Bishop - Joyce's Book of The Dark Finnegans Wake

JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK
Finneyans Wake
J o y c E ' S B 0 o K
J 0 H N B ISH 0 P
I 986
o F T H E D A R K
Finne8ans Wake
The University of Wisconsin Press . MAD ISO N. W I S CON SIN

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11 10 9 8 7 6
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Ubrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bishop, John, 1948-
Joyce's book of the dark. Finnegans wake.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Joyce, James. 1882-1941. Finnegans wake.
l. Title. II. Title: Finnegans wake.
PR6019.09F5566 1986 823'.912 86-40045
ISBN: 0-299-10824-4 (pbk: alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-299-10824-3 (pbk: alk. paper)

For my mother,
Anne Skomsky Bishop,
in memory of my father,
Walter Bishop
(1917- 1 9 83)
Contents
Maps and Figures ix

Abbreviations xi
Etymologies xiii
Acknowledgments xv
An Introduction: On Obscurity 3
Chapter 1 "Reading the Evening World" 26
Chapter 2 Nothing in Particular: On English Obliterature 42
Chapter 3 "Finnegan" 66
Chapter 4 Inside the Coffin: Finnegans Wake and the

Egyptian Book of the Dead 86
Chapter 5 The Identity of the Dreamer 126
Chapter 6 Nocturnal Geography: How to Take "Polar

Bearings" 146
vii
Chapter 7 Vico's "Night of Darkness": The New Science
and Finnegans Wake 174
Chapter 8 "Meoptics" 216
Chapter 9 Earwickerwork 264
Chapter 10 "Litters": On Reading Finnegans Wake 305
Chapter II "The Nursing Mirror" 317
Chapter 12 "Anna Livia Plurabelle": A Riverbabble

Primer 336
Notes 389
Index 463
viii Contents
Maps and Fi8ures
Map A. "Howth Castle and Environs" 32

Relief Map B. "Our mounding's mass" 34
Map A'. The Western European world 160
Relief Map B'. A "Wastended" "Neuropean"
"Whorled" 162
Figure 2. I. Etymological chart: *men- 60

Figure 4. I. Coffin text: Egyptian Supernature 97
Figure 7. I. Etymological chart: *gen- 186
Figure 7.2. Etymological chart: *leg- 200
Figure 7.3. Etymological chart: *ar- 204
Figure 8. I. The ideal or schematic eye 228
Figure 8.2. "one eyegonblack" 228
Figure 8.3. "truetoflesh colours" 229
Figure 8.4. "traumscrapt" 229
Figure 9. I. Etymological chart: *dheu- 266
Figure 9.2. The Facts of Speech 268
Figure 9.3. "Headmound" or "the Mole" 277
Figure 9.4. The "otological life" of "H. C. Earwicker" 278
Figure 9.5. Etymological chart: *bha- 292
Figure 9.6. Earwigs on parade 296
Figure 11.1. Mannekin-Pis 334
ix
Abbreviations
All references to Finneaans Wake in the following pages are identified by page and line
number-the figure 389.18- 19, for instance, designating Finneaans Wake, page 389,
lines 18 and 19. Books and chapters of Finneaans Wake are given in Roman numerals:
III.iv refers to Book III, chapter iv. The footnotes and marginal notes in lI.ii are
identified by the letters R, L, and F preceding the number of the note: 299.F2 designates
the second footnote on page 299.
Other works frequently cited in the text are identified parenthetically by the following
abbreviations:
D JamesJoyce. Dubliners. New York: The Viking Press, 191>1.

ID Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation ofDreams. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: Avon
Books, 1965.
lJ Richard Ellmann.}ames}oyce. R.evised ed. New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982.
L The Letters of}ames}oyce. Vol. 1 ed. by Stuart Gilbert. New York: The Viking Press, 1957.
Vols 2 and 3 ed. by Richard Ellmann. New York: The Viking Press, 1966.
NS Giambattista Vico. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin
and Max Harold Fisch. Revised ed. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984. As is customary in
the scholarship on Vieo, references are to paragraph number. rather than to page number.
OED The Oxford EnSlish Dictionary. Compact Ed. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. 1971.
P JamesJoyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a YounS Man. New York: Viking. 191>4.
U James Joyce. Ulysses. New York: Random House. 1961.
xi
The following abbreviations are used throughout the text to identify languages and
dialects:
Alb. Albanian Germ. Germanic O.E. Old English

Am. American Gi. Gipsy O.Fr. Old French
Anglo-Ir. Anglo- Irish Gr. Greek O.N. Old Norse
Arm. Armenian Heb. Hebrew Per. Persian
Ar. Arabic Hu. Hungarian Port. Portuguese
Br. British I.E. Indo-European Pro. Proven~al
Co. Cornish It. Italian R.R. Rhaeto- Romanic
Da. Danish Ki. Kiswahili Russ. Russian
Du. Dutch L. Latin Sans. Sanskrit
Eng. English L.L. Late Latin Sp. Spanish
Fr. French M.E. Middle English Sw.G. Swiss German
Fi. Finnish Med.L. Medieval Latin Turk. Turkish
Gael. Gaelic M.L. Modern Latin We. Welsh
Ger. German Nor. Norse
Other abbreviations and symbols:
arch. archaic
C. century
mod. modern
pp. past participle
pres. p. present participle
sl. slang
designates an etymologically reconstructed form
< "is derived from," in historical linguistics
"is equivalent to"
t indicates river-names (in chapter 12)
xii Abbreviations
Etymolo8ies
Because they are susceptible to varied interpretations and constructions, the

etymologies discussed in the following pages have been drawn freely from a number of
sources. Works consulted in the writing of this book include the following:
Benveniste, Emile. Indo-European Lanauaae and Society. Trans. Elizabeth Palmer. Coral
Gables, Fla.: Univ. of Miami Press, 1973.
Buck, Carl Darling. A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European
Tonaues: A Contribution to the History of Ideas. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1949·
Grandsaignes d'Hauterive, R. Dictionnaire des racines des lanaues europeennes. Paris:
Larousse, 1949.
Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. Greek-Enalish Lexicon. Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1871.
Onions, C. T. et al. The Oxford Dictionary of Enalish Etymoloay. Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1966.
Partridge, Eric. Oriains: A Short Etymoloaical Dictionary of the Enalish Lanauaae. New
York: Macmillan, 1959.
Pokorny, Julius. Indoaermanisches Etymoloaisches Worterbuch. Bern, 1959.
Shipley, Joseph T. The Oriains of Enalish Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-
European Roots. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984.
Skeat, William Walter. An Etymoloaical Dictionary of the Enalish Lanauaae. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1910.
XIll
Watkins, Calvert. "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans" and "Appendix of Indo-
European Roots," in The American Herita8e Dictionary of the En8lish Lan8ua8e.
Ed. William Morris. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969.
Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Lan8ua8e. College Edition. New York:
World Publishing Company, 1964.
Weekley, Ernest. The Romance of Words. 1949; rpt New York: Dover, 1961.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1976.
xiv Etymolo8ies
Acknowled8ments
To thank everyone who has contributed in one way or another to the writing of this book
would require the invention of a character named "Here Comes almost Everybody" who
had an effect on me. Out of this warm body of people. I wish to thank in particular
all those who read and discussed parts of this work as they emerged out of evolving
drafts: Ann Banfield. Suzanne Bick. Craig Buckwald. Mitchell Breitwieser. James Breslin.
William Chace. Vincent Cheng. Jay Fliegelman. Phillip Herring. Catherine Judd. D. A.
Miller. Josephine McQuail. Mary Ann O·Farrell. Brendan a Hehir. David Riggs. Shirley
Samuels. and Theoharis C. Theoharis. I owe more extended and special thanks to
Michael Andre Bernstein. Robert Polhemus. Ralph Rader. Thomas Parkinson. and John
Henry Raleigh for the suggestions and encouragement they offered after reading a pen-
ultimate version of the manuscript. Thanks go also to all those students in seminars at
the University of California at Berkeley who. reminding me steadily of the general per-
plexities felt by readers of FinneBans Wake. forced me to maintain a broad perspective on
the book and to refine my ways of articulating an understanding of its lucid darknesses.
For their patient assistance in the nightmare business of proofreading. editing. and help-
ing to prepare a finished manuscript. thanks go to Richard Curtis. Bronwyn Freier.
Richard Gringeri. Stephen Kusche. Stanley Liljefelt. Mark Winokur. and Gabrielle
Welford. my superhuman typist. I am additionally indebted to the Regents of the Univer-
sity of California for a research fellowship that made possible the consolidation of a
manuscript. and to the English departments of the University of California at Berkeley
and Stanford University for their general support.
In another vein. I owe a heavy debt of gratitude to all those students of the Wake
without whose work the writing of this book would have been impossible. My own
writing draws so freely from the following standard works of Wakean reference that
a blanket statement of indebtedness must here take the place of running notational
acknowledgment:
xv
James S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce's
"Finneaans Wake." 1959; rpt. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1974.
Adaline Glasheen. Third Census of "Finneaans Wake": An Index of the Characters and
Their Roles. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1977.
Clive Hart. A Concordance to "Finneaans Wake". Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,
1963·
Clive Hart. "Index of Motifs," in Structure and Motif in "Finneaans Wake". Evanston,
Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1962, pp. 211-47.
Matthew J. C. Hodgart and Mabel P. Worthington. Sona in the Works ofJames Joyce. New
York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959.
Roland McHugh. Annotations to "Finneaans Wake." Baltimore: The John Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1980.
Louis O. Mink. A "Finneaans Wake" Gazetteer. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1979.
Brendan 0 Hehir. A Gaelic Lexicon for "Finneaans Wake." Berkeley and Los Angeles:
Univ. of California Press, 1967.
Brendan 0 Hehir and John M. Dillon. A Classical Lexicon for "Finneaans Wake." Berke-
ley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1977.
Anyone familiar witI- these books will recognize their imprint throughout this one; I
have tried, wherever possible, to derive all "translations" of Wakese into English from
these sources, all unavoidable deviations from those sources being my own.
Finally I wish to express my gratitude to the staff of the University of Wisconsin Press
for their care in seeing this book through production; to Allen Fitchen, director of
the press, for his responsiveness, encouragement, and faith in my project, and to Jack
Kirshbaum, my editor, for his patience and his counsel on everything ranging from con-
junction emplacement to chapter content. Warmest thanks go to Ann Banfield, Mitchell
Breitwieser, Jay Fliegelman, Catherine Judd, D. A. Miller, Mary Ann O'Farrell, Dennis
Weiss, and my sisters, Jeanne and Nooshie, for their support, their enmeshment in this
book's darker undertext, and their willingness to listen to "things that will not stand
being written about in black and white." Somewhere among them, they heard it all.
This book is dedicated to my mother, Anne Skomsky Bishop, in memory of my father,
Walter (1917-1983).
xvi Acknow]edBments
Finneaans Wake
An Introduction:
On Obscurity
"IN OUR OWN NIGHTTIME"

Sooner rather than later, a reader of Finneaans Wake would do well to jus-
tify to himself its stupefying obscurity; for as even its most seasoned readers
know, "Finneaans Wake is wilfully obscure. It was conceived as obscurity,
it was executed as obscurity, it is about obscurity."1 And to this one might
add that nothing will ever make Finneaans Wake not obscure. Stories of
the pains Joyce took to deepen the opacity of Work in Proaress during its
composition only intensify the impression thrown off by the finished text.
Jacques Mercanton recalls finding Joyce and Stuart Gilbert "going over a pas-
sage that was 'still not obscure enough'" and gleefully "inserting Samoyed
words into it";2 Padraic Colum recalls "from time to time [being] asked to
suggest a word that would be more obscure than the word already there,"
only to have Joyce reply "five times out of six," in what amounts to an ad-
mission that his designs were darkly principled, "I can't use it."3 The essen-
tial question one wants answered in hearing these stories and in probing the
murkinesses of the text itself is whether this relentless obscuration was
really arbitrary and wilful-"sheer perversity," in Louise Bogan's phrase 4-
or whether it was leading somewhere that would repay the study, time, and
labor which Finneaans Wake demands of its reader. Joyce himself was un-
evenly helpful; as he put it to Frank Budgen on the less baffling matter
An Introduction 3
of Ulysses, "If I can throw any obscurity on the subject let me know" (L,
III, 261).
Not very expansively, he replied to the growing news that his readers
simply were not following him by wondering out loud, with lamblike inno-
cence, to William Bird: "About my new work-do you know, Bird, I confess
I can't understand some of my critics, like Pound or Miss Weaver, for in-
stance. They say it's obscure. They compare it, of course, with Ulysses. But
the action of Ulysses was chiefly in the daytime, and the action of my new
work takes place chiefly at night. It's natural things should not be so clear at
night, isn't it now?" (f], 590). Typically, he defended his methods by displac-
ing attention from his style to his subject, as he did again when replying to
objections raised by Jacques Mercanton over the obscurity of a passage
in Work in Progress: "It is night. It is dark. You can hardly see. You sense
rather."5 In Joyce's view, all obscurity came with the terrain he surveyed,
and not with his treatment of it: "If there is any difficulty in reading what I
write it is because of the material I use. In my case the thought is always
simple. "6 He was only pointing out in all these remarks that "obscurity" is
"darkness" rendered verbal (L. obscuritas, "darkness"), and that the night,
his subject, was intractably obscure. Only a little reflection, I think, will
demonstrate that the systematic darkening of every term in Finneaans Wake
was an absolute necessity, dictated by Joyce's subject; and that Finneaans
Wake has exactly what so cranky a critic as F. R. Leavis wished it had and of
course judged it did not: "the complete subjection-subjugation-of the
medium to the uncompromising, complex and delicate need that uses it. "7
Suppose only that Joyce accomplished the least part of what he claimed
when, over and over again throughout the 1920S and 1930S, he said that he
"wanted to write this book about the night" U], 695):8 "I reconstruct the
nocturnal life. "9 What would this sort of "reconstruction" have entailed? We
might begin to appreciate the difficulties he would have faced by resorting
to a simple experiment, an "appeal to experience" of the sort on which all
modern forms of knowing-and the novel-are based. Suppose, that is, that
we charged ourselves with the task of providing in chronological order a
detailed account of everything that occurred to us not last night (such an
account would be far too sketchy to be useful) but in the first half hour of
last night's sleep; or better yet, suppose that we fall asleep tonight intent on
preserving for liberal study in the morning a detailed memory of the first
half hour of sleep. "The charges are, you will remember, the chances are,
you won't" (254.23-24). What we are likely to recall of this little slice of
"Real life" (260.F3)-"you were there"-is a gap of obscurity far more stu-
4 JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

pefying than anything Joyce ever wrote. The "hole affair" (535.20 [and a
"hole," unlike a "whole," has no content]) will likely summon up a sus-
tained "blank memory" (515.33)-"What a wonderful memory you have
too!" (295.15-16)-which in turn should generate vast "Questions" (I.vi)
and "puzzling, startling, shocking, nay, perturbing" doubts (136.21-22)
about the possibility of literately filling in this blank "m'm'ry" (460.20
["m'm'ry," obviously, is "memory" with severe holes in it]). "Now just wash
and brush up your memoirias a little bit" (5°7.3°): even were we to sim-
plify this exercise for the benefit of members of "the Juke and Kellikek fami-
lies" (33.24-25)-these were a clan of morons, prominent both in Fin-
ne8ans Wake and in the press of Joyce's day, whom generations of inbreeding
had reduced to a state of breathtaking feeblemindedness-even were we to
simplify this exercise by stipulating that we recall anythin8 that passed
through our minds in the half hour of "real life" under scrutiny, it isn't clear
that there would be a great deal to say. Indeed, many of us will have only
total "recoil" of "the deleteful hour" in question (160.35, 348.8, 446.8 [not
"recall"]; 118.32). A delightful Irish saying captures perfectly this kind of
"recoil": "when a person singing a song has to stop because he forgets the
next verse," according to the Annotations, "he says 'There's a hole in the bal-
lad.'" Some such perturbing "hole in [the] tale" (323.22 [of our "real life"])
seems also to entrench itself in the head when we begin to "recoil" the "hole
affair" we endured last night. It is not simple obscurity that rises to meet us;
"quite as patenly there is a hole in the ballet trough which the rest fell out"
(253.20-21; cf. 211.19 [that "trough," not "through," deepens the emptiness
of the "hole affair"]).
Was one dreaming throughout this half hour? And how does one know?
Anyone's "m'm'ry" will attest that the average morning's catch of dreams
runs exceedingly thin when compared to the length of time one lay asleep
"during [the] blackout" (617.14). Indeed, some people claim never to dream
at all; people who do remember dreams are not likely to remember having
them every night; and only the insane will claim to remember having un-
dergone eight hours of nonstop dreaming on any night. Authorities on the
subject will help us as little as our own "maimeries" (348.7 ["maimed"
"memories"]): they have conducted for centuries an "embittered and appar-
ently irreconcilable dispute as to whether the mind sleeps at night" (ID,
629), arguing whether we dream continuously throughout the length of
sleep and simply fail to remember most of what we dream, or whether
dreaming interrupts sleep only erratically. 10 Even the most respected of these
authorities will not diminish our perplexities: in Freud's view, for instance,
An Introduction 5
"a dreamless sleep is best, the only proper one. There ought to be no mental
activity in sleep." II If we simply assume, however, that "no mental activity"
occupied the half-hour of "real life" we wished, in detail, to reconstruct,
questions of an unsuspected order of obscurity would rise up to meet us. For
dreams in their own ways may be obscure, and Finneaans Wake may also
seem obscure, but both dreams and Finneaans Wake will only seem radi-
antly translucid when compared to those lengthy intervals of "real life" that
occupy us in the space of sleep outside of dreams. Much of Finneaans Wake,
of necessity, is about just this. What happens here? And how does one know?
"Remember and recall, Kullykeg!" (367.II [Kallikak]).
One of many reasons why Joyce's repeated claims about Finneaans Wake
have seemed so improbable for so long is that people have customarily
treated the book, at Joyce's invitation, as the "representation of a dream"-
doing so, however, as if dreams took place only in theory, and without con-
cretely engaging the very strange and obscure question of what a dream is.
Recollectible dreams are the rare, odd landmarks of sleep, and certainly not
its norm; they rise out of the murk with a stunning clarity when compared
to the darker, lengthier extents of the night that everywhere fall between.
As a "nonday diary" (489.35) seeking to "reconstruct the night," Finneaans
Wake is not about a dream in any pedestrian sense of that word; treating it
as a book about a "dream" is like treating Ulysses as a book about "human
experience": both terms are far too broad to be useful. Joyce's comments on
the relationship of Finneaans Wake to dreams and dreaming-comments
that have bothered many readers-were therefore often appropriately cagey:
to Edmond Jaloux he said that the book "would be written 'to suit the es-
thetic of the dream'," as indeed it must if it were to portray the average
night in which dreams, "erigenating from next to nothing" (4.36-5.1),
punctuated the dark Ul, 546); and to Ole Vinding, comparably, he said "it's
like a dream" Ul, 696) .12 But as many as his comments as not orient us less
clearly in a "dream" per se than in "one great part of every human exis-
tence" (L, III, 146) "about which we know almost nothing"-in the night
as an obscure totalityY In the critical year 1927, when it became clear to
Joyce that readers who had championed Ulysses were withdrawing their sup-
port, and when he began cultivating their encouragement by talking about
abandoning Work in Proaress to James Stephens, he replied to Harriet Shaw
Weaver's objection that parts of his new work were "incorrigibly absurd" by
remarking, "There is no such absurd person as could replace me except the
incorrigible god of sleep and no waster quite so wasteful" (L, 1,252). He was

implying what he said often and elsewhere more directly: "I want to de-
scribe the night itself." 14 And of the night: "Here is the unknown." 15
"Recoil" again that "blank memory" of the "hole affair" we all went
"trough," "even in our own nighttime" (7.21). If we momentarily brush
aside all the evident obscurities and arbitrarily assume that a continuous
stream of "thought" purled through our minds in the half hour of "real life"
we wished, in detail, to reconstruct, we would face the new problem not
simply of replacing a "blank memory" with a presumed content, but of find-
ing a means by which to do so. Particularly if we think of sleep (as opposed
to "dreams") as that part of the night which cannot be remembered, this
would mean finding a way of "reveiling" (220.33 [note the occluding "veil"])
an interval oflife inherently barred from "mummery" (535.30 ["memory"]) .
Since "in the night the mummery" (310.23) is masked (or "mummed"), all
such attempts to "recoil" will seem "unaveiling" (503.26). Indeed, it is as if
the persons we become in the "veiled world" (139.1 [ofthe night]) say"good-
bye" to any potentially retrievable "mummeries" as soon as they "go by":
"Dear gone mummeries, goby!" (535.27). As if under hypnosis (Gr. hypnos,
"sleep"), "[we] will remain ignorant of all ... and draw a veil" (238.15- 17).
Can we nonetheless, by some determined exertion or inferential indirec-
tion, "reconstruct" a half hour of "real life" of which we have no "mummery"
and which no amount of volition ("would") orobligation ( "should") allows
us to know? "You wouldnt should as youd remesmer. I hypnot" (360.23-24)
because sleep (hypnos) puts us in a trance ("mesmer") that moves us into
"Metamnisia" (158.10 [Gr. "metamnesia," "beyond forgetfulness"]); and
from there, we find everything "leading slip by slipper to a general amnesia"
(122.5-6). What becomes obscure now is not simply the presumed content
of the "blank memory" we all "recoil," but the operation of memory itself,
and of "mummery's" darker underside, in forgetting. Any reconstruction of
the night would of necessity have to open up bottomless inquiries into the
complementary relations of memory and amnesia, and into our relations
with the past. Since memory is the network of operations that gives us a
sense of indivisible "sameness"-of "identity"-in time, what would be-
come equally obscure, even questionable, is the stability of "identity." For
"as I now with platoonic leave recoil" (348.8), thinking about sleep is like
being badly in "Platonic love": I have no real contact with the person in
question, who seems to have taken "leave," at least of my senses. Worse,
since presumably "I have something inside of me talking to myself" (522.26),
but I cannot "recoil" it, it must be that ''I'm not meself at all" (487.18).
An Introduction 7
"You," therefore, "may identify yourself with the him in you" (496.25-26)-
where that "him" would refer to a "person suppressed for the moment"
(280.12- 13).
Again, however, we might bypass all these obscure problems by suppos-
ing-improbably-that something awakened us after a half-hour of sleep
last night, and enabled us to rise out of the murk of our own lives with dim
memories and fleeting impressions that "something happened that time I
was asleep" (307.F5): a dream. Although this would put us "mehrer the
murk" (506.24 ["nearer the mark"]), a Beckettian cry ofrelief-"At last, a
brain with content!"-would be far too hastily vented; for the retrieval of
this dream "from the wastes a' sleep" (64.1) would actually stir up more
(Ger. mehr) rather than less "murk" (hence "mehrer the murk"). How do
we know that the dream shakily falling together in "mummery" really hap-
pened during sleep and is not, for instance, a spontaneous after-effect of
wakening? Since "we only know dreams from our memory of them after we
are awake" (ID, 76), not from direct experience, everything we "know"
is circumstantial, reaching us after the fact. 16 What we have rashly la-
beled a dream, then, might more accurately be called the "murmury" of a
dream (254.18). And since all such dreams occur to us-literally-when we
wake up and assume the conscious capacity to "remumble" them (295.4
["mumble"]), to articulate them to ourselves in "murmury" (254.18 ["mur-
murs"]), traducing them in the process, they will help only some in allow-
ing us to know what really happened in the clearer few minutes of the dark
half-hour that we wished, in detail, to reconstruct. This distinction is one
that Freud made by partitioning the dream into a "manifest content" (of
which the dreamer is conscious) and a "latent content" (of which the
dreamer is not): "dreams only show us the sleeper in so far as he is not sleep-
ing";17 the examination of "dreams is the royal road to the unconscious," not
the unconscious itself (ID, 647). Dreams in this customary sense, as Joyce
pointed out to Jacques Mercanton, are not what Finneaans Wake is about:
"'Work in Progress'? A nocturnal state, lunar. That is what I want to convey:
what goes on in a dream, during a dream. Not what is left over afterward, in
the memory. Afterward, nothing is left." 18
Even were we to disregard as sophistic the evident epistemological prob-
lems surrounding dreams, new problems would make difficult our attempts
to chronicle a half-hour fragment of the dark. For the question would arise
of how we might arrange the dream chronologically, in history's clock-time
and in linear script. Uncertainty would contaminate our knowledge of how
long the dream lasted, surely, and of when exactly in the half-hour under

our consideration it occurred. But even murkier questions would occlude
our sense of its evolution in time: on what image did this dream begin? and
what was going on immediately preceding its formation? On what last image
did the dream end? and what followed that? Merely to ask these questions is
to begin noting how bottomless any dream is in its obscurity, disappearing
into a point that Freud called its "navel," "where it reaches down into the
unknown" (ill, 143n., 564). Trying to ascertain what happened before the
first sketchy event that one recalls of any dream-"how the deepings did it
all begin" (428.5)-seems an exercise undertaken in vain, in vanity: "Fan-
tasy! funtasy on fantasy, amnaes fintasies!" (493.18). Thinking about these
nocturnal "fantasies," one finds "everything" (L. omnes) "leading slip by
slipper to a general amnesia" (hence" amnaes"), where thinking itself blurs
out into "emptiness" (L. vanitas) and a contentless "void" (L. vanus). Any
book purporting to reconstruct the night-and particularly an average
night stirred by dreams-would have to show us how and why and when
these "mummeries" (535.27 ["masked performances"]) bled up out of the
dark "from next to nothing" (4.36-5.1), and there forced themselves into
articulate "murmury."
Then, too, uncertainty would infect our knowledge not simply of the ex-
tension of the dream in linear time, but also of its own internal order in
time. No one remembers the experience of sleep, if at all, as a sequence of
events linked chronologically in time by cause and effect from the moment
his head hit the pillow to the time the alarm clock startled him into rational
accountability in the morning. Instead, memory of the night, often trig-
gered by a random gesture or thought, seems to arise by association, dim
particles of the dark standing out in "m'm'ry" and evoking others, and still
others, until, by a process of mnemonic linking, one has filled in the gaps
and reconstructed a spotty "m[e]m[o]ry" (460.20). How does one know that
this randomly drifting form of recollection does not replicate exactly the
order in which dreams sequentially unfolded in the night-apparent last
part first, apparent first part in the middle, "blackholes" (549.5) everywhere
else-and that what occurs to one as a jumble of disarranged impressions is
not just that: a jumble of disarranged impressions, perhaps concealing a se-
cret structure of its own, but perhaps not, upon which one imposes a co-
herent narrative structure after the fact in order to make logical sense of it?
Even supposing that we could dredge up a content for a half hour of "our
own nighttime" and could order it sequentially, there would remain the
vexing questions of what, if anything, the dream meant, and whether it was
worth figuring out: not everyone agrees that dreams are meaningful; and
An Introduction 9
not everyone who thinks that dreams are meaningful agrees on what dreams
mean. "It is night. It is dark." And it is all very obscure. Indeed, "we are
circumveiloped by obscuritads" (244.15 [note again the "circumveloping"
"veil"]) .
Some such exercise in "nightwatch service" (576.30) as the one we have
just undertaken is crucial to any reading ofjoyce's "nonday diary" because
it will begin-merely begin-to "reveil" the essential obscurity of the mate-
rial with which Finne8ans Wake is literately dealing: "reading [the] Evening
World" (28.20) as we experience it "even in our own nighttime" is not easy.
Such "night duty" (429.23) will also begin to "reveil" why darkness and
obscurity are integral aspects of Joyce's "book ofthe dark" (251.24), and not
mere mannerisms. Had Joyce made Finne8ans Wake less obscure than it
is, he would have annihilated everything about his material that is most es-
sential, most engaging, funniest, and most profound-rather in the same
way that an intrusive sweep of "floodlights" would destroy any nightscape
(134.18). The obscurity of Finne8ans Wake is its essence and its glory. In its
own artful form of "chiaroscuro, " the book renders the dark matters we have
considered eminently "clearobscure" (247.34 [the Eng. "chiaroscuro" de-
rives from the It. chiar-oscuro, "clear-dark"]).
As for that ample "blank memory" that we have left hovering uncomfor-
tably in mind, "shllwe help ... you t'rigolect a bit? yismik? yimissy?"
(234.25-26)-even while acknowledging that any such attempt "to recol-
lect" must be something of a "joke" opening into areas "of facetious mem-
ory"? (147.30-31 ["t'rigolect" plays on the Fr. ri8o/er, "to joke," while that
"yismik" "reveils" a resistantly unlifting "yashmak," the Moslem double
veil]). At the Wake's encouragement, then, "let's hear what science has to
say, pundit-the-next-best-king" (505.27-28), where the obscure word is "sci-
ence"; and as opposed to psychoanalysis, whose status as a science has been
in question since it originated, let's make this "real science," with wires and
meters and things that can be measured.
"HOW WE SLEEP"
Another, less troublesome reason why Finne8ans Wake may have seemed so
improbable as a reconstruction of the night, at least to readers of the last
three decades, is that many of them will have been indoctrinated into a far
different sense of sleep than the one which Joyce, living in an age dominated
by psychoanalysis, would have had. Anyone who has looked into the cur-

rent literature on dreams will have discovered a mass of facts about "REMs"
and "K-complexes" and "alpha waves" that Joyce could not possibly have
known. Since this literature inevitably affects the way in which we think
about sleep, it complicates the way in which we approach a book purport-
ing to reconstruct the night; for science claims to give true representations
of things, as opposed to eccentric and perverse ones. Problematically, then,
though it needs to be held in perspective, the new material cannot be ignored
without in some way relegating Finne8ans Wake to the position of a quirkily
dated legpull. Fortunately, any light on the dark being useful, it helps us
indirectly to fill in some of those roomy "blackholes" in our "m'm'ry." Here,
then, is a vastly simplified redaction of the current "facts," and some ques-
tions they raise about sleep and about the plausibility of Joyce's "book of the
dark." As it says there, "sifted science will do your arts good" (440.19-20).
The almost accidental discovery of "rapid-eye movements" (or "REMs")
in a sleep laboratory in the 1950S occasioned what some have considered a
revolution in the study of the night. 19 When sleep-researchers curious about
the causes of these odd rolling motions in the eyes of sleeping people began
systematically to awaken their dormant subjects, they almost always dis-
covered, beneath the twitching eyelids, "dreams." Sleep accompanied by
rapid-eye movements (or "REM sleep") therefore began rapidly to seem an
"objective" sign of dreaming and, beyond that, a universal one. People who
claimed never at all in their lives to dream, when awakened from REM
sleep, recounted the most vividly detailed dreams, and as volubly as neu-
rotics; yet when questioned about these dreams in the morning, they swore
that they had dreamed nothing at all. Others awakened in the middle of
REM sleep, who began comparably to recount dreams but dozed off in the
middle of their telling, recalled, when immediately reawakened, having
been awakened earlier, but not having dreamed. Over the decades, snow-
balling evidence of this kind began to show that everybody alive dreams,
and several times a night, but that the extreme volatility of the "maimeries"
involved makes dreams hard "t'rigolect": even people who do remember
their dreams by and large seem to recall only fractions. "We foregot at wik-
ing when ... the bleakfrost chilled our ravery": (338.30-31 ["when the
breakfast killed our reverie"]).
Because rapid-eye movements seem generally to accompany dreaming,
some people have come to regard them as the "somatic correlates" of "dreams. "
And dreaming in turn, far from being a purely psychogenetic disturbance,
has begun "to take on the proportions of an almost universal biological phe-
nomenon"20-"universal" because not only adult humans, but all forms of
An Introduction II
mammalian life, including newly born infants and unborn babies in the
uterus, also succumb to sleep disrupted by rapid-eye movements. 21 The gen-
eral picture emerging from the study of REM sleep is one of aggregating ob-
scurity and weirdness: it shows that nightly in sleep, roughly every ninety
minutes, for durations lasting anywhere from three to fifty minutes, every-
body in the world drifts into "a third state of existence," a dream-riddled
limbo that has also been called "paradoxical sleep"-"paradoxical" because
the person who has drifted into it is at once sleeping and not sleeping. While
his body lies paralytically immobilized and couldn't move if it wanted to-
"He's stiff" (6.22)-the eyes and brain seem to be partially awake and con-
ducting complex affairs in a world of hallucinated objects. Sleep researchers
had begun to observe, early in the course of these studies, evidently intri-
cate parallels between the movements and focal adjustments made by the
eyes in REM sleep, and the images that the dreaming subject believed him-
self to be seeing (in one famous case, the researcher wakening a sleeping
person whose eyes were twitching back and forth from left to right over and
over again learned that the dreamer had imagined two people throwing
tomatoes at each other as he watched from a distance) .22 It was as if, then,
the eyes of the dormant person had involuntarily lifted toward wakening
under some internal impulsion, while the rest of the body lay paralyzed in
slumber. Since the eyes seem to undergo such partial wakening during REM
sleep, the findings have enlivened a debate, persisting from the nineteenth
century, as to whether visual dreams are presentative or representative in
character: are dreams events in which we really see, but see unreal things;
or are they representative, fantasies in which we merely imagine ourselves
seeing things?
Investigations next began looming in on those slight twitches and jerks
which most people will casually have noted disrupting the bodies of people
asleep. The study of such movements, again during REM sleep, opened the
possibility that they too might well bear eerie correspondences to actions
hallucinatorily undergone interior to the dreamer's dream: in one exem-
plary case "the right hand, left hand, and a foot executed movements in the
order named, and the subject, when immediately awakened thereafter, re-
ported that he lifted a bucket with his right hand, supported it with his left,
and started to walk away."23 Inexplicably, moreover, periodic intervals of
REM sleep seemed to be followed by wholesale upheavals of the body, by the
need to shift position or roll over in bed. 24
Exercising the indefatigable ingenuity and resourcefulness of Western sci-
ence, neurologists have also affixed wires and meters to people's private

parts, so to ascertain that all males and females at all capable of it-even
infants newly born-experience penile or clitoral erections regularly dur-
ing phases of REM sleep, five times a night, every ninety minutes or so,
every night, reaardless of the dream's content (the report cited gives the case
of a male succumbing to dark, vexed arousal during repeated dreams of
major attack by shark and snake) .25 Since anyone overcome by an event of
this magnitude in wakefulness would surely acknowledge it consciously,
findings like these raise the fascinating question of how a person asleep and
dreaming might register a comparable but unconscious awareness, in the
imagery of the dream, of the event rocking the body. Certainly, the evi-
dence suggests what people have always vaguely known: that dreams and
sexual desire are inextricably and uneasily linked. But it also highlights the
strangely blurred relations between desire and the objects desire seeks out-
desire, in the case cited, evidently concealed from itself and converted into
its opposite in the misinterpretation-prone head. Toward what object, then,
when one "hallucinate[s] like an erection in the night" (310.23), is one
pointing-"pointing up to skyless heaven like the spoon out of sergeant-
major's tay" (331.1-2)? And "Whor dor the pene lie" (349.1-2 [Port. dor,
"pain"; It. pene, "penis"]) in dreams from which one wakens to "recoil"
only horror and terror?
Anxious to prove that dreaming had clear somatic manifestations, early
sleep-research tended to discover dreams only in the night's cyclically recur-
rent periods of REM sleep, presuming that the brain rested in the intervals
between. Later research pressing into these darker parts of sleep, however,
discovered that "mental life" seemed doggedly to persist there too, though in
far different forms: reluctant subjects repeatedly awakened from "non-REM
sleep" reported having been dimly mulling over trivial matters bearing on
work, personal problems, and other items constituting an average day's resi-
due. Unlike the vivid dreams bled up out of REM sleep, then, a kind of dim,
distorted, internal discourse seemed to seep through NREM sleep.26 But even
these discoveries seem unstable: severe nightmares and episodes of sleep-
walking, for instance, seem to emerge from NREM sleep; and the question
always remains whether the thoughts discovered in the dark did not rush
into the vacuum of the mind at the moment of the subject'S awakening.
Many obscurities remain. 27
The research is interesting because it has elevated to the status of scien-
tific truth one of many things that has struck people as being least probable
about Finneaans Wake: "whatever the significance of dreaming, it is impor-
tant to note that consciousness-in the sense of mental experience-is not
An Introduction 13
completely abolished even during the deepest stages of sleep" ;28 "there is no
point in the sleep cycle at which consciousness suddenly appears. It seems
to be there all along" (here the obscure word is "consciousness"). 29 So some-
thing very dark may indeed have been going on in that "deleteful" half-hour
of "real life" that we began to reconstruct and whose blank "m'm'ry" we all
"recoil." The question next arises, then, of what relation this dark thought
might have to language; for where there is thought, in one view, language
cannot be far behind.
The problem with all of these studies-and with their bearing on Fin-
neyans Wake-is that they finally reveal less about the content and the inte-
rior of the "dream," as we experience it "in our own nighttime," than about
the bodies of sleeping people. No one captivated by the dark will deny the
interest of the information this work yields. But the ways in which sleeping
people show themselves to wakened rationalists will finally not "reveil"
what in particular goes on in the "hole affair" we went "trough" last night
and which Finneyans Wake takes as its subject. In interesting ways, too,
these studies highlight the epistemological weirdness of all reconstructions
of the night and so set Joyce's in foil. Since all those many animals whose
sleep is accompanied by rapid-eye movements, when you wake them, have
nothing very substantial to say about their "dreams," the real "correlates" of
dreams-indeed, the only real evidence of their existence-seems to lie less
on eyelids than in the "murmur[ies]" and strangely nonsensical tales "re-
mumble[d]" by the people awakened: it's in language and in tales told,
where it is unclear whether science or interpretive art has primacy. And this
Joyce would well have known. In one way of thinking about the "revolution"
that rocked the scientific world in the 1950S, people discovered not so much
"rapid-eye movements," as the electroencephalograph and the value of stra-
tegic awakenings.
For "rapid-eye movements" were indistinctly there all along, too-in-
distinct because immeasurable. Joyce, of course, could not possibly have
known about them in any quantifiable form when he wrote about "Bind-
merollingeyes" (II.6-7 [the hero of Finneyans Wake]) and suggested that
one good way of learning more about the "floored" "mistermysterion" in
question would be to "Look at this twitches!" (301.18-19, 22-23 [all of
them]). But details like these (and there are many) reflect how widely
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century students of the dark believed that
dreams and agitations of the eyes in sleep went together-as those who
write about REM sleep themselves periodically acknowledge. 30 Most in-
sights into the nature of dreams gained through "the new science" of sleep

research had already been conjecturally formulated, though not electro-
encephalographically clinched, in the literature on sleep written prior to
their discovery and would easily have been within Joyce's reach.
When Joyce advised his readers to "hear what science has to say," more-
over (5°5.27), he was certainly not addressing an audience that would sud-
denly vanish when new scientific discoveries came along, ten years after his
death. Writing in an age of great scientific volatility himself, and modeling
his book on one called The New Science, he was inviting them to ponder the
contradiction-laden destiny of all "science" whose dark object was "nes-
cience," or unconsciousness; for "science" (from the L. scio, "I know") can
be of "nescience" (L. nescio, "I don't know") only with difficulty. Beyond
that too, he was calling attention to the inadequacies of science itself-
"pundit-the-next-best-king"-as a way of "knowing" in a world where aes-
thesis and play were heavily beleaguered alternatives. So "if sciencium
(what's what) can mute uns nought, 'a thought, abought the great 50mm-
boddy within the Omniboss"-note the somme (Fr. "sleep") infusing this
obscure "somebody"-"perhops an artsaccord (hoot's hoot) might sing urns
tumtim abutt the Little Newbuddies that ring his panch" (415.15-19). With
a little laugh by the way" (hoot's hoot)," the lines apprise us that Finneaans
Wake intends to set us straight as to "what's what" and "who's who."
THE JOYCEAN "UNGUMPTIOUS" AND THEIRS

As its spelling implies, the Joycean "UNGUMPTIOUS" has a lot of "gumption"
and humor in it, and is both distinct from and yet related to the "Uncon-
scious" in more orthodox forms. As its appearance in the text also suggests,
and as many Joyceans have compellingly demonstrated, there can be no
question that psychoanalysis had an impact, a deep one, on Finneaans
Wake: 31 the term appears in a phrase directing our attention to "LIPPUDENIES
OF THE UNGUMPTIOUS" (308.R2 [a "libidinous unconscious"]), in a book that
has the "intrepidity" to call itself "an intrepidation of our dreams" (338.29).
Like all the many psychoanalytical tags drifting through Finneaans Wake,
these terms suggest similarities and yet differences, both of which are im-
portant to weigh.
Mere mention of Freud will raise hackles on one side of the room and ban-
ners on the other; but sleep alone will elicit a version of the same bizarre
politics. Merely having proposed as an exercise the reconstruction of a half-
hour fragment of dark will already have raised in most minds unresolved
An Introduction 15
questions on which there will be sides to take, and about which seasonably
"fashionable" and unfashionable "factions" will form. A reader of Joyce
would do well to try cultivating an indifference to these partisanships, by
paying attention to the Wake itself: there we read that one must, "for a sur-
view over all the factionables see Iris in the Evenine's World" (285.26-27).
The line invites its reader to sort these matters out not by resorting to pro-
grammatic responses, but by studying what is seen, "in fact, under the
closed eyes" (107.28 [hence the "iris"]), in the "Evening World" (28.20 [the
night]). It also suggests that in exploring the "Evening World," the Wake
will, among all things else, "survey the factions" that have politicized the
same dark domain.
It seems to me impossible for any reader seriously interested in coming to
terms with Finneaans Wake to ignore The Interpretation of Dreams, which
broke the ground that Joyce would reconstruct in his own "intrepidation of
dreams" and, arguably, made FinneBans Wake possible: it was in the cultural
air that any early twentieth-century European would have breathed, and it
is everywhere implicit in Joyce's "nonday diary." Its first chapter, not least,
provides an excellent summary of the nineteenth-century literature on
sleep and dreams, and those that follow have not been surpassed in explor-
ing what dreams mean and how they work. No subsequent treatment of the
subject fails to show its influence. The book is important to Finneaans
Wake, however, not simply because it treats so elaborately of Dreams, but
because it is equally about Interpretation, which is any reader's only busi-
ness; and it is about interpretation of a kind that unyieldingly brings the
simple and central question "What does it mean?" to a species of peculiarly
nonsensical, obscure, and garbled literary text-"the text of the dream"
(ID, 552), the puzzling and troubling "murmurrandoms" (358.3) that any
dreamer "remumble[s] from the night before" (note the "random" element
in such "murmured memoranda") .32 Particularly because the only real evi-
dence of "dreaming" comes in the dark language of these "murmurable"
"murmoirs" (294.7, 387.34 ["memorable" because "murmured" "memoirs"]),
some interpretive technique distinct from those brought to bear on con-
sciously constructed narratives will be essential to a reading of what Joyce
called his "imitation of the dream-state"; JJ and The Interpretation of Dreams
offers not simply the most intricately developed and detailed example of
such a technique, but also an account-no matter whether critical or not-
of alternative interpretive techniques as well. It is, in short, an indispens-
able text to bring to Finneaans Wake.
On the other hand, it would be foolish to disregard Joyce's well-known

derogations of Freud and "the new Viennese school" (U, 2°5): all of his re-
corded comments on psychoanalysis were dismissive. 34 They suggest, per-
haps, what should be obvious: that both as a "competent" thinker and man-
a "competitor" and not a follower-and especially as an artist whose work
consistently explored "the inner life," Joyce was of necessity in competition
with psychoanalysis, and all the more particularly because of its claims to
authority. This much, at least, is implied in remarks like the chastising
aside he directed to Mary Colum when he heard that she was attending a
series oflectures by Pierre Janet: "You could learn as much psychology from
yourself as from those fellows. "35 And why not? A great deal has been said
about the heroism of Freud's self-analysis, but relatively little about Joyce's,
in the writing of Ulysses, which he regarded as "essentially the product of
[his] whole life":36 it would be difficult to conceive of anyone spending
seven years on a text that heavily autobiographical, reworking on a daily
basis the personal and literary past, without emerging from the experience
radically changed. One way of reading Ulysses, a work thematically ab-
sorbed with the issues of fathering and self-fathering, is to see it as the pro-
cess whereby an arrogant little man, a young Joyce who in fact had pub-
lished under the name "Stephen Dedalus," rewrote himself so entirely as to
emerge from the experience not simply with the humane capabilities of a
Leopold Bloom, and not simply even with the expansive good humor and
affability that every reader of the biography will know, but as one of the
twentieth century's great men of letters. The book, through its microscopic
examination of the inner life, altered the past in every way possible. 37
It would do Joyce insufficient credit, then, to read Finnegans Wake as
a "creative" reworking of understandings that might be had much more
straightforwardly through a reading of Freud, and not simply because Joyce
clearly went about reconstructing the night in his own idiosyncratic way,
but also because if most of the night is void of recollectible dreams, a work
aspiring to their interpretation would be only of partial relevance. 38 Joyce
thought about psychic interiors throughout his literary career and about
"nightlife" daily for almost twenty years (150.33, 407.20). It was his work.
As an author who distrusted authority in all its forms, he preferred to all
theory nagging, living, concrete immersion in the material under his scru-
tiny itself ("I hate generalities" [J], 565]). If, as he said, "Ulysses is related
to this book as the day is to the night," we should expect Finnegans Wake to
behave with all the uncapturable richness of a Ulysses, exploring its dark
subject thoroughly, systematically, but not systemically.39 Finally, too, as
Joyce's comparative remarks on Freud and Vico suggest, his real authority in
An Introduction 17
the study of the unconscious was Vico, and even here he distanced himself
carefully ("I would not pay overmuch attention to these theories, beyond
using them for all they are worth" [L, I, 241]).40
All this is only to note that Joyce's vexed relation to Freud is sufficiently
complex as not to be solved by oppositional diatribe, doctrinaire advocacy,
or, above all, simple disregard. "The relation of Ulysses and Finne8ans Wake
to [The Interpretation of Dreams] is tricky and subtle," as Adaline Glasheen
has rightly noted, "and deserves the fullest, deepest study." 41 Ongoing refer-
ence to The Interpretation of Dreams and its sequelae in the following pages
is intended to open relevant perspectives and to invite running comparisons
between Joyce's "UNGUMPTIOUS" and the Freudian one. I would like the
reader to see in these conflations a Joycean reading of Freud, and not a
Freudian reading of Joyce.
"EPISTLEMADETHEMOLOGY FOR DEEP DORFY

DOUBTLINGS"
Early in the course of our "unaveiling" reconstruction of a half-hour frag-
ment of the dark, the healthily skeptical reader will have wondered how
anyone could possibly know what goes on in a part of the night unyielding
to "m'm'ry" and resistant in every way to any form of direct knowing. Par-
ticularly for a writer of joyce's realist allegiances, the question would have
raised larger questions about how one knows-anything. Capable as one
may be in wakefulness of explicating allusions, for instance, or speaking
cannily about the collapse of representational epistemologies, it would seem
a genuine deficiency in any claim to knowledge not to know the content
of one's own head in an wholly representative slice of "Real life" (260.F3).
"Writing about the night," then, would have deepened in its purport for
Joyce, and also in its obscurity, because it would have meant not simply gen-
erating a "nonday diary," but concurrently undertaking a sustained "epis-
tlemadethemology for deep dorfy doubtlings" (374.17-18)-a phrase that
yields "two thinks at a time" (583.7). Finne8ans Wake launches on a dark
"epistemology," to be sure, bending the questions "How do I know?" (5°7.24)
and "Where did thots come from?" (597.25 ["thoughts"]) into "one great
part of [our] existence" about which we must willingly entertain "deep
doubts"-and "dorfy" ones, at that. But it is also, as an "epistle-made" ar-
tifact, an "epistlemadethemology" in which the status of language and
letters ("epistles") will unrelentingly be "made [a] theme."

Although it is currently one trend to see Finneyans Wake as a work "about
language"-and it surely is-Joyce himself, whenever he was asked to clar-
ify the book, problematically said that it was "about the night." This minor
discrepancy as to what the book is "about" is extremely important, as the
following pages intend to show; for while a book "about language" need say
nothing at all "about the night," and in fact usually will not, a book "about
the night" would of necessity have to undertake an intricate and won-
drously obscure inquiry into the nature oflanguage. "My heeders will recoil
with a great leisure" (160.35 [not "recall," not necessarily "pleasure"]) that
big "blank memory" left suspended in their heads after last night's orgy of
"leisure." Why do no words leap into the gap and fill this roomy space? "If
that [one] hids foreyodden has nate of ylozery" (339.24 ["has forgotten his
night of glory"]), is it because one has also "forgotten his native glossary"?
If the experience of sleep entails the wholesale rubbling of language, out of
what dark place in the mind do those "murmurable" "murmurrandoms"
that we "recoil" in the morning come from?
The fullest possible response to the question of what happens to (literate)
consciousness in the night-"Something happened that time I was asleep,
torn letters or was there snow?" (307.F5)-would oblige us to wonder, at
least if we think it improbable that language ever suddenly vacates the
head, whether letters and literacy fell into a strange new order in the dark,
like "torn letters"; or if sleep merely blanketed everything over, as if under
a bleaching fall of "snow" ("We feel unspeechably thoughtless over it all
here ..... [238.36]). In this latter case, the question would arise of how
language could possibly capture the nothing that language, constantly
about something, is not. For not the least obscure matter pertaining to our
experimental reconstruction, in detail, of a half-hour of the night-pre-
suming we could replace a profoundly "blank memory" with "somethink"
(83.14) -would be the question of what kind of language could adequately
fill the spaciously "hole affair." English?-with words like "memory" and
"recall," which are always of something? "Languish" too, then, is what Fin-
neyans Wake is necessarily about (96.11, 232.21 ["language"]), but pri-
marily because it is "about the night." And in an already doubt-riddled
"epistlemadethemology," letters-"epistles" and words-will be an ongoing
"thematic" concern.
As to the question of how Joyce in particular could possibly know the in-
terior of the night, we have the difficult evidence of Finneyans Wake itself to
examine, but also oblique indications from the biography and the letters.
All the evidence shows Joyce entering this area with extreme caution. He
An Introduction 19
began to write Work in Progress in March 1923, in English, tentatively,
unclear as to where it would lead him U], 551); and it took him the better
part of a year, by the end of which he had sketched out half the book, to
show the newly evolving work to anyone but his immediate friends, and
then too, only tentatively ("May I ask you, by the way, to be rather reticent
about my new book?" he wrote to Valery Larbaud [L, III, 87-88]). Nothing
indicates that Joyce knew his "experiment in interpreting 'the dark night of
the soul'" (L, I, 258) would exhaust two decades of his life, half of his liter-
ary career, and the odd resources of some sixty languages. Only as he
warmed to his material did he begin to realize the depth and extent of its
obscurities, and these obviously challenged and allured him, but also frus-
trated him immensely: "The task I have set myself is dreadfully difficul t," he
wrote to Robert MacAlmon in early 1924, "but I believe it can be done" (L,
III, 88). And to Harriet Shaw Weaver in the same year: "There are so many
problems to be solved that I can face only one at a time" (L, III, 96); "I have
been thinking and thinking how and how and how can I and can't it" (L, I,
220); "It is a bewildering business .... Complications to right of me, com-
plications to left of me, complex on the page before me, perplex in the pen
beside me, duplex in the meandering eyes of me, stuplex on the face that
reads me. And from time to time I lie back and listen to the sound of my
hair growing white" (L, I, 222). Nobody took these laments seriously; every-
body thought he was dramatizing himself while really only doodling around
with puns, indulgently parading the emptiest of eruditions, or inventing
some kind of private mythology. Joyce: "I am rather discouraged about this
as in such a vast and difficult enterprise I need encouragement .... but I
cannot go back" (L, I, 249).
Frank Budgen recalls being told by August Suter that "in the early days of
the composition of Finne8ans Wake," Joyce said, "I am boring into a moun-
tain from two sides. The question is how to meet in the middle."42 Suter
recalls the formulation differently: when he asked Joyce about his new
work, Joyce replied, "imagine a mountain which I am boring into from all
sides without knowing what I am going to find."43 The comparison was to
become a well-worked favorite, varying in form with the state of the work,
and in these guises show Joyce thinking about the night much as anyone
only can;44 for what happens "down there" can be inferred most clearly by
working out of the two well-lit shafts through which one enters and leaves
it, while falling asleep and waking up-although dreams pock the dark
with innumerable random obscure points of entry. As the Wake puts it, of a
hero obscurely called "The BeardedMountain" (222.12), "there are two signs

to turn to, the yest and the ist, ... feeling aslip and wauking up" (597. IO-
12): "the yest" here is where night fell and where "yest"erday disintegrated
("the west"), while "ist" (or "east") is where the day will break, and where
the present always reappears ("is").
One of these two openings had already been amply cleared away, for two
of joyce's earlier three works of fiction had come to deadends at the thresh-
hold beyond which Finnesans Wake was darkly to move. At the end of "The
Dead," "faintly falling" asleep in the Gresham Hotel, Gabriel Conroy feels
"his own identity ... fading out" as a reverie of snow drifts into his mind,
to change his mind and the texture of the story as well (D, 223-24); and at
the end of Ulysses, Joyce sought comparably "to convey the mumbling of
a woman falling asleep."45 To note that joyce's fiction pressed repeatedly
against the dark borderland separating wakefulness from sleep is only to
note one necessity that compelled him into the writing of the Wake-
which, after all, is only an inflected synonym for "The Dead." A second
necessity was the fact of Ulysses itself, through which, according to T. S.
Eliot, Joyce "killed the nineteenth century, exposed the futility of all styles,
and destroyed his own future" (fl, 528). What could Joyce have done after
writing Ulysses? A chronicle of June 17, 1904? Or a sweeping saga of three
generations of family life whose culminating item would be a writer dense
with sensitivity? The logical place for him to go was down, into the night.
"Having written Ulysses about the day, I wanted to write this book about
the night" (fl, 695).
The intensity with which Joyce studied dreams, read about dreams, and
discussed dreams with family members and friends has been broadly docu-
mented. 46 Jacques Mercanton, who is supposed to have become the official
expositor of Finnesans Wake had Joyce lived (fl, 710), makes it seem in his
recollection of Joyce that the going over of dreams may have been the first
order of business of every dayY But it clearly went further even than this:
stray remarks in his letters show Joyce waking up at night, scribbling on
paper in the dark, and falling back asleep: "I composed some wondrous de-
vices for Ad during the night," he informed Harriet Shaw Weaver, "and
wrote them out in the dark very carefully only to discover that I had made
a mosaic on top of other notes so I am now going to have to bring my as-
tronomical telescope into play" (L, I, 235). Already he was teaching her,
everywhere in the letters, how to read Finnesans Wake: "astronomical tele-
scopes," unlike regular ones, work only at night, and they train on matters
invisible to the light of day; they do what Joyce does in "his book of the
dark." No amount of generalizing or mere assertion, however, will uIti-
An Introduction 21
mately persuade anyone of anything. The only evidence that will show just
how much Joyce thought and learned about the night is Finnegans Wake
itself, "the Strangest Dream that was ever Halfdreamt" (3°7.11-12).
"SLEEP, WHERE IN THE WASTE IS

THE WISDOM?"
Somewhere very early in a meditation of this sort, the busily put-upon
reader will doubtlessly have paused to wonder why all of this should be im-
portant enough to merit his attention and time. Since the "hole affair"
"amounts to nada in pounds or pence" (52I.5-6)-since it defies "sound
sense" and is not very profitable either (hence the "pounds" and "pence"),
he will likely want to ask of "Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?"
(114.19-20). Though the only fully satisfactory answer to this question can
be a reading of Finnegans Wake, we might for now entertain a few orienting
considerations.
Writers who deal with the subject are fond of pointing out that we spend
one-third of our lives in sleep. The unyielding fraction, as anyone who has
tried unsuccessfully to conform to a regulated eight-hour sleep schedule
knows, is finally arbitrary, deriving from an Aristotelean partitioning of the
day into three equal thirds of which one seems "reasonably" appropriate to
the night. But the fraction is not simply arbitrary; it's conservative. 48 For the
forces that tow us into sleep, arguably, are always there under the surface of
things, exerting an obliviating drag on our capacities to engage resource-
fully and energetically in the world, blacking us out not just in those lengthy
amnesias endured every night, but-an eyelid drooping here, attention
lapsing there, best intentions crumbling everywhere-in the less noticeable
amnesias, lapses of attentiveness, surrenders to passivity, and withdrawals
from life that undermine the living of any day. Something of this nature
surely overcomes Mr. Bloom, for instance, at 10 o'clock on a hot summer
morning, when, theoretically well rested, he can barely bring himself to re-
gard the world from "beneath his veiled eyelids" because the news of an un-
manageable problem has left him sluggishly stupefied and stunned, in
lotus-land (U, 74; note also his eyelids on 71,75). "Nowtime" is just a vari-
ant of "nighttime," according to one of the Wake's careful spellings (29°.17)
as "night" is just "nowt" (238.27). That big "blank memory" that we have
all "recoil[ed]" from "our own nighttime," after all, did not simply vanish
when night did; the roomily "hole affair" lingers on vexingly, now, very

much a part of our present minds. If one-third of our lives is spent in sleep,
then, so too one-third of us is never fully in the here-and-now. Inviting us to
be conscious of the unconscious, or, in its own idiom, wakening the dead,
Finnegans Wake wakes us up to the dark third of us that never comes to
light.
At a complementary extreme, there are the forces that work against
sleep. Toward the waking end of Finnegans Wake, its reader meets a figure
who is given to venting, usually with great moral urgency, alarming state-
ments on the order of "I'm the gogetter that'd make it pay like cash regis-
ters" (451.4-5) and "I've a terrible errible lot todue todie todue tootorrible-
day" (381.23-24). He represents, among much else, that part of the Wake's
sleeping mind whose anxiety about quotidian survival-making rational
sound sense and tons of pounds and pence-is alarming him up into agony.
The huffy-puffy rhythm tells it all: everyone is under pressure, "to do" "to-
day" what's "due today," in "terror" and "error" and "horror," without per-
haps stopping to wonder why all that pressure need be there, or where in
one's life it originates. Sleep is what someone in this frame of mind doesn't
want to think about, hasn't the time to think about, and can't afford to in-
dulge in because of competing demands on his time and attention ("cash
registers," "the cash system," and the whole "cash-dime problem," for ex-
ample [161.7, 149.17]): "Dollarmighty!" (562.33). Sleep is a sheer, unprofit-
able "waste of time" (151.21). Still, since "today" is only "todie" in the
terms given-since one's management of the limited amount of time in a
day is only representative of one's management of the limited amount of
time in a life-it may well be important to think about the night and one's
dreams, before "today" slips into "to die," and to determine too where those
pressurizing, sleep-annihilating demands come from and whether they need
be met.
Sleep unfolds in "the darkness which is the afterthought of thy nomatter"
(258.32-33): to all quotidian appearances, it is absolutely trivial, a little
"after-thought" "of no great matter" to much of anyone-particularly with
all those "cash registers" in the background sonorously indicating what val-
ues are to be assigned to what things. Living as we do in a world where there
are all kinds of pounds and pence and sounds and sense to make, we all
mean business, if not literally. Who has time to think about the night in the
morning when something else is always judged to be more centrally press-
ing? Wondering who makes these decisions as to what has value and what
does not would in itself have fascinated Joyce, and also would have let him
exercise a modernist inclination to detect precisely in the trivial-a single
An Introduction 23
day, for example-the richest of revelations. Sleep is the underside of the
stone on whose sunlit upper surface is engraved the letter and the law of the
land: no one wants to look at it. It is so trivial, so marginal, so unthinkable
an "afterthought of thy nomatter," in fact, that even people writing about
dreams and the centrality of the marginal and FinneBans Wake seem quite
happy to overlook it, as if there were nothing there. So Joyce, "having done
the longest day in literature"-in wording he co-opted from his brother-
began "conjuring up the darkest night" (L, III, 140), and for many good rea-
sons: as we follow him into "our own nighttime," we find there, as intri-
cately writ as anywhere else, "as human a little story as paper could well
carry" (115.36).
Within FinneBans Wake, Joyce refers to his sleepy subject as "the moun-
tainy molehill" (474.22): the phrase advises us that he knew quite well how
big a "mountain" he was making out of a "molehill" by writing six hundred
pages, over two decades, "about the night"; but it also serves notice that he
found in the visionless and subterranean experience of sleep (a "molehill"
of sorts) a vast "mountain" of material. By tunneling into this "mountain,"
Joyce not simply mined open the twentieth-century's analytical fascination
with sleep, dreams, and the Unconscious, but developed as well a modern-
ist eschatology (Gr. eschatos, "furthest, uttermost"): "modernist" because
his efforts located in a trivial "afterthought of thy nomatter," in the abso-
lutely unthinkable, precisely what is most apocalyptic and revealing about
the precariously instituted order of things; an "eschatology" because it
sends knowledge and thought to their limits and uttermost ends.
Even if one wanted to and had the time, sleep is what one cannot think
about because it unfolds in a bottomless fissure within which thinking and
all our quotidian ways of knowing disappear. At its interior, every epis-
temological category on which the novel, science, and empiricism are tra-
ditionally predicated-indeed, the totality of "the real"-crumbles into
rich indefinition, and vanishes; and so too does "common sense." "Common
sense," then, tells us that everything about FinneBans Wake must neces-
sarily lie outside the pale of "common sense": no two people can ever em-
pirically "sense" a dream in "common," and it isn't even clear that one can.
Still, if we heed with Joyce "The Value of Circumstantial Evidence" (307.24
["dreams," for example]), boring into the core ofthe dark from its two fa-
miliar well-lit wakened edges, much might be inferred about the heart of
the night.
The best guide to FinneBans Wake is concentrated reflection on "our own
nighttime." Joyce told Jacques Mercanton that he countered criticism of the

book by saying that "it ha[d] to do with an ideal suffering caused by an ideal
insomnia. A sentence in the book describes it in those terms" [120.9-14].49
Since "ideal insomnia" differs from real insomnia by virtue of its ideality,
the sentence is inviting us to be thoughtfully vigilant "in our own night-
time" and complementarily thoughtful in wakefulness about "how we
sleep" (248.19). Anyone wanting seriously to read Finnesans Wake must at
some point go to "nightschool" (43°.2), take a few "Night Lessons" (II.ii), do
a little "nightwatch service" (576.30), exercise some "night duty" (429.23),
serve on "the vigilance committee" (34.4), and, above all, "sleep on it"
(445.22-23). All of the characters inside the book do these things, and so did
Joyce himself: "I am at present attending night school," he wrote jokingly to
his son and daughter-in-law in 1934, and then went on to close the letter with
a characteristic tag: "Good night, dear children. Nightynight everybody" (L,
III, 320-21). Only daily reference to the "hole affair" you went "trough" last
night will clarify this most "clearobscure" of books.
It was Joyce's lifelong rival, Doctor Oliver St. John Gogarty, who first re-
acted in exasperated disbelief to Finnesans Wake by calling it "the most co-
lossalleg-pull in literature since McPherson's Ossian. "SO But even its most se-
rious readers seem tacitly to have assumed that Joyce was only kidding
when he said it was "about the night." The real obstacle to our comprehen-
sion of Finnesans Wake since its publication, in my view, has been a reluc-
tance on the part of readers to think seriously about the very strange, liter-
ally unthinkable, and only apparently trivial material that it richly explores.
As a consequence, Joyce's own many assertions about the book-his "recon-
struct[ion of] the nocturnal life" and "imitation of the dream-state"-have
been dismissed out-of-hand as improbable, or else explained away either as
"conceits" that Joyce found useful for his own eccentric purposes, or as im-
pressionistic "devices" that in practice have licensed interpretive mayhem
on the one extreme hand and pedantic irrelevance on the other. As one con-
sequence, the text perhaps most widely regarded as the great monolithic
obstacle to our understanding of modernism has remained inaccessibly ob-
scure since its publication in 1939-and not simply to the interested lay
reader, but to many Joyceans as well. It is time that the putative bluff was
called, and shown to be no bluff at all. Finnesans Wake is about "the night
we will remember" (432.1 - 2) .
"But we'll wake and see" (375.8).
An Introduction 25
CHAPTER ONE
"Readin8 the Evenin8

World"
Any reader can extend his own reflections on the night into a "reading [of
the] Evening World" literately reconstructed in Finne8ans Wake (28.20) sim-
ply by examining the book's opening pages. If the Wake indeed "reconstructs
the night," this area ought theoretically to portray the irrecollectible
"thought" moving through sleep in the first few minutes after the loss of
conscious thought in bed; and it ought, ideally, to conform with some plau-
sibility to our shared sense of what that experience is like.
Immediate concessions to "common sense," then, and to what critics
skeptical of Finne8ans Wake have always maintained would not be out of
order: most of what one finds here is as impenetrably obscure as the "blank
memory" "recoil[ed]" from the early part of last night's sleep; whole vast
spaces on the page make absolute nonsense. The essentially English first
paragraph, to be sure, yields dim impressions: references to places in Dublin
seem to have been unhinged from their local mooring points and rendered
diffuse-"Adam and Eve's" Church inverted into a more oddly evocative
"Eve and Adam's," the Liffey and Dublin Bay losing their concreteness in the
looser terms "riverrun" and "bay." Propped up by that undeniably opaque
second paragraph, however, these few clear impressions fall outside of any
context that might render them intelligible; and appeals to authority will
not necessarily help here either. Other readers may have detected "the voice
of God," allegories involving the Holy Name, or clever puns in the Sanskrit
here, but perhaps we do not. 1 And even if we consult the available reference
works and have the allusions and foreign words explicated for us, they only
render what is already unintelligible a little more clearly unintelligible.
None of this matters in the least. If one operates on the premise that Fin-
neaans Wake reconstructs the night, the first preconception to abandon
wholesale is that it ought to read anything at all like narrative or make
sense as a continuous linear whole: nobody's "nightlife" makes sense as a
continuous linear narrative whole (150.33, 407.20). Just as it is impossible
to recall, minute by minute, in sequential order, the "hole affair" that one
went through in sleep last night, from the time one lost consciousness until
the time one awoke, so, arguably, it is impossible to read Finneaans Wake.
Instead, the book makes sense only in much the same way that "everynight
life" does (17.33). Impossible as it may be to fathom as an obscure totality,
even at the level of a page, particles of immanent sense will stand out from
the dark foil against which they are set, in turn to suggest connections with
others, and still others, until-not necessarily in linear order-out of a web
of items drawn together by association, a knot of coherent nonsense will be-
gin to emerge;2 and upon this coherent nonsense, as upon the shards of a
recollected dream, some interpretation will have to be practiced in order to
discover an underlying sense. "Reading [the] Evening World" as it is recon-
structed in Finneaans Wake is like reading the evening world as one knows it
in fact. This is also to note that any point of entry into this "book of the
dark" will inevitably be arbitrary and confusing-as Joyce himself im-
plicitly acknowledged by pointing out that "the book really has no begin-
ning or end .... It ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle
of the same sentence" (L, 1,246). One can, given these terms, start "reading
[the] Evening World" in much the same way that one starts exploring any
memory of the night: anywhere. For demonstrative purposes, this reading
will momentarily bypass altogether the first two murky paragraphs of the
book to begin in its third paragraph:
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunn-
trovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is re-
taled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great
fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid
man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to
the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the
knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since
devlinsfirst loved livvy. (3.15-24)
The paragraph locates us "in bed"-"early"-though it does so in a man-

ner quite "clearobscure" (247.34). For all the book's purported verbal in-
stability, virtually every page of Finneaans Wake refers comparably to "bed"
"Readina the Evenina World" 27

(5.20, 6.26), or to "night" (7.2), or to things associated with a night in bed:
to "dusk" (4.12), "eve" (5.I1), peaceful rest (6.35), "slumber" (7.21), "sun-
set" (9.2), even snoring and pillows (7.28, 6.24). Although these sleep-
orienting terms, deployed more often than not in plain English, permeate
the book and give it one kind of centricity, they enter the Wake's "night-
maze" so obliquely (411.8), with such eccentricity, that they become, as
here, almost unnoticeable-as if they were negligible after-thoughts of no
great matter (notice how unnoticeable this "bed" becomes at 18.18, "sleep"
at 4. 15, and "Nap" at 9.6). Arguably, the phrase "in bed" is as obscure a term
as any other in the paragraph before us, precisely because it eludes atten-
tion-and in much the same way that an interval of sleep might elude at-
tention in waking life, a part of the whole, linking the whole, too trivial to
bear much more than an "afterthought ofthy nomatter" when so much else
seems of greater urgency (258.32-33). Who can notice this bed with that
hundred-lettered word overpowering it by its proximity? "It's like a dream,"
in which many a "goodridhirring" (7.19 ["good red herring"]) operates to
distract attention from what may be most eccentrically central. If "precisely
the most trivial elements of a dream are most indispensable to its inter-
pretation" (ID, 552), however, a little attention ought to be expended here
too. The phrase "in bed" will serve illustratively, as an orienting point out of
which all other elements on this page-and on all those pages that surround
it in this circular book-might be seen to radiate by a logic of association.
In this nocturnal universe where "Totem Fulcrum Est" (481.4 [L. tatum ful-
crum est, "all is bed"]), it yields one kind of leverage on the dark.
The paragraph's location in bed will likely seem obscure to a reader, but
only because that bed is almost entirely obscure to the formerly solid ("erst
solid"), once upright ("once wallstrait") Irishman ("erse ... man") who is
laid to rest in it ("laid to rust") and who, no longer either solid or upright,
seems to have sustained a very serious fall ("The fall," "the great fall," "the
pftjschute" [Fr. chute, "fall"]). Perhaps only a minute ago our rubbled hero
could have identified his head and feet with as much proud precision as any
wakeful rationalist, and in several languages too. Now he hasn't the vaguest
awareness of their location, of their relation either to each other or to him-
self, or quite fully of their existence; the paragraph resolves as a muddily
blurred "humptyhillhead" sends sensory inquiries outward in space in quest
of the toes to which it is presumably attached, and not simply overshoots
the mark by miles, but even when all sensation is "laid to rust," finds no
clear object. Any head so oblivious of its personal and spatial attachment to
its own "tumptytumtoes" will likely be oblivious of itself. Normally full of

inquiry, in fact, our hero's inert head is now largely capable only of "un-
quiry"; the negation ("un-") of "inquiry," this would be the absence of the
capacity to inquire at all.
Together, these details begin to illustrate a whole negational mannerism
of the Wake's language, and, as put to play here, they yield the first of in-
numerable moments in the book that will be preoccupied with missing per-
sons (324.18-22), missing bodies (66.28ff., 291.15), lost properties (556.26-
27), headhunting (497.7), and so forth. They simply tell us that the "unquir-
ing" humanoid "laid to rust" "in bed" here is unconscious-unconscious, in
particular, of the existence and extension of his body as an object in space.
Who knows, in the middle of sleep, where his head and toes are or even that
they exist? We might see the paragraph murkily beginning to "represent,"
then, from his own internal point of view, "mun in his natural, oblious au-
tamnesically of his very proprium" (251.4-5)-a "man," that is, "in the
state of nature" (49.24-25), "obviously" "oblivious" "of his very proprium"
(L. everything his "own") because he is "making act of oblivion" (424.18-19)
and undergoing sleep's" auto-amnesic" "blackout" (617.14 [Gr. autamnesia,
"obliviousness of self"]). Since "point of view" would hardly be the most
accurate term to apply to anyone oblivious of his head and toes, however, it
might be more accurate to think of the paragraph replicating the "eyewitless
foggus" (515.3°) ofthis "unquiring one"-where an "eyewitless foggus," the
negation of an "eyewitness focus" or clear point of view, would yield only
an "eyeless" and "witless" gaze through "fog" into "the darkness which is
the afterthought of thy nomatter" (258.32-33). Sleep happens only in un-
consciousness, in "unquiry," "after thought" shuts off, and annihilating
space, it locates us in a domain where there is "no matter": "I've lost the
place, where was I?" (307.F4).
In turn, we might see the paragraph beginning to introduce the subject of
Finne8ans Wake, who, "if I may break the subject gently" (165.30), has
"tropped head" (34.6) -"dropped head," that is, almost as fully as if "dropped
dead," largely because there was "too much" of it there to begin with (It.
troppo, Fr. trop). And an "unquiry" related to the one evident on the open-
ing page will introduce us more formally to this "unquiring one" and to his
peculiar mode of "thought": "Who do you no tonigh, lazy and gentleman?"
(126.2). As the wording here suggests, all "unquiry" looms dopily in on a
single person (a "lazy gentleman") who is sleeping ("tonight"), void of sex-
ual identity ("lazy and gentleman"), and largely oblivious of his own proxi-
mate presence to himself in space ("to nigh"). "Who do you no" ("know")
tells us that he doesn't ("know") because he is unconscious-as throughout
"Readin8 the Evenin8 World" 29

Finnegans Wake, which more than once spells "know" "no." Like the "un-
quiry" of which we read on page three, then, this one is less a "query" than
a "queery"; indeed, "It am queery!" (5I2.33)-where the syntactical distor-
tion of third person ("It is a query") to first ("I am queer") implies that all
such "unquiries" emanate from the mind of a very singular first person in-
deed, and drift back into himself.
The relation of our "unquiring" subject to the manifold objects arrayed
around him in the paragraph under our attention is accordingly complex.
For as he lies "in bed," his "tropped head" questing vacantly for the toes to
which it is ordinarily attached, a murky landscape "turns up" in their
"place" (" upturnpikepointandplace"). As the commentary on Finnegans
Wake has made too clear, this landscape seems to stretch across Dublin from
the Hill of Howth (or Howth Head ["-hillhead"]), westward to Castle
Knock, once the site of a "turnpike," at the western border of the Phoenix
Park ("well to the west," "upturnpikepointandplace, " "the knock out in the
park"). These localities and others named in Finnegans Wake are repre-
sented in Map A, which depicts the greater Dublin area, the "Howth Castle
and Environs" of 3.3, within which all of Finnegans Wake remotely takes
place. But only remotely and only evidently. For anyone oblivious of the
location of his own head and toes-the closest few objects in the world-is
surely oblivious of the civic landmarks that lie outside of his disintegrated
bedroom; and our hero (a "host," or bartender as it will turn out) is here as
throughout Finnegans Wake "obliffious of the headth of hosth that rosed be-
fore him, from Sheeroskouro ... like a dun darting dullemitter" (317.32-
34). The wording here tells us that the sleep-sapped head of our host ("headth
of hosth") lies heavily there at the back of his mind, solid as a rock, the
Head of Howth ("headth of hosth"), or any of the Dolomite Alps ("dull-
emitter"); but also that this inertly "tropped head" is largely "oblivious" of
itself and of all such objects in the world around it as the Liffey (" obliff-") ,
the "headth of hosth," and Dublin ("dun darting dullemitter" suggests Lady
Morgan's phrase, "Dear Dirty Dublin"). This is because sleep has rendered it
an extremely "dull emitter," incapable of much thought, though none-
theless able to bleed out weak appearances in that dark ("dun"), flicker-
ing ("darting"), "sheerly obscure" form of chiaroscuro ("Sheeroskouro")
known as the dream. The objects and landforms "dully emitted" within our
hero's "unquiring" and "tropped head," then, have more the status of "im-
passible abjects" (340.5) than of "passible objects" proper: degraded and
emotionalized forms (" abjects")' "impassible" to anyone outside of the
sleeping mind within which they appear, they have no "possible" existence

in a reality collectively visible, as any nominalist would agree. There is no
such "thing" as a "humptyhillhead" or a "pftjschute" (" Whoevery heard of
such a think?" [460.16]) because both are more in the nature of "thinks"
than "things" (583.7; cf. 83.14, 242.4). Rather than lying "out there," in Car-
tesian space or in a Dublin objectively capturable in "facts," they aggregate
"in here," internal to our "unquiring" hero, of whom they are accordingly
distorted descriptions. If, then, "by a commodius vicus of recirculation"
(3.2), we "rearrive" at (3.5) any number of details already examined in the
paragraph under our scrutiny, we'll find them taking on a whole new range
of meanings. And what initially seemed sheer "disorder" will begin to re-
solve not simply into a "fine artful disorder" (126.9), but into a clear and
elegant "thisorder" (540.19): "it's like a dream."
That "knock out in the park," for instance, no more clearly refers to
"Castle Knock" than it does to a "knock out" pure and simple. Another
cipher designating the unconsciousness of the figure "laid to rust" "in bed"
here, it shows him "kayoed" (85.4 ["K.O.'d"])-"knocked out"-"parked"
(454.34): a "knockout" "in these parks" (505.34, 606.24) had rendered our
"pacific subject," "as close as made no matter" (85.4-7)' "unspeechably
thoughtless over it all" (238.36). While "hillhead" seems comparably to re-
fer to the "Hill" of Howth on Howth "Head," the suppressed and linking
term "Howth" derives from the Dano-Viking word hoved ("head"), so that
"Howth Head," literally signifying "head head," would refer back to our
"knock[ed] out" hero's "large big nonobli head" (64.30 [L. non oblitus, "not
quite obliviated"]) with stubbornly loopy determination: "Howth Head,"
meaning "head head," refers throughout Finnegans Wake as invariably to
our "knock[ed] out" "dull emitter's" "tropped head" as to anything percep-
tible in waking life. 3 Since, "on that same head" (471.29), the dark ground
that "selfstretches" (14.31 [anthropomorphically]) between the "knock[ed]
out" and his "tropped head" is largely identified here as "the park"-Phoe-
nix-we can infer that the peculiar mound of imaginary "no matter" sur-
veyed in this paragraph, however inertly stratified it may seem, is furtively
charged with the potential of imminent and flashy resurrection. "Laid to
rust" here, in other words, is simply the body of a man in bed, which will
rise in the morning when, phoenixlike, he wakes. It is only at that time-
when he "gets the pullover on his boots" (74.12), and starts ambulating
groggily around his bedroom-that "the headless shall have legs!" (471. 15).
All this is only to begin noting that the apparent content of the paragraph
we are examining-or of any other paragraph in Finnegans Wake-resembles
exactly the "manifest content" of a dream in being only a "goodridhirring"
"Reading the Evening World" 31

MapA
"Howth Castle and Environs" (3.3)
Dublin by Daylight
Dunsink (Observatory)
Finglas
River Tolka
+- to Mullingar Castle Knock Ashtown Cabra
Royal Canal
Strawberry Beds
.--..
I
("the knock out In the park" [3.22) ~
Knockmaroon (15.4)
Hole in
the Wall Deaf and Dumb"""
(pub) Institution
VICeregal Lodge ,arlhorough Richmond
PHOENIX PARK
Barracks (asylum)
Stoneybatter Rd.
(a "knock out in the park"; The Furry Glen The Hollow
"Lucalizod" < Gael. Cnoc na Marbhan, Gough Statue ........
(32.16 "hill of the dead-persons") Magazine Fort _ WELLINGTONANNA
[coinage for the Auburn CHAPELIZOD .....;:;;ii(M.aigaii:z,iiine;...w~all) - MEMORIALMam
(private estate; , Arthur Gumness
Lucan-Chapelizod
area]) name of "loveliest King's House Sons & Company
village of the plain" Kilmainham Power's Distillery
in Goldsmith's The Coombe
"The Deserted Village")
DUBLIN
Grand Canal Crumlin
Clondalkin
Saggart
r
to Rockabill Lighthouse
t
to Lusk
to Donabate
The Irish Sea
Baldoyle
~ Ireland'sEye
« Gael. Baile Dubahaill,
"Town of the Dark Foreigner")
Kilbarrack
HEAD OF HOWTH
(Gael. name: Beinn Eadair

[Ben Edar)
the Billow
("Howth" derives from the
Da. Haved, "head")
Tolka Drumcondra
'- Clontarf Bailey Lighthouse
Phibsborough
Dunphy's Corner Fairview
Mountjoy Prison
-.....
Find~~e~:~~~~~c~hurch'"Tolka
Gresham Hotel
Nelson's Pillar
Sackville Street
;;;d Eve's=r.;;~~~;:~~~]l~
LIFFEY Butt Bridge
Fishamble Street ,
Stronghow's Tomb
(Christchurch Cathedral)
Church of , / Pembroke Dublin Bay
St. Nicholas Within
.,.,.",
"B1ackpool" )
Rathmines
Dundrum Goatstown
Dalkey
Vico Road
(shore road
from Dalkey
to Killiney)
to Bray and
to Tonduff (Mountain) Bray Head
./
to "aleallusky Lubliner"
"Fengless" (74.15) (339.31)
["fangless": powerless: [Eng. lusky, "lazy, sluggish")
"Finglas": site of "cemetery,"
Relief Map B < Gr. koimeterion, "dormitory, ..........
&
sleeping place"): R.I.P. ~

"Our mounding's mass" (8. I)
"even prospect"
"Novo Nilbud by swamplight" (24. I) (252.8) '~rt.
[evening) "Fibsburrow" (147.26) "lvI/I.
------ ----
["fibs": delusions; '-. (SO"OFq
"duncingk" (550.35) "burrow": underground) ~ '3.1?j tOllrqr"
[a "dunce" at "Sunsink" (359.36) ;
blurred "dancing":
he can't keep time) "Dumping's Corner" (447.17)
"Cobra Park" (370.7) " " "the domnatory of Defmut"

[Eden. < Heb. <eden, pleasure) (593.21)
~
"Mountain of Joy.
of a truly criminal
"the duff and demb (76.4-5)
...----
"clownsillies" (537.35) - . . . . institutions" (73.20)~
"richmounded"
"whole in the wall" (90.21-22) "merlinburrow burrocks" (5.35)
["Merlin": "entombed alive"
"whole of the wall" (69.5-6) (Annotations) ;
"ashtun" (6.33)
"canalles" (494.32) [" ash" : extinguished; "burrows": underground)
[Fr. canaille, "cad, scoundrel") "tun": tub) ...............
~ PHORNIX PARK (80.6)
Ao:, (35~"'''' ...
______ ~~~~=:-~::;
"vicefreegal" (33.30) "fornix" "parks"
["stone-deaf" :
bothered,
"Willingdone "deaf")
"strawberry bedspread" mormorial"
(116.18,17)
(559.6) "marmorial"
"kayoed" (85.4) "a depression
!
"the furry glans" (526.22-23) (8·35, 9·34)
"knock[ed) out"-"phoenished"-"parked" Hoi Hollow"
(3.22) (130.11-12) (454.34) [L. marmoreus,
"the garden Gough gave" (271.29) marblelike;
[Eden, < Heb. <eden, "pleasure") Gr. mormor, the
"Knockout" "in these parks"
"lease lapse" (265.35) ~ boogeyman, hideous
(505.34) (606.24) "where our maggy seen all"
[he's expired) monster that
[knockout in these parts) (7.32) scares children)
"Iackslipping" (310.5) "DUFBLlN"
(447.23)
"unlucalized" (87.18) "weak aMaminal wall ... vinvin. vinvin" ["deaf-blind")
(437.10-11 )
"Iacksleap" (547.17)
"Luvillicit" (385.25) ..,;r "makeussin wall (sinsin! sinsin!)" (116.18)
"CHAMPELYSIED" (607.14) "in imageascene all: whimwhim whimwhim"
"Laxlip" (69.34) [Fr. Champs Elysees, (33l.30)
"Elysian Fields": "anny living" (463.10)
"Auborne" (174.31)
the underworld 1
/
"the King's Hoarse-" (219.15)
[Fr. au bornes,
"at the limit") "chapel exit" (127.29)
"Art thou gainous
sense uncompetite" "liquorally no more "atoms
__ _ "the deserted village" "the disordered visage" (286.B)
(325.4) powers" (321.1) (455.
--- (174.25) "likeliest villain of the place" (137.7) ~ "Fleshshambles"
"Chilblaimend" (74.15-16) (538.22-23)
"Distorted mirage" (265.28-29) ,/ ["chilblains" :
sores on the feet)
"liveliest vinnage on the brain" (381.4) /'Kongdam Coombe" (255.22)
"kill or maim him" (223.20) ["Coombe": < Gael. cum, "hollow")
"Were you there when they lagged
"chort
urn through the coombe?" (506.11 - 12)
[Russ.
["Were you there when they laid
"crumbling" (18.7) him in the tomb?" (line from
a Black spiritual))
"old" "dodderer" (201.8)
"Clowntalkin" (414.4)
"Milton's Park"
"saggard" (555.15) [Eden, < Heb. <eden,
I
["One who 'sags' or
hangs helplessly" (OED))
"old dodderer"
(201.8)
"Whooth?" (7.30)
to "Rockabill Booby" (104.6-7)
["booby": dummy; lulled in sleep]
"done abate" (547.27)\
\t
/'
--
.. Draumcondra 's Dreamcountry"
(293.FI) "the irised sea" (318.34)
[Ger. Traum, "dream"]
"ireglint'seye" (6.~
"looks like Iceland's ear" (129.27)
stratum"
(542.4)
-
men's asylum" "ithmusisthy" (623.10)
["his majesty"]
~ ~.
Adam Foundlitter"
(467.15)
Anglo-IT.
(420.35)
(Fr. reve, "dream";
""' ~'* ..
~",,,,
~ "the neck" (17.11)
Eng. rest; man,
"found littered"]
"the pit of his St Tomach's" (53.31)
called " . ~
to the hothehlll /'~theGrusham"
"clown toff"
(565.1-2)
from the hollow" (315.31-32)
(607.27) (~76.11)" [toff (Br. sl.):
[ gruesome] gent, swell, dandy]
"the hollow"
(136.34, passim) "pillary of the Nilsens" (322.32) "Fearview" (420.26)
["Nil sens" ; no sense;
a "pillory" immobilizes]
"it's snugger to burrow abed"
"sackvulle of swart" (565.35-36)
(14.3) ["swart": black]
"blackpool"
(85.15, passim)
"old butte new" (13.14) "And a live?" (608.14)
Anna Livia
and ifs"
17) "Pawmbroke" (74.15)
"fleshambles" ("Goney. goney gone!"
(494.32) [306.F2])
"strangbones tomb"
(343.4) "Novo Nilbud by swamplight" (24.1)
"-blagrogger-" (582.32)
"daybroken donning" (191.27) ["Black Roger": empty skull
of Nicholas Within" (541.4) [broken down] on black field; Fr. blaaue.
chort: devil. Old Nick]) until "dawnybreak" (353.31) "hoax. trick. delusion"]
"rath in mine mines" (16.27) "Downlairy" (40.30)

[or mind; "mines": beneath the surface] ["down": where he lies;
"lair": resting place]
"sire ofleery subs of dub" (596.12)

(96.10) "Ghoststown" (329.25)
"pleasure"]
t
in a "duldrum" (51.34)
["subs": they "go under";
Ger. leer. "empty"]
"The Vico Road goes round and round

"drummed all he done"
to meet where terms begin." (452.21-22)
(590.26) [dreamed]
t
to "tonedeaf-"
to "braynes" and "HoodieHead"
(74.13) (4.5-6)
(5 22 . 2 8) ("his braynes ["Hoodie": hooded.
coolt parritch" in the dark]
[cold porridge])
(7.12), a representational smokescreen that sustains the misleading appear-
ance of vague consonance with waking reality, while in fact indirectly rep-
resenting a "latent content," and an unconscious one, which bears on "mat-
ters that fall under the ban of our infrarational senses" (19.36-20.1). The
nature of this "latent content" in turn discovers itself if, at the Wake's re-
peated insistence, we "see [a] relief map" (564.10) of "Finn his park" (564.8
[not "Phoenix Park"])-where the spelling, like the entire passage in which
the phrasing occurs (564.1-565.5), renders the imaginary landscape with
which we are concerned explicitly anthropomorphic. One version of such a
map is bodied forth in Relief Map B, which shows "Howth Castle and En-
virons" and other localities mentioned in FinneBans Wake not as they are
represented by cartographic officialdom, but as they are represented through-
out Joyce's "book of the dark" (the meanings of any terms on the map not
immediately transparent will emerge in passing). Reference to the upper
right-hand corner of this "relief map" will show that the landscape which
our "knock[ed] out "dull emitter" has in mind-or, more accurately, has in
his "tropped head"-latently depicts, in "Sheeroskouro," a "still" "form out-
lined aslumbered, even in our own nighttime" (7.20-21). Shortly to become
known in FinneBans Wake as "our mounding's mass" (8.1), this slumbering
form is that of a sleeping body.
Scattered legends about the landmass that extends between Howth Head
and Castle Knock in Dublin might lead us to associate the "form outlined
aslumbered" here with that of a "sleeping giant" (540.I7)-perhaps even the
Irish demigod "Finn MacCool" (5.10,6.13, 139.14)-"whose head is the Hill
of Howth" "and whose feet turn up among the hillocks of Phoenix Park."4
But an association is not an identity, and the "abjects" and "thinks" our
"knock[ed] out" hero has in his "tropped head" ("he was obliffious of the
headth of hosth") are not really a perceived Howth or Castle Knock at all.
Underlying this dormant form, then, one finds no "real giant" at all, but
an altogether ordinary "man ofthe hooths" (619.25 [a "man of the house,"
and of "Howth" head]), "reclined from cape to pede" (619.27 ["cap-a-
pie"]), his "heartsoul dormant mid shadowed landshape" (474.2-3). The
paragraph, in short, amounts to a representation, in the condensed and dis-
placed referential systems typical of dreams, ofthe sleeper's "knock[ed] out"
body, which he now senses, from his own "eyewitless foggus," not as a
visible object rationally knowable and mensurable in feet and inches in Car-
tesian res extensa, but, "infrarationally," as a space of inert, unthinking
matter without knowable boundaries, internal to which he dwells equally
at every point. More than the Dublin of any authoritative history or guide-

book, this is the space within which all of Finnegans Wake takes place. And
it, too, in its own way, will turn out to be an immense "afterthought of thy
nomatter. "
Sleep entails a withdrawal of all perception and consciousness from the
world one "knows" by day-a world nowhere without real landscapes and
everywhere cluttered with real objects (bedroom walls, bed, head). But as
consciousness disintegrates in sleep, external objects vanish from percep-
tion. 5 And as objects vanish, "the sleeper turns into himself and falls back
... into his own body," "his own body being the material substratum of the
dream." "The process of falling asleep is a withdrawal" "from the object
world," and "the process of dreaming is rebuilding" "a new environment
formed out of the dreamer's body."6 In yet other words, "the dreamer sinks
into himself. And makes himself a whole new world; a man-made world, in
the deepest sense. A whole new world, out of the body of the dreamer."7 To
say it in the idiom of the Wake: "And then. Be old. The next thing is. We are
once amore a~ ~abes awondering in a wold made fresh" (:n6.15-17)-in a
"world made fresh," that is, because a "world made flesh"; and a "world
made flesh" because sleep, as "refleshmeant" (82.10 ["refreshment"]), puts
one "back in the flesh" (67.5-6). As in dreams, all "landshapes" in Fin-
negans Wake originate in the body of the sleeper to whom they occur; and
correlatively, all such "landshapes" inevitably reveal the nature of the body
ofthe sleeper. 8
In one form or another, the "unknown body" (96.29) of the man "tropped
head" at Finnegans Wake-the distorted "landshape" we have begun to
probe-will turn up everywhere in the book, underlying everything in it.
Recurrent "cap-a-pie," "head-to-foot," "head-to-toe," and "top-to-bottom"
formations, turning up all over the place, and often where one least expects
them, will keep this space deviously under a reader's attention everywhere
in the Wake. 9 Particularly in its first chapter, as a way of orienting his reader
into the alien spatialities of a world made fresh, Joyce calls heavy attention
to the "landshape" highlighted on the book's first page (at, for instance,
6.26-27, 6.29-35, 7.8-10, 7.13-14, 7.21- 24, 10·35-36, 11.6-7, 12.19-20,
12.35-36, 14.31 ["selfstretches"], 15.25, and 17.4-5). But after the chapter
moves through this succession of dreamscapes-and in the process intro-
duces us to a kind of shorthand whereby the slumbering form that we have
been examining becomes known simply as "our mounding's mass" (8.1)-
any hump, lump, dump, or mountainlike form will serve to evoke the
sleeper's body. The insistent appearance of this "still" "form outlined aslum-
bered" beneath tales apparently bearing on other places and other persons-
"Reading the Evening World" 37

"impossible to remember persons in improbable to forget position places"
(617.S-9)-will remind the "read[er of] the Evening World" that all of Fin-
neaans Wake, because "everynight life" does (17.33), takes place in the
"tropped head" of "one stable somebody" (107.31) who himself, because un-
consciously "knock[ed] out," drifts through the dark with "headandheel-
less" obscurity (SI.22-23) beneath the evident surface of things.
Momentarily, we might regard the "knock[ed] out" "dull emitter" "laid to
rust" "in bed" at Finneaans Wake as "Headmound" (135.9 [as opposed to an
alertly brainy "Edmond"]). As the name implies, he comes equipped with
an amply "Vacant. Mined" (42I.II)-a "vacant mind" whose "eyewitless
foggus" throughout the night, and whose vast ability to "no" (not "know"),
all of Finneaans Wake will now go on to "represent" in elaborate detail. Like
all of the figmentary characters who drift through his "tropped head" in the
dark, "Ah, he's very thoughtful ... when he's not absintheminded .... He
is, really" (464.15- IS). Problematically, however, and especially for knowl-
edgeably conscious readers, this "knock[ed] out" hero is extremely "ab-
sintheminded" throughout the length of the night-where that" absinthe,"
"now that I come to drink of it" (561. 14 [not "think" of it]), deepens any
form of quotidian" absentmindedness" conceivable to the wakeful rationalist
by "alcoherently" (40.5), and as deeply as sleep, "blacking out" everything
(23°.10). To the likely objection that may be arising at this point-"This
representation does not accord with my experience" (509.1-2)-the ob-
vious reply is that "experience" always has a colorfully narratable content
to it, whereas sleep pitches one into a "vaguum" (136.34 [a very "vague"
"vacuum"]) and sends one off "touring the no placelike no timelike abso-
lent" (6°9.1-2 ["absolute" "absent"]). To note further that English does not
have a single word-let alone a mimetic convention-that does for the "ab-
sent" what "representation" does for the "present," is to begin seeing why
Finneaans Wake had to be written as peculiarly as it is.1O In portraying a
man "knock[ed] out" and "tropped head," who "is not all there, and is all
the more himself since he is not so" (507.3-4), Joyce is "giving unsolicited
testimony on behalf of the absent ... to those present" (173.29-31). As he
put it in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, joking about her account of a large
dinner party, "the tangential relationships, the spiral progressions and the
presence of the absent remind me of something which perhaps I wrote or
ought to have written" (L, I, 2IS).
There is a happy corollary to these headier observations. As should have
become evident in passing-and, if not, "see relief map" (564.10) -the man
"tropped head" at Finneaans Wake is not very bright. Psychologically, sleep

is regressive. Physiologically classified a "vegetative state," it renders our
"knock[ed] out" hero something of a lush human vegetable given to pithy
little thoughts on the order of" I yam as I yam" (604.23; 481.35). As a conse-
quence of his fall (asleep), "his nut [is] cracked" (136.2), and a good half of
the "turniphudded dunce" (517.7-8) becomes a severe "mental and moral
defective" (177.16), if not a simple "Dimb!" "Dumb!" "dud" (6.9-10). In
what Joyce called his "nocturnal comedy," then, the man "tropped head" at
Finneaans Wake becomes, "in his own wise" (33.4 [this word merits study]),
"our worldstage's practical jokepiece" and "a veritable Napoleon the Nth"
(33.2-3)-"Napoleon" because he's a megalomaniac whose egocentrism
moves to indefinite and extreme degrees (hence "Nth").11 Certainly the
simplest way of reading Finneaans Wake is to see it as one protracted and
extremely funny little-moron joke, but with one important twist: the little
moron turns out to be an altogether representative Western Man, and the
more "know-all profoundly impressive" a Western Man in his bents and in-
clinations, the bigger the little moron (L, I, 257). For sleep takes place in a
state that reveals the power of a tranquilizing ability to "no" (not "know")-
and to "no" precisely those things about which Western "awethorrorty"
(516.19) has consolidated the illusive belief that it can "know."12 We might,
then, think of the "the old man on his ars" (514.34) shown in Relief Map
B-a beleaguered patriarch-as "Professor Ciondolone" (161.2-3 [It. cion-
dolone, "idler," "lounger"]), and, as the honorific implies, "the accom-
plished washout" (174.8), "in his own wise," may have a great deal to teach
us; or, at least, we should give the "doped bum" "the bumfit of the doped"
(339.26 [and "the benefit of the doubt"]).
Given the dubious relation of conscious "knowing" to the "funny and
floored" figure (227.24) shown "knock[ed] out" in the relief map, some
guidelines would be of use in helping us to proceed further in a "reading [of
the] Evening World." For we have hardly begun to read that paragraph con-
taining the phrase "in bed," which still stands surrounded by all kinds
of murkily nonsensical terms-" Finnegan, " "christian minstrelsy," that
hundred-lettered thunderword, the first two paragraphs. Rather than mov-
ing linearly through a text "imitative of the dream-state," drawing on the
compromised instruments of orthodox rationalism, it might better make
sense to proceed much as we might in interpreting a dream. In what fol-
lows, then, "our procedure [will consist] in abandoning all those purposive
ideas which normally govern our reflections," and all the more crucially
because "purposive ideas," or "ideas that are known to us" (ID, 567), will
teach us nothing more than what we already knew to begin with: that we
"Readina the Evenina World" 39

"had reason as I knew and you knew and he knew all along" (158.31). No
less problematically, purposive attacks on a text this obscure may cause us
to straitjacket it into perhaps faultily preconceived literary expectations.
Having then abandoned these preconceptions, we will "focus our attention
on a single element of the dream ... and follow out a chain of associations
from [this] one element, till, for one reason or another, it seems to break
off" (ID, 565-66). In the paragraph under our attention, for instance, this
would mean isolating a single element-a syllable, word, or phrase like "in
bed"-then to "Note the ... Associations" (27o.II-14), as the Wake cryp-
tically puts it, that furl out of that element as it is developed, from cover to
cover, throughout the book. "No connection [will be] too loose, no joke too
bad, to serve as a bridge from one thought to another" in pursuing these
associations, and especially no connection that arises "by assonance, ver-
bal ambiguity ... or by any association of the kind we allow in jokes or in
play upon words" (ID, 568-69). Some connection of this kind has already
yielded sense in thinking about the phrase "knock out"; and as that ex-
ample furthermore suggests, this associative way of proceeding, far from li-
censing anarchy, will in the long run capture meaning in a way that no
amount of calculating rationalism ("rationalization") ever could. 13 "If we
then take up a second element" in the paragraph, moreover, and repeat the
process with it, "it is only to be expected that the unrestricted character of
our associations will be narrowed" because we will "hit upon associations
that have something in common with the first chain" (ID, 566). As we re-
peat this process with a third, fourth, and fifth chain of associations, each
mutually restricting and hemming each other in, their self-delimiting con-
vergence will ultimately capture "unknown" or "unconscious" matters (ID,
567)-"matters that fall under the ban of our infrarational senses" (19.36-
20.1)-with an exactitude whose purport must be its own proof.
What follows, then, is a primer, an illustration of a process that any
reader might go through in "reading [the] Evening World." As it explores
"the book of DoublendsJined" (20.15-16 ["double-ends joined"]), taking as
its" allforabit" the paragraph in which our analysis began (19.2), this read-
ing will move to "double ends" and purposes, engaging us in "two thinks at
a time" (583.7). On one level, it will simply be moving through that para-
graph-and others along the way-very slowly, particle by particle, ulti-
mately to read them in some depth. But at the same time, because it will be
tracing long chains of association out of such paragraphs and throughout
the entire book, it will be reading Finnegans Wake over and over again, from
cover to cover, coming to terms on each repeated reading with a distinct

aspect of the whole. "Reading [the] Evening World" literately reconstructed
in Finne8ans Wake requires one to become familiar with a set of representa-
tional mannerisms peculiar to the working of the night, one of which has to
do with the latent omnipresence of the sleeper's body beneath all the mani-
fest appearances of his dream. Another of these mannerisms furls out of the
word "unquiring" and, in particular, out of the syllable "un-." For "by
naught" (555.5 ["night"]), in the" nou8httime" (349.6), its negational power
wields a spectacular force. As a way of seeing how this works, examine
again the figure shown "outlined aslumbered" in Relief Map B. And "do not
fail to point to yourself a depression called Holl Hollow. It is often quite
guttergloomering ... and gives wankyrious [one curious] thoughts to the
head" (565.1-3).
"Readin8 the Evenin8 World" 41

CHAPTER TWO
Nothin8 in Particular: On
En8lish Obliterature
In a book expressly intended to prove that personality survives beyond the

grave, the Spanish thinker Miguel de Unamuno proposes this interesting
exercise:
It is impossible for us, in effect, to conceive of ourselves not existing, and no effort
is capable of enabling consciousness to realize absolute unconsciousness, its own
annihilation. Try, reader, to imagine yourself, when you are wide awake, the condi-
tion of your soul when you are in a deep sleep; try to fill your consciousness with
the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it. The
effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of
ourselves as not existing. I
Still, he seems to overlook his own best evidence. Unimaginable as any-

one conscious may find the "no-consciousness" of deep sleep, quotidian re-
flection suggests that billions of people actually vanish into it each day,
with clockwork regularity, there in turn to conceive of nothing without
much torment at all. Contemporary sleep researchers speculate that recol-
lectible dreaming takes up roughly one and one-half hours of the average
night's sleep;2 and their tabulative ascertainments, doubtless borne out by
reference to "m'm'ry," merely quantify what nineteenth-century students of
dreams and Freud in essence also knew: "A dreamless sleep is best, the only
proper one." What happens in these dreamless extents of the night merits
42
our special attention now because Joyce, if he were indeed to "reconstruct
the nocturnal life" in Finnegans Wake, would necessarily have had to ac-
count for these parts of his sleeper's dark too, in turn to provide his reader
with some such "representation of no-consciousness" as Unamuno deems
inconceivable. Brief examination of any page of Finnegans Wake will begin
to reveal Joyce's success in this endeavor: the book represents nothing; or, to
modulate the phrase one degree, much of it represents much the same
kind of nothing that one will not remember not having experienced in sleep
last night.
A writer of strong realist allegiances, as the evidence of everything he
wrote before Finnegans Wake attests, Joyce would have beheld in the darker
parts of sleep the paradoxical spectacle of an undeniably real human expe-
rience ("you were there") within which "reality," "experience," and all hu-
man knowing mutually vanished into a state that the Wake calls, with con-
tradictory precision, "Real Absence" (536.5-6).3 Because Joyce held on the
authority of Vico the conviction that thought could yield access to matters
"found within the modifications of our own human mind"-matters that
"we cannot at all imagine and can comprehend only with great effort" (NS,
331, 338)-he would no more have refrained from rendering this "Real Ab-
sence" legibly particular in his "book of the dark" (251.24) than his surro-
gate, Shem the Penman, who "giv[es] unsolicited testimony on behalf of the
absent ... to those present" (173.29-31) in a neverseen, Wake-like "edition
de tenebres" (179.24-27 [Fr. "edition of darkness"]). Indeed, as Finnegans
Wake neared its completion Joyce spoke of having built it "out of nothing. "4
He was aware, of course, of problems. While he confided to Jacques Mer-
canton that his "whole book [was] shaky," in Finnegans Wake itself he de-
scribed his sleeping protagonist in these more expansively concessive terms: 5
Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our
certitude, the evidencegivers by legpoll too untrustworthily irreperible [L. "un-
discoverable, unlearnable"] where his adjugers are semmingly freak threes but his
judicandees plainly minus twos. Nevertheless Madam's Toshowus waxes largely
more lifeliked (entrance, one kudos; exits, free) and our notional gullery is now
completely complacent, an exegious monument, aerily perennious. (57.16- 22)
If these lines simply suggest, by one reading, that the entire representational
endeavor of Finnegans Wake is nothing but a "legpull"-a "notional gul-
lery"-since only one untrustworthy "evidencegiver by headpoll" can wit-
ness and report on those "too imprecisely few unfacts" even potentially re-
trievable from "the wastes a'sleep" (64. I); they also plainly state-even
Nothing in Particular 43
as they evoke "his judicandees" (L. his judicandis, "the judging of these
things")-that the "evidencegiver" in question is undiscoverable at this
moment of the night, and that those missing "unfacts" and his absent
"head" are equally "irreperible" too. While the passage acknowledges evi-
dent epistemological problems, then, it also expresses the Wake's obstinate
determination "nevertheless" "to show us," in a form of verisimilar por-
traiture that might well find place in a National Gallery ("notional gul-
lery, " "lifelike"), the "Real Absence" internal to a "completely complacent"
sleeping man-here virtually indistinguishable from a brain-void waxwork
dummy in turn "semmingly" pasted together of nothing ("Madame Tus-
saud," "waxes," "lifelike"; L. adju8or, "to be yoked together"; Hu. semmi,
"nothing"). So "completely complacent" in the passage at hand is the man
who lies "outlined aslumbered" from "leg" to "poll" ("legpoll") that little
seems to be on his "tropped head" except for dim indications of not being
there at all ("notions," "gullery"). And especially in a book about sleep
entitled the Wake, the closing reference-to Horace's Exe8i monumentum,
aere perennius ("I have finished a monument more durable than brass")-
will oblige us to begin wondering what exactly distinguishes the "Real
Absence" internally endured by this figure who rests in peace, not awake,
"tropped head," from the real absence internal to someone resting in eternal
peace, at his wake, dropped dead.
Spectral entry into these considerations must inevitably proceed from re-
flection on the more easily accessible experience of dreaming, where al-
ready the Wake's sleeping hero "is not all there" (507.3). And a passage in
the Wake growing out of these lines on "our notional gullery" will yield ac-
cess to the "clearobscure" character of dreams. For after moving through the
reach of murky obscurity in which these lines are set (I.iii-iv), the book
ultimately lifts back up toward the light of a courtroom hearing in which,
by one account, "a constable gives evidence" against "Festy King, also
called Pegger Festy, [who] is tried at Old Bailey for stealing coal and taking
off his clothes in public. "6 This culminant legal scene bears scrutiny:
Remarkable evidence was given, anon, by an eye, ear, nose and throat witness,
whom Wesleyan chapelgoers suspected of being a plain clothes priest W.P., situate at
Nullnull, Medical Square, who, upon letting down his rice and peacegreen cover-
disk and having been sullenly cautioned against yawning while being grilled, smiled
(he had had a onebumper at parting from Mrs Molroe in the morning) and stated to
his eliciter under his morse mustaccents (gobbless!) that he slept with a bonafides
and that he would be there to remember the filth of November, hatinaring, rowdy 0,
which, with the jiboulees of Juno and the dates of ould lanxiety, was going, please
the Rainmaker, to decembs within the ephemerides of profane history, all one with

Tournay, Yetstoslay and Temorah, and one thing which would pigstickularly strike a
person of such sorely tried observational powers as Sam, him and Moffat, though
theirs not to reason why, the striking thing about it was that he was patrified to see,
hear, taste and smell, as his time of night, how.... (86.32-87.12; emphasis mine)
Actually on trial here, as the underlining will suggest, is the evidence of

the senses, their testimony baffling the sleeping man who is nowhere directly
apparent in this scene but everywhere central to it because he envelopes it.
While all of his Irish senses actually lie "petrified" in the motor paralysis of
sleep ("he was patrified to see, hear, taste, and smell at his time of night"),
they also seem contradictorily capable of bearing confused false witness, in
these and subsequent lines, as they proceed to testify about subjects "un-
lucalised, of no address and in noncommunicables" (87.18-19), in a trial
whose single "evidencegiver by headpoll" when "bluntly broached, and in
the best basel to boot, as to whether he was one of those ... for whom the
audible-visible-gnosible-edible world existed" cannot exactly say that he is
sure (88.4-7).7 The formally contradictory sentence, then, intricately repli-
cates the "real" character of perception in dreams, where vision arises" in
fact, under the closed eyes of the inspectors [as] the traits featuring the
chiaroscuro coalesce" (I07 .28-29); and where the dreamer possessed by
voices, "when seized of the facts," actually "overhears[s] in his secondary
personality as ... [an] underreared" (38.26-28; emphasis mine). The evi-
dence spilled up under closed lids and within dormant ears, accordingly, is
as passive in form as the sentence representing it ("Remarkable evidence
was given, anon, by an eye witness petrified to see" [italics mine]); and, as
the highlighted adverb in turn suggests, "it ooze[s] out in Deadman's Dark
Scenery Court through crossexanimation of the casehardened testis" [L.
"witness"] both "anonymously" and "anon"-"immediately, without medi-
ation" (87.33-34). The reference here to "Deadman's Dark Scenery Court"
would only locate this entire trial more deeply within the body of a man
who lies "casehardened" ("hardened on the surface") under the sensory
closure of sleep, while internally undergoing a "cross-examination" of his
own "exanimation" ("deprivation oflife," or "apparent death") .8
All of the elements in this sentence extraneous to its syntactical core-
each inviting the Wakean question, "Is it a factual fact"? (529.31)-now
begin to operate comparably, as negatory ciphers denoting perception "oozed
out" of a body deadened to all sensory perception of the real. Those odd
"Wesleyan chapelgoers," for instance-practitioners of "inner calm" who
doctrinally embrace "the witness of the Spirit"-only cast further doubt on
the already jeopardized evidence by branding the strange witness of whom
we read an undercover Catholic. 9 Their rightful distrust of "figments in the
evidential order" (96.26-27) renders this "dim seer" (96.28) indistinguish-
able from the Wake's "patrified" hero, who sleeps undercovers and in dis-
guise throughout the entire sentence, enjoying insuperable inner calm as he
witnesses spirits and emits strange counterintelligence at the interior of" an
unknown body" (96.29) void of any sensation of the real at all ("Nullnull,
Medical Square"). His testimony, then, only illusively whispered "to a solici-
tor under Norse moustaches" and amplified by a sneeze-" (God bless!) "-
actually bears on events perceived in the absence of all direct perception, as
if over remotenesses of dark by means of imperceptible, because radiotele-
graphed, Morse code ("morse mustaccents" plays "Morse" and the Fi. musta
["black"] into the English word "accents"). IO His voluble testimony also
seems self-elicited ("eliciter") and quite inaudible; for the anonymous
"throat-witness" sleeping throughout this entire scene, "obliffious" entirely
of himself, is much more "pigstickularly" oblivious of the existence of his
own shut mouth: he's" (gob-less)" [Anglo-Ir. 8ob, "mouth"], and he just lies
there, "stuck like a pig." Evidence given about exact dates and times ("he
would be there to remember the filth of November ... the dates of ould
lanxiety"), designates as well the absence of perceived historical time alto-
gether-discrete "fifth" slipping into blacked-out "filth," and "the days of
old anxiety" blurring away entirely into "Auld Lang Syne" (where "auld ac-
quaintance" "be forgot" and is "never brought to mind" [389.11,390.23,21,
Il.iv]). The misheard echo of a Guy Fawkes Day chant-"Please to remem-
ber the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot"-finally suggests
that this entire Irish juridical nightmare, bearing obscurely on the anni-
hilation of English reality and legality, actually threatens more the ety-
mologically related properties of English reality and legibility.
For ultimately on trial in this strange legal scene is not simply the taxed
evidence of the senses, but all the exacting rules of evidence by which the
innately formless senses of sight and hearing have been disciplined over
years both of personal and cultural history to bear witness on an "audible-
visible-gnosible world" held intelligibly in place by those correlated insti-
tutional forces of kgality, legihility, and !2gic which Vico conceptually
equates with intellection and recollection in The New Science, by derivation
from the common root *le8- ("t6 collect, to gather") (NS, 240, 363). De-
manding intelligent and recollectively drilled study through peeled eyes and
amply opened ears, English and the reality it orders are evident to no one at
birth, or in sleep. If the "person of sorely tried observational powers" repre-
sented in this scene fails adequately to register the real evidence, then

(from the Latin e-videre, "to see clearly"), he can only fail badly to heed the
laws by which that evidence is wakefully ordered. The passage therefore be-
gins to suggest why Finnegans Wake had to turn obscurely "outlex" (169.3)
in order accurately to reconstruct "everynight life" (17.33), where vision
and evidence arise only in their own absence; but it also yields a simple
corollary allowing us to distinguish dream-riffed parts of the book from its
"Real Absences." For while all of sleep takes place under the closure of the
senses, dreams do not quite. "Show[ing] us the dreamer in so far as he is not
sleeping," in Freud's words, dreams submit to intelligible analysis, inter-
pretations as variant as those surrounding any legal case, and, above all,
recollection, because they lift from dormancy the trained senses of sight
and hearing, inevitably articulated with elaborate memories of struggles by
which the "earsighted" dreamer has learned the heard and written law
(143.9-10): no recollectible dream lies far from wakened life or is void of
visual or auditory image.
Yet in parts of the night reconstructed by Finnegans Wake, as its prostrate
central figure lies "deafadumped" (590. I), his"eyballds" glazed over and
"unoculated" in visionlessness (75.17, 541.27), the trained senses and all
that they have been disciplined to know fall dormant as the rest of his body,
whether singly or together, to leave only "the gravitational pull perceived by
certain fixed residents ... suggesting an authenticitatem of his aliquitudi-
nis" (100.32-34 [L., "an authenticity of his somethingness"]): "Is now all
seenheard then forgotten? Can it was ... "? (61.29-30). "Turn[ing] a deaf
ear clooshed" in parts of his sleep ("clooshed" folds the English "closed"
into the Gael. cluas, "ear"), "daffMr Hairwigger"-" (not all hear) "-"pro-
ceed[s] ... in the directions of the duff and demb institutions" to become
incapable of any legitimate or legal hearing at all (582.7, 491.30, 536.1-2,
73.18-20). And "claud[ing] boose his eyes" (509.30)-where "claud" blurs
"cloud" and "close" into the Latin claudo ("shut"), while the "boose" blacks
brain and "both" eyes out-he turns his "seeless socks" (468.25) vacant as
the gaps in empty wickets, so to lose all evidence of all evidence: "Wicked-
gapers, I appeal against the light. An nexistence of vi vidence" (366.2-3 [the
orthographical modifications suggest equally the "inexistence of evidence"
and the death-L. nex-of vivid existence]). At those darkest moments of
the night in which the man "tropped head" at the Wake finally finds "sound
eyes right but ... could not all hear" and "light ears left yet ... could but
ill see," he simply "cease[s]. And he cease[s], tung and trit" (Da. tung og
trret, "heavy and tired"), so to cross over the borders of "Metamnisia" (Gr.
metamnesia, "beyond forgetfulness") "in the waste of all peaceable worlds,"
there to "bare falls witless" to nothing (158.9-14, 247.22). Deliberately in-
verting "light" and "sound" and "right" and "left" to suggest the evaporation
of space, these lines would show the Wake's sleeper sinking under shut eyes
and ears into the "bare" and metamnesic "waste" of "peaceable sleep,"
where he "falls witless," witness only to "Real Absence." It is into compa-
rable metamnesia that the Wake's sleeping protagonist passes at the end of
the legal hearing whose intricacies we have followed, as its single "remark-
able evidencegiver," "having murdered all the English he knew," simply van-
ishes, trailing behind him an empty-pocketed garment-an envelopment
wi th nothing inside-and "thereinunder proudly showing off the blink pi tch"
(93.2-4). This "blink pitch" would in part be the "blank pitch" that gels
beneath his closed eyelids, as if under a "black patch," when they "blink"
for "one eyegonblack" (16.29) and pass out of dreams-no matter whether
the "eye go black" for one moment (Ger. ein Augenblick) or hours. But since
Finnegans Wake immediately moves into a chapter treating of illegibly bur-
ied letters and a "partly obliterated ... negative" lost "in the heart of the
orangeflavoured mudmound" (III.34-35)-its hero's "deafadumped" body,
now quite "ob-literate" (L. void ofletters) and suffused with the negative-
the same "blink pitch" would also denote the obliterate representation of
sleep's "black pitch," in Finnegans Wake, on "the blank page."
Accurately to reconstruct that part of life lived in immobility and dream-
void sensory paralysis, that is, Joyce necessarily devises in Finnegans Wake a
whole strange language of negation, a system of reference to no experience,
whose infinitely inflected terms, equally signifying the absence of percep-
tion and the perception of nothing, ultimately replicate from his own "eye-
witless foggus" the "one percepted nought" (368.36 ["night"]) endured by a
man unconsciously drifting toward sunrise through "Real Absence" in "the
heliotropical noughuime" of a "night-time's" sleep (349.6 ["heliotropes," or
"sunflowers," move like sleeping people toward the sun]). Writ on "slip[s] of
blancovide" (43.24 [Fr. blanc et vide "blank and void"]) and lexically ex-
pressing "the lexinction of life ... be your blanche patch" (83.25-26), one
form of this language of nihilation is called "sordomutics" in Finnegans
Wake (II7. 14 [L. surdus-mutus, "deaf-and-dumb");11 and it renders concep-
tually "deaf and dumb" and "blank and void" each articulated black and
white page of the book, in part by layering over the substantive nouns of
English an assemblage of insubstantives that refer to nothing but the ab-
sence of sensation, its objects, and all reference. Not a single "blanche
patch" in Finnegans Wake fails either directly or obliquely to evoke such
states of imperception as blindness, deafness, dumbness, and numbness; or

the "black," "blank," "dim," "silent," "mute," "numb," or "obscure" objects
of such imperception. For in sleep, "if we look at it verbally"-as opposed
to nominally-"there is no true noun in active nature where every bally
being ... is becoming in its owntown eyeballs" (523.10- 12 ["owntown" sug-
gests both "undone" and the Anglo-Ir. Bally-, "hometown"]). In such a state
of "sordomutic" insensation, where all substantives-"every those personal
place objects if nonthings where soevers"-lie "forswundled" (598.1 - 3 [Ger.
verschwindet, "vanished," or vorschwindelt, "made believe"]), we are of-
ten left to look at "some such nonoun" (104.16) as would suitably depict
the Wake's absent and "patrified" hero, "(a very pure nondescript, by the
way ... which paleographers call ... the Aranman inBperwhis throuBh the
hole of his hat)" (121.9-12); the phrasing here suggests that the vacant con-
tent of this "nondescript" Irishman's "head," all "holes" and scattered "whis-
pering," can only be "nondescribed," and in much the same way as might
the content of an empty "hat." 12
By day the man who sleeps at FinneBans Wake lives evidently in a Dublin
peopled by familiar citizens, in a period of its civil history when political
tensions rising from the struggles of the United Irishmen of 1798 still ran
high and when Michael Gunn's Gaiety Theatre offered the public the enter-
tainment of pantomimic dumbshows. But as Dublin by daylight fades away
to leave this "very pure nondescript" a "Novo Nilbud by swamplight" (24.1),
the "numb" of this "nobodyatall" (546.26,73.9 [the insensible "name"]) un-
dergoes an incessantly modulatory slippage from "Headmound" (135.9) to
"Donawhu" (76.32; 439.20 [less an Irish "Donoghue" than a "Don't know
who"]), to "Mr Makeall Gone" (220.24), according to his degree of "Real
Absence" in the night. Coordinately, this ordinarily united Irishman be-
comes a "benighted irismaimed" (489.31) whose "eyewitless foggus" renders
him largely "the blind to two worlds taking off the deffydowndummies"
(530.2-3): incapable either of vision or the hallucinated vision of dreams
("blind to two worlds"), an inert "dummy" whose ear lies "deaf" to his
own "dumb" tongue ("deffydowndummy"), he finds himself "taking off"
(imitating) a man "drop[ped] down dead and deaf" (323.19) under a bed of
daffodils ("daffydowndillies"). "Tropped head" and not awake, he might
just as well have "dropped dead," as far as he can "no," at a wake.
Properly to identify with this "-'Man Devoyd of the Commoner Charac-
teristics of an Irish Nature" (72.II-12)-with "such a none" (143.18)-a
reader cultivating the requisite "ideal insomnia" must therefore let the
Wake's "surdumutual" "nomanclatter" (530.10, 147.20 [this "nomenclature"
descriptive of "no man"]) woo him into the "blank memory" (515.33) of
NothinB in Particular 49
what it was like "blindly, mutely, tastelessly, tactlessly" (92.27) not to have
been there in the middle of last night's sleep, when he too drifted through
"states of suspensive exanimation," enjoying a kind "of mindmouldered
ease" (143.8-9, 14). Indeed, properly to identify with a central unconscious-
ness like "Headmound" or "His Murkesty" (175.23), a reader has to establish
less a conventionally empathetic identity than an "indentity," and "of un dis-
cernibles" (49.36-50.1)-where the attachment of the prefix "in-" to the
normally solid term "identity" directs one inward, but also negates, so to
suggest that "His Murkesty" doesn't have one at all.
As the example furthermore suggests, "every dimmed letter" (424.32)
comprising the "blurry wards" (425.13) of joyce's "sordomutic" "nonday
diary" (489.35)-a letter "written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed
of solitude, sealed at night" (337.13-14)-is systematically darkened in
order to intensify the shimmering torrent of negativity understreaking the
"darkumen's" reference to no perceived reference (35°.29). Given a darkly
human hero ("darkumen" combines "document" and "dark human" ) who "is
consistently blown to Adams" (313.12) in the "percepted nought" of dream-
less sleep, Joyce necessarily undertakes a complementary "abnihilisation of
the etym" (353.22), by blowing away the "black and white" oflexical English
into an "outlexical" "blotch and void" (229.27) adequate to the representa-
tion of "Headmound's" "Vacant. Mined." Affixes of negation like a-, ab-, de-,
dis-, ex-, -less, im-, in-, mis-, non-, and un-, accordingly, become as episte-
mologically central to Finne8ans Wake as the personal pronouns, in turn
systematically deformed, are to English; while syllabifications internal to
the "blotty words" (14.14) of Joyce's "NIGHTLETTER" (308.16) are com-
parably bent into senses that denote the darkening or absence of sense. The
English "for instance," "for inkstands" (173.34). gets blacked out and abne-
gated at two "unstant[s]" (143.8) in "the no placelike no timelike absolent"
of the Wake's "noughttime" (6°9.1-2), in order to capture the "Real Ab-
sence" of a hero who knows less "the existence of time in the world" than
the "exsystems" (148.18) "off time" (143.5) "undeveiled" (75.5-6; cf. 4°3.15).
Indeed, since "His Murkesty" has "tropped head" and lies "personally un-
preoccupied" (558.4) at the interior of "an unknown body" (96.29) in-
capable of deed or act, he seems to sense through much of the night only
his lack of sense and senses: "Impalpabunt, he abhears" (23.25-26 ["ap-
pears" but "ab-hears"]); "Murk, his vales are darkling" (23.23 ["Mark" only
"murk"]). "Smatterafact," "thin" (183.7, 106.24 [rather than find a fact,
"then"]). phrases in Finne8ans Wake like "the boob's indulligence" and the
"murketplots" (531.2, 368.9) would only apparently refer to "the pope's in-

dulgence" and "the marketplace," latently referring us back inward to the
"thin" and "dulled" "intelligence" lacking in a "boob" like "Headmound,"
who lies murkily "reduced to nothing" (499.3) "durk the thicket of slumb-
where" (580.15 ["durk" moves "dark" into the Ger. durch, "through," while
"slumbwhere" blurs "somewhere" away in "slumber"]) : "it's like a dream."
So pervasive is the annihilation of reference and matter of fact in joyce's
"nonday diary," "as a marrer off act" (345.4), that even such apparently or-
thodox English words as "excommunicated" (181.35) and "delightedly"
(179.30) bear essentially negative meanings: in "delight time" reconstructed
in this "nightynovel" (329.10, 54.21 [the "night time"]), they carry the full
weight of their negatory prefixes in order to help represent an "exexive"
"ex-ex-executive" (363.9, 42.8-9) who lies x'd out, "denighted" (615.15),
and "Exexex! COMMUNICATED" (172.10). A reader wishing "to shed a
light on" this "document," then, would do better "to shellalite on the darku-
men" (350.29)-bearing in mind that "shellalite," an explosive, "obliter-
ates": "letters be blowed!" (251.31).13
Now "in [this] Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for apos-
teriorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse of the world" (83.10- 12),
as the Wake informs its reader, calling attention to the elaborate "not lan-
guage" it has devised in order to represent the nat (Da. "night") through
which its hero suspensively drifts between the knowable past of a yesterday
("aprioric") and the potentiality of a knowable future tomorrow ("apos-
teriorious"). "Nat language" here means several things. "Since" the world
vanished into the" nat" ("night"), of course, the man "tropped head" at the
Wake has "no sinse of the world," and "this is not language in any sense of
the word": "not a salutary sellable sound is since" (598.4). Since "nat lan-
guage" also suggests "not language," however, the phrase indicates that the
language of Finneyans Wake will work heavily by oppositional negation.
Unlike English, that is, which conveys meaning in its ideal form by indicat-
ing the presence of corresponding ideas and things, this "not language" op-
erates largely by indicating their "Real Absence." The "lexical" parallels
into which the "outlex" (169.3) of Wakese can be translated, accordingly,
indicate largely what the Wake is not about-as, for example "recoil" is not
"recall" (quite the contrary); "Headmound" is not "Edmond" (quite the
contrary); and "Taciturn" (17.3), whose mouth is firmly shut throughout
the length of sleep, is not "Tacitus," who after all had a great deal to say on
the subject of Germany. 14
"Scotographically arranged" in plain "blotch and void" on "the blink
pitch" (412.3,229.27,93.4), this "nat language" now generates as a totality a
Nothiny in Particular 51
kind of portraiture opposite in every particular from that afforded by the
photograph and related forms of representation: antonymically inverting
the sense of "photography" « Gr. photographia, "light-writing"), Joyce's
sleep-descriptive "scotography" « Gr. skotos, "darkness") makes for a kind
of "darkness-writing" whose developed product, the inversion of a well-
articulated positive print, is a "partly obliterated negative" that captures the
"Real Absence" of an extremely "Black Prince"-"the blank prints, now ex-
tincts" (387.20)-who lies "reduced to nothing" in the "noughttime" (499.3)
and so can only be captured in "black prints." 15 Where the photograph,
taken through the open-eyed lens of the camera lucida (171.32), seeks to
freeze the plenitude of the present in all its fleeting detail, the Wakean "scoto-
graph," taken through "blackeye lenses" (183.17) kept as firmly "SHUT" be-
neath "a blind of black sailcloth" (182.32-33) as those of the eyes in sleep,
seeks to capture only the absent; "exhabiting that corricatore of a harss, re-
vealled by Oscur Camerad" (602.22-23), its "camera obscura"-dark cham-
ber, closed lens-exposes and "exhibits" the "character" of an "obscure
comrade" of ours who, because "put to bed" (It. corricatore, "one put to
bed"), seems more to be "ex-habiting" than "in-habiting" his body, as ifin a
"hearse," "tropped head." "Say mangraphique may say nay por daguerre!"
(339. 23) .16
Traditional forms of representation at the turn of the century, as Virginia
Woolf complained, aspired perhaps too unreflectively to emulate the appar-
ently flawless mimetic perfection of the photograph, ultimately to yield the
glory of the Norman Rockwell oil and the slice-of-life narrative circulated in
the Saturday Evening Post of Joyce's day. Compensatorily, then, the "scoto-
graphic" "blotch and void" of Finnegans Wake issues its reader-through
"black mail," as opposed to black-and-white mail (34.33-34, 69.2, 240.12,
350.11,457.2, 563.16, 420.17-421.14)-something of an elaborately articu-
lated "Scatterbrains' Aftening Posht" (99.34-35), a "Pooridiocal" (106.11)
whose each "blink pitch" "nondepicts" the "Real Absence" of sleep (Da.
aften, "evening"), where our hero's "brains" lie "scattered" in a "posh" (" a
state of slush" [OED]). Sentences comprising this "scotographic" "black
mail," then-this "night express" (135.34) expressive of "noughttime"-
might be regarded as representing all the blanks that fall in between ordi-
narily lexical sentences: "In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the
sounddance and thereinofter you're in the unbewised again" (378.29-30).
Manifestly a "word," "woid" points also into a "void" here, so to generate in
this particular construction an obliterate negative of the creative Logos, a

"muddled sentence," "wherein often," as in sleep, a reader is lucidly in the
Unbewusst (Ger. the "Unconscious").
The observation made of a "blindfold passage" (462.35) in this "night-
mail" (565.32) that "old hunks on the hill read it to perlection" (94. IO) -to
"perfection" in "perlection" (" a reading through" [OED]) -does not particu-
larly lighten the task of a conscious reader. "Old Hunks," a blind Eliza-
bethan bear and a cipher for the Wake's sleeping hero, couldn't see, and he
hibernated. A good reading of the Wake's "obliterated negative," then, would
require a reader to work through its black and white abc's by cultivating an
unrelentingly "abcedminded" (18.17) memory ofthe "blotch and void" "ab-
sentmindedness" experienced last night. For unlike actual photographic
negatives, which are clearly visible, the "obliterated negative" of this "Scat-
terbrains' Aftening Posht" "render[s] all animated greatbritish and Irish ob-
jects nonviewable to human watchers" (403.23-24). Many of its "blink
pitches" must therefore be construed as bearing a content as imperceptible
as that of the number zero borne on unreceived radio-waves wired through
"Etheria Deserta" (309.9) from "ostralian someplace" (488.20)-a world
"down under" (321.32,450.1), and a dark one (L. ostra, "purples")-by a
"Negoist Cabler ... who is sender of the Hullo Eve Cenograph in prose or
worse every AlIso's night .... Noughtnoughtnought nein" (488.21-26).
Colorfully articulated nullity of this kind would equally well describe
Finne8ans Wake, itself a "Hullo Eve Cenograph in prose and verse," which of-
fers its reader a new kind of writing (Gr. caino8raphos, "new-writing"), ex-
pressive of the "nought" (Gr. cenoBTaphos, "empty-writing") imperceived
by a man lying hollow in the dead of night ("Hollow Eve Cenograph"). A
vague humanoid presence identifiable throughout Finne8ans Wake primarily
by the acrostic initials HCE, this "spickspookspokesman of our spectures-
que silentiousness" (427.32-33 ["picturesque" "specter"]) occupies a mind
structured internally much like a "cenotaph"-a tomb commemorating a
body buried somewhere else-dimly stirred as if on a "Halloween" or "All
Souls' Night" ("Hullo Eve," "AlIso's"). Its obliterated and absent content
("Noughtnoughtnought nein"), by way of the Latin ne80 ("to say no") and
the German nein ("no"), would yield a quadruple negative representative of
the Wake's ubiquitous ciphers for the "blickblackblobs" imperceived during
the "blanko" "blotto" "blackout" of sleep (339.21,64.31,39.33,560.2,617.14).
While reading in the Wake's "nat language" of "the haardly creditable
edventyres" of this sleeping man, then (51.14)-where the blurring of the
Danish eventyr ("fairy tale") into the English "adventure" tells us that
Nothin8 in Particular 53
these "edventyres" will not be actual ones-a reader should find himself, as
he sympathetically "blacks out" and "goes dead"
Turning up and fingering over the most dantellising peaches in the lingerous long-
erous book of the dark .... I know it is difficult but when your goche I go dead. Turn
now to this patch upon Smacchiavelluti! Soot allours, he's sure to spot it! (251.22-27)
The "Machiavellian" inversions of Joyce's "scotographic" "blotch and void"

make FinneyansWake's the "black velvet" (242.6) of prose styles (It. smacchial
velluti, "cleans velvet"): its "sooty velour allures" ("Soot allours"; Fr. zut,
alors!). Since it offers its reader not the account of a "day in the city," but of
a "dayety in the sooty" (143.4-5)-where "dayety" evokes a "dumbshow"
(120.7, 559.18) darker than any ever performed in Michael Gunn's Gaiety
Theatre because enacted by "Makeall Gone," of "Dumnlimn" (443.16), in
the "sooty" black of night-it's "blink pitches" must be scrutinized for their
constant traces of the absent in the same way that "black patches," in dark-
ness, are spotted on black velvet ("turn now to this patch upon Smacchia-
velluti"; "he's sure to spot it"). "Revery warp" (211. 17 [and "word"]) on the
"dantellising" pages of this dark text, accordingly, makes sense in much the
same way that each constituent element in a dark textile like lace does
("dantellising" suggests the French dentelle, "lace"): and "lace ... Sure,
what is it on the whole only holes tied together"? (434.21-22). Particled up
"from next to nothing" (4.36-5.1) and set against a night-black velvet foil,
Finneyans Wake is a comparably dark "wordspiderweb" (L, III, 422), an aes-
thetic collection of nullities held in place by a "nat language" that gives the
human "noughttime" its apprehensible shape. And since all of the night,
dream-stirred or not, takes place in the "Real Absence" of experience, "every
dimmed letter" in Joyce's "darkumound" (386.20-21) should be examined
for its reference to the absence of a man "tropped head" in the dark.
Something of how this "nat language" is put contextually to work in the
linear "drema" (69.14) of Finneyans Wake-the entirely "nonactionable"
(48.18) "drama" of a "dream" erratically experienced over the space of a
night-is suggested by a return to the third chapter of the book, whose cen-
tral pages have already shown "our notional gullery" lying "completely
complacent" in the "vaguum" (136.34). For in this section of the Wake,
Joyce intricately portrays HCE sinking into a part of the night "versts and
versts from true civilisation, not where his dreams top their traums halt
(Beneathere! Benathere!)" (81.15- 16) : reference to a "tram-stop" here indi-
cates the end of the line and all "trains" of thought, just as "Beneathere!"
moves us "beneath" the headland of "Ben Edar" (Howth) and therefore be-

neath the head altogether; the entire construction evokes a part of the
"noughttime" in which "dreams stop" and the German Traum ("dream")
halts. Chapter I.iii begins inauspiciously as a series of figures who have lis-
tened to the singing of "Osti-Fosti's" ballad in the preceding episode insubs-
tantially vanish, together with all ordinary signs of human identity, each
after the other evaporating into a succession of varied absences:
Yet all they who heard ... are now .... as much no more as be they not yet now or
had they then notever been .... Of the persins sin this ... saga (which, thorough
readable to int from and, is from tubb to buttom all falsetissues, antilibellous and
nonactionable and this applies to its whole wholume) of poor Osti-Fosti ... no one
end is known .... Ei fU [It. "he was"]. His husband, poor old A'Hara ... at the con-
clusion of the Crimean War [at an end in a Black Sea] ... under the assumed name
of Blanco ... perished .... Booil[Russ. "he was"]. Poor old dear Paul Horan ... was
thrown into a Ridley's for inmates in the northern counties [an insane asylum] ... .
He was. Sordid Sam ... at a word from Israfel the Summoner [the Islamic angel of
death], passed away painlessly ... one hallowe'en night, ebbrous [It. ebbro, "drunk"]
and in the state of nature, propelled from Behind into the great Beyond .... Han var
[Da. "he was"] .... her wife Langley ... disappeared, (in which toodooing he has
taken all the French leaves unveilable ... ) from the sourface of this earth ... so
entirely spoorlessly (the mother of the book with a dustwhisk tabularasing his oblit-
eration done upon her involucrum) as to tickle the speculative to all but opine ...
that the hobo ... had transtuled his funster's latitat to its finsterest interrimost. Bhi
she [Gael. "he was"]. ... (48.6-50.17)
Then the three-page paragraph violently redacted here closes as a long con-
ditional clause ("Again, if Father San Browne ... ") turns weirdly inter-
rogative at its incompleted end, so to replicate formally the dissolution of
sense, with sentence, in a nebulous part of the night that only question and
hypothesis can begin to replicate: "and were they? Fuitfuit [L. 'he was he
was']" (50.18-32).
That deliberately occulted phrase "he was," repeated seven times to sug-
gest "helvetically hermetic" enclosure, structures the paragraph (" Ei fll.
Booil. He was. Han var. Bhi she. Fuitfuit"). It deviously tells us that the
sleeping man whose "eyewitless foggus" the paragraph replicates, himself
obscured from himself, isn't quite there anymore-simply "was"-his ac-
tual disappearance determining all the figmentary ones; for all those pa-
tently ridiculous figures were "Just feathers! Nanentities" (538.7) Y The
paragraph shows HCE sinking "benighth" (480.17) all knowing of the earth
("finsterest" evokes both the toponym "Finisterre" ["earth's end"] and the
German finster ["dark"]), as he takes a spectral "French leave" (s1. for "a
sudden unnoticed departure") and "disappears spoorlessly" from dreams
of worldly "habitat" into the unknown "latitat" (L. "hiding-place") of a
"finsterest interrimost" which finds him dreamlessly "interred" in super-
lative degrees of the dark and the interior. For if dreams have their strange
chronologies, dreamlessness does not, and the chapter has already gener-
ated a sequence of equations that began blurring an abnegated past and
a nonexistent future into a present void of circumstance ("all they who
heard ... are now ... as much no more as be they not yet now or had they
then not ever been"). As wording webbed through the middle of this dense
paragraph moreover indicates, the chapter begins at the end of the auditory
dream that was reconstructed in I.ii ("The Ballad" ) :
Me drames ... has come through! ["come true," moved to completion]. Now let
the centuple celves of my egourge [the dream involved a crowd, and the 'hundred
selves' now fade into a single 'cell'] ... reamalgamerge in that indentity of undis-
cernibles where ... may they cease to bidivil uns and ... melt into peese! [melt into
peace] Han val ["he was"]. (49.32-5°.5)
Merely opening with a scotographic account of how nothingness starts

seeping up into the "tropped head" of a man who has "nearvanashed him-
self" (61. 18), I.iii now begins systematically "propogandering his nullity
suit" (59.22 ["nearvanashed" recalls the literal meaning of "nirvana" in the
"blowing-out" of the flame of life, while the "gander" in "propogandering"
"takes flight"]). "All falsetissues" like lace, the body of this entirely "nonac-
tionable" and "antilibellous" chapter (Gr. antilibellos, "against books") ac-
cordingly becomes the formal equivalent of any "empty envelope" (L. involu-
crum) absent of "all unveil able French leaves" and addressed not with letters
but with the obliterate "nat language" of Wakese. The content of this "un-
vulope" (378.35) would be the Wake's nullified hero, a "tabula rasa erased" as
soon as anything enters his "Vacant. Mined" (421.11): "he has taken all the
French leaves unveilable ... the mother of the book with a dustwhisk tabu-
larasing his obliteration done upon her involucrum" (5°.8-13).
After observing that "there's nix to nothing we can do for he's never again
to sea" (50.35 ["at sea," "he's never to see"]), the chapter proceeds to chron-
icle HCE's deepening vanishment into the "noughttime" by showing how
"television kills telephony in brothers' broil" (52.18). Elsewhere in the Wake
identified as a "nightlife instrument," the "faroscope of television" (15°.32-
33; < Gr. tele, "far off" and L. visio, "seeing") would suggest a form of vi-
sion radiated up "under the closed eyes" (107.28); while "telephony" would
comparably suggest hearing bled up in dormant ears. Having dreamt of the
singing of the ballad in l.ii, that is, HCE's hallucinatorily active eyes and

ears now shut off, to leave him possessed only of "exrace eyes" (51.25-26
["ex-human" eyes capable only ofscotographic imperception]), and a mind
bearing a corroding residuum of vision that generates this "touching seene"
(the spelling would make this a "scene" already "seen," one washed away
with all internal "see-in," into a "seeing" ofthis sort):
... seein as ow his thoughts consisted chiefly of the cheerio, he aptly sketched ...
the touching seene. The solence of that stilling! Here one might a fin fell. Boomster
rombombonant! It scenes like a landescape ... or some seem on some dimb Arras,
dumb as Mum's mutyness, this mimage of the seventyseventh kusin of kristansen is
odable to os across the wineless Ere no ceder nor mere eerie nor liss potent of sugges-
tion than in the tales of the tingmount. (Prigged!) (52.34-53.6)
That this passage intricately reworks a sentence "prigged" from Joyce's A Por-
trait of the Artist as a Young Man conveniently allows us, at Joyce's insis-
tence, to compare the presentment of character in the earlier novel with
"the representation of no-consciousness" afforded by the "blink pitches" of
his scotographic "book of the dark." The relevant passage in A Portrai t shows
Stephen Dedalus looking soulfully at Dublin and meditating on the Viking
"thingmote," the public assembly-place around which "the seventh city of
Christendom" historically aggregated: 18
... the dim fabric of the city lay prone in the haze. Like a scene on some vague
arras, old as man's weariness, the image of the seventh city of christendom was
visible to him across the timeless air no more weary nor less patient of subjection
than in the days ofthe thingmote. (P, 167)
Dedalus may be absentminded, but far less so than the "very pure non-
descript" depicted asleep in the corresponding passage from Finnegans
Wake, who lies "still" and alone (L. solus) in a "situation" (Da. stilling) per-
vaded by a "silence" so deep that he could hear a pin drop ("The solence of
that stilling! Here one might a fin fell"). Since the orthographical softening
of "pin" into "fin" (Shelta, "man") suggests that this man himself has fallen
into hushed sleep ("Finn fell"), the succeeding line evokes the reverberant
felling of a "tree" (Du. boom): Big Pin! Even the drop of a pin, it seems,
would be thunderously momentous in this part ofthe "nought." Moreover,
what "seems" to be "scene" here (" It scenes," "some seem") is the mere
"mimage" (or "mirage" of an "image") of "a landescape" that is no more
clearly a dreamed "landscape" than an "escape" from "land" altogether. For
this extinguished example of man's mightiness ("Mum's mutyness") now lies
"mum," "dumb," in "muteness," against a "dimb" ("dim" and "dumb")
background. The senses of taste and smell, evidently cultivated in great ear-
nest ness earlier in the day by the Wake's hard-drinking hero, seem to have
become "patrified" ("the wineless Ere," "no odor"). Anything potentially
audible to him fills only an empty skull ("odable to os" [L. os, "bone"], Ger.
oed, oeder ["empty," "more empty"], "no eer ... ""nor liss"). Its blacked-
out content therefore resembles imperceptible static washed through ether
over the wireless air: "With nought a wired from the wordless either"
(223.34). "There [is]," in short, "not very much windy Nous [Gr. 'mind']
blowing at the given moment through the hat of Mr Melancholy Slow"
(56.28-30) -"Melancholy Slow," of course, because he just lies there, "hat"
instead of "head" to evoke a heady structure void of content, and the Greek
"Nous" rather than the English "mind" to suggest the "noose," at whose va-
cant center humans also disappear. 19
So "patrified" are this man's five senses, "as a murder effect" (345.7), that
subsequent lines invite us to wonder after the incessant manner of the Wake
ifhe has merely "tropped head" or actually "dropped dead": "D.e.e.d! Edned,
ended or sleeping soundlessly? Favour with your tongues!" (54.5-6 [the cere-
monial Latin phrase Favete lin8uis means literally "favor wi th your tongues,"
but proverbially "listen in silence"]) .lO The lines invite us to "listen" atten-
tively, then, but only by metamnesically "falling silent" as if in sound,
soundless sleep, so to bring to mind rich "blank memory" of the "nought's"
"Real Absence." Or, as Joyce himself advises in this region of his "darkumen":
... all, hearing in this new reading ... could simply imagine themselves in their
bosom's inmost core, as pro tern locums timesported acorss the yawning (abyss), as
once they were ["across" the "abyss" that opens in a body ("corse") stilled in sleep
( "yawn")] ... listening to the cockshyshooter's evensong evocation of the doomed
... silkhouatted ... aginsst the dusk [made insubstantial as the content of a "sil-
houette" or the inside of a "silk hat"] ... while olover his exculpatory features ...
the ghost of resignation diffused a spectral appealingness. . . . (55.33- 56.17)
As the "television" bleakly radiating this dusky "landescape" under closed

eyelids continues to diffuse with that "dusk," moreover, it washes out into
another image of scotographic negativity (57.23-29) and finally renders
"the blanche patch" representative of HCE's experience in the "nought" a
blanched-out white: "winter ... over[s] the pages of nature's book" (57.30-
31) and "the shadow of the huge outlander"-the "silkhouatte" ofthis man
somnolently slipped "out of laoo" and all earthly definition-vanishes
sightlessly "mid pillow talk ... through Molesworth Fields" (57.34-35)
into the obscurity of another "nonactionable" and "antilibellous" legal
trial, where the reader is now asked to formulate ongoing and "jostling
judgements of those, as all should owe, malrecapturable days" (58.21-22):

"wowhere are those yours of Yestersdays?" (54.3). For should he live to the
proverbial age of seventy, the "ordinary man with that large big nonobli
head" (L. non oblitus, "not forgotten"), and that blanko berbecked fischial
ekksprezzion" (64.30-31) will spend almost seven thousand "malrecaptur-
able days" of his life as these in dreamless sleep-twenty years-"meet
there night ... made their nought" (67.3-4 ["mid the night, made there
nought"]), "edned, ended or sleeping soundlessly." "Fischial," in these lines,
would evoke both "facial" and "visual" properties of "that big nonobli
head," though the term "blanko" would blank them out; while the Danish
negative eks- ("ex-"), abnegating an English "expression" already obliter-
ated by the Italian sprezzato ("broken"), would comparably x-out expres-
sion, vision, and their facial ground altogether, so to suggest on the Wake's
"blink pitch" how sleep can "bash in Patch's blank face beyond recognition"
and render him "not a tall man, not at all man. No such parson" (63.5, 10-11).
Obliterating every term in the literate stream of consciousness whose
evolving totality means Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait, the no less richly
particularized "blotch and void" of Finne8ans Wake yields, in this region of
the book, "a poor trait ofthe artless" (1I4.32)-where "trait" might be run
back etymologically to the Latin tractus (" a draft, a line"), and "artless"
comparably construed as an etymological synonym for "inert" (from the L.
inartis ["artless, idle"]). For the Wake's "poor trait ofthe artless" renders in
particular the scotographic "indentity" of "someone imparticular" (602.7)
lying "inert," without a "trait," in the "nought." Where a work titularly
conceived as A Portrait might well invite comparisons with pictures hung in
Ireland's National Gallery, then, a "specturesque" "poortrait" like that cap-
tured by the Wake's "obliterated negative" could only find room in a "no-
tional gullery"-to whose contemplation chapter !.iii now in fact returns
us as we read again of "Madam's Toshowus [lying] completely complacent,
an exegious monument, aerily perennious," slipped with "bland sol" "into
the nethermore" (57.26): the wording now suggests that a "blind soul" has
vanished, with "the pleasant sun" (L. sol blandus), into a netherwordly
nevermore.
Locating us beneath "an exeguous [scanty] monument"-"soon, monu-
mentally at least ... to be, to be his mausoleum" (56.I2-14)-these lines
now require brief reconsideration, by way of an "abnihilisation of the etym"
like that undertaken in the etymological chart labeled figure 2.1, the top of
which is all literate English, the very bottom only obliterate "nat language."
For parts of sleep that lie beneath "memory" and "remembrance," according
toJoyce's "adamelegy" (77.26), lie equivalently beneath "themanyoumeant"
Nothin8 in Particular 59
man l
meaning 1
mind mental
1
mentionable
automatic
memory remember reminiscence mania mantic mantra
t 1
f
commemoration" commentary memento
mean amentia automaton memoir commemorate -,- reminiscent I\. mani~c
1
ament automation memorandum remembrance reminisce I -manta
r'"r
bemoan
mention memorize memo commentator minion mantis
mentation
dementia
memorable comment -mantic 40
1
demented memorial Fr. mIgnon -mancy °
immemorial (darling)
dement
M.E. Ahriman
bimenen M.E. mmde
t (Zoroastrian
1
M.E. M.E. O.Fr. god of evil)
menenl mone
T mention O.Fr. memorie. O.Fr. remembrer

O.E.
bem;enan t
maenad
memoire
~inc:e:~::.tum
O.E. *man contrivance,
interpretation) Old High
(complaint)
Gr. automatos Ger. minna
L. L. rememorare (love [as
L. amens. (self-will- L. reminiscens
O.E. (call to mind a form of
amentis ing; acting (present participle
gemynde again; remember) of reminisci) memory])
(out of by itself)
O.E. m;enan L. commemorare
(to tell.
one'smind)
1 (to call to t
L. reminisci
Gr. mantikos
(prophetic)
signify. L. demens. Gr. autos mind. recall.
complain) relate) (call to mind.
dementis (self) +
recollect) L.
(out of -matos
I 1L.
one's mind; Minerva
mad) maenas L. comminisci.
commentus
Gr. -matos
(to think out.
(willing)
devise, contrive)
Germ. Avestan anra

*main- (evil) + L. memoria L. memorare.
Germ. Germ.
Germ. *gar-mundi-
f
mainyu (memory.
history.
memorandus
(to bring
*minthja
Gr.
Avestan main;~ditiovn)
to mind) mantis
(seer.
Gr. (spirit) prophet)
,
mainas
(she who Sans.
L. memor
..,,,
is mad) mantra
(mindful) (prayer.
hymn.
counsel)
*memus 1
* to *m{1-to-
~,
,,
*man-
m,· '.~'m,.,.,. *me-mn-us 1
*m.n-
proto-Indo-European *men-
Figure 2.1. Etymological chart: 'men-. "Undernearth" "the manyoumeant" (610.4,318.31) (to think. have the mind roused)
1. Pokorny, 700; Shipley, 248; Skeat, 350.
2. Grandsaignes d'Hauterive, 124; Shipley, 248; Skeat, 360.
3. Dotted lines indicate derivations now discredited but speculatively entertained in Joyce's day;
see A. Walde and J. B. Hofmann, Lateinisches Etymologisches Worterbuch (Heidelberg: Carl Winter,
1940), II, p. 68.
t
mentor muse mosaic monument money monster anamnesis amnesty
:~:l~~~n monito;::~~:~~on
remonstrance mnemonic amnesia
mandarin mathesis museum morttar;lint
f
Port.
mathematics monumental
monition
~~::~~1~~~~ monstrance
mnemonics
mandarin
t M.E. mynt
Malay
~~ t
M.E. moneye
1
Hindi
mantri L. musa
Med. L.
mosaiCU5.
musaicus
+
Late Gr.
mouseion
(a mosaic)
L. monitio
(warning)
L. ad-monere
O.Fr. moneie
O.E. mynet
t
Germ.
*munita
L. de-monstrare
(to show.
explain)
Med. L.
monstrantia
Gr. amnestia
(amnesty)
t
Gr. anamnesis Gr. amnestos
Gr. L. museum L. musica (to remind (recollection) (forgotten.
r
mathesis
~eo~~~t':red)
(library. (music. [of a fact
(learning) study) poetry. or duty])
learned
t study)
L. prae-monere
Gr. mnemonikos
f
(to warn.
(of memory)
f
Gr. foretell)
mouseion L. monumentum
Sans. (memorial) L. moneta
(place of L. manito
mantrin (money.
(counselor) the Muses) (one who
Gr. mousike mint)
anamlmneskein
Gr.
Gr.
f techne
(art of
the Muses)
L. Monera
~
("the Warner":
(to call to
mind again)
mouseios Gr. a· (not) +

epithet of Juno
Gr. mnem6n mnasthai
(of the whose temple housed
Gr.mathema (mindful)
Muses) the Roman mint)
(something
learned;
science)
t
Gr. manrhanein
(to learn) !
Gr. Mousa
(the Muse)
L. monstrum
(divine portent;
Gr. mimneskein
(to call to
\,0""
mind. remember)
prodigy; marvel)
L. monere, monitus
(to make think.
remind. admonish)
/
*mon-eyo-
*mon-
/ *mna-
(318.31) before falling there (the term buries "man" and "meaning" under a
"monument"). As the trained senses of the man "tropped head" at the Wake
blowout and "nearvanash" in the "nought," that is-together with all the
laws of which intellection and recollection are the abstract sum-so too
does "memory," and the whole field of "meaning" made possible in wakeful-
ness by the disciplined wiring of eyes and ears to legible letters and legis-
lated "things," the latter term genetically related to the "thingmote" that
Stephen Dedalus headily contemplates in A Portrait and that the "aerily pe-
rennious" "Headmound" certainly does not in the Wake's "poor trait" (con-
ceptually, "things" derive from the broad Teutonic term thin8 ["public as-
sembly"] and at one time designated what a group of people such as gathered
in the thingmote agreed to observe).
Since "memory" and "meaning," moreover, are only two in a long series
of etymologically toppling dominoes that include "man," "mind," and
"mentality," as well as "mentionability" and "commentary," parts of sleep
that fall beneath "the manyoumeant"-"undernearth the memorialorum"
(610-4)-lie also beyond the writing of literate "memoirs" (L. memori-
alium) and so require the obliterate reduction ofthe Wake's sleeping subject
to a "belowes hero" (343.17 ["below zero"])-a "whosethere outofman"
(19.17)-whose life in the night becomes a vast "apersonal problem, a lo-
cative enigma" (135.25-26). And "there too a slab slobs, immermemorial"
(600.26 [Ger. immer, "always"; "immemorial"]) . For immemorial sleep finds
this "very pure nondescript" with "not a knocker on his head or a nick-
number on the manyoumeant ... wooving nihilnulls from Memoland," as
"his spectrem" lies lost in "the irised sea" (318.30-34) : the "memo" "woven"
here would be of "nothing" (L. nihil), "no one" (L. nullus), and a "nobody"
(L. nemo), within the closed eyes of whose "spectre" the "spectrum" has
blacked out. "Reduced to nothing" in a body of matter rendered inert and
drained of perception under the force of sleep, the man "tropped head" at
the Wake so becomes, "as a murder of corpse" (254.32 ["as a matter of
course"]), "the presence (of a curpse)" (224.4-5)-"to say nothin8 of him
having done whatyouknow howyousaw whenyouheard whereyouwot ...
under heaviest corpsus exemption" (362.14-17; italics mine). Not quite as
dead as he will ever become, he nonetheless becomes in dreamless sleep,
as dead as he will ever have occasion to know. He now lies "undernearth"
"the manyoumeant" in a second sense, "laid to rust" there "under the Help-
less Corpses Enactment" (423.30), and in ways that will merit further study.
As will have become evident in passing, "A stod8e An81eshman has been
worked by eccentricity" in Finne8ans Wake (284.LI); for Joyce's "poor trait"

makes of a man "tropped head" "in bed" not merely something of "a stage
Englishman," but an astonishingly "stodgy" one, since he has, like "Madam's
Toshowus," essentially no ideas at all. A sustained reading of Finne8ans
Wake actually does manage to draw a reader deeply into a "blank memory"
of the "percepted nought" experienced in the night; and in doing so, it
opens all manner of inquiry into what precisely the "Vacant. Mined" could
have been about in those parts of its life when it seemed not to be there at
all. By probing into these extents of emptiness, moreover, ignored by most
writers on dreams, Joyce fathomlessly deepened the "mountainy molehill"
of the night, finding there much more than the primitive reasoning of the
dream which so compelled the attention of Vico, Freud, Levy-Bruhl, and
other students of the savage mind. In "reconstructing the nocturnal life, " he
was also exercising the whole twentieth-century fascination with nothing-
ness. "My eyes are tired," he wrote to his son Giorgio three years before he
completed Finne8ans Wake. "For over half a century, they have gazed into
nullity where they have found a lovely nothing" (L, III, 359, 36m.).
As Joyce's contemporaries were showing in countless ways over the two
decades during which he sustained the writing of Finne8ans Wake, nothing-
ness is a formative trait and invention of the human. Nonexistent in a mate-
rial reality that keeps on pouring forth stars, seasons, and generations of
species with plentiful regularity, it seems not to exist outside of human
minds, except when human minds themselves invested with the capability
of knowing it, choose to implant it there. Since individuals tutored in all
those words and abilities layered up over the Indo-European root *men-
seem able to know "nothing" only in the "Real Absence" of the night, the
experience of sleep becomes, at the Wake, the concrete reality out of which
the whole category of nothingness immanently wells. Sleep's "Real Ab-
sence" is the experience of nothing, really endured, in particular.
These observations will moreover suggest how organically Joyce, one of
the century's great humanists, managed to synthesize in a work essentially
like Ulysses, but "about the night," some of the principal intellectual preoc-
cupations of a culture already moving away from the scientific study of man
into the "new scientific" study of "our whosethere outofman"; the same pre-
occupations that would compel twentieth-century thinkers to contemplate
variously the related properties of aboriginality, prehistory, unconscious-
ness, and nothingness. His "knock[ed] out" "belowes hero" lies in a resonant
position: a man at the dazzlingly developed height of millennia of evolved
civilization-a twentieth-century Westerner-he lies "reduced to nothing"
within a body "tropped head," experiencing both the extinction of his con-
Nothin8 in Particular
sciousness and the nothingness above which his daily life, over years of per-
sonal and ages of collective history, has been masoned and layered. His va-
cant passage through the "noughttime," accordingly, broadens out into
endlessly stunning perspectives. While it is doubtlessly true that HCE and
his wife are by day as rationally individualized citizens of the Western
world as anyone
whereat samething is rivisible by nighttim, may be involted into the zeroic couplet,
palls pell inhis heventh glike noughty times 00, find, if you are not literally cooeffi-
cient, how minney combinaisies and permutandies can be played on the inter-
national surd! (284.8- 14)
As this "mythametical" discussion of surds, irrational numbers, un-

knowns, and zeros will suggest (286.23), the "risible, "invisible," "absurd"
nothing to which "Here Comes Everybody" (32.18-19) in the world is inde-
terminately reduced in the night bears darkly prolific powers. Since it is out
of this indifferentiated state, every morning and through all the mornings in
history, that all the manifold and splintered facets of the wakeful world
emerge-striving individuals, nations in strife, tongues-sleep's "Real Ab-
sence" becomes, at the Wake, a form of "substrance" (597.7 [elemental "sub-
stance," as discovered in somebody "under a trance"]), a torrent streaming
everywhere unconsciously under the evident surface of things (597. 1-8ff.).
Just as in real-world arithmetic, so in the nocturnal "aristmystic" of the
Wake (293.18): if an aspect of "the logos ... comes to nullum in the endth"
in this book (298.20 ["to nothing, in the end"]), it is nonetheless and for
that reason capable of modulating through an infinitely expanding series of
"combinations" and "permutations" that lift it, through "nullum in the
endth" (0 n) , into everything- oo-" no thing making newthing wealthshow-
ever for a silly old Sol, healthytobedder and latewiser" (253.8-9 [for a sleep-
ily "silly old soul" waiting for "old Sol" to rise]): "Wins won is nought, twigs
too is nil, tricks trees makes nix, fairs fears stoops at nothing" (361.1-3). In
its richly particularlized "nat language," Finne8ans Wake shows that the hu-
man experience of "one percepted nought" can be articulated with as much
richness and zest, pathos and humor, as the plenitude of wakeful life. In
ways to be made clear in passing, it finds this "nought" everywhere and al-
ways underlying and circumscribing the living of life in the Daily World.
"We see nothingness," in a way distinct to Joyce, "making the world irrides-
cent, casting a shimmer over things." 21
Profoundly engaged by the "hole affair" it reconstructively fills in, Fin-
ne8ans Wake manages to spin a universe, an "obliterated negative" of the

one now present to literate consciousness, out of the study of sleep's "Real
Absence." Much of this "huge shaping of literary anti-matter," a kind of a
phenomenology oflack of mind, is difficult to read not simply because of its
language, but also because its scotographic "nat language" struggles hard to
convey to a rationally lettered reader, in detailed "blotch and void," experi-
ences that lie in unconsciousness beneath "the manyoumeant."22 Subse-
quent chapters, then, lead into places where, consciousness moving out of
human experience and "noughttime" moving in, man is not, and "our
whose there outofman" and "belowes hero" becomes principle. The first of
these infinitely expanding sites, in a work with the word Wake engraved on
its spine and dustjacket, will inevitably be the grave, humanity's first writ-
ing, 50,000 years of it engraved on the surface of the earth before more or-
nate engravings and the Western alphabet proper began to flower, with spir-
its, around the dark locale of the tomb.
CHAPTER T H R E E
"Finne8an"
Momentarily, we might construe the hero of Finnegans Wake as "Finnegan"

(3.19), though for reasons gradually to become clear, this is no more his real
name than "Headmound" is. "Finnegan" is a cipher for the "perpendicular
person" (60.25) shown "outlined aslumbered" in Relief Map B, and it indi-
cates that he is quite fully "Dead to the World" (105.29). Our idiomatic cus-
tom of saying that people asleep are "dead to the world," however, now
raises the troublesome question of how being "dead to the world," not
awake, resting in peace "in bed" differs from what one foresees happening to
anyone "dead to the world," at his wake, resting in peace, and also "in
bed"-particularly if we dig a little more deeply into these terms.
Etymologically, the word "bed" derives from the proto-Indo-European
root • bhedh-, meaning "to dig or bury" or, in nominal form, "a hollow in
the ground, for sleeping" (this radical sense still survives in expressions like
"vegetable bed" [18. 17-19.19], "flower bed" [475.7-11], "lake bed" [76.14-32],
and "bed of rock" [472.2]). While the etymology certainly sheds grim light
on Indo-European man's sleeping arrangements in eras prior to the inven-
tion of "tick[s]" (26.15), "cots" (39.33), "bunk[s]" (40.19), "shakedown[s]"
(40.25-26), "lodginghouses" (39.31), "bedroomsuite[s]" (41.16), and "inns"
(7.5), it interests us here because of the spectral resonances it inevitably
generates throughout Finnegans Wake. If the man "tropped head" "in bed" at
the Wake is indeed "dead to the world" and can largely only "no," how can
he "know" that the "bed" in which he lies is not, "as a murder effect"
66
(345.7), a "bed of som" Or, to bend the same question back into the experi-
ence of "our own nighttime," how does anyone fully asleep and "dead to the
world" know that he is not really dead to the world? And conversely, how
does anyone actually dead to the world know that he is not simply asleep?
The problem is all the more perturbing because the word "bed" stands in
an oddly complementary relation to the word "cemetery," which derives
from the Greek koimeterion ("sleeping room," "dormitory")-in turn from
the verb koimao ("to put to bed")-and which customarily designates a
place where people "lie in peat" (4.15 [but also "in peace"]) in much the
same posture as that enjoyed by the stratified humanoid shown "tropped
head" in Relief Map B, whom we might now begin to think of as "laid to
rust" (3.23 [but also "rest"]), "pending a rouse ruction of his bogey" (499.1 [a
"resurrection of the body"]), after having been "recalled and scrapheaped
by the Maker" (98.17). Since, at his Wake, "be there some who mourn him,
concluding him dead" (489. I), it may well be that our hero has "indeeth"
"tropped head" (79.17 ["in death" "indeed"]); and that "now of parts un-
known" (380.23), "he went under the grass quilt on us" (380.26). For the dis-
tinction between an unconscious body (Eng. "corpse") and an unconscious
"body" (L. corpus) is a thin one; while anyone "laid to rest" "in bed," by a
slight inflection of terms, would also be "embedded."
That we drift through sleep in places primordially conceived as burial
sites and are laid to rest at our wakes in places originally designating bed-
rooms highlights the bottomlessness of the negatively definitive term "un-
conscious," in turn raising questions about the indistinctly differentiated
unconsciousnesses of sleep and death. What internally distinguishes eight
hours of sleepily peaceful requiescence from "(hypnos chilia eonion!)"
(78.3-4 [Gr. "sleep for thousands of ages"])? As the nineteenth-century
literature on sleep alone attests, students of the dark used to stand so fasci-
nated before the annihilative powers of the night, until modern thought
channeled attention into those more accessible parts of sleep surfacing in
dreams, that a representative figure like Schopenhauer could say, summarily,
"there is no radical difference between sleep and death." 1 He would only
have been expressing a belief so commonplace and so primal as to go back
to the source of our culture, and the Greeks, for whom Death and Sleep
where twin brothers, both sons of Night. According to Lessing, "the only
genuine and general representation of Death" for the Greeks was "a picture
of sleep;" and of sleep, of death. 2 Similarly for Joyce, any genuine "recon-
struction of the nocturnal life" would have entailed a "grave word" or two
" Finne8an"
(243.30) about the interior of the coffin. "Sleep is death stirred by dreams,
death is dreamless sleep." 3
To an alert rationalist, the distinction between a person at his wake ("Rot
him!" [422.9)) and a person not awake ("wake him!" [7.3)) will be all too
clear: in a word, "wake not, walk not" (546.1-2). But the distinction cor-
rodes almost entirely if one cultivates the "ideal insomnia" that Finnegans
Wake requires and tries to enter the "eyewitless foggus" of a man "tropped
head" and "dead to the world" "in bed" himself. The requisite exercise
would involve sinking again into the "blank memory" preserved from last
night's stint of embedment, now to observe how deeply the "hole affair"
(535.20)-and a "hole" is always edged with a little loam-is "rich in death
anticipated" (78.6). Sleep takes place "in your own absence" (189.31)-
your own "Real Absence" (536.5-6)-where "life, it is true, will be a blank
without you because avicuum's not there at all" (473.6-7). Anyone crawl-
ing into some bed "todie" (60.28, 381.23, 408.22 [not inevitably "today"))
will "recoil" how he lay there, "feeling dead" (269.FI), "very dead" (612.4),
resting in peace, and "thinking himself to death" (422.9 [as opposed, for in-
stance, to some brainy conclusion]). "Indead" (505.21, 560.18), the "hole
affair" seems to force one to "dejeunerate into a skillyton be thinking him-
self to death" (422.8-9): "a bad attack of maggot it feels like" (410.5).
As a "thanatomimetic" state, moreover-like "playing possum" (96.33-
34)-sleep makes one an involuntary participant in eerily extended "funeral
games" (332.26, 515.23,602.22 [as opposed to "funeral earnestnesses"). You
"drop in your tracks" (26.16) -"f[a]ll stiff" (379.18 ["full stop")). There,
"tropped head," amid "the redissolusingness of mindmouldered ease"
(143.14), one passes into a state of "exanimation" (143.8-9,87.34) and then
"[goes] about his business, whoever it was, saluting corpses, as a metter of
corse" (37.9-10 ["as a matter of course," one "meets a corpse"]).4 Anyone
can playa few of these "funeral games" when he goes to bed "todie"-"in-
dead," "he musts" (325.19 [because he "must"])-there to wonder how
deeply the "hole affair" implicated him in "funeral fare or fun fain real"
(83.22 ["real" "funeral," or one merely "feigned" in "fun"?]). Were one to ask
what "did die" "doom" last night (223.12; cf. II1.2, 358.36), one good an-
swer would be to say that "I was intending a funeral. Simply and samply"
(491.2-3 [not "attending" one)); for the puristic intention of anyone "dead
to the world" is in some sense easy to gauge. "On the verge of selfabyss"
(40.23), "so to shape, I chanced to be stretching, in the shadow as 1 thought,
the liferight out of myself in my ... imaginating" (487.13-15 [I did not

think, therefore 1 must not have been]). "Indead," "I godead" (251.26) "every
die" (283.F2 ["every day"]). And "every die" "yew yourselves" (98.36), even
the "most umbrasive of yews all" (362.17 ["impressive"]) comparably lie
there resting in peace in some imperceived "bed," "dead certain however of
neuthing whatever" (455.21-22). All those "yews," occulting a batch of
decomposed "yous" (cf. 23.36, 232.13, 469.27) would adorn the cemeterial
"bed," while the umbra in "umbrasive" (L., "shade") would evoke a dark
and chilly "underworld" (147.27) occupied by the "tropped head." "Howday
you doom?" (517.31; cf. 483.18). "Strangely cult for this ceasing of the yore"
(279. 2-3) .
The "veiled" and "blank memory" "recoil[ed]" from last night by every
"tombs, deep and heavy" in the world (503.26 [every "Tom, Dick and
Harry"]) opens now with problematic lucidity "to the unaveiling memory
of. Peacer the grave" (503.26-27)-where the end-stopped "of" evokes a
world void of objects (both of prepositions and of perception), while the
"misappearance" (186.12) within the "peaceful grave" of a dubious "Peter
the Great" suggests that in sleep one not only "goes dead" but also becomes,
because immobily "perpetrified" (23.30 ["thoroughly petrified"]), a "Peter"
of sorts (the Latinized Gr. petrus, in a pun that Joyce regarded as sanctioning
his own, means both "Peter" and "rock"). 5 One might begin simply to regard
the "loamsome" (26.15) "hole affair" of sleep, then, as a species of "death he
has lived through" (293.3-4) -a death of the sort that befalls Joyce 's dummy-
like hero. For "Charles de Simples had an infirmierity complexe before he
died a natural death" (29I.F8): the hint of "infirmity" lands him "in bed,"
where a nightly variety of "natural death" foreshadows the ultimate one.
The same kind of complementarity as that blurring together the meanings
of "bed" and "cemetery" and rendering indistinct the unconsciousnesses of
sleep and death links Finne8ans Wake with the Irish-American ballad of
"Finnegan's Wake." As most readers know, the ballad tells the story of a
whiskey-loving hod-carrier named Tim Finnegan (4.18,26-27) who goes to
work each morning fortified by a drop of "the craythur" (4.29). "Witha love
of the liquor Tim was born" (4.33-34), though it proves to be his undoing:
One morning Tim felt tippling full. (6.7- 8)

His head felt heavy, his hod it did shake (6.8-9)
He fell from the ladder and broke his skull (6.10)
So they carried him home his corpse to wake.
They rolled him up in a nice clean sheet,
And laid him out upon the bed
"Finne8an"
With a BaIlon of whiskey at his feet
And a barrel of porter at his head.
The mourners at Finnegan's wake-an Irish one, in which riotous gaiety co-
exists with funereal grief-gradually begin arguing, and in the ensuing ruc-
tions one of them hurls a noggin of whiskey across the room. But the liquor
misses its intended target and splashes instead all over the corpse of Fin-
negan, who revives and rises from his bed bawling out, "Thanam o'n dhoul,
do ye think I'm dead?" (cf. 24.15 [the Gaelic phrase means "Soul of the
devil" and recurs in various forms at 74.8, 258.8-9, 317.3-4, 321.29, and
499. 17- 18)) .6
The bearing of the ballad on a reconstruction of the night is finally quite
simple. Minimal reflection on Finnegan's fate will suggest that anybody who
gets up out of bed with a mouth that big and a thirst that grand cannot
really have been dead at all. In joyce's appropriation of the ballad, "Fin-
negan's Wake" simply becomes a comically parabolic account of what it is
like to "black out" and fall, though asleep, so to find oneself "laid out upon
the bed," "dead to the world," "rehearsing somewan's funeral" (477.9)-but
ultimately to undergo a thirsty "resurrection of the body" under the agency
of animating "spirits" "come to mournhim" (12.14-15 ["come tomorrow"]).
Sleeping, from this perspective, implicates one in effortless "rehearsing" for
"the big sleep," "the long sleep," or the "long rest" of commoner idiom
(25.26; U, 110 [the recurrent pun on "hearse" is a grim one)). But because
"the remains must be removed before eaght hours shorp" at this funeral "re-
hearsal" (617.16,27 ["eight hours" being the length of sleep)) , the "hole af-
fair" might more accurately be called an "ephumeral" (369.33 [an "ephem-
eral" "funeral"]), in which the body lies "dead to the world" in merely
"a protem grave" (76.21). Judging from a terse comment that Joyce himself
made about "Finnegan's Wake," in a letter written after the publication of
Finne8ans Wake, this was how he read the ballad (L, III, 448): he noted
simply that Finnegan was an exemplar of" Scheintod" (Ger. "apparent death,"
"suspended animation"). Or, as the Wake puts it, "Tam Fanagan's weak yat
his still's going strang" (276.21-22 [he may be "still" and "dead to the world,"
that is, but his "spirits" sublimate as potently in the dark as any in any
"still"]). No differently from anyone's experience of sleep, then, Finnegan's
experience at his wake might be regarded simply as an "ephumeral" drift
through "states of suspensive exanimation" (143.8-9) endured between pe-
riods of wakefulness that find him engaged in the masonry of the civilized
world ("Ro, Time Timea8en, Wake" [415.15]). Like others who "rise after-

fall" (78.7), "Finnegan" becomes one bedrock on which the Wake rests be-
cause being dead to the world, immemorially unconscious, is the basic state
ofthe night, the darker ground out of which the more colorful eventfulnesses
of dreams arise. This is also to begin noting that Finnenans Wake tells the
same story that "Finnegan's Wake" does, but with a difference; for the Wake
is about a wake as perceived not from the "point of view" of any wakeful
mourners or garrulous songsters, but from the "eyewitless foggus" of the
body "tropped head" "in bed."
And there are, accordingly, spooky corollaries. Insofar as the Wake is
elaborately reconstructing the "Real Absence" that a man lying "dead to the
world" at his own "ephumeral" can "no," Joyce is putting the proposition
"Suppotes a Ventriliquorst Merries a Corpse" (105.20), where the wording in
part recalls the ballad of "Finnegan's Wake" ("potes," "liquor," "merries,"
"corpse"), but also indicates the Wake's intention of rendering, in its own
spectral form of "ventriloquism," the muddy "explots" (124.29 [not exactly
"exploits"]) of a corpse that is "dud" (6.10), "duddandgunne" (25.23-24),
"noewhemore. Finiche!" (7.15): "you skull see" (17.18). Joyce is also saying
to his reader, in concert with the dark artiste in the Wake who "ma[kes] his
boo to the public" (423.22 [not "bow"]), "I'd love to take you for a bugaboo
ride and play funfer all" (304.11-12 ["funeral"]). And, with frightening
effect, he does just that, though with much "fun for all" along the way
(301.13; cf. 13.15, 111.15, 120.10,458.22 ["funeral"]). In directing our atten-
tion to the "blank memory" of the "funeral games" we all "rehearsed" last
night, the Wake therefore obliges itself "to reconstruct for us ... inexactly
the same as a mind's eye view, how these funeral games ... took place"
(515.22-25, 33). The "hole affair" now becomes an "undertaking" in both
senses of that word, with Joyce himself, like the Wakean artiste "suspected
among morticians" (172. I2) , playing the part of the "premature gravedigger"
(189. 2 8) or "underthaner" (335.36 ["entertainer" -"undertaker"]), whose
business it is to conduct for us, in a manner of "grand stylish gravedigging"
(121.32), an exceedingly peculiar species of "ante mortem" (423.21 ["post-
mortem"]). As a "representation" contradictively structured around the ex-
perience of "your own absence" (189.31) in the dead of "nought" (368.36),
the Wake offers its reader" an admirable verbivocovisual presentment of the
worldrenownced Caerholme event" (341.18- 19) -where the line seems mani-
festly to bear on a horse race ("the world-reknowned Carholme Event"),
but only because Joyce's "nonday diary" is elaborately concerned with that
variety of dark horse known as a "sleeper." Latently it indicates how fully
the Wake, as a literary "presentment" rendering from his own "eyewitless
"Finnenan" 71
foggus" the "Real Absence" of a man lying "dead to the world," is holding
forth a sustained "presentiment" of the "world-renounced event" that will
seep into the skull at the wake.
This means that FinneBans Wake, because sleep does, "really" takes place
in some murky "bed" in a "seemetery" (17.36 [a "seeming" "cemetery,"
though a real koimeterion]) -and in particular, "amid the semitary of Som-
nionia" (594.8 [L. somnus, "sleep"; somnium, "dream"]). More interestingly,
"if I may break the subject gently" and again (165.30), the subject "tropped
head" at this Wake, "becorpse" he is mindlessly "dead to the world" (509.32),
is largely only "the presence (of a curpse)" (224.4-5): "He's doorknobs
dead!" (378.1-2). The Wake in turn becomes an articulately graphic "pre-
sent(i) ment"-an eerie "engravure" of sorts (13.7) -of the stilled "stream of
unconsciousness" ("basin of unconsciousness"?) that has seeped in "among
skullhullows and charnelcysts" (613.20-21) interior to "the presence (of a
curpse)" who lies "blurried" (13.11 ["blurred," "buried"]) in some muddy
"bed" in a "seemetery," "sinking" (224.25 [not "thinking"]) of "a mouldy
voids" (37.9 [as opposed to a philosophical one]). Relief Map B shows "the
Outrage, at Length" (602.25). And as at the wake, so at the Wake: one tries
to "throw any lime on the sopjack" that one can (489.12).
Read from this perspective, as its title plainly indicates, the Wake is really
about a wake, and it becomes easily one of the most amusingly scarifying
"ghoststories" ever written (51. 13, 359.26). It operates less by evoking color-
fully decked-out "apparitions," who are always very much a part of this
life, all their chatty disclaimers notwithstanding, than by calling remorse-
less attention to "your ghost" (24.27), to the nothing "yew" become in the
dead of night, "when meet there night ... made their nought the hour
strikes" (67.3-5), and "yew" are not only "reduced to nothing" (499.3), but,
"as a murder of corpse" (254.32), laid out "dead to the world" in a "seeme-
tery." As a "NIGHTLETTER" radiotelegraphing complex "youlldied greed-
ings" through void ether (308.16-17 ["Yuletide" because sleep, like the In-
carnation, takes place "in the flesh"]), the Wake everywhere reminds one
that "his fooneral will sneak pie ace by creeps 0' clock toosday" (617.20- 2 I) -
where the line, rather than giving us the time, gives us the "creeps," by sug-
gesting how difficult internally to distinguish from "the long sleep" is the
shorter sleep that every "tomb, dyke and hollow" in the book (597.6 ["Tom,
Dick and Harry"]) will go through "todie" as "daylight" disintegrates into
"dielate" on "this daylit dielate night of nights, by golly!" (83.27). To put
all this in the assaultive idiom of the ghost story: "Boo, you're through!"
(247.12). And to put it in a word that comparably encapsulates the complex

tonality of gravity and levity, of "hilarity" and "tristesse" (21. 12) that char-
acterizes Finnegans Wake as a whole: "Boohoohoo ... !" (379.13).
The dark "tome" now modulates into a "bog of the depths" (516.25)-a
"Book of the Dead" (13.30-31, 134.36, 309.3, 580.16, 621.3)-whose graven
letters begin to operate much like those on a "tomestone" (253.34), marking
the spot where a man lies "dead to the world" and giving "testimony on be-
half of the absent ... to those present" (173.29-31)-though now "a tes-
tament of the rocks from all the dead unto some the living" (73.32-33).
"If Standing Stones Could Speak" (306.22-23), they would say much ex-
actly what "the menhere's always talking about" in this elaborately ara-
besqued "book of kills" (25.11-12,482.33 [not "Kells"; "menhirs" are "stand-
ing stones"]): "Here line the refrains of" (44.10), "the remains of" (13.10),
"the late cemented Mr T. M. Finnegan. R.I.e." (221.27 [R.I.P.]; 325.1); "may
ye root to piece!" (545.36). Or, more elaborately, in three sentences that
minimally fill in the "blank memory" one has of last night: "Rest in peace!
But to return. What a wonderful memory you have too!" (295.15-16).
"Wurming along gradually" (84.30), it becomes evident that this "book
of kills" had to be written "in the vermicular" (82.11-12 [L. vermiculus,
"worm"])-as opposed to an identifiable "vernacular"-because its "be-
lowes hero" (343.17), "the presence (of a curpse)," lives not in a perceptible
"world," but in something much more like "thewormd" (354.22 ["the world"
overtaken by "worm"]). Every page written "in [this] vermicular," accord-
ingly, each already strewn over with "engraved" letters and "grave word[s]"
(120.10, 243.30), becomes a kind of literate "graphplot" (284.7), holding
forth a spookily articulate "present (i)ment" of the "Real Absence" interior
to "a deadman" (87.33, 121.36) who lies "blurried" in a "graveplot." Sys-
tematically entangled with words like "night," "sleep," and "bed," that is,
and with particles operating in the Wake's "nat language," its reader will
find on any of the book's "graphplots" "allsods of" terms (289.4-5) in this
"vermicular"-like "loamsome," "dead," and "sods"-whose effect is every-
where to net and capture the underlying unconsciousness of a body lying
"dead to the world" in a "seemetery." And "amudst" these "graphplots"
(332.26), everywhere at the Wake, the reader will also find that in "spec-
tracular mephiticism there caoculates through the inconoscope . .. a still, the
figureofa fellowchap in the wohly ghast" (349.17-19), who "among nosoever
circusdances is to be apprehended" (342.12). Since an "inconoscope" would
look "in" at "icons" (or "images"), the lines suggest that no "apprehensibly"
visible "spectacle" "coagulates" at the Wake, or at the wake, or in one's
"blank memory" of the night-no "circuses," no "dances," no "circum-
"Finnegan" 73
stances," no colorfully parading members of "the fellowship in the Holy
Ghost," "nor no nothing" (455.2). Instead, one maintains in the "eyewitless
foggus" "recoil[ed)" from "lost life" (515.26["last night")) the "spectacularly
mephitic spectre" of a representative man ("fellowchap"), lying "still" in the
dead of night, whose "explots" are vision-void and "wholly ghastly": "caocu-
lates" evokes the Gaelic caach ( "blind"), while the English "mephitic," refer-
ring to "noxious or pestilential emanations from the earth," would summon
up "the ghouly ghost" (57.6). "You had just," in short, in browsing" amudst"
these "graphplots," "been cerberating a camp camp camp to Saint Sepul-
chre's march ... fellowed along the rout by the stenchions of the corpse"
(343-4-8). In his wakeful life, of course, the man "tropped head" at his
Wake fairly bustles with activity ("Tramp, Tramp, Tramp") in a world de-
fined by Church ("stations of the cross") and State ("Tramp, Tramp, Tramp
the Boys are Marching" is the tune to which the patriotic song "God Save
Ireland" is set). But in the "seemetery" of night, by contrast, he just lies
there, a "man made static" (309.22), "camp camp camp[ingJ" in one spot, so
to "cerebrate" the sorrowful mysteries of "the stenchions of the corpse":
"Tarara boom decay" (247.28). The peculiar tense ("you had been") puts
"being" in a past that is over and done with: "Siar, I am deed" (89.28).
"D.E.D." (420.30). "Dood dood dood!" (499.6).7
As all these many articles lifted from his "tropped head" imply, one thing
is certain of the representative "fellowchap" shown stratified in Relief Map
B: "he'll be the dea[th] of us" (379.20; 369.29, 460.22); and as someone at the
Wake puts it, "I hope they threw away the mould" (146.12-13). Throughout
the book, its reader will be "recurrently meeting" its hero-"Morbus 0'
Somebody" (88.14)-"in cycloannalism, from space to space, time after
time, in various phrases of scripture as in various poses of sepulture" (254.25-
28) as he drifts through the "semitary of Somnionia" in "total calm" in the
"duskguise[s]" (532.27), for instance, of "Totumcalmum" (26. 18 ["Tutankha-
men"]), "the noneknown worrier" (596.10-11 ["the Unknown Warrior"]),
"Morty Manning" (329.24 ["mortal man"]), "and all the deed in the woe"
(11.7 ["all the dead in the world"]). Since "cycloannalism" would differ
from "psychoanalysis" in exploring the profoundly unconscious state into
which a person "tropped head" will move not simply "todie," but also after
the "cycle" of "years" is up (L. annus, "year"), the term suggests that part of
the Wake's extended "undertaking" will be an investigation of "the mor-
bidisation of the modern mandaboutwoman type" (151.5-6). And "that's
the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many
counterpoint words" (482.33-34).

