Ecological-Artistic Interpenetrations on a Damaged Planet: Invoking James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
Bartholomew Ryan IFILNOVA / Universidade de Nova de Lisboa
Abstract Due to the increasing acceptance that we are now living in an age of radical environmental catastrophe, various innovative ecological-philosophical-artistic texts are being published, dispersed and discussed in attempting to transform our consciousness into ecological selves immersed in the ecological thought. In this essay, I present James Joyce’s final exasperating work Finnegans Wake as a supreme text of experimentation and dissidence and how it both links and articulates in dazzling new ways the contemporary ecological thought. Joyce’s art offers us ways and visions to constantly realign and transform our relationship to each other and all animate and inanimate things, and incorporates and interpenetrates all human and natural history and experience in this “timecoloured place” propelling us into the reality of the present which is the ecological thought. It is without a doubt one of the most difficult and impenetrable ‘novels’ ever written, but I propose that is only now that we are ready to enter this ‘book of the dark’ and understand it within a present-orientated Chthulucene (Donna Haraway’s neologism) rather than an Anthropocene epoch. I argue that Joyce’s ‘explosition’ demands the reader’s participation as an endlessly experimental, dissident, problematic, destabilizing and subversively joyous work of art, and as a philosophical vision for multispecies storytelling and entangling encounters. The final part of this essay demonstrates briefly that there is a profound ecological thought at the heart of the book via at least two aspects: i) ‘Wrunes’ - in the ruins, recycling and renewal of human history and the natural world; and ii) ‘Explosition’ - in the experience of interpenetration and entanglement of language and of animate and inanimate things and beings.
Keywords interpenetration, entanglement, wrunes, explosition, chaosmos, woid
In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance and thereinofter you’re in the unbewised again, vund vulsyvolsy.” - James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce is without a doubt one of the most intimidating and difficult books ever written. Since its publication in 1939, professors and students in literature and philosophy and readers outside academia have been perplexed, bewildered and angered in trying to find a way to simply read it - let alone decipher it. Yet there is another story that diverges from this standard judgement and perception of this final work by Joyce. It is a story of approaching the book as a vivid and vibrant experience in radical experimentation and
1 joyous dissidence, and a vision of ecological thought for the twenty-first century and beyond. Finnegans Wake never accommodates the reader to any comfortable narrative sense; it demands our energy and powers of patience and open-mindedness on every page and often every line of its 628 pages. This introductory essay presents Joyce’s final masterwork as a multiple expression of movement, sound and vision for contemporary and future ecological thought. First, I will link Finnegan Wake and what I mean by contemporary ecological thought and perspectives; second, I will ask and play with the question of what the actual artwork of Finnegans Wake is and can be?; and third, I will delve deeper into this extraordinary work in arguing that there is a profound ecological thought at the heart of the book via the word ‘wrunes’ - in the relation between ruins, recycling and renewal of human history and the natural world; and ‘explosition’ - in the experience of interpenetration and entanglement of language and of all animate and inanimate things and beings.
1. Contemporary Ecological Thought as a Prelude to Finnegans Wake
As the increasing damage to this planet is becoming more and more clear to us over the last two decades, an increasing number of innovative writers have emerged in the humanities -from philosophy, anthropology, ethnography, environmental studies, literature and contemporary art practices. Within the last ten years, I am thinking, for example of works such as Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2009) by Jane Bennett; The Ecological Thought (2010) and Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016) by Timothy Morten; How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology beyond the Human by Eduardo Kohn (2013); The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015) by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016) by Donna J. Haraway; Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (2016) by Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder; The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (2018) by Emanuele Coccia; and What is Philosophy for? (2018) by Mary Midgley. What is this varied contemporary ecological thought being shared and discussed in the last few years and how does it connect to Joyce’s monstrous Finnegans Wake? Why are we returning to Finnegans Wake? The question should perhaps be: have we ever had a chance to return to the Wake? Reading these various writers of ecocriticism, ecofeminism and plant-thinking on a damaged planet and in the age of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene has given me a new understanding of Finnegans Wake. This is not an essay about the current writers in vogue on ecological thought, but is an essay on Finnegans Wake.
2 Nevertheless, I will just mention a few aspects, sentences, words, expressions and perspectives from a few of these authors that has led me back to Finnegans Wake – a book which is now waiting and ahead of us again in the age of devastating environmental crisis. I am reminded of the opening line of Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce: “We are still learning to be James Joyce’s contemporaries, to understand our interpreter.”1
I will just mention three contemporaneous writers and two artists before entering Finnegans Wake. Let me first glance at Timothy Morten’s The Ecological Thought. In this short book, he gives various descriptions, elaborations and definitions of what the “ecological thought” is today. On the second page, he writes:
This book argues that ecology isn’t just about global warming, recycling, and solar power – and also not just to do with everyday relationships between humans and nonhumans. It has to do with love, loss, despair, and compassion, depression and psychosis, capitalism and what might exist after capitalism; with amazement, open-mindedness, and wonder, doubt, confusion and skepticism. It has to do with concepts of space and time. It has to do with delight, beauty, ugliness, disgust, irony, and pain. It has to do with consciousness and awareness. It has to do with ideology and critique. It has to do with reading and writing. It has to do with sexuality. It has to do with ideas of the self and with the weird paradoxes of subjectivity. It has to do with society. It has to do with coexistence […] Ecological thinking is to do with art, philosophy, literature, music, and culture.”2
Later in the book, Morten describes the ecological thought as “a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite centre or edge”3; as “radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise”4; that it “imagines a multitude of entangled strange strangers”5; and that “all the way down, it’s mutation, mutation, mutation.”6 And, regarding the relationship between art and the environment, he writes that “art forms have something to tell us about the environment, because they can make us question reality.”7 And, crucially, in my thinking of Finnegans Wake, “Ecological art is something, or maybe it does something.”8
1 (Ellmann 1982: 3) 2 (Morten 2012: 2, 4) 3 (Morten 2012: 8) 4 (Morten 2012: 8) 5 (Morten 2012: 15) 6 (Morten 2012: 64) 7 (Morten 2012: 8) 8 (Morten 2012: 11)
3 In his more recent called Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, Morten writes that - “Our sense of planet is not a cosmopolitan rush but rather the uncanny feeling that there are all kinds of places at all kinds of scale […] Places contain multitudes.”9 In The Ecological Thought, he introduces the idea of “dark ecology”:
I explore the possibility of a new ecological aesthetics: dark ecology. Dark ecology puts hesitation, irony, and thoughtfulness back into ecological thinking. The form of dark ecology is that of noir film. The noir narrator begins investigating a supposedly external situation, form a supposedly neutral point of few, only to discover that she or he is implicated in it.10
Donna Haraway declares in her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene: “I am a compostist, not a posthumanist: we are all compost, not post-human […] The edge of extinction is not just a metaphor; system collapse is not a thriller. Ask any refugee of any species.”11 She coins the word “Chthulucene”, which she explains “is a compound of two compound of two Greek roots (khthôn and kainos) that together name a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth.”12 Joyce will refer to the “chaosmos”13 of everything living and dying in “this timecoloured place”.14 She explains that
Kainos means now, a time of beginnings, a time for ongoing, or freshness. […] Chthonic once are beings of the earth, both ancient and up-to the-minute […] Chthonic ones are not safe; they have no truck with ideologues; they belong to no one; they writhe and luxuriate in manifold forms and manifold names in all the airs, waters, and places of earth.
