‘‘Paradox lust’’: the fortunate fall according to Joycein Finnegans Wake

Gerald Gillespie

Published online: 22 March 2011� Akademiai Kiado, Budapest, Hungary 2011

Abstract A half century ago Atherton started cataloguing the plethora of books in the

Wake, and fifteen years ago Hogan concentrated on Milton’s work among those furnishing

more potent, complex, and extended allusions. Not since Rabelais’s, Cervantes’s, Sterne’s,

and Goethe’s fictions, which demonstrated how to journey through vast realms of culture

and paradigmatic literature, has any author acted with such sovereign freedom as Joyce to

align a convergence of all books and language over the ages with his own search for

wisdom. The fact that Joyce achieved a very personal synthesis out of the referential

immensity adduced in the Wake should not deter us from recognizing certain deep patterns

which qualify Joyce as a renewer of important tradition. The patterns of concern here as

encountered in Joyce finally carry us over into experiencing a kind of ‘‘modern mysticism’’

that is not exclusively apophatic but also simultaneously directly affirmative, although not

explainable in any routine discursive fashion. Joyce’s idea of a divine creative principle

that appears to ‘‘fall’’ in the course of bringing forth its own purpose in a ‘‘creation’’ has an

honorable place in theological, cosmogonic, and mystical thought in the European tradi-

tion. A number of Renaissance savants and poets believed that various paradigms

embodied in ancient myth, including the biblical story of Adam and Eve, reflected this

proposition. Several streams feeding from the Renaissance over Romanticism into Mod-

ernism and interesting to Joyce (e.g., early anthropological myth analysis, cabala, theos-

ophy, etc.) kept alive the poetic vocabulary by which to express an encounter with the

baffling puzzle of Being as a drama played out by the human race, an evolutionary drama

with both historical and psychological dimensions. Joyce’s contemporary, Thomas Mann,

while quite different in many respects, shares Joyce’s perception that a parallelism exists

between the ‘‘fall’’ of Being or Spirit, the ‘‘agon’’ of human development, and the problem

of a seemingly absurd mind/body division. Although keen interest in poets like Blake, the

A short version of this essay has been presented as a talk at the Modern Language Association in LosAngeles in January 2011 in the session ‘‘Joyce and Narrative,’’ sponsored by the International James JoyceFoundation.

G. Gillespie (&)Stanford University, Building 260, Stanford, CA 94305-2030, USAe-mail: gillespi@stanford.edu

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Neohelicon (2011) 38:161–175DOI 10.1007/s11059-011-0092-y

heroic power of the imagination, and the Luciferic theme is prominent in Ulysses, a

movement occurs in the Wake away from the Bildungsroman structure toward a more

encompassing visionary sense of rebirth. In the Wake Joyce ‘‘revises’’ the Miltonic version

of the fall (as well as the Dantesque and others) in a way consonant with Goethe’s revision

of the meaning of the recorded three millennia of human striving in Faust II; the Goethean

coda anticipates Joyce in ‘‘fulfilling’’ the inner tendency which surfaces from the biblical

account of the family romance onward and appears instantiated repeatedly in the world

theater/history. Joyce’s version abandons the apocalyptic model of a once-only creation

and privileges the alternate model of an eternal or permanent universe, but according to

Joyce the repeatable story of the ‘‘fortunate fall’’ eventuates in a requisite salvational

insight suited to the Viconian ‘‘eternal return’’: in the words of the mother, ‘‘first we feel,

then we fall’’. Joyce reinvents the basic sacraments poetically to reflect the ultimate union

of creator and creation, and the Wake’s famous coda confirms the sacred mission and

destiny of love’s ‘‘body’’ (which is also by analogy the text’s body or embodiment).

Keywords Joyce � Milton � Goethe � Genesis � Androgyny

This essay will attempt to explore Joyce’s response to Milton and will invoke Joyce’s

ambivalent relation to Goethe as an aid toward that end. Milton and Goethe are invoked as

part of a larger tradition in a slim book titled Prophets of Heaven and Hell: Virgil, Dante,Milton, Goethe, written during the crisis of World War II and published posthumously in

1945; in it its author, Charles Roden Buxton, eloquently explained how this sequence of

four great epic visionaries, spanning antiquity and modernity, despite their obvious dif-

ferences came to constitute a special canon for several reasons besides individual artistic

prowess: each poet understood the significance of myth and used myth in their works. And

while their epics possessed historical value for their own times, they also had a moral and

intellectual effect that far transcended their times, cumulatively conveying the basic ideas

of Western civilization. This was the set of formidable giants whom Joyce faced in the

early twentieth century and into whose company he was determined to be inscribed. By its

very nature the ancestral list always begs to be extended; for example, as Ulysses dem-

onstrated, Joyce preferred to include Homer in the lead-off position, just as Virgil had done

for his own purposes. And like Thomas Mann in the Joseph tetralogy, Joyce knew as an

heir of the aggregate Western ‘‘meta-narrative’’ in its postclassical and Christian phases

that, if he aspired to attain the highest rank, he too had to cope with Milton’s anchor book

of books, Genesis.

Less than a century has passed since the completion of Finnegans Wake, into which

Joyce packed his amazing samplings of an inheritance of myths, religions, philosophies,

and literatures millennia deep and also reaching well beyond Europe. As Dirk Van Hulle

says in his study of the compositional history and principles of the Wake, Joyce was

motivated to write a history of the world from its inception and thus the growth pattern of

his encyclopedic recyclings of details from biological, linguistic, and historical evolution

has come to represent a gripping saga in its own right. But I propose to focus briefly on a

theme obviously associated with Milton in the European literary stream since Milton’s

reworking of Genesis in Paradise Lost. We can abbreviate today because we enjoy the

benefits of a huge critical apparatus on the diverse elements of the Wake as a repertorial

universe; this apparatus includes such studies as Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton

Robinson’s Skeleton Key, James K. Atherton’s The Books at the Wake, Adaline Glasheen’s

repeated census-takings, Bernard Benstock’s deeply informed analysis in Joyce-Again’s

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Wake, the chapter-by-chapter Conceptual Guide edited by Michael Begnal and Fritz Senn,

John Bishop’s invaluable exploration of Joyce’s Book of the Dark, and much much more.

