave. Had Days. Nemo in Patria. The Luncher Out. Skilly and Carubdish. A Wondering Wreck. From the Mermaids' Tavern. Bullyfamous. Naughtsycalves. Mother of Misery. Walpurgas Nackt. (FW 229)

These are the 12 middle chapters of Ulysses, the Bloom-focused chapters. The first 3 and the last 3 chapters are excluded. This list suggests a couple interesting points (leaving aside the puns and wordplay on the chapter titles): for one thing, by drawing attention to the episode names this way Joyce seems to be expressing the importance of these titles despite them never actually appearing anywhere within the text of Ulysses itself; and secondly, the absence of the first three and last three chapters from this list highlights the emphasis on the Homeric correspondences embodied in the chapters focused on Leopold Bloom, strengthening the case for Ulysses "the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner" being very much about navigation and seafaring. My friend Decio Slomp, an engineer from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, recently published a book documenting all of the nautical references embedded in each episode of Ulysses to argue exactly this: it's all about navigation.

*   *   *

In 1927 Joyce was once again broke, hurting for cash, begging Sylvia Beach for help despite the substantial royalties she'd already been sending him for Ulysses. An exasperated Beach bristled at his pleas, listing out the monthly income he was receiving off Ulysses and suggesting he be a better friend "to me who is your friend if ever you had one" and admit that he was spending considerable sums of money (29 April 1927, see Gordon Bowker's Joyce biography, p. 363). Wishing not to upset the proverbial applecart, Joyce sent her manuscripts for Dubliners and Stephen Hero, the friends made peace and eventually agreed to have Shakespeare and Co publish Joyce poems in a new collection, Pomes Penyeach.

Pomes Penyeach was published by Shakespeare and Co in July 1927. The title plays on the French word pomme and the covers are the colour of James Joyce’s favourite apple, the Calville. They are susceptible to fading and no two copies seem to be the same shade. pic.twitter.com/o25xTghhsT

— Glenn Johnston (@johnstonglenn) July 7, 2022

Another edition of Pomes Penyeach was printed in 1932 by Obelisk Press. Joyce scholar Katarzyna Bazarnik writes of this edition:

Pomes Penyeach was published once more during Joyce’s lifetime by the Obelisk Press of Paris in 1932. This was the most beautifully designed of all his books, printed on specially imported Japanese paper (called Japan nacre or iridescent Japanese vellum). It consisted of nine loose folio sheets, folded and laid one within the other, placed in a portfolio bound in pale green silk. The poems were printed in black on recto of each leaf, in facsimile of Joyce’s handwriting and opened with illuminated, multi-coloured initials designed by Lucia. Additionally, the pages were interlaid with sheets of transparent tissue on which the title and text of each poem was printed in green in the lower left-hand corner. (Bazarnik, "Joyce, Liberature, and Writing of the Book" from here.) 

Bazarnik shows a copy of this rare 1932 edition of Pomes Penyeach which belonged to Harriet Shaw Weaver that got damaged in a fire in her garage:

Pomes Penyeach, Obelisk Press, H.S. Weaver’s copy
burnt at the edges by a fire in her garage. (KB here.)

Seeing the imprint of Joyce's handwritten title and signature on the cover of this rare, delicate, and nearly destroyed book of poems (or pomes) further fed my fascination with Joyce's own interest in the material presentation of his writing. These ideas actually converge and resonate when Joyce weaves in a mention of Pomes Penyeach within a very rich passage in the middle of Finnegans Wake, p. 302. The passage is worth looking at in detail, since it appears to describe Joyce "signing away in happinext complete" signing autographs from beyond the grave, and now coming back to life ("Can you write us a last line?") sending messages, his letters to the reader sounding like modern-day text-speak:

me elementator joyclid … the aboleshqvick, signing away in happinext complete, (Exquisite Game of inspiration! I always adored your hand. So could I too and without the scrope of a pen. … Can you write us a last line? From Smith-Jones-Orbison?) ...
And i Romain, hup u bn gd grl. Unds alws my thts.  …
Two dies of one rafflement. Eche bennyache. Outstamp and distribute him at the expanse of his society. To be continued. Anon.
(FW 302.12-30)

Joyce as "me elementator joyclid" intertwines Euclid whose Elements pop up throughout this geometry/mathematics lessons chapter (II.2). The way "joyclid" is described as "me elementator" also includes the word mentator, as in one who mentates, drawing our attention to the person whose mental activity gave written life to the consciousness buried in the pages of Finnegans Wake, a glimpse of "me" "joyclid" breaking the fourth wall. It does seems like Joyce is pulling back the curtain here to reveal himself, "the aboleshqvick, signing away in happinext complete"---the abolished bolshevik, still scribbling his signature from the next dimension beyond the grave "in happinext complete."

The paragraph's emphasis on signatures ("signing away","I always adored your hand") calls to mind a line from earlier in the book (FW115.06-08), "why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own?" The implication seems to be that Joyce knew by the time he was writing this that he was so famous that anything he ever wrote, scribbled, or signed would become valuable as part of his legacy. 

"Exquisite Game of inspiration!" hints at the creative game known as the Exquisite Corpse, made famous by the surrealists. Since Joyce has already brought himself into the equation here as "joyclid" and alluded to his continued existence after death "signing away in happinext complete" the reference to Exquisite Corpse seems a clever way of suggesting his corpse is constantly revivified by readers playing the game of reading this book. Collaboration among creators who are unaware of each other's contributions is the core of how the Exquisite Corpse game works, thus Joyce seems to be directly addressing the collective game of interpretation involved in reading Finnegans Wake. After all, the text at one point expressly considers whether "His producers are they not his consumers?" (497.01) Readers are active participants or collaborators with Joyce in giving meaning to this chaotic text. As Joyce scholar Alan S. Loxterman described in his essay "Every Man His Own God: From Ulysses to Finnegans Wake":

Joyce was working toward his ultimate achievement, an anomaly in the history of literature which expands the way we read. Today, and into our foreseeable future, Finnegans Wake survives not as the completed comprehensible entity which previous fiction (including Joyce's own) had conditioned us to expect. Rather it remains what Joyce first called it, a 'Work in Progress,' an artistic arrangement of words which requires continuous collaboration from its readers to make those words meaningful as a text. (from Joyce's Finnegans Wake: A Casebook p. 115)

