Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London

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eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Issue 1 (2011) cooking apple), when he falls away from himself, when he loses himself in the one, when he covers over his own mortality. “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” (BT 301). 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, (or for 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. Later we will explore the concept of resolute Dasein and the notion of guilt in greater depth. First, though, we will investigate another modality of Dasein’s fallenness, that of language. 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” (FW 57). 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” (FW 45). Although we are told that at one time HCE was “King of the Castle,” as with the Edenic vision, this is never substantiated in 10
eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Issue 1 (2011) actuality. The facticity, in Heideggerian terminology, of HCE seems always to 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… stumpstampaded 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. (FW 43) 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”(BT 100) 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. 19 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, Appollonian facticity they constantly morph into HCE himself. One is left to contemplate whether the song of Being is the wisdom of Silenus, that the truth of human existence is that it would have been better for it never to have existed at all. 20 19 Scotus proposed a univocal ontology that studied being qua being. For Scotus, Being was transcendent of the Aristotelean categories: substance, time, quality, passion, habitus, relation, action, place, position and quantity. In rejecting the Thomist distinction between essence and existence, Scotus proved an influence for Heidegger's conception of truth by cultivating the notion of haecceity, or the principle that causes a particular being to be understood as the thing it is. This moved away from Thomistic conceptions of esse that stressed identification of beings by genera or universal type. Heidegger’s conception of Being as employed in Being and Time suggests something of Scotus’ haecceity. For more on Heidegger’s relation to Duns Scotus see his Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus (1916). 20 Georges Bataille contemplates the farcical absurdity of Finnegans Wake, proposing that HCE counters Hegel’s notion of the pious lord with that of a comic sovereign, finding humour in the realisation that meaning arises only as it is projected upon non-meaning, or death. Derrida explores the implications of the Wake’s laughter, both tyrannous and absurdly whimsical. See Georges Bataille, “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,” in Deucalion 5 (1955), reproduced in Yale French Studies 78. On Bataille, trans. Jonathan Strauss, ed. Allan Stoekl (1990), 9–28, and Jacques Derrida, “Two Words For Joyce,” (cf. note 4). 11
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Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London

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