The Metaphysics of Memory — Part Four
‘…. our old offender was humile, commune and ensectuous from his nature, which you may gauge after the bynames was put under him, in lashons of languages, (honnein suit and praisers be!) and, totalisating him, even hammissim of himashim that he, sober serious, he is ee and no counter he who will be ultimendly respunchable for the hubbub caused in Edenborough’.
- James Joyce, (1882–1941), ‘Finnegans Wake’.
Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Here Comes Everybody, the protagonist of ‘Finnegans Wake’, first encountered sailing into Dublin Bay, to replace the Everyman character Finnegan, the hod-carrier, the warrior, the cultural ancestor that fell; alternatively, Finn MacCool, (Fionn mac Cumhaill, mythical hunter/warrior of Irish mythology), St. Patrick, (fifth-century Romano-British Christian missionary, patron saint of Ireland), and all of the founding heroes that fell to form the foundation of the city of Dublin. Earwicker’s fall into shameful and dishonourable scandal is the fall of Everyman. There is a deep and complex metaphysical/theological narrative being followed through here; Earwicker’s indecent and impious and mundane escapades representing his fall, his sacrifice, and his entombment (at the beginning of the novel H.C.E. lies alongside the River Liffey as part of the landscape); but with a promise of resurrection:
‘For we have performed upon thee, thou abramanation, who comest ever without being invoked, whose coming is unknown, all the things which the company of the precentors and and of the grammarians of Christpatrick’s ordered concerning thee in the matter of the work of thy tombing’.
However depraved and debased the life of Everyman may be in this modern world there is always the possibility of some kind of transfiguration; however base and insignificant the character, there is no need to remain settled and predictable within a singular narrative framework concerning a particular subject; and it is the platform of language that affords the space for release and redemption; it is the atonement of Everyman through the medium of language that recurs as an idée fixe running through the text, as we see in the funeral elegy for H.C.E. that I quoted at the beginning. ‘The grammarians of Christpatrick’ have extirpated and interred the surrogate deity; H.C. E. stands accused and is put on trial to call himself to account; recalling the asseveration of Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844–1900), concerning the death of God, and his notion of the eternal recurrence; whereby the notion of God as now deceased is associated with the image of the Buddha’s shadow, which can still be observed within a cave for centuries following his death:
‘New battles. — After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries — a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow. — And we — we must still defeat his shadow as well!’
H.C.E. is ‘our old offender’, that is, Adam; he is made ‘respunchable’, that is, responsible, ‘ultimendly’, that is, ultimately, in the end, but also out of season, and at the wrong time, for ‘the hubbub caused in Edenborough’, that is, for the discord and holy mess that followed on from the Fall that had transpired in Eden. The story of the Fall, and its endless recurrences, invokes the notion of a human sacrifice, and of a scapegoat; the old offender carries the weight of responsibility for it; and as sacrifice and scapegoat he is rendered repeatedly punchable, that is to say, punishable, or rather, respunchable, punchable like a thing, (from the Latin, ‘res’, a nominative singular Latin noun for a substantive or concrete thing, as opposed to ‘spes’, meaning something unreal or ethereal). And the sacrificial offering is subjected to ‘lashons of languages’, he is lashed by language; with the further implication that he is lashed down and thus restrained by language, by rules and limitations of grammar; and yet, at the same time we descry latchings on of numerous languages, and further, transfiguration is constructed and elaborated by way of this multiplicity of languages.
And as for the ‘bynames’ that are ‘put under him’, the growing plurality of his names and of words generally, that tie him down as he is put on trial and subsequently sacrificed, is at the same time a wellspring of unimagineable fecundity. He emerges as the ‘humile, commune’, that is to say, the common humus humbly sustaining and nurturing the community. And yet at the same time this nourishment of names is also an ‘ensectuous’, that is to say, infectious, plague upon nature evoking the infestation of insects, the locusts, that assailed Egypt:
‘And Moses and Aaron came in unto Pharaoh, and said unto him, Thus saith the Lord God of the Hebrews, How long wilt thou refuse to humble thyself before me? let my people go, that they may serve me. Else, if thou refuse to let my people go, behold, to morrow will I bring the locusts into thy coast: And they shall cover the face of the earth, that one cannot be able to see the earth: and they shall eat the residue of that which is escaped, which remaineth unto you from the hail, and shall eat every tree which groweth for you out of the field: And they shall fill thy houses, and the houses of all thy servants, and the houses of all the Egyptians; which neither thy fathers, nor thy fathers’ fathers have seen, since the day that they were upon the earth unto this day. And he turned himself, and went out from Pharaoh’.
