GENETIC JOYCE STUDIES – Issue 21 ( 2021)

Editorial: Lots of at Finnegans Wake

Dirk Van Hulle

This is just to welcome everyone to this issue of Genetic Joyce Studies, full of new findings and other attempts to listen in as hard as the Four Masters:

And there they were too listening in as hard as they could (JJA 56: 126) as the opening line of the first pre-book publication of ‘Work in Progress’ reads. In April 1924, the transatlantic review published the ‘Mamalujo’ vignette (first drafted in September 1923; corresponding with Book II chapter 4 of Finnegans Wake, FW 383.01-398.28). In July 1938, almost fifteen years after this part was first drafted, Joyce added explicit references to ’s four Zoas (, , and ), linking them to the four evangelists:

Johnny. From the urizen of speeches. (JJA 56: 126) Marcus. Tharmaz syphon Mark. (JJA 56: 127) Lucas. For the luvah the lauds Lucas. (JJA 56: 129) And where do you leave Matt, the grand old Urthonian? (JJA 56: 130).

These references did not make it into Finnegans Wake.1 But they are part of ‘Work in Progress’. Joyce also noted down the names of the four Zoas in notebook VI.B.13, page 2302:

Urthona spirit} / Luvah emotion} / Urizen reason} / Tharmas body} ($X) Paintings of William Blake 43: It was clear to him that the chief personages of his mythological system (such as Urthona, the spirit, Luvah, the emotion, and Urizen, the reason) were three of the Four Beings of the Revelation. Yet he was not satisfied, for the fourth was lacking […] He added a new personage in , wanting to make the four Regents, and entitled it Tharmas, from the Hindu Tarmas, meaning “desire,” to represent the body, so to complete a new Fourfold Man. VI.C.13.023(d-g)

On 21 November 1925, Joyce borrowed Darrell Figgis’s book The Paintings of William Blake from Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company lending library.3 There is a cluster of notes towards the end of the notebook (pp. 229-232) that suggests that Joyce read the book systematically from the beginning, starting with a note (‘seed-plot’; VI.B.13.229(c)) taken from

1 the first sentence of Chapter One: ‘A man’s life is the seed-plot of his achievement.’ (Figgis 3) The cluster goes on until the last page of the notebook with a note deriving from Chapter Six: ‘A Friend in Need (1810-1821)’ (Figgis 90).4 As Joyce did not have any space left, he may have looked for any blank pages elsewhere in the notebook after which the notetaking proceeded on the front flyleaf,5 which contains notes, such as ‘horologe’, deriving from Chapter Seven: ‘The Madness of Blake’:

horologe Paintings of William Blake 95: Among Linnell’s friends was , one of the foundation members of the Water-Colour society, who painted rapid, solemn pictures for his needs, and took pupils. In his house Linnell had lived and learned a year. Varley was also a practising astrologer; and some of the predictions he had made, read from the horologes he cast, had been remarkably confirmed. VI.C.12.224(l)

In this chapter, Figgis discusses only one work in depth: , based on a drawing Blake made in response to a challenge by John Varley.

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In spite of what the chapter’s title might suggest, Figgis does not actually discuss Blake’s madness, but rather the issue that Blake was being dismissed as mad. On the same page, he explains how he sees the problem: ‘It will generally be found that the charge is made by those who have looked on some of his most arresting pictures, and have been startled and disturbed, not so much by Blake, as by that which he has stirred and awakened in themselves.’ (95) It is not unlikely that Joyce felt an affinity with this situation, reading Figgis’s book when the newspaper clippings started to dismiss ‘work in progress’ as a crazy project. There is another affinity between the Blake as presented by Figgis and Joyce’s project. Figgis pays attention to Blake’s drafts and sketches, and even to doodles that can be regarded as the visual equivalent of Joyce’s notes. Talking about a pencil drawing at the Whitworth Institute in Manchester, Figgis writes: ‘On the back of this sketch, however, are found a number of rough figures. They are obviously experiments in patterns, attempts to discover the best use that could be made of simple figures when needed as the symbols of energies and ideas to fill a design.’ (82)

While every chapter in the book is marked by a period in Blake’s life (followed by the dates between brackets), Chapter Seven is the only one that isn’t.

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Sandwiched between Chapter Six: ‘A Friend in Need (1810-1821)’ and Chapter Eight: ‘Fullness of Achievement (1821-1827)’, ‘The Madness of Blake’ implicitly does seem to be presented as an issue concentrated in one year, 1821 – exactly 200 years ago. That seemed as good an occasion as any other to open this new issue of Genetic Joyce Studies by recovering the four Zoas, lost along the road to Finnegans Wake, and now found again. We hope that the findings and essays in this issue may offer something for every human faculty and thus speak to all Zoas – intellect (Urizen), imagination (Urthona), sensation (Tharmas), and emotion (Luvah).

1 They were written on a second set of revised pages of the transatlantic review (MS BL Add 47481, 62-67; JJA 56: 125-133), separate from the other set of revised transatlantic review pages containing the bulk of the 1938 revisions for this section (MS BL Add 47481, 70-74; JJA 56: 113-121). That may be the reason why they did not make it into Finnegans Wake. 2 Source identified by Geert Lernout and Vincent Deane, ‘O’Casey and Blake: Two VI.B.13 Indexes’, A Finnegans Wake Circular 4.2 (1988), 21-31. 3 Kotin, Joshua, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, et al. Shakespeare and Company Project, version 1.5.1. Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University, 2021. https://shakespeareandco.princeton.edu/members/joyce- james/borrowing/. Accessed 28 May 2021. 4 crosshatching (VI.B.13.232(h)) Cf. Paintings of William Blake 90: When the school of Blake’s great preceptors reached its maturity, it discarded cross-hatching for its shading. VI.C.13.024(d) 5 This seems the most plausible scenario, although one cannot exclude the possibility that Joyce actually started reading in the middle of the book, possibly attracted by the title of Chapter Seven: ‘The Madness of Blake’.

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