This then leads me to the second part of the title which has chosen me today: "the definitive exgenesis of HCE." The word exgenesis enstates a withdrawal of genesis, thus suggesting a confusion or illegibility between beginning and end; in a word, a withdrawal indistinguishable from genesis, and a word in which exegesis is both heard and suppressed. Exgenesis cannot help but be de-finitive: if that word is to be understood as a withdrawal of that which ends. Definitive exgenesis would then be a reading of the fragmentary.
A fragment I am more certain of from VI.B. 15 is "w of b of j's f's w / describe -- f" (VI.B. 15: 99). The second set of initials is easy enough to decipher: Joyce's Finnegan's Wake--retaining the apostrophe from the title of the song. David Hayman has proven that Joyce had decided upon a wake setting at least by mid 1923, three years before this fragment would have been drafted. This entry, with the clearly retained apostrophe, joins an f to the w; the wake is f's proper. Such contiguity is disavowed by the title Finnegans Wake, sans apostrophe. The task of describing f (Finnegan or fall) is joined to this cryptic "w of b": the writing, wake, or work of the book (as if work is synonymous with writing). The initials remain merely marks of a secret or encryption granted a degree of propriety by the preposition "of." This syntax renders these marks as a barely legible statement. One could characterize this notebook fragment with the Old Irish word run, which means secret, if only for the illegibility of the ancient tomb markings it names. The cipher as rune is the illegible fragmentary remains from antiquity.
Before continuing a word or two regarding encryption seems in order. In the essay "Fors: les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok"--the preface to Cryptonymie: le verbier de l'homme aux loux--Jacques Derrida asks the question "Qu'est-ce qu'une crypte?" This question recallsMallarmé's first question concerning English in Les mots anglais (a text replete with word lists not unlike those found in the notebooks); suggesting that perhaps language is a crypt of a kind. A crypt is the most secret place, a silent tomb: "'Le secret est de rigeur,' d'où la crypte, comme lieu caché, dissimulation effaçant les traces de la dissimulation, lieu de silence" (Derrida, 18). The crypt is effaced by cryptic marks--a palimpsest of dissimulated marks in-scribed over a still illegible writing. Derrida, following from Abraham and Torok's reading of Freud, claims that the Wolf Man's magic word is sealed and thereby remains unspeakably silent. The crypt hides the event of its own hiding. And, it is no secret that Joyce was familiar with the Wolf Man, as Daniel Ferrer has demonstrated (cf. Ferrer). Another fragment from VI.B. 15 taunts us with this cryptic illegibility: "wanna see the sipilcher" (VI.B. 15: 41). The cryptic markings are at once intelligible and illegible.
This notion of encryption seems to be not without analogue to the memories of the wake, where nothing (or not quite nothing) is remembered: "O foenix culprit! Ex nickylow malo comes mickelmassed bonum. ... Only for that these will not breathe upon Norronesen or Irenean the secrest of their soorcelossness" (FW: 023.16-9). The impression of Latinate words registers through the names Mick and Nick. Nothing can come out of nothing (Ex nihilo nihil fit) and also, appositionally enstated, out of evil comes good (Ex malo bonum fit). The moral values of good and evil are paratactically enjoined to the suggestion of the maintenance of nothing. According to this passage the act of enstating this Latinate syntagm (or pair of syntagms) denies the presentation of a secrest of soorcelossness. In another letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver defending and illustrating his "nat language" (FW: 083.12), Joyce defined "secrest" as "superlative of most secret" (SL: 322; 13 May 1927). The word "secrest" is itself a secret, the meaning of which can be known only through correspondence. This deepest, most arcane and cryptic secret is soorcelossness: a loss of origin or exgenesis. But once the word is parsed, the secret remains.
To begin again: the composition of the first chapter in November 1926 was overseen by the VI.B. 15 notebook,written after Joyce's stay in Belgium that summer (JJA 32: xvi). Under the "CIRCE" section in the Scribbledehobble notebook there is a concentrated and virtually synoptic series of notes concerning I.1 (VIA: 744-53). These notes are contemporary with VI.B. 15. The conceptual frame for the Wake had been fairly well established by this time (all of book III, most of book I and important sections of books II and IV had already been drafted); the question now concerning the writing of the book is of a certain kind of elaboration. The first chapter or overture (ouverture) is such an elaboration, begun in the middle of the muddle. The concern of this paper will be the conceptual integration of the fall of Finnegan, the masterbuilder, into the first chapter by examining a few select examples from the text and the VI.B. 15 notebook. I shall endeavor to describe the encryption of exgenesis, or more precisely, an encrypted exgenesis.
