18. Penelope
And so we come to “Penelope,” the last and most famous chapter of Ulysses, presented as a first-person rumination of Molly’s day and her life. Her thoughts are presented in eight long paragraphs, if we can call them that, distinguished by their lack of punctuation, quotation marks, or capital letters as a new sentence or new paragraph begins. The first-person voice is not really a narration because it is not directed at any listener except the self, and is therefore entirely interiorized and private. This allows it to be entirely free and unrestrained, which accounts for the frankness, boldness, and unembarrassed bawdiness that Molly’s thoughts express.
Molly has a strong personality and an interesting and complicated background. She grew up on the island of Gibraltar where her father served as a Major in the British army, and her mother was a “Spanish Jewess” named Lunita Loredo, whose community would have “considered mixed marriage an anathema,” according to author Phillip Herring (Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle 133). There is virtually no action in this chapter except for a brief moment when Molly gets out of bed and urinates in a chamber pot. It is, therefore, complicated to discern Homeric parallels, which must ultimately be found in the character and the style of Joyce’s Penelope, rather than in the episode’s events.
In the Odyssey, Penelope initially puts off the demands of her suitors by pleading for time to weave a shroud for her aging father-in-law, which she unravels every night, and begins weaving again in the morning. This strategy of weaving and unraveling is unconscious and mental on Molly’s part, as she creates a line of thought, then takes it apart with digression and veering into other topics, only to return and resume the original concern. Penelope’s challenge to the suitors has no clear parallel although Molly’s suitors, past and present, surface in her thoughts. She actually remembers her first boyfriend Mulvey fondly, and remains saddened that the British Lieutenant Gardner, with whom she appears to have had a romantic connection, died in the Boer war. Bloom’s and his wife’s reaction to another fellow who had a one-time interest in Molly sharply illustrates the differences in their personalities. Bloom is almost forgiving of Menton’s rudeness to him after the funeral that morning (“Never mind. Be sorry after perhaps when it dawns on him” 95), while Molly blasts Menton for coming on to her those many years ago (“he had the impudence to make up to me one time well done to him mouth almighty and his boiled eyes of all the big stupoes I ever met” 609). But it is, of course, Boylan who is the suitor at issue on this day, since he is Molly’s first adulterous lover who clearly surprised and pleased her with his sexual prowess.
The Homeric parallel does surface here, for although Molly has many complimentary things to say about Boylan, she ultimately dismisses him as a potential partner and mocks him as an “ignoramus” who has “no manners nor no refinement nor no nothing,” a man who “doesnt know poetry from a cabbage” (638), unlike her much more polite and genteel husband. Comparing Bloom to other spouses she notes, “Poldy anyhow whatever he does always wipes his feet on the mat when he comes in wet or shine and always blacks his own boots too” (613). And she vigorously defends him against the disparagement of “goodfornothings,” noting “he has sense enough not to squander every penny piece he earns down their gullets and looks after his wife and family” (636).
Homer’s Penelope appears to devise the frustration of her suitors to create the time and opportunity for her husband to return to her from the Trojan War. In Ulysses, this is echoed in Molly’s strong focus on Bloom throughout her thoughts, making it clear that she wants nothing more than to have him return to her in the fullest marital way with the sexual satisfaction they enjoyed before the tragedy of Rudy interfered with it. It is almost as though she has begun the affair with Boylan as a wake-up call to her husband, to get him to see that he may lose her if he doesn’t deal with their situation. Given that their entire sexual crisis was triggered by the loss of a son, Bloom’s acquisition of a surrogate, even if only for a day, could conceivably make a change or resolution possible, and if so, the ending of Molly’s musings make it clear that nothing would make her happier. She looks forward to shopping and preparing a lovely dinner the following evening in the event Stephen returns to join them, and she goes back in her mind to Bloom’s sweet courtship of her, “the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head” (643).
