The Metaphysics of Memory — Part Seven
‘… in this scherzarade of one’s thousand one nightinesses that sword of certainty which would indentifidethe body never falls …’
- James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’
This sentence precedes three chapters in the novel that are concerned with tales from the earliest stages of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker’s life; the barely remembered inexperienced immature novice stumbling through his life, whose improper, unwholesome and stunted activities, performances and fluctuations of circumstance laid the foundations for the principle features of character that are now manifested in the man. A series of false steps have been undergone but never is it made fully clear what they are and how precisely he went astray; stories are recollected ‘in this scherzarade of one’s thousand one nightinesses’, but the ‘sword of certainty’ that would identify the fault never falls; little is known concerning the facts; it is rather gossip, rumour, and dream memory that are in operation. Events distant in time become tangled up and muddled with H.C.E.’s more contemporary escapades.
And later, as the night rolls on:
‘Dogs’ vespers are anending.
……
THE MONGREL UNDER THE DUNGMOUND. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INFRA-LIMINAL INTELLIGENCE. OFFRANDES.
Vespers, celebrated towards evening, indicate the time of night as the sleeper dreams on. The dog of an indefinable breed under the dung mound musters an old saw, every cock will crow upon his own dunghill, that is to say, everyone is confident and at ease on their home ground.But against a background of an evening chorus of barking dogs, infra-liminal denotes below or beneath the threshold, the limen, the limit below which a given stimulus ceases to be perceptible. Offerings, offrandes, religious devotions, substitute for intelligence, certainty, knowledge relating to events and outcomes; what exactly has occurred? A great deal is communicated by or obtained through another; mediated information, diverse accounts, present themselves as an act of faith.
Finnegan reappears in the text at this point; out of the depths of the past, out of the murky depths of the unconscious, surfaces the primeval form of Finnegan; the memory of whom threatens, and thus has to be propitiated with offerings; but though divinity is present here the dog theme suggests an association of the Finnegan figure with the forces of man’s baser, animal nature, the ‘id’ of Sigmund Freud, (1856–1939, wherein the innate, instinctive impulses express themselves.
And later, as the night continues to roll on, Anna Livia Plurabelle is comforting one of her children who has been distirbed by a nightmare:
‘Everyday, precious, while m’m’ry’s leaves are falling deeply on my Jungfraud’s Messongebook I will dream telepath posts dulcets on this isinglass stream (but don’t tell him or I’ll be the mort of him!) under the libans and the sickamours, the cyprissis and babilonias…’
Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, (1875–1961), are invoked; mes songes (French), my dreams; and mensonge (French), lie, falsehood. A proficient mind telepathically telegraphing soothing messages down the isinglass stream; while memory’s leaves are falling she will dream under the trees. Which reminds us of the novel’s opening: ‘…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….’
‘Riverrun’, erinnern, the original meaning of which was to become aware of, to take in; it relates to the proposition ‘in’; and is a crucial concept in the philosophy of Hegel; though the meaning in his day, as it is now, is to be reminiscent of, to remind someone, of something. In its reflexive form, sich erinnern means to remind oneself of, to recall, to remember something; and similar to the Greek anamimneskesthai, to recollect, the suggestion is of an accomplished end result, as opposed to a process, of an endeavour to recall or recollect something one knows or has come upon previously. The noun Erinnerung means a reminder, but also memory, recollection. Plato, (428/7–424/3 B.C.E.), believed all learning to be recollection, anamnesis, of things previously known but subsequently forgotten; this doctrine underlies much of the understanding of Erinnerung as employed within German idealism. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, (1775- 1854), declared that the ‘Platonic idea that all philosophy is recollection is true in this sense: all philosophy consists in a recollecting of the state in which we were one with Nature’. And ‘Finnegans Wake’ approaches more nearly to a production of nature than any other creative work; grand and extensive; bewildering and mystifying; at the service of itself alone; forever indicating a meaning; but never delivering up more than mere fragments of meaning.
Hegel employed Erinnerung to mean recollection, but together with this is also the implication of internalization; concurring with Plato that learning involves Erinnerung, in the sense of self-internalization, but not that it involves Erinnerung, in the sense of recollection. Plato’s anamnesis is without any comparable implication of internalization. The recollection of a past event is an internalization of the event; the event is within the one that is recollecting as opposed to being at some distance from him or her in space and time. But, to recollect an event, the one that is recollecting has to at the same time of the event have internalized it and acquired a memory of it that can then later be recalled; so that this memory is not so much internalized by the recollection as rather externalized, unearthed and brought to light from the memory. Erinnerung is therefore not first and foremost recollection, but the internalization of a sensory intuition as an image; and the image is abstracted from the concrete spatio-temporal position of the intuition, and given a place in the intelligence which has its own spatio-temporal subjectivity. And yet the image is momentary, and passes out of consciousness, so that the imagination is required to restore it to consciousness, to reproduce the image.