The impression I get from the paragraph on FW302 is that it's like Joyce letting the reader know he's still actively writing from beyond the grave, exchanging letters with the reader. Hence, "Exquisite Game of inspiration! I always adored your hand" could be like a reader actively complimenting Joyce on his writing here in the middle of a book. Then they request one last line, "Can you write us a last line? From Smith-Jones-Orbison?" McHugh notes Smith-Jones-Orbison as an allusion to the mathematician and puzzlemaker Henry Dudeney who used the names Smith, Jones, Robinson in his puzzles published in The Strand Magazine in the early 1900s. (Joyce would have been familiar with this magazine, it was published by the same company as Tit-Bits which Bloom reads in Ulysses.) Bringing in a popular puzzlemaker/mathematician makes sense here in the geometry chapter and it's fitting that the usage implies Joyce as the creator of mathematical puzzles. My reading of why Robinson becomes "Orbison" is the "orb" represents Joyce's boast that he had squared the circle, or circled the square. Since Dudeney appears elsewhere in the same chapter in another triptych ("Dideney, Dadeney, Dudeney" see FW 284), I wonder whether Joyce knew of Dudeney having developed a hinge method for turning a triangle into a square, by splicing it into pieces, rotating them (circling) until they form into a perfect square.

"And i Romain, hup u bn gd grl. Unds alws my thts." This is Joyce, writing sometime in the late 1920s, predicting the clipped condensed language of millennial text messages. It's also yet another example of Joyce in the Wake calling attention to individual letters. The lowercase "i" certainly stands out, especially alongside the capital R in "Romain" and together suggests something like "iDomain" or maybe an echo of "iSpace" which appears earlier in the text (124.12), a link that could actually make sense since the German word Raum means "space." This amusing little line comes across in the context of the passage like Joyce answering the request to "write us a last line" with a declaration that he still remains. If "i Romain" really does echo the earlier "iSpace" (FW 124.12) with Raum (space) involved, then it seems to imply Joyce declaring that while he's absent from time, he remains in space through all of his printed works and the "signatures" of his surviving manuscripts and materials, "paperspace." "Unds alws my thts" has implications beyond "and always in my thoughts" which are enhanced by the minimized phrasing---"Unds" in the context hints at girl's undies and in millennial slang "thts" would be thots or promiscuous women, as though he's promising the girl that she remains among his favorite ladies. (This line has a footnote at the bottom of the page which carries similar implications: "Lifp year fends you all and moe, fouvenirs foft as fummer fnow, fweet willings and forget-uf-knots." [FW 302.F04] Not only does Joyce invent fweet here, he's once again calling attention to the visual presentation of the text on the page by using the so-called long S or lowercase F for the letter S in this sentence. The "fouvenirs foft as fummer fnow" are souvenirs left for his readers, and invoking snowfall here recalls the ending of "The Dead" where the snowfall is also described with f-words, "faintly falling"---compare also FW 17.27 "flick as flowflakes." And then "forget-uf-knots" would be the flowers called forget-me-nots, but also seems to be Joyce once again declaring he will not be forgotten, due to the "knots" of riddles his readers are forever unraveling.)

"Two dies of one rafflement." So much information saturates these short sentences. The sound of two dice in "Two dies" along with the presence of the French word rafle for "game of dice" in "rafflement" draws an allusion to Stéphane Mallarmé's groundbreaking poem Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (One Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance). The essay I've referred to throughout this post, Katarzyna Bazarnik's study of Joyce's focus on the textual object discusses the remarkable influence Mallarmé had on Joyce. In his study of Mallarmé and the dice poem, R. Howard Bloch's book One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern (2016) points out that "Joyce kept a copy of 'One Toss of the Dice' close at hand while writing Finnegans Wake." (Bloch, p. 26)

Condensed in here with Mallarmé is also one of Joyce's earliest publications, his essay "The Day of the the Rabblement" published in 1901 as a student. The essay was rejected by the university paper, so Joyce and his friend Francis Skeffington (who was later murdered in the chaos following the 1916 Easter Rising) collaborated to publish a pamphlet of two essays together and distributed them throughout Dublin, hence this passage in the Wake concluding with "Outstamp and distribute him."

Joyce's student essay "The Day of the Rabblement" (1901).

The notebook dates at the JJ Digital Archive suggest Joyce was writing these lines around the same time Shakespeare & Co was publishing his poetry collection Pomes Penyeach (1927), thus the echo of the title in"Eche bennyache" resonates. Each, penny each. And then, "Outstamp and distribute him at the expanse of his society." The word "Outstamp" strikes me as another way to say express, but it also alludes to printing, Joyce's printed works for over a century now distributing across the world "at the expanse of his society" literally expanding the Joyce society and doing so at our expense as we shell out each penny, "Eche bennyache." "Eche" also contains the initials HCE for Here Comes Everybody. And McHugh notes the early Middle English word eche means "eternal, everlasting." The writer lives on through his printed works being distributed expansively throughout society, "To be continued. Anon."

Evident in the phrase "Eche bennyache" is also ache, belly ache. Joyce suffered from severe stomach issues while writing the Wake and shortly after the book's publication he died during surgery for an ulcer. Going back again to the section examined earlier (pgs 229-231 of book II.1) some of the same themes and references stand out, where the focus is on the autobiographical Shem character, the riddles he writes, and how "he's knots in his entrails!" (FW 231.25). 

"And oil paint use a pumme if yell trace me there title to where was a hovel not a havel (the first rattle of his juniverse) ..." (FW 230.36-231.02)

Joyce declares, I'll paint you's a poem ("pumme") if you'll trace me the riddle to the title to where was a novel not a novel (the first riddle of his universe). The first rattle of his junior verse, "Et Tu Healy" which he parodies immediately after these lines. This was Joyce's first poem written when he was 9 years old. His father proudly had it printed so he could distribute copies, even sending a copy to the Vatican. No surviving copies of "Et Tu Healy" have been identified as of this writing, though if one were to be discovered it could fetch up to 2 million dollars at an auction. A poem written by a 9-year-old. Only a few lines from the poem are known, and Joyce parodies them on this page (231.05-08). Echoing the earlier quoted assertions of "i Romain" and "To be continued. Anon." this same page also begins a sentence with, "Though he shall live for millions of years a life of billions of years" (FW 231.18-19). 

Beyond the Portal: Further notes from reading FW Book I.3-4

The text of Book I.3-4 of Finnegans Wake is so inexhaustibly rich (the word for it on pg 91 is "inexousthausthible") that my notes on this part of the book keep growing the more I think on it and each note could expand into its own area of study. Without going too deep into any of these subjects though, I'm going to share below some cursory and mostly disconnected observations from reading this part of the Wake. Consider these expanded footnotes to my previous post on The Portal. 

