On Giambattista Vico’s ‘The New Science’ : Part One — O foenix culprit!
‘… riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs’.
- James Joyce, (1882–1941), ‘Finnegans Wake’
Thus opens Chapter One of the Wake in which Joyce presents or rather proposes themes and characters that will feature throughout the text albeit the naïve reader will oft find him or herself led astray and once the book is read will need to begin again (Finnegan = fin (French) end + again) and indeed the last sentence of the text is the beginning of the above sentence which began midway:
‘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, 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! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the …’
- ‘Finnegans Wake’
And upon a re-reading it becomes evident enough that a principal concern of the introductory chapter and of the book as a whole is time, process, the fall and rise of man, conflict and its litter and the creation from litter of children, cities, and books as history somewhat ironically and in the nature of a burlesque imitating family tensions, the family consisting of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, (Howth Castle and Environs), Ann Livia Plurabelle, all beauty and an embodiment of the River Liffey that flows through central Dublin and who at the end of the novel disappears into Dublin Bay, and their sons, Shem the Penman (Joyce himself) and Shaun, and daughter Issy. The first sentence is the second half of the last, for, since the Wake is circular, the end meets the beginning, somewhat like the opening line of an epic the opening half-sentence begins the Wake in media res, or rather: ‘And after that now in the future, please God, after nonpenal start, all repeating ourselves, in media loquos’, (loquor (Latin) to speak, cf. in media locos, in the middle of places). The beginning tells everything to everyone who can take heed with what they are told and the first word riverrun is the central word of the book for Anna Livia’s Liffey, the feminine creative principle, is the river of time and of life and the Liffey flows past the church of Adam and Eve, reversed here to Eve and Adam to imply temptation, the fall of humanity, and rebirth and renewal, and into Dublin Bay where, after circulating down to Bray it circulates up to Howth the northern extremity of the Bay. Eve and Adam’s unites Dublin with the Garden of Eden and one time with another time. Howth Castle and Environs as the initials show is H. C. Earwicker for just as ALP is the river HCE is hill and castle. And locally vicus (Latin, lane or vicinity) is the Vico Road along the shore of Dublin, and historically vicus is
Giambattista Vico, (1668–1744), the philosopher of recirculation, author of ‘The New Science’, (‘La Scienza Nuova’), in which he expounds the view that civilization develops in a recurring cycle (ricorso: hence the Wake is circular) of three ages, the divine age, the heroic age, and the human age whereby each of the ages display distinct political and social features and can be
characterised via master tropes or figures of language. The giganti of the divine age rely upon metaphor to make comparisons and hence comprehend human and natural phenomena, and in the heroic age metonymy (figure of speech whereby a concept is referred to by the name of something closely associated with that thing or concept) and synecdoche (figure of speech whereby a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa) buttress the development of feudal or monarchic institutions embodied by idealized figures. The final age is characterized by popular democracy and reflection by way of irony with a rise of rationality leading to barbarie della reflessione or barbarism of reflection while civilization descends once more into the poetic era, and taken all together the recurring cycle of three ages that is common to every nation constitutes a storia ideale eterna or ideal eternal history. Hence it can be said that all history is the history of the rise and fall of civilizations in defence of which hypothesis Vico does provide evidence up until and including the Graeco-Roman historians.
From an historical perspective in the first chapter of the Wake we occupy the Viconian divine age albeit matters from the heroic and human ages intrude for in history as in nature the seed contains the tree, root and branch, hence not so much a narrative yet made in part of narratives we are presented with a formal arrangement somewhat akin to a musical composition with overture followed by several episodes that are moments of climax, tales of Waterloo, Mutt and Jute, the Prankquean, which then ends quietly in a lower key with an address to the dead. I am engaged upon research, reading the Wake through the lens of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831), and I have discovered at least two points of contact between the Wake and the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’. One is to do with language:
‘Here again, then, we see language as the existence of Spirit. Language is self-consciousness existing for others, self-consciousness which as such is immediately present, and as this self-consciousness is universal. It is the self that separates itself from itself, which as pure ‘1’= ‘I’ becomes objective to itself, which in this objectivity equally preserves itself as this self, just as it coalesces directly with other selves and is their self-consciousness. It perceives itself just as it is perceived by others, and the perceiving is just existence which has become a self’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
Language is the Daesin of Geist, the medium through which a community passes itself on, through which it recognizes itself, which is to say, Geist, or Mind, is not to be found in the head but is rather bound up with practices and relations with others by means of which it talks to itself, this is a rejection of metaphysical and methodological individualism whereby a necessary fundamental unit in philosophy, for René Descartes, (1596–1650), for Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804), is the individual, the mind knowing itself, I think therefore I am, the I think that accompanies all of my representations, but for Hegel it is not a matter of I think but of we think and the we think is conditioned by the history of our linguistic community, our language, our resources, our relations, and so on, and this is the second point of contact between the Wake and the Phenomenology, for within both there is presented a picture of what we truly are, a community of the living and of the dead. The chapters in the Phenomenology on Antigone and on absolute knowledge are very much concerned with how to live with the dead. We are not equipped for thinking truly freely, for Geist is history, right here and right now we are a community of the living and of the dead, conditioned by history, the dead are with us always and it is up to use to discover adequate means of acknowledging in our collective and communicable practices our relationship with the dead.
However, this is an article about Vico not Hegel, I do not know if Joyce ever read the latter but I do know he read the former, he read the whole of the ‘New Science’ in Italian in fact. Viconian ideal eternal history plays itself out in the Wake like a symphony wherein the interludes separating the parts have almost as much significance as the parts, everything, interludes and parts alike, are centered in the family, father, sons, daughter, mother, and their troubled interactions, while most of the characters are present somewhere albeit hiding in some guise or other, H. C. Earwicker whose initials keep on surfacing, the father, appearing as Finnegan, Wellington, or Van Hoother. Anna, Kate the housekeeper, Shem, Shaun, Joe, and Isabel are equally elusive and a diverse array of tones, rhythms, and diction suited to the characters assist in their identification but even such signals are drowned out in the overall general revelry, lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake, as the song goes. The first sentence as already noted is the second half of the last for since the Wake is circular end meets beginning. Vico, the philosopher of recirculation, while commodius is probably a reference to Emperor Commodus (161–192), and to a commode or chamber pot an appropriate vessel for riverrun, this is a dream after all, there will be a chamber pot in the bedroom, indeed ‘Ulysses’ ended with Molly. Bloom’s pot while ‘Finnegans Wake’ opens with A.L.P .’s pot. A pot of philosophical interest as it happens for a commode is a jordan, the Jordan river and the first name of the philosopher Bruno is Giordano, Giordano Bruno, (1548–1600). And so with Giambattista and Giordano presiding over the circulating river and all processes in a single alliterative commodious fragment Joyce introduces the two principal philosophers overseeing the Wake and its theme. And thus we enter the nightmaze:
‘Excelsior tips the best. Weak stop work stop walk stop whoak. Go thou this island, one housesleep there, then go thou other island, two housesleep there, then catch one nightmaze, then home to dearies. Never back a woman you defend, never get quit of a friend on whom you depend never make face to a foe till he’s rife and never get stuck to another man’s pfife. Amen; ptah! His hungry will be done! On the continent as in Eironesia’.
