Ariadne’s Dancing Floor

Joyce worked the texture of each of his books with a more complex intricacy of symbol and allusion than the one before. We have begun to see, through a wealth of critical studies, how he achieved this richness of text by concealing figures in a mazelike ground of such cunning entanglement that they have to be discovered. Riddle, Joyce never lets us forget, is the frequentive of read. Without daring to pose a unified theory of Joyce’s symbolic structures, I am going to consider this richness of his text as an aesthetic ideal which involved all of his formal concerns and which, moreover, is the distinguishing characteristic of twentieth-century art.

The imaginative bonding of images in an harmonic pattern would seem to be the naked principle of Joyce’s method. This is the method of all art, and one artist differs from another in the quality of invention with which he bonds one image to another. All of Joyce’s books fit together as a unity, an oeuvre. The archaic Greek mind ascribed all things cunningly wrought, whether a belt with a busy design, the rigging of a ship, or an extensive palace, to the art of the craftsman Daedalus, whose name first appears in the Iliad. Homer, describing the shield Hephaistos makes for Akhilleus, says that the dancing floor depicted on it was as elaborate as that which Daedalus designed for Ariadne in Crete. This dancing floor is perhaps what Homer understood the Labyrinth to be. Joyce did, for the ground on which he places all his figures is clearly meant to be a labyrinth. Such floors, usually in mosaic, persist through history, spread by Graeco-Roman culture, and can be found in cathedrals (Bayeux and Chartres, for example), villas, city plans, squares, and formal gardens. They all display an interlacing of lines in a pattern that doubles back on itself in a “commodus vicus of recirculation” as a cicerone’s voice says in the opening paragraph of Finnegans Wake, which is a small model of a labyrinth containing other Joycean images of the kind of mazes he will elaborate on (and has elaborated on in all his previous books): rivers, time as shaped by history and myth, and choice environs (a word that derives from the Latin for the twistings and turnings of streets in a city).

A page of the Wake is meant, as we know from the text itself (FW 122.23), to resemble the convoluted strapwork of the illuminated pages of the Book of Kells. Three traditions flow together to make the style of these pages: the uncial upper-and-lower-case mode of writing the Latin alphabet from which all modern Western typefaces derive, a fanciful and punning employment of animals as decorative detail inherited from barbaric and prehistoric art, and interlaced strapwork copied from the mosaic floors of Roman buildings, which descend in direct tradition from that dancing floor of Ariadne’s in Crete attributed by Homer to Daedalus.

It is usual for mediaeval strapwork to make a continuum, to wind through many swerves and bends, and end where it began, frequendy tied in a rich Celtic knot, or nipped in a beak. Such a decorative line loops through all of Joyce’s prose narratives. The first word of Dubliners, there, knits in with the last word of the Wake, the, which we are to understand as continuing on to the first word of the Wake, riverrun, making the text circular. We can now recognize the linking word theriver, the Dublin pronunciation of therever, an adverb compounded of a word indicating space and a word indicating time, the two great tonal symbols of the Wake, a kind of cosmic knot Joyce ties in his subject matter at the end of episodes, usually by summoning the presence of the theoretician of time and space as aspects of each other, Einstein, who, as elm (he was born at Ulm, Elm) and stone, organic and inorganic matter, turns out to be Shem and Shaun and all the other dualities in the book which by opposing each other, cooperate.

There are other ways of looking at the endless end and beginningless beginning of the Wake. One of the prototypes of the Wake is the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Riverrun, a coined word, is based on the French riverain, “riverside,” a quotation from Napoleon’s will (asking that he be buried near the banks of the Seine, as he is, in the Invalides church, beside a museum of his era, a tour of which occupies pages 8–10 of the Wake), but is also a translation of the Egyptian hieroglyph (two horizontal and parallel wavy lines) meaning to flow, or river. If we append the appropriate definite article, we have a duck in flight, and if we take this article to be the translation of the the at the end of the Wake, we have found Joyce’s cunning rhyme with the end of Ulysses, the yes of Penelope-Molly (penelops, a duck).

