About Warping Process: Heinz Cans Everywhere
(a short excursion in and around Finnegans Wake with illustrations from the Book of Kells, an Irish codex from the 7th century.)
"Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast..." (18-152)* I told a friend that I was reading Gulliver's travels. Apparently believing that it was just a book for kids, she was a bit puzzled. She wasn’t aware that it was part of my ongoing reading of an even more babyish and "oftwhile balbulous" (30-4) book: Finnegans Wake. If indeed Finnegans Wake is a Work in Progress, then reading it is surely a "warping process."(3-497)
As
a precursor of hypertext, Joyce’s book of "everybody, everywhere"
could only lead me to such readings. Indeed Finnegans Wake is certainly
the first literature work that functions more like a multimedia encyclopedia
than a mere novel. You just feel you have to look up everything. It is
loaded with hyperlinks, cross-references and topics flowing "...by
a commodius vicus of recirculation..."(2-3) all around
the book. Evidently, when one talks of hyperlinks in Finnegans Wake,
one shouldn’t be mistaken as to whether there actually is a mouse
to click on these. Indeed readers have instead to transform themselves
into library mice. Whence they will be able to forage across all
shelves, books and pages to make the links come true.
Finnegans Wake is a model for an all-englobing aesthetics. It points to a path that has been left untrodden. A path where there is no a-priories. It goes beyond the shortcomings of the less is more, or of the more is more. Indeed following Giordano Bruno’s motto for the reconciliation of opposites: "In tristitia hilaris hilaritate tristis", it englobes both of them and makes them work together in an integrated manner that is really productive: "by the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that identity of indiscernibles." (36-49) (note coincidance.)
We know that while for the better part of the modernist era, less is more was the only creed, conducing artists to such feasts as the Ready made, or e.e. cummings' verses while more is more was considered as heretical, arrière-garde.
As today more and more artists are drawn to the more is more motto as a reaction to the former prevalence of its modernist counterpart, one should certainly think of Finnegans Wake, that intemporal work, as the lead to another path permitting the reunion of the two.
Finnegans Wake is indeed a paradigm of the all encompassing. As a general tendency, more is more prevails, but in the details, less is more has the lead, "Economy of movement, axe why said." (35-432) It is a very generous example of a work that affects every kind of emotions, not just the one usually found in novels or drama. There is such a riches of text, a sense of overflow, even though it is counterpoised by the economy of words. Joyce’s use of Portmanteau words is properly amazing. It is his means to get right in the middle of the matter, saying much more with fewer words
As
defined by Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty and implied by their
very name, Portmanteau words, are words that like any Portmanteau, carry
several things at once. They create thus new meanings. For instance how
could one talk at the same time of Cosmos and Chaos if not as in "Chaosmos"?
Finnegans Wake is full of such centipedes, each having a richer
meaning than the sum of its part: "Sanglorians, Jungfraud’s
messonge book, Scherzarade, Wielderfight, Penisolate, Regginbrow, &c..."
The list is endless.
The 7th century Irish Book of Kells was an important reference for Finnegans Wake’s aesthetics. With its rich enluminure and arabesque "...his miniated vellum...that illuminatured one..." its "...whiplooplashes..." (12-119) "and the droopadwindle slope of the blamed scrawl"(35-122) that "seem to uncoil spirally and swell lacertinelazily..."(24-121), it certainly contributed to Joyce’s inclinations towards the "toomuchness, the fartoomanyness..." (36-122) of the Gothic and the Baroque, while escaping modernists grids. That the other 20th century masterpiece, Remembrance of things past, is also a paragon of the Gothic (Proust compared it to a Cathedral) is certainly no coincidence.
"Heavengendered, chaosfoedted, earthborn," it is the most modest artwork ever produced in its intentions: variations/development on an Irish pop song whose title has been only slightly changed: Finnegan’s wake. Its hero or rather antihero is at some point called "Here Comes Everybody" (18-32) who is kin to anybody, and will be farther known as "Heinz cans everywhere" (5-581) which couldn't be more popular.
