‘Austrasia or Anywhere’: Place, Space and the Antipodes inJames Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

Author:Jassy, Miriam

Publication Date:2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/19018

License:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/Link to license to see what you are allowed to do with this resource.

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‘Austrasia or Anywhere’: Place, Space and the Antipodes in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

Miriam Jassy

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

University of New South Wales (UNSW)

Australia

School of Humanities and Languages

Faculty of Arts and Sciences

March 2015

Thesis Dissertation Sheet

Abstract

James Joyce included imagery of t he Antipodes in Finnegans Wake to contribute to the book's contrary themes and innovative depictions of space and place. TI1rough close readings of the book's references to

the region known historically as the Ant ipodes (including but not limited to Aust ral ia and New Zealand),

Joyce's technique of doubling Ireland with other places as part of the book's style shows his universal idea of t he desirable yet complex m erging of opposites. The t rope of the Ant ipodes is of great value in

studying the f iguration of place and space in Finnegans Wake, as the region was considered to be

opposed to Europe in more than geographical terms. The Antipodes are merged with Ireland in Finnegans Woke by collapsing distance through amalgamations of language and formations of place.

The Ant ipodes are considered in their historical, geographic and literary context as cont rary to Eu ropean

l ife. The Ant ipodes' spatial f iguration in Finnegan.s Wake is discussed in the context of literary crit icism on

Joyce's writing of space and place in his earlier prose. It is argued that critical research on the stylizat ion of place and space in Finnegans Wake is at a nascent stage. Theoretical approaches to the authoring of

space are found in recent writings that draw on Geocrit icism, and Finnegan.s Wake is considered a

prototypical geocritical work as it uses mult iple and conflict ing textual perspectives to create a sense of place.

Ireland is presented as the primary narrat ive site in Finnegans Wake with a focus on how Joyce expanded Irish space on a global scale. Ireland is shown to be superimposed over the Antipodes through the

metaphor of verticality and t he motif of felix culpa, the fortuitous Fall. The spatial role of the character

HCE is discussed through his north-south alignments with the land, w hile the character Shem is the focus

for a discussion of t he Antipodes and perversity. It is argued that t he textual references to t he Antipodes

represent a portal for Irish exile and t ravel, reflecting Joyce's innovat ion in destabilizing spatial referents.

The thesis concludes that Finnegans Wake is a global text in its distortion of geographical boundaries

Declaration relaOOg to disposition of project thesisldissenation

I herebygant to the Univers...1y at New South W:S>es or its agents the right to .31Chive and to make available my thesis or dissa1ation fl whole or in part in the University libr3ries in all forms of media. now or here after known, subject to the provisions at the Copyright Act 1968. I retan all property rights. such as paten! rights. 1 also re-tain the t9K to use in future W<:ds (suOO ~articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.

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u

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contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial

proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or

diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement

is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have

worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that

the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that

assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and

linguistic expression is acknowledged.’

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Date 5th January 2015

ii

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Contents

Originality Statement .............................................................................................................. ii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. iv

Abbreviations and Referencing .............................................................................................. v

Chapter 1: Introduction—Place and the Antipodes in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake .......................................................................................................................................... 1

1.1 Locating the Antipodes in Finnegans Wake .................................................................... 1 1.2 Place in Joyce criticism .................................................................................................. 10 1.3 ‘Someplace on the sly, where Furphy he isn’t by’ (65.22): The ‘Plurable’ (264.02)

Nature of Place in Finnegans Wake ............................................................................... 19 1.4 ‘Southfolk’s place’ (215.25): Verticality, Perversity and the Antipodes in

Finnegans Wake ............................................................................................................. 25 1.5 Chapters in This thesis ................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.

Chapter 2: Falling Through Irish Space in Finnegans Wake ............................................ 35 2.1 ‘And shall Nohomia be our place like?’ (32.01): Defining Place in Finnegans Wake .. 35 2.2 ‘We of the clovery kingdom’ (110.04): Identifying Ireland .......................................... 41 2.3 ‘On all matters that fall’ (19.36): The Falls of Finnegans Wake ................................... 50

Chapter 3: ‘As Usual, Antipodal’ (60.28): The Contrary Geography of Finnegans Wake ........................................................................................................................................ 72

3.1 ‘Empire, you’re outermost’ (278.23): The Artefact and Fiction of the Antipodes ........ 72 3.2 ‘Unbox your compasses’ (287.11): Finding Finnimore in Perlieus Past ....................... 79 3.3 ‘Along With the Devil and Danes’ (47.27): HCE Caught Between Land and

Language ........................................................................................................................ 84 3.4 ‘On the hoof from down under’ (321.32): HCE, ALP (Harbouring Celtic Exiles,

Antipodean Larrikins Preferred) .................................................................................... 95

Chapter 4: ‘Either Hell or Australia’: The Antipodes and Perversity in Finnegans Wake ...................................................................................................................................... 106

4.1 ‘Always bottom sawyer’ (173.28): Shem’s Perverse Assignation in the Antipodes ... 106 4.2 ‘O! the lowness of him was beneath all up to that sunk to!’: On Shem’s Sinking

and Stinking .................................................................................................................. 117 4.3 ‘Djowl, uphere!’ (222.31): Devilish Shem is Summoned from Antipodean Depths ... 123 4.4 ‘He took a round stroll and he took a stroll round and he took a round strollagain’

(416.278): Or, Why the Gracehoper Goes South ......................................................... 132 4.5 ‘As if he fell out of space’ (462.31): Shem’s Degradation .......................................... 135

Chapter 5: ‘The merge of unnotions’ (614.17): Resolving the Contrary Appearances of the Antipodes in Finnegans Wake .................................................................................. 144

5.1 Awoken by the ‘Friarbird’ (595.33): Bridging the distance to the Antipodes ............. 144 5.2 ‘Dinkum belle’ (384.22): Long-Distance Travel to the Antipodes in Finnegans

Wake ............................................................................................................................. 159 5.3 Roaring Bulls and ‘the laughing jackass’ (368.07): The Rebounding Sounds of the

Antipodes in Finnegans Wake ...................................................................................... 167

Chapter 6: Conclusion—‘New Worlds for All’ (412.02): A ricorso ................................ 178

Bibliography and Works Cited ........................................................................................... 187

iii

Acknowledgements

In Memoriam ~

Gerry Taheny

Sligo 1950—Sydney 2014.

With Love ~

Dan Rowe

For reserving all antipodal apprehensions.

With Joy ~

Finnegans Wake Reading Group, Sydney

GC, HC, MF, GR, SW

With Thanks ~

Ronan McDonald, UNSW

Thesis supervision, trust and generosity

With Honour ~

My Family

For letting me loose in the library

iv

Abbreviations and Referencing

The following thesis, ‘“Austrasia or Anywhere”: Place, Space and the Antipodes in James

Joyce’s Finnegans Wake’ uses in-text referencing solely for:

• Joyce, J. (1939). Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber.

• Joyce, J. (1992). Finnegans Wake. New York: Penguin Modern Classics.

These page references are derived from the page and line numbers respectively, and appear in

brackets following the quoted excerpt, for example: ‘Austrasia or Anywhere’ (489.10).

These page references correlate with two digital resources: page/line references listed on

<FWEET>, the searchable Finnegans Wake database at www.fweet.org, edited by Raphael

Slepon; and a full-text online edition of Finnegans Wake originally hosted by Trent

University, http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/jjoyce/F1–1.htm.

All other referenced texts in this thesis are indicated by in-text references, which provide

author, page number and year of publication where the thesis uses multiples works by the

author.

The phrase ‘the Wake’ is used interchangeably throughout the following thesis with the

book’s title, Finnegans Wake.

v

Introduction—Place and the Antipodes in James Chapter 1:

Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

‘I want to learn from any on the airse, like Tass with much thanks, here’s ditto, if he lives

sameplace in the antipathies of austrasia or anywhere.’

(Finnegans Wake, 489.8–19.)

Locating the Antipodes in Finnegans Wake 1.1

The untrained eye reads Finnegans Wake as a tangle of non-narrative, anti-language that

challenges the way we identify characters and events within space. The trained ear, however,

hears the book’s repeated motifs and also gradually sees how these patterns appear on the

page. A reader’s sensory appreciation for the achievements of Finnegans Wake is crucial to

allowing the book to forge its particular kind of literary mystique in which expectations of

formal conventions, such as place, are shattered and replaced with something fluid. The

below chapters investigate that act of replacement by considering how places such as

Australia, New Zealand and the historically-termed antipodes region enter into the space

created by Finnegans Wake.

In this journey through Finnegans Wake I will deliberately focus on the naming and presence

of the antipodes wherever they have appeared in the text. This will be present a circumscribed

view on a text whose breadth is nothing short of enormous in terms of theme and creative

ambition. Through my readings of Wake criticism, the scope of that ambition will be aided

and illuminated by interpretations of those mosaic fragments that make up the book’s bigger

picture. As a reader of Joyce from Australia, I found a way in to the Wake’s labyrinth through

following threads drawn from the antipodes. Finnegans Wake is also a text whose primary

spatial focus is informed by imaginative projections of Ireland, so that any global sites such

as rivers in Australia must be followed to their source in Joyce’s vision of Ireland. In a text

where a main character such as Anna Livia embodies not just people but also animals and

landforms that existed over aeons imagined and real, I hope to show how a delimited

approach, such as my analysis of the antipodes, allows the reader a way in to appreciate the

text’s unusual approach to depicting place.

1

Finnegans Wake challenges the reader to re-evaluate the ways they experience a text,

particularly when trying to identify concrete concepts such as place and theoretical framings

of space. When reading the text, especially aloud and in a group, the Wake offers poignancy,

a profound social critique, and new ways for imagining universal human experiences such as

memories of, and connection to, place. Most of all, the Wake dramatises language so that

words are animated with this peculiar power to critique and amuse. One aspect of this

animated language to which I have drawn attention is the coalescing and collapsing of

opposite concepts, or what Benjamin Roy (2011) refers to as the ‘harmonizing tendency’ of

certain rhetorical tropes.

Finnegans Wake, like Joyce’s previous books, sets the action in Ireland predominantly except

that through the book’s use of ambitious spatial compositions, Ireland also accommodates the

world. In Joyce’s previous works, the author makes gestures towards the world beyond

Ireland. Europe hovers at the edges of Ireland in Ulysses, and for those city-dwellers of

Dubliners, the city offers ambiguous access to the outside world and to the rest of Ireland.

Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is tantalisingly poised for flight

but we the readers do not see him leave home. With the elastic geography of Finnegans

Wake, the world comes to Ireland and places merge in a new vision of Joyce’s prescient

global modernism. Those southern hemisphere places that became absorbed into the British

Empire and later Commonwealth, the antipodes, are among the non-European places that are

incorporated into Joyce’s Irish world in the Wake. This close reading of the antipodes’

representation in the Wake is an attempt to understand how space is configured and how

place is shaped in a book without borders.

The ‘antipathies of austrasia’ (489.8–19) presents a typically pun-stuffed introduction to the

complex arrangement of place in the Wake, and it serves as a useful orientation point for this

thesis that the regions known as the antipodes provide themes of opposition for Joyce’s

global picture of Ireland. The dissolution of schisms is a recurring structural element of the

text, one inspired by Joyce’s affinity with the Italian philosopher, Giordano Bruno. Richard

Ellmann explains Bruno’s relevance: ‘Bruno’s theory of an ultimate unity and its terrestrial

division into contraries attracted Joyce, perhaps, because he saw his art as a reconciler of

those opposites within his own mind, which he would later personify as Shem and Shaun’

(Ellmann, 1959, p. 60). The conjecture as to Shem’s whereabouts in the above quotation

about ‘austrasia’ comes from his twin brother Shaun, appearing in avatar form as Yawn, who

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considers that Shem could have gone as far as Australia or Asia, curtailed by their boundary,

‘the antipathies’. The antipodes are charged with antipathy, an emotional repulsion

characteristic of the twins who, perversely, cannot shake each other’s influence. Shem’s

hypothetical domicile in the ‘antipathies’ is as twofold as the twins: it is someplace and

‘sameplace’, both identical and indeterminate. This contradiction of some and same

(phonetically indicative of Shem and Shaun) iterates an important purpose of the Wake: to

imagine the possibility of unification through opposition. The instinct towards conflict is

confounded by showing it to be illusory, embedded in the Wake’s phonemic particles which

are almost resolvable through their recombination. Joyce’s critique of conflict is achieved

through the Wake’s linguistically acrobatic satire, as conflict is instantaneously undermined

by its reversal (for example, peace and discord merge in the doomed instrument of Ireland’s

harp in ‘harpsdischord’, 13.18). These continuous clashes within words results in the opposite

becoming apposite throughout the Wake.

The ‘antipathies’ of Shem’s possible whereabouts indicate the ways in which both space and

place are layered with culture, emotion and their exploitation through colonial and other

powers. The antipodes are ascribed their status of difference based on their location as

remotely opposite from the origins of the English language. As places situated diametrically

opposed to where the origins of the Wake’s Irish stories unfold, the antipodes are not merely

antipodal but antipathetic and unknowable. This negative sentiment towards distant regions is

not one wholly supported by Joyce despite his remarked dislike of the heat (Ellmann, 1976,

p. 387), but rather they are the same sorts of prejudice that Joyce satirised in his rewriting of

Ireland’s negative portrayal by outsiders. In his construction of antipodean places as alien,

Joyce’s targets are those who imposed difference as a tool and consequence of power. The

antipodes are attributed with a parallel experience of marginalisation as Ireland. That cultural

and political marginalisation was conveniently blamed on geographical marginality or

remoteness is emphatically overturned in Finnegans Wake. Both Ireland and the distant

antipodes are uncontained geographical entities that absorb and inform the globe. All

countries represented throughout the Wake are given this elastic potential in the text;

however, it is the bond between Ireland and the antipodes (with a certain emphasis on

Australia) is explored in this discussion.

The conceptual difficulty in describing how and why antipodean places are immersed in the

Wake is due to the enmeshed importance of place and language. The configuration of space

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adds another dimension through which the text may be interpreted, but the importance of

Ireland for Finnegans Wake is structurally and thematically crucial. Christy L. Burns’

postmodern approach to place in Finnegans Wake eloquently describes the political act

inherent in Joyce’s writing of an Irish epic that conspicuously resists linguistic traditions:

Instead of reclaiming place names and identifying the land as the essential founding place

of Irish identity, Joyce reconstitutes Irish culture as something that, while imaginatively

tethered to Ireland, maintains more in the materiality of the word; the word is likened to

Ireland in that its brute materiality resists being fully mastered—by the British who

endeavour to use it for their own ends. It resists intention, turning back to its sensate

components: the visual, aural (regional accent), and tactile aspects of language (Burns,

2008, p. 129).

This is a deft summation of the Wake’s impact, as its ‘materiality’ of the word predominates

over the tangibility of things. Places, nevertheless, effect the metonymic and stylistic

‘tethering’ that binds Ireland with the global reaches of the Wake’s world; and those ‘tactile

aspects of language’ are bodily and mobile, in that speech travels with the speaker. The Wake

illustrates how places are absorbed into language as idealisations and abstractions when

language travels. However, there is an all too tangible and human experience at the heart of

these linguistic formations of place, and that experience is of the land. In the Butt/Taff

dialogue, ‘langdwage’ (338.20) is intended to be parliamentary (‘paramilintary’ 338.20)—for

civilised, decisive legislating. However, the union of opposites in ‘paramilintary’ unmasks

language for its militant designs on the land, so that war is waged on land using ‘langdwage’.

The symbolic presence of mud, turf and bog shows the importance of land and ultimately

place, throughout the Wake. Burns affirms that as a map of Ireland, Joyce’s Wake ‘is shaped

more by words (and their material resistances) than by geographic boundaries’ (Burns, 2008,

p. 142). While the precise coordinates found in linear narrative of a character’s geography are

absent from the book’s aesthetic texture, place recurs as a structuring and thematic pillar. In

terms of structure, that role is to satirise orientation with opposition, so that notions of

stability are simultaneously upended; and no place is more clearly identifiable with

oppositions than the antipodes.

The antipodes are part of Joyce’s contrarian structure of Finnegans Wake. The seemingly

infinite outward spiralling of the text’s language reflects ‘Joyce’s interest in parallactic

technique’, writes Maria McGarrity (2009), in a manner which is ‘continually examining an

4

object from multiple directions’ (p. 5). The antipodes are the bottom-most or lowest direction

from which the action of the Wake is perceived. The antipodes play an aesthetic role in

reflecting the Wake’s language of fusing opposites, as they were traditionally consigned to

denote the opposite of a northern hemisphere-located, civilised society. The geographical

antipodes were certainly an opportune new world for imperial exploitation but those distant

southern territories suffered perceptions of backwardness, inferiority and ignorance resulting

from misunderstandings or prejudice along a global north-south axis. A principle myth of the

antipodes was one of balance that, as antipodes scholar Paul Arthur (2010) recalls, prevailed

in the nineteenth century. This belief referred to the weight of discovered lands in the

southern hemisphere as unequal to the task of providing counterpoise to the globe’s northern

hemisphere (Arthur, 2010, p. xvii). Other misrepresentations are tallied by critic Uli Krahn

(2002) in a ficto-critical work contrasting the pragmatic needs of trade with the speculations

produced by dreams of the feared and imaginary: ‘It’s often said that this mixed bundle of

science and lies and fantasies is just blatant ethnocentricity, employed as a mental preparation

for colonising’. Krahn expands on those fantasies: ‘The empty southern space was rapidly

filled by the imagination’; and ‘the seductive space below became encrusted with dark shapes

and expectations’ (pp. 79–81). In her overview of antipodean constructions, Krahn includes

Dante’s Divine Comedy which has the mountain of Purgatory situated in the south: ‘Virgil

and Dante ascend from Hell to Mount Purgatory’s shore, beholding the antipodean stars in

Hell’s final Canto, awed by the glorious southern dawn in Purgatory’s first lines’ (p. 82).

Enlightenment era discrediting of the antipodes persisted from medieval fears, which had the

antipodes associated with hell and the underworld in Christian belief systems.

The gradual colonising of the geographical antipodes generated an antipodean status so that

figurations of undesirability emerged from the idea of the feared and unknown south. This

thesis will use the term ‘antipodes’ with reference to specific landmasses south of the equator

that feature as language fragments and settings in Finnegans Wake. There is a second usage

of the term ‘antipodes’, and its variants ‘antipodal’ and ‘antipodean’, which is applied with

reference to the condition of opposition. As the material antipodes were geographically

remote and their inhabitants considered to possess behaviours opposite to the familiar and

accepted, the antipodean condition is that of the unknown, undesirable and unfathomable.

That so much of the antipodes in Finnegans Wake supports these associations, particular in

relation to Shem’s links with the fallen Lucifer and the book’s hell and underworld imagery,

leads to the question of whether Joyce is furthering or challenging literary stereotypes of the

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antipodes. While it becomes clear that criticism of Shem (or HCE, or others) is part of

Joyce’s extended satire on authoritarian moral systems, the borrowing of antipodes settings

for antipodean stereotypes partially reinforces those negative traits. This thesis will engage

with that contentious role of the antipodes in Finnegans Wake through the ambiguous themes

of power and perversity. A further aspect of the antipodes is associated with emigration and

the southward transposition of Irish culture. The causes for exile and emigration were

frequently far from positive, resulting from political repression, such as the transportation of

Fenians and systemic poverty in Ireland; yet the resulting renewal of life, culture and

language experienced by Irish people in the antipodes contributes to Joyce’s affirmation of

transnationalism, diasporic communities and multilingualism.

Joyce’s inclusion of Australia, New Zealand, the islands of Oceania and South Africa among

other antipodean places, affirm Finnegans Wake as a global text. The geographical antipodes

are infused through the text as a structural device like other binaries to indicate the constantly

shifting sense of scale: from grand to small, far to near and from north to south. Joyce used

Finnegans Wake as a project for recasting dominant, authorised views of the world in a

model unique to his own perception of time, place and history, in ways that play with the

notion of what a world is, or in his rapidly modernising inter-war year period, what the world

could become. Joyce used the phrase ‘urban and orbal’ (601.5–6) just a few lines in advance

of ‘Botany Bay’, the Australian port named at the outset of the colonial era, a name that

cropped up in Dublin as a nickname for a productive garden in the grounds of Trinity

College. Dublin’s cityscape, exalted in these final passages of the book, is not only urban, but

‘orbal’, a small world. The distance between Ireland and the antipodes is collapsed to create a

new scale of simultaneity. On this scale, the city and the globe are nested constructs,

destabilising narrative spatial expectations.

Before continuing to a review of criticism on place in the Wake, the reader will benefit from a

brief synopsis of what the narratives in Finnegans Wake achieve and encompass. The book is

a four-part epic satire, which in part takes its structural cue from the four ages of human

experience as theorised in Giambattista Vico’s New Science. Intrigued by Vico’s total

summary of human experience as a recurring cycle through the ages of gods (prehistory),

heroes (feudalism), individuals (democracy) and a ricorso or return to origins, Joyce selected

historical events and personas illustrative of these ages, retelling them from new perspectives

within a pronounced Irish framing. A select number of core characters or archetypes play the

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roles of these historical figures, so that through every recognisably famous figure or incident,

the identities of one Dublin family emerge as perennially present throughout time. The

following quote demonstrates the book’s range of intertexts, and its grammatical accuracy

operating within noticeably innovative narrative and linguistic challenges:

... whereabouts exactly at present in Siam, Hell or Tophet under that glorisol which plays

touraloup with us in this Aludin’s Cove of our cagacity is that bright soandsuch to slip us

the dinkum oil? (108.25–8)

The narrator at page 108 of Finnegans Wake is asking for the impossible—they want the

truth (‘the dinkum oil’)10 about the letter, the penning, despatching and contents of which

remains a mystery at the heart of the book. Other mysteries include the crime of HCE, the

complex sexual history of ALP, and the various struggles of Shem, Shaun and Issy. It is

challenging to know what is happening—to say where it is happening is equally puzzling.

The quotation above encapsulates the indistinct nature of place in Finnegans Wake: if there is

someone who can interpret the epistle, where are they, and how do we find them? To

determine the ‘whereabouts exactly’ of anyone in Finnegans Wake initially seems futile, as

place is as changeable as identity in the text. The antipodes are yet more challenging to

pinpoint on the Wake map because they disappear in and out of the northern hemisphere in

completing Joyce’s atomised vision of Ireland. The antipodes fulfil multiple roles in

Finnegans Wake. The antipodes embody the book’s overarching ‘antipodal’ or clashing

representations, as the language is built from fused oppositions; they reflect the geopolitical

invader-settler patterns of Irish history; and they provide unexpected settings for Joyce’s

great comic saga of human foibles.

The Wake figure who is most explicitly associated with the antipodes throughout Finnegans

Wake is Shem, one half of the twins. In his guise as ‘the as yet unremuneranded national

apostate’ (171.32), Shem often shadows Joyce the outcast. While Joyce never exiled himself

as far south as Shem—Australia—or his sister (who emigrated to New Zealand), part of my

discussion on the parallel narrative positioning of the antipodes and Ireland refers to Shem,

building on the work of an early Wake critic, Clive Hart. Hart (1962) declared Australia to be

‘Shem’s spiritual home’ (p. 118), which is a striking statement that has gone largely

unnoticed or at least unchallenged. Hart’s assertion is appealing but, also, not wholly or

10 The Australian slang phrase ‘dinkum’ also appears on page 384 of Finnegans Wake. Its usage by Joyce and origins are discussed in more detail in Chapters 3.1 and 4.2.

7

easily accepted. That assertion is even more intriguing as one that Hart himself disassociated

from, as Joyce scholarship advanced from those ambitious writings of the 1960s (Peter

Chrisp, Colorado University Finnegans Wake Discussion Forum, archival email, 27/11/12).

As a monument to that stage of Wake criticism, Hart’s book is emblematic of the problem-

solving that went into defining the limits, if any, of Shem’s identity, and Hart provided a rich

though brief discussion of Australia in terms of Shem’s cycle of global mobility.

Clive Hart’s (1962) Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake was an early and rare

contribution to critical work on Finnegans Wake and the antipodes. Hart assays Shem’s

connections with Australia through his analysis of spatial cycles. It is relevant to the limited

critical discussion on non-Irish places in the Wake that Hart’s schema of north-south

geographical cycles has not been included in a lot of later criticism. Hart’s attempt to

instigate an understanding of patterns as they emerge in Joyce’s characterisation of Australia

indicates the potentially problematic nature of his unique focus on spatial cycles. The long

gap of time between Hart’s attempt to identify a ‘structure’ in Joyce’s Wake and the present

thesis is a very good indication of how much critical work has been achieved in the interim to

establish how those structures and motifs have gained or lost critical attention. Although the

antipodes are an admittedly minor aspect of the geographical span of Finnegans Wake, they

are relvant to the books broad themes of perversity as indicated in Shem’s southward journey.

Australia is a major destination and temporary port described by Hart as a ‘torrid austral Hell’

(p. 118). Through his reading of Shem as an outcast and satanic figure, Hart insists that an

‘allegiance of Shem’s to the underworld is repeatedly established’ (p. 119). This connection

between Shem and the world of the dead is important, yet this thesis is equally concerned

with the role of Shem’s artistic isolation in the sense of his being a force for antipodal

rupture. As Shem the ‘penman’ is persistently contrasted with his moralist twin, Shaun, he

comes to represent an antipodean force among the two, representing an opposing force of

unshakeable strength. Powerful yet unknowable, resource-rich yet unable to harness his talent

to Shaun’s liking, Shem is a southern wanderer whose figuration I suggest cannot be

restricted only to the underworld and death. After all, it is Shem who ‘lifts the lifewand’

(195.05) when the twins are juxtaposed in vitriolic antagonism, and who authors a world and

animates his creations. Hart’s insistence on Shem’s hell-bound positioning is useful to a

point, yet it does not, as I insist is necessary, acknowledge the greater extent to which the

antipodean place (Australia) aligns with Shem’s qualities: antipodal (oppositional qualities

which render him powerful against Shaun through his resistant qualities) and unfathomable.

8

Joyce’s decision to use glimpses of Australia for the purpose of adding to the landscape of

Shem’s adventures prompts a further consideration of the southern hemisphere and its place

in the Wake. The Australian figurations in the text are elements including fragments of place,

personae, and other images, including animals. My aim is to advance the idea of the

antipodes as places reflecting antipodean versions of Ireland—historically remote and

culturally alien, despite centuries of assimilation.

The aims here are not only to locate the antipodes as settings in Finnegans Wake and to

advance the idea of Ireland’s status as culturally and politically antipodean through Joyce’s

parallel geographical images of the far south, but also to develop the ways in which place and

the Wake may be mutually illuminated. Literary definitions of place are unsettled in the

Wake, because place functions differently from the realist, tangible anchor which moored the

narratives of Ulysses and Joyce’s earlier prose in Dublin. Setting necessarily involves the

time and place through which a narrative is given credibility. Place is employed as a textual

tool to stage the setting’s verisimilitude. The reader’s experience of textual place creates an

additional version of that place, one that is remembered differently from the original, physical

location. Joyce’s pre-Wake depictions of Ireland and specifically Dublin correlate with these

definitions of place as a textual re-enactment between people and their environment. While

Ulysses experimented with remembered place in his surreal composition of Ulysses’ ‘Circe’

episode, place makes a drastic departure from realist conventions in Finnegans Wake.

The Wake requires a new definition for place, as it does for other textual components, and a

useful approach is to consider place as the purely imagined versions of environments. As

place in the Wake is used to cause associations rather than sensations, the book’s settings are

not intended to recreate singular reflections of Ireland’s or the world’s places. Instead, the

Wake depicts many imagined versions of places; just as the Wake’s happenings are conveyed

as the dreamed, perceived or imagined extensions of human minds in the act of memory, the

places in which these happenings unfold are similarly the dreamed, imagined and

remembered (falsely or otherwise) extensions of tangible locations. Joyce’s text plays with

the notion of originality, so that the idea of national or spatial origins, among other

environmentally bound elements of identity, is subverted in the process of writing the

unanchored places of the Wake.

9

Place in Joyce criticism 1.2

This critical review begins with a broad understanding of place within Joyce’s work in order

to arrive at the scholarship dealing with the Wake’s antipodean images. Substantial progress

has been made in writing about Joyce’s geographies. These include the mapped contexts in

which his fictional worlds function, the psychological boundaries or freedoms delineated by

space and, more recently, a sense of how Joyce can be read through environmental,

ecocritical theories of literature.16 The theoretical issues which arise from defining ‘space’

and ‘place’ were convincingly approached in Valérie Bénéjam and John Bishop’s (2011)

edited collection of essays on space in Joyce’s work. These critics supported the idea that

studies of space had been ‘severely delimited’, as ‘early critics had pointed to the

predominance of space over time in his work’ (Bénéjam & Bishop, 2011, p. 4). Nevertheless,

the authors concede that the intricacies of Dublin formed a substantial part of scholarship

focused on place. It is in this spirit of understanding Joyce’s radical re-placing of urban and

other spaces that my thesis approaches this ‘long-standing tradition’ of exploring Joyce’s

literary realms (Bénéjam & Bishop, 2011, p. 5). In doing so, I will show why Finnegans

Wake takes readers are far south as Australia and the antipodes.

Through much of these theoretical advances in recognising the significance of place in

Joyce’s work, as so much of it centres on Dublin and Ireland, the interest in how place

functions in Finnegans Wake has been a substratum of scholarly attention towards

nationalism, post-imperialism and history in Joyce’s writing. My thesis builds on that body of

work, drawing specifically on criticism dealing with non-European elements in Joyce. The

non-European languages, including global Englishes, are the first clue towards how deeply

extra-Irish settings are embedded in the text. However, the mass inclusiveness of Joyce’s

global language hints at a desire to uphold Ireland’s story as universally relevant. Joyce’s

political aims were indivisible from the aesthetic, as Richard Ellmann (1977) affirmed of

Ulysses, describing that book as ‘Joyce’s Trojan Horse: a monument, but full of armed men’

(p. 79). The militant monumentality of Finnegans Wake retains the fixation with Ireland’s

16 Michael Seidel’s Epic Geography (1976) applies a navigator’s eye to the Homeric paths through Ulysses; Maria McGarrity’s Washed by the Gulfstream (2008) includes Joyce in a geographic reading of Irish and Caribbean literature; and Brazeau and Gladwin’s 2014 publication spans nature, the urban environment and the body in Eco-Joyce, The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce, with equal inclusion of Finnegans Wake as well as Ulysses.

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political identity expressed in Ulysses, yet the coordinates are expanded to encompass all

earth and sea, everywhere under ‘the glorisol’/sun (108.27).

To support this sense of how place functions in the Wake, methodological flexibility is

required to incorporate various strands of Joyce criticism, as much of that work deals only

with Joyce’s pre-Wake writing. The return to place in Joyce studies can be seen as a

continuation of one aspect of historicist criticism that gained traction in late-twentieth-

century Joyce scholarship.20 Place also needs to be sifted out from much of that work, as the

historical concerns often took precedence over the geographical. That emphasis on the actual

over the abstract is reflected in changing Joyce criticism, as noted by one reviewer who

focused on these critical patterns. In addressing twentieth-century Ulysses scholarship,

Charles Ford (1990) commented, ‘in the first half of twentieth century Ulysses criticism

analysis often concentrated on elucidating the “realistic” elements of plot and character’ (p.

880). Ford also notes the ‘contrast’ in more innovative critical approaches, in which ‘critics

care less about details of action or character and more about exploring the nature of Ulysses’

linguistic experimentation’ (p. 881). Those critical innovations flourished due to the

influence of various literary and ideological frames including Feminism, Psychoanalysis,

Post-Structuralism and Post-Modernism.23 Alternatively, the work of Seamus Deane, Andrew

Gibson, Emer Nolan, Vincent Cheng and Sean Duffy, among others, can be seen to

demonstrate an overt postcolonial approach with their reconsideration of Joyce’s texts as Irish

art operating within the conditions of a British empire.24 Cheng’s (1995) comments in Joyce,

Race and Empire qualify this by rejecting as ‘insidious’ the ‘canonisation’ of Joyce as an

apolitical stylist; and that the result of this ‘convenient’ packaging of Joycean texts as High

Modernist for their stylistic innovation is ‘to defang the bite of Joyce’s politics’ (p. 2). These

ideas were anticipated in Emer Nolan’s (2007) renationalising of Joyce when she commented

on the broader context of the modern era of Ireland’s postcolonial experience: ‘British fears

of “losing” Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were deeply bound up

20 Critical works indicating this historical turn in Joyce studies include Thomas Hofheinz (1995); and Joseph Valente (1995). 23 With the influence of Hélène Cixous’ work on Joyce in the 1970s, later publications such as those by Suzette Henke in the 1980s show the strong interest in psychoanalytic and feminist approaches to Joyce; and Bonnie Kime Scott continued this trajectory in the 1990s. Umberto Eco emerged as the celebrity postmodern semiotician writing on Joyce in the 1990s, and post-structuralist criticism include works by Margot Norris, Derek Attridge, Daniel Ferrer and Jean-Michel Rabaté. 24 Enda Duffy, The Subaltern Ulysses (1991); Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (1995); Seamus Deane’s contributions to the Field Day anthologies and his 1992 Introduction to Finnegans Wake; and Andrew Gibson addressed these themes in Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses (2002).

11

with anxieties about the break-up of Empire more generally’ (p. 1). Duffy’s method adopted

a similar postcolonial stance in his discussion of Ulysses as a ‘partitioned’ text. Although the

partition of Ireland coincided with Ulysses’ publication and can therefore be seen to have

anticipated division, Duffy’s reading repositions Joyce in a continuum of Irish artists closely

engaged with high political and geographical stakes.

The critical position adopted in this thesis relies on the above influential critical approaches,

as both the linguistic-philosophical and political-historical focuses provide complementary

mappings of how Joyce has been absorbed into a range of critical discourses. For instance,

one scholar observes how Cixous worked towards her theorisation of sexual difference using

Joyce’s radical rewriting of ‘the relationship between world and text’ (Bray, 2004, p. 82).

Abigail Bray’s overview of Cixous and Joyce explores representation and radicalism,

subjectivity and its subversion.

Joyce attempts a mode of representation which is free of the illusion of authority; the

multiplicity of voices within Ulysses are not contained by a single perspective or

interpretation but rather offer the reader a range of subject positions (Bray, 2004, p. 82).

Cixous’ (1976) The Exile of James Joyce serves as an enchiridion through those decades as

Joyce criticism made every effort to keep up with his radical challenges to the literary form,

but how useful were these critical strategies in solving the Wake’s riddles? Alan Roughley

reminds us that Derrida shared Joyce’s sense of humour, which translated easily into the

Deconstructionist’s mode of jouissance that was so sympathetic to the Wake’s portmanteaux.

John Bishop’s (1986) Joyce’s Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake eschewed the less tangible

strands of textual theory for a valiant unravelling of the problems posed by Joyce’s final

book. Bishop explains how Joyce incorporated Vico’s treatise on humanity’s development of

language in The New Science. Language originated ‘not simply in historical time and

geographical space—but ... inside the body of human infants’ (Bishop, 1985, p. 192).

Through his insistence on the Wake as a dream and its performance of language in genesis,

Bishop suggests the dominance of the human body as the site for the Wake’s staging: ‘If

nothing in Vico’s gentile history happens out of this body, everything in Finnegans Wake

only happens inside of it’ (p. 193). Bishop’s perceptive identification of that body as

‘Dublin’s Giant’ (derived from ‘doublends jined’, 20.15–6) situates the dreaming, waking,

language-forming body in that place crucial to Joyce’s Irish dreamscape, Dublin. Even if we

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are to accept Bishop’s notion of the bodily site within which the action is narrated, that giant

body, like Swift’s Gulliver from whom Joyce drew inspiration, is necessarily a porous,

metaphorical boundary within which the streets, churches, rivers, parks and pubs are

positioned as crucial backdrops.

Scholars who approached the geography of Joyce’s Ulysses and earlier works include

Michael Seidel (1976), Eric Bulson (2001) and Earl G. Ingersoll (2012), who have variously

dealt with the contextual and literary importance for Joyce of maps, cardinal directions and

the psychological impressions drawn from the concrete nature of place. There are fewer

examples of Wake criticism that deal explicitly with place, although sections of important

works cannot avoid tangential engagements with place, such as Vicky Mahaffey’s (1996)

discussion of Grainne O’Malley, the ‘pirate queen’ from the west of Ireland and Roland

McHugh’s (1981) treatment of Dublin in The Finnegans Wake Experience.

Critical writing on Shem’s association with a perceived savage southland is not abundant, but

there is increasing criticism on the wider themes of race, empire and the portrayal of

civilisations in Finnegans Wake.33 My reading of Shem and the antipodes in the Wake has

benefited from postcolonial approaches that explore Joyce’s critique of imperialism. Glenn

Hooper suggests that Joyce:

has been rehabilitated as a figure conditioned by empire, in all its guises. Indeed, the

stylistic playfulness of his work is now routinely read as a postcolonial tactic or strategy ...

to accommodate the richness of a life conditioned as much by the British as by the Roman

Empire (Hooper, p. 11).

Gregory Castle’s apt interpretation of Duffy’s approach as ‘indebted to Fanon’s critique of

the native intellectual’ sees Joyce as ‘critical of both colonial and nationalist positions’

(Castle, 2009, p. 104). Further nuanced, postcolonial criticism was included in Attridge and

Howes’ Semi-Colonial Joyce (2000) that examines Joyce’s depictions of Ireland as a colonial

space. Transnationalism in Joyce’s work is described by Joseph Valente as ‘an anti-

nationalist position’ which ‘enters into a dialectical relation with pro-nationalist sentiments’

(Castle, 2009, p. 108). This thesis is influenced by these critical approaches to interpret place

and the antipodes in Finnegans Wake. I draw on a range of writings that comment on the

subtleties of Joyce’s resistance in all directions—empire, colony and nation—to suggest the

33 Two major works with focus on race and Finnegans Wake include Cheng (1995) and Platt (2007).

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purpose of that resistance: the desire of the postcolonial subject to write and articulate their

own non-colonial vision of both past and future. In acknowledging the diversity of

postcolonial positions, I echo Catherine Nash:

Most usefully postcolonialism denotes a range of critical perspectives on the diverse

histories and geographies of colonial practices, discourses, impacts and, importantly, their

legacies in the present—critical engagements that often preceded and must continue long

after formal political independence (Nash, p. 221).

This thesis on the antipodes in the Wake works towards such critical engagements, as places

in the southern hemisphere negotiated their political independence through eras of imperial

and Commonwealth relationships. Two critical works highlight fissures in this critical

engagement, as they do not provide a conclusive demonstration of the antipodes’ significance

for Wake studies. Henry Hsi-Nan Chen’s panoptic thesis of Joyce’s extra-European settings

attempts to explore how the world beyond Ireland is linked with Joyce’s microcosmic Dublin

(Chen, 1995). Chen’s analysis of Australia and the antipodes in the Wake’s motif of ‘New

Ireland’ does not extend far enough beyond the identifying of antipodean references, and

there is little attempt to risk interpretations of these far-flung settings. One binary of

ancientness and renewal is identified: ‘This new world of the antipodes is soon linked to the

old world of Asia which is, because of its position in the east, nevertheless new’ (Chen, 1995,

p. 233). That statement is the full extent of Chen’s discussion on why Joyce constructed a

counterpoint for ancientness in the Wake.

Barbara Temple-Thurston’s focus on the representation of South Africa in Ulysses and the

Wake also hesitates to draw conclusions beyond the identification of imagery (Temple-

Thurston, 1985). There is a solid bulk of lexical excavation work in this thesis, which, as a

1985 text, preceded the efficient availability of Wake resources online. Despite the author’s

taxonomical trove of references and allusions to South Africa through Afrikaans, Dutch and

indigenous South African languages, Temple-Thurston’s approach to the South African

tropes lacks the ‘parralactic’, multiplied viewpoint(s) that the Wake explicitly encourages. In

her reading of the Boer war through allusions in Ulysses, the discussion is concerned with

anti-British sentiment of the Boer and Irish nationalist movements. Less consideration is

given to the stratified levels of power and culture through waves of settler-occupation,

relevant to both Ireland and South Africa, such as that of the indigenous African populations.

14

My position on the antipodes as metonymic symbols for exile and renewal is in the historic

and literary sources for Australia as the destination of Irish emigrants and adventurers such as

Charles Gavan Duffy, Michael Davitt and Dionne Boucicault. Micawber’s cameo in the

Wake is another unsubtle reference to the antipodes as post-imperial world for renewal, with

the class levelling and economic imperatives associated with the colonial branches of empire

such as Australia. These contextual notions are absent from Chen’s dissertation. The tone of

Chen’s thesis anticipates Joyce’s global vision yet provides scant theoretical or substantial

interpretation.

Few other critical works consider the specific role of Australia or the antipodes in Finnegans

Wake. Melbourne-based poet and performer of Joyce works, Phillip Harvey (2012), has

included Wake’s references to Australia in his overview of poetic ‘imaginings’ of Australia in

Irish literature Harvey is one among many informal yet highly-informed interpreters of

Joyce, as part of Melbourne’s annual Bloomsday program (Devlin-Glass, 2015). This groups’

creative stagings of Joyce’s works are ideal for introducing Australian audiences to Joyce,

and have enjoyed great success for over a decade in bringing new readers as part of the quasi-

proselytising effect that I too have been successful in devising, in staging similar Bloomsday

events. There are two issues of tangential interest in relation to these Australian Bloomsdays.

First, that the focus in nearly universally on Ulysses, with some attention given to Finnegans

Wake such as the accessible ‘Washerwomen’ and ‘Gracehoper’ episodes. Second, these

engaging Bloomsday events are about gaining and maintaining a readership for Joyce, rather

than showing a specific critical interest in the topic at hand, the antipodes in the Wake. This

said, the parallel decades of Sydney and Melbourne, together with more recent Brisbane-

based Joyce-focused events, have led to continuous informal learning that has added to the

presence of Joyce in Australia (if not increasing awareness about Australia in Joyce.)

Australia’s presence in Finnegans Wake has also been documented in a range of fundamental

etymological guides by Roland McHugh and as part of Raphael Slepon’s (n.d.) online

database, <FWEET>. Although these latter works provide taxonomical information rather

than extended exegeses, these comprehensive etymological resources are used to support my

discussion of why and how the antipodes feature in Finnegans Wake. While aspects of

Slepon’s elucidations are derived from McHugh and other sources, this database of

annotations is continually increasing in scope and accuracy.

15

Added toHart’s Australian focus on Shem, some critical writings have made tangential

mention of the antipodes’ presence in Finnegans Wake. These relate to broader aspects of the

text such as place, history and southern hemisphere locations in addition to Australia. Roger

Corballis’ (2006) article on Joyce’s use of the Maori Haka chant is a key piece of research

into Joyce’s antipodes figurations. Corballis suggests some possible reasoning for Joyce’s use

of the Haka, yet this is something I will discuss in the broader context of Joyce’s critique and

questioning of anthropological practices below. Ron Malings’ essay on cricket in the Wake

rejects James Atherton’s assertion that cricket’s sole function in the book is to metonymically

represent sexual intercourse.44 Malings (p. 337) outlines three groups of cricket-related

phrases to suggest the broader implications of the game in denoting war, fraternal conflict

and patriarchal legacies (W. G Grace’s legendary beard reminds us that he was ‘Cricket’s

greatest father-figure’). This overview by Malings is a useful elucidation of cricket in the

Wake although it stops short of explaining the full significance of Australian cricket for

Joyce. There is a tantalising step towards this when Malings points out that the first Ashes

game of 1882 took place in the year of Joyce’s birth, yet the Ashes’ symbolism for Finnegans

Wake goes unremarked. Those ashes, which marked the triumphant establishment of cricket

in Australia (robbed and reborn in exile from England), correlate with the Wake’s phoenix

motif and Phoenix Park setting, as the mythical bird regenerates from its own ashes.

Other Joyce scholarship has made tangential mention of southern hemisphere places in

Finnegans Wake. Karl Resiman’s (2008) essay on African languages in the Wake explores

the text’s use of non-European languages in their geopolitical context. Reisman’s analysis of

two African languages highlights the tensions between African nations and their relationships

with settler-empires, the British and French. Using both lexical and geo-historical strategies

to explore the presence of Fulani in the Wake, Reisman’s work provides a valuable model for

approaching non-European linguistic textual elements, without totally dismissing the link

between place and language. Reisman (2008) defends his exegetical approach as one not

limited to reflecting a perceived superficial gymnastic wordplay on Joyce’s part, but with the

intention rather of illuminating what can be thought of as a postcolonial Joyce worldview:

44 Atherton’s The Books at the Wake (1959) provides a crucial guide to the intertexts of Finnegans Wake, although it is not a comprehensive source on explanations of cricket imagery.

16

As diaphanous as these readings may seem to some, in their whole they form an epiphany, a

gossamer web of meanings bringing to light phenomena of the darker worlds of

colonialism, slavery, and boarding school (p. 98).

Reisman’s venture into the ‘darker’ aspects of injustice and race provoked by land conflicts

indicates a clear critical link between language and place.

This review of Wake criticism now moves beyond those critical works with specific reference

to the antipodes to also include those with tangential connections. Phillip Gebeher’s (2012)

writing on the colonial trade of Guinness and other recent conference papers are part of the

increased interest in Joyce’s playful global geography. Gebeher’s paper was pertinent for its

consideration of nationalist and loyalist sentiments between Ireland and the British Empire in

the context of Guinness and Bass sales along colonial trade routes. Leila Crawford focused

on Ulysses with a discussion on the sea’s significance as an ambiguous setting. Crawford

dealt with the Irish settings used in the ‘Proteus’ chapter of Ulysses with a critical approach

relevant to my engagement with the nature of place in the Wake: ‘Water is always seeping

into Joyce’s language in Ulysses; however, it is not until Finnegans Wake that the levees

break’ (Crawford, 2012, p. 5). Crawford’s dramatic metaphor accurately indicates the deluge

of information and artistry confronting the Wake reader and the aquatic theme here is relevant

to key Wake places, the Liffey and the seas surrounding Ireland. A further work of

etymological investigation by Sidney Feshbach (2007) also touched on the porous interaction

between Joyce manipulation of language and the imagery of the sea. Although this thesis

focuses more on the landmasses as they are imagined on the Wake’s global scale, it is worth

re-enforcing the fluidity of Joyce’s approach to geography where both land and sea are

concerned. Like Crawford’s idea of the breaking levees, Feshbach (2007) draws on the

‘wavespeech’ haunting Stephen’s thoughts in the Proteus chapter of Ulysses (p. 557). For

Ulysses, the sea remains ‘bounded by barrels’ (Joyce, 1992, p. 456) in that nature and

geography are restrained to mimetic depiction and the imagined projections of specific

characters. Both barrel and sea seem to attain their own autonomy through language, when

Finnegans Wake creates its own peculiar global geography in which the antipodes and

Ireland are mutually refracted.

Len Platt’s writing on race and the Wake provides reasons for the difficulty of writing about

the representation of the book’s non-European places, reasons that I apply to the antipodes.

Platt (2007) concedes that ‘the idea of the racialised Other is clearly important’, but that the

17

representation of non-Europeans ‘is invariably framed in terms of fantasy and the alterities by

which the centre attempts to define itself’ (p. 121). If, as Platt suggests, it is difficult to talk

about non-European people as authentic in the Wake as they are mainly performative, music

hall-inspired caricatures, what sort of authenticity can be attributed to non-European places?

Irishness is racially significant for Wake studies, as is the geographically authentic

representation of Ireland, yet constructions of ‘the “black Wake” or the “Oriental” Wake

would seem to be an unlikely critical objective’ (Platt, 2007, p. 121). This thesis

acknowledges that unlikelihood, and is not making claims to construct an ‘antipodean’ Wake.

Rather, the aim is to question why the antipodes appear at all and why they have been

absorbed into Joyce’s global geography.

Criticism has dealt sparingly with the Wake’s antipodean imagery compared to general

concepts of place, possibly because those far southern images occur less frequently than other

motifs. Aspects of place which hold the most relevance for my explanation of the antipodes

in the Wake are cardinal points with a focus on the north-south pairing, maps, topography and

the various political and cultural geographical practices Joyce undermines in his geospatial

distortions. Critical works have engaged with place both in terms of its physical charting but

also for its psychological resonance in character and other literary constructs. Michael

Begnal’s Joyce and the City: the Significance of Place (2002) illustrates why Joyce’s ‘fiction

is rooted in the complexities of location’: these essays ‘move beyond traditional definitions of

the city’,54 which is a prerequisite for interpreting the role of Dublin as well as distant Wake

places.

Rabaté’s genetic analysis of Wake episode I.iii suggests that people imbue place with their

own lives so that ‘geography is not inanimate’ (Begnal, 2002, p. 187). Rabaté also resisted

the notion that the Wake is a tableau or frieze of places, rather than a mosaic reflecting the

Joycean sense of a flawed and fragmented world, Rabaté evokes Benjamin’s writing of the

city. ‘Because Joyce and Benjamin are aware that they cannot literally reproduce an

encyclopaedia of the city, the question becomes how to enact it in a dynamic language’

(Begnal, 2002, p. 188). Joyce, like Benjamin, desired to produce a text of his cities in a way

that trumped the encyclopaedic, as an authoritative guide to appreciating the place’s mythic

but also quotidian qualities. The warning raised by Rabaté is of a ‘genetic fallacy’ in

believing that a discovery of Joyce’s sources in shaping the Wake’s language will expose the

54 Rabaté’s critical approach is introduced in Begnal (2002, p. xv).

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meaning towards which Wake scholars have been critically geared. The shape of the present

argument is aligned with this critical stance, that Joyce’s structuring and thematic devices

present the reader with intentional subtexts that emerge from the book’s language mechanics.

The lists derived from Joyce’s sources are crucial to our understanding of the Wake in terms

of how it was written; my interest is in both why these sources were used and manipulated,

particularly in relation to the significance of place and ultimately the antipodes’ place in the

Wake.

‘Someplace on the sly, where Furphy he isn’t by’ (65.22): The 1.3

‘Plurable’ (264.02) Nature of Place in Finnegans Wake

To explain the presence of the antipodes in Finnegans Wake is to become conscious of the

difficulty of writing about place in the text. Yet the abstracted, intricately poetic forms

through which place is written in no way diminishes its importance. Finnegans Wake is a

book that tells many histories, predominantly versions of Irish history mediated through a

global skein that merges settings, languages and cultures. Joyce needed the world beyond

Ireland to use as mise-en-scéne for his staging of Ireland’s stories. This vision shows a world

in permanent flux that is perversely striving for unity through language. The Wake

demonstrates fragmentation and fusion: opposites are repeatedly combined and schismatic

forces are incessantly reunited. Ireland’s past as a disunited place is the main site for Joyce’s

series of impossible but idealised unions, and the disunity of distant places is reflected in that

textually central history.

A semantic challenge that arises when discussing how place is crafted in Finnegans Wake

concerns distinctions between place and space. Space features prominently in the physics and

themes of the text: space is pitted against time, noticeably in the Ondt and Gracehoper

episode. ‘Why can’t you beat time?’ (419.08) the Gracehoper asks exasperatedly of the Ondt.

The Ondt replaces his foe by occupying the interior of a warm home in the winter, a spatial

feat that the Gracehoper failed. Despite their conflict, the two insect figures indicate another

of the Wake’s polarities, as one cannot exist without the other. Similarly, place cannot be

encountered without the space which it fills, but even that negative-positive mirroring is

antagonised by the text’s unreliability of place. Place must occur where the apparent void of

space indicates, but space is not a guarantee of fixity for place in the Wake. Instead, the

textual components function like puzzle pieces, constantly being tested for correlation with

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each other. The River Liffey, for instance, is the most reliable form that emerges from the

puzzle as so much of the spatial indications provide for the identification of this particular

river in those narrative spaces. These places change shape and dimension due to the

incessantly fluctuating scale on which the text is composed, yet it is place—named and

geographically determined spaces—that have the focus for this discussion.

Place is an important consideration for Wake readers as it is one more method through which

Joyce composed a vision of humanity in relation to the physical world. The near romantic

embrace that Joyce extended towards Ireland (and especially Dublin) in his writing the Wake

from Paris anticipated Gaston Bachelard’s passionate descriptions of space and more

specifically, intimate or personalised places. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard (1969) set

the terms for future philosophical engagements with intimately inhabited places: ‘Space that

has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the

measures and estimates of the surveyor’ (p. xxxvi). Applying this idea to the Wake, readers

and critics may find endless reasons for why places in Ireland were admitted to the

topography of the text, yet it remains a constant that Ireland formed the ‘home’ from which

Joyce’s Wake ventured and returned, no matter how far it traversed—such as the antipodes—

around the globe.

From the cave to the castle to the artist’s hovel (Shem’s ‘haunted inkbottle’, 182.31), Joyce’s

final work is not merely illustrating places as fanciful gestures towards exoticism and

strangeness, but is actually dependent on these places for their connotative significance. Part

of the Wake’s task is to reposition Ireland as a centre of world knowledge by rewriting

aspects of world culture and history as if they were incidental to Ireland, or as the emanations

of Irish belief, memory and folk knowledge. The Tristan and Isolde story is one instance of

this, as Ireland’s setting in the tragedy, such as the coasts and caves, reinforces the tangible

importance of Ireland’s role in what became a more broadly British and continental tale.

Places, in critical engagement with Finnegans Wake, have not had the critical attention that

the multitude of languages has received, yet there is an unwritten acceptance that the

presence of a language indicates its place of origin. This instantaneous association between

languages and places is another element of my enquiry into place both in the text and its

critical responses, and with it my consideration of Joyce’s many ‘Englishes’, such that we

come to know the antipodes through colonial variants of English.

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In this thesis, I question the fleeting yet tangible glimpses of the antipodes in a work that

remakes the world through a macrocosm of Irish settings and narratives. How are these

Australasian images filtered through Joyce’s Irish diorama of the whole world? How is the

far southern side of the world invoked to elaborate those Irish narratives in Finnegans Wake?

Through recurring distortions of place and recognised geospatial boundaries, Joyce

establishes an elastic world in which a place as remote as Australia shares mutual experiences

with Ireland while functioning doubly as a complementary site. On the one hand, Australia

and surrounding countries also suffer and survive recurring incursions by foreign, aggressive

settlers. However, many of those places, particularly Australia, escaped this fate until the

arrival of then British in 1788 and as such are at a different stage in Joyce’s Viconian vision

of cyclical history. Australia and the antipodes’ ensuing story of European settlement are

echoed in Finnegans Wake, as places undergo a repositioning: the antipodes places are both

within and mirroring Ireland.

This thesis is prepared to explore not only how, but also why Joyce chose to position the

outside world within Ireland. That textual positioning is contingent upon definitions of place

in the morphing style and cyclical structure of the text, but this thesis upholds the idea that

place and particularly non-European locations such as the antipodes are invoked in Finnegans

Wake to better illustrate ideas about Ireland.

In his essay on the Wake, the young Samuel Beckett (1929) declared that the text is not

restricted to space alone: ‘There is a temporal as well as a spatial unity to be apprehended’ (p.

15). The dissolving of time prompts a hectically paced journey, blending events and their

orchestrators. To place reasonable limits on this discussion, I will restrict this thesis to

concepts of place rather than time, as the layering and juxtaposing of place highlights the

Wake’s ease with unifying disparate locations. Time is important for many reasons, none the

least being that Australia came to be governed under that name quite recently under the

British since 1788, yet its textual identity as a place is immersed in the Wakean cycles of

human history which abjure linear or exclusive time periods. The layering of places is

important in the Wake for Joyce’s playful unions between real and imagined places and

historical with mythical places, which occupy the same location. For instance, a primary

pairing is Phoenix Park with the Garden of Eden. Other examples that marry geographical

locations with their mythical counterparts include Valhalla, the Underworld and battle sites in

Ireland such as Clontarf. These instances of superimposition are frequent throughout

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Finnegans Wake and the results are often humorous but also indicative of Joyce’s mirroring

of human practices of self-awareness through history-making and other forms of storytelling.

