"Quand un salon littéraire devient un boudoir pour dames"
22 Janvier 2019
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress is a 1929 collection of critical essays, and two letters, on the subject of James Joyce's book Finnegans Wake, then being published in discrete sections under the title Work in Progress. All the essays are by writers who knew Joyce personally and who followed the book through its development:
Two "letters of protest" are also included in the Exagmination, from G.V.L. Slingsby ("Writes a Common Reader") and Vladimir Dixon ("A Litter to James Joyce"). "G.V.L. Slingsby" was the pseudonym of a woman journalist who complained about the difficulty of Work in Progress to Sylvia Beach. Since Joyce wanted the collection to contain negative criticism as well as positive, Beach invited the woman to write a pseudonymous article in dispraise of Joyce's new work. The journalist complied, choosing her pseudonym from Edward Lear's The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World.
Stuart Gilbert and Sylvia Beach believed that Joyce wrote the second letter of protest himself, as it is addressed to "Mr. Germs Choice" and "Shame's Voice" alternately (two puns on Joyce's name), and the letter itself is written in a pastiche of the punning style that Joyce was then using in his published work. Their assumption, however, was challenged and proven false by the discovery in the late 1970s of a number of books and letters authored by the historical Vladimir Dixon, a minor poet of Russian verse living in France during the 1920s.
lames
loyce/Finnegans Wake 1
M.C. MIGEL LIBRARY
AMERICAN PRINTING
HOUSE FOR THE BLIND
OUR EXAGMINATION
ROUND HIS FACTIFICATION
FOR INCAMINATION
OF WORK IN PROGRESS
V
. CP|\M&C
James Joyce / Finnegans Wake
A Symposium
OUR EXAGMINATION
ROUND HIS FACTIFICATION
FOR INCAMINATION
OF WORK IN PROGRESS
BY
Samuel Beckett, Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen,
Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona,
Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy,
Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage,
William Carlos Williams.
with
LETTERS OF PROTEST
BY
G. V. L. Slingsby and Vladimir Dixon.
A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK
Copyright by Sylvia Beach 1929
First published in 1929 by Shakespeare and Company, Paris
Published in 1939 by New Directions at Norfolk, Connecticut,
second edition in 1962 as Our Exagminations, etc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 44-32829
(ISBN: 0 - 8112 - 0446 - 4 )
All fights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in
a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no
part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying and recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the Publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published as New Directions Paperbook 331 in 1972
THIRD PRINTING
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Pages.
Introduction vii
Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce, by Samuel Beckett i
The idea of time in the work of James Joyce, by Marcel Brion. . 23
James Joyce’s Work in Progress and old norse poetry, by Frank
Budgen 3^
Prolegomena to Work in Progress, by Stuart Gilbert 47
The revolution of language and James Joyce, by Eugene Jolas. . 77
I DONT KNOW WHAT TO CALL IT BUT ITS MIGHTY UNLIKE PROSE, by
Victor Llona 93
Mr. Joyce directs an irish word ballet, by Robert McAlmon.. . 103
The catholic element in Work in Progress, by Thomas McGreevy. . 117
Mr. Joyce’s treatment of plot, by Elliot Paul 129
Joyce and his dynamic, by John Rodker 139
Before Ulysses — and after, by Robert Sage 147
A POINT FOR AMERICAN CRITICISM, by William Carlos Williams. . . 171
Writes a common reader, by G. V. L. Slingsby 189
A LITTER TO MR. James JoYCE, by Vladimir Dixon 193
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2017 with funding from
American Printing House for the Blind, Inc.
https://archive.org/details/ourexagminationrOOsamu
INTRODUCTION (1961)
The surviving authors of Our Exagmination have very
kindly asked its former publisher to contribute to the re-issue
of their work a few words about its origin. Many of the essays
included were first published by Eugene Jolas in his review,
transition : what, therefore, could be more fitting than an
introduction by Mrs. Eugene Jolas ? But she has declined the
honour, Mr. Stuart Gilbert has too, so it is left to me to tell
how this little volume came about.
To begin with, I have a confession to make : when given a
piece of Work in Progress to interpret by the author, I failed to
pass my ‘ exagmination ’ : whereas, as will be seen in the twelve
essays in this volume, all these followers of the Work went
around in it with the greatest ease.
‘ Our Exag ’, as at Shakespeare and Company it was called,
is most valuable, indeed indispensable to readers of Finnegans
Wake : they would do well to hear what these writers, friends
and collaborators of Joyce, followers of his new work as it
progressed, have to say on the subject. They had the ad-
vantage of hearing the hints that he would let fall and the
delightful stories he told when in the company of his friends.
Our Exagmination is therefore unique. And it has the added
charm of Joyce’s presence, for Mr. Stuart Gilbert strongly
suspects that Mr. Vladimir Dixon, author of ‘A Litter’, is
James Joyce himself.
Vlll
In 1929, date of publication of Our Exagmination, the future
Finnegans Wake was appearing in transition and its readers
were following it with excitement, though often losing their
way in the dark of this night piece. They needed help : the
articles contributed to transition by writers who had penetrated
deeply into the mysteries of Work in Progress, and other essays
on the subject, were assembled in the volume entitled (by
Joyce) Our Exagmination round His Factification for In-
camination of Work in Progress, and brought out by Shakes-
peare and Company.
Sylvia Beach.
DANTE... BRUNO. VICO.. JOYCE
BY
SAMUEL BECKETT
DANTE... BRUNO. VICO.. JOYCE
BY
Samuel Beckett.
The danger is in the neatness of identifications. The concept-
ion of Philosophy and Philology as a pair of nigger minstrels
outoftheTeatro dei Piccoli is soothing, like the contemplation
of a carefully folded ham-sandwich. Giambattista Vico him-
self could not resist the attractiveness of such coincidence of
gesture. He insisted on complete identification between the
philosophical abstraction and the empirical illustration, there-
by annulling the absolutism of each conception — hoisting
the real unjustifiably clear of its dimensional limits, tempor-
alising that which is extra temporal. And now here am I,
with my handful of abstractions, among which notably : a
mountain, the coincidence of contraries, the inevitability of
cyclic evolution, a system of Poetics, and the prospect of self-
extension in the world of Mr. Joyce’s 'Work in Progress".
There is the temptation to treat every concept like 'a bass
dropt neck fust in till a bung crate’, and make a really tidy job
of it. Unfortunately such an exactitude of application would
imply distortion in one of two directions. Must we wring the
neck ol a certain system in order to stuff it into a contempor-
ary pigeon-hole, or modify the dimensions of that pigeon-
A
hole for the satisfaction of the analogymongers ? Literary
criticism is not book-keeping.
Giambattista Vico was a practical roundheaded Neapolitan.
It pleases Croce to consider him as a mystic, essentially spec-
ulative, ' disdegnoso delV empirismo\ It is a surprising
interpretation, seeing that more than three-fifths of his Scien^a
Nuova is concerned with empirical investigation. Croce op-
poses him to the reformative materialistic school of Ugo
Grozio, and absolves him from the utilitarian preoccupations
of Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Bayle and Machiavelli. All this
cannot be swallowed without protest. Vico defines Provid-
ence as : ' una mente spesso diversa ed alle volte tutta contra-
ria e sempre superiore ad essi fini particolari che essi uomini
si avevano proposti; dei quali fini ristretti fatti me^\i per ser-
vire a fini piu ampi, gli ha sempre adoperati per conservare
Vumana genera^ione in questa terra \ What could be more
definitely utilitarianism ? His treatment of the origin and
functions of poetry, language and myth, as will appear later,
is as far removed from the mystical as it is possible to im-
agine. For our immediate purpose, however, it matters little
whether we consider him as a mystic or as a scientific inves-
tigator ; but there are ho two ways about considering him as
an innovator. His division of the development of human
society into three ages : Theocratic, Heroic, Human (civil-
ized), with a corresponding classification of language : Hie-
roglyphic (sacred), Metaphorical (poetic). Philosophical (capa-
ble of abstraction and generalisation), was by no means
new, although it must have appeared so to his contempor-
aries. He derived this convenient classification from the
Egyptians, via Herodotus. At the same time it is impossible to
deny the originality with which he applied and developed its
5
implications. His exposition of the ineluctable circular pro-
gression of Society was completely new, although the germ of
it was contained in Giordano Bruno’s treatment of identified
contraries. But it is in Book 2., described by himself as * tutto
il corpo... la chiave maestra... dell opera\ that appears
the unqualified originality of his mind ; here he evolved
a theory of the origins of poetry and language, the signi-
ficance of myth, and the nature of barbaric civilization that
must have appeared nothing less than an impertinent outrage
against tradition. These two aspects of Vico have their
reverberations, their reapplications — without however, rec-
eiving the faintest explicit illustration — in ‘ Work in Pro-
gress.*
It is first necessary to condense the thesis of Vico, the scient-
ific historian; In the beginning was the thunder : the thun-
der set free Religion, in its most objective and unphilosoph-
ical form — idolatrous animism : Religion produced Society,
and the first social men were the cave-dwellers, taking refuge
from a passionate Nature : this primitive family life receives
its first impulse towards development from the arrival of ter-
rified vagabonds : admitted, they are the first slaves : growing
stronger, they exact agrarian concessions, and a despotism
has evolved into a primitive feudalism : the cave becomes a
city, and the feudal system a democracy : then an anarchy :
this is corrected by a return to monarchy : the last stage is a
tendency towards interdestruction: the nations are dispersed,
and the Phoenix of Society arises out of their ashes. To this
six-termed social progression corresponds a six-termed pro-
gression of human motives : necessity, utility, convenience,
pleasure, luxury, abuse of luxury : and their incarnate man-
ifestations : Polyphemus, Achilles, Caesar and Alexander,
Tiberius, Caligula and Nero. At this point Vico applies
6
Bruno — though he takes very good care not to say so — and
proceeds from rather arbitrary data to philosophical abstract-
ion. There is no difference, says Bruno between the smal-
lest possible chord and the smallest possible arc, no difference
between the infinite circle and the straight line. The maxima
and minima of particular contraries are one and indifferent.
Minimal heat equals minimal cold. Consequently transmu-
tations are circular. The principle (minimum) of one contrary
takes its movement from the principle (maximum) of another.
Therefore not only do the minima coincide with the minima,
the maxima with the maxima, but the minima with the maxima
in the succession of transmutations. Maximal speed is a
state of rest. The maximum of corruption and the min-
imum of generation are identical: in principle, corruption is
generation. And all things are ultimately identified with
God, the universal monad, Monad of monads. From these
considerations Vico evolved a Science and Philosophy of Hist-
ory, It may be an amusing exercise to take an historical figure,
such as Scipio, and label him No. 3 ; it is of no ultimate impor-
tance. What is of ultimate importance is the recognition that
the passage from Scipio to Caesar is as inevitable as the passage
from Caesar to Tiberius, since the flowers of corruption in Scipio
and Caesar are the seeds of vitality in Caesar and Tiberius.
Thus we have the spectacleof a human progression thatdepends
for its movement on individuals, and which at the same time
is independent of individuals in virtue of what appears to
be a preordained cyclicism. It follows that History is nei-
ther to be considered as a formless structure, due exclusively
to the achievements of individual agents, nor as possessing
reality apart from and independent of them, accomplished
behind their backs in spite of them, the work of some superior
force, variously known as Fate, Chance, Fortune, God. Both
7
these views, the materialistic and the transcendental, Vico
rejects in favour of the rational. Individuality is the concre-
tion of universality, and every individual action is at the
same time superindividual. The individual and the univer-
sal cannot be considered as distinct from each other. History,
then, is not the result of Fate or Chance — in both cases the
individual would be separated from his product — but the
result of a Necessity that is not Fate, of a Liberty that is not
Chance (compare Dante’s *yoke of liberty’). This force he
called Divine Providence, with his tongue, one feels, very
much in his cheek. And it is to this Providence that we
must trace the three institutions common to every society :
Church, Marriage, Burial. This is not Bossuet’s Providence,
transcendental and miraculous, but immanent and the stuff
itself of human life, working by natural means. Humanity
is its work in itself. God acts on her, but by means of her.
Humanity is divine, but no man is divine. This social and
historical classification is clearly adapted by Mr. Joyce as a
structural convenience or inconvenience. His position is
in no way a philosophical one. It is the detached attitude of
Stephen Dedalus in 'Portrait of the Artist.. ' who describes
Epictetus to the Master of Studies as « an old gentleman
who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water. »
The lamp is more important than the lamp-lighter. By struc-
tural I do not only mean a bold outward division, a bare skel-
eton for the housing of material. I mean the endless substan-
tial variations on these three beats, and interior intertwining
of these three themes into a decoration of arabesques — decor-
ation and more than decoration. Part i. is a mass of past
shadow, corresponding therefore to Vico’s first human insti-
tution, Religion, or to his Theocratic age, or simply to an
abstraction — Birth. Part 2 is the lovegame of the children,
8
corresponding to the second institution, Marriage, or to the
Heroic age, or to an abstraction — Maturity. Part. 3 . is passed
in sleep, corresponding to the third institution. Burial, or to
the Human age, or to an abstraction — Corruption. Part 4
is the day beginning again, and corresponds to Vico’s Provid-
ence, or to the transition from the Human to the Theocra-
tic, or to an abstraction — Generation. Mr. Joyce does not
take birth for granted, as Vico seems to have done. So much
for the dry bones. The consciousness that there is a great
deal of the unborn infant in the lifeless octogenarian, and a
great deal of both in the man at the apogee of his life’s curve,
removes all the stiff interexclusiveness that is often the dan-
ger in neat construction. Corruption is not excluded from
Part I. nor maturity from Part 3. The four 'lovedroyd cur-
dinals’ are presented on the same plane — 'his element cur-
dinal numen and his enement curdinal marrying and his
epulent curdinal weisswasch and his eminent curdinal
Kay o’ Kay ! ’ There are numerous references to Vico’s
four human institutions — Providence counting as one I *A
good clap, a fore wedding, a bad wake, tell hell’s well’ : ' their
weatherings and their marryings and their buryings and their
natural selections’ : 'the lightning look, the birding cry, awe
from the grave, everflowing on our times’ : 'by four hands of
forethought the first babe of reconcilement is laid in its last
cradle of hume sweet hume’.
