A World of Gods and Monsters — Part Five
‘Why am I not born like a Gentileman and why am I now so speakable about my own eatables (Feigenbaumblatt and Father, Judapest, A. M.) whole-heartedly takes off his gabbercoat and wig, honest draughty fellow, in his public interest to make us see how though, as he says: ‘by Alswill’ the inception and the descent and the endswell of Man is temporarily wrapped in obscenity, looking through at these accidents with the faroscope of television, (this nightlife instrument needs still some subtractional betterment in the readjustment of the more refrangible angles to the squeals of his hypothesis on the outer tin sides), I can easily believe heartily in my own most spacious immensity as my ownhouse and microbemost cosm when I am reassured by ratio that the cube of my volumes is to the surfaces of their subjects as the sphericity of these globes (I am very pressing for a parliamentary motion this term which, under my guidance, would establish the deleteriousness of decorousness in the morbidisation of the modern mandaboutwoman type) is to the feracity of Fairynelly’s vacuum’.
- James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’
This excerpt is taken from a chapter in
This excerpt is taken from a chapter in which twelve questions are posed, either by Shem or by his brother Shaun; their sibling rivalry is one of the central themes of conflict throughout the Wake, and the passage above is part of the answer given to the eleventh question whereby Shem asks Professor Jones (Shaun) whether he would help his brother in time of need, to which the professor responds with an instant ‘No’. Here Professor Jones is discussing the dime-cash problem; that is, the time-space problem; Albert Einstein’s, (1879–1955), relativity theory certainly made its impact upon Joyce, given that it was informed by a number of characteristics mirroring his own vision of the world. Einstein is thus ubiquitous throughout the text, in various guises, (including ‘Winestain’); for it was he that joined together time and space, two things otherwise so patently disconnected to any analytical thinking mind, and thereby furnishing Joyce with a convenient theme to focus upon in order to give expression to his conviction in the unity of opposites, (see my article ‘A Geometry of the Absolute’).
It is uncertain exactly how well-informed Joyce was concerning Einstein’s theory. But the issue is not important; Joyce’s appropriation of relativity for ‘Finnegans Wake’ principally involves its fundamental concepts rather than precise details of the theory itself; indeed, these fundamental concepts are better suited to his intentions, rather than the details, by the very fact that they endorse, and reinforce, other themes present already throughout the text; and the creation of a new definition of time and space and of a subsequent new cosmogony was such an impressive feat of the imagination that Joyce could hardly avoid being struck by it; Joyce who, upon being asked whether he really believed in Giambattista Vico’s, (1668–1744), ‘New Science’, had responded: ‘I don’t believe in any science, but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung’.
Vico’s ‘New Science’ was a significant influence upon ‘Finnegans Wake’; in it Vico presented a cyclical philosophy of history whereby civilization develops in a recurring cycle of three ages; and each age not only displays distinctive politic and social characteristics but also each one can be characterized by dominant literary or rhetorical devices or figures of language in which words are employed in anything but their literal sense:
1. The Divine Age
A combative and aggressive race of great strength and vigour occupy the divine age; they are much reliant upon metaphor, (a figure of speech whereby a word or phrase is attributed to an object or to an action and to which it cannot be literally applied), in order to compare, and thereby to comprehend, human and natural phenomena; a poetic era, one might say.
‘The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order;
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other….. ‘
- William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida’
2. The Heroic Age
In the heroic age, metonymy (the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example the crown for the monarch), and synecdoche, (a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa), bolster the development of feudal or monarchic institutions given concrete form through idealized figures.
‘Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves’.
- William Shakespeare, ‘Julius Caesar’
3. The Human Age
The human age is characterized by popular democracy and reflection through irony, (the expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for jocular effect or to stress a point). In this age, the ascendancy of rationality leads to a barbarism of reflection; that is to say, there is a return of a barbarism to mark the first stages of civil society and which takes the form of a civil disease and begins its work to corrupt the body politic from within; and thus popular commonwealths decline into bureaucratic monarchies, and through the force of uncontrolled passions manners are corrupted once again as they had been in the earlier societies of gods and heroes; and so it is that civilization descends back to the poetic era, and the cycle begins once more.
‘Why the wrong is but a wrong i’ th’ world, and having the world for your labour, ’tis a wrong in your own world, and you might quickly make it right’.
- William Shakespeare, ‘Othello’
This recurring cycle of three ages, supposedly common to every nation, constitutes for Vico an ideal eternal history; history is the history of the rise and fall of civilizations; it is ideal because society progresses towards perfection, but never attains it, for it is interrupted by a break or return (ricorso) to a relatively more primitive condition. The role of language in moving the cycle forward is of especial interest; just as Einstein, in his use of thought experiments, (that is to say, imagined situations impossible to arrange in practice, though theoretically possible), with which he postulated conditions that contradicted everyday experience and common sense, (for instance, assuming that the velocity of light, unlike any other form of motion, was not subject to classical laws of transformation but forever remained constant), and in his new approach to thinking through the issues he was dealing with, had to develop an entirely new vocabulary to communicate his mathematical discoveries; a feature of relativity theory that paralleled Joyce’s own situation; for he, too, had to conceive of a new language in writing ‘Finnegans Wake’.
Another feature of relativity theory is its emphasis upon subjectivity and the rather curious role played by the observer; for whereas in classical, Newtonian, (Isaac Newon (1642–1726/7), physics, just like in traditional fiction, reality was characterized by its own independent existence, whereby the world of objects and events, and their description in fiction, were considered to be existing regardless of whether they were experienced or perceived, or the books were read, with the new theory it was postulated that the observer plays a more active role than that of a merely a registering instrument by the very fact he or she can influence the outcome of a measurement by his or her behaviour. Such a new role of the observer parallels the role of the reader of ‘Finnegans Wake’, for meaning in the text does not merely rest with the words on the page; but rather it is engendered through the act of reading itself, thereby allowing the reader to more actively partake in forging a fictional reality.
Another parallel between Einstein’s understanding of time and the fiction of Joyce is to be found in the relativistic concept of temporal dilation; for the absolute time of Newtonian physics was of an even and steady flow, measurable in fixed units, and fundamental to the scientific description of reality, correspondent to the notion of time in the practical affairs of day to day life; a conventional system of time in the absence of which society could hardly operate as it does, organized as it is around the clock and the leaves of a calendar. But as Henri Bergson, (1859–1941), observed, individual human experience of the passing of time is unlike Newtonian time, with its measurable quantities and standard units; it is rather a unique experience in which a sense of duration is dependent upon the circumstances surrounding the subject and on the state of the subject’s mind; a facet of time once considered irrelevant in classical physics, just as it has also been overlooked in a great deal of traditional fiction in which an author makes no attempt to recreate a character’s personal sense of the flux of time, instead opting for treatment of temporal passing as a mere framework to organize the events of his or her fictional reality, in the manner of a classical physicist viewing time and space as an absolute framework within which the material events of the world run their course in an undisturbed, steady order. Einstein’s assertion that physical time can dilate, however, granted licence to the endeavour of many modernist writers to render the act of human temporal experience by presenting it through the prism of the character’s mind rather than by employing the spatialized perspective of the traditional novel; a new time school of writers, of which Joyce was a one; as well as Marcel Proust, (1871–1922), Thomas Mann, (1875–1955), William Faulkner, (1897–1962), Gertrude Stein, (1874–1946), Dorothy Richardson, (1873–1957), and Virginia Woolf, (1882–1941).