Life in the cemetery, judging from the vast literature on the subject, is not
that empty. For instance, "skim over Throuah Hell with the Papes (mostly
boys) by the divine comic Denti Alligator" (440.5-6 ["Dante Alighieri"])-
where the reference to the "dental" equipment of "alligators" more or less
answers the question "Death, where are thy jaws?" by referring us to the
Inferno, the complaining members of whose men's club talkatively reveal
that death has Big Ones. Although Western culture, obsessed with "spirits,"
has generated countless books and institutions elaborately explaining events
presumed to follow the wake, in "underworld[s)" (147.27), "otherworld[s]"
(385.4), "netherworld[s]" (571.35), "yonderworld[s]" (593.23), "wonder-
wearlds" (147.28), "mansions of the blest" (426.26), "heavens" (170.9),
and puritan "Hell[s]" (63.23), it has produced very few-the Wake among
them-troubled enough to wonder about the substantially "Real Absence"
that informs the "tropped head" nightly, in "real life" (260.F3). To this tell-
ing oversight Joyce, throwing his ventriloqual voice into the dummy shown
embedded in Relief Map B, sighs in exasperation, "we only wish everyone
was as sure of anything in this ... world as we are of everything in the ...
fellow that's bound to follow" (452.29-31). That we collectively "know" a
great deal more about life beyond the grave than we do about life in the
middle of life, in its night, no doubt attests to our culture's hysteria about
the prospect of the wake; but the oddly displaced "knowledge" attests as
well to a collective hysteria about what it means to have to be alive at all.
Compensatorily, then, the Wake moves our attention into the cemetery only
to pull it back into the middle of life, into the obscure "seemetery" of sleep,
so to deepen the "mountainy molehill" it found there by addressing the
"clearobscure" question "why is limbo where is he"? (256.23). Where do
people get all their ideas of "other worlds, " and what enables them to describe
"the Hereweareagain Gaieties of the Afterpiece" (455.24) so elaborately?
Any number of items elicited from the "tropped head" of the man lying
embedded at the Wake will begin opening answers to this question. For "one
bed night he had the delysiums that they were all queens mobbing him. Fell
stiff" (379.17- 18) : if these terms suggest on the one hand the dreamy "delu-
sions" sent into the "night" by "Queen Mab" (in Br. folklore, the maker of
dreams)-and "full stop"-they also evoke the "Elysium" into which some-
one "dead to the world" has passed by "falling stiff" and entering a "seeme-
tery." In places like these, the Wake suggests-as others have elaborately ar-
gued-that some unconscious reflection on the human experience of the
night seems intricately entangled in even the most complex beliefs about
"eternal sleep" and the existence to which it leads-because, however short
"Finneaan" 75
an "ephumeral" it may be, sleep brings the world to its end: "Jehosophat, what
doom is here!" (255.12 ["Jehoshaphat," ofJoel3: 12, is another site of the end
of the world]). 8 In the Wake's "present (i) ment" ofthe "Real Absence" inte-
rior to a man "tropped head," then-"no thing making newthing wealth-
showever" (253.8-9) -"the death he has lived through becomes the life he is
to die into" (293.3-5); and out of the mundane experience endured in the
"seemetery" of "everynight life" (17.33,36), the Wake discovers, in all kinds
of places, projections forward through the cemetery into a presumed "nexis-
tence" (366.2)-a "next existence," met in "inexistence," after "death" (L.
nex). Because he is asleep, the man "tropped head" at the Wake is already in
an "other world" (9I.25)-one radically alien to and cryptically occulted
from the world accessible to the light of "day's reasons" (347.24)-but an
"other world" from whose experience people seem to have derived ideas of
what other "other worlds" might be like. 9 Passage through a night in the
"seemetery" moreover palpably embeds in human experience a sense of
what it is to fall down "dead to the world" and to undergo a spectral transit
through a dark "noughttime" at whose sunstruck latter end, after encoun-
tering shades and shadows and sometimes harrowing hell, one hurls back an
immobilizing rock and undergoes a resurrection of the body into the sun's
day, at the pearly gates of dawn, under an eastering blade of matitudinal
light: "Array! Surrection!" (593.2-3 [the "insurrectionary" note is of the
"Easter Rising"]).
The genuine mystery lying at the heart of all resurrection and solar
myths emerges in miniature, but with undiminished strangeness, in any
thinking about the "solarsystemised" process of sleep (263.24), which draws
everybody in the world "seriolcosmically" (263.24-25) through periodic
cycles of nonbeing and being, snuffing out and resurrecting lives like "Fin-
negan's" according to the design of "an archetypt" immanent in "one ...
original sun" (263.27 [an "archetype" manifest in the "sun," in turn mani-
festing an "architect" of "original sin"]). This "solarsystematized" arrange-
ment builds into the architecture of the world "a sot of a swigswag, systomy
dystomy, which everabody you ever anywhere at all doze. Why? Such me"
(597.21-22): the "doze" here calls attention to the periodic alternation of
"doing and dozing" in a world rocked under "one original sun," just as the
"swigswag" of that tipsy "sot" calls attention to the alternation of "blacking
out" and enlightened "sorting-out" in "everabody" given to "feeling aslip
and wauking up" (597. I2)-and just as the "systole" and "diastole" in "sys-
tomy dystomy" call attention to the flood and ebb of blood in the heart.
Why these periods suffuse "everabody" is a fathomless question ("Search

me!"), but a question nonetheless implanted in "everybody's" "body" ("Such
is me"). It raises the "cyclological" question (220.30-31) of why anyone in-
voluntarily made to "drop down dead" (323.19) in the "seemetery" of the
night should wake up at all, rather than "camp camp camp[ing]" off into
eternity cultivating an extremely long "blank memory." As it occurs uncon-
sciously to the man lying "dead to the world" at the Wake, ''I'd like myself to
be continued" (452.10- I I). The Wake in turn, now construing itself as "Tobe-
continued's tale" (626.18), discovers inits to-be-continued hero's "ephumeral"
disappearance in the "seemetery" of night a protoversion of other stories
bearing on the "resurrection of the body" into the light of new life.lO "The
descent to the underworld is what happens to every human being when he
goes to sleep. The question what is life turns out to be the question what
is sleep." II
At the Wake now, as at the wake, "postmartem is the goods" (455. II - 12) ,
and "the coffin" becomes "a triumph of the illusionist's art" (66.27). And in
turn, a story already "terribly difficult" to "tell" because of its emplace-
ment in a body "laid to rust" in a "seemetery" becomes even slightly more
"Tellibly Divilcult" (303.FI)-the undertones here hinting at "devil cults"
because "Tobecontinued's tale" opens fantasmal perspectives on unending
"nekropolitan nights" (80.1-2). Out of the "graphplots" aligned in the
Wake's "seemetery," accordingly, a "night of the Apophanypes" unfolds
(626.4-5), a "hallowe'en night" (49.24), which affords us, as a literary
"present (i) ment" of what "the presence (of a curpse)" must "sink" (628.10
[not "think"]), as it passes from one world to the next, an "epiphany" of the
"Apocalypse" (hence "Apophanypes")-so to raise a great deal of hell and
pull a little heaven to earth in order to bring both to light. For in this "book
ofthe depth" (621.3), where "every hollow holds a hallow" (25.13-14), "its
never dawn in the dark but the deed comes to life" (328.27-28) .12
The Wake now becomes something of a "fulldress Toussaint's Wakeswalks
Experdition" (455.5-6), holding out a "spictre" (299.5) of "new worlds for
all!" and all "scotographically arranged" (412.2-3). While the reference to
"Madame Tussaud's Waxworks Exhibition" reminds us that the man lying
"dead to the world" in this "seemetery" has all the headwork of a waxwork
dummy, it also suggests that he passes, while enduring a "wake" -like "perdi-
tion," into the dark of an "All Hallows' Eve" (Fr. La Toussaint) at whose res-
urrective latter end lies a "Lets All Wake Brickfaced" (359.27-28 [for "break-
fast," no matter how rigorously "brick-faced"]). "So for e'er fare thee welt!,"
as a priest at the Wake puts it, "Parting's fun"! (454.1-2 [Ger. Welt, "world"]).
"Nearvanashed" (61.18 ["Nirvana"]), the man "tropped head" at this Wake
"Finnegan" 77
has passed through "the Gate of Hal" (535.5 ["hell"]) and dwells "hells
where" (228.6), "in those wherebus" (239.30 ["Erebus"J) of "Veiled Horror"
(156.32-33 ["Valhalla"]), "Holl Hollow" (565.2), or "Had Days" (229.13
["Hades"]): the homey appearance of our friend "Hal" in that "gate of hell, "
however, tells us that his passage into an "other world" has happened not in
mythic or geographic space, but interior to a body that "Had Days" when it
was awake but now, "nearly vanished" in the "seemetery" of night, does not,
having entered an "other world" webbed of "veiled horrors" and "hollows"
and located" elsewhere" from the one open to "day's reason." Or again, having
come to the end of his day on earth, our "supernoctural" hero (598.17 ["super-
natural" because "nocturnal"]) finds himself translated into a "dimdom
done" (594.6) blissfully void of conflict largely because he "sleeps in peace,
in peace," in "peace peace perfectpeace!" (583.10, 364.20; 549.12).13 As these
examples suggest, the Wake's extensive "graphplots" are "erebusqued"
(38.3-4) with all the underworlds and otherworlds in the world ("ere-
busqued" combines "arabesqued" and "Erebus"), ultimately to make the
book something of a "multilingual tombstone" (392.24-25); but these "yon-
derworld[s]" emerge here not because Joyce's "knock[ed] out" hero, gifted
largely with the capacity to "no," "knows" Old Norse or Greek, for in-
stance-let alone the "wherebus" of his head and toes (239.30)-but be-
cause a version of them all becomes immanent in sleep's "ephumeral," and
in the nullity bubbled up in the "tropped head" passed into the "seemetery"
of the night.
One way of putting into perspective what now threatens to be a survey of
world eschatology, and of showing how the Wake might well be read as a
literary "present (i) ment" of the darkly colorful nullity interior to "the pres-
ence (of a curpse)," would be to "rearrive," "by a commodius vicus of re-
circulation," at the opening pages of the book, once again to "take our
review of the two mounds" (12.19-20 [of "humptyhillhead" and "tump-
tytumtoes"]). This "review ofthe two mounds," of course, will differ con-
siderably from anything like La revue des deux mondes; for if in wakeful life
the man lying "dead to the world" at his Wake "lives" in "le monde" (Fr.,
"the world"), at his "ephumeral" in the "seemetery," by contrast, he merely
"leaves" (353.10 [not "lives"]), and in something much more like Ie "mound"
(17.29, 18.3)-interior to which, as a glance at the "reliefmap" will suggest,
le monde has disintegrated severely. 14 If the disturbingly earthy "humptyhill-
head" "laid to rust" in that muddily obscure "bed" on the opening page ofthe
Wake cannot find its toes or distinguish "sopjack" from "abjects," it is "be-
corpse" (509.32), from this perspective, it has disintegrated into a sodden

parity with a terrain that muddily seeps back in, all boundaries separating
it from the global totality of its native earth having melted. In a turn of "the
vermicular" that puts a new slant on the name, Ie "mound" is all that
"Headmound," "our mounding's mass," holds in his "tropped head" and can
"no" (he is also given the "abusive name" "Dirt" more than once at his Wake
[71.5, 72.13]). These ciphers, then, show him endearingly "being humus"
(18.5), as he lies in a "seemetery," teeming with a "blank memory" the size
of which only a Wakean "tomestone" could ever articulate, accoutred in
"his Eddems and Clay's hat" (278.F7), amid "clayed sheets" (546. I), "his
clay feet, swarded in verdigrass" (7.30 ["verdigris" accumulates on human-
oid figures that do not move]), participating in a "castomercies mudwake
surveice" (349.25 [not a "customary midweek service," but a "survey" of "mud"
by the person "cast to mercy" at his "wake"]). Underlying everything in Joyce's
"bog of the depths," one finds some such "spictre" as this, revealing "Morbus 0'
Somebody"-Finnegan-drifting through loam at the speed of dark in a "bed"
in an obscure "seemetery." Essentially these figures evoke the unconsciousness
of sleep; but because they do so, they inevitably hold forth a "present (i) ment"
of the "explots" befalling "the presence (of a curpse)" when it passes through
the "seemetery" and into another world-here an earthy "underworld" in
which, "being humus, the same roturns" (18.5) "by a commodius vicus of re-
circulation" to its "hume sweet hume" (80.18; 261.5, 481.21, 606.16), where it
awaits a future "resurrection of the body" and "very merry Incarnations in this
land of the livvey" (308.19-20).
These nuances in the "vermicular" now oblige us to see further that the
Wake, because sleep does, takes place "all underground" (113.32, passim),
and not metaphorically. Since the perceptions withdraw from the world
outside the body in sleep, to fall "back in the flesh" (67.5-6), sleep leaves
one "buried" (131.15, passim), but "buried" within an animate sort ofloam-
"red loam" (469.3 [Heb. Adam]) -and all the more deeply because "humus"
and the "human" ("earthling") are etymologically entangled in each other
(NS, 12). We might, then, think of the figure shown "outlined aslumbered"
in the "relief map" as "Tommy Terracotta" (481.32), or more simply, as
"Terry Cotter" (71.22) since he just lies there "being humus," brain-void and
immobile as an earthenware or "terra cotta" figurine-though implicitly in-
formed with the human. IS Now in the night, "every morphyl man of us ...
falls back into this terrine" (80.22-23 ["tureens" are made of "terra cotta"]),
"where indeeth we shall calm decline, our legacy unknown" (79.17). "Mor-
phyl" here suggests "mortaL" of course, because our hero is "dead to the
world" and at a loss to know where "they drugged the buddhy" (602.26-27
"Finnegan" 79
[the "drugs" "knock out"; the "Buddha" in the "body" shows it "nearvan-
ashed"]); but it also plays off the Gr. morphe ("shape"), out of which arises
Morpheus, in Greek myth the son of Sleep and "shape-shifting" maker of
dreams. If the line suggests on the one hand that in sleep "We vivvy soddy.
All be dood" (264.FI ["very sorry," "all is dead" and buried in "sod"]), it also
suggests that the "terrain" in which everything is "blurried" is the dream-
stirred, "vivid sod" of the living body. It is in the animate underground of this
sort of red loam that the Wake, because sleep does, takes place.
"The sole [and 'soul'] ofthe settlement, below ground" (392.21), the man
"tropped head" and "buried" at this Wake now becomes a "belowes hero"
(343.17) in another sense: "a locally person of caves" (365.2), lying every-
where encrypted beneath "the manyoumeant," his life in the night takes
place in an "underground heaven, or mole's paradise" (76.33, cf. 483.27)-
or, more elaborately, in a "rambling undergroands" (481.15 [where the "ram-
bling groans" in this "rumbling underground" will lead to the production of
dreams]). "Dead to the world" as he may be, "he continues highlyfictional,
tumulous under his chthonic exterior" (261.17- 18) -where the signs of "tu-
multuous" "chthonic" activity in the "tumulus" (or "tomb") suggest that
underworldly "spirits" haunt "our mounding's mass" as much as they haunt
Finnegan, and as much as they haunt any "mound or barrow" (479.23-24).
"Hollow," yet "all-hallowed," the "darkumound" (386.20-21) of which
the Wake, as literary "document," is a "present (i)ment," now becomes an
"ollollowed ill" ("hill") riffed and stirred with "spirits" (7.33-34 [the "ills"
keep us "in bed"]). By another turn of "the vermicular," then, we might
think of Ie "mound" shown in Relief Map B as "Spooksbury" (442.7), or
"Soulsbury" (541.29), or "Haunted Hillborough" (340.34), or, less trans-
parently, as "Finsbury" (374.28), "Danesbury" (372.17), or "Edenberry"
(66.17-18)-where the "burryripe" "burryberr[yJ" in the last of these names
(291. II, 376.28) would indicate that the man "tropped head" there is "all
reddy berried" and "dead to the world" (421.6 ["already buried"]), but only
in a vegetative state like sleep (hence the frequent spelling of "bury" as
"berry" in Finnegans Wake) .16 As a totality, these ciphers show the man
"tropped head" at the Wake-"sir ghostus" (532-4)-"ghosting himself"
(501.32) as he lies "interred in the landscape" shown in the "relief map" (L,
I, 254). At the same time, however, they also map out a richly extended
"netherworld" (571.35) teeming with chthonic agencies that seek to erupt
out ofle "mound" and return into Ie monde, to wreak havoc with the world
of the living and the day. Archetypal depth psychologies locate chthonic
powers such as these in immaterial "depths," in the "underworld" of an Un-

conscious that lies not merely below ground, but "below the earth and be-
yond it," always and everywhere underlying the visible surface of things. 17
But in the nocturnal underworld treated at the Wake-an "underworld of
nighties and naughties and all the other wonderwearlds" (147.28)-we
should expect, as the terms imply, a great deal of this chthonic mayhem to
erupt somewhere in the occulted region of our hero's "underwhere" (365.11-
12 ["underwear"]), it, too, always and everywhere underlying the visible
surface of the daily world (hence the "nighties" and the "underwear" evi-
dent in those "wonderwearlds"). "See relief map" (564. IO and context) .IS
One way of putting some of these new properties of the "mound" into a
context, and of showing how subterranean forces stir inside it, would entail
moving forward into a row of Wakean "graphplots" that show the man
"dead to the world" in a "seemetery"-now construed as "Donawhu" (76.32
["Don't know who"])-leading a "plotty existence" (76.18) in "a protem
grave" (76.21) localized as usual "in the bed" (76.32). These terms suggest
that though "his body still persist[s]" (76.20), it has not moved a great deal
since he "tropped head" at the start of the Wake, having lain there statically
"the whole of the while (hypnos chilia eonion!) lethelulled" (78.3-4), in a
state "rich in death anticipated" (78.6). We read, however, of some "under-
ground" force that seeks, while "knowing the hingeworms of the hallmirks
of habitationlesness, buried burrowing in Gehinnon, to proliferate through
all his Unterwealth, seam by seam, sheol om sheo!, and revisit our Upper-
crust Sideria of Uti litari os ... " (78.8-11). Most of this language evokes the
"eyewitless foggus" of somebody who is "dead to the world": the deceased as
described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead were supposed to pass through
and "know the hingemarks of the murky hallmarks" in a "habitationless"
underworld in order to rise from the grave into new life; 19 and the references
to the Biblical graveyard of "Gehenna" (Jer. 19: 6), to "sheoI" (Heb. "the
grave"), and to "seams" of earth and "iron-mines" (Gr. sidereia) embed us
deeply in the "Underworld" (Ger. Unterwelt) of a "seemetery." As that fur-
tive "burrowing" suggests, however, a dark vitality is alive in Ie "mound,"
prodding "the presence (of a curpse)" to seek the "upper crust" of earth and
return to the "utilitarian" world of "side rial day." "How hominous his house,
haunt it? Yesses indead it be!" (560.17-18 ["Yesses" = "Jesus!," a riser]). But
because "upper crust" is also slang for "the head," we might see this "bur-
rowing" agency striving simply to lift the "tropped head" upward out of the
"seemetery" of sleep into perceptual vitality.
Purposive and urgent enough to transform a "Gehenna" into a "Gehinnon"
(Ger. geh hinnen, "Get out of here!"), this "burrowing" progresses in a di-
"Finnegan"
rection whose end is made clear by countless other passages that find the
man lying "dead to the world" in the Wake's "seemetery" "wurming along
gradually" (84.30) through the "burrows" and "barrows" of "Soulsbury"; for
this "burrowing" primarily moves with "burning" determination, "tobor-
row and toburrow and tobarrow" (455.12-13), "to burrow burning" (602.17-
18 [toward "tomorrow and tomorrow" and "tomorrow morning"]): "Will it
ever be next morning"? (66.10). The ciphers tell us that "deeds bounds going
arise again" (55.5 ["These bones gwine to rise again!"]), "in the quicktime"
(560.9 [morning)); but since we are sharing the "eyewitless foggus" of some-
one embedded in a "seemetery," they also suggest that as far as "the presence
(of a curpse)" can "no," "these bones" might be preparing to rise again "in
the quicklime," as they murkily gather themselves together and move from
"Yet stir thee, to clay, Tamor!" (255.4 [in the secret Irish tongue of BOB Latin,
tamor means "earth," but the whole "vermicular" construction moves us
through "yesterday, today, tomorrow")). In the "noughttime," from this per-
spective, "one world [is] burrowing on another" (275.5-6); for the "spirits"
of anyone who has come to the end of his day on earth and "tropped head,"
disintegrating with an Old World (of yesterday and the past in all conceiv-
able senses) only seek, after an annihilative gap of time in the "seemetery,"
"toborrow and toburrow and tobarrow" toward a resurrection of the body in
a New World (oftomorrow and the future in all conceivable senses). In "To-
becontinued's tale," then, as in others involving the resurrection ofthe body,
the "spirits" are intent on returning to earth to gratify dark appetites and
yearnings that arise in the "wonderwearld"-as, for instance, the appetite
for "breakfarts" (453.12) or "Breakfates" (131.4).20
As these brief readings "in the vermicular" will suggest, the Wake goes
about its "present (i) ment" of life in the "seemetery" so colorfully as to
make a reading of "Finnegan's" "explots" at his "ephumeral" unending.
Every "graphplot" in the Wake's "epistola of ... buryings" (117.28) opens
onto "fresh horrors from Hades" (183.35), when not "striking up funny fu-
nereels" (414.35), because a "present (i) ment" of essential unconscious-
ness-"Real Absence"-was crucial to Joyce's reconstruction of the night.
There are "coughings all over the sanctuary" at the Wake (26.26) -though
the "coughing" distinctly heard in that "coffin" tells us that the man "tropped
head" within it is not really "dead to the world" at all, but merely "dead to
the world." As the nagging persistence of that indistinction between the
twin unconsciousnesses of sleep and death suggests, these are not finally,
either for Joyce or his reader, merely gamey issues, but visceral ones. By
pulling one's attention into the "seemetery" of night, the Wake obliges its

reader everywhere to discriminate between "the sleep and the ghoasts"
(551.2-3) -between the "Real Absence[s)" of "sleep" and of "ghosts," as be-
tween "the sheep and the goats," and as if at "the end of the world" (hence
again those "sheep and the goats"). Inevitably, it leaves its reader wonder-
ing what internally differentiates sleep and death. Inevitably, too, it leaves
him meditating on what it must be to be the star of the show at a wake.
The only predictable certainty about any human life is that it will culmi-
nate in an event at which, but for one, there will be some "fun for all."
Everybody knows it, and everybody has a shadowy account of what it will
mean to be "propelled from Behind into the great Beyond" (49.25) as the last
in a steady sequence of rude kicks delivered from the rear assails one unex-
pectedly on that "one finel howdiedow [when] Bouncer Naster raps on the
bell with a bone" (455.13- 14). Well may this "Pater Noster" resolve into a
"Nasty" barroom "Bouncer" then, as he extends this "fine howdy-do" on
that "fine final day" that will signal the end of the world and time ("on the
bell"). The further out of consciousness one keeps one's own shady account
of the wake, the more bearable life in its middle may be; yet its presence in
the background, as both "The Dead" and the "Hades" episode of Ulysses sug-
gest, everywhere exerts a force on the foreground and so determines the way
life is lived in its middle-and all the more powerfully as death, already one
of the "catastrophic cataclysms which make terror the basis of human men-
tality" (U, 697), is susceptible to profound moralization and institution-
alization under the" awethorrorty" (516. 19) of" Bouncer N aster." The Wake,
like the wake, brings this "spectracular" event to the fore, to explore its
power on the living.
In The New Science, Vico establishes an etymological equivalence be-
tween "humanity" and humando (L. "burying"), anthropologically rein-
forcing the identity by calling attention to the strangeness of that moment in
prehistory in which an aspect of human consciousness flickered up out of
animality as our forebears stopped leaving the corpses of their parents to
rot, the prey of scavenging beasts, and instituted, in the custom of burial, "a
great principle of humanity" (NS, 12, 337, 529). His observations suggest
that consciousness of death and consciousness as a totality cannot be disen-
tangled: one is the condition of the other. In another form, the same story
is told in Genesis, concerning "Del Fall Adams" (70.5 [Ger. "the case of
Adam"]), who underwent, through the paradoxically "fortunate fall"-
"the great fall" (3.18)-an uplifting ascent into knowledge of good and evil
and an immediate fall into knowledge of death. Both Vico and Genesis
make an aspect of death as much a human creation as a fact of nature. "Hu-
"Finne8an"
man beings appear to be unique among the fauna inhabiting the 'biosphere'
that coats the planet in being aware that they themselves and all their con-
temporaries are going to die, and that death has overtaken countless genera-
tions";21 "animals are unaware of death because death is a symbolic form"
(cf. U, 46, IOI). 22 The story one has in a mind potentiated by death of what
its death will entail, then, wields the power of any symbol in having the
capacity to shrivel or magnify life where it is always and only known, in
its middle-as Joyce, educated into a Catholicism that rendered life in its
middle subservient to the demands of a moralized afterlife, would well have
known (P, III).
"Numerous are those who, nay, there are a dozen of folks still unclaimed
by the death angel in this country of ours today, humble indivisibles in this
grand continuum ... who, while there are hours and days, will fervently
pray to the spirit above that they may never depart this earth of theirs"
(472.28-33). Yet in the "semitary of Somnionia, " "dead to the world" as
Finnegan, each of these dozens is as unconscious as he will ever have occa-
sion to know: "if he was to parish ... before the dorming of the mawn"-
before "the dawning of the morn," while "dorming" under the "moon"-"he
skuld never ask to see sight or light of this world or the other world or any
either world" either (91.23-25). Like Bloom during his gentle descent into
"Hades," not least, the Wake suggests that something so natural, inevitable,
and commonplace need not inevitably fill us with horror and fear, aspects
of which, as states of mind and not facts of nature, are evolved out of rela-
tions with a punitive "Bouncer Naster." It goes about scattering this fear,
moreover, through the exercise of great good humor and restless curiosity,
so to demonstrate by the casting of light words over dark subjects, a conver-
sion of gravity into levity, and the raising of spirits of all kinds, that the hu-
mor, pleasure, and curiosity expended during a limited "lease on mirth"
(329.19 ["leases" expire, too]) is one best and ample means to a meeting of
"peace on earth" and its end.
If being "dead to the world," "of corpse" (254.32), were all that "every-
night life" entailed-" (Oh hell, here comes our funeral ... )" (190.2-3)-
nobody would ever go to sleep at all and everybody would die of protracted
insomnia. Yet as we experience it, "in our own nighttime," sleep is pleas-
antly revitalizing and invigorating, culminating as it does in "Array! Surrec-
tion!" (593.2-3 [and a sundazzled "resurrection" of the body]). "Finnegan's"
spooky experience, therefore, is only the bottommost layer in a book whose
"every word will be bound over to carry threescore and ten toptypsical
readings" (20.14-15); as it occurs to the man "tropped head" at his Wake at

a moment in which he murkily rises out of "the living detch" to "shake off
the dust and dream" (8.22, 280.35), "that's enough ... of finicking about
Finnegan and fiddling with his faddles" (531.27-29). Although there is, as
these lines imply, a great deal more to Finneaans Wake than an extended
reconstruction of "Real Absence" and the interior of the "tropped head"-
not least an exploration of a night's warm dreams-"nefersenless" (415.33
[and "nevertheless"]) "this is not the end of this by no manner means"
(373.35-36). For death, as the reference to the ancient Egyptian city of
"Nefer-sent" implies, has a long, dark history, and the grave has historicized
depths that lead downward into "the deep deep deeps of Deepereras. Buried
hearts. Rest [t]here" (595.28-29).
Further study of Finnegan's "explots" in the "seemetery" therefore obliges
us to "wurm along" a little more deeply "in dead men's hills" (352.31-32),
by drawing illustratively on the "new science" of Egyptology and moving
into "Aeships" (625.4 [or "Egypt"]). There, among "tomb people" (hence the
Gael. Aos-sidhe in "Aeships"), somewhere "in Amongded" (418.6 ["among
dead" in "Amentet," an Egyptian realm of the dead]), "we shall do a far
walk (0 pity) anygo khaibits" (570.28-29) as we contemplate, with "Ba's
berial," the invention of the cemetery, the construction of a formalized
afterlife, and the history of Western death (415.31 ["Amentet" was home of
the Egyptian khaibit, or "shadow," and ba, or "soul "]). And there, too, as we
"thothfully" consider "the silence of the dead, from pharoph the nextfirst
down to ramescheckles the last bust thing" (415.28,450.20-21 [with "Thoth"
and "Ramses"]), we shall find sleep everywhere intimately linked by a form
of dark and "secret hook-up" with "Secret Hookup" itself (360.16 [as with
"Sekhet Hetep," the Egyptians' otherworldly "fields of peace"]) .
"Finneaan" 85
CHAPTER F 0 U R
Inside the Coffin:

Finnegans Wake and the
EByptian Book of the Dead
PHARAOPH TIMES
Mortuary literatures and funerary texts, as at all wakes, assume an enor-
mous importance at joyce's Wake. Sensibly, joyce seems to find in them not
only previsionary accounts oflife beyond the grave, but also elaborate medi-
tations on the experience of sleep. Since a thorough study of the use to
which Joyce put myths of afterlives and other worlds in Finne8ans Wake
would in itself make a book, this chapter will undertake a reading of one
particular mortuary text-the Egyptian Book of the Dead-that the Wake
draws upon heavily in its portrayal of its hero's existence in the "semitary of
Somnionia" (594.8). A treatment of the Book of the Dead, in turn, will sug-
gest how the Wake bends other mythographies of postmortality into its re-
construction of the human dark.
It is impossible to overlook the vital presence of the Book of the Dead in
Finne8ans Wake, which refers to ancient Egypt in countless tags and allu-
sions. When joyce refers to his protagonist as a man not of "the hidden life,"
but of "the Hidden Life" (499. IS), for instance, he is translating one of
the names of the Egyptian underworld-Amenti ("the Hidden Land")-
and the name of one of its prominent deities-Amen-Ra ("Ra, the Hidden
One").1 When he comments-in the phrase "To it, to it! Seekit headup!"
86
(454.35-36)-on the celestial aspiration that causes people to look upward
toward heaven ("seek it head-up"), he is comparably alluding not only to
"Sekhet Hetep" (cf. 415.34-35)' but to the "Tuat," another name for the
Egyptian afterworld. And when he describes the "Toussaints' wakewalks ex-
perdition" as a "chamber of horrus" (455.5-6), he is alluding particularly to
the mortuary locale of the" Chamber of Horus."
There are several good reasons for approaching Finne8ans Wake, and its
treatment of the wake, through a reading of the Book of the Dead. Joyce ac-
tively sought to have somebody write an essay exploring the Wake's af-
finities with this text: as he explained in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver,
one of the "4 long essays" in that testamentary collection which he planned
to have follow Our Exa8mination was to examine specifically the Wake's re-
construction of the night by reference to the Book of the Dead (L, I, 281; ll,
613-14). Undiscouraged by his failure to recruit anyone to compile this un-
written work, he became more direct and advised Frank Budgen to compose
an article on Finne8ans Wake entitled "James Joyce's Book of the Dead."2
Budgen seems dutifully to have done this in an essay published as "Joyce's
Chapters of Going Forth By Day," which, apart from its title and a casual
reference, has much of value to say about the Wake but little to do with the
Book of the Dead. 3 In the course of four decades, nonetheless, readers of the
Wake motivated by this kind of heavy hinting have for the most part fulfilled
joyce's wishes by showing us how intricately the Wake alludes to the Book of
the Dead. 4 Still, even the most learned ofthese readers have seemed uncer-
tain at times of the exact portion and significance of their labors. While a
consideration of "Finnegan's Wake" will have suggested the broad reasons for
which Joyce would in part have modeled the Wake-his own book of the
dead-on its Egyptian prototype, only a close examination of the Book of
the Dead itself will provide more detailed answers to larger questions that
any reader is likely to have about much that he meets in the Wake: What
does the Wake have to do with a wake? What does either have to do with an
"imitation of the dream-state"? And, above all, what does a reconstruction
of the night have to do with such archaic and arcane cultural oddments as
the Book of the Dead, which one finds everywhere in the Wake? Since Joyce
clearly regarded the Book of the Dead as one of his conceptual models, some
sense of its structure must precede an account of its exact role in Finne-
8ansWake.
In its own elusive form of symbolic language the Book of the Dead af-
fords us probably the oldest, most impassioned, and most fiercely sustained
glimpse into events occurring at and beyond the moment of the wake that
Inside the Coffin

people of this world have ever enacted. More perhaps than any other cul-
ture, ancient Egypt has impressed upon us a paradoxical truth about the
way in which our consciousness depends upon the passage into uncon-
sciousness of past generations of men at their wakes: we know what kind
of life these people enjoyed before death largely because they were so heav-
ily preoccupied with life after death; "most of the surviving products of past
generations are parts of the equipment with which they furnished the
dead."5 As the archaeological testimony of its tombs and pyramids alone
suggests (62.20-21,261.9,553.10), dynastic Egypt was among the most nec-
rocentric culture that this planet has known. The literature that survives
from dynastic Egypt consists almost entirely of texts that were engraved into
the walls of tombs, carved all over the insides and outsides of coffins, or laid
beside the corpse on papyri. Even those odd documents that describe the
mundane work and play of the ancient Egyptians come to us primarily out
of tombs; and they tell us that even in those most convivially abandoned
of times in which the wealthy hosted dances and parties, the specter of the
tomb loomed large in the imaginations of the celebrants. It was a custom at
Egyptian parties for someone to sing a dirge reminding all those present that
the day of their own deaths was approaching; "in some cases, to drive this
lesson home into the minds of the company, the host had a mummy on a
sledge drawn through the dining hall."6 As this illustration suggests, the an-
cient Egyptians seem to have thought about their mortality with more per-
sistence and intensity than any other people who have lived. Indeed, as a
reading of the Book of the Dead will attest, they seem to have begun prepar-
ing for their deaths as soon as they began to think.
There is, in fact, no such single work as the Book of the Dead: the title
conventionally given to this odd cultural document is at best a makeshift
name, adopted by scholarly convention, which comes to us by one of the
most unprincipled etymological histories on record. Egyptologists adopted
this title through their barterings with graverobbers, who, over the course
of centuries, had come to refer to any piece of writing lifted from the desert
tombs as a "deadman's book" or a "book of the dead."? The accuracy with
which this informal title suits the content of the Wake, nonetheless, should
by now be immediately apparent.
As Joyce scholastically pointed out to Budgen-apparently in that season
in which he tried to prod Budgen into writing "James Joyce's Book of the
Dead"-the title by which the Egyptians themselves knew the Book of
the Dead, insofar as they knew any such odd scattering of documents as
now lies before us by any single formal title at all, was the Chapters of Cam-

ina Forth By Day, a title which throws an entirely different light on the con-
tent within.s The meaning latent in this "real" title, of course, suggests how
Joyce would have found in the Book of the Dead's account of life in the
"seemetery" a covert psychology of sleep; like the Wake, it turns out that
the Book of the Dead can be read in either of two ways: as the stream of
unconsciousness of a man dead to the world, or as the stream of unconscious-
ness of a man sleepily dead to the world. That Joyce was conscious of this
kind of bivalent readability in his source is suggested by one of the hundred
odd alternative titles for the Wake-and here, the Book of the Dead as
well-that he lists at the beginning of chapter I. v: "How to Pull a Good
Horuscoup when Oldsire is Dead to the World" (105.28-29). The line evokes
the underlying spiritual drama on which the Book of the Dead is based: the
resurrection into light of the dead god "Osiris" through the agency of his son
"Horus," a resurrection which every mortal Egyptian was understood per-
sonally to reenact, with the help of the gods, after his death; but it also
clearly refers to the restful sleep of the old man ("Oldsire") who lies em-
bedded at the Wake, hosting premonitory, because wish-fulfilling, dreams
(hence the "horoscope").9
As a collective cultural document, the many "Chapters of Coming Forth
by Day" that make up the Book of the Dead comprise a widely varied series
of "spells and incantations, hymns and litanies, magical formulae and
names, [and] words of power and prayers," which together were supposed to
serve the deceased man both as a guidebook to the unearthly topographies
of the next world and as a catalogue of verbal talismans, reference to which
would rescue him from the many dangers and hostile demons that he was
expected to meet there. 1O Singly, however, none of the papyri, stone carv-
ings, mummy bandages, amulets, "show coffins, winding sheets, ... urns,"
or shards of pottery on which the words of the Book of the Dead have been
found quite exactly resemble one another (77.28-29): no two of these dead-
man's books are identical. While Egyptologists have determined that all
these sepulchral texts share many common elements-often, indeed, whole
chapters inherited over a long tradition-they have also discovered that
each dead man had his own eclectically personalized version of the dead-
man's book; while two deadmen's books might contain some of the same
chapters, moreover, the chapters might be written entirely differently.
From these observations, archaeologists have inferred that every individ-
ual who could afford it consulted with his priests and scribes in the course
of his lifetime and more or less ordered-as one might today order the fur-
nishings of a living room-the writing of a guidebook that would answer
Inside the Coffin

his own particular needs and desires in the next world. II The personalized
document cited here as the Book of the Dead, accordingly, deserves a title
both more and less definitive. Since it is only one individualized version
of thousands of books of the dead, it might more accurately be construed
as The Scribe Ani's Book of the Dead, or, more resonantly, Ani's Wake; even
more accurately, since it deals with events that led Ani to his resurrection
into daylight after his wake, it might be entitled Ani's Chapters of Comina
Forth By Day-or again, as Ani Wakes. A comparison likening a document
this personal to the private furnishings of a living room, moreover, is not
at all facetious: the Papyrus of Ani was painted over years, both by Ani
himself and by hired scribes, on a roll of papyrus almost eighty feet 10ng;12
at Ani's funeral, it went into a tomb consisting of seventeen rooms, together
with "vases full of wine, beer, oil, perfumes, flowers, bread, cakes, ducks,
haunches of beef, and vegetables"; with the tools that Ani used to make a
living in life, as well as with his bed, his pillow, his harp, his chairs and
couches; with ushabti statuettes-magically to be evoked into life in the
next world-of servants and beasts of burden; 13 and with Ani's body, which
had been mummified over a period of seventy days, wrapped in linen ban-
dages inscribed with words from the Book of the Dead, and hermetically
sealed inside of two thickly veneered coffins of sycamore wood, the inner
one anthropoid, each of which was written over with more words from the
Book of the Dead.11
Less wealthy Egyptians seem to have furnished their dead with less opu-
lent tombs-and, correspondingly, with less opulent editions of the Book of
the Dead: they apparently purchased briefer, ready-made copies of books of
the dead from the establishments of local scribes, who kept in stock a selec-
tion of these documents varying in length, quality, and content and who
would, once the purchase was negotiated, fill the dead man's name into
blank spaces in the prefabricated papyrus just before the funeral. I5 Even the
poor man had his little variant of this general cultural document: wrapped
in linen and laid in an open grave with his new pair of sandals and a walk-
ing stick meant to lighten his future travels, the corpse of the poor man was
furnished with a few inscribed amulets and tokens intended to guard him
from dangers to be met in the next life. 16
Written roughly fourteen centuries before the birth of Christ, according
to Budge's chronology, the Papyrus of Ani shares enough common elements
with other books of the dead to have enabled Egyptologists to classify it as
one of the many "Theban recensions"-that is, as one of several variations
of the Book of the Dead which, because of their common properties, were

written at a historical moment in which Thebes was a center of power in
the Egyptian kingdom. And, as many students of the Wake have noted, "the
thieves'rescension" (410.36-411.1 [or "Theban recension"]) is the one that
Joyce studied when he wrote the Wake: indeed, his hero is "hinted at in the
eschatological chapters of Humphrey'sJustesse oftheJaypees and hunted for
by Theban recensors who sniff there's something behind the Bua of the Deaf"
(134.34-36) Y While Atherton rightly suggests that Joyce probably con-
sulted the Papyrus of Ani in writing Finneaans Wake, isolated passages
in the book show that Joyce drew on another Theban recension of another
deadman's book, the Papyrus ofNu: "the overseer of the house of the oversire
of the seas, Nu-men, triumphant, sayeth" (493.30-31) .18 This line echoes
the opening invocations in chapters of Nu's Book of the Dead, as the name
"Numen" implies: "the steward of the overseer of the seal, Nu, ... begotten
of the steward of the overseer of the seal, Amen-hetep, ... saith";19 and it
differs from comparable invocations in the Papyrus of Ani ("the scribe Ani
saith"). There is, furthermore, another Theban recension of yet another
deadman's book situated in Dublin, in its museum; and since Stephen
Dedalus alludes knowingly to divinities of the Egyptian pantheon in A Por-
trait and Ulysses, it is not inconceivable that Joyce would have been aware
of it. 20
The Wake's assimilation of these distinct papyri suggests not only how
broadly Joyce studied this material, but also how organically he would have
contoured all of it into the designs of Finneaans Wake. Since each copy of
the Book of the Dead has as its subject a real individual, each copy of the
book inherently differs from all others; yet because two distinct books of
the dead, one written for a scribe, and one for a steward of the overseer of
the seals, might each contain traditionally prescribed chapters identical in
all matters but those of naming and phrasing, the documents are at the same
time collective and universal. Any book of the dead, then, has at its center
a hero like the Wake's: a real individual like HCE who is also, dead to the
world and "reduced to nothing" (499.3), like Here Comes Everybody.
"IN THE OTHERWORLD . . . OF

TWO-TONGUE COMMON"
As one might expect from this account, the varying personal editions of
each of the three main variant recensions of the Book of the Dead that we
possess offer, at least in individual details, a confusing and often contradic-
Inside the Coffin 91

tory sense of what exactly life after death was supposed to be-which is
only to note that even the most educated person, in the most stable period
of Egyptian religious history, was uncertain of his exact position in a cos-
mos whose contours changed and shifted with Egyptian centers of powers
and senses of the universe. Collectively, however, the scattered remains of
that general cultural document now known as the Book of the Dead yield a
broadly coherent sense of the cosmos within which the ancient Egyptian
understood himself to spin out his days. It was a chilling and yet beautiful
cosmography, whose architects poured their attention into the mapping of
the landscape of a next and strange world. In their endeavors to peer beyond
the grave, Egyptian cosmographers devised an elaborate mythology revela-
tory of a universe haunted by gods and demons who bore human bodies under
the heads of serpents, jackals, apes, and birds, and who walked among blood-
red lakes of fire and among fields of eternal peace. People lived under this
cosmography and prepared themselves to die in it for almost five thousand
years; it shaped the literate world almost three times longer than Christian-
ity has, and seventeen times longer than Newtonian physics. The cryptic
hieroglyphics of the dynastic Egyptians offer us, then, as legitimate an
understanding of human mortality as does the scientific symbol-system that
orders modern reality. And in its own way, this determined cultural probe
into the phenomenon of the wake turns out to have much to do with the
simple, mundane experience of sleep. 21
Spatially, for example, the portals of entry into Amenti, the next world of
the Egyptians, were located in exactly the same place as are the opening
pages of Finne8ans Wake: "well to the west" (3.21), at "the place where the
sun set" at day's end, that point in space at which the sun left the world and
moved, according to empirical observation, beyond it. 22 To the ancient Egyp-
tians, in fact, the name "Amenti" denoted not only "the Hidden Land" and
"the kingdom of the dead," but also "the West," and in particular those spe-
cific regions to the west of the Nile where they situated their necropoli and
ritualistically buried their dead in order that they might find themselves
near the gates of sunset and the other world. 23 A modern person, trained to
know solar physics, will keep these many meanings clearly distinct from
each other; but to the ancient Egyptian, they were all of a punlike unity:
these people believed that somewhere in the west beyond their cemeteries
there existed a concrete site at which the sun moved out of the world-
through portals that Joyce's Book of the Dead, for instance, refers to as the
"Ghoststown Gate" (329.25), the "Gate of Hal" (535.5), or simply sunset.
The semantic blur implicit in the word "Amenti," finally, seems actually to

have effected the architecting of Egyptian cities: since the west was the land
of the dead, many ancient Egyptian cities sprang up in such a way that the
living established their dwellings on the east bank of the Nile, while in the
deserts on the western side of the river they built their spectral necropoli. 24
Unlike other primitive peoples, the Egyptians did not believe that the sun
moved underground when it sank below the horizon; nonetheless, since
none of their explorers ever traveled far enough west into the mountains
and sandseas of the Sahara actually to locate the place at which the sun
caved into Amenti, the problems of its disappearance and of the advent of
the night engaged their deepest attention. In modern times we express our
anxieties about comparable problems of transport and disappearance by
wondering of one another how we each get through the night. Less ego-
tistical than we have learned to be, the ancient Egyptians expressed the
same nyctophobic concern by wondering how the sun got through the
night, disappearing as it did at sunset in one part of the world and reappear-
ing in the morning in a chamber of the sky diametrically opposite. They
solved these difficulties by evolving an elaborate metaphysics to explain the
sheer physics of their world-a metaphysics that took as its two basic prin-
ciples the manifest forms oftwo divine beings, both "hidden": Amen-Ra, the
bearer of the sundisk, and Osiris Khent-Amenti (Lord of the Hidden Land of
the Dead).
According to Egyptian cosmologists, the entire earth, consisting of Egypt
and all known lands, was surrounded by a range of unapproachable moun-
tains situated way beyond the peripheries of the visible world. Upon this
ring of mountains rested the watery slab of the oceanic sky, across whose
deeps daily Amen-Ra traveled with the sun, in a boat, as the Egyptians
understood it, a boat infinitely more glorious than those which plied daily
up and down the Nile, but nonetheless a comparable boat, since the fiery
warmth of the solar disk had in some way to be sheltered from the quench-
ing waters of the celestial sea. 2S Empirical reflection will suggest why the
Egyptians should have imagined the outer boundaries of the real in these
exact terms: Egyptian adventurers never succeeded in traveling the neces-
sary four thousand miles to discover the sources of the Nile that Joyce makes
so much of in the Wake; no matter how far they ventured, there always
seemed to be another range of mountains in the distance, or an ocean which
they could not cross; and water always came down out of the sky. Within the
enclosed space of Egyptian reality formed by this ring of remotely pilIaring
mountains and the superincumbent slab of celestial waters, however, cos-
mologists understood there to be two openings: that through which the boat

of the sun disappeared at night, and that through which it emerged in the
morning; these were the two gates through which dead men, like Amen-Ra
in his boat, entered or left the realm of the dead. Since the Egyptians spa-
tially located the land of the dead in a region temporally equivalent to the
night, Joyce was able to elicit from their accounts of supernature descrip-
tions of the human night, so to bring the Wake, his modern book of the
dead, into complete conceptual alignment with the Book of the Dead. Like
Joyce, moreover, Egyptian cosmographers faced great difficulties in discover-
ing what exactly happened beyond the world in the land of the dead.
Since the Egyptians had as much trouble imagining an infinitely exten-
sive universe as we do today, they simplified the baffling conceptual prob-
lems generated in their mappings of supernature by proposing that a second,
terminal range of mountains circumscribed that chain of remote mountains
which already bounded the real world. 26 This understanding accomplished
two things: first, it placed the hidden realm of the dead not in the incon-
ceivable expanse of infinity, but in a finite, enclosed body of space, a dark
ring of extraterrestrial supernature surrounding the known world; second,
it implicitly defined a few of the basic features of the other world. Since
people who lived and depended on the Nile naturally tended to conceive of
any space between two ranges of mountains as a valley, it became under-
stood that an infernal river flowed through the broad valley of Amenti. And
since no one knew exactly where the Nile originated, it was understood that
the river flowing through the other world was in some way a continuation of
the Nile. As some Egyptian sepulchral texts explain it, a living being who
wished to reach the kingdom of the dead could do so not only by dying or by
traveling far enough west to reach the gate of sunset, but also by passing
through the two black holes that had long been observed behind the waters
of the Nile's First CataractY The supposition that the dead dwelled along
the banks of a circular river in a dark, entunneled valley of this kind, fi-
nally, offered an economically simple explanation of the celestial physics
that brought about the night: once the boat of Amen-Ra vanished through
the portals of sunset in the southwest, it navigated its way gradually north-
ward and then eastward through the enclosed, circular valley of Amenti-
on a skewed plane with the earth, but outside the ring of peaks that bounded
it-until it emerged triumphant, ten to twelve hours later, out of the gates
of dawn.
Much of what happened in the Hidden Land of Amenti could now be deter-
mined empirically-by observing events that occurred on the northeast and
southwest horizons of the sky at dawn and dusk, or by moving as close to

the edges of the real world as possible. Since the sun often disappeared from
the world and reentered it in emblazonments of scarlet, for instance, it be-
came clear that there were regions of eternal fire in Amenti: the Egyptians
were perhaps the first people to discover hell and to chart the circular archi-
tecture of the infernal world which, after three thousand years of modifica-
tion, Dante would describe in his Inferno. Since the morning sun often
seemed to have trouble pushing its way into the world out of dark accumu-
lations of thunderclouds-indeed, since it had had to fight its way through
the kingdom of night-cosmographers also assumed that in the ten or twelve
hours between nightfall and sunrise, the gods accompanying Amen-Ra in
his boat had to battle continuously against the forces of darkness. 28 What
forms these forces took could be inferred from stories told by people who
had in turn heard things from people who had traveled to the horizons of
the earth-into the fiery regs and ergs of the Sahara and beyond the jungles
of the Sudan, where explorers saw predatory beasts that rarely wandered
into the everyday cosmos. 29
From these varied fragments of concrete observation and hearsay of re-
mote origin, Egyptian thinkers finally evolved a diffuse sense of the fate of
Amen-Ra in the afterworld: in each of the twelve hours of the night in
which it sailed or was towed through Amenti, according to many sepulchral
documents, the boat of the sun passed through a continuum of twelve coun-
tries or kingdoms, all but one ruled and populated by demons and ani-
malistic forces that mutilated and preyed on the souls of living things and
that hungrily tried to overpower Ra and his company before they reached
the gates of morning. 30 In that hour which corresponded to the deepest part
of the night on earth, for instance, the sun entered the Kingdom of Seker, an
archaic god of death, who ruled, eternally unseen, over a domain of "black-
est darkness" and "bare, barren, sandy deserts, wherein lived monster ser-
pents." 31 Since in this part of the underworld-and in this part alone-even
the infernal river vanished from view, Ra and his company were forced to
a bandon the boat of the sunken sun and to move forward, through chinks of
virtually impenetrable rock, in the body of a serpent out of whose mouth
burned a weak, but illuminative fire. 32 In the next hour, in another king-
dom, Ra boarded the boat of the rising sun, which his attendants towed up-
stream along "the secret road of Amenti," like a boat along the Nile, toward
the gate of dawn. 33 As Ra circumnavigated his way around the cosmos
through the other world, his name and form changed in ways concordant
with the changed physical circumstances surrounding him: "I am the god
Tem in rising"; "I am Khephera in the morning, Ra at mid-day, and Temu in

the evening";34 in the depths of the other world, he was called Afu-Ra ("the
corpse of Ra") .35 The metempsychotic rhythms by which the name of Ra
changed from Tern to Temu as he passed from the world of the living into the
world of the dead and then back again were ones that Joyce carefully ac-
commodated to the story of his sleeper, "Tim Finnegan," who also nightly
falls dead to the world, and then reawakens, and then falls down dead
again: his name "is Timb to the pearly morn and Tomb to the mourning
night" (I39.w-II [in wakeful consciousness he knows that his name is
"Tim," but when he's dead to the world, he becomes a form of "Tomb"]);
and, "of course, he could call himself Tern, too, if he had time to? You butt
he could any tom" (88.35-36). The nightmarish underworld through which
the Wake's "Timb" fluidly drifts between sunset and sunrise, however, is as
much the world encountered in sleep as that which people have understood
to be the world of the dead.
One final observation about the cosmological framework in which New
Kingdom books of the dead are set will suggest how intricately Joyce mod-
ernized Egyptian tomb literature, much of it already consonant with the
Wake. It is undoubtedly confusing to read in the Book of the Dead of the
twelve divisions of the Egyptian afterworld, of the fourteen regions into
which each such division was again subdivided, of the three hostile gods
who guarded the doors of the palace in each subdivision, of the many preda-
tory monsters who lurked in the darkness about each such palace, and of
the rituals that the dead soul of Ra had to perform in order to pass all of
these named and numbered obstacles: details like these, not really impor-
tant to a modern reader, changed in every generation, with every slight
shift of theocratic power, and in every personally varied copy of the dead-
man's book. As confusing as all this detail may be, the fundamental shape of
the Egyptian otherworld remained nonetheless elegantly coherent, and
simple in its beauty. Conceptually, as we have seen, the Egyptians envi-
sioned this "hidden land" beyond the world as a ring of dark, navigable
space circumgirding and encompassing reality; as a finite, enclosed body of
space through which a circular river flowed, into which the light of the
world disappeared at night, and within which the spirits of all things un-
earthly became manifest. But they also envisioned it as a human body-
and, at least as we understand it, as a sleeping human body.
Whose body this was is made clear in every other phrase of every book of
the dead, and in maps of the other world that Egyptologists have discovered
among some tomb scriptures. It is the body of Osiris, the god who fell down
dead to the world, like Tim Finnegan, and then came back to life: "My body

is buried" ... "I am he who is hidden in the great deep" ... "the Hidden of
Forms" ... "I am in the Dweller in the Body" ... "I am he who riseth and
shineth" ... "0 Osiris, ... wake up and be strong like unto Ra every day. "36
Unversed in modern cartography, ancient Egyptian priests and scribes there-
fore drew their problematic maps of "the Hidden Land" of Amenti in curious
ways: at the top of the "map" reproduced in figure 4.1, for example, the
other world is diagrammed as "the body of a man bent round backwards in
such a way as to form a circle, and the toes touching the back of the head.
This god is, the [inverted] text tells us, Osiris, and it is his body which
forms the circle of the Tuat [another name for the Egyptian other world]." 37
In a map of the cosmos dating from a much earlier period of Egyptian his-
tory, an unnamed god-presumably "Osiris, Lord to the Uttermost Limit"-
is depicted lying asleep, or dead, on his back, with his legs bent around over
the front of his body to form a comparable circle; but here, Budge tells us,
the void enclosed by the circular body, rather than the body itself, "is thought
to represent the region where the dead live. "38
/ " Osiris. the Other World
"This god is Osiris and {

his body is the other world."
Inverted figure of the goddess
Nut. daughter of the sky. helping
the disk of the sun to emerge
from the body of Osiris.
"This god rests in the
Ant-boat (the boat of the
morning sun) with the
gods who are with him."
{ -The Sun
__ Khephera. the beetlelike form
that Ra assumed at dawn.
"Come forth from the waters {

and bear up this god."
~~j~;;~;~;;Wi~~~~~~~~r
t«!
-.........
The company of gods who help
Ra to arise at dawn. and who
"Nu." the god ofthe
watery(.")
{ also helped Osiris to rise
into wakened consciousness.
slab ( _ _ ) of the sky. From left to right they are:
Sa (knowledge).
Hu (intelligence).
Heka (god of words of power).
Thoth (god of language) .
Keb (the earth).
Isis. Nephthys. and three
unnamed gods ( _ ).
Figure 4. I. Coffin Text: Egyptian Supernature

Fragments of the myth of Osiris elusively invoked in all versions of the
Book of the Dead portray him as the one god in the Egyptian pantheon who
came to earth and took on the mortal lineaments of humanity, reigning as
a beneficent lawgiver and king of Egypt. He was, in the American idiom,
permanently put to sleep by Set, not coincidentally the god of night and
darkness, who confined the dead body in a casket and threw it into the sea.
When Isis, the wife of Osiris, brought the corpse of her husband back to
Egypt, Set thrust it below the world of light again, hacking it into fourteen
pieces and separately burying the dismembered parts in hidden locations all
over the earth of Egypt; from this element in the myth, Egyptians came to
understand that the body of Osiris encompassed the entire material uni-
verse-"Thy body is all pervading"-rather in the way that the Wake's
sleeper, buried in his own body, seems to encompass the entire world in the
opening pages of the Wake, when, dead to the world, he dreams of a land-
scape stretching from Phoenix Park to Howth Head without perceiving
himself as the scattered central subject who contains it. 39 Despite every-
thing that the powers of the night did to keep Osiris dead and buried, how-
ever, the superior force of the sun-god Amen-Ra woke him: moved by the
entreaties of Isis, Amen-Ra sent to earth a company of gods who recollected
the scattered being and returned him to life; among this company was
Horus, the son of Osiris and a god of the rising sun, who now slew Set
("How to pull a good Horuscoup when Oldsire is Dead to the World"). After
his resurrection, because Osiris was the only god or man ever to have died
and returned to life, he became Osiris Khent-Amenti, Lord of the Under-
world and the new "Prince of the night and of the thick darkness." 10 In this
position, finally, he brought into the Egyptian consciousness the possibility
of understanding that all mortals, after his example, might bodily enjoy life
after death in another world. 41 This account of the myth of Osiris, of course,
deliberately emphasizes its affinities with Finneaans Wake; for here, too,
Joyce would have elicited from his Egyptian models a set of understandings
applicable to his modern, sleeping man, who also lies in darkness on his
back "pending a rouseruction of his bogey" (499.I)-his body, like Osiris's,
forming the space within which another world resides. 42
The myth of Osiris, finally, provided the ancient Egyptian with a meta-
physics that perfectly complemented the celestial physics contained in the
myth of Amen-Ra. When, at sunset, the boat of Ra passed from the world
into the kingdom of the dead, it entered the domain and the body of Osiris,
whose resurrective potencies were now put to work to repay the sun for an
old favor: according to the Theban recension of books of the dead, those

gods who boarded the boat of Amen-Ra in Amenti to move it toward dawn
were the same gods who worked together to resurrect the scattered body of
Osiris. As the solar agency of Amen-Ra helped to resurrect Osiris, so com-
plementarily the chthonic agency of Osiris helped the sun return to dawn
after it passed, at nightfall, into his body. Together, these interlinked myths
suggested not only that people arose in the morning because the sun did,
but also that the sun arose in the morning because some humane, creative
nocturnal power was there to resurrect and wake up and see it: in under-
standing that the physical universe was phenomenologically rooted in a
knowing human body, these ancient people would have seemed to Joyce pe-
culiarly modern. The interdependence of these myths is suggested, more-
over, in the very form and verbal texture of the scribe Ani's Book of the
Dead: the Papyrus of Ani opens with a "Hymn to Ra," follows with a "Hymn
to Osiris," and thereafter blurs the two figures so incessantly into a comple-
mentarity that at times it becomes impossible to say whose resurrective
movement toward dawn and whose descent into nocturnal darkness is the
cause and effect of whose.
Everywhere alluded to and nowhere directly told in books of the dead,
the coordinated resurrection stories of Osiris and Amen-Ra establish the
cultural vocabulary in which Egyptian mortuary texts are written. Apart
from their religious significance, these stories rather resemble in cultural
substance, and in importance to the particular work in which they occur,
the coordinated resurrection stories of Tim Finnegan and Finn Maceoo!, to
which the Wake everywhere alludes but nowhere directly tells: none of
these four narratives make up the real plot of either of the two apparently
plotless works in question, nor do they name the real protagonists; for, like
the Wake, every version of the Book of the Dead has as its central figure a
real person-the scribe Ani, the steward Nu, "the first pharaoh Humpheres
Cheops Exarchas" (62.2I)-who is not there, the dead man next to whose
corpse the particular dead man's book was found at rest. It is his peculiarly
told story, central to each of these works, that is of essential interest to
us now.
APPLIED EGYPTOLOGY
One of the interesting features of New Kingdom books of the dead are the
"Rubrics" included with each of their various chapters, which inform us in
great detail of the ways in which those chapters were intended to be read.

Many of these rubrics directed a reader to "know it on earth"-that is, ap-
parently, to commit a chapter to memory before he passed into the other
world;43 other chapters were to be spoken out loud "regularly and con-
tinually millions of times, "44 or intoned under specified ritualistic circum-
stances. 45 Yet other chapters were to be inscribed on the coffin or recited by
relatives at the tomb. 46 Many of the chapters, however, were supposed to be
recited or known after death by the dead man himselfY Extended sections
of the Book of the Dead, consequently, put a reader into a position as diffi-
cult of access as that afforded by the Wake: not only does the deadman's book
look forward into the life that people anticipated living after death; much of
it, as the circumstances of its discovery show, was supposed to be read there.
Presuming to speak directly from the point of view of the corpse, the Book of
the Dead may be one of the few books on earth ideally written for an audi-
ence consisting entirely of the dead. In its utilitarian capacity as a guide-
book to the other world, moreover, it had very particular information to
impart to the dead man: it told him how to move from the life he had just
departed to a secure place in the next world by steering his way through the
annihilative duration of time that would befall him between the moment of
his death and the moment of his resurrection into life after death.
Once the Egyptian dead man became translated out of the world and into
the recumbent body of Osiris, he entered a region of space whose manifold
terrors every book of the dead maps out in considerable detail. Fundamen-
tally the most horrifying of these terrors seems to have been the loss of all
perception and sensation in a form of "blackest night":
The Osiris, the scribe Ani, whose word is truth, saith: -Hail, Temu [the sunken
sun]! What manner ofland is this unto which I have come? It hath not water, it hath
not air; it is depth unfathomable, it is black as the blackest night, and men wander
helplessly therein. 48
In an "unseen" world of darkness this "thick and impenetrable,"49 it was

even more horrifying to be deprived of the capacity to move, especially if
one had earlier learned that demonic predators and the agents of annihila-
tion and decomposition prowled everywhere through the dark:
The Osiris Ani saith: - 0 thou who art motionless, 0 thou who art motionless, 0
thou whose members art motionless, like unto those of Osiris. Thy members shall
not be motionless, they shall not rot (or stink), they shall not crumble away, they
shall not fall into decay. so
The dead man who traveled unprotected into this sunless world found him-
self powerless to accomplish even the most feeble acts of self-preservation.

Inhabiting a universe with other dead men-"those who are in inertness"
and "those who are asleep in the body of Osiris" 51-his inert body could not
eat, drink, open its mouth to warn off predators, or bestir itself in the least.
Unconscious and immobile, the dead man found himself utterly vulnerable:
o I am helpless. 0 I am helpless. I would walk. I am helpless. I am helpless in

the regions of those who plunder in Khert-Neter, I the Osiris Ani, whose word is
truth .... "
Underlying the Book of the Dead, then, Joyce detected an intricately de-
tailed reconstruction of the human night-and of vulnerable and uncom-
fortable sleep, in which a man awaits anxiously his resurrection from the
dark. Few of us need to worry, as the originators of Egyptian myth and
sepulture seem to have worried, about the vulnerable condition in which
sleep-and later, burial-might leave one, especially in a torrid land where
the things of the night crept at large around mud-built houses whose bed-
rooms could hardly have been impermeable. Yet the terrified vitality im-
plicit in these passages allows us to know that the state of oblivious inertia
being explored here is as much in the nature of sleep as of death: knowing
exactly how it felt not to have been there in the night, the "spooker" of
these passages (178.6 ["spooky speaker"]) seems to be projecting his mem-
ory of those unremembered parts of sleep past the moment of death into his
future grave-where he meditates on his fate in cunningly elaborate ways.
From these passages, in turn, it should be evident how Joyce found the
portrayal of the interior of the corpse offered in the Book of the Dead
appropriately servicea ble to his own portrayal of the interior of sleep. So, for
example, at the end of a passage in which HCE, as "the first pharaoh Hum-
pheres Cheops Exarchas," dreams of himself being "subjected to the horrors
of the premier terror of Errorland" (62.21-25), Joyce draws on the rhetoric
of English translations of the Book of the Dead to describe the oblivious im-
perception into which his sleeper momentarily sinks: "We seem to us (the
real Us!) to be reading our Amenti in the sixth sealed chapter of the going
forth by black" (62.26-27).53 That Joyce has in mind as a "premier terror" of
the dark "errorland" of sleep the loss of consciousness is suggested by the
name that he repeatedly uses throughout the Wake to refer to the Egyptian
afterworld. "Amenti" was not the name by which the ancient Egyptians
themselves most commonly referred to the underworld of "the Tuat" or
"Khert-Neter." Many New Kingdom books of the dead, in fact, use "Amen-
tet," "Ament," "Amenti," and "Amenta," if at all, to name obscure subsec-
tions of the realm more widely called the Tuat. Since the Wake, however, is
Inside the Coffin IOI

"basically English" (116.26), Joyce seems to have preferred the more obscure
of these often interchangeable terms because of the less obscure English
overtones it bore: "the premier terror" of the "errorland" of sleep, the terror
that caused "Cheops" to drive 100,000 laborers over the twenty years it took
to build his pyramid, is that of "amentia" in its fullest sense, ofloss of mind
and conscious life. 51
Considering the demonic strife to which the boat of Amen-Ra was sub-
jected on every night that it passed in Amenti, the Egyptians judged it ex-
tremely dangerous to be transported to the dark, Hidden Land if, upon one's
arrival there, one found oneself inert and amental. Innumerable serpents,
monsters, and demons roamed in this darkness-their means of subsistence
revealed in their names: "devourer ofthe dead," "eater of shadows," "bone
crusher," "he ofthe white teeth," "eater of blood," "the great god who car-
rieth away souls, who eateth hearts, who feedeth upon offal, who dwelleth
in the darkness," and so forth. 55 A cheerless fate therefore befell the ordinary
man who passed into Amenti-the poor man, that is, who was not supplied
with a guidebook sufficiently informed to spare him from all possible dan-
gers. Like every other mortal-like HCE in the opening pages ofthe Wake-
he found himself immobile and unconscious when he first arrived in the
dark entunnelment of the other world with his walkingstick, his winding-
sheet, and the meager ration of food that his impoverished relatives put into
his grave. And he remained senseless, vulnerable to predators, until that
single hour of the night in which the boat of the sun sailed through the re-
gion of Amenti in which he lay, bringing with its passage daylight and fresh
air into the infernal gloom. This is the sort of relieved understanding that
filters dimly into the "tropped head" ofthe Wake's sleeper in the last chapter
of the book when at dawn, after having lain motionless in the dark under-
world of his body for the length of a night, "going forth by black," he begins
to perceive, like a corpse stranded in Amenti, the light of the sun boating
into his awareness:
The eversower of the seeds of light to the cowld owld sowls that are in the dom-
natory of Defmut after the night of the carrying of the world of Nuahs and the night
of making Mehs to cuddle up in a coddlepot, Pu Nuseht, lord of risings in the
yonderworld of Ntamplin, tohp triumphant, speaketh. (593. 20 - 2 4) 56
When HCE rises from his inertness in this underworld, he will reawaken to
a whole, new day of life in a familiar city. As the ancient Egyptian under-
stood it, however, the dead man who was lifted from immobility when the
boat of Ra entered his part of Amenti wakened to his senses for only a lone

dusky hour, and in that time, he had to look after his own survival in an
utterly strange world. His course of action, as he had learned it on earth,
was then clear: during this hour, he stumbled aimlessly forward, handi-
capped by the need both to fend off monsters, thirst, and hunger and to re-
plenish his dwindling provisions, all the while trying to locate in the twi-
light of the new world that hidden region in the kingdom of Osiris in which
he might enjoy the security of immortal life. But as soon as the boat of the
sun left the region of Amenti in which he wandered, light and air vanished,
and the dead man sank back into an inertness from which he would not
reawaken again-if at all-until the boat of the sun reappeared. On every
day that he managed to survive in the afterworld, in other words, the aver-
age Egyptian endured an almost unbroken night of vulnerable sleep. A per-
son in these circumstances was all but doomed to be taken by a beast, if not
in his sleep, then in his single hour of wakefulness; without the protection
of "words of power" from a book of the dead, the duration of his life in the
life after death was only a matter of days. 57
Here, then, the Egyptians developed a strangely sophisticated concept-
that of "the second death" -the like of which few other accounts of human
mortality, primitive or modern, have evolved. Once we begin to consider
human anxieties about the chances of survival in the other world-anx-
ieties expressed in each of the passages from the Papyrus of Ani already
quoted-life after death turns out not to offer a release from the threat of
death at all. The Egyptians were hardly refusing to come to terms with
the prospect of human finitude by evolving an eschatology in which a per-
son was understood to be twice mortal, for after a deceased man perished
again in the other world, he did not advance reincarnate into yet another
other world, but was annihilated forever. This was the fate of the Egyptian
masses, who passed from life into the sleepy realm of Amenti, and from
Amenti into nothingness. 58 The concept of the second death, then, opened
up dark depths in a mythography that might otherwise have failed to distin-
guish the "Real Absence" of sleep from that met at the end of human time.
The understanding that a person could die twice, once on earth and once in
the other world, made it possible for Egyptian thinkers to acknowledge that
in the end the ordinary mortal passed from the world into a nothingness
unfathomably deeper than that endured in the night; and they prayed, ac-
cordingly, in their strange mortuary documents, not to be among the multi-
tudinous numbers of "those who are to be annihilated." 59 Curiously, then,
the primitive incantations of the Book of the Dead turn out to be far less
superstitious than many modern accounts of death. The conception of the
Inside the Cotlin 103

second death, moreover, sensibly sophisticated the Egyptian understanding
of what life after death would be-and in ways almost unthinkable to
Christian eschatology. For if the other world were at all to accommodate
a humanity whose existence was not independent of time, these people
shrewdly reasoned that not only must there be life after death, but there
must be death after death as well.
A man as wealthy as the scribe Ani hoped to avoid the second death and
the fate of the Egyptian masses: Ani's Book ofthe Dead contains, in addition
to a "Chapter of Not Rotting" and a "Chapter of Not Perishing," two "Chap-
ters of Not Dying a Second Time."6Q As the Egyptians understood it, there
were indeed two ways of escaping annihilation and of entering into immor-
tality. Depending upon the city and the period of Egyptian history in which
one lived, one compiled a book of the dead that invoked the aid of either of
the two resurrective deities in the Egyptian pantheon: Amen-Ra, who re-
appeared on the earth each morning, or Osiris, who reawakened into life
after falling under the powers of darkness. Worshippers of Amen-Ra aspired
to attain a place in the boat of the sun-"the Boat of Millions of Years"-
reasoning that if one secured a position in the sun god's company, one would
attain eternal light and never fear the disappearance of daytime and sun-
light and, correspondingly, of wakened consciousness. 61 Worshippers of
Osiris aspired personally to reenact the god's resurrection and to enjoy im-
mortal life, like Osiris, in that special, elysian region of Amenti called
Sekhet Hetep.62 The scribe Ani, who lived during a period of Egyptian his-
tory late enough to have learned the niceties of theocratic politics, diplo-
matically threw his faith into the resources of both of these deities at his
wake: in the "Hymn to Ra" which begins his book of the dead, he prays that
the Boat of Millions of Years will pick him up at the gates of sunset, carry
him through the underworld, and drop him off at the Elysian Fields of
Sekhet Hetep.6l In this way, apparently, he could experience as little as pos-
sible of the dangerous swoon into the realm of somnolent absence out of
which other people disappeared forever. In both of these means of attaining
immortality, Joyce clearly perceived the Book of the Dead bordering on a
reconstruction of the human night; for anyone who manages to come into
the company of the sun, or to rise up out of corporeal inertness with the
help of the sun, will also have moved through the night into morning. So it
happens that "the boat of millions of years" floats into the nocturnal under-
world of the Wake, without the need for much adjustment or translation of
terms, directly from the Book of the Dead (479.25-26; 26.18-19, 418.5-6).
It does so most notably at moments in the night when Joyce's sleeper, a man

buried in his body and laid out dead to the world in his bed, begins to sus-
tain an "infrarational" sense of his orientation in the night's "seemetery,"
and of his steadily fluid and "retrophoebi[c]" drift toward "the ra, the ra, the
ra, the ra" (415.10-12 [and dawn]; see, e.g., 479.18-36); for the force that
carries him toward morning and the company of the sun (hence, "retro-
Phoebus") is identical to the divine solar power celebrated in Raite books of
the dead.
Since the man asleep in joyce's book of the dead lies transfixed "in various
phases of scripture as in various poses of sepulture" (254.27-28), the sym-
bolic forms of Egyptian burial must also now compel our attention. As the
human subjects of Egyptian books of the dead understood it, one could nei-
ther awaken from inertia in Amenti and resurrect into a new life, nor escape
the second death and enter the Boat of Millions of Years or the Elysian Fields
of Sekhet Hetep, unless one were properly buried. And as Egyptian theocratic
history evolved, moving from a predominantly Raite theology to a proto-
Christian theology in which the redemptive figure of Osiris loomed large,
the rituals attached to a proper burial became more and more complicated
and elaborate. New Kingdom Egyptians like the scribe Ani and the steward
Nu, encouraged by the culturally definitive example of Osiris, came to be-
lieve not only that the soul reawakened into new life after death, but that its
survival depended upon the preservation of the body as well. At their funer-
als, accordingly, they sought meticulously to reenact the experience of
Osiris, as a way of guaranteeing their spiritual resurrection in a new spirit-
body in the next world. In their books of the dead, they systematically
changed their names: the scribe Ani became "the Osiris Ani," "the Osiris the
scribe Ani," or simply "Osiris";64 "every dead Egyptian was identified with
Osiris and bore his name. "65 This is rather what happens in the Wake, where
the real name of the sleeper gets lost, with his consciousness and identity,
instead to be recast in thousands offorms emblematic of his imminent mati-
tudinal resurrection: Christ, Tim Finnegan, Finn MacCool, King Arthur-
and here, of course, Osiris.
Egyptian morticians, observing that the soft internal organs of the body
decayed more swiftly than the musculature and skin, conformed to the reli-
gious expectations of their clientele by removing and "scattering" the parts
of a dead man's body while chanting hymns to Osiris: this procedure had the
economical effect of preserving the various organs of the potentially resur-
rective body from perceptible organic decay and simultaneously of replicat-
ing the experience of Osiris, whose entrails had been torn apart by the pow-
ers of night and separately buried. The embalmers, then, symbolically acted

out the roles of the scattering destroyer, Set, and of the jackal-headed god
Anubis, who was instrumental in accomplishing the physical reincorpora-
tion of Osiris. Inserting a curved iron rod up the corpse's nostrils, the em-
balmers pulled the brain out of the dead man, dried it, and set it aside in a
kit to be interred with the rest of the body/>6 Like their twentieth-century
descendants, they slit the corpse open at a spot somewhere to the left of and
between the navel and the groin, and from the wound they extracted the
perishable intestines,· heart, stomach, and liver. Modern-day embalmers
wash these entrails down drains;67 the Egyptians washed them with palm
wine, stuffed them with gums and spices, sealed them separately in four
"Canopic" jars named after the four animal-headed deities who upheld the
canopy of the sky at the four cardinal compass points of the universe, and
blessed them with the names of four gods who helped reintegrate the scat-
tered Osiris.68 After filling the hollows of the skull and trunk with spices,
gums, washing soda, and muddy Nile plaster, Egyptian morticians finally
wrapped the corpse in bandages that had been separately inscribed with the
name of the deceased and with verses from the Book of the Dead. 69 During
the two months in which the deceased's body underwent this process of em-
balming, the departed soul presumably lay unconscious in Amenti, await-
ing, like Osiris, the moment at which his scattered body would be gathered
together in order that within it he might be resurrected into eternal life and
brought into the company of the sun.
This resurrection happened at the tomb, where the various kits and jars
containing the organs of the dead man were collected together beneath the
funeral couch on which his coffin rested, and where the members of his fam-
ily elaborately relived the myth of Osiris. Inscriptions on the outer syca-
more coffin in which the dead man lay suggested that the coffin was the
womb of Nut, Osiris's mother, out of which he would again be reborn;70 the
inner coffin was shaped in the form of the body of Osiris himself.?l In turn,
the lamentations of the dead man's-the Osiris's-wife were heard as the en-
treaties of Isis, who once again moaned to Ra the sun over the dead and
broken body of her husband; the dead man's oldest son, in whom the dead
man lived on and in a manner defeated death, was understood to be an em-
bodiment of Horus, the force of the rising sun, who once again triumphed
over the powers of darkness and helped his dead father to live on in the
world.72 At some time in this period of mourning at the tomb, apparently,
just as the funeral ceremony properly began, the inert soul in Amenti
stirred dimly, assumed a spectre's consciousness, and began to move, Osiris-
like, towards resurrection. In Joyce's book of the dead, much the same kind

of feeble stirring occurs to the man "tropped head" in the night's "seeme-
tery" just after the Wake, and his wake, begin:
So may the priest of seven worms and scalding tayboil. Papa Vestray, come never
anear you as your hair grows wheater beside the Liffey that's in Heaven! Hep, hep,
hurrah there! Hero! Seven times thereto we salute you! The whole bag of kits,
falconplumes and jackboots incloted, is where you flung them that time. Your heart
is in the system of Shewolf and your crested head is in the tropic of Copricapron.
Your feet are in the cloister of Virgo. Your olala is in the region of sahuls. And that's
ashore as you were born. Your shuck tick's swell. And that there texas is tow-linen.
The loamsome roam to Laffayette is ended. Drop in your tracks, babe! Be not un-
rested! The head boddylwatcher of the chempel of Isid, Totumcalmum, saith: I know
thee metherjar, I know thee, salvation boat. For we have performed upon thee, thou
abramanation, who comest ever without being invoked, whose coming is unknown,
all the things ... concerning thee in the matter of the work of thy tombing. Howe of
the shipmen, steep wall! (26.6-24)
As always at the Wake, it is worth asking whose "eyewitless foggus" we

share here: that of a body at its wake, or that of a body not awake? Every
element in this passage helps to locate us at the unconscious interior of a
corpse drifting darkly toward its resurrection in each of those three distinct
regions of space that the Egyptians topologically equated: within the scat-
tered ruins of its own body, within the next world, and within the world-
encompassing body of Osiris. Some chapters from Egyptian books of the
dead were designed to be read at the funeral specifically in order that the
dead subject of the book might hear the words and so begin the process of
his own internally self-performed resurrection. Much the same design in-
forms this moment in the Wake (pp. 24-26), where the corpse, the Osiris,
hears voices-the voices of four old men who stand at the four corners of his
closed sycamore coffin73-praying that he will not be assailed by worms,
that he will not perish in one of Amenti's many lakes of boiling water, and
that he will indeed reach the blessed kingdom in which he might cultivate
wheat, the hair of Osiris, through eternity ("So may the priest of seven
worms and scalding tayboil, Papa Vestray, come never anear you as your hair
grows wheater beside the Liffey that's in Heaven!") /4 Like the mummified
Egyptian corpse whose "eyewitless foggus" is preserved in books of the
dead, the Wake's hero here seems dimly to lift into an awareness that various
organs of his body ("heart," "head," "feet," "0, la, la! ") have been separated
from his trunk, preserved by bottle-washing morticians in those Canopic
jars ("kits," "metherjar," "boddylwatcher"), and symbolically scattered to
the four corners of the earth and sky. In Egyptian mortuary practice, these
four jars were surmounted by lids shaped in the forms of the heads of ani-
Inside the Coffin 10 7

mals and man, each representing one of the deities who stood at the corners
of the sky and therefore defined the limits both of the underworld and the
body of Osiris;75 here, as is appropriate to a man embedded in the night, they
limn out a form loosely suggestive of the constellation Orion (hence the
evocations of the Zodiac). As in books of the dead, then, the corpse treated
in this passage from the Wake finds itself stirring to life in its own broken
body, in the night-world of Amenti, and at the corners of the sky simultane-
ously. Consciousness begins to seep back into the spice-and-gum-filled hol-
low of his skull-" (skull!) that was a planter for you, a spicer of them all"
(25.22-23)-and the corpse lying in a part of the tomb construed as a
"temple of Isis" ("chempel of Isid") apparently begins to recall phrases from
the "mummyscrip" wrapped around him (156.5) :76 the phrase "I know thee"
("I know thee metherjar, I know thee salvation boat") is a formula fre-
quently invoked in the Book of the Dead. 77 The Egyptians found it necessary
for a dead man to use this phrase as a way of acknowledging his familiarity
with the underworld and therefore of placating those hostile forces bent on
bringing him his second death; but a modern reader can interpret the for-
mula more liberally: it recurs so insistently in books of the dead simply be-
cause it asserts the possession of consciousness and the capacity to know.
For anyone who can say "I know"-or know at all-is certainly not lost in
the "Real Absence" of sleep, much less of death. And in the passage at hand,
as in books of the dead, the first things the reviving corpse wants to know are
the locations of his missing body and scattered entrails and of the solar "sal-
vation boat" that will carry him through "the land of the souls" (24.34),
through the gates of dawn, and into the light and life of a new day in "Healio-
polis" (24. IS). This passage, in short, enables us to enter the skull of an
encrypted Tutankhamen ("Totumcalmum") and to observe the form of
unconsciousness that rippled there for over three thousand years before his
tomb was opened. In a way there is nothing figurative about the passage
at all: it reconstructs exactly, from the internal "eyewitless foggus" of the
corpse itself, the kind of life that Tutankhamen and his contemporaries
imagined would follow death.
In joyce's book of the dead, "th'osirian" protagonist (350.25) within
whose body the other world is located lies scattered and scrambled in an
only slightly modified way. As "Totumcalmum," he is simply a man who
sleeps in "total calm" in "Chapelizod" ("chempel of Isid"), an innkeeper
(or "boddylwatcher") whose consciousness has disintegrated in the night.
Because the Wake systematically strives to reconstruct the "blank memory"
and "eyewitless foggus" of a body dead to the world, it might now be con-

strued as a "mummyscrip" whose content, like that of Egyptian "winding
sheets" (77.28), is "the presence (of a curpse) ": "for that (the rapt one
warns) is what [this] papyr is meed of" (20.10-11). Like the mummy of
Tutankhamen, moreover, joyce's "Totumcalmum" also is enwrapped in linen
cerements-"bedding" (24.13), since he moves through the dark "resting be-
tween horrockses' sheets" (491.31-32 [where "Horrocks" is an English tex-
tile firm and Horus is an agent of Egyptian resurrection]). He is also quite
literally "embalmed" (78.6)-indeed, "healed, cured and "embalsemate"
(498.36-499. I)-although the spirit-preserving "balm" that lies in his veins
and in his "metherjar" is far less exotic than the palm wine and bitumen
which Egyptian morticians used to keep their clients from decay: a "mether"
(Anglo-Ir. meadher [OED]) is a drinking tankard, and the potable balm
within it seems to have passed into the veins of Joyce's sleeper to insure him
of a particularly balmy sleep here.78
That a void great as the one internal to the constellation Orion suffuses
this sleeping man is suggested not only by the astro-anatomy of the passage,
but also by its assignation of "Totumcalmum" to "the region of sahuls," a
phrase that combines the primary English meaning of "the region of souls"
and the Middle Egyptian word sahu. Like other terms from the Book of the
Dead adopted by the Wake, the word sahu itself turns out to be something of
a pun, since it fuses together three discriminate meanings that a modern
reader would tend to separate: at one and the same time, the Egyptians used
it as the word for "spirit-soul" (a part of the self that lived after death), the
word for "mummy," and the name of the constellation Orion.79 Like other
elements in the passage, then, the phrase helps to set this moment in the
Wake "in the otherworld of the passing of the key of Two-tongue Common"
(385.4-5), although in joyce's understanding, the otherworldly "region of
sahuls" was topologically indistinct from the world his hero has entered by
having "tropped head" in sleep. For the Wake's embalmed "Totumcalmum,"
able only to "no" "Real Absence," lies in much the same position as Tu-
tankhamen, simultaneously "inert in the body," vaguely alert in the spirit-
filled otherworld like Amenti, and scattered throughout a universe formed
in the shape of the body of man. Nothing in this passage, finally, suggests
that Joyce's "Totumcalmum" is privy to the revelations of a collective uncon-
scious or that he has a deeply buried memory of Egyptian theology; for
while the Wake suggests that people derive their visions of the afterlife by
unconscious reflection on the experience of sleep, it also shows how they
concretize those visions with images drawn from material, historical reali-
ties to which their generations alone have direct access. The point is not
Inside the Coffin

that joyce's hero has a memory, or even a knowledge, of ancient Egypt, but
that the Book of the Dead and the Wake speak "two tongues in common"
("Two-tongue Common") because they both capture, in comparable hiero-
glyphies, parts of human experience in which "our whosethere outofman"
seems not to be there. Both map out the same other world. When joyce's
hero falls asleep in the "seemetery," accordingly, "his heart, soul and spirit
turn to pharaoph times" (129.35-36).
Two other features of this passage on "Totumcalmum" intensify its sepul-
chral effects. The first of these is that apparently eccentric riff of American
slang which intrudes discrepantly in a context otherwise heavily echoic of
the Book of the Dead. This evocation of American idiom seems to have been
joyce's way of reinforcing the understanding that his hero, at this point in the
Wake, has indeed passed into the next world, the other world, "the New
World": "the ousts of Amiracles" in the passage at hand (427.23 [not "Amer-
ica," but a realm of "miracles"]); the remote outreaches of Australian
"Tossmania" in the fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper (416.30); the ex-
tremities of British South Africa, in jaun's saintly vision of "the fulldress
Toussaint's wakeswalks experdition" ("we shall all be hooked and happy,
communionistically, among the fieldnights eliceam [Elysian] elite of the
elect in the land oflost time.johannisburg's a revelation!" (455.5-6,453.31-
34). A reading of the Book of the Dead enables us to see how little contri-
vance there is in the imaginative transaction by which joyce transforms
America and comparable ends of the earth into ciphers representative of an
other or "New World" like Amenti in the Wake. In the Irish experience of
the last two centuries, as millions of countrymen left their loved ones and
emigrated from their native earth, these places were regions into which
neighbors and relatives disappeared forever. Many of Ireland's emigrants,
never again seen alive by their relatives or friends, may just as well have
been dead to those they left behind, as the Wake suggests in its recurrent
portrayal of a son's departure from the known earth into the absence of an
other and New World (III.i, III.ii), and as Stephen Dedalus makes explicit
in Ulysses when, in his discussion of Hamlet, he defines a ghost: "What is a
ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impal-
pability through death, through absence ... " (U, 188) . So too in the passage
at hand, which begins its exploration of Totumcalmum's departure from life
by evoking Gerald Nugent's Ode Written on Leavina Ireland: "to part from Dev-
lin is hard as Nugent knew" (24.25-26 [though to part from life is harder]).
Many of those people left behind on their native earth-no less than those
who bemoaned the passage of the scribe Ani or the steward Nu into Amenti-

must have found the passage of loved ones into the New World of "Amira-
des" heartbreaking-as the self-exiled Joyce would well have known: in his
letters he refers to America, to which his son and daughter-in-law emigrated,
as "the ends ofthe earth" (L, III, 412). In the Wake, then, references to "the
New World" of America often become the ciphers for the New, unearthly
World inhabited by those "deadported" (536.2), in turn to deepen our sense
of the absence amid which Joyce's sleeper dwells. Like the originators of the
Egyptian books of the dead, who pieced together descriptions of the dark
underworld of night by referring indirectly to the unreal remotenesses of
the Sudan and the Sahara, Joyce too went to "the ends of the earth" to find
the images with which to describe his hero's "Real Absence" in the night.
All of the particular Americanisms informing this passage on "Totumcal-
mum," as adjoining references to "Pike County" and "hogglebully" suggest
(25.28, 33), come from Huckleberry Finn, a work in which Joyce perceived a
new-world manifestation of the spirit of the ubiquitous Finn who sleeps at
his Wake. The phrase "ashore as you were born," eccentrically spelled as
anything in the Wake, is actually a modification of the somewhat more un-
orthodox "shore's your born," which appears in the twelfth chapter of
Huckleberry Finn, at a moment when Huck, crouching "in dead silence" in
the night on the "texas" of a wrecked steamer, overhears two men plotting
the death of a third. "That there texas" itself refers to the upper deck of a
riverboat, on which the captain's sleeping quarters were located. In the
Wake, it bears a related meaning, apparently referring to Totumcalmum's
own sleeping quarters ("that there texas is tow linen"), whose sheeting in
turn seems made of something like "tow-linen," a rough fabric which Huck
observes the children of Parkville wearing when, attired only in garments
like nightshirts, they are invited up to "the mourner's bench" at an evan-
gelical camp meeting to cast off sin and to consider the prospect of heaven.
It is on the differing qualities of sleep and rest afforded by "shuck ticks" and
"straw ticks" that Huck muses in the long passage from Twain's novel which
provided Joyce with detailing descriptive of the swell qualities of his own
sleeper's bedding ("your shuck tick's swell"). Even apparently insubstantial
expressions in this American interlude come from Huckleberry Finn: both
the phrases "drop in your tracks" and "the road to Lafayette" occur in the
novel, although Joyce embellishes the latter of these by inserting an ad-
ditional "f" to remind us that however remotely his absent hero may have
been "deadported" to the New World, or Amenti, he lies simultaneously in-
ert in the province of the Liffey.80 Should these individual details seem too
arcane, the sonority and the locality of the passage alone should make its
Inside the Coffin I I1

placement in the New World clear (all of the sixteen places on the earth
named "Lafayette" are in the United States). The reasons for which this
New World enters the sleeper's dream in this part of his night should also be
clear from lines internal to the passage: "the loamsome roam is ended" (the
"lonesome road" to the "loamy" grave), "drop in your tracks," and "be not
unrested" spell matters out quite explicitly. The enshrouded, embalmed,
and scattered hero of this book of the dead, enduring his own "Real Ab-
sence" from life, is beginning to orient himself in a strange, amental, New
World like Amenti. 81
The last phrase in the passage on "Totumcalmum"-"Howe of the ship-
men, steep wall!"-integrates its Egyptian and New Worldly features with
the Wake's many evocations of Viking howe- and ship-burials: again,
Totumcalmum is embedded and dead to the world ("steep wall" = "sleep
well"). But the phrase also reinvokes the Book of the Dead by calling atten-
tion to other peculiar features of Egyptian sepulture. In the Old Kingdom
"mastabah" tombs, notably-mentioned in the opening pages of the Wake
("Damb! He was dud! Dumb! Mastabatoom, mastabadtomm!" [6.10-11])-
the corpse of the deceased man was not laid to rest in the spacious rectangu-
lar building that L.y above ground; this was built for the benefit of the liv-
ing, who came there to placate the deceased spirit with "offerings of the
field" (cf. 24.34-25.8). Instead, a walled-off vertical shaft forty to eighty
feet deep was sunk through the ceiling and floor of the tomb, and, at the
bottom of the shaft, a narrow, horizontal mummy chamber was hollowed
out to hold the corpse. At burial, his double coffin was lowered down the
shaft from the roof and pushed aside into the mummy chamber, which
was then walled up and sealed off, the steep, vertical shaft in turn being
crammed full of rocks and boulders. This laborious form of burial, asJoyce's
phrasing suggests, was not only intended to insure the absolute security and
rest of the preserved body ("Be not unrested" ... "sleep well" beneath the
"steep wall"); it also protected the living from the possibility of assault by
the dead ("We have performed upon thee, thou abramanation [' abomina-
tion' and 'Abram' -like forebear] who comest ever without being invoked, all
things concerning thee in the work of thy tombing") .82
One additional curious feature of these tombs deserves the special atten-
tion of a modern reader: the actual doors of mastabah tombs, through
which the living entered the building, were usually situated in the eastern
wall, so that the mourner might face the west, the locality of the sunset and
the Hidden Land of Amenti, upon entry. There, on the western walls of these
structures, the architects of postmortality painted "false doors," embel-

lished with the name of the deceased and inscribed with prayers for his eter-
nal survival, through which the spirit of the dead man presumably came
forth and went into the Hidden Land, the New World in the far west. As
Egyptian history evolved, however, and as more members of lower classes
undertook the expense of ritualized burial, the shape of the mastabah tomb
changed in such a way that its most material parts vanished and its most
immaterial ones became most prominent: members of the lower classes,
who could not afford to build the whole mastabah tomb, supplied their
dead with only the false, painted gateways to the west. The resulting ste-
lai-stone slabs shaped in the forms of arched doorways and gates facing
west, inscribed simply with the names of the dead and a few simple com-
memorative prayers-seem to be the original prototypes of our modern
tombstones. 83
As the Wake's treatment of "Totumcalmum" shows, Joyce clearly found
the force of sleep palpably manifested not only in Egyptian books of the
dead and in the extraterrestrial geographies they mapped out, but also in
the material forms of Egyptian funeral practice and sepulture themselves.
Even though the owners of books of the dead evolved the sobering concept
of "the second death," the second death itself, by an inevitably consolatory
reflex, was always understood to happen to someone else, never to the sub-
ject named in his own funerary papyrus. In the mortuary documents out of
which Western letters and conceptions of death originated, Joyce perceived
a desperate effort to convert "the silence ofthe dead" (452.20) into the im-
minently resurrective silence of sleep. For if death were regarded only as a
lapse into a form of sleep, then everything occurring after death must be in
the nature of sleep itself, a duration of "suspensive ex animation" before the
resurrection of the body (143.8-9). Passage after passage in the Wake, ac-
cordingly, treats its sleeping protagonist as one of the Egyptian dead lost in
"old nekropolitan nights" (80.1-2). Here, for instance, at a moment in the
middle ofsleep when "Totumcalmum" moves his head and generates a thought
that vanishes immediately and forever from the sands of his memory:
Mask one. Mask two. Mask three. Mask fOUf. Up.

-Look about you, Tutty Comyn!
-Remember and recall, Kullykeg!
Passages like these finally show why the Wake should have found the waked
Tutankhamen a perfect cipher for its somnolent protagonist, "Totumcal-
mum": Joyce sustains an equivalence between these two figures throughout

his "bog of the depths" (516.25) not because his hero has any substantial
knowledge of Tutankhamen, and not because the Egyptians thought at all
of Tutankhamen's death simply as a species of sleep; but because Tutankh-
amen was presumed at death to experience the same quality of nothingness,
to enter the same kind of other world, and to move toward the same kind of
solar resurrection as joyce's sleeper.
These lines also conveniently return us to that earlier passage descriptive
of "Totumcalmum," where the scattered and enshrouded protagonist of the
Book of the Dead had barely begun to undergo the process of burial and the
long resurrective movement that would lift him from dark oblivion into a
new life and dawn. When we last entered the gum-stuffed and amental skull
of this dead man, his consciousness and "sahul" were barely beginning to
stir alive in Amenti and in the embalmed parts of his body, "all matters in
the work of his tombing" having only begun. In order to help the inert Osiris
in Amenti rise up from the lethargy that left him helplessly vulnerable to
the second death, the Egyptians believed that a sequence offunerary rituals
had to be performed on the mummy, so that the dead man might regain the
will and consciousness necessary for his independent survival in the New
World. joyce's book of the dead evokes these mortuary procedures because
all books of the dead contained crucial chapters corresponding to each-
chapters that described events transpiring inside the mind of the corpse as
funerary priests on earth treated it to insure its resurrection. After offering
an internal understanding of the nullity felt by a dead man awaiting the
resurrection of his body, in other words, the Book of the Dead also minutely
documented the various stages by which the corpse would rise up from its
mortal inertia to return to life. The chapters chronicling this resurrective
movement form a substantial part of books of the dead and, in a way, consti-
tute its plot-the forward, linear, chronological movement that governs the
placement of the variable chapters in each variant book of the dead. As the
titles of these chapters alone suggest, they would have provided joyce with
an internalized account of the process by which a man dead to the world
ascended from "Real Absence" to wakened, literate consciousness.
Primary among these chapters and corresponding funeral rites is "The
Chapter of Opening the Mouth," which joyce evokes several times in the
Wake: once, for example, in a phrase that describes HCE's sleep as "going to
boat with the verges of the chaptel of the opering of the month of Nema
Knatut" (395.22-23);&1 and also, at the beginning of chapter I. v, in the title
"Of the Two Ways ofOpenin8 the Mouth" (105.23-24) .85 At the ceremony of
Opening the Mouth, two priests anointed the bandaged mouth and eyes of

the Egyptian corpse with a series of symbolic instruments and read from the
Book of the Dead, thereby empowering the mummified Osiris to throw off
his healing bandages and to open his mouth and his eyes in the underworld. 86
In the "Chapter of Opening the Mouth" corresponding to this ceremony in
the Papyrus of Ani, extraordinary things happened in the consciousness of
the dead man once the priests liberated him, to invoke two of the Wake's
central terms, from dumbness and blindness in Amenti:
THE CHAPTER OF THE OPENING OF THE MOUTH OF THE OSIRIS ANI. To be said:-The god
Ptah [the celestial blacksmith, who forged the human body] shall open my mouth,
and the god of my town shall unfasten the swathings, and the swathings which are
over my mouth. Thereupon shall come Thoth [the god of intelligence and literacy],
who is equipped with words of power in great abundance, and shall untie the fetters,
even the fetters of the god Set, which are over my mouth. s7
Prepossessed by those "swathings," nineteenth-century Egyptologists sur-

mised that Egyptians devised the ceremony of "Opening the Mouth" be-
cause they "foresaw that when a man had been made into a mummy, if life
were returned to him by magical means, it would be impossible for them
to move their members because of the bandages with which they were
swathed, and he could not breathe, [eat, drink, or talk] because his mouth
would be closed by swathings also."88 In Joyce's reading, however, the Egyp-
tian seems to have feared in death a "fettering" of far greater strength than
that imposed by any winding sheets. In life, no doubt, a man like the scribe
Ani had observed the fettering rigor mortis and inanimacy of the dead, and
in his sleep, no less doubtfully, he had experienced something like rigor
mortis internally. For in the classical Hemmun8straum, the dream ofphysi-
cal constraint obliquely reflective of sleep's power to paralyze the body, the
dreamer typically envisions something frightening, tries to shout or move,
and finds his mouth and body fettered helplessly still-as in the Book of the
Dead:
Permit not thou to come nigh unto me him that would attack me, or would injure
me in the House of Darkness. Cover over the helpless one, hide him. . . . Grant thou
that I may come forth, and that I may be master of my legs .... Let none come to see
the helpless one. 89
That the compilers of the Book of the Dead in part translated the memory
of sleep into those chapters describing the corpse's "opening of the mouth"
is furthermore suggested by the relationship of these chapters to others.
"Chapters of Avoiding Thirst and Hunger" in various books of the dead show
that the Egyptians knew what it felt like to be inert, "fettered," simultane-
Inside the Coffin II5

ously subject to the tantalizing desire for food and water, and yet incapable
of "opening the mouth";90 difficulties of this sort, recurrently disrupting the
sleep of "Humpheres Cheops Exarchas," arise comparably in the Papyrus of
Ani, as many thankful and victorious exclamations in his chapters of com-
ing forth by day attest: "I eat with my mouth. I evacuate with my body.
Behold, I am the god of the Tuat."91
In Ani's book of the dead, as in others of the Theban recension, "The
Chapter of the Opening of the Mouth" (chapter XXII) is aligned sequen-
tially with others in a plotted progression that makes its significance to the
Wake's reconstruction of the night especially clear: following the "Chapter
of Opening the Mouth" one finds "The Chapter of Bringing Words of Power
to the Deceased" (chapter XXIII) and "The Chapter Which Maketh a Man
to Remember His Name in Khert-Neter" (chapter XXV).92 In the reasoning
of the Book of the Dead, the deceased Egyptian could not fend off the phan-
tasmal threats found in Amenti unless he possessed the literate power to re-
cite charms; nor could he gain the paradisaical reaches of Sekhet Hetep un-
less he remembered his name. Stranded in strange kingdoms, he could not
utter with a mouth close by death such crucial formulaic phrases as "I
know thee, and I know thy name, and I know the name of her who is within
thee."91 "Opening the Mouth," then, seems to have meant much more to the
Egyptians than the casting off of facial bandages. By internally opening a
mouth helplessly and involuntarily closed-whether in sleep or in death-
"the inert one in the body" regained the extinguished capacity for speech,
language, consciousness, and knowledge: only then could he say, "I am the
master over myself and over the attributes of my head. "94
A passage close to the end of Finne8ans Wake allows us fully to appreciate
the experience internal to the inert Egyptian mummy in the hour of his fu-
neral. Here, in the early hours of the morning, joyce's "Totumcalmum" lies
alone on his funereal bed, just after the boat of the sun has risen into the
world above him to carry him out ofthe depths and darknesses of "Amenta":
Yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only is order othered.
Nought is nulled. Fuitfiat!
Lo, the laud of laurens now orielising benedictively when saint and sage have had
their say.
A spathe of calyptrous glume involucrumines the perianthean Amenta: fungoal-
gaceous muscafilicial graminopalmular planteon; of increasing, livivorous, feelful
thinkamalinks; luxuriotiating everywhencewithersoever among skullhullows and
charnelcysts of a weedwastewoldwevild when Ralph the Retriever ranges to jawrode
his knuts knuckles and her theas thighs; onegugulp down of the nauseous forere
brarkfarsts oboboomaround and you're as paint and spickspan as a rainbow; wreathe
II6 JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

the bowl to rid the bowel; no runcure, no rank heat, sir; amess in amullium; chlorid
cup. (613.13-26)
All of the words in the opening clause of the last paragraph quoted here,
except for "Amenta," are English: a "spathe" is a large, sheathing leafthat
encloses the flowers of certain plants; "calyptrous" pertains to the "ca-
lyptra" « Gr. kalyptra, "covering," "occulting," "veil"), the hood that en-
closes the sporecases of certain mosses; a "glume" is one of the leaves that
forms the outer envelope of the flowering parts of grasses or sedges, as in a
husk of corn; "perianthean," comparably, pertains to the "perianth," the
structure that forms the outer enwrapments of flowers; and thejoycean verb
"involucrumines," finally, derives from the English "involucre" or "in-
volucrum" « L. "envelope"), an anatomical and botanical term applied to
the outer, enveloping membranes of plants and animal organs. The sense
that the paragraph is describing the imminent unfurling of an inflorescent
core of vegetable matter-a self-enclosed blossom, or "chlorid cup"-is re-
inforced by its second clause; here joyce provides a compressed history of
the evolution of botanical life as the language advances, term by term,
through a sequence of words denoting more and more complex forms ofveg-
etable life: "fungaceous and algal"; "muscal" (pertaining to mosses) and
"filical" (pertaining to ferns); "graminal" (pertaining to grasses) and "pal-
mular" (pertaining to palms). As the culminative term in this heptad of bo-
tanical names suggests, the encored flower opening up to light here seems
to be that of the palm tree; and because this passage is temporally set in
the East-oriented, heliotropic moment of dawn, the palm flower that the
corpselike protagonist of this book of the dead has in mind seems to be that
of the date palm of Egypt-the phoenix palm, Phoenix dactylifera-a tree
whose blossoms are, in fact, enveloped by "spathes" and "perianths. "95
These details, at least, would account for the vitality that joyce's interred
hero, the most evolved form of vegetative life that the earth has ever seen,
feebly senses as he lies in a "spate" of nocturnal, "amental gloom." That the
passage reconstructs, once again, the "tropped head" of a man dead to the
world is made clear in the first of its paragraphs, which states that "there is
no body present" and-in an ambiguous clause that can be read either re-
strictivelyor nonrestrictively-that this absent body "was not there before"
either. As the paragraph evolves further, however, and as "feeling" and
"thinking" begin to infuse the blossoming palm ("feelful thinkamalinks"),
a clearer sense emerges of the actual circumstances generating this moment
in Totumcalmum's sleep.
Inside the Coffin II7

The paragraph seems to be about the buried man's mouth (a "skullhol-
low"), ready to undergo the resurrective ceremony of opening up as his
tongue, riding out to his jaw ("jawrode"), hits against structures of bone
("knuts knuckles") and soft labial flesh ("theas thighs") in an act of "re-
trieval" ("Ralph" derives from the Old Nor. Rathulfr, "the cunning of the
wolf," and the kenning of the wolf is at its muzzle). Our hero seems to be
undertaking one of those exploratory morning yawns in which the tongue
casually surveys the teeth and lips in an annular motion ("wreathe the
bowl"), finds the ground of its activity disgusting ("nauseous forere brark-
farsts"), executes a retreat ("onegugulp down of the nauseous," "wreathe
the bowl to rid the bowel"), and then falls back into a state of wishful pla-
cidity ("you're as paint and spickspan as a rainbow"). "No thing making
newthing wealthshowever" (253.8-9), the dark and empty space within his
mouth moreover differs little from the void contained within the closed
enwrapments of a flower. Since the corpselike protagonist himself seems
dimly to perceive the taste of decaying vegetable matter inside that mouth-
"increasing, feelful thinkamalinks luxuriotiating everywhencewithersoever
among skullhullows and charnelcysts"-he registers the subliminal aware-
ness in the appropriate vegetative imagery. The condition afflicting him
here, on one level, is simply what Leopold Bloom, feeling unpleasant under
comparable circumstances, calls "morning mouth," which, he adds, sends
"bad images" into the head around it (U, 61 [the L. luxurio in "luxuriotiat-
ing" = "I am rank"]). At the Wake, however, "the inert one buried in the
body" seems unconsciously aware that the bacterial forces which generate
the bad taste of "morning mouth" differ little from the bacterial forces
which, if left unarrested, generate putrefaction within the "charnel cysts"
of the dead man's "hollow skull." Here again, the Wake seems virtually to
replicate the "eyewitless foggus" of a corpse-a corpse now able to "no" that
the agents of putrefaction are growing inside out of itself. Like the subjects
of books of the dead, the man sleepily dead to the world at the Wake has the
taste of mortality in his mouth-although, as it also happens to the en-
shrouded Osirises of those books, his mouth will soon be opened, like the
dark core of the phoenix palm blossom, to the light of the boat of Ra. 96 For-
tified by its knowledge of the Book of the Dead, then, the Wake here answers
the haunting eschatological question of how the decaying corpse, buried in
loamy inertia and scattering throughout the material universe, initiates the
process by which it resurrects itself bodily into life: it opens its mouth in the
hour when the sun moves through the gates of dawn, and, as paragraphs
subsequent to this one in the Wake show, it lets language, consciousness,

knowledge, and sunlight flood back in to replace the darkness. In joyce's
book of the dead, the opening of the mouth accomplishes the same miracle
treated in its Egyptian antecedents: it resurrects.
Like the embedded man whose unconscious experience this passage
reconstructs, the corpses who speak out of Egyptian books of the dead
are internally aware of the forces of decomposition threatening to over-
whelm them:
And when the soul hath departed, a man seeth corruption and the bones of his
body crumble away and become stinking things, and the members decay one after
the other, the bones crumble into a helpless mass, and the flesh turneth into foetid
liquid. Thus man becometh a brother unto the decay which cometh upon him, and
he turneth into a myriad of worms, and he becometh nothing but worms, and an
end is made of him, and he perisheth in the sight of the god of day....<n
One of the mortuary practices that prevented this kind of onslaught, of

course, was embalmment; but there were others. "Under the Old Kingdom
the dead were anointed with the Seven Holy Oils, the names of which are
duly set forth in the Liturgy of Funerary Offerings, and on the alabaster
anointing slabs";98 and under the New Kingdom, the ritual of anointment
was incorporated into the ceremony of "Opening the Mouth," where the fu-
nerary priests, in a primitive form of extreme unction, applied unguents to
the lips and eyes ofthe deceased. Valued in life as medicines that insured the
health, cleanliness, and fragrance of the body, these ointments seem to have
performed a comparable service for the corpse, who, sick with mortality
and corruption, benefited both physically and spiritually from their cura-
tive powers. Whole medicine cabinets full of these sacred unguents were
stored in the tombs of Egypt's dead, apparently so that the person who had
passed into death could draw upon them in the process of resurrection and
restore himself magically to life and health. 99 A comparable kind of restora-
tion preoccupies the corpse "tropped head" at Joyce's Wake when, gathering
toward resurrection, he imagines the voices of young women addressing a
rejuvenated version of himself as he departs from his native earth into an-
other, New World:
... when you will be after doing all your sightseeing and soundhearing and smell-
sniffing and tastytasting ... send us, your adorables, thou overblaseed, a wise and
letters play of all you can ceive ... from your holy post now you hast ascertained
ceremonially our names. Unclean you are not. Outcaste thou are not. . . . Un-
touchable is not the scarecrown on you. You are pure. You are pure. You are in your
puerity. You have not brought stinking members into the house of Amanti. Elleb
Inam, Tipep Notep, we name them to the Hall of Honour. Your head has been
Inside the Collin 119

touched by the god Enel-Rah and your face has been brightened by the goddess
Aruc-Ituc. Return, sainted youngling, and walk once more among us. (237.16-3°)
Much of the passage comes directly from the Book of the Dead. In the
Papyrus of Nu, for example, the spirit of the departed exclaims:
I am pure. I am pure. I am pure. I am pure. My pure offerings are the pure offerings
of that great Benu (phoenix?) which dwelleth in Hensu.
And later:
I am pure. My breast is purified by libations, and my hinder parts are made clean
with the things which make clean, and my inner parts have been dipped in the Lake
of Truth. There is no single member of mine which lacketh truth. I have washed my-
self clean .... 100
At the close of the ceremony of "Opening the Mouth," finally, the Sem priest
recited comparable words as he smeared ointment on the lips of the corpse:
"I have anointed thy face with ointment, I have anointed thine eyes. I have
painted thine eye with uatch and with mestchem . ... Thy two eyes are
decked therewith in its name of Uatch, which maketh thee to give forth fra-
grance in its name of Sweetsmelling." 101
In Finne8ans Wake the sacred mortuary unguents that have been applied
to "the presence (of a curpse)" are rather more mundane. As William York
Tindall has noted, the pseudo-Egyptian deities "Enel-Rah" and "Aruc-Ituc"
are simply the skin care products "Harlena" and "Cuticura" spelled back-
ward, and the anointed members of the inert body are simply the modified
Italian Belle Mani ("beautiful hands") and the French Petit Peton ("little
tootsy") in reverse; in Tindall's phrase, "reversal means renewal."102 Had
Joyce been able to tour a contemporary drugstore, he may well have modi-
fied his inverted phrasings: the shelves of these "pharmacies" carry bottle
after bottle of unguents with names like "Wrinkle Away," "Dermalife,"
and "Nutraderm," and the backs of these bottles usually feature a little
paragraph advising one to "Apply first thing in the morning, last thing at
night." 103 The gerontophobic names of these magical medicines and the in-
structions pertaining to their use clarify the passage of the Wake under our
attention: like the perfumed oils with which the Egyptians anointed their
dead, the products here named in reverse foster the illusion of turning back
time and reversing the process of aging and dying; like the funerary uatch
and mestchem ointments, they hide the odors of the body, and the body it-
self, from people trained to attach greater value to things of the spirit. There

is little contrivance, then, in the understanding by which the Wake sees the
application of these products to the skin at bedtime as a kind of extreme
unction, an anointing of the flesh in the hour at which it falls down dead to
the world to release the soul into the underground of "Amanti": these oint-
ments protect joyce's sleeping hero from the certain threat of his own mor-
tality. If, like the Egyptian dead, the man "tropped head" at Joyce's Wake has
been invigorated and preserved with the embalming fluids of potent spirits,
so too have he and his wife been anointed before their passage into the dark-
ness-with extreme unguents whose names seem to be, ifnot "Harlena" and
"Cuticura," then "Nivea" and "Pond's Cold Cream. "104
Once the Egyptian corpse had undergone its curative anointing and the
ceremony of "Opening the Mouth," the responsibility for its resurrection
passed from the funerary priests and relatives to the dead man himself, who
was now fortified with the powers of articulacy and literate consciousness.
It was at this critical moment in the slow resurrective process that the Book
ofthe Dead assumed a utilitarian value to the corpse stranded in Amenti, as
the following passage from the Wake suggests:
-Let Eiven bemember for Gates of Gold for their fadeless suns berayed her. Irise,
Osirises! Be thy mouth given unto thee! ... On the vignette is a ragingoos. The over-
seer of the house of the oversire of the seas, Nu·Men, triumphant, sayeth: Fly as the
hawk, cry as the corncake, Ani Latch of the postern is thy name; shout!
-My heart, my mother! My heart, my coming forth of darkness! (493.27-35)
Here, as in the Book of the Dead, the moment being celebrated is not that of
complete resurrection, but a moment of incremental liberation from the
forces of inertia and obliviousness. The numinously renewed dead man
("Nu-Men," "I rise") has not quite yet found his way out of the realm of
darkness and death, and the Wake, the wake, is not yet over; having passed
beyond the Gates of Sunset ("Gates of Gold"), he has merely had his mouth
opened by priests of Osiris and Amen-Ra ("fadeless suns berayed") who re-
cite the funeral liturgy ("Arise, Osiris! Be thy mouth given unto thee!").
Finding his capacity for articulacy and literacy renewed, however, the
Egyptian dead man reborn in Amenti would have reacted much like the
man "going forth by black" in this passage: according to the particular
threat that he sensed growing in the darkness, or according to the particular
goal he wished to reach, he would have referred to the appropriate chapter
of his book of the dead and recited the necessary "words of power." This in
turn he would have accomplished by searching for the appropriate "vi-
gnette"-a picture of life beyond the grave drawn on the papyrus, which

served as a kind of chapter-marking. 105 In this passage from the Wake, the
corpse consults the "vignette" of" a ragingoos"-the evocation of a rainbow
suggesting that the sleeper is rising toward a visual dream-and begins to
read the magical spell from the corresponding chapter, much as the soul of
Nu, the steward of the overseer of the seals, would have done:
The steward of the overseer of the seals, Nu ... saith: 1 rise up like Ra .... My
heart, once brought low, is now made strong. 1 am a spirit in heaven, and mighty
upon earth. 1 fly like a hawk, 1 cackle like the smen goose ... 1 advance to the realm
of the star-gods. The doors of Maat are opened to me ... .
"We will not allow thee to enter in over us," say the bars of [the doors of Maat],
"unless thou tellest us our names." [And 1 reply], "Tongue of the place of Truth is
your name." ... The right lintel ofthis door saith: "I will not allow thee to pass over
me unless thou tell est my name." [And 1 reply] "Strengthener of the support of Maat
is thy name." ... H16
The first of these spells and the passage of the Wake that quotes it illus-
trate the principle underlying the many "Chapters of Making the Transfor-
mations" found in books ofthe dead: whether he wished to escape from dan-
ger, rise toward the boat of the sun, or fly to the house of Osiris, the prepared
Egyptian found it advisable to include in his book of the dead chapters
whose recitation would enable him, once his mouth was opened, to change
into a hawk, a heron, a swallow, a serpent, a crocodile, or, finally, a Bennu
bird (a phoenix). 107 Here, both as a hawk and a corncrake, the dead man
flies to the House of Osiris, where he then draws upon another chapter of his
Book of the Dead and, so as not to antagonize the gods of night and dark-
ness, utters a second spell revealing his innocence and his familiarity with
the underworld hidden in the body of Osiris. In the last line of the passage
from the Wake quoted above ("My heart, my mother! My heart, my coming
forth of darkness!"), the mummified dead man acknowledges that he has
advanced one more degree toward his resurrection into new life: his mouth
opened, he now becomes sensible of the heartbeat in his body and of his
imminent rebirth. lOS
Although the passage is virtually identical in contour and wording to the
passages quoted from the Papyrus of Nu, "th'osirian" hero of the Wake un-
dergoes a far less dramatic experience then his counterpart in the Egyptian
document. Not actually turning into a hawk or approaching the house of
Osiris, he becomes capable of dreaming. In the Book of the Dead, the
"Opening of the Mouth" enabled the dead man to rise from lethal absence
into an attentuated half-life which made possible the reading and reciting ()f

charms that insured his resurrection; in joyce's book of the dead, the "open-
ing of the mouth" seems to occasion a comparably incremental movement
toward resurrection, by elevating its central figure from vacant sleep into a
part of the night where, because dreams are inextricable from language, he
becomes capable of hallucinated vision and hearing. The passage from the
Wake under our attention, then, indeed signals a rebirth of sorts ("My
heart, my mother! My heart, my coming forth of darkness!"), for in the pro-
cess of finding his "mouth given unto him," Joyce's central figure rises from
"Real Absence" and inertia into the kinds of "infrarational" thinking that
Freud and his contemporaries explored in their studies of dreams and hu-
man infancy. And as recollectible dreams again begin to occupy this sleep-
ing man, Freud in turn valuably illuminates his mind; for psychoanalysis
has much to say about the symbolic meanings of birds, flight, and levitation
in dreams, and the dream into which HCE now passes bears obscurely on
snakes with evil intentions and volcanoes "in erupting" (494.8):
-Apep and Uachet! Holy Snakes, chase me charley, Eva's got barley under her flu-
encies!" (494.14-16)
HApep and Uachet" are "holy snakes" who appear in many Egyptian
books of the dead: Aapep is the black, evil serpent who threatens to devour
Ra in clouds just before his emergence at dawn from the blackness of
Amenti; Uachet, beneficent "lady of flame," is a serpentine personification
of the northern sky at sunrise. 109 Since these two conflicted serpents push
their phallic heads into "the womb of Nut, " the waters of the sky, at the same
time that Ra begins resurrectively to rise into the world amid clouds of fire
and smoke, in turn to give birth to a new day and to allow the resurrection
of the sleeper, these lines suggest how Joyce might have found in the Book of
the Dead-in addition to its sustained exploration of nothingness-forms
of thought comparable to those underlying dreams. Here again, symbolic
events that the Book of the Dead locates in the dark other world of Amenti,
twentieth-century thought would locate in the other world of sleep. 110
In the slow resurrective process that culminates in "the Opening of the
Mouth" and the revival of perception, Joyce found the real plot of the Book
of the Dead, the linearly progressive movement that determined the place-
ment of each of the variable chapters in each of its variants. Not at all ap-
parent, this plot lies concealed by diffusion in a highly allusive text which
appears to bear more on the never-told, cyclically progressive stories of Ra
and Osiris than on any real human being, and which also refers to every-
Inside the Cotlin 12 3

thing known in the circular Egyptian cosmos but the real life of the subject
who lies at its center, absent of all but his name-the Osiris Ani, the Osiris
Nu. This plot, then, is also essentially that of the Wake. As the Book of the
Dead unfolds, it reconstructs, from the "eyewitless foggus" of its absent cen-
tral subject, a succession of events of dramatic consequence supposed to
befall his corpse between death and resurrection: its mouth opened, it
breathed, it sensed the presence of its heart, it battled with inertia and with
the linens that swaddled it, it drifted its way through the kingdom of night
fending off nightmarish visions, it passed through various levels of attenu-
ated consciousness while lying inert in the body, it temporarily fended off
thirst and hunger by subsisting on the images of food and water, and so
forth. As in the Wake, so in the Book of the Dead: a reader who examined
either of those books expecting to find a gripping story would, as Doctor
Johnson remarked of Clarissa, "go and hang himself"; indeed, he might not
even notice a linearly progressive account chronicling the heliotropic move-
ment toward resurrection of a man lying inert in bed.
Just before the departed and a bsent subjects of these deadmen's books met
the sun or awoke into the fields of Sekhet Hetep, however, they did finally
manage a sequence of startling, active gestures. The soul of the deceased,
having wandered through the nocturnal gloom of Amenti in estrangement
from its deadened body, joined its new "spirit-body," which lay co-spatially
within its corpse; III and "the double tet" of this renewed body-its back-
bone and its phallus-prepared to stand up
upon the night of the things of the night of the making to stand up the double tet of
the oversear of the seize who cometh from the mighty deep and on the night of
making Horuse to crihumph over his enemy. . . . (328.3 1 -35) 1I2
Accoutered with a new body that rose up out of its old one, the dead man
now reemerged into active, physical vitality. According to "The Chapter of
Opening the Tomb ... and of Coming Forth by Day, and of Having Mastery
over the Legs,"
That which was shut hath been opened by the command of the Eye of Horus [the
rising sun], which hath delivered me. Established are the beauties on the forehead of
Ra. My steps are long. My legs are lifted up. I have performed the journey, my mem-
bers are mighty and are sound. ll3
He lifted up his head from the pillow on which it lay, according to "The
Chapter of the Pillow":

Awake out of thy sufferings, 0 thou who Ii est prostrate! Awake thou! Thy head is the
horizon. I lift thee up, 0 thou whose word is truth. IIi
Finally, he moved into the company of the morning sun, or else into the
wheat fields of Sekhet Hetep. And as Egyptologists have ascertained, the
Egyptians conceived the fertile land of Sekhet Hetep in imagery reflective of
the Nile delta on which the sun shown anew every morning, with three
differences: the wheat grew taller there; people did not have to work as pain-
fully; and no one who reached it died. liS The resurrection into new life that
the Egyptian corpse, the Osiris, was presumed to undergo at the end of its
passage through Amenti. then, resembled an experience that Joyce inter-
preted simply as awakening:
Verily, I am here. I have come. I behold thee. I have passed through the Tuat. I
have seen Father Osiris. I have scattered the gloom of night. I am his beloved one.
I have come .... 116
While this reading of Egyptian mortuary texts has treated the Book of the
Dead largely as if it were a version of Finnegans Wake, this emphasis might
easily be reversed, so that the Wake might be read as a book of the dead. A
peculiar transformation would then occur: the hero of the Wake would turn
out not to be sleeping man, but a corpse, his departed spirit wandering in
the other world. While some of Joyce's readers have approached Finnegans
Wake in this way,finding in its "nekropolitan nights" and in its incessant ref-
erences to the heavens and hells of earth's religions all manner of arcane
revelation into the fabric of supernature, Joyce's own stated interest was al-
ways in the human experience of night, the evidence of the Wake itself sug-
gesting that any prolonged scrutiny of events presumed to befall the stiff in-
side the coffin inevitably opens into a meditation on the state of sleep. The
Book of the Dead, then, provided Joyce with a richly inflected hieroglyphy
adequate to the reconstruction of a calmly sleeping twentieth-century man
embedded in "the semitary ofSomnionia": "going forth by black" and "com-
ing forth of darkness," he lies both hidden and apparent, himself and not
himself, alive while dead to the world.
Inside the Coffin 12 5

CHAPTER F I V E
The Identity of
the Dreamer
HOW TO FIND A GOOD TAILOR

At the center of Finnegans Wake, in the darkest hours of its night, the story
of a conflict between "Kersse the Tailor and the Norwegian Captain" occurs
to our hero (ll.ii, 311-30; cf. U, 61). As Ellmann explains it, the story is
based on one that joyce's father was fond of telling, "of a hunchbacked Nor-
wegian captain who ordered a suit from a Dublin tailor, J. H. Kerse of
34 Upper Sackville Street. The finished suit did not fit him, and the captain
berated the tailor for being unable to sew, whereupon the irate tailor de-
nounced him for being impossible to fit" (]J, 23). Though Ellmann goes on
to note that the unpromising subject "became, by the time John Joyce had
retold it, wonderful farce," its potential for sheer buffoonery has never been
satisfactorily explained in writing on the Wake. It emerges, however, in a
variant of the story according to which the captain, returning to pick up
the suit he ordered, flies into a torrent of invective for the shoddy work-
manship he discovers. The tailor looks at him with taxed professional calm,
tugs at the garment, and says patiently, "Well, you're not wearing it right! If
you just hold your arms like this [the arms twist up like mutant pretzels],
if you hold your head like this [the head glues itself to the shoulder], and if
you walk like this [the teller staggers off, doubled over and pigeon-toed], it
fits perfectly."
126
What all this has to do with "a reconstruction of the nocturnal life" will
become evident if, "by a commodius vic us of recirculation" (3.2), we "re-
arrive" at the first page of Finnegans Wake and the paragraph containing the
phrase "in bed"-now to note that the two sentences forming that paragraph
are internally linked by the garish homophony of the verbs "retaled" (3· 17
[properly, "retailed"]) and "entailed" (3.19). Only a very craftless or a very
canny writer would ever have paired them so loudly. Through "sound sense"
(109.15, 121. 15), Joyce is calling attention to the essential relation of these
two "tailwords" (288.3 ["detail," a third]), which derive together with "tai-
lors" from the Old French taillier ("to shape by cutting," "to determine the
form of"). The common element linking all these terms has to do with the
idea of "tailoring"-formal alteration-it, too, made thematic from begin-
ning to end of Finnegans Wake, though most notably in the "tail" (324.5 [or
"retailored" "tale"]) of" Kersse the Tailor," which lengthily engages the dark
questions "Who fits?" and "Who is suitable?" If the first sentence of that
paragraph on the opening page tells us that a "fall" has happened "in bed," it
adds by way of verbal qualification that this fall has been "retailed" there-
"rendered piecemeal" in this way of telling ("retailing"), and necessarily
"retailored" to suit the new and altered conditions of "the Evening World."
Now tailoring, in any form, simply involves the formal alteration of in-
vestments-articles of clothing-so that they come out fitting the body
more comfortably. It works exactly like sleep if, "letting punplays pass to
ernest" (233.19-20), we take "investments" or any of a whole array of
related terms in the more abstract senses that have evolved from them. By
day the hero of Finnegans Wake, something of "misfit," has a great many
"vested" interests in "the factionable world" (285.26) represented in the
map of Dublin, even though he sometime feels not "cut out for" (248.17)
and "unsuited" to its "fashions," and though sometimes in turn, "fearing for
his own misshapes" (313.32), he finds its "modes" unsuitable and "unfit-
ting" (165.25, 127.4). Often they "rub him the wrong way" and afflict him
with "wears and tears" (rr6. 36) . Survival in the "fashionaping" Daily World
(505.8), where being "fascinating" is indistinct from "fashion-aping," re-
quires a kind of "wearing" "uniformity," though nobody ever quite fits the
swell-looking "uniform" or lives up to his "model" (191.25; see 127.4). It
also demands both a keeping up of "appearances," with "apparel," and the
maintaining of "habits" that ultimately "run him ragged" and "wear him
down." Clearly, a person so "worn out" needs to be "redressed," and in both
senses of that word: on the one hand, he needs to be compensated for afflic-
The Identity of the Dreamer 12 7

tions, but on the other, he simply needs a new set of "investments." Relief
Map B, then, shows "the Wreck of the Ragamuffin" (290.F5) whose sus-
tained residence in the Daily World of Map A has left him in "Rags! Worns
out" (619.19)-the submerged reference to "the Wreck of the Hesperus"
(306.26-27), here as throughout the Wake, reminding us that the "hole af-
fair" takes place after nightfall (Gr. hesperos, "evening", cf. 321.14-15,
387.20,557.6). In reconstructing this "wrecked ragamuffin's" passage through
a night, the Wake now issues a general invitation to "Come to the ballay at
the Tailors' Hall" (510.14) -where the rhythm of the line and the paragraph
it opens evokes a song entitled "The Night of the Ragman's Ball" (510.13-30
[Annotations]), and therefore suggests that this night will entail the whole-
sale "formal alteration" and "redressing" of a badly "worn out" "misfit":
"Name or redress him and we'll call it a night" (514.17; cf. 232.20, 489.22-23).
As it turns into his body in sleep, accordingly, the "old worold" (441.18-
19)-the "worn" out "old" "worryld" (59.1O)-is retailored, so to become
"whirrld" (147.22) and to undergo a series of "formal alterations" for which
the Wake, fond of the prefix of renewal, generates many terms. As it turns
into his body in sleep, "willed without witting, whorled without aimed"
(272.4-5), it is "recorporated" (228.20), "regrouped" (129.12), "recom-
pounded" (253.35), "remassed" (358.13), "reformed" (361.4), "rearrived"
at "from scratch" (3.5, 336.18), and at bottom "recreated" so completely
(606.7)-"rereally" (490.17)-that it comes out "rassembling" the reas-
sembled "whorl" shown in Relief Map B (373.14, 6.24), where our hero's
"own fitther couldn't nose him" (322.12- 13 ["fitter"]). And especially not
"his own father," whose "model" no son ever quite "fits": "we drames our
dreams tell Bappy returns. And Sein annews" (277.17-18 [Fr. Sein, "bo-
som"]); "the same renew[s]" (226.17). The relief map accordingly illustrates
"the Benefits of Recreation" in two senses of the latter word (306.22). Sleep,
as a "solstitial pause for refleshmeant" (82.10), is in one sense simply a form
of recreation or refreshment that enables our "worn out" hero to return to
the world, after undergoing extensive "formal alterations," "finefeelingfit!"
(431.1). But in another sense, because it entails a wholesale "dismantling"
of the "fabric" of things, sleep re-creates the "worold" completely, retailor-
ing it precisely by "re-fleshing" it, in the form of the body (hence "reflesh-
meant") .1
In Carlylean terms, "sartor's risorted" (314.17 [L. sartor resartus, "the tai-
lor's retailored"])-at "One Life One Suit (a men's wear store)" (63.16-17).
And our worn-out hero, as "besuits" the "ragged," is now simply "suiting
himself." The orthodox way of putting this would be to say that in "sewing

a dream together" (28.7), he is getting his wishes fulfilled-"nett sew?"
(312.16). Tailoring, in Finnegans Wake, operates much like the "ingenious
interweaving process" that Freud calls the dreamwork (ID, 317); for that,
too, simply involves the "formal alteration" of "investments"-now con-
strued as psychic ones-so that they fit the body more comfortably. It re-
sults in the production of that "weaver's masterpiece," the dream (ID, 319),
where, "as the baffling yarn sail[s] in circles" (320.35), everything is for-
mally altered to suit "our talorman" perfectly (see 375.34-35).
By "redressing" him, the dreamwork enables our hero to bid "sew wrong"
(322.8 [and "so long"]) to a world characterized by "uniform matteroffact-
ness" (123.1O)-"Love my label like myself" (579.18)-and also to "curse
the tailor" who taught him to "Respect the Uniform" (319.27, 320.2, 579.14
[hence "Kersse the Tailor"]). Since he harbors a great deal of bottled-up
animosity for this "uniform," "he'll want all his fury gutmurdherers to re-
dress him" (617.18-19); the wording here suggests that it will take a whole
army of "fairy godmothers" to spin out the "baffling yarns" necessary to re-
dress the "fury" and "murderousness" rising from his "gut," but at the same
time to keep those forces comfortably concealed. As the Wake acknowl-
edges in the play of these terms, the formal alterations that transform the
Daily World of Map A into the Evening World of Map B make it difficult to
know "how comes ever a body in our taylorised world to selve out thishis"
(356.10-11 ["how can anybody ever solve out this thesis"])-where the line
in part calls attention to the puzzling nature of meaning in dreams, but also
latently reveals that HCE, the dreamer himself, inevitably "selves out"
"this, his" world, and again, as it "suits" his body ("ever a body"). Passages
in Finnegans Wake that allude to the story of "Kersse the Tailor" (23.10- I I,
for instance) operate in cipher to indicate that its hero is undergoing redress
and a change of investments at the moment in question (e.g., at22.30-23.15).
Now of all the properties formally altered in this wholesale retailoring of
the world, one particularly bears note here: "telling," since Joyce has re-
tailored the English "retail" into a neologistic "retale" on the first page of
the book, and since a running play on words blurs together the meanings
of "tailor" and "teller" throughout the Wake as a whole (cf. 317.27, 319.8,
319.24). The extended pun calls attention to problems of evident centrality
in Finnegans Wake by inviting the simple question of how anyone can "tell"
when he falls, or has fallen, asleep. As memory will attest, one largely does
not, because "telling" is in every way antithetical to the condition of sleep.
A Germanic equivalent of the Latinate derivative "rationality" « L. ratio,
"reckoning, calculation"), "telling" in even its most quotidian and feeble
The Identity of the Dreamer 129

forms implies the ability deliberatively to put two and two together. At
root, "to tell" simply means "to count," as in "telling" time or in working as
a bank "teller"; but beyond that, it means "to take account," recognitively,
as in "telling" what is going on. Finally, in this escalating calculus, "to tell"
is to provide a coherent "account," as in "telling a story." The man "tropped
head" at the Wake cannot "tell" in any of these senses. At the instant he
"falls to tail" (285.II)-suffers that "knock out" and "falls to his tail"-he
also "fails to tell" in every way possible. He cannot tell a story; he cannot
tell what is going on; and he cannot even tell himself apart from the figures
in his dreams, who in turn, after his example, can "not rightly tell their
heels from their stools" (476.31 [their heads from their toes)). The whole
matter of "telling," therefore, is necessarily "retailored" and formally al-
tered in Finnegans Wake.
One way of seeing how extensively these formal alterations sweep through
the Wake would be to examine very closely the syntax of that paragraph on
page three containing the verbs "retaled" and "entailed."2 A broader per-
spective on the matter would emerge from a consideration of the "tail" of
Kersse the Tailor itself, which cannot be read as a narrative involving dis-
tinct characters, no matter how hard one tries, because the Wake's "worn-
out ragamuffin" simultaneously plays the parts of the misfit and of the
dream-weaving "talerman" who suits himself (319.8). The episode recon-
structs not a discrete sequence of real-world encounters, but a general pro-
cess of unconscious "redress" that reaches its climax in the murderous story
of the shooting of the Russian general (who is at once our hero's father and
our hero himself in the role of a father under attack by two sons). As this
example in turn suggests, an ultimate way of seeing how radically the
Wake's "telling" is retailored to suit the conditions of the night would be to
begin inquiring into the identity of the man who sleeps at Finnegans Wake,
and all the more essentially because the question, "Who is he?," is central to
a coherent reading of the book (261.28). The strangeness of this question
emerges fully if we simply bend it back into "our own nighttime": how does
anyone sleepily "knock[ed] out" and unconscious "tell" who he is?
"RIGHTING HIS NAME"

As will have become evident in passing, and as many passages in the Wake
make clear, both the "nomen" (L. "name") of the "noman" who sleeps at Fin-
negans Wake (546.4) and "the facts of his nominigentilisation" (31.33-34)

constitute an ongoing problem in the book, rather than a dislodgeable point
of information:
Here line the refrains of. Some vote him Vike, some mote him Mike, some dub him
Llyn and Phin while others hail him Lug Bug Dan Lop, Lex, Lax, Gunne or Guinn.
Some apt him Arth, some bapt him Barth, ColI, Noll, SolI, Will, Weel, Wall but I
parse him Persse O'Reilly else he's called no name at all. (44.10-14)
Given these mutually contradictive and ridiculous choices, and considering

that the ostensibly privileged name "Persse O'Reilly" fails to appear in "The
Ballad of Persse O'Reilly" at all, we should incline toward the culminative
item in this catalogue ("he's called no name at all") -and all the more par-
ticularly because the phrase "here lie the refrains of" reminds us that we are
sharing the "eyewitless foggus" of somebody "dead to the world" in a dimen-
sion void of objects, whose "tropped head" contains only the "remains" of
"lines" and "refrains," and not alertly arranged and ordered letters. Of ne-
cessity the man asleep at Finne8ans Wake "remain[s] topantically anony-
mos" throughout the whole book (Gr. to pan, "the whole") because he has
"tropped head" (34.2-6), concomitantly jettisoning the orderly stuff that
ordinarily fills it, not least of which is a knowledge of his own name. As
Joyce remarked in an interview of 1936, "there are, so to say, no individual
people in the book-it is as in a dream, the style gliding and unreal as is the
way in dreams. If one were to speak of a person in the book, it would have to
be of an old man, but even his relationship to reality is doubtful. "3
Anyone's "blank memory" of the night will attest that no one fully
unconscious has a retrievable grip on his name, social security number, fa-
cial appearance as it most recently gelled in the mirror or the ego, or other
such accoutrements of "identity" as enable him, in waking life, to know
himself as familiarly as a third person. The Wake, accordingly, responds
only with positive negativity to continually raised questions about the "in-
dentity" (49.36 [the negated "identity"]) of its sleeping protagonist, as is
suggested by the parenthetical answer to the question "Who was he to
whom? (O'Breen's not his name nor the brown one his maid)" (56.32-33).
By reference to Thomas Moore's lyric "Oh! Breathe not his name," the line
indicates that the "naym" ofthis "nobodyatall" (29.19, 73.19) -where the
"nay" negates the "name"-cannot be "breathed" at all, and for reasons
lengthily spelled out in Moore's poem. 1 The chain of patently absurd names
cited above, then-itself only representative of the string of names that runs
through the book as a whole-constitutes only one of many "a long list
(now feared in part lost) ... of all abusive names he was called" (71.5-6),

where these "abusive names" might be understood as the products of no-
menclatural "misuse" and "abuse" both. Like many "a word often abused"
in Finneaans Wake (149.34)-"abuse" included-they should not be taken
at face value because each of them shows our hero "under the assumed
name of Ignotus Loquor" (263.2-3 [L. ianatus laquar, "I am talking about
the unknown"]).
Though the thousands of variable names patched around the "topanti-
cally anonymos" "belowes hero" of the Wake serve ultimately to cancel one
another out-"In the name of the former and of the latter and of their
holocaust. Allmen" (419.9-1O)-SO to emphasize his essential unnamability,
they also serve the crucial purpose of capturing him obliquely, in the manner
of "nicknames" (32.18,46. I; 59.16,98.27), "bynames" (29.31), "agnomen[s]"
(3°.3), "moniker[s]" (46.21), and "assumed names" and "illassumed names"
both (49.8,263.2; 86.12). They work associatively, that is, like the dream-
work's condensed and "composite structures," to reveal underlying states
and conflicts that befall "this most unmentionablest of men" in his drift
through the night (320.12-13).5 The nickname "Timb" or "Tomb" (139.10
["Finnegan"]), for instance, shows our hero laid out dead to the world.
While some may call him "Gunne or Guinn" (44.12), he is surely, as a "Gun-
nar, of The Gunnings, Gund" (596.15), "Goney, goney gone!" (306.F2). As
"Finn," by contrast ("some dub him Llyn and Phin" [44.11]), his "spatiality"
(172.9 ["speciality"]) is the containment of space (hence the enclosure of
"Dublin" in "dub him Llyn"). And since "some apt him Arth" (44.12), an
"apt" composite name might be "Arser of the Rum Tipple" (359.15- 16),
which designates neither "Arthur of the Round Table" exactly nor a "blacked-
out" "rummy" whose "tippling" has landed him "on his ars" either (514.34),
but their point of convergence, together with the sleeper's, in a once-and-
future figure who will "rise afterfall" (78.7).6
As the example of these particular "bynames" and the Wake itself sug-
gests, the trick to answering the excellent question posed and tackled by
Adaline Glasheen in her Censuses-"Who's Who When Everybody is Some-
body Else?"7-is simply to untangle, as in dream analysis, the "condensed"
and "displaced" figures that have been "traduced by their comedy nominator
to the loaferst terms" (283.6-8). Beneath the whole of Finneaans Wake, un-
derlying all the "samilikes" and "alteregoases" and "pseudoselves" in the
book (576.33), there lies only a singular "comedy nominator," the "one
stable somebody" (107.3°) whose nightlife generates the "comic denomina-
tions," distorting (or "traducing") them in the process, but who is finally
the only real "common denominator" underlying them all. Given any name

in Finne8ans Wake, then, the reader should reduce it "to the loaferst terms"-
where the appearance of the book's omnipresent and tell-tale "loafer" in this
"lowest" suggests that such a reduction would best be accomplished simply
by asking how the name reflects on its hero's "lofetime" (230.19 [nocturnal
"lifetime"]) .
If, "by a commodius vicus of recirculation," we "rearrive" at the vicinity
of the opening page containing the phrase "in bed," all the strange nominal
evocations surrounding it now turn out to reveal a little more about the
constitution of "Arser's" "knock[ed] out" and "tropped head" at this particu-
lar moment in the night. Like Humpty Dumpty ("the fall," "ofIwall" "hump-
tyhillhead," "humself," "prumptly," "tumptytumtoes"), he has fallen, al-
though asleep, so to enter a state of mind "scrambled," "addled," "cracked,"
infantilely regressive, and elusive of capture in the King's English (47.26).
Like anyone rubbled "after [the] humpteen dumpteen revivals" of a life-
time's mornings (219. IS [who counts them?]), our hero has been "eggspilled"
(230.S ["expelled"]) from the wakeaday reality represented in Map A and
transformed, from homme to "homelette" (S9.29-32), into the scrambled
"eggshill" (4IS.9-1O ["exile"]) depicted in Relief Map B, where he lies "em-
bedded," a Finnegan of sorts, in the night's "seemetery": Hombly, Dombly
Sod We Awhile" (4IS.14-15). As "a once wallstrait oldparr," comparably, "to
name no others, of whom great things were expected in the fulmfilming de-
partment" (398.24-26), our hero resembles the legendary "Old Parr" simply
in being an "old pa" or pere (Fr. "father"), burdened with a "scraggy isth-
mus" (3.5-6 [Gr. isthmos, "neck"]) and a "body you'd pity" (38I.IS), but
also with desires difficult of fulfillment in the day.8 In the night, however,
where this "old pa's" wishes get furtively "fulmfilmed," the term "Old
Parr"-"to name no others"-in a way "names" "no others," but only the old
man himself: since to be an "Old Parr" would be any old man's dream, the
term shows our hero wishfully dissolving conflicts that arise from a waning
virility. "Reduced to the loaferst terms," then, even particular "nicknames"
like "Humpty Dumpty" and "Old Parr" turn out to describe states of un con-
sciousness and unconscious conflict endured in the sleep ofthe book's heroic
"loafer"-though in their self-eradicating contradictiveness, again, they
leave the Wake's "knock[ed] out" nobody "called no name at all." And to the
essential question, "Who is he?" (26I.28)-"whoishe whoishe whoishe?"
(499.3S-36)-there are two primary kinds of answer. For as "someone im-
particular" (602.7), our "belowes hero" is "someone in particular" whom
the night has rendered indistinct.