As well as being a harbinger of pop art it is a challenging example of how one can create a highly complex work of art while being very entertaining instead of grandiloquent. Finnegans Wake is one of the most humorous book ever written, provoking a very wide range of laughters, from extreme joy to deepest sadness. Its fun is very pervasive. Most of the time when Academicians refer to the book, they spell its title as that of the pop song with the apostrophe... There is really no way to try and recuperate this text. "Qui quae quot at Quinnigan’s Quake!" (36-496)
If there were lots of attempts before this one to go towards intertextuality be it in music with Wagner or in literature with Sterne, this is the first complete and successful undertaking of the challenging purpose of enclosing the whole world in a seemingly limited form: "...that multimirror megaron of returningties, whirled without end ..." (20-582) A form whose raison-d’être is to be a whole, a "rolywholyover" (3-597) constituted of cross-references and feedback, "a crossmess parzel."(5-619) A form that will turn on itself always referencing itself and the world outside through thousand keywords or themes in a "...whirligig..." (15-119) of meanings. "It is a sot of a swigswag, systomy dystomy..." (21-597) turning endlessly on itself even if read ‘linearly’. This is verified by there being no real beginning nor end: the first sentence is the end of the last one: "Leave the letter that never begins to go find the latter that ever comes to end..." (11-337)
That this book is more than any other a paragon of hypertext, is witnessed by the impressive presence of some of the best Irish literary art. From Ogham alphabet to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, from the Runes to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or "plainlyinspiring the tenebrous Tunc page of the Book of Kells." (23-122) More than just Irish artists there is also omnipresent, Huckleberry Finn, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bible , Alice in Wonderland, the Qur’an, Hamlet, the Torah, Confucius, Zoroaster, the Kabbalah, you name it... Reading Finnegans Wake takes a lot of time and a large book collection. One is constantly opening another volume to check for something. Moreover it is loaded with nursery rimes, "nonsery reams," (18-619) "old mutthergoosip,"(3-623) games and plays, everything that would make my friend think of it as a Kindergarten book, "Sing: Old Finncoole, he’s a mellow old saoul when he swills with his fuddlers free!" (23-569)
What
comes out as the most striking past the sheer pleasure of just reading
Finnegans Wake, is the virtuosity displayed by the structure of
the book, "The proteiform graph itself a polyhedron of scripture."(8-107)
The wealth of ideas and findings that one encounters is really impressive,
one goes from surprises to surprises "...a word as cunningly hidden
in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured
ribbons."(5-120)
The book has a stable scaffolding of four parts. The first part has eight chapters, the second four, the third four and the fourth just one. It is overall one chapter shorter than Ulysses. But the last one indicates renewal and sends us back to the first page making it a metaphor of infinity.
The
division by four is due to the parallel with Vico’s three
ages of the world plus Ricorso, or return, "Our wholemole
millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon...autokinatonetically
preprovided with a clappercoupling smeltingworks exprogressive process..."(27-614)
An Italian philosopher of the 18th century, inventor of modern
history, Giambattista Vico devised an explanation for the course
of humanity based on three ages: the age of Gods, of Heroes and of People,
followed by a Ricorso, or return to the age of Gods &c... According
to him, the reason why humans became social beings is because of their
fear of Thunder. When "the more or less intermisunderstanding
minds of the anti collaborators..." (25-118) heard thunder, they
hid together in caverns where they were forced to interact. Hence the
presence of 10 mighty thunders "The hundredlettered name[...]last
word of perfect language" (23-424) signaling the transition from
one age to the other, like the famous one on the first page:
"bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonn-thunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!"(15-3)
it spells thunder in many different languages. And then of course there
are further divisions inside each part or chapter...
Perhaps one of the most challenging purposes of the book as a narrative is that Joyce induces in the reader a sense of the story, or rather stories, by only alluding to them. This he does by repeating and recasting in thousand different manners just a few facts. Never is anything clearly said. We only get glimpses of what may be going on, and that suffices to give us a feeling of what everything is about.
