Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London

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eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Issue 1 (2011) Let us examine the narrative more closely. According to McHugh, the etymology of the Basque word for orange is “the fruit which was first eaten.” 14 Taken with the Irish flag we find in “oranges laid to rust upon the green,” this suggests that the Irish nation is itself in some sense fallen. This biblical imagery is enhanced when we realise that “devlin first loved livvy” reveals not only a relationship between Dublin and the River Liffey but the Devil (as a tempting serpent) and Eve. We are even told that Finn lies like an overgrown “babeling” (Tower of Babel). He is symbolised by the ‘Ш’ rune depicting man’s prone state. Shaun is described as lying in “one foule stretch” for “ells upon ells,” a Miltonic metaphor reminding of Satan lying prostrate, outcast to the fires of Hell. This “fall of a once wallstrait oldparr” is repeated endlessly in all forms of HCE from Adam to Shaun. As statements of the recurring “fall” theme, these biblical and national images suggest that Irish religious and cultural structures have themselves grown out of the underlying structure of human being. We learn of HCE that “Father Barley […] got up of a morning arley and he met with a plattonem blondes names Hips and Haws” (FW 257), suggesting how the archetypal man, in his fallen state, is similar to John Barleycorn, a pagan symbol for the process of the barley harvest and brewing of beer and whiskey. The theme of Earwicker’s seduction by the two maids (“Hips” and “Haws”) finds echo here in the process of brewing beer. The world of the Wake is narratively bound to the fall of man. This narrative structure is imbricated into the very landscape itself. Fallenness [Verfallenheit] is also an important aspect of Dasein, being associated with its authenticity [Eigentlichkeit]. Indeed, “falling reveals an essential ontological structure of Dasein itself.” 15 Hubert Dreyfus outlines three forms of this structure: absorption, language and reflexivity. 16 Let us examine these. Dasein does not exist as a subject but is instead already bound up with the world such that it is the clearing- foundation in which human subjectivity shows up. 14 Roland McHugh, Annotations To Finnegans Wake (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 3. 15 Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie, John & Robinson, Edward (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006 [1962]), 224. In the following this source will be quoted in the continuous text as BT. 16 Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-world (Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1991). 8
eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Issue 1 (2011) In falling, Dasein itself as factical Being-in-the-world, is something from which it has already fallen-away […]. [It] has fallen into the world, which itself belongs to its being. […] In the kind of handling and being-busy which is “absorbed in the thing one is handling” […] the essential structure of care — falling — makes itself known. (BT 226 ff.) The care structure of Dasein’s skilled coping makes falling a necessity. Only as result of its fallenness can something like a subject (‘factical Being-in-the-world’) emerge within the pre-subjective clearing of Dasein. This subject, or self, which emerges in Dasein, is given identity by the inherited ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ 17 upon which Dasein takes a public stand. This possibility gives meaning to the ‘handling and being-busy’ of Dasein’s daily concerns, and provides the identity upon which it publicly takes a stand. That is, in falling, Dasein interprets itself in terms of the care structure that reveals the ‘there’ into which it has fallen, the situation into which it is ‘thrown’ [geworfen]. This situation is the nature of Dasein’s facticity. Dasein can never recover a grounded essence. It is always already ‘thrown’ [geworfen] into Being in that its being is always already an issue for it. Dasein’s ‘thrownness’ [Geworfenheit] is the content of its ‘facticity’ [Faktizität], or worldly situation, flavoured by its ‘state-of-mind’ [Befindlichkeit], or ‘attunement’ [Stimmung]. Because it is thus fallen, and hence not grounded, Dasein is “interpretation all the way down.” 18 It did not choose the thrownness of its existence but must inexorably take a stand on it. As it is ungrounded in this way, occupying only public stations of Being, Heidegger speaks of Dasein having fallen into the ‘one self’ [das Man] (an agreed upon way of public being). Unless Dasein comes to awareness of its existential thrownness, and chooses to inhabit the one with resolute authenticity; that is, in a way which recognises its groundless nature but heroically presses towards a public identity nonetheless, Dasein obscures the anxiety of its own thrownness. In Finnegans Wake, Shem poses the question, “when is a man not a man?” and answers “when he is sham.” When is he “sham”? When he “yeat the abblokooken” (FW 170) (eats the 17 Dasein’s ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ is the particular existentiell modality into which, as a possibility, it projects itself. Dasein projects itself towards its possibilities by enpresenting [gegenwärtingen] beings in its world as the ‘towards-which’ [das Wozu] of an ‘in-order-to’ [das Um-zu]. In being a student, for example, Dasein enpresents the ready-to-hand of a computer towards typing in order to write an essay for the sake of being a student. 18 Dreyfus, Being-in-the-world (cf. note 17), 300. 9
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