There is even an entire helpful monograph, Patrick Hogan’s Joyce, Milton, and the Theoryof Influence, dealing not only with the Dubliner’s lifelong relationship to the English poet

and to intermediate heirs of Milton such as Blake, Byron, and Shelley, but also with an

evolving interchange in Joyce’s mind between Dante and Milton among superior poetic

ancestors. Moreover, when it comes to such modifying influences as cabalistic lore, the-

osophy, and spiritualism, we have Jonathan Cope, Sheldon Brivic, and Enrico Terrinoni as

additional guides.

Thus my commentary should be understood as only a modest accretion to the vast

midrashic text embracing Joyce’s final masterwork. I have argued elsewhere (‘‘Nein oder

Ja’’) that, in comparison to an esoteric Franz Kafka, Joyce is an exoteric writer who

overwhelms us with direct but often multiplex palimpsestial references. Here I hope to

underscore that his exoteric rewriting of a primary myth, in large measure as a rival to

Milton, conducts us to a higher synthesis, to a daring modern mysticism. To arrive more

economically at that point, I shall concentrate above all on the famous ricorso, or the one-

chapter-long Book Four of the Wake which Grace Eckley has treated with admirable

compactness and sensitivity in the Conceptual Guide (pp. 211–236). Hogan does take note

of the cabalistic dimension in Joyce but without any elaboration, perhaps because others

such as Cope and Brivic have treated it. Let me, then, restart my limited inquiry with what

is a fair stipulation of several major givens validated in a host of specialized studies: In

addition to situating himself in the Wake as a newest authority in a series of great books

and authors stretching from the Bible and Homer onward, over the likes of Virgil, Dante,

Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe, Joyce has—with a zeal as great as Thomas Mann’s—

invoked and meshed together many explanatory systems. These include Greco-Roman,

Germanic, Celtic, Egyptian, Near Eastern, and Indic mythologies and religions. And

alongside Christian theologians and mystics, plus cultural theorists like Vico, philosophers

like Berkeley, and figures and incidents from Irish and world history old and new, we

encounter hints from the Cabala, alchemy, numerology, theosophy, and popular spiritualist

trends of Joyce’s day. None of these cultural modifiers controls Joyce’s message; all of

them together lend his vision the dignity of historical depth which he strove for.

It is the complexity of this warp and woof that, I believe, invites us to read the Wake as

extending and giving a course correction to the encyclopedic-humoristic tradition founded

by the great Renaissance mystifier Rabelais, whose Pantagrueline doctrine, along with and

by way of Cervantes’s Quixotism, Sterne transmuted into Shandyism. Through the joco-

serious doctrine of joyance or ‘‘joyicity’’ (FW 414.23), Joyce is striving for nothing less

than to refresh our world view, to revitalize primary truths of the human condition. As

Eckley titles her chapter, the ricorso is ‘‘Looking Forward to a Brightening Day’’; it

conducts the human soul out of the night of dream into dawn, rebirth. In an essay focused

on the ricorso, Damon Franke has connected the Wake’s theme of resurrection with

Joyce’s prolific play with forms of the Indoeuropean verb ‘‘to be’’ which he finds already

present in Molly’s famous ‘‘yes’’ at the end of Ulysses. We can speculate that besides the

Egyptian patterns borrowed from the Book of the Dead and recent centuries of Egyptology,

one impulse impelling the non-Christian Joyce in the Wake to unite East and West is a tacit

rivalry with the late work of the equally non-Christian Goethe who sought such a synthesis,

notably in his later years. Katharina Mommsen has carefully documented how Goethe

attributed his new capacity to use dream and fantasy in Faust II, Wilhelm Meister’sJourneymanship, and elsewhere to his appreciation of ‘‘oriental’’ storytelling in the 1001Nights (‘‘‘Als Meisterin erkennst du die Scheherazaden’’’). While there are multiple

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channels over which Joyce might have shared this interest, which appears in the Sheher-

azade and other Oriental story-telling motifs in Ulysses, the Goethean example, too, fits

unmistakably in a coherent picture of Joyce’s reception of this complex.

But let us stick with the fact that, among all the doublings that are resolved into a unity

in the Wake, Joyce melds the cultural marriage of eastern and western realms with other

thematic strata such as the union of dieing and being reborn, which the ultimate coda of the

Wake spoken by ALP demonstrates. That culminating moment of the direct article ‘‘the’’

carries us into the new day of the ‘‘riverrun’’ and the reality of Eve and Adam on page one

in the Wake; but their heyday rapidly is disclosed in the opening pages to be the story of the

Fall. Because of the powerful presence of the family romance in both novels, no reader can

avoid comparing the beginnings and endings of Ulysses and the Wake. The disturbed,

Hamlet-obsessed Stephen, an aspirant creator and self-labeled Luciferic rebel, is our initial

lead figure in Ulysses, whereas the Wake starts with our first parents and the cosmic

dimensions of the Fall and the processes inherent in the family romance. In the ‘‘Ithaca’’

chapter of Ulysses, a Dublin version of Homeric nostos, the father’s return home occurs in

two larger segments which I shall grossly foreshorten here: The consubstantial father and

son have grown interrelated over the course of several chapters. Stephen, the symbolic heir,

as if in a ritualistic imitation of (re-)birth, exits through the garden gate under a starry

heaven of Dantesque promise and to the glow of Molly’s lamp or the lumen naturae, and

Bloom, the father, disappears into the mysterious zero point, into sleep, death, the

unconscious, the ovum, the miraculous maternal channel. The gate of entry and exit, the

dot of all convergence—shown in large bold print at the close of ‘‘Ithaca’’—opens up in

the ‘‘post-final’’ interior of ‘‘Penelope,’’ a chapter Homer obviously never thought of,

carrying us into the amazing inner world of Molly, her famous reverie that affirms.