Relativity theory stimulated a new way of dealing with time in fiction by doing away with the boundary between the past and the future; as opposed to Newtonian physics whereby time was to be conceived in terms of linear progression, in which any event that had already occurred was a part of the past and had no bearing on other events, a progression incompatible with the actual nature of human temporal experience; for the mind never perceives reality as restricted to the present but rather (as Bergson well observed) past events and experiences, and imaginary projections into the future, inter-penetrate with the present to form a complex response in which the past, the present and the future all merge together (although, as it happens, Bergson had a problem with Einstein’s relativity theory although apparently he misunderstood it but I won’t go into all that here); Indeed, Einstein’s relativity theory professed such to be the nature of physical time also, whereby events do not proceed in a linear progression but rather, like the different constituents of human temporal perception, they coexist as parts of the time-space continuum.
The time school novelists endeavoured to recreate complex temporal consciousness by means of the stream-of-consciousness technique, on the assumption that the significance of the human being’s existence is to be discovered in the mental processes rather than in the external world; and as a consequence the objective of the writer was to represent the endless flow of consciousness rather than describe the objective reality, whereby his or her thoughts form a continuum in which there are no temporal divisions: it is an eternal present where differentiated time zones do not exist. Such a vision of time as eternal present, with an emphasis upon an an idea of oneness of all ages, lies at the heart of ‘Finnegans Wake’ as it produces its own reality free from the shackles of the rational logic that dominates our waking state; resembling instead the logic of the dreaming mind, or the working of consciousness, where images are subject to constant motion and transformation; character types such as Shem and Shaun undergo constant transformations, each metamorphosing into many other personages, fictional or historical, with which they share similarities (or contrasts, for Joyce also believed in the unity of opposites as I previously noted). The spatiotemporal interaction in ‘Finnegans Wake’ not only conveys the idea of time without boundaries between the past, present and future, but it also expresses the relativistic fusion of time and space into a timespace continuum.
In one aspect, the conflict between the two brothers represents the opposition between time and space. Shem is associated with temporality while Shaun typifies the spatial approach. Wyndham Lewis, (1882–1957). attacked the time school writers, and Joyce personally, codemning Bergsonian philosophy and the relativistic concept of time/space for their reliance on the flux of reality instead of solid objects. Lewis referred to ‘Ulysses’ as a chaotic depository of lifeless objects, by referring to itself as ‘a jetsam litterage of convolvuli of times lost or strayed, of lands derelict and of tongues lagging too’. Professor Jones represents Lewis, space-oriented Shaun as opposed to temporal Shem, as he delivers a lecture on the ‘dime-cash problem’; speaking ‘from the blinkpoint of so eminent a spatialist’, he begins his lecture by dismissing both Bergsonian flux and Einsteinian physics, claiming that ‘the sophology of Bitchson . . . is in reality only a done by chance ridiculisation of the whoo-whoo and where’s hairs theorics of Winestein’; then he attacks ‘Professor Loewy-Brueller’ (the anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl, (1857–1939), who also studied temporality) and places him in the same group of thinkers ‘hopelessly vitiated’ by what he has now resolved to call ‘the dime and cash diamond fallacy, the damned temporal fallacy. And so, in an awkward and long-winded style, a bit like Lewis’s writing in fact, he endeavours to expound his view of temporality, and not very successfully.
The fallacy of his opponents, Professor Jones explains, is their belief that ‘the inception, and the descent and the endswell of Man is temporarily wrapped in obscenity’ whereas he, in his ‘own spacious immensity’, prefers to be reassured by ratio that the cube of [his] volumes is to the surfaces of their subjects as the sphericity of these globes . . . is to the feracity of Fairynelly’s vacuum’. Thus self-assured spatially, he dismisses Levi-Brullo’s investigation of time as just another case of ‘romanitis’, that which Professor Jones pronounces to be ‘the poorest commononguardiant waste of time; according to him, it is not when that counts but where, since ‘[one] man’s when is no otherman’s quandour . . . while the all is where’. Professor Llewellys ap Bryllars, FD, PhD, supports Jones’s (Shaun’s) views on the solidity of space as against the immateriality of time; the quotation above may be paraphrased thus: ‘Professer Levi-Bruel, in his talk which caused such uproar about ‘Why am I not born a Gentleman and why am I now speaking about the contents of my intestines’, takes off his gabardine coat and wig to allow us to see that the inception, the descent and end of Man through time is borne out of obscenity, when one takes a longer or far-off view [i.e. we are a jumbling together of the sexes down through time — the kaleidoscope], and [listening to this] I can easily believe in my own theory that the immensity of space……is mirrored in my own microcosm, when I consider that the space occupied by my books [volumes] outweighs their subject matter like a globe compared to a vacuum’.
