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For Jennika
2. Professor Jones vs. The Time Philosophy (FW 149.14–150.14)
3. The Unity and Duality of Burrus and Caseous (FW 160.06–167.17)
4.
5.
Abbreviations
References to the following works have been recorded throughout using the abbreviations and editions as set out below.
FDV Hayman, David. A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963.
P Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin Books, 2000.
AFW McHugh, Roland. Annotations to Finnegans Wake. 4th ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
FW Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake, edited by Robbert-Jan Henkes, Erik Bindervoet, and Finn Fordham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. References to this edition always take the following format: FW (page number).(line number).
Letters Joyce, James. Letters of James Joyce. Vol. I, edited by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking Press, 1957; reissued with corrections 1966. Vols II and III, edited by Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1966.
JJA Joyce, James. The James Joyce Archive, edited by Michael Groden et al. New York: Garland Publishing, 1977–8. References to the JJA always take the following format: JJA (volume number):(page number).
U Joyce, James. Ulysses, edited by Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Random House, 1986. References to this edition always take the following format: U (episode number).(line number).
Transcriptional Conventions
Kind of Change: Symbols:
Additions
Matched set of nested caret marks: base ^added text^ text
Further additions on Matched set of nested caret marks: ^added ^further
same manuscript added text^ text^
Deletions
Revisions
Matched set of angled brackets: <deleted text>
Combination of angled brackets and caret marks: ^<deleted text> new text^
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Sam Slote, who supervised the bulk of the Ph.D. thesis from which this book grew. Sam has helped me a great deal over the years, and I’m particularly appreciative of the guidance he offered when this project was struggling.
I would also like to thank John Nash, who was my first Ph.D. supervisor and who also oversaw the master’s thesis that evolved into my Ph.D. project. John’s influence permeates this book.
During my time in Joyce studies, I’ve received a lot of advice and kindness from leading figures within that field. I would like to thank Luca Crispi, Anne Fogarty, Finn Fordham, and the late, great John Bishop.
I was fortunate to start my career as a Joycean alongside many brilliant young Joyce scholars. Of all my outstanding contemporaries, I would particularly like to thank my good friends Ronan Crowley and Liam Lanigan.
On completing my Ph.D., I moved to America where I first worked at Le Moyne College in Syracuse. I would like to thank Kate Costello-Sullivan and Ann Ryan for helping me to take my first steps in American academia.
I presently work at the University of Evansville alongside many excellent professors. I would like to thank all of the literature professors within my department—Mark Cirino, Kristie Hochwender, and Sara Petrosillo—as well as my former colleagues Larry Caldwell and Bill Hemminger. I would also like to thank the indomitable Dan Byrne in the History department.
Many kind individuals have helped me to write particular parts of this book. I would like to thank Jason Aleksander for his remarks on Nicholas of Cusa, Paul Richard Blum for his thoughts on Bruno, Jeffrey Braun for his advice on Einstein, Arnold Brooks for his guidance on Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction, Alan Code for his insights into Aristotelian logic, Bill Hemminger for reviewing my French translations, Leonard Lawlor for reading my discussions of Bergson, Robert Miner for his assistance with Vico, and David Roochnik for his observations on Plato.
In 2015, I received a fellowship from the Moore Institute at the University of Galway which allowed me to spend a month there. During that time, I conducted research for this book. I would like to thank Daniel Carey and everyone at the Moore Institute.
An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as “Time and Space: The Opposition of Professor Jones in Finnegans Wake I.6” in volume 8 of the Dublin James Joyce
Journal. It is reproduced with the kind permission of Anne Fogarty, Director of the UCD James Joyce Research Centre.
On a related note, I would also like to thank the Zurich James Joyce Foundation for generously allowing me permission to quote the manuscript note “Two Kinds of Monism” from the Hans E. Jahnke Bequest.
I would like to thank Ellie Collins, Alexander Hardie-Forsyth, and Karen Raith at Oxford University Press for their sage guidance. At Straive, I would like to thank Jothi Aloysia Stephenson for her excellent project management and Rachel Addison for her meticulous copy editing. I would also like to thank Sergey Lobachev at Brookfield Indexing Services for his splended index.
I would like to thank my parents, Simon and Elisabeth, and my brother Philip for their enduring love and support throughout my entire life.
I would like to thank my dogs—Barkley, Nula, and Bernie—for taking me on the walks during which much of this book was mentally written.
Lastly, and most of all, I would like to thank the person to whom this book is dedicated, my wife Jennika. She has supported and encouraged and enabled this book in innumerable ways over the many years it has taken to write it. Without her, I would neither have written this book nor have had a reason to write it.