Apart from this emphasis on the tangible conveniences com-
mon to Humanity, we find frequent expressions of Vico’s insis-
tence on the inevitable character of every progression —or retro-
gression : 'The Vico road goes round and round to meet where
terms begin. Still onappealed to by the cycles and onappal-
led by the recoursers, we feel all serene, never you fret, as
regards our dutyful cask.... before there was a man at all in
9
Ireland there was a lord at Lucan. We only wish everyone
was as sure of anything in this watery world as we are of
everything in the newlywet fellow that‘s bound to follow ’
'The efferfreshpainted livy inbeautific repose upon the silence
of the dead from Pharoph the next first down to rameschec-
kles the last bust thing’. 'In fact, under the close eyes of the
inspectors the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their
contrarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody similarly as
by the providential warring of heartshaker with housebrea-
ker and of dramdrinker against freethinker our social some-
thing bowls along bumpily, experiencing a jolting series of
prearranged disappointments, down the long lane of (it’s as
semper asoxhousehumper) generations, more generations and
still more generations’ — this last a case of Mr. Joyce’s rare
subjectivism. In a word, here is all humanity circling with
fatal monotony about the Providential fulcrum — the 'convoy
wheeling encirculing abound the gigantig’s lifetree’. Enough
has been said, or at least enough has been suggested, to show
how Vico is substantially present in the Work in Progress.
Passing to the Vico of the Poetics we hope to establish an
even more striking, if less direct, relationship.
Vico rejected the three popular interpretations of the poetic
spirit, which considered poetry as either an ingenious popular
expression of philosophical conceptions, or an amusing social
diversion, or an exact science within the reach of everyone in
possession of the recipe. Poetry, he says, was born of curio-
sity, daughter of ignorance. The first men had to create
matter by the force of their imagination, and 'poet’ means
'creator’. Poetry was the first operation of the human mind,
and without it thought could not exist. Barbarians, incap-
able of analysis and abstraction, must use their fantasy to
explain what their reason cannot comprehend. Before artic-
lO
ulation comes song ; before abstract terms, metaphors. The
figurative character of the oldest poetry must be regarded, not
as sophisticated confectionery, but as evidence of a poverty-
stricken vocabulary and of a disability to achieve abstraction.
Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics : Metaphy-
sics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disem-
bodiment of the spiritual ; Poetry is all passion and feeling
and animates the inanimate ; Metaphysics are most perfect
when most concerned with universals ; Poetry, when
most concerned with particulars. Poets are the sense, philos-
ophers the intelligence of humanity. Considering the Schol-
astics’ axiom : "niente e neirintelleto che prima non sia nel
senso\ it follows that poetry is a prime condition of philoso-
phy and civilization. The primitive animistic movement
was a manifestation of the ^ forma poetica dello spirito.'
His treatment of the origin of language proceeds rJong
similar lines. Here again he rejected the materialistic and
transcendental views : the one declaring that language was
nothing but a polite and conventional symbolism ; the other,
in desperation, describing it as a gift from the Gods. As
before, Vico is the rationalist, aware of the natural and inevit-
able growth of language. In its first dumb form, language
was gesture. If a man wanted to say ‘sea’, he pointed to the
sea. With the spread of animism this gesture was replaced
by the word : 'Neptune’. He directs our attention to the fact
that every need of life, natural, moral and economic, has its
verbal expression in one or other of the 30000 Greek divini-
ties. This is Homer’s 'language of the Gods’. Its Evolution
through poetry to a highly civilized vehicle, rich in abstract
and technical terms, was as little fortuitous as the evolution
of society itself. Words have their progressions as well as
social phases. 'Forest-cabin-village-city-academy’ is one rough
II
progression. Another : ’mountain*plain-riverbank’. And
every word expands with psychological inevitability. Take
the Latin word : ‘Lex’.
1. Lex
2. Ilex
3 . Legere
4. Aquilex
5. Lex
6. Lex
7. Legere
= Crop of acorns.
= Tree that produces acorns.
= To gather.
— He that gathers the waters.
= Gathering together of peoples, public
assembly.
= Law.
= To gather together letters into a word,
to read.
The root of any word whatsoever can be traced back to
some pre-lingual symbol. This early inability to abstract
the general from the particular produced the Type-names. It
is the child’s mind over again. The child extends the names
of the first familiar objects to other strange objects in which
he is conscious of some analogy. The first men, unable to
conceive the abstract idea of ‘poet’ or ‘hero’, named every
hero after the first hero, every poet after the first poet. Recog-
nizing this custom of designating a number of individuals
by the names of their prototypes, we can explain various clas-
sical and mythological mysteries. Hermes is the prototype
of the Egyptian inventor : so for Romulus, the great law-giver,
and Hercules, the Greek hero : so for Homer. Thus Vico
asserts the spontaneity of language and denies the dualism of
poetry and language. Similarly, poetry is the foundation of
writing. When language consisted of gesture, the spoken and
the written were identical. Hieroglyphics, or sacred lan-
guage, as he calls it, were not the invention of philosophers
for the mysterious expression of profound thought, but the
12
common necessity of primitive peoples. Convenience only
begins to assert itself at a far more advanced stage of civiliz-
ation, in the form of alphabetism. Here Vico, implicitly at
least, distinguishes between writing and direct expression.
In such direct expression, form and content are inseparable.
Examples are the medals of the Middle Ages, which bore no
inscription and were a mute testimony to the feebleness of
conventional alphabetic writing : and the flags of our own
day. As with Poetry and Language, so with Myth. Myth,
according to Vico, is neither an allegorical expression of gen-
eral philosophical axioms (Conti, Bacon), nor a derivative
from particular peoples, as for instance the Hebrews or Egyp-
tians, nor yet the work of isolated poets, but an historical state-
ment of fact, of actual contemporary phenomena, actual in
the sense that they were created out of necessity by primitive
minds, and firmly believed. Allegory implies a threefold
intellectual operation : the construction of a message of gen-
eral significance, the preparation of a fabulous form, and an
exercise of considerable technical difficulty in uniting the two,
an operation totally beyond the reach of the primitive mind.
Moreover, if we consider the myth as being essentially alleg-
orical, we are not obliged to acceptthe form in which itiscast
as a statement of fact. But we know that the actual creators
of these myths gave full credence to their face-value. Jove
was no symbol : he was terribly real. It was precisely their
superficial metaphorical character that made them intelligible
to people incapable of receiving anything more abstract than
the plain record of objectivity.
Such is a painful exposition of Vico’s dynamic treatment
of Language, Poetry and Myth. He may still appear as a
mystic to some : if so, a mystic that rejects the transcendental
in every shape and form as a factor in human development,
13
and whose Providence is not divine enough to do without
the cooperation of Humanity.
On turning to the * Work in Progress ’ we find that the mir-
ror is not so convex. Here is direct expression — pages and
pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and
Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it.
You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from
content that you can comprehend the one almost without
bothering to read the other. This rapid skimming and absorp-
tion of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what
I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual saliva-
tion. The form that is an arbitrary and independent pheno-
menon can fulfil no higher function than that of stimulus for
a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling compre-
hension. When Miss Rebecca West clears her decks for a
sorrowful deprecation of the Narcisstic element in Mr. Joyce
by the purchase of 3 hats, one feels that she might very well
wear her bib at all her intellectual banquets, or alternatively,
assert a more noteworthy control over her salivary glands than
is possible for Monsieur Pavlo’s unfortunate dogs. The title of
this book is a good example of a form carrying a strict inner
determination. It should be proof against the usual volley of
cerebral sniggers : and it may suggest to some a dozen incred-
ulous Joshuas prowling aroud the Queen’s Hall, springing
their tuning-forks lightly against finger-nails that have not yet
been refined out of existence. Mr. Joyce has a word to say to
you on the subject : * Yet to concentrate solely on the literal
sense or even the psychological content of any document to
the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circums-
tantiating it is just as harmful ; etc.’ And another : ‘Who in
his hearts doubts either that the facts of feminine clothie-
ring are there all the time or that the feminine fiction.
stranger than the facts, is there also at the same time, only
a little to the rere ? Or that one may be separated from
the orther ? Or that both may be contemplated simul-
taneously ? Or that each may be taken up in turn and consid-
ered apart from the other?’
Here form is content, content is form. You complain that
this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all.
It is not to be read — or rather it is not only to be read. It
is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about
something; it is that something itself. (A fact that has been
grasped by an eminent English novelist and historian whose
work is in complete opposition to Mr Joyce ’s). When the
sense is sleep, the words go to sleep. (See the end of ^Anna
Livid!') When the sense is dancing, the words dance. Take
the passage at the end of Shaun’s pastoral : To stirr up love’s
young fizz I tilt with this bridle’s cup champagne, dimming
douce from her peepair of hideseeks tight squeezed on my
snowybreasted and while my pearlies in their sparkling
wisdom are nippling her bubblets I swear (and let you
swear) by the bumper round of my poor old snaggletooth‘s
solidbowel I ne’er will prove I’m untrue to (theare !) you liking
so long as my hole looks. Down.’ The language is drunk.
The very words are tilted and effervescent. How can we
qualify this general esthetic vigilance without which we
cannot hope to snare the sense which is for ever rising to
the surface of the form and becoming the form itself? St. Aug-
ustine puts us on the track of a word with his 'inten-
derd\ Dante has : "Donne cdavete intelletto d'amord, and
Voi che, intendendo, il ter^o del movete ’ ; but his ' inten-
dere' suggests a strictly intellectual operation. When an
Italian says to-day * Ho inteso, ’ he means something be-
tween ' Ho udito ’ and ' Ho capita ’, a sensuous untidy art of
15
intellection. Perhaps * apprehension ’ is the most satisfac-
tory English word. Stephen says to Lynch : ' Temporal or
spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as
selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable back-
ground of space or time which is not it You apprehend
its wholeness. ’ There is one point to make clear : the Beauty
of ' Work in Progress ’ is not presented in space alone, since
its adequate apprehension depends as much on its visibility as
on its audibility. There is a temporal as well as a spatial unity
to be apprehended. Substitute ' and ’ for ' or ’ in the quota-
tion, and it becomes obvious why it is as inadequate to speak
fo ' reading ’ ' Work in Progress ’ as it would be extrava-
gant to speak of ' apprehending’ the work of the late Mr. Nat
Gould. Mr. Joyce has desophisticated language. And it is
worth while remarking that no language is so sophisticated
as English. It is abstracted to death. Take the word ‘ doubt ’ :
it gives us hardly any sensuous suggestion of hesitancy, of the
necessity for choice, of static irresolution. Whereas the Ger-
man ‘ Zweifel ’ does, and, in lesser degree, the Italian * dubi-
tare ’. Mr. Joyce recognises how inadequate ' doubt ’ is to
express a state of extreme uncertainty, and replaces it by ‘ in
twosome twiminds’. Nor is he by any means the first to
recognize the importance of treating words as something more
than mere polite symbols. Shakespeare uses fat, greasy
words to express corruption : * Duller shouldst thou be than
the fat weed that rots itself in death on Lethe wharf’. We
hear the ooze squelching all through Dickens’s description of
the Thames in ‘ Great Expectations ’. This writing that you
find so obscure is a quintessential extraction of language and
painting and gesture, .with all the inevitable clarity of the
old inarticulation. Here is the savage economy of hiero-
glyphics. Here words are not the polite contortions of 20th
century printer’s ink. They are alive. They elbow their
way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disap-
pear. ' Brawn is my name and broad is my nature and I ' ve
breit on my brow and all's right with every feature and I’ll
brune this bird or Brown Bess’s bung ’ s gone bandy ’. This
is Brawn blowing with a light gust through the trees or
Brawn passing with the sunset. Because the wind in the
trees means as little to you as the evening prospect from the
Piazzale Michelangiolo — though you accept them both
because your non-acceptance would be of no significance,
this little adventure of Brawn means nothing to you — and
you do not accept it, even though here also your non-accep-
tance is of no significance. H. C. Earwigger, too, is not
content to be mentioned like a shilling-shocker villain, and
then dropped until the exigencies of the narrative require
that he be again referred to. He continues to suggest himself
for a couple of pages, by means of repeated permutations on
his * normative letters ’, as if to say : ' This is all about me,
H. C. Earwigger : don’t forget this is all about me ! ’ This
inner elemental vitality and corruption of expression imparts
a furious restlessness to the form, which is admirably suited
to the purgatorial aspect of the work. There is an endless
verbal germination, maturation, putrefaction, the cyclic dyn-
amism of the intermediate. This reduction of various express-
ive media to their primitive economic directness, and the
fusion of these primal essences into an assimilated medium
for the exteriorisation of thought, is pure Vico, and Vico,
applied to the problem of style. But Vico is reflected more
explicitly than by a distillation of disparate poetic ingredients
into a synthetical syrup. We notice that there is little or no
attempt at subjectivism or abstraction, no attempt at meta-
physical generalisation. We are presented with a statement
of the particular. It is the old myth : the girl on the dirt
track, the two washerwomen on th^ banks of the river. And
there is considerable animism : the mountain * abhearing’, the
river puffing her old doudheen. (See the beautiful passage
beginning : * First she let her hair fall and down it fiussed ’.)
