Wipe your glosses with what you know
A reconnaissance mission through the works of James Joyce.
Rob James
June 16, 2025
That date, June 16, is what lovers of the work of James Joyce (1882-1941) the world over celebrate as Bloomsday. It is the anniversary of the late spring day in 1904 when the action takes place in that imposing monument of world twentieth-century literature, Ulysses. As such, it is also a suitable date to recap my earnest pass as a mature reader through the principal works of this perplexing but constantly surprising writer.
BIOGRAPHY
Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce (1959, revised 1982) is one of the greatest of literary biographies. It is a comprehensive and frank portrayal of a complicated and not always likable or admirable man, and it is a work of art itself. The biographer scours Joyce’s past and path. I love his quotation of a rather unimpressive work from secondary school; Ellmann charitably remarks that “this example may give heart to adolescents who are searching their own works for evidence of literary immortality, and not finding much.” It does indeed, and not just to teenagers.
Joyce was born in Dublin in a middle-class Catholic family. He was a lifelong subject of the United Kingdom, even when he had opportunities to become a citizen of the Irish Free State (1922-1937) or Éire/Ireland (1937- ). He left Ireland early in his life, and as a permanent emigre, he relished UK privileges abroad. He approved of the movement for Irish independence in principle, but drew the line at Irish Republican Army (IRA) style violence. That ambivalence led to an uneasy relationship between Joyce (much like his character Stephen Dedalus) and the country of his birth, upbringing and imagination.
He attended the Jesuit Clongowes Wood school, then University College Dublin. He met Nora Barnacle 10 June 1904, and something sexually important between them happened six days later on Bloomsday. To make ends meet he taught English, mostly in the nationally ambiguous city of Trieste 1904-1915 (during which time the Berlitz head absconded with the school money!). His short story collection Dubliners, completed back in 1905-1907, was finally published in 1914; his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published in 1916.
He and Nora lived in Zurich 1915-18 and Paris 1920-1940. His great work Ulysses was serialized and published in entirety in 1922, though it was banned in many countries (Ireland being the last to lift the proscription). He finally married Nora in 1931, and his last work Finnegans Wake was published in 1939. He died in Zurich and is buried there. (There is controversy over a Joyce memorial in Dublin, erected more to tourism than to the love of Ireland and Joyce for one another. It sounds a bit like the relation between John Steinbeck and my home town of Salinas, California, which resented his portrayal of the agricultural elite in The Grapes of Wrath until he received the Nobel Prize, at which point he became “our boy” and the local hero!)
All of Joyce’s work is set in the Irish capital. “If I can get to Dublin, I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”
DUBLINERS AND “THE DEAD”
Dubliners consists of fifteen short stories, told by child, adolescent and adult narrators. They capture the Dublin middle class at a peak of nationalist fervor. Irish publishers were put off by the vulgarities and by the slights of the United Kingdom. Only when English publishers issued the collection years after completion, in 1914, did the Irish follow suit.
Each features an epiphany, what Joyce called the sudden “revelation of the whatness of a thing,” the moment in which “the soul of the commonest object … seems to us radiant.” In Ellmann’s own eloquent words, “Though such occasions are as rare as miracles, they are permanently sustaining; and unlike miracles, they require no divine intercession. They arise in quintessential purity from the mottled life of everyday.”
The only story I have read and re-read so far is the last one, “The Dead.” It packs 19,000 words—a novella, really, akin to Heart of Darkness, Death in Venice, and The Beast in the Jungle (as it so happens, my other favorites—and I also prefer watching 800m and 1500m runs to both sprints and long-distance events). The 1987 John Huston film is a wonderfully faithful rendition and a beautiful depiction of 1904 Dublin.
The Morkan sisters host a Twelfth Night party and their nephew Gabriel Conroy frets over the academic speech he will give. He and his wife Gretta arrive late. Songs are sung, he gives his highfalutin speech, and he leaves proud of himself, thinking it has gone well. That night at a hotel, he triumphantly expects to make love to his wife. But she is lost in thought. At the party a man has sung “The Lass of Aughrim” (with a tragic lyric akin to Tess of the d’Urbervilles—a haughty lord has left a poor girl with a child from an affair he disclaims). The tune has transfixed her; it reminds her of a 17-year-old boy she loved, Michael Furey, who sang that song to her. She thinks he died for love of her, and is overcome by the flooding back of the memory.