That yes is itself a loop-back to the first word of Ulysses, stately, in which its letters are distributed backwards. Removed, as if for use as the last word of the book, the remainder is tat, to be seen as a Kells decoration, an alpha (for Christ, who at Rev. 21:6 gives that as a symbol for Himself) between two crosses: the crucifixion. And an l, or El, God the Father. There is more. Joyce wants his beginning words to be convoluted mediaeval capitals which on imaginative inspection are as richly entwined as the capital letters in the Book of Kells. Stately and plump fit into the series of symbols in the first chapter which identify Stephen as Everyman in the clutches of Riot, missing his inheritance, as Prince Hal under the sway of Falstaff, a melancholy prince in an inversion of degree, subjugated by a peasant (the 1882 Skeat’s Concise Etymological Dictionary that the young Joyce carried in his pocket derives plump from ME plomp, “rude, clownish”). We can also divide stately into tat, the crucifixion, the Greek word for nature, “YAH, and an S, which in this series of symbols (Creation, Fall, and Redemption) would be the snake in Eden. In fact, we are prompted to do so by the sandwich-board men who bear each a letter of Wisdom Hely’s ambulant ad, not always in orthographic order, and with S lagging behind. Stately was a very carefully chosen word.

Dubliners begins with the word there, and ends with dead; A Portrait with once and stead; Ulysses, stately and yes; Finnegans Wake, riverrun and the, with the two fusing into theriver. The fusion also serves to keep the vowel [ɛ] constant in all the end words.

Figures in mediaeval art often occupy contours that delineate other shapes, making a visual pun. The ambivalent images may be simple and obvious, such as a fish with a curved tail for the letter J, or complex and typological, such as an Orpheus charming the animals which can also be read as Noah filling the ark. Images which can be seen as more than one thing occur in the most archaic art, in the cave drawings of Aurignacian times, in primitive art the world over. Shields and masks from New Guinea show a second face when inverted. Joyce owned Freud’s study of Leonardo, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci (1910), at the time he was writing A Portrait, and may have seen in it strategies for shaping the complex multiple symbolism of the bird-girl epiphany in Chapter IV. Freud’s study attempts to connect a dream of Leonardo’s and the outline of a vulture which can be seen as a visual pun in Leonardo’s The Virgin and St. Anne. Freud’s scholarship is cockeyed (he mistook Dmitri Merejkowski’s The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, a fictional life, for a biography, mistranslated nibbio (kite) as vulture, and concocted a fantasy as dreamlike as the one he supposed he was analyzing with scientific nicety). Joyce was aware of this forgery of Freud-as-Shem-the-Penman: in the Wake, page 300, we can find in the maze “nibbleh ravensostonnoriously ihs mum to me in bewonderment” wherein we can see the nibbio in conjunction with a madonna and child (“ihs mum”). And in a footnote one Dav Stephens (da Vinci and Stephen Dedalus inside the one contour), who, we can learn from Adaline Glasheen’s Third Census, was Davy Stephens, a Dublin eccentric and newspaper seller who liked to dress up as a gentleman for Derby Day.

We can, however, understand that Joyce saw in Freud’s study an instigation for shaping symbols with multiple contents inside a single outline. The bird-girl must primarily be a dancer on Ariadne’s dancing floor, for it was a crane-dance that was performed there. Secondly she must be a symbol of Stephen’s soul, for there is an ancient and widespread symbolism in mythology and folklore of a bird as the soul.

The image of the bird-girl unfolds like the progressions of a metamorphosis in Ovid. It begins to take shape in the director’s condescending banter about the awkwardness of the Belgian capuchins’ garb rucked out in an ungainly fashion, like skirts (jupes) while riding bicycles. The image is next developed when Stephen sees a “faded blue shrine of the Blessed Virgin which stood fowlwise on a pole in the middle of a hamshaped encampment of poor cottages.” The director had unknowingly put his foot in it when he chose to criticize the capuchins, for it was a capuchin to whom Stephen had confessed after his waywardness. It is as if two lines of force cross each other in this crucial scene, and they are not lines; they are circles. There is a complex symbolism of circles in this chapter, turning up in the bicycle wheels of the Belgian capuchin, in the moon, everywhere if you are alert to them, and culminating in the hoop buried in the sand at the end of the chapter, symbolizing the soul’s cycle from God and back again, a segment of its circumference passing through matter just as the hoop on the beach is partly imbedded in sand.