"The letter[...]written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of solitude, sealed at night" (13-337) tells us that we shouldn't forget that this is a book about the night, "the evening world," as Ulysses was the book of a day. Consequently, everything is blurred, fuzzy and as if in a fog: "...you spoof of visibility in a freakfog..."(1-48) The apparent lack of clarity is only the sequel of skillful realism: all that haziness was evidently intended, "It darkles, all this our funnaminal world." (13-244) One really needs to plunge into the thickness of the text to only begin to get a glimpse of what all might be about. The sense of what might be happening during the "curse" of the night will grow, thanks to the recurrences and reappearance of the thousand same themes that keep reemerging in ever-different forms and structures, weaving a web of relationships between every parts of the book. It is this web that gives the clues necessary to the comprehension of the book, so that if one wants to understand the book, one really needs to weave that lace from scratch.
This is one of the reasons why one can not expect to understand it straight from the beginning; "You is feeling like you was lost in the Bush, Boy?"(3112) It is also unfortunately why so many readers get discouraged, mistaken it for an abstruse or hermetic work, everything Finnegans Wake is not: "this Earawyggla saga ... which thorough readable to int from and..." even if "...prefaced by (alas!) now illegible airy plumeflights..."(15-119) Nothing of the simple story of HCE, the pop song’s Tim Finnegan’s alter ego, will appear reasonably clear before having immersed oneself into the book, and that, for at least the first 3 chapters. The sense of the story will very slowly emerge from the magma of allusions, false tracks, bent keys &c... It is very much the same as accustoming ones vision to the darkness, "to peekabo durk the thicket of slumbwhere" (15-580) It takes time and patience and a thorough reading is necessary, "...that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia..." (13-120)
Almost every word sends us to another one and sometime to whole sentence pages before or after, where other words await us to send us even further. It is an endless dance back and forth, "hitherandthithering" (4-216) in the "nightmaze" (8-411). We might sometime understand parts of the book only 300 pages later so that it is more than ever a book to be read in every directions, all at once. Not to mention all the clues that one needs to find elsewhere, in the books already mentioned or others.
The wealth of the text lies here in the lines, in the text itself, in its thickness. It lies in the endlessly finer details. It has a structure very much like that of these strange mathematical objects called fractals. Like a tree or a cauli-flower, there is an endless path following the repetitions of motifs multiplicating themselves in bifurcations at ever finer scales. One needs only dive into it "..over a full trillion times for ever and a night..." (12-120) to bring forth loads of riches.
As in the song, it is a story of a fall, "the pftjschute of Finnegan..." (19-3) Unlike Tim Finnegan, he seems to have also committed a crime in Phœnix Park, Dublin. The "hole story" will revolve around this, his death, his wake and the hint that all might only be a dream.
The book is written by Shem one of two twins, Shaun being the other, sons of their mother ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle, or the river Liffey in Dublin) and father HCE (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker or the Hill of Howth in Dublin) a publican"…in the licensed boosiness primises of his delhightful bazar and reunited magazine hall, Hosty’s and Co, Exports,…"(24-497) It first appears as a letter/litter picked up or rather pecked up by a hen, "...a peacefugle, a parody’s bird..." (9-11) on the garbage mound outside of the pub (or Waterloo?) "Letter, carried of Shaun, son of Hek, written of Shem, brother of Shaun, uttered for Alp, mother of Shem, for Hek, father of Shaun." (17-420). It is a real palimpsest, endlessly overwritten by other people: the other twin, the father, the mother, the sister, the 12 consumers at the bar, the four old men, or Tom, Dick and Harry, for "…he had put his own nickelname on every toad, duck and herring…"(1-506) Almost everybody in this book on everybody takes its turn in its making, in bringing it to light, not to mention the reader.
The very name of our hero HCE appears first in the opening paragraph of the book, "...Howth Castle and Environs."(3-3) but there is no way to notice it before having read further. He will then take many other names, changing every other page or so, "To the hardily curiosing entomophilust then it has shown a very sexmosaic of nymphosis in which the chimerahunter..." (11-107) One is constantly carried back and forth between his different names, when he is not an Earwig. In the second chapter, everything will be told about his genealogy. We will learn that the only way to track his appearances is through acrostics.