Gabriel is burning. He sees his wife is still in love with this mere lowly boy, who only worked in the frigging gas works, not with him the fancy-pants teacher and book-review writer, and he is crushed. He reflects on the continuing power and presence of the dead in our lives. There are haunting reminders of death throughout: monks sleeping in their coffins to prepare themselves for their final end, the Morkan sisters representing impending mortality. The ending is heart-wrenching—read it aloud, with an Irish lilt if a lilt you can muster:
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
T.S. Eliot called it “one of the greatest short stories ever written,” and I agree. In different relationships in my life I have been Gabriel, I have been Michael, I have even been Gretta.
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
Both a Künstlerroman and a Bildungsroman, a novel of the development of an artist and a man, this work introduces streams of consciousness, enhanced internal monologue, and more epiphanies. Painfully autobiographical, it is the story of Stephen Dedalus’s rebellion against Catholicism and Irish nationalism, swerving between religiosity and hedonism, ultimately resolving upon principles of art and beauty.
The opening lines are written in a childish singsong (“Once upon a time and a very good time it was”). The vocabulary grows with the nuances of Stephen’s development. He transfers into Clongowes and when he gives his age as “half past six” (or did that happen to Joyce himself? I forget) he is hazed by older boys. He is accused of intentionally breaking his glasses but after being strapped by one father, he successfully convinces the senior father of his innocence. He sees the Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, who went from hero to zero after accusation of adultery, and betrayal by a lieutenant, gave ammunition to a diverse group of opponents.
As a Belvedere College teenager he frequents prostitutes. But he goes to a Jesuit retreat where a cold and lucid sermon by Father Arndle terrifies him with tales of Hell and lurid, almost pornographic, descriptions of its horrors and tortures. He returns hard to doctrinaire Catholicism and the possibility of taking holy orders (imagining “The Rverend Stephen Dedalus, S.J.”).
Then he has an epiphany watching a girl bathing at the shore, washing her shiny bare legs, resembling a sea-bird. He resolves upon a principle of aesthetics, his life mission being to capture the beauty of that seabird-girl, and by extension the beauty of all nature, in his art. “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!” At University College Dublin he becomes further wary of all institutions, and is alienated from everything Irish:
You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning.
He leaves Ireland to create himself:
April 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
ULYSSES
Now we come to the magnum opus, the novel that no one can ever say to have been completely read and understood. In college and law school, I read the opening page and the closing pages a few times and put the book back down in hopeless resignation. Well, I resign no more! Though every reading will fail, every misreading will be misrewarding.
It is the chronicle of a single Dublin day, from 8 am 16 June 1904 to the wee hours of 17 June 1904. It consists of interwoven narratives and interior monologues centering on three individuals (the number three appears countless times in all of Joyce’s work—more about that in Finnegans Wake). It is said to be the first work to “foreground the process of thinking.”
There are eighteen chapters for the 18 or so hours, supposedly each symbolized by an Odyssey character or event (see my Bronzed (with) Age post for the references), a color, an art or science, and even a body organ (then again, Joyce may be playing with us). Joyce writes “Ulysses” not “Odysseus” because he had a childhood book based on the Roman retelling. The three main characters correspond to “Odysseus” (Leopold “Poldy” Bloom or LB, age 38), “Penelope” (Molly Bloom or MB, age 33) and “Telemachus” (Stephen Dedalus or SD, age 22).
SD has returned from France, where he had gone at the end of A Portrait; he returned during the final illness of his mother (his father, Simon, being inebriated and of no use whatever). The Blooms had a boy, Rudy, but he sadly died eleven days after birth. A key connection is that both LB and Odysseus are fathers in search of their sons.
This is what I referred to in my Virginia Woolf survey as the ultimate peripatetic novel, documenting the extensive real and imaginary travels of LB and SD through the Irish capital. Joyce said, “If Dublin were destroyed, it could be rebuilt using Ulysses as the model.”
