The preceding paragraph of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake concluded with four statements, each of which was supposedly uttered by one of The Four Old Men. This quartet of elderly figures features heavily in the Wake. They carry much of the book’s narration, as well as appearing as characters in their own right. Symbolically, they represent both Space and Time—or, if your prefer, Spacetime—and were represented in Joyce’s notes by the siglum X:
... Joyce’s four old men represent in the first place Space, being geographically the four points of the compass and literally the first four letters of the Hebrew alphabet—thus standing for all the other letters and so representing literary space ... They represent the four walls of the room and the four posts of the bed, watching impotently and enviously the actions of the ever-changing figures that occupy the space between them. They are Aleph, Beth, Ghimel and Daleth, eternal beings ... Their order is unchangeable: North, South, East and West. It is probably from the old prayer ‘Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on’, that they become also the evangelists for they are still in the same order. As the four provinces they occur invariably as Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaught; never getting out of their order of precedence, and usually even speaking in that order. But I think it is as circumambient space that they are really important. They have been there all the time and know everything that has happened. (Atherton 54-55)
Their temporal role is characterized by their identification with the Four Evangelists, who recorded the history of Christ, and with the Four Masters, who recorded the history of Ireland:
Finally, it must be remembered that X are the Four Masters, the historians of Ireland. Individual correspondences are improbable, but the term Masters is implicit in its most literal sense. X are ultimately rulers, judges and authorities ... (McHugh 1976:100)
On a more mundane level, however:
These four again coalesce with four old men, familiars to the tavern of HCE, who forever sit around fatuously rechewing tales of the good old days. (Campbell et al 43 fn)
In Finnegans Wake, The Four often merge to form a composite character called Mamalujo (MAtthew-MArk-LUke-JOhn). In the passage we are now examining, this character appears as Mammon Lujius, a historian like his predecessors Herodotus and Livius.
The Four share their spacetime duties with The Twelve, a Greek chorus of regulars in HCE’s tavern. Joyce assigns them the siglum O, which I believe is derived from the dial of HCE’s pocket watch. If X are primarily spatial, then O are primarily temporal. They are the twelve hours of the day and the twelve months of the year. And if X are judges, then O are jurymen. They embody the Twelve Tables of Roman Law and express themselves in sesquipedalian words of Latinate construction.
Whenever the number four surfaces in Finnegans Wake, the reader should always suspect an allusion to the Viconian Cycle, the cyclical model of human history devised by the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, which Joyce used as a template for his novel. In Finnegans Wake, the Viconian Cycle has four quadrants, corresponding loosely to the four books into which the work is divided:
Here is how Roland McHugh summarized the relevance of Vico to a reading of Finnegans Wake:
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is the author of Principi di Scienza Nuova (The New Science), in which is expounded his theory that a common cyclical pattern identifies the histories of diverse nations. The cycle consists of (1) the age of gods, represented in primitive society by the family life of the cave, to which God’s thunder had driven man; (2) the age of heroes, characterized by the continual revolutionary movements of the plebeians against the patricians; (3) the age of people, the final consequence of the leveling influence of revolutions. The three ages are typified by the institutions of birth, marriage, and burial, respectively, and followed by a short lacuna, the ricorso (resurrection) linking the third age to the first of a subsequent cycle. These four periods are illustrated by the four books into which Finnegans Wake is divided and also by concise references to attributes of the ages (e.g., their institutions). (McHugh 2006:xiv-xv)
Book IV represents the ricorso, or recurrence of human things, where the Viconian Cycle closes upon itself in the manner of an ouroboros and begins over again. This is a Joycean modification of Vico’s tripartite structure. In Vico’s New Science, the term ricorso simply describes the manner in which each cycle echoes the events of previous cycles. It is not an episode in its own right, as many commentators on Joyce seem to imply.
The first draft of this paragraph is brief and unadorned:
And four things, saith Mamalu[jo], sall ne’er fail in Dyfflinarsky. A swellhead on an alderman. A shoe on a poor old woman. An auburn maid to be deserted. A pen no weightier than a polepost. And so. And all. (Hayman 53)
These four things can be equated with the book’s principal characters, the members of the family whose story Joyce is telling in a new way:
A swellhead on an alderman = HCE
A shoe on a poor old woman = ALP
An auburn maid to be deserted = Issy
A pen no weightier than a polepost = Shem the Pen and Shaun the Post
At 013.20 [RFW 011.09] X announced that four things in Dublin ne’er shall fail till heathersmoke and cloudweed Eire’s isle shall pall. These four last things are conspecta of [HCE], [ALP], [Issy] and [Shem/Shaun]. They are first listed in running print in collation with the Jewish calendar ... (McHugh 1976:47)
It need hardly be repeated that this entire passage (RFW 011.09–012.07) is ultimately about ALP’s celebrated Letter, continuing the discussion of this multilayered document that began back on page nine (RFW 09), when the gnarlybird discovered its remains in the kitchen midden behind The Mullingar House. Joyce is still looking forward to I.5, The Mamafesta, in which the Letter will be dissected, deconstructed and analysed in detail.
