Our Exag
In the late 1920s Eugène Jolas’s literary journal transition serialized early drafts of Books I and III of Finnegans Wake (or Work in Progress as it was then known). The response of the mainstream media to Joyce’s experimental methods was largely unsympathetic. While acknowledging his undoubted literary ability and mastery of language, they characterized his new work as unsound, disappointing, a mistake, or the latest dribble from Joyce (Van Hulle 84-87). Joyce, for the most part, declined to enter the lists and publicly defend his own work, but he was more than happy to deputize his coterie of admirers and assistants to do so on his behalf. Critical essays began to appear with increasing regularity in the pages of transition, apologetic works that attempted to shed a little light on Joyce’s obscure text. Although not one of these essays was actually authored by Joyce himself, it is generally accepted that his was the hidden hand that guided the pens (Ellmann 613, McHugh 47).
In 1929 Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company published a collection of twelve such essays and two Letters of Protest under the Wakean title Our Exagmination round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. This Survey of James Joyce’s “Work in Progress” Parts 1 and 3 from twelve different angles included eight apologetic works that had already appeared in transition and four newly-commissioned ones:
The book had twelve writers, like the twelve customers of Earwicker’s public house [in Finnegans Wake], or the twelve apostles of Christ. (Ellmann 613)
Or the twelve members of a jury, passing judgment on Joyce’s Work in Progress:
- Samuel Beckett: Dante ... Bruno . Vico .. Joyce
- Marcel Brion: The Idea of Time in the Work of James Joyce
- Frank Budgen: James Joyce’s Work in Progress and Old Norse Poetry
- Stuart Gilbert: Prolegomena to Work in Progress
- Eugene Jolas: The Revolution of Language and James Joyce
- Victor Llona: I Dont Know What to Call It but Its Mighty Unlikely Prose
- Robert McAlmon: Mr. Joyce Directs an Irish Word Ballet
- Thomas MacGreevy: The Catholic Element in Work in Progress
- Elliot Paul: Mr. Joyce’s Treatment of Plot
- John Rodker: Joyce and His Dynamic
- Robert Sage: Before Ulysses—and After
- William Carlos Williams: A Point for American Criticism
- G V L Slingsby: Writes a Common Reader
- Vladimir Dixon: A Litter to Mr. James Joyce
Faber and Faber brought out a British edition of the book in the same year.
So, what are we to make of this farrago? Is it of any assistance to a perplexed reader of Finnegans Wake? The correct answer to this question probably lies somewhere between the two extremes represented by the opinions of Sylvia Beach and Roland McHugh.
In 1961, when Faber & Faber reissued the collection, Sylvia Beach provided the brief introduction, in which she passed the following judgment on the book:
Our Exag, as at Shakespeare and Company it was called, is most valuable, indeed indispensable to readers of Finnegans Wake: they would do well to hear what these writers, friends and collaborators of Joyce, followers of his new work as it progressed, have to say on the subject. They had the advantage of hearing the hints that he should let fall and the delightful stories he told when in the company of his friends. (Beckett et al vii)
In direct contrast to this judgment is that of Roland McHugh, who had been careful not to read the essays until he had completed Finnegans Wake:
Most of Our Exagmination is so incredibly superficial that it would have done me no harm at all to have read it years earlier. Its authors are Joyce’s puppets. Most of it seems designed to thrust FW into the public eye with a barrage of fervent praise. No wonder it didn’t sell. (McHugh 1981:48)
Of the twelve essays in the collection, only Samuel Beckett’s has ever received more than a cursory glance. Clive Hart called it a somewhat skittish article (Hart 47), but another critic, Donald Phillip Verene, came closer to the mark when he wrote:
It is a classic of Joyce interpretation that has yet to be fully absorbed. (Feldman & Mamdani 53)
It is surely not without significance that Beckett’s Dante ... Bruno . Vico .. Joyce was given pride of place in the collection. The dots in the title represent centuries: three between Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), one between Bruno and Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), and two between Vico and Joyce (1882-1941). Taken together, we have here a series that embraces the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Modern World.