Stephen has a choice of cycles: the life of a priest, the life of an artist. He had been on the right cycle for the artist in his sinful binge (Joyce seeing that sexual energy is the first inchoate and undirected energy of the creative spirit). What the director is proposing, from the fledgling artist’s perspective, is to negate and paralyze that energy. Stephen intuitively moves over to the alternate cycle, the way of the artist, and is vouchsafed his vision.

He confirms the vision in the Wake by returning it to the midden of ancient imagery from which it arose. On St. Stephen’s Day all over Europe it is customary to kill a bird and display it on a pole. In Ireland the bird is a wren. In “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” (FW 44–47) we keep hearing “the rann, the king of all ranns,” which is “the wren, the king of all birds” of the boys’ song on St. Stephen’s Day + rann, Gaelic for refrain + Ran, the Norse sea-goddess Ran, whose locale was inlets and pools by the seaside.

Eighteen months after the publication of Finnegans Wake, when Joyce and his family were among the millions of refugees plunged into flight across Europe by the German armies, five children from Montignac in the Val Dordogne discovered the prehistoric cave Lascaux with its painted animals and signs, the first flowering of European art. Among the figures in this cave is a bird on a pole, the remotest ancestor of Joyce’s symbol. The ritual of hunting wrens on St. Stephen’s Day in Ireland probably has affinities (of thirty thousand years’ continuity) with the hieratic bird painted with elk fat and charcoal in Lascaux. There is a sense in which Lascaux is part of the texture of the Wake: Joyce had prepared our sensibilities for seeing Lascaux. Lascaux is very much a part of our reading Joyce.

Such fortuity has always been a problem for scholars. How much has Joyce worked into his text? Where do we stop? Was Joyce aware of Paul Chabas’ painting September Morn when he constructed his bird-girl in the Portrait? He probably wasn’t, yet there it is, a vernacular statement of his symbol. He had the kind of mind that would have appreciated this vulgate parallel, a version of Stephen’s vision for Bloom to go with Gerty MacDowell, “a seaside girl,” who moreover shared the dock with Ulysses in New York when the Society for the Suppression of Vice hauled them both into court.

Reading Joyce one is always going to encounter puzzling knots in his Daedalian twists and turns. Joyce seeded some of his symbols, apparently at random, like mitochondria with their separate DNA and RNA inside cells already well supplied with genetic codes. They are as yet unaccountable, and may be illusions. In Chapter IV of the Portrait, for example, there are scattered puns and images that seem to come from Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, a book Joyce owned at the time. Stephen eats slim jim from a cricket cap while “Some Jesuits were walking round the cycletrack in the company of ladies.” We recognize the circle symbol that persists throughout this chapter, and can connea it with Stephen’s choice between circle and tangent, obedience to or rebellion from order, priest and artist.

Pinocchio is a child’s book about a talking and autokinetic puppet who is seduced away from his kindly artisan father (Joyce would have seen Daedalus and Ikaros in the pair) by evil companions (Lucignolo is one, a fox another, perhaps Joyce’s “face of one of the jesuits whom some of the boys called Lantern Jaws and others Foxy Campbell”) against the advice of Pinocchio’s conscience, a cricket. Thinking that he is going to a boy’s paradise of candy trees and lemonade rivers, he is actually going to be changed into a donkey working a mill (“cycletrack”). He escapes, and his metamorphosis into a human boy is presided over by a Buona Fata. If one is looking for a synthesis of folktales as a deep substratum in popular literature for the Portrait, Collodi will answer.

