In one version of HCE’s story, he is attacked by three soldiers and/or is witnessed committing his unnamed crime by them.

These three figures symbolically correspond to HCE’s two sons, Shem and Shaun (his introverted and extroverted aspects), plus their combined form. This combined form appears as a Cad in the Park who accosts HCE in other versions of the story (he additionally corresponds to Tristan, who cuckolds HCE after his fall and then becomes the next HCE in the next cycle).

The three soldiers are also called three tailors. They spread stories and rumors about HCE, so they are tale-ers, but they are also the energies that weave the “suit” of life for him, the circumstances of his life, and his body (which is also the court suit brought against him, representing our tendency to attack ourselves for our guilt and to scapegoat others).

In their aspect as tailors, they are like the Three Fates in Greek mythology, weaving the thread of existence until the appointed time comes for it to be cut.

In II.3 — a long, confusing chapter in HCE’s tavern — a tale is told about a Norwegian Captain who came to Dublin to a tailor’s in search of a suit, as well as a “sowterkins,” which means “cobbler,” but also sounds like an archaic word for mistress or sweetheart. The captain makes off with the suit (without paying) and/or the tailor’s daughter.

The story is repeated twice more in that chapter, and it mixes with the present, with HCE’s tavern becoming the tailor’s shop, with HCE playing the roles of both the tavern keeper/tailer and the visitor/Captain.

After the first repetition of this story, one of the comments by a tavern patron is “so sartor’s risorted why the sinner the badder!” (sooner the better)

Sartor Resartus (literally “The Tailor Re-tailored”)  is Thomas Carlyle’s 1836 novel first serialized in Fraser’s Magazine, in which a fictional editor reviews a fictional book called Clothes, Their Origins and Influence.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about this book:

Sartor Resartus was intended to be a new kind of book: simultaneously factual and fictional, serious and satirical, speculative and historical. It ironically commented on its own formal structure, while forcing the reader to confront the problem of where “truth” is to be found. In this respect it develops techniques used much earlier in Tristram Shandy, to which it refers. The imaginary “Philosophy of Clothes” holds that meaning is to be derived from phenomena, continually shifting over time, as cultures reconstruct themselves in changing fashions, power-structures, and faith-systems.

Joyce obviously would have been interested in this book. In the philosophy of the fictional book it reviews, clothing becomes a metaphor for cultures, popular ideas, religions, and — ultimately — phenomenal reality itself. Civilization “clothes” us in ideas and trends; the universe “clothes” us in the facts of physical reality.

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The metaphorical application of clothes is developed in this paragraph from Finnegans Wake I.5 (a chapter describing ALP’s Letter, which is a symbol for FW itself, or all of literature):

Has any fellow, of the dime a dozen type, it might with some profit some dull evening quietly be hinted—has any usual sort of ornery josser, flatchested fortyish, faintly flatulent and given to ratiocination by syncopation in the elucidation of complications, of his greatest Fung Yang dynasdescendanced, only another the son of, in fact, ever looked sufficiently longly at a quite everydaylooking stamped addressed envelope? Admittedly it is an outer husk: its face, in all its featureful perfection of imperfection, is its fortune: it exhibits only the civil or military clothing of whatever passionpallid nudity or plaguepurple nakedness may happen to tuck itself under its flap. Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is just as hurtful to sound sense (and let it be added to the truest taste) as were some fellow in the act of perhaps getting an intro from another fellow turning out to be a friend in need of his, say, to a lady of the latter’s acquaintance, engaged in performing the elaborative antecistral ceremony of upstheres, straightaway to run off and vision her plump and plain in her natural altogether, preferring to close his blinkhard’s eyes to the ethiquethical fact that she was, after all, wearing for the space of the time being some definite articles of evolutionary clothing, inharmonious creations, a captious critic might describe them as, or not strictly necessary or a trifle irritating here and there, but for all that suddenly full of local colour and personal perfume and suggestive, too, of so very much more and capable of being stretched, filled out, if need or wish were, of having their surprisingly like coincidental parts separated don’t they now, for better survey by the deft hand of an expert, don’t you know? Who in his heart doubts either that the facts of feminine clothiering are there all the time or that the feminine fiction, stranger than the facts, is there also at the same time, only a little to the rere? Or that one may be separated from the other? Or that both may then be contemplated simultaneously? Or that each may be taken up and considered in turn apart from the other?

Normally, we might think of clothes as representing fiction and nakedness as representing facts, since a physical person is covered with something artificial. But here in this passage of the Wake, the “evolutionary clothing” seems to be the fact, while the naked body is the fiction (much as, in the example of the envelope, the fiction [text, letter] is inside and the contextual facts are enveloping it).

