I know that I have Broken Every Heart : The Significance of the Irish Language in Finnegans Wake and in Other Works of James Joyce 9781936320790

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I KNOW THAT I HAVE BROKEN EVERY HEART

I KNOW THAT I HAVE BROKEN EVERY HEART THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE IN “FINNEGAN’S WAKE’ AND IN OTHER WORKS OF JAMES JOYCE

DIARMUID CURRAOIN

MAUNSEL & COMPANY, DUBLIN AN IMPRINT OF ACADEMICA PRESS BETHESDA - DUBLIN - PALO ALTO

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Curraoin, Diarmuid. I Know That I Have Broken Every Heart : the Significance of the Irish Language in "Finnegan's Wake" and in Other Works of James Joyce / by Diarmuid Curraoin. pages cm. -- (Irish Research Series ; #68) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-936320-79-0 1. Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Finnegans wake. 2. Joyce, James, 1882-1941.--Language. 3. Irish language. I. Title. PR6019.O9F5766 2014 821'.912--dc23 2013049244

Copyright 2014 by Diarmuid Curraoin

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Academica Press, LLC Box 60728 Cambridge Station Palo Alto, CA. 94306 Website: www.academicapress.com to order: 650-329-0685

DEDICATION DO CHAROLINE

CONTENTS Foreword

xi

Preface

xv

Acknowledgements

xxi

Chapter One. The Language of the Outlaw – ‘Finnegans Wake’ and the Politics of Space, Time and the Unconscious Mind.

1

The Exile returns The Concept of Message in ‘Finnegans Wake’ The Story of the Night The Limitations of Language Life in a Dream State The 'Wake' wakes up The Concept of Plot in ‘Finnegans Wake’ ‘Finnegans Wake’ and the Deconstruction of the Soul ‘Finnegans Wake’ as an Act of War The Geography of ‘Finnegans Wake’ ‘Finnegans Wake’ and Colonial Respectability ‘Finnegans Wake’ and the Irish Revolution ‘Finnegans Wake’ and Gaelic River-Lore ‘Finnegans Wake’ and the German Language. Chapter Two. The Dream of the Black Panther - James Joyce and the Struggle for National Self-Realisation The Concept of National Self-Realisation The Dream of the Black Panther Pangur Bán Saltair na Rann Geographic Regionalism in ‘Finnegans Wake’

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viii Parnellism

James Joyce and Arthur Griffith The Journalism of James Joyce James Joyce and the Irish Language Shibboleths in the Writings of Joyce ‘The Last Tram Home’ Chapter Three.’I know that I have broken every heart‘ - The Secret Messages in Irish of ‘Finnegans Wake’

39

The True Nature of the ‘Wake’ The Heard, the Unheard and the Overheard The Incompleteness of Comprehension Static The Use of the Irish of the Ring Gaeltacht in ‘Finnegans Wake’ The Different Categories of Irish Language Usage in ‘Finnegans Wake’ Political Statements in Irish in ‘Finnegans Wake’ Expressions of Love in Irish in ‘Finnegans Wake’ Revelations of Religiosity in Irish in ‘Finnegans Wake’ Declarations of Sorrow and Loneliness in Irish in ‘Finnegans Wake’ Chapter Four. Less than Lovers, More than Friends - Feminine Incarnations of Ireland in ‘Finnegans Wake’ and in the Other Works of James Joyce ‘Finnegans Wake’, James Joyce's Last Word on the World Linguistic Divisions and Streetscapes Language in a Colonial context ‘Finnegans Wake’, an Act of Cultural Resistance Speaking in Tongues The Failure of Language Toraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne in ‘Finnegans Wake’ History as Fiction, Fiction as History The Little Black Rose Echoes of the Irish Language in Dubliners

59

Contents

ix

Implications for Modern Ireland. Chapter Five. The Sayings of the West – ‘Finnegans Wake’ and the Hisperica Famina

83

Ireland and the Taste for the Exotic The Golden Age A New Irish Form of Latin The Irish Language and Hisperic Latin The Altus Prosator The Altus Prosator in ‘Finnegans Wake’ Old Irish Glosses in ‘Finnegans Wake’ Incomprehensibility as a Function of Freedom Joyce's View of the Irish Golden Age Once a Great Nation Chapter Six. Our Hearts Flung Open Wide - James Joyce and Questions of Irish Linguistic Identity

101

Joyce and Ireland, a Complicated Relationship? James Joyce and the Learning of Irish James Joyce and the Politics of Language James Joyce and Pádraig Pearse Joyce's Political Writings ‘An Explanatory Treasure of Heart and Mind’ A New Fenian Cycle Irish Forms In The Absence of all Fanaticism Chapter Seven. Stories of You - An Abject Surrender to the \Complex Thinking of ‘Finnegans Wake’ Life as Defeat Sleeping Oneself Awake Fantasia

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Different Versions of the Same Thing Polarity The Reconfiguration of the Colonial Mind Complex Thinking in ‘Finnegans Wake’ A New Terminology Binary Pairs in ‘Finnegans Wake’ Rivers of Memory An Abject Surrender to Style Chapter Eight. A Prayer for a Resurrection Man - Breaking the Circle of ‘Finnegans Wake’

143

‘Finnegans Wake’ as a Ring Levels of Comprehension in ‘Finnegans Wake’ Linguistic Impressionism Breaking the Circle Echoes of ‘Ulysses’ Diarmuid and Gráinne A Deathbed Confession Back to the Beginning Jonathan Swift Do You Belong? Resurrection The Face of Midnight Appendix

165

Bibliography

169

Index

175

FOREWORD This book is a superb piece of scholarship. How often do you hear that phrase introduce a new book these days? This is a book which usurps many of the staid and stale interpretations of Joyce’s master-work ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ and breaks completely new ground. Conventional wisdom would have it that Joyce rejected much of what was unique to Ireland and Irish thought and sought out solely that which was Continental, experimental and estranged from his Irish background and sensibility. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Diarmuid Curraoin’s book gets inside Joyce’s head for the first time, a man whose wife Nora Barnacle (who was of course a profound influence on his life and work) straddled two principal world-views, Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic, two Cultures, two principal ways of speaking, two ways of being. Not only does this volume trace the genesis of ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ and the initial critical reception to the new moulding of language and idiom that this work entailed, but it gets closer to Joyce’s real intentions with this book and the philosophy that undercuts the Symbolism and syntax of what was essentially a new form of expression, a novel way of representing and interpreting the tympanum of this world – a new speech and way of being. The academic writing in this book is of the highest order in terms of conciseness and explication. It is a rare gem in terms of research literature. Curraoin’s writing is of the highest order, his sentences crafted in a manner that would have made Joyce himself proud. With ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ Joyce undoubtedly became a bastion of literary Modernism through his use of idiosyncratic language, multilingual puns and portmanteau words, techniques that many critics consider to have recreated the experience of sleep and dreams. Owing to the work's expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and its abandonment of the conventions of plot and character construction, ‘Finnegans Wake’ remains a mystery to much of the Irish public. As Curraoin puts it, Joyce was engaged in a more fundamental and radical project in this, his last book. Not only does ‘Finnegans Wake’ underline the comic vision and musical power that underlay

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Joyce’s incredible literary achievement but it also highlights the way in which Joyce tested the sinews of language itself, stretching it to its utmost, in an attempt to re-paint the vision that is the world as we see it. Joyce was years ahead of his time in interrogating the very notions of Irishness and identity and ‘Finnegans Wake’ is his elucidation of the psychic loss and estrangement the Irish felt in the inner recesses of their souls. ‘Finnegans Wake’ is the ultimate manifestation of what Irish people felt and continue to feel as one generation transfers this psychic loss to the next, as if it were a form of inheritance. Joyce went further, however. To represent and re-create such a sense of loss is by its very nature a project that can never be truly complete. The wheel can never be circled. The sentences can never paint the picture of what is hidden or rejected in the psyche, in the soul. The loss of identity and voice that accompanied Colonialism is mirrored in the ‘Wake’ by Joyce’s brave admission that language, like speech itself is a limited device. As Curraoin so deftly explores, ‘Finnegans Wake’ stands alone amongst the works of the author in that the theme of his novel is not so much drawn from its plot but rather from the words and syntactical formulations that Joyce chose to use. And yet neither the writer nor the language can ever fully ‘re-create’ the world. Joyce knew well the boundaries that the limitations of language place upon voice, the simple fact that when one speaks, when one writes, that one is never fully comprehended, that one is always, to some degree, misunderstood. Language is undoubtedly mankind’s most efficient, most successful form of communication but that is not to say that it is a perfect device, indeed nothing could be further from the truth. It is a blunt instrument which cuts roughly, which creates ridges and splinters of meaning, unclean lines running against the grain of truth. It is capable of much but never absolute accuracy. It can give an impression of that which we observe, hear, imagine, think or sense but words can never completely or even adequately recreate in the mind of another the images that are in our heads at any given moment. Sentences can never paint the picture of the world as we see it. Speech in all its forms allows the individual to develop but just barely. It allows society to function but just about. What is heard is not

Foreword

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what was said, what was said is not what was meant, what was meant was not what was felt and what was felt defies description even to he who has felt it. The essays in this unique volume break completely novel and unfurrowed ground. Curraoin has created a new and innovative paradigm within which Joyce’s ‘Wake’ can now be explored or appreciated. He has identified the hidden energies of the text, the cultural and linguistic magma that rises beneath the stream of consciousness approach, that interdependency, between Joyce and the Irish language that generates the ‘Wake’s’ peculiar power. Curraoin’s approach demonstrates how hard Joyce worked in the ‘Wake’ to find a new postColonial voice and to make a new language whereby: style and substance become one; theme coalesces with message and language becomes that theme but a theme that is off-centre…a language fluent in its inarticulate being, determined and passionate in its persistence to be heard… In terms of Joyce, the writer, ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ is undoubtedly the most important book he wrote, tracing as it does the evolution of his mind, as a writer and one of the greatest literary exponents the world has ever seen. Diarmuid Curraoin’s achievement in this volume marks a new landmark in Joyce Studies. Rather than being employed as a merely decorative device, as previously assumed, the use of the Irish language in the ‘Wake’ functions as the medium through which the author interprets his own complex relationship with his homecountry and reveals his greatest hopes and deepest fears. This volume is essential reading for every Joycean scholar. It traces Joyce’s final and most glorious ‘epiphany’ as a writer, that moment where in the truest of senses, Joyce finally came home. Mícheál Ó hAodha

PREFACE When did it start? When exactly did we begin to lose her? Was it one singular incident or a sequence of events that ended our relationship with Ireland, that broke our love affair with the Little Black Rose. She hadn't really been happy for a while, little wonder when one thinks of how we had behaved but she might have forgiven us our many sins and failings if she had known what she meant to us. If she had known that she wasn't wasting her time. She watched us change, adopt new modes of speech, new forms of address, the clothes of an enemy of whom we were both frightened and enamoured. She smiled at us still as we squandered her admiration but now in a less open, more guarded way. She was no longer always glad to see us but more significantly she could no longer be sure that we were always glad to see her. If she had only known that the very sight of her still stirred our soul and quickened our blood, that her words and stories were the only ones that we wanted to hear, that we would have run away with her in a heartbeat but this she couldn't know because we never told her. Unable to aspire to being anything more than the ruins of a country and preferring as we did, to hide behind the comfortable, self-loathing awkwardness of the enthusiastic slave, we said nothing. Afraid of appearing foolish, afraid of taking the chance, we never said how we really felt, our fingers frozen in the semi-permanent handshake pose of the culturally unaffectionate, we feigned delight at her ‘good news’ and with the two halves of our heart rolling around in our chest, we turned around, walked away and let her go. And oh how we missed her. Our character disintegrated as we remembered, in misery, the time when we were happy. We expended so much energy pretending to be ourselves that we failed to notice the ravages of a disappointed middle-age on our national personality, the jealousy, the moralisation, the hypocrisy, the factionalism, the gossip. We closed our eyes as the assassins sat in a huddle around their victim, faces contorted with strained

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concern, their voices hushed but forceful, filled with the fanaticism of those that have never been proven right but who would not be denied their moment of triumphant influence. We tolerated the emergence of the secret which in its keeping takes sides and divides its keepers from those from whom it is being kept but which lets the house sleep, a covered but unconcealed lump on the floor, until the rug is raised and is swept clinkering into the open spaces of friendships made impossible by its dissolute echoing. We became a land of splits and ever smaller groups, self-satisfied circles which having raised exclusion to an art-form distrusted the excluded for not wanting to know and never wishing to go back, centres of suspicion which assessed their relative safety, not in terms of the strength of their conviction but rather on the basis of whether or not they could be overheard. Conspiracies of the present against the absent. A new politics of the not being there. This is not how it should be.This is not how it ever should have been but this is how it is, a reality which in ‘Finnegans Wake’ James Joyce recognises but then attempts to reconfigure and move forward from. For it is in imperfection that one finds the greatest beauty. It is in the face of the most pernicious falsehood that one can find one's own deepest truth. It is in isolation that the individual can find liberation, the freedom needed to speak one's own mind, the independence of spirit required of an author to rise above a bereft nation, declare that the romance of the ages is far from dead, climb over the broken beams of our history into the shadow of the dark-haired Rosaleen, fall to his knees, becomes his people and a world hungry for hope and in a voice so loud that it calls up the rivers, so emotional that it raises the hero from his grave, cries out with all the power that our constituent parts can muster, ‘come back to me’. ‘Finnegans Wake’ is the anthem of the Unasked, of the Not-told, of the bringers of a stoneless silence, the song sung down those ever going New Jersey roads, heard on smoky Parisian, Mary Quant streets and proclaimed to the future by all those beautiful Irish outsiders soon to come, the dawn that breaks twilight over the streams, dismisses the ‘might have beens’ and calls those from whom the secrets are kept, those of whom the ‘auld wans’ and jealous friends warn, to gather their grace, cut loose, lean gently into the light of their lives which no

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logic can quench, dry her tears, hold her hands and quietly, fearfully allow that though we have learned little save that loneliness will be our lot yet we feel no loss for having loved you now this long time.

COMAOIN/ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Tá mé go mór faoi chomaoin ag Mícheál Ó hAodha a thug cabhair agus tacaíocht dom agus mé ag scríobh an leabhair seo. Murach é ní bheadh an saothar seo tar éis teacht ar an bhfód in aon chor. Ba mhaith liom buíochas speisialta a ghabháil le Aleksandra Dempsey a d'ullmhaigh agus a cheartaigh an chaipéis dom. Ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a ghabháil le Shane Keogh, Jennifer Cummins agus Jonathan Browner a léigh dréachtaí den scríbhinn agus a thug comhairle agus cúnamh dom agus mé i mbun oibre agus ba mhaith liom a rá go bhfuil mé buíoch freisin do Cyril Hoffman, Edith Byrne, Carl Shepard agus mo mhic agus iníonacha léinn a chabhraigh liom ar bhealaí éagsúla, tábhachtacha eile. I am greatly indebted to Mícheál Ó hAodha for his help and counsel. Were it not for him this book would never have seen the light of day. I would like to offer my special thanks to Aleksandra Dempsey who prepared my manuscript for printing. Her work was greatly appreciated. I would also like to thank Shane Keogh, Jennifer Cummins and Jonathan Browner for reading drafts of the different essays and for their help and advice during the writing of the book. I would equally like to express my gratitude to Cyril Hoffman, Edith Byrne, Carl Shepard and to my students who aided me in this work in a wide variety of important ways.

CHAPTER ONE THE LANGUAGE OF THE OUTLAW

‘Finnegans Wake’ and the Politics of Place, Time and the Sub-Conscious Mind When it comes to the question of message in the works of James Joyce one must recognise that a distinct division exists in the canon. All the works are equally important, however, in terms of intent, 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' must be grouped together, for it is in these two books that the author most clearly and deliberately confronts the Irish 'dasein', what it actually is to be Irish. It is in these works that Joyce, truly, begins to explore the rift that exists between the Ireland that is and the Ireland that we long for. It is in these volumes, even more so than in any of the others, that he burrows into all the facets of Irish life, for he knows, as other post-Colonial writers across the world would later discover, that Colonialism seeps through the treads of politics and power right down to the fabric of the everyday and banal, right into the workplace, sitting room and kitchen of the individual and that it is, in fact, the trivial decisions of ordinary life rather than the grand political designs of the imperial elite that ultimately transform a free nation into a subject people. He is forced, also, to recognise that no one, including himself, escapes the process and that he, as much as anyone else, must collaborate with the cultural powers that be, if he is to survive within the Colonial context. He cannot therefore preach. Joyce is as guilty as anyone else, in fact in some ways more so, for he, unlike the majority of his contemporaries, is fully and absolutely aware of what is going on. There is no high moral ground upon which he can stand. He therefore offers no solution to the problem. All he can do is describe the difficulty, in the hope that by doing so,

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by forcing us to confront the truths which we have so studiously driven from our minds and memories that a paradigm shift in thinking might occur which could potentially change everything, embolden us to such an extent that we might, for the first time in centuries, abandon the terrified, paralysed, posture of the captured prisoner and finally, tentatively but courageously lower our hands. In ‘Ulysses ‘Joyce sets the scene and in the interests of clarity, he does so in broad daylight. In ‘Finnegans Wake‘ he brings the reader into the heart of the Colonial night. ‘Ulysses’ is a story of an empire upon which the sun never sets. The ‘Wake’, the book of the night, a description of a dream state in which no sun has ever risen. The consciousness of the ‘Wake‘ is asleep while that of ‘Ulysses‘, that of stagnate, Colonial, sleepy Dublin, is beginning to wake up. The books form two sides of the one coin, one ‘falling sovereign‘. One seeps into the other. In the same way as Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House ‘ lays the foundation for ‘Ghosts‘, ‘Ulysses’ acts as a prelude to ‘Finnegans Wake‘. In the first work Joyce creates a central, spinning blazing core of truth which draws a mass of fluid themes to its surface. As evening falls on ‘Bloomsday‘ this swirling liquidity begins to cool and harden into a petrified prism through which the image of 1904 Ireland is reflected and refracted and viewed and examined in completely new and unique ways. It seems as if Joyce can do no more, as if he can go no farther but then suddenly the opaque glass tips over, crashes on the polished tiles of style and shatters into a thousand shards, glistening pieces which then begin to restructure, to reconstitute themselves, as the very essence of ‘Ulysses‘ rises from the dead and as the title of the second work, in anagram, suggests, Finn wakes again. The names change, the places are different but all the fundamentals, all of the essentials of ‘Ulysses’ are to be found, equally, in ‘Finnegans Wake’ .The living, breathing similes of the first work, for example, where Bloom favours ‘the inner organs of beasts and fowl‘ for his meat since he is, in fact, eating his own heart out, are to be found in the second. The stark, telling contrasts of the first work, for example, between the pretentious shallow scholarship of Daedalus in the National Library and the quiet, hidden learning of An t-Athair Dineen are to be found in the second. The great searching questions of the first work, for example, can the blind stripling sense an absence as well as a presence, in other

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words does colonised Ireland feel the loss of its language, are to be found in the second. The in-jokes such as the references to Gabriel Conroy of ‘The Dead ‘ in the first work are to be found in the second, the wordplay, for example, the coffin that is ‘ dun for a nun ‘ or Parnell’s brother with his ‘ poached eyes on ghost ‘ is to be found in the second. The searing humanity of Bloom’s conversation with his cat, the poignancy of his memories of Rudy, the multilingualism, the music, the Irishness of the speech, all of these things are also to be found in ‘Finnegans Wake‘ but are this time cloaked and covered in a style that makes them more difficult to identify. Joyce wished to escape from what Beckett described as ‘Irish Rhetoric‘, from the Colonial and from the quaint, from that picturesque turn of phrase which had turned so many Irishmen of letters into little more than ‘jesters at the court of their masters‘. In ‘Ulysses‘ one can feel the tension bubbling just under the surface. The cultural and linguistic magma is rising but is being held down. In ‘Finnegans Wake‘ it explodes through the crust into streams of subconsciousness and suddenly style and substance become one, theme coalesces with message and language becomes that theme but a theme that is off-centre and ungrammatical in its nature, a language fluent in its inarticulate being, determined and passionate in its persistence to be heard, in other words, it becomes voice. Joyce knew well the boundaries that the limitations of language place upon voice, the simple fact that when one speaks, when one writes, that one is never fully comprehended, that one is always, to some degree, misunderstood. Language is undoubtedly mankind’s most efficient, most successful form of communication but that is not to say that it is a perfect device, indeed nothing could be further from the truth. It is a blunt instrument which cuts roughly, which creates ridges and splinters of meaning, unclean lines running against the grain of truth. It is capable of much but never absolute accuracy. It can give an impression of that which we observe, hear, imagine, think or sense but words can never completely or even adequately recreate in the mind of another the images that are in our heads at any given moment. Sentences can never paint the picture of the world as we see it. Speech in all its forms allows the individual to develop but just barely. It allows society to function but just about. What is heard is not what was said, what was said is not what was meant, what was meant was not what

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was felt and what was felt defies description even to he who has felt it. Everything is forced. Nothing, seamlessly, fits. How then does the world deal with this inability to communicate? How can the individual reveal himself, define himself to his equally inarticulate peers. Words come to signify both more and less than they actually mean. Shibboleth and simile become, everywhere, the order of the day but in a Colonial context such as ours the collapse into cliché is all the more absolute since the learned expression of an alien Culture becomes, in time, all that we know. The success with which we can imitate the speech of the ‘mother country‘ becomes the rule by which our level of sophistication can be measured. Oh we may hold on to certain local features such as regional accents but only because we know that these don’t really matter. Regionalism is not Nationalism. A cultural province is not a country, it is a client incapable of originality. When a nation that sees itself as a nation turns its back upon the language that makes it a nation in the first place, as much of Ireland has done, it creates for itself the situation where the linguistic structures of the people whose language it has adopted become the vocalised embodiment of all that it wishes to be, a wish, the existence of which it denies even to itself. The colonised Irish have become the alter ego of the English conquerors, a ‘santy’ to their ‘santa’, a ‘ma’ to their ‘mum’, a ‘Stephenses’ to their ‘Boxing’ day. A little more jovial perhaps yes, a little more easygoing, a little more convivial, different enough to be separate but never enough to be distinct, never enough to be viewed by others or indeed by themselves as existing outside the parameters of the Anglo-Irish relationship, a hollow, hackneyed, knocked off version of the real thing, a ventriloquist’s dummy with a mean streak. Anyone who is familiar with ‘Ulysses‘ understands how significant voice is in that work. The person and attitude of the narrator switches constantly, sometimes awkwardly, in the novel to such an extent that we often are unsure of who is actually speaking, from whose point of view events are actually being viewed. A dialectical dialogue of sorts gradually emerges but one which is not made up of diametrically divergent views. The philosophic position that arises out of the process is not therefore of a dogmatic type. Broad principles come to

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the surface, principles which centre on the importance of both personal and national Authenticity, the benefits of human integrity and the absolute supremacy of love. In the ‘Wake‘ Joyce goes even further again . The very concept of a narrator per se is done away with for now it is as if the words themselves are speaking, point of view changes from line to line, sixty four different languages are employed, Classical and Historical references pop up here, there and everywhere, style hops and skips like a broken needle on a record as a thousand disembodied voices attempt to reshape the sights and sounds of the external world into a form comprehensible to the dreamer, the dreamer who is Joyce himself but who is now utterly devoid of conscious opinion. A new mood is produced, one of scrupulous, painful honesty as the work attempts to illuminate the darkest depths of the Irish soul while adding the finishing touches to that philosophy which had begun to form itself earlier in ‘Ulysses‘. A philosophy implied by the written but not necessarily by the writer, a cultural Existentialism conceived of by itself. Samuel Beckett who acted as Joyce’s secretary during the composition of large parts of the ‘Wake‘ insisted that the work was in fact about nothing, that it was in truth, 'rud ann féin', a thing in itself. Joyce himself gloried in the Obscurantism of the book saying that it would keep university professors busy for three hundred years and indeed many of those self same scholars have, in the last seventy years, treated ‘Finnegans Wake‘ as little more than a great academic puzzle, convinced as they have been that if one could decode all the different elements of the document that one, then, could come to fully comprehend its meaning. But what if, as Derrida1 once famously said of a different difficulty, nothing actually exists outside of the text! What if the book is a representation only of itself and nothing else? What if it is a phenomenon designed to be experienced, not engaged with or understood, what then? If all that we know for a fact about the ‘Wake‘ is that it is a description of a dream state, should that not be our starting point? Should we firstly not 1

Jacques Derrida - French-Algerian philosopher, 1930-2004 who developed the critical theory known as 'Deconstruction'. His philosophic work, contained in more than forty books, is generally classified and labeled as 'Post-Structuralism'

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ascertain what we actually mean when we say that we dream? For example do we know when we are dreaming? Usually we do not. The events which we witness make sense within the context of the dream and at the time do not strike us as being in any way strange. How does the dream reality differ from the waking one? In a dream time and space are meaningless .There is no beginning, middle or end. Sub-plots may exist but no coherent or planned story line does. If the ‘Wake‘ is an account of a dream then any attempt to identify such a plot within it is an utterly futile exercise. How are dreams formed? All elements of our human experience, all our memories of recent and distant events, all the people that we know, knew or ever had the slightest knowledge of, become jumbled up and mixed together in the most impossible of situations, situations which do not, however, seem impossible at the time. We react emotionally, sometimes fearfully to the events which are unfolding before our eyes no matter how implausible they actually are but then plausibility is not an issue in dreams since we cannot and do not subject the images to any logical scrutiny. Is there any real depth in dreams? If Freud and to some degree Jung2 are to be believed then Symbolism is most certainly to be found within them but symbols, the import of which, we do not appreciate or fully understand. We are conscious of dreams, we experience them but on an immediate and surface level only. Everything is familiar though we are not sure why. Everything is linked but we are not sure how. Length with no breath, width with no volume, cause and effect are no more. We skim our subconscious like a flat stone on the sea, hitting the waves but never the currents. Joyce attempts to recreate this indefinable familiarity, association and mono-dimensionalism with words and attitude. For let there be no doubt about it, a distinct and unique attitude is clearly to be seen in ‘Finnegans Wake‘. Joyce wishes to know the objective truth of Colonialism, its most fundamental nature and the dream state allows him to do this. Are we truly Nationalists, Socialists, Democrats, Irish people even Human Beings while we sleep. Do these designations mean anything in the unconscious 2

Carl Gustav Jung - Swiss psychiatrist, 1875-1961, one of the pioneers of Analytical Psychology.

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or subconscious realm? Is it not the pure self which is in the ascendant when we dream? An uninhibited self that is therefore by definition selfish, selfish and indeed angry, angry with the constricted waking world to which it must soon return. The ‘Wake‘ is therefore an angry book, not so much comic as others say but sneering and everyone to some degree gets it, all the characters that have formed the furniture of Joyce’s life. Unconstrained by his own superego or indeed any long-standing sympathies or affiliations the author mocks everyone including himself. The fury can at times be unsettling but one must always remember that its very presence is indicative of the Authenticity of the work and of Joyce’s grim determination to find that structure, that sequence, that formula of words which would, when uttered, rattle our windows and shatter our walls, break the spell that was and is still upon us and finally wake us up. ‘Finnegans Wake‘ is the search for that mythical, that magical, that perfect sentence. When Joyce finally published ‘Ulysses’ in 1922 he found it difficult to embark on any new projects. In fact exhaustion prevented him from writing anything for almost a year. In 1923, in a letter to his benefactor Harriet Weaver, he reported that he had finally again put pen to paper and had completed two entire pages of foolscap, two pages we now know to have been the genesis of what was to become ‘Finnegans Wake’. Later that year he completed five other literary sketches, sketches that would also later become part of the book, sketches which were constructed in his new style made up of idiosyncratic language, portmanteau words, neologisms and multilingual puns, a style which was to become the central and most controversial feature of the work. From 1923 onwards Joyce published sections of his new book in a variety of magazines including the influential journals ‘Transition‘ and ‘Transatlantic‘. These segments were greeted with widespread though not universal hostility. In 1926, however, when ‘The Work in Progress‘ as the project was then known was condemned by Stanislaus Joyce, the brother of the author and when offers of serialisation were suddenly withdrawn by a number of other periodicals, Joyce felt that he had to act and so quietly organised the publication of a series of essays by his friends and supporters, Rebecca West and Sam Beckett amongst them, in a collection

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known as ‘Our Exagmenation Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress’. Stanislaus and indeed other Irish writers, felt that James was becoming self-indulgent, ostentatious, that he was, in essence, wasting his time and talent in a vain attempt to impress a foreign literary elite, interested only in the cleverness of his expression, in his lilting turn of phrase, that he was in fact becoming the very thing which he hated, another Irish literary sideshow, an entertainment destined to amuse but never to challenge that Anglo-Saxon cultural and artistic ruling class of which he had, they maintained, of late, become so much enamoured. This was a rather uncharitable position with which Beckett, in particular, had little sympathy. His contribution to the debate, at this point, was crucial since no one had a greater understanding of what Joyce was attempting to achieve than he and it was his contention that his countryman was being totally authentic and utterly true to himself in this, his new enterprise. The two Irish boys came from different religious backgrounds. Joyce a Catholic, Beckett a Protestant. Both were greatly influenced by the traditions from whence they came. Beckett would seek the truth in language by paring it back, Joyce by building it up. Beckett would construct a simple country kirk of words while Joyce would raise cathedrals. In the work of Beckett the text itself is the only intermediary between the writer and his readership. The books of Joyce, on the other hand, require interpretation, spawn a critical theology, mean more than they say and Beckett held that in ‘Finnegans Wake’ his friend was simply returning to these his Catholic roots and taking his tendency to Symbolism right out to its limits, stretching it as far as it would go. This show of support in 1929 went some way to stabilising the situation and ‘Finnegans Wake’, as the book had become known, was published by Faber and Faber a full decade later on the 4th of May 1939. Unfortunately and depressingly for Joyce the release of the book in its full form led to another storm of controversy, hostility and self righteous indignation. A negative response that wounded Joyce deeply. The consternation which followed the publication of the work was prompted largely by two things. Firstly it was seen by many as being a studied insult to the English language and its historical conventions, another Irish

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outrage, an act of international literary terrorism. Equally, however, other readers were appalled by the apparent lack of characterisation or plot in the work. Over time and in response to this criticism an orthodoxy began to emerge which held that certain characters did exist in the book and that there was a discernible plotline to be seen. According to this view ‘Finnegans Wake’ is fundamentally the story of the Earwicker family from Chapelizod, a household made up of HCE the father, ALP the mother, Shem and Shaun their twin sons and Issy the daughter. HCE is a respected member of Dublin society until a rumour of some unspecified misdemeanour on his part, committed supposedly, in the Phoenix Park, begins to circulate in the city. ALP writes a letter in her husband's defence, her sons try to deliver it while at the same time attempting to take their father's place in the world. At the end of the book HCE is resurrected, just like Tim Finnegan of the street ballad from which the work takes its name and extricates himself from the abyss of shame into which he had been thrown. This is the orthodox view of the ‘Wake’ but it is a view that is not universally held. Some commentators maintain that the story is simply too unstable to be seen as a genuine plot or indeed that the personalities of the work are not coherent enough to be regarded as real and true characters. In this I would go further. ‘Finnegans Wake’ is in no sense a novel rather it is, in essence, a sequence of vignettes, sketches and overheard or as would be said in Dublin, ‘earwigged‘ dreamed conversations. There is no overall plot. The parts of the work are greater than the whole since no whole truly exists. The characters, such as they are, are simply dreamed shadows of personalities and features from Joyce's own life, shadows which flit in and out of existence and form temporary connections with one and other, all of which serve to symbolise the central relationships in the author's past. Shem and Shaun, James and John, Joyce and his father, more like brothers than parent and son. Issy, Íosa, or in English Jesus, who travels everywhere with her friends, her disciples, mother church. HCE, Parnell whom both James and his father adored, accused of writing letters in support of the assassinations of Burke and Cavendish, the misdemeanour in the Phoenix Park. ALP, Anna Livia Pluribella, Dublin, the seventh city of Christendom as

10

I know that I have broken every heart

Joyce used to say, the home that he has left but can never abandon nor indeed return to, since the town of his youth is no more. The comparisons are neither perfect nor permanent. The allusions neither complete nor accurate since such certitude as that exists not in the subconscious mind. ‘Finnegans Wake’ like so much of the ‘Portrait’ or ‘Dubliners’ or ‘Ulysses’ is fundamentally autobiographical in nature but this time it is autobiography written without the luxury of logic or the strictures of design. It is the product of a dreaming mind released from the dishonesty of structure as it struggles to awaken from the nightmare of its history. ‘Finnegans Wake’ is a work so personal that it comprehensively deconstructs the person of the author himself, of such an advanced Nationalism that it leaves the bewildered nation staggering and panting in its train. It is also, however, a document which fully captures and encapsulates the greater European tradition and the zeitgeist of the continent in the nineteen twenties and thirties. Freudian dream Symbolism is clearly there, though Joyce always maintained that he had never read the famous doctor's works, Heidegger's existentialist river of time runs right through it. The methods of Linguistic Analysis permeate the book while the early ideas of German Situationalism and even Einstein's Theory of Relativity contribute to its inherent thrust and intention. For this is, in no sense, a ‘romain’ or a tale, Joyce always refused to describe it as such. It is an articulate incoherence, a revolutionary action, an occasion of cultural Anarchism or as Jacques Derrida once put it, a Babelian act of war. And ‘Finnegans Wake’ is a war fought on many battle grounds. Some at home in Ireland and some not. In ‘Ulysses’ a nation is mockingly described as a group of people who are all from the same place. Joyce, of course, knows how ridiculous a definition this is, since it does not allow for any differentiation between a nation and a regional community or distinguish, in any real way, a country from a county, a village, a townsland or even an individual family home. When national language is absent all types of weird and wonderful constructions are employed, all kinds of excuses are made, so as to circumvent the serious contradiction that the absence causes. In Ireland, for example, we are often told that our people are bound together by ‘a common sense of belonging’ or by a

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‘shared historical experience‘.The fact that such a sense of belonging must be based upon something other than itself or that the shared experience came about as a result of a distinctiveness which predated it, is simply ignored as is any recognition of the harsh truth that the most basic condition of nationhood is not now, as it was not in the author's time, being adequately met. In such circumstances as these, love of place tends to become inordinately significant and if Joyce is to be successful in fully replicating the Colonial mind then place must become central to the work. Such a centrality is clearly to be seen in both ‘Ulysses‘ and ‘Finnegans Wake‘. In the ‘Wake‘, indeed, a second factor comes into play. Since time is meaningless to the subconscious mind, situation becomes everything, it being the only anchor which the dreaming mind, in fact, has. Where something happens to you in a dream becomes symbolically significant. How you got to that position does not. Since every place, therefore, represents something to the dreamer, every scene and site in the ‘Wake’ must represent something to the author. Destination is the journey and that journey is the book. In ‘Finnegans Wake’, we are lifted, by the writer, straight out of the Phoenix Park. We rise like the mythical bird above the Wellington Monument, past the Vice Regal Lodge, down O'Connell Street with its statues and memories, across the territory and topology of Ireland, through the mountains and rivers and languages of Europe, through the wards and boroughs and districts of Dublin. Many places are mentioned only in passing, to others flying visits are paid, however, there are also those locales with which the author feels a special connection, to which he returns again and again. The area surrounding the two Dublin villages of Ranelagh and Rathmines is one of these. The very first reference to Ranelagh comes on page 141 of the first edition when Joyce speaks of the famous Black Monday massacre of 1209. On that day a crowd, largely made up of newly arrived settlers, gathered at a field just off what is now Sandford Road. They were there to watch a hurling match between two local teams. The O'Byrnes and O'Tooles who had earlier been ethnically cleansed from their lands in Cuala or south Dublin to make way for these newcomers regarded the holding of such a significant public event in the newly conquered territories as a provocation beyond bearing and launched a full

12

I know that I have broken every heart

scale attack, an engagement in which approximately 500 of the Pale's men and women were killed. In the decades following the assault the local settler population commemorated the dead by ‘celebrating‘ the anniversary with an equally provocative grand picnic. Joyce has it thus, ‘Who seen the blackcullen jam for tomorrha's big pickneck. I hope it'll pour prais the Climate of All Ireland. I heard the grackles and I skimming the crock on all your sangwiidges fippence per leg per drake. And who eight the last of the goosebellies that was mowlding from measlest years and who leff the kilkenny stale the chump - who are those component partners of our societate, the doorboy, the cleaner, the sojer, the crook, the squeezer, the lounger, the curman, the tourabout, the mussroomsniffer, the bleakablue tramp, the funpowtherplother, the christymansboxer from their près salès and Donnybrook prater and Roebuck's campos and the Ager Aroundtown and Crumglen grassy but Kimmage's champ and Ashtown fields and Cabra fields and Finglas and Santry fields and the fields of Raheny and their fails ‘ Throughout the ‘Wake‘ Joyce employs wordplay and multilingualism to create meaning above and below the level of the printed words. The mention of ‘All Ireland‘ is a reference to the hurling match that was being held on that day. The use of the French word ‘sang‘ in ‘sangwidges’ conjures up the horror of the occasion, an image of food spattered with blood. When he speaks of ‘drake‘ he is, of course, referring to Francis Drake and his part in the Plantations of Ireland and when he makes reference to ‘goosebellies‘, he is not only talking of fruit but is also stirring up the phrase ‘what is good for the goose is good for the gander‘ in the mind of the reader. The settlers may have been the victims on this particular occasion but only because they had been the perpetrators on many others. Equally he wishes to draw a clear distinction between Ranelagh and other areas of county Dublin. For him Ranelagh was the seat of the colony, it does not ‘field‘ that is ‘feel‘ as other places do. It has not felt or suffered as other districts have, other districts and their fails, their fáils, their native Irish inhabitants. To him Ranelagh epitomises all that is Colonial, wealthy and respectable, a respectability that his own family once possessed. This broad theme continues on throughout the work. For example on page 235 of the first edition, in a

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segment largely concerned with the flora, fauna and Colonial street names of south Dublin where so many roads are named after trees, he says the following, ‘Turkish hazels, Greek firs, incense palm edcedras. The hysometer of Mount Anville is held to be dying out of arthataxis but, praise sent Larix U’Thule the wych elm of Manelagh is still flourishing in the open, because it is native of our nature and the seeds was sent by Fortune. We have our private palypeachum pillarposterns for lovesick letterines fondly affianxed to our front railings and swings, hammocks, tighttaught balletlines, accomodationooks and prismic bathboites, to make Envyeyes mouth water and wonder when they binocular us from their embrassured windows in our garden rare - Lady Marmela Shortbred will walk in for supper with her marchpane on, her necklace of almonds and her poirette Sundae dress with bracelets of honey and her cochineal hose with the caramel dancings, the brisky best from Bootiestown and her stucking staff of ivorymint. You mustn't miss it or you'll be sorry - He's not going to Cork till Cantalmesse or mayhope till Rose Easter or Saint Tibble's day. So Niomon knows. The Fomor's in his Fin, the Momor's her and hin. A paaralone, a paaralone. And Dublin's all adin‘ There are national, local and personal elements to be seen in this piece. The Easter Rose is of course the Easter Rising but the core of the section deals with the type of Colonial society which the Joyce family encountered when they resided in Castlewood Avenue. James had found Ranelagh or ‘Manelagh’ to be fundamentally ‘mane‘ or mean and ‘tighttaught’ in other words taught to be tight. It was a place obsessed with money and status.The ‘Arthataxis‘ is, of course, the White Cedar tree but what one hears when the passage is read aloud is ‘our taxes‘. He emphasises the sickly sweetness of its bourgeois Culture by referring to bracelets of honey, caramel dancings and Sundae dresses and also gives the impression that when his family lived in Castlewood Avenue where the houses, even today, are noteworthy for their long ‘rare‘ or rear gardens that they were being spied upon, treated with suspicion, that they were objects of envy. This is quite possible, a fiercely Parnellite household with its incredibly clever children might well have been the victim of jealousy or indeed disdain in an area that was then at the very heart of Unionist Dublin. It is, however, the reference to