We have Type-names : Isolde — any beautiful girl : Earwig-
gcr — Guinness’s Brewery, the Wellington monument, the
Phoenix Park, anything that occupies an extremely comfort-
able position between the two stools. Anna Livia herself, mo-
ther of Dublin, but no more the only mother than Zoroaster
was the only oriental stargazer. ' Teems of times and happy
returns. The same anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna
was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be. Northmen’s thing made
Southfolk’s place, but howmultyplurators made eachone in
person. ” Basta I Vico and Bruno are here, and more sub-
stantially than would appear from this swift survey of the
question. For the benefit of those who enjoy a parenthetical
sneer, we would draw attention to the fact that when Mr. Joyce’s
early pamphlet ' ' The Day of Rabblemeni ” appeared, the local
philosophers were thrown into a state of some bewilderment
by a reference in the first line to ‘ * The Nolan. ” They finally
succeeded in identifying this mysterious individual with one
of the obscurer ancient Irish kings. In the present work he
appears frequently as “Browne & Nolan ’’the name of a
very remarkable Dublin Bookseller and Stationer.
To justify our title, we must move North, ‘ Soprani bel fume
d Arno alia gran villa ’... Between * colui per lo cut verso —
il meonio cantor non e pin solo ’and the “still to-day insuffi-
ciently malestimated notesnatcher, Shem the Penman”, there
exists considerable circumstantial similarity. They both saw
how worn out and threadbare was the conventional language
of cunning literary artificers, both rejected an approximation
i8
to a universal language. If English is not yet so definitely a
polite necessity as Latin was in the Middle Ages, at least one
is justified in declaring that its position in relation to other
European languages is to a great extent that of mediaeval
Latin to the Italian dialects. Dante did not adopt the vulgar
out of any kind of local jingoism nor out of any determination
to assert the superiority of Tuscan to all its rivals as a form
of spoken Italian. On reading his ‘ De Vulgari Eloquentia'
we are struck by his complete freedom from civic intolerance.
He attacks the world’s Portadownians : ' Narn quicumque tarn
obscenae rationis est, ut locum suae nationis delitosissimm
credat esse sub sole, huic etiam prce cunctis propriam volgare
licetur, idestmaternam locutionem. Nos autem, cui mundus
est patria... etc. ’ When he comes to examine the dial-
ects he finds Tuscan: ' iurpissimum fere omnes Tusci
in suo turpiloquio obtusi non restat in dubio quin
aliud sit vulgare quod quaerimus quam quod attingit popu-
lus Tuscanorum. ’ His conclusion is that the corruption
common to all the dialects makes it impossible to select one
rather than another as an adequate literary form, and that he
who would write in the vulgar must assemble the purest
elements from each dialect and construct a synthetic language
that would at least possess more than a circumscribed local
interest : which is precisely what he did. He did not write in
Florentine any more than in Neapolitan. He wrote a vulgar
that cow/i/ have been spoken by an ideal Italian who had assim-
ilated what was best in all the dialects of his country, but
which in fact was certainly not spoken nor ever had been.
Which disposes of the capital objection that might be made
against this attractive parallel between Dante and Mr. Joyce in
the question of language, i. e. that at least Dante wrote what
was being spoken in the streets of his own town, whereas no
19
creature in heaven or earth ever spoke the language of "Work
in Progress' It is reasonable to admit that an international
phenomenon might be capable of speaking it, just as in
1 300 none but an inter-regional phenomenon could have
spoken the language of the Divine Comedy. We are incli-
ned to forget that Dante’s literary public was Latin, that the
form of his Poem was to be judged by Latin eyes and ears,
by a Latin Esthetic intolerant of innovation, and which could
hardly fail to be irritated by the substitution of * Nel me^^o
del cammin di nostra vita ’ with its * barbarous ’ directness
for the suave elegance of : * Ultima regna canam, Jluido conier-
mina mundo^ ’ just as English eyes and ears prefer : * Smok-
ing his favourite pipe in the sacred presence of ladies ’ to :
' Ranking his flavourite turfco in the smukking precincts of
lydias. ’ Boccaccio did not jeer at the * piedi sos^^i ’ of the
peacock that Signora Alighieri dreamed about.
1 find two well made caps in the ' Convivio^y one to fit the
collective noodle of the monodialectical arcadians whose fury
is precipitated by a failure to discover innocefree ” in the
Concise Oxford Dictionary and who qualify as the ' ravings
of a Bedlamite ’ the formal structure raised by Mr. Joyce after
years of patient and inspired labour : * Questi sono da chia-
mare pecore e non uomini ; che se una pecora si gittasse da
una ripa di milk passi, tutte Paltre le andrebbono dietro ; e
se una pecora per alcuna cagione al passare d'una strada salta,
tutte le altre saltano, e\iando nulla veggendo da saltare. E
io ne vidi gid molte in un po\^o saltare, per una che dentro
vi saltOy forse credendo di saltare un muro\ And the other
for Mr. Joyce, biologist in words : ' Questo (formal innovat-
ion) sard luce nuova, sole nuovo, il quale sorgerd ore Fusato
tramonterd e dard luce a coloro che sono in tenebre e in oscu-
ritd per lo usato sole che a loro non luce. ’ And, lest he should
2o
pull it down over his eyes and laugh behind the peak, I trans-
late * in tenebre e in oscuritd ’ by ‘ bored to extinction. ’
(Dante makes a curious mistake speaking of the origin of
language, when he rejects the authority of Genesis that Eve
was the first to speak, when she addressed the Serpent. His
incredulity is amusing : ' inconvenienter putatur tarn egre-
gium humani genei'is actum, vel prius quam a viro, foemina
profluisse. ’ But before Eve was born, * the animals were
given names by Adam, the man who * first said goo to a
goose ’. Moreover it is explicitly stated that the choice of na-
mes was left entirely to Adam, so that there is not the slight-
est Biblical authority for the conception of language as a
direct gift of God, any more than there is any intellectual
authority for conceiving that we are indebted for the ' Concert’
to the individual who used to buy paint for Giorgione).
We know very little about the immediate reception accor-
ded to Dante’s mighty vindication of the ' vulgar ’, but we
can form our own opinions when, two centuries later, we find
Castiglione splitting more than a few hairs concerning the
respective advantages of Latin and Italian, and Pol-
iziano writing the dullest of dull Latin Elegies to justify his
existence as the author of ' Orfeo ’ and the ' Stance ’. We
may also compare, if we think it worth while, the storm of
ecclesiastical abuse raised by Mr. Joyce’s work, and the treat-
ment that the Divine Comedy must certainly have received
from the same source. His Contemporary Holiness might
have swallowed the crucifixion of * lo sommo Giope ’, and all
it stood for, but he could scarcely have looked with favour on
the spectacle of three of his immediate predecessors plunged
head-foremost in the fiery stone of Malebolge, nor yet the
identification of the Papacy in the mystical procession of Ter-
restial Paradise with a * puttana sciolta ’. The ' De Monar-
21
chia ’ was burnt publicly under Pope Giovanni XXII at
the instigation of Cardinal Beltrando and the bones of its
author would have suffered the same fate but for the
interference of an influential man of letters, Pino della Tosa.
Another point of comparison is the preoccupation with the
significance of numbers. The death of Beatrice inspired no-
thing less than a highly complicated poem dealing with the
importance of the number 3. in her life. Dante never ceased
to be obsessed by this number. Thus the Poem is divided
into three Cantiche, each composed of 3 3 Canti, and written
in terza rima. Why, Mr. Joyce seems to say, should there
be four legs to a table, and four to a horse, and four seasons
and four Gospels and four Provinces in Ireland ? Why twel-
ve Tables of the Law, and twelve Apostles and twelve months
and twelve Napoleonic marshals and twelve men in Florence
called Ottolenghi ? Why should the Armistice be celebrated
at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh
month ? He cannot tell you because he is not God Almighty,
but in a thousand years he will tell you, and in the meantime
must be content to know why horses have not five legs, nor
three. He is conscious that things with a common numer-
ical characteristic tend towards a very significant interrelation-
ship. This preoccupation is freely translated in his present
work : see the * Question and Answer ’ chapter, and the Four
speaking through the child’s brain. They are the four winds
as much as the four Provinces, and the four Episcopal Sees
as much as either.
A last word about the Purgatories. Dante’s is conical and
consequently implies culmination. Mr. Joyce’s is spherical
and excludes culmination. In the one there is an ascent
from real vegetation — Ante-Purgatory, to ideal vegetation —
Terrestial Paradise : in the other there is no ascent and no
22
ideal vegetation. In the one, absolute progression and a
guaranteed consummation : in the other, flux — progression
or retrogression, and an apparent consummation. In the one
movement is unidirectional, and a step forward represents a
net advance : in the other movement is non-directional —
or multi-directional, and a step forward is, by definition, a
step back. Dante’s Terrestial Paradise is the carriage entrance
to a Paradise that is not terrestial : Mr. Joyce’s Terrestial Para-
dise is the tradesmen’s entrance on to the sea-shore. Sin is an
impediment to movement up the cone, and a condition of
movementround the sphere. In what sense, then, is Mr. Joy-
ce’s work purgatorial ? In the absolute absence of the Absol-
ute. Hell is the static lifelessness of unrelieved viciousness.
Paradise the static lifelessness of unrelieved immaculation.
Purgatory a flood of movement and vitality released by
the conjunction of these two elements. There is a conti-
nuous purgatorial process at work, in the sense that the
vicious circle of humanity is being achieved, and this achieve-
ment depends on the recurrent predomination of one of two
broad qualities. No resistance, no eruption, and it is only in
Hell and Paradise that there are no eruptions, that there can
be none, need be none. On this earth that is Purgatory, Vice
and Virtue — which you may take to mean any pair of large
contrary human factors — must in turn be purged down to
spirits of rebelliousness. Then the dominant crust of the
Vicious or Virtuous sets, resistance is provided, the explosion
duly takes place and the machine proceeds. And no more
than this ; neither prize nor penalty ; simply a series of stim-
ulants to enable the kitten to catch its tail. And the par-
tially purgatorial agent? The partially purged.
THE IDEA OF TIME IN THE WORK
OF JAMES JOYCE
BY
MARCEL BRION
THE IDEA OF TIME
IN THE WORK OF JAMES JOYCE
BY
Marcel Brion.
Certain thinkers have at times wondered if the essential
difference existing between man and God were not a difference
of time. Space is not concerned here — God is everywhere
— but, rather, this much more complex dimension which is
generally inaccessible to human science. -We measure time
but we do not know what it is.
We often encounter in mystical literature the story of the
monk or poet who has fallen asleep in the forest. When he
awakes he no longer recognizes either men or the countryside.
His meditation or slumber, which to him has appeared very
short, has in reality lasted hundreds of years. But during
this moment in which he has been snatched from the tyranny
of time he has caught a glimpse of the mysterious aspects of
infinity, he has neared the laws of the Cosmos, the throne of
God.
Theoretically, the difference in speed between two objects
in motion is sufficient to make them imperceptible to each
other ; to destroy, practically, their existence.
The relations between human beings are those of time.
26
All men are made similar by the nearly equal cadence of their
heart-beats, but they are separated by the rhythms of their
sensations or their thoughts. Only those walking at the same
pace know each other.
The fourth dimension is actually the only one that matters.
Space is nothing — it is reduced every day by mechanical
means of communication — but consider two men seated side
by side. They do not live in the same time. There is no
possible communication between them. And it is often the
tragedy of life to feel oneself only a few centimeters away
from the beings among whom one lives, yet separated from
them by all the infinity of time.
Time is not an abstract concept. On the contrary, it is
perhaps the only reality in the world, the thing which is the
most concrete. All the rest could only intervene in the form
of its emanations.
We may deduce from this that time is the essential factor
in a work of art. (This appears quite evident when consid-
ered in one if its aspects — rhythm). It is the law of archi-
tecture and of painting. The painters who have attained the
greatest emotional power are precisely those whose work
includes time — for example, Rembrandt. While we look at
it, the picture seems always in the process of“ being made”.
It seems to be constructing itself with the moments and it
seems that if we were to return on the morrow we should
find it changed. And, in fact, when we return on the mor-
row, it is changed. There are likewise masterpieces of sculpture
which give the impression of a continual palpitation, of an
uninterrupted succession of imperceptible movements. It is
this that is ordinarily called life — but life is the consciousness
of time.