PART I (TELEMACHIA) (S) (Stephen) (a son is disenchanted with home and sojourns forth)
(I.1) Telemachus. It is 8 am. SD and his annoying med-student roommate Malachi “Buck” Mulligan live in Martello Tower near the sea. Why annoying? Mulligan has brought in an English boarder (Haines) whom SD dislikes, and further Mulligan has criticized the now agnostic SD for not conventionally kneeling and praying with his mother during her last days. The three walk to the shore and make plans to meet at The Ship pub at 12:30 pm, but SD has decided he won’t come back to the tower that evening.
(I.2) Nestor. SD teaches the Italian campaigns of Pyrrhus, John Milton’s poem Lycidas, and basic math to a bored classroom. He receives his pay from the headmaster, Mr. Deasy, who asks SD to take a letter to a newspaper. SD rejects the tyranny of the past: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” Mr. Deasy thinks history is inexorably progressing toward the divine, but SD says “[God is] a shout in the street.”
(I.3) Proteus. SD walks along the strand. Amid interior obscure multilingual musing, he writes a poem on a scrap of Mr. Deasy’s letter. He traces the history of mankind from Eve to his own birth, all of us tethered one umbilical cord after the other. A three-masted ship reminds him of Calvary and the crucifixion of Jesus between the two thieves.
PART II (ODYSSEY) (M) (Molly) (Ulysses the “polytropic” man, hence he of “many twists and turns”)
(II.4) Calypso. It’s 8 am again, but now we are at the Bloom residence at 7 Eccles Street, ten miles from Martello Tower. LB buys kidneys, makes breakfast and brings it with the morning mail to MB still abed. A letter to her from her music career manager Blazes Boylan confirms their love affair. LB reads an article while taking a crap. A reference to “seaside girls” echoes the seabird-girl in A Portrait. A reference to a “photo girl” is to their daughter Milly, 15 years old, already adopting Molly’s loose and immoral ways. Their dead son Rudy would be eleven years old now.
(II.5) Lotus Eaters. LB gets his own love letter; he has his own love affair going on, between the assumed names “Henry Flower” and “Martha Clifford.”
(II.6) Hades. LB joins in Paddy Dignam’s funeral procession alongside SD’s father Simon. LB passes SD and Boylan. Here we read the memorable expressions “a corpse is meat gone bad,” cheese is “the corpse of milk,” and “hate at first sight.” We learn LB’s own father poisoned himself. There is musing that Queen Victoria should have focused on rearing the Prince of Wales going forward in time, not moping over Prince Albert going backward in time (a fair comment, given how Edward VII turned out).
(II.7) Aeolus. LB unsuccessfully tries to place an ad at the newspaper. SD brings in his headmaster’s letter, but they don’t interact. The headings in this chapter are written in a newspaper-headline style. Captive Ireland is compared to captive Israel; SD left the Emerald Isle but (unlike Joyce himself) returned to cast his lot with his homeland.
(II.8) Lestrygonians (cannibals). LB gets some food but is repelled by eating habits at Burton restaurant or Davy Byrne’s pub. LB reflects on how his romance with MB fizzled, contrasting “Me, and me now.” He wonders whether statues in the museum have anuses. He sees Boylan across street near museum, and avoids him by ducking into a gallery instead.
(II.9) Scylla and Charybdis. SD goes to the National Library, where he thinks of Shakespeare. Mulligan reads SD’s telegram (!) cancelling their evening meet-up at The Ship. SD muses on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s remark “Beware of what you want as a youth, you will get it in middle age.”
(II.10) Wandering Rocks (not actually an episode in the Odyssey, just something Circe warned of). Nineteen vignettes of minor characters. In the middle, Joyce really steps up the stream of consciousness. We finally earn that it is 16 June 1904.
(II.11) Sirens. LB has dinner (midday meal) with SD’s uncle. Boylan goes to MB and joins her in bed. There are many musical references.
(II.12) Cyclops. At Barney Kiernan’s bar. This tale is told by an unreliable narrator, a debt collector. The Jewish LB is berated by an antisemitic “Citizen” (a boor akin to Polyphemus, with LB playing the role of “Nobody” (eimi outis) in the Odyssey).
