part0019

The time was 1 February, 1902: the place, the Literary and Historical Society room in University College, Dublin. The speaker, who would be twenty years old the following morning, 2 February, was James Joyce; and it does not take great perspicacity to observe that his style was not yet equal to the task of containing his vision. Dublin students, who are always great wits, had a wonderful time parodying "timid courage" in the following days, but one of them (whose name has been, alas, lost) had even more fun with the final strophe, satirizing it as "absence, the highest form of presence."

As Richard Ellman has noted, Joyce was no man to back down from a paradox, and two of the stories in his first book of fiction, Dubliners, seem intended to drive home the points that death and absence can be higher and more beautiful than life and presence. As for "timid courage," that also remained a theme in everything Joyce wrote.

Joyce's first use of death and absence as positives, in Dubliners, is the marvelous short story, "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." A group of minor political hacks are sitting around drinking Guiness's stout and carefully avoiding talking about anything serious. Gradually we discover that it is Ivy Day—October 6th, the anniversary of the death of Charles Stewart Parnell—and that all of them had, in one way or another, betrayed him. It is Parnell, still called "the Chief," who is physically dead and absent but very much alive and present in the haunted consciences of every man in the Committee Room.

(Parnell organized the rent strikes of the 1880s, which for a time made it impossible for English landlords to collect Irish rents. He did not invent but popularized the boycott, which cut deeply into English profits in Irish markets. He became the leader of the "Home Rule" party and the most popular man in Ireland, called "Erin's uncrowned king," but fell from power after being denounced by the Roman Catholic clergy as an adulterer. After his political downfall he died quickly of pneumonia and, with what now seems prevision of 20th Century psychosomatic medicine, his few loyal followers insisted bitterly that "the Chief" had died of a broken heart.)

"Ivy Day" ends, with superb Joycean irony, when a loyal Parnellite named Joe Hynes arrives and reads a poem in praise of the dead Chief. The poem is wretched, mawkish, awful, shot through with every dreadful cliche of popular Victorian verse; and, precisely because it is not great literature but the simple expression of genuine emotion by a simple man, it is strangely moving. The closing line of the story gives the reaction of Crofton, the most vehement anti-Parnellite in the Committee Room:

The evasion of the meaning of the poem is obvious; whether Crofton is also hypocritical in praising the non-existent literary merits of the piece is unclear; maybe, like the author, Joe Hynes, Crofton is ignorant enough to think the verse is well written. Joyce, who believed ambiguity is the prime feature of human existence, loved to leave his readers with little mysteries like that. What is important is that the lyric, trite and dreadful as it is, makes Parnell the hero of the story:

Oscar Wilde, another Irishman, said it would take a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell (in Dickens) without laughing. In "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," Joyce drenches the sentimentality of Joe Hynes in mockery, producing exactly and precisely the bad poem Joe himself would write if asked to collaborate on the story, and then proceeds to cap the absurdity with Crofton's doubly-ambivalent hypocrisy; but who can sneer as the ghost of Parnell indubitably rises, even clothed in journalistic "verse," to haunt and afflict those who betrayed him? The dead and absent stronger than the live and present, and Joyce has vindicated his paradox.

That Joe Hynes is a man of "timid courage"—he has to be prompted several times before he will consent to read his subversive poem—indicates that another paradox from the 1902 lecture was still on Joyce's mind. Joe's hesitation is not only motivated by the fact that he is the only loyal Parnellite in the room, but is also necessary because he included a line (not quoted above) about the "rabble-rout of fawning priests" that will not go down smoothly with any Irish Catholic audience.

In "The Dead," the last story in Dubliners, Joyce returns to and enriches the themes of death, absence and timid courage. Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist, is an intellectual who is nervous, or timid, all through the story, because he knows that his opinions are not shared by his middle-class relatives. Nonetheless, he does state his opinions, even though hesitantly; and he has the courage to commit the "social sin" of marrying a woman from Connacht, even though Dubliners regard Connacht people as declasse. Courageous in his timidity, Gabriel is timid in his courage, and when asked directly if Gretta is from the West, he answers evasively that "her people" were.

The real hero of "The Dead," we only learn at the end, is not Gabriel but Michael (the angelic names are no coincidence, any more than the Phoenix in the "Ivy Day" poem was an accident). Michael Furey, specifically, loved Gretta before Gabriel did, and Michael even died for love—in a Romantic, absurd, Irish way, of course. Michael Furey died of pneumonia, which he caught standing all night in an Irish rainstorm singing love songs beneath Gretta's window. It is he, not Gabriel, who has dominated Gretta's thoughts and feelings all through the story: dead and absent, he is very alive and present in her heart. The dead, Joyce is here proposing, can not only psychologically displace us but even metaphorically cuckold us.

