The Metaphysics of Memory — Part One
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
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.
- ‘Finnegans Wake’, James Joyce, (1882–1941).
‘Finnegans Wake’ ends with the great monologue of Anna Livia Plurabelle, the river lady, the eternally flowing river that many a one will have dipped into, now attentive towards her own ageing as the years roll on, well aware that re-birth is to be achieved only through discharging herself into the great reviving and renewing sea of her particular demise. Hence, the wail of the river as she pours herself into the sea; the river that had imbued her entire monologue; now she must expend herself and become lost in the immense, acrid and salty waters.
But the end is the beginning; this final sentence of the novel is a mere fragment, stopping abruptly before reaching its end, and for the sake of its completion it is necessary to return to the opening of the novel. Ann Livia had promised the keys to heaven (‘Given!’… see the notes below), and appears to fulfil her promise… the opening line of the book is also a sentence fragment, one that continues from the novel’s unfinished closing line, rendering the work a never-ending cycle.
Anna Livia’s presence is implicated by the word with which the novel opens, ‘riverrun’. Anna Livia personifies the river Liffey, upon whose banks the city of Dublin was built. But Anna is not only a representation of the river Liffey, but of all rivers that appear in ‘Finnegans Wake’; a symbol of life, and of renewal. ‘Anna’ is formed from an Irish word meaning ‘river’; ‘Livia’ from ‘Liphe’ (Liffey), the place of origin of the source of the river. ‘Plurabelle’, an Italian word, the ‘loveliest’.
Anna Livia is present as a mature female archetype throughout ‘Finnegans Wake’. Anna Livia evokes a spectrum of maternal, sexual, and intermutual associations through her various identities and forms and symbolisms, such as that of the biblical Eve, mother of all. Anna Livia’s presence predominates, and by evoking her image and voice in the opening and the closing passages of the work, Joyce accentuates the significance of this all-embracing female figure of rebirth and renewal.
And yet, ‘riverrun’, the word with which the novel opens, suggests the German word ‘Erinnerung’, ‘memory’, a very significant concept to invoke right from the start of this particular work. And, for me, associated with ‘Erinnerung’ is the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831); Erinnerung is pivotal in the understanding of his philosophical system as a whole; it takes on and at the same time structures the fundamental concerns of his philosophy; the relationship of the eternal and of the transient; of the logical and of the historical; of objectivity and of subjectivity; of culture and of nature; of empirical subjectivity and of intersubjectivity; and of the Absolute.
But there is no English word to fully communicate the richness of the original meaning of ‘Erinnerung’; nor of the particular shades of meaning it acquires depending upon the context. ‘Recollection’ suggests a phenomenon of the mind, but Erinnerung is rather a universal ontological category, a movement of being itself which re-collects itself in accordance with its own nature, as Anna Livia recollects herself in accordance with her own nature as eternal river; it is the going into the self of a being and a return back to self; as Anna Livia flows into the sea to return back to herself as river, riverrun…; and yet, unlike the mediations and negations of immediate things that recur in Hegel’s system; an immediacy itself which disrupts the process as it is sublated into mediacy, Erinnerung is a new movement restricted no more by immediacy but engages in a backward regression into a timeless dimension, a having been, an essence; as Anna Livia enters upon an essential dimension as the River that runs through and beyond all space and time.
Erinnerung may be psychological recollection, but it is also a logical category; a descending into the foundation of a thing, into its essence, ‘Livia’, from ‘Liphe’ (Liffey), meaning the place of origin, the foundation of the river; Erinnerung is a withdrawing, a downward movement towards an essential interiority that is behind the appearance of the present thing, that being which is there. This withdrawal of being has a psychological meaning given that such a withdrawal presents itself as a temporal phenomenon; just as the essence of Anna is past being it is also an atemporal past; in the flow of the monologue the essence of Anna establishes a continuance of moments of being present that follow one another temporally, much as the youthful Anna becomes an aged Anna in respect of the reflection of the essence ‘woman’ that is present in them both.