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Ishtar Gate reconstruction in Berlin Museum

Babel

In my last post, focusing on the scene of a confrontation at a pub gate, I talked about the image of the gate as a portal to the afterlife or to the underworld. I later learned that the name for the city of Babel, as in the Tower of Babel, comes from the Akkadian bab-ilu which literally means "Gate of God" stemming from the same root as the name of Babylon. This section of the Wake touches on this etymological link in a few ways where the attacker at the gate is described: "This battering babel allower the door and sideposts, he always said, was not in the very remotest like the belzey babble of a bottle of boose" (FW 64.10-11, emphasis added). The passage on pg 69 of FW all about the Gate prominently mentions the Babylonian goddess Ishtar (to whom the Ishtar Gate of Babylon was dedicated) and, later on, in the last two pages of chapter 4, we find references to Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, and ALP sings the lyrics to a song called "by the waters of babalong" (FW 103) or Babylon. I think this chapter ending on pg. 103 is an echo of the chapter ending on pg. 74 where HCE drifts off into deep sleep at the sound of rain drops, whereas here it's the sound of a rushing stream, the waters of Babylon. My last post touched on the appearance of a ziggurat on pg 100 in the phrase "beaconsfarafield innherhalf the zuggurat" where HCE himself seems to have been buried inside a tomb within an illuminated ziggurat. The Tower of Babel legend is thought to be based on the Ziggurat of Ur, the ziggurat being a meeting point or portal between this realm and the ethereal realm, in other words a "Gate of God." Generally I think the clusters of references to Bablyon and Ur (and elsewhere in the text, clusters of references to the Garden of Eden) are intended as a way of signaling the main character fallen asleep is descending back to origins---in deep slumber he's going back to the world of the womb, "backtowards motherwaters." (FW 84.30-31) 

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The Bat

The attacker at the gate wields a "fender" or some type of a cudgel weapon that morphs and changes appearance throughout chapters 3-4. Details of the story keep changing---there was an attacker banging a bottle at the locked gate, or it was an encounter in the streets with the legless strangler Billy-in-the-Bowl, or there was a no-holds-barred wrestling match with an armed burglar. Joyce intertwines random details from various real-world contemporary newspaper accounts of crimes and trials. Witness accounts vary, "our mutual friends the fender and the bottle at the gate seem to be implicitly in the same bateau" (FW65.35-36) it says at one point, while earlier a witness declares "No such parson. No such fender. No such lumber." (FW 63.11) On page 81, the object is made to appear like a crowbar that a burglar and his victim wrestle over: "catching holst of an oblong bar he had and with which he usually broke furnitures he rose the stick at him." (FW 81. 31-32) On the next page the object could be a Webley revolver pistol, when, in the middle of their "collidabanter" it says "a woden affair in the shape of a webley" (FW 82.16) falls out of the burglar's pocket. On pg 84 it's a "humoral hurlbat" a bat used in the Irish sport of hurling. Later on pg 98 the weapon evolves again through rumors and kaleidoscopic views, "Batty believes a baton while Hogan hears a hod yet Heer prefers a punsil shapner and Cope and Bull go cup and ball." The presence of bat and ball suggest cricket and/or baseball references here, but more on that in a moment. As discussed in my last post, in the book Wake Rites, George Cinclair Gibson describes the "Batter at the Gate" confrontation as paralleling certain rituals of the ancient Irish druids. One of these rituals, which were designed to divest the old king of his powers, apparently included a hostile druid confronting the king at a doorway while aggressively wielding the wooden "shamanistic device" known as a bull-roarer. Gibson gives a good argument for the mysterious wooden object in this part of the Wake being a bull-roarer (see Wake Rites, p. 88-90) and notes that J.S. Atherton in his Books at the Wake observed that Joyce definitely knew about this druid device. 

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Wicket Gate

Joyce in his notes titled this section "Batter at Gate" and I'm intrigued by the use of the word batter here because, as the story morphs and mutates, there are noticeable elements of cricket and baseball. The mysterious wooden weapon wielded by the attacker becomes a bat (p. 84.04) and in the pages describing the gate at one point it says the attacker "went on at a wicked rate" (FW 70.32) which Fweet notes as an echo of "wicket gate" which could be the wicket in cricket. Peter Chrisp wrote a really fascinating blog post describing how Joyce was a lifelong fan of cricket with an extensive knowledge of the game's golden age players. There are tons of references to the gameplay of cricket and famous cricketers within the Wake. Notice also how the "trilithon" version of HCE's siglum resembles a wicket:

A wicket used in cricket. The name comes from wicket gate, a small gate.

trilithon E siglum for HCE

The confrontation at the gate gets re-examined and re-litigated in this part of FW and each time the details change. The identities of the two combatants can seem to blur, the presence of a "fender" as weapon helps confuse offender and defender. The nature of the clash changes. By the time we get deep into chapter 4, evidently the clash at the gate involved somebody throwing a stone. The attacker under questioning "would swear... he did not fire a stone either." (FW 91.08-11) Knowing Joyce had a love for cricket, and knowing also (after reading Brian J. Fox's insightful and well-researched book James Joyce's America) that Joyce closely tracked American popular culture of the time and filled FW with American pop cultural references, I think it's highly plausible Joyce was aware of American baseball and included it within the Wake. Seasoned Joyce scholar John Gordon apparently agrees---in his annotations for this section, he expands on the phrase "Pegger's Windup" (FW 92.06) with this: "given this chapter’s plethora of American idioms, 'pitcher’s windup' seem highly probable here.  (For non-American readers: in baseball, a pitcher will gyrate his body before fixing it in position before releasing the ball.  See 91.11-2 and note.)" His additional note from pg 91 refers to "Pegger Festy" where he explains the name has to do with someone throwing stones. Looking a little more closely at this page reveals more potential allusions things that sound like baseball, cricket, bat and ball games:

91.26: "as true as he was there in that jackabox that minute"  [baseball batter's box]

91.27: "or wield or wind" [wield a bat, wind up to pitch]

91.30-32: "if ever in all his exchequered career he up or lave a chancery hand to take or throw the sign of a mortal stick or stone at man"  [take or throw, pitcher's signs, stick or stone]

