The Mookse and the Gripes takes place in FW I.6, the quiz chapter. This post explores this section of Finnegans Wake.

The chapter is arranged as twelve questions. The questioner is a form of Shem, and the answerer is a form of Shaun.

The answers run from a twelve-page epic catalogue in response to question one (a list of descriptions of HCE, not unlike the lengthy “begats” in the Bible) to a two-word response to the final question. The other answers vary in length from less than a page to five or six pages. But the eleventh answer goes on for like twenty pages, and it is in there that the parable appears.

I should note that the twelve questions correspond to the twelve patrons of HCE’s tavern, the twelve signs of the zodiac, the twelve apostles at the Last Supper, the twelve men on a jury, the twelve hours on a clock, and so on.

The eleventh question asks, basically, if a beggar came to you begging for money, would you give him any?

It’s asking, essentially, about the encounter with the Cad in the Park. In the original telling in I.2, the Cad asks HCE for the time and is treated to a too-much-protesting defense when HCE mishears him (perhaps due to a confusion of languages). In another version in I.4, when two figures reiterate the encounter in the park as a dueling proto-Shem and proto-Shaun, they make peace when one gives the other a few quid to go buy whiskey.

In I.6, now that the dream has more fully gotten underway and the dream characters are really starting to wake up, Shaun here angrily rejects the idea of giving money to a Shem-like beggar.

He takes the form of a learned professor, refuting the time-space theories of Winestain (Einstein) and declaring that reality should be understood in terms of space. As usual, Shaun represents space and Shem represents time],The beggar’s/Shem/s request for money — a “dime” — is transformed into “time,” as he reiterates the Cad asking for the time. The Shemish theory of “Time-space” is rendered as “dime-cash,” and it is refuted and replaced by Shaun’s “cash-cash” theories, which valorize space. This cash-cash conception is Shaun’s understanding of reality as a zero-sum game, which perfectly explains why he’s not willing to part with his money.

The professor gives a very learned lecture and refutes the positions of other professors (who are versions of Shem). But because he says that his lectures may be beyond the understanding of his “muddlecrass pupils” (middle class), he will explain it again as a parable.

The Mookse and the Gripes!

In this bizarro version of Aesop’s Fox and the Grapes, the Gripes annoys the Mookse by asking the time, and the two of them fight while failing to notice the cloud girl, Nuvoletta, who wants to gain their attention but is unable. Two washerwomen (anticipations of the ones from I.8) come and carry away the angry brothers, leaving only a stem (Shem) and stone (Shaun) (in anticipation of the washerwomen turning into a stem and a stone at the end of I.8). Left alone, Nuvoletta falls as a raindrop into the river (in anticipation of the ending of Finnegans Wake in IV.1).

In broad terms, the Mookse corresponds to Shaun and England, and the Gripes to Shem and Ireland. But the Mookse is also the Roman Catholic Church and Pope Adrian (the first English pope, I believe), and he’s Henry II, who was authorized by Adrian’s Papal Bull Laudibiliter to invade Ireland. The Gripes additionally represents the Irish Church (which had more mystical, druidical elements) and the Eastern Orthodox Church in its schism with the West.

There are many references to this history and theology layered throughout the parable.

I won’t go line by line through the story, but I’ll give some highlights:

Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast ere wohned a Mookse.

In the very first line, Joyce is already parodying Portrait of the Artist, which begins, “Once upon a time, and a very good time it was….”

He establishes that the Mookse corresponds to Shaun and space. 

“Wohned” could be was, wandered (wend), went, or lived (from a German verb that looks like that word)

The onesomeness wast alltolonely, archunsitslike, broady oval, and a Mookse he would a walking go

He’s lonesome all by his onesome. It’s bloody awful, his brooding in his space world of geometric shapes. So off he goes (with a reference to the song A Frog He Would a Wooing Go).

There’s then a paragraph description of how he prepares himself (including that he “vaticanated his ears”). He set out to “see how badness was badness in the weirdest of all pensible ways.”

That’s business is business, bygones are bygones, boys will be boys…and a play on Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds.”

He had not walked over a pentiadpair of parsecs from his azylium when at the turning of the Shinshone Lanteran near Saint Bowery’s-without-his-Walls he came […] upon the most unconsciously boggylooking stream he ever locked his eyes with. […] It looked little and it smelt of brown and it thought in narrows and it talked showshallow. And as it rinn it dribbled like any lively purliteasy: My, my, my! Me and me! Little down dream don’t I love thee!

This stream is a young version of ALP (any lively purliteasey), or Issy. 

It rises out of the Colliens (from a French word for “hill” and Irish slang for girl, Colleen), and calls itself Ninon, which the annotations tell me was the name of a seventeenth-century courtesan, in addition to the Greek word for “baby” and “doll” (and it sounds like a Greek word meaning ever present, which the female principle is).

It runs. It rinns, anticipating the rain that will end the parable. Rinse, washing everything away, like the washerwomen do at the end.

(Frivolous note: “parsecs,” made famous by Han Solo’s line in Star Wars, is indeed a measure of distance, not time; at some future point, I will have to post about my only-semi-serious theory that James Joyce is responsible for Star Wars)

The characters meet:

And, I declare, what was there on the yonder bank of the stream that would be a river, parched on a limb of the olum, bolt downright, but the Gripes? And no doubt he was fit to be dried for why had he not been having the juice of his times?

[…]

His pips had been neatly all drowned on him; his polps were charging odours every older minute; he was quickly for getting the dresser’s desdaign on the flyleaf of his frons; and he was quietly for giving the bailiff’s distrain on to the bulkside of his cul de Pompe. In all his specious heavings, as be lived by Optimus Maximus, the Mookse had never seen his Dubville brooder-on-low so nigh to a pickle.

There’s so much to love here.

“Bolt downright” — Shem is always down on his luck, enough to overturn the standard phrase “bolt upright.” It also, of course, recalls lightning bolt, the fall of HCE, which is the cause of the brothers splitting apart (Joyce elsewhere calls them “sons of a blitz”).

He’s not perched, he’s parched — always thirsty, a drunk.

He’s also grapes — why wasn’t he having the time of his life or the juice of his times? I take this to mean that the Mookse and the Shaunish narrator are observing that he is unharvested, and thus (they assume?) unhappy. To them, he is a brooder-on-low (brother-in-law), brooding over low things (like the “lowness” of Shem in I.7).

But the Gripes seems like a perfectly quaint fellow. He quickly forgets and quietly forgives. But he’s also “for getting” and “for giving.” That’s an artist for you, isn’t it? He forgives and forgets: his forgetting is a kind of gain/getting, and his forgiveness is a kind of present (perhaps not unlike ALP’s gifts distributed from her nabsack…he does write the letter that she dictates, after all)

What he “gets”/forgets is the disdain of the dresser about his unbuttoned fly; what he “gives”/forgives is the disdain of the bailiff (perhaps the one who arrests Shem for his trial in I.4?) toward the backside (bulkside) of his “cul de Pompe,” which is French for pompous ass. 

So these are his two sides, front and back. The genitals and the rear end. The two sides of Humanity. Two figures have disdain toward him: a dresser (tailor?) and a bailiff. Maybe this suggests the disdain that people in general have for artists (throughout the novel, Shem and HCE are targets of attack and scapegoats).

But the Gripes doesn’t care — he forgets about it in the act of getting it (and perhaps, as the word “desdaign” suggests, he additionally “gets” the design of the suit. Maybe “gets” life in the sense of understanding here. An artist “gets it” in ways that others don’t, and in the process he “gets” disdain). But he forgives them for their disdain in the act of giving them more of it through his pompous ass (and maybe himself feeling some disdain toward them?). He also gives “distrain” — this strain — by giving them confusing works of art that they have to strain to understand, like I’m doing now.

They stand face to face:

Adrian (that was the Mookse now’s assumptinome) stuccstill phiz-à-phiz to the Gripes in an accessit of aurignacian. But Allmookse must to Moodend much as Allrouts, austereways or wastersways, in roaming run through Room.

Pope Adrian. All good things come to an end, and all roads lead to Rome.

Is this the end of the Mookse’s good mood? “austereways or wastersways” suggests the East/West split of the Church as well as the two brothers (one austere, the other a wastrel who sways with the booze — and sways on the tree as the gripes).

The Mookse sits down on a stone (Shaun = stone, Shem = stem, tree) in a passage dense with Latin and references to popes.

