The last page of Finnegans Wake

The Liffey by Edward Smyth, 1787, on the Custom House

In November 1938, sixteen years after he began Finnegans Wake by the seaside in Nice, James Joyce wrote its final pages. Anna Livia Plurabelle, the Liffey, dies as she flows into Dublin bay and merges with her father, the sea.

'I am passing out. O bitter ending! I'll slip away before they're up. They'll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the'. 627.34-628.16

Read this aloud (preferably in a Dublin accent) to get the rhythm, repeated rhymes, the cries of the gulls and the 'whsh!' sounds of the sea. Here's a video from chilloutvibe to inspire you.

'I am passing out'

The final chapter is about passing from the book's night world to waking reality.

'Passing. One. We are passing. Two. From sleep we are passing. Three. Into the wikeawades warld from sleep we are passing.' 608.33

'O bitter ending'

This is the bitterness of the salty sea and Anna's bitter disillusion with HCE/Dublin.  As she moves away from the city, he/it shrinks in comparison with the vast sea.

'I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You're but a puny.'  627.23

'They'll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it's old and old it's sad and old and weary...'

Here she moves from short choppy sentences to one very long one, as if she's just been swept up by the first big wave.

There's a precurser of this on page 261, in a passage written in 1934-5:

'Hencetaking tides we haply return, trumpeted by prawns and ensigned with seakale, to befinding oneself when old is said in one and maker mates with made (oh my!)'

According to the Digital Archive, in the 1934 typescript, Joyce wrote 'when old it's sad'.  Could this phrase have inspired the book's ending?

COLD MAD FEARY FATHER

'it's sad and old and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning....'

Oceanus, a mosaic from the Zeugma Museum, Turkey

The cold mad father is the Greek and Roman god Oceanus, Poseidon/Neptune or the Irish sea god Manannan MacLir - suggested in 'moananoaning'.

'They are coming, waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of Mananaan' 

Proteus

'Flow over them with your waves and with your waters, 

Mananaan, Mananaan MacLir...' 

Scylla and Charybdis

Above Stephen quotes a chant from George Russell's play 1907 Deirdre, in which Russell himself played the sea god. 

'moananoaning' reminds me of the keening of female mourners at an Irish wake or graveside - a tradition going back thousands of years.

Edmund Lloyd Epstein in A Guide through Finnegans Wake finds echoes of Tennyson's 'Crossing the Bar' in Anna's monologue. He traces 'moananoaning' and 'far calls' (628.13) to the first verse:

'Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea.'

'Moaning of the bar' refers to the sound made by waves crashing on a sandbar, at a river mouth or harbour entrance, when the tide is low. In the poem, Tennyson asks for a high tide 'too full for sound and foam' and a smooth sea - an easy death. 'May there be no moaning' sounds like 'May there be no mourning'.

x

'But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.'

Here Epstein finds echoes in 'you're turning' 627.02 and 'Home!' 627.24

Epstein says that this verse 'describes exactly the pilgrimage of Anna Livia; she once came out of her great father the Sea, and now she is turning again for home.'

'old it's sad and weary' and 'cold mad feary' derive from 'bold and bad and bleary' on the previous page:

'For all the bold and bad and bleary they are blamed, the seahags.' 627.25

'moyles and moyles of it'

'miles and miles' said in a Dublin accent.

The Sea of Moyle is the north channel of the Irish Sea, between Antrim and Scotland, which appears in a song by Thomas Moore.

Silent, oh Moyle! be the roar of thy water,
Break not, ye breezes, your chain of repose

Joyce described this in a letter to Giorgio as 'that part of the Irish Sea which is now called St George's Channel.' (LIII 339)

The sea is more usually called a mother and, in his first draft, Joyce included both parents:

'And its old and old it's weary I go back to you,
my cold father,
mother,
and old it's sad & weary mother
I go back to you,
my cold father
my cold mad father
My cold mad bleary father,
till the sight of him makes me saltsick
and I rush into your arms'

VI.B.47.p40 (quoted by by Rose and O'Hanlon in the JJ Digital Archive)

'-- God, he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.

Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbour mouth of Kingstown.

-- Our mighty mother, Buck Mulligan said.'

Mulligan is quoting Swinburne's 'The Triumph of Time', which is the source of Anna's 'I go back to you':

'I will go back to the great sweet mother,

      Mother and lover of men, the sea.

I will go down to her, I and none other,

      Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me;

Cling to her, strive with her, hold her fast:

O fair white mother, in days long past

Born without sister, born without brother,

      Set free my soul as thy soul is free.'

'The Triumph of Time'

'Swinburne's central emotional drive was the need to worship and achieve an ecstatic loss of self. As a boy he expressed this drive through encounters with the sea.'

Rikky Rooksby, Swinburne: A Poet's Life, Routledge, 1997

Elsewhere Joyce turns Swinburne into 'Swimbourne':

cf 'slept the sleep of the swimbourne in the one sweet undulant mother of tumblerbunks' 41.06

Joyce's sea is not sweet but bitter and cold as death. It makes Anna 'seasalt saltsick', like the 'bowl of bitter waters' that Stephen sees when he looks at the sea and thinks of his own mother's death.

'he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the well-fed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.'

'It lay behind him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus' song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love's bitter mystery.'

Telemachus

PRONGS OF THE SEA

'I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. '

Mosaic of Neptune from Palermo

The arms are rising waves, the prongs of Neptune's trident (triple prongs) and Dublin's Bull Wall and South Wall which stick out into the sea. 

'Moremens' are mermen and 'An Mhuir Mheann', the limpid sea, another name for the Irish Sea.

Avelaval.

'Ave atque vale' - Hail and farewell, from Catullus' elegy on his dead brother. 

Paul Devine tells me that 'Hail and Farewell, Ave, Salve, Vale, from George Moore has also been cited as a possible source.'