It would be useful to remember that the very first episode of the Wake to be drafted was the Roderick O'Conor episode of II.3. This episode tells of the aftermath of the downfall of the "last pre-electric king of Ireland" (FW: 380.12-3). Essentially the question "what happened next" is asked four times, and four times the answer is deferred through hyperactive historiographico-narratological twaddle. The very first section of the Wake to be essayed enstates narrational paralysis as the aftermath of a fall ineluctably suspended. One could perhaps read the Wake as an echo of the Roderick passage: a gathering of traces of the humiliated and embalmed chief dispersed and obscured amidst a fourfolded dynamic. The narrative of the Roderick O'Conor passage obscures exactly what it tries to comprehend by a narratological praxis haplessly coordinate with encryption. In answering the question the answer remains hidden. This equivalence--or, at least, virtually illegible boundary--between narrative and encryption can be found pro-jected in the notebooks. The project of the notebooks is an encryption in progress.
The following fragments from VI.B. 15 will help to initially illuminate Joyce's building of the fall of the "offwall" (FW: 003.19), a wall whose attribution of state ("of") is already a state of withdrawal ("off").
63: $HCE by brick / storycarrierTaken together these fragments ostensibly proffer a narrative of ruin. The first fragment seems to allude to the profession of "Bygmaster Finnegan" (FW: 004.18), a storycarrier: a carrier of stories, which are also horizontal tiers (étage and récit). By brick he carries stories, and this carrying forms the foundation of his stories, his narratives. Out of "hod, cement and edifices" he fashions "buildung supra buildung pon the banks for the livers by the Soangso" (FW: 004.26-7). The word "buildung" is another index of the conceptual miscegenation registered by the paronomastic possibilities of the word "story" (this word appears in VI.B. 15 just a few pages before the storycarrier entry; VI.B. 15: 33). "Buildung" enhouses the state of storycarrying in the Wake. As a combination of the English building with the German bildung it conflates epistemology with edifice. The word "bild," picture, and--oddly enough--figure of speech, is also indicated here. For the poets of the Athenaeum "Bildung" signified the ontic manifestation of the Ideal; it was the highest conceptual edifice. Buildung also suggests dung, as in the dungheap in which the infamous letter is hidden. Thus buildung suggests the encrypted fate of edifice and narration, the fate of Finnegan's stories. The formidable bild appears enshitted. The guarding of this radical scatological encryption falls to ALP, and so the second entry, "storycarrier $ALP / letter in memory," contains the germ of her exhaustive rôle in "stolentelling" (FW: 424.35).
65: storycarrier $ALP / letter in memory
67: $HCE falls--pieces
77: earse $HCE / not recognize him / -- mention him / cut --
168: like the fall from erect of 1001 / 2000 / Bricks
The third entry points to the humpty-dumptiness of Tim Finnegan, the pissed vaudevillian masterbuilder renowned for having fallen down. The remains are, at best, fragmentary, and piecing the story together is, at least, somewhat difficult, as demonstrated by Mamalujo's various inefficacious reconstructions. HCE shatters and the story has become fragmentary. The syntax of this entry ("falls--pieces") indicates that fall and fragmentation are coordinate rather than linked or enjoined in a causal relationship. The event of fragmentation--the fracture designated by the word "of"--is itself registered in a fragmentary form, and so the fracture itself remains encrypted. The fragments do not mark an attributable fracture.
The next fragment elaborates--if a fragment can be said to elaborate--this fragmentary enstatement of HCE's intelligibility. The "erse solid man" (FW: 003.20) cannot be recognized or enstated in his apportionment. In this entry the ciphered hyphens, or blank spaces, alternate between the places designating "not" and "him." The blanks circulate as heteroclyte encryption.
