Many critics reject the notion of stable narrative meaning in Finnegans Wake,(1) but upon learning of the 'fall of a once wallstrait oldparr'(2) being 'retaled early in bed and later on down through all Christian minstrelsy,'(3) perhaps we find a narrative of this very instability. That is, if it is the confusion surrounding the fall of Earwicker that leads to the dissolution of narrative stability, this instability is itself incorporated into the very fall narrative it embodies. The underlying 'motif' of Finnegans Wake; the seduction of HCE in the park by the young maids, the observance of this transgression by the three soldiers and the attempt by ALP to redeem her husband through an explanatory letter (delivered by Shaun; written by Shem) is an atomic theme, repeated endlessly in its many iterations. It subverts and lays claim to almost all other narratives. Within this destabilising master narrative, certain tropic elements - in particular guilt and fallenness - are explored more as ontological constituents of character than traditional thematic constructs. That is, as David Hayman observes,
Joyce seems first to have located his archetypes and then to have discovered himself and his world in them. The movement was from the archetype to the contemporary, to the personal, from the eternal to the (submerged) present.(4)
Joyce's everyperson archetypes provide an existential structure in terms of which the personal subject is understood. The ontological constituents of these archetypes provide a peculiar presubjective, non-temporal narrativity whereby HCE and ALP are by turn guilt ridden, subject to idle talk and redeemed in their very being. The subject has here fallen into language, where it evades attempts at theoretical classification. As critic Jean-Michel Rabaté notes 'We generally agree that any theory, while covering a certain field, also designates by its elaboration a gap, an empty space which it attempts to bridge, to fill in, to recover. In the case of the Wake, however, the real object of narratology may prove to be the gap itself'(5) The structure of the subject is formed around a pre-theoretical lack, or gap. The narrative subject of Finnegans Wake is not man as he is revealed by scientific theory or literary allegory. Nor is it even, as Donald Theall(6) avers, the machinic processes upon which these theories and allegories are predicated(7); for it is clear that these processes - correctly and skillfully identified by Theall - themselves tear apart the fixed identify of the subject and are hence a cause of its dissolution. No, the subject of the narrative of Finnegans Wake is something very like Martin Heidegger’s notion of Dasein; the site upon which anything like a subject can show up. As Alan Roughley notes, if we 'consider ALP and HCE as simulacra of what Heidegger designates as Dasein, perhaps we will discover that a comparative reading forms a 'necessary part of our 'rocky road' into the Wake'(8)(9). With a view to adumbrating this similarity I will now explore this shared site of narration - the pre-subjective structure of Being termed Dasein and the universal character archetype HCE – revealing how it is structurally bound-up with narratives of fallenness, guilt and the dangers of idle-chatter.
To begin our examination of fallenness in Finnegans Wake, I will present two long quotations exploring the text's notion of fallenness which will then be analysed in detail. Upon the 'fall of a once wallstrait oldparr,' we learn of Finn that,
The humptyhillhead of humself promptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy… Well, Him being so on the flounder of his bulk like an overgrown babeling... from the foot of the bill to ireglint’s eye he calmy extensolies.(10)
'Humptyhillhead' suggests the head of the fallen HCE (In his primordial incarnation as Big Master Finnegan) lies at the hill of Howth Castle (HCE is 'Howth Castle Environs). West of Howth hill lies the village of Chapelizod, with its turnpike, and Phoenix Park, where it is suggested Finn’s feet rest 'upturnpikepointandplace.' We are told that, lying prone he 'calmly extensolies', suggesting 'extended, so lies' with perhaps also an echo of 'existential.' We learn similarly of his son, Shaun that, as the four judges approach him to enquire into the nature of his Being,
Afeared themselves were to wonder at the class of a crossroads puzzler he would likely be, length by bredth nonplussing his thickness, ells upon ells of him, making so many square yards of him, one half of him in Conn’s half but the whole of him nevertheless in Owenmore’s five quarters. There would he lay till they would him descry, spancelled down upon a blossomy bed, at one foule stretch, amongst the daffydowndillies, the flowers of narcosis fourfettering his footlights, a halohedge of wild spuds hovering over him, epicures waltzing with gardenfillers, puritan shoots advancing to Aran chiefs.(11)
Shaun is described as lying across Ireland’s ancient divide between 'Conn’s half' and 'Owen’s half,' being covered by various kinds of potatoes (Flounders / Epicures / Garden Fillers / Aran Chiefs). Much like Dasein, HCE does not, in its regular, everyday comportment, encounter itself as a detached, Cartesian subject. Both Finn and Shaun are woven into the landscape. Like Dasein, HCE is an existential clearing in which man and world show up. If Dasein is said to be Being-in-the-world, HCE might be termed, in accordance with his publican profession, as Being-INN-the-world. The world of the Wake is not a simple 'wherein' of a narrative but a surreal manifestation bound-up with that narrative.
