The abnihilisation of the etym by the grisning of the grosning
of the grinder of the grunder of the first lord of Hurtreford ex-
polodotonates through Parsuralia with an ivanmorinthorrorumble
fragoromboassity amidwhiches general uttermosts confussion are
perceivable moletons skaping with mulicules while coventry
plumpkins fairlygosmotherthemselves in the Landaunelegants
of Pinkadindy. Similar scenatas are projectilised from Hullulullu,
Bawlawayo, empyreal Raum and mordern Atems. They were
precisely the twelves of clocks, noon minutes, none seconds.
At someseat of Oldanelang's Konguerrig, by dawnybreak in
Aira. (Finnegans Wake, 353)

With these ‘stage directions’ Joyce concludes the central part of the account of Private Buckley shooting the Russian general during the Crimean War. Butt assumes the role of the avenger of the insult to Ireland incorporated (excorporated?) in the officer relieving himself in the field and wiping himself with a handful of sod. There are frequent allusions elsewhere in the Wake to the events and it is known that the anecdote not only figured in Joyce’s earliest drafts but was also subject to revision in the run-up to publication in 1939. The continuing active status of this bit of the WIP then invites us to scrutinize it carefully for what we might call its programmatic content.

The rifle or musket shot is elevated to apocalyptic status. Numerous Norse and Viking lexical details enhance the archetypical confrontation, at times realized as between Scandinavians and Irish, at others between British and Russians, Butt and Taff, sons and fathers.The passage is not particularly dense, lexically, syntactically, nor in terms of overall comprehensibility. This open display may be, to a degree, determined by its central reference to the splitting of the atom by Ernest Rutherford (subsequently Lord Rutherford of Nelson) in 1919. Joyce informs the entire passage with the kinetic image of the exploding atom, the textual elements flying free as in graphic representations of atomic fission, under the rubric of ‘the abnihilisation of the etym’.The dialectic of vowel contrasts (grisning/grosning, grinder/grunder), the interplay of atomic particles (moletons, mulicules), apt kinetic verbs (expolodotonates, frago-, -smother- (cf. smitheerens), projectilised, confussion = fission/fusion, -break), the global spatial extension (Hurtreford = Hurdle-ford = Irish Baile Átha Cliath = Dublin, but also Rutherford), Coventry, Landaun- [London], Hullulullu, Bawlawayo (Bulawayo, Zimbabwe [bawl-away-o]), Raum [German ‘space’], Atems [atoms; German ‘breath’] (modern Athens = Edinburgh), Dawnybreak [Donnybrook], Aira [Ireland], the single cataclysmic moment (12:00:00 p.m.) - all these mark the farther points of the newly discovered subatomic world (1).

In 1991 in a talk on James Joyce as bachelor of arts Umberto Eco made the typically astute speculation that Joyce may have known, or known of, the seventh-century Irish grammatical and rhetorical tract Auraicept na-nÉces or The Scholar’s Primer, as it is known in English (2). The work appeared with an English translation in 1917 under the editorship of George Calder (3). Eco wondered whether the mention in the Wake of the ‘abnihilisation of the etym’ could have been inspired by the Auraicept, more specifically by its account of how the legendary scholar and cultural hero Fennius Farsaid drew on elements of the myriad languages of the Tower of Babel to construct a near-perfect metalanguage, which, unsurprisingly, is known to us as Gaelic. Eco found no explicit references to the Auraicept in Ellman’s biography of Joyce and related materials and, indeed, Joyce would no longer have been a resident of Ireland at the time of Calder’s publication. His edition was published in Edinburgh and no review or reference to it seems to have appeared in the popular Irish press that might have reached Joyce in Europe. Eco did see a possible reference to John F. Taylor in a passage not too distant from that cited above and adduced evidence that Joyce had attended Taylor’s lecture on early Irish schoolmen’s juxtaposition of Hebrew and Irish, also a feature of the Auraicept.