This story is autobiographical. Nora Barnacle, Joyce's mistress 1904-1931 and his wife 1931-1941, had been courted in Connacht by a Michael Bodkin, who actually did die of pneumonia after singing loves songs to her in a rainstorm. Joyce changed Bodkin to "Furey" to add violent, fiery connotations to the ghost that afflicts Gabriel Conroy. In 1909, Joyce even went to Galway to look at his dead rival's grave, and found beside it a grave for one "J. Joyce"—an incident that left him with a lifelong preoccupation with synchronicity long before Carl Jung named that phenomenon.

In Ulysses , the dead and absent are not only present but omnipresent. Stephen Dedalus is afflicted with what psychiatrists would call clinical depression; Stephen with his medieval erudition, prefers to call it "agenbite of inwit"—the incessant gnawing of rat-toothed remorse. His sin? He refused to kneel and pray when his dying mother asked him, an act not motivated by atheism but by anti-theism: Stephen fears that there might be a malign reality in the God he has rejected, and that any act of submission might open him to invasion and re-enslavement by that demonic Catholic divinity. Probably, only another ex-Catholic can understand that anxiety, but any humane person can understand the dreadful power of the guilt that, personified by Stephen's mother, haunts him all through the long day's journey of 16 June 1904 into night.

Stephen is the overture, and, later, the anti-chorus. The major theme of Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, Irish Jew, timid hero, solid wanderer in the formless abyss, the greatest comic and tragic figure in modern literature. If Stephen is haunted by a dead mother, Bloom is equally preoccupied with a dead son: Rudy Bloom, dead at the age of 11 days, absent from the public world of Dublin, alive and ever-present in Bloom's memories.

If the dead have power over our imaginations, the absent have even more power. Conspicuously absent from the text of Ulysses —he only appears on stage once, to utter banalities to a shopgirl—is Hugh "Blazes" Boylan, who is also over-conspicuously absent from Bloom's thoughts most of the day. Only about two-thirds of the way through the book, on first reading, do we discover why Bloom's private inner conversation with himself (which we are privileged to share) always wanders into chaotic images and a wild search for a new topic of interest whenever Boylan's name is mentioned by another character. Bloom knows, but does not want to know, that Blazes Boylan is having an affair with Bloom's wife, Molly. By being absent from Bloom's consciousness, Boylan acts like an invisible magnetic field governing thought processes that we can see, but cannot understand, until we know Boylan is there, unthought of, deflecting and determining the conscious thoughts we do see. That the name Blazes Boylan suggests devils and hell reminds us that Joyce's "man of timid courage," Bloom, will seize "the keys of hell and death" before the book is over.

Concretely, Bloom earns his living cadging ads for a newspaper; on 16 June 1904, he is trying to secure an ad for Alexander Keyes, whose company logo is a pair of crossed keys, suggesting the Coat of Arms of the Isle of Man. With typical Irish indirection, Mr. Keys is also advertising his loyal Parnellism: the House of Keys on the Isle of Man is the local parliament, independent of England, and Parnell's "Home Rule" party used that example as an argument that the Irish were entitled to their own parliament also. Symbollically, the crossed keys indicate everything associated with Celtic crosses, Christian crosses, Egyptian Tau-crosses and all crossed emblems of rebirth; and the Isle of Man symbolizes humanity's isolation and solidarity at once (another Joycean paradox): every man is an island, but we are all crossed or linked with each other, as Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom are crossed and linked in ways neither understands. (It is no accident that the first sentence of Ulysses has 22 words, one for each letter of Cabala, and that the last is "crossed.")

Indeed, Ulysses is made up of crossed keys in time as well as in space. In the first chapter, Stephen Dedalus broods on his agenbite of inwit, eats breakfast, and replies with dry, bitter wit to the more robust, blasphemous and outrageous jokes of Buck Mulligan. Only when we discover the parallelism ol Homer's Odyssey that explains Joyce's title do we realize that Stephen is reliving the experiences of Telemachus, who at the beginning of the Odyssey awakens in a tower, as Stephen does, and is mocked and bullied by Antinous as Stephen is mocked and bullied by Mulligan. When Stephen, in chapter two, is given pompous and pontifical advice by the Ulster Protestant, Mr. Deasy, we are again watching trans-time synchronicity: Telemachus was similarly given advice by Nestor in the similar section of the Odyssey. The parallels follow throughout: Bloom is Ulysses, Molly is Penelope, the Catholic Church is the island of the lotus eaters, the newspaper office where everybody quotes their favorite political speeches is the Cave of Wind, etc. Dead and absent for 3000 years, Homer's images are alive and present, in some sense, in Dublin.

In what sense (as the impatient may ask)? Is Stephen literally the reincarnation of Telemachus and Bloom of Ulysses? Or is the connection one of Jungian synchronicity (not yet discovered when Joyce wrote Ulysses )? Or might one posit Dr. Sheldrake's morphogenetic resonances in time? Joyce does not answer. He exhibits the living presence of the absent dead and lets us draw our own conclusion.