At one moment Finnegans Wake is described as “one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history.”15 On the first page of her book, Haraway states that: “Staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times,
9 (Morten 2016: 10-12) 10 (Morten 2012: 16-17) 11 (Haraway 2016: 101-102) 12 (Haraway 2016: 2) 13 (Joyce 1992: 118) 14 (Joyce 1992: 29) 15 (Joyce 1992: 186)
4 matters, meanings.”16 Finally in relation to Haraway (as I begin to read Joyce through the prism of ecological interpenetrations), she informs the reader at the beginning of the book that the “ubiquitous figure in this book is SF: science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far.”17 Through Finnegans Wake, the ubiquitous figures are HCE and ALP – that are manifested in various guises and multiple times throughout the entire book but are most famously remembered as the married couple Here Comes Everybody and Anna Livia Plurabelle.
The third writer here for my purposes in experimentation and dissidence is Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing who explosively begins her latest book with the title “Enabling Entanglements”.18 She makes three points on the first page to undermine all that has brought us to this damaged horizon:
First, All the Taming and mastering has made such a mess that it is unclear whether life on earth can continue. Second, interspecies entanglements that once seemed the stuff of fables are now materials for serious discussion among biologists and ecologists, who show how life requires the interplay of many things and beings. Human life cannot survive by stomping on all the others. Third, Women and men from around the world have clamored to be included in the status once given to Man. Our riotous presence undermines the moral intentionality of Man’s Christian masculinity, which separated Man from Nature.19
She then proceeds to go on a strange journey in following the trail of the Matsutake mushroom – which is the most valuable and sought-after weed in the world which grows in human-disturbed forests. Her primary question via her exploration in the book is: what manages to live in the capitalist ruins we have made? Like Haraway, she brings forward a vision of creative and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes – fusing anthropology, ethnography, botany, philosophy, genetics, biology.
Tsing states that “Encounters are, by their nature, indeterminate; we are unpredictably transformed.”20 There is a continuous indeterminacy of encounter where Tsing then goes on to mention the avant-garde composer John Cage – who had a lifelong interest in mushrooms
16 (Haraway 2016: 1) 17 (Haraway 2016: 2) 18 (Tsing 2015: vii) 19 (Tsing 2015: vii) 20 (Tsing 2015: 46)
5 and wrote a collection of performance pieces called Indeterminacy - “many of which celebrate encounters with mushrooms.”21 Cage was always joyously drawn to Finnegans Wake and completed two pieces of music around the book - Roaratorio and The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs. He also wrote a piece called “Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake”22 which is an example of interpenetration where he cuts up Joyce’s prose and twists and turns it into a new form and mechanism that he calls “mesostics”. He probably introduced his long-term collaborator and partner Merce Cunningham – one of the greatest dancers and dance choreographers of the twentieth century – to Finnegans Wake. Cunningham wrote a dance-piece called “Sounddance” – clearly inspired by the quote from Finnegans Wake that I use as the motto for this essay. It is significant that an avant-garde composer and dancer and choreographer of contemporary movement were not intimidated by Joyce’s monstrous work (unlike most readers in other fields in and outside academic) as they treated it as a thing in itself, a living work, that often need not be deciphered but instead played, sung and danced with. Morten, Haraway, Tsing, Cage and Cunningham all want to throw us into the middle of things, into the middle of life. That is the ecological thought, and that is what Finnegans Wake is – throwing us into the middle of things, the view of in medias res, like some music from India where you can enter from anywhere – there is no beginning or ending. The last sentence of Finnegans Wake joins with the first sentence of the book, and one can enter at any page and be bewildered, mesmerized, estranged, entangled, and perhaps even delighted. As Kierkegaard wrote once: “Life is like a poet and thus different from the contemplator, who always comes to a finish; the poet wrenches us out into the middle of life.”23 Let us now try to follow the experimental and dissidence poet who creates, destroys and forges again in writing Finnegans Wake and envision it as an example of ecological- artistic interpenetrations on a damaged planet.
