HCE’s fall results in his breaking into two halves, two “sons,” each with some of the qualities of the Father. Shem and Shaun are the introvert and the extrovert; the poet and the politician; the blasphemer and the priest; the oppressed and the oppressor; the shunned and the celebrated. And so on. They are the “contrary” forces that William Blake writes about.

They battle each other in conflicts that represent the wars of history and all interpersonal conflicts ever (which correspond to the brawl at Finnegan’s Wake in the song). But at the end of the day, they’re just two little boys scuffling.

Two early and significant explorations of the brothers occur in I.6 and I.4, the former a diatribe from Shaun about his brother, and the latter a description of a fight between early versions of the brothers before they fully divide from the father.

This post will examine the passage in I.6, and a future post will look more closely at the passage in I.4.

Chapter 6 – the quiz chapter – consists of 12 questions and their answers (a significant number in the Wake, as I have noted). The eleventh question is about how to treat a beggar (Shem).

The answer goes on for about a dozen pages, delivered by Shaun under the guise of a learned professor who gives a long lecture about space, time, and space-time launching into a charming set piece called “The Mookse and the Gripes” (a version of Aesop’s The Fox and the Grapes – this set piece will be the subject of a future post).

I must confess that during my first read, I did not really get the point of this interminable lecture (except, I guess, to demonstrate what a blowhard Shaun is). Honestly, I was sort of getting worn out already by the sixth chapter. It took a lot of effort to get through the first five chapters, which seemed to tell a complete story…but I wasn’t even a substantial fraction of the way through the book yet! “I get it, Joyce,” I said. “You’re a genius, and this is the most impressive thing ever written. Sheesh, do you have to be a show off?”

But during my re-read in 2020, and my subsequent rereads since, I was struck by how interesting this particular section is.

In his professor guise, Shaun reveals he is an important “spatialist” (specialist) – that is, someone who stresses the importance of space over time. This is appropriate because Shaun is the extrovert – he’s all about the external world and fitting into it. Shem is identified with time, with an introverted obsession with the past and with his subjective experience of the world, rather than the world itself as an external thing (occupying space).

Again, the brothers are two halves of the Human whole. Together, they (as HCE) are the entire space-time of the cosmos. Separate, they represent the tendency to privilege either space or time (which amounts, for me, to being distracted from reality by certain kinds of thoughts, to valuing certain Platonic ideals or static ideas of identity, to feeling and falling into a dream of separateness).

The professor refutes the cash-dime (space-time) thesis of other thinkers, as well as the dime-dime (time-time) thesis of others (these other thinkers are also surrogates for Shem). That is, for spatialists like Shaun, space is not part of a larger cohesive system, nor is it subordinate to time. Space is first and foremost.

As a result, from Shaun’s perspective, a beggar’s request for money (dime), although it seems genteel, is actually a kind of attack.

This whole question about a beggar is an echo of HCE’s encounter with the Cad in the Park (in I.2), whose innocent question about the time is misinterpreted as an accusation, an attack, or a sexual proposition. Here in I.6, the beggar’s request for a dime is a variant of this question, and Shaun explains now exactly why it (and its “dime-dime” or “dime-cash” worldview) is so threatening.

Here’s the key passage for me. Shaun says that to the Shem-perspective, dime is cash (time is space), but Shaun considers this not to be true because

the cash system […] means that I cannot now have or nothave a piece of cheeps in your pocket at the same time and with the same manners as you can now nothalf or half the cheek apiece I’ve in mind

One way to render this into normal speech is to say that in the world of space, I cannot have or not have a piece of money in your pocket at the same time and in the same manner as you can have or not have a thought that’s in my mind.

In other words, he’s saying that Shem and his ilk make a mistake in treating money or objects like thoughts, or space like time. Here in the world of space, two people actually cannot each have the same possession in the same way that each can have the same thought. The word “half” calls attention to this: if you have a piece of paper, then I can’t also (physically) have it at the same time in the same way. We would need to “half” it — cut it in half, so that it’s now two distinct things.

That is, he’s saying that the world of space is a zero-sum game. If I get something, you lose something.

Seen from this perspective, a beggar is necessarily a threat. He wants some of what you have. That is, he wants you to lose something.

But Shaun is also suggesting that the subjective world of thought and time doesn’t work like this. I can share a thought with you – like I’m doing now – and then we both have the same thought. It’s not a zero-sum game at all. I don’t lose my thoughts by sharing them.

(I recall with amusement that when I first started to use the internet in the 1990s, I marveled at how I could send someone a picture over email but still keep it on my computer…I wondered how that could possibly work)

So Shaun is saying that space is nothing like time — the physical world is nothing like thought — and we make a mistake to confuse them.

But, of course, Shaun is woefully short-sighted. Two or more people actually can simultaneously “have” an object if we mean “have” in the sense of sharing.

I’m reminded of the great Simpsons episode “Three Men and a Comic Book.” Bart and his friends pool their money to purchase an expensive comic book and end up accidentally destroying it because they can’t share the possession properly and needlessly squabble. They actually *could* have shared it, though. They could have equally “had” it if the will to cooperate were there.

But this kind of cooperation requires us to see things not merely in terms of space, but in terms of time as well. That is, an object does not have to be physically in my space in order for me to share it with you. You can physically hold it some of the time, and then I can physically hold it some other times, but we both “have” it at once, or have access to it. In order to do this, we have to come at the issue from a perspective that joins the opposites, that marries space and time into space-time.

Such cooperation cannot happen so long as we insist on seeing everything as a zero-sum competition, as it is in the world of space.

So how do we see things more clearly?

One answer is art, which is the realm of Shem the Penman, and his mother/muse ALP, who dictates the letter, the “mamafesta,” which is Finnegans Wake itself, but is more broadly all art.

I’m thinking now of a great short story where Tolstoy narrates from the perspective of a horse, who is completely confused about the idea of property…the horse is “owned” by a man who barely ever rides him, and the animal is ridden and cared for by servants who don’t technically “own” him, so what does it even mean to “own”?

Art can make people think about these questions: what does it mean to “have”? Are there better ways for us to conceive of “having” than merely in a spatialist way?

But more broadly, as I’ve been considering in my previous posts, art can also induce an experience of selflessness, a direct perception that there are no stable “things” or “self” that would justify hoarding possessions. This perception of selflessness can facilitate a spirit of cooperation, allow us to break out of the stories of our identities that we take to be static essences and create new stories about who we are, stories in which we cooperate and collaborate.

Now it’s true that two people can’t eat all of the same food. But in a food-rich environment, which is the world we now have, the evolutionary logic of hoarding all the resources for yourself and your immediate genetic kin starts to lose importance. There actually is a sense in which all people now can “have” an enjoyable life without “halving” it. There’s a sense in which we all can share the good life in the same way that we can share thoughts. Shaun-types just can’t see it.

All of this is relevant to a section of I.4 in which the brothers (or proto-versions of them) appear and do battle, in which their initial perception of a zero-sum game gives way to cooperation in a comical way.

This will be the subject of the next post.