14

I know that I have broken every heart

‘paaralone’ that is the most personal. The ‘old paar’, the old pair had been left alone. Had he abandoned his parents? Had he betrayed them? He certainly felt that he had and in objective terms he was probably right. The guilt that accrued as a direct consequence of this sense became a dominant feature in his writing and may, indeed, have proved to be a major contributory factor to his ultimate death. On page 334 Joyce continues with this image of his family being as outsiders in Ranelagh. On this occasion he refers to the village as ‘Danelagh‘, an obvious echo of Danelaw, again emphasising the Colonial nature of the district. In ‘Finnegans Wake‘ the Danes ,Vikings or Scandinavians represent all of the invaders of Ireland. The Normans were descendants of the Norse, the English conquest had been commenced by Anglo-Normans and therefore as Joyce saw it, there had not, in fact, been three separate attacks on the country rather there had been just one long, continuous Nordic assault. This view of Irish history is the primary reason that he makes so much use, in different guises and forms, of the Danish and Norwegian languages in the book. The second reason being that he wished to do homage to Henrik Ibsen, a writer and playwright whom he had admired from his boyhood days. George Bernard Shaw once said that dramas such as ‘Ghosts‘ or ‘When We the Dead Awake‘, shocking and controversial in their time, had torn Europe asunder and divided its intelligentsia into two groups, Ibsenists and Anti-Ibsenists. If this was true then James Joyce was most certainly a partisan of the former rather than the latter tendency, a revolutionary tendency which would put him at odds always with every establishment and cause him to say such as the following in ‘Finnegans Wake‘, ‘And this is defender of defeater of defaulter of the former of the funst man in Danelagh, willingtoned in with this glance dowon his browen and that born appalled noodlum the panellite pair's cummal delimitor, odding Oliver White, he's as tiff as she's tight. And thisens his speak quite hoarse‘ The ‘panelite‘ or Parnellite pair seems to refer to John and Mary Joyce, the parents of the author, a couple completely out of place in anti-Nationalist Ranelagh. The reference to ‘Willingtone‘ and ‘hoarse‘ or horse but spoken with an Etonian accent is, of course, directed at the Irish born Duke of Wellington who had once famously said that just because he was born in a stable that this did not

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mean that he was, in fact, such a creature. Joyce despises Wellington. Some of the strongest vitriol in the ‘Wake‘ is aimed at him, as, indeed, it also is at Dean Swift. The former for denying and belittling his Irishness, the latter for proclaiming it while at the same time referring to the mass of the Irish population, his countrymen, as ‘our savages‘. It is, however, on page 542 where Joyce, Ireland's tiger-cub as Yeats once called him, sharpens his claws and really lets rip into the hypocrisy of Irish Colonial respectability. He makes significant use of humour in this section as he does throughout the ‘Wake‘ and, indeed, as he also does in ‘Ulysses‘. Like any Irishman Joyce had a taste for the ridiculous therefore he tended to mock his opponents rather than contradict or attack them. Never despair but laugh into the face of adversity, right up close, right up under its nose was always his creed, a creed which the Irish tiger-cubs of the present era would do well to adopt. He begins this segment thus and again Ranelagh and Rathmines are to the fore, ‘I richmounded (a reference to Richmond Hill ) the rainelag (since he felt that the colony was becoming ‘lag‘, lag meaning weak in the Irish language) in my tub (drawn from the works of Swift) of roundwood and conveyed it with cheers and cables, roaring mighty shouts through the tubes of elm‘ And then going on to say, ‘Respectable, whole family attends daily mass and is dead sick of bread and butter, sometimes in the militia, mentally strained from reading works on German physics, shares closet with 8 other dwellings, more than respectable, getting comfortable parish relief, wageearner freshly shaven from prison, highly respectable, planning new departure in Mountgomery cyclefinishing, eldest son will not serve but peruses Big Man up in the sky scrapes, a noopanadoon lacking backway, quasi respectable, pays ragman in bones for faded window curtins, staircase continually lit up with guests, particularly respectable, house lost in dirt and blocked with refuse, getting on like Roe's distillery on fire ,slovenly active with jub, in business for himself, has tenth illegitimate coming, partly respectable,following correspondence courses, chucked work over a row, both cheeks kissed at levee by the late marquess of Zetland, sharing closet which is profusely written over with 11 other subscribers, once respectable, open hallway

I know that I have broken every heart

16

pungent of Baltic dishes, bangs kept woman's head against wall thereby disturbing neighbours, private chapel occupies return landing, removal every other quarter day, case one of peculiar hopelessness, respectable in every way harmless imbecile supposingly weakminded, a sausage every Sunday, has a staff of 8 servants, outlook marred by ne ' er do wells using the lanewayv, lieabed sons go out after dark, has never seen the sea, travels always with her 11 trunks of clothing, starving cat left in disgust, the pink of respectability, resting after Colonial service,labours at plant, the despair of his many benefactresses, calories exclusively from Rowntrees and dumplings, one bar of sunlight does them all, rarely pays tradesmen, went security for friend who abscounded, more respectable than some, teawidow pension but held to purchase, inherited silk hat from father in law, last 4 occupants carried out, copious holes emitting mice, decoration from Ugandan chief in locked ivory chasket, grandmother has advanced alcoholic amblyopia, the terror of Goodmen's field and respected and respectable, as respectable, as respectable as can respectably be, wherfor I will and firmly command, upon my royal word and cause the great seal now to be affixed, that from the farthest of the farther of their fathers to their children's children's children that they do inhabit it and hold it for me unencumbered and my heirs‘ Now as has already been said in regard to all the works in the Joycean canon, autobiographical elements, of one type or another, are a constantly recurring feature and this is every bit as true of the ‘Wake‘ as it is of any other of the books. Undoubtedly when Joyce speaks of respectability in such terms, a part of him is certainly remembering the economic decline of his own family in the period following his father's loss of employment when he ‘chucked work over a row‘ but at the same time there is no doubt but that he wishes also in this passage to lambaste the value structures of the ancien regime in Ireland, a regime which he regarded as being a corrupt and oppressive one, a ruling elite for which he had very little if any time. One must also, however, remember that he equally had his differences with the regime which replaced it. The actions of the early native governments of the Irish Free State being a source of much distress to him. He found their easy adoption of the structures and cultural forms of the former

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imperial administration difficult to understand, coming to the conclusion as he did, that the actual intention of these early Irish ministers was to make Ireland a country just like any other, no better, no worse, whereas the original objective of the Revolution had been to make Ireland a country unlike all others, distinct, unique, culturally separate but modern and relevant with social conventions and mores all of its own. This is not to say, however, that Joyce was an entirely uncritical supporter of the original revolutionary act either. Conflict bothered him. More than this he disliked the stereotype of the pugnacious Irishman, maintaining always that in his experience he had found the Irish to be a tremendously gentle people. Joyce had known Padraig Pearse when he had lived in Dublin. He had gone to classes in Newman House to learn Irish from him.Indeed in the 1901 census returns, when the Joyces were living in Clontarf, both James and Stanislaus are designated as being speakers of Irish and English and in that order. He certainly had some difficulties with Pearse. Pearse seems to have enjoyed getting a rise out of him, by mocking, in jest, the conventions of the English language, a language, amongst many others, for which James had the greatest respect. The might of its literary tradition he felt made it worthy of such regard. Pearse when speaking to Joyce often took the use of the word ‘thunder‘ as an example of the limitations of the English tongue saying that it had come to be employed in so many different grammatical constructions that it was now an utterly meaningless term. It is no accident, in my opinion, that ‘thunder‘ in one guise or another is one of the most commonly recurring words in ‘Finnegans Wake‘. Indeed it often appears when Joyce is speaking of the districts surrounding Ranelagh and Rathmines, an area of which Pádraig Pearse was a resident. When Joyce speaks directly and specifically of the latter of these two villages he tends, almost without exception, to associate it, to a much greater degree indeed than in the case of Ranelagh, with the Danes and Nordic power. On page 16 for example the following two elements are found together in close proximity, ‘Has, has at, hasatency, urp Boohooru, boru, usurp. I trumple from rath in mine mines when I rimimirim‘

I know that I have broken every heart

18 And; ‘You

toller

donsk,

you

talkatiff

scowegian,

nn.You

spiggoty

Anglease.Nnn.You phonio Saxo. Nnnn.Clear all so.Tis a Jute‘. A similar theme is to be encountered on page 340 of the book when Joyce writes, ‘Oh day of Rath, ah murther of mines. Eh selo moy. Uh zulu luy. Bernesson mac Mahahon from Osro bearing nose easger for sweet prolettas on his swooth prowl, bruinoboroff‘ Joyce often links Rathmines to the battle of Clontarf and the martyrdom of Brian Bóramha. One should note also the words ‘hasatency‘ and ‘spiggoty‘ in the first two examples above. ‘Spiggoty‘ drawn from Panamanian creole and meaning to speak, obviously echoes the name of Richard Piggott the forger who was paid by British elements to destroy the reputation of Charles Stewart Parnell. In court it was his misspelling of the word ‘hesitancy’ in some of his fabricated letters that ultimately caught him out. Joyce is associating the Betrayal of Parnell with the cowardly murder of Brian Boru. One must never underestimate the significance and extent of Joyce's Parnellism. Like many other Irish Nationalists, James could never truly forgive either the mass of the Irish people or indeed the Catholic church for the parts they played in the destruction of ‘the Chief‘. He came, also, to have an utter contempt for the Irish Parliamentary Party which had, in the name of a loathsome respectability, just like Shaun and Shem were to do in the ‘Wake‘, attempted to usurp the position of their spiritual father. Rathmines was the home of many the leading lights of the post-Parnellite political grouping. Those ‘coward hounds he raised to glory from the mire‘. The author also specifically links Rathmines to riverlore, to the coursing of history which is so much a part of the work. In the same way that the linguistic structures and conventions of the ‘Wake‘ are extremely reminiscent of those of the obscurantist ‘Hisperica Famina‘ Hiberno-Latin literature of the late Irish golden age, much of the content and Symbolism is drawn from the two great cycles of Irish mythology, the Fiannaiocht and the Ruraiocht with riverlore being a particular feature of the latter. In the same way as Setanta stands at the Cronn and calls upon the rivers and streams of Ireland to rise in his support and drive

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the enemies of Conchobhar Mac Neasa from the land, Joyce summons them up also to wash away all those who had sinned against the ‘Lon Dub‘, ‘the Blackbird of sweet Avondale’, Parnell, his own uncrowned king. In regard specifically to Rathmines, page 248 refers to the ‘sweetswanwater‘ that is to be found there, here alluding to the river ‘swan’ which once ran through but which now runs under the town, while Joyce on page 215 simply states, ‘My sights are swimming thicker on me by the shadows to this place. I sow home slowly now by own way, moyvalley way. Towy I too, rathmine‘ It is, however, on page 480 that this river and water lore reaches its technical zenith when Joyce, in an attempt to couple the soul of Ireland with the glorious educational mission of the Irish to Europe in the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, when we, as a nation, were truly the greatest single intellectual force on the face of the earth, begins to link, begins to intertwine and mix references to places, people and bodies of water in Ireland to their equivalents in the Salzkammergut region of Austria, a district around which he spent five weeks in the summer of 1928. He switches from one place to another as one does in a dream, forging his memories of his homeland with those he held of Oberösterreich into one great aesthetic purpose and whole. One minute he is referring to south Dublin, ‘I am afraid that you could not heave ashore one of your own old stepstones - and he could be all your and my das - the brodar of the founder of the father of the finder of the pfander (pfand being a village in Salzkammergut) of the pfunder of the furst man in Ranelagh‘ the next moment he is on a train in Austria when he catches his first glimpse of Lake Wolfgang, ‘What! ?Wolfgang ! Whoa. Talk very slowe‘, which he then directly connects to Glendalough and Naomh Caoimhín, ‘Hooshin hom to our regional's hin and the gander of Hayden (Hayden who is buried some 50 miles from Wolfgangsee in the city of Salzburg) would ye ken (as in Coinneach) a young stepschuler (as in ag súil or walking) of psychical chirography, the name of Keven‘.

I know that I have broken every heart

20

He refers to many of the Irish missionaries in the Salzkammergut district mentioning how their names have been changed over time, how their titles have over the centuries lost their essential Irishness, ‘I teachet you in fair time, the P.Q.R.S of legatine powers and you Ailbe and Ciardeclan. I brought you from loups of Lazary and you have remembered my lapsus langways‘ and, ‘Sagart can self laud nilobstant to Lowman patrician morning coat of arms with my tripennyferry cresta and caudal mottam. Ich dean. Which Gaspey, Otto and Sauer, he renders’, He refers to Mozart whom he calls ‘Mooso’ whose mother was from the village of Sankt Gilgen on Lake Wolfgang, again a settlement named, ultimately, after an Irish scholar, Naomh Giolla Aodhan and has the composer say of that district, ‘Sure I used to be always overthere on the fourth day at my grandmother’s place‘. He makes a very clear and obvious allusion to the famous ‘White Horse Inn’ which is to be found in the village of Sankt Wolfgang itself saying that ‘Finnegans Wake’ was his ‘inn White Horse’ a direct translation of and reference to an operetta, very well known in the German speaking lands called

‘Im

Weissen Rössl’ which is set in the hotel from which it takes its name. Not only this, in Sankt Wolfgang another hotel called the ‘Black Horse Inn’ stands directly opposite, across a small square, from the aforementioned premises. A square in which a local brass band has performed twice a week since time immemorial, a quadrant bounded on one side by a church which contains a famous alter designed by one Michael Pacher who was commissioned to construct it following a devastating fire in the building during the middle part of the fifteenth century. Joyce compresses all of these facts into one multilingual line, ‘When Lapac walks backwords he's darkest horse in Capalisoot ‘. Firstly ‘Lapac‘ is the Irish word ‘capall’ meaning ‘horse’ spelt or walking backwards. Secondly the sign above the door of the ‘Blackhorse Inn’ bears an

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image of a staggering horse retreating. ‘Lapac‘also functions within this context as a play upon the name Pacher while ‘capalisoot’ echoes both the Irish word for church, ‘séipéal’ and the construction ‘kapelle’ meaning a brass band in German, an allusion to the one that performs so regularly in the square. The mention of ‘soot‘in this final element of the sentence being then a reference to that tragic fire which made the restoration of the chapel and Pacher's presence there necessary. This is ‘Finnegans Wake’ at its technical best. Joyce loads every word and phrase down with an awesome burden of meaning so as to give as complete and comprehensive a view to the reader of the image that is firmly embedded in his memory. He is not, in fact, attempting to be obscure, on the contrary, he is trying, through style, to give a heightened clarity to his words and through those words to all human expression. On top of this he is also striving to add a fuller emotional sensibility to the scene than would, otherwise, be possible. He is hoping to transfer feelings directly from his own heart and head straight into the consciousness of his readership. He wants the reader to sense what it felt like to be there. He also wants him to know what it sounded like. He does this by filling the dialogue both with elements of the German language, to such an extent that he is at one point driven to exclaim, ‘Are we spreachin d'anglas landadge or are ye sprakin sea Djoytsch‘ In the end of this glorious foliation Joyce brings us back to what he calls in Irish ‘gan greyne Eireann‘ or in English, ‘sunless Ireland’ by constructing a linguistic bridge, by playing on the fact that very near Wolfgangsee, another lake, a much smaller mountain loch is to be found. This body of water is known as ‘Schwarzensee’, the black pool. One moment we are all standing beside the Austrian ‘dubh linn’, in the next, the mind of the author transports us magically back to the Irish one. The dreamer returns to Dublin. The wonder of the ‘Wake‘, in the end of the day, is that, in a very real sense, it is writing itself. A human memory sweeping out its dusty corners. An unfiltered and unconstrained account of the experiences of the author. Everything, every place, everyone he has ever encountered, is there. Chronological and linear development are no longer relevant to him, no longer possible. Past and present are thrown together. Ancestors and descendants

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intermingle freely. Fact is fiction and fiction is fact as the author, now deconstructed and unconstricted, wanders the highways and byways of his own subconscious mind. This is lucid but formless recall, unhindered by design or decision. Images come at him as they will. Emotions arise as they must. Structure and framework are thrown to one side and truth emerges from the chaos. Joyce is never more alive, never more brilliant than he is in the ‘Wake‘, for he has smashed all constriction and fear into a thousand powerless, faceless pieces. He has torn through the layers of the Irish psyche, through the recklessness, the jealousy and hypocrisy and left the terrors which haunt our dreams to face the sunlight, that we are not who we say we are, that we are not who we want to be and that were it not for our own failings we could, in fact, be so much more.

CHAPTER TWO THE DREAM OF THE BLACK PANTHER. James Joyce and the Struggle for National Self- Realisation. Everyone now wants James Joyce. Like Friedrich Nietzsche before him everyone claims him. Genius is a rare commodity. What it says matters and therefore it behoves anyone lucky enough to be trusted, even temporarily, with its examination to be true to it and see in it, no more or less than is actually there. With this in mind and so as to give as comprehensive an overview as possible, I will direct my attention both, to the more famous fictional elements of the Joycean canon but also to the less well known and less widely studied critical and political writings, for I maintain that it is only through an understanding of all the parts of Joyce's output that one can gain any clear and coherent insight into the entire body of work. This is particularly true when one is dealing with as complex a theme as that with which we will now be grappling. Before I go any further and in the interests of clarity, there are two phrases to be seen in the title of this essay which I must at this point define. These being the terms ‘Self Realisation‘ and also ‘The Dream of the Black Panther‘. The first is drawn primarily from the field of Psychology where it has come to refer to a form of absolute freedom born from a rejection of all external coercion and expectation. The premise of the idea is that there exists an authentic self which can only be discovered through a process of continuous struggle against the obsessions, assumptions and vanities of the ‘ego’, against the lies we tell ourselves of ourselves. Such psychological and spiritual maturation will probably happen in the case of the individual only gradually but moments of instantaneous change are also possible. Epiphanies can occur, epiphanies which arise on a personal level but which if shared by disparate members of a community may completely transform the nature of that group. A people therefore can, through euphoria of cultural and political self expression, build

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itself into an actual nation and fulfil all of the various conditions which the concept of nationhood demands. In terms of this concept a national revolution can only truly be successful if every single member of the emerging society undergoes a personal revolution of his or her own, if individual and community, both separately and in unison, recognise the inAuthenticity of the Colonial relationship and declare their independence from it. In regard to the second element of the title, it, in fact, fulfils two functions. On the more superficial level it references, of course, ‘The Black Panther Party for National Liberation’, a both, essentially, cultural and urban guerrilla movement which came to believe, as Irish separatists had done of Ireland years before, that it was only through the achievement of some form of national Authenticity that African-Americans could know anything approaching true citizenship and free themselves from the hostage-like, dependent role in which history and prejudice had, previously, cast them. On a deeper level, however, the term ‘black panther‘ has an even greater significance to our purposes within the context of this essay, for it is a phrase that, for no obvious reason, appears in one form or another, right across the entire range of the Joycean canon as a recurring motif. It is, however, in ‘Ulysses’, of course, that it makes its most famous appearance. There, the Irish-speaking English visitor Haines tells Stephen Daedalus in the Martello Tower that he has been woken and terrified by a dream of a black panther. Now in the work of Joyce everything means something. He despised carelessness of writing. Indeed in a scathing review of the poetry of William Rooney, published in the ‘Daily Express’ in December, 1902, he accuses the ‘lately dead‘ poet of this exact crime saying a one point, ‘carelessness is nothing but a false and mean expression of a false and mean idea‘. Evidence, certainly, seems to suggest that this episode in ‘Ulysses’ is primarily based on a real life experience from Joyce's past. This, however, does not explain the recurrence of the image. It appears to have a significance beyond the purely autobiographical. It seems that something else is being referenced and

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in my opinion the most likely candidate for that distinction is, in fact, the 9th century Old Irish poem ‘Pangur Bán‘. ‘Pangur Bán‘ takes the form of a short sequence of four line verses. It was written, certainly by an Irish monk, probably the scholar Sedulius Scottus and is preserved in the ‘Reichenau Primer’. In the margins of a scholarly tract on the works of Virgil, its composer, far from home and beside himself with boredom, scribbles the following note about his cat, I and Pangur Bán, my cat 'Tis a like task we are at; Hunting mice is his delight Hunting words I sit all night. Better far than praise of men 'Tis to sit with book and pen; Pangur bears me no ill will, He too plies his simple skill. 'Tis a merry thing to see At our tasks how glad are we, When at home we sit and find Entertainment to our mind. Oftentimes a mouse will stray In the hero Pangur's way: Oftentimes my keen thought set Takes a meaning in its net. 'Gainst the wall he sets his eye Full and fierce and sharp and sly; 'Gainst the wall of knowledge I All my little wisdom try.

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When a mouse darts from its den, O how glad is Pangur then! O what gladness do I prove When I solve the doubts I love! So in peace our tasks we ply, Pangur Bán, my cat, and I; In our arts we find our bliss, I have mine and he has his. Practice every day has made Pangur perfect in his trade; I get wisdom day and night Turning darkness into light. Now firstly one must remember that, just like the composer of this piece Joyce tended to write at night and secondly that this well known English translation of the work was written by the English, Celtic scholar Robin Flower, ‘Bláithín’ as he was widely known, a man who, in some respects at least, greatly resembled ‘Haines‘ of ‘Ulysses’. Now what the word ‘Pangur’ meant to the writer of the poem is somewhat unclear. In Old Irish a ‘pang’ is a pile of clothes and generally a ‘pangur‘ is a fuller, an individual who cleans clothes in a bath by walking on them, as a cat might walk affectionately on his owner. Equally the word ‘panathír’ for a panther is to be found in Old Irish documents from as early as the 7th century but it is more than possible that the author of this little poem knew nothing of it and was therefore employing a term of his own making, a liberality of vocabulary that is to be often found in Old and Middle Irish documents and that ‘Pangur Ban’ was, in fact, to him, his little white panther. Joyce, almost certainly, would have believed that this was what the name meant since such was the commonly held view at the time. Echoes of the ancient work are also to be heard elsewhere in

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'Ulysses', for example when Leopold Bloom chats to his cat. It should also be noted that Joyce once visited the island of Reichenau in modern day Austria where it is believed that this simple, little poem was written. Such a play on words as this, the creation of a connection between two phrases that are structurally similar but which differ fundamentally in terms of the images that they conjure up would, of course, be in complete keeping with Joyce's style. It would also be consistent with his anti-Colonial political views. The gentle Irish tradition of the 9th century was transforming itself into something more forceful and formidable. The kept people, the white domestic cat, was becoming the risen nation, the very definition of ferocious elegance, an ‘dubhphanathír‘, the black panther. Equally it should be said that the referencing of lines from Old, Middle and Classical Irish works was something of which he was very fond. He was forever doing it and often in the most dramatic of ways, for example, ‘Ar chuala sibh trácht ar Fhionn Mac Chumhaill , O Chualamairne trácht ar Fhionn Mac Chumhaill‘, or in English, ‘Have you ever heard talk of Fionn Mac Chumhaill , Oh we've heard talk of Fionn Mac Chumhaill‘, are lines which are drawn directly from ‘Saltair na Rann’, a 14th century collection of poems and fables written in Middle Irish while Book one, Chapter eight of ‘Finnegans Wake’ commences thus, ‘O tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now‘

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I know that I have broken every heart The similarity that exists between the two constructions is obvious,

however, it is an association which is rarely identified. Now how could this be so? When one considers the extent and the depth of the work that has been done upon this book over the last seventy years, how could it happen that such an obvious allusion would not be generally recognised? It happens because Joyce wanted to happen thus. Unless a reader of the ‘Wake‘ was familiar with the more ancient work he or she would never hear the echo, would never fully appreciate the import of the more modern phrase. This is how Joyce the author works. Unless one already knew something of the street game called ‘Chinies’, one would not fully understand some of the slang associated with the playing of marbles that appears in ‘Ulysses‘. Unless one had visited the city of Waterford one would probably not notice that the unit ‘sarthin suir‘ which appears on line 203.09 was not only a reference to the river that runs through that town but also to the accent to be heard there, a play on ‘certain sure’. Equally it is only devotees of Gaelic games who smile when they, in that same work, suddenly encounter the phrase ‘and a free for croaks after‘. The extent to which one can fully understand the literary work of James Joyce is, on first reading, bounded and limited by one's own experience, by where one is from, by what one has read, by what one knows. Everyone recognises something, different people see different things, elements, segments of the overall but only the author entirely comprehends the essence of the narrative. A reader can study, can learn, can come to know something of those features which are drawn from sources, the very existence of which they, previously, were ignorant but all such knowledge is second hand and therefore, in a sense, inadequate. Only the creator can count the sinews and see into all the dark recesses of that which he has created. Only he knows the plan and so in the context of his works and the universe which he fashions within them, Joyce is God. I suppose that it was inevitable, therefore, that much of the copious analysis of his writing done, in the years since his death, has more the appearance of a type of scholarly theology than of genuine critique. Often with only an interested tourist's understanding of the nature of Irish society and of that nexus of nuance which has, for some time now, passed for what might be described as the ‘Irish Mind’, one critic relies on

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the work of another, one generation accepts uncritically that which its predecessor held to be undoubtedly true, theory becomes orthodoxy, orthodoxy becomes dogma, the composition is treated with an almost scriptural reverence while the composer is instrumentalised, treated as little more than the conduit by which it came into being, the fundamentals of his character ignored and sometimes even derided, foremost amongst these latter traits and conditions being his nationality. In the same way that the essential Jewishness of the Evangelists became little more than a footnote for many Christian evangelicals, the essential Irishness of James Joyce has become an irrelevance to certain sections of the greater Anglo-Saxon world. Indeed when one reads some of the commentaries produced on the canon, one sometimes gets the feeling that the commentators involved would be much happier if Joyce had been from Croydon or Cambridge, Massachusetts for then they could concentrate on the universality of the work, untroubled by the complexities of Irish history and Culture, free from the sense that Joyce was really not one of them, free from the need to manufacture an apolitical, unpatriotic Joyce with whom they could live. The truth of the matter is, of course, that Joyce was anything but apolitical or unpatriotic. He was the son of a follower of Parnell and was a Parnellite himself to the core of his being. Nothing in his life effected him more deeply than the Betrayal of the uncrowned king of Ireland. All of his works are littered with his name. In ‘Ulysses’ Simon Daedalus visits Parnell's grave in Glasnevin while later Bloom damns all the constituencies bar six which and using his own words now ‘ratted on the Chief‘. In the story ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ from ‘Dubliners’ Joyce mocks the hypocrisy of Irish Party officials who had crucified their former leader for his indiscretions but who were now prepared to welcome King Edward VII of England to Dublin in spite of the then dead Parnell's insistence that none should ever do so and notwithstanding the monarch's somewhat colourful private life. The visit would be good for business they maintained. ‘let bygones be bygones said Mr. Hency - I admire the man personally. He's just an ordinary knockabout like you and me. He is fond of his glass of grog

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and he is a bit of a rake perhaps and he is a good sportsman. Damn it. Can't we Irish play fair‘. In ‘Finnegans Wake‘ the assault on the forger Piggott is unrelenting while the assassination of Burke and Cavendish in the Phoenix Park and the somewhat ambivalent attitude of much of the country to that incident is central to the book, an attitude which is dramatised in the novel by the line, ‘quarey was he invincibled‘, a reference to the shooting dead of James Carey on board the ‘Melrose' by Patrick O' Donnell on July the 29th, 1883, as the informer who had betrayed the assassins was being spirited out of the country. It is, however, of course, in ‘The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ where Joyce recreates an argument which occurred between his father and an aunt of his mother, Mrs. Conway, who lived with the Joyce family when it resided in Martello Terrace in Bray, an argument that erupted in virtually every Nationalist home in Ireland at the time of the split, that the Parnellian theme in the work of Joyce is at its zenith. Placing the words of his father into the mouths of Mr. Casey and Mr. Daedalus and those of Mrs. Conway into that of ‘da Auntie‘, Dante, the following is said, ‘And can we not love our country then asked Mr. Casey. Are we not to follow the man who was born to lead us. A traitor to his country replied Dante. A traitor, an adulterer. The priests were right to abandon him. The priest were always the true friends of Ireland. Were they faith said Mr. Casey. He threw his fist on the table and frowning angrily, protruded one finger after another. Didn't the bishops of Ireland betray us in the time of the Union when Bishop Lanigan presented an address of loyalty to the Marquess Cornwallis. Didn't the bishops and priests sell the aspirations of their country in 1829 in return for Catholic Emancipation. Didn't they denounce the Fenian Movement from the pulpit and the confession box. And didn't they dishonour the ashes of Terence Bellew McManus.

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His face was glowing with anger and Stephen felt the glow rise to his own cheek as the spoken words trilled him. Mr. Daedalus uttered a guffaw of coarse scorn. Oh by God he cried. I forgot little old Paul Cullen. Another apple of God's eye. Dante bent across the table and cried to Mr. Casey. Right, right, they were always right. God and morality and religion come first. Mrs. Daedalus seeing her excitement said to her. Mrs Riordan don't excite yourself answering them. God and religion before everything Dante cried. God and religion before the world. Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash. Very well then he shouted hoarsely, if it comes to that, no God for Ireland. John, John cried Mr. Daedalus seizing his guest by the coat sleeve. Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr. Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb. No God for Ireland he cried. We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God - away with God I say‘. At the height of the Civil War Sinéad de Valera was once asked by a journalist what the internecine conflict, at its ultimate root, was really about, to which she replied in one word, ‘Parnell‘. I have often attempted to fully understand what she meant by this. Was it that most of the Republicans came from families that had at an earlier point stood by Parnell. Maybe. Was it that the Catholic Church was again taking the part of one side only in a great national dispute. Possibly. Was it simply that another ‘Chief’ or, indeed, a group of ‘Chiefs’ was again being betrayed. Perhaps but I think what she meant, at the end of the day, was that after the split a significant section of Irish Nationalism was no longer interested in the Irish nation as it then was, no longer interested in rescuing the present but rather in rescuing the future. To do this, however, a new

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nation would have to be constructed, a transformational process which, almost by definition, would have to be violent and, indeed, to an extent, self destructive. Ireland would have to be forced to regard itself in the mirror, identify its imperfections, see itself as it actually was so that someday it could be as it wished to be. It is in the aftermath of the split that ‘Conradh na Gaeilge’ and the ‘Gaelic Athletic Association’ come to the fore. It is in the aftermath of the split that Connolly and Larkin arise. It is in the aftermath of the split that the Irish Literary Revival truly takes off and it is in this atmosphere that James Joyce begins his attempt to follow in the footsteps of his great hero and idol Henrik Ibsen, a dramatist who by forcing Norway to confront its shortcomings in his plays had prompted something approaching a national rebirth and thus cause in Ireland that which had already happened in Scandinavia, namely the emergence of a new and authentic national consciousness. Like most Parnellites Joyce remained furious with the country. For no one is ever more angry with Ireland than the Irish Nationalist. It is particularly in his works of non-fiction that this fury is most clearly to be seen, for one must remember that Joyce had a second, less celebrated career as a literary critic and journalist. As a young student in Dublin he contributed reviews and theoretical pieces on drama to ‘Bealtaine‘, the magazine of the Irish Literary Theatre of which W. B. Yeats was the editor. He also had a certain amount of poetry published in the pages of the far more radical ‘Dana‘, a journal with close links to Sinn Féin and with Arthur Griffith in particular. This was an association with Griffith that was to continue for decades. While in exile Joyce subscribed to both Griffith's ‘The United Irishman‘ and ‘Sinn Féin‘ the journal which later, in a sense, replaced it. In the same way as Bloom quotes Griffith throughout ‘Ulysses’ Joyce also did, both in conversation and in his writing. He also sent copies of much of that which he wrote while in Trieste, in the post to Griffith, who republished some of it. It should be noted that his brief essay ‘A Curious History‘, despite the fact that it was sent to every paper in Dublin, was published only by ‘Sinn Féin’. In 1902 and 1903 Joyce, just as Gabriel Conroy did in ‘The Dead‘, became a critic for the Dublin-based ‘Daily Express’ and in the same way as

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Conroy is embarrassed to be writing for such a pro-Imperialist newspaper so too, apparently, was Joyce. Despite the editorial position of that journal Joyce still managed, on occasion, to make his political feelings known. For example in a review of Stephen Gwynn's ‘Today and Tomorrow in Ireland‘ he says the following of the author, ‘He says that he is a Nationalist but give Ireland the status of Canada and Mr. Gwynn becomes an Imperialist at once‘. Even at this stage Joyce is no longer interested in mere Home Rule for Ireland. Like Parnell before him, of whom he said, ‘convinced as he was that British Liberalism would only yield to force, united every element of national life behind him and set out on a march along the borders of Insurrection ‘, Joyce even at this early stage has come to believe that ‘dominion status’ of any type will only add to the hypocrisy of culturally British, Irish Nationalism and that only through revolutionary acts of Authenticity, violent if necessary, can the Irish again become themselves. Ten years later in a public lecture delivered at the ‘Universitá Popolare Trieste’ he put it bluntly and again using his own words, ‘If a victorious country tyrannises over another. It cannot logically take it amiss if the latter reacts. Men are made that way and no-one, unless he is blinded by self-interest or ingenuity, can still believe that a colonising country is prompted by purely Christian motives when it takes over foreign shores‘. Later in the talk he stated, ‘if the Irish have not been able to do what their American brothers did, this does not mean that they will never do so’, and then speaking of the attitude of the Irish to the condition in which they found themselves he says, ‘a moral separation already exists between the two countries. I can never remember the English anthem ‘God Save the King‘ being played in public without a storm of whistles, yells and shushes that rendered the solemn and stately music absolutely inaudible‘. Joyce's career as a critic for the 'Daily Express' was to prove to be relatively short-lived but not for any political reason. He gained such a reputation

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for harshness and sarcasm that his reviews became an embarrassment to the paper. Affairs came to a head when Joyce was asked to review Lady Gregory's book ‘Poets and Dreamers‘. He tore it apart. In the words of Buck Mulligan in ‘Ulysses’ he ‘slate(d) her drivel to Jaysus‘. This was not a prudent thing to do since Lady Gregory had gotten him the job in the first place. Shortly afterwards Joyce was sacked. He took up Journalism again when he went to Trieste. Between 1907 and 1912 nine articles of his, all dealing with Ireland, were published in the city's most widely read newspaper ‘Il Piccolo della Sera‘. Joyce was delighted by how well his articles were received, saying in a letter to his brother Stanislaus, ‘I may not be the Jesus Christ I once fondly imagined myself but I think that I must have a talent for Journalism‘. It is in these articles that Joyce most clearly espouses the view, a view which both Existentialists and the Black Panthers were to hold at a later stage, in their different contexts, that the Irish must free themselves by changing themselves and that to change themselves they must firstly recognise what it is about themselves that keeps them from being free. In the ‘Shade of Parnell’ he turns again to the treacherous way in which the ‘Chief’ whom he loved was ultimately treated saying, ‘In his proud appeal to his people, he implored his fellow-countrymen not to throw him to the English wolves howling around him. It redounds to the honour of his fellow countrymen that they did not fail that desperate appeal. They did not throw him to the English wolves, they tore him apart themselves‘. In both the ‘Home Rule Comet‘ and ‘The Last Fenian‘ he again deals with these themes of Irish treachery and hypocrisy. Writing in the first of these he states, ‘For seven centuries Ireland has never been a faithful subject of England, nor on the other hand has she been faithful to herself’. Later in the passage he says, ‘She almost entirely abandoned her language and accepted the language of the conquerer without being able to assimilate its Culture or to adapt herself to the mentality of which that language is the vehicle. She always betrayed her

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heroes in their hour of need without even earning the bounty payment. She has driven her spiritual creators into exile and then boasted of them’, while in the latter piece he says of the Fenian Brotherhood, ‘Under the command of James Stephens, the country was organised into cells of 25 men each, a plan of campaign eminently suited to the Irish character since it minimised the possibility of Betrayal’. At another point in this tract he further criticises his countrymen with the words, ‘for the Irish, even when they break the hearts of those who sacrifice their lives for their country, never fail to show a great reverence for the dead’. In ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages‘ he scarifies the Irish for not studying or understanding the nature of that golden age of learning which between the 5th and 10th centuries had been their finest hour, when as he says, ‘The island was a true centre of Intellectualism and sanctity, that spread its Culture and stimulating energy throughout the continent - the Hellas of the north’. He also derides our inability to recognise who our friends are. When speaking of the manner in which the Holy See had made a present of Ireland to Henry the Second of England he states, ‘But the Pope meant nothing discourteous by this. Anyhow the Irish are so accommodatingly affable that they would hardly even grumble if tomorrow, owing to some unforeseen complication in Europe, the Pope having already given it to an Englishman, were to hand their island over to some temporarily unemployed hidalgo from the court of Alphonso‘, but it is also in this relatively late article, as is the case with the equally late ‘Fenianism‘, that Joyce, aware of what is happening at home, begins to sound notes of hope. It is in ‘Ireland, Land of Saints and Sages‘, for example, that he most clearly glories in the rise of ‘Conradh na Gaeilge’, putting it thus, ‘Ten years ago the Irish language was spoken mainly by country people in the western province - now the Gaelic League has revived its use. Every Irish newspaper, except Loyalist mouthpieces, has at least one special section in Irish. Correspondence between the main municipalities is written in Irish and Irish is

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taught in the majority of elementary and secondary schools. In the universities, it has been placed at the same level as the other modern languages such as French, German, Italian and Spanish. In Dublin, street names are written in both languages. The League organises festivals, concerts, debates and social gatherings at which the speaker of Beurla feels like a fish out of water. Often on the streets groups of young people may be seen to pass speaking Irish perhaps a little more emphatically than is really necessary‘, while it is in ‘Fenianism‘ that he declares his faith in Sinn Féin saying, ‘The new Fenians have regrouped in a party called Sinn Féin. They aim to make Ireland a bilingual republic and to this end, they have established a direct ferry link between Ireland and France. They boycott English goods, they refuse to become soldiers or swear an oath of allegiance to the British crown. They are attempting to develop the industry of the whole country and rather than fork out one and a quarter millions each year to maintain the eighty deputies in the English parliament, they want to institute a consular service in the principal world ports with the aim of merchandising industrial produce, without the intervention of England. From many points of view this latest form of Fenianism is the most formidable. Its influence has certainly once again remoulded the character of the Irish‘. This remoulding of the Irish character is the fundamental and recurring theme of all of Joyce's journalistic work but it is also the declared intention of his fictional output, to forge the conscience of his country in the smithy of his soul as he put it himself. This intention informed all that he did in the different fields in which he laboured. I started this dissertation by saying that everyone wants James Joyce, that is true now but it was not always so. We once took his certitude for vanity, his passion for arrogance, his exile for flight, his isolation for otherness. He was not one of us, at least, not really. We, therefore, failed to recognise the fact that not only was he speaking about us but that he was speaking to us, telling us that we must know ourselves before we can save ourselves, that we must recognise the ravages of the illness before we can identify the benefits of the cure, that we must stare long and hard into ourselves, into our history, into that ‘cracked mirror of

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the servant’ before we can forge again an authentic consciousness of the national soul, that we must hate the country we love before we can love the country we hate. In one of his final articles, the article from which the following passages are drawn, Joyce calls for action. He fears that he will not live to see a free and authentic Ireland. These are two sections which are every bit as significant now, at this time of economic crisis, as they were in the author's day, ‘One thing alone seems clear to me. It is high time that Ireland finished once and for all with failures. If she is truly capable of resurgence then let her do so or else let her cover her head and decently descend into the grave forever’, and, ‘The Irish are eloquent but a revolution is not solely made from human breath and Ireland has already had enough of compromises, misunderstandings and misapprehensions. If she wants to put on the show for which we have waited so long, this time, let it be complete, full and definitive. But telling these Irish actors to hurry up, as our fathers before us told them not so long ago, is useless. I, for one, am certain not to see that curtain rise as I shall have already taken the last tram home’.