That the simple models of reincarnation or metempsychosis

will not quite cover the case is indicated by the secondary level of parallels with Hamlet which underlie and reinforce the parallels with Homer. In the first Chapter, the Martello tower is compared to Elsinore, and Stephen wears a "Hamlet hat." He is asked his theory about Hamlet, and evades the question for the moment, to answer in full in Chapter 9. A whole stream of symbols linking Stephen with Hamlet, Bloom with the ghost of Hamlet's father, Molly Bloom with Gertrude etc. gradually emerges on re-readings of the book. What Joyce is exhibiting to us is, in fact, a coherent synergy or knot, as Bucky Fuller would say: a pattern that co-exists in many places and times. The dead and absent will be again live and present, in this context, because history repeats the same stories endlessly, just changing the names of the players.

But Ulysses is also a mock-encyclopedia, with every chapter corresponding to one human science or discipline; and the discipline emphasized in chapter one is theology, as Joyce's notes indicate. This begins with Buck Mulligan's burlesque of the Mass, runs on through Stephen's tortured reflections on the "mystic oneness" of Father and Son in the Trinity, comes back in Mulligan's hilarious ‘Ballad of Joking Jesus," and permeates every paragraph in subtle ways. If Stephen = Telemachus as son disinherited (Stephen's father, a drunk, has sold at auction the properties Stephen expected to inherit) and Stephen = Hamlet as son haunted (by a mother's ghost, not a father's, but still haunted), the theological context of the chapter implies that Stephen = Telemachus = Hamlet because all young men, at some point, are obsessed with a father who is either dead or missing-in-action: namely, God the Father. Ulysses is set exactly 18 years, or nearly a breeding generation, after Nietzsche announced that God was dead. Stephen as young rebel or puer aetemis is a perennial archetype; Stephen as individual is representative of the first generation to arrive at maturity with that grim Nietzschean autopsy on their minds.

This is why Mulligan remarks that he and Stephen are both "Hyperboreans." He is almost certainly referring to the startling opening paragraph of Nietzsche's The Antichrist:

Look me in the face. We are Hyperboreans; we know very well how far out we have moved. "Neither by land nor by sea will you find the Hyperboreans"—Pindar already knew that about us. Beyond the north, beyond ice and death, lie our life, our happiness. We have discovered joy, we know the way, we have the exit out of the labyrinth of history.

Nietzsche's labyrinth of history, which Stephen later calls the nightmare of history, is the rules laid down by State and Church. Mulligan has indeed found his way out of the labyrinth; but Stephen has not. He is named after the maker of labyrinths, remember, and he remains trapped in the labyrinth of his own narcissistic agenbite until Bloom delivers him.

This is why Stephen tells the fatuous Englishman, Haines, that the Irish artist is the servant of two masters—the imperial British State and the Roman Catholic Church. In this sense also, the dead live: the Irish writer of Joyce's day made his obedience to the dead invaders and traitors who made Ireland a colony of Rome and of England, or else he was forced to choose Joyce's path of exile: as did Shaw and O'Casey and Beckett and a dozen lesser lights along with Joyce.

For Bloom, as for Stephen, God is either dead or missing-in-action; but Bloom, at 38, has been a freethinker longer and is no longer hysterical about it Approaching middle-age (by 1904 standards, when average life expectancy was 50), Bloom has lost faith, successively, in Judaism, Protestantism, Catholicism and Freemasonry; one feels that his attachment to Socialism is precarious also. In the abyss of uncertainty, Bloom remains a modern Ulysses steering his way diplomatically and prudently among such hazards as drunken Catholics (Simon Dedalus), anti-semitic Nationalists (the Citizen) and unctuous undertakers who may be police informers (Corny Kelleher). Mourning his dead son, ashamed of and yet attached to his father who died a suicide, knowing his wife is "unfaithful," Bloom retains equanimity and practices charity discreetly and inconspicuously: feeding the seagulls, helping the blind boy across the road, negotiating to protect the rights of Paddy Dignam's widow, visiting Mina Purefoy in hospital. Lest we think this kindly chap a paragon, Joyce keeps Bloom in the same precise naturalistic focus as we watch him defecate, urinate, peep into a masochistic porn novel and masturbate. Joyce announced that he did not believe in heroes, and Bloom is no hero: just an ordinary decent man. There are a million like him in any large city: Joyce was merely the first to put him in a novel, with biological functions and timid courage unglamorized and uncensored.

The climax of Ulysses —the brothel scene in which Stephen, drunk, actually sees his mother's ghost cursing him, and Bloom, exhausted, dreams in hypnogogic revery of his son not at the age of his death (11 days) but at the age he would be if he had lived (11 years)—brings us back to the living presence of the absent dead. But in that scene also, Bloom's timid courage becomes timid courage as he risks scandal, gossip, disgrace and even associating with the possible informer, Corny Kelleher, in order to protect Stephen from two drunken and violent English soldiers. This is the pivot-point of the novel, and, since Joyce carefully avoids revealing Bloom's actual motivations, critics have had endless entertainment "interpreting" for us.

My own guess is that, even if Bloom is looking for a substitute son, as some say, or has unconscious homosexual urges as others claim, or is hoping to procure for Molly a lover less gross and offensive to Bloom's sensibilities than Boylan, as Marilyn French recently suggested, the answer lies in a four-letter word that each of Joyce's three major characters speaks once at a crucial point in the narrative. Stephen speaks it first, in the library, when asking himself what he left out of his theory of Hamlet; he answers, "Love, yes. Word known to all men." Bloom speaks it to the Citizen, offering an alternative to politics and national hatreds:

When Bloom brings Stephen home to Eccles Street to feed him, they share "Epp's massproduct"—Epp's cocoa—but Joyce the punster is telling us what can seize the keys of hell and death, proclaim the praise of life, and make the absent present. The cocoa is not only massproduced but is for Stephen a new Mass produced: a Mass of humanity to replace the Mass of God who may be dead or missing-in-action. "The physician's love heals the patient," wrote the psychiatrist Ian Suttie; Bloom's love, I think we are meant to believe, heals Stephen's agenbite of inwit. The point of Bloom's charity is precisely that it has no reasons. Beneath the Odyssey, Hamlet and Don Giovanni (recently discovered), Ulysses also parallels the most effective and memorable of the parables of Jesus: the story of the Good Samaritan.

The dead and absent survive, then, because we love them. Ulysses itself, the most complexly intellectual of comedies, is a testament to love: to Alfred Hunter, a man of whom we know only a few facts: he lived in Dublin in 1904; he was Jewish; his wife was, according to gossip, unfaithful; and one night he took home a drunken, depressed, impoverished and totally embittered young man named James Joyce and sobered him and fed him. All else about Alfred Hunter is lost, but those facts plus artistic imagination created "Leopold Bloom"; and if Hunter is dead and absent. Bloom remains forever alive and present for students of literature.

The curiosity of Joyce's mature technique is that while on first reading Ulysses seems only intermittently funny and consistently "naturalistic" (realistic), on successive re-readings it becomes progressively funnier and spookier. None of Joyce's 100 or more major and minor characters knows fully what is going on in Dublin on that one extraordinarily ordinary day of 16 June 1904. The first-time reader is similarly ignorant, navigating through 18 chapters and 18 hours of "realism" that is often as squalid and confusing "as real life." Beneath this surface, as we have already seen, the ghosts of Homer, Shakespeare, Mozart, and (if I am right about the Good Samaritan theme) Jesus are present-although-absent as the archetypal themes of their works are reflected in this everyday bustle of ordinary early 20th Century city.

Everybody in the story is involved in misunderstandings or ambiguities that become clearer and more hilarious on each re-reading. This existential fact—that every mind creates its own reality-tunnel—is the abyss of which Joyce spoke, at nineteen, in the lecture on absence and death from which we began. Stephen invokes the abyss again in his theory of Hamlet (Chapter 9), saying fatherhood is like the universe itself in being founded "upon the void, Upon incertitude." Various Dublin gossips (all male) have different theories about how many lovers Molly Bloom has had; the reader who believes them is terribly deceived. In Chapter 17, we are given a list of Molly's lovers which we are apt to consider definitive; on re-reading, we discover it is not a list of real lovers but of Bloom's suspicions. Molly's monologue should resolve the mystery, but only adds to the ambiguity; she is not as promiscuous as gossip paints her, but the exact number of her infidelities is still uncertain.

By the middle of the book, almost everybody in Dublin thinks Bloom has won a great deal on the horse race that day. On first reading, we are likely to think so, too, and wonder why he hasn't gone to pick up his winnings. Only on careful re-reading do we discover the confusions out of which this inaccurate rumor got started. A dog who appears vicious and ugly to one narrator appears "lovely" and almost "human" to another narrator, and a third narrator claims the dog actually talks. Alf Bergan sees Paddy Dignam at 4 p.m. but Paddy was buried at 10 in the morning; we are to decide for ourselves if Alf saw a ghost or just shared in the general fallibility of human perception. Some Dubliners think Bloom is a dentist, and discovering the source of that error is amusing to the re-reader. Bloom thinks Molly doesn't know about his Platonic "affair" with Martha Clifford, but Molly knows more than he guesses about that and all his other secrets. Nosey Flynn, the first Dubliner to tell us Bloom is a Freemason, is wrong about everything else he says; it takes careful study to discover that this font of unreliable gossip is right about that particular detail.

