Due to illness, Gerry Dukes has had to pull out as a panelist in the Gare Saint Lazare Players 2nd How It Is Symposium which is to take place on Friday the 14th of June. So, I have been asked to fill in for him. This is a very great honour, as I am very familiar with Gerry Dukes involvement with Barry MaGovern's I'll Go On one man show which he toured all over the world. I saw it twice, once in Cork, in the Everyman, and the second time in Dublin, in the Gate, if I am not mistaken. It was a magical performance. So, the text I will be presenting in Gerry Dukes absence is the text below, which focuses on part 2 of Joyce's Finnegans Wake and part 2 'avec Pim' of Beckett's Comment c'est/How It is, and finally the correspondence which both works have with the second age in Giambattista Vico's Scienza nuova.
Chapter
2, Book II, of Finnegans Wake
(1939) is the subject of the following
essay in which I attempt to trace the
correspondences with the second age in
Gimbattista Vico’s Scienza nuova
( 1765 ) , correspondences which James Joyce himself famously asked the young
Samuel Beckett to illuminate for the public, in order to prepare them for the Wakes eventual publication, and which
provoked the young Beckett to write Dante…Bruno.Vico…Joyce
(1929) . Furthermore, I will be
attempting to also explore the possible further correspondences between Joyce
and Vico and Beckett’s final full-length novel in French Comment c’est (1961) and which he later translated as How It Is (1963). Some of these correspondences I have already outlined in More Micks than Dicks ( 2017 ),[2] but they were primarily concerned
with part 1 of Comment c’est and
Vico’s first age, the divine. However, in the following work the focus has
shifted to Vico’s second age that of violence, or force, and the subsequent
treatments of the theme in both Joyce’s and Beckett’s most controversial and
obscure works. Finally, in an attempt to underline how contemporary all of the
issues are, I will be also making reference to the contemporary Italian
philosopher Giorgio Agamben and his ideas on biopolitics, as I see his work as
an extension of Vico’s, whose ideas are made all the more pertinent by
contemporary politics in the Trump era. President Trump, I will be positing,
being the pugnacious leader par excellence of our time[3], as Hitler was in Joyce’s, and so
the almost perfect expression of Vico’s ideas on rulers during ‘heroic’
times.
One
of the most surprising discoveries to make while reading Book 2 of Finnegans Wake is the appearance of
Adolf Hitler and the many other related references to Nazi Germany and the
pogroms on the Jews. But, they really should come as no surprise when one
considers the fact that Finnegans Wake
playfully echoes the thematic structure of Vico’s three ages of man theory as
they appear in his Scienza nuova;
with each section of Joyce’s work evoking an age as they are enumerated by
Vico. So, Book 1 of the Wake corresponding
with Vico’s first age, Book 2, the second, Book 3 the third, and finally Book
4, the shortest and comprising of only one part ( Book 1 of FW is made up of 8 different sections,
while Books 1 & 2 are each divided into four different parts) is given over
to death, before the whole cycle starts off again – Finnegans Wake the very title of the book being a sign of all that
is to come, sound conveying as much to meaning, as any other sense. Ideally,
then, the book should be read aloud. Normal ideas of punctuation have been
jettisoned, hence the omission of the apostrophe to denote possession, as the
wake is everyone’s and it will happen again, and again. The cyclical nature of
the book imitates life. Joyce used Giambattista Vico’s three ages of man theory
as a singularly complex structural device on which to rest the whole whopping
edifice, so that each book, as enumerated above, corresponds to a separate age
and the Viconean superstructure, like some infernal wheel, powers the narration
along.
So,
what were these ages? According to Vico,
the very first age was divine, the second heroic and the third human. Each age
is governed by different laws. The first age, being divine, was governed by
Gods, and principally by Jupiter himself. While the second age was governed by
heroes, again as in Homer. So, Agamemnon and Achilles being representative
characters, being heroic, of this particular age. Finally, the third age is
governed by humans, so reason is the principal guiding force. Beckett, and
indeed Joyce, make huge play of this, as you would expect. But let us return to
Vico’s second age, as it is Book 2 of Finnegans
Wake, and part 2 of Comment c’est/How It Is and the way in
which Vico’s theme of the second age,
being violence or force, is treated in each work that concern us here.
But
before beginning, it may perhaps be prudent of me to first of all comment on
the very close proximity in Vico’s work between religion and law, and how force
naturally binds them together. This is Vico’s fundamental modernity, history
being cyclical, so man then being apparently condemned to repeat eternally the
very same mistakes again, and again. Nietzsche, of course, took up this idea
and explores it further in his concept of the eternal occurrence. Vico’s three
ages, similarly, act as the eternal thread-mill[4]. So, the very complex ideas which he
explores in Scienza nuovo will always
have resonance, as man is condemned eternally to repeat the patterns. Vico
calls this phenomenon providence.
In a word, here is all humanity
circling with fatal monotony
about the Providential fulcrum – the
‘convoy wheeling
Giambattista
Vico makes reference to the quirites in Scienza
nuova, the ancient Roman holy priests who were responsible for defending
and at times with punishment of death, the sacred tenants of Roman law the
Twelve Tables, which preceded the ten Christian Commandments, and which upheld
ancient Roman patriarchy. Both Finnegans
Wake and Comment c’est/How It Is
are full of references to ancient Roman patriarchy laws, as enumerated by Vico
in Scienza nouva but which also have
a very strong resonance today. For example, Giorgio Agamben makes a direct
reference to Vico, early on in his much- celebrated work Homo sacer in which he quotes Vico when he states that the
exception[6] rather than the norm is always the
rule in jurisprudence. Might always being right. Such, in effect, is the real sacred rule of Law. Beckett in Comment c’est/How It Is makes reference
to this when the narrator speaks of ‘notre justice’[7] . Agamben quotes Carl Schmitt, who
is particularly apt for our present purposes, as Schmitt wrote extensively on
Hitler, particularly in- regards- to the changes made to German law during the
early 1930’s when the Nazis took power and started enshrining their pogroms on
the Jews into German law.
Il secondo fu eroico, ovvero della
forza, ma però
prevenuta già dalla religione, che
sola può tener
Only
religion can keep the power of force in check. This is one of the fundamental
ideas which both Joyce and Beckett explore in parts 2 of both their books. In
the Scienza nouva Vico is at pains to
show how religion, just like language and law, is an entirely manmade
structure, and so all truths, as a consequence, are manmade, hence
comprehensible, thus pre-empting Nietzsche by over a century.
Hoots fromm, we’re globing. Why
hidest
thou hinder thy husband his name?
Leda, Lada,
aflutter-afraida, so does your girdle
grow!
Willed without witting, whorled
without
aimed. Pappapassos, Mammamanet,
warwhets-
wut and whowitswhy. But its tails for
toughs and titties for totties and
come
Joyce,
it has been well documented, as a young man liked to distance himself from
Yeats, seeing the elder poet as a product of a bygone era. But it is very hard
to read the above passage taken from section 2, Book 2 of Finnegans Wake,
without being reminded of his sonnet Leda
and the Swan and which William Butler Yeats published in The Tower (1922), some years before Joyce’s book was finally
published in 1939, on the very eve of the second world war. In the ancient Greek myth Zeus takes the form
of a swan and begets Agamemnon by seducing Leda by first deception, and then
force, and from such twin origins the seeds for the destruction of Troy, indeed
‘civilisation’ we may add, are sewn.
A shudder in the loins engenders
there
The broken wall, the burning roof and
tower
The
fragment above by Joyce is typical of Finnegans
Wake where children’s nursery rhymes, ‘so how does your girdle grow’
clearly a pun on the phrase ‘so how does your garden grow’, mix with ancient myth, here the reference to
Leda; the Bible ‘world without aimed’ a play on ‘world without end’ which is a
line directly taken from The Lord’s Prayer; and sheer wordplay, ‘Pappapassos’ a
play on Pappageno, for example, yet the currency passos supplanting the former
suffix to conform with the recurring theme of patriarchy, and might basically
being right, which runs throughout the entire four Books, and which is also the
recurring theme in Vico. But if we scan further down to the very next paragraph
that directly follows the Leda piece, and which contains the following
side-heading, printed in capitals, again a feature which Beckett was to use in
part 2 of Comment c’est/How It Is[11], ‘PANOPTICAL PURVIEW OF POLITICAL
PROGRESS AND THE FUTURE PRESENTATION OF THE PAST’[12] we then move onto a reference to
Nazi Germany.
But, holy Janus, I was forgetting the
Blitzenkopfs!
Here, Hengest and Horsesauce, take
your heads out
of that taletub. And leave your
hinnyhennyhind you.
Its haunted. The chamber. Of errings.
Whoan, tug, trace,
stirrup! It is distinctly
understouttered that, sense you
threehandshighs put your twofootlarge
timepats in that
dead wash of Lough Murph and until
such pace one and the
same Messhern the grinning statesmen,
Brock
and Leon, have shunted the grumbling
countdetouts,
Starlin and Ser Arthur Ghinis.
Foamously homely brew,
Bebattled by bottle, gageure de
guegerre. Bull igien bear and
Then bearagain bulligan, Gringrin
gringrin. Staffs
We
must never forget the historical context, Joyce won’t allow us. The text above
is riddled with references to the ugly politics and alliances of the time,
which is the 1930s when Hitler and the Nazis went from being an extreme right-
wing group without much credibility, particularly after the failed pusch and
the imprisonment of Hitler in the twenties, to a major political party elected
into government by democratic means in 1933.
Janus is the Roman two- faced God, obviously
serving a dual function here in Joyce’s narrative, in the literal Viconean
sense, and by that meaning historic, as Janus is the god who looks back with
one face, while with the other attempts to navigate the future. On the other
hand, it can also be read in the idiomatic sense of being two-faced, or false,
saying one thing and then doing another. The context above clearly being
political, with references to Nazi
Germany with ‘Blitzenkopfs’. ‘Here Hengest and Horsesauce’ a possible play on
the German Herr, ‘Hengest’ paraphrasing chicken ( hen guest ), which could
possibly be a reference to either Chamberlin, or any number of European
statesmen at the time who went down the road of appeasement. We know that Joyce
composed chapter 2 of Book two during the 1930’s, and part 2 in Book 2 of the Wake is particularly full of references
to the events as they occurred. ‘Horsesauce’, a rather playful pun on the
popular, now banned song, Horst Wiessel
which was typically sung at all Nazi parades and demonstrations of power. Adolf
Hitler, and the Nazi party, being the greatest possible expression of Vico’s
second age, particularly with its ideas of racial superiority. Himmler’s SS
being the ultimate expression of Nazi ideas of
supremacy, and this is coming back to Agamben’s ideas on ancient Roman
law and homo sacer, which takes on a
very significant resonance in modern history as a consequence of the Final
Solution, regarding what became known in Nazi circles as ‘the Jewish question.[14]
‘The chamber. Of errings.’ Takes on a very
sinister connotation, given the overall context of the book. Joyce, by using
almost childish language, and so innocent, not so innocently puns, by inserting
such numerous references to political scandals, war and general skulduggery.
‘Starlin and Ser Artur Ghinis. Foamously homely brew, bebattled by bottle,
gageure de guegerre.’ Starlin being Stalin, the other infamous 20th
century despot with whom Hitler went into an unholy alliance with before the
outbreak of WWII. ‘gageure de guegerre’, guerre in French meaning war, and the
onomatopoeic resonance, which is such a central quality of the Wake making sure that we understand the
sense, through sound, quite well. Interestingly, if Finnegans Wake could be said to be a book for the ear then Comment c’est/How It Is could be said to
be one for the mouth. As the mouth is the central human orifice which recurs
again and again.[15]
‘Heil,
heptarched span of peace!’ abruptly annotated by Joyce in the footnote sections
with the comment ‘I’m blest if I can see it.’ All the signs of war being ever
present [16].
Fas est dass and foe err you.
Impoverment
of the booble by the bauble for the
bubble. So
wrap up your worries in your woe (
wumpum-
tum!) and shake down the shuffle for
the
throw. For there’s one mere ope for
down-
fall ned. As Hanah Levy, shrewd
shroplifter,
and nievre anore skidoos with her
spoileds.
To add gay touches. For hugh and guy
and
goy and jew. A peak in a poke and a
pig in a
pew.
So
that there is absolutely no ambiguity as to what we are actually talking about,
Joyce spells out the issue of the times, Europe in the nineteen thirties, only
some years after the Wall Street Crash, the rise of the Nazi party and the
subsequent premeditated attacks on the Jewish population in Germany.
Joyce
continues the playful, Rabelaisean humour; [17] by using stage German – ‘Fas est
dass and foe err you’ – to underline the ‘error’ ( echoing ‘The Chamber. Of
errings.’ Of the passage previous.) , ‘you’ rhyming with Jew which is further
on in the passage actually spelt out, but not before all the Jewish references
have been made, such as ‘Levy’ being the name of the ‘shrewd shroplifter’. But, as we read on, a very specific character
from out of twentieth century history emerges, as depicted by one of the centuries
most inventive and formidable minds.
wheeze of old windbag, Blusterboss,
blowharding
all about all he didn’t do. Hell o’
your troop!
