In the beginning was the pun. And so on.
- Samuel Beckett, Murphy

Ods-fish, says Pluto, where’s your Thunder,
Let drive and split this thing asunder.
- Jonathan Swift, Ars pun-ica

Asked why he experiences sentiments of remorse towards the end of the Ithaca episode of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom responds with an admission of Jewish guilt, “Because in immature impatience he had treated with disrespect certain beliefs and practices” (U 17.724). The penultimate item in the subsequent list of customs isolates the solitary verbatim reference in Joyce’s oeuvre to the unutterable name of the divine, the Greek moniker tetragrammaton. While Bloom admits a certain degree of reverence towards the Hebrew tradition of never fully naming God, referring to the name as “ineffable,” Stephen Dedalus bears no such pathos in his conversation with Mr. Deasy in the earlier Nestor chapter. Foreshadowing Joyce’s own idiosyncratic approach to the tetragrammaton in Finnegans Wake, Stephen names God as “a shout in the street” (U 2.34).(1) The actual shout, “Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!” bears specific relevance to this discussion of the tetragrammaton as the semivowel phonetics correlate directly to the initials YHWH (ee-ah-oo-eh, or Yahweh).(2) Joyce’s use of the tetragrammaton in Finnegans Wake III.3 traces the evolution of human history, the dawning of a new Viconian age – the democratic or human. In the structural conception of Finnegans Wake, this particular section comprises the third Human Age (Chapter 3) within The Human Age of Book III, heightening any conclusions drawn forthwith.(3) The method employed by Joyce to the end of defining his idiotic tetragrammaton is one of sophisticated, quadrilayered, adianoetic paronomasia and its resulting kenoma.

Although the term kenoma has become associated with literary criticism of late, its use here is restricted to the Gnostic sense in which it was originally intended.(4) What Joyce was concerned with in Finnegans Wake, at least in terms of this argument, was the theological and universal negative space, which William Blake, referencing the ancient Gnostics, referred to as “[a] Fathomless & boundless deep,/ There we wander, there we weep.”(5) The noun form kenoma has recently evolved out of the archaic kenosis, which the OED cites as “the self-renunciation of the divine nature, at least in part, by Christ in the incarnation.” Following this Gnostic formulation, which, considering the alternative religious sources Joyce draws from, seems intended, the etymological definition is the most relevant: kenosis is adopted from the Greek word meaning “an emptying.” This excises the Christian implications, leaving the emptying of God into man (or Adam Kadmon) at the moment of creation: God fashioning man in His likeness.

In any cyclical system such as the Viconian one which Joyce employs in Finnegans Wake, moments of recurrence are inevitable, and such is the case with kenoma. However, the beginning of III.3 illustrates the nadir of such a state, Yawn/Shaun lying prostrate upon the mound of litter(ature) and history. Foregrounded by the fall of man on the first page of the novel, a one hundred letter exclamation, the ricorso of the ensuing paronomastic kenoma is in full effect come Book III, Chapter Three.(6) The implicit purpose of the opening thunderclap would be the putting in motion of that “wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer” (FW 614.26), which Joyce incorporates into his flowing rheology. At the origin of ricorso on page 474, the fall of man has technically already occurred, but Joyce employs a clever method of anachronism nonetheless. By using the tool of paronomastic kenoma, instantiated through the episodes leading up to this moment, as a prelapsarian historiograph, Joyce assumes the role of artificer (along with his persona of action Haun), enacting an idiosyncratic rewriting of creation history.

If Yawn were to stand atop that crumbled edifice of the past two ages and gaze out from the middenheap at that “mid shadowed landshape” (FW 474.02-03), he would surely see flatlands far reaching, for the parataxis of kenoma levels all in that space. Any outliers of originality or meaning have been eradicated as Finnegans Wake famously embraces all meanings, but has none of its own: “And thanacestross mound have swollup them all” (FW 18.03-04). The history of this ancestral mound of death (Thanatos) and rebirth dictates the kenoma around it; puns create certain doubt where the most basic elements of indubitability are lacking.(7) These metempsychotic images and the wail “Hwoah!” (FW 474.15) evolve into language assimilation and migration, as will be discussed later.(8) While the absence of linguistic punning at the beginning of III.3 can be partly attributed to the general ricorso of the Human Age, the concept of Hermeticism plays a relevant role. As noted by Barbara DiBernard in her book Alchemy and Finnegans Wake, the soul (now human) is regenerated “from its sense-immersed state [of the previous chapter] into the perfection and nobility of that divine condition in which it was originally created” (16-17), namely kenoma. This sense immersion of a few pages earlier takes its form in the multilayered puns, which hold the eye and penetrate the ear. The perfection of divine kenoma does not exist, however, without some element of human fear. Mutilated translations of fear in the second paragraph of the chapter mark the days of God’s creation following the kenoma, in increasing exclamation to the factor of seven. Out of nothing comes something, albeit fear, refuting the Aristotelian maxim nihil ex nihilo fit: mortals who “afeared themselves were to wonder” (FW 475.03) and plagued with a “sevenply sweat of night blues moist upon them” (FW 474.24-475.01; my emphasis). The subsequent increasing size of Yawn (perhaps playing God as the artificer) makes him as large as all of Ireland and beyond, filling up the cosmos and intimating the superfluity of later passages.(9)