The whole of ‘Finnegans Wake’ is a complex structure of interrelated parts, overlaid with an intricate and somewhat frenzied attention to detail, but it remains very much an open text. It permits to flow through it all randomness and chance, simultaneity, odd conjunctions, the unforeseen and unexpected, and coincidences; in a total surrender to the river all meanings, intended and unintended, course through it. Memory, recollection, Erinnerung, thus presents itself as a descent into the essential interiority of an immediate past, a past characterised by being there. There is thus a fruitful comparison to be made, or so it seems to me, between a unification of the different meanings of Hegel’s concept of Erinnerung, and ‘Finnegans Wake’ as it moves between different levels, while the relationships between the different levels are not detailed in any precise or exact way. As we read through ‘Finnegans Wake’ we will make all sorts of connections; as we read it again we make other connections. It never ends.
Notes to the excerpts from ‘Finnegans Wake’:
Last line of the novel:
1. Whish! = the imitation of a soft sibilant sound as of something moving rapidly through the air; and whist! (Irish), meaning silence!, hush!
2. Far calls = far (Danish), meaning father. — father.
3. End here = refers to William Shakespeare, (1564–1616), ‘Pericles’, Act V:
MARINA: I will end here.
4. Us then = aus, (German), meaning end, finish.
5. Take = refers to William Shakespeare, ‘Measure for Measure’, Act VI:
Take, O, take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn;
But my kisses bring again, bring again;
Seals of love, but seal’d in vain, seal’d in vain.
6. Bussoftlhee = buss, meaning to kiss, and bussofthee refers to William Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet’, Act 1:
But soft! methinks I scent the morning air.
[Note also: ‘softly, remember!’].
7. mememormee = to remind, to bring to remembrance, and me me more me, and remember me.
8. thousendsthee = thousand years, and thou sendest thee.
9. Lps = lips, and refers to the ballad opera, The Bohemian Girl, by Michael William Balfe, (1808–1870), and the song ‘Then You’ll Remember Me’ which starts with the line:
‘When other lips and other hearts’
Also, in the play ‘Arrah na Pogue’ by Dion Boucicault, (1820–1890), Arrah slips her foster-brother by way of a kiss a message that helps him escape from jail.
10. The keys to. Given! = heaven, refers to ‘Revelation’ 9:1:
Then the fifth angel sounded:
And I saw a star fallen from heaven to the earth.
To him was given the key to the bottomless pit.
11. A way a lone a last a loved a long the = contains references to four neters (Egyptian gods, I have not managed to untangle it yet) plus ne, (Serbian, meaning no, and thé (French) plus thee (Dutch) for tea. Whereas ‘Ulysses’ ends with the forceful word ‘yes’, ‘Finnegans Wake’ ends with one of the least forceful words in the English language. But, it takes us back to the first sentence in the novel:
First line of the novel:
1. riverrun = the course which a river shapes and follows through the landscape.
2. Eve and Adam’s = Church of the Immaculate Conception, also known as Adam and Eve’s, a Roman Catholic church run by Franciscans, located on Merchants Quay, Dublin.
3. swerve = abrupt change of direction, erratic deflection from an intended course.
4. swerve of shore to bend of bay = bend of bay is the curving shoreline of Dublin Bay, seen from two different points of view: that of the native on the shore and that of either the foreign invader or the returning exile at sea.
5. bay = a body of water partially enclosed by land but with a wide mouth, affording access to the sea.
6. commodious = spacious and comfortable.
7. vicus = village; or a row of houses; or a quarter of a city; or a vicious circle, a situation in which a cause produces a result that itself produces the original cause; or Giambattista Vico.
8. recirculation = a renewed circulation.
9. Howth = promontory and peninsula on the northern side of Dublin bay.
10. environs = surroundings, outskirts.