The novel ends with Molly going to sleep remembering the day Bloom proposed to her, and in that tender and loving moment asked her “to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes” (644).
5
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake was Joyce’s last work, published in 1939, two years before his death in 1941. Like the groundbreaking Ulysses, the Wake, as we now refer to it, was completely avant-garde at the time of its publication, a work so unconventional that it is impossible to classify it by genre as a novel. It is poetic, yet with too much narrative to be considered purely as poetry, and it is written in English of sorts, although its words are often overlaid with echoes and spellings of other languages.
Joyce scholar and critic Kimberly Devlin points out that “The logic of the Wake has long been recognized as being rooted in elaborate puns, verbal coincidences and contiguities” (Wandering and Return in ‘Finnegans Wake’ 13). But as its title suggests, the work does have a theme of sorts that may be traced back to one of its inspirations, an Irish ballad titled “Finnegan’s Wake,” with the apostrophe missing from Joyce’s book, which multiplies the name of Finnegan as it multiplies pretty much everything in the work.
The ballad tells the story of a drunken hod carrier, who falls and dies after carrying bricks up a ladder. He is, however, resurrected at his wake, giving “wake” the double meaning of a raucous celebration of the dead and its reversal or revival as he “wakes” from the dead. One way to account for both the complicated form of the work and its layered themes and characters is to think of it as a dream, a work inspired by the way our dreams take the materials of everyday life and transform them into something new and mysterious that nonetheless retains an oblique relationship to the ordinary. John Bishop’s Joyce’s Book of the Dark: ‘Finnegans Wake’ recounts how Joyce explained to friends that his new work would follow Ulysses, his book of the day, with a new book of the night (4).
Joyce was inspired by a variety of thinkers and works in creating it, including the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and an ancient work titled The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Thematically the work can be said to revolve around a family with a nurturing mother, a father who is in trouble—perhaps for a crime of some sort—twin sons who are at odds with each other, and a daughter. These figures are given not only many names but also non-human incarnations: the mother as a river or a hen, for example, the father as land, the sons as an ant and a grasshopper, and the daughter as a cloud. Because these layered identities make it difficult to talk about them, critics have whittled their names down to a simpler format, with the father most generally referred to as Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker or HCE, the mother as Anna Livia Plurabelle or ALP, the sons as Shem and Shaun, and the daughter as Isabel.
An early introductory study by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson called A Skeleton Key to ‘Finnegans Wake’ discusses the work systematically by following its structure of four books of very different lengths. The first book contains eight chapters, the second and third consist of four chapters each, and the fourth book contains only a single chapter. My discussion will inevitably focus on the first book at greater length than the others, but will encompass some discussion of each of the Wake’s four books.
Book I
The Wake begins in mid-sentence with the un-capitalized word “riverrun,” as an unidentifiable voice describes a geographic landscape that we can recognize as Dublin, its river Liffey winding toward
the landmark of “Howth Castle and Environs,” whose capital letters point to the initials of a figure later identified as HCE (Finnegans Wake 3). This male figure, often described as lying on his back, is identified with the landscape, while his always-in-motion wife Anna Livia Plurabelle is identified with the river Liffey.
The next paragraph evokes narratives from various mythologies, with “Sir Tristram” perhaps alluding to the Celtic story of the lovers Tristan and Isolde, “tauftauf thuartpeatrick” making reference to the baptism of the Irish Saint Patrick, and “a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac” evoking the biblical story of Esau and Jacob and their father Isaac. The mention of an “arclight,” and a “regginbrow” suggests an allusion to the story of Noah’s ark, which survives the biblical deluge that is followed by a rainbow. The third paragraph now introduces “The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunn-trovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!)” (3), whose strange one-hundred letter parenthetical description represents a thunderclap. Campbell and Robinson construe this as the racket made by Finnegan falling from the ladder, but it may also refer to Giambattista Vico’s theory about the first age of man, the age of giants, when God used a ferocious thunderbolt to frighten the savages into forging a more orderly and civilized life. We remember now an early allusion to “Eve and Adam’s” in the first sentence of the Wake, a reference to Adam and Eve’s church in Dublin, but also to the fall of the biblical Adam and Eve. The “fall” is therefore an important theme in the work with both physical and moral connotations.