This comparison gains in importance if we triangulate, in extreme abbreviation, with

Milton’s Paradise Lost (PL) and Paradise Regained (PR). As a magnificent expansion

upon the family romance of Genesis, it is readily understandable why PL constitutes a rival

predecessor to both Ulysses and the Wake. We can concede that the way Stephen sallies

forth from a parodic Eden in Ulysses suggests qualities of courage inherent in a champion

for humanity, roughly postfiguring the brave departure of Adam and Eve into the world of

time, consciousness, and striving outside the gates in PL. But PR is starkly different from

either Ulysses or the Wake, because in PR Milton privileges the contest between the

antagonist Satan and the champion and savior figure Christ. This more orthodox choice by

Milton refocuses our attention on the fundamental conflict in the world process which in

the Wake Joyce spins out through a complex dialectic and symbiosis between the brothers

Shem and Shaun who appear in a host of variants. Gradually, Luciferic and Christ-like

attributes crisscross for Joyce. In addition, the basic congruence between marriage as

picturing cosmic and human order in the close of the Odyssey and in the functionally

‘‘final’’ ‘‘Ithaca’’ chapter of Ulysses is reaffirmed in the coda of the Wake. Joyce clearly

shares Milton’s essential sympathy at the close of PL for the brave human couple who are

setting forth from Eden, but Joyce tilts the close of Ulysses through a symphonic reca-

pitulation of the feminine role in Molly and he deepens this recapitulation in the Wake’s

coda when ALP as the Liffey has the final word. Whereas in Milton’s PR the divine child

returns as Christ, the champion, to best the devil, in the Wake Joyce burdens us with a very

challenging conflation of the savior figure, the artist role, and the Luciferic principle in

Shem who (as Gian Balsamo has shown) undergoes an apophatic martyrdom, acting as

scribal humanity writing the human story on its own body.

I must defer here any closer examination of how Milton inwardly resisted orthodox

Calvinism, flirted with Gnostic and Arian insights in his quest for a theodicy, exploited

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ancient and medieval literary tradition, and found a balance between logos and mythos in

depicting our origins—topics which A. D. Nuttall has treated in a sensitive nuanced fashion.

I will abbreviate by saying that, instead of a pendant celebration of some ‘‘regaining’’ of

Eden or salvation roughly comparable to Milton’s smaller continuation in a part two, in a

kind of New Testament titled PR, Joyce chooses to leave the human race, by way of the

Wake’s coda, at a high point of wisdom acquired through mankind’s living and suffering

over the ages, still facing mortality as a condition that gains its meaning only through life.

With all its bevy of agents—God, the angels, the demons—PL rotates around two great

centres: the narratives, on the one hand of Adam and Eve, and on the other of Satan. In

contrast, the Wake diminishes Satan as a major polarity and elevates ALP or the mother, a

cosmically expanded version of Molly, who gets the final word in summing up eons of the

family romance. In thinking of generations yet to come and accepting mortality (an

awareness she has long since acquired by eating of the tree of knowledge), the mother passes

over in a mystical marriage, reuniting with the father. Hogan is right in pointing out that for

the Miltonic womb of chaos Joyce substitutes the maternal womb. The cosmological and

ontological expansions by Joyce in celebrating the feminine principle go very far indeed.

Here is one among many illustrations of Joyce’s tendency prior to the Wake. In Milton’s

PL the archangel Gabriel vouchsafes to Adam a partial vision of the future and thus gives

us readers, too, an outline of major providential twists and turns on the human race’s

educational pathway, including the for Dante and Milton already manifest and inherited

promise of a savior. In the drama Cain, Byron updates the story with an exponential time

expansion which breaks the very shape of biblical revelation. Byron has Lucifer impart to

Adam a glimpse of the yet-to-be-unlocked knowledge of evolution, knowledge recently

generated in the Enlightenment and Romantic period; thus Byron introduces the haunting

and menacing question for modern readers: What can be the meaning of life if for untold

eons so many helpless and grotesque creatures have striven only to perish forever, and if

propagating life is only propagating death and murder? In a masterly stroke in ‘‘Oxen of

the Sun’’, Joyce transmutes this Byronic horror; the response occurs in Bloom’s fantasy

when the archetype of the Virgin Mary and/or Isis emerges from the grotesque animal

tumult, floating above everything frightful as the beautiful queen of heaven, the maternal

principle protecting humanity. As in Ulysses, so too in the Wake there can be no denial of

death, which deeply troubles humanity ever since we acquired consciousness, that is,

became what we are. However, despite the Fall, which is attributed to some mysterious

fault committed by the father figure rather than the mother, the Wake poignantly affirms

life as the answer in a grand coincidentia oppositorum.

The procedure in the ricorso for resolving the dilemma of falling is to replicate the

doubleness of the novel’s own overture, back into which the coda conducts us via the

pointing direct article ‘‘the’’. There in the beginning with the couple on the Edenic riv-

errun, Eve and Adam, we learn of the stupendous Fall. Similarly, in the ricorso Joyce

entertains us not just with the necessity of falling, but also with a story of holy springtime,

the virtually magical moment of cultural rebeginning, before we get to hear the voice of the

tired Liffey as she moves out to sea. In a recent paper (‘‘Swallowing the Androgyne’’),

I have treated one of the major functions of the story of Saint Kevin who on balance is a bit

more of a Shaun and Bloom in his practical achievements in founding Glendalough

(Irish = valley of two lakes), though that is less relevant than his act of worshipping water

as his ‘‘holy sister.’’ It bears repeating in the present context that, through the strange,

joyful behavior of Kevin, Joyce brings about a poetic miracle: He succeeds in conveying

the extraordinary idea that the sacraments of baptism, the Eucharist, and marriage con-

stitute ultimately a single mystery. This mystery recurs in the musings of the Liffey, the

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river that earlier flows through Glendalough, and who as she is completing her course

yearns to reunite with her husband and father, to return into the watery depths. Among the

many jocoserious plays on Milton, the travestied title ‘‘paradox lust’’ earlier in the Wake(FW 263, in margin) alludes not only to the troubling awareness that eros gives way to

thanatos, but also to the opposite: Death is overcome while being reinstated by carnal lust

because desire propagates life, life which entails dying. Our bodily existence is the con-

dition of sentience or the possibility of discovery of a ladder of love.