A book’s story may embrace several decades, several centu-
27
ries without revealing time to us. Another imposes it in a
brief moment. There are flat books and deep books (without
metaphor and almost in a material sense) ; there are also
books rich with time and books destitute of time. This is the
reason that one of the greatest writers of our period, one of
the most sensitive and most intuitive, made of time the essen-
tial dimension of his work — temps perdu and tetnps
retrouve.
Marcel’s Proust’s idea of time is extremely curious. In his
books time is a character like the others — I might even say
more than the others. Time is at the centre of his work like
a sort of lighthouse with turning signals. The men who
revolve around this luminous mass are suddenly illuminated
by the beams of the projector in periodic flashes, and the
moment the light abandons them they fall back into obscurity,
nothingness.
It is in time that the characters of Proust become conscious
of themselves. They seek themselves in it and are reflected
in it. They complete their metamorphosis in it. But time
remains exterior to them. They are not incorporated in it
any more than they integrate it in themselves. They submit
to it, as to gravity or the law of acceleration. But the author
has conceived it so intensely that we feel this time to be mat-
erialized often like an object, applied like a thin and trans-
parent pellicle on the face of men.
Perhaps because illness sheltered him from the customary
rhythm of life, because it imposed upon him a different order
of sensations, Proust understood time as a thing in itself, time
which does not ordinarily separate us from our act and which
we make simply a condition, an accessory of our existence.
With James Joyce it is another thing. I place James Joyce
and Marcel Proust together intentionally because in my opi-
28
nion they are the two greatest writers of our century, the only
ones who have brought an original vision of the world to our
epoch, who have renewed equally the universe of sensations
and of ideas. The work of Proust and that of Joyce are the
only ones between which a parallel may be drawn on an ideal
plane of quality — and this for reasons which go far beyond
questions of technique or talent — in the domain of literature
and art. Perhaps it is because a sort of pure instinct of genius
is likewise found here under a very elaborate art ; but, above
all, it is because with Joyce as with Proust time is a dominant
factor.
On the absolute plane, the life of the ephemera and that of
the animal endowed with the greatest length of life are equal.
In the one case as in the other it is a life, and the fact that it
stretches out for a few seconds or a few centuries has no im-
portance. It is probable that both will be divided into a like
number of units but that the unit will belong for the one
and extremely short for the other. The idea of time being
essentially that of the dissociation of moments, a hundredth
of a second for an insect that lives for some minutes will be
loaded with as many experiences as a year for the long-living
animal. It it the same thing, all proportions retained, with
men — some live at high speed, others at reduced speed ; and
they are separated, inexorably most often, by these different
cadences.
We may thus account for the fact that eighteen hours of
Bloom’s life should give birth to Ulysses, and we can easily
imagine that Ufysses might have been ten times as long, a hun-
dred times as long, extended to infinity, that one of Bloom’s
minutes might have filled a library. This is the mystery of
the relativity of time.
If time remains external to Proust, if he gives it an exist-
29
ence apart, isolated from his characters, for Joyce, on the
contrary, it remains the inseparable factor, the primary elem-
ent at the base of his work.
This is why he creates his own time, as he creates his voc-
abulary and his characters. He soon elaborates what he
receives from reality by a mysterious chemistry into new
elements bearing the marks of this personality. But even as
he metamorphoses the countryside, the streets of Dublin, the
beach, the monuments, he mixes all this into what appears
to us at first sight as a chaos. This chaos is the condition
necessary to all creation. The cards are shuffled to begin a
new game and all the elements of a universe are mingled
before a new world is made, in order that new forms may be
given birth. A total refutation of man and his milieu, a
rejection of combinations already used, a need of fine new
instruments. Joyce dashes the scenes of the world down
pellmell to find an unhackneyed meaning and a law that is
not outdated in the arrangement he is afterward to give them.
To do this it is fitting that he should at the outset break
through the too-narrow restraints of time and space ; he must
have an individual conception of these dimensions and adopt
them to the necessities of his creation. In Ulysses, and still
more in Work in Progress, we seem to be present at the
birth of a world. In this apparent chaos we are conscious
of a creative purpose, constructive and architectural, which
has razed every conventional dimension, concept and voca-
bulary, and selected from their scattered material the elements
of a new structure. Joyce has created his language, either
by writing words phonetically — and Heaven knows such a
method is enough to discipline English — or by introducing
foreign words and dialect forms, or finally by the wholesale
manufacture of words which he requires and which are not
30
to be had at second hand. And it is all done with an unpre-
cedented creative power, with an almost unique fertility of
imagination, inexhaustibly reinforced by the incredible extent
of his culture. In the field of verbal richness Joyce has
annexed the seemingly impregnable position of Rabelais ; but
whereas in Rabelais, form was under no direction other
than that of an amused fantasy, in Joyce it is the handmaid
of a philosophy. Work in Progress seems to be based on the
historical theory of Vico an actual recreation of the world,
its ideas and its forms.
Mr. Elliot Paul well demonstrated recently how Joyce in
his composition of Work in Progress revealed an entirely
individual conception of time and space.
This was already quite apparent in his first books. The
stories in Dubliners, for example, seem entirely filled with the
beating of a silent metronome. They unfold themselves in
" time ”. Properly speaking, Araby is a drama of time, a
drama ot lost time ; and we feel that each of the characters in
Dubliners is rich or poor with his time, that the vibration of
his life is hasty or slow.
In Ulysses the phenomenon is even more evident. To
reduce the decades of the Iliad, the Odyssey, of Telemachus
to eighteen hours in the life of a man — and of an ordinary
man to whom nothing happens save the most ordinary events
of existence — is one of the Einsteinian miracles of the rela-
tivity of time. And we understand it even better when we see
the movement of the vibrations transformed in each chapter,
changing rhythm and tempo, slowing up in the Nausicaa
episode, blowing like the wind in that of Eolus, giving spa-
cious and deep cadences to the gynecological discussion.
The chapter most powerfully demonstrating Joyce’s mastery
in expressing time is perhaps that in which Marian Bloom’s
31
revery unrolls its rapid uninterrupted chain of ideas, memo-
ries and sensations, contrasting to her calm regular breathing.
Better than anyone else, Joyce has restored the sense of
biological and intellectual rhythm. I imagine that he could
write an unprecedented book composed of the simple interior
physical existence, of a man, without anecdotes, without super-
numeraries, with only the circulation of the blood and the
lymph, the race of nervous excitations toward the centres, the
twisting of emotion and thought through the cells. I imagine
that Joyce could compose a book of pure time.
It sometimes seems that a page of Joyce is a strange vibra-
tion of cells, a swarming of the lowest Brownian movements
under the lens of the microscope. In my opinion, if the recent
books of Joyce are considered hermetic by the majority of
readers it is because of the difficulty which the latter exper-
ience in falling into step, in adapting themselves to the rhythm
of each page, in changing ' ' time ” abruptly and as often as
this is necessary.
But still more than to Ulysses these remarks apply to the
book which transition is publishing and of which we as yet
know only a part. Work in Progress is essentially a time
work. From a bird’s eye view, time appears to be its prin-
cipal subject. It begins in the middle of a moment and of a
sentence, as if to place in infinity the initial disturbance of its
waves. The concept of time here plays the principal role,
not only by its concrete expressions but likewise by its abstract
essence. It here takes on the significance of a creator-word
and determines all the movements of the work.
The chronology of the story matters little to the author of
Work in Progress. By his caprice, which in reality obeys a
carefully studied and realized constructive will, characters
most widely separated in time find themselves unexpectedly
32
cast side by side ; and, as for example Mr. Elliot Paul recently
wrote in transition, " Noah, Premier Gladstone and ' Papa ’
Browning are telescoped into one This image is perfectly
accurate, and the optics of the work are so much the less acces-
sible to the average reader as he does not always distinguish
the moment in which the present episode is placed. When
we are made to pass, without any transition other than an
extremely subtle association of ideas, from Original Sin to the
Wellington Monument and when we are transported from the
Garden of Eden to the Waterloo battlefield we have the im-
pression of crossing a quantity of intermediary planes at full
speed. Sometimes it even seems that the planes exist simul-
taneously in the same place and are multipled like so many
"over-impressions"’. These planes, which are separated,
become remote and are suddenly reunited and sometimes
evoke a sort of accordeon where they are fitted exactly, one
into another like the parts of a telescope, to return to Mr. Elliot
Paul’s metaphor.
This gift of ubiquity permits Joyce to unite persons and
moments which appear to be the most widely separated. It
gives a strange transparence to his scenes, since we perceive
their principal element across four or five various evocations,
all corresponding to the same idea but presenting varied faces
in different lightings and movements.
It has often been said that a man going away from the earth
at the speed of light would by this act relive in an extraor-
dinarily short time all the events in the world’s history.
Supposing this speed were still greater and near to Infinity —
all these events would flash out simultaneously. This is what
happens sometimes in Joyce. Without apparent transition,
the Fall of the Angels is transparently drawn over the Battle
of Waterloo. This appears to us as contrary neither to the
33
laws of logic nor to those of nature, for these " bridges ” are
joined with a marvellous sense of the association of ideas.
New associations, created by him with amazing refinement,
they cooperate in creating this universe, the Joycian world,
which obeys its own laws and appears to be liberated from
the customary physical restraints.
And we have, indeed, the impression of a very individual
world, very different from our own, a world of reflections that
are sometimes deformed, as in concave or convex mirrors, and
imprinted with a reality true and whole in itself. I do not
speak here only of the vocabulary which Joyce employs and
which he transforms for his usage — which, one might, say,
he creates — but especially of his manners of treating time
and space. It is for this reason, much more than because of
the work’s linguistic difficulties, that the reader often loses
his footing. This is related to the prodigious quantity of
intentions and suggestions which the author accumulates in
each sentence. The sentence only takes on its genuine sense
at the moment that one has discovered its explanatory rap-
prochements or has situated it in time.
And if the books of Joyce are as difficult for many to read
as those of Einstein it is perhaps because both of these men
have discovered a new aspect of the world and one which
cannot be comprehended without a veritable initiation.
Translated from the French
by Robert Sage.
JAMES JOYCE’S WORK IN PROGRESS
AND OLD NORSE POETRY
BY
FRANK BUDGEN
JAMES JOYCE’S WORK IN PROGRESS AND
OLD NORSE POETRY
BY
Frank Budgen.
Joyce is not to be described by an etiquette or located with-
in the four walls of any aesthetic creed. His logic is that of
life and his inventions are organic necessities. His present
work therefore, it seems to me, is best understood by what
has preceded it, his own in the first place and then its kin-
dred among past productions.
His mediaeval Catholic affinities have been often indicated
but while not denying the catholic-Irish element in Joyce —
its universality and its passionate localism — I think I can
see a kinship, equally authentic, with heathen Scandinavia.
The whole of Joyce’s work has been hitherto one long cele-
bration of the princij^al city of the Ostmen. (If tomorrow
Dublin were spirited away it could be reconstructed out of
“ Ulysses ”). His genius is theirs — adventurous, secular,
and logical.
In the Edda we find the same sense of continuous creation
as in Joyce’s Work in Progress. The world and the Gods
were doomed but phoenix like they were to rise again. The
Sun bore a daughter before the Wolf swallowed her. Vidor
and Vali found on the grass the golden tables of the stricken
38
gods and Thor’s hammer fell into the mighty hands of his
two sons. Joyce writes : “ The oaks of aid now they lie in
peat yet elms leap where ashes lay. Phall if you but will,
rise you must : and none so soon either shall the pharce for
the nunce come to a set down secular phoenish. ”
Joyce is at present reconquering and extending a poetic
freedom partly usurped by the working intelligence. Human
speech has always had two functions. It seems expedient
that a number of men building a tower shall attach fixed mean-
ings and logical relationships to the words they use but
when not actually working, the words become as free as their
users and are as able and willing to lay aside their union
cards doff their overalls and dance. In Work in Progress
they are dancing new figures to a new tune. The Norse poet
also was alive to the immense emotional force of indirect and
allusive speech as a principle of leverage applied to the ima-
gination. He called a Spade a Spade and a Ship a Ship when
he was using the one or the other. But as a poet he loaded
his song with Kennings so that the image of the thing besung
might appear with new life out of the multicoloured mosaic
of its attributes and associations.
The language and thought of Europe have since been enrich-
ed with ten centuries of cultural effort. Technical progress
has brought the sundered tribes of Europe nearer together.
Their interests interlock and their thought and speech inter-
penetrate in spite of wars and customs barriers. Joyce’s
material is therefore infinitely richer and more varied. He
has at his disposal all the legends not only of his own tribe
but of all the human race, and he is surrounded by a
social organisation immeasurably vaster and more complex
than that of viking Scandinavia. All languages and dialects
are there for him to draw on at will and the shop talk of all
39
trades and the slang of all towns. Like every great craftsman
he freely makes use of all that he finds existing and adds
thereto his own inventions. In this connections it seems
curious that the inventor of a wireless gadget or of a patent
medicine may burden the dictionary with a new compound
but that the poetshall be forbiddden an expressive word because
it has never been used before. For Joyce’s purpose no word
is unpoetic — none obsolete. Words fallen out of use are
racial experience alive but unremembered. When in the
poet’s imagination the past experience is relived the dormant
word awakes to new life and the poet’s listeners are lifted out
of their social, functional grooves and partake of the integral
life of the race. The average literary snob would reject half
the material that Joyce uses and no one but an artist of sove-
reign freedom and tireless logic could subdue such headstrong
stufl to the purpose of his design.