This brief and cursory description of just the first page, and just the first three paragraphs of the 628-page long Finnegans Wake, hopefully gives a hint of the enormous complexity of the work, at the same time that it makes clear that the text is not nonsense but has topics and themes and motifs that relate coherently to one another. It simply takes time, experience, and the help of aids like the Skeleton Key for the reader to sort things out.
On the next page of the first chapter (4) we receive a clearer description of the fall of the hod carrier “Bygmester Finnegan,” who appears to be climbing a structure as tall as a Woolworth skyscraper—“a waalworth of a skyerscape”—from which either objects like tools, or men like Laurence O’Toole, go “clittering up” and “clottering down” (5). This is followed by a question about what caused the fellow’s tragedy and “sin business,” suggesting there may be “one thousand and one stories” (the number of the Arabian Nights) needed to explain it. A wake (“Fillagain’s chrissormiss wake” [6]) follows, in which the fallen man is mourned, “Macool, Macool, orra whyi deed ye diie?,” at the same time that a board is spread with food and drinks for the mourners, “Grampupus is fallen down but grinny sprids the boord” (7).
The scene soon changes to a tour of the Wellington Museum (or “museyroom”) in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, with a guide pointing out exhibits from the Napoleonic wars (8-10). Once back outside, we now encounter one of ALP’s incarnations in the form of a little hen, a “gnarlybird ygathering,” searching for food in rhythms of pecking, “runalittle, doalittle, preealittle, pouralittle, wipealittle, kicksalittle” (10)—although in her human incarnation, her gathering includes cartridges and buttons, diapers, maps, pennies, brooches, garters, shoes, weapons, and many other objects: “all spoiled goods go into her nabsack” (11). While her husband sleeps, ALP makes a fire and prepares breakfast, including “iggs” served “sunny side up with care” (12).
Further on in the chapter we meet the sons in the form of primitive cavemen named “Mutt” and “Jute,” who initially have trouble speaking, with “mutter” and “stummer” coming from the “utterer” (16). Still further, we are given a story about the encounter of a Jarl van Hoother with a female figure called the “prankquean” (21-23), who kidnaps his sons one at a time when she is refused a glass of porter. Echoes of the ballad return with mourners encouraging Finnegan to stay dead and not wake up, “Now be aisy, good Mr Finnimore, sir. And take your laysure like a god on pension and don’t be walking abroad” (24). A little later they recur again, “Aisy now, you decent man, with your knees and lie quiet and repose your honour’s lordship” (27).
The chapter culminates with the announcement that a new fellow has arrived, one with a wife and two sons and a daughter. The familiar initials identify him as the figure we will come to know as HCE, an “old offender” who was “humile, commune and ensectuous from his nature” and who will be “ultimendly respunchable for the hubbub caused in Edenborough” (29). Campbell and Robinson note that “HCE has supplanted Finnegan” (55).
And so chapter 1 ends and the second chapter begins with a promise to tell us about “the genesis of Harold or Humphrey Chimpden’s occupational agnomen” (30). Working in an Eden-like garden “in prefall paradise peace,” royalty is announced to him by a runner. The Humphrey or Harold figure dresses up and bearing a pole topped with a flower pot goes to greet his “majesty,” who asks him a question about the preferable bait for “lobstertrapping.” He answers that he was just catching some earwigs, “Naw, yer maggers, aw war jist a cotchin on thon bluggy earwuggers” (31), and with this response “Haromphrey” is given “the sigla H.C.E.”. This results in “the nickname Here Comes Everybody” (32), and he becomes loved as “the big cleanminded giant H. C. Earwicker” (33).