ALP, as the Liffey or the stream of life, realizes her own involvement in this rela-

tionship, but she can only affirm—for all of us, on our behalf, by the will of Joyce as

author. Ultimately he depicts the male-female dichotomy in the family romance as a

reciprocity that mirrors that of humanity with God or, on a yet larger scale, that of the

creation with its creator. In the beautiful paired sentences, ‘‘Far calls. Coming, far!’’ (FW

628.13), the Liffey expresses what we can only sense behind the manifold phenomena we

have experienced through the novel. The mysteriously remote origin (metaphorically

father, present through Danish ‘‘far’’) attracts, and life (metaphorically mother, speaking as

the Liffey) responds. And, vice versa, God is attracted to her. The tension between creator

and creation appears in the love story that necessarily emerges through the world process.

Joyce could appreciate the fervor in a Gnostic like Blake who longed to overcome a false,

fallen creation and restore the lost paradise as humanity’s birthright. Joyce could also

appreciate the Gnostic tendency underlying Milton’s depiction of Eve’s curiosity and

daring. However, Milton’s imagination still operates within a Christian teleological

framework that posits the romance or drama as having a beginning and an end, whose

midpoint is the appearance of the champion in world history; whereas Joyce coopts that

pattern and subordinates it to his own mythological amalgam, in which, for example, the

Viconian ages obtain and thus a metaphor of cyclicality prevails that dispenses with both

Gnostic and Christian goals. In Joyce’s work we are induced to grasp the evolution of

humankind, in a Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean vein, as having already produced the

human body-mind reality, a reality which now continues doggedly on. We learn to accept

our existential condition as, effectively, an eternal identity.

Moreover, Joyce coopts the Boehmean theosophical heritage which puzzles over the

passionate drama of humanity as exhibiting godhead’s emergence and exalts the incar-

nation of a child as picturing the highest concept of a divine marriage. This drama is more

overt in Ulysses in ‘‘Oxen of the Sun’’, but it is implicit in the Wake in the Book of the

Children and their doings and conflicts. Like their parents, the children as embodiments of

specific phenomena exhibit the world process through which divine emanation is occur-

ring, the unfolding of the Sefiroth. According to Boehme, the Ein Soph or Nothing brings

forth the something, the manifoldness of creation in which human beings discover

themselves as participants. We can think of God as an origin, as the creative source, which

in an act of self-reflection posits itself as an Other. It is a reasonable speculation that,

behind the cabalistic and theosophical idea of the emergence of our world in the chaosmos,

Joyce intuited the discovery of the motherhood of God. God the father made himself into a

mother by giving birth to the world, and this mystery is reflected in androgynic humanity.

To Boehme, the tension between the forces of love and anger in our world is traceable back

to the mysterious tension inherent in godhead’s self-reflection.

The analogy is found in the myth of mankind in Genesis. The tension of creating which

induces a fall initially appears in the rebellion of certain angels. As if aiming toward some

remedy, God chooses to create another creature, mankind, in His own image. Then, in a

symbolic parallel, out of His surrogate image Adam, God creates Eve. In this myth father-

and-mother God loves his creation and takes on the roles of husband (creator) and wife

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(creation); then he replicates this divine androgyny on earth in androgynous humanity.

There is nothing new in this notion, at least since the Renaissance thinker Paracelsus

opined that ‘‘Before all things God the Father had a Wife, and she is comprehended with

Him in the first person of the Trinity’’ (Geheimnis 19). The danger which inheres in

bodying forth otherness is present in the legend of Adam’s alternate dangerous spouse

Lilith, and in Eve’s fascination with her own image. In becoming a mother, God may

ineluctably become narcissistic, too. However, as the non-Christian Goethe says in one of

the eight lines of the ‘‘Chorus Mysticus’’ closing Faust in 1832, ‘‘Everything is just a

metaphor.’’ Joyce is not founding any new religion; he is simply grasping for a very

difficult understanding of the attraction of life, even on the threshold of death, the role of

the ‘‘Eternal-Feminine’’ to draw us onward, upward, as the very last line of Faust states.

Joyce assigns the following thought to the weary Liffey as she merges into the world

ocean, ‘‘First we feel, then we fall’’ (FW 627.11), expressing the creation’s enactment of

godhead’s own self-manifestation. In the coda to the Wake, we learn that God falls,

because he loves, because he turns toward his counterpart, his creation, because he invests

the creation with his creative energy, impregnates it. As I have argued elsewhere,1 this is

an amazing juncture, because in the Wake the poet Joyce blends the mother into the father

and raises her to a special rank much as did the non-Christian Goethe who internalizes

himself in the epic drama as ‘‘Doctor Marianus’’ and who addresses the archetype, the

Virgin Mary, as ‘‘queen’’ and ‘‘goddess’’ as Faust II closes. In the analogous view of

Goethe’s later rival Joyce, love both causes the Fall and is the end purpose of falling.

Despite the significant divergence from PR in his ending of Faust II, Goethe shares

something with Milton whose influence on his epic drama he always downplayed; and

Joyce subsequently resembles Goethe in his manner of sharing with Milton, but not

acknowledging his debt to an intermediary and by-passing him to go back to the ‘‘abso-

lute’’ Urtext. PR refers several times to the biblical story of Job as the prefiguration of

Christ’s ordeal and triumph. Goethe always claimed it was not Milton’s poetry, but the

biblical Job who inspired the mature Faustian theme of striving, and analogously Joyce did

not want to credit the Goethean precedent for a post-Christian epic. It is easy enough to

find irritating points in PR that would put off both Goethe and Joyce who are eager to

‘‘correct’’ Milton. For example, in the contest for cultural primacy between Jerusalem and

Athens, Milton believes in the superiority of the Hebrews over the Greeks, the Greek being