Necessarily, for every one poetic device of the skald Joyce
must have a hundred. The kenning was extensive. In every
case the theme was expanded. Odin was the Wielder of
Gungni ; Thor, Hrungni’s bane, God of Goats, Hallower of
Earth ; Sleep, a parliament of dreams ; the eye, a cauldron of
tears ; a ship, a plank bear, and so on. The object was ima-
ginatively reborn in the light of each new name. The univer-
sality of Joyce’s theme dictates an intensive technique — a
greater density of word texture. Meanings can no longer lie
side by side. Here they overlap and there into one word he
crowds a whole family of them. A letter added or left out —
the sound of a vowel or consonant modified — and a host of
associations is admitted within the gates. And one letter
may stand pregnant with meaning as a rune. Through this
singular compactness a page of Joyce’s composition acquires
some of the potency of a picture. The words seem to glitter
40
with significance as they lie on the printed page. We speak
them and they flow like a river over our consciousness evo-
king images vivid and unexpected as those of a dream.
The Eddie poet tells us Odin had two ravens, Thought and
Memory. He sent them out into the world every day
( “ and he loosed two croakers from under his tilt, the groud
Phenician rover ”). Thought he loved, but if Memory came
not back, how could he endure the loss? This expresses the
normal human valuation. Next to the wish to livelies the wish
to remember — after experiencing we want to possess our-
selves of our experiences through memory. Modern art and
modern psychology witness how strong is this urge in the
individual. He recaptures for himself and hears from the
lips of others the story of his earliest days. He pursues his
dreams to the places where they hide, finds them and adopts
them. He hates his drunken brother but pastes pictures of
his grotesque antics in the family album. In Work in Pro-
gress the poet’s imagination seems one with racial memory.
Human society in its groups, tribes, nations, races, searches
the earth and its legends for the story ot its beginning. But
it is not as an historical hypothesis that Joyce recreates for us
the birth of the city (“ Twillby, Twillby ’’). The growth of
the spoken and written word (“ if you are abcedminded ”) —
the invention of tools, born of “ Moppa Necessity mother of
Injins ”. It is rather as if these things were personal experien-
ces once forgotten and by a prodigious effort of memory
brought to mind.
I see alarge humanity in Joyce’s work. None ot his contem-
poraries is so free from highbrow snobbishness and the super-
iority complex. The characters in Ulysses are of the com-
mon run of average humanity. Joyce didn’t find them at
hunt balls, country house parties and the Chelsea Studios
41
of millionaire dilettanti but in trams, pubs, shops and the
common streets and houses where the mass of the people
spend their lives. Ulysses is one day in a certain town
but the Adventures of the living and thinking body are as
understandable everywhere and at any time as music or a
drawing.
And the persons in Work in Progress are as universal as the
words through which they live. Adam and Eva, Cain and
Abel, Michael and Lucifer, the god who walked in the Garden
of Eden and his contemporaries who thundered from the skies
of Greece and Scandinavia, the wandering brother of the wide
open spaces and the brother of intellectual experiences — anta-
gonistic and inseparable. They are the representative persons
of the mind of the human race. The difficulty in enter-
ing into the imaginative world of Work in Progress lies in
no unessential obscurity on Joyce’s part but in our own atro-
phied word sense due in large measure to the fact that our
sensibilities have been steam-rollered flat by a vast bulk of
machine made fiction . The reader is becoming rarer than the
writer. The words of dead poets are read and confirmed like
the minutes of the previous meeting, with perhaps the dis-
sentient voice of one Scotch shareholder. Taken as read?
Agreed. Agreed. (Sonnet 43, When most I wink”) But
“ Work in Progress ” is obviously the next business on the
agenda paper, and if the words of a contemporary are not as
plain as a soap advertisement on a hoarding there is an outcry-
as if no mystery in poetry had ever been. Every poet’s work
has always presupposed the necessary religious and mythical
knowledge on the part of his hearers and an active imagina-
tion to follow identity through change.
The Jute and Mutt dialogue (Transition No. i) besides being
a passage of great beauty and a good example of Joyce’s
recreation of our poetic tongue, is essentially northern in cha-
racter. If stick and stone had speech to tell the story of more
transient shapes this is surely their authentic utterance and
this their unmistakeable character, humorous, harmless and
earthy. Only in the Edda where wise giant and Sybil and
wiser god discuss the origin and destiny of the world do I find
a similar sense of the mystery of creation, Mutt and Jute
approach each other like the vast slow moving figures on stilts
out of some dreamt-of pantomine and their greetings are the
purposeful and significant misunderstandings of slapstick
comedians.
Jute : Are you Jeff ?
Mutt : Some hards.
Jute : But you are not jeffmute ?
Mutt : Noho. Only an utterer.
Jute : Whoa ? Whoat is the mutter with you ?
They mimic the tribute giving and taking of vanished gen-
erations as clowns holding the stage after the exit of great an-
tagonists.
Jute : Let me cross your qualm with trink gilt. Here have
sylvan coyne, a piece of oak.
Mutt : Louee, louee ! How wooden I not know it, the
intellible greyt-cloak of Cedric Silkyshag I... Here where the
liveries, monomark. There where the missers mooney Min-
nikin passe.
The echo of the clamour of a great battle appears to them
ghostlike.
Mutt : Just how a puddinstone inat the brook cells by a
river pool.
Jute : Load Allmarshy ! Widwad fora Norse like ?
Mutt : Somular with a bull on a clompturf. Rooks roa-
rum rex roome ! I could snore to him of the spumy horn.
43
with his woolseley side in, by the neck I am sutton on, did
Brian d’ of Linn.
Shapes of land and water moulded by elemental forces,
compel, in their turn, the placing of cities and habitations ot
mankind. Mutt calls Jute to witness : —
“ Walk a dun blink round this allbutisle and you skull
see how olde yeplaine of my Liters, hunfreeand ours, where
wone to wail whimbrel to peewee o’er the saltings, where
wilby citie by law of isthmon, where by a droit of signory,
icefloe was from his Inn the Byggning to whose Finishthere
Punct. ”
And further he sees a thousand years of human destinies
crowded into the silence and fury of a snowstorm on a river : —
“Countlessness of live stories have nether fallen by this
plage, flick as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like a waast wiz-
zard all of whirlworlds. Now are all tombed to the mound,
isgesto isges, erde from erde. Pride, O pride, thy prize I ”
Settler and raider lie buried together and out of their dust
arise new forms of life : —
Mutt : Meldundleize ! And thanacestross mound have
swollup them all. This ourth of years is not save brickdust
and being humus the same roturns. He who runes may rede
it on all fours.
And as the unwilling Sybil sinks to the underworld and the
old giant forfeits his wagered head and the god departs, so the
familiar spirits of this river valley become again silent and
immobile.
Mutt : Ore you astonaged, jute you ?
Jute : Oye am thonthorstrok, thing mud.
The Scandinavian poet treated his gods familiarly as being
human like himself. Joyce does the same ; and singularly
enough the similarity extends to their special treatment of the
44
thunder god. Loki flouts each brother and sister deity in
turn. He derides the cowardice of the brave, confounds the
virtuous with their vices and jeers at the peacemaker for his
fruitless meddling. The entry of the thunder god silences
him. “ For I know that thou wilt strike ”. In Ulysses the
thunder god, disguised as phenomenon, interrupts a discus-
sion on birth control with similar effect. His role in “ Work
in Progress ” is still more important. Here he is ever pre-
sent, woven as a coloured strand in a tapestry, side by side
with all other elemental human values. Fear of a soaking,
fear, at most, of a lightning struck chimney pot or
doubt as to the efficiency of lightning conductors is all that
most of us are capable of experiencing at the approach of a
thunderstorm. But we may be sure that Thor was a living
god before he got pensioned olf as a myth. We hear him in
Work in Progress, as in the Edda, the friend and aflfrighter
of man, present at the origins of human society as the inspi-
rer of that fear which is the beginning of wisdom.
The many names and states of Mr. Earwicker recall those
of Odin with his legion of names — Grimni atGeirrod’s, Val-
father on the battlefield, Ygg on the scaffold, Bolverk on the
harvest field, Gangleri going up and down the world obser-
ving and learning Out of his own labour and a woman’s suf-
ferings he got the gift of song. He learned how to get off
with women and how to get on with them, how to drink ale
with friends, when to speak and when to be silent and he
passed on his knowledge to his juniors. In his multiple per-
sonality and his sum of human experience Mr. Earwicker is
of Odin’s kin. But Odin feels mental and physical pain.
He loses an eye and he hangs nine nights on a wind-swept
tree, offered, a sacrifice, himself to himself. In Joyce’s inten-
sely bright composition all human experience is transposed
45
into a key ot glittering humour which is the essential pro-
vince of the intelligence. He discovers in and extracts outot
every phase of human experience its intelligent counterpart
as a painter distils out of his motive its essence of colour.
Work in Progress gives a bird’s eye view of the time lands-
cape. We see it all at once — as in a section of Earth laid
bare by a landslide we see the changes of a million years lying
exposed in a few square feet.
I walked with Mr. Bloom, pro tern, traveller in Space-time
over Essex Bridge, Sat with him eating liver and bacon in the
Ormond hotel, heard with him the Clock Strike nine, stood
guard over Stephen and went home with him. In Work in
Progress it is I alone who am compelled ideally to move from
the Garden of Eden to Eden Quay in the turn of a word
those Elements which are the personages of Joyce’s book
being appropriately present anywhere at any time.
Thus the beginning of the world and the events of today
may lie side by sideembedded in the rhythm of last year’s catch
phrase (“ Ere beam slewed cable or Derzherr, live wire, fired
Benjermine Funkling outa th’ Empyre, Sin righthand Son ”).
Ancient fable and new fact — starting point and goal become
one. Dramatic conflict in its sexual, racial, social manifesta-
tions is presented as implicit in its characteristic sign, —
construct ann aquilittoral dry ankle...
Whatever the elements brought together they have the
rightness of a dream wherein all things we ever knew or
experienced occur notin their time sequence but according to
their necessary importance in the pattern dictated by the
dream’s own purpose and logic. And this I take to be the
key to the understanding of Work in Progress and the secret
of its peculiar beauty. In Ulysses is the life — real life — of
day ; here the reality — super reality — of night. The liver
46
and bacon that Bloom ate was limited — not alluring perhaps,
but smellable, tasteable and filling, whereas the vast appetite
of Shaun is fed on mountains of provoking but unsubstantial
food. While the loaves are aflowering and the nachtin-
gale jugs. ” And there is abundant refreshment forthe mour-
ners at Finnegan’s wake but they are warned. — “ But, lo,
as you would quaffoff his fraudstuff and sink teeth through
that pyth of a flowerwhite bodey, behold of him as behemoth
for he is nowhemoe ”, Joyce has penetrated into the night mind
of man, his timeless existence in sleep, his incommunicable
experiences in dreams. He is under the spell neither of sleep
nor dream but in this vast unexplored province he has found
the material with which he is writing the life and adventures
of the human mind.
PROLEGOMENA TO WORK IN PROGRESS
BY
STUART GILBERT
PROLEGOMENA TO WORK IN PROGRESS
BY
Stuart Gilbert.
" Great poets are obscure for two opposite reasons ; now,
because they are talking about something too large for anyone
to understand and now, again, because they are talking about
something too small for anyone to see. ” 'With this pream-
ble Chesterton introduces his study of that profoundest of
nineteenth-century English poets, Francis Thompson. " In
one of his poems ”, Chesterton continues, " he says that the
abyss between the known and the unknown is bridged by
' pontifical death ’. There are about ten historical and theo-
logical puns * in that one word. That a priest means a pon-
tiff, that a pontiff^ means a bridge-maker, that death certainly
1 . Quoi de plus divertissant et de plus instructif, tout ensemble, qu*un beau
calembouret-jmologique? (Victor Berard : p. io 6 ) The importance
of Homeric influences on James Joyce’s work can hardly be overestimated, and
it is noteworthy that the Odyssey begins with a pun on the name of its hero ;
ou vu t' ’OSuaaeu?
’Apysttov Tcapa V7)vai ■^ap’Xsxo Upa pe^tov
Tpo{^ kv £up£i^ ; Tt vu ot Toaov (oSuaao, Zeu ;
Odyssey /. 60-62.
2. With this use of "pontiff ” a passage from the Anna Li via (Anna Lit-
fey) section of Mr Joyce’s work, which, in some respects, reminds one of a
50
is a bridge, that death may turn out to be a reconciling priest,
that at least priest and bridges both attest to the fact that one
thing can get separated from another thing — these ideas, and
twenty more, are all tacitly concentrated in the word ' ponti-
fical ’ It is not an accident that in casting about for some
anticipation in English literature of the uncompromising bril-
liance of James Joyce’s latest work (for, after all, poets are
born not made, and — unless another miracle be presumed
-- the conception of a poet cannot be wholly immaculate), the
first name that suggests itself should be that of Francis Thomp-
son, that Crashaw ‘ * born again, but born greater For
Thompson, too, wrote of something too large for anyone
to understand ”, and since infinite greatness is — but for cer-
tain flashes when our sight is focussed to a god’s-eye view of
the universe — intellectually and linguistically out of our
reach, not only is the poet’s vision, in itself, difficult of ap-
prehension, but the language of common speech must often
prove inadequate to express concepts perceived sub specie
ceternitatis.