The two may be considered separately or together — but what’s interesting is that this metaphorical inversion seems to put fiction/art at the center, as a kind of inner essence, while facts are accidents.

I’m put in mind of William Blake’s idea that in the artist-prophet Los’ halls in the City of Art there are eternal statues from which physical reality derives. Those statues represent the Truth — that is, art contains eternal Truths of which everyday experience embodies and gives specific examples.

All things acted on Earth are seen in the bright Sculptures of Los’s Halls, & every Age renews its powers from these Works,
With every pathetic story possible to happen from Hate or
Wayward Love, & every sorrow & distress is carved here,

Every Affinity of Parents, Marriages & Friendships are here
In all their various combinations wrought with wondrous Art,
All that can happen to Man in his pilgrimage of seventy years. 

The True Reality is art: it enumerates the eternal patterns. Phenomenal existence consists of specific instances of the repetition of those patterns. On and on and on and on.

That idea is very much in line with the Wake. As the wheel of time turns on, the “same renews.” Every generation renews the pattern (“not a feature alike and the face the same […] it vild need olderwise since primal made alter in garden of Idem”).

But the specifics of the renewal are the accidentals, the clothing. The essence is the pattern, the art, the artifice.

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Incidentally, I don’t think this view commits one to metaphysical dualism or a belief in Platonic essences. These eternal patterns are kinds of abstractions I discussed in my last post. They are “eternal” in the way that mountains and rivers are: eternal from the perspective of human beings.

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Another reference to clothing, which is especially fascinating if we take it as representing the specifics of the phenomenal world, appears at the beginning of III.1:

Methought as I was dropping asleep somepart in nonland of where’s please (and it was when you and they were we) I heard at zero hour as ’twere the peal of vixen’s laughter among midnight’s chimes from out the belfry of the cute old speckled church tolling so faint a goodmantrue as nighthood’s unseen violet rendered all animated greatbritish and Irish objects nonviewable to human watchers save ’twere perchance anon some glistery gleam darkling adown surface of affluvial flowandflow as again might seem garments of laundry reposing a leasward close at hand in full expectation.

The whole bolded part is actually a lengthy simile describing the faintness of the tolling of the bell. It thus performs what it’s describing, glommed onto the sentence as an afterthought even though it dominates the sentence.

[This is the same bell that tolls at HCE’s fall — “zero hour” — at the moment the Cad asks the time]

But anyway, it’s saying that in the night, everything is invisible except for little gleamings that might seem to be laundry (hung out to dry?).

If clothing represents the phenomenal world, this would suggest that what we see and experience are only small aspects of the totality of the world, whose full reality or nakedness is better captured in fiction.

[Laundry hanging up puts me in mind of a line from II.2, Shem recalling his mother: “When she give me the Sundaclouths she hung up for Tate and Comyng and snuffed out the ghost in the candle at his old game of haunt the sleepper”

[Sunday clothes…giving me Sunday clothes could be a metaphor for birthing Shem and clothing him in a physical body…Sundaclouths sounds like Santa Claus…ALP gives the gifts of the past to the present, passing on the past into the next generation so that it may rise by living again in the children]

[The physical body — the clothing — is a gift from the universe. Sunda also suggests “sound” to me…all of this art is bound up in phonemes and sounds, as Shem corresponds to hearing]

This idea that the phenomenal world is all we can see recalls the debate between St. Patrick and the Druid at the end of the book. St. Patrick holds that objects are just what they appear to be, as separate objects illuminated by the sun in everyday life. Ironically, his waking-consciousness position can be compared, from the perspective of the Druid, to that of someone stumbling around in the dark, only seeing the fluttering of those objects that reflect the sun’s light. The Druid holds that the true reality is the inner light absorbed by objects, which links them all together, much in the style of Finnegans Wake connecting all objects. To apply the symbolism I’ve been developing in this post, St. Patrick corresponds to clothing and the Druid corresponds to nakedness. [It is thus amusing that Patrick bares his bottom at the end of the passage and (probably) defecates, defeating the Druid with his “Ards” (his arse…but also his arts. The waking world has its own art, distinct from that of dreams).

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Putting this all together with my post last week, I want to suggest tentatively that clothing represents not only the facts of phenomenal reality, through which move the eternal patterns of art, but various narratives of self that we are all capable of “changing” out of over the course of our lives.

Thus, HCE’s “suit” — he is dressed in his “mirthday suit” on the day of his encounter with the Cad — can function as a symbol for the incarnation of a soul into manifest reality or for an idea that I think incarnation itself signifies: a person’s crafting of a narrative of self. HCE’s fall is simultaneously a rise, a shedding of old clothes and a dressing in new: either the burial clothes at the wake (the death of the old), and the borrowed clothing of the next generation (the birth of the new).

More on this imagery to come.