(II.13) Nausicaä. Getty and two other girls (Cissy and Edy) are playing at the seashore with the kids they are minding. LB watches her from afar and er, uh, pleases himself; Getty notices but does not move away. Are they a voyeur/exhibitionist dyad? She is said to be an exhibitionist later in the book, but is that just LB’s rationalization? In any event, we have here a literary depiction of an orgasm (a “Roman candle” going O! O! O!). Afterwards, LB sees Getty has a disabled leg and reflects “that’s why she’s been left on the shelf.” (As you can imagine, this chapter has been critiqued from many standpoints for its sexual and disability references.) Getty’s interior thoughts are recorded in a breathless magazine style, with words like girlwoman, dreamhusband, and whitehot passion. LB’s own reflections include thoughts of Molly herself at age 15, the age of their daughter Milly today. We hear a repetition of “cuckoo,” bringing to mind the word “cuckold.” We can compare this scene to the epiphany of the seabird-girl in A Portrait.
(II.14) Oxen of the Sun. LB visits the hospital, where Mina Purefroy is about to give birth. There he finally meets SD (the med student Mulligan is only expected). There is much wordplay spread over nine passages, for the nine months of gestation.
(II.15) Circe. LB and SD are now at Bella Cohen’s brothel. This chapter is written as a play, interrupted by hallucinations. LB’s hallucination: he is first a criminal defendant in the dock, with several women attacking him. Then he is the King of Bloomusalem, whose reign starts off well until his subjects attack him. SD has his own hallucination, but apparently back in real life, he breaks a chandelier with an ashplant (a cane?) brandished as if a sword, shouting Wagner’s “Nothung!” SD insults King Edward VII and is slugged by a profanity-spewing British soldier. Amid all this bawdy cacophony there is a remarkable, heart-wrenching epiphany—LB’s haunting vision of his long dead son:
Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.)
BLOOM: (Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly.) Rudy!
RUDY: (Gazes, unseeing, into Bloom’s eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)
PART III (NOSTOS) (RETURN) (P) (“Poldy”=Leopold, LB) (Man returns home, Man reunites with Son, Man reunites with Wife)
(III.16) Eumaeus. LB takes SD to a cabman’s shelter to recuperate from the blow he took from the soldier.
(III.17) Ithaca. It is about 2 am. LB returns home with SD. SD reaches a catharsis releasing him from guilt over his mother (“Cancer did it, not I”). SD departs shortly after (but to where? Ah, if we only knew! Compare the ending of A Portrait).
LB heads to bed with Molly. BB has just been in that very bed; there are leftover flakes of LB’s own can of Plumtree’s Potted Meat still in the sheets. Husband and wife sleep head to foot!
The chapter consists of some three hundred questions apparently from or for Molly, kind of a catechism for everything from trajectory of a piss-arc to matters of theology. There are errors and misjudgments buried in the answers.
As an author of a book about the Big Dipper, I was surprised to find references to the septentrion (the seven stars) and the pointer stars of that portion of the Big Bear!
Q. Under what guidance, following what signs?
At sea, septentrional, by night the polestar, located at the point of intersection of the right line from beta to alpha in Ursa Major produced and divided externally at omega and the hypotenuse of the rightangled triangle formed by the line alpha omega so produced and the line alpha delta of Ursa Major.
There is a beautiful passage connecting the lunar to the feminine:
Q. What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?
Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.
There is a roster of twenty-five men with whom MB has “been.” And then there is this mysterious ending:
He has travelled.
Q. With?
Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.
Q. When?
Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.
Q. Where?
•
This ending raises so many questions. Does the large black dot mean LB has simply nodded off to sleep? Or is the dot simply the “QED” conclusion of the grand logical syllogism S M P • ?
(III.18) Penelope. The famous final chapter, consisting of eight incredibly, absurdly long sentences, entirely given over to MB’s thoughts in bed. The chapter starts and ends with what Joyce called the female word “yes.” The commentator William York Tyndall suggested, “Woman is to man as being is to becoming—and she is a little contemptuous of him.” The critics compare Molly to a nature spirit (“yes we are flowers all a womans body yes”), to Carl Jung’s anima, to Goethe’s eternal feminine or Ewig-Weibliche, to James Frazer’s Great Mother, and to Robert Graves’s White Goddess. Tyndall ecstatically concludes, “I accept Molly just as Margaret Fuller accepts the universe.” (Oh, brother.)
