Rosenbloom

     In From the Beast to the
Blonde, Marina Warner explores fairy tales as tales told by the
silenced, the servants and nursemaids, the stepdaughter reduced to servitude
in her father’s house. In Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen sees the “cracked
lookingglass of a servant” as a symbol of Irish art: Ireland, once
the land of saints and sages, is forced to wear the mantle of its English
conqueror.

Remember, maid, thou dust art
powder but Cinderella thou must return … (FW, p. 440)

     Irish writers have long claimed
the English language as their own and made it live as a popular tongue.
English, too, is an amalgam. After the Norman conquest, the language
of politics and learning was Latin or French. English was ignored, left
to evolve as a spoken tongue only. The Anglo-Saxon of Old English underwent
a simplification of its grammar at the same time as an elaboration of
its spelling and vocabulary. When Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury
Tales, “Middle” English had travelled far from its Germanic
roots. And there it essentially stopped, fixed by the poet’s pen. Chaucer’s
grammar, with its mix of old and new verb forms, for example, is almost
wholly the same as today’s English.

     Then the Hundred Years War
ended England’s ties to France, and the ruling class started to use
the tongue of their subjects, filling it, however, with the vocabulary
of their own. Thus English became uniquely dual in nature: a simplified
Germanic grammar with a mixed Anglo-Saxon and French vocabulary.

     And dual nature (“doublin
their mumper all the time” — FW, p. 3) is what Finnegans
Wake is all about, in both theme and method.

     In another matter of dual natures,
Marina Warner connects Mother Goose with the sibyls, the wise women
of ancient Greece. In medieval Europe, the Sibyl was associated with
the Queen of Sheba (partly by the similarity in name) as well as with
the Sirene and Venus (as in Wagner’s Tannhäuser). Aphrodite,
the Greek Venus, was sometimes said to ride on a goose. Thus the wisdom
of these women was popularly devolved to mere sex (though still a dark
mystery, at least as far as civilized man’s relation to it, necessary,
sacred, and bestial). Their tales became the cackling of gossip — women’s
talk during women’s work.

     But raising children was also
women’s work, and a certain wisdom or view of life continued to be taught
— through nursery rhymes and fairy tales.

     What is thus hidden, what deformities
of spirit that must be cloaked in nonsense and fantasy?

I loved her frail, white, little
hands through which you could see the light, her bird-like foot which
scarcely touched the ground, her figure which a breath would have broken,
and her pearly shoulders, little developed as yet, which her scarf,
placed awry happily disclosed. (Mademoiselle de Maupin, Théophile
Gautier)

     Her long slender bare legs
were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed
had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. … Her slate blue skirts
were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. … The
first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and
faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither,
hither and thither … (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
James Joyce)

     Tight boots? No. She’s lame!
O! (Ulysses)

     I do drench my jolly soul on
the pu pure beauty of hers past.

She is my bestpreserved wholewife … with incompatibly the smallest
shoenumber outside chinatins. They are jolly dainty, spekin tluly. (FW,
p. 533)

     In Arab tales of Solomon and
the Queen of Sheba (“solomn one and shebby, cod and coney” —
FW, p. 577), Solomon creates a river of glass in his palace, so
that Bilqis, as she is named, would raise her skirts to walk across
and thus reveal the truth of reports that she had an ass’s foot, which
became a goose’s foot as the story was retold in Europe (pes anserinus
instead of pes asininus). She does not, but the belief that she
did is defended by asserting that her foot was fixed, cured, purified
upon her accepting Solomon’s religion.

     Freud explained foot fetishism
as about what the foot supports, namely, the road to the secret cave
of the Sibyl, her genitalia. Thus in Finnegans Wake, Joyce finds
pairs of shoes on the beach on page 14 (“swart goody quickenshoon
and small illigant brogues” (like those left behind upon startling
a leprechaun at work (“she convorted him to the onesure allgood and
he became a luderman” (FW, p. 21; the Leprechaun is lucharman
in Ulster), “decent Lettrechaun” (FW, p. 419)) or Cinderella’s
tiny glass slipper (originally French pantoufle en vair, squirrel
fur, not verre) after the dance). In the Irish telling of Cinderella,
“Fair, Brown, and Trembling”, which also includes a whale on the
beach, as on page 13 of Finnegans Wake, Trembling is dressed
(for church) by the henwife (see below). And Joyce draws a diagram/map
of ALP’s bottom (“her sheba sheath”
— FW, p. 198) on page 293 — by circles with “a daintical
pair of accomplasses” (FW, p. 295). (Thus Shem becomes author
of himself as a sham ( German scham = vulva).)

     Little Women, by Louisa
May Alcott, is, like Finnegans Wake, circular. The pattern is
a favorite of the self-conscious artist, who not only draws from her
own spiritual and emotional life for the matter of her tales, but also
knows that the teller is an intrinsic part of the tale, the creator
that is created by her own creation. The tale is about the creation
of the teller of the tale of the creation of the teller.

     This is likely as true for
Finnegans Wake as it is for Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man and Ulysses. Shem is merged into Shaun to become HCE
who merges with ALP … that it may all start again, birth and death,
death and birth, the book of Lif.