They converse:

—Good appetite us, sir Mookse! How do you do it? cheeped the Gripes in a wherry whiggy maudelenian woice and the jackasses all within bawl laughed and brayed for his intentions for they knew their sly toad lowry now. I am rarumominum blessed to see you, my dear mouster. Will you not perhopes tell me everything if you are pleased, sanity? All about aulne and lithial and allsall allinall about awn and liseias? Ney?

That’s “Good hap betide us,” rendered as a bon appetite because the life, the wake of the Father, is a feast. He just wants to know the news. The Shaun narrator comments:

Think of it! O miserendissimest retempter! A Gripes!

This means a pitiful tempter. The Shaunish professor narrator seems to think it’s a great offense for a Gripes to speak so informally to a Mookse.

Miserentissimus Redemptor is the name of a 1928 Church encyclical dealing with reparation and atonement. Appropriate for the brother battle. 

It could be that the narrator, who is himself a product of the dreamer/HCE, has little hints of reconciliation — such as this reference to the encyclical — unintentionally breaking through his comments on the parable he’s telling.

Perhaps that is why the Shaunish narrator can only see the artist/Gripes in terms of “giving and getting” — the language of the world of space — but his words inadvertently reveal that the artist ultimately forgives and forgets, by getting and giving in ways that are unclear to someone who thinks of life as a zero-sum game.

The reply:

—Rats! bullowed the Mookse most telesphorously, the concionator, and the sissymusses and the zozzymusses in their robenhauses quailed to hear his tardeynois at all for you cannot wake a silken nouse out of a hoarse oar. Blast yourself and your anathomy infairioriboos! No, hang you for an animal rurale! I am superbly in my supremest poncif! Abase you, baldyqueens! Gather behind me, satraps! Rots!

Get behind me, Satan. A “satrap” is a subordinate ruler.

A “poncif” is French for an unoriginal, hackneyed work of art. It’s supposed to be pontiff, of course. Maybe this is one of those moments where the narrator unconsciously understands that he is an inferior artist to his brother (cf. Shaun’s “I adn’t the art” in II.3).

And then the response:

—I am till infinity obliged with you, bowed the Gripes, his whine having gone to his palpruy head. I am still always having a wish on all my extremities. By the watch, what is the time, pace?

Figure it! The pining peever! To a Mookse!

What nerve he has to ask the time to a Mookse! To an impossibly great pontiff!

So now we have confirmation that this is the fall of HCE reflected in the world of the brothers. As the Cad asked for the time, as the beggar asks for a dime, so does the Gripes.

The nerve!

By the watch = By the way

What’s the time, what’s the pace? What’s the time, what’s the place? What’s the time piece? What’s the time, please? What’s the time…peace (as in “peace out, I’m gone”? Very informal).

To the Mookse and the narrator, this is a great offense.

But unlike HCE, who stutters out a defense in response, Shaun — as is his wont — goes on the attack:

—Ask my index, mund my achilles, swell my obolum, woshup my nase serene, answered the Mookse, rapidly by turning clement, urban, eugenious and celestian in the formose of good grogory humours. Quote awhore? That is quite about what I came on my missions with my intentions laudibiliter to settle with you, barbarousse. Let thor be orlog. Let Pauline be Irene. Let you be Beeton. And let me be Los Angeles. Now measure your length. Now estimate my capacity. Well, sour? Is this space of our couple of hours too dimensional for you, temporiser? Will you give you up? Como? Fuert it?

Various versions of “talk to the hand,” mixed with references to Catholicism (the index of forbidden books, for instance). “woshup my nase serene” reminds me of the old “Up your nose with a rubber hose” from Welcome Back, Kotter. But it’s also “Worship my Nazarene!” Thus says this pope of all popes, conventional Christianity writ large.

“Quota hora” is Latin for what hour (it’s how you ask the time). The Mookse says that that’s what I came here with my Laudibiliter Bull to settle with you, mystic/Irishman/heretic. But he’s also calling him a quote whore, which an artist surely is. Or someone who quotes a whore (the muse? ALP?).

The narrator comments:

Sancta Patientia! You should have heard the voice that answered him! Culla vosellina.

For the narrator, this angry response is what passes for holy patience.

And the voice that comes in answer? What a little voice! (perhaps emanating from his cul/ass)

—I was just thinkling upon that, swees Mooksey, but, for all the rime on my raisins, if I connow make my submission, I cannos give you up, the Gripes whimpered from nethermost of his wanhope. Ishallassoboundbewilsothoutoosezit. My tumble, loudy bullocker, is my own. My velicity is too fit in one stockend. And my spetial inexshellsis the belowing things ab ove. But I will never be abler to tell Your Honoriousness (here he near lost his limb) though my corked father was bott a pseudowaiter, whose o’cloak you ware.