"IN THE HEART OF THE
ORANGEFLAVOURED MUDMOUND"
As readers of Finnegans Wake have long noted, Joyce incessantly likens "our
mounding's mass," as depicted in Relief Map B, to a vast "dump" (110.26), or
"DUNGMOUND" (276.RI), or "kikkinmidden" (503.8)-where the Danish ar-
chaeological term kikkenmidden (Eng. "kitchen midden") designates a heap
of bones marking the site of a prehistoric dwelling, midden itself deriving
from the Da. m~g dynge ("dung hill" or "refuse heap"). "A sort of heaps"
(596.18), "our mounding's mass" constitutes a "dump" of this nature be-
cause his rubbled and "deafadumped" body (590. I), now dead to the world,
marks the site of a past life (yesterday'S, for instance) and because matters
deriving from his past, including letters, are buried inside of it. One way
of discovering what lies "in the heart of the orangeflavoured mudmound"
(III.34)-the "orange" makes our hero a Protestant- would be to "Dig him
in the rubsh!" (26I.L2 ["dig in the rubbish," or "dig him in the ribs" and
wake him up]).
We might see the image of this "dump" particularized by "rearriving" at
the book's first page and the vicinity of the phrase "in bed," now to consider
"the great fall ofthe ofIwall" that it describes (3.18-19). Since the odd com-
pound "ofIwall" evokes the German Abfall, the Danish-Norse affald, the
Dutch afval, and the English offal, all generally meaning "refuse or scraps,"
the paragraph that we have been examining might now be construed as a
dense trash heap compacted ofthings let fall: "oranges ... laid to rust upon
the green," a "dumptied" "Humpty Dumpty" (17.4), a badly contused Fin-
negan, letters that may have become "litters" (17.28), and finally, contain-
ing them all, our "scrapheaped" hero himself (98.17), a "dustman" of sorts
(59.16 [Br. "garbage collector"]). "What a mnice old mness it all mnakes! A
middenhide hoard of objects!" (19.7-8 [and a "midnight hoard of objects"
internalized]) .
These details suggest in particular what the paragraph shows more gener-
ally if considered as a formal whole. On the evident verbal surface, it reads
like a scrap heap of conceptually disconnected words, fragments, refer-
ences, and quotations: "it's like a dream." For in the psychoanalytical ac-
count of dream formation, the manifest content of any dream is much like
the manifest content of this paragraph, in being particled together of "resi-
due"-"the day's residue" -or, in Freud's German, Tagesreste, where the Ger-
man Reste, literally meaning "remains" or "dregs," would figuratively give
the dream the surface structure of a mnemonic dump. Through its ongoing

reference to "dumps" and "middens," in part, the Wake is concretely convey-
ing the orthodox insight that dreams are compacted of immense networks of
scraps and fragments salvaged from the past. 9
Another way of reading Finne8ans Wake, then, would be to see anyone
section of it as a chaotic trash heap of mnemonic bric-a-brac, scraps, trivia,
personal memories, and particles of information gathered from such places
as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Dublin's papers and lore. Rather than
examining the "infrarational" connections that coherently link these par-
ticles of residue together in the "Evening World," it would be possible to
trace them back to their sources in the Daily World, to see where they came
from and to infer things about "the days when Head-in-Clouds walked the
earth" (18.23-24 [as opposed to his nights, when he does not]). Studies of
the Wake that identify the "facts" constituting its manifest content do just
this, and they accordingly serve the important purpose of putting our hero's
"nightlife" into a concrete, real-world context and milieu. The richness of
these studies enables us to work backwards from the Wake, to establish
a sense not of our hero's nightlife, but of his life in the day; and they allow
us to begin seeing "this very pure nondescript" as a Bloom-like "ordinary
man" (64.30), "somebody mentioned by name in his telephone directory"
(118.12- 13) .
Although we have so far regarded "Sir Somebody Something" as a stupe-
fied anyman (293.F2), an "imparticular" "Here Comes Everybody" (32.18-
19), the sheer density of certain repeated details and concerns allows us to
know that he is a particular, real Dubliner. The nature of these recurring
concerns, moreover, enables us to see that most of what Joyce leaked out to
his publicists and much of what the criticism has inferred is largely true.
Our hero seems to be an older Protestant male, of Scandinavian lineage,
connected with the pubkeeping business somewhere in the neighborhood of
Chapelizod, who has a wife, a daughter, and two sons. Since the subject of
his dreams is not these people or places as objective entities, however, but
the more complex matter of his "investments" in them, a great deal about
his factual life in the Daily World is hard to reconstruct with any certainty.
Finne8ans Wake offers less a factual "family history" than a "family his-
trionic" (23°.29).
What emerges from an examination of the details is the sense of someone
as singularly unsingular as Leopold Bloom. As "the herewaker of our hame-
fame" rises from the vacuum of his sleep toward a reacquired knowledge of
his "real namesame" in the last pages of the book (619.12-13), his spec-
tacular lack of distinction becomes more and more evident (and notably in

III.iv). "One of the two or three forefivest fellows a bloke could in holiday
crowd encounter" (596.15- 17), he could not stand out in a crowd if he tried.
Repeated indications suggest that he is "a man of around fifty" (506.34),
roughly "fiftytwo heirs of age" (513.23), "anything ... between fiftyodd
and fiftyevenyears of age" (380.13-14) or, more elaborately:
a man in brown about town ... picking up ideas, of well over or about fiftysix
or so, pithecoid proportions [Eng., "apelike"], with perhops five foot eight, the us-
ual X Y Z type ... not in the studbook by a long stortch ... always trying to poor-
chase movables by hebdomedaries for to putt in a new house to loot [to let], ciga-
rette in his holder,' with a good job and pension in Buinness's, what about our
trip to Normandy style conversation ... seeking relief in alcohol and so on ....
(443. 20-444. 2)
Reference both to the draining activity of "poorchase" ("purchase") and

to a "hebdomadary" ("weekly") salary earned in a "business" involving
"Guinness's" (hence "Buinness's") tells us something about this man's in-
come, as does reference to the "movables" that his harried "poor chase"
takes as its objects ("movables," sl. for "small objects of value, " also suggest
the Fr. meubles, "furniture"). It is through countless details like these that
we gradually amass the sense of a life as heartwrenchingly drab as Bloom's,
a life of dispiriting modern routine whose quotidian highlights seem to be:
business, reading newspaper, smoking cigar, arranging tumblers on table, eating
meals, pleasure, etcetera, etcetera, pleasure, eating meals, arranging tumblers on
table, smoking cigar, reading newspaper, business (127.20-23)
As the mirrorlike structure of this little catalogue implies, the alpha and
omega of the whole arrangement is "business," which brackets everything
else so stolidly that "pleasure" can only dissolve in a listless blur of ill-
defined "etceteras" somewhere in the middle of things. This happens be-
cause when our hero does get away from "business, reading newspaper, et-
cetera," "pleasure" takes singularly limited and unimaginative forms:
minerals, wash and brush up, local views, juju toffee [a real treat!], comic and
birthdays cards [on special days of the year]; those were the days and he was their
hero. (127.24-25)
Passages like these evoke a quotidian tedium much of the sort that our
hero himself foresees in the late hours of the Wake, as he grows dimly con-
scious of the imminence of another day-in-the-life of this quality and so
sinks resolutely back into sleep:

Retire to rest without first misturbing your nighbor, mankind of baffling descrip-
tions. Others are as tired of themselves as you are. Let each one learn to bore him-
self. It is strictly requested that no cobsmoking, spitting, pubchat, wrastle rounds,
coarse courting, smut, etc, will take place amongst those hours so devoted to re-
pose. (585.34-586.3)
These details also suggest why Joyce, rather than writing another novel like
Ulysses, sought in Finneaans Wake, with a Protestant publican rather than a
Jewish ad-canvasser as a hero, to provide an account ofthe "alternate night-
joys" (357.18) that lavishly open in the unharnessed imagination of this
"very pure nondescript" and in the dreams through which he is "redressed."
What he is unconscious of is precisely his own potential, and the possibility
that life could be so much more.
The reader will notice that each of the passages examined above contains
a reference to liquor ("Buinness's"), to barkeeping and bottlewashing (" ar-
ranging tumblers on table"), to pubs ("pubchat"), or to the sordid glory of
the barroom ("wrastle rounds, coarse courting, smut, etc"). These are only
representative instances of details whose continual recurrence compels us to
see our hero as a "large incorporate licensed vintner, such as he is, from for-
mer times" (580.23-24 [like yesterday]). Though the wishfully inflated
terms here elevate him into a better businessman than he seems to be, they
inevitably suggest, together with an unending stream of references to a bar-
room ambience evoked through song fragments and gossip, that our hero is a
"headboddylwatcher ofthe chempel of Isid" (26.17 ["head bottle-washer of
Chapelizod"]). All such references as these would constitute vestiges of
"the day's residue," too, allowing us to see the barroom as our hero's sphere
of operation. "Arranging tumblers on tables" is his life.
One would be hard pressed to find a page in Finneaans Wake that did not
name a variety of kinds and brands of alcohol and in part because these
items are our hero's occupational tools; alcohol in general is part of his days'
residue. lO But if, on the one hand, these references allow us to work back-
wards from the manifest content of the text to draw inferences about "the
days when Head-in-Clouds walked the earth," meanings in dreams are
"overdetermined," so that these references also operate symbolically, to help
describe the nights when "Head-in-Clouds" just lies there. Since alcohol has
the power to "black out" and render him "alcoh alcoho alcoherently" "ab-
sintheminded" (40.5,464.17; see 380.7-382.26), it invariably operates in the
Wake as a cipher for the opiating powers of sleep: "poppypap's a passport
out," but so are sleep and heavy drinking (25.5; cf. 84.17-18, 475.9-10). Be-

cause alcohol does to the brain much what sleep does, blotting out ration-
ality and lifting inhibitions, the move "From Miss Somer's nice dream back
to Mad Winthrop's delugium stramens" (502.29-30 ["midwinter's delirium
tremens"]) is an inevitable one. "Arser ofthe Rumtipple," then, has "boom-
arpoorter on his brain" (327.33-34 [wishful delusions of Napoleonic gran-
deur because of strong-spirited "water on the brain"]), and also "a boodle
full ofmaimeries" in both his "boozum" and his "hoagshead" (348.7,449.16,
15.31 ["bottlefull"]); the reference here, to a "Howth head" with all the in-
ternal properties of a "hogshead," invites us again to inspect the "tropped
head," of the figure shown "evidently under the spell of liquor" in the relief
maps (43.16) and to ask the question, sustained in the Wake,
-Wisha, is he boosed or what, alannah? ..
-Or he's rehearsing somewan's funeral.
Since the person "knock[ed] out" never knows what hit him, questions like
this one, as far as he can "no," can have no answer: "it may half been a
missfired brick" that "conk[ed] him" out (5.26, 170.14), or perhaps "he had
had had o'gloriously a'lot too much hanguest or hoshoe fine to drink"
(63.21-23 [Gael. thoise flon, "fill of wine"; "had had had" yields" 'had' one
too many"]). Alcohol, at any rate, saturates Joyce's" a lcohoran" (20.9- 10)
for an overdetermined variety of reasons.
So too do references to names of pubs and inns, which drift through our
hero's "nightlife" because he is concerned about his work and anxious about
the competition. II But at the same time, meanings in dreams being over-
determined, many of these pub-names also serve latent, sleep-descriptive
functions. Etymologically, an "inn" is a place where one is not "out," and
our "innermost" "innerman," (194.3, 248.32, 462.16) in the "duskguise" of
"Here Inkeeper," (376.10 [not "innkeeper"]), does a very good job of "keep-
ing in." As an "innvalet" (320.15), he is not simply a public servant ("inn
valet"), but one asleep in bed (hence "invalid"). "Malthus is yet lukked in
close" throughout the Wake (604.7), comparably, partly because this "In-
keeper's" "malthouse" is closed for the night, but also because, simply by
sleeping, he is practicing a form of birth control (hence "Malthus"). Pub
names like "The Old Sot's Hole" (41.32, 147.5), the "Halfmoon and Seven
Stars" (59.1-2), the "Blackamoor's Head" (59.2), and the "Black and All
Black" (59.4) accordingly help to evoke the blacked-out head of a benighted
man who "is not all there, and is all the more himself since he is not so,
being most of his time down at the Green Man" (507.3-4); and while this
"Green Man" seems simply to name another pub, it also suggests that this

man "keeping in" at "the Mullingcan Inn" (64.9), "mulling" as best as he
"can," will rise from the dead in the morning (like "the green man" of folk-
lore) .12 Attention to subliminal meanings like these, layered everywhere
under the Wake's verbal surface, now leads us back into a consideration of
our hero's "imparticularity" in the night.
HCE
One of many passages in the Wake that clarifies our hero's" Unmentionability"
(107.7) explains that
... there is said to have been quondam (pfuit! pfuit!) some case of the kind im-
plicating, it is interdum believed, a quidam (if he did not exist it would be neces-
sary quoniam to invent him) ... who has remained topantically anonymos but ...
was, it is stated ... seemingly ... tropped head. . . . (33.32-34.6)
These tangled words (note the six passive constructions) require some sort-
ing out. They tell us that while the "topantically anonymos" man who
sleeps at Finneaans Wake is largely only "a quidam" (L. "a certain unnamed
person") with a "quondam" identity-"it used to be there" when "he was"
(L. quondam fuit) , but now it simply isn't-Joyce had to find a way of desig-
nating the central presence of his hero throughout the book; for "if he did
not exist (and it is not at all clear that anyone "dead to the world" does) it
would be necessary quoniam to invent him" (L. quoniam, "because," "for
this reason"). While" allauding to him by all the licknames in the litany,"
then (234.21-22), Joyce draws on the inventive "sigla H.C.E." (32.14) less to
"allude to" than to identify the "one stable somebody" who sleeps (107.30),
unnamable because unconscious, at Finneaans Wake. Operating between
lines (481.1-3), within words (421.23 ["HeCitEncy"]), in reverse order
(623.9 ["ech?"]), but primarily in acrostic formations, the "normative
letters" HCE (32.18) permeate Finneaans Wake, moving through the body of
the text with supple protoplasticity, so to convey the continuous presence
of a specific "Homo Capite Erectus" (101.12-13) within whom the "hole
affair" unfolds. "A family all to himself" (392.23-24), "he is ee and no
counter he who will be ultimendly respunchable for the hubbub caused in
Edenborough" (29.34-36 [as for everything else in the book]). Like "Punch,"
in other words, "all the charictures in the drame" (302.31-32) are mere pup-
pets invisibly controlled by HCE-a "puppetry producer" of sorts (219.6-
8)-who alone is "responsible" for their motions (hence "respunchable").

Only interior to "the heavenly one with his constellatria and his emana-
tions" (157.18- 19) do all other manifestly differentiated "characters" like
ALP, Shem, Shaun, and Issy appear, as "constellated" products of his dream-
ing mind, in the manner of the Kabbalah's sephirotic emanations (see
29. 13- 15,261. 23- 24) .
Consider, for example, "Shaun the Post," who seems to attain the status
of an independent character in the third book of Finneaans Wake and whom
the criticism customarily treats as a discrete agent. Not simply joyce's re-
mark that "there are no characters" in Finneaans Wake, but countless details
in Book III itself reveal that Shaun's evidently "uniform" appearance is really
"fumiform" (413.31 [L. "made of vapor"]) ; that he "weigh[s] nought" (4°7.5),
like any phantom; and that his "autobiography," a nonexistent "blank," is
"handled ... in the ligna me of Mr van Howten" (413.30-414.3). Since this
"ligname" designates a body dead to the world (Ger. Leichnam, "corpse"),
and since the "nickname" "van Howten" moves us into "Howth" ("HEAD"),
the details show that Shaun is only a figment in HCE's "tropped head," repre-
sentative of a letter-carrying and letter-conscious state of mind into which
the dreamer ascends as he moves toward wakening. 13 The notoriously strange
"barrel" in which Shaun appears ("I am as plain as portable enveloped"
"care of one of Mooseyeare Goonness's registered andouterthus barrels"
[414.10- 12]) is therefore simply a cipher for the imperceived and "unknown
body" of HCE (96.29), within which the "fumiform[ed]" Shaun and all
kinds of letters are in fact "enveloped": etymologically, the English word
"body" derives from the Old English bodia ("a cask" or barrel) and is cog-
nate with the Middle Low German boddia (" a tub for brewing") because
then as now the body was perceived as a container of better things ("spir-
its"). While Shaun's barrel seems to be one of "Msr. Guinness's," then, the
spelling "Mooseyeare Goonness's" also suggests that beneath all appear-
ances, Shaun is simply a diffuse aggregate of "spirits," a being with all the
palpability of a fairy tale figure (hence "Mother Goose"), who appears in-
side of HCE.
It is- impossible, of course, not to wonder why Joyce chose "the sigla
H.C.E." to designate his hero, although these "initials majuscule," strictly
speaking, mean nothing and are "meant to be baffling" (119.16-17). In the
form explored by Roland McHugh, the "chrismon trilithon sign fTI , fi-
nally called after some his hes hecitency Hec" (119.17- 18), stands outside
of all familiar alphabetic systems; 14 while its acrostic equivalent, "the sigla
H.C.E.," "means" something independently of phonetic systems. The two
formations constitute, like the letter M in Beckett's Unnamable trilogy, a

sign without signification, a human formation closed to any referential ex-
terior, and so come to carry, in Finnegans Wake, the weight of the Biblical
Tetragrammaton, the unnamable name, in evoking only "a rude breathing
on the void of to be" (100.27), "the allimmanence of that which Itself is
Itself alone" (394.32-33 ["rude breathing" suggests the formative breath or
"spirit" of YHWH in Genesis]) . Still, since the characters in the acrostic are
Romanic, and since Joyce was hardly a practitioner of the arbitrary, it seems
inevitable that a rationale should underlie his choice of the trigrammaton
HCE. The configuration clearly works better than HIM or lAM, either of
which would hardly have been obscure enough to conform to anyone's sense
of sleep (see, however, 166.18- 19). But why HCE?
Readers who have engaged this question seem to have arrived at a sketchy
consensus, commonly detecting somewhere beneath HCE an evocation of
the words of consecration in the Roman Catholic Mass (incidentally the
longest wake on record): Hocestenim corpus meum ("Forthisismy body") .15
The reading is difficult to disregard once it is pointed out because it enables
HCE always to verge on signifying, without ever fully doing so, hoc corpus
est-"This is the body," stripped of pronominal definiteness and caught at
the transubstantiative moment in which "word is made flesh," and pri-
marily only flesh. It enables HCE to mean nothing, in other words, in much
the same way that the body "means" nothing. Whether or not one buys a
reading this definitive is finally not crucial because its purport is every-
where evident anyway. Sleep is absolutely transubstantiative in force: turn-
ing the whole world into the body of the sleeper, it incarnates everything
(see relief map). If the text periodically warns us that "it is a slopperish
matter, given the wet and low visibility," "to idendifine the individuone" of
which it treats (51.3-6 ["to identify" and "define" the "one" "individual"]),
it adds by way of parenthetical explanation that the whole business is "slop-
perish" because the "sword of certainty which would indentifide the body
never falls" (51.5-6). The wording here, for all its cultivated vagueness
plainly "identifies the body," even as it "hides" it (hence "indentifide"), and
in much the same way that the cipher HCE simultaneously "identifies" and
"hides" the Wake's central figure, "the presence (of a curpse)" (224.5-6).
While "allauding to him by all the licknames in the litany," then (234.21-
22)-by all such "nicknames" as "Finnegan," "Arser," "Old Parr," "etcicero"
(152.1O)-Joyce draws on "the sigla H.C.E." less to "allude to" than to "in-
dentifide" the "Great Sommboddy" lying "dead to the world" at the Wake
(415.17 [Fr. somme, "sleep"]), and to identify it largely as some" body"; for
underlying all the Wake's allusive "licknames" one finds only a body "let
The Identity of the Dreamer

drop as a doomsbody drops" (289.15): these "licknames," too, "indentifide"
the Ger. Leichnam ("corpse").
As HCE, then, the "belowes hero" of Finnegans Wake is not at all a "char-
acter," possessed ofreified properties like "personality," "individuality," and
"identity," but a body, inside of which, "tropped head," there is no con-
sciousness of anything much outside, except as it has been cargoed and re-
formed in memory; on top of and throughout which, in wakefulness, the
man-made constructs of character, personality, individuality, identity, and
ego have been layered. This is the case not simply because all of these con-
cepts and terms are arbitrary constructions entertained in consciousness to
describe conscious agents, but also because they are parochially modern
and narrow fictions, and not transhistorical or innate human properties.
Developed in that period of historical upheaval that saw, with the rise of the
novel, the evolution of a sense of selfhood compatible with the urgencies of
capitalism, terms like "character" and "personality" harness the human
into kinds of self-"possession"-ones heavily invested with a sense of the
"proper" and "propriety," of "ownership" and one's "own"-that ensure
adaptive survival within a system structured on the values of "possession"
and "property."16 The artificiality of these "fibfib fabrications" (36.34) en-
ables us to see from yet another perspective why Joyce would have spoken of
Finnegans Wake as a work breaking with a certain form of Cartesianism. It
is not simply that no one asleep has the least consciousness of objective re-
ality, or of the manifold objects of which it is constituted. In a world void of
objects, "if I may break the subject gently" (165.30 [and this last time in a
philosophical sense)), we also find the complementary property of the "sub-
ject," in whose eyewitness focus those objects congeal, "disselving" (608.5
["dissolving"]). Insofar as the Wake has a psychological "subject," that
"sopjack" is simply "an unknown body" (96.29).
If, then, we "rearrive" at the opening page of the book, we might see that
"Howth Castle and Environs" (3.3)-an odd locution, when all is said
and done-does not straightforwardly designate "Dublin," but Dublin as it
has been transubstantiated and incarnated inside the all-absorbing cipher
HCE; or, in Freudian terms, Dublin as it has been introjected and incor-
porated; or, in Joycean terms, Dublin as it has been swallowed "schlook,
schlice and goodridhirring" (7.18- 19 ["hook, line, and sinker"]), interior to
a body that has "disselv[ed]" under "the Helpless Corpses Enactment" of
sleep into the elements of "hallucination, cauchman, ectoplasm" (423.31,
133.24). If the first two of these elements evoke the familiar province of the
dream and the nightmare (Fr. cauchemar) , the last evokes only the less ac-

cessible eventfulnesses passed out in a body fallen "under heaviest corpsus
exemption" and submitted to the "changed endocrine history" of night
(362.17, 136.28): "ectoplasm," in the discourse of spiritualism, is the "no-
matter" that forms the bodies of ghosts; in embryology, it is the primal
matter from which, "later on life," all surfaces of the body that negotiate
contact with the external world-sensory organs, skin, brain, "brainskin"
(565.I3)-eventually evolve. As a phrase, then, "Howth Castle and En-
virons" merely accomplishes in small what that paragraph at the bottom of
page three does more elaborately. Like every other construction containing
"the sigla H.C.E.," it shows our hero "hiding the crumbends of his enor-
mousness" "to the hidmost coignings of the earth" (102.6, II8.36-II9.I); for
concealed beneath every manifest appearance in the Wake's nocturnal uni-
verse ("hidmost") is the unconscious body of its sleeper, "himself in the
flesh" (79.2), within whose "cremains" (hence "crumbends") all landscapes
hallucinatorily or ectoplastically arise.
These considerations will enable us to begin filling in the vast "blank
memory" we all have of the night by allowing us to see that what must take
place in parts of sleep void of dreams is the body itself, which has to be
there in the "Real Absence" of everything else for one "to be continued."
This in turn will suggest why the opening pages of Finneaans Wake will con-
form, as "representation," to anyone's experience of the night, though not to
a conventionally conceived dream. Since the content of our "knock[edJ out"
hero's "tropped head" here is largely "his own body" (I85.36)-"an un-
known body" as dead to the world as Finnegan's-what is ultimately being
represented is less a dream than the fertile ground of dreams; and if in wake-
fulness HCE "has" a body, in the night he simply "is" one. Finneaans Wake,
in other words, is a representation of a human body. This is only what we
might expect of a work entitled the Wake, where, as at all wakes, the body
is the life of the party. Finneaans Wake now becomes a "vivIe" of sorts
(IIO.I7), a form of "secret stripture" whose subject is "the supreme impor-
tance ... of physical life" (293.F2, 35.22-23).
Ten years before Finneaans Wake was published, in that collection of essays
entitled Our Exaamination, for which Joyce claimed responsibility, Marcel
Brion spoke of Work in Prowess, predictably enough, as an enterprise seeking
to convey "a reality true and whole in itself," "obey[ingJ its own laws and
appear[ingJ to be liberated from the customary physical restraints." But he
added:
I imagine that [Joyce] could write an unprecedented book composed of the simple
interior physical existence, of a man, without anecdotes, without supernumeraries,

with only the circulation of the blood and the lymph, the race ofthe nervous excita-
tions towards the centres, the twisting of emotion and thought through the cells. 17
Ten years later, presumably, Joyce had realized what in 1929 lay yet undone.
A number of gathering energies in Joyce's literary career make it plausible
that the Wake should move toward this end-not least the evidence of Ulys-
ses, which ends were Finne8ans Wake merely begins, inside a human body
on the verge of sleep; and whose real structure (retrospectively elicited as
Joyce revised and drew up the Gilbert-Linati schemata) turned out to be that
of the human body, an organism Bloom-like in its adaptive energies, rather
than an organization foreplanned. The body is, to some ways of thinking, a
Catholic prepossession-the "cloacal obsession" of H. G. Wells's phrase-
though by the time Joyce had passed through Ulysses into Finne8ans Wake he
had found it as catholic in its understructuring impingements on the real as
had Freud ("One life is all. One body. Do. But do" [U, 202]). If by 1937 Joyce
had taken to demeaning Ulysses as "a little prelude to WIP [Work in Pro8-
ress]"-and in some sense, rightly-he clarified the preludic relation of his
"day book" to his "night book" by calling Ulysses "more an epic of the body
than of the human "pirit," going on to observe impatiently that "for too long
were the stars studied and man's insides neglected. An eclipse of the sun
could be predicted many centuries before anyone knew which way the
blood circulated in our own bodies." 18 Both the context in which Joyce
made these remarks, and his tell-tale reference to an "eclipse of the sun"-
one way of saying "night"-lets us know that he was explaining, obliquely
as always, Finne8ans Wake.
Already one can see why the English word "body," unlike the enveloping
signifier "HCE," is hardly an adequate term for the "one continuous present
tense integument slowly unfolded" through" all ... moodmoulded cycle-
wheeling history," within which Finne8ans Wake takes place (185.36-
186.2). For this is not the body taken literally, or the body as we in any way
consciously bring it to mind, in the process converting it into exactly what
it is not (mind). It is above all not the body construed as an object-a thing
through whose instrumentality a headier, Britannica-reading subject wedged
in somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears can look down on the
paltry "tumptytumtoes" to which it is attached and comprehend its relation
to them by seeing them visibly "out there," in outer space, on a categorical
parity with his shoes and the furniture. No, "(the best was still there if the
torso was gone)" (291. 14-15) .19 Nor is this the organic body of romantic ide-
ologies; for as both a reading of The New Science and close study of "gradual

morphological changes in our body politic" will show (165.26-27), HCE's is
the "body politic" of "someone imparticular" (602.7), a body instilled with
discrete laws by parents localized in a real historical situation and disci-
plined into ~ish, politeness, and other such self-policing laws as are en-
trenched in the "Hoved politymester" of the head to insure its survival in the
polis (324.20 [the underlined words are etymologically related]).
The "local busybody" lying at the center of the Wake, then (438.16), has
affinities with the body as treated in Foucault, in being" an effect of power,"
an "institution" humanly made and organized by subjection to extended
disciplinary practices, within which a "micropolitics" is immanent. And it
certainly has affinities with the body as treated by Freud, the body con-
ceived as a field of emotions, attitudes, and symptomatic knots susceptible
to discursive unravelling, whose structures unfold in dreams and whose for-
mation is the story of a life held taut in unconscious conflicts of "wills gen
wonts" (4.1). The body lying dead to the world at the Wake is the form out-
side of which nothing known to humanity ever happens and inside of which
everything ordinarily set apart as external in fact only ever comes to life,
in the form of sensationalistic impressions, memories, stamps, welts, and
symptoms. Above all, this "unknown body" has affinities with the bodies of
Vico's earth-founding giants, of which all other things are evolved forms.
What is true of the boozy, symposial crowd gathered at "Finnegan's Wake"
holds equally true of much of the commentary on Finne8ans Wake and of
a platonically prepossessed Western culture generally: "they just spirits a
body away" (289.F2); or, more conspiratorially, "( ... we purposely say
nothing of the stiff, both parties having an interest in the spirits)" (82.8-9).
That so little has been said about the stiff at the Wake is only one sign of the
unconsciousness to which consciousness repressively relegates the body;20
but the oversight affects as well much commentary on dreams. Freud's in-
sistence on the sexual grounding of dreams might well be regarded, in this
Joycean light, as a determination not to see dreams foliating out of anything
other than the living body which is the site of their origination and their
driving cause. Dreams only hold out the manifest illusion of taking place,
for instance, in Dublin or in any other locale that one might investigate
"out there." In fact, they take place in sleep, in bed, inside of and because of
the body of the dreamer. By putting us "back in the flesh" (67.5) the Wake
returns us to "some precise hour which we shall again agree to call absolute
zero or the babbling pumpt of plat in ism" (164.9-11). All things in the Wake
start here, "in the flesh."

CHAPTER S I X
Nocturnal Geo8raphy: How

to Take "Polar Bearin8s"
FINN
Since "Finnegan," by associative "sound sense" (109.15), modulates through

"Finnagain" into "Finn, again" (5.10, 628.14), and since Joyce erratically
conceived of the Wake as "the dream of old Finn lying in death beside the
river Liffey" U], 544), we might momentarily regard the man lying "dead to
the world" at the Wake as the "sleeping giant," "Finn MacCool" (540.17,
139.14), although this is a "goodridhirring" too. "Finn" is another cipher,
telling us that the "magnificent brut" (60.26) shown "outlined aslumbered"
in the "relief map" has entered a universe of radically strange spatialities. 1
As "Mr Makeall Gone" (220.24), our hero operates like a "vacuum cleaner"
(309.21, 362.25-26, 364.33-34): as soon as he falls asleep and "makes all
gone," the entire earth gets swept "off the face of the erse" (178.6-7, 50.8-
12). Through this process of "subtractional betterment" (150.33-34), he is
"reassured by ratio that the cube of [his] volumes is to the surfaces of their
subjects as the sphericity of these globes ... is to the feracity of Fairynelly's
vacuum" (151.1-7). In other words, as the heady glue that holds it all to-
gether dissolves in sleep's vacuum ("subjects," capable of "ratio" and "ra-
tionality"), all geometrically constructed space disintegrates too ("cubes,
"volumes," "surfaces," "spheres," "globes"). As space vanishes, our hero
passes out of dimension into an aspatial "nolandsland" situated "In No-

where," "By Nowhere" (391.15, 175.7, 9). "Where are we at all? and when-
abouts in the name of space?" (558.33).
Anyone consulting his own "blank memory" of the night will recall that
when bed, walls, and "room whorled" away and vanished in sleep, a dimen-
sionless "worldroom beyond the roomwhorld" opened up (100.29), there to
reveal "the canonicity of his existence as a tesseract" (100.34-35). Since "a
tesseract is a four-dimensional hypercube that cannot be graphically repre-
sented in three-dimensional space," the phrase advises us that the Wake, be-
cause sleep does, necessarily takes place in a spatiality that has little in
common with the three dimensions everywhere evident in the masonry of
the Daily World. 2 Sustained parts of the book unfold in the "fourdimman-
sions" of a "newwhere" (367.27, 155.12; 467.23) whose "space-element" is
one of "Length Withought Breath, of him, a chump of the evums" (164.33,
261. 13-14). All these measurements are quite precise: "length without
breadth" evokes a "no placelike" dimension infinite in extension but only
ideal in form (6°9.2); "withought" is a cipher for unconsciousness ("with-
out thought"); "breath" limns out the interior of the body; and HCE desig-
nates the book's omnipresent hero, a brainless "chump ofthe evening," but
for that reason, too, "a champ of the aevum" (L. "eternity").3
Sleep erases the boundaries by which, in wakefulness, we distinguish our-
selves from the alien immensity of the surrounding world and set ourselves
apart from it, as we were taught, in worried little subject-object relations.
In sleep, "we're been carried away. Beyond bournes and bowers" (379.35).
"Your feats [and your feet] end enormous, your volumes immense" (419.5) . And
as boundaries dissolve and all perceived externals vanish, sleep translocates
"Allspace in a Notshall" (455.29 ["nutshell"])-even as it robs one of voli-
tion ("not shall"). Or again, it relocates "Omnitudes in a Knutschedell"
(276.L2), where that "nutshell" now resolves into the bonier, slicker Dutch
schedel ("skull"). "Due to a collupsus of his back promises" (5.27 ["back
premises"]), our hero becomes a "colossus" as soon as he "collapses" and-
"pftjschute" (3.19)-lands "knock[ed] out" "on the flounder of his bulk"
(6.31 ["the flat of his back"]). We "behold of him as behemoth for he is
noewhemoe. Finiche!" (7.14-15). With ephemeral instantaneity ("as be he
moth"), he suddenly falls down "dead to the world," "finished" ("Finiche")
and "nailed to the spot" (Fr. fiche); but at the same time, by "dropping
asleep somepart in nonland" (4°3.18), he falls out of dimension and spills
into infinity, a "behemoth" "divested of care" (Fr. il s'en fiche).
Like anyone, then, the hero of Finne8ans Wake is indeed a "sleeping
giant," though not a waking one-and a giant, moreover, in no pedestrian
Nocturnal Ge08raphy 147

or determinate sense. Viewed from his own "eyewitless foggus," by contrast
to runts like Finn MacCoo!, the man who sleeps at Finnegans Wake is so big
that nothing in space exists outside of him. He fills any "landshape" in
which he turns up because all such "lambskip[s]" (502.36)-"landscapes"
seen while "wools gathering" (353.33)-are only his dreams and really lie
inside of and fill him. Night bountifully redistributes "the fat of the land to
Guygas" (494.23 [Gr. gigas, "giant"]), though the "fat" and the "guy" imma-
nent in this "Guygas" reveal beneath the giant form an "ordinary man"
(64.3°): "finight mens midinfinite true" (505.24-25 ["finite man" with
"finite mens"-L. "mind"-moved by "night" into the "infinite"]). "From
the hold of [his] capt in altitude till the mortification that's [his] fate,"
everything in Finnegans Wake takes place inside of this "sleeping giant"
(540.17- 18), whose formal boundaries will by now be clear: "hold" and
"capt" evoke the ubiquitous "Howth" head (L. caput), while the "mortified
feet" and deadly "fate" remind us that, like "Finnagain," he "bit the dust at
the foot ofthe poll" (580.10- II [Eng. poll, "head"]).
By day, the hero of Finnegans Wake inhabits the world represented in Map
A, of Dublin, where he and his sinking "grocery business" are such small
and negligibly ephemeral concerns as to escape all cartographic and much
public interest. But as sleep turns him into a "Bygmester" (4.18)-or "big-
master" (624.II)-his body opens out "in the broadest way immarginable"
(4.19), spilling out "in all dimensions" and "in all fathom of space" (498.28,
394.10). If, "in the days when Head-in-Clouds walked the earth" (18.23-24),
he was a nobody, in his nights, when he just lies there, he fills immensity, his
"Head" in the "Clouds" for being both heavily befogged and wholly lost to
sight, "his extremeties extremely so" (74.15). As "allspace" relocates itself
inside his body, the world reorganizes itself in the image of his "grossman's
bigness" (565.22 [Ger. gross, "vast"]), not to mention his sleazier "grossery
baseness" (367.2 [see relief map]). In reading of "this preeminent giant,"
then (504.15)-"Promiscuous Omebound" (560.1)-readers of the Wake
must think BIG and "immengine" (337.20 ["imagine," "immense"]).
Construed as "the bookofDoublendsJined" (20.15-16 ["Dublin'sgiant"]),
the Wake now requires not simply "Belief in Giants" (306.16-17), but also
some practice in reading "Biggerstiff" letters (413.29); as opposed to a
Swiftian "Bickerstaff," a "bigger stiff" than is easy to envision generates
and contains them all. Various ciphers modulated with supple variability
throughout "the Book of Doublends Jined" serve to remind a reader of its
sleeper's periodically absolute "loss of bearings" in space (576.34-35). Gran-
diose and "most unenglish" (160.22) articulations on the other of "Fe fo

fom!" (11.7) and "Finfoefum" (7.9-10) recur with "fierce force fuming" in-
sistence (608.31) to show him drifting through the night "without links,
without impediments, with gygantogyres, with freeflawforms" (596.23-
24). As a "rude rule of fumb" (283.20), these terms indicate that "his im-
mensesness" is "loose at large and (Oh baby!) might be anywhere" (241.11,
99.6-7)-just as that interjected "baby!" reminds us that sleep regressively
returns him to the condition of "first infancy" (22.1), when also, "fum in his
mow" (596.6 [and "thumb in his mouth"]), he had "not yet" (3.10), "not
yet" (3. I I), shrunk through letters into the determinate limitations of pa-
triarchal space: "Ba be bi bo bum" (284.L3).4
The names of giants, too, often underwritten with little descriptions of
sleep, show the Wake's "Immensipater" (342.26) emancipating himself from
the constraints both of formally perceived space and of the patriarchal order
("immense pater") through which it genetically organizes itself in the
head. As "Wassaily Booslaeugh" (5.5-6), for instance, our sleeping giant far
outdwarfs the Russian giant "Vasily Buslaev" because, "knock[ed] out" and
"blacked out" as well, he is laughably void of any sense of his "beerings"
in space at all (321.13 ["wassail," "boose," "laugh"]). As "Finnfinn the
Faineant," comparably (254.20 [not "Finn the Fenian"]), he is an immense
and sluggish "do-nothing" (Fr. faineant, "lazy idler"), a "rai des faineants"
(131.9). And as "MacGhoul" (354.6), "the dead giant manalive" is simply,
like "Finnagain," dead to the world (500.1-2): "Finnk. Fime. Fudd?" (499.18).
The evocation here of Finn ("Finnk") and of "Fe Fo Fum" show our hero
lying "just in time as if he fell out of space" (462.31), while the echo of Fin-
negan's "think I'm dead?" notifies us of "the christlikeness of the big clean-
minded giant" (33.29 [his only really "christlike" attribute is a tendency to
undergo a resurrection of the body after having "tropped head"]).
The appearance of ciphers like these throughout "the book of Doublends
Jined" reminds us that "the whole thugogmagog" (222.14) takes place inside
the body of a sleeping giant ("Gog and Magog" were giants of ancient
Briton); but they also help us to fathom the nature of its hero's spatial per-
ception in the night, and largely by indicating when he is not actively dream-
ing. For dreams, unlike the sleep out of which they arise, take place in
visible and recollectibly delimited representations of space (one sees oneself
walking through a narrow corridor, for instance, or a field), whereas dream-
less parts of the night, unfolding in the "fourdimmansions" of a "Length
Withought Breath," do not. "As a rude rule of fumb," then, these ciphers
occur most thickly at the borders of dreams reconstructed in the Wake-as
happens, for example, in the closing pages of IIl.i, where a lengthily sus-
Nocturnal Geography 149

tained dream of "Shaun the Post" pales out into a darker "escapology"
as "Shaun" "spoorlessly disappale[s] and vanesshe[s]" (428.22, 427.6-7)-
"Gaogaogaone!" (427.9)-and "thylike fades" (427.17). The terms suggest
that both the visible "likeness" of Shaun ("thy like") and the visual proper-
ties of the dream itself ("twilight") "fade" here, leaving our blacked-out
hero to contemplate the absence of any image of the real, "whose dispari-
tion afflictedly fond Fuinn feels" (427.3°). The evocations of Finn and "Fe
Fo Fum" now suggest that as the familiarly constructed spatialities and
forms of the visual dream "disselv[e]" into the "specturesque silentiousness"
of "Real Absence" (608.5,427.33), "his immensesness" falls out ofthe little
dream scene played out behind his eyes and between his ears to sink back
into a spatiality of "Length Withought Breath." Throughout "the book of
Doublends Jined," comparably, "one must recken with the sudden and gi-
gantesquesque appearance" of "the dead giant manalive" within whose
"colossets" "the whole thugogmagog" unfolds (253.29-30, 500.1-2, 553.10-
II ["colossus," "closet"]). 5 A sleeping giant in reality, the "bigmaster" who
sleeps at FinneaansWake now becomes a "spaciaman spaciosum" (425.32)-

"a handsome example" (L. specimen speciosum) of "ample space" (L. spa-
tium spatiosum).
"THE SPACE QUESTION"

Acquaintance with the Wake's "sleeping giant" and the alien "dimman-
sions" within which his nocturnal life takes place leads us to a considera-
tion of the maps that accompany this book. Louis Mink, the distinguished
geographer of Finneaans Wake, has rightly observed that the Wake "has its
own geography, and a very queer geography it is too, since it violates the
geographical postulate of identification by fixed coordinates"; he goes on to
note that "the Wake's Dublin is very different from the real Dublin, but it is
derived from it."6 In these respects, the Dublin of Finneaans Wake resembles
entirely the cities that appear in anyone's nightlife; for these places, too,
differ radically but are derived from the real cities that they recall, and they
violate in every way possible "identification by fixed coordinates." Wake-
fulness takes place in the familiar "atmosphere" of a "world" mapped along
charted "latitudes," whereas sleep takes place in its own quite alien" amsto-
phere" (452.1-2 ["am stops here" in sleep's "atmosphere"]), in a "whirrld"
structured along lax "lassitudes" (147.22,441.9-10).

Map A, of "Howth Castle and Environs," shows "Dublin by Daylight."
Countless books and directories-Ulysses among them-chronicle its his-
tory and the lives of its inhabitants, and countless more codify the laws that
govern its languages, customs, and institutions. Bent into a meditation on
"our own nighttime," however, common sense will suggest that nobody
soundly asleep and oblivious of the location of his head and toes is likely to
have the remotest knowledge of the world as represented in this map, which
therefore fails accurately to reflect the universe really experienced or known
at night. Since anyone brainy enough to know that England is separated
from Ireland by the Irish Sea cannot sufficiently have "tropped head," new
mappings of the world faithful to the experience of the Wake's sleeping
giant-"a Colossus among cabbages" (132.27-28)-are necessary to an
understanding of the "dimmansions" in which he dwells (those "cabbages,"
like people, come in "heads," as do our vegetating hero and his "cabbageous
[not "capacious"] brain" [409.13]).
In contrast to the map of "Dublin by Daylight," then, Relief Map B shows
"Novo Nilbud by swamplight" (24. I), which depicts Dublin as a person
"tropped head" would really "no" it. Where "by daylight," like Leopold
Bloom, this "nulled nobody" ("Nilbud") would inevitably see before him at
every instant some aspect of the "city" of Dublin in all its panoramic variety,
nigh t finds looming in his" eyewi tless foggus " only a vanished" sooty" (143.5,
d. 2S.3)-"Black and All Black" (S9.4)-lit at best and only at intervals by
spectral "swamplights," "Will-of-the-Wisp[s]" (211.2, 404.15), "jackalan-
terns" (197.26, 10.27), and other such phosphorescent illusions as erupt in
dark marshes, in swamps, and, within dreams, on the undersides of shut-
tered eyelids. If Dublin lifts into vision at all in this "swamplit" world, it
appears only in distortionarily scrambled form (much as the name "Dublin"
swims into view out of the anagrammatically inverted "Nilbud"), so that it
appears strangely reformed-as "Novo Nilbud."
The two maps of Daylit Dublin and Swamplit "Nilbud" have been drawn
so that a one-to-one correspondence links them and shows their essential
relation to each other. They are two mappings of exactly the same place, as
really experienced by the same man, though in the antithetical states of
wakefulness and sleep, where the "untired world" "recurs ... the same dif-
ferently" (229.17,481.10-11). Since nothing in reality changes when our
hero falls asleep-" every thing's going on the same" (26.25), and "all in fact
is soon as all of old right as anywas ever in very old place" (586.20-21)-
every place inscribed with a name on the map of Dublin reappears, al-
though in distorted form, on the map of "Nilbud," where a dormant equiva-
Nocturnal Geo8raphy 151

lent appears tattooed on the sleeping "stigmataphoron" (606.27 [Gr. "thing
bearing tattoo marks"]) shown "outlined aslumbered" there. At the same
time, however, since everything in reality changes when he falls asleep,
each of the "sobsconcious inklings shadowed on [his] soulskin" in this map
of the night world (377.28) shows the effect of a "traumaturgid" "warping
process" (496.24, 497.3)-the "turgid" "dramaturgy" of the dream-work
(Ger. Traum, "dream")-which has cannily distorted whatever sleep has
not annihilated.
All of the names on the map of "Novo Nilbud," then-like all terms gen-
erally in Finnenans Wake-serve at least a triple purpose, whose total effect
is to describe a mind rippled by flickering "swamplights" whenever it is not
sunk into the abyssal "blackholes" of "Real Absence" (549.5, 536.5-6). By
standing in an inverse relation to the real-world locality which it parallels,
each item on the relief map acts as a term under erasure, so to indicate
the epistemological cancellation of that locality from "Nilbud's" "tropped
head." The "Goatstown" and "Dundrum" knowable in Daylit Dublin, for
example, evaporate into an indistinct "Ghosttown" because "sir ghostus"
lies in a "duldrum" (532.4, 51.34), and cannot "nowhere" they are (10.26
["know where"]) or that they exist. Although in wakefulness all of the
places named on the relief map lie outside of joyce's sleeping protagonist,
"there all the time without [him]" (U, 37), they appear here equally inside
of him, aspects of his "mummery," so that they bear his stamp and descrip-
tively reflect his life in the night. This is the case, for example, with "Clown-
talkin" (414.4 ["Clondalkin"]) and "clown toff" (315.31 ["Clontarf"]),
which refer in part to two places in Dublin, but latently reveal our hero's
sodden incapacity to act as a coherent monologist, much less a rationalist,
in his sleep. In the particular passages from which these names have been
stripped, finally, they all bear context-specific senses that cannot be evident
here. But since the network of geographical references informing any work
of fiction broadly orients it in its relations to the real, these names collec-
tively put Finnenans Wake into a context by mapping out one version of the
nocturnal universe-the Evening World-it spans.
At a remote level, Finnenans Wake really does take place in the Dublin of
Map A, where our hero lies at home in bed in Chapelizod, though he cannot
know this Dublin or that Chapelizod, much less his "bed," his "head," or,
since he "naver saw his bedshead farrer" (241.20), his "bed's head" either. To
all of these things, together with the whole fiction of subject-object distinc-
tions, he lies largely in a vanished relation (hence "bedshead farrer," which
plays on the Da. bedstefar ["grandfather"] to signify a "vanished relation") .

This is why Joyce was firm in insisting that a reader need not know Dublin
to read Finnegans Wake (though it doubtlessly helps);7 for the ability to
identify "Fishamble Street," say, differs entirely from the ability required to
orient oneself in the radically alien "Fleshshambles" shown "sprowled met
the duskt" in the darker map of the night (538.22-23,4.11-12 [the "owl" in
this "sprawled" has nocturnal intelligence, while the "dust" in this "duskt"
moves us into the night's "seemetery"]). More proximately than in Dublin,
the Wake takes place in the "Dustbin" or "Dupling" (181.17, 586.15 [the
trashed and dream-deluded little "dupe"]) shown snoring away in the map
of "Novo Nilbud," interior to whom everything depicted in the map of daylit
Dublin has been introjected and incorporated. Because Finnegans Wake
shows the world reformed in this man's body and memory, it necessarily
shuffles the "untired world" through a complex set of topological "inns and
ouses" (7.5) whereby all ordinary surroundings (like "inns and houses")
now lie simultaneously both "inside and outside" him.
For the two maps of "Dublin by Daylight" and "Novo Nilbud by Swamp-
light" interpenetrate, each lying simultaneously inside and outside its
other. The sleeping body shown "sprowled met the duskt" in the nocturnal
relief map, "in outher wards" (285.22-23 [and "in outer wards"]), really lies
in bed at the place marked "Chapelizod" in the map of Dublin; but coordi-
nately, the entire ground charted out in the map of Dublin really lies buried
in the mound labeled "headth of hosth" in Relief Map B, where it exists as
representation. Since Map A contains B, and Map B contains A, the hero of
Finnegans Wake might be considered, according to one of its recurrent
ciphers, a kind of Brian 0 Linn-the subject of a comic song bent on making
the wishful best of always bad circumstances by turning everything upside
down and inside out. 8 Throughout the Wake, "your pullar beer turns out
Bruin O'Luinn" (328.1-2) because sleep transforms an ordinary bartender
(or "puller of beer" ) into a hibernating hulk ("polar bear," Du. beer [ "bear"],
"Bruin") within whom Dublin has vanished and the end of the world ap-
peared (hence "polar" and comparable ciphers for "ends of the world" in
Finnegans Wake).9 As "Priam Olim" (6.23), comparably, our hero used to be
there in the Dublin of Map A (L. oUm, "once"; prius, "before"), but now,
"reincorporated" into the spatiality of Map B (387.36), where everything has
been turned "skinsideout" (507.6), both he and the world lie just "any were"
(602.20 [in a vanished past]). The map of "Novo Nilbud," then, shows our
hero lying "in vert" (5.6) as he "stand[s] at Bay (Dublin) from nun till dan
and vites inversion" (523.17 [in other words, he just lies there-"stands at
bay"-for an indeterminate length of time and "invites inversion"]). Or

again, it shows him at "hevnly buddhy time, inwreathed of his near cis-
sies" (234.13-14 [since a "heavenly body," like one "nearvanashed" in the
"narcissistic" state of sleep, becomes evident only at night; cf. 284.8-14,
526.34-35]) .
Accurately to portray the simultaneous existence of his ordinary man and
sleeping giant in the two conflicting spatialities of Dublin and the antitheti-
cal Nilbud of Map B-in a linearly progressive history and in the "ex-
progressive process" of a dream time beneath history (614.31)-Joyce de-
ploys throughout the Wake a wide-ranging toponymy by which to show his
hero leading a "doublin existents" (578.14) and dwelling "in two worlds" at
once (619.11). While it may well be true, for instance, that our hero lies in
bed in the "township of Chapelizod" (this is pronounced with an accent on
the short "i"), he himself can "no" it only from the "eyewitless foggus" of
someone "embedded" in the "tombshape" of "chapel exit" (265.3, 127.29)
or, again, of "Champelysied" (607.14 [Fr. Champs Elysees, "the Elysian
Fields"]). Terms like these oblige us to see the "Brian d' of Linn" (17.12)
asleep at Finne8ans Wake as "a doblinganger" (490.17 [Ger. doppe18an8er])
who lives neither exactly in Dublin nor in a narcissistic "notshall," but in
"doublin" (3.8), or "doubling" (97.9, 197.5,290.16,295.31,413.25,462.19),
his "real" life drifting forth through an eight-hour gap of time in Dublin
and history as he himself, "tropped head," conceives the place more as a
"Taubling" (7.6), or "Dufblin" (447.23): both terms evoke the "sooty" nei-
ther seen nor heard by a Taublin8 (Ger. "a little deaf-ling") whom sleep has
rendered "deaf-blind" (hence "Duf-blin").10 The conflicted coexistence of
these "two worlds" and spatialities in the mind of the Wake's dreamer is re-
flected in the design of Finne8ans Wake as a spatial artifact, which on the
one hand has the linear and determinate form of any printed book, yet on
the other hand cultivates the form of an eternally recurrent circle. ll
Ultimately arbitrary, the two maps of "Dublin by Daylight" and "Novo
Nilbud by Swamplight" constitute only one of many possible such sets of
maps of the "doubling" within which Finne8ans Wake is dynamically set;
rather than consolidating a set of features that remains fixed in the book,
they are meant to illustrate a kind of understanding necessary to a "reading
ofthe Evening World," as it unfolds within the central and underlying "pres-
ence (of a curpse)." Any Dubliner will note how eccentric Map A is, since
it puts main districts and thoroughfares on a parity with pubs and private
estates; and any reader of the Wake will note how comparably arbitrary is
the relief map of "Novo Nilbud," which draws on only a few of thousands of
toponyms in the book. The nocturnal map is equally arbitrary, however, be-

cause it makes "too dimensional" (154.26 [and "two-dimensional"]) the
"infrarational" spatiality within which Finne8ans Wake takes place. "THE
MONGREL UNDER THE DUNGMOUND" (276.RI)-the sleeping man buried in the
body of matter shown stratified in the map of the Evening World-is en-
dowed with an "INFRALIMINAL INTELLIGENCE" that cannot know things as
they are presented in either map, as visible forms localized in geometric
space. The map of "Novo Nilbud," then, objectifies space in a way inaccu-
rate to the experience of sleep, the night, and the body, and all the more
particularly because the "inklings shadowed on [the] soulskin" of the slum-
bering form it represents change fluidly from page to page of the Wake, as
"matters falling under the ban of our infra rational senses" arise internally,
within "the presence (of a curpse)."
As a way of seeing how these "infrarational" matters everywhere modify
the character of represented space in the Evening World, we might examine
a passage close to the end of the Wake, in which its sleeping giant plays host
to this drift of "withought":
Death banes and the quick quoke. But life wends and the dombs spake! Whake? Hill
of Hafid, knock and knock, nachasach, gives relief to the langscape as he strauches
his lamusong untoupon gazelle channel and the bride of the Bryne, shin high shake,
is dotter than evar for a damse wed her farther. Lambel on the up! We may plesently
heal Geoglyphy's twentynine ways to say goodbett an wassing seoosoon liv. (595. I -8)
The lines represent the same "landshape" as that shown in the map of
"Novo Nilbud," and again as it appears in "relief"; but here the term "he"
clearly "indentifides" the body of the sleeper underlying all evident appear-
ances, as that body stretches characteristically from head to foot ("Hill of
Hafid," or "Hoved," suggests "Howth" "head"; "knock and knock" names
two "knocks out in the park"; while "he strauches his lamusong" suggests
that "he stretches his limbs"). This "stretching," however, now generates a
second sense of "relief" (an easing of discomfort, a "longing" to "escape"
["langscape"]), so to show different energies riddling the body which, in the
opening pages of the Wake, lay deeply dead to the world. For "our local busy-
body" (438.16) is now "pleasantly healing" and coming back to life after a
night of static embedment in the "seemetery" (hence the "quickening" of
the "death bones" and the sense that "tombs speak"). As his body "pleas-
antly heals" and moves toward its resurrection, it also begins to regain its
capacity to "presently hear" things-that crowing rooster (595.3°), the
matitudinal Angelus pealed out of churchbells (601.15-31), noisy delivery
vans (604.9- 18) -and weakly to interpret what it hears as it ascends toward
Nocturnal Geo8raphy 155

wakeful clarity. "Nachasach," therefore, evokes "sassanach," the Gaelic for
"Saxon," because the interpretive medium of English, is already, "by and by"
(Ger. nach und nach), seeping back into our hero's "knock[ed] out" and
"tropped head" with morning. Hence again "knock and knock." If earlier
parts of the Wake have seemed like a vast "knock-knock" joke (:BO. 30- 32) be-
cause of the difficulty of knowing "who was there," answers, with English,
now begin to emerge: "the quick quoke" and "the dombs spake" suggest that
a body struck "dumb" in sleep, by "quickening," is regaining the ability to
"quote" and "speak." "Whake?" shows our hero wondering "What?" is stir-
ring the body of matter within which he lies embedded; but it also suggests
that in his "infraliminal intelligence," he knows full well. "At matin a fact"
(596.5 [as a matter of fact]), "clarify begins" here (594.12), at "matin"
("morning"), when he "comes out of the soil very well after all" (606.28-
29) and a world full of "fact" returns to his "tropped head." No longer quite
dead to the world, as if at his wake, "the presence (of a curpse)" is about
to "wake."
The Eastern or oriental term "Hafid," accordingly (Ar. "preserver," "one
who knows the known by heart") , shows our hero orienting himself, as sun
rises in the Orient, in a real world full of facts "known by heart and pre-
served in the head" ("Hafid" = "Hoved"). But since sleep has broken the
continuity of this world, and so has altered it, it is not quite the same world
that vanished when he fell asleep last night. Proverbially, people are accus-
tomed to saying that "things will look different in the morning," and the
proverb yields its share of truth. One falls asleep nightly, abandoning an Old
World sodden with conflicts and problems, and wakes up, ideally refreshed,
to find a whole New World occupying the site of the Old World that
crumbled with yesterday. The place-names covering the "langscape" pre-
sented here-"Cape Strauch" ("he strauches"), the town of "Lamusong"
("his lamusong"), "Gazelle Channel," and Mount "Lambel"-therefore ori-
ent us less in Ireland, than in "Newirglands" (595.10 ["New Ireland," in the
Melanesian Pacific]), though not in any literal sense. Elements in a Wakean
"geoglyphy" « Gr. "earth-carving"), rather than in an orthodox "geogra-
phy" « Gr. "earth-describing"), the toponyms suggest that as the world re-
aggregates in our hero's "tropped head" under the oriental pressure of sun-
rise, it is not quite the same world he left when he fell asleep because sleep,
having refreshed him, has altered it. He wakens renewed, "a newman" in a
new Ireland (596.36). In his "infraliminal intelligence," accordingly, an-
other drift of associations spins out of the resurrective stirring uncon-
sciously perceived in his "stretching limbs," both already eager to be "on the

up" ("Lambel on the up!") and, after a quick "wash," out amid company
( "wassing seoosoon" suggests "wishing to see you soon," "washing," and the
Ger. Wasser ["water"]). The gathering restlessness in his limbs also evokes
the memory of a "dance" with a "damsel" ("a damse") and, in particular,
with "a daughter more dotty than ever for a dance with her father." "What
were frozen loins [are] stirred and lived," then (549.8-9); and, feeling re-
newed, "the old man on his ars" shown "scrapheaped" in the relief map
wishfully foresees wakening into a "Newirglands" (with "newer vir glands"
[L. vir, "he-man"]) so that, like "Adam" with "Eve" at the beginning of the
world ("evar for ~ damse"), he can begin a new "season" of life all over
again ("seoosoon") and reconquer the lost affections both of young people
in general and of the members of his family in particular.
Countless passages in the Wake comparable to this one would have illus-
trated equally well how "geoglyphic" place-names, like all symptomatic
"writing ... streak[ed] over [the] bourseday shirt" of the book's sleeping
giant (27.10- II), fluidly change in order to reflect "matters falling under the
ban of our infrarational senses" as they ripple through "the presence (of a
curpse)." Such passages also help us to gauge the nature of the "dimman-
sions" into which the hero of Finnegans Wake moves when sleep pulls him
out of Euclidean dimension into the "nucleuds" of his body (283.24). Where
spatial relations between objects on the map of Dublin are conventionally
measured along straight lines in numerical units ranging from inches to
miles and are organized in geometric or geographic space, the transforma-
tion that relocates the world in the body of the Wake's sleeping giant causes
"spacious" "straight lines" to become "specious" "strayedline[s]" (153.17,
293.18,294.2-3), "extension" to become "extinsion" (371.24["extinct exten-
sion"]), and "number" to become "numb," "nummer," numbest (546.25-26,
10.28, 242.5, 313.25, 531.4 [because altogether impalpable]), if not dark
"nombre" (222.32 [Fr. ombre, "darkness"]) or obliterated "no" (420.25).
The night dismantles orthodox geometries and geographies, as we learn
in one of the Wake's extended "Night Lessons" (ll.ii) , and in place of rela-
tions drawn by a "geometer" « Gr. geometres, "earth measurer"), distances
are determined by a warmer "geomater" (297.1 [Gr. Gaia mater, "mother
earth"]). Neither Euclidean nor Cartesian in character, but emotional or
earthily "infrarational," distances separating "abjects" in the interior spa-
tiality of "Novo Nilbud" are those of the sort which, through variable
degrees of attachment and separation and attraction and repulsion, make
our hero imaginarily near to or remote from another person or place-in
much the same way that Stephen Dedalus, standing two feet away from

Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, can be eight months and hundreds of miles away,
in the Paris he knew before his mother's death. And "as I know and you
know yourself ... and the arab in the ghetto knows better" (286.5-7)' ra-
tionalists deft at objective measurement are not always best at gauging such
"mythametical" distances (286.23), which are "binomeans to be compren-
dered" (285.27-28 [as opposed to "binomials," which are]) because they
have little to do with rationality at all. Our hero's nightlife takes place in a
space constituted by these "infraliminal" distances.
"THE OWL GLOBE"

As one consequence of the topological transformation by which sleep turns
the map of Dublin "skinside out" into the map of "Nilbud," where every-
thing is "recorporated" (228.20 [and "recuperated"]), the Wake's sleeping
giant will necessarily absorb and engulf any place or any thing in the world
(just as his cipher, HCE, will absorb any context). Early in Finne8ans
Wake, its reader in fact learns that the still "form outlined aslumbered"
throughout the book, a body laid to rest in bed, is "tautaulogically the same
thing" as "the owl globe" (6.29-30); this would be "the whole globe," as
informed by a nocturnal intelligence ("owl"), within which letters have
come to an end (the extra "tau" in "tautaulogically" [not "tautologically"],
designates the last letter in the Hebrew alphabet and so suggests, like the
badly fatigued W at 6.32, the end of letters generally).
Map A', accordingly, of Western Europe in the 1930S, shows a portion of
"the whole globe" as the hero of Finne8ans Wake would doubtlessly know
it by day; and its nocturnal counterpart, Relief Map B', draws eclectically
on terms scattered throughout Finne8ans Wake to yield an "eyewitless fog-
gus" of the same extended region as Joyce's sleeping giant would certainly
"no" it in the night. Again, a one-to-one correspondence links these two
maps, so that every place charted on the first has its sleep-transformed
equivalent inscribed on the other; and, again, the two mappings lie cospa-
tially inside and outside each other, our hero in fact lying in bed in the area
marked "Dublin" in the map of Europe, but all of the map of Europe lying
buried in the "Dufblin" headquarters shown "corked" and "slaine" in Map
B' (447.23, 155.1, 609.34). The play between the two maps illustrates the
transformational process by which the "Western European world" of the
1930S, as Joyce's protagonist turns into his body in sleep, in turn turns into
a "wastended" "neuropean" "whorled" (320.17,519.1,272.4), who now lies

susceptible to those delusionally "neuropathic" reconstructions of the real
met in dreams. The nocturnal map of this "Neuropath," then (488.26),
renders concrete another version of the Wake's singular "amstophere" by
making visible "aspace of dumbillsilly" (15.18)-"a space," that is, as it is
largely not perceived by the "silly dumbbell" or espece d'imbecile (Fr., "type
of imbecile") who has not only "tropped head" within it but is identical to
it. Or again, it shows our hero in the "duskguise" of "His Revenances,· with
still a life or two to spare for the space of his occupancy of a world at a time"
(532.27,52.7-8 [a "revenant," like a sleeper, comes back to life from death
with a life to spare; but a sleeper does it more than once]). Comparison of
the two maps will allow a reader of Finneaans Wake to appreciate "the
highly continental evenements" (398.13) of this "neuropath" for whom
much of world and the letters that constitute it have "atlanst" become "van-
ished consinent[s]" (601.5, 337.8 [like "Atlantis" and its alphabet]). Where
our hero would know by daylight exactly where he stood in relation to
"Norway," "Monte Carlo," and "the Spanish," in his sleep, by contrast, he
can "nowhere" he lies only in relation to "Nowhergs" (533.22 ["nowhere"])
and "mostly Carbo" (232.3), because his body "distends" "in the broadest
way immarginable" and leaves his "tropped head" bearing only "murmur-
randoms of distend renations" with the "sphanished" (358.3, 473.20 ["dis-
tant relations," "vanished"]). If by day he can expatiate freely with his cus-
tomers about Napoleonic "Corsica" and "the Vatican," comparably, what
he can "no" in the "seemetery" of night is largely a "muddy terranean"
"nolandsland" extending through "Corpsica" into "the Vatucum" (120.29,
175.11,243.31 ["vacuum"; this "Vatucum," incidentally, is the only real au-
thority to which any reader of Finneaans Wake can legitimately appeal]).
Latently immanent in all these terms, too, is "the presence (of a curpse)."
A little attention to the area labeled "idlish" "frustate" in the nocturnal
map of "neurope" (182.15, 352.33 ["Irish Free State"]) will suggest that a
comparably "sunless map of the month" might well be drawn of Ireland or of
"any were" (602.20), since "allspace" goes into the "notshall" of the body at
night. Because our hero is as vastly "obliffious" of Ireland as he is of his head
and toes, the "Irish nation" evaporates in his sleep into an insubstantially
"airish" "notion" (55.24, 192.26, 223.3, 327.31, 344.18; 128.16); or "goes
under" to become a subterranean "oreland" (352.9, 359.26), its disappear-
ance leaving this "nought in nought Eirinishmhan" (616.3) only an "air-
ish," "idlish," and at times outrightly "eeriesh" "Inishman" (70.4, 320.13,
91.22 ["innish" because "inner"]). "In the drema of Sorestost Areas, Dis-
eased" (69.14-15), the quotidian reality of a "Saorstat Erin" (or Irish Free
Nocturnal Geoaraphy 159

+ North
The Arctic
U
East
West
... 1"
~""
Ocean
,..
United Kingdom -f"
Hibernia
+-- United States of America (Ireland)
~ Boston, Mass.
~ New York
~ Philadelphia
-f- Great Lakes
~ Erie
~ Oconee River
(Dublin, Georgia)
The Atlantic
~America
~ The Pacific Ocean
/ Australia
. / New South Wales The French
k' Tasmania
Itt" (VanDieman'sLand)
The Antipodes
~ Monte Carlo
Colonial Expansion
co~
V IfSI
-\
The Vatican
The Spanish Rome
/1 The Billowy Way

CI ~q
The Balearics
~fl
Map A'
The Western European world,
around 1930
I I
o 100 200 300 400
Miles
Asia
Asia
toJapan ~
(Land of the Rising Sun)
+-- Europe
Foochow
(China)
E
u,~,/j ,ere Buckley Shot the Russian General
sevastopo'7l [nkermann The Caucasus
B[ack Sea
Asia Minor
[stamhul (Constantinople)
~
Sea of Marmora The Ottoman Empire
Persia
(Fr. Mer de Marmora) (through [9[9)
The Turkish
The Turks The Persians
The Levant
Egypt The Nile

The Sinai
The Jordan
\
+
"Noth"
(494.14)
"the kathartic" (185.6)

"Waste" "Eased"
(309.13, (18.35)
494.14,
"nolandsland" (391.15)
578.30)
t
[no-man's-land)
"Soot" "sunsmidnought"
(494.14)
"land of Nod" "midnights unwards" (325.9)
"United Stars of Ourani a" (185.31) (181.5, 288.25) [" unwards": toward nothing)
I
[the night sky: Gr. Ourania, [Genesis 4: 17-18)
L. Urania, muse of the heavens;
Gr. ouranos, "the heavens") "disunited kingdom on the vacuum" "ossean" (139.22)
(188.16-17) ["Ossian": son of Finn,
a giant) "Schiumdinebbia" (324.27)
"benighted queendom" (241.22) [It. schiuma di nebbia,
("'' 7
"8osthoon," "Moss." (273.Ll, 490.1; 347.13) "moyles" (628.3) the "scotched" (210.27) "foam of mists")
[Anglo-Jr. bosthoon, "blockhead, dummy"; [Eng. moils, [Eng. scotched: stifled,
"N~"",,"
moss: just lies there) ............. _ "hiberniating" "tosses about in confusion"] stamped out)
;:IIii. (316.15-16)
,~_ _......"Iochkneeghed" (241.24)~
"the balltossic"
"new yoke" (137.32) ---. "under loch and neagh" (187.2)
[a "yoke" immobilizes) (196.20) [arrested)
"sly goings" 'fIlL.
"in [a) free state" (595.16) I'
(117.34,406.19,604.23)
"Fellagulphia" (320.20)
["gulf": abyss)
"Soretost AreaS"'(69.15).".;I
"greyt lack" (601.5)
~
"Erie" (601.6) ["eerie")
"the Afrantic (297.32) "Londsend" the "phlegmish"
["a-frantic": "not frantic,"
i.e., "not hot in the brain," (535.15) (397.24) "waterloogged" "Gent" "Alemaney" (423.4)
brainless, mindless) "-crezy" (9.8) (428.20) (278.L5) "8oyrut"
"Ocone! Ocone!" (297.11) "Ruines" "waterloose" "Belchum" (229.34) "behomean"
[Gael. och6n, "alas! ") "finister" (289.26) (8.2- 3) (9. Iff.) "Stoutgirth"
(516.35, 566.32-33)
(150.11)
[Fr. finisterre, "land's end," "swiltersland" (488.30-31)
~
"Amessica-" (105.36)
"earth's end," "the end of the world";
Ger. finster, "dark") the "fringe"
" . "16
parysls. (155.)
[Eng. swill: drink
. to excess; swelt,
"alps" (256.34)
[Ger. Alp,
_/ (311.33; 233.9) [paralYSIS + Eng. paresIs (swelter): black out, "nightmare") "osterich"
"finsterest" (50.17) II:" "bunkofbasky" 'l~ (a bram dIsease faint die) (70.1, 136.15)
[Fr. finisterre, (374.18-19) ~ causing partial paralysis ' "augstnch"
"the end of the world"; and mental degeneration); "our lake lemanted" (162.32)
Ger. finsterest, "darkest") "basquing" (556.33) r. paresis, "a relaxing"») '-.. (601.4-5) [hIS head IS buned)
~ "bayondes" (327.21) """"-- "Coma" (395.8) "Donawhu" (76.32)
to "the pacific subject" (85.7) ["beyant the bayondes "mostly Carbo" ' " ' ,,[ "don't know who")
... sleepy talking") "Moulsaybaysse" (464.21) (232.3) "the LIbIdo
[Fr. moule, "mussel"; "moulsay": '\ (417.17)
"down under" (321.32,450.1)
"s hanished" (473.20) he's clammed up; "bouillabaisse": "Corpsica"
in "the pillory way" (16.3-4) p and m a fine kettle offish) ( (175 II)
["pillories" arrest) ~ ~.\I',
"astraylia-" (321.9) ~ "barsalooner" (625.11-12) "Sourdania" (221 . 32) " teaucum
h Vt "
[Fr. sourd, "deaf~')(243.31) [vacuum)
"ostralian someplace" (488.20)
[L. ostra = "purples," dark colors) "ballyhooric" (555.10) "'
["ballyhoo": "empryreal Raum" (353.29)
"Tossmania" (416.30) sensational exaggeration) [Eng. empyreal. "ethereal";
["tossing"; "mania") Ger. Raum, "space")
"van Demon's Land" (56.21)

'- "antipathies" (489.10) "Room" (153.23)
"NooSochWilds" (497.13) /
"his coglionial expancion" (488.31-32)
[It. cOBlione, "stupid";
It. cOBlioni, "testicles")
"Midnight Sunburst" (71.15)
["midnight sun": boreal light
in darkness, as in dreams)
"zembliance of mardal mansk"

(317.33-34) ["semblance of mortal man";
Relief Map B'
(543.12)
Lappish murmansk, "the fringe of the world") A "Wastended" "Neuropean" "Whorled"
(320.17,519.1,272.4),
"Finnland" (340.24)
["Finn": giant, fills space)
"at no spatial time processly which
regards to concrude chronology" (358.5-6)
"moyles and moyles" (628.3)

~ [Eng. moil: to churn about; confusion)
"mires" (410.34)
"Easia" (482.30) [ease)
"volgar" (211.13)
rising sun (609.20) ~
"risingsoon" (312.8)
~ "youreups" (300.F2)
"Asea" (447.25) ..... [rise and shine)
"thefoochoor" (608.21)
"Ashias" (608.31) [ashes)
"the "check[ed)" (332.36)

["Check or slowback')
"hun er "(126.22) Gr. Cimmeria (sourceofthe name "Crimea"):
g y . "a place of perpetual mght at the end
"Trancenanla . .
(531.34)
~
[trance,inane]"Sea vaast a pool!"
(338.14) \
>". "
of the world. opemng mto Erebus. the underworld)
mkerman (433.9; 48.10. 71.8)

where "bulkily he shat" "that region's general"
"VarnaShedr' (192.2.471.19-20)
(339.11) "blackseer" (340.13)
"jugoslaves" (344.20)
(13733) "Are you not somewhat bulgar "tuckish armenities" (530.6)
[L. jugo, "to yoke, bind"; with your bowels?" (563.14) [tucked·in amenities)
bonds and yokes immobilize I ./ "ourmenial" (321.23-24)
"stambuling" (33.36)~ "Comestowntonobble" "Airmienious" (296.8)
[blundering in the d a , (74.11) ["mien": way of conducting
[Eng. empyrean, "ethereal")
[nobble (Br. sl.) : oneself; "air": invisible")
"something ... comequeers
to drug and lame) the "tarpitch" (232.1)
this . .. perssian"
the "Tark's" (357.6-9)
(239.1) "Off with your
"the turkest night"
(442.33) persians!" (532.2)
"tyred" (394.16)
(120.29) "alldconfusalem"
(355 II) "went somewhere
unknown")
"Aeships" (625.4) "the Nil" (598.6)
[Gael. Aos·sidhe, "fairy-folk," "Etheria Deserta" (309.9)
underground inhabitants of burial mounds - - - - - [ void ether)
(siodha); Gaelic Lexicon, 380) "mounden of Delude
... of Israel" "Erebia" (473.16)
(331.18-19) [Gr" L. Erebus, the underworld,
land of the dead)
State) disintegrates to become only a "dream" of "drama" ("drema") en-
dured in bed (a "sore-tossed area," associated both with the "diseased" and
the "deceased"). And "Erin," comparably, used to be there "in the days
when Head-in-Clouds walked the earth," but now that the invaluable re-
sources of his "tropped head" lie "spent"-"Erin gone brugk" (347.21)-Erin
exists only "erehim" (17.23), "ere in" sleep he fell (62.19,427.6), so to be
transformed into an "Ailing" (148.33 [because "in bed"]) or "erring" (198.12,
272.20, 288.F6; cf. 62.25), at least until "Eringrowback" in the morning
(389.4-5) y
"By his selfdenying ordnance," then, our self-extinguishing hero has "left
Hyland on the dissenting table" too (73.2-3 [where it lies "dissected"]), so
that a "sunless map" of "erehim" might be drawn with as much particu-
larity as the two relief maps of "Novo Nilbud" or ofthe "Waste" (494.14 [the
West]). If in wakefulness our hero certainly knows full well what and where
Counties Monaghan, Louth, Tipperary, Cavan, and Down are, "Monaghan"
by night vanishes into spooky "moonyhaunts" (595.15); "Louth" washes out
in the sleep of a "lout" (595.12); "Tipperary" disintegrates whenever, lost in
the "deep deep deeps of Deepereras" (595.28), he feels "his topperairy"
(131.5 [an "airy" "topper" would be a headlike structure void of content]);
"Cavan" simply disappears in "coffins" (595.15), "Maryborough, Leix, " dis-
solving into "Miryburrow, leaks" (577.14). As for "Down," it simply sinks
into deeper "downs" (IOI .6), there to form part of a world "down under"
(321.32, 450.1 [not necessarily Australia]) and finally to drift into "the
downandoutermost" (194.19). "All gone" (380.36).
These orienting comments apart, the two maps of the Evening World will
explain themselves and are meant to be read on their own. Except that they
will not account fully for the roles of Shem or Shaun in the Wake, or at all
for its female characters, they offer, in their own way, a synthetic reading of
the book. Items on these maps have been arranged in ways meant both to be
suggestive and to discourage the bad habit of reading sequentially along the
"ruled barriers" of written lines (see 114.2-20). Readers who have traced on
a map of Dublin Bloom's wanderings through the "Lestrygonians" episode of
Ulysses, for instance, will not be surprised to note that on the "sunless map"
of "neurope," the "strayedline[s]" leading from "Belchum" through "Ale-
many" and "Stoutgirth" into "hungery" and the region "where bulkily he
shat" "that region's general"-"Arssia Manor"-roughly sketch out the ali-
mentary tract of a sleeping giant, every square inch of it underwritten with
signs of conflict. Study of these submerged "aliment[s]" (163.2 ["elements"])

will also begin to suggest why the long story told in the Wake of "how Buck-
ley shot the Russian general" is only a dream (337.32-355.33), bearing on
"matters that fall under the ban of our infrarational senses," and not a his-
torical account of a skirmish in the Crimean War. "Berkeley showed the rea-
son genrously" (423.32-33 [by distinguishing the ideal from the real]): the
area in which Buckley shot the Russian general, and the place in which our
hero himself experiences "defecalties" (366.20-21) is not the Crimea at all.
As these indications in turn suggest, reference to these maps, or to any
sleeping body, will now enable us to draw some broad general inferences
about Finneaans Wake as a whole.
"POLAR ANDTHISISHIS"
Reference either to "the beast of boredom, common sense" (292.28) or to a
document like the Encyclopaedia Britannica would advise us that the two
mappings of the Evening World violently distort a reality more accurately
rendered in the familiar maps of Dublin and Europe. Consider only the
example of the "Willingdone mormorial" (8.35), which has assumed, in
"Novo Nilbud," dimensions ridiculously disproportionate to any sense of
spatial exactitude, and a centrality incommensurate with its real cultural
importance (Dubliners call it an "overgrown milestone" [36.18]).n Argu-
ably, however, the misrepresentation works the other way around, the maps
of Dublin and Europe disfiguring in their own ways a reality rendered quite
accurately in the two maps of the night. For no one, phenomenologically,
ever experiences the world as it is depicted in the maps of Dublin and Eu-
rope-now, for example, as one sits in a room reading amid a clutter of fa-
miliar objects, so "obliffious" of abstract compass directions like "north"
and "south" and of places like "Monte Carlo," until print, exigency, or asso-
ciation brings them to mind, that they might more accurately be labeled,
as in Map B', "Noth," "Soot," and "mostly Carbo." As one encounters the
world in its average everydayness, moreover, one is always more intimately
yoked in space to some underlying but unseen "carcasses," as shown in Map
B', than to a locale like "the Caucasus," knowledge of which ordinarily
reaches one not through direct experience but through the "carcass's" print-
reading eyes and hearsay-accumulating ears. Only minimal reflection will
answer satisfactorily the question of whether the space within which one
personally passed the last day or two might better be construed as the heart-
Nocturnal Geoaraphy
land of "Amessica"-a big one-or an abstract "America"; of"Errorland" or
"Ireland" (62.25); of "your disunited kingdom" (188.16- 17) or oftheir theo-
retically "United" one.
The two sets of maps, then-one of surface geometries and objective rela-
tions, the other of subliminal and emotional relations-might be seen as
distortions of each other, each ignoring properties central to the structure of
its counterpart. However true it may be that the two chartings of the Eve-
ning World radically deform the place familiarly depicted in the maps of
Dublin and Europe, the maps of Dublin and Europe complementarily over-
look, and so violently distort, a number of matters overwhelmingly central
to the two maps of the night-only the most obvious of these embodied in
the "Willingdone mormorial" and all that it stands for. Visceral "matters
that fall under the ban of our infrarational senses," they find no represen-
tative expression in the objective version of things charted out in the two
maps ofthe world known to "day's reasons" (347.24).14
One way of seeing how destructively "day's reason" distorts concerns that
everywhere inform the Evening World would be to consider the notorious
"Phoenix Park incident." Everyone acquainted with Finneaans Wake knows
that its hero broods guiltily throughout the book about some shadowy act
of trespass committed in the Phoenix Park, although the exact nature of
"the alleged misdemeanor" remains vexingly unclear (35.6, 33.14-34.29).
Those who have sought to unravel the details note that the crime is "never
fully delineated, but is alluded to or momentarily illumined at several in-
stances";15 and in the criticism, "there extand by now one thousand and one
stories, all told," about "whatever it was ... he thried to two in the Fien-
dish park" (5.28-29, 196.9-II) .16 Yet even studies that acknowledge the
necessity of the crime's incertitude rather than trying to pin it down to a
violation of "section I I of the C[riminal]. L[aw]. A[mendment]. act 1885"
(61.9-10 [the one for which they nailed Oscar Wilde]) fail sufficiently to
appreciate that Finneaans Wake is "an imitation of the dream-state," and
not a chronicle ofreal-world affairs. Most critical treatments of "the crime"
overlook the obvious fact that almost everybody in the world has dreamed
of perpetrating some nasty public indiscretion, but that having dreamed of
such an offense hardly means that one really committed it. Much the same
is the case with our hero, who has "an impressive private reputation for
whispered sins" (69.4 ["private reputation" is a self-canceling phrase]), and
whose crime takes place not in the Daily World represented in the maps of
Dublin and Europe, but in their fleshier counterparts. The actual site of
HCE's criminal trespass is not a real-world Phoenix Park at all, but rather

an area figured more accurately in the Wake as "feelmick's park" (520. I)
or "Phornix Park" (80.6). Our hero's indiscretion, "in shorts" (437. II), is
localized in a particular spot about which, as an adherent of the "High
Church of England" (36.29), he feels great shame" (you know ... in your
art of arts ... as well as I do (and don't try to hide it) the penals lots I am
now poking at)" (188.30-32). This would explain, moreover, why "the
crime" assumes the proportions of original sin, and also why, like a great
deal of conflict in Finneaans Wake generally, it takes place under the shadow
of "the Willingdone mormorial" (as opposed to "the Wellington Memo-
rial"). In "Dublin by Daylight," the "overgrown milestone" no doubt means
as little to our hero as it does to the average Dubliner, and not least because
it lies in his own backyard. But in "Novo Nilbud by swamplight," by con-
trast, precisely its triviality-as well as its extended associations with con-
quest and power-makes it an ideal item onto which the Wake's dreaming
hero can displace important "infraliminal" concerns.
If one studies the endlessly modulating forms that HeE's "crime" takes as
it reappears throughout Finneaans Wake, it now becomes evident that how-
ever imaginary the "ludicrous imputation[s]" ascribed to him may be, he is
in fact guilty, down to the letter, of every single one of them (33.26). There
can be no doubt at all that the "magnificent brut" has urinated in the area in
question (503.29 ["Trickspissers vill be pairsecluded"]). If he is indeed a
married male with a daughter, he has certainly exposed himself to two fe-
males there; and considering some likely occasions on which he would have
done so with one of them, he would likely have taken voyeuristic pleasure
in turn. Finally, too, it is not improbable that he is fully guilty of "abusing
the apparatus" (520.7-8) and "hav[ing] taken his epscene licence ... as re-
gards them male privates" (523.34-35 [though these would be his "epicene"
own]). What is true of the Wake as a whole, then, is also true of this
"crime." "It's like a dream": "a baser meaning has been read into [all] these
[alphabetic and fictional] characters the literal sense of which decency can
safely scarcely hint" (33.14- 15). Precisely the slippery indefiniteness with
which the Wake treats HeE's crime, finally, allows Joyce to capture his hero's
guilt with an exactitude that would not be possible in the rule-bound, fact-
craving Daily World.
The critical inclination to take HeE's crime literally, as a fact of the
world, stems from a failure to take the appropriate "polar bearing[s]" in a
nocturnal universe whose every feature is a "polar andthisishis" (177.33) of
the evident forms of the Daily World ("and this is his antithesis"). The
taking of these "polar bearing[s]" means that some epistemological adjust-
Nocturnal Geoaraphy
ments are essential to an understanding of our hero's nightlife. Anyone who
believes that the maps of Dublin and Europe represent the world accurately
has spent perhaps too much time reading "the dully expressed" (500.15-16
[the Daily Express]) and too little "reading the Evening World." The world
preserved in these maps is held in place by countless rule-governed systems
maintained by a hierarchy of authorities ranging from legislators and geog-
raphers to cartographers, printers, and authors. One accedes to the truth
value of these "fibfib fabrications" (36.34), as a necessary accommodation
to a collective reality, by placing trust in an "awethorrorty" that far tran-
scends any individual (516.19), and also by succumbing to many tacit as-
sumptions about what the world is and what its people are. If the two day-
clear maps show the "field" of our hero's "existence" as netted everywhere
by this "awethorrorty," the two Wakean maps of the night show simply the
"felled" of his "exsystems" (246.4, 340.8; 148.18 [all systems]). For not
simply geometric space and geography, but everything on which the daily
world and our hero's ordinary bearings in it are predicated turns into its
"polar andthisishis" in the night-and in ways everywhere reflected by the
Wake's carefully modified predicates themselves. 17 Since the Wake as a whole
is linked together by dissolved predicates, we might now see them moving
its sleeping "sopjack" into such odd relations with imaginary "abjects" that,
simply through its "sintalks" (269.3 [nasty "syntax"]), the book dismantles
the structures on which the Daily World is predicated. And as this disman-
tling happens in small, so it also happens in large.
Authority tells us, for instance, that the Dublin represented in Map A was
founded in A.D. 837 by Viking warlords on fenland and estuarial silt. Not
so. The real ground and foundation on which Dublin or any other city rests
is the substratum shown "outlined aslumbered" in the two maps of the
Evening World-the ephemeral, labor-exploitable body (U, 164) which ob-
jectively drawn maps of the world could not represent even if those who
drew them wanted to. This is why the Brian 0 Linn who sleeps "skinside
out" at Finne8ans Wake, an ordinary man in fact, becomes in the "Big-
messer's conversions" of his sleep a "Priam Olim" (530.32,6.23 ["Priam" is
the father of a fallen city]) or, in the guise of a "Bygmester" (4.18 [Da. "mas-
terbuilder"]), the maker and founder of cities generally (532.5-554.10). All
such orderly structures as that literately represented in the map of Dublin
are layered up over the Adamic clay depicted in the map of "Novo Nilbud"-
"Amtsadam, sir, to you!" (532.6 ["am Adam"])-which, more than vacant
matter and two or three Great Individuals, constitute their real glory and
ground. The observation underscores at once the pathos of our hero's posi-

tion and the naivete of early Marxist dismissals of Finnesans Wake. In "Dub-
lin by Daylight," our expendable average man-"Canon Futter" (9.19-20
["cannon fodder"])-is a marginal, ephemeral nothing, whereas in "Novo
Nilbud by Swamplight"-"fiefeofhome"! (133.17)-he fills immensity ("Fe
Fo Fum"). Hence again, by way of an intonation that Maria Jolas early
noted in the book's title, the power immanent in the Wake's sleeping giant:
Finnesans, wake!, you have nothing to lose but your chains. 18
At least since 1789, authority in its liberal forms has also argued that the
world depicted in the maps of Dublin and Europe is one structured on the
humane ideals of "lebriety, frothearnity and quality" (133.31-32 ["liberty,
fraternity, and equality"]). Not so. As the submerged references to our hero's
pubkeeping business and a glance at the nocturnal maps will attest ("Canon
Futter" "earns" by selling "frothy" "quality" stout and providing the service
of "ebriety"), the world is "infrarationally" shaped by the form of an all-
engulfing patriarchy, in whose business and interests everyone is enmeshed.
Beyond that, as much feminist writing has shown, the world figured in the
maps of Dublin and Europe as one of free agency is latently underlined by
the pattern and force of male desire, as the nocturnal maps more accurately
reveal. I9 All this is only to note, as have others, that far from marking a
withdrawal from a civilization in crisis, Finnesans Wake in an odd way crys-
tallizes that crisis, and not least through its assault on the institution of a
language through which all the other institutions of a patriarchal culture
are transmitted from parent to child and from generation to generation, over
and over again, "the seim anew" (215.23).20 The conflicts assailing the "per-
pendicular person" shown snoring away in the two maps of the night, then-
the head of a household and a beleaguered patriarch in fact-are represen-
tative of larger crises agitating the social world of which he is a negligibly
small but nonetheless formative part. The two maps of the night show "the
old man on his ars"-and "Great Scrapp! 'Tis we and you andye and me and
hymns and hurts and heels and shields" (514.34-35 [note the scale of emo-
tion running from awed reverence to sheer pain in all these "hymns and
hurts," the variety of response ranging from flight to entrenched defense in
all these "heels and shields"]).
Accession to the rational and objective view of things represented in the
maps of Dublin and Europe entails the harnessing of the body to laws-and
not simply to Freudian laws of corporate control, but to a whole host of laws
that are inscribed on every square inch of the Wake's sleeping "stig-
matophoron," all the way from "tumptytumtoes" to "humptyhillhead":
laws that reform the "bourseday suit" he was born with so that it will "stand
Nocturnal Geosraphy 169

up tall!" and walk (620.1); laws like "section I I ofthe C.L.A. Act 1885" that
determine "Cur, quicquid, ubi, quando, quomodo, quoties, quibus auxiliis"
(188.8-9 [L. "why, what, where, when, how, how many times, with what
assistance"]) his body will have its pleasure;21 laws that determine where
his tongue must hit the palate so as to produce distinct words and polite
conversation rather than mere noise, Wakese, or offensive remarks; and laws
that harness his eyes and mind in the act of reading, not least, so that they
dutifully move along word by word, line by line, page after page, translat-
ing words into conventional senses-and all this, too, without any slouch-
ing or moving the lips. The world figured in the maps of Dublin and Europe,
then, depends for its coherence not simply on authority, but on authorship
as a collective enterprise and on language as a system, whereas the world
pervaded by the Wake's sleeping giant does not: the two maps of the night
show us a landform in which letters are buried (Lv), missing (e.g., 66.10-
28), and undeliverable (420.17-421.14). And consequently, "as my instruc-
tor unstrict me" (295.21-22), there are no rules down here (295.21); one
moves "ad libidinum in these lassitudes" (441.9-10). "Reading the Evening
World" obliges one to take "polar bearing[s]" not simply toward a world
conventionally structured by "awethorrorty," but toward the convention-
ally legible structures of authors as well.
"POL I TIC OECO ME DY"

The terms strewn over the two maps of the Evening World are fundamen-
tally sleep descriptive, of course; but not to notice that one of their inciden-
tal effects is the wholesale dismantling of the arrangements "set up over the
slop after the war-to-end war by Messrs a charitable government" (178.24-
26) and of the political status quo that Joyce would have known in the 1920S
and 1930S would be to overlook an essential aspect of the Wake's dark refor-
mations of space and "exsystems." Because the terms on the night maps do
formally what dreams do, revealing in the body of the Wake's sleeping giant
an underworld of aggressive forces and illicit pleasures whose release would
mean the rubbling of government and self-government both, they introduce
us obliquely to the Wake's definite, if eccentric "politicoecomedy" (540.26).
What began as a contrast between the conflicting geometries and geogra-
phies experienced in wakefulness and sleep, then, now modulates into a
contrast in polar world-views-one structured on the principles of mastery,
order, and "day's reasons," the other escaping structure altogether in anarchic

playfulness, great "thisorder" (540.19), and "alternate nightjoys" (357.18).
For if the maps of Dublin and Europe chart out a dimension that we might
loosely construe as the Empire, their nocturnal counterparts, by standing
the world "on its dead" (560.7-8 ["head"]), show the Empire in general and
the "old man on his ars" in particular without any clothes. "Vott Fonn!"
(345.9) .22
Because the Wake purveys an "idiol08Y" of "the murketplots" (352.19,
368.9 ["murked plots"])-and not an "ideology" of "the marketplace," it
stands in an extremely fringey relation to the culture that produced it. 23 As
a work committed to the "tropped head," it is antithetical to the go-getting
propellants of "capitalism" « L. capitalis, "of the head," the brainy center
of all hustling), and not just rationalistically but pragmatically too: "it
amounts to nada in pounds or pence" (521.5-6). On the other hand, a work
so anti-authoritarian as the Wake stands in an equally fringey relation to
any orthodox form of Marxism. 24 Everything in the world represented in the
maps of Dublin and Europe, according to "Marx and their Groups" (365.20),
is particled up out of labor, tremendous labor, whose impact is felt in even
the most desultory acts of waking life (standing, for instance). In the
night's "amstophere," by contrast, "all's loth and pleasestir" (263.22-23)-
"loth, please, to stir," because" all's love and pleasure." We might, therefore,
regard "the accomplished washout" (174.8) shown stratified in the two re-
lief maps as a member of the "industrial disabled" (409.25-26), "disbarred
... from unnecessary servile work" (411.2-3), if not overtly "on strike"
against the arrangements represented in the maps of Europe ("not what I
wants to do a strike of work" [409.33-34]). Or, again, we might construe
"the lifesize obstruction" as a practicing "passive resistant" (529.29, 72.19),
since "his most besetting of ideas ... [is] the formation ... of a ... stra-
tum" (76.2-5) and he does an extremely good job oflying there, even when
conflicts arise. Finally, too, we might think of the Wake's heroic loafer as a
figure "hungerstriking all alone" (199.4), since sleep, from one perspective,
is simply a kind of "hungerstrike" in which the self breaks its contract with
the management of reality. If the arrangements represented in the two maps
of the Daily World do not quite work, then, it is because the constituent
force that holds them together-the brainy "Headmaster" (251.28) -does
not work either. "Strike the day off, the nightcap's on nigh" (306.F2) .25
A complex joke, in turn, suggests that "the aboleshqvick" (302.18 ["Bol-
shevik"]) "hungerstriking all alone" in the maps of the night is perpetrating
a deviant form of "sabotag" on the West in "the wastes a'sleep" (64.1)-
where "The West's Asleep" and he lies dead to the world (hence "abolish-
Nocturnal Geo8raphy
quick"). For" after suns and moons, dews and wettings, thunders and fires,
comes sabotag" (409.28-29 [It. saboto, "Saturday"]). At its most trans-
parent, the line draws a list of weekdays into a weekend to tell us that our
hero is a "weekender" (124.36), on "vacation in life" (411.1-2), though in
no pedestrian sense of these terms. A good way "to kill time" (173.11) and to
"vacate" the head absolutely, sleep sends our hero into a "vacation" of the
deepest possible kind and so makes him not simply "a weekender," but a
complete "timekiller" (247.2), capable of putting an "end" to "weeks," per-
ceived years, days, minutes, and history.26 And as "he doze soze" (345.7-8),
he inevitably throws a wrench into the working of the Daily World, for as
any employer will tell you, sleeping is not productive, and in certain forms
can be outright "sabotage." Like many other terms in the Wake, all these
lines on "weekending" begin inviting us to wonder what would happen to
the patriarchal machinery of the "waste" if all its latter-day Vikings, all
"the gogetter[s] that'd make it pay like cash registers" (451.4-5), and all the
"bright young chaps of the brandnew braintrust" (529.5) just relaxed and
calmed down for a while. 27 Deeper entry into the mind of the "laboursaving
deviser" (585.15-16) shown plotting away furtively in the relief maps of
"Nilbud" and "neurope," then, raises the wholly speculative question of
what the evolved work of the world would be if the wheels of its production
were moved-as Finnegans Wake and its dreamwork were motivated-by
"gaylabouring" (6.23 [not "daylabouring"]) and pleasure determined to
have its out.
Finally evident in the play of all these contrasts is not primarily a po-
litical self-consciousness about a "state" so anarchic as the night, but a
prolonged and intense focus on the nature of conflict itself. What Joyce
called "irreducible antagonism[s)" produce unyielding tensions, at every
minute of the day and night, between the two "coexistent and compresent"
worlds that this chapter has explored (526.12) -one "the wikeawades warld"
(608.34 ["wide-awake world"]) represented in the geographically coherent
maps of Dublin and Europe, the other an "in risible universe" (419.3 [an
"invisible" and "risible" one]) immanent in their dark and carnal comple-
ments; one a geometrically constructed space accessible to vision and rea-
son, the other an "infrarational" dimension out of sight and out of mind. 2s
Study of neither of these "two worlds" in itself will account for the forma-
tion of our hero's body, his life, or any minute in the here-and-now; nor for
the anarchic, yet controlled "politicoecomedy" of the Wake. 29 Like the com-
promise formation of a dream, Finnegans Wake takes place in the area
where these two "coexistent and compresent" dimensions, each "equal and
17 2 JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

opposite" (488.9). both necessary to the living of any life yet both "eter-
nallyopposed" (488.IO-II), produce incessant tensions requiring constant
resolution. We might therefore think of the body of the Wake's sleeping hero
as a "bluddle filth" (10.8-9 [a "battlefield" of "blood and filth"]) in which
all these conflicts are set perpetually at war. In many ways, these conflicts
and the carnal ground in which they play themselves out are so alien to and
removed from consciousness that Joyce devises a whole new science to re-
construct their intrusion into our hero's "tropped head." Since his intellec-
tual forebear in this endeavor was Vico, this would be the point at which to
distance ourselves from the language of the Wake in order to consider the
impact on "the book of Doublends Jined" of The New Science and its world-
founding giants.

CHAPTER S EVE N
Vieo's "Ni8ht
of Darkness" :
The New Science
and Finnegans Wake
Darkness ... is the material of this Science, uncertain,
unformed, obscure. . . . (NS, 41)
"OUR FAMILY FURBEAR"

The critical work on Finne8ans Wake has failed to account fully for Joyce's
passionate interest in Giambattista Vico's New Science. Working from a sar-
donic sentence in one of Joyce's letters to Harriet Shaw Weaver ("I would not
pay overmuch attention to these theories, beyond using them for all they are
worth, but they have gradually forced themselves on me through circum-
stances of my own life" [L, I, 241; Jj, 554]), most critics of the Wake have
remained content to draw on a reading of Vico that had already become
gelled, as early as 1950, into a received form destined to be passed on from
study to study without much examination or modification. William York
Tindall, the last critic to put finishing touches on this orthodox version of
Joyce's Vico, tells the story best:
In each cycle of history there are three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human,
or the primitive, the semi-historic, and the historic. These three ages produce three
174
sacred customs: religion, marriage, and burial, the first a product of the divine age,
the second of the heroic, and the third of the human. After circular flux comes re-
flux. When one cycle is over, another begins, and, as the Phoenix rises from its
ashes, history repeats itself. The first divine age that we know about is the period
before the Trojan War. With that war, the heroic age began. The human age of
Athens and Rome led to the reflux, and from Rome's decay came a new age, as di-
vine, barbarous, and cruel as the first. The feudal period of Europe brought a return
to the heroic age. Vico lived in the human age, and it is easy to guess where we are. 1
There are, of course, other givens: Vico's conjecture that the crack of th under,
first sounded on the first page ofthe Wake, terrified men in a barbarous state
of nature into seeking shelter in caves and so into beginning the churning of
the wheels of social history; his conjecture that the terrifying thunderclap
caused men to try to duplicate its sound and its power by babbling ono-
matopoeically, thereby beginning the history of human language; and the
observation, first made by Beckett in 1929, that Joyce textured Finne8ans
Wake with an array of quadrupartite phrases which evoke the four human
institutions informing Vico's history:
There are numerous references to Vico's four human institutions-Providence
counting as one! "A good clap, a fore wedding, a bad wake, tell hell's well": "Their
weatherings and their marryings and their buryings and their natural selections":
"the lightning look, the birding cry, awe from the grave, everflowing on our times":
"by four hands offorethought the first babe of reconcilement is laid in its last cradle
of hume sweet hume." 1
Most ofthese accounts, however, misrepresent The New Science_ Vico specu-
lates that history may operate cyclically, in fact, in a conjectural conclusion
sixteen pages long, appended to a work of four hundred pages; 3 and all of
the details with which Tindall clarifies the nature ofVico's human ages can
be found in the synoptic fourth book of The New Science, a summary which,
together with Book Five, comprises only one-fourth of the entire work. 4
It is-and should be-hard to understand how the Vi co portrayed in
Joyce studies should have generated "passionate interest" in Joyce long before
he began the writing of Ulysses, let alone Finne8ans Wake (]J, 340). It
makes little sense to suppose that the realist who in Ulysses had invested so
much care in the portrayal of a single man in a single city on a single day in
history should have ended his career writing a book in polyglottal puns in
order to transmit the news that the same things happened over and over
again in quadrupartite cycles. It is, moreover, difficult to understand how
this received vision of Vi co could have caused Joyce to claim that The New
Science strongly forced itself on his life or that Vico anticipated and yielded
Vieo's "Ni8ht of Darkness" 175

richer insights than Freud; indeed, it is hard to see how the established
sense of Vico bears any relation to Freud at all, or to the night that Fin-
negans Wake reconstructs. Yet when Joyce first conceived of writing a book
that would treat the mind in sleep, he also immediately conceived ofVico as
a prototype whose work would serve him (fl, 554). And after Finnegans
Wake was completed, he remarked in reply to adverse reviews in the Italian
press that the whole book was founded on the work of an Italian thinker (L,
III, 463). He seems to have conceived of The New Science, in fact, as an in-
tellectual foundation that would underlie Finnegans Wake as the Odyssey had
Ulysses; and like the Homeric correspondences in that novel, the references
to the four ages of Vichian nature internal to Finnegans Wake seem only to
be the superficially most apparent outcroppings of a conception fundamen-
tal to the book's whole treatment of the dark. Joyce's thinking was never me-
chanical, and the imaginative transaction by which he brings Vico into the
Wake proves to be no exception to that rule.
Like the Wake, The New Science was not much read or understood in its
own day, and when it finally was understood, it was rightly perceived as a
work that threatened both Christian orthodoxy and the body of mainstream
rationalist Enlight.:nment thinking. Nowadays, historians armed with hind-
sight-the historian's gift-speak ofVico as a thinker who effected a revolu-
tion in the study of history and the human sciences no less profound than
that which Galileo effected in the natural sciences; the English translators
of The New Science find in the book "the germs of all the sciences of social
change," and they speak of historiography as "Vichian and pre-Vichian. "5
The foresightfully radical snap of thought that made Vico unread and
misunderstood in his own day-the same decades of the eighteenth century
in which Pope wrote his Essay on Man-was his supposition that our politi-
cal forebears, men in a state of nature, were not enlightened rationalists
who could agree on social contracts and protective alliances, but semi-
bestial clods who had barely thrown off their fur, speechless giants who rut-
ted, bore furry children, and left them to wallow in their own excrement
while they themselves roamed off to sate their appetites (NS, 192ff; 369ff).
This was a conception of history that needed a Darwin before it could be-
come at all generally accepted, and it bore in itself a host of corollaries no
less radical. Well before the appearance of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind,
The New Science necessarily implied that human consciousness was an evo-
lutionary variable, changeable with history and society, and that it de-
pended on the whole human past for its definition. The anthropoid giants
who formed the first human society in Vico-a huddled, cave-dwelling

knot of men and women who only over generations would begin even dimly
to grasp the concept of a family-these forebears had a consciousness radi-
cally alien from our own, largely by having none at all; the people born ten
generations later had a slightly more articulated consciousness than these
forebears; and those born later still in Homeric Greece had an even different
consciousness yet. To discover the genesis of rational consciousness in "our
family furbear" (132.32) is one whole struggle of The New Science, which
tries scientifically to determine how beasts driven into caves by the crash of
thunder happened to make themselves over generations into learned En-
lightenment thinkers capable of building and governing the great nations of
the world. Vico's premise, of course, completely breaks with such forms of
Enlightenment belief as Cartesian rationalism and Lockean empiricism,
both of which regarded "Reason" as an eternal manifestation of laws of na-
ture determined if not by a benevolent deity then by a transcendental order;
and implicitly, but not explicitly, it therefore breaks with the world-view
out of which rationalism evolved. 6
The inherent threat that The New Science posed both to Christian thought
and to the newly rising force of rationalism will explain why Vico had in-
evitably to refer to "Divine Providence" in The New Science and also why he
preserved sacred history by locating the Hebrew race outside of the secular
world-and essentially beyond the scope of his history-at a region of earth
isolated by deserts and centuries from the rest of humanity; for according to
the orthodox thought of his age, Adam came to earth already equipped
with a language and an innately rational, if fallible, moral sense. As op-
posed to the sacred history of the Hebrew race, Vico's "gentile history"
treats of the "gentile races"-of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Teutonic Germany,
and the pagan Mid-East-whose forebears are born to earth wrapped in
nothing but animal appetites and fears. Although Vico claims that a Divine
Providence secretly guides the gentile races, his own evidence suggests that
the "famblings" (582.5 [or "families"]) of which these races are composed
merely stumble forward in blind, godless "fumblings": "gentile" history is
made by men descended from animals, and not always welU lfthe academ-
ics of Vico's Italy failed to understand his work, then, it was because, like
Descartes and Locke, they supposed that reason and enlightened thought of
the kind perceptible in the examples of classical Greece and Rome and in
the Book of Genesis were natural, transhistorical attributes of the human
mind: Enlightenment thinkers were accustomed to referring to the sage ex-
amples of Homer, Aesop, and other figures of antiquity who transcended
their historical age; Pope translated the Iliad, LaFontaine brought Aesop
Vico's "Night of Darkness" 177

into French. In Vico, however, rational consciousness appears in human
history only during the Age of Reason, and to find it in the past is to project
the modern mind backwards over the centuries to a historical age in which
people possessed their own modes of consciousness and their distinct social
forms.s
The Third Book of The New Science, "Discovery of the True Homer, illus- II
trates in detail the failures of nonevolutionary reconstructions of the past

(NS, 780-914) . For Vico shows here, in ways that richly illuminate Ulysses,
how Homer, far from being an enlightened sage, was the exponent of a bar-
baric tribalism. It has become a commonplace in the criticism of Ulysses to
remark that the novel's Homeric correspondences belittle Bloom and make
him seem laughably unheroic and impotent when compared to a warrior
like Ulysses. Yet the humor that Joyce generates by making Bloom a modern-
day Ulysses is not entirely of his own making; it is also history's. The Odys-
sey as a whole sets up a vital cultural backdrop against which Bloom's
twentieth-century heroism and endurance define themselves. At the mo-
ment in Ulysses paralleled to that passage in the Odyssey in which Ulysses
regains his homeland, Bloom sits still and, rather than wreaking havoc, uses
the weapons of intelligence, sympathy, and fair judgment;9 arming a bow of
reason with arrows of scruples, according to Joyce's schema, he neither mur-
ders Molly nor savages Boylan. Had Joyce not used Ulysses as a sustained
foil against whom Bloom could be compared in every human article, it
would have been almost impossible to give cultural perspective to what
might seem only at first Bloom's dubiously heroic capacity to survive, self-
possessed, in the face of modern adversity. Against a testicle-ripping, nose-
slicing hero like Homer's, Bloom bears our respect. And the ability of civi-
lization to evolve new forms of heroism at the expense of older and more
barbarous ones is a power that Vico, a voice at odds with those who have
appealed to the sage authority of Homer, emphatically champions:
Let us allow [Homer] to tell of the inhuman custom (so contrary to what the writ-
ers on ... natural law ... claim to have been eternally practiced among the nations)
which then prevailed among the barbarous peoples of Greece (who are held to have
spread humanity throughout the world): to wit, that of poisoning arrows, ... [and]
of denying burial to enemies slain in battle, leaving their unburied bodies instead as
a prey to dogs and vultures .... Nevertheless, if the purpose of poetry is to tame the
ferocity of the vulgar whose teachers the poets are, it was not the part of a wise
man, versed in such fierce sensibilities and customs, to arouse admiration of them in
the vulgar in order that they should take pleasure in them and be confirmed in them
by that pleasure. (NS, 781-82)

As the example of "The True Homer" attests. the problem that Vico faced
in accounting for the development of the gentile nations "from next to
nothing" (4.36-5.1) was twofold in its complexity. If the men who formed
the first social groups "at the very dawn of protohistory" possessed no rea-
son at all (169.2 I). and if all subsequent history were not inherently the
product of reasoning individuals. he had to explain not only the movement
that lifted human society out of caves into Enlightenment Italy. but also the
process by which "our family furbear" created a rational mind "from next to
nothing" of his own crude power. Both problems lie at the heart of The New
Science. and Vico begins to address them by developing a form of internal
dialectic to which Marx would later refer in Capital and which the Marxist
philosopher Georges Sorel would even later apply to the theory of the gen-
eral strike.1O Vico's postulate that human society begins when animalistic
giants are driven into caves by the terrifying sound of thunder might have
taken any number of forms. Had Vico our knowledge of the "new science"
of animal evolution. for instance. he might have begun his history with a
picture of apes seeking refuge from the jungle. As the Wake likes to put it.
giving an evolutionary intonation to a music hall song in deference to Vico
and Darwin both. "The Sister of the Wife of the Wild Man from Borneo Has
Just Come to Town" (130.22-24. 331.34-36. 345.4-5. 382.24-26. 415.7-8.
481.33- 35. 502.26-27; U, 380). Since Vico finds innumerable giants and
thunder-gods in the earliest myths and human records, however. he puts the
originating human moment in those terms (NS. 193. 301. 380) .II The estab-
lishment of coarsely gesturing and babbling animal families in caves at once
sets up a crude class structure differentiating those who own caves from
those yet unsettled vagrants who do not. and the social tension resulting
from that simple difference is never to relax in the course of Vico's history;
indeed. it is only to grow more complex and entangledY
This would explain, of course, how Marx could find in Vico a prototype
for his own more refined "new science" of dialectical materialism. And it
also helps to explain how Joyce could find Vico's historical vision compat-
ible with his own. since it operates with much more sophistication and in-
tricacy than the comparisons with Jung and its general treatment in Joyce
criticism would suggest. Achieving an inclusiveness that Joyce claimed not
to find either in Freud's theory of consciousness. or in the socialist and anar-
chist literature in which he was widely read. The New Science gave Joyce a
vision of a recurring patterning in social history that at once respected the
unique problems and conditions of successive social eras, yet also isolated.
Vico's "Ni8ht of Darkness" 179

as Marx did, social forces that manifested themselves in different cultures,
in different material settings, and in different periods of history.
Joyce also undoubtedly admired Vico's peculiarly modern willingness to
admit total unreason along with reason as a motivating force of history.
Mainstream rationalist thinking bred in the European social community a
hypocritical nineteenth-century politics verbally capable of asserting its al-
liance with Reason and its aspiration to rise onward and upward to work
out the beast, but in fact capable of creating social conditions that would
produce in Ireland, for instance, a famine described as "the worst event of
its kind recorded in European history at a time of peace." 13 This is essen-
tially the politics described in that section of the Wake which Joyce called
"Haveth Childers Everywhere" (PP.532-54), where HCE, stuttering con-
stantly with guilt, dubiously justifies the aspirant importance of his work to
his family by telling the whole story of civilization and including among
his accomplishments a rather large number of mistakes: the slums of London
(Pp.543-45), the pollution of the Liffey (p. 550), and the ambiguously pro-
ductive rape of Ireland (p. 547). Nature gives Vico's man the mind of an un-
conscious animal; Vico's history is the process by which man, of his own
blind, stumbling power, slowly builds that natural mind toward conscious-
ness, interdependently with language and civil institutions.
Here, too, Vico's vision of history certainly appealed to Joyce, because it
extended into social history processes that Joyce himself had sought to trace
in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where, as Stephen'S personality
evolves in time from infancy to young adulthood, the language and con-
sciousness through which he perceives and defines himself also evolve inter-
dependently, all as aspects of one another. Joyce would also have found
in Vico, then, a vision of historical growth as intricate as the vision of the
personal growth that he represented in A Portrait-the struggle of "a bat-
like soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and
loneliness ... " (P, 183). The phrase, descriptive both of Ireland's and of
Stephen'S individual development in A Portrait, defines equally well the evo-
lutionary development of human history in The New Science. It is not en-
tirely clear, in fact, whether Joyce came to admire Vico because he found
the vision of human growth presented in A Portrait confirmed in The New
Science; or whether it was Vico who helped cause Joyce to scrap Stephen
Hero and to rework it into the form that would come to be A Portrait. All we
know of the original transaction that would cause Joyce to champion The
New Science throughout his literary career and through all the pages of the
Wake is that he first read and expressed passionate interest in Vico during his

years in Trieste (1904-15); that he worked hard on Stephen Hero, abandoned
it completely, and rewrote it as A Portrait during the same period; 14 and that
Vico's vision of growth of the soul of mankind shares many affinities with
joyce's vision of the growth of the soul.
POETIC WISDOM
This comparison suggests a final radical corollary to the propositions on
which The New Science is predicated-the corollary most interesting to a
reader of the Wake. Since Vico argues that the language, consciousness, so-
ciety, and problems of any moment in history develop as consequences of
decisions made in a historical past in which the pressures of the immediate
moment far outweigh those of any speculative future; and since he assumes
that human history begins in the minds of bestial giants in a state of nature,
he puts himself into the difficult position of having to account for "social"
choices made by irrational beings who cannot know what "choice" and "so-
ciety" are. If the language, consciousness, and civil institutions of Europe
grew by a process of internal dialectic out of forests in which barbaric, ter-
rified animals scrambled for shelter at the sound of thunder, then a knowl-
edge of the process by which European civilization came to exist depended
on a knowledge of how those wholly irrational beings thought. His enter-
prise, then, is identical to that of Finne8ans Wake in that it entails a willed
abandonment of reason and a sympathetic entry into unconsciousness:
But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses ... by ab-
stractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our languages abound in, and so
refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers ...
that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of [the world perceived
by the first men]. ... It is equally beyond our power to enter into the vast imagina-
tion of those first men, whose minds were not in the least abstract, refined, or spiri-
tualized, because they were entirely immersed in the senses, buffeted by the pas-
sions, buried in the body.... we can scarcely understand, still less imagine, how
those first men thought who founded gentile humanity. (NS, 378)
The problem that Vico addresses in this passage is not one that he despairs of
solving; indeed, in the central and most lengthy book of The New Science,
"Poetic Wisdom," he tries to reconstruct the "scarcely imaginable" minds of
those aboriginal first men in order to account for the history that grows out
of them. "Poetic Wisdom" is the linch-pin of Vico's history, the studied and
labored piece of evidence upon which he builds his science.
Vico's "Ni8ht of Darkness" lSI

Our treatment [of history] must take its start from the time these creatures began to
think humanly. In their monstrous savagery and unbridled bestial freedom there
was no means to tame the former or bridle the latter but the frightful thought of
some divinity, the fear of whom ... is the only powerful means of reducing to duty a
liberty gone wild. To discover the way in which this first human thinking arose in
the gentile world, we encountered exasperating difficulties which have cost us the
research of a good twenty years. [We had] to descend from these human and refined
natures of ours to those quite wild savage natures, which we cannot at all imagine
and can comprehend only with great effort. (NS, :n8)
In a direct and substantial way, the mind that Joyce sought to reconstruct in
FinneBans Wake was equivalent to the aboriginal mind that Vico sought to
comprehend in Book II of The New Science; what Freud called "the dream-
work" and "the unconscious," Vico, lacking psychoanalytic terminology,
simply called "poetic wisdom" and "ignorance":
But these first men who later became the princes of the gentile nations, must have
done their thinking under the strong impulsion of violent passions, as beasts do ....
Hence poetic wisdom, the first wisdom of the gentile world, must have begun with a
metaphysics not rational and abstract like that of learned men now, but felt and
imagined, as that of these first men must have been, who, without power of ratioci-
nation, were all robust sense and vigorous imagination. This metaphysics was their
poetry, a faculty born with them (for they were furnished by nature with these
senses and imaginations); born of their ignorance of causes, for ignorance, the
mother of wonder, made everything wonderful to men who were ignorant of every-
thing. . . . (NS, 340, 375; see also 399)
In order to substantiate his dialectical account of history, essentially, Vico

had to invent an elaborate depth psychology-a "metaphysics," in his
phrase-that would enable him to comprehend the unconsciousness out of
which men made social choices "in the deplorable obscurity of the begin-
nings" of the human world (NS, 344):
But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote
from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all
question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that
its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human
mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have
bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it,
He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of na-
tions, or civil world, which, since men made it, men could come to know. This aber-
ration was a consequence of that infirmity of the human mind by which, immersed
and buried in the body, it naturally inclines to take notice of bodily things [i.e., the
physical universe], and finds the effort to attend to itself too laborious .... (NS, 331)

When Vico proposes to work his way back into the unconscious mind of
these first men by discovering "its principles in the modifications of our own
human mind," he is not simply proposing-as the psychoanalytic move-
ment would two centuries later-that a stream of primitive, infantile irra-
tionality, reflected in the myths and fables of the past, underruns our mod-
ern civil consciousness. His vision is primarily historical. If consciousness
is a man-made property that changes in historical time, then each individ-
ual owes the way in which he thinks to the generation of his parents; yet his
parents owe their thinking and behavior to the generation of their parents;
and so forth, in a chain extending back to the beginnings of the gentile
world. Those crude choices made by Vico's giants, then, inform all minds
born out of them; and the terrifying irrationalities and encaved social struc-
tures that they stumbled into still perpetuate themselves, despite the trans-
formations of generations and generations, "in the modifications of our own
human minds"-"the traditions of all dead generations weighing like an
Alp on the brains of the living," in one of Marx's psychoanalytic phrases. IS
This conception of history as a force funneling into and determining any-
one's life in the present rang particularly true to Joyce, who was born into a
family and a culture morally structured by a Catholicism genetically aris-
ing out of the Middle Ages. "Like a aentile man," too (150.26), he was born
into a nation whose political life had been determined by actions militantly
undertaken in the twelfth century, when Henry II, asking the English-born
pope of the Vatican for permission to take in hand the immoral Irish, made
the city of Dublin the eternal property of the citizens of Bristol. 16 Joyce was
born into a culture whose social structures were shaped by the infinitely
inheritable superstition of racism, a habit of mind passed on from parent to
child over generations and extending backwards through linguistic history
into a time when the verb "to like" was synonymous with the preposition
"like," and when to "like" someone meant that one found the likeness of his
own race and blood in them. 17 Joyce was born into a family and a religion
that implanted in him a fear of thunder so great that throughout his life he
refused to live in cities known for the frequency of their thunderstorms and
hid in closets, as Vico's giants did in caves, whenever thunder rent the sky; it
was Vico's primitive man who bequeathed to generation after generation the
fear of celestial punishment that found its way into joyce's consciousness.
And it was Vico's giants who bequeathed to the minds of all human genera-
tions after them the social unit of the encaved private family.
Twentieth-century psychoanalysis proposes to isolate and cure the irra-
Vieo's "Niaht of Darkness"

tionally disturbed components of personality by analyzing the fears and fix-
ations inherited from parents in an impressionable, irrational infantile past.
Vico's axiomatic observation that rationality is a man-made structure his-
torically evolved out of animal unreason will suggest why joyce would have
regarded Freudian theory as a diminution of Vico's insights. Since The New
Science sees the consciousness into which one grows as the product of a his-
torical development that begins in the terror of thunderstruck "furbear[s),"
it complementarily implies that the unconscious conflicts rifting modern
minds and societies are historically transmitted over much more than one
generation. The individual cannot purge himself of neurotic unhappiness
by rethinking his familial past alone, because his parents are largely inno-
cent transmitters of a language and an ideology determined by a history
that transcends them and himself both. Fully to understand the irrationali-
ties understructuring his mind, he has to exorcise his parents' parents, and
his parents' parents' parents, and the "first men, stupid, insensate, and hor-
rible beasts," who laid down the foundations of human civil life and con-
sciousness (NS, 374). As a Vichian who had already extensively examined
his relations with his mother and father in A Portrait and Ulysses, the joyce
of Finnegans Wake is as deeply interested in the remote determinants ofneu-
roses as in the immediate ones. Action according to this psychological
model is evident both in joyce's life and in his representations of it: "tapping
his brow" in the hour of his therapeutic release from the past in Ulysses, and
muttering that "in here it is I must kill the priest and king," Stephen Deda-
Ius has to lay to rest not only the irrationalities inherited from a devoutly
self-abnegating Catholic mother and a self-destructive, jobless father, but
also those inherited from the medieval Catholicism and the English eco-
nomic policy that made possible that mother and that father (U, 589). In
order to understand how that Church and that feudal economic behavior
originated, joyce in turn had to try to understand, in Finnegans Wake, the
"furbear[s)" buried in the darkness of Vico's aboriginality. All of history is
in one's parents; and the Oedipal struggle is with the whole of the past.
This understanding so fundamentally informs The New Science that it
shapes Vico's whole prose style, whose texture is as dense, punning, and
polyglottal as that of Finnegans Wake. In Vico's "gentile history," man cre-
ates over generations his own human nature-and exactly as he also creates
human nations. Since human nature and nations evolve interdependently
with language, Vico conveys their commutual coming-to-be, their nasci-
mento, by weaving through The New Science an assemblage of words originat-
ing in the same aboriginal root *gen- ("to come to be") -whose meaning

is also its evolution. Uttered in the darkness of prehistory by descendants
of Vico's first men, this syllable generates over generations, and in all the
nations of the gentile world, a diverse vocabulary whose meaning is the
genesis of human nature. (Some of its English outgrowths are diagrammed
in figure 7.1.) On the evolution of vocables like this, and the freight they
carry, Joyce succinctly comments in Finne8ans Wake that "the world, mind,
is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever, man, on all matters that
fall under the ban of our infrarational senses" (19.35-20.1)-where the ap-
positional equations of "world," "mind," "man," and his "runes" replicate
the vision of The New Science. An aspect of his science, as the etymology of
Vico's "gentility" will attest, is the conceptual identity of "nationality" and
"genitality": originating in the same source, both words embody the same
tensions. It is for this reason, in Finne8ans Wake, that HCE's encounter with
the "cad" (35.11; 35.1-36.4 [< Fr. cadet, "younger son"]) takes place in the
shadows of the Wellington Memorial (36.18), the dream-displaced scene of
his sexual "crime"; the conflict underlying this encounter, underlined by
references to nationalist and generational struggles, is localized in HCE's
genitalia. In The New Science and Finne8ans Wake, national and genera-
tional struggles are also genital struggles, because they all bring patriarchal
authorities and those subjugated to such authority into visceral conflict
over issues of power and potency.
Since Vico's "Poetic Wisdom" in its own way strives rationally to recon-
struct the minds of those irrational first men whose animal instincts began
to determine the subsequent evolution of history and human conscious-
ness, it encompasses the psychoanalytic work that Freud achieved in recon-
structing the infantile mind whose fears and pleasure determine the shape
of personal history. Here, too, Joyce learned much more from The New Sci-
ence than a principle of eternal recurrence. Vico gave him the dream-work
by which he spun out Finne8ans Wake. What Vico called "Poetic Wisdom,"
Freud explained two hundred years later as the primary process of the un-
conscious. But Vico also anticipates Freud, and ultimately contributes to
Ulysses and the Wake by drawing a rich fund of insight from the observation
and the memory of human infancy. In trying to understand how the first men
thought and oriented themselves towards others in a world void of society,
he naturally seeks to fathom the wholly unformed mind of the child. Be-
cause Vico's first men are born into a state of nature and differ from their
modern descendants largely in lacking the benefits of a long-evolved lan-
guage and consciousness instilled in children by the process of education,
Vico axiomatically assumes that these people thought as infants and chil-
Vieo's "Ni8ht of Darkness"

gentile
gentle
kind
lkindness
kin
+
nation
native
nativity
natal
inl1ate
nature t
pregnancy genuine genitals genius
genial
ingenious
ingenuity
genesis
or
genital
gentlhty gentleness kInd national .
r"o",
natural progeny genitality geniality engine
nationality na~ve progenItor
genteel gentleman , ingenue
r . r 1
pregnant
kIndred
0"'00'''= <0O,,,",""
Jaunty noel
t
:;:~ M.E. M.E. kwd
M.E.
engin
Fr. ingenue
(artless)
0.',.
gentri (s) e kynde M.E.
king L. natio
(breed;
naif
nati[ a.Fr.
t
1
M.E. gentil M.E. kind(el a.Fr.
kynd(e)
a.E.
f
a.E.
tribe
related
no(u)el
nael L. genuinus
engin
(skill,
t
by birth) (inborn, innate. inven-
gecynde cyning authentic)
(natural, (king) L. casus tion)
Innate) L. praegnantis genitivus L.
L. natalis Med. L.
L. L. gentjJi (heavy with (case of ingeniosus
a.E. cynd dies ingeniator
(pagan) a.E. child) origin)
gecynd(e) (day of (contriver)
cynn birth)
1
(nature,
(race, L. ingenuitas
a. Fr. race, L. progenies L. genitalisl (frankness,
family) (creative.
birth) (descent,
fruitful) L. genialis innocence)
descendants)
(of birth or
L genitivu5 generation;
(of birth) nuptial.
joyous)
L. ingeniare
(contrive)
L. gentilis Germ.
*kundiz L. ingenuus
(ofthe Germ. *kuningaz
(natural, (inborn,
same clan) (son of
native) innate,
royal kin)
honest)
Germ.
L. praegnas
Germ.
*kundjaz *kunjam
(family, (family) L. genui,
1
race) gignerc,
L. (g) nasci. past participle
present participle genitus
(g) nascens, (to beget,
past participle produce) L. genius
L. gens, gentis (g)natus (innate spirit; native
(belonging together
by birth; clan de-
scended through
male line from
(to be born)
t
*gna-sko-
\ *gi-gn·
intelligence; spirit
of procreation)
'" *gen-wo-
<O_O'O'\~J '~"'1
*gn-
\ *gna- *gen-
"
Figure 7.1. Etymological chart: "gen-. The Nature of the Generation of the Gentile Nations: "the
sibspeeches of all mankind have foliated (earth seizing them!) from the root of some funner's stotter
all the soundest sense to be found immense" (96.30-32) ("sibspeeches": "subspecies" of related
["sib"] tongues; "some funner's stotter": "some funny stutter" [Ger. Storter, "stutter" + Nor. Sam-
fundets Storter, "Pillars of Society"])
genetic generous genus generation genealogy recognize acquaintance gnosis nobility narrative know
t germ t gender generate gonads ".
I cognition •
I notion
gnostic noble narration
genetics I generoSitYl genre
generator
generative rreeccooggnnll: tziaOnnce •. acqruaint notice gnosticism
narrate
germinal generic regenerate I agnostic ignorance
germinate degenerate cosmogony cognlzant diagnosis ignorant
theogony cognizance prognosis ignore
engender
-gony gnomon
gnomic
M.E.
M.E. acqueynten unc(o) urh

acoin ten (strange.
t unknown)
O.Fr.
genereux O.Fr.
engenderer
O. Fr.
acointer t
O.Fr. genre
(kind.
sort)
~k~~~~~~;e.
stUdY)1
TL ~~~~ming
. (;
O.E. uncurh
(unknown)
acquainted) O.E. cunnan

(to know how
L. generalis L. recognoscere, L. accognoscere to; be able)
(belonging recognitum (to know
to one kind; (to recognize) perfectly) O.E. curh
relating to L. narraTe (known)
L. generosus all) L. cognoscere, (to tell.
(of noble birth; cognitum relate)
excellent) Gr. gnomon
(to get to (one who
L. generaTe. know. learn) knows)
L. germinare
generatus
(to sprout) O.E. cnawan
(to engender. (to know)
1
beget)
L. germ en
Gr. -gonia
(generation)
Germ. *kunrh-
t
Germ.
*know-
(sprout. fetus.
offshoot)
Gr. genea L. (g) noscere. (g) notus

(race) (to get to know.
Gr. gonos
Gr. genesis become acquainted)
(birth.
(birth. origin)
begetting.
generation)
r
*gon-o-
Gr. gignoskein
(to know)
*gnow-
proto-Indo-European
*gn-. *gen-
(to beget. bring
forth. conceive)
dren do (NS, 2II-16): according to fears, pleasures, and instincts. What dis-
tinguishes the newborn child of the modern world from "the first peoples,
who were the children of the human race" is the weight of history preceding
his birth (NS, 498). It is a long, complex history whose main lessons the
newborn child learns in the first few years of life when his parents teach
him, as in the opening pages of A Portrait, language, morality, identity, fam-
ily, and both the superstitions and the achievements of millennia (NS, 336).
But the mind of an infant not yet tutored into the orders of language, rea-
son, and social customs-not yet able to distinguish anything apart from
its pleasures and fears-that is the mind which nature gives to "the children
of nascent mankind" in Vico's Science, the mind out of which his aboriginal
giants crudely act and "reason" (NS, 376).
In the psychogenesis that Joyce derived from Vico, "our family furbears"
spent their entire lifetimes in a state of unconsciousness, and it was out of
this unformed, infantile mind that they began to generate the utterances
and groupings from which our own language and civilization grew. In "Po-
etic Wisdom," Vico constructs an elaborate psychology of the Unconscious,
or "Ignorance," to explain the dreamlike ways in which this infantile and
history-originating mind worked and made choices. His reconstruction be-
gins with a willed, imaginary abandonment both of rationalism and of the
man-made Newtonian order in which rationalism found its object:
From these first men, stupid, insensate, and horrible beasts, all philosophers and
philologians should have begun their investigations of the wisdom of the ancient
gentiles .... And they should have begun [not with physics, but] with metaphysics,
which seeks its proofs not in the external world but within the modifications of the
mind of him who meditates it. For since this world of nations has certainly been
made by men, it is within these modifications that its principles should have been
sought. And human nature, so far as it is like that of the animals, carries with it this
property, that the senses are its sole way of knowing things. (NS, 374)
"In the early childhood of the world," however, this sensory "knowing of
things" is not perceptual, but animal and instinctive (NS, 69): for "men at
first feel without perceiving, then they perceive with a troubled and agi-
tated spirit, finally they reflect with a clear mind" (NS, 218). Men void of
the learned capacity to perceive, who sense nothing but their own feelings,
can only stand as giants in proportion to all the rest of the unborn world
("the human mind, because of its indefinite nature, wherever it is lost
in ignorance makes itself the rule of the universe in respect of everything
it does not know" [NS, 180-81]). "Born in ignorance of causes, ignorance
making everything wonderful to men ignorant of everything," the first men

of Vico's "giantle" humanity (509.19 ["gentile," "giant"]) accordingly re-
semble the unconscious hero of Finneyans Wake-an "overgrown babeling"
who lies "fum in mow" (6.31, 596.6)-by virtue of a gigantic egoism that
knows in the world nothing but sensation interior to the body. Vico's "gi-
antle[s]" move organically through the Wake because they have the sen-
sibilities both of Joyce's unconscious hero and of unconscious human in-
fants, "in [whose] mental life ... today," according to Freud, "we can still
detect the same archaic factors which were once dominant generally in the
primeval days of human civilization." 18
There are now two ways of regarding the genesis of the world into which
this infantile mind awakens. In one, invented by Newton and upheld by sci-
entific rationalism, the world begins when a God immanent in nature occa-
sions an astronomical Big Bang that hurls the inanimate physical matter of
billions of galaxies outward into space to form, over eons and in a single
star-system, a planet whose molecules will providentially start replicating
themselves, in turn to generate animate matter capable of reproduction,
and then self-consciousness, and then the inspired writing of revelatory
books like Genesis: creation is already there, completely ordered and wait-
ing to be known as the infant grows. In the second version, told in Genesis
and upheld both in Finneyans Wake and in Vico's New Science of nescience,
"the world in its infancy" begins when a space-pervading spirit named "I
AM" (the Hebrew JHVH) starts gathering the appearances of nature out of a
dark and void formlessness, paramount among them the form of an aborigi-
nal man who becomes capable of naming animals, shaping the world, in-
venting and learning concepts like "matter," and evolving over time a mind
like Newton's, trained in the pragmatic fictions of mechanical materialism:
creation happens dynamically, from the inside out, as the world continually
unfolds in "the modifications of our human mind." If the first of these gene-
ses regards as primary the knowing of external matter, through science
« L. scio, "I know"), Vico's genesis regards as primary the not-knowing of
the human mind, whose coming-to-be through nescience ("I AM") will ul-
timately generate the man-made constructs of science and reason. In words
taken from what Vico called his" 'new science in negative form,' the form,
that is, of a destructive criticism of existing theories": 19
... as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding
them (homo intellinendo fit omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man
becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intellinendo fit omnia),
and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when man under-
stands, he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not under-
Vieo's "Niyht of Darkness" 189

stand, he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself
into them. (NS, 405)
The "giantle" world of Vi co's New Science, then, originates exactly as the
world originates in the Book of Genesis, and exactly as it always and only
originates in the minds of human infants. "Lost in ignorance," "buried in
the body and immersed in the senses," these impercipient, space-pervading
giants, informed by jov(e) or j(eh)ov(ah), rise from an unconsciousness
that only knows "I AM" into "gentile" human "nature" by gathering from
dark formlessness the etymologically related property of physical "na-
ture"-animating it and making it sensible according to anthropocentric
principles of infantile psychology that Vico elaborates throughout "Poetic
Wisdom" (see NS, 180-7, 211-12):
The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things
[as is] characteristic of children .... This philologico-philosophical axiom proves
to us that in the world's childhood men were by nature sublime poets. (NS, 186)
Since Vico's aboriginal man actively creates the world by "making things
out of himself," "the first nature" of gentile humanity in The New Science is
"a poetic or creative nature, which we may be allowed to call divine": "in
the world's childhood" of Vico's Divine Age, "men [are] by nature poets,"
and "the world in its infancy [is] composed of poetic nations" (NS, 187, 2I6
[italics mine]). The key terms here-as in all of these quotations and "Po-
etic Wisdom" as a whole-are "nature" (or "nations") and "poetry": Vico
employs the latter in its etymological sense of "creating" or "making" (from
the Gr. poiesis) rather than in the sense of literary production, since the
giants who people "the world in its infancy" know no language or writing
("infancy," etymologically, < L. infans ["not speaking"]). Just as the limits
of his culture's vocabulary cause Vico to adopt the term "ignorance" to de-
note "unconsciousness," so he uses the term "poetic wisdom" to denote the
manifold forms of unconscious thinking that Freud would study more spe-
cialistically in his work on infantile sexuality. Treating of "metaphor, " "syn-
echdoche," "metonymy," "allegory," and "myth," rather than of" condensa-
tion," "displacement," and "indirect representation," Vico's "Poetic Wisdom"
is a form of Freudian dreamwork. Organic to the minds of "the children of
nascent mankind," poetic wisdom is the unconscious wisdom into which
his first men rise from their nescience; it is the unconscious wisdom out of
which Enlightenment Europe and its institutions dialectically grow in
Vico's social history.

In order to explain how this poetic wisdom arises in giants aboriginally
"ignorant of everything" but the sensation of their bodies, Vico necessarily
undertakes a reconstruction of unconscious memory comparable to Freud's;
for "the world in its infancy" is a "time empty of facts which must really
have been full of them" (NS, 735). Not unlike Freud, he attributes the early
genesis of human nature to "the terror of present power," learned with the
crash of thunderbolts which rudely teach Vico's infantile giant that he does
not fill the universe (NS, 382). Generating the internal perception of fear in
a body aboriginally all appetite, this external sound operates like the
thunder of the patriarchal "NO!" in Freud's accounts of the sexual organiza-
tion and toilet-training of modern infants:
But the greatest and most important part of physics is the contemplation of
the nature of man .... the founders of gentile humanity in a certain sense gener-
ated and produced in themselves the proper human form in its two aspects: ... by
means of frightful religions and terrible paternal powers and sacred ablutions they
brought forth from their giant bodies the form of our just corporature, and ... by
discipline ... they brought forth from their bestial minds the form of our human
mind. (NS, 692)
Poetic wisdom arises in the minds ofVico's aboriginal giants, then, together
with the learning of corporeal control and the human body's limited dimen-
sions. Through poetic wisdom man creates his own body, which is not im-
manent in the physical universe, and which differs from the bodies of ani-
mals because it is humanly made and organized:
In the prevailing best usage [the Latin verb educere] applies to the education of the
spirit and [the Latin verb educare] to that ofthe body.... education began to bring
forth in a certain way the form of the human soul which had been completely sub-
merged in the huge bodies of the giants, and began likewise to bring forth the form
of the human body itself in its just dimensions from the disproportionate giant
bodies. (NS, 520)
If this kind of education reduces the space-pervading immensity of Vico's

infantile first men by subjecting them to self-imposed disciplinary laws,
however, it compensatorily liberates, through a form of "sublimation," a
human nature that will generate the world of nations and civil institutions:
Then, between the powerful restraints of frightful superstition and the goading
stimuli of bestial lust ... [these giants] had to hold in [check] the impetus of the
bodily motion of lust. Thus they began to use human liberty, which consists in hold-
ing in check the motions of concupiscence and giving them another direction; for
since this liberty does not come from the body, whence comes the concupiscence, it
must come from the mind and is therefore properly human. (NS, 1098)
Vico's "Ni8ht of Darkness" 19 1

In his reconstruction of the mind at the origins both of social history and of
personal history, Vico accordingly developed principles of "infantile regres-
sion" that Freud would elaborate two centuries later in his accounts of the
dreamwork of sleep. Vico discovered in his aboriginal first men the "Freud-
ian" principles of parental determination, dependency, and oedipality:
The nature of children is such that by the ideas and names of the men, women,
and things they have known first, they afterward apprehend and name all the men,
women, and things that bear any resemblance or relation to the first. (NS, 206)
He discovered that in infancy a child has no solidly established sexual iden-

tity and therefore thinks, in a kind of promiscuous abandonment allowing
the free association of everyone and everything, out of a mind "polymor-
phously perverse," as the first men of "giantle" humanity also did:
... Orpheus then founds the humanity of Greece on the examples of an adulterous
Jove, aJuno who is the mortal enemy of the virtues of the Herculeses .... Nor is this
unrestrained licentiousness of the gods satisfied by forbidden intercourse with
women: Jove burns with wicked love for Ganymede; indeed this lust reaches the
point of bestiality and Jove, transformed into a swan, lies with Leda. This licen-
tiousness, practiced on men and beasts, was precisely the infamous evil of the out-
law world [the world of the first men, who lived before the creation of civil law).
(NS, 80)
Finally, in an age whose philological authorities were trying to discover

how the languages of the gentile nations could have developed historically
from the Hebrew spoken by Adam in the Garden of Eden, The New Science
advanced the radical proposition that human language had its beginnings
in the minds of infantile first men who growled, whined, and whimpered in
pleasure and pain like animals in caves (NS, 63) ; for the languages of Vico's
gentile humanity, their beginnings found "in the modifications of our own
human mind," originate not simply in historical time and geographical
space, but also-as always and only-inside the bodies of human infants:
"the first dull-witted men were moved to utterance only by very violent pas-
sions, which are naturally expressed in a very loud voice" (NS, 461); "ar-
ticulate language began to develop by way of onomatopoiea, through which
we still find children happily expressing themselves" (NS, 447):
Men vent great passions by breaking into song, as we observe in the most grief-
stricken and the most joyful. ... it follows that the founders of the gentile nations,
having wandered about in the wild state of dumb beasts and being therefore slug-
gish, were inexpressive save under the impulse of violent passions, and formed their
first languages by singing.

Languages must have begun with monosyllables. as in the present abundance of
articulated words into which children are now born they begin with monosyllables
in spite of the fact that in them the fibers of the organ necessary to articulate speech
are very flexible. (NS. 229-231)
Vico's account of human genesis anticipatorily encompasses Freud's, fi-

nally, by understanding that human consciousness, language, and reality
genetically unfold from inside the bodies of infants. Although the decorous
civilization ofVico's Europe had begun learning to devalue the human body,
nothing in the universe known to Vico's gentile man ever happens outside of
its space, within which the human world and its knowing aboriginally and
always come to be. Since the infantile thinking of Vico's first men is equiva-
lently the unconsciousness of the body not yet tutored into human know-
ing, the psychology of unconsciousness that Vico develops in The New Sci-
ence also anticipates the account of infantile sexuality given in Freud's
theories of genitality. But Joyce, who described the secret pressures of the
stomach on rational thinking in the "Lestrygonians" episode of Ulysses, the
patterns of economic management imposed on consciousness by the evacua-
tory organs in "Calypso," and the evolved forms of human enterprise made
possible by the biological endowment of lungs on mankind in "Aeolus,"
probably preferred to Freud's theories of genital organization Vico's broader
account of how "gentile" human nature rolled up into the head not simply
out of the loins but out of the entire body of his aboriginal infant giants. In
Vico's nascimento, the thinking of the body begins not simply the history of
personality, but the history of the West; and "genitality," in this history, is
only a late and limited conceptual outgrowth of the broader force of a "gen-
tile nature."
A "GIANTLE"
If nothing in Vico's gentile history happens outside of this body, everything
in Finneaans Wake only happens inside of it. The hero of Finneaans Wake,
losing the historically evolved property of consciousness when he falls
asleep, spends the night "in the state of nature" from which Vico's original
men arose (49.24-25), so to become "our family furbear" (132.32 ["bear"
now because he is in hibernation]). "Ignorant of everything," he too lies
"buried in the body" and "immersed in the senses" like a space-pervading
giant. As incapable of abstraction as Vico's first people, emptied of all
learned knowing, he too possesses no ordered memory of a historical past at
Vico's "Niaht of Darkness" 193

all. Incapable in turn of perceiving anything in the world outside of his own
body, his body fills all sensed space, the infantile and unconscious way of
thinking internal to it reordering in its own form of "poetic wisdom" the
dimly recalled residue of the wakeful world. The intense process of reading
by which Joyce elicited a dreamwork from Vico's "Poetic Wisdom" had to be
one of the great literary encounters of Joyce's life; for Vico also gave Joyce a
richly articulated account of the genesis of language that enabled him to
evolve a reconstruction of the human night.
The primary materials filling HCE's mind immediately after his fall into
sleep in the first chapter of Finne8ans Wake indirectly represent, in images
of burial and entombment, the paralysis of his fallen body and the death of
his consciousness; but the psychology of unconsciousness of Vico's "Poetic
Wisdom" in turn caused Joyce to overlay his hero's fall with a regressive
hundred-lettered word expressive of the thunder that terrified Vico's giants
(3. I5- I7). Reconstructing the return of its "retrospectable fearfurther"
(288.F7) to the condition of Vico's aboriginal men, the first chapter of the
Wake is densely clustered with images of giants and "astoneaged" cave men
(I8.I5)-Neanderthal men (I8.22, I9.25), Cromagnon men (20.7), Heidel-
berg men (I8.23), Mousterian men (I5.33), Piltdown men (10.30), and the
paleolithic characters "Mutt and Jute" (I6. 10- IIff. ["mute and deaf"]),
who babble and stammer imperceptively like Vico's men, and who earn
their names from the comic-strip characters Mutt and Jeff, modern counter-
parts of the pictographic cave paintings of the "astoneaged." The Wake's
opening chapter dwells insistently on images of the giants of aboriginal
myth because its sleeping giant is one of them: the chapter draws heavily on
myths of origin provided in the Book of Genesis (4. I8- 5.4 and passim), the
Egyptian Book of the Dead (26. I 7- 20), the Irish Annals of the Four Masters
(I3.20- I4.I5), the Icelandic Eddas (I4. I6), and other accounts of the world's
coming-to-be. Insofar as HCE's fall into sleep buries him within the matter
of an "unknown body," his unconsciousness resembles that internal to all
the tombs of the world, although foremost among these are ones evocative
of paleolithic sepulture: cromlechs like those at Carnac and Stonehenge
(5.3I), megalithic circles like those seen in the Rollright Stones of England
(5.30-3I), kistvaens (5.3I), menhirs (25.II-I2), and, above all, prehistoric
barrow after barrow referentially underlie this chapter. If it reconstructs
Finnegan's wake from the "eyewitless foggus" of a man "tropped head," it
also, as the prelude to "the book of Doublends Jined," evokes the waking of
mankind in its cavemen and its neanderthal giants: a book of Wakening like
I94 JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

Genesis and The New Science, Finneaans Wake is also "the book of Doub-
lendsJined" (20.15- 16), or "Dublin's Giant." The unconscious mind "buried
in the body" that HCE possesses in sleep is the unconscious mind out of
which Vico's aboriginal giants initiated the historical wakening of man-
kind. It is the mind out of which, every morning, the world comes to be.
"FLESCH NUEMAID MOTTS"

Having reconstructed a psychology of the unconscious, Vico has only begun
the work of his New Science; he still needs to account for the first social
choices made by his world-founding giants. To this end, he summons up the
oldest human records available to him: myths, fables, and legends. Rather
than looking at these myths archetypally, he finds in them irrationally dis-
torted accounts of the first human social transactions; for "men are natu-
rally impelled to preserve the memories of the laws and institutions that
bind them in their societies" (NS, 201), and "mythologies" "will be seen to
be civil histories of the first peoples, who were everywhere naturally poets"
(NS, 352).
In order to read these myths with a sensitivity to the alien mentality that
generates them, however, Vi co devises a system of interpretation not unlike
dream interpretation, since its object is to elicit from the manifest appear-
ances of obscure texts latent and concealed truths about archaic times-
though times in which the earliest members of the gentile world established
the first societies and began the first human social transactions. "Poetic
Wisdom" elaborately studies "scarcely imaginable" modes of thought and
expression through which "unenlightened" minds transform recognizable
human concerns into mythical and fabulous forms. It necessarily seeks in
turn a means of deciphering these obscure productions, just as psycho-
analysis would decipher comparably strange forms of thought that played
through the mind in sleep.
Since Vico's reconstructive enterprise also required him to study the lan-
guage in which the concealed histories of the gentile races were preserved, a
final point of comparison is with the psychoanalytic focus on language it-
self. Specifically, Vico's reading of myths recalls Freud's repeated observa-
tions that the .. analysis of nonsensical verbal forms . . . occur[ringJ in
dreams is particularly well calculated to exhibit the dream-work's achieve-
ments"; for Freudian interpretation, like Vico's, works through the "analysis
VieD'S "Niaht of Darkness" 195

and synthesis of syllables" comparably to reconstruct an archaic human
past-the infantile past-whose influence structures "the text ofthe dream"
(ID, 338; 332n.). Indeed, in some special cases, Freud notes,
... the course oflinguistic evolution has made things very easy for dreams. For lan-
guage has a whole number of words at its command which originally had a concrete
and pictorial significance, but are used today in a colorless and abstract sense. All
that the dream need do is to give these words their former, full meaning or to go back
a little way to an earlier phase in their development. (ID,442)
And elsewhere in his work he broadens the understanding by treating phi-

lology as a protoform by psychoanalysis:
In the agreement between ... the dream-work ... and [what] philologists have dis-
covered to be habitual in the oldest languages, we may see a confirmation of our
supposition in regard to the regressive, archaic character of thought-expression in
dreams. And we cannot dismiss the conjecture, which forces itself on us psychia-
trists, that we should understand the language of dreams better and translate it
more easily if we knew more about the development of language. 2o
Vico's study of "the development of language" offered Joyce exactly this in-
sight into "the language of dreams," his psychology of unconsciousness in
turn anticipating Freud's both because of its earlier emergence in history
and because of its compass: not simply personality, but all of Vico's gentile
humanity begins in an unconsciousness whose dynamic is revealed in the
evolution oflanguage and whose deep structure is yielded by etymology. For
the etymology of "etymology," Vico notes, is "the science of the true" (from
the Gr. etymos, "true"; NS, 4°3); and the employment of this "adamelegy"
in the "root language" of Finne8ans Wake (77.26, 424.17), Joyce said, "guar-
anteed the truth of his knowledge and his representation of events" in his
"imitation of the dream-state." 21
Since Vico's gentile world unfolds from inside the bodies of aboriginal
giants, his speculations on the genesis of language proceed from observa-
tions on how language always and only originates in the minds of human
infants, as they begin to express themselves and simultaneously perceive
those others who will teach them a language and consciousness evolved
over millennia. Written language, in this prehistory-sign language-be-
gins with manual gestures, whose exercise gradually educes the hands and
eyes from the aboriginally giant body (NS, 225-26, 401-2, 431-46); while
phonetic language originates in comparably expressive exercises of the vo-
cal chords and ears: in asemantic babbling, laughing, and crying, all of
which Vico subsumes under the single term "singing" (NS, 228-31, 446-54).

