River and Mountain, Land and Sea: The Political Topography of Finnegans Wake

Abstract

notions of kinship and genealogy among those who remain on the division of land where their predecessors are buried developed into the notions of families or houses, into clans or peoples, ultimately into nations. “When Vico speaks of a mental language common to all nations,” Said writes, “he is, therefore, asserting the verbal community binding men together at the expense of their immediate existential presence to one another” (373). In other words, the nature-alienating abstractions that M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 746 make language possible are at the same time always making and remaking the abstract social relations of kinship, race, nation. What the Viconian theory implies, historiographical accuracy notwithstanding, is that the same process made nature available both to human discourse and to human habitation, namely, a division of land that marked a separation with the organic unity of primal nature. This division or territorialization was the condition of possibility for nation-state formations, whose legibility in turn depended on an understanding of nature that made totalizing state sovereignty over a demarcated territory seem self-evident. Finnegans Wake undermines this self-evidence. Joyce’s historical consciousness derives its scope from a combination of Vico’s lesson that human history comprises a cyclical, therefore ever-impermanent, appropriation of nature, corsi e ricorsi, and Giordano Bruno’s image of the universe as undivided infinity of which each particular thing is a reflection. Bruno summarizes his first two arguments in the treatise, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds: Firstly, that the inconstancy of sense-perception doth demonstrate that sense is no source of certainty, but can attain thereto only through comparison and reference from one sensible percept to another, from one sense to another, so that truth may be inferred from diverse sources. Secondly, the demonstration is begun of the infinity of the universe; and the first argument is derived from the failure to limit the world by those whose fantasy would erect around it boundary walls. These seem to be working principles of Finnegans Wake, too: its multivalent language wards against essentializing certainty, its limitlessness against drawing definite boundaries. Hugh MacDiarmid was among the earliest to compare this vantage point that sees all human history as one kaleidoscopic—“A collideorscape!”—universal mythography to Goethean Weltliteratur (Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 143.28). He saw in Joyce’s example that “Our consciousness is beginning to be planetary. A new tension has been set up between the individual and the universe.” Literature after the Wake, MacDiarmid argues, must now be responsive to the whole world, must embrace macaronic play, polyglot pluralism, must understand the human as multitude and time as deep abyss—all beings belonging to one infinite whole. But there’s a danger, again, in visions assuming that humans already belong to one whole in a social universe constituted by division. If a reading of the Wake’s rivers finds them washing away borders, then, after an interlude into the divisive cosmographies of Schmitt and Lewis, a reading of its mountains will have to sort through the accumulated detritus of a world humans have made and remade. “In this land of the livvey . . .” The parodied voice of the pompous professor emerges throughout Finnegans Wake, speaking with the untroubled authority of the best sophists. In the last chapter, this FRIDELL / the political topography of finnegans wake 747 voice appears in summarizing mode, as the narration arrives at dawn with St. Kevin bobbing back to shore in a tub after Shaun had been swept to sea in a barrel to revisit the Phoenix Park scene of HCE’s mysterious transgression: It is a mere mienerism of this vague of visibilities, mark you, as accorded to by moisturologist of the Brehons Assorceration for the advauncement of scayence because, my dear, mentioning of it under the breath, as in pure (what bunkum!) essenesse, there have been disselving forenenst you just the draeper, the two drawpers assisters and the three droopers assessors confraternitisers. Who are, of course, Uncle Arth, your two cozes from Niece and (kunject a bit now!) our own familiars, Billyhealy, Ballyhooly and Bullyhowley, surprised in an indecorous position by the Sigurd Sigerson Sphygmomanometer Society for bledprusshers. (Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 608.1–11) Like all the previous references to HCE’s indiscretion there’s a combination of two women (here a play on Nice and niece, referring to daughter Issy) and three men— indeed, the numerical arrangement is the only constant feature amid the gossip, calumny, testimony, interview, reenactment, film and trial (full of the “unfacts” of a “notional gullery”) by which we receive secondhand knowledge of this event (Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 