Following "Pegger's Windup" and "Pegger Festy" we also get "Wet Pinter" (FW 92.07) which, although likely anachronistic, could be an allusion to baseball terminology where a pitcher with good precision is said to "paint" the edges of the strike zone. With a batter at the gate and someone winding up to fire or peg a rock, and words like "sockdologer" on pg 91 (American slang for a decisive blow) there's definitely the impression of a clash resembling the pitcher/batter confrontation in baseball. Since this part of the Wake deals so much with origins, bringing in Babylon and numerous references to Adam & Eve, I think it's possible Joyce is touching on the metaphorical underpinnings of bat and ball games like cricket and baseball. In her insightful study of baseball and mythology Ground Rules: Baseball & Myth (1995), Deanne Westbrook quotes from the novel The Celebrant where Christy Mathewson theorizes on the origins of bat and ball as ancient weapons, stone and stick, perhaps even the first murder weapons:

"Throwing and clubbing. What could be more ancient?... We have to grant that our prehistoric forebears employed those same arts against the creatures of nature--indeed, against one another. Even in holy writ, mustn't we imagine that Cain slew Abel with a stone guided by the bare hand, or a club wielded as a bludgeon? Think of it. I stand on the pitcher's mound, the batter at home plate. We are surrounded by every manifestation of civilization... Yet my action in throwing and his in swinging are echoes of the most primitive brutality." (Ground Rules: Baseball & Myth, p. 110) 

 

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Turnpike

When I shared that last post, a commenter replied asking "no turnpike?" So let's discuss the turnpike. The turnpike, as in a turnpike road where a toll is taken, and more specifically referring to the old turnpike road system in Dublin from the 1700s-1800s, appears frequently in Finnegans Wake usually in connection with HCE who is "our family furbear, our tribal tarnpike" (FW 132.32). The turnpike first appears on the opening page with "their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park" (FW 03.22) where "the knock out in the park" refers to Castleknock, the district on the western side of Phoenix Park in Dublin. So there must have been a turnpike road there, but Fweet also alludes to a turnpike in Chapelizod, the area south of Phoenix Park where the action of the Wake is supposed to take place. HCE and his family are ostensibly asleep in their home above the pub owned by HCE, which is generally considered to be the Mullingar House pub in Chapelizod. When we meet HCE at the beginning of chapter 2, he's "jingling his turnpike keys" (FW 31.01) and is said to be "a turnpiker who is by turns a pikebailer no seldomer than an earwigger!" (FW 31.27-28). 

I think the turnpike takes on an additional meaning in the Gate passage I previously examined from page 69 where we read: "Now by memory inspired, turn wheel again to the whole of the wall." This is apparently referring to another very real pub in the vicinity of Phoenix Park, a pub known as The Hole in the Wall (formerly known as Black Horse Tavern). The Hole in the Wall pub is located in the district of Ashtown just north of Phoenix Park, and the phrase "turn wheel again" refers to the turnstile (or turnpike) set in a hole in the adjacent Phoenix Park wall. You can see the turnstile in the wall here in this old photograph:

Looking at Google street view, you can see the turnstile is still there to this day in the same spot:

I am left wondering why, though, if the action of the Wake is supposed to take place at Mullingar House in Chapelizod on the southern edge of Phoenix Park, why the scene would shift across the park to the Hole in the Wall pub in Ashtown. Maybe it's got something to do with the recurrent theme of HCE walking through Phoenix Park at night and either being accosted or encountering girls peeing or some other vague incident. Or maybe it makes more sense that the belligerent drunk who's banging at the locked gate would be stuck behind a locked turnstile. For what it's worth, the trek across the park from the pub in Chapelizod to the pub in Ashtown is about a 45 minute walk:

I am actually in Dublin right now as I type this and I'm planning to get over there this week to explore both of those pubs and the space in between.

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Via Heraklea

Ancient intersection of the Via Appia and Via Ardeatina by Piranesi

We touched on roads in relation to the turnpike above, but later in chapter 4 the references to roads proliferate so much that it's worth taking a closer to see what's going on. On page 80, while the street-cleaner and scavenger Kate Strong is delivering her witness account of what transpired, she mentions "there being no macadamised sidetracks on those old nekropolitan nights" (FW 080.01-02)---where the allusion to macadamization refers to a method of making or repairing roads, and "nekropolitan nights" could be an allusion to how Roman roads were lined with tombs and gravestones since the dead were forbidden to be buried within the city walls---and then over the next few pages we get several references to roads and paths. 

The allusions to roads cluster especially on page 81 where we get this interesting line: "If this was Hannibal's walk it was Hercules' work." (FW 81.03) The many references to roads and particularly this conjunction of Hannibal and Hercules and a pathway ("Hannibal's walk") took on a new meaning for me when I read Graham Robb's groundbreaking book The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts (2013) which is essentially a prehistory of the Roman road system. Robb mainly focuses on what's known as the Via Heraklea, an ancient road originally constructed by the Gaulish Druids extending from the tip of present-day Portugal along the southern edge of the Iberian peninsula up through the Alps. The road was said to be in the footsteps of Herakles who was originally a sun god, and Robb thoroughly lays out a convincing argument that the Druids, who were masters of astronomy, laid out the road to be in perfect alignment with the rising of the sun at the summer solstice and the setting of the sun at the winter solstice (the reference to "middle earth" in the book's title has to do with the Druids attempting to align the earthly world or middle earth with the upper world of the sky). As for the connection between Hannibal and Hercules in that line from FW pg 81, Robb offers this (mind you, he makes no direct reference to anything from Finnegans Wake):

Ancient writers who described the Carthaginian invasion knew that Hannibal saw himself and wanted to be seen as the successor to Herakles. He would march across the mountains in the footsteps of the sun god, shining with the aura of divine approval. (The Discovery of Middle Earth, pp 18-19)
When Hannibal stood at the Matrona in the early winter of 218 BC, watching his elephants stumble down to the plains of northern Italy, he knew that he was standing in the rocky footprints of Herakles. His strategists and astrologers, and their Celtic allies and informers, were certain that the sun god had shown them the way. (ibid, p 21)

"If it was Hannibal's walk it was Hercules' work."
(FW 81.03)

Via Heraklea, from The Discovery of Middle Earth by Graham Robb

I have no idea how Joyce would've known about the Druid Geodesy underlying the Roman road system or whether he knew about the Via Heraklea, but the connecting clues in this part of the Wake certainly give credence to Joyce being aware of what Robb discusses in his book. For example, Robb emphasizes that the ancient Celtic road system in Gaul was designed during the Iron Age, and on pg 79 line 14 of the Wake we read of "those pagan ironed times." That quote immediately precedes the appearance of clusters of references to roads and paths in the text. Then we have on pg 81, "If it was Hannibal's walk it was Hercules' work" which is followed by a paragraph making multiple references to roads including a treacherous mountain pass---"in the saddle of Brennan's (now Malpasplace?) pass" (FW 81.14-15) where Brenner Pass is a mountain pass that goes through the Alps.