‘‘Deepest verst in books and shallow in himself’’ (line 327), and the Hebrew mind the more

ancient source as Christ himself tells Satan (‘‘That rather Greece from us these arts

derived’’, line 338). Goethe was respectfully ecumenical toward all religions; Joyce was

‘‘disrespectfully’’ ecumenical; both enormously admired Greek culture. But then, there

were points of satisfaction for them in the epic sweep of a new consciousness exemplified

in Christ. After completing a Faust-like complete survey of the whole world and its

foundations by Christ in Book IV of PR, Milton’s narrator leaves us in possession of

‘‘insider’’ knowledge of Christ’s coming triumph at a nodular point in the history of the

human race. This ending is the grand kairos which we are permitted to ‘‘anticipate’’ in

retrospect, in a densely expressed sacramental moment and epiphany. In the final words of

PR, after a breath-taking cosmic tour, angels carry Christ to a divine meal and

From Heavenly Feast refresht

Brought on his way with joy; hee unobserv’d

Home to his Mother’s house private returned. (lines 637–639)

1 In ‘‘Swallowing the Androgyne’’.

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By way of an ending this amounts to far more than being captured in the trammels of

history, to which Christ providentially must submit as the Son prior to His resurrection. In

a final image, the young champion slips back into the warm human earthly channel, goes

home to His mother. The language is mysteriously comforting. It has touches of the soul’s

experience of a ‘‘noche oscura’’ such as we find in St. John of the Cross. The mother

appears as a necessary refuge after all the spiritual exertions of the champion depicted in

Milton’s PR, whereas it is the mother who guides and attracts in Goethe’s Faust and who

fosters and rejoins the son/father/husband in Joyce’s Wake.

To judge by the greatest ‘‘epic’’ writers of modernism, their understanding of recurrent

mythic patterns as a treasury of anthropological data in the human record does not result in

the discarding of interest in rituals or sacramental moments; rather, these retain their

fascination. For example, as a boy in Du cote de chez Swann, Proust’s narrator Marcel

famously treasures his mother’s bedtime kiss as a sacrament. Rebel Stephen famously

cannot bring himself to kiss his dying mother in Ulysses and agonizes over this denial of

her absolute gift of love and life. Countervailing is Bloom’s kissing of Molly on Howth

Head, when in foreplay they exchange seed cake in saliva mouth to mouth—a rapturous

and messy surrogate for the Eucharistic bread and wine in a book replete with dozens of

examples of substitutes. Without any reference at all to Joyce, William Kerrigan’s won-

derful essay on ‘‘Milton’s Kisses’’ pinpoints for us why the author of the Wake would see

PL as a masterwork to match or surpass. After an extraordinary enthusiasm for and range

of kissing in the Renaissance, book four of PL celebrates connubial love as a mystery that

antedates the Fall and develops kissing into a symbolism not only of manly-womanly

mutual entrancement but also of creative impregnation. Thus from the start there is a

direction or vector of dominance and submissiveness inherent in the kissing that portends

‘‘movement to aloneness to imaginative sovereignty’’ and implies ‘‘common ground’’

between Satan and womankind, as Kerrigan sees it (Kerrigan 131). Beyond the momentary

release in self-oblivion or union with the other, desire by necessity thus also involves

dominance and submission. That world of history and politics is strangely latent in the

Edenic moment, thanks to Milton’s inspired hovering as poet between mythos and logos in

PL; and it is no stretch to believe Joyce would appreciate how a fellow poet Milton savored

the primordial love match when he connected the story of origins to the consequent drama

of dualism and manifoldness with all its attendant glories and miseries.

What then is the entrance into night, night which ultimately issues into dawn, ambig-

uously both birth and death and return to the source in the Wake? Here it is helpful to

invoke another author of the late Renaissance whom Joyce read with fascination and whom

Marion Cumpriano emphasizes as central to atmospherics of the dark night of the Wake:

Saint John of the Cross. At a minimum we should be alert to general influence of the

mystical tradition reaching from Saint Teresa over her younger associate Saint John to both

Catholic and Protestant Baroque poets, for more than one reason. Both Spanish visionaries

came from originally Jewish families, and for all its relevance in a Christian framework

their celebration of the soul’s marriage with God transcends any narrow religious affilia-

tion. Philip Beitschman detects the Cabala behind Teresa’s remarkably well-plotted work

The Interior Castle as well as in Kafka. Jean-Michel Rabate associates Joyce’s interest in

Saint John with subtle probing of the ego already in a newer postmodern vein, while

Sandford Drob ignores Joyce and only focuses on postmodern philosophers of Jewish

background like Derrida and Levinas in light of the cabalistic heritage. However con-

strained by societal pressures or distanced from the Cabala, Teresa’s and Saint John’s

tapping into a love-death experience which the soul affirms is shared by other mystics from

a number of cultural streams. Evelyn Underhill cites a statement by a mystic nearer the

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Spaniards, Madame Guyon, that employs the water course metaphor in a way that will

occur in a gentler, more universalizing form in the final coda of the Wake:

The life of the believer is like a torrent making its way out of the high mountains down

into the canyons and chasms of life, passing through many experiences until finally

coming to the spiritual experience of death. From there, the torrent experiences res-

urrection and a life lived in concert with the will of God while still going through

many stages of refinement. At last the torrent finds its way into the vast, unlimited sea.