The vapours linger round the Heights,
They melt, and soon must vanish;
One hour is theirs, nor more is mine, —
Sad thought, which I would banish,
But that I know, where’er I go,
Thy genuine image, Yarrow!
Will dwell with me, — to heighten joy,
And cheer my mind in sorrow.
- William Wordsworth, ‘Yarrow Visited’, 1814.
The imagination thus achieves its three-fold function of being reproductive, associative, and productive or creative; and this we see in operation in ‘Finnegans Wake’.
Out of the depths of the unconscious of the dreamer emerge religious notions, vespers, offerings, the dog (God spelled backwards), together with Freudian and Jungian concepts. Philosophers are evoked in the text also; at the end of the previous article in this series I arrived at the stage of explaining Hegel’s contention that it is at least intelligible that religion and philosophy can both be grounded upon a mutual understanding and upon certain shared beliefs and interests; which is to say, to the extent that both of them in their most exalted forms may permit us to discover satisfaction in the world and ultimately to find ourselves at home in it. There is a significant difference however. In Christianity the notion of such satisfaction discovers its expression through the myths and tales of religious representation, whereas in philosophy a more literal meaning is endowed upon this notion, subsequent to the resolution, into a rational shape, of the aporias (contradictions) that obstruct our comprehension of the world. Absolute knowing is the term Hegel gives to this type of rational insight; and absolute Spirit is the form of consciousness that attains it:
‘The content of this picture-thinking [at the level of religion] is absolute Spirit; and all that now remains to be done is to supersede this mere form, or rather, since this belongs to consciousness as such, its truth must already have yielded itself in the shape of consciousness’.
For consciousness it finally becomes clear how absolute knowing is to be attained, once it comprehends the manner by which it was unsuccessful in finding satisfaction in the world as a consequence of it having found its way into it in an erroneous and misguided manner, in which it assumed merely limited conceptions that required completion. Absolute knowing thereby establishes an association with the notion of a complete, sound and unadulterated rational cognition of the world, as opposed to knowledge of some other worldly entity that might be labelled the Absolute. And consciousness has to determine how to bring such limited conceptions together, to run through again, which is to say, to recollect, (and this is what makes Erinnerung crucial to the system), the various stages that the dialectic took and that Hegel describes in ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’; commencing with consciousness it becomes apparent from the perspective of phenomenology that the standpoints appropriated by consciousness, sense certainty, perception, understanding, were one-sided, and that the truth resides rather in the recognition that not one of them alone can do justice to the manner by which individuality, particularity and universality are related in the phenomenological object:
‘Thus the object is in part immediate being or, in general, a Thing — corresponding to immediate consciousness; in part, an othering of itself, its relationship or being-for-an-other, and being-foritself, i.e. determinateness — corresponding to perception; and in part essence, or in the form of a universal — corresponding to the Understanding. It is, as a totality, a syllogism or the movement of the universal through determination to individuality, as also the reverse movement from individuality through superseded individuality, or through determination, to the universal. It is, therefore, in accordance with these three determinations that consciousness must know the object as itself’.
Of course, what this conception of individuality, particularity and universality as applied to our thinking about objects actually entails has to be clarified, as Hegel will proceed to do in the works following on from ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’; nothing short of such a complex conception will suffice, once the dialectical limitations that brought about this deficiency have been disclosed. From thence the philosophical system can be systematically refined and enhanced in terms of pure categories and forms of thought; the diverse standpoints of self-consciousness, reason, and Spirit, thus remind us (erinnern) how each on its own proved to be incomplete and that what is now needed is to discover a manner by which they can be unified into a more complex whole:
‘These are the moments of which the reconciliation of Spirit with its own consciousness proper is composed; by themselves they are single and separate, and it is solely their spiritual unity that constitutes the power of this reconciliation. The last of these moments is, however, necessarily this unity itself and, as is evident, it binds them all into itself’.
In ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ Hegel situated all of these ‘single and separate’ moments alongside one another, to demonstrate where each is inadequate when regarded on its own: ‘Our own act here has been simply to gather together the separate moments, each of which in principle exhibits the life of Spirit in its entirety’. And what renders clear the particular standpoint of consciousness at the end of the ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ distinctive, as it lays the groundwork and readies itself to endeavour upon science is a reflective examination, a recollection, of its categories in an attempt to overcome the kind of one-sided positions it previously traversed. For such a science to be possible, consciousness has to come to see, through a process of self-examination, of remembering, that it can arrive at a view of the world that will make the world fully intelligible, whereas prior to that moment it has presented itself as alien to consciousness.