Once Vico's primitive man orients himself in encaved social groups-fami-
lies-he begins to generate pictographic signs and monosyllabic utterances
that in memory acquire fixed meanings expressive of basic fears and desires
(NS, 448-54); and at this point in his development, man distinguishes him-
self from feral giants and begins to evolve more elaborate social structures,
languages, and forms of knowing. Basic to Vico's genetic account is the
understanding that all human language evolves out of an aboriginal state
by a process of distortionary slippage as "PREAUSTERIC MAN" (266.RI) un-
consciously blurs syllables and images together, in the course of his devel-
opment, in order to build new words and concepts that always lie just be-
yond his slowly growing, conscious grasp: the Latin word for sheep (pecus)
generates a word for money (pecunia) as the economic conditions of social
history evolve, for instance; and the syllable Ben-, over time, generates the
concept and practice of "engineering."
Complementarily, Vico discovers that the etymological unlayering of
modern languages, and the consciousness that they make possible, allows
the reconstruction of the unconscious mind out of which gentile humanity
arose. By drawing on the etymons of Western languages in FinneBans Wake,
Joyce could accordingly represent a human mind returned, in sleep, to
equivalent unconsciousness ... 'The only difference,' he declared [to Jacques
Mercanton], 'is that, in my imitation of the dream-state, I effect in a few
minutes what it has sometimes taken centuries to bring about."'22
The primary unconscious meaning that Joyce, through Vico, discovers be-
neath all human language is the "meaning" of the human body, within
which the whole of gentile reality comes to be:
The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the
body, and only with great difficulty does it come to understand itself by means of
reflection.
This axiom gives us the universal principle of etymology in all languages: words
are carried over from bodies and the properties of bodies to signify the institutions
of the mind and spirit. (NS, 236-37)
Just as Finnegans Wake takes place inside the body of a sleeping giant, so too
the whole of evolved human language and the reality it shapes arises from
the bodies of man's unconscious human ancestors:
I t is noteworthy that in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating to
inanimate things are formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts and
from the human senses and passions. Thus, head for top or beginning; the eyes of
needles and of potatoes; mouth for any opening; the lip of a cup or pitcher; the teeth

of a rake, a saw, a comb; the beard of wheat; the tongue of a shoe ... ; a neck of
land; an arm of the sea; the hands of a clock; heart for center. . . . (NS, 405)
Apart from the decorous restraint that causes Vico to pass over parts of the
body which twentieth-century man, compensating for centuries of repres-
sion, would later find central to consciousness, this passage too yields its
rough psychoanalytical insights and establishes a primary philological
principle informing every page of Finneaans Wake. Buried everywhere be-
neath the Wake's letters lies the form of a sleeping body, HCE. Since all ab-
stract language derives from an "ur sprogue" (507.22 [Da. ursproa, "original
language"]) in which this body is merged with everything exterior to it, all
human language, in both The New Science and the Wake, etymologically
conceals the unconscious "presence (of a curpse)" out of which all gentile
reality evolved.
At some seminal historical remove, for instance, the "pencil" that our
hero wields by day slipped into its name when an unknown user of the Latin
language identified a similar instrument with a part of the male body, and,
once one thinks about it, revealed an unconscious, but nonetheless poetic
wisdom; a comparably unconscious confusion of the body with the evolved
word and tool occurs many times in Finneaans Wake-e.g., 173.10, 261.10,
553.11, 563.5-6-though most notably at moments in which our hero,
thinking not out of his "tropped head" but out of his body, etches his desires
in dreams by allowing "that overgrown leadpencil" shown in the relief map
of Dublin (56.12 [The Wellington Memorial, or "overgrown milestone"]) to
write of its wishes and wants (see 280.9- 16). By day, the hero of Finneaans
Wake likely lives at an abstract remove both from his body and the car-
nal ground out of which the gentile world emerges; but at night, the re-
pressed "presence (of a curpse)" in his mind asserts itself in the uncovering
of the carnal etymon. By practicing an extended "abnihilisation of the
etym" throughout the Wake (353.22 [L. ab nihilo, "from nothing"]), Joyce
shows the body lying everywhere under the surface of language « L. lin-
aua, "tongue"]).
Vico's "universal principle of etymology in all languages" both justi-
fies and structures the whole of Joyce's "vivIe" (110.17 [L. vivus, "living";
"Bible"]): since all words are inherently puns in which evolved denotations
overlay long-lost and sometimes irretrievable meanings expressive ofthe un-
conscious thinking of the human body, Joyce's "root language" is real lan-
guage. By weaving through Finneaans Wake the carnal etymons internal to
English, Joyce could reconstruct an unconscious pattern that everywhere

subliminally informs the Daily World. If the thinking of the body underlies
all gentile reality and thought, and alone wells up into HCE when his ra-
tional consciousness dissolves in sleep, then the language of Finnegans
Wake had to work with this language beneath language, with carnal ety-
mons, to reconstruct in "flesch nuemaid motts," one kind of thinking that
underlies all thinking (138.8 [Fr. mots, "words"; Fr. nue, naked; Ger. Fleisch,
"flesh"]) .23
"IRO-EUROPEAN ASCENDANCES"
Vico's gentile man begins to evolve a social consciousness once the sound of
patriarchal thunder and "awethorrorty" abstracts him from the interior of
the giant body; this fall into exteriority in turn forces him to begin making
increasingly elaborate distinctions between his own and physical nature,
between himself and others. Since removal from the giant body initiates the
dialectically progressive history of civil relations, social history in The New
Science begins when giants related by blood and sharing the same little cave
manifest differences among one another and establish a social hierarchy by
contest of sheer force. It is a contest whose outcome makes the patriarchal
family a determinant structure underlying all subsequent societies, the im-
print of its forms still to be found "in the modifications of our own mind."
A second etymological principle of The New Science therefore holds that
the internal social history of a people is implicitly preserved in and trans-
mitted through its language, and that all words carry a subliminal record of
an entire past (NS, 238-40, 354): etymology, in short, is also a form of his-
tory, or verbal archaeology, whose study reveals the growth of "gentile" in-
stitutions. In an essay in Our Exagmination familiar to readers of Joyce,
Beckett has already called attention to that passage in The New Science in
which Vico, illustrating this etymological principle, looks into the network
of relations preserved beneath the modern words for "reading" (It. leggere),
"law" (It. legge, L. lex), and "legislation" (It. legislazione) (NS, 239-40 ).24
Noting that these terms are internally linked both by "sound sense" and by
an underlying semantic unity bearing on the idea of "collecting" and order-
ing, Vico discovers beneath them all a lengthy and tangled social history
whose evolved achievements are illustrated in the words listed at the top of
figure 7.2. The words and concepts of "legibility" and "legality," according
to this etymology, preserve a history of the internal evolutionary process by
which Latin man gathered himself from forests, where he first subsisted
Vieo's "Night of Darkness" 199

logic' lexicon dialectic legibility lecture lesson recollect collect select elite elect
logical lexical dialectics legible lectern recollection collection selection elitism election
1
logician lexicography dialectical lector legend selective elitist electoral
logistics dialect illegible legendry cull
illegibility prelect legendary eligible elegant intellect
prelection legion eligibility elegance intellection
logocentrism (a reading intellectuality
1
logogram in public)
logarithm Fr. lecture
Fr. elire
(prefixal (reading)
lOt) Fr. lecteur
(reader) M.E. legende
(to select);
past participle
elite (choice,
(story of a select)
saint's life) O.Fr. cuillir
analogue
(to pick out,
<=(
apologue
Gr. eklekto select) L. intellectus
apology
(selected) (understanding,
catalogue
decalogue Gr. dialektos
dialogue (discourse)
eclogue
M. L. recolligere
epilogue L. seligere
homologos Gr. analekto:t past participle past participle
horologe (choice, '\ recollectum selectus
monologue (to gather again) (to pick out,
select) Gr. dialegein
paralogism (to talk, select)
prologue L. intelligere
i
reason) L. eligere
syllogism past participle
~
present participle
etc. L. colligere eJegans intellectus
(suffixal past participle present participle
past participle
-logue, collectum electus
intelligens
-logy) (to gather (to pick out, (to perceive,
t together) select) understand)
anthropology
etymology
philology
psychology
etc.
t i
L. e- (out)
legere (to pick
out, select)
+
(suffixal Gr. logikos

-logy, (belonging to
-ology) speaking or
speech; or to
the rational)
Gr. logos'
(I. I; the word by which the
Gr.legein
future
inward thought is expressed
2: inward thought itself
lexo
(I: to gather, pick up;
II. I: word; language
to gather for oneself
2: discourse; report; story
2: to reckon. count;
Ill. thought, reason, reckoning)
tell, say, speak)
"
present participle
legens
*log-o- (I: to collect, gather, pick, pick out;
2: [with the eyes] to scan, survey, read)
~
Figure 7.2. Etymological chart: >leg-
I. "A gee is just a jay on the jaunts cowsway" (284.F5 [A "g" is just a "j" on the giant's causeway]) _
2. Cf. Heidegger, Bein8 and Time, Int.I1.7·B (32-34).
4. Benveniste, Indo-European Lan8ua8e and Society, pp. 518-22.

intelligent diligent religion loyalty legal legislate privilege legitimacy college allege legume
intelligence diligence religious loyal legality legislator privileged legitimate collegiate alleged leguminous
intelligible religiosity loyalist legalize legislature legitimist collegium delegate allegation
legalism delegation
negligent sacrilege delegacy
I
predilection negligence sacrilegious
neglect sortilege legacy relegate
~~~'e:~~~:s~~ia
attentiveness)
L. prae (before)
+ diligere =
praediligere
(to prefer)
L. sacrilegus
(temple-robber;
stealing sacred
i
(fortune-
teller)
O.Fr. loial. Ieial
L. L. sortilegus (legal; faith-
ful to obli-
gation)
L. privilegium
(an exceptional
i
M. L. legaria
(bequest)
M.L. delegatus
things) law. favoring

L. religio an individual)
i
(scrupulous-
ness; strict
observance) L. allegaTe
L. SOTS, sortis
(to send on
L. neglegere (a lot) +
L. pTivus (single) + L. collegium a mission)
past participle legere (to read)
lex. legis (law) ( association.
neglectum L. delegaTe
fraternity)
t
present participle (to send away)
neglegens L. sacer (sacred) + legIs lator
(to overlook. ignore) legere (to gather < legis (of law) L. relegaTe
(to send away) ,
r
up. take away) lato' (proposer.
L. diligere
bearer)
past participle
dilectus L. *religere 1
(to re·collect. L. de- (from) +
present participle L. legalis L. legitim us legaTe (to send)
diligens reconsider) (lawful)
(to pick out; prize.
esteem highly)
L. com- (together) +
t legare (to choose)
L. legare
L. lex, legis past participle
(a set form of words: /cgatus
law; contract; rule) (to choose. select;
appoint. bequeath)
'leg- 'leg-no-
~~~~~~~~~~
Indo-European 'leg-'
(to pick. gather;
pick out. select)
nomadic ally by gathering native plants (the Latin le8ere ["to gather"], from
the Indo-European root *le8- ["to gather, or collect"], generates the words
Ilex ["oak, gatherer"] and le8uminis, which once meant "anything that
could be gathered" and only later came to refer to vegetables); the same pro-
cess by which he later formed protocities whose members were capable of
collecting, storing, and later cultivating food themselves, and by which he
finally established larger social groupings, whose formation made necessary
the first formal laws. Gatherings of people into public bodies like these,
then, historically generated the necessary institutions of "legality" and
"legislatures" (after the Latin lex, le8is), as well as the etymologically re-
lated property of "legibility"; for the gathering complexity of civil law re-
quired its fixation in codes. That historical linguistics and anthropology
have inevitably modified the "facts" and refined our sense of the evolution
of these terms does not finally matter: The New Science explores the genetic
processes immanent in these words and the covert network of relationships
that they reveal.
Particularly because The New Science explores the evolution of "reason"
as a human institution, a dramatic way of illustrating what is at stake for
Vico in the practice of etymology would be to consider the process by which
the gentile world undertook the "fibfib fabrication" (36.34) of the term "rea-
son" itself. As figure 7.3 will suggest, the growth of this word out of the Indo-
European radical *aris implicated in an objectifying tendency that also
solidifies the meaning of "reality," which is a concept and a word and a
"fact" of the world only in the radical sense of "fact" « L. factum, "a thing
made," as if "manufactured"). The etymology also suggests that the ascent
of man into a "rationality" that maintains this sense of the "real" also en-
tails enmeshment in a network of correlated formal institutions-"read-
ing," "art," and "orderliness" among them-whose internalized effect is co-
incidentally parallel to that exerted by legal "ordinances" and the "army."
For "art," "reading," and "reasonability," by putting and keeping the world
in "order" and maintaining a sense of the "ordinary," do much what" armies"
do-as analysts of ideology have long known. The network of relationships
implicit in the etymology of the "real" reinforces those implicit in the his-
tory of "legibility," then, to suggest how the evolution of Vico's gentile "re-
ality" is implicated in the slow formation of institutions and laws whose
learning contractually holds together the Daily World.
The New Science is predicated on etymological studies like these, which
reconstruct the forgotten and underlying senses of words that determine
modern consciousness and institutions-words like "society," "liberty," and

"hostility," for example, and "nation" and "gentility." Formative among
these is the word and concept of "family," which Vico finds stamped into the
minds of all people in his gentile history. When Vico's giants first group to-
gether in caves, they have no need of a distinct word or concept like "fam-
ily," since signs designating individual members of the group would ring out
all necessary social distinctions (NS, 257, 552). In order to understand the
genesis of "families," then, Vico traces the word back toward the Latin fa-
mulus, "servant," and reconstructs a moment in prehistory when men still
in the wild and at the mercy of stronger anthropoids seek out the patriarchal
groups already established in caves for protection: they are admitted as
"slaves," famuli, and their ownership in time generates the word familia,
which in Latin originally means "a household of servants," and not a group
of people related by blood. In turn, Vico speculatively derives the word
famulus from the Greek and Latin words for "fame" or "rumored glory"
(pheme and fama), since the gathering rumor of a gloriously protective
group brings these uncivilized wanderers into the patriarchal fold (NS, 555).
Their entrance into the germinating society sets up the need for words and
concepts that distinguish the patriarch's sons-still regarded as his negoti-
able property-from his slaves, and also from those untamed giants who
still wander alone outside of gentile nature. The widening of social distinc-
tions and tensions therefore generates the words liberi ("sons" or "chil-
dren"), famuli, and hostes ("strangers, enemies"). In time, as the patriarch
amasses enough slaves to work for him, he liberates his sons from servitude
to confer on them a vague freedom withheld from the famuli. The condition
of his sons accordingly begins to generate the concept, new to social history,
of "liberty"; they "were called liberi, free. But it was [originally] a distinc-
tion without a difference" (NS, 556) .25 With the passage of generations and
the accumulation of more wealth, the concept of freedom in turn generates
a concept and word for "nobility" (liberalitas) , and the word familia comes
to mean a blood-related group of people wealthy enough to be free because
they have large holdings of property and famuli to work for them. By this
point in gentile history, man has stumbled up out of the obscurity of the
world's beginning, and the conditions under which isolated patriarchal
families would generate tribal feudal isms and a slavery sanctioned by tradi-
tion have become solidly established as forces internally driving a history
made by man, but now way beyond his immediate control (NS, 552-69,
583-84) .
All of these Vichian verbal archaeologies are important to Finnegans
Wake, which, after the example of Vico, discovers beneath all words a layer
Vieo's "Night of Darkness" 20 3

1
real read rate rational reason order
reality' realty' republic reading ritual rates ration rationality reasoning ratify orders
realist realtor reader rite ratings rationalism reasonable ratification orderly
1
rebus
realism real estate readability rede ratio rationale reasonability orderliness
arithmetic
realistic rationalize
reification riddles ratiocinate arraignment
rationalistic arraign
reify ratiocination
16th c.
realtor
(coined by CN.
Chadbourn of
1
M.E. redel
hundred
a.N.
r M.'.om"
t
Minneapolis?) hundrath
Eng. M.E. reden ( lOoth
1
real M.E. raison M.E. araynen
(to explain;
t
1
count)
(not imag- to read)
inary) a.Fr. ordre
a.E. r,ed
I
(advice, a.Fr. rate a.Fr. aralmer
counsel) O.Fr. raison (to bring before
1
a.E. raeden
t
L. ration em
a court of law)
(acc. of Med. L. rauficare 0.',. O"ffi'

(to fix by
L. riwalis L. L. rata pars calculation;
(ritual) (reckoned to validate)
L. res publica
part)
1
(things public;
common wealth) L. rati6cinari
(to calculate;
a.E. raeden Germ. *rath
(to advise, (number)
L. ratio, Tationis
counsel,
(a reckoning, calcu-
in-
Gr. arithmos lation; transaction.
terpret)
(number) business affair;
GJ",," ~ri:,"' \
,
L. raWs (past participle of rear)
(reckoned, calculated;
(thmg, object; *ri-W' settled, determined;
valid, binding, legal)
~::~~i;r:S~~roperty;
~ .~, ."~
*(a)ri, *rei·1 *re-
____________....;====-____• protO-Indo-European
*ar-
(to fit, join,
fit together)
Figure 7-3, Etymological chart: ·ar-. "those ars, rrrr! those ars all bellical, the highpriest's
hieroglyph __ . wrasted redhandedly from our hallowed rubric prayer for truce with booty. _ , and
rudely from the fane's pinnacle tossed down ... among Those Who arse without the Temple"
(122.6-12 ["ars": L. ars, "art"; "ars all bellical": L. ars bellica, "the art of war"; "truce with booty":
"truth and beauty"; "fane": L. fanus, "temple," opposite of pro-fanus, "outside the Temple"])
1. Cf. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, pp. 216-20.
2. Pokorny, Indo-Germanisches Etymoloaisches Worterbuch, p. 60.

ordinary art arms
ordinariness ordinance (law) primordial artist articulate aristocrat harmony army disarm
1
ordnance (arms) primordium artistic articulation aristocracy harmonic armed disarming
extraordinary aristocratic harmonize
artistry
ornament articles
subordinate artificer artiste armaments
ornamental arty alarm
subordination ornamentation armada alarming
exordium artifact artifice
coordinate d ornate armistice alarm clock
artisan
coordination
~:e~;h:~~c~~ adorn
artificial
armipotent
armoire
alarmist
ordain artful
adornment armor
preordain Eng. armorial
ordination ordnance arthritis armory
ordinal (supplies) (prefixal etc.
arthro-)
O.Fr.. M.E.
ordenance
L. primordium a.Fr. desarmer
(an order. O.E.
O.Fr. command) (origin) (division. earm O. Fr. alarme
ordinarie
t part)
Med. L.
subordinare
(to set in a
L. primus
(first)
+
Gr. Aristotle
("by far
the best"?)
< aristos +
t
It. aJI'arme
lower order) ordiri teJe (far)
(begin)
L. extra
L. ordiri
ff
+
L. articulus
(small joint.
part. division)
ars,in-artis
L.
Gr. harmonia
(a fitting to-
gether; agree-
l
(to begin a ment; harmony)
Gr. ariston
web; to begin) (unskilled) (breakfast)
(><"'(
L. artus Gr. arete
(virtue)
L. ars. arti,
(skill. style.
technIque. art)
t
(the joints)
Gr. arthron
(jOInt)
Gr. harmos
(a jOining.
joint)
L. ordo. ordinis
*(a)-r~-(k)-
't *ar(a)-tu t t
(a line. row. order;
order. arrangement;
< a row of threads
in a loom)
\ *ar:;:-ti- , .
'V
*ar(a)-dhro-
*ar(~)-isto *ar(~)-mo
t
J
/
of subliminal meanings stratified in sociohistorical time, the most current
of which, making possible an aspect of modern social consciousness, con-
ceals archaic self-interests and fears that arose "at the very dawn of proto-
history," "when Chimpden first took the floor" (169.21,46.2 [and the ascent
of man began]). Again, this conception of history anticipates the psycho-
analytical view of society as the collective creation of individuals whose
actions are determined by parents, intrafamilial conflicts, and phobias in-
herited from the past. But the Vichian vision according to which Finne8ans
Wake makes the embattled human family a paradigmatic force in the genesis
of social reality is historical, and it sees all of these struggles as institu-
tionallegacies « I.E. *le8-) irrationally passed on from generation to gen-
eration; so that even today every father inevitably maintains a power in-
vested in him by tradition, while every son born into a world shaped by this
already-established authority has inevitably to overcome it, then to com-
pete with peers that he might inherit the patrimony of an authority now
historically transformed. When Joyce makes the family the center of all his-
torical conflict in Finne8ans Wake, then, he is isolating the primal social
struggle in Vico that both historically and always engenders other struggle.
Since Joyce sought in Finne8ans Wake a language that would reconstruct the
"infrarational" thought to which his hero-"a respectable prominently con-
nected fellow of Iro-European ascendances with welldressed ideas" (37.25-
26)-regresses in his nightlife, he draws on Vico's sociolinguistic vision by
making central to the book not simply those carnal etymons that reveal the
sleeping giant out of which gentile "reality" unfolds, but words and institu-
tions that subliminally show how deeply riddled with unconscious conflict
that giant form is.
HERE COMES EVERYBODY

According to a third etymological principle of The New Science informing
the Wake, the etymology of a language can reveal not only the internal so-
cial formation of a people, but also the international forces that trans-
formed that people through trade, war, migration, colonization, and "mis-
cegenations on miscegenations" (18.20): "These ... axioms give us the
principle of a new etymologicon for words of certainly foreign origin, dif-
ferent from that mentioned above for native words. It can also give us the
history of nations carried one after another into foreign lands by coloniza-
tion" (NS, 299-300, 303-4).

A writer like Joyce, born into a nation that had been subjected to wave
after wave of colonial and imperialistic invasion, could not fail to find these
insights compelling. Once Vico's social history widens out of its claustral
patriarchal groupings into a stage at which feudal tribes war, trade, or ally
themselves with other feudal tribes, all history becomes an intertribal, and
later an international collision of social forces; and whenever nations of two
cultures collide, languages and consciousnesses collide and evolve also. In
The New Science, then, Vico treats modern languages as if they were the lan-
guage of Finne8ans Wake-as blurred, polyglottal compacts of dozens of
strange and foreign languages. In this kind of analysis, English would not be
an exceptional case.
The earliest known inhabitants of England were eventually displaced by
people who spoke a Celtic tongue descended from the proto-Indo-European
hypothetically spoken somewhere, most likely, in Eastern Europe-a Celtic
related to the Welsh, Scottish, Breton, and Irish still in existence today. But
the Roman invasions overlaid this British Celtic with some Latin and a new
civic consciousness, and marauding Angles and Saxons, pressured from be-
hind by invading tribes from the East, moved in to override almost entirely
the original British Celtic with an extensive Old Teutonic base. Invading
Danes and Norsemen added a different complexion yet to the Anglish and
Saxon already spreading outwards toward the frontiers of the island. Mis-
sionaries of the medieval Church made universal Latin the language of the
literate and educated, and the Norman invasion brought, with its laws, the
whole consciousness of the Mediterranean and Romance languages into En-
gland and then into Ireland-where the hybrid Anglo-Irish known by day to
the hero of Finne8ans Wake acquired a polyglottal texture already densely
riddled with historical tensions.
Like The New Science, Finne8ans Wake also tries to fathom "the obscure
soul of the world" (U, 27), the force of a fumblingly made history in which
generation after generation of billions of ephemeral individuals born in un-
consciousness engendered, by their groping efforts, the conscious present in
which one lives. A book about rapidly vanishing dreams and "darkness
shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend" (U, 27), Fin-
ne8ans Wake explores, after the example of Vico, all the dark, uncon-
sciousnesses that underlie its hero's thinking and enable it to be what it is; in
every sentence it brings to mind those forgotten "furbears" who spoke alien
tongues in the obscure prehistory of the gentile world, so to make possible
all the small articles of the consciousness and reality within which Joyce's
hero by day individually lives:
Vieo's "Ni8ht of Darkness" 20 7

You mean to see we have been hadding a sound night's sleep? You may so. It is just, it
is just about to, it is just about to rolywholyover. Svapnasvap. Of all the stranger
things that ever not even in the hundrund and badst pageans of unthowsent and
wonst nice or in eddas and oddes bokes of tomb, dyke and hollow to be have hap-
pened! The untireties of livesliving being the one substrance of a streamsbecom-
ing. Totalled in toldteld and teldtold in tittletell tattle. Why? ... Why? Such me.
(597. 1 - 22 )
Having laboriously earned, by this late point in Finnegans Wake, the right
to compare the length of life to the length of a volatile dream about to
be scattered into nothing, Joyce evokes beneath the "basic English" of this
passage the Mid-Eastern Book of One Thousand and One Nights ("unthow-
sent and wonst nice"), the Sanskrit svapna ("asleep") and svap ("sleep")
in "Svapnasvap," and other such formative "odds and ends" ("eddas and
oddes") of Western history as those "toldteld and teldtold" in the Icelandic
Eddas written at Oddi ("in eddas and oddes"), in John I : I ("In the be-
ginning was the word"), and in the Egyptian Book of the Dead and com-
parable "bokes of tomb, dyke and hollow"-all in order to represent the
panhistorical human "substrance of a streamsbecoming" that has become
embodied in a simi' Ie sleeping man, not even aware of himself, who is about
to roll over, and waken from unconsciousness into English and the reality it
upholds. Like anyone's, this man's mind and "the entirety of[hisJ livesliving"
has been made possible both by billions of Toms, Dicks, and Harrys ("tomb,
dyke and hollow") bled up out of gentile humanity over centuries in India,
Egypt, Arabia, Norway, England, and Ireland, and by the steadily evolving
language, "totalled in toldteld and teldtold in tittletell tattle" whose "Total"
is English and the wakeful consciousness it makes possible. As he lies
unconscious in the unwilled "trance" of sleep ("sub-strance"), all of the
forces that have genetically shaped his consciousness come to represent
him: he lies as unconscious of them as he is of himself, his "substance"
"substrance[dJ" by their "streamsbecoming." In visions of history as com-
plex as those entertained by The New Science and Finne8ans Wake, then,
"English"-a comparatively modern development of world history-ac-
quires meaning only as a convenient blanket term designating a language
and sensibility historically compounded of scores of others.
In Vico's third etymological axiom, Joyce found richly reaffirmed the cer-
tain knowledge that language and consciousness are manifestations of each
other, living and evolving forces made by men, but beyond any individual's
control, which grow and expand and become more international as "our

social something bowls along bumpily, experiencing a jolting series of pre-
arranged disappointments, down the long lane of (it's as semper as oxhouse-
humper!) generations, more generations and still more generations" (107.32-
35): "semper," here, combines "simple" with the Latin semper ("always"),
while "oxhousehumper" translates into English the first three letters of
the Hebrew alphabet-aleph (meaning "ox"), beth ("house"), 8himel
("camel")-in order to convey, in the image of a problematically propelled
bowling ball, the commutual evolution of language, consciousness, and so-
cial forms in Vico's gentile history.
Joyce found much in Vico that was congenial. That half of The New Sci-
ence contained in "Poetic Wisdom" gave him a psychology of the uncon-
scious, an account of dream formation, and a system of dream interpreta-
tion which, because they were synthetically integrated into a social history
and a linguistic vision, appealed to Joyce more than the new sciences of
psychoanalysis or linguistics. Unlike other philosophies of history and
unlike any of the new sciences of sociology, anthropology, or political sci-
ence, Vico's New Science did not regard language as an instrument subser-
vient to a subject more central, but saw it instead as a condition that made
possible both civil history and human consciousness. Long before Darwin
developed the new science of animal evolution and Freud refined his ac-
count of infantile genesis, Vico saw human history as the creation of people
born into the world in an unconsciousness that only after the struggles of
millennia would evolve and codify into letters the arbitrary accomplish-
ment of reason. Joyce undoubtedly admired above all in Vico, as he did in
Aristotle and Aquinas, that synthetic catholicity and systematic wholeness
of thought which was able to integrate in The New Science a philosophy, an
evolutionary science, a developmental psychology, a sociology and anthro-
pology, a dialectical history, and a verbal archaeology. Written in the cen-
tury that saw the genesis of scientific rationalism, The New Science antici-
pates in total the whole array of human sciences which would precipitate
out of the positivist tradition at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Since it does not make the individual, but mankind the center of a ter-
restrial cosmos, The New Science afforded Joyce the example of a work both
traditional and radical, humanistic and anthropocentric, on which he
might model Finne8ans Wake. Vico's etymological reconstructions of the
unconscious forces at the base of history moreover gave to Joyce the working
principles by which Finne8ans Wake would represent the unconscious con-
flicts underlying his hero's wakeful thought, and all his daytime social

transactions. In Vico's etymological vision, Joyce found that every normal
particle of language was inherently a quadruple pun of sorts. Beneath its
current denotation, every word concealed two meanings revelatory of its
existence in history, one reflecting the internal evolution of social forms
and the other reflecting the wider international forces whose play modified
those forms. And because every particle of language was a creation of gen-
tile man, whose world and reality arose from the interior of flesh, all words
finally concealed the aliterate thinking of the body, within which joyce's
subject lies unconscious in the regression of his sleep. The pun, according to
Vico's etymology, was not simply an option of Joyce's style: its form was in-
herent in language and in the tensions giving rise to the consciousness that
language makes possible.
Very much a book of origins-like Joyce's own Book of Waking- The New
Science would also have provided Joyce with an account of human gene-
sis more complex than that contained in the orthodox Biblical Genesis,
quietistically received as truth over generations; than the rationalist ac-
count of genesis, according to which human reason arose through mecha-
nistic laws of nature; than the psychoanalytical account of genesis, which
scrutinized personal, but not social origins; and than socialist accounts of
genesis, which examined broad social tensions, but not the individuals in
whom they were embodied. Since sleep, from a Vichian perspective, can be
construed as the process through which a person awakens from uncon-
sciousness at the interior of a space-pervading body, Finne8ans Wake assimi-
lates whole the genetic vision of The New Science in order to represent the
drift of its "dead giant manalive" (500.1-2) out of nothingness toward
wakening and "the opening of the mind to light" (258.31-32). Telling in its
own way a "meandertale, aloss and again, of our old Heidenburgh in the
days when Head-in-Clouds walked the earth" (18.22-24)-the references to
"Neanderthal" and "Heidelberg man" returning us to "primeval conditions"
(599.9-IO)-it reconstructs "the ignorance [or unconsciousness] that im-
plies impression that knits [our] knowledge that finds the nameform that
whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives de-
sire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that en-
tails the ensuance of existentiality" (18.24-29 [the "ignorance" out of
which, every morning, the whole of gentile existence comes to be]).
Elsewhere the Wake pays tribute to Vico by casting him in the image of
the maker of first things, the knower of the world's dream, and the tutelary
divinity of HCE's nightlife:

For the producer (Mr John Baptister Vickar) caused a deep abuliousness to de-
scend upon the Father of Truants and, at a side issue, pluterpromptly brought on the
scene the cutletsized consort. . . . (255. 2 7-3 0 )
Set in the unconsciousness of Joyce's sleeping Dubliner ("abulia," < Gr.

aboule, "without will," is a psychological term for the loss of volition), this
is a modern reconstruction of Adam's dream, the dream in which the first
man imagined his ideal consort, Eve-whom "the producer" removes here,
"cutletsized," from Adam's rib. As the story from the Book of Genesis about
the birth of human imagination that haunted Milton and his Romantic suc-
cessors, the moment of Adam's dream begins the generation of secular his-
tory in the Bible. As it is evoked in the Wake, Vico becomes its generator
and its interpreter, its "baptist" and its "vicar," because Vico, for Joyce, was
the first man in modern history to fathom the first man and the first man's
first dream.
Joyce finally found in The New Science an intricate sense of human evolu-
tion that refused to reduce history to a process in which discrete individuals
in discrete generations act separately at moments discretely isolated in time.
In Vico, the whole of gentile history determines the consciousness, lan-
guage, society, and material circumstances in which anyone finds himself
in the present; so that no one, consequently, would have the life and mind
that he does were it not for an infinitude of people in the past: Vico's first
men, whose bodies determined the structure of all subsequent reality and
whose first hardly imaginable outcries made all subsequent language pos-
sible; the nomadic men of patriarchal Israel who made possible the coming
of Christ and the millennia during which the image of the Crucifixion and
the Resurrection shaped the perceptions of the whole Western world; the
Greek thinkers who made possible the ongoing enterprises of philosophy,
natural science, and mathematics; and billions of men more. A book that
treats with studious intensity "all matters that fall under the ban of our
infrarational senses," Finnegans Wake absorbs Vico's vision of history to
make its reader conscious on every page of the universe of people who have
generated the possibility of his individual existence (see, e.g., 582.13-21,
599·4-18) .
Absent from his own consciousness, Joyce's sleeping hero in turn becomes
an embodiment of all the historical forces that have produced both him and
the conflicted desires which structure his dreams. In his identity-void drift
through sleep, he becomes indirectly represented in the images of so many

other people-his sons, his racial and historical forebears, individuals
prominent in the historical age in which he lives-that his mind eventually
becomes a space made possible and cohabited by a world of people, each
insubstantial as himself, who constitute a kind of psychic community in
which each historically depends on each other but all ultimately enter into
the formation of the dreamer's single dream:
... an you could peep inside the cerebralised saucepan of this eer illwinded goodfor-
nobody, you would see in his house of thoughtsam (was you, that is, decontami-
nated enough to look discarnate) what a jetsam litterage of convolvuli of times lost
or strayed, of lands derelict and of tongues laggin too ... bashed and beaushelled
. . . pharahead into faturi ty. . . . (292. 12- 19)
Another pun basic to Finne8ans Wake, then, condenses the individual and
the collective, the self-enclosed dreamer unwillingly paralyzed in his body
in present time and, as in Vico, the multitude of men in the collective his-
tory which parented him, which includes him, and within whose evolved
tensions, in sleep as in wakefulness, he finds himself and his desire netted.
This kind of pun operates most simply in Finne8ans Wake merely in the pro-
liferation of names that reveal the unconscious presence of its sleeping pro-
tagonist. "Here Comes Everybody" (32.18) and "Haveth Childers Every-
where" (535.34-35), names that evoke HCE in social and paternal forms,
are not simply ciphers for the "one stable somebody" who sleeps at the
Wake, but paradigms of the mankind whose struggles and labors have made
possible that private, self-enclosed somebody. So, too, this catalogue of
heroes and warriors who helped to shape the history that made possible
the coming of the man asleep at Finne8ans Wake, a man whose life has risen
out of the past in which they perished: "Helmingham Erchenwyne Rutter
Egbert Crumwall Odin Maximus Esme Saxon Esa Vercingetorix Ethelwulf
Rupprecht Ydwalla Bentley Osmund Dysart Yggdrasselmann? Holy Saint
Eiffel, the very phoenix!" (88.21-24 [read acrostically, the first letters of
these names make a statement]) .
By structuring the mind of his sleeping hero in the indirect images of all
these others, Joyce demonstrates how fundamentally, if unconsciously, indi-
viduals are deeply entangled members of one another. He was not simply
suggesting that his hero's thinking is composed of the people who have
touched him most directly-of his parents, whose circumstances determined
the nation and race, the language, sexuality, social class, fears, religion,
and conscience that shaped him as a child; of his teachers, who informed

him with the evolved learning and ideology of all gentile history; and of his
neighbors, whose patronage and scorn helped to determine the character of
his social existence. He was suggesting also that even the remotest human
contact in his modern man's life, simply by virtue of its contact, inevitably
finds a reflexive place in his humanity, to become a part of his conscious-
ness and his personal identity. Just as human nature, in Vico's gentile his-
tory, is made wholly by people, so HCE's whole nature is unconsciously de-
fined and structured by others both within and far beyond his immediate
circle of acquaintance. It was from Vico that Joyce learned, even while
writing those two egotistical biographical novels, Stephen Hero and A Por-
trait, that no infant born into the world of gentile nature can even remotely
attain a "personality" without the prior existence of scores of people in the
world immediately around it, and of billions of others buried in the night of
a historical past ordinarily lost to consciousness: all of human thinking, in-
crementally modified by the desiring individual who lives at its experienced
center, comes from someone else. In reconstructing the "indentity" of a man
whose conscious identity has dissolved in sleep, Finnegans Wake struc-
turally treats its central figure as the raddled blur of millions of persons,
most of whom are completely absent from the consciousness that they un-
consciously helped to shape. "As a singleminded supercrowd" (42.22), our
hero is "more mob than man" (261.21-22).
These persons, therefore, need not even be close to the dreamer in space
or time. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus claims that his consciousness has been
fathered not at all by Simon Dedalus, but by Aristotle, Aquinas, Shake-
speare, Swift, and the Fathers of the Church; this consciousness is fa-
thered further, and more humanely, by his evanescent crossing with Leopold
Bloom, a stranger who teaches him simple solicitude and interest for a few
hours. Finnegans Wake, working from Vico's science of history, merelyex-
tends Stephen'S insights into the genesis of identity to their logical and just
ends when, in its own strange form, it treats HCE's personality as an or-
ganically unified tissue of other persons, most of whom, buried in a past of
which he is unconscious, play absolutely no part in his wakened life at all.
According to the standards by which we ordinarily assess that genre of writ-
ing known oxymoronically as "realistic fiction," even the most unreflecting
hack would think four times before setting the hero of a novel into a plot
that depended, for instance, on an ancient cult of Greek mystics, influen-
tially descended from a seditious Semitic carpenter, who managed to trans-
form the identity of a Roman emperor of the Western world and subse-
Vieo's "Night of Darkness" 21 3

quently the identities of the descendants of the barbaric hordes his heirs
would conquer. Not Joyce. If realistic fiction by convention scorned the fan-
tastic, the "imitation of the dream-state" that he achieved in Finneaans
Wake found historical reality more fantastic than both the fantasies realistic
novelists scorned and the contrived reality they sought to represent. HCE's
personality, then, is defined not only by family and contemporaries, but by
people as remote in history as Christ and Constantine and Attila. These
people are members of his personality: they arise in his "nightlife" not
simply in composite structures that obliquely capture his identity, but as
parts of him, by virtue of having made parts of his consciousness possible.
Thousands of people from the past and from all nations crowd into HCE's
dream to constitute the mind beneath his mind. In the individually dream-
ing body they establish a thickly entwined human community whose evo-
lution in history has vitally formed the ground of his wakeful life. His ego
or"I ... be the massproductofteamwork" (546.14-15).
Like The New Science, Finneaans Wake generates a vision of human con-
sciousness in which individual personality can be spoken of only as the
summed collection of all persons who have collided with it, made its exis-
tence in history possible, and even vaguely helped to shape it; paradoxi-
cally set entirely within an individual body, the book devastates as com-
pletely as the condition of sleep the whole notion of discrete individuality.
It finally conceives of individuality not as a solipsistic cage, but as a society
of sorts, in which family, contemporaries, historical and racial forebears,
and the shadows of long-forgotten people interact to evolve a conscious or-
ganism, as in Vico, that has dreams and nightmares in a present time which
always moves forward under the evolutionary forces of achieved or frus-
trated desire and wish.
Although the deformations of English integral to the work have caused
some readers to regard it as the product of a furious egocentrism, nothing
could be further from the truth. No defense of Joyce's aesthetic methods will
make a first reading of Finneaans Wake less tortuous and frustrating than it
may perhaps be: it is humiliating for some to be reminded that one does not
know everything in the world, or even in the fractional part of the world
that Joyce managed to assimilate. But even a tortuous first reading of the
Wake should suggest that few books are less egocentric: dead to the world,
its "belowes hero" has no consciousness of himself as an "ego" or an "iden-
tity" at all. As social in its vision of individual personality as The New Sci-
ence, Finneaans Wake does not elevate HCE even to the individual level of
an insignificant Leopold Bloom, but represents his mind in the displaced

guises of all those others who have made that mind what it is. Almost pro-
miscuous and indiscriminating in its fascination with humanity, it does not
seek to tell the egotistically private success story of an individual burdened
with great expectations. Less egocentric than somatocentric, it depicts a
hero void of identity and weirdly named "Here Comes Everybody," who lies
"refleshed" in the universally experienced condition of sleep, thinking in
the form of poetic wisdom that flows out of the body and underlies the texts
of dreams, whose mind is an introjected image of the universe and of the
universe of people who made him. The "ideal universal history" that Vico
discovered beneath the consciousness of everyone born in the enlightened
present, Joyce made a living, dynamic world in Finne8ans Wake. Its prose is
the prose of the world.

CHAPTER E I G H T
"Meoptics"
SOME "VIDUAL" AIDS

Although the complaint that "joyce's vision has atrophied" in Finnegans
Wake most often comes from readers hostile to the book, even its admirers
have noted in perplexity that "the strangest feature of this dream is that it
lacks visual imagery ... it is no easier to visualize a Mookse or a Gripes
than to gather a clear-cut impression of slithy tove or a mome rath. " I Diffi-
culties like these now merit our attention because the evident visual opac-
ity of the Wake is only a special case of what has been more broadly per-
ceived as its general referential opacity: since so much ofthe Wake is hard to
visualize, it is difficult to see it referring to anything at all. Here as always,
however, the continued practice of "ideal insomnia" and steady reference to
the night will illuminate a great deal, and largely by reminding us that most
of the night does not involve vision or visual dreaming of any sort at all.
One can hardly notice the transformation as it overtakes one nightly in
bed, but as one lies there colorfully envisioning other people and places
while drifting out of wakefulness into sleep, one suddenly becomes func-
tionally blind. 2 The greater part of sleep engages you in "blind poring,"
"with ... dislocated reason," "in your own absence" (189.30-31), so that
anyone asking himself what he saw while asleep last night will likely assent
to what he might read virtually anywhere in Finnegans Wake:
- You saw it visibly from your hidingplace?
-No. From my invisibly lyingplace.
216
The Wake, in turn, not simply resists visualization, but actively encourages
its reader not to visualize much in its pages, where "it darkles ... all this
our funnaminal world" (244.13). Because HCE passes through the night
"with his eyes shut" (130.19), he regards the world from the interior of
"blackeye lenses" (183.17) sunk in "eyes darkled" (434.31) and kept firmly
"SHUT" behind "a blind of black" (182.32-33); through the "eyewitless fog-
gus" ofthis "benighted irismaimed" (489.31 [his eyes "benighted," each "iris
maimed"]), we regard a universe of profound "unsightliness" (131. 19). "It's
a pity he can't see" (464.5), because it makes all the many "unseen" "thinks"
that happen in FinneBans Wake difficult for the reader who craves spectacle
to apprehend (158.36, 194.18, 4°3.22).
Consciousness is so firmly affixed to the human eye that one would find it
difficult to write an extended sentence in English without agitating some
aspect of vision (as in this sentence, for instance, the terms" affix," "length,"
and "extended" evoke spatial relations; "write," if not "sentence," evokes
graphics; and "aspect" furls out of the Latin specere ["to look at"], in kin-
ship with terms like spectrum, spectacle, introspect, and perspective). All
such concrete nouns as "eye," certainly, "appeal [appear] to [the] grope-
sarching eyes" (167.12-13); but so too, implicitly, do many abstractions:
"insight," for instance, "ideas," « Gr. eido, "to see"), and "theory" « Gr.
theoreo, "to look at, view"). In the Wake, by contrast-where everything is
"forswundled" (598.3 [Ger. verschwindet, "vanished," or vorschwindelt,
"made-believe" )-the language struggles hard to "appeal [appear]" neither
to the eye nor to those parts of consciousness rooted in the eye because it
probes a state of existence in which everything is unconscious, and there-
fore not immediately "wiseable" (16.24 [or "visible"]).
Antithetical in every way to the world accessibly open to "the light of the
bright reason which daysends to us from the high" (610.28-29 ["descends,"
"day sends"]), the Evening World is situated at the heart of an immense men-
tal and cosmological "Blackout" (560.2, 617.14; cf. 221.22, 403.17 ["Black!
Switch out!"])-and not least because sleep and night undo the creative fiat
(L. "Fiat lux," "Let there be light!") by pitching the visible into a form of
doubly complected darkness. As gravity pulls the planet through the pen-
umbra and umbra of its own shadow and "the owl globe wheels into view"
(6.29-30), visible earth spills off the face of the earth, and "the darkness
which is the afterthought of [the Lord's] nomatter" alone becomes manifest
(258.32-33). Within the darkness of this "earth in umber" (588.20 [L. um-
bra, "shadow"]), millions of "humble indivisibles in this grand continuum"
fall down dead to the world in synchrony with the Wake's "benighted iris-
"Meoptics" 21 7
maimed" (472.3°), where, blinded by sleep and given "glass eyes for an eye"
(183.36), they see only "invasable blackth" (594.33 [as opposed to "visible
black"]). A recurrent term in Finneaans Wake-"Fiatfuit!" (17.32)-simply
means in Latin that '''Let there be!' was," or as Joyce puts it elsewhere in
English, "leaden be light" (313.35); "as it was, let it be" (80.23). The phrase
punctuates the book in various forms to remind its reader that because there
is no sunlight at night and no vision in sleep, any reconstruction of the
night must also inherently study the "shadyside" of the creation (585.29)-
its nightly decreation-through whose dark force the fiat and the covenant
are breached as, on the underside of the earth and closed eyelids, the world
is hurled back to the "primeval conditions" that obtained before its genesis
(599.9-10).3 "Like a great black shadow" (626.24-25), HCE therefore passes
the night in the intangible deeps of an "earth in umber hue" (588.20). "in
the shade" of a "shadowed landshape" (134.31-32,242.18,251.16, 279.FI5-
16,474.2-3), where he tends to envision only shadows of "in vas able blackth"
"and shadows shadows multiplicating" (281.17-18).
It will help a reader both to orient himself in Joyce's "book of the dark"
and to maintain an essential "blank memory" of his "own nighttime" if he
realizes that an extended representational mannerism put to play in the
work seeks in every context "the best and schor test way of blacking out a
caughtalock of all the sorrors of Sexton" (230. 10-II) ; since the "sorrows of
Satan," like the "horrors" to which a "sexton" will introduce one at one's
wake, largely concern the "tropped head," we find the line "blocking out a
catalogue" of ciphers that evoke the night's "seemetery." But since "the
caughtalock" in question is simply aman "arrested"-"caught" and "locked"
in sleep-it also tells us that he tends to find "the best way of blacking out"
anything that threatens to disrupt his rest with visionary turmoil. To por-
tray the dark "optical life" (179.1-2) of this "benighted irismaimed," Joyce
in turn necessarily and ceaselessly finds "the best and shortest way of black-
ing out" anything that might be visualized-by drawing on a number of
murky terms that we have already considered ("black," "blank," "blind,"
"blot," "blotch," "dark," "night," and "murk") but also ubiquitous others.
These "blackartful" terms lie everywhere in Finneaans Wake (121.27) , dense-
ly woven over every page, scotomizing the work in ways so playfully per-
vasive that they can hardly be catalogued and at best merely illustrated. Ac-
tively warning a reader never to visualize anything but "invasable blackth"
unless there are clear indications to the contrary, they collectively yield a
good rule of thumb to follow in reading this "specturesque" "book of the
dark" (427.33): "keep black, keep black!" (34.34 [not "back"]).

"It is a mere mienerism of this vague of visibilities," "for inkstands"
(608.1 [Fr. vaBue, "empty"], 173.34), that terms like "shade," "tar," "coal,"
"pitch," "soot," and "ink" should everywhere occlude words that are other-
wise "basically English" (116.26). With intricate particularity, these "black-
artful" terms (121.27) enable the Wake to adopt its own peculiar "dressy
black modern style" (55.14-15), a "blackhand" "sootable" to the portrai-
ture of "a blackseer" who is given to envisioning only vast "blackshape[s]"
and lots of "pitchers" (495.2; L, III, 147; 340.13; 608.29; 233· 1,438.13, 531. 15,
587.14,598.21). Since each such "pitcher" would be a "picture" more "pitch-
black" (385.6) than "pitch" ("pitch," "pitcher," "pitchest"), as "unseen" by
someone trained with "the Black Watch" (438.15 [not necessarily a British
Highland regiment]), it doubtlessly "reminds you of the outwashed en-
gravure that we used to be blurring on the blotchwall" (13.6-7). Anything
so clear as "West 23rd Street" necessarily becomes, when captured from this
"focoal" perspective (411.32) and in one of these "pitchers," only "Waste-
windy tarred strate" (549.15)-a lot of ethereal "tar" and "waste," as blown
through the hollows of the "bloweyed" "stratum" (hence "strate") shown
lying there in the "relief maps" (534.18). The Wake might be construed,
then, as representing an "EBONISER. IN PIX" (304.RI); only apparently an
"Ebenezer" representable "in pictures," the "blackseer" underlying this
phrase is an absolute "eboniser," "blacked out" and lost in deep "pix" (L.
"tar"). A "tarrable" "fullsoot" (520.2, 411.22 ["terrible falsehood"]), the
"sootynemm" shows "Eboniser" "in duskguise" as "a Tar" (420.5, 532.27,
385.33 [not necessarily a sailor]), and it makes him "a quhare soort of a ma-
han" indeed (16. I): the "soot" in that "soort" blacks out a word already
ebonised by the Danish sort ("black"), so to locate the Wake's hibernating
"mahan" (Anglo-Ir., "bear") in the "ideal residence for realtar" (560.13 [not
"realtor," but "real tar"]). "Watching tar" (505.2) might well be an ideal
preparatory exercise for any reading of FinneBans Wake.
Every "blind drawn" (559.5), every" black patch" (559.25, 93.4), and all
"Phenecian blends" and "Persia[n] blind[s]" in the Wake (221.32, 583.14-15)
comparably help the open-eyed reader appreciatively to share the "eye-
witless foggus" and "Black Watch" of a sightless "irismaimed" who lies "un-
speechably thoughtless over it all here in Gizzygazelle Tark's bimboowood"
(238.36-239. I [note the "tar"]) : while that "bamboowood" ordinarily makes
"blinds," here it makes also "blind," and, together with the references to
"Gazelle Park" and "the Bamboo Wood," where Buddha lived, it suggests
that HCE is not only "nearvanashed," but "belined to the world" (156.20)-
indeed, "blem, blem, stun blem" (98.3-4 ["blind," "stone blind," "stunned,"
"Meoptics" 21 9
and, by way of the Gael. sl. blem, "crazy"]). "And what wonder with the
murkery viceheid in the shade?" (251. 15-16): "murky eyesight" is an only
"certainty" (Oa. vished) or "knowledge" (Ger. Weisheit) that emerges in
sleep's "murky light" (180.17 [Oa. m¢rk, "dark"]). Since our hero passes
through sleep "siriusly and selenely sure behind the shutter," at any rate
(513. I) -where "Sirius" and the moon (or "Selene") orient us in the night
and that "shutter" shuts out light-a reader of the Wake would well do more
than "keep black!": "pull the blind" (132.14) and "draw the shades, curfe
you" (145.'n-34 [since "curfew," "curse you," comes at night]).
"Blueblacksliding constellations" like these "continue to shape" the uni-
verse of Finneaans Wake from beginning to end (405.9-10), and more often
than not, since it is hard to see at night, in ways "sootably" hard to see.
"Umbrellas" and "parasols," for instance, pop up all over the book because
both of these instruments do in miniature what the night does absolutely,
blotting out the sun and throwing pockets of "jettyblack" shade into the
world (583.22 ["parasol" derives from the It. parare sale, "to ward off the
sun," while "umbrella" comes from the L. umbra, "shade"). The "great
black shadow" sleeping at the Wake therefore lies embroiled in a dark "fam-
ily umbroglia" (284.4)-an "imbroglio," to be sure, since familial conflicts
underlie his dreams, but an "umbrella" also, since the essential forces in
these conflicts are "infrarational" and have nothing to do with vision at all.
Since dreams threaten to awaken visual consciousness from "the sense ar-
rest" that pervades most of sleep (5°5.31), every "exposed sight" in Fin-
neaans Wake "pines for an umbrella of its own" (159.35-36); and for this
reason, we periodically find "Eboniser" maintaining his placid" Black Watch"
on the world by "hoistina ... an emeraency umberolum in byway of para-
auastical solation to the rhytteJ in his hedd" (338.7-8). The line tells us that
rather than working out a "paraphrastical solution to the riddle in his head"
by facing the conflicts that might disrupt his sleep with the fatiguing de-
mands of a visual dream, the "blackseer" in himself" blanks his 0aales"
(34°.13,349.27 ["his eyes"]), opens a big mental "umbrella" (Sp. paraauas),
and slips from imminent strife back into sleepy peace (hence the contradic-
tory play of the We. rhyfel ["war"] and hedd ["peace"] in "the rhyttel in his
hedd"). "In any case" (Fr. en tout cas), since we have an "entoutcas for
a man" as a hero (129.6 [Fr. en-taut-cas, "umbrella"]), the Wake might now
be read as the Ballad of "Parasol Irelly" (525.16), its shadowy protagonist,
the proud owner of an "umbrilla-parasoul" (569.20), moving us some-
what "beyond" (Gr. para-) ordinary Western accounts of the "soul" (hence
"parasoul") .

The Wake in turn becomes an extended "umbrella history" addressed
to "lay readers" (573.36, 35 [as opposed to "standing" ones]), and it pro-
ceeds "parasoliloquisingly" (63.20 [as a "soliloquy" made in the shade
well ought]), "going forth by black" (62.27) while moving "Parasol Irelly"
through a stream of shady encounters localized, for instance, "on Umbrella
Street" (98.24) or "under the idlish tarriers' umbrella of a showerproofwall"
(182.15-16): "idlish tarriers," in contrast to athletically jogging "Irish har-
riers," would simply lie there, "tarrying idly" in one dark spot, while that
"showerproofwall" would resist not only rainfall but anything at all threat-
ening to "show" itself ("shower" can rhyme with "lower" here). As an "um-
brella history," in turn, the Wake becomes peopled by the many "dark-
ener[s]" (418.5), "shadowers" (60.21), "dark deed doer[s]" (246.30), and
other such "invisible friends" (546.29) who move through our hero's "tropped
head" during sleep and, by day, engage him in all manner of unconscious
struggle. Anyone may well recall such "invisible friends" by cultivating a
"blank memory" of last night: blind though you may have been, "you saw
their shadows ... struggling diabolically over this, that and the other ...
near the Ruins" (518.3-6 [where these "Ruins," from the L. ruere, "to fall,"
return us to a meditation on the body shown rubbled in the relief maps]).4
In the Wake, these "invisible friends" include many "Doyles" and "Sul-
livans." So many "Doyles" and "Sullivans" populate Finnegans Wake that the
book calls the "component partners" of the morphic "state" it represents
"doyles when they deliberate but sullivans when they are swordsed" (142.8,
26-27 [Fr. sourd, "deaf"]), though collectively they resolve into "The Mor-
phios" (142.29 [Gr. Morpheus]). While the name Doyle, deriving from the
Gaelic 6 Dubhghaill, literally means "black-foreigner" and historically re-
fers to the Danes; and while Sullivan, comparably, derives from the Gaelic
6 SuileabhQin and literally means "black-eyed," Joyce said he "put the lan-
guage to sleep" in Finnegans Wake and consequently "could not ... use
words in their ordinary connections" Ul, 546). Many of the "Doyles" and
"Sullivans" who appear in the Wake, accordingly, linger there in extraor-
dinary ways. Sleep forces the Wake's "benighted irismaimed" into all sorts
of "blank assignations" with the "doyle"-the "dark alien"-in himself
(575.15);5 and the book's many "Sullivans" often have eyes less visibly black
than eyes with "blackeye lenses" "blacked out" to the core. For all the
"bleakeyed" figures and forms moving throughout Finnegans Wake (327.29),
the only violence perpetrated on them is the night's-as anyone falling
asleep anywhere will note: "Conan Boyles will pudge the daylives out
through him" (617.14-15), and so badly that all things will "change their
"Meoptics" 221
characticuls during their blackout" (617.13-14). What the Wake studies in
its accounts of tortuous struggles between "Doyles" and "Sullivans" and
"Tars" of this "soort" are conflicts that Joyce commemorates as "Contrasta-
tions with Inkermann" (71.8-9). These stand in "contrast" to Goethe's Con-
versations with Eckermann, a tome of almost unbearable light, in being re-
laxingly dark; for if an "inkman" is black, an "inkerman" must be blacker;
and if Goethe helped lift the Enlightenment to its apex ("More light!"), the
Wake helps inject it with a little more dark ("Keep black!").
At the end of many a "blindfold passage" (462.35) and movement "down
blind lanes" (116.34), the Wake ends up pointing its "irismaimed" into "an
allblind alley leading to an Irish plot in the Champ de Mors, not?" (119.31-
32 [Fr. champ des morts, "cemetery"]). Because the man "tropped head" at
the Wake lies "blurried" in the night's "seemetery" (13. I I ["blurred," "bur-
ied"]) , the reader might also enter his "eyewitless foggus" by recalling
or imagining what it would be like to "have of coerce nothing in view to
look forward at" but the undersideofa "mudfacepacket" (410.2-3,492.20)-
and preferably one six feet deep. Our hero envisions precisely this item
while in mind of a "family drugger" (492.21) set up on "Ombrilla Street"
(492.23), though he himself lies "confined," because sleep "arrests" his
body, "in [a] back haul of Coalcutter" (492.15) blacker for the "coal" than
"the black hole of Calcutta" (cf. 86.7-lIfI.). If one now refers to the inani-
mate "mound" shown stratified in Relief Map B-and it could be likened to
the dumped "black haul of some coal-cutter"-one will note that sleep has
"burrowed the coacher's headlight" (11.17): each such "headlight" would be
one of the eyes of the blindman in question (Gael. caoch, "blind"), each by
night "buried" and "burrowed" in the underground of the body. More than
once in the book identified as "the Mole" (310.1), the Wake's "benighted
irismaimed" should therefore be understood to have all the visionary acuity
of a mole-though a mole sleepily "obcaecated" (76.36 [L. obcaecatus,
"made blind, invisible"]) in a "mole's paradise" (76.33-34), a "mountainy
molehill" (474.22), a "wholemole" (614.27 ["molehole"]).6
As all these examples suggest, trying to capture the "eyewitless foggus" of
a man "dead to the world" and given to envisioning sodden "mudface-
packets" necessarily engaged Joyce in the exercise of something like "pho-
tography in mud" (277.25-26). Like Shem the Penman, a reader of the Wake
should therefore discover that "every splurge on the vellum he blunder[s]
over [is] an aisling vision" (179.30-31): either vision is badly "ailing," that
is, or-since the Gaelic aisling means "dream"-it bleeds up spectrally
within sealed "blackeye lenses." Almost every page in the Wake "pulls a

lane picture for us, in a dreariodreama setting, glowing and very vidual, of
old dumplan" (79.27-29): each "pulls a very lean picture," that is, one
dimly "glowing" when "dreams" appear, but otherwise simply "vidual."
Since the Latin vidua means "deprived" (but also "widow" in context), the
line indicates that everything normally "visual" becomes, in the "blackeye
lenses" of the Wake's "irismaimed," simply "vidual" ("deprived of the vi-
sual"); but it also suggests the extent of the Wake's intention to do for the
night and the absent what "the Lane Pictures" do in offering colorfully ver-
isimilar representations of a present: "Ah, in unlitness 'twas in very simili-
tude" (404.12).
Critics have passed on the extremely odd and hardly comprehensible idea
that Book I of Finne8ans Wake, which joyce called "a kind of immense
shadow," and part of which he published under the title "A Mole" (L, II,
lxx), takes place in the daytime, and even begins in the morning.? This
reading surely needs reconciliation with joyce's own belief that he was
"writing about the night" ("It is night. It is dark. You can hardly see"), but
also with a reader's experience of the very murky "darkumen" itself (350.28),
which begins with the fall of "Eve" (3.1)-not necessarily "a beauty from
the bible" (192.28)-and alludes to "the night" and "the shades that Eve's
now wearing" "in dims and deeps and dusks and darks" that are streaked
over "ebony" "blink pitch" (226.12-14, 341.9, 93.4 ["every black page"]):
when "Eve takes fall," it is night (293.21). The observation that "it is not
always night in dreams" will begin to reconcile these discrepancies, but will
not finally explain why so much of a "darkumen" supposed to begin in the
morning comes off the page "surrounded by obscurity" and "looking pretty
black" (546.19, 188.4-5).8 In fact, little of joyce's "reconstruction ofthe noc-
turnal life"-and certainly none of Book I-takes place in the day, al-
though its hero periodically, if only momentarily, seems to envision "charm-
ing details of light in dark" in dreams (606.21-22). Daylight occurs to its
hero only toward the end of Finne8ans Wake, in the middle of III.iv, when
"the dapplegray dawn drags nearing nigh for to wake all droners that drowse
in Dublin" (585.20-21), and "when the messanger of the risen sun ...
[begins to] give to every seeable a hue and to every hearable a cry and to
each spectacle his spot" (609.19-21). "In the moontime" (528.5 [a noctur-
nal "meantime"]), "till daybowbreak and showshadows flee" (546.23),
"yeddonot need light" to read extended parts of the book (535.9 [the refer-
ence to the japanese city Yeddo, however, apprises us of the steady pull
exerted on HCE's nightlife by the imminence of tomorrow and the "Rising
Sun"]) .
"Meoptics" 223
If, then, we return to the opening chapter of the Wake, any number of
"blackartful" signs will show that the "hole affair"-a "spoof of visibility in
a freakfog" (48.1-2)-is heavily "involved in darkness" right from the start
(79.1). In a phrase by now familiar, for instance-"yet may we not see still
the brontoichthyan form outlined aslumbered" (7.20-21) -any difficulty we
might have had visualizing a "brontoichthyan form" is obviated by the cast of
the sentence in which the phrase occurs. Not a question, but an assertion, it
tells us that we could not see it lying still a moment ago, and "we may not
see [it] still." More explicitly, a few pages later: "we may take our review
of the two mounds [of 'hillhead' and 'tumptytumtoes'] to see nothing ....
We may see and hear nothing if we choose .... as he lays dormont" (12.19-
20, 25-26, 35). Joyce gets so much play out of "visus umbique" like these
(183.14)-out of "things seen" (L. visus) "everywhere" (L. undique) "ob-
scurely" (L. ambi8ue) -that terms like "see," "look," "peer," "scene," "view,"
and "eye" invariably bear cautious scrutiny for what they "reveil" about
HCE's very deeply "blackguarded eye" (464.12 [and never trust a "black-
guard"]). These terms are so pervasive, in fact, that we might now "rear-
rive" at the first page of the Wake to clarify, by "keep[ing] black!," some
more of its murkily "clearobsure" terms.
We learn here, for instance, that our hero is "a bland old isaac" (3. II) :
the "comedy nominator," reduced "to the loaferst terms" (283.7-8), sug-
gests in part that the Wake's heroic "loafer" resembles the Biblical Isaac in
being just an old man whose paternal authority has of late been assailed by
one of his "kids"-"Jerkoff" (246.30 [Jacob])-who, merely by growing into
all the nasty tensions and pretensions of adolescence ("buttended" = "pre-
tended"), has begun treating his "oldparr" like a "cad" ("kidscad" [3. II]).
But the phrase also suggests simply that HCE, like Isaac, is "blind." And this
is why "rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aqua-
face" (3.13- 14).
Merely by falling asleep, the Wake's "irismaimed" has drifted into a uni-
verse whose visible surfaces lie beyond-below-the red end of the spec-
trum ("rory = Irish = red," in Joyce's gloss of this line; "regginbrow = Ger-
man regenbogen + rainbow" [L, I, 248]). If "nighthood's unseen violet [ultra
violet] render[s] all animated greatbritish and Irish objects nonviewable to
human watchers" elsewhere in the Wake (403.34-36), so too here must
"nighthood's unseen infrared," at the other, "rory" end of the spectrum. In
other words, the spectrum of visible light extending from red to violet and
perceptible at every minute of the waking day is nowhere to be seen here
("No end to the rainbow was to be seen"); and in its place, within "eyes

shut," kinds of light invisible to "eyes whiteopen" have swum problemati-
cally, if at all, into view (234.7): "his reignbolt's shot" (590.10). Sleep begins
precisely here, where the spectrum of visible light comes to an end-to both
its ends-and where kinds of light invisible to the open eye emerge "from
the irised sea" (318.34 ["see"]) to "reveil" to a man made absent "the spec-
trem of his prisent" (498.31 ["the spectre of a present," as illuminated in
"spectral" colors bled out of a "prism" imprisoned in "blackeye lenses"]).
Vision arises here, like the verb "to be seen," in passive form, and in the
absence of any identifiable agent or perceived object.
"Eboniser's" darkening "fall" asleep "in bed" on the first page of the Wake
moreover scatters him "through all christian minstrelsy" (3.18). The phrase
suggests in part that a deep past-"all Christian history"-has assumed a
weird vitality in his nightlife, and it also historically dates him: "Christy
Minstrels"-a generic name for variety shows in which white performers
sang "Negro spirituals" in blackface-were popular in turn-of-the-century
Europe. Not least, however, the phrase evokes a world of weird vaudevil-
lean inversions, where white has been made black, and light dark (d.
66.19-22). For the man "tropped head" at the Wake lies "melained from
nape to kneecap" (247.19 [Gr. melaino, "to blacken"]) -see relief map-and
has so "blacked out" as to become, though not in any way accessible to vi-
sion or susceptible to racial construction, a "darky" (515.34), a "blackman"
(236.16), a "Tar." "The darkens alone knows" what this blind and blacked-
out "darky" is able to see on the first page of the book (439.24), where, as far
as he can "no," "it mights be anything after darks" (603.25-26).9 Together,
all these terms indicate, as we might expect, that Joyce's "book of the dark"
begins in the dark and only progressively moves toward "the opening of the
mind to light" (258.31-32). A reader sensitive to its "dressy black modern
style" will therefore likely discover that through much of the Wake "there
would not be a holey spier on the town ... nor a yew nor an eye" anywhere
(23.35-36): that "holey spier," of course, would be our hero, who "spies"
only "holes" (as opposed to "holy spires") because he is dead to the world
(hence "yew") and blind (hence "no eye") : .. 'tis endless now senne eye [or
1] ... last saw" (213.15).10
Although he is "looking pretty black" at everything (188.4-5), the Wake's
"irismaimed" nonetheless "ha[s] more in his eye" (81.20) than this survey of
"sightlessness" can have suggested: "his lights not all out yet" (379.13) be-
cause visual dreams do sporadically fill the "Black and All Black" interior of
his "tropped head" with spectral outpourings of vision and color. Our cer-
tain memory of such dreams, then-compelling us to wonder, "Will it
"Meoptics" 225
bright upon us, nightle"?-merits the infirm answer, "Well, it might now,
mircle, so it light" (66.21-23). Apprising us of the "miracle" by which
"light" flows forth in "batblack" "blackeye lenses" (405.36), the phrasing
here reminds us that colorful "light at night" (256.34) does irradiate sleep,
and largely because "we're eyed for aye" (239.6). "Let us see all there may
remain to be seen," then (113.32-33): "light us find" (267.1), with "eye[s]
... nolensed" (113.28 ["no lens!"]), night's manifold "brights and shades"
(621.23) .
"RAYINGBOGEYS"
It follows, of course, that whatever vision does arise in sleep is not precisely
in the nature of vision at all, since it too bleeds up "in fact, under the closed
eyes" (107.28). To represent fully the intricate character and play of this
"light at night" (256.34), while yet maintaining an accurate "unlitness ...
in very similitude" (404.12), the Wake necessarily develops its own system
of vision and optics-or, more accurately, of "invision" and "meoptics"
(626.28, 139.16)-which elaborately captures "the charming details of light
in dark" (606.21-22) that iridescently emerge, with visual dreams, within
the "blackeye lenses" of "eyes darkled." As the spelling implies, the Wake's
"meoptics" is an insuperably "myopic optics," applicable primarily to the
"me" that comes to light when the eyes "SHUT" ("myopia" derives from the
Gr. myein, "to close or shut" and ops, "the eye"). And "when I turn meop-
tics, from suchurban prospects" as my bedroom walls by falling asleep
(139.16), what becomes visible, if not "invasable blackth," are kinds of light
that have only the most spectral connections with those bled out of New-
ton's spectrum.
According to classical treatments of the subject, which evolve out of
Descartes's Dioptric (1636) and Newton's Opticks (1704) and culminate in
von Helmholtz's magisterial three volumes on Physiological Optics (1866),
vision occurs as rays oflight reflected from real objects endowed with Lock-
ean "primary qualities"-"one photoreflection of the several iridals grada-
tiones of solar light" (611.16-I7)-impinge on the retina and ding it for life
with an image of the real (see figure 8.1). Since Helmholtzian optics are
inaccurate to the experience of sleep, however, where vision arises within
the sealed chambers of the "eyegonblack" (16.29 ["gone very black"]), only
the dawning of daybreak at the end of Finnegans Wake finds "hemhalts-
healing" (611 .28 [a "Helmholtzian" optics "healing"]); prior to that, as the

spelling implies, the machinery of classical optics simply "halts," the Wake's
"meoptics" filling in its ample gaps (see figure 8.2).
This "meoptics" works the other way around: the light searing the retina
comes from within and from behind-as "if this could see with its back-
sight" (249.2 ["backside"])-and even as it issues invitations to "Lucihere!"
(295.33 ["Look here!"]), it also plays demonic pranks on the dreamer (just as
the L. lucifer literally means "light-bringing" but refers to the Prince of
Darkness). Color precipitating "from next to nothing" in sleep, then (4.36-
5.1), causes HCE to see as if "through his eyetrompit" only vast "tromps-
l'oeil" (247.32-33 [Fr. "visual illusions"]), and with such murky strain as to
require the optical equivalent of an "ear-trumpet" (see figure 8.4).
Well-endowed as he may be with "a peerless pair" of "seeless socks"
(382.23, 468.25 [this "peerless pair" "peers" at nothing]), the Wake's "be-
nighted irismaimed" has as fine "a first class pair of bedroom eyes" as any of
the figmentary characters of whom he dreams (396.rr); and at ample coun-
termoments to the book's predominating "blackouts," its "Anglo-Irish"
sleeper-"he, selfsufficiencer ... what though the duthsthrows in his ...
eyes" (240.14- 17 ["what though the death-throes," the blinding "dust
thrown"]) -turns luridly "agio iris" (528.23 [his "iris aglow"]), so that "by
the hundred and sixty odds rods and cones of this even's vision" (4°5.12-13),
he becomes" all eyes": "We are all eyes. I have his quoram of images all on
my retinue, Mohomadhawn Mike" (443.1-2).1l The wording here in part
calls attention to the way in which Muhammad received the words of
the Koran on "the night of power" in Ramadan (hence "quoram" and
"Mohamad-"); but, by way of the Gaelic amadan ("fool"), it does so pri-
marily in order to call our attention to the weird optics of vision in dreams,
during which the "retina" ("retinue"), "under the closed eyes," may in fact
actively "rudden up in fusefiressence on the flashmurket" (378.8): retinal
"flesh" all "murked" ("fleshmurket"), in other words, "flashes" out in "phos-
phoresence" ("fusefiressence") to raise a visionary "fussforus" (505.33), so
that suddenly one finds oneself strolling wishfully through a "fleshmarket"
and really believing oneself there. For one is as likely to discover an account
of Muhammad's "night of power" in the nineteenth-century literature on
sleep as in any book on Islam:
Tradition accounts for Mohammed's being among the prophets in this wise: While
indulging in spiritual meditations and repeating pious exercise on Mount Hira in the
month of Ramedan, the Angel Gabriel came to him by night, as he was sJeepin8,
held a silken scroll before him, and required him, though not knowing how to read,
to recite what was written on the scroll. The words thus communicated remained
graven on his memory.... 12
"Meoptics" 227
Image
~ , f~~
L~' _
"'JIj<\~~
I!!f§;~
,~",,,,_~r
"pupils" , '\' //r
,,"" (25L30)
"" " ,,'' '
ms (285,27. 528.23; 238,32. ~_'I
~~'i\l.
318.34.489,31. 493,28. 612.20)
Figure 8. I. The ideal or schematic eye
"blackeye lenses" "the eye" "nolensed"

(183.17) (113.28 [no lens])
"Oscur Camerad" (602.23 [the

"camera obscura" of our
"obscure comrade"])
"a blind of black" (182.33)
"SHUT" (182.32)
"blepharospasmockical ?
suppressions" (515,16-17
[Gr. blepharon. "eyelid"])
Figure 8.2. "one eyegonblack"
In Joyce's conflation of "quoram" and "retina," the silken screen seen by

Muhammad "with his eyes shut" is not fully distinguishable from the reti-
nal screen perceived by anyone in sleep. For Joyce and the authorities of his
own day rightly inferred what students of "rapid-eye movements" have re-
cently and more firmly claimed: except that they are firmly "SHUT," the
eyes of a person hosting a visual dream behave oddly as they do in wakeful-
ness under the photic pressure of real objects; and while it is obviously im-
possible to look "under the closed eyes" without opening them and destroy-

"his truetoflesh colours"
(481.30)
"eye-to-eye ayewitnessed" """'
(254.10) "- "".,:,..--- "selfcolours" (237.4)
"irmages" (486.34
/"'--,
["mirages," "images") "glowworld"
(318.14 ["glowworm"))
"at the present momentum, potential as I am,

I'm seeing rayingbogeys rings round me" (304.7-9)
Figure 8.3. "truetoflesh colours"
"his eyelids are painted" (248.16)

"The letter! The litter!"
"Of eyebrow penci lied"
(93.24-25) "traumscrapt" (623.36["transcript"
~ ofGer. Traum, "drt'am"; "trauma"))
T<"'- ---.......- ~-- ------""'--"" ---.. . . -.. ,
, "mimage" (53.3 ["mime,"
I "mirage," "image"))
I
1 +-/ ___ --..... --...-.... __ '-
"down under" (321.32,450.1)
I
( : ~,~
.L"t--- ........... -----.../ . .
,"_f
"our moving pictures" (565.6)

"And roll away the reel world, "look at that now! I don't know is it your spietre
the reel world, the reel world!" or my omination but I'm glad you dimentioned it! (299.4-6
(64.25-26) [the "ominous" "emanation" is the "spectre" of a "picture"])
Figure8.4. "traumscrapt"
ing the conditions that prevail there, it may even well be that "the rods and
cones of even's vision" spark dimly up, during dreams, to generate a "fussfor"
us (415.5) Y By anyone's account, the visual dream entails a partial waken-
ing of the eyes out of sleep, and, with them, the wakening of a shadowy
aspect of visual consciousness.
All the many and "varied lights" appearing in Finneaans Wake are accord-
ingly "veereyed lights" (344.23), snapped on within the incandescent "eye-
"Meoptics" 229
bulbs" (531.8,557. 12)-the "gropesarching eyes" (167.12-13)-of an "aglo-
irismaimed" whom we might again construe as "Burymeleg and Bind-
merollingeyes" (II .6-7). If the wording here accords with reflections on
"our own nighttime" in suggesting that most of sleep sinks one into a state
of motor paralysis and functional blindness, it also implies that at moments
in the night the "bound eyes" of this "irismaimed" start to "roll," so to
render his "bul8e8laryin8 star8apers razzledazzlin8ly full of eyes, full of
balls, full of holes, full of buttons, full of stains, full of medals, full of
blickblackblobs" (339. 19-2I) : the phrasing calls attention to the "bulging,"
"glaring," and "gaping" "eye" "balls" of a "stargazer" (one who exercises
vision at night), while the "medals" and "buttons" scattered among the
ocular terms suggest the growth, in these eyes, of a "uniform" appearance-
that of "the rouged engenerand" (372.6-7 [or "Russian Genera!," "rouged"
because colorfully "made up" and "engendered" in HCE's eyes]). Followed
by a line that shows this "rouged engenerand" taking form in the seven col-
ors of the spectrum (339.27-29 [or rainbow]), the passage suggests that
"eyes now kindling themselves are brightening" (290.4); and it also allows
us to begin seeing, in "lumerous ways" (282.29 ["numerous" "luminous"]),
how intricately "this looseaffair brimsts of fussforus!" (5°5.32-33 [again
note the "light-bearing" lucifer in this darkly "loose affair"]).
Such sporadic ocular turmoil as disrupts sleep with vision will perhaps
explain the Wake's recurrent preoccupation with forms of "light" that no
one awake can ever see-with "infrared," "ultraviolet," "herzian waves,"
and "xrays," for instance, all of which resemble the light washing over ob-
jects perceived in dreams in not being visible to the open eye (207.IO-II,
316.2-3, 425.35, 590.7-9; 232.IO-II, 460.25; 51.25-26, 248.1, 530.8). But it
will also certainly clarify the Wake's well-known obsession with "rain-
bows" and "rainbow girls," and its dense employment of what Joyce called
"the iritic colors" (L, I, 295) .14 The term obviously signifies the seven colors
of the "rainbow" (Gr. iris); but as the iritically afflicted Joyce would well
have known and as passages everywhere in the Wake suggest, these "iritic
colors" largely appear beneath the "iris" of vision-capable eyes ("see Iris in
the Evenine's World" [285.27]) .15 If it is true, then, that HCE (as" Terry Cot-
ter" [71.22]) tends to envision wet "mudfacepackets" throughout the night
(because "his likeness is in Terrecuite and he giveth rest to the rainbowed"
[133.3°-31]), it is no less certain that he is periodically able to see, "by
arclight" (3.13 [Fr. arc-en-ciel, "rainbow"]), all seven colors of the spec-
trum: "lift the blank" and "split the hvide and aye seize heaven!" (247.30-
31); and as that "eye (and I) sees these seven" colors, it also becomes ca-

pable of seeing the "black and white" constituted by their total absence or
presence (hence "the blank" and the Da. hvide ["whites"]). What the
Wake's "irismaimed" has in mind while "seeing rayingbogeys" of this sort
(304.9 [apart from "bogeys" formed of illusionary "rays" and "rainbows"]) is
simply visible "light." For anyone awake who looks around right now and
surveys the multicolored "photoprismic velamina of [the] hueful panepi-
phanal world" (611.13 [the L. velamina, "coverings" or "veils," of the Gr.
panepiphanes, "all visible"]), will always and only see, anywhere and
everywhere he looks, the colors of the rainbow-though not in neatly ar-
rayed order and rarely in unmixed primary form. Since Joyce also called the
Wake's "iritic colors," in an unusually straightforward remark he purport-
edly made to C. K. Ogden, "the colours of the colour-band" (Annotations,
21S), we should finally see that in Finneyans Wake the colors of the "rain-
bow" simply signify the colors of the spectrum: they make up the total span
of visible light.
It is, accordingly, a sign of our blinded "Irismans ruinboon" (612.20)-a
"boon" redeeming his overwhelming "black ruin" (38I.17)-that he always
has his" gropesarching" "eyes on the peer for Noel's Arch" (490.22 - 23 [Noah's
"arch" is the rainbow]). The opalescent gathering of those iritic colors way
out there in the reaches offar space, on the backs of his eyelids, means that
suddenly, "from next to nothing" (4.36-S.I), out of a universe washed away
and swamped in black, a New World starts radiantly to undergo creation all
over again, bringing to his eyes sights and scenes familiar as "home sweet
home." Having "eyes on the peer for Noel's arch" is like being "on the pier"
when "Noah's ark" comes in-"Gauze off heaven! Vision" (S66.28 [and "Gods
ofheaven"J), ''I'm blest ifI can see" (273.F2, cf. 273.4-s)-because a spirit
scattered in a formlessly dark void starts to incarnate itself ("Noel"), and
with such particular heat in the area of the eyes that it witnesses the crea-
tion of a whole new world:
Yes, there was that skew arch of chrome sweet home [Gr. chroma, "color," "the
surface of the body"]), floodlit up above the flabberghosted farmament and bump
where the camel got the needle. Talk about iridecencies! Ruby and beryl and
chrysolite, jade, sapphire, jasper and lazul. (494.1-5)
What that" camel" shares wi th the" ghosted," "flabbergasted," and "knock[ ed]
out" "Irisman" who envisions these "iridecencies" ("to get the needle" is to
be "knock[ed] out") is tremendous strain in the region of the "eye." For "it is
easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle" (Matt. 19: 24), than
for light to enter the eye of a man "tropped head. " Since the camel seems to
"Meoptics"
squeeze through here (along with that "bump"), so perhaps does iridescent
light. Those seven gemmy stones at the end of these lines call attention to
our "aglo-irismaimed's" "marbled eyes" (55.22), "his pebbled eyes" (463.27),
both of them stirring up internally with a splay of iritic colors, in false ex-
pectation of a dream "being visible above thorizon" (494.9): a "ruby" is red,
"beryl" orange, "chrysolite" yellow, and so forth through the spectrum.
Since the long discursive passage that follows these lines has nothing very
visually "dreamlike" about it, however, moments in the Wake like these
complicate the book's "meoptics" by raising the question of what its "iris-
maimed" might be looking at. Reference to Helmholtz's Physiological Optics
would apprise us here that "the field of vision of a healthy human being is
never entirely free from appearances ... which have been called the cha-
otic light or luminous dust of the dark visual field. It plays such an important
part in many phenomena ... that we shall call it the self-light or intrinsic
light of the retina." Commonly, this "chaotic light" takes the form of "float-
ing clouds," "broad streamers," or "floating cloud-ribbons," all of "which
may be transformed into fantastic figures." 16 According to Freud and the sev-
eral nineteenth-century authorities whom he cites, turbulent versions of
these "intraocular retinal excitations" playa constituent, if not a causative
role in the formation of dreams. 17
Now "peel your eyes" (302. II) : if the reader closes his eyes and "steps out
on the peer," he should eventually note that "he can eyespy through them,
to their selfcolours, nevertheleast their tissue peepers," and even through
"parryshoots" (237.2-4 ["parachutes," like umbrellas, darken what falls be-
low]). All of these "meoptical" terms are asking the reader to consult his
own "peepers" (his eyes and their "tissues," and not "tissue papers") and, by
using the eye to see the eye, to become "eye-to-eye ayewitnessed" (254.10).
The murkily visible "selfcolours" that one will gradually "espy" "out there"
by engaging "in meeingseeing" of this sort (179.1), insusceptible to mapping
in schematic drawings of the" Ideal Eye," are playfully illustrated in figure
8.3; by many accounts, these borealic "selfcolours" are an element in the
"light" that bathes the world in dreams.
No matter whether "presentative" visual dreams entail the active waken-
ing of the eyes or the passive detection of "chaotic light" drifting through
"blackeye lenses," the Wake now suggests that one passes, in falling asleep,
"from golddawn glory to glowworm gleam" (99.1): because the shimmer
falling over all surfaces of the world perceived in dreams is created out of
the eye's flesh and cast forth in a semblance of the real, HCE's "eyebulbs"
might be understood to create light-"fleshed light" (222.22)-like "glow-

worms," "fireflies," "lightning bug[s]," and other forms of life that radiate
color out of living tissue (29.7, 199.36, 246.8, 449.22-23, 528.28). As several
citations from Moore's Melodies suggest ("The glowworm's lamp is gleam-
ing, love"), "this glowworld's lump is gloaming off" (318.13-14) whenever
HCE (the "lump" in question) dimly turns into and fades out of a whole
oneiratic "glow-world"; for when his eyes "rudden up in fusefiressence" or
swim in chaotic light, they exude light like "glowworms," in a nocturnal
universe where, after all, "the gloom hath rays, her lump is love" (411.27-
28 ["The moon hath raised her lamp above"]).18 However fully "his reign-
bolt's shot," then, we now "know [HCE], the covenanter, by rote at least,
for a chameleon at last, in his true falseheaven colours from ultraviolent to
subred tissues" (590.7-9); when the spectral hues of the rainbow (or arc
of "covenant") do glow in the dark of his closed eyes, they reveal a strange
new world illumined under a "heaven" lit with a paradoxically "true false
seven" colors. A "lunar rainbow" of sorts because it only appears "under
the dark flush of night" (527.7 [and also "the dark flesh"]) and because it
can never be seen with open eyes (hence "ultraviolet" and "subred"), this
nocturnal "spectrem" (318.33,498.31 ["spectre's spectrum"]) is radiated up
out of "blackeye lenses" whose "subred tissues" cast forth light, in "true-
toflesh colours" (481. 30), like the bodies of fireflies and the flesh of the
"chameleon." 19
Creating their own form of "earthlight" (449.7), each of HCE's eyes now
becomes a powerful "flask of lightning" (426.29-30 [a container of liquid
and "lightning"]) internal to which, as "flesh" turns into "flash" (220.28 [a
common "misspelling" in the Wake]), he has occasion to glimpse "fleshed
light like likening" (222.22-23 [and "flashed light like lightning"]): as that
"flesh" "flashes" awake, that is-elusively as "lightning"-it yields inevi-
table if obscure "likenings" (''I'm sure he squirted juice in his eyes to make
them flash for flightening me" [626.15-16]). The vision of an "irismaimed"
endowed with this "lightning look" (117.3) therefore becomes at moments
in the Wake a kind of dark "peekaboo" (580.15), or "meteoromancy" (228.20-
21 ["divination by meteors"]), in which "gropesarching eyes" lost under a
"night of falling angles" (21.25), a "night of starshootings somewhere in
Erio" (22.12-13 ["somewhere in an area" accustomed to the more stolid vi-
sion of "Erin"]), are constantly teased by the appearances of scarcely visible
"starshootings," "falling angles," "sheep's lightning" (449.28), and-"eye
bet" (30I.7)-comparably elusive kinds of light (now you see it, no you
didn't): "happen seen sore eynes belived?" (534.26 [Ger. Haben sie so eines
erlebt?, "Have you experienced one like that?"]). Or again, "his veins shoot-
"Meoptics" 233
ing melanite phosphor" (475.14-15 [Gr. melanos, "of black," phosphoros,
"light-bringing"), his eyes engage in a form of "search lighting" (292.18),
since they illumine the night's "glowworld" like "search lights," but have
also to "search" murkily for whatever "light" they create. As "the lighning
leaps from the numbulous," at any rate (367.27-28 [and as imagistic "liken-
ing" emerges from the "nebulous"]), the Wake's "irismaimed" becomes a
"lewdningbluebolteredallucktruckalltraumconductor!" (378.9-10 [a "con-
ductor" of "lightning," "lewd" "trains" ofthought, and the "dream," or Ger.
Traum]) . And his nocturnal vision becomes, in the idiom ofthe Wake, "flash
as flash can" (188.12-13 [one plays "catch as catch can" with these forms of
light]).20
To those visionary guidelines we have already compiled, then, we might
now add a few others: "where there's white [and light], lets ope" (441.6 [and
where there's not, let's "pull the blind" and "keep black!"]). Or again, "don't
you let flyfire till you see their whites of the bunkers' eyes!" (542.25-26)-
where that "bunker," of course, would be a man "in bed" or "bunk," within
whose "firefly"-like eyes whole "New Worlds" are coming to be (hence
"Bunker's Hill"). The Wake in turn becomes a "jackalantern's tale" (197.26-
27, 10.26-27 ["for the lamp ofJig-a-Lanthern!"])' because it takes place in
a hollow (and vegetating) head-or "a candlelittle houthse" (10.26-27
["Howth" = "HEAD"]) -that is erratically "lit [with] thousands in one night-
lights" (135.20): these "thousands" would include the manifold "jack-o-
lanterns," "rayingbogeys," "flyfires," "fusefiressen[t]" "headlights," "fleshes"
of "likelings" (339.16-17), and "swamplights" that we have explored in pass-
ing; and as the wording implies, they all appear "in one"-person-our "be-
nighted" hero, whom we now might construe less as an opaque "Eboniser"
than as a colorful "Saxon Chromaticus" (304.18 [not "Grammaticus"]), an
agent "from Chromophilomos, Limited" (123.14-15 [Gr. chromophilomos,
"colorloving"; "limited" because color is not always there]).
A particularly clear place in Finnegans Wake at which to study the for-
mation and dissolution of visual dreams would be the beginnings and ends
of chapters IIl.i and IIl.ii, which Joyce, obviously playing on the word
"watch," called "The First and Second Watches of Shaun." Etymologically
related to the words "wake" and "waken," "watch" means both "the act of
keeping awake and alert," and "to look at," so that the term captures an
essential feature of all visual dreams, during which the eye wakens, as if to
"keepeth watch" (355.31), and then, on "nightwatch" (576.30), lazily
"watches." The Shaun chapters open, accordingly, with the appropriately
contradictory admonition, "Black! Switch out!" (4°3.17), which advises us

on the one hand to "keep black!" ("Switch out!"), but also, antithetically,
vigilantly to "watch out!" For it is "in the sighed of lovely eyes" rifted by
precisely this tension (405.28-29 ["inside of"]) that the dreamed image of
Shaun, at first "nonviewable to human watchers," gradually appears from
within a "fogbow" (or obscured rainbow) that only slowly releases seven
clear iritic colors from out of "obscidian" black (4°3.23-24, 6, 8-16). The
visual filaments of the dream accumulate as "anon [and 'anonymously']
some glistery gleam darkling" gathers in intensity until a "lamp" -bearing
"will of a wisp" appears (4°3.24-4°4.1, 13, 15). And within that "will-o'-
the-wisp"-"now, fix on the little fellow in my eye" (486.13-14)-a figure
"whom we dreamt was a shaddo, sure, he's lightseyes, the laddo" (4°4.14-
15). This would be Shaun, a "picture primitive," "growing to stay" (405.3,
4°4.15). He is "lightseyes" (and "light-sized") not simply because as a hal-
lucination he "weigh[s] nought" (4°7.5), but also because he appears
within the darkly "lit eyes" of the Wake's "aglo-irismaimed." This light-
bringing "lampman" appears in the "tropped head" (427. I), moreover,
carrying letters (and therefore literacy and ego functions), enveloped by
that strange "barrel" which, as we have seen, is simply a cipher for the im-
perceived body of the Wake's sleeping hero; should the reader now consult
the reliefs maps of the night, he will note that it is largely within the min-
iscule "lightseyes" of the giant "form outlined alsumbered" there that
Shaun-and graphic letters-are "enveloped."
At the far end of "The Second Watch of Shaun," conversely, we see this
"pattern sent" (472.25 [the image or "pattern" of a "patron saint"]) "quickly
lost to sight" as visible light crumbles away in "embers" (471.28, 473.9ff.).
Indeed, as "yon beam of light we follow receding on [Shaun's] photophoric
['light-bearing'] pilgrimage to [his] antipodes" (472.16-17 ["down under"]),
we learn that his "now paling light lucerne we ne'er may see again" (472.22-
23)-the evocation of "Lake Lucerne" and of movement "to the four can-
tons" (472.24) suggesting that Shaun is drifting into a "helvetically her-
metic" and "landlocked" "state." Like others in the Wake, the passage shows
"vision pass[ing]" and "fading" from the "tropped head" (486.32-33) as the
Wake's "benighted irismaimed" sinks out of his "nightwatch" into a new spe-
cies of nothing (473.6-7).
What happens in the middle of these extended "watches," in the interval
between the aggregation and corrosion of visual dreams, is an activity that
the Wake calls "spacemak[ing]" (247.2). The precipitation ofthe "iritic col-
ors" out of the night's "invasable blackth" means that within the dimen-
sionless body and "tropped head" ofthe Wake's "sleeping giant," delimited
"Meoptics" 235
forms of visible space-whole cities, bodies, mountains, rooms littered
with objects-sometimes start to undergo elaborate imaginary creation.
During his visual dreams, then, we find HCE "recovering breadth" (344.19)
by "building space" in his head (155.6) or "making spaces in his psyche"
(416.5-6; 415.28, 417.25)-and, in the process, rising from the ranks of "the
great unwatched" (435.31-32). The construction of illusionarily constel-
lated spaces and objects out of a wilderness of iritic and chaotic "light"
complementarily entails the splintering out of the giant body of an organiz-
ing principle, in the form of a viewing spectator-or a "spatialist" (149.19
["specialist"]) whose "spatiality" (172.9) is the "watching" and specular con-
tainment of the "seene" (52.36 ["scene"]; cf. 114.23). Difficult as it may be
to determine from whose point of view one sees, "with his eyes shut," ob-
jects that appear in dreams ("we cannot say whom we are looking like
through" [370.25]), what is ultimately "shown" to the dreamer whose "magic
lantern [rises] to a glow of fullconsciousness" (421.22-23) is not simply
the "shown" dream scene itself, but also a character "watching the watched"
(509.2; cf. 508.35-509.4)' whom we now simply call "showm" .(29.4 [or
"Shaun"]). The wakeful vigilance of this implicit observer ("your watch
keeper," through whom "you've seen all sorts in shapes and sizes" every-
where in the world [464.25-26]) would explain why "Shaun the Post,"
whose name Joyce sometimes spells as "showm" or "shone" (29.4, 75.11,
441.23, 528.21), is always implicated in the Wake's "space-making" event-
fulnesses (see especially 149.IIff. and 415.25ff.). The appearance of diffusely
spatialized objects in visual dreams necessarily signals "a trend back to the
object world" and therefore the wakening of the dreamer's ego (let's "Show'm
the Posed" [92.13]), which is everywhere wrapped up both in those objects
and, as one's literate "murmury" of visual dreams will attest (254.18), in the
carrying and delivery of letters. 21 A "character" with all the disorienting at-
tributes of a figure in a dream and the bearer of our hero's ego functions as
well (see 485.5), Shaun is as much a figure through whom we see things as a
figure whom we see (this is why, as the commentary has generally noted, he
"narrates" whole sections of Finnegans Wake).
As visible spaces, their semiconscious "watcher," and the ego fall together
within the "tropped head" of the Wake's "visionbuilder" (191.34), finally,
the Wake "brings us a rainborne pamtomomiom" (285.15-16, F6). On the
one hand this suggests a "rainbow pantomime," or "dumbshow," like that
played out in chapter lI.i ("The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies");
but the undertones also suggest that all such "dummpshow[s]" (120.7-8)
are really staged within HCE's "deafadumped" body (590.1)-"(dump for

short)" (IIo.26)-within whose wakening and watching eyes a "pandemo-
nium" of chaotically intersecting "rayingbogeys," "flyfire[s]," and "fleshes"
of "likening" are coalescing, at all sorts of obtusely "falling angles" (21.25),
to form sites like "Dreamcolohour" (176.10 [remotely a place like "Drumcol-
logher," perhaps, but primarily a space built only at the "hour" and in the
"colours" of the "dream"]). "Dreamcolohour" now merits a tour. "Follow
the spotlight, please!" (506.27).
"COLOURS"
Appearing at the structural center of the Wake, the "rainborne pamtomo-
miom" enacted in "The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies" (II.i) is cer-
tainly essential to any consideration of the book's dark optics. Joyce infor-
mally called this chapter "twilight games" (L, I, 241) and in a well-known
letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver said that he based it on a children's guessing-
game called "Angels and Devils or colours" (L, I, 295), going on to explain
that the child designated "it" in this tagging game had to guess the name of a
color withheld from him by others, and, if successful in guessing, catch the
person who chose it. The complex relevance of this ritual to a reconstruc-
tion of the night begins with the observation that the entire mime as staged
in Finnegans Wake takes place inside the body of a recurrently evoked "sleep-
ing giant" who, throughout "the whole thugogmagog," is reclined cap-a-pie
and is largely dead to the world (220.14,26; 221.26-27, 29; 222.14; 253.29-
31). Underlying this entire game of" Find Me Colours," in short (626.17), is
the body of the Wake's sleeping protagonist, within the "selfcolours" of
whose "closed eyes" the whole chapter takes place (hence the "Finn Mac-
Cool" in "Find Me Colours"; cf. 219.18). Because he is generally "off colour"
(230.1) and "he don't know whose hue" in the dark (227.25 [much less
"who's who"]), the "guess-work" he undertakes in this "twilight game"
might more properly be conceived as a form of "gazework" (224.26): "when
the h, who the hu, how the hue, where the huer?" (257.34-35). For at the
hour of the night explored here-"lighting up o'clock sharp" (219. I) -the
Wake's "visionbuilder" is trying hard to see, and "sinking [not 'thinking']
how he must fand for himself by gazework what ... colours wear" (224.25-
27 [and "were"]).
Once more, then, "our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!" (52.18-
19). If the reader again consults his "tissue peepers," he will be able to par-
ticipate directly in some of the "twilight games" that our hero plays in the
"Meoptics" 237
"Colours" chapter. "Peel your eyes" by closing them, and ask yourselves
"not have you seen a match being struck" (233.18-19), but
-Have you monbreamstone?

-No.
-Or Hellfeuersteyn?
-No.
-Or Van Diemen's coral pearl?
-No.
As "your refractions" will attest (256.31 [and your "reflections," too]), all of
these riddles again move us to the centers of HCE's "marbled eyes" (55.22),
which, however dark and sightless they may be here, are nonetheless inter-
nally capable of "participating in the ambiguity of the jewel" when scin-
tillant bursts of invisible "nightlights" fire through them (135.20) .22 Al-
though his "catseye[s)" (423.7-8) are "submerged" throughout his sleep
(like "coral pearl"), and lie "down under" (hence the reference to Australia's
"Van Dieman's Land"), they are nonetheless always "a spark's gap off"
(232.33) from striking up both "hellfire" and light-like the German Feuer-
stein ("flint") -so that they become at times dark "moonstones" of sorts,
riddled through with forms of light visible only at night ("moonbeams").
Able "to setisfire" (234.24-25 [and "satisfy"]) "His Sparkling Headiness"
(236.5-6)-note the "sparkles" in that "tropped head"-by "giv[ing] him
chromitis" (232.2 [Gr. "inflammation of color"]) and filling with "the cloud
of the opal" (220.9-10), HCE's "eyenbowls" therefore become sporadically
"glycering juwells" in this part of the Wake (389.28, 236.2)-"wells" of vit-
reously "glyceric" fluid internally lit like "glistering jewels" (Ger. Juwel). 23
Each, "like a heptagon crystal emprisoms trues and fauss for us" (127.3-
4 [Fr. {ausse, "false"])-and, in seven colors (hence "heptagon crystal"),
"trues and phosphoros" (Gr. "bringer of light"): "sight most deletious ['de-
leted' because unreal] to ross up [and raise up] the spyballs" (247.20-21).
That the occulted color HCE tries to discover by "gazework" within his
"glystering juwells" should be "heliotrope" would account for the position-
ing of the" Colours" chapter at the center of Finne8ans Wake. Although "he-
liotrope" simultaneously names a gemstone, a reddish-purple color, and a
kind of sunflower, the word derives from the Greek heliotropion and radi-
cally signifies a "turning toward the sun"; and it is here, precisely half-way
through the Wake's reconstruction of the night, that its unconscious hero-
an "unknown sunseeker" (IIO.30)-starts inexorably to float up toward

sunrise, resurrection, and the wakened rediscovery of sunlit vision. As the
property sought by "gazework" throughout the Wake's "twilight games,"
"heliotrope" therefore signifies less a concrete color or object than a whole
visionary trend: "the flower that stars [and starts] the day" (248.12- 13
[though that "star" keeps us oriented in the night]), its dense if occluded
appearance in the "spyballs" of our "sunflawered" hero (350.II) suggests
that he lies "in [a] sunflower state" at this moment in the night (5°9.21), and
that he is beginning, as he moves through "the heliotropical nou8httime"
(349.6)-"through dimdom done till light kindling light" (594.6)-to re-
gard the world from beneath "heliotrope ayelips" (533.2 ["eyelids" "turning
to light"]).21 We might see the "Colours" chapter taking place not simply
inside the body of the Wake's "sleeping giant," then, but more particularly
inside of his "thundercloud periwig" or "haliodraping het" (246.7, 5°9.22);
within the empty confines of this heady structure ("wig," "hat"), flashes of
"likening" (hence "thundercloud"), iridescent "haloes" (hence "haliodrap-
ing"), and "sunlife" are threatening imminently to reappear (517.20). "Let
Phosphoron proclaim"! (603.36); "then shalt thou see, seeing, the sight"
(239. 12 ) .
As an alternate name which Joyce gave to these "twilight games" suggests
("Angels and Devils"), the creation of light in our hero's eyes throws him
into primal and archaic conflict; while one half of his "tropped head," repre-
sented by "Chuff" (or Shaun the Post), "fleshe[s] light" (222.22), begins
"making spaces in his psyche" (cf. 247.2), and so sends his ego sailing to-
ward the well-lit, ordered patriarchal world constituted of objects and
letters, the other half, represented by "Glugg" (or Shem the Penman), seeks
to preserve the relaxed state of sleep by "blacking out" everything poten-
tially visible (230.10), failing at "gazework," and engaging in the produc-
tion of wonderfully turgid "blackmail" (240.12; cf. 229.26-28 [as opposed to
visible mail]): "cokerycokes, it's his spurt of coal" (232.1 [not "port of
call"]). The two antagonists in these "twilight games" therefore appear
throughout the "Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Maggies" as the conflicted
powers of Light and Darkness-as St. Michael and a Luciferian Old Nick, or
as "Mick and Nick" (e.g., at 230.3-4)-who conduct a war over light in an
"arimaining lucisphere" (239.34 ["Ahriman," the Zoroastrian god of evil,
would correspond to the dark but light-bringing "Lucifer"]) .25 As elsewhere
in the Wake, their struggles show our hero "ambothed upon by the very spit
of himself" (230.2) : the wording here tells us that he "am both" contestants in
the visionary conflict (or "ambush") dramatized in the "Mime," "ha[ving]
"Meoptics" 239
help [or half] his crewn on" one <;>f the two antagonists and "holf his crown
on" the other (610.11-12 [this apparently wagered "crown" is less a monetary
unit than a slang term for the "head"]).
To put all this in more orthodox language, the struggle specifically local-
ized in our hero's eyes throughout the "Mime of Mick, Nick and the Mag-
gies"-and elsewhere in his body everywhere else in the Wake-is simply
that which structures any dream, during which a variable force impinging
on the "tropped head"-pain, desire, a sensory disturbance-seeks to re-
turn the ego toward wakefulness by "giv[ing it] some sort of hermetic prod
or kick to sit up and take notice" (470.2-3), while a concurrently acting
counterforce, "the universal, invariably present and unchanging wish to
sleep" (ID, 267-68), dissolves all such "upsits" (127.17 [and "upsets"]).
More particularly, the two conflictive forces warring in our hero's eyes and
"tropped head" throughout the "Colours" chapter might be construed as
"shamed and shone" (75.11 ["Shem and Shaun"]), the first of whom, "thrust
from the light, apophotorejected" (251.6-7)' "is all in vincibles" (232.25-
26 [because, like anyone's upsetting "shame," he is repressed and susceptible
to capture neither in visible imagery nor in letters, though he emerges "in-
vincibly" in drear.:.s]); the second of whom "shines" familiarly in our hero's
vision and self-conceptualizing consciousness. Or again, the two antag-
onists might be construed as the socially outcast and rejected "Shames"
(93.21) or "Pain the Shamman" (192.23), "The Memory of Disgrace" (413.3
[roughly speaking, our hero's repressed desire and "pain"]), who never sees
the light of day because he is "acheseyeld" from it (148.33 [not simply
"exiled" but also, as the blinding "aches" in those "eyes" suggest, banished
from conscious visibility]); and the socially adroit and adaptable "Show'm
the Posed" (92.13 [our hero's ego]), who everywhere carries and delivers
letters, thrives in the clearly seen, and "show and show" (233.10) and "show
on show" (441.23).
The "bone of contention" over whom these two "crown pretenders" struggle
during the Wake's "twilight games" (256.3,252.15 ["crown" = "head"]) is
Issy, who is surely the most difficult of the Wake's main "characters" to
fathom. Like the "rainbow girls" who form her entourage, she seems to be
associated with the dreamer's iritic colors-with "rainbows" or visible
light-because she represents, in part, woman in an "ideal" and visual as-
pect ("ideals" are from the Gr. eid6, "to see"). A goodlooking looker with
"looks" (548.28), "Isabelle" "is a belle" (556.7, cf. 446.7) and, as such, the
object of HCE's specular desire. "Like the beauty of the image of the pose of

the daughter of the queen of the Emperour of Irelande" (157.34-36), she
therefore drifts through the Wake in the guises of so many female models,
movie stars, and actresses-"like Mrs Cornwallis-West" (157.33-34 [a real
stage-star of our hero's day, but also a version of Tristan's Isolde, betrothed to
Mark of "Cornwall"]) -that one might well devise a long "parroteyes list"
(493.5) of the mimetically desired forms she assumes in the "parrot-like
eyes" of our hero, a man old enough as to have long ago discovered his sex-
ual "paradise lost." As "the imnage of Girl Cloud Pensive flout[ing] above"
him (82.19-20 [her "image" always "in"side]), "Miss Butys Pott" "floats"
everywhere within his eyes (220.7), by day as by night, permanently in-
forming his vision with the spectacle of a tantalizingly inaccessible beauty
that "make[s] Envyeyes mouth water" (235.24-25 [hence "flout"]). In part,
she represents the "dearstreaming faces" (148.27) of all the young and beau-
tiful women whom our hero can wishfully look at all he wants, but never,
never touch: these would include the pin-up girls of the early twentieth cen-
tury, but also, and not least, his own daughter and her peers (those "rain-
bow girls"). As Issy herself puts it, ''I'm only any girl, you lovely fellow of
my dreams" (146.5-6), and-"how marfellows!" (148.24)-"1 mean to
make you suffer" (145.15).
In all her shifting forms, Issy reminds us that not simply the philosopher's
space, but ideal beauty too falls together in the eye of the beholder, and
so she becomes, to "her bleaueyedeal of a girl's friend" (384.24 [HCE]),
"dadad's lottiest daughterpearl" (561. 15). In "pearlagraph" (226. I), that is,
she coats the interiors ofHCE's "closed eyes" in much the same way, though in
younger form, that opalescent "mother-of-pearl" films the closed chambers
of shellfish: "I feel a fine lady ... floating on a stillstream of isisglass," as it
occurs to our "aglo-irismaimed" (486.23-24 [where the gelatinous sub-
stance "isinglass" would be a cipher for his "glycering" eyes, the "isis" in
this "isinglass" the goddess ingrained within them; cf. 84.29, 247.36, 415.28,
460.21]). As a "character" distinct from our hero's real-world daughter,
then, "Issy" is as much in the character of HCE's vision as a being in her own
right ("you'll see if I'm selfthought" [147.8-9]). As fully constituent a part
of his "eyeforsight" (417.23) as an organ like the retina or a physical prop-
erty like light, she fills "Envyeye's" eyes with lifelong "jealousy" (note the
Ger. Eifersucht ["jealousy"] in his "eyeforsight"); with "envy" « the L. in-
vidia ["hatred"], in turn from invidere ["to look askance at"], ultimately
from videre ["to see"]); and also with a distracting "skysign of soft adver-
tisement" (4.13-14). Anywhere she appears, even if imaginarily, she is ca-
"Meoptics"
pable of "softly adverting" his look from its proper business, and, in doing
so, of exercising a disturbing telekinetic power over various parts of his body:
"I turned his head on his same manly bust," for instance (527.3 1-32) .26
As a figure held together of light in our "irismaimed's" eyes, Issy always
appears in the Wake "in apparition with herself" (528.25), a visual image
framed in a "shellback thimblecasket mirror [that] only can show" her "sis-
ter reflection" (561.16-17, 220.9 ["shellback" because this visual image
takes form in "daughterpearl," within "shells" of sorts; "thimblecasket" be-
cause those shells are the eyes of a big body "dead to the world")). She ap-
pears there never in a touchably sweaty "nightdress," but in a merely visible
"lightdress, spunn of sisteen shimmers" (157.8, 159.9): perpetually inviting
the kind of troublingly intactile contact that seeing as an erotic activity
allows, she "flouts" into his vision, in other words-"Hey, lass!" (226.6)-
like an unattainable form on the ceiling of the "Sistine" chapel (hence
"sisteen"); like a poster-girl (27.18), accordingly dressed, for all practical
purposes, in "boyproofknicks" (527.19-20); or like the untouchable appari-
tion of a seductive Blessed Virgin: "Think of a maiden, Presentacion ...
Knock and it shall appall unto you!" (528.19,21 [the Annotations refer us to
"the apparition of the Virgin at Knock, in County Mayo, in 1879"]). Or
else-"delightsome simply!" (144.13- 14 [note the particle of "light"])-
she "flouts" into HCE's "eyeforsight" as "Icy-la-Belle" (246.20) or "Icy"
(104.10; cf. 145.11, 214.31), "poor chilled" (527.35 ["child"]), like a visible
but cold and unapproachably remote "star" (L. stella [hence, in part, the
many "Stellas" in the Wake]). Finally, too, Issy never appears in unmediated
singularity, but-as "Alitten's looking" (528.4)-always in apostrophic rela-
tion to an adoring but absent male whose watchful eyes, like the inside of
"Aladdin's lamp," are wishfully" alit" and heliotropically "turning to light":
"I always had a crush on heliotrope," as she puts it (461.8-9), even while
her reflection, obscured "under Pouts Vanisha Creme" (461.2-3 ["Pond's
Vanishing Cream")) "make[s] off in a thinkling" (256.4). "(I'm fading!)"
(528.11 ) .
What is true of Issy is true also of the "rainbow girls" who surround
her: in the "Colours" chapter, they become "bright elects" (239.28 [vis-
ibly appealing "bride-elects"]), whom HCE tries "to catch ... by the cal-
our of [their] brideness" (223.5-6 ["colour," "brightness," and L. calor,
"warmth")). And attention to the severe "arch trouble" that they cause in
our hero's "tropped head" (459.16 [that "arch," of course, the rainbow))
should clarify the nature of the "twilight games" in which they are all en-

gaged. These begin when our hero's "Shame" (or Shem) -"the duvlin sulph"
(222.25 ["devil himself"])-"cometh up as a trapadour" in the night's "in-
vasable blackth" and tries to discover concealed color (224.25): if the word-
ing here manifestly paints Shem as a "dour" and love-lorn "troubador" of
sorts, it latently reveals him as a force emerging from somewhere "down
under" in the body, below the visible and conscious surface of things, as if
from beneath a "trap-door." Showing sinister "red devil in the white of his
eye" (252.33-34) and acting as a perversely "light-bringing" Lucifer (hence
the ignitable "sulphur" in that "duvlin sulph"), this "shameful" figure tries
to force his way into the realm of the visible-so stirring our hero's vision
towards wakefulness-by seeking to find "by gazework what their colours
wear as they are all showen drawens up" (224.26-27). As these terms now
suggest, the ultimate aim of "Shame's" devilish "gazework" is not simply the
achievement of vision-the heliotropic turning of eyes to light with the dis-
covery of "what colours were as they are shown drawn up"; more particu-
larly and less innocently, "aye seize" (247.31 [as "eye" aggressively "sees"]),
this "gazework" also seeks to bring to light the most invisibly occulted
place in our hero's world: the "pink of panties" (248.36) and the space be-
tween Issy's "whiteyoumightcallimbs" (238.30), the "colours [girls] wear as
their drawers show up."
"Shames'" shameful activity, of course, automatically awakens the "watch-
ful" counteragency in our hero's "tropped head"-disciplined "Show'm the
Posed"-who acts as an archangelic defender of the patriarchal order first
by censoring "Shames" and thrusting him back "down under" into the invis-
ible ("To part from these, my corsets, is into overlusting fear" [222.29-30]);
and, second, by displacing the visionary turmoil "Shames" has aroused
in our hero's "tropped head" into respectably sublimated and deceptively
"translace[dJ" (233.9 [or "translated"]) forms ("Behose our handmades for
the lured!" [239.10]). "In the moontime" (528.5), Issy herself, "who shone
yet shimmers will be e'er scheining" (528.21-22), lies diffusely suspended
between these two forces ("shone yet shimmers" = "Shaun" and "Shem"),
her "appearance" or "look" (Ger. Erscheinung) throwing our hero into cor-
respondingly troubled conflict. For as "dadad's lottiest daughterpearl"
(561.15), Issy and her girl-friends (Fr. filles) everywhere film our paternal
"magnate's" vision, "attracting" his eyes with an irresistibly "magnetic" force
("the horses how magnete draws his field and don't the fillyings fly?" [246.23-
24]); but as the references to magnetic repulsion, "flight," and "Lot" and the
Cities of the Plain also suggest ("lottiest"), his looking, capable of "disrob-
"Meoptics" 243
ing to the edge of risk" (238.16), is always subliminally charged with the
danger of verging on the shameful: "Close your, notmust look!" (147.29; cf.
144.36-145.1); "Approach not for ghost sake! It is dormition!" (561.27-28).
If dreams are indeed symptomatic of difficulties that trouble our hero dur-
ing his waking days, we might now see that the ways in which he "rather
naightily" (222.35 ["naughtily" and "nightly"]) goes about "flesh[ing] light"
and "making spaces in his psyche" in the Evening World inevitably tells us
something about the ways in which he complementarily, if unconsciously,
"makes spaces" and light in the Daily World and, in the process, envisions
that world and the people with whom he lives. Judging from the way in
which "he lay[s] there ... like Lord Lumen [L. 'light'], coaching his pre-
ferred constellations" in the night (476.22-24 [to give the obvious ex-
amples]), we can infer that by day our hero looks at younger and rival males
with envious distrust and at younger females with masked desire; but "look-
whyse" (369.34 [and "likewise"]), we can also infer that the presence or ab-
sence of any of these figures anywhere around him in the Daily World-or
the corresponding presence of any such "invisible [because internalized]
friends" (546.29)-would determine, with the repulsive flinch, glower, or
magnetic pull they exerted on his eyes, the nature of his surroundings and
the bearableness of the life that those surroundings enfold. Not simply do
we see our hero, in these instances, succumbing to visionary fixations that
unconsciously constrain a world of infinite possibility into preordained pat-
terns; we also see him unconsciously determining the appearance of the
world in which he lives. Through its study of "meoptics," the Wake is only
anticipating the post-Wakean investigations of phenomenology and psycho-
analysis in showing that our hero's seeing, even in its most dispassionate
forms, is never a matter of purely passive Helmholtzian object-reception,
but an actively chiasmic exchange in which his eyes seek out, frame, and
light up objects of their own peculiar choosing-so to color them, "while
gleam with gloom sw[ims] here and there" (600.30-31), in their own idio-
syncratic and often doleful ways.27 The Wake's "meoptics" will seem solipsis-
tic, finally, only to those who are determined to see others as discretely iso-
lated and mere objects, rather than as responsive people in whom one has,
even in the night, living and charged investments.
No such scientific account of vision as that which our culture has com-
pounded in its manifold elaborations of the "Ideal Eye," to say this in an-
other way, could possibly explain why five distinct individuals looking at
the same fixed, gray object-the Wellington Memorial, say-might di-
versely see a stirring tribute to the British past, a good place for a picnic,

the ideal receptacle for a stick of dynamite, nothing, or a stone phallus.
Idiosyncratic subterranean connections like these, falling together in the
underground of the body and lying at the heart of all visual experience, are
much what classical optics overlooks and much what the Wake's "meoptics"
everywhere intricately explores; for these "infrarational" matters emerge
most clearly in a night's dreams, when objects proper disappear "under the
closed eyes" and when-to take the classic "Freudian" example ofthe snake
whose appearance has only a little to do with a snake-homogeneously
fixed visual relations are violated by emotionally charged and symbolically
fluid ones. The Wake's "meoptics" is an eroticized optics. In examining the
anti-Newtonian "spectrem" that comes to light in the dark of its "aglo-
irismaimed's" "blackeye lenses," it is calling compensatory attention to the
unconscious underside of vision, the neglected half of the unitary relation
that makes the seer and the seen (and anyone "can see the seen [not 'scene']
for seemself" [114.23]) aspects of each other.
The great playfulness of all the ciphers put to play in "the Mime of Mick,
Nick and the Maggies" therefore undergoes a final transcendent lift from
"the trivial to the apocalyptic," in Joyce's phrase U], 546), when one notes
that the chapter is structured by unending allusions to children's games and
by dense references, through its evocations of the archangelic war between
St. Michael and Lucifer, to pre-Genesis accounts of creation. These formal
elements make it necessary to see that the space within which the "Col-
ours" chapter unfolds-a pair of eyes turning heliotropically to light-is
the primordial site in the flesh through which the world always and only
wakens and comes to light, whether in infancy or in the morning, both in
the era of genesis and now. If we take seriously those verses in Genesis, the
orthodox book of Wakening, that show God first creating light and then
making man in his own image, it therefore becomes possible to regard man,
too, as a being capable of creating light-and all the more necessarily be-
cause the genetic order is consonant with the findings of color and vision
theorists, who, however notorious "the history of the investigation of col-
our vision [may be] for its acrimony," all finally agree with Helmholtz and
Clerk Maxwell ("Maxwell, clark" [130. I I]) in locating color "not in the na-
ture oflight but in the constitution of man." 28 As Newton himself observed,
even as he brought to light the mechanics of light, light "rays, to speak prop-
erly, are not coloured. In them is nothing else than a certain power or dis-
position to stir up a sensation of this or that colour .... "29 Since the "sensa-
tion of this or that colour" is stirred up only in the human eye, however, and
since nothing visible to that eye is not colored, we might now wonder about
"Meoptics" 245
the degree to which the entire realm of the visible, by day as by night, falls
together "only all in [the] eye" (118.17).
A student of its "meoptics" will find distributed everywhere throughout
the Wake, as Joyce hinted, an elaborately developed "theory of colours" (L,
I, 406). For as the book's passing fascination with the iris will now suggest,
the "sevenal successivecoloured" hues of "the seamless rainbowpeel"
(126.19,475.13 [the colors ofthe spectrum]) are not inherently discrete and
separate qualities, but a continuity: no sharp "seam" or line of demarcation
in nature determines where indigo ends and where violet begins, or where
visible violet fades off into "unseen [ultra]violet" (403.22). Needing to be
"unmeshed," the "PRIMITIVE SEPT" of colors precipitates into difference only
in tutored eyes (267.13ff., RI), where, as we "tell them apart, cadenzando
coloratura" (226.30), the "telling" learned in childhood is crucial: "R is
Rubretta and A is Arancia, Y is for Yilla and N for greeneriN. B is Boyblue
with odalisque 0 while W waters the fleurettes ofnovembrance" (226.30-33
[note also, while cultivating this childhood "remembrance," how eyes must
learn to unmesh the components of this "RAYNBOW" before they can distin-
guish letters; cf. 247.35-248.2]). Just as the colors of "the his heptachro-
matic sevenhued septicoloured" spectrum are not divisibly fragmented out-
side of the eye (611.5-6 [hence the deliberate fusion of the objectively
definite and the subjective in "the his"]), so perhaps the whole of "light," a
form of electromagnetic radiation with much the same physical properties
as "herzian waves" (232.10-11,331.23,460.25), "xrays" (248.1,51.25,530.8),
"wireless" waves, and all those other forms of invisible "light" whose "un-
seen" paths the Wake traces, as if in a cloud chamber, through its hero's
"blackeye lenses." Washing and waving over everything visible, those warm,
miraculous stuffs that we call "light" and "color," then-both spelled with
quotation marks in the work of vision theorists-must be construed as car-
bureted mixtures of electromagnetic radiation and ocular flesh;30 for elec-
tromagnetic radiation alone does not constitute and will not make "light"
(ask any corpse), though the body's "flesh[ingJ" and "glowworm"-like
"headlight[s]" will.
The real theater of war within which both dreams and the Wake's arch-
angelically embattled "twilight games" are staged, then, is also the chaotic
site in which the visible world always and only undergoes its genesis, the
fleshy ground in which not so much "light," but "the seeds of light" are
planted and, in "truetoflesh colours," "the soul of light" is born (593.20,
481.30, 235.7); "so see we so," at least, "as seed we sow.... And her troup
came heeling, 0" (250.28-30 [look hard enough and "heliotrope" will come

to light here]). Set "in Evans's eye" (533.4-5 [where friend "Evans'," unlike
"heaven's," is human]), and exploring the genesis "of our world's oldest
light" (123.36 [the one first seen in childhood]), the "twilight games" of
which the Wake as a whole is constituted take place at "lighting up o'clock
sharp" (219.1), and not a minute sooner or later: that cryptic hour now
turns out to be precise precisely because it designates the time of the crea-
tion of light.
"T R A U M S eRA P T"

From the way in which our hero is "ambothed upon by the very spit of him-
self" in the "Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies," (230.2 ["am both"]), we
might now draw some conclusions about dream formation in the Wake.
Study of the night's "meoptics," as will have become obvious in passing,
has generated an essential distinction between the "manifest" and the "la-
tent" contents of dreams. Necessarily, the dreamer lies in a split condition
and becomes "of twosome twiminds" to himself during dreams (188.14),
the consciously "watchful" and letter-carrying half of his "tropped head"
(Shaun) credulously watching and scanning-indeed, participating in-
those larger-than-life scenes thrown against the backs of the eyelids and il-
lusively assumed to lie "out there," while what the dreamer is in fact seeing,
if not black eyelids, are diffuse "fleshes" of retinal "likening" motivated
at the "backsight[s]" his eyes (249.2) by a malicious counteragent (Shem)
who is pulling the wool over them (see 164.4-5, 167.8-14, 299.4-6). "Two
dreamyums in one dromium? Yes and no error" (89.3). "There being two
sights for ever a picture," then (1I.36)-one "visible" and therefore con-
sciously "wiseable" (16.24), the other "all in vincibles" and therefore in
need of being "decoded" (232.25-26)-the dreamer assumes "a double
focus" during visual dreams (349.13), by acting as both the unconsciously
canny producer ("Shem") and the consciously baffled consumer ("Shaun")
of the spectacle he beholds: "his producers are they not his consumers?"
(497.1-2). And, to illustrate the character of the "two sights" this "double
focus" allows, is not the repulsive stranger in the dream who lusts after "the
dotter of his eyes" (372.3 ["the daughter of his eyes"]) in fact "the dotter of
his [own] eyes?"
Without necessary recourse to authority, the Wake's "meoptics" will now
turn out to throw all manner oflight on the structural character of dreams-
in ways that might most elaborately be illustrated if we recall dreams like
"Meoptics" 247
the one apocryphally attributed to Muhammad, in which the dreamer
"sees" and reads written words. Dreams like these would surely have elic-
itedJoyce's special attention because they would have allowed him to study
his governing subject, sleep, in conjunction with his working medium,
letters; and they would invariably have raised perplexing questions about
the visual forces at play in the "blackeye lenses" of a person who dreams of
reading written signs. Who writes these signs (cf. 107.36ff.)? On what me-
dium? And from what "point of view" does one see them "in fact under the
closed eyes"? Since it is "true [that] there was in nillohs dieybos as yet no
lumpend papeer in the waste" (19.31-32)-where the Latin in nullis diebus
("in no days") and in nihilo ("in nothing") "describe the night itself,"
while the absence of the German Lumpenpapier ("rag paper") tells us that
sleep is refreshingly paperless-i t would be inaccurate to think of words un-
consciously appearing in dreams in the same way that we think of words
consciously written on paper. Like the buried letter that appears "under the
closed eyes" throughout chapter I.v of the Wake (1°7.28), every letter ap-
pearing in our "blurried" "irismaimed's" nightlife "is only all in his eye"
(lI8.17) .
According to one line of speculation inevitably issuing from the Wake's
study of "meoptics," we might therefore conceive of an agent internal to the
body agitating the "rods and cones of this even's vision" into wakefulness dur-
ing visual dreams-and doing so not haphazardly, but with such weird pre-
cision as to etch there, graphically, people, scenes, and even alphabetic
characters of a sufficiently credulity-gripping lifelike ness as to convince the
dreamer of their reality. Dreams would be produced, according to this
understanding, exactly as is "the letter" that surfaces recurrently in Fin-
ne8ans Wake; for in one of its earliest manifestations, "The letter! The lit-
ter!" is "of eyebrow pencilled" (93.24-25). Written not on paper with pen-
cil, in other words, but on the "tissue peepers" of the eyes with "eyebrow
pencil," this deceptive "letter" and all the signs constituting it would re-
semble exactly the dream in being a Waphic representation written in the
medium of ocular flesh, where, as "flesh" turns into "flash" and that "flash
becomes word" (267.16), a force in the body "make[s] a shine" in the eye
(222.24 ["a sign"]), in the process generating a vast and baffling "mascarete"
(206.14 [a "masquerade" inscribed with "mascara"]). For an illustration of
how "all sorts of makeup things" (625.5 [like "dreams"]) apply to the eye,
see figure 8.4.
The diagram shows that no artist in the world has so fine a medium with
which to work as Shem the Penman, that half of the Wake's sleeper said to

be responsible for scripting its "letter" with "eyebrow pencil." In the case of
visual dreams, of course, we are considering the way in which this dark" Au-
tist" (434.35 [or "autistic artist"]) inscribes his "traumscrapt" (623.36)-or
"transcript" of a "dream" (Ger. Traum)-on only a few square inches of the
flesh, the "tissue peepers" of the eyes; but elsewhere in the Wake we learn
that this devilish "plaidboy" (27.9 [a "playboy" who makes body-covering
patterns like "plaids"]) is given to "making encostive inkum out of the last
of his lavings and writing a blue streak over his bourseday shirt" (27.IO-II
[note-byway of the "cost," "income," and Fr. bourse, "money"-the econ-
omy with which Shem writes on this "birthday suit"; note also, by way of
that thick "blue streak," his penchant for obscenity]). In a passage central
to the "Shem" chapter, even more elaborately, we find this carnal "Autist"
making ink out of his excrement, ostensibly-"produc[ing] nichthemeri-
cally from his unheavenly body a no uncertain quantity of obscene matter"
(185.29-30)-and, with this "ink ... out of his depth" (186.17), "wr[iting]
over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by
its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly
unfold[s]" (185.35-186.1). The details linking these passages are important
because they show that one aspect of the writing which asocialized and
banished "Shames" or "Pain the Shamman" produces is somatic: Shem's writ-
ing is symptom-making, the most efflorescent variety of which is the dream,
the most common of which is mere living.
The letter that Shem creates, like the dream itself, originates in the
"depths" of an "unheavenly body" (one that becomes evident, like a "heav-
enly body" or HCE's, only at night). Or again, as the Wake elsewhere de-
scribes it, this letter comes from a world "down under" (321.32,45°.1) and
is wirelessly transmitted to Shaun the Post by an identical twin "brother"
who "lives sameplace in the antipathies of austrasia" (489.10; 163.15;
488.21). Though the wording here seems to situate Shem in "the Antipodes,"
in the criminal colonies of" Australia," and though it seems to make him a
"Cabler" of telegrams (488.21; 489.8-9), we should recall that the manifest
appearances of dreams are ludicrously deceiving; latently, the wording is
telling us simply that this dark "Autist" ("autistic" forces are internal to the
body) lives in exactly the "sameplace" as the dreamer's ego and literate
self-in "his own body"-although "samewhere" (347.10) in its "antipa-
thies" (Eng. "aversions") or "antipodes" (Eng. "opposites"), "down under,"
beneath consciousness and visibility.31 This "autist," then, under the "oleas
Mr Smuth (434.36 [note that "smut"]), requires an "alias" (L. "other")
because he stands in relation to the dreamer's consciously literate self
"Meoptics" 249
("Smith") as his identical "other" (252.14,408.17,25 ["brother"])-exactly
in the same way that Shem stands to Shaun, a "Siamese" twin to his "soam-
heis brother" (425.22 [as I "so am he is" too]). Since this "autist" "down
under" in the body does not carry letters, however, he transmits his fleshy
"traumscrapt" into the dreamer's letter-stuffed head and his eyes (cables it
up to "Show'm the Posed") through channels absolutely imperceptible to
the senses, as if by radiotelegraphy; and so he becomes, unlike any pedes-
trian "writer," a "wreuter of annoyimgmost letters," in "blackhand," who
moreover "smells cheaply of Power's spirits" (495.2, 4): "Reuters" names a
wireless agency, the "blackhand" "keep[s] black!," while those "annoying"
and "anonymous" communiques, like dreams themselves, reveal dark and
hemmed -in "Powers" and "spirits" that purvey, not surprisingly, "a no uncer-
tain quantity of obscene matter" (not necessarily excrement).
Now the "NIGHTLETTER" that this "Autist"living "down under" in the
dreamer's "antipathies" transmits into his letter-carrying head may "uphere"
(222.31 ["appear" "up here" in the Daily World]) most clearly in dreams
(308.16 [this "NIGHTLETTER," again, a radiotelegram sent in the night])-
but only because dreams are visible; all of the passages under our attention
apprise us, however, that the "traumscrapt" Shem produces is written not
simply with "eyebrow pencil" on those few square inches of flesh local-
ized in the "tissue peepers," but "all over" "every square inch" of "his own
body." Since this "traumscrapt" is moreover "produce[d] nichthemerically"
(185.29)-where the English "nychthemeron" « Gr. nycht ["night"] and
hemera ["day"]) designates "a period of twenty-four hours" (OED)-we
should see it playing into our hero's life from the unconscious world "down
under" not simply in the eyes and not simply during his dreams, but every-
where "in the flesh" through every minute of every day and night, so that it
would generate, as it manifested itself on other "square inch[es] of the only
foolscap available, his own body," less easily legible, more widely dispersed,
but ultimately life-containing "traumas" (hence again "traumscrapt"),
whose totality would be the "one continuous present tense integument" of
the lived body, HCE, itself. In the play of all these ciphers, as will have be-
come evident, the Wake is elaborating on and broadening the psychoanalyti-
cal account of dream formation.
According to that account, dreams are produced by the same networks of
unconscious thoughts that erupt, in waking life, in somatic symptoms-in
"palpitations, groundless anxiety, phobias, depression, paralysis, or sensory
disturbances"-and also in those underlying and symptom-producing "de-

fects in the field of personal relationships, attitudes to work, love, and so on
which are practically speaking much more disabling. "32 In Finneaans Wake,
where we find our hero's unconscious "alter ego" (see 463.6-7)-his "au-
tistic" "other"-"writing a blue streak all over his bourseday shirt," dreams
are in the nature of symptoms because they arise in HCE's "blackeye lenses"
when the murky" Autist" "down under" in "his own body," wielding a carnal
"eyebrow pencil," tattoos the "tissue peepers" with stigmatic retinal signs
whose right reading would show our hero's body and life in conflict with
themselves. 33
From yet another perspective, these considerations enable us to see why
Finneaans Wake, as an "imitation of the dream-state," is also, and neces-
sarily, a representation of the body rather than of a life observed (through
the eyes), narrated (by the tongue), or imperfectly understood (by the
brain). Because the dreams that occur to our hero arise from the same
sources "down under" in his body as do the interimplicated symptomatic
knots that constitute that body and its life, "reading the Evening World" as
it is literately reconstructed in Finneaans Wake is finally equivalent to
"reading off [the] fleshskin" (229.30) of the "stigmataphoron" (606.27 [Gr.
"thing bearing tattoo marks"]) depicted in the "relief maps" ofthe night-
and all the more particularly because that body, as The New Science shows,
is a man-made institution everywhere informed by and with language.
From his dreams, accordingly (the dream, for example, of a crime in the
Phoenix Park), a reader of the "the Evening World's" "traumscrapt" can in-
fer a great deal about the "traumas" that make up HCE's troubled life in the
Daily World: we know that "he's knots in his entrails," for instance (231.35
[and also in his groin]); comparable "sobsconcious inklings shadowed
[elsewhere] on his soulskin" (377.28) ;34 and so "many scalds and burns and
blisters, impetiginous sore and pustules" covering his body everywhere
(189.32-33) that they would constitute, if studied in their totality, the "one
continuous present tense integument" of his body and life as a totality. In
Finneaans Wake, as in "that letter selfpenned to one's other" which is the
dream (489.33-34), "style, stink [ink] and stigmatophoron are of one sum in
the same person" (606.27-28).
That visual dreams entail the partial wakening of the eye would explain
their lifelikeness-the Wake's "irismaimed" has "the eye of a gull" and be-
lieves anything he sees (377.4-5)-but also their underlying opacity. For
what HCE must really be seeing while "really" seeing all those symptomatic
shapes and scenes playing through his "blackeye lenses" is simply heavy "lid
"Meoptics" 25 1
efter lid" (509.27 [Da. efter, "behind"]). He "knows de play of de eyelids,"
then (234.16-17 [the black American idiom underlining their blackness])
not simply because they lie directly and everywhere in his line of vision,
but also because they are erratically able, as "heliotrope ayelips" (533.2), to
turn to light. "His eyelids are painted" on these occasions (248.16), so to
form a kind of screen against which "play[s] of de eyelid" and "Movies from
the innermost depths" are made "televisible" (194.2-3, 265.11): "and roll
away the reel world, the reel world, the reel world" (64.25-26).35 During the
envisioning of these "moving pictures" we therefore "leave Astrelea" (64.23,
565.6 [the "astral" "lea" strewn with the night's "heavenly bodies"]) and,
rising from the unconscious world "down under" with the Wake's "iris-
maimed" (hence "Australia"), we "Cherchons la flamme!" (64.28 [not only
la femme, but also a world of fierily living color]).
Contemplation of the eyelids, however, also returns us to the night's "in-
vasable blackth," within whose depths our hero lies cozily enwrapped in
"his sevencoloured's soot" (277.1); unlike the "sevencolored suit" owned by
Joseph, the Biblical knower of dreams, this one would be "sootably" "Black
and All Black," and it would enfold a figure who has once again become
"one heap lumpblock" (277.2-3)-a "lump," who just lies there, envision-
ing as honestly as "Diogenes" with "his diagonoser's lampblick" (290.21-22
[Ger. Blick, "look"]) only black "lampblack" (114.10-11). Since "lamp-
black," like a "black-lamp," would fill the "eyebulbs" with shadows rather
than light, these "meoptical" terms-and yet others-remind us of the great
and underlying drag which "invasable blackth" exerts on everything in
sleep, beneath dreamed colors, and at the Wake. 36 They also return us to the
occulted interiors of HCE's "blackeye lenses," within which there is a great
deal more to see.
"ONE EYEGONBLACK"
As a way of demonstrating simultaneously the versatile power with which
"the Autist" in the body writes all over one's "tissue peepers," the dark char-
acter of the presentations his "eyebrow pencil" draws, and the Wake's pecu-
liar but distinct "very similitude," we will now play some "flesh and blood
games, written and composed and sung and danced by Niscemus Nemon"
(175.31-33), or Shem the Penman, characterized here as a "no one" (L.
Nemo) whom "we do not know" (L. nescimus). For everybody has a dark
"Autist" like Shem living "sameplace" "down under" inside of him; and

there are concrete ways of showing, "in the flesh," how actively and "nich-
themerically" he inscribes his "traumscrapt" all over one's "bourseday
shirt." Engagement in his "flesh and blood games" will therefore serve the
additional purpose of showing how a proper site of identification with a
hero like HCE, "the presence (of a curpse) ," is in "the present (of course),"
and "in the flesh."
In reconstructing the night "naturalistically of course, from the blink-
point of so eminent a spatialist" as HCE (149.18-I9)-where that "blink"
"blanks" out the German Blickpunkt ("point of view") to leave it only an
empty "blankpoint" (468. 17)-Joyce found himself of necessity modifying
the laws of literary naturalism, and in much the same way that quantum
physicists rewrote the laws of nature in the early twentieth century. "I am
working out a quantum theory about it," he writes in a passage ostensibly
exploring the words tantum (L. "to such a degree") and talis (L. "of such a
kind"), "for it is really most tantumising state of affairs" (149.34-36). Now
quantum physics shows that the laws describing the smooth operations of
the physical universe break down into all manner of radical strangeness
when one examines events that take place at very high speeds, over very
small intervals of time, and in very small places. So, comparably, the con-
ventions of naturalistic representation break down radically when one be-
gins to consider-as Joyce had already done in the "Lotus-Eaters" episode of
Ulysses-the quantumizing effect on "point of view" of the trivial little eye-
blink, during which one's Blickpunkt goes blank as the "eye goes black" for
"one eyegonblack" (16.29 [the Ger. ein AU8enblick literally means "one eye-
blink," but idiomatically "one instant"]).
Thousands of times a day as one traffics in the Daily World of which the
two maps of Dublin and Europe are representative, one's eyelids pass down
over the eyes, blotting out everything and overwhelming the visual field;
and thousands of times a day, "His Sparkling Headiness" (236.5-6), bent on
conquest of the empirical, fails to see what is really there in front of his
eyes. A "most tantumising state of affairs"-"really"-that one almost
never sees the only thing that stays absolutely constant in visual space: "his
own body," "the presence (of a curpse) ," as it becomes visible in the form of
"lashbetasselled lids" relegated to unconsciousness every time one over-
looks the underlid (474.8). One can always avoid facing the Heraclitean tor-
rent of the world, but one cannot never see the backs of one's own eyelids.
"Bring[ing] to mind the ... out of sight," then (200.25-26 [or, in its more
common idiom, waking the dead]), the Wake now invites its reader to be-
come conscious of "de play of de eyelids," in part because that play makes
"Meoptics" 253
sharply visible a conflictual process that impinges everywhere on the body
but that elsewhere and largely has nothing to do with vision at all. For
Joyce, moreover, "de play of de eyelids" would have raised the question of
how one might render what one really sees "out there" in nature-"natu-
ralistically of course, from the blinkpoint"-when English has no term for
the obverse of the eyelid and when works like Helmholtz's Physiol08ica1 Op-
tics hardly note their presence. Through its "meoptics," the Wake prescrip-
tively corrects the oversight.
"What the blinkins is to be seen" in "one eyegonblack" (568.1-2 [apart
from its passive form])? At a quantum level, the "eyegonblack" "reveil[s]"
(220.33 [as it "veils"]) the essential discontinuity and constructedness ofthe
visual space within which scientific and literary naturalism are mapped
out, as against the underlying ubiquity of the body. Just take "a dun blink
round ... and you skull see" (17.17-18): as that "blink" renders "Dublin"
"dun" (a "dun blink" is a dark one), it illuminates the interior of your
"skull." Study of the "eyegonblack," then, shows the visual field represented
in the two maps of Dublin and Europe incessantly flipping "skinside out"
(507.6) into the spatiality represented in the two carnal maps ofthe night,
where vision undergoes momentarily dark revision and then emerges again,
having enjoyed in the incremental "blackout" a slight "solstitial pause for
refleshmeant" (617.14,82.10 [at the "solstice," as during the eyeblink and the
night, the sun seems to stop]).
"What the blinkins is to be seen" in the almost instantaneous "eyegon-
black" therefore compels attention throughout the Wake because only mat-
ters of "degree" and "kind" ("tantum," "talis") differentiate a wink per se
from" a winkle of sleep" (199.11 - 12), or" a wink of sleep" from forty: sleep,
in a book where "wink's the winning word" (249.4), is only "forty winks"-
perhaps fifty-endured in unbroken succession (28.18,495.22,561.34,595.8),
a form of sustained and involuntarily enforced exposure to the backs of the
eyelids ("I could snap them when I see them winking at me in bed" [148.14]),
as to the rest of the body whose presence one repressively overlooks by day.
"Clos[ing the] blinkhard's eye" (109.21 [and "the blackguard's"]) as darkly as
a "hard blink" does, the night reconstructed in the Wake therefore becomes
"a winker's wake" (514.20[asopposed toa winklessdeadman's]), the "winter"
underlying that "winker" designating the time of "hibernation. "
Study of the "eyegonblack" in turn raises the question of why one blinks
at all or, by sleeping, succumbs to "forty winkers" (495.22 [again those sub-
liminal "winters"]). According to those who have studied "the inception

and the descent and the endswell of Man" (150.30-31 [the "new science" of
evolution is just the study of how a multitude of Finnegans wake]), land-
dwelling animals sport "those lashbetasselled lids on the verge of clos-
ing time" (474.8) in order to help them moistly "reflesh" (and so "refresh")
the eyes in surroundings that can easily grow dry and grating; eyelids at-
tach themselves to the bodies of animals that do not live under water. The
"eyegonblack" therefore liquidates visual space in two senses of that word,
dissolving the iritic colors as it also, with the effect of Noah's deluge,
floods the visible world with the "saltwater" (386.19, passim), in partic-
ular, of "meye eyesalt" (484.5; 222.27). During both the blink and the
longer "winker" of sleep, then, "the length of the land lies under liquida-
tion (floote!) and there's nare a hairbrow nor an eyebush on [the] glau-
brous phace of Herrschuft Whatarwelter" (12.7-9; cf. 3.13-14): the opaque
"phace" (or "face") in this phrasing conceals "daylight" (Gr. phaos) and
a pair of "eyes" (Gr. phaea) that are sunk in a "watery world" (452.3°)
which becomes visible only within an "aquaface" (3.14); while the English
"glabrous" ("without hair") pulls us not simply beneath the surface of the
visible world, but beneath the "hirsute" surface of vision itself, into the
space below the two "eyebrows" ("hairbrow," "eyebush"). Here, "eye sinks"
(336.3° ["I think"]), in pure "blink pitch" (93.4 [a "blink's" "black pitch"]),
the visible "regginbrow" (3.14 [the "rainbow" "in brow"]) comes to its ends
as a vast "waterworld" comes to light (367.26): "what a welter" of "tar,"
"water," and "tarwater"in this "Whatarwelter" (Ger. Welt, "world")! "Search
a fling did die near sea" (223.12-13): "did die" rather than "did I" because
"eyewinker" (320.27 [a visually liquidated "Earwicker"]) has himself been
"liquidated"; "such a thing did I never see" largely because "eye" was un-
conscious of it.
As these spellings moreover imply, the "language" of Finne8ans Wake now
becomes broadly "linguified" (228.21 ["liquefied"]), its "lingo" dissolving
into "linquo" (178.2 ["liquid lingo"]), in order to represent what "eye sinks"
when "the length of the land lies under liquidation." For the "meoptical"
universe ofthe Wake's night is one of both "wet and low visibility" (51.3-4);
and if extended mannerisms in the book warn us to "keep black!," others
encourage us only "to sea" (50.35; 23.12, 223.13 [to "see" only saltwater]).
"Let [anyone] blink for himself" (468.17 [not "think"]): if with wakeful
"eyes whiteopen" you always and everywhere see something like "dear dirty
Dublin," during the "eyegonblack" "[you] sea" something that might more
accurately be painted as "teary turty Taubling" (23.12,7.5-6) -where those
"Meoptics" 255
saline "tears" liquidate and wash away the "dirt" as you momentarily be-
come a specular "Taubling" (Ger. taub, "empty"). "Lid efter lid" "under the
closed eyes," "[you] sea" only "that tare and this mole, your tear and our
smile" (509.26)-"tar," like a "mole," though to the fluid background strain
of "The Tear and the Smile in Thine Eyes" (lyrics from yet another of
Moore's Irish Melodies). 37 At a quantum level, then, the eyeblink finds one
"whipping his eyesoult" (222.26-27 ["lashing" them in "eyesalt," as if"weep-
ing his eyes out"]): "they nearly cried (the salt of the earth!)" (454.24-25).
What one will largely "sea," "mid bedewing tears under those wild wet
lashes" (463.9-10), is the liquidation ofthe world in a form of warm "salt-
water" that Joyce calls "the tears of night" (158.20-21). One says "adieu" to
the visible by closing the eyes: "Ah dew! Ah dew!" (158.20), "a! a! a! Par la
pluie!" (158.23-24). And as drops of "refleshing" "dew," "rain" (Fr. pluie),
and "thrain tropps" "liquidate" (484.4 [Ger. Tranen, "tears"]), a little "um-
brella" (Fr. parapluie) furls forth its shade. When the Wake's "irismaimed"
puts "the length of the land under liquidation," accordingly, "the tears of
night beg[i]n to fall" everywhere over the world in which he dwells (158.20-
21), so to transform it into a kind of "Tear nan-Ogre" (479.2)-an "other
world" manifestly like the mythical Irish "Tir na nOg," but one that actu-
ally comes to light within the "teary" eyes of the "blacked-out" "ogre" de-
picted in the relief maps. Dead to the world, this sleeping giant has become
"tearly belaboured by Sydney and Alibany" (489.31-32 ["dearly beloved"]):
because his vision has gone "elsewhere" in the night (L. alibi), somewhere
"down under" ("Sydney" and "Albany" are in Australia), his closed and
"liquidated" eyes "labour" darkly in "tears."
Whenever "the water of the face has flowed" so deeply as this in the Wake
(361.35 [that "face" being HCE's]), its "blottyeyed" "irismaimed" (361.36)
undergoes a form of partial visual regression to the era of his genesis (hence
the evocation of that time when the spirit also "moved upon the face of the
waters" [Genesis I: 2]). Or, more particularly, since any closure of the eye
evolutionarily "liquidates" vision and reforms it beneath "saltwater," the
eye blink returns the visible world to "primeval conditions" "far below on
our sealevel" (599.10,463.4-5): during the "eyegonblack," "I am highly pel-
aged ... to see" (358.10-II [Gr. pelagos, "sea"]). Our "tearly belaboured"
"irismaimed" therefore "pours a laughsworth of his illformation over a larms-
worth of salt" (137.34-35 [Fr. larme, "tear"]) by tending periodically to en-
vision, in his sleep, many "floods" (330.10), "floodplain[s]" (36.15), "invis-
ible" "saltlea[s] with flood" (8I.I, 17-18), and comparable "saltings" that
are never quite "wiseable" (17.20, 16.24 [or "visible"]). All that he is really

able "to sea" at such moments in the night (50.35), as his "murty odd oogs"
(88.17) rock eerily "through his old tears" (381.20-21) in "seeless socks"
(468.25) void of iritic light and all sight of earth, are unplumbed, salt, and
tractless "sees" (416.3° [or "seas"]): like the Netherlands generally, the
Dutch 008 ("eye") in these "murky" "oogs" would lie somewhere below
saltwater level, while the spelling of "sea" as "see" suggests that the object
of HCE's vision here is simply saline "see" water (cf. 366.16, 375.34-35,
445.26, 588.15)·
As happens in the dream-void parts of anyone's nightlife, the visual di-
mensions of whole sections of Finne8ans Wake fall together inside of deeply
liquidated and very "fishy eyes" like these (559.23), which have regressively
passed out "to see" (366.16 ["to sea"]). 38 This is the case not only in parts of
the Wake's opening chapter, for instance (cf. 3.13-14, 7.5-6, 12.7-9); but
also through extended sections of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" (where "H. C. E.
has a codfisk ee" [198.8-9]); and throughout all of chapter II.iv, which
is surely one of the weirder items in the book. There, beneath the forms of
four old men "crossing their sleep [and the sea] by the shocking silence"
(393.35-36), we find HCE moving through an "invinsible" "waterworld"
(367.25, 26) while peering through "the salty catara off [of] a windows"
(395.11 [the "cataract" blinds]) and "behold[ing] the residuance of a delu-
gion" (367.24). As the spelling of "delugion" suggests, however, the "deluge"
(13.36, 86.24, 214.7, 315.13) or "universal flood" (388.12) that he "sea[s]"
here and at comparable moments in his sleep is more in the nature of a "del-
ugium" (502.30 [or "delusion"]) than a "deluge" pure and simple. Terms like
these suggest that "his deepseeing" "deepseepeepers [have] gazed and sazed
and dazecrazemazed into [their] dullokbloon rodolling olosheen eyenbowls"
(75.13, 389.26-28)-where the phrase echoes a line from Byron's Childe
Harold ("Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll") in order to show
the Wake's "irismaimed" visually lost in the "great deap sleap" of "the
Deepsleep Sea" (277.13, 37.18 [all these terms point the "deep seeing" of
"deep sleep" into a "Deep Sea"]). When "the length of the land lies under
liquidation," accordingly, our "seelord" (325.16 [not "sealord"]) becomes a
kind of Noah again, passing through a world everywhere visually liquidated
and "inundered" (127.5) as his "gropesarching eyes" search in vain for any
sight of earth, any iritic light, or "any shape at see" (375.34-35 ["ship at
sea"]): "What ravening shadow! What dovely line!" (357.16-17; cf. 358.4-5
[the colors "raven" and "dove" are black and dark]). AndJoyce's reader, him-
self equipped with the necessary "fathomglasses to find out all the fathoms"
in the "saltwater" (386.16-17, 19), can again "blink for himself" to "feel
"Meoptics" 257
what I mean" (468.17-18) : he will be seeing "real life behind the floodlights"
(260.F3 [these "floodlights" the eyes; cf. 221.28, 318.6, 330.10, 494.2, and
498.24- 25]) .
Having "define[d] the hydraulics of common salt" (256.28), we might pro-
ceed further in an "analysis" of the liquidating properties of eye-closure by
trying to "analectralyze that very chymerical combination, the gasbag
where the warderworks. And try to pour somour heiterscene up thealmost-
fere" (67.8-10). These "chimerical" "waterworks" would be the eyes of our
hero (the voluble "gasbag" who is their only "warder"), while the "hydro-
gen" (or "heiterscene") that they release into "the atmosphere" of the Eve-
ning World would be one of their chief effects. Just as "electrolysis" reduces
a compound into its constituent "chemical" elements, so a good "ana-
lectralysis" of the eye finds vision darkly liquidated into the "chymerical"
elements of black, chaotic light, vitreous "juice" (Gr. chymos) , and lots of
"heiterscene"-or, better yet, "linguified heissrohgin" (228.21 ["liquefied
hydrogen"])-but only because "hydrogen," from the French hydro8ene
("water-producing"), does exactly what the eyes do. Eye closure and tear
production, as these lines suggest, are causes and effects of each other: one
blinks to liquidate the eyes, while the welling-up of tears complementarily
induces the blink.
It is at a point so "tearly belaboured" that one would do well "to pour
somour heiterscene up thealmostfere" ("some more," "some our"); for as
the modulation of "hydrogen" into "heiter scene" now suggests (Ger. heiter,
"merry"), a good strong burst of "laughtears" (15.9) will also liquidate vi-
sion and make the "eye go black"-ultimately to raise questions like those
posed by Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, as to whether
one can laugh and think at the same time, or whether the power that erupts
in "laughtears" annihilates consciousness, at a quantum level, as deeply as
does sleep. Anyone "weeping like fun" (558.24) will discover not only that
his "blink points unbroken on" (419.1 [Ger. Blickpunkt, "point of view," um-
8ebrochen, "broken down"]); but also that he has been ephemerally trans-
lated "during [the] blackout" (617.14) into an "in risible universe" (419.3
["invisible" because "risible"]) indistinct from that experienced every-
where in the Evening World. Because a good laugh can cause the "loss of
reason," control, vision, and the head all "togutter" (332.12, 517.14 ["to-
gether"]), "man's laughter" modulates into "manslaughter" at the Wake
(433.29), having the power to "paralyze" and leave one "stricken"-"with
the whooping laugh at the age of the loss of reason" (423.26 [that "laugh,"
too, is contagious]). If only ephemerally, then, the liquidating experience of

"laughtears" allows one to enter the "eyewitless foggus" ofHCE, now"Mis-
ter Funn" (5.12), who seems to have "collaughsed" (580.7-8), "Drowned in
the Laffey" (420.34 ["drowned in laughter"]), or, at the least, from "dyin
loffin" (420.13), severely "tropped head."39 "From the poignt of fun where I
am crying to arrive you at" (160.32-33 [not "point of view"]) , "laughtears"
too will liquidate the eye, reducing vision yet further to one of its "chimeri-
cal" elements-this one "hilarity," as opposed to "tristesse" (21.12). And in
what is only another matter of quantumized kind and degree ("tantum,"
"talis"), it should now be clear that anything at all conceivable as "objec-
tive" vision is always subliminally mediated by a thin film of tears-ocular
"hydrogen"-the release of either of whose extremes can alter elementally
at anyone instant one's seeing of the world: the world looks hysterically
different, and closer to the way it looks in the Evening World-"really"-
when viewed through a film of "tears" or "laughtears."
It should also now be evident that all of the "meoptical" properties
brought to light through study of the "eyegonblack" visibly "reveil," at a
quantum level, the powerful determination with which the whole involun-
tary force of sleep seeps up into the day, everywhere to underlie and deter-
minatively impinge on the real. No one consciously decides when or when
not to surrender to "tears" or "laughtears," when or when not to lower
"those lashbetasselled lids on the verge of closing time" by succumbing to
"forty winks" or by "blinking upon this earthlight" (449.7). Blinking over-
powers the eye as autonomically and involuntarily as do sleep and dreams,
without external stimulus or any calculated decisiveness; the blink-reflex
tugs at the wakened eye even in the dark, and even when one deliberately
keeps one's eyelids closed in the dark.1O Like the retina, then, the eyelids and
the tearsacs become only two more of countless locales "in the flesh" on
which the murky "Autist" "down under" inside everyone, "wr[iting] over
every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body" (185.35-36),
etches out in the medium of living flesh a visible sign, "of eyebrow pen-
cilled" (93.25), ultimately to glyph the face with the kind of opaquely leg-
ible "expression"-certainly not literary-that can be seen, for instance,
when the person to whom one is delivering one's harangue fails to keep his
eyelids open, fails to let them blink in relief, or bursts into tears, so to con-
vey the news, though not in so many words, that one is being tedious,
alarming, or painful.
In the writing on the lid, one sees the individual "autistically" (and "ar-
tistically") retailoring his body, its vision, and the world that takes shape in
that vision to suit his needs and himself. For at every waking moment, lid-
"Meoptics" 259
ded vision is taxed with a variety of heavily competing options: fully alert,
at one extreme, one can overlook the underlid and stare into the face of the
present; or, not alert at all, one can fall back into the body and watch the
"blinketey blanketer" (603.31) "blanket" the "blinketey blank" world-as
the Wake's still-sleepy hero does close to daybreak when, to avoid the irrita-
tion of gathering sunlight and the news it carries of another day of work, he
"blankets" his head and resumes a placid "eyewitless foggus" on the dark.
"The mauwe that blinks you blank is mostly Carbo," then (232.2-3 [mostly
"black," often "blank," sometime "mauve"]) because it plays a flexibility
into one's negotiations with the real, allowing one at any instant, in what is
only another matter of kind and degree ("tantum," "talis"), to "tare it or
leaf it" (II8.23 ["take it or leave it"]), like "The Man That Broke The Bank
at Monte Carlo" after he broke the bank. The wide-ranging degree of this
flexibility becomes not unusually apparent when one looks at any "dried
ink [on a] scrap of paper" (II8.33), as now, or otherwise meditates on the
strangely soporific powers of academic Literature ("You're getting hoovier,
a twelve stone hoovier, full ends a twelve stone hoovier, in your corpus
entis"-L. "body of being"-and also, by way of the Du. hooved, in your
"head" [376.14- 15]). The adaptable little "eyeblink" allows one vigilantly
to scan the "leaf" of the page whenever one wants (hence "leaf it"), or to
black it out while surrendering to the daydream, as if to turn it all to "tar"
and to "tear" it to shreds ("tare it"). At a quantum level, "eye sinks," sleep
and the "Autist" "down under" are tugging away at one's "bourseday shirt"
right now.
As a marginal locale in the body incessantly taxed with conflicting op-
tions, the eyelids become an ideal site for the inscription of symptomatic
"traumscrapt," and so become a few "square inches of the only foolscap
available, his own body," on which the "Autist" from "down under," again
wielding that resourceful "eyebrow pencil," can leave "sobsconcious in-
klings shadowed on [the] soulskin" (377.28). Anyone adept at "reading off
his fleshskin" (229.30) will find these darkly legible "inklings" everywhere
he looks in the Daily World if he examines the supple forms that eye-
blinking takes-in the nervous twitches and tics of "tickeyes" (43.9), in
leadenly drooped lids, in eyes narrowed in suspicion or anxiety, in "Irish
eyes of welcome ... smiling daggers" (176.22-23), in eyes that sparkle "in
the twinkly way" (148.13-14), in "fleurty winkies" (561.34), in "tears,"
"laughtears," and so forth. Even among people of imperturbable counte-
nance (let's "Show'm the Posed"), the eyelids show the imprint of these in-
finitely variable symptomatic signs; the longer and more rapidly the "Au-

tist" in the body pulls down "those lashbetasselled lids on the verge of
closing time," the longer one is "caughtnapping" (336.25 ["catnapping"]),
and the longer one is "caughtnapping," the more deeply one moves in the
direction of "forty winks."
"SUPRA SONIC LIGHT CONTROL"

Prolonged scrutiny of the backs of the eyelids, finally, will help one to
fathom the visionary character of "everynight life"-but largely because it
turns out to be almost impossible to see them. No matter how hard one
tries, one will find that an insuppressible and silent "headnoise" (535.23)
tends constantly and involuntarily to pull the eyes away from a purely op-
tical "eyewitless foggus" by generating another, wholly imaginary kind of
vision "in the sighed of lovely eyes" (4°5.28-29 ["inside of," through sub-
vocalic "sighs"]). However easy it may be to liquidate physical light by
dropping those "lashbetasselled lids," "you [are] not quite so successful in
the process verbal whereby you would sublimate your blepharospasmocki-
cal suppressions" (515.15-17 [Gr. bJepharon, "eyelid"]). Since a "blepharo-
spasm" is the medical term for an eyeblink subject to unrest, the wording
here calls our attention to a form of vision, also arising "in fact, under the
closed eyes" (107.28), which is made possible not by the active lighting-up
of "eyebulbs," but, representative rather than presentative, by a "process
purely verbal." Rolling into the eyes out of the space between the ears and
the tongue as a result of language, and "presenting a strangely profound
rainbowl in [one's] occiput" (107.II-12 [the "occiput" is the back of the
head or skull]), this is the form of vision that enables anyone to see "inex-
actly the same as a mind's eye view" (515.22-23), or from a literarily "bard's
highview" (5°4.16), all things ordinarily visible to the eye's eye view-not
least in the night-and often in defiance of "one snaked's eyes" themselves
(564.34 [that whispering "snake," as in Genesis, deceives]): "do you hear
what I'm seeing"? (193.10), "see wha'm hearing?" (174.13). Able to cast over
the "things" really seen in the Daily World a sometimes dense if irrecollect-
ible film of "thinks" imaginarily seen (as when someone lost in a daydream
fails to observe what is going on around him), this representative kind of
vision too has the evident power of making the eyes involuntarily drift and
halt transfixed in their sockets, so to interfere with the mechanical trans-
mission of objects and light rays into the eyes through the channels charted
out in the schemas of traditional opticians. This form of "second sight"
"Meoptics"
(520.29; 5.25) is important to a "reading [of the] Evening World" because the
Wake's "irismaimed" exercises it everywhere.
If study of HCE's "liquidated" "blackeye lenses" has made it seem, for
instance, that "by the salt say water there's nix to nothing we can do for
he's never again to sea" (50.34-35 [or "see"]), we should now note that
this "say water," unlike mere "seawater," has lots offormative language (or
"say") spectrally dispersed in it (cf. 371.8, 9, 20,32; 372.27; 373.11; 436.13;
540.23); moreover, that this diffuse "say" sometimes "manage[s] to catch a
listener's eye" (174.17-18), so to illuminate, with "the light of other days,
[the] dire dreary darkness" in which he dwells (136.20-21) by allowing him
to construct "an earsighted view of" the world (143.9-10). "Earsighted"
himself (and extremely "nearsighted" too), our hero has learned to "talk
earish with his eyes shut" (130.19), and as a consequence, he is continually
"insighting," throughout the Wake (437.5 [visually "inciting"]), a kind of
"photosensition under suprasonic light control [that] may be logged for [and
looked for]" everywhere (123.12-13): the wording here tells us that the "sen-
sation" of "light" ("photosensation") arises at times out of inaudible (hence
"suprasonic") sound sounded within our hero's "tropped head." Or, as Joyce
put all this much more straightforwardly in his notebooks," fTl talks then
picture." 41
Lines like these, distributed everywhere in the Wake, finally suggest that
from the relativistic "blankpoint" of an "Eyeinstye" (305.6 [that "stye"
"keeps black!"]), there may be more to the ear than meets the eye: "Habes
aures et num videbis?" (113.29-30 [L. "You have ears and you will not see?"]).
"Ear! Ear! Not ay! Eye! Eye! For I'm at the heart of it" (409.3-4). Particu-
larly in a book with a hero sometimes called "Earwicker" (I.ii), some atten-
tion to the role that "the night's ear" (74.10- 1I) plays in the darker parts of
life now becomes essential to any reading of the Wake. But before taking a
long, hard "monolook interyerear" (182.20 ["into your ear," in order to
understand the Wake's "monologue interior"]), a closing word on the liqui-
dated eye.
This chapter has only barely begun to explore the Wake's "meoptics,"
which ultimately amounts to a new optics and a "new science" in the na-
ture of Vico's. Anything like "objective" vision, not least, receives a sharp,
dark, refractive twist and wrench in the humor-filled "meoptics" of the
Wake's "Oscur Camerad" (602.23); there especially, the imperious vagaries
of "point of view," as practiced by the first person, come to all kinds of prob-
lematic dead ends. Clues strewn densely over every page of the Wake, "from
spark to phoenish" (322.20), will help its reader to know at any particular

moment in the book what to make of the infinitely variable "brights and
shades" (621.23) and "sparks" and "phoenixes" that play through the "mil-
lioncandled eye" (25.26) and "blackeye lenses" of its colorfully "benighted
irismaimed"; and at the same time, each of these clues will generally reveal
something more, and more spectacular, about the immense "charm of his
optical life" (179.1-2) and the miraculousness of his and "her changeable
eye (which see)" (332.21-22 [note, for instance, the indiscriminate range of
its voyeuristic inclinations». If "you don't reckon eyes him" (465.3) or the
immense visionary splendor of Finne8ans Wake at these moments, it is per-
haps only because, with "your glosses" (304.F3 [and "glasses"]) clouded
over by bad habits, you don't "reckon" with his "eyes" (hence "reckoneyes")
or with the "light phantastic" (182.4) that they mediate, make, and, "under
the dark flush of night," blackly liquidate. In the Wake's vision, this failure
to see what seeing fully involves has "meant milliems of centiments deadlost
or mislaid on" us (239.3)-"sentiments" whose reawakening restores to us,
as in Vico, "the original sinse we are only yearning as yet how to burgeon"
(239.2). Finally, the Wake's "meoptical" insight into the night forces us to
"see that wonder in your eye" (215.4-5), and, finding it considerable, we
emerge from the book's darkness "hav[ing] frankly enjoyed more than any-
thing these secret workings of natures," "really so denighted of this lights
time" (615.13-15).
"Lights out now (bouf!), tight and sleep on it" (445.22-23).
"Meoptics"
CHAPTER N I N E
Earwickerwork
"OUMMYSHIP"
Where the mastery of most arts and sciences requires the laboriously
schooled mounting of a "8radus ad Parnassum" (L. "steps to Parnassus"),
Finne8ans Wake simply asks its readers to take a few "false steps ad Per-
nicious" (467.34)-and largely through a sleep-mimetic dismantling of the
head. Pursued in one direction this headrubbling exercise leads "the noer"
(286.28 [or negated "knower"]) into the "duskt" of the night's "seemetery"
(4.12, 17.36 [hence "Pernicious"]); but in another, it leads to the ground fig-
uratively depicted at the bottom of figure 9.1, somewhere far below which
lies "the childhood of the world" explored in Vico's "Poetic Wisdom." Study
of the etymology suggests not only that the night's "dusk," the "seemetery's"
"dust," and the Wake's "obfuscation" are essential aspects of each other, but
also that "dullness" and "doldrums," and "deafness" and "dumbness" are.
Signifying both the perception of phenomenal disappearances (as happens
at "dusk," in "death," and in regions that lie "deep" "down"), and the phe-
nomenal disappearance of perceptions (as happens in "deafness," "dumb-
ness," and "dullness"), a number of the terms drawn into a relational unity
by this etymology map out more of our hero's countless "houdingplaces"
(127. I I ["Houdini's" was a vanishing act]), some of which will now repay
investigation. l A little attention to the Wake's "meoptics" will make unnec-
essary a comparably detailed treatment of its dark and extended "sordo-
mutics" (I17. 14 [L. surdus-mutus, "deaf-mute"]). But if "the ubiquitous
'deaf and dumb' motif in Finne8ans Wake has never been adequately ex-
plained," it is only because too few of its readers have taken the requisite
"night lessons" in "night school." 2
Examine again the "dummy" (334.22) shown "outlined aslumbered" in ei-
ther of the relief maps-or any body sleeping, for that matter-and ask yourself
two essential questions. "Did you gather much from what he let drop?" (509.5-6
[his body and its head, for instance». Probably not, since "his lapper and lib-
bers was glue goulewed" (531.13-14 [his lips stick]), and he is "obviously dis-
emvowelled" (515.12). Or again:
Did the kickee ... say anything important?
-No more than Richman's periwhelker.
-Nnn ttt wrd?
-Dmn ttt thg.
Like a "periwinkle," "whelk," or other shellfish, a sleeping person generally