Dante, Bruno and Vico are the three Patron Saints of Finnegans Wake. Joyce invokes this holy trinity in his opening paragraph, just as Homer and Virgil invoke the Muse in the opening lines of their epics.
Dante is well known and widely read, but the same cannot be said of Vico or Bruno. Considering how important these two philosophers are to a proper understanding of Finnegans Wake, it is surprising that Wakean scholars are not more familiar with their writings. I have read—not studied—David Marsh’s English translation of Vico’s Scienza Nuova. And that’s it. I have read about Giordano Bruno, but I have never so much as cracked open one of his many works—a state of affairs I really should try to rectify.
Dante
Entire books have been written on the relationship between Dante Alighieri and James Joyce, two exiled artists who created their own vulgar dialects to express what could not be expressed by the vernaculars of their day (Latin and English). Dante was perhaps Joyce’s favorite author (Ellmann 4), so we should not be surprised to find his ghost haunting the pages of Finnegans Wake. But what did Dante contribute to the book?
In his Epistle to Can Grande, Dante explained the meaning of his Divine Comedy:
§ 7. For the elucidation, therefore, of what we have to say, it must be understood that the meaning of this work is not of one kind only; rather the work may be described as polysemous, that is, having several meanings; for the first meaning is that which is conveyed by the letter, and the next is that which is conveyed by what the letter signifies; the former of which is called literal, while the latter is called allegorical, or mystical. And for the better illustration of this method of exposition we may apply it to the following verses : When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language; Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his dominion. For if we consider the letter alone, the thing signified to us is the going out of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses; if the allegory, our redemption through Christ is signified; if the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to a state of grace is signified; if the anagogical, the passing of the sanctified soul from the bondage of the corruption of this world to the liberty of everlasting glory is signified. And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, they may one and all in a general sense be termed allegorical inasmuch as they are different (diversi) from the literal or historical; for the word allegory is so called from the Greek alleon, which in Latin is alienum (strange) or diversum (different) (Dante 199)
No one would deny that Finnegans Wake is also polysemous, though not necessarily in the exact sense described here by Dante.
From Dante Joyce also learnt the art of literary architecture. Dante structured his Commedia after the elaborate geography of Hell, Mount Purgatory and the Celestial Spheres. Joyce had done something similar in Ulysses, with Homer’s Odyssey as the scaffold. In Finnegans Wake, however, it was Vico’s philosophy of history that provided the supporting trellis.
Giambattista Vico
Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method, believed that an inductive approach to nature could perfect not only the natural sciences (Natural Philosophy) but also social sciences, such as ethics and politics:
I:127 Again, some may raise this question rather than objection, whether we talk of perfecting natural philosophy alone according to our method, or the other sciences also, such as logic, ethics, politics. We certainly intend to comprehend them all. And as common logic, which regulates matters by syllogisms, is applied not only to natural, but also to every other science, so our inductive method likewise comprehends them all. (Bacon 101-102)
It was Bacon’s new scientific method that allowed Isaac Newton, drawing upon the work of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, to deduce his Universal Law of Gravitation. Newton had succeeded in reducing the wanderings of the Moon, the planets and the comets to a simple mathematical equation. This was the vindication of the Pythagorean creed that all is number (Russell 53), and of Galileo’s remark that the Universe is an open book written in the language of mathematics (Galileo 60).
Giambattista Vico was one of those admirers of Newton who aspired to do for human nature what the Englishman had done for heavenly nature: reduce it to natural law. Can the rise and fall of empires, the ebb and flow of civilizations, the growth and decay of entire nations, be captured by simple mathematical equations? Vico set himself the task of combing through the chronicles of the past for the fundamental laws of history. In his seminal work Principi di Scienza Nuova d’intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni [Principles of the New Science of the Common Nature of Nations], he presented the results of his research.
Like Finnegans Wake, The New Science was greeted in its day with incomprehension. It is quite possible that more people have read Joyce than Vico. And those who do read Vico are usually surprised to discover that The New Science is as much about language and literature as it is about history. This is especially true of those readers who come to Vico through Joyce, because what they find in the pages of The New Science is not what the introductions to Finnegans Wake led them to expect.