'L'aval' is 'downstream' in French. Fweet suggests the Hebrew 'havel havalim': vanity of vanities in Ecclesiastes.

'My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff!'

The flowing Liffey has been carrying autumn leaves, which are also the pages of the book that fall away as we read the final monologue:

'Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speafing. Lpf!....Only a leaf, just a leaf and then leaves....I am Leafy, your goolden...' 619.

Only one leaf is left - the final page. She carries it to remind her of life.

'So soft this morning ours.'

The first words of the monologue are 'Soft morning, city!' 619.20
'It is the softest morning that ever I can ever remember me' 621.08
'Softly so.' 624.21

There's a shift of perspective from carrying to being carried. As she hits the wide sea, she reverts to childhood, and is now herself being carried by her cold mad feary father - the sea. This brings back a childhood memory of being carried through a toy fair.

'Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair!'

 

This line is based on a memory of Maria Jolas, which she describes in the wonderful opening of A Woman of Action – A Memoir and Other Writings (2004).

''Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair!' The words are James Joyce's but the experience was mine, drawn from the well of distant recall in the course of a dinner-table discussion: how far back can memory reach?

  It was night, we were walking along the acetylene lighted dusty 'midway' of the Jefferson County Fair, on the outskirts of Louisville Kentucky. I was perched on my tall young father's broad shoulders, my legs dangling onto his chest, hands clasping his head.  Was mother with us? Were there two older children walking beside us? Was there a younger sister or a new baby at home? Perhaps, indeed, probably, but I have no recollection of their existence at that time. Dazzled by the lights, the noisy crowds, the garish booths lining each side of the road, with the broad night sky above, and,  beneath me, my father's safe shoulders, I was unaware of everything but my own bliss. Joyce used my 'ride' in a 'minor key' at the very end of Finnegans Wake, when the approach of night was leading him to seek again the warmest, surest haven he had known, that of his own father, his 'mad-feary' father's unswerving love.

  Today, with my eightieth birthday well behind me, other happy things well up to the surface....'

Maria Jolas A Woman of Action – A Memoir and Other Writings (2004) p 9

Richard Ellmann claimed the line was 'inspired by a memory of carrying his son George through a toy fair in Trieste to make up for not giving him a rocking horse' - but gave no source for the story.   

 

Adaline Glasheen, who was told the Jolas story by Hugh Kenner, provides the source of Ellmann's version:

'Dear Hugh my doesn't the world of Joycean fact slip like soap, slither like dreams. Maria Jolas says it was her toy-fair. Helen Joyce told me that Giorgio [Joyce] told her it was his toy-fair in Trieste, through which his father carried him.'

Adaline Glasheen to Hugh Kenner, 1 September 1977, Burns (ed), A Passion for Joyce: The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Adaline Glasheen, University College Dublin Press, 2008, p268

I like Maria Jolas's description of Joyce's feelings for his own father here too. Finnegans Wake can be read partly as a tribute to him. He's the main model for H.C.Earwicker who,  in Joyce's earliest notes, was simply called 'Pop'.

Joyce's VI B 3 notebook, compiled in 1923

All our fathers are included too, since Finnegans Wake is, as J.S Atherton wrote, 'everyone’s dream, the dream of all the living and the dead'. 

In 2008, when our online group first read this page, the late Karl Reisman commented:

'You know, the Carry me along, taddy is nothing like the opening of Portrait and yet when I read the end of FW I keep hearing Portrait in this line. Is that just my crazyness?'

Dominique (Cachou Le Pitou) answered:

'No Karl, not crazy, it's baby tuckoo, the moocow, and the Mississippi Hare coming for to carry us home.'

'If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup.'

This is the most mysterious part of the ending.  Anna's mind is disintegrating, and this feels like an hallucination in which father, husband, the white waves of the sea and an angel of death are jumbled together. Angels often appear in near-death experiences.

There's also the river water sinking under the sea ('I sink I'd die') and then washing up (also wake up and worship). 'Wash up' is US slang for ending something, says the OED quoting:

'The stage manager called out: ‘What will I do with this act, Mr. Ziegfeld?’ ‘Wash up him and the bird,’ said Flo [Ziegfeld] and that was the last of the Italian and his trained canary... Hype Igoe, the World's sporting writer, heard of the incident..and in commenting..upon Frank Moran, heavy weight pugilist, advised that matchmakers ‘wash him up’. The phrase caught the sporting fancy..and has become a colloquial fixture..as a meaty synonym for finals and farewell.'

The World, 25 October 1925

I wonder if Joyce knew that.

Arkhangelsk was the chief seaport of medieval Russia. Like Dublin, it lies on both banks of a river beside a sea. A local legend, shown on its coat of arms, claims that the Archangel Michael defeated the devil here. 

'whitespread wings'

'I seen'

Anna speaks as a working-class Dubliner, like the constable in Ulysses, who tells Corny Kellaher 'I seen that particular party last evening.'  The 'him' and 'his' reminds me of Molly Bloom's monologue, where all men are simply 'he'.

I've found white wings and the sea in another poem of Swinburne:

'The keen white-winged north-easter
That stings and spurs thy sea'

'A Swimmer's Dream'

But there's also a sentimental song:

''White Wings" they never grow weary,
They carry me cheerily over the sea.
Night comes, I long for my dearie,
I'll spread out my "White Wings"
And sail home to thee.'

Maybe there's another echo of Yeats's 'who goes with Fergus?' sung by Stephen to his dying mother:

'White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.'

Telemachus

Any other ideas?

'We pass through grass behush the bush to.'

This part is left over from Joyce's first version of the ending:

'For I feel I could faint. Here weir, reach, island, bridge. There! That's what cockles the hearty! A bit beside the bush and then a walk along the

Paris,
1922—1938.'