And as regards the Via Heraklea as a solstice road, the very next page after the Hannibal/Hercules/roads passage mentions "the solstitial pause for refleshmeant" (FW 82.10) followed by the appearance of "Yuni or Yuly" (FW 82.28) and "Yuletide or Yuddanfest" (FW 82.36) which would be June/July and Yuletide/Judenfest (Christmas/Jewish holidays), in other words the summer solstice and winter solstice. I should also mention that one of the figures who frequently comes up in Graham Robb's book is the Celtic tribal leader Vercingetorix who led a failed rebellion against the Romans, and Vercingetorix also appears numerous times in FW, including three times in the section of the book we're focusing on here. What any of this has to do with the confrontation at the pub gate, I'm not entirely sure. Notably, the Roman roads are often punctuated by archway gates. In my last post, I touched on the idea that the gate threshold has to do with HCE crossing over into the night-world akin to Osiris going into the underworld in his night boat. Osiris travels under the earth amid the stars and this part of the Wake, besides containing references to the astronomically-aligned Druid road system, is also loaded with references to astronomy and astrology, but that's a topic for another day. 

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H.E.R.E. C.O.M.E.S. E.V.E.R.Y.B.O.D.Y.

Among the many fun easter eggs to discover in Finnegans Wake are the instances of meta-reference where the book tells you about something specific located elsewhere in the book. One interesting example of this appears on page 6 where it says "see peegee ought he ought" (FW 006.32) and if you read that as "see pg 88" and look to page 88 of the book, what stands out is the long acronym that spells out the name Here Comes Everybody: "Helmingham Erchenwyne Rutter Egbert Crumwall Odin Maximus Esme Saxon Esa Vercingetorix Ethelwulf Rupprecht Ydwalla Bentley Osmund Dysart Yggdrasselmann" (FW 88.21-23). I mentioned in the last post that in this part of the Wake, HCE either encounters or is seen to embody dozens of mythic gods and historic kings from various cultures and I think that's evident in this long name here. But also, that line from page 6 "see peegee ought he ought" is, according to the notes in Fweet, also a specific reference Joyce was making to an image plate shown between pgs 88-89 of a 1911 book by a French Egyptologist, Gods and Kings of Egypt by Alexandre Moret, and that specific plate displays an image of "The Wake of Osiris" not just the wake but the awakening, according to the mythology a revival via sexual arousal brought about by his sister Isis to resurrect him. You can read more about all of that here. I bring it up to further emphasize the identification of HCE with Osiris who was also known as Osiris-Unnefer and I read somewhere that Unnefer could be why Joyce gave his hero the first name of Humphrey.

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The Canon

That memorable line from the closing pages of chapter 4 "the canonicity of his existence as a tesseract" (FW 100.34-35) provokes many ideas. I previously discussed how, at this stage in the text, HCE as a person with an identity has been obliterated (either in deep sleep or in the transition thru the underworld after death) and here on pg 100 he has become "the prisoner of that sacred edifice" (FW 100.25), buried like an entombed pharaoh king inside of some kind of tesseract ziggurat, "innerhalf the zuggurat" (FW 100.19). 

Focusing on that word "canonicity" though---it's apparently a real word that Joyce took from apocrypha about the New Testament but I think there is more to it. HCE entombed inside a ziggurat tesseract is also HCE or Here Comes Everybody or all of human knowledge, myth, history, inventions, tools, and treasures buried inside The Canon of the book, the tesseract cube that is the book Finnegans Wake itself. Similar to how HCE in the Wake is made to literally embody the collective corporal body of the city of Dublin itself, his existence here has become the canon, and "the canonicity of his existence as a tesseract" means Joyce's Everyman buried forever inside the literary canon along with all of his "inhumationary bric au brac"(FW 77.33), the gems and artifacts to be discovered by the reader who exhumes the tomb of the text. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Trial

While the text grows increasingly opaque, the noticeable narrative throughout Book I.2-4 revolves around a scandalous legal trial, the details of which are always vague and obscured yet we return to the courtroom scene over and over. Witnesses give their differing accounts of what happened, lawyers cross-examine, judges convene in chambers, one of the defendants even rips a loud, stinky fart that shocks everyone. Besides bringing in details from several legal trials of his era, Joyce also weaves into the text details from the tragic wrongful conviction of Myles Joyce, an Irish peasant who spoke no English but was tried in an English court, convicted of massacring a family, and executed in 1882, the year Joyce was born (Myles Joyce was posthumously pardoned in 2018). That trial was impactful for James Joyce, he published an essay about it in 1907,  "Ireland at the Bar".

Also, though, for virtually the entire time Joyce was composing Finnegans Wake in the 1920s and 30s, he himself was essentially on trial in courtrooms in the United States for the scandals around his banned book Ulysses. The more the reader can understand that, the clearer it becomes why so much of the Wake, beyond even these chapters about the trial, uses a style of interrogation and intensive questioning trying to get to the bottom of something. A recent book by Brian Fox James Joyce's America sheds some clarifying light about all of this:

The first part of the Wake to be drafted, Book I.2-4 in the finished work, deals with introducing HCE and his alleged crime and subsequent trial. The earliest drafts make clear that Joyce's own writing is under indictment here as well... The narrative voice immediately follows accusation with defence and counter-accusation---a move that will be repeated numerous times throughout the finished work... (James Joyce's America, p. 184)

Fox goes so far as to argue, convincingly I think, that the central theme of a crime and a legal trial in Finnegans Wake has to do with the scandals of Joyce's American reception (specifically, the trials over the chapters of Ulysses published n the Little Review, Joyce's American copyright struggles and the piracy of his work by Samuel Roth, and the federal ban of Ulysses). Fox writes:

The core theme of HCE's alleged crime in the park and its subjection to trial and defence from the start involves those adversarial elements of Joyce's American reception linked to legal confrontation...
Indeed, so much of the book is concerned with defending or indicting the alleged crime or crimes in the park that Joyce's response to his own exploitation [via Roth selling pirated editions of Ulysses & Finnegans Wake in USA] and condemnation---the incorporation into the work of its hostile reception---is arguably one of the primary themes of the Wake itself." (James Joyce's America, p.  184-185)

(Thank you Peter Coogan and the whole Austin Finnegans Wake Reading Group.) 