2. Chaosmos, Sounddance, Wrunes and Explosition in the Ecological Thought
How does one write another work after the painstaking seven years in completing the revolutionary mock-epic masterpiece of modernism that is Ulysses? Finnegans Wake was begun by Joyce in 1923 a year after the publication of Ulysses, and then spent the next seventeen years constructing and reconstructing his “work in progress” before publishing it in
21 (Tsing 2015: 46) 22 (Cage 1981: 133-176) 23 (Kierkegaard 1993: 73)
6 1939 on the eve of World War II. Upon finishing it, he was practically blind and exhausted both physically and mentally, and most of the public was bewildered and irritated by this most experimental of written artefacts. Ulysses is a seven-hundred-page novel set in a single day; Finnegans Wake is a six-hundred page ‘novel’ set in a single night. Ulysses is the book of a single day and threads, flows, stutters and wanders along the shores of our consciousness, and every so often dives into the ocean breaking all rules (such as what occurs in episode fifteen known as the Circe or “nighttown” episode) which takes up almost a fifth of the book and has been referred to by Declan Kiberd as “the book’s unconscious”24). Finnegans Wake is the book of a single night and we enter the dream state. As Joseph Campbell writes: “this is the field of Finnegans Wake, into which that of Ulysses dissolved when Stephen disappeared into the night, Bloom fell asleep in Molly’s bed, and Molly herself went off to sleep, musing ‘I said yes I will Yes’.”25 Finnegans Wake takes place in the mind and body of a sleeping being(s) which surfs and plummets the oceanic consciousness, bringing on a psychedelic and apocalyptic journey in the art of living and dying in a constantly recycling, repetitive and transformative cosmos or “chaosmos”. It is psychedelic in that ideas of space and time are constantly bent and broken. It is apocalyptic in that, firstly, it is after all a “wake” - which is the night before the funeral of a person which awaits us all and where we will each experience our own particular apocalypse; and, secondly, it is a revelation (which is what “apocalypse” means – from the Greek apokalyptein [apo = away from / kalyptein = cover or conceal]) - in that it is to wake us up to the alarmingly vivid experience of reality that is happening now. If Ulysses provides a massive challenge to translate into other languages, Finnegans Wake delivers almost an impossibility with its myriad of languages and neologisms on every page. Perhaps Augusto and Haroldo de Campos have delivered the most elegant, sustained and successful approach in their beautiful edition called Panaroma do Finnegans Wake, which contains twenty-two sections selected from Finnegans Wake with the original text presented side by side with their magisterial translations into Portuguese.26
The title alone of Joyce’s final work contains a myriad of meanings and allusions which incorporates all the elements of Joyce’s interpenetrative strategies and visions. Finnegans Wake is an Irish-American song about a hod-carrier (“of hod, cement and
24 (Kiberd 2009: 229) 25 (Campbell 2005: 346) 26 (Campos & Campos 2001)
7 edifices”27 [HCE]) who – like the egg oracle Humpty Dumpty – falls off his ladder while working and dies. He was probably hungover from drinking too much whiskey (or thinking with Joyce – wisekey) at the time which will also be the potion that will resurrect him at his own wake. The etymology of whiskey is of course from the Irish “uisce beathe” – meaning water of life or breath. “Finn” is also a name borne by countless legendary figures in Irish history and mythology. The most famous of them being Fionn mac Cumhaill – an odysseus- like figure in Irish mythology who is a warrior, a seer, a hunter, lover, husband and leader. In the Irish language, Finn/Fionn can mean bright, clearing, fair or lustrous; and also means ‘end’ (fin) in French. And then we have the second part of Finnegan, which can be a negation (negan) and a repetition (egan alluding to again). Thus, we have a triple title of ‘end- negating’, ‘clearing again’, and ‘coming again of Fionn the mythological hero’. ‘Wake’ implies the night before the funeral where the corpse is laid out for viewing and for paying one’s last respects; it is the wake up from sleep; and it can be the tracks on water that are formed from a boat passing through. Finally, there is no apostrophe in the word Finnegans in Joyce’s title which implies an imperative to all Finnegans – which is all of us - to awake us to the new and endlessly returning and recycling (a ricorso) vision of the book and of life and death.
When Joyce was just twenty-two years old, he articulated his task and objective in becoming a world author in this revealing letter in 1904 to Nora Barnacle:
My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity – home, the recognised virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines. How could I like the idea of home? […] Now I make open war upon it by what I write and say and do. I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond. I started to study medicine three times, law once, music once. A week ago I was arranging to go away as a traveling actor. […] I spoke to you satirically tonight but I was speaking of the world not of you. I am an enemy of ignobleness and slavishness of people but not of you. Can you not see the simplicity which is at the back of all my disguises? We all wear masks.28
Working with the ecological thought, we have here indications of critiquing all the established values of Western culture. Joyce is echoing Nietzsche’s questioning and overturning of many of the core values in Western culture over the last 2500 years. As vagabond, Joyce is embracing his new home which is nowhere, anywhere and everywhere. He picks three key disciplines which are not to be taken lightly here for the ecological
27 (Joyce 1992: 4) 28 (Ellmann 1982: 169-170)
8 thought: in medicine, he explores the science of the body; in law, he explores the socio- political-economic rules of the world; and in music, he explores art in its immediate form. And he must wear various masks to carry out his ambitious projects of executing Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – two works that invite multiple readings, multiple subjectivities and include multiple voices and artists throughout human history to propel us towards something both classic and dazzlingly new. As Joyce in Finnegans Wake writes: “though his heart, soul and spirit turn to pharaoph times, his love, faith and hope stick to futuerism.”29 The ‘pharaoph’ signifies both the pharaohs of ancient Egypt and ‘far off’ times; and the three Christian virtues of faith, hope and love are reordered and transferred over to iconoclastic futurism. Christianity has been a misordering from the beginning; so Joyce activates his endless disordering and reordering. Finnegans Wake is described by Philippe Sollers as “an active transnationalism, disarticulating, rearticulating and at the same time annulling the maximum number of traces – linguistic, historical, mythological, religious”, and that it “is the most formidably anti-fascist book produced between the wars.”30
