Fifteen Eighty Four

In the last chapter of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus misquotes a line from Thomas Nash’s “Litany in Time of Plague.” Nash wrote the poem during one of a series of bubonic plagues that beset London in the sixteenth century and the poem is fixated on death as a universal and imminent prospect. In my book, James Joyce and the Matter of Paris, I argue that Stephen unconsciously blends Nash’s line “Brightnesse falls from the ayre” with a line from Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Voyelles” to respond to the scent of Emma Clery’s body, as it emits a “distilled odor and a dew.” In the 1903 Dublin of Portrait, Stephen and Emma’s intimacy is constrained by Catholic morals and Edwardian gender roles yet, as their spontaneous expressions mingle, the two of them engage unwittingly in an aesthetic collaboration. This moment of interconnection undermines the calculations of the marriage market; its transient beauty defies the individualizing and objectivizing logic of consumption. But in a time of pandemic, does this scene evoke a sense of peril rather than triumph? What meaning does an aesthetic of the porous body have for us now, in our moment of threat?

In the “Hades” episode of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom reflects onwidespread illnesses. En route to Glasnevin cemetery, the advertising agent muses: “Scarlatina, influenza epidemics. Canvassing for death. Don’t miss this chance” (U 6:124-25). Joyce published the first version of the episode in September 1918, just as the influenza pandemic was beginning to take hold. He was sheltering in Zurich from the First World War, where Spanish flu caused the death of one of the group of amateur actors he was involved with. Bloom’s reflection, surprisingly, associates pandemics such as influenza and scarlet fever, which killed thousands of people in the nineteenth century, withpublicity campaigns. His association might appear to normalizepremature death and to make consumer choices or even democracy seem like processes of consensual infection. Yet Bloom recognizes that diseases like scarlet fever and influenzaresemble the external forms and structures that shape our existences—if we feel we can choose to opt in or out (“don’t miss this chance”) that choice is framed by and contingent on external situations.

Whereas Ulysses explores the ineluctable imbrication of the individual in larger structures and processes, Finnegans Wake overwhelms the individual. Its characters are submerged in aportmanteau language that superimposes different historical epochs, ethnic groups, and linguistic phases; they merge with physical objects, material processes, and microbial actions. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, the central figure of the book, is identified with a series of historical personages from Noah to General Wellington in an inclusivity and pervasiveness that is signaled by his pseudonyms Here Comes Everybody and Haveth Childers Everywhere. His initials appear like a virus in a massive number of phrases over the course of the text, in a manner that suits his archetypal identity as invader.

Yet if such viral spread prompts the efforts of our moment, in which our lives, the lives of people we love, and the lives of people we don’t even know depend upon our maintaining physical distance, the Wake situates it within a more complex reality. While outsiders have often been blamed for infection, Joyce’s text continually undermines the logic of native purity and foreign corruption. To take a specific example: HCE’s twin sons Shem and Shaun are cast in an early dialogue as native and invader, Mutt and Jute. However, Mutt, as his name suggests, is already of mixed pedigree. In a collapse of time frames, he sees the invading Jute as “a parth a lone,” one of the Parthalonians described in the medieval pseudo-history Lebor Gabála Érenn, The Book of Invasions, as forming an early colony in an uninhabited post-diluvial Ireland. Mutt speaks of “ye plaine of my Elters,” the plain of my elders or the plain of Moyelta, an area north of Dublin where the Parthalonians lived until almost all nine thousand of them were wiped out in one week by a plague. The illness comes from within, striking the Parthalonians as they live in isolation, “a parth a lone,” anautochthonous pandemic that refutes the notion of an uncontaminated land and a safe people.

If our need for quarantine tempts us to think of ourselves as discrete individuals and invites states to think in terms of narrowly defined national interests, the Wake shows us our universal vulnerability as well as our interconnection. Mutt signals this when he replaces “Let Erin remember,” Thomas Moore’s song of invaders triumphantly repelled, with “Let erehim ruhmuhrmuhr”; the safeguarded and idealized nation is transformed into temporal discontinuity and recollection intorepeated unverified mutterings, as Mutt likens the movements of foreign peoples to the waves of the sea: Let erehim ruhmuhrmuhr. Mearmerge two races, swete and brack. Morthering rue. Hither, craching eastuards, they are in surgence: hence, cool at ebb, they requiesce. Countlessness of livestories have netherfallen by this plage, flick as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like a waast wizzard all of whirlworlds. Now are all tombed to the mound, isges to isges, erde from erde. Pride, O pride, thy prize! (my italics, FW 17:23-30).

This “plage” on which so many life stories end is both plague and beach. Mutt mourns these deaths, like Gabriel Conroy looking at the snow at the end of “The Dead.” Yet Mutt’s speech, like the English language itself, suggests a long history of fertile assimilation. If viruses are endemic to the human community, and infection inevitable, those viruses eventually become part of us. The “plaine of my Elters” is a place of death but it is also one of generation, a vast blizzard of “whirlworlds” that creates a complex future. Joyce brings Dubliners to a close with Gabriel’s elegy but Mutt’s is followed promptly by Jute’s monosyllabic rejoinder “’Stench!” an abrupt reminder of the corruptibility of flesh. Mutt answers this disturbing observation with an emphatic “Fiatfuit! Hereinunder lyethey. Llarge by the smal […].” Noting the fumigant use of quicklime in the burial of plague victims, both the famed and the ordinary, Mutt both commands new life, fiat, and acknowledges its passing, fuit.

This “plage” on which so many life stories end is both plague and beach. Mutt mourns these deaths, like Gabriel Conroy looking at the snow at the end of “The Dead.” Yet Mutt’s speech, like the English language itself, suggests a long history of fertile assimilation. If viruses are endemic to the human community, and infection inevitable, those viruses eventually become part of us. The “plaine of my Elters” is a place of death but it is also one of generation, a vast blizzard of “whirlworlds” that creates a complex future. Joyce brings Dubliners to a close with Gabriel’s elegy but Mutt’s is followed promptly by Jute’s monosyllabic rejoinder “’Stench!” an abrupt reminder of the corruptibility of flesh. Mutt answers this disturbing observation with an emphatic “Fiatfuit! Hereinunder lyethey. Llarge by the smal […].” Noting the fumigant use of quicklime in the burial of plague victims, both the famed and the ordinary, Mutt both commands new life, fiat, and acknowledges its passing, fuit.