As in the published version the A and L of 'along' is completed by the P of 'Paris', giving us Anna's initials - matching the HCE of the book's opening. But it's interesting that Joyce, who had written the second part of the sentence twelve years earlier, did not then know how it would begin.

On the third typescript, he crossed that ending out and moved the 'pass through grass' phrase back to this position.  He changed 'beside' to 'behush' continuing the rushing sounds of the sea and 'hush'. 

'Here, weir...' was moved back to 626.97 but 'That's what cockles the hearty!' disappeared from the text.

'Far calls. Coming, far!'

Father calls and Anna answers, "I'm coming father!'   These are also the calls of the gulls and a lighthouse (Phare in French). In our online group, Eric Rosenbloom commented, 'a word for sea in Irish is farraige, stress on 'farr'.  It's a 'feminine' noun.'

The phrase is the title of one of Toru Takemitsu's lovely 'tonal sea' pieces. Thank you Steven Eric Scribner for sharing this on Facebook.

'End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take.'

Finn is Finn MacCool, HCE as the sleeping giant of Dublin. Finn is also Fin (end).  These seven words recreate the final sentence's movement from ALP at the end to HCE (again!) on the opening page.

Joyce is giving us a clue to the book's title, still a secret when he wrote these words. 'Take' - it's an offering.

'Bussoftlhee'

But softly.

Soft again but now with Shakespearian meaning of 'wait' (or 'quiet' as in 'behush' above).

'But soft! methinks I scent the morning air' Hamlet.
'But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?' Romeo and Juliet

'But soft! ' 462.25
'Adieu, soft adieu' 563.35

A buss is a kiss, which shortly follows.

 

'mememormee!'

Remember me! and 'me me more me' - an attempt to hold on to her identity. Remembering and forgetting runs through the ending.

Balfe's 'Then You'll Remember Me' from The Bohemian Girl starts with 'other lips'.

In his introduction to the Oxford paperback edition, 'mememormee' is the only word from the final page quoted by Finn Fordham, who describes the ending as a 'death aria'.

The word recalls Dido's lament ('when I am laid in earth') from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas:

'Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.'

In Purcell's opera, the aria is followed by a chorus with more wings:

'With drooping wings ye cupids come,
and scatter roses on her tomb,
soft and gentle as her heart;
Keep here your watch, and never part'

'till thousndsthee'

'in this scherzarade of one’s thousand one nightinesses' 51.04
'And into the river that had been a stream (for a thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her...' 159.10
'We’ve heard it sinse sung thousandtimes.' 338.01
'one thousand and one other blessings will now concloose thoose epoostles' 617.04
'A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights?' 627.14

'Lps. The keys to. Given!'

Some readers read this as a message from Joyce that he has given us the keys to reading Finnegans Wake.

'Lps' are lips, and the keys are also a kiss - the key in a kiss given by Arrah Na-Pogue (Arrah of the kiss) in Boucicault's play. 

'in the good old bygone days of Dion Boucicault, the elder, in Arrah-na-pogue, in the otherworld of the passing of the key of Two-tongue Common' 385.02

J.S.Atherton explains the allusion in his brilliant Books at the Wake:

This is also mentioned in the lessons chapter, by Issy:

'If it’s me chews to swallow all you saidn’t you can eat my words for it as sure as there’s a key in my kiss.' 279.F06

In the earlier version there's a clearer sense of keys as a reciprocal gift of love:

'How you said you'd give me the keys of my heart. Only now it's me who's got to give...The keys to. Given!'

But the first sentence above was moved back to 626.30.

'I will give you the keys of my heart' is a line from 'The keys of heaven' ( which sounds like 'The keys to. Given!').  

In The Sleeping Beauty, the heroine is awakened by a kiss, referred to a few pages earlier in Anna's letter:

'That was the prick of the spindle to me that gave me the keys to dreamland.' 614.28

THE FINAL SENTENCE

'A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the'

This is what Joyce wrote, but Faber's typesetters managed to lose 'a lost'!

The last words were prefigured in 'The Dead':

'How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park!'

Joyce talked about that final 'the' with Louis Gillet:

'In Ulysses, to depict the babbling of a woman going to sleep, I had sought to end with the least forceful word I could possibly find. I had found the word 'yes', which is barely pronounced, which denotes acquiescence, self-abandon, relaxation, the end of all resistance. In Work in Progress, I've tried to do better if I could. This time, I have found the word which is most slippery, the least accented, the weakest word in English, a word which is not even a word, which is scarcely sounded between the teeth, a breath, a nothing, the article the.'

Louis Gillet, Stèle pour James Joyce, Marseille 1941, pp.164-65

For a whole essay on the final word, see Jim Le Blanc's 'The Closing Word of Finnegans Wake', in Hypermedia Joyce Studies.

But the last page doesn't end there.

Joyce liked to end his novels with a colophon ('finishing touch' in Greek) giving places of composition.  This is how A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ends, with another invocation of a mythical father.

And here's Ulysses.

With Finnegans Wake, Joyce could have written  'a colophon of no fewer than seven hundred and thirty two strokes tailed by a leaping lasso' (123.05) for he wrote the book in Nice, Paris, Bognor Regis, Tours, Saint-Malo, Ostend, Antwerp, London, The Hague, Brussels, Amsterdam, Rouen, Zurich, Le Havre, Torquay, Llandudno, Hamburg, Copenhagen and several other places –  see the list of his addresses in Danis Rose's Textual Diaries of James Joyce. 

But he needed just 'Paris' for Anna Livia Plurabelle's inititals.

The date was '1922-1938' until January 1939, when Joyce changed the second date while correcting the galleys.