Let me explain. 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)
This is not quite how Samuel Beckett saw the essence of Vico’s philosophy of history:
It is first necessary to condense the thesis of Vico, the scientific historian. In the beginning was the thunder: the thunder set free Religion, in its most objective and unphilosophical form—idolatrous animism: Religion produced Society, and the first social men were the cave-dwellers, taking refuge from a passionate Nature: this primitive family life receives its first impulse towards development from the arrival of terrified vagabonds: admitted, they are the first slaves: growing stronger, they exact agrarian concession, a despotism has evolved into a primitive feudalism: the cave becomes a city, and the feudal system a democracy: then an anarchy: this is corrected by a return to monarchy: the last stage is a tendency towards interdestruction: the nations are dispersed and the Phoenix of Society arises out of their ashes. To this six-termed social progression corresponds a six-termed progression of human motives: necessity, utility, convenience, pleasure, luxury, abuse of luxury: and their incarnate manifestations: Polyphemus, Achilles, Caesar and Alexander, Tiberius, Caligula and Nero. (Beckett et al 5)
The cyclical concept of three ages and a ricorso, so fundamental to the underlying structure of Finnegans Wake, is certainly present in Vico, but it is not really what Vico is about. It plays quite a minor rôle in The New Science. Nonetheless, here is how Vico himself introduced the concept of the three ages:
§31 So this New Science or metaphysic, pondering the common nature of nations in the light of divine providence, having discovered such origins of divine and human things among the gentile nations, establishes thence a system of the natural law of nations, which proceeds with the greatest equality and constancy through the three ages which the Egyptians handed down to us as the three periods through which the world had passed up to their time. These are: (1) The age of the gods, in which the gentiles believed they lived under divine governments, and everything was commanded them by auspices and oracles, which are the oldest things in profane history. (2) The age of the heroes, in which they reigned everywhere in aristocratic commonwealths, on account of a certain superiority of nature which they held themselves to have over the plebs. (3) The age of men, in which all men recognized themselves as equal in human nature, and therefore there were established first the popular commonwealths and then the monarchies, both of which are forms of human government, as we observed a short while ago. (Vico 17-18)
The lesson to take away from all of this is that Finnegans Wake is cyclical. In the Wake Joyce tells the same story over and over again.
En passant, I might point out that during the gestation of Finnegans Wake, another philosopher of history is mentioned in Joyce’s notes and correspondence almost as frequently as Vico: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Clive Hart (47, 49) has also drawn attention to the world-ages of Indian philosophy, the opposed gyres of William Butler Yeats’s A Vision, and the cyclical evolution of William Blake’s The Mental Traveller. But these will have to wait their turn.
Giordano Bruno
If Vico provided the wheels for Joyce’s vehicle, Bruno provided the engine.
