Here Comes Everybody?

It’s a commonplace for Wake commentators, beginning with Campbell and Robinson’s Skeleton Key, to see the Wake as  presenting us with a protagonist who is Everyman, whose dilemma is universal, recurrent everywhere and in every era.  It appears to be an obvious way of treating the book: HCE is, after all, Here Comes Everybody, and the family’s trials and squabbles get mapped onto almost everything one can imagine in history. What could be more simple?

Nevertheless, it’s a view I’ve been finding increasingly inadequate. Here are some reasons:

1. The statement that such-and-such a character or situation in a book is universal is a banality, not an insight. Rather than look carefully at the specifics of what’s happening in the book, it takes a large step back until the lack of detail makes the book look very broadly like lots of others.  As the Wake says, “the farther back we manage to wiggle the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen saw” (112.01-02). To read from such a distance is to make everything that’s potentially new and challenging about the book dissolve into a familiar and simple story one already knows and has read many times before. The hero with a thousand faces turns out to have one face all along, which is the one he had in the last book.
2. Presenting banality as discovery is bad lit crit. The claim that because one is familiar with something it must therefore be universal, or something as vague and all-encompassing as “human nature,” is also a deeply suspicious one to make in general. All it really says is that the speaker can’t imagine being otherwise.
3. Is Joyce really writing 628 pages of some of the most difficult prose ever written in order to show a truism? (I’m using that word to mean something that appears obviously true if you don’t look too hard at it, and useless or just plain wrong the moment you do.)
4. The argument that the story’s universality is shown by the 60-odd languages the Wake puns in and across also falls apart as soon as you look at it. They have quite the opposite effect. Nobody, even the “ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia” (120.13-14), is familiar with all those languages, from Shelta, Old Church Slavonic and Melanesian pidgin to Samoan, Turkish and Rhaeto-Romanic. Their effect is not to open the page up to a universal reader, but to guarantee that any actual reader experiences the Wake as devolving into opacities that are almost fractal. On those occasions when you do think you’ve made a certain amount of sense out of a passage, it’s a common experience to find that McHugh’s or Fweet’s glosses will identify it as a multilingual pun in a language you’re unable to pursue it through. Conversely, it’s a common experience to look up McHugh for a passage you find opaque, only to realize with a sinking feeling that the blank space means McHugh doesn’t know either. The experience of reading any text often present itself as a play of not-knowing and knowing, where the former seems to efface itself in favour of the latter. What the multilingual puns of the Wake guarantee is that not-knowing doesn’t fade out: it’s always in the forefront of the reader’s experience. We are always, and very often uncomfortably, aware that Wake language is simply not letting us plunge beneath the surface to some sort of familiar story beneath it. Surely we have to treat that opacity as in some way what the book is about, not something to be dissolved almost immediately in the assurance that it’s no more than an unusual or virtuosic way of conveying a universal story we already know.
5. Campbell and Robinson focus almost entirely on the content of what’s said in the Wake (which of course is no mean achievement, and a major moment in Joyce scholarship). But they have very little to say about the act of saying it, and how that completely reframes the content. The points that follow are about some of the aspects and implications of this.
6. Finnegans Wake is obviously excessive, but few texts are quite so excessive. If we simply look for the content, we find—over and over, and in all sorts of guises—the story of HCE, his family, his apparent misdemeanours, his guilt, and the desire for exculpation. It’s tempting to read this as universal, especially when the text itself is so full of statements to that effect. Maybe too easy. But when someone tells us something a little bit too often—especially when it’s something apparently obvious, banal and anodyne—don’t we have reason to suspect something’s the matter, just as the Cad becomes suspicious when his request for the time is met with an outpouring of protestations of innocence over some events he’d never even suspected before that point (35.01-34.36)? If something is really so obvious, so universally true, why say it at all, let alone over and over? And when the repeated assertion is that a particular action is no more than that usual suspect for all felonies, “human nature,” don’t we suspect that there’s a whitewash going on? Would we for a moment credit it if it were offered, for example, by that other well-known target of accusations of sexual misdemeanours, Harvey Weinstein?
7. These excuses are also completely contradictory. The claim that whatever happened it’s a universal story, something that we find everywhere in history, sits ill with the equally frequent claim that nothing happened anyway. It’s what Freud calls kettle logic: (“When you returned the kettle I lent you, it had a hole in it.” “It was fine when I gave it back to you, the hole was already in it when I borrowed it, and I never borrowed it anyway.”) Any one excuse may or may not be true, but when they’re piled one on the other they give away a certain desperation. Very often, this is doubly marked by the stutter of the flustered and disingenuous HCE.
8. Combine the contradictions with the excessiveness that comes from trying to plug all the holes only to find that your very efforts are making new ones, and what we have is a comedy of mortification. The long and sometimes mock-scholarly investigation of the letter in I.5 is a marvellous example of this. The letter the hen scratched up looks nothing like the exoneration it’s supposed to be: the comedy is in the increasingly desperate ways the narrative has of making out that it is, and that it couldn’t be anything else. Campbell and Robinson don’t have an ear for this comedy, which lies in the act of saying rather than the content of what’s said.