CHAPTER THREE ‘I KNOW THAT I HAVE BROKEN EVERY HEART‘ The Secret Messages in Irish of ‘Finnegans Wake’ ‘Finnegans Wake’ has, unfortunately, for long been the ‘poor relation’, the ‘ugly sister’ you might say of the Joycean canon. A work generally ignored, left holding the coats while its older ‘siblings’ have tripped the light fantastic across the boards of destiny and history. Why is it that she has not been asked to dance? She does not possess the obvious, simple beauty of the others, that much is true. Her loveliness is of a deeper, more complicated, less flamboyant type but this alone does not fully explain how James Joyce's final masterpiece came to be regarded as the great ‘wallflower’ of modern Irish literature. It was not that she was disrespected, if anything she was respected too much. Her intelligence and erudition were legendary as, indeed, was her impenetrability but it was this very impenetrability that potential partners found both intimidating and off-putting, for why would one attempt to know a book that will not be known, to understand a text that will not be understood, to love a work that will not be loved, to be a friend to an idea that preferred to keep its own counsel and the splendour of its own absolute isolation. This, however, is to completely misinterpret and misunderstand the true nature of the ‘Wake’, for its obscurity and complexity rather than being born of a desire to separate the content of the work from society, emerges, in fact, from a genuine wish to accurately reflect the true nature of the world as it is, as we, as sentient, conscious beings, actually, experience it. Life is not a narrative. Communication is inadequate. Our senses fail us. Thoughts mingle with action, dreams with reality, emotions with perception, as the interior and exterior selves attempt to pair and in so doing gain an effective understanding of what is actually

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going on. This partnership, however, is doomed to failure since the clarity which success would demand is never available to it. Everyday life is composed of a never-ending sequence of encounters with struggling egos and thwarted wills, of verbal duels and conversational conflicts, of sound-bytes, snatches of statements, nuggets of information, pearls of wisdom, the known, the half-known, the unknown, the heard, the half-heard, the unheard and the overheard. The voices from our televisions, on our streets or, indeed, in our heads tie and tether us to ourselves and others but only loosely since we can neither apprehend nor comprehend the full essence of their pronouncements, for they are not really making them to us, they are not really speaking to us, the words would be spoken whether we chose to listen or not. Our knowledge of ourselves and the Universe must remain woefully incomplete and ignorance the defining feature of our species, not because we cannot hear the eternal symphonies of the cosmic strings but rather because we are never destined to play them. All we can do is listen in, eavesdrop, ‘earwig‘ as they say in Dublin and like drunks down the back at Midnight Mass, the only thing we can ever hope to get out of the proceedings is the gist. On an intuitive level all of us know this to be true. All of us realise that incompleteness of comprehension is a central feature of the human condition. All of us understand the limitations that the incongruities of human consciousness place upon us in terms of interaction with both our external and internal realities, however, this is a truth with which literature, in all its guises, has found it difficult to deal. Soliloquies, dream sequences, plays within plays, flashbacks even streams of consciousness are amongst the very many devices that have been and are still employed in an attempt to accurately portray the relationship that exists between the individual and the maelstrom of stimuli in which he or she functions. The use of such forms, however, presents the author with two somewhat serious problems. Firstly this isn't how it happens and secondly everyone knows that this isn't how it happens. There is no such absolute separation between our interior and exterior existences. We do not completely depart the now and become totally immersed in the crystal clear waters of memory. We tend not to walk away from our friends and family and conceal

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ourselves in empty rooms just so as to give ourselves a good talking to. We do not make use only of words to process the mass of information that assails our senses on a daily basis and we most certainly do not engage in any of these activities, to the exclusion of all others, in well delineated and identifiable units and blocks of time. Everything occurs simultaneously. The deployment of these constructions inevitably places an unreality at the heart of any narrative and makes the fiction more ‘fictional’ than it needs to be. A fact that both authors and readers generally ignore since both sides of the literary transaction understand fully what these devices are supposed to signify and accept them as inadequate conventions of a literature which is unable to overcome the limitations and strictures of language itself. In other words, right from the outset, a compromise is negotiated with the Authenticity that the writer would wish to achieve, a compromise that is made in the interests of easy comprehensibility and engagement for if the work is not comprehensible to the reader it will not engage him and if no one finds the book or poem or play engaging then it will not be read. In this zero sum game between truth and entertainment the authentic will always come off second best. Well almost always, for in ‘Finnegans Wake’ this is the very dilemma, ‘the Gordian Knot’, that Joyce is attempting to untie. In the ‘Wake’ convention is abandoned. The statement is made and, as is the case in ordinary life, it is up to the reader or listener to understand its import if he can. The conscious, the subconscious and unconscious all coalesce and become one, as thought, memory, dream, action and perception collide and forge a new literary reality. Falsehood and inAuthenticity are burnt away in the white heat that is produced by the collision while Joyce who is the ‘Earwicker‘, the ‘earwigger’, the central character of the piece scans his memory and imagination and eavesdrops upon a thousand conversations, conversations which encapsulate the essence of his being, conversations which define the very quantum of his soul. In the same way as four Irish masters of the seventeenth century, four masters of whom the author of the ‘Wake' was very much enamoured, convinced of the imminent annihilation of their people, attempted to quickly write down all the stories, hopes and dreams of their nation so that when we were gone something would remain, some evidence that we had been there, Joyce records

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his own stories, hopes and dreams in a form reminiscent of the spoken ‘seanchus’ lore of his own tribe so that neither he nor they would pass into an absolute and unforgiving oblivion. The book is long but everything happens in a moment, in a heartbeat, as meaning is piled upon meaning, as the misheard is fused with the misunderstood so to create a new understanding, an imperfect understanding, a more authentically human understanding for all that, of what it was to be Joyce, of what it was to be an exile and of what it still is to be Irish. The result is a static which crackles and pulses upon the page. Joyce is transmitting but on a million frequencies and unless one possesses the correct receiver and is prepared to incessantly tune and retune the set then one will hear nothing. The strange thing about ‘Finnegans Wake’, however, is that the more you engage with it, the more it engages with you. It gradually teaches you how it should be read and at a certain point messages start coming through loud and clear. I say this from experience, for this is exactly what happened to me when I began to uncover the ‘teachtaireachtaí rúnda’ or secret messages embedded in the text. I had, for long, of course, been aware that the ‘Wake’ was full of Irish words and phrases and that even much of that which passes for English in the work is, in fact, a direct translation of Irish word and sentence structure but it was only when I began to encounter certain elements which seemed to have a direct connection with the Gaeltacht of Ring in county Waterford and transliterated forms which could only be drawn from that area and its dialect that I began to bring the phonetic rules of ‘Seanachaint na nDéise’ to bear on the ‘Wake’. I quickly discovered that when these conventions were applied to some of the more mysterious lines in the work that suddenly they could be read and more than this, that their content tended to be of a very personal nature. Now why ‘Gaelainn na Rinne’ would be the predominant dialect in the Irish of the ‘Wake’ is, in a sense, difficult to understand. There is no record of Joyce ever having been in county Waterford let alone in Ring but yet the ‘Seanaphobal’ meaning the ‘old parish, people or place’, a central district of the Gaeltacht area, appears to be referred to under a number of guises, ‘the pubbel‘ on line 556.26, ‘old perishers‘ on line 265.20, ‘old place’ on line 586.21, ‘the seanad and pobbel’ on line 454.35 and singular words and elements such as ‘breadcost’, the Ring rendering of the

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form

‘bricfeasta’

meaning

‘breakfast’

or

‘rawk’

43 as

in

‘Rawkneepudsfrowse‘ on line 526.25, a less than flattering reference to the women of Rathnew as they are portrayed in ‘Toraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne’, are to be found throughout the novel. Joyce may well have come into the possession of books which dealt specifically with the dialect of Ring. He may have been influenced and aided by his friends, Padraic Colum or Waterford's own Arthur Power for example, though there is no evidence to suggest that either one of them was particularly well acquainted with ‘Gaelainn na nDéise’. Equally, of course, one must also accept that in this case, as in so many others, an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, in other words that just because there is no record of Joyce having been in Ring that this does not mean that he was never there. Whatever be the full truth however, the situation came to pass, the extent, variety and sheer virtuosity of the Irish language elements deployed in ‘Finnegans Wake’ indicates clearly that the convention which holds that James Joyce had only a rudimentary grasp of the Irish tongue is rooted not in fact but solely in opinion, opinion based upon incomplete knowledge. Was it ever truly reasonable to suggest that a man of Joyce's undoubted and unquestionable linguistic ability would have little understanding of the Irish language. It was but only if evidence existed that he were either hostile or indifferent to the medium. Even a cursory examination of his journalistic and academic output from his time in Trieste, where he glories in the growing strength of the revivalist movement, would indicate that nothing could be further from the truth. To Joyce, like his idol Ibsen before him, a nation state without a national language was an absolute contradiction in terms, a monument to defeat, failure, inAuthenticity and hypocrisy. A province playing at being a nation once again. ‘Finnegans Wake’ is, of course, a book of many tongues. Ireland's ancient ‘Auraicept na n-Éces’ maintains that, in the beginning, there were over sixty human languages, languages which, at Babel, coalesced into one, a code which possessed the best features of all those which had gone before. In the ‘Wake’ it is sixty four languages that appear, tongues which turn and twist and bleed into one another. All the lexicons play their part but it is English and Irish which hold the central roles since it is they, far more than any of the others, which provide the

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greatest complexity, meaning and depth. It has for long been recognised that much of the English in the work functions on many levels. It is far less widely known that the Irish does too but in distinctly different ways. The puns, allusions, anagrams and portmanteau words are again all there but added to this, is a even greater determination to conceal import and significance. One must firstly identify the Irish forms, then consider them, then say them, then break them down and finally come to conclusions in regard to them. Joyce does not make it easy but on pages ninety and ninety one he does give us some indication of what he intends to do. In this section for example he says, ‘through his Brythonic interpreter on his oath , mhuith peisth mhuise as fearra bheura muirre hriosmas‘. This passage of the ‘Wake’ deals with Saint Patrick's meeting with king Laoghaire and his officers at Tara and if one plays around with the 'h' and 's' sounds in the line, one finds the macaronic statement, ‘Mhaith na péist mise a fheara mhóra, Muire Chríost's ma‘. In other words ‘The snakes forgave me oh great men, Holy Mary, Christ's mother‘, a reference that is clearly Patrician in nature. One cannot, however, leave it at that. The element ‘Brythonic interpreter‘ must mean something, must be a direction to do something else. This one took me a while but if one pronounces the words as if they were English with a somewhat ‘Patrician’ British accent one gets, ‘May I please wish you a very, very merry Christmas‘, an allusion not only to ‘Naomh Pádraig's’ origins and class but also to the fact that this encounter is said to have occurred at a time of religious festival. This line, in essence, provides us with a key. Joyce is telling us how he intends to hide the Irish statements, that he will, as he does with all languages, break some rules of grammar and syntax, that he will ignore conventions of indirect speech, that he will replace dependent with independent forms and in so doing make them look like phrases from another tongue. This came as some relief to me since most of the secret messages on first or indeed second glance seemed to be pronouncements in the Japanese language. I was further encouraged, though annoyed at myself for not finding it earlier, when in a mass of Irishisms on page ninety, I came across the element ‘if it was, in yappanoise language‘. Joyce is telling us where to search and what to look out for.

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Now I do not wish to give the impression for a moment that all the Irish language elements in the ‘Wake’ are so well concealed. The vast majority of them, indeed, are perfectly obvious to those who have a knowledge of the tongue. It is only the most personal constructions that are so ingeniously veiled, nor do I wish it to be thought that this essay provides an exhaustive or entirely comprehensive examination of the question. There is much yet to be done but I do think that it is important that this issue be addressed in something approaching a systematic way, for if it is not, the extent to which James Joyce was a writer and artist of the classical rather than the Colonial Irish tradition, cannot be appreciated nor his, supposedly, complicated relationship with his homeland fully understood. The Irish language structures in ‘Finnegans Wake‘ can in essence be divided into four categories. Firstly, individual words or brief phrases which are included simply to add to the richness of the text. Elements from other tongues also fulfil this purpose but the Irish features massively outnumber those of all other languages in the book save English or more specifically Hiberno-English. Secondly brief statements which have a significantly descriptive purpose in the work. There are literally hundreds of these, many of which function on more than one narrative level. Thirdly, more substantial constructions which are designed to exert a powerful influence upon the broad general direction of the passage or paragraph into which they are placed. Many of these again operate on a number of different and diverse levels and finally those sentences and phrases, robust and remarkable in their nature, which stand apart from the words and themes which surround them and reveal the torments and concerns of the author, as a man, as a father, as an exile, as a mortal being. The four separate categories of Irish constructions in the ‘Wake’ are all significant but it is, however, on the latter three groups that I now wish to concentrate my attention, not because the first group is of any lesser an importance but since its presence has for long been noted and recognised. One must remember that there is hardly a page of this expansive work that does not contain at least one word of Irish, in most cases a lot more than one, elements that add to the distinctively Irish ‘blas’ or flavour of the masterpiece. The other

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groups, though far less well known, fulfil a greater purpose in the book, in that they inform even more directly its essential theme. In other words one cannot even begin to reach an accurate understanding of ‘Finnegans Wake’, one cannot even begin to identify, let alone define it in literary terms unless one is familiar with them. In terms of the constructions of the secondary group, these as I have said, deal directly with the characters and action that are to be found in the work but one must never forget that there is a certain Jungian quality to the ‘Wake’ by which the primary personalities of the piece function as Archetypes, different and conflicting versions of the author himself. Joyce, of course, was well acquainted with Karl Jung. He had treated Lucia, Joyce's daughter but was unable to make any real headway, coming to the conclusion that the young woman would never recover from her psychological difficulties. This was a prognosis that Joyce could never accept, a prognosis that caused him to hold the doctor in a certain degree of contempt. His view of the human mind was, nevertheless, clearly influenced by Jung, to the extent that traits and opinions which are attributed to different personages in the ‘Wake’ may, in fact, be extreme representations of the author's own characteristics and viewpoints. Thoughts, strengths and weaknesses which he associates, on some level, with himself. Even though these constructions of the second category are firmly rooted in the action of the text, they also therefore are, to some degree at least, telling us something of the mindset of Joyce. For example on page 373 one finds the element ‘Broree abú’ or as it would be in Irish ‘Brúgh an rí abú’. On one level, of course, this is a reference to the district in which the young Éamon de Valera was brought up, it's mention being in absolute keeping with a broad sympathy which is to found throughout the book for the founder of Fianna Fáil, however, ‘Brúgh an rí abú’ literally ‘long live the hostel of the king‘ clearly also echoes the stories of both the Fiannaíocht and Ruraíocht mythic cycles, as, indeed, does the compound ‘ganlannlubber‘ on page 370. On first sight ‘lanlubber’ or ‘landlubber’ seems to be the predominant form and since it is drawn from a passage that speaks about former Vikings who have abandoned their ships and settled in Ireland, it is, undoubtedly, partially meant in this sense but if one breaks it down further into ‘gan’, ‘lann’ and

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‘lubber’, ‘lann’ being a blade in Irish and ‘gan’ being without, it can then be read as ‘ganlannlover’, the lover who has lost his blade or sword. This then is an obvious reference to the character of Fergus Mac Roech in the ancient ‘Táin bó Cuailgne’ who loses his sword during a surreptitious visit to the tent of Queen Mebh of Connacht during the campaign. In both the Ruraíocht and the Fiannaíocht, it must be remembered, that ‘the loss of sword’ motif is one that indicates the emasculation of a warrior. Politics emerge again on pages 338 and 347 where Joyce, using the great Irish-American slogan ‘Éire go brách’ as his base, firstly mocks John Redmond's call to young Nationalists in Ireland to fight in the British army during the First World War with the Irish/English/German macaronic phrase ‘for Ehren boys go brawl‘ and then again while speaking of the dire economic state of the country with ‘Erin gone brugk‘, yes he had it first. On page 364 he employs the term ‘kinahaun‘, ‘cine amháin’ in Irish meaning ‘one nation’ while on page 339 he refers to the emergence of physical force Nationalism, in the wake of the Easter rising as ‘Gaelstorms‘. ‘Sinn Féin’ appears throughout the work in a multiplicity of different spellings as does the contraction ‘LonDub‘ which in English clearly refers to ‘LondonDublin’, a play on the ‘Londonderry' format and the Colonial nature of the city in which Joyce himself was reared but which in Irish stands as ‘Lon Dubh’, the Blackbird, an echo of ‘the Blackbird of sweet Avondale’, one of the titles by which his beloved Charles Stewart Parnell was known. On a more human level, on page 373, he speaks loving of ‘the moherboher to the Washte3‘, the main-road to the West which ran through Cabra where he had once resided, reveals the anguish of exile on page 628, where referring to Ireland as ‘acoolsha‘ this being ‘a chuisle’, ‘my pulse’ or ‘my beloved’, he says, ‘but you're changing acoolsha , you're changing from me‘ On page 361 he speaks sadly of ‘Ingean mingen’, ‘iníon m'iníon’, ‘daughter oh my daughter’ while on page 626, at the end of the last great,

3

' moherboher to the washte ' - The ' mórbhóthar to the west ', ' mórbhóthar ' in Irish being a ' great ' or main road and ' washte ' being a Connacht rendering of the English word ' west '

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heartbreaking, soliloquy of the ‘Wake’ he suddenly tells himself to ‘Whish! A gull‘, ‘éist ag gol’, stop weeping. All of these forms and the thousands of others of the second category play their parts in the narrative while at the same time also telling us something of the narrator. They are, however, brief and simple structures. Many do function on a number of different levels but their very brevity constrains them. Such limitations do not exist in regard to the formulations of the third group. These are, in the main, much more extensive constructions and therefore Joyce is able to load them down with a significantly greater weight of meaning. They therefore play an even more central part in the overall project since they are more capable of bearing the burden of responsibility that the author has been placed upon them. On page 332, for example, one encounters the element, ‘Pappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmacmacmacwhackf alltherdebblenonthedubblandaddydoodled‘, one of these great, long, multi-faceted word of which Joyce was so fond. The construction can be broken into three consecutive parts. The first fundamentally musical, the second Irish language and the third Hiberno-English but again with a musical slant. ‘Pappappapp‘ is an attempt to mimic the sound of a trumpet playing but also clearly contains the form ‘papa’ and therefore has an obvious nuance of fatherhood. The central Irish section basically reads, ‘ar a son nuair a gheall laoch na tullachmban gean mac mac mac’ meaning ‘on their behalf when the hero of the mountain of the women promised a son's affection to the son of the son’. The term ‘tullamon‘ is a clear reference to ‘Slíabh na mBan’, or ‘Slíabh na mBan Fhinn’ in county Tipperary, ‘the mountain of the women of Fionn’ where legend tells us that a group of otherworldly women continue to wait, as they have done for centuries, for the captain of the Fianna to return and release them from a cavern at the centre of that mountain into which he had placed them so as to protect them from their enemies, a liberation which his own death had prevented. The mention of the granting of a son's affection to the ‘macmac‘ the ‘sonson’ is almost certainly a reference to Fionn's declaration of fealthy to Cairbre mac Chormaic, the son of Cormac mac Airt, High King of Ireland, an old rival of Fionn with the implication through the English word

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‘mock’ that this individual was not truly his father's son, the belief long existing that Cairbre Mac Chormaic, similar to Moses in the Jewish tradition, had been found as an infant in a basket in the reeds of the river Boyne and raised as a prince in the Irish royal house. The third section of the construction seems on first sight to be little more than a play upon the somewhat chaotic chorus of the song ‘Finnegans Wake’ but if one examines it, one finds that it is not entirely without sense either, for it can be read as ‘whack fall the debblen on the dubblan daddy doodled’, an apparent reference to the death of Fionn the great father, the actual father or grandfather of many of the Fianna officers and the father figure to much of the army, a father which some elements of the Irish mythic tradition maintain, was buried in, what is now, the greater Dublin area. This strange long word therefore appears to be speaking of the loss of that Fionn, that Finn, that as even the title of the work, in anagram, tells us, is now waking again. As is the case with so many of the Irish language references in the ‘Wake’, this is confirmed by what is to be found on the other levels upon which the construction is operating. The appearance of the unit ‘mong‘ echoes the ancient division of Ireland into ‘Leatha Mogha‘ the half of Mong and ‘Leatha Chuinn‘ the half of Conn. The use of the spelling ‘lach‘ for ‘laoch‘ meaning hero echoes the word ‘lachs‘ in German meaning a salmon, a clear reference to that ‘bradán feasa’, that salmon of knowledge that forms such a central part of the story of Fionn Mac Chumhaill. Three lines later one encounters the phrase, ‘Fine again, Couholson‘ which not only names ‘captaen na Féine‘ or the commander of the Fianna but also tells us that he has risen. Even apart from all of this, however, one fines that contrast which I believe to be at the core of ‘Finnegans Wake’, that delineation that both links and divides the book from the earlier ‘Ulysses', that both links and divides Joyce from his daughter Lucia, that both links and divides the two sides of the cosmic coin, day and night. At the beginning of the Irish language element one finds the phrase ‘ar a son’. In the middle of it one encounters the section ‘gealach’, the moon, an interpretation that is confirmed by the appearance of the fraction ‘mon‘. This is the central theme that runs through the heart of the ‘Wake’, the balance between the sun and the moon and it is a

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theme, the personal import of which, only comes truly to the fore in the Irish statements. The moon technically does not shine. It only reflects the light of the sun. Does the sun therefore represent Joyce himself and the moon Lucia? Is Lucia, in fact, simply reflecting the searing, dangerous brilliance of her father but then does not her name mean light? Is it she that is the sun in whose light Joyce continues to thrive as an author or does it in fact mean both connections, a creative interdependency, a spiritual symbiosis in which the two individuals are joined and upon which they must rely? Equally do not Yeats' words ‘the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun‘ from ‘The Song Of The Wandering Aengus’ immediately come to mind when one recognises this particular celestial equation and does not one hear the phrase ‘it had become a glistening girl with apple blossoms in her hair, who called me by my name and ran and vanished in the brightening air‘ resonating in one's soul. Now one must not make the mistake of thinking, that in terms of pure narration, Joyce made use of Irish only when dealing with sections of Irish mythology. If he had done so then it would only have been an Authenticity of text rather than an Authenticity of authorship, of person, of being that he was seeking. In the ‘Wake’ Joyce is exorcising those ghosts of nationality that had for so long haunted him and is becoming, in his own strict and demanding terms and in every sense of the words, a full and complete Irish writer. On page 362 the reader encounters the following construction, ‘Thamamahalla yearin out yearin‘. In my opinion this phrase can be read in two ways and I also hold that when such is true, Joyce intended that the interpretations be read in sequence. If one brings ‘Gaelainn na nDéise’ to bear on this structure two lines appear, one completely Irish, the other macaronic, with English being the second tongue, ‘Tháim i mo halla , d'iarrfainn ort iarainn’ , and, ‘Tháim i mo chodladh , year in out year in’ The first section, which in English would stand as ‘I am in my hall , I would ask you for iron’ is a clear reference to the death of Dido in Virgil's Aeneid and to the manner in which the maddened queen, having fallen in love

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with Aeneas, prince of Troy and having shared her life with him for a year, now realising that he is to leave, asks her sister Anna to bring Aeneas' sword to the great hall where she intends to take her own life with it. An action she carries out thus making an unwitting accomplice of her innocent sibling. This reading of the words is confirmed by the similarity that exists between the feature ‘thamamahalla‘ in the ‘Wake’ and the somewhat unusual word for sword that Virgil uses at the relevant point in the Aeneid namely ‘thamalos‘. The second interpretation of the line, 'I am asleep year in out year in’, also, to a degree, refers to this incident in the Aeneid since Dido in her growing madness declares that she has been asleep for the past year and that in her slumber she had failed to recognise, what she now holds to be, the treacherous nature of her former lover. I believe also, however, that Joyce is, here again, speaking personally. If he has something truly intimate to say in ‘Finnegans Wake’, if he wishes to say it only to his own, if he wants to whisper it to ‘muintir na hÉireann’, to the family of Ireland, to his family of Ireland, he will say it in Irish. Lucy's growing madness, growing distress was not dissimilar to that of Dido. It was frenzied, frantic, angry, sudden and may well have been triggered by her disappointment in affairs of the heart. We know that Joyce felt that he should have noticed the signs. We know that he felt that he had failed her. We know that he came to believe that she had inherited her oddness, her strangeness, her sorrow from him and in a strange echo of Sam Beckett's famous question, the same Sam Beckett who in all innocence had been the object of Lucia's romantic intentions, ‘Was I sleeping while the others suffered‘, Joyce is stating that he was not awake to the fact that his own daughter's grasp on reality was quickly slipping away. And when it comes to the final category of constructions. Those teachtaireachtaí rúnda4, those secret messages in which Joyce reveals so much of himself to his own people, it is his concern with the deteriorating mental health of his only daughter and his own inability to save her that again forms the central and poignant theme of his pronouncements. On page 335, for example, one encounters the extremely complex line,

4

Teachtaireachtaí rúnda – ‘secret messages’ when written in the Irish language

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‘Ko Niutirenis hauru leish! A lala! Ko Niutirenis haururu laleish ! Ala lala!’. Now if you ignore the facts that, at first glance, the sentence has a very unIrish look about it and that it is surrounded by lines that appear to have been drawn from a New Zealand ‘haka‘ then double play some of the letters, leave the ‘Ko’ elements to one side for a moment and enunciate the statement as if it were in Ring Irish where ‘tá‘ meaning ‘is‘, is pronounced ‘thá‘ and the letter ‘i‘ is sounded as ‘y‘, two different versions emerge, these being, 'ní tír anois thá urú leis, a leana, ní tír anois thá urú rua leath leis, alla leana', in other words. ‘it is not a country now, there is an eclipse upon it, oh child, it is not a country now, there is a red eclipse, half revealed, half child’, and, ‘ná téir anois thá ar thú leigheas a leana, ná téir anois thá rúradh le leigheas, alla leana’, or in English ‘do not go now oh child, you must be cured, do not go now oh child, there is a prescription for a cure’. Which does it mean? Well as is always the case in ‘Finnegans Wake’ it means both but there are certain indications that the second more personal form where Joyce is clearly speaking of his daughter Lucia's illness, is intended to be the predominant one. ‘Alla‘ in Ring Irish is a prefix which means ‘half’ but the word ‘eala‘, different spelling with the same sound is a swan while ‘lala‘ in colloquial English is a term indicating madness, therefore when the two are combined, ‘Alla lala’ can be understood as ‘my half mad swan’. Equally though the element 'co' often appears in old Irish tracts as a shortened form of ‘agus’ the Irish word for ‘and’, the ‘ko’ sound here seems to have a higher purpose. If it is added to the ' al ' particle that runs throughout the line, one gets ‘koal’ or ‘coole’, ‘the swans of Coole’ and if one then reads the line back in part, ‘do not go oh child’ is it not Yeats, again, that one hears. On page 554 one encounters a strange sentence, a sentence which has echoes in other parts of the book and which, certainly, appears to reference the writers of the four Christian Gospels. This again, however, is yet another encoded

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line which can be read in Irish in two different ways. If one reads the construction, ‘Mattahah, Marahah, Luahah, Joahanahanahana‘, as if it were standard Irish one gets, ‘Mhaithfeá, Mhairfeá, Luaifeá, Johann, cheana, cheana’ or in the English tongue, ‘you would forgive, you would live, you would mention, John already, already’. This may very well refer to Joyce's inability to forgive his father John for the suffering through which he put his family in the writer's youth, an inability to let bygones be bygones which caused the author great pain in his later life. If the phrase is read as if it were Déise Irish, however, a different meaning emerges, ‘meath athá, mar athá, Lu athá ro shean, cheana, cheana’, or in English, ‘a shame it is, that it is as it is, that Lucy is too old, already, already’. Joyce, the father, here may simply be referring to the fact that his daughter, whom he calls at another point in the ‘Wake’, ‘the darling of my heart‘, is growing up and moving away from him or, indeed, he may be voicing a fear that Lucia now was simply too old to save from the anguish which assailed her. The loss of Lucia to mental illness is also the theme of the ‘teachtaireacht rúnda’ to be found on page 609, this being, ‘Matamarulukajoni’. Again the line has the appearance of Japanese about it but if one brings the pronunciation of ‘Gaelainn na Rinne‘ to bear upon it then the following message emerges, ‘Má thá mar thú Lu cá gheobhainn í’, in other words, ‘if there is another like you Lucy then where can I find her’. On page 358 Joyce goes even further stating that ‘hopeygoalucrey‘ is now his ‘mottu propprior‘. The first element is an obvious anagram and if one subjects it to the same process as before the following sentence appears in Irish ‘stop ag gol Lucy a chroí’ or in English, ‘stop crying Lucy my love’. The majority of the encoded messages that I have found up to this point are similar to these and deal primarily with Joyce's boundless affection for his long-suffering daughter but there are others which are designed to cast light on

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other areas of the writer's life. We have often been told, for example, that Joyce was a committed Atheist but was he? His sister Eileen, on his death, reacting furiously to the manner in which he had been portrayed by reactionary forces in Ireland as a virtual antichrist, stated that during his regular visits to her in Trieste, which tended to take place at Easter time, he attended the Catholic ceremonies every day. The messages certainly seem to support the idea that Joyce was a man of far greater religious feeling than we are generally led to believe. For example on page 601 in a passage filled with ecclesiastical imagery, we find the form ‘Asthoreth, assay‘ in other words ‘a stóirín Íosa’, ‘Jesus my beloved’ while on page 345 we encounter the element ‘achaura mocreas‘. Now on this occasion, at first glance, the structure does look Irish and appears to be a transliteration of ‘a chara mo chréas’ that being ‘oh friend my wound’ but if one again subjects it to the pronunciational conventions of Ring Irish the construction ‘ach tháir mo Chríost’, ‘but you are my Christ’ comes to the fore. Religion and family then combine on page 233 where an exasperated Joyce, again making use of a pseudo-Japanese formulations declares, ‘Makoto! Whagta kriowday! Gelagala nausy is’, This line is primarily a combination of pure Ring Irish and dialectical German. If transliterated it becomes ‘Mo chuid ó, lagfá croí Óigh Dè, gé lag eala nausy ist’, in other words ‘O my family, you would weaken the heart of the Virgin of God, the swan is nasty to the goose’. The swan in the ‘Wake’ is almost always Lucia. Throughout the book the ‘goose’ references the Barnacle goose or Nora and therefore the whole line is a definite allusion to the manner in which Lucy's fury was largely directed towards her mother, a mother who was not able for her, a mother who had been weakened by years of stress and hardship. The term ‘nausy’ is clearly drawn from the German word ‘nass’, this meaning damp or unpleasant but there is, also, an obvious echo of ‘Nazi’ to be seen in the form. This is far from being the only time that references to the German National Socialist movement are encoded in Irish in ‘Finnegans Wake’. On page 229, in a paragraph rich in allusions to the Wagner Bayreuth festival, a festival which Hitler regularly attended, one finds the element ‘Leimuncononulstia’ or in transliterated form ‘Léim an con anall – stria’. This in English being, ‘The hound

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jumped over – stria’, referring, needless to say, to the ‘Wolf’ as he liked to be called, to Hitler’s abandonment of his Austrian homeland and his ‘jumping of the fence’, if you wish, into Germany. In the same section one encounters the term ‘maleesh‘ or ‘mailís’ meaning malice in Irish and the phrase ‘suchess of sceaunonsceau‘ or in Irish ‘sceon óns ceo’, terror from the fog, a probable allusion to Germany's tactic of carrying out military operations under the cover of early morning mist. On occasion, however, the object of Joyce's displeasure is somewhat less clear. On page 225 he speaks of the ‘worawarrawurms‘ or when doubled-played and transliterated into Irish the ' droch rath air, rath mór orms ', this in English being ‘the his bad fortune is my good luck(s)’. The phrase seems to refer to some group of begrudgers in Ireland but to whom exactly Joyce is referring is not entirely certain. The fact, however, that the construction ends with the form ‘wurms’ is indicative, of course, of the author's utter disrespect for them whoever they were. On page 209 one comes across another formulation which is both mysterious and intriguing. This being the sentence ‘in a waveney lyne aringarouma‘. If this phrase is transliterated it breaks into a combined structure made up of both Irish and English language elements, ‘waive the lying in Èirinn go raibh mé’ or if placed entirely in English ‘waive the lying but I was in Ireland’. Is Joyce telling us that he did actually come home after 1912, that he did pay a visit to this country at some point in the succeeding years. It looks that way but one can't be sure. What is interesting also however, particularly when one considers his use of Déise Irish throughout the work, is the fact that the element ‘ring’ stands out in clear and stark relief at the core of the final synthetic word. The most devastating of all the messages in my opinion, however, comes again on page 601, where Joyce, almost out of the blue, suddenly states, ‘Tasyam kuru salilakriyamu‘, for if you slam all the words together and then break them apart again, the following construction appears, ‘tasyam kurus lila kriy amu’ and if you then pronounce this as if it were Irish, what you will hear yourself saying is 'tá's agam

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chuireas uile chroí amú’, ‘I know that I have set every heart astray’, ‘I know that I have broken every heart’. Now there is no doubt but that Joyce had, during his career, brought sorrow into many people's lives. He had refused to pray with his mother on her deathbed. He had allowed his father to fall into further penury. He had become estranged from his brother Stanislaus. He had fallen out with friends such as Sam Beckett and Arthur Power. He had deceived patrons such as Harriet Weaver and Sylvia Beach. He had subjected Nora and his children to periods of great uncertainty and occasional poverty. He had wounded many people in Ireland through the cruelty of his description and the harshness of his comment and yet many commentators have held that so intent was he on the creation of perfection that he hardly noticed his growing isolation and cared little for the hurt that he had caused. This particular message proves that orthodoxy to be completely untrue. He was certainly aware of the pain that he had inflicted on those around him and was clearly sorry for the heart break which his words and actions had produced amongst some of the members of that which he called ‘the little brittle magic nation‘. One gets the feeling when one reads the line that he felt as if he had let all of us down. Well let me say this to you James Joyce wherever you are now. You have never let me down. You have not broken my heart nor indeed the hearts of any of the men and women of this Irish generation. The poet Seán Ó Ríordáin might well have been speaking for all of us now when he said ‘is cuid díom thú, comh mór leis an aibítir agus soiscéal Dé‘, ‘you are as great a part of me as the alphabet or the gospel of God’. When you left these messages for us, specifically for us your compatriots, you must have known that the day would come when we would find them, though you might have hoped that it would not have taken quite so long. Bloomfeld, one of the fathers of modern Linguistics once said that language was the true homeland and if that be so, then I think that it is fair to say that you have come home today in a fuller, freer, more comprehensive way than you ever have before and therefore using words of a song from the people of Ring, from

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the people of the Déise, it only falls for me now to say, ‘fáilte romhat abhaile a Jimmy a mhíle stór5‘.

5

Fáilte romhat abhaile a Jimmy a mhíle stór – ‘Welcome home Jimmy my thousand love’. ‘Jimmy mo mhíle stór’ is a song in the Irish language in which a heartbroken girl laments the exile of her beloved ‘Jimmy’ and longs for his return to his homeland. The song may very well have emerged from the broad ‘Aisling’ tradition with the young woman being, in fact, a feminine incarnation of Ireland and the ‘Jimmy’ or ‘James’, referred to in the lines, being, in reality, her lost lover and supposedly legitimate king, James Stewart.

CHAPTER FOUR LESS THAN LOVERS, MORE THAN FRIENDS Feminine incarnations of Ireland in ' Finnegans Wake ' and the Other Works of James Joyce. The Danish existentialist Soren Kierkegaard 6 once famously said that life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards. To a certain extent this statement is true also of the works of James Joyce. A tendency exists to engage with the four major books in the order in which they were written but, unfortunately, the level of that engagement is rarely consistent. ‘Dubliners’, the ‘Portrait’ and even ‘Ulysses’, though clearly complex, are regarded by most as being both readable and comprehensible, ‘Finnegans Wake’ on the other hand, is not and is therefore left to one side. If examined at all the text is generally studied in combination with one or a number of the myriad of glossaries and summaries that have been produced since the book's publication. In other words it tends to be viewed through a prism of orthodox interpretation, an interpretation which leaves little or no room for personal or individual discovery, the very type of discovery envisioned by the author. ‘Finnegans Wake‘ is in a very real sense Joyce's last word on the world, the ultimate product of his evolution as both a writer and a thinker. Any conclusions drawn in regard to the presence or absence of thematic construction must begin and end there and must be one's own. To do otherwise is to make inadequate judgment based upon incomplete evidence and hearsay. When one looks at the entire spectrum of the Joycean canon a certain balance is to be observed. ‘Dubliners’, ‘Exiles’, ‘Chamber Music’ and the ‘Portrait’ are all constructed around those interconnections which dominate all human existence; men and women, the old and the young, the strong and the weak, love and hate, life and death. These relationships are carried forward into ‘Ulysses’ but are superimposed upon the grid map of Dublin thus surrounding the

6

Søren Kierkgaard - 1813-1855, from Copenhagen, widely regarded as being the father of existentialism.

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central action with the biological, temporal, emotional and now physical infrastructure of which humankind is both the beneficiary and victim. In ‘Finnegans Wake’' the fault lines of the earlier works are again to be seen but this time running beneath the street-scape of language itself. For in the same way as the structure and layout of any city is pre-determined by the obstacles that previous human action and nature have created, the highways and byways of every tongue must circumvent those impediments which historical context and development have placed in their path. No road will bring you exactly where you want to go. No sentence will convey exactly that which you want to say. Mankind is governed by unknown and unknowable exceptions to the rules of grammar and exists primarily in the cracks between the tenses. He says only that which is sayable, expresses himself only to the extent that expression will allow, near enough is not good enough, words fail him. When one considers the manner in which we interact with one another in our everyday lives the extent of that failure becomes clear. If we are, for example, asked to describe some object or other, we can only do so within the confines of the language which is being employed. We scroll through the menu of nouns and adjectives which that code provides and choose those which most accurately portray the image in our heads. In this way we convey an impression to the listener of how the object seemed to us but an impression which lacks any real nuance or true individuality, a description devoid of human Authenticity and therefore almost by definition, devoid of clarity. The situation is even worse when one is dealing with the intangible, for despite their obvious failings, language's agreed signifiers have some imperfect capacity to delineate and describe the smooth lines and sharp edges of the physical world. Certainly terms which refer to the extent, dimension or appearance of the tangible are inherently flawed, utterly dependent as they are on a commonality of both attitude and experience between speaker and listener. Elements such as ‘beautiful’, ‘ugly’, ‘old’, ‘new’, ‘strong’, ‘weak’, ‘light blue’ or ‘dark red’ may mean one thing to one of the participants in a conversation and something completely different to the other but they are, at least, capable, to some degree, of engendering in the mind of the second protagonist a vague image of that which has been perceived

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by the first. No such transference, however, is possible when one is dealing with questions of human emotion or memory. In this domain one is not working in the realms of knowledge, incomplete though that knowledge might be. One is engaged in opinion and to an extent guesswork. Each of us knows exactly how we feel when we love, hate, fear or become nostalgic but we have no idea how anyone else does. Certainly we can recognise the outward symptoms of the different states. We can attribute sorrow to tears, nervousness to trembling and thus deduce that the other is feeling as we would in a particular circumstance but this is not something which we can know and since we cannot know it, we cannot accurately describe it. More than this, indeed, experience tells us that we are incapable of portraying our own emotions to others beyond the bounds of that which the vocabulary of the physical world allows. People speak of the ‘numbness‘ and ‘hollowness’ associated with grief, of the ‘emptiness‘ of loneliness, of the ‘lightheadedness‘ of elation, of being ‘gutted‘ by disappointment, hackneyed and clichéd forms which tell us little or nothing of the essence of the disruption that the individual is encountering. A comprehensive, even satisfactory terminology of the human heart does not exist because it cannot exist. The experiential sameness that such an index would require simply isn't there. Both the physical and metaphysical implications of these truths are enormous. If we live in a world which we cannot fully describe then we can never entirely understand it. If we live in communities with which we cannot adequately interface then human endeavour can never achieve that state of perfection for which it longs and strives. It is the imprecision of our communication which eventually undoes our best laid plans and causes all of our systems, political, social, economic and technological to struggle. Everything works but just about. Society functions on the basis of a fraud, a fraud which the clichéd nature of our language does much to perpetuate, that we are all ultimately the same because we all say the same things. Unable to express our essential selves and unable to completely comprehend those who surround us, we live in a state of constant and chronic self-delusion where we convince ourselves that we actually know what is going on. We classify those we encounter into groups. We

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break people down into types. We categorise our associations with others. We identify and judge on the basis of information that we do not and cannot have. We create internal mythologies of life, scenarios of how the world is and of how the world should be and thus drown out those inarticulate voices in our heads which continuously tell us that despite all evidence to the contrary, we are utterly alone in the cosmos. The disconnection between meaning and language is, of course, a universal one. Joyce, however, understood that the gulf between the two was significantly wider and more obvious in a Colonial context, particularly in the Irish Colonial context. For the Irish ‘fullstopper’ or ‘semiColonial’ thinks and speaks in and out of a language which both is and is not his own. In other words though he may have been reared in the English language, a language which in that sense, at least, is his mother tongue, he very probably still has a conception of it being an external rather than an internal lexicon, a code to which he owes no particular loyalty. He therefore feels quite free to break its conventions when it suits him to and to fall back upon more ancient and native structures and constructions when the strictures of the alien format stand in the way of more natural expression. He does this in the full knowledge of the fact that his countrymen and women will almost certainly understand him since they too are, probably, au fait with those overlapping layers of syntax and significance which form the fundamental essence of Hiberno-English. If in the company of those whom he regards as being strangers, however, he may well behave differently. He may adopt a more general, less ‘national’ mode of speech. The level and degree of the idiosyncrasy of his language is therefore linked directly to the capacity of his listeners to comprehend him. This is something which concerns Joyce not a wit in ‘Finnegans Wake'. He has transcended the Colonial relationship to such a degree that he is no longer beholding to anyone. He is answerable to no-one, not even his readership. He will say what he wants to say, speak as he wants to speak. If we can understand him, that is well and good. If we cannot, that is our problem. Like Art O Laoghaire7 before him he has decided to 7

Art Ó Laoghaire - The subject of the late eighteenth century poem ‘Caoineadh Airt uí Laoghaire' or in English ‘The Lament of Art O'Leary’. In this work Art's wife Eibhlín Dhubh ní Chonnaill mourns the death of her husband at the hands of the High-Sheriff of Cork, Abraham Morris, on

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be free and to accept the consequences of that freedom. In ‘Finnegans Wake’ James Joyce walks straight out of his Compton. A paradox therefore exists. Living language is, at one, the lock which imprisons us in our own heads and the key that can liberate us from ourselves. What, however, is its fundamental and essential nature. In my opinion, it is that, ultimately, of a metal spring. If it is left un-stretched for any length of time it will become brittle and fragile. If it is drawn too far, it loses its capacity to function as a thing in itself. The accepted grammar and syntax of any tongue is, in fact, the product of an unrecognised, unspoken negotiation between the future and the past, between forms which modernity thrusts upon it and linguistic conventions that simply cannot be given away. It can neither be just a petrified code of rules nor indeed a sequence of random borrowings. In ‘Finnegans Wake’, however, Joyce has no interest whatsoever in advancing the cause of English per se. There is no doubt but that he wishes to make the coil shudder and resound but as an act of national even Nationalist originality, the originality of which all Colonials are robbed but at the same time he systematically draws the wire out to breaking point so that it becomes inert and useless in the hands of its makers. ‘Finnegans Wake’ is an act of cultural resistance, an act of war as Jacques Derrida put it, James Joyce's most powerful assertion of his Irishness, a chaotic declaration of his own eloquent Authenticity. Now, of course, the question of Irish cultural Authenticity is a difficult knot to untie due to the multiplicity of different twisted and spliced strands of identity which form it. Yeats maintained that unless we recognised its complexity that we ran the risk of viewing every new development which emerged as being in some way inherently un-Irish, as novelty unworthy of support or respect. Joyce understood that we needed to define ourselves in terms wider than those simply of that which we are not, and to again exhibit those features which would mark us out as a distinct nation rather than merely a collection of islanders. The optimistic tenor of his entire canon envisages a situation where we are tethered to that which May the fourth 1773 but also describes how Art, a former hussar in the Hungarian cavalry, provoked and antagonised the imperial elite in Ireland by wearing the uniform and bearing the arms of the military force to which he had once belonged. It was Art's refusal to live as a perpetual victim and his open defiance of the Penal Laws which, ultimately, brought about his downfall.

