Margaret C. Solomon - Eternal Geomater: The Sexual Universe of Finnegans Wake

Reproduction from the manuscript known as the Book of Kells is by courtesy of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.

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COPYRIGHT 1969, by Southern Illinois University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Designed by Andor Braun

Standard Book Number 8093-0392-2

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 69-17107

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ADMIRERS of Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who have eventually determined to attempt Finnegans Wake and have given up in despair after the first few pages, should remind themselves of some of the things they must have learned, from their reading of those earlier novels, about Joyce's method and about his announced intentions. A nice touch of ironic humor in Stephen's conversation with the dean of studies is lost, for instance, unless the reader can hold in his mind fragments of information from the early pages of A Portrait in which Simon Moonan is associated with the word "suck" and is involved in a homosexual incident discussed by the boys of Clongowes but only subconsciously understood by the child Stephen. The dean of studies, with whose dull consciousness Stephen plays maliciously, concludes his piece of moral advice to the heretical university student:

It may be uphill pedaling at first. Take Mr. Moonan. He was a long time before he got to the top. But he got there.

--I may not have his talent, said Stephen quietly.

--You never know, said the dean brightly. (p. 190)

Such assemblings of widely-dispersed elements are constantly required of Joyce's readers. In Ulysses, the process is the same, and the complexity has increased. One must collect and sort words, phrases, sense impressions and fragments of information which have certain "colors" or shades

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of colors--like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that will eventually compose a finished pattern. The reader's capacity for storing the bits and pieces in the compartments of his memory breaks down. He has to go back again and again to fill up holes where there has been a subtle cut between related shades. In Finnegans Wake, of course, a more subliminal process is operating. It does no good even to try consciously to sort and hold the words and fragments of words by which a person's sensibilities are bombarded in the opening pages of the book. The reader must put his trust in the power of his subconscious mind to register impulses of vaguely familiar linguistic and literary allusion. He is presented with a pile of language and is given no model to follow; his best bet is to read on until certain aggregates of repeated material begin to cling together so as to form basic constituents for the complex whole. Adaline Glasheen's brilliant analysis of "The Opening Paragraphs" of Finnegans Wake is largely a work of hind-sight. The elements are far more easily identified once a person begins to see the intended shape of the finished product.

Joyce has always placed upon his readers demands which correspond to his own creative goals. The writer's original "epiphany" must be re-experienced by the reader of the short story; the maze of the labyrinth must be groped through alongside of the puzzled, weak-eyed Stephen, until the fear of making a mistake disappears; the frustrations of Ulysses-Bloom, in his attempts to find his way "home," have to be shared by the baffled reader. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce's intentions are more grandiose, and the reader must be willing to accept a slow enlightenment as "work in progress." From Stephen's comparatively mild statement, in A Portrait, that he is going to "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" (p. 253), Joyce moves, in Ulysses, to a bolder assertion, implicit in the triumvirate of Bloom, Stephen and Molly. Stephen affirms

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his significance as "a conscious rational reagent between a micro- and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void." Bloom meditates upon a bewildering

universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached. (p. 699)

Molly merely wishes "somebody would write me a loveletter... true or no it fills up your whole day and life always something to think about every moment and see it all around you like a new world" (p. 758). It is a new universe Joyce is creating in Finnegans Wake, one that will satisfy the longings of Stephen to be an artist-God, the new-science speculations of Bloom, and the propagating desires of the earth-mother, Molly. The reader must expect to find chaos on the first pages. All the materials for the creative act are there, and they are disturbingly familiar, since the new world is to be fashioned out of the smashed fragments of the old. As a matter of fact, it is "The seim anew" (215.23), and the reader will become more and more confident of his ability to recognize familiar patterns as the universe takes shape, section by section. The command, "Let there be light," may not come soon enough to satisfy impatient readers, but it will come.

The present study proposes to illuminate some of the dark passages of Finnegans Wake. It would be foolish to try, in this multi-dimensioned novel-universe, to undertake an exegesis comprehensive enough to cover every level of meaning. Hence, the discussion will focus on the universe

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of the human body that interested Bloom so much--in particular, its sexual parts--for every facet of the book can be (and, in my opinion, should be) related to this microcosm. I believe that this very preoccupation with sex was Joyce's cosmic joke. Taking upon himself the role of a God engrossed in sex--and using all the religious myths and symbols of creation to perpetuate his joke--was one way of using his jesuitical training in an act of defiance, a way of flying by (by means of) one of those nets which Stephen, in A Portrait, declared were flung at an Irishman to hold him back from flight. "You have the cursed jesuit strain in you," says Buck Mulligan to Stephen ( Ulysses, p. 8), "only it's injected the wrong way."

FINNEGANS WAKE is a funny book, and I do not wish to spoil the joke by over-sexplication. Nevertheless, my analytical re-readings--occasioned by a curiosity about the constant linguistic emphasis on sexual overtones--have led to a far greater understanding, on my part, of the reasons for the major symbols of the book: namely, the male and female sexual organs of the human body. It has been fascinating to watch these stylistic components of a newlycreated universe expand and contract, turn inside out and shift dimensions--in the manner of an optical illusion--all at the will (sometimes perverse) of the god-like artist. The sexual symbolism, of the novel is pertinent to all historical, religious, cultural and psychological human processes; it is particularly relevant to the opposition and occasional precarious unification of art and religion, as exemplified by the twins, Shem and Shaun.