The tradition of the realistic novel, at this point, has refuted itself, in a classic Strange Loop. Joyce has given us more realism than any other novelist and the upshot of it is that we don't know what's real anymore. If Dante's epic was informed by the philosophy of Aristotle, whom he called The Master of Those Who Know, Joyce's epic, as Ellman commented, is dominated by David Hume, the Master of Those Who Don't Know. Is the man in the brown mackintosh who continually gets entangled with Bloom a significant figure in Bloom's past (or future?) or is this repeated conjunction mere coincidence"? We are privileged to peep into the mind of a typist named Martha (who works part-time for Blazes Boylan) but we don't know if she is thinking about Bloom or about the hero of a novel she has been reading. Since Bloom's thoughts, like everybody's, contain wishful thinking and self-deception, we cannot believe him totally, but the other narrators are so prejudiced pro-Bloom or anti-Bloom that we can't trust them either. We have seen Reality and found it an abyss indeed; Blake only claimed to see infinity in a grain of sand, but Joyce has shown us the infinity by opening every hour of an ordinary day to endless interpretations and re-interpretations.

Things become even more interesting, and weirder, when we begin to count the coincidences in this very, very average day: a day so banally normal that early critics complained chiefly that many chapters are boring and pointless. On the first page. Mulligan is performing a parody of the Catholic Mass and whistles to summon the Holy Spirit; a mysterious returning whistle answers from the street.

Mulligan, a devout atheist, is not impressed by this coincidence, but it is the overture to a rising crescendo of synchronicity throughout the day. A few pages on. Mulligan mentions working at the Mater hospital; Bloom lives on the same street with that hospital. Mulligan then talks of a friend named Bannon who is courting a girl in a photo shop in Mullingar; at the same time, but three chapters away in the text, Bloom is reading a letter from that girl, who happens to be his daughter, Milly. Bannon arrives in Dublin at 11 that evening, just in time to see the meeting of Stephen and Bloom in conjunction with another appearance of the enigmatic man in the brown mackintosh. Moses is the topic of conversation in the newspaper immediately before and after Bloom enters, and when Bloom arrives at the library two hours later, Mulligan anti-semitically calls him "Ikey Moses"; at the end of the day. Bloom suddenly guesses the answer to the child's riddle, "Where was Moses when the candle went out?" Other coincidences connect Bloom and Moses throughout the day; a secondary string of synchronicity links bloom with Elijah; a third famous Jew, Jesus, gets linked to Bloom in Chapter 12, where the narrator's favorite oath is "Jesus" and the Citizen threatens to "crucify" Bloom.

Weirder and more wonderful: in the newspaper office. Bloom reflects that William Braydon, the editor, looks like Jesus and then remembers that Mario "the tenor" also looked like Jesus. Giovanni Matteo Mario (1810-1883) was famous for looking like most popular portraits of Jesus, but equally renowned for his role as Lionel in Flotow's opera, Martha. Jesus was associated with Martha (of Bethany) and Bloom is corresponding flirtatiously with Martha Clifford. Four hours later, in Chapter 11, Bloom sits down in the Ormonde Hotel restaurant to write a letter to Martha, and Simon Dedalus sings the aria, Martha, from Flotow's opera, for which Mario was famous. Bloom notes the synchronicity in part, and dismisses it; but Bloom is to become, temporarily at least, a spiritual father to Stephen Dedalus, a role which Simon Dedalus has alcoholically abandoned. When in the next chapter. Bloom tells the anti-semitic citizen that Jesus was a Jew and so was his father, the citizen replies that Jesus had no father: Jesus, Mario, Martha, Stephen's reflections on the mysteries of fatherhood in Catholic theology and Hamlet, Joyce's preoccupation with incertitude and the void, have dovetailed so neatly into multiple synchronicity that one hardly notes that the next song to be sung in the musical Chapter 11, by Ben Dollard, is "The Croppy Boy," which contains a line, "And forgot to pray for my mother's rest," which brings us back to Stephen's guilt.*

The Irish critic Sheldon Brivic has counted over 100 coincidences of that complexity integrating the banalities and confusions of 16 June 1904 into a patterned harmony that none of the characters consciously apprehend, although their thoughts and actions are creating or co-creating it in collaboration with each other and with the dead and absent. As Brivic says (Crane Bag, VI, 1):

The presence of the absent and the dead in this network of connections is the theme of Joyce's last, greatest work, Finnegans Wake. Where Ulysses is an epic of the day, Finnegans Wake is an epic of the night; where the former dislocates our normal notions of "reality" only indirectly and on careful re-reading, the latter makes no concession to day-time "reality" at all and plunges us, from the first page to the last, in Altered States of Consciousness. "Joyce's prose," Timothy Leary has said (in Flashbacks ) "prepared me to enter psychedelic space."

The "nat language" of Finnegans Wake, in fact, can best be described as hologrammic prose.

Just as a hologram is so structured that each part contains the whole, Finnegans Wake is structured in puns and synchronicities that "contain" and reflect each other, creating the closest approximation of an infinite regress ever achieved in any art-form. The absent is everpresent, the dead are all alive, and the abyss of uncertainty appears in every multi-meaningful sentence. (This will be illustrated below.)

The revolutionary nature of this dream-book can be indicated by the fact that Joyce's notes include four separate symbols to stand for that which in a day-time novel would be the hero or protagonist:

and

. There is, as we have said, no "character" dominating this book, but rather what mathematicians would call a system function. The first person "dead" or missing in Finnegans Wake is the conscious ego we normally take for granted. We can only deduce him, as it were, from the system of which he is part.

The ego (Joyce's

), we know, is one Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, a publican (inn-keeper) in Chapelizod, a western suburb of Dublin. Probably, he was a sea captain for many years before settling down; almost certainly, he is having this dream in 1921 or when the Irish Revolution was at its most violent, and any stranger in the park might be an I.R.A. terrorist, any three British soldiers might arrest you "on suspicion." Earwicker is terrorized, throughout the dream, by ambiguous strangers in the park and three accusatory British soldiers.

To try to "understand" Finnegans Wake in terms of the life of

or Earwicker, the conscious ego, is entirely mistaken, however. The Ego that seems so real in day-light is "dead" or comatose in the dream-world, and Finnegans Wake is dominated by those trans-Ego functions Joyce abbreviates as

and

has some of the qualities of Freud's personal unconscious and also of his "censor band." Joyce identifies it also with Stonehenge and other Celtic monoliths (because of shape?) and, by association, with human sacrifice, religion, guilt, anxiety and the fear of authority-figures. On this level, you will find on every page of Finnegans Wake disguised, distorted and sometimes deeply hidden ("repressed") images of everything that is taboo in Catholic Ireland, especially incest, homosexuality, voyeurism, exhibitionism, urination, defecation, masturbation, patricide, regicide and cannibalism. In Jungian terms, this is the Shadow of the waking Mr. Earwicker; it is the Mr. Hyde within every Dr. Jekyl.

is the "collective unconscious" of Jung, the "phylogenetic unconscious" of Grof, the "neurogenetic archives" of Leary and/or the "morphogenetic field" of Sheldrake—to use four modern scientific metaphors. In older mystical languages it is called the " Akashic records" in Theosophy, the "long memory" in Hermetic texts, the aliyavijnana ("treasury mind" or "storehouse mind") in Buddhism. On this level, every page of Finnegans Wake is drenched with human and pre-human "memories" unknown to the conscious

(Earwicker-Ego). The heroes of Ireland are all there: Parnell and O'Connell and Silken Thomas Fitzgerald and Brian Boru; and so are Napoleon and Charlemagne and all the emperors of Rome; and the Hebrew prophets and Noah and Abraham and Sarah and Adam and Eve; and Confucius and Buddha and Mohammed; and all the dead-and-resurrected gods of Frazer's Golden Bough: Tammuz and Adonis and Hyacinth and Osiris and Attis and Dionysus, etc.; and chimpanzees and other mammals and salmon and whales and insects and freehand flowers. On this level, Finnegans Wake is like the Outline of History and The Origin of Species talking to each other in rich Dublin brogues.

It is of this level of being that Freud wrote, mystified, "The unconscious is not aware of its own mortality," and Aleister Crowley, more perceptively, wrote, "The unconscious is aware of its own immortality." Joyce also identifies this

with mountains because mountains symbolize eternity and, coincidentally.

is the Chinese ideogram for "mountain"; he also identifies

with the Hebrew

identified by Cabalists with the descent of "spirit" into "matter," an occult metaphor which is understood by Christian Cabalists to refer to the incarnation of God in Jesus and by pantheistic Cabalists to mean that the history of life itself is the autobiography of God. Chinese

is pronounced shan, Hebrew

is pronounced sheen (and usually spelled shin) and Finnegans Wake contains a Shaun, a postman who is perpetually trying to deliver a letter containing undefined good news. The letter was found in a garbage-heap which becomes, in turn, Dublin, an archeological dig, all human history, and

itself or the living presence of our dead ancestors.

Shaun the postman is a character in Dion Boucicault's 19th Century melodrama, Arrah na Pogue. The Gaelic title means "Nora of the kiss' and coincidentally invokes Joyce's life companion, Nora Barnacle. Dion Boucicault suggests Dionysus, one of the dead-and- resurrected gods who haunt Finnegans Wake; and there is a Finnegan in Arrah na Pogue, too.

The fourth function,

, of the system-function

seems to have been named only twice before Joyce (the Buddhists call it "void" and the Taoists call it wu-hsin or no-mind) although described by all mystics. To use the Taoist metaphor

is no-mind because it is the class of all possible minds, which is not a mind for the same reason that the class of all possible mammals is not a mammal. It is speaking of this level that mystics say such "paradoxical" things as existence and non-existence are the same, the real is the unreal, all is illusion but the poplar tree in the courtyard is Buddha, etc. Obviously, here ordinary language breaks down and Joyce was compelled to invent his own language to write Finnegans Wake .