If what happened were told by several characters easily recognizable, everything would be very fine. The trouble is that one never really knows who is who. Like HCE everyone "... of mixed sex cases among goats, hill cat and plain mousey..." (2-48) changes constantly names and appearances. But then, when one finally recognizes a protagonist, his or her account of what happened has suddenly completely changed:"...every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkery was moving and changing every part of the time..." (21-118). It isn’t a book with three or four or who knows how many characters, it is a book peopled by one thousand and one characters, which is a sequel of the fact that the "hero" "Bygmester Finnegan"(18-4), is also called "Here Comes Everybody" (18-32). So evidently the difficulty to find one’s way out is greatly enhanced.
"Closer
inspection of the bordereau would reveal a multiplicity of personalities
inflected on the documents or document and some prevision of virtual crime
or crimes might be made by anyone unwary enough ..."(23-107) It’s
not only that the same people have many different faces but also that
they are "telling one thousand and one stories all told of the
same". There is almost no agreement about what was the possible
crime of HCE and of what happens around the pub "Thus the unfacts,
did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude,
the evidencegivers by legpoll too untrustworthily irreperible..."(16-57)
His fall has not only the same reason as that of the song. There is question of a sin commited in Phœnix Park. Like Humpty Dumpty, HCE had a great fall, "...he became the foerst of our treefellers[…]and, in the absence of any soberiquiet, the fanest of our truefalluses." Implying in that same last word both Adam’s "felix culpa" that called for a redeemer, and a true phallus. Felix culpa will evidently end up "fœnix culprit." (16-23) The "absence of a soberiquiet" is referring to "the love of the liquor with which Tim was born" Apparently he there encountered two girls behind a bush and was seen by three soldats/witnesses, "Imagine twee cweamy wosen. Suppwose you get a beautiful thought and cull them sylvias sub silence. Then imagine a stotterer. [...] Then lustily immengine up to three longly lurking lobstarts." (16-337) What he did is evidently not clear, nor is it possible to tell if these two girls were ALP his wife and Isabella his daughter. As an earwig, and thus an insect, he might be prone to incest (anagram). Anyway during the course of the book it will be question of that fall again and again and of the subsequent trial in his pub where the twelve customers become jurors, and the four old men judges.
As we draw later in the night the story will get more and more blurred, reaching a very thick level of fuzziness in the third part, "Scotographically arranged" in "Sheeroskouro." It is the most difficult part of the book and one of the most rewarding to decipher. Later, "While the dapplegray dawn drags nearing nigh for to wake all droners that drowse in Dublin," (20-585) things will get a little bit clearer again "till cockeedoodle aubens Aurore." (33-244). ALP will wake up and read the letter. Signed "Alma Luvia, Pollabella"(16-619 it will show that the hen and ALP were in fact one, closing the circle of writer, carrier, finder, reader. She will call HCE to wake up as well, but as a "newman" cleaned up of all alleged sins and ready for the Ricorso, "Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long!" (25-619) It is at this point that we will realize that HCE was only sleeping and that the better part of the book was just a dream. The dream of HCE about a sin he might have only committed in intentions, and his unconscious self-defense. His sense of being threatened by his twins who were ready to carry out for true the 'killing of the father' in his dream. Nevertheless, we are still not sure who was the dreamer. Like the famous Chuang-tzu who didn’t know if he were a butterfly dreaming that he was a human or a human dreaming that he was a butterfly, it is difficult to tell if it is the stories of James Joyce dreaming about HCE dreaming about a sin or HCE dreaming that James Joyce writes stories about his dream.
What
we suspected from the very beginning becomes now evident: the stories
didn't matter as much as the way the Wake spake about the Wake, how it
was written, how it wrote and unfold itself. It now becomes clear that
what makes the Wake is the thin lace or web (the wabce we should
say Portmanteaucally, putting the abc amidst web and lace) The web we
talked before that appears only through thorough reading. A web that like
any cobweb will follow a pattern cunningly put in place in silent by the
exiled Joyce. It remains the choice of the reader to follow its possible
paths and to make new connections, to make sense out of it according to
the clues provided at profusion all through the text.
Los Angeles, April 29, 1998
*the numbers inside the brackets refer to line numbers and page numbers
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