But soon questions are raised about this fellow, slander is insinuated, and other stories about him are told. One of them entails his encounter on a walk in a park with “a cad with a pipe” (35). The man asks HCE to tell him the time, to which HCE responds by looking at his watch, telling the fellow the time, and then defending himself against all the slander to which he has been subjected. This leads the cad to go home and recount the strange meeting to himself over drinks at supper, only to be overheard by his wife who, in turn, tells her priest, trusting him to keep it confidential. The priest, however, tells it to a man while laying bets at a racetrack, and is overheard by two other fellows. As a result the whole story is eventually transformed into a ballad called “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” (44). This begins with the story of Humpty Dumpty’s fall from “the Magazine Wall” in Phoenix Park, and ends with the prediction that unlike Finnegan, HCE will not rise again, “And not all the king’s men nor his horses/ Will resurrect his corpus” (47).
Up to this point there has been a certain clarity about the story of HCE, but in the third and fourth chapters that clarity will disappear and be replaced by multiple versions and accounts, by doubts and questions raised about all of the characters, creating an irresolvable confusion, a “spoof of visibility in a freakfog” as the first sentence of chapter 3 calls it (48). We are supposedly given a follow up on the fates of “the persins sin this Eyrawyggla saga.” Though it is described as “readable,” it is also from top to bottom “all falsetissues,” and so we are told nothing of any certainty. Given “the wet and low visibility” (51) of the setting, it is even impossible to “idendifine the individuone” who was asked to tell “that fishabed ghoatstory of the haardly creditable edventyres of the Haberdasher, the two Curchies and the three Enkelchums”.
HCE’s adventures are here described as hardly credible, their story-teller impossible to identify, their account no more than fish stories or ghost stories, and the protagonist himself split into five different entities. No wonder we are not going to get any solutions to anything in this chapter. “Thus the unfacts, did we posses them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude, the evidencegivers by legpoll too untrustworthily irreperible” (57). But although we learn nothing usable about the facts of the story, we are given some intriguing allusions, including one to the “sixes and seventies” of “Halley’s comet” (54), which has a 76-year period and made an appearance in April 1910. There is also a reference to “Television” (52), a medium apparently talked about as early as the 1920s, even if not available until after Joyce’s time.
Chapter 4 offers to “Let us leave theories there and return to here’s here” (76), a present time in which th
e father figure appears to be dead and in his “teak coffin,” with all sorts of funerary equipment about: “Show coffins, winding sheets, goodbuy bierchepes, cinerary urns” (77) and more. But, of course, in Finnegans Wake the dead may always “rise afterfall” (78). As a result, previous events will be revisited, more conflicts and trials will be conducted, and the wife—now named “Kate Strong, a widow” (79), will still be found scavenging around “her filthdump near the Serpentine in Phornix Park” (80). At some point we are told “And so it all ended” (93), even though it clearly hasn’t, and we now get mention of “The letter! The litter!” perhaps found in the midden heap or dump. By the end of the chapter, the focus will have shifted to the wife and mother: “But there’s a little lady waiting and her name is A.L.P.” (102), and she will defend her husband. “Then who but Crippled-with-Children would speak up for Dropping-with-Sweat?” (102). And so we come to chapter 5, generally regarded as “the letter chapter.”
It begins with a religious invocation, “In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven” (104). And “plurabilities” or plural possibilities are what we will get once more, beginning with a barrage of titles for the letter. “Her untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest has gone by many names at disjointed times,” we are told, and the italicized list which goes on for three pages includes a self-reflexive title, “This Funnycoon’s Week” (105), an allusion to Tristan and Isolde, “Armoury Treestam and Icy Siseule” (104), a reference to Humpty Dumpty’s fall, “Lumptytumtumpty had a Big Fall” (106), and reference to a play presented by the children in the first chapter of Book II.
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