Here are a couple of statements, phrases and neologisms from Finnegans Wake which describe or give perspectives to the book itself (this is a work that is after all constantly interpreting itself, or, as Umberto Eco puts it, is “the poetics of itself”31; and Samuel Beckett famously states that Joyce’s work “is not about something; it is that something itself32): “the book of the depth” (621); “Book of Breathings” (415); “dreambookpage”(428); “nightmaze” (411); “traumscrapt” (623); “meandertale” (18); “escapology” (428); “the last word in stolentelling (424); “a multilingual tombstone” (392); “It’s prayers in layers all the thumping time” (454); “wordsharping” (422); “wanamade singsigns to soundsense (138); “lying high as he lay in all dimensions” (498); “explosition” (419); “Leave the letter that never begins to go find the latter that ever comes to end, written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of solitude, sealed at night” (337); and “as you sing it it’s a study […] This nonday diary, this allnights newseryreel” (489). In a letter five years before its complete publication, Joyce describes the monstrous “work in progress” as “a big long wide high deep dense prosework” (Joyce 1966: 306). It is depthless, having no centre or edge - like the ecological thought that Morten presents. The ecological consciousness is seeing the great sky as ALP sees it in
29 (Joyce 1992: 129) 30 Kuberski 1994: 55) 31 (Eco 1989: 72) 32 (Beckett 1961: 10)
9 Finnegans Wake as “my great blue bedroom.”33 This is the great expanse. I will conclude this essay by looking at two aspects of Finnegans Wake that can help inform and enrich the contemporary ecological thought of writers such as Morten, Haraway, Bennett, Marder, Tsing and more): first, in the relationship-tension between human history and nature under the word Wrunes; and second, in the continuous interpenetration and entanglement of everything under the word Explosition; and, conclude with mention of the motto of this essay – “In the buginning is the woid.” i) Wrunes: history, ruins, nature, recycling and renewing
Finnegans Wake begins in mid-sentence: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”34 In these first three lines of the book, we are given the clues, story and philosophical framework. The sentence collapses human history with a recycling, renewing nature. It encompasses the two parental figures of the book: HCE and ALP. ALP is the ever-transforming water who has the first and last word of the book moving through the human story – from the fall of nature into humanity in the story of the creations of the Judeo- Christian God Eve and Adam (the macro) and in the presence of a man-made church and drinking tavern called “Adam and Eve’s” on the bank of the River Liffey (the micro). Of course, Joyce switches the order, placing the feminine first (and last) – another prelude to ecofeminism. The river snakes through the land “from swerve of shore to bend of bay”, giving us the sense of the meandering quality (or perplexity) of the tale – literally the “meandertale” – that is both history and the ways and evolution of nature. This takes us to a “commodious vicus” – which alludes to the decadent, dictatorial Roman emperor Commodus who was then assassinated – hence, we can think of vicus as vicious. “Vicus” is the Latin word for “street” and is also a nod to the Renaissance philosopher Vico whose obscure masterwork The New Science is a fundamental background text for Finnegans Wake for its theory of the earthly cycle of corsi and recorsi, the foundation of and philological interpretation of myth and creativity and etymology of languages, and the presentation of the primitive poetic logic at the heart of all things. Analogous to Joyce’s final work as the “book of the dark”35, Vico writes: “Darkness … is the material of this Science, uncertain, unformed,
33 (Joyce 1992: 627) 34 Joyce 1992: 3) 35 (Joyce 1992: 251)
10 obscure …”36 The “commodious vicus” can also allude us to a “vicious circle” which reveals the violence at the heart of history, and the “recirculation” of both history and nature itself that is always returning. In this case, in this sentence, the recirculation is back to HCE (Howth-Castle-Environs) - who is the husband, the father, everyone (Here Comes Everybody); to Howth, which is the peninsula at the north end of Dublin bay which means ‘head’ (Howth is derived from old Norse meaning “head”), and which is in the shape of sleeping giant (an allusion to Vico’s giants at the beginning of time). Howth Castle is a specific castle which is a link to deception and betrayal (The 1st Earl of Howth was called Sir Amory Tristram [before changing his name] and whose names brings up the legendary Tristan [an important figure throughout Finnegans Wake] who went to Ireland to collect Isolde for his Uncle Mark – but whom he would betray by taking Isolde as his lover), and refusals (the famous pirate Gráinne O’Malley was rebuffed here and so, in retaliation, kidnapped the Earl of the Castle’s grandson and heir). The sentence ends with the word “Environs” which derives from the Old French word environer meaning “to surround, enclose, encircle”. In this final word then, we get the sense of encircling, revolving and the environment itself. This is only first sentence of the book (which is actually only part of a sentence), and reveals to us the vision of “tales all tolled”37 and “last word in stolentelling”38, as it subverts and includes multiple narratives, masks, secrets, betrayals, interpenetrations of the macro and the micro, and the meandering and recycling of events in both history and the natural world. Thus, Joyce writes a few pages later: “But the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes forever.”39
The only unadulterated or undistorted reference in the whole of Finnegans Wake is a passage from Edgar Quinet’s Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire de l’humanité from 1827. Here is the original text in Finnegans Wake:
Aujourd’hui comme aux temps de Pline et de Columelle la jacinthe se plaît dans les Gaules, la pervenche en Illyrie, la marguerite sur les ruines de Numance et pendant qu’autour d’elles les villes ont changé de maîtres et de noms, que plusieurs sont entrées dans le néant, que les civilisations se sont choquées et brisées, leurs paisibles générations ont traversé les ages et sont arrivées jusqu'à nous, fraîches et riantes comme aux jours des batailles.40
36 (Vico 1984: 41) 37 (Joyce 1992: 275) 38 (Joyce 1992: 424) 39 (Joyce 1992: 19) 40 (Joyce 1992: 281). Translation: “Today, as in the days of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth disports in Gaul, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numantia; and while around them the cities have changed
11
In their guide (the first of its kind) to Finnegans Wake, Campbell and Robinson write in a footnote to this quote: “Art survives the city, and nature survives both.”41 This passage was one of Joyce’s favorite pieces of writing, and on walking down the Boulevard Edgar Quinet in Paris one day he recited the whole passage by heart to the Irish tenor John Sullivan.42 This kind of passage would be dear to both Joyce’s instincts, aesthetic and vision, not only because it is written in rhythmic, musical prose, but that its message is that of the transience of art, history and time itself. The “Quinet Sentence” showcases the music of language and nature abiding through the various human constructions through the centuries (which also brings to mind Shelley’s poem Ozymandius).