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we might yet become rather than to that which we have ceased to be. The central theme of ‘Finnegans Wake’ clearly is, as the author succinctly puts it on page 160, that ‘Mr. Finn can become Mr. Finnagain‘, that Fionn can rise from the dead and be changed for the good by the experience, an Ireland, re-imagined, respoken, rewritten into life, essentially the same but fundamentally different, an entity made more coherent by its struggle to exist. ‘Finnegans Wake’ can only be understood in terms of that struggle. Through it Joyce strikes a blow for that which was and that which, in a different form, can be again but one must not fall into the trap of viewing the contents of the work in the same terms, of seeing the torn and twisted words of the text as so many wounded soldiers strewn across a battlefield of the great war between the said and the meant. This would be to attribute an ugliness to the work which is completely absent. The ‘Wake’ is beautiful. Its elements resonate with love rather than hatred. Rather than the cries of conflict its lines are more reminiscent of expressions one would associate with some impossible, youthful romance where every sentence is loaded down with meaning, where every statement is replayed and re-examined so that the full measure of devotion can be weighed or imagined. ‘She loves me, she loves me not‘, ‘sweet nothings’ or more to the point ‘sweet everythings’. The ‘Wake’ is a dance, a dance between the writer and the written. The steps are both followed and abandoned, decorum both maintained and left to one side. The words are spun and turned, led, followed and thrown, the floor cleared by the energy and exuberance of the movement, too dangerous to watch, too dangerous to ignore the literary world stands aghast not knowing what will happen next but yet fascinated since it is in that very not knowing that all true romance lies, that spirit of endless possibility which skips across the syllables and over the broken footlights of fate. Joyce, however, is not only dancing with the words, he is also waltzing with the reader or more to the point, communing with him. He speaks in tongues, codes of multiple meaning, levels which slip and slide over one another and slider away to the darkest corners of the mind. Only he understands everything. Only he can. For in the context of the work Joyce is God, the creator, the allknowing, the metaphysical consciousness in whose dreams all the action is

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forged. In his mansion there are many rooms, one prepared for each of us, the elements of the text which our abilities and experience will allow us to immediately recognise and comprehend but total comprehension is not possible, that is beyond our poor powers. The ‘Wake’ is, in essence, a dramatisation of mankind's fall from grace, of our descent into the great babbling silence. We cannot say what we mean and therefore we cannot mean what we say. We hear everything but understand nothing or at least nothing of what truly matters. Everything always therefore seems incomplete. We strive to deal with the imperfections of the physical world while struggling to believe in the perfection of a metaphysical one. Haunted by the ridiculousness of our own efforts and the idea that the narratives of our lives make no sense, we retreat into those stories which do, into the Symbolism and simplicity of reconstructed memory, gossip and legend. We fall back upon the products of language, the very thing that has betrayed us, the very thing that has isolated us, the very thing that has made us blind, deaf and mute, for we all know, as Joyce implies in all of his works, that speech is, in the final analysis, all that we have to hold on to, that it defines us as sentient, thinking beings, as communities of the many and of the one, that it has given us the gist of ourselves, that it has imperfectly described us into an imperfect existence, for it pre-dates us. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was made flesh. The inability to articulate is, of course, and as I have already said, a universal human constant. All societies, all communities come, therefore, to rely upon the mythic as an instrument both of definition and navigation, as a way of negotiating the world and understanding their place in it. In most cases, however, there is no sense of loss, no conception of the situation ever having been any different, no obvious or historical fall. In Ireland, however, the concept of the ‘céim síos’, the downward step, the humiliation, dominates our understanding of ourselves. As Joyce restates constantly in the ‘Wake’ a thousand years of Germanic assault, Vikings, Normans and Saxons reduced the land which had for four hundred years been the shining beacon of Intellectualism in Europe, to an illiterate, poverty-stricken shadow of its former self. A people no longer living life but dying it. A nation prepared to obliterate itself culturally and linguistically

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in its desperate determination to survive. Cast out of Eden we became that ‘fine gan spake’ to which the title of the book at least partially refers, a nation without a national language, a contradiction in terms, the very epitome of Colonial Provincialism. It was not, ultimately, the grand designs of the imperial elite but rather the trivial choices and decisions of everyday life that had transformed us into a subject nation. In essence we had sold out the national self by betraying the personal one. We had informed on ourselves. Joyce, therefore, in the ‘Wake’ must follow the same path, must come to an understanding of the mind of Ireland by examining the mind of the individual Irishman and the mind he chooses to explore, needless to say, is his own. For one must never forget that there is a certain Jungian quality to the ‘Wake’ by which the primary personalities of the piece function as Archetypes, different and conflicting versions of the author himself. This is a fact that Joyce makes no attempt to hide. ‘Shem the Penman’ or ‘James the Penman’ is one of the central personalities of the ‘Wake’, an alter ego to the equally important Shaun, a character obviously modelled on Joyce's own father John. On page 168, following a passage in which a multitude of different Archetypes flow in and out of each other, Joyce declares in Latin ‘Semus Sumus’, for

‘we are James’. In the sections that immediately follow this

statement, so as to ensure that the readership fully understands that the author is speaking primarily of himself, these lines are to be found, ‘He even ran away with hunself and became a farsoonerite, saying he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland's split little pea‘. In the same foliation he again engages in that self criticism which is one of the predominant features of the work, when he says and making use of the Cant lexicon of the traveling people as he so often does, ‘Shem was a sham and a low sham‘, but to his mind he is not the only sham. ‘Shamrógshire8‘, the Irish Free State, run by 'rógs' or rogues and bought, as he says on line 264.22 for, ‘a price partitional of twenty six and six‘, 8

Shamróg – a shamrock in Irish.

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is also a fraud. The human cost of the Civil War, ‘sould for a four of hundreds‘, as he mentions on line 264.20, has divested it of all idealism and romance. He refers to de Valera as ‘Divil era‘ on line 473.08, however, he appears to be employing the word ‘divil’ or ‘devil’ here as it is commonly used in Ireland, as a term almost of endearment but certainly of sympathy, as in such phrases as ‘the poor divil’. There is little or no hostility to Éamon de Valera to be found in the ‘Wake’, if anything the opposite is true, a fact to which the following fragments from lines 473.21 and 046.23, respectively, attest. ‘Hold to! Now! Win out, ye divil ye’, and, ‘Lift it, Hosty, lift it ye devil ye! up with the rann, the rhyming rann’. The second of these formulations is particularly interesting. Its concluding sections certainly echo the words of the ‘wren’ or ‘rann’ song, once widely sung in Ireland as part of an ancient, though Christianised ceremony on Saint Stephen's day. It also seems to reference, in the second last fragment, however, a declaration of support for the Irish Republican Army, a ‘slogan’ which became part of the vocalised landscape of the War of Independence. The penultimate element is then reinforced by the final one, by the feature ‘the rhyming rann‘. At this point ‘rann‘ is no longer functioning as a noun but is now being employed as a verb. Someone has run away. Someone whose designation rhymes with the last three words, ‘the rhyming rann‘, ‘the Black and Tan’. Michael Collins also appears, on occasion, in the ‘Wake’. Joyce, however, exhibits a certain ambivalence towards him. On page 131, for example, he describes his death in the following way, ‘His Tiara of scones was held unfillable till one Liam Fail felled him in Westmunster‘, This particular sentence is top heavy with secondary meaning. Up until the Middle Ages, Scone was both the inauguration site and residence of the kings of Scotland. The ‘Lia Fáil’, or stone of destiny, used in the crowning of Scottish monarchs, was kept there, while Ireland's equivalent was held at Tara. It was the presence of these features which ultimately invested both sites with that mystical

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authority upon which their political power was based. So dominant did both become that the very Kingdom of Scotland became known as ‘Righe Sgoinde’ or the Kingdom of Scone while in Old Irish manuscripts the Kingdom of Ireland was often referred to as the Kingdom of Tara. In this line Joyce bundles together these facts with the element ‘Tiara of scones‘. The inauguration stone of the Scots, was transferred to Westminster Abbey following the loss of Scottish independence and has been used as part of the British coronation ceremony ever since. The mention of ‘Westmunster‘ is therefore not only an allusion to the scene of Michael Collins' death at ‘Béal na mBláth’ but also to both the abbey and palace of Westminster. The name ‘Liam Fail‘ incorporates three separate images, Liam Lynch, the Commander in Chief of the Republican forces during the Irish Civil War, Fianna Fáil the political party that Republicans would later found and, of course, the ‘Lianna Fáil’ of the two Gaelic Celtic countries. The entire section, however, pivots on the word ‘unfillable‘. This element contains within it the Irish verbal form ‘fill’ meaning to return. The sense or import of the line can, in fact, be read in two ways. The ‘Tiara of scones’ seemed ‘unreturnable’, according to the author, until after the death of Collins but it is not clear as to where exactly it might then have been returned, does he mean to Ireland or does he mean back to Westminster? Did the tragedy of Collins' loss make the achievement of Irish self government more or less conceivable? Joyce is deliberately ambiguous about this, an ambiguity which reflects the confusion which beset the country following the killing, though his characterisation of the leader as the ‘faulterer‘, at a later point on the same page seems, at best, to indicate a certain lack of confidence in his steadfastness. History was becoming mythologised and the great central themes of all mythology were bringing themselves to bear on historical fact. All disagreement was becoming Betrayal as the manner in which the goal might be achieved rather than the worthiness of the goal itself became the true bone of contention. A political battle of wills was being transformed into a struggle for style. Joyce once said in conversation with his brother Stanislaus ‘don't talk to me about politics. I'm only interested in style‘, however, style to the author was

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not the superficial quality it is so often portrayed as being. It is a substantial thing in itself, informing as it does, how we think, how we act, how we live our lives. Betrayal to the author was the ultimate ‘fashion crime’, a crime which many felt ‘New South Ireland’ as he referred to the Irish Free State in lines 078.26-27, embodied, a crime of which a section of Irish society, also, regarded Collins as being guilty. On page 137, Joyce, continuing with the intricate process of interlacing the strands of modern Irish history with those of a mythical past, makes mention of Wynn's Hotel, the establishment in central Dublin, where the decision to found ‘Óglaigh na hÉireann’ or the ‘Irish Volunteers’ was taken on November the 11th 1913, a decision which appears to have been for the writer, one of those moments in time when the lines between the literal and the legendary lose all true definition. It may be no coincidence, in fact, that the collection of ten episodes which he completed in 1923 and which, at the very least, laid the groundwork for ‘Finnegans Wake’ appears to have been entitled ‘Finns Hotel’ thus linking, as he was to do so often in the later work, the past and the present through sound alone. In this segment he says, ‘Made up to Miss MacCormack ni Lacarthy who made off with Darly Dermod, swank and swarthy; once diamond cut garnet now dammat cuts groany; you might find him at the Florence but watch our for him in Wynn's Hotel‘. This passage, on one level, of course, clearly references ‘Toraíocht Dhiarmada agus Gráinne’, the most famous and in many ways the most significant of the stories of the ancient Fiannaíocht mythic cycle. In it Gràinne, daughter of the high king Cormac mac Airt places the young Fianna officer Diarmuid Ó Duibhne under a ‘geis’, a bond of chivalric obligation, to take her away from Tara and her wedding where she is to marry the much older Fionn Mac Chumhaill. This he does, eventually falling in love with the somewhat petulant princess. Fionn is incensed, behaves badly and ultimately manufactures the circumstances in which Ó Duibhne is slain by the supernatural wild boar of Ben Bulben. On a second level, however, Joyce is directly linking both the character and legend of Diarmuid Ó Duibhne with the establishment of that organisation

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which was to play the leading part in the Easter Rising. It should be noted that the ‘swank and swarthy‘ Seán mac Diarmada, a later signatory of the Proclamation of the Republic in 1916, attended the meeting in Wynn's Hotel which brought the 'Volunteers’ into being and was one of the prime movers behind its formation. In this segment from the ‘Wake’, ‘Miss Maccormack ni Lacarthy‘ in other words ‘Gráinne’ has ‘made off’ with ‘Diarmuid na mban9 ‘, ‘Diarmuid of the women’, thus choosing the romance of the younger man over the honours, titles and achievements of his tired and aged commander. She has taken Ó Duibhne's hot and passionate blood over the cold hand of an old hero, attracted, as females tend to be, to the possibilities of the future rather than to those glories of the past to which men are so often drawn. Joyce, here, is representing the great change which occurred in Irish Nationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century in mythic terms, terms which can more accurately convey, both the emotion and monumental nature of the transformation than a simple restatement of historical details ever could. In the aftermath of the Insurrection the Irish people abandoned the Parliamentary Party and placed its faith in ‘physical force Republicanism’ or as the author, in this image, would have it, Ireland had fallen for the fiery youth of the new Fenians and left the Constitutionalists to their pipes, slippers, bittersweet memories and painfully good sense. She had picked actions over words, promise over politics. It might end badly but then everything always does. She would prefer to take her chances with dangerous Ó Duibhne rather than die of boredom with a Fionn who was, by then, far from being ‘Cool’. Yet above all other characters and personages it is Fionn mac Chumhaill who causes the pulse of the ' Wake ' to quicken and its heart to skip a beat. The work is replete with references to him, so many, indeed, that Joyce seems, at times, to struggle to come up with new titles for the commander of the Fianna. ‘Macool’, ‘Mister Finn’, ‘Mister Funn’, ‘Finn Couholson’, ‘Captain Finsen’, ’Fjorgn Camhelson’, ‘Bygmester Finnegan of the Stuttering Hand’ are just a few of the literally hundreds of versions of his name that appear. At times he is heroic

9

Diarmuid na mban - Diarmuid of the women, a term of endearment often used of Diarmuid Ó Duibhne in the Fiannaíocht.

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and inspirational. At times he is portrayed as being jealous and ridiculous. At times he is painted as a dark and dangerous figure. At times we pity him. At times we are infuriated by him. In exactly the same way as we are by the Fionn of the Toraíocht. In exactly the same way as we are by our homeland, by that Ireland which he represents. At one point in ‘Ulysses’ Stephen Daedalus angrily cuts Leopold Bloom off in mid sentence saying, ‘We can't change the country so let's change the subject’, but this is advice that Joyce does not, himself, take to heart in ‘Finnegans Wake’. The entire work, though filtered through the author's dreaming mind, is about the country, about the Irish, about who we are and who we were but more importantly about whom we imagine ourselves to be. What we think we remember. All history is fiction and James Joyce knows it. All memory is fusion, a fusion of the real and the unreal. In the ‘Wake’ fact and fantasy are married together, joined at the hip, locked in an embrace which both encloses and excludes the truth. Ireland is a metaphysical entity, both here and not here at the same time, flickering in and out of existence. A potent and powerful image. An ever-changing dream that we dream of ourselves. And nowhere in the Joycean canon is the fluid nature of that dream more obvious than in its representation of Ireland as a feminine force. Traditionally Ireland is a woman. Clíodhna, Fódhla, Banba even Éire, the poetic titles of the island, were all, according to our mythic cycles, names borne originally by Fir Bolga or Milesian princesses. In the ‘Aisling’, possibly the most influential Irish literary form of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, the country is always portrayed as a ‘spéirbhean10’, ‘a woman of the sky’, a graceful and beautiful creature for whom men were prepared to struggle and die. In these poems Ireland is under attack. She is in mortal danger but there is always hope, always a chance that she might yet be saved. By the nineteenth century, however, all hope is gone. The country is defeated and prone and in the despair of the time, the youthful,

10

Spéirbhean – a woman of the sky in the Irish language, a beautiful woman, a term often used to represent Ireland in the Aisling tradition.

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regal girl that was, is transformed into the broken and impoverished poor old woman, ‘An Seanbhean Bhocht’. Joyce refers to ‘An Seanbhean Bhocht’' in both ‘Dubliners’ and ‘The Portrait’. In ‘Ulysses’ she appears under a number guises. She is the old hag that Leopold Bloom catches sight of on different occasions as he wanders the streets of Dublin. She is the serving woman who attends Mulligan, Haines and Stephen Daedalus at the start of the novel, an old Irishwoman who cannot recognise the Irish language, who clearly has never heard the tongue spoken in her life. She is the very definition of total and utter subjugation, a stagnate subjugation which appalled the author, a subjugation that seemed irreversible until the advent of the Easter Rising. ‘Dubliners’, ‘The Portrait’ and ‘Ulysses’ were all either written or situated in the years prior to the Insurrection. ‘Finnegans Wake’ was constructed in its aftermath and therefore reflects the change that has occurred in the poetic incarnation of Ireland. For some decades the Irish Literary Revival, through journals such as ‘Dana’ and ‘Bealtaine’, the ‘Gaelic League’ and the IRB had done much to make the Ireland of art and poetry, young and beautiful once more. Many men and indeed women had again found themselves lost in the dark eyes of Rosaleen11. ‘Róisín Dubh’, the ‘Little Black Rose’, was again the ‘other woman’ with whom so many were prepared to run away, for whom so many were prepared to lose everything. The Anti-Libidinalism of the past, the orientation towards death was gradually replaced by a new surge of vigorous libidinal energy, of pure revolutionary desire. The desire to live. The desire to be. The desire to rise again. The need to love the Ireland we hate rather than hate the Ireland we love. One can even see the transformation taking place in the lyrics of political songs of the era. In some, the old woman, almost in real time, is actually in the process of being replaced by her younger, more handsome counterpart. For example, ‘It was down by the glen-side I met an old woman, 11

Rosaleen – an anglicised form of the Irish ‘Róisín Dubh’, a feminine incarnation of Ireland.

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plucking young nettles she ne'er saw me coming, I listened a while to the song she was humming glory o, glory o, to the bold fenian men. It's nearly ten years since I saw the moon beaming on Molly Bán's eyes again with hope gleaming. I see them again through all my daydreaming. glory o , glory o to the bold fenian men‘ In ' Finnegans Wake the ‘Seanbhean Bhocht’ does appear but only as a relic of a time better forgotten. Róisín, however, is everywhere. Her name falls like rain upon the text, ‘the duskrose‘ on line 015.01, ‘the rose of the winds‘ on line 0431.27, ‘a young rose‘ on line 130.30, ‘wildrose‘ on line 210.10, ‘jettyblack rosebuds‘ on line 583.22, ‘durck Rosohun‘ on line 351.09, ‘Rosa Lane a sigh and a weep‘ on line 093.27, ‘tenderosed‘ on line 336.27, ‘a roselixion‘ or a resurrection on line 346.13, ‘generose ‘ as in generous on line 362.16, ‘piked forth desert roses‘ as in the Wexford pikemen of 1798 on line 321.32, ‘arise mother's roses‘ of line 463.09, ‘phaynix rose a sun‘ of line 473.16, ‘acity arose‘ of line 094.18, ‘Rose Easter‘ as in the Easter Rising on line 236.08, the ‘Aisling vision more gorgeous‘ of line 179.31 is back in town, her lipstick on and dressed to kill. Joyce speaks as a man in love, overwhelmed by the promise of what might be. Everything is changed, changed utterly and maybe more so for him than even for Yeats a terrible but glorious beauty has been reborn. Yet for the author the resurrection remains incomplete. The beautiful girl may, again, walk amongst us but, beneath that facade of confidence, she remains existentially oppressed, uncertain of herself. The horror of her past has made her awkward in the company of strangers. She may have returned to the greater international community but she is not really of it. She has not, in truth, as Robert Emmet put it, taken her place amongst the nations of the earth. Joyce dramatises this view of post-Colonial Ireland with the line,

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I know that I have broken every heart ‘A little black rose a truant in a thorntree‘. Róisín Dubh may be blooming again but she differs from all other

flowers. She remains an outsider, hiding in the rosebush, hiding in plain sight, hiding ultimately from herself. A reconciliation between the past and present will be necessary, a reconciliation between what was and what is. If the revolution is to attain any serious level of Authenticity then it must be consummated, a consummation that can only be achieved through linguistic and cultural renewal and in the very structure of this sentence Joyce is telling us how such a transformation might be brought to pass. For this feature is one of the many thousands in ‘Finnegans Wake’ which functions on both an Irish and English language level. In Irish if one is truant from school one is said to be ‘fén tor’, beneath the bush or in the thorn-tree. Joyce by merging the two lexicons, the two conceptions of the world into one poetic statement, is sewing together the Gaelic and the Anglophonic, the two sundered halves of the Irish psyche and is, by so doing, ending the Irish civil war of the soul. ‘Finnegans Wake’ is a work of sixty four languages and in the book James Joyce dances and flirts with them all but there is only one of the number with whom he meets in secret, only one to whom he reveals his sorrows and in so doing demolishes the myth of himself that he has constructed for himself. The Irish language is James Joyce's metaphysical, feminine presence, his own dark rose, his co-conspirator in a covert war against both personal and national emotional fraudulence. In the ‘Wake’ he makes use of the Irish language to encode an array of messages, messages for his own people, messages which give us a new and deeper understanding of who the writer actually is, what he actually stands for. The Irish element of the book, in essence, constitutes a portrait of the artist as a middle aged man, an individual beset by self doubt, heartbroken by the illness of his daughter, haunted by poignant memories of family and country, a family and country which he felt that he had in some way betrayed. The longer and more substantial Irish language features of the work frequently again incorporate the mythic traditions of Ireland, particularly drawing from the ‘Toraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne’ saga, a story whose coupled themes of the failures of fatherhood

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and the vicissitudes of romantic love utterly dominate the ‘Wake’ both structurally and spiritually from beginning to end. Equally and somewhat strangely they also often appear to de- and reconstruct the poetry of William Butler Yeats, ‘Ná téir a leana‘, ‘do not go o child’, being, not only, a prime example of this particular phenomenon but also of a process in the book by which the image of the particular ' child ' to which Joyce is, obviously, in this foliation, referring, namely his daughter Lucia, is merged with that of the ‘Róisín Dubh’ figure so as to create a vibrant mother/offspring, English/Irish archetype, over whom the author can watch and worry and attempt to make up for the abandonments of the past. One cannot but be moved by the sincerity of the affection which the writer displays towards this feminine form through large swaths of the masterpiece. On page 395, for example, the author speaks of the, ‘queeleetlecree of joysis crisis‘. This feature when read in English, clearly couples the elements, ‘queen’ and ‘little’ with a play on Lucia's name, a device which incorporates the ‘ríoghan beag’ or ‘little queen’ of the ‘Aisling’ tradition. If the construction is read, however, as if it were written in Irish then the somewhat fatherly and significantly more emotionally potent phrase ‘cloígh le do chroí’ or ‘go and follow your heart’ comes to the fore. The ‘hopeygoalucrey’ anagram of page 158 which deconstructs in Irish as ‘stop ag gol Lucy a chroí’, meaning in English ‘stop crying Lucy my love’ also includes an echo of the same poetic tradition where the ‘spéirbhean’, who is Ireland, weeps bitterly, both for the suffering of her children and the manner in which those charged with her protection have deserted her. She longs for the arrival of a saviour, a true husband, normally in these works the King of Spain, who will drive away the demons which assail her, dry her eyes and make her whole again. Maternal and romantic feelings are fused together in an emotional environment which vibrates with a strangely hopeful resignation. It is no coincidence therefore that in this instance in the ‘Wake’ Joyce places the element ‘hope’ at the beginning of the formulation and concludes it with the Spanish word ‘rey’ meaning King. The father of a crying girl, the son of a weeping country, it is little wonder, indeed, that the author's dreaming mind would forge and fuse these two

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dominant feminine forms into one, a force into which both the native and alien waters of his nature and talent could flow, a mythical creature whom he could embrace in that mystical and mysterious space which exists between men and women, women and men, between the porous borders of meaning which delineate those inadequate designations of lovers and friends. Now one must not make the mistake of thinking that such virtuosity in Irish as this, is only to be found in Joyce's final great masterpiece. This process had begun far, far earlier. In ‘Dubliners’, in the story ‘Eveline’ a dying mother utters the mysterious phrase ‘Derevaun Sheraun’ to her daughter. This young woman, from whose perspective the entire tale is told, has no Irish and therefore hears what is, in fact, a version of the 1798 war cry, ‘d' Éirinn bhán is arán’, ‘for holy Ireland and bread’, as two nonsensical and meaningless words. The ancient slogan is here, however, back to front, ‘for bread and holy Ireland’ was what was actually said by the followers of Tone and later Emmet. Joyce does not make mistakes, at least not in matters such as this. This inversion, therefore, must be deliberate, as many such inversions also are in his later work. In the ‘Wake’ when such happens Joyce is telling us to invert the two first letters so as to find a deeper meaning in the element and when one applies that convention to this particular phrase, the form ‘Serevaun Deraun’ is produced. In purely mythical terms ‘Serevaun’ is clearly a reference to the Searbhán Lochlannach of Toraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne, a one eyed giant, a Cyclops, an image of which Joyce often makes use but in common speech a ‘serevaun’ is a bitter or embittered individual, usually a woman, a ‘shrew’, a gossip. It is the second element of the construction, however, that is the more interesting for if one spells ‘deraun’ as it must be spelt in Irish and consults any of the Irish-English dictionaries which were then available to the author, one is firstly referred to ‘deorán’ and ultimately to ‘giúrann’ where one discovers that a ‘deraun’ is, in fact, a dialectical word for ‘barnacle’. ‘The little gossip Barnacle’. Joyce has encoded both Nora's surname and his greatest criticism of his later wife through language trickery in Irish, decades before ‘Finnegans Wake’ was even conceived of.

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It should also be noted that Joyce tells us on two occasions in the ‘Wake’ how this mysterious construction in ‘Dubliners’ should be decoded and read. Firstly on line 222.32 when he says, ‘Aminxt that nombre of evelings‘, meaning, amongst other things, ‘Amix that name of Eveline's’ and then again in a fragment that commences on line 285.27 with the statement, ‘For a surview over all the factionables see Iris in Evenine's World. Binomeans to be comprendered’, and which ends on page 286 with the words, ‘So, bagdad, after those initials falls and that primary taincture, as I know and you know yourself, begath’, indicating that for a ‘sure view’ of the Irish of Eveline's ‘word’ the initials must fall but that the ‘primary taincture’ or ‘taint’, this being the opening insult, is ‘by no means’ to be ‘comprendered’ or understood by ‘no means’ or ‘means No’, in other words by Nora. By linking the mythical and the mundane in camouflaged statements in Irish like these, the author is demonstrating how memory and modernity bleed in and out of each other but more than this he is prompting them to live each other to death. For Joyce knew that a nation may give away the essence of its nationality but that does not mean that it is content to be that which it has become. It aspires to be more than it is. Convinced of an individuality that it cannot manifest in the most basic and elemental of terms, it looks for other ways in which it can define itself adequately. Sectionalism, Sentimentalism and in Ireland's case Sectarianism become the order of the day. The struggle for a new and forceful Authenticity is the only antidote to the illness, the only balm that can cool the painful wound. Only truth can rescue the situation, a recognition of the fact that it is not we who are saving the Irish language. It is she that is saving us. In the dream state of ‘Finnegans Wake’ neither the Laws of Physics or nature any longer apply. Anything is possible. The only true awareness that the dreamer has, is a metaphysical one, a sense of his own existence outside the confines of a waking reality. Myth, the lies we tell ourselves of ourselves, is all

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that tethers him to the greater truth since the actual, shattered reality of the human condition is more than he can bear. The world in which we live forces us to adopt a variety of very different roles on a daily basis, roles which instrumentalise us and define us solely in terms of our general usefulness. We become living plays of many parts, balance-sheets of strengths and weaknesses, constantly transformed by the circumstances in which we find ourselves and the varying functions which we are expected to perform. This is something which we instinctively know to be true, that we have a public and private face, that we spend our lives in the continuous company of both external and internal strangers. In ‘Being and Nothingness’ Sartre holds that this shattering of the authentic self is the phenomenon which underpins much of the deep-seated loneliness and angst which afflicts the modern industrialised world but also maintains that when we don our work personas every morning, something real, something of our essential selves remains visible beneath. This is a position in the ‘Wake’ with which Joyce clearly disagrees. In an echo of the ‘Toraíocht’ where Diarmuid, Aonghus12, Muadhán13 and even Fionn are all totally separate manifestations of one entity, a central life force skips down the lines of the book and through the millennia of Irish history adopting the personalities of both mythical and historical players. Ó Duibhne becomes ‘the old kingdom of Poland’, the Magnus Ducatus Lublinesis therefore the Magnus Ducatus ‘Dublinesis’, in other words, Wellington. Wellington becomes Ruairí Ó Conchobhur14, Ó Conchobhur becomes Michael Collins, Collins becomes Saint Patrick as delineation flows into legend and chronological considerations cease to be relevant in the dream state which the author is experiencing. There are no connections between the characters nor is the process of transformation in any sense gradual or, indeed, explicable. The primary consciousness of the work survives as we all do every day. It is someone and then suddenly, it is someone else. 12

Aonghus – the Oll-Athair or in English the 'All-Father', a Godhead figure in the Fiannaíocht and foster father of Diarmuid Ó Duibhne. 13 Muadhán – a servant who comes to work for Ó Duibhne and Gráinne during the pursuit but who is, in fact, Aonghus the divine foster father of Diarmuid in disguise. 14 Ruairí Ó Conchobhur – the last High-King of Ireland, deposed by the Normans in 1169.

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The implications of ‘Finnegans Wake’ are clear. We become all of our different functions. We become personal communities of all of those roles which we are expected to perform. One but separate. Unholy trinities with promises to keep. Free only when we dream. The waking world has become a commodity. A product. A holiday from the void. There are rites of passage which must be undergone. Stages which must be suffered. Goals which must be met. The entire Western World has been colonised by manufactured ideas of what constitutes a successful life, ideas which have produced the same paralysis across the globe as Irish Coloniality once engendered in the Dublin of ‘Ulysses’ or the ‘Wake’, a paralysis which can be overcome, a Coloniality which can be broken but only if we are prepared to listen to the fundamental message of all of Joyce's work, namely that salvation is possible, that moments of personal, national and global epiphany do occur. Efficiency and effectiveness have their place but it is in our humanity that we must glory, fragile and fault-ridden though that may be. We must reject the cold, controlled Conventionality of Joyce's Gabriel Conroy who loves a wife whom he doesn't know and adopt the passion of Michael Furey who dies for a girl whom he can never have. A moment of romantic and euphoric Self-Realisation in which, as Ibsen once so dramatically put it, ‘we the dead awake‘. During the era of our much vaunted economic boom the Irish people found themselves in such a dream state. The risen nation. Anything could be done. Nothing was impossible. The rules of Economics no longer applied. The free availability of credit had liberated us. The Celtic Tiger became our new Róisín Dubh, the image by which we defined ourselves. We were tied not to the past, only the present, legends in our own lifetimes. We could be anyone we wanted to be and we wanted to be our colonisers. We wanted to be gentry. We recreated their lavish parties. We swanned around in the modern incarnations of their carriages. We retraced their grand tours. We bought houses so as to become landlords. Then when we awoke, when the harsh truth of the situation began to dawn on us, that there were no fairytale endings, that the piper had to be paid, we were crushed by the realisation, humiliated before the world. Maybe they had been

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right all the time. Maybe we were incapable of managing our own affairs. Maybe there was something inherently wrong with us. We were again seized by an antilibidinal drive, a death wish, which pushed us in the direction of the last refuges of

all

Colonial

peoples,

self-loathing,

self-pity,

self-justification

and

recrimination. The era of Fianna Fáil governance became the twentieth first century equivalent of the ‘seven hundred years’, the time upon which everything could be blamed. The period which removed all responsibility from our shoulders. If Joyce were alive today what would he say. Would he say anything. I think that on the balance of the evidence, he might maintain that the current crisis gives us another opportunity to take a good, long look at ourselves, a chance to tell the truth about ourselves to ourselves and thus begin the process of reconstructing ourselves as a complete, relevant and authentic European people. The fraudulence must cease. The pretence must end. We must desist from simply playing at being a nation once again. He might also say, however, that self reproach is neither a useful nor appropriate response to the current situation, that we are still the ‘little brittle magic nation’ of which he spoke, that though prudence is a virtue it is far from being the only one and that by confronting our fragilities we could be of service to all of mankind. For the entire thrust of Joyce's argument, from the very beginning of his literary project, was that a certain universality might be achieved through the examination of Irish Coloniality. If the Irish were brought face to face with themselves and forced to recognise the inconsistencies and incongruities which prevented them from being free, that the cause of human self-realisation on both a grand and individual scale would be advanced. For we must always remember that the Irish have no monopoly on guilt, self-delusion or repression, that every human being feels himself to be enslaved by forces from which no political ideology can free him. Ageing, duty, loyalty, obedience and death constrain every living soul while the failures of language condemn us all to the tyranny of repetition and imitation. The Irish may never again out-perform their neighbours in economic terms, may never again out-strip all of Europe in their consumption, may never

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again out-build, out-spend or out-borrow the whole world but knowing the human heart and soul as only they do, is it not entirely possible that they might yet again out-live, out-love, out-laugh and out-write them all, that they might rediscover that taste for the absurd, that admiration for the exotic, that talent for originality which had once made them great. For each of us is struggling to utter more than cliché, to be more than cliché, to be more than we are allowed to be. To speak our own minds and our own hearts, to construct a grammar of absolute comprehensibility, a syntax of true fellowship, to become known to ourselves and each other and in so doing no longer be damned to live different versions of the same life, to be different versions of the same thing. Great national declarations are not enough. We must each one of us strike for our own personal independence, actualise ourselves and in so doing actualise the country. Find those things in our lives that free rather than confine us and pursue them to the end. For when all is said and done is that not the primary message of ‘Finnegans Wake’, of all Joyce and indeed of all mythic memory, that a corpse no matter how beautiful remains but a corpse, that Insurrections of the inadequate do occur, that every generation is entitled to the brief delusion that anything is possible, that we possess an inherent dignity which the knowing glances of the self-righteous cannot destroy, that Pragmatism cannot save us but that euphoric rampant Romanticism can, so that the next time that Róisín Dubh in all her promise enters the smoke filled room of our soul, that we gaze through the chattering crowds of nay sayers, catch her eye and smile and not do that which the defeated always do, look and look away again and dream no more forever.

