Notes from Under- ground

by David Rose

Cryptogrammic Cryptogams: Fungi in Finnegans Wake There is a certain parallel between the collection of Myxomycetes and the exegesis of Finnegans Wake. In both cases the trick is to acquire an instinct for the potentially most profitable areas to search. – Roland McHugh, The Finnegans Wake Experience1

magine a book, written in English yet Anna Livia (ALP) is the River Liffey, the publication of Ulysses (1922), the incorporating dozens of languages, which flows through Dublin, Ireland. indubitable masterpiece of twentieth- whose constant demand of the reader The Wake takes place at night, and the century novels. Joyce once commented, isI the need to look up the meaning of language strongly partakes of dream. “The demand that I make of my reader nearly every word. One may seem to So strongly that pausing to recover the is that he should devote his whole life to know the words; they are familiar…yet meanings embedded in each word and reading my works.”2 This is a bit more largely unfamiliar. Strange constructions sentence becomes much like trying devotion than most would care to award like hierarchitectitiptitoploftical and to remember the shred of a dream one author, even if he is James Joyce. But cryptoconchoidsiphonostomata erupt on the verge of its ebbing away from Ulysses and the Wake are extraordinary into this de-realized wordscape with memory. The Wake has been dismissed books, each requiring more careful unforgiving regularity. The words appeal as word salad, and its reputation as study than the typical reader ordinarily both to eye and to ear, but the overall linguistic gobbledygook has brought cares to make. The Wake, in particular, effect is one of befuddlement, hypnosis, forth as much scorn from detractors requires a relentless microanalysis and or perhaps delirium tremens. Welcome as passionate devotion from admirers. simultaneous encyclopedic telescoping to the world of Finnegans Wake. The Without question, Finnegans Wake is one for meaning that is dizzying in the story? If story there be, it involves of the most sublime and exasperating extreme when grappling with a text of an Irish barkeep named Humphrey adventures in reading, and anyone who such broad interconnectedness and deep Chimpden Earwicker, his wife Anna Livia enjoys the art of reading should try it on ambiguity. Finnegans Wake is circular: Plurabelle, their sons Shem and Shaun, for size. water flowing to the ocean and returning and their daughter Issy, the Rainbow Girl. James Joyce spent seventeen years to source. With meanings smeared Earwicker (coded as HCE) is Everyman. writing Finnegans Wake in the wake of polysemically across every word and FUNGI Volume 4:1 Winter 2011 23 sentence, the oceanic interconnectedness reader), it is tantalizing to mull over the episode were low-cost housing units of all and everything in the Wake fungal references therein to ask if Joyce (shaped like mushrooms, presumably) becomes a predominant key to making was really up to something, mycologically erected for the Dublin Artisans’ sense of it. Yet the operant structure of speaking. One writer has insisted that Dwellings located near Phoenix Park, the Wake is reminiscent of the internet the Wake is nothing more (or less) than which still holds claim to being the and of fungal mycelium – vast networks a treatise on fly-fishing – to everyone largest urban park in Europe.7 Phoenix of threadlike process lacking a center his own hobbyhorse. Murray Gell-Mann Park was once a royal deer park; to Joyce and leading everywhere. In fact, when pinched the word quark (383.01) from it was a large fungopark where a shrine the internet first reached a critical mass the Wake and revolutionized particle of Mount Mu (51.19-20) marked the of popularity in the mid-1990s, Joyceans physics with it, and John Cage re- spot at which the tumptytumtoes (3.21) were quick to realize the potential for circulated the Wake through his own of the giant Finnegan protruded like hyperlinking the text of Finnegans quarky mesostics in Writing through Ptychogaster from the roots of a Tumtum Wake in ways that would streamline Finnegans Wake and several aleatory tree. The telltale fungi of Finnegans Wake our probing its