History is the nightmare from which Stephen Dedalus is trying to awake43 in order to forge a renewed vision. In Finnegans Wake, the nightmare becomes the “nightmaze” - a material-symbolic ecology, open to diverse interpretations and interventions. After the madman’s pronouncement that “God is dead”44 towards the end of the nineteenth century, it is declared at the beginning of the twentieth century in Ulysses that “it is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.”45 The sacred-secular culture or Bildung in the forging of the German nation in the nineteenth century is presented as “piled buildung supra buildung”46 at the beginning of Finnegans Wake. In this neologism, we see the building or constructing upon dung, the excrement of animals – literally - shit. One of the two sons of HCE and ALP is called Shem Skrivenitch (an avatar of the author). He is the giddy, wasteful artist with the name ‘Skrivenitch’ - containing ‘write’ (from scribo in Latin), ‘itch’, ‘hidden’ (which skriven means in Croatian), and the real name of ‘Skrivanitch’ (who learnt English from Joyce in Trieste47). The word and its sound also alludes to sham, shame, same, shaman, and even alchemist (“the first till last alchemist”48). ‘Shem’ also means ‘name’ in Hebrew, and it refers to the Shemites who were the tribe responsible for helping build the Tower of Babel – a story
masters and names, while some have ceased to exist, while the civilisations have collided with one another and shattered, their peaceful generations have passed through the ages, and have come up to us, one following the other, fresh and laughing as on the days of the battles.” 41 (Campbell and Robinson 2005: 176) 42 (Ellmann 1982: 664) 43 “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (Joyce 2008: 34) 44 (Nietzsche 1974: 181 [par. 125]) 45 (Joyce 2008: 198) 46 (Joyce 1992: 4) 47 (McHugh 2016: 423) 48 (Joyce 1992: 185)
12 that fascinated the leader and fonder of deconstruction – Jacques Derrida.49 No wonder Joyce was so important to Derrida who made a very Joycean joyful war on philosophy, literature, history and theology.50 Echoing William Blake in the second episode of Ulysses, the young artificer and maker of labyrinths Stephen Dedalus reflects: “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?”51 Through the ruins of history, we will feel, see, hear, taste and smell the ‘wrunes’ which is the experience in reading Finnegans Wake itself in that has an impact on all our senses at once (combinations such as “earsighted”52 and “do you hear what I’m seeing?”53). We will uncover and subvert the rules of literature and language to take apart and renew again the possibility and actuality of flourishing once more in our fall, rise and fall again as humans in the natural world and constructed, deconstructed and constructing worlds. Preempting Joyce and Derrida’s babelian act of war, Hamann writes (and which Kierkegaard will later quote enthusiastically in his experimental multilayered text Repetition): “[I] express myself in various tongues and speak the language of sophists, of puns, of Cretans and Arabians, of white sand Moors and Creoles, and babble a confusion of criticism, mythology rebus, axioms, and argue now in a human way and now in an extraordinary way.”54 ii) Explosition: interpenetration and entanglement
“How good you are in explosition! How farflung is your fokloire and how velktingeling your volupkabulary!”55 This is what the crowd say to the other son of HCE and ALP called Shaun, after he delivers his new version of Aesop’s Ant and Grasshopper to them – now transformed into “The Ondt and the Gracehoper”. This word as explosion-exposition, found at the end of this most exquisitely reworked story and fable of the book, is a good example of interpenetration and entanglement which fills every page of Finnegans Wake. The
49 Geoffrey Bennington writes in his text on Derrida in the section called “Babel”: “To serve as a sort of emblem of this situation, Derrida chooses the ‘example’ of Babel, which ties together the themes of translation and the proper name. […] This story [the story of the tower of Babel], to which Derrida returns several times, fascinated […], contains resources we shall not exhaust here. The essential fact hangs on this: by imposing his name (confusedly perceived as ‘confusion’) against the name of name (Shem), God imposes both the necessity and the impossibility of translation.” (Bennington 1993: 174-175) 50 In a footnote in Dissemination, Derrida writes of “the whole of that essay [La Pharmacie de Platon], as will quickly become apparent, being itself nothing but a reading of Finnegans Wake” (Derrida, 1993: 88). In one of his essays on Joyce, Derrida admits further that The Postcard, Glas and his introductory essay “Scribble” are all indebted to and haunted by Finnegans Wake (Derrida, 2013: 27). 51 (Joyce 2008: 24) 52 (Joyce 1992: 143) 53 (Joyce 1992: 193) 54 (Hamann 1821-43: I, 467). See also Kierkegaard 1983: 149. 55 (Joyce 1992: 419)
13 Wake’s interpenetration and entanglement is another powerful prelude, companion and expression of contemporary ecological-artistic thinking today. I borrow ‘interpenetration’ from avant-garde artist John Cage; and ‘entanglements’ from ecofeminist Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing. Cage writes (in block capitals) in a piece called “Communication” from 1958:
INTERPENETRATION MEANS THAT EACH ONE OF THESE MOST HONOURED ONES OF ALL IS MOVING OUT IN ALL DIRECTIONS PENETRATING AND BEING PENETRATED BY EVERY OTHER ONE NO MATTER WHAT THE TIME OR WHAT THE SPACE.56
Earlier in the same piece, Cage sums up for me the vision of the contemporary artist and a way for us as readers and participants to enter Finnegans Wake, and also to become part of the ecological thought today - in the middle of things, in the middle life:
WHEN WE SEPARATE MUSIC FROM LIFE WHAT WE GET IS ART (A COMPENDIUM OF MASTERPIECES). WITH CONTEMPORARY MUSIC, WHEN IT IS ACTUALLY CONTEMPORARY, WE HAVE NO TIME TO MAKE THAT SEPARATION (WHICH PROECTS US FROM LIVING) […] VERY FREQUENTLY NO ONE KNOWS THAT CONTEMPORARY MUSIC IS OR COULD BE ART. HE SIMPLY THINKS IT IS IRRITATING. IRRITATING ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, THAT IS TO SAY KEEPING US FROM OSSIFYING.57