CHAPTER FIVE THE SAYINGS OF THE WEST ‘Finnegans Wake’ and the ‘Hesperica Famina’ The Irish are a people with a taste for the exotic. Otherness captivates them. Even our earliest myths and sagas portray us as a nation aware of the greater world, dangerously interested in the cultural mores which pertain therein. Geography, to a degree, had isolated us but it was History which would change all that, which would move us centre stage, make us truly relevant, thrust upon us the responsibility of being European Civilisation’s last great hope. The late fifth century and early sixth was a time of dramatic change both in Ireland and in greater Europe. Under pressure from barbarian assault, the Roman Empire had begun to totter, then tumble and then ultimately collapse totally, leaving the Continent in the hands of illiterate tribesmen who not only had little interest in learning but seemed determined to uproot it completely and to return the world to a significantly more elemental, less sensitive state, while here in this country, these years had witnessed the arrival of Christianity and with it, the emergence of a new cultural hegemony built upon the two central pillars of Education and Faith. As Rome ebbed, Ireland flowed, as the legions retreated, Irish scholarship advanced, as the five kingdoms fell into their dark era, Ríocht Éireann or the Kingdom of Ireland entered her Golden Age, becoming a beacon of light in a night of horrors, the greatest centre of Intellectualism since the days of the Athenian sunrise. Monasteries sprang up all over the island, institutions which functioned essentially as universities, teaching Theology, the Arts, the Sciences, the Classics, marrying together both the past and the present, the religious and the secular. Scholars poured into the country from all over the Continent, while Irish monks

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established educational institutions in those very places which the foreign students had, in desperation, left. Ireland became the powerhouse of a civilised and civilising Europe, of a tradition attempting to raise itself from the dead. Not all the ‘Saints’ were scholars nor, indeed, all of the ‘Scholars’ saints but this combination of the aesthetic and the practical, of creed coupled with creativity proved to be an alchemy capable of breaking the barbarous spell, of overthrowing the tyranny of ignorance which was yet standing on the neck of all hope and human progress. The dynamism of the time was extraordinary, the excitement infectious. Enthusiasm for life, love and learning was transformed from a complex emotional state into a foundation stone upon which an ideology of liberation could be built, an ideology which held that it was impossible to hate too little or love too much, that the flames of hell were being fuelled by the burning of books and that, in the final analysis, as Jesus Christ had, reportedly, said ‘wisdom is justified of all her children ‘. As that which Charles, Emperor of the Franks called the invasion of continental Europe by Irish philosophers commenced, as wave after wave of the country's brightest and best swept like a tsunami across the known and yet unknowing world, from Iona to Kiev, from Bonn to Bobbio, as movements rose and fell, from the pure aestheticism of the early mission to the ‘flower-power‘ of the much later white-clad, tattoo-covered, long-haired adherents of ‘Céile Dé‘, Ireland threw a T-bone into the mouth of savagery and dared it to chew with its loose teeth. The Irish were out to overthrow everything, not only the thought-patterns and structures of the Gothic horror but also those of the Roman one as well. There were no sacred cows. Nothing was safe. Anything, on any level, was fair game. Conservatism was the enemy, all form was oppression. Art and beauty and truth and faith would save the world since they held that if one cannot believe into something greater than one's self, one is damned to put one's trust in something lesser. This was a war waged in the name of the Word, the Word made flesh and therefore inevitably language would have to be one of its battlegrounds. Latin

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was the language of the Faith but it was also the language of the Empire, an Empire of which Ireland had never formed a part, an Empire for which the Irish appear to have had very little sympathy. In the same way as Joyce, when writing to Harriet Weaver, had said of English, ‘I cannot write in it without being enveloped in its tradition‘. In the same way as he declared to Samuel Beckett when speaking of what he was doing to that language in ‘Finnegans Wake’, ‘I am going to hand them back their English language‘, the Irish scholars of the Golden Time, determined to be true to themselves and, in a sense, true to their modern era, decided to hand back Latin to the Latins but in a condition that most certainly would not please them, in a form that, at times, they literally could not recognise. Prior to the arrival of Christianity in Ireland, the mass of the Irish population knew little or nothing of the Latin tongue. International trade and commerce, such as it was, demanded a certain knowledge of the language but then only amongst a small minority and on a very limited basis. After the arrival of the religion, however, the Irish took to the Latinate lexicon like ducks to water. Within ten years of the end of the Patrician mission they were writing creatively and extensively in it but this was a Latin like no-one had ever seen before. In the Hollywood blockbuster ‘The Name of The Rose’ which is set in early medieval Europe, Seán Connery's character, a travelling monk, at one point bemoans the fact that the Irish are inventing a whole new type of Latin. The source is not exactly authoritative but the statement, for all that, is largely true. Hiberno-Latin was, right from its earliest beginnings, characterised by an almost total irreverence for the norms, structures and accepted vocabulary of Classical Latin. Just as one finds in ‘Finnegans Wake’ its written lines were filled with neologisms, foreignisms from Irish and Hebrew but more commonly from ancient Greek, bizarre scholarly terminology, translingual puns, portmanteau words, unusual grammatical constructions, syntactical devices which would not be out of place in modern ‘beat’ or ‘slam’ poetry and right from the start everyone was doing it and in more or less the same way. Naomh Columcille wrote like this, as did Naomh Adamnán and Columbanus. The same wordplay is

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to be found in the works of Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, an Irish scholar of the Sciences based in the holy city of Cordoba, who as early as the ninth century was speaking of a heliocentric solar system made up of ten planets and equally of those unseeable particles and units of which all matter is made. The Welsh born but Irish-educated Saint Gildas, author of ‘De Excidio Britonum’ and almost certainly of the Hisperic ‘Lorica’ wrote in this way, as did the somewhat later John Scotus Eriugena, the world renowned philosopher who once told a shocked synod in Rome that the Irish people had alway presumed that the Book of Genesis was an allegory, not to be taken literally and that the faithful in this country just didn't know what the big deal was all about. Why the Irish began to write in this particular style and continued with it for almost five centuries, has always been a cause of some controversy. German scholars such as Georg Gotz insisted that since the Irish, almost uniquely amongst the peoples of Europe at the time, spoke a language uninfluenced by Classical Latin, they had little innate understanding of the nuances of the tongue, learned the lexicon from dictionaries and glossaries and that therefore Hisperic Latin was little more than a bad habit out of which the Irish just couldn't get. This is a position which was utterly demolished in a work by Doctor Michael Herren published in 1974. In this book he makes the point that though the Irish scholars of the Golden Age were playing with rules of Latin grammar, they were not, actually, breaking them, that this was not ‘dog’ or ‘vulgar’ Latin, a decadent descendent of a pure form. If anything it was in some ways hyper-Classical, making use of the so-called ‘Golden Line’, the adjective, adjective, verb, noun, noun construction of fourth, fifth and sixth century Roman rhetorical poets such as Juvencus, Avitus, Dracontius, Ennodius or Venantus Fortunatus. Indeed, he maintained, as did H. A. Strong in his work ‘Note on the Hisperica Famina’ of 1905 that this use of the ‘Golden Line’ may well, in fact, have been a form of parody. A young, exuberant and explosive civilisation mocking the staid masters of the past. The Harley-Davisons and black leather jackets of Irish Intellectualism had come roaring into town and there was absolutely nothing that the old men could do to stop them.

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In his 1974 document Herren also implies that Gotz is exhibiting an attitude which one often encounters when dealing with works of unquestionable excellence which emerge from this country, namely that either the author is in some way un-Irish, not really one of us or secondly that he is brilliant purely by accident, that the works of Hisperic Latin are stunning not as a result of any particular artistic design or vision but simply because their creators did not know what they were doing, that they were original by default. As a repudiation of such a view, he produced a brief catalogue of Classical Latin words which are never used in ‘Hisperic’, even in religious tracts, and asks how reasonable is it to suggest that these elements are not being replaced by different formulations as a matter of conscious policy. Amongst these terms are, for example, Deus for God, Caelum for Heaven or Sky, Panis for Bread, Sanguis for Blood, Terra for Earth, Vox for Voice, Verbum for Word, Bellum for War, Aqua for Water, Corpus for Body, Liber for Book, Mortis for Death, Auxilium for Help, Dare meaning to Give, Legere meaning to Read, Animus for Mind or Soul, and when one considers the fact that ‘legere‘ is the root of the Irish word ‘Léigh‘, ‘corpus‘ the root of the Irish word ‘corp‘, ‘liber‘ the origin of our ‘leabhar‘ and ‘animus‘ the provenance of Ireland's ‘anam‘, elements which all signify the exact same concepts as their Latin ancestors did, is it not outrageous

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in the extreme to suggest that the Irish scholars used alternatives to terms such as these, which are to be found everywhere in the Christian canon, simply because they were too stupid to remember the official terms. When it comes to questions of terminology a certain difficulty also exists with the phrase ‘Hisperica Famina’ itself. The designation is itself, in fact, an example of Irish wordplay. ‘Hisperica’ is a portmanteau word which contains both the Roman name for Ireland, ‘Hibernia’ and the element ‘Hesperides’, a Greek name for legendary islands of the West, while ‘Famina’ is a pseudoarchaic form of the Latin word ‘fari’, literally, meaning to speak. Some scholars use ‘Hisperica Famina’ as an alternative title for Hiberno- or Hisperic Latin, as a name for the very language or dialect itself. Others employ it, only, when speaking of the poetic works to be found in five particular manuscripts, works, which they maintain, differ fundamentally from all other Hisperic enterprises while more again hold that the category should be broader and include poems or prose pieces which exhibit the same stylistic characteristics no matter from whence they are drawn and no matter of what they speak. This latter view seems rational but it must be admitted that there is something very unique about the texts to be found, firstly, in the so-called ‘Vatican’ manuscript, secondly in the ‘Echternach’ manuscript, thirdly in the ‘Saint Victor’ manuscript, fourthly in the ‘Cambridge University’ manuscript and finally in the ‘St Omer’ manuscript. All of these documents were, in latter centuries, rediscovered in the archives of continental institutions which had originally been Irish run or influenced. They are all transcribed copies of earlier manuscripts, the ‘Echternach’ manuscript even having been dated and emerging from the mid ninth century. The general consensus holds, however, that all are versions of pieces written, at home in Ireland, within a very narrow timeframe, 650 to 665 A. D and are the products of a ‘craze’ or a ‘fad’ that developed as this country began to make the transition from a heroic, militaristic society to a more stable and pacific one. The convention by which warriors would build a reputation for themselves by challenging more famous fighters to bouts of single combat, bouts from which only one would emerge alive, the custom upon which

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mythic tales such as the ‘Táin bó Cuailgne15’ is largely based, being gradually replaced by a situation where scholars of note would ‘call each other out‘ and engage in word contests, battles of poetry and grammar where the participant who produced the more beautiful verses and made use of the more complex Latin would be adjudged the victor. Certain lines indicate that this practice was .

particularly popular amongst the thousands of foreign students then studying in Ireland. Other lines suggest that the primary challenge was to give a poetic quality to the most mundane of subjects, the weather, the sleeping customs of sheep, the dining habits of bees, for example, ‘The precious shower of words glitters by no awkward barriers confining the diction, and husbands its strength by an exquisite labour, and by device thrilling sweet descent, of Ausonian speech, just as countless swarms of bees, in their hollow hives, sips honey streams in their homes‘, or, ‘Ah I divine it now, you are coming to your own home. You follow with your gaze the well known flocks, dressed in their holiday clothes. A vast fog makes my heart beat to its depths. I dismiss the bewildered sorrow of my soul‘, or, ‘Trina mormoreus pastricat trophea notus, (The howling wind has collected 3 triumphs) quod spumaticum rapuit tolo diluvium (Bore away the foam in a great flood)‘,

15

Táin bó Cuailgne – one of the central tales of the Ruraíocht or Red Branch mythic cycle which describes a military confrontation between the ancient kingdoms of Ulster and Connacht, a conflict in which Setanta, known as Cúchulainn, plays a pivotal part.

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‘Titaneus Olimphium inflamat arotus tabulatum, (The Star of the Titans blazes in the home of Olympus) thalascium illustrat vapore flustrum (and illuminates the calm sea vapour)‘. On occasion the poetry refers directly to the language battle itself. The ‘Faminators’, as the combatants were known, are engaged in ‘war by other means‘ and speak of the struggle in military terms, terms which not only echo the heroic tradition of Ireland but also that of Greece and also, in a very real way, the structures of Virgil's Aeneid, for example, ‘I do challenge this talented liar to a combat of words, to engage eagerly in an agility of verbs. I have contended against 3 such heroes before and slaughtered the helpless warriors. I have punished powerful peers. Brought down the strong in the fray. My enemies cruel darts did cut, but I drew my dextrous sword which sunders sacred pillars. I taken my wooden shield in hand, which encompasses me. I brandish my deadly tipped dagger of iron, and torment the wheeling archers. Hence I summon my strength to the fight, the elegance of phrase dazzles, builds nothing upon weak foundation, but checks with vigour and balance. Can you produce such skill, such honied flow of Ausonian speech‘.

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Now as I have already said, passages such as these possess a uniqueness, a particular quality that makes them quite exceptional, not only in an Irish but also in a world context. The only thing that comes near to them in intent is the ‘hip hop’ poetry produced in somewhat similar battles in cities such as Detroit and St. Louis in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. These newer works, however, possess nothing of the linguistic and metaphorical complexity of the ‘Hisperica Famina’. These modern ‘rap’ poems have far more in common with what in Old Irish is called ‘Rithlerg’, a basic form of topical rhyming verse which also emerged in the latter stages of Ireland's Golden Age but which appears to have been the forte of the unschooled and untrained rather than the educated elite. There are, however, structural associations between other ancient poems and such pieces as those just seen which would justify their inclusion in the overall category. The ‘Lorica’ and Naomh Columcille's ‘Altus Prosator’, apart from employing the same bizarre vocabulary as the works of the ‘faminators’ also exhibit some of the same oddities of construction. As Herren says of the connections between all of these writings, the element ‘ut’, for example, is constantly followed by the perfect subjunctive, even in places where, technically, the perfect subjunctive should not appear while at the same time the infinitive is used in those places where ‘ut’ and the subjunctive should always be. Equally he maintains that, in an echo of Old Irish, the preposition ‘de’ is clearly and deliberately overused. Bradshaw, speaking of these works but specifically of those to be found in the ‘Folium Luxemburgense’, refers to the fact that the same inconstancy of syllable number is to be found in the phrasing of all of the passages, as indeed, is a similar style of multi-line assonance. In some ways it is the ‘Altus Prosator’ which most clearly illustrates the revolutionary nature of this entire literary movement. Even in the first, somewhat famous, six lines of the poem Columcille's reluctance to play ball with Rome and the official Roman lexicon is clearly evident. It begins thus, ‘Altus Prosator vetustus dierum, (High Sower, ancient of days) et ingenitus, (and unbegotten)

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erat absque origine, (was without origin) primordi et crepidine, (at the beginning and foundation) est et erit, (is and will be) in saecula saeculorum infinita (ages of ages infinite)‘. The first point to be made in regard to this brief passage is that three words which appear in its lines are, strictly speaking, not Latin. ‘Crepidine‘ is a neologism but has been constructed out of a Latin root. ‘Vetustus‘ is an invented, personalised form of the adjective ‘vetus’ meaning old while ‘Prosator‘ meaning, ‘he who sows’ appears nowhere else in the Romance tradition. Not only is the author clearly avoiding the use of the word ‘Deus’ for God but equally he is referring to the Supreme Being metaphorically, an unusual thing in itself but all the more strange since the metaphor employed has both agricultural and sexual connotations. This poem, therefore, takes the concept of Godliness itself, removes it from the purely spiritual realm and links it structurally to the fundamental constants of human existence, nutrition and procreation. Such images are to be found in the Judaic tradition but were completely absent from Christian writings of the 8th century other than those associated with the Irish Church. Columcille is undermining Rome's somewhat tired interpretation of the very notion of deity and replacing it with a more earthy yet more seductive Irish one but he is not doing this through argument or discourse, he is not trying to change anybody's mind. Instead he is doing it, as Joyce was to do it much later, by changing the words. And in Book one, Chapter seven of ‘Finnegans Wake’ Joyce even changes the words of the ‘Altus Prosator’ itself. Some maintain that the author, in this particular section, provides us with nothing more than a meaningless sequence of eight untranslatable lines of Latin which is surrounded by and decorated with, elements of ‘toilet humour’. The ‘toilet humour’ is, in a sense,

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there but to describe the Latin as meaningless or untranslatable is more than a little misleading. It is subjected to the same pressures that are placed upon every other tongue in the work and it does have a Hisperic rather than the Classical flavour to it but this is not done without reason. The Latinate passage itself, certainly, does have a scatological quality to it, for example, at one point Joyce says, ‘Sub invocatione fratrorum geminorum Medardi et Godardi laete ac melliflue minxit’, or in English, ‘At the insistence of the twin brothers Medardi and Godardi happily and mellifluously he passed water’. The apparently puerile nature of this phrase and others like it, is broadly in keeping with that of other elements which appear as juvenile off-jokes, written in the margins of the passage. This balance between fragments, both within and without the text does seem to support the idea that this is all an exercise in humour. The truth of the matter, however, is that the scatological asides and those internal statements which they reflect, are an attempt to recreate the so-called ‘gluaiseanna’ or glosses of Old Irish manuscripts. During the Golden Age, in Ireland or in Irish institutions abroad when young students were transcribing or, indeed, translating Latin works, they had a tendency to write little notes in Irish on the page. Literally thousands of these ‘gluaiseanna’ still survive. They very often have a somewhat youthful, playful air about them. Sometimes they are little jokes, sometimes they are little poems or stories but more often than not, these peculiar annotations function as attempts to work out what is actually being said in the Latin. In this piece in ‘Finnegans Wake’ the student who is represented by the glosses themselves is mistranslating the original piece with some unfortunate results and is finding the entire exercise extremely funny, as any young man of his age would. This foliation is therefore far from being without a serious side, a seriousness of intent which is to be seen right from the very beginning when Joyce, on the face of it at least, seems simply to mimic the original ‘Altus Prosator‘. He opens the section with the line,

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‘Primum Opifex, Altus Prosator‘, The deployment of this element is, unquestionably, an exercise in mimicry but it is not one of mockery as is sometimes said. The alterations to the original formulation are not arbitrary nor are they made for purely poetic affect. The addition of the fragment ‘primum opifex‘ deflects the attention of the reader away from God and back in the direction of the writer, the first clause informing our understanding of the second to such an extent, that its import is entirely transformed. ‘Prosator‘ now no longer means ‘sower’ but is being used to signify ‘proser' or ‘prose-writer’, ‘oh Prime one of the Eye, oh most high Prose-writer’. Joyce, tormented for the duration of his life by painful ocular problems and his compulsion to write, is here, of course, referring to himself. This is in absolute keeping with the entire tenor of Book one, Chapter seven. This whole section deals with the character of Shem whose name, of course, is a contracted form of Séamus, the Irish for James, an individual who is, I believe, clearly an archetype of the author himself. If one reads the chapter with this idea in mind, one quickly sees that Joyce is attempting, throughout, to confront those faults of which he has been accused as a writer, that he is a composer of impenetrable works, that he is little more than a pornographer. In the lines, for example, which immediately follow the rewritten ‘Altus Prosator’ section he says, ‘The pious Eneas conformant to the fulminant firmen which enjoins on the tremylose terrian that when the call comes he shall nichthemerically from his unheavenly body a no uncertain quantity of obscene matter not protected by copyright in the United Stars of Ourania‘. This section, written clearly in the overblown style of the ‘Hisperica Famina’, is an obvious reference to the banning of ‘Ulysses’ in the United States of America and does also indicate that the author feared that the criticisms made of that work were not completely without foundation. Such self-doubt is to be seen earlier in the chapter when he declares and, again, referencing the works of Hisperic Latin,

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‘This explains the litany of septunical lettertrumpets, honorific, highpitched, erudite, neoclassical which he so loved as patricianly to manuscribe after his name. It would have diverted, if ever seen, the shuddersome spectacle of semi dement zany amid the inspissate grine of his glauens den making believe to read his usylessly, unreadable blue book of Eccles’, The ‘uselessly’ spelt ‘usylessly‘, ‘unreadable blue book of Eccles‘ is, of course, ‘Ulysses’, Leopold Bloom having resided in Eccles Street and the first edition possessing a blue and white cover for Hellenic affect. The reference to the ‘blue book‘ also echoes a political street song or rhyme of the late nineteenth century which ended with the line ‘Joe Biggar and his big blue book‘, a doggerel which glorified the obstructionist tactics employed by the Irish Parliamentary Party under Parnell in the British parliament and particularly the manner in which Parnell's lieutenant Joseph Biggar, in an attempt to disrupt the functioning of that institution, used to read from his big blue book of botany for hours and hours on end. Was ‘Ulysses’ all an exercise in obstructionism? Was it unreadable? Was it useless? Was it gratuitously obscene? These seem to be the questions which haunt the writer. The sense that his work is incomprehensible, that he is incomprehensible, that he is being misunderstood at every turn, is an ever present constant in the stories of Joyce but nowhere is it more clearly evident than in this chapter of ‘Finnegans Wake’, for it is here that he links himself directly to his countrymen

of

a

former

time,

of whom

the

accusation

of

wilful

incomprehensibility was also made but who, through sheer exuberance, blew apart the very notion that language was no more than a simple inheritance, something that one was given but could never truly own. Who realised that, though it was easier to accept the designations of others and use their words in the ways that they did, that this was a fundamentally, enslaving convenience since it removed all possibility of genuine originality and damned all literature to be little more than different versions of the same thing. At one point in the chapter Joyce bluntly states and making use, even in this, of a Hisperic noun,

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‘Let manner and matter of this, for these our sporting times be cloaked up in the language of blushful porporate that an Anglican ordinal, not reading his own rude dunsky tunga may ever behold‘. In other words he comes to the conclusion that incomprehensibility is, in fact, a function of freedom. If they cannot understand you it is because they cannot know you and they cannot know you since you are not one of them. This is essentially the reason why Joyce writes as he does in ‘Finnegans Wake’, the reason why the book is replete with Irish and Irishisms and the reason why he employs Hiberno-Latin and allusions to the ‘Hisperica Famina’ in the the way that he does throughout the novel. And let there be no doubt about it but that references to the ‘Hisperica Famina’, both in Hisperic Latin and also in translation, abound in the work, particularly in Book one. Again in Chapter seven of that section, for example, ‘plurator, hisperon, viricordo, revolted stellas, secular sinkalarum, vespertine, impenetrablum, effluvious‘, elements hacked directly from its lines, all appear. At one point the author even lists some of the themes of the ancient verses, making use of a version of a Hisperic verb in the process, ‘The wail of the wind, the fog of his mind fag, the buzz in his braintree, herdset to mumorize more than a word a week‘, James Joyce never hid the regard in which he held the Culture and the missionary zeal of the Golden Age of Irish Civilisation. In fact, while resident in Trieste he delivered an entire lecture in a local university on the question, a lecture in which he outlines and describes the contributions made by Irish scholars and saints to the rebirth of European Culture. His pride is palpable, as is

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his reluctance to brook any criticism of these men. In ‘Ireland, Land of Saints and Sages’ he, for example, says, ‘The honorary title was by no means invented yesterday nor the day before. In fact it dates back to very ancient times when the island was a true centre of Intellectualism and sanctity, that spread its Culture and stimulating energy throughout the continent’, and then again, ‘I beg you to follow me for a moment while I show you traces left behind in almost every country by the many Irish apostles. It is important to take account of facts such as these, though, nowadays, they might seem trivial to the agnostic mind, as the centuries in which they occurred and in the Middle Ages that followed, not only History itself but the various arts and sciences were all religious in character and under the tutelage of a church more than maternal. Indeed, what were pre-Renaissance Italian artists if not so many handmaidens obedient to the lord-learned commentators on holy writings, or illustrators in verse or painting of Christian fable‘. He also states, ‘There is an interval of almost eight centuries from the date of the invasion of the English to the present day. I dwelt a little on the preceding period with the purpose of enabling you to discern the roots of the Irish temperament but I do not intend to detain you with an account of the affairs of Ireland under foreign occupation. I do this mainly because Ireland ceased to be an intellectual force in Europe. The decorative arts, at which the Irish excelled were abandoned and the sacred and profane Culture fell into disuse‘. We were once a great nation and James Joyce knew it. We were once the light of the world and it wounded him that we were no longer so. There was a time when we were not the victims of history but rather its shapers, the makers of the mould. There was a time when we were the greatest intellectual force on the face of the earth and this was a time when the sacred and scientific worked hand in hand, a time when the causes of the mind and soul preceded all others, a time when we were truly ourselves, proud of what we had done, certain of what we could do. This is the Irish tradition with which Joyce wished to be associated, of

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which he felt a part. A tradition of Culture and creativity which neither the tyranny of syntax and grammar, the isolation of geography nor the vicissitudes of natural human frailty could hold back and it is this Ireland, in the words, phrases, chaos and order of ‘Finnegans Wake’ that James Joyce is calling out of the tomb, is conjuring up, is re-imagining into being. ‘Latin me that, my trinity scholard‘, said the writer at one point in the ‘Wake’ and let there be no question about it either but that the Latin language was for him, one of the great loves of his life. Indeed, in an essay which he finished on the 8th of May 1899 entitled ‘The Study of Languages’ he states the following in regard to that tongue, ‘Quotations are constantly employed, even by those who are not Latin scholars and common convenience would prompt us to study it. Then also it is the uniform language of the ritual of the church. Moreover it is for those who study it a great help intellectually, for it has some terse expressions, that are more forcible than many of our similar expressions. For instance a single Latin phrase or word is so complex in its meaning, and enters into the nature of so many words and has yet a delicate shade of its own that no single word in English will properly represent‘, and then later, ‘The language of Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Pliny and Tacitus, all of whom are great names and who have withstood dislodgement from their high seats for thousands of years‘, and then again, ‘They are moreover interesting as the writers in a vast Republic, the greatest and vastest the world had ever seen, a Republic which during five hundred years was the home of nearly all the great men of action in that time, which made its name heard from Gibraltar to Arabia and to the stranger-hating Briton, everywhere a name of power, and everywhere with conquest in its army's van‘. Joyce most certainly was infuriated by the interference of the Catholic Church in Irish political and social affairs, as a ‘dyed in the wool’ Parnellite could he, in fact, have taken any other position but this did not mean, for one

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moment, that Rome, the very idea of Rome, lost any of its significance or attraction for him. Cultural Catholicism had forged his character. In a very real sense it had made him who he was. A fact which he never denied, a fact in which, if anything he gloried. The ‘Hisperica Famina’' simultaneously was and was not an element of that Roman tradition, the tradition of which he himself, also, was and was not a part. It was, on top of this, the product of an Irish cultural inheritance to which he was hopelessly, helplessly drawn. It was, equally, in some strange way, modern even modernist in its nature. The Irish Golden age had many different phases and eras, many different cultural movements and literary revivals. Writing styles had changed over its four hundred years, attitudes and orthodoxy had risen and then fallen out of favour, philosophies had come and then gone. The literature of the saints and scholars had developed along the same lines as that of more recent times. Any impenetrability that might be associated with the ‘Hisperica Famina’ and similar related works was not, in fact, a function of their ancientness or oldness but rather of their modernity. This was the output of a Civilisation far more sophisticated than that of Joyce's time, far more sophisticated than that of our own era, far more advanced than any of us could ever hope to be. What Joyce was to do in terms of language in ‘Finnegans Wake’ had been done before and had been done by his countrymen. Not only was he aware of the fact, he was, also, clearly familiar with their texts. Did these Hesperic works spark his imagination? Did they act as the blueprints for the masterpiece that he would construct? This is impossible to say. What can be said, however, is that the ‘Hisperica Famina’ certainly formed a part of the cultural and literary background from which ‘Finnegans Wake’ was to emerge, that it was firmly embedded in the memory of that mind which was to remember it back into existence. The word ‘influence’ in English has a Latinate provenance. In its truest, most basic sense it means a ‘flowing in’. The ‘Sayings of the West’ flowed into ‘Finnegans Wake’, were, at least, one of the tributaries which fed it, which filled it to a flood, a flood which could not be confined, a flood which washed all convention away.

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I know that I have broken every heart Maybe this is the Irish way, maybe this is what we have always done.

Maybe we are destined always to be traditional only in our iconoclasm. Maybe our tradition, in the final analysis, is in fact, to blow all tradition apart.

CHAPTER SIX OUR HEARTS FLUNG OPEN WIDE James Joyce and Questions of Irish Linguistic Identity. James Joyce had a complicated relationship with his homeland. How often have all we read, how often have we all repeated this particular article of faith. It is a phrase that appears, in some form or other, in almost every treatise, every commentary written on the works or character of the author for the past seven decades and we can be virtually assured, that somewhere in the world, at this precise moment, some poor student with an essay or thesis deadline pending, is penning or typing these exact words as we speak. But what does it mean? In what sense was Joyce's relationship with this country complicated. What is the nature of the complexity? He was extremely critical of many aspects of Irish life. He found Irish hypocrisy difficult to take. He was infuriated by Irish foolishness and cowardice. Many of the island's institutions vexed him, her cultural stagnation frustrated him, her easy acceptance of pretence, poor efforts and humbug tormented him but what's so unusual about that. Is that not a condition in which many of us, often, find ourselves. We do not come from a country whose citizens believe that we occupy a mystical space at the centre of the universe or that our nation is in some way superior to the other peoples of the earth. We do not describe actions or viewpoints which we find distasteful as being ‘unIrish’ in the way that, for example, the Italians or Germans or Americans do. I have never once heard anyone of a broadly Nationalist Irish background say that we must defend and preserve our way of life. Maybe it is that we don't think that we have one or maybe we simply believe that the one that we do have, such as it is, is no great shakes. Whatever be the truth in this regard, one thing is certain, Ireland's ability to drive her children to a point of almost total and utter exasperation was not one which she reserved solely and uniquely for James Joyce alone. It is a gift which we are all given. It is as common as muck and if we accept the fact that this is so

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then are we not, at least to a degree, misrepresenting the truth of the situation by creating the impression, unwittingly or otherwise, that Joyce's attitude to his country was in some way particularly jaundiced. I think that it is important to add at this point, however, something which all Irish people know but which is often lost on outsiders. Our disappointment with how the country actually is, is largely prompted by our sense that this is not how the country should be and is counterbalanced by a strange, maybe groundless, faith in the idea that, as George Elliot put it ‘it is never too late to be that which you might have been‘. It is an oddly hopeful desperation. Equally that the criticisms which every single one of us make of the country on a daily, if not hourly basis, are not acts of disloyalty, are generally manifestations of love rather than hatred, expressions of a frustration with the rate of progress, illustrations of a genuine desire to see some form of national advancement. Now this is not to say for one moment, of course, that the sharp and demanding genius of James Joyce did not, in any way, effect his connections with and his conceptions of this island. He was the man that he was purely because of the fact that his mind worked in a different way. His experience of what it is to be human was distinctly different from that of the rest of us and therefore, to this extent, his emotional and psychological engagement with the nation into which he was born was truly unique. There is probably no other writer in all the annals of literature who believed more deeply in the precept that the artist must be an outsider and be an outsider from everything, that he must withdraw completely since it is only from a distance that truth can be seen. When Davin in the ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man‘ beseeches Stephen Daedalus to recommence his learning of Irish so that he may be ‘as one with us‘, it is this very oneness that the character rejects along with the idea that he, as an individual, bears any personal responsibility for the failings of his forefathers or has any particular historical duty to take part in any communal effort. Communality involves at least an element of representation and, as a result, a consequent renunciation of personal sovereignty, a freedom or integrity that neither Daedalus nor Joyce are prepared to relinquish even in the interests of

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friendship. Equally the author is fully aware of the fact that exclusion is an inherent function of all group dynamics. For there to be an ‘us’ then there must also be a ‘them’, a feature of human society which, as evidenced by the character of and the role played by Leopold Bloom in ‘Ulysses’, clearly fascinated the writer but one which he must, himself, step outside of. He must sit at the fulcrum rather than at either end of the seesaw to have any real chance of accurately judging the balance. He is engaged in an aestheticism of the heart and soul every bit as ferocious and unforgiving as that of the monks of old. Trieste, Paris and Zurich are his Glendalough and Clonmacnois, places in which he can come to some real understanding of the land in which was reared and achieve an honesty of both thought and purpose which will resonate on a broader and more universal level. The ‘them’ and ‘us’ inter- and co-dependency is, of course, a human rather than a purely Irish constant but nowhere are its mechanics as intricate and sophisticated as they are here. Everything in Ireland is in a strange way political, everything is tied up with concepts of identity. Our interaction with one another is dominated by our relentless attempts to assess the relative ‘soundness’ or ‘unsoundness’ of all those who surround us. Everything gives us away, the interests we have, the sports we play, the languages we speak, the music we listen to, the public figures we praise, the time of day at which we eat ‘the dinner’, if we even say ‘the dinner’, whether like poor Gabriel Conroy we holiday at home or abroad, all of these things and many, many more form the criterion by which we are assessed and evaluated by our countrymen and women, by which we are firmly deposited into one box or another, associated, in the public and maybe in our own minds, with one faction or another, competing definitions of nationality, identity and Irishness. In this country we all both take and are allocated sides. A poisonous situation which is further exacerbated by an all-pervasive sense that those whom we view as our political, cultural or indeed social opposites are out to get us. We are all waiting for the knock on the door, the tap on the shoulder, the stab in the back. A nation no longer only exemplified by friendliness and generosity but rather by the raised eyebrow, the knowing look and that overwhelming suspicion that any day now someone is going to steal our spuds.

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I know that I have broken every heart How did this all happen? When did this mutual vilification society arise?

Why did Ireland become a land of watchers, waiters, whingers, furious fraternities, suspicious sororities, whiskey-breath whispers, self-loading secrets, venom shot coffee and of names, confidences and hearts broken on gin-coated false teeth. At what point did we leave the door of the Snake-house open and allow slander to slider into every corner of the national mind. Was there, in fact, a ‘big bang’, a ‘split’ that begat all ‘splits’. During the Civil War there were those, certainly, who believed that the fuse of that particular internecine conflict had actually, been lit years earlier, at the moment of the character-assassination of Charles Stewart Parnell, that it had taken decades for a slow, simmering anger to reach the boil. It is difficult, of course, to establish causal links in such cases, to prove that one event led to all those which followed, however, it can be said that it certainly does seem as if the rot set in at that point and that it would be an extraordinary coincidence therefore if the tragic downfall of the ‘Chief’ did not play a major part in the beginning of this state of perpetual Betrayal. There were some, of course, at the time of the Parnell controversy who felt genuinely let down by the uncrowned king of Ireland while others and Joyce amongst them felt that they had been let down by Tim Healy and the Catholic Church. Later some were to feel betrayed by John Redmond, others by Pádraig Pearse. Collins was a hero to some and a traitor to others, as, indeed, were de Valera, Cosgrave and Mulcahy. In the thirties and forties de Valera was seen to have sold out the Republicans as was, in his turn, McBride and in more recent times similar but more general sentiments have been widely expressed in regard to Fianna Fáil, the Labour Party, again Catholicism, the Banks, the structures of the State, the European Union and a whole other plethora of individuals and institutions far too numerous to name. Whether the schism that occurred in regard to Parnell directly caused this strange reconfiguration of those ancient Irish tribal loyalties and animosities upon which Joyce so often commented or whether it simply reinvigorated a tendency which was already reemerging due to a wide array of disparate historical processes, is impossible to fully establish, however, there is no doubt at all but that it was a traumatic event, an event which, like any trauma, had both self-

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destructive and life-affirming effects. The past was all defeat, the present all disappointment therefore only the future could be saved. It was in the aftermath of the split that the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association came to the fore. It was in the aftermath of the split that Connolly and Larkin arose. It was in the aftermath of the split that the Irish Literary Revival truly took off and it was in this atmosphere that James Joyce began his study of the Irish language. Stanislaus Joyce in his book ‘My Brother's Keeper’ states the following, ‘my brother studied Irish for a year or two’. This was an interest which the historical evidence would seem to indicate that both brothers shared. O’Hehir tells us that James and Stanislaus would spend much of their time, during their famously long walks around the city, working out the Irish roots and etymologies of the different place names which they encountered while the returns of the 1901 census, taken while the Joyce family was resident in Clontarf, in which the two boys and they alone, are registered in the language section, as being speakers of both Irish and English, is clear proof of the divergence which exists between the narrative surrounding these events that appears in the fictional works and the actual facts of the matter. In the ‘Portrait’' Stephen abandons Gaelic League classes after only one session, there is absolutely no question of his having been a student of Irish and again to restate Stanislaus' words ‘for a year or two‘. In ‘Stephen Hero’ Daedalus is drawn to the Conradh na Gaeilge classes not, primarily, as a result of any great linguistic ambition on his part but rather out of a romantic interest which he has in one Emma Clery whereas in ‘My Brother's Keeper’ we are told that it was the influence of George Clancy, who later went on to become a teacher of Irish and who Stanislaus describes, when speaking of James, as being ‘first amongst his friends‘, that initially brought Joyce into these circles. It should also be noted, of course, that even in ‘Stephen Hero’ Daedalus is determined to learn and voices his frustration at the manner in which ‘progress was retarded by the stupidity of two of the young men’. Now much is very often made, both of the fact that Joyce was taught Irish in Newman House by Pádraig Pearse and also that the two men do not seem to have parted on the best of terms. A number of things have to be remembered about this, however. If Joyce was attending classes for a year or two then he

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would have had more than one and maybe far more than one teacher. When one examines the phonetics associated with the Irish words and phrases to be found in ‘Finnegans Wake’ for example, it is quite clear that they are largely drawn from Munster dialects not from the Connacht Irish of Pearse. Joyce, plainly, learned most if not all of his Irish from somebody else. Therefore his annoyance with Pearse cannot rationally be seen as a rejection of the Irish language nor, indeed, can it even logically be regarded as a renunciation of Irish Republicanism since Pádraig Pearse, at the time that Joyce encountered him, was still an enthusiastic supporter of Home Rule rather than independence and Constitutionalism rather than physical force Separatism. He was, in essence, at this point, a Redmondite, with absolutely no connection with Irish Republicanism at all. It was Pearse's teaching style, a style that was later to change dramatically, not his aims or intentions to which Joyce objected. In ‘Further Recollections of James Joyce’, Frank Budgen recalls the author telling him that he had stopped attending Pádraig Pearse's classes because Pearse insisted on advancing the cause of the Irish language by denigrating the English one, something which would, of course, have annoyed anyone with more than a passing interest in English literature. It was not, therefore, their respective attitudes to the Irish language which divided the two men but rather their views on the English tongue which brought about their own little ‘split’. As I have, earlier, indicated, questions of identity are far more fraught than they are often believed to be. This is true of national, local or cultural identity but it is also true of the identity of characters in James Joyce's fictional works. Many of the personages who people the pages of the ‘Portrait’ or ‘Ulysses’ or the ‘Wake’ are, of course, based upon actual individuals with whom the writer was acquainted but there are no absolutes. Davin is not George Clancy, at least not absolutely, nor, indeed, is Emma Clery, who functions as yet another of the many Róisín Dubh figures and Archetypes which appear in the canon, nor is Daedalus entirely Joyce. Mr. Hughes may be modelled on Pádraig Pearse but then Pearse isn't the Irish language, subtleties not accidental but born both of the author's own understanding of the nature of identity and of his own personal experience of the phenomenon.

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Joyce was his own man in as far as he could be but such personal sovereignty did not involve for him the total abandonment of national sensibility or familial connection. His father had been a supporter of Parnell and the ‘New Departure’, a strongly Nationalist political position which his son shared from his earliest youth to his dying day, a political tradition which made him dismissive of Unionism and sympathetic to those Nationalist movements, both political and cultural, which arose in Ireland in the early decades of the twentieth century, opinions which he clearly and openly espoused in his Journalism, views which, probably, sowed the seed of his growing and gradually blossoming relationship with the Irish language. All of the fictional works contain elements of Irish and deal, on some level, with questions of linguistic rejuvenation but it is in ‘Finnegans Wake’, Joyce's last word on the world that this life-long process reaches its glorious zenith, for as Kenneth Neilson observes ‘it might seem reasonable to assume that Joyce's knowledge of Irish was at its high point in the early years of the century but a look at the writings seems to indicate the exact opposite‘. This is a position which Maria Tymoczko in her 1994 work ‘The Irish Ulysses’ supports when she also says that all the indications are that Joyce's grasp of Irish strengthened rather than weakened during his time on the Continent and that he, clearly, had access from some quarter, to newly published Irish language books and articles. Doctor Kelleher in his work ‘Irish History and Mythology in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ maintains that all evidence would suggest that the author was studying scholarly editions of Old and Middle Irish tracts during his time abroad since the interpretations of ancient Irish myths and sagas which one finds in the ‘Wake’ seem, both linguistically and in terms of content, to be drawn directly from these sources rather than from Modern Irish or indeed English language versions of the works while Connolly and Tymoczko both comment on the fact that amongst his possessions in 1939 were two dictionaries of Irish, one of which included an abridged version of a standard text by an t-Athair Dineen which was specifically designed for and normally used by language learners. O'Hehir also makes mention of the fact that in Joyce's ‘Scribbledehobble’ notebook, the author lists Irish as second amongst the languages which will make

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a contribution to the ‘Wake’, with the Berkeley scholar also stating that though the fact that the writer seems to have added the Irish elements to the different sections of the book after the first drafts of the various episodes were written, something which would indicate that these were features about which the author had to think, the sheer sophistication of his phonetic spelling which often includes aspiration and eclipsis mutations, reveals Joyce to have been an individual with at least a ‘common knowledge‘ of Irish. It should also be noted that if one examines the summaries of the ‘Finnegans Wake’ workbooks one finds lists of vocabulary from a wide variety of different languages which Joyce intended to use in the final work, lists drawn even from French, a tongue which he was using on a daily basis for much of his life but encounters no such list for Irish. When one considers the extent of the author's employment of Irish in the ‘Wake’ does not this absence seem to imply that Joyce had no need for such a list when it came to Irish, that his knowledge of the tongue was sufficient to make such a list unnecessary. ‘Finnegans Wake’ is, needless to say, a work of many languages but it is with Irish, above any of the others, that Joyce enters into a new and especial communion, a deeply personal relationship, during the course of which he speaks directly to his readership in an open but yet extraordinarily obtuse way. ‘I have buried an explanatory treasure of heart and mind under an Irish dung-heap or in Finnegans Wake‘ Adaline Glasheen quotes the author as having said, in the preface to her and Thornton Wilder's ‘A Tour of the Darkling Plain’. The fact that the author uses the adjective Irish here, does not of itself, automatically mean that any such ‘treasure’ must actually be in the Irish language nor does the use of the term dung-heap indicate any disrespect. To us in this less organic, more effete era, such an image may be the very definition of decay but to Joyce, coming, as he did, from a time and a city where such features were to be found in the corner of every garden, dung-heaps were associated with fertilisation and growth, life born from death as Pádraig Pearse used to say. Equally it should be remembered that the seanfhocal or proverb ‘is dána gach madra ar a charnaoile fhéin‘ was one, in its English translation ‘every dog is brave on his own dung-heap‘ which was in common currency during the author's youth. Then again Joyce might not be

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telling the truth. His comments on his works and indeed on broader issues have a certain kaleidoscopic quality about them. Expressing two polar opposite opinions on the same question was not something to which he was particularly adverse. Confusing others, particularly literary critics, seems to have been a pastime of his with the same Adaline Glasheen in the same work noting that even his 1934 scheme of ‘Ulysses’ might have an element of deception about it. A very high proportion of the thousands of Irish fragments and phrases used in the ‘Wake’ are in ‘Gaelainn na Rinne’ or Ring Irish, the Irish of the Déise Gaeltacht of county Waterford. Why this is so is unclear but it might be that Joyce thought that the use of ‘Ring’ Irish would be in keeping with the cyclical nature of the overall work, a work which is, in truth, a ‘ring’ in itself. On page 168, in two lines, he appears to combine a reference to ‘An Rinn’ with phrases hacked from the twelve tablets of the Roman law so as to reveal a sympathetic attitude to this and the other Irish speaking areas. He puts it thus, ‘The Ring man in the wrong shop with the rite words in the rote order‘ ‘Ubi lingua manupassit esto fas. Adversus hostem semper sac‘, with the Latin being translatable as, ‘the place where the stand is made through language, it is blessed. An abiding curse against the enemy’. The conventions of the Irish of Ring certainly seem to be those with which the writer is both most familiar and comfortable, a fact to which forms such as ‘kinkin‘ or ‘cincín’ meaning nose on line 006.21, ‘thawt‘ or ‘tháid’ representing ‘you are’ on line 095.17 and ‘lithargogalenu‘ or ’litir go Gaelainne’ meaning ‘letter to Irish’ appear to attest. This is not to say for one moment, however, that Joyce limited himself solely to this dialect alone. In a book that overthrows the idea that works of literature are in some way bound by national borders, it is little wonder that the writer refuses to be constrained by regional ones. All forms of the language appear at one point or another. If ‘Finnegans Wake’ is to be a new form of Fiannaíocht, a new mythic manifestation of what it is to be Irish then all the Irish must be there.

