The Pleasure Reinciple or Paradox
Lost
If, among the billions of motifs that ‘adomically’ [cf. FW 615.6] constitute Finnegans Wake, I simply could not help [m'empêcher] picking out [pêcher] the ‘Phoenix’, it is because this motif appears at the beginning of the Portrait of the Artist, where it is surreptitiously associated with the theme of Sin [Péché].
The Portrait of the Artist recounts the genesis of the artist Stephen Dedalus. It begins somewhat like this: ‘Once upon a time there was a strange little birdie . . .’ This strange bird, a tuckoo (a cuckoo badly pronounced, that is), will grow into Dedalus, the flying artist, a strange bird indeed. All this begins thus like a strange f/airy tale [conte de fée/nix]. This tale lays its first egg – a little scene, two pages long. These two pages contain, in embryonic form, the totality of James Joyce's work, including Finnegans Wake. The Portrait opens with a primitive scene, a fateful [destinale] scene in which the one who will become the artist is put to the test of the Law. The origin of this primitive scene is always the same, namely the first, Eve's primitive scene/sin [(s)cène] in the very first book which deals with the question of whether or not to be in the know [faire ou pas la connaissance de la connaissance]. There is the Apple; there is the secret of the Apple. And, straightaway, there is the Law. What the first woman will discover, by not submitting to the injunction of the Law, is the secret of the Apple, which is (the) inside (of) the apple: its flavour, its kindness – a jouissance and a knowledge experienced through the mouth. What is inside the apple? Not death, but flavour.
What about the artist? What he, as a descendant of Eve, will discover by infringing the Law is the secret of the Pome.1 It is also something which is hidden inside. Inside a fruit-word [mot-fruit]. It is the pleasant, forbidden secret of which he will become master during the first scene of apprenticeship, which will give birth to all the other scenes of the Portrait of the Artist containing initiation rites, and which, in the end, will give birth to the whole series of trial [épreuves-procès] scenes that weave Finnegans Wake together.
The first scene resembles one of these examination scenes we experience when we dream, or, like Parzival, are invited at the Fisher-King's, in the Quest for the Holy Grail. Disquieting scenes they are, because the trial takes place without us knowing what is happening and what exactly they are about: they always take place in conjunction with cenes [cènes] where one is enjoying oneself [entrain de jouir]; and all of a sudden one is harshly punished for something one has done that one should not have done, or for something one has not done that one should have done, but what is it exactly? Basically, nobody is supposed either to know or to ignore the Law. We are supposed to obey the letter of the Law, absolutely, blindly. That is what Law means – the kind of Law whose amazing, invisible Portrait was drawn by Kafka.2 If you do not obey the invisible Law, you will be struck with blindness. If you do not turn a blind eye, you will be blinded – that is what little Stephen was told.
In the beginning, then, there is the Law, the incomprehensible Word. These obscure and threatening words: ‘You-shan't-or-else’. Where does this encounter between the child and the words lead? To a game. The game of the Law. The little Word game that will eventually generate the gigantic Wordplay which is Finnegans Wake.
Here is the original mystery as it is being told to us on page two of the Joycean Genesis, in little Stephen's language, in free indirect speech:
The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. They were Eileen's father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said:
– O, Stephen will apologise.
Dante said:
– O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.3
Pull out his eyes,
Apologise,
Apologise,
Pull out his eyes.
All the elements of Finnegans Wake are already there:
First of all, there is the family unit, the Vances, incestuously structured by the grace of grammar, where parents are their own children as well as their own parents. Just as in Finnegans Wake where the Earwicker family, double-father son-daughter-mother, constantly intermarry, fight against one another and beget one another.
Then, there is the pure, precious model-Sin [Pêché-modèle]: the one committed in pure innocence – the cause of artistic creation. What is it? We do not know any better than the child. Was it to hide under the table? Out of playfulness? Out of guilt, or fear? Of what? First he is under the table, then there is the Law. With its threat of enucleation. And still no offence.