But what kind of game is Joyce playing with that “slim jim out of a cricketcap”? Slim jim (sticks of jerked beef, a schoolboy delicacy) is an obvious signature of the kind Joyce can be discovered tucking into his text, and it is likely that Slim Jim was an inevitable nickname in his adolescence. Jiminy Cricket is an age-old euphemism; the OED gives early nineteenth-century examples. Joyce has linked jim and cricket, cycletrack and Collodi’s donkeypowered mill. It is as if Joyce recognized an elective affinity among images, however metaphysically witty, and hoped they would bond together in a kind of poetic chemistry. Whether the reader is missing something by not finding these recondite allusions is like asking if one can fully appreciate Chartres while being ignorant of its engineering, its history, and the iconography of all its sculpture. Ultimately, as with Chartres, we realize that Joyce wrote with a faith in his materials and his method that lies beyond even extraordinary study. Like Proust, he compared his work to cathedral building: a grandeur of thrust and presence, and a painstaking care in the significance of the minutest details.

Another example. In the first section of the Wandering Rocks chapter of Ulysses, which traces a perambulation of a priest along the streets of Dublin, we read:

On Newcomen bridge the very reverend John Conmee S. J. of saint Francis Xavier’s church, upper Gardiner street, stepped on to an outward bound tram.

Off an inward bound tram stepped the reverend Nicholas Dudley C. C. of saint Agatha’s church, north William street, on to Newcomen bridge.

At Newcomen bridge Father Conmee stepped into an outward bound tram for he disliked to traverse on foot the dingy way past Mud Island.

Several strands of the symbolic web crisscross here. Throughout this chapter people and things (including narrative style and grammar, as Clive Hart has shown in a brilliant essay)¹ seem to collide, but don’t, and seem to con figure: they come together, like Homer’s Symplegades, only to part. The passing of the two priests here would be meaningful in Dickens or a detective novel. Joyce is playing a game with our attention. The bridge is named Newcomen. These sentences seesaw like the beam of a Newcomen steam engine. Does the Rev. Dudley get his name from the fact that the first Newcomen engine was built at Dudley Castle, Staffordshire? The bonding of names would seem here to be footling and trivial. Does St. Agatha, patron of bell founders, interact with the great missionary St. Francis Xavier? St. Francis is there to disgrace and satirize Father Conmee’s shallow and smug meditations on the salvation of savages. Is St. Agatha there to match the swaying of bells with the swaying of the beam of a Newcomen engine: another image of things that seem to collide, the Age of Faith and the Age of Machines? And priests and bridges (pons, pontifex), and Nicholas and John (the saints with those names open vistas of symbolic interpretation), and are we to remember that we are near the site of “An Encounter” and thus see things Bunyanesque in Mud Island?

What is the relationship between figure and ground? It is characteristic of modern (as of mediaeval) art that figure and ground interpenetrate. We can explain cubism by noting that Picasso and Braque developed Cézanne so that figure is subsumed by ground. In a pun, figure and ground can change place with each other, as in the pointillist charts for determining color blindness. Like Arcimboldo, Tchelitchew, and Freud’s da Vinci, Joyce habitually reworks his ground and renders it figure.

In the mimicry of styles in The Oxen of the Sun we see a continuous figure evolve, in imitation of the foetus developing from fecundation to birth. The ground, however, on which this figure moves is yet another labyrinth, like the corridors of schools and streets of Dublin and Cork in the Portrait, and the effect is that of a voice in time, assuming the sensibilities, outlook, and limitations of the perspective peculiar to age after age, but always within the genus of voice in which Joyce is a kinsman, taking now this turn that Sir Thomas Browne would have taken, now that native to Smollett, or Dickens, or Carlyle. Style, as in all of Ulysses, is here identified with fate. What and how we see is determined by the quality of our attention. Theseus in the turns of the labyrinth was looking for a monster with whom he must fight to the death, Ariadne’s thread in one hand, sword in the other. All else was absent from his heroic ecstasy of purpose.

Bloom, Stephen, and Molly, treaders of labyrinths of rooms, furniture, streets, and memory (every chapter of Ulysses is its own kind of labyrinth), have no such purpose, though Joyce by bonding figure and ground in a harmony of symbols assigns them a purpose, a fate discernible in signs.