With is the winker for the muckwits
of willsely and nith is the nod for
the uproar
napollyon and hitheris poorblond
piebold
hoerse. Huirse. With its tricuspidal
hauberk
helm coverchaf emblem on. For the man
Beckett
in Comment c’est/How It Is as we have seen already with part one ‘avec
pim’ continues the Viconean thematic; divinity and the period of wandering
before the encounter with Pim, to ideas of possession and violence in part 2
‘avec Pim’, all of which is announced very clearly in the fourth fragment of
part two, two pages into this part of the novel.
prestement comme d’un bloc de glace
ou chauffé
à blanc ma main se retire reste
suspendue en l’air
u bon moment c’est vague puis
lentement redes-
cend et se repose ferme voire
légerement proprié
taire déja à plat sur les chairs
miraculeuses per
pendiculaire à la fente le moignon du
pouce et
les éminence thenar et hypo sur la
fesse gauche les
quatre doigts sur l’autre la main
droite donc nous
ne sommes pas encore tête-bêche
The
phrase ‘légèrement propriétaire’ ‘with a touch of ownership’ signals almost
right away into part 2 ‘avec Pim’ the whole Roman idea of ownership in regards
to spouses, and which Giambattista Vico is at such pains to describe in Scienza
nuova concerning the place of women in the old empire. Here is Vico on the subject:
Family fathers held the sovereign
right of life or death over their
children, and hence despotic dominion
over their possessions.
Possessions.
It is one of the key ideas behind all of the grotesque humour of part 2 ‘avec
Pim’ in Comment c’est/How It Is. Beckett is as clear and precise about
this, as he is pitiless, and it is all tied up with Vico, and ancient Roman
law.
de l’ongle donc de l’índex droit je
grave et lors-
qu’il se case outombe jusqu’à ce
qu’il repousse
d’un autre sur le dos de Pim intact au
depart de
gauche á droite et de haute n basse
comme dans
with the nail then of the right index
I carve and when it breaks
or falls until it grows again with
another on Pim’s back intact at
the outset from left to right and top
to bottom as in our civili-
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio: Homo sacer, Il potere sovrano e la nuda
vita, Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi Filosofia, Torino, 2005.
Agamben, Giorgio: Homo Sacer,
Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford
University Press, 1998.
Beckett, Samuel: Comment c’est, Les Éditions de Minuit,
Paris, 1992.
Beckett, Samuel: Disjecta – Miscellaneous Writings and a
Dramatic Fragment, Edited by Ruby Cohen, Grove Press, New York, First
Edition, 1984.
Beckett, Samuel: How It Is, Faber
& Faber, London, 2009.
Joyce, James: Finnegans Wake, Wordsworth Classics with an Introduction by Len
Platt, London, 2012.
Vico. Giambattista: New Science,
Translated by David Marsh with an Introduction by Anthony Grafton, Penguin
Books, London, 2001.
[1] Joyce, James: Finnegans Wake, Wordsworth Classics with an Introduction by Len
Platt, London, 2012, p.140.
I
shall be referring to this edition throughout the text.
[2] I
first presented the essay Embodying
“Be-ING” – Beckett and Heraclitus and which appears in More Micks than Dicks ( Famous Seamus, London, 2017. Now, out of
print.) at the ‘Samuel Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland III conference at
University College Dublin, 2/08/2013. In this essay I first made reference to
Vico and the correspondences with Comment
c’est but it was not until the How It
Is Symposium held in the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris by Gare Saint Lazare Players on the
23/02/2017 that I made direct reference to the correspondences between Comment c’est and Finnegans Wake in an open forum discussion with Jean Michel Rabaté,
as I had already started my research on Finnegans
Wake and the connections with Vico and Comment
c’est before the symposium. The following essay are some of the results of
my findings, but I should like to make it clear that this particular study is
but one of a much larger project, which hopefully one day will result in the
publication of a book with the singular objective of attempting to trace in
full the many other correspondences uniting all three books, and authors. In
many respects, I see this project as the culmination of a life’s work.
[3] We are living in an age which some
have described as the return of the autocrats: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Wei in
China and Erdoyan in Turkey, just to name a few, all corresponding with Vico’s
‘heroic’ or second age when the law of force, rather than reason, applies.
Russia’s decision to abandon the Soviet American missile treaty instigated by
Gorbachev and Reagan during the Cold War years is merely just one illustration
of this fact.
[4] There are many fascinating parallel
studies available on the similarities between Vico and Nietzsche. Vico’s use in
the Scienza nuova of thunder, representative
of Jove/Jupiter, has been compared to Nietzsche’s motif of lightening, for
example. For a good introduction see:
Price
W. David: Vico and Nietzsche; On
Metaphor, History and Literature, The Personalist Forum, University of
Illinois Press, Vol 10, No 2, Fall 1994, pp. 119- 132.
See
also Isaiah Berlin, Allan Meyill, Thomas Norris and David P. Parry.
[5] Beckett, Samuel: Disjecta – Miscellaneous Writings and a
Dramatic Fragment, Edited by Ruby Cohen, Grove Press, New York, First
Edition, 1984 p.23.
[6] ‘Sebbene
già Vico avesse affermato in termini non troppo dissimili la superiorità
dell’eccezione, come ‘configurazione ultimi dei fatti’, sul diritto positive (
‘Indidem iurisprudentia non censetur, qui beata memoria ius theticum sive
summon et generale regularum tenet; sed qui acri iudicio videt in causis
ultimus factorum peristases seu circumstantias, quae aequitatem sive
exceptionem, quibis lege universali eximantur, promereant.’: De antiquissima,
cap.ii)’
Agamben,
Giorgio: Homo sacer,, il poetere sovrano
e la nuda vita, Piccolo Biblioteca Einaudi Filosofia, Torino, 2005, pp. 20,
21.
[7] ‘cinquante
mille couples de nouveau au même instant partout le même séparés par le même
espace c’est mathématique c’est notre justice’
Beckett,
Samuel: Comment c’est, Les Éditions
de Minuit, Paris, 1998, p.175.
Vico
speaks of ‘tre spezie di diritti naturali’ three types of natural law, or
‘l’ordre natural’ as Beckett repeatedly refers to it in Comment c’est.
[10] Heaney, Seamus: W.B. Yeats,
Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney, Faber & Faber, London, First Published
2000, p. 80.
[11] It is perhaps one of the most
extraordinary passages in part 1 of Comment
c’est/How It Is when the phrase M’AIME
TU CON/DO YOU LOVE ME CUNT is printed in screaming capitals. ( Give page
numbers )
[14] ‘At
homos sacer is est, quem populis iudicavit ob maleficium; neque fas est eum
immolari, sed qui occidit, parricidi non damnatur; num lege tribunician prima
cavetur “ si quis eum, qui eo plebei scito sacer sit, occiderit, parricida ne
sit”. Ex quo quivis homo malus ataque improbus sacer appellari solet.’
As
Agamben states, ‘Festo, al lemma sacer
mons del suo trattato Sul significato
delle parole, ci ha conservato memoria di una figura del diritto romana
arcaico in cui il carattere della sacralità si lega per la prima volta a una
vita umana come tale.’ Sacredness, in this sense, takes on a totally ambiguous
meaning, in the eyes of ancient Roman law. Whereby the homo sacer – or sacred man has a dual function; both divine and
Agamben,
Giorgio: Homo sacer, Il potere sovrano e
la nuda vita, Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi Filosofia, Torino, 2005, p.79.
[15] bouche
– give quote
[16] Absolutely must get exact dates of
composition, see Richard Ellman, and Joyce’s letters of the period. Is this an
exact reference to the ‘Peace in Our Time’ declaration in 1939, or perhaps it
must have been earlier. Check. Also, consider the 1972 edition of the annotated
notes and corrections made by Joyce in the Rutledge edition. ( 75£, or
thereabouts, Book Depository ).Had Joyce read Mein Kampf ? For example.
[17] A contemporary comparison would be
Roberto Beninni’s La vita et bella in
which the protagonist, played by Beninni himself, jokes all the while he
accompanies his son through the madness of the holocaust.
[18] Joyce, James: Finnegans Wake, Wordsworth
Classics, 2012, pp. 273-274.
[19] Beckett, Samuel: Comment c’est,
Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1992, p.109.
We
must never forget that Beckett’s original publisher in French was linked to the
resistance in France during the Nazi occupation, nor indeed how Beckett himself
was part of a resistance cell Gloria, and narrowly escaped with his life having
been pursued by the Gestapo after hiss friend Alfred Péron had been arrested,
he was later to die on the 1st May, 1945, just after having been
liberated from a concentration camp. ( p.314, Knowlson, DTF)
[20] Beckett, Samuel: How It Is, Faber
& Faber, London, 2009, p. 60.
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