Yale University

From the SelectedWorks of Carla Baricz

2008

The Finnegans Wake Diagram and GiordanoBrunoCarla Baricz, Yale University

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The Finnegans Wake Diagram and Giordano Bruno Carla Baricz

Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 2008, pp. 235-242 (Article)

Published by Fordham University Press

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256229

The Finnegans Wake Diagramand Giordano Bruno

CARLA BARICZ

The diagram on page 293 of Finnegans Wake (Figure 1) is a miniature ofJoyce’s cyclic, overlapping universe. As such, it is representative of theWake as a whole and particularly appropriate for the chapter of NightlyLessons, in which the diagram provides the basis for Issy’s and the twins’geometry homework. A graphic representation of contraries, it is, amongother things, Joyce’s answer to the philosophical claim made by the Pytha-goreans that men died because they could not join their beginnings totheir ends. Given that this notion was reinterpreted by Yeats in A Vision,the diagram may also serve as Joyce’s good natured challenge to Yeats’sown geometrical gyres which, in Yeats’s words, attempted to put the ser-pent’s ‘‘tail in its mouth’’ (Figure 2).1

The figure’s overlapping circles illustrate the opposing and unifyingrelations at play in the Wake and the means by which ends and beginningsbecome one in a cosmological system driven by a ricorso. Wake readers areaware that the diagram serves many of the images and icons present inthe text, from the twins in the womb, to the mobius strip or ‘‘DoublendsJined’’ of the text, to all the double Os (the ‘‘loos’’ and ‘‘loops’’ in thebook), to the frontal and dorsal aspects of a body (male and female), to amap of Phoenix Park, to a portrait of the dreamer, to the process ofmeiosis, and so forth. In other words, this ‘‘lesson,’’ both for the childrenand for the reader, functions as a representation of many of the conceptspresent in the Wake that one would normally assume could not be joinedbut that, in the general overlapping portmanteau process Joyce employs,most exuberantly can be. By proving that such opposites might indeed beconnected, Joyce recalls the philosophy and the geometry of GiordanoBruno, whose coincidencia oppositorum—the union of an action or nature

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with its equal and opposite—forms the basis of one answer to the Pytha-gorean dilemma and underlies much of the Wake’s text.

In one of Issy’s footnotes referring to the diagram, Joyce alludes to TheMetaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science by Edwin Burtt,which provides some clues as to the provenance of Joyce’s idea. In hischapter on pre-Copernican mathematics, Burtt glosses the tradition of the‘‘geometry of the heavens,’’2 citing Giordano Bruno, Nicholas of Cusa,and other precursors to the Scientific Revolution who believed in themystical-transcendental properties of numbers and borrowed from Neo-Platonic and Pythagorean philosophy. Joyce was particularly fond ofBruno, having encountered him in his college days through J. LewisMcIntyre’s biography of the philosopher, which he reviewed. In thatBruno was fascinated by the idea of geometry as a means of expressingthe unifying nature of monism, many of his diagrams in works such asDe Monad, Numero, et Figura attempt to unify or to join the unjoinable(Figures 3 and 4). His depiction of androgyny (Figure 3), as Lucia Boldriniobserves, is quite similar to Joyce’s diagram.3

If based on Bruno’s design, Wakean geometry is nevertheless muchmore than just a depiction of the theory of opposites. Joyce’s pictorialrepresentation echoes the overlapping circles found in Burtt’s example ofCopernican planetary motion, a diagram (Figure 5) whose content isderived from Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus. As an alternative to Aristo-telic cosmology, Copernicus’s mathematical/astronomical model revivedan interest in the tradition of the Pythagoreans (Burtt 40) and found asupporter in Bruno, who had become interested in Pythagorean conceptsthrough the Neo-Platonic philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa.4

By referencing both Bruno and Copernicus (Figure 6), Joyce alludesto an entire astrological/astronomical tradition with roots in ancient phi-losophy (Figure 7). Therefore, the Wake diagram can be read as a sum-mation and a joining of seemingly contrary philosophies and modes ofthought—Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, Bruno monad, Cusa’snumerological metaphysics, and the Pythagorean centrality of numbers.By combining different versions of the same geometrical pattern of cir-cles and triangles, Joyce shows that the beginnings of divine numbertheory and the end of scientific mathematical proofs form a pattern ofcyclical continuation that unites the empirical and the ideal universe. Indoing so, he also answers Yeats, forming his own version of the gyre(Figure 8) by returning to the drawings of William Blake (Figure 9), oneof Yeats’s primary influences and a writer to whom Joyce had devoted

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one of his Italian lectures (‘‘Idealismo’’) in Trieste. As Frances Boldereffpoints out,5 the Wake diagram seems to resemble the twenty-third plateof Blake’s Milton poem, which connects the poet’s Four Universes, out-lining the relationship among Satan, Adam, and the cosmic egg.