Shaun may be able to tell the story, but it is the artist Shem -as the Gracehoper- who, just before he dies, sings his song and with the last line asks The Ondt, “why can’t you beat time?”58 Joyce is both the Gracehoper and the Ondt in his interpenetrations and “twosome twimind”59. As the Gracehoper, he is both hopping up and along from side to side, creating, living in the moment and celebrating life’s sensuality; as the Ondt, he is meticulously finishing this colossally subversive work of art - in framing, rewriting, layering, preparing, promoting, publishing. This is the ‘chaosmos’ of Joyce’s art – as chaos and order in one word, where Finnegans Wake and Ulysses are the two most totalizing works containing a multiplicity of fragments, fractals, suggestions and portals all interpenetrating, where nothing is really ossified.
56 (Cage 2017: 46) 57 (Cage 2017: 44) 58 (Joyce 1992: 419) 59 (Joyce 1992: 188)
14 Finnegans Wake continually bends both space and time as psychedelic and apocalyptic and allows no centre or edge but rather a continuous interpenetration of language, narrative and animate and inanimate things. Humans will turn to trees, stones and water and there will be a return again. This is not unlike Morten’s “mesh”, where he writes in The Ecological Thought that “each point of the mesh is both the centre and edge of a system of points, so there is no absolute centre or edge.”60 Morten’s ‘mesh’ itself is “a complex situation or series of events in which a person is entangled; a concatenation of constraining or restricting forces or circumstances; a snare.”61 Language itself becomes alarmingly alive as it mutates and transforms into some new. It is a moveable body. If Ulysses is “the epic of the human body”62 where he changes Mephistopheles’ declaration from Goethe’s Faust of “Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint” (I am the spirit that perpetually negates) to “Ich bin der [sic] Fleisch der stets bejaht (I am the flesh that always affirms)”63, then Finnegans Wake is the epic of every entangled body. As James Fairhall writes in an essay in a volume called Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce: “Bodies of all kinds interpenetrate and define each other in its portrayal of ‘this timecoloured place where we live.”64 John Cage literally interpenetrates Finnegans Wake through his invention of the ‘mesostic’ text. This is literally a poetic form that interpenetrates, where a text is arranged where a vertical sentence intersects with a horizontal sentence. Cage used preexisting texts from Finnegans Wake and experimented with having the words JAMES JOYCE in capitals going vertically down through all the various selected texts of Joyce placed horizontally. His piece was initially called “Writing Though Finnegans Wake” and “had one hundred and fifteen pages”65. Cage explains that he then wrote a new series of mesostics called “Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake”, in which he explains that he “did not permit the reappearance of a syllable for a given letter of the name.”66 Finnegans Wake seems to be already an example of mesostics when Seamus Deane concludes his introductory essay to the work: “Its story runs vertically though history in all of its individuated forms and it runs horizontally across it in a single form.”67
60 (Morten 2012: 29) 61 (Morten 2012: 28) 62 (Ellmann 1982: 436) 63 (Ellmann 1982: 502) 64 (Fairhall 2014: 245) 65 (Cage 1981: 135) 66 (Cage 1981: 135) 67 (Joyce 1992: xlviii)
15 For more interpenetrations and entanglements in language, Umberto Eco applies the idea of entrelacs to Finnegans Wake. Entrelacs – or interlace – describes several related objects or concepts and which Eco explains, “There are no boundaries between animals, spirals, and entrelacs; everything mixes with everything.”68 Hence, there are biological and linguistic entrelacs, interlacing, entanglements and interpenetrations. Eco shows The Book of Kells as a supreme example of this: “[…] there was a flowering of entrelacs, of highly stylized and elegant animal forms in which small, monkey-like figures appear among an incredible geometrical foliage capable of enveloping whole pages”69 Eco -as the great fellow medievalist aficionado- can understand very well that The Book of Kells is a key inspiration for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce is never shy to admit the love he has for this book, publicly celebrating its importance and link to his art and vision.70 But in the end of course – as the book that is trying to defy our traditional and day-to-day use of space and time and entangle us in an the explosition of wrunes, Joyce ensures that it is Finnegans Wake that inspires The Book of Kells: “the cruciform postscript […] plainly inspiring the tenebrous Tunc page of the Book of Kells.”71 Another example of entanglement, interpenetration and interruption of words and framing on the page is in the school lessons chapter72 of Part Two of Finnegans Wake which brings us to the present out of the deep dark past of the parents in Part One. At first glance, this chapter appears to be the most intimidating of a most intimidating book. There are three interpenetrations occurring: that of the main text, the footnotes, and then the side notes/commentaries which are found along both sides of the marginalia (the right side in Capitals and the left side in italics). One can see how this might have inspired the arrangement of philosopher Derrida’s interpenetrative book Glas73 and artist Cage’s text on Satie which is an imaginary conversation between the two musicians, explained before it begins that Satie’s “remarks are ones he is reported to have made and excerpts from his writings.”74 Satie would not be there to hear or read Cage’s words. Cage goes even further in his collaboration with David Tudor in the word/music piece “Indeterminacy” where Cage reads out various vignettes, stories, anecdotes and reflections while Tudor is another room playing the piano to the words. Neither have access to hearing
68 (Eco 1989: 79) 69 (Eco 1989: 78) 70 (Ellmann 1982: 545) 71 (Joyce 1992: 122) 72 (Joyce 1992: 260-308). Campbell and Robinson calls this chapter “The Study Period” (Campbell and Robinson 2005: 163). 73 Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. by Richard Rand and John P. Leavey, Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. 74 (Cage 2017: 76)
16 each other. And like Finnegans Wake, everything is delightfully indeterminate and unstable and both totalizing and infinitely open at the same time.