If time, place, language and the reader’s linear sense of history are dissolved and regathered

into continuous pairings, can the antipodes and Ireland be found? The theorising that the

Wake is ‘decentred’59 is a sound conceptual approach to a flexible text, yet this idea of un-

fixedness has limitations when considering the centrality of Ireland’s spatial and historical

heritage from which Joyce derived his Wake materials. In Atherton’s (1959) great work on

the book’s intertexts, it is stated that ‘Finnegans Wake is, in one sense, a history of Ireland’

(p. 90). That one sense is a dominant force in the Wake because the events and personalities

of Irish history clearly inform Joyce’s adaptation of Vico’s cycles in a narrative populated by

Irish figures. Ellmann approached the treatment of time and place within Joyce’s aesthetics of

fragmentation, particularly in Ulysses though with strong implications for the Wake. Places

can be identified by their ‘incessant doublings and undoublings’; Ellmann’s (1990) position

on Joyce’s aesthetics as inherently political also evokes the centrality of Ireland for Joyce’s

art, stating that Ulysses ‘examines the servitude of his countrymen to their masters in Church

and State’ (p. 50). The emphasis on ‘country’ in that postcolonial relationship is a source for

the Wake as well as Ulysses.

Ireland’s centrality is evident in the Wake through Joyce’s interest and rewriting of external

perspectives, including the far southern view from the antipodes. Some of those perspectives

were made official through mapping by ancient empires with the mixed result that Ireland,

like the eastern extremities on the map, including China, could be easily reached for trade and

resources. Joyce’s references to Ptolemy’s world map from the second century CE is used in

the Wake to document navigational developments but also to highlight the layered loyalties of

the Greek-based geographer, a subject of the Roman Empire (Crone, 1978, p. 5). Ireland’s

representation on the Ptolemaic and other maps from pre-modern eras provided Joyce with

the past historical views of Ireland, through the naming and positioning of Ireland in relation

to the relevant balance of power, whether Roman or British.

Eric Bulson (2001–2002) explores Joyce’s mapping of Dublin in Ulysses with relevance to

place in the Wake. Bulson explains Joyce’s incorporation of maps as source material for his

59 Margot Norris established this approach with her book The Decentred Universe of Finnegans Wake: a Structural Analysis (1976).

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writings, and also theorises on Joyce’s desire ‘to give Ireland back to the Irish’ through his

unique literary mapping (p. 83). This latter theory is convincingly based on Joyce’s use of

maps of the west of Ireland for his journalism in Galway as well as the impact of Britain’s

Ordnance Survey from the nineteenth century. Bulson (2001–2002) writes:

Ulysses has been written so that geography becomes central to interpretation, and the act of

reading the story is concomitant with tracing the movement of the various characters in

each episode from one site to another (p. 82).

Writing on the Wake, I question whether it is possible to trace similar Bloomsday-style routes

through Dublin in a three-dimensional staging of scenes from Finnegans Wake. The book’s

excessive inclusion of street names and urban monuments certainly make this possible. One

can stroll through Phoenix Park or follow the peregrinations of Hosty the balladeer almost as

readily as accompanying Bloom along Eccles Street. Despite this apparent ease of locating

Wakean moments in concrete space, difficulties arise when far-flung places like Australia (or

Africa, Asia and America) appear as unmistakable features of the Wake’s Dublin topography.

It is from this disjunction between the material Ireland, and the Ireland of Joyce’s creation

that a new sense of place is established in Finnegans Wake: Ireland is a place but also a

parabolic set of conditions in which other countries might view elements of their own past

channelled through Ireland’s story. Bulson (2001–2002) concludes, ‘in the context of Joyce’s

life and work, maps produce the illusion of geographical closeness, paradoxically telling us

more about the relationship between Joyce and his penchant for geographical abstractions

than about the actual city of Dublin’ (p. 96). The illusory, fixed geography of maps remained

an abstracted and creative field for Joyce’s treatment of place and the absorption of the

antipodes in Finnegans Wake.

Hugh Kenner wrote on the abstractions to which Dublin was subject in Joyce’s art.

Fortunately, Kenner’s book Dublin’s Joyce (1956) addresses Finnegans Wake in addition to

the earlier works and examines Joyce’s lasting fascination for his homeland. Ireland remains

fertile ground for Joyce’s post-exilic endeavour:

As Joyce contemplated these (historic) events, a guiding image thrust itself forward

insistently. It was reinforced by trivial accidents of the sort that so often played into his

hand: the arrival of a post-card showing in the silhouette of the Hill of Howth the

unmistakable outlines of a sleeping giant; a pamphlet by an English village priest

describing the discovery of a giant’s grave in the parish lot (Kenner, 1956, p. 16).

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The topographies of my geospatial approach to Finnegans Wake are present in this

recollection. Dublin’s landscape (Hill of Howth) is a metonymic landform for HCE’s body;

also, the giant’s grave, a hole in the earth, suggests both the downward trajectories I will

discuss in relation to the south and southward journeys in the Wake, as well as the

subterranean layers, those pits and bogs which preserve a local history, evading mapping

until their archaeological unearthing.

A delay in the critical attention devoted to the materiality of place has been due to the work

devoted to theoretical constructs for explaining Finnegans Wake. Margot Norris’ The

Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake (1976) used structuralism to explore the amorphous

aspects of the text, symptomatic of dreaming. Norris’ focus on ‘myth, dream and neurotic

symptom, all structures governed by unconscious laws’ is a partially convincing

interpretation of the Wake as Joyce’s attempt to replicate the laws of the dream (p. 27). John

Bishop’s Book of the Dark (1981) is a more poetic and less ideological expression in the

same vein. As both landmark works must be credited for their elucidation of the Wake, to

what extent do they engage with place as a function of the dream? Norris (1976) stated that,

‘in dreams, the mystery of changes in form and substance is shifted to the linguistic realm’ (p.

31). This means that the coexistence or superimposition of place in the Wake (an example of

‘changes in form’) is possible due to the merging of ideas in language. This is true for place

in the plasticity of the Wake’s language. Still, in the merging of places such as Egypt’s Nile

and Dublin’s Liffey, or the Howitt Mountains in Australia and Dublin’s Howth Head, the

poetic power of language alone is just part of the spatial significance. Joyce used Ireland and

especially Dublin as a kaleidoscope to view the world. To read Finnegans Wake for its

shaping of geographical topographies should not immediately reduce the book to linear,

novelistic interpretations, a misleading idea which Norris rightly avoided. Despite this

refutation of the Wake’s status as a novel due to the novel’s assumed relationship with the

conventions of reality as opposed to the dream, I find the two-sided structuring argument of

‘Dream Versus Novel’ as restrictive. Finnegans Wake is an ambitious prose work that copies

the mental processes of a dream, but is not a dream, as it can be recalled without alteration

and replicated upon each reading: the Wake can be described as a diagram of a dream.

Place as both a material trope and an imagined space is implicated in the split charges of

literalism or symbolism when considering the Narrative-Or-Dream debate. To take a non-

dream stance should not relegate the critic to the position of a believer in the total literalness

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of Finnegans Wake. The more fantastic passages, such as Issy raining tears from her position

as a little cloud, are intended to replicate the mythology and imaginings crucial to non-literal

narrative traditions. Conversely, to consider the entire text as the dream of a character whose

identity must be discovered, and the textual dream as a sequence of symptoms to result

simply in a pathological pronouncement of Joyce (or the reader), is also a limited approach.

Roland McHugh (1981) warned against literal readings in his partial dismissal of the

‘novelistic approach’ (p. 51).

captured this rejection of reductive readings:

McHugh also rejects the ‘naive realism’ (p. 50) with which

early books paraphrased the text or provided descriptive ‘translations’ of its sequential

incidents. In describing these two opposed Wake approaches, McHugh invokes those who

shared his inclination towards anti-literalism, except that this approach did not, as might be

expected, conform to a strictly symbolic or abstracted analysis. Clive Hart, McHugh’s senior

colleague in Wake scholarship—described as ‘an Australian of a jovial and tolerant

disposition’ (McHugh, 1981, p. 57) — ‘our lives

are full of fucking symbols: we don’t need them in our reading matter as well’ (McHugh,

1981, p. 46). Clive Hart’s tolerance clearly had its limitations. The main problem McHugh

saw with Joyce interpretations steeped in symbolism was the increase in difficulty added to

the subject by their well-intentioned explicator. Identifying the antipodes as figurations of

place raises these continuing critical difficulties, yet these places can be interpreted as

symbolic, material, connotative, illusory, dynamic and sensory.

‘Southfolk’s place’ (215.25): Verticality, Perversity and the Antipodes 1.4

in Finnegans Wake

The antipodes present us with a characteristically dual Wakean dilemma—attractive but

frightening, the (spatial, not temporal) end of the world offers hope for renewal. In Joyce’s

cyclical text, the treatment of place can be seen as an act of preservation or archiving,

because landmarks—both natural and artificial—are mythologised beyond their ordinary,

tangible use. Endowed with a sacredness that sees distant, unrelated places merged in equal

importance (the rivers of Wake episode I.viii are a striking example), place as a site for

communal memory is identified and elevated. However, this sacredness of place is achieved

differently from the nationalist poets who glorified ancient Celtic sites and from the manner

in which Yeats animated Sligo and the west of Ireland. Joyce’s Wakean sacredness of place

lies in its power to challenge the reader, the person who engages with the possibilities and

practise of imagining how disparate places might coexist in writing; and in conceptualising

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how the differing, specific events of unlike places nevertheless evoke the same principle,

Joyce’s dissolution of oppositions. The importance of place is that it provides a setting for

Joyce’s antipodal language and construction of human endeavour as antipodean; that Joyce

consistently resolves these ‘antipodes’ of human antagonism through language is an irony of

both people and place in his literary imagining.

The task in recovering and explaining the antipodes in Finnegans Wake is to understand the

north-south axis along which parts of the book are written. This verticality of the text is

reflected in both structure and theme, through the broad movements of character and smaller

glimpses into movement depicted in language. In explaining how this north-south binary is

depicted and its importance, previous critical works are useful as models that have engaged

with the east-west axis in Ulysses and the Wake. Earl Ingersoll’s essay on Dubliners pre-

empted my use of Michael Seidel’s Epic Geography, which reads Joyce’s works through

geographical orientation and its political and psychological implications. For instance, the

stifled and insecure characters of Dubliners are overshadowed by London to the southeast,

and not all are responsive to the messages of cultural hope associated with the rural west.

Ingersoll (2002) goes against critically traditional readings of Joyce’s story The Dead in

suggesting a positive culmination of Gabriel Conroy’s meditations as one ‘empowered by the

west to write a new text, one grounded in the psychic power of “the West”’ (p. 107).

Ingersoll is concerned with cardinal directions ‘as metaphor’, that is, for their connotative

importance.

Ingersoll (2002) suggests that Joyce’s inspiration ‘to write a new text’ (p. 107) of Irish history

was willed into action long before Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s essay Ireland, Isle of Saints and

Sages (1907) reflects the quest for Ireland’s Celtic racial origins, with a material appreciation

of the east-west axis of migration across Europe and the Mediterranean (Joyce, 1959). Seidel

(1976) highlights Joyce’s historically accurate belief that the Celts of Ireland moved

gradually west through Spain from earlier mid-Europe origins: ‘The westward progress to

Ireland haunted Joyce’s imagination for years’; and he adds that Ulysses and then Finnegans

Wake are ‘about the complexities of multiple migrations’ (p. 18). A further comment on the

racial origins of those migrations hints at the layering which forms the Wake’s structuring

principle: ‘The falls and resurrections of a melange of Phoenicians, Semites, Greeks, Slavs,

Norsemen, and Celts inhabit Joyce’s fictional vision of Ireland’ (Seidel, 1976, p. 18). It also

becomes clear, the further one ventures into analyses of the southern hemisphere elements in

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the Wake, that Joyce has extended these complexities of migration to distant shores. As the

descendants of those migrations generate a syncretism based on mixed origins, any isolating

of national and racial origins becomes a more ludicrous prospect in the genuine melting pot

of this ‘cabful of bash’ (34.11), the part-African calabash which is Finnegans Wake.

Seidel’s treatment of the north-south axis in the Wake is inconclusive because his book is

primarily concerned with Ulysses. Nevertheless, his approach to how place is conceived of

directionally in the Wake merits the obsession with which Joyce fulfilled the literary potential

of journeying. Ellmann (1959) recalls Joyce’s enthusiasm for Homer’s Odyssey: ‘The most

beautiful, all-embracing theme is that of the Odyssey ... Then the motif of wandering. Scylla

and Charybdis—what a splendid parable’ (p. 417). This comment was hastily scribbled down

by one of Joyce’s English language pupils, revealing Joyce’s romantic as well as didactic

attachment to the theme of a cyclical journey. Seidel’s framing of north and south includes a

very brief history of climate and compass scholarship, which would dissatisfy antipodes

scholars as the climatic notions advanced are related mainly to the Mediterranean rather than

the subequatorial. Even as the cultural melting pot of Wakean languages blends national

identities and subverts the notion of national uniqueness, Joyce was naturally curious, during

his travels, about the suggestion that ‘national temperament is, in part, a regional, climatic

condition’ (Seidel, 1976, p. 65). Joyce had a temperamental relationship with the weather his

whole life, having a phobia of thunderstorms and disinclination to heat. Hot climates are

unsurprisingly associated with the fiery rhetoric of hell in Catholic theology that Joyce

replicated so faithfully in the sermon chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

(1916). Hellish heat flares occasionally throughout Finnegans Wake with humorously

damning accusations against Shem. Heat is also indicated by the warmth of southward

climates where Shem has escaped and acquired a multiethnic identity, as a ‘Europasianised

Afferyank’ (191.04). During one particularly vicious accusation by Shaun in the role of

Justus, Shem’s apostasy is described as a ravaging fire that provides a metaphor for

devastation: ‘the reducing of records to ashes, the levelling of all customs by blazes’ (189.36)

(also relevant to the vignetter of the cricket ‘Ashes’ noted above).

Shem’s escape to hotter, southern places retains its link with geographical Dublin in a fire

that destroyed the Customs House in 1921. Shem is the scapegoat for this and other disasters

because as an Icarus figure, he courted the sun on his ‘wildgoup’s chase across the kathartic

ocean’ (185.06). Icarus’ proximity to the sun and Shem’s association with the heat is one of

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Shaun’s metaphors for Shem’s self-exposure as a writer, the inward-looking artist who

consults his own ‘scalds and burns and blisters’ (189.32). The twinning of Shaun and Shem

with contrasting elements mirrors their climatic or topographical qualities—Shaun rolls down

the river in Book Three, whereas Shem wanders through the desert, an outcast.

The antipodes enter Finnegans Wake as motifs of place, distance, and strangeness and they

are thematically crucial to the continuing discussion of power, perversity and renewal. Yet,

the antipodes and far southern global places are also an important part of the book’s

engineering, as they function as part of the book’s structure. As suggested above, the book’s

orientation is overwhelmingly multi-directional and the action is parallactic. The task here is

to analyse just one of those structural trajectories, the downward—or geographically

speaking, the southward. The following Wake excerpt shows how imagery of ‘hell’ and the

fall from grace are associated, with the result being a sometimes quite-literal ‘tumble’:

Schottenly there was a hellfire club kicked out through the wasistas of Thereswhere.

Like Heavystost’s envil catacalamitumbling. (514.9–11)

The fascination with gravity and downward motion is associated with the theological premise

of the fall, so that all downward movement is ironically linked with that Christian motif,

subverting its intent while drawing on its richness of interpretative possibilities. One irony

among many is the arbitrary moral system derived from the fall (loss of innocence in Eden),

compared with the ‘solarsystemised’ (263.24), empirical measurement of gravity. Joyce’s

fascination with gravity is evident in the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses when Bloom climbs over

the railings outside his house on Eccles Street and ‘allowed his body to move freely in space’

(Joyce, 1992, Ulysses, 17.3). The precision with which Bloom’s fall and mild concussion is

described is exchanged, in Finnegans Wake, for an expansive palimpsest of plunges in which

the fall is replicated in numerous falls, both individual and collective. The antipodes provides

a finite point for those falls, and their occasional pairing with the nether worlds of hell is part

of the ironic treatment of the original fall.

The southward, downward orientation in Finnegans Wake humours but also undermines the

Christian fall from grace, and adds narrative falls to indicate changes in the status of

civilisations, and their representative individuals (Carey, 2002, 2003). ‘The great fall of the

offwall’ (03.18) is Finnegan’s, as the patriarch and builder tumbles from his ladder.

Civilisation crumbles with Finnegan’s fall and war is unleashed. Like all conflicts in the

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Wake, these are wars for power in Ireland and wars the world over, as Joyce’s language

fragmentation unites disparate places. Far southern places are introduced here in the use of

Australian boomerangs (‘boomeringstroms’, 04.06) that feature on the battlefield. The

cyclical arc of the boomerang reflects the oscillating, infinite text, but the weapon’s phonetic

presence, its ‘boom’, echoes the thunder which fills the space with sound; not just any sound,

but the particular sound of power made by thunder, creating the electrical current, ‘strom’

(German). The booming sound from heaven indicates Joyce’s incorporation of Vico’s

‘thunder-word’ theory of language development (that is, the development of human speech in

imitation of thunder and elemental sounds, described below), but structurally, the downward

direction of sky-to-earth is invoked. The tumbling down from heaven towards both earth and

hell is reiterated throughout the Wake with reference to motifs human, Christian, and

elemental. In her writing on the fall in Joyce’s works, Gabrielle Carey (2002) discussed

Joyce’s tendency towards redemption for human imperfection as ‘the literature of descent’ (p.

14). In the Wake, this emerges clearly as those who fall, in both the literal and spiritual sense

of erring and sinning, fall together with Finnegan. The Christian falls include those Judeo-

Christian biblical narratives including the Eden family, Noah and Lucifer. The elemental falls

include the rainfall represented by the daughter Issy, the frequent rainbows of heavenly light

emanating earthward, and the recurring thunder.

The southward and downward trajectories are reflective of Finnegan’s reduced status, as his

view no longer stretches comprehensively and from a great height, ‘entowerly’ (04.36), over

his land. The structural orientation of Finnegans Wake enforces but also resists the

gravitational pull, as its personae (used in place of the too literal term ‘characters’) seek to

rise. ‘Rise you must’ (04.16), the narrator intones, and cycles of usurpation and uprising

ensue with the re-arising of Finnegan in later avatars of HCE. Despite the apparent

boundlessness of the narrative, each episode is framed by the relationship between the land

and its inhabitants. The setting of Dublin is portrayed through an eternal vision of earth and

sky, with the ‘lowliness’ of ‘the herb trinity’ (clover), and the ‘skyup’ of ‘evergrey’ above

(14.34). To affirm the universalising scope of the text, the Wake uses earth and sky as spatial

coordinates similar to the temporal milestones common to all human societies of birth,

reproduction and death. Resurrection remains a curious motif among these life events as a

mythic enquiry as to the finite nature of death. Returns from the far south and from foreign

places are treated like rebirths, or like HCE’s re-emergences from underground.

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The literal downward journey into the earth of objects as well as people is also an important

structural element as exhumation is another means through which the text justifies its

fragmentation. The strata of the text’s language and meanings resemble the layers of earth

covering and uncovering evidence of history. The letters of the Wake’s language—and The

Letter, the book’s mystery epistle—are derived from ‘litter’: rubbish buried in the ground, but

once dug out, raised to a level of importance and born aloft (93.24). Joyce’s selection of the

Australian mining town ‘Broken Hill’ (183.24) as the income source for Shem’s fantasy life

as a wealthy gentleman reinscribes a downward trajectory in its most earthbound form.

Broken Hill had a massive yield of valuable metal from the 1880s, and its significance for

Shem’s dreamed of wealth in ‘drachmas’ (182.24) links Shem with his desert journeys and

excavating the earth. Shem’s identification with Broken Hill also suggests his paternal

origins. The dream of reliance on his father—HCE is the Hill of Howeth—is a flawed, or

‘broken’, aspiration.

The antipodes, and the juxtaposed structure of opposites connected with their geographical

importation into an explicitly Irish epic, are related to the theme of power through the

struggle between civilisation and primitivism. These dynamics are evident in a brief look at

the Mutt and Jute dialogue:

Mutt. Ore you astoneaged, jute you?

Jute. Oye am thonthorstrok, thing mud. (18.15–6)

The idea of the antipodes provides a site for these kinds of struggles because power is

wielded through language and violence in patterns that were predicted to continue as the far

southern island nations were absorbed into empire. A battle confrontation on page seventy-

eight is poised at a mythical ‘New South Ireland’ (78.26–7), an ironic reference to the

Australian colony of New South Wales. As the battle scene is also explicitly in the North-

West of the globe and juxtaposes Celtic and British armies (‘bluemin and pillfaces’, 78.27),

the acquisition of colonial land appears to be the common theme between the ‘old’ Ireland

and the ‘New South’ version. Ireland ‘renewed’ in the south refers also to the Irish Free State,

and responses to an entrenched power in the north—through resistance and language—are

registered. Joyce’s imaginative linking of the far southern side of the globe with the southern

part of the Wake incarnation of Ireland indicates awareness, if not sympathy, with those who

are rendered mute (see ‘Mutt’ in the above dialogue) by the language of the immovable,

unconquerable power.

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Maria McGarrity (2009) concurs with Sheldon Brivic in addressing the epic level of Joyce’s

engagement with the world beyond Europe and the west: ‘Brivic is right to suggest that Joyce

as a colonial writer seeks out non-Western subaltern images’ (p. 2). This implies a rejection

of the ‘hierarchical’, linear novel form through an epic of venturing, in that an abandonment

of the place of origin involves resistance, through evasion, of the received power structure.

Joyce’s rejection of Roman Catholic and British Imperialism is reflected explicitly in Shem’s

adventures .84 Shem’s self-reinvention through abandonment of Shaun’s authoritarianism is a

proactive response to power, evocative of the modernist freedom to pursue individual will.

Shem’s retreat to the southern hemisphere indicates the importance of geographical

expansion in the text’s global reach, as the ‘new world’ is utilised for non-material purposes

as the artist’s haven, although the reaches of imperialism are not entirely excluded from this

scene of escape (the mined riches of the far south are repeatedly unearthed, sometimes by

Shem in his ‘coalhole’, 194.18). Shem’s contends with stifling, parochial power through

evasion similar to Dedalus’ ‘exile and cunning’.

The comic dialogue between subject (Mutt) and coloniser (Jute) illustrates the power

exchange in action and the antipodean aspects of that power: primitivism, civilisation and the

role of language. Jute is an Iron Age technocrat and no longer ‘stone aged’—he is also not

astonished by the cave-dwelling Mutt. Rather, Jute has been thunderstruck by a shock that

has deeper resonance for Wake readers. To be thunderstruck is to be shocked into language,

based on Joyce’s use of the Viconian theory that aeons of civilised life were ushered into

action by thunderclaps, and that language phonemes were invented in imitation of the sound

of thunder that represented a divine voice. Joyce imitates these thunderclaps through his

elongated thunder-words in the text, but the brevity of Mutt and Jute’s dialogue represents the

pivotal moment between two groups on either side of that linguistic divide, encountering each

other. Jute already has scripted language as he uses his eye (‘oye’) to see it, whereas Mutt’s

access to language remains aural and primal (‘ore’). Joyce’s inclusion of primitivism is used

as a foil for civilisation in a succession of power struggles that are replayed within both

Ireland and the non-European realms beyond.

84 Shem has continued the work of Stephen Dedalus’ rebellion as shown in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914) and Ulysses (1922). Although Stephen’s utterance of ‘non serviam’ (‘I will not serve’) occurs amid the comic ribaldry of the Circe chapter in Ulysses, this Joycean scepticism expressed through Dedalus’ privileged ‘free thought’ over subservient devotion to ‘two masters’, the British crown and the Roman Catholic Church (as expressed to Haines during the opening chapter of Ulysses).

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Antipodean settings and images may seem obvious in relation to HCE, yet he has access to

both positive and negative experiences of power in the Wake as his identity is determined by

configurations of compass directions, specifically, north and south. HCE’s northern origins as

a Scandinavian Viking are frequently reiterated. His targeting as a scapegoat by Dublin

society indicates Joyce’s criticism of nationalist movements’ hatred for perceived internal

enemies. HCE’s dual role as foreigner and Dubliner is intentionally ambiguous. His northern

heritage is continually exaggerated as if to insist upon the indelible influence of Scandinavian

culture on Ireland, which is something that Joyce felt was absent from the Celtic Revival

movement from which he distanced himself. Joyce’s early interest in Ibsen and Nordic

languages indicates this external and northward search for artistic influence and confirmation

of his own sense of Irish heritage as mixed. HCE’s hybrid persona echoes Bloom’s mixed

loyalties as a British subject, Jew and Irishman in Ulysses. Joyce approached the theme of

mixed identities (cultural, national, religious) as ‘he saw at first hand the multiple identities of

the subjects of that (Austro-Hungarian) empire’ in Trieste (Williams, 2008, p. 76). The

northern Italian city was an important site for Joyce’s increasing exposure to the melange of

languages that would later determine the art of the Wake (McCourt, 2000).

An unmistakable transfer of power occurs at the singing of the ballad of Persse O’Reilly,

which is a pub song that incriminates HCE (in H. C. Earwicker’s other guise as Persse

O’Reilly.) As Hosty the balladeer is about to launch into his song of HCE’s fall from grace, a

thunder-word is heard. This thunder-word is an onomatopoeic gesture to glasses smashing in

the pub and the general applause in hailing Hosty with praise for his imminent song, but the

signal of language transferring from the oppressed to the oppressor (in this case, an opinion-

maker) reflects the transfer of power between peoples. Hosty and the crowd see themselves

as original Dubliners dealing with an invader in HCE. The Vikings and later Normans were

rarely without some degree of state and military power in Ireland, so that the crowd’s

‘roasting’ of HCE forms Joyce’s satire of local loathing towards external control.

The antipodes are linked with perversity in ways other than HCE’s crime of self-exposure

(among other sins). Perversions of a sexual nature are not excluded from this discussion, yet

the perversity signalled by the upside-down stereotypes of the antipodes are concerned with

waywardness and deviation, both crucial to geographical constructs of the far south as places

for alien and therefore oppositional behaviour. Derived from the Latin perversus to mean

facing the wrong way and evolving into a medieval concept of perversity as wrong, and not

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in accordance with what is accepted, perversity pervades the text entirely (Harper, 2014).

From the fused oppositions of language in the polyglot ‘splitting and agglutination’ (Ellmann,

1959, p. 703) to the collapsing of time and place so that multiple events blend based on the

shape-shifting common in dreams, the Wake is a book committed to perversity. If nothing

else, the text is a piece of music composed of words rather than musical notation, clearly the

‘wrong way’ to write music, but with the perversity of an innovative artist, Joyce declared of

the Wake: ‘it’s pure music’ (Ellmann, 1959, p. 703). As for the book’s comic impact, the

textual jokes contribute to perversity, as they possess the surprise necessary for punch lines

by going a different way or confounding a listener’s expectations.

1.5 Chapters in this Thesis

This chapter has introduced the purpose of this thesis, which is to focus on the naming and

presence of the antipodes wherever they have appear in the text. In this chapter I established

my argument that throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce situates Ireland at the centre of an array

of global narratives, rather than at its margins, thus allowing for other colonial spaces such as

those situated in the problematically named antipodes to gain a new vivacity through the

polyphony of Finnegans Wake. A literature review was presented to disciver how and to what

extent the non-Irish spaces and antipodean places which appear in the Wake, have hitherto

been analysed. The centrality of place as a guiding framework for this thesis was initiated as I

introduced how this thesis will approach the complex writing of place within the frequently

abstracted and non-realist texture of Finnegans Wake. Also I presented my method of literary

analysis for the antipodes in the Wake, instigated by motifs of verticality and how the theme

of perversity is linked with many instances of the antipodes’ presence within the book.

Chapter 2 will be concerened primarily with the idea of place. Initially the chapter will

explore how place can be analysed and understood as tangible constructs given then complex

and often amorphous nature of Finnegans Wake. The chapter will continue to address the

specificity of Irishness and how the places of Ireland can be identified through the universal

new language that Joyce adopted for his final book. The cenrality of Ireland as a written place

is crucial to Joyce’s repositioning of Ireland in world narratives, furthering my discussion of

how places in the antipodes emerge as intersecting narratives within this shifted global view.

Chapter 3 argues that the geographical antipodes including Australia, New Zealand and other

far subequatorial regions such as New Ireland are interwoven in Finnegans Wake to

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contribute to lexical patterns of irony and opposition. The contrary construction of geography

in the Wake is explored through the motif of the North-South pairing and the figure of HSC

who is continually shown to represent a conflicted self in relation to fixed notions of place.

Chapter 4 continues with the idea that the presence of the antipodes in Finnegans Wake

shows the region’s nominal embodiment of opposition. Evidence of the antipodes as it

appears in the embodiment and experiences of the figure of Shem will be presented to

explore the theme of perversity.

The fifth chapter explores the themes of nature, travel and sound in the ways that the

antipodes are presented in Finnegans Wake. Having endeavoured in the preceding chapters to

explore the related ideas of opposition and perversity associated with the antipodes in the

Wake, this final discussion of antipodes phrases questions whether any sense of harmony or

sense of unity is possible. I argue that given the simulateneity and Joyce’s interest in both

Bruno and Vico’s visions of history, that he does use antipodean motis to further a view that

harmony – however abstract and unusual given its literary embodiment – is indeed possible

and tangible in the language of place in Finnegans Wake.

A final chapter will conclude the argument about the significance of the antipodes as a

perverse configuration of place within Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

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Falling Through Irish Space in Finnegans Wake Chapter 2:

‘And shall Nohomia be our place like?’ (32.01): Defining Place in 2.1

Finnegans Wake

The fall punctuates Finnegans Wake with remarkable frequency and is represented on a

spectrum from the most complex conceptualisations of moral failings to the most blasé

snapshots of slapstick comedy. Between either points of any of these given falls, there is a lot

to be seen in the detailed and populated environment of the Wake. One possible explanation

for the merged language of Joyce’s prose in the Wake is that all these visions have blurred

together in the downward rush. In Ulysses, Joyce trained the reader’s eye to observe

microscopic details and to witness the universality of experience within the particular lives of

the Blooms. Where Ulysses experimented with the uncomfortable close-up and the overhead

crowd shot, Finnegans Wake (continuing from the experiment of Ulysses’ fifteenth chapter

‘Circe’) uses a relentless montage. The blended languages, eras and events result in the

continuing inter-connectedness of every particle, and this first chapter will focus on the

variations on the event of the fall. The falls are instigated by forces in the space they occupy,

and my aim is to observe some of these falls in slow(er) motion in order to view the versions

of Irishness that Joyce applies to the text’s spatiality.

This chapter first examines whether it is possible to identify places within the Wake’s

apparently amorphous space. The challenge in defining place and space differently becomes

feasible when considering Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1977) formulation: ‘“Space” is more abstract than

“place”. What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and

endow it with value’ (p. 6). Although a seemingly benign statement as to the obvious

distinction between these two concepts, it is the sense of ‘value’ that is crucial here as a

guiding notion for the approach of this thesis to understandings of place. Through Joyce’s

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exhaustively detailed worlds in Finnegans Wake, the reader gains a greater sense of the value

with which Ireland is endowed in the book’s organisation of space. These identifications of

the value of place are closely involved with my discussion of the vertiginous scale of the

book’s structure, and of the formation of Ireland in the text.

For an author whose major works are set in one specific place—Ireland, and its urban centre

in Dublin—the spatial radicalism of Finnegans Wake is at times bewildering. What has Joyce

gained in widening the parameters of his language to encompass the world’s languages and

their geographical origins? An element of ‘Joyce’s revenge’, to borrow the title of Andrew

Gibson’s (2002) postcolonial book on Ulysses, is to forge his own mock empire with the

Wake’s global reach. Through the ‘interruption’ and ‘digestion’ that Mary Louise Pratt

(2004) identified in the imperial appropriation of subject cultures, we read in the Wake a

massively exaggerated yet reversed process of those actions which fragment, absorb and

substitute the found material of a colonised place. In dealing with the Wake’s space it is

important to acknowledge yet not depend on time for any structuring measure of value in

space. Time is perhaps an even more elastic force to contend with, and my analysis will focus

only on the book’s spatial formations and fragmentations.

This thesis approaches Joyce’s Wake as among other things, a parody—as an absurd

recolonising of global space by Ireland, which is a viable concept when the book’s mileage is

considered. The Arctic and Antarctic poles, New Zealand, Asia, Australia, South America

and South Africa all make their appearance on the Wake radar. The absurdist nature of these

journeys is that the narrative never fully leaves Ireland, but also due to the ‘not yet’ temporal

dimensions of that key opening phrase ‘passencore’ (pas encore) (03.04), the return to

Ireland from elsewhere is similarly delayed. The Wake may be a book of transits as well as a

book of places, but the imperial inroads made by those journeys enact an ‘Irishing’ of the

world that is victorious rather than victimised, and artful instead of accidental. Joyce’s

‘worlding’ of the space beyond Ireland uses Ireland to supplant the international, imperially

defined journeys of the past with an impertinent new thoroughness (Ashcroft, Griffiths, &

Tiffin, 1998, p. 241). The world is saturated with Ireland in a way that mocks the political,

economic and religious barriers that Joyce felt prevented him from making the return journey

homeward. Ireland provided Joyce with the materials to remake world space. Despite the

sensation of diving into an amorphous primordial marsh that may assail the reader when

trying to make sense of the Wake’s terrain, there is actually a design that has sculpted space

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into a global vision of Ireland and that space contains a centre, or a ‘heart’, according to

Joyce:

I always write about Dublin because if I can get to the heart of Dublin. I can get to the heart

of all the cities in the world. In the particular is the universal (Deane, 1992, p. xix).

The urban space of Dublin is a playful site in the Wake as Joyce uses the city metonymically

to disinter his version of Ireland’s past. Joyce’s intention was to reimagine global space

through a prism of Ireland’s past and urban space in particular, and we can draw a link

between cities as the spatial version of ‘the precise system of ordering’ that Joyce chose for

the structure of his global text (Deane, 1992, p. xxi). Joyce’s desire to ‘get to the heart of all

cities in the world’ displays an ironically ambitious, artistic imperialism. The universalising

urge is evident throughout the Wake; however, there still remains that tunnelling down into

the heart of the particular. Joyce’s Irish empire in the Wake repudiates the centuries of foreign

rule through distortion not only of the collective memory of those events, but by distorting

the idea of foreignness itself.

Place, like so many other structural and symbolic elements of the Wake, is as slippery a

concept to grasp as narrative and persona. It might be more practical to consider modernist

geographies in terms of space and place; however, that distinction is less easily navigated in

Finnegans Wake. Joyce has intentionally collapsed literary conventions of setting, perhaps

because he worked so hard in Ulysses to build a city’s replica. Figurative places certainly

occur in the Wake, but their boundaries are unstable because their naming is changeable.

Additionally, space works in Finnegans Wake as the marker of distance (and difference)

between two points of a fall, and those gaps are the non-figurative, metaphorical indications

of perceived moral lapse.

While place remains ‘immarginable’ (04.19)—with indistinct margins—it is imaginable. The

reader is required to imagine place in unconventional ways: as alive in the animist sense, as

contested space in the political sense and as an experimental zone in which human instinct is

variously thwarted and compelled. Andrew Thacker (2003) defined the two terms thus: ‘To a

number of geographical theorists space indicates a sense of movement, of history, of

becoming, while place is often thought to imply a static sense of location, of being, or, of

dwelling’ (p. 13). In advocating a median way between the literal and the alternatively

abstracted, or dream readings of place in Finnegans Wake, an interchange between space and

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place is required. Heidegger’s notion of the dwelling as an extension of human identity is

relevant when considering the spaces within which the Wake figures function. Lefebvre’s

dynamic understanding of spaces as productions or processes echoes the plasticity with which

the Wake’s places shift. The intention here is to highlight how place contributes to the

spiralling body of allusions with which Joyce structured the text. Place is never a fixed

backdrop, nor a void, but a set of patterns with multiple connotations for how spaces must be

imagined.

Writing about ‘Ithaca’, the island-named penultimate chapter of Ulysses, the critic Jon

Hegglund (2008) suggests ‘we need to look carefully at the politics of its form’ (p. 59). In

that question-answer, panoptic view of Bloom, Stephen and their cups of cocoa, ‘the solidity

of archival fact gives way to the fluidity of information that refuses to be fixed and

compartmentalized’ (Hegglund, 2008, p. 59). The refusal to be fixed—as certain knowledge,

or in place—also resonates throughout the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses. Both ‘Ithaca’ and

‘Circe’ blast forward in time towards Molly’s bedroom monologue which offers us her bird’s

eye view of Dublin Bay superimposed on her girlhood memories of Britain’s Spanish

enclave, Gibraltar. In Ulysses, form might be experimental but the settings are all

cartographically definite, as place is locatable and imbued comprehensively with the

geographical ‘value’ to which Tuan alluded.

The ‘politics of form’ takes on an even more alarming plasticity beyond the final ‘yes’ of

Ulysses, as the reader enters the funhouse of Finnegans Wake. An avenue through the

extensive enquiries of Wake criticism opens up the question of where exactly the book is set:

how does Joyce’s play with spatiality in the Wake produce a geographically radical Ireland?

Place—like the primal sins encoded in Wakese—is ‘obscene’ in all senses of the term;

designated as restricted viewing, intuited but obscure. Joyce’s hyperactive parody of the

mapping of Ireland is literally ‘off the charts’, as place becomes something other than

mapped positions. Joyce’s blurry settings of Ireland and elsewhere add to the subversiveness

of the Wake as they ridicule the restrictions implicit in language, borders and censorship. The

material for which Ulysses was branded obscene has gained ground in Finnegans Wake, but

the sexual acts and religious subversion are disguised, and their precise location in the

narrative layering of settings is indefinite. The perverse action and concepts of the Wake in

this way are protected, as it were, by a deliberate complication of space through language.

Not all Joyce critics feel that Ireland is as crucial a setting in the Wake as it is for Ulysses, and

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it is not, surely, what Jacques Mailhos (1998), for instance, regards as a ‘perfectly

circumscribed space’ (p. 151). Mailhos’ comparative reading of memory techniques in Joyce

and Perec plausibly suggests that the spatial identity of Ireland is less concrete in the Wake:

‘whether (the texts are) based on the map of Dublin (as is the case in Ulysses, and, to a lesser

extent, in Finnegans Wake)’ (p. 151). This ‘lesser extent’ is inaccurate –

I argue that the latter text is just as, if not more, imprinted with the ‘map of Dublin’, right

down to the street names, churches and roads and canals which wreath the city. No matter

how far the text ranges, all the way to New Ireland and Australia in the antipodes, the Wake

recirculates to return and inhabit the Liffey and its adjacent environs. For both Ulysses and

Finnegans Wake, Dublin dominates the space through which the narrative moves, even if

those movements may be at times harder to trace in the Wake as its spatial boundaries are

constantly shifting.

Lefebvre articulated three axes through which space may be understood, and Joyce’s spatial

formations in the Wake appear to inhabit the ‘lived space’ of the imagination (Hubbard,

Kitchin & Valentine, 2004, p. 210). This is as opposed to the ‘perceived space’ of daily life

and the ‘conceived space’ of official, state-sanctioned spatial usage. The distinctions between

Lefebvre’s three conceptualisations of space pertain to the freedom with which that space is

used, as the seizing and relaxing of control over public spaces was at the forefront of his mind

in Paris of the late 1960s. Added to this pressure of state impositions on space is the urban

space’s functionality as a site for the flow of capital. Space in the Wake is identifiably

transcendental in that it evades both the quotidian and the bureaucratic, but through this

densely allusive architecture of space, the value of place becomes challenging to quantify, as

it is so diffuse. If the Wake’s spaces are to be plotted on the two more tangible of Lefebvre’s

three axes, it is clear that the imaginary function of the ‘lived space’ subverts and distorts

other forms of authority that determine spatial experience. The constraints of governments,

religions, commerce, community interaction and ultimately time are all overcome, as

Finnegans Wake utilises Irish space as a site for puzzling over, celebrating and to some

degree, resolving all of the conflicts that stemmed from those modes of authority.

An extension of Lefebvre’s ‘conceived space’ is theorised by Deleuze as ‘striated’ space

which infiltrates the relative freedoms of ‘smooth’ space (Westphal, 2011, p. 39). This spatial

dichotomy is especially useful when considering the dream state of Joyce’s Wake, as the

smooth, uninterrupted waves of sleep provide an unconscious territory which is subject to the

39

perforations of guilt and anxiety. I have used this metaphor of sleep interrupted or punctuated

by dreams for the Wake’s arrangement of spaces in the narrative, as with the theorising of

public space by Deleuze drawing on Lefebvre’s premise that repeating lines or formalities

offer a sense of order, however unwelcome. Just as the dreamer usually lacks control over the

shaper of their sleep due to these interventions, the citizen inhabits spaces that determine their

freedom among the ‘striations’ of order. Adrian Parr (2010) summarises:

It is striated by the fall of bodies, the verticals of gravity, the distribution of matter into

parallel layers, the lamellar and laminar movement of flows. These parallel verticals have

formed an independent dimension capable of spreading everywhere, of formalising all the

other dimensions, of striating space in all of its directions, so as to render it homogenous (p.

263).

The impact of these striating forces are formalising in the Wake, in the sense of introducing

patterns, motifs and recurring structures through which the dream-woven anti-narrative

emerges. While the result is not entirely ‘homogenous’ for the Wake, the junction between

where these smooth and striated spaces meet provides a useful way for thinking of the text’s

spatial arrangements.

The mechanics of the dreaming state upon sleep are analogous to the impact of that ‘striated’

space upon the smooth. Dreams introduce action, images and sensations into otherwise

inactive but sentient sleep, bringing with them patterns of thought that however unconscious,

work towards giving the formless images a sense of progression or inter-relationship. An

example of this occurs in Finnegans Wake throughout episode III.iv. The uncertainty between

the sleeping and wakeful states is embodied in HCE and ALP’s bedroom scene when the two

are heard emerging from restless sleep: ‘Too mult sleepth. Let sleepth. But really now

whenabouts?’ (555.01–03.) The sense of time and place is blurred in the transition between

the unconscious and conscious states, so that theirs is a false awakening, like the

disconcerting sensation of waking up while still dreaming. The false awakening has spatial

consequences, because it is disorientating: ‘Where are we at all? and whenabouts in the name

of space?’ (558.33). HCE and ALP’s bedroom is then transfigured into a film set, and the

privacy of their shared sexual life is dissolved. Dreamed panic about the exposure of personal

sexuality is clearly indicated by the spectatorship implied by the film set, which focuses

squarely on the private space: ‘Interior of dwelling on outskirts of city.’ (558.36). These

scenes and other episodes of exposure and public embarrassment (such as Shem’s failure to

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correctly guess the colour of underwear in episode II.ii, and Shaun’s arrest and interrogation

by the Four Old Men) suggest how the smoothness of the sleeping mind becomes a harried

space when harnessed by psychological forces. The Wake’s textual devices imitate those

‘striations’ or intrusions, showing how the dreaming mind struggles to make sense of its own

movements. Elsewhere in this thesis I suggest that Finnegans Wake is not merely a ‘dream

book’, a recording of the projections of an unnamed sleeper. If the Wake is to have its dream-

like events classed as ‘dreams’, then the book is a representation of a recurring dream, given

the book’s well-known circularity joining the textual ending to the beginning (of ‘the’ 628.16

and ‘riverrun’ 03.01.)

Even though Deleuze argued that smooth space ‘does not belong to a prelapsarian world from

which humans have fallen (as Rousseau might argue)’ (Parr, 2010, p. 261), the imagery of

irrevocably descending lines of demarcation, restriction and division signal an important

frame for explaining psychological excavations of the individual’s unconscious mind.

‘Without boundaries or measure, smooth space is frequently affiliated with the unconscious’

(Parr, 2010, p. 262). The striations which impede on otherwise unrestricted space are

symbolic of the rigidity of rubrics which attempt to harness human behaviour. The individual

failure to be bound by those expectations emerges in both conscious and unconscious regret

or resistance, and in Finnegans Wake we are shown the shaping of that meeting between the

individual mind and outside pressure. The metaphor of verticality given above is instrumental

as a shaping force, and the many falls in Joyce’s dream text correspond with these striations.

‘We of the clovery kingdom’ (110.04): Identifying Ireland 2.2

My reading of space and place in the Wake focuses on how the trope of the fall is charged

with the specific allusions of Ireland as the prominent, if refigured, setting. The falls occur

where the smoothness of unconscious space collides with societal conventions, as so much of

the worried or disgusted depictions of transgression in the Wake feature an instance of the

flouting of those rules which have been ‘handed down’. That a number of these falls are

situated in the territorial context of Ireland, reveals an authoritative regrouping of diffuse

mappings of the same place. One means of anchoring the diffuse formations of Ireland in the

Wake is to adopt aspects of Bertrand Westphal’s geocriticism. Although I will continue to

invoke the ideas of geocriticsm in this thesis, I will not be relying on its tenets as a central

methodological strategy. Instead, I will refer to the ways in which Westphal advocates the

geographical study of place as an additional tool for exploring Joyce’s complex simultaneity

41

in the Wake. Eric Prieto (2011b) summarises the main tools of the geocentric approach,

explaining how the focus shifts from a single author or text to the place these literary

representations are depicting. I suggest that Joyce inadvertently pre-empted the geocritical

stance in portraying Ireland in Finnegans Wake. The Westphal methods are ‘stratigraphic’

and ‘polysensorial’, beautifully plural adjectives that could be descriptions of the Wake itself

(Prieto, 2011b). The stratigraphic approach involves written perspectives over the course of

time—the sedimentary accumulation of opinions, knowledge and evidence of place—and the

polysensorial resists the privileging of visual evidence. These techniques, added to the hoped

for ‘dynamism’ of a geocritical analysis, are present in Finnegans Wake.

Although the Wake is itself another representation of Ireland rather than a literary critical

document, the process rather than the result must be acknowledged for its strength as a

geocritical means of collating textual and oral evidence about a single place or region. The

prismatic patterning of place in the Wake shows Joyce’s anticipation of geocritical

commitments to place: ‘it becomes clear that the overarching goal is to pick a place

and study it from every conceivable angle: over time, across cultures, using multiple

senses, and without prioritizing any single perspective’ (Prieto, 2011b) p.2. Joyce certainly

rejected any singular perspectives on Ireland such as the Irish Revival’s political resistance to

British authority through Gaelic language and sport. Radically, Joyce favoured non-Celtic,

European and classical languages (French, Italian, Latin, Greek and Norwegian) to support

his views in the essay Ireland, Isle of Saints and Sages (1907) that Ireland was steeped in a

variety of pre-British, continental and Scandinavian influences (Joyce, 1959).

The Wake builds on the concentric epics of Ulysses to involve even more epics that find

landfall in Ireland. Ulysses successfully constructed a concentric epic through the parallel of

Bloom with the Greek adventurer. In the Wake, concentricity is multiplied so that multiple

epics coexist, such as Tristan and Isolde, which is replicated through the medieval love story,

Wagner’s opera of the same name, and Boucicault’s melodrama, ‘Arrah-na-pogue’ (384.32).

Joyce’s modus operandi is to identify patterns in Irish art and history and evoke their

centrality of place. During a particularly noisy moment on the fourth page of Finnegans

Wake, the historian-narrator observes the battle scene, saying: ‘What clashes here...?’ It is

natural to ask ‘where’ is the ‘here’ that those clashes are—where are we in space? To

appreciate Joyce’s desire to present an authentic and unromanticised view of Dublin to the

world as he did with Dubliners, it is helpful to apply a geocritical attitude to describe Joyce’s

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literary rewritings of Ireland in the Wake as dependent on and responsive to the written space

of Ireland.

Joyce excavated his own published works as part of his self-reflexive style, as his own

writing of Ireland was primary among his sources for the written Ireland. Conscious of

having contributed to the corpus of literary works on Ireland, the giant’s buried body in the

Wake contributes ironically to the mobility of the word in both speech and writing, as

opposed to the permanence of the body. Having permanently departed Ireland by choice,

Joyce’s own documentation of Irish experience yielded the Wake’s composition further

material for justifying that self-imposed exile. The desire to write Ireland into a more

formidable modernist existence combined with a more than sentimental longing for his

homeland fuelled Joyce’s ambition. Mary Reynolds (1981) finds a parallel here with Dante:

Joyce’s preferred focus of interest was not the Ireland of the pre-Christian sages, nor the

contemporary Ireland of Yeats and Synge and the Irish literary movement. He proposed

nothing less than to make Dublin, as Dante made Florence, the centre and projection of a

universal drama (p. 11).

Joyce’s chosen absence from Ireland is precisely linked with the sense of opposition he felt

towards a birthplace that had only tenuous tolerance for his development as an adult and as an

artist. The notion of Ireland’s development as a place in closely linked with personal

development and freedom, an idea inadvertently raised in a selection from Joyce’s 1907 essay

Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages. Vincent Cheng’s (1996) historically informed reading of

racism towards Irish Catholics includes a reference to Joyce’s rebuttal of that punitive

colonial treatment:

… this pejorative concept of Ireland is given the lie by the fact that when the Irishman is

found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man.

The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the

development of individuality (p. 25).

The blending of place and person in ‘Irishman’ together with the freedoms offered by

‘another environment’ reflect Joyce’s personal experience of the conflicting issues associated

with culture and place. One of the central struggles in the Wake is Shaun’s conformity against

Shem’s individuality. Shem embodies a host of other Irish figures for whom ‘another

environment’ has been preferable, including artists and politicians together with economic

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migrants. The Wake attempts to dramatise the mixed experiences of that process towards

‘development’ outside of Ireland.

The patterns of place combine with other patterning tactics in the Wake to increase reader

recognition of significant allusions to Ireland. Martha Black (2002) wrote about the layered

significance of place in Joyce’s writings: ‘Joyce not only grounds his work in the reality of

the city but also chooses locations whose implications and ironies deepen his depiction of

Irish life and his Irish characters’ (p. 18). The inclusion of the antipodes in Finnegans Wake,

and contrasts in compass directions, highlight how Ireland might be imagined as a global hub,

a centre with the ‘orbal’ (601.05) or global space. If the new world and far southern lands are

associated with renewal, Ireland’s west as a site of cultural renewal is a contentious one. Two

noteworthy puns on the term ‘west’ and ‘waste’ refer to the revivalist folk song The West’s

Asleep and the west of Ireland as a space of Irish transitioning from a dormant agrarian force

to a politicised movement for change: ‘the wastes to south’ (35.31) and ‘the wastes a’sleep’

(64.01). Simultaneously insulting and absurd, the west of Ireland as a ‘wasted space’ or

‘wasteland’ can be read in a number of ways, and it is especially charged with meaning for

the Irish Revival. Eliot’s portrait of an exhausted Europe, a familiar ‘waste land’ in

modernism, is only partially insinuated by Joyce’s portrait of history-ravaged Ireland as

wasted by war. The west is ironically viewed as a ‘waste’ through the eyes of an invading

force, for whom the space is wasted unless it is colonised and productive. This utilitarian

aspect of the term ‘waste’ plays with notions of litter and refuse in the Wake to evoke the

mental flotsam that emerges in subconscious thought through dreaming, but the pun appears

to reject restrictive notions of the Irish west as either singularly a place of cultural salvation

or colonial loss. Joyce’s revitalisation of Irish space, by comically invoking the term ‘waste’,

refutes imperial incursions of the kind that labelled Australian space as Terra Nullius, an

empty land, as space wasted prior to imperial utilisation.

While Ireland undoubtedly forms the predominant shape of land or place as distinguishable

from arbitrary space, the Irishness of the Wake’s Ireland is continually compromised, even

despite the explicit settings of Howth Head, Phoenix Park and the River Liffey which form

the book’s geographical delta. The book’s stratigraphic style, closely resembling the

geological basis for that description, seeks and reinvents encounters with diverse

documentations of place over time. The motif of the letter—constantly resurfacing and

reburied—indicates the physical layers from which documented evidence of place must be

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extracted. An example of punning which indicates terrestrial ‘strata’ is the place name

‘Daneygaul’ (237.18), a reflection of Ireland’s mixed racial past evoked by the presence of

Danes (Viking) and Celts (Gallic) in Donegal. Place appears to be indivisible from the people

who inhabited it, and inseparable from the language, story and song which arose to reflect

that place. The preservation of place in writing is admired through Joyce’s spoonerism on

page fourteen of the ‘bog look’ (14.01): Finnegans Wake acts as a log-book of events

preserved, like those books and artefacts retrieved from peat bog. This living evidence of a

society—its culture—shows history becoming geography, as the earth keeps the record. The

time capsule of pages thirteen to fourteen takes a stratified ‘look’ at the bog, noting four

different names for the city: ‘Dublin’ is observed at different stages of its emergence from the

bog as ‘Ublaniaum’, ‘Hurdlesford’ and ‘Ballyaughacleeaghbally’. The narrative voice waxes

lyrically about the state of peace that appears to have descended on the land as a response to

the many wars that instigated those changes in name. The nature of place has become

‘paisably eirenical’—an ironically peaceful form of Ireland because the bloody wars continue

to resurface in memory and writing as ‘blotty words’ (14.14). Tomas Hofheinz’s (1995)

postcolonial criticism on the ‘invention’ of Irish history highlights Joyce’s recourse to

conflicting historical narratives:

Joyce interlaced these Irish historiographical modes in order to form a referential field at

once comical in its staging of specious explanation and serious in what it implies about the

meaning of historical making (p. 3).

For Westphal and those applying geocriticism, the emphasis is on that ‘making’ of the place

as it takes shape in the mimetic arts (Westphal, p. 6).

Geocriticism consciously invites simultaneity through an insistence of divergent referents to

the same place. It is that multiplicity of perspectives which enables a richer relation ‘between

the world and the text’ (Westphal, 2003, p. 6), and the geocritical emphasis on place seeks

solid and recurring patterns. From the expansive reach of Wakean space it is recognisably

urban places that continually replenish the Wake’s world of simultaneity, and Lefebvre’s

formulation of the city is recalled by Rob Shields (2004) as a site for what we colloquially

refer to as the freedom to associate. The transition from singular to plural within the fertile

social space of the city is an apt description of the many crowd scenes in Finnegans Wake, in

which the populace gathers en masse for the simple joys of taunting and insulting each other.

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Lefebvre’s Marxist observation of the collective freedoms made possible within an urban

space is equally if not more relevant to the Wake as it is to Joyce’s earlier works. Joyce’s

publication of Ulysses in 1922 animated Dublin, although through an intensely scrutinised

modern subjectivity. Individuality is inscribed by Stephen Dedalus’ treasured ‘free thought’

(Joyce, 1992, p. 20) as the enlightened means of achieving both personal and wider political

freedoms. That and other individual voices may be seen in a continuum of what Hofheinz

(1995) described as ‘improvised attempts to define, assuage and further Ireland’s slow and

painful break from its colonial past’ (p. 3). The Wake’s Dublin is at times less tangible than

the streets of Dubliners, and less easily navigable than the walking tracks of Ulysses, yet

Dublin remains and gains power as the instrument of Joyce’s vision of modernity. Radio,

television and cinema compete with the urban clamour of the preceding centuries. Dublin was

at the intersection of Joyce’s hopes for Ireland’s economic and cultural independence—his

briefly successful attempt to launch a cinema in 1909 is proof of his desire to not only

influence the cultural destiny of Ireland, but to do so in a profoundly modern way. The Volta

Electric Theatre literally connected Dublin audiences—with technology and with European

filmgoers, as most of the films shown in those early Volta sessions were reels imported from

the continent (Ellmann, 1959). In Finnegans Wake, Joyce achieves the connectedness of

Ireland with Europe by images in language rather than images on screen.