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I think that, at this stage, it is important to illustrate the dimensions of Joyce's usage of Irish in ‘Finnegans Wake’, the central part that the language plays in the complex text. I am, in this first instance, limiting myself to only one chapter. I could have chosen any in the book, the employment of the tongue is constant and uniform throughout. The selection of this segment of the volume is a completely arbitrary one but does give an idea, at least, of both the manner and frequency with which the writer deployed the native lexicon. The following is a list of relatively simple Irish forms which appear in Book two, Chapter one. I must emphasis that this is little more than a mere sample of the constructions to be found therein. The collection is neither a comprehensive or exhaustive one. All place and personal names, of which there are very many, have, at this point in the exercise, been left to one side, as have elements which, though they may have the appearance of Irish about them, might, in fact, be drawn from other sources. It should also be stated that though some of the formulations to be seen here are both intricate and sophisticated, they do not, in the main, exhibit either the depth of complexity or the wealth of significance that one encounters in some of Joyce's grander Irish language statements in the book. In other words, in regard to his manipulation of Gaelic elements at least, this is Joyce at his worst rather than at his best. 1. Line 219.11 - coarbs - comharba - a successor. 2. Line 219.11-12 - clivesollis - claidheamh/claíomh solais – sword of light, a reference to a newspaper published by the Gaelic League between 1899 and 1932. Pádraig Pearse acted as its editor between 1903 and 1909, during which time the journal published original works in both Irish and English. 3. Line 219.19 - grischun - gríosán - a ‘blusher’ or - garsún - a boy. 4. Line 221.29 - pibe - píob - a pipe. 5. Line 221.34 - sowry - samhradh - summer. 6. Line 222.28 - liubbocks - lúbach - flexible or deceitful. 7. Line 222.31 - djowl - diabhal - a demon or devil. 8. Line 223.13 - owen - abhann - a river. 9. Line 224.11 - colline born - cailín bán - the fair haired or beautiful girl. The formulation refers to a feminine incarnation of Ireland which appears in

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the Irish poetic tradition but also to a well known melodramatic play by Dion Boucicault which was first performed in New York on the 27th of March 1860. 10. Line 224.19 - mearly - go mear - quickly. 11. Line 224.20 - skoll - scoil - a school. 12. Line 224.35 - thong - teanga - a tongue, a language. 13. Line 226.31 - greenerin - grian Éireann - the ‘sun of Ireland’ but with a clear echo of ‘grianán’ meaning a ‘sun-room’, a reference to the place where Fionn mac Chumhaill's proposal of marriage was made known to the princess Gráinne in the ‘Toraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne’ saga. The structure ‘green Erin’ or ‘green Ireland’ is also, of course, to be seen. 14. Line 227.29 - puck - poc - a punch or a blow but with a possible echo of Kilorglin's ‘puck fair’ and the ‘puck goat’ who ‘presides’ over it. The goat is creature that appears regularly in the ‘Wake’ usually representing Fionn mac Chumhaill, the ‘old goat’. The use of this word also, of course, references a character in Shakespeare's ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’. 15. Line 228.04 - everallin - inbhear álainn - beautiful estuary but with a clear sense of ‘ever álainn’ or ‘ever beautiful’ also. 16. Line 228.07 - mocknitza - mac Neasa - a reference to Conchobhur mac Neasa, king of Ulster in the Red Branch mythic tales. 17. Line 228.08 - dagrene - deo gréine - sunburn or ‘spark of the sun’. 18. Line 228.12 - cumman - cumann - a group or association but with an echo of ‘camán’ a hurl or hurley stick to be seen. 19. Line 228.12 - brassolis - breá solas - fine light. 20. Line 228.14 - gelchasser - gealchosach – ‘bright-footed’, a name that appears in the Fiannaíocht mythic cycle. 21. Line 228.15 - shimach - siomach - a trout or a tall, thin man. 22. Line 228.35 - anteach - an teach - the house. 23. Line 229.04 - logh - loch - a lake. 24. Line 229.17 - maleesh - mailís - malice. 25. Line 230.24 - coronaichon - corónach - a funeral dirge but also with the sense of ‘coróin Mhuire’, the Rosary.

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26. Line 230.28 - moramor - móra mór - great spirit but also with an echo of ‘go mór mór’ meaning especially or particularly. 27. Line 232.19 - dearmate ashore - Diarmuid a stór - Diarmuid my beloved. This element plays upon an episode of the ‘Toraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne’ saga where Diarmuid Ó Duibhne having encountered a large group of warriors who having travelled to Ireland from some of the outlying islands of the kingdom and who remain billeted on their vessels, pretends to be their ‘dear mate ashore’, exploits their vanity and fools them into engaging in dangerous forms of martial trickery over three days, an exercise which leads to the death of hundreds of their number. The element also references the fact that it is during this section of the myth that Gráinne, for the first time, manifests genuine affection for Diarmuid. 28. Line 232.24 - mavrone - mo bhrón - my sorrow. 29. Line 235.03 - evings - aoibhinn - pleasant or beautiful. 30. Line 235.04 - blossful - blas - flavour or accent but with a clear echo of the English form ‘blissful’ to be detected. 31. Line 236.14 - billy - bile - a sacred tree in Old Irish but also referencing ‘billy’ or ‘billy goat’ in English. 32. Line 237.16 - borab - borb - bitter or abrupt. 33. Line 237.20 - celtach - ceilteach - Celtic but also incorporating the idea of something being ‘faoi cheilt’ meaning ‘hidden’, ‘concealed’ or ’secret’. 34. Line 240.13 - golls - ag gol - weeping but with the secondary sense of a ‘goll’ in Old Irish meaning a blind individual. 35. Line 241.01 - crumm - ag cromadh - stooping. 36. Line 242.01 - sorestate hearing - Saorstát Éireann - The Irish Free State. 37. Line 242.20 - samhar - samhradh - summer but also incorporating the Celtic midwinter festival of ‘Samhain’ and the English adjective ‘sour’. 38. Line 243.02 - annams - anam - soul but equally referencing the related word ‘anim’ meaning ‘name’. 39. Line 243.03 - magrathmagreeth - mo ghrá mo chroí - love of my heart. 40. Line 243.22 - streelwarker - straoille - a slovenly person but also obviously referencing the English form ‘streetwalker’.

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41. Line 244.34 - leabarrow - leaba - bed but also including references to the rivers Lee and Barrow. 42. Line 245.13 - lubbernabohore - liobar na mbóithre - a tramp, a wanderer of the roads. 43. Line 245.28 - marely - maor - an official or officer but also incorporating the English words ‘barely’ and ‘mare’. 44. Line 248.16 - cucullus - Cúchulainn in a Latinised form. 45. Line 248.27 - threaspanning - trasna - across supported by the English element ‘spanning’ but also echoing the verb

‘taispeáin’ to ‘show’ or

‘reveal’. 46. Line 248.33 - awabeag - abha beag - small river. 47. Line 249.31 - ogh - ógh - a virgin. 48. Line 250.27 - aghatharept - achadh - a field but also incorporating the form ‘Agatha’, a reference to the early Christian saint of that name who is, amongst other things, the patron saint of both earthquakes and the volcanic eruptions of Mount Etna. This partially explains the concluding element of the feature ‘arept’ or ‘erupt’. The formulation also, however, echoes ‘Auraicept na n-Éces’ or the ‘primer of the scholar’, a 7th century Old Irish work, initially composed by the monk Longarad but which was added to by others in the succeeding centuries. In this document, which proclaims the superiority of the Irish language over the Latin one, we are told that following the fall of the tower of Babel, 72 wise men from the school of Fenius took the best features from all of the languages of the world and incorporated them into the Irish tongue thus making that code the most perfect medium of expression on the face of the earth, a story which must have resonated with Joyce during his composition of ‘Finnegans Wake’. The similarity between ‘Fenius’ and the words ‘Fenian’ and, indeed, ‘Fionn’ should, also, be noted. 49. Line 250.34 - duff - dubh - black. 50. Line 251.01 - far - fear - a man but also echoing the Danish word ‘far’ meaning father.

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51. Line 252.01 - shoolters - siúl - to walk or - siúltach - a walker. An echo of the word ‘Shelta’, the name of the language of the travelling people is also to be detected. 52. Line 252.04 - dvoinabrathran - bráithre - brothers of religion but coupled with a Dublin pronunciation of the English word ‘divine’. 53. Line 252.21 - bawn - bán - white. 54. Line 252.24 - gar - a favour or - gar do - near to. 55. Line 253.23-24 - gossan - garsún - a boy. 56. Line 254.15 - minnelisp - minne - a stutter. 57. Line 255.23 - duckindonche - deoch an dorais - the drink of the door, a parting glass. 58. Line 256.33 - isky - uisce - water. 59. Line 257.27 - dunandurras - dún an doras – ‘close the door’. 60. Line 257.33 - uplouderaman - ludramán - a fool. 61. Line 258.10 - mak - mac - a son. 62. Line 258.28 - shin - sinn - us. 63. Line 258.30 - garda - garda - a guard, a policeman. 64. Line 258.33 - krubeens - crúibín - a hoof or pig's trotter. It should not be thought, however, that Joyce's engagement with the Irish language in ‘Finnegans Wake’ is limited only to the employment of individual words or short phrases, no matter how complex they might be. The truth of the matter is that the author, in this book, connects with many features and aspects of the broader Gaelic tradition in a manner that some would find surprising. The novel is replete with Irish place-names. Some are translated, others transliterated, others transmuted in a variety of ways. The following is a brief list of such from the opening chapters of the novel, a mere ‘taste’ of the scholarship in this particular field of study which the writer reveals throughout. 1. Line 005.36 - bore the more - bóthar mór - great or main road with an echo of Moore Street in Dublin to be detected. 2. Line 024.21 - bower moore - bóthar mór - great or main road but this time with a clear reference to Moore Street to be seen. 3. Line 017.13 - rawhoney - Rath Éanna - Raheny in Dublin.

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4. Line 081.09 - so more boher o connell - seo mórbhóthar uí Chonaill - this is the great road of O' Connell, O' Connell Street. 5. Line 087.31 - bohernabreen - bóthar na bruidhne - the road of the hostel Bohernabreena in Dublin. 6. Line 089.07 - rooskayman - Ros Comáin - Roscommon. 7. Line 085.02 - mayo of the saxon - Maigh Eó na Sacsan - the plain of the yew tree of the Saxons, a reference to the Saxon-run monastery from which Maigh Eó or Mayo takes its name. 8. Line 091.08-09 - dundalgan - Dún Dealgan - the fort of Dealgan Dundalk. Joyce also displays a knowledge of Irish language literature in the book. He seems to have been particularly au fait with works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of these poems and prose pieces he clearly knows only in translation but there are others with which he seems to be familiar in their original Irish form. The following is again only a minute sampling of the references and allusions which he makes to his Gaelic literary inheritance in the relatively early sections of the work. 1. Line 024.34 - pole ole lonan - poll óil lonáin - the drinking hole of the bird - ‘is nárbh fhearra leat fíon ná uisce poll‘ – ‘would you not prefer wine to a waterhole’ – ‘An Bonnán Buí' by Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna, an Irish language poet of the early 18th century. 2. Line 024.25-26 - to part from Delvin is hard as Nugent knew – ‘from thee, sweet Delvin, must I part’ – ‘Ode written on leaving Ireland’ composed in Irish by Gearóid Nuinseann, a poet of the 16th century, translated by Drummond for the ‘Cabinet of Irish Literature’, published in 1897. 3. Line 055.23-26 - the clad pursue the bare, the bare the green the frore, the frore the cladagain - based upon a section taken from Seathrún Céitinn's 17th century work ‘Foras Feasa ar Éirinn’ in which he describes the afforestation and deforestation of Ireland. 4. Line 134.22 - with the gale of his gall – ‘Cogad Gáedel re Gallaibh’ – ‘The war of the Irish upon the Foreigners’, a twelfth century history which deals primarily with Brian Boru's campaigns against the Danes.

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5. Line 332.23 - giel as gail, geil as gaul – ‘Cogad Gáedel re Gallaibh’. The author, at times, also references Gaelic games, an area of Irish life of which he does not appear to have had any direct experience. There are a lesser number of such images to be found in the ‘Wake’ than the others that are here mentioned but their presence is significant in that they reveal not only an understanding and respect for the native sporting tradition but also a clear appreciation of its place in the national imagination. Amongst the examples of this feature of the work are these, 1. Line 077.25 - pelah - peil or ag imirt peile - football or playing football. 2. Line 332.26 - the fiounaregal gaames - the fionn regal gaa games. 3. Line 396.01-02 - both lines of forwards (Eburnea's down, boys!) rightjingbangshot into the goal of her gullet - drawn from the legend which speaks of Setanta's killing of the ferocious hound of Culann by hurling a ball down his throat. The longer, more extensive Irish language elements of ‘Finnegans Wake’ have of times been portrayed as being little more than throwaway lines, employed by the author simply either to add a real but fundamentally meaningless richness to the lexicon of the work or to further inject humour into the body of a complicated and difficult novel. Nothing, indeed, could be further from the truth. A careful examination of these formulations reveals an extraordinary degree of complexity born of the writer's intricate and artistic use of the tongue. On line 007.04, for example, one encounters the phrase, ‘issavan essavan‘, a transliterated version of, ‘is í Vanessa a bhean', or in English, ‘Vanessa is his woman’, This statement refers to Jonathan Swift's intense relationship with Ester Vanhornigh, a girl, twenty three years his junior, whom he had, at one point, tutored. The couple met in 1708 with the young woman falling deeply in love with the writer. Their association ended seventeen years later as a result of Swift's liaison with one Ester Johnston or ‘Stella’. During the course of their love affair,

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Swift taking the first three letters of her surname and a pet form of ‘Ester’ began calling his lover ‘Vanessa’, a name which he immortalised in his poetry. It is this process of composition that Joyce is mimicking by dividing the statement into two words. The certitude of the assertion equally seems to reflect a belief that, despite claims that Swift had never held Ester in quite the same regard as she had held him, this Vanessa had, in fact, been the love of the satirist's life. Then on lines 035.15-16 one finds the sentence, ‘Guinness thaw tool in jew dinner ouzel fin‘, a distorted form of the question, ‘Conas atá tú inniubh mo dhuine uasal fionn’, or in English, ‘How are you today my noble person Fionn’. This segment again clearly references Fionn mac Chumhaill and therefore forms part of the grand re-imagining of the Fiannaíocht cycle with which Joyce is so much concerned in the work. There is, however, a secondary story being told here. In the late seventeenth century a ship called the ‘Ouzel’ left Dublin port and disappeared without a trace. After three years a board of arbitration was established, made up of local merchants and businessmen. This body declared the vessel to be lost at sea. Monies were paid in compensation to those affected by the loss, directly as a result of this declaration. Two years later the ‘Ouzel’, carrying its full complement of crew and its hold filled with exotic goods and spices, suddenly reappeared in Dublin bay. It's captain, Eoghan Massey of Waterford, claimed that the ship had been commandeered by Algerian Corsairs and that he and his men had been held captive until their recent and fortuitous escape. Their story was not widely believed and it was thought by many that they had spent the period of their ‘disappearance’ engaging in piratical actions in the West Indies. In 1705 the arbitration board which had been formed to deal solely with the ' loss ' of the ' Ouzel ' was put on a more permanent basis so that it might deal with similar controversies and disputes. This new organisation, now known as the ‘Ouzel Galley Society‘ held its meetings in local taverns and lodging houses, amongst them being

‘Jude's Hotel’. The body was again made up

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primarily of Dublin's business elite with Arthur Guinness being one of its prime movers. In this section of the ‘Wake’, Joyce mentions the ‘Ouzel’ by name, refers directly to Arthur Guinness and alludes to ‘Jude's Hotel’ under the guise of ‘jew‘ since both ‘jew’ and ‘jude’ are ultimately derived from ‘Judah’. It should also be noted that the word ‘ouzel’ is an archaic English term meaning ‘Blackbird’, a creature, which due to its associations with Charles Stewart Parnell, appears again and again in the book. On line 55.14 one finds the element, ‘o thaw bron orm, a Cothraige, thinkin thou gaily‘, this being a thinly disguised version of, ‘o thá brón orm a Chothraighe, tuigeann tú Gaelainn’, or in English, 'I am sorry Cothraighe, do you understand Irish’. The first point of interest in regard to this sentence is the deployment of the name ‘Cothraighe’. The Irish being speakers of a Gaelic or Q-Celtic tongue were, initially, unable to pronounce the letter ‘P’ and generally sounded it as if it were Q, K, or C. When ‘Patricius’ or Saint Patrick came amongst them then, despite their best efforts, they could not say his name correctly. ‘Cothraighe’ was the best that they could manage. Secondly it should also be recognised that this construction directly mirrors a well known folk song of the 19th century which commences thus, ‘A Dhónaill uí Chonaill an dtuigeann tú Gaelainn, tuigim go maith í a chailín ó Éirinn‘ or in English, ‘Daniel O’Connell do you understand Irish, I understand it well oh girl from Ireland’. The song describes how a young Irish woman, working as a servant in England, warns Daniel O’Connell that his food has been poisoned by agents of the British state and does so through the medium of Irish so as to insure that his would-be killers are not aware of the fact that their intended victim is alive to the danger. The song is somewhat ironic since O’Connell, notwithstanding his

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political activities, was a strong believer in the inherent supremacy of English over Irish Culture and uses the Irish language here only when his very life depends upon it. By connecting Saint Patrick to O’Connell, Joyce is commenting on the strangeness of the coincidence by which both an Anglicised Irishman and a Hibernicised Roman Briton were regarded by the people of Ireland as being liberators. Politics also comes into play on lines 042.11-12 where Joyce says, ‘seinn fion, seinn fion's araun‘, this being a transliterated and slightly distorted form of, ‘seinn Fionn, seinn amhrán Fhinn’, in other words, ‘play Fionn, play Fionn's song’. In this sentence Joyce is, yet again referencing the stories of the Fenian Cycle but is also alluding to historical and political developments in Ireland in the early part of the twentieth century. The construction clearly and deliberately echoes an early motto of the Gaelic League, ‘sinn féin, sinn féin amháin‘ , or in English, ‘ourselves, ourselves alone’. The phrase can also, however, be translated as, ‘Sinn Féin, only Sinn Féin’. This theme also appears on line 074.01 where one finds the line, ‘some Finn, some Finn avant‘. In these statements Joyce is further weaving both the modern and mythic treads of Ireland into one great tapestry, into a work of art that accurately recreates the disparate colours of his country and consciously, through the medium of Irish, reconstitutes the very fabric of time. Now the truth of the matter is, of course, that it should not really make any difference what James Joyce thought of the Irish language. He was but a man not a god. His opinions in regard to such issues should carry no more weight than any of ours do but added to those elements of the modern Irish identity which I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, namely the tendency towards

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Factionalism and the predisposition to irrational suspicion, is a third feature, this being our penchant for hero-worship, a weakness from which Joyce, in regard to Parnell, himself suffered. We have a custom of placing those whom we consider great on such a high pedestal that we can no longer easily see their human failings, a process which leads to our investiture of their every utterance with a prophetic quality. We claim for them something which they never claimed for themselves, the gift of infallibility. Many of us have for long felt that an impression had been given by some that James Joyce, in as much as he belonged to anyone, did not belong to us, that though born on this island, he was not really one of us, that he was connected to a faction which regarded Colonial Culture as being the very soul of urbane sophistication and saw nothing in Irishness save impoverished rurality, backwardness and brutality, an impression which very much centred upon the language question. Now that the evidence is mounting that Joyce saw both the Irish language and his general Irishness as integral parts of his artistic essence and being, the temptation to engage in that self same Sectionalism but in reverse, must at all costs be resisted, not only because it would be destructive so to do, not only because it would be puerile but because it would, in its simplicity and Elementalism, be a complete denial of the truth. Joyce's relationship with his homeland may not have been all that complicated but the people which inhabits this country is amongst the most complicated nations on the face of the earth, a mass of competing identities bound together by the love of the competition in which all participate. A nation is not a club or political party with aims and purposes in which all members must believe. Nationality is not a religion with dogma which all the Faithful must share. It is more akin to a collection of brothers and sisters with their own personalities, identities and visions of what the grouping stands for and, in the complete absence of Fanaticism, of what the future should bring. A family no longer divided. A house no longer closed. Our doors and our hearts flung open wide.

CHAPTER SEVEN STORIES OF YOU An Abject Surrender to the Complex Thinking of ‘Finnegans Wake’ We all know that this is going to end badly. Just another package passed and pushed into the press of some nowhere, elsewhere hospital. A tartan rugged wheelchair window-cornered in an old folks' home on bingo night. A kitchen floor flatlined flop surrounded by flap, spilled tea and the fragments of a broken cup. For some of us the conclusion may be a little less mundane, a real hellsinker of a finnish event; a battle, a bullet, a blonde bombshell, a bus-blunder or a Brazil nut gone the wrong way but in each and every case the same absurd ignobility awaits. This is going to end badly and we all know it. Thrown into a life that can never overcome its own inherent limitations and, in non-metaphysical terms at least, actually survive itself, the human individual is forced to accept the fact that no matter how distinguished his achievements, no matter how important he manages to make himself in the world of men, no matter how determined he is to succeed and live on, he will never be too great to fail and that eventual and catastrophic defeat is the very cost of his paltry and ephemeral victories. He is, therefore, presented with a simple choice. He can either stare into the darkening abyss or decide not to, starve for want of meaning or strive for that quantum of surrender which will allow him to continue to place one foot in front of another while, all the time, knowing that all he has to look forward to is the looking back. He must delude himself into being and commence the process of sleeping himself awake. The waking mind is governed by bi-cameral parliaments of inter-locking fictions. A lower house made up of formed or partially formed impressions, delusions of what is and what might possibly be true, narratives cobbled together from looks, glances, smiles and frowns but ultimately born from a deep-seated

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desire to escape the boredom, to be more than we are and become heroes in our own adventures of the human imagination. We

deliberately

misunderstand,

consciously

mis-remember

and

misinterpret both so as to make ourselves more interesting to ourselves and also so as to keep the eternally greying cells of the mind, in some way, occupied. The fantasia which swirls around us, however, is not entirely of our own making. The higher chamber, the societal superstructure of perennial pretence, also plays its part with its incessant myth-making and its promotion of certain tautologies of deceit and deception now so old and so commonplace that they raise not an eyebrow nor have any whiff of controversy about them. Those amongst us who, for example, pride themselves on their practicality and worldly approach to instances and issues have a tendency to be somewhat dismissive of the aesthetic, falling for the fable that the more artistically-minded are interested or involved in disciplines which are, though to some extent laudable, fundamentally useless or pointless exercises in extravagance, while artists, on the other hand, often adopt an anti-democratic ideological position which holds that concern for the concrete or tangible is some way unCultured and therefore, beneath them. Equally, when it comes to the genders, the acceptance by many if not most men of the notion that they can never truly understand women, a myth designed not, of course, to indicate any inherent lack of comprehension in male thinking but rather to portray the feminine mind as being in some manner dangerously flawed, is matched only in its perniciousness by the quietly held conviction of many if not most women that they understand men only too well, regarding them as being largely creatures of habit and instinct, habits and instincts which make them both predictable and fundamentally predatory. The most singularly significant relationship on the face of the Earth therefore, namely that between the two sexes of the human race is mythologised and reduced to little more than a binary counterbalance between irrationality on one hand and foolish bestiality on the other, an Elementalism which, in both the simplicity and crudity of its nature, utterly distorts our understanding of the species to which we belong, promulgating, as it does, the conceptualisation of a humanity consisting not of two similar versions of the

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same thing but rather of a collective genus made up of two entirely distinct subgroups which function essentially as polar opposites of one another. Whether this bizarre Adam versus Eve polarity was the original one or not is impossible to know, however, what can be said is that the manufacture of binary pairs like it and the definition of features in terms of off-centre opposites is something which has come to dominate all human language and therefore all human thought. We contrast elements which differ fundamentally from one another but then lock them together in couplets which dramatise oppositional relationships in contexts where no true oppostionality actually exists. ‘Black’, for example, is not the opposite to ‘white’. ‘White’ has no opposite but if it were to have, such a colour could only be classified as ‘unwhite’. ‘Hatred’ is not the opposite to ‘love’. ‘Love’ has no counterpoint but if it were to have, such an emotion could only be designated as ‘un-love’. ‘Wrong’ is not the opposite to ‘right’. ‘Right’ is not entirely or perfectly counterbalanced by any other state. If it were to be then such a condition would have to be called ‘un-right’ or ‘un-righteousness’, a term which would take some account, at least, of the modifications, qualifications and incompletenesses associated with the real judgements which are made by real people in the real world. If, for example, one was told that an individual was drinking heavily in a Public House on a particular night but that his companion did the opposite, what could one take from the statement, that his friend drank a little, that his comrade did not drink at all or that by some extraordinary and absolutely unique aberration of anatomical certainty, rather than imbibing alcohol, he began to expel it in glassfuls through his pores. In truth any one of these and, indeed, other options could be envisioned from the description. The statement could be interpreted in a multiplicity of different ways. A decision would then have to be made as to what was most likely to have been meant, a choice to comprehend the sentence on the basis of

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facts other than those, actually, in evidence. In other words one would hear what one wanted to hear. This is one of the main features which distinguishes the ‘waking’ illusion from its ‘sleeping’ equivalent, namely the part played by the will in its construction. The images which enter the mind of the sleeping individual come at him at a rate and in an order over which he has no conscious control. These thoughts may not be entirely random, being products of an unconscious realm it is impossible to say whether the actual sequence in which they appear has any real significance or not but what can be said is that the sleeper is subjected to the narrative rather than being its author. The frames roll as they will without his direction and without any critical or editorial analysis. This distinction coupled with that continuity over a protracted period of time which one associates with the ‘waking’ state creates the false impression that the delusions of the night differ fundamentally from those of the day, that a polar oppositionality exists between dreaming and living. ‘Dreaming’ has no opposite but if it were to have, it would, in fact, be the act of ‘de-dreaming’, the systematic extraction of all fantasy, hope and romance from the very marrow of the world, the reduction of life to a loveless mess of hard tacks, bread and butter issues, back to basic boredoms and sensible shoes, an environment in which the human spirit cannot survive or function let alone flourish. ‘Finnegans Wake’ may be the book of the night, it may be the product of a dreaming mind but this is not to say that it is in some way divorced from the light or from conscious, everyday, mundane existence, that it is a work without implication or relevance to modern life. It is a mirror, a ‘cracked mirror‘ maybe, which reflects the world both as it is and as it isn't, upside-down, back to front and inside-out. The question of perceived oppositionality is, of course, a significant one everywhere but is absolutely pivotal in the Colonial context since the success of any imperial project is utterly dependent on its capacity to reconfigure the defining parameters of the subject nation so comprehensively that it loses all

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sense of itself, to also, in a manner of speaking, turn it upside-down, back to front and inside out. The Colonial has a divided nature, torn, as he is, between the cultural sphere in which he actually lives and the world to which he feels that he belongs or should belong. He is a type of hybrid cobbled together from native features which he cannot reject and alien ones which, in many cases at least, he does not wish to. On the face of it this is an appalling state of affairs, individuals and communities ripped apart by competing and mutually exclusive understandings of self but this, again, is to view Coloniality in terms of a simple and simplistic binary polarity which has no real legitimacy in logic or fact. In Joyce's era, as in our own, there were those who viewed any step of any type away from England as a retrograde one and who regarded every movement towards a culturally or politically independent Ireland as a rejection of Modernity and a return to what they considered to be a native Barbarism. Equally there were those who held that it was only through the stanching of all foreign influences that anything approaching a genuine Irish nation could be reconstructed. To the former, the very strength of British Culture was indicative of its inherent superiority, with any attempt to arrest its total domination of the Irish psyche being little more than an insolent, stubborn refusal to move on. To the latter, engagement with social mores or literary forms from other countries, had the potential to completely undermine an Irish identity then so degraded and fragile that it could not safely be exposed to the open air. The truth of the matter is, however, that a unique singularity can be sparked into life by the action of one of these forces on the other, a robust distinctiveness which removes identity from the binary equation in which it is trapped. The concept of ‘being Irish’ has no direct opposite, however, if one were, for some reason, required, neither ‘not being Irish’ nor ‘being unIrish’ would suffice since these are far too broad and contain no real nuance or sense of oppositionality. Historical context, geography and perceived contrasts in national personality often lead us, on some level at least, to think of ‘being English’ as the

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other end of a binary pair into which we have been posited but this also, needless to say, cannot rationally stand. The only formulation which would, in truth, fit the bill is ‘being de-Irished’, in other words, the removal systematically of all Irish features and aspects from a Culture, community, personality or mind and the transformation of this island into little more than a quirky, top of the morning theme-park for tourists, a cold, concrete un-threatening shopping mall where anything and everything is for sale, an embodiment of our failure to make an authentic, modern contribution to human progress. But then are not all failures of any type, ultimately, failures of philosophy, failures which normally arise due to a reluctance to apply sufficiently complex thinking to complex situations or problems. The notion that the difficulties which underlie greater complications, are, in the main, simple ones, may, indeed, be attractive to many, as is the sense that almost any question, no matter how apparently intractable, can be understood and answered when reduced to its first principles, however, it must be recognised that neither folk wisdom nor the modern tendency to create flexible matrices of disconnected logic provide the type of rationality required to adequately comprehend those features of both life and literature which, on the face of it at least, reject and defy all attempts at comprehension. It is the quality of thought rather than its quantity that is of primary importance when one is engaging with deeply philosophical issues, the very type of issues which are raised by Joyce in ‘Finnegans Wake’. One could spend one's life pondering the structural oddities of the book, revelling in its references, spectating at it word-games, admiring the beauty of its devastating imagery but none of these diversions will, in themselves, reveal its wider implications as a moment of literary challenge. One must be prepared to consider and appreciate the purpose and not solely the products of its form. The examination of the masterpiece is often undermined by an inability to set the external aside, to negotiate the text itself without precondition or preconception, to identify that which is actually being said rather than that which Joyce is expected to say.

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In a very real sense ‘Finnegans Wake’ is not so much a novel but is rather a collection of a million short stories, lines, fragments, paragraphs, each telling a separate tale, each of which creates a completely unique emotional atmosphere. To understand the book, therefore, one must develop the capacity to think one's self into its very Emotionality, to feel it as it was meant to be felt. The thought processes required to do this cannot be solely analytical in nature, cannot be concerned only with a fruitless deconstruction of style but must also bring a warm rather than cold logic to bear on the words, an understanding that possesses the necessary humanity to take the pulse, count the breathes and read the heartbeat of a resurrected and resurrecting life-force that neither the dust of decades nor the fading print of time can contain. ‘Finnegans Wake’ is, in truth, both an exercise and education in a new form of thinking where all possible cognitive processes are brought into play simultaneously and all dimensions of a subjective and therefore essentially unreal reality are twisted, turned and rotated until both the ordered chaos and chaotic order of sentient and social existence can be observed, appreciated and thus considered. In any given situation the human individual thinks neither in a solely linear nor entirely lateral way but in a form that incorporates the two. Images flash into his mind and before his eyes. He hears sounds and voices which swirl both within and without his head, the latter calling him back to the world of men with its successes, failures, systems, humiliations and incessant point-scoring, the former filling him to the brim with those vanities, insecurities, self-justifications, rivalries and jealousies which make rational judgement and truly reasonable interaction between the internal and external virtually impossible. This is how the world is, a state of affairs that literature, generally, cannot reflect. The telling of stories, by its very nature, involves a prioritisation of feelings and events. The creation of narrative requires that certain elements of the human experience be left to one side so that other aspects which are considered to be more relevant to the overall project be left in. The central core of the work must not be undermined or overwhelmed by superfluous material that, though interesting, is not entirely necessary to the construction of theme.

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Sometimes, however, less is not more. Sometimes saying too little is worse than saying too much. Sometimes the tendency to under-think, the failure or refusal to accept that psychological states, human relationships and therefore society are not straight-forward entities which can summed up in a punchline, can blind us to the essential truth that the mechanics of living, though important, do not the act of ‘being’ make. An indefinable, indescribable but yet undeniable quality underlies, underlines and permeates all that we are and do. A phenomenon which we might or might not call ‘soul’ but a feature which we ignore at our peril since this is the very thing which gives life at least the illusion of meaning, that makes the human fragility of the ‘other’ even imaginable to us and provides mankind with the capacity for that level of thoughtfulness which allows us, maybe by accident and definitely despite ourselves, to do the right thing every so often. This is the type of complex thinking that ‘Finnegans Wake’ embodies and advances, a complexity of thought which, by its very nature, causes certain problems for those concerned with the description and analysis of the work. The examination of the interconnections which exist between the internal consciousness of the text itself and those features of the external world which that text references, coupled with the states of being produced by the stylistic mysticism of the writing, require, in my opinion, the provision of a new terminology. When one is confronted by a work of art so original that it is defined, primarily, by its uniqueness, one must be prepared to abandon those systems of annotation which, while perfectly adequate in their capacity to provide the reader with additional and interesting information, reduce a dynamic literary achievement to the level of a puzzle, rob it of its spontaneity and thus, inadvertently, transform what should be a life-changing engagement with romantic truth into a cold and entirely academic exercise. The publication of ‘Finnegans Wake’ marked the birth of a completely new form of living literature, ending, as it did, experiential oppositionality between reader and writer. Transmission of message was no longer solely limited to that which was easily comprehensible while the reception of same was no

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longer bound by the strictures that such easy comprehensibility would place upon it. The very obscurity of the book provides it with its depth, the depth in which one is baptised and thus liberated from the passivity of a purely transactional relationship. The close study of the ‘Wake’, if it is to be true to the novel itself, therefore cannot be, in any sense closed but must be open to experimentation and the consequent successes and failures that any such attempted innovation will bring. This is a process to which I now wish to make my own poor contribution by employing a new series of terms in the examination of the use of the Irish language in two different sections of the work, a series which, in the interests of clarity, I will now list and briefly explain, Castacht - Complex Thinking. The deployment of a logic which takes full account of all the complexities of life and circumstance, includes rather than excludes Emotionality as a crucial element of understanding and which counts all tautologies to be little more than irrelevant conveniences born of an inability to fully conceptualise the vicissitudes of the authentic human condition. Machnamh - Consideration or Thought. The nature of the complex thinking that Joyce reveals at any given point in the work and the idea or ideas which he wishes, therein, to convey. Cruth - Shape or Appearance. The manner in which the author structures his complex thinking, the structural devices and vehicles by which his thought processes are conveyed. Timpeallacht - Environment. The emotional environment which the writer creates within fragments, lines, paragraphs and passages of the work. Cúplacht - Twinning or Duality. Joyce's use of polarities and binary pairs both to create literary and psychological tension and so as to undermine the legitimacy of perceived oppositionalities. Macalla - Echo. Connections formed through sound between elements within the text and elements without. Nasc - Link. The referencing of external features in any manner other than through sound. Ceangal - Associations created in any way between different and separate sections of the work.

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The use of binary pairs is amongst the most commonly employed features of the ‘Wake’. One of the most interesting is to be found on lines 485.12 and 485.13 where Joyce states, ‘Are we speachin d'anglas landadge or are you sprakin sea Djoytsch?’ This particular element is to be found in a section of the work which is replete, both, with references to monks and monasteries and also with thinly disguised distortions of words drawn from the German language, the essential subject of the passage being the Irish religious and scholarly mission to central Europe in the latter half of the first Millennium. On the surface of the sentence an obvious polarity is to be observed between, ‘speachin d'anglas landadge‘, or ‘speaking the English language’ and, ‘sprakin sea Djoytsch‘, or ‘sprechin Sie Deutsch’, ‘do you speak German’. One must remember, of course, that for much of the author's life, due to political and military circumstances, English and German Culture were seen as being the absolute opposites of one another, despite the fact, as the writer emphasises here, that the English and German languages, emerging as they do from the same linguistic and historical background, sound so similar when heard spoken from a distance that they are difficult to tell apart. This is not, however, the only such duality to be seen in the fragment. The particle ‘anglas‘ is a clear macalla of the Irish word ‘eaglais’ meaning ‘church’, referencing again the part played by Irish missionaries in the Christianisation of the German-speaking lands, a particle which is reinforced by the element ‘speachin‘, a macalla of the English verbal form ‘preaching’. Equally ‘anglas ‘ echoes the Irish adjective ‘ainnis’ which signifies that something is ‘miserable’, an emotional state which is then counterbalanced by the presence of the fragment ‘joy‘ in the word ‘Djoytsch‘. The entire segment ‘d' anglas landadge‘ also creates a sonic impression of the forms ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo sandwich’, the sandwich in which the

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construction ‘glas land‘, ‘green land’ and therefore Ireland is both the structural and figurative meat. Another cúplacht is then to be seen between the ‘land‘ element at the beginning of the statement and the ‘sea‘ particle at its end, an oppositionality of the perception which, again, has no real basis in logic while the entire exercise is brought to both a literal and philosophical conclusion by the word ‘Djoytsch‘ with its clear macalla and nasc of the name ‘Joyce’ itself. The author, in this line is therefore, in fact, asking five separate questions rather than solely the one which appears on the skin of the text. These being; (1). Am I speaking English or German ? (2). Am I speaking the language of the Church, in other words, Latin ? (3). Am I speaking the ‘language of the land’, with its echoes of ‘Landsmål’ and Ivar Aasen's attempt to develop an authentic national language in Norway but with Joyce's ‘Landsmål’, of course, being Irish or am I speaking the ‘language of the sea’ over whose waves Britannia is said to rule? (4). Am I speaking the language of sorrow or the language of jubilation? (5). Am I speaking English or am I speaking ‘Joyce’ ? The implications of this particular sentence are obvious. By positing these binary forms in such a manner and posing these questions in one singular formulation, the writer is recognising the fact that though the world generally requires simple answers, designations and classifications, that something or someone is either this or that, delineations of this type are neither possible or legitimate since the demand for them is born of an aberrant logic which deals with life in an essentially untrue and self-deceptive way. The world is not a poem to be parsed into simple contrasts and easy Categorisations. If it were then we could make sense of it but it isn't so we can't. There are no opposites because there are no absolutes. It is for this reason that Joyce in ‘Finnegans Wake’ speaks in all tongues and none. The codification of words into communities of meaning is something in which he is no longer interested.The idiosyncrasy of his expression will both liberate him from cliché and incarcerate him behind bars of incomprehensibility. For better or worse, however, and in every sense of the words,

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‘Djoytsch‘ will be a language that simply will not serve. Such castacht or complexity of thinking is not limited solely to individual or specific fragments of ‘Finnegans Wake’. It forms the very basis of the entire narrative from beginning to end, a fact that a close examination of the Irish language elements of the opening fifty pages of the book clearly reveals. Joyce, in the work, is trying to forge a strong connection between that which is being described and the very manner of its description, to create an association so strong that the two ultimately become one. He is also attempting to accurately reflect, in as far as he can, the mechanics of the dreaming mind and the manner in which it reconfigures the observations, obsessions and emotionalities of the waking one. Now, needless to say, such a machnamh will need a cruth, a device by which his ambitions can, at least, figuratively be achieved. It is the image and action of rivers which, throughout the novel, serve this purpose. In ‘Finnegans Wake’ the names of rivers punctuate the text while Anna Livia or the Liffey acts as both a metaphoric representation of Dublin and, in the latter stages of the work, as an embodiment of the author's own consciousness. Joyce's rivers flow not only on the surface, however, they are also to be found deep down beneath the psychological mantel, with determined currents pouring into the waters of the author's ‘dasein’, sweetening the flavour and strengthening the swell with injections of the barely remembered and not quite forgotten, those fluidities of which all tradition is made. This great cultural confluence is fed, by many streams, by many sisters, a good number of whom were reared by strangers in foreign climes but the most significant contribution to the overall nature of this section of the ‘Wake’ is made by five local girls, who while speaking in their own tongue, supply the writer with the nutritional wherewithal to be who he is and perform his wondrous miracles of the word. The following are those particular word-flows but it must be understood that the lists of their constituent elements here provided are far from being comprehensive and are designed only to give a mere taste of the quality of the work rather than a full survey of that work's actual extent. (a). The Fiannaíocht or Fenian Cycle.