"clams up" and just lies there, "protesting to his lipreaders with a just-
beencleaned barefacedness" so bare and so clean that his lips seem not to
move at all (91. 17- 18). Penny for penny, he becomes the cheapest "dumb-
show" in town, and so too necessarily at the Wake:
Act: dumbshow.
Closeup. Leads.
Man with nightcap, in bed ....
Moments like these, scattered everywhere throughout the Wake, enable us

now to think of our hero as "Boawwll's Alocutionist" (72.16 [by way of the
Gr. and L. privatives a- and ab-, a negated "elocutionist"]); and unlike any
student of "Bell's Standard Elocutionist," who would have learned to enunci-
ate crisply delivered oral performances, "he, to don't say nothing" (288.5-
6), don't say nothing, "on account off" (536.24-25 [not "of"]) the night
"nearly takes [his] own mummouth's breath away" (510.3-4 [note the "owl"
obscured in "Boawwll" and "keep black!"]). Sleeping giant though he may
be (hence "mammoth"), his "mum mouth" is "SHUT" so fully as to be, as
far as he can "no," indistinguishable from "his speak quite hoarse" (334.16
["big wide arse"]): "he's so dumnb [in all senses of the word]. If he'd lonely
talk" (225.17- 18). Since all of us, comparably, "were lowquacks did we not
tacitturn" in sleep (99.1-2 [L. loquax, "talkative"; tacitus, "mute, silent"]),
our representative hero necessarily becomes something of a weird "elecu-
Earwickerwork
7
dump deep Dublin deaf dull doldrums donkey dust obfuscation
dumpiness dimple depth dummy deafmute typhlosis dustheap obfuscate
dwell
dumpy dumpling dope (blindness) dwelling
dopey dumb typhlology (sense of
dumbshow
(science of "hesitancy")
(HI-; Il,i:
blindness)
mime)
dump
(19th c. U.S.:
a refuse heap) dump
(18th c.:
a shapeless
lump)
r
2. any narcotic
dumb
doldrums
(a thrown
fit of
intense
dullness
[formed
3. any addict
from "dull"
4. any dull
Ger. DiimpeJ/ by analogy
dummy) Gael. dubh
TiimpeJ with
dumpy
(short and
(pool; deep
hole in Du.
t doop (black) +
linn (pool) Ger. Ger.
"tantrum"])
M.E. downe,
squat: = Dubh·linn raub
flowing or (sauce, dip; Taube doun (down)
formed by ("Blackpool": (deaf) M.E. dwellen
still water; baptism) (dove)
echo of
"humpy,"
"lumpy,"
an abyss)
+
Du. doopen
(baptize, dip)
Dublin), in
reference to
a deep pool
at the mouth
(linger,
delay)
f'
t
O.N. dunn
etc.) (soft, fine-
M.E. dimpuJ of the River dwellan
as·dust O.E.
(a water-filled LilIey [CL,
381-82] dust
pit; a dimple)
~O.E. deop
M.E. dumpen
(to dump,
I (deep)
let fall, O.E. *dympeJ
throw (a deep place
down) in water)
+
obscure
scandinavian
source, akin
to
Sw. dompa
Nor. dumpa
(throw down)
Nor. dump
(a deep, de-
pression; a
hollow in the
earth)
Possibly O. Ir.
dub (black, dark); Germ. *duns-tD
source unclear (dust; dustlike)
because" 'deep'
~
and 'black' can
easily be iden·
erm. *duskaz
Germ. *deup (dusk)
Germ. *dump tical"[Po, 264]
(deep)
(a deep
l' I.E. *dhus·no· k.
in earth)
I.E. *dhu·m-b·
(a deep in
earth)
i I
I
I.E. *dhubhu·
(dust·colored,
mist-gray)
[*dhwens-]
't
"
I.E. *dhuem-
(to be foggy, dark,

muddy, obscure)
I.E. *dheub·
(deep and
-------.c:..------- ,...........
__ - I.E. *dheu·bh-
(to be dark. misty,
blacked·out, obscure) I.E. *dheu-k·
(to make dark,
, ..........
hollow)
.....
..... --- ..... _ _ _ _ _ _ _
,;;:"""'___....;:a..______,,;;;}...___
Figure 9.1. Etymological chart: *dheu-. "What is to be found in a Dustheap" (307.23)

doze death dud funeral thanatos dune down downward dotty furies feral theos
funereal thanato· (feeble- (pertaining theophany
dead doddering to the dead theogeny
dizzy mimetic minded) deer
(of sleep) dodder theology
dizziness
dithering etc.
dither
t
didder
Du. dood l'

(dead) dawdle
D.E.
scottish 1'"
dottle
dead M.E. doun (to be diddle
Gael. duine
(open, high
grassy land)
silly, 't
(person, asleep) \
man)
M.E. downldoun
(chain of
(down [di-
formations deer/dere
rectional])
byechoism (deer)
D.lr. duine
(mortal,
M.Du. dune
(sandhill,
dune)
t
D.E. a-Iof-
[or "sound
symbolism"]) t
man) (off of. t
away from)
+
D.E. diine (to totter)
(the hill) ~
(town)
D.E. dysig
(foolish, Gr. enthousiazein
L. fiinero.
(to be possessed,
fiinerare
(to bury)
D.lr. dun
([hill] fort)
M.E. doten
(to be silly)
D.E. dydrian
.,.
inspired)
Gr. enthousl
(waste away, (confuse, entheos
\
vanish, dis· delude) (possessed
appear) Gr. thanatos by the god,
(death, "twin M. LowGer.
t brother of
inspired)
i ltv
Germ. *dwinan sIeep"[L&S] )
(waste out, Germ. *diuzaz
vanish) Germ. *dunaz (an animal; a living.
L. fiinus, fiineris (hill) breathing creature
[Cf. the formation
Germ. (a burial) close
["formally *dhunetos C
(:illl,C * uno of "animal" from the
L. anima (breath,
to D.lr. dun. \ stronghold) Gr thlS, rhmos
'fortress, strong- (a mound [of sand]; soul) ])
hold'" (Po, 263). any heap, the sand
Shared sense at the bottom of
the ocean)
IE. *dhuno-
L. fumus
(hill, dune,
Gr. thymos (smoke,
stronghold)
r
[thumos] vapor)
(breath, soul,
life, strong
passion [Cf.
L. fuseo, fuscare L. anima,
I.E. *dheu-n-
IE (to darken, (to swirl together, animus])
*d'h"k blacken) as dust)
U5~ L. fum. furere
(to fume. smoulder;
I.E. *dhumo- rave, rage)
I.E. *dhus-ko- (scatter,
t '\'
(rising in be scattered) I.E. *dheu-d-
J/
(to whirl or swirl
in confusion; scatter;
be scattered)
Proto-Indo-European *dheu- (I)
I.E. *dheu-s- (to become exhausted, I.E. *dheu-m-
unconscious; to dwindle, I. E. *dheu-s-
(to rise in a haze,
vanish, die) (to rise like smoke,
as mist, fog, dust;
intangibly, obscurely)
to be or grow foggy, ProtO-Indo-European *dheu- (II)
misty, obscure) (to rise in a haze, as
'>.... fog, mist, dust:

a. and grow dense, dark,
obscure;
b. and scatter,
evaporate, blow away)
tioner" (58.34-35 [an "executioner" of "elocution" and a mute practitioner
of "alocutionary" speech-acts]), Finne8ans Wake in turn holding forth
"Mute art for the Million" (496.7). (See figure 9.2.)
Moreover, our hero is "as datf as you're erse" (268.L4)-"as daft as you're
Erse," perhaps, but also "deaf as your arse." And the arse, as reference to
509.30-33 and the accompanying commentary in the Annotations will sug-
gest, is not the most developed of his sensory organs. 4 As anyone who has
slept through an alarm clock knows ("I hate to look at alarms but ... I
hereby hear by ear from by seeless socks 'tis time to be up and ambling"
[468.23-26]), sleeping people do not always hear things. Even when they do
vaguely hear things, as anyone who has slept through a dull lecture will
attest, they do a very poor job of recalling, interpreting, and intelligently
discussing what they have heard afterwards. When HCE falls asleep and
loses consciousness both of "Dublin" and the "Saorstat Erin," therefore,
\. Face to Face
(after an illustration in Ferdinand de Saussure. Course in General
Lin8uistics. trans. Wade Baskin [New York: McGraw-Hill. 1966]. p. II)
Mutt ("a dumm") and Jeff ("the deff")
2. "on ace to ..... ace!" (18.36)
Figure 9.2. The Facts of Speech

he enters a "state" that might most accurately be construed as "Dufblin"
(447.23 ["deaf-blind"]), "Taubling" (7.6 [Ger. taub, "deaf"]), or "sorestate
hearing" (242.1). In parts of the night, as he lies "bothered ... from head to
tail" (381.28 [Anglo-Ir. "bothered" = "deaf"]), having "dropped down dead
and deaf" "in Demidoff's tomb" (323.19, 329.23 [a "demi-dumb-and-deaf"
one], he accordingly becomes known by such "psourdonome[s]" (332.32 [Fr.
sourd, "deaf"]) as "old dummydeaf" (329.27) or "Sur Soord" (238.31)-
both presumably attached to "Mrs Taubiestimm" (546.29 [Ger. taubstumm,
"deaf and dumb"]). Passing "through deafths of durkness (4°7.12 ["deaf," in
"death"]) while "sound asleep" (204.16 [and "asleep to sound"]), our hero
therefore becomes the quintessential deaf-mute. And if he'll representa-
tively be the death of us, "he'll [also] be the deaf of us" (379·20)-"Yus,
sord" (379.21). Since "his hearing is indoubting just as [his] seeing is onbe-
lieving," in short (468.15-16), a reader of the Wake would profit from a few
lessons in "How to Understand the Deaf" (3°7.20-21).
In a word, they can "heerdly heer" (485.27-28). "Old dummydeaf" lies so
deeply "in debt and doom" in the dark (496.4 ["deaf and dumb"]) that the
terms "deaf-mute" and "deaf-dumb" recur throughout Finnegans Wake in a
weltering proliferation of "hardly heard" and mutely garbled forms. This
is perhaps most apparent in sections of the book given over to characters
like "Mutt and Jute" (15.29-18.16) and "Butt and Taff" (337.32-354.21),
whose names, at the end of a chain of sonic associations, sound like the
words "mute" and "deaf" as badly mismanaged by two deaf-mutes crippled
with nasty colds. But comparably distorted appearances of "deaf-mute"
configurations appear everywhere at the Wake, in order to remind us insis-
tently of the underlying "bedeafdom" (236.30 ["deaf-dumb"]) ofthe night.
A line informing us that a dim figure shouted at our hero "last epening af-
ter delivering some carcasses mattonchepps and meatjutes, " for instance
(67.16-17), only apparently has to do with the rude delivery of a supply of
"muttonchops and meatjuice" ; beneath the manifest surface of the phras-
ing, we might see that the outrage perpetrated on "Sur Soord" "last evening"
befalls everyone in "everynight life": last evening, too, your "carcass was
delivered mute-and-deaf and deaf-mute" (cf. 467.15-17, and note the heav-
ily conflicted "mutter and doffer duffmatt baxingmotch" at 415.13 [not
really, finally, the interesting "mother and daughter deaf-mute boxing-
match" it appears to be]).
Particularly because the "stream of consciousness" or "interior mono-
logue" seems to involve some tacit play between the ear and the mouth, our
hero's "defdum" (89.33 ["deaf-dumb"]) has important broad repercussions
Earwickerwork
in Finnegans Wake-as an example from Ulysses will make clear. There we
find Bloom "thinking," as he tries to assess the fortunes of the Guinness
brothers, "What am I saying, barrels? Gallons" (U, 79). The word "saying"
localizes the Joycean "interior monologue" somewhere in the dark channels
linking mouth and ear, both of which evidently participate in an internal, if
unsounded talking-over. Since Bloom's nocturnal counterpart has ears that
don't work and a mouth glued shut by sleep, however, the Wake's nocturnal
"monologue interior" necessarily modulates into something more akin to a
"moanolothe inturned" (254.14; cf. 105.12); for "old dummydeaf" is so
"turned inward" as to be "lothe" to "moan" at all, let alone to rise out of the
"deafths" of his "bedeafdom" (407.12,236.3°). All ofthe heady mechanisms
that guarantee the smooth flow of consciousness in Ulysses, in turn, become
densely problematized in the Wake, where "the mouth that tells not will
ever attract the unthinking tongue and so long as the obseen draws theirs
which hear not so long till allearth's dumbnation shall the blind lead the
deaf" (68.32-34). A single unit of Wake an "moanolothe inturned," this sen-
tence shows all five of the closed senses extinguishing themselves "in con-
flict of evidence" (314.4); for "allearth's dumbnation" has fallen on the
"presence (of a curpse)" and moved it to "the end of the world" (hence "Al-
lah'sdamnation") .
The best place at which to see what articles like this lead to in more ex-
tended forms would be the dialogue of "Mutt" and "Jute" (15.29-18.16),
"Mutt and Jeff" (L, I, 406), or "mute" and "deaf"-whose essential action,
staged on a dump (17.4-5), is that of sleep's extended "dummpshow" (120.7-
8). If one compares the details exchanged during this dialogue to the repre-
sentation of "Dufblin" given in Relief Map B, it will become evident that the
"hole affair" takes place on the ground of a "gyant" body lying dead to the
world in the "seemetery" of "everynight life" (18.II-12, 17.4-5, 17.26ff.,
17.33).5 The dialogue is localized, moreover, somewhere in the region of
"the neck" ofthis sleeping giant (17. II, 17.21 [Gr. isthmos, "neck"]). Since it
brings together a stammering "Jute" (16.10 [or "mute"]), who is somewhat
"jeff" (16.12 [or "deaf"]), and a "Mutt" (16.II [or "mute"]) who is appar-
ently "jeffmute" (16.14 [or "deafmute"]), the dialogue raises mind-boggling
questions, of a kind repeatedly asked in Finnegans Wake, about what either
of the deaf listeners can possibly be hearing when either mute "alocu-
tionist" spills out his story in silence: "did one scum then in the auradrama,
the deff, after some clever play in the mud, mention to the other undesir-
able, a dumm ... ?" (517.2-4). Underlying the whole "sottovoxed stale-
ment" (313.18), in short-none of it "wiseable" (16.24 [or visible]) because

the "hole affair" is sunk in the "dun blink" of the night's "eyegonblack"
(17.17, 16.29 )-is a conflict in the region of the neck of our sleeping hero, a
stupefied "Taciturn" (17.3), whose shut mouth seems determined to invade
his ear (hence the "invasion" motif), and whose deaf ear in turn seems in-
tent on drawing out his mouth ("the bark is still there but the molars are
gone" [466.36-467.1]).6
Like other characters in the Wake, this "Taciturn" figure has "a quick ear
for spittoons" (38.9-10 ["spittoons" and speechless mouths having exactly
the same content]) and is simply "diagnosing through eustacetube" during
the dialogue of "Mutt and Jute" (36.35-36), trying to ascertain what goes
on in the obscure and roomy space (mind [16.27]) that extends from "mouth-
parts to his orefice" (414.27): "Ope Eustace tube!," as it elsewhere occurs to
"Mr Eustache" (535.26, 361.11). The dialogue anticipates others in the
Wake, then, in which we find "the doomed but always ventriloquent Agi-
tator" who is our hero (56.5-6) "agitating" himself by throwing his voice
into the wooden space between his ears, playing a ventriloquist to his own
dummy ("How wooden I not know it" [16.33]), and feebly "hearing his own
bauchspeech in backwords (100.27-28 [Ger. Bauchredner, "ventriloquist"]).
Generally, since he has a deep if not always conscious memory, our "ven-
triloquent" hero does thousands of voices, largely because he has heard and
engaged in ongoing dialogues with all of them (his mother's, his father's, his
wife's, his customers' and "Here Comes [almost] Everybody's") : "Hear more
to those voices! Always I am hearing them" (571.24-25). "Playing on the
least change of his manjester's voice" (73.13-14), moreover, and "talking
alltheways in himself of his hopes to fall in among" the others to whom
these voices are attached (602.3 I - 32), he is easily capa ble of throwing them
all into the vacuous space between deaf ears and dumb mouth, so to fill
that space with a world of hallucinated and "uncontrollable nighttalkers"
(32.7-8). Indeed, as "his thick spch spck[s]" out of "a twithcherous mouph"
(23.4, 88.18 ["treacherous" because deceptive, "twitching" because shut]),
"he stalks to simself louther and lover, immutating aperybally" (460.11-
I2)-"imitating" and "aping" "everybody," that is, but badly "mutating"
them in the process. And it is for this reason, to "rearrive" at the dialogue of
MuttandJute, that "Taciturn" becomes "ourwrongstoryshortener" (17.3-4):
not only does he generally get a "story" all "wrong," but he also tends, as he
"cIear[s his] throttle" and tries to "brake the news" (457.33, 377.25), to
make a "long story short" (hence the "brakes" and the "throttle" in his
"throat"), sometimes even, in order to preserve the state of sleep, reducing
it to "next to nothing."
Earwickerwork 27 1
Nothing quite so eventful as fully "agitated" "ventriloquence," therefore,
occurs during the dialogue of Mutt and Jute. For as its detailing suggests,
the "hole affair" finally bears on the burial "mound" (or "howe") that
underlies both of the hallucinated "nighttalkers" (17.29, 18.I2ff., 17.4ff.
["howe" = "Howth" = vacant head]). As always, this would be the body
dead to the world at the Wake, out of whose unconscious interior the two
conflictive and stymied voices have precipitated. Since the scene is finally
"inedible" (16.23 [and "inaudible"]), not "wiseable" (16.24 [or "visible"
or conscious]), "onheard of and umscene" (17.15-16 ["unheard" and "not
seen"]), the subject of the dialogue is simply the Wake's sleeping subject,
within whose "deafadumped" body (590.1) a richly articulated form of
the night's "Real Absence" has accumulated. "No thing making newthing
wealthshowever," this "Real Absence" becomes indistinguishable from the
real absence out of which Vico traces the genesis of the West (hence the
passage's many evocations of "cave" men [16.3] and, by reference to "Mutt
and Jeff," of modernist equivalents of "Mousterian" cave paintings [15.33]) .
The dialogue, ultimately, is about the primordia of human dialogue.
The deaf ear striving to hear what the dumb mouth is striving to say will
account for a goc.J deal of the passing "auradrama" in Finne8ans Wake-as
happens, for instance, in the chapter on buried letters (I. v), when an obscure
professor "Duff-Muggli" (123.11 ["deaf-mute"; Anglo-IT. duff, "black"]) en-
dorses "the well informed observation, made miles apart from the Master by
Tung-Toyd" (123. 19-20 [at the other end of the Eustacian tube by the "tongue-
tied" mouth]). In at least one instance (571.27-34), as HCE miraculously
"work[s] his jaw ... and hark[s] from the tomb" (246.9), this "auradrama"
seems to generate some audible "sleeptalking" (459.5). Brief consideration
of a sleeping person's stupefied "bedeafdom," however, will also help to ex-
plain why so much of Finne8ans Wake comes off the page reading like pure
"absurdity" ("The surdity of it!" [538.18]) and sheer "Nonsense!" (56.28).
For the mental life of a hero who has "no senses," at least by any ordinary
understanding, can of necessity be only "non-sense"; and "the night" itself,
in Joyce's words, "is an absurd thing"-"absurd" deriving from the Latin ab-
surdus, "unheard of," in turn from surdus, "deaf."7
As the night moves HCE forward "for its nonce ends" (149.22) under the
forces of sensory "closure" and "absurdity," however, the ears become ex-
tremely important because, unlike the eyes and the mouth, they never really
close. Throughout the Wake, they therefore serve an enlightening and "oreil-
lental" function (357.18 [FT. oreilJe, "ear"]) by filling the "non-sensed" dark
with a complex "sound sense" whose study will now be crucial (109.15).8

Glasheen has suggested that "if you have time on your hands," you might
"look up every 'ear' in" Finne8ans Wake. 9 If one were to add to all these
many "muchears" (II .24) terms like "hear" and "listen," and "sound" and
"silence," the project would amount to an endless rereading of the book. Au-
ditory terms like these lie distributed over virtually every page of the Wake,
integrally entangled in its "vermicular" and "nat language" and among its
"meoptic" ciphers. These "earmarks of design" (66.1) now make it possible
to move once again from cover to cover through "this Eyrawyggla saga"
(48.16-17), this time paying some attention to the role of "hearing in this
new reading" (55.33).
"E A R WI eKE R"

Why Joyce chose to saddle his ostensibly ordinary twentieth-century sleeper
with the altogether extraordinary name of "Humphrey Chimpden Ear-
wicker" is elaborately explored in the second chapter of Finne8ans Wake,
which seems to explore "the facts of his nominigentilisation" (31.33-34) but
finally bears only on what Joyce frankly called "the Earwicker absurdity"
(L, I, 203). Well before he began to work on Work in Progress, Joyce pointed
out to William Bird that "in sleep our senses are dormant, except the sense
of hearing, which is always awake, since you can't close your ears. So any
sound that comes to our ears is turned into a dream" U}, 546-47). It should
come as no surprise, then, to learn in the Wake's account of "Earwicker's"
"nominigentilisation," that "Earwicker" is HCE's "occupational agnomen"
(30.3). Now an "agnomen," in English, is a "nickname," not a real name,
and in particular a "nickname" bestowed on a person "on account of some
extraordinary virtue, action or the like";10 and "Earwicker," in turn, "comes
from the Anglo-Saxon Euerwaar or Ever-Waker" and simply designates a
watchman. ll Since "watchmen," "watching," "waking," and "vigilance" all
etymologically derive from the Indo-European root *ve8- ("to be lively"),
and since mammalian ears serve the partial function, according to the
"new science" of evolution, of maintaining "watchful" "vigilance" against
the threat of nocturnal attack by predators or burglars and prowlers (34.4),
an integrated synthesis of all these understandings should make it evident
that anybody asleep absolutely merits the "occupational agnomen" of "Ear-
wicker" simply because ("it is an openearsecret, be it said" [425.16]) he has
no choice but to maintain a perpetually vigilant "earwitness" on the world
through ears that just won't close (5.14) Y Even if HCE "is not all there,"
Earwickerwork 273
then, and "not all hear" exactly either, a good part of him is always only
"all ears" (507.3,536.1-2, 169.15). Indeed, "Earwicker, that patternmind,
that paradigmatic ear, receptoretentive as his of Dionysius," is inevitably
taking constant readings on noises that well out of the dark around him
(70.35-36 [as if he were in "the ear of Dionysius," a vast and hollow natural
cavern which, like his own "tropped head," has famous echoically amplify-
ing powers]).13 "Earwicker," finally-as opposed to "Finnegan," "Finn," or
"Eboniser"-is simply a cipher whose appearance throughout the Wake
alerts us to moments in which its sleeping hero has transitorily ascended
into a state of auditory vigilance; for "he caun ne'er be bothered [Anglo-Ir.
"bothered" = "deaf"] but maun e'er be waked" (496.34-35 ["everwaked"]):
"Witchman, watch of your night?" (245.16).14
One passage in Finne8ans Wake that will illustrate particularly well the
potent nocturnal sweep of Earwicker's e'erwakened ears appears at the be-
ginning of chapter Il.iii, at 309.1-311.4, in one of the darkest parts of the
Wakean "noughttime." Since the passage is too long to quote in its entirety,
the reader might wish to consult it before following the ensuing commen-
tary, if only primarily to note that it makes sheer "nonsense" if read sequen-
tially, according to those laws that insure the coherence of documents in the
Daily World. About as difficult and obscure as Finne8ans Wake ever gets, the
passage will illustrate the validity of what Joyce told Frank Budgen when he
said that his work was "basically simple"-if. rather than reading it linearly
and literally, we interpret it as we might interpret a dream, by eliciting from
the absurd murk a network of overlapping and associatively interpenetrat-
ing structures.
One of these structures, by now familiar, reconstructs the night's "Real
Absence" and locates us squarely in the "ether" ofa "vaticum" (or "vacuum")
emanating from a "man made static" (309.9, 21, 22 [he doesn't move]). The
second sentence of the chapter alerts us to an unspecified turbulence that
"was now or never in Etheria Deserta" (309.8-9 [in void "ether"]); and if
we examine the sentence further, it becomes evident that it has no subject
at all, its predicate informing us further that this Absent Subject (our hero),
"now or never," simply "was." Particularly because "Etheria Deserta" plays
on an old name of Howth head ("Edri Deserta"), we can infer that the
"ethereal" "vacuum" being explored here has accumulated in the "tropped
head" of a "man made static" by sleep. The passage shows our Absent Sub-
ject-"the Vakingfar sleeper" whose "waking" is "far" (310.10) -entertain-
ing "in the night the mummery of whose deed" (310.23-24 ["the Memory of
the Dead," who remember nothing]), so that again the Wake becomes a

"balk of the deaf" (or "Book of the Dead"), reconstructing the form of
"doom" experienced by a body dead to the world. Aspects of this "doom-
body's" "Real Absence" (289.15) are in turn particularized in ways that need
no extended elaboration: identified as "the Mole" (310.1), our "man made
static" lies "equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas" (3°9.17-18
["keep black!"]); and he has, shut as if in a "wink," the vegetating "oyne of
an oustman in skull" (310.29, 30 [an "ousted" man]). He lies suspended, fi-
nally, "in the doom of the balk of the deaf" (309.2-3)-his hearing
"balked" or, at least, "for much or moment indispute" (3°9.10).
That these pages have such a complex content, however, suggests that not
everything about our Absent Subject can be quite fully dead to the world.
And if we "rearrive" at the passage, in fact, another network of associa-
tively linked terms, bearing on what seems to be a complex radio set, seems
to take up a great deal of room in his emptily "tropped head." A wondrous
device, this "tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler" (3°9.14) is "culpable of
cunduncing Naul and Santry" (31O.I2-13)-"capable of conducting and
condensing all and sundry" signals, that is, even from the Irish "Dail" (hence
"daildialler") and from as far away as the villages of"Naul" and "Santry." It
does this by drawing forth coherent signaling from the "man made static"
crackling through the "Etheria Deserta" of the ionosphere; and by "bawling
the whowle [boiling the whole bawl and howl] ... down in an eli mini urn
sounds pound [aluminum sauce pan]" (309.22-23 [thereby "eliminating" ex-
traneous noise]), "so as to serve ... up a melegoturny marygoraumd, eclec-
trically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes" (309.23-310. I). What emerges
from this "high fidelity" radio, in short, is a rich "mulligatawney" of me-
lodic "song" (hence the Gr. melos, "song," in "melegoturny"), "eclectically"
and "electrically filtered" for wholesome consumption in "allirish hearths
and homes" (hence the scattered culinary terms). Most readers of the Wake
attentive to this dense radio vocabulary have regarded the passage under
our study as a description of a radio or television set in Earwicker's pub, out
of which will be broadcast later in II.iii the stories of Kersse the Tailor and
of Buckley's shooting of the Russian General. IS
If we press further into the interstices of these details, however, it becomes
rapidly clear that the radio set in question has many astonishingly eccentric
features. "Capable of capturing skybuddies, harbour craft emittences, key
clickings, [and] vatic urn cleaners" (3°9.20-21), it has the powers not simply
of a radio set but of a radar station (which picks up "sky bodies," or air-
planes) , of a telegraphic post (which interprets "key clinkings"), and, since
it is capable of "distance getting" (3°9.18), of a sonar apparatus as well. All
Earwickerwork 275
of these distinct instruments are sensing devices that have in common the
ability to elicit inaudible signs streaming in out of dark ether from invisible
sources, and to make them audible and interpretible to human ears. Not the
least peculiar feature of this sensing device is its extremely feeble power
source; its "battery ... [is] tuned up by twintriodic singulvalvulous pipe-
lines ... with a howdrocephalous enlargement" (310.2-6) which, we learn
in a related detail, is operating at "one watthour" (310.25 [the amount of
energy needed to keep a one-watt bulb lit for an hour]). The conspicuous
appearance of HCE here-and the heavy recurrence of the cipher elsewhere
in the passage (at 309.20,310.1, and 310.22-23) tells us that our hero's "body
still persist[s]" in this part ofthe night's "Real Absence" (76.20), as a "forced
in [the] waste" (3°9.13), insistently informing and underlying everything in
this assemblage of terms. And the appearance both of "Howth" (HEAD) and
the Gr. kephale ("head") in that "howdrocephalous enlargement" correla-
tively suggests that the real power source feeding this radio is our vastly "hy-
drocephalous" hero himself, whom sleep has made a very dim bulb indeed
(hence again "one watthour"; "hydrocephalus" is water on the brain). How-
ever much the passage seems to be about a "harmonic condenser enginium"
(310.1 [a radiolike "engine"]), the latent immanence both ofHCE and the
Latin ingenium ("mental power") in that "enginium" suggests that the
sound-sensing device in which we are interested is embodied in HCE, "in
the flesh."
Another way of reading this part of the Wake, then, would entail isolating
not radio parts, but all those associatively linked terms that have been
sorted out, diagrammed, and put into perspective in figures 9.3 and 9.4,
which offer in condensed form a visual sketch of the "otological life" of our
"earopean"hero (310.21,598. 15 ["otology" is the science of the earJ) . Showing
a radio-receptive headset "as modern as tomorrow afternoon" (3°9.14-15),
with all of the peculiar features that we have explored, the diagrams invite
us to see that Earwicker, as a recurrent "character" in the Wake, is consti-
tuted essentially of two vast, vigilant, and radarlike ears with a large and
hydrocephalous head wedged vacantly somewhere in between; and, particu-
larly because we learn earlier in the Wake that "the ear of Fionn Earwicker
aforetime was the trademark of a broadcaster" (108.21-22), these diagrams
will also suggest why the passage under our attention will now resolve into
a representation of Earwicker's own hearing, as a process misconstrued
through free association as a process of radioreception. Ultimately, the pas-
sage is only describing Earwicker's ears, the one part of him awake at this
moment in the night, as they hover statically in the dark and maintain their

"Occupational agnomen" (30.3) :
"H. C. Earwicker" (33.30)
"Psourdonome" (332.32 [Fr. souTd. "deaf"])
"Demidoff" (329.23 ["demidumb and deaf"])
Figure 9.3. "Headmound" or "the Mole"
ever-vigilant "earwitness" on the world, our hero himself "pricking up

ears ... and picking up airs from th'other over th'ether ... this night sub-
lime" (452.12-14).
In precisely specified ways, the "otological" referencing of the passage
alerts us to the reasons for the vigilant sleeplessness of Earwicker's ears.
Whenever sound waves "pinnatrate" the "pinna" (310.9) and whorl deep
into "the latter end" of "the lubberendth" (310.21 [labyrinth]), they cannot
help but jostle into active motion all the essentially mechanical compo-
nents of the ear: the "tinpanned" "tynpan" (82.34, 224.19, 310.11), which
resonates with only somewhat finer suppleness than a banged "tin pan" or
"eliminium sounds pound"; the "hummer, enville and cstorrap" (310.19-
20); and the constituent elements of the essential organ of hearing, finally-
the "routs of Cor thy" (310.13 [or "rods ofCorti"J), in "the organ ofCorti"-
which cannot help but vibrate mechanically when stirred by sound. Rocked
into motion by sounds that enter the ear even in the deepest night, all of
these unsleeping mechanisms therefore put Earwicker into the position of
having constantly to ask "what are the sound waves saying?" (256.23-24). In
"the sense arrest" that renders him "deafadumped" in sleep, it is not his ears
Earwickerwork 277
"his otological life" (310.21)
"camparative accoustomology" (598.23)
"the science of the sonorous silence" (230.22-23)
"How to Understand the Deaf" (307.20-21)
Middle Ear
hammer. anvil. and stirrup
("hummer. enville and cstorrap"
External Ear [310.19-20))
Inner Ear or Labyrinth
("Iubberendth" [310.21))
semicircular canals:
"twintriodic singulvalvulous
pipelines" (310.4-5 [two sets
of three bones and canals per head))
rods of Corti ("routs ofCorthy"

[310.13]. in the organ of Corti.
the essential organ of hearing)
space ofNuel ("Naul" [310.13))
tube ("Eustache" [310.12))
to "vitaltone speaker" (309.19)

("Does your mutter know your mike?"
(139.15))
"harmonic condenser enginium" of "H. C. Earwicker"

(310.1. 33.30)
with
"howdrocephalous enlargement" (310.6)
"Hush! Caution! Echoland! (13.5)

"Hear! Calls' Everywhair!" (108.23)
"How chimant in effect!" (569.11)
"Eh. chrystal holder?" (319.16)
Figure 9.4. The "otological life" of "H. C. Earwicker"
or his hearing that shut off, but the representation of hearing in his conscious-
ness, which is evidently empowered with the ability to choose to hear or not
to hear as it likes. Everyone has firsthand evidence of the audio-selective
oddness of nocturnal hearing-notably in the memory of moments that in-
volved sleeping through alarm clocks or phone calls, whose sounds obviously
"pinnatrated" the ear, but failed to make the slightest dent on the "howdro-
cephalous" head. 16 In Finne8ans Wake, comparably, sounds from the real
world are invariably impinging on Earwicker's ears with erratic constancy
throughout the night; and, in the "lubberendth" of the book's extinguished
and extremely slow hero (Eng. "lubber" = "slow person"), these sounds are

either "eclectrically filtered" out and docilely ignored after an interval of
muzzy reception in the "tropped head" (309.24), or else "bawl[ed] ... down
in [the] eliminium sounds pound" of the mind and subjected, by our "Taci-
turn" and misinterpretation -prone "wrongstoryshortener," to" a warping pro-
cess" (497.3) that resolves them by incorporating them into the ongoing im-
agery of the dream. 17 If it initially seemed that our Absent Subject ("the
Mole") was enduring "the doom of the balk of the deaf" in the passage
under our attention and that his hearing was "for much or moment in dis-
pute," then, it should now be clear that his hearing is actually in great sus-
pense at this moment in the night, his ears cocked with eartrigger precision
in vigilant readiness to pop alert at the least sound. The opening two pages
of ILiii, in fact, are an essential setup for a little moment of sonic turmoil
that our hero has been anxiously anticipating from the very first line of the
chapter, where we read that "It may not or maybe a no concern of the Guin-
nesses but." (309.1).
The reader will note, in a context heavily concerned with sound-
reception, the ominous buildup of references to the belly, food, and espe-
cially drinks at the bottom of page 310, beginning with the term "evenbreads"
(310.22 [a literal English rendering of the Ger. Abendbrot, "supper"]) and es-
calatingwitheffervescent urgency through the terms "bock," "stou[t],"" ale,"
"foam," "cork," "froth," and "pop" (310.28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 35). We learn in
this region of the text that "that host of a bottlefilled, the bulkily hulk-
wight ... is in on a bout to be unbulging an o'connell's" (310.26-28). The
line manifestly suggests that the Wake's bartending "host" is worrying about
having to open a "filled bottle" of "O'Connell's ale," anxiety about his work
haunting him even in the night; but the term "bottlefilled" ("battlefield")
also joins the phrase "a bout" to indicate that our "host of a bottlefilled"
is undergoing considerable conflict here. The terms, moreover, specify the
nature and site ofthat conflict by suggesting that our "bulky" "host," who
is not simply a bartender but an active drinker as well, is amply "bottle-
filled" himself: "all seethic" (310.28 [" acidic," "all seething"]), his "bulkily"
"bottlefilled" stomach is "about to unbulge."
Hence the lines that close this passage: "pressures be to our hoary frother,
the pop gave his sullen bullet action and, bilge, sled a movement of cathartic
emu lsi potion ... " (310.35-36). If we are to identify with a hero who "over-
hears," we should hear three things here. First, in a line of imagery that will
generate in this chapter the sustained dream of barroom strife, a bottle of
beer is being opened, the cork making an audible "pop" as "pressure" shoots
it off with "sudden bullet-action" and the "hoary froth" of the "emulsified
Earwickerwork 279
potion" starts to "slide" over the side of the bottle (311.1). Second, a very
moral statement, on the order of "praises be to our holy father, the pope gave
a solemn benefaction and led a movement of Catholic emancipation," is
being pronounced. But third, in a line of reading that will consolidate these
two senses, we should hear this sudden "pop" originating out of our hero's
own shut mouth and "bottlefilled" body: our "hoary frother" (310.35 [not
"holy father"]) has belched, in short, and as this articulate little sound
emerges from his own magniloquent lips, our sleeping patriarch badly mis-
construes it by associating it with a "papal" « L. papa) pronouncement.
This happens because his oral performance entails an internal "bout" or
conflict having to do with a discrepancy between pleasure and forms of po-
liteness that are inevitably moralized and acculturated: as a "movement of
cathartic emulsipation" (a "moment of catharsis" that "emancipates" "emul-
sified potion"), the "big brewer's belch" feels good (95.26), but it's not nice.
Because the movement of his own lips puts our "ventriloquent" hero in mind
of the mechanisms of talking, moreover, and also of a thirst that has accumu-
lated during the night, the disruption of his stuck lips associatively jogs a
memory of what it is like to talk and enjoy mouthy vitality (311.5ff.), so that
it "slake[s] [his] thirdst thoughts awake" (31 I. 16 ["take," "wake," "thirst"])
and generates over the next few pages of the Wake the story of "Kersse the
Tailor," which appropriately explores, in a tense barroom setting, our hero's
dubious "fitness" and "suitability." If we go back to the first line of chapter
II.iii now ("It may not or maybe a no concern ofthe Guinnesses but."), it
becomes evident that one of many matters initially suppressed on that end-
stopped "but" was of course a "concern of Guinn esses," because Guinness's is
what our "bottlefilled" hero has been both restraining and waiting to hear
over two pages.
The trivial sonic eventfulness treated in this passage now turns out to be
representative of a great deal in the Wake as a whole, where, as "sound"
acoustically "sensed" "pinnatrates" his ears, Earwickercontinually "make[s]
soundsense and sensesound kin again" by trying to make "sense" of the
"sound" (121.15-16 [even though, like Finnegan, he is dead to the world]).
Introducing us to the "science of sonorous silence" (23°.22-23), the passage
asks us to see that no matter how deeply "one feels the amossive silence"
(31.31-32)-profound "SILENCE" (501.6)-that seems to have pervaded "a
sound night's sleep" (597.2 [the "moss" in "amossive" just lies there too]),
"there [were inevitably] sounds of manymirth on the night's ear ringing"
(74. IO-I I). Indeed, as "the auditor learns" (374.6), manifold" Acoustic Dis-
turbance[s)" of all kinds (71.18) are inevitably penetrating "earwaker's" ears

throughout the night (173.9-10) and-"Have you heard?"-demanding his
vigilant attention and interpretive scrutiny (45. I) .18 For even if "you cannot
wake a silken nouse out ofa hoarse oar" (154.9-10 [or "make a fine mind"-
Gr. no us-out of the hydrocephalous space between "hoarse" mouth and
deaf "ear"]), Earwicker is constantly trying to ascertain "with his unaided
ears" (475.36) "what are the sound waves saying" (256.23-24). Making him a
victim of extended nocturnal "persecussion" (125.16 ["percussive persecu-
tion"]), these omnipresent "sound waves" burden him with unconscious de-
cisions as to whether potentially sleep-disruptive "nusances" need to be
"traduced into jinglish janglage" (275.F6 [out of acoustical "jingle jangle"
into the "English language"]); or whether they can be ignored ("hearken
but hush it" [134.28]), so to become "onheard of" (17.15), "underheerd"
(160.26), and even "unherd" (223.1-2).
Since each of the night's many "acoustic" events partially "wakens" "ear-
waker," "acordant to all acountstrick" (180.5 [Port. acordar, "to waken";
"acoustic"]), each such "noisance" (479.20 [or "noisy" "nuisance"]) neces-
sitates the production of a "tricky account" in his "tropped head" (hence
again "acountstrick"), which, simultaneously taking brief recognitive "ac-
count" of the disturbance and "whishing" it away (587.12 [Eng. "wish";
Anglo-Ir. whisht, "be quiet"]), weaves it into all the other components of
the dream, with so greatly "wicker"-like a complexity, as to make it unre-
cognizably "onheard of"-both to Earwicker and, unfortunately, to his sym-
pathetic reader as well. If, on the one hand, each such sound "will wecker
[his] earse" (375.19 ["waken his ears" and "wicker" them with "Erse"]), on
the other each also succumbs to Earwicker's "whishtful" desire to sleep
(333.34), and so becomes mere "noisense" (147.6 ["noisy" "nuisance" now
converted into "non-sensed" "nonsense"; on the equation of "wishing" and
"whishing" in the Wake, see also 4°7.11 and 457.3°]).
From this perspective, the Wake might now be regarded as one erratically
extended sound effect-a "sound seemetery" again (17.35-36), in which
all sorts of "songs" and "howls" unconsciously sensed by "the presence (of a
curpse)" "blurried" in the night's "seemetery," as if on "AIls Sings and AIls
Howls" eve (304.F5 ["All Saints and All Hallows"]), generate a sustained
form of "seeming." For the Wake "is told in sounds" that include "ereperse"
(117.12, 15 [or "earpierce"]); and throughout the night reconstructed in
"this radiooscillating epiepistle" (108.24), "the ear of Fionn Earwicker"
(108.21-22) operates much like the phantasmal radioset explored at the be-
ginning of chapter Il.iii by sorting out sounds "for all within crystal range"
(229.12) -Eh, chrystal holder?" (319.16):
Earwickerwork
-Now we're gettin it. Tune in and pick up the forain counties. Hello! ...
-Hello! ...
-Hellohello! . . . (500.35-501.4)
-My dear sir! In this wireless age any owl rooster can peck up bostoons.
(489.36-490. I)
Continually "picking up" sounds that pour invisibly out of the dark "open
air" around him (Fr. torain, "open air")-as if by "wireless" from another
world (hence "Boston"), or as if over a telephone line in the "Real Absence"
of anything visible-Earwicker's amply opened ears are constantly on the
prowl in the night (hence that "owl"). And not least of the sonic transmis-
sions they "peck up" seems to emanate from some "bosthoon" (Anglo-Ir. for
"blockhead" or dummy).
"The auditor learns" that there are two varieties of "Acoustic Disturbance"
"on the night's ear ringing," one of which, originating in the "rambling un-
dergroands" of our sleeping "bosthoon's" body itself (481.15 [note the "groan"
erupting out of that "rumbling underground"]), is so pervasive in the Wake
and in "real life" that only its forms, and not its frequency, can be indicated.
Such sounds erupt in periodic "snoring" of the sort that seems to punctuate
and complicate "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly" (7.28, 37.12, 4°.5); hoarse
"hemming" and hawing, throat-clearing and "coughing" (414.19-20,571.25-
26 ["Horsehem coughs enough"]) ; the "earpiercing dulcitude" of the "Yawn"
(474.12-13); Earwicker's own "rude breathing on the void of to be," re-
minding him of his vital continuity and persistence in time (100.27,499.14
["Lung lift the keying!"]; 482.3 ["Breeze softly. Aures are aureas"]); the beat-
ing of his heart (74.14,403.5 ["And low stole o'er the stillness the heartbeats
of sleep"]); the gurgling of his digestive tract, particularly as his appetite
and hunger rise toward morning (456.20-23 ["all the vitalmines is begin-
ning to sozzle in chewn ('tune') and the hormonies to clingleclangle"]);
and even an odd stint of nocturnal tooth-grinding. 19 Finally, too, as "farter-
noiser" (530.36 ["Pater Noster"]), "our hoary frother" is no more successful
than Wonderworker-wielding Bloom at curbing the flow of "flatuous" "illit-
erative porthery" out of "his aers" ["arse"] into his "ares" ["ears"] (23.9-10,
231.3°,421.23); not "fatuous alliterative poetry," but a "flatulent" and "illit-
erate" after- and sound-effect of "porter" -consumption," this "porthery" is
misinterpreted, at least once in the Wake (23.6-8), as the sound of thunder,
so to give us dark, Aristotelean insight into one source of one of the Wake's
thunderwords. 20 "Zounds of sounds" like these, all of which lie "buried" in-
side "the dead giant manalive" (499.27,5°0.1-2), each as open to analysis
as "that big brewer's belch" made manifest on page 310, generate throughout

the Wake's nighttime an incessant "static babel" (499.34) -"static" not
simply because this continuum of sounds originates in a "man made static,"
but also because it makes a perpetual background noise like that audible in
radio "static." Together, in one way of thinking, these sounds are our hero-
"nay, even the first old wugger of himself in the flesh" (79.2 ["Earwick-
er"])-whose vitality they define "silentioussuemeant under night's al-
tosonority" (62.3-4): silenceusement (Fr. "silently"), they show what his
"tissue meant"-and all the more intricately "because, living, loving, breath-
ing and sleeping morphomelosophopancreates, as he most significantly did"
(88.8-9 [see context]), these sounds show "all" his "flesh" or "body" (Gr.
pan, "all"; kreas, "flesh, body") "skillfully" (Gr. sophos) taking the "form"
(Gr. morphe) of "music" (Gr. melos). Since "Here Comes Everybody's" body
is incessantly generating unheard "static babel" of this sort, the wakening
from the dead of these sounds allows one to begin noticing how much of
"the presence (of a curpse) "-and "the present, of course"-is not simply
repressed as a condition of civility, but relegated to deep auditory uncon-
sciousness, so in turn to. raise dark questions as to how much of the sound
that surely "pinnatrated" one's ears last night-or a few minutes ago, for
that matter-was "really" heard at all. It is as if, hypnotically, "you ... re-
main ignorant of all what you hear" (238.15-16).
The same questions contaminate the second class of "Acoustic Distur-
bance[s]" that play into Earwicker's ears throughout the Wake. Perhaps more
intriguing than those of the flesh because they hold forth an extended "clue-
key to a worldroom beyond the roomwhorld" (100.29 [or, again, a clue to
the real world beyond HCE's "whorled bedroom"]), these "noisance[s]"
allow us to see, from yet another perspective, that Finneaans Wake is not
finally the "universal dream" of some disembodied global everyman, but a
reconstruction of the night-and a single night-as experienced by "one
stable somebody" whose "earwitness" on the world is coherently chronologi-
cal. Sounds emanating out of the real "worldroom" outside ofHCE's dream-
"Hear, 0 worldwithout!" (244.1)-are inevitably streaming into his ears
throughout the night and are in turn inevitably reflected somewhere darkly
there "in the back of [the] mind's ear, temptive lissomer" (477.18). Many of
these "noisances," very dark indeed, are as difficult to reconstruct with any
certainty as are the real-world sonic components-unheard alarm clocks,
heavy rains and storms, neighbor's howling pets-that anyone might find,
upon reflection, incorporated into the dreams of any average night.
Such real-world "Acoustic Disturbance[s]" are most easy to make out in
the sunstruck closing pages of the Wake, where the "noisance[s]" impinging
Earwickerwork
on Earwicker's ears, many of them sounds that we would expect to accom-
pany an average morning's wakening, occur with an altogether realistic fre-
quency and clarity. The distant sound of a mail train moving through the
night across the River Liffey about three-quarters of the way through the
book, for instance-"the mails across the nightrives" (449.30 [Fr. rives,
"riverbanks"]) -causes "earwaker" to "turn a widamost ear dreamily" into
"the exhaling night" (449.28-29,22); and, his "hares [and ears] standing up
well and [his] longlugs dittoes" (449.20 [s1. "lugs" = "ears"]), his "tropped
head" fills momentarily with other such nocturnal sounds as the croaking of
frogs (449.32-33) and the warbling of night birds (449.17-19,24-25 ["owl"],
27, 31), whose noise lifts him into a dim, subliminal awareness of the immi-
nence of sunrise, breakfast, and resurrection (449.33-450.2 ["tealeaves,"
"trout," "egg," "poach"]). The very obscure sound of that train, however,
merely signals the beginning of a gradual, remorseless buildup of urban ac-
tivity and traffic-lots of traffic-whose sonorous din swells steadily as the
book delivers HCE toward the moment of his wakening. This would explain
why Joyce expressed concern that the penultimate chapter of the Wake
should be "about roads, all about dawn and roads";21 for as "the nightmail
afarfrom morning nears" (565.32), and as "the annamation of evabusies"
(568.4 [and "the animation of everybody busy"]) fills Earwicker's ears with
the noise of "all these peeplers entrammed and detrained" (567.33), the
sounds of the morning's bustle and of traffic are audible everywhere:
-Huesofrichunfoldingmorn. Wakenupriseandprove. Provideforsacrifice.

-Wait! Hist! Let us list!
For our netherworld's bosomfoes are working tooth and nail overtime ....
(571.3 2 -36)
Earwicker hears in these "bosomfoes" of the dark-clamorous disturbers of

his sleep-insistent reminders of his pending reinsertion into the linear
clock-time of "history" (hence "Hist!"); but he also continues doing an ex-
cellent job of sleepily "whishing" them all away: "It's only the wind on the
road outside for to wake all shivering shanks from snorring" (577.36-578.2
[yet note the subliminal hint of "shanks" moving on that "road"). The
strident work of these "noisance[s]," however, becomes harder and harder
for him to ignore as he gravitates toward his wakening. When he hazily
notes, for instance, that "it is not even yet the engine of the load with haled
morries full of crates, you mattinmummur, for dombell dumbs" (604.9- 1I),
the line of "moanolothe inturned" shows him again vaguely conscious of
noises in the world "out there": perhaps an "engine" -driven "lorry" "full of

crates" is "hauling" a "load" and making a delivery to his establishment; or
perhaps "the scream of the service" audible here is an ear-brutalizing milk-
man (604.16 [hence the "cream," whose souring into "scream" invites us to
recall the sometimes inconsiderately noisy behavior of "the cream of the ser-
vice"]). At the same time, an echo of the sounding of the Angelus ("Hail
Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee") shows Earwicker dimly aware
that all these disturbances, simply the morning's, foreshadow an imminent
resurrection of his body (hence again the Angelus). And the string of ex-
pletives that closes off this flurry of sonic agitation, finally-"Oyes! Oyeses!
Oyesesyeses!" (604.22)-simply evokes the legal term "Oyez! Oyez!" (0. Fr.
"Now hear this!"), to indicate that "Sur Soord's" hearing is regaining a legiti-
mate hold on the Daily World held in place by laws and interpretive agree-
ments: "Hearing. The urb it orbs. Then's now with now's then in tense continu-
ant. Heard. Who having has he shall have had. Hear!" (598.28-30). Together
with a reference to the gospels ("he who hath ears to hear, let him hear"
[Matt. II: 15]) and an evocation of the pope's address "To the City and the
World" (L. Urbi et Orbem) , all of these ciphers evoke the return of our "hoary
frother's" consciousness, with auditory clarity, "to the city and the world."
Although the sounds "pinnatrat[ing]" Earwicker's ears are easiest to make
out in the Wake's closing chapters, other "noisances" punctuate the long and
heavily "Silent" earlier parts of the book (14.6). The most dramatic of these
varied "Acoustic Disturbances," and one that might be regarded as represen-
tative of the lot, seems to occur in chapter I.iii, at pages 63-70, when "Ear-
wicker or, in slightly modified phraseology, Messrs or Missrs Earwicker, Seir,
his feminisible name of multitude" (73.3-5), is deeply enough asleep, as
the "comedy nominator" implies (283.7), to be oblivious of his individuality
and gender. The pages in question, "bearing ... several of [those] earmarks
of design" which provide a reader with clues about Earwicker's "otological
life" (65.36-66.1), most evidently describe a turgid and sporadically con-
ducted "bottle at the gate" (65.35 [or, as the spelling suggests, a "battle"
involving a "bottle"]). And a heavy layer of details allows us to infer that
what must "really" be happening in the "worldroom" outside of Earwicker's
dream at this moment in the night involves an "unsolicited visitor" knock-
ing on a door somewhere out there in the dark (70.13). "Alleging that ... it
was only after ten o'connell, and this his isbar [this bar] was a public oven
[haven] for the sake of irsk irskusky [Irish whiskey]," this noisy visitor "de-
mand[s] more wood alcohol," asks our hero "to come out," and, "not easily
discouraged, open[s] the wrathfloods of his atillarery and [goes] on at a
wicked rate" (70.28-30,27,34,30-32 ["wood alcohol" because our bartend-
Earwickerwork
ing hero wants this disturber of his peace to drop dead]). Whether Ear-
wicker is hearing an actual after-hours visitor to his pub, as these details
and the diffuse timing of the incident at "ten o'connell" suggest, or whether
he is simply hearing a dull knocking somewhere in the distance and mis-
construing it as an annoying call to duty cannot at all be clear.22 It is clear,
however, that "someone or other," for obscure reasons, is acting as a dark
"summoner" and pulling HCE's hearing and consciousness up from the
"deafths" of the night, so to raise in his "tropped head" a question asked
elsewhere in the Wake: "Why wilt thou erewaken him from his earth, 0
summonorother"? (255.5-6) -especially when "the hour of his closing hies
to hand" (255.6-7 [note the sonic evocation of "Earwicker" in this "ere-
wakening" return to the past]). While our hero unconsciously hears the
sound of knocking somewhere in the dark "worldroom" out there, and even
vaguely realizes what is going on, he misconstrues it in every way possible,
as detailing scattered over these pages suggests, "whishing" it away in order
to preserve the state of sleep. 23
Passages like these illustrate in only the most minimal ways the kinds of
"Acoustic Disturbance[s]" that beam in out of the dark, throughout the
Wake, to fall upon Earwicker's radiolike ears. As the chronological pacing of
these "noisance[s]" will suggest, especially when integrated with other of
the sonic events that interfere with HCE's sleep, they map out the contours
of a single night. 24 These passages are important, however, because they also
demonstrate the manifold ways in which "our ears, eyes of the darkness"
(14.29), "see" in the night, and therefore serve as HCE's "aural eyeness"
(623.18). For in all the instances that we have examined, Earwicker's ears
enable events in the dark "worldroom" of external space to "hear show of
themselves" (8.3-4 [the "here" taking place in "hear"]), and so they gener-
ate in the "tropped head" many an "earsighted view" of the world (143.9- 10) .
"Phonoscopically incuriosited," as the Wake recurrently suggests (449.1; cf.
123.12-13), our vigilant "earopean" hero is inevitably "made curious" (It.
incuriosite) by "sound" (Gr. phone); and, as "one who watches" for it con-
tinually (Gr. skopos [hence "phonoscopically"]), he is capable of convert-
ing it, "in the ... mind's ear" (477.18), into forms of light and "objects of
vision" perceptible imaginarily in the "mind's eye" (515.23 ["object of vision"
is another meaning of the Gr. skopos]): "Vouchsafe me more soundpicture!
It gives furiously to think" (570.14-15).

"p H 0 N EM A NON"
Very early in the Wake, Joyce alerts his reader to the nature of those "dec-
troscophonious" mechanisms (123.12) through which the ear, by acting as a
"receiver" (Gr. dekter) of "sound" (Gr. phone), generates, in the "tropped
head," "earsighted" "objects of vision" (Gr. skopos) and so brings the world
to light. Since the hero whose "eyewitless foggus" we share throughout the
Wake has the ability to hear or not hear in the night, according to the emo-
tional charges carried by sounds that have the potential to arouse him,
We may ... hear nothing if we choose ... though every crowd has its several tones
and every trade has its clever mechanics and each harmonical has a point of its
own. . . . But all they are all there . . . as he lays dormont from the macroborg
of Holdhard [Howth head] to the microbirg of Pied de Poudre [Fr. pied, "foot"].
Behove this sound of Irish sense. Really? Here English might be seen. Royally?
(12.25- 1 3. 2 )
As these lines suggest, it "behoves" our hero (the "one stable somebody"
identified here through the tell-tale rhythm of "As I Was Going to St. Ives")
imaginarily to "behold" the sounds he hears, which play into his ears con-
stantly, in a diverse array of "tones," from discrete "points" difIerentiably
localized in space, and in distinctly recognizable "harmonical" patterns-
even while he lies unconscious in the night. 25 As "eyes of the darkness," his
ears therefore serve the function of an "optophone"-an instrument enab-
ling someone blind to read by converting ordinarily "visible" signs (Gr.
optos) into musical "sound" (Gr. phone): "Hear? ... 'Tis optophone which
ontophanes. List! Wheatstone's magic lyer" (13.14, 16-17).26 As these terms
further suggest, Earwicker's "optophone" -like ears are the portals through
which, in the dark, "reality" (Gr. onta) and "being" (Gr. ta onta, "existing
things") come to light (Gr. phaino, "to bring to light, make to appear"):
hence the verb "ontophanes," which we might take to mean "to bring real
appearances to light."
Since events befalling "the presence (of a curpse)" in the "nowtime"
(290.17 ["nighttime"]) also occur subliminally in "the present, of course"
and in "now time," these passages furthermore ask us to become conscious
of the ways in which the ears take ascendancy over the eyes even in the here
and now (cf. II3.27-30, 409.3-4)-especially since the Wake, frequently
eliding the words" hear" and" here," suggests that much of the "here" uncon-
sciously undergoes formation in "hear" (cf. 8.3-4, 76.10-II, 147.3,468.24-
25, 478.2, 536.2, 565.19, 588.27, and 593.5-6). For vision is an incomplete
Earwickerwork
and partial sense: it is not always there in sleep and never there behind one's
back, whereas the ears are openly receptive even in the dark, and, like the
absurd radio described at the opening of l!.iii, operate continually with a
"circumcentric" sweep that encompasses 3600 (310.7). Sympathetic identity
with a hero like Earwicker, then, obligating us to eradicate consciousness
of everything but the vitality of the ear, will waken from the dead and lift
into consciousness a subdimension of space, distinct from visual space,
which Joyce calls "a melegoturny marygoraumd" at the beginning of l!.iii
(3°9.23-24). This auditory "space" (Ger. Raum) , always suffused with
sound and "music" (Gr. melos) , "goes round" one everywhere (hence
"-goraumd") and differs from visual space, whose outward extension is
stopped flat by opaque objects (eyelids and walls, for instance) because it
penetrates even "soundconducting walls" (183.9): "Do he not know that
walleds had wars. Harring man, is neow king. Thisismodeln times" (289.F6).
Limited in extension only by the power of the ear itself ("Ear! Ear! Weakear!
An all ness eversides," "even to the extremity of the world" [568.26,360.31-
33J), this sonic spatiality resembles the space that one enters when riding on
a whirling, music-irradiated "merry-go-round" (hence "marygoraumd"),
because it is always in motion and never still or stable to the eye. 27 Since it
escapes the dominance of vision and the demands of real-world exigency,
this dimension of the real tends to fall beneath consciousness (as now, per-
haps, such of its constituents as the sounds of remote traffic, the body, or a
"sky body" droning in the air miles above one may also fall beneath con-
sciousness [3°9.20, 22J). But it is in this unconsciously perceived "o'ralereal-
ity" (289.4 [Fr. oreille, "ear"J) -an emanation of Earwicker's ears-that the
Wake shows major parts of the world "ontophan[ing]" and coming to light.
Particularly because the spiral of the inner ear is the scene of The New
Science, which reconstructs dark "changes of mind" (165.17) on the evi-
dence of modulations in "sound sense" swept out in the course of "Iro-
European ascendances" (37.26), this auditory "marygoraumd" becomes, in
particular, the space in which speech takes place, and therefore the site of
HCE's wakening and genesis. Because The New Science shows humanity ris-
ing into enlightenment not primarily in visually extended space, but in the
slow drift forward through time of "phonetic" structures that have the
power to make and alter "phenomenal" ones, we should furthermore see
that this auditory "marygoraumd" is the protospace out of which visual
space and consciousness waken. Even since the beginning of time, in "first
infancy" (22. I), the ears have always and inevitably been open and recep-

tive; whereas the eyes, sightless in all the dark places and darker parts of
life, have not. Vision therefore becomes, in the Wake, a sense whose devel-
oped forms are preceded and made possible by hearing. The world comes to
light through "our ears, eyes of the darkness" not only in the night, but also
"in the night of thick darkness" and "in the early childhood of the world"
treated in The New Science (NS, 331, 69), when a patriarchal power heard in
the sound of thunder gives the unconscious body "the fright of [its] light"
(3°9.2 [and "life"]) and so begins the eye-opening genesis of gentile reality.
The Wake describes this genesis, in the play-filled "Mime of Mick, Nick and
the Maggies," in terms that locate it in childhood:
For the Clearer of the Air from on high has spoken in tumbuldum tambaldam to
his tembledim tombaldoom worrild and, moguphonoised by that phonemanon, the
unhappitents of the earth have terrerumbled from fimament unto fundament and
from tweedledeedumms down to twiddledeedees.
Loud, hear us!
Loud, graciously hear us!
Now have thy children entered into their habitations .... Gov be thanked! Thou
hast closed the portals of the habitations of thy children and thou hast set thy
guards thereby ... that thy children may read in the book of the opening of the
mind to light and err not in the darkness which is the afterthought of thy nomat-
ter. . . . (258.20-33)
As the patriarchal force identified as "Gov" here (a "God," or paternal "Gov"-

ernor) sends formative "noise" thundering into the infant ear-"Loud" as if
through a "megaphone" (hence "moguphonoised") -the law of the "Lord
God" ("Loud" "Gov") is implanted in the bodies of indistinct and un-
formed little "tweedledeedumms" and "twiddledeedees" stricken with "mo-
giphonia" (Eng., "difficulty in producing loud vocal sound" [OED]). And as
a consequence of the implantation of that "sound" and "voice" in the ear's
flesh (hence the Gr. phone in "phonemanon"), the "earth" "trembles" and
"rumbles" "from firmament unto fundament" (hence the Fr. terre [" earth"] in
"terrerumbled"), and "phenomenal" reality begins undergoing its genesis
and coming to light. The informing of infant bodies through such vocal pro-
tocommandments as the thundered word "No!" or the order "that they do
mingno merder" (259.5[L. min80' "piss"; Fr. merde, "shit"]) retailorsthose
bodies "from fimament unto fundament" (L. fimus ["excrement"], fundus
["bottom, arse"]) and brings about a cataclysmic upheaval of the universe
at whose purposive latter end the body is humanized and made visible, to-
gether with the "phenomena" of gentile reality (hence the "dim" premoni-
Earwickerwork
tions of "temple," "tomb," "tumulum," and "doom" audible in the omi-
nously thundering rumble of "tumbuldum tambaldam" and "tembledim
tombaldoom") .
The context in which this particular thunderclap sounds in the Wake-at
the end of the childishly play-filled "Mime of Mick, Nick and the Mag-
gies" -dramatizes its ambiguated power. For the hearing of this "loud" "pho-
nemanon" "in the far ear" has an "oreillental" effect (23.22-23, 357.18 ["far
east" and "orient" now overlaid on the Eng. "ear" and Fl. oreille in order to
designate the precise site of the dawning of light]); it makes possible "the
opening of the mind to light" and the entry of children into the "habits" and
"habitations" of civilization. At the same time, however, the hearing of this
patriarchal "phonemanon" also produces "unhappiness" and "worry" in the
newly formed "unhappitents" ofthe "worrild," because it means falling for
life into a posture of inescapably slavish "obedience" « L. ob-audire, "to
hear completely") made necessary by submission to the strait-jacketing
constraint ofa language. As the "phenomenal" appearances of the "worrild"
are brought to light through the hearing ofthis "phonemanon," accordingly,
a being appears
who, in deesperation of deispiration at the diasporation of his diesparation, was found

of the round of the sound of the lound of the. Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdyloo·
shoofermoyportertoorysooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk.
Byfall.
Upploud! (257.25-30)
Like the formative "breath of god" in Genesis (hence the L. spiritus dei in
"deispiration"), the "loud sound" of this patriarchal thunder, by opening the
mind to light, allows its hearer to take "the sound of the land" ("sound
of the lound") and begin his "preparation" (L. paratio) for ascent into the
light of civilized "day" (L. dies [hence "diesparation"]), and so merits "ap-
plause" (Gel. Beifall, "applause" ["Byfall"]; Eng. "applaud" ["Upploud"]).
But it also gives birth to "deep desperation" ("deesperation") and scatters
"the unhappitents" of the "worrild" into unending wandering and loneliness
(hence the "diaspora" in this "diasporation"). This is why the hundred-
lettered thunderword in this context is compounded of terms meaning
"shut the door" (Oa. luk d~ren; Gael. dun an doras; It. chiudi l'uscio; Fl.
fermez la porte; Eng. idiom, "sport the oak"; Russ. zakroi dver; Turk. kapiya
kapat). As the thunder of this patriarchal "phonemanon" sounds "in the far
ear," doors start slamming and shutting violently everywhere, closing for-
ever the infinite possibilities of childhood; and as those "doors shut," for-

malized "rooms" (an Eng. cognate of the Ger. Raum, "space") start appear-
ing behind them, causing visual space in turn to undergo its genesis. The
sound of this thunderclap, in context, therefore becomes a burst of "ap-
plause" falling at the end of a play (257.31-32)-and, in particular, the end
of the play of childhood. But the end of childhood, complementarily, means
the beginning of the play of "the worrild," which comes to light here "by
falling" ("Byfall") "up loud" ("Upploud"), into the perception of the "pho-
nemanon" of articulate sound.
How this "falling" "up loud" into articulate sound happens is illustrated
in one way by figure 9.5, which charts the evolution of the conceptually
distinct terms "phonetics," "phenomenon," and "phantasm"-all of which
stand in spectral relation to one another and, as the Wakean coinages "pho-
nemanon" and "ontophanes" suggest, may not be so clearly distinguished in
"sound sense" as they are to "day's reason." Although it is unclear whether
the two phonetically identical roots *bha- I ("to talk") and *bha- II ("to
illumine") are semantically related in historical fact, a little Wakean "ada-
melegy" (77.26) will allow us to see that all of the concepts which they gen-
erate do share a common "sound sense," having to do with illumination and
the bringing of things to light. For "talk" (Gr. phone), no less than "light"
(Gr. phos), has the power to illuminate: just as "professors" enlighten stu-
dents and bring to light new knowledge, and just as "confessors" cause dark
growths in the soul to come to light, so talk generally illuminates, opening
up new "facets" of the world and irradiating it with an "epiphanic" "phos-
phorescence." Reference to the first page of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man will illustrate the essential unity of all the terms shown spilling up out
of the radical *bha-; most of these terms might accurately enter a paragraph
describing the effect of that page: a "preface" of sorts, the opening of A
Portrait holds forth an "epiphany" in which we see "phenomenal" reality
coming to light as the "infant" Stephen, orienting himself in human "phonol-
ogy," beginning to identify the "faces" of members of his "family," and lis-
tening to "fables" and "fairy tales," begins to discover, with his "fate," first
"fame" and the rudiments of a "profession," as well as "infamy" and the
habit of "confession." It "make[s] soundsense" (121.15) that "talk" and
"light," "phonics" and "photons," should be related.
As talk has the power to illuminate, so it has the power to make "phe-
nomena" manifest. For if we integrate these etymologies with a reading of
passages in the Wake which explore the "phonemanon" itself, it becomes
necessary to see that the way in which any "phenomenon" comes to light
(Gr. phainomenon, "that which appears" or "that which has been brought
Earwickerwork 29 1
phonology phenomenon phantom fancy
phone phonetics anthem aphasia phenomenology diaphane phantasm fanciful phosphor
phonic phonetic epiphany adiaphane he nolo phantasmagoria fantasy phosphorus
phonate apophantic dIaphanous Ph gy
antiphon epiphanic fantastic phosphoresce
r
P enotype
(combinatorial fantasia phosphorescence
apophatic
~~::~s \
-phon- pheno-. as in
(Combinatorial) : phenacetin [a
telephone product of "illu-
emphasis
microphone minating gas"]) Gr. phantasma +
phonograph agora (assembly) ;
aphony phantasmagoria
Gr. phone (voice) cacophony (1801: magic-
+ logia ; symphony lantern show.
phonology serial illusions)
(study of spoken
sounds [17991])
M.E. fantsy.
O.E. antefn fantasy
(song of
praise or joy)
Gr. epiphanes
t
phantasia
L. L.
(coming to light. (idea. notion)
antiphona
L. L. Gr. apophatikos
appearing)
(song of parti- (denying.
~
cipatory response) negative) L. emphasis
,fC
,
(meaning in-
directly manifest)
Gr. diaphanein
Gr. apophansis
(enunciation, affirmation,
(to show through.
appear through) f
Gr. emphasis
Gr. aphasia a making manifest through (an appearing in)
(speechlessness) speech)
t
t
Gr. phonetikos
(spoken)
Gr.phonema
Gr. aphatos
Gr. apophasis
(denial. negation)
t
I
(a sound made Gr. apophanein
(speechless)
or uttered, a (to show by word or
Gr. phantasma
1
thing spoken. reason, make see)
word. speech) (appearance. image.
dream. phantom; image
presented to mind by
Gr. aphanai an object; mere image)
(not to speak)
Gr. phantazein
(to make [or become]
Gr. phemi (I speak) visible or manifest)
phanai (to speak. tell. assert)
Gr. phainein
(to bring to light; to
make appear; to show)
~------------~,--- IndO-European *bha- (II):

(to render luminous.
to bring to light.
to enlighten)
IndO-European *bha- (I):

(to talk. speak)
proto-Indo-European *bha-
Figure 9.5. Etymological chart: *bha-_ The "funantics" of "phonemanon" (450.27.258.22)

photon fable preface fane fascinate
ineffable fairy confess
photo face fame . infamy fabulous ineffability infant profane fascination
famous (famIly fabulist fanatic ~:~:l fatery fatidic
confession
~:F m':;;"o~ :::~:~ity

facial infantile confessor
facet fanaticism fateful profess
infancy fay
profession
t
t
fatality
professor
t
i
L. confessio
I \ fabliau (confession)
I \
~,=,
I \
1;~ ~: ~:ri.
a.Fr. fable
I \ t
a.Fr. fablel
a.Fr. fame
I ,
t
,,
L. praefatio
Gr. phosphoros
(Lucifer. the I (preface) (to confess)
L.L. familia ,
morning star) L. profiteri.
f
(household. professus
T
f
family) L. alfabilis
(to avow
(easy to
Gr. phOs (light) + 4' speak to) publicly)
t
L. can·
,
phoros (bringing) L. famosusl
L. fanaticus (together)
(famous) L. inelfabilis
(inexpressible) + fiteri
I (pertaining to
the temple.
L. in· (not) +
inspired)
elfabilis
I f. (expressible)
V/ L. adfor. adfari
L. profanus
(impious.
L. fatidicus
• L. infamia (to accost.
not sacred)
(prophetic)
r
L. familia
~
(infamy) address)
(household
L. facies
[of servants])
\
f L. fateor. fateri. fassus
(reveal. avow. make known)
(form. appear-
ance. visage, L. elfor. elfari
face) (to speak out.
express)
Gr. phOs. phOto

(light)
L. farum (the spoken:
L. fama destiny. fate)
(talk. report. plural fata (the
rumor; fame) Fates. destiny)
~----
to light") is difficult to disentangle from the illuminating powers of the hu-
man "voice" (Gr. phone). Indeed, since the "phenomenal" may be brought
to light in same way that "phantoms" are-through the opera~ions of human
"phonology" « Gr. phone) -it becomes equally necessary to see that, at a
primal level, distinctions between the "phenomenal" and the "fantastic"
break down completely. As a reconstruction of the night, the Wake ex-
plores precisely this area of primal breakdown; for the dim borderline sepa-
rating the "phenomenally" and the "fantastically" apparent crumbles en-
tirely in the dream, where all evident "phenomena" are only "phantasmaL"
and where sheer "fantasy" is the only observable "phenomenon." As a re-
construction of the night, then, the Wake is exploring the primordia of the
"funnaminal world" (244.13 [note the sleeping giant "Finn," and the "ani-
mal" body, underlying "funnaminaIJ).
Complementarily, we might see the world coming to light "phenomenally"
through the power of a human "phonology" that begins in an obscure and
unrecapturable burst of "tribalbalbutience" like that out of which the radi-
cals *bha- I and *bha-II hypothetically emerged (309.2)-where "balbu-
tience," from the Latin balbutiens ("stammering" or "speaking obscurely"),
derives from the Latinate equivalent (balbal) of the Greek *barbar ( "barbar-
ian"), the latter being a term of echoic origin evidently applied to "tribes"
whose members spoke not Greek, but gibberish (like "barbarbarbar"). For
the spilling-up into distinctness out of the *bha- radicals of all the lexical
terms given in the etymological diagram illustrates concretely how gentile
reality comes to light, "in the far ear," through one vast process of au-
diophonic amplification, or "overhearing," by means of which a humankind
originating in "tribalbalbutience" is able to "phone man on" ("phonema-
non") into a future that is continually wakening and unfolding. As human
speech amplifies a simple "sound sense" into a proliferating array of newly
elaborated "phonetic" arrangements and forms through the process of ety-
mological change, it also makes new distinctions. And by making new dis-
tinctions-between the "phenomenal" and the "phantastic," for instance-
"phonetic" talk, like light, makes things distinct. This "may not or maybe
a no concern of the Guinnesses but." (3°9.1), it is surely a concern of
"Genesis."
As the quotation implies, all of these considerations allow us now to re-
turn, "by a commodius vicus ofrecirculation," to that passage at the begin-
ning ofIl.iii, where we last left HCE suspended "in his umbrageous house ...
with the radio beamer tower" (380.15- 16), hovering in the dark with his
radio-receptive ears waiting to hear. Beginning with the announcement

that "the fright of his light in tribalbalbutience hides aback in the doom of
the balk of the deaf" (3°9.2-3), the passage finally shows us how formed
"light" enters the "tropped head"-whether in childhood, "in the childhood
of the world," or at night-as ears deaf to sound are startled into vigilant
attentiveness. As a misperceived "Acoustical Disturbance"-"our hoary
frother's" belch, in this instance-"make[s] soundsense" in the dark (121.15) ,
the "phonemanon" generates a stream of "phonetic" associations, to which
"phantasms" are attached; the "birth of an otion," then (309.12)-or the
wakening of a "little ear" (Gr. otion) -inevitably entails "the birth of a no-
tion" or two.
The wakening of that little ear not only complicates the structure of the
passage in question, which finally consists of a great deal more than inter-
linked networks of radio parts and otological terms; it also explains why the
rest of the passage is there at all. For Earwicker's ears differ from the ears of
animals in being capable not simply of acoustical perception and mere
"hearing," but also of phonetic perception and "listening." Like all of his
body, HCE's ears are humanly made and organized, wired by parents and the
authority of literacy with "phones"-"phones" which might be understood
both in the sense of "voices" (Gr. phone) and of "phonemes," irreducible
units of articulate speech sounds that have been there since the beginning of
recollectible time and that can be popped into wakefulness at the least asso-
ciation. If our hero is "haard ofheaering," then (332.20), "he's [also] herd of
hoarding" (33I.3)-until "deaf do his part" (331.5). And what he "hoards"
are billions of "phones."
If we move through the passage once again, then, another network of as-
sociatively linked elements will emerge from it; for sounds entering the hu-
manoid radio-receiver with the "howdrocephalous enlargement" must, in
order to be heard, "pinnatrate inthro an auricular forfickle (known as the
Vakingfarsleeper, monofractured by Piaras UaRhuamhaighaudhlug, tympan
founder, Eustache Straight ... )" (310.9- I2) . Much ofthis detail fleshes out
features peculiar to Earwicker's "otological life" : the terms "pinna," "aur-
icle," "tympanum," and "eustachian," for instance; and also, among the
components of "UaRhuamhaighaudhlug, " Raum (Ger. "space"), "-aud-" (L.
audio, "to hear"), and "lug" (sl. for "ear"). But since the construction also
contains the taxonomic name of the "earwig" (L. Forficula auricularia), it
shows "earwigs," too, creepily moving through the ear of the "sleeper"
whose name, "Piaras UaRhuamhaighaudhlug" (or "Persse O'Reilly" [I.ii])
itself evokes a French "earwig" (perce-oreille). Shown in figure 9.6, these
insects crawl through Earwicker's ear not only in the passage at hand, but
Earwickerwork 295
The Common Earwig
Taxonomic L.: Forficula auricularia (310.10)
Fr.: perce-oreille
Figure 9.6. Earwigs on parade
everywhere in the "Eyrawyggla saga" (48.16-17). and they raise an immedi-

ate question: "Did you aye, did you eye, did you everysee suchaway, sucha-
why eeriewhigg airywhugger?" (360.31 -32). The" absurdity" of the question
in turn suggests that the way in which earwigs (or the ears themselves, for
that matter) visually appear to the "eye" has nothing to do with their recur-
rence in the Wake. The "funny antics" of these insects, in a book "as cockful
offunantics as it's tune to my fork" (450.27). ultimately has to do not with
the book's "meoptics" or "acountstrick[s]" (hence the "tuning fork"), but
with its "funantics"; and "funantics" would be "phonetics" sent off on some
very "funny antics."
"E A R WIG S"

Because the name of the "earwig" « O.E. earwicga, "ear-worm") main-
tains an odd semantic constancy in a number of European languages (the
Fr. perce-oreille ["ear-piercer"], the Ger. Ohrwurm ["ear-worm"], the Da.
~rentvist ["ear-twist"], and the Russ. ukhovyortka ["ear-borer"] all parallel-
ing the Eng. "earwig," and all intimating that some darkly fundamental re-
lation links this creature with the human ear), most books on insects find
themselves in the position of having to do much what Joyce does in the sec-
ond chapter of the Wake, which gives the obscure "facts in the nominigen-
tilisation" of "earwigger" (31.28) and recurrently associates his "agnomen"
with the English "earwig" (e.g., at 31.26-28). Characteristically, entomo-
logical texts note in a sentence or two that "there is nothing to justify the

vulgar belief that these insects introduce themselves into the ear and bore a
hole in its interior through which they may penetrate into the brain" ;28 or
else they note that the creature "is called earwig, gossips will tell you, be-
cause it creeps into the ears of incautious sleepers in the open air, and so
worms its way to the brain, where, if you will believe the purveyors offolk-
lore natural history, it grows to a gigantic size." 29 "Earwigs," in shott, seem
to behave in the ear much as hearsay and gossip do, furtively entering the
brain and growing way out of reasonable proportions once they get there; at
least in Western folklore, they seem to constitute a primitive theory of
dream formation. Their presence in Earwicker's ears at any moment in the
Wake, then, even while he lies as deeply dead to the world as a corpse in the
Book of the Dead, indicates that his ears are bugged with "the Bug of the
Deaf" (134.36) and that he is about to receive a heavy dose of auditory
phantasmagoria.
As the hardly scientific articles of entomological gossip quoted above also
suggest, "earwigger's" ears are in fact (of sorts) filled with these dream-
breeding "bugs of the deaf"; for "earwigs," obviously, have really gotten into
"earwigger's" ears in much the same disturbing way that they just got into
yours: through hearsay or gossip (hence the common equation of "earwigs"
and "ear wags" throughout the Wake-where "ear wags," "by the wag,"
would simply mean "gossips" [413.35; see 98.28-29, 149.13, 315.23-26,
339.18-19,485.21,496.15-16, 619.6-10]). Since "every busy eerie whig's a
bit of a tory tale to tell" (20.23), we might see that these brain-beclouding
"earwigs" are simply ciphers for elements in a "word" (175.12 [a verbally
contained "world"]) where "everything is hearsay, a matter of tales and
rumor" ;30 capable of filling the "tropped head" (or empty "wig") with
"story-tales" that regress into the past ("tory") even while moving progres-
sively toward the future ("whig"), these "eerie whigs" therefore move
through Earwicker's ears with all the "eerie" weirdness of elements in
dreams. Indeed, since the "tropped head" of our vacant hero is filled with
tangled chains of hearsay, gossip, and ear "waggery" (79.2) -with signifying
chains not least of which is the Authorized Version-"the human head ...
might be usefully compared with an earwig on a fullbottom" (164.27-29
[where that "fullbottom," a kind of wig, would evoke the empty head]). 31
The kind of hearing generated by the movement of earwigs through the ear
and "wigeared" head (414.36) would stand in contrast to the kind of un-
heard hearing registered in the "tropped head" when the "rods of Corti" res-
onate mechanically in "the lubberendth" but leave no recollectible memory
of sound in the mind. For if Earwicker hears, in the night, some real sounds
Earwickerwork 297
that seem to leave no memorable impression in his consciousness, he com-
plementarily hears many unreal sounds that do: these would be sounds
auditorily hallucinated and heard in "the mind's ear" (254,18), as when fig-
ures without fleshed mouths speak in dreams. "The whacker his word the
weaker our ears for auracles who parles parses orileys" (467.28-29): "Persse
O'Reilly's" "ears," in other words (his" auracles"), are in a manner able to
"talk" (Fr. parler), however "weakly" and "whackily," by recalling the
sound of the spoken "word."
We might see how "earwigs" behave in Earwicker's ear if we return to that
passage at the beginning of chapter Il.iii in which we first noted them and
begin reading again "in midi as reeds" (158.7 ["in medias res," though as if
listening like "Midas," to the suggestive whisper of mere "reeds"]) . As" Piaras
UaRhuamhaighaudhlug" lies there sound asleep in a vacuum and waiting to
hear, we learn that he is surrounded by a bizarre gathering-of "concer-
tiums," "Guild[s]," "Reunion[s],"" Bnibrthirhd[s]," "Crowds," and "Ligue[s]"
(310.14-17 [as well as "Bnai-Brith brotherhoods" and "leagues"])-all of
which "lall the bygone dozed they arborised around" (310.18). The "con-
cert" in "concertiums" suggests that all of these "consortiums" generate
sounds; and if we reduce them all "to the loaferst terms" (283.7-8 [ones ap-
plicable to our "loafer's" sleep]), it becomes evident that all these "associa-
tions," historically, are "free associations" (since anyone or anything can
join, for instance, a "crowd"). Lying at the center of the passage that we
have been examining, then, these terms suggest that Earwicker's ears are
constituted not simply of radiolike sound-receiving mechanisms and "oto-
logical" parts, but also of extensive chains of audiophonic "associations"
which reach back into "all the bygone days" ("lall the bygone dozed")
and which, having gotten into his ears "through the grapevine," "arborise
around" him in a tangled and arborlike trellis of sounds. If these associa-
tions "lull the Big One," who is "dazed" because he has "dozed" off, they
also generate a kind of internal whispering. As the image of whispers pass-
ing through the whorled concealments of the ear along a line of "free asso-
ciations" implies, Earwicker orients himself in the world not only by pick-
ing up merely "Acoustic Disturbance[s]," but also by keeping his ear to the
ground (500.1) and by keeping finely tuned in to that immense network of
"sound sense"-human speech-whose most local and parochial form, gos-
sip, also has the power to bring dark things to light. Earwicker's ears there-
fore become in themselves a "pub" of sorts, filled with the voices of all sorts
of others that are lifted into wakefulness by free association.
If a reading of The New Science shows HCE lying at the evolved end of a

diachronic language whose roots lie unrecapturably buried in the uncon-
sciousness of prehistory, immersion in the Wake's "funantics" complemen-
tarily shows Earwicker lying at the center of an immense phonological
tangle whose totality is language as a synchronic structure. This is an as-
pect of the Wake-and it is a definite, if partial aspect-that does not need
a great deal of attention here because it is the only aspect of the book that
many readers seem currently willing to engage. Regarding the Wake as a
work whose subject is "the pure jouissance ofthe signifier outside meaning,"
a work within which "the limits of communication [have been] ... undone
in the spreading out of a play of the signifier," readings which treat the book
as a work of pure textuality are obviously important because they call at-
tention to the Wake's clear interest in the utter abitrariness oflanguage as a
sign-system infiltrated with insidious patterns of" awethorrorty," so to show
how Joyce anticipated by decades one current academic interest in theoryY
Such readings will hardly explain, however, why it would have taken Joyce
fifteen years to produce a text which he was always careful to distinguish
from dada and the surreal; 33 or why, when he was asked to say what the
Wake was "about," Joyce never hesitated to say that it was "about the night"
(as opposed to less concrete forms of nothing). To regard the Wake as a free-
floating scud of signifiers disengaged from contact with the concrete, then,
finally overlooks, in the best of all Western traditions, "the supreme impor-
tance ... of physical life" and "the presence (ofacurpse)" (35.22-23), by
reducing the body "tropped head," repressively, to only one "square inch of
the only foolscap available" on it-the tympanum-notwithstanding the
Wake's insistence that its own penman and joyce's surrogate in the book
writes all "over every square inch of ... his own body" (185.35-36). As
those most influential in advancing the importance of theory have attested,
Joyce was light-years ahead of attempts now being made to theorize him.34
"THE BALLAD OF PERSSE O'REILLY"

If we now put into an integrated perspective the various audiophonic forces
that play through Earwicker's ears in the dark, it should be evident that al-
though he has "Ivy under his tangue" (485.21-22 [because both "tongue"
and "language"-Gael. tean8a-arevegetating]) anda "hohalloto hisdulla-
phone" (485.22 [because his ears are "dull" and "hollow"]), "eh, eh, eh, es-
quire earwugs, escusado, of Jenkins' Area" is in severe conflict from begin-
ning to end of the Wake (485.20-2I)-in an "area" precisely specified by
Earwickerwork 299
reference to "the War ofjenkins' Ear," and in a manner specified by the dull
questions "eh?" and "excuse me?" which remind us of his underlying "hard-
hearingness" (581.31) .35 50 extensive are these conflicts, in fact-between
absolute deafness and aroused hearing, between merely acoustical "hear-
ing" and attentively phonetic "listening," between the hearing of "outer"
and "inner" sounds-that "if you hored him outerly as we harum lubber-
intly, from morning rice till nightmale, with his drums and bones and hums
in drones your innereer'd heerdly heer he" (485.25-28). The proliferation of
these conflicts in the "inner ear" (hence the ear "drums," the "labyrinth" in
"lubberintly," and "innereer'ed") leads to moments in HCE's nightlife whose
audiophonic properties are so entangled that our hero becomes as unrecog-
nizable as the dismembered protagonist of "Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye," a
body nearly slain "with guns and drums, and drums and guns." For his al-
ways wakeful hearing, in the night, modulates through a steady continuum
of forms capable of degenerating, for instance, from a call to "listen!"
(571.24) into one to "Lesten" (477.7 [where "listening" "lessens"]), and ulti-
mately into a state where "he lisn't the lug" (162.26 [and where the "lug"
"isn't" "listening" at all]).
How these various forces at conflictive play in Earwicker's ear come to-
gether in the Wake's "auradrama" might best be seen in its second chapter
( "the Earwicker absurdity" ) , which patently explores the" character" of Ear-
wicker, repeatedly asks the important question, "Have you heard?" (45.1,
44.17- 18), and tells the story of how Earwicker got his name so obscurely
that it is never clear whether the agnomen was a distinction conferred on
him by the king or an abusive epithet hurled at him by the rabble. Ulti-
mately, as the chapter suggests, "the facts in his nominigentilisation" are nei-
ther accessible nor important, though the process that leads to all the evi-
dent conjecturing is.
"Discarding once for all those theories ... which would link him back
with such pivotal ancestors as the Glues, the Gravys, the Northeasts, the
Ankers and the Earwickers of5idlesham in the Hundred of Manhood" (30.5-
8), the chapter begins with a list of names that our hero, like Joyce, may
have gotten from a tourist guide while summering in 5ussex: 36 since the
names come off tombstones, their owners having in common the fact of
being dead, the details tell us that Finnegan will no longer be quite dead to
the world in this part of the night, but will instead, even while lying
embedded in a "sound seemetery," ascend into a state of vigilant Earwicker-
hood. We therefore find him basking "in prefall paradise peace" and "saving
daylight" here (30.15, 13 [by sleeping]), wrapped in the "duskguise" of a

"cabbaging Cincinnatus" (30.12-13). "Cabbaging," of course, suggests that
he is looking for a HEAD of something or other, and since "Cincinnatus," if
we "traduce ... [the] comedy nominator to the loaferst terms" (283.6-7),
was most famous for "his retirement" (607.14-15), he becomes a cipher for
our sleeping giant, "Finntinnotus" (285.LI ["Finn"]), who has also finally
"retired" (33.3)-although only for the night: hence his appearance, in this
chapter, "in a wardrobe panelled tuxedo" and "a shirt well entitled a swal-
lowall" (33.6-8 [articles of "evenin8 dress," as opposed to daywear; on sleep
as a form of "retirement" see also 55.14,77.18,144.4,248.27, and 436.16)). As
the world's most famous retiree, moreover, Cincinnatus is celebrated most
because his retirement was disrupted twice by calls to duty; and much the
same is true of our sleepily "retired" hero, who is also evidently disturbed by
a "call" of some sort to serve (30.I9-3I.28).
Since HCE can only "no" in the night, it is not clear whether the "call"
that rouses him from his "prefall paradise peace" is the barking of a dog, as
the detail at 30.18-19 seems to suggest" (or so it appierce)" (512.24); but the
evocation early in the chapter of wording from "John Peel"-a hunting-song
about noise that "would waken the dead"-does suggest that an "Acoustic
Disturbance" of some sort has broken through the night's" amossive silence"
(3I.32) and so has made a man sleepily dead to the world very much "akin"
to a noise-roused neighbor of "John Peel" :37 "For he kinned Jom Pill with
his court so gray and his haunts in his house in the mourning" (3I.28-29
["haunts" and "mourning," however, show "Finnegan" stubbornly intent on
remaining dead to the world)). Whatever the case, the misinterpreted sound
agitates in HCE's "tropped head" an extended exploration of what would
surely be a Protestant bartender's greatest dream and nightmare: what if,
while he "was asleep at the wheel" (519.18), the King came into his pub and
ordered a drink (30. I9-3I.28)? And worse, what if his regular clientele
talked?
As a deft practi tioner of both" acounstrick[s]" and "funantks," Earwicker
now becomes "a lay teacher of ... orthophonethics" (38.35-36 [as opposed
to a standing one]) -where "orthophonetics" would be the "proper study of
sound"; and in this capacity, he is periodically "overheard, in his secondary
personality as ... [an] underreared, poul soul, by accident" (38.27-28).
"Under-eared" "in his second personality" because he cannot hear things ex-
actly, yet an "over-hearer" (presumably in his "first personality") because
whatever he does hear, he distorts way out of all reasonable proportions,
Earwicker himself now becomes both the generator and receiver of an elab-
orate chain of "gossiple" that is ostensibly passed "earstoear" throughout the
Earwickerwork 301
chapter (38.23, 539.1-2), but in fact is "delivered in his epistolear" (38.23),
"his strict privatear" (327.36). In the same way that any dreamer underlies
"all the charictures in [his] drame" (302.31-32), so too "Earwicker, that ho-
mogeniusman" (34.14), finally underlies all the ridiculously "heterogenious"
figures who spread rumors of his "whispered sins" (69.4).
As "the learned scholarch Canavan of Canmakenoise," for instance,
(31.21-22 [Gael. 6 Ceanndubhdinn, "dark-head"]), our dark-headed hero
"can make noise," even while dwelling, as ifin monastic "Clonmacnoise,"
in a deeply "secret cell" (182.34-35). Indeed, since "we knows his ventru-
quulence" (360.20-21 ["truculent" "ventriloquism"]), it should be clear
that "he clearly expresse[s] himself" throughout this chapter (34.35), though
in forms as indirect as that of the sentence in which this phrase appears
(34.34-35.1). Since this garrulous figure from "Canmakenoise" is also "the
owner of an exceedingly niced ear" (48.20-21), we might see that "the
doomed but always ventriloquent Agitator" himself, by pursuing "a long
chain of thoughts and associations" through "syllable[s] of ... verbal hotch-
potch" (ID, 331), generates the whole noisy "caravan" of "uncontrollable
nighttalkers ... who ... [are] staged" in the chapter (56.5-6, 32.7-10 [and
who are therefore not unambiguously real]). As he does so, "gaunt grey
ghostly gossips [start] growing grubber in the glow" (594.25-26).
One of the first of these is "Gaping Gill," a figure who is "swift to mate
errthors" while "diagnosing through eustacetube" (36.35-36). "Swift to
meet others," but also "to make errors" in the process, "Gaping Gill" is
simply a version of our "sleepy talking" hero himself (327.21), "Mr Eu-
stache," whose biggest "error" lies in his failure to see that he "makes" up,
while dreaming, all those "others" whom he "meets" in his own "tropped
head," which therefore resembles "Gaping Ghyl," a deep vertical shaft in
Yorkshire, primarily in being a profound natural cavity. In "mat[ing an] err-
thor" and proceeding to spread rumors of HCE's "whispered sins," moreover,
"Gaping Gill" runs into a "hypertituitary type," practiced in "Heidelberg
mannleich cavern ethics," named "Sweatagore" (37.1-2). Here, too, since
the overproduction of "pituitary" hormone causes "gigantism" (hence "hy-
pertituitary"), and "Sweatagore" evokes the Russian giant "Svyatogor," we
might see only the Wake's sleeping giant underlying all the "delusional act-
ing" (164.3), all of which takes place in a sleeping body (hence HCE), dead
to the world (hence the Ger. Leiche, or "corpse," in "mannleich"), that has
regressed to a Vichian unconsciousness (hence the references to "Heidelberg
man" and "cave ethics"). Dark encounters like these suggest not only that
all the spreading gossip which culminates in "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly"

latently unfolds in the vertiginously coiled labyrinth of Earwicker's ear, but
also that our hero is guilty of nothing much greater than" Hearasay in para-
dox lust" (263.L4 ["heresy" implying internal division, and "hearsay" its
cause]), having become "a lustsleuth nosing for trouble in a booby trap"
(33.31-32 [that "booby trap" the "booby's" own head]). As the "lustsleuth"
within him seeks out pleasure, he invariably runs into trouble, so to throw
himself into conflict and to agitate himself out of the "prefall paradise
peace" in which the chapter began (hence "Paradise Lost"). By the time the
ballad itself is "piped out of his decentsoort hat" at the end of the chapter
(43.34-35 [the Da. sort and Eng. "soot" keeping the "head" concealed be-
neath that "hat" black]), all of the conflicting "gossiple so delivered in his
epistolear" comes to define him, "Persse O'Reilly," as a precise network of
living contradictions (or a "paradox" of "lusts") .
In concrete ways, the chapter is elaborately dramatizing what all of Fin-
neaans Wake announces generally: that "overhearing" is a condition of this
book, structured as it is on the closure of the eye and the eternal openness of
the ear. Any reader cultivating the essential "ideal insomnia" must there-
fore constantly "overhear," and in all three senses of the word, if he wishes
to identify with a hero like "Persse O'Reilly": by magnifying hardly heard
intimations, as if "overhearing" gossip; by amplifying and distorting the
sounds of words according to no laws but those of "funantics"; and by dis-
obeying and hearing things not intended to reach his ears (nasty innuendos,
for instance). Indeed, he must everywhere "beware how in that hist sub-
taile of schlangder lies liaison to tease oreilles" (270.15-16); for just as the
"subtle hiss" of the "serpent" (Ger. Schlanaer) deceived Eve, and just as the
manifest appearances of dreams deceive the dreamer, so too the mislead-
ingly "subtle history of slander" explored in "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly"
can easily deceive the reader: like a dream, this slander gives false impres-
sions, not least of which is that all of the evidently "delusional acting"
takes place outside of our hero. The latent sense of the Wake falls together
where his dreams do, in "subtle connections" (or "liaisons") that "tease
the ears."
By "overhearing" and translating all of the book's graven letters "from
black hand to pink ear" (43.28)-all ofthem written "in audible black and
prink" (425.23-24 ["inaudible black print and ink"])-a reader will lift
them into the vitality of living "earish" (130.19 [and perhaps "Irish"]), and
so bring them to life in "the presence (of a curpse) ," where the Wake takes
place: in a body that does not think, "is not all there," but can never not
hear. One of the book's primary assertions accordingly becomes, in place of
Earwickerwork
"I think, therefore I am," "I hereby hear by ear," therefore "I am amp amp
amplify" (468 .24- 25, 533.33).
In turn, and especially because letters and the institutions they empower
accumulate somewhere in "eyedulls or earwakers" (351.25), in the diffuse
space between "Fickleyes and Futilears" (176.13), we might now amplify
these remarks by considering the character of the Wake's "litters" (17.28 [or
severely "littered" "letters"]). It should by now have become evident that
the Wake is about "the caecodedition of an absquelitteris puttagonnianne"
(5I2.17-18)-the "blind surrender" to the dark (L. caecus, "blind"; deditio,
"surrender") of a sleeping giant (hence "Patagonian") who is at times en-
tirely "without letters" (L. absque litteris). As a body void of mind, HCE
therefore becomes "our illicterate of nulla tin en ties" (336.31-32) not simply
because he is "easily representative" (42.22 [as if "our electorate"])' but also
because his "easily representative" status hinges on his being an "illiterate
nonentity"-indeed, a greater "illiterate" than any of the "have-nots" or
"proletariat" (It. nullatenenti). In what amounts to another extreme para-
dox shaping the whole design of a work as superliterate as the Wake, then-
a paradox comparable to the one that enables Joyce to bend all the erudite
detailing of Ulysses toward the humane understanding of an ordinary man
on an ordinary day-any reader wishing genuinely to engage the Wake and
achieve a state of "ideal insomnia" must accomplish a task even far more
difficult than that imposed on him by the necessity of having to look up
words in dictionaries: hard though it may be, he must try to abandon the
monied and privileged reflex of literacy in order to attain to "dummyship"
and become as good an illiterate as HCE.

CHAPTER TEN
"Litters" : On Readin8
Finnegans Wake
Long before now, the reader will perhaps have objected that the kind ofread-
ing by which even one paragraph of Finne8ans Wake has been made to yield
sense has licensed me to lift quotations from all over the book, ripping
single words out of context and attributing to the Wake's sleeping hero
phrases that ostensibly bear on other characters; or that this kind of reading
has required a flagrant abandonment of sequential progression along the
printed line and instead has cultivated sense by a broad-ranging and di-
gressive association whose only limits have been the covers of the book and
the terms contained in it. I have only been practicing on Finne8ans Wake a
kind of textually self-endorsed "Sortes Vir8inianae" (28I.R2), where the
phrase refers to a traditionally long-standing, if odd kind of reading proce-
dure called "Sortes Vir8ilianae" (L. "Virgilian fortune-telling"). A Western
version of the I Ching, Virgilian sortilege licenses the eager reader who
seeks light in personal affairs to open his Virgil "at random" and-"volve
the virgil page" (270.25)-begin interpreting whatever line he hits upon "ad
lib" (583.6, 302.22-23).
To the objection that terms have been taken out of context the obvious
reply is that they are the context: as dreams only happen in sleep, which is
their condition, so the Wake only unfolds in the reconstructed night that
successive considerations ofthe book's "nat language," its "vermicular," its
"meoptics" and "sordomutics," and its modes of "formal alteration" and" ad-
amelegy" have allowed us to see as simultaneously present and overlapping
structures underlying the "hole affair." As for the objection that the words
and traits of seemingly independent "characters" like Shaun have been mis-
attributed to HCE, it will help to recall that Joyce said "there [were] no
characters" in Finnegans Wake, where all "traits featuring the chiaroscuro
coalesce, their contrarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody" (107.29-
30): "every dream deals with the dreamer himself. Dreams are completely
egotistical. Whenever my own ego does not appear in the content of a
dream, but only as an extraneous person, I may safely assume that my own
ego lies concealed, by identification, behind this other person" (ID, 357-
58) . Steady reference to sleep, finally, would again sanction the associative
way of reading exercised in this book, since this is how we go about "read-
ing the Evening World" as we experience it "in our own nighttime": a par-
ticle of recalled sense becomes clear here, a second, disconnected particle
becomes clear there, and further struggle with the "m'm'ry" dimly fills in
the large gaps between the two. Reading of precisely this sort is what we
have practiced on Finnegans Wake, by clarifying a phrase on page three,
then one on page 527, and by gradually filling in parts of the 524-page gap
that intervenes.
Apart from these considerations, however, any number of "curious warn-
ing sign[s]" in Finnegans Wake itself, "indicating that the words which fol-
low may be taken in any order desired" (121.8, 12-13), suggest that this may
indeed be the best way "to make soundsense" (121.15) of our hero's "ip-
sissima verba" (121.8-9 [L. "very same words"])-where our hero, in this
context, seems to be "the Aranman ingperwhis through the hole of his hat"
(121. I I - 12) or, again, "hole of Aran man the hat through the whispering his
ho" (121. 13- 14). Since these lines implicitly and explicitly mean what they
say only if they are read out of linear order, they not only license the way of
proceeding that I have adopted; like other indications scattered everywhere
throughout this circular text-"pure chingchong idiotism with any way
words all in one soluble" (299.F3)-they also require it.
Right at the threshold of Finnegans Wake, its reader learns that
Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen's maurer, lived in the broad-
est way immarginable in his rushlit toofarback for messuages before joshuan judges
had given us numbers or Helviticus committed deuteronomy. . . . (4.18-21)
The sentence sets in motion a two-page account that shows every conceiv-
a ble standing structure on earth falling: towers and buildings fall (4. 35-5.4) ,
ladders fall (6.9-10), trees fall (4.14-15), and "erection[s]" "phal!" (6.9,

4.15); but so too do rational and legal structures and, obviously, readable
and legible structures as well. Since the underlying cause of this pancosmic
collapse is simply our hero's fall into sleep, the passage is orienting us in a
world that exists "before joshuan judges had given us numbers"-a world of
Vichian primordiality prior to the establishment of moral standards, that
is (hence the disarray of "joshua," "judges," "Numbers," "Leviticus," and
"Deuteronomy"), but a world equally prior to the establishment of "num-
bers" and comparable symbol-systems as well: at the center of the passage,
with the Tower of Babel, languages collapse too. This sense is sustained by
the rude appearance of a law-breaking "Helvetius" in the stolidly law-
making "Leviticus," and also by reference to "freemen's maurer" (Ger. Frei-
maurer, "freemasons"). Since "Helvetius" was a "freethinker," and the "free-
masons" might simply be construed by free association as a "free associa-
tion" (anyone can join them, and as spiritual joiners they can join anything
with anything), the passage is both suggesting and formally demonstrating
that standing laws and rules have collapsed with HCE's consciousness in
sleep. Like Finnegan, our hero has "stottered from the latter" and "tropped
head" (6.9-10 ["tottered from the ladder"]); but this means too that he has
"stuttered from the letter" and lost control of his literate consciousness. To-
gether, all these elements are stating obliquely what is everywhere evident
in Finneaans Wake anyway: that the language of the book, like the language
of dreams and like language autonomically disrupted by the stutter, will
operate in a manner unpredictably different from that in which rational lan-
guage operates. As a reconstruction of the night, Finneaans Wake is "freely
masoned" (552.5), "freewritten" (280.2), and structured "in the broadest
way immarginable" by "free associations." I
Any reader wishing to "read the Evening World," as opposed to "the dully
expressed," must therefore learn to "stotter from the latter" with the hero of
the Wake, by slipping from the literal surface of the text and becoming a
freethinker of sorts. Making "infrarational" and "freely masoned" connec-
tions is ultimately more important to an understanding of the Wake's "slip-
ping beauty" (477.23 ["sleeping beauty"]) than making literate distinctions,
which is the business of "day's reason." "Yoking apart," as we are taught in
one of the Wake's "Night Lessons" (270.3 [and "joking apart," too]) is so es-
sential to a reading of the Wake's "traumscrapt" (623.36 [and its "scrapped"
letters and "script"] that joyce alerts us to its intricacies everywhere-and
not least in his account of his work's production. At the beginning of I. vii,
notably, we learn that Shem the Penman comes of a lineage whose pecu-
liarity is well worth examining.
" Li tters"
Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is joky for Jacob. A few tough necks are still
getatable who pretend that aboriginally he was of respectable stemming (he was an
outlex between the lines of Ragonar Blaubarb and Horrild Hairwire and an inlaw to
Capt. the Hon. and Rev. Mr Bbyrdwood de Trop Blogg was among his most distant
connections) but every honest to goodness man in the land of the space of today
knows that his back life will not stand being written about in black and white.
(169. 1-6)
If we take these lines literally, they simply tell us that "Shun the Punman"
(93.13) is illegitimate, not ofrespectable lineage, and that he moves outside
the law ("outlex" plays on the L. lex, "law"). But to take the lines literally
is precisely to "shun the punman" who generates them, largely by failing to
note that a great deal in these lines about lineage and lines is going on "be-
tween the lines." The "joky" passage suggests strongly that to take literally a
"stemming" (Da.-Nor., "voice") that is related to "the most distant connec-
tions," glides "between the lines," "kids around too much" (Fr. trop blaaue),
and generates meaning in "outlex" (the opposite of the Gr. lexis, "word") is
to invite disaster. Like others in Finneaans Wake, the passage is obliquely
warning us that the words constituting Joyce's "nonday diary" may not yield
coherent meanings if held to their literal senses and that the ruled lines
making up the printed book may lead nowhere. If, however, we look for and
pursue lines and foliations of thought that have the tangled organic in-
tricacy of hairs like those found in "Bluebeard's" or "Horrild Hairwire's"
beards-where the play on the song-title "There's Hair Like Wire Growing
Out of the Empire" suggests that the empire's ruled English has gone lux-
uriantly haywire-we may capture the meaning ofthe "punman's" "traum-
scrapt." Because they seek to reconstruct "matters that lie under the ban of
our infrarational senses," in unconsciousness, lines in Finneaans Wake lead
toward understandings that "will not stand being written about in black
and white," and precisely because things "written in black and white" make
themselves apprehensible to wakeful consciousness. Fully to understand
the man "tropped head" at Finneaans Wake, then, a reader of the Evening
World must not only "stotter from the latter" but also pursue "the most dis-
tant connections" by reading "in outlex" "between the lines." For if it is
only stating the obvious to note that whole lines in Finneaans Wake make
sheer nonsense, then "sure, treasures, a letterman does be often thought
reading ... between lines that do have no sense at all" (454.4-5). Here,
too, Joyce is calling our attention to an important distinction between the
kind of reading necessary to an understanding of the Evening World and the
kind of rational literacy required to read "the dully expressed"; for "thought-

reading," as opposed to "book reading," requires the exercise of intuition
and imagination. And "that (the rapt one warns) is what [the Wake's] papyr
is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints" (20.10- 11 [and not
explicits and clears and corrects]): "Hirp! Hirp! for their Missed Understand-
in8s!" [and not for their clear understandings] "chirps the Ballot of Perce-
Oreille" (175.27-28).
The greatest obstacle to our comprehension of Finne8ans Wake since its
publication has surely been a failure on the part of readers to believe that
Joyce really meant what he said when he spoke of the book as a "reconstruc-
tion of the nocturnal life" and an "imitation of the dream-state"; and as a
consequence, readers have perhaps too easily exercised on the text an un-
yielding literalism bent on finding a kind of meaning in every way anti-
thetical to the kind of meaning purveyed in dreams. 2 Since the Wake every-
where warns us that we should "stotter from the latter" by "feeling aslip"
(597.12), read "between the lines," and pursue "the most distant connec-
tions" "in hides and hints" in order to comprehend the man "tropped head"
at its center, "you can't believe a word he's written in" (252.27). The hero of
Finne8ans Wake, "as I'm given now to understand, [is] illscribed in all the
gratuitouses" (496.5-6 [and not "described" or "inscribed" in all the explic-
itly clear literal senses evident on the page]); his nightlife is reconstructed
"between the lines," and not on them. A reader must therefore "be vacillant
over those vigilant who would leave [him] to belave black on white" (439.31-
32 [and largely because the black-and-white surface of the printed page it-
self, like the manifest content of a dream, is only a "goodridhirring"]).
As a "farced epistol to the highbruws" (228.33-34)' the Wake holds out
the illusion of being a sacred text for "highbrows" (like a "first epistle to the
Hebrews"). In fact, however, it is a "farce"-"Outragedy of poetscalds!
Acomedy of letters!" (425.24). And as "a comedy of letters," Finne8ans Wake
is the antithesis of everything taught in the "academy of letters. " It seems to
require the same kind of sober attention as "a tragedy of poet" or "skald,"
but that impression is as misleading as the manifest appearance of a dream,
whose latent content may have much the lowbrow substance of an "out-
rageous postcard." "How many of its readers realize" (112.1-2 [really real-
ize]) "that [it] is not out to dizzledazzle with a graith uncouthrement of ...
the lapins and the grigs"? (112.36-113.3). The referentially secure languages
of "Latin" and "Greek," of course, are helpful to a reading of the Wake, but
less so than a knowledge of" lapins" (Fr. "rabbits") and "grigs" (Eng. "crick-
ets"), which leap all over the place, "runnind hare and dart" (285.4), rather
like the nocturnal thought of the "quhare soort of mahan" who sleeps at the
"Li tters"
Wake (16. I). Because it is an "imitation of a dream-state" and not rationally
discursive thought, Finnegans Wake is written in "coneyfarm leppers"
(257.5-6 ["coneys" = rabbits]), and not "cuneiform letters," or, again, in
"some little laughings and some less of cheeks" (125.15 [and even less "Latin"
and "Greek"]). What it really requires of its reader is the ability to pursue
"distant connections" and, in doing so, to leap all over the place. "Read your
Pantojoke" (71.17-18 [and not the "Pentateuch"]).
The well-known "letter" that surfaces recurrently in Finnegans Wake as a
cipher both for the text of our hero's dream and for the "nonday diary" of
the Wake itself therefore has a number of noteworthy peculiarities to it.
"Written in lappish language" (66.18-19 [L. lapsus linguae, "slips of the
tongue"])' it is expected to arrive "next morning" (66.10), like a dream,
and it is addressed to someone who lives at "Hyde and Cheek, Edenberry"
(66.17-18). The person expected to receive this letter would be HCE, then,
"all reddy berried" in "Edenberry" (421.6 ["already buried" because dead
to the world]), as a consequence of which our reading of the "litters"
blown through "the hole in his hat" involves a kind of perpetual "hide and
seek" among expressions everywhere absolutely delivered "tongue-in-cheek"
(hence "Hyde and Cheek"). Because this letter is also "superscribed and
subpencilled" (66.16), the sense it bears lies not on the printed line, but "be-
tween the lines" (letters "superscribed" would lie above the line, as letters
"subpencilled" would lie beneath). All the terms that Joyce draws on to de-
scribe this "letter," then, serve to warn us that all the printed letters and
words in Finnegans Wake are mere "vehicles" leading to hidden meanings
and letters that are nowhere explicitly evident to a reader's literate con-
sciousness (see 41. 17-2I). "Black look[s] white and white guard[s] black, in
[the] siamixed twoatalk" that constitutes Finnegans Wake (66.19-21) largely
because, like any "blackguard's" talk or like the manifest content of any
dream, every appearance made manifest to consciousness on the page is de-
ceptive and cannot be trusted. "Litterish fragments lurk dormant" and "bur-
ied" in the Wake (66.25-26), waiting to be awakened or unearthed when
discovered at the end of "distant connections," in spaces "between the
lines." Pragmatically, then, a reader of Finnegans Wake should be careful
about taking anything in the book literally: "a baser meaning has been read
into these [alphabetic] characters the literal sense of which decency can
safely scarcely hint" (33.14- 15).
Not simply rationalistic literalism but an insistence on treating the book
linearly, with the preconceived expectation that it can be treated as "nar-
rative" or that a concealed narrative can be reconstructed from it, has also

stood in the way of our understanding of Finnegans Wake. Here, too, the
questionable assumption that Finnegans Wake might operate as narrative
arises from a failure to think about Joyce's subject, the night. Attempts to
translate the Wake into "narrative," which it is obviously not, are equivalent
to acts of "secondary revision" (or "secondary elaboration") in dream analy-
sis, or to the act of "rationalization" in waking life: they impose, by force, a
sham coherence on materials that are not so much incoherently disordered
as "thisorder[ed]" (540.19), arranged in ways that resist the attacks oflogic
because informed by an associative, non-narrative coherence of their own.
As an "imitation ofthe dream-state," Finnegans Wake is more in the nature
of "ignarrative" than "narrative" because the "one stable somebody" who
lies at the center of its nocturnal universe is the ignorant generator and re-
ceiver of the texts of his own dreams. "Narrative" derives from the Latin nar-
rare ("to tell"), in turn from gnarus (L. "knowing"), and it implies that the
teller knows what he is talking about. But because our hero has "skittered
his litters ... any old howe" (370.6-8 ["scattered" and "littered" his "let-
ters" in the "tropped head"]), he cannot tell a thing.
Together, all ofthese features of its "freely masoned" "traumscrapt" make
the text of Finnegans Wake a "nightmaze" (411.8 [a "nightmare" formally
constructed like a "maze"]), a "jigsaw puzzle" (210.11), a "cryptogam"
(261.27) or "holocryptogam" (546.13), a game of hide-and-seek or "cash
cash" (24.1 [Fr. cache-cache, "hide and seek"]), a rebus (12.34, 104.14,
523.20), or a riddle in which "the speechform is a mere sorrogate" (149.29)
that represents, like a dream, "matters that fall under the ban of our infra-
rational senses." As a book on the subject points out, Finnegans Wake takes
in every particular the form and style of the riddle. 3 It is full of episodes
whose dramatic interest lies in the asking, but not necessarily the answer-
ing, of riddles: for instance, Shem's "first riddle of the universe" (170.4), the
Prankquean's riddle (21-23), the riddles posed during "The Mime of Mick,
Nick and the Maggies," (219-259), the riddle of "the crime in the park" (or
"whatever it was he reddled a ruad to riddle a rede for the sphinxish pairc"
[324.6-7]), and the whole of the "Questions and Answers" chapter (Lvi).
These local moments merely call our attention to riddles that rise up to
meet us everywhere in the text, in a way that might be exemplified by prac-
ticing a Virgilian sortilege on the book and opening it at random. Wherever
it falls open, there will be a riddle to solve. Every word, every phrase, every
paragraph, and every story in Finnegans Wake requires the same kind of so-
lution as a riddle does. And this includes the English. -
Consider, for example, the notorious word "hesitancy," which recurs
" Li tters" 311

throughout Finne8ans Wake in scores of misspelled forms-as "the spoil of
hesitants, the spell of hesitency" (97.24), "and be the seem talkin whar-
abahts hosetanzies, dat sure is sullibrated word!" (379.6-7). Joyce pointed
out in one of his letters (L, I, 241) that every Irishman would associate this
word with Richard Piggott, who tried to implicate Parnell in the Phoenix
Park murders of 1882 by forging a series ofletters, but who "was trapped ...
by his spelling of the word 'hesitancy' as 'hesitency'" (Annotations, ix). Yet
to explain the recurrence of the "spell of hesitancy" throughout Finne8ans
Wake on the basis of this story alone will not quite solve the riddle it poses
as a reader (and particularly a non-Irish reader) encounters it-as Joyce's
remark to Harriet Shaw Weaver suggests. By pointing out that every Irish-
man would recognize a certain meaning in the word, he was also implicitly
noting that every non-Irishman would not, and need not, simply because
"-all give it up?-" (170.23) "the spell of hesitancy," like the word "spell"
itself, can mean a number of things. Our hero, after all, "ha[s] dizzy spells"
(373.27). A "spell" in this sense is simply a lapse of time, and so sleep itself
might be regarded as "a spell of hesitancy," or "hazeydency," a "slip of the
time between a date and a ghostmark" in which letters are scattered and time
pauses (305.4, 473.8-9 [hence the "dense haze" and the ghosted "post-
mark"]) . As to the "spell of hesitancy" in this sense, "Hasitatense?" (296. F4) .
We might now pay attention to the kind of thought that plays through the
mind during the solution of a riddle like this. After an initial period of
bafflement in which he feels lost "in the meddle of [a] mudstorm" (86.19-20),
the person to whom the riddle is posed" seeks, buzzling is brains," as he tries
to discover "what is that which is one going to prehend?" (223.25-26 ["puz-
zling" and "buzzing his brains," he tries to "apprehend" an answer "before"
it is given]). If he is clever, he arrives at "the correct solution" (17°.22-23),
after a brief "spell of hesitancy," by suddenly waking up and getting it. He
arrives at this "correct solution," moreover, not by any rationalistic calcula-
tion or by a procedure he might "prehend." For the solution of a riddle im-
plicates one in a thought process that is able freely to establish "distant con-
nections" and discover sense "between the lines" "in hides and hints and
misses in prints"; and Finne8ans Wake, by "asking the teaser" in its every
word (III.27), is engaging its reader exactly in this process. 4 Sense in the
"robulous rebus" of Finne8ans Wake (12.34) falls together exactly as it does
in riddles and in the "freely masoned" dreamwork of the night. It is "a trea-
sure stumbled upon suddenly; not gradually accumulated by adding one to
one."S You can look it up in Latin, you can look it up in Greek, you can look
it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; indeed, "you may be as practical as is

predicable but you must have the proper sort of accident to meet that kind
of a being with a difference" (269.13-15).
Ordinary works of literature operate by presenting us with a verbal sur-
face written in the indicative and offering us a field of indicators (as in the
sentence, "It was a dark and stormy night"). As an "imitation of the dream-
state," by contrast, Finne8ans Wake offers us a verbal surface that is only
apparently indicative, but really full of riddles (as in the sentence, "It was
black and white and red all over"). As a totality, then, the Wake becomes an
"Anonymay's left hinted palinode obviously inspiterebbed by a sibspecious
connexion" (374.7-8): every word in the dreamlike letter that recurrently
appears in the "tropped head" ofthe man asleep at the Wake ("Anonymay's"
= "anonymous") is "obviously inspired" by a "specious," "suspicious,"
though "related" meaning (hence "sibspecies") -one that often has little to
do with the apparent sense of the word. The text accordingly becomes a
"left hinted palinode" (a "palinode" is a poem in which the writer retracts
something he has said) because as soon as it provides a reader with "mean-
ing" through the letters and words apparent on the line, it takes the mean-
ing away and leaves him with "sinister" hints (L. sinister, "left-handed")
and with puzzles to solve (hence "left hinted palinode"). The surface of
this "inspiterebbed" (or "inspired") text therefore becomes a "spiderweb" of
sorts, full of traps for the literate and rational sides of our minds.
Because the lines and letters in Finne8ans Wake make sheer nonsense and
the latent senses to which they all point lie "between the lines," at the end
of "distant connections," in "hides and hints and misses in print" nowhere
manifestly evident on the page, the concrete text that we are reading-the
material text bound in paper and running 628 pages-becomes mere "packen
paper" by one turn of the Wake's imagery (356.24 [Ger. Packenpapier, "wrap-
ping paper"]), a literately addressed envelope beneath whose surface invis-
ible letters and meanings lie "buried" (I. v), "dormant" (66.26), waiting to
be unearthed. Most of the identifiable words that one finds in the lines of
this text, accordingly, once a certain kind of pedestrian, mechanical trans-
lation has been accomplished, become "eminently legligible" (356.21 ["leg-
ible" precisely because "negligible"]): "blimp, blump; a dud letter ... a by-
word, a sentence with surcease" (129.7-8). All of these elements make
themselves apprehensible to the literate mind, where exactly the meaning
of the dream and the riddle-solving process in which the dream engages its
interpreter are not. If on the one hand we have therefore been "reading a
book" with all the properties of any other book-real pages, words, and
visible letters-it comes as a surprise to learn that we have also "just (let us
"Li tters"
suppraise) been reading in a (suppressed) book" (356.19-20). Like the
manifest content of a dream, everything manifest on the printed page of the
Wake points to a second, concealed text whose every "word [lies] as cun-
ningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of
coloured ribbons" (120.5-6). "It's like a dream."
Anyone who has analyzed a dream to his own satisfaction knows that
dreams have much the same structure as the riddles that we have been con-
sidering, the same structure as the Wake's "left hinted palinode." There is
nothing essentially rational about the process (as opposed to the theory)
by which these nocturnal "rhyttel[s] in his hedd" (338.8 ["riddles in his
head"]) can be made to reveal conflicts (We. rhyfel, "war") of sufficient
gravity as to have disrupted the sleep-sapped "hedd" of the dreamer (We.
hedd, "peace"). Quite the contrary. Any dream is "quite puzzonal to the
wrottel" (183.6-7): it is "quite personal to the writer" who thinks it up in
the middle of the night, yet "quite a puzzle" with which "to riddle" in the
morning, when its creator finds it impossible to understand. As "puzzonal
wrottels" ofthis kind, dreams operate exactly as riddles do not simply in the
wholly intuitive process by which they are untangled, but in the kind of
understanding they yield. The successful interpretation of a dream results
not primarily in an intellectual understanding, but in an illuminating
"click" that wakes up the dreamer in the middle of his own life. And just as
the analysis of a dream produces a sudden recognition, just as the solution
of a good riddle generates a ripple of mirth, so a good "read[ing of] the Eve-
ning World" works to liberate "everyone's repressed laughter" (190.33-34).
whose release is a sign that the book has been read rightly: in risu veritas, as
Joyce remarked of the Wake Uf, 703 [L. "in laughter there is truth"]).
That the language of Finnegans Wake really strives to "reconstruct the
nocturnal life" and hold forth" an imitation of the dream-state" can be seen
by "rearriving" at that paragraph on page three to which we have been re-
turning "teems of times and happy returns" (215.22-23). Though the para-
graph makes a vague kind of sense if we read it as we do ordinary prose-
moving along word for word, sentence after sentence, translating each word
into the ordinary senses of which it seems to be compacted, it will ulti-
mately resist this kind of understanding, and for many reasons: incompre-
hensible words will impede our forward progression through the sentence,
often creating disconcerting gaps in our understanding, sometimes forcing
us to go back to the beginning and start all over again, ultimately leaving
us with the uneasy sense that we may not be getting it. Even if all the in-
comprehensible terms are explained, "the fog of the cloud in which we toil

and the cloud of the fog under which we labour" does not necessarily lift
(599.3 0 -3 1).
As our reading of the Evening World will have suggested, the paragraph,
like Finnegans Wake as a whole, might better be treated as a rebus, a
crossword puzzle, or a hardly comprehensible dream whose manifest ele-
ments are particles of trivia and nonsense that conceal latent and apoca-
lyptic senses which lie not on the lines but between them, and not in any
literal senses but in "outlex." By "thought-reading" "between [these] lines"-
"lines" that make no sense at all"-and by following the Wake's advice to
pursue "freely masoned" "distant connections" "in the broadest way immar-
ginable," the reader will discover a buried sense in buried letters in the para-
graph-especially "on a second wreathing" (336.27-28 [or third or fourth]).
According to this model, any paragraph in Finnegans Wake would operate
exactly like a dream by providing us with a set of vectors that points to an
absent content-"the presence (of a curpse) "-into the "eyewitless foggus"
of whose "tropped head" the process of reading the Evening World leads.
The insistent presence of this corpse returns us to a meditation on the
body that lies dead to the world at the center of the Wake, and to Joyce's
stated claims about his work. Readers of Finnegans Wake have long felt that
a great deal in the book "cannot be traced, with any show of plausibility, to
the sodden brain of a snoring publican. No psychoanalyst could account for
the encyclopedic sweep of Earwicker's fantasies .... "6 Yet as our explora-
tions of the Wake's "nat language," its odd allusions to figures like Finnegan
and Finn, and its "meoptics" and "sordomutics" will have begun to suggest,
Joyce knew exactly what he was doing, and Finnegans Wake is indeed much
what he said it was: a reconstruction of the night. If the work has seemed
"utterly improperable" for so long (538. I2), it is only because Joyce has
"uttered it improperly," and because we, as readers acclimatized to a study
of "the dully expressed," have approached it with a conventionally strait-
ened sense of what it is "proper" to "utter" and what it is not. In the belief
that "we must be constant (what a word!)" to literalistic sense and to all the
leaden rules that govern the Daily World (238.11 - 12), we overlook the field
of immense potentialities that the text, like the dream, opens ("Comport
yourself, you inconsistency!" [192.31-32]).
Reading the Evening World will also have begun showing that Finnegans
Wake, as Joyce claimed, "does for the night what Ulysses does for the day,"
and that its status as representation, until now a negligible concern, is suffi-
ciently complex an issue that the stakes will have to be raised in criti-
cal discussions of what the book accomplishes and of how it stands in
"Litters"
(an exceedingly odd) relation to the literary tradition out of which it self-
consciously arose. When Joyce justified the literary experimentation of the
Wake by announcing that "one great part of every human existence is passed
in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake lan-
guage, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot" (L, III, 146), he was presum-
ably saying, among other things, that he was seeking "to render sensible a
part of human existence"; and when he said that "the night world can't be
represented in the language of the day" U], 590), he presumably meant that
he was "representing" an experience that we all share. Our failure to see
that Finneaans Wake really "reconstructs the nocturnal life" stems from our
unwillingness and inability to think, finally, about the Wake's intractably
strange subject, the night and our unconsciousness.
As to the business of "wreathing" its "litters," finally (336.27, 17.28
["reading its letters"]), "it is perensempry sex offun to help a dazzle off the
othour" (364.23-24): "it's pure and simply six of one and half a dozen of the
other" as to what comes first or last in any reading of the Wake, a work of
bottomless "sojestiveness" (222.32) like the dream. But "always" (L. sem-
per), "constantly" (L. perenne), it should be "fun" ("sex of fun") , and the
reader must take part in the game if he wishes to "get the dazzle off this
author"-or, for that matter, any "other."

CHAPTER E LEV E N
"The Nursing Mirror"
That dreams entail "infantile regression," a return to the state of mind of

infancy, is a central tenet of almost all writing on the night. According to
Freud, "dreams simply make us into children once more in our thoughts
and our feelings";1 "what once dominated waking life, while the mind was
still young and incompetent, seems now to have been banished into the
night .... Dreamin8 is a piece of infantile mental life that has been super-
seded" (ID, 606). When the old man who sleeps at the Wake enters the Eve-
ning World, accordingly, he returns not simply to a "state of nature" (49.25),
but to a condition much like that which he experienced "in first infancy"
(22.1 [< L. infans, "not speaking"]), so to enjoy a "second infancy" (22.26)
and to become something of "an infams" (621.26 [an "infamous" one]). For
infancy takes place exactly where sleep does, in an "unknown body" void
of mind, somewhere in eyes "meoptically" unlit and in ears and a mouth all
"sordomutic. "
One way of understanding the careful lack of specificity that Joyce culti-
vated when he spoke about Finne8ans Wake-when he remarked, for in-
stance, that "one great part of every human existence is passed in a state
which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language" (L,
III, 146)-would entail asking only what he would have produced ifhe had
wanted to write, after Ulysses, a novel exactly like Ulysses but about some-
one 36 or 37 years younger than the 38-year-old Bloom. Because Finne8ans
Wake does for the night what Ulysses does for the day, it is a work precisely
3 17
of this sort; for when its hero falls asleep, he becomes unconscious, and
"what is unconscious in mental life is also what is infantile." 2 By reconstruct-
ing the "nightlife" of an "ordinary man," the Wake is also reconstructing,
with some intricacy, "a day in the life" of the first years of "reallife"-the
complicating snag being that there were no days in those "toyms" that any-
one will recall lying somewhere "way back in [the] mistridden past"
(602.36, 110.31 [recall, however, all the "toys"]). The "blank memory" lin-
gering in the head from "lost life," accordingly (515.26 ["last night"]), now
becomes darkly enmeshed with those "lost" parts of "life" deriving from
childhood.
If we "rearrive" at that the paragraph of the Wake, for instance, we will
now find, reinforced by a reading of those extended parts of the book given
over to child psychology (ll.i, lLii), yet another of "threescore and ten top-
typsical readings" concealed at the ends of "distant connections" "between
the lines." For our hero's "fall" asleep has "retaled" him "early in bed"
(3.15-17), and as a consequence, "the humptyhillhead ofhumselfprumptly
sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes"
(3.20-21). Most "Grownup Gentlemen" (221.2) are likely to have heard in
Wakean coinages like "humptyhillhead" and "tumptytumtoes" an unspeak-
ably ridiculous infantility. What else? "We bright young chaps of the
brandnew braintrust are briefed here ... with maternal sanction" (529.4-5
[those "briefs" are all at once letters, laws, and underpants, and "here" is the
Daily World]), and so we tend brainily to patronize the gleeful "little folk
creeping on all fours" (178.18- 19). The evocations of infancy heard in these
terms, however, now turn out to be crucial because "Humpty Dumpty" is
"A Pretty Brick Story for Childsize Heroes" (106.14), and so is Finne8ans
Wake, which we must now construe, since "we are in rearing" (21. I), as
"the Nursin8 Mirror" (46.25).
Where we earlier discovered in the "unquiring one" stratified in this para-
graph the thinking of a "tropped head" oblivious of its spatial and personal
relation to its own "tumptytumtoes," one form of unconsciousness spec-
trally overlaps another now, as the night in turn opens out bottomlessly into
"childhood's reverye[s)" (483.5-6). Because it is reconstructing the "eyewit-
less foggus" of a man asleep, the passage is also, and necessarily, recon-
structing the "eyeless" and "witless" "eyewitless foggus" of "an overgrown
babeling" (6.31 ["baby"]) whose "eyes" and ears and "wit" have "not yet"
(3.10), "not yet" (3.11) wakened. "Back we [return]," then, "by the jerk ofa
beamstark, back [to] paladays last" (615.25): to a "paradise lost" experi-
enced "long ago" (Gr. palai), in "toyms" full of "playdays" and "giants"

(hence "Jack and the Beanstalk"). The "babeling" coming to light in this
paragraph, "overgrown" because "not yet" wakened to a sense of space, is
also a "giant" of sorts, and so comes attached to those silly "tumptytum-
toes." Since it is one of the Wake's "Night Lessons" (lI.ii) that "digits" (fin-
gers and toes) are first "digits" (numbers), their discovery making possible a
non-Euclidean construction of space (282.7ff.), the paragraph now evokes a
time when this "unquiring one" did "not yet" know that his "unknown
body," let alone all of those pedagogically useful "tumptytumtoes," layout
there in the dark, way off at the far end of the world, waiting to be discov-
ered and exploited by parents and math teachers. Still, since "he knowed
from his cradle ... why his fingures were giving him" (282.9-11 ["figures,"
"fingers"]), five ofthem lie immanently out there, waiting to be brought to
light whenever he wakens, in the five countable components of "upturn-
pikepointandplace" (3.22 [Annotations]):
-Recount!
-I have it here to my fingaU's ends. This liggy piggy wanted to go to the jampot.
And this leggy peggy spelt pea. (496. 1 7- 1 9) 3
What a little "bofte a surprises" this paragraph has become (165.29-30 [Fr.
"box of surprises," or "jack-in-the-box"]), and not least because, "to our
surprise, we find the child and the child's impulses still living on [here, as] in
the dream" (ID, 224)-just as we find those childish impulses living on in
the sudden popping-up of a memory of that "jackabox" (91.26, 485.33),
which too, with "Humpty Dumpty" and those obscure "tumptytumtoes,"
"we all remember ... in childhood's reverye" (483.5-6).
To ignore these childish impulses and all the infantile material repre-
sented in the paragraph because there is Latin to explicate or a theory to
expound is to perpetrate thoughtlessly upon ourselves, as it was perpetrated
upon us, something that the Wake calls the "young persons (Nodding Neu-
trals) removal act" (529.8). For we not only annihilate a deeply formative
part of the dream, but lobotomize a whole portion of the brain with which
we traffic in the Daily World, remaining unconscious of and shriveling our
sense of possibilities by keeping the child inside the body buried. Again,
then, we "have just ... been reading in a (suppressed) book" (356.19-20)-
one of many "excluded books" (537.27) which the ego- and letter-carrying
part of the mind (let's "Show'm the Posed") has severe difficulties not
simply thinking about, but acknowledging at all. The content of this" (sup-
pressed) book," however, now turns out to be crucial to Joyce's "book of the
dark" not simply because it impinges everywhere on the amnesic domain of
"The Nursing Mirror" 3 19

"childhide" (483.31 [a deeply "hidden" "childhood"]), but because it also
tells the story of how a world of little Finnegans wake.
"Well, Him a being so on the flounder of his bulk like an overgrown ba bel-
ing, let wee peep, see, at Hom, well, see peegee ought he ought" (6.30-32)-
noting, as we do so, that "we" become very "wee" in "the Nursina Mirror" of
the Evening World (cf. 57.12-13, 259.3-4)' so that "wee," like our "Child-
size Hero," "ought to see pg. 0" ("see peegee ought"), the blank page be-
ginning the story of "Here Comes Everybody's" "real life," when we too
"new nothing" (516.30 [not "knew"]). Sympathetic study of this amnesic
blank will enable us now to note that our hero is identified as "Haroun
Childeric Eggeberth" right from the beginning of the Wake (4.32). If this
"cradlename" (201.32) seems manifestly to designate the rulers of their
"days" (a Persian caliph, a Frankish monarch, and an Anglo-Saxon king),
the night undoes those "daze" altogether (51.1, 316.26), so to reveal latently,
in as fantastic an incognito as any that "Haroun al-Raschid" ever assumed
in the fairy tale of the Thousand and One Niahts, an unformed "child"
("Childeric"), moving away from the time of its conception ("egg") and
"birth" toward the moment at which he will Wake. As an "overgrown babel-
ing," our "Childsize Hero" maintains this infantile "duskguise" from begin-
ning to end ofthe Wake, becoming, "for innocence" (435.10 ["for instance"]) ,
a "Grampupus" (7.8 [It. wan pupo, "big baby"]), a "peewee" (II.IO), a
"Minnikin" (17.2 [Du. "little man"], a "babylone" (17.33), or a gigantic
"Mister Funn" again (5.12 [as opposed to a sullen "Mister Pain" or a somber
"Mister Finnegan"]). Our hero's unconscious drift through sleep, as idiom
suggests, "rejuvenate[s]" him (41. 13), and in a sense that might be radically
construed ("rejuvenation" derives from the L. re- [" anew"] and juvenis
["young"]). "Young as of old, for [a] daily comfreshenall, [this] wee one"
rules the night (619.14-15): dark "daily confessional" though sleep and its
dreams may be, it also "comes and freshens all," so that an old man afflicted
with "ague will be rejuvenated" (II2.20 ["age," too]). Not simply an experi-
ence that embeds an old man in a "seemetery," then, but an extended pro-
cess of rejuvenating "refleshmeant" that leads "from next to nothing" to the
moment at dawn when HCE will Wake, sleep might now be considered, as in
"The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies," a daily reenactment of child-
hood itself.
Showing our hero in "dozen[s] of cradles" (211.20 [as elsewhere the Wake
shows him in dozens of coffins]), all of these "cradlenames" (201.32) cause a
strange transformation to sweep over everything in the Wake, as again we
find "no thing making newthing wealthshowever for a silly old Sol, healthy-

tobedder and latewiser" (253.8-9): note particularly, as a consequence of
this transformation, how the "silly old soul" evoked in this familiar phras-
ing will now awaken the memory of "Old King Cole," just as "healthy to-
bedder"-and the phrase "early in bed" on the opening page of the Wake
(3.17)-will recall the bedtime homilies that "Here Comes Everybody"
heard in childhood ("early to bed and early to rise"). "All's set for restart
after the silence" (382.14), then, as "the old man on his ars" shown "scrap-
heaped" in Relief Map B becomes a magically rejuvenated "Courser, Re-
courser, Chan8echild" (481.2; cf. 87.18), "remembering [his] shapes and sizes
on the pillow of [his] babycurls" (24.29-30)-where the appearance of
Vico's ricorso in "recourser" tells us that his history is beginning all over
again. "The course of history" therefore modulates into "the course of his
tory" at the Wake (143.12) in part because, under the infantile, regressive,
and conservative trend of the dream (hence that "tory"), the sleeper returns
to a past extending through yesterday into "first infancy." The Wake in turn
becomes "a bit of a tory tale" (20.23) or a "Goes Tory by Eeric Whigs"
(359.26)-a "ghost story" about a man dead to the world who, even while
progressing toward the fu ture ("whig"), "goes" extremely" tory." As" he doze
soze," his emptily "tropped head" ("eerie wig") fills with "the Tales of Yore
of the times gone by before there was a hofdking or a hoovthing" or any-
thing "in Oreland, all sould" (359.24-26): the evocations of "All Souls' Day"
and burial here (in an underground "oreland") remind us that our hero has
"tropped head"; but the counterevocations of a time before that governing
head was implanted in the body at all (hence the "high-king" and Du.
hoofd, "head"), return us to the beginning of the world.
Moving its "Chan8echild" "past Morningtop's necessity"-the drab ex-
igencies that force him, at the "top of the morning," to reassume the burdens
of "head trouble and heal travel" (620.13 [thinking and walking])-"the
Nursing Mirror" therefore begins to reflect its hero in "the clarience of the
childlight in the studiorium upsturts" (266.11-13). If this line manifestly
evokes "the children's study upstairs," like chapter II.ii generally, it does so
largely in order to suggest that a kind of "clarity" and "light" known only to
infant "upstarts"-"childlight"-now blazes up into and illumines our
hero's "tropped head." For "it's the armitides toonigh ... and there's to be a
gorge ups truce for happinest child her everwere" (I 1.13- 15). In the cessation
of conflict that sleep brings (" armistice, truce"), the infant buried inside
"the old man on his ars" is going to "gorge up truth."
Staged in a "Playhouse" of sorts (2I9.2)-a "kids' and dolls' home"
(294.FI) rife with memories of gleeful visits to the "Cats' and Dogs' Home"-
"The Nursing Mirror" 321

dreams take place exactly when and where the song- and game-filled "Mime
of Mick, Nick and Maggies" does: at "childream's hours, expercatered"
(219.5-6 [and in the body of HCE]). "Expertly catered" by a mind like the
child's, they yield a kind of meaning which, in the morning, is "expertly
expurgated" by the literate adult. As "an imitation of the dream-state," the
Wake necessarily undertakes bottomless forays into childhood memory
everywhere, everywhere evoking somewhere "between the lines" and at the
ends of "hides and hints and misses in prints" experiences that "we all remem-
ber ... in childhood's reverye" (483.5-6). Not a page in Finneyans Wake, all
of them plushly "teddybearlined" (208.17), fails to refer densely to "fairy-
tales" (220.13), stories from "storybooks" (219.24), "youth plays" (253.6-9),
children's games (176.1-18, Il.i), "toy fair[s]" (628.9), "mothers gossip"
(316.1I-I2 [but also "Mother Goose"]), and "nonsery reams" (619.18
["reams" of "nursery rhymes" and comparable "non-sense" J). 4 And not a page
fails comparably to evoke some variant of Swift's "little language," which,
though it is given in pure form primarily to Issy throughout the book, merely
epitomizes a kind oflinguistic regression that anyone might find anywhere in
the Evening World: 5 "let him tome to Tindertarten, pease, and bing his
scooter 'long" (191.21-22); "Paralas infanetes. St" (565.28 [Esperanto for
"baby words," Esperanto being the "universallanguage"J). Through these
vehicles, "as were we their babes in" (619.23-24), "the Nursiny Mirrar" can-
not help stirring, as profoundly as the dream, childhood memories of the
deepest kind-even while the letter-carrying half of its reader is looking for
deep commentary on the Summa Theoloyica or arcane puns in the Greek. All
of these recollected vestiges of childhood, part of a collectively shared heri-
tage whose learning precedes schooling and is in itself the learning of lan-
guage, are inevitably attached to voices and memories that will pull anyone
back to "the very dawn of protohistary" (169.2 I). Every page in the Wake, if
the reader lets it work upon himself, will lead him back to the "nursery"
(169.23, 227.11; 584.16, 619.18), to the "village childergarten" (253.30-31,
483.25-26), and to "toyms" "in that sometimes prestreet protown" (97.21)
where "real life" first "erigenat[ed] from next to nothing" (4.36-5.1). "In
effect, I remumble, from the yules gone by, purr lil murrerof myhind ....
When she give me the Sundaclouths .... " (295.4-7). As a reader, like the
Wake's "Childsize Hero," "remumbles" (and "remembers") these things, he
will also likely "remember from the years gone by," somewhere "between the
lines" and in the nursing "mirror of the mind," a "poor little mother afmine,"
and attached associations-of "yule," "Santa Claus," and the laying-out of

"Sunday clothes": "I have heard her voice somewhere else's before me in these
ears still that now are for mine," as it occurs to HCE (565.15-16 ["someone
else's," this voice entered his hearing "somewhere else," "before" and prior to
the construction of "me"]). All generally deriving from the era of his incar-
nation and birth (hence, in part, the incessant evocations of Christmas at the
Wake) , memories like those show him" at his old game of haunt the sleepper"
(295.9- IO) ; for the memory of a children's game called" Hunt the sli pper" also
"haunts the sleeper," who now moves through the night glamorously "in-
vested" "in littleritt reddinghats and cindery yellows and tinsel and glitter
and bibs under hoods" (551.8-9) . Much more than the evident "news-reel" of
images projected against the dreamer's closed eyelids, "this nonday diary, this
allnights newseryreel" (489.35) also becomes a nonstop "nursery rhyme"
(hence "newseryreel").
"Since we are talking amnessly of brukasloop crazedledaze," "for inno-
cence," (562.16 ["aimlessly," in "amnesia," of "sleep broken" by memories of
"cradle days"]) , consider only the big blank "m'm'ry" the Wake wakens "from
an early peepee period" of "your last wetbed confession" (533.26, 188.1 ["you
were there," even if the "m'm'ry" is obscure]) ; or of "the time we ... were
fairly tossing ... in bed, having been laid up with Castor's oil" (431.35-
432.1); or of the time "we play[ed] dress grownup" (26I.FI); orofa time whose
"m'm'ry" is wakened from the dead (and "deadhead" [407.36]) by a line urg-
ing that "when you pet the rollingpin write my name on the pie" (441.17 [not
"get the writingpen"J). Is not this Wakean "scripchewer" (412.4 ["scripture"]),
even while calling attention to the ways in which the ascent into literacy
massively shrivels one's sense of possibility, unearthing a buried "m'm'ry" for
those of its readers who no longer write on pies and pastries but on paper-no
doubt with methodologically justified impeccability? As for that "scrip-
chewer," who can forget not the meaning but the taste of reading material-
curiously compelling, slightly bitter, a little too pulpy, finally not palatable?
"How strange memory is! To remember that after such a long time" (L, I, 375) .
"If we each could always do all we ever did" (287.F2).
Now "as you all know, of a child, dear Humans" (533.24-25), a snowball-
ing and" (suppressed)" accumulation of childhood memories much like
these is what grown-up little boys and girls are "mead of, mard, is made of"
(374.1 [Per. mard, "man"]):
- Trists and thranes and trinies and traines.
-A take back to the virgin page, darm it!
-Ay, grauntye.

Set to the rhythm of that nursery rhyme about the constitutional makeup of
"little boys and girls," the wording here puts us in mind of a younger, as
opposed to an older man (hence "Tristan"), who is in tearful conflict (hence
the "sadness" [Fr. triste] and the "tears" [Ger. Tranen]) and whose "real life, "
because its living preceded the gelling of English in the head, is written not
on legible pages, but on a "virgin page." The wording also refers to Thomas
Moore's "Take Back the Virgin Page"-a song set to the Irish air "Dermot"
(hence "darm it!") and subtitled "Written on Returning a Blank Book," and
it therefore suggests that because "childhide" is written in a "blank book"
full of "virgin pages" of this sort ("see peegee ought"), so too must be
Joyce's "book of the dark" and "Nursing Mirror. "6 Indeed, "that (the rapt one
warns) is what [this] papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses
in prints" (20.10- II). As the terms in this familiar line will now suggest,
the content of the "papyr" making up Joyce's "mummyscrip" (156.5) is ex-
actly the same as the content of the "papyrus" (hence "papyr") used to wrap
an Egyptian "mummy": a body dead to the world, HCE. And the nursery-
rhyme rhythm underlying the line now makes clear that "the presence (of a
curpse) "-and "the present, of course"-is "made of" precisely the same
things little boys and girls are: an aggregate of "buried" memories at whose
inmost core lie the kinds of childhood memory brought to light by "the
Nursing Mirror."
The letter "buried" in that body which Finnegans Wake takes as its sub-
ject therefore has the same latent, because infantile, content as a dream;
and it is "written in [a] lappish language" (66.18-19) more of whose pecu-
liar inflections we are now in a position to understand. Though it will
reach the dreamer only "next morning" (66.10), when he reacquires the lit-
erate ability to carry and deliver letters (66.II-13) and when it stands
"stated in Morganspost" (36.5 [Ger. Morgen, "morning"; Post, "letter"]),
this communique comes in
a huge chain envelope, written in seven divers stages of ink, from blanchessance to
lavandaiette, every pothook and pancrook bespaking the wisherwife, superscribed
and subpencilled by yours A Laughable Party, with afterwrite, S.A.G., to Hyde and
Cheek, Edenberry. (66.r~-I8)
Everything knowably manifest about this letter, in other words, is merely

its "envelope," a complexly linked "chain" ("huge chain") of trivial materi-
als ("pots and pans"), within which lies a message "lurk[ing] dormant"
(66.26) and striving to get out by "hook or crook" ("pothook and pan-
crook"). "Superscribed and subpencilled," this dormant message lies some-

where "between the lines" ("above" and "below" them), so that it conveys
meaning like a dream, a "slip of the tongue" (L. laps us linguae), or a word
delivered with "tongue in cheek" whose "hidden" meaning its interpreter
must "seek" ("Hyde and Cheek"). The reference to "hide and seek" also im-
plies, however, that the message "lurking dormant" in this "lappish lan-
guage" (Ger. lappisch, "childish") carries its reader through a "huge chain"
of associations back to "childhide" itself. And as an added complication,
this dormant message seems to be formally written in "wholesome pot-
hooks" (181.13; II9.29). SO, at least, according to Joyce: "I am at present at-
tending night school," he wrote to his son Giorgio in 1934, "where they
teach 'em how to make pothooks" (L, III, 320).
Now "pothooks" are one form of those cursive lines that children make
when they are learning to write or, by extension, any illegible handwriting
or aimless scribbling:
Only a paleography of "your prescriptions" (419.32)-the "pothooks" and

"scribbledehobbles" (275.22) whose writing preceded the formation of "in-
scriptions" proper-will help anyone to understand the "scribings scrawled"
here (615. IO), which some penman like Shem has evidently" scra bbled and
scratched and scriobbled and skrevened nameless[ly and] shamelessness[ly]"
all over the place (182.13-14). For if graphic writing, even if only approxi-
mately, is representative of thought-the written words "I think" meaning
that I really do (think)-then surely some kind of thought must "lurk dor-
mant" beneath these "pothooks"-and all the more particularly because the
"little man" (166.21) who forms them is capable of as much lip-biting inten-
tionality as any adult. Written by "the babes that mean too" (308.25 [they
"mean" things "too," ifnot in orthodox language]), these pothooks resemble
exactly the "NIGHTLETTER" whose meaning, imperceptible because radio-
telegraphed up from "down under," the Wake tries to capture (308.16). All
nonsense on the surface, all unconscious infantile thinking underneath,
both dreams and the Wake take form in a script like that seen here. "Indis-
criminatingly made belief mid authorsagastions from Schelm the Pelman"

(369.27-28), these "pothooks" do not make beliefs, but rather indiscrimi-
nate "make-believe"; nor do they work like" author's suggestions," but rather
by "autosuggestion." To understand the "wreuter" who "scribbles them"-
"Schelm the Pelman" (Ger. Schelm, "rogue")-a reader might well take
depth lessons at a "Pelman Institute" (according to the Annotations, a
"memory training center").7
Because the letter whose meaning the Wake explores takes the form of
these pothooks, it is said to be hidden and buried in a spot where "the first
babe ofreconcilement is laid in its last cradle ofhume sweet hume" (80.17-
18): "last .cradle of hume," of course, because our hero has fallen back into
his body and gone dead to the world; "cradle" and "reconcilement" with
"the first babe," however, because the fall back into his body also returns
him to "first infancy." In what will partially account for the Wake's inces-
santly exclamatory style, then, we might see that much of the material un-
consciously "unearthed" as we dig (as if with a "pick") for meanings buried
beneath the surface-of dreams, pothooks, the text of the Wake, and "the
presence (of a curpse) "-is simply "childhide." "So pass the pick for child
sake! 0 men!" (80.18- 19 [and not for the sake of correct readings]).
The Wake unearths buried memories of this "childhide" in inevitably pri-
mary ways. Not least "because he mussed your speller on you" (191.30-31),
Joyce puts his reader into a position roughly analogous to that of a child
encountering an unknown language for a first time, so to recall an era of life
in which "Here Comes Everybody" started knowing "anguish" (603.21 [U.S.
college s1. for "English"]) and in turn started obscurely to fathom the over-
whelming "awethorrorty" of the authors behind it. This perhaps will ac-
count for the "humiliation" that some readers feel on first looking into "the
Nursing Mirror"-though in an ideal and just world, consciousness of a
humiliation etymologically and ideologically indistinct from one's human-
izing should have come decades before one even heard of Finnegans Wake,
when one was a little Finnegan waking. So bafflingly weird at times is the
"Babbyl" of "the Nursing Mirror" (532.25 [the "baby Babel"]) -"Whangpoos
the paddle and whiss whee whoo" (297.F5)-that one stands roughly in the
same relation to its "storiella as she is syung" (267.7-8 [a "young" "story,"
whose truth is as difficult to ascertain as that behind a "fib," or It. storiella])
as a child stands in relation to the language in his primer. Hugh Kenner has
remarked that learning to read Finnegans Wake is like going to a Berlitz
school to learn a language that is useful nowhere on earth. An essential
countertruth, however, is that we are learning how to read-and not only
"between the lines"-but a language, "the seim anew" (215.23), in a "story-

aboot" where "we start from scratch" (336.17-18). What is true of any lan-
guage, finally, is also true of the Wake's: "it's as simple as A. B. c." (65.27-
28, 107.34, 249.18)-though another essential countertruth requires us to
see that it may be as strange as A. B. c., too.
"This nonday diary" and "allnights newseryreel" therefore becomes a
"unique hornbook" of sorts (489.35,422.15 [note the "unicorn"])-as its re-
current misquotation of alphabetic nursery rhymes like "A was an Archer"
everywhere suggests: "Hootch is for husbandman handling his hoe" (5.9);
"Lei lois for libelman libling his lore" (250.19). Since it unburies "child-
hide" and all the activity buried there rather than squelching it, however, it
becomes a "childlit" inversion of the "great primer" (20.8), an antiprimer
like that reconstructed in the "Night Lessons" chapter (lUi), which takes
the form of, only to demolish, schoolbooks. As a "book" (L. liber) that
makes "free" (L. liber), the Wake sets the child buried inside at "liberty"
(25°.21): "two pretty mistletots, ribboned to a tree, up rose liberator and,
fancy, they were free" (588.35-36)-where the line, set to the rhythm of a
children's song ("Ten little Injuns"), also suggests that "fancy is as free" in
this book as it is in the unconscious. "Childs will be wilds. 'Twastold"
(246.21-22 [and "twice-told," because the Wake, like the dream, tells the
"torytale" of infancy all over again]).
In turn, this reanimation of the wild child makes Finne8ans Wake a kind
of vast mnemonic "wonderland" in which "milliems of centiments dead-
lost" on us are continually being resurrected from the dead as an "original
sinse we are only yearning as yet how to burgeon" reawakens (239.3, 2).
Necessarily, "the Nursin8 Mirror" reflects its "Childsize Hero" "through al-
luring glass or alas in jumboland" (528.18)-"alas" because he's dead to the
world, "jumbo" because he's a sleeping giant-and so situates him in a
"wonderland" like that encountered in Throu8h the Lookin8 Glass, where
the Daily World is "alluringly" "rejuvenated" and "refleshed."8 Readers re-
calling the "toyms" "when theywereyung and easilyfreudened" (115.22-23)
will remember that childhood and wonderland could be places of both anxi-
ety and "delight time" (329.10 [like "the nighttime"]). So, too, Finne8ans
Wake, where "we go out in all directions on Wanterlond Road with [a]
cubarola glide" (618.21-22). If the possibility of "going out in all direc-
tions" all at once induce in readers accustomed to "the dully expressed" a
kind of "wonderlost" anxiety (363.23)-"You is feeling like you was lost in
the bush, boy?" (I12.3)-then the sudden recognition of an infant "bush-
man" in that "bush boy" should convert all "wonderloss" into "wonderlust"
(576.21 [mental "wanderlust"]), by reanimating a sense of what it was to be

a child, "wanting" things badly (hence "Wanterlond") but also-by way of
reference to "the Cubanola Glide," a dance craze of the 1920s-eager to take
brash, modern, and "new steps."
Everyone worries about growing older and approaching the event of his
wake. "Though Wonderlawn's lost us for ever"-"Alis, alas, she broke the
glass!" (270.19-2I)-the Wake rediscovers it everywhere, even in the body
of the "Wondering Wreck" (229.14) shown rubbled in the two relief maps of
the night:
And then. Be old. The next thing is. We are once amore as babes awondering in a
wold made fresh where [as] ... in the storyaboot we start from scratch. (336.15- 18)
Note the "love" (It. amore), the "wonder," and the fairy tales ("Babes in the
Wood") buried somewhere very deeply inside of this "old man on his ars,"
"Dropping -with -Sweat" (102.30) . If "Grampu pus is fallen down" atthe Wake,
and "grinny sprids the boord" (7.8-9 [the "old man" dead to the world, his
widow arranging the wake]), it is complementarily true that "grampupus"
has become a "big baby" (It. gran pupo) -as a consequence of which, every-
where one looks in "the Nursing Mirror," a "grin spreads broadly" across the
face ("grinny sprids aboord"). As old meanings take on a new and "rejuve-
nated" life, that is, lifeless Mr. Finnegan modulates into a gigantic "Mister
Funn" again (5.12); and in the grin generated by that reawakened sense of
fun, another "sobsconscious inkling," writ on the somatic "foolscap" of "the
presence (of a curpse)," ripples up into the head from "down under" to ani-
mate the body and bring a "deadhead" back to life. This awakening now
signifies the persistence inside Here Comes Everybody, of a "child, a natural
child" (595.34)-playful, creative, flexible, resourceful, and powerful-in
a head otherwise clogged with "dud letter[s)" (129.7 [and dead laws]). This
is why the Wake, although it shows "the old man on his ars" and the pa-
triarchy of which he is a representative member in crisis, cannot finally be
considered a merely annihilative attack on letters and Western institutions,
but in fact a rosy, affirmative, and joyous comedy. For when the "old man" at
the Wake goes dead to the world, the "childhide" inside him riotously
wakens; and "whilst age is dumped [and damned] to mind the day,"
"youth ... charm[s] the night" (371.18-19). "Doth that not satisfy youth,
sir?" (224.28).
At the end of an aggregating understanding, moreover, it should be clear
that inside of Here Comes Everybody, underground, there dwells a sleeping
giant that knows no existence in letters and that comes to light in the dark;
our usual name for it is childhood or infancy. Necessarily, in the process that

sees a multitude of Smiths and Finnegans wake, this giant is harnessed, re-
strained, and shrunk, "cut short into instructual primers by those in au-
thority for the bittermint of your soughts" (440.22-24 [not necessarily "for
the betterment of your thoughts," that "awethorrorty" can make one "bit-
ter" about what one's "sought"]). No one would argue that children should
not be trained through language into forms compatible with the exigencies
of the Daily World. And in fact, something precisely of this sort happens to
"Haroun Childeric Eggeberth" as he drifts toward his awakening on the last
page of the Wake, and in the process takes forms that show him returning to
reality: our "hugest commercial emporialist" (589.9- IO), we learn toward
daybreak, leaves "Heinz cans everywhere" (581.5) in "Eternest cittas, heil!"
(532.6). As these terms ominously imply, however, the question is not
whether or not the sleeping giant inside everyone should be restrained at
all, but whether or not it is restrained at all well.
As my explanations here are probably above your understandings, lattlebrat-

tons ... I shall revert to a more expletive method which I frequently use when I
have to sermo with muddlecrass pupils. Imagine for my purpose that you are a squad
of urchins, snifflynosed, goslingnecked, clothyheaded, tangled in your lacings,
tingled in your pants, etsitaraw etcicero. (152.4-10)
Memorably patronizing « L. pater, "father"), this tutelary voice should re-

mind us that English domesticated all us "little brats" (hence "lattlebrat-
tons") in much the same way that England domesticated Ireland (or "Little
Britain")-and perhaps to a degree that causes us even now not to notice
that interesting little "tingle," or to recall how hard it was to learn to sit still
("etsitaraw"). "This, of course; also explains why we were taught to play in
the childhood" (163.4-4 [where "taught" and "play" are contradictory». By
reminding us, "for innocence," of how "the lads is attending school nessans
regular, sir, spelling beesknees" (26.34-35), "the Nursing Mirror" is also re-
vealing the concealed necessity (hence "nessans") which motivated the
"nice and" regular attendance of school; for those "nice" competitive little
"spelling bees," in which everyone strove to be "the bee's knees," ultimately
entailed instruction in competitive egotism and so really meant training in
"business" ("beesknees") -and business much of the same sort that haunts
our "hugest commercial emporialist" in the night. In more relaxed extents
of the dark, all this tension disintegrates. "Too soon [like tomorrow] are
coming tasbooks and goody, hominy bread and bible bee" (256.17-18)-
the "taskbooks," placed by "father" (Co. tas) in the "satchel" (Du. boeken-
tas), which teach one to be "good, homily-bred, and bibled."

How these "tasbooks" enter the head is illustrated particularly well in a
paragraph that brings an end to all the children's gaming in "the Mime of
Mick, Nick and the Maggies" (257.3-28). The paragraph takes the rhythm
of a nursery rhyme entitled "Old Daddy Dacon" ("Old Daddy Dacon/Bought
a bit of bacon") ; but the lilt of the rhyme is violently and insistently broken
on prepositions whose objects are parenthetically displaced by a string of
admonitions, familiar because familial, of this kind:
like (You'll catch it, don't fret, Mrs Tummy Lupton! Come indoor, Scoffynosey, and
shed your swank!) ...
to (The nurse'll give it toyou, stickypots! And you wait, my lasso, fecking [stealing]
the twine!) ...
of (You're well held now, Missy Cheekspeer, and your panto's off! Fie, for shame,
Ruth Wheatacre, after all the booz [boss] said!) ...
for (Ah, crabeyes, I have you, showing off to the world with that gape in your
stocking!) . . . (257.12-24)
What we hear in the harsh conflict that wrecks the lilt of the nursery rhyme
with the voice of parental admonition is the process that creates the Daily
World and its objects-for distorted objects precisely are what will one day
appear in the gaps occupied by those parentheses. As father ("Old Daddy
Dacon/Bought a bit of bacon" ) brings home the "beacon" (257.15 [so to "en-
lighten"]), doors and possibilities shut forever (257.28), nursery rhymes
vanish, play ends (257.31ff.), and from little childish "tweedledeedums"
and "twiddledeedees" (258.24), "theworrild" and its "unhappitents" (258.21,
22 [and "worry" and "unhappiness"]) begin coming to their dark and
troubled light. "So now, to thalk thildish thorne ... we are doing to thay one
little player before doing to deed" (461.28-30 [and before leaving the "play"
world of the dream and the Evening World, to resume somber "prayer" and the
"doing" of adult "deeds"): "0 Loud, hear the wee beseech of thees of each
of these thy unlitten ones" (259.3-4). "Prayfulness! Prayfulness" (601.29
["pray" for more "playfulness"]).
0, by the way, yes, another thing occurs to me. You[,] let me tell you, with the
utmost politeness, were very ordinarily designed, your birthwrong was, to fall in
with Plan, as our nationals should, as all nationists must, and do a certain office
(what, I will not tell you) in a certain holy office (nor will I say where) during
certain agonising office hours (a clerical party all to yourself) from such a year to
such an hour on such and such a date atso and so much a week pro anno. (190.10-17)
The details parenthetically suppressed here do not need to be told to anyone

because everyone already knows them anyway: just fill in the blanks with
the appropriate personal details, and "Pity poor Haveth Childers Every-

where" (535.34-35). And if you pity him, "'tis sore pity for his innocent
poor children" (47.13).
"Anxious to pleace" (II3.34 [and "to police"], the letter-carrying and
"civilized" side of HCE's mind ("Show'm the Posed") destroys an enormous
range of possibilities and potentials by banishing and outcasting-much as
civilization outcasts "lepers"-"that babe, imprincipially, my leperd breth-
ern, the Puer, ens innocens," out of whom he grew in principia (483.20-21
[L. "in the beginning"; L. puer, "boy"]). "Been ike hins kindergardien?"
(483.25 ["Am I my brother's keeper?"]), Shaun asks of this "lepered" "other"
(252.14,408.17,25 ["brother"])-just as Cain asked of Abel (Gen. 4:9). And
just as Cain's killing of Abel, like Romulus's of Remus, made possible the
genesis and building of first cities (Gen. 4:17), so the perpetration in our
own minds of "the young persons removal act" upon the "first mover" out of
whom we all grew (483.27) surely insures our socialized adjustment in the
cities of the Daily World, but also destroys an enormous resourcefulness and
energy born in "childhide." In "Here Comes Everybody," the Wake shows us,
"the child, a natural child, ... wouldbewas kidnapped at an age of recent
probably, possibly remoter" (595.34-36). The Wake, because the night does,
brings it back.
For "I have regions [not reasons] to suspect ... that [this] 'little man' is a
secondary schoolteacher under the boards of education" (166.20-22 [and
not on them]) who may have a lot to teach "youth" (224.28, 432.17 [and
"you"]) about "tie taughts" (527. I ["thy thoughts"]) -and not least by
showing you how deeply and badly those "thoughts" have been "tied taut,"
precisely because they have been "taught"-"cut short into instructual
primers by those in authority for the bittermint of your soughts" (440.24).
Indeed, "it may be, tots wearsense" (75.3 ["that wheresince"]) all kinds of
brainy "sense" have been "worn" into "all us kids" (276.L3) and former
"tots" by "awethorrorty" (hence "wearsense"), those in authority "whose
told his innersense" (229.36) "stole his innocence" precisely when they
"told him inner sense": "our breed and better class is in [a] brood and bitter
pass" (237.32-33 ["bread and butter" evoking the family]). "Which every
lad and lass in the lane knows. Hence" (600.3-4):
"Whoopsabout a plabbaside ofplobbicides ... poison kerls"? (331.17-18
["boys and girls"]). Addressed to all of us grown-up "poisoned churls" (Ger.
Kerl)-" (now you know it's true in your hardup hearts!)" (396.10-II)-
the question invites us to contemplate a "plebicide" of the "plebiscite"-a
rubbling of the conventional legacy transmitted unconsciously through
generations and through authorized language-by means of a generally

play-capable "whooping about" through the "childlit" instrumentality of a
language like Wakese. And it also invites us to wonder what would happen
if all the energy and vitality buried with "childhide" could be made to work
to "Here Comes Everybody's" advantage, rather than buried.
To see precisely what is at stake here, we need only consider Joyce's career
as a writer of fiction: it begins with the phrase "there was no hope" (D, 9),
in the first sentence of a story about a boy who is afraid to eat crackers in
public lest the sound of his chewing "make too much noise" and disturb
others (D, 15). To measure the distance that Joyce traveled in the time that
moved him from the hearing of hell-fire sermons (P, I I I), into the wri ting of
that bleak phrase and story, through the capitalized "Yes" that ends Ulysses,
and into Finne8ans Wake is to see what the wakening of that sleeping giant
might do in one person's life: "Rockaby, babel, flatten a wall" (278.L4 [the
return, with a vengeance, of the repressed». If the Wake is something of a
"torytale," then, it is all the more crucially a "torytale" with extreme "rep-
trograd leanins" (351.27-28 ["retrograde leanings"». For were it un-
leashed in Here Comes Everybody with as magnificently productive a lack
of shame as it was unleashed in the writing of the Wake, the slumbering
giant buried inside would release a force of potentially revolutionary mag-
nitude (one capable, like "Lenin's," of turning a "Petrograd" inside out and
into a "Leningrad") .
"One of the most murmurable loose carollaries" growing out of these con-
siderations (294.7 [a very "loose corollary," its logic best illustrated in the
work of "Lewis Carroll"» is that one must become a child again if one is to
read the Wake. Joyce is hardly being obscure when he tells his reader that the
letter buried in the body at the Wake "was folded with cunning, sealed with
crime, uptied by a harlot, undone by a child" (94.8-9 [not necessarily a
professor]): "Joke and Jilt will have their tilt" (290.F2). Everyone trains, in
the Daily World, to be a brainy little "pantosoph" (Gr. "all knowing"), but
in the Evening World, "your panto's off" (257.20), so that genuinely to en-
gage the Evening World and "the Nursin8 Mirror," its reader must relearn
"Jests and the Beastalk with a little rude hiding rod" (307.FI): that "Bea-
stalk," in part, suggests "baby talk" ; but also a "beanstalk" like that shown
rising from the "unfettered belly" (567.5) of the sleeping giant whose "rude
little rod" is featured prominently in Relief Map B. Propelled by "the It with
an itch in it" (268.4 [Ger. Id, "it"]), this rod has as a primary purpose PLEA-
SURE-of a kind which, the Wake suggests, most grown-up "poisoned kerls"
do not have the faintest idea at all.