Stating

Much criticism of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man reads Stephen’s aesthetic theories in chapter V as Joyce’s own: as a description of Portrait itself , or as programmatic of the later work. One thing that such an approach stands to overlook is the status of Stephen’s philosophizing as an action performed by a character in a novel.

This is where the novel of ideas differs from a philosophical essay. An essay asks one to focus on the argument, the accuracy of its premises, the rigour of its development, the applicability and generality of its conclusions. A statement in a novel may ask us to do all of that, but it also asks us to pay attention to the act of stating it: who is saying it, to whom, where and when, under what circumstances; what is the speaker doing in and with that act of stating it?; what do they want, or expect, or hope their auditor to do with it? what (a different question) does the auditor actually do with it?; what effects does it have further on down the line?

Stephen’s view of art is that proper art is static rather than kinetic. Proper art doesn’t invoke desire or loathing, which are the urges either to possess or to go from something. It arrests the mind and raises it above those emotions (Gabler V.1105-13). That’s what Stephen says, the content of it. But when we look at the act of saying it, the ways in which all this is part of the action of a novel, we see something rather different. In the very act of saying it, by means of saying it, Stephen is trying to lay claim to and possess something he does not yet have, the status of the artist; he’s fleeing those famous nets of nationality, language and religion. Stephen needs an auditor: he bribes the more impoverished Lynch with a supply of cigarettes; what he gets from Lynch is the stream of cynical banter that says his ears may be bought, but not his independence. The entire episode is steeped in a persistent sexual unease. Stephen is jealous of Emma Cleary’s friendship with the young Father Moran, and only a couple of pages after his sighting (but not approaching) her, in the very paragraph immediately preceding the one in which he makes that distinction between kinetic and static, the first aesthetic example he gives to Lynch is the story of a young woman whose heart is pierced by a long fine needle of shivered glass. It’s an odd and disturbing punishment at several removes, to which Stephen even denies the status of tragedy: it “is remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions” (Gabler  V.1001-02). None of that is static. It’s kinetic, marked everywhere by the ebb and flows of Stephen’s desires, as indeed one would expect of the actions of a novel. We see not only what Stephen is saying, but also some of the reasons behind his saying it. The narration of events lets us see things about Stephen that he may seem to be not entirely aware of.  As the title reminds us, it’s the portrait of a young man.

So, on the one hand, we have a stated content; on the other, as this is a novel, we have also the act of stating it, the drama in which those statements play a role. The latter is not reducible to the former. The act of stating something can have effects that are not predictable or calculable from the actual content. It can often say more than the stated content, or things that the content is there to hide.

This split between the said and the saying, I would argue, is no less important in Finnegans Wake.

