In a description of the fallen world in I.1, the narrator says of the people,

But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life’s robulous rebus

“Sneeze out a likelihood” is a garbling of the phrase “squeeze out a livelihood,” but this potential solution to life’s puzzle is not just a way of making a living but a likelihood: a probable event, a state of mind that one is likely to inhabit.

A rebus is a puzzle that mixes image and sound, much like Finnegans Wake itself, which crosses the appearance of words and their sounds. The Wake itself is an embodiment of the puzzle of life, and the implication is that learning to “solve” the Wake is analogous to learning to “solve” life’s rebus, which is less a rational solution than a salving of its wounds.

The fact that the solution has to do with a “likelihood” points forward to a passage in I.5, describing the location where the events of the Letter take place (which, again, is the fallen world of experience):

There,

> the possible was the improbable and the improbable the inevitable.

Playing with Aristotle’s ideas of the possible and the probable, the narrator asserts that anything that’s possible to happen is also likely or even inevitable, not matter how improbable it may seem.

And yet that which is is just as likely as anything else that is, which is just as likely as that which is possible and never comes to pass:

>utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be.

“Likelihood,” then, is that set of the possible that often seems improbable but must come to pass. It is life itself, in other words. The odds that any single thing would happen — the odds that, for instance, you would be sitting exactly where you are reading exactly these words at exactly this moment — are astronomically small in the scope of the universe. And yet, from another point of view, given the way history has unfolded, these events may have to happen in the way they do, deterministically, as surely as the position of all the molecules in the universe at one moment, blindly following the laws of nature, inevitably must produce the next moment and the next. Everything that happens is wildly improbable; everything is necessary.

The use of the word “likelihood” puts me in mind of the Prankquean’s initial retort to Van Hoother: “Unlikelihud”

“Hud” is Danish for “skin.”

In the second round of the Prankquean paragraph, the “Unlikelihud” transforms into “Am liking it.”

If we take the Prankquean as a person initiating the Fall and then encountering the fallen world of experience – or, to go back to my last post, as someone in the midst of the internal process of dynamically engaging contrary forces —  then this movement from “Unlikelihud” (not liking skin?) to “Am liking it” signifies coming to embrace the world of the flesh, an affirmation of this world in all of its improbable but necessary cycles of fallenness and manifestation of possibilities.

The “Am liking it” affirms this world as a possibility that has come to pass — an improbable possible inevitable — that we should not merely endure but enjoy (cf. Nietzsche’s idea of Amor Fati, with which Joyce would have been familiar).

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The Prankquean episode is echoed in the Norwegian Captain episode of II.3, where the Captain visits land three times, cheating a tailor by running off, without paying, with a suit (and/or with the tailor’s daughter).

It’s another way of narrating the Fall, this time as a conflict between men, as opposed to a battle of the sexes. It emphasizes a different part of the Oedipal anxiety. Instead of the Prankquean stealing a boy, the Norwegian Captain makes off with a girl.

When the tailor demands that he return, the Norwegian Captain first responds, “All lykkehud!”

“Lyke” is archaic English for “corpse.” The fallen world initially seems like a corpse, just as it first appears to the PQ an unlikeable unlikey-hud. However, the Captain’s initial rejection of the fallen world could also contain an idea closer to “Me likey all skin.”

That more positive meaning emerges in the second round when, in response to a call to return, he proclaims, “Ild luck to it!” The verb for his utterance here is “blastfumed.” He blasts, fumes, and blasphemes, all at once.

“Ild” is Danish for fire. And luck is a word that resonates throughout the Wake, in addition to matching the Prankquean’s “liking.” The word “luck” summons look (and looking, and all that entails, such as HCE peeping at the girls in the Park and the three soldiers watching his crime), fortune, lux (Latin for light), St. Lucy (patron of eyesight).

I take this luck/lux/ild to be an inner light that unites all things, which is proclaimed by the Druid at the end of the Wake in IV.1 (the final chapter). It is also the luck of every event, each event as a “likelihood” emerging from possibility. All things are bound together by this light. Perhaps this is why the verb for “Ild luck to it!” sounds like “blasphemed”: the perspective the Captain gives here, which resonates with that of the Druid at the end of the Wake, is blasphemy from the perspective of orthodox/exoteric religion and waking consciousness. To the waking mind, objects are not connected to each other by means of an internal light — they are distinct. And to the exoteric religious mind, this world is distinct from eternity, not one with it. The Prankquean, the Captain, and the Druid commit the “blasphemy” of discovering redemption and joy within the cycle of death and rebirth, not apart from it. “The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the Earth,” reads the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, “but men do not see it.”

But perhaps if they knew how to look (luck, lux), they would See.

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In other words, we can take the Prankquean and Norwegian Captain episodes to be alternate versions of the Fall, in which an individual first rejects the fallen or material world and then comes to affirm it. By doing so, the individual can discover the Rise in the Fall.

In our own lives, we inhabit the affirmative perspective indicated by the phrase “Am liking it” by making contact with the inner light (ild) in all things, by shifting our perspective to see all things as connected to each other in a way suggested by the Wake’s mixing of words. The perception of such interconnection allows someone to open themselves up to the dynamic interplay of contrary forces and, ultimately, the realization that not only do all things participate in each other but all “things” (including the self) are ultimately narratives in the mind.

Perhaps the previous paragraph sounds like the ravings of a madman. All I can say is that years of careful study of the Wake and years of mindfulness practice have enabled me to enter modes of perception toward which I can only gesture with words. In the end, language may be insufficient to communicate the “might of souls, / And what they do within themselves,” to quote Wordsworth. This is one justification for Joyce constructing his own language in Finnegans Wake.

Interested readers should investigate the Buddhist concept of mutual co-arising, the idea that all phenomena arise together and interdwell, along with the Buddhist notion of impermanence, emptiness, and anatta (“no self”). All phenomena are “empty” in the sense that there is no ultimate, permanent substance to them, and in the sense that their identity as separate objects is constructed by an observing mind; in point of fact, every “thing” participates in all things and co-arises with all else.

My contention is that a careful study of the Wake can induce a mode of perception that entails directly experiencing what is referred to by these Buddhist concepts. A reading of the Wake can be a kind of training for the mind to achieve such states of consciousness.

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A few miscellaneous thoughts to close:

The Prankquean paragraph finds her making two statements that both contain the syllable lik: her “Unlikelihud” in the first becomes “Am liking it” in the second. She does not make a third utterance that contains the syllable lik, but there is something in the paragraph that might function as such a third: the thunderword, whose lightning — light, lik, luck, lux, look — can signify not just the Fall but the illumination of Enlightenment (a Rise), signaled also by the rainbow in this passage.

In my last post, I connected the Prankquean paragraph, and Finnegans Wake more broadly, to Blake’s conception of contraries, and I began by drawing a comparison to “The Tyger.” A key difference between that poem and Joyce’s paragraph, however, is that Blake’s “The Tyger” is primarily articulating the confusion of a fallen mind encountering the world: the poem consists entirely of questions, as opposed to “The Lamb,” which consists of questions and simplistic answers. The Prankquean paragraph explores more fully the cycles of the fallen world, and it shows how a person can come to embrace the fallen world and find redemption.

More to come on these ideas in future posts.

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Last thought: life’s mysteries are a “robulous rebus” because we experience the Fall as a zero-sum competition in which we can be “robbed” (like HCE being accosted by a potential mugger in the Park). But also, “robulous rebus” sounds like Romulus and Remus, another pair of brothers who represent Shem and Shaun: the contraries of the universe, acting through the psyche, history, and mythology.