This post extends my last post by examining what has become for me one of the key paragraphs of the book, starting on page 81 in I.4.

In this passage, the two sides of HCE battle each other. It takes place long after HCE’s alleged crime and encounter with the Cad, but two combatants replay the story. I’ve come to regard them as proto-Shem and proto-Shaun, early versions of the brothers. HCE and the Cad are very much two sides of the same man. But here in I.4, they are beginning to separate. Their separation will be complete on pages 92-93, where Shem and Shaun first recognizably appear.

The paragraph beginning on page 81 is long, dense, and difficult. On a first read, I needed a guidebook more than other places in Finnegans Wake to clear up what may be happening. But basically, it’s a fight:

The boarder incident prerepeated itself. The pair (whethertheywere Nippoluono engaging Wei-Ling-Taou or de Razzkias trying to reconnoistre the general Boukeleff, man may not say), struggled apairently for some considerable time, (the cradle rocking equally to one and oppositely from the other on its law of capture and recapture), under the All In rules around the booksafe, fighting like purple top and tipperuhry Swede

The incident between brothers (or involving the border between self and other), “prerepeated” itself (much like the first page’s word “rearrived”…all events have happened before and will happen again as these eternal archetypes continually play themselves out with some variation). They might have been Napoleon and Wellington (as in the “Willingdone” passage in I.1) or Buckley and the Russian General (as recounted in the Butt and Taff episode of II.3). They are all conflicts.

The two fighters are difficult to distinguish from each other. They mix aspects that will later be associated with Shem or Shaun. For instance, one figure is called the Adversary (a reference to the devil, or Shem) but is said to have “Michelangiolesque resemblance” (the archangel Michael, or Shaun).

Eventually, the fighting stops when one asks the other, essentially, “Hey, weren’t you pick-pocketed recently?”

in the course of their tussle the toller man, who had opened his bully bowl to beg, said to the miner who was carrying the worm (a handy term for the portable distillery which consisted of three vats, two jars and several bottles though we purposely say nothing of the stiff, both parties having an interest in the spirits): Let me go, Pautheen! I hardly knew ye. Later on, after the solstitial pause for refleshmeant, the same man (or a different and younger him of the same ham) asked in the vermicular with a very oggly chew-chin-grin: Was six victolios fifteen pigeon takee offa you, tell he me, stlongfella, by picky-pocky ten to foul months behindaside?

The beggar/Cad figure is usually the son, but here he’s the “toller” man (taller, perhaps older, and the one who tolls the bell for the other), while the other figure is the miner/minor.

He asks whether the other man had been pickpocketed of 6 pounds, 15 shillings. Note that he speaks in a pidgin English, which anticipates the final episode of St. Patrick and the Druid, where the Druid speaks in the same manner. My guess is that by representing their speech like stereotypes of those from the East, Joyce is suggesting the rising sun of the morning and the dawn of waking consciousness (since the sun rises in the East). Its presence here might suggest that this fight is an inversion of the final episode: here, the Cad/Buckley figure is victorious, in getting money out of his mark.

I will discuss the “six victolios fifteen” below, which is a specific historical reference.

The man who spoke then offers to repay the victim…if the victim could first give him ten pounds. He

became friendly and, saying not his shirt to tear, to know wanted, joking and knobkerries, all aside laying, if his change companion who stuck still to the in vention of his strongbox, with a tenacity corrobberating their mutual tenitorial rights, happened to have the loots change of a tenpound crickler about him at the moment, addling that hap so, he would pay him back the six vics odd, do you see, out of that for what was taken on the man of samples last Yuni or Yuly, do you follow me, Capn?

The victim – now with the characteristic guilty stutter of HCE – says he doesn’t have ten pounds but could “advance you something like four and sevenpence between hopping and trapping which you might just as well have, boy baches, to buy J. J. and S. with.” [that is, whiskey…John Jameson and Sons]

In this version, the Cad figure isn’t a beggar but an outright robber. And he does succeed in getting money out of his target by asking for it under the pretense of wanting it to repay money that was owed to the target.

We could try to make sense of this: maybe the HCE figure here is legitimately fooled (or drunk) and doesn’t notice that it’s a trick. Or maybe he wants to surrender the fight, and this is a way for him to hand over money and not lose face.

Or we could just regard this as dream logic. If the two men are ultimately one man, the usual rules of borrowing, stealing, and owing money cease to work.

And here, I think, this passage acquires special significance in light of my discussion of the “zero-sum game” in the last post.

Here, this act is a direct repudiation of a zero-sum game. The one who was wronged is the one who offers to pay. Instead of interpreting him as a fool, we might interpret him as one who shows compassion and kindness to one who has wronged him. It’s the opposite of a hard-nosed, Shaun-ish conception of justice (Shaun appears as Justius in I.7).

Perhaps we can take it as an instance of forgiveness, or acknowledging the fortune of the Fortunate Fall.