- Exodus 10:3–6, King James version.
Such afflictions are to a degree the outcome of our old offender being split into divisions through names, or ‘bynames’; that is, into sects, ‘ensectuous’, that are totalizing him, or ‘totalisating him’. The concept of the deity is totalized, in religion, as the One. As is Being in the philosophy of Parmenides of Elea, (late 6th and early 5th century BC), for whom, contrary to appearances, reality is one and nothing changes:
‘We can speak and think only of what exists. And what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous’.
And so too in the henological philosophy of Plotinus, (c. 204/5–270 AD), for whom there is a transcendent One, not so much the sum of everything but rather that which is prior to everything; identifiable with the concept of Good, and the principle of Beauty; but not simply a concept of the mind, it may also be experienced, through henosis; an experience transcending all multiplicity; thinker and object are thereby one:
‘We ought not even to say that he will see, but he will be that which he sees, if indeed it is possible any longer to distinguish between seer and seen, and not boldly to affirm that the two are one’.
‘Even hamissim of himashim’; in English ‘himashim’ is a third-person rendition of the expression ‘I am that I am’, by which God specifies Himself to Moses:
‘God replied to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you’.’
- Exodus 3:14, King James version
The Greek and the Judeo-Christian traditions thus totalize their conceptions of the deity and depict God as One and Being; ‘honnein’, Greek óν, aspirated to become ‘hon’, for One; coupled with German ein, for One; but also with nein, for Nothing. As I remarked at the end of ‘The Metaphysics of Memory: Part Three’ it is through language that the contradictory and seemingly irresolvable tension between imagination and memory, both cultural and personal memory, is articulated in ‘Finnegans Wake’; we see it at work here, and there is a prayer in the text recollecting the ‘Book of Common Prayer’: ‘Grant peace in our time, O Lord’; but, in this rendition, divinity resolves itself into a mere noisy but empty sound:
‘Till tree from tree, tree among trees, tree over tree become stone to stone, stone between stones, stone under stone for ever.
O Loud, hear the wee beseech of thees of each of these thy unlitten ones! Grant sleep in hour’s time, O Loud!
That they take no chill. That they do ming no merder. That they shall not gomeet madhowiatrees.
Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low!
Ha he hi ho hu.
Mummum’.
God, our ‘Loud’, as a mere name, a word, a sound, corresponding to nothing in objective reality; praying to a name only is futile; all that can be hoped for is sleep; for annihilation in an hour, or in time generally, a time that is fundamentally ours. Our being has been completely revealed as temporal in its essence and thus as essentially subject to ruination and death. But then, does not our ‘Loud’ also implicate the resounding hollowness of language? But much can hang on one’s philosophy of language. Plato, (428/427 or 424/423–348/347 BC), espoused a theory of universals, concepts, whereby universals may not exist as physical objects do, but they are real: ‘What about someone who believes in beautiful things, but doesn’t believe in the beautiful itself…? Don’t you think he is living in a dream rather than a wakened state?’ But for a nominalist, like Thomas Hobbes, (1588–1679), ‘there is nothing universal but names’, there are neither universal things or the only universals are names only’, and all talk of incorporeal things is ‘insignificant speech’.
Our ‘Loud’ is an empty name; and prior to this prayer we read: ‘The timid hearts of words all exeomnosunt’; evoking memories of the Latin ‘exeunt omnes’, a stage direction meaning ‘exit all’; but perhaps here suggesting ‘die all’; the lack of a divine presence, the death of God, reverberates throughout the language here; indicating an emptiness and yet and omnipotency of language itself: that is to say, nothing comes from nothing, ex nihilo nihil fit, a philosophical thesis that as far as we know was first asserted by Parmenides, but language has indeed this illimitable capacity to create ex nihilo.
Wrapped up in ‘Finnegans Wake’ is a reading of the history of civilization and of consciousness within a perspective made singularly possible by various and diverse cultures together with their epic traditions; the Fall of Man at the opening of the novel, for instance; which can also be read as the Fall of Lucifer, together with the collapse of the social order; and immanent within such an apocalyptic vision is the Word, fractured and disseminated via relentless, highly inventive linguistic boldness.
