September 2020 - Austin Ratner

Rest in Peace. The phrase itself is a “dead metaphor”—so old and familiar, we no longer see it as metaphor at all. Rather, we see it as lamentable news of the most concrete, unvarnished fact of life: a death. But its root components in fact originate in an ancient metaphor, a comparison between sleep and death found everywhere from Homer and the Hebrew Bible to Shakespeare and Sleeping Beauty. And it’s the metaphor that undergirds the whole of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which uses images of night and sleep to parody death. Shem the Penman, in his guise as schoolboy Dolph, plays at such parody in the chapter known as “Night Lessons.” Having digressed for a while about a dead mother*, Shem turns back to his former subject with a farewell “Rest in peace!” His next words signal his intention to resume where he left off before digressing: “But to return.” This is also a pun, however, that completely undoes the woebegone acceptance of death in the previous line: “Rest in peace! But to return.” (295.15) The satirical pen of James Joyce: where dead metaphors come back to life.

Ancient writers employed the sleep-death metaphor poetically and beautifully, but never satirically. In his 1933 paper “The Sleep of Death,” Marbury B. Ogle*, one-time classicist at the University of Minnesota, collates instances of the metaphor from across ancient literature, including a lovely pair from Homer and Virgil. In The Iliad, Agamemnon ferociously strips brave, young Iphídamas of his sword and cuts his throat with it. Homer writes of the Thracian boy, “Down he dropped into the sleep of bronze.” (Fitzgerald trans., p. 258) With mention of sleep, Homer skillfully tempts the reader with the hope that Iphídamas isn’t dead but just asleep, then swiftly turns the wish to unfeeling, unyielding bronze, doomed to sink into the cold and dark. Centuries later, Virgil applies this exact Homeric sleep-death / wish-reality formula to the death scene of Trojan warrior Orodës: “Harsh repose oppressed his eyes, a sleep / Of iron, and in eternal night they closed.” (Aeneid, Fitzgerald trans., p. 321)

The graveyard epitaph “Rest in Peace,” meanwhile, seems to have originated with the ancient Hebrews. (E.L. Doctorow’s young protagonist in World’s Fair has “the distinct impression that death was Jewish” for good reason.) The phrase “rest in peace” occurs all over the Bible in various forms and in the still-current Jewish funeral prayer Kel Maleh Rachamim, which begins by asking of God ham-tzay m’nucha, or “provide rest [to the deceased],” and concludes with the more direct nuach b’shalom, or “rest in peace.”* After speaking the name of a dead person, living Jews of a certain generation sometimes say alav ha-shalom, which has a similar sense of “peace be unto him.” And Jewish tombstones from the Roman Empire bear the inscription dormitio in pace (“sleeping in peace”), according to our friend Marbury Ogle, who is currently dormitio in pace in Lafayette, Indiana, unless someone has been digging up Midwestern classics professors.

The Jewish prayer seems to turn the sleep-death metaphor in the direction of euphemism with a hope of resurrection; if death is only sleep, then the dead can wake up. Ogle notes this tendency among Greek philosophers, too: “The comparison of death to sleep evidently became a commonplace in the discussions of philosophers concerning the nature of death and in their arguments to combat the fear of it.” The Hebrew Bible repeatedly invokes the language of awaking from sleep to describe actual resurrections. The Book of Isaiah 26:19, for example, says: “Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing*, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead.” The Christian Gospels never directly depict Lazarus or Jesus “awaking” but Christian tombstones do say “rest in peace,” updating dormitio in pace to requiescat in pace and R.I.P.