This time LB, perhaps emboldened by his care for SD in lieu of mourning over Rudy, tells Molly that tomorrow SHE should fix HIM breakfast. (Good for LB, I say.)
MB for her part has been abed the whole livelong day, drifting along her own stream of consciousness. She thinks of Boylan, who has just been with her and who certainly had his fun (“nice invention they made for man for him to get all the pleasure”); she wonders if he may have induced her early menstruation. She thinks of LB, odd, awkward and innocent, but also of other lovers, including women (“We are dreadful lots of bitches I suppose”). She thinks of what happened that very day, 16 June 1904, and of her childhood in Gibraltar as a child of the mountains. Finally she looks back on LB’s courtship, first pathetically and finally with passion. I simply have to repeat (and recite) the breathlessly cinematic fireworks of the concluding pages:
I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
FINNEGANS WAKE
Ulysses is a Dublin day, Bloomsday; Finnegans Wake a Dublin night (that same night?) in dreamtime.
The work is like nothing else in literature. It is radically nonlinear. It is in English but not in English. It features extensive wordplay, hallucinations, and myths. It has been called a “monomyth,” a term adopted by Joseph Campbell, and it is a sum of all myths. It is recursive, like the ouroboros, the legendary snake that consumes itself that I cited in my study of the plot of The Maltese Falcon. At root, “Finnegans Wake is about Finnegans Wake.”
The would-be reader should be aware of two philosophical sources: the dualism of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600, when he was inconveniently burned at the stake for heresy) (“the coincidence of the contraries,” the one versus the many, each quality bringing forth its opposite), and the cyclical (or corsi e ricorsi) theory of history of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744, when he died abed) (each discrete “civilization” passes courses or corsi through divine, heroic and human “ages” followed by a period of chaos or ricorso). (One example is Genesis-Trojan War-Pericles-Thirty Tyrants; a succeeding one is Romulus-Republic-Empire-dark ages.)
The book has four parts, with 8, 4, 4, and 1 chapters respectively. Vico’s cycle is referenced for the four parts of the book and also for the chapters within each part, a four-edged “square wheel” that unevenly bumps along the road. (Vico and Bruno can also be puns for Dublin place names and who knows what else.) Vico’s cycles drive all the many rivers of the “riverrun.” Practically every river in the world is mentioned (most were belatedly added in a revision).
Accused of “trivia,” Joyce retorted that the work is sometimes “quadrivial,” and he defended its complexity: “I can justify every line of my book.” Wordplay is inserted and tolerated from time to time in Ulysses, but in Finnegans Wake it is maddeningly nonstop. To read both works is like going from Cezanne to Pollock, from Bach to Bartok. And yet read both works you should, if you would read either.
Here is just one example near and dear to my own James family: the tree. The very first line of the book refers to Eve and Adam. (In that first line, it refers to a Dublin church known as Adam and Eve’s.) Soon thereafter an allusion is made to the Garden of Eden, and inevitably to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. That leads Joyce to riff on trees of many other kinds, including the rood (cross) on which Jesus was crucified. (There is an Old English poem The Song of the Rood.) From there it is one short step to Yggdrasil, the World Ash Tree of Norse legends, or the “everlasting ash tree.” That quickly becomes the evernasty ashtray. Then that becomes the overlisting eshtree. The World Ash Tree produces all of life, and thus is also the be in stalk. Utterances bring forth the creation of lives in the worlds of the ash tree, so we have beings talk. From there it is one more short step to the fairy tale of Jack and the Giant, and the beanstalk. (Yggdrasil becomes eggdrazzle, but I don’t know what to make of that one.) Amazingly, all these tree references are just for one concept—the World Ash Tree in relation to all of creation, to states of being, and to states of mind. There are thousands of other concepts in Finnegans Wake drifting along other streams of consciousness.