57.16–21). The paragraph’s speaker takes on the role of a defense attorney. Accusations against HCE are dismissed as the “mere mienerism of this vague of visibilities,” a case of mistaken appearance as the cloth merchants (“three droopers”) and their assistants (“two drawpers assisters”) were found with drawers in an unfortunate “indecorous position” by some suspicious but witless intruder. In “pure (what bunkum!) essenesse,” that is, in actuality, beneath all the cant, the charges are shown to be nonsense, or bunkum. But the odd interrupted construction of this phrase seems also to imply that “bunkum” could modify “pure”—to speak of essence, then, is always nonsense. Multiple allusions to scientific authority frame the speech: the moisturologist; the “Brehons Assorceration for the advauncement of scayence,” combining Brehon Law with British Association for the Advancement of Science; and the intruder upon the scene, “Sigurd Sigerson Sphygmomanometer Society,” referring to the nineteenth-century Dublin neurologist George Sigerson. However precisely able to divine the truth or essence of things this complex scientific assemblage would appear to be, though, there’s a haunting sense of superstition—“Assorceration” contains sorcery as “scayence” contains séance. This doubt recurs three pages later with reference to the “immaterialist” philosopher George Berkeley, who claimed that all “zoantholitic furniture, from mineral through vegetal to animal,” in Joyce’s paraphrase, does not exist, is immaterial, unless a mind perceives it (611.14–15). The speaker combines this theory with Kant, who conceded that things-in-themselves do exist, but remain ultimately unknowable: “he savvy inside true inwardness of reality, the Ding hvad in idself id est” (611.20–21). Freud is thrown into the mix with the reference to “id,” which implies that the unconscious structures apprehension of the thing-in-itself, no matter what scientific objectivity the observer claims. “Itself” will always be “idself,” that is, already a projection of repressed, obscuring desire. The abiding lesson is that our inability to know what actually happened M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 748 between those three men and two women is a function of a larger inability ever really to know anything. Although we might take all the above as the elaborate sophistry of a sententious solicitor trying to exculpate HCE, the structuring doubt of the park scene seems to extend to a repudiation of essentializing of all kinds in the book. The “essenesse” of the above passage also refers to the two brothers Shaun and Shem (esse ‘n’ esse); the word’s depiction of their being separated on two parallel sides by a middle barrier is the same arrangement of chapter II.ii, which has the voices of Shaun and Shem (here, Dolph and Kev) as marginal annotations on either side of the text. Sequentially in their night lessons, under the ring-fencing of disciplines, the two sons and daughter practice grammar, history, letter writing, mathematics, and geometry. A long parenthetical interlude at the start of the geometry lesson anticipates the brothers swapping positions and tells a potted history of Ireland using a geographical diagram of a river with two rival banks to illustrate the relation between the land-bodies now called Ireland and England across the narrow, separating sea. Rivers abound in the paragraph before the interlude, prominently ALP, who will be the subject of a vulgar geometry lesson herself. Shem and Shaun are figured as explorers who will from both sides of the river survey the history of Ireland but also their parents’ sexual relationship, by encircling the island with them as river and mountain: And to find a locus for an alp get a howlth on her bayrings as a prisme O and for a second O unbox your compasses . . . So let’s seth off betwain us. Prompty? Mux your pistany at a point of the coastmap to be called a but pronounced olfa. There’s the isle of Mun, ah! (287.8–16) Their textbook instructs them to mark a point on their paper, but “mark” is complicated into “mux your pistany,” or mix your mud. Echoing “Anny liffle mud” with “ann aquilittoral dryankle,” the mud here suggests the liminal space between water and land, rather than the sharp demarcations of a “coastmap.” While you can mark a point a in neat “applepine erdor,” it tells a lie of a sort about the corresponding “isle of Mun” (where Man is dirtied by both mud and the Irish mún, urine). The muddying of geometric precision is furthered in the Latin passage that begins the interlude (rendered here in Roland McHugh’s approximating translation), which gives an account, “in the Roman tongue of the dead,” of the most ancient wisdom of both the priests Giordano & Giambattista: the fact that the whole of the river flows safely, with a clear stream, & that those things which were to have been on the bank would later be in the bed; finally, that everything recognises itself through something opposite & that the stream is embraced by rival banks (287.24–28). In this vision drawn from Bruno and Vico, human history is