As one might expect, James Joyce has a more blasphemous take on the metaphor. He comes to it through the raucous Irish ballad “Finnegan’s Wake” in which whiskey-loving hod-carrier Tim Finnegan falls drunk from a ladder and dies. Tim’s “laid out on the bed / With a bottle of whiskey at his feet / And a bottle of porter at his head.” Friends and relatives get drunk and fight over his open casket and accidentally christen his body with spilled whiskey. Tim leaps from his casket and cries, “Thanam an dhoul [Gaelic curse: your soul to the devil], d’ye think I’m dead?” Joyce echoes the ballad’s events in the first chapter of Finnegans Wake with funny, drunken corruptions of the lyrics like “Anam muck an dhoul! Did ye drink me doornail?” (24.15)

Both song and book use the ancient sleep-death, waking-resurrection metaphor less to romanticize death than to give it the finger, rebelling against neurotic conscience and despair through satire and laughter. In all of Joyce’s work, he mimics the religious language of guilt and uses it to say something life-embracing: in Dubliners, he turns deadly sins into earthy virtues; in Finnegans Wake, he takes his satirical rapier to death itself, refusing to identify with death despite conscience’s demand that he should. Instead he satirizes death as a long drunken sleep with morning—not mourning—at the end of it. A funeral in this way becomes “a grand funferall” (13.15), and a cemetery no more than a “seemetery.” (17.36) The Wake itself refuses to die. It doesn’t even have an ending, but instead concludes in the middle of a sentence that resumes in the novel’s first line:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

A way a lone a last a loved a long the

* In the spirit of ending in the middle, a few miscellaneous notes. 1) Dead mothers are a major theme for Joyce, who lost his when he was 21. Ulysses commences with abundant references to a mother’s death and Finnegans Wake concludes with a heart-wrenching mother of a mother’s death scene. 2) Marbury B. Ogle seems to have had a relative named Ogle Marbury who was long ago chief justice of the Maryland state supreme court. Also, Marbury O. married his wife Anetta on June 14, 1904, exactly 2 days before Joyce’s first date with Nora Barnacle, being the day on which Ulysses takes place, June 16, 1904, i.e. the original Bloomsday. 3) Nuach in Hebrew means rest in English and also spells the name Noah. The biblical story of Noah, who “giveth rest to the rainbowed,” as Joyce puts it (133.31), constitutes another major theme of Finnegans Wake. 4) Awake and Sing is the title of Clifford Odets’s first play, which debuted in 1935. In a 2006 Lincoln Center production, Mark Ruffalo played the rumpled yet dashing Moe, and before the celebrity-adoring audience was done applauding his entrance, he said coolly to the young women onstage: “Hello girls! How’s your whiskers?”

James Joyce’s fourth and final opus Finnegans Wake is a book so notoriously difficult to read that those who manage to finish it call it by a nickname conveying both dread and reverence: The Wake. In the movie Shine, Professor Parkes speaks of Rachmaninoff’s notoriously difficult piano concerto No. 3 in a similar way: “Well, no one’s ever been mad enough to attempt The Rach,” says Parkes (John Gielgud at the age of 92!) to young David Helfgott (Noah Taylor). “It’s a mountain. Your hands are two giants struggling for supremacy.”

The Wake, the awesome, the impossible, the psychotic Wake! Is it even a book or is it really an art installation? You don’t read it so much as enter it like a Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirror. Only there is no light in this hall of mirrors—there’s only the light that a sleeper brings with him to his dreams, a low, heatless, living light like that of fireflies, or like the microbursts of light that tired retinas discharge against the darkness in bed at the end of a long day. Joyce wrote it in a kind of nonsense creole in order to “reconstruct the nocturnal life” with language as purposely obscure as nighttime itself. Within its own pages, The Wake calls itself a “lingerous longerous book of the dark” (251.24), and Joyce repeatedly defended his opaque work as a book about the Night: “[T]he action of Ulysses was chiefly in the daytime,” Joyce says, “and the action of my new work takes place chiefly at night. It’s natural things should not be so clear at night, isn’t it now?” To Jacques Mercanton, Joyce explained, “It is night. It is dark. You can hardly see. You sense rather.” (Quoted in Bishop. p. 4)

As usual, Joyce pulls off the improbable, plunging the reader into a baroque living darkness flowing with wishes and fears and memories, loved ones and enemies, disguises, phantasms, weird catalogues, triple and quadruple meanings inscribed on the palimpsest ceiling of the Night. Joyce’s technique of generating these nonsensical night words was to corrupt real language, leaving familiar words and names dimly perceptible behind the nonsense. In this way, Joyce recreates the distorting power of darkness upon the human senses.