Let’s take the Wake‘s invocations of Giordano Bruno, and his philosophy of the reconciliation of opposites. Much Wake criticism reads this rather like reading Stephen’s aestheticizing in the Portrait: as a description of and guide to the way the Wake itself works, setting out its principles of construction. Campbell and Robinson’s Skeleton Key takes this approach throughout. Here, for example, is the end of the trial scene in I.4, where we have a series of terms connected with Shaun “cumjustling” another series connected with Shem:

The hilariohoot of Pegger’s Windup cumjustled as neatly with the tristitone of the Wet Pinter’s as were they isce et ille equals of opposites, evolved by a onesame power of nature or of spirit, iste, as the sole condition and means of its himundher manifestation and polarised for reunion by the symphasis of their antipathies. Distinctly different were their duasdestinies. (92.06-11)

The source of this, as McHugh glosses it, is Coleridge’s paraphrase of Bruno in The Friend:

Every power in nature and in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole means and condition of its manifestation, and all opposition is a tendency to reunion. This is the universal law of polarity or essential dualism, first promulgated … by Giordano Bruno. (McHugh 92)

And now here is Campbell and Robinson’s paraphrase (the square brackets are their own):

The hilarious hoot of Pegger’s windup contrasted as neatly with the sad tone of the wet pinter’s as were they, “this one” and “that one,” equals of opposites, evolved by a one-same power of nature or of spirit, which we may call “that other.” [And here a great law is illustrated: the great law, namely, of Bruno the Nolan; the law underlying the historical polar play of brother opposites generated by a common father. The law is as follows:] (1) Direct opposites, since they are evolved by a common power, are polarized for reunion by the coalescence of their antipathies. (2) As opposites, nevertheless, their respective destinies will remain distinctly diverse. (88-89)

What’s in those square brackets does all the work. It explicitly turns what’s being said into the principle behind the Wake, which is now a direct illustration of that great law, an example governed by it, as though what we see in the Wake is everywhere a reunion of opposites. Indeed, that’s the broad thesis of the Skeleton Key, which it shares with Campbell’s later work on what appears to him increasingly as monomyth, the one heroic story told everywhere and at every time.

But isn’t this approach to focus entirely on the content of what’s said, and to avoid the dimension of the act of utterance? The very repetition Campbell and Robinson find in the Wake, the way it appears to tell the same story over and over in various guises, would seem to indicate that one telling is never enough, that any coalescence of opposites is nothing more than a momentary stay, a prelude to their flying apart again. Earwicker and his attacker, for example, never seem to be clearly distinguished from one another, so that every apparently clear demarcation between them is likely to be upset almost immediately. The brothers multiply in their avatars, and the tables of correspondences among the main personages that Adaline Glasheen draws up in her three censuses sometimes shift considerably from one version to the next. The sheer repetition seems not so much a wealth of examples of the reunion of opposites, as a deep and persistent, even structuring anxiety about whether they do actually come together. If they do, why is once never even vaguely enough? The content of the statement, that opposites come together, is undermined everywhere by the fact of its countless repetition. Every repetition seems to say covertly, Well, that didn’t work, maybe this one will.

We get the same undermining in so many other aspects of the Wake. When Earwicker meets the Cad in I.2, he says he is innocent, but what gives away the game and catches the Cad’s suspicion is the simple fact that he’s said it in the first place, without provocation and out of the blue. HCE never knows when or whether he’s saying more about himself than he realizes. His moments of self-praise tend to be undone by other less flattering stories that occupy the same space as the ones he wants to tell, carried in the same words. His great outburst of civic pride in his achievements in III.3–his building of Dublin and wooing of ALP–is also the story of a marital rape. When every word stands to be a pun in any of 60 or so languages, we don’t so much have a unity of meaning as the certainty that for any reader, beginning with HCE himself, the very words you speak may be carrying a hidden and uneliminable testimony against you. It is, in short, hard to think of a book that is less like the unification of opposites than Finnegans Wake.