After being paid,

There was a minute silence before memory’s fire’s rekindling and then. Heart alive! Which at very first wind of gay gay and whiskwigs wick’s ears pricked up, the starving gunman, strike him pink, became strangely calm and forthright sware by all his lards porsenal that the thorntree of sheol might ramify up his Sheofon to the lux apointlex but he would go good to him suntime marx my word fort

Memory’s fire rekindles, and the Cad figure, the proto-Shaun, seems to recognize his other. He remarks, “You stunning little southdowner! I’d know you anywhere, Declaney.”

A southdowner is a sheep (not a goat, which is a Biblical symbol of those who are damned; HCE carries a coat that can make him look like either: at the time of his encounter with the Cad, he had his “overgoat under his schulder, sheepside out”).

Proto-Shaun vows to “go good to him suntime” – that is, to pay him back (perhaps when the sun rises and it becomes time for the waking side of HCE to dominate) – and he goes off merrily and excitedly to drink after they shake hands.

The book comments,

the queer mixture exchanged the pax in embrace or poghue puxy as practised between brothers of the same breast.

And in the next line calls it

their torgantruce which belittlers have schmallkalled the treatyng to cognac

Their reconciliation joins them in a “queer mixture” (there are plenty of implications of incest between all members of the Earwicker family, brothers included).

Their union is a “poghue puxy.” Poghue is Irish for kiss. Pux is Greek for with a fist (like boxing). A fist-y kiss.

Their pax in embrace – pacts in embrace – is the fisty kiss.

Siblings show love through battle. Real love. By hurting each other.

Those who would belittle this whole thing — their “torgantruce,” which sounds like an Irish word that means “bombardment” [and also suggests that twisting (tor) began (gan) their truce] — schmallkalled it treatyng to cognac – schmall is German for narrow. That is, those who insist on seeing this situation narrowly will look at it as nothing more than signing a treaty (words on paper, not something felt in the heart)…one person simply treating another to a drink.

But that interpretation is too narrow — it misses how such a gesture between siblings can be a true “queer mixture,” a uniting of them back together – by both being willing to offer the other a token of peace.

Not for nothing, these lines are the easiest to grasp in the whole paragraph thus far, so they call attention to themselves. And they make it a point to mix Latin and Greek and Irish and German…there’s Russian and Turkish later in the paragraph too…this is a reconciliation of all peoples, a resetting of the Fall that was the Tower of Babel that shattered our languages and made us dream we’re disconnected from each other. Finnegans Wake is always performing the reconciliation that moments like this describe.

But the two brothers do not unite at this point…that will be the work of ALP, gathering up the pieces and dictating her manifesto (her “mamafesta,” the Wake itself) which Shem (the poet) will write.

For now, they each go off – proto-Shaun to drink, and proto-Shem to report his injuries (his report being a kind of art, another symbol for artistic production),

in justifiable hope that […] some lotion or fomentation of poppyheads would be jennerously exhibited to the parts

He’s taken quite a beating, bleeding everywhere, but

it proved most fortunate that not one of the two hundred and six bones and five hundred and one muscles in his corso was a whit the whorse for her whacking. Herwho?

This is a powerful statement that the strife between people, even between deep friends and sworn brothers of the same breast, ultimately does no damage. That reconciliation is possible. The word “fortunate” – as in the Fortunate Fall – is present here.

*

Key to this episode is the idea of recognition – the kindling of “memory’s fire” when the proto-Shaun recognizes the other that he earlier “hardly knew.” I would suggest that the misrecognition that precipitated the fight was not merely over identity but over the entire conception of life as a zero-sum game. By being willing to advance his brother some of the money that (at least in theory) is ultimately, someday, coming back to himself as part of getting repaid, proto-Shem is in effect cutting his brother some slack, recognizing that being “repaid” for wrongs does not have to look the way we think it should from a “spatialist” point of view; recognizing that the one who thinks he was wronged (most people in a conflict think they are the aggrieved party) can cut the other some slack, which is not the same thing as actually surrendering anything of value (they can both “have” without “halving”).

The idea that most people tend to believe they are the truly aggrieved party is underscored by how difficult it is to tell the combatants apart in the first half of the paragraph.

What this paragraph in the Wake suggests to me is that instead of remaining locked in our stories about how we have been Wronged and what we are Owed by others, we can cultivate greater joy for everyone by just cutting people some slack and offering to extend an olive branch even if we feel like we’re the ones who are owed something.

“Being owed something” is the logic of the Land of Space. It’s Shaun logic. It’s the grim logic of Justice (“Justius”) who will not be satisfied until all debts are paid. It’s the logic of bookkeepers and bean counters who see human relations as little more than a score to be tallied.

But what if we let go of our stories of zero-sum conflict? What if we decided to tell the story a different way? What if we just shrugged and said, “You know what? I know you owe me some money, but so what? Here, go have a drink on me, and pay me back everything when you can”?