Introduction
There are two primary ways to approach James Joyce’s relationship to philosophy. One is to regard Joyce as a philosopher. Philip Kitcher offers an example of this approach when he writes:
Joyce’s mature fiction is much concerned with a reworking of the oldest, most central philosophical question, Socrates’ “How to live?” Joyce hopes to understand how to avoid the factors that confine our lives, how we might find some direction when we inevitably go astray, how we might come to terms (honestly) with our inevitable faults, missteps, and misdeeds.1
If to be a philosopher is to address the question “How to live?,” then Kitcher is certainly right that Joyce is a philosopher. One thinks here first of Ulysses and the “good man” Leopold Bloom, but all of Joyce’s works explore that question, including Finnegans Wake. 2
The other way to consider Joyce’s relationship to philosophy, which is the approach of this book, is to examine the philosophical allusions within his works. One finds references to philosophy in Dubliners, Portrait, Exiles, and Ulysses. Yet none of those works point to philosophy as often as Joyce’s last. The Wake contains more philosophical allusions than any of Joyce’s other works, and it references a broader range of thinkers than any other text in Joyce’s oeuvre.
For this reason, Finnegans Wake criticism has frequently explored the philosophical allusions within Joyce’s last novel. The very first work to do this was Samuel Beckett’s “Dante. Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” That essay was the first piece in the collection Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, which was published in 1929, ten years prior to Finnegans Wake, when that novel was still known as Work in Progress. While Our Exagmination ascribes its twelve essays to twelve different authors, there was one man who guided them all. In a letter to Valery Larbaud, Joyce said, “I did stand behind those twelve Marshals more or less directing them what lines of research to follow” (Letters I, 283). This was certainly the case with Beckett’s essay. Joyce
1 Kitcher, “Introduction,” 16.
2 Joyce said of Bloom: “I see him from all sides, and therefore he is all-round in the sense of your sculptor’s figure. But he is a complete man as well—a good man. At any rate, that is what I intend that he shall be.” (Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses and Other Writings, 17–18.)
commissioned that essay from the young Beckett, gave him the subject matter, and provided him with many of the essay’s key ideas. Beckett’s title includes the names of two Italian philosophers, Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico, and the latter dominates the essay. The bulk of “Dante. . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” is devoted to explaining Vico’s philosophy and to showing how Work in Progress references that philosophy.
Beckett’s essay led the way in a field whose central works include James Atherton’s The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1959), Clive Hart’s Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (1962), John Bishop’s Joyce’s Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake (1986), and Donald Phillip Verene’s Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and Finnegans Wake (2003). Like “Dante. Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” these books focus primarily on Vico. The other philosopher in the title of Beckett’s essay receives little to no attention within them. The privileging of Vico over Bruno in these books is broadly representative of how Wake studies has approached those two philosophers. The only book devoted to Bruno’s influence on the Wake is Frances Boldereff’s 1968 work, Hermes to His Son Thoth: Being Joyce’s Use of Giordano Bruno in Finnegans Wake. This is an idiosyncratic text that has little in common with the aforementioned studies of Vico’s role in Joyce’s last novel. Yet, while the definitive book on Joyce and Bruno remains to be written, that relationship has been successfully examined in book chapters and articles by critics like Gareth Joseph Downes, Federico Sabatini, and Theoharis C. Theoharis.3
The most recent major exploration of the philosophical allusions in Finnegans Wake is Verene’s 2016 work, James Joyce and the Philosophers at Finnegans Wake. As one would expect from a celebrated Vico scholar, Verene’s book focuses primarily on Vico. Two of the five chapters are devoted to him, and the chapter on Beckett’s “Dante. Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” mostly discusses the third figure within the title of that essay. At the same time, Verene’s book also has a chapter on Bruno and Nicholas of Cusa, as well as a chapter that considers many of the other philosophers to whom the Wake alludes. After the book’s five chapters, there is a very helpful appendix titled “Register of Philosophers at the Wake” that offers a list of the philosophers referenced in Joyce’s last novel.
My book builds upon the insights of the works mentioned above. Its approach is not to elucidate every philosophical reference within Joyce’s last novel, but rather to examine how the Wake references the philosophers who feature most
3 Downes has published several articles on Joyce’s relationship to Bruno, including “The Heretical Auctoritas of Giordano Bruno: The Significance of the Brunonian Presence in James Joyce’s The Day of the Rabblement and Stephen Hero,” in Joyce Studies Annual, 14 (2003): 37–73. Sabatini has also written many articles on Joyce and Bruno, most notably “James Joyce and Giordano Bruno: An ‘Immarginable’ and Interdisciplinary Dialogue,” in Daniel Ferrer, Sam Slote, and André Topia (eds.), Renascent Joyce (Florida James Joyce Series. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 25–37. Theoharis has a chapter on Joyce’s understanding of Bruno in his excellent book Joyce’s Ulysses: An Anatomy of the Soul (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
prominently within it. In conducting this examination, the book carefully explores the Wake’s allusions to a range of great philosophers including Aquinas, Aristotle, Bergson, Berkeley, Nicholas of Cusa, Hegel, Spinoza, Plato, and, of course, Vico and Bruno.