Campbell and Robinson’s approach is top-down. They begin with abstractions so broad as to be empty, accommodating any and every content: “opposites,” “polarities,” “reunion,” and so on. These oppositions then become blurred: as soon as you try to find a pure version of one, you find out it’s mixed with something else. But that, I would suggest, is not the experience of reading Finnegans Wake. What we find first of all is not a schema of oppositions ranged one against the other. To get such an abstraction, you’ve actually got to work rather hard, and tease it out of a text in which it’s not easily apparent. (Critically, it takes quite a time for that work to emerge: Campbell and Robinson’s Skeleton Key quite amazingly appears only five years after the Wake itself. We have, to name only a few, Adaline Glasheen’s three censuses between 1956 and 1977; Clive Hart’s Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake in 1962; and Roland McHugh’s The Sigla of Finnegans Wake in 1976, four years before his Annotations.) What the reader encounters is nothing as clear-cut as oppositions. Instead, it’s a multiplicity of differences, where even the one word can appear divided against itself, with other meanings, even other languages, nestled within it and occupying its space. We can read Bruno’s motto itself, In Tristitia Hilaris Hilaritate Tristis, that way. In sadness itself there is always cheer to be found, and in cheerfulness sorrow. One never finds a pure sadness, a pure cheerfulness, one only abstracts them after the event. To imagine these pairings and conceptual oppositions as coming first is wishful: if only the world in all its contingency and irreducible difference were just the product of a simple and pure set of laws that have already accounted for everything, and for the sense of the world.

But that wishful process of making sense of everything through one magical and reassuring schema is figured within the book too. When for the sleeper every word may carry an unwanted freight that might just be giving the game away behind your back, it’s a defensive and wishful action to try to arrange everything into simple pairings: the things you want and the things you don’t, the desire to possess and claim, and the desire to abandon and fly from, the good things and the bad things. But it’s a never-ending process of winnowing out, and one with the seeds of its own failure already there. To say, as one is forced to, that these categories never really exist in a pure form but are always mixed in with their opposites may be little more than a face-saving way of saying that if you start off from abstract oppositions, you quickly find that it just doesn’t work. That Brunist schema of opposites, then, doesn’t represent the principle on which the book works, a law governing its wisdom, so much as something the book shows failing everywhere, the dreamer’s desperate and endless strategy  of defense. Finnegans Wake is not so much a modernist version of Brunism as a demonstration of the impossibility of now being a Brunist.

And it is, isn’t it, a rather silly law. Is there really any such thing as a “historical polar play of brother opposites generated by a common father”? Would any historian, or philosopher of history, or anthropologist for that matter, seriously argue that history is the product of battling abstract polarities? Garrett Deasy might, with his confidence that “all history moves towards one great goal,” but he hardly stands for the world-view that Ulysses endorses. Bruno is an armature rather than a law: a way of constructing an elaborate fiction, no more the lesson of Finnegans Wake than that earlier armature, the Odyssey, was the lesson of Ulysses.

Trigram

I’m not sure how many occurrences of the trigrams HCE and ALP there are, in all their forms, in Finnegans Wake.  I’m not even sure how you’d count them, or what would count as an occurrence. Obviously, any three words whose first letters give us the acrostic will count: so, without dispute, “Howth Castle and Environs” on the very first page, with caps to draw attention to itself (03.03: which seems a very fitting place to find the first trigram, and in the familiar edition it even has a line to itself, at the end of the first paragraph). Barely any less obviously, any permutation of the combination will count just as well: again without dispute, “To the continuation of that celebration until Hanandhunigan’s extermination!” (06.20-21), which is, I think, the first of the permuted trigrams.

But let’s stop here for a moment. There are already a number of things worth noting here. 

• The first is the simple one that this acrostic I just cited isn’t quite continuous: there’s an “until” between the first word and the second. That doesn’t invalidate anything, it just indicates that we can happily take the trigrams as having a certain internal dispersal. The words giving us those letters can be separated by other words that don’t count.

Well and good. How many words, then? What’s the maximum number of words we’d allow between an H and a C, say, before we decided that it’s not really a trigram? One? Two? Three? Eleven? And why would we choose that number? How could we be sure that whatever n we’d name, there wouldn’t be an occurrence with separation n+1 that it really makes sense to think of as a trigram, because Humphrey’s written all over it thematically?