The different types of places in the Wake are also worth noting, as metropolitan spaces often

dissolve into the smooth territories prone to unquantifiable experience which Deleuze

described (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 411). Journeys on rivers and seas compliment the

fraught conflicts occurring on land. The action also shifts from the metropolitan to the rural

or wilderness, adopting an animistic tone through the embodiment of mountains and hills as

HCE, and of rivers as ALP. Other elements are introduced which blend place with the body

in anthropomorphic, mythopoetic formations. This is to say that these personages are not

literally locked within places, like Ariel fixed within a tree by the power of Prospero’s

sorcery in The Tempest, but that they become immersed and a part of these places, and are

forever associated with physical parts of the land.

ALP’s tone in addressing her husband and children in Book IV is strongly encoded with the

intimacy of a close-knit family, yet it is also infused with the distinctly archetypal portrait of

ALP as the river flowing towards the ocean. HCE’s mountainous identity also garners

familial affection, and the passage in this early section—‘And shall Nohomiah be our place

46

like?’ (32.01)—contains more epic allusions to place. The state of ‘Nohomiah’ is a comical

form of ‘exile’ (that is, ‘no home’), transparently referring to the Jewish leader Nehemiah

who, with Ezra, returned from the exile in Babylon and rebuilt Jerusalem. The overlay of

colloquial syntax (‘be our place like’) infuses this return journey that was both religiously and

nationalistically motivated with a dash of localised affection for place. The biblical tone

given to an Irish cultural and spiritual return to ‘our place’ evokes the grand theatre of

voyages. Up and downriver, as well as trans-oceanic crossings provide crucial aquatic

settings for the Wake’s many patterns through which recognisable places are spatially re-

imagined. Noting these patterns in relation to to the mythic framework for Ulysses, Maria

McGarrity invokes the trope of destiny linked with the sea, which is a powerful element of

the Wake’s spatial configuration:

Within the reimaginings of epic struggles and wanderings, the sea often plays a critical role

as a realm of destruction, delay and death, though it also has the power to convey

information and return the hero to both the personal and cultural past (2008, p. 80).

Through Joyce’s multilingual voices, the Wake’s Irish-centric emphasis on place is derived

from inscriptions of Ireland as distinctly global. As an artist who could easily be regarded as

anticipating the geocritical mode of scholarship, Joyce responded to the treatment of Ireland

in texts from authors both internal and external, on all the sides of conflicts and systems of

power through which the space of Ireland was organised. For instance, Joyce was especially

interested in retrospective Irish histories that joined Ireland’s origins with biblical narratives

of origins such as the flood in Genesis (Joyce, 1959). Other history sources include books on

Ireland’s regional importance during the medieval period, such as Walsh’s (1922) focus on

Ireland’s Scandinavian relations. The broad world seeps through every sentence in the Wake

which appears to obliterate difference in place through mixed languages, and places in the

Wake are in many ways un-mappable: their holographic positions shift even as they are

becoming identifiable.

Place in the text follows the logic of dreams in which different places blend into uncannily

familiar new settings. Among these fusions, the most powerfully identifiable place is Ireland,

and the reimagining of Ireland through the Wake is unequivocally global. The union of ALP

and HCE represents how these generally opposed concepts of native and foreign, and local

and global are joined. Anna Livia embodies Dublin’s river, the Liffey, yet her river’s waters

eventually become one with the world’s oceans beyond. HCE is an ‘alien’ (197.03), as well

47

as the Greek wanderer Deucalion (‘eld duke alien’, 197.03), yet his immersion in Ireland

means he has become an amalgam of Ireland’s urban centres, reflecting them physically:

‘And his derry’s own drawl and his corksown blather and his doubling stutter and his

gullaway swank’ (197.04–06). HCE’s combined origins mark his as an ‘Everybody’ from his

Greek epic mythical journeying to his voice, which channels the four cardinal directions of

Ireland (his drawl, blather, stutter and swank mimic his surroundings in Derry, Cork, Dublin

and Galway.) The sounds of HCE’s voice indicate a strong spatial element in the

geographical overlaying of Ireland on the figure’s global breadth.

Joyce’s filtering of so much world history, myth and language positions Ireland as a central

portal of global importance in the Wake. Although various layers of irony emerge through

this structuring of Ireland as central, it is the reasons why Ireland remained ever-present in

Joyce’s work that explain the country’s spatial significance. In his letters and literature, Joyce

fought for the ‘soul’ of Ireland, as the aesthetic rebellions in A Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man and Ulysses reveal. Clare Hutton’s essay on Joyce’s relationship with the Irish

Revival show Joyce’s artistic aims to be not as far removed from revivalism as they were

doubtfully considered (McCourt, 2009, p. 195). When Joyce’s autobiographical character

Stephen Dedalus returns in Ulysses, he declares himself ‘the servant of two masters’, England

and Rome (Joyce, 1993, p. 202), and although he may not have returned to Ireland personally

to diminish those dual authorities, Joyce unambiguously reclaimed Ireland for himself, and

for a vision of the nation which defied its prior subservient incarnations. Ulysses was a major

precursor to the Wake’s centring of the world in Ireland, through its canny superimposition of

the classical Odyssey myth over an ordinary Dublin day.

Added to these structural elements of Ireland in the Wake as a filter and portal for the rest of

the world’s history and ideas, is the difficult notion of Ireland’s historically perceived

inferiority. Ireland’s geospatial and geopolitical status as subservient to its Viking and

English neighbours, from the era of the Norman invasion until the early twentieth century, is

a position of inferiority that is contested in the Wake. Joyce’s focus on Ireland is not achieved

solely with a parody of the nationalist hubris of the kind he satirised in the Cyclops chapter

inter-sections of Ulysses. While elements of that parody continue in Finnegans Wake, it is

Joyce’s utilisation of Irish myth and history which replace Ireland as a central focus among

the wider world. The techniques consist of superimposition and layering, phonemic

distortion, motifs, and patterns of characterisation, and the content is consistently derived

48

from Ireland’s textual existence framing the country as a pivotal rather than tangential place.

Observing these methods as they occur in the opening pages of Finnegans Wake, we are

confronted by an Ireland whose recognisability is contingent on the reader’s capacity to play

with notions of identity and place. As the saga of events unfolds including Finnegan’s fall,

HCE’s crime, Shem’s exile and Shaun’s recourse to sin, Ireland is demonstrably a zone in

which the experiments of civilisation are examined. Societal origins, myth making, moral

inter-relationships and collective life in the city are some among many themes made possible

by Joyce’s focus on place.

Joyce’s satire of nationalist obsessions with origins is clear from the epic sweep with which

he portrays civilisation in its first throes of language. The first paragraphs iterate Ireland’s

founding as prelude to key birth right scenes of the Old Testament: Adam and Eve, Noah’s

sons, and the Abrahamite dynasty are plotted along the Wake’s intentionally bewildering

temporality. In this recurrence of ‘not yet’ and the pseudo-French ‘passencore’ (pas encore),

Joyce has situated the reader among ‘Howth Castle and Envrions’ in a new time zone

altogether, one that acknowledges multiple origin stories by circumventing and conflating

their origins (Epstein, 2009, p. 11). Irish and global civilisations as precipitated by ‘the fall’

are introduced through this range of founding myths from those biblical origins alongside the

arrival of the legendary Irish earl of Howth, Tristram, with an insistence on its widespread

recognition: the story is ‘retaled’ throughout ‘christian minstrelsy’ (03.18), it is told, sung and

sold (retailed). The irony of events having to ‘account’ for themselves in narrative is marked

by Hofheinz (1995), whose dismissal of Jameson’s ‘radical simplification’ of Ulysses

expands into a logically complex reading of the Wake (p. 13). One aspect of that reading is a

sensitive analysis of the Norwegian Captain episode, which situates the drama of history-

telling in place, to acknowledge ‘Joyce’s complex relation of Irish patriarchal experience to

Irish history’ (Hofheinz, 1995, p. 35). This mode of analysis admits the negative notions of

failure and betrayal, as Joyce’s text is a deliberate rejection of glorifying nationalist

narratives. Through his source materials on Irish history, Joyce created a figure in HCE who

could stand for the mistaken decisions of the past, as the ‘E’ stands for ‘errorland’

(62.25)/Eire-land. These errors are situated firmly in Irish space.

The ongoing portrayal of HCE’s difficulties is partially to do with his awkward role as a

patriarchal failure. As HCE stands for those past generations who have not successfully

liberated Ireland from foreign rule, his victimisation (both official and driven by the mob) is

49

emblematic of that imposed guilt. For example, the courtroom scene charges ‘Festy King’

(85.23), a decadent royal incarnation of HCE, with the same act that will later cause the

Russian General to be targeted by Buckley and the soldiers: exposing himself and defecating

‘on the field’ (85.31). The ‘king’s’ crime is to befoul his own land—the ‘field’ stands for

Phoenix Park, rendered as ‘Phenitia Proper’ (85.20). Given that Festy King (HCE) is being

charged for the crime at the Old Bailey, it appears that this vassal king has failed to carry out

the will of the crown in his use of the land. Phoenicia (‘Phenitia’), the ancient sea-faring

nation, gained global influence through language (Punic) and settlement (Carthage). ‘Phenitia

Proper’ might resemble Phoenix Park in Dublin, yet it also stands for the empire’s origin,

London, the site for Festy King’s trial. Dublin’s Phoenix Park is therefore a Phenitia

‘Improper’ where sins like HCE’s are committed. The indictment against the much-reduced

King is echoed by local aristocracy (‘kings of the arans and the dalkeys, kings of mud and

tory’, 87.25) who demand evidence of the act of exposure: ‘Exhibit his relics!’ (87.32). This

public humiliation by local ‘kings’ simultaneously martyrs and shames the Festy King

(although his relics are barely those of a saint). HCE in this role signals the uneasy

relationship between the local and imperial, as the Festy King is offered sacrificially to the

prosecuting imperial powers. In this guise, HCE becomes a loser in the game of ‘divide and

conquer’, caught between conflicting interests.

‘On all matters that fall’ (19.36): The Falls of Finnegans Wake 2.3

In addition to politically charged portrayals of place, there are recurring tropes from religion

used to highlight the Wake notions of ordinary people’s subjugation by the rhetoric of sin.

The Judeo-Christian fall from grace in Eden is a significant Miltonian motif within the

Wake’s downward structuring trajectory, and the ‘garden’ itself is an important setting. The

language of Finnegans Wake orchestrates a bizarre amalgamation in the book’s opening

sequence of Irish history and the Christian or western story of origins, the fall in the Garden

of Eden. This conflation is evident in the page’s final phrase: ‘the knock out in the park

where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlins first loved livvy.’ (03.22–

4.) Expelled from the garden (knocked out of the park), sectarian Irish conflict is symbolised

through orange and green, with the orange (l’arancia in Basque) a folkloric sign for Eve’s

apple (McHugh, 1980, p. 34). This is clear from the union of Dublin with the Liffey, as the

two are often paired throughout the book with HCE and ALP, the archetypal man (Adam)

and woman (eve). There are of course even more allusions and inferences that can be

50

extracted from these crucial opening phrases, but they are powerful evidence of Joyce’s

ambition for his text: civilisation’s origins with Ireland placed at the centre.

Yet HCE in Ireland as a parallel vision of Adam in the Edenic garden presents an archly

satirical response to these stories of origin. HCE’s continually misreported ‘crime in the park’

contributes to Joyce’s satire of Catholicism’s focus on sin as a tool for social manipulation.

The sin of exposure to a pair of young women (maidservants), witnessed by three men

(Welsh fusileers) remains an ‘alleged misdemeanour’ (35.06) throughout the text; the ‘leers’

embedded in the characterisation of the three male witnesses implies their guilt as well as

scapegoating of HCE. What should have been an innocuous convergence of three parties (two

girls, three soldiers and one man—HCE) grows into an uncontrollable rumour that persists in

many forms throughout the book. Whether HCE committed that particular crime, the dream

narrative is intended to exaggerate unconscious desires as the uncontrolled images they fuel.

The image of the garden or park is reduced from a place of purity to a site for transgression,

where sexual urges find public expressions.

The downward trajectories of the Wake’s falls are a useful pattern to observe as referents to

dissolving ideologies of moral lapse (Carey, 2002, 2003). The dream state is Joyce’s literary

territory for a satire on the regimentation of spiritual failure by institutions including religion,

yet that resistance must always be incomplete to render the anxiety of dreaming genuinely.

The Judeo-Christian fall reverberates persistently throughout the text—‘They will be

pretumbling forover’ (13.18)—which complicates the irony of Irish place in the Wake as

Edenic and global. Geert Lernout (2010) notes that ‘in contrast to Yeats’ version of a largely

pagan Erin, Joyce’s early Ireland is Christian’ (p. 194). The profusion of Catholic law and

ritual throughout the Wake in addition to recurring references to Genesis suggests how the

biblical story of the fall could come to dominate narrative interpretations of the book. As the

narrative-focused critic Harry Burrell (1996) reminds us: ‘in Finnegans Wake, the Fall Story

underlies, generates and is fundamental to all of the action on virtually every page. It is the

basic level of narrative’ (p. 9). The ‘level’ rather than the fall’s fundamentality is of interest

here. I concur that the fall story of Genesis is vital for the reader’s understanding of the text,

yet it is not considered the sole, narrative hub on which the book turns given the book’s

kaleidoscopic heterogenity. The narrative patterning of verticality from which the fall draws

its power is as pervasive a force, though perhaps not as frequently studied as the impressive

circularity of the book’s cyclical structure.

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The fall of Finnegan in Book One resonates with the fall in Christian theology, so that the

expulsion from Eden is interwoven in the moral complexities around Finnegan/HCE’s

identities. Yet there are many falls, indicating the broad appeal for Joyce of the metaphor of

the fallen state to indicate failure or varying degrees of defeat. Humpty Dumpty’s great fall

(‘humpty shell fall frumpty’, 12.12), Finnegan from his ladder, Parnell’s falling out of favour

and even the sound of thunder descending from above contribute to the significance of the

fall. As with Joyce’s ambiguous depiction of the west of Ireland as a ‘waste’, Joyce’s

depiction of lowness, the fallen, or bottom-most in status is often ironic. Although this is seen

most clearly in the disparaging portrait of lowly Shem in episode I.vii, the panoramic view is

frequently switched to a low angle so that the reader is positioned to view the heavens for the

same mystery they presented to prehistoric and pre-satellite navigators. The text of Finnegans

Wake provides a simulation of innocence in that regard, as the world is so entirely de-

familiarised that the reader is forced to navigate its terrain from the ground up.

The trope of falling joins earthy and perceived ‘heavenly’ regions in the Wake’s manifold

depictions of humanity within civilisation and Ireland within space. The physical fall unites

person with place as moral and spiritual failings are associated with earthly or worldly space

as opposed to the pure and ‘heavenly’. The fall of Adam is thus interwoven through HCE as

Finnegan whose downward tumbling causes the noise of the first ‘thunder-word’ (03.15). It is

challenging to imagine the figure HCE as separate from Ireland, even though he is intended

as an archetypal ‘everybody’ (from one of his nicknames, ‘Here Comes Everybody’, 32.18.)

The body of HCE is restored to Ireland through Joyce’s burial of him in the landscape, as

well as in the mass of detail that makes up this epic new version of events. Joyce’s new

history of Ireland’s origins in the Wake is embedded in detail borrowed from the author’s

expansive intellectual heritage including folkloric culture, such as ballads, jokes and legends.

From this spread of high and low culture Joyce’s centralising of Irish history not only

displaces those other world histories externally imposed on Ireland, but also rethreads the

fabric of history.

In the world history of the Wake, the sources are rarely factual, but a mix of stories and

beliefs from his great palette of cultures. For his version of the fall, Joyce has placed an Irish

folk character, Tim Finnegan, the builder from the ballad, at the centre of events. A substitute

Christ figure, Finnegan’s fall from the ladder echoes the deposition of Jesus from the cross.

When Finnegan is laid to rest on his back, his silhouette resembles but also becomes the

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outline of Dublin’s landscape through a playfully distorted list of its districts: ‘Hum! From

Shopalist to Bailywick or from ashtun to baronoath’ (06.33) (Slepon, n.d.). The mention of

‘Hum’ refers to Humphrey (HCE) or Humpty—the nursery rhyme character whose ‘great

fall’ and recurring presence in the Wake appears to note a warning in the apparently harmless

song. The global impact of the wake held for Finnegan is evident in the narrator’s hyperbole,

‘E’erawhere in this whorl would ye hear sich a din again?’ (06.24), as the songs of mourning

enter the clamour of the text. Finnegan is associated now with Celtic figure Fintan Mac

Bochra who survived Noah’s flood in salmon form: Finnegan in his grave is Fintan as tinned

salmon, ‘woebecanned and packt away’ (07.17) (Nagy, 1985, p. 6). This merging of

archetypal male figures—a builder, like the New Testament’s carpenter, and Celtic deities—

is amusing for its own sake but also because it confirms Joyce’s reflection of Ireland’s mixed

heritage of myth and founding narrative. The Fintan-as-salmon story especially reveals that

post-conversion, fifth century CE Christianisation of Celtic lore, as one of the myths around

Fintan sees him to travel to Ireland with a granddaughter of Noah to escape the flood

(Murphy, 2008). This is particularly relevant in these opening pages of Ireland’s origin

myths, but the idea of Ireland’s history as hybrid rather than pure persists.

In adapting and distorting existing depictions of Ireland, Joyce used European as well as

Celtic mythological figures to frame his Wake version of events in Ireland. The universalising

power of this double placement tends to reduce the parallel relationship of Ireland and

Europe, placing Ireland at the active centre of history for which other places provide sonic

reverberations. Following the origin and burial/wake episodes described above, a lively

episode brings readers into a museum through which they are guided by one of the Wake’s

stock characters, Kate the Servant (‘janitrix’, 08.08). The ‘Willingdone Museyroom’ (08.10).

The tour is inspired by the authoritative air of historical museums and the Wellington

Monument in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, completed in 1861. The panel reliefs depict the Dublin-

born British General Wellington’s many battles, particularly against his archrival, Napolean.

The tour relies on the currency of accepted versions of history, as Wellington’s fame is

exploited in tandem with the towering column. Kate accepts tips from her visitors as she

points out the ‘museum’s’ highlights which include scenes of the Peninsular Wars, including

the battle of Torres Vedras, rewritten in ‘Wakespeke’ as ‘Tarras Widdars!’ (09.21) A

paraphonic allusion to ‘Tara’s widows’, the phrase pitches the battle simultaneously in the

heart of France’s campaign against the rest of Europe in Portugal, and also in the heart of

Ireland at the hill of Tara, formerly the site of Ireland’s indigenous power structure.

53

Collapsing space through language thus, the ‘museyroom’ episode exposes nineteenth-

century nationalism through its military and imperial events, linking them closely with

Ireland’s own historical conflicts.

The foundation tales of Ireland according to Joyce’s Wake accrue yet more diverse allusions

as we progress through the mysterious, layered landscape. This Dublin landscape maintains

its shape as Finnegan/HCE’s laid out corpse as well as the city itself, as more well-known

figures from Irish history and legends are introduced as children, playing on their father’s

stomach (McHugh, 1976, p. 13). ‘Scentbreeched and somepotreek’, Saint Brigid and Saint

Patrick (12.22) are the two main figures though in among them are Aulaf, Sitric, and Ivar,

ninth century Hiberno-Norse kings, early founders of Dublin, Waterford and Limerick as

strategic Viking fort towns. From these Viking references we are being led back through time

in reverse from Wellington’s victories, although, as has been suggested, for the Wake reader

it must be as if these aeons are synchronous.

Joyce’s layered histories do not necessarily place the most recent events at the top of the

mound, and the midden recurs as an ironic motif in the book for cast-off rubbish that is later

treasured for its historic value. While the Wake’s narrator continues to pan across the Dublin

landscape and its inhabitants, a questioning of national origins again arises in the view that

Dublin’s inhabitants (or the ‘children’ playing on the giant’s tummy) ‘are all there scraping

along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life’s robulous rebus (12.32–3) This

overt nod to Romulus and Remus refers to the famous founding of Rome, another distant city

that is superimposed over Dublin, also hints at the forthcoming drama to emerge between

HCE’s twin sons Shem and Shaun, as well as Joyce’s own description of the meaning of life

as a ‘robulous rebus’, a puzzle of symbols and part-words to be solved much like Finnegans

Wake itself. In thieving Rome’s legendary founders for Dublin, the rebus of the Wake ‘robs’

the origin stories of Europe. Ireland’s religious colonisation by Rome is reversed in the

Wake’s order of things, as the significance of place is redistributed in Ireland’s favour.

The roles of language and narrative have historically dominated Wake criticism, so that

aspects not apparently as crucial to textual explication such as place, have been less

discussed.134 This critical trajectory is understandable, given that the Wake greets readers in a

134 Burrell’s Narrative Design in Finnegans Wake (1976) is an example of the narrative focus, adding to the narrative-or-dream debate with emphasis on a biblical narrative.

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melange of languages and a series of observations and events that defy sequencing. The

book’s imagining of Dublin and Ireland is considered as a backdrop for the at times puzzling

foreground action. The fundamentals of place in the Wake were established as Dublin-centric

early on, as indicated by James Atherton’s (1959) reference to Edmund Wilson’s 1941

interpretation: ‘Wilson said that the whole book was an account of a dream by a drunken

publican in Chapelizod’ (p. 11). That this Dublin neighbourhood featured in this pithy early

synopsis demonstrates the fundamental vitality with which Dublin is recreated in the Wake.

Regrettably, the crucial aspects of the Wake’s Dublin geography such as the neighbourhood

of Chapelizod, Phoenix Park and the stretches of the Liffey in their vicinity are absent from

L. M. Cullen’s 2009 essay on Dublin in James Joyce in Context. Although Cullen’s is a rich

and detailed explanation of the socio-economic conditions in late nineteenth-century Dublin,

the essay discusses Joyce’s writing excluding Finnegans Wake. Given the limited space with

which to explain Dublin as a ‘context’ for Joyce’s work, Cullen asserts that it is only the

north-eastern quarter of the urban centre that is ‘Joyce Country’ (2009, p. 117)—essentially a

section bounded in the south-east by O’Connell Street and to the north-east by North Circular

Road. Although this Mountjoy Square (‘Joyce Country’) part of Dublin is a primary area for

most of Joyce’s urban settings, the increasingly fashionable and affluent areas to the south of

the city and other areas of the inner north-west (Phoenix Park) are not excluded from Joyce’s

urban geography.

Cullen (2009) believes that places outside of his ‘Joyce Country’ quadrant are not written

with as much detail or vividness:

Beyond this geographical fringe or frontier, there is no real intimacy in Joyce’s accounts of

other parts of Dublin: they lack focused observations of the inhabitants of the lives of the

locations in which the narrations unfold (p. 117).

This statement borders on the egregious for any reader of the Wake for whom Phoenix Park,

Howth Head and the Liffey River are intimately associated with almost every incident,

persona, emotion and symbol in the book. The places themselves are abstracted, but only to a

point. For example, to truly understand Joyce’s casting of HCE as the giant in repose in the

form of Dublin’s topographical appearance, one has to see that very outline of the city in

pictorial form, if not in person; and the reader’s curiosity is stirred by the course of the Liffey

55

which is animated prolifically in the Washerwomen/ALP episode (I.viii).138 The aesthetic of

Finnegans Wake is far different from that of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man, which conform to Cullen’s insistence on a particular mode of literary ‘intimacy’.

Ulysses illustrates an aesthetic bridge between the social realism of Joyce’s earlier works and

the radicalism of the Wakean language system, and it would be strange to suggest a sharp

decline in thematic or stylistic intimacy following the intensely raw and sensual aspects of

Ulysses. McHugh’s (1976) writing on the presence of Dublin in Joyce’s works dwells on the

emotional connection with place, citing a fellow essayist:

Dublin, in Joyce’s exile vision, moves into an area between dream and fact. Physical

absence and temporal distance enable a focus so concentrated that the city must have

seemed to him almost like a scale model of a reality (p. 22).

The difference between Joyce’s intimacy with Dublin’s neighbourhoods and the intimacy

with which readers engage with Joyce’s fictitious places is an important distinction to make.

One may partially concede Cullen’s (2009) point that Joyce’s Dublin sites outside of the

northside Mountjoy Square section ‘often function as mere scene-setting’ in contrast with the

‘remarkable intimacy’ (p. 173) from within that area. After all, for southside sites as in the

‘Nausicaa’ episode, readers are given mere glimpses of the seaside neighbourhood church,

and the death of Emily Sinico in ‘A Painful Case’ (from Dubliners) at Sydney Parade is

reported, rather than pictured. Against these examples is the powerfully intimate portrayal of

Sandymount Strand which entered ‘into eternity’ as the setting for Joyce’s mature stream of

consciousness in the ‘Proteus’ episode of Ulysses (Joyce, 1993, p. 37). Further close

explorations of Dublin’s southern reaches occur in the initial sections of Ulysses, such as

when the reader is literally plunged into the sea at Dublin’s south with Buck Mulligan’s

valiant swim at the close of ‘Telemachus’.

Yet for the Joyce reader who proceeds to Finnegans Wake, ‘aspects of the social life of the

city’ are too narrow a field for the vast scope of the book, in which an epic story of humanity

beyond the scale of Ulysses is successfully drawn (Cullen, 2009). It is necessary therefore to

change the criteria for the Wake’s effectiveness in terms of its use of place. Social realist

mimesis and acute historical accuracy to evoke living conditions are insufficient. Ellmann’s

(1977) somewhat instinctive idea of ‘countersense’ (p. 117) provides a useful approach, as

138 This author has performed excerpts from I.viii at Bloomsday events in Sydney, 2004–2014.

56

place must be considered simultaneously for its tangible past (the Vikings’ mounds, or

Hoggen, for instance) and the symbolic power afforded by the book’s insistent mutability (the

mound of rubbish/historical refuse in which the letter is found.) The reader (who chooses to

enter the Wake at the possible beginning at p. 3) is directed towards this multivalent use of

geography. The events we are about to witness occur in the realm of ‘Howth Castle and

Environs’. The reader is compelled to enter those environs on terms set by the narrative, that

is, through ‘recirculation’ over time—we are re-entering the ambit of a previous visit, and

place is both for ‘scene-setting’ as it might be in a realist tale, but also for storytelling. The

paradox of the Wake’s use of space is that once places become identifiable, their significance

is almost instantly collapsed into the encroaching significance of a newer, hybrid place.

The fall as an archetypal collapse in society is also literalised by the position of an actor in

space. Benno Werlen’s (1993) work in social geography discusses the motivations of actors

in space as that which determines spatial development, and Piotrowski’s (2011) theories view

space as a set of relations and forms. In the Wake, Joyce continually demonstrates how

human conceptions and imaginings of space are shaped by those spatial relations with the

people inhabiting it; and how those relations are manipulated and governed so that space is

continually reclaimed. Throughout the Wake Ireland is equally a place of departure as well as

return, and the reader must travel ‘on an Irish visavis’ (53.07); we may move through textual

space on an Irish visa, and we must understand the patterning or sculpting of space through

the set of Irish relations—vis a vis Ireland—to fully enjoy Joyce’s new way of writing the

world. From the opening moments of Finnegans Wake, the setting is instantaneously Irish

and simultaneously global. The sense of place is never singular throughout the Wake, but

always layered, and in this recommencement chapter of Book One, place is ostensibly located

within Ireland. This geocentric focus on Ireland is partially against William Tindall’s (1969)

early interpretation of the Wake as being ‘about anybody, anywhere, anytime’ (p. 3). The

book is expansive enough to measure up to such universality, but Ireland remains

unmistakably a geographical core of the work. To better prepare the field for later discoveries

of the Wake’s antipodes, I will discuss the vertical aspects of that geographical structuring.

From my readings of the Wake and its criticism, observing patterns provides a more

illuminating method than a fixation on narrative, and among the major patterns worth tracing

through the book’s spatiality is that of Ireland’s portrayal along a vertical axis. It is the fall’s

seemingly uncontrolled slip downwards along that axis which demands attention. The body

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of identifiable motifs and more extended patterns of repeated images in the Wake form the

dominant textual device, and can be considered in terms of Deleuze’s idea of the refrain, the

repeated song or sound signal (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 384). A refrain is a causal

insertion that ‘acts on that which surrounds it’, and fulfils a ‘catalytic function’ (Deleuze &

Guattari, 1987, p. 384). According to Deleuze, a refrain is executed to impact upon space and

enact a process of territorialisation. In a discussion of Wagner’s leitmotifs, Frederic Jameson

suggested that the musical refrain referred to future and past events, which unites the

divergent temporalities of the eternally present of consciousness to broader, continuous time

(Jameson, lecture, UNSW, attended 6.12.12, Allegory and Wagner). This property of the

refrain’s relation to time was characterised by Deleuze for its artificiality but also its aesthetic

cunning: ‘The refrain fabricates time (du temps)’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Can the fall in

the Wake be categorised as a refrain in this manner? The refrain’s defining qualities—causal,

catalytic and reconstructive across time—may serve as a guide. Oddly enough, the online

elucidations of the Wake do not include ‘the Fall’ as a ‘motif’ because its presence is not

always extracted from the recurring sound patterns which populate the text. The fall is

discussed here as a proteron for the multiple ways in which it pervades the textual fabric, and

the word ‘fall’ itself occurs three hundred and sixty-one times in the book, with over eight

hundred annotations for ‘fall’ provided on FWEET (the Finnegans Wake searchable database

of elucidations) (Slepon, n.d., viewed 23rd November, 2014). The ‘great fall’ (03.18) of

Humpty Dumpty is one instance of how the fall is embedded in aural motifs such as the

nursery rhyme, and the spectacle of HCE’s oscillating transition from city founder to public

fool is a larger instance or series of events against which the fall plays out. The many kinds of

falls are of course a major aspect of Joyce’s ‘geocritical’ excavation, in that his art in the

Wake has reencountered for readers the ways that falls have been documented in Ireland’s

past.

Richard Beckman’s analysis of direction and perspective in Joyce’s Rare View (2007) aptly

observes the ‘behindness’ or rearward perspective among the many directional viewpoints in

the book. The aim here is to build on this kind of perspectival or directional criticism by

adopting the viewpoint from below and above. This low-angle view is appropriate for Wake

readers familiar with the iconic illustration of page 293, wherein the twins use geometry to

draw a diagram of female genitalia as seen from below (293.12).

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The comical literalness with which the fall and vertical trajectories are enmeshed in the

Wake’s escapades contributes to my spatial analysis of the text. This sort of vertical reading

of the Wake can operate on a global scale to incorporate the antipodes, as they are at times

creatively fused with lowness and underworld images. Subsequent chapters will revolve

around this directional inclusion of the Antipodes in the Wake’s geography. For now, viewing

the Wake’s falls for their directional as well as moral or conceptual elements enables a more

conscious exploration of how space is produced as well as inhabited in the text.

An instance of that verticality of perspective is evident in the construction site scene. The

tower occupies multiple roles in the Wake, primarily as a tide marker of the Babel influence

but also to connect human civilisation with space, as the tower represents a crossing of the

gap between earth and sky. The Babel image is one of trespass, certainly, but in the case of

Finnegan’s tower, the phallic suggestion of the tower invokes desire and masculinity as the

patriarch lays claim to space:

like Haroun Childeric Eggeberth he would caligulate by multiplicables the alltitude and

malltitude until he seesaw by neatlight of the liquor wheretwin ‘twas born, his roundhead

staple of other days to rise in undress maisonry upstanded (joygrantit!), a waalworth of a

skyerscape of most eyeful hoyth entowerly, erigenating from next to nothing and

celescalating the himals and all ... (04.32—05.01)

The tower thus imposes value on space by reducing its infinitude to a scaled, restricted object

from a fixed place. Finnegan is the archetypal flawed patriarch—he is a pillar of the

community, but his status is eventually brought low, as he later merges with the fallen man,

HCE. Finnegan is briefly here the master of his environment. His aspirations to build the city

are evinced in ‘alltitude and malltitude’. The ‘malt’ sound in ‘malltitude’ refers to the Roe

Whiskey distillery’s 1757 Windmill tower. ‘Mall’ also refers to horizontal constructions such

as roads, as a Roman Road and the Dublin Street where this tower is located share the same

name—Watling Street. The Irish folk ballad (about Tim Finnegan’s fall from the ladder)

starts with that street name in its first line. The fall, ‘he stottered from the latter’ (06.09),

includes the stuttering utterance, a reverberation of the many thunder words, which descend

from the sky to inspire language. Finnegan’s speech act, the verbal processing of thought into

sound, reflects the unstable notion of the truth which fills the book. While the heights of

ladder and the tower excite Finnegan with privileged perspective over civilisation, the

multiple storeys (and stories) that arise are the foundation for conflict.

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Height and depth are invoked by the Wake’s narrators to weigh the characters’ moral

conduct. Westphal considers the symbolic nature of passage between two opposed spaces in

acts of transgression. The idea of the fall indicates this limit-crossing: ‘transgression means

violating a moral, rather than a physical, limit’ (Westphal, 2003, p. 42). The symbolic

commentary of height and depth unsurprisingly mocks the prudish standards of Joyce’s era

and becomes part of the greater act of Joyce’s ventriloquism. For instance, the rumour

circulated about HCE’s sin in the park is described as a ‘baser’ (33.14) ascription to the

events. This victim of gossip attains a towering stature, being not only a ‘giant’ but also

imbued with ‘christlikeness’—the latter term being of course loaded with the irony that

Christ was above others as he was literally raised on a crucifix (33.29). The bridging of

height and depth in the Wake often yields a parallel with human conduct, or rather societal

critique of that conduct. The gap between high and low—or good and bad—is frequently

joined by a structure as has been briefly shown, but also through the force of actions like

falling or throwing. An early symbol for this indicates the Muslim kaba, a sacred stone, that

‘hurtleturtled’ (05.17) down from heaven. Changing from white to black to reflect the human

stain of sin, the pairing of black and white is extended from this act of falling to a

conversational refrain, in which the question is asked ‘how are you today, my dark sir?’

(Slepon, n.d., viewed 23rd November, 2014). The refrain alternates ‘dark’ with ‘fair’,

impugning the civilised and sophisticated gentleman (‘sir’) with sinister motives. The pairing

of dark with fair is also indicative of the book’s destabilising attitude to the concept of sin.

The original image of ‘hurtling’ or expulsion from heaven is a ‘catalytic’ refrain in the

Deleuzian sense in that it both questions moral conduct in humans but also the institutions

established to govern such conduct; both are scrutinised for hypocrisy by Joyce. If either

party is given leeway, it is the individual before the institution. This kind of sympathy for the

alleged devil is apparent in the treatment of Lucifer in the Wake. Lucifer’s being cast out, or

more resoundingly, down from heaven, is an important and resonating pattern throughout the

book.

The image of the fallen angel in the Wake is used as a critique of the sharp divide imposed on

human morality between good and evil. Comically paired as ‘Mick’ and ‘Nick’, the angel and

devil grace many episodes of the text as blurry alternatives; that is, Joyce’s prose refuses to

divide the two strictly. Following the ‘Pranquean’ episode, we hear the exclamation ‘O

foenix culprit! Ex nicklow malo comes mickemassed bonum’ (23.16). Derived from the Latin

‘felix culpa’, the fortunate lapses of both Lucifer and Adam are parodied, as the text presents

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the reader with an alternative view. While the devilish instinct may bring us down

(‘nickylow’), he is also not our true moral enemy (‘Nix’ and ‘foe’ from ‘foenix’); the Nick

figure will arise again as he is homophonically described as a ‘phoenix’. The blending of

depth with doomed or damning consequences is a frequent motif, yet that downward

‘hurtling’ is at times halted by language as it is here in ‘foenix’. The circulation of letters

containing news is Joyce’s ironic play on the idea of salvation through ‘the word’ of a

Christian god. One such letter is considered for its black and white approach to salvation, and

the narrator asks: ‘Will it bright upon us, nightle, and we plunging to our plight? Well, it

might now, mircle, so it light.’ (66.21–23). The rhythm and chorus of Percy French’s jolly

ballad which informs those lines (‘Are ye right there, Michael, are ye right?’) contrasts

humorously with the doomed condition suggested by helpless ‘plunging’; and this rhyming

couplet juxtaposes Nick and Mick with the darkness that could be assuaged by Mick and a

miracle. Once more the duality between bad and good or light and dark is collapsed, as the

final ‘light’ replaces the repetition of ‘might’—and we are reminded that the original name

for Nick is Lucifer who name corresponds with ‘bringer of light’ (Slepon, n.d.).

Vertical spatiality is also a key pattern for interpreting HCE’s precarious status as a respected

patriarch. Verticality is inscribed by Joyce into the cyclical waves of Irish history—that for a

new power to rise, a previous group is overcome and is buried by time and the earth. The

theme of HCE’s internment germinates this set of images, as he embodies the newcomer who

enters history through entering, literally, the land of Ireland. Like Leopold Bloom before him,

HCE is intended to cut an unusual figure for an ‘Irishman’, being a non-Catholic settler from

Northern Europe. Yet it is HCE’s foreignness which is used to mock any sense of national

purity, given the waves of migration to Ireland and settling by force and otherwise. Joyce’s

practice of bringing the world to Ireland also indicates Ireland’s presence in the world—that

is, how Ireland came to be known and named by those beyond. The Wake appears at first to

keep separate the Celtic peoples of continental Europe and the Celts who inhabited Ireland,

yet Joyce imparts various historical ironies into the idea of Ireland as a singular or insular

culture.

During the ‘dubious witnesses’ scenes of pages 58–62, the narrator considers their

(admittedly elastic) era to be ‘a leaden age of letters’ (61.30), a modern version of the largely

prehistoric or pre-literary Iron Age. The narrator disbelieves how many tall tales and lies

about HCE can have been committed to paper, yet earlier queries also raise the idea of stories

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changing depending on how the languages, landforms and landmarks are explained. ‘Whose

are the placewheres?’ (56.33) is part of that questioning of HCE’s origins and his

identification with Ireland. Despite the continuous physical association of HCE as the giant

embedded in the landscape of Dublin, still his belonging to the place is questioned. ‘Tal the

tem of tumulum’ (56.34), the same enquirer encourages, in a demand for historical accuracy

(‘tell the time’), a great story (the ‘tale of the tub’) and archaeological evidence (the tumuli—

raised burial mounds used by Celtic peoples both in and outside Ireland.) The built and

natural environment is subject to time and change, so that the physical evidence on which

historical knowledge is based is just as unreliable as their associated stories. ‘What regnans

raised the rains have levelled’ (56.36–57.1) the narrator explains, denoting that the lasting

deeds of kings are at the elements’ mercy—that kings raised as well as ‘razed’ in the same

breath is part of the Wake’s view of history, in that equal and opposite actions cancelled

themselves out, with only doubtful stories remaining.

The task of analysing the remaining available evidence of history is given to the Four Old

Men. Among the many competing voices in the Wake, which all contribute their versions of

Dublin’s history and HCE’s story, are this group known as The Four. Represented in Joyce’s

sigla (list of characters) as a large X or tilted cross, each of the four lines indicates one of the

four in the recurring groupings of The Four Masters of the Annals of Ireland and the Four

Apostles (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John). On their first vocal appearance on page 57, the

Four address the reader from Ireland’s four provinces: Ulster, Munster, Connaught and

Leinster. The Four agree that HCE’s haunt is not local, but from beyond: ‘his hantitat hies not

here’ (57.06–7). In recollection of Ireland’s Neolithic as well as Bronze and Iron Ages, the

past is characterised by the transition from stone to metal technologies in the term ‘thermites’

(57.12). The word encompasses an image of towering structures, the mounds evoked by the

work of ‘termites’, as well as ancient burial mounds still visible in Ireland today, of which

‘Maeve’s Tomb’ in Sligo is a remarkably intact example. Metals (though more than simply

bronze or iron) are crucial in producing thermite reactions, and the term voiced by The Four

suggests a long-lost ‘hermit’ existence in which Celtic tribes were isolated from each other as

well as the rest of the world.

The inevitability of falling is tied in with the book’s continuing defence of human frailties.

Westphal reads this falling due to transgression similarly by citing the threshold zone

between sanction and sin, named by Deleuze and Guattari as the epistrata or ‘the margin of

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tolerated deviance’ (Westphal, 2003, p. 42). While failures to judge the width of that margin

may lead to a spectacular fall, the Wake’s inherent critique is against the misuse rather than

the imposition of that margin. All boundaries which regulate sex in society are material for

Joyce’s saga in the Wake, but more than anything it is the controlling practices used by

religious or state authorities to maintain stratification in society which merit attention. The

hyperbolic absurdity of the case against HCE dramatises the Joycean mockery of sex-

negative dogma. For instance, HCE becomes a ‘grandfaller’ (29.07), which is glossed as

‘grand fellow’ (Slepon, n.d.), but also indicates the other roles of a patriarch—a grand faller,

and a grandfather. To reproduce, the father must inevitably fall due to carnal sin and is

eternally indicted by the paradox of procreation. What is HCE’s response to his inevitable

judgement? Instead of seeking elevation to some higher spiritual plane, the fallen man drinks

himself into oblivion and falls through the gaps in both his and others’ memories. His

whereabouts are the subject of gossip and rumour throughout page ninety-eight, and he

attempts to disguise and bury himself for concealment.

It appears that the HCE figure does not accept the epistrata, but wishes to create a parallel

zone that redefines the limits of ‘tolerated deviance’. The methods of escape all indicate the

depths of HCE’s deviance, but his sin is simultaneously made so ridiculous by his

outrageous, unmistakable size. One method is concealment in a cave (opened by the

command ‘open shunshema’ (98.04)—literally, a shunning of shema, Hebrew for the

imperative ‘listen’); HCE will not hear the condemnatory voices from a cave. Additionally, a

stealthy exit by ship (a ‘dutch bottom tunk’ 98.07) accessed from HCE’s ‘subterranean’

(98.06) hideaway. Eventually, it is HCE’s wearing of a nun’s habit in the guise of Carpulenta

Gygasta that gives him away (99.09). HCE has becomes a gigantic ‘Jocasta’, the doomed

mother of Oedipus implicated in the incestuous transgression. To compound the fall from

high to low that HCE has endured following the trial scene, the reader is swept to the top of

the Martello Tower of Ulysses where Buck Mulligan’s glib comment is recalled. HCE is

‘beetly dead’ (100.1) in the Wake, resembling the ‘beastly dead’ of Mulligan’s quip about

Stephen’s mother. HCE has beetled to the base of the tower, and appears to be eternally

fallen.

Further insect imagery accompanies HCE’s continuous fall. The ‘earwicker’ part of the HCE

acronym refers to HCE’s earwig-trapping occupation, and hence he is given a further

nickname of Persse O’Reilly (he of the pierced ear.) Vertigo or dizziness is a primary

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symptom of inner-ear infection, so that any hearing impairment or pain associated with the

ear is a direct cause of falling, and one that is powerfully emblematic of Joyce’s anti-hero. An

immense onomatopoeic word (one of the ‘thunder-words’ discussed below in more detail)

precedes the singing of ‘The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’—the sound is of crashing glass as

one of the book’s pub scenes gains momentum. The song invigorates the notion of HCE as a

Humpty Dumpty figure, as ‘he fell with a roll and a rumble’ (44.02) The fall’s social and

literal gradient is steep: from ‘king’ to rotten old vegetable, and the base of the wall of the

Magazine Fort. The exaggerated charges against HCE in the ballad are his radical ideas

including ‘openair love and religion’s reform’ (45.16). Derived from the dubiously witnessed

incident in the park, the crime of ‘openair love’ is committed against space as well as

propriety. HCE’s fall is precipitated not only by his sexual indulgences, but also by the

crowd’s resistance to an alleged incursion on regulated space.

The satirical weight is against the crowd’s conservatism here as ‘original sin’ was derived

from the ‘openair’ knowledge gained by Adam and Eve. That this concept of sin should be

‘reformed’ (by ‘religion’s reform’) is comically odious to Hosty (the balladeer) and the

crowd. The power of the crowd is to enforce the social physics of the up and down

dichotomy, as HCE/Persse is bound by the laws of a dumped Humpty: he will receive no

resurrection. Instead, the descendant of Vikings is aligned with a past that must remain buried

by the ‘Gaels’: ‘we’ll bury him down in Oxmanstown/along with the devil and Danes.’

(47.22). HCE, the first egg (Humpty) and man (Adam) have been marked not only by his

supposed sin but also by the stain of reputation: ‘there’s no true spell in Connaucht or

hell...that’s able to raise a Cain.’ (47.29). HCE has been cast down, and his recovery efforts

to rise again in the world make for entertaining reading.

Further episodes link the actions of sexual transgression with the fall. HCE’s mysterious and

much-discussed public sin is imbued with the sensual atmosphere of ‘Milton’s Park’ on page

96. The paradise setting is about to be ‘lost’ in the Milton sense, as language and love

dissolve in an orgasmic expression of eight consecutive letter O’s, which follows the spatial

descent: ‘It was too bad to be falling out about her kindness ...’ (96.22). These events are part

of an argument between The Four Old Men, but any ructions are resolved as they proceed to

discuss the nature of truth rather than the specific events of HCE’s apparent crime. The idea

that the fall is an inevitable fixture within human nature can be seen as part of the Wake’s

critique of Catholic dogma, as so-called transgression is really an expression of human

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curiosity. HCE is reprieved from the charge of ‘lustsleuth’ (33.31) but is frequently depicted

as sexually motivated, whether as a seducer or husband. It is the female presence which also

neutralises the barrage of indictment against HCE as guilty of any specific crime, ‘she who

shuttered him after his fall’ (102.01) ALP has ‘sheltered’ him in a way that repudiates the

claim that he has fallen.

The bridging of above and below is achieved through the unidirectional fall but also by the

reverberating force of sound. The Wake motif of ‘thunderwords’ are strings of sound,

emblems of the celestial chaos from which the human figure is shocked into speech. Each

thundering neologism serves a unique purpose at these noisy junctures in the text, yet all are

united by the quality of the thunderousness, that is, their climatic effect on the continuing

storm of action. Deleuze and Guattari comment on the power of sound: ‘sound invades us,

impels us, drags us ... It takes leave of the earth, as much in order to drop us into a black hole

as to open us up to a cosmos (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 383).

Sound has the capacity to join the divergent territories of land and air, and the idea of

entering a ‘black hole’ relates to the idea of sound replacing a sonic void. Joyce’s

thunderwords were inspired by Vico’s theory that humankind modelled language on the

‘voice of god’ produced by thunder, evoking the double power of sound to both inspire and

terrify. To be ‘dropped’ by sound can be discussed in a number of ways in the Wake; Shem

notoriously inhabits a vague and distasteful zone in an ‘obscene coalhole’ (194.18). He is the

artist who uses sound for his own aesthetic reworking and is considered ‘low’ for his efforts

by the Shaun figures who respond to the ‘thunderwords’ obediently rather than creatively.

The Shem response is akin to Brivic’s reflections on Joyce’s method: ‘Because Joyce could

never subordinate himself to God, he could accept the world only by making it a product of

his own imaginative will’ (Brivic, 1985, p. 45). The world is remade by Joyce to reverberate

with the echoes of perceived gods and their pronouncements, and the noise can be deafening.

HCE’s carnality is again under scrutiny when another thunderword is heard descending. The

gossip and innuendo continues to swirl around HCE and his involvement with the two

women who are intimated to be prostitutes. Prostitution is the subject of the thunderword

(90.31) in response to the preceding dialogue about temptation. The suggestion of lapse is

associated explicitly with ‘bad company’: ‘Whether he fell in with what they meant?’

(90.24). HCE’s ‘deception’ of the crowd and himself is exposed in that he ‘pierced our

really’s’ (90.30)—Persse O’Reilly has pierced the truth with his dishonesty. The double sin

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of carnality and soliciting for sex with prostitutes is outrageously undermined by Joyce, as

that ‘piercing’ of the ears also results from the deafening thunderword. The collected words

meaning ‘prostitute’ are both HCE’s ecstatic cry and the crowd of righteous condemnation in

response. That crowd is silenced as the letter is demanded to be brought forth signalling the

depths and heights to which the stratigraphical text of the Wake will take the reader.

The motif of the letter and its interrupted content serves many narrative and stylistic purposes

in the Wake. This chapter treats the letter as a tide marker, as it rises and falls based on the

fortunes of those writing, finding and reading its words. The letter is also stained by those

tides—of opinion, of judgement and of fortune. The expert archaeologist who could explain

the ancient Irish language and its accent is nowhere to be found, but for years has been

‘delving in ditches dark’ (108.16). To further explain the discovery of the letter, a widescreen

image of Ireland is shown, positioning the reader firmly in the specificity of place, even

though Confucian-era Chinese ideas of land emerge: ‘We who live under heaven, we of the

clovery kingdom, we middlesins people have often watched the sky overreaching the land’

(110.04–6). The Milesians, legendary pre-Christian and proto-Celtic colonists of Ireland, are

imagined between above and below as dwellers in a ‘middle kingdom’. Like the divinely

favoured Middle Kingdom of China, Ireland’s people are earthbound but with ‘sins’ to

account for. It is against this backdrop that the dump is sighted: the midden is a

‘comicalbottomed copsjute’ (110.126) from which the hen retrieves the letter.

On a narrative level, the letter serves various purposes, including ALP’s written statement

defending HCE but also a letter home to Ireland from emigrants. The former version is

considered here as ALP’s totemic representation in the Hen has found but also written the

letter. Vico’s theory of the origins of human speech echoing thunder is a relevant pattern to

the forthcoming thunderword, yet this scene is devoted to writing rather than speech. The

thunderword on page 113 is an image of the sexual act, consisting of legs cocked, kicking and

‘him around hers’ (113.10). Presumably this is a version of HCE’s apparently sinful

encounter, as it contains both sex and voyeurism (‘downmindlookingat’—‘don’t mind

looking at’, 113.10). For the sexual act, or that which simply stimulates a sexual response

(the cancan dance) to be seen or understood, requires a descent as the observation must be

made from the ‘down mind’. ‘Down’ becomes interchangeable with ‘don’t’ as the descent

into sexual expression becomes synonymous with transgression. Margot Norris reminds us

that the sexually active body is always connected with space: ‘at the heart of each is a

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crime—a violation—specifically, an act of trespass over a forbidden boundary’ (Norris, 1974,

p. 37). The long shot of Ireland depicts a place, ‘our isle’ that is ‘holy and undivided’

(110.06–13). The letter addresses the illusion of wholeness and unity and these fractures

occur along the vertical axis, given the letter’s burial.

The letter is powerfully symbolic as an object denoting human foibles but also the

independence of human action. The act of writing resembles the transfer of power from the

divine to the human or from the heavens to the earth as writing both stimulates and records

anti-divine rebellion. Words are literally ‘written down’ to reflect this vertical hierarchy from

mind to matter: ‘wrote it, wrote it all, wrote it all down’ (118.14). Written records carry with

them the stain of doubt like the ‘teastain’ (111.05) on the letter because they only reflect a

partial truth, if not an outright falsehood. Those who ‘wrote it all down’ cannot be trusted, as

they are telling cock and bull stories (the authors are ‘Coccolanius or Gallotaurus’ (118.13).

The mechanics of the epistolary process are implicated in the book’s pattern of downward

trajectories, shown in the margins of the letter. Abstract space is mapped through the

organisation of words on the page as the sentences are grouped in lines of latitude and

longitude, ‘half of the lines run north-south’ (114.03), with the others going east-west. The

words are animated to reflect their human authors: ‘these ruled barriers along which the

traced words, run, march, halt, walk, stumble at doubtful points, stumble up again ...’

(114.08–09). Later, when the script is being closely scrutinised, Joyce includes a satirical stab

at handwriting experts, although it is the downward sloping orthography indicates human

frailty: ‘the fatal droopadwindle slope of the blamed scrawl, a sure sign of imperfectible

moral blindness’ (122.35). A letter documents events as a record, yet as an object it bears

evidence of its time. The letter’s burial indicates the secretive or dangerous nature of its

content, as if those events are trying to be forgotten or dismissed. The evidence of that

concealment is in the object itself: ‘it has acquired accretions of terricious matter whilst

loitering in the past’ (114.29). The dirt has stuck literally to the letter and figuratively to the

story of mortal failings.

The falls of the Wake are critical to an understanding of the book’s compassion for human

error combined with its satire of invented divine judgement. Yet there is also the concession

to these judgements as a reasonable structuring force for human society. The haziness of

HCE’s encounter with the Two Young Women includes violations from voyeurism to incest,

with the suggestion that the dreaming mind experiences the guilt and fear of what the waking

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mind cannot allow itself to imagine. Margot Norris includes the idea of structured societal

relationships in her writing on trespass: ‘Implicit in these crimes, therefore, is the notion of

laws, of boundaries, of an ordering of rights and duties and a legal organisation of space’

(Norris).

The reader recognises HCE due to his identifiable fallen state in the ‘Quiz’episode (I.vi). To

guess the identity of the patriarch, we are told: ‘he crashed in the hollow of the park, trees

down, as he soared in the vaguum of the phoenix, stones up’ (136.33–4). The syllables of

‘tree’ and ‘stone’ combine to form Tristan, whose persona serves as a motif for passionate yet

adulterous love. HCE’s ‘crash’ and re-rising is associated with vaginal spaces - Tristan and

Isolde’s cave is the ‘hollow’ and ‘vacuum’. Yet the result of his balls-up (‘stones up’) crash is

the tree and stone—the twin sons. HCE’s descent is confirmed again when his mortal coil is

described: ‘heavenengendered, chaosfoedted, earthborn’ (137.14). Between heaven and earth

is the chaos of humankind from which HCE emerged, and must inevitably revisit through his

procreative instinct. Ultimately, the cycle of life is resituated in a narrative of Ireland as its

city relies on HCE to form a recognisable place in the unformed chaos of space. Yet no place

is perfectly stable and the wall must wobble—‘wubblin wall’ (139.13). Dublin denotes the

wall from which HCE must fall. Gravity, like the forces of narrative, has pushed HCE from

his perch so that the city and his descendants may arise.

A quarrel among those descendants is a recurring pattern which emerges early during the

wake held for Finnegan. This conflict is evident also in the two fables of the Mookse and

Gripes, and the Ondt and Gracehoper, of which the former is the present concern. The fable is

told by Professor Jones whose pedagogy is obsessed with the supremacy of space over time,

‘to put it more plumbsily’ (149.29), he insists, in order to explain his theories more

profoundly and plausibly (though ‘clumsily’ to the reader.) Jones intends to get the upper

hand in the debate with no remorse for ‘downtrodding’ (151.11) on his foes. The ideas of

‘plumbing’ and ‘treading’ (‘trodding’) initiate images associated with the Grapes from the

‘Fox and the Grapes’ fable, given their Wake incarnation as ‘the Mookse and the Gripes’. The

ensuing passage is rich with Joyce’s satire of Wyndham Lewis who is linked with Jones and

the Mookse. The work of both Einstein and the anthropologist Levy-Bruhl are considered to

be a ‘waste of time’ (151.21), as ‘the all is where’, because space is a privileged concept in

contrast with ‘his man’s when’ (151.34). Throughout this chapter I have considered the

significance of space and the specificity of Ireland and Dublin, and how vertical trajectories

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provide continuous parallels for human behaviour and belief. In the Mookse and Gripes

episode, that emphasis on space is questioned, as time and space are espoused as pre-eminent

by equally fractious rivals.

The rift between high and low is embodied in the contrasting status of the two fabled figures.

The Mookse plays similar roles to Shaun as-older-brother figurations; as the Pope from

Rome, he is authoritative, demanding and righteous. He is especially agitated by the sight of

the Gripes, who is situated above him in a tree, ‘bolt downright’ (153.10–1). There is the

suggestion that the Gripes has been drinking heavily (he is, after all, the Grapes to the

cunning Fox) and of the Mookse’s disapproval on sight. The Gripes is inferior, his ‘brooder-

on-low’ (153.18–9). The Mookse is undoubtedly a disciplinary figure who is on the lookout

‘to see how badness was badness’ (152.29). He also intends to bring the Irish populace,

represented by the Gripes, into line with the Church in Rome. The independent streak of the

Irish Gripes proves shocking, as the latter is considered a subordinate and ‘infairioriboos’

(154.11). The Gripes humours his interlocutor but resists the dominant restrictions on his

concept of time, accepting the charge of inferiority: ‘My tumble, loudy bullocker, is my own’

(154.33–4). The deliverer of the papal bull is similarly a herding and domineering driver,

who locks the bullock into the guiding yoke. The Mookse at first invokes divine authority to

support his arguments, indicating the ‘foluminous’ celestial space of stars, thunder and

lightning and he raises his jewelled sceptre to the sky; he finally resorts also to his books on

church dogma but cannot persuade the Gripes. They descend into name-calling and wild

fighting.