The last entry--an incomplete simile--recalls the notes taken regarding narratology and The Thousand and One Nights in the Scribbledehobble notebook under the heading "THE SISTERS": "Arabian nights, serial stories, tales within tales, to be continued, desperate story telling" (VI.A: 21). If--within a context of notebook conceptualization--the number 1,001 is taken as some kind of index of narratological concern, then the association between crumbled edifice and encrypted story proffered by the word "buildung" is reinforced. HCE falls from an upright edifice of multiply enfolded narratives and crashes into almost exactly twice as many fragments. Or, to be more precise, something is implied as being like "the fall from erect of 1001." This fragment offers an analogy of fragmentation, and not a singular event of fracturation.
This fragment--"like the fall from erect of 1001"--bears a relation to an earlier fragment from VI.B. 15: "wall in course of erection" (VI.B. 15: 97). Both fragments appear in the "Fall" passage of the first chapter in a twained and parenthetical manner:
It may half been a missfired brick, as some say, or it mought have been due to a collupsus of his back promises, as others looked at it. (There extand by now one thousand and one stories, all told, of the same.) But so sore did abe ite ivvy's holired abbles, ... (FW: 005.26-30) [This sentence is interrupted by a parenthetical catalogue of rock assemblies, the "walhall horrors." (FW: 005.30)] ... wan warning Phill filt tippling full. His howd feeled heavy, his hoddit did shake. (There was a wall of course in erection) Dimb! He stottered from the latter. Damb! he was dud. Dumb! Mastabatoom, mastabadtomm, when a mon merries his lute is all long. For whole the world to see (FW: 006.07-9).The syntax of the notebook fragment"wall in course of erection" has been changed to "wall of course in erection." This transposition is virtually without semantic value but is hardly insignificant. The first version implies that a wall is engaged in a process of being raised. The wall is enstated as being independent from the event of its erection. In the second version this contingency is elided by the transposition. Wall and erection are, of course, enstated as being inseparable. Their course is coeval.
The necessity of this conflation rests with the other parenthetical fragment derived from VI.B. 15: "There extand by now one thousand and one stories, all told, of the same." This fragment explicitly enstates the association between 1,001 and narration: there are one thousand and one stories of the same. These one thousand and one stories are all analogues of the same unstated event. Indeed, the previously drafted notebook fragment is enstated as one of these possible analogues. The erect wall is one extension among many similar stories.
Another such narrative presented here concerns HCE's becoming subject to a collupsus. Or rather, his back promises are subject to a collupsus: these back promises are his anatomical back or a series of anterior responsibilities. The collapse does not affect HCE, but rather some displacement of him, which is itself ambiguously enstated. HCE does not become a subject during the enstatement of the collupsus. This word bears some examination as it is infected with the Latin root for collapse, collapsus. One could say that the word collapse has been built from collapsus. In the Ars Poetica, Horace likens a language's lexicon to leaves in a forest, the oldest die to make room for the succeeding generation: "Vt siluae foliis pronos mutantur in annos, / prima cadunt ita uerborum uetus interit aetas, / ... Debemur morti nos nostraque" (Horace, ll. 60-3). Lexical obsolescence is equated with death. The word collupsus entombs its elder root Latinate word within its English offspring.
Also buried within the above passage is the list of "wallhall's horrors": gatherings of menhirs and archaic crypts and ruins. Many of these appear listed in VI.B. 15. The word "wallhall" suggests a gathering of walls (perhaps as pictures for an exhibition) and Valhala, the Scandinavian mythical burial ground for heroes. The buildung blocks of narrative--such as the two out of one thousand and one stories--are rendered as tombs for the fall's encryption These crypts thus prefigure the museyroom episode in which the battle of "waterloose" (FW: 008.02-3) is exhibited. This museum is located in a cryptlike or vaginal space underneath the phallic Wellington Monument in Phoenix park and is guarded by Mistress Kathe. The museum commemorates HCE's martial and marital fall: the waterloo where Wellington is defeated defecating and masturbating on a toilet.
