Finnegans Wake ‒ A Prescriptive Guide

The Caged Lion

The fourth chapter of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is the third and final part of The Humphriad, the story of HCE that began life in the autumn of 1923 as a short sketch known as Here Comes Everybody. This vignette was the acorn from which that mighty oak the Wake grew. By the time Joyce was finished expanding and elaborating it, The Humphriad had become an epic tale of HCE’s Original Sin, or Crime in the Park, and the fatal consequences to which it led. Part III opens where Part II left off: HCE is imprisoned, asleep or dead. In the dreamworld of Finnegans Wake there is no real difference between the three. In each case he has been removed―whether permanently or temporarily―from the world of the living. In The Humphriad III HCE will be buried, but the history of his fateful encounter in the park with the cad will be repeated by his two sons―the oedipal conflict will become a sibling rivalry. This will lead to a complicated trial, which can also be seen as a variation on the same theme. The chapter will close by bringing HCE back onto the scene and preparing the way for the following chapter, which will be devoted to an examination of ALP’s letter.

Adaline Glasheen

In her Third Census of Finnegans Wake Adaline Glasheen begins her brief synopsis of this chapter with a quotation that William Butler Yeats attributed to Goethe (who was referring to Irish Catholics and their treatment of the Protestants in their midst):

“... the Irish always seem like a pack of hounds, dragging down some noble stag.” Joyce identified himself (and Parnell) with a stag, and feared dogs always. Book I, iv is about attempts to hunt down HCE. But the great man is alert as Ulysses or Bloom (Joyce called him “le vieux lion,” Letters, III, 56) to save himself in danger and simultaneously to rise in the world: at the start of I, iv, he is a caged lion in a zoo; at the end, he is a prisoner of the Vatican―one of the Pope Leos―a much better sort of jail. Between these states of quiescence, HCE plays Machiavelli’s game of Lion and Fox. Brewer says the lion is a symbol of resurrection. ―Glasheen xxxiv–xxxv : Yeats, Autobiographies 390 : Eckermann 391 : Brewer 759

In Il Principe (The Prince), Machiavelli exhorts his Prince to cultivate both the cunning of the fox and the strength of the lion (Machiavelli 69 ff). The Lion was Joyce’s nickname for this chapter.

The Humphriad begins with HCE encountering a king on the road outside his tavern. The king is engaged in a foxhunt. The Humphriad closes with HCE being hunted as a fox across the Irish landscape. We realize that HCE was the king’s true quarry from the start. The two foxhunts are one and the same. History is a Viconian cycle that always circles back to its beginning.

The Meath Hounds

Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon

In their Chicken Guide to this chapter, Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon present the following synopsis:

HCE’s self-induced and continuous confinement is revisited. The protective telephone-booth of I.3 has become an imprisoning teak coffin. It is the general opinion of the locals that Earwicker is dead and embalmed entirely from his big toe to his great head, pharaoh-like, in an Irish pyramid. The sense of public safety is shattered, however, when a person who strongly resembles HCE makes an appearance on the plain and is victim to a fourth and final assault. A suspect is arrested and a trial held to seek to establish guilt. Four judges preside and witnesses are called. A map of the scene of the crime is handed up in court. The evidence proves inconclusive and no-one is convicted. The judges remain non-committal. They are faintly amused at the idea of two men falling out like that over the question of the correct time.

The remainder of the chapter reconsiders HCE’s escape from his mausoleum. Whereas in the previous section he appears initially as a lion, he is now portrayed as a fox on the run from hounds. An alternative explanation for his unexpected preservation is advanced. Various private and press statements reporting sightings of him are evinced. These are too many to allow anyone for long to doubt the reality of his continued existence. The belief that he is no more than a rumour, or a common phrase, or a piece of slang, is quickly shattered. He seems, however, to have dropped out of sight. His wife ALP is brought into the picture. It is she, she who sustained and protected him, who will put an end once and for all to all the poppycock going on about her dear, hard-working husband. ―James Joyce Digital Archive

William York Tindall

William York Tindall

In A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake, William York Tindall analyzes this chapter as a suite of six movements:

Chapter IV consists of six movements or strophes―like those of a musical suite or of a long poem. Adding transitions or explanations would make the order of parts apparent there or here. Modern poets leave transitions out in the interest of intensity. Joyce left them out for that reason too―for the Wake is not unlike a poem in prose―and also for the effect of dream. Sudden juxtapositions of incompatibles and sudden shifts of rhythm and tone are what he needed for his designed effect.