Quantum physicists, meanwhile, have gotten beyond ordinary language by using special mathematics, and they have also discovered that an

level is necessary to complete description of existence. To the Copenhagen school of quantum theory,

is the multiple-reality of an atomic "particle" before we measure it and constrain it to one value. To the "hidden variable" theorists like Bohm, who deny that the act of measurement can magically transform a multiple reality to a single reality,

is the hidden variable (they write it c1 ) which constrains particles even when we aren't measuring them. To the quantum logic school of von Neumann,

is the indeterminate function between Aristotelian true and false, the "maybe" in which quantum systems spend most of their time when we are not constraining them by experimental meddling. To Heisenberg,

is the multiple true- false-maybe forward-and-backward-in-time condition of potentia, which only becomes "reality" after our participation as experimentalists. Finally, in the Everett-Wheeler-Graham, or EWC, model,

is every possible state that a "particle" or a "universe" can get itself into, all of which are considered equally "real," not just mathematically but physically, even though we only participate in one "reality" at a time.

It is evident that these conflicting interpretations of quantum experiments, despite differences in technical philosophical niceties, all agree that ordinary everyday "reality" is only an aspect of a more complex function of multiple realities. If we ask why this quantum ontology agrees so conveniently with the teachings of Buddhism and Taoism, and why both physics and Eastern mysticism agree with Finnegans Wake, the only answer seems to be that the deep structure of matter, experimentally investigated, contains the same paradoxes as the deep study of mind, when experimentally investigated by the techniques of meditation and Altered States of Consciousness. In the depths, we do not find One Mind and One Reality, as Theists and Materialists both imagine, but something so different from day-time concepts that it can only be categorized in contradictions—No Mind (Taoism) and Many Realities (EWC model) or mathematical fictions that only become "real" when we interact with them (Copenhagen/Heisenberg views) or the three-valued von Neumann logic (True/False/Maybe) which resolves all Zen riddles and Sufi puzzles if you apply it to them.

Before the reader cries (as Byron did of Wordsworth) "I wish he would explain his explanation," let us look concretely at some of the hologrammic prose of Finnegans Wake and see how the systems of

and

apply to it. We try the first sentence:

On the level of

or daily Ego consciousness, the dreamer is mingling geographic details of his everyday experience. The river Anna Liffey runs "riverrun") past the Church of Adam and Eve on Merchant's Quay in downtown Dublin; the Liffey empties into Dublin Bay ("bend of bay") which in turn swerves southward past Vico Road between Dalkey and Kiliney ("vicus of recirculation"); on the north rim of the bay is the hill of Howth and Howth Castle. The daily Ego has even inserted its initials: H owth C astle and E nvirons: H umphrey C himpden E arwicker.

On the level of

or the Freudian unconscious (Mr. Hyde) we find infantile obsessions on urination and defecation: the river is a urine symbol, "commodius" suggests commode or chamber-pot, and recirculation includes a cul, French ass-hole. Voyeurism and/or exhibitionism are also implicit in Adam and Eve, via the popular tag, "naked as Adam and Eve." Howth Castle atop Howth Hill is, of course, a Freudian phallic symbol.

On the level of

or the collective unconscious (" Akashic records") Adam and Eve are male and female archetypes, the river and hill are Chinese images of yin (generalized femaleness) and yang (generalized maleness), the "vicus of recirculation" contains the turning wheel and/or Jungian mandala that most mystics have visioned, and several of the dead and absent are alive and present within the multiple language: the Roman emperor Commodus and the Neapolitan philosopher Vico, for instance.

On the level of

or multiple realities (no-mind), we are in the Garden of Eden with its four rivers while we are simultaneously in Dublin with its one river ("riverrun . . . Eve and Adam"); vicus (Latin road, later town) coincidentally links the dreamer, Earwicker (it is part of the eymology of his name) with the historic locale, because Dublin was originally Baile-atha-Cliath, "the town of wicker bridges"; the cul in "recirculation" includes not just a Freudian anal reference but introduces the themes of Finn Mac Cool and felix culpa which hologrammically appear in every part of the book, virtually in every paragraph.

That was a brief introduction to the hologrammic structure of the first sentence of Finnegans Wake; the reader can see how, like a hologram, this prose contains the whole in each part—as the universe does, according to the recent theories of the physicist David Bohm. The reader may also begin to fathom why Lao-Tse said, "The largest is within the smallest."

