You can read the previous entries on this subject here and here. In those posts, I sketch out the idea that the naked body is a symbol in the Wake for art, while clothing is a symbol for the facts of reality. The Wake suggests that, in a sense, fiction is “truer” than fact, for art contains the patterns that repeat with variations in life, the same anew.

This post extends my thoughts on this subject.

HCE is often described at key points in the novel as wearing seven articles of clothing (corresponding to the seven colors of the rainbow and Issy in her appearance as the seven rainbow girls: in this context, she is nature clothing the archetype called HCE with particular facts). For instance, when he shows up at the end of the Prankquean paragraph in the guise of van Hoother:

Jarl von Hoother Boanerges himself, the old terror of the dames, came hip hop handihap out through the pikeopened arkway of his three shuttoned castles, in his broadginger hat and his civic chollar and his allabuff hemmed and his bullbraggin soxangloves and his ladbroke breeks and his cattegut bandolair and his furframed panuncular cumbottes like a rudd yellan gruebleen orangeman in his violet indigonation, to the whole longth of the strongth of his bowman’s bill.

Or when he encounters the Cad in I.2:

one happygogusty Ides-of-April morning (the anniversary, as it fell out, of his first assumption of his mirthday suit and rights in appurtenance to the confusioning of human races) ages and ages after the alleged misdemeanour when the tried friend of all creation, tigerwood roadstaff to his stay, was billowing across the wide expanse of our greatest park in his caoutchouc kepi and great belt and hideinsacks and his blaufunx fustian and ironsides jackboots and Bhagafat gaiters and his rubberised inverness, he met a cad with a pipe.

I’d like to suggest that HCE’s outfit in each situation signifies his appearance as a specific individual, or rather a particular story of an individual (a way of describing and relating facts), who manifests the eternal story of HCE.

Thus, I see the naked body and clothing symbolism operating in two ways, or on two levels:

1. In the first sense, the naked body represents art, or more specifically the archetypes contained in art, while clothing represents phenomenal reality. The world of our everyday experience entails archetypes “dressing up” in the specific circumstances of everyday life. HCE thus wears the costume of Parnell or Napoleon, but he also wears the costume of each of us. [And again, one need not believe in Platonic Ideals to accept this view — these archetypes are images in the human mind, and are based on abstractions]
2. In the second sense, the naked body signifies the creative process itself, and clothing corresponds to the fruits of that creative process, the manifestation of archetypes in the narratives that each of us spins about ourselves, ways we narrate our experience to ourselves and others, the ideas about “I am” that we construct on the backs of our actions and appearances. To the degree that the naked body represents the process of composing these stories, the creative force that underlies these acts of (self-)creation, it corresponds to what William Blake called the Imagination.

Putting these two ideas together, nakedness signifies the creative process and the archetypes with which the creative process deals, while clothing represents the manifestation of those archetypes through phenomenal reality, works of art, and stories that we tell ourselves about our own identity.

Thus, when rumors speak of HCE’s disappearance, a report is made of discarded clothes, their wearer presumably having been killed:

Aerials buzzed to coastal listeners of an oertax bror collector’s budget, fullybigs, sporran, tie, tuft, tabard and bloody antichill cloak, its tailor’s (Baernfather’s) tab reading V.P.H., found nigh Scaldbrothar’s Hole, and divers shivered to think what kaind of beast, wolves, croppis’s or fourpenny friars, had devoured him.

In the first sense, the clothes represent HCE’s discarded body. The individual dies, but the essence has escaped to start the cycle anew. In the second sense, the clothes represent a discarded conception of the self, a story that has no longer served its purpose.

The seven items of clothing were found near “Scaldbrothar’s Hole.” According to the annotations on fweet.org, Scaldbrother was “an old labyrinthine cavern on Arbour Hill, Dublin, named after Scaldbrother, a medieval robber, who was said to have hidden his plunder there.” This sounds to me like the Cad, in his guise as a mugger. He is some “kaind of beast” — Cain, who slew his brother Abel — responsible for HCE’s demise/fall. The word “croppis” links him to Irish rebels (named for the rebels of 1798, who wore their hair short to show their support for the French Revolution).

A budget is an obsolete term for a leather pouch or wallet. A filibeg is a kilt (which becomes “fullybig” on the large[r than life] HCE). A sporran is a pouch worn in front of a kilt. A tuft is a cap tassel. And a tabard is a “loose sleeveless upper garment.”