The bird’s eye view is now given to Nuvoletta, the celestial, girlish embodiment of Issy:

‘looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars’ (157.09). Neither Nuvoletta, nor her

reflection below in the stream, are capable of attracting the Mookse or Gripes’ attention. The

two are obsessively preoccupied, the Mookse particularly intent on digging in and reclaiming

intellectual territory: ‘Moo thought on the deeps of the undths he would profoundth come the

morrokse’ (158.15). The verb usage of the term ‘profoundth’ equates depth with thought and

discovery, so that for once the figurative descent is not associated purely with lapse and error.

Instead, descent is intellectually rigorous and even holy.

The fable ends with a final yet graceful descent. As with the ‘washerwomen’ scene of 1, viii,

the story ends with nightfall. The air is moistening with dew and ‘the tears of night began to

fall’ (158.21). The rival intellectuals become squabbling children and they are gathered up

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separately by their mothers. Nuvoletta/Issy is left to contemplate the tree and stone which

remain symbolically in place of the twins. Nuvoletta’s impending fall is a gracious bridging

across the terrestrial and celestial zones. Her fall is one of resignation and futility: she had

failed to interact with her earthly counterparts because they were each in their own way

lacking, whether sight or hearing. Nuvoletta merges with the rain as she breaches the zone

above for the river below—she ‘climbed over the bannistars’ (159.08), and ‘there fell a tear, a

singult tear, a leaptear’ (159.16). Nuvoletta’s vertical crossing was achieved by decision

rather than accident, as she leapt rather than fell. Her descent into the river below is partly an

escape from her lonesome fate—all her friends are asleep and her family elsewhere. She is

just as independently driven as the two men below and of a similar mercurial mobility. Her

sighs stirred the air into the evening breeze and she gains momentum, gathering herself to

leap as rain. Like the heroine of the Pranquean story who moves about the land enraged in the

form of ‘rain’, Nuvoletta enters the water in sadness. They are both vindicated however, as

the Pranquean will elicits a response from her insulter, and Nuvolettta becomes part of the

flow of the river as she is ‘Missisliffi’ (159.12). Her fall was perhaps inevitable as rain, but

her onward journey represents a fate more earthly and even empowering than her previous,

celestial-bound longings.

The falls of Finnegans Wake embed countless notions of humanity’s self-consciousness in an

Irish scene, so that space is inscribed with the value of specificity. Theological, political,

historical and moral collapses are dramatised within a paradoxically recognisable distortion

of Ireland. ALP’s mesmerising ricorso chapter returns the focus to ‘liffeyism’ (614.24) as we

hear Dublin’s river roaring towards the ocean, and Ireland named amid the chaos of historical

memory as ‘Eblania’ (614.15). Ireland’s role in the spatial fluidity of the Wake is to

demonstrate the particular on behalf of the universal. HCE, for instance, instigates the many

falls which the text includes as inevitable punctuations for the story of human experience.

‘First to fall, cursed be all’ (83.20–21), is the Adamic burden placed on the book’s flawed

human. My understanding of the falls’ intersection with place is that each one is met by a

landing place, and Joyce’s Ireland in the Wake shudders with the unmistakable reverberations

of those falls.

Place is not as elusive in the Wake as it may first appear. In this fragmented Wake world in

which atoms are ‘etym’s (353.22), Ireland is given central coordinates so that it is easily

identifiable among Joyce’s systematised reorganisation of recognisable world geography and

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history. In a juggling act of place, time and familiar stories of origins, Joyce has resisted the

notion of Ireland as a peripheral, insignificant place with a deft layering of detail that

parodies historical disciplines and epic fiction. The narrative tone of a comical windbag let

loose upon its favourite subject, Ireland’s story emerges in the book’s opening pages. From

the polymath narrator’s perspective, all human history from ‘the fall’ (03.15) onwards can be

explained through a close examination of the events and myths particular to Ireland. Robert

Sage introduced Joyce’s Work in Progress by affirming the Irish influence he found vital in

Joyce’s new vision of the world: ‘Coming from a country as rich in legend and folklore as

Ireland, it is not surprising that Joyce should have had the idea of creating a history of the

universe and creating a language in which such a history would have to be related’ (Sage, p.

157). In terms of Joyce’s technique of layering in the Wake, as much of the world’s

knowledge of itself as can be mustered has been imposed upon Ireland and filtered through

Ireland. Joyce’s omniscient, wiseacre narrator has composed a symphony of the world in the

key of Ireland. A keen ear will hear antipodean notes emerge from the morass of strange and

new sounds. To appreciate the breadth of Joyce’s geocritical vision in the Wake, we must

remain with one foot in Ireland and the other—antipodally—on the opposite side of the

world. It is from this distant perspective that the vast projection of Ireland onto the screen of

the world can be viewed in all its paradoxes.

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‘As Usual, Antipodal’ (60.28): The Contrary Chapter 3:

Geography of Finnegans Wake

‘Empire, you’re outermost’ (278.23): The Artefact and Fiction of the 3.1

Antipodes

Any attempt to grasp the subtlety with which the antipodes are woven through the dense

tapestry of Finnegans Wake is to lay hold on a handful of the ‘kangaroose feathers’ (299.11),

which appear in Book II. Unique and recognisable as a kangaroo, yet as fleeting as feathers,

the antipodes slip in and out of the Wake’s predominantly Irish world to affirm a sense of the

marvellous, to ridicule any apparent success in the quest for truth, and to contribute fuel to

the machinery of oppositeness which manoeuvres the Wake through time. Also, the presence

of places, as distant from The Wake’s European dramas as the antipodes, ignites a curiosity

about how the reader might embrace the apparent ‘nonsense’ that the ‘kangaroose feathers’

symbolise. ‘Horse feathers’, a contemptuous declaration of ‘nonsense!’ implies the

suspension of disbelief required for mapping the antipodes in the Wake’s infinite world.

A primary reason for investigating the antipodes in Finnegans Wake is the region’s nominal

embodiment of opposition. A further reason is that the book forces the reader to re-evaluate

referents and their subjects at every lexical turn: for this reason, the antipodes are defined

here as two kinds of places—firstly those located in the southern hemisphere and historically

consigned to a zone of inverted political and cultural mores below the equator; secondly,

places that are simply ‘antipodal’ to the Ireland that the book extracts from amorphous space

(discussed in Chapter 2.) This chapter aims to distinguish between these two antipodes, those

of the far south and those which are constructed as geo-social opposites, and to examine how

place is formulated along thematic lines of power and alienation. Inherently opposed

characterisations of places recurs as a major structuring device throughout the Wake. The

simultaneity of the Wake’s language experiments with the blending of opposites only to

highlight their unique value, particularly those that emerge as localities from the mass of

undifferentiated space.

This interpretation of Joyce’s portrayal of the antipodes intersects with various interpretive

paradigms, including postcolonial and geocritical perspectives. The notion of

‘anticolonialism’, explained by Mary Louise Pratt, is one approach among many that supports

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a re-considering of the centuries-old construction of the far southern antipodes as a

geographical repository for remapping by Europe, or the imperial powers from the north

(Pratt, 2004). The label of opposition inherent in ‘antipodes’ constitutes an instigation of

difference, dividing the hemispheres and their respective inhabitants into mutual exclusion;

yet at no point has the label ‘antipodes’ been utilised to the full extent in the reverse direction.

To overcome the boundary of restrictive, geographically based difference, the term ‘far

southern’ is used interchangeably with the term ‘antipodes’, in describing the Australasian

places in relation to the northern coordinates of Joyce’s Europe. A geocritical perspective is

also beneficial to consider how the antipodes as a region has bled into the distorted spatial

picture the Wake presents. Westphal’s method focuses on regions or places identifiable by

their ‘distinct cultural and topographical profile’ (Prieto, 2011(b), p. 22). The disparate places

of the antipodes which surface in the Wake may not strictly conform to the regional

specificity of a geocritical reading, but their profile is one that represents a realm wildly

opposite to the Wake’s Ireland.

The nominal contrariness ascribed to the antipodes imposes an external marker of absurdity

on a geographical area considered highly ambiguously by its visitors and colonists from the

northern parts of the world. Images, phrases and symbols of the antipodes are included in the

Wake as if to highlight that early modern ambiguity which extended into Joyce’s lifetime.

The idea raised in the previous chapter that all spatiality in the Wake contributes to the value

of place for a vision of Ireland is relevant to those antipodes images, as they are invoked to

refer not only to themselves but to Ireland. As the primary spatial locus, Ireland is a place of

complexity, collision and conflict. This mesh of opposite qualities is illuminated by inter-

lingual and inter-cultural details, especially those of the antipodes. As a place prone to

division cause by political, religious and geo-social ructions, the ‘anti’ aspects of Ireland are

complemented by the geographical heft of the distant southern region known as the

‘antipodes’. The latter is a place where, presumably, all that is known and expected in the

European and Irish realms is absent or inverted. Yet, as the Wake’s all-encompassing

geography demonstrates throughout the book’s global dramatisation of Irish space, even the

antipodes is subsumed by simultaneity to represent ‘every person, place and thing in the

chaosmos’ (118.21). According to this blended logic, even something as apparently separate

as the antipodes is found within the confusion of the cosmos.

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A theoretical basis for considering the oppositeness of the antipodes as it is threaded through

the relative familiarity of Ireland in the Wake is derived from Joyce’s inspiration from the

philosopher Bruno. Above I referred to the continuous flux from which the resolution of

opposites is shown to be always imminent. The Wake’s dream state dramatises that process of

infinite transformation, which complicates the requirement for a clear sense of resolution.

The philosophy behind that continually transformative process must be established, as

Joyce’s book borrowed from Bruno’s interpretation of coincidentia oppositorum, which is the

position taken by Heraclitus of naturally occurring and mutually resolving paired forces, an

idea used in turn by Nicholas of Cusa. The theory greatly supported Bruno’s belief in an

infinite universe, and formed ‘a substratum of all Bruno’s thought’ (McTighe, 2007, p. 28).

While McTighe argues that this use of coincidentia oppositorum as well as infinitism is

contradictory in Brunonian mysticism, Bruno nevertheless destabilised late medieval dogma

with his support for the Copernican revolution as well as his writings in favour of monadism.

The basis of this monadism in Hermetic onotological dualism, insisting that the universal is

discoverable in the particular, originated from the idea: ‘that which is above is like that which

is below’ (McTighe, 2007, p. 39). The prepositional metaphor of above and below is also

useful for this reading in which two geographical regions are superimposed, as the antipodes

is frequently detected in the labyrinthine northern world of the Wake.

Joyce’s multilingual choir of voices in Finnegans Wake reflects the relationship between

language and place in the manifold ports of origin from which those languages depart and

return. Amid that frenetic language exchange performed by the text is a structural energy

derived from ‘incessant relative change’ (Bruno, 1998). This idea of flux partially inspired by

Bruno can be applied to the way place is navigated in Joyce’s global expression of Ireland, as

it accommodates the idea that countries in the Northern and Southern hemispheres were not

restricted to fixed colonial roles. While those relations were certainly embedded in favour of

those wielding the most maritime power, the Wake’s undercurrent of flux indicates a belief

that these roles face inevitable change, if not reversal.

Andrew Thacker’s writing on mobility in modernism comments on the formerly imbalanced

bond between those subequatorial places and the European north: ‘European modernism

relied, in important ways, upon the imperial spaces of Africa, the West Indies and Asia,

specifically India’ (Thacker, 2003, p. 6). Vincent Cheng has analysed some Indian

components of Finnegans Wake, particularly in the ‘Museyroom’ episode, demonstrating a

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perceptive view of Joyce’s layering of imperial-colonial relations (Cheng, 1995, p. 283). The

book’s depiction of these relations is built through Joyce’s bricolage of multivalent

references, yet Cheng successfully detects a core theme, being the Wake’s ‘colonial power

dynamics’ (1995. p. 278). The exertion and transmission of power through language is a

prominent theme in the Wake, and power is worth mentioning here to establish the concept of

the colony as a contested place.

Joyce’s language of conflation in the Wake refuses to separate the imperially controlled

spaces from their origins, and both are represented in the shifting power dynamic. Material

places are merged and space becomes unstructured, the consequences of which means it is as

challenging to discuss place in the Wake as it is to detect characters. Even so, the shapes and

sounds of places are very clear at times, and the global quality of Joyce’s world in the Wake

suggests a universal fascination with disparate societies and the places which they inhabit.

Ireland is regenerated through the book’s exponential language as a contested colonial site,

yet nested within the Wake’s Ireland are other, similarly affected places. While images of the

antipodes are peripheral to the Wake’s central drama of Ireland in their proportionate

representation, they nevertheless contribute to that drama by illustrating some of its themes,

including power and renewal.

Echoes of the antipodes are filtered through the polylingual texture of the Wake’s prose.

Playing on the opposition conveyed by the term, the term ‘antipodes’ appears variously in

Finnegans Wake as ‘antipodal’ (60.28), ‘antipodes in the past’ (472.18), ‘antipopees’

(422.02) and ‘antipathies of austrasia’ (489.10). The majority of antipodes images include

Australia (stereotypical phrases such as ‘dinkum’ (108.28) and ‘boil his billy’, 210.07) and

New Zealand (significantly, the Haka, 335.04). In order to perceive the layers of meaning

which these antipodal intrusions add to a broadly Irish text, I question not only how these

images are used, but why. To elucidate a rationale for these unexpected far southern moments

is to find depth in Joyce’s arrangement of places in his ‘microspatial’ world of the Wake. The

microspatial and macrospatial are helpful terms adapted by Alessandro Scafi in his

cartographical histories, the first with reference to empirically known spaces, and the latter to

suggest what can only be imagined (Scafi, 1999). The antipodes, for instance, were

conceived of by cartographers in macrospatial terms (their land and sea formations

indeterminate), whereas today’s macrospatial world is extended to planets beyond our solar

system (Scafi, 1999, p. 55). For this study of the Wake’s forays into the antipodes, it is

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suggested that these places together with Ireland have entered the ‘macrospatial’ in that they

occupy the same imagined space in which places are recognisable but uncontrollably

interchangeable. That is, both places exist ‘between dream and fact’ (McHugh, 1976, p. 22).

This chapter will first discuss the process by which the antipodes was inscribed as a

documented region of foreignness by its European cartographers, before focusing on how the

antipodes emerges in the Wake’s global and prismatic construction of place.

The term ‘antipodes’ must initially be acknowledged for its historically pejorative

connotations, and it serves as a convenient term that is used here retroactively and as an

artefact, rather than as a term for contemporary relevance. David Fausett’s work on the

‘austral world’ refers to the scientific as well as ideological means with which the unknown

far south was subject to conjecture (Fausett, 1993, p. 10).

the reverse idea of a frightening antipodean zone,

In the Wake the astral and austral

realms fuse in a navigational mystery not unlike the mystique surrounding the unknown

southern continent. During the trial of Festy King (the fallen figure of HCE), his wife is said

to have ‘disappeared ... from the sourface of the earth, that austral plain he has transmaried

himself to’ (50.8–11). HCE had indeed crossed the sea before marrying ALP. In this

geocentric phrasing, the earth’s surface is a ‘sourface’—both the south face and also a sour

face (a frown). The humour of the archetypal heterosexual relationship emerges as ALP, who

has disappeared from his side where she usually stands to defend his reputation, is a ‘pain in

the ass’, the ‘austral plain’ to which he is wedded. Ever his complementary figure, the absent

wife is the southern bride of the sailor of Norse (Northern) origins. Her unknown location

also indicates the bewildering earth, its surface retaining secrets. The identity of the antipodes

shared this secretive nature before the age of marine discoveries, such that Aristotle discussed

whether the antipodes were inhabited, against the backdrop of ‘perilous’ fourth century BC

ocean voyages. ‘Fears of sp the edge of the earth or burning up in the “torrid zone” conspired

with navigational problems to make the southern regions seem unreachable and terrifying’

(Fausett, 1993, p. 11). These fears certainly eased over further centuries of European

exploration, and the bitterness of not being able to reach the ‘sourface’ or the south surface of

the earth was probably more to do with the inconvenience of having to travel so far without

sufficient supplies or secure knowledge of friendly ports – otherwise Australia would have

been named a great deal earlier than it was. The unrequited desire for the south thus emerged

in in the form of Utopian imaginings of the

undiscovered southern regions, for instance in the neo-classical interest surrounding Plato’s

vision of Atlantis.

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The antipodes as a named though unknown region first emerged in maps based on Ptolemy’s

geography of the inhabited world known as the Oikoumene (Crone, 1978). More confusingly,

the early ‘Antipodes’ were situated in the north, while a continent known as Antichtones was

guessed as neighbouring, or balancing, Africa. Other, non-Ptolemaic cosmologies emerged,

and alongside these navigational enquiries, the economic imperative to control trade routes

took hold: ‘the commercial world was aware from late medieval times of the vast potential of

the spice trade and the profits being lost to powers that controlled the caravan or Red Sea

routes to Europe’ (Crone, 1978, p. 25). The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English

exploited that potential during the renaissance and early modern periods, with Pedro

Fernandez de Quiros using the ‘austral’ lexicon to name Vanuatu: Austrialia del Espiritu

Santo. ‘The name he invented survived in a modified form and actually appears on early

maps of the northern Queensland area’ (Fausett, 1993, p. 1). Joyce’s antipodean images do

not solely emphasise Australia, but the quest for discovering the southern continent has been

outlined here to reveal the mystery and later secrecy—to preserve mercantile-imperial

interests—around a place that geographically dominated this ‘many-times unknown region’

(Fausett, 1993, p. 1). That idea of the continual revealing and veiling of the far south’s lands

resonates with Joyce’s disguising of place in conglomerate languages. Like the antipodes,

Ireland was also ‘many-times unknown’, not for being physically unreachable, but for being

misunderstood for its cultural and political resistance, dating from the twelfth century.

Fausett notes the early seventeenth century Dutch voyages around Australia (including Dirk

Hartog’s) as contributing ‘to the region’s fertility as a setting for literary works’ (Fausett,

1993, p. 3). Paul Longley Arthur also discusses the literary genre of imaginary journeys

which feature a far southern setting, writing:

An antipodean expectancy filled minds, maps, novels and utopian plans, laying the

foundation for perceptions of Oceania and Australasia that continue to impact on how this

part of the world is seen from a distance as well as from within (Arthur, 2010, p. xvii).

While I will not contest that continuing impact in this forum, it is clear from studies by

Arthur, Fausett and other geographers that the initial geographical mysteries of the antipodes

inspired fictions of a speculative kind in European authors. ‘Growing familiarity with the Far

East and the Americas’, writes Fausett, ‘turned the focus to terra Australia incognita, which

continued to provide a rich source of imagery’ (Fausett, 1993, p. 1). Unlike Jonathan Swift’s

far southern Gulliverian travels, Joyce chose not to use the antipodes as a major setting for

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his epic novel; rather, the far south is used in Finnegans Wake as a minor setting to represent

exile, return and migration from Ireland. These global movements towards and away from

Ireland contribute to the structuring threads along which themes of power and renewal

emerge.

The antipodes images also add to Joyce’s textual role as a collector of the exotic in the Wake,

with the uncomfortable caveat that these phrases may diminish the effect of Joyce’s anti-

colonialism in their usage. This is due in part to a disconnection between the literal antipodes

places and their usage in the book which vary between metaphorical, decorative, comical,

beautiful and strange. Various instances of antipodes imagery may lead the reader down an

investigative path to consider Joyce’s sources, particularly the Australian texts. For instance,

Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life as well as the WWI-era poetic works of CJ Dennis may have

left traces in the Wake. Furphy is mentioned once by name, and the Glugg character of

chapter II.i bears some striking resemblances to the rebellious poet figure in Dennis’ verse

tale, The Glugs of Gosh. A major source for Joyce’s adoption of colonial-era Australian slang

was Morris’ Austral English: A Dictionary of Australasian Words (1898) (Morris, 1898).

Places such as New Zealand also held interest for Joyce, as his younger sister Margaret

ventured there as a young nun and stayed for the duration of her life. Cricket imagery also

provided Joyce with material on the geopolitical legacy of the British Empire. To read the

Wake’s antipodes imagery as literal is part of the broader challenge of meeting ‘the massive

presence of irony in (Joyce’s) works’, as reading the Wake requires an implicitly symbolic

reception of events as they unveil themselves through the text (Boysen, 2013, p. 15). Epstein

argues that the first quarter of the book does not even stage any events, but rather sets the

scene—establishing a sense of place (Epstein, 2009). Just as Das Rhinegold provides

Wagner’s Ring Cycle with a preliminary understanding of place—the macrospatial world

corrupted by greed—Joyce’s first part of Finnegans Wake resembles a foundation for its

ensuing motifs, all of which stem from those first eight chapters which establish Ireland’s

mythopoetic setting.

The reader’s sense of geography and direction are challenged by a sense of place that is tilted

on its axis. The recombining of words and motifs in Finnegans Wake demands we re-tune our

ears to hear different patterns of sound. The mesh of multiple languages demands that the

reader tunes in to a frequency that wavers between foreign and familiar. Finnegans Wake

shares this quality with its intertexts, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Lewis Caroll’s

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, in which the reader’s

(and characters’) sense of scale, space and direction are constantly disrupted. Gulliver

famously travels south-west from Indonesia arriving at Lilliput in the space where Australia

had been located and mapped by the Dutch. Upon arrival, Gulliver is named ‘man-mountain’

by the diminutive inhabitants (Swift, 1990, p. 31), a description of proportions that

influenced Joyce’s creation of HCE, the man/mountain—a character who has merged with

the known microspace (Howth) to form a macrospatial, imaginary image (‘in the waste and

mightmountain’, 19.32.) The antipodes provided Swift with a partially known, mysterious

zone, a macrospace for his fantasy of distorted scales of representation.

For Lewis Caroll’s Alice, her curiosity eventually overcomes her anxieties about gravitational

forces in a statement reminiscent of medieval apprehensions about the antipodes:

I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the

people that walk with their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think—’ (she was rather

glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn’t sound at all the right word) ‘—but I

shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma’am, is this

New Zealand or Australia? (Caroll, 2008 (Gutenberg ebook edition).).185

Alice’s conjecture about upside-down pedestrians is a notion derived from the time when an

‘other’ side of the world became a real possibility. In pre-Renaissance history, there wasn’t

the dominance of the North-South trajectory as that which would emerge more strongly with

the 15th century voyages of the Portuguese Discoveries. The European thirst for navigable

maritime routes to Asia powered this enhanced awareness of the profitability of the South, to

the extent that Spain and Portugal compromised over these newfound territories in Africa and

Asia by drawing a North-South boundary separating their interests.

‘Unbox your compasses’ (287.11): Finding Finnimore in Perlieus Past 3.2

Joyce’s play with etymology is clear in the ‘tilted’ compass of Finnegans Wake. Disparate

locations occupy the same space, in the same way that opposing phonemes come to occupy

the same word. Just as language has been intentionally alienated, place is also reframed to

demonstrate a Cubist quality of showing the various impressions of the same place over time.

185 The 1951 screenplay by Aldous Huxley for the Disney animated film of Alice in Wonderland has this phrased more succinctly: ‘What if I should fall right through the centre of the earth... oh, and come out the other side, where people walk upside down!’

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On this premise, the distinction between North and South is blurred to indicate the

geographical ignorance of past eras - those long ago purlieus in which a much smaller scale

of place was available to the individual. To show this, the Wake includes a surprising

convergence of word and place in the cardinal directions South and East which are worth

noting in relation to the Wake’s characters, particularly HCE in his burial place, as described

during the post-resurrection address of pages 24–26. South and East share an etymological

root and their eventual separation into two different cardinal points is ironic in the light of the

Wake’s style of language fusion. East is derived from Nordic languages in the forms: ost,

oost and ast (McTurk, 2005, p. 125). Of the four cardinal points represented by mythological

dwarves who appear in the Eddas, the eastern dwarf was named Austri (and the Southern

dwarf, Suori) (Bycock, 2005). It is believed that Latin adopted the Nordic term ‘aust’ for

South rather than East, whereas a common etymology for the modern English term South is

related to the words in Old English and Frisian, ‘suth’ and ‘sunne’, referring to places in

warmer climates to the south of England, ‘regions of the sun’ (Bandle, Elmevike, &

Widmark, 2002, p550. )

The evolution of words for East also developed according to the direction of sunrise, which

was a point of ancient orientation, giving rise to the name thereafter of The Orient for the

East. Why Latin-speakers adopted the Nordic ‘east’ for their term South is open to conjecture

and may be linked with pagan rituals and beliefs, although it is possible that the elements

influenced this etymological quirk. Just as speakers of Old English saw the ‘sunne’ revert for

most of the year to the South, the early Latinate tribes would have known about summers of

eternal sun. Their Germanic enemies and Frisian tribes of the lands of the midnight sun

which, although located geographically north of Italy, were considered to be below Rome, in

status and civilisation, if not in cartographical terms. It is certainly challenging to imagine the

mindset of tribes and nations operating before the knowledge of True North as well as other

navigational aids. Through the ‘doubling up’ as it were of East and South in the Latin

derivation of the word for South, we can inhabit the Wakean imagination which relocates two

disparate points in the same place.

The awakening of Finnimore, who is a subsequent form of the fallen Finnegan and an

incarnation of HCE’s heroic qualities, is a noteworthy instance of this layered geography.

Finnimore himself is a conflation of binaries. Both dead and alive, he must remain in repose

so as to provide a martyr for the uprising. A hint at the nationalist glory awaiting Finnimore

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(if he stays dead in his grave to be immortalised and venerated) is in Joyce’s reference to the

Easter Rising memorial song, The Foggy Dew; the great giant must avoid getting his feet wet

in the dew ‘abroad’ (24.22).

The difference between Ireland and abroad is demolished through Joyce’s geographical

conflations. Finnimore’s ‘fame is spreading’ outside Ireland and ‘beyond the Bothnians’

(25.9–11) since his death. Representing the gulf between Sweden and Finland, Bothnia

(despite its lisping on ‘Bosnia’, which could indicate that the lisping Issy is shares in the

narration) is a geographically loaded placename. A Latinate variation on the Old Norse Botn,

those regions were named in terms of extremities, as Northernmost, but surprisingly, as

nethermost, or ‘bottom’ in Old Norse, a suffix applied to describe low-lying areas (Room,

1974, p. 298). The Finnish word for North (Pohjola) is similar to the word for bottom (pohja),

as lands on Finnish coast of the Gulf of Bothnia were named. To find the words North and

bottom so closely related is a linguistic throwback to a time before there was a sense of

magnetic north and its association thereafter with the top and the head rather than the bottom

and the tail. Direction was considered very differently in the pre-Copernican and even pre-

Christian era, and it is not surprising that the Vikings, who sailed resolutely southward and

eastward, thought of themselves as ever isolated, on the ‘bottom’ of the world, in a word,

antipodean.

In typical Wakean mode, to be ‘Bothnian’ is to be both: both old and new concepts of North,

in which north is considered the endmost and the top-most, but in the ancient sense of

Bothnian, in which North was the outermost and the lowest, the bottom. It must be added that

in light of Joyce’s superimpositions in this speech to Finnimore (England on Ireland, Rome

on England), that the Gulf of Bothnia is overlaid upon the Liffey, which is forever bound by

both—by both of the two Washerwomen, and by the twins Shem and Shaun. For the sake of

explaining Finnimore’s growing fame, that he is known even beyond the Bothnians suggests

his fame ‘abroad’, beyond Dublin, where he is recognised on both sides of the Liffey.

The evolution of the Latinate ‘South’ from East described above is interesting in relation to

the obvious difficulty inherent in the notion of the relativism of cardinal points. Forever

fixed, there need be no variation from the directions recognised as True—North, South, and

their horizontal counterparts. Finnimore’s interlocutor on pages 24—26, the spokesperson

who wishes to place Mr Finnimore once again in his grave, impresses upon the dead giant

why he must remain dead, part of the reason being that he has already entered the stars as a

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new constellation. ‘Your heart is in the system of the Shewolf and crested head is in the

tropic of Copricapron. Your feet are in the cloister of Virgo. Your olala is in the region of

sahuls’ (26.11–14). The cues in ‘system’, ‘cloister’ (cluster), ‘tropic’ and ‘region’ are

astronomical as well as cartographical, yielding an image of Finnimore as if he were a god

illustrated on a star chart. The giant is clearly oriented southward in this chart, as Lupus (the

wolf constellation) is located in the southern sky, where his ‘heart’ is, and further south, his

head is positioned at the Tropic of Capricorn. According to modern maps, Finnimore is

‘upside down’ in the Alice in Wonderland sense, his feet pointing north, his head pointing

south. Joyce’s adjustment to the constellations’ names evokes how different cultural names

become associated with natural phenomena through renaming. The Lupus constellation, for

instance, which was renamed within a new system of Judeo-Christian mythology by Julius

Schiller, was called Benjamin after Jacob’s youngest son (Stott, 1995). Meaning ‘son of the

right’ or ‘son of the south’ in ancient Hebrew, we are reminded that ‘right’ and ‘south’ meant

the same thing when facing east. Joyce’s game with language in Finnegans Wake extends

beyond the reformation of words to the reformation of the world. The puzzling fusions of

place in space means that the reader is forced into an awareness of multiple, simultaneous

positions—these are physical positions on maps and the compass directions between them, as

well as the belief systems which formulated those senses of direction.

The risen Finnegan in the Wake’s overture episode of I.i experiences uncertainties about

place, but his journeying through Dublin and its macrocosmic space reflect how north and

south are used to conflate geographical as well as other oppositions. The geographical and

cultural superimpositions continue in a manner which blends enemies and places traditionally

divided by historical conquests and the cycle of civilisations’ rise and decline. The speech to

Mr Finnimore (24.16) begs him not to wander around—particularly as he might get lost on

Northumberland Road in Dublin’s south (‘North Umbria’, 24.19) or more alarmingly lose

himself on Watling Street, located North of the Liffey and a double for the great Roman Road

of England and Wales, known by the same name. The anglicising of the Gaelic word for

street sraid appears in ‘Waddlings Raid’ (24.20), alluding to the plight of Ireland as an

English colony, its language changed and its lands literally ‘raided’. The warning about

becoming lost on Watling Street refers to the Wake’s cycle of empires, as Britain belonged to

the Romans, Ireland will belong to the British. Among other precarious destinations

mentioned are Healiopolis, a nickname given to the Vice-regal Lodge in Phoenix Park after

the Governor-General of the Irish Free State, Tim Healy. Ireland has re-arisen as a nation, but

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its founding father figure Finnimore may become lost as the ancient Egyptians, whose great

city of Heliopolis takes after the evening sun they worshipped and is forever set, never to

arise.

The North-South pairing recurs as a theme rather than as one among the myriad of the

Wake’s explicit motifs. That essential theme of division between North and South relates to

the broader patterns of invader and colonised, misunderstandings and power struggles. The

North-South schism receives surprisingly minimal critical attention. Some striking phrases

which explicitly use these cardinal terms are used mostly in relation to Dublin’s environment:

Dublin’s northern and southern sandbanks (198.04), the north and south circular roads

(295.31) and the opposing river walls of the Liffey (497.13 and 628.05) (Slepon, n.d., viewed

14th December, 2014). Even within the one phrase is a note of the author resigned to the

cyclical nature of human conflict based on perceived divisions: the weary tone of ‘sehm

asnuh’ (‘same as now’) is heard earlier from the Washerwomen, ‘the seim anew’ (215.23).

There is a clear parallel here between time and space, in that the theory of repeating cycles of

human action also evokes the sameness of places, as all places are subject to the effects of the

universal human drama that Joyce depicts in Finnegans Wake.

Losing one’s way is a key notion related to the ‘confusium’ (15.12) of location in Finnegans

Wake, although dislocation is extended beyond the horizontal plane of the earth to the areas

both above and below it. The subterranean places may indicate the unconscious or forgotten,

as vertical spatiality in the text often indicates what is either repressed (buried) or revealed

(unearthed). Joyce’s confusion of languages in the book’s dream-like narrative raises a

significant point about wish fulfilment in dreams, but also the merging of place in dreams.

The contrary orientation of the text suggests how opposite places may coexist, yet Joyce also

reminds us that borders were once the limits of knowledge as well as the limits of place. The

mystery of the ‘Terra Australis Incognita’ is one example of the thirst for hidden and

unmapped places, and conversely, foreign stereotypes were the imagined monsters of

unknown places. Add to that a curious notion that the so-called ‘top’ of the world could well

have been its ‘bottom’, and the Wake simulates a time in which north was not yet ‘true’ and

south’s separation from east was overdue.

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‘Along With the Devil and Danes’ (47.27): HCE Caught Between Land 3.3

and Language

Joyce’s comedy of language and power is set against the structure of fused oppositions, and

those in possession or loss of power are shown to be caught in a system determined by

abstruse human conditioning towards violence and exploitation. The figure of HCE stutters

through his pronunciation of the already difficult Wakese, signalling his confusion about his

belonging to either side of the power divide. His stuttering in particular on those with power

in Ireland reveals his baffled loyalties and neurotic response to both external and internal

leadership: ‘crow cru Cramwell’ (53.36) vies with ‘parparaparnelligoes’ (303.11), (Parnell.)

That last mention of Parnell by the twins in the Night Lesson episode of II.ii indicates the

hereditary effect of HCE’s ambivalent reaction to power. A frequent victim of authority,

HCE’s nervous language embodies the fear of his children’s similar alienation within Ireland.

As an immigrant with difficulties blending in, HCE’s anxiety is occasionally evident in the

next generation. Access and use of language is one of the signs of integrating with the

specificity of place, indicating a desire to appear non-opposite. Systematic dispossession also

relies on language, as Peter Maguire notes: ‘The history of Ireland has typically been written

as the history of an occupation; it could with equal authority be written as the history of a

language’ (Maguire, 2002, p. 91). The portrayal of these power struggles in the dialectical

nature of the Wake’s ‘antipodean’ language invites postcolonial readings, although the critical

terminology is changing to involve Joyce’s linguistic innovation together with critical

innovations around definitions of place. This mode of criticism appeared in a comparative

essay by Christy Burns, whose parallel reading of place in the Wake and Brian Friel’s

Translations explores the interlinked nature of land and language (Burns, 2008). This has

continued with the publication of the environmentally-focused essays published in Eco-

Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce (Brazeau & Gladwin, 2014).

Simmons notes that a postcolonial perspective is in keeping with the revisionism that has

sought a range of subversive voices in the colonial history of Ireland, an idea highly

appropriate to Joyce’s ventriloquism of Ireland’s multilingual and politically active past

(Simmons, 2008). Maguire makes the point that with diminished fortunes in Ireland’s

sovereignty, language is relied upon to compensate for a decreased sense of power:

‘Whenever Irish culture reaches its lowest level of deterioration, textual recording of that

culture takes on increasing importance’ (Maguire, 2002, p. 119). The prehistoric past of

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Ireland provides varied materials for Joyce’s exploration of the balance of power as it became

determined by the spread of language as well as physical force.

The Wake examines the connections between language and place, and the mix of languages

used by HCE to communicate in Ireland indicates his unstable identity. Even though he is

ultimately to be associated with the giant, heroic figures of Celtic lore, HCE is also human

and subject to the difficulties of asserting a secure identity where language, place and power

converge. HCE’s behaviour when he meets The Cad in the park is one that questions the

racial background and also the political allegiances of those taking part in the drama. At the

start of the chapter, HCE had amused the visiting ‘sailor king’ from ‘Pouringrania’ (pouring

rainier—England’s climate is referred to derogatorily in comparison with Ireland’s) whose

sense of humour was inherited from ‘William the Conk’—the royal party is English (31.3–

28). HCE, a bailiff, is in service of the foreign king, whose visit coincides with HCE’s

disruption of the ‘prefall paradise peace’ (30.15). When HCE meets the Cad, their respective

loyalties to the English crown are part of the mistrust between them. The Cad clearly reminds

HCE of those members of the ‘vigilance committee’ (34.04), and later others who reported

his ‘alleged misdemeanour’ (35.06). Even though the Cad addresses him in (a Wakean form

of) Irish Gaelic, HCE believes his life to be in danger.

HCE’s paranoia is not unfounded, as one of the perpetrators of the Phoenix Park Murders—

political assassinations—is referenced. HCE seems equally concerned about character

assassination, based on a further reference to Parnell and the backlash of the Pheonix Park

Murders. The famous spelling error ‘hesitency’ which exposed fraudulent letters

incriminating Parnell are foremost in HCE’s fears. Deterring any more false accusations,

HCE points to the Wellington Monument and declares he will swear an oath of honesty. The

language used indicates the level of confused political loyalties, as HCE will ‘make my hoath

to my sinnfinners’ upon the bible, the ‘High Church of England’, and that he will make that

oath with ‘my British to my backbone tongue’ (36.26–32). HCE’s nervous stutter betrays the

strain of this encounter. If the Cad represents the British army, HCE regrets that the ‘nearest

help’ in the form of the ‘fenian rising’ is at that moment unreachable (35.23–4). The

ambiguity of the HCE and the Cad meeting and miscommunicating on an open field is

reminiscent of the political and military divisions of Ireland, and that perhaps HCE is indeed

a southerner (Southron) unable to understand his countryman from the north.

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The communication problems between HCE and the Cad relate to other instances of

miscommunication, as well as excessive attempts to overcome such mishearings. The idea

inherent in misheard speech is that language, and its ultimate purpose, understanding, is open

to misuse or intentional wrongdoing like other forms of cultural identification. Memorable

passages from Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man already dealt with

language as a vehicle for cultural transition. There is the old woman delivering milk in the

opening chapter of Ulysses who cannot understand the Englishman Haines speaking Gaelic.

In A Portrait, it is the ‘tundish episode’ in which Stephen discusses Anglo-Irish etymology

with his university professor. In Finnegans Wake the fragility of language as a cultural

artefact is further complicated by the text’s aesthetic system. In the Wake language is subject

to political movements, the Babel syndrome (in which multiple languages are drawn into

intense interaction with ominous portent) and the unpredictability of human frailty both

physical and psychological; HCE is a stutterer and hard of hearing, while others such as

Hosty wilfully exaggerate. Joyce’s pun on truth as it is transformed from language to

recorded artefact occurs just before Hosty sings his ballad which further vilifies HCE, The

Ballad of Persse O’Reilly: ‘may the treeth we tale of live in stoney’ (44.09). The truth is a

victim of language when its tellers are lying through their teeth; these versions of ‘truth’ are

not set in stone, but grow and twist like the branches of a tree (‘treeth’). The twinned motif of

tree and stone invokes Shem and Shaun, further implying that the story of HSC is not

confined singularly to one ‘truth’, and that the father himself produced alternative versions of

himself in his sons.

Even though the dream language of the Wake could be considered as the expression of

unconscious desires and wish fulfilment, the constant distortion and magnification suggests

rather that the language of dreams is unreliable—it is rather a relaxing of the boundaries

between conscious perceptions and assumptions. An instance where language and truth are

demonstrably separate in the Wake is Hosty’s ballad. Readers experience a scene of rumours

gathering speed around Dublin, in a scene where place and language are also shown to be

historically antagonistic. An alcoholic busker, Hosty and his entourage are seized by the

‘gossiple’ (38.23) which has spread via the Cad’s wife about HCE, and his uproarious

scapegoating begins. Hosty has been dossing with two other down-and-out comrades, yet

their indigence is no barrier to their influence, as the trio are reminiscent of great poets in the

tradition of Swinburne, and the three Irish writers, Shaw, Yeats and Wilde (41.08–9). Dublin

emerges clearly in the dawn personified as HCE, ‘Ebblinn’s chilled hamlet’ (41.18), as the

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trio make their way south from their doorway on College Green. Hosty’s triumphal march

around the city centre is an improvement on his previous situation as he had planned to head

south on the Dun Laoghaire ‘tramaline’ (40.30) and kill himself.

The awakening audience of the ballad reflects the multiracial society of Dublin, which

includes the ‘liffeyside people’ but also the ‘mainland minority’, referring to those who

travelled in the direction of Ireland ‘via’ England’s Roman roads (Watling, Ernin and Icknild)

(42.25–7): these people could be Roman Catholics from England (a minority on a different

mainland) or Protestants in Ireland (the minority on the Irish mainland). That this ‘minority’

can be read in both ways is typical of Joyce’s inclusion of multiple and at times conflicting

perspectives in the one phrase. Joyce includes a fourth Roman road—‘Stane’—but it also acts

as a past tense verb, meaning that those who travelled north in the Roman era, or in the

‘Stone’ age, stayed. (‘Stane’ is interchanged with ‘stone’ in the Pranquean episode which

occurs in an ‘auldstane eld’ (21.05), a stone age). ‘Stane’ also introduces the staining of

reputations in the press, as four ‘hacks’ are part of the crowd’s ‘minority’. Linked with the

four cardinal directions, and the winds of the newspaper room in the ‘Aeolus’ chapter of

Ulysses, the journalists work for an Irishman (Harmsworth), an Irish newspaper owner whose

name did not require further punning. It is at the mercy of these divergent political leanings

represented in the four compass directions that news travels in increasingly exaggerated form.

Place is identified in this and other sections of the Wake through racial as well as spatial

indicators. Difference in race, religion, class and communal loyalty is evident in references to

the medieval Pale region around Dublin which is mentioned during Hosty’s exploits. The

airing of Hosty’s ballad dramatises the importance of language in popular song, particular

folk ballads which coincide with forms of nationalism. The narrative gathers momentum in

these last stages of I.ii, as the crowds press in towards central Dublin to hear Hosty’s ballad.

The ‘supercrowd’ (42.22), which has absorbed the aforementioned minorities and other

sections of society, includes the contrasted groups of poor Dublin youths and ‘busy

professional gentlemen’ (42.29–36). The latter group is referred to as ‘a brace of palesmen’

(42.34), alluding to the Pale of designated official English rule in the Dublin area established

by the Norman British in the fourteenth century. The ‘braced pales’ of the phrase indicates

the physical fence boundary, but a ‘race of pale men’ is phonemically present in the phrase

too, evoking the historically privileged Hiberno-English presence in Ireland. Despite these

differences, a ballad like Hosty’s which lampoons HCE as an outsider has the power to unite

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the diverse Dubliners mentioned. Even Dublin’s Jews are alluded to: ‘some wandering

hamalags’ out of ‘Mosse’s Gardens’ (43.2–3). As with so many other dissolution of

opposites, the Jews (denoted by their ‘wandering’/Moses) are replaced by their biblical

enemy, the Amalekites (‘hamalags’). HCE has become the scapegoat of scapegoats,

displacing even the Jews, who have mixed in with their foes and benign neighbours.

Another facet of HCE’s vilification is a further displacement. Nineteenth-century Irish

nationalist resentment towards the British is frequently, in the world of the Wake, redirected

towards the Vikings. HCE is an easy target for ridicule based not only on his habits

(perverted) and appearance (overweight), but because he is a ‘son of Scandiknavery’

(47.25)—of Nordic descent. The war of opinion against HCE is symbolised by the

‘wararrow’ (43.21), a ritualistic arrowhead passed on as a call to arms between allies

preceding war. At the printing of Hosty’s ballad, Thomas Davis’ nationalist ballad, A Nation

Once Again, is highlighted in parenthesis: ‘(a nation wants a gaze)’ (43.21–2). Joyce’s

merciless punning on Davis’ earnest song nevertheless refers to a nationalist vision (‘gaze’),

with the implication of Hosty’s ballad being that a nationalist vision is impossible without an

enemy, especially one seen as an infiltrator. Joyce’s opaque critical engagement with Irish

nationalism is veiled in this constant sleight of hand, as Dublin sites are rewritten to represent

the invader-coloniser cycle. For example, the location where Hosty’s ballad is sung, ‘Saint

Annona’s Street and Church’ (44.06), St Andrew’s Street, was the site of the old Norse

parliament, Thingmote. Disparagingly, HCE is labelled ‘a Norwegian camel old cod’ (46.26)

and his imminent demise is cheered. The song celebrates HCE’s hoped for burial, to take

place at ‘Oxmanstown, Along with the devil and Danes’ (47.26–7). The name Oxmanstown

comes from the word for east (ost) but is on the north side of the Liffey where the men from

the east—the Vikings (osttmen)—retreated during the Norman invasion. Hosty’s ballad

revels in a shrieking xenophobia. While the Viking era preceded the anti-British sentiment of

modern Irish nationalism, Joyce’s satirical ballad seems to write back to those critical of his

perceived political neutrality. Joyce’s contribution to the Celtic revival situated his rebellion

not in the prehistory of supernatural Gaelic heroes, but in recorded time when the Anglo-

Saxon forces first emerged as an invader equal to the Vikings.

Joyce’s comical premise in this first section of the Wake shows a highly satirical portrait of

nationalist passion through extreme, Viking-directed resentment. The target of all the vitriol,

HCE, is more than a mere character but he is himself the city, Dublin. The crime or sin of

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HCE (in his Earwicker form) is an extended metaphor for the qualities of a city, and how they

can change over the centuries. Those qualities are diverse and rarely flattering: ingratiating

with the coloniser (the Sailor King), paranoia of accusations of disloyalty towards both

coloniser and rebel (the Cad), repressed sexuality (spying on the two maidens) and hubris

(HCE’s ambition, self-aggrandizement and constant humiliation). As a city, the Wake’s

Dublin (and Ireland generally) makes up for these faults through far more mirific qualities,

those which perform wonders and excite the imagination: fascinating stories (the crowd

cannot get enough of the ‘problem passion play’ (32.32) of HCE’s life story, together with

fables of The Pranquean, Mookse and Gripes and The Ondt and Gracehoper); captivating

music, sound effects, sermons and theatre (Hosty’s ballad, Shaun’s epic sermons, and the

melodrama of The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies in Book II); breathtaking landscape

(Anna Livia as the river flowing to the bay is one example); colourful costumes (the costume

motif lists items based on the colours of the rainbow); and even great food (eggs are a

favourite, in accordance with Humpty/ HCE’s ovoid form). The ‘fun’ of Finnegans Wake

more than outweighs the mistrust and negativity of the anti-HCE crowds, who symbolise self-

hate as much as they represent local pride. Joyce’s elevates the ‘character’ of Dublin from a

subdued colonial outpost to a famed, though distant, legendary centre of myth and learning.

The Greek-Egyptian geographer under Claudian era Roman rule called Dublin ‘Eblana’, a

name which resurfaces in many forms throughout the Wake (46.13; 135.28). Ptolemy was the

name later taken by Greek kings who rejected Rome’s rule, suggestive of a Ptolemaic model

for new Irish ‘kings’ of Dublin to imitate. The irony of kings of Greek ancestry establishing

rule in an adopted, essentially foreign place, Egypt, ought not to be lost on the reader, as the

‘kings’ of HCE’s unfixed era could scarcely claim to be indigenous to Ireland due to Norse

and Norman settlement and assimilation. These ideas are present in one of many namings of

Dublin: ‘Caedurbar-atta-Cleath became Dablena Tertia’ (57.31–2), and the change in

language from Gaelic to Latin reflects the city’s changing identity.

HCE’s continuous ridiculing and vilifying by his own townspeople of Dublin is symbolic of

the diplomatic isolation of Ireland through ostracism rather than mere geographical

remoteness. In HCE’s repeated mocking, Joyce undermines the fabrications and falsities

through which Ireland and the Irish were viewed. Historically positioned as the other (Cheng,

1995, p. 31), Ireland’s reputation was filtered through the incriminating British perspective

since the time of the Pale. The negative public relations extended on Ireland’s behalf came

and went with the severity of foreign rule, to the extent that Ireland’s own inhabitants were

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led to assimilate the view of outsiders. Another encounter with a troublemaker reminiscent of

the Cad occurs, in an episode concentrating these ideas of frustrated internal conflict and

HCE’s individual Irish experience of cultural cringe (an Australian term pertaining to

collective self-loathing or self-deprecation due to externally determined ideals) (Phillips,

1950, p. 299). HCE’s journey from reviled scapegoat to resting, venerated giant continues as

many foreigners are visiting Dublin, including Herr Bettreffender (an Austrian journalist) and

also ‘Humphrey’s unsolicited visitor’ (70.13). The Austrian is infused with the story of the

biblical patriarchs: his stolen lamb’s wool coat intersects with the Jacob and Esau brothers’

conflict, a recurring motif of Ireland’s internal divisions. The Austrian has been usurped just

as Esau was, his coat ‘borrowed’ by the cunning Jacob who then earned their blind father’s

birth right. During this ‘siegings story’ (73.24), HCE has been improving and guarding the

defences of Dublin, and another newcomer attempts to enter the citadel. Irish, Roman,

American and even Australian clues indicate the mixed identity of the drunken, would-be

intruder, an invading ‘Titus’ who hurls insults as well as actual stones at the door of HCE’s

Inn. This episode is discussed below in greater detail to highlight inclusions of the antipodes,

but it is worth noting that the visitor’s failed attempt to goad HCE into a fight encompasses

the violence of both verbal and territorial conflict. The ‘langwedge’ (73.01) is both language,

and the stone wedges on which early writing such as cuneiform was found, symbolic of

claims to first origins; and the wedge between conflicting parties is plain, so that land as well

as language becomes divided.

The prehistoric past of Ireland provides varied materials for Joyce’s exploration of the

balance of power as it became determined by the spread of language as well as physical

force. Primitivism is referred to here in relation to those representations of prehistoric oral

cultures and their adaptation to technological as well as territorial changes. The association of

primitivism with ancientness and civilisation with the new is another binary which meets

with recurring conflation in Finnegans Wake, so that technological advances of the modernist

context (television and radio, for instance) are portrayed as extensions of the prehistoric

grasping for linguistic certainties. The technobabble of Finnegans Wake is not so much

futurist as it is a reminder of the perpetual communication barriers between peoples. Another

recurring conflation challenges the stereotyped image of primitivism and place, as northern

and southern regions usually corresponding with the primitive ancient and the civilised new

are fused. Shem and Shaun are invoked by their mother ALP in her closing monologue,

which uses the North/South binary to describe them: ‘Two bredder as doffered as nors in

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soun’ (620.16). The phrase makes rich use of Norse languages including Dutch, Norwegian,

with a twist of German in the word ‘brüder’ (brothers) found in ‘bredder’, the Norwegian for

river banks. They are different as North and South, and I am interested in the preposition ‘in’,

a suggestion by the Wake’s characteristic simultaneity that the Northerner has relocated

South: the ‘nors’ are literally in among the southerners. The anagrams of Shem and Shaun’s

names in ‘The sehm asnuh’ (620.16) immediately precedes the North/South observation of

the twins, with its echoing of the recurring ‘Same/New’ and ‘same as now’ motifs. The idea

that ‘new’ folk from the north are the ‘same’ as in the south is inextricably linked to Joyce’s

fusing of difference across the dimensions of time and space.

HCE is a figure that is persistently emblematic of the book’s conflicts, and in this manner he

also embodies the geographical schisms between north and south. The at times almost

insuperable barrier of Joyce’s narrative method in the Wake is that which has best

demonstrated the author’s views on history and its making, especially one as complex as

Ireland’s. Joyce’s disruption of linearity, excess in tone (from mockery to joviality), de-

familiarising of English and other languages and ultimately his conflation of characters and

their motivation impose a sense of collectiveness on the narrative (best personified in one of

HCE’s nicknames, Here Comes Everybody.) Joyce’s Wakean machine in the first chapter

produces a vision of medieval Dublin with a Viking emphasis based on the writings of the

Four Annalists, combined as ‘our herodotary Mammon Lujius’ (13.20). These annalists

provide a Herodotus as well as hereditary service, reminding us that: ‘Dyffinarsky ne’er sall

fail til heathersmoke and cloudweed Eire’s ile sall pall’ (13.22) in a document which mimics

the style of medieval Irish history texts (and we are reminded by Slepon that ‘abbreviation by

initialising was common in medieval Irish chronicles.’) (Slepon, n.d., viewed December 30,

2014) Dyfflinarskidi was the name for part of Norse Dublin, and HCE is clearly associated

with the Norse settlement (‘heathersmoke and cloudweed Eire’s...’). As a member and

descendant of the invading class, HCE is both of Ireland and beyond it, an embodiment of

foreign settlement that nevertheless shaped and inhabited the built and social environment.

The ridiculing and fall of HCE highlights Joyce’s resistance to the resentment based on

perceived racial differences among the Irish. HCE is despised as a foreigner from the north,

an idea that magnifies the north-south divide within Dublin as well as that between the Irish

Free State and Northern Ireland, particularly relevant to Joyce’s post-Ulysses, post-

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partition200 writing in Finnegans Wake. It is based on Joyce’s elaborate satire on north-south

divisions that I suggest an antipodes model can be used to frame Joyce’s picture of Ireland in

the text.

A consequence of the comical levelling of opposed forces through language is that Joyce

undoes the negative signifiers of the so-called primitive, by framing the primitive as

embodying a different stage of his four Viconian cycles. The non-primitive in the settler-

oppressor role is not more advanced morally or intellectually than their neighbour, rather,

they are at an advanced stage of the cycle towards their annihilation. As places recently

settled by European powers at the time of the Wake’s composition, the far southern antipodes

occupy this peculiarly Joycean-Viconian position, destined to replay, with local variation,

those struggles in which power is wielded through force and language.

One of the Wake’s major confrontations between invader and native inhabitant illustrates this

struggle. Page 15 is devoted to the cyclical violence (a ‘chiliad’, 15.05) of Ireland’s

successive invasions and internal power struggles (14.35—15.19) explaining how these

dynasties eventually intermingled. The encounter between Mutt (local) and Jute

(invader/visitor) employs comic misunderstandings to show Ireland placed in a context of

global rather than internal power structures as Dublin once again becomes a site of conflict

due to dispossession. That people from far-flung places can understand one another without

an exact exchange of languages through translation is a further irony exploited by the theme

of dispossession in the Wake, as it quickly becomes evident in the Mutt/Jute dialogue. The

two are Antipodal, falling quickly into Master and Slave role, as the local cave-dwelling Mutt

is tricked into subservience by offers of gold (16.30). Yet it is the visiting Jute’s observations

of Mutt which expose their mutual suspicions. Mutt (initially he is the ‘mute’ person in their

encounter) is described as small and malformed (‘pigmaid’, 16.30, pygmied). Apart from his

alarming habit of drinking from a hollowed skull, Mutt—who is dutifully keeping watch on

the lookout of a keep—is referred to as ‘Comestipple Sacksoun’ (15.35). The insulting name

reduces a potential warrior to a petty ‘constable’, referring to his drinking as alcoholism

(tipple, sack and ‘porterfull’ 16.04). Jute is puzzled as to the identity of the cave-dweller

based on his ignorance of many languages, and Mutt is guessed to be a Saxon (‘Sacksoun’),

200 Ulysses as a novel influenced by the experience of partition is discussed in Duffy (1991), even with the parliamentary and military imposition of partition taking place roughly in synchronisation with the final stages of completion and publication of Ulysses in 1922.

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British tribes of Germanic origin. ‘Sacksoun’ doubles as the Porter family’s servant

Sackerson (or Saunderson in II.i), who works in HCE’s pub. Using the same spelling for

South as for the description of Shaun/Shem (‘Two bredder as doffered as nors in soun’,

620.16), Mutt is a Saxon-esque figure, a northerner who has sacked and resettled in the

South.

Writing on the African language elements in the Wake, Karl Reisman has also identified

similar instances of the blurring between indigenous and invader in colonial situations.