Let us try a simpler example, from Chapter 2:

On the

level, dreaming Earwicker recalls, all night long, the songs the customers in his pub like to sing; here he is half-remembering "Molly Malone"—"In Dublin's fair city" / cross Ebblinn's chilled hamlet . . . the rhythm gives us the tune, while the reversed initials (E.c.h./HCE) remind us that the day-time Ego is only present-by-absence in the dream world. On the

level, "chilled hamlet"suggests Byron's Childe Harold and the rumors of incest and homosexuality that surround the poet; "hamlet" alone brings in Oedipal themes. On the

level, Childe Harold is the archetype of the Wanderer, Hamlet is the puer eternis with overtones of the trickster-god (Hamlet feigns madness and speaks in riddles), the "cross" again invokes death/resurrection, and, since the historical Hamlet was governor of Dublin during the Danish occupation of Ireland, "racial memory" or Sheldrake's morphic resonance are again present. Since Eblana was the first Latin name for Dublin (on a map by Ptolemy c. 100 AD), Ebblinn also contains the living presence of the absent dead. On the

level, the "ham" in Hamlet connects with the three sons of Noah (Shem, Japhet and Ham) who recur periodically; ham also associates with Bacon, who coincidentally is thought to be the real author of Hamlet by some; Bacon in Old High German is Bach and the initials E.C.H. are backward and Bachward also, in the manner of Bach's more intricate melodies.

Of course, the very name of the Crimean War combines crime and war and this reflects the whole dark, Shadow side (

) of humanity. Buckley is from a Gaelic root meaning "youth," so the story, like Hamlet, has Oedipal overtones. Defecation and war are connected by anal sadism on the

level, according to Freud; they are also connected by territorial imperatives on the

level, according to ethologists who tell us mammals defecate to claim territory and war is a continuation of mammalian territorial dispute. On the

level, the story of the General reflects Earwicker's personal shame about an incident in Phoenix Park (foenix cul prit) in which three British soldiers saw him taking a crap in the bushes. (Dublin didn't have many public toilets in those days.) On the

level, the story indicates quantum indeterminacy: just as a "particle" is only "spin up" or "spin down" when we measure it and in every state or no state when we aren't measuring it, the General is only "human" with his pants down and is an "Enemy" with his pants up.

A more lyrical passage illustrates the same principles amusingly:

The reader may find it enlightening to disentangle the four levels of

and

, as an exercise. It is worth noting that we have two patriarchal prayers combined, with a matriarchal underlay. "In the name of Allah, the Allmerciful" is the Islamic sunset prayer; I assume anybody can find the Lord's Prayer of Christianity easily enough. On a deeper level of the psyche, the Great Mother still reigns: Annah is "mother" in Turkish; the female river Anna Liffey appears "Annah . . . living"; the special Anima or Great Goddess of Finnegans Wake, Anna Livia Plurabella, combining river and woman emerges from "Annah. . . living. . . plurabilities." The first woman, present in the first sentence ("riverrun. . .") is still present below the surface although absent on the surface: we can dig her out of "Eve rliving,""haloed be her eve" and " uneve n." The Maize Mother or Corn Mother, earliest form of the goddess according to Frazer, is there hiding in "Allmaziful." Just as she was there, intangible as a tune, in "cross Ebblinn's chilled hamlet," where she is the ghost of Molly Malone; and just as, in the first sentence, she was not only the river but the vicus which gave English wicce, a turning, a turning dance and craft of wicca, the one faith which kept the worship of the Goddess alive in the patriarchal aeon.

It should be clear that in Finnegans Wake, past, present, future, space, time and Ego-reality are all dissolved into the multiple "realities" described by mystics and quantum physicists; that Joyce, a man of timid courage, has seized the keys of hell of death, by showing that the Ego dies and is reborn more continually than we realize, and that absence or death are as unreal in this context as the famous Schrödinger equations which demonstrated in quantum theory that a cat may be dead and alive at the same time.

As Philip K. Dick wrote in VALIS:

The emerald canticle of H ermes brings us backward and Bachward to H umphrey C himpden E arwicker again, that day-time Ego. Above and below, like absence and presence, are equivalent in this hologrammic field; Bach again invokes Bacon and Ham and Hamlet and pork and Pork (Padraic), Ireland's patron saint and Saint Patrick's Cathedral where Swift, the melancholy Dean was a melancholy Dane in Dublin brogue; "seriolcosmically" refers not only to Joyce's serio-comic style but to The Serial Universe, in which J. W. Dunne attempted to demonstrate mathematically that each mind was part of a bigger mind, in infinite regress (an approximation of Joyce's hologrammic

); the original sun is the Big Bang combined with the original sin which brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Adam and Eve and felix culpa and Phoenix culprits and Finn Mac Cool and the Russian General showing h is c ulious e piphany to Buckley; and, if Bach is bacon in Old High German, returning us to pork and ham, Bach in modern German is "brook," bringing us back to Anna Livia Plurabella, the river- woman who is Joyce's ultimate symbol of permanence in change, change in permanence, life in death, presence in absence.