There are, in fact, two difficulties (or, rather, two aspects of
the same difficulty) to disconcert a reader of WorAiw Progress,
Perplexed, he poses first the essential question '' What is it
all about ? ” adding, soito voce, a plaintive afterthought
'' Why, anyhow, does the author make it so difficult ? * ”
Homeric " catalogue ” — in this case, of rivers, their names welded into
words may be compared. '' Do you know she was calling backwater
girls from all around to go in till him, her erring man, and tickle the pontiff
aisy-oisy } ”
I. It is significant that these questions What is it all about? and Why does
the author make it so difficult ? are the very cris de coeur of Everyman when some
unforeseen catastrophe makes of him a target for the arrows of outrageous
fortune, and, baffled by this seemingly wanton cruelty, he asks himself what
on earth or in heaven the Demiurge was about when He contrived his laby-
51
The subject of Work in Progress may easiest be grasped
by a reference to Vico’s Scien^a nuova, a treatise on the philo-
sophy ofhistory which appeared about two hundred years ago.
The reception of Vico’s work was that which too often
awaits the philosopher attempting a new synthesis of the
disparate phenomena which make up world-history. The
story goes that a contemporary savant^ Capasso, after an un-
successful attempt to digest Vico’s work, ran ostentatiously to
his doctor to have his pulse taken, and a certain Neapolitan
noble, asked for news of the writer, tersely replied ' * Off his
head I ” Vico proposed the making of an ideal and time-
less history in which all the actual histories of all nations
should be embodied ”. Human societies begin, he conten-
ded, develop and have their end according to certain fixed
laws of rotation ; there is a recurrent cycle in human ' ' pro-
gress ”, as in the astronomical domain. (Observe the subtle
implications of the title Work in Progress). But this
natural history of man is not, as might be expected, to be
discovered by a mere series of inductions from past events.
The essential facts are embodied in the lives, true or legen-
dary, of national heroes ; they are revealed through human
personalities, rather than by acts or events. In his preface to
Vico’s works Michelet has succinctly set out this relation be-
tween the heroic personality and the so-called " ' facts ” af his-
tory. ' ' The principle of the New Science is this : humanity
is its own creation. The heroes of myth, Hercules whose
arms rend the mountains, Lycurgus or Romulus, law-givers
who in a man’s lifetime accomplished the long work of cen-
rinthine universe. Thus, too, Mr. H.G. Wells’ young giant, seeing for the
first time the crowded confusion of modern life (vide The Food oj the Gods),
mutters : " I don’t understand... What are all you people doing with your-
selves ? What’s it all for ? What is it all for and where do I come in ? ”
52
turies — all these are creations of the peoples’ thoughts. God
alone is great. When man craved for men-like-gods he had
his way by combining generations in an individual, by incar-
nating in a single hero the ideas of a whole cycle of creation.
Thus he fashioned his historical idols, a Romulus or a Numa.
Before these shadowy heroes the peoples made obeisance.
But the philosopher bids them rise : ' That which you adore ’,
he says, ' is but yourselves, your own conception Hitherto
mankind believed that all progress was due to chance appear-
ances of individual genius. Political, religious, poetic
advance was ascribed to the unexplained talent of certain in-
dividuals, splendid but incomprehensible. History was a ste-
rile show, at best a diverting shadow-play. ” The aim of the
new science was to illustrate the fundamental unity of history,
God’s work in progress, which is not based (as, at first sight,
it would seem) on sporadic advances due to the accidental
genius of individuals, but on a general and inevitable move-
ment of mankind as a whole, a trend recurrent and predict-
able like that of the tides, embodied, crystallized in great per-
sonalities. Thus, speaking of the ' sages’, Vico remarks that
Solon was neither more nor less than the people of Athens,
awakened to consciousness of its rights, the true founder of
democracy. Dracon was simply the emblem of an aristo-
cratic tyranny which preceded the change. ” ' * The diversity
of views as to Homer’s birthplace forces us to the conclusion
that, when the various races of Greece disputed among them-
selves the honour of claiming him as one of theirs, it was
because they themselves were Homer. ”
Vico places the beginnings of human history one or two
centuries after the Deluge. The earth had grown dry and a
storm brooded dark above the hills, on whose summits lonely
giants roamed. Suddenly sounded a crash of thunder and.
53
terrified by this happening whose reason they ignored, they
raised their eyes and gazed for the first time heavenwards”.
That was the beginning of what we call civilisation. Their
fear of the sky (the heavens personify the first of the gods to
all primitive peoples) was the beginning of wisdom. It drove
them to refuge in dark caverns of the earth and thus arose
the idea of the family and man’s first attempt at 'virtue’.
Hitherto, these giants, like beasts of the field, had fornicated
openly with the female of the moment. Now, after the sky-
god had spoken by his thunder, they were ashamed of open
coition ; each took to his cave a single woman and with her,
in darkness, founded a family. Thus, for Vico, the etymo-
logy of * Jupiter ’ is jus pater: the sky is not merely the
allfather but also the source of law and justice, of the family
tie and social consciousness. But not only did the voice of
the thunder inspire the brutish giants with ideas of shame
and justice ; the strong emotion of their fear loosened their
tongues and they ejaculated the first monosyllable of the lan-
guage, the name of father, that word which in all tongues has
the same root. It is significant that Work in Progress opens
with a crash of thunder.
James Joyce’s new work, in fact, (as far as can be judged
from the portion of it which Transition has so far published)
is, in one of its aspects, a realization of the Italian philo-
sopher’s conception of an " ideal history those " eternal
laws which all nations observe in their beginnings and deve-
lopments, in their decay and death, laws which, if world upon
world were born in infinite eternity, would still hold good
for those new worlds ”. Under the variety of external forms
there is an essential identity between all peoples, all histories,
which is embodied in the legends and lives of their national
heroes. Work in Progress is, indeed, a book of heroes,
54
many of whom are merged in the panheroic figure of H. C. E.
(Here Comes Everybody). Vico’s work, moreover, is much
preoccupied with the root-meanings of words (their associa-
tive rather than strictly etymological implications) and he
contemplated the formation of a ' mental vocabulary ’ ”,
whose object would be to explain all languages that exist by
an ideal synthesis of their varied expressions. And now,
after two centuries, such a synthesis of history and of lan-
guage, a task which seemed almost beyond human achieve-
ment, is being realised by James Joyce in his latest work.
To a certain extent, therefore, the verbal difficulties ot
Work in Progress are accounted for by the nature of the sub-
ject. It is obvious that in this composite picture of the life of
mankind, where mythical heroes of the past, characters of
biblical legend and notabilities of recent times are treated as
one and the same protagonist, the style was bound to reflect
the kaleidoscopic permutations of the temporal, physical and
spatial attributes of the " hero ”. But in the verbal struc-
ture of Mr Joyce’s new work there is a personal element which
had already manifested itself in Ulysses and was, strangely
enough, overlooked even by appreciative critics. Thus, in a
recent study of Ulysses a commentator quotes at length the
following passage from the opening of the Oxen of the Sun
(Lying-in Hospital) episode and condemns it as "unconditio-
nally inept and unpardonable”. " Merely to arrange words
in the form of a Chinese puzzle is pointless. It is unfortu-
nate that Mr Joyce has chosen to commit this folJy so many
times in a work of such significance. ” The passage is as fol-
lows.
" Universally that person’s acumen is esteemed very little
perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as
55
most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be stu-
died who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erud-
ite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind’s or-
nament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by
general consent they affirm that other circumstances being
equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation
more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far
forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for
that prolilerant continuance which of evils the original if it be
absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign
of omnipollent nature’s incorrupted benefaction. ”
The obscurity of that passage, its prolixity and redundancy
— all are deliberate, and artistically logical. For this whole
episode of the Oxen of the Sun is constructed so as to follow the
growth of the embryo from its dark and formless origin to the
hour of its emergence into the light of day, a fully developed
and perfected child. The style of this section of Ulysses is at
first dark and shapeless. Gradually the diction takes form
and clarifies itself till it culminates in a futurist cacophony of
syncopated slang, the jargon of our latest and loudest/ewwe^^e
nickelee. But, before this outburst, the language ascends in
orderly march the gamut of English styles — of Mallory, Man*
deville, Bunyan, Addison, Sterne, Landor, Macaulay, Ruskin,
Carlyle and others. (It may be noted, however, that, as in
the unborn embryo there is often premature development of
a certain part, so there are occasional patches in the first sec-
tion of the Oxen of the Sun where the terseness and clarity of
later styles are anticipated.)
In the Sirens episode, again, the structure of the chapter
strictly follows the form of a fuga per canonem. Not only
this, but the terminology is chosen so as to include musical
metaphors and terms. " Fall flat ”, " sound as a bell ”,
5 ^
all for his own gut ”, “ stave it off ” — these and man)'
other such idioms were deliberately selected for their musical
associations.
The literary device employed by Mr Joyce in these episodes is
not, as might appear at first sight, a mere caprice or tour de
force, but has its justification in the origins of human speech.
The earliest language was (as Vico points out) that of signs ;
the human animal was, in fact, dumb. He indicated the
subject of his thought by pointing a finger at the object.
The next stage was the naming of objects by ejaculated
monosyllables. Then the name of the thing itself was
used by extension to signify a wider, even an abstract,
concept. From this view of the origin of language it
follows that the use of simile and trope was not, as is
generally believed, a poetic artifice, but was imposed on pri-
mitive man by the very conditions of his development and
limits of his vocabulary. If we talk of the mouth of a river,
for instance, we do not use the word ' mouth ’ because it
seems a felicitous metaphor but because the makers of the
language could conceive of no possible alternative ; indeed,
unless we have recourse to scientific jargon, no better term
has yet been invented. In carefully adapting his words to his
subject-matter, Mr Joyce is not performing a mere conjuring-
trick with the immense vocabulary he has at his command but
is going back to the original and natural methods of human
speech. By extension, in such passages as that quoted above,
the adaptation of words to subject was carried into the
domain of style ; but the principle remained the same — the
fixing of the reader’s mind on the subject-matter by every pos-
sible means, the exploitation of every potentiality of the lan-
guage to create a complete harmony between form and
content.
57
A common error on the part of both professional and ama-
teur critics is that of applying to new literary forms the quasi-
ethical test : " Would I wish all modern literature to be
composed after this model ? ” That test of the universal (of
doubtful value even in the domain of conduct) is quite inap-
plicable to original works of art. It is, rather, the criterion ot
a masterpiece of literature that it stands alone, and this holds
good as well for diction as for form and content. The unu-
sual word-formation of Work in Progress, a constructive
metabolism of the primal matter of language, was called for
by its subject and is thereby justified, but it will in all proba-
bility remain a unique creation — once and only once and by
one only. For it is inconceivable that such a method of wri-
ting could prevail in general or narrative literature and it
would be wrong to see in Work in Progress the promise of a
systematic disintegration of language, or any sort of propa-
ganda for an international tongue, a new Volapiik or Espe-
ranto. Indeed, disciples of the New Word would defeat their
own ends. The word-building of Work in Progress is foun-
ded on the rock of petrified language, of sounds with solid
associations ; were this groundwork to be undermined by a
general decomposition of words, the edifice would in time be
submerged in the shifting sand of incoherence, there would
be a dissolution of logical speech and thought and in the last
end man would revert to his brutish state, as it was in the
beginning before the Lawfather thundered.
A dangerous game, in truth, the jeu de mots, this vivisec-
tion of the Word made Flesh ! But so, perhaps, was crea-
tion itself — the rash invention of a progressive Olympian
with a penchant for practical jokes.
A consciousness of this ' ' joky ” side of creation pervades
Work in Progress. The world is indeed a Wonderland ot
58
perpetual surprises for every Alice of us. In the reductto ad
absurdum of the processes of human thought — for absurdity
is latent there behind the looking-glass of logic — Lewis Car-
roll, that elfin dialectician, excelled ; it is noteworthy that he,
too, experimented in the composition of picturesque and amu-
sing neologisms, '"portmanteau words ” as his Humpty
Dumpty called them. But Carroll’s inventions were exclusi-
vely English and went no further than the telescoping of
English words together, whereas the Irish writer’s vocabulary
is world-wide — Work in Progress may well be easier rea-
ding for a polyglot foreigner than for an Englishman with but
his mother tongue — and he compresses allusions rather than
single words. The difference can best be shown by quotation.
Here are two familiar lines from Carroll’s " Jabberwodky
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
They are explained as follows.
" That’s enough to begin with ”, Humpty Dumpty inter-
rupted : ' ' there are plenty of hard words there. ' Brillig ’
means four o’ clock in the afternoon — the time when you
hegm broiling things for dinner... 'Slithy’ means "lithe
and slimy ’. You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two
meanings packed up into one word... ' Tores ’ are some-
thing like badgers — they’re something like lizards — and
they’re something like corkscrews... To 'gyre’ is to go
round and round like a gyroscope. To " gimble ’ is to make
holes like a gimlet. ”
Humpty Dumpty might have added that " ' brillig ” also
suggests the sunshiny hours and "' gimble ” implies gam-
bol ” ; but no doubt he guessed that Alice, a clever little girl,
could see these allusions for herself.