Reisman suggests how these languages illustrate the complex political interchanges involving

alliances and fractures among both local and imperial forces. In explaining that the Fulani

people ‘became the main agents of British “indirect rule” in Northern Nigeria’ (Reisman,

2008, p. 80), Reisman contends that Joyce’s inclusion of these paired African languages

indicates a parallel tension between Ireland and Britain, or even Ireland and the

Scandinavians. The latter places are invoked through Reisman’s analysis of the Brian Boru

figure in the context of African honorific terms for a leader, considering the various alliances

made between Brian Boru and the Vikings of Dublin against the Irish O’Neills. Reisman’s

web of meanings provides an ample initiation into the Wake reader’s awareness of the

Africa’s extensive representation in the text, yet there is an additional correspondence that the

author omitted. Due to limitations of space, Reisman gives no clear indication of the narrative

implications of the Fulfulde/Hausa language pairing taking place during the trial scene of

episode I.iv. Pegger Festy (the exhumed reincarnation of Finnigan/HCE) is standing trial for

his crime which is one that channels famous trials emblematic of Ireland’s colonial past.

The trials include that of the Invincibles, militant independence extremists responsible for

political assassinations in Phoenix Park—a ‘treepartied ambush’ (87.35). That notorious case

is interwoven with the Maamtrasna trial of Galway, as the accused is identified as a

‘Gallwegian’ (89.07) in need of an ‘interpreter’ (91.03). The language barrier was a crucial

aspect of the trial for Joyce, which he covered in an opinion piece for La Picolla della Sera

(Ellmann, 1989). At this trial, a Gaelic-speaking Irishman, named Myles Joyce, was executed

on a murder charge for which he was not permitted to provide a defence in his own language.

Joseph Valente acknowledges Joyce’s identification with the accused, writing that Joyce:

‘recognises the Maamtrasna proceedings to be an instance of the different writ large and in

blood’ (Valente, p. 253). It is surprising that given Reisman’s account of the Fulani people’s

language as indicative of their political repression both of and by others (Reisman, 2008) that

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he does not refer to the actual event unfolding in the content of Finnegans Wake itself. This

omission reveals the divergent critical approaches to the text as conceptual or narrative. It

also shows that Reisman’s work in this instance was focused on that ‘darker world of

colonialism’ by focusing on non-European places (the African sites) while eliding Joyce’s

specific Irish places (Phoenix Park; the Galway courtroom) within that part of the text.

Two Australian places located within Reisman’s articulately labelled dark world of

colonialism are included in his essay, though without explication given their tangential

relation to his particular focus on Africa. A clearly phonetic hint towards the Diamantina

region in Australia’s northern state of Queensland (‘diamondinah’, 250.31) is not glossed at

all, whereas he does comment upon an unexpected reference to Lake Eyre in South Australia:

‘For ever they scent where air she went’ (250.32). Reisman suggests the writings of British

author Henry Kingsley as a source: ‘Henry Kingsley’s ‘Eyre’s March,’ set along the arid,

southern salt-pan regions of South Australia’ (Reisman, 2008, p. 86). Henry Kingsley is

frequently listed as a source for ‘Australasian words’ in Morris’ dictionary Austral English

that provided numerous quotes from the British author. Kingsley’s travelogue is not overtly

related to the ‘children’s games’ episode of Finnegans Wake in which this line appears, and

the very audible allusion to Mary Had a Little Lamb, and the woolly vest and investment

embedded in ‘Voolykins’ diamondinah’s vestin’ (250.31).

Yet there is a further connection that Reisman has not explained—that of the three Kingsleys.

In addition to that British author who set most of his fiction in his temporarily adopted home

of Australia is Mary Kingsley, the nineteenth-century British ethnographer who worked in

West Africa, and Charles Kingsley, author of The Waterbabies. The first two Kingsleys,

explorers abroad in their distant colonies, are suggestive of the sometime king (HCE), the

forerunner of the Norse invader-settler. Yet in his Celtic mythological role as a giant

submerged in Loch Neagh (and also a sailor from abroad, ‘Wasserborne the waterbaby’,

198.08), HCE plays a sub-aquatic role that is ‘Kingsley’ as well as kingly. A further parallel

returns us to the novels as well as the poem by Henry Kingsley (‘Eyre’s March’): just as HCE

is a figure of suspicion and derision by the Dublin locals, Henry Kingsley and his genre were

derided by some in Australia, as Joseph Furphy was archly critical of his superficial treatment

of Australian culture in Such is Life (Furphy, 2011, p. 164).

Although the focus has dwelt on Issy and the Twins on page 250, the King is not far away in

support of parental warnings issued from ‘their prunktqueen’, ALP in her matriarchal role.

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The tendency Reisman has exhibited in not situating his exegesis more thoroughly in the

narrative happenings of the text from which his examples are drawn is not a deficiency, as he

has successfully linked different phrases in their isolation with some of the Wake’s broad

themes. Where my discussion on the material and metonymical roles of place in the text

diverges, is in a more closely considered reading of the surrounding matter of the chapters

and excerpts in which these glimpsed representations of the antipodes are found.

‘On the hoof from down under’ (321.32): HCE, ALP (Harbouring 3.4

Celtic Exiles, Antipodean Larrikins Preferred)

The continuing analysis of HCE’s figuration relies on the text’s methods of writing north and

south and their shared vertical axis in the context of Irish space. So much of the ambiguity

around HCE’s identity, whether his patriarchal status ought to be celebrated or demolished, is

due not only to his morally questionable acts but also his geographical loyalties. HCE’s

embodiment as ‘Here Comes Everybody’ (32.18) reflects the multiplicity of his origins, but

also the process of originating in place: HCE has ‘come’ from somewhere, yet at what point

can it be said that he comes from Ireland? The extensive alienation of the HCE archetype

alternately reveres and abhors his immigrant status. There are occasions when that sentence

of otherness is commuted and the next generation concedes that previous immigrants are

absorbed and integrated by their new world: ‘pastimes is past times’, the children

acknowledge in episode II.ii, as they study the ‘everybody’ multiplicity principle in the H-C-

E combinations of historical lineages (263.13–15). Joyce uses the ubiquity of the newcomer’s

struggle to highlight HCE’s difficult relationships with place. It is possible to see where this

sense of dislocation is coupled with the will to belong, a conflation of desires that echoes the

‘relentless doubleness of things’ noted by Richard Beckman (Beckman, 2007, p. 4). This

doubleness can be seen throughout the Wake’s stories of HCE’s arrival and integration, and

in his inn-keeper incarnations, the HCE figure is poised between those two states. Through

the entertainment of other wanderers and the incorporation of their stories into HCE’s story

of difficult integration, the puzzle of identity in Ireland is explored on a global scale.

HCE’s arrival in Ireland (at the close of I.i, and his subsequent rise to fame in I.i) continues to

impose a disorderly sense of direction on the reader. Some of that disorder comes from the

overlay of east on west and of north on south. HCE’s ship is ‘this archipelago’s first visiting

schooner’ (29.22–3), when he ‘came at this timecoloured place where we live’ (29.20). The

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ship and its arrival are adorned with Semitic words and names, suggestive of eastern origins,

including an Arabic ship, a ‘dhow, The Bey for Dybbling’ (29.22), phrases which exaggerate

HCE’s foreignness. HCE’s arrival at Dublin Bay is replayed in various later scenes

(examples), but here he is introduced as the cause of the fall, and instigator of ‘the hubbub

caused in Edenborough’ (29.35–6). Eden, the Scottish capital and the Eden Quay of Dublin

are merged together with the origin stories they represent. Edinburgh and Dublin both

capitulated to an external power on a political level, but in terms of language and heredity,

the point of the ‘hubbub’ to come seems that no one place can remain an Eden, an untouched,

isolated place, forever.

Place continues to play an important structural role in HCE’s misadventures, as the scenes of

his actions instigate the themes of sin and rumour which proliferate equally throughout the

text. The hubbub is unleashed following the vaguest of reports of wrongdoing by HCE, ‘the

literal sense of which decency can safely scarcely hint’ (33.14–5). The first paragraph of page

34 speaks defensively of HCE as ‘our good and great and no ordinary Southron Earwicker’

(34.13–4). An outmoded term referring to a person from the South, a ‘Southron’ was once

used by the Scots to describe the English (McArthur, 1998, p. 147). Earwicker (HCE) is

unexpectedly referred to as an Englishman, although it is as likely that ‘southron’ refers to his

southern home (HCE is living in Dublin in the south of Ireland) as well as his north-south

journey from abroad. The situation with the subsequent meeting of the Cad (who threatens to

perpetuate the rumour) is almost saved by the bell: it rings ‘over the wastes to south’ (35.30–

31). The harmless meeting with the cad quickly becomes a confrontation steeped in mutual

suspicion. HCE’s mixed regional loyalties cause him to stutter and he is uncertain to which

power he ought to align himself.

The antipodes are infrequently designated with the clarity of location given to Dublin and

Ireland in the Wake, yet how they do emerge is as a region denoting uncertainty and

waywardness. A grouping of ‘antipodes phrases’ occurs on page 321 which suggests this

trope of geographical but also moral dislocation. Episode II.iii of the Wake is set in HCE’s

Dublin pub, and the tale of the Norwegian Captain unfolds. A Flying Dutchman figure, the

Norwegian Captain is fitted for a suit by the Dublin tailor Kersse—the Captain does not pay

for the ill-fitting suit, and evades payment three times. Upon his return he is married to the

tailor’s daughter. Australia appears during the third of the Norwegian Captain’s escapes, as

he sails into ports around the world on his travels. David Hayman suggests this story is ‘an

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account of the gradual accommodation of the lawless Viking invader to a civilised urban

existence and his eventual absorption into the native population’ (Hayman, 2007, p. 255).

The Viking is not alone in denoting this transition from wild to civilised, and from foreign to

domestic. As we are reading this story, we take a pause for HCE to admit two travellers to the

pub. They are ‘astraylians in island’ (321.09), ‘from the outback’s dead heart’ (321.08). At

first their regional origins mark them as lost—‘astray’. Soon we realise that this brief cameo

is of a pair of opposites—a ‘tall hat’ and a ‘kiber galler’—a top-hatted gentleman and a

peasant. These characters are dodgy, even criminal—‘breaking and entering’ (321.7–11)—

but HCE is pleased to put their money in the til. Joyce here invokes the convict or ex-con

Australian, unpredictable travellers like the Norwegian Captain whose wanderings they

shadow.

It could be said that each new character shifts the atmosphere or colours the spatial elements

to reflect their entry into the scene, as the Chapelizod premises takes on decidedly Australian

tones, becoming ‘mulligar scrub’, with rhyming slang used to superimpose the Australian

bush (‘scrub’) on HCE’s pub (the Mullingar Inn). The term ‘scrub’ with specific relation to

the Australian bush is listed in Morris’ dictionary Austral English (1898), the book which

Joyce came to indirectly via the linguistic guide by Otto Jespersen (Growth and Structure of

the English Language, 1905). Morris’ book inadvertently lent Joyce the term ‘kookaburra’

and various other Australian words; and ‘scrub’ is included by Morris with a source from a

Henry Kingsley novel set in Australia. The travellers in this ‘Mullingar’ moment settle into

the scene ‘with the gust of a spring alice’ (321.31)—as if blown northward by the winds from

Alice Springs. It is the phrase ‘with him’ that joins these ‘swaggelers’—swagmen

travellers—with their Ireland setting (321.31). Does this mean ‘with HCE’ or ‘with the

Norwegian Captain’, who, presumably, is also ‘on the hoof from down under?’ The phrases

‘down under’ and ‘piked forth desert roses’ contribute more than their surface images of

Australia (321.32). The term ‘piked’ is glossed as ‘piped’, suggesting that these suspect

Australian pub-crawlers ‘piped forth’—they join the pub crowd in song and storytelling

(Slepon, n.d., viewed December 30, 2014). ‘Desert roses’ are the floral emblem of their

escaped region—Sturt’s Desert Rose from the Northern Territory of Australia. Yet for the

purposes of pub talk, I suggest these ‘desert roses’ are another oxymoronic opposition—they

are lies or exaggerated, tall tales (roses blooming in the desert). This extended imagery of

Australia includes the antipodes region in the trope of criminality, untrustworthiness,

alcoholism and charm of a wayward kind. A further sonic implication of ‘piked forth desert

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roses’ echoes the idea of reincarnation raised by Joyce in Ulysses, when Molly distorts the

Greek concept of metemspychosis for ‘met him pikehoses’ (Joyce, 1993, p. 147). Returning

after death from an underworld is a recurring theme for Shem and for returning exiles, and

here indicates a resurrection from ‘down under’.

The vertiginous scale of verticality is also crossed in the Wake by patterns indicating vast

distances. The mystery associated with the positioning of Ireland in the world is likened to

that of other ‘far away’ places, including both far northern and southern regions. Joyce uses

geographical snapshots to indicate the relative geographical isolation of Ireland, at one point

establishing a correspondence between Australia and Ireland. ‘Even to the extremity of the

world? Dingoldell!’ (360.33); the ‘dingo’ and ‘gold’ designate the Australian presence (the

gold indicating the colonies’ tempting goldfields), and the distant global positioning of

‘extremity’ refers both to the antipodes and to Ireland. Elsewhere in the book, the frequently

invoked saint of Dublin, Lawrence O’Toole, is paired with the term ‘Ultima Thule’ to form

‘Larix U’ Thule’ (253.19) to paraphrase the medieval cartographical term for unknown

regions beyond known, mapped spaces. Epstein’s reading of the ‘Dingoldell’ passage

explains the theme of sexual consciousness in the father and young woman figures (Epstein,

p. 150). As HCE listens to the nightingale’s (‘naughtingels’, 359.32) song on the radio, the

girl is linked with Alice of Wonderland (‘Alys! Alysaloe!’, 359.32–33). Later, as the

symbolic castration occurs with the druidic cutting of the mistletoe and the girl’s observation

of the phallus, the shocking contrast in proportions evokes both Gulliver and Alice, each at

their own ‘extremity’: ‘The enormanous his, our littlest little!’ (360.33). The littleness of

Alice is reflected in the final syllable of the source name for her character, Alice Liddell, as

well as her shrinking to a tiny size in the Lewis Carroll’s stories, and her having fallen down

a hole in the earth, like the well in the nursery rhyme ‘Ding Dong Bell’. The fusions of

opposites is clearly implied as the extremes of gender difference are juxtaposed, compounded

by the merging of dog and cat, in ‘dingo’ and the ‘pussy’ from the nursery rhyme (‘Ding

dong bell, pussy’s in the well.’) The exaggeration of scale imposed on the phallus comically

invokes a phrase derived from a life of St Patrick, in which the author states, ‘A person born

in Great Britain could scarcely call Ireland the extremity of the world’ (Kinane, 1920, p. 26).

HCE’s position here is vulnerable, both as a male under scrutiny from the next generation,

and as a potent, giant figure associated with ‘the extremity of the world’—Ireland is

embodied with the mystical fantasy imposed by its geographical and cultural distance from

its neighbouring island.

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The global extremity to which the Wake reaches invokes the antipodes amid the language of

colonising and war. The idea of space as a territory for inevitable conflict is elaborated in the

aftermath of HCE’s entombment. The burial of the patriarch in episode I.iv signals a new era

of Ireland’s history in which the descendants begin to fight over the available land. Ireland is

split on a north-south axis and a section of Australia, New South Wales, is imposed upon the

land as ‘New South Ireland’, and its ‘Celtiberian’ soldiers march against ‘Vetera Uladh’

(78.26–7), Old Ulster. The division of old and new along that border between north and south

is caused by disagreements about religion (loyalty to the Pope), although the makeup of those

two armies is syntactically unclear. Are they Moorish descendants (‘bluemin’) and British

(‘pillfaces’) respectively, or both members of two opposing armies? Prisoners of ninth

century Vikings, the Moors in Ireland were comparatively ‘old’ compared with their southern

neighbours. Joyce’s scene of mobilising armies evokes historical patterns of colonial

settlement and ownership through place naming. The naming of the place New South Wales

was construed as a property of the British, just as Gaul (France) and Iberia (Spain) were

occupied by the Romans and Carthaginians. The Celtiberian tribes’ descendants came to

occupy Ireland, which in turn has become occupied by remote others (papal and British

powers).

As North and South are linked with old and new territory, the East/West divide plays a more

profound role as death, the great leveller—quite literally laying out people along the

horizontal axis. The dead are great travellers (the ‘gone-most west’, 66.32), and their bodies

are laid out with their feet pointing west according to Christian burial rites, ‘feets to the east’

(76.12). An easterly departure is symbolic of the peaceful accord struck between two

antagonists, in a version of the HCE/Cad encounter told in I.iv, pp. 81–85). As the sun sets on

another version of events, we are reminded that ‘all goes west’ (85.15), no matter how far

easterly one has ventured. In keeping with the downward or southward trajectory described

above, the dead not only travel ‘west’, but south, because their journey is subterranean.

HCE’s burial partially restores him to respectability as a local, because he is literally

embedded in the land of Ireland. Yet his comical victimisation in parallel guises of supposed

importance (Festy King, Napoleon and King Billy) suggests a refusal of that final acceptance

if HCE cannot remain silent and in repose as the resting giant. In his unearthing, HCE

represents the attitude which is uncomfortable with a diverse past that cannot easily explain

its origins.

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The earth as symbol for belonging or reclaiming of territory continues to appear along the

horizontal as well as the vertical axis. The east–west divisions within Ireland receive some

attention in episode I.iv in the satire of the Festy King trial scene referred to briefly above.

The inspiration from the Maamtrasna trial highlights the mixed heritage of languages in

Ireland as well as reintroducing the warring brothers’ theme in a courtroom setting. HCE’s

sons (Shaun and Shem) simultaneously appear in the trial as accused (named Festy King) and

accuser (the witness) respectively. The prisoner’s royal lineage is revealed: he was ‘once

known as Melecky’ (86.08) after Malachi and other similarly named kings following the

death of Brian Boru; also he claims to have sailed to Ireland with the Milesian settlers from

Spain. One element of the crime of the accused is that he disguised himself by covering his

face with mud. The recurring motif of mud suggests the claiming of new territory through

assimilation, perhaps initially superficial, as the maelstrom of territorial warfare that those

early settlers entered is here called the ‘mudstorm’ (86.20). After the lengthy and accusatory

cross-examination of Shem the witness, their father Pegger Festy himself re-appears,

although before he can speak in his self-defence the jurors ask for the mud (‘stucckomuck’

91.02) to be cleared from his face. The difference between face and voice in determining

identity is questioned as well as criticised. Pegger Festy’s resurfacing also suggests the bog

bodies of high status men buried centuries before. Whether their language or their appearance

is a better claim to belonging in Ireland is part of the subtext of Pegger’s claims. He insists he

never acted violently—‘he did not fire a stone’ (91.11) Clearly, Pegger/HCE has been

confused with the Unsolicited Visitor who threw stones at his gate, with the broader joke

asking who cast the first stone in the territorial conquests of Irish history.

Pegger Festy’s cameo is reiterated in a later scene of confrontation, with access to place

forming the axis of contention. The specificity of Dublin is once again broadened to include

far southern places, reflecting the book’s surprisingly far-flung geographical reach. In

considering the externally imposed concept of ‘the antipodes’ on a historically unmapped

region, Joyce’s methods for ironically rewriting Ireland’s geographical past as an antipodes

of the north, rendering it as a place defined by its oppositeness in relation to Britain and the

European continent. HCE’s role in this oppositional identifying of place is in his ambiguous

status as a Norseman in Ireland. His dual role as outsider and city founder has been discussed

above, yet HCE’s relationship with place highlights the historical ironies of modern Irish

nationalism which originated in the desire to resist external influence. HCE arrived as a result

of the Viking waves of settler-migration and much of the HCE-related humour is derived

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from his awkward integration into Irish society. As with Joyce’s treatment of the outsider in

Leopold Bloom the Jewish Dubliner of Ulysses, the theme continues in Finnegans Wake.

The HCE figure is one thread of the Wake tapestry which highlights this problem of place,

because in his Finn incarnation, HCE-Finn is the sleeping giant whose body in repose is the

coastal landscape of Dublin. Yet, as the Chapelizod inn-keeper, HCE remains a taunted

figure, so that his smallest of sins are conjured by hearsay into the most graphic accusations.

The following abbreviated section shows HCE as inn-keeper receiving verbal abuse that

pokes fun at his dislocation:

compiled, while he mourned the flight of his wild guineese, a long list (now feared in part

lost) to be kept on file of all abusive names he was called: Informer, Old Fruit, Yellow

Whigger, Bogside Beauty, Yass We’ve Had His Badannas, York’s Porker, Funnyface, At

Baggotty’s Bend He Bumped, Cainandabler, Ireland’s Eighth Wonderful Wonder,

Godsoilman, Moonface the Murderer, Hoary Hairy Hoax, Tight before Teatime, Acoustic

Disturbance, Gibbering Bayamouth of Dublin, Artist, Unworthy of the Homely Protestant

Religion, You’re Welcome to Waterfood ... (71.04–22)

The phrases which reference place names and the insult ‘informer’ indicates the suspicion

and distrust at work in a society governed by external—generally British—authorities.

Betrayal in politics is a continuous theme in the Wake, and one that HCE as a foreign migrant

cannot escape. The insult of ‘informer’ indicates HCE’s perceived divided loyalties, and

hence his questionable belonging within the boundaries of Ireland. The irony in this distrust

is raucously demonstrated through the string of insults which include references to HCE-as-

Finn’s embodiment of the land—he is ‘Ireland’s eighth wonderful wonder’. Those familiar

with Ulysses’ second chapter may recall the dialogue between poet Stephen Dedalus and the

school headmaster Deasy. The latter jokes that Ireland never experienced persecution of Jews

because: ‘she never let them in’ (Joyce, 1993, p. 36). The notion of being let in or kept out is

relevant to the Wake episode I.iii shown above, as HCE is insulted by a late night visitor to

his pub who HCE won’t let in. The ‘unsolicited visitor’ makes violent threats, but HCE is

‘anarchistically respectsful’ (72.16–7); following this refusal of entry we have a group of

phrases to consider that reflect simultaneity of place between Dublin and the far south,

historically referred to as the antipodes.

The first phrase comes from page 72:

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though it was as easy as kissanywhere for the passive resistant in the booth he was in to

reach for the hello gripes and ring up Kimmage Outer 17.67, because, as the fundamentalist

explained, when at last shocked into speech, touchin his woundid feelins in the fuchsiar the

dominican mission for the sowsealist potty was on at the time and he thought the rowmish

devowtion known as the howly rowsary might reeform ihm, Gonn. (72.19–25)

HCE does not retaliate against The Unsolicited Visitor, but rings up to complain using the

‘Hello Gripes’ (the telephone). The dominican mission refers to Vigilance Committees which

attempted to curb the excesses of anti-Irish-Catholic coverage in the British press. The

mission also refers to missionary Catholic movements beyond Ireland, such as missions to the

South Seas. Instead of receiving sympathy and defence from the insulting drunkard who

won’t leave HCE and his pub in peace, the telephone booth becomes a confession booth and

HCE himself is expected to recite the rosary.

Shortly thereafter, the Visitor also tries one more time to goad HCE into battle, and two

figures connected to Australia emerge out of this noisy encounter. The Cad becomes an

archetypal antagonist in the same way that HCE is an archetype of the migrant made good

wishing to stay out of trouble. The Cad merges first with the figure of ‘bullocky’ and then

Charles Gavan Duffy. Bullocky was the nickname of an Aboriginal Australian cricketer.

These relevant phrases from page 72–73 are included here:

That more than considerably unpleasant bullocky ... pegged a few glatt stones all of a size,

by way of final mocks for his grapes, at the wicket in support of his words’... ‘the

seriousness of what he might have done had he really polished off his terrible intentions

finally caused him to change the bawling’... ‘this backblocks boor bruskly put out his

langwedge and quite quit the paleologic scene, telling how by his selfdenying ordnance he

had left Hyland on the dissenting table...’ (72.25–73.03)

Bullocky, traditional name Bullchanach, was part of an Aboriginal cricket team which toured

England for six months in 1868. In the unsolicited visitor’s encounter with HCE, the Cad-

visitor-now-Bullocky is shown throwing stones from the gate and banging on the gate

(‘pegged a few glatt stones’, ‘at the wicket in support of his words’). Gladstone was the

British Prime Minister who attempted to institute the Home Rule Bill for the self-government

of Ireland in 1886, delivering a three hour parliamentary speech. Gladstone is an ambiguous

figure in this context of adversaries, as the original Gladstone was amenable to the

independence movement heralded by Irish leader, Parnell. That Bullocky ‘pegs a few stones’

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suggests he’s a militant independence supporter. Yet the ‘boor’, denoting South African

nationalist Afrikaaners, sticks out his tongue (his lang “ wedge) and gives up on throwing

stones in this ‘paleo-logic’ scene. It’s a caricature of politically getting one’s way, first

through violence and later, diplomacy.

The Cad then echoes the words of Charles Gavan Duffy, an Irishman who left Ireland for

Australia in this climate of nineteenth-century political resistance to Britain and said: ‘there is

no more hope for Ireland than for a corpse on the dissecting-table’. Duffy was a Dublin

luminary in politics, journalism and literature, who campaigned publicly for independence.

Duffy’s presence signals the reverse of that northward journey of Bullocky the cricketer.

Bullocky travelled north from Australia to the heart of the British Empire, and Duffy

travelled south from Ireland, preferring to remain in exile rather than for his personal and

political talents to be constrained by a repressive system (Parnaby, n.d.). Duffy’s detractors

criticised him for his prolonged exile in the same manner that Joyce experienced the

parochial suspicion extended from home to the expatriate, in an ironic anticipation of the so-

called ‘brain drain’ experienced in Australia when our intellectual exiles, such as Clive James

or Germaine Greer, refused to return home. When eventually the Cad-Bullocky-Duffy figure

of the unsolicited visitor leaves, part of his layered destination is ‘moonshiny gorge’ (73.21),

or Moonshine Gorge in the Western Australia’s Kimberley. The Cad turned Bullocky is off to

console himself with well-deserved spirits (moonshine).

The Encounter with the Cad and his variants, with its brief antipodean cameo appearances,

adds to the series of images of conflict. Joyce is parodying his own pacifism, but also using

the language of simultaneity to layer place upon place, indicating the common political or

conceptual problem in each situation. HCE is exhorted to come out and fight ‘to come outside

to Mockerloo out of that for the honour of Crumlin’ (73.06); Crumlin is an actual Dublin

district that sounds like a blend of Cromwell and Dublin that was transferred from the

ownership of the Vikings to Henry II upon the 1169-era Norman conquest of Ireland. The

question of nationalist honour is parodied in this brief phrase; we could be at Waterloo

(‘Mockerloo’) or on the streets of Dublin outside a pub. The vast global reach of the British

Empire in signalled in the references to Bullocky and Charles Gavan Duffy, both of whom

lobbed missiles at the English, whether cricket balls or criticism. Duffy was eventually

knighted for his services to the Commonwealth; based in Melbourne, he served as Victoria’s

state Premier and contributed greatly to Australia’s urban political culture. From radical

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Fenian to knight of the realm, Duffy’s career illustrates the challenges faced by pre-

independence Irish nationalists. Far more difficult was Bullocky’s career, cut short in 1869

by repressive Victorian laws that prohibited the freedom of movement for Aborigines. The

Aboriginal cricketer and the Irish nationalist partially suggest that HCE, hiding ‘behind

faminebuilt walls’ and suffering through these ‘siegings’ (73.24), embodies at first a non-

radical fence-sitter, but also one who is the target of Irish and other indigenous discontent;

there is a subtle difference between political indifference and collaboration, and HCE is a

border-crossing figure whose loyalties are constantly scrutinised.

At times heroic and at other times a betrayer, HCE provides Joyce with a global patriarch

whose experience of political and cultural upheaval in Ireland metonymically informs the

author’s depictions of similar upheaval the world over. The antipodes are threaded through

these difficulties, as shown in the examples above, to suggest the broad reach that the Wake’s

examples of flawed humanity bring to bear on the world beyond Ireland. The purpose of

observing HCE’s antipodean links in the above analyses is to establish a foundation for

discussion of the book’s other important figure, Shem. Shem’s perverse characterisation,

thoroughly discussed in the following chapter, will also reveal links with the antipodes

through imagery and the phrasing of Irish and southern hemisphere places.

As the Wake illustrates how the state of being antipodean is determined by more than just

literal, measurable spans of geography, the symbolic role of place must be considered in

conjunction with its material origins. An example occurs in the crowd scene of I.iii when

diverse Dubliners are asked for their opinion of HCE’s guilt over his crime in the park. A

pseudo-Australian, ‘Mr Danl Mgrath’, is introduced in the vox populi as a bookmaker

familiar to ‘Eastrailian poorusers of the Sydney Parade Ballotin’ (60.27). The Australian

persona merges with the Dublin train station (Sydney Parade), so that Australians from

Sydney on the eastern coast (‘Eastralian’) are together with their local newspaper (The

Bulletin) replaced in Ireland. Another reference is to an 1894 letter published in the Bulletin

which suggested the renaming of the east coast of Australia ‘Eastralia’ (McHugh, 1991,

p. 60). That letter appealed to Joyce’s own delight in wordplay while also hinting at the union

of differences and indeed opposites which his Wake language strives for: Australia’s name is

derived from its identification as a South Land (Terra Australia), which the Bulletin letter

writer wished to superimpose with an eastern identification. To reiterate the etymological

explanation given above, the meaning for ‘austr’ shifted from east to south in the move from

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Nordic/Germanic to Latin, a movement in concepts which reflects the fluctuating relation of

language to place. ‘East’ is etymologically derived from the proto-Germanic ‘austr’ for east,

echoed frequently in the Wake to define HCE’s continental/Nordic ‘ostman’ origins. A

Joycean approach to ‘Eastralia’ reads that imagined place as one and the same, both an ‘east’

and a ‘south’. The joke appears to be on the aspiring ‘Eastralian’ of 1894 who in asserting a

separate identity (eastern) is doubly evoking the ancient meaning, ‘southern’. Joyce’s

insistence on marrying difference through puns and layered wordplay reveals antipodal forces

in language so that contrasting ideas occupy the same lexical place. The Wake’s shattered and

rejoined structure of place through language makes room for Australia in his macrocosm of a

global Ireland.

Ireland is equally a site of departure and return, as the link between the book’s final chapter

(the ricorso) and the opening pages show. Despite the intentionally hazy mapping of place

through its obscuration in layered language, place is nevertheless weighted through the

figures of myth and narrative who people it. For example: ‘Sir Tristram, violer d’amores,

fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy

isthmus of Europe Minor’ (3.04–06). Tristan’s trans-oceanic travels are yet to occur, but there

is a prediction for Dublin’s infinite founding in other locations across the water, such as

‘Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper’ (3.08): Dublin will be

doubled by a city of its name in America. Despite the many east-west parallels which emerge

from Ireland’s European alignments in the text, the focus here has been mainly on the north-

south axis. The antipodes’ externally determined state of opposition makes the region a ripe

field for Joyce’s oppositional punning in the Wake.

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‘Either Hell or Australia’: The Antipodes and Chapter 4:

Perversity in Finnegans Wake

‘Always bottom sawyer’ (173.28): Shem’s Perverse Assignation in the 4.1

Antipodes

Antipodean places were associated with hell and the underworld in European literary

depictions of these newly encountered places. Everywhere is antipodal to somewhere, but

according to Clive Hart’s ‘hierarchy of worlds’ (Hart, 1962, p. 112), Ireland remains earthly

in Finnegans Wake while Australia and environs are relegated to a purgatorial and often

hellish status. Paul Arthur’s (2010) analysis of imaginary voyages in literature, such as Le

Foigny’s La Terre Australe Connue (1676), explains the heaven-hell binary of speculation

and representation of these ‘new worlds’:

If the new land was a heaven on earth, then the inhabitants were welcoming angels, and it

was right to enter, enjoy the fruits of that paradise ... but if the new land was a hell on earth,

the inhabitants were savages who were violent or moral lax and therefore needed to be

thwarted, tamed and civilised (Arthur, 2010, p. 46).

Shem is recurringly associated with the antipodes, due to his downward positioning in the

book’s syntactical and structural patterns, and due to what Epstein refers to as Shem’s

continual representation of the ‘lower half’—of the body, of moral systems and of global

space (Epstein, 2009, p. 73). Beckman admires Epstein’s thesis yet considers how the

top/bottom pattern may be restrictive to other formulations such as primary/secondary and

self/other (Beckman, 2007, pp. 526–527). From the top/bottom pattern of Shaun and Shem’s

ordering, I add the geographical and geopolitical relation of North and South as an idea

compatible with the self and other divide. Like the inhabitants of the new worlds, the Shem

figure provokes Shaun into formulating a ‘civilising’ response. Shem must be obstructed,

instructed and moulded into Shaun’s version of a man rather than a ‘sham’ (170.24). The

sceptical introduction to Shem in I.vii, queries his origins with the racially charged statement

that some ‘pretend that aboriginally (Shem) was of respectable stemming’ (169.2). The

Shaunesque narration of I.vii, pronounces Shem’s moral defectiveness. The derision of the

twin brother can be read analogously to the relationship between empire and outpost, as the

centre is constantly looking to replicate its own image in its satellite. Joyce’s resistance

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within the bounds of the imperial relationship was established in Ulysses when Dedalus

proclaimed the ‘cracked looking-glass of a servant’ as the ‘symbol of Irish art’ (Joyce, 1993,

pp. 6–7). The metaphorical weight of the mirror in the hands of a colonial subservient carried

through to Finnegans Wake, in which Joyce continued to use ‘parody, the mode par

excellence of colonial mimicry’ beyond the final pages of Ulysses (McGrath, 1999, p. 36).

These continuous parodies (those chapters of Ulysses which mimic and outperform their

inherited styles of ‘English’ literature’) remind us that Joyce has ‘rewritten the world form

the colonial margins as a hybrid, performative enunciation’ (McGrath, 1999, p. 36). The

purpose of these enunciations is to critique and deflate any authority that established itself

through brutal power at either end of the imperial or the nationalist, anti-colonial spectrum.

An instance of the deflated ambition of empire is echoed in the disappointment of those

explorers who ventured into antipodean territories. Joseph Banks, the botanist who sailed

with Captain James Cook to investigate Australia’s suitability for colonisation, had absorbed

the prejudices from William Dampier’s earlier accounts of Australia’s Nyoongar or West

Australian indigenous peoples: ‘we could scarce distinguish whether or not they were men’

(Arthur, 2010, p. 48). Accounts such as Dampier’s, and that of Joseph Banks who landed in

Australia with Cook in 1770, were profoundly suspicious of the indigenous inhabitants for

their dark skin, criticising the human and animals of Australia alike as the victims of a

wrathful god, or as Peter Conrad explains: ‘Such commentaries afflicted Australia with a

burden of original sin’ (Conrad, 2012). Genetic and bio-historical differences were viewed

negatively from a European, northern view of an inferior southland.

The association of moral ‘sin’ due to physical sub-normality is evident in Shaun’s description

of Shem, which outlines a ‘hybrid’ (169.09) and grotesque appearance, in a manner that

suggests the ancient myths of the inhabitants of undiscovered regions, including ‘a southern

people characterized by bizarre physical abnormalities’ (Arthur, 2010, p. 49). The interest for

Shaun is not only in Shem’s abnormality in his origins, appearance, voice and behaviour, but

also how to invoke the weight of authority—family, nation, religion and reputation—to

reverse that abnormality. This chapter observes that quest as it plays out in the twins’ various

incarnations. The attack on Shem in I.vii, is the starting point, with sections to follow on the

Chuff and ‘mime’, as well as the Ondt and the Gracehoper episodes. Throughout these

scenes, Shem is considered by his opponent to be damned, or at least in continuous

association with the forces of evil which manifest in hellish, and satanic spaces and images.

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Images of the antipodes reinforce these negative summations of Shem’s character, yet for

Shem himself, they ironically provide a source of escape and exile.

The present chapter is sympathetic to Clive Hart’s fascination with structure in Finnegans

Wake and explores the book’s textual mechanics by considering how place fares in ‘the

complex relation of part to part’ (Hart, 1962, p. 15). Specifically, the unexpected appearances

of the antipodes alert the reader to the book’s wide-ranging dimensions. My aims are to

explore how these parts enter into relation with the Irish and other places in the Wake, and

also to suggest how implications and significances of the antipodes aid our understanding of

the text. An important aspect of that significance was identified by Hart in the form of

Shem’s southern journeys: ‘Shaun follows an east-west trajectory, while Shem prefers to

travel north-south, passing through the antipodes’ (Hart, 1962, p. 113). The specificity of

these patterns is surprising given the Wake’s constantly fluctuating figuration of place. Hart

himself has reconsidered the ambition of his own critical stance on these structural aspects of

the Wake, declaring them to be largely drawn from his intuitive reading practices rather than

later genetic critical evidence (P. Chrisp, Email from <FWREAD> archive, November 26,

2012).229 Despite Hart’s ambivalence, his writing in Structure and Motif is one of few early

critical works to actively describe how the book’s human figures interact with places. My

present aim is to build on these identifications of place in the Wake in exploring the stages of

Shem’s southward travels and antipodes associations which I argue are closely associated

with Shem’s embodiment of perversity.

The Wake challenges readers’ notions of literalness and metaphor, and requires suspension of

disbelief when considering how Shem and his avatars may come to represent a kaleidoscopic

array of themes including those associated with perversity. Chen’s position on the non-Irish

places used in the text shows a less flexible approach to the characters’ mercurial mobility.

Chen considers Michael Seidel’s treatment of the geographical trajectories at the close of

Ulysses ‘awkward’, whereas I found Seidel’s mapping of Ulysses’ epic arcs an intriguing and

useful model for discussing place in Joyce’s late fiction (Seidel, 1976). Chen also asserts that

‘the axis Hart charts for Shem does not allow for Shem to be the author of the letter from

Boston’ (Chen, 1995). This reading by Chen has not allowed for diversions from plot-based

229 Chrisp cites evidence from Fritz Senn: ‘Clive Hart’s Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake took a much wider view, away from individual particles, and it was a big step forward. But I also know that Clive no longer believes in its results and would now throw about 95 per cent of it overboard’ (Senn & Murmoirs, 2007. p. 32).

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interpretations of the Wake. Chen also insists on the book’s departure from Joyce’s prior

realism as a foundation for readings of Joyce’s non-European geography. Yet to read the

Wake in a manner that permits it to range the full, multi-directional course of its elastic

geography is to accept the simultaneity with which its settings and events operate. Shem is in

Boston as well as the antipodes, because they are both parallel dimensions of the new world,

or the ‘New Ireland’ which Chen himself sought to explore. Clive Hart did not need to

specify between Shem’s peripatetic cycles, because they occurred simultaneously according

to Joyce’s ‘tootoological’ (468.08) (tautological) structure.

Marked by patterns of difference, resistance, waywardness and defiance, Shem’s misfit status

is heightened by his association with the geographical antipodes. The term ‘perversity’,

though closely associated with ‘perversion’, is not exclusively sexual, although Shem is often

linked with perceptions of deviance. In its broadest sense of behaviour and demeanour as

apposite, perversity in relation to Shem’s nature is a recurring and crucial part of the narrative

that filters through Shem’s avatars. Shem’s perversity is drawn primarily in contrast with his

twin brother Shaun’s tractable and amenable responses towards, and indeed upholding of

authority. Philip Kitcher refers to Shaun’s ‘confident stance as defender of civic virtue and

bourgeois order’, whereas, ‘Shem, like Stephen, will not serve’ (Kitcher, 2009, p. 22). The

twins’ contrasted responses to Catholicism, for instance, highlights what Geert Lernout

identified in Joyce’s sustained criticism of religion in the Wake: ‘The superficial religious

layer of the book in its first incarnation changed as soon as Joyce began to develop the

character of the two brothers Shem and Shaun’ (Lernout, 2010, p. 197). Shem’s willingness

to be associated with the world below—the perverse depths rejected by religion as leading

inevitably to Hell—is a curious yet persistent link between the antipodes’ geographical

allusions and the contrariness of Shem.

Shem and Shaun’s diametrically opposed understandings of truth are represented by their

proximity to the source of those truths. Shem’s recurring departures, absences and states of

exile represent a rejection of Shaun’s version of the truth, and his willingness to enter the

uncertain territory of the antipodes and other places where ‘unbelief’ may flourish is a solid

indication of Shem’s rejection of Shaun’s truths. Shaun may be the postman, often on the

move, yet he is following prescribed paths. It is Shem, the author of the letter and Dionysian

creator, whose imaginative pilgrimages in art are unpredictable. Beckman uses a global

image to demonstrate this opposition: ‘Shem and Shaun are opposite poles on which the

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world-book revolves’ (Beckman, 2007, p. 515). The earliest and continuing condescension

towards the antipodes was a fear of its geographical distance, and the vastness of that distance

is symbolic of the gap between truth and imagination. The regions of the antipodes entered

that gap, embodying the uncertain and often imaginative practices that arise when the truth of

a place cannot be immediately verified.236 The idea of truth is continually questioned and

played with in Finnegans Wake, and Shem’s evasion and delay through his antipodes exiles

add to this layering of resistance to doctrine, particularly as it is embodied as a singular truth

by the believing Shaun.

Truth is destabilised in the Wake and especially in relation to the antipodes and its perverse

implications. The phrase ‘dinkum oil’ (108.28), an Australian-favoured slang term meaning

‘the truth’ occurs in the Wake amid speculations about identity and authorship. Finding out

the ‘dinkum oil’ on who wrote the letter—the Wake’s mystery epistle—is a deliberate

provocation as truth remains elusive. The confusion pertains also to Shem’s role as artist, or

‘penman’. Maren Linett suggests that Shem’s role is akin to biblical authorship, as an author

of the Wake’s recurring ‘letter’, a motif that stands in for (among other things) scripture

(Linett, 2009). Shem may be a divinely inspired author; however, it is Shaun who delivers

‘the word’ in the form of the Gospel. Benjamin Roy’s scholarship on the Gospel texts in the

Wake builds on Linett’s view of the textual transfer that occurs between Shem and Shaun

(Roy, 2008). The Gospel texts became synonymous with ‘truth’, thus elevating Shaun’s

status over that of Shem. Although Linett’s focus remains on Shem’s Jewish guise, there is

clear sense of Shem as one marked by his adherence to a fundamentally different truth:

Shem as Jew marks a real history of erasure as the author of foundational aspects of western

culture: the Hebrew Bible had indeed been reinterpreted, reorganized, and revalued by

Christianity, which had relegated it to the subordinate status of Old Testament (Linett,

2009, p. 272).

The idea of the letter as a testament to the truth that is open to reinterpretation, as an old truth

made new, is reflected in the complementary relation between the twins. Shem’s

unwillingness to conform to Shaun’s supposedly respectable way of life results in a

geographical as well as cultural excision from society. Shem not only goes his own way, he

goes the wrong way.

236 These imaginative practices which entered into colonial and imperial documentation are explored in depth by Arthur (2010), Krahn (2002), Fausett (1993), and Cosgrove (1999).

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Shem went far further in exile than his creator, James Joyce. ‘Joyce throve on flurry’, wrote

Ellmann, describing the author’s aversion to stasis and intra-continental travels: ‘to be

dissatisfied by Rome is a grander destiny than to be dissatisfied by Trieste’ (Ellmann, 1959,

p. 224). The appeal of Rome as a city of exile rapidly diminished, yet the continent remained

preferable to the limited artistic freedoms available to Joyce in Ireland. Joyce’s flight is

memorably emulated by Shem: ‘He even ran away with hunself and became a farsoonerite,

saying he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with

Irrland’s split little pea’ (171.04–6). The comical political stance of ‘farsoonerite’ is notable

for the distance implicit in ‘far’, as Shem did not remain permanently in Europe, but is

associated also with ‘Soak Amerigas’ (171.35) among other far southern locations to be

discussed. The momentum of Shem’s rain-soaked ‘departure’ (174.22) is exacerbated by the

scene in which Shem is shown going the wrong way: instead of joining in the violent fray of

Ireland’s territorial battles, he hides at home. The events take place ‘on that surprisingly

bludgeony Unity Sunday’ (176.19) and we read the first of many descriptions of Shem’s

exiles: ‘the scut in a bad fit of pyjamas fled like a leveret for his bare lives, to Talviland’

(176.26). An escapee and shirker, the ‘scut’ Shem returns home and there remains, but why

the brief reference to ‘Talviland’—which uses the Finnish term for winter, ‘talvi’?

‘Winterland’ recalls Joyce’s fondness for Lewis Caroll’s imagined world, ‘Wonderland’.

Playing music on his piano and avoiding the chaos outside, Shem is presented as a pacifist

and artist who would prefer to remain in the Wonderland of his own home, ‘self exiled’

(184.06) from the war outside. It is evident that Shem’s exiles occur in various spatial forms.

He removes himself from society while remaining in his home nation, and then also travels

great distances as a geographical exile. In the context of my analysis of the Wake’s places, it

is largely evident that the society and place in which he is variously ensconced (as a recluse)

or exiled from, is Ireland. The mocking of Shem throughout section I.vii, stands as Joyce’s

retaliation against criticism of his own exile from Ireland, as the absurdity of the claims

against Shem becomes increasingly ridiculous.

The author of Ulysses was condemned as a ‘perverted lunatic’ in one memorable, negative

review of that book, and his perverse creation Shem absorbs those lasting blows. (McHugh,

1991, p. 192) The criticism expands specifically on Shem’s perverted nature with phrases

such as ‘the noxious pervert’s perfect lowness’ (174.35–36). Linett persuasively argues how

those Shem-condemning phrases about writing (‘The lowquacity of him! ... The last word in

stolentelling!’, 424.34–35) are ‘sites where Joyce explores his reputation and, more

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meaningfully, his own worth as a writer’ (Linett, 2009, p. 265). Joyce’s self-identifying as a

writer willing to encounter and expose his demons had been a persistent theme in his personal

correspondence, evident in a limerick written to Ezra Pound after the publication of A

Portrait. The limerick hints towards the self-satire with which Shem would be presented in

the Wake:

There once was a lounger named Stephen

Whose youth was most odd and uneven.

He throve on the smell

Of a horrible hell

That a hottentot wouldn’t believe in (Ellmann, 1959, p. 414).

The alliterative images of ‘hell’ and the African ‘hottentot’ (known correctly by the tribal

name Khoikhoi) carry a droll humour, placing Stephen below the Africans in a crude

hierarchy (Mokhtar, 1981, p. 640). Shem-as-Joyce has clear origins in Stephen-as-Joyce, and

even though both are ironic poses, the Wake incarnation is far more a celebratory caricature

of an individual’s perversity than the earlier, more earnest autobiography. The limerick is

significant for its comical portrayal of the persistent influence of Catholic doctrine in Joyce’s

imagination, and how he perversely ‘throve’ on those images, not to mention the visceral

‘smell’ of everything that those on the right path considered ‘horrible’. In this self-satirising

cameo, Joyce relies on the stereotypes of primitivism to increase the hyperbolic portrait of his

perversity.

To endure the relentless taunts of ‘lowness’, especially those from Shaun, Shem enacts

various strategies from the silence, exile and cunning survival manual prescribed by Stephen

Dedalus. Shem finds an uneasy refuge far away in the antipodes and elsewhere. While his

state of exile is not always linked specifically with the regions of the antipodes, those regions

are nevertheless a major part of his continuing contrariness and his desire for escape from the

paths adhered to faithfully, in Ireland, by Shaun. Shem and Shaun’s opposed beliefs and

actions are not always presented in personal confrontations, as their differences are also

explored through proxy pairings such as the Ondt and Gracehoper; like other Wake figures,

the differences between the twin brothers is expressed through letters and correspondence.

The mysterious letter is symbolic for the Wake itself but also operates on less elevated levels

as instances of correspondence between those in the old and new worlds: Ireland and

America, and Ireland and Australia (Epstein, 2009, p. 53).

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whereabouts exactly at present in Siam, Hell or Tophet under that glorisol which plays

touraloup with us in this Aludin’s Cove of our cagacity is that bright soandsuch to slip us

the dinkum oil? (108.25–28)

The antipodes are threaded through the Wake’s tapestry of place, although those places are

not always the glorious destination that the warmth of the ‘glorisol’ would have us believe.

The heat, in fact, is overwhelmingly hellish as the antipodes are linguistically associated with

hell and the underworld, as the search in ‘Siam, Hell or Tophet’ above suggests. The

unfortunate Siam in this trio apparently leads directly on to Hell and Tophet, and this

geographical inclusion of South-East Asia’s only non-colonised sovereign nation forms the

first phonetic part of ‘Shem, Ham and Japheth’ (the three sons of Noah.) This linking of

Shem with hell, Asia and the underworld is a major aspect of the perversity associated with

the antipodes in Finnegans Wake. The racial, spatial and narrative implications of the

antipodes in the book, from this phrase alone expose their role as a place of mythic, aesthetic

and political uncertainty. The term ‘antipodes’ suggests a broad, paradigmatic opposition

which Joyce capitalised on for his frequent juxtapositions in the Wake, further reflecting the

plastic, metaphorical way in which Ireland is contrastingly posed as an ‘antipodes’ within the

northern hemisphere.

Shem is an occasionally distasteful but always intriguing figure, in all of his roles including

his primary roles as the rebellious twin brother of moralist Shaun and his frequent encoding

as Joyce’s caricature. Yet instead of casting Shem as simply a writer, Shem is a forger—a

criminal prone to subterfuge who uses his learning and penmanship for nefarious ends. Shem

is fortunately a less violent figure than Farrington, the main character and copyist in the story

‘Counterparts from Joyce’s Dubliners. Farrington felt trapped by the routine of his workaday

life, with the implication that one futile day would copy itself again and again into the future.

Shem’s copying is of a different order: we aren’t always sure if the charge of forgery is

purely Shaun’s spite at work. A greater correlation exists between Shem and Stephen

Dedalus. Kitcher sees a clear link between the credo of Dedalus and the craftiness of Shem in

‘forgery’. Dedalus aimed to shape and raise the consciousness of himself and his race, a hope

stated in the declaration ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul’ from A Portrait’s ambitious

conclusion (Joyce, 1964, p. 253). Kitcher sees this in terms of art and also of identity for

Shem: ‘Conscience and consciousness are not to be borrowed, but forged—forged, but not a

forgery. Shem is dedicated to the work of self-forging. He is resolved not to be a sham’

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(Kitcher, 2009, p. 34). Whether or not the reader adopts Kitcher’s wholly sympathetic reader

of Shem, this pertinent illumination of the term ‘forger’ does highlight Shem’s rejection of

the ‘sham’ indictment. Joyce’s self-satire as a forger in Shem also implicates his accusers,

which alerts us to another fictional outcast whose crimes of forgery were exaggerated.

Dickens’ Micawber in David Copperfield is another well-known antipodes-bound emigrant,

one whose reputation was sabotaged by Uriah Heep, in whom the true crimes of forgery were

ultimately discovered (Henderson, 2007). Micawber’s redemption from doubt and his

southward journey to a better life from England to Australia is celebrated briefly in the Wake.

The lengthy ‘quiz’ question about HCE/Finn McCool (in I.vi) assembles a myriad of phrases

to illuminate the nature of the patriarch. Like Micawber, whose optimistic motto was

‘something will turn up’, the HCE archetype was similarly idealistic: ‘till he was buried how

happy was he and he made the welkins ring with Up Micawber!’ (131.06). Micawber also

rings reminiscently of the Australian slang term for ‘friend’—‘cobber’—that Joyce uses

elsewhere in the Wake. ‘Micawber’—or ‘me cobber’—adds to the positive depiction of

Micawber. Ireland’s patriarch Finn McCool is also depicted as an optimist, especially

towards the fate of those bound for the far south.

Shem’s lampooning begins with his introduction in I.vii, such that even though ‘aboriginally

he was of respectable stemming’ (169.02), Shem’s ‘lowness’ and distasteful nature are

compounded by unrelenting examples of his bad taste. As with other hyperbolic descriptions

in the Wake, the insistent voice of condemnation becomes farcical. The choice of the word

‘aboriginally’ evokes the narrator’s pseudo-scientific taxonomy of Shem’s attributes, as well

as an anthropologist’s interest in origins. Shem also plays Joyce in the author’s relentless

autobiographical depiction. Ellmann cites Adeline Glasheen’s ‘census’ of the Wake to note

the models for the twins:

… two feeble-minded hangers-on, James and John Ford, who lived in Dublin on the North

Strand. They were known as ‘Shem and Shaun’, and were famous for their

incomprehensible speech and shuffling gait ...he had in mind also Jim the Penman, a play

about a forger by Sir Charles Young Shem, and Sean the Post, a character in Boucicault’s

Arrah-na-Pogue. From these Shem and Shaun easily are dilated into old Nick and Saint

Mick (Michael), and into other forms of the miscreant and the censor, the artist and his

often hypocritical critic (Ellmann, 1959, p. 550).

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The self-portrait in Shem reflects Joyce’s self-perception as the paradoxically celebrated

outcast. Famous for his apostasy and criticised for degeneracy with the publication of

Ulysses, Joyce’s prolonged exile from Ireland is mirrored in Shem’s frequent absences as

well as his exaggerated revolting characteristics. Shem as the refugee of conscience from

Ireland in pursuit of his artistic freedoms inspires a range of motifs in Finnegans Wake

associated with his staged ‘wrongness’, one of those being his telegrams. As a writer, Shem is

ironically ‘excommunicated’ (181.35), and his communications from abroad are discussed

here to explore how his perversity fares in exile. The striking attributes of Shem as betrayer,

degenerate and apostate are inevitably bound up in the important of home and exile, and these

ideas stage a representative saga of the significance of Ireland and the antipodes among the

Wake’s places.

Shem’s attribute as a betrayer is an ambiguous characterisation of Joyce’s own perceived

neutrality or indifference towards Irish independence. It is worth exploring the negative

aspersions cast on Shem’s forgery, as well as the positive implications of forging as art as

affirmed by Kitcher. Shem’s brand as a forger rather than a literary author is Joyce’s comic

redressing of his critics through the exaggerated repudiation of the visceral, sensual content

which made his earlier books so controversial. Add to this Shem’s perceived cowardice,

which is introduced even before his forgery, his ‘shamiana’ (182.01). Shem’s reiterated

loathsomeness is increased by the charge of cowardliness which is derived from his

indifference towards war and politics (rather than any blatant sabotage). Through his inaction,

Shem’s status is even further reduced, his lowness exacerbated. The aforementioned

clamorous scene which depicts Shem hiding at home in his bed while violent clashes occur

outside is understood to be symbolic both of the First World War, the Easter Rising and

Ireland’s civil war (pages 176–177). In accordance, however, with Joyce’s perpetual union of

opposites in Finnegans Wake, Shem is made deliberately likeable against the backdrop of his

many repulsive physical qualities.

Endowed with unique gifts, literary, moral and imaginative, Shem is too often positioned

humorously to be truly disdained. These admirable powers are clearly Joyce’s defence of his

own literary achievements despite the popular rejection of his work through censorship and

clerical condemnation, and they are also evidence of the ambiguity of each ‘persona’ in the

Wake. Despite the charge of cowardice, Shem is bold in confrontations with his brother (as

can be seen in the dialogue between ‘Justius’ and ‘Mercius’). Shem is simultaneously a figure

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of fun—‘joky’ (169.01)—and also puzzlement as he is a ‘hybrid’ (169.10). Shem is derided

for his cheap and tasteless ways, but he rarely, if ever, becomes violent in his Shem persona.

It is in his guise as Buckley/Butt in Butt and Taff’s (Shem and Shaun’s) retelling of the

shooting of the Russian General (II.iii) that an act of violence is indirectly attributed to Shem.