Let us examine the narrative more closely. According to McHugh, the etymology of the Basque word for orange is 'the fruit which was first eaten.'(12) Taken with the Irish flag we find in 'oranges laid to rust upon the green,' this suggests that the Irish nation is itself in some sense fallen. This Biblical imagery is enhanced when we realise that 'devlin first loved livvy' reveals not only a relationship between Dublin and the River Liffey but the Devil (as a tempting serpent) and Eve. We are even told that Finn lies like an overgrown 'babeling' (Tower of Babel). He is symbolised by the 'ш' rune depicting man’s prone state. Shaun is described as lying in 'one foule stretch' for 'ells upon ells,' a Miltonic metaphor reminding of Satan lying prostrate, outcast to the fires of Hell. This 'fall of a once wallstrait oldparr' is repeated endlessly in all forms of HCE from Adam to Shaun.
As statements of the recurring 'fall' theme, these Biblical and national images suggest that Irish religious and cultural structures have themselves grown out of the underlying structure of human being. We learn of HCE that 'Father Barley… got up of a morning arley and he met with a plattonem blondes names Hips and Haws,'(13) suggesting how the archetypal man, in his fallen state, is similar to John Barleycorn, a pagan symbol for the process of the barley harvest and brewing of beer and whiskey. The theme of Earwicker’s seduction by the two maids ('Hips' and 'Haws') finds echo here in the process of brewing beer. The world of the Wake is narratively bound to the fall of man. This narrative structure is imbricated into the very landscape itself.
Fallenness [Verfallenheit] is also an important aspect of Dasein, being associated with its authenticity [Eigentlichkeit]. Indeed, 'falling reveals an essential ontological structure of Dasein itself.'(14) Hubert Dreyfus outlines three forms of this structure: absorption, language and reflexivity.(15) Let us examine these. Dasein does not exist as a subject but is instead already bound up with the world such that it is the clearing-foundation in which human subjectivity shows up.
In falling, Dasein itself as factical Being-in-the-world, is something from which it has already fallen-away… [it] has fallen into the world, which itself belongs to its being.(16)
In the kind of handling and being-busy which is 'absorbed in the thing one is handling' … the essential structure of care – falling – makes itself known.(17)
The care structure of Dasein’s skilled coping makes falling a necessity. Only as result of its fallenness can something like a subject ('factical Being-in-the-world') emerge within the presubjective clearing of Dasein. This subject, or self, which emerges in Dasein, is given identity by the inherited for-the-sake-of-which (18) upon which Dasein takes a public stand. This possibility gives meaning to the 'handling and being-busy' of Dasein's daily concerns, and provides the identify upon which it publicly takes a stand. That is, in falling, Dasein interprets itself in terms of the care structure that reveals the 'there' into which it has fallen, the situation into which it is thrown [geworfen]. This situation is the nature of Dasein’s facticity. Dasein can never recover a grounded essence. It is always already thrown [geworfen] into Being in that its being is always already an issue for it. Dasein’s thrownness [Geworfenheit] is the content of its facticity [Faktizität], or worldly situation, flavoured by its state-of-mind [Befindlichkeit], or as William Blattner calls it, its 'attunement.' [Stimmung](19) Because it is thus fallen, and hence not grounded, Dasein is 'interpretation all the way down.'(20) It did not choose the thrownness of its existence but must inexorably take a stand on it.
As it is ungrounded in this way, occupying only public stations of Being, Heidegger speaks of Dasein having fallen into the one self [das Man] (an agreed upon way of public being). Unless Dasein comes to awareness of its existential throwness, and chooses to inhabit the one with resolute authenticity; that is, in a way that recognises its groundless nature but heroically presses towards a public identify nonetheless, Dasein obscures the anxiety of its own thrownness. In Finnegans Wake, Shem poses the question, 'when is a man not a man?' and answers 'when he is sham.' When is he 'sham'? When he 'yeat the abblokooken'(21) (eats the cooking apple), when he falls away from himself, when he loses himself in the one, when he covers over his own mortality. As Heidegger observers,
For the most part, everyday Dasein covers up the ownmost possibility of its Being – that possibility which is non-relational and not to be outstripped.(22)
Dasein, like HCE fleeing from his accusers, tries to deny its own structure. The 'possibility which is non-relational and not to be outstripped' is nothing other than the phenomenon of death, or Dasein's demise. For Shem and for Heidegger, men are not men when they evade the truth of their guilt, (and fo Heidegger, the truth of their death). As with Finnegans Wake, Being and Time appears to cultivate a peculiarly buried, non-temporal narrative, with Heidegger proposing that Dasein switches from inauthenticity to resoluteness after its conscience calls it to guilt.