- ‘Finnegans Wake’
And how to find one’s way around the maze without getting lost? Well, you could just start reading, identify the principal characters, (good luck with that), look for a story line, (you could always make one up like I do when reading a novel that doesn’t engage me so I re-write it in my head), and with such an approach your biggest challenge would be to discern character and story through the complexities of Joyce’s language which has to be overcome at least to some extent on your journey. Or you could take the advice that Joyce himself gave, to his friends, to his benefactor Harriet Shaw Weaver, (1876–1961), and to others who wished to know how to approach ‘Work in Progress’ as it was called during its development. And that is to read Vico’s ‘Scienza nuova’, and for those who didn’t know Italian he referred them to Jules Michelet’s, (1798–1874), French translation given that no English edition existed at that time, which I find rather odd given its importance, however, an English translation is now available. Vico’s work, which Joyce discussed as early as 1911 to 1913 at Trieste with his pupil Paolo Cuzzi in his English- language lessons and perhaps he read even earlier in whole or part during his university studies in Dublin, contains the structure upon which the Wake is constructed. ‘What Joyce found in Vico was what every novelist needs when planning a long book — a scaffolding, a backbone’, said Anthony Burgess, (1917–1993).
One must apprehend and comprehend the puns and references in the Wake for a proper interpretation and yet doing so is only skimming along the surface and to appreciate the depth of its meaning one must dig deep into the intellectual structure out of which it is composed. And the problem of its depth is not resolved by the few pages of observations regarding Vico’s ‘New Science’, that Joyce adapts a version of Vico’s historical cycles and is influenced by Vico’s conception of etymology (always a danger in philosophy as it happens, resorting to evidence from etymology), that one finds in the critiques of the Wake. Rather, Joyce was intimately acquainted with Vico, so to speak, and the reader of the Wake needs to be intimately acquainted too. We are reading two books at once, the Wake and the ‘New Science’, as a ‘twone’, a reading that demands ‘two thinks at a time’ and both works thereby alter in the mind of the reader in relation to the other. As Joyce re-studied Vico’s ‘New Science’ to write the Wake the same expectation is placed upon the reader and for most readers, well it was for me anyway, this leads to a first time encounter with Vico, and it may be stated without exaggeration that the Wake more than any other work in the twentieth century including that of Benedetto Croce, (1866–1952), has brought to the fore the originality and richness of insights that lie within the ‘New Science’. Joyce is a fine interpreter of Vico, one of the best, albeit his intention was not to be an interpreter in an ordinary sense of interpreter. Still, in my interpretations of Hegel I often engage in flights of fantastical imagination rather than scholarly exegesis which could explain why I felt my contribution to the Hegel module I took at the University of Sheffield was misunderstood and under-valued (I bear no grudges). With philosophical and literary imagination philosophical ideas are thereby truly felt and animated, it is then such an enthralling and thrilling journey to embark upon.
Does Joyce’s writing style exemplify a stream of consciousness, a term coined by William James, (1842–1910), in ‘Principles of Psychology and in a broader sense is in addition also associated with psychoanalysis?:
‘We now begin our study of the mind from within. Most books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree. It is astonishing what havoc is wrought in psychology by admitting at the outset apparently innocent suppositions, that nevertheless contain a flaw. The bad consequences develop themselves later on, and are irremediable, being woven through the whole texture of the work. The notion that sensations, being the simplest things, are the first things to take up in psychology is one of these suppositions. The only thing which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset is the fact of thinking itself, and that must first be taken up and analyzed. If sensations then prove to be amongst the elements of the thinking, we shall be no worse off as respects them than if we had taken them for granted at the start’.
- ‘The Stream of Thought’, in ‘Principles of Psychology’
Joyce himself however declared his technique to be one of interior monologue, the inspiration for which is Édouard Dujardin’s novel ‘Les Lauriers sont coupés’, and Dujardin claimed the starting point for the soliloquy of the novel was the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s, (1762–1814), dialectical conception of the I as opposing itself to the not-I (a rather serious difficulty here with what counts as me and what is not-me (how big is my self?) but I won’t get bogged down with that here, and at least he made a big step forward in philosophy in taking self-consciousness to be a social phenomenon):
‘[In the preceding analysis] I and not-I are [in a certain respect] … the same . . . but they remain two, a duality. Shouldn’t there also be numerical identity? I believe this to be the highest task of philosophy. It is only possible insofar as things come to be adequate determinations of our pure I, [that is, insofar as] justice prevails. This is the case with God’.
- ‘Eigene Meditationen’, in ‘Wissenschaftslehre’
Joyce however put the kibosh on any debt to psychoanalysis in a comment to the Danish novelist Tom Kristensen, (1893 — (1974), upon advising him to read the ‘Scienza nuova’ in order to understand ‘Work in Progress’ Joyce said: ‘My imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung’. In a conversation Joyce had in the 1930s with the Zurich publisher Daniel Brody, (1883–1969), regarding Carl Jung’s, (1875–1961), negative assessment of Ulysses he remarked: ‘People want to put me out of the church to which I don’t belong. I have nothing to do with psychoanalysis’. In the Wake we discover: ‘when they were yung and easily freudened, in the penumbra of the procuring room and what oracular comepression we have had apply to them!’, one of a number of blunt and uncomplimentary albeit humorous passages on the founders of psychoanalysis.
And so Neapolitan sage Vico turns up in the Wake at the very start by a commodious vicus of recirculation and a paragraph later appears the first of Joyce’s ten Vichian thunder words, (see below) the longest words in the English language, for in the ‘New Science’ the clap of thunder is the primordial appearance of Jove causing the offspring of the sons of Noah who have grown to the size of giants, the giganti, wandering the great forest of the earth after the universal flood, to flee into caves, to form marriages and found families, hence beginning the gentile nations of the great city of the human race. In the marginalia of the class-book section in the middle of the Wake (see my article The Geometry of the Absolute) appears a list of each of Vico’s principal notions starting off with ‘imaginable itinerary through the particular universal’, the ‘imaginative universal’ (universale fantastico) that Vico declares is the master key to his work (Vichian imaginative universals are a rather bizarre idea but I will get to them eventually).