In his review of J Lewis McIntyre’s Giordano Bruno, published by the Daily Express in October 1903, Joyce described Bruno as follows:
A Dominican monk, a gipsy professor, a commentator of old philosophies and a deviser of new ones, a playwright, a polemist, a counsel for his own defence, and, finally, a martyr burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori... (Joyce, Mason & Ellmann 133)
In Bruno’s most representative work, Spaccio de la bestia trionfante [Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast], which was published in London in 1584, the following remarks are made by Sofia, or Wisdom:
... the beginning, the middle and the end, the birth, the growth, and the perfection of what we see, come from contraries, through contraries, into contraries, to contraries; and where there is opposition, there is action and reaction, motion, diversity, plurality, order, gradation, succession, vicissitude. (Bruno 420)
In the same year, in another of his Italian Dialogues, De la causa, principio, et uno [Cause, Principle, and Unity], Bruno explored this idea of the coincidence of opposites—coincidentia oppositorum—at greater length. In the Argument of the Fifth Dialogue, he summarized the contents of the concluding section of this work under thirteen headings, including the following:
Tenth: How in the two extremes which are said to lie at the opposite ends of the ladder of nature, we must no more contemplate two principles but one, not two beings but one, not two contraries and opposites but one and the same concordance. There height is depth, the abyss is inaccessible light, darkness is clarity, the large is small, the confused is distinct, altercation is friendship, the divisible is indivisible, the atom is immense—and vice versa ... Thirteenth: The indications and proofs are introduced that contraries really do coincide, that they have the same origin, and that they are actually one and the same substance. (Bruno 207-208)
Joyce himself summed up Bruno’s philosophy in a letter to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver:
Bruno Nolano (of Nola) another great southern Italian was quoted in my first pamphlet The Day of the Rabblement. His philosophy is a kind of dualism—every power in nature must evolve an opposite in order to realise itself and opposition brings reunion etc etc. (Letters 27 January 1925)
The coincidentia oppositorum is an idea Bruno borrowed from the German scholar Nicholas of Cusa, though that particular phrase does not occur in any of Nicholas’s extant works. In his essay De docta ignorantia [Learned Ignorance], Nicholas spoke of the human intellect raising itself to that Simplicity where contradictories coincide (Nicholas of Cusa 264). It was from Nicholas that Bruno learnt that an infinitesimal chord of a circle is indistinguishable from an infinitesimal arc, while a circle of infinite radius is indistinguishable from a straight line (Nicholas of Cusa 35, Bruno 286).
There is so much more to Bruno’s philosophy than the doctrine of the coincidence of opposites. This was the man, after all, that Joyce regarded as the father of what is called modern philosophy (Joyce, Mason & Ellmann 133). He championed the Copernican Revolution but went far beyond Copernicus in asserting that our Universe was infinite, and that the stars were distant Suns orbited by distant Earths inhabited by rational beings. He anticipated Bacon by encouraging the use of the scientific method and he anticipated Milton by espousing the right to freedom of speech.
But that’s enough for the moment.
References
- Dante Alighieri, Paget Toynbee (editor and translator), The Letters of Dante, Oxford Clarendon Press, Oxford (1920)
- Francis Bacon, William Wood (translator), Joseph Devey (editor), Novum Organum, St Louis Publishing Company, St Louis MO (1901)
- Samuel Beckett et al, Our Exagmination round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, Faber & Faber Ltd, London (1961)
- Giordano Bruno, Paolo de Lagarde (editor), Le opere italiane, Dieterichsche Universitätsbuchhandlung, Göttingen (1888)
- Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
- Matthew Feldman, Karim Mamdani (editors), Beckett/Philosophy, ibidem Press, Stuttgart (2015)
- Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore [The Assayer],G Mascardi, Rome (1623)
- Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, Northwestern University Press, Evanston IL (1962)
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939)
- James Joyce, The Letters of James Joyce, Volumes I, II, III, Stuart Gilbert (editor), Richard Ellmann (editor), Viking Press, New York (1966)
- James Joyce, Ellsworth Mason (editor), Richard Ellmann (editor), The Critical Writings of James Joyce, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY (1959)
- Roland McHugh, The Finnegans Wake Experience, Irish Academic Press, Dublin (1981)
- Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Third Edition), The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD (2006)
- J Lewis McIntyre, Giordano Bruno, Macmillan & Co, Ltd, London (1903)
- Nicholas of Cusa, Jasper Hopkins (translator), De Docta Ignorantia, The Arthur J Banning Press, Minneapolis MN (2001)
- Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
- Dirk Van Hulle, James Joyce’s “Work in Progress”: Pre-Book Publications of Finnegans Wake Fragments, Routledge, Abingdon, Oxfordshire (2016)
- Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London (1945)
- Giambattista Vico, Goddard Bergin (translator), Max Harold Fisch (translator), The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY (1948)
Image Credits
- Our Exag: Wikimedia Commons, Fair Use
- Dante Alighieri: Wikimedia Commons, Sandro Botticelli, Public Domain
- Giambattista Vico: Wikimedia Commons, Francesco Solimena, Public Domain
- Table of Viconian Cycles: © Clive Hart, Fair Use
- Giordano Bruno: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain