The River that runs by . . .
The river that runs by the LODE compass made at Harristown, and now contained in the LODE cargo, is the same river that runs through James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the River Liffey. Joyce gives the river the character and name of Anna Livia Plurabelle.Finnegans Wake is a work of avant-garde comic fiction by Irish writer James Joyce. It is significant for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written over a period of seventeen years and published in 1939, two years before the author's death, Finnegans Wake was Joyce's final work.The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, which blends standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words to unique effect. Many critics believe the technique was Joyce's attempt to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams.The book involves the Earwicker family, with a father HCE, a mother ALP, and their three children, Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy.Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the WAKE, in a nonlinear dream narrative, follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn.The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle. Many Joycean fellow travellers, such as Samuel Beckett, link this cyclical structure to Giambattista Vico's seminal text La Scienza Nuova ("The New Science"), upon which they argue Finnegans Wake is structured.The "WAKE" begins thus;riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.though, actually, it is the end of the last sentence of the book:A lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.So the beginning is the end in "a commodius vicus of recirculation".
See . . . in media res . . .
The water cycle and cyclical history
Here Comes Everybody . . .
Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, or HCE, is for some the book's main protagonist. His guilt, his shortcomings, his failures pervade the entire book. While the constant flux of HCE's character and attributes may lead us to consider him as an everyman, he is a particular, real Dubliner, "an older Protestant male, of Scandinavian lineage, connected with the pubkeeping business somewhere in the neighbourhood of Chapelizod, who has a wife, a daughter, and two sons." (p. 135, Bishop, John. Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake, University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.)
HCE is referred to by literally thousands of names throughout the book; leading Terence Killeen to argue that in Finnegans Wake "naming is [..] a fluid and provisional process". HCE is at first referred to as "Harold or Humphrey Chimpden"; a conflation of these names as "Haromphreyld", and as a consequence of his initials "Here Comes Everybody".
These initials lend themselves to phrase after phrase throughout the book; for example, appearing in the book's opening sentence as "Howth Castle and Environs". As the work progresses the names by which he may be referred to become increasingly abstract (such as "Finn MacCool", "Mr. Makeall Gone", or "Mr. Porter").
Many critics see Finnegan, whose death, wake and resurrection are the subject of the opening chapter, as either a prototype of HCE, or as another of his manifestations. One of the reasons for this close identification is that Finnegan is called a "man of hod, cement and edifices" and "like Haroun Childeric Eggeberth", identifying him with the initials HCE.
Anna Livia Plurabelle, or ALP, is HCE's wife ALP as;
"the river-woman whose presence is implied in the "riverrun" with which Finnegans Wake opens and whose monologue closes the book. For over six hundred pages, Joyce presents Anna Livia to us almost exclusively through other characters, much as in Ulysses we hear what Molly Bloom has to say about herself only in the last chapter."The most extensive discussion of ALP comes in chapter I.8, in which hundreds of names of rivers are woven into the tale of ALP's life, as told by two gossiping washerwomen.
The Liffey, one river among over a thousand more named in Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
In Finnegans, Wake! - a blog devoted to Finnegans Wake containing interpretations, reflections, relevant links, and other information concerning James Joyce's greatest but least-read masterpiece, and authored by "Who... wrote the durn thing anyhow?" (FW 108), Peter Quadrino, explores this Chapter 8, in the reflected light of a Book Review (Part 4 of 4): Joyce's Book of the Dark by John Bishop, posted on November 1, 2014. Quadrino writes:
The eighth chapter of Finnegans Wake is perhaps its most famous section. Known for containing the names of over a thousand of the world’s rivers embedded in its prose, the chapter is devoted to the mother goddess archetype in Joyce’s mythology, the river-woman Anna Livia Plurabelle, “angin mother of injons… the dearest little moma ever you saw” (FW p. 207).
James Joyce considered the Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP) chapter to be the showpiece for his entire book. It was his pride and joy, the chapter upon which he was “prepared to stake everything." While the public and his own supporters were questioning the merit (and sanity) of the early published fragments from his Work in Progress, Joyce declared in a letter to his patron “either [ALP] is something, or I am an imbecile in my judgment of language.” Fellow Irishman James Stephens agreed, declaring it to be “the greatest prose ever written by a man.”
Joyce went through seventeen different revisions of the chapter during the Wake’s creation, constantly weaving new river names and foreign words into its pun-laden network, while exhausting himself into a “nervous collapse,” as he told Ezra Pound, from the thousands of hours he worked on it.
"riverpool"
"the urb it orbs"
Similarly hundreds of city names are woven into "Haveth Childers Everywhere", the corresponding passage at the end of III.3 which focuses on HCE.
HCE personifies the Viking-founded city of Dublin, and his wife ALP personifies the river Liffey, on whose banks the city was built.
Edna O'Brien: how James Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle shook the literary world
When it was first published, Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle was derided as the musings of a shipwrecked mind. Ninety years on, this section of Finnegans Wake offers a late example of his great, radical vision
Edna O'Brien
Fri 27 Jan ‘17 09.00 GMT
In his 50s, as his genius escalated and transmogrified, James Joyce admitted that he was at the end of English, saying he could no longer use ordinary words with daytime association, as this was a book of the night, “bauchspeech from his innkempt house”. The Work in Progress, as it was called, would be Finnegans Wake, which took 17 years in the doing. He wrote on the lid of a green suitcase that he had purchased in Bognor Regis, on a lacklustre honeymoon, wrote at night and laughed a lot at his own puns and polyglot language. His wife, Nora Barnacle, would get out of bed and tell him to stop writing and therefore stop laughing and moreover the work was just chop suey. She was the one person who was not afraid of him and he loved her for it.
He had one-tenth normal vision and his list of ailments read like a footnote to the work – glaucoma, iritis, cataract, crystallised cataract, a nebula in the pupil, conjunctivitis, torn retina, blood accumulation and abscesses. He felt himself brother to Dean Swift, “whose glauque eyes glitt bedimmd to imm! whose fingrings creep o’er skull: til, qwench!” He wrote with thick coloured crayons and the help of three magnifying glasses. Sometimes his concentration was such that he almost lost consciousness and in extremis said, as when writing Ulysses, that he was only “a transparent leaf” away from madness. It is interesting that this tumble of language, this transubstantiation of words, these heavenly and unheavenly vocables, poured out from him without any thought of his blind eyes, as they came directly from the unconscious mind. It was when rereading and correcting that he became aware of impending wreckage. Yet he returned unremittingly to the task, with new, convoluted polyphonic words, building his Tower of Babel and fulfilling his prophecy of keeping the professors and the literati puzzled for hundreds of years.
Despite his antipathy towards, and mockery of, Freud, he was now invading the world of dream and he told the French journalist Edmond Jaloux that his intention was “to suit the aesthetic of the dream, where the forms prolong and multiply themselves, where the visions pass from the trivial to the apocalyptic, where the brain uses the roots of vocables to make others from them which will be capable of naming its phantasms, its allegories, its allusions”. At this point one is inclined, like Molly Bloom, to cry out, “O rocks! ... Tell us in plain words.”
As instalments of the work appeared in literary magazines, bile and condemnation proliferated. It was “linguistic sodomy”, the work of a shipwrecked mind and a monstrous leg-pull. Only Beckett saw Joyce’s radical intention of grinding up words so as to extract their true purpose, then crossbreeding them and marrying sound with image to compose a completely new kind of language.
Elsewhere, Joyce was assailed. DH Lawrence said that the instalments were all “old fags and cabbage-stumps”, Nabokov deemed them “a cold pudding” and HG Wells warned Joyce that he had “turned [his] back on common men”, with the result being “vast riddles”, “a dead end”. Ezra Pound, Joyce’s most robust advocate, said that “nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization”.
Joyce was all alone and discouraged. Was he “an imbecile in my judgment of language?” he asked, then resolutely declared, “I cannot go back.”
Even his faithful friend and patron Harriet Shaw Weaver began to have doubts about his puns, his aqueous passages and his riparian geography, fearing that he was losing touch with those readers astounded by the genius of Ulysses. He sought to allay her fears. He sent her keys to the more obscure words, but the keys were themselves mind-boggling. “Wolken” was “a woollen cap of clouds” and “passencore” tallied with “pas encore and ricorsi storici of Vico”. His monthly income from her had to be doubled, because the harder he laboured the more he drank and tipped lavishly in restaurants. Then in October 1927 she received the following short note – “I am working very hard on the final revise […] on which I am prepared to stake everything.” This was “Anna Livia”, his melodic chapter with which he hoped to win over recalcitrant readers. He wrote seven versions in all, constituting thousands of hours of labour, each episode more enriched, more exuberant and more transmutative. What he was doing was leaving a literary ghost mark for a world that was unprepared for it. Anna is both woman and river and “her fluvial maids of honour”, from all corners of the world, constitute 350 river names. It appeared in Criterion magazine, and at the instigation of TS Eliot it was published by Faber for one shilling net. Joyce composed a ditty to boost sales:
Buy a book in brown paper
From Faber and Faber
To see Annie Liffey trip, tumble and caper.