The Portal

Illustration from William Blake's Jerusalem

                                               

Some observations on the Gate or Portal in Finnegans Wake I.3

Towards the end chapter 3 (book one) of Finnegans Wake, a drunken German angrily bangs at the locked gate of an Irish pub shouting threats and insults at the pub owner for locking him out after closing time. The gate Joyce places at the entrance of his main character HCE's pub is a megalithic stone structure, described as a "stonehinged gate" (FW 069.15). 

I've been dwelling on the meaning of this gate in chapter 3. The door or portal is a recurrent image in the Wake. One of the many names used for the main character is Mr. Porter. The belligerent at the gate unfurls a litany of insults and nicknames at him including "Sublime Porter" (FW 072.02-3). That word porter has similar etymological roots to the word metaphor meaning "to carry across" like to carry across a threshold. I think that's relevant here because so much of the Wake and especially the part of the book I'm focusing on right now seems to speak in alternating metaphors. 

The banging at the gate calls back to an earlier clash at a doorway in chapter 1 when the Prankquean rains hell on Jarl van Hoother (Earl of Howth) for locking the door of Howth Castle. The "stonehinged gate" on page 69 is "triplepatlockt" and on the adjacent page appears the Prankquean, "a shebeen quean, a queen of pranks." (FW 068.22)

George Cinclair Gibson's insightful study Wake Rites: The Ancient Irish Rituals of Finnegans Wake (University Press of Florida, 2005) discusses the "Banging at the Gate" scene as a parallel enactment of one of the ancient Irish rituals practiced at Tara. The actions of the verbal assailant at the gate, Gibson explains, "are the precise components of the Druidic curse known as the glam dichenn. The most compelling of all ritual curses, the glam dichenn would have been directed at a disgraced leader or failed king and delivered only by a powerful Druid." (p. 123)

As for the location of this scene, Gibson notes: 

...the glam dichenn directed against the fated king of Tara is purposely delivered on a threshold. In Druidic tradition, threshold and liminal locations are the optimal loci for harnessing and generating magical power. Liminal locations---for example, 'the threshold separating the inside of the room or house from the outside world'---can be utilized by a Druid as 'the source of extraordinary powers because the liminal transcends normal distinctions between separate categories" (Nagy, "Liminality," 135-36).  A Druid would use these liminal places (for example, near a door, on the boundary between civilization and wilderness) to create a magically charged "atmosphere" in order to "help generate the power necessary for ritual" (Nagy, "Liminality," 138). 

(Gibson, Wake Rites, p. 124)

The "threshold and liminal locations" which Gibson says "are the optimal loci for harnessing and generating magical power" represent a junction point where worlds intersect. The door in Finnegans Wake is a threshold wedged between the world of wakefulness and deep sleep. The book itself is also represented like a door or gate, the sigla Joyce uses for the book is a square ▢ a type of portal. I think the gate also represents a portal to the afterlife or the underworld, chapters 3 & 4 feature numerous references to the underworld journey of the dead in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. 

The description of the gate on page 69 includes an odd textual quirk where a capital letter appears unexpectedly with "There" in the middle of a sentence: "Where Gyant Blyant fronts Peannlueamoore There was once upon a wall and a hooghoog wall a was and such a wallhole did exist." The gate, or hole in the wall, is fronted by two giant pencils---"Gyant Blyant" includes the Danish word blyant for "pencil" and "Peannluemoore" is phonetically Irish for "big pencil"---even within the sentence itself, before we get to the gate we first encounter two giants fronting or guarding it. These "faithful poorters" (FW 069.26) are akin to the doorkeepers at Tara, named Camellus and Gemellus, who are directly named later on in the next chapter when the gate incident is re-litigated (see p. 90). Since they are described here as two giant pencils, it would appear these twin guardians of the gate are like two big obelisks. The obelisk is another recurrent image in Finnegans Wake usually representative of the obelisk at Wellington Monument in Phoenix Park, but here since there are two pencils or obelisks it could be invoking the original Egyptian style of placing a pair of obelisks at an entrance way.

This insight about the Egyptians using obelisks in pairs to create a portal between them came from a FW reading group discussion over this chapter last year. Architecture professor and Joyce scholar Marcin Kedzior shared this information with me:

Obelisks were always raised in pairs in keeping with the Egyptian value of balance and harmony; it was believed that the two on earth were reflected by two in the heavens. Egyptologist Richard H. Wilkinson writes:
"The phenomenon of duality pervades Egyptian culture and is at the heart of the Egyptian concept of the universe itself. But rather than focusing on the essential differences between the two parts of a given pair, Egyptian thought may stress their complementary nature as a way of expressing the essential unity of existence through the alignment and harmonization of opposites - just as we today might use "men and women", "old and young", or "great and small" to mean "all" or "everyone" (129)."
(from here: https://www.ancient.eu/Egyptian_Obelisk/)

That point about duality pervading Egyptian culture links back to the Wake because duality and the unity of opposites are also central to Finnegans Wake. And I think the dualities and their powerful conflicts tend to cluster around gates, doors, thresholds in the book. The angry drunk guy berating HCE at the door is an opposing force, a polar opposite of HCE the sleeper himself. The violent confrontations depicted around this section, where the belligerent at the door goes on for pages describing how he wants to break HCE's skull and pummel him, I see these as being clashes within the sleeper HCE himself. The brutality of these clashes I think are similar to the destructive confrontations a soul goes through in its journey through the underworld or the Bardo---the type of thing that goes on in the Egyptian Book of the Dead or the Tibetan Book of the Dead where there are monsters and demons who will tear your flesh to pieces, putting your soul through the trial of your attachments and preparedness for nirvana or for reincarnation. 

I'm getting far afield here, so let me briefly summarize how I see all of this. The gate or portal, the megalithic "stonehinged gate" (FW 069.15) and everything that goes on around this part of the text are suggestive of a number of things: 

• the sleeper HCE is crossing over a threshold and entering into the void of deep sleep, his persona obliterated. In John Bishop's introduction to the Penguin edition of FW, he notes "Chapters 3 and 4 of Book I are both murkier and harder to read than the first two chapters of FW---in part because HCE recedes even more deeply out of conscious life, now becoming literally absent... and therefore only indirectly represented, in rumor, gossip, and report." (p. xx)
  
• Traveling across the threshold of the portal into deep sleep, within HCE are enacted ancient rituals of the divestiture of the High King of Ireland at Tara by the Druids at megalithic sites (see Wake Rites).
• Descending into the underworld of sleep, HCE experiences the death and resurrection myths of Osiris in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. 
• The megalithic portal or doorway which is the entryway to HCE's pub is also the gateway to deep sleep, to death, to rebirth, and an inviting open door for the reader to dive into all of the above, "Opendoor Ospices" (FW 071.13).
• The megalithic gate becomes representative of HCE himself, or rather HCE transforms into a megalith or monolith or "monomyth" (FW 581.24).