Even here the torrent does not totally come to be one with the vast ocean until it has

once more passed through final dealings with the Lord. (Underhill 242)

Goethe varies this widely known ‘‘stream of life’’ metaphor in his famous Storm-and-Stress

poem ‘‘Mohammed’s Song’’ (‘‘Mahomets Gesang’’) by analogizing the water course from

the clouds and high peaks to alluvial plains to the heroic poetic spirit that carries fellow

human beings along ultimately ‘‘To your old father,/ To the eternal ocean,/ Who with

outspread arms/ Awaits us’’ (lines 36–39). It is a fitting coincidence that Teresa especially

venerated holy water and believed in its curative powers—for Joyce was fascinated by water

and water opens and closes and encloses the Wake. The metaphor of interfusion which

appears in The Interior Castle is strikingly in harmony with ALP’s thought:

But spiritual marriage is like rain falling from heaven into a river or stream,

becoming one and the same liquid, so that the river and the rain water cannot be

divided; or it resembles a streamlet flowing into the ocean, which cannot afterwards

be disunited from it. (Teresa of Avila, ‘‘The Seventh Mansions,’’ section 5, TheInterior Castle)

Of course, as John Bishop so brilliantly demonstrates in his chapter on ‘‘‘Anna Livia

Plurabelle’: A Riverbabble Primer,’’ the flows or fluxions in the Wake are innovatory

insofar as they encompass everything nasty and scary as well as nice in our evolution. In

the Wake’s terms, sometimes asleep we hear ourselves in the rhythms of our mysterious

bodies, sometimes dreaming we drift into the strangest recesses of the psyche, sometimes

we sense our being as a sewer system through which pollutants flow, sometimes we

imagine washerwomen are at work and the stream is cleansing our natural filth, sometimes

we float darkly in placental liquid beneath our mother’s heart waiting for birth. After what

we readers encounter in the Wake, is it anymore so wildly speculative to imagine the

unknowable godhead as a mother, the chaosmos as the placental realm we are dreaming in,

and the emergence of meaning as a kind of birth into spiritual light?

I am not saying that Joyce subserves some particular message about duality and unity

from great minds of the past; rather, that he integrates a host of messages in his own quest

probing darkness and dream. Joyce is rightly regarded to be one of the greatest synthesizers

in human history, for he manages to fuse the sacraments of baptism, the Eucharist, and

marriage and to combine the idea of the consubstantiality of father and son with the idea of

the consubstantiality of mother and father, and thus envisions the consubstantiality of

parents and children, all humankind, as a meaningful continuum. In ever falling, humanity

expresses God’s fall, and this falling of ours through time and the flesh, which reveals

divine love, is paradoxically an ascent. This paradox is a heritage. As Joyce says in a gloss,

modifying Milton in Book II.2 of the Wake, we are dealing with ‘‘Hearasay in paradoxlust’’—that is, hearsay and heresy, and we are lost in paradox; also, what we hear told of

the lustful human story is related to the apocryphal version found in Paradise Lost. But, so

modern consciousness or the writer may exult, ‘‘O felicitous culpability, sweet bad cess to

you for an archetypt!’’ (FW 263.28–29).

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How, then, may thinking about Joyce’s relationship to Goethe shed some light on the

relationship to Milton? As James Boyd already laid out in considerable detail in 1932, the

Shakespeare adulator Goethe was exceptionally well read in English literature from

the Renaissance forward and, despite some cavils, esteemed Milton as a true poet and

ranked Byron highest among contemporaries. Boyd represents the scholarly consensus that

Goethe was indebted to PL for aspects of his own Mephistopheles and the ‘‘Prologue in

Heaven’’ in Faust. It was widely recognized in the Romantic period that Satan had returned

as an important literary figure for modernity because of Milton—and therein resides a kind

of challenge and obstacle for Joyce. In treating the spirit of nay-saying who serves also as

an interior master of theater in Faust, an instigator of illusions and phantasmagoria, Goethe

had, in effect, preempted the inviting prospect of rewriting the Miltonic fallen angel.

In many ways Goethe was too close to Joyce in history. Goethe’s cosmic drama Faust:A Tragedy, completed in the year of its author’s death (1832), was a complex masterwork

overarching millennia which demanded a lot from its initial interpreters—a challenge

which Joyce hoped the Wake too would pose, provoking its best readers and thus ensuring

its survival. Faust was uncomfortably present at a zenith of Goethe’s recognition around

1900 in Europe and America just when Joyce embarked on his own literary career. Joyce

also could not fail to understand that Goethe’s Faust had deeply informed the imaginative

quester drama Peer Gynt by Ibsen, one of his contemporary literary heroes. In a chapter for

the comparative study European Romantic drama, the eminent theaterman Martin Esslin

has demonstrated the immediate and lasting power of Goethe’s Faust to incite respondents

and emulators across Europe. Concentrating on the ‘‘problem’’ which the Helena section of

Faust II posed for Goethe in maintaining the dignity of his compound work as a tragedy,

David Barry speculates that the marriage theme in the German play seems to anticipate that

in the Irish novel Ulysses through a deeper spiritual affinity rather than any provable

filiation—at least insofar as both authors, Goethe and Joyce, connect sexual union with

artistic and/or cultural creativity.

An obvious illustration is the way in which in Ulysses Joyce ‘‘continues’’ the Odysseybeyond the actual fulfillment of nostos and Homer’s moving celebration of marriage. Joyce

carries us into the amazingly new literary moment, the unprecedented lengthy ‘‘Penelope’’

chapter consisting of Molly’s eight sentences. I resist the temptation to speculate that these

eight rambling sentences are meant specifically to signal a daring variation on, or opening

up of, the dense, awesome eight sentences of Goethe’s ‘‘Chorus Mysticus’’ closing Faust,eine Tragodie, but now as a modernist ‘‘divine comedy.’’ Nonetheless, the general prop-

osition is clear. The ‘‘Penelope’’ chapter serves, simultaneously, as Joyce’s earthy answer

to the inspiring finale of Faust II in the sections ‘‘Mountain Gorges’’ and ‘‘Chorus Mys-

ticus,’’ where Goethe celebrates ‘‘The Eternal Feminine’’.2 I have treated the complicated

patterns of Joyce’s rivalry simultaneously with Shakespeare and Goethe elsewhere,

including an attempt to outbid Goethe’s own rivalry with and use of Shakespeare in the

novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and to exhibit a yet more impressive mastery of

the epochal Hamletic obsession of Europe in Ulysses.3 Robert Weninger has given us a

supporting detailed ‘‘Parallactic Reading’’ of the protagonists Wilhelm and Stephen and

how their kinds of sharing, for example, Homer worship, link Goethe and Joyce. Richard

Ellmann has gathered many documented moments over Joyce’s lifetime of his conscious

interest in Hamlet and Faust, in addition to the epic poems of Homer and Dante. Half

2 See the sub-chapter ‘‘Baroque High’’ in chapter 3, ‘‘Apex and Core’’ of Echoland (55–60) for anappreciation of the conclusion of Faust II.3 See my article ‘‘Afterthoughts of Hamlet’’.