The dis-erection or de-erection of the wall is also thus associated with masturbatory possibilities: "Mastabatoom, mastabadtomm, when a mon merries his lute is all long. For whole the world to see." Masturbation appears as one of the thousand and one stories; however the references here complicate this matter, as also cited here is a mastaba-tomb, a type of single-staged Egyptian crypt (which predates the pyramid). The masterbuilder, in falling, is now incorporated--indeed encrypted--into a masturbatory master-tomb. "Mastabatoom" also names Bataou, the title of Osiris as "soul of the bread," a god of germination, thereby suggesting a ricorso (Troy, 61-2). Within the two words mastabatoom and mastabadtomm there is a conflation of builder, masturbator, sinner (mister bad Tom) and tomb. And such encryption is "[f]or all the world to see." This entry entombs the VI.B. 15 fragment "5 min exposure / for all the world to see" (VI.B. 15: 83). The bild of the bildung is obviously displayed. The encryption is intelligible, but only as a secrest; the picture is visible only as overdetermined encryption.
This encrypted unintelligibility is registered through resonances to both Finn Macool and the song "Finnegan's Wake." Immediately following the claim of worldwide visibility one reads "Macool, Macool, orra whyi deed ye diie? of a trying thirstday mournin?" (FW: 006.13-4). The overly precise date of the downfall (Thursday morning) is enstated as a metaplasmic paronomasis suggesting the event of a wake (thirsty day mourning). This pun is itself syntactically enstated as the cause of death: why did you die of a trying thirstday mournin. The event of the downfall is caused by the advent of mourning. The wake does not so much commemorate the fall, but rather the wake is encrypted as fall, into post-Babelian language, which--despite the apparent hyperactivity of narrational technique--tells (or builds) no story.
As is apparent the confusion at the Wake is not only narratological but linguistic as well. Laurent Milesi, in his essay "L'idiome babelien de Finnegans Wake," explores the Babelian character of (what I have been calling) exgenesis through a meticulous reading of the notebooks. In particular, the fragment "bababa," the first element of the first thunder word--which appears in an early form in VI.B. 15 (VI.B. 15: 155)--provides an important motif of the linguistic encryption of the fall. "Le chute est dans l'érection du sens, véhicule de l'idéologie subversive des humains, en particulier de ceux assemblés à Babel" (Milesi, 185). The raising of Babel is rendered indistinguishable from its destruction or collupsus. Milesi picks the following example from the "Haveth Childers Everywhere" passage as an example: "Blabus was razing his wall" (FW: 552.19-20; cf. Milesi, 182).
The relentless divagations on both the narratological and the linguistic levels remain de-finitive: they deprive the text of an enstatable end. An example of such takes up the suggestion of Bataou, the god of germination: "Grampupus is fallen down but grinny sprids the board" (FW: 007.08; cf. Troy, 70). The bread sprung from the dead, departed and buried god of germination is being prepared as a corps morcelé for consumption at a sacramental breakfast. After the preparation of this meal, "as you would quaffoff his fraudstuff and sink teeth through that pyth of a flowerwhite bodey behold of him a behemoth for he is nowhemoe. Finniche! Only a fadograph of a yestern scene" (FW: 007.13-5). The remnant is called a fadograph, an effaced image, graphic or bild. Subsequent to encryption the faded remnant is intelligible only as a faded writing of a bild.
After the description of this cannibalism one is enjoined to the hope that "Yet may we not still see the brontoichthyan form outlined aslumbered" (FW: 007.20). This hope is phrased as a syllepsis--a syntactic pun. The phrase could also read counter-intuitively as an expression of hope for continuing to not see the form outlined aslumbered. Through the syntactic form of the phrase, the visible form or buildung of HCE is denied. The syntax attempts to de-scribe the image offered forth by the fadograph--render it unintelligible. Such is the sentiment voiced at the end of this chapter as the rising Finn is told of his obsolescence in "Heliopolis" (FW: 024.18). When the event of the song's conclusion is played out, a wake--or awakening--is denied for Finnegan, drunk as a doornail.
Anam muck an dhoul! Did ye drink me doornail?The citation from the song incorporates a metonymic displacement: "do ye think I'm dead" has been written as "Did ye drink me doornail." A vernacular attribute of death stands in to describe the state into which he has been drunk. He had died on a "thirstday mournin" and is now drunken to a metonymically displaced death, reassured as a metaphorical and dependent deity ("like a God on pension"). The syntax again denies HCE from being a subject; and perhaps, from being subject to a fall isolable from the wake. This event of his advent or coming at his wake is disavowed.
Now be aisy, good Mr Finnimore, sir. And take your laysure like a God on pension and don't be walking abroad. ... You're better off, sir, where you are..." (FW: 024.15-28).