He lifts the lifewand and the
dumb speak. (FW, p. 195)

     A common event in fairy tales
is the fool, often literally a braying ass, revealed to possess wisdom
for those who would hear it (“if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere
grieved for” — FW, p. 482; as Bottom says in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen … nor his heart to report … what my dream was”; and as Paul
wrote in the First Letter to the Corinthians: “Eye hath not
seen, nor ear hear, neither have entered into the heart of man, the
things which God hath prepared for them that love him”). As Marina
Warner shows in From the Beast to the Blonde, this follows a
direct line to ancient tales of wise women outside of mainstream society.
Even Solomon is suspicious of Bilqis (“A reine of the shee, a shebeen
quean, a queen of pranks” — FW, p. 68), a woman as wise as
he, and thinks she might be a demon (with a tell-tale deformed or nonhuman
body part). He is pleasantly surprised (either way, perhaps) and they
get on famously.

… but I, poor ass … (FW,
p. 405)

     The ass is typically masculine,
the goose feminine. When they talk, we are reminded of our animist past
(as in tales of hearing the speech of farm animals
— and their secrets — on Christmas Eve), when the hills and rivers
and trees were alive with spirits, spirits with which we were kin. And
so Finnegans Wake follows the Liffey river’s circuitous route
(“riverrun” — FW, p. 3) to the sea and to the hill of Howth.
The river is personified as ALP, which is German (whence much of Ireland’s
fairy lore, via the Vikings) for mountain but also for elf,
and the latter also came to mean nightmare. When Germany became
Christian, names with Alp in them switched it to Engel (as Shaun dominates
the latter half of Finnegans Wake). Alp the incubus then, is
a demon only by reference to Christ (as the reverse might also be said).
She is in fact a voice still heard if only in sleep, free from the filters
of the day’s demands and distractions — thus is Finnegans Wake
a night book, its language reflecting the mingling of worlds, of the
people inside the hill (the shee) and the people who have built
atop the hill, of giants and elves and talking animals and quotidian
history.

     One animal in particular appears
in Finnegans Wake to uncover what is hidden: “a cold fowl behaviourising
strangely on that fatal midden … and what she was scratching at the
hour of klokking twelve looked for all this zogzag world like a goodishsized
sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass.)”
(FW, pp. 110-111; the tale of “Fair, Brown, and Trembling”
was published in Boston); “henservants” (FW, p. 432); “henwives” (FW, p. 128). We may view the hen as a stand-in for Mother Goose, and thus for the Sirene, the Sibyl, and the Queen of Sheba, because she is an actor for ALP, the
hill-elf who may be said to be telling her story (or inspiring it to
be told). It is her letter that Shem copies and Shaun delivers (“you
will now parably receive, care of one of Mooseyeare Gooness’s registered
andouterthus barrels” — FW, p. 414; note that in Messr. Guinness
(brewer) here, Mooseyeare evokes ass as Gooness evokes
goose), and it is her voice speaking at
the end of the book. Coincidentally, the Greek for goose is
÷h´íá, pronounced hinna. And hana in Arabic means bliss; it is
also Old English for cock. Hen in German is henne.

     … the secretary bird, better known as Pandora Paulabucca, … indiscriminatingly made belief mid
authorsagastions from Schelm the Pelman to write somewards to Senders
about her chilikin puck, laughing that Poulebec would be the death of
her … (FW, p. 369

Latin paula bucca = little mouth, to poolbeg = little hole; Irish Poulaphuca = Puck’s, the Pouka’s, hole, a (laughing) waterfall of the young Liffey — compare “Pukka Yurup!” (FW, p. 10); poule bec is
hen-beak, echoing chilikin puck as chicken peck; Senders
is Cinders, i.e., Cinderella — see also

“repeating himself and telling him now, for the seek of Senders Newslaters and the mossacre of Saint Brices [see below], to forget the past” (FW, p. 389-390))

     The hen is also a manifestation
of Brighid, the mother goddess of old Ireland who was christianized
to St. Bridget. She was also known as Bride and Brid, which is a variant
of bird that was common in Old and Middle English. But the centrality
of Brighid in Finnegans Wake, particularly the rape of her abbess
on “31 Jan. 1132 a.d.” (FW, p. 420), is another story, already
told elsewhere by the late Clarence Sterling, although it is very much
a part of this one. And vice versa. (It should also be noted that Brighid
was a brewer — see Mooseyeare Gooness, above.)

…
with a queeleetle cree of joysis crisis she renulited their disunited
… (FW, 395)

     I sate me and settled with
the little crither of my hearth … (FW, 549; Irish crith,
pronounced cree = tremble, i.e., Cinderella)

     Or all of these are avatars
of the one “bird” closest to Joyce: his partner Nora Barnacle, from
Galway in the west (like Grace O’Malley, a source for the Prankquean
of pages 21-23), whose name is also that of a goose well known to parts
of Ireland (particularly the west) and thought to grow in the sea from
driftwood or barnacles.

Well, you know or don’t you
kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a taling and that’s the
he and the she of it. (FW, p. 213)

     Ah ess, dapple ass! He will
be longing after the Grogram Grays. (FW, p. 609)

     She. Shoe. Shone. (FW,
p. 441)

Jeremiah
Curtin, Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland, 1890, Little, Brown &
Co., Boston.

Thomas Keightley, The
Fairy Mythology, 1878, G. Bell, London.

T. R. Lounsbury, History
of the English Language, 1879, Henry Holt & Co., New York.

Eric Rosenbloom, “The
Ravisht Bride”. In: A Word in Your Ear, 2005, Booksurge. Available
at:
http://www.rosenlake.net/fw/WIE_RavishtBride.pdf.