The tailor’s tab is the tag listing his name, though the word “tab” — associated with money owed at a bar — suggests to me also the concept of owing a debt, which is crucial to the Wake and will be the subject of future posts. For now, suffice it to say that one interpretation is that all of us are “renting” our physical bodies in this temporary thing called life, and we thus owe a great deal to the universe…the bill will come due at our death (though it is impossible to pay).

This tailor — and again, the figure of the tailor or tailors in Finnegans Wake is analogous to the Cad — is called Baernfather. This is a reference to Bruce Bairnsfather, a British cartoonist famous for his comics about World War I. His best-known comic depicts two soldiers in a foxhole, with explosions all around them, as one says to the other “Well, if you knows of a better ‘ole, go to it!” It is perhaps a fitting reference for a tailor’s work found near Scaldbrother’s Hole. As we will see, the primal scene of the children and the father (HCE and his sons) will be represented as war (or rather as an archetype expressed in all human conflict, including wars), especially in II.3.

“Bairn” is Scottish for child, and “Baern” is apparently an Irish rendering of it. [readers who know more than I do about this are welcome to correct this point] If that is correct, then the tailor, as Cad (cadet in French means younger son), is the “child father,” HCE’s son come to overthrow him, as in Freud’s Oedipal conflict (and thus become the father in the next cycle). On a personal level, the Cad is anxieties that the dreamer of the Wake has about his son; more generally, he is the anxiety of all of us about the next generation, or the future more broadly; politically, he is the energies of Irish resistance against the English.

But he is also an artist, as suggested by Baernsfather. The word “Scaldbrother” recalls the Norse “skald”or poet. [In II.1, the word occurs in the next generation when one of HCE’s sons (Shaun) accosts the other (Shem) with “Arrest thee, scaldbrother!”]

HCE’s fall is also the source of artistic inspiration. The guilt of the son at his aggression toward the father becomes the motivation for creating art. The Fall of HCE — the breaking apart of an original unity (Here Comes Everybody) into separate selves and “things” as we feel and fall — becomes the basis of creating art so that we can generate in ourselves and our readers feelings of connection that may somewhat bring us back to that original unity, a selflessness that is in touch with the riverrun/flux of life (back to Howth Castle and environs).

As such, the discarded clothes can represent the works of art that record that inspiration. I’m reminded of William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where the writings of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg are the “linen clothes folded up,” while Swedenborg sits as the angel at the tomb of the risen Christ. Or at the end of Blake’s Milton: A Poem, where the Clouds of Ololon (a character who has just achieved “self-annihilation” and enlightenment) “folded as a Garment dipped in blood / Written within & without in woven letters: & the Writing / Is the Divine Revelation in the Litteral expression.”

The idea is that the writings that come from inspired artists are a mere record of the experience of inspiration, clothes to be tossed off. Those writings point in the direction of inspiration (and the archetypes), but to take them literally is to be caught in them, to miss the inspiration and be misled. Imagine, for example, that I taught a child about the dangers of lying by telling her the story of the boy who cried wolf, but the child interpreted the story as a literal warning about wolves and became obsessed with guarding her room from those specific animals. That’s what people do when they take inspired works literally. Blake’s radical suggestion is that the Christian Scriptures (and, I would suggest, all holy books) are exactly that: they point to an inward experience on the part of their writers that readers ought to cultivate for themselves; but far too many people take them at face value. Perhaps Finnegans Wake is written in such a confusing manner to make it impossible for readers to take it literally, for there is no “literal” or “surface level” text. The only way to “read” it — other than purely enjoying the sounds of it — is to search for deeper meanings and seek to make contact with the inner experience that inspired it.

This conception of writing as the mere record of inspiration is analogous to the idea of each of us continually constructing narratives of the self. Each of our stories about the self is an artistic creation that we are always in danger of mistaking for an essence (and thus we feel and fall back into ignorance and suffering). We are each a skald, a scaldbrother (we are our own “brother’s keeper,” as it were). We are more artists than we know. And it is possible to cease to regard our stories of the self as essences: it is possible to discard these clothes and identify instead with the process of artistic creation, which is bound up in those cycles and archetypes, higher stories that get closer to what we are: an ever-changing flux of riverrun that is the source of all creativity.

Or as Blake put it, “The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.”