When considering the myriad philosophical references within Joyce’s final work, it is helpful to have a sense of Joyce’s knowledge of philosophy. As Fran O’Rourke observes, while Joyce only formally encountered philosophy during his time at University College Dublin through his classes on logic, all of Joyce’s studies at that university “took place within an atmosphere permeated by Aristotelian Scholasticism.”4 This sparked an abiding interest in philosophy within Joyce, and that interest can be seen in his works, his notes, his libraries, and his numerous utterances on that field. That being said, as Sam Slote observes, Joyce did “not actively engage in the history of philosophy in a sustained manner.”5 For this reason, while Joyce knew of many different philosophers, he lacked a detailed understanding of how those philosophers fit into the larger philosophical tradition. Furthermore, his education did not give him the skills to interpret works of philosophy or to engage with philosophical ideas as a trained philosopher would. One can therefore understand why O’Rourke says that “Joyce’s attitude to philosophical questions was that of the amateur: fascinated, wondering but still puzzled.”6
When Joyce drew upon the discipline of philosophy during the writing of Finnegans Wake, he did so as an artist utilizing a resource to enrich and develop an artwork. Joyce was happy to transform philosophers and philosophical ideas to suit his aesthetic and conceptual purposes. Accuracy of representation was not one of his goals. One must therefore be careful in how one interprets the philosophical allusions in Finnegans Wake.
For example, within the Wake there are three recurring structures that point to philosophical ideas: the thunderwords allude to the fact that, in Vico’s historical scheme, the first era begins with the first storm after the mighty flood of the Book of Genesis; the four-part cycles reference the cycles of Vico’s model of history; and the numerous plays on the name “Browne and Nolan” evoke Bruno’s principle of the coincidence of contraries. On first glance, the relationships between those structures and those ideas seem straightforward. Yet, when one examines those relationships more carefully, one can recognize their complexity. The thunderwords point to a key moment in Vico’s conception of history, but they do not embody an idea within Vico’s thought. The cycles of the Wake derive from those of Vico, but they are different to them in a number of important ways. Joyce’s novel consistently alludes to Bruno’s principle of the coincidence of contraries
4 O’Rourke, Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas, 12.
5 Humphreys, “How Does James Joyce Rate as a Philosopher?”
6 Humphreys, “How Does James Joyce Rate as a Philosopher?”
but, when it offers that principle, what is offered is quite different to Bruno’s principle. On each occasion, Joyce redefines the idea he has borrowed.
Furthermore, within the Wake the most significant philosophical allusions are often those that connect philosophers or philosophical ideas to characters within the novel. These characters are usually versions of Shem or Shaun. Linking philosophers and philosophical ideas to particular characters helps Joyce to define the identities and worldviews of those characters. It also often allows him to define his own position. This is because Shem and Shaun frequently represent Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. Joyce’s relationship with Lewis collapsed during the writing of Finnegans Wake, and so Lewis is regularly presented within that novel as Joyce’s antagonist. There are consequently a number of scenes within the Wake in which the philosophers and philosophical ideas that are connected to Shem are also connected to Joyce and the thinkers and ideas that are aligned with Shaun are also aligned with Lewis and, thereby, against Joyce. These scenes offer insights into how Joyce saw his relationship to particular philosophers and philosophical ideas. At the same time, the manner in which Joyce connects characters to thinkers and ideas is not always so helpful. There are characters within the Wake who principally represent philosophers. The best known such character is book four’s Balkelly, a Wakean rendering of George Berkeley. What makes these characters difficult to fully define is that, while Joyce ties each of them to a particular philosopher, he often ascribes to these characters ideas and actions that do not accord with the philosophies of the thinkers they represent. One must therefore be cautious in how one characterizes the relationship between such a character and the philosopher that inspired them.
As can be seen, the Wake’s philosophical allusions offer many challenges. In this book, I respond to those challenges by examining such allusions using a form of the following procedure. First, I offer a concise introduction to the original form of the referenced philosophical idea that explains where and when that idea first appeared and how it was understood by its originator. After this, I look at Joyce’s initial interaction with that idea and show both how he acquired it and how he first understood it. Joyce’s notes and non-fiction writings are invaluable resources for locating his initial impressions of philosophical ideas. When necessary, I then demonstrate how Joyce’s conception of the idea in question developed over time. This is often required because Joyce gathered most of the philosophical ideas referenced in the Wake years before he began that work, and, when Joyce retained a philosophical idea for a long period of time, that idea invariably evolved in his mind. In the last stage of the process, I turn my attention to the piece of text within the passage under examination that references Joyce’s conception of the idea in question at the time of writing. In examining that piece of text, I offer its earliest version, show how Joyce incorporates that version into a draft, and then follow the evolution of that piece of text as it moves across drafts and into the Wake. The purpose of this methodical approach is to illuminate every
stage in the production of a philosophical reference. This is the only means of fully demonstrating how such references operate.