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1. - Line 006.13 - macool - Mac Chumhaill. 2. - Line 006.26 - brawdawn - referencing the ‘bradán feasa’ or ‘salmon of knowledge’ of the Fiannaíocht but also with a macalla of ‘breá dawn’ or ‘bright dawn’ to be seen. 3. - Line 006.27 - finisky - fionn uisce – ‘bright water’, an allusion to ‘Páirc an Fhionnuisce’, ‘the field of the bright water’, anglicised as the ‘Phoenix Park’ but also containing a nasc with ‘Fionn’, the commander of the Fianna. 4. - Line 009.34 - branlish - Bran, one of the two hunting dogs of Fionn Mac Chumhaill. 5. - Line 013.19 - ollaves - ollaimh - druids or sages. 6. - Line 013.24 - bulbenboss - Beann Gulban - Ben Bulben, the mountaintop where, in the concluding sections of ‘Toraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne’, the death of Diarmuid Ó Duibhne is engineered by Fionn. The final element of the word refers to the manner in which Fionn, at this point in that work, shows Diarmuid exactly ‘who is boss’. Its addition here creates a timpeallacht of some sorrow, similar to that which is to be found in the saga itself. 7. - Line 019.25 - con an - Cónán Mac an Léith Luachra, an important warrior of the Fenian stories. 8. - Line 020.23 - torytale - a reference to the ‘Toraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne’ tale itself but incorporating also an allusion to the ‘Toraidhe’ or ‘Torys’, a name given to Irish soldiers during the wars which erupted following the establishment of the Irish Confederation in the middle years of the seventeenth century. 9. - Line 021.31 - redtom - an anagram of the name ‘Dermot’, an anglicised form of ‘Diarmuid’. 10. - Line 022.18 - dom ter - again an anagram of the name ‘Dermot’ 11. - Line 023.20-21 - noanswa - a rendering of the Irish language phrase ‘ní hannsa’ meaning ‘does not prefer’ or ’does not favour’, a formulation which appears again and again in the pages of the ‘Toraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne’ saga. The word also, however, clearly contains a macalla of the English language construction ‘no answer’, a possible allusion to Fionn's

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refusal to respond to the demands of his grandson Oscar that he employ his magical powers to save the life of the dying Diarmuid in the final stages of that work. 12. - Line 024.16 - Finnimore - Fionn Mór - Great Fionn. 13. - Line 024.19 - kapelavaster - capall an mháistir - the horse of the master, a reference to a story of the later Fiannaíocht known as the tale of the ‘Giolla Deacair’ or ‘Difficult Servant’. 14. - Line 046.20 - oscar - a reference to Oscar, grandson of Fionn and a prominent officer in the armies of the Fianna. 15. - Line 051.27 - clownturkish - cluain toirc - the field of the wild boar. This element again refers to the death of Diarmuid Ó Duibhne who is mortally wounded by such a creature due to the jealous machinations of Fionn Mac Chumhaill. Macallas of both ‘clown’ and ‘turkish’ are also to be seen in the construction, fragments which allude to the fact that the demise of the ‘young Turk’ Diarmuid was brought about directly as a result of Fionn's foolish resolve to marry the much younger Gráinne. (b). Brían Bóroimhe or Brian Boru. 1. Line 020.17 - mahomahouma - mathghamhain - a bear - the royal brother of Brian Boru. 2. - Line 004.08 - cashels - caiseal - a castle or fort made of stone but here directly referencing ‘Cashel of the Kings’, the political and ecclesiastical settlement situated in present day county Tipperary which was burnt and then later occupied by Brian of the Dalcassians. 3. - Line 006.21 - kinkin corass - Ceann Coradh - the head of the weir, anglicised as Kincora, one of the palaces of Brian Boru. 4. - Line 013.27 - adear, adear - Áth Daire - the ford of the oak tree, anglicised as Adare and now in county Limerick, a settlement seized by Brian Boru at an early stage in his military career. 5. - Line 015.11 - killallwho - Cill Dhá Lúa - the church of Dolua, anglicised as Killaloe, another of the palaces of Brían Bóroimhe. This term also references the fact that it was Brian's pursuit and execution of all of those

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members of the Eóghanacht dynasty who had participated in the killing of his brother, that initially launched him onto the greater political stage. 6. - Line 016.22 - dungtarf - a macalla of Cluain Tarbh, anglicised as Clontarf and an allusion to Brian's defeat of the Danes in a battle which took place there in 1014. 7. - Line 016.25 - boohoorú - a version of the very title ‘Boru’ but incorporating the formulation ‘boo hoo’, a somewhat dramatic reference to the king's reputation for the prodigious creation of weeping widows and orphans. (c). Historical references unconnected to Brian Boru. 1. Line 021.20-21 - grace o' malice - Gráinne ní Mháille - anglicised as Grace O' Malley, Connacht's famous pirate queen. 2. Line 021.23 - dovesgall - Dubh ghaill - the dark foreigners - a term normally applied to the Danish rather than to the Norwegian Vikings. 3. Line 022.26 - knavepaltry - Naomh Pádraig - Saint Patrick with an English reading of the elements ‘knave‘ and ‘paltry‘ possibly referencing the years he spent, in his younger days, as a slave in Ireland. 4. Line 022.26 - naive bride - Naomh Bríghid - Saint Bridget with an English reading of the words ‘naive‘ and ‘bride‘ alluding to the young age at which Bríghid decided to become a ‘bride of Christ’. 5. Line 025.29 - ardking - ardrí or high-king. 6. Line 025.31 - liam failed - a clear reference to the ‘lia fáil’ or stone of destiny but equally alluding to ‘Rí Liam’ or ‘King Billy’ and his failure to completely obliterate Catholicism in Ireland. 7. Line 031.21-22 - canmakenoise - Cluain Mac Nóis - Clonmacnoise, the great ecclesiastical and academic centre of the Irish golden age. The structure of this formulation clearly celebrates the fact that there was a time when Irish Intellectualism could really make noise, could genuinely cause a stir. 8. Line 032.01 - spalpeens - spailpín - a travelling farm labourer. This term alludes to those thousands of Irishmen who having been stripped of their lands in the wake of the Williamite Plantation, were forced to wander the

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roads of Ireland in search of work on the very farms which had, only recently, been taken from them. (d). - Mythic tales and elements unconnected with the Fiannaíocht. 1. - Line 023.27 - wave of roary - Tonn Rudhraighe - one of the mythical waves which were said to protect Ireland from her enemies. Tonn Rudhraighe was believed to ‘hold the pass’ at Dundrum Bay in modern-day county Down. 2. - Line 023.29 - horselug - horse loch - the loch that ‘neighs’ therefore Loch Neagh but also incorporating a reference to Lugh, the ancient Irish god of the sun. 3. - Line 029.12 - frailshees - a clear macalla of the English word ‘frailties’ but also incorporating a reference to the ‘Shees’ or ‘Sheas’ thus creating a timpeallacht or emotional atmosphere in which the reader can actually sense the fragility of the relationship which existed between Captain William O' Shea and his wife Kitty before their divorce and her subsequent marriage to Charles Stewart Parnell. The fragment ‘shees‘ also, of course, alludes to the ‘sídhe’, the magical hidden race of Ireland, its use seeming to indicate that both the honourable Captain and his erstwhile wife lived in a world of their own and were, for all intents and purposes, ‘away with the fairies’. 4. - Line 035.32 - couhounins - Cú Chulainn, the primary hero and central character of the Ruraíocht mythic cycle. 5. - Line 014.35 - hebear - Éibhear - a Milesian ruler murdered by his brother Eireamhán. 6. - Line 014.36 - hairyman - Eireamhán - a Milesian prince who killed his royal brother Éibhear. The formulation ‘hairyman‘ or ‘hairy man’ creates an obvious nasc with the the Biblical story of ‘Cain and Abel’. 7. - Line 015.04 - formoreans - na formhóraigh - the devils who, according to some of the oldest of the Irish mythic tales, live in a land at the very top of the world. 8. - Line 015.05 - tooath of the danes - Tuath de Danann, the nation of the goddess Dana, one of the peoples who, according to Irish synthetic history at least, inhabited Ireland prior to the arrival of the Celts.

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9. - Line 015.06-07 - firebugs - fir bolga16 - again a mythical race said to have inhabited Ireland prior to the invasion of the Milesians17. (e). Forms of Éire. 1. - Line 021.24 - earin - Éireann - of Ireland. 2. - Line 021.26 - erio - Éire - Ireland. 3. - Line 022.10 - earring - Éirinn - in, to or for Ireland. 4. - Line 023.19 - irenean - Éireann - of Ireland. 5. - Line 025.17 - eirenesians - Éireannaigh - Irish people. 6. - Line 025.27 - erinne - Éirinn - in, to or for Ireland. 7. - Line 028.01 - queenoveire - queen of Ireland, sometimes used as an honorific title for the Virgin Mary. These are the primary Irish language thematic strands which are to be found in the early sections of ‘Finnegans Wake’, however, it must be emembered that not only do these interlace with cultural treads drawn from further afield but also that they are ‘cut’ with an enormous collection of other Irish words which are connected with no particular theme. The following is again only a very limited sample of the Irish language elements of this type to be found in the opening pages of the book. 1.

Line 003.15 - gharaghtak - gaireachtach - boisterous.

2.

Line 003.16-17 - thurnuk - tórnach - thunder.

3.

Line 005.31 - carhack - carraig - rock.

4.

Line 006.01 - thurum - tuairim - an opinion.

5.

Line 014.01 - turves - tórramh - a wake.

6.

Line 017.24 - morthering rue - maidrín rua - little red dog, a young fox.

7.

Line 021.30 - luderman - ludramán - a fool.

8.

Line 024.15 - anam muck an dhoul - anam mhic an diabhail - the soul of

the son of the devil. 9.

Line 024.31 - clay - clé - left.

10.

Line 024.34 - broin - brón - sorrow.

16

Fir Bolg - according to ‘The Book of Invasions’ one of the peoples which occupied Ireland prior to the arrival of the Celts. 17 Milesians - according to ‘The Book of Invasions’ the final wave of invaders to occupy Ireland. The English term is derived from the Irish language title ‘Maccaib Mhíle’ literally meaning ‘the sons of Milesius’.

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Line 025.25 - buddhoch - bodach - a lout.

12.

Line 026.03 - tilly - a thuilleadh - more, extra.

13.

Line 034.16 - shomers - seomra - room.

14.

Line 037.25 - mowshe dho hole - más é do thoil é - if it is your will.

15.

Line 039.35 - duck and doggies - deoch an dorais - the drink of the door -

the parting glass. 16.

Line 041.04 – o’deavis - o dia fios - o God knows.

17.

Line 043.20 - caoch - caoch - blind.

18.

Line 044.07 - rann - rann - a verse.

19.

Line 049.09 - cawer - cathair - city.

20.

Line 050.17-18 - bhi she - bhí sí - she was. In these words Ireland lives. Maybe not Ireland as we would surely have

her but Ireland in all her infuriating, irresistible, beautifully tragic glory. Ireland as she is to us. Ireland as she was to Joyce. The tributaries of the mind flow into one great raging torrent. Streams of both personal and folk consciousness mix and mingle with those that have journeyed from faraway hills and break for a border which they, in their present form, can never recross. This is not to say, however, that they cannot rise again, that everything they carry with them will be lost to the sea into which they themselves are about to dissolve. They may wake up dead as the Irish say but they will awake, in the hinterlands of days well dreamed and nights long lived where faction is fiction and triumph truth and where commentary spills onto the field of play and becomes a two minute, two point game of a comeback realised. The ball breaks on the half-back line and flashes lightening above, beneath, around and through the hapless, helpless now not so confident defence. The hurls bend and spring and clash. The forwards burst into the square, the spectators rise from their seats, tension fills the fever pitch as the sliotar, destiny and the future slams into the raised hand of the one man who can change everything. He turns. He strikes, the second splits as the world is gripped by a great not-knowing, the not-knowing in which all romance truly lies, as a million glances, last chances and soft-eyed smiles scream the shot through the letters of a script prematurely written. The lines unwind themselves. The sentences break as

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style taps the shoulder of a sleeping giant and Fionn awakes and calls to his lost girls and speaks of the duties of love and the reinvention of endless beautiful friendship which raises the hackles and shakes the shackles of those experts on everyone else who, chained as they are to the basement radiators of bad memory, disappointment and the vicissitudes of the human experience, view with disdain and growing disquiet, his ancient, oceanic assertion that the very cosmos is powered and sung electric (good man Walt) by a trillion, timeless, momentary love affairs, both infinite and infinitesimal in duration, which flicker in and out of existence across the curved corners of that void of dark vaulted reality which mankind's unreasonable need for rational order, even in matters of literature, poetry and the heart, has brought into being. Those who think little of us and our ways tremble and denounce our stubbornness, seeing that such a re-imagining, philosophical, at least, in it's outward features would raise our sad composition from the level of a pleasant though misguided foolishness to that of a quantum political science, within the parameters of which their refusal to leave well enough alone added to their classification of the hidden courtship of big shots' daughters by those who will not be falsified by remnants of mortality here or in deeds in Tara, as scheduled, criminal conspiracy and acts of international terrorism, would make their position seem not only illogical but ridiculous. Something which would, of course, utterly subvert the uptight suspicion upon which they thrive and completely overthrow their absolute insistence that the mystical spaces which exists between men and women, legend and logic, be overseen and patrolled by East German border guards, ably assisted by Alsatian attack dogs called killer and that every single parallel which yet divides truth from beauty be lit up and illuminated by black and white blitz film ak ak guns fired both by grounded, groundless Biggles and squadrons of peninsular Stalinists who no longer truly know for whom or for what they fight. They, these cats of dependent claws that is, exhausted, now as always, by their somewhat less than impressive list of qualifications and facile dissertations, eventually stand aghast, whispering smoke and myrrh into their long, aged Jameson and Coke, thus distilling with bitter breath, all affection, hope and human connection down to a whiskey bar rhythm of biology, ulterior motive and

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double meaning nervous laughter which snare-drums a tough rap of kept time to which no star can dance but which sounds, in an unquestionably unsound way, like a mature, evolving, fiscally responsible anthem of cold, calculating craven cries with which no wonderment can live and for which no one will die. Meanwhile back at the Blanch where twenty is the new seventy and going out is the new staying in, Lydia the Lithuanian languishing with lots of love from Liamo and the lads leers over loquaciously at Lucas from whom she is poles apart while Barney buttering his bread on both sides just to be sure, to be sure, quizzes chequebook Charlie, who eighting chips off his shoulder waves to Cliodhna who fitting at the counter, flogs goldshop fags to Fergus who having slipped a disc stooping for conkers tells Mossy, out with his cossy, of the lack of bon mots in Leeson Street, of how Candida was far from candid with her less than nobel chap and of that ghost of the hero which his auld wan shaw while Bernie, originally from ovens, who spent a week reading children's books on the beach in Benidorm and thought they were brillo, doesn't tell the misses of the Clarissa he kisses in the print shop he visits but bores her rigid with the prices of fridges, the stretchiness of bad jumpers and his big plans for an alien invasion film of huge rabbits called thumpers while Jacky must pack and to England go back after getting the sack for being no crack as a funeral usher in Tadhg Kelleher's hearse and limo service which, as the man says, brings you where you want to go dead or alive while poor Rita, stumped with the bales out, sips her Rosé redily, now well beyond the crying over fellahs stage but good-looking in that grey haired sort of way, roos her redeployment to Rockall where she is to sell project mats to penguins while Fíona corners malice sprung flag-markets where friendship rules football and the union jacks everything else. Donal wipes his HD glasses just to see a little depth in the pub while Larry the looper, late of the lost city of Leakslip but who jogs to Jobstown every day just to find out if they've got one, chats to Billy who says nuthin drunk which he wooden stay sober and sops Darjeeling just for something to do. Down the back Mount Charles breakers still trying to golfclubsoda lifeblood out of their razor sharp suits get not just desserts but take the soup and the meancourse as well while slander wagons, slobbering coffee more ethical

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than they are, circle the bar, looking for any supposed young eegit or auld fool to scelp but say not a word of brand new models shifting gear with horse-dealers down below in the off street smoking zone. The hits keep coming and the plasma crackles to life sèancing strut season mandarins who defending their right to bare legs, barrel bad apples down a new tunnel and then go home and dry for Ulster or sour-faced good engines feeling dank, temper mental dating agencies by insisting that after a few points Banba is anyone's while perth Priscilla hands out free purple in the porch to the last of the great international ploughboys who stroking her cheek and singing fare thee well my own true love, prance, unperturbed apparently, into yet another Celtic twilight. But then how many goodbyes can a man say before it maims him. How many slow, unlikely auf wiedersehens can he suffer before his heart becomes no more than a cross of sinew and flesh, a muscle weighing heavily upon a hollow, empty chest which pumps the blood to limbs now forever going and a mind that fearful of imagining, conjures up memories of a time that never was before parting broke the days of languid, longing summers when all his favourite stories oh Aisling, were stories of you.

CHAPTER EIGHT A PRAYER FOR A RESURRECTION MAN Breaking the Circle of Finnegans Wake Every student of the work of James Joyce is aware of the fundamentally circular nature of ‘Finnegans Wake‘. The book is structurally a ‘ring’ with no real beginning or end, a cyclone of words and word-actions which reek havoc on the periphery of human understanding while leaving, at the same time, it's heartlands largely untouched. One can, if one chooses to, simply observe the phenomenon from a distance, remain in safety, hear its howls but feel none of its effects. If, however, a reader truly wishes to experience the revolving chaos, he must accept that this is a storm that will not simply come to him, that it has to be chased, that he must take his courage in his hands and drive right into the developing maelstrom. But where, at what exact point, should he make his entrance. This depends upon what he is attempting to achieve. Narrative is, to say the very least of it, far from central to the work. The language is the story and since that language remains largely stable in its instability across the elements and episodes, he might knock on any door and be pleased with his reception. Certainly the mood will vary from unit to unit. At times he might feel like apologising for the intrusion, at others made somewhat uncomfortable by the fact that no one seems to notice that he is there but then there are easier books with which he could engage if it is the ‘red carpet’ treatment that he seeks. The ‘Wake’ won't hug you like a long lost cousin but it won't throw you out on your ear either. A welcome all the more satisfying for its moderation and sincerity. If it is the word games associated with the work that are your primary interest then almost any page of the volume will, more than adequately, serve your needs. If it is the deployment of one particular language or dialect that you find fascinating then certain hunting grounds will prove far happier than others. If the reviewing of references to the output of other writers is your main concern

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then an examination of the numerous glossaries and keys will point you in the right direction and thereby limit the amount of firsthand work which you will have to do. If instances of humour, political and historical allusion, literary theory or off-centre characterisation are what tickle your fancy then a degree of preparation will tell you exactly where you should set your sights. If, however, it is message that you are after, that you intend to mine then you must concentrate your efforts upon the weakest point of the circumference, the only part of the novel which presents a coal face into which one can burrow and dig, the only part where the different strata which form the whole are clearly to be seen, that moment of structural disconnection which the Laws of Physics impose on the ‘Wake’, namely the opening and closing segments of the physical book. ‘Finnegans Wake’ is regarded by many as being, in essence, some form of intellectual hypermarket in which anything that is sought can be found, that it can be turned into anything you wish, made mean anything you would like it to mean. Since all human life is present and therefore, in a very real sense, all human experience is accounted for in its pages, a view has emerged which sees the work as some strangely lob-sided conversation in which the import of that which the speaker says is not so much dependent on the listener's capacity to understand but upon his decision to interpret the words as he sees fit. Now, certainly, there are different levels of comprehension associated with the ‘Wake’, levels which are linked directly to that which the reader already knows, to those features which his knowledge allows him to recognise in the text but this is not to say, for one moment, that Joyce is the junior partner in the relationship, the supplier of bricks and mortar rather than the architect of the edifice. He is not a mere facilitator nor is the reader, through the act of reading, rewriting the book. The author is communicating with the world. He has something to say, a message constructed from a myriad of sketches, images, tongues, twists and turns, a grand theme which sweeps through the leaves of the saga and rattles the windows of perception. ‘Finnegans Wake’ is not about everything, for if it were, it would, in truth, be about nothing. Its obscurity and opaqueness is not born of an intention to tell too little but rather of a determination to tell too much, to manifest truth and beauty in all their multi-faceted, multi-dimensional glory, to view that which ‘is’

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in a new and completely original way. Most other works of literature are essentially descriptive in their nature, differing from business-letters, birthday cards and sick notes only in terms of extent, standard of writing and the deployment of style. Fundamentally they all function as members of the one set, different versions of the same thing. The ‘Wake’, however, exists on another plane. Joyce not only wishes the reader to see the truth, he wants him to feel it, to encounter it as he does in the tangible world, imperfectly, inadequately and therefore authentically. The reader is bombarded by a million light-bearing particles to which he is either vulnerable or impervious. If the latter is the case then they will simply strike against him and fall to the floor like so many dead flies. If the former is true then they will enter his body, run through his bloodstream and gather in his brain. It is only at this point that the reader plays his part in the great performance and then only if he can. If he is unable to recognise any of the elements then he will not have any idea at all of what the writer is speaking. If he knows each and every one of them then he will achieve a complete comprehension of that which the author is trying to convey. If he falls somewhere between the two stools, which, needless to say, everyone does, the accuracy of his perception will depend entirely upon the extent and quality of his understanding, an understanding contingent upon many factors. How au fait is he with world literature? How good is he at breaking codes? Would he know a portmanteau word or a multilingual pun if it hit him? How deep is his knowledge of Irish history, mythology, geography, politics or society? Has he any facility with the Irish language or Hiberno-English18? Does he know the Irish personality and mindset? Does he appreciate how Joyce thinks? Does he know what Ireland looks, smells, tastes or sounds like? And then most crucially of all how did he come by whatever information that he might have in regard to each of these. Has he an insider's or an outsider's ‘take‘ on these questions? ‘Finnegans Wake’ is, by far, the most culturally Irish of all of James Joyce's works. It shudders with the nuances, subtleties and contradictions of Irish 18

Hiberno-English - a dialect of English spoken in Ireland which being heavily under the influence of the Irish language, makes use of vocabulary and syntactical forms not to be found in the standard tongue. Until quite recently this was the predominant form of English employed in Ireland.

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life. It is therefore significantly easier for Irish readers than for anyone else to recognise the central theme as it develops, to feel it as it is supposed to be felt, to achieve a more than passing comprehension of the author's intentions but this is not to say that the message of the book will, inevitably, be lost on the wider world community. One need not be a member of the Irish nation to see what is really being said but if one is not, it will be necessary to learn to think like one. The failure of a reader to do so will result in his becoming meshed in the long dark hair of the work, obsessed with elements of colour and perspective and at least partially blinded to the actual picture that Joyce is attempting to paint, the impression of the world that he is struggling to give. The mind of ‘Finnegans Wake’ is a quintessentially Irish one, filled with the ghosts and sprites of a haunted people. Its consciousness is also, of course, universal but due only to the porous nature of all experiential borders, lines through which nightmares ride unhindered, free to commit, against a sleeping humanity, their acts of international terrorism. Now Joyce is all about honesty, telling the truth though the heavens fall has always been his game. The only dreams that he has ever dreamt are his own, the only thought processes of which he has any intimate knowledge are those which flit and flicker in the deepest recesses of his own brain. It is these that he must bring to life, these and none other, to do anything else would involve him in the perpetration of a fraud, a renunciation of his own artistic purpose and integrity. It is not then through choice per say, that he invests the ‘Wake’ with the spirit of Ireland, the spirit in which he has been marinated to the marrow of his bones. He is simply being faithful to himself and his own. Spirit, however, is a difficult thing to convey in letters, more difficult still if an author is not content to simply describe it. Hard, straight lines will give no sense of the phenomenon. The words must float and roll like smoke on the air. The ‘Wake’ is not an exercise in Photography, the images are not well defined. Snapshots of history will not do the trick. A linguistic Impressionism is required to give greater depth than their capacity for minute accuracy would provide, a depth which strangely and somewhat paradoxically is most efficiently and effectively measured and appreciated by a careful interaction with surface-detail,

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for it is that which you encounter on the surface of the novel that ultimately effects you, makes you feel as you do. The purpose of a more involved scrutiny of the text should therefore be to find an explanation for the emotional reaction prompted by the words, to identify the medium and method used by the author to bring such a situation about and to thereby achieve a fuller and more rounded understanding of both the writer's psychological makeup and yours. What he wants to say but not, necessarily, what you want to hear. With all of this in mind therefore let us turn our attention back to that break in the circle, to the text that surrounds the physical scar on the skin of the ‘Wake’, to the moment at which end flows into beginning, a fusion which utterly obliterates both concepts. It is here that the central theme of the work is, inevitably, at its most obvious and vulnerable but to be detected the structural order of the sections must be reversed with day following night rather than night following day, since the ‘Wake’ , in truth, commences not on page number one but in the dying paragraphs of the tale, resurrection and its possibilities forming both the tangible and thematic essence of this most romantic of masterpieces. The pages which precede the last great soliloquy of the ‘Wake’ give some indication of what Joyce is intending to do. A long involved section, filled with references to ancient Irish mythology suddenly crashes into a paragraph which maintains a clearly Fenian theme but speaks directly now of Fionn Mac Chumhaill, who is said to be buried on the hill of Howth, rising from his slumber, rising from the dead. ‘he being as bothered that he pausably could by the fallth of hampty damp‘, Humpty Dumpty, whom all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put back together again, being an incarnation that the writer uses throughout the work to dramatise the collapse of British moral authority in Ireland following the executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising. Legend had held that Fionn would come back to life if Ireland needed him to do so and this is exactly what the writer maintains is now occurring in these lines. He then describes the very moment of resurrection with the words,

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‘Hence we've lived in two worlds. He is another he what stays under the himp of holth. The herewaker of our hamefame is his real namesame who will get himself up and erect, confident and heroic, when but, young as of old’ This particular passage contains allusions to both Isaac Butt, the great Irish parliamentary leader and also to General Holt of the United Irishmen. It also clearly has sexual overtones. The risen Fionn will not be the aged and embittered warrior of the later Fiannaíocht tales. He will return as he was ‘of old’, heroic, confident and virile. This image echoes a belief common amongst many Republican theorists of the early twentieth century, notably James Connolly, a conviction that was, later, to be held in many Colonial and post-Colonial situations across the world, that acts of Insurrection had a psychological as well as a political purpose, that they could undo the emasculating effect that Colonialism tends to have on the male population of any subject people, an effect which Joyce also, of course, confronts in the character of Leopold Bloom in ‘Ulysses’ where the feminine quality that others in that work attribute to this central personality is, in fact, the very definition of his Irishness, an Irishness that some of them then attempt to deny. Even at this point, before the soliloquy begins, if you listen very carefully you can hear the writer revving his engines. You can just feel that he is going for broke, the overall sense being one of, here goes nothing and here comes everyone. It is as if the mind of the author is filling up with the sights and sounds of his past, that memory and imagination are coalescing into a new broad front and as his life flashes before his eyes and the waters gather, that which was a stream suddenly becomes a river, becomes a torrent of consciousness. ‘Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speafing’, thus begins the procession with the ‘leafy’, the Liffey but also the wearer of the ivy leaf, the Parnellite, Joyce himself, starting out on their final journey to the sea and oblivion. The first image that one then encounters in this passage is a religious one: ‘Folty and folty all the nights have falled on to long my hair’, a reference both to the forty days and forty nights that Jesus Christ spent in the desert and also, therefore, to the author's years of exile on the European

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continent, an echo which is reinforced by the play on the name of the French city of Toulon and the German phrase ‘mein Herr‘ which is to be found at the end of the line. This sub-theme is then further strengthened by the words, ‘And robins in crews so‘, Robinson Crusoe, as Joyce portrays himself as a castaway separated and isolated from his own people. At this stage the plot begins to thicken as Joyce commences a process of rapid switching and alternation between representations of different features and stages of his life. In the same way as the Liffey is both the sum of all its tributaries and the product of the spring from which it has sprung so too is he. James Joyce, the man, the writer, the concept, is everything he has ever felt, heard, thought, said or believed. He is everyone that he has ever read, spoken to or known and now he is going and as he puts it himself in the final stages of the soliloquy: ‘if I go all goes’. Fionn Mac Chumhaill, by now, the embodiment of a new fearless and vigorous Ireland, re-enters the fray at this point with the author telling him to, ‘Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long’. Then the author hears his own mother saying, ‘Here is your shirt, the day one, come back’, and then again, ‘And stand up tall! Straight. I want to see you looking fine for me’, elements again which contain nuances of the return of national pride and virility. Róisín Dubh, the Little Black Rose, the feminine incarnation of Ireland, then takes centre-stage with quick-fire mentions, in a matter of three lines, of ‘Blooming’, ‘Budd’ and ‘Rosensharonals’, features, two of which at least, awaken the memory of Leopold Bloom in mind of the reader, as does the statement, ‘hugly Judsys, what wouldn't you give to have a girl!‘, which incorporates also, of course, the name of Saint Jude, the Catholic patron saint of hopeless cases.

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Another such echo of Joyce's previous work then appears on page six hundred and twenty of the book when the author states, ‘Maybe it's those two old crony aunts held them out to the water front’, these ‘crony aunts‘ being the ‘Conroy’ aunts, the Morkan sisters of ‘The Dead‘. Indeed the line, ‘The Head does be worrying himself ‘, which appears on the same page, has something of the character of Deasy in ‘Ulysses‘ about it, since in his conversation with Stephen Daedalus in that work, this particular Headmaster seems to worry himself about everything from the safest ways in which to carry money to the prevalence of ‘Foot and Mouth‘ disease. Equally, being an Empire Loyalist, he is also intent upon worrying Daedalus, dispelling any illusions about the Irish nation under which the young teacher might be labouring and thus proving the natural superiority of imperial, British Culture to him. These literary allusions do not, however, stand alone. They are interspersed with images of a more domestic and personal nature. For example the segment, ‘There is no school today. Them boys is so contrairy‘, echoes both the interruptions that occurred in the author's schooling as a result of his father's financial profligacy and also the somewhat competitive quality which was central to his relationship with his brother Stanislaus, a theme which is also to be seen in the following passage, ‘I see the likes in the twinngling of an aye. Som. so oft. Sim. Time after time. The sehm asnuh. Two bredder as doffered as nors in soun. When one of him sighs or one of him cries 'tis you all over. No peace at all’ ‘sehm asnuh’, ‘the same as now’, is an obvious anagram of ‘shem shaun’ a reference to pivotal characters who are portrayed as being two sides of the one coin throughout the ‘Wake’. The fact that Séamus is James and Seán is John in Irish, coupled with the fact that this brief section is all about the connections which exist between brothers and those which are to be found between fathers and sons seems to indicate that the writer saw Stanislaus and himself as being, ultimately, simply different versions of their father John Joyce.

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The writer also refers to his association with Nora Barnacle at this early point in the soliloquy with the words, ‘Come and let us! We always said we'd. And go abroad. Rathgreany way perhaps’. This segment is particularly interesting since ‘we'd’ clearly stands not only for ‘we would’ but also for ‘wed’ , indicating, as it seems to, not only that the couple had always intended to marry but that they had wished to do so before they ever left Ireland. The deployment of the place name ‘Rathgreany’ here is also extremely significant in that its use tells us something of how the author viewed his love affair with his later wife. In the ancient Irish saga ‘Toraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne’, a now old and villainous Fionn Mac Chumhaill, not the young and heroic warrior of the earlier stories whom Joyce calls upon to rise from his slumber, pursues the young lovers Diarmuid Ó Duibhne and Gráinne, the daughter of the High-King, across the length and breath of Ireland. Eventually negotiations take place during which Diarmuid wrests certain compromises from both Fionn and the King and is seen to have won the peace. He then takes up residence with his new wife in Rath Ghráinne or Rathgreany in the west of the country, far from all centres of power and his enemies. There, the young couple raise their family in peace and splendid isolation. By making reference to this saga, in this way, Joyce is making clear that he does not regard his and Nora's exile from their homeland as being in any sense a defeat. They left the country on their own terms. Equally by comparing their relationship with that of Diarmuid and Gráinne he is imbuing it with heroism and an extraordinary level of romance thus revealing his pride in it and what he clearly saw as being its mythic almost metaphysical nature. The early section of the final soliloquy is replete with references to the life, loves and imagination of the author. A point, however, is reached in it when the river of consciousness must move on and Joyce brings the first act of the drama to a close with the statement, ‘there isn't much more dirty clothes to publish’. At this stage the character of the Liffey becomes predominant and the language of the piece changes somewhat. The river is approaching the sea. Sweet

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and salt water are beginning to mix, a fusion which is represented by the writer in the very words he uses. The passages are now filled with distorted geographical points of reference, Scandinavian names, snatches of street conversations, as the Liffey comes home to Dublin, comes home to die but dies in the sure and certain knowledge that it will rise again. The theme of resurrection remains constant throughout this section of the work. On page six hundred and twenty one the phrase, ‘Its phoenix, dear‘, is to be found, reflecting both the fact that the Liffey is arriving in the vicinity of the Phoenix Park and also that the city of Dublin itself is rising from its ashes. On the same page the reader encounters the element, ‘the timpul they ring the earthy bells’, the feature ‘timpul’ representing both the words ‘teampall’ meaning church and ‘timpeall’ standing for ‘around’ in the Irish language thus again dramatising the cyclical nature of life and reality, of life springing from death. Indeed at a slightly earlier juncture Joyce includes the fragment, ‘pearse orations’, an allusion to Pádraig Pearse's oration at the grave of O'Donovan Rossa in which the phrase, ‘life springs from death’ is actually used. On page six hundred and twenty five one comes across the statements, ‘thems the muchrooms come up during the night’, and: ‘once it happened so it may again‘, the employment of the word ‘may‘ here connecting the concept of rebirth with the executions of the the leaders of the 1916 Insurrection since most of these were carried out shortly after the event, many in the month of May of that year. This is not, however, the only occasion when Joyce alludes to the Easter Rising at this stage of the work. In these pages he also, for example, says, ‘But once done, dealt, and delivered, tattat, you're on the map‘, then later he declares, ‘The brave that gave their. The fair that wore, all them that's gunne‘, and at another point,

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‘We can sit us down on the heathery benn, me on you, in quolm unconsciounce. To scand the arising’, The ‘heathery benn’ here referred to being ‘Beann Eadair’ or in English, the hill of Howth. This segment, therefore, not only includes again an allusion to the supposed burial place of Fionn Mac Chumhaill but also incorporates a reference to an important episode in the relationship of Leopold and Molly Bloom. Equally it contains a personal element. Samuel Beckett who acted as Joyce's secretary during the writing of some of ‘Finnegans Wake’ was a child in Dublin during the Easter Rising and was brought by his father to the mountains so as to observe the great fires. Another personal comment on the resurrection of Ireland is to be found in the line, ‘I pity your oldself I was used to. Now a younger's there’. The writer makes mention of his writing of ‘Finnegans Wake’ at this juncture in the novel, at one point referring to the book as, ‘Finglas since the flood’, and also on page six hundred and twenty three where he says of his own writing, ‘my currant bread's full of sillymottocraft’. On page six hundred and twenty seven of the work with the Liffey now about to cease to exist as a separate entity, with its death now imminent, the mind of the writer, rather than that of the river becomes predominant again. Joyce, at this point, declares, ‘Anyway let her rain for my time is come’, a line which introduces the final paragraphs of the book, a sequence of sentences which must rank amongst the most poignant anywhere in world literature as James Joyce, clearly aware of the fragility of his health, suddenly and devastatingly says goodbye to his own people and country. The loneliness of this piece is heartrending. Joyce commences it by confessing his own vanity and denigrating his life's work. He describes himself angrily as the ‘puny‘ , a mere technician of puns and punning, ‘How small it's all. And me letting on to meself always. And lilting on all the time. I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You're

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only a bumpkin. I thought you were the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You're but a puny‘. He then speaks lovingly of the Irish people and how, in his mind's eye, he is back in their company, ‘Home! My people were not their sort out beyond there so far as I can. For all the bold and the bad and bleary they are blamed, the seahags. No! Nor for all our wild dances in all their wild din. I can see meself among them‘. At this point he makes reference again to the Easter Rising, to the fact that it had occurred as nature was being reborn, that it had happened in the Spring, ‘And the clash of our cries till we spring to be free‘. It is then, in the final segment of this most personal of statements, that he speaks of the loneliness of a life spent amongst strangers and of his conviction that that life is about to end. He is returning to his fathers, his heavenly one certainly but also to the now dead John Joyce. He again sees his countrymen rising and is beset by pangs of guilt. He wishes his readership to know exactly when this section was written and therefore includes a reference to the French Fascist leader Pierre Laval as a device by which it can be dated. He wishes these lines, in essence, to be seen as his dying declaration. He alludes to the fact that one leaf clings to him still, this, of course, being the ivy leaf. In other words he will leaves this world an unrepentant Parnellite. He concludes this passage with the element ‘Whish. A gull’ or in the Irish language ‘Éist ag gol‘, stop weeping, then calls again on Fionn to rise and, with that, allows the end to flow into the beginning, ‘But I'm loothing them that's here and all I lothe. Loonely in me loneness. For all their faults. 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, moamanoaning, 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,

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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’. And so, suddenly, by a ‘vicus of recirculation‘ we find ourselves back on Howth head and the supposed burial place of Fionn Mac Chumhaill. Time has been reset, rewound. The reader has, at this point, read the novel once. The book has taught him how he should engage with its words. Everything seems clearer now, clearer but in some way different. We now understand more and so we seem to encounter a different version of the same story. This time around the reference to Dublin, Laurens county, Georgia which we find in the second paragraph of the first page, seems like more than a mere affectation, more than just another example of Joyce's linguistic virtuosity. Dublin is not only alive again but is reproducing, replicating itself across the world. The ‘boomeringstroms‘ of page four have thus been thrown but are now returning to the thrower. ‘the oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay’, Ireland is back, changed certainly but back for all that. Fionn has also risen from the dead. He, too, is transformed. No longer the heroic warrior of old but now a builder. He has become Timothy Finnegan of the ballad of ‘Finnegans Wake‘, strong, powerful, successful, modern. The lines which describe him reverberate with hope and optimism. ‘Mister Finn, you're going to be Mister Finnagain’, ‘Mister Funn, you're going to be fined again!’, and then suddenly, in the midst of references to ancient stone monuments and Masonic practices he mysteriously dies again and Ireland returns, once more, to being a shadow of her former self, ‘Only a fadograph of a yestern scene’, the element ‘fado’ echoing both the English verb ‘to fade’ and the Irish word for ‘long ago’, ‘fadó’ while ‘yestern’ incorporates, in equal measure, the English adjective ‘western’ and the German form which represents the concept of