The resonance of kenoma in the opening pages of Finnegans Wake III.3 would not be artistically possible without Joyce’s use of paronomasia throughout the novel. The space of kenoma is not only the lack of paranomasia, but also the negative space created by that linguistic tool. The original Fall of Man, the echoing darkness that begins III.3, was located in the rhetorical tradition as a repercussion of the inability of man to cope with the devil’s onslaught of wicked words. In his study of rhetoric in Early Modern English Drama entitled Wanton Words, Madhavi Menon isolates two contributing sources to this theory. First, Thomas Wilson, in his 1560 The Arte of Rhetorique, refers to a commonly held precept, that the postlapsarian reclamation of the power of rhetoric (Joyce’s paranomasia) allowed for the efficient triumph over Satan’s evil. God redeems men from their fallen state to “halfe a God” by granting them “the gift of utterance, that they might with ease win folke at their will” (cited in Menon, 18-19). In Finnegans Wake III.3, this advent of divine power through the human figure can be seen by the accretion of paronomasia as the chapter progresses.(10) The power of this blessed utterance finds its origin in St. Augustine as well, where the philosopher’s similarly structured approach to rhetoric suggests “diseases of fallen language [Joyce’s language archaeology] - plurality, ambiguity, obscurity - offer themselves as antidotes for the ‘sickness of human wills’” (Menon 20; my emphasis). These characteristics to which Augustine refers are particularly important in the consideration of Joyce’s potential goal inherent in his constant obfuscation of meaning: if Ulysses is the archetypal modernist text (an onslaught from all angles), is Finnegans Wake a healing of modernity? Similarly, the later transalpine migration of languages on pages 478-479 illustrates an ascension to a higher form of metaphysical self, ending with the ultimate attainment of mystical fulfillment in “Tear-nan-Ogre” (FW 479.02), the Irish land of the afterlife. Structuring the paronomasia of Joyce as a literary tool, like all other systems in Finnegans Wake, presents particular difficulties. Joyce’s implementation of Viconian history and linguistic puns to the end of deciphering “lines of litters slittering...till Hum Lit” (FW 114.17-19) entails a tetrad of some sort. To ground our discussion in this four level system, consider Northrop Frye’s determination of the entire novel as comprised of four layers of textual action in his essay “Cycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake.” From surface to underbelly, they are as follows: Shem writing and Shaun the Public receiving, HCE as the builder of cities and civilizations, Anna Livia Plurabelle as the continually renewing river of time, and sleeping Finn as all of mankind, the cosmos (16-17). A corresponding schema of paronomasia in Finnegans Wake serves to destroy the binaries of the literal, or linguistic, and the figurative, whether sexually or socially allusive. The resulting system, by way of Joyce’s portmanteau words, takes the linguistic layer to its highest multiplicity of language, turns the sexual into a scatological-sexual hybrid, and introduces historical and literary/philosophical levels.(11)

The impetus for certain aspects of Joyce’s “quadrapun” may be derived from Vico’s description of metaphor. Rosa Maria Bosinelli notes such a connection in her essay on Joyce’s treatment of Vico as “a corporeal dimension, and a fleshy thickness [in Vico’s metaphor]” (124). In his section on tropes in New Science, Vico himself alludes to this element: “It is noteworthy that in all languages most expressions for inanimate objects employ metaphors derived from the human body and its parts, or from human senses and emotions” (159). In the process of achieving this tetrad of meaning, Joyce utilizes one of his favorite sources in addition to Vico – Shakespeare. The locus of Joyce’s scatological-sexual mode almost certainly rests with Shakespeare, as scatological puns often appeared in Shakespeare’s plays with heavy connotations of sexual bawdiness.(12) Particularly, reliance on the Elizabethan context of Shakespeare’s punning tradition functions intrinsically in Joyce’s transmutation of the pun in Finnegans Wake. Inherent desecrations of conventional rhetoric play out in the opening scene of III.3 as the four senators climb the middenheap to question the prostrate Yawn:

Those four claymen clomb together to hold their sworn starchamber quiry on him. For he was ever their quarrel, the way they would see themselves, everybug his bodiment atop of anywom her notion, and the meet of their noght was worth two of his morning. Up to the esker ridge it was, Mallinger parish, to a mead that was not far, the son’s rest. (FW 475.18-23)

Just as in Shakespeare, there is a sexual sarcasm within references to literature and history, Joyce’s own “agenbite of inwit.” While a critical tradition describing Joyce’s multilayered meaning as denotative of portmanteau words and scavenging of language certainly exists, the nature of play in Finnegans Wake often falls by the wayside. Aside from obvious implications drawn from the scatological-sexual mode, Joyce’s quadrapuns refer to historical events and literary elements often associated with scandal or ridicule, and addressed in sarcastic or playful tones. Therefore, when Joyce makes reference to Robert Browning’s poems “Any Wife to Any Husband” and “Meeting at Night, Parting at Morning” in 475.20-23, he does so with desecratory inflection. The man’s “bodiment” presses down heavy upon the woman and the meeting of their “noght,” a nighttime sexual encounter, is accentuated.(13) This brief example helps to locate some of the characteristics of Joyce’s tetrad of paronomastic modes.

In order to realize fully the capability of Joyce’s innovation, we might consider a more comprehensive example. From the opening paragraph of III.3, the description of Yawn on the hillock provides a suitable embedded quadrapun, characteristic of the surrounding kenoma: “Yawn in a semiswoon lay awailing and (hooh!) what helpings of honeyful swoothead (phew!), which earpiercing dulcitude!” (FW 474.11-13; my emphasis). The pun of “earpiercing” consists originally in its reference to the Ghost in Hamlet and his revelation to Hamlet of his uncle’s treachery: “And in the porches of mine ears did pour/The leperous distilment” (1.5.63-64). In the Shakespearean context this act of pouring poison into the ear hole puns on the etymological definition of lechery and its connotations of sexual debauchery. The implicit reference to the earwig also highlights the penetration of a bodily orifice through the hearing function, possibly the “drawing out” of Gertrude into an act of cuckoldry, a proper “leeching.” In Finnegans Wake, Joyce expands this phrase to include the historic, literary, linguistic (formulation of language), and scatological-sexual elements demarcating the quadrapun. The French “perce-orielle,” meaning earwig, becomes the historical Irish equivalent Persse O’Reilly. The historical allusions to Sir Walter Raleigh, who infamously brought Ireland the potato or “wild spuds” (FW 475.10), and Padraic Pearse, the young leader of the 1916 Easter Rebellion, form the aggregate name. Furthermore, the associations with naming as related to H.C. Earwicker imply Joyce’s idiotic tetragrammaton: “thok’s min gammelhole Norveegickers moniker” (FW 46.20; my emphasis), as will be discussed later.(14) Earwicker is mocked and execrated in Hosty’s “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly”: “Won’t there be earwigs on the green?/(Chorus) Big earwigs on the green,/The largest ever you seen” (FW 47.16-18). The sexual implications of cuckoldry and illicit promiscuity with young girls that plague HCE throughout the novel resurface here in this multifarious trope. Finally, the use of ballad format belies literary significance as well as with the possible connection to Lady Gregory, née Augusta Persse.(15) A more obvious, related use of the literary mode of paronomasia would be Cad telling the story of HCE’s crime and the subsequent pouring of it by the river sigla ALP into the ears of the people of Dublin, all of which leads to the eventual composition of the ballad by Shem’s counterpart, the poet Hosty.(16) All of these meanings coalesce to form the paronomastic tetrad, which Joyce employs time and again in Finnegans Wake.

