Pop
On 20 May 1921 the Scottish cartoonist John Millar Watt created a comic strip for The Daily Sketch entitled Reggie Breaks It Gently. The protagonist, soon to be renamed Pop, was a stout businessman sporting a tall hat and tailcoat. The strip chronicled his family life rather than his career in the City. Pop was a henpecked husband with two daughters, a son and baby. The strip was hugely successful and ran until 1949.
It can hardly be a coincidence that early in 1923 a similar character called Pop made his appearance in Joyce’s notebooks:
Under the heading “A PAINFUL CASE” in Scribbledehobble we find an important cluster of references to Pop, a slightly stuffy and decidedly quirky middle-class Anglican with an overly strong attachment to his marriageable or adolescent daughter. (Hayman 99-100)
In reworking the story of Tristan and Isolde—renamed Tris and Is in his notebooks—Joyce was particularly interested in the familial aspects of the romance. What would the parents of a modern-day Isolde be like? Many of the succeeding notes in notebooks VI.A (Scribbledehobble) and VI.B.3, which Joyce compiled in 1923, are devoted to Pop’s mishaps and psychological hang-ups. David Hayman discusses the following in The “Wake” in Transit (square brackets enclose editorial additions):
Is & Pop beat time in church (VI.A.51)
[Is] told her friends pop walked zigzag (VI.A.51)
Pop sits [with his] back to [the] sea: [he is a] naturfreund: saving daylight: [he is remarkable for] his anglican ethics: ... General X—kept gen[eral] drapery stores: his year made up of anniversaries: ... in WC [he keeps] blotting paper: ... [he] sleeps in [the] park, [with] paper over [his] face: [a] joy to sit under a grating: ... takes Is for walk, explains [that he wants] to see people come back from Fairyhouse[racetrack] ... Pop ‘all holla, holla, holla’: eats in shirtsleeves: ... Pop angry with weather wore string for tie: whiskers inside or outside bedclothes: Pop wears 2 pr socks (VI.A.121)
Is father take Queen Elizabeth out to the people’s garden in the park with a 6 chambered revolver & blow her bloody brains out (VI.B.3.18-19)
Pop Hibernis Hibernior (VI.B.3.19)
Pop gave wh [whore or whole?] bob for job & 3d tip (VI.B.3.34)
Papa Is goes to bed in socks (VI.B.3.49)
Is’s Pop and Mop (Pa and Ma) (VI.B.3.61)
Pop—after dinner he blew his nose (VI.B.3.79)
Pop composed extempore verse (VI.B.3.93)
Pop made [the sign of the cross] whenever [he] saw [an] éclair (VI.B.3.98)
Is’s Mum copies Pop’s curses (VI.B.3.111)
Pop’s tall hat (VI.B.3.112)
Pop calls early [one] morning with or [without] X (VI.B.3.112)
Volumes (Pop) (VI.B.3.123)
Pop and Mum wrangle re a road (VI.B.3.136)
Pop has Waterbury watch (VI.B.3.130)
Pop in shirtsleeves makes [a] political lovespeech (VI.B.3.131)
Tris like Pop he boasts (Is) (VI.B.3.140)
It is not true that Pop was homosexual he had been arrested at the request of some nursemaids to whom he had temporarily exposed himself in the Temple gardens (VI.B.3.153)
Pop holds up traffic (VI.B.3.159)
Pop abdicates (VI.B.3.159)
Gradually Pop metamorphosed into an archetypal father figure—an Everyman. Eventually Pop and Mop evolved into the male and female protagonists of Finnegans Wake. Joyce was recasting his embryonic work as the story of an archetypal family, rather than a simple retelling of Tristan and Isolde.
O, by the way, yes! Another thing recurs to me
On reading the first quotation from David Hayman above, the astute reader will have realized that some of Joyce’s earliest references to Pop were not simply isolated notes: they were entries in a list of notes beneath the heading
As I mentioned in Part 4 of this series, A Painful Case is one of the short stories in Joyce’s collection Dubliners. It was partly inspired by Tristan and Isolde and partly set in Chapelizod, so it is not surprising to find Joyce returning to it for inspiration. But in fact Scribbledehobble contains similar lists of notes under forty-seven different headings, several of which were taken from the titles of other works by Joyce—among them some that one would not immediately connect with Finnegans Wake. The following image, which tabulates fifteen of these headings, is taken from Hayman (19-20):
Joyce, it seems, did not see his various literary creations as purely isolated works. Certainly, each one can stand alone and be appreciated in isolation of the others, but they are also like the tesserae that make up a mosaic—individual parts of a larger whole that do not make complete sense on their own. There is nothing unusual or striking about such a statement as far as Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses are concerned: several characters are shared by those three works and they comprise an obvious series. But it is surprising to see Joyce turning for inspiration to his stageplay Exiles or his collection of lyrics Chamber Music, or the short story Eveline from Dubliners. Are these too parts of a series? A series that will in time include Finnegans Wake?
The relationship between Finnegans Wake and Joyce’s earlier works has hardly been touched upon by Wakean scholarship. To my knowledge, only the American blogger Jorn Barger has shown more than a passing interest in the subject. At the very least, Finnegans Wake can be interpreted as a nocturnal response to Ulysses, but Barger has even gone so far as to suggest that it is the key to Ulysses, whatever that means:
The key to Ulysses... is Finnegans Wake? (Barger)
Barger also surmised that Finnegans Wake was the third part of a planned tetralogy, with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses comprising the first two parts. To balance the first of these, the concluding work would have to be relatively short. It is true that when asked what his next book after Finnegans Wake would be, Joyce replied on one occasion: I think I’ll write something very simple and very short (Ellmann 731). On another occasion he indicated that he was considering something simple about the sea:
All the hints add up to suggestions that the work would be short, simple, about awakening, and about the sea. (Campbell 316)
Joyce’s unfinished tetralogy (Barger)
Barger’s Robotwisdom website is now archived by the Internet Archive.
Jorn Barger invented blogging and a significant volume of his online research comprises Joycean scholarship of the highest order and originality. If Barger thought it worth writing, I think it worth reading.
References
- Jorn Barger, Robotwisdom
- David Hayman, The “Wake” in Transit, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York (1990)
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939)
- Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
- Willard Potts (editor), Portraits of the Artist in Exile: Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego (1979)
- Joseph Campbell, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the art of James Joyce, New World Library, Novato CA (1993)
Image Credits
- Pop: John Millar Watt, Fair Use
- Pages 19-20 from The “Wake” in Transit David Hayman, Fair Use