And yet, it is quite unexpectedly from the Law itself, by a strange understanding of it [drôlement entendue], that the work will derive.
Finally, there is the exemplary blossoming of art. The birth of the feeble-eyed but keen-eared artist. What interests the artist is not what the words mean but what they contain phonically. Who cares about the Law as long as it sounds nice. It grumbles: apologise!? What luck! From this bizarre word the child derives a funny little poem. What's in a word? A little treasure of sounds. That is already the question in Ulysses.5 And it also already contains the whole answer of Finnegans Wake.
And what is an artist? He is the lucky one ‘capable’ of playing with language, that is the lucky, culpable [coupable] one. (In Joycean parlance [En joycien] capable and culpable are synonymous.) He is the stealer of signifiers, the cunning connoisseur of the Law out of love for the noise of the Law. The moral of this tale, for Joyce, is that one needs the Law to derive music from it. The artist needs the Law but only the better to cheat it. Our outlaw [hors-la-loi] remains an inlaw [frôle-la-loi].
From which we will have learnt that the artist has to be descended [se faire descendre] in order to immediately rise again from his cinders [des cendres]: the Tuckoo will give birth to Icarus, the feathered boy, the bird manqué who falls only to rise again, Dedalus who, in turn, will give birth to Shem the penman [l'homme à penne], the painman [l'homme à Peine] in Finnegans Wake, who, painfully [à peine] hatched, is already accused, and ready to start again and commit his works in the same Other Phoe-nest [Fait-nid].
Paradox lust in Finnegans Wake6
Finnegans Wake, the phoenix of literature, is the Paradise of those lusting for [jouisseurs] Paradox, where loss is gain, or where that which does not exist, does, because everything that is not, be-comes [tout ce qui n'est naît]. It is the nideal [nidéal] nest of ‘parody's bird’ (FW 11), this mocking bird that populates the text – sometimes also called Phoenixcan [cf. FW 608.32], the Phoenix can, the place where phoenixes can soar from the graphico-phoenic level any time.
I have chosen to pursue this innumerable motif through three of its epiphoenic modes of appearance: the History of Ireland, Myth and Language.
This choice has been made for the sake of convenience because, as is well known, there is in Finnegans Wake, with its constant shifting of grammatical boundaries and proliferating linguistic codes, no place that does not constitute a mixture of different levels of meaning and often paradoxical interferences. Selecting would be ruinous, the nest would become a grave [le nid (est) tombe], and the grave is a home – – – and even the father, in the end, turns into mer . . .7
The primal park8
It is in Phoenix Park, Dublin, that the father, H. C. Earwicker, with his eternal erection problems, experiences the first downfall in his penixphallic career. He is caught at we-don't-know-what.
Phoenix Park is the famous Dublin park where, in May 1882,9 an attempt was made to assassinate the Vice-Roy of England, through which two men lost their lives. The affair had tragic political repercussions, in particular for the fate of Parnell, the ‘uncrowned king’ who was first adulated and later held in contempt by the Irish. In 1887, The Times published a letter believed to have been signed by Parnell, which condoned these killings. The letter was a fraud, the work of someone called Pigott, who was unmasked two years later thanks to a surprising detail: the forger made very idiosyncratic spelling mistakes. He spelt the word ‘hesitancy’ with double t.10 What a fortunate mistake!11 What a signatture! This mistake which then saved Parnell's honour, later also brought happiness to Joyce. It sparks a good many pages in Finnegans Wake back to life. By the stroke of letters and of a letter, the whole Irish Revolution passes through Phoenix Park: a nest of letters, the place of Parnell's fall and his redemption, the Park later becomes the place where H. C. Earwicker, Joyce's fabricated parody of a successor, falls in turn and rises again – but with some literal difference: it is, in fact, in ‘Phornix Park’ [FW 80.6] that our groundfather [parterrefamilias] will have viceroyally [vicieuroyalement] phornicated with two girls – unless nothing took place but illusions to all the feminous [femmeux] Parks where our ancient motherly tattle [antiques commemérages] comes from. Are we not in ‘Edenberry, Dubblenn, WC’ (FW 66), first city and first cesspit?