In addition, the significance of the above-mentioned quadrapun is buttressed by its apparent isolation in the context of the surrounding chapter. The referent traces itself back through the book, but in the kenoma of III.3 does not seem to attribute any immediate puns or meanings to the phrase. Even the usually thorough Roland McHugh, makes no mention of “earpiercing” on page 474 in his Annotations to Finnegans Wake. Contrast this with a similar trope in the preceding chapter, however, and the kenoma of III.3 is drastically accentuated. Take, for example, a phrase from section III.2 during which Haun is bid goodbye by the twenty-nine girls of St. Bride: “that borne of bjoerne, la garde auxiliaire she murmured, hellyg Ursulinka, full of woe” (FW 471.30-31; my emphasis). The location of the scatological-sexual mode within a passage ripe with unfulfilled feminine sexual potency is not difficult: the use of St. Ursula and her 11,000 virgins, or the imagery depicted by the male soldier off to “the auxiliary guard,” leaving the female prurient, are both appropriate allusions. In fact, most of the levels of meaning conveyed by this paronomastic phrase are readily available, as they are in the majority of pages leading up to the nihilistic kenoma of III.3. The linguistic punning on “Hail Mary, full of grace” and its Joycean transmutation “hellyg Ursulinka, full of woe,” requires only topical examination. Moreover, the literary and historical levels are intertwined in this instance, with Henrik Ibsen’s pen name Brynjolf Bjarme and his historical rival, Norwegian poet Bjornstjerne Bjornson, simultaneously indexed by “that borne of bjoerne.”(17) If these allusions are not immediately decipherable, they are certainly within easy reach. In these ways, the referent inherent in this phrase refers to that space of the chapter, and traces itself back through the text; in moments of kenoma, these efforts are perceived as one-sided.

Any attempts at straddling bistable conditions during moments of kenoma are identified as futile within the logic of Finnegans Wake. In other parts of the text, this philolinguistic balancing act is supported by the substratum of Joyce’s four paronomastic modes. However, when kenoma dominates, these allusions become refractory and implosive, as Samuel Beckett’s reading of Vico would suggest, destroying the foundations on which the polarity rests.(18) Puns should be, by definition, binary – a “bistable illusion.” Joyce complicates such prescriptive attempts through his creation of poetic pictures in which the reader sees more than the customary face or vase. When Marshall McLuhan criticizes the pun as “that which derails us from the smooth and uniform progress that is typographic order” (47), his argument entails the choosing of one or both poles of the bistable illusion. Joyce, on the other hand, suggests that meaning exists in that middle space, the kenoma of portmanteau words, which means many things at once, but as a comprehensive unit, means nothing.(19) For example, Joyce’s use of the word “quadriliberal” (FW 477.19), and the many connotations which it seemingly construes, creates an illusion of meaning. The immediate intimations are threefold: quadrilateral meaning “four-sided” (perhaps in reference to the geometry of Finnegans Wake – a square inside a circle), the literal Latin quadrilibris meaning “weighing four pounds,” and the figurative quadrilibris meaning “four books” (referring to both the Gospel hybrid Mamalujo and the Annals of the Four Masters). These associative meanings are all valid; however, the term “quadriliberal” as a comprehensive unit does not produce any meaningful result: an adjective is combined with a base meaning “four,” producing at best “four times worthy of a free man.”

Similarly, as Derek Attridge points out in his essay “[The Peculiar Language of Finnegans Wake],” the identification of literal and figurative binaries within a systemic hierarchy are destroyed by Joyce’s idiosyncratic use of paronomasia (82). The hierarchal ambiguities of Joyce’s paronomasia consist in the author’s reluctance to submit to a closed system of structured meaning, despite his preference for the scatological-sexual mode.(20) Louis O. Mink, in his essay on reading Finnegans Wake, goes even further to suggest that the levels of meaning which result from Joyce’s “quadruple-entendres” are indistinguishable: “no correspondence between levels of meaning and levels of importance” (45). This seems epistemically irresponsible on the part of Mink, however, as all Joyce’s systems are hierarchical dans le moment, and Joyce remains Viconian despite his transitory complexity. Each of the series within its exterior series is organized meticulously and any notions of nihilistic cosmology result not from the lack of structured meaning, but the ambiguity of knowledge attained through natural history. When Joyce bases his system on the evolution of this history, the human and the divine simultaneously, it is that theme which dictates the kenosis of importance, the necessary emptying of cosmology. Within this fluctuating system of linguistic paronomasia, Joyce’s universal philosophy is established.

For Vico, linguistic etymons tell the stories of things, and thus, all etymology is metempsychosis, fluidity of essence and attainment of a higher quidditas. Similarly, all puns must be metempsychoses as well, since “the spirit of one word enters another.”(21) Surely then all history, from the genesis of language to modernity, is paronomastic, as Dominic Manganiello notes in “Vico’s Ideal History and Joyce’s Language.” Our current state is constantly the historic “displacement of the theology of the Word” (200). However, out of this empty void created by displacement evolves Joyce’s “idiotic” notion of naming the Divine, a theory certainly not Christian, but religious nonetheless.

