While the children work upstairs, their father appears to be downstairs serving customers in a pub. The chapter’s beginning gives us little information but many questions. “As we there are where are we,” it begins (260), and proceeds to refer to a “he” who is not clearly identified but who prompts a series of questions, “Who is he? Whose is he? Why is he? Howmuch is he? Which is he? When is he? Where is he?” and “How is he?” (261).
In their book Understanding ‘Finnegans Wake,’ Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon describe the first section of the narrative as taking the reader on a geographical journey (147), and, indeed, we appear to be led past a river, perhaps Dublin’s or “Eblinn water,” to a “phantom city” with a lovely vista “buona the vista,” orchards, and the “creepered tower of a church of Ereland” (264). We may be passing through Phoenix Park, where we see “the phoenix, his pyre, is still flaming away with trueprattight spirit,” until we find ourselves in Chapelizod outside of Dublin since we have come to “Izolde, her chaplet gardens” with their “hedges of ivy and hollywood and bower of mistletoe” (265).
The focus now shifts to the household of Shem and Shaun, the “jemmijohns” who work on some “rhythmatick” and pore over “Browne and Nolan’s divisional tables” while their sister “will sit and knit on solfa sofa.” (Brown & Nolan were Dublin publishers) (268). From arithmetic, the boys’ study will progress to many other subjects such as history, including “memoiries of Hireling’s puny wars” or Ireland’s Punic Wars (270), and to periods both B.C. and A.D. “Please stop if you’re a B.C. minding missy, please do. But should you prefer A.D. stepplease” (272). The right margin next to this last comment refers to a “PANOPTICAL PURVIEW OF POLITICAL PROGRESS AND THE FUTURE PRESENTATION OF THE PAST,” a not illogical description of the task of history.
A few pages later, as the right margin announces, we come to an intermission or recess—“INCIPIT INTERMISSIO” (278)—and thoughts soon turn from war to sports, “Since alls war that end war let sports be leisure and bring and buy fair. Ah ah athclete, blest your bally bathfeet” (279). But at this point Issy, who has been adding brief footnotes to the commentary, offers one that is almost a page long, beginning with suicidal thoughts (“I was thinking fairly killing times of putting an end to myself and my malody”). But then, she goes on to tout her own educational ambitions (“we will conjugate together”) and (“I’ll get my decree”) because “I learned all the runes of the gamest game ever from my old nourse Asa” (279).
The “homework” chapter encompasses many areas of knowledge, as it concedes near the end, “We’ve had our day at triv and quad and writ our bit as intermidgets. Art, literature, politics, economy, chemistry, humanity, &c.” (306). But the most dramatic moment in all these learning exercises comes on page 293, when a geometry lesson is supplemented by a diagram generally interpreted as an image of the mother’s private parts as viewed by her sons. There is no mistaking that the diagram refers to ALP since the letters are clearly printed to represent what appears to form a sexual triangle. The concept of children’s interest in their parents’ sexuality is at the heart of Freud’s concept of the “primal scene,” the notion that children either remember or fantasize about parental copulation as a way of understanding their origins. In the Wake too, the scene is less erotic or bawdy than evocative of the dream compulsion to return to and understand beginnings, hence the many allusions throughout the book to Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, and Noah’s flood. Here, just below the diagram, some of these biblical themes are evoked, with a reference to “Sare Isaac’s” reminding us of Isaac as the biblical father of twins, and a reference to Genesis where “Eve takes fall”.
We can therefore construe this moment in the episode to enlarge the notion of the twin boys’ search for knowledge to include a desire to explore where they came from, which inevitably requires thinking of the womb and their mother’s body. The marginal note on the left just under the ALP diagram alludes to “Uteralterance or the Interplay of Bones in the Womb” (293). And a few pages later one of the brothers appears to promise, or threaten, the other that “I’ll make you to see figuratleavely the whome of your eternal geomater” (296). But even during this intimate joint visual adventure, the brothers remain at odds: “And Kev was wreathed with his pother” (303).