It is useful, and striking in its way, to lay out several of these diagramsas possible models for Joyce’s figure in Finnegans Wake, whether he wasdrawing on any one in particular or, more likely, on an amalgam of whatthese kinds of diagrams represent in various texts.

SOME OF JOYCE’S POSSIBLE SOURCES AND THEIR PROVENANCE

Figure 1. The Wake diagram. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York:Viking, 1939), 293.

Figure 2. Ourboros—a symbol of eternity in early occult literature.‘‘First he [Saturn] rises up, winged and helmeted, his helmet covered bya black veil. Around it a serpent wraps his tail that he catches in hismouth.’’ Example from Karl Preizendanz, Papyri Graecae Magicae,cited as annotation in Giordano Bruno, On the Composition of Images,Signs and Ideas, ed. Dick Higgins (New York: Willis, Locker & Owens,1991), 140. Yeats, like Joyce, seems to have known of and beeninfluenced by Bruno’s work.

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Figure 3. One of Bruno’s renditions of the Pythagorean idea of themonad, which fuses seeming contraries such as good and evil, scienceand religion, male and female. Giordano Bruno, ‘‘De Monade, Numeroet Figura,’’ in Opera Latine Conscripta. Vol. 1, Part II. Facsimile Ed.(Stuttgart-bad Cannstatt: Frierich Fromman Verlag Gunter Holzboog,1962), 349.

Figure 4. One of Bruno’s geometrical proofs regarding the motions ofthe heavens. Giordano Bruno, ‘‘Articuli adversus Mathematicos,’’ OperaLatine Conscripta. Vol. 1, Part III (Stuttgart-bad Cannstatt: FrierichFromman Verlag Gunter Holzboog, 1962), 78.

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Figure 5. Sketch based on Edwin Burtt’s simplified example of theCopernican model of celestial motion, which eliminated a number ofepicycles demanded by the Ptolemaic system.

F

S E

G

AD

B

C

Figure 6. Copernican diagrams used to predict the length of a solar orlunar eclipse. Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the HeavenlySpheres. Trans. A. M. Duncan (New York: Barnes & Noble Books,1976), 231–232.

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Figure 7. Calcidian astronomical diagram of solar eccentric within thecircle of the zodiac. Calcidus’s Commentary on Timaeus is based onPlato’s account, which assumes relative motion of the heavenly bodies.Pythagorean philosophy had a marked influence on Plato’s philosophy,and the continuation of this tradition can be seen in the works ofGiordano Bruno and Nicholas of Cusa. Image reproduced in BruceEastwood & Gerd Grasshoff, Planetary Diagrams for Roman Astronomyin Medieval Europe ca. 800–1500 (Philadelphia: American PhilosophicalSociety, 2004), 77. (Leiden University Library, ms. BPL 64, fol. 77v.)

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Figure 8. Triangles and Circles—an example of the continuation of theoccult tradition in the work of Yeats. (a) Giordano Bruno’s 1591

depiction of a system of mnemonics, showing the means by which onemay learn. Each of the twenty-four positions on the chart is assigned toa letter, and the circular ALTA RISA spells out ‘‘high’’ or ‘‘deep laughs.’’Explanation cited from annotative note on diagram, Giordano Bruno,On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas, ed. Dick Higgins (NewYork: Willis, Locker & Owens, 1991), 291–292. (b) Yeats’s Great Wheelemphasizing the concept of cyclical return—‘‘The wheel is everycompleted movement of thought of life, twenty-eight incarnations, asingle incarnation, a single judgment or act of thought. Man seeks hisopposite of his condition, attains his object as far as it is attainable and[. . .] returns again.’’ William Butler Yeats, A Vision (New York:Macmillan Company, 1956), 81. (c) Yeats’s gyre—‘‘Line and plane arecombined in a gyre which must expand or contract according towhether the mind grows in objectivity or in subjectivity.’’ Yeats, AVision, 71.

(b)(a)

(c)

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Figure 9. Blake’s thirty-second plate for his poem Milton. ‘‘Fouruniverses round the Universe of Los [cosmic egg] remain Chaotic, /Four intersecting Gloves & the Egg form’d World of Los / In midst,stretching from Zenith to Nadir, in midst of Chaos.’’ William Blake,Milton. eds. Kay and Roger Easson (New York: Random House, 1978),117–118.

NOTES

1. William Butler Yeats, A Vision (New York: Macmillan Company, 1956), 68–69.2. Edwin Arthur Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science

(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1925), 33. Further references to this work will becited parenthetically in the text.

3. Lucia Boldrini, Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2001), 174.

4. Hilary Gatti, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1999), 118–119.

5. Frances Boldereff, Reading Finnegans Wake (Woodward, PA: Classic NonfictionLibrary, 1959), 139.

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