59
With these a few lines from Work in Progress may now
be compared. '' Not all the green gold that the Indus contains
would over hinduce them (o. p.) ^ to steeplechange back to their
ancient flash and crash habits of old Pales time - ere beam slewed
cable or Derzherr, live wire, fired Benj ermine Funkling outa
th’Empyre, sin right hand son... ”
The last words of this passage are built on an old music-
hall refrain, popular in those ‘ good old days ’ when the
Empire ” in Leicester Square was the happy-hunting-ground
of the pretty ladies of London town : " There’s hair, like
wire% coming out of the Empire. ” An electrical undercurrent
traverses the whole of this passage, which alludes to the dawn
of pre-history when Vico’s thunderclap came to rescue man
from his wild estate ; the ' ' flash and crash days ”. * ' Beam
slewed cable ” hints at the legend of Cain and Abel, which is
frequently referred to in Work in Progress. " There’s hair”
has crystallized into ‘‘ Derzherr” — Der Er^herr (arch-lord)
— - with a sidethrust at the hairy God of illustrated bibles.
He is a " live wire ” — a bustling director. “ Benjamin ”
means literally ' ' son-of-the-right-hand ” ; here the allusion is
to Lucifer (the favourite archangel till his rebellion) as well
as to Benjamin Franklin, inventorof the lightning-conductor.
The end of his name is written " — jermine ”, in tune with
1. “ our people ” ; indicated by the preceding passage.
2. Pales, the oldest of woodland gods: " Palestine ” is also implied.
3. " Hair like wire ”, curiously enough, brings us back to Lewis CarrolL
who may have had some part in the procreation of the phrase. Isa Bowman in
her Story of Lewis Carroll (p. 24), speaking of his insistence on accuracy,
relates : ” I remember how anrfoyed he was when, after a morning’s sea bath-
ing at Eastbourne, I exclaimed : ' Oh this salt water, it always makes my
hair as stiff as a poker ! ’ He impressed it on me quite irritably that no little
girl’s hair could ever possibly get as stiff as a poker. ' If you had said stijff
as wires, it would have been more like it’ ” Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 130.
6o
the German word Er^herr, which precedes, and " Funkling’’
(a diminutive of the German Funke — a spark), which follows.
Also we can see in this word a clear, if colloquial, allusion to
the angel’s panic flight before the fires of God. In the back
ground of the passage a reference to the doom of Prometheus,
the fire-bringer, is certainly latent. ‘ ' Outa ” — the America-
nism recalls ' * live wire ”, as well as such associations as
‘‘ outer darkness ” — Lucifer’s exile in the void. “Empyre ’’
suggests Empyrean, highest heaven, the sphere of fire (from
“ ”, the Latinized form of the Greek root “ pur ” — fire)-
Finally, sin implies at once the German possessive sein (his),
and the archangel’s fall from grace.
This passage illustrates the manner in which a foliates
outwards through the surrounding text, beginning from a single
word — here the “ flash ” in “ flash and crash ” has “ elec-
trified ” the words which follow, and a German formation
has similarly ramified into the context. All through Work
in Progress similar foliations may be traced, outspreading,
overlapping, enmeshed together ; at last deciduous, as new
and stronger motifs thrust upwards into the light. The dif-
ference in texture between such complexity and Carroll’s oc-
casional use of “ portmanteau words ” is evident. A simi-
lar contrast can be established between the neologies of
Work in Progress and the new-coined words of Edward
Lear, which, though they have not the same currency as Car-
roll’s, are no less rich in verbal humour. Lear, too, had a
gift for depicting droll or fantastic personages.
His Waistcoat and Trowsers were made of Pork Chops ;
His Buttons were Jujubes and Chocolate Drops ;
His Coat was all Paficakes with Jam for a border.
And a girdle of Biscuits to keep it in order ;
6i
And he wore over all, as a screen from bad weather ,
A Cloak of green Cabbage-leaves stitched all together.
In this “ nonsense rhyme ” of Lear, The New Vestments,
there is a curious anticipation of the idea of comestible dress
developed by Mr Joyce in a description of Shaun’s apparel
(Transition, n® 12) ; his “ star-spangled zephyr... with his motto
through dear life embrothered over it in peas, rice and yeggyolk, ”
and his “ gigottumups ”
Lear’s method of dovetailing words together (“ scroobious ”,
“ slobaciously ”) may be compared to an Englishman’s way
of carving a leg of mutton ; he cuts vertically through the
meat of sound and the fat of common sense, with an eye only
to the funny effect of the chunk removed ; whereas the Irish
writer (like Tristan at the decoupage of the deer and to the
wonderment of Mark’s knights) carves his gigot in the conti-
nental manner, that is to say, parallel to the etymological
bone, following the way the muscles are naturally and anato-
mically set. Again, like Gibbon’s “ solemn sneer ”, Lear’s
humour often depends on pairs of words, usually adjectives,
unequally yoked together. “ All the bluebottle flies began to
bu\t{ at once in a sumptuous and sonorous manner, the melo-
dious and mucilaginous sounds echoing all over the waters and
resounding across the tumultuous tops of the transitory Tit-
mice upon the intervening and verdant mountains with a serene
and sickly suavity. ” A travesty of Gibbon’s use of paired
words is found in Ulysses. “ Silent in unanimous exhaus-
tion and approbation the delegates, chafing under the length
and solemnity of their vigil and hoping that the joyful occur-
rence would palliate a licence which the simultaneous absence
of abigail and officer rendered the easier broke out at once
into a strife of tongues. ” In Work in Progress the treatment
62
of pairs of ideas is symbolical, in the exact meaning of that
word ; ideas are fused together. Thus in “ gigot turnups ” we
have the ideas of leg-of-mutton sleeves and their inferior coun-
terpart, pegtop trousers, turned up in the modern manner,
fused into one. Both Lear and Joyce exploit the incongruous,
basis of all humour, but, while Lear’s incongruities are laid
side by side in comic pairs, Joyce’s are symbolised, merged in
one — the exact opposite of the Lear-Gibbon hendiadys.
This fusion of ideas is illustrated in the description of the
tree of life, “ our sovereign beingstalk, ” and the “ origin of
spices ” {Transition, n® 15). Lear’s extravagance are airy
nothings, soaring on dual wings of candid nonsense, whereas
Mr Joyce’s for all their subtile buoyancy, are gravid with the
seeds of red magic.
There is also a radical contrast between the humour of
Carroll and Lear and the almost demoniac ribaldry of parts
of Work in Progress. In the lines quoted above it is signifi-
cant that the nearly meaningless catch of a London music-hall
song should serve Joyce as the warp whereon to weave the story
of divine reprisal on a revolting archangel. Of all the aspects
of Work in Progress this, perhaps, will prove the most dis-
concerting to the general reader. The boisterous joviality of
certain passages, the verbal horseplay, for instance, of that past-
master of conceit. Jaunty Jaun, will certainly offend those who
hold that gravity should exclude buoyancy in treating of first
and last things. But, after all, the terms “ heavy ” and
“ light ” are relative ; birth and death, the story of the Fall,
God’s mysterious ways to man — all these are tragic or absurd
according to the observer’s standpoint ; exclusive seriousness,
indeed, is a colour-blindness of the intellect.
Given the subject of Work in Progress, the form and lan-
guage employed followed as a matter of course. The perso-
63
nality of H. C. E., polymorphous yet strangely self-consistent,
heroic yet human all-too-human, dominates the book from
its broken beginning, the point arbitrarily chosen (since for
time-bound man a beginning there must be) for us to set foot
upon the circular track of the New History. The difficulties
of the text are conditioned by the subject, for the language is
world-wide as the theme. Words are built up out of sounds
whose associations range over many frontiers, whose echoes
ricochet from the ends of the earth. In this spectral realm of
gigantic shadows, of river and mountain seen nearly or dimly
as the nightclouds now lift now close in again, lies revealed
the ageless panorama of the race, our own world and yet an-
other. To comprehend this new vision of a timeless world
something is needed of the clairvoyant audacity of Francis
Thompson’s last poem :
0 World invisible, we view thee,
0 World intangible, we touch thee,
0 World unknowable, we know thee.
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee 1
II
The foregoing remarks may, it is hoped, suffice to give a
general view of the method and scope of Work in Progress,
but it may not be unprofitable to add a pratical illustration
of the manner in which to read the work (perhaps not with-
out some mental effort, certainly with ultimate enjoyment)
and look for the allusions embedded, obscurely sometimes, it
cannot be denied, and beneath the surface, in the text. The
following passage is taken from the fragment published in
Transition No. (pp. 17-19) and is reprinted with permission
of the editor and author.
Sis dearest, Jaun added, with voise somewhit murky as he tur-
ned his dorse to her to pay court to it, melancholic this time
whiles his onsaturncast eyes in stellar attraction followed swift
to an imaginary swellaw, 0, the vanity of Vanissy ! All ends vanis-
hing! Pursonally, Grog help me, I am in no violent hurry. If
time enough lost the ducks walking easy found them. I’ll nose
a blue fonx with any tristys blinking upon this earthlight of all
them that pass by the way of the deerdrive or Wilfrid’s walk but
I’d turn back as lief as not if I could only spoonfind the nippy
girl of my heart’s appointment Mona Vera Toutou Ipostila, my
lady of Lyons, to guide me by gastronomy under her safe conduct.
That’s more in my line. Td ask no kinder of fates than to stay
where I am, under the invocation of Saint Jamas Hanway, servant
of Gamp, lapidated, and Jacobus A Pershawm, intercissous, for
my thurifex, with Peter Roche that frind of my boozum, leaning
on my cubits, at this passing moment by localoption in the birds’
lodging me pheasants among, with me hares standing up well and
me longears dittoes till well on into the beausome of the exha-
ling night, picking stopandgo jewels out of the hedges and cat-
ching dimtop brilliants on the tip of my wagger for them breezes
zipping round by Drumsally do be devils to play fleurt. I could
sit on safe side till the bark of Saint Grousers for hoopoe’s hours,
laughing lazy at the sheep’s lightning, hearing the mails across
the nightrives (peepet I peepet I) and whippoor willy in the woody
(moor park I moor park !) as peacefed as a philopotamus, and
crekking jugs at the grenoulls, leaving tea for the trout and bel-
leeks for the wary, till I’d followed through my upfielded neviews-
cope the rugaby moon cumuliously godrolling himself westasleep
amuckst the cloudscrums for to watch how carefully my nocturnal
65
goosemother would lay her new golden sheegg for me down under
in the shy orient. What wouldn’t I poach — the rent in my
riverside my otther shoes, my beavery, honest ! — for a dace
feast of grannom with the finny ones, flashing down the swans-
way, leaps ahead of the swift mac Eels and the pursewinded car-
pers, rearin antis rood perches astench of me, or, when I’d like
own company best, with the help of a norange and bear, to be
reclined by the lasher on my logansome, my g. b. d. in my f. a.
c. e., solfanelly in my shellyholders and lov’d latakia the benuvo-
lent, for my nosethrills with the jealosomines wilting away to
their heart’s deelight and the king of saptimher letting down his
humely odours for my consternation, dapping my griffon, burning
water in the spearlight, or catching trophies of the king’s royal
college of sturgeons by the armful for to bake pike and pie while,
0 twined me abower in L’Alouette’s Tower, all Adelaide’s naug-
htingerls, ]uckjucking benighth me, I’d tonic my twittynice
Dorian blackbudds off my singasongapiccolo to pipe musicall airs
on numberous fairyaciodes. I give, a king, to me, she does alone
up there, yes see, I double give till the spinney all eclosed asong
with them. Isn’t that lovely though ? I give to me alone I trou-
ble give ! And what sensitive coin I’d be possessed of, at Latou-
che’s begor I’d sink it sumtotal, every dolly farting, in vestments
of subdominal poteen at prime cost and I bait you the whole ounce
you half on your backboard that I’m the gogetter that’d make it
pay like cash registers. And, what with one man’s fish and a
dozen mens poissons. I’d come out with my magic fluke in close
time, fair, free and frolicky, zooming tophole on the mart as a
factor. And I tell you the Bectives wouldn’t hold me. By the
unsleeping Solman Annadromus, ye god of little pescies, nothing
would stop me for mony makes multimony like the brogues and
the kishes. Not the Ulster Rifles and the Cork Milice and the
Dublin fusees and Connacht Rangers ensembled. I’d axe the chan-
66
non and leip a liffey and drink anny black water that rann onme
way. Yip ! How’s thats for scats, mine shatz, for a love-
bird ? To funk is only peternatural its daring feers divine.