The end of the chapter, however, seems to offer something like graduation after all these lessons—“Commencement Day is at hand,” Campbell and Robinson note (192). In honor of the occasion, the boys appear to be offered a “Noblett’s surprize,” or Nobel Prize, by their sugar daddy, “Heavysciusgardaddy, parent who offers sweetmeats” (306). The chapter ends with a long series of examination questions that might have been derived from an equally long list of italicized classical figures on the left margin. Pericles, for example, follows Julius Caesar in the margin, and appears to be accompanied by the question “Is the Pen Mightier than the Sword?”— perhaps an allusion to the fact that, like Caesar, he not only led Athens in the Persian wars, but also promoted oratory and the arts. Lucretius, the Roman poet and philosopher who wrote “On the Nature of Things,” is linked to the topic of “The Uses and Abuses of Insects” (306), and Tiresius, whom the goddess Hera had turned into a woman for killing copulating snakes, raises the question “Is the Co-education of Animus and Anima Wholly Desirable?” (307).
The chapter ends with a set of visual images, including a figure thumbing its nose and a set of cross bows, or “crossbuns,” according to Issy’s footnote. There is also a charming NIGHTLETTER offering yuletide greetings to “Pep and Memmy,” “wishing them all very merry Incarnations” and prosperity, or at least “plenty of preprosterousness” in their “coming new yonks.” The letter is signed by “jake, jack and little sousoucie (the babes that mean too)” (308).
Chapter 3 of Book II leaves the children behind and returns to the father and the stories of his assorted problems. If we were to try to configure the scene domestically, we could picture ourselves leaving the children upstairs to return to the tavern downstairs, where men are drinking and talking and telling stories of various conflicts. The scene could be considered comparable in some respects to the “Cyclops” chapter of Ulysses, which is also set in a tavern with lively discussions by and conflicts among the customers.
But an interesting difference in this chapter concerns the role of media. Right from the beginning we are told that a radio is broadcasting, a “high fidelity dialdialler, as modern as tomorrow afternoon.” We learn that it is equipped with “supershielded umbrella antennas for distance getting,” and connected by magnetic links with “a vitaltone speaker, capable of capturing skybuddies, harbour craft emittences, key clickings, vaticum cleaners” (309), thereby producing a cacophony of sounds. The problem, as Rose and O’Hanlon point out, is that “though a radio programme is being broadcast, this is also an account of actual events in a public house, these two factors being virtually indistinguishable” (165).
Either in the pub, or on the air, a number of stories will be narrated. The first one concerns a hunchbacked and possibly Norwegian sailor whose “Hump! Hump!” (312) may identify him with Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker or HCE, who asks a “ship’s husband” or shipping agent where he could order a suit of clothes. He is referred to a tailor named Kersse, who makes the suit which does not fit—because of the hump, the tailor claims—and leads to a furious confrontation with Kersse being called “you scum of a botch” and “you suck of a thick” (322). The radio broadcast interrupts with a “Welter focussed” or weather forecast, predicting “Wind from the nordth,” as well as an “allexpected depression,” “veirying precipitation,” an “unusuable suite of clouds” “a retch of low pleasure,” and an “outlook for tomarry.” This last reference suggests that if one wanted to marry tomorrow, it would be with good visibility, “his ability good” (324).
Joyce scholar John Gordon does indeed find a marriage theme buried in this story: “That the sailor should send someone named a ‘husband’ to negotiate his ‘suit’ indi
cates that the tailor’s daughter, the young ALP, is the object of the negotiation” (198), although an allusion to the “nowedding captain” (325) suggests that a marriage may not work out. At the heart of this chapter we hear a story now generally identified as “How Buckley Shot the Russian General,” which critic Finn Fordham calls “one of the densest pieces of writing in one of the densest darkest parts of one of the densest darkest novels” (Lots of Fun at ‘Finnegans Wake’ 89).
Fordham notes that Joyce’s father may have told his son this story about an Irish soldier in the Crimean War, who was about to shoot a Russian General when he noticed that he was defecating. The humanity of the moment made him hesitate, but when the General wiped himself with a bit of turf, the soldier was disgusted and shot him. In the Wake, this story is narrated by two figures named Butt and Taff, versions of Shem and Shaun, who may be regarded as radio comics, for, as Fordham notes, their scene “has often been understood as a dialogue that is taking place on television” (90), a medium apparently existing in crude experimental forms as early as the late 1920s, making it possible that Joyce had heard about it.