Just as it is important to consider how the Wake’s philosophical references function in themselves, so it is equally important to assess how they work together. This is because the Wake’s philosophical references frequently appear in clusters that bring together the ideas of different philosophers. While Joyce sometimes connects philosophers in order to suggest parallels between their ideas, he at other times unites philosophers in order to set them in opposition. In examining a passage in which philosophers are connected, I follow a similar procedure to the one described above. After considering the passage’s philosophical references in the usual manner, I then explain the relationship between the philosophers that the passage connects. This explanation focuses on the aspects of their philosophies that are referenced in the passage under analysis. In the next phase of the procedure, I follow the development of Joyce’s conception of the relationship between the philosophers in question. This is not always possible, but there are a number of thinkers that Joyce continually groups together. Aristotle and Aquinas is the classic example of this. Lastly, I explore how the passage under consideration defines the relationship between the philosophers it connects. To offer a basic example of this, if one thinker within a pair is aligned with the character of Shem and the other with that of Shaun, then, by virtue of the largely antagonistic relationship between those characters, those two thinkers are primarily defined as being opposed to one another.
What differentiates this book from most prior studies of the philosophical allusions in Joyce’s last work is less how it explores those allusions and more how it reads the Wake. Most of the critics who have examined the Wake’s philosophical allusions—and this includes the likes of Atherton, Hart, Bishop, and Verene— have read the Wake by looking at particular words and phrases from throughout the novel. They rarely look at clauses or sentences, let alone larger units like speeches or paragraphs. In the works of these critics, individual words and phrases are either considered by themselves or woven together. Here is an example of the latter approach from Bishop:
The Wake, in turn, not simply resists visualization, but actively encourages its reader not to visualize much in its pages, where “it darkles . . . all this our funnaminal world” (244.13). Because HCE passes through the night “with his eyes shut” (130.19), he regards the world from the interior of “blackeye lenses” (183.17) sunk in “eyes darkled” (434.31) and kept firmly “SHUT” behind “a bind of black” (182.32-3); through the “eyewitless foggus” of this “benighted irismaimed” (489.31 [his eyes “benighted,” each “iris maimed”]), we regard a universe of profound “unsightliness” (131.19).7
7 Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, 217.
The words and phrases quoted in this passage do not derive from a single section of the Wake, but are rather drawn from chapters from across the novel. What’s more, as can be seen from the page and line references, the quoted words and phrases are not used in the order in which they appear in the Wake.
There are two good reasons why the studies of Joyce’s last work that have examined its philosophical allusions have frequently read that novel by focusing on particular words and phrases from across its whole span. The first is that the Wake’s references to philosophy are distributed unevenly throughout the novel. It is often the case that references to a particular philosopher can be found in several different chapters. To offer just one example of this, the chapters that contain references to Aristotle include I.5, I.6, II.2, III.1, and III.3. It is therefore difficult to speak of any one philosopher’s role within the text by focusing on only one section or even one chapter of the novel. Since the density of the Wake makes it extremely difficult for regularly sized monographs to discuss large sections of it in any detail, it is understandable that critics looking to examine the Wake’s scattered references to a particular philosopher have frequently chosen to read that novel by focusing on textual fragments drawn from multiple chapters.
The second reason why studies of the Wake’s philosophical allusions have frequently read that novel through words and phrases rather than clauses or sentence relates to the manner in which the Wake was written. In Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, Hart observes that “the sentence in Finnegans Wake is hardly ever the unit of composition.”8 For all that Joyce’s compositional methods during the writing of the Wake were numerous, complex, and unstable, Hart is not wrong here. The sentences of the Wake are usually long, elaborate sentences that contain many parts. Joyce generally did not write these sentences from beginning to end. Most often, he began with a comparatively simple core sentence and then expanded it repeatedly through the addition of words, phrases, and clauses. This is why the sentences of the Wake are usually heterogenous masses that have homogenous sections within them. Critics of all kinds, not only those interested in philosophy, have often responded to the Wake’s sentence structures by focusing on individual words and phrases, as this allows a critic to look at particular parts of a sentence without having to work through the whole.
I take a different approach to reading the Wake in this book. Each chapter focuses on a section of Joyce’s novel that contains a number of significant philosophical allusions. These sections are generally only a few pages long. This approach was inspired by one of the best recent books on the Wake, Finn Fordham’s Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals. My reading style is similar to that of Fordham, but it is not entirely the same. Whereas he reads the sections on which he focuses genetically, which is to say that he follows
8 Hart, Structure and Motif, 40.
the composition of each section from its first draft to the version that appears in the Wake, I focus on the text of the Wake and read each of my chosen sections from beginning to end. For the purposes of space, I do not consider every sentence or even every paragraph within a section. Rather, I privilege the passages within each section that contain philosophical allusions. I use this reading style because it allows the Wake’s philosophical allusions to be considered within their contexts. When one isolates a philosophical allusion by plucking a word or phrase from a sentence, there is no way of accurately judging the nature of that allusion because there is no way of knowing how it is informed by the surrounding text.
