HCE interred in the landscape

The full stop after 'platterplate' is a mistake, added by transition's typesetters.

Here's a letter used as a picture, on page 6 of Finnegans Wake. This E lying on its back is Finnegan/HCE, flat on his back after tumbling from his 'hierarchitectitiptitoploftical' tower.
In the sentence, the narrators ask us to look at the fallen giant. The sense is clearest in the first draft: 'He, a being so on the flat of his bulk, let wee peep at Hom, plate III'. 

from the Garland Press edition of the James Joyce Archive

Joyce then changed 'flat of his bulk' to 'flounder of his bulk', 'plate' to 'platterplate' and the number of the plate to the E lying on its back. 

We are being invited to look from above down at the giant's fallen body; at a plate, or illustration, in the book we are reading; and at a platter, a plate with Finnegan as a huge flounder lying on it.  He has become the meal to be served at his own wake.

A European flounder

Flounder, to stumble and struggle clumsily e.g.  'My foot did slide and..Flundring, almost flat on earth I go.' William Wirley, 'Lord Chandos', 1592  

Here's the second draft, where Joyce has changed 'peep' to 'peepsee' and added 'weighed down upon' and  'see peegee ought he ought?' - directing us to the page where the plate appears?

With the fair copy, 'weighed down upon' was dropped, but Joyce added  'like an overgrown babeling', an image of him as a huge helpless baby, fallen from the Tower of Babel. 

Finnegan is stretched out across the landscape of North Dublin. 'He calmly extensolies' from 'Shopalist' (Chapelizod) in the west to the 'Bailywick' (Baily lighthouse of Howth) in the east. The 'Hum!' is short for Humpty Dumpty and his humptyhillhead at Howth (which means 'head').

'The great fall of the off wall 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' 03.19

Explaining the opening page, Joyce drew a plan for Harriet Shaw Weaver of his giant lying beside the Liffey, with his head at Howth.
 

 

'HIS TITLE IN SIGLA'

This E lying on its back was packed with significance for Joyce. Standing on its three legs, a capital E was his siglum (sign) for HCE. Here's a list of sigla he sent Harriet Shaw Weaver in March 1924.

Joyce's characters had so many different names that he needed sigla to organise his material. Over time, the sigla took on lives of their own. If you want to learn more about them, I recommend Roland McHugh's The Sigla of Finnegans Wake.

He'd already used the HCE siglum in the 1925 Letter chapter, paired with Anna Livia's siglum.

The E this way up is decribed as a 'meant to be baffling chrismon trilithon sign'. 'Chrismon' is another name for the Chi-Rho symbol – a monogram made of the first two letters of Christ in Greek.  'Trilithon' is a word invented by William Stukely in 1740, in his book on Stonehenge. From Greek ‘tri’ – three, and ‘lithos’ – stone, it describes two large upright stones topped by a horizontal lintel.
 

Engraving from Stukely's Stonehenge

'This adytum..is in truth compos'd of certain compages of stones, which I shall call trilithons, because made, each of two upright stones, with an impost at top.'

William Stukely, Stonehenge, 1740.

Stonehenge was mysteriously important to Joyce.  When he visited the monument, in 1931, he said, 'I have been fourteen years trying to get here'.

(Statement by Mrs. Kathleen Griffin on the BBC Third Program, Part II,"The Artist in Maturity," 17 February 1950. quoted by David Hayman, A First Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, p3)

I'd love to know more about this visit!

Joyce's sign for HCE, which also appears in a hand drawn footnote on page 299, looks like  part of Stonehenge with two trilithons.

In October 1926, Harriet Shaw Weaver sent Joyce an illustrated pamphlet about a supposed  'Giant's Grave' beside St Andrew's Church in Penrith.  He recognised the grave as his HCE sign lying on its back. It was this idea that inspired the whole opening chapter of the book.

When Joyce wrote his second draft of the chapter, he actually drew the platterplate, with a massive E on it, facing the first page.  You can see that he has drawn his E with longer lines at each end, like the tall stones of the Giant's Grave. 

Joyce also identified the E on its back with the Chinese sign for mountain, which began as a picture of three peaks. 

Joyce told Eugene Jolas that, 'time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of my book.'

In a letter to Weaver, Joyce claimed that the Chinese word for mountain was 'the common people's way of pronouncing Hin or Fin.'

HCE is 'a man that means a mountain' (309.04)
 

The Chinese word for mountain is usually spelled 'Shan'

I wonder if Joyce planned to include the student's drawing of the sign as his platterplate. It would explain why he wanted it drawn by someone who was Chinese, just as he included a real child's drawing on page 308.