By introducing the notion that various accounts in this chapter are products of media, the continual interruptions and introductions of new topics become more understandable and justified. Butt and Taff’s account is interrupted at one point by radio or television (“verbivocovisual”) reporting a horse race, “given by The Irish Race and World”: “The huddled and aliven stablecrashers have shared fleetfooted enthusiasm with the paddocks dare and ditches” (341). We are reminded here of the role that the Gold Cup race plays in Ulysses, and particularly in the “Cyclops” episode where Bloom gets in trouble because Lenehan mistakenly tells the fellows in the pub that Bloom has gone to collect his winnings, which he will presumably not share by standing drinks. In the Wake too, there will be a lot of betting and tipping reminiscent of the names of Butt and Taff: “This eeriedreme has being effered you by Bett and Tipp. Tipp and Bett, our swapstick quackchancers” (342).
The Butt and Taff dialogue goes on and on until at last Butt finishes the story in the first person, his name now relating more clearly to the Russian General’s final action of “beheaving up that sob of tunf” in order to “wollpimsolff” or wipe himself in his “exitous erseroyal,” presumably his royal butt. Buckley is outraged at the insult to Ireland, and “[a]t that instullt to Igorladns” he “gave one dobblenotch and I ups with my crozzier” to “cockshock rockrogn,” in an allusion to the nursery rhyme, “Who Killed Cock Robin” (353). Buckley has shot the Russian General, an act that triggers the “abnihilisation of the etym,” that is, the annihilation of the atom or of the word, a dramatic event with all the predictive features of a nuclear explosion. We are told that it “expolodotonates through Parsuralia with an ivanmorinthorrorumble fragoromboassity amidwhiches general uttermosts confussion are perceivable moletons skaping with mulicules,” an explosion with an even more horrible rumble amid whose utter confusion, or nuclear fusion, we can perceive molecules escaping.
It may seem impossible that Joyce would have been aware of the concept of an atomic bomb before Finnegans Wake was published in 1939, but it turns out that H.G. Wells published a novel as early as 1914 called The World Set Free, which predicts a nuclear explosion. The Wikipedia article on Wells’ novel explains that scientists at that time were already aware that “the slow natural radioactive decay of elements like radium continues for thousands of years, and while the rate of energy release is negligible, the total amount released is huge.” Joyce was likely aware of this scientific thinking because he described a scenario similar to a nuclear explosion: “projectilised from Hullullullu, Bawlawayo, empyreal Rome, and mordern Atems,” or projected from Honolulu, Borneo, imperial Rome, and modern Athens, or modern atoms (353).
The Butt and Taff dialogue comes to an end, and the scene returns to the tavern whose customers argue about the conflict they just heard on the radio. “Shutmup,” one says, defending Buckley, “And bud did down well right” (355). The tavern-keeper seems to adopt a positive note and tells an anecdote about reading a book with his “naked I” while visiting an outhouse “for relieving purposes in our trurally virvir vergitabale (garden)” (357)—a scene reminiscent of Bloom in the “Calypso” chapter of Ulysses reading a story in a penny-weekly magazine while sitting in the outhouse in his garden. The HCE figure appears to like the “(suppressed) book” he is reading, finding it “eminently legligible” and commending the quality of the paper. He claims to have read enough of it to hope “it will cocommend the widest circulation and a reputation coextensive with its merits when inthrusted into safe and pious hands” (356), an excellent review Joyce might have wished for his own suppressed books. He even commends the illustrations of “Mr Aubeyron Birdslay” (357)—a reference to Aubrey Beardsley, the English illustrator of Oscar Wilde’s Salome.
Soon another radio interruption, possibly from a “ham” radio, tells us that we have just “beamed listening” to an excerpt from “John Whiston’s fiveaxled production, The Coach With The Six Insides,” to be continued in “Fearson’s Nightly,” perhaps a magazine like Pearson’s Weekly (359). This is followed by a musical interlude beginning with the “dewfolded song of the naughtingels” or nightingales—possibly a reference to the Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale (“floflo floreflorence”) or the Swedish Nightingale (“sweetishsad lightandgayle”), the nickname of the Swedish singer Jenny Lind. More allusions follow to a series of composers. They include Meyerbeer (“meer Bare”), Bellini (“Bill Heeny”), Mercadante (“Smirky Dainty”), Beethoven (“beethoken”), and others, including Mozart (“sweetmoztheart”) (359-360). “May song it flourish,” the narrative voice tells us, and given the musical quality of much of the Wake’s prose, we may agree.