At a glance, the inscrutable night-tapestry on The Wake’s pages resembles Lorem Ipsum, the gibberish Latin that printers have used for centuries as dummy text. Joyce’s variety of Lorem Ipsum, however, only looks like gibberish. In fact, it was created through 17 years of painstaking labor, according to disciplined methods. In order to appreciate its minute artistry, you must examine it under a linguistic microscope, closely studying a word at a time. Consider this apparently nonsensical line: “Not yet has the Emp from Corpsica forced the Arth out of Engleterre.” (175.9) If you think about the line’s allusions and consult Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake, you discover real words, often from more than one language, real people, and real places, all superimposed, conjoined, and blended to form “neologisms”—the new words you see there on the page. “The Emp from Corpsica,” for example, clearly refers to Napoleon, the Emp-eror who hailed from the French Mediterranean island of Corsica. Emp seems to blend Emperor and imp, both of which describe Bonaparte. Corpsica in turn blends the word corpse into the name of the island of Napoleon’s birth, suggesting an island that is also a dead body. That happens to be exactly how Joyce thought of Ireland. His first book, Dubliners, dealt with the paralysis of the will that he’d diagnosed in his Irish countrymen, and Joyce’s idea of Irish paralysis involved a “personification of Ireland as a sick or even moribund individual,” as Florence Walzl put it in 1961. I could go on: Arth in this context refers to Sir Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo, a motif throughout The Wake; according to McHugh, Arth is also Welsh for bear, which makes a shadow rhyme with Engleterre, a slight alteration of Angleterre (French for England) by the German word Engel (angel), etc.

Did Joyce really intend to pun in Welsh, English, French, and German in the space of just one sentence? Yes. When critics attacked the Wake for its apparently trivial wordplay, Joyce famously replied, “Yes. Some of the means I use are trivial—and some are quadrivial.” (Budgen, p. 347) “Quadrivial” punning is in fact the fundamental aesthetic strategy of The Wake. But the problem remains: how—and why—does one read such a book? Joyce claimed that he didn’t really expect people to study 600 pages of puns with their noses to the page like a jeweler with a loupe. He said The Wake was “pure music.” (Ellmann, p. 703) Most of Joyce’s contemporaries, including patrons and allies, however, did not consider it an artistic success. They thought Joyce was “only doodling around with puns, indulgently parading the emptiest of eruditions, or inventing some kind of private mythology.” It was not the reaction Joyce hoped for. He wrote, “I am rather discouraged about this … but I cannot go back.” (Bishop, p. 20)

The Wake is what it is: long, redundant, and difficult. The Beatles’ John Lennon, who published his own nonsense writing in both song and in prose, had this to say about Finnegans Wake: “I dug it…. But I mean, he just went … he just didn’t stop, you know.” As The Wake itself confesses with embarrassment: “this nightlife instrument needs still some subtractional betterment.” (150.33-34) It could have been shorter, perhaps, but it’s a fitting mic drop at the end of a ballsy literary career; Joyce published it in 1939 and, having thrown down the ultimate literary gauntlet, he died two years later. Despite The Wake’s length and difficulty, Lennon included Joyce on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, whereon his 1938 Zurich photograph is partly obscured by Lawrence of Arabia.

I’ve said my 1001 Arabian thunderwords. Goodnight.

Austin Ratner

Month: September 2020

The Wake Part II: Rest in Peace, Awake and Sing!

The Wake Part I: Joyce’s Quadrivial Lorem Ipsum