The six parts of Chapter IV take this sequence: first, a brief introduction (75–76), second, a long meditation on death and burial (76–80), third, another story of the Cad (81–86), fourth, Earwicker’s trial before four judges (86–96), fifth, a fox hunt and flight into exile (96–101), and last, a hymn to A.L.P. and the river (101–02). ―Tindall 83

It is curious that Tindall sees HCE as the defendant at the trial. Most scholars now see the trial as another expression of the sibling rivalry between Shem & Shaun. Having said that, there is still some disagreement about who is who. Adaline Glasheen and Edmund L Epstein identify the defendant Festy King as Shem, whereas to Anthony Burgess he is Shaun. On FWEET, Raphael Slepon identifies him as HCE, perhaps with hints of Shem. Rose & O’Hanlon also embrace the ambiguity and include both generations:

At its most arcane, the fourth and final assault is archetypal, man versus man, and the protagonists merge into a ‘queer mixture’ at the point of reconciliation. Following this logic, Festy King (the man later arrested for the crime) can be interpreted as HCE + Cad, assailant and assailed undifferentiated. HCE is both bullied and bully. His single weapon, the staff, duplicates into staff/strongbox. After the struggle, when the pair reconcile their differences, they become brotherly. The one who leaves is referred to in the plural ‘they’, as also is he who remains. The staff qua staff (‘their humoral hurlbat’) goes; the staff qua strongbox remains (‘left along with the confederate fender’). This explains why HCE is both accused and accuser in the ensuing trial; he subsequently disentangles himself into Shem-Shaun particles. Notice how HCE calls his assailant ‘son’, or is it the other way round?, at [RFW] 66.13 ([FW] 82.36). ―Chicken Guide

Festy King’s surname identifies him with the king who accosted HCE at the outset of The Humphriad. But when Festy King disguises himself as Tykingfest (068.37), we are being invited to identify him with Tristan-Tantris, the Oedipal Figure who embodies both Shem & Shaun.

As we shall see in due course, Joyce’s Festy King was based on a father and son of that name, who were both witnesses in a trial that took place in Connemara in 1923. Joyce read of the case in one of his favourite newspapers, the Connacht Tribune. In Finnegans Wake this comical trial is blended with the Maamtrasna murder trial, a much darker case that took place in 1882, the year of Joyce’s birth.

Maamtrasna, County Galway

Vico

The structure of Finnegans Wake is loosely based on Giambattista Vico’s cyclical philosophy of history. In Joyce’s interpretation, history is comprised of repeating cycles, each of which has four ages:

The Theocratic Age of Gods and Giants
The Aristocratic Age of Heroes
The Democratic Age of Man
Ricorso: Collapse of Society and Return to the First Age

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) is the author of Principi di Scienza Nuova (The New Science), in which is expounded his theory that a common cyclical pattern identifies the histories of diverse nations. The cycle consists of (1) the age of gods, represented in primitive society by the family life of the cave, to which God’s thunder had driven man; (2) the age of heroes, characterized by the continual revolutionary movements of the plebeians against the patricians; (3) the age of people, the final consequence of the leveling influence of revolutions. The three ages are typified by the institutions of birth, marriage, and burial, respectively, and followed by a short lacuna, the ricorso (resurrection) linking the third age to the first of a subsequent cycle. These four periods are illustrated by the four books into which Finnegans Wake is divided and also by concise references to attributes of the ages (e.g., their institutions). ―Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, Third Edition xiv–xv