Sevensinns in her singthings,
Plurabelle on her prose
Seashell ebb music wayriver she flows
It begins in gay, effervescent mood, as two washerwomen on opposite sides of the River Liffey regale each other with scathing gossip. The sounds are of water, birdsong, bird cries, the beating of the battler on convent napkins, baby shawls, combies and sheets that a man and his bride embraced on. So they tuck up their sleeves, loosen the “talk-tapes” and egg each other on to tell it “in franca lingua. And call a spate a spate.” We are introduced to Anna, a shy, limber slip of a thing, “in Lapsummer skirt and damazon cheeks”, her hair down to her feet, “her little mary” washed in bog water, with amulets of rhunerhinerstones around her neck. “You’ll die when you hear.” We learn of her nymphet shame in the sloblands of Tolka and the “plage au Clontarf”, smacking cradle names on her paramours, “lads in scoutsch breeches”, the surf spray on her face and “the saywint up [her] ambushure”. From the city, she graduated to the “dinkel dale of Luggelaw” and there, under the silence of the sycamores, many are allowed to roam in her kirkeyaard, including a heremite named Michael Arklow, who plies “his newly anointed hands” into the “strumans” of that fabled hair. To give some idea of Joyce’s exigent method of writing, that same hair, which was borrowed from the head of Livia Schmitz, wife of Italo Svevo, also resembles the Dartry reservoir, streaked red from the canisters thrown in from the nearby dye works, and Joyce being Joyce, it transforms and ends up being the colour of bog land at sundown.
Joyce had to increase his income because the harder he laboured the more he drank and tipped lavishly.Anna sets her cap at Bygmester Finnegan, a “duddurty devil”, rumoured to have committed some fiendish sexual act in Phoenix Park. She dispatches her boudeloire ninnies and backwater sals to call on Finnegan, in residence on a barge in Howth. She warns them to go “aisy-oisy”, letting on that she doesn’t care. In time, Finnegan takes her as wife, having chosen her for her seven hues. Joyce’s rapturous description of Anna’s bridal preparations belongs easily in The Song of Songs:
First she let her hair fall and down it flussed to her feet its teviots winding coils. Then, mothernaked, she sampood herself with galawater and fraguant pistania mud, wupper and lauar, from crown to sole. Next she greased the groove of her keel, warthes and wears and mole and itcher, with antifouling butterscatch and turfentide and serpenthyme and with leafmould she ushered round prunella isles and islets dun quincecunct allover her little mary. Peeld gold of waxwork her jellybelly and her grains of incense anguille bronze. And after that she wove a garland for her hair. She pleated it. She plaited it. Of meadowgrass and riverflags, the bulrush and waterweed, and of fallen griefs of weeping willow. Then she made her bracelets and her anklets and her armlets and a jetty amulet for necklace of clicking cobbles and pattering pebbles and rumbledown rubble, richmond and rehr, of Irish rhunerhinerstones and shell-marble bangles. That done, a dawk of smut to her airy ey.
Anna is more Celtic geisha than traditional wife. In the “way of a maid with a man” she tickles his pontiff’s fancy with tricks and ruses, doing a turn on the fiddle, legging a jig, singing a hymn or warbling “The Rakes of Mallow”. Her cooking comprises “blooms of fisk” and “staynish beacons on toast”, with wishy-washy tea, “Kaffue mokau” or fern ale in “trueart pewter mug”. Anything to plaise him. She procures all the nice little whores, the lizzies and the doxies, “to hug and hab haven in Humpy’s apron”, while wishing she did not have to. She gives birth to three children, Shem and Shaun and Izzy, named after Chapelizod who pines for her Tristan. In time, the father’s affections veer towards the daughter and Anna wishes that he would rush upon her darkly, as he used, “like a great black shadow”.
So how, for readers, does Anna Livia fulfil our notion of heroine? Is she a kindred spirit? Do we identify with her? The answer is no, not in the same way as we do with that other Anna, or Emma Bovary, or Clarissa, or Moll Flanders. She is at once too rarefied and too remote. Whereas Molly Bloom was all flesh and appetite, Anna is all essence. We do not get inside her mind or know the registers of her disenchantments as she passes from youth to age, except for a rare and piercing lamentation – “Is there one who understands me?” Probably not, with the exception of Joyce. Anna is his signature in his last lonely and embattled months, a time of mounting hostility towards Finnegans Wake; a daughter, Lucia, his inspiritrice, committed to an asylum; walking in the snow in Zurich with his little grandson, his eyes hidden with thick, dark glasses, entrenched in that same darkness that he had, in high-hearted youth, pitied in his hero Ibsen. It was January 1941, Europe in the throes of war and Joyce, “his heart’s adrone”, unknowingly on the brink of death.
André Gide, who had demeaned Joyce in his lifetime, 10 years after his death wrote in homage that “the greatest audacity is that at the end of life”, by which he must surely have meant Finnegans Wake and Anna Livia Plurabelle. Despite her trepidation, Anna meets her fate resolutely, as she goes towards her end, her “cold mad feary father”, the enveloping sea.
Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all the liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. […] Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! […] Night night! […] Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!Anna is his last creation, his farewell to words, haunting, ineffable, a mythic Eve, haloed in “the dusk of wonder”.
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