interconnectivity. Why? compositions. Cage’s Roaratorio, for indeed crop up at the very beginning Because Finnegans Wake was already example, might serve as the audiobook of of the book, and they are, significantly, hyperlinked! Rhizomatic Joyce had Finnegans Wake, and his Mushroom Book related to fermentation and decay: anticipated hypertext by seven decades. begins straight off by juxtaposing a recipe rot a peck of pa’s malt (3.12). Rotting Marshall McLuhan claimed the Wake for Polyporus frondosus with the voices and fermentation, two economically is a verbal universe where all technologies of Joyce’s ten thunderclaps, a reference important processes associated with and media merge, anticipating and to the ten “thunder words” of Finnegans fungi, appear together in this, the third encompassing the effects of media in the Wake that intimates a folkloristic theory sentence of the Wake. Serpula lacrimans, 21st century. By capturing the psychic of the origin of fungi (thunder causes or dry rot, also known as the “house and social dynamics of all media, the the fruiting of mushrooms) found fungus,” destroys timber and wooden Wake replicates the sensory effect in Robert Gordon Wasson.4 So, too, structures even in the absence of water. of media environments. Imagine the the enterprising Parallel Mycologist Another, Coniophora puteana (wet rot) totality of television, radio, and digital will find here an “autonomous event spreads like a sheet over moist wood. In signals (electronic streams of image and system” where twoodstools (40.23) and a general sense, rot is associated with discourse) passing unperceived through holocryptogams (546.13) are emergent various forms of decay and by extension one’s personal space at any instant; and signposts to the evolutionary history refers to the universe of wood-decaying imagine human consciousness replicated of the fifth kingdom.5 One may study and parasitic fungi. Joyce returns to this on the internet at millions of computer evidence of mushrooms in the woods, in introductory theme a few lines later: terminals, from millions of servers. the archives, on Mushroom Observer, in oranges have been laid to rust upon The Wake’s verbivocovisual (341.18) the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; why the green (3.23) a reference to plant environment approximates the effect of not in the Wake? Admittedly, this may at diseases caused by parasitic fungi of capturing these streams at one stroke and first seem like reading Alexander Smith’s the order Uredinales: rusts that destroy fixing them in language, in a language Mushrooms in their Natural Habitat to cereal grasses, conifers, and ferns. The that is recombinant like DNA, where tease out all the Joyce references. Less fungi, subvisible but dangerous, lurk at words are encoded with the semantic flux a foray into the high-brow canon of center stage in the vast midden heap of of all the echoing multi-transmissions (as yesterday than an exercise in crypto- civilization. well as all the static, discontinuities, and taxonomy, our devotions may bring us Fermentation is the phenomenon glitches) at every moment in and through to either the Holy Grail of Mycology or that truly captured Joyce’s imagination. time, all while seeming to tell a regular a simulacrum of smoaked maitake. And, It captured his duodenum, too – he story.3 Some have wondered whether as we drift toward the foggy bottom of was an ardent drinker of ardent spirits, a story gets told at all and protest the Wake’s turbid river-sentences, we particularly a Swiss white wine known the tendentious belief that Finnegans might witness the sexual conjugation of as Fendant de Sion that he affectionately Wake has virtually anticipated digital Achlya or overhear the busy buzztrack called the “arch-duchess’s urine.” The media, like an exponential expansion of of antediluvian myxomycetes streaming influence of Guinness & Company and Wikipedia re-routed through vaudeville oozefully in the bituminous muck in the John Jameson & Son in Irish history and via string theory understood from the “depths of the Cambrian fen.”6 in Finnegans Wake is pervasive, and Joyce perspective of the Egyptian Book of In Ulysses, Joyce contextualized the suggests that his polyglot manipulations the Dead. Exploring