Rather than perpetrating violence, Shem is on the receiving end of threats, evident of the

aggressive upheaval he later evades through exile. On exiting his home, Shem ‘found himself

(hic sunt lennones!) at pointblank range blinking down the barrel of an irregular revolver’

(179.02–3). As with most encounters between antagonists in the Wake, meaning is overtly

metaphorical, even when the literal encounter is brimming with the sight gags of

juxtaposition: in this instance, the gun against Shem’s swollen red nose. ‘Hic Sunt Lennones’

is a witty stab at Michael Lennon, a judge and former friend of the Joyce family (Ellmann,

1959, p. 642). Joyce was upset by a negatively slanted article Lennon wrote for Catholic

World, and replaced the judge’s name in the medieval phrase found on maps, ‘Hic Sunt

Leones’—here be lions. The phrase was used to mark unknown parts of the world on maps, in

the same way that ‘Hic Sunt Dracones’ (here be dragons) was intended to show not only

unknown, but life-threatening places. Just as Shem is held at gunpoint by his local

interlocutors, so too did Joyce find himself targeted by detractors especially those who

remained in Ireland.

Although Shem is established as abject and victimised, rather than violent, a further violent

parallel is worth considering, as it concerns the motif of crime in the park, and the biblical

twin brothers, Cain and Abel. The two brothers involved in violent crime are James and Peter

Carey, who Bloom in Ulysses recalls were members of the Irish Invincibles, a group

responsible for the Phoenix Park Murders in 1882. James Carey, one of three knife-wielding

assassins, gave up his accomplices to the British and fled for South Africa, and was himself

killed by an Irish American Fenian on board ship. His death celebrated as the just end for a

‘hypocrite and a cunning coward’ (Fairhall, p. 13), James Carey’s reputation illustrates the

extremities to which passions and opinion ran among Irish nationalists of all affiliations

towards the end of the nineteenth century, but more importantly, how quickly those opinions

could overturn, reverting to their opposite.

The incident and subsequent scandal is noteworthy for the importance of place in the Wake,

as Phoenix Park is frequently coloured with Edenic qualities as the site for humanity’s

creation and also fall. HCE is not the only perpetrator of crime in the park, as Shem and

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Shaun are associated with the two of the three soldiers who are witness to HCE’s

transgression. In concert with these continuing parallels, Shem and Shaun take on the grim

conflict of both Cain and Abel, and the Carey brothers, yet the violent overtone is sublimated

with comedy. Shaun’s violence against Shem is character assassination rather than actual

violence, yet his target is not an innocent candidate for his vitriol. As with the mock-heroic

portraits of Bloom as King in the Circe chapter of Ulysses, Shem glorifies in images of

himself as a great scholar with a string of letters after his name (179.22), a great lover

(180.01) and singer (180.08). These delusions are simultaneously discredited as Shem is ‘a

drug and drunkery addict’ grown ‘megalomane of a loose past’ (179.20–1). Shem’s own

memory betrays itself as the depths of his depravity are elucidated. Epstein suggests that

Shaun is addressing Shem directly, with the opening moments of the chapter serving as ‘a

long stream of invective directed by Shaun at his embarrassing, recalcitrant, and ironic

brother, Shem’ (Epstein, 2009, p. 82). Irony is a key indication of the perversity of Shem,

whose ‘diabolical roots’ link Shem with ‘the spirit of the Pit’, and this is before he takes on

the role of Nick the Devil in the episode ‘The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies’ (Wake

episode II.i). Epstein reminds us how effectively Shem is associated with the ‘lower half of

the world’ and the bottom half of the human body: ‘Shem is constantly ‘rising up’ from

‘Down Under’, either Hell or Australia’ (Epstein, 2009, p. 85). The reference to Shem as

‘always bottom sawyer’ (173.28) contains a perverse double entendre: the literal image of the

saw-wielder positioned below in a pit (as opposed to the top-sawyer above ground) refers

also to homosexuality (those who see bottoms—‘bottom saw-yer’.) The antipodes, linked so

viscerally with Shem, represent the unthinkable and the untouchable, places which suggest

the traveller has gone ‘the wrong way’—down instead of up.

‘O! the lowness of him was beneath all up to that sunk to!’: On Shem’s 4.2

Sinking and Stinking

Joyce’s caricature of himself as Shem the betrayer expands beyond the satire of his perceived

political indifference. Joyce’s confessional, revealing literature is embedded in Shem’s litany

of tasteless and depraved acts, which culminate in the extraordinary scene of his ‘black mass’

(185.13–26). In the momentum towards that much-discussed scene in which Shem produces

writing materials from him own excrement, the nature of Shem’s betrayal is made apparent.

Ulysses is referred to abjectly as worthless and obscene—‘the usylessly unreadable Blue

Book of Eccles’ (179.27), so that the megalomania of Shem is reduced from his self-image as

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a scholar, lover and singer to ‘lowdown blackguardism’ (180.32). Joyce’s literary works are

mocked as ‘piously forged palimpsests’, and Shem himself is a ‘pelagiarist’ (182.03),

although the real act of betrayal seems not to be simply Joyce’s imitation of the many styles

in Ulysses, but the book’s confessional, exposing qualities encoded in Shem’s having written

‘nameless shamelessness about everybody ever he met’ (182.14). To have depicted Dublin

life in the raw, drawing characters and conditions so faithfully in Dubliners and Ulysses,

appears to be the real crime at the heart of Shem-as-Joyce’s betrayal.

Shem’s ‘black mass’ draws significant commentary in Wake explication (Bishop, 1993, p.

249; Epstein, 2009, p. 88; Heumann, 2001), but I only focus briefly on the graphic scene to

reiterate the notion that Shem’s apostasy and degeneracy are interlinked. As with the

accusations of betrayal and exposure represented by charges of forgery, the offensive

extremes of the black mass provide metaphorical references to the criticisms of Joyce’s

beliefs and actions. An amusing pun I referred to earlier shows Shem as the

‘excommunicated Drumcondriac’ (181.35), with the pun on his persistent apostasy

represented as a kind of self-deluding sickness (hypochondriac.) Yet the pun necessarily

involves Dublin (its suburbs), so that Shem’s ‘excommunication’ is also a geographical exile.

There is no doubt by the end of his mass why the Shem figure is despised by his Catholic

critics. Shem is cast as a devil figure based on his ‘Satan’s’ nature, one which is prompted to

extremes, in order to achieve its own perverse will. In a remarkably Sade-like description,

Shem finds a vulgar way around those who repress his writing, those publishers and their

lawyers, and soon after, the ‘pastor’ (185.04). Denied candles for light and paper, Shem is

driven not only into exile but also to manufacture his own materials from his own bodily

output. The malodorous literality of Shem’s self-production ascribes a distinct whiff to the

history of Joyce’s resistance to the boycotting of his published works.

In the backlash following their publication, Joyce’s works might have caused him notoriety

among an appreciative trans-Atlantic literati, yet they were equally guilty of causing

embarrassment in the Edwardian age of prim repression, and to Ireland, a country and its

inhabitants already shamed by its inferior, colonial status (Bishop, 2003). There is another

colonial reference in ‘Broken Hill stranded estate’ (182.24), the Australian-based mining

corporation which appears in this anti-Shem portrait. Added to the sense of Shem’s laziness

based on the desire for a passively drawn, aristocratic ‘jucal inkome’, the substitution of

‘stranded estate’ for ‘landed estate’ implies rootlessness (182.23–8). The mix of Greek,

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Dutch and Italian references in this passage further implicates Shem’s ‘stranded’ life in

Europe, counterbalanced by inspiration for his writing (‘inkome’) from the nether regions and

underworld—Broken Hill. Shem’s lowness is also a betrayal of his father’s legacy as the

‘Hill of Howth’, as he represents a ‘broken’ and lesser version of HCE’s impressive

embodiment of the landscape (‘Dublin’s Eight Wonderful Wonder’, 71.14.) Shem’s

geographical flexibility, his ability to distance himself from Ireland, appears to have

emboldened his pen to write about what and whom he has left behind, a failing that is seized

upon by Shaun.

Abandonment of Ireland is a recurring element in Shaun’s criticism. Intermeshed with

Joyce/Shem’s gross act of exposing the intimate lives of his characters in his works, there is

the additional charge that Shem has not only transgressed, but also then absconded. Shem

becomes emblematic of various despised figures, inciting a paradoxical envy, such as those

liberated by their art and imagination (the ‘slow fires of consciousness’ 186.04) and those

who evade the partisan pressure of politics (‘your true colours’ 187.33). In the build-up

towards the Justius/Mercius dialogue—the final confrontational encounter in I.vii between

the twins in the guise of a judge and a defendant—Shem and Shaun are further divided along

racial lines. Their contrast as an Aryan official (Shaun is a constable of the ‘Kruis-Kroon-

Kraal’, 186.19) and a ‘coon’ (187.12) brings the fraternal conflict uncomfortably into the

racial power imbalances of many societies, including those represented in the antipodes. The

South African spin on the Ku Klux Klan seen in the ‘Kraal’ indicates the extent of Joyce’s

satire, as the status of the brothers is shown briefly as that of the ‘the blond cop’ and his

‘dark’ suspect. The ‘dark’ and ‘dog’ insults are fused with this homophonic paraphrasing of

the Danish for ‘How are you today, my dark sir?’ in the phrase: ‘Where ladies have they that

a dog meansort herring?’ (186.32). Shem’s dancing around the questioner, his mobility and

mercurial evasions are embodied in his movements which are ‘like a prance of findingos’

(186.35–187.35), or like a pack of dingoes. This animalistic depiction is at first playful, but

later, during the Justius castigation, becomes more sinister as Shem/Mercius is called ‘sniffer

of carrion’ (189.28)

Shem’s descent in Shaun’s esteem continues, and a geographical plummeting accompanies

the mounting tirade of Justius that was anticipated by the desert-dwelling Australian dingoes.

Among Shem’s crime is that of an Australian—‘the reducing of records to ashes’ (189.35)—a

reference to the satirical ‘death’ of British cricket at the hands of the Australian cricket team

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(resulting in The Ashes series which commenced in 1882, the year of Joyce’s birth) (Briggs,

2009). Just as the colonial team reclaimed and reinvented a British custom, so too did Joyce,

in the guise of Shem, reclaim English and reinvent it, even if that artistic elevation is seen as

a lowering, a ‘reduction’.

As episode I.vii gains momentum, Justius (Shaun) castigates Mercius (Shem) as if from the

bench in a court room although a priestly tone is swiftly assumed as the former becomes a

confessor to the latter. Justius refers to the ‘hesitensies’ he overcomes in confronting Shem,

an overt allusion to the misspellings in the forged letters of Pigott published in The Times in

1887 which aimed to bring down Parnell. With the accusations of forgery thus linked with

one of the more outrageous incidents of deception in Irish public life, and in living memory,

Joyce’s self-portrait in Shem as a perpetrator of betrayal is stretched to such an extreme

dimension as to appear distorted. That distortion encompasses Shem’s distance from Ireland

which is interlinked with indifference. Kitcher focused on the faults raised by Justius/Shaun:

‘Shem, he claims, is a denier, one who abandons, mutilates, desecrates, and destroys his past,

his traditions, his country and his family’ (Kitcher, 2009, p. 38). In Shaun’s view, Shem

delights in the results of his dark and diabolical writing to the extent that art becomes

privileged over place and all the things associated with the stability of place—home and

nation. ‘And dabal take dabnal!’ (186.09)—this exclamation attributed to Shem reveals a

preference for the art produced from his ‘squidself’ (186.06), in his continuing demonic

treatment of Dublin, over safeguarding its reputation.

To encounter the multiplicity of place in the Wake and how Shem is associated with the

antipodes in that profusion of layering, we can look at the example of a structure—Shem’s

House. More of a hovel, the structure is both a metaphor and a fictive house which can be

considered as an instance of what geographer Benno Werlen calls action-oriented social

geography (Werlen, 1993). In this social geography that binds people with places, meaning is

attributed to the indifferent materiality of space. As natural and built places are infused with

the significance of their wider social meaning, the sense of belonging is increased on this

‘symbolic plane of social communication’ (Werlen, 1993, p. 175). Werlen cites the example

of houses bestowed with a proper name, which gives residents a feeling of their own and their

domicile’s individuality. Shem’s house, crammed with hoarded mementos, is called The

Haunted Inkbottle, a place that readers return to as a fixed point in between Shem’s far-flung

exiles. The address of the house, ‘no number Brimstone Walk, Asia in Ireland’ (182.31),

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highlights the strangeness that denotes Shem—he is an artist, an outsider—and also suggests

the layering of place and the concentric mapping of the local with the regional: somewhere is

always upon or in somewhere else: ‘Asia in Ireland’. The name of the house, Haunted

Inkbottle, helps focus on Shem’s individuality between the chapters in which he morphs into

other avatars.

There is a clue about his far southern travels inside the house, stashed away together with his

collection of women’s garters and other detritus. Among the mementos are ‘kisses from the

antipodes’ (183.31). Unlike the cluttered debris in Shem’s house, the kisses are tangible in

that they are memories of sounds—phonetic upon recall and kinetic when pronounced, yet

unfixed in language.

Like the ‘once current puns’, ‘quashed quotatoes’ and ‘messes of mottage’ also found in this

extensive list (pages 183–184 inclusive), those ‘kisses’ are evidence of language rather than

language itself. The airily innocent ‘kisses from the antipodes’ are elusive ‘x’s marking the

spots where the antipodes meet Finnegans Wake: on sea, on land and on paper. The ‘kisses

from the antipodes’ are telegrams and letters, yet in the telegram motifs scattered through the

book, the telegrams are sent from Australia by Shem and received by Shaun, an insight

provided by Clive Hart, the only critic to date to have published extended criticism on

Shem’s Australian adventures (Hart, 1962). The kisses resemble the ‘four crosskisses’

(111.17) marked on the The Letter identified in I.v, and their metonymic function of intimacy

across vast distances is poignant in considering how permanent that distance once was for

emigrants from Ireland. Whether sent from the antipodes or from ‘Boston (Mass.)’ (111.09),

these annotated kisses allow the traveller to commit themselves to paper, rather than to any

fixed place.

Logical explanations around these disembodied kisses may prevail in a different way: as one

thing in the Wake is never simply itself, the Haunted Inkbottle structure is also Shem the

writer-artist’s house, and a caricature of the author James Joyce’s head (one black curtain

represents the author’s eye-patch, for instance; and the extensive mounds of detritus represent

the unrelenting details which feed his creative work). The morass of mementos within the

‘House’ is just another midden in the Wake’s great archaeology. In this light, those ‘kisses

from the antipodes’ could represent Joyce’s letters from his sister, Margaret Joyce, who

entered a convent in Greymouth, New Zealand, in 1909. Correspondence between a sensible,

career-focused cleric and their wayward, artist sibling is a relationship echoed in the Shem-

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Shaun relationship, although one that is frequently said to resemble Joyce’s connection with

his brother Stanislaus rather than his sister Margaret (Ellmann, ‘Introduction’, Joyce, 1958,

p. xx). Biographical readings aside, a more useful discussion of how these ‘kisses from the

antipodes’ figure in the layered places in the Wake is derived from Bernard Westphal’s

description of literature’s interaction with material place. Westphal insists that fiction ‘does

not reproduce the real, but actualises new virtualities’ (Prieto, 2011(a), p. 20). He also adds

that ‘fiction detects possibilities buried in the folds of the real’ (Prieto, 2011(a), p. 21), a

phrase that resonates with my study of the antipodes in the Wake, images which have

remained largely confined to the folded creases of maps; and in the case of Shaun and Shem’s

correspondence, the antipodes are buried in the folds of letters and telegrams.

The telegram which depicts the difficult fraternal relationship is enmeshed in the motifs of

Shem’s falling—out of favour, and into debt. Unlike other desperados, Shem is not ‘true to

type’ (172.18) with that pun on his faithfulness to reality in his writing another clue as to his

perversity; Shem will not kill himself or fall ill. ‘With the foreign devil’s leave the fraid born

fraud diddled even death’ (172.20–21), complains Shaun, emphasising the diabolical streak in

Shem’s contrary ways. The telegram reflects Shem’s absences and impoverishment:

‘cabled...from his Nearopoblican asylum to his jonathan for a brother: Here tokay, gone

tomoroy, we’re spluched, do something, Fireless. And had answer: Inconvenient, David.’

(172.22–26). Shem’s place of asylum is unsurprisingly near a pub, but also, possibly, ‘new

republican’, suggesting that Shem’s foreign destinations are proving liberating if not

enriching. The space in which Shem the ‘Low Swine’ may be encountered is on one’s

‘gullible’s travels’ (173.03). These regions are Gulliverian, with the distortions of

Wonderland, as Shem has entered unknown and threatening territory, a fitting environment of

perversity where everything is shaped and sized the wrong way. Shem’s depiction as an ‘Irish

emigrant the wrong way out’ (190.36) can be variously interpreted, yet it seems on one level

to suggest that Shem has departed Ireland for the wrong reasons, as he has left by choice to

become a global citizen rather than left by force or economic hardship. Shem’s promiscuous

relation to space places him nowhere and everywhere, to become a ‘Europasianised

Afferyank!’ (191.04). The implied criticism in Shaun’s exclamation explicitly derides Shem’s

hybridism (Mays, 1998; Wollaeger, 2008).

The climax of the Shaun/Justius speech in I.vii condemns Shem to madness, although the

hastening of Justius’ pronouncement is met by a defence from Mercius (Shem) whose

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retaliation, although impressive, does not disavow entirely the charges of perversity.

Paradoxically, it is to Shaun that the few antipodes-derived images are given, perhaps in

order to communicate with Shem to guarantee that he will be believed. Shaun/Justius hurries

Shem towards the upheld mirror: ‘Iggri, I say, the booseleers!’ (193.17). This Arabic word

for ‘quickly’ (iggri) was transferred by Australian soldiers to name a road, Iggri Corner at

Bullecourt on the battle front in France (Bean, 1933, p. 428). Fusiliers, possibly Irish solders

fighting on behalf of Britain, are merged with Australian soldiers to become ‘booseleers’, a

doubtful source for Shaun’s ‘secret’. The first syllable of Bullecourt may connect with ‘bull-

roarer’, which is a prehistoric whirling instrument that appeared in many tribal cultures –

amazingly enough at polar ends of the earth in both Ireland’s druidic and Austrlia’s

indigenous peoples. The bull-roarer (a spinning wooden board attached to a spinning cord)

will be discussed again below as it pertains to the aural manifeestations of the antipodes in

Finnegans Wake. The currently-discussed ‘bull-roarer’ may have occurred to Joyce, as an

Aboriginal Australian curse is used by Shaun to on Shem. ‘He points the deathbone and the

quick are still’ (193.29). To point the bone is among the deadliest of concepts in Australian

indigenous law, and the bone is wielded by a ritual executioner. The Shem response is a

playful reversal typical of the Wake in which he raises a ‘lifewand’ (195.05), a kind of cosmic

conductor’s baton that waves the sounds of his artistry into being. Joyce has obeyed the

Brunovian impetus to obliterate oppositions through their resolution, and we can view

Shem’s self-defence with amusement and wonder because, as Kitcher reminds us of Shem’s

usual habits: ‘He extricates himself from difficult situations by leaving, running way, keeping

out of sight and slinking into whatever cover he can find’ (Kitcher, 2009, p. 35). To this

charge, Shem admits freely that remains perversely out of sight—‘an unseen blusher in an

obscene coalhole’ (194.18) and out of earshot—underground: ‘dweller in the

downandoutermost where voice only of the dead may come’ (194.19). The latter position

perpetuates the image of Shem’s dark connections with the underworld, as his ear is

perversely attuned to the ghosts of memory and the diabolical reaches of the beliefs opposed

by Shaun.

‘Djowl, uphere!’ (222.31): Devilish Shem is Summoned from 4.3

Antipodean Depths

Shem’s alignment with all things infernal is reiterated in his avatar role as Glugg (who plays

the part of ‘Nick’) in the film-play of the children’s game in episode II.i of Finnegans Wake

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(known as ‘The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies’). Discussed in more detail below, it is

worth noting the continuing verticality of the scale on which Shem’s characterisation is

stretched. Conjured by the make-believe of the Mime, Shem as Glugg is summoned: ‘Djowl,

uphere!’ (222.31). The anagram of ‘low’ (in ‘owl’) infused with the respelling of ‘diabhal’

indicates the ‘low’ presence of Shem, and the performative command of the exorcist or

conjurer (‘Devil, appear!’) refers to the depths from which Shem is being drawn to appear ‘up

here’. In the subsequent analysis, Shem’s associations with the antipodes focus on his

diabolical qualities and the lower or downward thrust of his status in contrast with Shaun.

The fused oppositions of Finnegans Wake suggest that the antipodes play a potentially

Edenic as well as infernal role. Although Shem’s hideout might be deviant and arse-like in its

underground position, the sounds of the antipodes suggest something more vast and echoing.

Australia’s vastness is superimposed on Africa, for instance, with the Kangaroo buried under

colonial African bureaucracy as a ‘congorool’ (165.21). The context of that phrase is to

indicate how Shem and Shaun encounter the archetypal female—the ‘Marge’ to the Butter

and Cheese of the two brothers (Caseous and Burrus). The apex of the ‘climactogram’

(165.23) suggests the brothers’ origins in the triangle of their mother’s generative organs, a

geometric theme that is more explicitly depicted in the diagram of page 293 during the

geometry lesson in section II.ii of the Wake. What is striking about the momentum in

geometrical narration is the earlier portrait of ‘Margareen’, an archetypal female endowed

with ‘the bush soul of females’ (165.18). This phrase evokes both the Australian bush and

certain African beliefs about external depictions of the human soul. The African elements are

increased by the inclusion of the fragment ‘zulu’, and the Australian elements confirmed by

the marsupial images of ‘wallopy’ (wallaby) and ‘congorool’ (kangaroo). As this description

of the triangle hints at the common maternal origin of the two brothers, it is interesting that

the female aspect of the triangle should incorporate both continents, Africa and Australia.

The animal life of Australia, although subsumed within the African colonial realms of the

British Empire, signals a lively contrast with the dark and threatening realm of the

‘deathbone’ (193.29). The modernist portrait shows ‘changes of mind’—a derogatory charge

perhaps of indecisiveness in women, but one that also reflects the Cubist methods of

portraiture and those experimenting with abstraction in art such as Wyndham Lewis. For both

these styles, the viewer is encouraged to complete the picture of that ‘bush soul’ by ‘the

mental addition’ of the wallaby or kangaroo tail. The outrageously new and experimental

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forms of art are complete only with the superimposed and imaginary details from the new

world (Loss, 1993).

Turning now to episode II.i (‘The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies’), there are some

hints as to Shem’s expansive association with far southern places and with those, his image of

perversity and literal waywardness in his brother’s view. This episode is a drama played out

by the Wake’s characters in which Shem’s role is to play Glugg, the devil figure linked with

Nick. As Glug in ‘The Mime’, Shem’s trajectory is again downward. Restless and lustful,

‘the duvlin sulph was in Glugger’ (222.25), as his perverse ways are conveyed through a

strong association with hell and the damned. Joyce’s puns derived from New Testament texts,

Matthew and Corinthians, subvert their messages. From Matthew’s promise of ‘everlasting

life’, Shem-Glugg is reduced to ‘overlusting fear’; the Corinthians instruction to acts of

‘hope, faith and charity’ are transmuted to ‘feet, hoof and jarrety’ (225.222.03–31). Thomas

McGreevy’s 1929 essay on the Catholic aspects of Joyce’s Work in Progress declares the

fatalistic attitude of Irish Catholics, suggesting they admit that ‘devilry exists’ (McGreevy,

1929). Joyce’s close engagement with Catholic doctrine, and all the acts and ideas which

challenge that doctrine in his work prior to the Wake led one English critic to claim in a Joyce

‘a great Jesuit-trained talent has gone over malignantly and mockingly to the powers of evil’

(McGreevy, 1929, p. 122). The criticism of ‘malignancy’ suggests the potential spread of

sympathy for Joyce’s content and style in Ulysses. McGreevy, by contrasts, uses the term

‘purgatorial’ to describe the language of the Wake in a complimentary sense, in its mutability

and uncertainty, given that the fate of purgatory’s intermediary state is fluctuating rather than

eternally fixed. As with Dante’s theologically-inspired satirical structures, Joyce also uses the

immense spaces and suggestive imagery of purgatory and the inferno. The figure of Shem

slides into infernal territory when he is cast in the role of Nick.

Joyce’s juxtaposition of the twins as angel and devil is one important aspect of this comic and

colourful Mime episode, and Shem’s lower status enacts another version of the fall as his fate

here is ‘visible disgrace’ (227.23). The paired figures add to the book’s quasi-mystical,

ultimately epistemological position that resolution emerges organically from conflict. This

equation prompted Thornton Wilder’s pronouncement on the Wake as having been

‘conducted in a style that enables the author through apparently preposterous incongruities to

arrive at an ultimate unification of harmony’ (Wilder, 1963, p. 74). Bruno’s philosophy is a

continuing source of explication for Joyce’s aesthetic technique in this regard, and remained a

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force for inspiration throughout Joyce’s writing life (Beckett, 1929; Koch, 1972; Rabaté,

1989; Wilder, 1963). Carla Baricz explains Bruno’s ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ as ‘the union

of an action or nature with its equal and opposite’ (Baricz, pp. 235–236). Shem’s ordeal as

Glugg is not necessarily equal to that of Shaun as Chuff by the conclusion of the ‘Mime’, yet

Bruno’s influence is clear. According to Wilder: ‘There are hundreds of allusions to Bruno in

Finnegans Wake and in general Joyce identifies Bruno with himself as Shem—speculative,

rebellious against authority and—in his own eyes—persecuted’ (Wilder, 1963, p. 77). Yet,

the pattern of reversals in the Wake suggests that vertical drops such as Shem’s fall do not

present a sealed fate. It is Wilder’s contention that the subject of the book is ‘the continuity of

what is Living, viewed under the guise of a resurrection myth’ (Wilder, 1963, p, 75).

Following the dream logic and the cyclical structure present throughout the Wake, Shem’s

fall can only lead to a resurrection.

To ask why ‘Glugg’s got to swing’ (226.20) is to identify how Shaun-Chuff asserts his moral

superiority over Shem. Glugg-Shem is cast as the abject figure, vulnerable and humiliated in

the quest for sexual knowledge. Twenty-nine maidens represent a rainbow or bouquet, a

‘florileague’ (224.23) of young girls who both tempt and taunt the hapless Glugg/Shem. The

game of Angels and Devils ensues, with the object being to guess a secret colour. Glugg loses

the game, failing to guess the colour of the Maidens’ underwear. The three guesses are

infernal images—brimstone, hellfire and demons, though each of course is paradoxically a

precious metal dug from below the earth or sea: moonstone, red sandstone, coral and pearl.

Have you monbreamstone?

No.

or Hellfeuersteyn?

No.

Or Van Diemen’s coral pearl?

No. (225.22–27)

Glugg’s final guess ‘Van Diemen’s coral pearl’ (225.25) refers partially to the devilishly

distant Tasmania. The madness of somewhere as distant as the southern state of Australia

arises in Joyce’s letter of 5th August, 1943: ‘We hardly know where we are going or when.

We might end up in Tasmania’ (Ellmann, 1966, p. 451). Departure, escape and creativity

offer Shem-Glugg redemption from his lowly role in the Mime. Even those conflicts (‘martial

and menial’) provide Glugg an outlet to vent his frustration and rebel against the

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pronouncement on his masculinity. He gets into fights, ‘wrestled a hurry-come-union’

(227.30), in an inversion of the Eucharistic ritual, where what is usually holy has become

harried. Glugg’s puerile actions are linked with his earlier guise as Shem the excretory artist

in the black mass scene of I.vii, as in the fight scene, ‘he excremuncted as freely as any

frothblower into MacIsaac’ (227.32–3). The implication is that his spitting (or shitting) has

disgusted the other twin son, and that he is as guilty as Jacob for shaming their blind father

Isaac. Yet, for the biblical son Jacob, redemption for his trickery was eventually delivered, as

Glugg’s will be through his wanderings.

The accusations of perversity against Shem’s speech are an ironic reflection of the Wake’s

unusual sound patterns and echoing of multiple languages. Shem’s tongue is ‘artificial’ yet it

has a ‘natural curl’ (169.16), implying the ‘hybrid’ approach that Joyce himself had towards

languages as a multilingual Irishman who became as conversant as native speakers in Italian

and French. The condemnation of Shem’s ‘hybrid’ status brands him negatively as

indecipherable by the sound of his voice. The bulk of tangible information about Shem

pertains to his appearance, yet there are some clues as to the sounds of his voice as uttered

through his ‘sedimental cuplslips’ (171.18) no less unclear due to the excessive drinking

described in that same passage. The contrast between ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ of Shem’s

tongue may be extended to accents as well as languages, as the sounds of voices pour forth in

the Wake to entertain, cajole, spite, accuse and exalt, and occasionally these utterances are

inscribed in the accent of a language or dialect. Playing with accents is a vast and erratically-

ranging technique in the Wake, and the idea of faithfulness to the written word in sound is

analogous to the contrast between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’. The transferring of Irish names

into Hiberno-English pronunciations is a repeated trope that teases out ideas of origins and

loyalties to place and nation. For instance, a recurring pun on Howth Head is in variations on

the hill’s Irish name, Beinn Éadair. The same landmark is called ‘Benn Heather ‘, ‘be

nayther’ and ‘Beneathere’. The reader, reading silently or aloud, is forced to pronounce the

language with the inflections embedded in the syllables—the stuttering of HCE, the lisping of

Issy and also the ‘brogue’ or range of Irish accents in Ireland. The hardening of the ‘th’ sound

in evoking the ‘d’ sound occurs in the phrase ‘odder hand’ (180.16), so that the Irish ‘other’

becomes audibly ‘odder’. Shem is repeatedly cast as the other, yet his access to otherness

through languages and multilingual pronunciations is not just ascertained from what he

himself says, but from what he hears.

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Comprehending Joyce’s jeux de mots in the text relies on discovering the original phrases

being subjected to parody. There is an extra step required in dissecting the original within the

parody when the former is oral rather than written, as is the case with accents. Joyce himself

may never have heard the original accent in which the Australian words were used, or the

sounds that he has imagined through the text. A virtually singular instance in which the

Australian accent can be identified is in the comments of ‘Danl Mgrath’, the Australianesque

figure introduced earlier. His philosophy of ‘striving to die, hopening tomellow’ (60.28)

possibly plays on the lengthened, flattened vowel sound of ‘die’ for the word day’ in the

broadest, ‘ocker’ or colloquial Australian accent.

The non-human sounds of the antipodes imaginary are more convincingly recreated through

various encounters in the Wake, particularly because Australia is configured at different

stages as a place of origin as well as exile. The episode that considers the mysterious origins

of travellers combines the far north and south, introduces ‘our traveller remote, unfriended,

from van Demon’s Land’ (56.21). That scene, which has momentarily ago deposited tourists

in Phoenix Park and discusses the founding of Dublin by different waves of inhabitants,

includes the distrust of the traveller as one unnaturally or diabolically mobile. To be ‘from

van Demon’s Land’ is a signal of confused origins: is the traveller from the land of Van

Diemen the seaman—Holland—or Van Diemen’s new land in Tasmania? The pun on

‘demon’ must have been irresistible for the continued association between Shem, another

great traveller, and the underworld, a link that Clive Hart reminds us is ‘repeatedly

established’ (Hart, 1962, p. 119). To underscore this demonic possession, Shem as Glugg

endures an exorcism in the ‘Mime’ scene, a passage of physical contortions which is the act

that counter-balances his forgetfulness of origins, his ‘birdsplace’ (231.24). With the worst of

the possession over, the passage continues with phrases traded through the post, including the

modified words of the loyal poetess O’Doherty, pining for her lover transported to Australia

(‘Isle wail for yews, O’Doherlynt!’ 232.13). The messages through the post call Glugg back

to the Maidens’ game, where he makes another attempt to guess their secret colour. Once

again, Shem is cast in a devilish role to meet those ‘Angelinas’ (233.05).

The antipodes emerges as an alternative ‘birdsplace’—where we hear the Kookaburra, the

cassowary and the Friarbird (Morris (1898) includes listings of these birds). Joyce’s quest to

let the ‘dumb speak’ (195.05) punctuates the Wake with non-human speech, as well as

Shem’s unwelcome utterances—those rebellious or questioning proclamations which emerge

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from the mouth of the artist, or in the case of the Wake’s dream-like narration, the sleep-

talker. To the disgust of Shaun/Justius, Shem would have himself and others cause annoyance

rather than remain mute. When Shaun as ‘Justius’ points ‘the deathbone’, Shem’s reverses his

degraded status through a creative act, creating a new sound that demands a new way of

listening. Lifting his ‘lifewand’ in response to his subjugation by ‘Justius’ as described in

episode I.vii, the string of alphabetic ‘q’s is a dramatic drowning out of his interlocutor as his

orchestral baton draws speech from ‘the dumb’. Ducks asking ‘what what what’

(‘Quoiquoiquoi...’) they indeed are, drawing on the biblical prophecies of speech drawn from

the mute (Isaiah, 35:6). The rapidly repeated quacking sound could be also the voice of a

thunderbird, as the very long word resembles the ‘thunder-words’ that resound throughout the

book. Each thunder-word plays a unique part, often representing the crash from a fall, or a

transliteration of the sense made by ancient man of the thunder’s sound. The thunderbird, a

giant airborne beast in some mythologies, is represented by a great Totem Pole of the

Kwakwakwa-speaking North American indigenous tribe. A speaking thunderbird is described

in Levy-Bruhl’s book of primitive mythology that Joyce consulted (Atherton, 1959, p. 22),

which leads us directly to another thunderbird, the cassowary that is mentioned in a footnote

during the children’s ‘night lesson’ of episode II.ii.

From personal encounters with cassowaries and emus, these flightless birds emit a low,

echoing bass drum sound. Joyce’s cassowary reference occurs in the second footnote on page

263, part of the children’s history lesson:

We dont hear the booming cursowarries, we wont fear the fletches of fightning, we float the

meditarenias and come back to the isle we love in spice. Punt. (263.FN2)

This footnote clarifies the lesson about occupiers and languages, including the Viking

invaders of Ireland. The students will not fear thunder and lightning. That the children might

fare more courageously in storms than Joyce’s own widely known phobia of thunder and

lightning suggests the Wake’s recurring theme of generational difference. The twins and Issy

will overcome the fears of their primitive father-figure, as they have learned about HCE in

the guise of prehistoric man—Vico’s cave-dwellers, hearing God’s voice in thunderclaps.

The fearful scurrying into caves is shown a page earlier: ‘Hoo cavedin earthwight At furscht

kracht of thunder’ (260.11). Joyce’s notebook shows that ‘cassowaries = thunder’

(VI.B.45.148g) (o), a note derived from information about the Ratitae species in Joyce’s

major source book, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Eleventh edition) (Encyclopaedia Brittanica,

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Edition XI, p. 337). The species include cassowary and emu, with their joined entry under

‘Emeu’ (a separate cassowary entry neglects the bird’s call); both emu and cassowary are

conflated in Joyce’s reference to the emu’s call produced by: ‘an organ of sound in the

breeding-season, at which time the hen-bird has long been known to utter a remarkably loud

booming note’ (Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Edition XI, p. 337). The ‘fletches of lightning’ on

page 262 are not restricted to the reference to a verse treatise entitled The Isle of Man by anti-

Jesuit author, Phineas Fletcher—they could represent the Papuan use of cassowary feathers in

ritual, as the cassowary’s mythical importance is mentioned in another of Joyce’s sources,

Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s book on Australian Aboriginal and Papuan life, Primitive Mythology

(1935). Joyce’s pun on ‘cassowaries’ may ultimately reinforce the peripheral role that

antipodes images play in the Wake, yet they also compel the reader to consider Joyce’s

method of contracting places and their symbols into densely packed allusions.

Even in child or adolescent form, Shem is continually associated with perverted thoughts,

although these are positioned as positive in Joyce’s paradoxical system of elevating Shem

above his detractors. The ‘cursowarries’ help to orientate our reading of place in the Wake as

one of many epistemological shifts reflected in the children’s lesson, as we return from the

footnote containing cassowaries to a heliocentric image of space. The ‘solarsytemised’

(263.24) vision of the infinite, ‘expanding universe’ links the lesson with Bruno, whose belief

in the infinite reaches of the universe extended the earlier hypotheses of Copernicus. Bruno

would not restrict his cosmological vision to a singular sun as a central orb, insisting on the

potential for multiple solar systems (Paterson, 1970, p. 37). The notion of Bruno’s ‘infinite

universe and worlds’ (The title of Bruno’s book, De l’Infinito, Universo e Mondi), as well as

his theory of complimentary oppositions, is found in the phrase ‘seriol-cosmically’ (263.24);

Dunn’s treatise on infinite time in The Serial Universe (1934) blends with ‘serio-comic’. The

lesson at this point invokes a pun on ‘original son’ and ‘sun’ as the preceding teaching is

concerned with the inter-mixing of races due to the spread of religion, disease and war.

Bruno’s radical cosmology is embedded in the Wake philosophy of the fortunate fault—‘O

felicitous culpability!’, so that HCE’s generative relationship to the twins also takes into

account the guilt of the ‘archetypt’ (263.20–30). The controversy is annotated by Shem as

‘Hearasay in paradox lust’ (263L), an idea confirmed by Epstein who suggests this part of the

lesson teaches the children about the fallen state of their parents, that life inevitably results

from ‘lust’ (Epstein, 2009, p. 130). Shem observes this heresy, perhaps taking part in it by

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distinguishing between clerically approved doctrine—‘almightily’—and philosophical

freedom—‘reason’.

Further comic imagery is derived from this contrast between the divine and the mortal, or

what was observed by the children as divergence from orthodoxy which produced

‘hearasay’—heresy. The sexual union of the ‘royal pair’ is staged in their ‘palace’, the inn

named ‘The Goat and Compasses’, a pun on ‘God Encompasses’ or ‘God Encompass Us’

(275.15- 6.). A play of words amusing in its own right, the compasses signal the divergence

from theological dogma in the symbol of mathematics and navigation. The infinite embrace

and progeny of the progenitors (‘in whose veins run a mixture of’) is linked with the

‘hearasay’ or heresy of the earthly and diabolical influence in the ‘Goat’. The goat is worldly,

but inevitably ‘under-worldly’ as a companion of Bacchus and the night (276.11–20.) Two

phrases appear in this passage which evoke Australian slang, adding to the idea, discussed

above, that antipodes images are linked with the underworld and its mythical emissaries.

‘Zumbock’ (276.13) is the German expression for ‘to the Devil’ derived from the literal term

‘to the goat’. The Australian Aboriginal word for sheep, ‘jumbuck’ is orthographically

similar to ‘zumbuck’, and ‘shepherd’ is found in the previous sentence, which begins with

‘Goteshoppard’ (276.12). The source Joyce may have used for this blurring of sheep and

goats in ‘Zumbuck’ is the same book that gave him ‘kookaburra’ (93.26) and its origins—

Morris Austral English: An Australasian Dictionary (1898). A sheep/goat pairing reflects the

twenty-four other instances of the sheep/goat motif, which is Joyce’s joke on the parable in

Matthew that has Jesus as the divine shepherd sorting the sheep from the goats. The goats are

among the damned and sent to the left rather than the right, or righteous, side of the saviour.

Shem’s annotation (pointedly positioned in the left margin) reminds us of the birth right

scene of Jacob and Esau: ‘For all us kids under his aegis’ (276L)—literally, under his

‘goatskin’. Shem’s comment unites the twins of the same genetic inheritance, separated by

the New Testament parable.

The goat/sheep phrase ‘Zumbuck’ is followed closely by ‘good oil’, a variation on the

Australian slang phrase discussed above which is a synonym for the ‘truth’—‘the dinkum oil’

(108.28) (Laugeson, 2003). In this section of the children’s lessons, the ‘good oil’ represents

ale, gravy and semen, compounding the earthly imagery of wine, food and sex. Other clues,

including Robert Burn’s ‘houghmagandie’ (sex) add to the atmosphere of eroticism,

reproduction and feasting. The ‘good oil’ is striking as an instance of Australian slang

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interwoven with other surrounding images. The phrase ‘bergoo bell if Nippon have pearls or

opals Eldorado’ includes the sonic equivalent, ‘bell’ that Joyce associated with kookaburra.

This is discussed elsewhere in relation to ‘kookaburra bell’ (393.26.) Opals are the gemstone

famously mined in Australia, and even though the phrase in question includes Japan and

South America, the pearls and opals are reminiscent of the quiz scene of II.i, in which

Shem/Glugg guesses the secret colour, suggesting ‘ Van Diemen’s coral pearl’ and a feldspar

species variation on opal, moonstone.

Finally, a footnoted reference to Alice in Wonderland and her topsy-turvy adventures—‘A

liss in hunterland’ (276N)—reaffirms the pattern of reversal that night-time brings in the

Wake, and the patriarch’s sexual obligations that are embedded in the night, as the male half

of the ‘royal pair’ becomes ‘topsirturvy’ (275.14). The likelihood of ‘the good oil’ as an

intentional Australian term is strong with ‘bell’ and ‘opal’ also striking inclusions. From

these insertions into the text the reader may derive a continuing pattern of association

between the darkness of night and the ironically diabolical (symbolised by the goat images).

Further still is Shem’s association with those visceral and morally questionable habits of

drink and debauchery as criticised in I.vii, which are here depicted more favourably as

preludes to reproduction. The antipodes imagery serves to reinforce the themes of the earthly,

indulgent and the heretical as opposed to the ascetic, orthodox and divine.

‘He took a round stroll and he took a stroll round and he took a round 4.4

strollagain’ (416.278): Or, Why the Gracehoper Goes South

The Shem/Shaun rivalry is among the most identifiably persistent patterns in the Wake, and

this resurfaces in later chapters when the twins and Issy begin to outgrow their childhood as

represented in the night lesson episode of II.ii. Shaun’s pronouncements on Shem’s

antithetical conduct emerge in key chapters: the Ondt and Gracehopper parable and the Shaun

sections of III.i; also, when Shaun is transformed into the drowsily dreaming version of

himself as Yawn, when he is interrogated by the Four Old Men in III.iii. There are of course

many concurrent patterns proliferating alongside the anti-Shem thread throughout these

Shaun chapters, yet the focus here continues on the typecasting of Shem as exile, due mainly

to his antithetical stance on everything which Shaun upholds. Shaun’s role as inheritor of the

patriarchal realm is complicated by the existence of the perverse twin.

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In addition to the pattern of Shem’s representing the lower half of the body, Shem also

spatially signifies the lower half of the world, and those far southern are mythically linked

with variations on the underworld (Epstein, 2009). Even with these polar divergences

between Shaun and Shem in their changing guises, their close connection as twins establishes

an ongoing contest as to the more deserving inheritor. While Shaun always painted himself as

the more favourable son, it is in Book Three that Shaun too falls, as he assumes the bodily

and behavioural paternal inheritance. Shem’s importance for the Wake’s saga of human

frailty is to provide the ballast or earthy realism to Shaun’s aspirations. While Shaun

succeeds the father, he must partially become a Shem in doing so. The underworld and other

morally dubious places that Shem represents ultimately prove attractive to Shaun, whose

travels as a postman are restricted to Ireland, his own archipelago of ‘Eironesia’ (411.12).

In order to become as imposing a physical being as his giant father, Shaun also indulges in

the sins of ‘gulpable gluttony’ (406.33). On the verge of defending his crucial role as

postman and telling the tale of the Ondt and Gracehoper, Shaun recalls the close bond of the

twins in childhood: ‘We shared the twin chamber and we winked on the one wench and what

Sim sobs todie I’ll reeve tomorry’ (408.22). The pronouncement that Shaun will dream of

Shem’s worries is undermined, as Shem is again linked with death (‘todie’), a repetition of

the theme that Shem’s absence is a version of his death, a departure from the present

(‘today’). Shaun also takes to drinking as heartily as Shem ever did, toasting himself

(‘Shaunti and shaunti and shaunti again!’—a pun on ‘Slainte’) in order to elevate his status as

peacemaker (also echoing Eliot’s ‘shanti’) compared with the rebel Shem. The errant brother

is linked with Wolfe Tone’s ship in Bantry Bay, and is cursed: ‘Down among the dustbins let

him lie!’ Shem is once again the debased and disaffected down and outcast, a dweller among

the dead, as ‘dustbin’ is given as slang for ‘grave’ (Slepon, n.d., viewed 7th December 2014).

Writing on the twins, Linnet reminds us of the critical attention given to the twins’ separate

roles:

Richard Beckman and Grace Eckley have each written judiciously about the extent to

which opposites are overcome in the ‘mergence’ of the twins, but both critics caution us not

to let the reconciliation of the brothers or the moments when they trade places overwhelm

their opposition (Linett, 2009, p. 267).

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Despite the sense of Shem’s mirroring his glutton brother (‘He looks rather thin, imitating

me’, 408.24) and the nostalgia of childhood resemblance (‘tomirror in tosdays of yer’,

408.19), the twins are diametrically opposed once again as the Ondt and Gracehoper.

The fable of the Ondt and Gracehoper is told by Shaun to his interlocutor, the Donkey, who

has been demanding justification for Shaun’s behaviour and aspirations throughout this initial

chapter of Book Three. Epstein (2009) aptly summarises the purpose of the fable from both

perspectives—Shaun’s ‘an attempt by Shaun to justify his hatred of his brother’ (p. 172) and

Shem’s the fable ‘shows Shaun to be a pompous, self-serving Philistine’ (p. 173) Previous

critical attention has been devoted to the delightful and accessible tale of the two antagonistic

insects (Benstock, 2001; Slote, 2000), and the focus here is to highlight how the language of

the antipodes and the underworld enters into Shem-as-Grasshopper’s experience of exile

(Toyoda, 2004). The ultimate conflict between art (‘Artalone the Weeps’, 418.01) and

commerce (‘Highfee’, 418.02), between literature (‘writing’, 418.03) and wealth (‘money’,

418.04), settles the argument from Shaun’s point of view. His triumphant assertions are an

effort to overwhelm the humble cosmology projected in the midst of the Gracehoper’s music-

making during the fable, as the latter focused on anonymous individuals (‘Little Newbuddies’

415.19) rather than God (‘the Great Sommboddy’ 415.17). Shaun uses the fable to condemn

Shem’s philosophical commitment to the earthly and humble as untruthful and also

‘libeluous’ (415.26)—that is, a misreading and miswriting of his place in the ‘Omnibuss’

(415.17). The Ondt ends his successful coup against the Gracehoper with a further dismissal

of him as ‘A darkener of the threshold’ (418.05). The Shem figure is once again deprived of

light as a dweller among the damned, as one who casts a darkening shadow. Shaun’s victory

does not continue interminably during the Donkey’s questioning, but in the Ondt and

Gracehoper fable, Shaun establishes a pattern for the episode of heaping generous criticism

on Shem who is cast as a contemptuous but also competitive figure.

The spirit of competition enters the Ondt in the insect fable, and part of his prize is the

absence of the Gracehoper, his wanderings symbolic of Shem’s exile. The figurative triumph

for Shaun in the figure of the Ondt confirms the universal reordering of the twins, as Shaun

remains at home in the north, and Shem’s departure sees him go south. Shaun once again sees

the twins’ status in terms of top and bottom, with Shem relegated to the depths. The sounds

of Australia might be foreign to the Wake author’s ear, but some of the buzzing, clicking and

droning of Australia’s insect life which thrums loudly across the bush haze on a hot day can

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be associated by Australian readers with the Gracehoper episode. Shem’s desperate departure

is embodied by the Gracehoper, as he takes refuge in the southern hemisphere, suffering from

hunger and other afflictions. He has not laboured in advance like the ant in preparation for the

winter. He leaves the northern hemisphere at Christmas and begins circumnavigating the

globe. Irritated by his own insect infestation (nits), the Gracehoper’s struggles with

‘Tossmania’ (416.40) and reveals that his distracted journeys have led him to where the ‘June

snows’ (416.32) of the southern hemisphere are not oxymoronic, but a feature of the

antipodal climate. The extended dilemma of feeling as if he is upside down disorientates the

Gracehoper, whose sense of heaven and hell reflects the imposed polarity of north south

along the Antipodean conception of ‘hell’ as southward. The image of an upturned ship

bearing its bottom blends comically with the distinction between heaven and hell, the angels

and the pope: ‘Was he come to hevre with his engiles or gone to hull with the poop?’

(416.31). To compound his confusion, an epic storm front forms the backdrop of the

Gracehoper’s cyclical journeys show he has confused his northern and southern poles. The

lights of the Aurora Borealis are re-conjugated as the ‘Boraborayellers’ (416.34), an image of

the Borabora islands in the South Pacific, but also of the Australian indigenous sacred

ceremonial circle, the bora ring. Great waves of light are transformed into loud waves of

sound (‘yellers’), which can be heard echoing from their remote southern origin all the way to

Trieste, where Joyce would have experienced the winter ‘bora’ wind that affects the Adriatic.

‘As if he fell out of space’ (462.31): Shem’s Degradation 4.5

The Wake’s episode III.i closes with the most vitriolic attacks on Shem that Shaun can

muster, yet his accusations of perversity are exposed as hypocritical by the demonstration of

repressed sexuality in the subsequent chapter known as Jaun’s sermon. Yet until Shaun falls

out of the barrel and into the river as a sign of his human erring and ultimate fall in III.i, the

weight of opinion weighs against Shem. A striking spatial image is used to conjure the

antipodes, as Shaun suggests a mental asylum in the distant south: ‘the iniquity that ought to

be depraved of his libertins to be silence, sackclothed and suspended, and placed in irons into

some drapyery institution off the antipopees’ (421.35). The layered meanings here include a

clear reference to Jonathan Swift’s career. Swift is famed for writing Gulliver’s Travels (that

great antipodean adventure), but also the satirical Drapier’s Letters. In his role as Dean of

Christchurch Cathedral Swift established asylums for the mentally ill (‘draypery institutions’)

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(Swift, 1990, p. 473). Shem is regarded by Shaun as among those unfortunates whose wits

must be salvaged by Dean Swift’s benevolence.

From Shaun’s perspective, only the most cruel and confining punishment is appropriate for

the ‘dejeunerate’ (422.08); Shem should be sent to an antipodes destination for having anti-

papal ideas and ‘depraved’ practices, suggested by the layered phrasing of ‘antipopees’.

Shaun is also taking the part of the British monarchist, whose imperialist response to dissent

involved transportation to the antipodean colonies—‘placed in irons’ and despatched. Among

the various other claims against Shem is a gripe against his appearance, particularly his

colour. Due largely to alcohol consumption, or additionally to his expansive travels, Shem is

said to have a ‘ruddy’ (421.34) and ‘tanbark complexion’ (423.29). Difference in colour and

the insistence on Shem being contagious (‘he prediseased me’, 423.27), according to Shaun,

are what prevented his brother from marrying—as he is ‘forbidden tomate’ (423.30): not only

is he prohibited from conjugal privileges, but he also represents ‘forbidden fruit’ (tomato).

Although Shaun himself we be exposed in episode III.ii as a dubious celibate, his anti-Shem

raillery continues unabated.

Shem is paraded as perverse, unhealthy and satanic according to Shaun’s increasing

hypocrisy and outrageously biased vision. This is seen, for instance, in an alleged attempt to

join the clergy as a ‘demonican’ (424.03)—a perverse Dominican. Shaun’s racism continues,

as Shem is also portrayed as dark-skinned. Shem was not only kicked on his bottom (‘the

saint kicked him’, and the reference to the Buckley and the Russian General makes the object

of the kick clear, 423.31), his bottom is black: ‘negertoby’ (423.23). ‘Toby’, an early modern

slang for buttocks, and the suggestion again of Shem’s underworld habitation (he is subject to

the ‘Helpless Corpses Enactment’ 423.31) add to the patterning of Shem’s continuing

‘lowness’ as prescribed in I.vii, of the Wake.

Disgust with Shem is expressed by Shaun in terms of the earth, the realm below the earth,

dirt, and the bottom. Shaun complains that were he to paint Shem’s portrait, he would be

interrupted by Shem’s self-obsessed and filthy writing: ‘Be me punting his reflection he’d

begin his beogrefright in muddyas ribalds’ (423.18). Thus joined to the earth (‘muddy’) at his

bottom (‘ass), Shem is verbally debased—but Shaun may ultimately share that ‘rightdown

lowbrown’ (424.35–6) position. By the end of this, the Donkey’s Questions episode, Shaun

too will fall and be brought low, but into the river rather than onto mud or earth. Shaun

decreed Shem as a ‘shame’ (425.22), but cannot avoid the doubleness and connectedness of

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their relationship, as Shem is his ‘soamheis’ (425.22)—Siamese—brother. As Shaun is, he is,

and the narrative substance behind Shaun’s hyperbole and Shem’s rebellious antics is that

both are erring, and their lapses encourage and expose the faults in each other.

The prolonged focus on Shaun in Book Three reveals another side to the twins’ relationship

and their divergent experiences of sex. Themes of perversity are brought to a fascinatingly

low level when Shem makes an unusually brief appearance in episode III.ii. As ‘Dave’, Shem

becomes, to a certain extent, the David to Shaun’s Jonathan. Shaun’s transformation to the

priestly ‘Jaun’ is no guarantee of purity and abstinence. Instead, Jaun uses his cover as a

confessor to the school girls to indulge in sadistic fantasies and masturbation. Jaun’s sexual

innuendo is frequent in this episode: ‘If I never leave you biddies till my stave is a bar I’d be

tempted rigidly to become a passionate father’ (457.05–7). The shift from the horizontal to

the vertical (using the musical notation lines of staves and bars respectively) is emblematic of

Jaun’s phallic activity that gains momentum with the arrival of ‘Dave the Dancekerl’

(462.17). Later nicknamed ‘Shemuel Tulliver’ (464.13) after Swift’s antipodes voyager

(Lemuel Gulliver), the David character becomes the third party in what appears to be a

homoerotic incestuous ménage.

Jaun, who was about to leave to fulfil his work as a missionary on a ‘Benedictine errand’

(452.17), leaves David behind as his ‘proxy’ (462.16). The newcomer will be encouraged

towards sexual congress with Issy, and the onlooker Jaun’s repressed sexual urges are fully

exposed. The notion becomes apparent that the missionary figure Jaun uses the rituals and

language of the church to channel his desires: ‘I’d give three shillings a pullet to the canon

for the conjugation to shadow you kissing her from me liberally all over as if she was a

crucifix’ (465.24–5). The ‘congregation’ has become, through Jaun, a voyeuristic audience of

the hoped for copulation coyly disguised as ‘conjugation’, with the instances of ‘pull’ and

‘canon’ another description of Jaun’s autoerotic intentions. Throughout the Wake it was

Shaun who accused Shem of perverse and unseemly behaviour. Here we see Shaun in the

guise of a dominant and demanding man, the unsuccessful ascetic using Shem to enact the

desires that he initiates.

Shem’s appearance as ‘darling Dave’ (462.30) is partially in keeping with his previous

negative characterisation by Shaun. Jaun reiterates the criticisms of earlier episodes, yet his

introduction to Dave is favourable and gratifying because he has a use for him. Dave is

treated less as a rival than as a lesser version of himself, ‘the shadow of a post’ (462.21–2).

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Jaun offers some comments on Dave’s initial appearance that echo earlier Shem-directed

insults—that he is a stateless nomad and that he smells. Dave appears ‘as if he fell out of

space’ (462.31), a reminder that Shem is a fallen man, a figure doomed to wander. When

Jaun declares ‘I knew I smelt the garlic leek’ (462.29), the smell is earthy and vegetable, a

reminder that Shem has risen from the dead ‘like the catoninelives’ (462.31). While the

‘garlic leek’ sends up the Gaelic League, Dave is later shown to be disloyal to specific

political groups and is not especially devoted to the Gaelic revival; the garlic therefore also

indicates the reek of garlic used for protection against feared figures like Shem or Dave—the

vampiric body returned from below.