Which brings us back to Hegel and the development of the experience of religious consciousness. At the end of Part Three I had arrived at the stage of religion as a form of art, the worship of statues, and rather than seeing their gods as mute it was necessary for religious communities to make their gods speak, and then they may be properly worshipped, not merely through the forms of sculpture, but also through hymns, in which the writer can permit him or herself the conceit of believing him or herself as a mere scribe, recording the words of the gods themselves, as Hegel explains:
‘The work of art therefore demands another element of its existence, the god another mode of coming forth than this . . . This higher element is Language — an outer reality that is immediately self-conscious existence . . . The god, therefore, who has language for the element of his shape is the work of art that is in its own self inspired, that possesses immediately in its outer existence the pure activity which, when it existed as a Thing, was in contrast to it’.
However, a statue stands there continually; the god is present, at least in representation, to his or her followers in a permanent way. Yet with the advent of the oracle the deity spoke, albeit in a remote and estranged kind of voice, a reflection of the oracle’s function in resolving issues of contingency; for instance, is this a good time to embark upon a journey? Such issues, that is, that could not be dealt with through recourse to the laws of the gods, for there was no need to consult an oracle concerning those, for they were known and understood by everyone. And the advent of the hymn within religious cultures marked something of an advance over the oracle; but now among those desirous to worship religiously there was a sense that, just as with consulting an oracle, through the singing of hymns the god is now, unlike the case with the statue, no longer permanently present to them. Religious consciousness thus developed to yet another form of religious life, that of the cult.
A cult will endeavour to overcome the deficiency of an impermanent divine presence through bringing speech and statuary together. And now they can worship through the singing of hymns before the statues; and by this means they can welcome and receive their gods. But religious consciousness has not advanced so far as to recognise that evil dwells in the soul, and thus, to become appropriately ready for the welcoming reception of their gods, they endeavour to purify themselves through getting the better of their mere bodily selves. This they suppose they achieve through sacrificing their material possessions; and yet it is something of a paradox that such sacrifice is in addition the prelude to a feast, which, as Hegel notes, ‘cheats the act [of sacrifice] out of its negative significance’. A tension here in need of a resolution; and the cult’s attempt to overcome it is through devoting itself to the construction of holy buildings, or temples. And the creative individuality of the artist that we saw at the level of sculptural art here no longer intrudes itself to the same degree: ‘this action is not the individual labour of the artist, this particular aspect of it being dissolved in universality’.
But this is dialectic that is being played out; and so nothing remains settled for long. Now temples have been created that come to serve more as places where the city can parade and put on show its power and its wealth, rather than anything much to do with religion. In this phase of religious development, however, consciousness does have an exuberant and positive, quite life affirming, relationship with the divine; very much reflected in the feasting of the worshippers: ‘In this enjoyment, then, is revealed what that divine risen Light really is; enjoyment in the mystery of its being’. Nonetheless, the cult is simply relating to the divine as something natural: ‘its self-conscious life is only the mystery of bread and wine, of Ceres and Bacchus, not of the other, the strictly higher, gods whose individuality includes as an essential moment self-consciousness as such’.
The gods and goddesses continue to be represented in human form in the games and processions, in the champion athlete who may be seen as a sort of living statue, and at the same time as a sort of repository of the pride of a nation. But the dialectic carries on … religious consciousness then comes to sense that this is not an appropriate way to be representing its gods and goddesses; that is, through the ‘corporeal individuality’ of an admirable, good-looking and in every way most awesome warrior. Religious consciousness then turns away from the plastic arts towards literary forms, that is to say, to the epic, (we are eventually finding our way back to ‘Finnegans Wake’ here), to tragedy, and to comedy. In the epic, and perhaps ‘Finnegans Wake’, recollecting as it does the whole of human history, may be the epic of epics, the gods are displayed as guiding forces in the affairs of humanity, directing the actions and destiny of the heroes that are portrayed in the story; they are the controlling agencies:
‘They are the universal, and the positive, over against the individual self of mortals which cannot hold out against their might; but the universal self, for that reason, hovers over them and over this whole world of picture-thinking to which the entire content belongs, as the irrational void of Necessity — a mere happening which they must face as beings without a self and sorrowfully, for these determinate natures cannot find themselves in this purity’.