'WE CANNOT IMAGINE A FITTER SWAN SONG'

Writing after his friend's death in 1941, Frank Budgen compared the ending with 'The Dead':

'The key of Ulysses is too bright, its movement too rapid for that pity and reconciliation which provide the magical end of the story, 'The Dead', to have any part in it, but that same human element expressed with yet greater artistry does return in the last pages of Finnegans Wake when Anna Livia goes forth by day, as a woman (wife and mother, representative of all flesh) to join the countless generations of the dead, as a river to become one with the god, her father Ocean....The last work of Joyce ends, as did his first, in the contemplation of the mystery of death. In both cases the rebellious pity of the human heart finds in the beauty of a constant element of nature — in the one falling snow, in the other smooth gliding water — the symbol and the instrument of reconciliation with human destiny. We had hoped for further years and other labours. We cannot imagine a fitter swan song.'

'Chapters of Going Forth by Day', James Joyce and the making of Ulysses, OUP, 1972, p 341-2

Paul Léon wrote that writing the ending for Joyce was a 'veritable deliverance':

'This postscript had probably been carried in its completed form for many years in the prodigious brain that engendered it. The first version, which was only about two a half pages long, was written in one afternoon, in December 1938. It was a veritable deliverance. Joyce brought it with him when we met that evening for his usual half-past eight rendez-vous in Madame Lapeyre's pleasant bistrot, on the corner of the Rue de Grenelle and the Rue de Bourgogne...'

'In Memory of Joyce', Poésie No V (1942), reprinted in James Joyce Volume 2: The Critical Heritage, (ed Robert Deming)

Eugene Jolas described the 'profound anguish' Joyce felt at writing this ending:

'For Joyce himself, Finnegans Wake had prophetic significance. Finn MacCool, the Finnish-Norwegian-Irish hero of the tale, seemed to him to be coming alive again after the publication of the book, and in a letter from France I received from him last spring, he said: '...It is strange, however, that after publication of my book, Finland came into the foreground suddenly'....'Prophetic too, were the last pages of my book,...'he added in the same letter.  The last pages, that had cost him such profound anguish at the time of their writing. 'I felt so completely exhausted,' he told me when it was done, 'as if all the blood had run out of my brain. I sat for a long while on a street bench, unable to move....'
   'And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms.'
  There was no turning back after these lines, my friend. You knew it well. Adew!'

Eugene Jolas, 'My Friend James Joyce',  Sean Givens (ed) James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism,  Vanguard Press, 1948, p17-18

'My daughter-in-law staged a marvellous banquet for my last birthday and read the closing pages on the passing-out of Anna Livia — to a seemingly much affected audience. Alas, if you ever read them you will see they were unconsciously prophetical!'

To Constantine Curran, 11 February 1940, Letters, p 408

Did Joyce mean that he believed he was prophesying the death of European civilization? Or did he imagine that his own life was coming to an end?

'when the approach of night was leading him to seek again the warmest, surest haven he had known' 

Maria Jolas

For a lovely creative reading of the final monologue, see Orlando Mezzabotta's 'ALP's reGrettas or HCE's Dämnerung' which is online here.

For the rest of the 'suspended sentence' (106.13) which continues on the opening page, see my post, 'The sentence it took Joyce twelve years to write'.

The Dream of H.C.Earwicker?

A scene from Passages from Finnegans Wake 

'The Dream of H.C. Earwicker' is the title of Edmund Wilson's review of Finnegans Wake, published in The New Republic on 28 June 1939, and later reprinted in The Wound and the Bow. 

Wilson was the first critic to argue that Joyce's book represented Earwicker's dream, at first in a 1929 article:

'The hero of the night's sleep in question is, we gather, a man named H. C. Earwicker, a Norwegian or descendant of Norwegians, living in Dublin....We are introduced, at the very beginning, into Earwicker's drowsing consciousness...'

Edmund Wilson, 'James Joyce', The New Republic, 18 December 1929

Wilson based his theory on the earliest chapters of the book which had been published in transition. At this time, Joyce hadn't written books two and four.  The article, reprinted in Axel's Castle in 1931, influenced many later readers.

In his 1939 review, Wilson added detail to his theory, arguing that the book had a 'realistic foundation' which he described at length:

'Let me try to establish some of the most important facts which provide the realistic foundation for this immense poem of sleep.  The hero of Finnegans Wake is a man of Scandinavian blood...Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who keeps a pub called the Bristol in Dublin.  He is somewhere between fifty and sixty, blond and ruddy, with a walrus moustache, very strong but of late years pretty fat. When embarrassed, he has a tendency to stutter...he is married to a woman named Ann, a former salesgirl, who is more or less illiterate and whose maiden name seems to have begun with Mac. They are both Protestants in a community of Catholics, he an Episcopalian and she a Presbyterian...It is a Saturday night in summer, after a disorderly evening in the pub....Earwicker has been drinking off and on all day and has perhaps gone to bed a little drunk. At any rate, his night is troubled. At first he dreams about the day before....'

Having decided that the book is happening in Earwicker's sleeping mind, Wilson complains that a Dublin publican could not be having a dream like this!

Edmund Wilson

'We are continually being distracted from identifying and following Earwicker, the humble proprietor of a public house, who is to encompass the whole microcosm of the dream, by the intrusion of all sorts of elements – foreign languages, literary allusions, historical information – which could not possibly be in Earwicker's mind....We are in the first place asked to believe that a man like H.C.Earwicker would seize every possible pretext provided by his house and its location to include in a single night's dream a large number of historical and legendary characters. And is it not pretty far-fetched to assume that Earwicker's awareness of the life of Swift or the Crimean War is really to be accurately conveyed in terms of the awareness of Joyce, who has acquired a special knowledge of these subjects? Also, what about the references to the literary life in Paris and to the book itself as Work in Progress, which take us right out of the mind of Earwicker and into the mind of Joyce?'

Where were we 'in the first place asked to believe' any of this?