Had Joyce had access to early medieval Irish works on rhetoric and linguistics, he would doubtless also have been interested in examples of the etymologizing procedure known as etarscarad ‘separating, dividing’, literally ‘cutting between’ (4). For example, the personal name Domnall is analyzed as follows: ‘Domnall, i.e., doman-nuall, i.e., the celebrity (nuall) of the world (domain) about him. Or Domn- all, i.e., doman-uaill, i.e., pride of the world about him’(5). This could be called a reversal of, or complement to, the process that brought elements of disparate Babelian languages into Gaelic. It might well have been seen as an antecedent of Joyce’s lexical manipulation and deployment in the Wake. Yet etarscarad does not quite replicate the pun, since, while a word is split, the constituent parts are then traced back to two pre-existent and discrete words, each of these with own synonyms, a centrifugal extension like the exploding atom. The pun, at its simplest, works the other way around, noted as early as 1711 by Addison in The Spectator: ‘Having pursued the History of a Punn, ... I shall here define it to be a Conceit arising from the use of two Words that agree in the Sound, but differ in the Sense’ (6). Even though Joyce’s ‘word-splitting’ and frequent substitution of the resulting parts by elements from other languages is sui generis in its range and scale, we may imagine that, with his pointed interest in ‘correspondences’ (birth dates, initials, etc.), he was confirmed in his practices by the medieval Irish antecedent, when he subsequently read of etarscarad in R. A. S. Macalister’s The Secret Languages of Ireland (1937), a copy of which Joyce acquired just before the publication of the Wake (7).

Our interpretive tendency (if not bias) in addressing the Wake is to attempt to identify the commonplace English words behind the text. Thus, we read as ‘abnihilisation’ as annihilation (< *ad nihilum) and see there the atom split and (almost) reduced to nothing. But the literal text has ‘abnihilisation’, which, real word or not, can itself be subjected to etymologizing and must then, conventionally at least, mean something like ‘bringing from nothing’. And it is the etym (etymon), not the atom that is so born. The image of the split atom is then turned on its head or a miniature reverse universe created. Just as the split atom releases its inherent, latent energy, so the Wakean word, pulled from nothing, from the prelingual, speechless void, fills the universe, even creates a new one. To stretch our metaphorical interpretation a bit, the etym can be understood as the smallest lexical particle, almost an abstraction (cf. protons, neutrons) but vitalized in its specific realizations. Beyond this we have ‘sub-etymic’ particles such as -ump (variants -amp, -omp), everywhere represented in hyper-charged form--the Joycean neologism--in the anecdote, in distinction from the proscribed anti-iconic word rump (the Russian general’s, that is), which is thus given elevated status through its absence, like its exclusion from the childhood vocabulary of Stephen Daedalus (8). Language thus seen is pre-Babelian, even if still not the language used between God and Adam. The general is everywhere in the detail (as a Russian general is the metonym of his detail). And all history - universal, Irish and Earwicker’s - is incriminated in the Crimea.

Private Buckley’s shot at the hunkered-down Russian general, the Crimean conflict in miniature, which had its own share of farcical moments, triggers a bombardment of words, among which the self-referential text at the opening of this note. Joycean scholarship continues this logogony (see skaping above and cf. Scandinavian skapa ‘create’; Atem as the lord of creation in the Egyptian Book of the Dead) (9). In this, Joyce seems almost to have foreseen atomic fusion and the potential energy from coerced coalescence. Yet the Wake is a cyclic work, with antecedents in this respect not only in the better known Vico but also in early Irish cosmological thought. A fresh Big Bang follows the Apocalypse of the battlefield musket shot as B follows A or fission, fusion.

Finnegans Wake is so dense in its cross-referentiality that almost any passage of comparable length to that quoted above could be mined with profit for its relevance to overarching themes. Nonetheless, the brief riff on ‘the abnihilisation of the eym’, in addition to its concern for rivalries, culpability, prurience, truth, story-telling, parallel narratives, etc., also offers a succint characterization of Joyce’s conception of one fundamental of the creative process, not so much its animus or stimulus as its physics, the literary demiurge fashioning language, words, sentences, paragraphs ex nihilo.

WORKS CITED

Addison, Joseph. [untitled]. The Spectator 61 (1711), 6.

Auraicept na-nÉces. Ed. and trans. George Calder. Edinburgh: J. Grant, 1917.

Eco, Umberto. “A Portrait of the Artist as Bachelor.” In On Literature. Trans. Martin McLaughlin. Orlando: Harcourt, 2004, pp. 84-103.

------. “A Portrait of the Artist as Bachelor.” In Sulla letteratura. Milano: Bompiani, 2002, pp. 91-113.

Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1939.

Macalister, R. A. S. The Secret Languages of Ireland. Cambridge: The University Press, 1937.

Sanas Chormaic: Cormac’s Glossary. Trans. J. O’Donovan. Ed. Whitley Stokes. Calcutta: Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society, 1868.

Sanas Cormaic: An Old-Irish Glossary. Ed. Kuno Meyer. Anecdota from Irish Manuscripts 5. Dublin: Hodges and Figgis, 1913.

Sayers, William. “The Russian General, Gargantua, and Writing of ‘Wit’s Waste’.” Joyce Studies Annual (2008), 149-62.

------. “‘Tincurs tammit!’: Joyce, Travelers, and Shelta.” HyperMedia Joyce Studies 8:2 (July, 2007). Online.