In tragedy, on the other hand, the protagonists at least have the appearance of being more in control of their destinies in relation to their gods: they are: ‘self-conscious human beings who know their rights and purposes, the power and the will of their specific nature and know how to assert them’. Such a difference between epic and tragedy is reflected in the fact that whereas in the epic the narrator is the rhapsode standing outside and looking in as the story unfolds, (Joyce, in the case of ‘Finnegans Wake’, or whoever’s dream it is, perhaps one Mr. Porter, pub landlord); in tragedy the heroes speak on their own behalf; the actors play their parts in the drama. But a feeling of impotency in relation to the gods prevails, reflected by the chorus, which ‘clings to the consciousness of an alien fate and produces the empty desire for ease and comfort, and feeble talk of appeasement’. What tragedy ultimately reveals is division within ethical substance; that is between family and state, between feminine and masculine, and an incapacity to see from the perspective of its other, symbolized through the manner by which the gods dupe and cheat and misdirect the tragic heroes: ‘The action, in being carried out, demonstrates their unity in the natural downfall of both powers and both self-conscious characters’.
Religious consciousness, having observed the role of character in tragedy, can no longer consider such gods as agents that are directing the lives of the heroes. Instead, the divine is now perceived as fate; and, as Hegel notes, ‘[t]his Fate completes the depopulation of Heaven . . . The expulsion of such shadowy, insubstantial picture-thoughts which was demanded of the philosophers of antiquity thus already begins in [Greek] Tragedy’.
Such a process continues further onward through comedy, for now the representation of the gods using masks can be utilised to reveal that behind it all there is merely another actor. The gods themselves become mere abstract Platonic universals …. O Loud, and now we are back with ‘Finnegans Wake’.
Aristophanes, (c. 446 — c. 386 BC), who does make his presence felt in places in the Wake, makes fun of such universals and of Socrates in his play ‘The Clouds’, in which Strepsiades together with his son Pheidippides seek out Socrates to tap into his wisdom and knowledge in the hope that it will enable them to overcome a heavy amount of debt that they have accrued. Socrates in the play is the head teacher at the Thinkery, and we are introduced to him in the play as he floats on to the stage in a basket, treading on air, contemplating the sun, head in the clouds, far removed from reality; who then proceeds to instruct Strepsiades in atheism by introducing him to the Clouds. O Loud. O Cloud:
‘SOCRATES (pompously) I am traversing the air and contemplating the sun.
STREPSIADES Thus it’s not on the solid ground, but from the height of this basket, that you slight the gods, if indeed….
SOCRATES I have to suspend my brain and mingle the subtle essence of my mind with this air, which is of the like nature, in order clearly to penetrate the things of heaven. I should have discovered nothing, had I remained on the ground to consider from below the things that are above; for the earth by its force attracts the sap of the mind to itself. It’s just the same with the watercress.
STREPSIADES What? Does the mind attract the sap of the watercress? …….’
To know the truth concerning celestial matters one must converse with the clouds, as Socrates later explains:
‘Oh! most mighty king, the boundless air, that keepest the earth suspended in space, thou bright Aether and ye venerable goddesses, the Clouds, who carry in your loins the thunder and the lightning, arise, ye sovereign powers and manifest yourselves in the celestial spheres to the eyes of your sage’.
Again, the dialectic will proceed forward, for religious consciousness cannot settle with situating the divine separated from itself:
‘It is the return of everything universal into the certainty of itself which, in consequence, is this complete loss of fear and of essential being on the part of all that is alien. This self-certainty is a state of spiritual well-being and of repose therein, such is not to be found anywhere outside of this Comedy’.
This is a purely secular outlook that religious consciousness has now attained, and so it cannot be satisfied. Now it will return to a more conspicuously religious perspective with a conception of the divine that will represent an advance on anything that has hitherto been observed as stages in the development of religious consciousness (an advance that I will cover in Part Five).
But of course ‘Finnegans Wake’ is not a summa theologica so much as a summa of Joyce’s macaronic textual practices, wherein the chronicles of civilizations are plundered in order to demonstrate how every past is incorporated into every present and will be present again in every future; an eternal recurrence; everything repeated continually: Finnegan = ‘fin’ (French ‘end’), and again. As in a dream wherein tense distinctions are destabilised, time here proceeds in endlessly repetitive cycles. In ‘Ulysses’, Leopold Bloom, a quite ordinary character going about his business in an ordinary way on an ordinary day, thereby repeats the fabulous, in the literal sense of the word, exploits of a Greek epic hero Ulysses. And in the opening episode Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s literary alter-ego, thinks clearly: ‘I am another now and yet the same’, as he aids Buck Mulligan in performing his mock eucharistic rite and morning ablutions; a brave new world, an apocalyptic history, all totally recollected and manifested through the language of ‘Finnegans Wake’; including, at one moment, a stoical resignation towards death, and a good note on which to finish for now, given that:
‘I’ve a terrible errible lot todue todie todue tootorribleday’.