As regards Hart’s idea that “the sentence in Finnegans Wake is hardly ever the unit of composition,” this is undoubtedly an important idea that should influence every reading of the Wake 9 At the same time, it is also important to acknowledge that Joyce’s novel is largely made up of sentences. Long, complex, challenging sentences certainly, but sentences nonetheless. Therefore, rather than abstracting particular words and phrases and regarding them as independent units, it is more appropriate to treat the Wake as consisting of sentences made up of parts that have an integrity of their own. In examining a sentence within Joyce’s last novel, one should consider its parts, its whole, and the relationship between the two. Happily, thanks to the greater availability of the Joyce archive and the heroic efforts of genetic Joyce scholars, it is now easier than ever to understand how the sentences of the Wake operate. In looking at the drafts of a sentence, one can see how the sentence evolved during the composition process and so gain an understanding of both the parts into which the sentence is divided and how those parts unite to form the whole. This is one of the main reasons why the readings in this book consistently draw upon archival materials, such as Joyce’s drafts and notes.
Naturally, the downside of my approach to reading the Wake is that, in discussing how that novel alludes to a particular philosopher, I cannot examine all of the Wake’s allusions to that philosopher. I respond to this problem within the book by focusing on the sections of the Wake in which Joyce most consistently and purposefully references the key philosophers of the novel. For example, Chapter 1 considers the role of Vico in the Wake by looking at a section of I.5. That section contains two paragraphs in which Joyce repeatedly references Vico and points to numerous aspects of his thought. While the Wake contains a multitude of references to Vico, there is no other section of the novel that so frequently alludes to Vico’s ideas. Consequently, while one cannot obtain a complete sense of how the Wake references Vico from examining those paragraphs, one can certainly gain an understanding of many important facets of how it does so.
This book’s methodology allows it to demonstrate that the Wake’s references to philosophy collectively create a network of ideas, thinkers, and texts. For all the
9 Hart, Structure and Motif, 40.
intricacy of this network, it has a logic and an integrity. At its center sit Joyce’s interpretations of Vico’s model of history and Bruno’s principle of the coincidence of contraries. All of the other philosophical ideas that play a significant role within the text are defined in relation to Joyce’s conceptions of those ideas. This is principally done through the characters of Shem and Shaun. Joyce connects Vico, Bruno, and all the philosophers he views as their kin to Shem. Since Shem and Shaun are in many ways opposites, it makes sense for Joyce to associate Shaun with all the thinkers he views as opposing Vico’s model of history and/or Bruno’s principle of the coincidence of contraries. Joyce gives the reader a sense of his stance toward to this division by repeatedly associating himself with Shem and his antagonist Lewis with Shaun. In presenting and explaining this network, this book shows how the Wake’s philosophical allusions function, how they fit together, and how Joyce uses them to define his relationships to the ideas referenced by them.
The History of the Letter
(FW 116.36–119.09)
As mentioned in the introduction, the idea that Vico plays an important role in Joyce’s final work was first put forward by Samuel Beckett in his 1929 essay “Dante Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” and it has been a critical mainstay ever since. Many Wake scholars have argued that Joyce’s novel was heavily influenced by Vico’s major work, Scienza Nuova (New Science). John Bishop, for example, asserts that Joyce “seems to have conceived of the New Science, in fact, as an intellectual foundation that would underlie Finnegans Wake as The Odyssey had Ulysses.”1 In recent decades, however, the idea that Vico’s philosophy is integral to the Wake has been challenged. Textual scholars have looked carefully at how Joyce gathered the Viconian terms and ideas that he utilizes within his novel, and their findings have brought into question the nature of Joyce’s interest in Vico. Wim Van Mierlo, for example, has contended that the “dissipation of thematic interest” within Joyce’s notes on Vico in notebook VI.B.1 makes it “clear” that, in taking those notes, Joyce “was not looking for any intelligible and comprehensive summary of Vico’s philosophy.”2 Textual scholars have also examined how Joyce incorporated his references to Vico into the text and have suggested that Vico is not always the point of origin for the passages that reference him. For instance, Andrew Treip has argued that, when Joyce made Viconian additions to the drafts of II.4, he did so in order to enhance pre-existing aspects of the text.3 This chapter will explore the debate regarding Vico’s role within the Wake by examining a section of I.5 that is full of references to Vico. That examination will demonstrate both how those references allude to Vico’s ideas and how they relate to the larger concerns of the chapter in which they appear.
1 Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, 176.
2 Van Mierlo, “Finnegans Wake and the Question of Histry!?,” 62.
3 See Andrew Treip, “Lost Histereve: Vichian Soundings and Reverberations in the Genesis of Finnegans Wake II.4,” 641–57.