• The second is that this acrostic is also already multiple. We have another C before we get to the main act, and the H is doubled internally in the word it introduces: “To the continuation of that celebration until Hanandhunigan’s extermination!” This particular repetition seems to emphasize the trigram, to make sure we don’t miss it. And repetition per se seems appropriate anyway, in general: one of the things that characterizes Earwicker is, after all, a stammer. Many occurrences that like this one are formed within a single word seem quite unproblematic: “Humme the Cheapner, Esc” (28.18-19) emphasizes the acrostic with that internal Che—and that Earwicker is accused of cheapening all sorts of things is, of course, at the heart of his problems.

But then, again, why stop there? Why these Hs, Cs and Es rather than the others in the sentence? Why not also, “To the continuation of that celebration until Hanandhunigan’s extermination!” I’m not saying we should include them, I’m just asking on what grounds we could rigorously exclude them. Could we give a clear set of incontrovertible rules for it, any more than we could put a firm and non-arbitrary limit on n?

There’s a lovely and complex example combining both of these on page 57, where the dispersal of the HCE trigram around an occurrence of the ALP trigram gives us the unexpected image of Earwicker embracing Anna Livia (and in a quite literal sense—it’s what the letters do): “Before he fell hill he filled heaven: a stream, alplapping streamlet, coyly coiled um [Hum, Humphrey], cool of her curls” (57.10-12). Chapter I.3 begins with the high chest-note C that finishes off the triumphant and scurrilous Ballad of Persse O’Reilly from the end of the previous chapter: “Chest Cee!” (48.01). Don’t the internal occurrence and repetition of the letters serve to emphasize that all of this has been about barely anything other than HCE all along?

• Which brings us to a third possibility. Can we have an incomplete trigram?  What about the simple word “he,” which we could hardly do without? Doesn’t it suggest not only its continuation into the trigram, but also the possibility of a trigram that—as with so many utterances in Joyce, beginning with all those never-to-be completed sentences that mark the interior monologues in Ulysses—trails off incomplete under the weight of a guilt it can no longer countenance? Every time the word “he” occurs, then, it potentially bears this freight: “he” is an HCE that cannot quite speak its name, that stops at the apparently more neutral, noncommittal pronoun, unable to prevent that very incompletion from being a form of signature. We know that the word “he” signals guilt anyway every time it refers to Earwicker, as his guilt is everywhere in the book: what the incomplete trigram does is repeat that thematic concern on the level of the letter. Go to the end of the book, and part of its effect is that the final expected P of ALP never arrives, any more than the full stop: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” (628.15-16). That loss gets emphasised even more in Danis Rose’s version, with its restoration of a lost word that’s also noted by Henkes and Bindervoet: “A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the” (493). And in the final word, “the,” don’t we also have another final and quite appropriately incomplete occurrence of the HCE trigram? Again, my point is that we can never on principle exclude the possibility that there’s no longer any clear outside to those effects, some place in the text that would be immune to them—and, what’s more, that this indefinition and fuzziness of boundaries is itself a vital part of those effects of the trigram.

Rosebud

Charles Foster Kane is dying. Once he has said what will be his last word, “Rosebud,” rendered in that famous extreme close-up, the snowglobe he is holding slips from his hand and shatters on the floor. The noise brings in the nurse, and the next day, of course, his death is all over the world’s headlines. The reporter Thompson is told by his boss to find out what this “Rosebud” could possibly be, and Citizen Kane is under way. David Thomson’s marvellously idiosyncratic biography of Orson Welles, Rosebud (London: Little,Brown, 1996) points out that Kane is alone in this famous deathbed scene. The nurse enters only once she’s heard the glass shatter. There’s no one there to hear him say “Rosebud.” Thomson (the writer on the film rather than the writer in the film, the Tintin twin without the “p”) makes this the crux of his argument about the film. Why, he asks, does the final frames’ revelation of what Rosebud is strike so many viewers as false, as far too trivial for the weight it has in the film, as a miscalculation on Welles’s part? Thomson argues that this is precisely the point: it is trivial, sentimental, hollow, and that is exactly what it should be. The absence of anyone to hear that word turns everything in the film, newsreels and all, into Kane’s deathbed fantasy. This man who has lived out his life in public needs to imagine himself as having some purchase on public fantasy, as having some mystery at his heart. That the mystery turns out to be hollow is of no account at all. No one is there at the end to see the word on the burning sled, either. Except, of course, the camera, which has been there all the way through. The camera, this machine—and Kane is, after all, the age of mechanical reproduction itself—is posterity in the only form it takes here, and precisely because it is pure apparatus: not a person in sight.