170 G. Gillespie

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mockingly, the Wake names the primary series of the great modern masters in the notable

phrase, ‘‘that primed favourite continental poet, Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper’’ (FW

539.5–6), as if they constitute a corporate entity and identity. Many commentators have

noted the probable influence of the ‘‘Walpurgis Night’’ scene and the ‘‘Classic-Romantic

Walpurgis Night’’ in Faust on Joyce’s ‘‘Circe’’ chapter in Ulysses.

Joyce wisely never sought to follow Goethe in any direct way by renewing Faustthrough an extended variation on it; rather, alongside the admired earlier Dantesque

example, Joyce kept in mind the recent Goethean example of creating an epochal drama

which not only surveyed millennia of the human story and interpolated parodic allusions to

major literary milestones, but also commented on the poet’s own era and sometimes took

swipes at contemporary social types and ills. The ironizing critical tone is set in the

following lines of the ‘‘Prologue in Heaven’’:

Der kleine Gott der Welt bleibt stets von gleichem Schlag,

Und ist so wunderlich als wie am ersten Tag.

Ein wenig besser wurd’ er leben,

Hattst du ihm nicht den Schein des Himmelslichts gegeben;

Er nennt’s Vernunft, und braucht’s allein,

Nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein.

Er scheint mir, mit Verlaub von Euer Gnaden,

Wie eine der langbeinigen Zikaden,

Die immer fliegt und fliegend springt

Und gleich im Gras ihr altes Liedchen singt;

Und lag’ er nur noch immer in dem Grase!

In jeden Quark begrabt er seine Nase. (Faust, HA III, p. 17, ll. 181–192)

In the translation by Walter Arndt:

Earth’s little god runs true to his old way

And is as weird as on the primal day.

He might be living somewhat better

Had you not given him of Heaven’s light a glitter;

He calls it reason and, ordained its priest,

Becomes more bestial than any beast.

He seems to me, begging your Honor’s pardon,

Like one of those grasshoppers in the garden

That leg it skip-a-skimming all day long

And in the grass chirp out the same old song.

If only he’d just lie in the grass at that!

But no, he sticks his nose in every pat! (ll. 281–292)

The humble literary quark, cited by Goethe here, made its historical appearance in a rather

important connection which the envious admirer Joyce was clearly capable of appreciating.

Spoken by a contemptuous Mephisto, it is contained in the third layer in the complex,

ironic opening frame of Faust, when Goethe, an admirer of Shakespeare and Calderon,

invokes the imaginative grandeur and temporal perspectivism of the Baroque world

theatre.4 Bantering with God, Mephisto deprecates humanity as a presumptuous

earthbound grasshopper that appears to jump heavenward, but as an Icarus-like clown

4 See my article ‘‘Classic Vision’’.

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inevitably plunks his nose into trivial earthly stuff, which represents the colloquial sense of

the word ‘‘Quark’’ (petty details, nonsense, messy pat) in Mephisto’s devilish diatribe

(Faust: eine Tragodie, line 282).

Quark reemerges in the Wake in the twentieth century as a loan word when it is quoted

by Joyce in the plural form in the opening line of a bawdy song in Book 2, ‘‘—Three

quarks for Muster Mark!’’ (FW 383.1). Famously, the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, winner

of the Nobel Prize, lifted this German word not from Goethe’s Faust, or from any other

German usage, but from this very passage of the Wake in order to name a newly discovered

atomic particle. Now the term and its Joycean lineage are firmly established internation-

ally.5 Of course, Goethe’s ‘‘Zikade’’ cannot but remind us in this context of Joyce’s fable

‘‘The Ondt and the Gracehoper’’ in the Wake, another rather presumptuous figure. What

interests me here in particular is the rise to the surface of this unusual word because it

strikes me as symptomatic of the nagging presence of Faust close to the surface of Joyce’s

mind. More generally, the temporal mobility of quark as an item in Joyce’s enormous

vocabulary borrowed from every time and place comports with his habit of treating

materials with the calculated distancing and distortion which generations of writers have

relearned and refashioned since Menippos and Lucian (vide Koppenfels passim). In his

monograph Joyce and Menippos, Dieter Fuchs has recognized that there is a natural

connection between late Roman encyclopedism, gathering and preserving fragments of the

old culture, and Joyce’s humoristic encyclopedism, reassembling pieces of our heritage

after centuries of Christianity. I believe the resurfacing of quark also indicates that long

after Joyce had abandoned his youthful thoughts of perhaps writing his own Faust the

Goethean example remained still strongly imprinted on his mind.

Goethe though differed from Milton in a way anticipating Joyce’s divergence from the

English poet, because Goethe saw human striving and yearning as key, rather than the

orthodox Christian principle of redemption. And Goethe exalted love as the true educator

of humanity, coopting Dante in that regard in the coda to Faust.6 Agreeing with Goethe,

but pursuing the concept of the Eternal-Feminine in his own way, and disagreeing with

Milton who did not recognize the consubstantiality of father and son, Joyce had every

incentive to focus all the more keenly on the congenial Miltonic ‘‘heresy’’ which daringly

located connubial bliss in ‘‘our’’ prelapsarian experience. This paradoxical and archetypal

lust of a humanity that was not yet fallen, according to Milton, allowed to his rival Joyce’s

way of thinking the inference of God’s own necessary Fall which ineluctably informed our

human nature. We encounter that mysterious linkage, without any explanatory preface, in

the opening pages of the Wake.In summing up the general character of Joyce’s rivalry with Milton, and simultaneously

with Goethe (a proximate rival), it is useful to contrast Joyce briefly with Thomas Mann

(an actual contemporary). Though Mann shared many convictions about who were the key

champions of the European heritage, he had no significant direct relationship to Joyce.