"He who runs may read," as they proverbially say in the Daily World. "Ac-
cording to the Nursing Mirror" (46.25), antithetically, "he who runes may
rede it on all fours" (18.5-6). And since "all's fair on all fours, as my in-
structor unstrict me" (295.21-22)-"childhood's age being aye the shame-
least" (227.34)-"the runes of the gamest game" mapped out by all this
phrasing (279.FL19-20) encourage a return to "childhide" and enrollment
in a "Newschool" (327.8) whose "unstrict[ors]" do not teach "the dully ex-
pressed" but guide us "through their laughing classes" (526.35-36 [hilari-
ously, as if Through the Looking Glass]) : "there is no school today" at the Wake
(620.rr-I2 [largely because it is night]). Given an "overgrown babeling" as
a hero, then, one ought to "try to analyse ... as though he, a notoriety,
a foist edition, were a wrigular writher neonovene babe" (29L21-28 [L.
"newly born"]). To do this is not necessarily to intellectualize this "analec-
tual pygmyhop" (268.28-29 [note the "hopping" little "pygmy" in this "in-
tellectual pick-me-up"]), but to engage in a profound form of "childsplay"
(50LI1) whose purposive latter end is waking-up of the "deadhead" and the
world. Since "a brat, alanna, can choose from so many" possibilities (270.4-
5 [Gael. a leanbh, "child"]), while the rule-governed adult may not, one
must "fast" become "in ludubility [playfulness] learned. Facst. Teak off that
wise head!" (607.3 [and all the more particularly ifit's wooden]). "Get busy,
kid!" (477.14). "Gee up, girly!" (rr2.6). "And keep the kids bright!" (469.32-
33). Through his penman, after all, Joyce tells his reader only what he told
Frank Budgen when he said that the Wake was "basically simple." "My child,
know this": "I am simpliciter arduus [L. "simply difficult"], ars ofthe schoo,
Freeday's child in loving and thieving" (487.35, 33-34) ["Friday's child is
loving and giving," while "freeday" simply designates the night]).
As Mink has noted in the Gazetteer (p. 243), Joyce is fond of referring in
the Wake to the "Mannekin-Pis, the statue (and fountain) of a pissing boy
behind the Hotel de Ville" (or City Hall) in Brussels (17.2, 58.10, 207.14,
267.F2, 329.4, 334.35). The statue of this "wee mee mannikin" (576.15 [see
figure ILl]) evidently struck Joyce-and in part, no doubt, because it has
much the same crafted structure as the Wake itself, whose penman, adept at
"nameless shamelessness" (182.14), makes much the same three-word state-
ment behind the backs of "those in authority" and everywhere lifts into
consciousness "the shifting about of the lassies, the tug of love of their lads"
and" a great deal of merriment, hoots, screams, scarf drill, cap fecking [steal-
ing], ejaculations of aurinos, reechoable [re-echo-able] mirthpeals and gen-
eral thumbtonosery" (253.25-28). We see such "mirth" and "general thumb-

Figure I I. I. Mannekin-Pis
tonosery" illustrated in the Wake's childish pictographs (30S.FI & 2), the
second showing healthy little nibbles taken out of the bones ofthe "old folk-
ers" (30S. IS ["fuckers"]) by "the babes that mean too"; the first announcing
the arrival of an "anticheirst" (30S.FI) which is at once optimistic, since
the coming of the "anti-Christ" would signal, like the night, the end of his-
tory and the establishment of a new earth; and also bitter, since tutelage
into use of the opposable thumb (Gr. cheir, "hand") means the beginning of
the end of "holy childhood" (ISS.IO) and the death of innocence. "Shoe-
pisser pluvious" (451.36 [and not "Jupiter Pluvius"]), finally, is the reigning
deity and watermaker in the Wake, as he is in The New Science and in the
night.
Readers of science fiction are fond of claiming that it is the only form of
imaginative literature that takes the future seriously. Not really. Since it
imagines the future, in large, by projecting forward through the years the
technological trends and scientific discoveries of the present, it fails to see

that the future will not take place in a field of vacant objects-weapons or
spacecraft, for instance-abandoned by "the old folkers," or in any form of
Cartesian "outer space" at all. The future that will rain down upon the
earth exists in the minds of children who are growing up and learning "an-
guish" now and whose adaptable persistence through the ages the Wake
celebrates in its recurrent quotation of a beautiful sentence from Edgar
Quinet;9 and it is also, under the aspect of "tomorrow," awakening right
now in "tie taughts" (527.2 ["thy thoughts"]): "Ideal Present Alone Produces
Real Future" (303.L3). Coming to light out of darkness now as millions of
Finnegans wake, that future, too, is what the Wake, as a reconstruction of
the night, is necessarily about. For the "wee mee mannikin" drifting uncon-
sciously through "the Nursina Mirror" toward his rude awakening in the
Daily World "is childsfather to the City" (15.8); "the first mover" of the hu-
man cosmos out of whom, in the morning and at the beginning of time
(483.27), all the splintered appearances of the Daily World will emerge;
"whoses wishes [are] the farther to my thoughts" (147.19-20 [because they
historically "father" and perenially stretch and "farther" them]). It is into a
consciousness of the immense potential borne by this child and buried in
"Here Comes Everybody" that the Wake, because the night does, in part
seeks to waken its reader. As the book moves toward its close and the dawn-
ing of a new day on earth, its vision focuses on "a youth in his florizel, a boy
in innocence, peeling a twig, a child beside a weenywhite steed. The child
we all love to place our hope in for ever" (621.30-32). And that child goes
back a long way.

CHAPTER TWELVE
HAnna Livia
Plurabelle" :
A Riverbabble Primer
RIVER-NAMES
On "Anna Livia Plurabelle," the showpiece of Finneaans Wake, Joyce said he
was "prepared to stake everything" (L, III, 163): "either the end of Part Ib-
is something," he claimed, "or I am an imbecile in my judgment of lan-
guage" (L, I, 249). To Ezra Pound he wrote of the "nervous collapse" into
which the writing of the episode cast him; to Valery Larbaud, of the labor it
exacted: "What a job! 1200 hours of work on 17 pages. She has grown-river-
wise-since the night you heard her ... " (L, III, 164, 165). He released all
these notices, moreover, while working in 1927 on only the eighth of seven-
teen distinct revisions through which the chapter moved between its con-
ception in 1923 and its completion, with Finneaans Wake's, in 1939. 1
Critics who have studied the chapter have confirmed what Joyce himself
publicized and everyone knows: "hundreds of river-names are woven into
the text. I think it moves" (L, I, 259). By October, 1927, Joyce estimated that
he had worked 350 river-names into "Anna Livia," and within a month
wrote of having "woven into the printed text another 152" (L, I, 261). Read-
ers given to calculating these things estimate that the final version of the
chapter contains anywhere from eight hundred to a thousand rivernames,2
so to quantify a puzzle about whose quality James Atherton is perhaps most
drily eloquent: "probably the most widely known fact about Finneyans
Wake is that it contains hundreds of river names. But nobody has ever been
able to suggest what purpose is served by this inclusion of names, except
perhaps the reader will unconsciously absorb an effect of rivers .... " 3
If the chapter was joyce's showpiece, then, it has also highlighted the
many eccentricities and implausibilities for which Finneyans Wake rapidly
became notorious. Rightly calling the "tour de force of riparian geography"
put to play in "Anna Livia" the feature of the chapter on which it "must
stand or fall," Fred L. Higginson, like many readers, finally judges all the
river-naming "a mere device"-a device motivated not by any discernible
principle but purely by obsession. "Searching for rivers to fit the text was
done not only by Joyce," he writes, "but, rumor has it, also by colleagues,
amanuenses, a grandchild, and houseguests: anyone who would feed the
obsession." 4
Reaction to so strange and mere a "device" has varied widely. On the one
hand, there are those who believe that "such a labor does not surpass the
importance of certain 'parlor games' ," hardly offering "a new way of lead-
ing toward regions still unknown," but rather "the manifestation of a dille-
tantism and of extreme estheticism." 5 On the other hand, there is the view
of James Stephens that "Anna Livia Plurabelle is the greatest prose ever writ-
ten by a man" (]], 617). Falling somewhere between these two extremes and
deferring to Joyce's assertions that parts of the Wake were "pure music,"
"pleasing to the ear" (]], 703; L, I, 341). much of the criticism on "Anna
Livia" justifies its fascination with the chapter by impressionistic ally ap-
pealing to its "flowing" sonority and "sound sense," typically noting that
"many parts of Earwicker's story are aesthetically satisfying for the sound
alone."6 Not many readers, however, are likely to struggle through very
many pages of prose so tortuous as the Wake's simply because, though they
may not mean anything, they sound nice. River-names, moreover, are only
the most obvious eccentricity of a chapter in which yet other readers have
also discovered little streaks of "kissuahealing with bantur" (204.3 ["Kiswa-
hili" certainly and perhaps "Bantu"])' references to "escumo" (198.2 [Es-
kimo]) , and riffs of Dutch not atypical of the Wake as a whole. These
features of the chapter are at once extremely clear, since exegetes have ex-
plicated the Wake's foreign languages over and over again; and yet they are
not very clear at all, since few readers ever address the interesting question
of why the Swahili, for example, should be there at all.?
Still, somewhere amid all these odd findings and conflicting views, there
is a vast discrepancy. While Joyce claimed that the writing of the episode
"Anna Livia Plurabelle" 337

exhausted him, the scholarship portrays him casually flipping through
Swahili dictionaries and the indices of atlases and, simply to indulge man-
nerisms, popping African words and the names of rivers into an originally
clear English text at an alarmingly feeble-minded rate-the English" 'upper'
becom[ing] 'wupper' (a river)," for instance, and" 'lower' becom[ing] 'lauar,'
adding the river Laua," somewhere in the three years between 1924 and 1927
(206.31).8 Since many of the Wake's eccentricities-its resort to obscure for-
eign languages, its tendency to catalogue and list things, and its purported
appeal to "sound sense"-become most evident in "Anna Livia," we might
make the chapter something of a test case of the book as a whole. All of the
chapter's strangest peculiarities will resolve into a stunning simplicity if we
only continue to read the book as a "reconstruction of the nocturnal life"
endured by "one stable somebody." To appreciate fully the quality of the re-
construction undertaken in this part of the Wake, then, the wakeful reader
should once again fall into the "eyewitless foggus" and "blank memory" of a
man "tropped head" by recalling only what it was like to have been asleep
in the middle of last night. Access to one of these reaches of the dark is
afforded by the last paragraph of "Anna Livia":
Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice
bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thorn Malone? Can't hear with bawk
of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho. talk save us! My foos won't moos. I feel as old
as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia's daughtersons. Dark hawks
hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of
John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night
now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside
the rivering waters of. hitherandthithering waters of. Night! (215.31-216.5)
The oddest feature of this paragraph-and one which has led many read-
ers to reject Joyce's intimations that the Wake has "one stable somebody" as a
hero-is its apparently absolute lack of bearing on HCE, who is not simply
absent from the scene, but not even talked about. That would be exactly
the point: since our "belowes hero," having "tropped head," "is not all there,
and is all the more himself since he is not so," the paragraph is representing
his "Real Absence" (507.3-4, 536.5-6)-and doing so very effectively. Like
a dream, whose manifest features everywhere reveal latent signs of the
sleeper's "presence," however, so all the superficial details in this passage
ultimately point to HCE's underlying "prisonce" (536.24 [his sleepily "ar-
rested" "presence"]). We learn, for instance, in a yawned sonority, that a
"heavy" and "ho head halls"; and "the gravitational pull perceived by cer-
tain fixed residents" in the region of that "bulkhead" (100.32, 511.24 [a

"head" so "bulky" it cannot be moved]) moreover extends through space to
feet: "my foos won't moos" (Ger. Foos, "foot") tells us that those feet lie
there as movelessly as "moss" (Ger. Moos). Much the same "gravitational
pull" stratifying this "unknown body" (96.29), its "most besetting of ideas"
being as always "the formation ... of a ... stratum" (76.2-5), also moves
internally to still its jaw and tongue: "talk" is "balked." Pandimensional in-
ertia has rooted earthwards this entire "landshape," beneath which lies the
body of the book's sleeping giant, "heavy as yonder stone," as it stretches
characteristically from "ho head" ("Howth" head) to "feet" (see reliefmap).
Not simply his body, but his perceptions seem comparably overcome by
the night's "sense arrest" (5°5.31). Accumulating at the end of a chapter
through much of which" 'tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw"
(213.15), all those "bats" remind us to "keep black!" ("flittering bats," "bawk
of bats"): "who could see?" (213.7). And our "deafadumped" hero (590.1),
"deaf as a yawn" throughout the "hole affair" (200.15), seems also unable to
hear ("Can't hear. ... Can't hear"). Less fully perhaps than at other times
in the night, he just lies there dead to the world, for all he is able to "no" at
his wake, traveling into "moss" and loam beneath a "stone" beneath a tree
("My foos won't moos" "I feel as old as yonder elm"; "I feel as heavy as
yonder stone").
Since the paragraph bears such a richly articulated content, however, not
everything about our hero can be quite fully dead to the world; and because
everything in the paragraph gets there by way of his "overhearing" the gossip
of two washerwomen, we should begin to conceive of him being only" all
ears" (169.15). "Earwicker, that patternmind, that paradigmatic ear, recep-
to retentive as his of Dionysius" (70.35-36), is inevitably, at this moment of
the night, maintaining his ever-vigilant and watchful "earwitness" (5.14)
on the world through ears that just won't close. And at this moment in "his
otological life" (310.21), as he "overhears" the dialogue of two invisible
washerwomen, his ever-wakened ears have a very confusing choice to make:
they can turn their anxiously vigilant attention outward, to radioecholo-
cate with the acumen of a "bat" and the intensity of a "hawk" the "field-
mice" creeping in at the corners of his bedroom, the "bats" flitting around in
the night, or whatever might be rustling out there in the dark ("flittering
bats," "fieldmice," "bats," "dark hawks hear"). Or they can relax, turn
inward, fall into the rest of the sleeping body, and listen there. As this
brief foray into the "science of sonorous silence" or "camparative accous-
tomology" should suggest (23°.22-23,598.23-24), HCE indeed "can't hear"
by the "acoustics" to which he is "accustomed" by day (hence "accous-

tomology" )-but only because a deafening rush of waters everywhere au-
dible at the background of the world threatens to drown all hearing out. If
his "ho head halls," it also "echoes" (Ger. halle), with the dialogue of
two washerwomen whose speech in turn echoes wildly of all those waters
("Can't hear ... with the waters of. The chittering waters of.... Can't
hear with ... thim liffeying waters of.... the rivering waters of"). What
these deafening waters would be is suggested both by the absolute indistinc-
tion between "them" and "him" (in "thim")-and also by a passage from
the "Sirens" episode of Ulysses in which Bloom observes the two barmaids
in the Ormond Hotel holding a seashell to each other's ears:
Bloom through the bardoor saw a shell held at their ears. He heard more faintly
that that they heard, each for herself alone, then for each other, hearing the plash of
waves, loudly, a silent roar. ... The sea they think it is. Singing. A roar. The blood is
it. Souse in the ear sometimes. Well, it's a sea. Corpuscle islands. (U, 281)
Much this kind of "souse in the ear" ("the sound of water surging against
something" [OED]) would be the sonority that the Wake's "earsighted"
sleeper "overhear[s], in his secondary personality as a[n] ... underreared"
(143.9-10, 38.27-28) throughout "Anna Livia Plurabelle." Although "his
braynes [are] coolt parritch" throughout the night (74.13 ["cold porridge"]),
"his heart's adrone, his bluidstreams acrawl" (74.14), and his ever-open ears
are inevitably suffused with the "pulse of [his] slumber" and "the heartbeats
of sleep" (428.16,4°3.5). Indeed, as we learn elsewhere in the Wake, when-
ever HCE happens to rest in absolute "peace," "he would seize no sound
from cache or cave beyond the flow of wand was gypsying water, telling him
now, telling him all ... " (586.33-35 [Da. vand, "water"]).
The relevance of the sound of such flowing water to "Anna Livia Plurabelle"
and to the man who dreams at the Wake will now become apparent if we
turn to the literature on dreams. "An increased flow of blood through the
ear," according to Havelock Ellis, can "furnish the faint rudimentary noises
which, in sleep, may constitute the nucleus around which hallucinations
crystallize. "9 Freud says much the same thing when he observes that "in
dreams," "all the current bodily sensations assume gigantic proportions. "10
The idea, in fact, is so commonplace in early modern literature on sleep
and dreams that one finds it summarily treated in the eleventh Encyclopedia
Britannica, the source book that Joyce demolished in order to write the
Wake: there one learns that "besides the eye the ear may supply material for
dreams, when the circulation of the blood suggests rushing waters or similar
ideas." II

In order to plumb the "real life" underlying that part of the night recon-
structed in "Anna Livia," therefore, we need only heed the good advice that
Joyce extends right at the threshhold of his "black and blue" (or dark)
"book" (L. Liber lividus): "lift we our ears, eyes of the darkness, from the
tome of Liber Lividus" (14.29-30), and then, holding them carefully poised
there, listening in very attentively to the dim double wash of blood barely
audible right now "in the far ear" (23.22-23), simply share in the "gossip"
that our sleeping hero "overhears"-severely overhears-by keeping our
eyes fixed on the page. All of the obscure terms in the following lines are
marked by a superscript dagger and identified upon first occurrence in the
table of water laid at the bed of the page; and oddly, they refer us to nothing
more than arteries and vessels of moving water (rivers):
How does it tummel t? Listen now. Are you listening? Yes, yes! Idneed I am! Tarntyour
oret ouset ! Essonne t inne t ! (201.2-4)
WeIP, I never heard the like of that! Tell me moher. Tell me moatst. t (198.27-28)
o but you must, you must really! Make my hear it gurgle gurgle, like the farest
gargle gargle in the dusky dirgle darglet ! ... But you must sit still. Will you hold
your peace t and listen well. .. ? (206.16- 18,207.30-31)
Oceans t of Gaud t , I moseP hear that!

Mezha t , didn't you hear it a deluget of times, ufer t and ufer t , respund t to spond t? You
deed t , you deed t ! (214.7-8)
Are you sarthint suirt? ... Isset t that? ... Ay, you're right. I'm eptet to forget-
ting .... It's that irrawaddyngt I've stoket in my aarst.It all but husheth the lethestt
zswound t . (203.8-9,214.13,208.4,214.9-10)
Went, of all the ones ever I heard! ... where is it? ... I've lostt it! Aimihif! ... So
near and yet so far! But 0, gihont! I lovat t a gabbert. I could listen to mauret and
moravar t again. (200.28-29,213.5-9)
Onon t ! Onon t ! tell me more. Tell me every tiny teignt. I want to know every single
inguIt. (201.21-22)
tRivers: Tummel (Scotland), Tarn (France), Ore (Sweden), Ouse (England). Essonne (France),
Inn (Europe); Dargle (Ireland), Peace (Canada); Aude (France), Moselle (Europe); Mezha
(USSR), Ufa (USSR), Dee (England); Sarthe (France), Suir (Ireland), Isset (USSR), Epte (France),
Irrawaddy (Burma), Stoke (England); Aar (Switzerland and Germany), Husheth (Annotations,
214). Lethe (Hades); Lost (US). Aimihi (Iran), Gihon (Eden [Genesis 2:13]), Lovat (USSR), Gabir
(Annotations, 213). Maur (Malacca), Aure (France). Morava (Europe); Onon (USSR), Teign (En-
gland), Ingul (USSR).
Other references to water: tarn, moat, oceans, the Deluge, Ger. Ufer ("riverbank"), It. sponda
("riverbank"), "pond," Fr. onde ("wave"). Internal references to "wells" of various sorts-for in-
stance, "artesaned wellings" (209.33). and "the holy well of Mulhuddart" (206.18)-make it clear
that the interjective "well" is among these terms.
Otological terms: Da. ¢re ("ear"). in "Tarn your ore"; L. audire ("to hear"). in "Oceans of Gaud,
"sound" in "zswound."
"Anna Livia Plurabelle" 34 1

"Are you in the swim or are you out?" (204.26-27 [and do you therefore
have water moving in your ears or do you not?]). The transformation is
magical: "bring[ing] to mind the ... out of sight" (200.25-26), these lines
invite infinite exegesis, and not least because they literally mean, in visibly
graven letters, much what the invisible and aliterate sound of the blood-
stream moving through a human ear also "means"-"liquorally" (321.1)-
as it speaks, "so near and yet so far," to the person unconsciously encoiled
everywhere at its center. Even if our hero seems not to hear "the least
sound" in "the Lethean swoon" of sleep because of some vague "wadding
stuck in [his] ears" ("it all but husheth the lethest zswound"), he actually
"overhears" a great deal: arteries and vessels of running water. And while
their sonority reminds him that he might easily rise toward auditory vigi-
lance by "turning his ear out," the lethargic undertug of sleep makes him
antithetically "tarn t [his] oret ouset " (into arteries of water) , so that he "es-
sonne[s]t inne t " ("listens in") only to fluvial "irrawaddyngt ... stoket in
[his] aarst": to vessels and veins of moving water. Momentarily we will re-
gard these "lyne[s]t" (209.18) as the nucleus of "Anna Livia," and as they
suggest, substantial parts of the chapter are not directly" about" Anna Livia
at all, but rather-like many other of those ostensibly transitional passages
which in fact hold the chapter together-about degrees of hearing, or of
not hearing, or of never hearing;12 as they "make my hear it" (206.16-17),
they "make me hear my ear" and its "hearing." Particled together ofterms
largely signifying arteries of moving water-rivers-these lines orient the
chapter at the interior of Earwicker's ear, which "overhears," in the absence
of all other sound, the vitality of its own bloodstreamY
Study of these lines will suggest at once why Joyce, launching yet another
of many "imeffible tries at speech unasyllabled" (183.14-15) and once again
turning obscurely "outlex" (169.3), would have ransacked atlases in order
to find a "vocabulary" supple enough to bring to mind a tangible reality
always there in the background of the world and always "lying below" con-
sciousness (213.5). Far from obscuring the chapter by "arnoment[ing]t"
it with the "Naama[s]t" of hundreds of arteries of water (208.8; 204.5
["names"]), he was highlighting essential "hydeaspectst " of the chapter
(208. I I); what readers have largely seen as a "mere device" motivated by an
eccentric obsession was in fact an elucidative necessity crucial to the for-
mation of a text representative of the sound of waters washing through the
ear. "Mercedt muldet !" "Ysselt that the limmatt?,' (212.26, 198.13).
tRivers: Lyne (England); Arno (France); Na'aman (Palestine); Hydaspes (India); Merced (US),
Mulde (German), Ysel (Netherlands), Limmat (Switzerland).

The skeptical reader will perhaps object: "Where do you get that wash?
This representation does not accord with my experience" (509.1-2). Yes and
no: preoccupied by day with an Irish reality that sends brawls into his bar-
room, nightmares into his sleep, and, not least, those fieldmice into his bed-
room, our hardworking bartender would no doubt find the sound of his own
bloodstream so trivial as to let it "sankht neathe t " consciousness entirely
(202.32-33). But in the night, when a quotidian reality held in place by
monuments of graven letters, audible gossip, and "awethorrorty" crumbles
out of mind and the thinking of the body moves in, his blood enwraps him,
like an undergarment (200.25-26), and it has a lot to say:
Tell me quick and dongu t so crould! ... 0 gig goggle of giguels t . I can't tell you how!
It's too screaming to rizo, rabbit t it all! Minneha, minnehi t minaaehet , minnehot!
(206.8, 14- 16)
Not least of what these sparklingly comic lines afford us is some insight into
what our "belowes hero" has on and everywhere in his mind in the middle of
dreamless sleep ("0 go in, go on, go an!" [204.27]): his bloodstream, surely,
sounding in the "tropped head" to let him "no" that he is not "the presence
(of a curpse)," but a living "presence, of course." News of its garrulous in-
cessance somewhere out there in the dark ("Where did I stop? Never stop!
Continuarration! ... Garonne, garonne t !" [205.13-15]) is therefore glad-
dening. Even if mysteriously ("I can't tell you how"), it "tells" him-where
the pronoun here and in the recurrent construction "tell me, tell me, tell
me" might be understood as a direct and not an indirect object; and what it
refers to as it "tells" him, "quickening" him and insuring his vitality ("tell
me quick"), is only what the sound of washing water audible in your own
ear also refers to as it "tells" you: "Minnehaha," "laughing water." 14
The vague sonority of the liquid washing away "in the far ear" will now
compel our attention because, whether one is conscious of it or not, it has
been there since the beginning of the world ("Mezha t , didn't you hear it a
deluge t of times, ufer and ufert"); because nothing in the known universe
takes place outside of the sound of its sound, enveloped within which and
nowhere outside of which is the story of a life; and because in parts of the
night, it is all that the Wake's "belowes hero" can "no." All of the arterial
"lyne[s]t" from "Anna Livia" that we have so far examined begin intro-
ducing us to the sonority of our hero's bloodstream and to unconscious au-
ditory associations attached to it "the like of [which] you nievert heard"
tRivers: Sankh (India), Neath (Wales); Dongu (Africa), Giguela (Spain), Rabbit (US), Min
(China), Mina (Africa), Minho (Portugal); Garonne (France), Nievre (France).

(206.7-8) -"nivert," "nivert," "nevart" (203.36) -largely because the pho-
netic apperception of English and "the dully expressed" (500.15- 16) gets in
the way. Hence Joyce's eloquently terse defense of the chapter "to a friend
who complained it was just dada": "It is an attempt to subordinate words to
the rhythm of water," he said (fl, 564 [and not the opposite, an attempt
to subordinate the rhythm of water to words)) .IS
The dim double wash heard "in the far ear" will further merit our study
because it affords us the example of an articulate sound-system, a language
for which "language" is not at all the right word, more murky and illegible
by far than anything writ in Finneyans Wake, that streams eternally into the
ear out of a "mouthless face" without a source (101.30). Joyce calls this
"affluvial flowandflow" "lappish language" in the Wake (404.1,66.18-19),
and "Anna Livia Plurabelle" is its intricately inflected text. No one would
likely want to argue that this sound "sangnifying nothing" (515.8 [Fr. sany,
"blood"]) is not, nonetheless, "deeply sangnificant" (357.15): if you can't
hear it, you're dead. A sort of signified without a signifier-" (we need no
blooding paper to tell it neither)" (101.19-20)-this obscure liquid rush
therefore forces a reader of the Wake into the difficult position of having to
"know by heart" (196.14 [as opposed to brain)). Or, as the sound of blood
beating away "in the far ear" right now invites one to wonder, "Are you in
the swim or are you out? ... I mean about what you know. I know right
well what you mean"; "did they never shareet you ebro t at skolt , you anti-
abecedarian?" (204.26-28, 198.19-20 [not "show you Hebrew at school"]).
By way of this second question, Joyce frankly "call[s] a spate a spate"
(198.19 [a "spate" is a sudden rising in a river]) and self-consciously ac-
knowledges the peculiarities of the arterial language woven through the
pages of "Anna Livia," which he variously calls "ebrot " (198.19) and "re-
ussischert Honddu t " (198.18). Not "Hebrew" and not" r:ussischer Hindu"
(Ger. russischer, "Russian"), but only arteries of moving water, these terms
make the "affluvial flowandflow" of "Anna Livia" a profoundly "antiabe-
cedarian" antilanguage whose "meanamt " (214.34 [not "meaning"]) be-
comes apparent not in letters, but in the sound that floods the ear in all the
gaps that fill the ear precisely when the ear stops hearing letters. In order to
"rightly rede t " the chapter (201.28), the conscious reader, doomed though
he may be to pay careful attention to its phonetics and graphemics, ulti-
mately has to "tarn t [his] oret ouset " and study the transformation that takes
tRivers: Nive (France); Neva (USSR); Shari (Africa); Ebro (Spain); Skollis (Greece); Reuss
(Switzerland); Honddu (Wales); Me Nam (Thailand); Rede (England).

place "in the far ear" when he stops reading literate language and "essonne[s]t
inne t " to the "tonet sonora t " (200.13-14) of the "ebro t " that fills the ear out-
side of civilized structure. For if "learning" to "recognize" "what a" lan-
guage like "Hebrew," "Hindu," or English "means" requires one to know an
"alphabet," dutifully "read" "chapbooks," and become "abcedminded" (18.17
[" a-b-c-d-minded"]), then "lerryn[ing]t" to "recknitzt" "wardha t " "language"
like "ebrot" or "Honddut " "meyne[s]t," by contrast, obligates one only to
"no" the "alpheubettt ," "redet " river-riddled "chapboucqst," and become an
adamant "antiabecedarian" (212.20, 214.34, 200.36, 201.28, 206.12, 208.20,
198.20,208.35). Unlike Hebrew or Hindu, moreover, whose "alphabets" are
fixed by patriarchal law and lexicon with changeless graven letters-" aleph,
beth, ghimel, daleth, and so on and so forth"-the "ebro t " and "Honddut " of
which "Anna Livia" is composed are "spilled" (420.33 [not "spelled"]) in an
arterial "alpheubettt " whose "nubileet letters" (205.7)-"alpilla, beltilla,
ciltilla, deltilla" "and soay and soan t and so firtht and so forth t " (194.22-
23, 200.13)-are "linked for the world on a flushcaloured field" "in scarlet
thread" (205.8-9 [in the "flesh" and calor-L. "warmth"-of the sonorous
and "scarlet-threaded" bloodstream]): "I sohnt t zot!" (214.19). Purveying
"sohntt" and "meanamt ," therefore (and not "thought" and "meaning"), in
a form only "all inuendation" (194.32 [all "inundating" "innuendo"]), this
"language" bears obscure "tidings" (194.23 [floods of them]) which in their
totality issue "a letter to last a lifetime" (211.22 [and not a minute more or
less because when it begins, a life may begin, and when it stops, a life
does]). "When you're quite finished with the reading matarial," therefore
(205.20 [the text of ALP]), "tarnt your ore t ouse t," "essonnet inne t ," and
start to "lerrynt" your "ebrot ". "intimologies" (101.17)-bearing in mind
only that these are not, "don't you kennett"? (213.11 [not "ken it"]), "He-
brew etymologies." "If the waters could speak as they flow!" (588.22-23),
they would "meynet " what "Anna Livia" does.
Distinguishing the lexically articulate languages of "Babbel" (199.31
["Babel"]) from the "outlexical" sound of purely fluid "babble," the chapter
accordingly invites its reader everywhere to cross that odd threshhold sepa-
rating phonetics from acoustics, and then again that threshhold separating
the acoustics of the external world from the acoustics of the internal. Ulti-
mately, it requires one to perceive not only differences between the binarily
tRivers: Tone (England). Sonora (Mexico); Lerryn (England); Recknitz (Germany); Wardha
(India); Meyne (France); Alph (Xanadu); Alpheus (Greece); Boucq (Belgium); Nuble (Chile);
Lee (Ireland); Soan (India); Isonzo (italy); Kennet (England).
Other bodies of water: Firth of Forth (Scotland).

opposed phonetic elements that constitute any conventional language, but
differences between all systems predicated on difference and "exsystems"
pure and simple (148.18). The Wake is relatively explicit about this:
•
-When your contraman from Tuwarceathay is looking for righting that is not a good
sign? Not?
-I speak truly, it's a shower sign that it's not.
-What though it be for the sow [sound] of his heart? (490.28-31)
If anyone wakefully conscious right now might be construed as a "country-

man" resident in the Daily World, in other words, his nocturnal counterpart
must be considered an unconscious "contraman" (490.28 [or opposite]); and
while the conscious "countryman" will inevitably see, everywhere he looks,
all seven colors of the spectrum (Gael. tuar ceatha, "rainbow"). the "con-
traman" dwelling in the Evening World, because he is blind, cannot "look" at
or for anything. These lines finally suggest that not simply "looking for
writing," but falling into language generally is "a sure sign" that one is badly
misreading the wet and "showery" "sanscreed" (215.26) of which "Anna
Livia" is composed (it's like "looking," rather than listening, for "the sound
of your heart"). Where the effect of "writing" is to "right" things, by defin-
ing and limiting them according to known rules and "creeds" (hence "right-
ing"), "Anna Livia's" "sanscreed" is "without creed" altogether (hence the
Fr. sans, "without") and does exactly the opposite. To "lerrynt" it, as it
"tells" one (200.36 [not "learn"]), one must "be good and don't foIt in the
sayt" (208.30-31 [or into "saying" and language]): "take my stroke and bend
to your bowt " (206.23 ["to get the bend of the bow," idiomatically, is to
understand]) .
Moving outward from the lines that we have regarded as the nucleus of
"Anna Livia," and backward from the chapter's closing paragraph, we will
now want to note that visible "lyne t " after "lynet " in the washerwomen's
dialogue simply means what the sound of the human bloodstream also
"meyne[s]t," both as it streams through "the presence (of a curpse)" and
as it moves right now, "in the present, of course," beneath consciousness
and the visible surface of the world in the mind of the sympathetic reader.
The chapter is a graphic and phonetic representation of the invisible and
aphonetic form of "meanamt " purveyed by the waters washing away "in the
far ear" of the "tropped head."
tRivers: Fol (Turkey); Bow (Canada and Australia).

Other bodies of water: the sea (in "say").

MORE "UNDERGLIMPSES"
Representative of the chit-chatty "chattahoocheet " (209.22) that makes up
the whole of "Anna Livia," the eclectic lines that we have examined will
now clarify the formal shape of the chapter, which Joyce called" a chatter-
ing dialogue across a river by two washerwomen who as night falls become
a tree and a stone" (L, I, 213). Essential to an understanding of this strange
dialogue is the simple observation that our hero-an absent man who will
not quite listen (198.28-199.10, 199.24-25,32-33, 200.1I-16, 201.24)-lies
at its hidden center both because he is its subject and because he alone "over-
hears" it, even if badly. Throughout "Anna Livia," we find "old Humbert"
(198.28-29 [HCE]) "sittangt sambret on his settt," "dramment and drom-
men t " "and dromingt" (198.34-35, 199.6 ["dreaming and dreaming and
dreaming"])-and so deeply that "you'd think all was dodo t belonging to
him how he d urmed t adranse t in durance t va alt" (199.9- 10 [ "dreamed atrance
in durance vile," like the speaker of Moore's "I dreamt I dwelt in marble
halls"). The wording here tells us in part that the Wake's sleeping giant lies
dead to the world in this part of the night, "holding doomsdag over hun-
selvt " in "Funglus grave" (199.4-5, 198.33 [hence the extinct "dodo," the
"fungus" in the "grave," and the reference to Dublin's "Finglas" area, site of
Prospect Cemetery]); and also that he is corporally "arrested" by sleep, as if
held "under loch t and neaght" (196.20 [hence his "prisonce" "in durance
vile"]): he's asleep (Fr. dodo, "sleep"; [aire dodo, "to go to bed"). As all the
arteries of water that "maguet " up these "lyne[s]t" ultimately suggest (206.9),
he sustains an odd species of "dream" in this stretch of the dark-a dream
woven around the sound of the echoic play of waves of water like those leg-
endarily audible in the dark of "Fingal's Cave" (hence again "Funglus
grave" ) . 16
What "Old Humbert" has primarily in his mind here, as he listens to the
"bloodvein[s]t" and "veslest vett " tangling their ways up out of "the core
of his cushlas" (212.16, 201.23, 203.23-24 [L. cor, "heart"; Gael. cuisle,
"pulse"])-and as he lies, "with Corrigan's pulse and varicoarse veins,"
"in contemplation of the fluctuation and the undification of [its] filimenta-
tion" (209.2-3, 214.23-24)-is his own bloodstream, its "scarlet thread"
"linked for the world on a flushcaloured field" (205.8-9 [the "flesh-colored"
tRivers: Chattahoochee (US); Humber (England), Sittang (Burma), Sambre (Belgium and
France). Sette (Brazil), Drammen (Norway). Drome (France). Dodo (Africa). Durme (Belgium).
Adra (Spain). Adranos (Turkey). Dranse (Switzerland). Durance (France). Vaal (Africa); Humse
(Netherlands); Mague (Ireland); Bloodvein (Canada). Vesle (France). Vet (Africa).
Other bodies of water: Lough Neagh (Ireland).

"warmth" of the body]). 17 Channeling the sonorous flow of moving waters
that "vistulet a hymn, The Heart t Bowed Down," throughout "Anna Livia"
(199.27-28), this "scarlet thread" generates a "meanam t " that we "scheldtt "
(206.26) "rightly rede t " only if again, "in the broadest way immarginable,"
we pursue the most "distant connections" by yielding to a process of free
association whose first and grounding term is the sound of the bloodstream.
For the whole of "Anna Livia" and everything in Finne8ans Wake bearing on
the "character" ofHCE's trigrammatonic consort, ALP, spills up out of and is
written in this sound. So "tune your pipes and fall ahumming" (197.36-
198.1), and "Note the ... Associations" (270.11-14). Most evidently, what
we know to be blood running through the ear (and specifically through "the
juggaleer's veins" [3°0.31; 511.35]) sounds like running water, so that by one
drift of thought, the sonority of his own bloodstream would raise in HCE's
"tropped head"-and more generally than particularly-the memory of
other arteries and channels of running water, and of everything that one
might find "asousiated" with running water (151.29 [the "souse" in "asousi-
ated" refers both to "the sound of water surging against something" and to
the "alcoheren[ce]" of our" absintheminded" hero]) .18 Such "asousiat[ions]"
would explain, of course, the diffuse networking of rivers that pervades the
chapter. Primary among these rivers, for our hero, would be Dublin's River
"Liffey," "Anna Liffey," whose Gaelic spelling is "Life." 19
Both the syllable "Life" and the river to which it refers therefore become
irresolubly bivalent in Finne8ans Wake, designating "two thinks at a time."
There can be no doubt that the sound of water washing away "in the far ear"
reminds Earwicker of the River Liffey, whose geography, as the commentary
has amply shown, "Anna Livia" elaborately explores. On the other hand,
the status of the Liffey in the Evening World is altogether comparable to that
of "Dufblin" (447.23 ["deaf-blind"]). If our hero loses consciousness of
Dublin, "togutter" with his head and all other objects, when he drifts "from
Liff away. For Nattenlaender" (382.27-28 ["from a life" in which the "Liffey"
is objectively knowable, into the Nor. natten land, or "land of night"])' so
too, "obliffious" of the "headth ofhosth" (317.32 ["Head ofHowth"]), must
the "head of [our] host" become "oblivious" of the real-world "Liffey." To dis-
tinguish that river from the river pouring through our hero's vacant mind in
the night, consequently, Joyce calls the darker ofthe two torrents the "lifey"
(203.6), the "lifing" (495.21), or, most explicitly, "the living" (131.13- 14) .20
tRivers: Vistula (Poland and USSR), Heart (US): ScheIdt (Belgium).

Comparably, to distinguish the nocturnal river streaming through the Wake
from Dublin's "Anna Liffey, " whose course one can find charted on any map
of Dublin, he calls the stream of dark water flowing through the "terrian"
depicted in Relief Map B "anny livving," or "anny living," or simply the
"Brook of Life" (185.28, 327.6, 463.10, 264.6 [that "terrian" would be not "the
terrain" of Dublin, but the Wake's rubbled "earthling"]). "As if their lifting
deepunded on it" (310.5-6 [because they and he do]), our hero's ears lie
filled with the rush of the "deep" and "undulant" waters of this river (hence
"deepunded"), which, as all these "spilling[s]" imply (461.3), is largely the
river of his "liffe" (23°.25,447.23): "Lif, my lif!" (328.17).
Another "asousia[tion]." Since the sound of this river pouring away "in
the far ear" is almost impossible to hear, it reminds Earwicker of other
barely audible sounds: for instance, the sound of birds and "flittering bats"
cutting their way through the air (206.19-20, 215.31-32), and of "field-
mice," "rabbit[s]t," "coney[s]t," hare[s]," "otterst," and "wiesel[s]t" slipping
in silence through all the small places and margins of the world (215.32,
206.15, 198.15, 210.15, 214.12, 197.4). Within the Wake, Joyce accordingly re-
fers to the subject of "Anna Livia" as "little ana countrymouse" (553.2
["liffle Anna countrymouse," he wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver, "keeps
me awake half the night"; L, I, 232]). By drawing on these analogies, he
obviously meant to call attention to the virtual imperceptibility of the
sonic reality under his study in "Anna Livia." In parts of the night in which
Earwicker lies lost in the sound of his own bloodstream, in turn, "greater
grown then in the trifle of her days, a mouse, a mere tittle, trots off with
the whole panoromacron picture" (318.8-9): everything "panoramically"
seen by day vanishes in these intervals, as a phenomenal reality ordinarily
altogether negligible fills HCE's "tropped head." "Playing catched and
mythed" with a sound hardly heard, finally (197.22-23 ["cat and mouse"]),
Earwicker's ears also "catch and miss," among the associations they gener-
ate, the sound of whispering and gossip (hence the "myth" in "catched and
mythed"). Gossip, too, the best kind always whispered, is sometimes virtu-
ally impossible to hear-especially if you yourself are its subject. The al-
most inaudible sound of his own blood "overheard" therefore reminds HCE
of what it is like to hear (or not to hear) gossip somewhere in the "land of
the livvey" (308.20).
Out of these aggregating associations, we might now see the chapter's un-
real setting beginning to take shape, as vague gossip being passed back and
tRivers: Rabbit (US), Coney (France), Otter (England), Wiesel (Germany).

forth across the River Life begins to generate" a chattering dialogue." As to
the question of why "Anna Livia," unlike most other parts of the Wake,
should take on the form of a dialogue, reference again to the sound of the
blood purling away at the edges of the audible will yield manifold answers.
"Tarnt your oret ouset," and "listen now": "suchot fuffing a fifeing 'twould
cut you in two!" (199.29-30). If you "essone t inne t " to the sound beating
away "in the far ear," you will in fact hear it "cut[ting] you in two"-"sys-
tomy dystomy" (597.21 [according to the "system" of the heart's "systole"
and "diastole"]). Whether one examines" Anna Livia" as a structured whole
or studies small phrases in it, consequently, one will find the chapter rifted
and cut into all manner of depth less twos.
Representative of the gossipy give-and-take underrunning the entire epi-
sode, all the lines that we have so far examined formally replicate, in their
own way, the presence and absence of sound "in the far ear." For ifone of the
two washerwomen ("Queer Mrs Quickenough" [620.19]) does all the "tell-
ing," filling the dark with an outflush of fluvial "chattahoocheet," the other
("odd Miss Doddpebble" [620.19-20]) impatiently waits in the dead pause
to hear ("Where did I stop? Never stop! Continuarration! You're not there yet.
I amstel t waiting. Garonne, garonne t !" [205.13-15]).21 Rhythmically, more-
over, these and most other lines in "Anna Livia" are partitioned into intri-
cate binary patterns ("stop," "stop"; "garonne, garonne") that exemplify
the "inclination to make jingles" and to increase alliteration which Joyce
exercised while endlessly revising the chapter: 22 "didn't you hear it ... ufer
and ufert, respund to spond t? You deed, you deed t ! I need, I need!" (214.7-9).
Like the larger dialogic structure of the chapter, these "wyeryet rima[s]t"
(200.33 ["weary rhymes"]) everywhere replicate the dim double beat of
blood washing away in the ear; and, by "bring[ing] to mind the gladdest gar-
ments out of sight" (200.25-26), they begin giving us, like Denis Florence
MacCarthy's Under8limpses, "underglimpses" of "investments" (not neces-
sarily underpants) everywhere "lying below" (213.5) the "uniform" appear-
ance of things ("combies" or "combinations" also are "undergarments"):
And what was the wyeryet rima t she made! Odett ! Odett ! Tell me the trentt [trend] of
it while I'm lathering hail t out of Denis Florence MacCarthy's combies. (200.33-35)
Particularly because it derives from the Latin rivalis ("one using the same
stream"), "rivalry" in turn now becomes a formal principle of "Anna Livia,"
tRivers: Sucio (South America); Amstel (Netherlands); Wye (England), Rye (England and Ire-
land), Rima (Nigeria); Odet (France), Trent (England), Hail (Arabia).

riving and rifting it into all manner of twos. The grounding and most evi-
dent of these rivalries is that explicitly dramatized in the chapter, which
makes "rivals" of the two washerwomen and the riverbanks on which they
stand (208.14, 197. I). But since "queer Mrs Quickenough and odd Miss
Doddpebble" resolve, at the end ofthe episode, into "a tree and a stone"-
into versions of "outlexical" Shem and letter-carrying Shaun (215.35,
216.1-2)-we should see that, as in a dream, all things manifest on the sur-
face of the text act only as vectors pointing to far more turbulent rivalries
and conflicts everywhere "lying below" the evident surface of things. Cutting
the reader in two as deeply as they do Earwicker, these "infrarational"
matters make "rivals" of knowing and "not knowing" (209.21 [as of con-
sciousness and unconsciousness]); of knowing by brain and "know[ing] by
heart" (196.14); of meaning and "meanamt ," and "thought" and "sohntt"; of
hearing and not hearing; of immersion in the body and the waters of Life
and removal from the sound of those waters into the deadly hearing of pho-
netic English ("You'll die when you hear" it because it contains, for in-
stance, the phrase "you'll die" [196.5-6]). Finally, too-and only apparently
"against all rhyme and reason"-these rivalries pit "rhyme" against "reason"
(212.16-17): all such phrases as "without rhyme or reason," evoked through-
out Finne8ans Wake (154.30-31, 178.5, 183.13, 212.16, 263.26-27, 478.10,
496.14), make up a peculiar class of idioms "used to express lack of good
sense or reasonableness" (OED, "rhyme," sb. 3b). All ofthem surely apply
to the Wake as a whole and to "Anna Livia" especially, the "meanamt " of
whose "ebrot" appeals less to "reason" through a literal "sense" visible on
the page, than to the ear, through occulted rhymes, rhythms, and "sounds"
buried among the words. 23
Like a dream, the text therefore becomes "a two in one garment" (208.15)
written in a strange form of "franca langua" (198.18-19 [or mixed jargon])
whose right reading requires a reader to do "two [things] add at tammart
(200.31 ["two thinks at a time"]). Ifthe manifest content of the chapter is
susceptible to research in atlases and Swahili dictionaries, its underlying
and "infrarational" sense falls together only in all the sonorous gaps that fill
the ear when the ear turns letters to "litters." This is why the chapter will
never be easy to read and why it will always remain opaque, except as a
parlor game, to anyone approaching it only literalistically-even if the
reader has a fluent knowledge of conversational Eskimo and a steel memory
tRivers: Adda (Italy), Tamar (England).

of all the river-names in the world. For much of what the liquid sonority
reconstructed in the chapter "meyne[s]t" is incomprehensible without some
depth study of "ebrot " "intimologies." If attention to that sound will explain
such formal features of "Anna Livia" as its binary forms and the manifold
puns on river-names, as a case in point, it will now also clarify much of the
chapter's content, which bears primarily on four things: an absent man who
will not listen, genealogies, laundering, and Anna Livia.
Over five-and-a-half pages, the Oxford English Dictionary lists nineteen
definitions of "blood," not the least "sangnificant" of which explains that
"blood is properly treated as the typical part of the body which children in-
herit from their parents and ancestors," uniting them in "blood-relations"
and "blood-relationship[s]" and linking them in bonds of "parentage, lin-
eage, descent," and of "family, kin, race, stock, nationality" (OED, "blood,"
sb. 111.8-13). As another association generated by the sound washing away
"in the far ear" will therefore suggest, "anybloody['s]" "thickerthanwater"
(70.25, 26 ["anybody's" "blood"]) sounds a little different from water be-
cause it is much, much "thicker." "Tarn your oret ouset. Essonet innet ":
Wharnow t are alle t her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria
be to them farther? Allalivial, all alluvial! Some here, more no more, more again
lostt alla stranger. I've heard tell that same brooch of the Shannonst was married into
a family in Spain. And all the Dunders de Dunnes in Markland's Vineland beyond
Brendan's herring poolt takes number nine inyangsee'st hatst . . . . (213.30-36)
What our hero, a man of Irish blood, obscurely "overhears" in "lyne[s]t" like
these, as "all thim liffeying waters of" the night wash through him to tell
him of "all Livia's daughtersons," "the living sons or daughters of" (215.31-
216.2), is little more than what his "bloodvein[s)t" also "tell" him: a tale
told of Irish blood, with Viking filiations, and particularly the blood of his
own family. We might therefore think of passages like these-and "Anna
Livia" is full of them-as "bloodlines," "linked for the world on a flush-
caloured field," that lead "waybashwardst " in time to the place where HCE
was born (202.22-23, 197.9ff.).
Because the heart "beats" and the blood washing away "in the far ear"
makes "washingtones" of sorts (434.22-23), the "tone t sonorat " of these ar-
terial "bloodlines" also reminds HCE of the "beating" sound of "washing"-
and only all the more strongly because being asleep is like being run through
a washing machine in an "Annone Wishwashwhose" (614.2-3 [or "Unknown
tRivers: Warnow (Germany), Aile (Germany and Switzerland), Shannon (Ireland), Yangtze
(China), Hat Creek (US); Wabash (US).
Other bodies of water: "Brendan's Herring Pool" (the Atlantic Ocean; St. Brendan, according to
an Irish legend, discovered America).

Washhouse"; see 614.1-13]). As it waves over the body to replenish it, "mak-
[ingl a newman if anyworn" (596.36), sleep forces everyone in the world to
clean up his act and, no matter who he is, cleanses him of his filthy "hab-
its": overeaters can't eat, overachievers can't achieve, smokers can't smoke,
and drinkers can't drink (cf. 585.36-586.3). It is for this reason, in "Anna
Livia," that" Ireland sober is Ireland stiff" (214. 18 [whereas Ireland drinking
is Ireland awake and mobile]) ; our hero, the "stiff" lying there "hungerstrik-
ing all alone" (199.4) and listening to the waters of his Life churning about
him, is being run through an eight-hour wash cycle of forced sobriety,
his bloodstream acting as an invisible and internalized version of the Dub-
lin Corporation's Main Drainage System-"a side strain of a main t drain"
(2I4.2)-which carries off all the filth and pollution accumulated in "the
body politic" (165.27) and, overnight, runs it off into nothing. 24
Hence the complaints audible behind the beating and washing sound of
our hard-drinking hero's "Life":
Looking at the dirt of it! He has all my water blackt on me. And it steepingt and
stupingt since this time last wik. How many goes is it I wonder I washed it? I know
by heart t the places he likes to saale t, duddurtyt devil! Scorching my hand and starv-
ing my famine to make his private linen public .... My wrists are wrusty rub-
bing the mouldawt stains. And the dneeperst of wet and the gangrest of sin in it!
(19 6. 12 - 18 )
Amn't I up since the damp dawn, marthared mary allacook, with Corrigan's pulse
and varicoarse veins ... soaking and bleaching ... a widow like me, for to deck
my ... son, the laundryman with the lavandier flannels? (214.22-28)
If all these recriminations, made by a woman who has injured herself while
ironing and even starved herself-and all for the sake of an ingratefully
heedless little man-now sound unbearably maternal, they ought to. For
the figure speaking of "lavandier" here (Fr. lavandiere, "washerwoman")
pours forth an audible vision, like that visited upon Saint "Martha Mary
Alacoque" ("marthared mary allacook"), of a "Sacred Heart"-and, in
particular, of a "sacred heart" associated with self-sacrifice (hence the
"martyr" in "marthared") and with lots of "cooking" (hence "allacook").
"Listen now. Are you listening?" As the sound of those "bloodlines" flowing
through your own ear plainly "tell" you: "Think of your Mat!" (206.3).
According to this imperative, readers cultivating the requisite "ideal in-
somnia" and "blank memory" of "lost life" (515.26 ["last night"]) would
now do well to wonder whether there was ever a time in their lives compa-
tRivers: Main (Germany); Blackwater (Ireland), Steeping (England), Stupia (Poland), Heart
(US), Saale (Germany), Duddon (England), Dirty Devil (US), Moldau (Czechoslovakia), Dnieper
(USSR), Ganges (India), Ma (Burma).

rable to the hour of the night reconstructed in "Anna Livia," when they
dwelled, only in unconsciousness, in a universe circumbounded primarily
by the sound of a beating heart and arteries of running water. Should they
have trouble "recoil[ingP' such a time-"O, foetal sleep! Ah, fatal slip"
(563.IO)-a simple Wakean question might help to jog a memory or two for
which "memory" is not at all the right word: "where have you been in the
uterim?" (187.36). Through these terms, the Wake suggests that in those
darker reaches of the night when our hero's "tropped head" contains only its
own bloodstream, his ears having abandoned their educated hold on a
world ordinarily structured in acoustical and phonetic understandings, his
hearing falls back into "an unknown body" and dissolves in a tangle of
blood, where, "deap on deep in anear" (95.30 [and "in an ear"]), it leads
him "backtowards motherwaters" (84.30-31). "And it is as though ... the
obluvial waters of our noarchic memory withdrew" (80.23-25):
Look at here. In this wet of his prow. Don't you know he was kaldt a bairn of the
brine, Wasserbournet the waterbaby? Havemmarea t , sot he was! H.C.E. has a cod-
fisck ee. (198.6-9)
The spectral appearance of this strange little "waterbaby"-a concealed

"Mann in the Cloack" (21 I. 1 [or "cloaca"]) -in the midst of a space defined
only by sonorous arteries of moving water is startling and eerily beautiful,
and so is the way in which these lines ask us to "recknitzt" their "meanamt ."
The allusion here is not so much to the nastily punitive, graven letter of the
patriarchal Book of Genesis (" In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat
bread"), as to the rhythm of Genesis; and as we all recall not recalling, the
rhythm of genesis was the rhythm of running water: "Was not my oltyt
mutthert , Seretht Maritza t , a Runningwater?" (469.13-14). Reconstructing
a form of blank "momerry" wholly inaccessible to consciousness and "day's
reason" (378.33 [a "merry" "memory" of "mom"]), the passage is evoking
the origin not of reason but of rhythm, "in the far ear," and it is, moreover,
particularizing the site and manner of that origin by indirectly recalling,
only through a "sound" ("Havemmarea t "), the "sense" of the "Ave Maria":
"blessed is the fruit of [the] womb."
That sleep entails "intrauterine regression" is so commonplace a tenet of
psychoanalytical literature that one finds it represented even in Ulysses,
tRivers: Waterbourne (England), Olt (Rumania), Mutt (Switzerland), Sereth (Poland and Ru-
mania), Maritz (Bulgaria).
Other references to water: Ger. wasser ("water"), Da. hay ("sea"), L. mare ("sea"); Da. sill,
("lake," "sea").

where Bloom tumbles Wake-wards into sleep and the night under the aspect
of "the childman weary, the manchild in the womb" (U, 737) .25 A reading of
"Anna Livia Plurabelle"-plausibly if not inevitably reinforced by the evi-
dence of the notebooks Joyce kept while working on the embryomimetic
"Oxen of the Sun" episode of Ulysses-shows Joyce reaching inductively,
through his interest in the body and the night, insig?ts that Freud and his
disciples reached deductively by elaborating the psychoanalytic theory of
the dream. Joyce doubtlessly knew from his readings in embryology that
"the fetus hears clearly from the sixth month in utero. "26 And in a passage
that explains how HCE, somewhere "round Nunsbelly Square," "was founded
deap on deep in anear" (95.35-36, 30 ["in an ear"]), the Wake even tells us
that "Earwicker, that patternmind, that paradigmatic ear, receptoretentive
as his of Dionysius" (70.35-36), has blank "momerr[ies]" of an indefinite
"she [who] was lost away away in the fern" (95.29-30). Since the German
fern means "distant," the details suggest that while our hero may indeed be
"found dead" to the world in the night (hence "founded"), the state of
"foetal sleep" itself (563.10) returns him mnemonically to a period of "lost
life" when, "deep on deep in an ear," he heard in "distant" space "somme-
thingt" as inaudible as a rustling "fern" (208.24). "(How faint these first
vhespers womanly are, a secret pispigliando, amad the lavurdy den of their
manfolker!)" (38.13-15): although the source of this "secret" "womanly"
"whispering" "overheard" in the "night" (L. vesper, "night"; It. pispi8/iando,
"whispering") is inaudible in the "weekday" (R. R. lavurdy) , it comes to the
fore everywhere in "Anna Livia."
Our "wasserbournet " hero, washed in a "majik wavus" of arterial sound
that moves him "backtowards motherwaters" (203.31 [Ki. maji, "water";
wavus "net"]), recalls prior times in his life when-"not yet" (3.10), "not
yet" (3. II), "passencore" (3.4-5 [Fr. pas encore, "not yet"]) -he was "not
all there," "ripe before reason" (212.16-17), hearing only the "oreillental"
sound of running water "in the far ear" while "erigenating from next to
nothing" out of a "deltic origin" like that which opens "Anna Livia" (357.18,
4.36-5. I, 140.9 [note in "oreillental" and "far ear," how the "ears" "orient,"
as if in a "far east"]):
o
tell me all a bou t
Anna Livia! I want to hear all
about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna
Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You'll die when you hear. (196.1-6)
tRivers: Somme (France).

In "rhyme without reason," the passage recreates a space "aqualavant to"
that lying on the far side of the female delta and orifice, the "first of all
usquiluteral threeingles" (285.16,297.27 [L. aqua, "water"; Fr. lavant, "wash-
ing"; Gael. uisce, "water," L. luteus, "mud"]): hence its deltic shape and the
"urogynal" "0" from which the whole chapter spills forth (619.2 ["original";
"urogenital"; Gr. Byne, "woman"]). "Mak[ing] you to see figuratleavely the
whome of your eternal geomater" (296.30-297.1), the passage moves us be-
hind the occulting and shame-invested "fig leave" (hence "figuratleavely")
into a "momerry" of first "w home" ( "womb, " "home" ) , where all "meanamt"
streamed into "the far ear" out of arteries of running water, as in turn the
primordia of sensation and unconscious spatial perception "erigenat[ed]
from next to nothing" (hence the "geometer" in "geomater"). "I dhink I
sawn to remumb or sumbsuch," as the canny reader will unconsciously "re-
coil" (608.22 ["I think I seem to remember some such"]); and "pubably it
resymbles a pelvic or some kvind" (608.23 ["probably it resembles" in "sym-
bols" the "pelvis" of some kvinde-Da., "woman"]).
As both dream theory and these passages from "Anna Livia" suggest, the
dimensionless spatiality in which our "wasserbournet " hero experiences the
greater part of the "nice" (65.12 ["night"]) has far less to do with any for-
malized "room" or "home" (his "bedroom," say) than with something that
the Wake now calls "woom," "wome," and "whome" (465.8,201.24,296.31
[on the equation of "nice" and "night," see 253.18,415.14, 502.29, 558.21]).
The orientation of "Anna Livia" in this "kvind" of "woom" will now account
for the gynocentrism of the episode, for its attribution to the figures of
washerwomen (rather than laundrymen, say, or other males who work in
water), and for its associative merging of Dublin's "Anna Liffey" with a
"mothernaked" feminine "Anna" (206.30), who becomes, as a "character"
informing everything in the Wake, "our lavy in waving" (275.12 [an aquatic
"lady in waiting"])-"a lymph that plays the lazy winning she likes" to "a
man that means a mountain" (309.4-6 [and through the "overhearing" of
"lymph" by someone "lazy,"" a nymph who plays the lady when she likes"]).
For the sonority of his own "bloodlines" "overheard" unconsciously reminds
HCE of a first and deep attachment to his mother, "the missus, seepyt and
seweryt" (207.13): "forth of his pierced part came the woman of his dreams,
blood thicker then water" (130.31-33)-where that "pierced part" would be
"pierce" "oreille's" ear, the "blood" washing within it reminding him both of
a distant past (hence the "then" in "blood thicker then water") and of
tRivers: Mississippi (US); Missouri (US); Morna (USSR).

"Wooming" in general (603.1 ["women," and "wombing"]). Because that
first attachment is the ground out of which all others grow, a sound associ-
ated with his "dearest little moma t " (207.34) extends to and underlies his
thinking about all other women-including "baith our washwives" (281.1
[note the "bath" in which "both"these Woschwiben-Sw.G. "chatterboxes"-
are immersed]). All characters in Finne8ans Wake, in turn, who ultimately
reflect the underlying "presence (of a curpse)" that dreams them up, "as an
understood thing sle[ep] their sleep of the swimborne in the one sweet un-
dulant mother of tumblerbunks" (41.6-7 [" Swinburne," of course, authored
those lines that haunt Stephen Dedalus throughout Ulysses: "I will go back
to the great sweet mother, Mother and lover of men, the sea"]). Because
sleep does, all of Finne8ans Wake takes place in a "woom" of this "kvind,"
the "unknown body" of "somewome" (298.19).
If, "by a commodius vicus of recirculation," we "rearrive at" the opening
pages of Finne8ans Wake, for instance, we will find our hero identified as
"Haroun Childeric Eggeberth" (4.32) right from the moment in which, hav-
ing "tropped head," he begins to undergo the "long, very long, [and] dark,
very dark" process (598.6-7 [sleep]) that will culminate in his wakening
("My heart, my mother! My heart, my coming forth of darkness!" [493.34-
35]). Only one of the hundreds of "cradlenames" (201.32) given to the
"heavengendered, chaosfoedted, earthborn" body that is the Wake's "belowes
hero" (137.14 ["engendered," "foetus," and Da. ftiJdt, "born"]), the name now
reveals him as a "vary and likely" "foetotype" (324. I) toppling through the
dark like a "headandheelless chickenestegg" (81.22-23) while "babetise[dJ"
in the "hitherandthithering waters" of the night and the river Life (537.8,
cf. 276.F1).
A strange transformation now sweeps out of "Anna Livia" over the Wake
as a whole. If the darker parts of the book "take you for a bugaboo ride and
play funfer all" (304.11-12), here-"no thing making newthing wealth-
showever" (253.8-9)-it "make[s] you to see figuratleavely the whome"
(296.30-31). Halfway through the Wake, "Anna Livia Plurabelle" delivers
HCE to a moment in the dark when his "unknown body" lies poised-"like
the dud spuk of his first foetotype" (323.36-324. I)-enduring a form of un-
consciousness so deep that the Wake calls it "mortinatality" (447.8), "Uter-
alterance or the Interplay of Bones in the Womb" (293.LI). The "subject" of
"Anna Livia," ultimately, is this "unknown body" of sonorously moving
water (his own), through whose sound a man experiencing "Real Absence,"
"know[ing] by heart," and obscurely "overhearing" many riddling "blood-
lines," state-dependently recalls a time when he could "no" only the pres-
ence of a "Sacred Heart" whose embrace was all-pervasive:

Or where was he born or how was he found? Urgothland t, Tvistown on the Katte-
kat t ? New Hunshire, Concord t on the Merrimake t ? (197.8-10)
Not a real toponym, "Tvistown" here plays on the Danish tvist ("discord")
to form a doublet with "Concord"; and since "discord" and "concord" both
derive from the L. cars, cordis ("heart"), metaphorically signifying "two
hearts beating as one" (con-cordia) and "two hearts in conflict" (dis-cordia),
the passage evokes a time when, as a New World "erigenat[ed] from next to
nothing" (hence the New World references), HCE's "heart was as big as him-
self, so it was, ay, and bigger!" (406.23 [because it, too, was "two in one"]).
"Anna Livia" now necessarily begins to explore a "lost histereve t " (214.1
[not "history"]) whose content is in part the "blank memory" that cannot
be recalled from yesterday night (hence the L. hesternus, "yesterday," in
"histereve"). But because the chapter takes us "where the hand of man has
never set foot" (203.15-16), it also plumbs a far darker "lost histereve"-or
"hystry" (535.18 [Gr. hysteros, "womb"])-whosecontent is the "blankmem-
ory" of the time of our hero's genesis and wakening (hence the hysteros and
first mother "Eve" in "histereve"; cf. 564.31). In contrast to the Roman his-
torian "Livy," a chronicler in letters of "history" and the accomplishments
of Empire, the teller of the "hystry" sounding throughout "Anna Livia" is
therefore known in the Wake as "livy" (452.19), "livvey" (308.20), or-to
return to the first page of the book-"livvy" (3.24), "whose annallivves the
hoiest!" (340.21-22 ["Hosanna in the highest!"]):
"Fieluhrt ? Filou! What age is at? It saont is late. Tis endless now senne t eye or ere-
wonet last saw Waterhouse's cloght. They took it asunder, I hurdt thum sigh. When
will they reassemble it? 0, my back, my back, my bacht ! I'd want to go to Aches-Ies-
Painst • Pingpongt! There's the Bellet for Sexaloitez! And Concept a de Send-us-pray!
Pangt! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! (213.14-20)
Because night seems to fall at the end of "Anna Livia," the critical work
on Finnegans Wake has passed on the view that this passage describes the
ringing of the Angelus at 6 P.M. As in a dream, however, manifest appear-
ances are deceiving, and night cannot really be falling here because it is
already night on the first page of the Wake and everywhere in its midst. So, at
least, one of the washerwomen sharply tells the other, in the middle of" Anna
tRivers: Ur (USSR), Gotha (Sweden), Concord (US), Merrimack (US), Ister (the Danube), Fie
(Africa), Saone (France), Seine (France), Eye (England and Scotland), Erewon (Annotations,
213), Clogh (Ireland), Hurd (Annotations, 213), Ache (Austria), Ping (Thailand), Pongo (Africa),
Belle (US), Pang (Thailand).
Other bodies of water: Cattegat (Baltic); Ger. Bach ("brook"), Aix-les-Bains (a thermal spa in
France) .

Livia," when she reminds her that "tisn't only tonight you're anacheronistic!"
(202.35 ["tonight" does not mean "day"]). Keeping us oriented in the world
that comes to light when HCE is dead to the world ("Acheron" is a river in
Hades), "when nullahs t were nowhere" (202.36), and when the phenomenal
appearances of the Daily World have been "taken asunder" by the night, the
line tells us that sleep is radically" anachronistic" « Gr. ana- [" against"]
chronos ["time"]) because it annihilates measurable clock time altogether.
Chronicling our hero's movement through the dark not by "clock" "times,"
then, but by arterial "cloght" "thamest " (199.1), the passage takes place not
at the time of the Angelus at all, but at the time that the Angelus asks us to
think about: the time ofthe Incarnation, and of the Conception, and-"par
the Vulnerable Virgin'st Maryt del Dame!" (206.5-6 [Fr. s1. vulnerable, "preg-
nant"])-of great "labor" and "pain": "who but Crippled-with-Children
[ALP] would speak up for Dropping-with-Sweat?" (102.29-30 [an exhausted
HCE]). Hence the particular words of the Angelus cited in "Concepta de
send-us-pray" (L. concepit de Spiritu Sancto ["she conceived of the Holy
Ghost"]), the Latin words for "holy spirit" displaced by the French Saint Es-
prit in order to "send us spray." Finally, the passage treats of a time "before
the blood" (467.6 [or, as "genetics" modulates into "genesis," "before the
Flood"]), situating HCE "somewhere, parently [not 'apparently'], in the
ginnandgo gap between antediluvious and annadominant" (14.16-17 [when
"Anna" was "dominant"; the "Ginnunga-Gap" of the Norse eddas, like the
"woomy" gap in which Here Comes Everybody" 'gins to go," designates the
site of the world's genesis]).
The reference to "Waterhouse's cloght" (213.16) will now begin to clarify
joyce's reasons for punctuating "Anna Livia" with allusions to Eskimos. For
Eskimos, like "Wasserbournet the waterbaby," also live in structures made of
water-in "Waterhouses" better known as "igloo[s]" (207.33). And as the
rhythmic sound pulsing "in the far ear" "tells" HCE, he does too: "Cant ear!
Her dorters ofe? Whofe? Her eskmeno daughters hope? Whope? Ellme, elmme,
elskmestoon!" (572.16-17). Evoking both the tell-tale rhythm that closes
"Anna Livia" and the Danish elsk ("love"), these terms notify us that HCE
lives in a body made largely of water, but they also show "Humperfeldt and
Anunska, wedded now evermore in annastomoses by a ground plan of the
placehunter, whiskered beau and donahbella. Totumvir and esquimeena"
(585.22-24). While the wording here reminds us in part that our hero is
dead to the world (hence the deadly "belladonna"), yet full of "spirits"
tRivers: Nula (5. America); Thames (England); Virgin (US). Mary (Australia).

(hence the Anglo-Ir. usquebau8h, "whiskey," in the "whiskered beau"), it
largely puts us in mind of the" anastomosis" (" connection of blood vessels")
in the "placenta" ("placehunter"), so to show our hero (L. totus vir, "all
man") circumenwrapped by a "beautiful woman" (It. bella donna). This
would be his "esquimeena," whose "whome" was his first "waterhouse" and
"home." And "that's what you may call a tale of a tub!" (212.21).
Or better yet, in a line that will clarify the Wake's erratic use of Dutch,
"that's what you may call" "OurTaalona Taub" (105.9 [Du. taal, "language";
Du. taub, "deaf"])-where the phrase refers not only to Swift's Tale ofa Tub,
but also, as elsewhere in the Wake, to pregnancy (e.g., 7.5). The bearing on
HCE of the particles of Dutch scattered through "Anna Livia" becomes
darkly explicit in a passage that describes "Anna Livia" singing "in a tone t
sonora t " to her" VU88ybarneyt" (200.6 [Da. barn, "child," vU88e, "to rock to
sleep"), while "Oom Bothart [himself lies] below like Bheri-Bherit in his
sandyt cloak, so umvolosyt, as deaf as a yawnt, the stult! ... Poor deeft old
deary!" (200.14- 16). "Below" what? Adjoined to the name of the Dutch-
speaking Boer general "Oom Botha," who had as much trouble with (the)
English as our "deaf" and "bothered" hero (hence the Anglo- Ir. "bothered,"
or "deaf," in "Oom Bothar"), the preposition moves us into regions like
those in which nederlands is spoken (Du. nederlands, "Dutch"): into "nether-
lands," below sea- and water-level. Like other parts of the Wake streaked
with Dutch, these lines accordingly show "Oom Bothar" "luistening" "in
the waveslength" (384.19,394.16-17 [Du. luisteren, "to hear"]), while "the
soundwaves" buffet and "trompe him" (23.26[Fr. tromper, "deceive"]). They
also show him harboring, while wondering "why is limbo where is he and
what are the sound waves saying" (256.23-24), "sommethingt " that the Wake
calls "remembrandts"-of"his Anastashie" (403.10- 11 [Gr. anastasis, "resur-
rection"]). Now "remembrandts," since "Rembrandt" was a Dutchman,
would be nether-Iandly or subaquatic "remembrance," and it would yield
"rheumaniscences in his netherlumbs" (319.17 ["reminiscences," that is, of
"that which flows"-Gr. rheuma-and not necessarily as stored in the
head]). All of these terms ultimately show "Haroun Childeric Eggeberth"
drifting through "foetal sleep" "on the nod, neer the Nodderlands Nurskery"
(385.8-9); and since, as Samuel Beckett noted of the Wake's hero, "there is a
great deal of the unborn infant in the lifeless octogenarian," we might now
see that parts of the Wake dense with Dutch are seeking to reconstruct, be-
tRivers: Vouga (Portugal), Botha (Annotations, 200). Bheri (India), Sandy (US). Umvolosi (Af-
rica). Yaw (Burma).

cause the night does, "vary and likely" "foetotype[s]" (324.1): although
"they're lost we've found rerembrandtsers" (54.1-2) Y
In turn, the chapter's Dutch and its fleeting references to Eskimoan "Water-
houses" make it less difficult than might be supposed to see why Joyce
would have drawn on Kiswahili in order to write "Anna Livia." For Swahili,
spoken at the headwaters of the Nile, in a locale "long hidden beyond the
horizon of scientific certainty," was, at least in popularized forms of early
modern cosmologies, the language spoken at the Source.28 In "Anna Livia"
where our hero has become only all "headwaters," we can be "sarthint suirt "
that we are "get[ting] it frisk from the soorce" (2°9.13- 14 [note the Gr. mor-
pheme 00-, "egg," at the heart of that "soorce," and the Da. fisk, "fish," in
"frisk"]) :
Don't you know he was kaldt a bairn of the brine, Wasserbournet the waterbaby?
Havemmarea t , so he was! H.C.E. has a codfisck ee. Shyrt she's nearly as badhert as
him herself. Who? Anna Livia? Ay, Anna Livia. Do you know she was calling ...
from all around, nyumba noo, chamba t choot... ? (I98.7-II)
The Kiswahili words layered into this passage-nyumba ("house"), chamba

("hiding place"), and choo ( "privy") -now invite us to associate our hero's
"waterhouse" and "hiding place" with a "ladies' madom toilet chambers"
(395.10 [hence the "privy"; note the "madonna" in that "modern" chamber]) ;
and also with a "tempo" and sound audible only "in her tumbo" (209. I I [Ki.
turnbo, "belly"]). And as the binary beat of that "tumbo" suggests ("nyumba
noo, chamba t choot"), HCE lies lost in "headwaters" at "the soorce" in this
part of the night because he is recalling "the grandest gynecollege histories"
(389.9). Through its use of Swahili, the Wake is seeking to woo its reader
into a meditation on "the secrest of ... soorcelossness" (23.19), moving
him "backtowards motherwaters" and a place where "the dart of desire has
gored the heart of secret waters" (599.25-26 ["gore" implies "blood"; note
the "heart"]). Consequently, "the majik wavus" of which "Anna Livia" is
woven "has elfun anon meshes t " (2°3.31 [Ki. maji, "water," wavus, "net,"
elfu, "1,000"]), "making meanacuminamoyas t " (201.30 [Ki. mia na kumi na
moja, "1I1"])-where the ciphers "III" and "1111," in the Wake's hiero-
glyphy, signify the filling up of emptiness (" 100, 1000"), and so renewal. 29
Owing to all these peculiar "hydeaspectst " ofthe chapter, the "meanamt "
of the "ebrot " that pours into HCE's "tropped head" throughout "Anna Livia"
tRivers: Syr Darya (USSR). Bhader (India). Chambal (India). Chu (China. USSR); Mesha
(USSR). Mean and Acu (Annotations. 201). Cumina (S. America). May (Ireland).
"Anna Livia Plurabelle"

now begins to sound forth in "a meusic t before her all cunniform letters"
(198.24-25). These are not such "cuneiform letters," out of which the law-
making institutions of Westernism evolved, as the pictographic character V
("woman, pudendum"), .fixed by law and lexicon into a phonetic symbol
that would generate over centuries the terms "dogma," "derision," and "do-
mesticity."30 "Rothert," these "cunniform letters" take the "form" of the
"cunny," purveying sense subsemantically, in the same way that the sound of
arteries of water and "meusict " do: hence the many "warbly sangst" (200. I 1-
12) that ALP sings throughout "Anna Livia" (e.g., at 198.23-27 and 199.29-
200.16). Once again, then, "when you're quite finished with the reading
matarial" (2°5.20 [the literate text of "Anna Livia"]), "rede t " what "was put
in the Mericyt Cordial t Mendicants' Sitterdag-ZindehLMunadayt Wake-
schrift" (2°5.16-17). Sounded "in the far ear" when HCE is dead to the world
(hence the "wake" in this "makeshift" "Wakeschrift") and when time, days,
and weeks end altogether (hence the "week-ending" effect of "Saturday-
Sunday-Monday"), this "Mericyt Cordial t Wakeschrift" differs from any
"weekly magazine" (Ger. Wochenschrift)-or from "the Momina Times" or
"the Daily Mail"-because it is writ not in letters but in the "cunniform
letters" that spill into the ear between letters to make "litters" of them, so to
become "sommethingt" like the "mormon'st thamest ," or the "toiling moil t "
(199.1-2). Where ordinarily legible periodicals chronicle "births," "deaths,"
and the passage of "mankind's history," this "Mericyt Cordialt Wakeschrift"
speaks of "berths" and "debths" and tells an unwritten story-of "woman-
kind['s]" "hystry" (128.19). Bearing on what it is to be "alive" (hence the
Sans. zindah in "Zindeh"), its subject is a "Mater Misericordia" (L. " Mother
of Mercy," the L. misericordia itself deriving from the verb misereri ["to
pity"] and cors, cordis, [the "heart"]); and ultimately it yields, in the "ebrot "
and "cunniform letters" playing through the Wake, a reconstruction of "real
life" that is altogether "truetowife" (11.29 [and "true to life"]) because true
to Here Comes Everybody's relations with "amother" (125.12 [and therefore
"another"]) .
In orderto pursue the "meanamt " of these "cunniform letters" more deeply,
the reader heeding the sound of the Life washing away "in the far ear and
wondering "in [his] thoughts how the deepings did it all begin" (428.5) must
now move "backwards ... out of farther earshot ... in the direction of Mac
tRivers: Meuse (France); Rother (England); Sanga (Africa); Meric; (Turkey); Corda (Brazil),
Zindeh (Iran), Mun (Thailand), Una (Yugoslavia); Mormon (US), Thames (England); Moi
(Africa) .
Other bodies of water: Moyle (north channel of the Irish Sea).

Auliffe's" (426.34-427.4 [where the "aleph" in "Mac Auliffe" names "the
soorce," "liffe[y)" yields the sound of running water, and "Mac Auliffe" itself
designates a "son"-Gael. mac-of "life"]) . Only by taking soundings "deap
on deep in anear" will one discover "how Big Bil Brine Borumoter first took
his gage at lillolly lavvander waader" (331.26-27 [or, like a "barometer,"
"gauged" the pressure of Nor. lavvande, "low water"]) while "oreillent[ing)"
himself (357.18) in "matter" « I.E. root *mater, "mother"). We have "such a
loon t waybashwardst to row" (202.22-23) in order to discover what kind
of "meerschaundize" lies (210.2 [Ger. Meerschaum, "sea-foam"])-like the
froth and abundance spilled forth on the far shores of the world and out of
Pandora's Box (2°9.18-212.19 [Gr. pan-doron, "all gifts"])-in the "mixed
baggyrhattyt" (2°9.10) of ALP's "culdee saccot ofwabbasht" (210.1) that it
would be best, in moving "backtowards [these] motherwaters," to proceed
slowly.
Of this Mr A . . . and these wasch woman ... nothing more is told until now....
And then. Be old .... We are once amore as babes awondering in a wold made fresh
where [as] •.. in the storyaboot we start from scratch. (336.12-18)
" MIS E RIC 0 R D I A"

Because the unconscious perception of the bloodstream and all the "mea-
namt " associatively adhering to it constitute an incessant part of the "gos-
siple so delivered in [HCE's] epistolear" (38.23), its sonority spills out of
"Anna Livia" into everything else in the Wake, enveloping it everywhere
and ultimately giving the book its circular, recirculating form. Throughout
the night, the hearing of his own bloodstream in the "Real Absence" of any-
thing else causes HCE "to pianissime a slightly varied version of Crookedribs
confidentials ... and, to the strains of The Secret of Her Birth, hushly pierce
the rubiend aurellum of ... a lay teacher of ... orthophonethics" (38.30-
36 ["Crookedribs," as the Annotations explains, is "Eve"]). Although the
wording here seems to describe the passing of gossip from one distinct per-
son to another, we can infer from the context (I.ii) that only "one stable
somebody"-"Persse O'Reilly"-underlies all the manifest appearances,
characteristically "overhear[ing], in his secondary personality as ... [an]
underreared" (38.27-28) and therefore acting as both the generator and re-
ceiver of all the evident "gossiple." As "a lay teacher of orthophonetics,"
again, Earwicker is a master of "overhearing"; and the "overhearing" of his
tRivers: Loon (Canada), Wabash (US); Bhagirathi (India), Sacco (Italy).

own bloodstream, because of the "secret" "womanly" associations attached
to it (38.14), makes his "rubiend aurellum" (L. auris, "ear") turn red every-
where in the night (hence the L. rubens, "reddish" or, because blood-filled,
"blushing") .
A return to the opening pages of the Wake, then, will show this always
overheard riverbabble permeating even the book's first lines, and everything
that follows them in the body of the text:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a
eommodius vieus ofreeireulation back to Howth Castle and Environs. (3.1-3)
Particularly because "circulation" is a word usually associated with the

bloodstream and the amply noted "commode" in "commodius" is a synonym
for "chamberpot," we might now see that "the commodius vicus ofrecircula-
tion" which HCE undergoes by passing into sleep returns him to a "whirled"
in which there is "plenty ofwoom" (582.20,465.8), even as it turns him into
a sleeping giant capable of incorporating "Howth Castle and Environs." At
the Wake as in the era of his wakening, therefore, "Haroun Childeric Egge-
berth's" first intelligence is of running water ("riverrun"), and of vaguely
tactile movement and binary sound in confined space ("swerve of shore,"
"bend of bay"); and as in the era of his genesis, too ("Eve and Adam's"),
intelligence of the maternal precedes that of the paternal.
Embodied in the sonority of running water, this intelligence permeates
everything in Finne8ans Wake. For even though, sleeping like a rock, "he
calmly extensolies" in the dark, dead to the world and "rockbound" (6.35,
7.1), still, "all the livvylong night, the delldale dalppling night, the night of
bluerybells, [ALP's] flittaflute in tricky trochees (0 carina! 0 carina!) wake
him" (7.1-3). The "bells," "flutes" "ocarinas," "trochees," and alliterative
doublets in this construction make "meusict ," while the Italian carina
("nice" [a term related to Romanic words for the "heart"]) evokes our hero's
pleasure in ALP as, "unda her brella, mid piddle med puddle, she ninnygoes
nannygoes nancing by" (7.26-27)-the "umbrella" "keep[ing] black!," the
"puddles" and "waves" (L. undae) keeping HCE "inundered" (127.5), and
the "nannygoat" returning him to childhood. If "he's doorknobs dead!,"
then, "Annie Delap is free! Ones more" (378.1-2); and "once more," because
the unconscious associations welling up out of the sound of his bloodstream
and its "lap" never stop (hence "Delap"), "one's more" than one-as in the
era of his genesis and birth, when he was "wedded ... in annastomoses"
with ALP (585.22-23). "She is livving in our midst of debt," then (11.32 ["in
the midst" of sleep's "death"]), "and laffing through all plores for us (her

birth is uncontrollable)" (11.32-33 [as "uncontrollable" as HCE's nocturnal
"remembrandts" of his]). And "she knows her knight's duty while Luntum
sleeps" (12.4-5): since "knight's," like "night's," would move us into the
Dark Ages and thoughts proper to a hero like "Mr Knight" (245.32 ["night"]),
whose hearing of English disintegrates "When London [and English] Sleeps,"
the line suggests simply that ALP's "night's duty" is to "wake him"-in both
senses of the word (to watch over the dead, to quicken and bring to life).
"She who shuttered him after his fall and waked him widowt sparing" (102.1-
2), accordingly, becomes a figurative "widow" to a man dead to the world
(e.g., at 7.8ff., 79.27ff., 214.26, 387.33), tendering him "Anna Stacey's how
are you!" (28.31 [Gr. anastasis, "resurrection"]).
Although it may seem, to all external appearances and to "day's reason,"
that the "one stable somebody" shown in the two relief maps of the night is
a solid man, the unending play of terms like these throughout the Wake fi-
nally suggests that "our mounding's mass" has a deep "streamline secret" en-
coiled within him (560.30), and that "all the livvylong night, the delldale
dalppling night," "the solid man [is] saved by his sillied woman" (94.3).
As "Ainsoph ... with that noughty besighed him zeroine" (261.23-24),
our hero is always and inevitably "a family all to himself" in the Wake
(392.23-24), since he alone generates and contains in his dreams (like the
Kabbalah's supreme creator, "Ain-Soph") the figures of Shem, Shaun, Issy,
and ALP-and since ALP herself, however "naughty" a "heroine" she may
seem, is only a "nought," a "zero," a dream bled out of a sound as inaudible
as the "sigh" in "besighed." If "a so united family pateramater" as our hero
"is not more existing on papel or off of it," then (560.28), since he himself
dreams up and contains both paternal and maternal figures (L. pater et
mater, "father and mother"), it is complementarily true that" as keymaster
fits the lock it weds so this bally builder to his streamline secret" (560.29-
30). However "solid [a] man" of character and body our hero may be in the
Daily World constituted of authority ("papal"), "paper," and the whole
"bally building" of civilization (Anglo-Ir. bally, "town"), the "samething is
rivisible by nighttim, may be involted into the zeroic couplet" (284.8-10);
when he lies "reduced to nothing" in the night, that is (499.3 ["zero"]), the
discretely individ ualized and" solid man" disintegrates, becoming" divisi ble, "
and even "disselving" (608.5) into a "couplet" of sorts.
The two terms in this "zeroic couplet" would be the characters HCE and
ALP, who lie "anastomosically assimilated" with each other throughout the
Wake (615.5) and together represent the "one fledge, one brood" (378.4
[and the "one flesh, one blood"]) that constitutes both "the presence (of a

curpse)" and the "anastomosic" "ground plan" (585.23) out of which this
presence evolved. If the first of these trigrammatonic configurations
remotely evokes the Latin hoc corpus est, and so "identifide[s]" the body
"tropped head" at the Wake, ALP provides both the missing complement
("this is his blood") and a resurrective principle capable of transforming
the wake into a wakening. Recurrences of the couplet HCE and ALP evoke
the steadily wakening "fleshblood" of the "one stable somebody" who lies
dead to the world at the Wake (292.9); but since the sound of the blood in
that "fleshblood" recalls "absent female assauciations which I, or perhaps
any other person ... have the honour to had" (413.18-20), they also force
us to see, in new ways, that what exactly we mean when we conceive of our
hero as a stable "him" or "himself" is exceedingly problematic. Indeed,
these "couplets" suggest that a "hemale" already returned to an "early
bisectualism" through the infantile regressive powers of the dream (581. 18,
524.12,36 ["bisexualism"]), also undergoes "sexual" "bisection" through the
force of uterine regression, taking both "the form masculine" and "the gender
feminine" (5°5.25). For as he lies asleep "with his cunnyngnest couch-
mare ... lame of his ear and gape of her leg," "he as hale as his ardouries,
she as verve as her veines" (576.27-29, 577.3-4)' he becomes inextricably
entangled not simply in a "cunningest nightmare" (Fr. cauchemar, "night-
mare"), but, through the hearing of his "ardouries" and "veins," in a "cunny
nest" (hence "cunnygnest") localized in a feminine "gape of her leg"
(hence the "mare" in "couchmare"). There, "him her first lap, her his fast
pal" (318.12-13 ["lap" = "pal" = "ALP"]), the two together "han in hende
will grow" (318.14 [Nor. han i hende, "he in her"]). There, too, the anneal-
ing force of" ardour" is born (hence" ardouries").
These dyads, then, finally reveal our hero to be less a discretely individu-
alized "solid man" than a knot of modulating attachments that lead back in
time to the era of his wakening, where, "when older links lock older hearts
then he'll resemble she" (135.32-33). Throughout the Wake, HCE is "for-
melly confounded with amother" (I25.II-I2)-"formally confounded with
another," that is, precisely because he was "formerly con-founded with a
mother":
-I get it .... he stands pat for you before a direct object in the feminine. 1 see.
-Madonagh and Chiel, idealist leading a double life! . . . (490.9-II,6)
Since "the aged monad" who sleeps at the Wake disintegrates into "Real Ab-
sence" in the night (341.13), under the twin forces of infantile and uterine
regression (514.34, 608.5), he is not finally a paternal old man at all, but

rather a child entangled in a mother's body, an "idealist leading a double
life" in a universe within which patriarchy and all its laws have collapsed:
"in the dream we return to the dual unity, mother and child, as one body."3!
In one way of thinking, then, the real hero of the Wake is not at all "the old
man on his ars" shown visibly "scrapheaped" in the relief maps, but his
"polar andthisishis" and unconscious (177.33), a mother and child whose
mutual embrace, as in figurations of the Pieta, implicitly represents the
"Real Absence" of the father. In turn, these considerations enable us to see
that parts of the Wake in which ALP is dominant take place not in the
socially engendered spatiality of a male body, but in a "woom" where
"femelles will be preadaminant" (617.23-24 [as if "before Adam"]) and
where, our "hemale man all unbracing to omniwomen" (581.18), "woman
will water the wild world over" (526.20-21). From this perspective, the
Wake takes place both in the body of a male lying dead to the world as if at a
wake, and in the body of "amother" with whom, while wakening, he is "for-
melly confounded."
Beginning with the phrase "Eve and Adam's" (3.1), Finneaans Wake there-
fore teems with forms of "the zeroic couplet" HCE and ALP, which Joyce
modulates, in the course of the book, through "minney combinaisies and
permutandies" (284.12-13). In an endless series of "combinations and per-
mutations" of inter-entangled "combies" and mutandes (It., "underwear"),
these "couplets" give us continual MacCarthy-like Underalimpses into "in-
vestments" lying below the visible surface of things-not least of which is
"love" (hence the Gel. Minne, "love," in "minney"). Showing HCE every-
where "anastomosically assimilated" with "his streamline secret," these
dyads appear not only acrostically, but descriptively, turning "the solid
man"-"our mounding's mass" -into a "melting mountain in wooing wave"
(132.7-8) or, since he lies moored to the earth like Gulliver in Lilliput, into
"a Mons held by tentpegs and his pal whatholoosed on the run" (113.19-20
[L. mons, "mountain"]). Or, again, they poise "Flowey and Mount on the
brink of time" (197.14-15), the scene of the Wake itself extending "from
Fonte-in-Monte to Tidingtown" (202.9 [note the "fountain" inside the "moun-
tain," and the "tide" on which the "town" is based]). Ultimately, these
dyadic configurations show that the real hero of Finneaans Wake, "The
Bearded Mountain" figured in the relief map, never exists independently of
his "streamline secret" and consort, "The River Romps to Nursery (Maidy-
kins in Undiform)" (222.12- 14) -where the female "kin" in "Maidykin," as-
sociated with the "nursery," wears an "undiform" because she takes the
"urogynal" and maternal "form" of "waves" (L. undae).

"Because it's run on the mountain and river system" illustrated in the play
of all these terms (288.F3), the Wake in turn is "poured forth where Riau
Liviau riots and col de Houdo humps" (42.18-19 [Pro. riau, "river basin,"
colo, "mountain"; Provenc;al is "the language oflove"]). And although HCE
"half hear[s] the single maiden speech La Belle sp[i]n[s] to her Grand Mount"
throughout the night (137.35-36), "as Rigagnolina to Mountagnone, what
she meaned he could not can" (255.15-16 [or "ken," since he is unconscious
of it; It. rigagnolina, "rivulet," montagnone, "big mountain"]). These terms
now make the Wake's nocturnal "interior monologue" something that might
more accurately be construed as the "Intimier Minnelisp of an Extorreor
Monolothe" (105.11-12; cf. 254.13-14); for though our hero seems, on the
"exterior," to be dead to the world (hence his emplacement beneath that
"monolith"), the "interior" of his body is suffused by the "intimite" "lisp" of
a sound unconsciously signifying "love" (Ger. Minne). By another drift of
association attached to the sound of blood washing away "in the far ear,"
then, the River "lifey" modulates into the "Lovvey" (231.12), and our hero is
washed forward in its stream.
The power and depth of the attachment represented by the Wake's "ze-
roic couplet[s]" is expressed eloquently enough in Ulysses, where Stephen
Dedalus wonders whether "amor matris, subjective and objective genitive,
may be the only true thing in life" (U, 207 [L. "love of mother"]), and where
the hallucinated ghost of Mary Goulding Dedalus dramatizes the sentiment
by declaring to her son, "years and years I loved you, 0 my son, my first-
born, when you lay in my womb" (U, 581). Although these "years," by
anyone's count, would make for a long gestation, the Wake finally sug-
gests that they are a vast underestimate and that, in a human universe in
which attachment and interdependence are the grounding facts of life, the
"strandentwining" "[naval]cords of all link back" (U, 38) in a never-broken
continuity that makes Here Comes Everybody a membrane and member of
other people. For the "innate little bondery" of anastomosis (296.29),
which makes mother and child one body and person, allows no established
and "neat little boundary" to separate one from "amother"; and the "innate
bondery" that "formelly confounds" HCE "with amother" in the era of his
genesis therefore becomes, in the Wake, the "groundplan" out of which
evolve the bonds that link him, "later in life," with Here Comes Every-
body else.
As "the uniter ofU. M. I. hearts" (446.7-8)-his and hers in anastomosis,
"yours and mine" now-the "leading lady" of Finnegans Wake therefore be-
comes "a most kindhearted messmother" (560.26-28 [note the Ger. Kind,

"child" underlying that "kindheartedness"]), linking everyone "in those
happy moments of ouryour soft accord" (446.15-16 [where "accord," < L.
cor, cordis, radically signifies two hearts beating as one]). And "in that
united I. R. U. stade" (446.17-18 [as opposed to the "state" made possible by
male differentiation and conflict]), where "I are you" and "you are I"
(hence "I. R. U."), the groundwork of "sym-pathy" (Gr. "feeling together")
and "com-passion" (L. "suffering together") is laid-as of the Latin mis-
ericordia ("compassion, mercy") and the German Barmherzigkeit (literally
meaning "yeast-heartedness" and lexically "compassion"): "Notre Dame de
la Ville, mercy of thy balmheartzyheat!" (102.18- 19 [note the "balm" and the
warmth in this "heart"]). As the primal ground of an attachment that pre-
cedes the formation of letters and consciousness, ALP therefore becomes
"bondwoman of the man of the house, and murrmurr of all the mackavicks,
she who had given his eye for her bed and a tooth for a child" (101.32 [Gael.
maca mhic, "sons of a son"]): though domesticated culturally (hence "bond-
woman"), this "mother" memorable through a "murmur" (hence "murr-
murr") generates both in her body and in the human family the primordia
of human "bonding" (hence "bond-woman"), and by filling the "bed" with
"children," and those children with "eyes" and "teeth," she does so in ways
altogether antithetical to those dictated by the patriarchal lex talionis ("An
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"). "We're all found of our anmal matter," as
the Wake puts it (294.F5), so to suggest that because "we're found[ed] in ani-
mal matter," we are inevitably "fond of our Alma Mater" (L. "fostering
mother") .
Our hero, who has had no choice but to maintain the role of patriarch
in his conscious life, has evidently drifted far away from this "urogynal"
"bondwoman," whose "impermanent waves were the better half of her"
(101.30-31 [he being the worse half]). A prodigal son with "a prodigal
heart" (210.17), he accordingly hears in "the hitherandthithering waters"
pouring away "in the far ear" a sound symbolic of the force of attachment,
and of attachment's passing; for "the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, 0 weh! I'se so silly to be
flowing but! no canna stay!" (159.16-18 [Ger. Weh!, "Woe!"]). The passing
forth of these waters in the night, then, reminds him "infrarationally" not
simply of the dark forward rush of time, but of the simultaneously joyous
(hence "laughing") and heart-breaking power (hence "heart" and "brook")
that time wields in tightening and severing the attachments that link him to
other people. When "we list, as she bibs us, by the waters of babalong"
(103.10-11), we in turn should hear in Anna Livia's river-babble intimations

of the passing away of childhood (hence the "bibs," "babble," and "baby");
of the loss of parents whose deaths are the inevitable countersign of our
coming-to-be; and of exile from a paradise to which sleep, nightly, returns
us (hence the evocation bf Psalm 133 ["By the waters of Babylon, there we
sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion"]):
because ye left from me, because ye laughed on me, because, 0 me lonly son, ye are
forgetting me!, that our turfbrown mummy is acoming, alpilla, beltilla, ciltilla, del-
tilla, running with her tidings, old the news of the great big world, sonnies had a
scrap, woewoewoe! bab's baby walks at seven months, waywayway! (194.20-25)
ALP's role in "Anna Livia" as a "proxenete" to a "man in passession"

(198.16-17, 22 ["passion," "possession"])-where the English "proxenete"
« Gr. proxenetes, "agent" or "broker") designates a matchmaker or nego-
tiator of marriage (OED)-would have to do with her grounding role in the
mediation of HCE's passions. The parts of the Wake that show HCE and ALP
"wedded now evermore in annastomoses by a ground plan of the place-
hunter" (585.22-23 [in the "anastomosis" of the "placenta"]) are also
implicitly showing the "infrarational" bases underlying forms of human
jointure and "wedding," where too, as in the "innate little bondery" of" an-
nastomoses," there is no "neat little boundary," and "Twainbeonerflsh"
(571.29). "Who so shall separate" HCE and ALP, accordingly, "fetters to new
desire, repeals an act of union to unite in bonds of schismacy" (585.24-26
[though this newly formed "union," because "schismatic," is not without
tension]). One of Anna Livia Plurabelle's functions as a "character" in the
Wake, then, is to act as "the Bringer ofPlurabilities" (104.1-2), and to open
up the possibility of those human "pluralities" which are born of the
making and severance of formed attachments-inevitable if only because
birth and death are facts of the world-whose experience is at one and the
same time the suffering of an indifferentiable pain and joy, and whose en-
durance signifies growth (hence the "tears" [Fr. pleurs] and the "beauty" [Fr.
belle] in "Plurabelle"). "For as Anna was at the beginning lives yet and will
return" (277.12-13), so "Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be" (215.24);
"Mammy was, Mimmy is, Minuscoline's to be. . . . The same renew"
(226.14- 17). Note how, in these progressions from past to future, "Mammy"
modulates into something "very tiny" (It. minuscoline) but never quite dis-
appears: "Mater Mary Mercerycordial of the Dripping Nipples, milk's a
queer arrangement" (260.F2).
The play of these terms also suggests quite the opposite of what is often
asserted by those who have read neither the Wake nor Joyce in any mean-

ingful way: far from being the work of the cold and cerebral writer, the Wake
is a work of exorbitant and almost overwhelming passion and compassion,
and the only thing that will prevent anyone from acknowledging it is too
much reading of "the dully expressed." Not least of its accomplishments in
plumbing those "infrarational matters" that come to light in the dark, when
individuals differentiated in the Daily World by identity, consciousness, gen-
der, and language "disselve," the Wake makes us all-"a lot of lasses and lads
without damas or dads, but fresh and blued" (341.33-34)-the freshly rein-
vested "flesh and flood" of one bodyY
" 0 V A S LEE p"

In that passage from the "Ithaca" episode of Ulysses which catalogues the
many properties that Bloom-"waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier"-
admires in water, we learn among all things else of "its ubiquity as con-
stituting 90% of the human body" (U, 671, 672). Read in conjunction with
"Anna Livia Plurabelle," the Bloomesque detail obliges us now to reconstrue
the spatiality within which Finne8ans Wake takes place not as the body of
"the solid man" depicted in the two relief maps of the night, but as a body
primarily of water. As our hero, like "every morphyl man of us ... falls
back into [the] terrine" depicted in the two carnal maps of the night (80.22-
23 [where that "tureen," unlike a "terrain," holds liquid]), he becomes not
only "himself in the flesh," but "himself in the flesh ... incarnadined"
(79.2-3)-the Shakespearean adjective suggesting that by turning into his
own body, he passes into a spatiality of flowing fluid and "multitudinous
seas incarnadine" (Macbeth, II, ii, 61). When the Wake's sleeping giant
"goes under" in sleep, he therefore "disselv[es]" (608.5 [and "dissolves"]) in
a body largely of water, where, quite easily, "you can sink [him] lead"
(317.3-4 [so to answer Finnegan's question, "Do you think me dead?"): "It's
his last lap, Gigantic, fare him weal" (242.20-21 ["It's Your Last Voyage Ti-
tantic, Fare Thee Well"]). As "he dives" and goes "inunder" in this "Deep-
sleep Sea" (321.4, 320.3, 37.18), he comes to resemble "McGinty" of popular
song: "and dong wonged Magongty till the bomb tomb ofthe warr, thrusshed
in his whole soort of cloose" (366.32-33 ["and down went McGinty to the
bottom of the sea, dressed in his old suit of clothes"]) .
Drowned in "liquick music," our hero "sleep[s] in the water ... and
dream[s]" at moments in the Wake like these (280.32, 34-35), thereby keep-
ing his nightly "dathe with a swimminpull" (377.35 [or "date with a swim-

mingpool"»; as the night renders him dead to the world (hence the "death"
in that "dathe"), it also "pulls him into" a body overwhelmingly liquid. If
the "ephumeral" experience of sleep embeds him in a "seemetery," then,
the grave in which our liquidated hero lies must now be construed as a
"watery grave" (78.19), the Wake itself becoming a dark "bog of the depths"
(516.25 [or "Book of the Dead" plumbing subaquatic "depths"]) . And as "the
length ofthe land lies under liquidation" (12.7 [now in a new sense», Here
Comes Everybody begins "disselving" in the night's "deap sleap" (608.5,
277.13 ["deep sea"» into "Heave, coves, emptybloddy!" (324. II), his "body"
"empty" of everything but "blood" and approaching the condition of an
"empty bladder." Interior to this body of water, our hero lies "as snug as ...
Jonas wrocked in the belly of the whaves" (463.31-32)-"locked in the belly
of a whale in waves," but also, because he has undergone both infantile and
uterine regression, "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep": "Rockabill Booby in
the Wave Trou8h" (104.6-7).
Since HCE, as a sunken "Gigantic," lives diffusively dispersed in his own
dimensionless body of water, other bodies of water recur throughout the
Wake as ciphers for his own; for, "having become genuinely quite beetly
dead whether by land whither by water. ... He lay under leagues of it
in deep Bartholoman's Deep" (99.36-100.4). While reference here to "the
Bartholomew Deep"-an oceanic trench off the coast of Chile-would put
us in mind of a body of water virtually void of all signs of life, the "man" in
"Bartholoman's" would localize the "Deep" being plumbed here inside of a
human body.33 Particularly because our hero's ears alone lie open to event-
fulnesses rocking the interior of this body of water, "students of mixed hydro-
statics and pneumodipsics will after some difficulties" need to learn to take
"soundings" in it (151.29-3°,5°1.12). "Hydrostatics" being the study of still
water and "pneumodipsics," presumably, a yearning for spirits « Gr. pneuma
["breath, spirit"], and dipsos, ["thirst"]), these terms suggest that at mo-
ments in the night when HCE lies "inundered" in bodies of water (127.5
["under" "waves"]), he orients himself "in all fathom of space" (394.10) by
sustaining an auditory awareness of differing degrees of fluid movement and
breath. Ascertaining the character of his "sinking" in these variably deep
bodies of water (224.25 [not "thinking"]) is therefore difficult; indeed, fath-
oming the "SILENCE" of "Challenger's Deep is childsplay to this" (501.6,
II)-"childsplay" reminding us of the night's deepening infantile regres-
sions, and the reference to "the Challenger Deep," the deepest oceanic abyss
on earth, suggesting that the thoughts arising "from [the] dupest dupes" of
a mind liquidated in sleep (367.34-35), in the Wake's comparative study of

"depths," are harder to fathom than "the deepest deeps" in the geophysical
world. 34
We might see these ciphers put to play most clearly toward the end of the
Wake, at a moment close to our hero's wakening, when he lifts upward
toward consciousness, as elsewhere in the book, like a "deadsea dugong
updipdripping from his depths" (29.24-25 [a "dugong" being a submarine
mammal), so to surface "from the depths" of his "unknown body" of water,
and "from a death" that he has endured in a "deadsea" of sorts:
Bring about it to be brought about and it will be, loke, our lake lemanted, that
greyt lack, the citye of Is is issuant (atlanst!), urban and orba!, through seep froms
umber under wasseres of Erie.
Lough! (601.4-7)
As our "late lamented" hero-the "great lack" whose "Real Absence" is

plumbed here-rises "through sleep from slumber" into morning light out
of the night's "eerie" dark (hence the L. umber, "shadow"), he also rises
upward from a closed body of water ("lake," "Lake Leman," "Great Lake,"
"Erie," "lough"). What "was ere" only "umber under waters" (hencetheGer.
Wassers, "of water") now undergoes a seepy lifting-up into clarity: "Arise,
Land-under-Wave!" (248.8). As he ascends "from his depths," moreover,
"awike in wave risurging into chrest" (596.6 [" awake," "resurgent," resurrect-
ing like a "cresting wave" or "Christ"]), a whole array of darkly drowned
civil structures rises with him: the legendarily submerged Brettish city of
"Ys" ("citye of Is") and the kingdom of "Atlantis" ("atlanst!") together
with the civil structure of his own consciousness, now "at last" (" atlanst!")
emerging from its immersion in a closed body of water to regain the capac-
ity of real existence in a civilized present. "Ye of Is" (you who dwell in the
present state) should note the emphatic attention given to the verb "is" in
the phrase "the citye of Is is issuant." As he returns "to the city and the
world" (hence the L. Urbi et Orbi in "urban and orbal"), "the emplacement
of solid and fluid having to a great extent persisted" throughout the dark, "a
socially organic entity" emerges from the depths of his own body "in a more
or less settled state of equonomic ecolube equalobe equilab equilibbrium"
(599. IO- 18 [note all the L. aqua, "water"]).
As a "bog of the depths," the Wake is full of such "subrises" as these
(370.24 [and "surprises" occasioned by HCE's "rises" from his deeps]); and
generally, the Wake clarifies our hero's emplacement in all the bodies of
water and deeps to which it alludes by ordering them in relations of sug-
gestively ascending vitality. Just as "Challenger's Deep" is dense with un-

fathomable "SILENCE," in contrast to the audibly everflowing and familiar
River Life, so some bodies of water have less or more life in them than others.
Moments in our hero's "deap sleap" that are set in oceanic abysses or the
"deadsea," then (29.24), 'indicate roughly that HCE lies lost in "dead seek-
ness" (62.7)-the "sickness" keeping him in a "dead seasickabed" (392.6)-
and is void of any clear sign of life at all. Since "that dead wash of Lough
Murph" (272.23-24) is sometimes stirred by "Morpheus" and his dreams, by
contrast, parts of the Wake that show him immersed in "a protem grave ...
of the best Lough Neagh pattern" (76.21-22) would suggest that the "loch-
kneeghed forsunkener" (241.24 [Ger. Versunkener, "one sunk," or "sunk in
thought"]) has risen into a slightly richer form of underwater absence and
spectrality-even while kept "under loch and neagh" (196.20 [because ar-
rested by sleep and immersed in his own body of water]) . For the Celtic un-
derworld or a flooded city, according to varied legends, lies submerged be-
neath the waters of "Lough Neagh," which therefore harbor signs of ghostly
human life. 35 Since yet other legends attribute to its waters the power to
"petrifake" wood (77. I), passages in the Wake evoking Lough Neagh also
show our otherworldly hero "landloughed by his neaghboormistress and
perpetrified in his offsprung" (23.29-30); for in falling asleep, like a rock,
and entering a subaquatic "otherworld," an aged HCE-an "offspring" well
"offsprung"-also returns to "an inversion of a phallopharos" (76.34 [or
dark womb]) and becomes surrounded by "his neighbormistress," ALP. From
the underworldly depths of a body of water like Lough Neagh, finally,
within which "Donawhu" (76.32 [or "Don't know who"]) seems auditorily
aware of "her waters of her sillying waters of" (76.28-29), he rises into the
warm and fecundating shallows of a body of water like that represented in
the Wake by the equatorial Nyanzas, Victoria and Albert, where he begins
to "get it frisk from soorce"; and from there he rises into full hearing of the
"babbling, bubbling, chattering," and "gossipaceous" River Life (195.1-2,
4), everywhere animate and audible "in the far ear," and everywhere "san-
gnifying" his quickening.
Where this ascending progression of "subrises" leads will grow clear if we
return to the opening pages of Finnegans Wake, and to the precise place at
which our "reading [of the] Evening World" began-on the phrase "in bed"
(3.17), in whose vicinity we learn that "Hie cubat edilis. Apud libertinaill
parvu]am" (7.22-23 [L., "Here sleeps the public man. Near the small freed-
woman"). The Latin verb" cubat" in this construction ( "sleeps") puts a new
inflection on the phrase "in bed" (L. cubile) and in turn throws a new per-
spective everywhere across Joyce's "bog of the depths." For one of many pos-

sible Latin synonyms for the English "in bed" would be the phrase" in cu-
bato" (which, from the verb cubo, cubare, would literally mean "in having
gone to bed"). Because our hero's night-long drift through the dark in his
own closed body of water takes place in cubato, his sleep necessarily be-
comes, everywhere in the Wake, an extended form of "incubation" (112.21,
397.34 [where the orthodox Eng. "incubation," historically deriving from
the L. incubare, "to lie down upon," generates the meaning "to hatch"
simply because birds "lie down upon" their eggs]).
Playing host to a night-long incubus (L. "nightmare," 13.11, 221.23), the
"headandheelless chickenestegg" who is our hero (81.22-23) now "dis-
selv[es]," within his own closed body of water, into a fluid and life-
generating state that the Wake calls both "incubation" and "ovasleep" (397.16
[L. ova, "egg"]); and somewhere in its "exprogressive process, ( ... known
as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial and hatch-as-hatch can)" (614.31-33), he
sustains dark "remembrandts" of his quickening and birth (see 614.27-
615.10 entirely). That "Eggeberth" moves through the night while "incubat-
ing"-"ovidently" "asleep in [a] shell" (166.11, 469.17)-will explain, in
part, the many extremely "doubtful eggshells" (183.11-12) and the heavy
"soufflosion of oogs," "uoves, oves and uves" that appear everywhere in Fin-
negans Wake (184.3°,29 [It. uovo, L. ova, Gael. ubh: "egg"]). Eggs show up
on virtually every page of the book in part because they are objects towards
which our hero's desire (for breakfast and wakening) points; but also be-
cause sleep sends "the same homoheatherous checkinlossegg as when sol-
lyeye airly blew ye" (129.14-15) into "eggshill" from the Daily World
(415.9-10 ["exile"]), by turning him into the incubating form shown
scrambled in Relief Map B: "the same" person (Gr. homos) as when he last
"saw" the "sun" (hence the L. sol and the seeing "eye" in that "solly eye")
and when he last moved about in the free of the air (" airly blew"), this
incubating humanoid is now so radically alien an "other" (Gr. heteros) as to
resemble the dismembered hero of "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye," a barely rec-
ognizable "eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg." If we reexamine the relief
map of "the wellknown kikkinmidden where the illassorted first couple first
met with each other," however (5°3.8-9), it will become "ovident" that this
"deafadumped" ground is precisely the place where our hero's parents (inev-
itably an odd and "ill assorted couple") once met: "he was poached on in
that eggtentical spot" (16.36), which therefore extends not simply through
space, but, from wakening to wake (17.22-23), through all time as well. If,
once more, we "rearrive" at that paragraph on the first page of the Wake, we
might now see that the "unquiring" humanoid "empty dempt[ied]" (319.36)

somewhere in the liquidated space between "humptyhillhead" arid "tum-
ptytumtoes" is simply "incubating," and so merits yet another form of com-
parison with a "homelette" like Humpty Dumpty (59.31).
Because he "incubates" himself in sleep, "Haroun Childeric Eggeberth"
spends the night "reberthing in remarriment out of dead seekness" (62.7);
though dead to the world (hence the "Dead Sea"), he gives "rebirth" to
himself in a body of water associated with "amother" (hence the "berth,"
"birth," and "remarriment"). In turn, however improbably, he "Hatches
Cocks' E88s" (71.27), the Wake in turn assuming the title "E88 Laid by For-
mer Cock" (440.20 ["former" because he's dead to the world]). In general,
however, eggs are associated with and brooded over by hens, and so too
Haroun Childeric Eggeberth's; he becomes, in the night, "one fledge, one
brood" (378.4) not simply because sleep "disselv[es]" him into "one flesh,
one blood" "anastomosically assimilated" with "his streamline secret," but
also because he becomes an "incubating" "fledgling" of sorts, a "chickchild"
"asleep in [a] shell" (244.9-10, 469.17), brooded over by a figure to whom
the Wake now gives such "mudhen ... name[s]" as "Breedabrooda" (393.23,
78.17 [note the "brooding" "hen"]) . Vaguely evoking "original sin," this "orig-
inal hen" (110.22) undergoes a kind of unending "volucrine automutative-
ness" throughout the Wake (112.12 ["bird-like self-changeableness"]), be-
coming, for instance, our hero's "poachmistress" (412.23 [as opposed to a
literate "postmistress"]) and a "fiery goosemother" or "nocturnal goose-
mother" (242.25,449.36-45°.1) who is magically capable of "lay[ing a] new
golden sheegg" overnight (45°.1 [that "golden sheegg," in part, the sun and
its news of breakfast; cf. 382. II, 594.32-33]). The evocations heard among
all these terms of "fairy godmothers," "the goose that laid the golden egg,"
and "Mother Goose," of course, should waken from the dead some memories
of "childhide, " while the correlated maternal associations will suggest how
the Wake's recurrent references to "the Hen" also ultimately evoke those
times in which Haroun Childeric Eggeberth, "erigenating from next to
nothing" in a dark body of water, was "formelly confounded with
amother"-and all the more particularly because the Greek to hen signifies,
in philosophy, "the One" out of which the phenomenal world splinters, "ab
ove" (154.35 [L. ab ova, "from the egg," idiomatic for "the beginning"]). For
as the arterial sound of "Anna Livia," now "the Sassqueehenna" (594.30 [the
Susquehanna River and a "sassy queen hen"]), spills into his ears, "sing-
ing him henpecked" rhythms and "cackling" and "cheeping ... with a
choicey voicey like waterglucks" (492.9; 200.27, 8-9), it reminds "Cheepa-
lizzy's Hane Exposition" (II 1.6-7 [not only "Chapelizod's," but a mother

hen's, too]) of a time in life in which he was also undergoing an "ovasleep"
of sorts, within the body of "amother" who "ha[d] plenty of woom in the
smallclothes" (465.8-9). As then, so in the sleep of "everynight life": as
"woman with her ridiculous white burden ... reach[es] by one step sub-
lime incubation," "ague [and age] ... [are] rejuvenated" (112.20-21). You
"hatch yourself well! Enjomb yourselves thurily!" (465.9- 10 ["enjoy," "en-
womb"]); and only at the moment of wakening, when "there'll be iggs for
the brekkers come to mournhim, sunny side up with care" (12.14-15), do
you too "Come! Step out of your shell!" (621.3-4).
Owing to the incubatory properties of sleep, moreover, the "nitrience of
oxagiants" alters greatly (67.7 [together with "the nutrients" of sleeping
giants])-and in ways suggested by the appearance of the "nitrogen and
oxygen" in these "aliments" (286.L4, 163.2). Roughly, these define the me-
tabolism of a "vegetable" (here, a human one), and in turn they suggest
that nourishment in the vegetative state of sleep (406.31), apparentlyeffort-
less and free of dependence on the external, bears comparison with mother-
child "milkfeeding" and foetal nurture (337.5) .36 Particularly because HCE's
sleep might be construed as "a lenty" form of "fasting" (130.8, 189.29-30,
211.16, 611.9), during which he lies there "on the verge of selfabyss, most
starved" and "fastbroke down" until "Break-fast" breaks his fast (40.23,
541.25, 124.9-10), these terms make necessary the adoption of an "emended
food theory" adequate to the "changed endocrine history" of the night
(136.28, 163.35-36). Our hero, "highly pelaged and deeply gluttened"
(358.10 ["pleased and gladdened"]), becomes something of a "somatophage
merman" when he sinks into "ovasleep" (171.3)-a "merman" because he lies
submerged in his own body of water, as if in a "sea" (Gr. pela80s) of "glu-
ten," and "somatophage" because he subsists on that body. Indeed, he spends
the whole night "changing cane sugar into sethulose starch" and "feeding
on his own misplaced fat" (29.28, 79.13), so to give himself much "food for
refection" (455.9 [and us "food for reflection"]) : during sleep, you "wait on
yourself," and "You're Welcome to Waterfood" (4°5.25,71.22 [not "Waterford,"
but all the "water food" you can eat]). "See what happens when your soma-
tophage merman takes his fancy to our virgitarian swan?" (171.2-4 [the
"virgin swan" another version of the "hen"]): "he, selfsufficiencer, eggscu-
muddher-in-chaff" (240.14-15), loses the status he enjoys in consciousness
as a "breadwinning" patriarchal "commander-in-chief" (55.7-8) and re-
gresses into conditions like those experienced when he was an "egg-cum-
mother." "Since both [HCE and ALP] was parties to the feed," however, "it's
Hetman MacCumhal foots the funeral" at the Wake (243.13- 14), by provid-

ing the bountiful "cropse" (55.8 [or "corpse"]) offwhich he and all the phan-
toms in the dream in fact live (cf. 7.8-19), while "mealwhile [not mean-
while] she nutre him jacent" (243.13- 15 ["jacent" means "recumbent"]).
The best place in the Wake in which to see this "emended food theory"
dramatized would be in the book's first fully sustained "picture primitive" of
Shaun the Post (405.3), who appears in the "allmurk" (404.10) dressed en-
tirely in foodstuffs (e.g., at 404.23-407.6), obviously "having a great time of
it, a twentyfour hours every moment matters maltsight" (405.22-23 [Ger.
Malzeit, "meal," the "malt" blacking "sight" out]). Shaun is "invested" in
food here largely because our hero's appetite has risen in the latter half of
the night, so to waken his ego ("Show'm the Posed") and its acquisitive en-
ergies, and in turn to generate conflict with that part of himself (Shem) that
stays "down under" in the body and is all "somatophage merman" (see
170.25-171.28). As his body starts creating itself out of itself by drawing
on "the food that is to build" (246.12), the passage begins evoking a time
when "little eggons, youlk and meelk" (613.11 ["little egos" like "you and
me," subsisting on maternal "egg, yolk, and milk"]), enjoyed a "breakfast
of first, a bless us a blood" (405.32-33)-and "all free of charge, aman"
(406.21-22). "In the mealtub" (312.24-25 ["meantime"]), "plain as por-
table enveloped ... care of one of Mooseyeare Goonness's ... barrels"
(414.10- 13), Shaun begins traveling through "foetal sleep" not only in HCE's
"body" « a.E. *bodi8, "cask"), but also within a "Mother Goose" (or
Hen) whose appearance shows him undergoing the infantile and incubatory
regressions of the dark. Now exercising a "prelove appetite" "at the sign of
Mesthress Vanhungrig" (406.35,30 [Ger. hun8ri8, "hungry"]), he becomes
"one ... that ... would aight through the months" (405.17-18 ["eat," as
once through "eight months"]), an infant returned to the womb. "Ever of
thee, Anne Lynch, he's deeply draiming!" (406.27 ["draining," while "dream-
ing"]), and "for auld lang Ayternitay" (406.28)-where the evocation of
"auld lang syne" summons up a "blank memory" of times that "be forgot"
and are "never brought to mind" (390.23, 21), largely because they were
times when "his heart was as big as himself, so it was, ay, and bigger"
(406.22 - 23 [times when he was" confounded with amother"] ) . "Thus thicker
will he grow now, grew new" (406.28-29), until, "growing to stay" over the
course of Book III (404.15)-" (gracious helpings, at this rate of growing our
cotted child of yestereve will soon fill space and burst in systems, so speeds
the instant!)" (429.1I-13)-he reenacts the process of birth and grows into
the spit and image of the old man who was "reduced to nothing" at the be-
ginning of the night, the son who is his father's dream turning into his own

father: "'tis Father Quinn again" (562.27-28 ["Finnegan" "quickened"]); "I
met somewhere somelam to whom he will be becoming liker" (562.34-35).
Much more might be said about the Wake's reconstructions of "ovasleep"
and "about that coerogenal hun and his knowing the size of an eggcup"
(616.20-21)-not least by way of noting how the evidently aggressive "hun"
who is the incubating subject of this construction becomes everywhere
linked with a feminine "hen" and "her" (Da. hun) with whom, bonded in
"original sin" ("coerogenal hun"), he is latently "co-erogenous." Through-
out the Wake, we find "the hen and crusader everintermutuomergent"
everywhere (55.11-12), in a "scene [that is] refreshed, reroused, ... never
to be forgotten" (55.10- I I). This is a scene that deepens, however, when the
Wake answers the question of "Where" the night takes place by "indicating
the locality" of deep sleep (599.25, 32) and directing our attention into a
realm of pure "liquid" (Sans. sara) and fluid "sap" (Ger. Saft) governed by
"Anna Livia" ("Innalavia"):
Polycarp pool, the pool of Innalavia, Saras the saft as, of meadewy marge, atween
Deltas Piscium and Sagittariastrion, whereinn once we lave 'tis alve and vale, minny-
hahing here from hiarwather, a poddlebridges in a passabed, the river of lives, the
regenerations of the incarnations of the emanations of the apparentations of Funn
and Nin in Cleethabala ... let it be! (600.5- 12)
Set amid "laughing waters" ("minnyhahaing") at "the soorce" (Victoria

and Albert Nyanza appear at 600.12-13), the passage orients our hero much
where "Anna Livia Plurabelle" does, in the "riverbed" (It. alveo) of a
river (Dublin's "Poddle") indistinct from" Innalavia 's" "delta," "her water"
("hiarwathar"), and the uterine tract ("piddle," "pissabed"): it amounts to
another reconstruction of nocturnal "woom," within which now are made
"apparent" the ghostly "apparitions" of "parents" and ancestors ("apparen-
tations") and of the washing forth and away of attached lives (hence the Fr.
laver, and the L. Ave and Vale, "hail" and "farewell"). Lifting also upward
through the birth-signs "Pisces" and "Saggitarius" into the "stars" (Gr. as-
trion, "star"), the passage leads also" towards a relevution of the karmalife
order" (338.6), by evoking "revolutions" of "karma" and "lives" ("incarna-
tions"), and "revelations of the Carmelite order" (the Incarnation). The
convergence of all these ciphers suggests that the Wake, because it is about
the night, is also necessarily a cosmogony, whose subject is the fluid torrent
of creative power out of which the world originates every morning and al-
ways. For in the Wake, creation is not a historical event that happens only
once, with a remote big bang in the Garden of Eden, but a "hystorical"

event (564.31 [Gr. hysteros, "womb"]), happening constantly in the "garden
of Erin" and other modern nations as people keep on waking up and children
keep on spilling into the world. As in Genesis, then, where all the glittering
appearances of the earth come forth out of a dark, formless, and inchoate
body of water seeded with paternal form, as if from the interior of an egg
("let it be!"), so too in the Wake's account of HCE's genesis, where a world
originates somewhere in the dark and liquid space of a body of water that
itself originated in a body of water strewn with amniotic "alum and oves"
(393.24 ["Adam and Eve"]) Y In trying to fathom a hero who reverts in the
night to "ovasleep," the Wake is also plumbing the form of unconscious
"sinking" (not "thinking") that informs the interior of embodied water, as
the body weaves itself up out of the dark, "from next to nothing," "some-
whave" at "the heart of secret waters" (501.21,599.26).
"THE CONSTANT OF FLUXION"

While these meditations lead us to see how deeply ALP, "mother of us all"
(299.3), informs the body "tropped head" at the Wake, a return to their con-
crete point of origin in "the presence (of a curpse)," and to the sound of
arteries of running water washing through "the far ear" will put them all
into perspective. That riverlike sound generates one last and most profound
association in our hero's "tropped head"-an association with the invisible
force of fluidity itself, "everflowing on the times" (117.3-4). This is why
Joyce could not possibly have been more explicit about the "meanamt " of
"Anna Livia" without destroying his text and its treatment of "matters that
fall under the ban of our infrarational senses." "Anna Livia" is not, finally,
about blood as a wakeful rationalist might know it, the object of scientific
observation and a by-product of pain that becomes visible only when it
leaves the body, stops, and stops sounding forever. Putting into English the
"wyeryet rima t " that flows through "Anna Livia" and throughout the Wake
would have put it into reason and vision, where precisely it is not.
We must, then, "bewise of Fanciulla's heart, the heart of Fanciulla! Even
the recollection of willow fronds is a spellbinder that lets to hear" (278.7-9
[It. fanciulla, "girl"]). The admonition advises us, in a passage about the
reading ofletters, to "beware" and "be wise," and in part by noting that where
"spelling" "binds," the "spilling" out of "the heart" of ALP's arterial "flow-
andflow" simply "spellbinds"; having all the substantiality of the memory
of the rustle of willows, it speaks of a figure called "Pantharhea" (513.22

[Heraclitus' panta rhei, "all things flow"]), who appears in all those gaps
and silent interstices of the world where language and the structures it
makes possible are not-at night, in sleep, between words. "INCIPIT INTER-
MISSIO" (278.R1 [L. "intermission begins" here]).
Since these silent gaps fall outside of letters, and outside of the institu-
tions that those letters empower, what becomes expressed in the "cun-
niform letters" of which "Anna Livia" is composed is a form of creative
power, feminine rather than masculine because it escapes traditional phal-
lologocentric mastery and control. This productive force works much differ-
ently from the creative powers of patriarchy, whose deity, as exemplified in
Genesis, brings the world to light by creating things in his own image, do-
mesticating the unknown with the known, and discriminating and estab-
lishing difference-between light and dark, night and day, heaven and
earth, sheep and goats, men and women, right and wrong. 38 "Anna Livia's"
"affluvial flowandflow" spills into the world a "safety vulve" (297.26-27), a
"constant of fluxion, Mahamewetma" (297.29-30)-where the reference to
the Vedic "mahamavantara," or world-cycle, calls to mind cosmogonic revo-
lution, and the evocations of the "vulva" and the "mama wet Ma" call to
mind maternity and birth.
Like a dream, Finnegans Wake has its day's residue, too; and a substantial
part of that residue is language itself, whose operative structures linger on
in the Evening World, generating the illusion not only that words will keep
the legislated and referentially secure relations to things that they maintain
in the Daily World, but also that the "patrilinear" form of the book will
yield a linear sense (279.4). As in a dream, however, this manifest appear-
ance is misleading, since the sense of the dream is latent, buried, and rather
than static, charged with a "constant of fluxion" that makes the release of
meaning possible only if one travels along streams of unlimited association.
Being wakeful readers, we cannot help but be mindful of the linearity, liter-
acy, and lexicality of the Wake, precisely because these things mirror and
make possible "the use of raisin" (130.16 ["reason"], 154.31, 183.13). But
"raisin," as its spelling suggests, is all dried out here, and will not alone
prove adequate when sent into the depths of the dream, whose form is not
"patrilinear," but associative, fluvial, and capable of sweeping memory's
bric-a-brac along with all the hydrodynamic "thisorder" and "fluxion" em-
bodied in a river. And "that's the point of eschatology our book of kills
reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded
can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for" (482.33-36).
Calling attention to the conflicts and confusions that fill the literate and

legislated space between "eye" and "ear" ("ear aye sieze," "eye ere"), the
line suggests that terms in the Wake which cannot be literalistically "coded"
will instead release meaning if an "ear" attuned to the sound of "the constant
of fluxion" audible in the rivers pouring out of the heart (hence the L. cors,
cordis, in "decorded") "seizes" on that sound and heeds its "meanamt ."
The Wake therefore becomes something of a "New Free Woman with novel
inside" (145.29). For there is a "novel inside" of the Wake, though hardly
one of the sort that the criticism has traditionally sought, with real-world
"exploits" involving a hunchback Nordic guilty of urinary excess. It is,
rather, a "nightynovel" (54.21), which follows "the explots" of a "man made
static" in bed for "eaght hours" (124.29,309.22,617.27), its linear plot being
one of steadily deepening "embedment" that reverses itself at the book's mid-
point, in the gap between I.viii and II.i, where a rejuvenating body begins
to relive its own childhood and gravitate heliotropically toward the moment
of its resurrection and wakening: "No Sturm. No Dran8" (300.L2); "Pas d'ac-
tion, peu de sauce" (274.L2). If the Wake preserves an eccentric and remote
attachment to the novel and comparable forms of "patrilinear plop" (279.4),
however, it also dismantles those forms, simply by taking as its subject
the real experience of sleep, within which the real crumbles altogether-
together with the paternal old man who "disselv[es]," by night, into a
mother and child.
Just as ALP surrounds a hero who is "formelly confounded with amother"
everywhere in the night, so too a "New Free Woman" "envelopes" every-
thing inside of the novel which represents HCE's "nightlife," in turn becom-
ing "the mother of the book" (50. II - I2) . And just as a "meanamt " "spilled"
with "cunniform letters" plays through HCE's ears everywhere in the Wake,
so the sound of its "constant of fluxion" envelopes all the letters buried
inside him (I.v): "We note the paper with her jotty young watermark:
Notre Dame du Bon Marche. And she has a heart of Arin! What lumililts as
she fols" (112.31-33). The familiar "river" flowing out of the "heart" here
(Alb. lumi, "river") "speaks," in other words (Alb. fol, "speak"), to an ordi-
nary old man whom night has rendered dead to the world and "disselv[ed]"
into a "Jolly Young Waterman." ALP now becomes "Misthress of Arths" at
his Wake (112.29) in part because she wakens this once-and-future hero
("Arthur"), but also because she assumes the role of "mistress of arts" in a
work that modulates now into a "Brook of Life" (264.6 [or fluid "book of
life"]). Container and discoverer of its buried letter, "she ... who tears up
lettereens she never apposed a pen upon" (276.6-7 [or ever really opposed])
rises into this role largely by overwhelming the orthodox letters and literal

senses established by patriarchy with her "cunniform letters" and "ebrot ,"
which do not stay still, but grow and behave with all the unpredictability of
children" (the mother of the book with a dustwhisk tabularasing his ob-
literation done upon her involucrum)" (50.11-13 [L. involucrum, "enve-
lope"]). Much like the scavenging Hen of I.v, then, who gathers up the
rubble of a trashed day's residue and puts it into "the sack of auld hensyne"
(112.8 [and into forms of thought that "be forgot"]), this "Misthress of
Arths" reforms the world when she "pits hen to paper" and, "in cunniform
letters," produces "scribings scrawled on eggs" (615.10). She does so, in part,
by reanimating in our hero, as once in her "cunniform" "whome," the un-
potentiated mind of the child. For "lastly but mostly, in her genesic field it is
all game and no gammon" (112. 16-17)-where, because "gammon" means
both "talk" and "ridiculous nonsense," the line suggests that orthodox
"patrilinear" "talk" and "nonsense" will be supplanted by a playful flexi-
bility or "gaming" that earns its "genesic" power by making no pretense to
authority (OED, "gammon," sb. 4, v. 4).
As HCE's "Misthress of Arths," this "New Free Woman" in turn issues an
"untitled mamafesta" (104.4) "plainly Showing all the Unmentionability"
(107.6-7), whose "meanam t " resonates through the Wake as a whole. One
of the few "Our Mothers" in literature-another" (suppressed) book"-it
argues the power not of phallologocentric structures but of utero-illogico-
eccentric ones (like children and dreams), and it is all the prettier for it:
In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities,
haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!
Her untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest has gone by many names
at disjointed times. Thus we hear of, The AU8usta An8ustissimost for Old Seabeastius'
Salvation, Rockabill Booby in the Wave Trou8h ... Anna Stessa's Rise to Notice . ..
(104·1-8)
The opposite of an assertively aggressive "manifesto," this one is feminine

in form (as the suffixal" -a" suggests); it replaces the overbearing "man" in
"manifesto" with a "mama" who is the antithesis of all those patriarchal
deities of whom "we read" in the Koran ("In the name of Allah, the All-
merciful, the compassionate") and the Bible ("thy kingdom come, thy will
be done, on earth as it is in heaven") -not least because, in childhood, "we
hear of" "her singtime sung" (rather than "read" about his). The essential
sense of this "mamafesta"-"You'd be Nought Without Mom" (106.3)-
therefore takes a dual form, on the one hand bespeaking the creative power
of "somewome" who is "amother" than our hero ("It Was Me Egged Him on

to the Stork Exchange" [106.17-18]) and on the other reconstructing "the
mind of the unborn child" "formelly confounded with amother": a suba-
quatic "Seabeastius," as opposed to an imperial "Sebastius" (" Rockabill
Booby in the Wave Trough" [104.6-7]). Speaking of a redemptive "Most-
highest" (Messiah) who "has gone by many names at disjointed times," it is
ultimately declaring, in times out of joint, the power of "the fruit of the
womb" and of "the child we all love to place our hope in for ever" (621.31-
32), through whom, in the infantile regression of the dream and in fact, the
world is constantly being "rearrived" at and reformed. And while patriarchy
can constrain it-indeed, must constrain it-its power will not be hemmed;
for not even the sternest authority can predict what a child will become-or
what a word in the Wake will lead to. "Unhemmed," each has no clear limit;
"uneven" (and therefore" odd" ), each deviates from all determinate plan.
Perhaps "you missed my drift" (424.31 [and also that of the Wake]). Never
definitively "arrived at," meaning in Finnegans Wake "drifts" and is con-
stantly "rearrived" at (3.5); and consequently it hovers in a state of continual
arrival and is constantly becoming: "In the becoming was the weared, wont-
nat!" (487.20-21 [O.E. wyrd, "time, change, becoming"]). The "cunniform
letters" that "Anna Livia" adds to the book therefore send its reader" arride
the winnerful wonders off, the winnerful wonnerful wanders off" (265.15-
16 [Eng. "arride," "to gratify"]) ; for as one" stotters from the latter," pursues
"distant connections," and "wanders off," "wonders" and "delight" (Ger.
Wonne) open up, their discovery attesting to a capacity not to trap and
domesticate the unknown with what is already known, but to move with
flexibility into a future potentially rich in "plurabilities."
The "hearing of" "the constant of fluxion" that envelopes the letters of
Joyce's "Brook of Life," then, requiring only that we engage them with some
resourcefulness and play, makes its reading as unpredictable as children can
be, flooding the future with the prospect of unforeseen "plurabilities" that
signal growth, vitality, and change. As soon as any aspect of the book be-
gins to make sense-the idea of "raisin," for example-networking depths
of new associations and bottomless complications, all welling up out of the
dark experience of the night, web out everywhere in all directions; and, in
turn, all the "changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns" in this nocturnal
"chaosmos" alter (II8.27-28, 21 ["chaos," "cosmos"]), taking on new mean-
ings as they come to life where they ought to and only can, in "the presence
(of a curpse)," as pathos and misericordia (pleures) and laughter and de-
light (belle) wake. 39 This is why a good reading of the Wake, a circular book
without an end, can have no real ending.

"How it ends?" (614.19). Particularly because the sense of this book of the
dark lies entangled in a network of free associations, it never ends. "It's like
a dream," whose fruitful analysis, as Joyce himself well knew, has no point
of termination: "A book like that," he said of the Wake, "has no ending. It
could go on forever." 40 And like a dream, whose "meanamt " stays suspended
in a "constant of fluxion" and is always being "rearrived" at, "it will re-
member itself from every sides, with all our gestures, in each our word"
(614.20-21). "So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound to
carryover three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book
of Doublends Jined" (20.13-16): there's one at least for every year in the
proverbial three score and ten that make up a life. And on that score, par-
ticularly if we recall Daniel's very strong words to "Nebuchadnezzar" on the
subject of dream analysis-"this is the dream, and we will tell the inter-
pretation thereof" (Daniel 2)-"Nobookisonester" (177.14). There's "love-
softfun at" Finne8ans Wake (607.16), a book that one might easily read for a
lifetime. More people should join in its fun.

Notes
Index
Notes
AN INTRODUCTION: ON OBSCURITY
I. Adaline Glasheen, A Second Census of"Finne8ans Wake": An Index of the Characters
and Their Roles (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1963), p. xvii.
2. Jacques Mercanton, "The Hours ofJames Joyce," trans. Lloyd C. Parks, in Portraits of
the Artist in Exile: Recollections ofjames joyce by Europeans, ed. Willard Potts (Seattle:
Univ. of Washington Press, 1979), p. 214·
3. Mary and Padraic Colum, Our Friend james joyce (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
19SB) , p. ISB.
4. Louise Bogan, "Finnegans Wake," Nation, 6 May 1939; rpt. in james joyce: The Criti-
cal Herita8e, ed. Robert H. Deming (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), II,
p.666.
5. Mercanton, "The Hours ofJamesJoyce, " p. 233.
6. Frank Budgen, james joyce and the Makin8 of 'Ulysses' (1934; rpt. Bloomington:
Univ. of Indiana Press, 1960), p. 284.
7. F. R. Leavis, "Joyce and 'Revolution of the Word,'" in For Continuity (1933; rpt. Free-
port, N. Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 196B) , p. 20B.
B. See also Ole Vinding, "James Joyce in Copenhagen," trans. Helge Irgens-Moller, in
Portraits of the Artist in Exile, p. 149.
9. Mercanton, "The Hours ofJamesJoyce," p. 209.
10. "To remark that one is not a constant dreamer is not to assert that dreaming is rare,
but merely that one's recollection is rare .... It cannot of course be said that the failure
to remember dreams is any argument against their occurrence" (Havelock Ellis, The
World of Dreams [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 191 I], pp. 13- 14). Ellis also isolates the issue
essentially at stake in all debates about the continuity of dreaming through the night:
"Many psychologists, as well as metaphysicians-fearful to admit that the activity of
the soul should ever cease-believe that we dream during the whole of sleep .... On the
other hand, [some have] held that deep sleep is dreamless" (p. 13). Contemporary polemics
about whether "dreaming" continues throughout the night or only during periods of
REM sleep reflect the same essential concern, although the controversy now bears on the
perdurability of "consciousness," rather than the soul.
I I. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, tr. and ed. James Strachey
(New York: Norton, 1966), p. 89.
12. Vinding, "James Joyce in Copenhagen," p. 149.
13. Mercanton, "The Hours ofJamesJoyce," p. 208: "Then [Joyce] came back to 'Work
in Progress,' to the problems of dreams, which occupy a third of our lives and about
which we know almost nothing." Compare Freud's late complaint, of 1933, that" analysts
behave as though they had no more to say about dreams, as though there was nothing
more to be added to the theory of dreams," in "Revision of the Theory of Dreams," New
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Nor-
ton, 1965), p. 8.
14. Vinding, "James Joyce in Copenhagen," p. 149·
15. Mercanton, "The Hours ofJamesJoyce, " p. 207·
16. "It is rarely possible to be aware of dreaming while it continues, and the only evi-
dence of it would be uncertain memory to the effect after wakening .... Thus skeptics
could argue that the reality of dreaming during sleep is an inference based on circum-
stantial evidence, and therefore that the phenomenal event of dreaming is ... hypo-
thetical. Malcolm (in Dreaming) goes so far as to insist that the only meaning the word
dream has is in reference to the strange tales we report to one another. The usefulness of
that word (or dreaming) in relation to something we assume is happening during sleep
is apparent ... although it has no direct empirical referent" (Frederick Snyder, "The
Physiology of Dreaming, "in Dream Psychology and the New Biology ofDreaming [Spring-
field, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1969], pp. 17- 19) . Snyder's reference is to Norman Malcolm's
Dreaming (New York: Humanities Press, 1959), a work grounded in British analytical phi-
losophy, for discussions of which see Philosophical Essays on Dreaming, ed. Charles E. M.
Dunlop (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977).
17. "A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams," in The Standard Edi-
tion of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey, vol.
14 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 223.
18. Mercanton, "The Hours ofJamesJoyce,"p. 207.
19. Any book on sleep and dreams published after 1960 will have a discussion of REM
sleep and an account of its discovery. For a highly readable treatment of the subject, see
Gay Gaer Luce and Julius Segal, Sleep (New York: Coward-McCann, 1966), pp. 187-229.
For a good anthology containing summaries of and excerpts from the major technical
articles, see Ralph L. Woods and Herbert B. Greenhouse, The New World of Dreams (New
York: Macmillan, 1974) ; this is a companion volume to Woods' World of Dreams (New York:
Random House, 1947), an anthology surveying world literature on dreams from the
Upanishads and Aristotle through Bergson and Freud. Both make for good introductory
browsing.
Two other anthologies, more technical in nature but useful for their discussions of the
relations of the new materials to Freudian, Jungian, and phenomenological theories of
dreams are Milton Kramer, ed., Dream Psychology and the New Biology of Dreaming
(Springfield, Ill.: Thomas, 1969), and Ernest Hartmann, ed., Sleep and Dreaming (Boston:
Little, Brown and Co., 1970). Whether the new findings reinforce or jeopardize psycho-
390 Notes to Pages 6-11

analytical understandings seems to depend on whether the person exploring them
wishes to reinforce or jeopardize psychoanalytical understandings.
20. Luce and Segal, Sleep, p. 19I.
21. If cycles of REM sleep are to be regarded as signs of "dreaming," their occurrence in
the foetus, newly born infants, and all mammals raise yet other obscure questions. What
purpose is served by a "dream" that has, presumably, no content? And how do such
"dreams" spin up out of the phylogenetic past? Since reptiles, amphibians, and lower
forms of animal life seem not to "sleep" at all, according to these criteria, but only to
undergo periods of relative rest and quiescence, sleeping and dreaming, like intelligence
itself, seem to be evolutionary variables that reach their most flowery and obscure forms
in the human, who alone may sleep soundly throughout the length of a night. See Truett
Allison and Henry van Twyver, "The Evolution of Sleep," Natural History 79, no. 2
(1970) : 56-65, anthologized under the title, "The Sleep and Dreams of Animals," in
Woods and Greenhouse, pp. 342-55. On REM sleep in utero, see Charles Furst, Ori8ins of
the Mind: Mind-Brain Connections (Englewood Cliffs, N.j.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), p. 100.
22. William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman, "The Relation of Eye Movements During
Sleep to Dream Activity," Journal ofExperimental Psychol08Y 53 (1957) : 339-44; William
Dement and Edward A. Wolpert, "The Relation of Eye Movements, Body Motility, and
External Stimuli to Dream Content," Journal of Experimental Psychol08Y 55 (1958):
543-53. See also Dement, Kleitman, and Wolpert, "Your Eyes Watch the Dream Action,"
in Woods and Greenhouse, New World, pp. 293-96, and Luce and Segal, Sleep, pp. 200-202.
"However, more recent research indicates that it is difficult to match eye movements
with the reported dream content (except in unusual cases, as in a dream of watching a
Ping-Pong match), and people can apparently experience vivid visual dreams accom-
panied by only a few eye movements" (Furst, Ori8ins, p. 96).
23. Nathaniel Kleitman, "The Nature of Dreaming," in CIBA Foundation Symposium
on the Nature of Sleep, ed. G. E. W. Wolstenholme and Maeve O'Connor (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1961), pp. 352-53. See also Russell Gardner et aI., "The Relationship of Small
Limb Movements during REM Sleep to Dreamed Limb Action," Psychosomatic Medicine
37 (1975): 147-59· "However, the relationship between limb movements during REM and
the content of the dream is not perfect: many times a dreamer will report having a very
active dream when no muscle twitches are visible" (Furst, Ori8ins, p. 97).
24. Dement and Wolpert, "The Relation of Eye Movements, Body Motility, and Exter-
nal Stimuli to Dream Content," pp. 543-53.
25. Charles Fisher, joseph Gross, and joseph Zuch, "Cycle of Penile Erection Syn-
chronous with Dreaming (REM) Sleep," Archives of General Psychiatry 12 (1965) : 29-45;
Herbert Greenhouse, "Penile Erections during Dreams," in Woods and Greenhouse, New
World, pp. 296-97; Luce and Segal, Sleep, pp. 198-99. See also I. Karacan, A. L. Rosen-
bloom, and R. L. Williams, "The Clitoral Erection Cycle during Sleep," Psychophysi-
0108Y 7 (1970): 338, and, in the same place, Harvey D. Cohen and Arthur Shapiro,
"Vaginal Blood Flow during Sleep": "observed [increases in vaginal blood flow] in the
sleeping female appear analogous to the pattern of penile erections observed in the
sleeping male."
26. David Foulkes, "Theories of Dream Formation and Recent Studies of Sleep Con-
sciousness," Psychol08ical Bulletin 62 (1964): 236-47; Foulkes, "You Think All Night
Long," and Robert L. Van De Castle, "Thinking during Non-Dreaming Sleep," in Woods
and Greenhouse, New World, pp. 298-302 and 303-13.
Notes to Pases 11-13 39 1

27. Why most people dream in color, yet others evidently only in black and white, is
not at all clear; nor is it clear why a small percentage of people have "auditory dreams,"
consisting only of voices and sounds unaccompanied by any visual imagery. Then too,
there is sleepwalking, where more than the eyes move, and where the distinctions be-
tween sleep and wakefulness grow disturbingly obscure:
"A sixteen-year-old girl, dreaming of burglars as she later said, took the family re-
volver in her sleep and killed her father and brother, injuring her mother. In 1946, an
Arkansas farmer awakened from a nightmare into greater horror, when he found that he
had warded off an imaginary attacker with a heavy flashlight-and killed his only
daughter, a four-year-old. A Berkeley housewife arose one morning at 2 A.M., threw a
coat over her pajamas, and gathered the family dachsunds into the car for a long drive to
Oakland, awakening at the wheel 23 miles away.... Perhaps one of the most amusing
stories is that of an English lady who awakened one night. There was a thud on the bed,
and she was so frightened she fainted. When she awakened in daylight, she found that
her sleep-walking butler had set the table for fourteen on her bed .... One young
Frenchman, who often arose in the morning with bruises and bad wounds, yet claimed
that he had slept soundly and restfully. His wife knew otherwise. He spent a part of his
nights in a pitched battle with the furniture-breaking things, bumping things, and
even throwing chairs as he shouted. He seemed to be re-enacting a shipboard trauma suf-
fered as a very young man .... A typical and not so funny case was reported ... in 1965,
when a twenty-three-year-old Australian woman was found at night in a Sidney street by
the police-with broken legs. As she explained, she had had a vivid dream about eloping
with her fiance. He had placed a ladder against the window of her third-story bedroom
and she stepped out onto a ladder that, sadly enough, existed only in her imagination"
(Luce and Segal, Sleep, pp. 134-35).
Stories like these no doubt illumine the one overt fear that Bloom is said to have in
Ulysses, "the committal of homicide or suicide during sleep by an aberration of the light
of reason, the incommensurable categorical intelligence situated in the cerebral con-
volutions" (U, 720); but they also raise very dark questions about the indistinct line that
separates sleepwalking from unreflective walking in general.
28. Furst, Ori8ins, p. 104.
29. Foulkes, "Theories of Dream Formation," p. 240.
30. On the nineteenth-century belief that movements in the eyes of sleeping people
and of animals signified dreams see, for example, Robert MacNish, The Philosophy of
Sleep (New York: D. Appleton, 1834), pp. 310- 12, and]. N. Pinkerton, Sleep and Its Phe-
nomena (London: Edmund Fry and Son, 1839), p. 20; on the wakefulness of "the visual
faculty" in sleep, see John Bigelow, The Mystery of Sleep (New York and London: Harper
and Brothers, 1905), p. 5; on "the retinal element of dreaming" and "movements of the
eye," see Havelock Ellis, World of Dreams, pp. 26-31; and so forth. Observations of this
sort are everywhere in the literature that Joyce would have known.
The most famous exemplar of nineteenth-century reflection on "rapid-eye movements"
is George Trumball Ladd, whose "Contribution to the Psychology of Visual Dreams," in
Mind, A Quarterly Review ofPsycholo8Y and Philosophy, n.s., 1 (1892) is anthologized in
Woods' World of Dreams, pp. 5II-15, and in Woods and Greenhouse, New World, pp. 180-
82. The essay is also discussed in The Interpretation of Dreams (pp. 66-67), where Freud
generally endorses its findings. "Through pure introspection, [this] professor of mental
39 2 Notes to Pa8es 13-14

and moral psychology at Yale University was able to distinguish between the fixed posi-
tion of the eyes in deep, presumably dreamless, sleep, and their mobility during dream-
ing, cautiously stating that he was 'inclined to believe that, in somewhat vivid visual
dreams, the eyeballs move gently in their sockets, taking various positions .... ' Ladd
surmised that 'in a dream we probably focus our eyes somewhat as we should do in
making the same observation when awake'" (Kleitman, "The Nature of Dreaming, "p. 350;
for a comparable contemporary retrospect on MacNish and Pinkerton, see Gardner et
aI., p. 147).
31. Notably, by Harry Levin, in james joyce: A Critical Introduction, rev. ed. (New
York: New Directions, 1960), pp. 139-222, a work whose views, in earlier form, Joyce had
admired (L, III, 464); by Richard Ellmann, injamesjoyce, pp. 436,546,716; by Frederick
]. Hoffmann, in "Infroyce," in Seon Givens, ed., jamesjoyce: Two Decades of Criticism
(New York: Vanguard Press, 1963), pp. 390-435; by James Atherton, in The Books at the
Wake: A Study ofLiterary Allusions injamesjoyce's "FinneBans Wake" (1959; rpt. Carbon-
dale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1974); by William York Tindall, in A Reader's
Guide to "FinneBans Wake" (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), pp. 18-19 and
passim; by Margaret C. Solomon, in The Sexual Universe of "FinneBans Wake" (Carbon-
dale, Ill.: Southern Ill. Univ. Press, 1969); by Margot Norris, in The Decentered Universe
of "FinneBans Wake": a Structuralist ReadinB (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1974); by Colin MacCabe, in james joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: The
Macmillan Press, 1979); and by Sheldon R. Brivic, joyce between Freud andjunB (Port
Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat Press, 1980) .
32. Paul Ricouer, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 6-8. On "the text of the dream," a term that
Freud makes equivalent to the "manifest" or verbally recalled dream, see also "Revision
of the Theory of Dreams," pp. 9 and 14.
33. Mercanton, "The Hours ofjamesJoyce, " p. 221.
34. OnJoyce's characterization of psychoanalysis as "blackmail," see]], 324; as deviant
"confession," ]], 472; as "mechanical" in its symbology, jj, 382; on the superiority of
Ulysses, seejj, 324, 436. See also Budgen, "Further Recollections of James Joyce, "injames
joyce and the MakinB of "Ulysses", p. 320.
Both from his overt remarks and from that well-known passage in the Wake which ex-
ploratively drifts into the penumbra of the Freudian unconscious (II5.II-35), we can
infer that Joyce distrusted the humorless solemnity of some psychoanalysis-i ts "unsmil-
ing bit on 'alices" (II5.22 ["analysis"]); its "feebought" mercantile aspect (II5.25); and
the tendency at least of its ephebes to narrow perspectives by putting everything only
"under the pudendascope" (II5.30). Then, too, there was the dangerously normalizing
sound ofthe Freudian "cure," as opposed to the Irish one, good whiskey: "I can psoakoona-
loose myself any time I want" (522.34-35 ["soak," "on a loose"]), as the blacked-out
brain underlying FinneBans Wake murkily notes, so implicitly to contrast "analysis"
(Gr., "loosening up") with "lysis" pure and simple.
A final consideration, since Joyce had a daughter in recurrent treatment, is that these
were not merely intellectual, but painful real-world issues for him. One can hear some-
thing of his frustration and anger speaking through his daughter in Lucia's remark on her
failed analyst-for-a-season, Carl Jung: "To think that such a big fat materialistic Swiss
man should try to get hold of my sou!!" (fj, 679).
Notes to Pages 15-17 393

35. Padraic and Mary Colum, Our Friendjamesjoyce, p. 134.
36. Jan Parandowski, "Meeting with Joyce," trans. Willard Potts, in Portrait of the Art-
ist in Exile, p. 158.
37. For a reading of Ulysses that develops this line of thought in more intricate ways,
outside of the psychoanalytic vocabulary, see Ralph Rader, "Exodus and Return: joyce's
Ulysses and the Fiction of the Actual," University of Toronto Quarterly 48 (Winter 1978-
79) : 149-71.
38. Unlike such of his followers as Roheim and Ferenczi, Freud seems never to have
been stirred by the question of what happens in sleep outside of dreams: "what is sleep?
That is a physiological or biological problem about which much is still in dispute. On
that we can come to no conclusion" (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 88).
39. "related as day is to night": Vinding, "James Joyce in Copenhagen," p. 149.
40. In 1934, when Joyce was asked in an interview whether he "believed" in The New
Science, he replied, "I don't believe in any science but my imagination grows when I read
Vico as it does not when I read Freud and Jung" (fj, 693). This echoed a remark of 1913
in which he had already noted that "Freud had been anticipated by Vico" (fj, 340). To-
gether the comparisons suggest, as will become evident, that Joyce found in Vico's New
Science a version of "the new science" of psychoanalysis, but one more congenial to his
temperament.
41. Adaline Glasheen, A Third Census of"Finne8ans Wake": An Index of the Characters
and Their Roles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1977), p. 100.
42. Budgen, "James Joyce," in Givens,jamesjoyce: Two Decades of Criticism, p. 24; see
also "Further Recollections of James Joyce," p. 320.
43. August Suter, "Some Remininscences of James Joyce, "trans. Fritz Senn, in Portraits
of the Artist in Exile, p. 64.
44. For more on this underground tunnelling, see the Letters, I, 205, 220, 222; III, IIO;
and Nino Frank, "The Shadow That Had Lost Its Man," trans. Jane Carson, in Portraits of
the Artist in Exile, p. 92. See also Finne8ans Wake, where this dark mountain reappears
everywhere, in countless forms. As "our mounding's mass" (8. I), "the mountainy mole-
hill" (474.22), "The Bearded Mountain" (222.12), it turns out to be the hero of the book,
indefinitively known as "Mr Tunnelly" (435.34-35).
45. Louis Gillet, Clay book for james joyce, trans. George Markow-Totevy (London:
Abelard-Schuman, 1958), p. II I.
46. Seejamesjoyce, pp. 85,177-78,317,343-44,436-38, and 543-50; Portraits of the
Artist in Exile, pp. 207, 208, 212, 226, and 233-34; and Budgen, "Further Recollections of
JamesJoyce,"p.327.
47. Mercanton, "The Hours ofJames Joyce, " pp. 207, 212, 225, 233-34.
48. On the Aristotelian origins of the eight-hour night, see Luce and Segal, Sleep,
pp. 31-32; on its inadequacy, see Groucho Marx, Beds (New York, 1930): "We spend a
third of our time in bed or, if you are an actor, two-thirds; or, if you live in Peoria, three
thirds."
49. Mercanton, "The Hours ofjames Joyce, " p. 221.
50. Oliver St. John Gogarty, review, Observer, 7 May 1939, 4; rpt. in james joyce: The
Critical Herita8e, 2, p. 675.

l. "READING THE EVENING WORLD"
I. "voice of God": Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to
"Finne8ans Wake" (New York: Viking, 1961), p. 15.
2. An example of coherent nonsense is what one will find elaborated in some of
the commentary on Finne8ans Wake, which explains, without irony, that the book is
about a Nordic hunchback saddled with the improbable name of Humphrey Chimpden
Earwicker, who is married to someone even more improbably named Anna Livia Plura-
belle, and who has committed an indistinct crime involving two temptresses, three sol-
diers, and unclear quantities of urine in Dublin's Phoenix Park. The story is clearly there
in Finnegans Wake for its reader to elicit; one cannot not notice it. Were it to appear in a
work like Ulysses, however, it would be easier to take for what it really is: ridiculous.
"It's like a dream"; and like a dream, it will clarify with interpretation.
3. As "Hoodie Head," for instance (4.5-6; cf. 276.26, 588.16), this head lies "hooded,"
in crowblack dark (hence "hoodie crow"). As a "Hoved politymester" (324.20), by con-
trast, it is the center of all self-government and -management, a kind of "uphill head-
quarters" (202.16 ["hill head"]) or "Headmaster" (251.28) exerting corporate control
over the rest of the body. As a "houthse" (10.27 ["house"]) or "howthold of nummer
seven" (242.5), it is our hero's chief dwelling place, a locale of "nummer seven" because in
sleep its seven orifices-two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, a mouth-are "number" (more
"numb") than anyone awake can possibly imagine (hence the spelling, which prevents
the mishearing of a numerical "number"). As "Holdhard" (12.36 ["Howth" rhymes
roughly with "both"]), this head head largely stays still, "held hard" because arrested in
sleep, as here: "The cranic head on him, caster of his reasons, peer yuthner in yondmist.
Whooth?" (7.29-30). The dopily "unquiring" "Whooth?" here, an immobilized "cra-
nium" that is ordinarily "master of his reason" but that now lies dull as a rock (hence the
"granite" in "the cranic head"), is incapable of differentiating its own "peering" from
apparently external "appearances"; the verb "peer" functions doubly in this construc-
tion to suggest that the "headth of [our] hosth" ("Whooth?") is at once the "unquiring"
subject whose "cranic head" actively "peer[s]" in the mist and, at the same time, the
unseen" abject" ("Whooth?") that passively" appears in the mist." In this act of dream
perception, as always, all "abjects" are aspects ofthe subject.
Further examples of the equivalence of "Howth Head," "head head," and our hero's
"tropped head" follow in the text.
4. Campbell and Robinson, Skeleton Key, pp. 7, 26; this is a given in the criticism.
5. The night's absorption of objects and of the objective reality that they hold together
will explain, for instance, why so many pawnshops and auction houses float through
Finne8ans Wake. Anyone "perplexing about a paumpshop" (516.28) will note that these
are merely real-world sites in which objects drift into their vanishing points, sometimes
to reemerge, according to the mundane formulation "Goney goney gone!" (306.F2; cf.
398.5-6,427.9,596.15). Pawnshops and auction houses do feebly in the Daily World
what sleep does absolutely in the "Evening World." Simply by falling asleep, the man
"tropped head" at the Wake has taken "a brisk pause at a pawnbroking establishment"
(41.29-30) of celestial dimensions, in which the strangest objects in the world, if one
examines the details, get "pawned": somebody's "head" (560.8), his "word" and "truly
admirable false teeth" (596.30,41.30-31 [as opposed to "real" ones]), "boom compan-
ions" [and English] (498.16), and "souls" (579.30). The process of wakening, on the other
Notes to PaBes 26-37 395

hand, finds him drifting "out ofthe paunschaup on to the pyre" (2°9.31) where, phoenix-
like ("pyre"), the vanished objects that constitute a whole world reemerge and get "re-
deemed": morning finds our sleeping hero "pawn[ing] up a fine head" (560.8) and "re-
purchasing his pawned word" (596.30). A recently circulated story about the man who
woke up one morning to discover that burglars had broken into his house during the
night, stolen all his furniture, and replaced it with identical duplicates nicely captures
"the pawnbreaking pathos" (164.23) and humor of "the Evening World."
The dense occurrence of sentences and prepositions without "objects" in Finne8ans
Wake works much to the same effect-as, for instance, when we learn that "now at last
is Longabed going to be gone to, that more than man," where the "to" never finds an
object (254.34-35). All such constructions signify the absence of objects in "Longabed's"
"tropped head."
6. Geza Roheim, The Gates of the Dream (New York: International Universities Press,
1952), pp. 7, 49, 58; "in sleeping, all cathexes are withdrawn from the environment that
is seemingly external and objective but really libidinal and subjective" (p. 20); "the
dream is a rebuilding of[a] lost world on a libidinal-narcissistic basis" (p. 132); "the dream
environment is formed out of the libidinally cathected body of the sleeper" (p. 36).
Cf. ID, 40Ill.
7. Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 49; see also
pp. 47 and 56.
8. For another account of the Wake's fleshed landscapes, see Claude Gandelman,
"Finne8ans Wake and the Anthropomorphic Landscape," Journal of Modern Literature 7,
no. I (Feb. 1979) : 39-50; through excellent illustrations, the article also explores a par-
allel between the Wake's landscapes and anamorphic visual representations, so to relate
the Wake's "Sheeroskouro" to Lacan's discussions of anamorphosis in The Four Fundamen-
tal Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
9. For a very spotty survey of the incessant "misappearance[s]" (186.12) of our hero's
"tropped head" and missing feet, see 6.27 ("feet," "hoer his head"); 6.34 ("Roundthe-
head," "foot"); 7.IO-II ("head," "tayle"); 7.29-30 ("head," "feet"); 8.9-10.22 ("hat,"
"boots"); 8.16-17 and 10.10- II ("hat," "harse"); 10. 10-II and 10.20 ("hat," "tail"); 12.36
("Holdhard" [Howthhead], "Pied" [Fr. pied, "foot"]); 15.31 ("hoagshead," "locktoes");
26.12-13 ("head," "feet"); 57.17 ("legpoll"); 58.25 ("cappapee"); 70.22-23 ("head,"
"heeltapper," "head") ; 78.5 ("from grosskopp to mega pod" ) ; 81.22 ("headandheelless") ;
89.31 ("head in thighs"); 110.14- IS ("twoe nails on the head"); 119.35- 120. I ("caps,"
"tails," "tails," "mouths"); 127.33 ("Head," "Rump"); 130.1-2 ("leglifters," "brow-
benders"); 131.33-35 ("hodpiece," "footsey"); 132.12- 13 ("head," "feet"); 136.33 ("head-
wood," "feet"); 139.8-9 ("summit," "footles"); 152.33-34 ("from veetoes tothreetop");
158.26, 33 ("feet," "heed"); 160.19-20 ("barefooted ... face"); 163.18-21 ("top," "but-
tom," "bottom," "top"); 167.10-13 ("exlegged," "acropoll"); 191.14 ("head to foot");
206.32 ("from crown to sole"); 215.34,36 ("foos," "head"); 220.14 ("caps or puds");
220.26 ("cap-a-pipe"); 221.29 ("Kobay pipe by Kappa Pederson" [cap-a.-pie]); 227.IO-II
("foot," "capital"); 233.2-3 ("moutonlegs and capers"); 242.4 ("from ... coupoll to
... basement") ; 247.19 ( "from nape to kneecap") ; 284.25 ("behidden on the footplate") ;
331.28 ("capriole legs"); 381.28 ("from head to tail"); 424.19 ("footinmouther");
428.26-27 ("trampthickets" [feet], "battercops"); 471. IS ("the headless shall have
legs!"); 475.25,28 ("footsteps," "caperchasing"); 476.31 ("heels from their stools" [heads
from theirtoes]); 483.19 ("top," "heel"); 499.31 ("Herd!," "Foot!"); 518.9-10 ("With my
Notes to Pa8e 37
tongue through my toecap on the headlong stone"); 519.21 ("last foot foremouthst");
522.28-29 ("noses to boot"); 563.8 ("capers," "heel"); 578.7-8 ("hedcosycasket,"
"feet"); 578.26-27 ("head," "fate"); 619.25,27 ("man of the hooths," "from cape to
pede"); 620.12- 13 ("Head," "Heel"); 622.30 ("capapole").
The ubiquity of formations like these throughout Finne8ans Wake reminds us of its
placement in the body of a man "tropped head."
10. A remote approximation would be "deconstruction," on which see Norris's Decen-
tered Universe and Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer, Post-StructuralistJoyce: Essays from
the French (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984). A more resonant approximation
would be "de-presentation," on which see Samuel Weber, The Le8end of Freud (Min-
neapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 66-67; Weber coins the term while dis-
cussing a passage from The Interpretation of Dreams in which Freud insists that "at bot-
tom dreams are nothing more than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the
condition of the state of sleep" (ID, 545n.).
II. "my nocturnal comedy": from an unpublished letter to Louis Gillet, dated 9 Sep-
tember 1938 and quoted in Georges Markow-Totvey's "Introduction" to Gillet's Claybook,
p.20.
12. Hence the obvious satirical targets of Finne8ans Wake, who include: Pontiffs, in
every sense of the word (152.18-156.34); Priests (III.ii); Politicians (446.27-448.33); Pu-
ritan moralists (187.28-193.28, III.i, ii); and not least, as the Irish have always known,
Professors (149.11-168.12; 419.20-34; 425). Wyndham Lewis alone seems to have struck
Joyce as fitting all five bills.
13. Joyce spoke of Finne8ans Wake as effecting "a deliberate break from a certain Car-
tesianism" (Frank, "The Shadow That Had Lost Its Man," p. 97). The difficulty with ra-
tionalized approaches to Finne8ans Wake is suggested by the fate of the phrase "knock
out"; the commentary has made it seem so definitively to refer to "Castle Knock" that
the French version of Finne8ans Wake translates the phrase as "Castleknock a l'entree du
parc"-losing what seems to me a great deal, and overlooking the latent and "buried
letter" of which Finne8ans Wake speaks so clearly. See Finne8ans Wake, trans. Philippe
Lavergne (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), p. 9.
Judging from the derision with which some of the writing on Finne8ans Wake speaks
of association as a mode of thought, a qualifying note is necessary. "We need not suppose
that every association that occurs during the work of interpretation [will have its] place
in the dream-work" (ill, 571) or, comparably, that every association that occurs to us in
analyzing words and phrases in Finne8ans Wake will be relevant to Finne8ans Wake: only
well-documented reference to the text itself will assure us that whatever associations we
may discover are part of the book's structure, and not monomaniacal impositions of our
own clever invention.
2. NOTHING IN PARTICULAR
I. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tra8ic Sense of Life, tr. J. E. Crawford Flitch (London:
Macmillan and Co., 1921), p. 38.
2. See, for example, Luce and Segal, Sleep, pp. 89-90, and the sources cited there.
3. The term also has theological overtones. Inverting the process by which the inani-
mate stuffs of bread and wine are transubstantiated into the "Real Presence" of Christ in
Notes to Pa8es 38-43 397

the Eucharist, sleep would transubstantiate the real presence of anyone into "Real Ab-
sence" within the inanimated matter of the body.
4. Mercanton, "The Hours ofJamesJoyce," p. 223.
5. Ibid., p. 221.
6. Tindall, Reader's Guide, p. 87; Glasheen, Third Census, p. xxxvi.
7. The reference to "Baselbut," a region around Basel, Switzerland, would inform us,
in the Wake's cipher system, that its hero is "landloughed" (23.29) and hermetically
sealed in the vacuum of "four cantins" (496.9 [not "cantons"]) at this moment in the
night, not in contact with the world "out there." It will also begin to illustrate the asso-
ciative way in which foreign languages not genetically allied to English seem to operate
in this text "imitative ofthe dream-state." In a letter of 1940 to Armand Petitjean (L, III,
50m.), Joyce spoke of a move to Switzerland as the act of "penetrat[ing] a country which
is hermetically helvetic." Both the dating of the letter, on the verge of World War II, and
its reference to "Helvetius," a freethinker, recall Switzerland's history as a state tradi-
tionally impervious to conflict and open to freethinking. Swiss-German intonations
seem to emerge in Finne8ans Wake, as in Joyce's thinking, to indicate its hero's movement
into much this kind of "state." When captured in Swiss-German, "he canseels under
veerious persons" (373.29): he "cancels," "conceals," but also hermetically "can-seals"
in "four cantins" that lie landlocked, conflict-free, and open to the free thought of the
night.
8. The bracketed definitions of "casehardened" (not necessarily a legal term) and "ex-
animation" are from the OED. An additional reference to the children's game of "Dead
Man's Dark Scenery or Coat," described in Norman Douglas's London Street Games as
"one of those jacket-games, where one party has to hide, covered in their coats," would
only reinforce the sense of the passage: it yields the "eyewitless foggus" of someone
wrapped in the cloak of darkness. (Annotations, p. 87).
9. George G. Findlay, "Methodism (Doctrine)," in James Hastings, ed., Encyclopedia of
ReU8ion and Ethics (New York: Charles Scribners' Sons, 1927), 8, p. 610.
10. Since telegraphy and radiography, unlike writing, convey articulate meaning
through the medium of an "ether" imperceptible to the human senses, both serve as fig-
ures, throughout Finnenans Wake, for kinds of sense sensed in the absence of real percep-
tion, by a man put "under ether" (98.3 ["anaesthetized"]) in sleep.
If the reader will "turn a widamost ear dreamily" into the room in which he is sitting
right now-a "witness" ear, and "most widely"-he will note how indistinctly he
"hear[s] the wireless harps of sweet old Aerial" (449.28-30) playing everywhere into his
head. For "in this wireless age" (489.36), at every minute of the day and night, wireless
communiques and radio waves bearing human voices and complex messages from all
over the world "for all within crystal range" (229.12) are streaming constantly into the
eyes and ears, "wordloosed [wirelessed] over seven seas crowdblast [broadcast] in cel-
lelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript" (219.16- 17 [in "Celtic-Hellenic-Teutonic-Slavic-
Zend-Latin-Sanskrit soundscript"]). What one will note, in trying to perceive these
"open tireless secrets" (407.21 ["wireless"]) is the presence of a concrete "reality," there
all the time around one, of which one is largely unconscious. And as any number of
citations will show, it is a "reality" exactly of this kind that Finne8ans Wake is scru-
pulously representing: "You have jest (a ham) beamed listening through" (359.22 [not
"been listening to"]) a "NIGHTLETTER" of sorts (308.16 [in Am. s1., "a telegram sent
overnight"])-a "NIGHTLETTER" concretely identical to the one reconstructed in Fin-
Notes to Pa8es 43-46

ne8ans Wake. For "as I hourly learn from Rooters and Havers through Gilligan's may-
poles," moreover (421.31-32 [where "Reuters" and "Havas" are wireless agencies, and
"Gilligan's maypoles" are "aerials" humanized by reference to their inventor]), there is a
great deal of hot news constantly blowing through and around my head of which I am
"obliffious. "
Since one's "real" perception of radiotelegraphic communiques resembles in concrete
one's perception of "open tireless secrets" delivered incessantly from an unconscious into
consciousness, "Morse nuisance" (99.6) becomes, in Finne8ans Wake, a cipher for the
operations of its sleeper's darker side. And Joyce's "new book of Morses" (123.35) requires
in turn some familiarity with a "morse-erse wordybook" (53°.19 [Ger. Worterbuch, "dic-
tionary"]) or with a primer of "noirse-made-earsy" (314.27 ["noirse" blurs "Morse" into
the Fr. noir, "black"]), because the act of translation required in reading Finne8ans
Wake, as in the case of radiotelegraphic transmission, is not from visible letters into an-
other form of visibility, but from visible letters into the invisible-from consciousness
and English into the "m'm'ry" of the unconsciousness of sleep.
Further examples of how radiotelegraphy works in Finne8ans Wake follow in the text.
See also Hart's notes on "The Telegram" in Structure and Motif in "Finne8an's Wake"
(Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 122-28, 243; the entries on "Havas,"
"Reuters," and "Tass" in the Third Census; and Joyce's hints on the subject in a letter to
Harriet Shaw Weaver (L, I, 321).
II. "Sordomutics" would equally suggest the French sourd-muet and the Italian sor-
domuto, both meaning "deaf-and-dumb." The Wake's "sordomutics" is a deepened form
of the language that the French call Des sourds-muets ("the language of the deaf and
dumb").
12. As the line suggests, "hats" in Finne8ans Wake always merit inspection because
they sound like and have all the earmarks of "heads," but come with larger air supplies
inside: hats are antiheads. The joke begins in the hallucinatory "Circe" episode of
Ulysses, where one finds Stephen Dedalus momentarily engaged in a dense conversation
with Lynch's "cap" (U, 504), the idea there being that where Stephen has a head full of
ideas, Lynch has a "cap" « L. caput, "head").
As "a well known tall hat" blown in the wind (321.9-IO)-"a nightcap ofthat silk or it
might be a black velvet" (32I.IO-II)-the hero of Finne8ans Wake becomes frequently
equivalent, in the "noughttime," to the content of an empty and untenanted hat. He has,
moreover, "the most conical hodpiece of confusianist heronim" (131.33-34 ["the most
comical headpiece of confused hair on him"]) because that "headpiece," like an empty
"wig," has nothing inside but air and "confusion"-though also, and crucially, a hint of
the transcendental (hence "Confucius"). "Wigs" and "caps" work like "hats" in the
Wake: if there's nothing inside, there's nothing inside. As a "beer wig" (559.25), to illus-
trate the supple range of these figures, the emptily "tropped head" on our hero would be
"blacked-out" and full of "spirits"; as an "eerie whig" (20.23,360.32), it would be stirred
by the "spirit's whispers in his magical helmet" (220.25-26); as a "wolkencap" (23.21), it
would lie under a "woolen" "nightcap," lost in turbid clouds (Du. wolkencap, "cloud
cap"; d. 126.14- 15); and so forth.
13. In context, the quoted line reads, "leave us and the crimsend daun to shellalite
on the darkumen" (35°.28-29); it is pointing out how catastrophically the rationally
lettered consciousness that returns to the "tropped head" at "dawn" obliterates the senses
purveyed in dreams.