The fourth and last part of the Wake reminds the reader of its principle of ‘Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer’ that operates by Joyce’s fourfold transformation of Vico’s three ages of ideal eternal history described in various combinations of four terms, here as ‘eggburst, eggblend, eggburial and hatch- as-hatch can’. And the Wake gives the final instruction, mememormee!, an echo of Vico’s claim to which Joyce subscribed that ‘memory is imagination’ (la memoria è la stessa che la fantasia). And Joyce’s other philosopher, practitioner of the art of memory, and advocate of the coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum), Giordano Bruno arrives at the Wake with Vico with whom he is recirculated. and we can make much out of the commode, the chamber pot, the jordan, Bruno’s first name in English and a jordan is so-named being originally a bottle of water brought from the Jordan River by Crusaders or pilgrims. Vico is connected to the Jordan River by his first name, Giambattista (Giovanni Battista) which in English is John the Baptist, (c. 1st century BC — c. AD 30), the saint who preached and baptized along the Jordan, and Vico, born on June 23, was baptized on June 24, the day of Saint John the Baptist. Bruno is the accused heretic, ‘the Nolan’, born at Nola near Naples, part of the Comune di Napoli, who, refusing to recant, was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in the Campo de’ Fiori at Rome on February 17, 1600. In the Latin passage of the class-book section of the Wake we discover ‘Jordani et Jambaptistae mentibus revolvamus sapientiam’, (See my article, The Seventh Degree of Wisdom — part five. MyLatin is a bit rusty. Let us turn to the minds of Jordan and Jambaptista wisdom?):
‘… venite, preteriti, sine mora dumque de entibus nascituris decentius in lingua roman mortuorum parva chartula liviana ostenditur, sedentes in letitiae super ollas carnium, spectantes immo situm lutetiae unde auspiciis secundis tantae consurgent humanae stirpes, antiquissimam flaminum amborium Jordani et Jambaptistae mentibus revolvamus sapientiam: totum tute fluvii modo mundo fluere, eadem quae ex aggere fututa iterum inter alveum fore futura, quodlibet sese ipsum per aliudpiam agnoscere contrarium, omnem demun amnem ripis rivalibus amplecti..’
- ‘Finnegans Wake’
Joyce hereby recirculates the letters of the two philosophers’ first names corresponding to the letters of his own name and upon Joyce writing: from ‘a jambebatiste to a brulobrulo!’ we hear the sound of the burning bundles of sticks (French, brûler, to burn) in the play on Bruno’s (brulo) name. In the millwheeling vicociclometer passage Bruno’s doctrine of opposites (see my articles The Cartesian Spring — parts two and six, Probable Impossibilities and Improbable Possibilities — part five, and The Divided Mind: Stoicism — part one), appears as ‘the dialytically separated elements of precedent decomposition for the verypetpurpose of subsequent recombination’ thereby joined with Vico’s cyclic conception of history.
‘O foenix culprit! Ex nickylow malo comes mickelmassed bonum. Hill, rill, ones in company, billeted, less be proud of. Breast high and bestride! Only for that these will not breathe upon Norronesen or Irenean the secrest of their soorcelossness. Quarry silex, Homfrie Noanswa! Undy gentian festyknees, Livia Noanswa? Wolkencap is on him, frowned; audiurient, he would evesdrip, were it mous at hand, were it dinn of bottles in the far ear. Murk, his vales are darkling’.
- ‘Finnegans Wake’
O felix culpa!(referring to the hymn Exsultet, a Holy Saturday (Easter eve) Catholic hymn, sung upon lighting the Paschal candle, beginning with Latin ‘Exsultet’: ‘Exult’, and including the phrase Latin ‘O felix culpa, quæ talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem!’: ‘O happy fault, that merited such and so great a Redeemer!’; the ‘O felix culpa!’ notion is possibly based on Saint Augustine’s, (354–430), idea that without Adam’s sin, Christ would not have been born; also, without Lucifer’s sin, Adam would not have been created.
Plus the phoenix was a symbol employed by Michelet to explain Vico’s theory.
Joyce thereby has his two philosophic companions, somewhat like Dante Alighieri, (c. 1265–1321), and Publius Vergilius Maro, (70–19 BC), as his guides through the underworld of history replete with its repetitions and resurrections that run through its oppositions and re-combinations and as a philosophical reader of the Wake I happily accompany them meeting everybody and in so doing ‘to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and forge in the smithy’ of our souls the ‘uncreated conscience’ of our race, as Joyce put it in ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. In Joyce’s employment of conscience we encounter Vico’s conscientia or the recognition of what we find but do not produce, and the philosophically inclined used to searching for the clarity and distinctness whereby Descartes kick-started modern philosophy are tempted by Joyce to access his book of the night and observe what is to be found on the other side of Descartes’s brightly lit room warmed by the heat of his oven (he didn’t actually sit meditating in the oven as sometimes reported).
The Wake compels us to reconsider all we have ever learned about the art of reading, it re-defines what it means to read, and Joyce once suggested that it be regarded as a language. And Samuel Beckett, (1906–1989), in his essay, ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico .. Joyce’, which appeared in ‘Finnegans Wake: A Symposium — Our Exagmination Round His Incamination of Work in Progress [… &c.]’ written with Joyce himself ready to hand, concluded that Joyce like Dante, who created an Italian that had never been spoken to write the Divine Comedy, created an English in which the words used to speak about a thing become the thing itself:
‘You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read — or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself. (A fact that has been grasped by an eminent English novelist and historian whose work is in complete opposition to Mr Joyce’s). When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep. (See the end of ‘Anna Livia’) When the sense is dancing, the words dance. Take the passage at the end of Shaun’s pastoral: ‘To stirr up love’s young fizz I tilt with this bridle’s cup champagne, dimming douse from her peepair of hideseeks tight squeezed on my snowybreasted and while my pearlies in their sparkling wisdom are nippling her bubblers I swear (and let you swear) by the bumper round of my poor old snaggletooth’s solidbowel I ne’er will prove I’m untrue to (theare!) you liking so long as my hole looks. Down’. The language is drunk. The very words are tilted and effervescent. How can we qualify this general esthetic vigilance without which we cannot hope to snare the sense which is for ever rising to the surface of the form and becoming the form itself? St. Augustine puts us on the track of a word with his ‘intenders’; Dante has: ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’, and ‘Voi che, intendendo, il terzo ciel movete’; but his ‘intenders’ suggests a strictly intellectual operation. When an Italian says to-day ‘Ho inteso’, he means something between ‘Ho udito’ and ‘Ho capito’, a sensuous untidy art of intellection. Perhaps ‘apprehension’ is the most satisfactory English word’.
- ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico .. Joyce’,
In philosophical terms such are designated as performative utterances whereby what is said does not refer to some separate act that is described but is the act itself and a great writer never leaves the language in which he or she writes his or her work the same as it was when he or she came to it. Joyce alters not only the English language, he alters what language itself is. ‘Are we speachin d’anglas landadge or are you sprakin sea Djoytsch?’ As litter becomes letter we encounter at Joyce’s hands a new sense of what literature is while language is taken back to its original power to make and remake the world, the power previously reserved to the mythic word, a dreamoneire, a dream of Ireland:
‘We have wounded our way on foe tris prince till that force in the gill is faint afarred and the face in the treebark feigns afear. This is rainstones ringing. Strangely cult for this ceasing of the yore. But Erigureen is ever. Pot price pon patrilinear plop, if the osseletion of the onkring gives omen nome? Since alls war that end war let sports be leisure and bring and buy fair. Ah ah athelete, blest your bally bathfeet! Towntoquest, fortorest, the hour that hies is hurley. A halt for hearsake. A scene at sight. Or dreamoneire. Which they shall memorise. By her freewritten Hopely for ear that annalykeses if scares for eye that sumns. Is it in the now woodwordings’.
