How the Past Possesses the Present in Finnegan's Wake

Naturally, since it was suggested to be a challenge, I took Dr. Sexson up on discussing Finnegan's Wake.
He will notice right away that I have written a relatively short essay by my own standards, and did not have the time I would have liked to have had to devote to the writing of this essay, but I thought much, and researched a little, and generally I don't trust other peoples ideas about these sorts of things as much as I trust my own, so what I have written is still virtually entirely my own thoughts on Finnegan's Wake, with some points about the layout of Joyce's Dublin dug up through some Googling.

One may notice that it does not seem to be a serious academic attempt to discuss Finnegan's Wake, but I don't really care because I'm not interested in the standards of academia, I'm interested in explaining to you how the past possesses the present in Finnegan's Wake. I take this stance firmly on many occasions, but this one seemed particularly justifiable given the nature of the text I am attempting to discuss. If you find parts of it difficult to read, sorry, feel free to ask me for elucidations, but overall the essay follows the same breathless flow of the story, without much time spent dwelling on things or over-analyzing them, since nothing can really be certain about Joyce's book here.

That said, here it is: enjoy...

How the past possesses the present in Finnegan’s Wake

           

Parlor at the middlend of the way that tales us that we know not from whens we come, But in’s head we canfound it with where we are. Oversimplified.

            In fact, one might argue that this is more or less the essence of Finnegan’s Wake, the past possessing the present. The very first word, riverrun, is a pun on the French word rêver with the classic English ending “-ing” turned into a dialect spelling to create riverrun. It has been postulated that this may be a play on the idea that Samuel Taylor Coleridge awoke from a dream and started writing everything he saw in a poem called Kubla Khan, which makes a reference to where “Alph, the sacred river, ran…” suggesting a connection with both dreams, and rivers, and the ever-flowing nature of the two. But what does this have to do with the past possessing the present? To understand it may be necessary to examine further the contents of the book. Even just the interconnected first and last pages should give us a sense of what we’re dealing with.

After we start riverrun, we then go past Eve and Adam’s, our first two figures of mythology so far, viewed as the ancestral parents of all humanity, located in Eden, or in Dublin Bay. In essence we have, by way of the river of a dream, run back to the beginning of human history, but only as a starting point, for the narrative flow in the form of the running river continues to move on. In this way, the past is possessing the present, but can never remain the present any more than can any other thing.

            The next reference to “history” is Howth castle, which was an historical castle located in Howth on the northern side of Dublin Bay, but why it is significant is obviously glossed over, simply because Joyce does not care to dwell on the past, but rather cares to be immersed in it. So much for the very short first paragraph, or at least so it seems, but then there is always more to Joyce than there appears. Firstly, one may note that Eve and Adam’s is probably referencing an old church in Dublin (well, actually it was a tavern that people delivered sermons out of called Adam and Eve’s), which lends itself to the pervasive double entendre of Finnegan’s Wake. We also see the words “commodius vicus” which are a Latinized version of the English word commodious, meaning spacious, and the actual Latin word vicus, meaning a neighborhood, the spacious, (and in this context, vastly populated) neighborhood of myth, from Adam and Eve, through the death of widespread classical paganism in Rome, to the recognizable land mark of recorded history, Howth. One can thank the language of dreams for bringing us all on such a marvelous journey from unknowable past to certain present in only the latter half of one sentence.

            One might ask then, where is the former half of this sentence, and to know one has to travel to the end of the book, to the last remarks of the dying Finn, who is about to become Finn again. “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” away alone at last aloft (I loved?) along the river run… now that is a quiet and peaceful scene, but as we have noted, riverrun is not simply the river run, it is dreaming, it is continued, it flows down to Sir Tristram, or more popularly, Sir Tristan de Lyonesse, likely fictitious knight of the round table, but again, who is concerned with historicity when one is simply steeping the tea of his time in the past. Sir Tristan, the one who went to Ireland to fetch Iseult, or Esyllt, or Isolde, however you want to get at it, had passencore rearrived (and again we see the French influence of pas encore, still not) from North Armorica (oddly enough not North America with a play on love, but an even more multiplicitious pun relating to Armorica, the land of current Brittany, related to the Cornish, and therefore to Sir Tristram himself) on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor (the British Isles) to wielderfight his penisolate war.

But what was Sir Tristram again? A violer d’amores? This is a pun on viol d’amores, the violinist of love, modern Italian, as opposed to Latin. Is this significant, of course, though Joyce might not have put it in there with intention as such. Sir Tristan, however, is not just a lover, he is a violator of love in some respects, as he falls in love with Iseult, and tries to elope with her, instead of bringing her back to marry the Cornish King, as per his original errand. Which sets us on another cycle backward, to Pyramus and Thisbe, the archetypal star-crossed lovers, and possibly the source of the legend of Tristan and Iseult. Not only does the past possess the present, but the past possess even the more recent past, which of course, is necessarily true when one understands that all present immediately becomes the more recent past.

Now, we can probably skip topsawyer and his rocks, but for a brief mentioning of this as a reference to the founding of a new Dublin in Georgia, USA by a true Dubliner named (according to Joyce) Peter Sawyer (actually William Sawyer, but Peter works better as a Greek reference to rocks, and to St. Peter, who was supposed to found his church on an outcropping of rocks). Then we get to avoice from afire bellowsed, which seems to be a voice from afar bellow, from deep down in our ancestral past, but could so easily also be a voice from a fire bellow saying mishe mishe, or God in the burning bush saying Moses! Moses! But isn’t that the ancestral past too? Not yet, thought venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland Old Isaac, kind of like when Jacob put on the coat of a kid (skin of a baby goat) in Genesis, the same coat as his brother Esau wore, and bamboozled his blind old father Isaac, so that he might become the future of the Hebrew race, but again, that hasn’t happened yet, so it’s not yet past, and yet it’s present in the text.

 Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jehm and Shen brewed by arclight, which might just be a fancy way of saying that Jehm and Shen, two very Hebrew sounding names, had not brewed two gallons of some malt liquor (which from what the French tell me was pretty good, as it was pas mal) by the light of the silvery moon. And a rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface or in other words, a red king’s end to the queen’s rainbow was to be seen all around the face of the waterworld. But I don’t think we need to talk about the bloody patriarchy usurping the natural and water affiliated position of the matriarchy right now, so let’s move on to the fall (thunder thunder thunder thunder thunder)

Of a once wallstrait Oldparr, which seems to be retaled early in bed, and later on life, down through all Christian minstrelsy, or more simply: we take our myths, our stories, our fairytales and our “history” from the cradle to the grave, and only make our slight additions and revisions, before the minstrel plays it on for the next generation. Funny how the minstrel, the bard, the one who sings the histories of the great heroes in all myth, is now doing the same work for Christianity, kind of like king David and his psalms did for the Hebrew.

Now here is a spot where we can take a breath to talk about the oral traditions, as they are a very old thing, and deserve much attention indeed, but Joyce doesn’t so neither will I. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the Pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, (or the first solid Irishman, as Erse is of course the traditional form of Irish Gaelic, who I would guess here might represent Adam again, seeing as how Dublin Bay is apparently Eden, and the word erse seems to be a combination of first and earth also, and Adam was made of clay, so that could work, but since we’re in Joyce, nothing is certain) that the humpty hillhead of humself prumptly sent an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes. In other words, Finnegan fell ass over tea kettle, and his toes and his head were changing places rather quickly, so that his head ended up on the ground first, though it was not his original intention to have his head go inquiring about the location of his feet. But there, upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park, where oranges have been laid to rust since devlinsfirst loved livvy. This seems to be saying to me that up by the old turnpike, at the hill (Gaelic cnoc) out in the park, where protestants (oranges, as opposed to Irish nationalist Greens) had been laid to rust, or rest, whatever you do when you die, since Hades, here representing the devil as lord of the underworld, first loved something living, (either English living or French la vie) which was Persephone. This is coincidentally when the first true winter came about, and oranges, the fruit that is, would have started decaying for the first time, and seasons would have started, and time would then have taken a brand new form, and created a type of cyclical flow, almost like the four ages of Vico, or the classics, or this story Finnegan’s Wake and its four books.

And have we yet rearrived after our not-so-brief summary of the first page to talk about how the past possesses the present in Finnegan’s Wake? Very nearly. But first one must address the fact that Finnegan’s Wake, as a title, is a reference to an old Irish Folk tale, about a man named Tim Finnegan, who fell off of a ladder and died. But when Finn’s wake rolled around, it was Tim for Finn to become Finn again, after he was splashed with some whiskey, which they say in Erse, is é an t-uisce na beatha, (is the water of life), and his whole journey started over again.

Now, after getting a brief rundown of what the first page of Finnegan’s Wake might plausibly be referring to, on one level, we can see that every little sentence is in effect referring to an instance of what we view as the past, but what this book views as an ever present part of a never-ending cycle. The four books, whether perforce or perchance, representing the four ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron, begin perhaps in Iron, or perhaps in Silver, it is hard to tell. The diction suggests that man has not yet fallen through the ages, that the book is beginning in Gold, but it is only the continuation of the last sentence of book four, so is it book four that is gold, or book one? The point is that it could be either, and it would not matter. All time is a circle, and all that is past is eternally present. This is further suggested by the language used to start virtually every sentence of the second paragraph, which all suggests that there is a position in time for each thing, but that regardless of that position in time, it is always reachable, even if one sees it as future. Time, on the whole, is an illusion that man cannot discern because of its grand scale. Like the western horizon of the earth, the western horizon (used by Joyce to refer to the land of the dead, and therefore necessarily the past, one would think) of time appears flat and final, with no visible curvature, but like the earth, time is round.

Each instance further eludes to instances both historical, and mythological, suggesting that Joyce feels that the mythological “past” which should henceforth be assumed to be spelled with implied quotes, is always in cahoots with the apparently historical “present” which shall likewise bare the same assumption as past. In fact, even after only this first page, one gets the sense that God himself would put the universe in quotes, and laugh at the seriousness of man. It is essential, then, that Joyce mingle the two distinctions with the allusion to Sir Tristram de Lyonesse, whose legend was supposed true for a short while, but which, like all Arthurian legend, was much more likely a fabricated fallacy, based on the older legend of Pyramus and Thisbe. Everywhere we are introduced simultaneously to modern references to the geography of Joyce’s Dublin, and to myth, suggesting that the two are indeed in a state of necessary coexistence, since one cannot separate them using even words, our greatest tool. To refer to Eve and Adam’s, the old “church” by Dublin Bay, is necessarily to refer to Adam and Eve. To refer to the fall of the stock market on Wall Street is necessarily to refer to the fall of humpty dumpty from the wall, and to know that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put humpty dumpty together again was seemingly to know the future.

But of course, the laws of entropy can be reversed when enough energy is put into a system, and this is, in fact, the whole point behind the folk tale of Tim Finnegan, that nothing is truly dead, that it is all cyclical. This makes me think that Joyce would have chuckled at the crisis on Wall Street in 2008, and it is what will make me chuckle at the next fall of the ouef wall (French for egg, commonly used as a metaphor for a work of some importance).

Thus we return to the idea that to tell a tale is always to retale it. So much like Finnegan we find ourselves here again: thinking of words we can assay to forge assents of what we men upon meteing another man, the one outside, the