It was Giambattista Vico’s theory that archaic families of signs survive in words. These aboriginal meanings are like prehistoric objects recoverable from middens, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, weapons, kitchen utensils, figurines of goddesses. Joyce wrote all his books as palimpsests over objects in this midden, and eventually over his own work. Ulysses is written over a specific text; the Wake is written over the tattered, fused, living web of spoken language. We hear this rush of sounds with an ear that hears English best in the polyglot babble and usually makes English sense of everything heard, no matter what language it is.

The polyphonic closing page of the Wake recapitulates Chamber Music. This suite of thirty-six lyrics in the Elizabethan mode is a progression following the seasons of the year, a love affair that ends in grief, and the course of a river from its source to the sea. Like Dubliners it ends with an image of mutinous, plunging waves. All of Joyce’s works culminate in a diffusion of spirit that is both an annihilation and a union. By linking his last work to his first, he insists that his books are an oeuvre in a structure of great unity and symmetry. Each work follows and absorbs the preceding. The Wake is a night complementing the day of Ulysses. Both the Portrait and Ulysses are derived from Dubliners, as many critical studies have demonstrated. Perhaps we can say that all Joyce’s themes resolve into one: the encounter of the unique, innocent soul with a world stained by guilt, defeat, and delusion.

Once we have plotted the ways of Joyce’s labyrinthine symbolism, will we possess a vision, some ineffable wisdom? No. For Joyce’s symbolism is a mimesis of symbolism: a dramatic perception, ultimately tragic, that man’s ideas, his art, his noblest configurations of sense, are no more than symbols. They are forgeries of meaning. Their only validity inheres in their being a system, or family, one thing kin to another in a way that we will probably never understand. The systems cohere and function, and have the inviolable integrity of languages.

Joyce builds within a strong frame. If time is a river, matter is its bed, motionless in relation to time’s flow. The river runs into the sea, losing its identity and form. But evaporation from its surface and from trees and grass it has nourished, rises to make rain, which falls on the Wicklow hills and becomes the river again.

Humanity evaporates moment by moment in voices which ring against ears. We participate in the self-renewing cycles of nature, but language is our own continuum. At the very root of all Joyce’s styles is the wondering appreciation that there must be all over the world phrases, rhythms of speech, and ideas that are older than any other trace of man’s past. Joyce’s faith was that these midden meanings are not lost but sleeping, and that the most daring challenge of the artist was to grasp the reality of this fabric of the imagination.

Ulysses is what this communal myth looks like seen from the Mediterranean, in cross section and on a single day. Modern Europe is in one sense a transposition of Mediterranean culture. Ulysses, like the Wake, begins in a bay to which Mediterranean culture can come, and ends at Gibraltar, the beginning of the route. The Wake, in turn, is Europe seen from the north, from Scandinavia, from the forests. Each work is catholic in a different sense. In Ulysses the whole world (katholikos) derives from a field of forces the poles of which are Jerusalem and Rome, Bible and Odyssey, sacred and civil. The, Wake explores the archaic foretime that gave birth to Jerusalem and Rome, and traces history in the reverberations from centers of power rather than the centers themselves. Its basic tale is of every achieved harmony invaded and wrecked: Eden by Satan, the first family by Cain’s violence, the scriptorium at Kells by Danish marauders. We rise, we fall. We may rise by falling. Defeat shapes us. Our only wisdom is tragic, known too late, and only to the lost.

Joyce’s achievement is to have fulfilled in a masterly oeuvre a particular promise of art in the twentieth century. We can define elements of his mastery by placing him beside his peers. Pound, so curiously hostile to the Wake and eventually disenchanted with Ulysses after he had championed it, was working parallel to Joyce in that he was tracking the beginnings of civilizations and cultures, and meditating on what qualities made them vulnerable to destruction or guaranteed them long life. But whereas Pound hoped to instruct mankind and display history as a lesson, Joyce did not. Man is tragically man, never to elude his fate.