- ‘Finnegans Wake’
A dreamoneire. Which they shall memorise … coursed and recoursed through Vico’s science of imagination and Joyce’s imagination. Dublin delivers a reference point for the contents of ‘Ulysses’ but the Wake can only be approached as a text. Donald Phillip Verene, (1937 -), has said of it that it is a book of wisdom and that a book of wisdom was one that contained in principle and to an extent in fact all that there is, a truth of the whole.
Cicero, (106 BC — 43 BC), in his discourses upon liberal education spoke of education as worthy of a free person, not a slave, while also being a way of liberating the mind albeit the usual ambiguous meaning taken here, that liberal arts is in some way both for the free and in order to make one free, is actually due to a combination of the thinking of Cicero and Seneca, (c. 4 BC — 65 AD), a view of liberal education that became incorporated in the seven liberal arts which dominated Western universities for the best part of 1,000 years, between the foundations of Bologna in 1088 and the reshaping of universities in the German and French models in the early 19th century. The liberal arts are based upon freedom.
Freedom from what or to do what?
Descartes employed a method of doubt. What does it mean to doubt something? To negate it. To say no. If you wish to see to what extent the French despise Hegel then witness Jacques Derrida, (1930–2004), endeavouring to be Molly Bloom yes I say yes oh yes:
‘Qui, oui, vous m’entendez bien, ce sont des mots francais’.
‘Who has a recognized right to speak of Joyce, to write on Joyce, and who does this well? What do competence and performance consist of here? When I agreed to speak before you, before the most intimidating assembly in the world, before the greatest concentration of knowledge on such a polymathic work, I was primarily aware of the honor that was being paid me. I wondered by what claim I had managed to make people think I deserved it, however minimally. I do not intend to answer this question here. But I know, as you do, that I do not belong to your large, impressive family. I prefer the word family to that of foundation or institute. Someone answering, yes, in Joyce’s name and to Joyce’s name has succeeded in linking the future of an institution to the singular adventure of a proper name and a signature, a signed proper name, for writing out one’s name is not yet signing. In a plane, if you write out your name on the identity card which you hand in on arrival in Tokyo, you have not yet signed. You sign when the gesture with which, in a certain place, preferably at the end of the card or the book, you inscribe your name again, takes on the sense of yes, this is my name, I certify this, and, yes, yes, I will be able to attest to this again. I will remember later, I promise, that it is really I who signed. A signature is always a yes, yes, the synthetic performative of a promise and a memory conditioning every commitment. We shall return to this obligatory departure point of all discourse, following a circle which is also that of the yes, of the ‘so be it’, of the amen and the hymen. I did not feel worthy of the honor that had been bestowed on me, — far from it, but I must have been nourishing some obscure desire to be part of this mighty family which tends to sum up all others, including their hidden narratives of bastardy, legitimation, and illegitimacy. If I have accepted, it is mainly because I suspected some perverse challenge in a legitimation so generously offered. You know better than I the disquiet regarding familial legitimation; it is this which makes Ulysses, as well as Finnegans Wake, vibrate’.
- ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’, (from an opening address at the Ninth International James Joyce Symposium, Frankfurt, 1984).
Yes in ‘Ulysses’ it is supposed, by Richard Ellmann, (1918 –1987), is a word intended to be beyond all context or classification or analysis, a cosmic affirmation which is to say, it was a word when so used that stood beyond any grammatology, any doctrine of deconstruction. More is required for interpreting Joyce’s work than merely reading it as we are caught in the flow of the riverrun of the pages. Reflecting upon meeting Joyce for the first time, at a session of the P.E.N. Club, the French critic Louis Gillet, (1876–1943), wrote to Paul Valéry that ‘it was an evening that made one long to speak every language, and I hear that in order to appreciate Finnegans Wake one really ought to know seventeen’.
‘L’insinuant’
par Paul Valéry
Ô courbes, méandre,
Secrets du menteur,
Est-il art plus tendre
Que cette lenteur ?
Je sais où je vais,
Je t’y veux conduire,
Mon dessein mauvais
N’est pas de te nuire…
Quoique souriante
En plein fierté,
Tant de liberté
Te désoriente ?
Ô courbes, méandre,
Secrets du menteur,
Je veux faire attendre
Le mot le plus tendre.
Roland McHugh, (1945 — ), in his ‘Annotations to Finnegans Wake’, employs sixty- two abbreviations for various languages and dialects in the text. In addition, there are instances of, for instance, Maori and Estonian. It certainly helps but is not essential for the reader of the Wake to know in addition to English and Latin the languages of the three Continental countries in which Joyce lived, Italy, Switzerland, and France. He spoke fluent Italian, German, and French. And Danish. And beyond the language requirement it also helps to have an extensive knowledge of history, including that of Ireland and Scandinavia, and of the great books of the world, ancient, modern, East, and West. But in these days of the internet it is all there at our fingertips anyway. The Wake is as close to a complete speech of humane letters as may ever be discovered.
‘Cantique de Jean Racine’
Verbe égal au Très-Haut,
notre unique espérance,
jour éternel de la terre et des cieux,
de la paisible nuit nous rompons le silence;
Divin Sauveur, jette sur nous les yeux;
répands sur nous le feu de ta grâce puissante
que tout l’enfer fuie au son de ta voix.
Dissipe le sommeil d’une âme languissante
qui la conduit à l’oubli de tes lois!
O Christ sois favorable à ce peuple fidèle
pour te bénir maintenant rassemblé;
reçois les chants qu’il offre
à ta gloire immortelle,
et de tes dons qu’il retourne comblé.
Word equal to the Most High,
our unique hope,
eternal day of the earth and of the heavens,
we break the silence of the peaceful night;
Divine Saviour, cast your eyes upon us;
Spread out over us the fire of your mighty grace
so that hell itself flees at the sound of your voice.
Dispel the slumber of a pining soul
which drives it to forget your laws!
O Christ, show favor to these faithful people
now assembled to praise you.
Receive these songs that they offer
to your immortal glory,
and these full offerings returned to you.
‘Pas d’action, peu de sauce’.
- ‘Finnegans Wake’
‘point d’argent, point de Suisse’.
- Racine, ‘Les Plaideurs’, Act 1, Scene 1, ‘point d’argent, point de Suisse’ (‘no money, no Swiss’, referring to Swiss soldiers).
He was courteuos but very silent. He was good with children. His eyesight may have been impaired, but he had an ear open to the world’, remarked Alex Leon, recalling Joyce, who, between 1928 and 1939 was an almost daily visitor to his family’s flat on the rue Casimir-Perier, for Joyce came to consult with Alex’s father, Paul Leon, (1874–1962), who acted as the writer’s unpaid secretary and adviser: ‘In writing Finnegans Wake, Joyce was breaking the bonds of language. He would check ways of saying things with my father, who could speak seven languages’.
‘My Girl is Fair as Amber’
Min pige er så lys som rav
og Danmarks gyldne hvede,
og blikket er så blåt som hav,
når himmel er dernede.
Prinsesse Tove af Danmark.
Min piges smil er sol i maj
og sang fra lærkestruber,
og smilehulet viser vej
til sindets gyldne gruber -
Prinsesse Tove af Danmark.
Min pige kan vel være hård
mod dem, hun ilde lider,
da har hun ord, som hidsigt slår
og lidt for hidsigt bider.
Prinsesse Tove af Danmark.
Det smilehul går bag en sky,
og farligt øjet gråner;
men smilet bryder frem på ny,
og blikkets bølger blåner.
Prinsesse Tove af Danmark.
Thi ser jeg i de øjne ind,
de bliver vege, varme.
Da hviler jeg i hendes sind
som i to bløde arme.
Prinsesse Tove af Danmark.
‘Where from? roars Poolbeg. Cookingha’pence, he bawls Donnez-moi scampitle, wick an wipin’fampiny
Fingal Mac Oscar Onesine Bargearse Boniface
Thok’s min gammelhole Norveegickers moniker
Og as ay are at gammelhore Norveegickers cod.
(Chorus) A Norwegian camel old cod.
He is, begod’.
-’Finnegans Wake’
‘Forget!
Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon (the “Mamma Lujah” known to every schoolboy scandaller, be he Matty, Marky, Lukey or John-a-Donk), autokinatonetically preprovided with a clappercoupling smeltingworks exprogressive process, (for the farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial and hatch-as-hatch can) receives through a portal vein the dialytically separated elements of precedent decomposition for the verypetpurpose of subsequent recombination so that the heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities transmitted by the ancient legacy of the past; type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, with sendence of sundance, since the days of Plooney and Columcellas when Giacinta, Pervenche and Margaret swayed over the all-too-ghoulish and illyrical and innumantic in our mutter nation, all, anastomosically assimilated and preteridentified paraidiotically, in fact, the sameold gamebold adomic structure of our Finnius the old One, as highly charged with electrons as hophazards can effective it, may be there for you, Cockalooralooraloomenos, when cup, platter and pot come piping hot, as sure as herself pits hen to paper and there’s scribings scrawled on eggs.
Of cause, so! And in effect, as?’
- ‘Finnegans Wake’
Dublin, 1902. Joyce the artist as a young man expresses the view that he distrusts Plato while in addition professing no interest in Homer, (c. 8th century BC), being of the opinion that the Greek epics and Hellenism were outside the tradition of European culture and it was Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ that was Europe’s epic. Quite obviously he did not maintain this position in virtue of the presence of Daedalus as the background of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ and the successive stopping points of Greek hero Odysseus updated to twentieth century Dublin in ‘Ulysses’. Joyce the accomplished linguist never studied classical Greek opting instead for Italian, and it is a markedly Vichian view to separate Hellenistic and European culture whether that was Joyce’s intention or otherwise for Vico’s conception of Western history was that the ancient world constitutes a corso in which Homer is the summary figure of the first two ages of Greek gods and heroes, the third age of distinctively human law and intellect arriving with Socrates and the philosophers. European culture is a ricorso, with Dante occupying a place analogous to Homer, such that Vico calls Dante the Tuscan Homer.
‘What ought we to say about the fact that he [Homer] tells of his heroes (and above all, the wise Ulysses) taking such delight in wine and, when they are afflicted, taking all their comfort in getting drunk?’
‘These are truly precepts for consolation, most worthy of a philosopher!’
………
‘The later constancy, which is established and confirmed by the study of the wisdom of the philosophers, could not have devised gods and heroes who are so fickle. Some, even when they are in commotion and disturbed, are quieted by the slightest impetus of some reason at odds with this. Others, while they are boiling with violent wrath, upon remembering some tearful thing, melt into bitter weeping (so during the return to barbarism in Italy, at the end of which comes Dante — the Tuscan Homer who sings of nothing other than history — one reads of Cola di Rienzo, whose biography expounds vividly … the customs of the Greek heroes of which Homer tells us; when Cola makes mention of the misfortune of the Roman state oppressed by the powerful at that time, he and those present to his account break out into outright tears). By contrast, others, when afflicted with extreme grief, if some dainty thing presents itself (as when the feast of Alcinous presents itself to the wise Ulysses), completely forget their woes and devolve one and all into gaiety’.
- ‘The New Science’
Dante summarizes the medieval world and is followed by the Humanist philosophers of the Renaissance and, later, by the Cartesians and the modern conceptions of law and society of the 17th century natural law theorists, led by Hugo Grotius, (1583–1645), and Thomas Hobbes, (1588–1679). According to Vico’s philosophy of history there is no continuous development from the ancient world to the modern for the modern merely recapitulates the ancient in different terms. And Joyce’s distrust of Plato? The classical text for consideration of the connection between philosophy and poetry is Book X of the Republic wherein Plato takes up the place of poetry in human education and human knowledge. Earlier Socrates had established that while poetry may provide us with pleasure it is unable to provide us with moral principles and thus be a guide to the just and good life, and poetry can affect the psyche but it does so indiscriminately for in it both good and bad actions of people and gods are portrayed with equal validity. ‘We’ll say that what both poets and prose writers [logopoioi, makers of speeches] say concerning the most important things about human beings is bad’, said Socrates. All literary expression is defective in this way: ‘Of poetry and tale-telling, one kind proceeds wholly by imitation [mimēsis] — as you say, tragedy and comedy; another, by the poet’s own report — this of course, you would find especially in dithyrambs; and still another by both -this is found in epic poetry and many other places too’.
Poets even lie about Uranus:
‘A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and, what is more, a bad lie.
But when is this fault committed?
Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and heroes, — as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow of a likeness to the original.
Yes, he said, that sort of thing is certainly very blameable; but what are the stories which you mean?
First of all, I said, there was that greatest of all lies in high places, which the poet told about Uranus, and which was a bad lie too, — I mean what Hesiod says that Uranus did, and how Cronus retaliated on him. The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and thoughtless persons; if possible, they had better be buried in silence. But if there is an absolute necessity for their mention, a chosen few might hear them in a mystery, and they should sacrifice not a common (Eleusinian) pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim; and then the number of the hearers will be very few indeed.
Why, yes, said he, those stories are extremely objectionable.
Yes, Adeimantus, they are stories not to be repeated in our State; the young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he is far from doing anything outrageous; and that even if he chastises his father when he does wrong, in whatever manner, he will only be following the example of the first and greatest among the gods.
I entirely agree with you, he said; in my opinion those stories are quite unfit to be repeated’.