The plot of Finnegans Wake is rather beside the point—what is the point of the weirdest dream you ever dreamt? To the extent that there is a plot, though, there are some characters to keep in mind. The main ones are shorthanded as HCE, ALP, Shem/Jerry, Shaun/Kevin, and Isabel/Issy. The five of them live in the Chapelizod district of Dublin, near the land of Phoenix Park (associated with HCE), on the river Liffey (associated with ALP). But “character” is a bit misleading; these persona can be people, yes, but they can have pseudonyms (HCE can be Haveth Childers Everywhere), and they can stand for and even turn into natural objects. HCE is the male, fixed, creative, mastering force, associated with the land and the ocean; the sons first quarrel with one another then join forces to defeat common foes; and ALP is the female, fluid, renovating, nurturing force, associated first with the river Liffey coursing through Dublin and then with all the rivers of the world.
PART I (FALL OF MAN) (Divine)
(I.1) Fall of Man (divine) begins in the middle of a sentence (remember this): “riverrun past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” The church and the castle are Dublin landmarks.
Joyce riffs on an Irish 1850 music-theater song (not a folk song as is often supposed) in which an everyman, Tim Finnegan, a sod carrier and tower-builder, falls from a ladder to his apparent death. At his wake, the corpse vanishes before the attendees can eat him as if he were a salmon. Several vignettes pass. Then the corpse reappears, some whiskey splashes on him, and he returns to life briefly before the attendees encourage him to go back into eternal rest. His corpse becomes Howth Hill. HCE sails from the vast ocean into Dublin Bay. Here we read the first of the “thunderclaps,” 100-letter words with syllables from many languages.
(I.2) The Cod (heroic) Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker=Here Comes Everybody=HCE runs a pub. “The cad” is rumored to have molested little girls. Earwick is perhaps a portmanteau for time and space (ear being era and wick being a place name); or maybe an earwig is an insect, an anagram for incest. We hear a primitive version of the fairy tale of Jack and the Beanstalk, which leads to the heroic myth of Ygdrassil and the be in stalk. Human poetry and beingstalk lead to concepts of chaos and rebirth. (!)
(I.3) Gossip and the Knocking at the Gate (human) Accusations and gossip abound about HCE at the Mulligan or Bristol bar. There, Joe is the bouncer/handyman and Kate the old maid of the pub.
(I.4) Trial (ricorso) HCE escapes, is brought to trial, and is then released. He is free but hounded by the hint of scandal (two girls were allegedly involved). His wife ALP has written a letter, perhaps exonerating him, but where is it? This chapter ends on a river…
(I.5) The Letter (divine) …and this chapter begins on a river. It turns out ALP dictated her “mamfesta” to her son Shem the Penman, who entrusted it to his brother Shaun the Postman. But the letter is not delivered; instead it winds up in a midden heap and is picked up by a hen called Biddy. There are extensive references to the beautiful Tunc page of The Book of Kells.
(I.6) Quiz (heroic) Twelve riddles.
(I.7) Shem the Penman (human) Story of Shem the Penman and ALP, as distortedly told by Shaun as unreliable narrator. “Shem was a sham and a low sham.” Shem is akin to Joyce in real life—they are both half blind (Joyce had severe eye problems), they are both an English teacher.
(I.8) ALP (ricorso) Featuring Anna Livia Plurabelle, she of the feminine vowel “O.” This is the famous episode of two washerwomen having a dialogue across a stream. Eventually the river widens and they turn into objects—a tree (for Shem) and a stone (for Shaun)! Go to YouTube to listen to a recording of Joyce himself reading pages 213-215. “So many rivers, I think it moves.”
PART II (CONFLICT) (Heroic)
(II.9) Children at Play (divine) For those readers still in search of a plot (give up, I say!), here is the best clear outline of the cast of characters. There are the starting five, HCE, ALP, Jerry/Shem, Kevin/Shaun, and their sister Issy; twelve pub customers at closing time; four old men (the four evangelists co-branded as “mamalujo” for MatthewMarkLukeJohn), twenty-eight neighborhood girls (numbering the days of the lunar month; Issy becomes the “leapgirl” some times, the girls being “heliotrollops”); then over the hill in the bushes of Phoenix Park dwell two more girls and three soldiers. Here we behold a contest between Chuff (Mick, the Archangel Michael) and Glugg (Nick, Satan). Once again we hear echoes of the eternal myth of two brothers who violently quarrel with one another, then unify to defeat their father.