Dave is depicted as apart from Jaun in appearance, behaviour and origin, yet he is relied upon

to complete the sexual act due to Jaun’s artificial and often wilfully interrupted state of

denial. Jaun includes Dave in the carnal indulgences he has devised, and uses their sole

similarity—their penises—to unite them in purposes: ‘as nasal a Romeo as I am, for ever

cracking quips on himself’ (463.08). Jaun projects his own masturbatory habits on his

‘proxy’, and Epstein uses the wealth of phallic images to suggest that Shem-Dave actually

becomes Jaun’s penis (Epstein, 2009, p. 187). The possibility that Jaun experiments first with

the ‘queer’ (463.12) Dave before imposing him on Issy is implied in the phrase: ‘I’m

enormously full of that foreigner’ (463.14–5). Jaun’s obscenity is further revealed in the

likening Dave’s arrival to Patrick, signalled by ‘a blindfold passage by the 4.32’ (462.35)—St

Patrick was said to have returned to Ireland as an escaped slave in the year 432. Dave’s

enslaved position is confirmed by the terms ‘Shervos!’ (464.07) and later ‘Shervorum!’

(465.05), phrases that are presumably uttered by Jaun in his mounting excitement: the latter is

Latin for ‘of servants’ with an echo in the earlier term, a Germano-Hungarian greeting with

Latin origins. They indicate an affirmative stance on the usual Dedalus-reminiscent

philosophy of ‘Non Serviam’. Patrick returned to Ireland as a servant of the Roman Catholic

Church rather than as a slave of the Vikings, just as Dave has now returned to fulfil Jaun the

priest’s bidding.

Jaun maintains his dominant status over both Dave and their female conquest in a manner

that indicates his assumption of the patriarchal and at times imperial role. Dave is both envied

and admired for his global travels, his ‘marauding about the moppamound’ (464.26). His

familiarity with the ‘mappa mondo’, or Italian ‘world map’, partially excuses him from sins

such as alcoholism and vagueness as he is ‘absintheminded’ (464.17). Yet the kernel of

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distrust remains because Dave has been a ‘runaway’ (462.17) and ‘escapa sansa pagar’

(464.11)—escaping without paying. The notion of Dave as a perpetual escapee, wastrel or

emigrant (he who is at one with the ‘landskip’ 464.35) is admittedly at odds with the image of

the biblical King David for whom he is named. It is possible therefore that due to Jaun’s great

size (due to his increase in proportion from his ‘gluttony’ in III.i,) Dave represents the young

King David who is paired with the giant figure of Goliath; the young David’s harp and stones

are certainly present in this scene as Dave is asked to play on his ‘jubalharp’ (466.18), and is

simultaneously criticised for his singing (‘he stones out of stune’ 466.35–6) but admired for

his courage (stones/balls). There are further clues to support Epstein’s aforementioned

suggestion that Dave becomes the phallic focus of the scene, such as his bald head (‘someone

has shaved his rough diamond skull’, 464.08) and continuing references to masturbation

(‘spatton spit’ and ‘wanked to wall awriting’, 464.11, 464.22). Once again, Jaun’s repressed

urge for sexual contact of any kind other than self-stimulation are transferred to Dave, who he

fears has become diseased (‘cholera’, 463.30) and mad (‘demented’, 463.36) through his

escapades.

The polarity between Jaun’s love and loathing for his fraternal counterpart is shown here, as

his initial instinct is to place Dave in quarantine on a small island at sea: ‘Give him an eyot in

the farout’ (463.30); yet later they are ‘the closest of chems’ (464.03), with Shem named in

their perverse partnership. Beckman’s wariness of Shaun’s faux goodwill here counters an

earlier suggestion by Margot Norris that the two are ‘interchangeable’ (Norris, 1976, p. 50).

Yet Norris too acknowledges the ‘classic Master-slave dialectic of Hegelian philosophy’

evident in the fraternal relationship, citing a vivid comment from Campbell and Robinson: ‘If

it is the typical lot of Shem to be whipped and despoiled, Shaun is typically the whipper and

despoiler’ (Norris, 1976, p. 50).

Upon Dave’s return he is now being measured up, literally and figuratively, for his

procreative and copulative capabilities. Throughout this scene, Dave is being considered for

his successful transition from adolescence to manhood, particularly as he invokes the role of

the juvenile David. Jaun is genuinely surprised by the lowness of Dave’s voice, and notes his

physical maturity: ‘the molars are gone’ (467.01). Jaun’s patronising tone towards Dave

persists as he heaps suspicious praise upon him, calling him ‘french davit’ (464.36). Jaun

mocks the continental pronunciation of ‘David’ as he has been enquiring after Dave’s

European travels, insinuating that Dave has kept company with leaders such as Peter the

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Great and Turgesius with whom he himself is on personal terms. In admitting Dave into this

company, Jaun judges but remains in control of Dave’s masculinity. Dave, after all, is still a

‘Davitt’, an Irish nationalist who resisted British imperialism and spent time in exile in

Australia. Epstein concurs with this reading: ‘Dave has been an exiled convict in Australia,

literally ‘down under’; his head is shaved in the convict’s cut and he bears a prison pallor’

(Epstein, p. 187). Despite his ‘convict’ (465.36) status, Dave serves a strategic purpose for

Jaun.

Jaun’s lust is partially pragmatic, as the intercourse he demands is representative of a desire

for national or at least social continuity. The emphasis on ‘ownkind’ and the demand for

Dave and Issy to ‘be irish’ (465.31) foreshadows the parental role that Jaun desires to inherit

from HCE, as part of that role is to foster a new generation loyal to national ideals. To Issy,

Dave is presented as an aroused and juvenile ‘Jack Horner’, and Jaun’s admonition to him—

‘don’t be shoy’—is a demand for him to shed his shyness and his boyhood in order to

become a ‘husbandmanvir’ (465.07). As Jaun thrusts Dave together with Issy, there is a rush

of phallic and pubic imagery: ‘snailcharmer’, ‘bilabials’, ‘tail’, worm and womb (the early

bird is here shown as the ‘curly bard’, 465.19–28.). Dave’s subjection to humiliation by Jaun

is revealed in the brief sentence ‘That’s his penals’ (465.05); scrutiny of Dave’s penis

harkens instantly to the Penal Laws, the British strangulation of Irish Catholic freedoms

through harsh legal restrictions. Penal servitude in the southern hemisphere is also relevant as

a consequence of British power, not only in Ireland, but also throughout the Empire. Dave’s

position is strikingly subaltern, Joyce’s comment perhaps on the persistence of often brutally

enforced hierarchies throughout the history of human societies. Jaun comments ironically on

his own perverse drives—which lead ‘from the racist to the racy’ (465.30)—marking an overt

pronouncement that an illusion of sexual control is the only possible result of social control.

Jaun emerges again as the posturing patriarch, a Polonius who directs the young lovers to ‘Be

offalia. Be hamlet’ (465.32) The directives continue for Dave to ‘be’ this and ‘be’ that. While

Dave is encouraged to heighten his ontological awareness and to experience the material

realities of sex, Jaun confines himself to theory and control, remaining the fanatical and

frenzied celibate, excited by his own frustration.

Shem-Dave’s silence throughout the scene only serves to expose the tide of Jaun’s perverse

instruction to the ‘courting cousins’ (466.04). Just as Jaun went into explicit detail during his

sermon to the girls of what specific acts they should not perform with their lovers, and

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thereby giving utterance to his fantasies, his directions to the archetypal male and female (in

Shem and Issy) fills whole pages (465—468.) Jaun’s zeal for the sexual act contributes to the

irony that his spiritual life as a celibate priest was insufficient. There are a few points during

this sex sequence when Jaun is clearly drawing on the supposedly dark powers of Shem to

absorb his physical but also spiritual potency. ‘Turn about, skeezy Sammy’ (466.09): the

gloss on ‘skeezy’ as sleazy or loathsome is part of Jaun’s degrading rhetoric (OED, n.d.;

Lovely Little Lexemes, 2012). Synesthesia pervades Jaun’s sensory articulation of his

experience as voyeur, unless the tactile element of his language is to be taken literally when

he says: ‘I can feel you being corrupted’ (466.07) and ‘till we feel you are tropeful of

popetry’. The latter phrase, directed at ‘skeezy Sammy’ (Shem), involves levels of smut and

heresy—‘top full of puppetry/poetry’ and hopeful of popery (that is, wearing a pronounced

skullcap), as the victim ‘turns about’ for his penis to be judged. The sexual architect and

puppeteer Jaun then commands Issy to be trusting (‘if you doubt of his love of darearing his

feelings you’ll very much hurt’, 466.11), and for Shem-Dave to impose himself sexually, and

possibly violently (‘Shuck her more!’, 466.16). Jaun denies himself the chance to physically

replace Shem-Dave as the lover, as he cannot physically lower himself to the action; but Jaun

nonetheless insinuates himself into the sexual act through the base expressions of his own

urges.

The perverse extremes of the Jaun-Dave episode are not without their shock value, and there

are greater depths of depravity to account for before Jaun’s triumphant departure. Why

continue to tease out these instances of sexual activity in the Wake? Thus far the Shem and

Shaun pattern has been used to mock a simplistic dichotomy between good and evil, heaven

and hell, the angel and devil, and how those contrasts are dismantled through the brothers’

gestures. Shem and Shaun are of course not solely brothers, but representatives of male

behaviour in response to the instruction and example of their patriarchal antecedents.

Jaun and Dave figure can be said to enter into sexual activity together, as if to show the

extent of Jaun’s ‘descent’ as it were, to Dave’s ‘queer’ (463.12) level. When Epstein lucidly

describes the action of page 466 as the two men singing together in harmony (Epstein, p.

187), the ‘metaphor’ (466.10) for sex that Jaun coyly referred to moments before emerges

again as the pair is heard making music together. This music, their love, is heretical as the

devil (‘diavoloh’ 466.27) and is invoked twice. When Jaun goads Dave into action, (‘Poss,

Myster?’, 466.30) he is asking himself, Shaun the Postmaster, when this mystery of

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masculinity (‘mister’) is possible. The term ‘Acheve’ (466.30) noted in McHugh’s

Annottations for the Wake, derives from ‘achever’, the French for ‘finish’, though it also

suggests the phrase ‘à la chèvre’, meaning ‘to the goat’, a phrase issued earlier in German for

‘to the Devil’—though here it could equally be sending Dave ‘to the horn of the goat’

(McHugh, 1991, p446). Shaun as Juan cannot contemplate their union in anything other than

the terms of authority—their brotherhood is defined by their schooling, religion and family

hierarchy. Jaun’s concessions to Shem-Dave’s apposite or resistant participation are due to

Shem-Dave’s artistic talent: ‘Sam knows miles bettern me how to work the miracle’ (467.18).

The ‘miracle’ is the sexual climax that Jaun was hoping for, though refers equally to the

Eucharistic mass which Shem was able to ‘work’ or create himself. The metaphor of distance

is invoked again to separate the two despite their sexual union (whether this is to be seen in

their own coupling or in Jaun’s heterosexual sex by proxy): ‘place the ocean between his and

ours’ (467.23). Despite the hierarchy Jaun establishes to raise himself on his ‘soapbox’ above

Shem, his elevation to heaven fails.

From the above reading of Jaun’s role in the final stages of the Sermon episode, it is apparent

that his role is sexually dominant, but he is exposed as voyeuristic and alcoholic. Joyce’s

satire exposes the hypocrisy of the abstainer who speaks from a ‘pulpitbarrel’ (472.04) as

Jaun is intoxicated by the sound of his own preaching. Jaun makes his glorious departure, but

his religious pilgrimage is ironically steeped in perverse imagery. Shaun’s new name, a

homophone for ‘horn’ also signals the German word for ‘rooster’—Hahn—and the language

of ribald and perverse sensuality has thoroughly infused the laudations which mark his

departure: ‘Win out, ye divil ye! The silent cock shall crow at last’ (473.22). Some of Shem’s

heretical magic has rubbed off on Haun, who departs with a sulphurous whiff: ‘You watch

my smoke’ (469.27–8). It seems Haun can only begin his missionary journeys once he has

advanced into a sexually mature phase, even if that maturity is undermined by its proxy

expression through Shem.

Shaun’s avatars in Haun and Jaun experiences desire for these departures without the full

errantry achieved by the more wayward Shem. Jaun makes a southbound gesture: ‘by

blessing his sthers with the sign of the southern cross’ (471.112). The Southern Cross, that

constellation which rotates according to its unique southern hemisphere orbit around the

celestial pole, is repositioned here in this Jaun-Shaun moment constellation as an absurd

caricature of an upended Christian cross, a downward pointing arrow reminiscent of the

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perpetual ‘low’ and downward judgements to which Shem is subjected by his twin brother.

The Southern Cross, weighted at its bottom end, is Haun’s gesture towards his baser instincts,

his abdominal and genital regions and the earth that he plans to wander (instead of signalling

towards heaven with a top-weighted cross.) The balance of power will shift yet again in

episode III.iii, when Shaun is made subordinate to the Four Old Men and his relationship

with Shem is scrutinised.

The antipodes are southern spaces in this layered language of place, and that

southwardness—with its perceived oppositeness and enigmatic claim on the wanderer—is an

indication of the emotional and psychological impact associated with those great distances

travelled.

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‘The merge of unnotions’ (614.17): Resolving the Chapter 5:

Contrary Appearances of the Antipodes in Finnegans Wake

Awoken by the ‘Friarbird’ (595.33): Bridging the distance to the 5.1

Antipodes

Parnell’s speech of 1885 dared his opponents to place limits on ‘the march of a nation’

(Foster & Jackson, 2009, p. 415). Joyce parodied this nationalistic sentiment with ‘the merge

of unnotions’ (614.17). The pun continues Joyce’s broadening of distinctly Irish experiences

to show his belief that ‘in the particular is contained the universal’ (Ellmann, 1959, p. 505).

While this ‘particular’ approach originated with Joyce’s portrayals of Dublin and Ireland in

his earlier work, the preceding chapters show how Joyce’s depictions of Ireland encompass

great swathes of world geography, language and culture in Finnegans Wake. While it may

seem to be a humanist or universalist view to refer to this style as a global vision, there is no

doubt that Joyce’s spatial and thematic appropriations of world imagery beyond Ireland in the

Wake stage a continuum of human experience that readers from any background can

recognise as a reflection of their own. It is through this breadth of Joyce’s radical challenge to

Western thought and language that his linguistic and geographical references to places in the

European-defined antipodes enliven the text and also demonstrate the contrariness that

dominates Finnegans Wake’s stylistic method. Difference to the point of perversity was

explored in depictions of HCE and Shem’s representations, with the antipodes noted as a

metonymical thread of the text that reinforced these characters’ ambivalence on many

levels—social, historical, geographical and artistic.

This chapter considers whether unity or harmony could ever be read as a process overcoming

those divisions. Like so many other contrary states, the anomalous antipodes are also

ultimately absorbed and integrated. It can be conceded that just because this stylistic

integration shows how the antipodes are part of the skein of Finnegans Wake, they are not

instantly united with Joyce’s Hiberno-centric geography. Instead, there is a continuous

process of reintegration and disintegration as the language absorbs and sheds its many

geographical associations. As the Australian merchant in Book I, Danl MGrath, was shown to

be ‘as usual, antipodal’ in his outlook on HCE, all things antipodes have hitherto been

considered in the light of this implicit oppositional approach. Yet the significance of Joyce’s

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method is one that insists on an attempted ‘merge’, however unlikely, of unlike notions, or

‘unnotions’. Frederico Sabatini explains Joyce’s method in terms of Bruno’s influence:

The philosophy of the coincidence of contraries, which informs all of Bruno’s thought and

aesthetics, becomes in Finnegans Wake a hyperbolized poetics of the ‘cocoincidences’

(597.01), namely, a poetics that involves the paradoxical, and yet realized, aim of making

the coincidences themselves converge, in a sort of continuous chiasmus relationship that

unifies by means of repetition and reversal, series of binary oppositions (Fairhall, 2013, p.

27).

I suggest that this kind of paradoxical convergence is identifiable in the literal geography of

unlike oceans (‘unnotions’) that separate Joyce’s thematic origins in Ireland with their

diametrically opposed places in the far south of the antipodes. The spatial element of Bruno’s

influence throughout Finnegans Wake is reiterated by Sabatini:

That Joyce was interested in such a vision of the great space merging with the smallest

places is now well known both as a major influence both for his re-creation of

phenomenological space, and the non-closing nature of Finnegans Wake…(Fairhall, 2013,

p. 27).

These subsequent sections explore instances of the antipodes in textual patterns of sound,

geography, themes of renewal and travel, and allusions to anthropology. The book’s global

reach includes these antipodean moments, with union and harmony emerging as the

inevitable consequence of division.

Harmony is a useful starting point when considering the antipodes in the context of the

phonic impact of Finnegans Wake. Joyce uses sound patterns to amuse and confuse his

readers, and the places of the antipodes are heard amid the cacophony of Finnegans Wake’s

animal and human figures. Glimpses and sounds of the antipodes within Joyce’s labyrinthine

text highlight themes of union and harmony that imbalance and overcome the discord of

‘Babel’ which initiates with the great ‘fall’ from page 3 of the Wake. As the Wake is geared

towards a recommencement or a return to origins, notably through the final ‘ricorso’ section,

the lexical presence of those European-settled colonies south of the equator contributes to

ideas associated with departures from known worlds to new. I am not suggesting that Joyce

supported a European imperial project that sought to unite disparate geographical entities for

some homogenous anticipation of a globalised culture. Joyce’s opinion that nations were

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irreconcilable countries with distinct traits was raised in his critical writings, and his rebellion

against both imperialist and nationalist restrictions on identity are clear in his prose works.

The harmony which is promoted in Finnegans Wake is primarily social and intellectual, the

first being an antidote to the violent excesses of the First World War, and the second a balm

to the ignorance he abhorred in nationalists like The Citizen of Ulysses. For Joyce, the

resolution and harmonising of differences led to understanding, a defiance of disagreement

where a pure clarity of ‘unnotions’ could merge.

The Wake encourages an increasing appreciation for accord based on social and intellectual

needs rather than militaristic or political motivations. Joyce disrupts the imperial and

nationalist march (‘merge’) with his Viconian cycle that saw time repeating itself. What was

considered to be ‘progress’ by imperial powers is drawn less flatteringly in the Wake as a

form of recycled phases of human behaviour. As the British, and other European nations

attempted to maintain or increase their imperial reach, Joyce used the colonial antipodes to

pattern Finnegans Wake with fractured images of imperial desires. The distant colonies do

not always prove to be model offspring of the mother country just as Shem and Shaun cannot

be classed as wholly dutiful sons. As the twins are destined to usurp the patriarchal role and

as ALP will be replaced by younger, upstream waters in her final journey towards the ocean,

so too will the outreaches of empire reassert their own peculiar independence. The antipodes

present a distorted rather than a faithful reflection, and echoes through the text in de-

familiarised reverberations. The texture of the Wake ultimately undermines these distortions

and defamiliarisations for the ‘ideal reader’ who gives the book a patient and panoptic chance

to explain itself (Joyce, 1992, ‘…that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.’

(120.13)).

Geography and travel accompany sound as thematic threads through which antipodean places

can be identified in Finnegans Wake. As the textual structure is so complex and materially

unfathomable in parts due to the layering of lexical particles, the significance of place would

be difficult to explain without critical intervention. Bertrand Westphal’s theories of

geocriticism (introduced above in Chapter 2) justify how antipodean images enter into

figurations of Ireland in Finnegans Wake. This understanding of the fictional recreation of

space reinforces Joyce’s ‘hiberno-centric’ global vision in the Wake.

Joyce’s rewriting of Ireland in the antipodes is present in antipodes’ images of wildlife and

geography such as the wallaby and the New South Wales penal colony of Botany Bay. In

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addition, the New Zealand Haka is present in Finnegans Wake as the emblematic moment of

Joyce’s reworking of familiar sounds to bridge the distance between Ireland and the

Antipodes. Following this engagement with geocritical ideas, a subsequent section will deal

with themes of long-distance travel between Ireland and the antipodes. Certain aspects of this

long-distance theme were presented in the analysis of Shem’s telegrams (discussed above in

Chapter Three), yet there are further instances of Ireland-antipodes long-distance

communications and relationships, which leave their imprint on Finnegans Wake.

In this thesis, I have attempted to identify and analyse the antipodes images and to posit

reasons for their inclusion in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The antipodes have been shown as

theoretically interlinked with the language and structure of coincidentia oppositorum—the

resolving opposites associated with Giordano Bruno’s philosophy—which imbue the book

with its distinctive and contrary tone (Boysen, 2013, pp. 55–56). The antipodes are an

unusual addition to Joyce’s figuration of place as they contribute to the ambiguous

atmosphere of the book in which stability and certainty dissolve. Historically linked with the

unknown and primitive from a European perspective, the antipodes are drawn into the Wake

world similarly to the ways in which Ireland had been geopolitically positioned: fringe-

dwelling, inferior and colonisable. Associated thus with the passive reduction of their power

and territory, the antipodes also signal perversion and attract suspicion, especially in serving

as a port of exile for Shem. After all of these associations with struggle and suffering that the

antipodes present, there is also optimism in the notion that the antipodes provide a site for

renewal.

The idea that distant antipodes ports offered renewal must not be approached as purely

positive, despite the ecstatic tone with which figures such as Shaun and Anna Livia greet the

newness of the dawn or affirm the sense of return at different stages of the Wake, especially

the climactic closing section of Book IV. Anna Livia’s speech is suffused with nostalgia so

that even as she makes her away to the sea—‘I am passing out…I’ll slip away before they’re

up’ (627.34)—the reader is afforded a very clear sense of the new generation and the

recommencing cycle of life: ‘let her rain for my time has come’ 627.12). Anna Livia

anticipates the renewing water cycle in the form of the daughter, the ‘rain’ on her way to

becoming the new river. This gentle welcoming of generational change hints as darker layers

of usurpation, as power reverberates through the completion of one ‘reign’ (‘rain’) in

anticipation of the next. Irony prevails, as cultural or national resurrection must be placed in

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the satiric dimension with which Joyce uses these tropes of power and perversity. This is

further indicated by the idea of new worlds as revamped versions of old worlds, for instance

in the re-flowering of Dublin’s renewed status as a European city in ‘Novo Nilbud’ (24.01),

with a criticism implied that Dublin has actually gone backwards according to the

typographic joke—‘Nilbud’/Dublin—and ceased to ‘flower’ at all—‘nil’ and ‘bud’). This

chapter observes how correlations between the antipodes and newness are imbued with the

book’s overarching ironic treatment of statuses such as new or renewed.

My observations of doubleness through the ironic renewal in this chapter also reflect aspects

of Bertrand Westphal’s geocritical approach, which considers the active role that fictional

representations of place may take in redefining concepts of those places. Previously in

Chapter 2, I referred to Westphal’s ‘stratigraphic’ and ‘polysensorial’ conceptions of textual

places in order to establish the book’s concentric structuring of place within a doubly Irish

and global mesh of associations. Westphal’s ultimate aim is that of a geographer, to study the

place rather than the author or their literary output: ‘geocriticism tends to favour a geocentred

approach, which places place at the centre of debate … the spatial referent is the basis for the

analysis, not the author and his or her work’ (Westphal, 2003. pp. 112–113). Finnegans Wake

does not adhere entirely to this anti-biographical stance, given that so much of the draws on

Joyce’s own life and interests (with an example being James and Stanilaus Joyces’ fraternal

relationship reflected in the relationship between Shem the writer and Shaun the teacher or

preacher). Yet that raw material is only one fibre used in the Wake’s explicit weaving of a

broad study of place, resulting in a hyper-universalised Ireland.

Finnegans Wake anticipated the place-focused ‘debate’ that has emerged through Westphal’s

claims for geocriticism. This theory of place seeks diverse sources, not limited to literary

works, to speak for a place, in a practise approaching historical or even archaeological

enquiry. Although geocritical scholars have not to date commented on the potential for the

Wake’s instrumentation of their principles, Joyce used multiple texts and objects (such as the

Book of Kells, Viking-era archaeological sites and Cromwellian dicta, among other official

documents) to recreate Ireland’s fractured sense of place (Rus, 2013). (New scholars entering

the geocritical discussion are certainly writing about Joyce and his treatment of place. One

PhD candidate has published a paper indicating her broader comparative work on Joyce’s

Dublin together with the Norwegian author’s Lars Saabye-Christensen’s writing of Oslo.

From this paper it is not clear whether Fnnegans Wake is included, as the Wake nor any of

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Joyce’s books are listed in the citations. Only one work of Joyce scholarship, Frank Budgen’s

The Making of Ulysses, would indicate that this author has focused only on Ulysses and has

not (yet) approached Finnegans Wake.)). Geocritical principles also include the idea that

multiple non-fictional and fictional texts may be brought to bear on how place is conceived in

our collective understanding, and that multiple genres and forms work together to the

treatment of places over time. For some critics, Joyce is still considered a realist or mimetic

writer of place in the light of his prose prior to the Wake. Eric Prieto regards Joyce as an

author confined to writings of place which are only representative, rather than inventive or

transcendental. The significance of Dublin in the mostly but not entirely realist prose texts of

Dubliners, A Portrait and Ulysses might confirm this, yet a Wake reader is compelled to

resist this restriction. Prieto indicates an easy categorisation used in the below parenthesis:

Westphal formulates his theory of geocriticism in pragmatic terms, emphasizing the

interface between fictional representations of real-world places and the places themselves.

These relationships are highly variable, ranging from what he calls ‘homotopic’ depictions

of place (in which the fictional place is compatible with what we know of the place, as in

Balzac’s Paris or Joyce’s Dublin) to ‘heterotopic’ representations (which explicitly diverge

from the facts as we know them)… (Prieto, 2011b).

Wake scholars are aware of the more generous scope with which Dublin and Ireland are

rewritten and re-contextualised in Joyce’s final book, for which ‘heterotopic’ is an apt

depiction. Prieto has alternative critical aims in the above explication, so this present

discussion draws on the increasing body of geocritical writing, with the claim that Finnegans

Wake presents a crucial, proto-geocritical work that redefines how place can be experienced

within and beyond the text. Finnegans Wake certainly ‘diverges from the facts’ in order to

deny the primacy of facts over memory. Although the Wake does encourage readings of the

dreaming, unconscious mind, the central role of Ireland and its spatial counterparts such as

the antipodes suggest how the book also functions as a textual example of both the active and

dysfunctional memory (an idea proposed by Finnegans Wake scholar, Dr Michael Farrell.)

(M. Farrell, Notes, Sydney Finnegans Wake Reading Group, September 8, 2013) Farrell’s

emphasis on the workings of memory intersects with Westphal’s approach to ‘the memory of

cities’ (Westphal, 2003), as Joyce’s Dublin is newly depicted in the Wake as an offshoot of

memory as well as a tangibly recognisable place. The connection with the antipodes is that

these offshoots of memory refract images of Dublin into vastly different directions, including

the subequatorial.

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The unknown, indeterminate mystery of a distant place such as Australia is given a

smattering of brief cameo appearances throughout Finnegans Wake. This inclusion highlights

the contrast of newly encountered and long-inhabited geographical places in a satirical mode,

which appears to mock the human sense of time. Joyce’s Wakean narrators frequently remind

readers that Ireland has been perpetually inhabited, reoccupied and re-territorialised since the

Neolithic era. Joyce’s heterotopic architecture of place in the text is surreal in that the tendrils

of the antipodes cling onto the more overt and expansive visions of Ireland. Finnegans

Wake’s ambition as a global text is achieved in that it works outward from Ireland to absorb

other geographical zones. The antipodes are absorbed to highlight the aforementioned themes

of power and perversion (discussed in Chapter Four), though the possibilities of a new world

for European arrivals found in the antipodes are equally involved as signals of the new and

unpredictable world which Joyce has created in the Wake interpretation of Ireland.

Peter Conrad commented on the cultural conservatism of early twentieth-century British

Australia, though the primitivism he notes in the avante-garde’s appreciation of other

antipodes countries reflects a lack of knowledge about Australia in the decades of Joyce’s

writing of Finnegans Wake. His description of an artistic view of the antipodes reveals the

artists’ critique of mapping and their sympathy for distorted idealisations of place:

In 1929 the French surrealists published a world-map, on which they either shrunk

countries or inflated them according to their surrealistic content. New Guinea, whose

savagery had been extolled by the painter Emil Nolde, stretched across the ocean all the

way from the New Hebrides to Borneo, looking more than ever like a pterodactyl with open

jaws. New Zealand also swelled in size and significance: it boasted geysers and cannibals,

both of which were considered surreal. But the Australian continent came out looking as

small as Tasmania (which was omitted altogether) … (Conrad, 2012).

The stretching and contraction of countries on the Surrealists’ world map illuminates how

Modernist artists such as Eluard and Ernst absorbed geographical concerns into their

interpretive visions (Wood, p.198.) Eluard’s is a close equivalent to Joyce’s geographical

distortions. For Joyce, Ireland has swollen in size and significance to form a global memory

of place that all the narrative voices and mobile figures draw on, remembering everything

through a language that channels the significance of Ireland. When the antipodes are infused

with these memories, it is to refresh and replenish the store of this global Irish memory.

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For Joyce, language is the first navigator of unfamiliar geography, and this present analysis of

sound, travel and anthropological allusions embraces the question of how Joyce creates a new

language for his new world in Finneagns Wake. Joyce’s references to distant global places in

the Wake are reminiscent of the range of sources utilised by a geocritical approach. Military,

poetic, literary and historical texts are brought to bear on a place (Westphal gives the example

of Alexandria, a city at the intersection of Durell, Cavafy and travellers’ diaries) (Westphal,

2011, p. 112). Joyce’s depictions of colonial and imperial relations are reiterated through

songs, speeches, poems, advertisements, letters and quotations, and struggles for power are

comic due to his intentional conflation and disruption of languages in which these texts are

rewritten. The purpose of these linguistic disruptions is to illustrate the transition of culture

through language, so that folk songs and proverbs carry weight throughout the text, its title’s

origin in the ballad ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ being the first among seemingly endless examples.

The melange of languages also suggests why factual and fictional beliefs about place merge

when both are lost in translation, so that the actual and the imagined are transferrable. This

idea is discussed in geocriticism in order to appreciate how ideas of place are informed by

more than tangible measurements and what can be reliably referred to as ‘the real’, but by

memory or opinion:

… once it is recognized that the real is not an objective, independent, autonomous reality

but is instead infused with representation, meaning, discourse, the literary study of real

spaces becomes as important as scientific ones (Posthumus, 2013, p. 10).

Finnegans Wake can be described in this way as a literary study of a real space, in that

Ireland is reinterpreted as a place where other places such as the antipodes may encounter a

dramatic, globalised version of their own experiences.

This chapter observes how the antipodes’ envelopment in phrases of the Wake yields a

positive theme, or affirmation of the idea of renewal—an offshoot from Bruno’s idea of

harmonised contraries. Vico’s influence complements the Brunovian dissolution of

contrasting places with a focus on time. Joyce’s linguistically daring depictions of

civilisations and their decline was partially inspired by Vico’s Scienzia Nuova: ‘I don’t

believe in any science…but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read

Freud or Jung’ (Ellman, p. 693). Joyce’s imaginative transposition from Vico’s vision of time

to the Wake is reiterated by Damon Franke (2007):

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Vico uses a complex etymology to theorize these cyclical stages, popularly known, in order,

as the divine age, the heroic age, the human age, and the age of return. The last stage is a

time of reflection known as a ricorso (in Italian, ‘recurrence’) (p. 121).

Franke’s essay includes analysis on the theme of resurrection, with some attention given to

Joyce’s characterisation of the 1916 Easter rising as embedded in ideas of geopolitical

renewal. As notions of resurrection are overwhelmingly global in the Book IV (as the call for

‘surrection’, 593.02, is addressed to ‘the wohld bludyn world’ 593.02), it is not only the

Asian east which is united with the European west, but the distant antipodes as well (even

then, the ‘whole bludyn world’ for Anna Livia revolves around its lifeblood, ‘Bludyn’, a

further anagram of ‘dublyn’/Dublin.). The final section of Finnegans Wake presents the

ricorso as an elated surge of narrative, which celebrates the previous three cycles and causes

their recycling and re-ignition.

The ricorso achieves many epic feats in consolidating the Wake’s Irish-centric global vision,

and one of these features a dramatic vision of colonial-imperial relations as shown in the

situation of a colonial subject seeking validation from an imperial source. Two significant

antipodes references are woven into the narrative thread, and they coincidentally add to

motifs of the natural world—animals and birds—further emphasising a sense of harmonious

merging of humans with their natural surroundings. The introduction of the ‘friarbird’

(595.33) and the case of the ‘austrologer Wallaby’ (601.32) will be discussed below to show

the literary merging of place, in that Australian imagery is superimposed over moments in

Irish, and specifically Dublin’s social history.

The appearance of this ‘astrologer’ is involved with concepts of colonising and imperialist

mirroring of Europe in the antipodes. Ireland’s reflection on the opposite side of the world as

‘New Ireland’ is embedded in the odd place-name ‘Newirgland’ (595.10). Indicating

Tipperary as a prologue to his naming of the thirty-two counties, Joyce puns on the power of

the sun to reach all the way around the globe to both Tipperary in Ireland and New Ireland in

the Papuan archipelago (‘It’s a long ray to Newirglands’ premier.’ 595.10). Tipperary was

Ireland’s first (‘premier’) county, yet like England (‘irgland’), Ireland too has been

reproduced, if only in name, in the antipodes. The reverberations of the catchy First World

War song It’s a Long Way to Tipperary hint at the overlapping of loyalties and obligations

that the imperial-colonial relationship imposed. Divided by geography, the antipodes regions,

like Ireland and England, are integrated into global patterns through Joyce’s conflation of

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place names. Although readers soon meet ‘the austrologer Wallaby by Tolan’ (601.32) as part

of this ricorso, it is important to consider what role might be played by astrology or its

marsupial representative in the context of spatial and temporal renewal.

The ricorso invites cosmic as well as pan-global readings, as Anna Livia is experiencing and

generating a global return to origins on many levels, both spatial, mythical and tangibly

connected to Ireland through the image of the river Liffey as a place of rebirth. The Liffey’s

centrality as a radial place from which other locations may be defined is suggested to readers

in the term ‘Geoglyphy’ (595.07). The renewal of place through desired or imposed

settlement is viewed as inevitable as it is bound up in the ricorso chapter’s insinuation that

HCE will reawaken from sleep with the new day. Anna Livia announces that she is ‘calling

all daynes to dawn’ (593.11)—she is summoning a new day and also HCE (the northerner, a

Dane) to arise and greet the new day. As a Dane who replaced and replenished Ireland’s

population, HCE is subsumed into the historical mass of masculinity, which perpetrated the

destruction of societies and also their renewal: ‘the hundering, blundering, dunderfunder of

plundersundered manhood.’ (596.2–3.) The repetition of the word ‘under’ within each of

those descriptors of HCE also indicates the layered cycles of the Wake’s final chapter.

Wherever and whenever power has been asserted, it will eventually fall away and become

‘under’—reduced and subjugated due to the renewal of some other’s superior presence. Even

sleep is a cycle, as HCE remains ‘under’—still in unconscious sleep where ALP is awake.

ALP’s depiction of HCE the everyman resounds globally. Although he is allowed to sleep on

until the shutter is taken down from the windows of his tavern, the world is awakening, even

as far south as the antipodes: ‘Thus faraclacks the friarbird. Listening, Syd!’ (595.33.) The

friarbird—a honeyeater bird species endemic in the southern hemisphere—has been

identified as that genus of Australian avifauna whose call resembles the phrase ‘four o’clock,

four o’clock’ (Slepon, n.d., viewed 28 November 2014). That the Wake’s friarbird ‘clacks’

from afar emphasises the union of place over distance discussed previously in this thesis.

Also rhyming with ‘lyre-bird’, the Australian bird with its uncanny talent of perfectly

imitating the sounds of humans and their machines, the friarbird here mimics a clock. The

sounds of Sydney in the afternoon at four o’clock can be heard in Dublin where one city

echoes another. The presence of Sydney in the Wake has been discussed above in this thesis

(see Chapter 3.4) where the Australian figure ‘Danl McGrath’ weighs in on the public debate

about HCE’s guilt. ‘Syd’ is also the south (Danish), adding to the audience for these

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complementary sounds from the far south of the antipodes. Not only is the world turning, but

the city seen here in the book’s final chapter is also an emblem of human civilisation, a

pattern of birth, reproduction, death and rebirth. ‘The urb it orbs’ (598.28), we are told, when

urban life indicates global cycles of humans in time, as they navigate the orb (world).

The Australian friarbird is not the sole representative of antipodes life in this study of Book

IV. It is joined by the image of a marsupial, the wallaby, embedded in a directive to Shaun

(as Kevin) to embark on his duties as a missionary:

You must exterra acquarate to interiritate all the arkypelicans. The austrologer Wallaby by

Tolan, who farshook our showrs from Newer Aland, has signed the you and the now our

mandate. Milenisia waits. Be smark. (601.33–6).

The wallaby had been introduced earlier in Chapter Three where its fur, together with the tail

of the kangaroo are invoked as decorative fashion trophies, included in a portrait of a woman

(165.20). Here, ‘wallaby’ inspires new meanings in the ricorso chapter where it is echoed in

the names of two historical figures that Joyce found fascinating. In these instances, ‘wallaby’

is intended to depict the renewing of identity, and the first figures is that of the ‘Austrologer

Wallaby by Tolan’: his complete title (‘by’ or, ‘of’ ‘Tolan’) refers to the doubling of two

figures of flight, both authors and both in danger for their publications.

First there is John Whalley, a Dublin astrologer. What it meant to be an astrologer in Dublin

in the seventeenth century is a tale of creative quackery well suited to the distorted portraits

in Finnegans Wake. Whalley merges with John Toland, a translator of Giordano Bruno’s

work (Wigelsworth, 2008, p. 65). Whalley and Toland both at one time fled Dublin for

England—Toland for his translations and Whalley for his unpopularity as a vocal anti-

Catholic, and as an alleged informer to the English authorities. The path of exile between

Ireland and England is instantly broadened through the inclusion of the phrase: ‘farshook our

showrs (forsook our shores) from Newer Aland’ (601.35), an utterance which stretches the

trajectory of exile far south to New Zealand and New Ireland. The latter, a narrow island in

the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea, is not too far from Joyce’s ‘New Z-land’,

although he has echoed the book’s cyclical structure by replacing the letter ‘Z’ with ‘A’. The

top and tail pattern embedded in this wordplay on place is relevant to the theme of return and

ultimately renewal of Book IV. The critic Finn Fordham (2007) concurs with this

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interpretative approach to the pairing of Ireland with New Ireland in Joyce’s scheme of

superimposed and reflecting geographical sites:

The identification allows us to picture a movement from the ‘NSW European archipelago’

(Britain and Ireland) to an archipelago on the opposite side of the world. The Irish Free

State is metaphorically a ‘New Ireland’, so Joyce incorporates this ‘New Ireland’ as an

analogy and a diametrically opposed alternative (p. 474).

Joyce’s ironic approach to the distant, antipodean incarnation of a ‘newer Ireland’ inspires

further colonial implications about place and territoriality, enmeshed in Joyce’s naming of

‘Newer Aland’. It may not be widely known that Australia overcame German colonists to

annex those same islands in 1914, making them the colony of a colony, another ‘A-land’

(Howe, Kiste, & Lal, 1994, pp. 56–57). The ‘mandate’ indicates the claimed territory, and the

paragraph suggests a going forth by sea towards the doubled image, or the ‘Newer’ land to

the south. Melanesia becomes ‘Milenisia’, with an embedded reference to the Spanish-Iberian

tribal people known as the Milesians who voyaged from Spain towards settlement in Ireland,

and entered mythology as the founders of Ireland’s early Celtic society (Carey, 2011, pp. 8–

11). Joyce’s invocation of the Milesian myth continues the pattern established throughout the

book of framing Ireland according to the many mythical, geographical and political means

through which the country was defined. In this way, Finnegans Wake can be viewed as a

modernist recollection of all the preceding texts on Irish identity formation, particular those

concerned with land claims and territoriality such as the Lebor Gabála Érenn (the medieval

Irish Book of Invasions). The geographically layered phrasing of the ‘Newer Aland’ passage

not only refracts the antipodes through Ireland as a place, but also through accretions of myth

and textual records pertaining to racial origins.

The ‘austrologer Wallaby by Toland’ component of the ‘Newer Aland’ passage continues the

interaction between evidence in recorded text and settlement myths. John Whalley is figured

as an ‘austrologer’, one who travels south, guided by the stars. The naming of Whalley as

‘Wallaby’ could also phonically resemble the three syllables of the name of the Greek

geographer Ptolemy, whose work John Whalley translated and published in Dublin. The

melding of translators who fled Dublin must have amused Joyce, reflecting his own flight as

a multilingual exile. Yet there is a darker inference, revealed by the directive sentence which

orders the subject to leave the land and acquire new land across the water: ‘You must exterra

acquarate’; and to subdue, question and populate with the island-dwellers: ‘interirigate all the

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arkypelicans’. To ‘inter-irigate’ evokes the Wake’s dramatisation of colonialism and

miscegenation as ceaselessly recurring, almost as a callous authoritarian offshoot of

individual and delusional self-regard. Subtle criticism of such practices also emerges in the

abrupt sentence ‘Milenesia waits’, parodying the presumption of the colonising force; that

this ‘newer’ territory passively ‘waits’ for their arrival. In the twinning of ‘Milenesia’ with

the subequatorial archipelago (the European-renamed Melanesia), the antipodes are blatantly

superimposed or fused with the Milesian myth, and the formation of Irish identity as the

theme for migration and re-territoriality is emphasised.

The implications drawn from the symbolism of ‘wallaby’ and Whalley are clearly about

movement—between hemispheres, across seas and not merely for the purposes of leisurely

travel. The ‘wallaby’ or wally/Whalley figuration is associated with radical ideas and

departures (astrology and exile). The wallaby image bounces back into view at another stage

of the book, although the journey of departure from Ireland is reversed. The ‘wallies of Noo

Soch Wilds’ phrase (497.13) occurs during a scene that, curiously, demonstrates an

interrogation that the ‘wallaby austrologer’ passage ordered. In episode III.iii, Yawn (a

version of Shaun) is explaining his family’s place in Ireland’s history to the Four Old Men—

the Four Historians. The story of HCE’s settlement in Dublin and establishment as a founder

of society is raised to an epic parody of global voyages of return: all are drawn back to

Ireland, the world’s colonial subjects gather in HCE’s pub which has become a ‘delightful

bazaar’ (497.4–36). The spectacle of the vassal subjects and all their gifts is an explicit

mocking of Empire except that HCE stands in as the benevolent emperor whose realm is

awash with booze (‘his boosiness primesis’). The presence of ‘wallies of Noo Soch Wilds’

among his gathering allies refers, multi-directionally and phonetically, to the Welsh, the New

South Welsh, and the Scots. The ‘wallies’ are also a possible suggestion of Chinese migrants

in Australia, as Wally in the Scots dialect denotes ornamental porcelain or China.315 Finally,

some of those newcomers to HCE’s tavern are possibly from the ‘valleys’ of New South

Wales, implying that these allies bearing tributes are from the distant antipodes (buried deep

in distant ‘valleys’ downunder), with the added impression that these allies are wild—a feral

but loyal addition to HCE’s realm.

315 The Scots dialect definitions for ‘wallies’ are provided in as part of the ‘Draft Additions 1993 Series’, <Oxford English Dictionary>, last viewed March 15th, 2015.

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The variations on ‘wallaby’ explained above are a few of the antipodean threads interwoven

through the Wake’s global tapestry. The antipodes have proved particularly useful in adding

to Joyce’s store of contrarian imagery: anything that repeats his formula of the mutual

resolution of opposites contributes to the book’s fascination with the potential for harmony

amid polyphony. The selected examples have shown Joyce’s parodying treatment of colonial

relations, particularly by highlighting the ambiguity with which these colonial subjects move

around the empire, whether by choice, by force or by necessity. The Wake plants us firmly in

Dublin but also takes readers beyond these urban parameters. Joyce merges Ireland with the

world to suggest that scenarios of settler-occupation occur everywhere in the world and in

repeating cycles; but the antipodal mirror also shows a distorted vision in every place mapped

as part of the Wake’s world topography. Which is accurate, the ‘urban’ vision of Dublin or

the ‘orbal’, global picture? The antipodes’ inclusion in the Wake could be just another

imaginary voyage to an unknown place, a place of imagined outsiders.

The discussion of ‘wallaby’ as a symbol for departure is contrasted with the two uses of

‘Botany Bay’ in Finnegans Wake. I suggest that the name ‘Botany Bay’ connotes a site of

arrival, which is in keeping with the continual sense of renewal that is present of Book IV of

the Wake. Botany Bay enables the reader to identify Australia through the British naming of

their chosen port of entry to New South Wales in 1788, even if the phrase doubly invokes a

smaller, and perhaps less historically resonant location in Dublin (‘Botany Bay’ was the

vegetable garden of Trinity College which Joyce refers to twice in Finnegans Wake). As part

of a lengthy, self-promoting speech about his own accomplishments, HCE expounds on his

sexual potency and siring of future generations: ‘with a slog to square leg I sent my boundary

to Botany Bay and ran up a score and four of mes while the yanks were huckling the empire’

(543.06).

Cricket metaphors are more richly strewn through the text in the following episode (III.iv),

and this ‘slog to square leg’ is a droll foreshadowing of those exploits. The new ‘boundary’ is

both the Botany Bay Square of Trinity College as well as the New South Wales colonial port

to which the Irish presence has been ‘extended’. The cricketing feat echoes the brief mention

that Joyce gives to a similar ‘slog’ in Ulysses (Bloom recalls a great shot which took out a

window of the Kildare Club across the street) (Joyce, 1993, p. 83). HCE’s comparison of his

prowess with the ‘yanks’ seems an overt reference to the fragmentation of empire. The

Americans disbanded from the empire with the independent attitude seen in their emerging

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writers (Mark Twain’s Huck Finn exudes a clear influence throughout the Wake, with

‘huckling’ here as the clue), and HCE instead committed himself to tireless repopulation. In

doing so, the realm of Ireland is unrestricted by geography and continues in the antipodes—‘I

sent my boundary to Botany Bay’ (543.06).

The phrase ‘Botany Bay’ occurs for a second time within a grand scene of choral devotion

conducted by Shaun in his role as the saintly Kevin:

Hillsengals, the daughters of the cliffs, responsen. Longsome the samphire coast. Foree thee

to thee, thoo art it thoo, that thouest there. …Whose every has herdifferent from the similes

with her site. Sicut campanulae petalliferentes they coroll in carol round Botany Bay.

(601.10–16).

The twinning of Dublin with Sydney (New South Wales, Australia) may not be broadly

evident at first glance. Yet the inclusion of Botany Bay is highly evocative of renewal

through migration, and the presence of Botany Bay takes on a far more optimistic tone that

the original ballad, Bound for Botany Bay, sung by Irish and other convicts facing a new life

through transportation to Australia. The act of singing, which recurs throughout the book,

often extols events as the Wake’s collective voice. Here, Anna Livia’s welcoming song to

Shaun (as St Kevin) is echoed by the gathering of female saints: ‘Hillsengals, the daughters

of the cliffs, responsen’. (They are ‘hell’s angels’, as sanctified versions of Shaun’s previous

and less pious female students.) The surrounding imagery paints an epic setting of sea and

sky for these sounds: ‘Sicut campanulae petalliferentes they coroll in caroll round Botany

Bay.’ The bells tolling are simultaneous incarnations of the bell above Trinity College and

the famous convict song. An obscure poem documents the university’s bell (Anonymous,

1836), whereas ‘Botany Bay’ became the archetypal song of Australian transportation under

the British penal system. The song is not traditionally sung in a round (as hinted above, they

‘caroll round Botany Bay’), but is written in simple ballad rather than fugue form.

Nevertheless, echoes of an imprisoning ‘corale’ embedded within this pealing of bells

(campanule) could indicate the penal colony of Botany Bay. Sadly the Bay’s role as an

imprisoning landscape is not unique but local and global, ‘urban and orbal’ (601.5–6). Bells,

in the Wake, signal time rather than space as they are associated with clock-towers, such as

that ‘thunderous tenor toller’ which sounds at HCE’s encounter with the cad (35.32). It is a

different kind of ‘bell’, which leads to another instance of Australian slang in the Wake—

‘dinkum’. The phrase ‘dinkum belle’ (384.22) is discussed below in relation to the presence

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in the Wake of three Irishmen who travelled to Australia—Michael Davitt, Dion Boucicault

(both Senior and Junior) and John McCormack.

‘Dinkum belle’ (384.22): Long-Distance Travel to the Antipodes in 5.2

Finnegans Wake

Irish travellers who ventured to Australia are rarely associated with interpretive approaches to

Finnegans Wake. This chapter will proceed to discuss how that distance is bridged and by

whom. The purpose and result of travel to somewhere like Australia is part of the Wake’s

adventurousness through language and ideas, so that those who return from the antipodes

renew their understanding of Ireland. Joyce’s own travels were limited to Ireland, Europe and

the British isles, so that all the great global journeys alluded to in the Wake are imaginative

projections.

Travelling the distance to the southernmost colonies of Britain was a journey most Irish

people undertook during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under duress, whether as

political prisoners, convicts under the penal resettlement scheme, or as economic migrants

(O’Farrell, 1987, pp. 7–8). Yet some chose to make the journey independently, and those

historical figures entered into Joyce’s reimagining of Ireland’s spatial relationship with the

colonial antipodes. Dion Bouccicault, Michael Davitt and the tenor John McCormack are

three Irishmen whose achievements and adventures, including journeys to Australia, leave

their traces throughout Finnegans Wake.

Travel is a crucial theme throughout the Wake—it is travel through space and time that

empowers the dreamer of the text to encompass vast distances and sound out the phonemic

resonances of disparate places. Travel by sea is frequently interwoven through one of the

more prominent narrative threads, the voyage and love story from the medieval romance,

Tristan and Isolde. Among Joyce’s permutations on the motifs and characters from this epic

include the phrase of endearment ‘dinkum belle’ (384.22). While the two parts of the phrase

must be considered separately (‘dinkum’ and ‘belle’), it must be noted that the phrase is

included to signal Tristan’s ‘true love’ or ‘faithful beauty’ to add to his accumulating

exhortations addressed to his adored ‘colleen bawn’ (384.21). Previous discussions of the

word ‘Dinkum’ relate to the word’s earlier appearance in Finnegans Wake (‘the dinkum oil’

108.25), and its Anglo-Australian or possibly Chinese-Australian origins for meaning truthful

or authentic (a discussion of the term ‘dinkum’ appears above in Chapter 3.1).

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The ‘belle’ of ‘dinkum belle’ stems from the nomenclature associated with Isolde as Isuelt La

Belle and HCE’s daughter, Izod/Issy of Chapelizod. The close textual proximity between the

Irish phrase for one’s fair beloved girl in ‘colleen bawn’ and the phrase reminiscent of

Australian slang in ‘dinkum belle’ indicates Joyce’s attempt to both narrow the distance

between Ireland and Australia, and also broaden the geographical relevance of the medieval

love story. The Collen Bawn is also one of Boucicault’s well-known melodramas, which is

discussed following a further instance of the term ‘belle’.

Through Joyce’s mutations of words and especially names, space and place are subject to

dissolution so that one place comes to inhabit or interfere with the boundaries of an alternate

site. No stable image of Ireland is possible, the Wake appears to suggest, without reference to

the world beyond and its relationship to Ireland. A brief observation of a further usage of

‘belle’ illustrates this. The opening pages of Finnegans Wake describe a mound/hill in which

HCE’s alter-ego, Finnegan, or the giant, is interred. The site of the hill is located, it would

seem, where HCE has his infamous encounter with the two young women. These two are

charmingly referred to as ‘this belle’s alliance beyind Ill Sixty’ (07.33). The dropping of the

‘h’ before ‘hill’ and within ‘behind’ refers by accent to either the cockney/British or perhaps

Australian soldiers, both of whom defended the battle site of Hill 60 during the First World

War. The Australian accent is also suggested through the use of the letter ‘y’ in a plausible

allusion to the observations of Mark Twain. The American author documented his encounter

of the Australian accent in his antipodes travelogue of 1897, Following the Equator:

… [Twain] can’t resist poking fun at the local accent, with its mislaid ‘y’, relating a

chambermaid’s morning comments: ‘The tyble is set, and here is the piper (paper); and if

the lydy is ready I’ll tell the wyter to bring up the breakfast (Twain, 1899, chapter XI).

The snapshot of military history using Napoleon’s “belle alliance” to refer to HCE’s

uncertain voyeuristic interests is further evidence that Joyce’s renewal of Ireland is partially

achieved through geography, by re-placing Ireland in alternative locations (and otherwise

through language and textual reference.) The “dinkum” or true love between the legendary

Tristan and Isolde serves as a more reliable motif than HCE’s ambiguous extra-marital

encounter. The Four Old Men charged with the task of writing Ireland’s histories are affected

deeply by the love of Tristan for Isolde, as the procreative act of their sexual union is akin to

the mytical power of a god ‘who made the world’ (384.35)—interestingly, this is a global

rather than a local perspective as the Annalists’ purview spans beyond Ireland in the Wake’s

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spatial dimensions. The inspiration associated with Tristan and Isolde’s flush of love and

consummation through the phrase ‘dinkum belle’ is ironic, as with other of depictions of love

by Joyce. Bloom’s cuckoldry in Ulysses is reiterated in the tale of King Mark of Cornwall,

Iseult’s intended:

In Bognor (Joyce), rewrote the passage dealing with King Mark, Tristan and Iseult…; this

revived his favourite theme of cuckoldry, and the squawking of the seagulls on the Bognor

Strand made him think of imitating their sounds to suggest the derision visited upon King

Mark (Ellmann, 1959, p. 555).

Travel is not solely the province of Joyce in southern England and the legendary lovers

aboard ship in episode II.iv. Recurring themes of travel and long-distance relationships

evolved greatly in Joyce’s writing since the stymied travel of stories like ‘Eveline’ in

Dubliners. Unlike the restricted figures of those earlier short stories, the figures of Finnegans

Wake embark on journeys beyond Ireland. The antipodes provides ports of call to some of the

Wake’s travellers, including Irish playwright and actor, Dion Boucicault, the nineteenth-

century Irish independence leader, Michael Davitt and the Irish tenor who Joyce admired,

John McCormack. Boucicault, Davitt and McCormack all travelled to Australia for work

rather than leisure. The playwright and singer found new audiences, while Davitt observed a

new society and political movements in the making.

Boucicault’s relevance to Joyce’s works is interesting primarily for the dramatist’s

intertextual presence in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Boucicault’s unusual surname and

popular plays have merited close study of the dramatist’s inclusion in the Wake, in which he

and his plays are referred to over sixty times. Additionally, Dion Boucicault’s distinctive

Hugenot surname provides fodder for Joyce’s puns, becoming: ‘Dion Cassius Poosycomb’

(391.23); ‘dyinboosycough’ (95.08); and ‘Bouchicaulture’ (569.35). While Boucicault’s

Australian travels may not have entered into Joyce’s absorption of Boucicauldian allusions,

the resonance of the playwright’s journeys between British colonies adds to our

understanding of the popularity of Irish-inspired melodrama. Allusions to the rituals of the

popular theatre experience surface prominently in Finnegans Wake, mainly in episode II.i

(‘The Mime’.) Entire scenarios such as the secret passing of the keys through a kiss in Arran

Na Pogue are planted unmistakeably in the Wake’s fertile ground for elaboration.

Boucicault’s centrality to popular culture in Dublin between the 1860s and 1916 is especially

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relevant, according to Cheryl Herr’s extensive research on that period of theatre history in

Ireland, which names the dramatist as ‘the Beloved Boucicault’ (Herr, 1991. p. 11).

For Boucicault, touring his Irish-themed productions of The Shaughraun and Arrah-na-

Pogue in Australia provided a financial incentive, these plays proving hugely popular with

Australians of Irish heritage (Van Den Poorten, 1969). There was also the added experience

of romantic renewal in the actor-manager’s third marriage to a much younger actress. The

extensive intertextual references to Boucicault’s plays in Finnegans Wake reveal Joyce’s

memories of the plays, their songs and characters. The Wake’s central figure Shaun is named

after ‘Shaun the Post’ from the popular Boucicault play, Arrah-na-Pogue. The plays’

melodramatic love stories are also made to intersect with Joyce’s workings of ‘Tristan and

Isolde’, for instance their voyage in episode II.iv. Joyce played with the notion of the

dramatist’s use of melodrama to convey a stylised and romantic reflection of Irish society.