This paragraph is funny, and it can be read as a cynical trick (“Ha! The Cad duped him into handing over money!”), but I read it also as indicating something profound, the possibility of a union that will be depicted later in the text more completely.

*

But how to achieve such a union?

The passage also features a curious moment that sets the brothers on the path to reconciliation. During the fight, the attacker becomes friendly when he drops his weapon:

There were some further collidabanter and severe tries to convert for the best part of an hour and now a woden affair in the shape of a webley (we at once recognise our old friend Ned of so many illortemporate letters) fell from the intruser who, as stuck as that cat to that mouse in that tube of that christchurch organ, (did the imnage of Girl Cloud Pensive flout above them light young charm, in ribbons and pigtail?) whereupon became friendly

It is at this point that the above exchange about the pickpocketing occurs.

During my 2020 reread, I was confused as to who was the “intruser”/intruder. I realized that from the perspective of each of them, the other one is the intruder. So it’s both of them.

The thing that causes this “intruser” to become friendly is that something wooden in the shape of a Webley falls from him. I had to look up Webley, which is a type of gun. It is the phallic implement of the Cad here (in other versions it is a pipe or, as above, a worm).

“Wooden,” however, recalls the wooden coin that an invader tips a native Irishman early in the book. [“Let me fore all your hasitancy cross your qualm with trink gilt. Here have sylvan coyne, a piece of oak.”] The fact that the coin is “Woden” recalls the chief god of the Vikings, the invaders of Ireland, and this – like the “sylvan coyne” – is also a reference to Wood’s coins, which I will have to write about in a future post.

I think this “affair” that drops to the ground is both the wooden coin (weapon of HCE in the guise of capitalist or colonizer, condescendingly manipulating his victims with money) and the gun (weapon of the proletariat or colonized, revolting against oppression).

In other words, my tentative conclusion is that this bit of the paragraph depicts not one or the other man dropping something. It’s the aggressive part of both sides of the conflict that drops the weapon.

So perhaps the paragraph suggests that reconciliation is only possible when we first lay down our weapons, no matter which side we’re on, no matter how wronged we think we are, no matter how much we think we’re owed, and no matter how right we think we are. Most people think they’re right.

There’s obviously a complex historical layer to this scene as well, one that is intensified by the term “six victolios fifteen,” which refers to “6 Victoria 15,” a notation for a legal statute enacted under Queen Victoria dealing with the abolition of the British slave trade.

When one man asks the other if this amount was stolen from him, this might be a symbol for the colonized of history asking (sarcastically?) if colonizers lost something in the abolition of slavery. Under this reading, the one asking the question – whose later words have the name Marx mixed into them at least twice – might be getting some kind of reparation by his trickery or pulling off some kind of revolution against capitalists. That is, maybe the one asking the question is also owed something.

After all, who is owed what by whom? From whose perspective?

It gets more confusing because their identities are not consistent. If the one asking the question is a Marxist or anti-colonial revolutionary, why is the one being asked the question a “miner” (working class)? Or a “minor” (the younger son/Cad, normally the revolutionary figure)? Why does the one asking the question call the other “stlongfella,” a reference to Éamon De Valera, nicknamed the Long Fellow, an Irish statesman who was a revolutionary leader in the 1916 Easter Rising and later became president of Ireland.

Which of the men in this paragraph is the revolutionary? Which one is on the side of justice? Which side is owed what? Don’t they both have stories about “what they’re owed” and “what is right”?

Things are tangled and confused in the Land of Space, where understanding the world as a zero-sum game means that everyone has to fiercely defend what they have from others and attack others for What They Are Owed.

But what if…everyone could drop their stories, drop their weapons? Would it make it possible for things to “become friendly” and for both sides to make concessions, where all parties give up something even though they also feel like they’ve lost something and are owed something?

To be clear, I’m not denying that there are real, objective injustices in history, nor am I denying that the concept of justice, and the pursuit of justice, is important and can lead to good things. But I think Joyce is challenging us in this paragraph to see how a myopic obsession with “what I am owed” – and a tendency to see others not as individuals but as Platonic forms, as members of categories, as avatars of categories that either owe or are owed in some story or another – produces or at least exacerbates avoidable conflict.

Perhaps we cannot achieve total peace, but we might arrive at a “torgantruce” – if not on the world stage, then at least in our personal dealings with others. But it all depends on how we narrate to ourselves the stories of who we are and what our situations are.

Joyce famously said that history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awaken. The stories we tell about the world, history, ourselves and others…to the extent that they saturate our consciousness and guide our interpretation of the world, they are dreamlike. Many of us spend much of our lives lost in stories like these, narratives that our minds are constantly spinning. Finnegans Wake dares us to imagine telling those stories differently and, perhaps, in the process, try to cut other some slack.

When two people finish fighting with each other, I’m not sure it’s within human nature for either one to turn a cheek and invite a fresh punch. But what if…they bought each other a drink?