- ‘The Republic’
Because of this failure of poetry to embody principles whereby we may distinguish good from bad, just from unjust it is defective in its content, and further, it is defective in its form, whether it is declaimed by rhapsodes, (classical Greek professional performer of epic poetry in the 5th century), recited as lines by actors in comedies or tragedies for both rhapsodes and actors imitate good and bad persons and actions with equanimity, hence those who interpret literary productions for us merely follow and portray the moral oscillations present in them. ‘Now, as it seems, if a man who is able by wisdom to become every sort of thing and to imitate all things should come to our city wishing to make a display of himself and his poems, we would fall on our knees before him as a man sacred, wonderful, and pleasing’, said Socrates, while adding: ‘we would say that there is no such man among us in the city, nor is it lawful for such a man to be born there’. In the city that Socrates is envisaging it would be against the divine order for such a poet to develop, such a poet could appear only as a self- invited guest who would think him or herself well received, but Socrates says: ‘We would send him to another city, with myrrh poured over his head and crowned with wool’. The poet, thinking him or herself a great success, even a celebrity in the Socratic city, would unexpectedly find him or herself honoured by being sent on his way and while accepting praise and adulation he or she would find himself outside the gates of the philosophically ordered city.
A distrust therefore grounded in Plato’s treatment of the poets, would Plato (himself a failed poet), relace poetry with philosophy? In the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of Ulysses, in the exchange between Stephen and Eglinton over the arts and the merits of Plato and Aristotle, we read:
‘O, fie! Out on’t! Pfuiteufel! You naughtn’t to look, missus, so you naughtn’t when a lady’s ashowing of her elemental.
Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with grace a notebook, new, large, clean, bright.
— That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet’s musings about the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato’s.
John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth:
— Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle with Plato.
— Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his commonwealth?
Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood they creepycrawl after Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past’.
- ‘Ulysses’
And furthermore:
‘Time? We have loads on our hangs. Till Gilligan and Halligan call again to hooligan. And the rest of the guns. Sullygan eight, from left to right. Olobobo, ye foxy theagues! The moskors thought to ball you out. Or the Wald Unicorns Master, Bugley Captain, from the Naul, drawls up by the door with the Honourable Whilp and the Reverend Poynter and the two Lady Pagets of Tallyhaugh, Ballyhuntus, in their riddletight raiding hats for to lift a hereshealth to their robost, the Stag, evers the Carlton hart. And you needn’t host out with your duck and your duty, capapole, while they reach him the glass he never starts to finish. Clap this wis on your poll and stick this in your ear, wiggly! Beauties don’t answer and the rich never pays. If you were the enlarged they’d hue in cry you, Heathtown, Harbourstown, Snowtown, Four Knocks, Flemingtown, Bodingtown to the Ford of Fyne on Delvin. How they housed to house you after the Platonic garlens! And all because, loosed in her reflexes, she seem she seen Ericoricori coricome huntsome with his three poach dogs aleashing him. But you came safe through. Enough of that homer corner!’
- ‘Finnegans Wake’
The Platonic garlens crown the poet when he is ushered to the Plato’s ancient gates of the city to be accomodated now not in the city but in the gardens outside the walls, and in Book X of the ‘Republic’ the condition is set for the re-entry of the poets, but it is a condition that cannot be fulfilled simply in poetic terms: ‘let it be said that, if poetry directed to pleasure and imitation have any argument to give showing that they should be in a city with good laws, we should be delighted to receive them back from exile, since we are aware that we ourselves are charmed by them’. According to Socrates we have an inborn love of poetry particularly when we ‘contemplate it through the medium of Homer’ and hence we would be happy if such an apology were possible and forthcoming by poetry. ‘But as long as it’s not able to make its apology [defense speech], when we listen to it, we’ll chant this argument we are making to ourselves as a countercharm, taking care against falling back again into this love, which is childish and belongs to the many [hoi polloi]’.
A propos Plato’s quarrel:
‘No, so holp me Petault, it is not a miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed: it only looks as like it as damn it; and, sure, we ought really to rest thankful that at this deleteful hour of dungflies dawning we have even a written on with dried ink scrap of paper at all to show for ourselves, tare it or leaf it, (and we are lufted to ourselves as the soulfisher when he led the cat out of the bout) after all that we lost and plundered of it even to the hidmost coignings of the earth and all it has gone through and by all means, after a good ground kiss to Terracussa and for wars luck our lefftoff’s flung over our home homoplate, cling to it as with drowning hands, hoping against hope all the while that, by the light of philophosy, (and may she never folsage us!) things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour and be hanged to them as ten to one they will too, please the pigs, as they ought to categorically, as, stricly between ourselves, there is a limit to all things so this will never do’.
- ‘Finnegans Wake’
Hoping against hope all the while that, by the light of philophosy, (and may she never folsage us!) things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour and Plato contends that even though we must ‘agree that Homer is the most poetic and first of the tragic poets’ we cannot allow poetry in our perfect city: ‘let it be our apology that it was then fitting for us to send poetry away from the city on account of its character. The argument determined us. Let us further say to it, lest it convict us for a certain harshness and rusticity, that there is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry’. The ‘old quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry as it happens has only just been forged by Plato through Socrates’s city in speech but Plato says we will say it is old for with age comes reverence and we will point to various signs that it is an old opposition based on lines from poets allegedly attacking philosophy. Plato proceeds to quote a few lines that he claims come from such poets and his quarrel with the poets involves not only the claim that poetry cannot supply principles of moral wisdom but in addition as in the dialogue the ‘Ion’ that the making of poetry requires a kind of madness on the part of the poets and the rhapsodes who recite it. It is the Muses who govern the poets, but, as Hesiod says, they told him ‘we know how to tell many falsehoods that seem real: but we also know how to speak truth when we wish to’. For Plato the philosopher has to intervene to move the speech of what may seem real to a speech of the truly real.
Joyce has put the Greek word for light in ‘philophosy’, phōs, the contraction of phaos, for this philosophy is the love (philia) of light or clarity and a play on filofol that suggests a fine madness or fine folie, fine (Italian) also implying a final or ultimate kind of madness, a madness for clarity. ‘May she [philosophy] never folsage us!’ = saige- fol (literally, wise- crazy). This is the Platonic clarity of the sun identified with the Good that illuminates vision outside the dream-world of the images on the wall of the Platonic cave. Joyce has thereby reversed the quarrel because the philosophers have their own kind of madness, their attachment to clarity. And here Plato’s ideas (eidē) are joined with Descartes’s famous clear and distinct ideas, his light of nature, or clarté. In the episode of the ‘Ondt and the Gracehoper[ the Ondt is ‘swarming of himself in his sunnyroom, sated before his comfortumble phullupsuppy of a plate o’monkynous and a confucion of minthe (for he was a conformed aceticist and aristotaller)’ and here is Descartes again with Plato, Descartes with his certainty, his clarity, of cogito ergo sum, seated in the warmth of his comfortable poêle, full of philosophy, and then Plato, with a plate of ‘monkynous’ (monkey nuts, peanuts). As Joyce indicated in his letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver of March 26, 1928: ‘monkynous = monkey nuts also the ‘nous’ rational intelligence cf monasticism’. Joyce also indicates:’confucion of minthe, confession of mind ‘infusion de menthe’,’ which connects with the asceticism and Aristotelianism of monasticism. The Platonic nous requires us to climb up the tree of knowledge to the forms, which can only be reached by intellection, or noēsis, the top of the Platonic Divided Line. By contrast, a few lines earlier on the page: ‘The Gracehoper who, though blind as batflea, yet knew, not a leetle beetle, his good smetterling of entymology asped nissunitimost lous nor liceens but promptly tossed himself in the vico’.