The presence of the tetragrammaton arises early in Finnegans Wake with the hundred word scream on the first page at the beginning of the Divine Age, representing Vico’s thunderclap and also the word of God’s unutterable name.(22) This name carries particular weight in the novel, resonating throughout as sort of “a rude breathing on the void of to be” (FW 100.27), suggesting the formative breath of Yahweh in creation.(23) God is the monad of all monads, and part of Joyce’s process in the utterance of the tetragrammaton concerns the absurd attempt to isolate monadic identity through a tetrad of structure and meaning.

Vico’s giants are terrified of the Thunderword beginning Finnegans Wake, but the wail of Yawn of the attempted naming at the beginning of III.3 is devoid of those fearful connotations. Instead the seven fears intimating HCE the Creator are inflicted upon the four carrying Yawn – “Shanator”(s) Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John(ny). Yawn’s “Hwoah!” (FW 474.15) carries tones of humanism, an attempt to locate himself within HCE’s spatial world, and a response to the waking consciousness of man, “his dream monologue was over” (FW 474.04).(24) If Yawn’s voice is the one crying in the wilderness of kenoma, then the related question arises: Who is he calling for? It seems that he must call upon Shem the Pen to initiate the creation of not only the literature of the book-mound, but also the peculiar Joycean tetragrammaton.(25) The quadraletter YHWH remains in the wake of the paronomastic superabundance of Vico’s first two ages, but Shem as the representative of the poetic and oracular tradition is conspicuously absent. Now in the Human Age, Yawn calls out the Hebrew moniker of God, “Shem Hammephorash,” but the recorders of divine history Mamalujo come instead. Although the argument of Matthew-Mark-Luke-John as being the true answer to divine naming remains possible, closer to Joycean irony may be metatextual nature of the question itself. Has Yawn become entangled in the ambiguity of his artificer Joyce? The arrival of “three kings of three suits and a crowner” (FW 474.18-19) to hold “their sworn starchamber inquiry upon him” (FW 475.18-19) certainly presents a diversion from his ultimate goal.(26) As the voicing of the ineffable tetragrammaton would be part of Joyce’s attempt to express the inexpressible with the pen, what are we to assume about the absence of Shem and his divine Hebrew name?

One certainty is that the father figure of HCE transitions too quickly away from the center to be trusted as a stable example of the ideal Divine. As Margot Norris notes, “He is uncertain of name and identity, rather than a center that fixes, defines, and gives meaning to his cosmos” (61). However, in the absence of HCE’s fixation itself, certain connections with Joycean mind-play are made. HCE could, by proving the ineffability of names and signs inherent in his own sigla, validate his creator, subconsciously or not.

Regardless of any eventual validations of being, it becomes impossible to deny the role of the idio(t)syncratic tetragrammaton alongside paronomasia and kenoma in Finnegans Wake III.3. Following the tradition of biblical wordplay, the novel revels in the belief that names were keys to nature and the essence of a being or thing. Thus, our optimism as readers when Yawn remarks to the four senators: “Moy jay trouvay la clee [key] dang les champs” (FW 478.21). Finding Yahweh as the clé to God would be quite an achievement, even for Joyce’s ambitious dream book. Yet it is such a quest that seems to drive Joyce impossibly forward, each new foray obfuscating the true name even further. When Yawn calls upon his maker to instantiate creation from the paronomastic kenoma, it is lechery upon divine ears to hear a human voice out of the kenoma, being equivalent to sacrilege. In fact, one of the religious complications of the circular Viconian history implicates Joyce himself, tying him to the wheel of his own structure, his “vicociclometer.” In a last ditch attempt to define the indefinable, Joyce pays credence to the audacity of Pico della Mirandola – in the phrase “shin the punman” (FW 517.18) – who added the “shin” letter of the Hebrew alphabet to YHWH, creating a pentagrammaton YHSWH representing Jehoshua or Jesus.(27) While Joyce no doubt admired the idiosyncratic nature of Mirandola’s invention, this refutation of the tetrad and avocation of Christianity goes against Joyce’s carefully planned meaning and structure: Joyce is seen grasping at proverbial straws.

Following the intricate journey of linguistics from 478.06 to 479.12, the evolution of peoples and speech from Mesopotamia over the Alps through the Norse Vikings to the Emerald Isle and beyond to Tir na n’Og, the ending question still remains to Joyce and his readers: “Whateveryournameis?” (FW 479.12). Finnegans Wake comes as close to a work of pure nature as any novel, remarks Anthony Burgess, bringing up questions never attempted in literature. Perhaps Joyce ends up slightly short in the final explication, or, on the other hand, perhaps he has left all that is needed for the self-didactic reader: “Can you rede its world?” (FW 18.18-19).