14. For this reason, certainly one of the most interesting and indispensable of the word
lists that has grown up around Finne8ans Wake is Clive Hart's Concordance. Simply by
putting the Wake in alphabetical order, the Concordance has established itself as some-
thing of a Contradictionary or Outlexicon of world language, immersion in which will
repay study because ofthe wealth of interesting concepts that spills out of it ("unstant,"
for instance) .
Reference to the Concordance will also discredit the often repeated view that Finne8ans
Wake, because it tells the same life's story over and over again in constantly varying
forms, is a repetitious book. Quite the contrary: one would think that in a work aspiring
to reconstruct "Real Absence," terms like "eyewitless" (for "eyewitness") and "witless"
(for "witness") would recur over and over again. In fact, each occurs only once in the
space of six hundred pages. What finally seems astonishing from this perspective is how
little Joyce repeated himself in a work that "bare[s] full sweetness" (615.33 ["bears rich
false witness"]) to the night.
15. The OED lists the "scotograph" as "an instrument used by the blind for writing in
the dark"; and also, by way of such illustrations as the following, as a synonym for x-ray
radiography: "The [X-rays] have very little in common with light. Would not 'scotogra-
phy' be a better name for their work than 'photography'?" (Sir Alfred Wills, letter to the
London Times, 10 March 1896). Since it allows perception where no real empirical per-
ception is possible, as in sleep, the "xray" (248.1) too becomes a cipher for HCE's "night-
life," the Wake in turn giving his "X ray picture" (530.8). Cf. 522.20-24 and the gloss in
the Annotations: "Thanks to Xrays, the time will come no doubt when he will snap-
pograph you wrong side out."
16. It's "graphically" representative of "man," that is ("mangraphique"), but not in
the manner of "Daguerre." A notation on unorthodox methods of attack, the line is play-
ing off Bosquet's comment on the Charge ofthe Light Brigade ("C'est ma8nifique, mais ce
n'est pas la 8uerre" ["It's magnificent, but it's not war"]).
17. Both the "legal trial" analyzed earlier in the text and the global vanishing act of
these "nanentities" are representative of a great deal in Finne8ans Wake, many of whose
passages seem to be about real-world events like courtroom trials, ballad singing, or
crimes; if, however, one starts pressing the details, these events turn out to happen in the
middle of a stretch of sleep. Consider, for example, the chain of obviously ridiculous
figures who putatively spread rumors about "Earwicker" in I.ii. One of these, we learn,
"to whom reference has been made had been absent ... but on racenight, blotto.... he
sought his wellwarmed leababobed [Gael. leaba, "bed"] ... and ... resnored alcoh al-
coh alcoherently ... during uneasy slumber ... [to two others] of no fixed abode .. .
who had passed several nights ... under the blankets ... on the bunk ... pillowed .. .
and [a third] ... who ... had been towhead tossing on his shakedown ... after .. .
trying ... to get ... into ... the bed .... [All] as an understood thing slept their sleep .
. . . " (39.28-29, 33; 40.2, 4-5, 14, 16- 19, 20, 21, 33, 34, 36; 41.6). Or consider again "Mrs.
F ... A ... " (59.4), who, "resting for the moment" (58.34), delivers compassionate com-
mentary on our hero while "recoopering her cartwheel chapot (ahat! ... )" (59.5-6).
Though she seems involved in fussy millinery work, something beneath all the evident
appearances seems also to be "recuperating a head" (and an empty one at that). Many of
the characters who move through Finne8ans Wake are obliquely sunk into sleep of this
sort because they appear in the "tropped head" of the sleeper to whom they occur. "It's

like a dream," in which all the obviously nonsensical appearances latently bear on "one
stable somebody" (107.30).
18. Atherton, Books at the Wake, p. 107.
19. As Atherton notes (p. 262), the line additionally echoes the shrewd observation
made by Wyndham Lewis in Time and Western Man that "there is not very much reflec-
tion going on at any time inside the head of Mr. james joyce." Finding the assessment
evidently inaccurate to a reading of Ulysses, joyce bent it into pertinence in this part of
Finneaans Wake, where his sleeping protagonist lies quite void of brain.
Playing off proximate phrasing (56.20-21), "Melancholy Slow" would also refer to
the first line of Oliver Goldsmith's "The Traveller; or a Prospect of Society" ("Remote,
unfriended, melancholy, slow"). The reference would only deepen the sense that the
Wake's sleeping hero has passed from everyday familiarities into another "state" at this
moment in the dark. Treating of Goldsmith's absence from his native earth, "for a while
my proper cares resigned" (1. 101), "The Traveller" is set in Switzerland, where "wants
[are] few, [and] wishes all confin'd" (11.209-10). See Atherton, p. 97.
20. The Classical Lexicon gives the English "Be well-disposed with tongues, i.e. be si-
lent!" for Favete linauis, noting that the phrase served as "a command to citizens at Ro-
man religious ceremonies" (p. 36). McHugh, in Annotations, translates Favete linauis as
"listen all in silence" and ascribes it to Horace, who quotes it for religious effect in the
Odes (III, I. 2). A.). Macleane, finally, in his commentary on the Odes, points out that
"'Favere linguis' ... in its first meaning signifies the speaking of words of good omen. But
it came as commonly to signify total silence" (The Works of Horace with Enalish Notes,
rev. and ed. Reginald A. Chase [Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1858], p. 312). The historically
complex phrase, in other words, designating lingual silence, carries contradictory ten-
sions appropriate to the "sonorous silence" (230.23) of the Wake's "nat language."
21. jean-Paul Sartre, Beina and Nothinaness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Citadel
Press, 1966), p. 23. There are of course differences, though finally not irreconcilable
ones, between Sartrean nothingness and the Wake's "Real Absence."
22. "literary anti-matter": Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
Univ. of Calif. Press, 1971), p. 274.
3. "FINNEGAN"
I. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and). Kemp
(London: Trubner and Co., 1886), 3, p. 267 and chapter 41 generally.
2. Gottfried Lessing, "How the Ancients Represented Death," in Selected Prose Works of
G. E. Lessina, trans. E. C. Beasley and Helen Zimmern (London: George Bell, 1889),
p. 182. On the Dark Twins, see the Iliad, XIV, 213, and XVI, 672; Hesiod's Theoaeny, 756;
and the Aeneid, VI, 278. On the primordiality and persistence of the analogy between
sleep and death in Western thinking, see Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death, trans.
Helen Weaver (New York: Random House, 1981), pp. 22-24, 354, 440-41, 525, and 625.
For an eloquent meditation on the similarity, see Sir Thomas Browne's Reliaio Medici,
part 2, sec. 12, in The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Norman). Endicott (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 85-86.
3. Ludwig jekels and Edmund Bergler, "Instinct Dualism in Dreams," The Psycho-
analytic Quarterly 9 (1940) : 402; Roheim, The Gates of the Dream, p. 3; Brown, Love's
Body, p. 52.

4. On "thanatomimesis," see Robert Kastenbaum and Ruth Aisenberg, The Psychology
of Death (New York: Springer, 1976), pp. 132-53, 175.
5. Cf. 41.6,77.1,87.11,405.35-36, and 610.3. As is implied in the expression "sleeping
like a rock," in the night "Tu es Petrus" (407.15 [L. "you're a rock," but also "Thou art
Peter"; d. 153.23-24]). That the "man made static" at his Wake (309.22) lies "rock-
bound" (7.1), sleeping like a rock "in the rockabeddy" (472.2), and in some guises
"Iook[s] stuck to the sod ... visibly unmoved" (430.12-14) will clarify one ofthe senses
underlying the recurrent phrase "thuartpeatrick" (3.10) in Finnegans Wake (a "peat-
rick," or "Patrick," would be an Irished "Petrus"). It would also explain what some of the
oddly "peter-fied" personages, like "Peacer the Grave" and the immobily "lapidated"
"Peter Roche" (449.12- 16) are doing in the book: like any good "petrock" (203.31), they
just lie there, playing dead. For other occurrences of "thuartpeatrick" in the Wake, see
the "Index of Motifs" in Clive Hart's Structure and Motif, p. 223.
6. The phrases and lines from the ballad italicized in the text appear in Finnegans
Wake at the places designated parenthetically. For the full version of "Finnegan's Wake,"
see]], pp. 543-44, or Glasheen, Third Census, pp. 93-94, which also lists other evoca-
tions of "Finnegan" in the Wake. For another account of the ballad's role in Finnegans
Wake, see Glasheen's "Notes toward a Supreme Understanding of 'Finnegan's Wake' in Fin-
negansWake," A Wake Newslitter, n.s., 5 (Feb. 1968) :4-15. On its employment at6.13-28,
see Eileen G. Margerum, "First Music," A Wake Newslitter, n.s., 10 (Aug. 1973) : 60-64.
7. As throughout Finnegans Wake, however, where "dead," "death," and comparable
terms take incessant oblique forms, the spellings here are ambiguous because the man
"tropped head" "in bed" at the Wake is not actually "dead to the world" but only "dead to
the world."
8. A whole set of ciphers designating "the end of the world," accordingly, plays through
Finnegans Wake to signal the annihilation oftime, earth, and perception at the "ephum-
eral" met in the "noughttime." Allusions to the "a bockalips" (6.26 ["Apocalypse"; the
"bock" "blacks out"]) or to the Book of "revelation" (453.33-34)-including passing ref-
erences to the separation of "the sleep and the ghoasts" (551.2) -would be among these.
But so too would references to "death angel[s]" of all kinds (472.29); to "ragnar rocks"
(19-4 ["Ragnarok"]) or "guttergloomering" (565.2 [Ger. Gotterdammerung, "the Twilight
of the Gods"); and so forth. Recurrent evocations of "Roland" and "Oliver" from Le
Chanson de Roland, would work to this effect too (e.g., 73.33-74.5), to evoke "the sol-
emn last farewells of Roland and Oliver," who "say goodbye to each other as if they were
about to fall into a long sleep of infinite duration" (Aries, The Hour of Our Death,
pp. 22,23)·
9. "Our concept of the other world is unconsciously modeled on sleep and dreaming";
"myths on the descent to the other world and the return are based on the basic dream
mechanism" (Roheim, The Gates of the Dream, pp. 271, 277; d. 259, 275, 278, and chapter
5 generally). See also James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (New York: Harper
and Row, 1979); and Brown, Love's Body, pp. 46-55.
Both Roheim and Hillman point out-to illustrate what is at stake here-that in Greek
and Roman myth, where Sleep and Death were already twins, the underworld was in
many ways a conceptual twin of the night. Opening "well to the west" (3.21), at the
boundary of earth and ocean, the entrance to Hades lay "past the gates of the sun and the
district of dreams," beyond a land of eternal night known as "Cimmeria" (Odyssey,
XI,13-19; XXIV, 12). Spatially, the gateway to Hades seems to have been situated in a

spot topologically indistinct from the one in which the night, and Finneaans Wake, be-
gin temporally: at sunset. Because it takes place in the "semitary of Somnionia, " then,
the Wake moves its reader through "Cimmerian shudders" (504.7 ["shadows," with
"shudders"]) into a "netherworld" (571.35) without the least contrivance or conceptual
tampering on Joyce's part at all.
As a proper name, moreover, "Hades" (Gr. Aides) designated both "the god of the
world below" and the "underworld" itself, but as a common noun, aides simply meant
"unseen" and was related to such terms as aidelos ("making unseen," hence "annihilat-
ing") and aidnos ("unseen, hidden, dark"); all of these were privative forms (a-) of
idein ("to see"), from which English "ideas" derive. Like a dark pun, the name "Hades"
would semantically have evoked a world comparable to the one met in the night's "seeme-
tery, "where the man "tropped head" has no ideas and nothing to see. Finally, too, there ran
through "Hades" the dark river "Lethe" (Gr., "forgetfulness"), of which "Finnegan" has
obviously drunk: a "lover oflithurgy," (432.32), his "lethargy," etymologically, has the
radicalof"Lethe"init (78.4, 214·IO, 272.F3, 334.1, 397.8).
If passing into "Hades" meant entering a region indistinct from the night, finally, the
forces of the night complementarily welled out of Hades into the world of the living.
"Those hornmade ivory dreams you reved of" (192.27) issued out of "gates of dreams" that
Homer and Virgil attached to Hades (Odyssey, XIX, 562-67; Aeneid, VI, 893-96) -one the
"gate ofivory" and the other "the gate of horn" (or "the gate" "with the cow's bonnet a'top
o'it" [63.19, 28-29, 34]). And if dreams were creatures of the underworld, so too were the
souls of the dead, who were thought to have the palpability and substance of images in
dreams (Odyssey, XI, 204-22) and moreover came to visit the living while the living slept
(Iliad, XXI, 62 - I04). The topologically blurred relations ofthe underworld and the night
are perhaps best captured by a line that Aeneas utters while down there: "Umbrarum hic
locus est, Somni noctisque soporae" (Aeneid, VI, 387-90 ["This is a place of shadows, of
sleep and somnolent night"]).
For a classicist's extended treatment of this material, see Ernest Leslie Highbarger,
The Gates of Dreams: An Archaeoloaical Examination of Verail, Aeneid VI, 893-899
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1940). For an archetypal analysis, see Hillman.
For a Freudian one, see Roheim, pp. 281-85. On the Greek, see Liddell and Scott, and
Hjalmar Frisk, Griechisches Etymoloaisches Worterbuch (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1954),
pp·33-34·
IO. As Joyce hinted at the end of a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, "Tobecontinued's tale"
is" (to be continued tomorrow)" (L, I, 280; cf. III, 374, 375n.). For other instances of what
it means "to be continued" in Finneaans Wake, see 66.8- IO ("To be continued ... next
morning" ) ; 302.29-30 ( "To be continued. Anon" ["shortly," but in the meantime" anony-
mous"]); 454.7; and, most elaborately, 359.26-28, particles of which are discussed below.
II. Brown, Love's Body, p. 52.
12. On Halloween and All Saints' Day, see also 19.25, 26.6, I04.2, 237.35, 304.F5, 359.26,
427.32-33, 455.5-6 [Fr. La Toussaint, "All Saints' Day"], 488.23-24, and 537.28. For an
"eyewitless foggus" account of the resurrection of the dead in another world (that is, of
"spirits" coming back to life in the "tropped head" of someone sunk in the "seemetery" of
night), see 329.22-330. I: "it was joobileejeu that All Sorts' Jour" (329.30-31 [where "Sor-
tir du Jour," the title used in Fr. translations of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, would also
signal the resurrection of the dead]) .
13. On "heavenly peace," compare 470.36-471.5 to 499.1-12, and see by all means, at
Notes to Paaes 77-78

454.28-455.29, the very funny account of what "heavenly peace" and life "Up There"
(454.36) would really be like. Noting that our "patrified" hero has reached the end of his
day on earth and so achieved its perfection and fulfillment would give a second sense to
the recurrent "Twoedged Petrard" (497.8) having to do with "Peter" in Finne8ans Wake.
Anyone "dead to the world" and sleeping like a rock ("Tu es Petrus") would also have
entered unto his kingdom ("Tu es Petrus") .
14. On the "mound," see also 102.22,111.34-35,331.18-20,420.14,479.23,499.34, and
innumerable passing references. As l.v lengthily shows, "letters" are buried in this
"mound"-"letters" in all conceivable senses (ABCs, scraps of remembered conversation
and reading, and, in general. the whole business of "literacy").
15. As is noted elsewhere of the figure who sleeps like a rock at the Wake, "his likeness
is in Terrecuite" (133.30; d. 119.2,240.19). "Terry Cotter" would just be an Irished ver-
sion of the Hebraic" Adam."
16. In general. at the Wake, real-world place-names ending with" -bury" and" -borough"
undergo translation from the "vernacular" into "the vermicular" as they vanish, with all
consciousness of Ie monde, into the "tropped head" in Ie "mound." There they become
burial sites (" -bury"s), subterranean "burrows" (" -borough"s), or "barrows" (burial
mounds). In the daily world, place-names like London's "Harrow-the-Hill" or "Finsbury"
designate "suburbs"; at the Wake, by contrast, they designate "su burrs" (454.3°) in which
the man lying "dead to the world" is wont to "harrow the hill" (355.16 ["harrow hell"])
or, in the guise of "Finn," simply lie there, void of ideas, entertaining himself at a sort of
"Finsbury Follies," the price of whose admission is "dirt cheap at a sovereign a skull!"
(374.27-28). The double "r" in those "suburrs, " of course, puts us in mind of" burrows."
Cf. 5.35, 24·20, 29.35-36, 62.28, 147.26, 372.17, 495.16 ["borrowing" = "burrowing"],
5°3.14, and 565.36.
17. Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, p. 36.
18. In a body "tropped head," this is only what we might expect, since a great deal of
vitality and conflict will inevitably hit "below the belch" (492.36 [the neck]), but also
"below the belt" (457.17). For other passages equating the occulted world "below" with
the occulted content of "drawers," see 107.6-7 ("Unmentionabi/ity"), 371.35 ("under
where"), 571. 15- 16 ("under close"). 577.29 ("unterlinnen"), and so forth. These terms
demonstrate additionally how a "reading [of] the Evening World," in "bring[ing] to mind
the gladdest garments out of sight" (200.25-26), really can lift out of unconsciousness
things like "the canon's underpants" (206.27), which were not evident in the order of
things a few minutes ago, and are usually nowhere evident in the order of a daily world
regulated by an "underlinen overlord" (97.24).
19. E. A. Wallis Budge, trans., The Book of the Dead: The Hiero81yphic Transcript of the
Papyrus of Ani, Medici Society Version (1913; rpt. Secaucus, N.j.: University Books,
196o), pp. 409- 19, 591 -94. In order to pass from his grave into immortality, the Egyptian
mummy was required to know and name, at each in a succession of doors in the House of
Osiris, "the bars of the door," "the right lintel," "the left lintel." "the ground," "the bolt,"
"the socket and fastening," "the posts," and "the Doorkeepers." Otherwise, they wouldn't
let him through.
20. A reader who explores this part of Finne8ans Wake further will note that over
pp. 75-78 Joyce draws extensively on Dutch terms. This happens, in part, because the
Dutch for "Dutch" is nederlands ("netherlands") and because nederlands is spoken in
"netherlands," a "state" in which everything lies "under." Through there is far more to

the use of Dutch in Finnegans Wake than this makes evident, at least one set of associa-
tions prompts Joyce to draw on nederlands to color out parts of the night in which the
book's "belowes hero" has drifted into a netherlandly "netherworld" (571.35).
21. Arnold Toynbee, "Man's Concern with Life after Death," Life after Death, ed.
Arnold Toynbee and Arthur Koestler (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), p. 3.
22. Jules Vuillemin, Essai sur la signification de la mort (Paris: Presses Univ. de France,
1948); quoted in Warren A. Shibles, Death: An Interdisciplinary Analysis (Whitewater,
Wise.: Language Press, 1974).
4. INSIDE THE COFFIN

I. E. A. Wallis Budge, trans., The Book of the Dead: The Hieroglyphic Transcript of
the Papyrus of Ani, Medici Society Version (1913; rpt. Secaucus, N.].: University Books,
1960), pp. 150, 351 n. 3, 355 n. 4; E. A. Wallis Budge, The Dwellers of the Nile: The Life,
History, Religion, and Literature of the Ancient Egyptians (1926; rpt. New York: Dover,
1977), p. 159; E. A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Heaven and Hell (1925; rpt. LaSalle, Ill.:
Open Court Pub. Co., 1974). pp. 16, 96, 109, 110.
2. Frank Budgen, "James Joyce, "in Givens,lamesloyce: Two Decades ofCriticism, p. 26.
3. Frank Budgen, "Joyce's Chapters of Going Forth by Day," in Givens,lamesloyce: Two
Decades of Criticism , pp. 343-67.
4. See Campbell and Robinson, A Skeleton Key, p. 73, 198, 204, 2 I I, 304; Joseph Camp-
bell, "Finnegan the Wake," in Givens, lamesloyce: Two Decades of Criticism , pp. 368-89;
Atherton, Books at the Wake, pp. 191-200; Tindall, A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake,
passim; David Hayman, " ... a Sentence in Progress," PMLA (March 1953): 136-54;
Clive Hart, "His Good Smetterling of Entymology," A Wake Newslitter, n.s., 4 (February
1967): 14-24; James Atherton, "Shaun A," in A Conceptual Guide to Finnegans Wake, ed.
Michael H. Begnal and Fritz Senn (University Park: Penn State Univ. Press, 1974), p. 157;
Michael Begnal, "Some Gleanings from the Book of the Dead," A Wake Newslitter, n.s., 12
(April 1975): 30-31.
The most exhaustively researched and detailed account ofjoyce's allusions to Egyptian
sources is Mark L. Troy's "Mummeries of Resurrection: The Cycle of Osiris in Finnegans
Wake" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. ofUppsala, 1976), which readers looking for more detail and a
perspective on the Wake's Egyptological materials distinct from my own should by all
means consult. Readers interested in consulting the Egyptological notes that Joyce kept
while writing "Work in Progress" should refer to Danis Rose, Chapters of Coming Forth by
Day, A Wake Newslitter Monograph, no. 6 (Colchester: A Wake Newslitter Press, 1982).
For Rose, the Book of the Dead is "undoubtedly the single most significant source re-
sorted to by Joyce in compiling his own Irish book of the dead" (p. I).
5. Arnold Toynbee, "Man's Concern with Life after Death," in Toynbee, Koestler, et aI.,
Life after Death, p. 16.
6. Budge, Dwellers on the Nile, p. 134.
7. Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. x-xi.
8. L, 1, 406; Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 28.
9. Apart from its reference to Horus's victory over the forces of nocturnal darkness (his
"coup"), "horuscoup" also refers to the horoscope, because folk history attributes its in-
vention to Egyptian augurers. "Horoscope" seems to enter into the complex of meanings
Notes to Pages 84-89

in the line under our attention, again, as a way of commenting on the wish-fulfilling
potencies of the dream.
10. Budge, Book of the Dead, p. x.
II. Ibid., pp. X, 21, 27; Budge, The Mummy: Chapters on E8yptian Funereal Archaeol-
08Y (1925; rpt. New York: Macmillan, Collier Books, 1972), pp. 204, 209.
12. Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 217; The Mummy, p. 171.
13. Budge, The Mummy, pp. 168-70.
14· Ibid., pp. 163-67.
IS. Ibid., pp. 204-5; Book of the Dead, p. 27.
16. Budge, The Mummy, pp. 153-54,347-48; E8yptian Heaven and Hell, pp. 80-81.
17. Atherton, Books at the Wake, p. 192. Atherton also clarifies the reference to "Humph-
rey's Justesse of the Jaypees" in the line cited by pointing out an allusion to Henry
Humphrey's The Justice of the Peace in Ireland, in which, of course, there are no "es-
chatological chapters." Since "Humphrey" is simply a cipher for the Wake's inert and
"hump" -like hero, the phrase aspires to a problematic definition of the sleepy tran-
quillity into which he has fallen: absolute peacefulness only "hinted at" in Humphrey's
book is one of the states into which the Theban recension of the Book of the Dead tries to
see; but before a dead man could attain that desired state he also had to go through a
harrowing last judgment before the gods in which his whole life was put on trial.
Troubled by his conscience even in the unconsciousness of sleep, the Wake's dreamer
seems to undergo a process of judgment and peace that lies halfway between the kinds of
judgment and peace described in these two works.
"Bug of the Deaf," apart from referring to the Book of the Dead, also suggests the ear-
wig, on which see chapter nine.
18. Atherton, Books at the Wake, pp. 192-93. For further discussion of the Papyrus of
Nu and an excellent assessment of Joyce's acquaintance with available Egyptological
sources, see Troy, "Mummeries," pp. 72-74. As both Atherton and Troy note, Joyce ap-
proached the Book of the Dead through the writings of Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, whose
work no reader of the Wake should slight. Dated though Budge's Egyptology may be, it
was Joyce's.
19. Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 614. See also those quotations from the Book of the
Dead in the Wake at 328.31-35 and 593.20-24, where Joyce also refers to Nu, "the steward
of the overseer of the seals," in the phrases "the everseer of the seize" and the "eversower
of the seeds."
20. Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 217. An account of the book of the dead in the Dublin
Museum ("the Dublin Papyrus") is available in Edouard Henri Naville, Das ae8yptische
Totenbuch den XVIII. bis XX Dynastie (Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlangsanstalt,
1971), Bd. I, pt I, pp. 80-81; for reproductions of illustrations from the Dublin Papyrus,
see also Bd. I, pt. 2, pp. 3, 4, 19, 22, 27-30, and 212.
21. Since the Egyptian Kingdom endured for some five thousand years, according to
one chronology, its perception of the cosmos changed and modified in ways whose study
falls beyond our immediate purpose. The body of this chapter accordingly deals primarily
with the cosmology and mythography ofthe New Kingdom, which Egyptologists, dating
all things as they do by reference to dynastic successions, situate in the Eighteenth
through Twentieth Dynasties-roughly between 1550 and 1050 B.C., according to Budge.
It was during this period that books of the dead seem to have flourished most widely and
reached their most ornate forms, many of them sharing enough properties to be classified
under a "The ban recension."

Since Egyptologists have not agreed on a definite system of Egyptian chronology, the
dating of various books of the dead explored in the text is given according to Budge,
Dwellers on the Nile, pp. 1-17, whose figures are currently regarded as "high":
Pyramid Text of Pepi I: Sixth Dynasty (2825-2631 B.C.)
Papyrus of Ani: Eighteenth Dynasty (1600-1350 B.C.)
Papyrus of Nebseni: Eighteenth Dynasty
Papyrus of Nekhtu Amen: Eighteenth Dynasty
Tomb Inscriptions of Tut-ankh-amen: Eighteenth Dynasty
Papyrus of Nu: Eighteenth or Nineteenth Dynasty
Book of Gates: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties
Coffin Text ofSeti I: Nineteenth Dynasty (1321-1205 B.C.)
Turin Papyrus: Twenty-sixth Dynasty or later (663-520 B.C.)
22. Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 202.
23. Ibid., pp. 202, 206, 351 n.3; Budge, Dwellers on the Nile, pp. 207, 227-28; Adolf Er-
man, Life in Ancient Egypt, trans. H. M. Tirard (1894; rpt. New York: Dover, 1971),
pp·3 IOff.
24. Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, pp. 31Off.
25. Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 130-36; Egyptian Heaven and Hell, pp. 88-89.
26. Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 136; Egyptian Heaven and Hell, p. 89.
27. Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 137; the ancient Egyptians evidently believed that the
Nile bubbled up out of these holes and flowed in two directions out of them (Book of the
Dead, p. 163).
28. Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 345 nn. 1-2; Egyptian Heaven and Hell, pp. 177-79.
29. Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 136, 284, 323, and 499; Egyptian Heaven and Hell,
P·128- 29.
30. Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 142-61; Egyptian Heaven and Hell, passim.
32. Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 145; Egyptian Heaven and Hell, pp. 132-34.
33. Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 147; Egyptian Heaven and Hell, pp. 149-51, 156.
34. Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 376, 124; the two quotations are from the Turin Pa-
pyrus and the Papyrus of Ani. See also Troy, "Mummeries," pp. 36, 38, 85.
36. Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 69, 404, 431, 450, 611, 505-6; see also Egyptian Heaven
and Hell, pp. 89 and 197; and Dwellers on the Nile, p. 278.
37. Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 135. The diagram reproduced in figure 4.1, as well as
the explanatory notes (at the right of the diagram) and the translations of the hiero-
glyphics (at the left), all derive from Budge (Book of the Dead, pp. 133-35). See also
Egyptian Heaven and Hell, pp.89, 197; Dwellers on the Nile, p. 214; and E. A. Wallis
Budge, Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life, 3rd ed. (London: K. Paul, Trench, Triibner, and
Co., 1908), p. 25. Budge dates this coffin map, which comes from the marble sarcophagus
of the pharaoh Seti I, at 1350 B.C., in roughly the same period of Egyptian history that
saw the writing of the Papyrus of Ani.
38. The diagram and the commentary on it can be found in Budge, Book of the Dead,
pp. 131-32.
39. Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 353. On the opening pages of the Wake as a representa-
tion of the scattered body of Osiris, see Adaline Glasheen, "The Opening Paragraph," A
Wake Newslitter, n.s., 2 (April 1965): 7; Atherton, Books at the Wake, p. 198; and Troy,
"Mummeries," pp. 37,41,47.

40. "Hymn to Osiris," in Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 368.
41. As Budge notes, "the story of Osiris is nowhere found in a connected form in Egyp-
tian literature, but everywhere, and in texts of all periods, the life, sufferings, death, and
resurrection of Osiris are accepted as facts universally admitted"; he goes on to point out
that the story of Osiris is told coherently only by such Greek writers as Plutarch, Di-
odorus Siculus, and Strabo (Book of the Dead, p. 53). The myth was, in other words, so
formative a part of the ancient Egyptian consciousness that it could be told entirely by
the allusion-as today for instance, one might invoke the whole story of the New Testa-
ment by naming Christ, or the whole order of Newtonian physics by mentioning "grav-
ity." The summary of the myth of Osiris given in the text derives from Budge's account in
his Commentary on the Book of the Dead at pp. 52-58 and 180-81; from that provided by
Sir James Frazer in The New Golden Bouah, abr. Theodore H. Gaster (New York: Mentor,
1964), pp. 384-89; and from Troy, "Mummeries," pp. 22-23.
42. This way of reading the myth of Osiris would have seemed alien to the ancient
Egyptian, for whom the myth was reality. Any evocation of "sleep" as a way of compre-
hending the fate of Osiris, moreover, would have been equally baffling; for sleep is the
center of a peculiarly modern fascination. Of the two or three thousand deities named in
various books of the dead, none of any consequence seems to have been understood as
the god who sent sleep and dreams into the human universe. In a way, the Egyptians had
as little need for this kind of god as did the people of Homeric Greece: the god of sleep
and the god of the land of the dead was the same god.
43. E.g., chapter I, "The Chapter of the Funeral Procession," in Budge, Book of the
Dead, p. 365.
44. "The Chapter of Not Dying a Second Time," in Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 567.
45. Chapter CXXXIII, "The Chapter of the New Moon," in Budge, Book of the Dead,
p. 507; the rubric instructs one to recite the chapter over a model of the boat of Ra that
has been fashioned in green stone and purified in incense, in the presence of no one but
one's son or father.
46. See, respectively, "The Chapter of the Funeral Procession" (chapter I) and chapter
XVIII (without title) in Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 408 and 512.
47. See, e.g., chapters CXLVII and CXXV, "A Chapter to Be Recited by the Deceased
When He Cometh to the First Hall of Amentet" and "A Chapter to Be Recited at the Wax-
ing of the Moon," in Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 408, 512.
48. Chapter CLXXV, "The Chapter of Not Dying a Second Time," in Budge, Book of the
Dead, pp. 562-63.
49. The adjectives and epithets given special emphasis in the text are from Budge's de-
scriptions of Amenti and the Tuat in Book of the Dead, pp. 135-36ff., and in Eayptian
Heaven and Hell, pp. 135, 138, 192.
50. Chapter XLV, "The Chapter of Not Rotting in Khert-Neter," in Budge, Book of the
Dead, p. 460.
51. Budge, Eayptian Heaven and Hell, pp. 167, 119; Book of the Dead, p. 156.
52. Chapter XXXIV, "The Chapter of Lifting up the Feet and Appearing on Earth," in
Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 478.
53. Atherton, Books at the Wake, pp. 194-95. Atherton notes that "Joyce uses the phrase
'Us, the real Us' twice in the Wake (62.26 and 446.36); it translates, 'I, even I,' in the
royal plural as it was used by the Pharaohs in their inscriptions."
54. On Cheops, see Budge, The Mummy, p. 334·

55. See, for example, Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 136-50, 315- 16, and 395. In some
books of the dead, serpent-headed butcher-gods and eaters of souls were assigned names
thirty to forty syllables long, which the dead man needed to know and speak out loud if,
for example, he did not want his face and groin gnawed off in the dark. In the presence of
beings named "Hewer-in-pieces-in-blood, Ahibit, lady of hair" and "Lady of light, who
roareth mightily, whose breadth cannot be comprehended. Her like hath not been found
since the beginning. There are serpents over her which are unknown," immobility and
speechlessness would be definite handicaps (Book of the Dead, pp. 41 I, 416).
56. Explication of Finne8ans Wake 593.20-24. "The eversower of the seeds of light,"
apart from referring to invocations in the Papyrus of Nu ("the overseer of the seal"),
evokes the gathering and regenerative force of the sun, which is now moving into our
hero's consciousness "sowing seeds of light" and bringing warmth to the fields of the
underworld. As one of the "cowld owld sowls" he is obviously a "cold old soul," but also,
as the triply repeated word "owl" in the phrase suggests, a being possessed of nocturnal
intelligence. The term "domnatory," therefore, conflates "dormitory" and "damnatory"
("of or assigned to damnation") in order to suggest that the underworlds of sleep and of
traditional scriptures share an equivalence. Not necessarily the Egyptian deity "Tefnut"
(who "seems to personify the power of sunlight" [Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 175), "Def-
mut" reveals our hero, because asleep, to be a "deafmute."
"Nuahs, " "Mehs," "Pu Nuseht, " and "tohp," as others have noted, are simply the names
and words "Shaun," "Shem," "The Sun Up," and "light" (Gr. photos) spelled backward.
Since, in reading these words, one has to move backward, the inversions symbolize tem-
poral reversal and renewal. For further discussion of the passage see Atherton, Books at
the Wake, p. 193; Tindall, A Reader's Guide to Finne8ans Wake, p. 307; Grace Eckley,
"Looking Forward to a Brightening Day," in A Conceptual Guide to Finne8ans Wake,
p. 213; and Troy, "Mummeries," p. 80.
57. All details in this paragraph come from Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 143, 153;
E8yptian Heaven and Hell, pp. 94, 104-5, II4, and 124-25.
58. Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 160-61.
59. Ibid., p. 429.
60. Ibid., pp. 460, 465, 459, and 561-65 respectively.
61. Budge, Egyptian Heaven and Hell, pp.20-2I, 94-95, 138, and 166; Book of the
Dead, pp. 472, 564.
62. See, for example, Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 136-37 and 154; Egyptian Heaven
and Hell, pp. 48-63; Dwellers on the Nile, p. 280.
63. Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 346; see also p. 222.
64· Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 339,341,367.
65. Frazer, The New Golden Bough, p. 389.
67. Richard Selzer, "The Corpse," in Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 132.
68. See Troy, "Mummeries," p. 67. By quirk, the names of these four "Canopic" jars
have nothing to do with the word "canopy"; they were so called by early Egyptologists
who believed that Menelaus's pilot, Canopus, was buried in Egypt and worshipped there
in the form of an inhumationary jar (Budge, The Mummy, p. 194).
70. Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 16-17,447; The Mummy, pp. 160-61; elsewhere in the

Book of the Dead, the coffin and tomb are conceived of as an egg out of which the corpse
is reborn (see, e.g., pp. 609, 6II-I2).
71. Budge, The Mummy, p. 178 n. I.
72. Frazer, The New Golden Bouah, p. 389; Erman, Life in Ancient Eaypt, p. 308; Budge,
Book of the Dead, pp. 250-55.
73. Reasons for locating Joyce's hero in a sycamore coffin are suggested by lines imme-
diately preceding the passage, where the man lying dead to the world at the Wake hears
the voices of four old men admonishing him: " ... let your ghost hold no grievance.
You're better off where you are, Sir, ... under your sycamore" (24.27-31). In the explic-
itly funereal and Egyptian context of the passage, which refers to "Healiopolis," "the
land of souls," the otherworldly region of Sekhet Aaru ("the Field of Offerings"), Usha bti
statuettes, and embalming procedures (24.18, 33-34 and 25.2, 3-4, 22-23), Joyce evokes
the sycamore for two reasons.
Before Egyptian eschatological myths evolved into the elaborate forms of New King-
dom books of the dead, the Egyptians had simpler conceptions about what life after
death would be; according to one such belief, the dead man traveled to a fertile under-
world much like Sekhet Hetep or Sekhet Aaru-it was, in fact, called Aaru or Earu
("offerings") -where he could cultivate fertile wheat for eternity and "when tired in the
evening ... sit under his sycamore" (Erman, Life in Ancient Eaypt, p. 306).
Why a sycamore? "The scarcity of wood [was] quite a calamity for [ancient] Egypt"
(Erman, p. I I). Since Egypt had few trees, the image of the shade-giving tree would
likely have been made an attribute of the paradisaical afterlife; and since the sycamore
was one of the few woody plants available to carpenters, virtually all of the wooden "in-
humationary bric au brac" (77.33) hauled out of Egyptian tombs was fashioned of its
wood: statues and statuettes, biers, funerary masks, the scribe Ani's two coffins, and so
forth. Joyce's many references to "sycamores" in the Wake highlight the substantial
alignment of the Book of the Dead with his own book of the dead, as reference to any of
the following passages will attest; each refers also to ghosts, Amenti, beds or coffins,
the absence of loved ones: 95.19-21,203.20-21,281.20-22,384.1-5,388.24,397.22-24,
460.21-23,476.14,533.16-17, and 555.7-8.
In the Wake the sycamore coffin guarded at each of its "four coroners" (219.10) by the
four old mourners is simply the sleeper's bed-which is elsewhere, according to the con-
text of his dream, felt as a fluidly drifting boat, a layer of earth, or the vague matrix of
compass points that define his orientation in the space outside of his body. For the sources
ofthis note, see Erman, Life in Ancient Eaypt, pp. II, 193-94, 306, 451, and 453; Budge,
The Mummy, p. 166,210,256,257, and 260; Budge, Dwellers on the Nile, pp. II3 and 121;
and Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 285, 483, 617, and 619.
74. A prayer for deliverance from the attacks of worms comparable to that heard above
in the Wake appears in the Papyrus of Nekhtu-Amen: "The Osiris, the royal scribe,
Nekhtu-Amen, whose word is true, knoweth thee, he knoweth thy name. Deliver thou
him from the worms which are in Ra-stau, which live upon the bodies of men and
women, and feed upon their blood ... " (Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 156; see also
McHugh, Annotations, p. 26). On "the idea of a heaven where wheat grew luxuriantly"
and the mythic equation of wheat and the body of Osiris, see Budge, Eayptian Heaven
and Hell, pp. 164-65; Frazer's lengthy discussion of Osiris's role as a god of the corn in The
New Golden Bouah, pp. 39Iff.; and Troy, "Mummeries," pp. 68-70.
The reference to "Our Father" ("Papa Vestray" = L. Pater Vester) in the passage at hand
410 Notes to Pa8es 106-7

bends back on the dreamer, the dead man himself: the prayer uttered by the four old men
wishes that the corpse of "our father" won't be assailed by worms or damned to lakes of
burning water. The allusion to Papa Westray, finally-the northernmost of the Orkney
Islands-locates the passage at the borders of the known world.
75. Budge, The Mummy, pp. 161,194-201; Book of the Dead, pp. 130-31, 191-92,322.
76. In some versions of the myth of Osiris, Isis buried the scattered parts of her hus-
band separately and had a funeral temple erected over each of the graves. See Budge, The
Mummy, p. 278; Book of the Dead, pp. 55-56.
77. See Atherton, Books at the Wake, p. 198. For an illustration of the way in which the
formulaic "I know thee" was invoked in books of the dead, see the passage from the Pa-
pyrus of Nekhtu-Amen, quoted in note 74.
78. Troy, "Mummeries, " p. 35.
79. Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 29, 62, 94, 70-73, 29°,317; The Mummy, p. 175. Some
books of the dead contain a "Chapter of Setting Out for Orion"; the pyramid text carved
into the walls of the Pharaoh Pepi I's tomb, for example, reveals that Pepi thought he had
to "revolve in heaven like Orion" in order to attain immortality (Budge, Book of the
Dead, pp. 85-86; E8yptian Heaven and Hell, p. 14).
80. The phrases from Twain's novel discussed in the text appear in the following chap-
ters of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1977) : "Shore's your born,"
chapter 12, p. 59; "Your shuck tick's swell," chapter 20, p. 103; "texas," chapter 12, pp. 57,
58, chapter 13, p. 60, chapter 14, p. 64, and chapter 32, p. 175; "tow-linen," chapter 20,
p. 106; "the road to Lafayette," chapter 31, p. 172; "dropped in our tracks," chapter 40,
p. 215. On Joyce's extensive use of Huckleberry Finn in the Wake, see James Atherton, "To
Give Down the Banks and Hark from the Tomb," jamesjoyce Quarterly 4 (1967): 75-83;
R. P. Laidlow, "More Huck Finn in Finne8ans Wake," A Wake Newslitter, n.s., 5 (October
1968): 71-73; Danis Rose, jamesjoyce's Index Manuscript Holo8raph Workbook Vl.B.46
(Colchester: A Wake Newslitter Press, 1978), pp. 18-31; and Danis Rose, "More on Huck
Finn," A Wake Newslitter, n.s., 17 (April 198o): 19-20.
American sonorities informing other passages from the Wake on the New World ("No
petty family squabbles Up There ... nor no nothing" [454.36-455.2]) also often come
from Huckleberry Finn, as Joyce acknowledges when he characterizes the stasis of peace-
ful requiescence explored at 454.26-455.29 as "Mark Time's FinistJoke" (455.29): when
his hero is dead to the world (hence the "finish" and L. finis ["end"] in "Finist"), he
simply lies there and "marks time," but in doing so, he also enters a New World.
In this New World, there is no work:
-Would you mind telling us, Shaun honey, ... where mostly are you able to
work ....
-Here! Shaun replied .... being too soft for work proper. ... I am always telling ...
my answerers, Top, Sid and Hucky, now (and it is a veriest throth as the thieves' recen-
sion) how [I am] ... disbarred after holy orders from unnecessary servile work of
reckless walking of all sorts for the relics of my time .... Amen, ptah! (410.28-41 I. 1I)
In addition to "Tom, Sid, and Huck," this passage evokes Jim's term of endearment for
Huck ("Huck honey"), and the names of the Egyptian deities "Amen," "Ptah," "Thoth."
Through these ciphers the passage orients us again in a New World, like Amenti, where
the man buried at the wake lives again in the rejuvenated, dreamed form of a son
( "Shaun") -even while simultaneously enduring a vacant "vacation in life" amid "the
relics of time." Because his body is enjoying heavenly peace while his renewed spirit is

touring the New World, moreover, he doesn't have to do work. Instead, his" answerers" do
his work for him. The reference here is to the ushabti statuettes that wealthy Egyptians
had buried with them. Called "shabbty little imagettes" in the first chapter of the Wake
(25.2; Atherton, Books at the Wake, p. 194), these little stone or sycamore statues of
slaves were supposed to come to life in Amenti to do the dead man's work for him after he
recited the spell known in the Theban recension of books of the dead ("thieves' recen-
sion") as "The Chapter of Not Doing Work in Khert-Neter" (Budge, Book of the Dead,
pp. 30, 224, 629). The word ushabti literally meant "answerers" because the little slaves
answered the master's commands (Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, p. 317; see also Troy,
"Mummeries," pp. 65-66).
As this passage finally suggests, what the Egyptians imagined happening "in the
underwood" (360.14 - 15 [ "the underworld" bu t also "under wood" and inside the coffin])
happens also in sleep: all action in dreams is performed by imaginary surrogates who do
things that the inert, sleeping body cannot.
81. Illustrative of one critical attitude toward the Wake is the widely published and
always amusedly told story of how Joyce never really read Huckleberry Finn. The story is
based on a letter that Joyce wrote to one of his nephews living in New York; with the
letter, Joyce forwarded a copy of Huckleberry Finn and, explaining that "I never read it
and have nobody to read it to me and it takes too much time with all I am doing," he
requested that his nephew "mark with blue pencil in the margin the most important pas-
sages of the plot itself and in red pencil here and there whenever the words or dialogue
seem to call for the special attention of a European" (fl, 699n.; L, III, 401 -2). The spec-
tral transaction by which Huckleberry Finn actually does find its way into Finnegans
Wake suggests quite the opposite of what is usually assumed by people referring to this
letter. Joyce knew the novel quite well. Huckleberry Finn appears in the Wake largely
because it is a book that speaks in a common idiom of related concerns: much of Twain's
novel takes place in the night, and all of it in the mind of a child. Joyce would also have
found many of the central concerns of Huckleberry Finn falling right into alignment
with the Wake: Twain's sustained interest in death, the night, witching and spirits, dream
interpretation and dreams, and rebirth, which critics have recently regarded as a con-
trolling theme of the book. In Huckleberry Finn, there are constant confusions between
sleep and wakefulness, between the appearance of death and death itself; whole episodes
and conversations might have come out of the Wake: "We slept like dead people," "De
man ain't asleep, he's dead," and so forth (Huckleberry Finn, chapter 13, p. 64; chapter 9,
p. 44). That such a book should have found its way into the Wake, finally, has to do with
more than the exploited coincidence of the name "Finn": "Cat my dogs ef it ain't de
powerfulest dream I ever seen," as Joyce, quoting Twain, copied in his notebook on
Huckleberry Finn (Rose, Index Manuscript, p. 24).
82. For the sources of this paragraph on the mastabah tomb, see Budge, The Mummy,
pp. 317-28; and Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, pp. 310-14, who points out that most of
the mummies bouldered down into the depths ofmastabah tombs, disappeared centuries
ago, victims of the energetic trade of tomb robbing.
83. On the evolution of the mastabah tomb, see Troy, "Mummeries," pp. 61-62, and
Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, pp. 311-14.
84. Explication of Finnegans Wake 395.22-23. "Going to boat" suggests "going to bed,"
and also entering the boat of Ra in the nightworld, the boat which bears Joyce's sleeper to
the gates of dawn. "Verges on the chaptel" evokes "the virgins of the chapel" because our
412 Notes to PaBes 112-14

hero's dream is erotic here; but it also names "the verses of the chapter" in this book of
the dead. "Nema Knatut," finally yields "Tutank(h) amen" spelled backward; once again,
the reversed spelling symbolizes the temporal reversal necessary to the process of
renewal.
85. Atherton, Books of the Wake, p. 193. This title may also refer to the eleventh-
dynasty "Book of the Two Ways," an early book of the dead. See Budge, Book of the Dead,
p. 137; E8yptian Heaven and Hell, pp. 12-13.
86. On the ceremony of "Opening the Mouth," see Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 246- 55
and 278-79; Budge, Dwellers on the Nile, p. 169; and Troy, "Mummeries," pp. 74-77.
87. Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 433-34.
88. Ibid., p. 246. The bracketed phrase incorporates into the sentence understandings
that Budge develops elsewhere in his discussion of the "opening of the mouth."
89. Ibid., pp. 525-26.
90. Ibid., pp. 36, 38, 48, 89, 285-86.
91. Ibid., p. 485·
92. Ibid., pp. 32, 433-37. On "words of power" (98.26, 345.19)-Heka, in the Middle
Egyptian-see Atherton, Books at the Wake, p. 194, and Troy, "Mummeries," pp. 76-77.
This was the term by which Egyptians characterized all words and phrases in the Book of
the Dead.
93. Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 414-15 and 278-79.
94. Ibid., p. 524.
95. Between October 1921 and August 1922, the Joyces lived at 9 rue de l'universite in
Paris (L, II, lviii); "there they slept three in one room, one in the other. In the larger
room Joyce kept a series of potted Phoenix palms: as one died, it was replaced by an-
other. He said the plant reminded him of the Phoenix Park, and he attached great impor-
tance to it" (fl, p. 518) .
The period of time in which Joyce carried out this impractically expensive little ritual
was the same as that in which he finished proofreading and saw the publication of Ul-
ysses (in February 1922). Although it may have seemed to others that Joyce was moodily
unproductive between February and August 1922, the "great importance" he attached to
this ritual suggests that he was actually beginning to compose the Wake, although not in
words, the first of which were drafted in March 1923. Instead, he seems to have mulled
over the story of HCE's rise and fall by contriving the resurrections of potted phoenix
palms-and, undoubtedly, by observing the enspathed perianths of their blossoms. This
may be the only instance in literary history in which the genesis of a book has been
recorded in the quotidian ritual by which an author maintained his house plants. The
anecdote suggests how stubbornly joyce's symbolisms sought attachment to concrete
reality.
Information on the phoenix palm in the text derives from the article "Date Palm" in
the Encyclopedia Britannica, Fourteenth Edition, 1929 (vol. 7, p. 68).
96. For an Egyptian association of the palm, the god Ra, and the "Opening of the
Mouth," see the "Hymn to Ra" quoted in Budge's Commentary to the Book of the Dead
(p. 109): "Hail to thee, Ra, ... whose shrine is hidden, thou god in thy boat .... At his
will the Nile appeareth, when the greatly beloved Lord of the palm-tree cometh he
maketh mortals to live .... His name is hidden from his children in his name 'Amen' ...
Beloved art thou as thou passest through Egypt. When thou risest thou sendest forth
light .... "

97. Budge. Book of the Dead. p. 462; from the Papyrus ofNu.
98. Budge. Dwellers on the Nile. p. 73.
99. On the origin of the sacrament of Extreme Unction. see Kenneth Scott Latourette.
A History of Christianity. rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row. 1975). vol. I. pp. 532-33.
Latourette sees the Christian practice of anointing originating in the primitive belief that
unction promoted physical and-by inferential extension-spiritual healing.
100. Budge. Book of the Dead. pp. 575 and 589; the parenthetical question in the first of
these quotations is Budge·s.
101. Budge. Book of the Dead. p. 254.
102. Tindall. A Reader's Guide to Finne8ans Wake. p. 167.
103. Back panel. "Revlon Milk Plus 6 24-Hour Moisturizer."
104. "Cuticura": 164.30. 291.F6. 550.18; "Harlena": 164.31; "Nivea": 583.22; "Pond's
Cold Cream": 461.2-3.526.29.527.13. The last of these cosmetics, even more so than the
others. seems always to be associated with Issy.
105. Budge. Book of the Dead, pp. 29-48; Budge. The Mummy. p. 171.
106. The quotations conflate three separate passages from the Papyrus ofNu: the Invo-
cation to chapter CXXVI; the spells of transformation into birds in chapter CXLIX; and
the naming of doors in the House of Osiris in chapter CXXV (Budge, Book of the Dead.
pp. 614.300. and 591. respectively). For comparable passages and formulae in the Papyri
of Ani and Nebseni. see The Book of the Dead. pp. 409- 12. 394. and 547.
107. For a list of such chapters, see Budge. Book of the Dead. pp. 37-39; for the corre-
sponding Commentary, see pp. 304- 10. "Chapters of the Changing into a Hawk of Gold"
and into a "Divine Hawk" can be found at pp. 523-35. the "Chapter of Changing into a
Benu Bird." at pp. 552-53.
As Atherton has pointed out (Books at the Wake. pp. 195-96). the hero of the Wake
dreams of his own transformation into a Bennu bird in the following passage:
The phaynix rose a sun before Erebia sank his smother! Shoot up on that. bright Bennu
bird! Va faotre! Eftsoon so too will our own sphoenix spark spirt his spyre and sunward
stride the rampante flambe. Ay. already the sombrer opacities of the gloom are sphan-
ished. Brave footsore Haun! Work your progress! Hold to! Now! Win out. ye divil ye! The
silent cock shall crow at last. The west shall shake the east awake. Walk while ye have
the night for morn. lightbreakfastbringer, morroweth whereon every past shall full
fost sleep. Amain. (473.16-25)
Once again, the necrology of the Book of the Dead becomes a reconstruction of the night
in the Wake: the process by which the Arabian phoenix ("Erebia") rises from the gloom
of Amenti ("Erebus") into the fiery light of a new day is simply that by which Joyce's
sleeper drifts through the nocturnal unconsciousness into which he vanished ("sphan-
ished") toward the moment of awakening at dawn; in its risen light. Phoenix Park
("sphoenix spark") will once again rise up into the vision of this phoenixlike being. As
additional details suggest, however. the phoenix into which the dead man (hence the
"pyre" in "spyre") imagines himself transformed here is less a bird than Shaun ("Haun").
his son. who travels into a New World (tomorrow) after the old man has died and van-
ished from the Old World ("the phoenix rose a son before Erebus [death] sank his
mother").
Tindall points out that in "Va faotre!" Joyce not only reproduces the Biblical command
to be fruitful and multiply in twentieth-century terms (Fr. Va foutre! "Go fuck"). he also
names the phoenixlike agent of his sleeper's life after death: the Breton Va faotre means
"my son" (A Reader's Guide to Finne8ans Wake. p. 247).

108. As Atherton notes (Books at the Wake, p. 193), the phrase "My heart, my mother!
My heart, my coming forth of darkness!" "is verbatim from Chapter XXXB" and XXXA of
the Book of the Dead. See Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 371 and 454 ("Chapters of Not
Letting the Heart Be Taken Away") .
109. Atherton, Books at the Wake, p.200. On Aapep, see Budge, Book of the Dead,
pp. 159-60, 166, 109, 198, 345n.; on Uachet, pp. 189, 265, 401; on both see Troy, "Mum-
meries," pp. 51 - 54·
IIO. For a Freudian reading of the Book of the Dead, see Roheim, The Gates of the
Dream, pp. 145-49,303,312-15, and 372-73.
III. See "The Chapter of Making the Soul to Be Joined to its Body" and "The Chapter of
Not Letting the Soul Be Kept Captive in Khert-Neter" in Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 228,
471-74· "
112. Explication of Finneaans Wake 328.31-35 The Egyptian hieroglyphic "tet" ( il ),
which literally meant "firmness" or "stability," pictographic ally signified the sacrum
bone of Osiris, the part of his spine located closest to his genitals; the word by which we
know this bone, equivalently, comes from the Latin os sacrum ("the sacred bone").
Amulets of gold, carnelian, lapis-lazuli, and gilded heart-of-sycamore wood shaped in
the form of the tet were frequently a part of Egyptian tomb furnishings; usually they
were draped around the neck of the mummy, and usually books of the dead contained
chapters whose recitation would empower the corresponding organs of the deceased's
new body to stand. See Budge, Book of the Dead, PP.263, 319-20, and 616-20; The
Mummy, pp. 259-60; and Troy, "Mummeries," pp. 34-35,49,73.
"The night of 'the things of the night'" and "the night of setting up the Tet in Tettu" are
equated in the Papyrus of Ani. Both seem to refer to the occasion on which Horus, the
rising sun, defeated Set and the powers of night in the last hours of night before the
dawn, thereby completing the reconstruction of Osiris and ensuring his resurrection. See
Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 276 and 424-27.
II3. From the Papyrus of Nebseni, in Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 476-77; see also
pp. 228, 474-75.
II4. From the Papyrus of Ani, Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 621. A pillow or headrest
made of sycamore wood was sometimes placed beneath the head of the Egyptian corpse;
often it was the same pillow on which the man had slept night after night in his bed
while alive, and often it was inscribed with words from "The Chapter of the Pillow." See
Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 321; Dwellers on the Nile, pp. 57-58; The Mummy, pp. 210-1 I.
115· Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, pp. 306, 317; Budge, Book of the Dead, pp. 139ft'. and
206; Budge, Egyptian Heaven and Hell, pp. 41-63 and 91.
116. From "The Chapter of Coming Forth by Day after Passing through the Aamhet" in
the Papyrus of Ani, Budge, Book of the Dead, p. 483. "Aamhet," Budge informs us in a
footnote, was" a chamber in the domain of Seker, god of death."
5. THE IDENTITY OF THE DREAMER

I. Somewhere at issue in the Wake's extended play with tailors and tailoring is the
whole question of sleep's relation to "fitness." Everyone has heard the story of the ener-
getic octogenarian who bounces out of bed every morning having required only an hour
or two of sleep; and everyone knows the darker counterstory of the depressive teenager
who cannot keep his eyes open anywhere, for anyone. To these stories one adds the leg-
Notes to Pages 122-28 4 15

ends-of Napoleon, for instance, who believed that a child needed six hours of sleep a
night, a woman five, and a real man only four; or ofSchopenhauer, who found it impos-
sible to think unless he got a solid twelve hours a night. Stories like these raise questions
of what sleep accomplishes that enables sleep requirements to vary so widely from indi-
vidual to individual. And they are complicated by others that show how greatly people
tailor sleep to suit themselves and their needs. Why is it that some people waken out of
beds that look as crisp and unwrinkled as if they had hardly been slept in, while others
crawl out of spaces that look as if they had been sacked? What happens down there?
People who have studied these things invariably note that the restorative powers of
sleep have little to do with any such "healing processes" as folklore attributes to a
changed metabolism. Though body temperature falls slightly in the night (see 597.32-
34), the heartbeat decelerates (see 608.10- II), and the musculature relaxes, the most
dramatic of the night's alterations sweep through the head, where distinctions between
the purely physiological and the purely psychological grow very hazy indeed: both the
evolved need for sleep and sleep's ability to reinvigorate originate in the brain. It would
of course be extreme to claim, as some have, that the need for sleep is purely psychologi-
cal (or physiological), because the whole area is one in which distinctons between the
mind and the body break down entirely. Perhaps the only thing of which we can be cer-
tain is that by "redressing" one, sleep "will make a newman if anyworn" (596.36-597. Iff.
["of anyone" "worn"]): "after a goodnight's rave and rumble ... he [is] not the same
man" (41. 14- 15).
For further discussions of the subject, see Andre Tridon, Psychoanalysis, Sleep and
Dreams (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1921), pp. II-15; Ernest Hartmann, The
Functions of Sleep (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), p. 68; and Luce and Segal, Sleep,
pp. 21-29, 108-9·
2. Like every other element in the paragraph, its syntax is retailored in order to "de-
scribe the night itself." Its first sentence, like the state of sleep, is passive and void of
identifiable person ("The fall ... is retaled") ; while in the second ("The great fall ...
entailed ... the pftjschute"), the object is just a foreign and blurred version of the sub-
ject (Fr. chute = Eng. "fall"). Since we find "the fall" entailing a version of itself, more-
over, rather than a distinct effect, causal relations have also clearly disintegrated" (for
was not just this in effect which had just caused that the effect of that which it had
caused to occur?)" (92.33; cf. 482.36-483. I). At every level, the grammar is elaborately
replicating the perceptual character of dreams.
We know that these syntactical niceties are deliberate because other passages in the
Wake self-consciously discuss them. Finneaans Wake is more thickly riddled with passive
constructions-or "deponent[s]" (187.30) -than any teacher of writing would ever care
to point out, because "passivism" (137.33) together with "being sinned" and "being
been," is a condition of the night ("being been" would signify a purely passive form of
being). "Has it become to dawn in you yet that the deponent, the man from Saint Yves,
may have been (one is reluctant to use the passive voiced) may be been as much sinned
against as sinning?" (523.7-10). A "deponent" in the legal sense since he alone emits all
the conflicting evidence over which he refuses to budge, the Wake's "pacific subject" is
also a "deponent" in the grammatical sense, since in sleep he takes a form outwardly
passive though internally active, at least until "dawn dawns" in him. He is also entirely
like "the man from St.Ives" in lying at the heart of a riddle of apparently stupefying in-
solubility whose resolution, as here and as throughout Finneaans Wake, turns out to be
Notes to Paae 130

very simple. As the recurrent rhythm of "As I Was Going to St. Ives" reminds us through-
out the Wake (e.g., at 12.29-31, 215.15- 17, 330.1-4). all the dizzily proliferating appear-
ances in the dream finally reduce to a single "one," and he is simply sleeping.
Reference to the "relief map" will clarify some choice instances of the passive voice in
Finnegans Wake: "it was attempted by the crown" (86.6-7 [sl. for "head"]) feebly and
unsuccessfully; and "as if that were not to be enough for anyone" (85.20-21), "little
headway, if any, was made" (85.21-22). This is the case, "it was felt by me" (537.22-23),
because the owner of the head "to whom reference has been made had been absent"
(39.28-29), although "it was not unobserved of those presents" (92.22-23). The passive
voice in Finnegans Wake in general replicates the "passivism" of the "tropped head."
3. Vinding, "james joyce in Copenhagen," p. 149. On the identity of the sleeper, see
Edmund Wilson, "The Dream of H. C. Earwicker," The Wound and the Bow (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1947), pp. 243-71; Ruth von Phul, "Who Sleeps at Finnegans Wake?"
JamesJoyce Review I (June 16, 1957) : 27-38;james Atherton, "The Identity of the Sleeper,"
A Wake News/itter, n.s., 4 (Oct. 1967) :83-85; Hart, Structure and Motif, pp.81-83;
Bernard Benstock, "L. Bloom as Dreamer in Finnegans Wake," PMLA 82 (March 1967) :
91-97, andJoyce-Again's Wake (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1965), p. 215; Robert
Martin Adams, James Joyce: Common Sense and Beyond (New York: Random House,
1966), pp. 178-81; and Michael Begnal, "The Dreamers at the Wake: A View of Narration
and Point of View," in Begnal and Grace Eckley, Narrator and Character in "Finnegans
Wake" (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 19- 123.
The views expressed in these places, representative of those circulating in the criti-
cism, fall into four main groupings, according to which: (I) the dreamer is a single sleep-
ing man; (2) the dreamer is joyce himself; (3) the dreamer is a "universal mind"; and
(4) there is no single dreamer, but actually ten or several. Ofthese views, the first is most
consistent both with joyce's remarks on the subject and with the remarks of joyce's co-
workers and publicists (Budgen, Gillet, and all the writers represented in Our Exag-
mination). Not simply joyce's reading of the Wake makes this the most sensible approach
to the book, however, but repeated indications given everywhere in the text itself. There
we read, for instance, that all "the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their con-
trarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody" (107.29-30). That this "one stable some-
body" (not ten) is identified as "our social something" humanizes and particularizes him.
4. Oh! breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade,
Where cold and unhonor'd his relics are laid;
Sad, silent, and dark be the tears that we shed,
As the night-dew that falls on the grass o'er his head.
But the night-dew that falls, though in silence it weeps,

Shall brighten with verdure the grave where he sleeps;
And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls,
Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.
Thomas Moore, Moore's Irish Melodies (Boston: Oliver Ditson Co., 1893), rev. ed., p. 80.
Hodgart and Worthington (Song, pp. 9-10) have pointed out that joyce incorporated
into Finnegans Wake the titles of all but two of Moore's 124 Irish Melodies, together with
the names of the original Irish airs to which they were set (Moore wrote "Oh! Breathe
Not His Name," for instance, to the tune of "The Brown Maid"). While many readers
apprised of this discovery have seen in joyce's subsumption of "Moore's melodies" (439.9-
Notes to Page 131 4 17

10) an instance of a mechanical list-making tendency presumed to inform the Wake as a
whole, the example of "Oh! Breathe Not His Name" will suggest that this is not the case
at all. Like other works to which Joyce alludes in the Wake, the Melodies appear in the
book because they develop many of the same themes as those that Joyce necessarily
plumbed in his "reconstruction ofthe nocturnal life"; they deepen the senses of passages
in which one finds them. Born of a late Romanticism already accustomed to finding the
dream superior to reality, the Melodies could not have been written without the words
"niaht" ("Oft in the stilly night, / Ere slumber's chain has bound me"), "sleep" ("When
daylight was yet sleeping"), "dream" (" 'Twas one ofthose dreams"), "death" ("When in
death I shall calm recline") or variants of these terms, one or another of which occurs in
every other of Moore's lines: if one strings together enough phrases from the Melodies, a
protoversion of Finneaans Wake emerges. Joyce would have found in "tummy moor's
maladies" a parallel, native, if somewhat soupy version of his own work (492.34).
5. "The composite structures which occur in dreams in such immense numbers are put
together in an equal variety of ways .... Their strangeness disappears completely when
once we have made up our minds not to class them with the objects of our waking per-
ception, but to remember that they are the products of dream condensation and are em-
phasizing in an effectively abbreviated form some common characteristic of the objects
which they are thus combining. Here again the common element has as a rule to be dis-
covered by analysis. The content of the dream merely says, as it were, 'all these things
have an element x in common'" (Freud, On Dreams, trans. James Strachey [New York:
Norton, 1952], p. 47; see also ID, 327-30, 354-61).
6. Freud likens the condensing power of the dreamwork to a "procedure by means of
which Galton produced family portraits: namely by projecting two images on to a single
plate, so that certain features common to both are emphasized, while those which fail to
fit in with one another cancel one another out and are indistinct in the picture" (ID,
328). A procedure exactly of this kind generates all the names assigned to the Wake's
dreamer. Readers skeptical of Freud might turn to Aristotle to find confirmed the same
understanding: according to Aristotle, "the most skillful interpreter of dreams is he who
has the faculty of observing resemblances," not differences (De Divinatione Per Somnum,
464 b, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon [New York: Random House, 1941],
p. 630; quoted in ID, 130 n.l, 355 n.I).
7. Glasheen, Third Census, p. lxxii.
8. Thomas Parr, a Shropshire farmer, earned cultural fame not simply by living to the
age of 152 (1483-1635), but by purportedly getting a girl into trouble when he was well
over 100 and by taking a second wife when he was 122. His virile example seems to have
inspired the aging rakes of the court of Charles I to have the old man carted to London in
a special litter so that he could be put on exhibition before the king. Unfortunately, Old
Parr died during the trip. Buried in Westminster Abbey along with the great figures of
English history, he became a kind of local Adam in the English imagination; and the
term "Old Parr," not at all an idiosyncratic invention ofjoyce's, became a long-lasting
synonym for a "very old man." One still finds it in twentieth-century thesauruses.
9. In one way of thinking, everything that has ever gone into our hero's mind has stayed
there, the vast bulk of it sorted out and relegated to the trash heap of amnesic obscurity
because of its irrelevance, its uselessness, its triviality: still, "we keeps all and sundry
papers" (147.24-25), and "each, every, all is for the retrospectioner" (265.5-6). An im-
mense accumulation of "litterish fragments lurk dormant" in "our mounding's mass"
Notes to Poaes 132-35

(66.2S) , and they make him something of a vast personal "museomound" of memories
(8.S), many of which lie in his unconscious. Where by day the items in this "museo-
mound" are retrieved and brought to mind according to a reality principle, in order to
suit the exigencies of the present, by night, as a dim "musing" moves through the
"mound" (hence again "museomound"), they are stirred into new and exotic configura-
tions-in much the same way that real particles of broken glass, torn paper, and other
scraps are stirred into new and exotic configurations in "a collideorscope" (143.28
["kaleidoscope"]). All of these terms are ciphers for our "scrapheaped" hero's "deafa-
dumped" body, within which the "dummpshow[s)" of dreams take place (S90. I) . On the
hypermnesia of dreams, see ill, 4S- SI.
10. In the opening pages of the book, for example, one finds "pa's malt," "brewing,"
"Jhem or Shen" (3.12-13 ["John Jameson's Whiskey"]); a "jiccup" (4.Il ["hiccough"]);
"rushlit" (4.19 ["rushlight" is sl. for "liquor"]); "yeasty" (4.21); "guenneses" (4.24
["Guinness's"]); "Toper's Thorp" (4.27 [a community of heavy drinkers]); the "craythur"
(4.29 [whiskey]); "balbulous" (4.30 ["bibulous"]); "the alltitude and malltitude" (4.33
["malt," and the sl. "in one's altitudes," meaning "drunk"]); "liquor" (4.34); "Wassaily
Booslaeugh" (S.S-6); "Hootch" (S.9); "vine" and soured wine "vinegar" (S.Il); "tip-
pling full" (6.8); "thirstay" (6.14); "Fillagain" (6.14 [as a bartender must]); "agrog"
(6.19); "filling" (6.22); "tap up his bier" (6.24["beer"]); "bock" (6.26); "finisky," "barrow-
load of guenesis" (6.27 ["fine whiskey," "barrel-load of Guinness's"]); "the tootal of the
fluid" and "the twoddle ofthe fuddled" (6.28 [the "total of the fluid" generating "twaddle"
among the "fuddled") -not to mention the heavily sustained evocations of "Finnegan's"
major "blackout." What rises out of the play of these terms is a sense of our hero's life in
the day. Comparable networks of references pertaining to Dublin, to luminaries of "the
homely protestant religion" (S30.28) , to "Scandiknavery" (47.2 I), and to five recurrent
family members would allow us to see the Wake's protagonist as a Protestant Dubliner
and family-man of Nordic lineage.
II. Since he is not particularly successful (S89.12-S90.3), he dreams, like Bloom, of
better things. The names of private estates in his neighborhood preoccupy him (264. I Sff.) ,
as do the success stories of "wine and spirit merchants" who have thrived. Adam Find-
later intrigues him as greatly as he intrigued Bloom in Ulysses (U, S8), and since some
call him "Gunne or Guinn" (44.12), we can infer that he finds himself in competition
with businesses operated by Michael Gunn, whose Gaiety Theatre was a place of enter-
tainment, and with the Guinnesses, who made a fortune selling alcohol. In the night,
where his inadequacies are wishfully redressed, the nicknames "Gunne or Guinn" reveal
our hero's "investments" in these people.
12. For more on pub-names in the Wake, see the Gazetteer, passim, and Benstock,
joyce-A 8ain'sWake, pp. 32-37.
13. Joyce spoke of the Shaun section of the Wake as "a descri ption of a postman travelling
backwards in the night," adding cryptically that "in reality it is only a barrel rolling
down the River Liffey" (L, I, 214). Shaun's "work [at] postal night duty" (L, III, 107) has
to do with the dreamer's literacy-his ability to carry and deliver letters.
14. Roland McHugh, The Si8la ofFinne8ans Wake (Austin, Texas: Univ. of Texas Press,
1976) .
IS. Henry Morton Robinson, "Hardest Crux Ever," A james joyce Miscellany, Second
Series, ed. Marvin Magalaner (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 19S9) ,
pp. 19S-207; Philippe Sollers and Stephen Heath, "Joyce in Progress," Tel Quel S4 (June
Notes to PaBes 137-41 4 19

1973) : IO-II n. 3; Philippe Sollers, "Joyce and Co.," trans. Stephen Heath, Tel Quel 64
(Winter 1975) : II; and Jean-Louis Houdebine and Philippe Sollers, "La Trinite de Joyce,"
Tel Quel83 (Spring 1980) :51-55, 69-76, and 80-81.
16. The terms are finally demoralizing because they consign to growth-capable people
the status of fixed objects. For an excellent discussion of the histories of these words, see
the entries on "Individuality" and "Personality" in Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vo-
cabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 133-36 and
194-97; for a discussion of their relation to the novel and the social reality of which it is
a manifestation, see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of
Calif. Press, 1957), pp. 9-27.
17. Marcel Brion, "The Idea of Time in the Work ofJames Joyce," Our Exa8mination
Round His Factification For Incamination of Work in Proaress (1929; rpt. New York: New
Directions, 1962), pp. 33, 31.
18. Mercanton, "The Hours of James Joyce," p. 237; Jan Parandowski, "Meetings with
Joyce," in Portraits of the Artist in Exile, p. 159. Compare also Joyce's remarks to Arthur
Power on Turgenev: "he is like all the classical writers who show you a pleasant exterior
but ignore the inner construction, the pathological and psychological body which our
behaviour and thought depend on. Comprehension is the purpose of literature, but how
can we know human beings if we continue to ignore their most vital functions" (Power,
Conversations with james joyce, p. 56).
19. Knowing one's "tumptytumtoes" through one's eyes, to illustrate the contortions
that consciousness can perpetrate on the body, is to relocate one's "twoe nails on the
head" (110.14- 15) and also to ignore the vast underground that Finne8ans Wake explores
in its treatment of "matters that fall under the ban of our infrarational senses" (19.36-
20. I). One way of comprehending these "infrarational senses," which involve no know-
ing at all, would be simply to move those "tumptytumtoes," which tend to vanish, on
the principle "out of sight, out of mind, " at the first appearance of a line of print. "You'll
feel what I mean" (468.18). "I fee where you mea" (295.36-296.1).
20. For representative exceptions, see E. L. Epstein, "James Joyce and the Body," in A
Starchamber Quiry: Ajamesjoyce Centennial Volume, 1882-1982, ed. E. L. Epstein (New
York: Methuen and Co., 1982), pp. 73- 106; Solomon, Eternal Geometer; Benstock, joyce-
A8ain's Wake, pp. 267-82; and Norman O. Brown, Love's Body.
6. NOCTURNAL GEOGRAPHY
I. On "Finn" as an aspect of the dreamer, see also L, III, 422n., 472, 473n.; Adaline
Glasheen, "Out of My Census," The Analyst, no. 17 (1959) : 23; and Hart, Structure and
Motif, pp. 81-82.
2. Solomon, Eternal Geomater, p. 120.
3. Ellmann points out that while writing Work in Proaress, Joyce grew "interested in
variations and sameness in space, in the cubist method of establishing differing relations
among aspects of a single thing, and he would ask Beckett to do some research for him in
the possible permutations of an object" (fj, 551). A number of scholars have clarified our
sense of how extensively Joyce researched modern conceptual alterations of space and
object-relations like these in order to render distinct the alien spatialities of the night.
Solomon, in Eternal Geomater, discusses at length "Joyce's fascination with ... the
fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometry, which accompanied the introduction of
42 0 Notes to Pa8es 142-47

the theory of relativity" (pp. I2off); and Roland McHugh, in The Si8la of Finne8ans
Wake, calls attention to entries in Joyce's notebooks that show him investigating the
higher dimensional geometries of Riemann and Lobachevski (pp. 74-75) . Finally, too, by
reformulating "object relations" in such a way as to see in "objects" immanent versions
of the subject, psychoanalysis had its impact on the Wake.
For further discussion of Joyce's interest in post-Newtonian science, see Ihab Hassan,
"Joyce and the Gnosis of Modern Science," and S. B. Purdy, "Lets's Hear What Science Has
to Say: Finne8ans Wake and the Gnosis of Science," in The Seventh ofJoyce , ed. Bernard
Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 207- 18.
4. For other evocations of "Fe Fo Fum," see the "Index of Motifs" in Hart's Structure
and Motif, p. 222. Giants who wished to extend their vocabularies beyond the humdrum
"Fo Fum" might consult the appropriate dictionary, L. Sainean's La Lan8ue de RabeJais
(Paris, 1922), to which Joyce referred in order to write "the Book of DoublendsJined" (L,
I, 255). There they might find listed continental expletives on the order of "Par Mahon!,"
"Corbieu!," and" Vraybis!" (cf. 253.33, 253.36, and 254.26). It is impossible, as they
say, to give an adequate translation, but roughly these things work out, over other in-
tonations as well, to the English "Fe Fo Fum!" For examples of how the "language
of Rabelais" is put to work in Finne8ans Wake, see the Annotations, pp. 4, 20, rr8-19,
124, 252-54, and the corresponding pages in the Wake. For an account of Joyce's use of
Sainean, see Claude Jacquet, Joyce et RabeJais: Aspects de la creation verba Ie dans Finne-
8ans Wake, Etudes Anglaises, Cahiers et documents, no. 4 (Paris: Didier, 1972).
Heavy quotations from Macpherson's Ossianic poems and extended references to the
literature on Finn throughout Finne8ans Wake work, in part, to the same gigantic effect.
On these giant languages, see Fritz Senn, "Ossianic Echoes," A Wake Newsletter, n.s., 3
(April 1966): 25-36; and Swinson Ward, "Macpherson in Finne8ans Wake," A Wake
Newsletter, n.s., 9 (Oct. 1972) :89-95.
5. The appearance of "the great Finnleader himself" at the end of 1. viii (214. I I), the
heavy layering of quotations from Macpherson's Temora at the end of 1. vii, and the com-
parable quoting of "The Youthful Exploits of Finn" at the end of Lv (see Annotations)
would work comparably to signal a fall back into the dimensionless sleeping body.
Compare also the general (and representative) structure of ILi, which begins with
heavy evocations of a "sleeping giant" (219.18, 219.20-21, 220.26, 221.29, 222.12, 222.14)
and which closes, on the announcement that "one must recken with the sudden and gi-
gantesquesque appearance" of the book's hero (253.29-30), amid pages streaked heavily
with references to "Fe fo fum" (254.20-21), "the language of Rabelais" (252.33-35,
253.33, 253.36, 254· 14, 254·26 [see Annotations]), and the names of giants (246.5-6,
254.20, 258.9). The appearance of all these ciphers at the beginning of the chapter means
that the "mime" or "dumbshow" of which the chapter treats is played out behind the eyes
and between the ears of the Wake's "sleeping giant"; their appearance at the end of the
chapter means that the spatially perceptible appearances of a dream are "mak[ing] off in
a thinkling" (256.4) as HCE passes out into the dimensionlessness of deeper sleep.
6. Mink, Gazetteer, p. xi.
7. Heinrich Straumann, "Last Meeting with Joyce," trans. Eugene and Maria Jolas, in
MariaJolas, ed., AJamesJoyce Yearbook (Paris: Transition Press, 1949), p. 114: "In answer
to my question, as to whether a knowledge of the local conditions in Dublin would
make the reading of Finne8ans Wake any easier, [Joyce] replied firmly in the negative.
One should not pay any particular attention to the allusions to place-names, historical

events, literary happenings and personalities, but let the linguistic phenomenon affect
one as such. If a premise to the reading of the work must be sought, then it should be a
knowledge of the philosopher Giambattista Vico, to whom he was greatly indebted."
8. Three typical verses:
Brian 0 Linn was an Irishman born
He lived at a time when no fashions were worn
His teeth stuck out and his eyes far in
''I'm a beautiful creature," says Brian 0 Linn.
Brian 0 Linn had no breeches to wear
He got an old sheepskin to make him a pair
With the fleshy side out and the wooly side in
"They'll be lovely and cool." says Brian 0 Linn.
Brian 0 Linn had no shirt to his back
He went to the miller and borrowed a sack
Then he puckered the meal bag in under his chin
"Well, they'll take them for ruffles," says Brian 0 Linn.
A redaction of versions given in Colm 0 Lochlainn, Irish Street Ballads (New York:
Citadel Press, I960), pp. 30-3I, and by Robin Roberts, Irish Street Sonas. Stinson Rec-
ords, SLP 63, I963.
9. This would be the appropriate point at which to take "polar bearing[s]" (602.30) in
the Wake's "amstophere," where "polar" (" antithetical") does not always mean" arctic,"
but where "bear" (Gr. arktos) sometimes does.
Because the earth comes to an end when sleep begins, place-names ordinarily desig-
nating the limits of knowable terrains often mean, in Finneaans Wake, eschatological
"ends of the world" as well. The Wake moves its hero to "Landsend," for instance (29I.I
[but not necessarily to Cornwall]), or to "Finishthere" (I7.23 [Fr. Finistere, "land's
end"]), because these toponyms designate sites at which earth vanishes. And parts of the
night comparably move our hero into unearthly "antipodes" or "polar" regions (472.I7,
435.I2, 567.35), simply because by losing his identity in sleep he discovers "his polar
andthisishis" (I77.33), in a world "down under" (32I.32). Perhaps the most resonant of
all the Wake's ciphers for "the end of the world" is "west." "All goes west" (85. IS) in
Finneaans Wake-"well to the west" (3.2I)-because at a primal level "west" and
"night" are identical. Etymologically deriving from the IndO-European root *wespero
("night, evening"), the English "west" is cognate with the Latin vesper and the Greek
hesperos ("night"), all these terms designating the "timeplace" (4I6.24) at which the
earth spills off the face of the earth as the Daily World, "ebbing wasteward, leaves to the
soul of light its fading silence" (235.6-7). As the space out of which night erupts,
"westerness" (2I.22) generates complex associations throughout the Wake, and particu-
larly because, whether at day's or life's end, to take the "journey westward" or "to go
west" (D, 223; 85. IS) means idiomatically "to die." On "Westerness," see also 66.32-34,
295.I, 3I9.6, 407.36, and 457.20 ("look for me always at my west").
"Bearing right" along in these "polar bearing[s]" (97.4), "bears" move heavily through-
out Finneaans Wake because, among all things else, they are good at "hibernating"
(79.5). "with bears' respects to" (358.30 ["which bears respect to"]) the night. Whether
as a "Fitz Urse" (97.5 [L. ursus, "bear"]) or "Bernesson Mac Mahahon from Osro" (340.I7
[Da. bjorn, Anglo- Ir. mahan, It. orso, "bear"]), "our tribal furbear" and "grizzliest" hero
422 Notes to Pa8e 153

is a "quhare soort of mahan" (132.32,340.21, 16.1 [Anglo-Ir. mahan, "bear"]) who rests in
peace beneath a Wakean "graphplot" reading "as urs now, so yous then!" (535.3-4 [the
line plays the L. ursus, "bear" into the formulaic epitaph-"As us now, so you one day"-
to remind us that we all spent last night hibernating, "dead to the world"]). For more on
bears, see 43. I, 51. 15, 97.5-I2, 200. I, 253.31, 255· 15, 267.22, 339.27-340.21, 373.14- 16,
430.6, 539.31; Glasheen, Second Census, pp. 166-67, Third Census, p. 25.
10. As the examples will suggest, the apparently playful process by which Joyce alters
the name "Dublin" throughout Finne8ans Wake works in fact with some precision to map
out the conditions ofthe night; every altered spelling of "Dublin" bears scrutiny for what
it "reveils" not to be happening in the "knock[ed] out" and "tropped head" of a figure
who lives in "nill, Bud" (620.3), when not in "Dumbaling" (34.1, 586.15 [since sleep
renders him "dumb" in both senses of the word]). His nightlife takes place less in "Dear
Dirty Dublin" than in the "dire dreary darkness" of "deep dorfy doubtlings" and deeply
nagging "Doubtlynn" (136.20, 374.18, 248.7), because it is altogether unclear "whether
... the audible-visible-gnosible-edible world exist[s)" for him (88.5-7). Even the name
"Dublin" seems to play into this nocturnal toponomastics; historically deriving from the
Gaelic dubh-linn ("black-pool") and originally referring to a deep pool at the mouth of
the River Liffey (Gaelic Lexicon, p. 381), it refers equally throughout Finne8ans Wake to
the "blackholes" and "black pools" into which sleep immerses everyone (549.5, 204.18).
Like all terms in Finne8ans Wake and all images in dreams, "black pool" seems to refer
outwardly toward the real world of Dublin, although it also refers inwardly, to the
"sleeping giant" of "Novo Nilbud," within the fathomless "Blackpool" (88.34) of whose
"tropped head" the Wake takes place.
II. Since the "sooty" in which the Wake unfolds is a negation of the city and all struc-
tures upholding it, vanished cities like "Troy," "Carthage," and Goldsmith's "Deserted
Village" move spectrally through the book to remind its reader that "everynight life"
itself takes place in a vanished civilization (see, e.g., 17.26ff., 55.3-5). Passing refer-
ences to utopian "noplaces" like Samuel Butler's "Erewhon" work to a comparable effect
(391. 15, 152.18, 510.27).
12. Compare substitutions for "Erin" like "Wherein?" (16.21), and "Even" (130.3
["night"]). An old poetic name for Ireland-"Inisfail" or "Innisfallen"-comparably
modulates into "in his Falling" (72.7) and "in his fallen" (476.13) in order to evoke the
"Inishfeel" (510.33 ["innish-feel"]) of someone "in his fail" (462.8). And under the di-
rection of the Wake's "hibernian knights underthaner" (335.26 [its Hibernicized "Ara-
bian nights' entertainer"]), even the name "Hibernia" describes the night: in the Wake,
"Hibernia" refers as much to the slow business of "hiberniating" (316.15) as it does to a
state knowable in wakefulness.
13· Mink, Gazetteer, p. 536.
14. Joyce himself made this point at more eloquent length: "Classical literature repre-
sents the daylight of human personality while modern literature is concerned with the
twilight, the passive rather than the active mind. We feel that the classicists explored the
physical world to its limit and we are now anxious to explore the hidden world, those
undercurrents which flow beneath the apparently firm surface. But as our education was
based on the classical, most of us have a fixed idea of what literature should be, and not
only literature but also of what life should be. And so we moderns are accused of distor-
tion; but our literature is no more distorted than classical literature is.... When we
are living a normal life we are living a conventional one, following a pattern which has

been laid out by other people in another generation, an objective pattern imposed on
us by the church and state. But a writer must maintain a continual struggle against
the objective: that is his function. The eternal qualities are the imagination and the sex-
ual instinct, and the formal life tries to suppress both. Out of this present conflict arise
the phenomena of modern life" (Arthur Power, Conversations with james joyce, p. 74;
italics mine).
15. Bernard Benstock, "Every Telling Has a Taling: A Reading of the Narrative of
Finnegans Wake," Modern Fiction Studies 15 (Spring 1969) : 5.
16. According to the Skeleton Key, HCE was "caught peeping at or exhibiting himself to
a couple of girls" and "was witnessed by three drunken soldiers, who could never be
quite certain of what they had seen" (pp. 7-8); according to the Third Census, he is "a
homosexual who annoys three soldiers," though "the soldiers deny it [and] say HCE ex-
posed himself to two girls" (p. xxxi); the Reader's Guide notes simply that "he did some-
thing in the Park, as, according to others, Adam did something in the Garden." "His sin
... remains indefinite" (p. 58). For an excellent discussion of the crime, see Norris, De-
centered Universe, pp. 44-47.
17. A statement that it would be quite feasible to make of our hero in the Daily World,
for instance-"of course, how wouldn't we know where he had his little existence and
what he wished and could do"-might take, in the altered predication of "the Evening
World," a form reading, "off course" "how wooden" "we nowhere" "he addle liddle" "ex-
systems" "end" what he "swished" "uncouth" "doom" (410.18, 16.33, 10.26,4.28,148.18,
239.32, 319.32, 239.35, 483.18). Dissolved predicates like these are everywhere in Fin-
negans Wake.
18. Eugene Jolas, "My Friend James Joyce," injamesjoyce: Two Decades of Criticism,
p. 14; see also Dominic Manganiello, joyce's Politics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1980), pp. 224-25.
19. For an excellent account of joyce's relation both to the women's movement of
his own day and to current feminist critical practice, see Bonnie Kime Scott, joyce and
Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984). Readers bothered by the male
form depicted in the two maps of "the Evening World" might note simply that our hero
has no choice but to sleep in the ridiculous "mirthday suit" he was born with (35-4).
Since the polymorphic interior of this "mirthday suit" teems with heavily "mixed sex
cases" (48.2), moreover, the visible outlines made evident in the two diagrams are mis-
leading. "Sapphrageta and Consciencia [are] undecidedly attached to" the Wake's "sleep-
ing giant," as a reading of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" will make clear, and complementarily
he is "attached" to them (542.19-20 ["Sappho," "suffragette"; the obscure term in this
formulation, of course, is "attachment"]) .
20. For an excellent exploration of the ideologically subversive effects of the language
ofthe Wake, see Colin MacCabe'sjamesjoyce and the Revolution of the Word, pp. 133-71.
21. The seven Latin adverbs are those taught to priests for use in the confessional
("let us pry" [188.8]). Recalling them helps the confessor to determine the nature of his
client's sin.
22. The extent of Joyce's global exasperation with the sociopolitical world in which he
found himself is suggested in part by his odd living habits: in the course of 36 years
of "marriage," he and Nora moved between 150 and 200 times, cutting a kind of noman's
land through seven countries (see Ellmann's list of "Joyce's Addresses" in the Letters, II,

lv-Ixii). We might detect in the terms that make up the nocturnal map of "neurope,"
then, some ofJoyce's exasperation with the West, and also share some of the complex glee
that he must have felt in discovering "Berlin," for instance, to be "barelean" (550.8 [not
much there]); free-living but pricily prohibitive "New York," where his son Giorgio
sought to make a future, to be just another "new yoke," "new yoke" (137.32); the French
to be the "fringe" (311.33 [hardly the center]); or "Saville Row fashions" to be "civille
row faction[s]" (320.7), in that unaffordable "fashions," by visibly distinguishing" The
haves and the havenots" (295.L2), also make visible potential "civil war factions." The
evidence ofjoyce's letter shows him perpetrating this kind ofnomenclatorial decimation
on places he actually lived in whenever he grew discontent with them: a boring summer
in London's Campden Grove found it altered into "Campden Grave" (L, I, 317 ["that grove
was inhabited by mummies"]); "Antwerp" was interesting for a while, but as the mos-
quitoes began to compete with its lures, it became "Gnatwarp" (L, I, 245; 140.2); even
his own publishers, Faber and Faber, when they failed to do a job to his satisfaction, got
transformed into "Feebler and Fumbler" (L, III, 320).
Finally, too, there are joyce's explicit statements on the Western world. In a letter of
1934, he wrote to his son, "it is or should be patent that the conduct of public affairs in all
the great countries of the world between Russia and America both included makes stupid,
boring, irritating, backwards England seem like a land inhabited by non-bloodthirsty
homines sapientes" (L, III, 312). And while this makes England seem an island oflight in
a sea of barbarism, we should recall his remarks on the subject to Arthur Power: "I de-
cided that I could never have become a part of English life, or even have worked there, for
somehow I would have felt that in that atmosphere of power, politics, and money, writing
was not sufficiently important" (Power, Conversations withjamesjoyce, p. 64).
23. The allegiance of the Tel Quel group, particularly in its Maoist phase, to Finne8ans
Wake is well known; both in China and in the Wake, its editorial staff seems to have
perceived formal alternatives to the Western status quo. For Philippe Sollers, "joyce's re-
fusal to indulge in the slightest dead pronouncement is exactly itself the political act";
"Finne8ans Wake is the most formidably anti-fascist book produced between the two
wars" (Philippe Sollers, "joyce and Co.," trans. Stephen Health, Tel Quel 64 [Winter,
1975]: pp. 3, 4)·
The extent to which the Wake has been perceived to move at the fringes of all systems
is perhaps best suggested, however, by an opaquely uninterpretible detail included in
Herman Blei's "Terrorism, Domestic and International: The West German Experience,"
in National Advisory Committee on Criminal justice Standards and Goals, Report of the
Task Force on Disorders and Terrorism (Washington, D.C., 1976), p. 498. We learn here that
Gudrun Ensslin, the West German minister's daughter and student turned member of the
Baader-Meinhof gang, had worked for some time prior to her career in terrorism on an
incompleted doctoral thesis on Finne8ans Wake. The interesting question is what con-
nection Blei perceived to link the two forms of evident anarchy.
24. For a sober assessment of joyce's politics and an excellent account of his passage
through socialist allegiances into loose adherence to a form of rational anarchy as es-
poused by Bakhunin, see Manganiello, joyce's Politics.
25. "While we should like to drag attentions [very reluctantly] to the Wolkmans Cum-
sensation Act" (616.24-25) which stirs him towards morning (hence "welkin"), as "sen-
sation" starts to return to his "tropped head" (come-sensation), so to remind him of the
Notes to Page 171

imminence of another day of labor. Sleep, as a reading of Civilization and Its Discontents
or a chat with the person down the street will suggest, is just a built-in compensation act
for anyone on the staff of the Daily World.
26. A steady stream of ciphers in Finnegans Wake serves to remind us that our hero,
"being personally unpreoccupied" (558.4), has been "discharged from [his] last situa-
tions" (529.14 [yesterday's]) and is ephemerally on "haloday" from beginning to end of
the book (353.7 ["halo" because he is in another world]). Such ciphers would include
references to "pensionees" (301. 19), people on "relief" (409.20), "bushman's holiday[s]"
(IIO.28 ["busman's"]), bank holidays like "St. Lubbock's Day" (292.5 [see "Avebury" in
Third Census]), and "day[s] off" generally (306.F2). As the Wake moreover shows in the
play of these terms, the "industrially disabling" aspect of sleep is so invariably moralized
that, depending on who notes whom doing it, the same essential act of relaxation is sus-
ceptible to different colorations and forms. The "regular layer" (181.32) shown stratified
in the relief maps is "out of a job" (181.30) when he feels guilty like an "oaf, outofwork,
one removed from an unwashed savage" (191. I I). When he does not, he is simply taking
his well-deserved "leisure like a god on pension" (24.17) -or better yet, "like a gourd on
puncheon" (373.20 ["gourd" because the "vegetative" state of sleep renders him a "hu-
man vegetable," and a hollow one at that; "on puncheon" because sleep leaves him
"absintheminded"]) .
27. Since the night automatically injects an "armistice" into the conflicts whose
working-out is the making of the Daily World, another version of this line of thought
furls out of the Wake's heavily recurrent references to "truces," "armistices," and peace
agreements. The two maps of "the Evening World" show our hero with "his defences
down during the wapping stillstand" (588.5; 347. II [Ger. Watfenstillstand, "truce"]), on
"the uneven day ofthe unleventh month ofthe uneventedyear" (517.33-34)-where an
"uneven day" would be a very "odd" one, like night; an "unleavened" interval of time
would entail no "rising" and no real "events" ("unevented"); and "the eleventh hour
of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" of 1918 would refer to the signing of the
Armistice that ended World War I. "It's the armitides toonigh," then, "and there's to be a
gorge ups truce" (II.13-15 [as well as a "gorged-up truth" that will reveal, in the form of
the dream, unconscious conflicts underlying real ones]) .
28. "irreducible antagonism": Mercanton, "The Hours ofJamesJoyce, " p. 212.
29. Joyce: "As an artist I am against every state. Of course I must recognize it, since
indeed in all my dealings I come into contact with its institutions. The state is con-
centric, man eccentric. Thence arises an eternal struggle. The monk, the bachelor, and
the anarchist are in the same category. Naturally I can't approve of the act of the revolu-
tionary who tosses a bomb in a theatre to destroy the King and his children. On the other
hand, have these states behaved any better which have drowned the world in a blood-
bath?" UJ, 446).
7. VICO'S "NIGHT OF DARKNESS"

I. W. Y. Tindall, James Joyce: His Way of Interpreting the Modern World (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950), p. 71. Tindall goes on to note that "the three ages have
languages suitable to each. In mute, divine periods, men use hieroglyphics: picture-
writing, coats of arms, and fables. A heroic age brings proverbs and metaphor, the lan-
guage of the imagination. In the human age, language becomes abstract or vulgar. ...

Attracted by Vico's interest in myth, language, and family, Joyce preferred him to other
cyclists."
2. Samuel Beckett, "Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce," in Our Exasmination, p. 8.
3. Book 5 of The New Science, "The Recurrence of Human Things in the Resurgence of
Nations," 1046-96.
4. Book 4 of The New Science, "The Course of Nations," 915-1045.
5. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin, "Introduction" to The AutobioS-
raphy of Giambattista Vico, (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1944), p.20. Here I should
acknowledge a general indebtedness to Fisch and Bergin's wonderful "Introduction" to
The Autobiosraphy. Other works I have found useful are Giambattista Vico's Science of
Humanity, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976); and New Vico Studies 1 (1983).
6. Compare to Vico's evolutionary account of consciousness these representative views
of others who wrote at his time:
" ... the condition of man [in nature] is the condition of war of everyone against
everyone; in which case everyone is governed by his own reason ... " (Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan, in The EnSlish Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, ed. Edwin A. Burtt [New York:
Random House, 1939], p. 163).
" ... the power of forming a good judgment and of distinguishing the true from the
false, which is properly speaking what is called Good sense or Reason, is by nature equal
in all men .... Inasmuch as [reason or good sense] is the only thing that constitutes us
men and distinguishes us from the brutes, I would fain believe that it is found complete
in each individual, and in this I follow the common opinion of the philosophers, who
say that the question of more or less occurs only in the sphere of the accidents and does
not affect the forms or natures of the individuals in the same species (Rene Descartes,
"Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking the Truth in
the Sciences," in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and
G. R. T. Ross [New York: Dover, 1955], pp. 81-82).
"To consider political power aright, and derive it from its original, we must consider
what state all men are naturally in .... The state of nature has a law of nature to govern
it, which obliges everyone; and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will
but consult it, that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in
his life, health, liberty, or possessions" (John Locke, "An Essay Concerning The True
Original, Extent and End of Civil Government," Two Treatises of Government, in The En-
Slish Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, pp. 404-5). Vieo's, of course, was not the only in-
teresting deviation from the mainstream Enlightenment thinking represented in these
passages.
7. Vico, in fact, has to provide an elaborate account to explain how his first men ar-
rived in a bestial state of nature, since ideological orthodoxy held that all mankind de-
scended from a rational Adam. In order not to violate "sacred history" in his "gentile
history," Vico supposes that after the Flood, Noah's sons wandered from the culture of
their father and roved in the wild for centuries, until they reverted to animalistic beasts
void of any property of mind but sensation (NS, 192ff).
8. "It is another property of the human mind that whenever men can form no idea of
distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand .... "
"This axiom points to the inexhaustible source of all the errors about the beginnings of
humanity that have been adopted by entire nations and by all the scholars. [For, the
Notes to Paaes 175-78 42 7

"conceit of scholars"] will have it that whatever they know is as old as the world" (NS,
122-23, 127)·
9. Compare Bloom's actions during his homecoming on June 16, 1904 (U, 732-34)' to
those of Homer's hero:
[Odysseus'] servants kept carrying the scrapings [of the dead suitors] and put them
outdoors.
And when they had set in order the entire hall
They led the serving women out of the well-based hall
Between the round-room and the excellent fence of the court.
They cooped them in a narrow place from which was no way to escape .
. . . a cable from the dark blue-prowed ship
[Telemachos, at Odysseus's order] threw round the pillar of the great round-room and
tied it on,
Tightening it high up, so none could reach the ground with her feet.
As when either thrushes with their long wings or doves
Rush into a net that has been set in a thicket,
As they come in to roost, and a dreadful bed takes them in;
So they held their heads in a row, and about the necks
Of all there were nooses, that they might die most piteously.
They struggled a little with their feet, but not very long.
They brought Melanthios through the forecourt and the yard,
Cut off his nose and ears with the pitiless bronze,
And tore off his private parts for the dogs to eat raw,
And chopped off his hands and feet in their furious spirit.
Then, when they had washed off their hands and their feet,
They went into the house of Odysseus, and the work was done.
(Homer, Odyssey, XXII, 450-79, tr. and ed. Albert Cook [New York: W. W. Norton and
Co., 1974], p. 309).
10. Fisch and Bergin, "Introduction" to The Autobiography, pp. 104-5.
I I. Any discussion of an originating moment is destined to be problematic, for reasons
treated eloquently by Stephen Heath in "Ambiviolences: Notes for reading Joyce," in
PoststructuralistJoyce, p. 61. Ifwe take it for granted here that a secure knowledge of ori-
gins is impossible, however, nothing at all releases us from the nagging and human ne-
cessity of having to try to reconstruct them. It is precisely this double bind that contrib-
utes in part to the modernist anxiety discussed by Michel Foucault in his explorations of
"The Analytic of Finitude" and "The Retreat and Return of the Origin" (in The Order of
Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [New York: Vintage, 1973], pp. 312- 18,
328-35). Asking "how the deepings did it all begin" (428.5) is an essential exercise every-
where in both The New Science and Finnegans Wake, everywhere leading into the same
obscure terrain as does thinking about the night.
12. Fisch and Bergin, "Introduction" to The Autobiography, p. 50:
The state of nature was one not of static equality, but of differentiation, inequality,
and dialectical change. There was inequality between the organized family and the
"lawless vagrants" still living in that chaos out of which the family grew; inequality
among the vagrants themselves. The more violent and enterprising of the latter raided
the homesteads of the settlers and burned or carried off their crops, but they preyed
also on the weaker and more helpless of their own kind, who were thereby driven to

throw themselves on the mercy of the settlers .... The family unit was thus enlarged
and still further differentiated, and the tension between its elements was heightened.
To the distinctions of sex and generation there was added a distinction of blood and
class.
The serfs of the family had less in common with its blood members than with the
serfs of another; the father of a family had more in common with the father of another
than with his own serfs. To secure themselves against the mutinies of their serfs as well
as against outlaw invasions, the fathers formed mutual alliances, patrician orders,
"heroic states," with the fathers as citizens and the serfs as plebs ....
For further exploration of the comparison between Vico and Marx, see Giorgio Taglia-
cozzo, ed., Vico and Marx: Affinity and Contrasts (Atlantic Highlands, N.].: Humanities
Press, 1983).
13. Gifford and Seidman, Notes forjoyce: An Annotation ofjamesjoyce's "Ulysses" (New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1974) , p. 24.
14. See Herbert Gorman,jamesjoyce (New York: Reinhart & Co., 1948), p. 32, andJJ,
306-7; Ellmann additionally notes that Joyce's "decision to rewrite Stephen Hero as a
Portrait in five chapters occurred appropriately just after Lucia's birth" Uj, 296).
IS. Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon" in On Revolution, vol. I
of the Karl Marx Library, tr. and ed. Saul K. Padover (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971),
p.245·
16. The Charter of II73 in which Henry II granted the city of Dublin to the city of
Bristol is quoted at length in the Wake (545.14-23). Joyce slightly adjusts the charter's
language, however, altering the signature of "Henricus Rex" to "Enwreak us wrecks" and
adding to the charter's wording the giant Albion's "Fe Fo Fum" and an economic under-
tone in "Fee for farm." While Henry II granted Dublin simply to "my subjects at Bristol,"
finally, the "Enwreak us" ofjoyce's modified charter grants Dublin to the citizens of Bris-
tol "that from the farthest of the farther of their fathers to their children's children they
do inhabit it and hold it." As Joyce's language here suggests, and as Vico's history re-
affirms, single political acts engender consequences that endure through history.
17. Both the verb and preposition derive from the Middle English lich ("body") and its
cognate lik (adjectival "like"), both in turn from the Germanic root *liko- ("body,
shape, form") .
18. Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, tr. and ed. James Strachey (New
York: Norton, 1950), p. 43; cf. also pp. 46 and 86-87, and ill, 588: "We can guess how
much to the point is Nietzsche's assertion that in dreams 'some primaeval relic of human-
ity is at work which we can now scarcely reach any longer by a direct path'; and we may
expect that the analysis of dreams will lead us to a knowledge of man's archaic heritage,
what is psychically innate in him .... psycho-analysis may claim a high place among
the sciences which are concerned with the reconstruction of the earliest and most ob-
scure periods of the beginnings of the human race." In his later work, Freud moves
psychoanalysis toward this kind of Vichian reconstruction, becoming increasingly ab-
sorbed with the collective character of the neurosis and more akin to Vico than Joyce
may have supposed.
19. Fisch and Bergin, "Introduction" to The Autobioaraphy, p. I I.
20. Freud, "'The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words': A Review of a Pamphlet by Karl
Abel," in On Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psycholoay of Art, Literature,
Love, Reliaion, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), p. 62.

21. Mercanton, "The Hours ofJamesJoyce, " p. 221.
22. Ibid.
23. For other work on etymology that comparably explores the presence of the body
beneath language, see Theodore Thass-Thienemann, The Subconscious Lan8ua8e (New
York: Washington Square Press, 1967), and The Interpretation ofLan8ua8e: Understandin8
the Unconscious Meanin8 of Lan8ua8e, 2 (New York: Jason Aronson, 1968). See also
Richard Broxton Onians, The Ori8ins of European Thou8ht (rpt.; New York: Arno Press,
1973) .
24. Beckett, "Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce," Our Exa8mination, pp. 10- I I.
25. The abstract English noun "freedom" originates in an entirely comparable class
distinction, since its Anglo-Saxon etymon freo, originally meaning "not-enslaved," was
conferred on the blood-sons of tribal chiefs in order to distinguish them from the rest of
their fathers' property.
8. "MEOPTICS"
I. "Vision atrophied": Henry Miller, "The Universe of Death," in The Henry Miller
Reader, ed. Lawrence Durrell (New York: New Directions, 1959), p. 210. Proponents of
this view would do well to reflect on the fact that during "one great part of our exis-
tence"-and it's not sleep-vision atrophies, if one does it right. The eyes are only a frac-
tion-a heavily intellectualized and reifying fraction-of the entire body.
"Lack of visual imagery": Levin,jamesjoyce, p. 175.
2. Luce and Segal, Sleep, pp. 64ff.; as the authors go on to point out, "anyone sitting in
his own living room, watching a sleeping pet, might have observed the functional blind-
ness of sleep. Indeed, many people sleep with their eyes half open, unaffected by move-
ments around them." Luce and Segal also call attention to the work of researchers who
have flashed lights into the eyes of people asleep with their eyelids taped open only to
elicit no movement, no memory, no response; sleep blinds.
3. For other occurrences of the trashed "fiat" in the Wake, see the "Index of Motifs,"
Hart's Structure and Motif, p. 222.
4. For more "umbrella history," see 24.33,52.26-27,57.23 ["gamps"], 98.3 ["bumber-
shoot"], 106.32,220.32,248.1, 277.L3, 309.17-18, 315.19, 361.19, 373.20-21, 380.15,449.14,
520.15 ESp. para8uas, "umbrella"], 527.8, 530.28-29, 537.6, 568.7, 601.6, and 620. I.
5. One particularly dark scene in the Wake's "umbrella history" involves a legal action
"heard by Judge Doyle" (574.9) and a jury of "fellows all of whom were curiously named
after doyles" (574.31 -32) in which chief testimony is "delivered in doylish" by a "Doyle"
from "the Doyle's country" (575.9- 10,6-7). Resolving by way of the observation that "no
property in law can exist in a corpse" (575.5 [and this presumably includes vision]), this
"trial" resembles the dream, and comparable "trials" in the Wake, in part because it
hinges on missing evidence.
6. "Moles," "bats," "owls," and other creatures endowed with gradated forms of blind-
ness and night vision flit through the Wake's extended darkness in order to remind the
reader of HCE's fluctuating "unsightliness" in sleep. "Peatrefired [petrified] under the
batblack night" (405.35-36), the Wake's "peepeestrilling" hero (276.20 [It. pipistrello,
"bat"]) is "blind as a batflea" (417.3) and so moves through the night engaged in vast
sensory-deprivation games like "batman's biff" (337.3) and "blondman's blaff" (508.17)-
not to mention "Deadman's Dark" and "deafmen's duff" (87.33,467.17). Like the word

"bat," the word "owl" comparably overlays many otherwise "basically English" words in
Finneaans Wake to remind us "owl" (37.29 ["all"]) that "owl" vision or intelligence
experienced by the "cowld owld sowl" who sleeps at the Wake (553.20 ["cold old soul"])
is "owlwise" nocturnal (78.30). For more on "moles," see 129.4, 145.31-32,57.85,271.4,
310. 1,509.26,576.25; on "bats," see 151.33,178.27 [It. pipistrello, "bat"], 180.27,215.32-33,
221.33 [Fr. chauve-souris], 272.8, 276.20-21, 289.27, 337.3, 348.3-4 [Russ. bitva], 349·8,
374.19, 446.II, and 597.14; on owls, see also 4.II, 6.9, 107.22,230.3, 331.19,489.36, and
621.11.
7. "immense shadow": Breon Mitchell, "Marginalia from Conversations with james
joyce," in Clive Hart and Fritz Senn, eds., A Wake Diaest (Sydney: Sidney Univ. Press,
1968), p. 81.
8. "not always night in dreams": Glasheen, Third Census, p. xlvii.
9. All of the "meoptical" details laced over the first page of the Wake again suggest,
though from another perspective, that the moment in HCE's nighttime reconstructed in
the paragraph to which we have been repeatedly returning will leave him in the morning
with only the "blank memory of [a] hatless darky" (515.33-34); but now we are in a
position to see why that "blank memory" should be attributed to a "hatless darky." The
negated "hat" evokes the empty head, of course, while the "darky" resolves into a man
made dark to the core; sleep turns all people into "darkies" of sorts (175.30, 293.13,
356.17, 6°3.27). As a "bamboozelem mincethrill," therefore (515.28)-the "bamboo"
making blind[s], the "booze" "blacking out," and the condition of sleep generally "bam-
boozling"-the Wake's hero becomes a spectral "Masta Bones" playing "on the bones"
(515.32, 36; 341.8), in part because he resembles, in being "blacked out," a castanet-
playing "tristy minstrel" (521.22); but also because he resembles a skeleton who "recon-
struct[s]" dark "funeral games" for us (515.21-25).
From these details, we might draw broader inferences about the Wake's allusions to
black spirituals and its erratic employment of black American idioms, which its bar-
tending Irish hero would likely not know in any detail: like others, these languages oper-
ate symbolically in the Wake because "blackness" and "spirituality" are quintessential
properties of the night. The lyrics of most of the minstrel-show airs, Stephen Foster
songs, spirituals, and comparable items listed by Hodgart and Worthington in Sana turn
out, from this perspective, to be cannily descriptive of the dark thought passing through
the "Black and All Black" interior of "The Blackamoor's Head" (59.4, 2). In a "black
modern style"-and spiritually-they show "Masta Bones" aware, like "Old Black joe"
(175.33-36; cf. 141.27), that "Gone over the bays!" (95.6 [and "the days," since it is
night), though "deeds bounds going arise again" (55.5 ["These Bones Gwine To Rise
Again"]) when his body overcomes sleep's arrest ("deeds bound") by resurrecting in the
morning. In the meantime, like john Brown's, his "body lies a-mouldering in a grave" of
sorts, "while his shoul comes merging along" (364.9-10; d. 415.21-22). Because inner
conflict murders sleep even in the deep of night, however, "Ain't No Hiding Place Down
There" (233.7). Still, like "Old Man River," but because his mouth is shut, "the old man
... don't say nothing" (599.34-35; 288.5-6). And so forth. All of these lyrics, and com-
parable ones listed in Hodgart and Worthington, situate the Wake's "darky" in a "New
World" (not necessarily America) like that met in the night.
Putting this subject into perspective, finally, Mercanton recalls an occasion on which
joyce "had gone to bed late, got up in the night to work, dreaming about [a] young Negro
dancer whose performance had charmed him" (p. 225). joyce's comment on the dream
Notes to Pages 223-25 43 1

(p. 227) -"That's what I was made for, a little Negro dance" -puts him into sympathetic
identity with that dark figure performing in the dark; and it also suggests that in all the
black idioms and songs strewn through the Wake he saw languages and art-forms "jazz-
like" his own (5Il. II ["just like"]): "jazztfancy [and just fancy] the novo takin place of
what stale words whilom were woven with" (292.20-21).
10. A number of passages in Finnegans Wake that critics have customarily treated as
clear narratives susceptible to visualization ought therefore to be "blacked out" because,
steeped in terms evoking sightlessness, they too have nothing essential to do with vision.
The second chapter of Finnegans Wake, for instance, which climaxes in the story of the
encounter with "the Cad" and closes with "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly," seems largely
to reconstruct an auditory dream-one consisting primarily of sounds in the absence of
all vision: much of it takes place in "Earwicker's" ears, not his eyes. It is immediately
before the encounter with the Cad that the reader is warned to "keep black!" (34.34).
And "The Ballad" itself is performed, "after a brisk pause at a pawnbroking establish-
ment" (41.29-30), with "an overflow meeting of all the nations in Lenster fullyfilling
the visional area" (42.20-22); since there are exactly zero nations in the province of
"Leinster," the detail suggests that HCE's "visional area" is as empty as that "lens" in
"Lenster": "a nation wants a gaze" in this extremely "vidual" part of the Wake (43.21-22
[and only when our hero gets one, presumably, will he see" A Nation Once Again"]).
II. Since there are, in fact, about 120 million rods and six million cones in the retina,
the cited detail informs us that our "aglo-irismaimed's" vision, at this moment in his
sleep, is extremely dim and "vidual": "if the whole population of the United States of
America were made to stand on a postage stamp, they would represent the rods on a
single retina"; "the number of cones is about the same as the population of Greater New
York." See S. L. Polyak, The Retina (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1941), p. 447; the
quotations are from R. L. Gregory, Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 49.
12. Bigelow, The Mystery of Sleep, p. 54; the italics are his.
13. Elsewhere, the Wake calls attention to "the millioncandled eye" (25.26 [and retina])
of its "benighted irismaimed" in ways that are "sootably" "hard to see." At the end of
"Anna Livia Plurabelle," for instance, the two washerwomen whose gossip constitutes
that chapter briefly sight an unidentifiable "glow" "pharphar" in the dark (214.10-215.10
[Gr. pharos, "lighthouse"]); and particularly because the part ofthe night reconstructed
here is not primarily visual-"who could see?" (2 I 3.7)-disagreement arises as to what
the "glow" is. "You're thinking of Astley's Amphitheayter," one woman therefore chides
the other, and "the ghostwhite horse of the Peppers. Throw the cobwebs from your eyes,
woman ... !" (214.13-17). These odd "cobwebs" are probably the dreamer's retinas: "the
ancient name of the membrane, because of its thinness, was, in Greek, arachnoeides . ..
which means the 'cobweb tunic' .... At a later period [it] was compared ... with
a fishing- or casting-net" [L. rete] and so acquired the name 'retina'" (Polyak, Retina,
p. 145; see also, in the Wake, 131.18- 19 and 477.12).
The lines from "Anna Livia" under our scrutiny, moreover, call attention to what the
washerwoman does not see in "cobbwebbed" eyes: and what is not seen is "Pepper's
ghost," which Bloom associates in Ulysses with nocturnal phosphorescences (U, p. 151);
it was a "stage illusion produced by projector & glass screen" (Annotations, p. 214),
having all the obviously hazy insubstantiality of an image filming the retina in a dream.
Since Mink notes in the Gazetteer, finally (p. 213), that "in 1815, the Molyneux Asylum
43 2 Notes to Payes 225-29

for Blind Females took over [the] bldgs" that had formerly been occupied by "Astley'S
Amphitheatre," the cobwebbed-eyed figure "thinking of Astley's" and "Pepper's ghost"
here must also have Blind Females somewhere in mind ("My sights are swimming
thicker on me by the shadows to this place" [215.9-10]). Everywhere underlying the
manifest detail in these lines, in short, we can infer the latent presence of the Wake's
"aglo-irismaimed."
14. For a catalogue of rainbow configurations in Finnegans Wake, see Roland McHugh,
"Rainbows," A Wake Newsletter, n.s., 15 (Oct. 1978): 76-77; and Ian MacArthur, "Rain-
bow 29," A Wake Newsletter, n.s., 16 (Aug. 1979): 62.
15. This is perhaps the appropriate place at which to recall that Joyce underwent ten
eye operations while writing Work in Progress, three of them in April 1923, a month after
he started the project, six others between April 1923 and June 1926, the period over
which he "solved most of [the Wake's] structural problems and determined the final se-
quence of episodes" (A. Walton Litz, The Art ofjames joyce [New York and London: Ox-
ford Univ. Press, 1964], p. 83; on the dating ofJoyce's eye operations, see Richard Ellmann,
The Selected Letters ofjames joyce [New York: Viking, 1975], pp. 215,261). We might think
of aspects of joyce's "book of the dark," then, taking shape in the forced study of "his
optics" ( "meoptics").
No single problem made Joyce's eye operations, most of them on the left eye, necessary.
With varying constancy between 1917 and 1941, he suffered from glaucoma, synecchia,
iritis, conjunctivitis, episcierotis, retinal atrophy, and primary, secondary, and tertiary
cataracts-all of them painful and incapacitating diseases whose gravity and scariness
no healthy-sighted person should underestimate. Iritis, in early stages it is said to give
the sufferer the sensation of having gri tty sand in the eye, and so it forces him into inces-
sant, involuntary tearing and blinking whose unrelieving effect is only to exacerbate the
condition. Closing the eye, far from relieving the pain, deepens it, and in severe cases,
the pain radiates into the brow, the nose, the cheek, and the teeth, ultimately to bring on
severe headaches (see L, III, II3- 14). While sand can be washed out of the eye, iritis
cannot. It either goes away or it doesn't, and in the latter case it can spread. Left untreated,
it can ravage the affected eye entirely and overtake the second by "sympathetic infec-
tion." Advanced cases of iritis were "cured," in Joyce's day, by removing the entire eye-
ball. Hence the earliest of Joyce's eye operations: an iridectomy on the right eye (his
"good eye") in 1917 was followed by two iridectomies on the left ("the broken window of
my soul" [L, III, I II]).
The "cures" seem as painful as the affliction. Joyce would have been conscious during
these operations, his eyelid forced back and held open with a speculum, his eyeball
grasped with a pair offorceps to prevent any involuntary flinching. He would have "seen"
the surgical knife, razored on both edges to allow the doctor a minimum of movement,
approach his cornea and cut its way, with a sawing motion, through to the anterior
chamber and then into the iris, where its work would have been to slice out any infected
tissue. Joyce would have undergone in reality, in short, a kind of horror conceived in a
film like Le Chien Andalou to be surreal. And he would also have had occasion, during
these procedures, to consider how objects can enter the eye of a subject in ways not usu-
ally explored in Newtonian or Helmholtzian treatments of optics. On iritis and iridec-
tomies, see C. W. Rutherford, The Eye (New York and London: D. Appleton, 1928),
pp. 144-47, 156 - 60,25°-55.
Somewhere in the development of his system of "meoptics," Joyce's interminable visits
Notes to Pa8e 230 433

to the eye clinics certainly had their effect on Finnegans Wake, though how little they
did might be seen by holding the text against his letters; he writes there, for example, of
intending to "go to see Dr. Borsch (of whom I dreamed last night) tomorrow ... [to] ask
him to let me finish Ad before the next match" (L, III, 132). The letter shows him think-
ing all at once about his dreams, the Wake, his vision-and an eye surgeon, whom he did
not want to see but had to, invading all three. However dizzyingly intricated the rela-
tions between "blindness and insight" might be in this particular instance, no dream of
Swiss oculists or anything at all comparable appears in Finnegans Wake because the
blindness overtaking its "benighted irismaimed" is absolutely normal to the night.
Joyce's eye difficulties impeded, rather than helped, the progress of Work in Progress.
Richard Ellmann is therefore quite right to call "the theory that Joyce wrote his book
for the ear because he could not see ... not only an insult to the creative imagination,
but an error of fact .... The eyes are closed in Finnegans Wake because to open them
would change the book's postulate" (fl, 716). Perhaps the best stance to take on this issue
is one advanced by Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, who announces that "a man of genius
makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery" (U, 190).
These ringing words only mean, beneath all the rhetoric, that a resourceful person
learns from his mistakes rather than letting them cripple him; and we might reasonably
infer that a man of genius does not passively suffer victimage either. In considering the
Wake's "meoptics," surely, we are seeing Joyce making his difficulties work for him, rather
than against him.
16. Herman von Helmholtz, Treatise on Physiological Optics, ed. James P. C. Southall
(New York: Dover, 1962), 2, p. 12. Helmholtz goes on to observe that "the background
of the visual field, on which these phenomena are projected, is never entirely black;
and alternate fluctuations of bright and dark are visible there, frequently occurring in
rhythm with the movements of respiration .... The shapes that are assumed are very
curious, especially when one happens to be in a strange place that is perfectly dark ...
because then these imaginary figures are apt to be mistaken for real objects." Indeed,
they "may easily have been the origin of many ghost stories" (p. 13).
17. Assenting to the observations of Wundt, Maury, and Ladd, Freud notes that "the
changing, perpetually shifting character of the excitation of the idioretinal light corre-
sponds precisely to the constantly moving succession of images shown us by our dreams.
No one who attaches importance to these observations ... will underestimate the part
played in dreams by these subjective sources of stimulation, for, as we know, visual im-
ages constitute the principal component of our dreams" (ID, 67). Freud goes on, of
course, to insist that the somatic constituents of dreams will not finally explain their
peculiarities or their meanings. See also ID, 64-67, 82-83, 260-62, 573-74, 585-87.
18. The young May moon is beaming, love,
The glowworm's lamp is gleaming, love,
How sweet to rove through Morna's grove
While the drowsy world is dreaming, love.
19. "lunar rainbow": Mitchell, "Marginalia from Conversations with Joyce," A Wake
Digest, p. 81.
20. "When I'm dreaming back like that I begins to see we're all only telescopes"
(295.10-12): in other words, the vision of anyone asleep and dreaming might also be
considered a kind of "telescopy," since when "eye begins to see" in the night (hence the
third-person form of "I begins"), "binocular man" discovers things not visible in the light

of day (68. I). In particular, nocturnal "telescopy" allows the "dim seer" to "uncover the
nakedness of an unknown body" (96.28-29)-one like HCE's, or a "heavenly body," that
becomes evident only at night" (0 my shining stars and body!)" (4.12- 13).
The appearance of "telescopes" in the Wake therefore serves to apprise its reader of
visual conditions within HCE's "blackeye lenses" at "sootably" dark times in the night.
The collapsible "sexcaliber" "tallowscoop" that appears in the Wake's account of the
battle of "waterloose," for instance (8.35-36), not only serves as a displaced visual im-
age of HCE's phallus; since images in dreams are overdetermined and yield multiple
meanings, it also tells us something about the murky "vidual" properties ofthat "candle-
little" scene (10.27 [which is dimly "candlelit" by the "tallow" in the "tallowscoop").
We learn, comparably, ofShem the Penman, that "the only once ... he did take a tompip
peepestrella throug a threedraw eighteen hawkspower durdicky telescope ... he got the
charm of his optical life when he found himself ... at pointblank range blinking down
the barrel of an irregular revolver ... handled by an unknown" (178.26-179.4). The line
generates a set of complex tensions between the visible and invisible in order to suggest
that Shem represents a part of HCE which falls largely outside of visual experience. For
what begins here as a feeble attempt to see through a "dirty" or "durdicky telescope"
(Gi. dur-dicki mennri, "telescope") occasions great and futile strain as the dark vision-
ary trying hard to "peep" at a "star" (It. estrella) modulates into a blind "bat" (It.
pipistrello), while the telescope itself changes into a gunbarrel. Looking down a gun-
barrel. of course, generally tends not to sharpen vision at all, but rather to eradicate it.
For more on telescopy in the Wake, see 9.34, 10.13, 235.24-25, 275.L2, and 449.34; on
"heavenly bodies," see also 185.29, 234.13-14, 249.2-3, and 533.4-5.
21. Cf. Roheim, The Gates of the Dream: "The dream is visual ... in the dream the
dreamer is halfway out of sleep and building up a new world ... " (p. 61) ; "the dream, as
opposed to sleep, represents the trend back to the object world" and therefore "is a func-
tion of the ego" (PP.95, 117).
22. "The ambiguity of the jewel": Jacques Lacan, "The Line and Light," in The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Norton, 1978), p. 96. The phrase occurs in a discussion of "embodied light"
(p. 90). where Lacan locates the essence ofthe visual not in "geometral relations" like
those diagrammed in figure 8.1, but in "light" itself: "the essence of the relation between
appearance and being, which the philosopher, conquering the field of vision, so easily
masters, lies elsewhere [than in geometric relations]. It is not the straight line, but in the
point of light-the point of irradiation, the play of light, fire, the source from which
reflections pour forth. Light may travel in a straight line, but it is refracted, diffused, it
floods, it fills-the eye is a sort of bowl-it flows over, too, it necessitates, around the
ocular bowl. a whole series of organs, mechanisms, defences" (p. 94). As will become
clear, much this refractive complexity permeates HCE's "eyenbowls" (389.28).
23. Hence, throughout the "Mime ofMick, Nick and the Maggies," the running glitter
of "crystal[s]" (229.12)-variably of "amethyst" (245.7), "carbuncle" (224.36), "dia-
mond" (25°.31), "hematite" (247.35), "jasper" (249.8), "opal" (220.10), "pearl" (226. I),
"ruby" (224.3, 226.31, 249.7), "seafire" (245.8 ["sapphire"]), "turquewashed" (235.8
["turquoise"]) , and, above all, "heliotrope."
24· On "heliotrope" in the Wake, see also 89.18-19, 223.9-II, 223.28, 235.5, 236.35-
237.2 (Fr. tournesol, "heliotrope"), 237.5-6, 248.8- 10, 248. II - 13, 248.14- 18, 248.33-35,
250.30, 265·LI, 273.24, 280.24, 303.FI, 349.6, 461.8- 10,470.7, 509.21-24 ("Kansas" is "the

sunflower state"), 561.20, 594.8, 603.28, 6IO.36-6II.I, and 626.17-18. For good discus-
sions of the Wake's preoccupation with "heliotrope," see Solomon, Eternal Geometer,
pp. 22, 27, 31-33; Patrick McCarthy, The Riddles ofFinne8ans Wake (Cranbury, N.J.: As-
sociated Univ. Presses, 1980), pp. 104-46; McHugh, Si8la, pp. 59-60; and Grace Eckley,
Children's Lore in "Finne8ans Wake" (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 131 -32 ff.
Here it would be relevant to note that all the stained-glass configurations in the last
chapter of the Wake are ciphers for our hero's "heliotrope ayelips" (533.2), through
which, as morning dawns, real sunlight is beginning colorfully to bleed.
25. The character of this struggle would explain, incidentally, why Joyce incorporated
into the "Colours" chapter submerged accounts of "the Sudanese War" (L, I, 302), where
"light" and "dark" were also in conflict; and it would generally clarify the chapter's
dense references to angels, devils, and the occult (on which see Matthew Hodgart'sjames
joyce: A Student's Guide [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978], pp. 154-63). Ety-
mologically, "color" and the "occult" -together with "hell," "holes," "hollows," "cells,"
the "clandestine," and "concealment"-are aspects of each other, all deriving from the
Indo-European *kel- ("to cover, conceal"); for in all of these things, as in Aristotle's
"adiaphane" (U, 37), what is below and beneath the visible is covered up.
26. Throughout the Wake, Issy therefore stands competitively opposed to "Anna Livia
Plurabelle," of whom she is finally a fragmentary aspect because, as anyone who has
been through it knows, "looks" don't have everything to do with it. ALP differs from Issy
in being" a woman of no appearance (I believe she was a Black ... )" who moves, "unda
her brella" (7.26), in a dimension everywhere "invisible" and "unseen" (158.25-26, 28,
36). This "woman of no appearance," however, is for that very reason "a woman to all
important" (158.32): she represents a form of femininity to which our hero's attach-
ment-profound, if unconscious attachment-is precisely not visual ("Think of your
Ma!" [206.3]).
27. As will have become evident in passing, the Wake is everywhere undertaking, "in
the flesh," a subversion of "spectator consciousness" comparable to that pursued by
Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible, whose phenomenology of "the
flesh"-"the sensible in the twofold sense of what one senses and what senses" for which
"there is no name in traditional philosophy"-is only a version of the far more ambi-
tious and iconoclastic enterprise Joyce began in 1922 (The Visible and the Invisible,
ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1968],
pp.99, 139-40). As the frequent equation of "eye" and "I" in Finne8ans Wake suggests
(23.36,61.24, 197.17, 213.15,295. II, 301.7, 330.26, 336.30, 347.8), the tendency of modern
thought to privilege the observing "eye" has sanctioned also the tyranny of the "I" and
all the baggage it carries with it: the clinical observer, his dispassionate point of view,
and the all-knowing and self-enclosed subject. Joyce's "vision," by contrast, transcends
mere vision, to offer us both "a full new" (344.22 ["view"]) of "the whirrld" (147.22),
and a new "Phallusaph[yJ" as well (72.14 [note the pleasure that motivates this negation
of "philosophy," and "see relief map" for the details]) . By closing the eye and moving into
the night, the Wake is ultimately exploring an iceberg beneath the tip even of Merleau-
Ponty's visible: "under the closed eyes," it brings to light not only the rest of "the presence
(of a curpse) "-in itself a heavily "sleeping giant"-but the rest of "the present, of
course." As Joyce himself put it while working on the "Colours" chapter, at a time
in which his seeing was endangered but the progress of Work in Pro8ress was not, "What
the eyes bring is nothing. I have a hundred worlds to create, I am losing only one of
them" (fj, 664) .
Notes to Payes 239-44

28. Gregory, Eye and Brain, p. 118, where Maxwell is quoted.
29. Quoted by Christine Ladd-Franklin, in "The Nature of Colour Sensations," Helm-
holtz, Physioloaical Optics, 2, p. 457. Compare the Wake's account of the encounter be-
tween Patrick and the Archdruid Berkeley at 611.4-612.36.
30. See, for example, the typical remarks on the "Two Meanings of the Word Light" in
W. D. Zoethout's Physioloaical Optics (Chicago: Professional Press, 1935), 2d ed. p. 161:
"In a discussion of physiological optics great care must be exercised not to confound the
two meanings of the word light; the objective, or physical, and the subjective, or psycho-
logical. There is, as far as we have knowledge of, no resemblance between the objective
light sent by the sun and the subjective light of our consciousness. To ignore this distinc-
tion is to hopelessly flounder in the realm of optics .... There is neither green nor red in
the universe; there are ether vibrations of longer or of shorter wave lengths. The redness
or greenness is a matter of our brains, or, more properly speaking, of our consciousness."
Not to mention "ouroptics."
31. "This genre of portraiture of changes of mind to be truly torse [and accurate to the
Wake's representation of the body or "torso"] should evoke the bush soul ... so I am leav-
ing it to the experienced victim [anyone who has been "knocked out" and rendered
"dead to the world"] to complete the general suggestion by the addition of a wallopy
bound or ... a congorool teal" (165.18-21). Through these loony references to "bush
souls," "kangaroo tails," and "wallabies," Joyce is informing us pretty directly that Aus-
tralian and New Zealand idioms, of which our Irish hero is quite likely unconscious,
will operate symbolically throughout the Wake to evoke "changes of mind" that over-
come HCE when he drifts into his own "antipodes," "down under" in "his own body." For
an excellent survey of Australian references in the Wake, together with an account of
their relations to Shem and his telegram, see Hart, Structure and Motif, pp. II6-28, II2,
243; for an assessment consonant with my own of the way in which Joyce draws on Aus-
tralian slangs (and also Maori and other "bush" languages) see Epstein, "James Joyce and
the Body," p. 98.
32. J. A. C. Brown, Freud and the Post-Freudians (Middlesex: Penguin, 1964), p. 34.
33. "Considerations of representability, " as Freud noted, playa crucial role in the for-
mation of dreams, whose underlying causes and concerns, being unconscious, are not
essentially visual. The mere visibility of a dream, in other words, is another "goodridhir-
ring," a way of obscuring and masking, by displacing into the eyes, the real and "infra-
rational" concerns that lie at its core and that arise from "sameplace" "down under" in
the dreamer's "antipodes." As in the familiar example of conversion hysteria, where con-
flictual desire is displaced upwards from a lower to a higher part of the body ("the tasks
above are as the flasks below" [263.21]), dreams might well be regarded as displacements
upwards into the eyes of conflicts localized elsewhere in the body's "bluddle filth" (10.8-9
[the "battlefield" of "blood" and "filth"]). Note, in this regard, how "the sensory crowd
in [HCE's] belly [is] coupled with an eye" at the beginning of that chapter in the Wake
concerned with the buried letter (107.15- 17). On "considerations of representability,"
see ID, 374-80, 586-87.
34. One such symptomatically "sobsconcious inkling," to illustrate the endless extent
of the "knots" constituting our hero's body, would be his "sobs" (hence "sobsconcious"):
although our hero would surely be "conscious" ofthem when they threatened to well up
from "down under," nothing over which he has any rational foresight or choice prompts
them; they rise up "autistically," automatically, as if on their own-and sometimes for
underlying reasons, because "subconscious" ones, of which he has only the vaguest
Notes to Paaes 245-51 437

"inklings." Such "sobsconcious inklings" would be the produced work not ot hIS con-
scious self ("Show'm the Posed"), but of the "Autist" inside him.
35. "They say that filmacoloured featured at the Mothrapurl skrene about Michan and
his angeleens is corkyshows do morvaloos" (443.34-36 [Fr. quelque chose de merveilleux,
"something marvellous")-to illustrate further how "moving pictures" (565.6) operate
in "the Evening World." Manifestly an off-the-cuff remark on a recent "coloured film,"
but in fact a particle of nocturnal thought retrospectively illuminating "the Mime
of Mick, Nick and the Maggies" (hence "Michan and his angeleens"), this line recalls
Dublin's "St. Michan's Church," "the vaults [of which] are famous for 'an amazing preser-
vation of the corpses' buried in them." The detail reminds us that our hero, though "dead
to the world," is in very good condition; for" 'the skin ofthe corpses [in St. Michan's,like
his] remains soft as in life.'" Within the sealed pits of his eyes, moreover, a "coloured
film" of iridescently lit "mother-of-pearl" sometimes takes form (hence the "Mothrapurl
skrene"), so to allow him the viewing of shifting pictures. The two quotations are from
Gifford and Seidman's Notes for Joyce (p. 260) , where an undated Official Guide to Dublin
is in turn quoted.
Because vision in dreams reaches the viewer as if out of thin air, moreover, and also
allows him to see things in their "Real Absence," the night's "moving pictures" might
also be considered a form of " television" « Gr. tele- ["far off"] and L. visio ["seeing"]). In
a book where everything about "Man is temporarily wrapped in obscenity [and obscu-
rity]," accordingly, the Wake's "irismaimed" periodically finds himself "looking through
at these accidents with the farofscope of television (this nightlife instrument ... )"
(150.30-:B; for more on this nocturnal "television," see 52.18, 254.22, 345.45, 489.21,
597.36, 610.35, and especially 349.6-28).
36. In contrast both to the rainbow colors and to those that fall beyond the visible
spectrum, the Wake's "meoptics" also includes "a nocturnal tri-colour" (L, I, 269). "a
tricolour ribbon that spells a caution" (503.24); for the colors "black, green and gray"
(441.4). as Joyce explained in a series ofletters to Harriet Shaw Weaver, signify in the
German that he would have spoken in his endless visits to eyeclinics, "successive stages
of cecity" or blindness (L, I, 269, 273-4): wuner Star (Ger. arun, "green"), is a German
medical term for "glaucoma"; arauer Star (Ger. arau, "gray") for "cataract"; schwarzer
Star (Ger. schwarz, "black") for" amaurosis," or "dissolution ofthe retina." The appear-
ance of these colors in conjunction with "everything or allselse under the grianblachk
sun of gan greyne Eireann" (503.22-23) indicates that the Wake's "irismaimed" is return-
ing to a "sunless" (Gael. aan ahrein) part of the night (hence the Gael. areinbeach,
"zodiac," in "grianblachk"), where he endures a general "deadening" of the body (hence
the "gangrene"), and not least in his eyes. "The crystalline world [within the crystalline
lens] wane[s] chagreenold and doriangrayer in its dudhud" at these moments (186.7-8);
and the whole picture changes, much for the worse (hence "Dorian Gray").
37. Erin! the tear and the smile in thine eyes
Blend like the rainbow that hangs in the skies;
Shining through sorrow's stream,
Sad'ning through pleasure's beam,
Thy suns, with doubtful gleam,
Weep while they rise!
Erin! thy silent tear never shall cease,
Erin! thy languid smile ne'er shall increase,

Till, like the rainbow's light,
Thy various tints unite,
And form in heaven's sight
One arch of peace!
Cf·426.15- 16.
38. "Particularly to be noted is the innervation of the ocular muscles in sleep; the eyes
are rotated outwards and upwards. The physiologists state absolutely that this is a return
to the position of the eyes which obtains in animals not possessing binocular vision (as
for example the fishes) "; Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (New York:
Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1938), p. 76. While an observation like this perhaps sheds
light on vision in dreamless parts of the night, Ferenczi draws on it, together with many
comparable "bioanalytic" findings, in order to theorize sleep as a form of "thalassal re-
gression" through which the mammalian organism, imbued with a "biological uncon-
scious," strives to undo the evolutionary catastrophes layered into its body by seeking "to
reproduce the ... thalassal situation seemingly long since transcended" (p. 85). On
sleep as an internalized form of evolutionary reversal and return to the sea, see espe-
cially pp. 73-80.
As will become more clear when we examine the role of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" in
the Wake, much this understanding moves through Joyce's work, too, where "Our Hu-
man Conger Eel" (525.26), "ambilaterally alleyeoneyesed" and profoundly unconscious
(323.29), drifts through parts of the night immersed in a body of water (his own), while
his "fishy eyes" (559.23) stare vacantly "through the ghost of an ocean's" (426.20-21
[without "the ghost of a notion"]), able only to "see ... in the fishnoo!" (525.27 [this
"vision," in a "fishnet," would resemble that of the Vedic god "Vishnu," who took the
form of a fish on earth]) .
39. Whenever a reader ofthe Wake discovers that "all the mound reared" (420.14 [Fr.
tout Ie monde rire, "the whole world laughed"]), it means, on two levels, that "all the
mound" depicted in the two "relief maps" of the night has been stirred into vitality
(hence "reared") by those energies arising from "sameplace" "down under" in the body
which generate the experientially distinct though psychically related events of "laugh-
tears" and the dream. For whenever those energies ripple though our hero's body (or the
reader's), they alter its investments and retailor the heavily taxed "bourseday shirt" into
a lighter and more bearable "mirthday suit" (35.4), so to "reflesh" it-literally-and as
fully as might a stint of sleep. This is why, to spell out "the laugh and the shout" of it
(101.5 [as opposed to the drearily reasoned "long and short"]), the Wake so outrageously
seeks the release of" everyone's repressed laughter" (190.33 - 34). (Read 'Em and Weep was
a title that Joyce may have consulted in order to write the Wake [Annotations, p. 215]).
Laughing while reading Finneaans Wake liberates both the "Autist" "down under" in the
body and the energies with which he composes "the Evening World" (see 187.33); that
laughter is also a sign-an "inkling" written on somatic "foolscap"-that one has identi-
fied with the hero of the Wake, "the presence (of a curpse) ," "in the present, of course,"
and "in the flesh."
40. "The cause of the involuntary blinking, which takes place at the rate of from 2 to
30 times per minute, is not known. It is not evoked by the drying of the cornea for the
amount of moisture in the surrounding air has no influence on the rate. As blinking is
continued in the dark, light cannot be regarded as the provocative agent." "Neither the
mechanism of the blink nor the particular nervous center for the blinking movement ...
is known .... Emotional states affect its frequency; most noticeable is the inhibition of

blinking in persons with a 'vacant stare when lost in deep thought.' Sleep arrests the
periodic blink, but ... resting with the eyes closed does not alter the blink rate (i.e., the
twitching of the lids) .... It is at the unconscious, vegetative level that tear production
and periodic blinking are integrated for normal functioning of the eye." The two quota-
tions derive, respectively, from Zoethout, Physiol08ical Optics, p. 362, and William K.
McKewen and Ernest K. Goodner, "Secretion of Tears and Blinking," in The Eye, 2d ed.,
ed. Hugh Davson (New York: Academic Press, 1969),3, pp. 371, 373.
41. McHugh, Si8la, p. 23.
9. EARWICKERWORK
I. The etymological chart undertakes two sleights of hand: the dotted lines in the dia-
gram indicate purely speculative connections for which there is no scientific evidence;
and although the two roots (* dheu- I and * dheu- II) have the same phonetic structure,
they may not be related at all, standing perhaps in the same relation to each other as do
the English words "bear" (to carry), "bear" (a large clumsy mammal), and "bare." Since
the Wake speaks of pursuing "fairworded instance[s] of falsemeaning adamelegy," how-
ever (77 .2S-26), no reader ofjoyce need feel the least restraint in engaging in this kind of
shadowy semantic speculation.
2. "deaf and dumb motif": Mink, Gazetteer, p. 282.
3. Not necessarily a camera angle, the term "closeup" here suggests that HCE is about
to "close up" his senses entirely (while "leads" comparably suggests that "heavy weights"
are dragging his body down under [OED, "lead," sb. 6]). For our hero lives predominantly
inside "his roundhouse of seven orofaces" (3S6.S-6) -the "face" beneath those "orifices"
revealing them to be the two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, and talkative mouth. And
"with seven hores [holes] always in the home of his thinkingthings, his nodsloddledome
of his noiselisslesoughts" (379.14- IS ["the nice little home of his nice little thoughts"]),
there is invariably in the daytime some nice little percept or "noise" to "listen" for and
"seek" out-"to be sure." But by night, "to be shut" (341.34), there is not; for sleep takes
place when everything is "SHUT" (182.32), "after closing time" (S07.S-6) , at "the hour
of his closing" (2SS.6-7), in a world retailored so as to be predicated not on the openness
of the sensory "orofaces" but on their "Closure" (S8S.27): "shutter reshottus" (3S2.2S).
"Tropped head" "under the Helpless Corpses Enactment" (423.31), our hero follows all
its rules: "he blanks his 088Ies . ... He blocks his nosoes . ... He wollops his mouther
[walls up his mouth]" and "He boundles allto8otter his manucapes and his pedarrests"
(349.28-34 [the phrasing describes the anointing of the eyes, nose, mouth, hands, and
feet in the ritual of Extreme Unction or last rites]); and then he just lies there, "dustung-
washed" (342.13 ["tongue" "washed" in "dust"), with "dust in his ears" (180.28) and dust
in his eyes (240.16), peering insightfully through a "mudfacepacket" into the heart of
"stillIer realithy" (S03.4 [Gr. lithos, "stone"; the third "1" in "stillIer" yields the Da. ler,
"clay"]). And since he lies so completely "shuttered ... after his fall" (102.1-2), he
passes the night as ifin a succession of "closets" (e.g., 184.33, 44S.S), "cells" (e.g., 12.2,
182.3S, 29S.LI), and "coccoons" (SI9.3), within which he lies "Closet for repeers" (421.3
[while "closed for repairs" and revisionarily "re-peering" at the world]). In the Wake's
depiction of sleep's "sense arrest," accordingly (SOS.31), everything at all imaginably ca-
pable of it keeps on "shutting" and "closing": mouths repeatedly shut or are shut (324. IS
["shut down and shet up"]; 3SS.8); books are shut and chapters sealed (20.IS-18,

62.7, 621.3); doors shut over and over again (20.17- 18, 257.27-28, 316.20, 371. 16- 17);
curtains drop and action keeps on halting (49.2,501.6-7,531.27); people are shut up and
"confined to guardroom" (196.20, 492.17) ; and "blinds" continually shutter windows and
eyes (23.5, 132.14, 147.22 ["Close your, not must look"], 182.32-34, 221.32, 559.5), as our
hero complementarily "puts the shutter up" and "shut[s] up shop" (23.5, 161.23-24,
370.34-35, 372.5, 595.31-32): "pull the blind, toll the deaf and call dumb, lame and
halty" (132.14).
4. The Annotations (p. 509) refers us to the following verse:
A man may laugh through the whole of a farce,
A man may laugh through the whole of a play,
But a man can't laugh through the hole of his arse,
'Cause he just isn't built that way.
5. The dialogue begins, moreover, with the appearance of a figure "a parth a lone"
(15.30 ["a part, alone"]), whose "hoagshead" (15.31 ["Howth HEAD"]) is "blacked out"
and full of "spirits" (hence "hogshead"), and whose "locktoes" obviously cannot move.
The appearance of a "Comestipple" (15.35 [or "constable"]) signifies the deepening of
these forces of "arrest" and, with other terms, "blacks out" that "hoagshead" even more
deeply (hence "comes tipple" [cf. 15.35-36]). Ultimately, then, the "quhare soort of a
mahan" out of whom "Mutt" and "jute" emerge shows us "the pillory way to Hirculos
pillar" (16.3-4); and while these terms seem to name a traditional site of "the end ofthe
world" (the Pillars of Hercules), the appearance of an immobilizing "pillary" beneath
the surface of the phrase suggests that "the end of the world" reached in the dialogue
occurs in the "tropped head" of some body "deafadumped" in the night's "seemetery."
It is within this "tropped head" that the mute and the deaf dimly come together to
discourse.
6. Also localized in the area of this "neck," in the topography of Finneaans Wake, is
Clontarf, the site at which Brian Bom, in A.D. 1014, drove back the Viking invaders who
had long overridden the coast of Ireland. In joyce's thinking about Irish history, Clontarf
would have been a place where "two races" (17.24) and two voices immanent in Irish
speech-one Celtic, the other Teutonic-met, clashed, and merged with each other in
"miscegenations on miscegenations" (18.20); for, "as is said of Ireland, 'It has two voices,
one comes from the mountains and the other from the sea.'" The conflict that we find
localized in our hero's neck during the dialogue of Mutt and jute, then, has behind it a
long and tangled history which is simply the history of human speech. The quotation is
from Carola Giedion-Welcker, "Meetings With joyce," in Portraits of the Artist in Exile,
p.261.
7. Mitchell, "Marginalia from Conversations with joyce," A Wake Diaest, p. 81.
8. On "sound sense," see 12.36-13.1,96.30-32, 109.15, II2.II-12, 121.13-16, 138.7-9,
169.24-170.1,318.35-319.1,419.6,499.25-27, 522.28-30, 598.4. and 612.29.
9. Glasheen. Third Census, p. 81.
10. The quoted phrases are from the illustrations given under the entry on "Agnomen"
in the OED, where we read of a character in Scott's Waverly who acquires the neat little
"agnomen of Bean" because of "his small pale features"; see also the entry on "Agnomi-
nate" ("to bestow an agnomen on, style, nickname").
II. Glasheen, Third Census, p. 121; Basil Cottle, Penauin Dictionary of Surnames
(Middlesex: Penguin, 1967), p. 95. For excellent accounts of the real-world Earwickers,
see Clive Hart's "Notes" in A Wake Newsletter, o.s., 4 (July 1962): 1-2; and Peter Timmer-
man, "The First Guide to Finneaans Wake," A Wake Newsletter, n.s., 16 (June 1979):
45-48.

