The Passion of Earwicker

Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, and today the first day of Lent. As all good Christians know, this period marks the beginning of 40 days of fasting in memory of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, to prepare believers for the celebration of Easter. BUT, according to James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, the carnival of Shrove Tuesday and the period of fasting that follows have their roots in Pagan festivals to honour the god of vegetation. The corn god had to die every year in order to be reborn with the youth and vigour required to bring an end to winter for an agricultural people. These ceremonies in turn had their roots in even older rituals in which a priest-king, thought to have personal power over the elements, is killed, mourned for a period, and finally replaced by a younger candidate. Our Mr. Earwicker, the god of an urban people, in his present iteration is perhaps most simply summarised as a statesman whose character is assassinated so that his people may live. But like Jesus (and through Jesus), he has his origins in these ancient tales of blood sacrifice and natural revivification. So as I (painfully slowly) illuminate his “fishabed ghoatstory”, and as leaves and blossoms return to the trees, remember to give a thought to the Passion of Mr. Earwicker.

Page 52

Page 51

Chapter Three

You may have noticed that the previous chapter had a fairly high level of narrative drive. Well, I hope you enjoyed it, because it’s over now. With chapter three we take a sudden plunge into extreme obscurity (“S’dense!”, as the first line says). I’ve been scratching my head over it for two weeks now, and I hope you won’t be too disappointed with the results.

Partially, at least, chapter three continues Mr. Earwicker’s story, but mostly it repeats and revises it. We begin by learnng of the final ends of many of the supporting characters from the previous chapter, all of them slightly altered, so that Hosty becomes “Osti-Fosti,” and the Cad with a pipe becomes “the snob of the dunhill.” After that comes the first (and, I think, the most confusing) of a number of retellings of Earwicker’s encounter with the Cad. An Irishman (Joyce himself, according to one source) exiled on the English coast tells the “fishabed ghoatstory” of HCE at the request of three schoolboys.

As I said, clarity is scarce, but the tale appears to concern the transformation of chapter two’s mundane encounter into the stuff of myth and religious ritual. A man is offered a cigar (“pluggy well suck that brown boyo, my son, and spend a whole half hour in Havana”), which appears to lead to his meeting “Master,” the “bester of redpublicans” at the Eagle Cock Hostel (the action having permanently moved from Dublin’s Phoenix Park to HCE’s pub). Their conversation is a comically mangled variation on the original, punctuated by the Irishman’s instruction to the schoolboys to follow his example (his own, or HCE’s, or both, I have no idea).

The story, we’re told, is never forgotten. Years later, one of the boys, now an old man, “rehearses” the story to a “namecousin” of an archdeacon. This cousin apparently repeats it to his relative, for we’re told that every time the archdeacon “reads the part”, his listeners, hearing his imitation of the performance given his cousin, feel themselves “timesported” back to the English coastline, watching the Irishman’s interpretation of the part originally played by Mr. Earwicker. All clear?

After a cock-and-bull story like that, it’s reassuring for the narrator to admit that he’s no less confused than we are. What are the facts? But the further we search for the truth, the further it appears to drift away. A crowd of “evidencegivers” is gathered “by legpoll” to offer their opinions, most of which are laughable, paradoxical or incomprehensible. Finally, a written record appears to be discovered, in the form of a police report recounting the second variation on the meeting with the Cad. A tall man, ”humping a suspicious parcel,” is held up by an “unknowable assailant” with whom he had fought over one of two women. But this evidence too is questioned in every particular: that the man was not tall, that he carried not a fender (a fireguard) but a bottle of stout, which he claimed to be attempting to open by banging it against a gate, although the sound he made was more like the end of days.

After a number of digressions, we finally return to Earwicker’s house, and to the third version of his encounter. Earwicker’s home is sealed by a gate both to lock others out and to lock him in. In the middle of the night, he is woken by a man issuing threats from beyond the gate if he (Earwicker) failed to give him drink. After delivering a torrent of abuse (which Earwicker greets with Christlike silence) the offender throws a few stones and finally retreats. And so Earwicker returns to bed. But is he sleeping? Is he imprisoned? Is he dead? As usual, nothing is clear, but the chapter ends with a prophecy that like King Arthur, “he skall wake from earthsleep.”

I hope this is helpful. I tried to strike a balance between sufficient explanation and overexplanation, but if anyone has questions, clarifications or corrections, I’d love to hear them!

CHAPTER THREE INDEX

Page 50

Page 49

UPDATE: I really wasn’t happy with the effects I had on this one, so I just redid it a little bit.

Page 48

Page 33

Page 34

Page 42

Page 41

Page 40

Concerning Puns

All right-thinking people hate puns. And our hearts all share the same image of the wretched punster, a characterless character afflicted by a surplus of education which has left him bereft of humour, save for the heaving chortles that belch forth from his unkempt beard as he repeats to some hapless, cornered victim – in the office Christmas party or the line for the post office – his discovery of two different words that happen to sound the same. James Joyce was, apparently, exactly this sort of person. According to his biographer, Richard Ellmann, the young Jim not only collected puns, but worse yet, he would reel them off at parties. And so it makes sense that some people might dismiss Finnegans Wake, as Martin Amis did in an article on the novel, as a book written in puns, a “reader-hostile, reader-nuking immolation.” But regardless of whatever regrettable behaviour might have marred Joyce’s personal life, the wordplay of Finnegans Wake is completely different from that of newspaper headlines and your pedantic uncle. It is a book that you cannot read without reorganising your approach to finding meaning.

In a normal sentence, ideas are connected in a logical structure to create a more or less coherent message. But in phrases like “the fall of a once wallstrait oldparr,” and “the length of the land lies under liquidation” (an eerily fitting description of Ireland today), the reader is adrift in a sea of ambiguous meanings. The banal abuts the divine, pleas of innocence turn into confessions and sermons into seductions. As communication goes, it’s perhaps a little inefficient. But once you get into it, it has a wonderfully disorienting effect on your brain. I could be wrong, of course. Possibly the greatest effect that reading Finnegans Wake has on the brain is that of forcing you to rationalise the time spent reading it...

Page 39

Page 13

Page 25

Page 38

Page 11

Page 37

This style is not playing to my strengths, I’m afraid. Roll on chapter three!

Page 36