I read all this as a convincing argument that Finnegans Wake is not the dream of Earwicker.

Much of Wilson's description* of the Earwickers is taken from Bk III chapter 4. This leads to another complaint about Joyce's incompetence as a writer:

'In Finnegans Wake we are not supplied with any objective data until the next to last chapter....It seems to me a serious defect that we do not really understand what is happening till we have almost finished the book.'

*Wilson has taken the name of the pub, the Bristol, from the Prankquean episode: 'And where did she come but to the bar of his bristolry'. 21.33. In fact, the Wake pub is more usually the Mullingar Inn.

'A WHOLE HOUSEHOLD DRIFTING ON THE WAVES OF SLEEP'

Wilson's argument was quickly accepted by many Wake readers. In 1931, the French critic Louis Gillet had argued that Joyce's Work in Progress was a collective dream by all the characters:

'The author has placed the characters of his poem in a pub on the river's bank....and these characters represent all human history!....The world and its history become the dream of these characters....The last part, drafted but still unknown, I believe will relate the family's sleep and dreams....a whole family, a whole household drifting on the waves of sleep.'

'James Joyce and his new novel', 15 August 1931

In 1940, Gillet revised his opinion, accepting Wilson's argument. He even added to the book's 'objective data' with a picture on the dreamer's bedroom wall:

'It goes without saying that the action is nil, reduced only a ghost of action occurring in the mind of a sleeping man. This slumbering hero is a Dublin pub-keeper, proprietor of a tavern of low repute in the vicinity of Phoenix Park. We learn on page 559 that in the room where he sleeps there is a framed colour-print of St Michael and the dragon....The man's name is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker.'

'The extraordinary adventure of James Joyce', 15 December 1940

A BRANCH TAPPING ON A WINDOW

The Earwicker dream theory was further developed in 1944 with Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. They invented a branch tapping on the sleeping Earwicker's window, intruding on his dream. This is first mentioned in a footnote to the word 'Tip' in the Museyroom scene:

'The repetition throughout Finnegans Wake of the word 'tip' finally turns out to be a dream transformation of the sound of a branch knocking against HCE's window as he sleeps beside his wife in the upper room. This branch is the finger of Mother Nature, in her desiccated aspect, bidding for attention.'

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Viking Press, 1964, p 41

They don't explain how or where Tip 'finally turns out' to be a branch. 

The branch is not mentioned again until they reach Book III Chapter 4, the chapter which gave Wilson his 'objective data'. Here Campbell and Robinson have made Wilson's summer dream a midwinter one.:

'It is the morning after the night of the winter solstice. A dry leaf still clinging to the tree outside the window has been scratching at the panel; and this sound has drawn the inexhaustible dream from the depths of the psyche...'

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Viking Press, 1964, p 325

I find this baffling, for the 'Tip' motif does not appear anywhere in this chapter (You can read all 39 appearances of this motif in fweet).  The only mention of a leaf is the description of the sleeping Issy as 'like some losthappy leaf' (556.19).

 

THE DATE OF EARWICKER'S DREAM

Let's call this approach, which assumes that Joyce has created a level of waking reality outside the dream, the 'branch tapping on a window'.  

In  'The Date of Earwicker's Dream', a baffling essay published in Twelve and a Tilly (1966), Nathan Halper argued that Earwicker's dream was taking place on a particular date in history. He decided on 18 March 1922, a Holy Saturday near the Spring equinox.

Halper presents his arguments as a series of numbered assertions.e.g.

'15...The phrase felix culpa keeps running through Earwicker's drean, This is from the hymn Exultet....

  This hymn is chanted on Holy Saturday'

Yet Halper can't resist including evidence which undermines his theory: Finnegans Wake refers to events which happened after 1922 and many dates apart from 18 March.

'2...It is not easy to believe that, in the 1920s, he was working on a dream that was going to be dreamed in 1930. Nor is it likely that, once he settled on a day, he kept revising it, moving it into the future, altering it, year by year, every time he thought of a new allusion....

11. If, at some moment, Mr Earwicker is thinking of a particular day, this – by itself – does not make it the day on which he happens to be dreaming....It is conceivable that...(Joyce) has managed to hint at every day of the year. 

12. This is only partly for the purposes of misdirection.

  He has a second reason. It is every dream and he's taking steps to show that it happens every night.

  The universal, however, has its home in the particular.

  It is a specific dream.  He is taking pains to give it a specific night: a house in which its universality may most efficiently reside'....

15 It is a week-end in Lent.  The year is 1922.

  There are indications in the text that confirms this period. But when we have looked for signs that it's one day rather than another, we have not been so successful.

  They should be there for the finding – I have looked for them again.

  A would-be Holmes, I have sought a print, a scent, a twig that has been bent, a match that has been dropped.'

ANTHONY BURGESS

In 1965, Anthony Burgess adopted Wilson's Earwicker dream theory and Campbell and Morton's branch at the window:

'We are primarily in a bed above a bar in Chapelizod, Dublin, on a Saturday night, with a dry branch tapping or tipping at the window, and we must never let ourselves forget it. In the final chapter we are not allowed to forget it. The fact that we we have to look at the near-end of the book to find out where the dreamer is dreaming does not imply that the whole thing is badly made or that Joyce is withholding anything from us. Finnegans Wake is cyclical like a riverrun, and we can enter the river at any point we wish.'

Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader, 1965, Hamlyn Paperback edition, 1982, p219 

Here Burgess is defending Joyce from Wilson's criticism, 'It seems to me a serious defect that we do not really understand what is happening till we have almost finished the book'.

A year after Here Comes Everybody, Burgess published A Shorter Finnegans Wake, in which he now argued that the dreamer's real name was not Earwicker but Porter, a name used in Bk III 4.