It may not be immediately obvious but there is an allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844–1900) in the quote; his last work, the autobiographical ‘Ecce Homo’ contains chapter titles such as ‘Why I am so wise’ and ‘Why I am destiny’. The third part of ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ introduces the theme of eternal recurrence, a cyclical view of time though certainly very different from Vico’s cyclical view of history; and it is almost obscured by other themes. The main question is: What does one experience when one travels? Zarathustra decides that no matter where one travels one can experience only oneself. But if this is the case, then the individual is beyond good and evil, both of which require some absolute standard or criterion of judgement; but there is none. The human being lives in a world, not of purpose, knowledge, law, and design, but of accident, innocence, chance, and prankishness. ‘In everything, one thing is impossible: rationality’. Of course one may use a little wisdom, but only as a joke.
But what of people who cannot accept this doctrine because they are weak in body and in mind? They cannot be expected to accept the truth; they talk but cannot think; they ask only for contentment and refuse to face life; they expect teachers of contentment, flatterers who will tell them they are right; they want those who will condemn as sins the acts that they never commit, and who will praise their small sins as virtues. But Nietzsche continues, ‘yes, I am Zarathustra the godless!’ These teachers of resignation! Whatever is small and sick and scabby, they crawl to like lice, and only my nausea prevents me from squashing them!’ (Nausea again, see part three of this series).
Although much that Nietzsche says is negative and critical, he constantly warns the reader that criticism should be given only out of love and in preparation for a positive doctrine to follow. Condemnation for its own sake is evidence only of an interest in filth and dirt:
‘Every moment beginneth existence, around every ‘Here’ rolleth the ball ‘There.’ The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity. -
- O ye wags and barrel-organs! answered Zarathustra, and smiled once more, how well do ye know what had to be fulfilled in seven days:-
- And how that monster crept into my throat and choked me! But I bit off its head and spat it away from me.
And ye — ye have made a lyre-lay out of it? Now, however, do I lie here, still exhausted with that biting and spitting-away, still sick with mine own salvation.
AND YE LOOKED ON AT IT ALL? O mine animals, are ye also cruel? Did ye like to look at my great pain as men do? For man is the cruellest animal.
At tragedies, bull-fights, and crucifixions hath he hitherto been happiest on earth; and when he invented his hell, behold, that was his heaven on earth.
When the great man crieth — : immediately runneth the little man thither, and his tongue hangeth out of his mouth for very lusting. He, however, calleth it his “pity.”
The little man, especially the poet — how passionately doth he accuse life in words! Hearken to him, but do not fail to hear the delight which is in all accusation!
Such accusers of life — them life overcometh with a glance of the eye. ‘Thou lovest me?’ saith the insolent one; ‘wait a little, as yet have I no time for thee’.
Towards himself man is the cruellest animal; and in all who call themselves ‘sinners’ and ‘bearers of the cross’ and ‘penitents’, do not overlook the voluptuousness in their plaints and accusations!
And I myself — do I thereby want to be man’s accuser? Ah, mine animals, this only have I learned hitherto, that for man his baddest is necessary for his best, -
- That all that is baddest is the best POWER, and the hardest stone for the highest creator; and that man must become better AND badder: -’
- Thus Spake Zarathustra
If God is dead, how did he die? Here Nietzsche criticises composer Richar Wagner, (1813–1883), with whom he was once closely associated but they eventually quarrelled. Wagner had composed an opera, ‘Götterdämmerung’ (‘The Twilight of the Gods’), a highly dramatic story of the destruction of the Norse gods. Nietzsche says that the gods did not die in the way that Wagner describes; on the contrary, they laughed themselves to death when one of their number announced that there was only one god. This jealous god had lost his godhead by saying the most godless word; and the other gods died laughing.