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Film has never had any problems with the impersonality of narration. Quite the contrary, the problems come about when the apparatus starts trying to pretend that it’s not a machine but someone’s viewpoint. Most of the time, first-person shots in film are not as if seen through the eyes of a character in the film; they’re over-the-shoulder shots, showing you both the character and what they’re seeing. That small angle between the camera’s line of sight and the character’s is a wedge of separation that’s structurally important. Reduce it, and odd things happen. You can do this for brief shots: the lurching onward rush of the zombies from 28 Days Later, the awakening from unconsciousness to see blurred anxious faces peering down. But when you try to sustain it, you get odd effects, as in  Robert Montgomery’s 1946 The Lady in the Lake, where the camera itself plays Raymond Chandler’s detective, Philip Marlowe (except when Marlowe sees his image in a mirror, and we see that he’s the director, Robert Montgomery). What you get is not the plenitude of a subjectivity that’s finally met its adequate technical expression, but a film full of anxious addresses to the camera, as though there’s something missing from this world, and everyone is pleading with or threatening the camera to get it back. But classical narrative theory has lots of trouble with impersonal narration. Everywhere, it rushes to fill in the void by inventing personlike “narrators” who can be supposed to know, or see, what we are being told. It may be worth resisting this rush, to consider what might be at stake in the possibility of an impersonal dimension to narration. We have that, certainly, with Finnegans Wake, where there’s barely anything like an “I” to connect all of this to. But don’t we also have it already in, for example, the very common use of third-person narration focalized on one of the characters? Take A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for example. Doesn’t the third person there work not as the point of view of some impossible, magical being with access to Stephen’s inner life, but as an aspect of Stephen himself, this proud, idiosyncratic boy and adolescent who is always viewing himself as if seen not quite by others (for whom he often has a complete disdain) but by the universe itself? His questions are how a poet, an intellectual, the forger of the uncreated conscience of his race no less, should behave. This is the dimension lent it by the third person, one that would disappear if we were to transcribe Portrait entirely into the first person of its final diary entries. For the Wake, too, the Kane-like fantasy is everywhere in the first four chapters in particular, as they endlessly stage that unanswerable question of how the world seems to the unconscious, troubled sleeper.

Not I

Samuel Beckett’s 1973 play Not I  is barely 16 pages long. In it, the stage is dark except for a tight spotlight on a woman’s mouth some 8 feet above the stage. Mouth (the only name she’s given) babbles, laughs, screams, sometimes even falls momentarily silent. The story she tells, in fragments with barely a single complete sentence among them, is of a lonely and isolated life: parents who vanished early, a childhood in an orphanage, some sort of punishment, a court case, and being all but speechless until a sudden flood of words very late in a long life. All this is told in the third person. Occasionally, Mouth seems to be responding to some sort of question from elsewhere. On four occasions, she stops and insists vehemently on the third person (“… what? … who? … no! … she! ..”). On those occasions, a dimly seen Auditor clad in a hooded djellaba downstage left responds with “simple sideways raising of arms and their falling back, in a gesture of helpless compassion,” each one less than the one before, and the final one barely perceptible. The words of the title are never spoken.

Third-person is a defence, and the only one left. Who did all of this happen to? Someone else: not I.

This may be rather useful for thinking about one important aspect of what’s happening in Finnegans Wake. Not I is an intense distillation of something central to the Wake, and which is going to become a focus in chapter I.2.