To understand the Vico references in I.5, one must begin by examining the history of Joyce’s interest in Vico’s philosophy.4 The exact starting date of this interest is difficult to locate. Verene observes that Joyce may have been introduced to Vico between 1898 and 1902 by his Italian teacher at University College Dublin, Father Charles Ghezzi.5 As captured in Portrait, Ghezzi spoke to the young Joyce about Bruno and so was evidently happy to discuss Italian philosophy with his students.6 While at University College Dublin, Joyce may also have heard of Vico through reading Raffaello Fornaciari’s Disegno storico della letteratura italiana (Historical Outline of Italian Literature), which contains a number of positive references to Vico. Constantine Curran, who attended University College Dublin at the same time as Joyce, says that Joyce was reading this book in 1901.7 However, Joyce’s first biographer, Herbert Gorman, argues that Joyce’s initial interaction with Vico came after he left university. According to Gorman, “Giambattista Vico and his Scienza Nuova . . . must have penetrated the subconscious mind of Joyce” in 1904 during Joyce’s stint as a teacher at Clifton School in Dalkey.8 Max Harold Fisch goes one year later and claims that Joyce “read and digested Vico in Trieste about 1905.”9 While none of these possible dates for Joyce’s discovery of Vico can be dismissed, it is also the case that none can presently be substantiated. One of the reasons it is hard to say when Joyce discovered Vico is that it is difficult to define what discovery means in such a context. Joyce may, for example, have read of Vico in Fornaciari’s book in 1901, but that was not necessarily the encounter that sparked Joyce’s enthusiasm for Vico.
What can be said with greater certainty is that, by the early 1910s, Joyce was an admirer of Vico. Evidence for this comes from Joyce’s conversations with Paolo Cuzzi, a Triestine lawyer who took English lessons with Joyce between 1911 and 1913. As Joseph Mali observes, the meetings between the two “took place at Joyce’s home in via Donato Bramante 4, right on the Piazza Giambattista Vico.”10 It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that the two should have discussed Vico. Richard Ellmann describes their conversations:
But often their subjects were less predictable, as when Cuzzi, who was studying Vico in school, discovered that Joyce was also passionately interested in the Neapolitan philosopher. Freud too became a subject of conversation. Cuzzi was
4 Arthur Walton Litz, Donald Phillip Verene, and Joseph Mali have all examined the development of Joyce’s interest in Vico. The account that follows draws from all three of those examinations. See Litz, “Vico and Joyce,” 245–55; Verene, Knowledge of Things Human and Divine, 10–20; and Mali, The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History, 74–8.
5 Verene, Knowledge of Things Human and Divine, 10. 6 See P 271.
7 Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 121. 8 Gorman, James Joyce, 114–15.
9 Fisch, “Introduction,” 97. 10 Mali, The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History, 77.
reading Freud’s Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, and he talked with Joyce about slips of the tongue and their significance. Joyce listened attentively, but remarked that Freud had been anticipated by Vico.11
This quote shows Joyce’s belief in the significance of Vico’s philosophy as well as his sense of its breadth. Joyce portrays Vico neither as a philosopher nor a historian, but rather as a proto-psychologist. What’s more, in bringing Vico into a discussion of verbal slips, Joyce offers early evidence of his interest in Vico’s ideas on speech and language.
Around the same time as Joyce was discussing Vico with Cuzzi, he was also taking notes from commentaries on Vico. In the Cornell collection of Joyce’s papers, there are three pages of notes on Vico.12 These pages consist of typed paragraphs in English and Italian. The paragraphs in English are from the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was published between 1909 and 1911. The source of the Italian paragraphs has not been identified. Andrew Treip argues that they come from Benedetto Croce’s La Filosofia di Giambattista Vico (The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico), which was published in 1911. He supports this idea by pointing to the fact that Croce’s book was published around the same time as the edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica from which Joyce drew his English notes on Vico.13 The reason Treip cannot be more definitive in his identification is that the Italian paragraphs in Joyce’s notes on Vico are not direct quotes from Croce’s book on Vico. If those paragraphs do derive from that book, they must be summaries or paraphrases. While the lack of a clear source for the Italian paragraphs makes it difficult to date Joyce’s notes on Vico, it seems most likely, based on the available evidence, that they were written shortly after 1911.
The notes on Vico in the Cornell collection have three main themes. Several of the paragraphs in both English and Italian consider Vico’s theories of historical development and especially the idea that the histories of nations move in threepart cycles. Indeed, the whole first page is devoted to this subject. The other paragraphs often focus on Vico’s ideas regarding the evolution of language and, in particular, the role of myth within that evolution. There are also two paragraphs that discuss Homer and consider the relationship between poetry and philosophy. Of these three themes, the first is particularly striking because that is the aspect of Vico’s thought that Joyce would principally reference in the Wake. While there is evidence that Joyce was interested in Vico in the 1910s, this interest is not immediately apparent in the texts he worked on during that decade. The word “Vico” appears in Ulysses, but only within the name of the Vico Road in
11 Ellmann, James Joyce, 340. It is worth noting that the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Vico from which Joyce took notes speaks of Vico as having “made the original discovery of certain ideas which constitute the modern psychologico-historic method” (“Vico, Giovanni Battista,” 23).
12 See Cornell–1–3; JJA 3:391–3. 13 Treip, “The Cornell Notes on Vico,” 218.
Dalkey, and there are no hints that Joyce’s mention of this road is intended to serve as a reference to Vico.14 Since Vico is also missing from Joyce’s remarks on Ulysses, it seems that Joyce did not regard Vico’s ideas as being directly relevant to that novel.