12. Cf. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 195: "In the field of the
unconscious, the ears are the only orifice that cannot be closed." Actually, "goat along
nose" (413.28 [and "God alone knows"]), this is not quite true; for the Wake also ex-
plores the "panarom[ic]" "extench" of the "gnose's" "gnoses" (143.3,524.30,182.4,157.25
[the "nose's" "gnosis"]), through which our hero unconsciously "telesmells" properties
like" H,CE," (95.12) and its innumerable variants (71.28 [his wife], 95.13 [himself]) -all
of which, as they fall "under his nosetice" (164.31), he "nose ... without warnword"
(378.12). The life-long openness of the ear, however, is crucial both to Lacan and to
Joyce, as it was also to Freud, because hearing, unlike the "chemical sense" of smell, is
literately trained, so to become the means through which speech enters, informs, and
forms the body. See also Freud, The E80 and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey
(New York: Norton, 1962), pp. 14-15.
13. The tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse used this cave as a prison because its amplifying
properties allowed him to "overhear," through subterranean passageways, what his pris-
oners and enemies were saying. Like other references to prisons in the Wake, this one
operates in cipher to suggest that our hero not simply "overhears" but also lies" arrested"
in sleep; and like other references to caves and hollows, it also reminds us that HCE-"a
locally person of caves" (365.2) -is himself a vast natural cavity. On "the Ear of Diony-
sius," see Mink, Gazetteer, p. 286; and Adolphe Badin, Grottes et Cavernes (Paris: L.
Hachette, 1867), pp. 103-8.
14. Just as Joyce modifies the spelling of "Dublin" throughout the Wake in order to clar-
ify conditions in "the Evening World," so he adjusts the "agnomen" "Earwicker" in order
to give his reader a precise sense of HCE's widely variable acoustical perceptivity in the
dark. As "earwaker," for instance, our hero is clearly capable of vigilant listening (173.9,
351.25); but as "Ear! Ear! Weakear!", he has to strain hard to do so (568.26). Since tongue-
"wagging" is animated and indiscreet speech, by contrast (OED, "wag," v. 1-4. b., II.9.d),
the modulation of "Earwicker" into "earwuggers" and comparable forms (3I.II) would
suggest that HCE is only "wagging" his own "ears" at the instant in question (" I suppose
you heard I had a wag on my ears?" [149.12- 13]); while the notification that "E'ers wax
for Sur Surd!," of course (238.31 [L. surdus, "deaf"]), would signal "old dummydeaf's"
imminent lapse back into "the deafths" of sleep, where, as "daffMr. Hairwigger" (491.30),
he becomes an empty head ("wig"), full of air and void of sound. Toward the end of
the Wake, finally, as "uhrweckers" prepares to waken (615.16 [Du. uhrwecker, "alarm
clock"]), he becomes an "Eireweeker" (593.3 [about to rise into the concrete reality of a
"week" in "Eire"]) and then "herewaker" (615.12), the last of these "agnomens" signaling
his imminent return to the Daily World.
Much the same kind of playas Joyce gets out of the name "Earwicker" also effects the
constantly varying forms of its Franco-Gaelic equivalent, "Persse O'Reilly" (44.24),
or "Perce-Oreille" (Fr. "earwig"). As "beers o'ryely," for instance (498.18- 19 ["beer,"
"rye"]), our hero is auditorily "blacked-out" but consumed with "spirits"; "as pierce of
railing" (39°.5), he is undergoing a spiri ted, if wholly internal bout of" earpiercing" rail-
lery (474.12- 13); as "0 rally, 0 rally, 0 rally!" (593.3-4), he is about to get up to return
to the Daily World; and as "Peace, 0 wiley!" (332.9). he is moving with "wiley" deter-
mination back into sleepy "bedeafdom":
-Yes, pearse.
-Well, all be dumbed!
- 0 really?

IS. For variously developed accounts of this radio, see Campbell and Robinson, A
Skeleton Key, pp. 196-97; Tindall, A Reader's Guide, p. 189; Glasheen, Third Census,
p. liv; and McHugh, Siala, p. 77.
Apart from the radio components and terms discussed in the text, the Annotations
calls attention to those "supershielded umbrella antennas" (3°9.17- 18 [antennas arrayed
like the ribs of an umbrella]); "magnetic links" (3°9.18- 19); "a vitaltone speaker"
(309.19); a "hamshack" (309.22); much "static" (309.22); "ohms" (310.1); "circum-
centric megacycles" (310.7); "gain control" (310.6); "pip" (310.9); "twintriodic" (310.4
["triode" tubes]); and the "Bellini-Tosti coupling system" (3°9.18- 19), where "Bellini
and Tosi" together invented an early radio-sensing device capable of "distance getting"
(309.18), although "Bellini" and "Tosti," considered separately, were Italian operatic
composers whose work one might plausibly hear on any good radio.
16. "Some puzzles remain. For example, how is it that we can be roused from sleep
selectively by different stimulus patterns? A new mother will be wakened by the faintest
cry from her baby, while the father continues to sleep. Similarly, a sleeper is more easily
awakened by the sound of his own name than by other names. The everyday facts seem
to imply that some circuits in the cortex can remain vigilant even during sleep" (Furst,
Oriains of the Mind, p. 89). See also the discussion of "Noise and Sleep" by]. D. Miller in
"General Psychological and Sociological Effects of Noise," in Edward C. Carterette and
Morton P. Friedman, eds., Hearina, vol. 4 of Handbook of Perception (New York: Aca-
demic Press, 1978), pp. 646-S2.
17. See Freud's discussions of "alarm-clock dreams" and the general effects of "au-
ditory stimuli" on nocturnal thinking in ID, pp. s6-64 and 26S-69. The analysis of pre-
cisely such dreams enabled him to formulate the well-known statement that "Dreams are
the auardians of sleep and not its disturbers": "either the mind pays no attention at all to
occasions for sensation during sleep ... or it makes use of a dream in order to deny the
stimuli; or, thirdly, if it is obliged to recognize them, it seeks for an interpretation of
them which will make the currently active sensation into a component part of the situa-
tion which is wished for and which is consistent with sleeping. The currently active sen-
sation is woven into the dream in order to rob it ofreality. ... Thus the wish to sleep . ..
must in every case be reckoned as one of the motives for the formation of dreams, and every
successful dream is a fulfilment of that wish" (pp. 267-68).
18. "Can you hear here me, you sir?" (478.2); "Can you hear better?" (478.4); "Do you
hear what I'm seeing?" (193.10); "Big Seat, did you hear?" (361.6); "And I suppose you
heard"? (149.12-13); "Have you hered"? (44.18); "Have you erred"? (491.16). The fact of
Earwicker's acoustical vigilance would account for the heavy recurrence of questions
like these throughout the Wake, and particularly in the "Earwicker" chapter (Lii),
which culminates in the question "Have you heard?" (4S. I; 44.17- 18, 2S).
19. We find Earwicker "gnatsching his teats" (222.27) at 231.9-22. While the passage
seems to describe Shem the Penman enduring "a violent pang of toothache after which
he throws a fit" and runs off to write abusive poetic blackmail (L, I, 29S), a great deal
of sonic turmoil underlies the manifest content of the passage. Although it seems
that the man "tropped head" at the Wake, characteristically, "thought him a Fonar all"
here (231. I I - 12 ["thought" nothing, as if at his "funeral"]), a sound "like gnawthing un-
heardth" (231.21-22) is obviously infiltrating his awareness: like "nothing on earth,"
this would be the sound of a "gnaw-thing unheard." And it is, accordingly, "as thought it
had been zawhen intwo" (231. IS); deeply indeed, his "thought has been sawn into," and

from a region specified by reference to the German Ziihnen ("teeth") in "zawhen." The
"gnawthing unheardth" reverberating through his "tropped head" therefore reminds him
dimly of "gumboil owrithy" (231. 13 [of a "boil" in the mouth making the "gums writhe,"
and of the sensation of having the words of the poet "John Boyle O'Reilly" in his mouth]),
and so it "disconvuls[es] the fixtures of his fizz" (231. 16- 17 [the "fixed features"]) be-
cause it is painfully ugly, but also because it causes his jaws to move, so to generate a
dream of ugly "poetry" and leave him with a "mouthfull of ecstasy" (231.9)-where this
"ecstasy," deriving from the Greek ecstasis ("being put out of place") and the Latin
ecstasis (or ex-stasis), suggests that his mouth has shifted out of inert "statis" into move-
ment and heightened feeling.
In turn, this "gnatsching of teats" puts Earwicker subliminally in mind of prior times
in his life when he stood in comparably strange and agonized relations to his own teeth:
of that time when pain shot "up through the errorooth of his wisdom," for instance
(23I.IO-II ["wisdom" and "root" evoking the growth of the teeth, "Ararat" the time of
genesis and the appearance of rock-hard matter "from next to nothing"]); and of a time
in darkest infancy when nursing and painful "teething" occurred in unconscious syn-
chronicity (hence the "gnatsching of teats" at 222.27). The deepening of the network of
memories attached to the sound of "gnawthing unheardth," then, suggests why an epi-
sode of nocturnal tooth-grinding should appear in "the Mime of Mick, Nick and the
Maggies," whose focus is so much on childhood. But it will also raise questions about
what people given to nightly tooth-grinding can be thinking about; and it should also,
by directing a reader's attention to the unheard sound coming out of his mouth into his
ear at the time of reading, waken from the dead another part of "the presence (of a
curpse) "-and of "the present, of course." For attention to the sound rising out of
erratically active, gritting, grinding, or moving teeth-"like gnawthing unheardth"-
will suggest, finally, how much of the vitality of the body is maintained in auditory
unconsciousness.
20. The best interpretation of the source of the second of the Wake's hundred-lettered
thunderwords (23.5-7) is offered by Aristotle, in "De Divinatione Per Somnum" (On
Prophesying by Dreams), 463, in McKeon, The Basic Works of Aristotle, pp. 626-27. Not-
ing that "some dreams are causes, other tokens ... of events taking place in the bodily
organism," Aristotle observes that
the movements which occur in the daytime [within the body] are, unless very great
and violent, lost sight of in contrast with the waking movements, which are more im-
pressive. In sleep, the opposite takes place, for then even trifling movements seem con-
siderable. This is plain in what often happens during sleep; for example, dreamers
fancy that they are affected by thunder and lightning, when in fact they are only ring-
ings in their ears ....
And Sir Thomas Browne, elaborating on Aristotle, refines this understanding:
There is an Art to make dreams, as well as their interpretations, and physitians will
tell us that some food makes turbulent, some gives quiet dreams. Cato who doated
upon cabbadge might find the crude effects thereof in his sleepe, wherein the Aegyp-
tians might find some advantage by their superstitious abstinence from onyons ....
A little water makes a sea, a small puff of wind a Tempest, a grain of sulphur kindled in
the blood may make a flame like Aetna, and a small spark in the bowels ofOlympias a
lightning over all the chamber.
(Sir Thomas Browne, Notebook Entry "On Dreams," in Endicott, ed., The Prose of Sir
444 Note to Pa8e 282

Thomas Browne, pp. 447-58). As these observations suggest, especially when integrated
with those details about "flatuous" "porthery" cited in the text, "farternoiser" seems to
have "ordurd" (23.4) and gotten "the wind up" in that part of the Wake marked by the
second thunderword (23.14), his awakened "hearsomeness" (23.14) causing him to mis-
construe the sound, along Aristotelean lines, as the sound of thunder. And although the
thunderword occurring at 414.19-20, comparably, seems to be a misheard bout of cough-
ing, it ought to be pointed out that not all of the Wake's thunderwords can be attributed
to purely acoustical sources.
21. "I know thatAd[III.iv] ought to be about roads, all about dawn and roads, and go
along repeating that to myself all day as I stumble along roads hoping it will dawn on me
how to show up them roads so as everybody'll know as how roads, etc." (L, 1, 232).
22. As Gifford and Siedman point out (Notes forJoyce, p. 362), "closing time for Dublin
pubs in 1904 was 11:00 P.M.," so that the time "ten o'connell" would generally evoke, for
our hero, closing time. Since Gifford and Seidman go on to point out that "laws governing
the times when alcoholic beverages could be served in public houses were subject to cer-
tain exceptions for individuals who could 'prove' they were traveling and thus would not
be able to 'dine' (drink) during the legal hours," there is the remote possibility that the
passage is about an actual after-hours visitor to the pub.
23. "On his first time of hearing" what he imagines as a loudly knocking "process
server" (63.20-21,32), Earwicker thinks that the "unsolicited visitor" is "merely trying
to open zozimus a bottlop stoub by mortially hammering" "against the bludgey gates for
the boots" (70.13, 63.31 -33): the evident knocking, in other words, is attached to a re-
quest for a serving-person ("the boots") to open a door ("open zozimus") and to serve
drinks (a "bottlop stoub"); but because our hero is "deaf" (Ger. taub), asleep as if in
"Aladdin's cave" (hence again "open zozimus"), he does all he can to ignore the noisy
disturbance. What seems to be real knocking at a door out there in the dark now gener-
ates an elaborate network of associations.
In one line of thought, a figure "prised safe in bed as he dreamed" is "wokenp" "by
hearing hammering" in the "Mullingcan Inn" (64.4, 7, 9); and this partly wakened
sleeper imagines an old, put-upon man getting "hastily into his shoes with nothing" and
coming "down with a homp, shtemp and jumphet to the tiltyard from the wastes o'sleep"
(63.35-64.1). Part of him, in other words, "mulling" as well as he "can," imagines having
to wake up and take care of a customer. Still, sleep insures that "this most nooningless
knockturn" (64.15-16 [this "meaningless knocking," heard not at "noon," but in a "noc-
turne"]) will be disregarded; for "this battering babel allower [all over] the door and
sideposts" "would not rouse him out of slumber deep" (64.9- 10, 12). Earwicker ac-
cordingly shuts out the noise and sinks into a placid little dream of erotic pleasure
(64.22-65.33); and the dream enables him to pass, even while the noise persists "out
there" (65.34-64. I), back into the condition of being "dead to the world" (66.28), sleep
in turn rendering his "carcasses mattonchepps and meatjutes" (67.16-17 ["mute-and-
deaf" and "deaf-mute"]). But "in the drema ofSoretost Areas, Diseased" (69.14-15 [this
"dream" "dramatic," the bed a very "sore-tossed area"]), as "Humphrey's unsolicited
visitor" (70.13) continues making noise "out there," our hero continually misconstrues
it-as a series of threats (70.21-24), insults (71.5-72.18), and assaults (72.27-33)-
during all of which, as a practicing "passive resistant" (72.19), he just lies there. When
Notes to Paaes 284-86 445

the disturber of his peace goes away, finally, everything "proceed[s] ... in the directions
of the duff and demb institutions" (73.19-20), and our hero goes "dead to the world"
(73.23 ["Bully Acre" names a cemetery in Dublin]).
In so far as our hero periodically goes "dead to the world" and sinks into the night's
"seemetery" during this noisy interlude, the "battle at the gate" also becomes at times a
battle for a soul fought at the gate of the other world, the passage also offering its reader
a "present (i)ment" of what "the presence (of a curpse)" must "no" when "summonor-
othor" raps at the gate of his tomb.
24. Many of these "Acoustic Disturbances" are so dark that anything approaching a
definitive or complete list of them would be rash. To illustrate the range of these back-
ground noises, however, we might note that a dog seems to be barking in the "world-
room" "out there" at 96.33-97. 18" (or so it appierce)" (512.24); the noise is incorporated
into a dream of a chase and foxhunt in which our hero is literally "hounded," and the
disturbance is resolved and wished away as a heavily dogged fox, already melting into a
hibernating bear, turns deaf, holes up, and "hide[s] him close in covert" (97.14 [and per-
haps "in covers"]) .
"Birds start their treestirm shindy" rather early in the night (621 .35-36), at 359.18ff.,
when a "naughtingel" (359.32) or "lightandgayle" (360.2) "warn[s] to hear" by starting
to "chirp" stridently to someone "jeff" (359.18 [or "deaf," who "wants to hear"]). The
disruption begins with the vague notice that "Eeric Whigs" is receiving radio signals
(359.26, 22ff.), escalates into a call to full "Attention!" (359.30), and blossoms into a
paragraph full of music (359.31 -360. 16). Further terms suggest that the hearing ofthis
music is conflicted, however ("Let everie sound of a pitch keep still" [360.3]), because
Earwicker wants the vaguely pretty "sound and pitch" emitted by the "son of a bitch" to
stop, so that he can return placidly to his reverie (hence "everie").
The annoying sound of that nightingale only anticipates the moment when "the silent
cock shall crow at last" and bring an end to the night (473.22). And, indeed, a boisterous
"cock of the morgans" begins "to doodledoo" for the first time at 584.22ff., its "Cocorico!"
(584.27,30-31,32-33) lifting our "returned auditor" (584.29) upward into an awareness
ofletters and literacy ("We herewith please returned auditors' thanks" [584.3°]). And in
the following pages, as the book gravitates toward the moment of wakening, the cock-
crow only increases in frequency and intensity.
The night has already been disrupted, however, by the remorseless wakening of the
young and the restless. For the sound of "a cry off" somewhere in the dark, as one of our
hero's children wakes up, falls on Earwicker's ears at 558.32ff. and recurs, in mnemonic
echo, throughout the rest of chapter III.iv. The cry is so disturbing that it lifts our hero
abruptly out of deep sleep into a relatively clear, if ephemeral and spotty moment of con-
sciousness-one which affords us, as Edmund Wilson early noted, perhaps the clearest
view of Earwicker's bedroom and real-world circumstances that the Wake allows (558.35-
559.16 ff.). And if part of the cry's disturbing effect grows out of our hero's genuine pater-
nal solicitude, part of it also grows out of his unconscious agony. For the cry causes his
wife to get up, as mothers will (559.30 ff.), to leave his bed for the bed of a younger man,
so to demonstrate concretely how all of the old man's worries a bou t being a bandoned for
another, younger man have a basis in sound fact.
Yet other "Acoustic Disturbances" are there for the astute auditor to disentangle from
the wickerwork of the dream. These noises range in relative clarity from the clamorous
pealing of the morning's church bells (at 569-4 ff. and 60I.l6 ff.); to the delivery of the
Note to Page 286

morning mail, economically synchronized with HCE's wakeful rising into a state of
mind itself capable of delivering letters ("Heer's heering you in a guessmasque, latter-
man!" [603.2-8]); to a very, very dark moment in which our hero's wife seems to get up,
presumably in order to answer a call of nature (at 332.36-334.6?).
25. A passage from the sonic episode of Ulysses, "Sirens," will explain why "every
crowd has it several tones and every trade has its clever mechanics"; the passage shows
Bloom thinking about musical "Instruments. A blade of grass, shell of her hands, then
blow. Even comb and tissuepaper you could knock a tune out of.... I suppose each kind
of trade made its own, don't you see? Hunter with a horn .... Shepherd his pipe ... .
Policeman a whistle. Lock and keys! Sweep! Four o'clock all's well. Sleep! ... Drum? .. .
Towncrier, bumbailiff.... Waken the dead" (U, 289). Conflated with those lines cited
from the Wake, the passage asks us to become conscious of the ways in which the unique
"mixture of sound-ingredients in a noise characterizes the impression in a way that indi-
cates its meaning"; Robert Morris Ogden, Hearin8 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.,
1924), pp. 259-60.
26. "Wheatstone's magic lyre," as Glasheen notes (Third Census, pp. 304-5), refers to
Sir Charles Wheatstone's "acoucryptophone," "a light box, shaped like an ancient lyre
and suspended by a metallic wire from a piano in the room above. When the piano was
played, its vibrations were transmitted silently and became audible in the lyre, which
appeared to play itself." Much the same kind of magical power to release sound in the
absence of any visible source is possessed by Earwicker's ears.
27. Quoting Lessing in A Portrait, and later in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus argues that
"what is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space" (P, 212; d. U,
37). His remarks, not Joyce's, cause us perhaps not to notice that what is audible is pre-
sented in space as well. Indeed, as a voice at the Wake puts it, "I should advise any ...
among my heeders [hearers] ... to cluse her eyes [Gael. c1uas, "ear"] and aiopen her
oath [Gr. aio, "to perceive, especially by hearing"] and see what spice may send her"
(164.35-165.6 ["spice" would be enriched and "spiced-up" "space"]). The lines ask us to
note that space is still there in the absence of vision, constituting itself with rich par-
ticularity "in the far ear" as "zounds of sounds," all precisely localized in space, impinge
on the ear from various depths and distances (23.22-23); the echo of "far east" in this
"far ear" calls our attention to the power of the ear to "orient" in space and will account
for the appearance, in that radio-descriptive passage that opens Il.iii, of a linked as-
semblage of oriental terms: "Arabia Deserta" (309.9), "Ibdullin" and "Himana" (3°9.13,
14), "Nur" (310.24 [Ar. nur, "light"]), and "muezzin" (3IO.25 [Ar. mu'adhdhin, < udhan,
"an ear," a crier who calls from the top of a minaret]). These elements, in part, apprise
us of the ear's "oreillental" power (357.18 [Fr. oreille, "ear"]).
Initiating an orienting reflex that causes one to turn and look (or, in Earwicker's case,
to imagine doing so), the ears also exert an "oreillental" function by bringing to light
parts of the world otherwise sunk in invisibility. Like the "Bellini-Tosi" aerial system
evoked at the opening of II.iii (3°9.19), moreover, the ears are capable of "distance get-
ting" (3°9.18), and can also home in on and pinpoint the location of sound-transmitting
objects by a kind of sonic triangulation conducted in a dimension that students of the
ear call "binaural image space." "It's Dracula's nightout" in the Wake, then (145.32),
partly because Earwicker's ears, unconsciously radioecholocating and "distance getting"
in the dark, periodically engage in a form of "batman's biff" (337.2 [and "blindman's
buff"]).

That substantial dimensions of space and kinds of extension generally maintained in
unconsciousness roll out of the ears alone is finally suggested by some consideration of
the semicircular canals diagrammed in figure 9.3. Arrayed like Cartesian coordinates at
weirdly kiltered ninety-degree angles with respect to each other, but ultimately exerting
an anti-Cartesian function because they orient us in kinds of space that escape measure-
ment in length or breadth, these "twintriodic singulvalvulous pipelines" (310.4-5 [there
being, like the bones of the middle ear, two sets of three in every head]), have been
called "the organs of motion and balance and sense of space."
On binaural image space, see, for example, R. T. Beatty, Hearina in Man and Animals
(London: G. Bell, 1932), pp. 98-109; and Ogden, Hearina, and pp. 260-73.
28. Louis Figuier, The Insect World (New York: D. Appleton, 1868), p. 284.
29. Frank E. Lutz, Field Book of Insects (New York and London: G. P. Putnam, 1918),
p. 61. The marginal text with which Derrida frames his essay on the tympanum, inciden-
tally-a prose rhapsody on the depths of the ear from the surrealist poet Michel Leiris's
Bitfures-otIers one of the best available accounts of the meaning of the Wake's many
references to "earwigs." See jacques Derrida, "Tympan," in Marains of Philosophy, trans.
Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. ix-xxix.
30. Anthony Burgess, Rejoyce (New York: Norton, 1965), p. 203.
31. just as joyce's modifications ofthe name "Earwicker" throughout the Wake tell us
about our hero's acoustical relations to the "worldroom" outside of himself, so variations
of the term "earwig" inevitably tell us something about the constantly shifting nature of
the ghostly hearing that occurs to our hero "in hear." As "earbig," for instance (91.11),
HCE is massively "all ears," and as "earwag" (98.28-29), he is fulfilling his "audiurient"
desire to hear by generating internal gossip (23.2 I [L. audio, "to hear"; uri ens, "desiring"]) .
The presence in the labyrinth of "hairwigs" and "eeriewhig[s]," by contrast (221.28,
360.32), would suggest the head (or "wig") dissolving into phonic emptiness, pure "air,"
and a hint of the progressively "eerie"-just as a dim "beer wig" (559.25) would suggest
hallucinated hearing in a locale otherwise "blacked-out" and "spirited."
32. "pure jouissance": jean-Michel Rabate, "Lapsus ex Machina," Post-Structuralist
joyce, pp. 97-98; "play ofthe signifier": Stephen Heath, "Ambiviolences: Notes for Read-
ingjoyce," Post-Structuralist joyce, p. 52.
33. "Nothing was more foreign to joyce than theories," according to Nino Frank, who
also recalls joyce saying that surrealism "left him cold: the path along which Breton led
his followers went from the subconscious to the conscious, whereas joyce traveled the
other way" (Frank, "The Shadow That Had Lost its Man," in Potts, Portraits of the Artist
in Exile, p. 99).
34. See particularly jacques Derrida, "Two Words for joyce," in Post-Structuralist joyce,
pp. 145-59·
35. Edward jenkins was an English smuggler whose ears were cropped by the captain of
a Spanish revenue cutter during a period of strained relations between England and
Spain. "At a favorable moment, when English traders were urging a renewal of aggressive
war against Spain, earless jenkins was exhibited in the House of Commons; and the war,
properly called 'The War of jenkins' Ear,' was declared in October 1739" (Samuel Eliot
Morison, The Oxford History of the American People [New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1965], p. 155)·
36. As Peter Timmerman has discovered, these names appear both in A Pictorial and
Descriptive Guide to Boanor, etc. (4th ed., 1922-23) and on tombstones in the graveyard

attached to Sidlesham Church, four miles away from Bognor, where Joyce spent part of
the summer of 1923 and began to take notes preparatory to the writing of the Wake:
"Sidlesham Church," according to the Descriptive Guide, "is an Early English structure
worthy of notice, and an examination of the surrounding tombstones should not be
omitted if any interest is felt in deciphering curious names, striking examples being
Earwicker, Glue, Gravy, Boniface, Anker, and Northeast." (See Peter Timmerman, "The
First Guide to Finne8ans Wake," A Wake Newslitter, n.s., 16 [June 1979]: 45).
37. "John Peel" (1832) is by John Woodcock Graves; the important verse is the sec-
ondone:
D'ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay?
D'ye ken John Peel at the break of day?
D'ye ken John Peel when he's far far away
With his hounds and his horn in the morning?
Twas the sound of his horn brought me from my bed,
And the cry of his hounds has me oft-times led;
For Peel's 'view hallo' would waken the dead,
Or the fox from his lair in the morning.
One modified citation of the song in the Wake, apart from that given in the text, suggests
how Joyce draws on "John Peel" to evoke moments of his hero's dark, ephemeral auditory
wakening: "It might have been what you call your change of my life but there's the
chance of a night for my lifting. Hillyhollow, valleylow! With the sounds and the scents
in the morning" (318.35-319.2). Although "sound," "scents," and "sound sense" will
fully return to HCE's "tropped head" only in the morning, in other words, noise induces
a transitory "lifting" at brief moments in sleep (a "change in anyone's life"). For other
occurrences of the rhythm and words of "John Peel" in the Wake, see Hodgart and Worth-
ington, Son8, p. 155. See also Tindall, A Reader's Guide, pp. 57, 196, and Glasheen, Third
Census, p. 228.
10. "LITTERS"
I. Although Freud called free association "the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis"
and of dream interpretation, the process is no more inherently Freudian than the broad
Western literature on dreams is. Calling attention to the importance of association in
Artemidorus of Daldis's Oneirocritica, "the most complete and painstaking study of
dream-interpretation and practices in the Graeco-Roman world" (ill, 130n.), Freud him-
seIfpoints out that the technique is in fact ancient and is reflected everywhere in serious
works on dreams. References to free association in Finne8ans Wake, then-as the passing
examples provided in this chapter will suggest-take a wide variety of forms.
2. "In writing of the night," Joyce said to Max Eastman, "I really could not, I felt I
could not, use words in their ordinary connections. Used that way they do not express
how things are in the night, in the different stages-conscious, then semi-conscious,
then unconscious. I found that it could not be done with words in their ordinary rela-
tions and connections" Ul, 546). What Joyce meant in making these remarks is suggested
by a passage from The Interpretation of Dreams, well-known to students of Freud, that is
essential to any serious reader of Finne8ans Wake:
If I look around for something with which to compare the final form assumed by a

dream ... I can think of nothing better than the enigmatic inscriptions with which
FlieBende Bliitter [a magazine] has for so long entertained its readers. They are in-
tended to make the reader believe that a certain sentence-for the sake of contrast, a
sentence in dialect and as scurrilous as possible-is a Latin inscription. For this pur-
pose the letters contained in the words are torn out of their combination into sy lla bles
and arranged in a new order. Here and there a genuine Latin word appears; at other
points we seem to see abbreviations of Latin words before us; and at still other points in
the inscription we may allow ourselves to be deceived into overlooking the sense-
lessness of isolated letters by parts of the inscription seeming to be defaced or showing
lacunae. If we are to avoid being taken in by the joke, we must disregard everything
that makes it seem like an inscription, look firmly at the letters, pay no attention to
their ostensible arrangement, and so combine them into words belonging to our own
mother tongue. (ID, 539)
An example of this kind of "enigmatic inscription" would be the following fragment of
Senecan dialogue:
Prae laetis si apage ortu ova qui te di ferent esse.
Noto contradictu in mi juge mentitis a veri fini dea.
No quare lingat prae senti si.
And upon this text, two interpretive operations might be expended. Exercising the most
rational methods of which we are capable, we might explicate "the genuine Latin words,"
look up whatever we can in the appropriate reference books, and compensate for the
mangled syntax by correcting the spellings that deviate from orthodoxy; but to do so
would be to miss its essential point. (The lines are English and merely say, "Pray let us
see a page or two of a quite different essay. Not to contradict you in my judgment, it is a
very fine idea. No quarreling at present I see.") Much the same kind of "freely masoned"
connection-making as is required to read this pseudo-Latin is also required in the inter-
pretation of dreams and in the reading of FinneBans Wake, where "words [are not used] in
their ordinary relations and connections." Rather than adhering doggedly to the letter of
the law and the law of the letter, a reader of "the Evening World" must "stotter from the
latter" and pursue meaning" in the broadest way immargina ble." For further examples of
the mock Latin used in this illustration, see C. C. Bombaugh, Oddities and Curiosities of
Words and Literature, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: Dover, 1961), pp. 169-71.
In another well-known passage in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud comparably
likens the manifest content of the dream to a rebus, whose elements, if taken at face
value, yield only the impression of sheer nonsense-as is also evidently true of the
"robulous rebus" of FinneBans Wake (12.34). If, however, "we try to replace each sepa-
rate element [of the puzzling text] by a syllable or word that can be represented by that
element in some way or other [then the text of the dream will be] no longer nonsensical
but may form a poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance" (ID, 311-12;
cf. 356, 377, 444). Although it hardly yields "a poetical phrase of greatest beauty," the
following primitive pictograph exemplifies the peculiarities of the manifest content of
distorted texts like the rebus, FinneBans Wake, and the dream:
~~~~'h
450 Note to Page 309

And here, too, two interpretive procedures might be expended on the text. According
to the most orthodox procedures of which "day's reason" is capable, we might consult a
zoological text to determine what kinds of animals these are, we might read an archaeo-
logical account of Lascaux to determine what meanings primitive men attached to quad-
rupeds, we might even read up on totemism; and though we will doubtlessly learn a
great deal in doing so, we will still misread and miss the underlying sense. (The animals
are "good gnus.") One goes about reading the "robulous rebus" of Finneaans Wake in
exactly the same way as one goes about reading signs like these-not by treating them in
their "ordinary connections and relations," but by pursuing, "in the broadest way im-
marginable," extraordinary connections and "freely masoned" relations. By doing so,
one finds the sought-after meaning one was looking for where one least expected it, in a
way no one could have predicted.
3. McCarthy, The Riddles of Finneaans Wake, p. 16: "That Finneaans Wake is a giant
riddle is apparent to anyone who has made a serious attempt to follow even a page or
two of the book. In fact, virtually any word, any description, any situation in the Wake
resembles a riddle .... "
4. In solving a riddle, "do you think for a moment? Yes, by the way. How very neces-
sarily true!" (521. 15- 16). If we take this "by the way" as an English equivalent of the
Greek para- ("by the side of," "by the way"), we can see in the solving of riddles the
essential structure of paronomasia, or punning, in which "naming" (Gr. onomaze, "to
name") happens "by the way," "obliquelike" (187.29). Every punned word in Finneaans
Wake poses a riddle for its reader.
5. Brown, Love's Body, p. 244, on the deficiencies of learning and the power of loss of
control.
6. Levin,jamesjoyce, p. 175.
II. "THE NURSING MIRROR"

I. Freud, Introductory Lectures, p. 211. For extended and well-known discussions of
"infantile regression," see ill, 221-53; 559ff; and Introductory Lectures, pp. 195-212.
2. Freud, Introductory Lectures, p. 210.
3. There is, of course, as much to these obviously infantile lines as there is to those
"tumptytumtoes" lost on the first page of the Wake. "Fingall's ends" tells us that the
Wake's "sleeping giant" has lost consciousness of the individuated limits of his own body
and cannot differentiate the place where his "fingers end" from the place where "Fingal,"
a plain north of Dublin, "ends"-so that, again, we see sleep returning him to the condi-
tion of "first infancy." But the lines invite us also to reconstruct a "toym" in our hero's
"mistridden past" when the practice of pedagogical counting games like "This Little
Piggy Went to Market" (hence "recount") made it possible for his parents to draw forth
from the darkness of infantile unconsciousness his fingers and toes, so to sort things out
"from the last finger on the second foot of the fourth man to the first one on the last of
the first.
-Finny. Vary vary finny.
-It may look finny but fere it is" (519.11- 15)
That nursery rhyme, in other words, served the real-world purpose of "varying" what
once were formless appendages ("fins"; hence "vary finny") -and in such a way as to
make possible the consciousness not simply of fingers, but of their utility in gratifying
Notes to Pa8es 311-19 45 1

desires (hence "this liggy piggy wanted to go to the jampot") and in fulfilling essential
needs (hence "this leggy peggy spelt pea"); for not until the infant becomes conscious of
the location of his fingers can he perform the higher functions of getting j am. using a
pencil to "spell p." or. for that matter. making water and "spilling pee" (the "leg" in
"leggy peggy" tells us that our hero made mistakes somewhere in the learning of these
difficult lessons). As a reconstruction of the night. the Wake now asks us to see that al-
though "Here Comes Everybody" in the world surely went through such rituals as these
sometime in "reallife"- ( "you were there") -their "m·m·ry." "leading slip by slipper to
a general amnesia" (122.5-6). is reevoked in "the Evening World." Underlying so much
that we take for granted. "lots lives lost" (257.35-36).
4. Hodgart and Worthington. in Sona in the Work ofJames Joyce. cite occurrences of the
following nursery rhymes on the pages of the Wake cited parenthetically ("Remember
and recall. Kullykeg!" [367.11]): Around the Rugged Rocks (19.64.416); As I Was Going
to St. Ives (12.102. 147. 215. 252. 291. 330. 390. 523. 552. 614); As I Was Going Up One Pair
of Stairs (251-52.424-25); A-tisket. A-tasket (315); A was an Apple Pie (94); A was an
Archer (5. 19. 72. 80. 226. 228. 242. 250. 293. 302. 314. 319. 404. 603); Baa. Baa. Black
Sheep (51. 133. 148.279.300.301); Babes in the Wood (336. 5°4.551.619); Baby Bye. See
the Fly (146); Brow Bender (130); Bye. Baby Bunting (529); Clap Hands (346); Close Your
Eyes and Open Your Mouth (53. 165); Cock a Doodle Doo (96. 244. 461. 584. 595);
Crosspatch. Draw the Latch (9. 163); Daffydowndilly (475. 530); Denary. Danery (261);
A Dillar. a Dollar (288.427); Ding Dong Bell (360. 361. 588); Do You Know the Muffin
Man? (491); Eeny. Meeny. Miny. Mo (21.94.261); The Farmer in the Dell (236. 262); A
Frog He Would A-Wooing Go (152. 310. 484); Georgie Porgie (37. 179.279.327.375);
Goosey. Goosey Gander (287); Guy Fawkes ("Please to remember the fifth of November" )
(87. 177.364); Here We Go Gathering Nuts in May (176.226.285.490); Here We Go
Round the Mulberry Bush ("This is the way we wash our clothes") (6.176.237.490.
581); Hickory. Dickory Dock (261. 314. 378); Hilary. Dilary (314); Hokey Pokey (71. 78.
234.254.256.315.368.542.558); The Holly and the Ivy (58.59.97.147. 152.236.265.291.
421.465.468. 502. 505. 556. 588. 616); The House that Jack Built (8-10. 18. 80. 106. 205.
271. 274. 369. 375. 439. 476. 511. 58o); How Many Miles to Babylon? (17. 20. 84. 236);
Humpty Dumpty (3.7. 12. 13. 17.29.44-47.99. 106. 129. 163. 175. 184.219.230.285.294.
296. 314. 317. 319. 320. 325. 334. 341. 343. 352 • 37 2• 373. 374. 375. 386. 415. 422. 434. 455.
466.496.5°4.550.567.596.606.614.619.624.627.628); I Had a Little Hobby Horse (197.
225); Jack and Jill (61. 141.211.290.318.462.589); Johnny Is a - - . yah! yah! yah! (163);
The King of Hearts (405); The King of the Cannibal Isles (78. 254. 315. 600); Knock
Knock (330); Lavender's Blue (226); Little Bo Peep (80. 96. 143. 144. 147. 227. 248. 272.
276.413.420.435.449.459.478.500.5°2.5°8.540.563. 571. 588. 590.601. 614. 624); Little
Boy Blue (556); Little Jack Horner (465. 623); Little Miss Muffet (413); Little Nancy
Etticoat (208); Little Polly Flinders (562); Little Tommy Tittlemouse (17); London
Bridge is Falling Down (7.58.233.239); Looby Loo (226); Mary Had a Little Lamb (250.
440); Mary. Mary Quite Contrary (20. 204. 247. 272. 321); Monday's Child (88. 117.487);
Needles and Pins (6. 131. 210. 336); Oats. Peas. Beans. and Barley Grow (239. 602); 0
Dear. What Can the Matter Be (28.225.275.621); Old Dolly Dinkins (339); Old King
Cole (569.619); Old Mother Hubbard (161. 388); One Fine Day in the Middle of the
Night (191. 346. 347. 556. 624); One May Morning in the Middle of July (191); One. Two.
Buckle My Shoe (314); One. Two. Three. Four. Mary's at the Kitchen Door (271); Oranges
452 Note to Pa8e 322

and Lemons (59); Pat-a-Cake (294); Pease Porridge Hot (289, 395); Peter Piper Picked a
Peck of Pickled Peppers (104, 112, 346, 616) ; Polly Put the Kettle On (23, Il7, 161, 229, 236,
330,332,372,585); Pop! Goes the Weasel (72,215,223,341,465,540); Pussy Cat, Pussy
Cat, Where Have You Been? (223); Reuben, Reuben (2II); Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar
Man, Thief (57, 79, 132, 144,202,31 1,317); Ride a Cock Horse (40, 102, 104, 121, 348-49,
363); Ring A-Ring 0' Roses (6, 65, 147,201,2°9,210,215,225,239,245,246,314,33°,448,
453,459,462, 494, 510, 552, 624); Rockabye, Baby (104, 2Il, 248, 278, 294, 331,420, 472,
546,582); Rub-A-Dub-Dub (178, 239, 29°,351); See Saw, Margery Daw (508, 535); See
Saw, Sacradown (18, 84, 508, 555); She Sells Sea Shells by the Sea Shore (508); Simple
Simon (202,408); Sing a Song of Sixpence (10, II, 129, 134-35, 147, 167, 190,232,242,244,
267,276,279,3°0,364,377,407,45°); Sir, Sir Solomon (416); Taffy Was a Welshman (10,
14,222, 323, 390, 433); Ten Little Injuns (10, 588); There Was a Crooked Man (190-91);
There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe (13); There Were Two Blackbirds (346);
This is the Way the Ladies Ride (The Lady Goes Apace, Apace) (7,40, 102, 140,257,490,
554, 583); This Little Piggy Went to Market (368, 496); Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (176,
277, 371, 385); Two Little Dickey Birds (588); What Are Little Girls Made Of? (20, 209,
374, 513, 558); When Adam Delved (21); When Good King Arthur Ruled This Land (79);
Where Are You Going, My Pretty Maid (273, 336, 357,476,512); and Who Killed Cock
Robin? (6, 7,95, 2Il, 245, 256, 328, 333, 353, 361, 362, 383, 384, 568, 588).
This list is incomplete and does not include the equally numerous references to chil-
dren's singing games that Hodgart and Worthington have discovered in the Wake, or to
nursery rhymes in languages other than English; nor does it indicate the wide field of
reference to childhood demonstrated by Grace Eckley in Children's Lore in Finne8ans
Wake. What percentage of Finne8ans Wake is taken up by obscure allusions like these?
5. Swift's "little language" appears in TheJournal to Stella, a series ofletters in journal
form that he wrote between 17Il and 1713 to Esther Johnson ("Stella") and her compan-
ion Rebecca Dingley in Dublin while, at the height of his public life, he led a prestigious
and busy political life in London. In the course of the correspondence, the "little lan-
guage" started to enter the letters. Endearingly weird, it is, as one of Swift's editors puts
it, an "elaborate reproduction of the babble ofthe nursery" (Frederick Ryland, ed., "In-
troduction" to The Journal to Stella, vol. 2 of The Prose Works ofJonathan Swift, D.D.
[London: George Bell and Sons, 1900], p. xix).
An example of the "little language" from letter 46: "Ppt does not say one word of her
own little health. I am angry almost; but I won't cause see im a dood dallar in odIe sings.
Iss, and so im DD too. God bless MD, and FW, and Me, ay, and Pdfr too. Farewell, MD,
MD, MD, FW, FW, FW. ME ME Lele. I can say lele it, ung oomens, iss I tan, well as 00"
(Ryland, 368). As Ryland explains: "In the little language proper some acquaintance
with the speech of the nursery will help the judicious student to find equivalents for '00,'
'zis,' 'im,' and so forth. As a rule, I is substituted for r; thus we have 'deelest logues'
for 'dearest rogues,' 'rettle' ... for 'letter,' 'flom' for 'from,' 'vely' for 'very,' and so
on." The cited sentences from letter 46, according to these rules, would yield grown-up
language meaning, "I am angry almost; but I won't because she is a good gal/girl in other
things. Is, and so is Dear Dingley too ... I can say 'lele' it, young women, yes I can, well
as you." The other odd terms in the letter are simply alphabetical symbols-"Ppt" evi-
dently standing for "Poppet" or "Poor Pretty Thing"; "Pdfr" for "Poor Dear Foolish
Rogue"; MD for "my dears"; FW for "farewell" and/or "foolish wenches"; and ME for
Note to Pa8e 322 453

"Madame Elderly" (Rebecca Dingley). The meaning of "lele" is obscure (Ryland, xx).
The spectacle of one of the greatest political and literary luminaries of his age, a man
in his mid-40s who would come to be admired as one of the great English prose stylists,
returning to the solitude of his lodgings at night to unwind in baby talk before going to
bed, evidently struck the author of "the Nursina Mirror" as a relevant illustration of the
persistence of the infantile in Here Comes Everybody. For more on Swift's "little language"
in the Wake, see Levin, jamesjoyce, p. 166; Atherton, Books at the Wake, pp. 114-23; and
the entries on "M.D." and "Pepette" in the Third Census, pp. 190, 223.
6. Take back the virgin page,
White and unwritten still;
Some hand more calm and sage,
The leaf must fill ....
Thoughts come as pure as light,
Pure as ev'n you require; But oh! each word I write,
Love turns to fire.
7. Finneaans Wake itself took gradual form in autosuggestive "scribbledehobbles" like
these (275.22)-where the odd term is the name Joyce gave to the notebook out of which
Work in Proaress obscurely evolved (see Thomas E. Connolly, ed., Scribbledehobble, The
Ur-Workbook for Finneaans Wake [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1961]). Joyce
himself, moreover, was quite explicit about the power of "prescriptions": "the original
genius of a man lies in his scribblings: in his casual actions lie his basic talent. Later he
may develop that talent until he produces a Hamlet or a 'Last Supper', but if the minute
scribblings which compose the big work are not significant, the big work goes for nothing
no matter how grandly conceived. Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the
script of one's personality like your voice or your walk" (Power, Conversations withjames
joyce, p. 89). And on p. 95: "a book, in my opinion, should not be planned out before-
hand, but as one writes it will form itself, subject, as I say, to the constant emotional
promptings of one's personali ty."
8. For the best account of the role of Lewis Carroll in Finneaans Wake, see Atherton's
chapter on "Lewis Carroll: The Unforseen Precursor," in The Books at the Wake, pp. 124-
36. For a superb analysis of the affinities binding Joyce's comedy to "the comedy of reg res-
sion" in the Alice books, see Robert M. Polhemus, Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from
Austen to joyce (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 245-337.
9. "The only quotation of any length to be included in" Finneaans Wake (Hart, Struc-
ture and Motif, p. 183), the sentence is from Quinet's Introduction a la philosophie de
l'histoire de l'humanite, and it appears in the Wake, the French slightly misquoted, in the
"Night Lessons" chapter, at 281.4- 10. Those lines translate as follows:
Today, as in the time of Pliny and Columelle, the hyacinth thrives in Wales, the
periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numantia, and while the cities around
them have changed masters and names, several having passed into nothingness, civi-
lizations having clashed and broken, their peaceful generations have crossed the ages
and come down to us, fresh and laughing as in days of battles.
These "peaceful generations," like all the little "Blooms" that go sailing off into the fu-
ture of June 17 at the end of Ulysses (e.g., U, 783, II. 5-7), resemble the children of the
world, resourcefully determined to thrive, because they must, even if "the old folkers"
do not. For other evocations of this sentence in the Wake, see Hart, Structure and Motif,
pp. 182-200, where it and its variants are discussed at length.

12. "ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE"
I. A. Walton Litz, The Art ofjamesjoyce, pp. 100, 118.
2. 800, according to Fred H. Higginson in his "Introduction" to Anna Livia Plurabelle:
The Makina ofa Chapter (Minneapolis: The Land Press, 1960), p. 13; and 1036" (exclud-
ing repetitions, and counting as one different rivers of the same name)," according to
L. O. Mink in "Anna Livia's Handmaidens," A Wake Newslitter, n.s., 15 (December 1978):
83. See also the Gazetteer, p. xvii.
3. Atherton, Books at the Wake, p. 45.
4. Higginson, Anna Livia Plurabelle: The Makina of a Chapter, pp. 13, 4.
5. From an unsigned notice, "James Joyce et Le Snobisme," Le Monde (2 May 1931), 4;
rpt. in Deming,jamesjoyce: The Critical Heritaae, 2, p. 416.
6. Marvin Magalaner and Richard M. Kain, joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation
(New York: Collier, 1962), p. 244.
7. On the Swahili (Eng. for "Kiswahili") in Finneaans Wake, see Philipp Wolff, "Kiswa-
hili Words in Finneaans Wake," A Wake Newslitter, o.s., 9 (January 1963): 2-4; Jack P.
Dalton, "Re 'Kiswahili Words in Finneaans Wake' by Philipp Wolff," A Wake Newslitter,
o.s., 12 (April 1963): 6-12; Clive Hart, "The Elephant in the Belly: Exegesis of Finneaans
Wake," A Wake Newslitter, o.s., 13 (May 1963): 1-8, rpt. in A Wake Diaest, pp.3-12;
M. J. C. Hodgart, "Kiswahili/Kissuaheali," A Wake Newslitter, n.s., (February 1964):
4-5; and Jack P. Dalton, "Some Errata in Hodgart's 'Word Hoard'," A Wake Newslitter,
n.s., I (June 1964): 1O-I1.
On the Dutch in Finneaans Wake, see Leo Knuth, "Dutch Elements in Finneaans Wake
PP. 75-78 Compared With Holograph Workbook VI.B.46," A Wake Newslitter, n.s., 5
(April 1968): 19-28; "Dutch in Finneaans Wake," A Wake Newslitter, n.s., 8 (April 1971):
24-32, (June 1971): 35-43, and (August 1971): 54-62.
"Apart from pertinent word lists," as Fritz Senn has rightly argued, "what we need is
some idea of why any given language is used in a given place"; Senn, "Dutch Interpreta-
tion," A Wake Newslitter, n.s., II (June 1974): 54.
8. Higginson, Anna Livia Plurabelle: The Makina of a Chapter, pp. 8, 18,41,53,69.
9. Ellis, The World of Dreams, p. 77.
10. "A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams," Standard Edition, 4,
p. 223. According to Freud, "a dream appears to be a reaction to everything that is simul-
taneously present in the sleeping mind as currently active material" (ID, 261)-includ-
ing "Internal (Somatic) Stimuli" (ID, 67-76, 117- 18,253-72,628). "The essential nature
of the dream is not altered by the fact of somatic material being added to it," however
(ID, 262). For "dreams do not simply reproduce the stimulus; they work it over, they make
allusions to it, they include it in some context, they replace it by somethina else" (Intro-
ductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 96 [italics mine]).
II. Northcote Whitbridge Thomas, "Dream," Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., 8,
p·559·
12. On hearing, see 196.5-6, 197.20, 198.27-28,200.28-29,201.3-4,203.20,204.25-26,
204.34-35,207.30-31,209.24,213.8-9,213.16, 213.33, 214.7-10; on not or never hearing,
or not being heard, see 198.27-28,199.32-33,200.14-16 (Anglo-Ir. "bothered" = "deaf"),
201.24,23-24 ("in the silence"), 206.7-8, 207.23, 213.29-30, 215.3Iff.; on the desire to
hear, evoked continually by the chapter's refrain, "a, tell me all I want to hear" (198.14),
see 196.1-4, 204.12-23, 206.16-17, and 206.18-20.

13. All of the river-names cited in the text have been drawn from Mink's Gazetteer,
McHugh's Annotations, Litz's The Art ofJames Joyce (pp. 100-114). and Mink's "Anna
Livia's Handmaidens." Names of rivers that are repeated in the text are identified only at
the bottom of the page on which they first appear.
14. "From the waterfall he named her, Minnehaha, laughing water" (Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, The Sona of Hiawatha, part 4). Note how the passage cited in the text, like
the sound of the bloodstream, sustains part of its meaning not through any literal "sense"
but through that distinct form of "sound" known as rhythm: "Minneha, minnehi,
minaehe, minneho! ... Make my hear it gurgle gurgle like the farest gargle gargle in the
dusky dirgle dargle!" (206.15- 18). In what will begin to illuminate Joyce's claims that the
chapter purveyed meaning through "sound sense" (though not in the merely impression-
istic way that the criticism has implied) the "sound" of these lines replicates not the
"sense," but the tom-tom "sound" of Longfellow 's poem about "Laughing Water" ("By the
shores of Gitche Gumee'/By the shining Big-Sea-Water").
15. Joyce "felt some misgiving about [the first draft of 'Anna Livia'] the night it was
finished, and went down to the Seine to listen by one of the bridges to the water. He came
back content" UJ, 564n.). Joyce's remarks to Harriet Shaw Weaver on an early draft of
"Anna Livia," moreover, make clear the extent to which he conceived the episode, right
from the start, in a way that would highlight both hearing in the night and the sound of
water: "the first words are '0 tell me,'" he explained, the last 'waters of Night!''' (L, III,
90 [1924]).
16. "Fingal's Cave is cut through columns of basalt that shield all parts of the island [of
Staffa, in the Hebrides]. Its Celtic name is An-Na-Vine or Fine, which means 'the harmo-
nious cave,' or, according to another translation, 'Fingal's Cave.' These two names ex-
plain themselves; often, in effect, the roar of the sea and murmurs of wind, which die
out while whirling to the back of the cave across columns arranged like the casings of an
organ, produce sounds of marvelous harmony; 'these are the aeolian harps of the ghosts
of the Fianna,' say the Gaels, who link the idea of Fingal to everything that seems super-
natural to them": Badin, Grottes et Cavernes, p. 171, translation mine; "Fingal" is "Mac-
pherson's name for Finn MacCool in the Ossianic cycle" (Mink, Gazetteer, p. 314). The
harmonious inspiration for Mendelssohn's "Hebridean" or "Fingal's Cave Overture," Mink
reminds us, Fingal's Cave resembles the "tropped head" of the Wake's "sleeping giant" -" a
locally person of caves" (365.2) -in being a vast natural cavity filled, as in "Anna Livia,"
with haunting echoes of washing waters. For more on "Fingal's Cave," see Mink, Ga-
zetteer, p. 314; and the orthodox and nocturnal maps of Europe included in this book.
17. As Glasheen notes (Third Census, p. 63), "Corrigan's pulse" is named for the" Irish
doctor who discovered the ailment"; it resembles our hero's in being Irish.
18. The chapter thus opens up indefinitely into the kind of archetypal and anthropo-
logical analyses with which readers of the critical work on Finnenans Wake will be fa-
miliar: almost anything that one might associate with running water is reflected some-
where in "Anna Livia." For a superb illustration of where one path of these associations
leads, see Grace Eckley, "Queer Mrs. Quickenough and Odd Miss Doddpebble: The Tree
and the Stone in Finnenans Wake," in Begnal and Eckley, Narrator and Character in "Fin-
nenans Wake," pp. 129-235. On the relations of human communities and running water,
see also Vico (NS, 527-28, 534, 714).
19. 0 Hehir, Gaelic Lexicon, p. 392. "Life is an old form of Liffey," Glasheen compara-

bly notes. quite rightly going on to argue that "in FW every 'life,' 'live,' 'alive,' 'living'
names Anna Livia and the Liffey" (Third Census. pp. 168-69).
20. This will perhaps explain why. in a letter to Italo Svevo. Joyce compared "the little
river of [his] city. the Anna Liffey," to "the longest river on earth" (L. III. I33n.). Particu-
larly because the comparison enters the letter with remarks on "cordiality" « L. cars.
cordis. "heart"). what he likely had in mind as "the longest river on earth" was Here
Comes Everybody's bloodstream. since 60 or 70.000 miles of "vesles vet" lie coiled inside
every body. daily channeling the flow of two thousand gallons of blood through an end-
lessly intricated network of "scarlet thread."
21. Eckley. "Queer Mrs. Quickenough and Odd Miss Doddpebble." in Narrator and
Character in "Finne8ans Wake." pp. 199-200.
22. Higginson. Anna Livia Plurabelle: The Makin8 of a Chapter. p. 6.
23. This feature of the "ebro" in which "Anna Livia" is written will suggest why the
apparent recklessness that Joyce is supposed to have exhibited while helping to translate
the chapter into French and Italian was only apparent. As Ellmann recounts it. "Joyce's
whole emphasis [in these translating sessions] was ... on sonority. rhythm. and verbal
play; to the sense he seemed indifferent and unfaithful" UJ. 700); "he sometimes as-
tonished [both the French and Italian translators] by caring more for sound and rhythm
than sense" UJ. 632-33). What sense? Nino Frank. one of Ellmann's sources, comparably
notes that "two things struck [him]: first. that the rhythm. the harmony. the density and
consonance of the words were more important to Joyce than the meaning. and that. for
example. having written one thing. Joyce scarcely hesitated to put down something com-
pletely different in Italian. as long as the poetic or metrical result was equivalent"
(Frank. "The Shadow that Had Lost its Man." in Portraits of the Artist in Exile. p. 97).
Reading "Anna Livia" suggests quite the opposite of what is generally assumed from ac-
counts like these. Because the chapter is about a kind of sense and "meanam" that fills
the ear in the absence of literal sense and meaning. Joyce knew quite well what he was
doing.
24. This would account. incidentally. for the appearance throughout Finne8ans Wake of
weird temperance organizations like "the Ballymooney Bloodriddon Murther" (219.19-20
[note the "blood"]). Unlike "the Ballyhooly Blue Ribbon Army." the subject of a comic
song "about a temperance movement in a notoriously intemperate town" (Mink. Gazet-
teer. p. 222). this one meets in the night (hence the "moon"). when HCE is dead to the
world (hence the "blood-ridden murder"). Sleeping is our hero's way of taking the pledge.
25. On sleep as a somatic "reactivation of intrauterine existence." see Freud's "Meta-
psychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams." p. 222. and the Introductory Lec-
tures on Psychoanalysis. where Freud characterizes sleep as a "withdraw[al] ... " into
"existence in the womb" that returns the adult organism to "the foetal state of rest"
(pp. 88-89). Because his interests lay more in the analysis of dreams than in a recon-
struction of the night. Freud himself made relatively little of these remarks. though his
immediate successors developed them in elaborate and often engaging ways.
The most interesting of these elaborations. for a reader of the Wake. are Roheim's. in
The Gates of the Dream. and Ferenczi's in Thalassa. Because Roheim "assumes that the
dream is primarily a reaction to the fact that we are asleep." and seeks to develop an
account of "a basic dream valid for mankind in general" (Gates. pp. I. IS). his work
amounts to a "reconstruction of the nocturnal life" which. though psychoanalytically
Notes to PaBes 348-55 457

biased, resonates in every way with Joyce's in the Wake. In Roheim's account ofthe dark,
"the sleeper turns into himself and falls back into the womb, his own body being the
material substratum of the dream-womb" (p. 7); "the environment into which the
dreamer regresses is both [his] own body and the maternal womb" (p. 20). See also pp. 14,
16,20,88-94, and Brown, Love's Body, pp. 45-56.
Ferenczi's Thalassa, an astonishing fantasia, synthesizes the "new sciences" of psycho-
analysis, animal evolution, and embryology in order to provide a "utraquistic" or "bio-
analytic" account of sleep (pp. 3, 84, 73-81) . Operating from the observations that sleep,
foetalized birth (and coitus) are mutually developing evolutionary variables that attain
their most complex forms in human beings, Ferenczi sees the womb as an internalized
sea that mammalian organisms incorporate and carry with them when they stagger onto
land. "The amniotic fluid represents a sea 'introjected,' as it were, into the womb of the
mother-a sea in which, as the embryologist Hertwig says 'the delicate and easily in-
jured embryo swims and executes movements like a fish in water'" (p. 56). Falling
asleep, therefore, means not simply undergoing uterine regression-"turning into one's
own body and the maternal womb"-but also undergoing a deeper form of thalassal re-
gression and, as the Wake puts it, "go[ing] the way of all fish" (254.12): "H.C.E. has a
codfisck ee" (198.8-9). Ferenczi's work is altogether compatible with the Wake.
26. Thomas Verney, M.D., with John Kelly, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child (New
York: Summit, 1981), p. 21. "Recent studies show that from the twenty-fourth week on,
the unborn child listens all the time. And he has a lot to listen to. The pregnant abdomen
and uterus are very noisy places. The mother's stomach rumblings are the loudest sounds
he hears. Her voice, his father's voice, and other occasional sounds are quieter but still
audible to him. The sound that dominates his world, though, is the rhythmic thump of
the maternal heartbeat .... The reassuring rhythm of its beat is one of the major con-
stellations in his universe. He falls asleep to it, wakes to it, moves to it. Because the
human mind, even the human mind in utero, is a symbol-making entity, the foetus
gradually attaches a metaphorical meaning to it. [ItJ comes to symbolize tranquillity,
security and love to him" (p. 38, 28 [note the inadequacy of the EnglishJ) .
Actually, these studies are not so recent; they simply yield articles of understanding
that Joyce, writing of the "virgin womb of the imagination" (P, 217), reading extensively
in embryology, and pressing his ear against Nora's belly in order to listen to the birth of
Lucia (It., "light") into the world, would have learned in any number of mutually re-
inforcing ways. His interest in these topics can be minimally gauged from a study of the
embryological notes that he compiled while planning "Oxen of the Sun" (see Philip F.
Herring, Joyce's Ulysses Notesheets in the British Museum [Charlottesville, Va.: Univ. of
Virginia Press, 1972], pp. 163-257). The notebooks show him exercising an interest in
"creation from nothing" (Herring, p. 280), "previous existence" (p. 163) and "plasmic
memory" (p. 171); and they include entries not simply on the formation and wakening of
the ear-"4 & 5 m[onth] (ear hammer and anvil) ," Joyce notes (p. 224), "one (ear) can
hear what other says" (p. 223)-but also on the genesis of sensation, in "4[th] and 5[th]
m[onth]," when the "pressure of amnios on face ear, jawal, [and] buccal" areas elicits a
reactive response from nerves growing outward from the interior of dark water (p. 224).
Joyce goes on to note that the "fetus [is] 1st independent" and exercises "voluntary move-
ment [in the] 5th m[onth]" (p. 170). The notebooks ultimately show him studying with
some empirical intensity "the embryo philosopher" who lies at "the bottom of reason"
(pp. 218, 219) . As one of}oyce's main amanuenses and confidants has notified Joyce's pub-
Note to Page 355

lic, study of "the embryo philosopher" also played into a book about how little Fin-
negans wake: according to Samuel Beckett, "there is a great deal of the unborn child in
the lifeless octogenarian" who lies dead to the world, enjoying "foetal sleep," at the Wake
(Our Exa8mination, p. 8).
This is so weird and wonderful an aspect of Finne8ans Wake that it would be best to be
clear at once about what a form of unconsciousness that might now be equated with
prenatal memory might mean ("You were there"). Especially in a world of "Uncontrol-
lable Birth" (184.15 [but a day of variously problematized forms of "birth control"]), be-
liefs about what kind of life might have preceded its waking are likely to be as highly
charged-"no thing making newthing wealthshowever"-as beliefs about what kind of
life might follow its wake (see 293.LI, 323.36-324.1,452.29-31, and 447.8). Many read-
ers, wanting "to avoid assuming a memory of different kind than that with which we are
familiar" (Roheim, The Gates of the Dream, p. 89), will concur with the idea that "it
is not necessary to postulate any memories of blissful intrauterine feelings"; "the intra-
uterine fantasy ... is a nursing fantasy with a shift downward from the breast to the
abdomen" (B. D. Lewin, The Psychoanalysis of Elation [New York, 1950], pp. 109-10;
quoted in Roheim, p. 89). And yet others will want to take this aspect of the Wake very
seriously indeed: there is a whole "new science" or "new discipline called prenatal psy-
chology" (Verney, p. 24) , whose study obviously engaged Joyce deeply.
To simplify a meditation that now threatens to become as bottomless as the one local-
ized in Finnegan's coffin, we might think of prenatal memory as a form of "sohnt" that is
"state-dependently" evoked in those parts of the night falling between dreams, when
HCE's "tropped head" contains only the hearing of its own bloodstream (a "state-
dependent memory," in neurology, is one that "can be recalled only in [the] specific ...
state ... in which the memory was acquired" (Furst, Ori8ins of the Mind, pp. 256,
178-179). It would be a memory of what the "unknown body" void of mind "thinks"
as it pulls itself together out of darkness somewhere within hearing of the river Life.
"Foetotype[s)" (324. I) captured in this form of "sohnt" are reconstructed everywhere in
the Wake.
Consider, for instance, this business about the unborn child's hearing its mother's voice
and stomach rumbling, and compare it to a passage in the Wake which explains "that
Glugg, the poor one, in that limbopool which was his subnesciousness he could scares of
all knotknow whither his morrder had bourst a blabber or if the vogalstones that hit his
tynpan was that mearly his skoll missed her" (224.16-20). "Subnesciousness," presum-
ably lying beneath "nesciousness" « L. nescio, "r do not know"), would move us below
any conventionally defined form of "unconsciousness" into a new depth of the Joycean
"ungumptious," so to raise many questions about the "limbopool" being sounded here:
are the "vocal tones hitting [Glugg's] tympanum" those of a "mother's blabber" (or
mouth) , or did his "mother burst a bladder"? One can "scarce of all know," though the
imprint on "his skoll" of noise emanating from a feminine "schoolmaster" ("skoll missed
her") evidently "scares" him. Nobody ever said that Joyce, Finne8ans Wake, or the night
and the Unconscious were not strange.
27. There were, for Joyce, some characteristically strange extratextual sequels to the
writing of "Anna Livia Plurabelle." When Daniel Brody reminded him in 1940 of a Ger-
man translation of the chapter that Georg Goyert had done, Joyce wrote back to wonder:
"Do you think it would be possible to publish the version you have in Holland? After all,
it is only about rivers and washerwomen" (L, III, 464). Why ask an editor known from
Note to Page 355 459

Zurich to publish a German translation of an English text in a country where Dutch is
the main language? We are looking, perhaps, at that side of joyce's mind which appalled
and astonished Frank O'Connor who, pointing to a picture of Cork in joyce's apartment
and asking what the frame was made of, got the answer" cork." Had joyce had his way,
"Anna Livia" might have been framed like that picture: as Corkin cork, so "remembrandts"
in nether-lands.
28. Ferdinand C. Lane, The World's Great Lakes (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1948),
p. 47: "the big lakes so long hidden beyond the horizon of scientific certainty have been
identified as Victoria Nyanza, [and] Albert Nyanza."
For a representative specimen of the kind of language found in that peculiar turn-of-
the century genre, the Nile travelogue, see Emil Ludwig, The Nile: The Life-Story of a
River, trans. Mary H. Lindsay (New York: Viking, 1937): "Where are we? The source of the
Nile .... None guessed its origin. For thousands of years men sought this source and
went astray.... Here, at the source ... [the land] has been likened to Paradise," its
smallest features revealing "the symbol of the landscape of a dream" (pp. 5-6). For a
more sinister example of the same rhetoric, see Samuel White Baker, The Albert Nyanza:
Great Basin of the Nile and Explorations of the Nile Sources (rpt.; New York: Horizon
Press, 1962), 2, p. 520: "Whether the man of Central Africa be pre-Adamite is impossible
to determine .... Cut off from [the Christian] world, lost in the mysterious distance
that shrouded the origin of the Egyptian Nile, were races unknown, that had never reck-
oned in the great sum of history-races that we have brought to light, whose existence
had been hidden from mankind, and that now appear before us like the fossil bones of
antediluvian animals. Are they vestiges of what existed in a pre-Adamite creation?"
These quotations will also clarify the recurrence in Finnenans Wake of references to
"Victoria Nyanza" and "Albert Nyanza," the two great bodies of water from which the
Nile arises (23.19-21,89.27, 105.14,202.18-20,558.27-28,598.6,600.12-13 [Mink, Ga-
zetteer, pp. 200, 529]). Absorbed by "the secrest of their soorcelossness" (23.19 [but note
again the Gr. 00-, "egg," in this "soorce"]), as well as the origins of "the Nil" (598.6
[Fr. Nil, "Nile"; L. nil, "nothing"]), joyce embroiders these two traditionally fathomless
"bodies of water"-each interimplicated in each other by a network of tangled water-
ways and yet lying incommunicado at "the soorce"-into ciphers for the "anastomosi-
cally assimilated" mother and child (615.5) out of whom, downstream, civilization
grows. See the cited contexts.
29. Where a reading of The New Science will explain why joyce, undertaking an "ab-
nihilisation of the etym" (353.22), unravelled English into the polylingual elements out
of which it arose, attention to the Swahili and Dutch in "Anna Livia" will yield a prin-
ciple by which to understand the appearance in Finnenans Wake of languages not ge-
netically related to English-especially if we compare the Wake's use of Swahili and
Dutch to other languages that have been explored in passing: Swiss-German (chapter 2,
note 7), Australian and New Zealand slangs (chapter 7, note 29), black American
idioms (chapter 7, note 9).
As joyce himself points out in a passage about Shem-a penman who speaks with
"tongues in his cheek" about "anythongue athall" (340.4, 117.15-16)-"thevariousmean-
ings of all the different foreign parts of speech" that appear in the Wake are" misused"-
misused as wittily as elements in dreams-and misused precisely in order to "giv[e] un-
solicited testimony on behalf of the absent ... to those present" by doing service in the
work of "unconsciously explaining" nocturnal events in the body of someone "tropped
Notes to Page 361

head," evidently "of pentecostitis" (173.29-36, 130.9 [italics mine]). Languages like
Dutch and Swahili, in other words, of which a sleeping bartender would be obviously
unconscious, overlay parts of this "basically English" text (116.26) in order to invest it
locally with properties which, if we pursue "distant connections" and read "between the
lines" (169.6, 3), we might associate with Dutch and Swahili.
We might see how this principle could be extended-to Armenian or Latin, for in-
stance-by "talking of hayastdanars and wolkingology and how our seaborn isle came
intoexestuance" (387.11-12 [where the Hayasdan in "hayastdanars" is Armenian for "Ar-
menia," and "vulcanology" is the study of how, "from next to nothing," the earth began
"boiling up" (L. exestuans) into "existence"]). Because Armenian is a language cur-
rently spoken at the site of Mt. Ararat, where the Biblical world began, the associations
show Armenian serving the symbolic function, in a way that a historicized proto-
Indo-European never could, of a protolanguage in Finne8ans Wake. It would differ from
Swahili, in this respect, because the "distant connections" to which we are led by think-
ing about Mt. Ararat and the sources of the Nile are altogether distinct in their com-
plexities. Though Latin, comparably, is one ofthe founts of English and the instrument of
the Catholic Church, it is also, as a "dead language," a language spoken primarily by
dead people. Parts of the night in which HCE lies dead to the world in a "seemetery,"
then, are written "decentius in lin8ua romana mortuorum" (287.20-21 ["more fitly in the
Roman tongue of the dead"]) .
To be exhaustive at this point about the sixty-odd foreign languages put to work in the
Wake would be impossible-and particularly because the relations between these lan-
guages and the English with which they merge are hidden in indefinite associations.
A great deal more work needs to be done, however, on the "states" that the languages of
foreign states evoke in the Wake.
30. David Diringer, The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind, 3d ed. rev. (Lon-
don: Hutchinson and Co., 1968), I, p. 21.
31. Brown, Love's Body, p. 56.
32. See Brown, Love's Body, pp. 80-89, for the best possible commentary on this aspect
ofthe Wake.
33. On the Bartholomew Deep, see Mink, Gazetteer, p. 225; and Sir John Murray and
Dr. Johann Hjart, The Depths of the Ocean (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912), Map 2,
PP·128- 29.
34. Exceeding "the unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific" (U,
671), the "bed" of the Challenger Deep lies under a bonecrushing slab of water seven
miles deep, 36,198 feet below the surface of the ocean, where 3-112 tons of frigid abyssal
brine weigh upon every square inch of space and prevent even water from freezing. Void
of light, which cannot penetrate the ocean beneath a depth of 1,800 feet, and of life,
it is "the deepest hole in the deep," a concrete site of "Real Absence," and has not yet
been definitively sounded. On the Challenger Deep and the sources for this note, see
Mink, Gazetteer, p. 256; Murray and Hart, The Depths of the Ocean, p. 143; C. P. Idyll,
"The Science of the Sea," and Robert S. Dietz, "The Underwater Landscape," in C. P.
Idyll, ed., The Science of the Sea: A History ofOcean08raphy (London: Thomas and Sons,
1970), pp. 2-21 and 22-41; C. P. Idyll, Abyss: The Deep Sea and the Creatures That Live in
It, rev. ed. (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1976), p. 23; and Martyn Bramwell, The Rand
McNally Atlas of the Oceans (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1977), p. 159.
35. On "Lough Neagh," the largest lake in the British Isles, see Mink's Gazetteer,

pp. 417- 18; Campbell and Robinson. A Skeleton Key. p. 81 n3; and Roland McHugh. "Re-
cipis for the Price of a Coffin." in Begnal and Senn. A Conceptual Guide to Finne8ans
Wake. p. 31: "The Celtic underworld was often conceived as being situated beneath the
sea or a lake. In pagan times. Eochu was believed to be lord of the otherworld beneath
Lough Neagh (hence its name. Loch n-Eochach. the lake of Eochu). In Christian times.
after Eochu had been euhemerized into a mortal man. his connection with the lake was
explained by inventing the legend that he was drowned when the lake burst forth and
flooded his country. So the legend recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis that fishermen on
Lough Neagh could see buildings (round towers) in calm weather."
36. "Sleep [is] characterized by certain body postures which. especially in the case of
first sleep. have been described by quite unbiased observers as 'the foetal posture.' The
extremities are drawn up to the body. so that the whole body assumes the so to speak
spheroid shape which exigencies of space made a physical necessity in utero. Between
sleep and the embryonic state far reaching analogies can be demonstrated with regard to
metabolic function. Animals are preoccupied in the daytime with the obtaining and di-
gestion of food. but its absorption proper. its assimilation into the tissues. takes place
rather during the night. so the physiologists assert (qui dort dine). Thus sleep creates the
illusion of an effortless providing with nourishment similar to that obtaining in utero.
It is often maintained. furthermore. that growth and regeneration take place for the
greater part during sleep; while growth might be said to be the sole activity of the em-
bryo in the womb" (Ferenczi. Thalassa. p. 75).
37. Along this line of associations. the Wake absorbs myths structured on the image of
a "Cosmic egg." which Campbell and Robinson allude to in A Skeleton Key (pp. 5.31).
On such myths. see Charles H. Long. Alpha: The Myths of Creation (New York: Collier.
1963). particularly chapter 3 ("Creation from Chaos and from the Cosmic Egg").
pp. II3-49·
38. I am indebted here to an essay written by Brett Bourbon. on "The Interrelation
between Identity and Becoming in Finne8ans Wake." for a class on the Wake taught at
the University of California - Berkeley in Spring 1985.
39. Joyce: "The object of any work of art is the transference of emotion"; "I've tried to
write naturally. on an emotional basis as against an intellectual basis. Emotion has dic-
tated the course and detail of my book. and in emotional writing one arrives at the un-
predictable which can be of more value. since its sources are deeper than the products of
the intellectual method .... This is 'Work in Progress'" (Power. Conversations with
JamesJoyce. pp. 98. 95).
40. Mercanton. "The Hours ofJames Joyce. " p. 213.

Index
Absence, 38; of senses and perception, 7, Amnesia ("blank memory"), 4-5, 7, 29,
45-50,58,62, 100, 102, 398n.lO, 441 n.3; ab- 47-49, 58, 63, 68, 69, 71, 73, 77, 317- 18; vi-
sentmindedness, 38, 53, 57; "Real Absence," sual components of, 47, 218; content of,
43-44,47-59,62-64,76, 109, 152,272, 143. See also Memory, unconscious
274-75, 282, 338-39; of life, 45, 62, 66-74, Anarchy, 40, 170-71, 179, 425n.23-24, 426 n.29
103-4; of experience, 54; of ideas, 63; of Anna Livia Plurabelle (character), 140,
mind, 63-64,101-2; "your own absence," 349-70, 365, 376-84; as widow, 328, 365; as
71; and exile, IIO-II; of human subject, acrostic ALP, 348, 366; associations with
274-75; of content, 315 water, 356, 364; associations with maternal
Adam, 5°,83, 168, 424n.16; "red loam," 79; attachment, 356-71, 376-84; presence
and Eve, 157, 223, 303, 363, 364, 367, 380; throughout FW, 363-64, 374, 379, 382; as
Enlightenment view of, 177, 192; Adam's "Bringer ofthe Plurabilities," 370, 384; as
dream, 211 Hen, 376; as "mother of the book," 382 -84;
Alarm clocks, 268, 278; alarm clock dreams, relation to !ssy, 436n.26
443 n . 1 7 "Anna Livia Plurabelle" (chapter), 257, 336-
Alcohol, 38, 47,137-38,279-80,282, 393n.34, 63; Joyce on, 336, 344, 347, 349; rivers and
419n.lO; and "blacking out," 38, 54, 70, 76, river-names in, 336-38, 341-49, 352, 379;
132, 137; and "Finnegan's Wake," 69-71; and composition of, 336-38, 456n.15; sound of
drugs, 79-80, 137; sobriety and temperance bloodstream as basis of, 340-46, 363-66; as
organizations, 353, 457 n .24 representation of aliterate "meanam,"
All Souls' Night (Halloween). 53, 55, 77, 281, 341-48, 362; rivalry in, 350-51; as recon-
321 struction of prenatal memory, 354-61;
Amen-Ra, 93-94, 98-99, 102, 104, II8, 123- gynocentrism of, 356-57; temporality of,
24; meaning of name, 86. See also Sun 358-59; foreign languages in, 359-61; vi-
Amenti, 85; meaning of name, 86; described, sion in, 436n.26, 439n.28. See also Em-
94-95; and "amentia," 101-2; experience of bryology; Mothering; Representation;
corpse in, 102-25 Sexuality: female
America; as "New World," 110-11,358, 4II- Appetite and hunger, 101, 103, 115- 16, 124,
12 n.80; other world, 282; "Amessica," 166; 171, 279, 282; for breakfast, 82, 118, 284,
Joyce on, 425n.22; American idioms and 375, 377-78; in infancy, 377-78. See also
songs in FW, 110-12, 252. See also End of Shaun
the world Aries, Philippe, 401 n.2, 402n.8
Aristotle. 22. 282. 394n.8; on dream interpre· Bigelow. John (The Mystery of Sleep ). 227
tation. 418n.5. 436n.25. 444n.1O (quoted). 392n.30
Arrest. corporal: and paralytic sleep. 12. 59- Bird. William. 4. 273
63.74-75.218; as "petrifaction." 45-46.48. Blindness. 47. 48. 50. 53. 59. II5. 154.230. 270.
69.374; ciphers for. 75. 79. II5-16. 148.222. 280. 304. 339. 346. 348; functional. of sleep.
338.347.441 n.15. 442n.13; vs. rigor mortis. 123-30; Joyce and. 434-35n.15. 438n.6;
77.91. 101-4. 109. II4- 17. 122-24; "sense stages of. 438n.6
arrest." 220. 339 Blinking. 47. 253-60; autonomic nature of the
Arthur. King. 105. 132. 138. 382 blink-reflex. 259; as symptomatic sign.
Association. free: 9. 27; and interpretation. 259-61; variability of. 260
39-40.274-80.295.382 .384-85. 397n.13. Bloom. Leopold. 17. 22. 84. II8. 164.313. 340.
449-51 nn.I-2; as form of thought in 371; compared to HCE. 135-37. 419n.II;
dream. 156. 192. 276. 280. 302. 309. 382. Odysseus. and heroism. 178; impact on
445n.23; and language and reading. 305-9; Stephen. 213. 283; stream of consciousness.
and childhood. 322. 325. 327; as basis of 269-70; falling asleep. 355; fear of sleep-
"Anna Livia Plurabelle." 348-50.352-53. walking. 392n.27; homecoming. 428n.9; on
356. 363-64. 366. 368-70. 380-81 Pepper's ghost. 432 n. 13; on musical instru-
Atherton. James. 91. 336. 393n.31. 401 n.19. ments.447 n.25
406nn. 17-18. 408n.53. 4II-12 n.80. 414n. 107. Body: as object in space. 28. 144; ciphers for.
415n.108. 417n.3. 454n.8 37. 141-43. 235. 378. 396-97n.9; as latent
Attridge. Derek. 397n.1O ground ofthe dream. 37. 80. 143-45. 156-
Australia. 110. 164.235.238.249. 252. 256. 325. 58.237-38.240.250-51. 302; sleep as bur-
437n·3 1 ial in. 79-80. 98. 154. 181-82. 193-94.
Authority. patriarchal. 39. 83. 168-70. 329; 270-72. 321; as site of "underworld." 96-97.
collapse of. 170-71. 328. 366-67. 377. 101-2. 108-9; as site of the resurrection.
381-83; and conflict .. 35. 229; in Vico. 123-25; as container of letters and dreams.
190-91. 199-206; language as submission 140. 235. 248. 332; as subject of FW. 140-45.
to. 289-90. 329-31. 345. 354. 381 • 383 155-58. 193-95.252-61. 315.341-46; or-
ganic vs. politic. 145; as field of conflict.
Badin. Adolphe. 456n.16 173. 240. 246-51. 253-54. 261. 279-80.
Baker. Samuel White. 460n.28 299-300; formation of. in infancy. 190-93.
Ballad (I.ii). 55-56. 206. 282. 299-303. 309. 289-91; as ground of gentile reality and
432n.1O language. 197-99.210; repression of. 198.
Bats. 339. 430n.6. 435n.2o 210. 254. 299; as ground of vision. 244-47;
Bears. 53. 153. 193.219. 422-23n·9 as medium of symptomatic writing. 248-
Beckett. Samuel. 8. 140; on Vico. 175. 199; 51. 259-60. 328. See also Education; HCE:
and Work in Prowess. 360 Identity; Laws; Tailoring; Vico; Vision
Begnal. Michael H .• 417n.3 Bogan. Louise. 3
Benstock. Bernard. 417n.3. 419n.12. 420n.20. Book of the Dead. Egyptian. 81. 86- 125; FW
421 n·3. 424n.15 as. 72. 94.104.109-10. 11I-12. II4. 125.
Bergin. Thomas Goddard. 427n.l. 428n.12 275. 372; history of, 88-89. 90-92; as guide
Berkeley. George. 165. 437n.29 to next world. 89. 100. 102. 121; relation to
Biblical references: Jehoshaphat. 76; Apoca- the night. 89. 92-93. 96. 101. 105. 109.
lpyse (Revelations). 77. 334.402 n.8; Ge- II2-13; recensions of. 90; "rubrics" in. 99;
henna. 81; the Fall. 82; the sheep and the "vignettes" in. 121; corpse's exploits in. 107.
goats. 83. 381. 402 n.8; YHWH. 141. 189; II4; chapter placement in. II4-16. 123-25;
Fiat. 217-18; Isaac. 224; Jacob. 224; Noah. "chapters of making transformations." 122.
231. 255. 257; Lot. 243; Joseph. 252; the See also Amen-Ra; Amenti; Egyptology and
Flood. 255-57. 342• 343. 359. 427n.7; Pen- Egyptian allusions; Osiris
tateuch. 307. 310; Babel. 307. 326. 332. 345; Boru. Brian. 441 n.6
Hebrews. 309; Cain and Abel. 331; Anti- Brian 0 Linn. 153. 154. 168. 422n.8
Christ. 334; Jonah. 372; Eden. 379-80; Brion. Marcel. 143
Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar. 385; Ararat. Brivic. Sheldon R.• 393n.31
444n.19. See also Adam; Genesis. Book of Brody. Daniel. 460n.27
Index
Brown, J. A. C, 437n.32 Cities: founding of, 168, 199; wakening as re-
Brown, Norman 0.,37,77,312,367, 396n.7, surgence of, 283-85, 373; in Genesis, 331;
420n.20, 451 n.5 negation of, 423 n. II
Browne, Sir Thomas, 401 n.2; "On Dreams," Clonmacnoise, 302
444 n .20 Closure, of senses, 440n.3
Buckley and the Russian General, 130, 165, Colors, 232-34; in dreams, 237; formation of,
230, 275 237-46; concealed, 243; and color theory,
Buddha, 80, 154, 219 245-46; nocturnal tricolor, 438n.36. See
Budge, Sir E. A. Wallis, 97, 404 n. 19, 405- also Light
15 nn. I - I16 passim; Joyce's Egyptological Colum, Mary, 17
authority, 406 n. 18; dating of books of the Colum, Padraic, 3
dead, 407n.21; on coffin map, 407n.37; on Comedy, 39, 72, 84, 259, 314, 333; and fun,
the myth of Osiris, 408n.41 71, 316, 328; and laughter, 258-59, 233,
Budgen, Frank, 3, 20, 87, 88, 274, 417n.3 439 n. 39; joking, 307- 10
Burgess, Anthony, 448 n. 30 Conflict, 95-96, 132, 133, 154, 169; with Cad,
Burial, 71, 75, So; mummification, 88-89, 185, 224; and dream production, 139, 141-
105-6, 108-9, I12, I14- 16; rituals and prac· 42,220,246-51, 314, 437nn.33-34; and the
tices, Egyptian, 90, 105-6, I12; anxieties body, 145, 192-93,240,250-51,254, 404n.18;
about, 101, I12; Viking, I12. See also Ca· alimentary, 164, 279; genital, 167, 184-85;
tholicism and Catholic allusions as historical heritage, 184-85; intrafamil-
Buried letter. See Letter: buried ial, 203-6; visual, 239, 243, 246-47, 253,
Burrows and burrowing, So-83, 404n.16 259-60; between Shem and Shaun, 239-41,
Butler, Samuel (Erewhon) , 423 n. I I 243-44,247-50; vocal, 270-71; audio-
Butt and Taff, 269 phonic, 295-303; between ear and eye, 382;
Byron, Lord (Childe Harold), 257 cessation of, 32 I
Connolly, Thomas E., 454n.7
Cad, 185,224, 432n.1O Cosmogony, 379-81
Campbell, Joseph, 395n.l, 405n.4, 424n.16, Crime in the park, 166-67, 185,251, 3I1
462n·37 Crimean War, 165
Carlyle, Thomas (Sartor Resartus) , 128,
440n·3 Dada, 299, 344
Carroll, Lewis, 332, 454n.8; Tweedledeedum Dalton, Jack, 455n.7
and Tweedledeedee, 289, 330; Throu8h Dante (Inferno), 75, 95
the Lookin8 Glass, 327-28, 333 Darwin, Charles, 176, 179, 209
Catholicism and Catholic allusions, 83, 141, Dead Sea, 373, 374, 376
144, 183-84; incarnation, 72, 79, 141-43, Deaf-mutism, 47, 48-49, 57-58, I14-16, 190,
231,322, 359, 379; consecration, 141; tran· 201-5,264-72,277,339,375,399 n . I1 ,
substantiation, 141-43,366, 397n.3; An- 409n·56, 445 n .23
gelus, 155, 285, 358-59; confession, 170, Deafness, 47, 57-58, 154, 264-72, 274, 275,
320, 424n.21; Blessed Virgin, 242, 354, 359, 277-78, 279, 281; infantile, 295, 300, 339,
362, 369, 370; Mater Misericordia, 366-67; 343,360
Ave Maria, 354, 384; Eucharist, 398n.4; ex· Death, 44, 53, 54, 58, 66-85; Greek concep-
treme unction, 414n.99, 440n.3 tions of, 67, 402-3n.9; as absolute uncon-
Caves. See Holes sciousness, 70, 82; as eternal sleep, 75, 101,
Cemetery: as scene of FW, 72, 74, 76, 77, 79, 109, 112-13; as symbolic form, 84; Egyptian
84; history of, 92, I13 conceptions of, 87- 125; "second death,"
Challenger Deep, 372-73 103, I13; anxieties about, 103, I15-16;
Character: status of characters in FW, 55, 130, death of parents, 370
139, 140, 142, 164-65, 234-36, 273-74, 276- Dedalus, Stephen, 57, 59,62,91, ISo, 184,213,
77; novelistic concept of, 142; voices in FW, 399n.12, 447n.27; as Joyce's pen name, 17;
271-72,295,298; "others" in FW, 302-3, 305-6 on ghosts and absence, 110; attachments,
Christmas, 72, 322-23, 359 157-58; as infant, 291; relation with
Chuff,239 mother, 359, 368; on genius, 434n.15
Cincinnatus, 301 Derrida, Jacques: "Tympan," 448n.29; "Two
Index
Derrida, jacques (continued) in, 137-38, 435n.20; and distortion, 152;
Words for joyce, " 448n.33 displacement, 167,243; Vico's "poetic
Descartes, Rene, 117; Cartesian space, 31, 36, wisdom" as, 182, 190, 194; censorship, 243;
144-45, 335; cogito, 68-69, 303-4; FW as sublimation, 243, 249; considerations of
deliberate break with Cartesianism, 142, representability, 437n.33
157, 397n.13; and collapse of inner-outer Dublin: 26, 30-37,49, 54, 142, 14S, 150-54,
distinctions, 153, 157-58, 189-90, 193; and 158, 168-70, 171-72, 253-5S, 268-6g,
rationalism, 177; Dioptric, 226; on state of 348-49; in history, 49,57, 168, 423 n. 10,
nature, 427n.6 429n.16; "Dublin papyrus," 91, 406n.20; as
Dillon, john M., xvi, 401 n.20 dreamer's home, 135
Diogenes, 252 -place-names: Adam and Eve's Church, 26;
Dionysius of Syracuse, 442n.13 Liffey, 26, 30, 180, 348-49; Castle Knock,
Diringer, David, 461 n.30 3°-31,36, 397n.13; Howth (Head), 30-31,
Discipline. See Education; Law 36, 54-S5, 138, 140, 148, 155, 234, 272, 274,
Douglas, Norman, 398n.8 276, 395n.3; Phoenix Park, 31, 36, 166, 251,
Doyles, 221 395n.2; Gaiety Theatre, 49, 54, 419n.lI;
Dreamer: identity of, 130-45; "an old man," National Gallery, 54, 59; Chapeiizod, 108,
131; "one stable somebody," 132-33, 139, 13S, 137, 153, 154; Clontarf, 152,441 n.6;
302-3, 306, 338-42, 400n. 17, 416-17n.2, Wellington Memorial, 165, 18S, 198, 244;
417n.3; aged ness of, 133,236,241; Protes- Prospect Cemetery (Finglas), 347; Main
tantism, 134, 135, 167; occupation of, Drainage System, 353; Waterhouse's Clock,
135; family life of, 135, 167; lineage of, 359; Poddle River, 379; Astley'S Amphi-
135,352; as father, 167,224,241-43; ap- theatre, 432-33n.lO; St. Michan's, 438n.35;
parent absence of, 338-42, 347; and un- Fingal, 4S1 n·5
conscious memory, 354-56; "a family all Dubliners: "The Dead," 21, 83; "The Sisters,"
to himself," 365. See also Earwicker; Fin- 33 2
negan; Finn MacCool; Mountain; Pubs Dumbness, 39, 50, 52, IS9, 264, 26S, 271, 282;
and Inns and dummies, 69, 77, 79
Dreams: and memory, 4- 10, 19, 42, 46-48, Dumbshows (pantomime), 48, 54, 236, 26S,
317-18,321-24,326-27,354-55,3Sgn.lO; 27 1-72
and epistemology, 7-10,18, 390n.16; mani- Dump, 134-35, 236, 271-72, 375, 418n·9
fest and latent contents, 8, 31-36, 247-52,
309- IS, 324- 2S; and secondary revision, 8, Ears: 261-62, 264-304, 323, 337, 340-64, 381;
311; and sexuality, 12-13, 123, 14S, IS7, as ground oflanguage, 261, 288-91; ascen-
16S-67, 240-43,249; and language, 14, 16, dancy over the eye, 261-62, 287-95; and
18- 19. 46-47. 59-62, 123, 195-98, 271-72. stream of consciousness, 269; in sleep,
30S- IS, 449-51 nn.I-2; and interpretation, 270-74, 276-82; never close, 272-74, 303,
16- 17, 27, 39-41; of constraint, liS; of fly- 339, 372, 442 n. 12; and vigilance, 273, 276,
ing, 122; and psychoanalytic account of 279, 281, 282, 295, 300, 339, 342; anatomy
dream formation, 129-30, 134, 249-SI, and mechanics of, 277-79, 295, 448n.27;
316, 3SS, 435 n .21 , 437 n ·33, 44 ln·7, 457- as scene of NS, 288; and auditory space,
s8n.2S; "residue" as content of, 134-35, 288-91; as site of genesis, 289-95, 362-63;
381, 384; representations of space in, 149- orienting power of, 290, 297, 355, 363;
50, 239, 244; of indiscretions, 166-67; con- sound of bloodstream in, 344-45, 349, 351,
flict as origin of, 220, 240, 242-44, 2so-51, 363-64, 380; embryology of, 458n.26
301-2; symptomatic nature of, 244-4S, Earwicker, 255, 262, 273-86, 339, 342, 349,
247-SI; ofreading written signs, 247-SI; 363; as cipher, 274-80, 288; as a real name,
sonic components of, 282-86, 301; infantile 300, 44In.II, 449 n ·36
regression in, 316, 321-22, 324-27 Earwigs, 295-98; etymology, 296; and folk-
Dream-work: wish fulfillment, Sg, 128-30, lore, 297
133, IS7, 198, 240, 281, 284, 286, 33S, 339; Easter rising, 76
condensation and "composite structures," Eastman, Max, 449n.2
132-33,214, 418nn.5-6; "day's residue," Eckley, Grace, 409n.s6, 417n.3, 436n.24
134, 137; "overdetermination" of meaning 453 n ·4, 457 n . 18
Index
Eddas, 194, 208; Ginnunga-Gap, 359 Ensslin, Gudrun (Baader-Meinhof Gang),
Education: as disciplining of eyes and ears, 42 5 n . 2 3
46-47, 165, 170, 196, 304; and language, Epiphany, 77, 291
169-70, 322, 326-27, 329-33, 345; in Vico, Epistemology, 43, 50
184-85, 190-93; in infancy, 289-91, 318- 19, Epstein, E. L., 420n.20, 437n.31
322, 451-52n.3; FW as negation of, 309, Erman, Adolf (Life in Ancient E8yptj,
329,332-33,345-46, 397n.12; learning to 407n.23, 4IOn.73, 412nn.82-83
write, 325; as humiliation, 326; learning to Eschatology: defined, 24; and postmortality,
read, 326-27; as necessity, 329; as repres- 75-79; Christian vs. Egyptian, 104. See also
sion, 329-31; as destruction of potential, 331 Book of the Dead; Death; Life after death;
Eggs, 133, 320, 357, 361 , 375-80, 383 Nothingness
Ego, 131, 142, 235-37, 239, 249, 319; egotism Eskimos, 337, 351, 359-60
of dream, 306; competitive egotism, 329 Eternity, 92, 147, 154; "eternal recurrence,"
Egyptology and Egyptian allusions, 81, 85, 185
86-125; Sekhet Hetep, 85-86, 104, II6, Ether, 53, 58, 274-77, 398n.lo
125; Horus, 87, 89, 109, 124; Khephera, Etymologies of: "absurdity," 272; "accord,"
93; Isis, 98, 108; Cheops, 102; Nut, 106, 369; "Adam," 79; "artless," 59; "aspect" and
123; mastabah tombs, II3. See also its correlates, 217; "barbarian," 294; "bed,"
Amen-Ra; Amenti; Book of the Dead; 66; "body," 140; "cemetery," 67; "color,"
Osiris "hollow, " "holes," and their correlates,
Eliot, T. 5.,21 436n.25; "discord" and "concord," 338;
Ellis, Havelock (The World of Dreams ), 340, "Dublin," 423n.lO; "dusk," "dust," "ob-
389-90n.lO; 392n·30 fuscation," and their correlates, 264-65;
Ellmann, Richard, xi; on Kerse the tailor, "Earwicker," 273; "earwig," 296; "entaiL"
126; on Joyce's attitudes toward psycho- "retail," and "tailor," 127; "envy," 241; "es-
analysis, 393 n.34; on Joyce and houseplants, chatology, " 24; "etymology," 196; "evi-
413n.95; on Joyce's interest in cubism and dence"" 46; "fact," 202; "family," 203-5,
spatial relations, 420n. 3; on Joyce 's ad- 291; "freedom," 430n.25; "genesis," "na-
dresses, 424-25n.22; on Joyce's eye prob- ture," "genitality," and their correlates,
lems, 433 n. 15; on genesis of A Portrait, 184-85; "Hades," 403n.9; "humanity" and
429n. 14; on Joyce and "Anna Livia Plura- "humiliation," 79-80,83, 326; "idea," 217;
belle," 456 n. I 5; on Joyce's recklessness in "incubation," 375; "infancy," 190; "inn,"
translating "Anna Livia Plurabelle," 457n.23 139; "language," 198; "legibility" and its
Embryology, 143,354-56; and foetal develop- correlates, 46, 199-202; "liberty," 203;
ment, 358; anastomosis of the placenta, "like," 183; "matter," 363; "mind" and its
359-60; pregnancy, 359-60; gynecology, 361 correlates, 59-60; "misericordia," 362;
Emotion, 155-57; as aspect of the uncon- "myopia," 226; "narrative," 31 I; "obe-
scious, 166, 169; as first thought in Vico, dience," 290; "obliteration," 48; "pencil,"
182; as a component of the visible, 244-45, 198; "Peter," 69; "phonetics," "phenomena,"
258,367; genesis and development of, and their correlates, 291 -94; "poetry," 190;
368-70; as growth, 370. See also Investments "Ralph," I 18; "rationality," "reading," "real-
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 135, 165, 312; on ity," and their correlates, 202; "rejuvena-
dreams, 340 tion," 320; "retina," 432 n. 13; "science,"
English, 46; as interpretive medium, 156; his- 15; "tell," 129; "theory," 217; "thing," 60;
tory of, 207; medium of education, 324, "trait," 47; "watching," "waking," and "vigi-
326-27; as domesticating force, 329; haz- lance," 273; "west," 422 n.9
ardous to your health, 351; disintegration Etymology, 196, 294-95; in Freud, 195-96; as
of,365 protoform of psychoanalysis, 196; as regres-
Enlightenment: social contracts, 176; and sion, 196; Joyce on, 196, 197; Vico on, 196-
Goethe, 222 97, 199-206, 206-7; as reconstruction of
End of the world: ciphers for, 55, 110- II, 153, unconsciousness, 197; as uncovering of the
255-59, 262, 420n.8, 422 n.9, 441 n.5; sleep body, 197-98, 430n.23; as history, 199-206;
and death as, 76-77, 82, 334; end of history, playfulness of, in FW, 440n.1
172, 334-35 Euclid, 157, 319
Index
Europe. in FW. 158-59. 165. 169. 171. 172. See "Finnegan's Wake." 69-70; Joyce on. 71
also Vico Finnegans Wake: eccentricity of. 3. 338. 342;
Evolution. 178; in A Portrait. 180; of meaning Joyce on. 4. 6. 8. 17. 20. 24-25. 27.43.64.
and human nature. 184-85; NS and "ascent 131. 146. 174-75. 196. 197. 221. 223. 224. 231.
of man." 206; of vision. 254-57; and hear· 237. 245. 272-74. 309. 312• 316. 333. 336•
ing. 273; of sleep and dreaming. 391 n.21. 344.347.349. 390n. 13. 397 n . 13. 403 n . lO•
439n·38. 458n.25 419n.13. 42In·7. 445n.21. 449n.2; composi-
Eyelids. 247. 251-56; as only visual constant. tion of. 21. 413n.95. 449n.36. 454n.7; as
252; as repressed part of body. 252; invisi· representation. 26. 38.40.43.55.141.197-
bility. 252. 261; as site of conflict. 259; as 98. 223. 251. 264; circular form of, 27. 154.
site of symptomatic inscription. 259-60; 363. 384; grammatical person in. 30; passive
blepharospasmic suppression of. 261; mar- constructions. 45. 139.224. 416-17n.2; af·
ginallocale in body. 261 fixes. 50-51. 128; syntax and grammar of.
Eyes: as seat of consciousness. 217; effects of 55. 168; missing grammatical subjects and
eye closure. 217-25. 253-60; Ideal eye. 227. objects. 69. 131. 330. 343. 395 n ·5; tense. 75;
232. 244; power of language over. 229. predication. 131. 167.224. 373. 416n.2.
231-32.251.261; as object of vision. 232. 424n.17; linear form of. 154.284.381-82;
252. 257; as containers of light. 233. 238; politics of. 165-73; time of. 223-26; quality
wakening of. in dreams. 234. 244-46; as ofrepresentation. illustrated. 252-60; dis·
containers of graphic letters. 235. 247. 250; tinguished from dada and surrealism. 299;
conflict in. 239. 243. 246; as creators of erudition of. 304. 309; as "imitation of the
light. 239. 244-46; and ideal beauty. 240; dream-state." 309-11. 313-16. 324-26; as
erotics of. 241-45; power over body. 242; as "reconstruction of the nocturnal life. "
site and ground of the visible. 245-46; 338- 63
training of. 245-46; as medium of symp· -model paragraph analyzed. 27-37. 39-41.
tomatic writing. 248-51; fracturing effect 66-67. 78-79. 98. 127-30. 133. 134. 142-43.
of. 250-51; liquidation of. 255-59. 262; and 224-25.314-15.318-19.358.374.375.
tear production. 255- 59; equated with "I." 384-85
256; of fish. 257; effect of laughter on. Fisch. Max Harold. 427n.5. 428n.12
258-59; autonomies of. 259 Foucault. Michel. 145. 428n.1I
Foulkes. David. 14. 391 n.26
Fall. the. 28. 82; into exteriority. 199; opening Four. the. 107. 257
pages. 306-7 Frank. Nino. 394n.44; on Joyce's break with
Fairy tales. 53. 140. 322-23; Queen Mab. 75; Cartesianism. 397n.13; on Joyce and theo-
Bluebeard. 308; Jack and the Beanstalk. ries. 448n.33; and Italian translation of
319; Babes in Woods. 328; Little Red Riding "Anna Livia Plurabelle." 457n.23
Hood. 332; The Goose that Laid the Golden Freemasons. 307
Egg. 376 Freud. Sigmund. 5-6.9. 15. 17. 18.47.63. 123.
Family: origins of. in Vico. 176-79. 199. 134.142.145.269; impact on FW. 15-18;
203-6; as heritage. 183; as transmitter of and Vico. 176. 179-80. 182-93. 195-96. 209;
language and ideology. 184-85; as determi- infantile sexuality in. 191-93; interpreta-
nant structure. 199. 202. 206; as center of tion and focus on language. 195-96. 232.
historical conflict in FW. 206; as para- 245.305-15. 449-5In.2; infantile regres·
digmatic force in genesis of social reality. sion. 317; id. 332; somatic stimuli and
206; and bloodlines. 352 dreams. 340; on uterine regression. 355.
Fawkes. Guy. 46 4 1 5 n . lo
Ferenczi. Sandor (Thalassa). 394n.38. -Works: "The Antithetical Sense of Primal
439n.38. 458n.25. 462 n.36 Words." 196 (quoted), 429n.20; Civilization
Ferrer. Daniel, 397n.10 and Its Discontents. 426n.25; The Ego and
Festy King. 44 the Id. 442 n. 12; Interpretation of Dreams.
Finn MacCool, 36. 57. 99. 105. 132. 274; as as- 5-6.8.9. 15. 16. 18.28. 39-40. 128-29. 196.
pect of the dreamer. 146-50.237.294. 301 240.302.306.317.319. 392n·30. 397 n . lO•
Finnegan. Tim. 69-85. 96. 99. 105. 132-33. 397n.13. 414n.6. 418nn.5-6. 429n.18.
134.148-49.274.280.296-97.300-301.320. 434n.17. 437 n ·33. 443 n . 17. 449 n . l • 449-
328 • 37 1 50n.2. 451 n. I. 455n.lO; Introductory Lec-
Index
tures on Psychoanalysis. 317. 394n.38. Giedion-Welcker. Carola. 441 n.6
451 nn.I-2; 455n.lO. 457n.25;jokes and Gifford. Don (Notesforjoyce). 429n.13.
Their Relation to the Unconscious. 258; "A 438n·35.445n.22
Metapsychological Supplement to the The- Gilbert. Stuart. 3
ory of Dreams." 8. 340. 455 n. 10. 457 n.25; Gillet. Louis (Clay book for jamesjoyce).
On Dreams. 418n.5; The Questions of Lay 394n-45. 397 n . lI • 417 n ·3
Analysis. 189. 429n.18; "Revision ofthe Ginnunga-Gap. 353
Theory of Dreams" (New Introductory Lec- Glasheen. Adaline (Third Census). xvi. 18.
tures on Psychoanalysis). 390n.13. 393n.32 44.132.223.273. 394n-4l. 399n.lo. 402n.6.
Funeral. 70-71. 79. 82; games. 68-69. 71; 407n·39. 420n.l. 447 n .26• 454n·5. 456n.17.
mummification and embalming. 105-6. 457n. 19; on the crime in the park. 424n. 16
109; rites. Egyptian. 105-6. 114-21; an- Glugg.239
nointing and extreme unction. 119-21. See Goethe (Conversations with Eckermann). 222
also Burial Gog and Magog. 149
Furst. Charles. 391 n.22. 391 n.23. 443 n. 16. Gogarty. Oliver St. John. 25
459n.26. 391 n.21 Goldsmith. Oliver: "The Traveller." 401 n. 19;
"The Deserted Village." 423 n. I I
Games: hide and seek. 310. 311; FW as. 316. Gorman. Herbert. (jamesjoyce). 429n.14
332; counting games. 319; children's games. Goyert. George. 460n.7
237.245-46.322.323.330. 398n.8• 453 n ·4; Graves: as site of "Real Absence."63. 69; assite
FW as childsplay. 333. 383 of engraving. 64. 72. 73; sleep as "protem."
Gandelman. Claude. 396n.8 70. 81. 374; "watery grave." 372. See also
Gaping Gill (character). 302 Tomb
Gender: dissolution in sleep. negation of sex- Gregory. R. L.. 245. 432 n. II
ual difference. 30. 285. 364-67; and sexual Guinness (family). 419n. II
differentiation. 366-69 Gunn. Michael. 49. 54. 419n.1I
Genesis: Vico's account of. 189-90; infancy as
site of. 191-93; versions of. 210; oflight and Haroun al Raschid. 320
the visible. 245-47; of vision and visual Hart. Clive. xvi. 399n.lO. 402n.5. 405n.4.
space. 289-91; of phenomenal reality. 417 n ·3. 420n.l. 421 n·4. 430n·3. 437n.31.
289-95; of objects and anxiety. 300; of 441 n.lI. 455n.9. 455n.7; Concordance dis-
world. 335; womb as site of. 354. 359. 362- cussed.400n. 14
64. 379-80; ear as site of. 362-64; of ardor Hassan. Ihab. 421 n.3
and love. 365-66; of attachment. 365; of Hats and wigs. 49. 58. 59. 79. 164. 238. 297.
matter. 363 303. 310. 321 • 399 n .12
Genesis. Book of. 83. 141. 189. 194. 211. 245. Hayman. David. 405n.4
261; Enlightenment views of. 177; creation HCE: introduced. 53; as "someone imparticu-
of light in. 217. 245-46; and pregenesis lar." 59; as nothing. 63. 304; waking life. 64.
myth. 218. 245-46; as patriarchal structure. 134-38; as representative man. 74. 136. 169.
290. 354. 381. See also Adam; Biblical 265.3°4; as universal-individual. 91; ab-
references sence of name of. 91. 124; anonymity and
Geography. 150-64; and geographical refer- imparticularityof. 130-33. 139; as dreamer
ences in FW. 151-53. 156-57.348-49.358; of FW. 139-45; nature and meaning of "the
dismantling of. 157. 168 normative letters" H. C. E.• 139-45. 158.
Geometry. 146. 155. 157. 166; Euclidean and 276.366; compared to Tetragrammaton. 141.
Cartesian. 157; dismantling of. 157. 168; as 366; as cipher for the body. 141-45. 276.
object of vision and reason. 172; Rieman- 366; as Vichian man. 193-95.210-11; as
nian and Lobachevskian. 421 n.3 network of historical forces and tensions.
Ghosts and ghost stories. 53. 72. 77. 79. 80. 82. 211-12; as "Here Comes Everybody." 212-
92. 113. 143. 321 15; mode of identification with. 253; as in-
Giants. 36. 147-50. 237-38. 265. 270. 302. 304. fant. 320. 328. 333; apparent absence of. in
327. 328. 339. 347. 364. 371-72; in Vico. ALP. 338-42; as "unborn infant" or "foeto-
145. 173. 176-78. 181-82. 188-94; names of. type." 357. 360; as dual unity with ALP.
149. 302; infants as. 189. 192. 319. 320. 365-68; as knot of attachments. 366-68.
328-29. 332. See also Finn MacCool See also Body; Identity
Index
Hearing: 45, 58,155; power over eye, 160-61; Horace, 44, 401 n.20
visionary, 286-95; in sleep, 268-304; in HostY,55
dreams, hallucinated, 123, 271,297-98; Houdebine, Jean-Louis, 420n.15
constant wakefulness of, 273-74, 276-77, Humpty Dumpty, 133, 134, 318, 319, 375-76
287; balked, in suspension, 275; represented
as radioreception, 276-77; selective, in I Ching, 305
sleep, 276-81; as interpretation, 285-86, "Ideal insomnia," 25,49,68
301; and the unconscious, 276-79, 280-81, Identity, 7-8, 131-45, 365-68, 370-71; dis-
368; and "overhearing," 278-79,294,3°1, integration and absence of. in sleep, 7-8,
303-4,339-52,355-57,363-64; unheard 21,28-29,49-50,54,59,62,63-64, 131,
hearing, 297, 301, 343-44, 349; as uncon- 146-47, 274-75, 285, 365, 366; of FW's
scious screening, 280-81, 283; and phenom- dreamer, 36-38, 49-50,130-33,135-45,
ena, 287-95; hear = here, 287; in infancy, 273-74,317-18, 320-21, 417n.3; at death,
289-9" 323; as obedience, 290-91; audio- 42, 62, 72-73, 76-77, 103-4; of figures in
phonic amplification, 294; vs. listening, 295, dreams, 55, 131-33, 139-40, 270-71, 301-3,
300; hearsay and gossip, 297, 298, 301-3, 306; and the fiction of individuality, 64, 91,
339, 340; and conflict, 299-301; phonetic 142, 168,2°9,214-15,366; and "person-
vs. acoustic, 345-46; hearing in utero, ality," as modern constructs, 142; as prod-
354- 61 uct of history, 176-77, 180, 183-85; for-
Heart, 123, 356; periodicity of systole and di· mation of, in infancy, 191-93,288-91,
astole, 76, 350; sound of, 282, 340, 347; beat- 322-24, 328-31; sexual, 192, 366; collective
ing, 352; binary, 350, 361; Sacred Heart, nature of, in Vi co, 208, 211-15; as a knot of
351,353; heartbeat in womb, 354-58, 378; attachments, 365-66. See also Character;
and anastomosic dual unity, 358; as seat of Conflict; Dreamer; Ego; Shaun the Post;
emotion, 368-69; sound as antilanguage, Objects
380- 82 Infancy and childhood: spatial perception in,
Heath, Stephen, 419-20n.15, 428n.lI, 448n.32 148-49, 193-94,318-19; in Vico, 185-93,
Heavenly bodies, 220, 249, 252, 435n.20 264, 334-35, 338; and formation of body,
Heliotrope, 48, 117, 124, 238-39, 242, 245, 190-93,289-91; infantile regression, 192-
246, 252, 382 94,317-19,322,326,364; hearing in, 289-
Helmholtz, Hermann von, 126, 226, 232, 244, 91; and learning oflanguage, 246,322-26,
245,254,434n.16 328-31; as infinite possibility, 290, 333, 335;
Helvetius, 307, 398n.7 end of, 290-91, 330, 334, 370; FW as re-
Hen, 376-79, 383 awakening of, 318, 328-33, 383; as the re-
Henry II, 183 pressed, 328
Herring, Philip F., 458n.26 Interpretation. See Reading
Hesitancy, 311-12 Introjection, 142, 146-49, 153, 157, 158
Hibernation, 53, 153, 193, 219, 254 Investments (cathexes). 128, 367, 378. See
Higginson, Fred L., 337, 338 Tailors and tailoring
Highbarger, Ernest Leslie, 403 n.9 Invisibility: of the chthonic, 80; of under-
Hillman, James, 402- 3 n.9 wear, 81, 243; of the body, 165, 254; as
Hobbes, Thomas (Leviathan). 427n.6 transcendence of vision and reason, 172,
Hodgart, Matthew 1- C, 436n.25, 456n.7; 216-26; of conflict, 220; of Shem, 240,
Sona in the Works ofjarnesjoyce, xvi, 417 n.4, 243; of dreams' latent content, 243, 247,
43 In·9, 449 n ·37, 452-53 n ·4 249; and the unconscious, 243. 249-50,
Hoffman, FrederickJ. ("Infroyce"), 393n.31 270-72
Holes: "hole affair," 5, 64, 70; and hollows, 41, Ireland, 163-64; the Famine, 180; and English
78, 80, 118; in the head, 48-49; in lace, 54; economic policy, 184; colonization, 207; do-
graves as, 68; caves, 80; Ear of Dionysius, mestication of, 329
274, 339; Gaping Ghyl, 302; Fingal's Isolde, 241
cave, 347 Issy: as emanation, 140; as daughter, 156,
Homer: Odyssey and Ulysses, 176; Enlight- 240-43; little language, 322
enment views of, 177; in Vico, 178-79; and
Hades, 403n.9; Odysseus' homecoming, Jacquet, Claude, 421 n.4
428n ·9 Jaloux, Edmond, 6
470 Index
Janet, Pierre, 17 Landscapes, 30-38; negated, 57; "interment
Jesus Christ, 81, 105, 149, 373 in," So; internalized, 147; spatiality of, in
Jewels, 232, 238, 241-42 dreams, 147-48, 155-58, 270-72, 338-41,
Jolas, Maria, 169 348-49
Joyce, James, 3-25 passim; lack of specificity Lane, Frederick, 460n.28
in speaking about FW, 6, 317; on Freud, Language: and dreams, 8, 14, 16, 18-20,
Vico, and science, 16-18, 394n.40; growth 39-40, 46-47, 59-62, 123, 195-98, 261-62,
as a writer, 17, 332; dreams recalled, 21, 269-72,3°5-15,381, 393n.32, 449-51 nn.l-
431-32n.9, 434n.15; interest in the body, 2; as consciousness, 19,46-47,59-62,96,
143-44, 355, 420n.18; fear ofthunder, 183; 115-19, 121-23, 129-30, 140, 156, 170, 181,
eye diseases and operations, 230, 433- 184-88, 196-97, 202-3, 208-9, 235-36, 239,
34n.15, 438n.36; summer vacation in Bog- 249-5°,281,284-85,288-95,307-8,313-
nor, Sussex, 310, 449n.36; on laughter, 314; 14, 319, 322, 324-27, 329-31; and negation,
purported coldness, 331; and composition 29,41,48-51,64-65; absence of, 56, 159,
of "Anna Livia Plurabelle," 336-38; interest 264-69,317,344-46,351,381-82; as day's
in embryology, 355, 459n.26; attitudes to- residue, 131, 133-34, 158,298-99, 381; and
ward psychoanalysis, 393 n.34; on Switzer- the transmission of instituted power, 169,
land, 398n.7; acquaintance with Egyptol- 289-91, 304, 329, 331-32, 381; as authority,
ogy, 406n. 18; his houseplants, 413n.95; on 170,289-91, 315, 326, 329, 331, 346, 362,
Shaun, 419n.13; on classical vs. modern 381; and the production oftp.e body, 190-
literature, 420n.18, 423-24n.14; interest in 93,246,251,289-9°,319, 452-53n.3; gene-
spatial and object relations, 420- 2 In. 3; sis of, in Vico, 192-93, 196-98; and the
and post-Newtonian science, 421 n.3; on production of reality, 199-202, 289-95;
Dublin in FW, 421-22n.7; on the artist, learning of, 246, 323-26, 328-31; graphic,
state, and revolutionary violence, 424n.14, in dreams, 247-50; representative power,
426n.29; on modern Europe, 424-25n.22; 261-62; and stream of consciousness,
politics, 425n.24; on vision, 436n.27; atti- 269-72; as obedience, 290; diachronic vs.
tudes toward surrealism and theories, synchronic, 298-99; as repression, 329-31;
448n.33; on scribbling, 454n.7; on prim- and difference, 345-46
acy of emotion over intellect in writing, -in FW: negated, 29, 41, 48-51, 64-65; oblit-
454n.7, 462n.39; misgivings about Anna erated, 47-64,131,134,351,361; and op-
Livia, 456n.15; apparent carelessness in positional negation, 51; rendered "vermicu-
translating" Anna Livia Plurabelle," lar," 73-74,79-80; and "giant language,"
457n.23, 460n.27 148-49,421 nn.4-5; "blacked out," 218-25;
Joyce, Lucia: analysis with Jung, 352 n.24, "put to sleep," 221; "not used in ordinary
393 n ·34 connections," 221, 449n.l; liquidated,
Jukes and Kallikaks, 5, 6, 113 256- 58; distinguished from rational lan-
Jung, Carl, 179, 393n.34, 394n.40; archetypal guage, 307-15, 449-52nn.I-2, 380-81; and
psychology, So, 195, 403n.9 "little language," 322; as antilanguage,
344-45, 351, 362, 381, 382-83. See also Au-
Kabbalah, 140, 365 thority, patriarchal; Education; Etymology;
Kain, Richard M., 455n.6 Finnegans Wake; Law; Manifest and latent
Kenner, Hugh, 50, 401 n.22 distinctions; Reading
Kersse the Tailor and the Norwegian Captain, Languages and idioms in FW, 3, 20, 337-
126-30, 275, 280 38, 455n.7; status of, 78, 460-61 n.29;
Kleitman, Nathaniel, 391 n.22, 3';11 n.23, American, 98; black American, 252; Orien-
392-93 n·30 tal, 156, 447n.27; Japanese, 223; Dutch,
Knock (Knock apparition), 242 257, 337, 360-61, 404n.20, 455n.7; Latin
Knuth, Leo, 455n.7 and Greek, 309, 312, 319; Esperanto, 322;
Koran, 227, 383 Swahili, 337-38, 351, 361, 455n.7, 460n.29;
Provem;al, 368; Swiss, 398n.7, 40In.19; Aus-
Labor: body as unit of, 169; and sleep and FW, tralian and New Zealand, 437n.31; Arme-
172 nian and Latin, 461 n.27
Lacan, Jacques, 396n.8, 435 n.22, 442 n. 12 Larbaud, Valery, 20
Ladd, George Trumball, 392-93n.30, 434n.17 Latourette, Kenneth Scott, 414n.99
Index 471
Lavergne, Philippe: French translation of FW, 131-32; as manifest content of FW. 166-67.
397 n .13 307- 10. 313. 315. 319. 322. 381-82; deficien-
Law and laws: of evidence, 44-47; relations cies ofliteralism. 167, 308-10. 313. 315.
of legality to legibility, 44-47, 59-62, 166, 381 - 82
169-70, 199-202,274; language as inter· Litz. A. Walton, 433n.15. 456n.13
nalized system of, 45-47, 170, 199-202, LivY.358
289-90, 328-31, 344-46, 362; as main- Locke, John. 177,226; on state of nature,
tainers of "reality," 59-62, 168, 199-202; of 4 2 7 n .6
corporate control, 144-45, 170. 191-93. Long. Charles H .• 462n.37
289-90; reading as submission to. 170. Longfellow. Henry Wadsworth (The Sona of
199-202.274. 315, 328-31. 333; ofreason. Hiawatha). 456n.14
177-78. 427n.6; collapse of, in FW. 170. Lough Neagh. 347. 374
307-8. 332-33. 380- 81 Luce, Gay Gaer. 39On.19. 392n.27. 430n.2
Leavis. F. R.• 4 Lucifer. 227. 230. 239. 243. 245
Leiris. Michel. 448n.29 Ludwig. Emil, 460n.28
Lenin, V. I.. 332
Lent. 377 McAlmon. Robert. 20
Lessing, Gottfried, 67. 447n.27 MacArthur. Ian. 433n.14
Letter. the. 50. 248-50; buried. 48. 134. 170. MacCabe. Colin, 393n.31. 424n.20
198.248, 272. 310. 313. 324. 326. 332. 382, MacCarthy. Denis Florence (Underalimpses).
397n.13, 437n.33; inscription in flesh. 350,367
248- 51; as cipherfor the dream. 249- 50. McCarthy. Patrick (The Riddles of Finneaans
310. 324-26 Wake). 436n.24. 451 n.3
Levin. Harry. 216, 315, 393n·31, 454n.5 McHugh. Roland, 433n.14. 462n.35; Annota-
Levy-Bruhl. Lucien, 63 tions. xvi. 5, 128. 231. 242, 250, 268, 312.
Lewin, B. D., 459n.26 319, 326. 363. 398n.8, 401 n.20. 4IOn.74.
Lewis. Wyndham. 397n.12. 401 n.19 421 nn.4-5. 432n.13. 441 n.4; on sigla. 140;
Life after death: heaven, 75. 77. 80; limbo. 75, The Siala of Finneaans Wake, 412 n. 3,
360; sleep as. 75-76, 109-10; as illusion. 419 n .14.443n.15
77.82.86; Egyptian, 90-125; duration of Macpherson. James. 25; Temora and other Os-
life in. 103; immortality. 103-4. See also sianic poems in FW. 421 nn.4-5. 456n.16
Underworld Magalaner, Marvin. 455n.6
Light: eternal. 104; absence of, 216-25; in Malcolm. Norman. 390n.16
sleep. 223-26. 238-39; spectrum of visible. Mamafesta. 383-84
224. 229, 232, 233, 238. 244-47; invisible, Manganiello. Dominic Uoyce's Politics).
225. 230. 233. 246; quality of. in dreams. 424n.18.425n.24
228-32.236-39; "chaotic" (or "intrinsic") Manifest and latent content: in language of
retinal. 232-33. 236. 258-59; and space. FW. 71-72. 129. 137-38. 152. 159. 169. 242,
235-36; and point of view. 236; in eyes. 239. 249. 269. 279. 320; in characterization.
262-63; as constituent of the visible. 242- 139-40. 303
46; Newton on. 244; creation and genesis of. -manifest content: of dreams and FW com-
244-47; nature of. 244-47; role of ear in. pared. 31-36. 309-10. 313-15. 324-25.
286-87; in infancy, 289-91. 295; and en- 338- 39, 351, 358- 59, 382; as trivia and resi-
lightenment. role of speech in, 291 -95 due. 134-38; in myth. 195; as nonsense. 325
Limbo. 75. 360 -latent content: the body as, 31-36, 41, 143.
Linearity. 8-9, 27. 39. 54. 164.274; and 249; etymology as uncovering of. 206; invis-
manifest content. 381; in Book ofthe ibilityof. 242-43. 249-50. 272; of dreams
Dead. 114. 115-16, 123-24; and history. and FW compared. 309. 315. 324-25. 351,
154; and lines in FW, 308-9. See also Plot; 382; infantile, 324-26
Reading Mannekin-Pis. 333
Literacy: as submission to authority. 295; as Margerum. Eileen G.• 402 n.6
privilege. 304; as repression. 331; as shrivel- Mark of Cornwall, 241
ing of possibilities, 323; inimical to "Anna Marx, Groucho. 394 n.48
Livia Plurabelle," 345,362 Marx, Karl, 179-80. 183; and Marxism, 169.
"Literal sense": literalism and names in FW. 171
472 Index
Mathematics, 64, 158, 319. See also Geometry Muhammad, 228, 248
Matter, 189, 363 Mummy, 88, 90,105-6,108,109,112,114-16;
Maxwell, Clerk, 245 FW as "mummyscrip," 109, 324
Memory, 7-9, 46-47, 59-62; relations to con- Mutt and Jute, 194, 269, 270-72, 441 nn·5- 6
sciousness and language, 47, 59-62; memo- Myths, 183; of postmortality, 86; as civil his-
rials as, 62,112; of name, 132; in dreams, tories, 195; NS as interpretation of, 195
135, 382; myth as, 194; "Memory of the
Dead," 274-75; of sound, 297-98. See also Names in FW. See Referentiality
Amnesia; Memory, unconscious Napoleon, 39, 138, 159, 416 n.1
Memory, unconscious: of infancy and child- Narcissism, 154
hood, 318-19, 321-26; buried memory, 321, Narrative, 27, 129-30,235-36,271-72,
323-24, 326; prenatal memory, 354-56; or 310- II; and nature of events in FW, 54- 57,
"remembrandts," 360-61,365,375; "state- 400n.17, 432n.lO; fracturing effect of, 251.
dependent" memory, 459n.26 See also Character; Plot; Point of view
Mercanton, Jacques ("The Hours of James National Gallery, 54, 59
Joyce"), 3,4,7,8,16,21,24-25,43,144, Naturalism. See Realism
172, 196, 197,385, 3B9n.2, 39On.13, Negation and negativity, 28-29,41,45,48,
43 1 -3 2n ·9 50- 53, 62, 64; of sexual difference, 30, 285,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 436n.27 364-67; of city, 54,67,151; of identity,
Midden heap, 134-35, 375 130-33, 139-45; of place-names, 151-52; of
Miller, Henry, 216 rationalism and science, in NS, 189
Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies, 237- New Ireland, 157
44,245-46, 289-91, 311, 320, 321 , 330 Newton, Sir Isaac, 92, 188, 244; Opticks,
Mink, Louis, 150,265,333, 432-33n.13, 226-27, 245-46. See also Science
442n.13, 455n.2, 456n.13, 456n.16, 456n.24, New World: tomorrow as, 82, 156; Amer-
457n.24 ica, 110-22,282; dream as creation of new
Minnehaha, 343, 379 world, 231, 232-33, 234
Mitchell, Breon, 43In.7, 434n.19, 44ln.7 Night Lessons (II.ii) , 157, 319, 327
Modernism: 24, 25; and nothingness, 63-64; Nile, 94, 125; sources of, in Victoria and
vs. Egyptian belief, on death, 91-92; con- Albert Nyanza, 361, 374, 375, 460n.28
ceptions of self, 142 Nirvana, 62, 77, So, 153; meaning of, 56
Moles, 58, So, 222, 223, 255, 275 Nonsense, 26-27, 272, 274, 313; dreams and
Monologue interior, 262, 269-72, 368 myth, 195-96,281; and absurdity, 272, 273,
Moore, Thomas (Irish Melodies), 417-18n.4; 296; of dreams and FW compared, 308, 313;
"Oh! Breathe Not His Name," 129, 417n.4; and childhood, 325; orthodox language as,
"The Young May Moon," 233, 434 n. 18; 383. See also Sense and sensation
"Erin, The Tear and the Smile in Thine Norris, Margot, 393n.31, 397n.lO, 424n.16
Eye," 256, 438-39n.37; "Take Back The Vir- Nothingne~,43-44,46,4B,50-54,56,62;and
gin Page," 324, 454n.6; "I Dreamt I Dwelt unconsciousne~, 63; perception of, 63, 264;
In Marble Halls," 347 in Book of the Dead, 100, 114; in Egyptian
Mothering: cultural domestication of, 353, thought, 103; "real nothingness," 63; im-
359, 369; in FW, 353-69, 364-65, 383; moth- manence in the mind, 63, 78; permutability
er's body, 356, 367-70; mother-child rela- of, 64; as "newthing," 64,76, 118,272, 320,
tions in FW, 359-60, 363-70, 382-84; anti- 359; and death, 69, 72, 114; periodicity of
patriarchal power of, 381-83; mother and being and nonbeing, 76; as origin, 272,
child as hero of FW, 382 356-57; reduction to nothing, 365
Mound, 78, 80, 134-35, 153, 272 Novel: and "appeal to experience," 4; and FW,
Mountain, 20, 24, 37, 356, 367-68 4; and "real life," 4-5; FW as "representa-
Mouth (tongue): opening of, 114- 19; and tion of a dream," 6; as "imitation ofthe
"words of power," 116-17, 121-23; asa dream-state," 16, 166; U and the, 2 I, 175-76;
ground for language, 261; in sleep, 265-68, and "common sense," 24; conception of
339; and stream of consciousness, 269, "character" in, 142; and naturalism, 253;
271-72; movement of, 280. See also Deaf- stream of consciousne~, 269-70; FW as, 382
mutism Nugent, Gerald (Ode Written on Leavins
Movies, 252, 438n.35 Ireland), 112
Index 473
Nursery rhymes, 322-24, 326, 452n.4; Mother dreams, 122; revival of, as wakening, 123,
Goose, 140,322,326,328; "As I Was Going 156; spatial, 147-50; in sleep, 150,264; of
toSt. Ives, " 287; "Old King Cole," 321; "What phenomenal disappearance, 264
Are Little Girls Made Of?," 323-24; "A Was Persse O'Reilly, 129,295,297,303,363. See
An Archer," 327; "Old Daddy Dacon, " 330; also Ballad; Earwicker
"Jack andJill," 332; "Rockabye Baby," 332, Peter the Great, 69
372, 384. See also Education; Humpty Petrifaction, 45, 69, 374; sleeping like a rock,
Dumpty; Infancy and childhood 364,374
Phenomena, genesis of, 289-95
Objects: annihilation of, in sleep, 30-31, Phenomena and phenomenology, 63, 165-66,
37,48-49,69,131,146-47,245,348,395- 244, 289-95
96n·5; in dreams, 30-37, 235-36, 239- Phoenix, 31, 263
40,244-45, 435n.21; and the breakdown of Phoenix palm, 117
subject-object distinctions in FW, 78-79, Phoenix Park. See Crime in the park; Dublin:
142, 147, 153-54, 244-45, 246; as aspects place-names
of the subject, 142-44, 156-57, 244-45, Phonetics, 288, 291-96, 303-4; as auditory
395n.3, 416n.2, 420n.3; as constituents of constraint, 344; absence of, in "Anna Livia
space, 155, 157,236, 420n.3; and objec- Plurabelle," 345; vs. acoustics, 345; fixed
tivity, 155, 157-58, 165-66, 169-70,202, by laws, 362
244-45, 259, 262, 335, 460n.16; formation Phul, Ruth von, 417n.3
of, in infancy, 289-91, 319, 330, 452 n.3; and Piggott, Richard, 312
object relations, 368-70, 420n.3 Platonism, 145
Obliteration, 47, 51, 52, 56, 59, 64, 327-28. Play and playfulness, 15, 171,291,321-23,
See also Negation 328-30, 332-33; necessity of learning, 333;
Obscurity, 3-26, 58; Vico on, 178; of myth power of, 383-84. See also Games
and prehistory, 195-96, 207-9, 264; of for- Pleasure: repression of, in HCE, 136-37,280;
eign languages, 337- 38, 344 and criminality, 166-67; as breach of law,
Occult, 77; demons, 89, 92, 95, 102, 117 169; as motivative force of dream and FW,
O'Connor, Frank, 460n.27 171,303,332; in "Here Comes Everybody,"
Ogden, C. K., 231 335-36. See also Repression
o Hehir, Brendan: Classical Lexicon, xvi, Plot of FW: relation to cemeterial plot, 73, 82,
401 n.20; Gaelic Lexicon, xvi, 423n.1O, 270-72; as "delusional acting," 302-3;
457 n .19 Joyce on, 316; as embedment, 382
Old World, 82, 156 Point of view, 29,71, 318; blacking-out of,
Onians, Richard Broxton, 431 n.23 219-26,253,258; in dreams, 236-37, 247-
O'Reilly, John Boyle, 444 n.19 50; effect of eyeblink on, 253-57; during
Original sin, 76, 371, 379; crime as, 167; tears and laughter, 258-59; end of, 262
"original sinse," 263, 327 Polhemus, Robert M., 454n.8
Osiris, 89, 93, 98-100, 104; identity with the Politics, 170-73, and nineteenth-century lib-
dead, 105-7, 114-15, 121-23, 125; body of, eralism, 180; of "Haveth Childers Every-
107-8 where," 180; and history, in Ireland, 183
Other world: sleep as, 76-77, 79; body as, Polyak, S. L. (The Retina), 432 n.ll, 432 n.13
108; Tir na Nog, 255; America as, 282, Pope, Alexander (Essay on Man), 176, 177
402-3n.9. See also Book of the Dead; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A: com-
Underworld pared to FW, 57, 59, 62, 83, 91, 332; Vico
Our Exagmination, 87, 143, 199 and, 180; as examination of relations with
Owls, 153, 282, 409n.56, 430n.6 parents, 184; opening pages, 188, 213; first
paragraphs, 291
Pandora, 363 Pothooks, 325-26
Parandowski, Jan, 144, 394n.36, 420n.16 Pound, Ezra, 3, 336
Parnell, Charles Stuart, 312 Power, Arthur (Conversations withJames
Parr, Thomas, 133, 418n.8 Joyce), 420n.18, 423-24n.7, 425n.22,
Patriarchy. See Authority, patriarchal 454 n·7,462n·39
Perception: 45; burial in flesh, 79; and vi- Priam, 168
tality, 81; loss of, 100; regaining of, in Prehistory: aboriginality, 63, 181-82; infancy
474 Index
as, 185, 188-8<}; sleep as, 193-95; Nean- 253-54; and the representation of "real life"
derthal Man, 194, 210; Heidelberg Man, in FW, 4-9, 18-19,24-25,26-35,38,40-49,
194, 210, 302; primordial dialogue, 272. See 51-59,66-71.216-25,227-37,315-16,320,
also Infancy and childhood; Vico 322, 324, 382, 452 n.3; and the relations of
Psychoanalysis: and the "science" of the FW to objective reality, 24,135-39,151-
dream, 10- 12; its relations to FW, 15- 18; 58,165-70,274-86,300-301,382,445-
Joyce on, 16- 18; vs. "cycloannalism," 74; 47nn.23-24; and the depiction of real-world
psychoanalytical account of dream forma- events in FW, 116- 18, 155- 57, 274-80,
tion, 129-30, 134,25°-51,316,355, 435n.21, 443-45nn.19-20, 445-47nn.23-24; and re-
437n·33, 441 n·7, 457n.25; and language, 195; ality, as man-made institutions, 153, 168,
as reconstruction of" proto history, " 196; 202; and the representation of unconscious
and vision, 244. See also Dreams; Freud; reality in FW, 252-60, 338-44, 347-50,
Manifest and latent content; Science; Vico 352-54, 398-99n.lO. See also Novel; Ob-
Pubs and inns, 138; dreamer's life as publican, jects; Representation; Science
30, 108, 135-40, 169, 274, 279-80, 285-86, Referentiality, 27-28, 31, 36; negation of,
301, 445-46nn.22-23; pub as public, 297 49-52; of names in FW, 130-33; of acrostic
Purdy, S. B., 421 n.3 HCE, 140-42; apparent lack of, in FW, 216,
305-16; of FW. compared to conventional
Queen Mab, 75 literature, 309, 313, 382; ofriver-names in
Quinet, Edgar, 335, 454n·9 "Anna Livia Plurabelle." 341-45
Regression: and sleep. 39; infantile. 149.
Rabate, Jean-MicheL 299, 448 n·32 317-19.322,372.384; Vichian. 192-94,210;
Rabelais, Fran<;ois, 42Inn.4-5 etymology as. 196; visual, 257; thalassal,
Rader, Ralph, 394n.17 371-72,374; uterine, 354-56. 366-67. 372
Radio, 53, 275-76, 281, 294-95 Reinvigoration: sleep as. 84; as "refJesh-
Rainbows, 121, 224, 230-32, 233, 237, 245-46, meant." 128. 254. 256; as recreation and re-
255,260; and "rainbow girls," 230,240-42. freshment, 156
See also Light: spectrum of visible Rejuvenation, 320-21; of meaning. 328. 377
Randomness, 9, 16,27,3°5, 3II; and unpredic- Rembrandt van Rijn, 360
tability, 316, 381-84. See also Association Renewal. 32 I
Rationality, 28, 39; or rationalization, 40, 31 I; Representation, 36, 38, 40-41. 43, 52. 165-70;
"day's reason," 76, 78, 166; etymology of, of nothing, 47- 59. 62-64; of life beyond
80, 202; and constructed space, 147; inade- the grave. 67. 71-72, 74. 79. 80. 154. 194; of
quate in gauging emotions, 158; as distor- the body. 141-45. 154-57; ofthe invisible.
tion, 166; as accession to laws, 169; absence 216-27.254-58.271-72.341-46.367.
of, in first men, 179; as a man-made institu· 380-81; FW's representation concretely il-
tion, 179, 184, 188-89, 202-3; inadequacy lustrated. 232. 252-60, 341-46; of infancy.
of, in understanding prehistory, 181; neces- 315-33
sity of abandoning, 182, 188; in Vico, 183; Repression: of aggression and power. 128-29.
loss of, in laughter, 258-59; inimical to FW. 169-70, 243. 328. 332; as unconsciousness
308, 310; in sleep and FW. 309; inadequacies of possibility. 136-37.315.319.330-31; of
of, 312-13, 351, 380, 382; rhyme or reason. the body. 145. 197-98.253-54.279-80.283.
351, 354-56 299. 444 n. 19; and sexuality. 166-67. 170.
Reading: as process, 39-41. 305-16, 382-85; 190-93; of Shem by Shaun. 240. 249. 283;
and linearity, 164, 169-70, 274; as insti- learning and reading as instruments of. 170.
tuted system of rules, 169-70,274; as inter- 289-91. 315. 319, 329-32; FW as undoing of.
nalized submission to authority, 202; effect 263,314. 326- 29. 331-33. 383- 84. 439 n ·39;
of, on body, 260, 328, 384; out of context of infantile memory, 318- 19.322-23
and linear order, 305-6, 316; and associa- Resurrection: of the dead. 67. 77, 79, 81-82.
tion. 305-13, 315, 348-50, 352-53; "between 97. 106-7; of the body. 70. 82. 85. 87. 98• 99.
the lines," 308-10. 313, 322; as uncon· 106, II3. 119.121; and solar myths. 76, 114;
sciousness of possibility. 319; in childhood, as waking. II5-16. 122. 123-25; in FW.
326-27,329,332. See also Literal sense; Mani· II6- 19. 155. 159. 238. 284-85; etymology
fest and latent distinctions; Randomness as. 197-98; "waking the dead," illustrated,
Realism, 4-5,16,18.43,52,175,213-14, 254-60; as reawakening of "original sinse."
Index 475
Resurrection (continued) Sexual difference: disintegration of. in sleep.
263; of memory. 327; of stifled possibility. 30. 285. 366-69
327; of childhood. 328; of dead head. 333; Sexuality: clitoral and penile erections dur-
bringing to mind the out of sight. 342. ing dreams. 13; phallic. 123-24. 157. 198.
See also Arthur; Finnegan; Jesus Christ; 332; and dreams. 145. 247-48. 250; incest.
Osiris 156-57.242-44; defecation. 165.249; and
Revue des deux mondes. 78 shame. 166-67. 240-44. 249. 332-33; homo-
Ricouer. Paul. 393n.32 sexuality. 166-67. 424n.16; bisexuality. 167.
Riddles. 310-14 366; masturbation. 167; urination. 167. 323.
Robinson. Henry Morton. 395n.l. 405n.4. 333-34.382. 395n.2. 451-52n.3; voyeurism.
424n.16. 462n.37; Skeleton Key. 26. 36 167. 241-46. 263; illicit pleasure. 170-71;
Rockwell. Norman. 52 toilet training. 191.289-90. 451-52n.3; in-
Roheim. Geza. 394n.38; The Gates of the fantile. in Vico. 191-93. 198-99; "poly-
Dream. 396n.6; on the dream and the other morphous perversity." 192; desire. 239. 241;
world. 402-3n.9; 415n.llo; on dream and sex for fun. 316; female. 354-84. See also
the ego. 435n.21; theory ofthe dream. Appetite; Body; Contlict; Crime in the
456n.25; unconscious memory. 459n.26 park; Education; Underwear
Rose. Danis. 405n.4. 411 n.8o Shadows. 58. 218. 223. 373; and ghosts. 69. 76
Rutherford. C. w.. 433n.15 Shakespearean quotation. 82. 371
Shapiro. Arthur. 391 n.25
Sainean. L.. 421 n.4 Shaun the Post. 140. 150; as representative of
Saint Martha Mary Alacoque. 353 HCE's ego functions. 22. 234-36. 240. 319.
Saint Michael. 239. 245 378; as carrier of letters. 140. 234-36. 239.
Saorstat. Erin. 159. 164. 268 246. 319. 331. 351. 419n.13; his barrel. 140.
Sartre.Jean-Paul. 64. 401 n.21 235. 378; "First and Second Watches of."
Saturday Evening Post. 52 234-36.239; "Show'm the Posed." 236. 240.
Schopenhauer. Arnold. 67. 416n.1 260. 319. 331. 378; as watcher and "spa-
Science: and problems of evidence. 8. 14-15. tialist." 236.244.246; censor. 243. 319. 331;
18.43-48.54.58.63.190.194.228-29; and baffled receiver of news from "down under."
sleep and dreams. 10-18. 24; and "new sci- 246. 249; implication in the visible. 249; re-
ences." 14-15. 63. 85.179.209. 255; Joyce's lation to Shem. 249; and literate conscious-
attitudes toward. 17. 394n.40; Newtonian. ness. 249. 331; his appetite and "invest-
92. 188-90; Vico·s. contrasted with main- ments" in food. 378; in "Anna Livia Plura-
stream. 177. 181. 188-90; quantum theory. belle." 351
253; and oversights of empiricism. 244-45. Shem the Penman. 43. 71. 140; as Cabler. 53.
254. 264; and science fiction. 334-35; post- 240. 249; invisibility of. 240. 243-44. 249;
Newtonian. 421 n.3. See also Descartes; below consciousness and literacy. 240. 249.
Dreams; Embryology; Evolution; Freud; 351; as "unconscious alter ego." or "other."
Newton 251; "down under" in the body. beneath the
Scotography. 52.54. 56. 58.63.77 conscious and visible surface of things. 241.
Scott. Bonnie Kime (Joyce and Feminism) • 243-44. 249-50. 252. 259. 378; as prompter
424n.19 of the dream. 241. 244. 247-49; malicious
Segal. Julius. 39On.19. 392n.27. 430n.2 counteragent. unconsciously canny pro-
Seidman. Robert (Notes for Joyce) • 429 n.13. ducer. 247; as inscriber of "the Letter." 248-
438n.35. 445 n.22 49; writing on the body. 248-51. 252. 259; his
Selzer. Richard. 409n.67 writing as somatic. symptomatic. 249.
Senn. Fritz. 421 n.4. 455n·7 250.259; as "Autist." 249-50.252.259; rela-
Sense and sensation: 45. 268; relation to lan- tion to Shaun. 250; as Punman. 308; riddler.
guage. 62; "trained senses." 62; loss of. 100; 311; scribbler. 325-26; shame's voice. 333; in
regaining of. 115-16; in mouth. 117-18.280; "Anna Livia Plurabelle." 351
as aspect of dreams. 123; as primordial. in Simultaneity. 306
Vico. 183. 189; distinguished from percep- Sleep. 3-26; REM sleep as "somatic correlate"
tion. 188; closure of. 270. 272; absence of. of dreaming. 11-13; REM and NREM.
272; dormancy of. 273; and sensing devices. 11-15; continuity ofthought during. 13;
276; "sense arrest." 277 length of. 22; triviality of. 23; snoring. 28.
Index
282; as."vegetative" state. 38.80. I16-18. 146-48.254-58.372; "objective." 30-31.
151. 234. 377; and death. 43. 45. 49. 53. 58. 155. 236. 244-45. 254; Cartesian. 31. 46.
66-85. 109. I13. 114-15. 194; and closure of 144-45. 335. 448n.27; ofthe body. 36. 76.
the senses. 46-49. 270. 272; dreamless. 42. 96-99. 145. 148-49. 154. 158-59. 189-90.
50. 55. 59. 62. 67. 122. 143. 149-50. 194. 236. 253. 371-72. 421 n.5; perceptual consti-
256-58. 343. 354-56. 379; as substance. 64. tution of. 47. 145. 236. 244. 254; mythic. 78;
77. 141. 208. 259; relations to "underworld." chthonic. 80; of the "other world." 92-97.
77. 109; as recreation and refreshment. 128; 100. 107. I14. 374; infinite. 94. 148; and di-
from a Vichian perspective. 193-94; as mensionlessness. 101. 148-49. 235. 356. 372;
ground ofthe dream. 239. 271-72. 305; as four-dimensional. 147; creation of. 149.
"forty winks." 254-55. 259; and vigilance. 189-93.289-91.318-19; emotional con-
260. 273. 276. 278; FW as mimetic of. 264; stituents of. 156-57.244; in visual dreams.
talking in. 272; toothgrinding in. 282. 236. 239-40. 244-45; perception of. 236.
443-44n.19; sonic disturbances of. 283-86; 240. 244; subliminal components of. 236-
as "state of nature." 293.313; as retirement. 37. 240. 242-45. 249. 254; auditory. 288.
301; as reenactment of childhood. 320. 382; 447-48n.27; uterine. 355-57. 259-60. 367.
as rejuvenation. 320-21. 377. 382; as fall 379-80. See also Descartes; Geography; Ge-
back into body. 326; as wakening and re- ometry; Objects; Reason; Vision
birth. 357. 359-60. 363-64; as uterine Speaker. absent. 101.271-72
regression. 359-64. 378; as incubation. Speech acts. 265
375-80; as reenactment of birth. 376-79; "Spirits." 70. 80. 82. 140. 250
altered metabolism of the body in. 377-78; Stella. 242
sleepwalking. 392 n.27 Stephens. James. 6. 337
Snyder. Frederick. 390n.16 Storytelling. nocturnal. 271; and sound. 2Bo.
Solipsism. 214. 244 281
Sorel. Georges. 179 Straumann. Heinrich. 421-22n.7
Sollers. Philippe. 419-20n.15. 425n.23 Stuttering. IBo. 294; language of FW as. 307
Solomon. Margaret C. (Eternal Geomater). Subject and subjectivity. 72; subject-object
393n.31. 420n.3. 420n.20. 436n.24 relations. 78. 142. 147. 153-54.244-46;
Songs: "Auld Lang Syne." 46. 378. 383; "Brian body as subject of FW. 142-43; constitution
o Linn." 153. 154. 168; "The Wild Man from between eyes and ears. 144. 150
Borneo." 179; "The Man that Broke the Sublimation. 191; in dreams. 243. 249
Bank at Monte Carlo." 260; "Johnny I Substance. sleep as. 64. 141. 208
Hardly Knew Ye." 300.375; "John Peel." 301. Subterranean. 81-82. 159
449n.37; "There's Hair Like Wire Growing Sullivans. 221
Out of the Empire." 308; "Ten Little In- Sun. 59; as archetype and origin. 76; resurrec-
juns." 327; "When London Sleeps." 365; tion and solar myths. 76; solar system. 76;
"Down Went McGinty." 371; "It's Your Last solar physics. 76. 217-18; and Egyptian
Lap. Titanic. Fare Thee Well." 371; "Rocked supernature. 92-96. 98-99. 102. 104. I14.
In The Cradle Of The Deep." 372; "Jolly 116-18; and heliotrope and sunlight. 238-
Young Waterman." 382; "A Nation Once 39; solstitial refleshmeant. 254
Again." 432n.lO; "The Ballyhooly Blue Rib- Sunset. 92-94. 98. I12. 121
bon Army." 457 n.24. See also "Finnegan's Suter. August. 20. 394n.43
Wake"; Moore. Thomas Surrealism. 299. 433n.15
Sound: absence of. 47-49. 57-58.154.268- Swift. Jonathan: use of "little language" in
69.273.280-81; "sound sense." 127. 146. FW. 322. 453n.5; A Taleofa Tub. 360; Gulli-
280. 288. 291. 294. 295. 297. 337. 338; as ver.367
component of the dream. 273. 278. 280- Swinburne. Charles Algernon. 357
82.283-86.3°1; and external reality. 278. Symptoms. 145. 250; FW as symptomatic writ-
282-86; as wakening force. 280. 283- ing. 157.251; dreams as. 244-45. 248-51;
85. 3°1; sound of the body. 282-83; in adult body as symptom. 251; facial expres-
"Anna Livia." 340-49; in utero. 360; FW as sion as. 259-60
sound effect. 281. See also Ear; Hearing;
Phonetics Tacitus. 51
Space. 146-65; annihilation of. 29. 47-48. Tailors and tailoring: "formal alteration." 127;
Index 477
Tailors and tailoring (continued) Unamuno. Miguel de. 42 (quoted). 397n.1
alteration of investments. dreamwork as. Unconscious. the: as "the unknown." 6-7. 9.
127-30; redress. 127-30. 137; retailoring of 79; in Joyce and Freud. 8. 15- 18; as nes-
body in blink. 259 cience. 15. 189; ciphers for. 29. 31. 38; as
Telegraphy. 46. 53. 58. 72. 247. 250. 275. subject of FW. 24-71 passim. 135-45.
398n.lO; Reuters. 250. 325 151-70. 194-95. 216- 25. 227-37. 315- 16.
Telephony. 56. 282. 299 320. 322. 324. 338-85; as "no-conscious-
Telescopy. 21. 434n.2o ness." 42-59; unconsciousness as death. 44.
Television. 56. 58. 252. 438n·35 49.52.62.66-84. 101-2: collective. 109;
Terracotta. 79. 230 body as. 135-45. 194. 253. 341-46. 357;
Thirst. 100-101. II5-16. 280 relations to nothingness and aboriginality.
Thomas. Northcote Whitbridge. 455n.11 63; absolute. 71. 79. 82; as ground of the
Thousand and One Niahts. 320; 1001 as cipher. dream. and FW. 71. 251; as "underground."
361 79-80. 328; as "underworld." 80. 170; as
Thunder: in Vico. 175. 177. 179. 194; patriar- chthonic power. 80. 99; as world "down
chal thunder. 199. 289; thunderwords. 282. under." 110.164.235.238.249-52. 437n·3I;
289 and "infrarational" coherence. 122- 23. 135.
Time. 51. 82; chronology of dreamlessness. 154-58. 172. 185; as invisibility. 217. 221.
56; end of. 75-77. 82-83. 103. 171-72; sleep 240.243.249.254.255.270; and laughter.
as breach in continuity of. III- 12; reversal 258; represented in FW. 252-60. 338-44.
of. 120-21; as "spell of hesitancy." 312; in 347-50.352-54. 398-99n.lO; as origin. in
"Anna Livia Plurabelle." 358-59; annihila· Vico. 179. 181. 188; NS as psychology of.
tion of. in sleep. 359 181-82.185-93; as "ignorance." in Vico.
Toynbee. Arnold. 83-84. 88. 405n.5. 405n.21 182.188.193; and infancy. 185-93.318-39.
Transubstantiation. 141-43. 366 369.384; collective. in Vico. 2II-15; rela-
Tridon. Andre. 416n.l tion to letters and literacy. 308- 15.449-
Tristan. 241. 324 52 n. I; and prenatal life. 355- 59. See also
Triviality: of sleep. 23; of elements in dreams. Dreams; Freud; Infancy and childhood;
29. 135. 167; marginality. 169; and the apoc- Manifest and latent Distinctions; Vi co
alyptic. 245; marginality. 169; of elements Underground. 79-80. 328
in FW. 315. 324; of body. in "Anna Livia Plu- Underwear. 81. 243. 318. 350. 367
rabelle." 343 Underworld. 69. 75: sleep as. 78. 79. So-81.
Troy. Mark L.. "Mummeries of Resurrection. " 374; unconscious as. 80. 170; Celtic. 374;
405n-4. 406n.18. 412n.83 Elysium. 75. 104. 110. 154; Erebus. 78;
Tussaud. Madame. 44. 59. 63. 77. 87 Hades. 78. 82. 359; hell. 75. 76. 77; Nether-
Tutankhamen. 74. 108. 109. II3. II6 world. 59. 75. 80. See also Book of the
Twain. Mark (Huckleberry Finn). I I 1.41 I n.80. Dead; Life after death; Other world
412n.81
Twins. See Shaun the Post; Shem the Penman Vacations and holidays. 172
Valhalla. 78
Ulysses: as self-analysis. 17. 184; and FW. Vegetation. human. 37.117-18.151.234.299.
17-18.21. 137.317; Bloom's eyelids in 377. See also Dumbness; Madame Tussaud
"Lotus-Eaters." 22.253; "Hades." 82. 84; Veils. 7. 10. 69. 78. 23 1• 254
Dedalus in. 91. 184; "Scylla and Charyb- Ventriloquism. 71. 271-72. 280. 302. See also
dis." I 10; morning mouth. 118; Kersse in. Dumbness: and dummies
126; as "epic ofthe body." 144.193; "Les· Verney. Thomas. 458-59n.26
trygonians." 164. 193; realism of. 176; Ho- Vico. Giambattista (The New Science). 43.
meric correspondences in. 176. 178; "Nes- 46. 63. 83. 145. 174-215. 264. 272. 288-89.
tor." 207; Stephen Dedalus' self-fathering. 297; and Freud. 18. 176. 179. 195-96. 209;
213; stream of consciousness in. 269-70; on the state of nature. 175. 176-77. 179-80.
erudition of. 304; "Yes." 332; "Sirens." 340; 181; on genesis of language. 175. 179. 193.
"Oxen of the Sun." 354- 55; our great sweet 196-97; as an intellectual foundation of
mother. 357; Stephen's relation with mother FW. 176; conception of history in. 176-80;
in. 368; "Ithaca." 371 on origins offamily. 177. 178-80. 199.
Umbrellas. 220. 232. 256. 275 203-6; Joyce's interest in. 179-80; on ori-
Index
gins of consciousness, 180, 181; on origins Washerwomen, 339-40, 346, 347, 350-51, 357,
of civil institutions, 180, 199; of history, 358-59, 363; and washing, 352-53
181; NS as psychoanalysis, 181-93, 196-99; Watt, Ian, 420n. 16
on origins of Western thought and civiliza- Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 3,6,20,21,38,87,
tion, 181-83, 199,362; on "Poetic Wisdom," 174,237,312,345,349, 399n.IO, 403 n .lO,
181-93, 264; and infancy, 185-93, 264, 334; 438n·36, 456nn. 14- 15
on origins of language, 192, 195-97; on ori- Weber, Samuel, 397n.1O
gins of social history, 202 -6; NS as book of Weekends and weekending, 172, 362
unconscious origins, 210, 215, 272; on ori- Wellington Memorial, 165, 185, 198, 244
gins of dialogue, 270-72_ See also Genesis; Wells, H. G., 144
Wakening West, 92, 112-13
Victoria and Albert Nyanza, 374, 379, 460n.28 Wheatstone, Sir Charles, 287, 447 n_26
Vikings, 57, 168, 352 Wilde, Oscar, 166; The Picture of Dorian Gray,
Vinding, Ole, 6, 7, 17, 131, 389n.8 438n ·36
Virgil: Virgilian fortune telling, 305, 311; Williams, Raymond, 428n.16
Aeneid, 401 n.2, 403 n.9 Winking, 254-55, 274; forty winks, 254, 259
Vision: during dreams, 11-12,47-48, 121, 150, Winter, 58, 254
223, 226-40, 243-44, 247-49, 251-52; Wilson, Edmund, 417n.3, 446n.24
presentative vs. representative, 12,227-33, Wish fullfillment, 89; and dreamwork, 128,
261-62; in sleep, 16, 24,45-47, 53, 57, 59, 133, 157; and genital desire, 198; and desire
151,216-25, 226; theories of, 226, 244-46, to sleep, 240, 281, 284, 286, 335, 339
254,261; erotics of, 240-45, 436n.26; li- Wolff, Philipp, 455n.7
quidation of, 255- 58, 262; power oflan- Womb, 354, 359, 379-80; hearing in, 354-55;
guage over, 261 -62, 286-95; genesis of, sleep as return to, 354-56; as site of "Anna
289-9 1 Livia Plurabelle," 355-56; as site of FW,
Voice: and phenomena, 285-94; illuminating 357-58, 360; as site of genesis, 359, 379-80;
power of, 291 -95; as component of ear, 295; as site of night, 374, 376-77
and hearsay and gossip, 297, 298 Work in Proaress, 20, 143, 144
Vuillemin, Jules, 405n.22 Woolf, Virginia, 52
Women: and ideal beauty, 240; and looks, 240;
Wake, 66-85; relation of FW to, 87, 270-71, status of female characters in FW, 356-57;
328, 339, 362 , 365, 377-78 and history, 362; primacy of, in FW, 367
Wakening: of eyes and vision, 11- 15,234-38, Word made flesh, FW as, 37, 141; and Vico,
240, 243, 245-46; of "original sinse," 73; as 198-99
"coming forth by day," 115, 117-18; as resur- Wordplay, 305- 15; puns, 92, 110, 184, 198, 210;
rection of the body, 115- 16; and acquisition acrostics, 139-42, 348, 366; as paradigm of
of literacy, 140, 156; as return to reality, collective-individual, 212; slips of tongue,-
155-56, 373, 382; of mankind, 194; role of 310,325; rebus, 311-12, 315
sound in, 281, 284-85, 301, 354-57; of ear, Worthington, Mabel (Sona in the Works of
289-91,294-95; dream analysis and riddle jamesjoyce) , xvi, 417n.4, 43In.9, 449n.37,
solving as, 314; as quickening and birth, 45 2 -53 n ·4
343, 345, 357-58, 364-66; as return to real-
ity, 373- See also Evolution; Genesis Zero, 53, 62, 145, 365-68
War ofjenkins' Ear, 300 Zoethout, W. D., 437n.30, 439-40n.40
Ward, Swinson, 421 n-4
Index 479

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JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

The University of Wisconsin Press . MAD ISO N. W I S CON SIN

Printed in the United States of America

Ubrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN-13: 978-0-299-10824-3 (pbk: alk. paper)

Maps and Figures ix

Chapter 1 "Reading the Evening World" 26

Chapter 2 Nothing in Particular: On English Obliterature 42

Chapter 4 Inside the Coffin: Finnegans Wake and the

Chapter 5 The Identity of the Dreamer 126

Chapter 6 Nocturnal Geography: How to Take "Polar

Chapter 8 "Meoptics" 216

Chapter 9 Earwickerwork 264

Chapter 10 "Litters": On Reading Finnegans Wake 305

Chapter II "The Nursing Mirror" 317

Chapter 12 "Anna Livia Plurabelle": A Riverbabble

Map A. "Howth Castle and Environs" 32

Figure 2. I. Etymological chart: *men- 60

D JamesJoyce. Dubliners. New York: The Viking Press, 191>1.

Alb. Albanian Germ. Germanic O.E. Old English

Other abbreviations and symbols:

Because they are susceptible to varied interpretations and constructions, the

"IN OUR OWN NIGHTTIME"

4 JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

6 JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

8 JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

10 JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

12 JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

14 JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

THE JOYCEAN "UNGUMPTIOUS" AND THEIRS

16 JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

"EPISTLEMADETHEMOLOGY FOR DEEP DORFY

JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

20 JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

"SLEEP, WHERE IN THE WASTE IS

22 JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

"Readin8 the Evenin8

The paragraph locates us "in bed"-"early"-though it does so in a man-

"Readina the Evenina World" 27

JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

"Readin8 the Evenin8 World" 29

JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

"Reading the Evening World" 31

+- to Mullingar Castle Knock Ashtown Cabra

Grand Canal Crumlin

The Irish Sea

(Gael. name: Beinn Eadair

sleeping place"): R.I.P. ~

"Cobra Park" (370.7) " " "the domnatory of Defmut"

"done abate" (547.27)\

"looks like Iceland's ear" (129.27)

"old butte new" (13.14) "And a live?" (608.14)

"rath in mine mines" (16.27) "Downlairy" (40.30)

"sire ofleery subs of dub" (596.12)

"The Vico Road goes round and round

JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK

"Reading the Evening World" 37

JOYCE'S BOOK OF THE DARK