While Dasein is always already fallen, severed from the nothingness of its roots, we are afforded a glimpse of HCE in a pre-fallen state, 'before he fell hill he filled heaven: a stream, alplapping streamlet, coyly coiled um, cool of her curls.'(23) Yet while this vista, an eirenic vision of male and female archetypes lying in coitus, demonstrates the harmonious interaction of HCE and ALP, it remains but a fleeting thought, and is rarely realised in all the ages of the Wake. HCE falls with the first thunderclap, announcing the end of the ginnungagap (in Norse mythology the void before time), the brief moment before the Vichian ages reset themselves and the cycle begins anew. Far from 'filling heaven,' he is brought low by the scandalous rann (satirical song once used to humiliate ancient Irish kings) composed by his detractors. This song, 'The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly' (perhaps a pun on the female genitalia and a garrulous 'oh really?') chortles with loquacious glee, humiliatingly asking all and sundry:
Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty / How he fell with a roll and a rumble… He was one time our King of the Castle / Now he’s kicked about like a rotten old parsnip.(24)
Although we are told that at one time HCE was 'King of the Castle,' as with the Edenic vision, this is rarely substantiated in actuality. The facticity, in Heideggerian terminology, of HCE seems to always inherit the thrownness of its fall. It is the rann that holds sway throughout Lucalizod.
The wararrow went round, so it did, (a nation wants a gaze) and the ballad… stump-stampaded on to a slip of blancovide and headed by an excessively rough and red woodcut, privately printed at the rimepress of Delville, soon fluttered its secrets on white highway and brown byway to the rose of the winds and the blew of the gaels, from archway to lattice and from black hand to pink ear, village crying to village, through the five pussyfours green of the united states of Scotia Picta(25)
Thus the intoxicated song spreads across Ireland (Scotia) as a 'war arrow' and brings low Earwicker. Just as Heidegger notes that we never encounter an objective present 'east wind' but rather 'wind in the sails'(26) it would seem here that the rann 'flutters its secrets… to the rose of the wrings and the blew of the gaels.' The very elements themselves are disclosed by the narrative fall. As well as signifying Ireland, Scotia may also be suggestive of Duns Scotus, renowned for his univocal ontology and doctrine of the categories. If we allow ourselves this interpretation, the 'united states' may perhaps refer to his categories of Being, with the rann itself the univocity, or 'one voice' of Being itself(27). Given this reading, Being itself is a comedic and humiliating song with human being the fallen sinner thrust into its midst. The singers of the rann may hold themselves to have embarked on a Dionysiac dance but in their dreamlike, Appoline facticity they constantly morph into HCE himself. One is left to contemplate whether the song of Being is a Nietzschean wisdom of Silenus, that the truth of human existence is that it would have been better for it to never exist at all.(28)
Before we see why this reading can be avoided, let us observe that with this rann we have encountered another way in which Dasein is fallen: its subjection to idle talk [Gerede]
Discourse, which belongs to the essential state of Dasein’s Being and has a share in constituting Dasein’s disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk. And when it does so, it serves not so much to keep Being-in-the-world open for us in an articulated understanding, as rather to close it off, and cover up the beings within the world.(29)
Discourse, as the logos, is the way in which we let something be shown, or articulated as the thing it is. As Being-in-the-world, Dasein pre-ontologically (pre-theoretically) discloses beings as they are given by the world’s equipmental nexus. This world-nexus can be articulated like joints (perhaps in a skeleton). Discourse can take the form of telling, in which one articulates, for example, a hammer as being 'too heavy,' before reaching for another. 'Telling is the articulation of intelligibility.'(30) It need not be linguistic in character – for example, one can tellingly articulate the intelligibility of an escalator by using it, or can articulate the above proposition regarding the hammer by simply discarding it and reaching for another. However, when it speaks about something towards which it bears no comportment, Dasein has fallen into idle talk. Idle talk has become de-worlded and, as such, does not articulate the intelligibility of the world, but represents a detached impoverished way of understanding. In short, idle talk passes over the phenomenon of the world, 'clos[ing] it off, and cover[ing] up the beings within the world.'
The groundlessness of idle talk is no obstacle to its becoming public; instead it encourages this. Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one’s own. If this were done, idle talk would founder… Idle talk is something which anyone can rake up; it not only releases one from the task of genuinely understanding, but develops an undifferentiated kind of intelligibility, for which nothing is closed off any longer.(31)
Idle talk does not grant informed articulation but empty, de-worlded speculation. In idle talk, Dasein has not articulated a being in its world situation, 'making the thing one's own.' Against analytical tradition, Heidegger holds that interpretation is impoverished when it is detached and observational as the merely observational 'releases one from the task of genuinely understanding.' The present-to-hand of de-worlded objects, that is, is the province of the correct but not of truth.