I'll try to expand on all of these points here. While a reader can try to identify a "narrative" or "plot" in chapters 3-4 of the Wake, what I'm usually more interested to follow are the consistent patterns noticeable in the subtext. So much of chapter 3 seems to involve HCE's personal identity fading away as he falls into deeper sleep. The sleeper's sense of individual identity becomes obliterated, as described on page 51, "(since in this scherzarade of one's thousand one nightinesses this sword of certainty that would identifide the body never falls) to idendifine the individuone." Mythological and historical personages abound in this chapter. Siddartha, Buddha, Osiris, Blakean gods, the Prophet Muhammad, ancient Vikings and Celtic Kings and Druid Poets all appear and proliferate in these pages as it seems like the dead from across history and the entire globe gather to arrange for the passage of HCE into the afterlife, he is being "timesported acorss the yawning (abyss)" (FW 056.03). 

The sleeper HCE in ever deeper slumber loses his entire persona, buried in a coffin of sleep paralysis, his consciousness dead to the world, he's "nearvanashed himself" (FW 061.18), his ego extinguished in nirvana and near-vanished in sleep. H.C. Earwicker, or Mr. Porter the pubkeeper, disappears and is replaced by any number of mythological heroes and gods and kings undergoing trials against entities trying to devour him. All these entities seem to be parts of his own being. 

There's an interesting and sort of subtle indication of the interlink between entities when the angry drunk at the gate is berating HCE. Notice the dualities in this description of the language used: "swishing beesnest with blessure, and swobbing broguen eeriesh myth brockendootcsh" (FW 070.03-4). Mixing business with pleasure, or a bee's nest with blessings, and swapping broken Irish with broken Deutsch. I think the presence of the words "eerie" "myth" and "brocken" also indicate a reference here to the Brocken spectre, a phenomenon where an enormous shadow of an observer appears on a cloud, made legendary by the propensity for this spectre to occur when an observer stands atop the Brocken peak in Germany. This phenomenon has been referenced frequently in literature, most memorably for me in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow. I think the presence of the Brocken spectre in this passage of Finnegans Wake is confirmed a few lines later with "roebucks raugh at pinnacle's peak" (FW 070.13) plus other references to hikers on a mountain top. 

So the confrontations with hostile entities can be seen as conflicts within HCE himself or with his shadow. One of these encounters takes place at a megalithic stone structure, first introduced as "one of the granite cromlech setts" (FW 061.14). The chapter seems to alternate between describing HCE inside an elaborate coffin and describing HCE being harassed at a doorway, with lots of Egyptian references embedded in these passages. The impression I get when reading this part of the book is that HCE is being prepared for reincarnation, "striving todie, hopening tomellow" (FW 060.29), he's placed inside a pyramid like a dead pharaoh, "reberthing in remarriment out of dead seekness to devine previdence... first pharoah, Humpheres Cheops Exarchas." (FW 62.07-21) Since we're jumping from Druids to Egyptian pharaohs here, it's worth mentioning that Joyce, from his early writings, made connections between the ancient Irish Druids and the Egyptian priests, memorably declaring in "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages" that, "Ancient Ireland is dead just as ancient Egypt is dead."

Example of a granite cromlech.

HCE in this section seems to be traveling like the sun on a journey under the earth at night and through the stars, this is the mythical image of Osiris in his night-boat. Whether it's Stonehenge or Egyptian pyramids, these ancient temples were usually designed as star-gates and at this point of the book, cosmic elements abound as HCE seems to be floating among the stars in a boat:

"combing the comet's tail up right and shooting popguns at the stars" (FW 065.11)

"gazing and crazing and blazing at the stars" (FW 065.13)

"they all were afloat in a dreamlifeboat" (FW 065.29-30)

We get another reminder that we are actually talking about a coffin but the way it is described, "The coffin, a triumph of the illusionist's art" (FW 066.28), suggests death is an illusion and that our main character will eventually re-appear just "round the coroner." (FW 067.13) I should also point out this section contains a paragraph all about sex for procreation followed by a paragraph about the delivery of a letter through the post. John Bishop in Joyce's Book of the Dark wrote about the letter passage on p. 66 as having to do with a dream experienced by the sleeper and his attempt to transfer this dream information across the threshold of sleep into consciousness in the morning: "Will it ever be next morning the postal unionist's ... strange fate ... to hand in a huge chain envelope... ?" (FW 066.10-14) The passage about posting a letter is bracketed by paragraphs about procreative sex and a special coffin used in a magician's act. In discussing the recurring images of ancient portals throughout FW, George C. Gibson in Wake Rites confirms that "HCE's passage through these perilous thresholds is an act associated with themes of rebirth, Easter, initiation, and the transition from the old world to the new." (Wake Rites, p. 197)

As we get to the passage with the "stonehinged gate" on page 69, we encounter more dualities. The long paragraph preceding the gate scene starts with "Oh! Oh!" (FW 067.32) and ends with "(ah! ah!)" (FW069.02), Joyce's way of summoning alpha and omega. In the "stonehinged gate" paragraph are more celestial references, with the dual "Isther Estarr" and "Yesther Asterr" suggestive of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar with the word star evident in both names. The text places us "In the drema of Sorestost Areas, Diseased." There are a number of meanings here (including, phonetically, the Irish for "Irish Free State"), but one of the ways I read it is "Solstice Areas, Deceased" in reference to Stonehenge or some other ancient abandoned solstice temple site. Stonehenge was important for Joyce. There are at least half a dozen direct references to Stonehenge in Finnegans Wake, and as Peter Chrisp mentioned in his blog post about Joyce's development of the HCE character, when James Joyce visited the site of Stonehenge in 1931 he remarked, "I have been fourteen years trying to get here." The quote comes from David Hayman's book A First Draft Version of Finnegans Wake (p. 3), where Hayman says Joyce was referring to the work he was engaged in with Finnegans Wake. 

The "stonehinged gate" paragraph on page 69 further amplifies the significance of the gate metaphor with several references to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, "to garble a garthen of Odin and the lost paladays when all the eddams ended with aves." (FW 69.09-11) The gate becomes "an applegate" (FW 69.21) suggesting an apple tree in this garden, also inside the gate are sheep and goat and other livestock harvested by the primordial farmers. The etymology of the word paradise literally means "to build an enclosure around." So like we've said, this gate is a portal, an intersection of worlds. It could be a gate to the dreamworld, to the afterlife, to the cosmos, or to the lost paradise. Or all of the above, that's how the Wake works.