5 Today almost every educated person in the world is familiar with the scientific term, and quite a few areaware that it was lifted from Finnegans Wake even if they have never opened the pages of Joyce’s novel. Forexample, the electronic publication Take Our Word for It (issue 111, p. 2) cites Gell-Mann’s own account ina letter he wrote to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978. Anyone who doubts Gell-Mann wasseriously interested in literary and linguistic matters should consult his lead chapter in the collective volumeon the evolution of human languages which he co-edited for the Santa Fe Institute in 1992. Yet like thebroad public Gell-Mann gives no indication of recognizing ‘‘quark’’ to be an allusion to Faust.6 Goethe’s belief in love extended to male bonding in intense friendship, as Katharina Mommsen hasdocumented in the book ‘‘Kein Rettungsmittel als die Liebe’’: Schillers und Goethes Bundnis im Spiegelihrer Dichtungen (Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010).

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As mentioned, Mann’s Joseph tetralogy expresses fascination for the family romance in

Genesis and for the worlds of ancient Egypt and the Near East, and situates the story of

humanity in an evolutionary framework reaching from primordial to historical times.

Though the Joseph volumes appeared not many years after the Wake, they are more in

harmony with the Miltonic model of plotting that expands on scriptural tradition and dares

to fill in a lot of helpful ‘‘missing’’ material, a fictional supplement. Mann’s encyclopedism

is spun around a story line that exploits the biblical heritage even though it freely borrows

recent scholarly insights to apply in retrospection and adduces elements out of a larger

historical repertory. The ‘‘Prelude’’ to The Tales of Jacob, volume one of the tetralogy,

entertains the ancient idea of the emergence of a luminous human champion, and in Joseph

we get, among other things, a foreshadowing of Christ and of the story continued in its

Judeo-Christian phases, while allusions to contemporary twentieth-century history grow

more pronounced in the later volumes. In contrast, the Wake, though it is certainly pep-

pered with references to the contemporary scene as World War II draws nigh, closes with a

complex, transcendent vision of all human time.

Mann’s earlier The Magic Mountain, published two years after the completed Ulysses,

in many respects stands closer to Joyce. Naturally, their respective emphases reflect the

major cultural channel (English/German) in which each author works, so that Miltonic

notions will bulk larger for Joyce, Goethean for Mann. Nonetheless, thematic congruences

abound, most notably a powerful common interest in androgyny. Mann’s educational

quester figure Hans, a parodic Dante as well as Hamlet and Faust, acquires his own Virgil

in Settembrini as his initial guide through modern Hell before he is seduced by an unlikely

Dionysian version of Lilith and Beatrice combined, and eventually, aided by experience of

modern works of art, he acquires insight into the essential innocence of primordial

humanity (e.g., L’apres-midi d’un faune) and the nobility of love in the courageous human

couple (e.g., Aida). Like Joyce’s Stephen, Mann’s educational protagonist Hans (under

authorial supervision in the novel’s larger hermetic experiment) exits the womb-like

enchantment in the sanitorium and re-enters the toils of history in a heightened state of

awareness. The analogy to our being allowed to share Bloom’s reassuring fantasy in ‘‘Oxen

of the Sun’’, that a maternal goddess of love protects us from the horrific facts of our

evolution, is Hans’s famous dream in the ‘‘Snow’’ subchapter of The Magic Mountain. In

the dream Mann lets Hans glimpse the presence of the unnamed Madonna and Child before

he explores the preceding archaic realm and discovers the moment of the witches

devouring a child—that is, recognizes the promise which answers the horror of mindless

circularity in nature. Here the German novelist gestures toward the hope which, in the light

of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton tried to state in the sequence PL and PR. But Mann’s

deeper purpose, through spiritual affinity, is to approach the modern humanistic position

which Joyce elects as a conscious successor to Milton. The Miltonic palimpsest in PL and

PR—assimilating such complex matters as the rival cosmological pictures contending in

the Renaissance—establishes a bridge over which antiquity and the Middle Ages flow

beyond Dante to modernity; and especially PL stands as an act of artistic will and synthesis

that can inspire later writers.

The Helena episode in Faust II will serve to illustrate how Goethe raises the stakes in

the nineteenth century. Out of inherited materials he invents what the romantic Novalis,

had he lived longer, would have deemed a neomythological compound (a process Mann

strives for in The Magic Mountain). More than the framework of the old sixteenth-century

Faust chapbook is relevant in Goethe’s cosmic drama; the constantly metamorphosing

play, Faust: eine Tragodie, allows us to witness events in a symbolic mental space, events

whose meaning is conditioned by clues drawn from millennia of culture. The Renaissance

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quester Faust meets and woos the fabled Helena, and from their union the child Euphorion

is born who represents the modern spirit of poetry and the risk-taking Byronesque moment.

Among many other things, we get to enjoy the pleasure of hearing Helena talk in latter-day

classical hexameters and Faust teach her how to rhyme as in the post-medieval verse he

speaks. The key point relevant to Joyce (Joyce as he relates to more distant ‘‘heretical’’

Milton and all-too-close Goethe) is that the Irish author more directly follows in the

footsteps of the German author insofar as imaginative freedom is concerned when playing

with ‘‘our’’ inherited repertory. With Goethe there occurred a qualitative leap toward

perspectival and multiplex referentiality in the reconstruction of the perceived palimpsest.

We readers cannot so easily witness the author Joyce as he solitarily gazes at and considers

Miltonic themes, because he senses others are looking too, or have looked earlier, as if in a

Goethean phantasmagoric looking-glass. That is, our situation as would-be interpreters

resembles that moment when we look at the mirror in the ‘‘Circe’’ chapter of Ulysses (a

mirror we know from the ‘‘Witches Kitchen’’ scene in Faust) and—thanks to author

Joyce—the heads of Shakespeare, Bloom, Stephen, and everyman seem to blend. Even

more haunting, then, is the lonely voice of the Liffey in the coda of the Wake, as if it may

be the voice of the soul, nature’s soul, our soul; and how joyous it is to wake again on the

riverrun near our first parents, in a very different paradise regained.

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