Bebold ! Like Varian’s sweeping all behind me. Aud before you
knew where you weren’t I stake my ignitial’s davy, cash-and-
cash can-again, I’d be staggering humanity and loyally rolling you
over, my sponse, in my tons of red clover, fiehigh and fiehigher
and fiehighest of all. I’d spoil you altogether. Not a spot of my
hide but you’d love to seek and scanagain. There’d be no stan-
ding me, I tell you. And as gameboy as my pagan name K. G. is
what it is I’d never say letfly till Fd plant you, my Gizzygay, on
the electric ottoman in the lap of lechery simpringly stitchles
with admiracion among the most uxuriously furnished compart-
ments with sybarate cham bers Just as I’d run my shoestring into
near a million of them as a firstclass dealer and everything. Only
for one thing that Fd be awful anxious, you understand, about
shoepisser pluvious and in assideration of the terrible luftsucks
playing around in the coold amstophere till the borting that
would perish the Dane and his chapter of accidents to be atra-
mental to the better half of my alltoolyrical health, not conside-
ring my capsflap, an that’s the truth now out of the cackling bag
for truly sure for another thing I never could tell the leest false-
hood that would truthfully give sotisfiction I’m not talking apple
sauce eithou. Orupinmyhat. I earnst. Schuef
The above passage occurs in a sermon delivered by Jaunty
Jaun to his congregation of the twenty-nine girls who figure
as a female plebiscite ” in Work in Progress, - The form
is that of a “ lenten pastoral and it is interesting to compare
Jaun’s homily with the series of sermons delivered at the
“ retreat ” described in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man. Jaun is the jovial, blustering type of Irishman who
67
believes in enjoying life, and the advice he gives to his cha-
pel of girls is a cheerful counterblast to the comminations of
the Jesuit priests. He has much to say about himself ; he is
a boaster, but, like many boasters, a bit of a coward. An
expert in love-making, he is, one feels, an equally competent
love-breaker. The mood of this excerpt is high-spirited fan-
tasy; in texture it is lighter, and in allusion less esoteric,
than those portions of the work which deal directly with the
main theme ; for these reasons, and because it suffers less by
excision, this passage has been selected as a suitable introduct-
ion to the perusal of Work in Progress.
In the notes which follow explanation is given of nearly all
the synthetic words or phrases. The commentary, however,
does not claim to be exhaustive ; some allusions have certainly
been overlooked, a few (e. g. Jacobus A. Per shawm, Variants)
have remained insoluble ; moreover, certain interpretations
are merely tentative. Indeed, one of the fascinations of rea-
ding Work in Progress is that as a mine of suggestion and
allusion it is practically inexhaustable ; apart from its literary
and cosmological innovations, the resolution of its synthetic
word-structures may well have a special appeal to the present
generation of the English-speaking races, whose interest in
words — parvis componere magna — is demonstrated by the
space reserved in contemporary journals for problems in
word-building and word-manipulation.
Voise. — His voice, grown rather hoarse, suggests “ noise
Somewhit. — A trifle less than “ somewhat ”.
Dorse. — He turns his hack on her to pay court to his
voice.
Onsatumcast. — Upwards (towards the planet) plus ‘‘ uncer-
tain ” (timidly).
68
Stellar. — The allusion is to Dean Swift’s Stella ' ; in the follo-
wing sentence Vanissy (Vanessa) continues the motif.
Swellaw. — He swallows down an impediment in his throat,
looking towards a bird that is not there, a projection of
the “ bird ” allusion in “ swift ”. Swellaw, thus spelt,
may also suggest celestial ordinance.
Pursonally. — He has been complaining that he wants more
money ; Jaun is the sort of man who never has enough
of it.
If time... them. — A variant of the proverb Chi va piano va
sano. If Mr. Time-Enough lost his ducks, Mr. Walking-
Easy found them.
I’ll nose... fonx. — Fonx suggests “ funk ” (a blue funk) as
well as “ fox ”.
With any tristys. — As well as any sad person (Tristram) alive
on the earth.
Of all them... — An echo of the lines “ O all you who pass
by etc. ”
Wilfrid’s walk. — This appears to be a child’s name for some
animal (c. f. Teddy-bear).
I . As in Ulysses, so in Work in Progress, there are many references to
the awful Dean of St Patrick’s ”, and in a recent review of a fragment of
Mr Joyce’s latest work, published under the title Anna Livia Plurabelle, it
was implied that the language of this work was akin to the '' little language ”
in which Swift addressed MD. As the reviewer wittily observed, '' a
little language is a dangerous thing The comparison was, however, inapt.
The prose of Work in Progress is far removed from a " little language ” of
lovers, or those pretty, petty diminutives coined by Presto for Pepette. It
is, on the contrary, a great language, an augmentation of the resources of the
common tongue, like a language of giants or Homer’s "speech of the blessed
gods Moreover, a little language is a sort of private code, significant
only to those ' ' in the know ”. The peculiarity of Mr Joyce’s latest work is
its "Catholicism ”, and most of the difficulties of the text are due to the
ubiquity of its allusions.
69
Spoonfind. — The ideas of “ kiss ” and “ waitress ” are com-
bined, preparing for “ Lady of Lyons ” — the title of Bul-
wer Lytton’s famous play and an allusion to a popular
restaurant.
Mona Vera... — The one true Catholic (toutou i. e. fondling
and everywhere) and Apostolic Church. Jaun would like
to find a girl with a job of her own to support him so that
he would not have to work. A teashop assistant would
do — or (for Jaun is here in orders) the Church.
Saint Jamas Hanway. — Jonas Hanway (1712-1786) was the
first man to walk the London streets carrying an umbrella.
The Londoners threw stones at him.
Pershawm, intercissous. — I am unable to trace the history ot
this other holy martyr, who was “ cut up ”, as Hanway
was stoned.
Thnrifex. — Suggests thurifer and crucifix. Jaun is fond of
his pipe; further references to this come later. Tobacco
is, in fact, his favourite incense.
Peter Roche. — “ Thou art Peter, and upon this rock etc. ”
Roche also suggests fish^ the roach as well as (I suppose)
ihc anguille sous roche. From this point a “ fish ” motif
begins to insinuate itself. Or, to vary the metaphor, this
word sounds the tonic of the key for the following pas-
sage.
Frind of my boozam. — C. f. .a line from Moore’s “ Meeting
of the Waters “ ’T was that friends, the beloved of my
bosom, were near. ”
Cubits. — Elbows plus Cupids.
With me hares... — He sees himself spending a night in the
woods (Phoenix Park ?) amongst the animals. He will be
rather frightened, his hair will stand on end, his ears pric-
ked up (longears also implies “ rabbits ” ). This part of
70
Jaun’s sermon is a “ pastoral ” in both senses, and its
language is redolent of the fauna of field and forest.
Beausome. — Suggests bosom and beauty.
Stopandgo jewels. — Glowworms.
Dimtop brilliants. — He will catch misty dew on the tip of his
tongue.
Fleurt. — Recalls the French origin of the word “ flirt ” —
fleurette.
Saint Grousers... This seems to refer to the opening of the
shooting season. Jaun will stay on the safe side till the
lawful season for shooting begins ; “ hoopoes’ hours ”(?).
Sheep’s lightning. — ~ Sheet lightning is to fork lightning as the
sheep to the wolf.
Nightrives. — He hears the night mail-trains going along the
river banks.
Moor park ! — The cry of this Australian bird is said to be
‘‘ More Pork ” I (c. f. Adelaide’s naughtingerls below.)
Also an allusion to Moor Park where Swift met Stella.
Philopotamus. — An apt variant of hippopotamus.
Crekking jugs... ■— He will crack jokes with the (Frenchy) frogs
and his genoux will knock together with panic. Crekking
recalls “ brek-kek-koax ” the classical “ frogs’ chorus ”.
Leaving... trout. — Jaun is lazy; he will be too slack to bring
home his picnic outfit. Belleek is a kind of china.
Neviewscope. — Cloud-gazing telescope ; nepheloscope. (Allu-
sion to Nevsky Prospect? Also, perhaps, to nepotism;
Jaun is sure to have an amicus in curia.)
Rugaby moon.... — Rugby plus lullaby. Jaun sees the moon
rolling between the clouds like a ball between the muddy
feet of the scrum. Westasleep suggests the song “ The
West’s asleep ” (lullaby motif). The moon “ goes to
sleep ” when she reaches the limit of her course.
71
For to watch... — He will await sunrise.
The rent... — There is a hole in his trdusers on the side
towards the river. Beavery suggests hat-beaver-breviary .
Dace... grannom. — “ Fishing” allusions. The grannom 'is
a fly used by fishermen. The feast of grannom is probably
some fishermen’s festival.
Swansway. — A “ kenning'' for river.
Pursewinded. — - Suggests pursy plus short-winded.
Rearin antis. — An echo of “ rari nantes ". Jaun, of course,
is an easy victor in the LifFey swimming match.
Astench. — Astern plus tench plus stench. They would get
scent of Jaun, from behind, to leeward.
Norange. — The derivation of orange is naranj (Arab :). This
is, in fact, the old form of the word (c. f. apron from nap-
peron). There is here a hint of the rainbow motif which
appears so often in the work.
Bear. — Besides the obvious meaning, the word (German
Birne) is suggested, and the suffix “ or two " (an orange
or two) as in “ carriage and pair ”.
Logansome. — Lonesome ^\us logan-stone (a poised heavy stone
at the river’s edge).
G. b. d. in my f. a. c. e. — An ingenious combination of sug-
gestions for both pipe-smokers and musicians (the notes
on the “ lines ” G B D are between the “ spaces ” F A C E).
The GBD pipe is well known.... Here a “ music motif”
begins to foliate.
Solfanelly. — Suggests the “ tonic solfa ” and solfanelli (Ita-
lian : matches).
Shellyholders. — Hands cupped like shells.
Bcnuvolent. — Italian forms continue. Full of clouds
(jiuvoli).
Jealosomines. — Jessamines plus jealous-of-mine.
72
Deelight. — The word “ delight ” is thus stressed in the duet
“ The Moon hath raised her lamp above
Saptimber. — Surely it is more reasonable thus to call the
month than “ the seventh ”, when it is really our ninth 1
Dapping. — A method of fishing. Griffeen (?)
Burning water. — The water would be lit up.
Pike and pie. — Suggests “ by and by The p io b muta-
tion was prepared for above.
0 twined... — Echo of a song.
Adelaide’s naughtingerls. Adelaide recalls the song as well
as the town.
I’d tonic... — I’d teach my nine-and-twenty blackbirds how
to sing. (Echo of the nursery rhyme — with musical and
fforal variations.)
Numberous. — Numerosus (musical).
Fairyaciodes. — Variations (fairy — odes).
1 give... -j- This is a translation of the “ tonic sol fa ” names
of the notes in the scale (as an Italian ear might hear
them : do, “ Igive”, re, “ a king”, and so on) : do, re,
mi, fa, sol, la, si, do, I double give: the high do (C).
Eclosed. — Echoed plus (French) e'clore.
I give to me... — This is the major chord (do-mi-sol-do :
CEGC).
Sensitive. — Allusion to the sensitive (note preceding the tonic).
Latouche’s. — Probably a business in which Jaun thinks of
investing : the name is evidently chosen for its musical
association (Jes touches — the keys of a piano). There is
here a foliation of French words. The Latouche in ques-
tion is, perhaps, one of the numerous Huguenot families
settled in Dublin (c. f. Bloom’s reflexions- on Miss Dube-
dat: Ulysses, p. 167. L’Alouette, “ a lark in clear air”, is
also mentioned in Ulysses ; p. 8).
73
Subdominal. — Abdominal attuned to subdominant. Note
how Jaun in (in) vestments combines, as usual, the lucra-
tive with the ritual.
Bait. — Bef adapted to the “ fish ” motif.
Half... — “Sis ” is lightly clad ; her garments of weigh but
half an ounce.
Factor. — Besides the vague “ business ” allusion in this word
there is a suggestion of the French facteur. One of Jaun’s
avatars is “ Shaun the Post ”.
Bectives. — A football team.
Solman Annadromous. — Solman ‘ suggests {inler alid)'‘'‘ sal-
mon ” (a fish said tp be sleepless). Anadromous — of
fish ascending rivers to spawn. The ‘ n ’ is doubled here
so as to form “ Anna ”, a river prefix often used in Work
in Progress. “ Anna” seems to be a popular corruption
of the Latin amnis ; thus the Anna Liffey was shown in
old maps as Amnis Livius. Anna Livia (the Eve of the
story), “ a judyquean not up to your elb ”, holds, earlier in
the work, a levee of some hundred of her namesakes from
all parts of the earth, including Anna. Sequana (Seine),
Annie Hudson, Susquehanna and good Ann Trent.
Pescies. — Little fishes (Italian) with, perhaps, a suggestion
of “ sins ” — peches.
Brogues and kishes. — From the Irish expression “ ignorant
as a kish of brogues (a basketful of little shoes ) ”. Here
the “ loaves and fishes ” are hinted at.
1. This association of Solomon and Salmon may be assimilated with the
Irish legend of the salmon of wisdom ” ; to eat the smallest morsel of its
flesh was (as in the the case of the national hero Finn MacCool) to acquire
the gift of wisdon and prophesy (c. f. the " tree of knowledge ” and Pro-
metheus legends, strands of which are often discernable in the texture of
Work in Progress).
74
Axe the channon. — Channon — ‘‘ Shannon ''plus “ channel
Leip a liffey. — - Nothing could hold up the advances of Jaun
the lover. The leip formation may suggest the “ salmon’s
leap ” (Leixlip).
Annyblack water. — Anny, as above, for amnis. Three Irish
rivers are called “ Blackwater ”.
Scats. — Norwegian for treasure ; in German Schat^.
Peternatural. — Peter, the “ loganstone ” of the Church, made
a very human slip on three famous occasions.
Its daring... — This passage is obscure ; the obvious meaning
is “ It is divine to risk doing the thing one fears ” ; but
in this passage Jaun is making love and, from what prece-
des, seems to be indulging in a certain exhibitionism.
The “ for 
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