Boucicault’s initial journeys to Australia, however, were purely imaginary. The British

colony is a shadowy, dangerous place for political and criminal exile in his plays. Cheryl

Herr considers Boucicault’s plays as a cultural expression of patriotism on a continuum that

culminates in less naïve plays staged at the turn-of-the-century (Herr, 1986, p. 11). Joyce was

familiar with the plot and characters of The Shaughran, considered to be Boucicault’s most

political work: its action commences with the return home to Ireland from Australia of an

escaped Fenian prisoner, Robert Ffoliott’ (McFeely, p. 78). Various essays on Ulysses

comment on Joyce’s channelling of Boucicault’s fame through Bloom’s awareness of popular

theatre and in particular, characters from The Shaugran. Pomeranz notes Bloom’s reflections

on Harvey Duff, police informer, and Kain notes Bloom’s knowledge of a well-known actor

in the rascal role; Feeney’s discussion comments on Bloom’s knowledge of the informer

figure, a ‘Dannyman’, from Boucicault’s play The Colleen Bawn (Pomeranz, p. 138; Kain, p.

97; Feeney, p. 58). Denise Ayo also argues that the Citizen’s dog Garryowen symbolises the

colonial stereotypes imposed on Irish subjects, seeing a link with Dion Boucicault’s The

Colleen Bawn: or the Brides of Garryowen (1860) (Ayo, 2010, p. 153).

A false ‘Fenian’, the hero of The Shaughran is less a radical than a romantic, a role supported

by the title figure, the wandering larrikin Conn, who professes to have sailed to Melbourne to

secure his master’s escape. Ffolliot’s attempts to maintain his links home with Ireland

through letters are disrupted, in a plot device more clearly contrived than Joyce’s ambiguous

inter-hemisphere telegrams between Shem and Shaun. ‘How many letters have you had from

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him for the past year?’ the scheming Kinchella demands to know of Ffoliott’s lover, Arte

O’Neill. Her loyalty is steadfast even though the villain’s aside reveals her letters have been

intercepted: ‘I’ve got them all safe under lock and key’ (Boucicault, The Shaughraun, Act 1).

Kinchella’s disruption of long-distance love between Ireland and Australia is solved through

dramatic contrivance, as the hero’s return journey is successful.

There is a further layer of significance for Boucicault’s recurring presence in Finnegans

Wake through his plays. The playwright’s son succeeding him as an actor and theatre

manager, remaining behind in Australia. Dionysius Boucicault Junior (known as ‘Dot’) found

success in playing villains, and although he did not make his home in Australia, he returned

twice to Australian and New Zealand to oversee and perform in lucrative theatre seasons,

featuring his father’s plays (Van der Poorten, 1969, pp. 200—202). It cannot be said

definitively that the younger Boucicault eclipsed the older (as the father remains more widely

known as a playwright and international sensation of the stage), but for Joyce’s readers there

are interesting parallels with the Wake’s prevailing motif of the ‘conquest of the father by the

sons’ (Di Bernard, 1980, p. 35). The younger Boucicault’s success was more of a

continuation than a conquest of his father’s legacy. Still, the fact of the son replacing the

father, quite literally on the stage used for performing fantasies of Irish rural life and

rebellion, should resonate strongly for readers of the Wake.

Michael Davitt’s activities in Australia were also cultural, but politically motivated in

comparison with his theatrical contemporary, Boucicault. Davitt’s well-written memoir Life

and Progress in Australasia is an excellent snapshot of Australian political and social life that

establishes clear links between labour and political movements in Ireland and Australia.

Davitt’s two mentions in Finnegans Wake are both associated with Shaun and Shem’s

fraternal relationship. In the first instance, Davitt was referred to within the Juan/Dave

narrative of III.ii (‘I’m proud of you, French Davit!’ (464.36). At that point, Shem-Dave was

subordinate to his domineering brother, and the praiseworthy tone cannot be read literally.

Later, when Shaun (as ‘Yawn’) is subdued by the Four Old Men who question his

relationship with his brother, the tone is more genuinely adoring towards the absent brother.

The passage has already situated Shaun’s search of his memory for the whereabouts of his

brother in Australia:

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I mean in ostralian someplace ... (488.20); if he lives sameplace in the antipathies of

austrasia or anywhere … safe and damned, or he hopped it or who can throw any lime on

the sopjack, my fond fosther, E. Obiit Nolan, The Workings, N.S.W. (489.9–13).

Throughout these two pages, Shaun’s insistence on the brothers’ closeness is admittedly

suspect though there are countless references to the awkwardness and difficulties in both

sibling rivalry and love. The words ‘same’, ‘shame’ and ‘shun’ are invoked through the puns

used to convey the twin’s relationship from Shaun’s perspective: ‘He feels he ought to be as

asamed of me as me to be ashunned of him’ (489.19). In among these angst-filled

protestations is the sense that brotherly feeling could represent general empathy among

mankind, because Shaun’s brother is referred to as ‘one’s other’ (489.33.) Joyce’s reference

to Baudelaire with the exclamation ‘Mon freer!’ (489.28), is a telling introduction to the

presence of Davitt, whose early radical nationalism intended to ‘free’ his country and his

‘brothers’ (frère) therein.

I call you my halfbrother because you in your somberer otiumic moments remind me

deeply of my natural saywhen brothel in feed, hop and jollity, S. H. Davitt, that benighted

irismaimed, who is tearly belaboured by Sydney and Alibany. (489.28–32).

The reason for the inclusion of initials ‘S. H.’ remains an unsolved reference that could

perhaps indicate Joyce’s youthful incarnation as the protagonist ‘Stephen Hero’. This

speculative notion is linked with Davitt’s humble yet heroic figure. Davitt’s fame as a

‘maimed’ campaigner for labour and land rights is noted (he lost his arm as a child when

poverty led him to factory work and the resulting accident) (Fly, 2006, p. 28). ‘S. H’ could

also indicate the share initial letters shared by Shem and Shaun as Davitt encompasses the

contrasting qualities of the Wake’s twins. Davitt wrote the iconic ‘pen letter’, a document

from Fenian correspondence which was used to convict him and haunted his later

respectability in politics (the code word ‘pen’ was attributed to the use of firearms) (Moody,

1945, p. 224). Shem the penman is frequently taunted for his attempts at writing, yet Shaun

the Postman is the one responsible for sending the Wake’s legendary letter.

The phrase ‘benighted irismaimed’ also includes ‘benighted Irishman/United Irishman’, both

clues to Davitt’s life-long patriotism, as his ordeals and successes earned through his

dedication to nationalist causes are acknowledged. Davitt also provides us with yet another

Joycean self-portrait; famously iris-maimed by chronic eye inflammations, Joyce’s eye-

patched visage became iconic in its own way. His heroic dedication to completing Finnegans

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Wake amid frequent pain and recovery from operations contributed to the ‘benighted’

darkness that no doubt eased his physical discomfort. Joyce’s combination of opposites in

‘maimed’ and ‘united’ also reflects the continuing pattern of coincidentia oppositorum, which

is particularly relevant in these passages of III.iii in which Shaun (as Yawn) frequently draws

on the Brown/Nolan-Bruno of Nola motif. Patrick Reilly reiterates the significance of the

resolution of opposites in terms of Joyce’s literary and philosophical influences:

Joyce admits to being influenced to some degree both by Vico and by Giordano Bruno …

who theorized that all opposites are united in their infinite measure and elements that are

logically contradictory in the finite world coexist without contradiction in the infinite

universe (Reilly, 2007, p. 719).

Among the many contradictions of the questioning episode in III.iii, Shaun is perhaps

protecting his real brother Shem with a barrage of decoys to purposely mislead his

questioners. Shem is perennially associated with the Irish long-distance travellers who are

claimed by others back home—whether for their positive reputations or alleged crimes.

Wherever Shem has deserted to, Shaun is forced to acknowledge their resemblance as his

brother’s ‘doblinganger’ (490.17)—both his doppelganger and fellow worker from back

home in Dublin (‘ganger’ from ‘doblin’.) The renewing possibilities of travel are

counterbalanced by the enduring force of geography and family ties.

Michael Davitt spent seven months in the Australian colonies, deriving material for a book

that blends travel writing with insights about Australian colonial labour practices (Life and

Progress in Australia, 1898). His book documents the travels made between his arrival and

departure ports which spanned Albany in Western Australia and Sydney in the east (‘Sydney

and Alibany’, 489.32). Davitt’s desire for his book to reflect a broad range of encounters with

industrial and everyday life in Australia is reminiscent of Joyce’s omniscient portrayal of

Ireland in the Wake, as Davitt’s aim is to cover many aspects of Australia including ‘the

general life, resources, politics, parties, progress, prospects and scenery’ (Davitt, 1898,

‘Preface’, p. vi). The author’s admission of this broad scope is akin also to the dazzling

nature of Joyce’s text, reflecting Davitt’s excitement and obvious enthusiasm for his topic,

the new colonies: ‘The treatment of such an area of topics must necessarily be somewhat

kaleidoscopic’ (Davitt, 1898, ‘Preface’, p. vi). The kaleidoscopic approach suggests that

Davitt wished his readers to see the inter-related nature of his chosen topics, and for the

reader to adjust their vision in order to appreciate his information about these ‘rising

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communities’ which have formed as a result of the work of expatriates from the ‘old

countries’ (Davitt, 1898, p. vi—vii). Davitt’s optimistic approach to the Australian colonies

sees the possibilities for renewal of European social and economic institutions.

Of the three Irish travellers to Australia referred to above, John McCormack and Dion

Boucicault (Senior) are presented more frequently in Finnegans Wake as their songs and

plays recur through major motifs across Joyce’s text. The playwright and actor’s association

with Australia is roughly contemporaneous with that of Davitt, even though Davitt’s

Australasian journey of the 1880s was not published until 1898.

John McCormack’s singing career held a particular fascination for Joyce. He met the tenor in

Dublin in 1904 and was encouraged by McCormack to take up singing as a career for

himself. McCormack’s biography by Pierre Key is an important source for Finnegans Wake

(Landuyt, 2001). The singer’s own words, song lyrics and operatic roles are traceable at

many points in Joyce’s text. McCormack’s visits to Australia in the early twentieth century

may have held passing interest for Joyce, given the importance of sea voyages for the Wake.

‘That trip to Australia was one of the most interesting of my life,’—remembers

McCormack’s, as recorded in Key’s biography—‘Next morning we proceeded to Freemantle

and thence over the Australian Bight, which is supposed to be the roughest sea in the world’

(Key, 1918, p. 296).

‘Bight’ is the only suggestion that this trans-oceanic passage might have inspired Joyce in his

Wake depictions of the antipodes. Joyce provides a glimpse of the sunrise over a pseudo-

Stonehenge (‘macroliths’, that is, large stones), which is situated at ‘Fangaluvu Bight’

(594.24), named for Fangaluvu Bay, of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. This image returns

the reader to Book IV, where Anna Livia observes the sunrise, and the renewal of place and

time. While we might seem to be ‘a long, long way’ from John McCormack, his famous First

World War recording, It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary, is recalled in this episode of

renewal at sunrise. Above, in Chapter 5.1, I made mention of the earlier allusion to this song,

with ‘it’s a long ray’ (595.09). In keeping with the book’s geocriticism’s ‘stratigraphic’

search for sources on place, Joyce too considers how layers of texts come to define a place.

Using the imagined site of New Ireland with its tribal inhabitants (the ‘maramara’, 595.27),

both the volcano and the nearby stone monuments of the island (‘idols for isthmians’ 594.25)

are read by the narrator as proof of continuous habitation of the earth, whether it is in Ireland

in Europe or New Ireland in the Antipodes.

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John McCormack garnered Joyce’s admiration not only for his singing, but also for his

glamorous lifestyle. The singer gained celebrity status for his recordings of both sentimental

and patriotic Irish songs, in addition to his operatic records. McCormack also dressed well,

travelled in style and enjoyed a rewarding family life. Unlike the misfits and political exiles

from Boucicault’s plays, sent as convicts to Australia, McCormack was not forced to make

the journey. He chose to participate in performances produced by the Australian singer,

Nellie Melba. The 1920 concert tour is memorable for the wrong reasons, as it did not

compare as favourably with his well-attended 1911 and 1913 Australian tours. Although

McCormack complimented Australian audiences on their knowledgeable appreciation for

music, he took umbrage at what he felt were politically motivated interruptions. Australians

resented McCormack’s newly acquired American citizenship, which irked their sense of

British loyalty (Scarry, 1974, p. 527). Heckling at one of his Adelaide concerts prompted

McCormack to cancel his remaining shows (The Toronto World, 1920). The disruption was

caused by ‘part of the audience rising and singing the British national anthem and some of

them shouting that McCormack was a Sinn Feinner’ (The Toronto World, September 13,

1920). The singer was upset given his omission of the national anthem was (in all likelihood)

accidental, yet the incident draws our attention to characterisation in Finnegans Wake, as the

respectable Shaun is at times modelled on McCormack as ‘the good son’ (Landuyt, 2001).

While McCormack remained a favourite, absentee ‘son’ of Ireland, his new citizenship and

home in America suggested he and Joyce now had self-imposed exile in common, for which

both suffered occasional criticism.

Roaring Bulls and ‘the laughing jackass’ (368.07): The Rebounding 5.3

Sounds of the Antipodes in Finnegans Wake

Joyce devoted himself to creating a distinctive literary sound when composing the text of

Finnegans Wake. Sound, as spoken and heard language between the book’s human and other

figures, is an important site of transaction because their mishearings and missed meanings

yield richer humour and breadth of ideas for the reader. The main ideas discussed above—the

resolution of opposites through geography, distance and travel—are useful themes for

understanding how and why Joyce chose to involve the antipodes in his portrayal of Ireland

in the Wake. Sound was briefly discussed above, as bells and the Friarbird herald the

antipodes; however, there are further sounds that contribute to our sensory experience of the

antipodes in the text. Joyce’s making of a new kind of writing is audible in his staging of the

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dreaming mind’s shape-shifting visions. The timbre of Finnegans Wake incorporates the

sounds of his new, modern era, while also channelling voices and noises from the ancient

past. In his occasional though fascinating characterisation of the antipodes, Joyce embraces

the contradictory status of antipodes places as simultaneously ancient and ‘new’—old places

with indigenous traditions which are forced into newness by colonisation.

The collapse of old and new into a startling sense of the present recalls the reader to Joyce’s

modernist intentions. His experiments with language in the Wake produced entirely new

sounds, as well as the merging of ideas resulting from these neologisms. The recurring

presence of thunder is an important use of sound as it shows Joyce’s fascination with the

formation of human language in response to the ‘language’ of nature, theorised by Vico as an

imitative response to thunder. Also, Joyce’s well-documented fear of thunderstorms sheds

some biographical light on these references to pagan spiritual beliefs about thunder: observers

described Joyce’s aversion to thunder and lightning as visible ‘panic’ (Ellmann, 1959,

p. 395). The motif of the bullroarer appears four times (at present count) in Finnegans Wake

and its connection to thunder sounds and indigenous life in the antipodes is discussed below.

The following discussion of the bullroarer in the Wake requires some background explanation

of its original Australian researcher, the anthropologist Alfred Howitt. The reference to a

Mount Howitt early in Finnegans Wake merges the site of that mountain range in Victoria,

Australia, with Dublin’s Hill of Howth: ‘For that saying is as old as the howitts’ (15.24)

(McHugh, 1991 p. 15). It is at this site that readers also meet Howitt, an Australian geologist

and anthropologist. More extensive discussion will be presented below, but for the moment it

is worthwhile considering the parallel Wake pattern which links a paternal figure or a

founding father with a mountain or hill, so that Howitt’s mountain provides an antipodean

reflection of HCE’s hill of Howeth. The newly created sound in ‘howitts’ arguably mimics

how an Australian or New Zealander might pronounce ‘Howth’, also using the doubled ‘t’ in

‘Howitts’. As Joyce mimics every European accent possible throughout the Wake, it is not

unlikely that his over-hearing of New Zealnders at the France-New Zealand (Allblacks)

rugby game might have inspired the elongated ‘ow’ sound, showing how an antipodean could

so easily pronounce the Celtic-Viking name ‘howth’ phonetically instead of using the

regional peculiarity (‘howth’ as in ‘both’). The ‘old’ age of the ‘saying’ refers to the proverb,

‘as old as the hills’, merging the ancientness of landforms with the archaism of language.

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This physical merging of a mountain in Australia with a hill in Dublin collapses both space

and language to create Joyce’s new global landscape.

The sounds of the ‘howitts’ also invokes the sounds of World War One artillery, as the

howitzer guns provide a modern image of the wars fought among the many warring factions

in Europe and specifically Ireland of the early medieval period, referred to above as ‘the eve

of Killallwho’ (15.11), (a direct comment on Brian Boru of Killaloe’s defence of Ireland

against the allied Viking armies.) The echo of artillery fire in ‘howitts’ showing wars across

time are eventually outweighed by the opposing urge, when the violence has ‘thawed’ and the

‘lovers’ take pre-eminence over the war-mongers. The reader is then availed of the important

phrase that is ‘as old as the howitss’: ‘Pluck me whilst I blush!’ (15.22.) As the urges to

survive, love and repopulate are shown to be equally as ‘old’ as the will to war, the

possibility for renewal is in the utterance of the ‘saying’ itself (‘that saying is as old as the

howits’). The act of speaking reproduces the memory of the proverb, just as the urge to

‘pluck’ the ‘bold floras of the field’ regenerates the newly merged populations who survived

the upheavals of ‘Killallwho’. This wordplay, which blends an Australian mountain with

Dublin’s prominent headland, shows Joyce’s global scope in sourcing sounds from distant

cultures and languages.

Another sound linked with the antipodes is channelled through the appearance of the

bullroarer in Finnegans Wake. The bullroarer is closely associated with Joyce’s inclusion of

the thunder motif. A bullroarer is a Neolithic era musical instrument used by indigenous

cultures in disparate parts of the world. Usage of this carved wooden blade whirled in circles

at the end of a woven cord was present in Australian Aboriginal tribal groups (Haddon, 1898,

pp. 219–221). Bullroarers were used also by Indigenous Americans, African tribal peoples,

and European societies including Celts in Scotland, Scandinavians and also possibly by the

Celtic druids in Ireland. Joyce become acquainted with the bullroarer in the same way that he

encountered the cassowary discussed in Chapter Three—through reading anthropological and

reference works including entries in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and books on the subject

introduced below. His four allusions to the bullroarer in Finnegans Wake are likely to have

been inspired by one or more of three difference sources. Haddon’s The Study of Man (1898)

provides an overview on the bullroarer’s usage in an attempt to speculate how it might have

transitioned from an instrument used in Shamanistic ritual to a modern-day toy for children

and farm implement (the noise created the whirring aerofoil affects cattle who are made

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uneasy by the noise and return from the pastures.) The bullroarer is also mentioned in Levy-

Bruhl’s Primitive Mentality (1922). Joyce may have derived additional details about the use

of the bullroarer from Levy-Bruhl, whom he met in Copenhagen in 1936 (Ellmann, 1959,

p. 696). The anthropologist-philosopher is referred to in the Wake as ‘Loewy-Breuller’

(150.15): bruellen is German for the verb ‘to roar’, establishing a further connection with the

bullroarer.343

Haddon’s (1898, p. 219) The Study of Man makes mention of Australian anthropological

studies recorded by two authors, Fison and Howitt. The latter is Alfred Howitt, for whom

Mount Howitt (referred to on page fifteen of Finnegans Wake) is named. The mountain’s

naming in 1864 together with Howitt’s extensive contribution to natural science and

anthropology in Australia may certainly have escaped Joyce’s notice (Skerrit, 2011, pp. 40–

51). He may not have seen or pursued Haddon’s footnote about Aboriginal uses of the

bullroarer recorded by Fison and Howitt. On the other hand, the presumption that Joyce used

the phrase ‘as old as the howitts’ after the mountain rather than the anthropologist is only

contextual, given that the proverb being echoed is associated with hills (‘as old as the hills’).

To return to the bullroarer, the first allusion is used as sound effects to convey the chaos of

battle of Clontarf: ‘Somular with a bull on a clompturf. Rooks roarum rex roome!’ (17.09).

The proximity of ‘bull’ and ‘roar’ present in this description of the scramble for the high

kingship of Ireland indicate the imagined noise of succession battles and invasions.346 A later

invocation of the sound of the bullroarer refers not to battle but to the washerwomen’s

description of Anna Livia’s sexual encounters with HCE: ‘her bulls they were ruhring’

(198.04). At both of these instances the whirling rumble or buzzing of a bullroarer suggests

Joyce’s intention to create an epic backdrop for the cycles of civilisation propelled by the

social forces of decimation and repopulation. There is little coincidence that to make its

noise, the bullroarer must be propelled overhead (or at a safe distance from the body) in a

circular motion for its sound to carry. The bullroarers rotary-derived noise is a useful symbol

for the cycles of human experience depicted in Finnegans Wake.

A further allusion to the bullroarer is more overtly linked with primitivism. Previously in

Chapter Four, I discussed Shaun’s taunting of Shem, yet in relation to the use of sound and

343 McHugh (1981, p. 150) also notes the German name ‘Loewe’ translates to ‘lion’, so that the pun on the anthropologist’s name appears complete, even without the added reference to bull-roarers. 346 McHugh’s (1981, p. 17) annotations remind readers that Brian Boru’s battleground at Clontarf means ‘bull meadow’.

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the antipodes, Shem is characterised as a quasi-Druid figure enhanced by elements of

indigenous, tribal ritual. In Shaun (as Jaun)’s extensive faux embrace of his twin brother,

Shem (as Dave) is described as having his head shaved for ritual druidic purposes—‘be the

holy snakes’ (464.08). The reader is convinced that Shem is playing at primitive ritual

through sonic devices that resemble a bullroarer: ‘holdhard til you hear him clicking his

bull’s balls’ (464.18).347 The bull-roarer emitted a hum or whirr rather than a ‘click’ so the

connection with an Australian indigenous bull-roarer thins, while the association with Irish

prehistoric culture appears stronger. The ‘bull’s balls’ reference appears to build on the

sexual innuendo of the Jaun-Dave monologue, and could resemble bells or rattles once used

in ancient fertility rites. A Late Bronze Age find in Ireland unearthed forty-four ovular bells

known as crotals, exhibited in the National Museum in Dublin and the British Museum since

their excavation in the 1820s. The possible use of these bells in fertility rites is based on

archaeologist John Coles’ (1971, pp. 164–165) observation that the pendulous bell resembled

bulls’ testicles. Although this theory was not documented until well after the publication of

Finnegans Wake in the 1970s, the crotals appear ‘scrotal’ even to the untrained eye—so the

crotals of Dowris could have served as the inspiration for the ‘bull’s balls’ of page 464. The

noisy instruments of music and ritual in prehistoric societies add another layer to the score of

sounds accompanying Finnegans Wake. While the antipodes has been interspersed

sporadically to extend the spatial scope of the text, its reverberations in sound create a

renewing effect. As these primitive, almost extinct practices are preserved in the images of

the Wake like artefacts in a bog, they are crucial sounds in the forming of a new textual

language.

Morris’ book Austral English was referenced in the preceding chapters to explain the

Australian images of the Jumbuck and Kookaburra in relation to the Shem-Shaun twins

motif. While Morris’ book is etymological by genre, it has drawn on anthropological as well

as literary texts to create its alphabetised trove of local slang. It is possible that Morris’ book

was more useful to Joyce for his antipodes images than was at first anticipated in this study.

Joyce’s encounter with Morris was through the linguist Jespersen’s book Growth and

Structure of the English Language (1912). Jespersen is not listed in Atherton’s book of

intertexts, The Books at the Wake (1959), although the linguist has since been studied

extensively as a Wake source (Rosiers, 1999). The information from Jespersen (1905,

347 McHugh’s (1981, p. 464) original annotations and subsequent editions provide no gloss for ‘bull’s balls’.

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pp. 157–158) is largely a list of wildlife derived from Morris and resulted in the Wake

phrases ‘all the buds (birds) in the bush’ and ‘laughing jackass’ (95.36—96.01.) The

imagined sound of the jackass (which was a misnomer for the Kookaburra) is presented in the

Wake as ‘Harik!’ thrice repeated (96.01). The present chapter continues to explore how

images, objects and other antipodes allusions contribute to the sound of the Wake.

Joyce was clearly interested in Morris’ idea quoted by Jespersen that settlers in Australia

were confronted by the challenge of naming—‘there was never an instance in history when so

many new names were needed’ (Morris, 1898, p. xii). Morris was referring to the creation of

‘new names in English’ as opposed to their existing indigenous names. Considering the

multilingual sound of Finnegans Wake, Joyce was perhaps moved to include both the

indigenous and invented names for Australia and environs, as he used the incorrect name

‘laughing jackass’ in addition to the accurate name for the kingfisher species, ‘kookaburra’.

The text of the Wake succeeds in the Edenic task of discovering and naming the visions that

appear before the reader, although there is an added obligation to the reader to pronounce the

new words. In Joyce’s renewal or ‘ricorso’ of the world, places and their peculiarities are

given new names for old. That the renaming often occurs against the will of the newly named

is linked with the themes of usurpation that crowd the Wake.

The anthropologist Howitt’s publications are regularly cited in Morris, and many of the major

‘antipodes moments’ such as the Haka, are also listed. Also featured in Austral English are

the place names already discussed in Chapter Three including Van Diemen’s Land and

Broken Hill. Roland McHugh had identified some but not all of the Australian slang (such as

the meteorological term ‘burster’ for a sudden, southerly wind-gust) which leaves a

knowledge gap as to Joyce’s other source for antipodes words, other than his major sources,

the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Levy-Bruhl. There is the possibility that having read about

Morris’s Austral English in Jespersen, Joyce was moved to acquire the book of ‘Australasian

dictionary’, in which the term ‘burster’ was included.

In listening for the sounds of the antipodes in Finnegans Wake, it is possible that the reader

creatively attributes allusions to the region that are not endemic to the text. With the

discussion and evidence presented above I have traced the most concrete of connections

between Joyce’s exhaustive lists and his ultimate inclusion of antipodes life. Added to these

evidence-based discussions, the temptation towards conjecture is inevitable for such an

inviting, open work as the Wake. There are certain instances where a hypothesis for Joyce’s

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antipodes inclusions might be justified, relating to the works of Australian author Joseph

Furphy. Joyce closes the radio-quiz riddles episode of I.vi with a list of the quiz-master’s

Shaun’s description of Shem. These include ‘breastbrother’, as the twins ‘robbed the same

till’ (168.07–9.) The ‘dingo’ appears when the two brothers are described as ‘bum and dingo’

(168.11). The obvious Australian animal reference is confusing at first, as the slang for an

idler (‘dingo’) has fallen into disuse in Australia, unlike ‘bum’ for ‘tramp’. There is no

evidence that Joyce used the phrase ‘bum and dingo’ with reference to Bum and Dixon, the

two friends who appear in the first chapter of Furphy’s Such is Life (1903). It is fanciful

rather than possible that Joyce read only as far as the antics of Tom Collins in the first

chapter, and that the image of the Wake twins ‘tucked in the same bed’ (168.10) resonated

with this description of the two bullock-drivers: ‘Dixon and Bum were evidently old friends;

they reclined with their heads together, occasionally laughing and whispering’ (Furphy, 2011,

p. 13). Dixon is an idler in the context of early twentieth-century labourer’s slang, as he has

Collins fetch his horse for him, and his conspirator Bum lives up to the charge of laziness, as

he had ‘thanklessly tossed’ the pannikin of water provided. Bum and Dixon are but

coincidentally associated with the ‘bum and dingo’ phrase of Finnegans Wake, page 168.

The ‘Bum’ character in Such is Life only makes a brief appearance, while Finnegans Wake

makes more use of the posterior appellation in an altered form for the comedian-twin, Butt.

Performing a duologue with Taff, Butt’s tale of how Buckley Shot the Russian General is a

vocal and boisterous episode that features additional noise and reverberation from Australian

and New Zealand objects and sounds, the boomerang (Indigenous Australian weapon) and

the Haka (Maori chant). Corballis (2006) provides a detailed history of Joyce’s brief

encounter and familiarity with the Haka. The Haka itself is presented in this section of the

Wake to introduce the Butt and Taff comedy routine. The two performers retell the conflict

that culminates in the shooting of the Russian General by Buckley, a soldier. The

appropriation of the New Zealand battle chant is typical of Joyce’s multicultural borrowings,

and it sets the scene for an uprising or assertion of power from below, both geographically

(New Zealand) and generationally (the soldier/Butt defeats the General/HCE). The Haka is an

important phonic gesture towards the idea of renewal that the antipodes bring to Finnegans

Wake. It is interesting to note that two phonemic references to the boomerang occur shortly

after the Wake’s rendition of the Haka. Jespersens’s (1995) link to Morris’ Austral English

could have provided an additional source for Joyce, as the Haka and boomerang are listed in

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Morris, as are some of the avian references discussed in preceding chapters such as the ‘Four

O’clock Bird’ and the Cassowary.

The boomerang is presented as ‘boomaringing in waulholler’ (348.10). One of the traditional

boomerang types—the kind that returns to the thrower—has the added significance of

complementing Joyce’s structure and motif of cycles in the Wake. The word has been adapted

to the present tense from ‘rang’ to ‘ringing’, a sound that echoes in the ‘Valhalla’

(‘waulholler’) of Butt the soldier’s memory of fallen comrades. The boomerang as a two-

sided triangular object does seem to have any currency in this episode, it is only the ‘boom’

sound that Joyce has used to build up the Russian General scene’s polyphony. This

absorption of the Australian word reflects Joyce’s exploitation of language in the Wake as

sound particles are split from their meanings. Between the ‘booms’ of the boomerang, some

Australian slang is heard that casts the speaker, Butt (another guise for Shem) as an

Australian soldier fighting with the British, the ‘troupkers tomiatskyms’ (350.27). Butt uses

noticeably Australian slang to describe all the good times, ‘It was buckoo bonzer, believe me’

(351.19). By including the purely phonetic, nonsense term to denote something superlative in

‘bonzer’, Joyce draws on the newness and phonemic impact of the slang term as if to

illuminate his own lexical experiments.

Epstein’s (2009, pp. 144–148) overview of the Butt/Buckley episode is a useful critical

reminder of the noise imagery in the scene: the next generation usurps the older (heralded by

the sound of Butt/Buckley’s well-aimed shot at the General’s behind) and the atom (‘etym’)

is exploded. Soon after the Buckley story subsides, Epstein explains that HCE tries to distract

the drinkers in the pub with a tale of his own virility—with the source of his arousal a

‘suppressed’ book (356.20). The book is described as ‘boomarattling from burst to past’,

suggesting that from ‘first to last’ it causes a stir, but that it also ‘boomerangs’ or returns to

its ‘burst’, its origins. In a not uncommon self-referential moment, the text of the Wake refers

to both of Joyce’s major publications, the ‘suppressed’ Ulysses and the boomeranging or

cyclical Finnegans Wake, which returns to the first page from its last. The ‘boom’ phoneme

of the ‘boomerang’ allusions is a clear link with Joyce’s thunder motif in the Wake, as the

sound of a ‘boom’ is renamed as ‘thunderweather’. The link to the ‘booming’ sound of the

cassowaries (which Joyce derived from his Britannica notes) is a further inscription of the

sonic presence of the antipodes environment in the Wake.

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To complete this excursion into the Wake’s antipodes sounds, it is worth listening to a final

excerpt from Morris’ collected sources in Austral English. A portrait of a swagman, an

itinerant farm-worker or bushman, is quoted by Morris from an article in The Argus. Readers

and critics of Finnegans Wake will be familiar with the rhythmic patterns used to signal

Joyce’s recurring motifs. One of these motifs is a list of seven items of clothing worn by

characters (usually incarnations of HCE) in their given setting. The Argus description

provides a familiar rhythm that may have been adopted for Joyce’s creative lists:

… he wore a Cardigan jacket, brown moleskin trousers, blucher boots, and socks, all of

which were mended with rough patches. His knife and tobacco … were still intact, while

across his shoulder was a swag, and the fingers of his right hand had tightly closed round

the handle of his old black billy-can … He had taken with him his old companions of the

roads--his billy and his swag (Morris, 1898, p. 449).

This description seems to have informed Joyce’s rhythm for the clothing motif:

In his raglanrock and his malakoiffed bulbsbyg and his varnished roscians and his cardigans

blousejacket and his scarlett manchokuffs and his tree-coloured camiflag and his

perikopendolous gaestorms. Here weeks hire pulchers! (339.11–15).

The mention of the ‘cardigan jacket’ is audibly similar to Joyce’s ‘cardigans blousejacket’

with which he has clothed Butt/Buckley’s nemesis, the Russian General. The boots for hire

(‘pulchers’ named after General Bloucher) are similar to the ‘blucher boots’ worn by the

swagman described in the Argus. The swagmen described in Morris’ quoted sources are

cousins to HCE as they can be linked through the image of the humped back. HCE’s humped

shoulder fuses his human figuration with the Hill of Howeth and mountain imagery, yet it is

also layered with the idea of ‘humping’ or carrying a burden. Whether HCE’s avatars are

seen ‘humping a suspicious parcel’ (62.28) or can be identified by ‘that hell of a hull of a hill

of a camelump bakk’ (323.23), the burden of the hump marks the HCE-as-pariah as one of

the ‘fossikers and swaggerlers’ (321.31)—an explicit inclusion of the itinerant swagman.

The ironic portrayals of HCE as both pariah and patriarch are invoked in the final episode of

the book in which ALP returns the cycle of history to its origins. Some further Australian

slang terms can be identified in her retelling of some of the Wake’s recurring motfis such as

the dialogue of Mutt and Jeff (or ‘Muta and Juva’), the arrival of Saint Patrick and the High

Kings of Ireland. Occurring in close proximity to Anna Livia’s discussion of ‘Newer Aland’

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and the ‘austrologer Wallaby’ described above, the text adopts pidgin English to describe the

encounter between a settler-converter and the local population, which Epstein (2009, pp.

264–266) analyses as the encounter between sage (Irish druid Balkelly) and saint (Saint

Patrick). The words ‘bullocky’ and ‘tappany’ (611.04) were discussed above in Chapter

Three as the nicknames of two Australian Aboriginal cricketers, and they are invoked here

synonymously with the indigenous ‘fella’, the local druid confronted by the prospect of

invasion and conversion. The Aboriginal names and the Chinese pidgin (heard commenting

on ‘Joss’, 611.14) are a curious blend of subaltern voices made to be in awe of the great

debate on colour between the sage and the ‘Rumnant Patholic’ (611.24). The debate blends

opposite colours including black and white in the term ‘niggerblonker’ (611.31),

uncomfortably drawing attention to the language of power, that which defines the locals and

settlers by their racial appearance. A further piece of Australian slang can be detected not

long after on page 612. The two debaters refers to the High Kings of Ireland with various

laudatory titles including ‘Highup Big Cockywocky Sublissimime Autocrat’—so that the

‘Cockywocky’ (612.12) resembles an Australian farmer in slang documented by Morris. The

‘Boss-cockie’ employers others to work alongside him on the farm (derived from the bird,

cockatoo) (Morris, 1898, p. 46). The coincidental appearance of ‘Boss-cockie’ immediately

before ‘Botany Bay’ in Morris’ alphabetical listings could have provided Joyce with his

source for Australian terminology.

The sounds of the antipodes regions are filtered through Finnegans Wake for their decorative

and aesthetic presence as fodder for the book’s elaborate punning, yet from the instances

above, it is clear that Joyce demonstrated a dissolving of place barriers in order to merge

Ireland with the globe’s far-flung places. The purposes of superimposing the antipodes over

Ireland is to bolster the book’s ironic remaking of Ireland as the entire world, the ‘farbigger

pancosmos’ (613.12), which encompasses the globe and the scope of human experience. Of

the many rivers mentioned in the Washerwomen’s episode of I, 8, the Orara and the Murray-

Darling are of note. The listening washerwoman exclaims: ‘Orara por Orbe and poor Las

Animas!’—to pray for the world and all its souls. The Spanish word ‘orara’ for ‘pray’ is

distinct from the name, Orara, which was adopted from the Aboriginal name for the New

South Wales river.

This is one instance where the Wake explores the idea of diverse language evolution so that

the same words carry different and sometimes opposing meanings. The Murray and Darling

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rivers, (both named after British colonists of Australia), add to the humour in the

Washerwomen scene. ‘I recknitz wherefore the darling murrayed her mirror’ (208.35),

repurposes the name ‘Murray’ to form a word resembling ‘married’ or ‘muddied’. In the

context of the ensuing scene in which the first Washerwoman describes Anna Livia’s

elaborate costuming and self-conscious effect on her male admirers, the second

Washerwoman’s ‘mirror’ comment elicits multiple meanings. The costumed Anna Livia

became fixated with her own beauty in the mirror, and, like the Darling River’s confluence in

the north with the Murray further south, the original is joined with its image. Joyce adds an

autobiographical layer to Anna Livia’s role as matriarch with a tribute to his mother, Mary

Jane Murray. Finally, this Murray-Darling reference recapitulates the notion of the antipodes

as a mirrored opposite. The Elizabethan term ‘wherefore’ indicates why Anna Livia married

or muddied her reflection, and the names of the Australian rivers also tell us where Anna

Livia flowed towards—from Ireland in the north towards the antipodes in the distant south.

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Conclusion—‘New Worlds for All’ (412.02): A ricorso Chapter 6:

The audible Aladdin allusion in ‘New Worlds for All’ precedes the Wake’s Tale of the Ondt

and the Gracehoper episode. In hinting at the idea of an exchange in the refrain ‘new lamps

for old’, Joyce invokes the endlessly renewable spatial possibilities of his own text. The

implied nationalist sentiment in ‘New Worlds for All’ reflects Joyce’s support for Ireland’s

independence while simultaneously satirising the global ventures that claimed new ‘worlds’

on behalf of imperial powers. One of these strange new worlds, the antipodes, emerges

through Joyce’s rewriting of global space.

The Wake succeeds in many things including the rewriting of rituals for every possible

human experience (bodily, spiritual and emotional), but it functions satirically too as irony

results from its language of opposites. The preceding chapters have shown how the

geographical antipodes including Australia, New Zealand and other far subequatorial regions

such as New Ireland are interwoven in Finnegans Wake to contribute to these lexical patterns

of irony and opposition. This thesis was introduced with a review of the critical literature that

has explored Joyce’s body of work for its treatment of place. My purpose in providing this

review is to indicate how studies of place in Finnegans Wake are a growing area, in contrast

with the body of writing around that theme already published on Ulysses. An added result of

these enquiries showed that Ireland understandably features as the primary site for analytical

approaches to place in Joyce’s work, and that there is certainly room for investigating how

places beyond Ireland and also Europe are referenced in Finnegans Wake.

The allusions to places in the world other than Ireland seem at first superfluous in the Wake.

Joyce has reconstructed an array of world myths, folklore, biblical narratives and historical

events as if they all took place in Ireland. The rationale for commenting on the inclusion of

non-Irish places such as the antipodes is based on Joyce’s presentation of Ireland as a model

for global patterns of power relations, particularly those places subject to colonisation. This is

aptly explained by Michael Mays (1998) who described in colonialism in Finnegans Wake in

the following way:

[colonization] is never a unilateral transaction or a straightforward march, but a meandering

series of negotiations involving a seemingly infinite set of relationships and their unceasing

consolidations, betrayals, reversals and inversions (p. 23).

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In this thesis I have claimed that Joyce’s ironic re-colonisation of these global narratives

situates Ireland at the centre of his dramatic textual spatiality. In attempting to distinguish

between how space and place might be perceived, Yi-Fan Tu’s notion of value was invoked

as a means for ascribing significance to named places. Value, combined with Lefebvre’s

articulation of an imagined space assisted in formulating a framework for understanding

Joyce’s writing of place in the Wake. Subversion of physical and narrative boundaries is

evident in Joyce’s creation of what I termed ‘Irish space’. In defining Joyce’s spatial

arrangements of the Wake as being radial from an Irish centre, Chapter Two explores how the

human and other figures in Finnegans Wake move through these spatial zones, focusing

primarily on the figure of HCE, the Fall and related vertical trajectories. In addition to the

book’s significant lapsarian tropes such as Finnegan’s fall from the ladder and the expulsion

from Eden, I referred also to the depths or descents which occur along a vertical axis of

motion such as burying and burrowing, particularly in relation to mounds, tombs and bogs. It

is into these visual symbols of internment and concealment that a figure such as HCE is often

consigned, given his role as the ‘grandfaller’ (29.07)—the lapsed and expendable patriarch.

Also along the vertical axis I identified further narrative tropes which form a strong parallel

with the paradoxical idea of the fall. The Felix Culpa or fortunate fall in Finnegans Wake is at

the heart of the book’s commentary on the human urge to rekindle life or art, so that the

bodily temptation to recreate ironically replicates the Christian god’s creative act of the sixth

day (creating the human). The idea of the fortunate fall in Joyce’s works has been described

as ‘the literature of descent’ by Gabrielle Carey (2002, p. 14), a fortuitous phrase that

harmonises with the focus of this thesis on the downward trajectories traced through

Finnegans Wake. The tropes of thunder and writing are both cast downwards, one sonically

and the other manually. The repeated thunder-words are the most notorious examples of

difficult-to-pronounce Wakese, stringing together multiple foreign words (such as for

‘thunder’, p. 03.15) into a form of transliterated English. The idea of a human response to an

unseen but heard god (given voice by the thunder) is derived from Vico’s theory of early

human responses to the natural world and their establishment of civilisations. Writing is then

produced as an echo or reverberation of that thunder, and my analysis of The Letter discusses

the parallel human will to replicate the power associated with thunder through writing. In my

approach to the Mookse and Gripes episode together with Nuvoletta’s leap, I continue to

analyse the figurative and literal high and low positioning to understand how power and

participation in social organisation are suggested through narrative action. My claim is that

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Ireland is the primary site for these landings, leaps and crashings, but that ultimately, the

reverberations and vibrations from these falls to earth are measured by how far their lexical

reach extends. I have argued that these figurative and literal falls occurs geographically

within Ireland, but that distant places such as the antipodes are infused into this figuration of

Ireland.

In this thesis I have provided a detailed justification for how the antipodes can be considered

in a study of Finnegans Wake based on geographical and literary approaches to the region.

The history of the Greek term for the region was discussed to indicate how Europeans viewed

places at the physical extremity of the globe to be opposite in behaviour and appearance (as

the term ‘antipodes’ means to walk upside down, or on the ‘wrong’ or opposite foot). In

many ways Finnegans Wake is the ideal foil to centuries of misled imaginings as its themes

overcome divisions and prejudices among human societies through universalising their

failings. Wake studies now incorporates this thematic and also stylistic technique of

‘harmonising opposites’ as a structural paradigm, as it was specifically derived from

Giordano Bruno’s theory of Coincidentia Oppositorum. I provided a brief overview of the

philosophical absorption of this idea, which can be traced from Heraclitus and medieval

thinkers including Nicholas of Cusa. The theory of resolving opposites was explained with

relevance to the Wake’s at times surprising inclusion and merging with distant geographical

locations such as Australia, New Zealand and New Ireland.

Further framework for discussing the antipodes’ inclusion in Finnegans Wake was introduced

through spatial theorists including Westphal and Scarfi. The former’s focus on the specificity

of regions and their representation in both conflicting and complementary texts has supported

the present focus on the collective geographical idea of the ‘antipodes’. Scarfi’s categorising

of cartographical histories as utilising the macrospatial realm refers to the imagined and

inaccessible places of pre-modern geography. Joyce’s blending of Ireland with places in the

distant south-east creates a macrospatial effect in that readers have an imagined or fictive

space that challenges restricted definitions of place. I used additional theoretical approaches

in Fausett and also Arthur’s antipodes studies which both deal with European representations

of these geographical places. Navigational and cartographical sources were invoked to

provide context for how the Australian and surrounding oceanic regions were termed ‘the

antipodes’. I have drawn on Fausett’s studies of the once ‘unknown’ continent (Australia) to

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form a parallel with Ireland’s status as an unknown or misunderstood culture as the result of

successive territorial usurpations.

A further purpose of the third chapter was to investigate the intertexts and allusions of

Finnegans Wake that relate to the antipodes. Key among these were Swift’s Gulliver’s

Travels (1726) and Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking

Glass (1897). The satire and children’s story share some similarities with the Wake in their

twists on scale and macrospatial (imagined) destinations. Gulliver’s Lilliputian adventures

and Alice’s fluctuating proportions are indicative of the elastic approach that Joyce would

take to the giant and his successors in Finnegans Wake. Gulliver and Alice famously enter

strange worlds in which the opposite of what is expected ensues. The geographical

connection with Gulliver’s travels to far southern seas and Alice’s musings on life at the

‘other side’ of the world add to the significance of these works in terms of their influence on

Finnegans Wake.

I also consulted etymological works on the Wake’s linguistic conflations of place that

dissolve the antipodes into Joyce’s new, global vision of Ireland. Morris’ dictionary of

Australian English that Joyce consulted proved useful for understanding the adoption of

specific names for animals and birds as well as some slang from the late nineteenth century.

Added to this awareness of ‘Austral’ English, particular attention was given to the evolution

of the etymology for the cardinal directions to consider how Norse languages made their

impact in Ireland. The present day sense of north and south was not always globally uniform,

and examples of these at times conflicting names for spatiality were affected by the power

invested in the dominant languages. Finnegans Wake actively demonstrates the commingling

of languages to show how the Gaelic language (among others) succumbed to influences from

military and cultural incursions at different stages from the Roman Empire, the Vikings in

Scandinavia, and Britain. This brief insight into the development of names for cardinal

directions provided some theoretical grounding for approaching Joyce’s shaping of place in

the Wake. With this approach to compass directions and place, incarnations of HCE as

Finnimore (another Finnegan) were shown to embody how sense of direction and space were

informed by language development. As the differences between disparate places are

dissolved in their lexical union, Joyce’s use of multiple languages hints at the convergences

of human societies that resulted in shared languages as well as shared space.

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HCE continued as a focus for the third chapter, showing the inter-relationship between

language and place. That HCE’s famous encounter with the Cad is ambiguous in many

aspects except for HCE’s nervousness is revealing of the insecurity over place. Phoenix Park

is the site for his encounter with a stranger, and to HCE the Cad could represent any number

of challenges to his presence there. The ballad of Hosty is another destabilising episode for

HCE, who is cast as a scapegoat and an outsider. Themes of nationalism and xenophobia

emerge in the ballad scene as HCE’s identity is challenged. His Scandinavian ancestry is

insulted and I have suggested that this comical pillorying of HCE serves as Joyce’s deferral

of twentieth-century anxiety over the dominant British power in Ireland to highlight even

earlier conflicts of identity due to Norse settlements in Ireland. Through these explorations of

HCE’s depiction, I have shown his interchangeable figuration with Dublin the city as well as

the book’s patriarch. HCE’s fortunes and failings represent the battles fought to contain the

identity of a place. The runaway, hybrid language in the Wake reveals Joyce’s critique of this

urge towards fixedness as language is characterised as something that is not bound by

borders. Also associated with the criticism of HCE, is the geographical dispute over northern

and southern origins within Ireland. HCE’s Viking background is used as a correlative for

Northern Irish people who are portrayed as mistrusted by those in the south. Like Shem, HCE

is also ‘antipodal’, though not wilfully like his son, the contrarian. HCE’s desire to blend in

serves to further expose him. Despite his willingness and success in becoming the city of

Dublin/Eblana (‘Hircus civus eblanensis’, 215.27), HCE is always singled out for being the

opposite of how he sees himself—as an embodiment of Ireland.

The third chapter continued with some treatment of the binaries associated with themes of

land and its control through language. This was achieved through a critical and close reading

of the Mutt and Jute dialogue and the Trial scene from 1.iv. I argued that the staging of

confrontations between invader and potential colonial subject highlight the cycles of power

and decline that Joyce involved through his Viconian allusions. These references complicate

the notion of primitivism, which viewed societies in terms of their territorial and

technological gains over others. Joyce’s satirical portrayals of invader-native exchanges

undermine the premise of primitivism by exposing the mutable language and values on both

sides of the relationship. The structural presence of Vico in the text attributes a sense of flux

to that relationship, affirming the inevitability of change over stagnation.

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The universalising effect of these invader-native encounters is relevant to the overall

antipodes focus, enabling this thesis to find resonance in the Wake’s Irish scenes for similar

global relationships. I introduced Reiseman’s work on the African languages in Finnegans

Wake as these are present in the Trial episode (I.iv) and relate closely to the conflation of

languages due to encounters with British imperial territorialism. In situating my analysis

more definitively within the plot-moments of the Wake narrative, I linked certain Australian

references with the Trial and Children’s Games scenes to show the broad patterns Joyce

established of colonialism and its subversion.

The third chapter continues with an extensive discussion of the antipodes phrases related to

HCE’s varying fortunes. Some of the most resonant for discussions of space and place in this

thesis, are ‘astraylians in island’, ‘New South Ireland’, place names such as Alice Springs (in

Australia’s Northern Territory), and natural phenomena including the dingo and desert rose.

These moments illuminate characterisations of HCE as well as those he meets, and their

presence further establishes the vast geographical reaches of the text. The notion of Ultima

Thule to represent mythical global havens also invokes the distance and mystery of remote

regions such as the antipodes, with Ireland mirroring this remoteness and sense of the

unknown.

I investigated further images of Australia and the antipodes region, highlighting the fluidity

of place and identity in Finnegans Wake. The presence of ‘Eastralia’ encompasses both

cardinal directions and Australia to reveal the power of language and naming. Joyce utilised

this Australian-documented suggestion for the renaming of the east coast of Australia to

indicate how societies attempt to achieve control over place through language. This power

through publication (the author of the letter proposing the name ‘Eastralia’) is contrasted with

powerlessness, in the presence of an indigenous Australian. The cricketer known as

‘Bullocky’ is superimposed over the figure of the Unsolicited Visitor, who threatens HCE’s

pub. His naming indicating the loss of the player’s original name upon joining European-

Australian society as a member of an officially-sanctioned cricket team. A reverse figure—an

Irishman who became an Australian—is present in Charles Gavan Duffy, whose presence is

also noted within the ‘Bullocky’ passage about HCE’s struggles. Joyce’s sympathy for this

political exile who resettled in Australia is invoked to show Ireland’s global solutions for the

local problems of dispossession and disempowerment.

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The fourth chapter also focused closely on why the Irish-identified figures in the Wake can be

read in association with the geographical antipodes in Finnegans Wake. The materiality of

place was invoked to consider how a character such as Shem is cast as a colonial subject and

how he navigates these power relations in the context of place. Critical writing by Vincent

Cheng and Andrew Thacker were cited as relevant texts for discussing European

relationships with colonised realms in distant territories. These relationships of power and

ambivalent response were shown to be in a state of flux, especially when considered in

Joyce’s constructions of these relationships, as separateness is completely overturned. A

figure such as Shem is seen as ‘antipodal’ because his power as an author (‘penman’) is

contingent upon the bias of his writings as well as his willingness to create, rather than repeat

(in the manner of his sermonizing brother, Shaun). Once he has shown himself to be in

opposition to the power structures presented (in the form of the Latin mass and a variety of

wars), Shem’s status is reduced from that of a man to a ‘sham’.

Shem’s persistent typecasting as a misfit and apostate is discussed in stages above in the

fourth chapter. Shem’s various perversions of expectation are shown also to be hyperbolic

portraits of Joyce himself, as he responded to his critics through self-caricature so

unappealing (physiologically speaking) in order to outdo, it would seem, his detractors in

their ability to disparage. Shem’s state of contrariness is shown to be both geographical and

psychological, as he is persistently summoned from the depths both diabolical and global.

The fifth chapter introduced further allusions to Australia, New Ireland and New Zealand in

terms of the book’s spatial configuration and place names, travel by Irish people to the

region, and Joyce’s sources for his antipodes phrases. Both anthropology and etymology were

discussed as disciplines which provided Joyce with rich sources for antipodes imagery. The

Wake’s fascination with Neolithic evidence of humankind’s modes of communication

through ritual as well as language is expressed through references to bullroarers. The sonic

reverberations of the ancient instruments together with its centrifugal propulsion reflect the

Wake’s motifs of thunder and time cycles. The possibility of Joyce delving further than the

linguist Jespersen for his antipodes phrases in the Wake was suggested above due to the

commonalities established with the etymologist Morris, the author of Austral English.

Joyce posed many challenges to his readers in creating a book that is structured as much like

a game or puzzle, as it is a narrative. The reason that a regional, geographical focus such as

the European-defined antipodes emerges, is because the rules and patterns of the puzzle

184

become more swiftly evident with increased familiarity, and the paths through the book

become more navigable. The purpose in this thesis has been to navigate the text’s complex

spatial arrangement to identify and consider why our far southern places appear at all in a

book that has been argued above as heavily weighted towards a hiberno-centric global vision.

The answer appears in the Wake’s overarching mission to reflect the span of human life

experience, and to speak an English that contradicts all expectations in the book’s polyphonic

language. Critics who attempt to define the scope of the Wake’s ambition return frequently to

the inextricably bound ideas of fragmentation and integration.

In his book on Joyce and love, one of the only critical works which has ventured to discuss

this obvious yet overlooked topic, Benjamin Boysen can be seen to adopt a romantic

approach to Joyce’s engagement with the world as a sum of its human parts. In adopting a

dangerously universalist idiom, Boysen (2012) comments on the simultaneity inherent in

Joyce’s style and purpose:

It may well be one of Joyce’s greatest achievements that his work at one and the same time

is the most private and the most general, the most original and the most tradition-bound, as

well as the most ground-breaking praxis, which nevertheless bears witness to the greatest

historical awareness.

As a consequence, Joyce accentuates his holistic belief in the special interdependence

between part and whole, between the individual and the community, which designates the

very amorous space in which we are born, love—laugh—and die. Hence he belligerently

opposes every power ideology that unceasingly strives to uphold the distinctions, the

boundaries and the dividing lines (p. 95).

Boysen’s uses of the term ‘interdependence’ is a helpful way to articulate the relationship

between between the antipodes imagery in Finnegans Wake and the broader setting of

Ireland. Such an attempt would rob the book of its dynamism, as the texts always resists

stasis with the aim of generating humour and enjoyment through increased puzzling and

unravelling of its word-by-word layers. Joyce was too finely attuned to the Dedalus-inspired

‘nightmare of history’ to awaken his readers to some naively crafted sense of harmony.

Instead, the ‘boundaries’ indicated above by Boysen stymie each reader’s journey through the

text, if only to illustrate how language can be abstracted from place but never from human

experience. Readers will find that Finnegans Wake has redefined literary formations of space

in order to critique the possessive and decisive means by which human desire has attempted

to control place.

185

In obscuring the identity of geographical places, Joyce has shifted the emphasis to what

Boysen termed the ‘amorous space’: as the Wake ‘brings us’ (03.02) to a microscopic

engagement with a mosaic style of language, it is that willingness to engage with the Wake’s

structural patterns that results in the intimacy with which each reader experiences the text.

For those readers who experience a revivifying love for the text upon constantly returning to

it, the ‘amorous space’ inhabited by the individual or collective encounter with the book

results in unusually placed experiences, such as the reading regularly aloud from the Wake as

a sort of anti-Bible, on seminary-style Sundays, as is the case with this author’s Finnegans

Wake reading group. Just as these Australian-based reading groups have joined the broader

world experience of Joyce’s writing, the outmoded construction of ‘the antipodes’ can be

glimpsed as a tincture colouring the experience of Finnegans Wake. Joyce has included the

antipodes as an intermittent reflection of Irish spatiality to show that the events of human

experience predominate over the places that contain them. It is the imagination, a site for the

‘amorous space’, which overcomes tangible boundaries and the oft-remarked ‘tyranny of

distance’.

186

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