In his letters, Joyce uses the sign as the chapter title. In May 1927, when giving clues to Harriet Shaw Weaver, who was trying to guess the title of the book, he explained the meaning of the sign.

Joyce told Cyril Connolly that the first part of his book was 'a kind of air photograph of Irish history, a celebration of the dim past of Dublin.' (The Condemned Playground, 1946,p10)

This is particularly true of the opening pages, where we are looking down on the outstretched form of HCE, 'interred in the landscape'.

HCE AS OSIRIS

 

Maciej Slomczynski, the Polish writer and translator of Ulyssses, found a possible source for the 'see peegee ought he ought' in Alexandre Moret's Rois et Dieux d'Egypt 1911.  His theory, in which he reads this as 'see page 88', was described by Mark L Troy, in his 1976 doctoral thesis, Mummeries of Resurrection:

 

 

 

'The image of Osiris' literal erection from the dead, effected by Isis in the shape of a bird...is a vivid one. It is central to the cycle of Osiris, and important in FW. Mr. Slomczynski has discovered that, within the text of FW, we are referred to a photographic plate depicting the act. This happens at 6.32: "well, see peegee ought he ought, platterplate." If we observe the aural value of the phrase, and follow the suggestion of "see pg eighty-eight" in Moret's Rois et Dieux d'Egypte (1911, reprinted soon after the opening of Tutankhamen's tomb and popular at that time), we will find a "platterplate", that is a plate of "dished" or fallen Osiris, roused by Isis. This plate, reproduced here as fig. II, is titled "The Wake of Osiris" ("Veillée funèbre d'Osiris-Ounnefer mort"). Because we are actually told to "see" the plate, another significant level of meaning is added to the complex "fadograph of a yestern scene" (7.15). James Atherton has explained to me...that fado in Gaelic can mean "far off" in either spatial or temporal dimensions, and, of course, there is the English fade meaning a weakening of effect by time and space. The "fadograph" is then a photograph of a faded scene, removed in time and space. As we shall see (p. 46) Joyce refers to Osiris, passing away, as a "Yesterday", a "Guestern" god. These two words are combined in "yestern" and describe the Moret plate of the deceased Osiris.'

 

Mark L Troy, Mummeries of Resurrection  

 

It would be good to find evidence, from Joyce's notebooks, that he used Moret's book. Roland McHugh is not persuaded, and so this reading doesn't appear in his Annotations to Finnegans Wake.

 

Yet Rose and O'Hanlon accept the theory, which they paraphrase here:

 

'If you peep at the above plate on page eighty-eight of Moret's Rois et dieux d'Egypte, you will see a depiction of the funeral vigil of Osiris (here supposed to represent HCE as an overgrown baby or a flounder fish being served on a platter)'  

 

Rose and O'Hanlon, Chicken Guide

 

Fweet includes the reading, while pointing out that it requires a 'mighty stretch of the imagination.'

 

Osiris was a god whose body was spread across a landscape - though cut into pieces unlike Finnegan's.

 

HCE is often a fish in the book, usually a lively salmon rather than a fallen flounder. As Robert H. Boyle argued, 'the Wake must be considered as belonging in great part, albeit a bizarre part, to angling literature'.  

The fish in these pages may represent Christ, who was said to have fed 5,000 people with two small fish, and who invited his followers to eat his body in the mass. For early Christians, the Greek word for fish, Ichthys, stood for 'Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter' (Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour).

Just as we're about to eat him, he melts away, though he is still visible in the Dublin landscape.

But, lo, as you would quaff off his fraudstuff and sink teeth through that pyth of a flowerwhite bodey behold of him as behemoth for he is noewhemoe. Finiche! Only a fadograph of a yestern scene. Almost rubicund Salmosalar, ancient fromout the ages of the Agapemonides, he is smoltenin our mist, woebecanned and packt away. So that meal’s dead off for summan, schlook, schlice and goodridhirring.
  Yet may we not see still the brontoichthyan form outlined aslumbered, even in our own nighttime by the sedge of the troutling stream that Bronto loved and Brunto has a lean on. Hic cubat edilis. Apud libertinam parvulam. 7.12

Brontoichthyan - thunder (bronte) and fish (icthys), and the Brontosaurus and Icthyosaur, since this is taking place in the dim prehistoric past.

The Latin at the end has the HCE and ALP initials and means, 'here sleeps the magistrate with the little freed girl.'

He is not dead but 'aslumbered', lying beside his river wife, the Liffey.

Perhaps Joyce was thinking of this passage when he told a friend, Dr O'Brien, that he 'conceived of his book as the dream of old Finn, lying in death beside the River Liffey and watching the history of Ireland and the world – past and future – flow through his mind like flotsam on the river of life'. (Ellmann)

 

A sleeping giant in the landscape, in an 18th century puzzle picture.