What are often considered evils turn out on close examination by Nietzsche to be goods. Sex, which is cursed by ‘all hair-shirted despisers of the body’, is a virtue for the free and innocent. Lust to rule, which destroys civilisation, is a fit activity for the overman. Selfishness, a vice only of masters as seen by their slaves, is a necessary virtue of great bodies and great souls. The first commandment is to love yourself, the great law is ‘do not spare your neighbour! Man is something that must be overcome’.
Nietzsche turns at last to the doctrine of eternal recurrence. The theory that history repeats itself in identical cycles is familiar to us through Plato, (428/427–348/347 BCE), who derived it from the writings of Egyptian and Babylonian astronomers. It requires a concept of time that has not been congenial in Western thought ever since it was attacked by Saint Augustine, (354–430 CE). For us, time seems to move in a straight line that has no turnings (although of course relativity theory does tend to go against whatever time might seem to us to be like). Nietzsche, knowing that his doctrine would not be well received, stated it as first of all coming from Zarathustra’s animals: ‘Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being’. Whatever is happening now will happen again and has happened before; the great things of the world recur, but so do the small; and the recurrence of the small things, of the men farthest removed from the overman, seems at first impossible for Zarathustra to accept. That the return is exactly the same — not that the best returns, not that the part returns, not that all except the worst returns, but that all, best and worst, returns — is difficult for him to acknowledge. But at least he is willing to abandon the doctrine of progress for the truth of eternal recurrence.
Thus endeth part three of ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’. I have more to say on time and space, because as it happens, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831), brought them together also, but I shall leave it until the next part.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
……
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you.
- T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)
To be continued……
Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ quotation:
1. ‘Why am I not born like a Gentileman = Wyndham Lewis, in ‘Time and Western Man’, says that ‘Ulysses’ tells us nothing about Jews and criticises Stephen for ‘trying to be a gentleman’.
2. eatables = food; and Oscar Wilde on fox hunters: ‘The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’.
3. Feigen = Feige (German), fig, fig tree; and Baum (German), tree; and Feigenbaum (German), fig tree; and Blatt (German), leaf; and (Adam and God).
4. Judapest = Budapest, capital of Hungary (had a large Jewish population); and Jude German), Jew (Lévy-Bruhl was one).
5. A. M. = A[nno] M[undi] (Latin), in the Year of the World (5688 Anno Mundi = 1927 (or 1928) Anno Domini (date of ‘Time and Western Man’).
6. wholeheartedly = with one’s whole heart, thoroughly earnest or sincere; completely devoted.
7. gabbercoat = overcoat, a large coat worn over the ordinary clothing, especially in cold weather; and gabber, to talk volubly, to jabber; and William Shakespeare: ‘The Merchant of Venice’, I.3.109: ‘spit upon my Jewish gaberdine’; and gaberdine, a loose coat reaching down to the ankles, a coarse frock or loose upper garment formerly worn by Jews.
8. draughty = artful, crafty; rubbishy, filthy; pertaining to a draught, or current of air.
9. Allswill = All’s well that ends well (proverb); and (allswill, Demiurge).
10. inception = origination, beginning
11. descent = decline; and Charles Darwin, ‘The Descent of Man’.
12. endswell = endsville, the end of the road, ‘the end’.
13. temporarily = for a time (only), during a limited time.
14, obscenity = impurity, indecency, lewdness (especially of language); foulness, loathsomeness; and obscurity.
15. faroscope = phoroscope, an instrument for reproducing a visual image at a distance by means of electricity; and faroscope, far-seeing; faro (Italian), lighthouse.
16. subtractional = subtraction, Math. the taking of one quantity from (out of) another; the operation of finding the difference between two quantities, the result being termed the remainder.