Phoenix Park is indeed at once a dump and a garden of Eden where our innumerable H. C. Earwicker, who is also Ardamant and his opposite, falls through happiness and pleasure, following the paradoxical logic that organises the Joycean ‘chaosmos’ [FW 118.21]: for had he not fallen, he would have failed to reserect [rechuscité], which would have made him highly culpable indeed.
We recognise the Augustinian theme of the felix culpa, the happy fault, or the necessary original sin: Adam must fall in order to give rise to the Redeemer. A good succession from Sin to Son,12 the text implies, because in some languages it may even be enough to change one letter to either commit or efface the fault. Do not falter on the fault? [Il faut la faute?] Never mind, even the fault can lapse from the heights of sin to the common state of a slip of the tongue or pen [lapsus].
Seen from Phoenix Park, the Fault is thus rerouted and above all infinitely multiplied by crossbreeding with the Phoenix. At a stroke from the magic feather, the motif of the felix culpa becomes ‘foenix culprit’ (FW, 23),13 and turns out to be of the inextinguishable species of the Phoenix: from the first single necessary fault stem the thousands of faults with which this phoenixian Letter that is Finnegans Wake is written, this culpa [coulpe], this cup [coupe] filled with ashes fertile in signi-fairies [signes fées].
‘O fortunous casualitas!’, the text sighs on p. 175. Fortunate catastrophe indeed from which the artist always falls happily [tombe toujours bien]. O innocent culprit who does and does not do at the same time, does and denies [fait et nie], is foe and nix and never phoenishes doing it, in the Park, the faun who is sometimes a mad ‘faunayman’ (p. 25) – [faune-nieur], sometimes ‘Faunagon’ (p. 337).
Foenix culprit is, depending on the language (English, French or German), culpable of reading it, the culpable foe of humankind and the culpable one who did not do anything, fait nix, fait Nichts, nothing at all.
Maybe one only ever leaves the bewitched Park to find oneself in it again, in the unheimlich translation of the Freud-Joycean Jungfraud's Messongebook (p. 460).14
Phoenix Park is a theatre where the same scene/sin [(s)cène] is constantly being replayed in a hundred simuldamneous translations: Adam and Eve's Garden Party, or Jesus’ ‘goddinpotty’ (p. 59) in the manger, or the divine Pot [Potée] in the Chalice, or the Eurekarist. And this theatre is called the ‘feeatre of the Innocident’ [FW 59.9], in Feeneganswakean or in French: the Theatre is its Devil.15 But do we not find at the bottom of the word ‘goddinpotty’ our phoenix already stewing in its nest?
The echonomical bird
– The Phoenix Family: One could not dream of a more suitable myth to illustrate the structures of the Earwicker family, the main population of Joyce's Book, than that of the Phoenix and its self-begetting.
It is known that this bird, at once unique and yet not unique because it ceaselessly descends from its cinders [descendre de ses cendres], is its own father and son and even more. At the end of a five-hundred or fifteen-thousand-year cycle it is burned by a ray of sun, turns into ashes and is reborn into another cycle. And what about the mother? She seems repressed, unless she herself is the ashes? Or the hearth/home [foyer]?
In that case, the phoenix who is also its own nest, is also its own mother, the egg and the hen, the egg turned hen in order to re-lay [se ré-pondre] (to) itself, the egg that makes its own nest [l’œuf qui fait son nid, l’œuf fait nid], the eggphoenest [l'euphénid], etc., is its own family to itself.
The same goes for the incestuous Earwicker family, whose five members break through the shell, quarrel, clasp, split up, fleece one another, fall in love, gasp, kill and succeed one another in an incessant scrambling [brouillage] of themes, making countless omelettes as they (re)unite. The sons become the father as so(o)n as they are [qu'en tant que ‘sons’ ils ‘sont’ déjà]. The father is more often cooked than cock [fait le plus souvent la coque que le coq] and the mother cockobbles [recocolle] the pieces together.
For even inside an egg there are genders and roles. All these mutual forgeries produce all sorts of amusing pranks [farce amusement] in the house. Especially every time the funferal [funérailleries; cf. FW passim] of the master takes place, since, according to the mortvellous [mortveilleux] logic of the self-engendering [autogéniteur] bird, one never ceases to be until the day before one's birth [on ne cesse d’être qu’à la veille de naître]. All of them eggain [à œufs tous] rebuild the phoenix: ‘Grampupus is fallen down but grinny sprids the boord’ [FW 7.8–9] – it will be high life once more [ça va être encore la fête]. When it finishes it means that it already begins to be Phinished [Phinix].
This hearth/home [foyer] is always a proper madhouse [foire universelle]. The more the eggier [Plus on est d’œufsfous, plus on rit]. That is what is called ‘funforall’ in Finnegans Wake (p. 458), a mixture of pomes and circumstance [Pommes funèbres et royales], where one no longer knows whether one is drinking beer [Bière] or is being put on (in) a bier [mis en boîte dans une Bière].
This is how the family lives it up and creates the World: if the father with his accidents constitutes Time, the mother is Spacies, that is Space and Species [cf. FW 600.2–3].
– As for the Book,16 the phetish bird is its perfect Teetotem [Touthème]: the book is its own nauthor, its reading, its own family, its cycle of production-consumption [cf. FW 497.1–2] with all its inner critics [critiques intestins]. A phoenix, the book finishes only to start all over again. In fact, it never really ‘starts’ because in the first line it continues. Finnegans Wake is a sequel. Which announces its own structure of inclusion with the famous sentence which runs under our eyes when we open the book:
‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.’ [FW 3.1–3]
If that is a sentence. But it is rather the river language that started before the book and circulates unchannelled between the paper covers, goes undertext [rentre sous texte], overflows and resurfaces in tears on the last page . . .
A book that flows [coule], a book that rolls [roule] – this rotund book is eager to quote its formal, if not philosophical vicinities, including the cyclical theory of History elaborated by G. B. Vico in the eighteenth century. Pedalling on this vicycle [vicyclette] one goes through the divine age, the heroic age, then the human age – and finally through an obscure, confusing Ricorso, the twilight of a new day.
Vico is not the only godfather of the big Egg. One should not be surprised to encounter throughout the text the burning ashes of Giordano Bruno, the heretic so dear to Joyce. Bruno was burnt at the stake in Rome in 1600. By his destiny as much as his philosophy (the reconciliation of contraries) he is also doubly of a species that always begins anew [il est doublement de l'espèce toujours recommençante].
A nest of S'ignifiers [S'ignifiants]: From Spark to Sphoenish
Because of the end without end of its destiny, and the fire that smoulders under the embers [couve sous la cendre], the phoenix is the luminous metaphor of the work that proceeds inside the Wakean signifier. The Writing pokes [tisonne]. Words fly into sparks, flare up and seem to set one another ablaze [semblent, dans un flamboiement, s'embraser les uns les autres], to disappear and in their incandescence pick up innumerable meanings [reprendre en incandes/sens]. This ‘Words’ – always several – projects sparks of secondary signifiers the moment it is pronounced, which then light other little fires [allument . . . d'autres petits foyers] everywhere. The signifier Phoenix itself is scattered about into a thousand signifiers. Broken, disseminated [répandu], it comes back all intermingled with others and becomes phoenish, phoenis, phaynix, finixed, phenician, fornix, fortnichts, depending on whether it mixes with end, penis, night, Phenicia, Finnish, etc.
But since I would never finish raising [relever] the phoenix unless I put the whole of Finnegans Wake on paper, I will choose one of its most beautiful reappearances: the alliance between the phoenix and the sphinx. The marriage of these signifiers takes place in Erebia (an alliance between Erebus and Arabia) on page 473 at the end of Vico's heroic age, in an auroral climate [dans un climat d'aube] in which our phoenix is a trifle cock [coq], a trifle Lucifer, bringer of light. And under the Sphinx’ influence it prepares to burst out of the darkness of its pyre towards the sun.
‘so too will our own sphoenix spark spirt his spyre and sunward stride the rampante flambe.’ [FW 473.18–19]
From the pyre which is at the same time its opposite, namely spire, our eternal spark will soar out of this Park and its niddle [énidgme] and, mounted on a ray [montée sur un rayon], it will re/gain [re/gagner] the sun.
Finnegans Wake, the book that never ceases (not) to be (born) [qui ne cesse de re/n’être]
Finnegans Wake is the Book of a Long Night. It is the Sombre letter which Joyce sends to himself; his always purloined letter, always found lost, reposted, returned to its sender, who is himself the ultimate and first addressee and unique ideal reader. Written in the language of a hundred languages, the Finnegans Wake letter constantly translates itself – before the Law [en justice] – to axcuse [s'axcuser] and to phenicitate itself on madness [se phéniciter de folie], the use of (bed) forgeries [usage de faux lit] and breach of nest [abus de nid]. It warns its author against the danger of lingering ‘in the wake of the blackshape’ [FW 608.28–29], following the tracks of the black sheep that it is:
You will gain a lot of loss at this fool's game [à ce feu de dupe], the letter promises him.
Once Finnegans Wake finished,17 Joyce dies. Finnegans Wake smoulders/hatches on [couve encore]. Some say the author would have written a book of the day, if he had survived it. But after seventeen years of Work in Progress,18 has not Joyce become the last phoenix? Sometimes one really dies from writing certain books. Then one returns ashen [on revient cendres].
Translated by Laurent Milesi
Notes
1. |
Pome, as Joyce says. Pome, or the poem-fruit [fruit-poème], as the little Joycean collection of verse suggests: Pomes Penyeach. [HC] |
2. |
In his fable Vor dem Gesetz (Before the Law). [HC] |
3. |
This last line is repeated in English in the original [tr.]. |
4. |
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Granada, 1977), pp. 7–8. [HC] |
5. |
‘What's in a name?’ Stephen asks, while playing with the meaningful echoes of proper names like William Shakespeare, Ann Hathaway, but also Stephen Dedalus (see the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ chapter in Ulysses). [HC] |
6. |
The phrase ‘Paradox Lust’ is an allusive play on Milton's verse epic Paradise Lost and lust (jouissance). Through this slippage Paradise Lust thus mixes the pleasure of the Paradox, and the pleasure found in the lost paradise, the paradox that insinuates itself into the exchange between loss and pleasure [jouir]. [HC] |
7. |
A pun related to matter – mater – material (see ‘Missexuality’ above) [tr.]. |
8. |
Cf. FW 263.20. |
9. |
Not in 1883, as the original states [tr.]. |
10. |
Cixous’ account is inaccurate here. The mistake, in fact, was to spell hesitancy with an ‘e’ (‘hesitency’) [tr.]. |
11. |
This is part of an extended play on the Wakean motif of the felix culpa [tr.]. |
12. |
And even: ‘And that was how framm Sin fromm Son, acity arose . . .’, Finnegans Wake confesses on p. 94. [this note, in the original, is followed by two attempts at translation]. [HC] |
13. |
Foenix culprit is a play on Phoenix, Felix and Fait-Nichts, Nichts [or nix] (German: nothing). The Fait/nix, the Culprit, is a good-for-nothing [fait rien]. Is there any more paradoxical (lucky) Felix than a culpable one [coupable] who did not do anything [Fait-Rien]? [HC] |
14. |
‘Jungfraud's Messongebook’ is a pun on Jung and Freud, Freud and fraud. The messongebook is the book of messonges, lies [mensonges] and masses [messes] . . . [HC] |
15. |
This is a punning allusion to Antonin Artaud's Theatre and Its Double [tr.]. |
16. |
‘Quant au Livre’, the title of one of Mallarmé’s essays [tr.]. |
17. |
In English in the original [tr.]. |
18. |
The working title for FW during its gestation [tr.]. |