'His name is, as far as we can tell, Mr.Porter....Mr. Porter and his family are asleep for the greater part of the book. It has been a hard Saturday evening in the public bar, and sleep prolongs itself some way into the peace of Sunday morning. Mr. Porter dreams hard, and we are permitted to share his dream....Sleeping, he becomes a remarkable mixture of guilty man, beast, and crawling thing, and he even takes on a new and dreamily appropriate name – Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker.'

A Shorter Finnegans Wake,  Faber, 1966, p7

Wilson, Gillet and Burgess base their arguments on a belief that the penultimate chapter is more 'real' than the rest of the book. This is the book's most visual chapter, with a mass of physical detail missing elsewhere. But that doesn't make it more real.  Here's how the bedroom setting, including Gillet's picture on the wall, is described on p558-9:

'Scene and property plot. Stagemanager’s prompt. Interior of dwelling on outskirts of city. Groove two. Chamber scene. Boxed. Ordinary bedroom set. Salmonpapered walls. Back, empty Irish grate, Adam’s mantel, with wilting elopement fan, soot and tinsel, condemned. North, wall with window practicable. Argentine in casement. Vamp. Pelmit above. No curtains. Blind drawn. South, party wall. Bed for two with strawberry bedspread, wickerworker clubsessel and caneseated millikinstool. Bookshrine without, facetowel upon. Chair for one. Woman’s garments on chair. Man’s trousers with crossbelt braces, collar on bedknob. Man’s corduroy surcoat with tabrets and taces, seapan nacre buttons on nail. Woman’s gown on ditto. Over mantelpiece picture of Michael, lance, slaying Satan, dragon with smoke. Small table near bed, front. Bed with bedding. Spare. Flagpatch quilt. Yverdown design. Limes. Lighted lamp without globe, scarf, gazette, tumbler, quantity of water, julepot, ticker, side props, eventuals, man’s gummy article, pink.'

This is not a real room but a stage set, with many of the words taken from William George Fay's Short Glossary of Theatrical Terms, 1930 (see the list in fweet).  The casement is fitted with argentine, 'a material used on the stage as imitation of glass for windows' (Fay).

When the action begins, we see HCE and ALP in their most grotesque incarnations. There is also the sense that we are watching a film, with a closeup of the lead players.

'Closeup. Leads.
Man with nightcap, in bed, fore. Woman, with curlpins, hind. Discovered. Side point of view.....Male partly masking female. Man looking round, beastly expression, fishy eyes, paralleliped homoplatts, ghazometron pondus, exhibits rage. Business. Ruddy blond, Armenian bole, black patch, beer wig, gross build, episcopalian, any age. Woman, sitting, looks at ceiling, haggish expression, peaky nose, trekant mouth, fithery wight, exhibits fear. Welshrabbit teint, Nubian shine, nasal fossette, turfy tuft, undersized, free kirk, no age. Closeup. Play!' 559.20-30

This is the source of Wilson's 'objective data', and the reason why he says that Earwicker is a blond and ruddy Episcopalian and Anna a Presbyterian. But HCE here is wearing a wig and stage makeup. Armenian bole is 'a fine red powder used on the stage to give the appearance of sunburn on the skin' (Fay). So he is playing a blond and ruddy Episcopalian. 

Although this stage publican version of HCE is called Mr Porter, elsewhere in the chapter he is called Albatrus Nyanzer, Honuphrius 'a concupiscent exservicemajor' and Humperfeldt - names just as real or unreal. 

POINT-OF-VIEW

The biggest problem with the Earwicker dream theory is that we never see anything in the book from his point-of-view. Apart from the 'Haveth Childers Everywhere' section (532-554), when we hear his voice in a seance, he is either being investigated by the narrators (the 'we' voice of most of Book One) or discussed by other characters, such as the washerwomen in Anna Livia Plurabelle. 

'And the cut of him! And the strut of him! How he used to hold his head as high as a howeth, the famous eld duke alien, with a hump of grandeur on him like a walking wiesel rat.' 197.01

In the Porter chapter, we see him through the eyes of the four old men, and their first sight as they enter his bedroom is of his bare buttocks as he lies on top of his wife. His backside is also Dublin's Phoenix Park.  See my earlier post, Dublin's Phoenix Park as a Giant Male Arse.  The scene is described by the second old man, Marcus Lyons:

'The straight road down the centre (see relief map) bisexes the park which is said to be the largest of his kind in the world. On the right prominence confronts you the handsome vinesregent’s lodge while, turning to the other supreme piece of cheeks, exactly opposite, you are confounded by the equally handsome chief sacristary’s residence.' 564.10-15

Did you ever have a dream in which you were inspecting your own arse? An arse which was also a park?

'A MYTH OF SLEEPING LIFE'

If Joyce intended the book to be Earwicker's dream, he would surely have said so, since he discussed his book at length over many years. Apart from conversations, formal interviews and letters providing glosses, he oversaw a book of explanatory essays, the Exagmination and an authorised biography by Gorman with a lengthy account of his aims. See my post Joyce describes Finnegans Wake.

He often talked about his book as representing a dream, without mentioning a dreamer.

'Work in Progress? A nocturnal state, lunar. That is what I wanted to convey: what goes on in a dream, during a dream.'

Jaques Mercanton, 'The Hours of James Joyce', in Portraits of the Artist in Exile (ed Willard Potts), pp 209-221

'One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutandry grammar and goahead plot.'

To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 24 November 1926, Letters Vol 3, p146 (Selected Letters p.318)

'[Finnegans Wake] would have the gigantic dimensions of a Myth and yet it would be contained within the fleeting instants of a dream. It would be a Myth of sleeping life as Ulysses had been a Myth of waking life'

Herbert Gorman, James Joyce, Bodley Head, 1941, p.331

'I want to describe the night itself. Ulysses is related to this book as day is to night....There are, so to say, no individual people in the book – it is as in a dream, the style gliding and unreal as the way it is 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 with reality is doubtful.'