The bottom of the Divided Line is the imagination, or eikasia of the poets, who know only images or eikones. Poiein is to make in general and in particular to compose poetry and the poets are makers through words and the words of the poets imitate things that are visible with the bodily eye while the philosophers are also makers through words, for instance, makers of the city in speech, and they are also imitators in this making for their words lead us to or make for us a knowledge of the Forms which can be seen only with the mind’s eye. from an epistemological point of view the quarrel with the poets is intense in virtue of the productions of the poets seemingly taking us to the nature of things and tese productions do not merely mirror the visible world they seem to take us into the very form or meaning of its visibility such that we do not merely see things but see into things. Before it is given its Platonic sense, eidos, as it appears in Homer, means ‘what one sees’, ‘appearance’, ‘shape’, usually of a body, and for Plato the eidē exist in some intelligible place (topos noetos), just as the aistheta, or sensible phenomena, exist in the organic unity of the kosmos. In later Platonism they are located beyond the heavens in a kosmos noetos, the eidē are transcendent but they are immanent as well because things are claimed to participate (methexis) in the eidē, and the philosopher can with words lead the ‘friends of the Form” to the noetic grasp of the real, to what we might call the ‘really real’ (to ontos on).
In saying that the philosopher imitates the forms in language this is not to say that there can be a literal statement of their nature for the philosopher’s discourse always points only to the nature of things, it never contains them, as Plato makes clear in his Seventh Letter: ‘there does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise of mine dealing therewith. For it does not at all admit of verbal expressions like other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communications therewith, it is brought to birth in the soul on a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark, and thereafter it nourishes itself’. True philosophy is never written down because it can never be written down. The ancient quarrel is based upon the fact that poetry and philosophy are types of literature, the one a language of images and the other a language of ideas, and both are mimetic uses of language that differ in their objects of reference, the one visible and the other invisible. Images have no intrinsic standard either moralistic or epistemic, as an image can be made of anything good or bad, true or false, and Ideas in our minds imitate the pure forms or eidē and are principles from which all else can be judged and known. Plato’s quarrel sets the agenda of Western philosophy, its principal problem is to forge a sort of thinking and language that separates it from poetry, and to oppose a given philosophy on the grounds it is poetry is to condemn it immediately, a damning criticism indeed, hence Plato gives us the option: Homer, or Plato? In Homer’’ hands is the mantle of the music that gives pleasure to the psychē while in In Plato’s hands is the garland ready for use.
So Joyce mistrusts Plato given the latter’s readiness to limit poetry and to permit litter to become letter but not to permit letter fully to become literature and yet Joyce mistrusts the Platonism of Plato while trusting the Neoplatonism of Vico whose ‘New Science’ is grounded upon a resolution of the ancient dispute between Plato and Homer, indeed as Vico contends it is the master key to his science, the discovery of which he claims cost him the greatest part of his intellectual life, and one of the axioms of his science is that ‘doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat’ which echoes a line in Plato’s Timaeus ‘Now in regard to every matter it is most important to begin at the natural beginning’, (see my article On Plato’s ‘Timaeus’ — ‘The World Soul), a principle that led Vico to the discovery ‘that the principle of these origins both of languages and letters lies in the fact that the first gentile peoples, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters’, and further, it led him to the discovery that Homer was not a philosopher and should not be treated as such albeit Plato did:
‘Axiom 42. Jove flashes lightning and fells to the ground the giants, and every gentile nation has a Jove. This Axiom contains the physical history, preserved in myths, that there was a Universal Flood over the entire earth. This same Axiom, together with the preceding postulate, must make determinate that within the course of so many years, the impious races of the sons of Noah had arrived at a feral state; and by a feral wandering, they were scattered and dispersed throughout the great forest of the earth; and by a feral education, giants came and were found among them at a time when heaven first flashed lightning after the flood’.
…..
‘Axiom 46. All barbarian histories have mythical beginnings. All the axioms from Axiom 42 on give the principle pertaining to our historical mythology’.
…..
‘Accordingly, the poets must have been the earliest historians of nations, and it is here that Castelvetro did not know how to make use of this statement to discover the true origins of poetry; he and all the others who have reasoned upon this from Aristotle and Plato on down could have easily noticed that all gentile histories have mythical beginnings, as was proposed above in the Axioms and was demonstrated in the Poetic Wisdom. There is the proof that the nature of poetry determines that it is an impossible thing for someone to be equally sublime as both a poet and a metaphysician. For metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses; the poetic faculty must immerse the entire body in the senses. Metaphysics rises up to universals; the poetic faculty must dive deep into particulars’.
- ‘The New Science’
Vico presents us with a solution to the ancient dispute that is straightforward enough to raise the question as to why it had not been formulated earlier in the history of philosophy, which is to say, he attributes wisdom to both poetry and philosophy but declares one wisdom, poetic wisdom (sapienza poetica), comes before the other. Poetic wisdom is to be found in fables and is the first form of human thought while philosophy comes later and the intelligible universals (universali intelligibili) or logical class concepts it employs presuppose imaginative universals (universali fantastici) that are embedded in poetic characters and the trope that governs poetic logic is metaphor and every metaphor is a fable in brief (ogni metafora sì fatta vien ed essere una picciola favoletta). What Vico designates poetic wisdom we would today call mythic thought, and, as Ernst Cassirer, (1874–1945), has said, Vico ‘is the real discoverer of the myth’. Mythic or poetic thought in this primordial sense does not attain to irony and Every fable is vera narratio, true narration, just as every perception is true in itself and true and false perceptions enter the mind only through its attainment of the power of judgment which becomes knowledge when incorporated in a rational account of what is originally perceived. The trope of irony enters the formation of human experience only with philosophical wisdom or reflective thought because irony ‘is fashioned of falsehood by dint of reflection which wears the mask of truth (perch’ella è formata dal falso in forza d’una riflessione che prende maschera di verità)’.
The language of intelligible universals is that of ordinary thinking as reflected in the logic of Aristotle and particulars are grouped together in terms of their common properties and these species are organized into genera in a hierarchy culminating in ten categories or the most general predicates that can be attributed to a thing, hence universals are abstracted from the particulars they originally order as infima species. An abstract property can be univocally predicated of individual entities which differ accidentally among themselves but manifest a common property hence a group of individuals who differ in their particularity, for instance, can be said to share equally in the predicate ‘brave’ and this way of understanding the world is originally the product of philosophical reflection that becomes the way of common thinking. The founders of the gentile nations, however, did not first think in these terms for their minds were unable to form intelligible universals, rather their minds, like the minds of children, excelled in imagination and imitation, and they were also incapable of forming ironic speech in virtue of irony requiring a mentality that can distinguish true from false and speak the false as if it were true thereby asserting one thing while meaning another. The first human thoughts were governed not by rational reflection but by the poetic or mythic imagination or fantasia, the first human beings were poets who made their world through the power of metaphor and this original power of metaphor did not have the logic of putting the name of one thing in place of another, as Aristotle held in the ‘Poetics’. In this Aristotelian sense a metaphor is a compressed analogy through which one thing is seen as like another.