When Finnegans Wake was published in 1939, this passage had been elaborated significantly by Joyce. The connection of the Four with the Four Masters is made explicit by the reference to the grand old historiorum, wrote near Boriorum. Boriorum refers to the Βορειον Ἀκρον [Boreion Akron], or Northern Cape, in the description of Ireland in Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography. It probably refers to Bloody Foreland (Cnoc Fola), a headland in County Donegal in the northwest of Ireland. The Annals of the Four Masters were compiled near a Franciscan monastery in Donegal:
It remains now to say something of the monastery of Donegal, near which these Annals were compiled, and from which they have been called Annales Dungallenses [Annals of Donegal]. It is situated on the bay of Donegal, in the barony of Tirhugh, and county of Donegal ... The remains of this monastery are still to be seen, in tolerable preservation, at a short distance from the town of Donegal ... On the 2nd of August, 1601, the building was occupied by a garrison of 500 English soldiers ... Shortly afterwards, O’Donnell laid siege to this garrison, and on the 19th of September following the building took fire, and was completely destroyed ... After the restoration of Rory O’Donnell to his possessions, the brotherhood were permitted to live in huts or cottages near the monastery ... It was in one of these cottages, and not, as is generally supposed, in the great monastery now in ruins, that this work was compiled by the Four Masters. (O’Donovan xxviii-xxix)
(It is now thought that the Annals were actually compiled at a Franciscan house of refuge on the River Drowes in County Leitrim, just outside Ballyshannon. Perhaps John O’Donovan was referring to this house of refuge, which is over 20 km from the ruined abbey, when he wrote of huts or cottages near the monastery.)
The phrase baile’s annals reminds us also of the so-called Annals of Dublin (Baile Átha Cliath being an Irish name for Dublin). These were a collection of annals collated from various sources by early Irish antiquaries (such as John Ware, his son Robert Ware, and the husband of his great-granddaughter Walter Harris) and appended to Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Among these annals, the following may be noted:
140 Eblana, supposed to be Dublin, noticed by Ptolemy, the geographer, as a famous city. It was called by the Irish, Athcliath, or Bally-Athcliath, “the town of hurdles,” from a ford across the Liffey, then constructed of hurdles.
1331 A great famine relieved by a prodigious shoal of fish, called Turlehydes, being cast on shore at the mouth of the Dodder. They were from 30 to 40 feet (10-12 m) long, and so thick that men standing on each side of one of them could not see those on the other. Upwards of 200 of them were killed by the people. (Thom & Co 2090, 2092)
Dyfflinarsky refers to the Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin:
During the ninth and tenth centuries the Kingdom of Dublin—known to the Scandinavians as Dyflinarski—became one of the most powerful in the west. (A Walsh 22)
The bluest book in baile’s annals also, of course, refers to Ulysses, which was not only published in a blue dust-jacket, but also denounced as filthy and pornographic—ie blue.
Why does Joyce abbreviate four things to f.t. ? Joseph Campbell & Henry Morton Robinson have suggested the following:
f.t.: four things. Abbreviation by initialing occurs frequently in the medieval Irish chronicles. (Campbell et al 43 fn)
We also have the Danish: for tiden, at the present time, which lends a time-transcending quality to the following annals. Note the Danish: til, until in the next line.
Why the four things shall abide till heathersmoke and cloudweed Eire’s ile sall pall I cannot say. This phrase derives from an enigmatic note written in orange pencil in one of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake notebooks:
heath & tobacco
overspun Earth (FW VI.B.15.5)
I presume overspun should read overspanned, or perhaps even overspread. But how does Joyce get cloudweed out of this? Is tobacco a weed which creates clouds of smoke? The initialism HCE is in there, to be sure, so the overall meaning seems to be that the quadripartite Viconian Cycle shall continue to turn so long as Everyman exists.