Ole Vinding, 'James Joyce in Copenhagen', in Portraits of the Artist in Exile, pp 149

This last quotation is an explicit rejection of Wilson's claim that Finnegans Wake has a 'realistic foundation.' 

FINN MACCOOL AS THE DREAMER

It's a shame Joyce didn't say more about  'an old man'. But it may relate to the only published remark in which he ever mentioned a dreamer, given here by Ellmann:

'Joyce informed a friend later, 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.'

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, OUP 1982, p544

Clive Hart gives a slightly different version of this story, as well as its source:

'Mrs Adaline Glasheen reports that Dr O'Brien, a friend of Joyce's, told her in conversation that Joyce had told him 'that Finnegans Wake was 'about' Finn lying dying by the River Liffey with the history of Ireland and the world circling through his mind.''

Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, Northwestern University Press, 1962 p81

This comment must date from 1938-9, when Joyce became friends with Dr Daniel P O'Brien of the Rockefeller Foundation. He spent a lot of time with Joyce in La Baule in September 1939, following the outbreak of the war.

Perhaps Vinding's 'old man' is Finn MacCool.

If Joyce saw the book as a dream of old Finn, it would be after November 1926. That was when his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver asked him to write a piece about the Giant's Grave at Penrith, inspiring the opening chapter. Here's Danis Rose's great description of Joyce's reaction to Weaver's commission:

'Joyce was electrified: here exactly was what he needed to give spin to his work in progress: the notion of HCE as a (sleeping) giant interred in the landscape and, beyond that, of a man assumed dead but sleeping....And with MacCool came the ballad-hall Tim Finnegan with his hod....With his fall off the wall came the first Fall, Adam and Eve and all their descendants down to Mr and Mrs Porter shagged out in their bed. In a word, Miss Weaver's fortuitously brilliant idea gave Joyce the notion for a chapter, or prelude, that was destined to become the common picture of Finnegans Wake: a giant dreaming of falls and walls, a babble of tongues, a tale of howes and graves and burrows and biers.'

Danis Rose, The Textual Diaries of James Joyce, Lilliput Press, 1995, p.95

Joyce had already written most of books one and three by this time.  

This Finn idea may even have come to Joyce at the very end of writing the book. In 'Finn MacCool and the Final Weeks of Work in Progress'  (A Wake Newslitter October 1980) Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon showed that Joyce took most of his notes on Finn in 1937-1938. 

Joyce talked a lot about Finn MacCool in the opening months of World War Two:

'For Joyce himself, Finnegans Wake had prophetic significance. Finn MacCool, the Finnish-Norwegian-Irish hero of the tale, seemed to him to be coming alive again after the publication of the book, and in a letter from France I received from him last spring, he said: '...It is strange, however, that after publication of my book, Finland came into the foreground suddenly....the most curious comment I have received on the book is a symbolical one from Helsinki, where, as foretold by the prophet, the Finn again wakes, and volunteer Buckleys are hurrying from all sides to shoot Russian generals....'

Eugene Jolas, 'My Friend James Joyce', 1941 in Sean Givens (ed) James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, Vanguard Press, 1948, p17

Perhaps Joyce discovered that the giant was his dreamer after he finished writing the book!

In a letter to J.S.Atherton, Weaver rejected the Earwicker dream theory:

'I own that The Skeleton Key, though extremely useful in many ways, has its irritating features – at least it has to me.  The authors seem to me to read unwarranted things into the book. Their ascription of the whole thing to a dream of HCE seems to me nonsensical....My view is that Mr Joyce did not intend the book to be looked upon as the dream of any one character, but that he regarded the dream form with its shiftings and changes and chances as a convenient device, allowing the freest scope to introduce any material he wished - and suited to a night piece.'

quoted in The Books at the Wake, Southern Illinois University Press, 1959 p17

The idea of a mythological giant being the dreamer would also allow him 'the freest scope to introduce any material he wished'.

EVERYONE'S DREAM

J.S.Atherton came up with my favourite dreamer theory, in a brilliant lecture, 'The Identity of the Sleeper', which he gave at the very first James Joyce Symposium, at the Gresham Hotel, on Bloomsday in 1967.

'I do not wish to deny any of the theories which have been put forward as to the identity of the dreamer: they are all true up to a point. For, as I see FW it is everyone’s dream, the dream of all the living and the dead. Many puzzling features become clear if this is accepted. Obviously we will hear many foreign languages: Chinese will be prominent if we know Chinese; German if we know German, and so on....It is the universal mind which Joyce assumes as the identity of the dreamer; he, of course, is writing it all down but everyone else contributes.'

I've posted the whole lecture here in 'Who is Dreaming Finnegans Wake?' 

For more on Joyce's belief in a Universal Mind see 'Finnegans Wake as Magical Evocation'.

For an argument that challenges Atherton's universal mind, see John Bishop's 1986 Joyce's Book of the Dark,  the most recent version of the single dreamer theory.  I am more persuaded, and inspired, by Atherton's idea, but I recommend PQ's four part review of Bishop's book in his excellent Finnegans, Wake! blog.

'Wather Parted from the Say'

Finnegans Wake includes lots of comic verse, often set out as verse, but sometimes hidden in the prose:

This is the beginning of a song mocking HCE at the close of the pub episode, on page 371. To set the scene, it's closing time in HCE's pub (based on the Mullingar House, Chapelizod). He is trying to throw the disorderly drinkers out, but they are 'clamatising for an extinsion on his hostillery'. Adding to his sense of urgency, he can hear the sound of an angry mob of 'Mullinguard minstrelsers' marching through Dublin to attack him.