On the first page of the book, long before anything else in recorded history, we have the sleeping giant spread out across Dublin. There’s no first person here, or even really anyone for it to happen to, just a vast, inert, profoundly unconscious body, with its head at Howth and its toes in Phoenix Park. Over the page, we are immediately plunged into all sorts of dark and barely comprehended conflicts, which would suggest that this is at very least a troubled sleep. Out of these conflicts, a succession of figures emerges. First of all, there’s “Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand” (4.18), who also seems to be called “Wassaily Booslaeugh of Riesengeborg” (5.5-6). That he’s “like Haroun Childeric Eggeberth” (4.32) and “He addle liddle phifie Annie hugged the little craythur” (4.28-29) will in retrospect tie this Finnegan to HCE and ALP, neither of whom have yet arisen except in those trigrams. And as this Bygmester Finnegan is a builder engaged in building something like the tower of Babel, it’s hardly surprising that proper names, like everything else in language, should be sliding around a lot here. He’s also, already, part of a repetition: “Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Mister Finnagain!” (5.9-10). No sooner are we introduced to him than he’s gone again, dead, fallen off his wall, and we’re reminded again of that “brontoichthyan form outlined aslumbered” (7.20-21). Kate shows us through the Waterloo museyroom, and we’re introduced to another avatar, the Willingdone: this time it’s not just an accident that leads to his demise, but the plotting of the sons. We find echoes of the same figures in the old chronicles (13.33-14.15). We get another version of him with Jarl van Hoother and the story of the Prankquean, which offers an explanation of how the sons got turned against the father. And then we’re back at Tim Finnegan’s wake again, with the corpse aroused by spilt whisky, and apparently greatly disturbed by certain mentions of his daughter and then his wife. The thing that finally seems to quiet the corpse down and lead to his slipping back into unconsciousness is the chapter’s final assurance that yet another version of him, his replacement HCE, is already on his way.

So, repeatedly we have a sleeper, disturbed by struggles that are not yet at all clear, and returning to unconsciousness not because the struggles are resolved in any way at all (or even fully expressed), but because they can be passed on to someone else, whose purpose is to bear these conflicts with the distance afforded by denial: not I. As Freud argues, one of the functions of a dream – if we do even have a dream here – may be the attempt to prolong sleep. HCE is thus in this sense not at all the sleeper, but a sort of alibi, a figure onto which all sorts of unsayable and even unthinkable matters can be displaced. HCE is at at least two removes from the sleeper, that silent and inert giant underlying everything: he’s at very least the replacement for a stand-in (Finnegan) – and in the course of getting there, we’ve also had those more fleeting stand-ins, the Willingdone and Jarl van Hoother. The name, perhaps, is warning enough. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker? Really? (We should be no less suspicious of Anthony Burgess’s claim that the real waking name of this family is Porter: a publican called Mr Porter is like calling your butcher Mr Chops – or your two sons, a writer and a postman, Shem the Penman and Shaun the Post. They are, after all, and as the next chapter will say about HCE, occupational agnomens (30.3)).

HCE, then, is a screen onto which deeper worries and fears get projected, a screen on which they can be both brought to some sort of obscure light and at the same time denied: not I (because there’s no I here anyway), he. Because of this distance, HCE can be the object of the most fervent and repeated denunciation, as well as the object of an unabashed wish-fulfilling admiration, in rapid alternation but also, because of the incessant undermining the wordplay performs, sometimes even in the same sentence. The sheer onslaught of all this repetition, the sheer relentlessness and self-accusing ferocity of it, is a dimension that’s altogether missing from Campbell and Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. For them, HCE is Everyman, an eternal and unchanging archetypal story that therefore is bound to repeat. What they miss in their Jungian reading is perhaps the genuinely Freudian dimension of drive: the way this story is repeatedly uncomfortable and mortifying, but for all that is powerless to stop itself, like the torrent of words from Mouth in Beckett’s play.

Prankquean

The story of the Prankquean in I.1 is full of the threefold symmetries and repetitions that characterize folk tales. I ran them up in three columns to emphasize the similarities, and then almost immediately found out that Eric Rosenbloom had done exactly the same thing at his website: http://www.rosenlake.net/fw/Prankquean.pdf. I like his better, so I’ve taken mine down and put a link to his.