As William Tindall noted, the Viconian Cycle can be discerned on different levels in Finnegans Wake:

As Homer’s story, freely adapted, determines the three-part structure of Ulysses and the sequence of chapters, so Vico’s system, freely adapted, determines the four-part structure of the Wake and the sequence of its chapters. Part I is Vico’s divine age, Part II his heroic age, Part III his human age, and Part IV an enlarged ricorso. The seventeen chapters also follow this sequence. Chapter I of Part I is a divine age, Chapter II a heroic age, and so on―wheels within a wheel. The eight chapters of Part I represent two Viconian wheels within, and affected by, the general divinity of the part. The eight chapters of Parts II and III―four chapters in each―represent two cycles within, and affected by, their heroic and human contexts. Chapter XVI of Part III, for example, though a ricorso, is a ricorso within a human age, hence different in character from Chapter IV of Part I, a ricorso in a divine age. Part IV, the general ricorso, has one chapter, which, though a ricorso, is by position in the sequence another divine age or its herald. Each of the parts and chapters, whatever the age it celebrates, contains elements of the other ages. Chapter I of Part I, a divine age within a divine age, displays the city which arises in the human age. ―Tindall 10

The Humphriad as a whole is part of the First Age (Book I of the Wake). But the first four chapters of Book I also form a complete Viconian Cycle. On this level, The Humphriad III is the ricorso―a ricorso in a divine age, as Tindall puts it.

Giambattista Vico

The Humphriad is generally regarded as one of the more transparent sections of the Wake. Part I is one of the shortest chapters in the book, and probably the easiest―both to read and to understand. There is, however, an undeniable increase in difficulty as one proceeds through these three chapters. Chapter I.4 represents a considerable step-up in difficulty. At twenty-two pages in The Restored Finnegans Wake, it is the longest of the three chapters that make up The Humphriad, and the most challenging. But this is to be expected, as this chapter embodies the collapse into chaos before the start of the next cycle. As Tindall puts:

After the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, destroying itself, perishes from the earth, a period of confusion, the ricorso, stirs things up. From their confusion, “like the phoenix, they rise again”―or, as Joyce puts it, “the Phoenican [Finnegan the Phoenix] wakes” (608.32). ―Tindall 8–9

Finally, two comments from John Gordon’s blog:

I.4: An exceptionally auto-echoic chapter―verbal formulae are constantly recalling or summoning approximations from elsewhere within its 28 pages―perhaps because it takes place in an enclosed space. Klang associations are everpresent.

(Another distinguishing feature of this chapter: its high incidence of American allusions and expressions.) ―John Gordon

And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.

References

E Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, J B Lippincott Company, Philadelphia (1901)
Joseph Campbell, Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York (1944)
Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Eckermann, Translated from the German by John Oxenford, Revised Edition, George Bell & Sons, London (1883)
David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1963)
Eugene Jolas & Elliot Paul (editors), transition, Number 3, Shakespeare & Co, Paris (1927)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, The Viking Press, New York (1958, 1966)
James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Translated into English by Luigi Ricci, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1921)
Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, Third Edition, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland (2006)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
William Butler Yeats, Autobiographies: Reveries over Childhood and Youth and the Trembling of the Veil, The Macmillan Company, New York (1927)
William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York (1969)

Image Credits

The Caged Lion: A Caged Lion at Dublin Zoo, Ellen F O’Connor (photographer), Boston Public Library, Arts Department (1935), Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License
The Meath Hounds: Letitia Marion Hamilton (artist), Dawson Gallery, Private Collection, Dublin, Fair Use
William York Tindall: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Fair Use
Maamtrasna, County Galway: The Road to Maam, Anonymous Photograph, Public Domain
Giambattista Vico: Franscesco Jerace (sculptor), Castel Nuovo, Naples, Marie-Lan Nguyen (photographer), Public Domain

The Humphriad III