The song is sung by Ostia, who is at the head of the mob. We last heard from him as 'Hosty (no slouch of a name) an illstarred beachbusker', who sings the 'Ballad of Persse O'Reilly' , another song attacking HCE, on pages 44-8.

The last line above is the cheering of the mob listening to Ostia's song, as on page 46:

Lift it, Hosty, lift it, ye devil ye! up with the rann, the rhyming rann!  

'Ostia' is Italian for host – the eucharist, raised by a celebrant, which gives an extra meaning to the mob's call, 'Ostia, lift it!' Orlando Mezzabotta has posted to the online Wake reading group that ''ostia!' is a very common imprecation in Venetian/Triestine dialect. Not really blasphemous: let's say -- a soft swearing. A variant is 'Pan da Ostia' (Host's bread), used to show surprise.'  There's also the Latin 'hostis', meaning enemy.

Ostia is also the port at the mouth of the River Tiber - a fitting name for the singer of a song about water. Its name comes from 'os', the Latin word for 'mouth'. Ostia is the mouthpiece of the mob – the hostile host – pursuing HCE.

'Dour douchy' is a play on Tenducci - the Italian soprano castrati, Giusto Fernando Tenducci (1736-90). He was a star in Britain and Ireland, famous for singing the role of Arbaces in Thomas Arnes' 1762 opera Artaxerxes.  Tenducci's big aria was 'Water Parted from the Sea': 

'Water parted from the Sea
May increase the river's tide;
To the bubbling fount may flee
Or thro' fertile valleys glide.
Tho' in search of soft repose,
Thro' the land 'tis free to roam,
Still it murmurs as it flows,
Panting for its native home.'

Tenducci sang this aria in his concerts, in which he also performed traditional Scottish songs.

This led to 'Water Parted from the Sea' being mistakenly included as an old Scottish song in the 'Scots Musical Museum' (right), edited by Robert Burns and James Johnson.

Later in the Wake we have 'tendulcis tunes like tunes like water parted fluted up from the westinders' 541.32 

On the left is another reference to the song in the 1826 memoirs of the Dublin actor and dramatist John O'Keeffe, which I found online.

He quotes a song sung by the 'frolicsome Dublin boys', which Joyce is parodying in his own verse.

The Dublin boys were themselves parodying another song, written in the 17th century.

Tommy was a Piper's Son,
And fell in love when he was young;
But all the Tunes that he could play
Was 'O'er the hills, and far away'.

The verses of Ostia's song are interspersed with descriptions of the marching mob, the disorderly drinkers and HCE's state of mind. The pub is also beginning to be transformed into a ship, which will sail away at the end of the chapter.  It's a classic anxiety dream.

Here's the whole song put together:

Dour douchy was a sieguldson.

He cooed that loud nor he was young.

He cud bad caw nor he was gray

Like wather parted from the say.

For be all rules of sport, ‘tis right

That youth bedower’d to charm the night

Whilst age is dumped to mind the day

When wather parted from the say.

From Dancingtree till Suttonstone

There’s lads no lie would filch a crown

To mull their sack and brew their tay

With wather parted from the say.

His bludgeon’s bruk, his drum is tore.

For spuds we’ll keep the hat he wore

And roll in clover on his clay

By wather parted from the say.

The gangstairs strain and anger’s up

As Hoisty rares the can and cup

To speed the bogre’s barque away

O’er wather parted from the say.

Try singing that to the tune of 'Over the hills and far away'!

Going through verse by verse:

Dour douchy was a sieguldson.

He cooed that loud nor he was young.

He cud bad caw nor he was gray

Like wather parted from the say.

HCE was a seagull's son? A sigurdson? Elsewhere, he's a Viking foreign invader, founder of Dublin. That's followed by one of more than forty Wake pairings of the dove and the raven, released by Noah from his Ark (below).  When HCE was young he cooed loudly, like a dove. Now he's old and gray, he can only 'bad caw', like a raven. 

Noah in his Ark is like HCE in his ship/pub.

He's like 'wather parted from the say', which could be water parted from the self (se = self in Latin), or piss. 

That's just a paraphrase, and no paraphrase can do justice to this strange and beautiful verse.

For be all rules of sport, ‘tis right

That youth bedower’d to charm the night

Whilst age is dumped to mind the day

When wather parted from the say.

This one's much clearer. He's washed up, dumped to mind the day while the young are 'bedower'd to charm the night'. This is the same message as the seagulls' mocking 'Three quarks for Muster Mark!' song on p.383.  It's now 'when' wather parted, the moment of transition to old age.

From Dancingtree till Suttonstone

There’s lads no lie would filch a crown

To mull their sack and brew their tay

With wather parted from the say.

Here's another common Wake pairing - the tree/Shem and the stone/Shaun, the young who will supplant HCE. Shem is the dancing tree, Shaun the sitting stone. Maybe also Dunsink and Sutton in Dublin. They will filch HCE's crown and mull their sack and brew their tea with his water.

His bludgeon’s bruk, his drum is tore.

For spuds we’ll keep the hat he wore

And roll in clover on his clay

By wather parted from the say.

His stick and drum are broken, but we'll keep his hat for our spuds, and roll in clover on his grave, which is the city of Dublin by the River Liffey ('by wather parted').

The gangstairs strain and anger’s up

As Hoisty rares the can and cup

To speed the bogre’s barque away

O’er wather parted from the say.

The mob's anger is up. Ostia is now Hoisty, raising a cup to speed the old bugger/ogre's barque away over the water.

This refers to the pub's transformation into a ship, described on the previous page, where we see the four old men leaving the pub and falling into the sea  ('The for eolders were aspolootly at their westend in the mailing water' 372.34).

At the end of the chapter, the ship sails away, becoming the setting for the Tristan and Isolde episode which follows.

So sailed the stout ship Nansy Hans. From Liff away.  382.27