In the Shadow of His Language

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In Chapter V of Portrait, Stephen converses with the dean of University College Dublin, who is English, and reflects on their different relationship to the language they speak:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

The passage speaks to Joyce’s relationship with English and with language in general (important for Finnegans Wake, of course), as well as the Celtic Revival movement that, in Joyce’s day, sought to restore the Irish language (a movement with which Joyce largely disagreed).

This post considers the idea that a language can “belong” to a person in this sense, and it tries to grapple with what Joyce is doing to this idea by writing Finnegans Wake. I even discuss the Bad Bunny Superbowl halftime show controversy — which makes this my most topical post yet!

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It’s Plurbin’ Time: Pluribus and Finnegans Wake

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Vince Gilligan’s latest show, Pluribus, is a departure from his previous hits, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Eschewing the crime drama and action associated with those earlier shows, Pluribus takes a premise that sounds like an episode of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror and uses it as the backdrop for gorgeous cinematography and scenes of impressive performances from Rhea Seehorn, who often has the challenge of acting alone in a scene or with one or two other actors who are playing essentially brainwashed people with little personality.

It is also Gilligan’s first show to mention Finnegans Wake by name!

Read on for my thoughts about Pluribus, its relationship to the Wakean theme of the “Fortunate Fall,” and some musings on whether the show can be read as a criticism of Communism, Capitalism, Buddhism, Christianity, or something else.

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The Middle Pillar and Chakras in the Wake

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Coming off my last post about Qabalah, I thought it would be useful to discuss a passage of the Wake in which the yogic “energy centers” of the body appear. This is another piece of occult beliefs that Joyce probably first encountered as part of Theosophy: in some traditions of yoga (that is, Indian systems of mysticism), there are said to be seven energy centers or “chakras” running down the body, along the spinal cord. In Western occult traditions, a similar belief in energy centers was endorsed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which attributed five energy centers to some sephiroth of the Tree of Life, the central column of spheres called the “Middle Pillar.” The idea is that the Middle Pillar is balanced between the pillar of severity and the pillar of mercy, just as Tipareth (the central sephirah) balances also the spheres above and below it (and thus is the union of the physical and the spiritual, the human and the divine).

Read on for my discussion of Joyce’s attribution of Irish writers to these energy centers.

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The Qabalah in Finnegans Wake

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The Qabalah is a tradition popular in Western esotericism. It was originally a form of Jewish mysticism, dealing with the idea of God’s power “emanating” into creation in ways detailed in a diagram called the “Tree of Life,” a series of ten spheres (called “sephiroth”) that represent various concepts: they are arranged descending toward the sphere representing the physical universe. During the Renaissance, Hebrew Qabalah became an influence on Western Hermeticism, occultism, and “magick.” Ideas derived from the Hebrew system became combined with other esoteric ideas like astrology and tarot. Later occultists, including members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which W.B. Yeats was a member, engaged in “magical” practices that drew upon Qabalah, such as imagining spheres of light on the body corresponding to the sephiroth.

So what does any of this have to do with Finnegans Wake? There are several references to Qabalah and other occult topics in the novel, which Joyce likely learned about through his interest in Theosophy, a spiritual movement that blended a number of different beliefs and practices from all around the world. After losing faith in Catholicism, Joyce investigated other spiritual traditions like this, before more or less rejecting most of supernaturalism. I qualify that last sentence because the issue of what exactly Joyce personally believed, at various points in his life, is complicated, but we can be confident from his mocking references to Theosophy in Ulysses that by the time he wrote that novel, he did not accept it and found it at least kind of silly.

The most major Qabalistic reference in Finnegans Wake is the list of ten syllables running down page 308 in II.2, which I have discussed here.

This post will muse a little more about the relationship between Qabalah and the Wake, and I will even suggest that the Wake could function like a Qabalistic classification system and could be the basis of practices that are enriching to an individual. Belief in the supernatural is not necessary to view the Wake this way or to use these practices.

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