The first humans faced the problem of making things in the world out of the pure immediacy of perception in which every physical sensation appears as a different being in an ongoing flow of sensations, and these first humans ‘regarded every change of facial expression as a new face’. Vico’s narration of the first human thought is that, after the universal flood, some of the offspring of the sons of Noah grew into giants, over two centuries, as the world dried out, and they lost the religion of their father and the institutions upon which human society is based, especially marriage. Wandering in the great forests of the earth, they encountered thunder and lightning as new phenomena, caused by the drying-out of the earth and they then felt fear for the first time, not fear of a specific danger but fear or terror (spavento) of being alive. They imitated the sound of thunder by uttering ‘Pa!’ then doubling it as ‘Pape!’ and the first word they formed was the onomatopoetic sound of Jove, Jupiter Tonans. With this word they were able to grasp that each of the sensations of the incidences of thunder they felt were not appearances or perceptions of separate beings but that these particular thunders were all the presence of Jove. Jove’s body was the sky and this alter-body was divine, of an opposite order of being to their own, and their ingenuity (ingegno) did not rise to the level of abstracting similarity in the dissimilar, for each instance of thunder was at once a complete particular and a complete universal, a complete being of Jove, Jove was a particularized universal or, as Joyce puts it in the Wake, theirs was an ‘imaginable itinerary through the particular universal’. Once one thing can be named all can be named and the world of flora and fauna becomes full of gods for them and the first humans thereby entered Vico’s first age of ideal eternal history, the age of gods. This original power of metaphor is the power of identity, it is an original metaphysics or theology which elaborates the metaphorical identity into mythical narratives or fables that make the first truths of human experience.
As humanity develops in Vico’s ideal eternal history from the age of gods to the age of heroes in which the heroes embody the virtues necessary for social life beyond that of the first families, led by the first fathers,who have come to form marriages as the result of their experience of Jove, their fear of Jove leads them to a second passion, that of shame or modesty (pudore), that causes them to control their bodies and passions. The power of imaginative universals is extended to form the meaning of the heroes hence Achilles is the imaginative universal of bravery or courage and all individuals who are brave are literally Achilles. They are not like Achilles or analogous to Achilles, rather, Achilles is equally them and himself. In giving another example, Vico says: ‘Just so the Egyptians reduced to the genus ‘civil sage’ all their inventions useful or necessary to the human race which are particular effects of civil wisdom, and because they could not abstract the intelligible genus ‘civil sage’, much less the form of civil wisdom in which these Egyptians were sages, they imaged it forth as Thrice-great Hermes’. Through imagination or fantasia a particular can be universally predicated of any number of particulars, just as the property of bravery or courage can be rationally predicated of a group of individuals, but this rational or logical relationship based on the abstract universal presupposes the imaginative universal. Philosophical wisdom is not possible except as a development of poetic wisdom so Achilles or Thrice-great Hermes comes first, they must be imagined, made as poetic characters, before they can be thought, that is, made intelligible as particular instances of class concepts.
When they can be so thought the mind has passed into the age of humans, Vico’s third age, the age in which custom gives way to written law and reflection arises as the means to assert truths of experience. In this third age fantasia is not lost, it assumes the form of the aesthetic, not the mythic or the Vichian poetic wisdom. Cassirer in ‘Language and Myth’ has developed the point: ‘If language is to grow into a vehicle of thought, an expression of concepts and judgments, this evolution can be achieved only at the price of foregoing the wealth and fullness of immediate experience. In the end, what is left of the concrete sense and feeling content it once possessed is little more than a bare skeleton’. This original power to capture in language the immediate is now possible only through artistic expression. ‘Here’, Cassirer contends, ‘it recovers the fullness of life; but it is no longer a life mythically bound and fettered, but an aesthetically liberated life. … What poetry expresses is neither the mythic word-picture of gods and daemons, nor the logical truth of abstract determinations and relations. The world of poetry stands apart from both, as a world of illusion and fantasy’.
But this world of poetry is not illusion and fantasy in the sense of something unreal or irrational, that is, something without true meaning or sense for the mind still capable of the power of the metaphor in Vico’s third age is liberated to act according to its own principles. As Cassirer concluded: ‘This liberation is achieved not because the mind throws aside the sensuous forms of word and image, but in that it uses them both as organs of its own, and thereby recognizes them for what they really are: forms of its own self- revelation’. Poetry is our only means to recollect that original sense of the world and word out of which the human world has been made. Imagination, then, is memory, and when the poetic imagination brings these archai forth they are the self in an interior monologue with itself. Is it possible for us to achieve a language of imaginative universals that we can encounter in aesthetic terms? For the world of myth like the world of the child is in itself closed to us, the world itself is already formed, it cannot be remade except in the dream to which we have access and which has a logic that is one with mythic thought and we come into this world of the dream only at night, in the dream all the gods and demons come forth, they become available.
Joyce’s poetic problem seen in this particular light is to ask whether there is a way to move words against themselves so that they will actually reveal what Vico calls the common mental dictionary (dizionario mentale comune), that is to day, the very sense-making power of the imagination that lies behind every language and which every language is trying to express in its own grammar and vocabulary. To do this, verba must be taken back to res via etymology and it completes the project begun in Plato’s dialogue the ‘Cratylus’, (the theme of which is language,I have no written an article on that one,I must attend to it). And yet this has need of not an ordinary etymology of the history of words moving back into their past in the manner of a lexicon, it requires an etymology of coincidence in which words overlap with each other and with their own meanings such that they are continually meeting each other and taking us as readers along with them until senses of the self and world are generated that could not in principle be anticipated, for just like Kurt Gödel’s, (1906–1978), incompleteness theorems in mathematical logic, (in any reasonable mathematical system there will always be true statements that cannot be proved), in Joyce’s linguistic coincidences we are never at a point where we can assert that’s all folks or it is finished and in the Wake we come as close as we can short of a regression to the mythic mind as such to thinking in terms of imaginative universals, (I have more to say about them later).
The first thunder word appears on the first page of the Wake, the fall of Finnegan off his ladder, and the Fall of Man.
‘Joyce asked me ‘Aren’t there four terrible things in Japan, ‘Kaminari’ being one of them?’ I counted for him: ‘Jishin (earthquake), kaminari (thunder), kaji (fire), oyaji (paternity).’ and he laughed’.
- Takaoki Katta, (1886–1976).
ukkonen (Finnish): thunder
brontę (Greek) : thunder
Donner (German): thunder
tonnerre (French): thunder
tuono (Italian): thunder
thunner: (Dialect): thunder
trovăo (Portuguese): thunder
Varuna: Hindu creator and storm god
åska (Swedish): thunder
torden (Danish): thunder
tornach (tornokh) (Gaelic): thunder …
‘bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner ronntuonnthunntro varrhounawnskawn toohoohoordenenthurnuk!’
To be continued …