Thomas Mann and Proust both attempted an inclusive and exhaustive configuration of European society, and both built complex symbolic structures which can be compared with Joyce’s. Mann beside Joyce appears pedantic, mechanical, humorless. The life that Joyce breathed into his work is not there. Beside Mann, Joyce’s success at integrating all the elements of his work into a moving, articulate whole becomes clear. Mann imposes meaning; Joyce finds it; Mann looks for weakness in strength; Joyce, for strength in weakness. Mann’s novels illustrate ideas; Joyce’s return ideas to their origins.

Proust, so distant from Joyce in temperament and method, is yet strangely close to him in saturating an exact realism with a pervasive internal symbolism. A set of affinities exists between Joyce’s water nymphs (from the Portrait to ALP) and Proust’s frieze of girls against the sea at Balbec, between Bloom and Swann, Molly and Odette. Their delineations of the childhood of Stephen Dedalus and little Marcel define two cultures, and their studies of the provincialism of Dublin and of the Faubourgs St.-Honoré and St.-Germain are the two classics of their genre. How time deepens and forces tragedy is a common theme. They bear strongest resemblance, surprisingly, in their coming to accept the reader as a presence felt in the act of composition. When the novel arises, it is in front of a congenial and friendly audience. The narrator of Don Quixote tells his audience straightway that he isn’t certain of his hero’s name (as if we might be able to supply it), and authors throughout the eighteenth century are variously diplomatic, polite, and confiding to an assumed civilized reader. This congeniality ends after, perhaps with, Dickens and Scott, both of whom have designs on the reader’s morals and sensibilities. The novelist becomes a teacher, the reader a pupil. Realism banishes the reader altogether. Flaubert gives the impression that he would have written his novels if he were alone in the world. As alienation becomes a major theme, the greatest alienation is that of the reader. For whom did Kafka write his stories? What audience did Pound have in mind for The Cantos? There is heroism here (witness Picasso and cubism, Ives and his audienceless, un-played music, Gertrude Stein and her Olympian disdain for readers), as there is arrogance, sometimes justifiable, sometimes unforgivable.

It would seem that the text of Finnegans Wake and Proust’s 2,265 pages of digressions spawning digressions are ultimate examples of the writer estranged from and unaware of any reader whatever. They are the opposite: both reestablish an intimate friendship with readers. Proust treats his audience as a member of his circle, discusses his characters with him, begs for patience, and in the end explains that to hear him out is not to ingest his story but to be made aware of ours. His novel, he says, is an optical instrument with which the reader sees himself.

Joyce in the Wake dispenses with the godlike method he used to write all his books through Ulysses. The text is a game, often a comic riddle of outrageous fun and ingenuity. We are repeatedly urged to read the text aloud. A wonderful buffoonery and wickedly accurate mimicry is in full spiel; whatever the joke is, it is decidedly a joke and not a book at all for the audience that sits respectful before Mann, in awe of his learning, irony, and philosophical subtlety; not a book for Zola’s earnest readers; not a book you would expect in our century at all. Sit down with the most melancholy and lyric evocation of the past in our time, Hermann Broch’s Brucknerish Death of Virgil, and then turn to the Wake. The transition is like turning from an erudite string quartet to an Elizabethan street fair.

We have yet, after all these years, to admit that the Wake belongs to the art of the mime, to the most vulgar and riotous of the arts. True, it is a text of the most demanding sense, the most exacting of all his works. But it is cast in the mode of the most primitive of European art forms, the communal party, drunken, obscene, orgiastic, loud with singing, rich in license: the kermis, the wedding frolic, the Irish funeral, the ritual dances on Ariadne’s patterned floor. The circle is immense that Joyce bent back to its origin: from a bleak story about a priest who dropped a chalice, a death, and a dreary wake, to a summoning of that chalice in all its permutations sacred and profane, to a drunken gathering of the human family, where the old tales are told over again, and where the decorum is, beyond all sense, to grieve and rejoice together.

¹“Wandering Rocks,” in James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays, edited by Clive Hart and David Hayman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 181–216.