Science guides us through the categories that correspond to the limited forms of consciousness characterised and described in ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ which thus assists us towards attaining the sort of dialectical outlook that absolute knowing needs; and by demonstrating how these various categories have functioned when instantiated in various world-views, ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ therefore constitutes ‘the Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearances’. The preparations are complete, the moment is ready for the forward movement to the more abstract level of ‘The Science of Logic’, where these categories can be investigated and analysed in their own right:
‘Spirit, therefore, having won the Notion, displays its existence and movement in this ether of its life and is Science. In this, the moments of its movement no longer exhibit themselves as specific shapes of consciousness, but — since consciousness’ difference has returned into the Self — as specific Notions and as their organic self-grounded movement’.
And thus the way is prepared for the transition within the philosophical system from the ‘shapes of consciousness’ outlined in ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ to the ‘specific Notions’, the concepts or categories, to be outlined in ‘The Science of Logic’; and therefore for science in its pure and abstract form, ‘in this ether of its life’……….
‘The June snows was flocking in thuckflues on the hegelstomes, millipeeds of it and myriopoods…..’
- ‘Finnegans Wake’.
To be concluded …..
Notes to Quotations from ‘Finnegans Wake’:
First Quotation:
1. scherzarade = scherzare (Italian), to sport, play; and Italian scherzo: German Scherz, joke; and Scheherazade, ‘A Thousand and One Nights’.
2. certainty = a fact or thing certain or sure.
3. identify = to determine or establish the identity of; to ascertain who a given person is.
Second Quotation:
1.vespers = the sixth of the Canonical Hours of the breviary, said or celebrated towards evening.
2. anending = anend, to the end, right through; straight on, constantly;and unending; and at an end.
3. mongrel = the offspring of two different breeds of dog. Chiefly, and now only, a dog of no definable breed, resulting from various crossings; and every cock will crow upon his own dunghill, (a phrase), everyone is confident and at ease on their home ground; and evening chorus of barking dogs.
4. infra= denoting ‘below’, ‘beneath’, in respect of status or condition.
5. liminal = of or pertaining to the threshold or initial stage of a process; especially in psychology. Of or pertaining to a ‘limen’ or ‘threshold’ (the limit below which a given stimulus ceases to be perceptible).
6. intelligence = knowledge as to events, communicated by or obtained from another; information, news.
7. offrandes = offrand, the presenting of something to God (or to a deity or object of worship) as an act of worship or devotion.
Third Quotation:
1. Jungfraud = Freud’s and fraud and Jungfrau (German), virgin; and Joyce declined in 1919 to be analysed by Jung; Lucia was to be, but not until 1934.
2. Messongebook = Messbuch (German), missal, and mes songes (French), my dreams; and mensonge (French), lie, falsehood.
3. telepath = an adept in, subject of, or believer in telepathy; and telegraph.
4. dulcets = dulcet, sweet to the eye, ear, or feelings; a dulcet note or tone
5. isinglass = a firm whitish semitransparent substance, a form of gelatin; and Tristan sent messages carved on bark and twigs to Isolde, informing her he was waiting at a tree beside the stream, by dropping them into a stream which ran through her chamber (related in Bédier: ‘Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut’ (‘Le Grand Pin’)).
6. mort = dead; and to be the death of, something that kills, or renders liable to death; often hyperbolically.
7. libans = Libanus (Latin), Lebanon; and libanos (Greek), incense (Maronites); and cedars of Lebanon.
8. sickamours = sycamores; and amour (French), love.
9. cyprissis = cypresses; and cyprus (Latin), a tree growing in Cyprus.
Fourth Quotation:
1. flock = to come or go in great numbers, to troop.
2. flue = any light floating particle; and flue (Danish), fly.
3. Hegel = German philosopher, (1770–1831), Hegel’s tomes, his voluminous writings; and hailstone, a pellet of hail, and Hagel (German), hail; and stoma (Greek), orifice, pore.
4. milliped = any one of the chilognathan myriapods, in which the numerous legs are usually placed on each of the segments in double pairs, except the three or four pairs immediately behind the head; and mille pedes (Latin), a thousand feet.
5. myriapod = a class of arthropodous animals, comprising the centipedes and millipedes; and myrioi podes (Greek), ten thousand feet.