To conclude: it seems that my mistranscribed line--"Did god be come"--has returned to haunt me, even though the fragment is "nowhemoe" (FW: 007.15) to be found. This word just used to designate the mistranscribed line--"nowhemoe"--can be found in VI.B. 15 on page 185. (The notebook entry is slightly different: "noewhemoe.") This compression or crasis of no where more designates an aporetic answer for the misenstated question: did god be come?--"he is nowhemoe." Nowhemoe is his state, his enstatement, and the mark of his encryption. His identity is given as a retraction of identity rhetorically encrypted. This word enstates the present moment ("now") as being nowhere. The question that arises in the mistranscribed line cannot be answered by Finnegans Wake. Or rather, following from Samuel Beckett's suggestion, there is an answer and it is the writing itself: the writing which encrypts as it proceeds. In Joyce's buildungsroman the writing hides as it comes.
But the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever, man, on all matters that fall under the ban of our infrarational senses for the last milchcamel, the heartvein throbbing between his eyebrowns, has still to moor before the tomb of his cousin charmian where his date is tethered by the pam that's hers (FW: 019.35-020.04).The subject of this sentence--man--is ambiguously enstated, perhaps the subject is not even the man but the writing, or an auto-ruin, an auto-rune. The impossibility and inevitability of enstating the exgenesis of HCE is the only possible statement of the wake: endurance of encrypted statement. This wrune is perhaps the w enjoined to f: Finnegans wrune, the encrypted crypt that marks the desistance of Finnegan. To paraphrase the above passage, these runes are written under the auspices of a prohibition of intelligibility ("under the ban of our infrarational senses"). And this writing is before the "last milchcamel... has still to moor before the tomb." This prohibition is enacted within a period of awaiting, an awaiting of mourning.According to Roland McHugh, ancient Arabs tied camels to graves. But within this passage, if not within the Wake and its extended genetic family, the subject that is the precedent for this event of mourning remains "nowhemoe" enstated. This token of funereal obeisance is enstated in a cryptic writing indicating secrets of nothing--nothing that can be enstated as an event.
The camel recurs at the beginning of the "Haveth Childers Everywhere" passage as the agency of HCE's re-presentation through the host of Shaun's body: "I am bubub brought up under a camel [gammel, Danish "old"] act of dynasties long out of print" (FW: 532.07-8). The representation, long denied, once enstated, is now obsolete. The camel is merely an index of the irony of presentation at the Wake. Certainly there subsists a presence but it is an enruined presence: a fadograph of mere tokens of funereal obeisance proffered at a crypt. This crypt is like the notebooks--out of print and prone to erroneous fidelity.
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Samuel Beckett, "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce," Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress, Samuel Beckett et al, New York: New Directions, 1939. 3-22.
Jacques Derrida, "Fors: les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok," Cryptonymie: le verbier de l'homme aux loux, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Paris: Flammarion, 1976. 9-73.
Daniel Ferrer, "La scène primitive de l'écriture, une lecture joycienne de Freud," Genèse de Babel, Joyce et la création, ed. Claude Jacquet, Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1985. 15-35.
Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in "Finnegans Wake," London: Faber, 1962.
David Hayman, "'Scribbledehobbles' and How They Grew," Twelve and
a Tilly, eds. Jack P. Dalton and Clive Hart, London: Faber, 1966. 107-118.
--.The "Wake" in Transit, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.
Horace, Ars Poetica, Épitres, ed. François Villeneuve, Paris: Belles Lettres, 1967. 181-227.
Stéphane Mallarmé, OEuvres complètes, eds. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry, Paris: Gallimard, 1945.
Roland McHugh, Annotations to "Finnegans Wake," revised edition, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Laurent Milesi. "L'idiome babelien de Finnegans Wake," Genèse de Babel, Joyce et la création, ed. Claude Jacquet, Paris: CNRS, 1985. 155-215.
Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, "The Name of the Book," A "Finnegans Wake" Circular 4.3 (Spring 1989): 41-50.
Danis Rose, The Textual Diaries of James Joyce, Dublin: Lilliput 1995.
Mark L. Troy, Mummeries of Resurrection: The Cycle of Osiris in "Finnegans
Wake," Stockholm: Uppsala, 1976.
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