McHugh, as we have seen, calls these four things “conspecta” of the sigla of HCE, ALP, Issy and Shem/Shaun—whatever that means (McHugh 1976:47, 97)—and links them with The Four Old Men. Note, though, that he now regards the fourth thing as representing the Oedipal figure, who combines Shem and Shaun into a single character:
A more useful collation is that between X and the respective sigla [HCE], [ALP], [Issy] and [Oedipus] ... The four conspecta are figures on the sides of the spinning teetotum, itself a figure of FW:
Matthew: An alderman carrying a pot on a pole. A turleyhide whale. [HCE]
Mark: A poor old woman. A crone of immense fecundity. [ALP]
Luke: A redhaired maid. The Deserted Village. [Issy]
John: Twins, the pen and the sword. [Oedipus]
(McHugh 1976:96-97)
The allusion to a spinning teetotum—a Jewish dreidel, for example —is obvious in the published version:
the fear of um. T. Totities! (FW 013.24)
But in The Restored Finnegans Wake, Rose & O’Hanlon have emended this to:
the fear of um. Notities! (RFW 011.12)
This is supported by an entry written in orange pencil in one of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake notebooks:
Notities (FW VI.B.35.1)
Notities, a collateral form of notitia, is Latin for fame, celebrity, being known (Lewis 1218)
The image of a pot on a pole recurs frequently throughout Finnegans Wake in connection with HCE. Why should this particular motif represent the book’s protagonist? John Gordon has probably solved this mystery. While taking a survey of the furnishings of the master bedroom in HCE’s tavern, he writes:
The most prominent feature of the bed is the bedposts, each aligned with one cardinal point of the compass ... Three other items in the room, a chamber-pot, a hat, and a bell-pull or buzzer ... The hat—generally described as a bucket-shaped affair—is whisked before our eyes in one of the book’s teases when an actress is described as speaking ‘while recoopering her cartwheel chapot (ahat!—and we now know what thimbles a baquets on lallance a talls mean)’ (59.06-7) [RFW 047.28-30]. If this means anything it means that ‘tombles a’buckets’ of 5.03 [RFW 004.28], ‘clottering down’ the bauble-topped tower there is the same thing as the thimble-shaped baquet [French, tub] on the tall lance there—that is, a hat. As such it is perhaps the primary source of the pot-on-pole insignia already mentioned, and the readiest way of accounting for it is to conclude that HCE, like many men, has hung his hat on the handiest vertical, one of his knob-topped bedposts ... (Gordon 19-20)
In the final draft, the four things that shall abide are now assigned months from the Jewish calendar (Adar, Nisan, Tammuz and Marcheshvan). And they are followed by the characteristic sighs (RFW 006.14: So sigh us) of The Four Old Men (some of which undergo alterations throughout the text):
The paragraph ends with a fifth Jewish term, Succoth, or the Feast of Tabernacles. In Finnegans Wake, Johnny MacDougall is always accompanied by his donkey, the “fifth” member of the quartet. The Four are identified with the four provinces of Ireland, but for much of its history Ireland comprised five provinces: Ulster, Munster, Leinster, Connacht and Meath, the latter being the Royal Province that included Tara. The donkey represents Meath. Note how in the first draft of this paragraph (quoted above), the four things were already followed by a fifth item: And so. And all.
Succoth, however, was also the boyhood name of St Patrick:
Towards the end of the fourth, and at the beginning of the fifth century, King Niall of the Nine Hostages went on successive expeditions against the peoples of Gaul and Britain. Amongst the captives brought back from one of these foreign raids was Succoth, a lad of sixteen, the son of Decurion Calpurnius, and his wife Conchessa, who was a relative of the great St. Martin of Tours. The boy Succoth, afterwards called Patricius, probably in allusion to his noble birth, was sold as a slave in Ireland, and employed by his master Milcho to tend his cattle on the slopes of Slieve Mish in Antrim. (Flood 10)
The Jewish terms may have been added to give the Irish annals a universal dimension, and to reinforce the temporal element of The Four. According to Rose & O’Hanlon’s James Joyce Digital Archive, Joyce took the first four Jewish terms from the article Belshazzar in the 11th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
On the 14th of Tammuz (June), 538 B.C., Nabonidos fled from Sippara, where he had taken his son’s place in the camp, and the city surrendered at once to the enemy. Meanwhile Gobryas had been despatched to Babylon, which opened its gates to the invader on the 16th of the month “without combat or battle,” and a few days later Nabonidos was dragged from his hiding-place and made a prisoner. According to Berossus he was subsequently appointed governor of Karmania by his conqueror. Belshazzar, however, still held out, and it was probably on this account that Cyrus himself did not arrive at Babylon until nearly four months later, on the 3rd of Marchesvan. On the 11th of that month Gobryas was despatched to put an end to the last semblance of resistance in the country “and the son (?) of the king died.” In accordance with the conciliatory policy of Cyrus, a general mourning was proclaimed on account of his death, and this lasted for six days, from the 27th of Adar to the 3rd of Nisan. Unfortunately the character representing the word “son” is indistinct on the tablet which contains the annals of Nabonidos, so that the reading is not absolutely certain. The only other reading possible, however, is “and the king died,” and this reading is excluded partly by the fact that Nabonidos afterwards became a Persian satrap, partly by the silence which would otherwise be maintained by the “Annals” in regard to the fate of Belshazzar. (Chisholm 712)
This article also mentions a Persian satrap (RFW 011:40 sultrup) and “Annals”. It is hardly a coincidence that the same page contains an article on the Celtic festival Beltane. Joyce probably spotted the article on Belshazzar while he was researching Beltane for this passage, as Beltane is alluded to in the phrase Baalfire’s eve at RFW 011.23:
As to the derivation of the word beltane there is considerable obscurity. Following Cormac, it has been usual to regard it as representing a combination of the name of the god Bel or Baal or Bil with the Celtic teine, fire. And on this etymology theories have been erected of the connexion of the Semitic Baal with Celtic mythology, and the identification of the beltane fires with the worship of this deity. (Chisholm 712)
To underline the universal nature of the four last things, Joyce adds some Latinate numerals. the first three of which also echo Irish prepositional pronouns: umam, around me : dom, to me, for me : tríom, through me. Hebrew, Latin, Irish, English—Joyce likes to cover all his bases.