By contrast, there is plenty of evidence of Joyce’s interest in Vico during the writing of Wake. Joyce urged friends such as Padraic Colum, Constantine Curran, and Harriet Shaw Weaver to read the New Science in order to understand his new work.15 When Colum responded to Joyce’s request by indicating that he could not read the New Science in the original Italian, Joyce directed him toward the French translation by the historian Jules Michelet.16 Joyce also took notes on Vico during the composition of the Wake. Notebook VI.B.1 contains two clusters of notes that relate to him.17 The Brepols edition of that notebook identifies some of those notes as deriving from the same Encyclopedia Britannica article that Joyce used for his earlier notes on Vico, but the sources of most of those notes are as yet unknown.18 In addition to appearing in Joyce’s notebooks, Vico also pops up in Joyce’s readings of the Wake. For example, in a November 1926 letter to Weaver in which he explains the opening page of the novel, Joyce glosses the word “passencore” as “pas encore and ricorsi storici of Vico” (FW 3.04–05).19 (The term “ricorsi storici” here points to Vico’s idea that the ideal cycles of history return to their starting points once they have completed all three of their stages.) The reference to Vico within Joyce’s explanation of the first page of the Wake is important because, as is often pointed out, that page references many of the major ideas within the novel. Vico’s presence on page one is therefore quite the accolade.
For all the evidence of Joyce’s enthusiasm for Vico during the writing of the Wake, one of the key questions that has yet to be answered is whether Joyce read the New Science in the original Italian. He was certainly familiar with Michelet’s French translation, but, as will be discussed later, Michelet’s translation is more of an adaptation than an accurate rendering of the original. No editions of the New Science have been found in Joyce’s libraries and none of his notes have been shown to derive directly from that work. Although it seems probable that Joyce read the New Science in the Italian original at some stage, no conclusive evidence has been offered to show that this is the case.
14 See U 2.25.
15 See Ellmann, James Joyce, 564; Colum and Colum, Our Friend James Joyce, 122; and Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 86–7.
16 Colum and Colum, Our Friend James Joyce, 122.
17 The first cluster is on pages 96–7 and the second is on pages 114–17. For the first, see VI.B.1: 96–7; JJA 29:50, and for the second see VI.B.1: 114–17; JJA 29:59–60.
18 Joyce, The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo. Notebook VI. B.1, 155–6. Treip suggests that the notes on pages 96–7 “probably derive from some extensive Italian text commenting on Vico’s New Science” (Treip, “Histories of Sexuality: Vico and Roman Marriage Law in Finnegans Wake,” 183).
19 Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce, 317.
That being said, Joyce’s written and spoken remarks on Vico during the writing of the Wake evidence a knowledge of many of Vico’s ideas. Joyce’s familiarity with those ideas is also demonstrated by the complexity of the Wake’s references to Vico’s New Science. Yet, to be interested in a thinker is not necessarily to agree with that thinker, and Joyce’s enthusiasm for Vico’s ideas should not be taken as a sign that he fully supported them. When Joyce wrote or spoke of Vico, it was often with ambivalence. For instance, Tom Kristensen asked him if he believed in Vico’s new science and Joyce responded, “I don’t believe in any science, but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung.”20 Similarly, when Jacques Mercanton brought up the subject of Vico, Joyce remarked:
I don’t know whether Vico’s theory is true; it doesn’t matter. It’s useful to me; that’s what counts.21
Arguably the most telling of all of Joyce’s comments on Vico’s theories is to be found in a 1926 letter to Weaver:
I would not pay overmuch attention to these theories beyond using them for all they are worth, but they have gradually forced themselves on me through circumstances of my own life. I wonder where Vico got his fear of thunderstorms. It is almost unknown to the male Italians I have met. (Letters I, 241)
These three quotes all contain both a dismissal of Vico’s ideas and a suggestion of their value. In the first, Joyce locates the value of Vico’s writings in how they foster his imagination. By speaking of his imagination rather than his knowledge or his understanding, Joyce here defines Vico’s writings more as art than works of history or philosophy. The second and third quotes are similar in that they both characterize Vico’s theories as being “useful.”22 By this, Joyce seems to mean that Vico’s theories provided him with ideas that he could adapt to suit his purposes and then integrate into his writings. What makes the third quote different to the other two is that it contains a new element. After rejecting Vico’s theories and then pointing to their worth, Joyce goes on to suggest that there is a sense in which he finds Vico’s theories to be true. Joyce says that those theories have “forced themselves” on him through the “circumstances” of his “own life” (Letters I, 241). He here suggests that he considers Vico’s theories to be true insofar as they have been supported by his personal experiences. Joyce then goes on to provide an example of this by speaking of Vico’s “fear of thunderstorms” (Letters I, 241). Such storms play a key role in Vico’s thought. In the New Science, the first thunderclaps and lightning strikes after the end of the great flood of the Book of Genesis scare