this masterwork is display of commercial mushrooms with of language are tantamount to the rather like calculating the square root his characteristic historical accuracy: processes of brewing and distilling. In of God. Finnegans Wake has been called “punnets of mushrooms” in the Dublin a passage where Shem (a self-parody Joyce’s summa semiotica. The Wake is the Corporation Fruit, Vegetable, and of Joyce) cooks eggs in his kitchen, terminal book. Fish Market are flanked by “flaskets fermented words (184.26) refer to the Joyce’s inoculation with the of cauliflowers, floats of spinach, … language of Finnegans Wake itself. mycological spore may at first seem sub- pomellated apples and chips of Fermentation has a host of implications clinical. Yet since the Wake encompasses strawberries.” Punnets are baskets for in the Wake, from Noah’s drunkenness all and everything, including a coded collecting berries and fruit. “Kerwan’s to breweries, alehouses, and famous reference to your name (yes, you, the mushroom houses” in the Lestrygonians Irish malt products like Guinness stout. 24 FUNGI Volume 4:1 Winter 2011 The fermentation of alcohol occurs Those many warts, those compared the Vedic and Irish literature to when yeasts (unicellular fungi in the slummy patches, halfsinster postulate that an Amanita muscaria cult genus Saccharomyces) break down wrinkles, (what has come over the may have existed in prehistoric Ireland. sugars, as in partially germinated barley, face on the wholebroader E?), and Notwithstanding that Finnegans Wake to make malt that is used in brewing (shrine of Mount Mu save us!) the appeared in print three decades prior and distilling (rot a peck of pa’s malt). large fungopark he has grown! to Wasson’s Soma and seven prior to Joyce was captivated by the metaphoric Drink! (51.17-20) Wilson’s Ploughing the Clouds: The Search potencies of fermentation, and he told his for Irish Soma, it seems that the most friend Frank Budgen, “Fermented drink Fungo is an obsolete term for tantalizing evidence for “Irish Soma” may must have had a sexual origin. … In a mushroom or fungus; fungopark must in fact lurk in Finnegans Wake. Did Joyce woman’s mouth, probably. I have made then be any park where mushrooms have an intimation of the ethnomycology Bloom eat Molly’s chewed seedcake.”8 grow, but in this case it is specifically of Wasson in the fungopark passage? This is a reference to the moment in Phoenix Park. There was no systematic Of course, this is preposterous. Or is Ulysses where Leopold Bloom recalls survey of flowering plants (or the it? The uncanny possibilities become Molly’s early infatuation, kissing him cryptogamic ones) of Phoenix Park until curiouser and curiouser as we press and passing a bolus of chewed seedcake 1988, though the early Dublin botanists forward, for in Book 2, in megafundum from her mouth to his. Joyce takes the Caleb Threkeld (1672-1768), John Rutty of his tomashunders (229.21), we metaphor of fermented words to even (1697-1775), and Walter Wade (1770- relish another direct hit on a favorite greater extremes in the Wake: Shem 1825) were the first to publish findings Wasson hypothesis: the association of uses his own feces to write all over his that included some of the Phoenix Park mushrooms and thunder. An anagram body, and the excremental self-creation flora.9 Joyce implicitly recognized this for “soma thunders,” tomashunders of shit-writing mockingly subverts the lack of attention to the park by Irish elevates the mycological to an archetypal Victorian convention of the “language botany, yet alludes to stranger flora yet: theme: thunder is the cryptogrammic of flowers” where the lowly mushroom namely, Amanita. Carefully subverting embodiment of technological change that symbolized suspicion and lichens the commonly known characteristics of reverberates in the ten thunder words of dejection or solitude. By comparison, Amanita – warts, slummy (slimy) patches, the Wake. Shem’s alchemical operation of changing and wrinkles – he then adds ritual If wayward speculation about feces to indelible ink seems congruent elements: supplication at the shrine of Amanita muscaria in the Wake nettles with the inky deliquescence of Coprinus Mount Mu[shroom] and the imperative the