Reading Shem in Sweny's

My weekend in Dublin ended with a return visit to Sweny's Pharmacy, to join in their regular Sunday night reading of Finnegans Wake. On arrival, I was welcomed by volunteer P.J.Murphy, in his white chemist's coat, who offered me a mug of tea and a paperback copy of the book. Twelve people arrived for the reading, and we all sat around the walls of the Pharmacy.

There were also free fairy cakes!

Fairy cakes!

I was nervous beforehand, because I've always believed that Finnegans Wake should be read in an Irish accent. While I'm happy to do that on my own, I'd be  embarrassed to put on an Irish accent in front of a room full of Irish people.

So it was a relief to find that there were other non-Irish folk there. I sat between David Cunningham, a Scottish lighting designer, who was working on a production at the Abbey, and Kirsten, a Danish journalist who'd just moved to Dublin and was discovering Joyce for the first time. She'd already been to the Ulysses reading at Sweny's. I think, after that, Finnegans Wake came as a bit of a shock! There was also a jolly American and another Englishman. The remaining seven were Irish.

Kirsten from Denmark

 

A jolly American

The reading was begun by the bearded Irishman (below) behind the counter, who explained that we were in the Shem the Penman chapter, starting from the middle of page 176. Shem the Penman is a comic and grotesque portrait of Joyce himself, and it's the funniest and easiest chapter in the book. Everyone would read a page in turn, in an anti-clockwise direction.

The reading begins

The fact that there were twelve of us was a wonderful Joycean coincidence. Joyce told his friend Padraic Colum, 'Twelve is the public number. Twelve hours of the day, twelve men on a jury.' In the book, there are twelve drinkers in HCE's pub, who are also members of a lynch mob, mourners at the wake, jurymen, months, hours, apostles, a football team, the twelve tables of Roman Law, Napoleon's marshals, tribes of Israel, and heaps of other things.  

You can spot the twelve in the book because they're always accompanied by pompous words ending in
'-ation'. They 'crunch the crusts of comfort due to depredation, drain the mead for misery to incur intoxication, condone every evil by practical justification and condam any good to its own gratification...' (142.19-21).

While he was writing the Wake, Joyce got twelve friends to write a book of essays explaining what he was up to. Published in 1929, it was called Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. The cover has Joyce's sigla (symbol) for the twelve, a circle (based on a clock face). That's also picked up in the word 'Round' in the title.

So it was very appropriate that there were twelve of us and we were all sitting around the walls of Sweny's Pharmacy, reading the book in a circle!

Having said all that, three other women did join us after the reading had started, but after five minutes listening to us reading Finnegans Wake, they realised they'd made a mistake and left. Yes, the Shade of Joyce compelled them to go, preserving the magic Twelve!

As the reading passed around, I couldn't help flicking forward to see which page was likely to come my way. Some pages are much harder to read than others. I was lucky to get page 182, a relatively easy one describing Shem writing 'nameless shameless shamelessness about everybody he ever met.'

Kirsten, who followed me, was less lucky to have to read the long list of all the rubbish strewing Shem's house ('once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage, unquestionable issue papers, seedy ejaculations...'). 

Kirsten reads p183

The Englishman who followed stood up to read his page, another difficult one describing Shem's preparation of an insane egg dish.

Englishman reading page 184

But I felt sorriest for the Irishman who got page 185. He had to read the filthiest passage in the whole book. It describes Shem making ink from his own excrement and, to preserve decorum, it's in Latin! There's a translation here. He did a heroic job getting through it.

We raced through the chapter at a good rate and seven of us had to read a second page. 

I was pleased to end up with the final page, which describes the coming of Anna Livia Plurabelle, 'as happy as the day is wet, babbling, bubbling, chattering to herself, deloothering the fields on their elbows leaning with the sloothering slide of her, giddygaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia.' When I was a teenager, my Father bought me a record of Cyril Cusack reading this so it's very familiar to me. I copied Cusack's phrasing and rhythms (but not his Irish accent). At the end, I got a round of applause!

After the reading, we all went over the road to have a drink in the Lincoln's Inn pub. Another Joyce coincidence! This pub is next door to Finn's Hotel, where Nora Barnacle was working as a maid in 1904 when she first went out with James Joyce. The Lincoln's Inn even has the original front door of the hotel. The words 'Finn's Hotel' are all over Joyce's early Wake notebooks, and it looks as if this was his first title for Finnegans Wake. He has hidden this original title in the Wake at 514.18:  '— .i..'. .o..l.' 

The perfect ending to a wonderful Wake weekend in Dublin.