A final point here, at least just within the confines of this essay, is in the entanglement of trees with people and the text. There could be much written again of the interpenetration of water in rivers and ecofeminism – as the river is a valve or ‘vulve’75, ‘intervulve’76 and ‘rivulverblott77’; it represents “ancient metaphors for unbounded time; yet because they flow from beginning to end, they can stand as well for bounded human life”78; it is an “affluvial flowandflow”79; and the river as “woman will water the wild world over.”80 The ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ chapter is known as the “showpiece”81 of Finnegans Wake in which Joyce worked painstakingly on and where he wrote that that “hundreds of river-names are woven into the text. I think it moves.”82 But here I will just give the overlooked trees a mention for it is well known of the centrality of water and the river in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The tree is present via its various species and genres throughout the whole of Finnegans Wake. Important figures in the Wake – the two washerwomen and the Mookse and the Gripes - turn into either a tree (growth) or a stone (petrification) at the end of their respective tales. On the second page of the book, Joyce writes: “The oaks of ald [alder] now they lie in peat [peace] yet elms leap [sleep] where askes [ash] lay.”83 We return again to the fall and rise of humanity and nature, as in Norse myth, the ash (Ask) was the first man and the elm (embla) was the first woman.84
The elm tree is “associated with fertility and the ability of its timber to remain submerged in water without rotting makes it a symbol of durability.”85 Campbell and Robinson equate the elm tree and stone with “change and permanence, Shem and Shaun, Mercy and Justice, time and space. Tree and stone undergo many metamorphoses throughout
75 (Joyce 1992: 297) 76 (Joyce 1992: 314) 77 (Joyce 1992: 538) 78 (Fairhall 2014: 242) 79 (Joyce 1992: 404) 80 (Joyce 1992: 526) 81 (Bishop 1986: 336) 82 (Joyce 1966: 163). In Brazeau and Gladwin 2012, see Scott, Bonnie Kime; “Joyce, Ecofeminism and the River as Woman” p. 59-69; and “‘Aquacities of Thought and Language’: The Political Ecology of Water in Ulysses, p. 136-158. 83 (Joyce 1992: 4) 84 (McHugh 2016: 4) 85 (Mac Coitir 2003: 130)
17 the book.”86 As the washerwomen say at the end of Joyce’s most celebrated chapter: “I feel as old as yonder elm […] I feel as heavy as yonder stone.”87 And later, at the end of “the children’s hour” chapter and just before “the study period” or “Nightlessons” (Joyce, 1992: liii) chapter, Joyce writes: “Till tree from tree, tree among trees, tree over tree become stone to stone, stone between stones, stone under stone for ever.”88
Before Finnegans Wake, Stephen Dedalus carries and refers to his walking stick or “ashplant” throughout Ulysses. Ash in Irish mythology is associated with fertility and healing through a symbolic link with water, and the ash staff protects against evil. These are all significant to the journey of Dedalus and Joyce in the durability of creativity and rebirth (fertility), a return again to entanglement or entrelacs of philology and water – exemplified in the Proteus episode of Ulysses (that episode that belongs to Stephen Dedalus). Ash is also a word for the grey residue that remains when material is burned and links with the “ruin of all space”. Alongside the story from folk tradition which tells of the ash being the first tree to be hit by lightning89, there is the apocalyptic element and ‘explosition’ in thunder and lightning that strikes in the middle of Ulysses, and the one-hundred letter word of the thunderclap that occurs ten times throughout Finnegans Wake. The elm and the ash are presented together at the beginning of the book – as durability, fertility, and endings and beginnings in one. The sentence that follows the first mention of the elm and the ash provides the fall and rise of humanity and nature – within Finnegans Wake, and for us and the planet itself: “Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.”90
The trees and the forest are both real and imaginary symbols of growth and health and the state of the planet. Cutting trees down on a massive scale is the great manifestation of human colonization (and ultimately now destruction) of the planet in appropriation, division and production.91 Tsing writes that “people and trees are caught in irreversible histories of
86 (Campbell & Robinson 2005: 138) 87 (Joyce 1992: 215-216) 88 (Joyce 1992: 259) 89 (Mac Coitir 2003: 120) 90 (Joyce 1994: 4) 91 The white European man’s conquest of the final parts of the globe at the end of the nineteenth century prepares the landscape for the twentieth century of world war, extraordinary technological development, rapid human population increase, and age of mass extinctions. Carl Schmitt’s description of the social and economic order in “appropriation, distribution and production” is useful here in describing concisely the “Nomos of the Earth” that continues in the neo-liberal colonization of the world today. (Schmitt 2006: 324)
18 disturbance”92 and this disturbance is the interpenetration and entanglement in Finnegans Wake too. We follow and accept this disturbance, this journey, this tracking which “means following worldly entanglements. […] Entanglement bursts categories and upends identities.”93 In his book, Forest: the Shadow of Civilisation, Robert Harrison writes that the forest “appears as a place where the logic of distinction goes astray. Or where our subjective categories are confounded. Or where perceptions become promiscuous with one another, disclosing latent dimensions of time and consciousness.”94 This could easily be a description of Finnegans Wake. At the very end of the book, ALP -as the river- carries the leaves into the sea and says of her entanglement - “I am leafy speafing”95, and then is swallowed up by the sea and dissipated only to begin again in the clouds above among her “big blue bedroom” to rain down and form new streams and nourish the plants and humans everywhere. The hero of Ulysses is Leopold Bloom – his namesake in ‘bloom’ represents growth, flourishing and flowering, and his aim is to guide, warn and set free the artificer, creator and artist in Stephen Dedalus. By the time of Finnegans Wake, experimentation and dissidence have broken all protocol where the explosition is everywhere in the interpenetration and entanglement of all language and of animate and inanimate beings and material things in a contemporary, dynamic, ecological vision. I will make a final comment regarding the word “Tip” that is repeated throughout the Wake. This is another addition to the interpenetration between trees, humans, language and the sounddance in the ecological-artistic adventure, as I follow Campbell and Robinson’s interpretation:
The repetition through Finnegans Wake of the word ‘tip’ finally turns out to be a dream transformation of the sound of a branch knocking against HCE’s window as he sleeps beside his wife in the upper room. This branch is the finger of Mother Nature, in her desiccated aspect, bidding for attention.96
Conclusion: “In the buginning is the woid”
I conclude on the ecological-artistic interpenetrations on a damaged planet with this sentence from Finnegans Wake that also begins this essay: “In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance and thereinofter you’re in the unbewised again, vund
92 (Tsing 2015: 190) 93 Tsing 2015: 137) 94 (Harrison 1992: x) 95 (Joyce 1992: 619) 96 (Campbell & Robinson 2005: 39.
19 vulsyvolsy.”97 This sentence encapsulates much of my approach to Finnegans Wake as a vision of the contemporary ecological thought. First we have of course a paraphrase of the opening sentence from the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the word [Logos]. There are three radical changes: first, there is now a ‘buginning’, where the ‘bug’ is an insect, a harmful microorganism, or someone or something annoying that is at the root or interior of something; second, the sentence is in the present tense, close to Walter Benjamin’s Jetztzeit where “time is filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]”98; and third, ‘word’ has become ‘woid’ – a typical Joycean neologism combining two words (‘word’ and ‘void’) in one and, like chaosmos or thisorder, encompasses his vision and faith in contradiction.99 As Deleuze and Guattari write in What is Philosophy?: “Art is not chaos but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation, so that it constitutes, as Joyce says, a chaosmos, a composed chaos – neither forseen nor preconceived.”100 This is the abiding struggle and challenge for Joyce, modernism, postmodernism and beyond: to affirm existence, creativity, community and connectivity in the face of the nothing and destruction. Joyce wrote in a letter to his son upon the completion of the Wake: “My eyes are tired, for over half a century, they have gazed into nullity where they have found a lovely nothing.”101 Cage will write later that “Every something is an echo of nothing.”102 This is the “Vacant. Mined”103 and “whorled without aimed”104 of Finnegans Wake and the contemporary ecological thought. Perhaps this single line from Ulysses sums up Joyce’s conception of Ulysses, modernism, art and beauty itself: “[…] ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void.”105 And, after all, as Molly Bloom says in another way at the very end of the book, “there’s nothing like nature.”106
The second and third part of the sentence complete my attempt to include Finnegan Wake in the current ecological-artistic interpenetrations. We are, to repeat, always in the middle of things and in the middle of life in the ecological thought, and in Finnegans Wake “in the muddle is the sounddance”. The middle is also a muddle – murky, obscure and caught
97 (Joyce 1992: 378) 98 (Benjamin 1999: 253) 99 Eco concludes his essay on Finnegans Wake with this sentence: “The only faith that the aesthetics and metaphysics of the Chaosmos leaves us is the faith in Contradiction” (Eco 1989: 87) 100 Deleuze/Guattari 1994: 204) 101 (Joyce 1966, 359; 361f.) 102 (Cage 2017: 131) 103 (Joyce 1992: 426) 104 (Joyce 1992: 272) 105 (Joyce 2008: 650) 106 (Joyce 2008: 731)
20 in the mesh. Joyce will write elsewhere: “Will you walk into my wavetrap?”107. In that middle/muddle is the sounddance – nature is inside and outside us that is alarmingly alive, is dancing and is noisy – much like the Wake itself. And the final part of the sentence includes and alludes in sound and writing to that which is unproved (‘unbewiessen’); improvised, unconscious (‘unbewusst’); and having the ricorso, vice versa and eternal return present too (‘vund vulsyvolsy). With Finnegans Wake, Joyce has moved from Eurocentric to planetary culture, and as Kuberski writes in his book Chaosmos, “one may conclude that the ‘dream’ of Finnegans Wake is also an attempt to reveal the being of the world, to allow the earth itself to speak in its many voices.”108 In the Wake, we are witnessing and experiencing a multifaceted voyage in experimentation and dissidence which the current innovative ecological thought must and is embracing, articulating and actualizing. The interpenetrations and entanglements are everywhere in this planet that we humans have damaged and continue to damage with ferocious speed. In our becoming more aware of our interconnectedness with everything and witnessing the disintegration of many of our systems, we are starting to feel that as uncanny, intimidating and perhaps even liberating. I will finish with the words of another complex, Irish, ecological-artistic philosopher of interpenetrations exploring the transformation that must be undertaken in our relationship with everything animate and inanimate on the planet:
I’m ruined, he said. Walk through the ruins, she said. Walk through the ruins you’ve already walked through. Walk in the great world you’ve already walked into. It’s a nothing, a nowhere, I’ve walked into, he said.109
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