(II.10) Homework (heroic) Shem tutors Shaun on the first volume of Euclid, but Shaun is inattentive; the Pythagorean diagram with large drooping hypoteneuse square reminds him of genitals. (There is more pedantry inside; here is where I found the citation to the Moynihan Energy Scheme I saw in a Scientific American Mathematical Games column. Like Shem like Shaun, as a 22-year-old I personally waged battle with the great Martin Gardner, demonstrating an error in the column that he gratefully and gracefully acknowledged.)
(II.11) Tale of a Pub (human) HCE is in the pub below the boys’ tutoring session, where he is confronted by the four old men.
(II.12) Tristan (ricorso) HCE’s dream. Here is the famous passage “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” (page 383), from which Nobel Physics Laureate Murray Gell-Mann named three fundamental particles. (Joyce’s “quarks” are caws of large noisy birds, reminding me of Wallace Stevens: “I was of three minds,/Like a tree/In which there were three blackbirds.”)
Joyce’s focus on the number three shows up further since quarks mysteriously have either two-thirds or one-third of a charge, suggesting that trinities are deeply embedded in human nature, in physical nature, and in the supernatural. Channeling and extending Eugene Wigner, I devoutly believe there is an unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the humanities and in spirituality, not just in the natural sciences.
Back to King Mark, Tristan is hailed as “the spry young spark/That’ll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her,” winning the heart (etc.) of Iseult or Isolde, and overthrowing the crusty monarch. The four evangelists on Tristan and Iseult’s path confront the aged king too. In each case, anticipating the later chapters featuring Shem and Shaun, the young overthrow the old.
PART III (HUMANITY) (Human)
(III.13) Shaun the Postman (divine) Shaun is floating down the Liffey river. Fourteen questions are asked. A letter appears; is it ALP’s exoneration epistle? Fables are told, including “The Ondt (Danish for evil) and the Gracehoper” (a remarkable title since years later we know Grace Hopper as the computer programmer responsible for naming the computer “bug”).
(III.14) Jaun’s Sermon (heroic) Shaun is now Jaunty Jaun. He sermonizes Issy and the 28 other girls. There is reference to a “loveletter”—are Shaun and Issy an item, despite (or repeating) the whiff of incest?
(III.15) Yawn (human) Jaun becomes Yawn, lying on a mound, replacing and supplanting the body of their father HCE as the embodiment of the landscape. Shaun changes into a vessel, an urn, carrying forth and supplanting the voice of their father HCE as the embodiment of the creative process. With the sons ensconced, is Haveth Childers Everywhere revived and rehabilitated, or is he vanquished and does he disappear?
(III.16) The Bedroom (ricorso) HCE/ALP (Mr. and Mrs. Porter?) try to copulate while their three kids are sleeping or pretending to sleep upstairs. Jerry Porter (Shem) awakes from a nightmare. The four evangelists are watching the parents, standing at each corner of their fourposter bed, observing the couple’s four sexual positions.
PART IV RENEWAL (Ricorso)
(IV.17) New Day (ricorso) As dawn breaks, several vignettes produce questions more than answers. That is fitting and proper for an ending that is also a beginning—as the song might refrain after each chorus, “Finnegan, begin again.”
There is a narrative of the awakened, reborn or transfigured HCE and the revelation at last of the now discovered ALP letter—it excuses the offense but does not deny that something terribly wrong in fact happened. “Depravities [incest allegations?], no longer hinted, are displayed.” Does ALP wake or resuscitate her husband? Or do Issy and Shaun combine to revitalize both parents? Does Shaun renew and replace HCE? A “daughterwife” (Issy?) renews and possibly replaces ALP, who “passes out” and becomes the River Liffey. ALP, or ALP as the river Liffey, flows out and dissolves and disappears into the ocean.
The work ends smack dab in the middle of the sentence that begins the work, a way a lone a loved a long the
a long the? (think back)
a long the… (go back to the first page)
along the riverrun past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. …
I hope this survey emboldens me and others to deeply delve into this ruffed and unsteady pleasuretrove foreverwhere and forevermore.