To be continued…….
Notes to quotations from ‘Finnegans Wake’:
First quotation:
1. offender = one who offends, who transgresses a law, or infringes a rule or regulation
2. commune = to receive communion, to communicate intimely; and common.
3. ensectuous = insect and incestuous.
4. gauge = to take the measure of (a person, his character, etc.). 5
5. bynames = a secondary name, nickname.
6. lashons = lashings, (Anglo-Irish), plenty , and lashon, (Hebrew), tongue, speech, language.
7. honnein = khanneni(Hebrew), pity me; and Honi soit qui mal y pense (Medieval French), ‘evil be [to him] who evil thinks of this’; the motto of the Order of the Garter.
8. hammissim = khamishim (Hebrew), fifty; and khamisha khumshey (Hebrew), five fifths, i.e. Pentateuch.
9. sober serious = from ‘My People; Stories of the Peasantry of West Wales’, by Caradoc Evans, 25. ‘A Heifer Without Blemish’: ‘What nonsense you talk out of the back of your head! Sober serious, mouth not that you have thrown gravel at Sara Jane’s window!’
10. ee = eye; and ye; and Pigott’s forged Parnell letter begins ‘Dear E!… let there be an end of this hesitency’; and he is he and no other he.
11. ultimendly = ultimately, and timendum (Latin), to be feared.
12. respunchable = responsible.
13. hubbub = noisy turmoil; confusion, disturbance; and khibbubh (Hebrew), fondness.
14. Edenborough = Edinburgh, district of the Lothian region, and capital of Scotland; and Eden and Burgh Quays, Dublin, face one another across the Liffey ; and eden, paradise; and Garden of Eden.
Second quotation:
1. abramanation = abomination, an object that excites disgust and hatred; and abram (Slang), naked; and Abraham (‘Genesis’); and Mark Twain, ‘Huckleberry Finn’: ‘The man that bought him is named Abram Foster — Abram G. Foster — and he lives forty mile back here in the country, on the road to Lafayette’.
2. precentors = clerics who directs the choral services of a church or cathedral; persons, usually a clergy member, who are in charge of preparing worship services.
3. grammarians = specialists in grammar or linguistics.
4. Christpatrick’s = Christ Church and Saint Patrick’s, Dublin cathedrals.
5. tomb = to bury, entomb.
Third quotation:
1. Macalister, ‘The Secret Languages of Ireland’, translates a ‘Bearlagair Na Saer’ sentence referring to the bonds of Masonry as ‘Stone to stone, stone between two stones, and stone over stone’.
2. unlitten = not lighted.
3. Grant sleep in hour’s time = Anglican Morning Prayer: ‘Give peace in our time, O Lord’.
4. ming = to remember; to give an account, to relate; and mingo (Latin), to urinate; and commit; and ming (Chinese), name.
5. merder = murder; and merda (Latin), dung, ordure, excrement; and merde,(French), shit ; and the children urinate and defecate before going to bed.
6. madhowiatrees= Exodus 20:13–14: ‘Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery’ (5th-6th Commandments, according to Roman Catholic tradition); and mad Hiawathas.
7. Loud, heap miseries upon us = Lord have mercy upon us, yet incline our hearts to keep thy laws!; and the modern Liturgy of the Hours usage focuses on three major hours and from two to four minor hours: Invitatory; the Office of Readings (formerly Matins), major hour; Morning prayer (Lauds), major hour; Daytime prayer, which can be one or all of Midmorning prayer (Terce), Midday prayer (Sext), Midafternoon prayer (None); Evening prayer (Vespers), major hour; Night Prayer (Compline).
8. entwine = to twine or twist together; to plait, interlace; and Anglican Book of Common Prayer, Holy Communion, Response to Commandments: ‘Incline our hearts to keep Thy Law’.
9. Mummum= amen; and mum!, hush!, silence!; and mother
Fourth quotation:
1. ‘I’ve a Terrible Lot to Do Today’ (song, Dion Boucicault).
2. todue = today, as to-be-done presently; in the flux of the present tense: ‘today’ (Latin: hodie) synonymous by means of near homophony with ‘to die’ (todie).