17. betterment = improvement.
18. readjustment = a second adjustment, a new or different adjustment.
19. refrangible = admitting of, susceptible to, refraction; and angle of refraction, the angle between the refracted ray and the perpendicular to the surface of the refracting medium at the point of incidence.
20. squeals = squeal, a shrill sound, complain; square, the second power of a quantity.
21. hypothesis = a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation; and Pythagorean proposition or theorem: ‘The square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides’.
22. tin = airtight sealed metal container for food or drink or paint etc.
23. heartily = earnestly, sincerely, really; with courage, zeal, or spirit.
24. spacious = great, extensive, ample.
25. immensity = immeasurableness, boundlessness, infinity.
26. microbemost cosm = microcosm, the ‘little world’ of human nature; jocularly used for ‘body’; man as an epitome of the universe (term also used by Spengler).
27. ratio = Math. The relation between two similar magnitudes in respect of quantity, determined by the number of times one contains the other (integrally or fractionally); and radio.
28. cube = the third power of a quantity; and Kepler’s third planetary law: ‘The square of the period in which a planet orbits the Sun is proportional to the cube of its mean distance from the Sun’.
29. volumes = volume, a separately bound portion or division of a work; one of two or more portions into which a work of some size is divided with a view to separate binding; one of a number of books forming a related set or series.
3o. surfaces = surface, fig. usually denoting that part or aspect of anything which presents itself to a slight or casual mental view, or which is perceived without examination; outward appearance.
31. subjects = subject, that which forms or is chosen as the matter of thought, consideration, or inquiry; a topic, theme; the theme of a literary composition; what a book, poem, etc. is about.
32. sphericity = roundness; and (volume of books/area of the subjects = roundness of the planets/x→ r³/r² = 4πr²/x → x = 4πr, i.e. 2c [c (length of the circumference) = 2πr] → x = intersection of two circles).
33. globes = globe, a body having (accurately or approximately) the form of a sphere; testicles.
34. pressing = earnest, warm.
35. parliamentary = enacted, ratified, or established by Parliament.
36. deleteriousness = harmfulness.
37. decorousness = propriety in manners and conduct; the state or quality of being decorous; limits of appropriate social behavior within set situations.
38. morbidize = to make morbid.
39. mand = Final element of com)mand, de)mand, etc.; \Skinner’s term for an utterance aimed at producing an effect or result’ and man&mad; and mand (Danish), man; and manda (Russian), vulva.
40. feracity = fruitfulness, productiveness; and Molly Mallone (song): ‘In Dublin’s fair city’; and veracity, unwillingness to tell lies, truthfulness, truth; and ferocity.
41. Fairynelly’s = Farinelli, celebrated Italian castrato singer of the 18th century and one of the greatest singers in the history of opera; and Fulcanelli is almost certainly a pseudonym assumed, in the early XXth century, by a French alchemist and esoteric author, whose identity is still debated.
42. vacuum energy = an underlying background energy that exists in space even when devoid of matter; and Fulcanelli told Bergier: ‘You’re on the brink of success, as indeed are several other of our scientists today. Please, allow me, be very very careful. I warn you… The liberation of nuclear power is easier than you think and the radioactivity artificially produced can poison the atmosphere of our planet in a very short time, a few years. Moreover, atomic explosives can be produced from a few grains of metal powerful enough to destroy whole cities. I’m telling you this for a fact: the alchemists have known it for a very long time… I shall not attempt to prove to you what I’m now going to say but I ask you to repeat it to M. Hellbronner: certain geometrical arrangements of highly purified materials are enough to release atomic forces without having recourse to either electricity or vacuum techniques… The secret of alchemy is this: there is a way of manipulating matter and energy so as to produce what modern scientists call ‘a field of force’. The field acts on the observer and puts him in a privileged position vis-à-vis the Universe. From this position he has access to the realities which are ordinarily hidden from us by time and space, matter and energy. This is what we call the Great Work’.