In Finnegans Wake, as we have seen, Joyce certainly seems to suggest that human beings suffer negative consequences from idle talk. After relentlessly heckling HCE over his alleged scandals, the customers at his inn announce that 'you'll read it tomorrow, marn, when the curds on the table.'(32) The scandal of Earwicker lacks any ground. It is confused, and those who partake in spreading it themselves merge into the accused. Yet nothing can prevent it being blared by tabloid headlines. Perhaps feeling that he has strayed too far from what Heidegger would term the public identity of how one is a gentleman, Earwicker scrambles to articulate a defence of himself, arguing that though he has surely done wrong in his life, 'I like to think… confessedly in my baron gentilhomme to the manhor bourne.'(33) That is, he considers himself a gentleman (or gentle homme) still, though even this defence is contaminated with 'confess[ion],' barrenness, and the unchaste image of 'man whore.' The tension between idle talk and discourse thus gives rise to panic and guilt. In idle talk, the subtlety of human being and its complexity is levelled into dismissive categorisation. One is 'guilty' because they say so. It is simpler to accuse disposively than to listen discursively. HCE is defeated, beaten and left to lie fallen, guilty on his bar room floor.
In Being and Time, guilt is that which reveals Dasein as the being it is. Dasein is called to authenticity by its guilty conscience.
This call whose mood has been attuned by anxiety is what makes it possible first and foremost for Dasein to project itself upon its ownmost potentiality for being'(34)
This 'ownmost possibility' is Dasein's death. Only by embracing this revelation can Dasein comport itself authentically. The call of conscience to guilt [Gewissensruf], then, reveals Dasein's fundamental lack. Dasein is guilty in its ownmost possibility. Heidegger writes,
We define the formally existential idea of the 'Guilty!'(35) as 'Being-the-basis for a Being which has been defined by a 'not' – that is to say, as 'Being-the-basis of a nullity.'(36)
What is this nullity? Heidegger notes that Dasein is
never existent before its ground, but rather in each case only in terms of it and as it. Being the ground therefore means never to have power over One’s ownmost being from the ground up. This not belongs to the existential sense of thrownness. Being the ground is itself a nullity of itself.(37)
That is, Dasein cannot ever get back behind its thrownness, it is 'never existent before its ground.' Dasein can never climb out of the world such that its existence is no longer of any concern to it, being instead always already bound up with a care structure that presents its thrown facticity in accordance with its attunement. In anxiety, Dasein realises it is thus imprisoned, and realises that grounded meaning is forever elusive outside of its ownmost possibility of death.
The call of conscience, then, reveals Dasein as guilty, and to be authentic, Dasein must embrace this guilt. In the vernacular, it might be said that Dasein must accept itself for what it is. By accepting fallen meaning as fallen, Dasein casts off distraction and dwells mindfully in the heritage of the one. This has profound implications as a social narrative, as Dasein opens itself up to cultural, religious and even literary narratives as the determining source of its meaning. But what of Earwicker? Does guilt likewise lead him out of fallenness? HCE’s guilt, while no less axiological, may seem at fist glance more traditionally moral, though, as we will see, as an archetypal narrative Earwicker is no less prone to his thrown nullity. The Earwicker narrative is universal to all men. 'it was… a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him as sense of those normative letters the nickname Here comes Everybody.'(38) In every incarnation, HCE is tempted into scandal. Like Dasein, HCE seems unable to get behind its 'thrownness'. Earwicker always seems unable to avoid his scandalous fall into guilt. Earwicker’s fall is predicated on Finn’s and re-enacted by Shaun. As Campbell and Robinson aver, 'the bier of Finnegan is the stage on which history enacts itself in the goings and comings of HCE.'(39) Finn, as the original faller is the existential structure of HCE who in turn is the existential structure of Shaun and Shem. Together the male archetypes of Finnegans Wake are the paternal structure of human being. As a trinity, grandfather, father and sons are Dadsein in their guilt.
HCE, finally, will be redeemed by the letter of his wife, who herself urges him to 'stand up tall! Straight,' informing him that she 'want[s] to see [him] looking fine for [her]'.(40) This statement, of course, is as phallic as it is palliative; while the letter, as we know, never arrives. HCE appears publicly suspended between scandal and redemption, caught in a comic tragedy in which he is unable to measure up. If this is the wisdom of Silenus it is made humorous, and thus absurd. Resolute Dasein, meanwhile, is 'redeemed' from inauthenticity as it presses into the identities of its cultural world, mindfully aware of their ultimate groundlessness. If Heidegger seems oblivious to the Wildean irony that this commitment entails, something of his bluster is avoided in the troubled social standing of HCE. For Here Comes Everybody, replacing solemn heroism with uproarious farce.
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