abecedarian reader, one can easily comatus, and the corrosive sublimation Drink!, adumbrating the shamanic use of cling to a shred of stability by way of of his Swiftian endeavor recycles back Amanita muscaria in Siberian cultures Amanita phalloides, the infamous again to fermented words. where the urine of a person under deathcap. At 198.32, Joyce takes us to Flowering plants and trees of all mushroom intoxication is recycled by giant’s holes in Grafton’s causeway and kinds inhabit Finnegan’s cosmos. The the acolyte to perpetuate its intoxicating deathcap mushrooms round Funglus Wake’s botany is rampant, but essential. effects. This is later recapitulated in grave, referring to unique formations Joyce bent the conventions of the Mount of Mish (131.01) and sacred sponge of basaltic columns: Giant’s Causeway “language of flowers” to his own ends (516.25). and Fingal’s Cave in northern Ireland just as he appeared to draw on the Did Joyce know Amanita muscaria and the Inner Hebrides, respectively. Celtic mythology of trees. He pilfered conclusively? It seems he did; for in the Funglus grave (conflating “fungus + from obscurities like S. A. Binion’s “Museyroom episode” he brings forth a Fingal”) refers to Fingal’s Cave, a huge sea Phyllanthography: A Method of Leaf Tom, Dick, and Harry trio, one of whom cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa, and Flower Writing (1909) and even he calls Touchole Fitz Tuomush (8.26- near Mull and Iona. Discovered by Sir adumbrated the historical grammar 27), disguising the French word for fly Joseph Banks in 1772 and visited by Felix of poetic myth found in The White agaric, Tue-mouche (pronounced “too Mendelssohn in 1829, the cave is 250 feet Goddess (1948) by Robert Graves. Joyce’s moosh”). In Annotations to Finnegans deep, 70 feet high, and was formed when placement of mushrooms at the darker Wake Roland McHugh gave this phrase basaltic rock cooled to form hexagonal interstices of his night world accords a military/sexual gloss instead of the columns. Myxomycetologist Roland with the tangential valuation awarded mycological one suggested here; however, McHugh glosses Funglus as “Finglas,” a the fungi by non-mycologists and Tue-mouche, “too much,” mushrooms district of Dublin, near the Glasnevin mycophobes: mushrooms are hated and in general and Amanita muscaria in Botanic Garden in Phoenix Park; and therefore overlooked when they appear. particular are all indicated. Tuomush the word round suggests mushrooms The Wake’s “language of mushrooms” is also portends twoodstool (40.23) in growing in a fairy ring, intensifying deeply rooted in his botanical vision, but an orthographical interlinkage that the imagery of poisonous mushrooms like any slightly regarded ort in the Wake intensifies this interpretation as a growing in a circle around a grave. It is a twoodstool twinkling in the margins mycological realization. In Soma: Divine doubtful that Amanita phalloides actually might suddenly occupy centrality of Mushroom of Immortality (1968), R. grows on Staffa, but Joyce’s deathcap station, as in Book 1, chapter 3 where Gordon Wasson set forth his celebrated mushrooms here form a metamorphic we find our disreputable hero Earwicker theory that Amanita muscaria was shift of the fungal toward the geological, implicated in a dubious and unspecified the Soma of the RgVeda. Over thirty an approximation of hylozoic belief and “crime in the park:” years later yet, Peter Lamborn Wilson a drift toward a cosmic vision where the FUNGI Volume 4:1 Winter 2011 25 most toxic mushroom known becomes guides characterize Grifola frondosa Wake, scarcely noticed, crop up time and our totemic ancestor. There are further as smelling of mice and cold mashed again: paddish pretties (31.24), pilzenpie hints of this at deathcup (450.30) and cup potatoes – subjective perceptions that tell (37.32), mussroomsniffer (142.10), and champagne (462.09). us more about our hunger for knowledge even characters such as Mildew Lisa and As we all know, toadstool is a common than our taste for maitake.12 the Mookse (mykes) and the Gripes (grib) synonym for mushroom, usually having From the umwelt of the Wake’s harbor mycological readings in which the a negative connotation, although the quashed quotatoes (183.22) the ricorso rhizosphere surfaces in consciousness familiar usage that mushrooms are of pan-etymological meanderings through the cipher of Joyce’s immense edible and toadstools poisonous has no through the preconscious formation poem. As Marshall McLuhan pointed scientific validity whatever. When Joyce of meaning is oceanic and fluid, out, Joyce solved numerous problems sets a twoodstool on the verge of selfabyss recycling through mind and history, which science had not yet formulated as (40.23) he validates the observation that recycling through the words themselves. problems. mushrooms grow on wood: constructive Finnegans Wake is not a disquisition on Finnegans Wake ends with the word fragmentation of twoodstool produces mycology, but a mycelial mat in which the (628.16), forever bringing us back to “two + wood + stool.” A handy gloss fruiting bodies are knotted deep in the beginning again: riverrun, past Eve might be toadstool (growing on wood). the sclerotia of words. Joyce’s ultimate and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend The deeper meaning, however, derives vision of the fungal world appears in a of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus from William Blake, taking into account portmanteau construct of wider botanical of recirculation back to Howth Castle the association of the toadstool with the significance: fungoalgaceous muscafilicial and Environs (3.1-3). The Wake has abyss. Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven graminopalmular planteon (613.17). attracted its share of excellent readers; and Hell, depicts a fungus as an emblem The passage in which this tidy botanical among them are John Lennon, Joseph of the material world: “I remained compendium appears deserves placing in Mitchell, and Sam Savage. In Up in the sitting in the twisted root of an oak, he its larger context: Old Hotel, Mitchell claimed, “I am an [an Angel] was suspended in a fungus obsessed reader of Finnegans Wake – I which hung with the head downward A spathe of calyptrous glume must’ve read it at least half a dozen times into the deep...By degrees we beheld involucrumines the perinanthean – and every time I read the Anna Livia the infinite Abyss.”10 For Blake, fungus Amenta: fungoalgaceous Plurabelle section I hear the voices of my manifests the materialism in which muscafilicial graminopalmular mother and my aunts as they walk among the spiritual world is mired, an early planteon; of increasing, livivorous, the graves in old Iona cemetery and it is intimation in the Romantic Era of the feelful thinkamalinks; luxuriotiating getting dark.”14 In Savage’s tale Firman, attempt to gain philosophical perspective everywhencewhithersoever among the eponymous hero is an intellectual on the perplexing flux of organic life, to skullhullows and charnelcysts of a mouse born in a bookstore on a litter begin to fathom its meaning in human weedwastewoldwevild… fashioned by his mother on the torn-up terms apart from the developing regime pages from Finnegans Wake. And even of scientific knowledge and the trend The compression of the several mycologists have playfully bantered with toward evolutionary thought. Joyce divisions of cryptogamous (fungi, algae, the Wake’s potential for appreciating the himself, in A Portrait of the Artist as mosses, ferns) and vascular (grasses multifarious panoply of the fungi: a Young Man, had used the metaphor and palms) plants introduces a veritable of fungus to depict the quintessential planteon of botanical life. McHugh has Every evening at lighting up horrors of Hell.11 Obedient as we are noted that calyptra refers to the hood of o’clock sharp and until further today to the paradigm of science, the spore case in non-flowering plants notice in the mushrump marsh the these usages will seem either quaint or (though this meaning does not apply to mushworm worms its way down metaphysical. But the literary tendency the fungi). In Joyce’s Book of the Dark riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, past toward philosophical speculation runs in John Bishop provides an incisive analysis far different channels than the everyday of this passage as a “compressed history empiricism of differentiating one species of the evolution of botanical