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‘yesterday’,’gestern’. The country has become little more than a fading photograph of a former, more glorious time. To emphasis the extent of the collapse, in an episode very reminiscent, in theme at least, of the Fiannaíocht accounts of Oisín's return from Tír na nÓg where that ancient warrior having aged not a day for a period of three hundred years in the land of youth, returns to Ireland to find it inhabited by a more modern but lesser caste of men, Joyce brings the reader on a tour of a ‘Wallinstone’ or Wellington Museum, a conceptually unstable edifice which structurally seems to possess both the features of an equine monument and also those of an actual building. ‘The mistress Kathe’, works as a ‘janitrix’ at this place and holds the ‘passkey supply’. Joyce is, of course, here alluding to Kitty O' Shea and is directly referencing an exchange that occurred at a meeting of the Irish Parliamentary Party, in the immediate aftermath of the divorce scandal, where the now disgraced Parnell, having declared that he was still, ‘the master of this party‘, was answered by Tim Healy with the phrase, ‘yes but who is the mistress‘. The reference to Kitty being the holder of the pass keys here may have some sexual connotations and is indicative of a tendency in the author, a tendency common amongst many Parnellites at the time, to hold Catherine O'Shea largely responsible for the liaison which ultimately destroyed the ‘Chief‘ and which completely subverted the drive for national independence. This ‘Museyroom’ is a strange place, filled with relics of the victories of Wellington. Arthur Wellesley is portrayed by a hero-worshipping narrator, who functions, in essence, as a museum guide, as being, in a very real sense, superhuman. We are given a long, involved sequence of descriptions of his encounters with the ‘Lipoleums‘. Now, certainly, this particularly word does echo the sound of the name of Wellington’s nemesis Napoleon Bonaparte but a second component is to found in the term. The ‘Lipoleums‘ exhibit none of the godlike characteristics that the so-called ‘Iron Duke’ does or indeed that Emperor of the French did, they are ordinary men, mere mortals, full of faults and failings. Equally they appear to be Irish soldiers of the Nationalist tradition, the so-called

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‘Wild Geese‘ who fought in their thousands in the armies of continental Europe during much of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries. Joyce, in this passage, is again referencing his other work and is using his most famous ‘everyman’ character to convey the fundamentally flawed, human nature of that version of the Irish people which had survived after the fall into mediocrity which accompanied the demise of Fionn Mac Chumhaill and the heroic society which he represents, for, in essence, the ‘Lipoleums’ are not primarily the ‘Napoleons’, they are, in fact, the ‘Leopold Blooms’. The term ‘Jinnies’ is also to be found throughout the passage. This formulation has a far more obvious provenance. ‘Seoinín’ in the Irish language has come to mean an obsequious person of any type but originally meant an Irish individual who adopted the customs, habits and mannerisms of the British occupiers. Its ultimate root is the name ‘Seán‘ or in English ‘John‘, ‘Jackeen‘ which is simply now a term used for any Dubliner but was, once only used of the Loyalists of the Pale, being just another version of the designation. The ‘Jinnies‘ are the little ‘Johns’, the little ‘John Bulls’, the little ‘Jeans’, the ‘inimyskilling inglis‘, the Enniskillen English, as also appears in the tract. The ‘Jinnies’ are the Colonial rather than native Irish. Those who, being loyal to the British crown, fought in the British army. The term ‘Jinnies’ also echoes the word ‘jennet’. Though the word is commonly used in Ireland to refer to a foolish or stupid individual, it is actually a technical term for creatures which are produced by the cross breeding of horses and donkeys. This allusion to donkeys then continues into the final lines of the section, the central character of which is called ‘seeboy’. On one level this element is referencing the word ‘sepoy’, an Indian soldier serving in the British army, on another it is alluding to the house of Savoy and the part it played in European politics in the early nineteenth century, however, the predominant form here is, in fact, ‘C boy’ or Daniel O' Connell, an interpretation that is supported by the presence of the structure ‘madrashataras‘ which incorporates firstly the form ‘mad, rash at tara’, secondly ‘madrasa at tara’, both of which refer to the great Monster Meeting held by O’Connell on the hill of Tara in August, 1843 and finally the formulation ‘madras shot taras’, a ‘madra’ being a dog in Irish,

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alluding, as it does, to the violence that the supporters of the Repeal Movement often suffered at the hands of the forces of the British state. The Duke of Wellington, who had been born in Ireland, had once, famously, denied his Irishness by stating that just because he was born in a stable that this did not mean that he was a horse. At a Monster Meeting held at Mullaghmast, O’Connell had responded to this jibe by saying, ‘perhaps not but it does make one an ass’. In these lines Joyce double plays the word ‘ass’, using it, both, to mean a donkey and also to refer to Wellington's, apparently, ample posterior, ‘This is Willingdone, bornstable ghentleman, tinders his maxbotch to the cursigan Shimar Shin. Basucker youstead! This is the dooforhim seeboy blow the whole of the half of the hat of lipoleums off of the top of the tail on the back of his big wide harse’ The author then adds insult to injury by including the fragment, ‘Shimar Shin’, a transliterated form of an Irish language construction ‘suigh mar sin’ or in English ‘sit down then’. This entire passage gives the reader an impression of a debased Ireland, inhabited now by a population essentially inferior to that which its forefathers made up, a nation of hoplites which fights in everyone else's wars, a country in which he who denies his origins is lionised and where the native community is brutalised, where as Joyce says and now using ‘jinny or ginny goat’ as the predominant form, ‘Goat strip Finnlambs‘. At this point in the work Ireland seems lost, the situation seems hopeless but as soon as we have withdrawn from the museum, the following fragment appears, ‘What a warm time we were in there but how keling is here the airabouts! We nowhere she lives but you mussna tell annaone‘, Éire is still about but she is in hiding, waiting for the opportunity to rise again.Thus commences a section in which Britannia, the female representation of British power, and Róisín Dubh, the feminine incarnation of the Irish spirit come

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to the fore. The former is intent on maintaining her control of Ireland, determined to continue to ‘kick arias‘, to kick Éires, to keep the Irish down. Joyce says of her, ‘How bootiful and how truetowife of her, when strengly forebidden, to steal our historic presents from the past postpropheticals so as to will make us all lordy heirs and ladymaidesses of a pretty nice kettle of fruit. She is living in our midst of debt and laffing through all plores for us (her birth is uncontrollable), with a naperon for her mask and her sabboes kickin arias (so sair! so solly!) if yous ask me I saack you’. A conversation then takes place between a young man and the Róisín Dubh personage. The youth is fearful that all of our ‘historic presents’ have, in fact, been stolen, that all of those cultural features which have arisen as a result of our ‘historic presence’ on the island of Ireland, have been misappropriated by our enemies. The writer puts it thus, ‘Did ye save any tin says he. Did I what? with a grin says she. And we all like a marriedann because she is mercenary. Though the length of the land lies under liquidation ( floote! ) and there's nare a hairbrow nor an eyebush on this glaubrous place of Herrschuft Whatarwelter she'll loan a vesta and hire some peat and sarch the shores her cockles to heat and she'll do all a turfwoman can to piff the business on. Paff. To puff the blaziness on. Poffpoff. And even if Humpty shell fall frumpty times as awkward again in the beardsboosoloom of all our grand remonstrancers there'll be iggs for brekkers come to mournhim, sunny side up with care’. Clearly Ireland is waiting and is ready for the moment when Humpty Dumpty falls again, when foreign authority again collapses and when it does, it will devour it, will, literally, have it for breakfast. The question, however, then arises, even if the country can save something of herself, can she rescue enough of herself to ever truly regain that which she once was. In the final lines of this opening segment of the work Joyce, firstly, reworks the following words of Jonathan Swift, ‘Now here’s a proof of Irish sense, Here Irish wit is seen,

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When nothing's left that's worth defence, We build a magazine‘, into, ‘Behove this sound of Irish sense. Really? Here English might be seen. Royally? One sovereign punned to petery pence. Regally? The silence speaks the scene. Fake!’. He then adds the following lines, ‘So This is Dyoublong? Hush! Caution. Echoland!’ The reference to Echoland certainly is designed to indicate that Ireland, following the death of Fionn Mac Chumhaill and all that he stood for, has become no more than an echo of the loud heroic roar against the darkness that it once was. Equally that Colonisation has reduced the expression of the Irish to little more than an echo of that which their masters say. This is completely in keeping with the entire tenor of the author's rewritten lines of Swift, that the country is now defined by its silence. ‘Echoland’ also, however, seems to incorporate the phrase ‘ecce homo‘, ‘behold the man’, the words spoken by Pontius Pilate when he presented the scourged Jesus Christ to the hostile crowd which was demanding his execution and also the title of Friedrich Nietzsche's final original work ‘Ecce Homo, how one becomes what one is‘, a book which speaks of the creation of a higher self through a searing honesty which overwhelms one's baser instincts. The second line of the couplet therefore directs how exactly the first one should be read. ‘So This is Dyoublong ?’, is not therefore, as it is often portrayed as being, an expression of the writer's alienation from Irish society but is rather both a genuine enquiry and a call for the making of a serious decision. Which Ireland do you actually belong to and to which Ireland would you like to belong, the romantic one that plays hard ball or the comfortable version which tells you to sit in your tracksuit and simply let life pass you by. The Ireland that fills you full of warm tea and microwaved, coffee shop chat or the Ireland that looks you in the eye, asks you questions that

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you don't understand and spits at you when you don't answer quickly enough. To whom or what do you belong? To whom or what do you want to belong? Can you belong to anything, even to yourself and do you wish to? Can you rise? Can you wake up or are you content to curl up with a bad book in your padded coffin ? Resurrection is certainly, to Joyce at least, part of a natural order, a process of continuous reinvention whereby an individual or a society, in response to those demands that time and circumstances make of it, changes in basic and fundamental ways, a readjustment which, on the face of it, often seems to be indicative of a general decline. If, however, a Culture remains loyal to those essential values which made it unique in the first instance or an ageing person holds on, grimly, to that part of himself or herself that is twenty one forever then outward appearance is irrelevant and rebirth stands as an ever present reality. The overcoming of death, in any context, may, in a sense indeed be a cyclical thing but it is not a transformational occurrence that is brought about, solely, by external forces or stimuli. It is also an act of will. If one is raised by another, one remains in a dependent condition. One is as one has been made rather than as one has chosen to be. It is only by choosing to rise, acting upon that choice, rolling back the boulder with the strength of one's own determination and walking unaided into the sunlight that one can truly overcome the darkness, that one can ever truly be one's self. It is only through an absolute refusal to view the end as an end in itself that one can possess the means to avoid it. It is only through a willingness to adapt that a genuine contribution can continue to be made. It is only through the discovery of new methods of living that one can live on, through the composition of new airs for ancient words that the old songs can survive and still be sung. And it is in those old songs which echo around in the deepest recesses of the Irish mind that the essential nature of James Joyce's own people and those cultural imperatives which drive ‘Finnegans Wake‘ forward are to be found. For if one really wants to know what any community or grouping thinks about anything, one should pay no heed whatsoever to what its leaders say. One should listen to its music. One should, in particular, listen to what its children sing, for it

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is often in the playful rhyme of the street, unencumbered as it is, generally, by cynicism or strategy, that one encounters the most honest manifestations of the communal mindset. For much of the twentieth century Ireland was a poor country, a land of small houses and large families. Generations of our young spent much of their childhood in the company of neighbours' offspring, sporting on what were then mercifully quiet roads. Street songs, needless to say, were legion, some cruel, some humorous, many political. There was one such song, ‘Are you ready for a war’, a member of this latter category, which often caused both amazement and comment, revealing as it did, both a terrifyingly realistic understanding of the nature of military conflict and secondly a particular attitude to the destiny of the Irish race which was extraordinary in its metaphysical hopefulness. In its lines the English throw down the gauntlet, the Irish pick it up. The English lose one hand, the Irish lose two. The English lose one leg, the Irish lose both. The English forfeit one eye, the Irish are blinded. All seems lost, defeat inevitable, the Irish outdone at every turn. That is until one reaches the final, pivotal exchange when in response to the declaration by the English that they are now all dead and gone, we are told, ‘now we are all alive again for we are the Irish, now we are all alive again, for we are the Irish soldiers’. This strange, juvenile, musical conversation echoes both the theme and the spirit of ‘Finnegans Wake’, accepting without question, as the novel also does, that death is a part of life and resurrection is a part of death. So deeply embedded is this fundamental concept in the cultural, religious and political traditions of Ireland that it has, in essence, become part of the Irish personality, a dream that the Irish dream of themselves, that it is in our survival rather than in our victory, in the face of both overwhelming corporeal and metaphysical odds that our glory, in fact, lies, that ‘you will never beat the Irish’, that ‘we will rise again’ as James Connolly said with his dying breath or as it is put more dramatically in the ballad from which Joyce's work takes its name,

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‘Bedad he revives, see how he rises, Tim Finnegan rising from the bed. Whittle your whiskey around like blazes, be the thundering Jaysus do you think I'm dead?’ The Irish are a complex and complicated people and no one knew this better than the author. He had spent much of his life enumerating and cataloging the faults and failings of his countrymen but their romance made him love them still, a romance as presence today as it was in the writer's time, that captivating capacity for rapture, that recognition of the power of the word, those smiling narratives of late goals, girls and revolution, the oft tested but yet unwavering belief that, in the end of the day, everything and everyone will be ‘grand’. This cosmological optimism may, in some ways, be a comfort to us but it has its disadvantages as well. It makes the modern world a difficult place for us to live in. It breeds a taste for the ridiculous, a lightheartedness, an ability to see the humour in almost any situation which, often, prompts outsiders to view us as being less than serious people. It causes us to regard rules, administrative structures and a systematic approach to engagement with society as products of a worldly attitude, a mindset of which we know nothing and with which we have little or no sympathy. It also makes us reckless, reckless with money, reckless with our inheritance, reckless with friendships, reckless with our very lives. The thing that kills us as a nation is that strange, unspoken but yet deep-seated feeling that in some mystical way, the only way that truly matters to us, we simply cannot be killed, that being Irish, as Joyce understood, is ultimately both an act and a leap of faith. So say a prayer for the resurrectionmen, God's own heretics, the blood enemies of all death and oblivion, for whom nothing is won nor no cause lost that can be found. Say a prayer for the resurrectionmen, the deniers of all inevitability, that irreducible remanent whose poets have cursed the Cosmos and damned the certainties of the very Universe to hell. Say a prayer for the resurrectionmen, the keepers of a simple gospel, writ large on the face of midnight by a dancing star, that we will be again what we once were, that the future will be redeemed and that from the tyranny of fate and history and the bondage of the very grave, we are going to be free.

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I know that I have broken every heart Bás don bhás agus an bheatha abú19.

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Bás don bhás, an bheatha abú - death to death, long live life as said in the Irish language.

APPENDIX HCE AND ALP IN 'FINNEGANS WAKE'

Since the publication of ‘Finnegans Wake’ much time and energy has been expended in the attempt to ascertain why exactly Joyce assigned the titles HCE and ALP to characters in the work. Why he chose such a bizarre form of nomenclature for them. On the face of it these titles are simply abbreviations of the somewhat more conventional Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and Anna Livia Plurabelle, the names of two of the most central and important personalities in the book but even a cursory examination of the novel reveals the fact that there are times within its pages when the former clearly do not stand entirely for the latter, where one version does not represent the other and where two identities have diverged, divided and multiplied into four. This coupled with the fact that the ‘Wake’ is littered with mottos, slogans and other terse phrases whose constituent words begin with the same letters leads one, inevitability, to the conclusion that the deployment of HCE and ALP involves something more than a straightforward word-game, that their use is, in truth, in some way essential to the overall spirit and atmosphere of the masterpiece. An orthodoxy has arisen over time which holds that HCE is primarily a contracted representation of the construction ‘Here Comes Everybody’, a contention which is certainly supported by the appearance of this concept along with the character of ‘Earwicker’ in the 1923 sketch which has, for long, been assigned this name but an argument which does not, in my opinion, completely resonate with the nature of ‘Finnegans Wake' and the thought-processes which drive it forward, this novel, of course, being a work which blows the very idea of representation apart and shreds the very notion that anything or anyone can accurately be read or truly understood in any genuinely meaningful way. It appears to me that the employment of HCE and ALP must, in the context of the book, therefore serve some higher purpose, a purpose which I

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cannot adequately define but in regard to which I would like now to offer the following observations. When I encounter the elements ALP and HCE what I, in fact, see are brief, anagrammatic forms of the names 'Parnell' and 'Catherine O'Shea'. The vagaries of the sub-conscious mind are brought to bear on the two historical personages, a process which leads to them being flung screaming into an altered, eroticised but yet recognisable version of Irish history. He becomes her. She becomes him. The ambivalent attitude to the assassinations of Burke and Cavendish in the Phoenix Park of which the ‘Chief’ was accused, is fused with the controversy surrounding the divorce case thus transforming two crises into one extraordinary moment of Freudian truth. The emergence of, and the difficulties surrounding the letter in the ‘Wake’ therefore clearly echo the Piggott forgery scandal while the attitudes of Shem and Shaun, the sons of HCE to their father whom they apparently support but actually wish to overthrow mirrors those of the membership of the Irish Parliamentary Party to their wounded leader when knowledge of his Romatic involvements came to light. Equally I think that it is important to remember that from around 1880 onwards Ireland became a country dominated both linguistically and politically by a host of groupings known primarily by abbreviations made up of three letters, the GAA, the IRB, the UVF, the IRA, the RIC, organisations, all of which possessed their own personalities and styles, personalities and styles which became vested in the very letters themselves rather than in the words for which they, in fact, stood. The full designations of these bodies were rarely if ever used, in a real sense they became irrelevant. The IRB and the RIC, for example, became things in themselves, defined by themselves, with Irish Republican Brotherhood and Royal Irish Constabulary becoming explanations of the actual rather than actualities in themselves. It was not that fact and mythology were diverging or that the unreal was overthrowing the true rather it was as if everything both was and was not what it seemed to be and that what seemed to be was all that truly existed. History had become little more than gossip and gossip of the most vicious type which refracted light through a social, point-scoring prism of slanderers, busybodies and

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nose-pokers twisting it into a Colonial nightmare of perpetual suspicion where everyone wants something and nothing is pure and within which only the calls of the faithless are taken while those of the open remain unanswered, passing straight to a voicemail to which no one or nothing ever listens, leaving the truth untold and any pup sold to a national entity which now convinced of the inevitability of assault or betrayal speaks the body language of the fearful seeing only malignancy in friends and wisdom in the new-fangled but deeply-held maxim that every stranger is an enemy that one hasn't made yet. The nation that had divested itself of all understanding and mercy in its single-minded determination to strike down its uncrowned king became the breeding ground of the pleasures of the long unforgiven wrong, of the grudge long borne and of that both comfortable and poignant realisation that there is a great moral freedom in knowing that the harm has already been done. Our most celebrated son had become the last on every list, laid low by a small calibre judgement which cannot kill cleanly but damages the flesh of the spirit so badly that its target languishes and lingers until he no longer wishes to live. Parnell was a victim of an abbreviated morality that no longer knew what it was meant to signify and could not recognise the somewhat awkward reality that no one is entirely that which he says that he is nor, indeed is he completely defined by how he acts. Human reality lies somewhere between the two, in that no mans' land between the saying and the doing, in that space which stands between sanctity and sin. It is the actual nature of our self-deception, the qualities of our hypocrisy and the exact manner in which we choose to betray everything for which we once stood that ultimately decides whether or not we can be saved, whether our names form arwsticulate statements of creative being or simply stand as confused jumbles of letters which spell out nothing other than our all too authentic inadequacy, an inadequacy which reduces the heart to a muffled, single drumbeat and comes to a stop only when love finally falls silent, broken and bound upon the wheel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY CHAPTER 1 Beckett, Samuel et al, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. Paris: Shakespeare and Co. (Sylvia Beach), 1929; rpt, with an Introduction by Beach, New York: New Directions, 1961, 1972. Bernstock, Bernard, The State of the ‘Wake’, in James Joyce Quarterly, 14, 3, (Spring 1977), 237-240. Budgen, Frank, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ and other writings. London, Oxford, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1972. Colum, Mary and Padraic, Our Friend James Joyce.Garden City New York: Doubleday, 1958. Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology. John Hopkins University Press, 1967. Ellmann, Richard, James Joyce (Oxford Lives).Oxford University Press USA, revised edition, 1983. Freud, Sigmund, De Traumdeutung. Leipzig: F. Deuticke, 1899. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Compass Edition, 1958. ______Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1961. Jung, Carl, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works of C. G. Jung). Routledge, 2nd edition, 1991. Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland. The Literature of the Modern Nation. Jonathan Cape, 1995. Shaw, George Bernard, The Quintessence of Ibsenism. London: Walter Scott, 1891. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Dover Publications, 471st edition, 1998.

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De Valera, Terry, A Memoir. Currach Press, 2006. Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Compass Edition, 1958. ______Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1961. ______Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (Oxford World Classics), edited by Kevin Barry.Oxford University Press USA, 2008. Joyce, Stanislaus, My Brother's Keeper, James Joyce's early years.The Viking Press, 1958. ______Recollections of James Joyce by his Brother. The James Joyce Society, 1950. Maslow, Abraham, Towards a Psychology of Being. Radford, Virginia: Wilder Publications Limited, 2011. CHAPTER 3 Beckett, Samuel, The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett. Faber and Faber, 2006. Bowker, Gordon, James Joyce: a new biography. Faber, Straus and Gioroux, 2012. Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Compass Edition, 1958. ______Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1961. ______Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (Oxford World Classics), edited by Kevin Barry. Oxford University Press USA, 2008. Joyce, Stanislaus, My Brother's Keeper, James Joyce's early years.The Viking Press, 1958. ______Recollections of James Joyce by his Brother. The James Joyce Society, 1950. Kinsella, Thomas, The Táin: From the Irish Epic Táin Bó Cuailgne, a translation. Oxford Paperbacks, 2002. Yeats, William Butler, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Wordsworth Editions Limited, new edition, 2000. CHAPTER 4

Bibliography 171 Bowker, Gordon, James Joyce: a new biography. Faber, Straus and Gioroux, 2012. Derrida, Jacques, Deux mots pour Joyce: Collection la philosophie en effet. Galilee, 1987. Feshbach, Sidney, James Joyce Quarterly, 16, 6, p. 378, 1979. Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Compass Edition, 1958. ______Ulysses.New York: Random House, 1961. ______Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (Oxford World Classics), edited by Kevin Barry. Oxford University Press USA, 2008. ______Dubliners (Penguin Modern Classic). 2000. Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland. The Literature of the Modern Nation. Jonathan Cape, 1995. Kierkegaard, Soren, Fear and Trembling. Penguin Classics, 1986. Sartre, Jean Paul, Being and Nothingness.Washington Square Press, 1993. CHAPTER 5 Bradshaw, Henry and H. Gaidoz, Mélanges: Le Manuscrit Luxembourgeois des Hisperica Famina. Revue Celtique II, ps 219-220 and 388, 1890. Cahill, Thomas, How the Irish saved Civilisation: the untold story of Ireland's heroic role from the fall of Rome to the rise of Medieval Europe (Hinges of History). Anchor, 1996. Herren, Michael, The Hisperica Famina: The A-Text. Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974. ______The Hisperica Famina II (volume 85 of Studies and Texts). Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1987. Jenkinson, Francis, The Hisperica Famina. University of California,The University Press, 1908. Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Compass Edition, 1958. ______Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1961. ______Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (Oxford World Classics), edited by Kevin Barry. Oxford University Press USA, 2008. Russell,

Bertrand,

A

History

Schuster/Touchstone, 1967.

of

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Philosophy.

Simon

and

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Strong, H. A, The American Journal of Philology, volume 26, 1905. CHAPTER 6 Bowker, Gordon, James Joyce: a new biography. Faber, Straus and Gioroux, 2012. Budgen, Frank, Further Recollections of James Joyce. Shenva Press, 1955. Connolly, Thomas Edmund, The Personal Library of James Joyce. A descriptive bibliography. Norwood Editions, 1977. Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Compass Edition, 1958. ______Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1961. ______Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (Oxford World Classics), edited by Kevin Barry. Oxford University Press USA, 2008. ______Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Wordsworth Classics, 1992. Joyce, Stanislaus, My Brother's Keeper, James Joyce's early years. The Viking Press, 1958. Kelleher, John, Irish History and Mythology in James Joyce's ' The Dead '. University of Notre Dame Press, 1965. O’Hehir, Brendan, A Gaelic Lexicon for 'Finnegans Wake' and Glossary for Joyce's Other Works. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967. Tymoczko, Maria, The Irish Ulysses. University of California Press, 1994. Wilder, Thornton and Adaline Glasheen, A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen. University College Dublin Press, 2001. CHAPTER 7 Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Compass Edition, 1958. _______Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1961. ______Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (Oxford World Classics), edited by Kevin Barry. Oxford University Press USA, 2008.

Bibliography 173 O’Hehir, Brendan, A Gaelic Lexicon for ‘Finnegans Wake’ and Glossary for Joyce's Other Works. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967. CHAPTER 8 Connolly, James, Selected Writings, edited by Peter Berresford Ellis. Monthly Review Press, 1976. ______The Lost Writings. Pluto Press, 1997. Cronin, Anthony, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. Da Capo, 1999. Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Compass Edition, 1958. ______Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1961. ______Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (Oxford World Classics), edited by Kevin Barry, Oxford University Press USA, 2008. Lyons, F. S. L, Charles Stewart Parnell. Gill and Macmillan Limited, new edition, 2005. Morgan, Austen, James Connolly: A Political Biography. Manchester University Press, 1988. O’Hehir, Brendan, A Gaelic Lexicon for 'Finnegans Wake' and Glossary for Joyce's Other Works. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967.

INDEX Adaline Glasheen, 108, 174 Adam versus Eve, 123 Adare, 134 aesthetic, 19, 84, 122 Agatha, 113 aisling, 71 Aisling, 73, 75, 141 ALP, 9 Altus Prosator, ix, 91, 92, 93, 94 America, 94 American, 33, 47, 174 An Bonnán Buí, 115 Anglo-Saxon, xii, 29, 130 Anna Livia, 9, 27, 132 Archetypes, 46, 66, 106 Arthur Griffith, viii, 32 Arthur Guinness, 118 Arthur Power, 43, 56 Auraicept na n-Éces, 113 Austria, 19, 27 Authenticity, 5, 7, 24, 33, 41, 50, 60, 63, 74, 77 autobiographical, 10, 16, 24 Avitus, 86 Babel, 43, 113 Banba, 71, 141 Bealtaine, 32, 72 Beckett, 3, 5, 7, 8, 51, 56, 85, 153, 171, 172, 175 Ben Bulben, 69, 133 Betrayal, 18, 29, 35, 68, 104 Biggar, 95 Black Panther, vii, 23, 24 Blackbird, 19, 47, 118 Bloom, 2, 27, 29, 32, 71, 72, 95, 103, 148, 149 Bloomfeld, 56 Bray, 30 Brian Boru, 18, 115, 134, 135 Britannia, 131, 158 British, 18, 33, 36, 44, 47, 68, 95, 118, 125, 147, 150, 157, 158 Buck Mulligan, 34

Burke and Cavendish, 9, 30 Cant, 66 Cashel, 134 Castacht, 129 Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna, 115 Catherine O'Shea, 156 Catholicism, 99, 104, 135 Ceangal, 129 Céile Dé, 84 Celtic, 26, 68, 79, 112, 118, 141 Chamber Music, 59 Christian, 29, 33, 52, 88, 92, 97, 113 Christianity, 83, 85 Cicero, 98 Circle, x Civil War, 31, 67, 68, 104 cliché, 4, 81, 131 Clíodhna, 71 Clonmacnoise, 135 Collins, 67, 68, 69, 78, 104 Colonial, vii, viii, x, 1, 2, 3, 4, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 24, 27, 45, 47, 62, 66, 73, 80, 120, 124, 125, 148, 157 Colonialism, xiii, 1, 6, 148 Columcille, 85, 91, 92 complex thinking, 121, 126, 128, 129 Compton, 63 Confederation, 133 Connacht, 47, 106, 135 Connolly, 32, 105, 107, 148, 162, 174, 175 Conservatism, 84 Cosgrave, 104 Cothraige, 118 Cruth, 129 Cúchulainn, 113 Culture, 4, 13, 29, 34, 35, 96, 97, 98, 119, 120, 125, 126, 130, 150, 161 Cúplacht, 129 Curious History, 32 cynicism, 162

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Daedalus, 2, 24, 29, 30, 31, 71, 72, 102, 105, 106, 150 Daily Express, 24, 32, 33 Dana, 32, 72, 136 Danish, 14, 59, 113, 135 dasein, 1, 132 Davin, 102, 106 De Excidio Britonum, 86 de Valera, 31, 46, 67, 104 Deasy, 150 Déise, 53, 55, 57, 109 Derrida, 5, 10, 63, 171, 173 Dineen, 2, 107 Dion Boucicault, 111 Doll’s House, 2 Dracontius, 86 dream, xii, 2, 5, 6, 10, 11, 19, 24, 40, 41, 71, 77, 78, 79, 81, 162 dreamer. See dream dreaming, 6, 10, 11, 71, 75, 124, 132 Drummond, 115 Dublin, 2, 9, 11, 12, 13, 17, 19, 21, 29, 32, 36, 40, 49, 59, 69, 72, 79, 114, 115, 117, 132, 152, 153, 155, 174 Dubliners, viii, 10, 29, 59, 72, 76, 77, 173 Dyoublong, 160 Earwicker, 9, 41 Easter Rising, 13, 70, 72, 73, 147, 152, 153, 154 Eccles Street, 95 Echoland, 160 economic, 16, 37, 47, 61, 79, 80 Éire, 47, 71, 137, 158 Emma Clery, 105, 106 England, 29, 34, 35, 36, 118, 125, 140 English, 4, 8, 14, 17, 21, 24, 26, 27, 33, 34, 36, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 62, 63, 74, 75, 76, 85, 93, 97, 98, 99, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 125, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 145, 153, 155, 157, 158, 160, 162 Ennodius, 86

Europe, 11, 14, 19, 35, 65, 66, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 97, 130, 157, 173 European, 10, 80, 83, 96, 148, 157 European Union, 104 Eveline, 76, 77 Exiles, 59 Existentialism, 5 experience, xii, 6, 11, 17, 24, 28, 39, 42, 60, 64, 65, 102, 106, 116, 127, 139, 143, 144 faminators, 91 Feminine incarnations, 59 Fenian Cycle, ix, 119, 132 Fianna, 46, 48, 49, 68, 69, 70, 80, 104, 133, 134 Fianna Fáil, 46, 68, 80, 104 Fiannaíocht, 46, 69, 109, 111, 117, 132, 133, 134, 136, 148, 156 fiction, 22, 32, 41, 71, 138 fictional. See fiction Finn, 2, 49, 64, 70, 119, 155 Finnegans Wake, vii, viii, ix, x, xii, xiii, xvii, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 17, 20, 21, 27, 30, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 49, 51, 52, 54, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114, 116, 121, 124, 126, 127, 128, 131, 132, 137, 143, 144, 145, 153, 155, 161, 162, 167, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175 Fionn Mac Chumhaill, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157, 160 First World War, 47 Fódhla, 71 France, 36 Francis Drake, 12 Frank Budgen, 106 Free State, 16, 66, 69, 112 Freud, 6, 171 Furey, 79 Gabriel Conroy, 3, 32, 79, 103 Gaeilge, 32, 35, 105 Gaelainn. See Gaeilge Gaelic Athletic Association, 32, 105 Gaelic League, 35, 72, 105, 110, 119 Gaeltacht, viii, 42, 109

Index Gearóid Nuinseann, 115 General Holt, 148 George Bernard Shaw, 14 George Clancy, 105, 106 George Elliot, 102 Georgia, 155 German, vii, 10, 15, 20, 21, 36, 47, 49, 54, 86, 130, 131, 139, 149, 155 Ghosts, 2, 14 Gildas, 86 glosses, 93 God, 28, 31, 33, 54, 56, 64, 87, 92, 94, 119, 136, 138, 163 Golden Age, ix, 83, 86, 91, 93, 96 Gothic, 84 Gotz, 86, 87 Grace O' Malley, 135 grammar, 44, 60, 63, 81, 86, 89, 98 Greece, 90 Greek, 13, 85, 88 H. A. Strong, 86 Haines, 24, 26, 72 Harriet Weaver, 7, 56, 85 HCE, 9 Hebrew, 85 Hiberno-English, 45, 62 Hiberno-Latin, 18, 85, 96 High King, 48 Hisperic, ix, 86, 87, 88, 93, 94, 95, 96 Hisperica Famina, ix, 18, 86, 88, 91, 94, 96, 99, 173 Holy See, 35 Home Rule, 33, 34, 106 Horace, 98 Howth, 147, 153, 155 human, 5, 6, 21, 37, 40, 42, 43, 46, 47, 59, 60, 61, 65, 67, 78, 80, 81, 84, 92, 98, 102, 103, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 139, 143, 144, 157 Humpty Dumpty, 147, 159 Ibsen, 2, 14, 32, 43, 79 imperial. See imperialist Imperialist, 33 Insurrection, 33, 70, 72, 148, 152

177 Intellectualism, 35, 65, 83, 86, 97, 135 IRB, 72 Ireland, viii, ix, xii, xvi, 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 24, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 54, 55, 56, 59, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 97, 98, 101, 103, 104, 107, 110, 111, 112, 115, 118, 119, 125, 131, 135, 136, 137, 138, 145, 146, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 162, 171, 173 Irish, vii, viii, ix, xii, xiv, xvii, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 125, 126, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 172, 173, 174 Isaac Butt, 148 James Joyce. See Joyce Jesus Christ, 34, 84, 148, 160 John Joyce, 150, 154 Jonathan Swift, x, 116, 159 Journalism, 34, 107 Joyce, vii, viii, ix, xii, xiii, xiv, xvii, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104,

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105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 125, 126, 129, 130, 131, 132, 138, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175 Jung, 46, 171 Juvencus, 86 Kelleher, 107, 140, 174 Kierkegaard, 59, 173 Killaloe, 134 Kilorglin, 111 Kincora, 134 kingdom, 78, 112 Labour Party, 104 Lady Gregory, 34 Language, vii, viii, ix, xiii, 1, 3 Larkin, 32, 105 Latin, ix, 66, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 96, 98, 109, 113, 131 Legend, 147 Leopold Bloom. See Bloom Liam Lynch, 68 Liberalism, 33 Liffey, 132, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153 Lipoleums, 156, 158 Little Black Rose. See Róísín Dubh Loyalist, 35, 150 Lucia, 46, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 75 Lucretius, 98 Macalla, 129 Machnamh, 129 Mary, xvii, 14, 44, 137, 171 Mary Joyce, 14 Masonic, 155 Mebh, 47 metaphysical, 61, 64, 71, 74, 77, 121, 151, 162 Michael Herren, 86 Milesians, 137 Molly Bloom, 153 Morkan sisters, 150 Mullaghmast, 158 Munster, 106 myth. See mythical mythic. See mythical

mythical, 7, 11, 69, 76, 77, 78, 136, 137 Napoleon, 156 Nasc, 129 nationalism, 10, 33, 47 Nationalism, 4, 31, 70 Nationalist, 14, 30, 32, 33, 63, 101, 107, 156 Nazi, 54 New Departure, 107 Newman House, 17, 105 Nietzsche, 23, 160 nightmare, 10, 146 Nora. See Nora Barnacle Nora Barnacle, xii, 151 Normans, 14, 65 Norway, 32, 131 Norwegian, 14, 135 Ó Duibhne, 69, 70, 78, 133, 134, 151 O’Hehir, 105, 174, 175 obscurity, 39, 129, 144 obstructionism, 95 O'Connell, 11 Oisín, 156 old parish, 42 oppositionality, 124, 125, 128, 131 orthodoxy, 9, 29, 56, 99 Ouzel, 117, 118 Padraic Colum, 43 Pádraig Pearse, ix, 17, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 152 Pangur Bán, vii, 25, 26 paralysis, 79 Paris, 103, 171 Parliamentary Party, 95 Parnell, 3, 9, 18, 29, 31, 33, 34, 47, 95, 104, 107, 118, 120, 136, 156, 175 personality, xvi, 125, 126, 145, 148, 162 Phoenix Park, 9, 11, 30, 133, 152 Pierre Laval, 154 Piggott, 30 Plantation, 135 Pliny, 98 Plot, vii polarity, 123, 125, 130

Index politics, xvii, 1, 68, 70, 145, 157 Pontius Pilate, 160 Portrait, 10, 30, 59, 72, 102, 105, 106, 174 Proclamation, 70 Psychology, 23, 172 Ranelagh, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19 Rathmines, 11, 15, 17, 18, 19 Redmond, 47, 104 Regionalism, vii, 4 Reichenau Primer, 25 Republican, 67, 68, 148 Republicanism. See Republican respectability, 12, 15, 16, 18 resurrection, 73, 147, 152, 153, 162, 163 revolution, 17, 24, 37, 74, 163 revolutionary. See revolution Ring, viii, x, 42, 52, 54, 56, 109 rivers, xvii, 11, 18, 113, 132 Robin Flower, 26 Robinson Crusoe, 149 Róisín Dubh, 72, 74, 75, 79, 81, 106, 149, 158, 159 Roman, 83, 84, 86, 88, 91, 99, 109, 119 romantic, 51, 75, 79, 105, 128, 147, 160 Rome, 83, 86, 91, 92, 99, 173 Ruraíocht, 46, 136 Saint Bridget, 135 Saint Jude, 149 Saint Patrick, 44, 78, 118, 119, 135 salmon of knowledge, 49, 133 Saltair na Rann, vii Sartre, 78, 173 Scandinavia, 32 Scotland, 67 Scribbledehobble, 107 Seanbhean Bhocht, 72, 73 seanchus, 42 Seathrún Céitinn, 115 secret messages, 42, 44, 51 Sectarianism, 77 Sectionalism, 77 seeboy, 157, 158 Self Realisation, 23 Sentimentalism, 77

179 Setanta, 18, 116 Shakespeare, 111, 171 Shaun, 9, 18, 66 Shelta, 114 Shem, 9, 18, 66, 94 Shibboleth, 4 Sinn Féin, 32, 36, 47, 119 soliloquy, 48, 147, 148, 149, 151 speech, xii, xvi, 3, 4, 44, 62, 65, 76, 89, 90 spirit, xvii, 64, 112, 124, 146, 158, 162 Stanislaus Joyce, 7, 105 Stephen Gwynn, 33 Stephen Hero, 105 Symbolism, xii, 6, 8, 10, 18, 65 syntax, xii, 44, 62, 63, 81, 98 Tacitus, 98 Táin bó Cuailgne, 47 Tara, 44, 67, 69, 139, 157 the Chief, 18, 29 The Dead, 3, 32, 150, 174 Thornton Wilder, 108, 174 Timothy Finnegan, 155 Timpeallacht, 129 Tír na nÓg, 156 Toraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne, viii, 43, 69, 74, 76, 111, 112, 133, 151 Toulon, 149 tradition, 10, 17, 27, 45, 49, 75, 84, 85, 90, 92, 97, 99, 100, 107, 111, 114, 116, 132, 156 Trieste, 32, 33, 34, 43, 54, 96, 103 Tuath de Danann, 136 Tymoczko, 107, 174 Ulster, 111, 141 Ulysses, x, 1, 2, 4, 7, 10, 15, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 49, 59, 71, 72, 79, 94, 95, 103, 106, 107, 109, 148, 150, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175 Unionism. See unionist Unionist, 13 United Irishman, 32 United States, 94 Venantus Fortunatus, 86 Vikings, 14, 46, 65, 135 Virgil, 25, 50, 90, 98

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Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, 86 voice, xiii, xiv, xvii, 3, 4, 87 Volunteers, 69, 70 W. B. Yeats, 32 Wake. See Finnegans Wake Waterford, 28, 42, 109, 117

Wellington, 11, 14, 78, 156, 158 Westminster, 68 Wild Geese, 157 William Rooney, 24 Wynn's Hotel, 69, 70 Zurich, 103