The remainder of the chapter will revisit the sins of the father, who at one point offers a confession of his sins although he complains about his accusers—“The rebald danger with they who would bare whiteness against me I dismissem from the mind of good” (364). HCE is nonetheless tried by a jury consisting of the people in the tavern, including four elders who are eventually identified with the four evangelists in the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (“Mr Justician Matthews and Mr Justician Marks and Mr Justician Luk de Luc and Mr Justinian Johnston-Johnson” (377). They claim that HCE should be ashamed of himself: “He should be ashaped of hempshelves, hiding that shepe in his goat,” presumably for hiding a sheep in his coat (373). Other charges are levied, “Sell him a breach contact, the vendoror, the buylawyer” (374) and threats made: “Wait till they send you to sleep, scowpow. By jurors’ cruces” (375).
The chapter ends with the tavern closing for the night while the tavern-keeper, described as plagued by a “wonderful midnight thirst” goes around to finish drinks his customers had left behind, ready to “suck up” “whatever surplus rotgut, sorra much, was left by the lazy lousers of maltknights and beerchurls in the different bottoms of the various different replenquished drinking utensils left there behind them on the premisses” (381). Not surprisingly he “came acrash”, falls down, and in the end “he just slumped to throne” (382).
Chapter 4, the last chapter of Book II, begins with the sound of seagulls announcing its theme: The sea voyage of Tristan and Isolde, the betrayal of Tristan’s uncle and Isolde’s destined husband, King Mark, and the voyeuristic viewing and account of four old men identified with the four evangelists of the Bible. Scholar John Gordon, who makes efforts to put Wakean scenes into a plausible novelistic context, suggests we view it from the perspective of HCE in bed, with four bed posts looking down on him, remembering the romance of his youth (214). Campbell and Robinson offer a similar scenario: HCE’s “body, helpless on the floor” represents King Mark of the Tristan myth dreaming “the honeymoon voyage of Tristram and Iseult” (248).
The chapter begins with the sound of birds mocking King Mark, “Three quarks for Muster Mark!/ Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark,” and describing him as a rooster
flapping out of Noah’s ark. No longer the “cock of the wark” he is obliged to see that “Tristy’s the spry young spark/ That’ll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her/ Without ever winking the tail of a feather.” In the myth of Tristan and Isolde, Tristan is bringing Isolde to his uncle King Mark, who plans to wed her, but the couple falls in love on their voyage on the sea when they ingest a love potion. In Joyce’s version, the four old men looking at the scene from above seem here identified with the birds “[o]verhoved, shrillgleescreaming. That song sang seaswans.” The birds “trolled out rightbold when they smacked the big kuss,” or saw the big kiss “of Trustan and Usolde” (383). Soon they are transformed from birds into men, “They were the big four, the four maaster waves of Erin,” perhaps masts on the ship, “all listening, four,” and identified with the evangelists, “Matt Gregory,” “Marcus Lyons,” “Luke Tarpey,” and “old Johnny MacDougall.” At this point they are described both as listening, “luistening and listening to the oceans of kissening,” and looking “with their eyes glistening” as he (presumably Tristan) was “kiddling and cuddling and bunnyhugging scrumptious his colleen bawn” (384). Joyce’s allusion to “The Colleen Bawn” refers to a play produced “in the good old bygone days of Dion Boucicault” (385), a 19th century Irish playwright who wrote and produced a work by that title that is more complex and sadder than the Tristan and Isolde story. Given the early reference to Noah’s ark, and the fact that Tristan and Isolde’s romance takes place on a ship at sea, it is not surprising that the evangelists will recount tales of drowning. “[T]here was the drowning of Pharoah and all his pedestrians and they were all completely drowned into the sea, the red sea” Johnny reports, and goes on to tell of “poor Merkin Cornyngwham, the official out of the castle on pension, when he was completely drowned off Erin Isles” (387). Campbell and Robinson believe this second allusion refers to Martin Cunningham in Ulysses, and it may suggest that perhaps he eventually dies by drowning (250). Later when “Matt Emeritus” speaks, he too will refer to “Poor Andrew Martin Cunningham!” (393). Like several earlier chapters, this one ends in a prayer (“Anno Domini nostri sancti Jesu Christi”) and a song, possibly accompanied by musical instruments including “The Lambeg drum, the Lombog reed” and “the Lumbag fiferer” (398).
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