Outside the gate, the belligerent drunk German continues to badger HCE with 111 different names mocking him. HCE refuses to "respond a solitary wedgeword" (FW 072.18) and attempts to not acknowledge "his langwedge" (FW 073.01). Those words "wedgeword" and "langwedge" are important and revealing here. We're talking about a "stonehinged gate" which serves as a portal between worlds. The gate would be wedged in between two separate dimensions. HCE doesn't respond and doesn't want to further drive a wedge between he and his assailant. Joyce placing the word "wedge" in association with language here could be alluding to ancient cuneiform writing which was wedge-shaped. But also, as we discussed in our FW reading group when we covered this passage, there's more to it because in architecture a wedge serves as the keystone holding together a doorway. 

Keystone wedge in architecture.

The wedge actually holds dualities together, strengthening the gate structure. This is the "langwedge" of the Wake, uniting opposites, often in this book you'll find polarities merged inside one word or phrase. With the appearances of that word "wedge" at the end of chapter 3, the stone architecture of HCE's gate builds into something more elaborate. No longer just a gate, now it has become a megalithic tomb. A nebulous somebody or nobody is seen to "build rocks over him" (FW 073.09) and he is safely ensconced in an "archcitadel" (FW 073.24) with "chambered cairns" (FW 073.29). Chambered cairns are neolithic burial monuments for the dead:

By Islandhopper, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Even though the text says of HCE within his intricate stone tomb that "he med leave to many a door beside" (FW 073.28), the persona of the man asleep is hard to find. He seemed to say goodbye to his angry assailant right before traversing the portal, crossing over into time-bending dimensions on the other side lightyears away, he "proceeded with a Hubbleforth slouch in his slap backwords... in the directions of the duff and demb institutions about ten or eleven hundred years lurch away in the moonshiny gorge of Patself on the Bach. Adyoe!" (FW 073.18-22) All that's left for us to examine is the increasingly ornate megalithic structure, "skatterlings of a stone" (FW 073.34) forming an "eolithostroton" (FW 073.30). Now separated from HCE by time spans in the thousands of years we become archeologists trying to develop "a theory none too rectiline of the evoluation of human society and a testament of the rocks from all the dead unto some the living." (FW 073.31-33) And then Joyce ends the chapter on the following page with pretty clear indications that the main character has now fallen into deepest sleep. 

In describing the sequence of events from this part of the Wake, John Bishop emphasizes that this all "seems to have to do not only with HCE's disappearance from consciousness, but also with his physical 'arrest,' his immobilization in the world of night; while in chapter 4, a significant turning point in the book, a process of 'disselving' and dispersion begins, as HCE fades from central focus into a remote background." (p. xx, Penguin edition of FW) In chapter 4, we once again encounter some references to Egyptian pharaohs buried deep inside pyramids, HCE's coffin becomes like a torpedo or submarine transporting through an "underground heaven, or mole's paradise" (FW 076.33). Further within chapter 4, HCE officially becomes no longer a somebody but an everybody, on page 88 he is named "Here Comes Everybody" with each letter representing the name of some historical or mythical figure.

By the end of chapter 4, where there was once a person now there is only an increasingly ornate stone structure, envisioned with "beaconsfarafield innerhalf the zuggurat" (FW 100.19). Maybe HCE is now the illuminated inner half of a ziggurat. He's no longer an entity but a geometrical structure, confirmed by "the canonicity of his existence as a tesseract." (FW 100.34-35) By the following chapter he has truly become a megalith, where the "trilithon sign M" (FW 119.17) is a fallen letter E meant to look like a trilithon. 

FW 119.17

This evolution of HCE into a gateway portal built of stone that is also an elaborate "eolithostroton" (FW 073.30) or ziggurat or tesseract entombing him reminds me of a Gopuram, the monumental and ornate entrance tower to a Hindu temple.

Gopuram, gateway entrance to Hindu temple

This transformation of a seemingly human character into a ziggurat or tesseract stone tumulus is weird and confusingly abstract, but bear in mind that structure is also a gate or door and Joyce repeatedly hints at having dropped keys for the reader. One of these keys might be the aforementioned trilithon sign formed by rotating the E sigla for HC Earwicker, and that seems to be hinted at on page 100 with "tristurned initials, the cluekey to a worldroom beyond the roomwhorld" (FW 100.29). Bear in mind too that the wedge in the aforementioned "wedgewords" and "langwedge" is indicative of the keystone in architecture. So much of what all this is saying seems to be commentary on Finnegans Wake itself, Joyce's own history of the world thru the experience of one person asleep at night, the reader being led on an archeological dig thru the history of the human body and human experience.

That amazing line on page 100 depicting lit up ziggurats, "beaconsfarafield innerhalf the zuggurat" conjures in my head a very similar image as that provided by the recently deceased poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (himself a Joycean) at the end of his epic poem Time of Useful Consciousness (2012): "Macrotiendas in Teotihuacan/ The pyramids lit up like cupcakes." The below picture shows me sitting atop a ziggurat pyramid structure staring down the Avenue of the Dead in Teotihuacan, Mexico, with a James Joyce shirt on my back.

Exploring that ancient site of a complex pyramid city that was abandoned thousands of years prior, I couldn't help but think of Joyce and Finnegans Wake and the way he designed his book. The tour guide described how archeologists discovered buried remains underneath each of the ziggurat temples, they even found an "underground heaven, a mole's paradise" deep underneath the main ziggurat/pyramid, a series of tunnels decorated with gems to create the atmosphere of a mythical underworld amidst the stars. 

Joyce when he was finishing up writing Finnegans Wake worried that his highly complex masterwork might end up being neglected and abandoned. "Perhaps it will end in failure, be a wreck or ‘catastrophe’ ...and perhaps in the years to come this work of mine will remain solitary and abandoned, like a temple without believers." (Portraits of the Artist in Exile, p. 160-161, my emphasis) I think the Wake will always maintain the aura of an abandoned temple ripe for archeological exploration, but with Finnegans Wake group digs taking place all over the world and even assembling virtually via "Bangen-op-Zoom" (FW 073.26-27) amidst a global pandemic just like ours did, the great temple site has not remained solitary and the gems and treasures yielded from these group digs are invaluable to an appreciation of what the human mind is capable of.  

"So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined... til Daleth, mahomahouma, who oped it closeth thereof the. Dor." 

(FW 020.13-18)

(Thank you to Marcin Kedzior, Madeline Melnick, and the Austin Finnegans Wake Reading Group.)