20 Ellmann, James Joyce, 693. 21 Mercanton, “The Hours of James Joyce,” 207.
22 Mercanton, “The Hours of James Joyce,” 207.
mankind into conceiving of its gods and this begins the first cycles of history.23 Since Joyce was also terrified of thunderstorms, it makes sense that he would find an element of truth in this notion. What’s more, when Joyce speaks of Vico’s “fear of thunderstorms,” he suggests that Vico’s understanding of history was informed by the circumstances of his own life (Letters I, 241). In offering this suggestion, Joyce defines Vico’s histories as containing both events that are true in that they actually took place and events that reveal truth by representing the character of their creator. One can understand why Joyce, as a creator of semi-autobiographical fictions, would relate to such an approach. The personal connection between the two is one of the reasons why Vico is so frequently referenced in the Wake
Viconian Cycles
The section of the Wake that is densest with Vico references occurs in I.5, the chapter about the letter that the hen Biddy Doran finds in a dump. Over the course of the chapter, the narrator examines every aspect of the letter, from its authorship to its handwriting to even the envelope in which it was sent. This allows Joyce to consider a number of the major challenges of textual interpretation. The chapter’s key references to Vico can be found in FW 116.36–117.32, a passage that Joyce created as an addition to an existing discussion of the letter.24 That passage begins by focusing on the subject of love:
So hath been, love: tis tis: and will be: till wears and tears and ages. Thief us the night, steal we the air, shawl thiner liefest, mine! Here, Ohere, insult the fair! Traitor, bad hearer, brave! (FW 116.36–117.02)
The key sentence here is the first: “So hath been, love: tis tis: and will be: till wears and tears and ages.” Love is here described as a transhistorical phenomenon that has been, is, and will be. At the same time, love is also presented as something that has a fixed life span. To say that love exists “till wears and tears and ages” is to suggest that a love can become old and worn and begin to fall apart. The word “tears” functions in a double sense because it points both to the destruction of love and to the weeping that so often results from such destruction. However, if love is always of a finite length, it may be that that length is great. Just as the term “ages” can be taken to suggest that love can grow old, so one can also read it as suggesting that love “will be” until ages have passed. Evidently, the temporality of
23 See Vico, The New Science, §62, 53. [Citations of Vico’s works in this book take the form: Vico, Title of Work, Paragraph Number, Page Number.]
24 The JJA dates the first draft of FW 116.36–117.32 as “probably June 1927” (JJA 46:419). No date is provided for the first draft of the preceding section, FW 115.11–116.35, but the second draft is dated “March 1925” (JJA 46:321). The earliest draft of the following section, FW 117.33–119.09, is dated “December–January 1923–1924” (JJA 46:297).
love is a complex matter. This is the most important sentence of the opening four because, in thinking about how love exists both within and without time, it points to issues that will become of central importance in the discussion that follows. As the paragraph continues, it proceeds to reference Vico:
The lightning look, the birding cry, awe from the grave, everflowing on the times. Feueragusaria iordenwater; now godsun shine on menday’s daughter; a good clap, a fore marriage, a bad wake, tell hell’s well; such is manowife’s lot of lose and win again, like he’s gruen quhiskers on who’s chin again, she plucketed them out but they grown in again. So what are you going to do about it? O dear!
(FW 117.03–09)
These sentences contain two examples of a form that is commonly known within Wake criticism as a Viconian cycle. The first is the first sentence: “The lightning look, the birding cry, awe from the grave, everflowing on the times.” The second appears within the second sentence: “a good clap, a fore marriage, a bad wake, tell hell’s well.” These cycles are just two among the many that can be found within the book. According to Fweet, a website that offers annotations to Finnegans Wake, there are forty-nine such cycles in the Wake as a whole.25 Joyce made the connection between his cycles and those of Vico explicit when he said of Vico, “I use his cycles as a trellis.”26 Vico’s cycles are here defined as a framework from which Joyce could grow his text. That Joyce should focus on Vico’s cycles in the Wake is not surprising. Those cycles are one of the best-known features of Vico’s thought, and Joyce had shown his interest in them as early as the notes in the Cornell collection.
The work in which Vico most fully defines his historical cycles is the New Science. For the sake of ease, this is commonly referred to as a single work, but there were in fact three editions, and each is quite different. As Leon Pompa explains, Vico significantly revised the first edition of 1725 for the second edition of 1730. He then made a number of additions to the second edition in order to create the third edition, which was published posthumously in 1744.27 Within Vico criticism, it is common to identify the three editions as the First New Science, the Second New Science, and the Third New Science. The standard edition is the third because that is where Vico most fully explains his ideas. All of the evidence of Joyce’s knowledge of the New Science suggests that the edition he knew was the Third New Science
To understand how Vico’s historical cycles operate within that edition, one must first gain a sense of the primary mode of history offered by the Third New Science This can be done by looking at a section of the introduction to that edition in which Vico discusses his methodology:
25 “Fweets of Fin (_M,ViconianCycle_) with FW Text.”