life.”13 from another. Yet, one almost wishes to Joyce’s weedwastewoldwevild delineates a burst the bubble of Joyce’s and Blake’s ruderal environment in which toadstools mycological metaphysics by seeking to are weeds that mimic and reflect the know just what species of fungus was gestalt of popular mycology. In the suspended over that dark abyss. Did Wake’s closing pages, Earwicker himself, Blake’s vision originate in a passing normally in the guise of an earwig glance at Grifola frondosa at the base (Forficula auricularia), makes a sudden of an oak in Lambeth? The inclination appearance as a mushroom: “Mch? toward specificity is a tempting (and Why them’s the muchrooms, come always positive) direction to take, but up during the night” (625.19). Note ultimately unsatisfying to the mental that the 90-degree counterclockwise traveler seeking to broaden literary rotation of “M” in Mch gives us “ECH,” perspectives on mycology. We may as an anagram of HCE, recapitulated well wonder why British mushroom in muchrooms. Mushrooms in the 26 FUNGI Volume 4:1 Winter 2011 meeting, but most agree that the agree two butmost meeting, time. There are differing accounts of the for the inParis firstandonly meeting ofliterature geniuses the twoliving made ofthe encounterwas –here were Much modernism. pinnacle ofliterary Time remains to this day another lofty In Marcel whose ofLost Search Proust, to meet In 1922,Joyce hadoccasion ofmushrooms. onthemeditate mystery Wake place to alively is andrewarding Finnegans themselves, compositions Thoreau,Cage’s David like of Henry the Like journals past. just of the century thework greatest ofliteraturequestion then FinnegansCage Wake without is John with andifyouagree human spirit, affirmation of the literature aperpetual in Fluntern Cemetery. He considered there buried in1941andwas in Zurich Inexile, Joyce grief. died acute personal daughtertroubled brought himonly relationships familial and odd and his engendered; books his and neglect did little to mitigate ofhostility the sense life-style Irelandfrom andperipatetic exile adultlife; self-imposed of his his a condition ofnear-blindness for much that himin left diseases and other ocular thatremember Joycefrom iritis suffered also (anditis), writer by anegotistical that’s off tossed remark casually ajaded think much ofthis one.” onethink Lest afterlife. Joyce commented dryly, “Idon’t thought ofthe himifheever once asked Joyce’s compatriot Arthur Power desire… ofloveand luminescent filaments man’salong the dead fingerstrailof caps, andinky marsh beacons 15 Roland 1 toabout? talk need like truffles.” other each ifthey ask andthey meeting ofourtime figures literary two greatest Arthur Power “Here complained, are the Joycereplied, Ido.” truffles. liked “Yes, Joyce ifhe Proust asked mentioned: was toscarcely oneanother. spoke Onething 1922; (1990,orig. JamesJoyce, Ulysses L.E.Bassett). 7 LangdonSmith, Evolution(1915, 6 Terence McKenna,The Archaic (1986, 5 Mushroom,” inPersephone’s Quest R.G. 4 hereisJamesJoyce,FinnegansWake amushroom”(618.27). linenumberasfollows,e.g.,“gentle commonlyindicatedbypageand sentencesinFinnegansWake are Referencetowords,phrases,and Oxford),p.716. 3 RichardEllmann,JamesJoyce(1959, 2 Revival (1991,HarperCollins),p.51. (1976, orig.1939;Penguin). Experience (1981,California),p.39. Wasson, “Lightningboltand Vintage Yale) pp.83-94.

McHugh, 16 So what else would they what wouldthey else So Endnotes

The Finnegans Wake The textused

RichardEllmann, op.cit.,p.524. communication; June16,2010. 16 GaryLincoff, personal (1993, 15 JosephMitchell, UpintheOldHotel (1986, 14 JohnBishop, Joyce’s BookoftheDark Stoughton), p.314. 13 MarcelBon,TheMushrooms and Compass;orig.1916),p.120. 12 JamesJoyce,A Portraitofthe Artist plates17-18,pp.172-72. 11 William Blake,TheMarriageof 12:116-120. 10 Mycologists,1726-1900”Irish F. C.Hassell,“TheEarlyIrish orig.1934),p.108. 9 FrankBudgen,JamesJoyceandthe p.294,164. 8 International), western Europe (1987,Hodder& Toadstools ofBritainandNorth- as aYoung Man(1964, Illuminated Books(1993,Princeton), Heaven andHell,inTheEarly Naturalists Journal(1957), Making ofUlysses(1991,Oxford; FUNGI Volume 4:1 Winter 2011 Vintage), p.xii. Wisconsin), pp.116-17. Viking

27 Illustration by Angele Mele.