Rime on my raisins is “rhyme or reason,” but it’s also the frost on the testicles. Without any rhyme or reason, he will make his submission — a most Shemish gesture (reflected in his ingratiating obsequiousness in I.7). But he’s also submitting a statement. He’s actually pretty bold here, so maybe “submission” is merely anticipating what a little wimp he’ll be later in the book.

It’s interesting that Shaun asks “Will you give you(rself] up?” and he answers “I cannot give you up.”

This might hint at homoeroticism and suggest the sexual implications of both the Fall and forgiveness/Redemption. But more important here: Shem understands in a way that Shaun doesn’t how the two brothers are inextricably linked together.

He takes “Laudibiliter” and twists it into “loudy bullocker,” which is what Shaun is. My tumble (my temple), my fall, is my own. Perhaps this is the first of Shem’s mea culpas.

“My velicity is too fit in one stockend.” That could be “My velocity [from the Fall] is two feet in one second,” or “My felicity is two feet in one stocking” or “My felicity is to fit in a stocking.” These are references to two becoming one, and they might also be dirty jokes whose interpretations are best left to the reader.

And he goes on to say, though my corked father — we’re expecting that to be wine — was but a soda water, I will never be abler (as in Cain and Abel) to tell you the time. Or whose cloak you wear. Or whose time/clothing you were/wear or wage war. 

“Which cloak you wear” might mean, basically, “which conqueror of Ireland you are,” but it is also one of the many references to clothing in Finnegans Wake.

The phrase “corked father” contains at least two more jokes: Joyce’s father was from Cork, and “corked” is Irish slang for drunk (which Joyce’s father often was). Could “corked” also be “cucked” (cuckolded), which the Gripes’ father, HCE, was.

Also, “corked” is Irish slang for drunk.

So even though the Gripes’ father was a humble sodawater — implying that the Gripes is greater than this father, since the Gripes is potential wine — he can’t tell the time, or tell the identity of his attacker.

The Mookse responds, among other things in a long two paragraphs, that “I regret to proclaim that it is out of my temporal to help you from being killed by inchies, (what a thrust!), as we first met each other newwhere so airly.”

The end of that sentence recalls the Cad’s remark to HCE in I.2: “I have met with you, bird, too late, or if not, too worm and early.” Both are drawn from James Joyce’s meeting with William Butler Yeats in 1902. Yeats’ account of their meeting (quoted in Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce) indicates that the young Joyce “began to explain all his objections to everything I had ever done.” At the end of their meeting, this exchange occurs:

Presently [Joyce] got up to go, and, as he was going out, he said, “I am twenty. How old are you?” I told him, but I am afraid I said I was a year younger than I am. He said with a sigh, “I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old.”

The Cad and the Mookse both can represent a son (young man, young artist) confronting the father (older man, older artist). Joyce variously identifies himself with both the Cad and HCE, both Shaun and Shem. Here Comes Everybody, and here come all the sides to each individual person, each of us “more mob than man.”

The narrator parenthetically comments, “(Poor little sowsieved subsquashed Gripes! I begin to feel contemption for him!)”

Compassion and contempt at once.

The Mookse continues, saying among other things:

I can seen from my holeydome what it is to be wholly sane. Unionjok and be joined to yok! Parysis, tu sais, crucycrooks, belongs to him who parises himself. And there I must leave you subject for the pressing.

The Act of Union, 1800, made Ireland officially a part of the UK. 

Praise belongs to him who praises himself. But also parisos (Greek for equality), paresis (incomplete paralysis), or Paris. Or they belong to him who perishes himself.

I take this to be another example of the Mookse/narrator being consciously arrogant but subconsciously full of deep wisdom. He’s trying to praise himself and assert himself as the superior of the Gripes, but his words suggest, among other things, that self-effacement balanced with self confidence forms the basis of recognizing a kind of equality with others (since all of us are equally manifestations of the universe, stories that we, and/or the universe, are telling).

The Mookse takes out all of his tomes and uses his church lore to prove his superiority to the Gripes. And now, my favorite paragraph in this fable:

While that Mooksius with preprocession and with proprecession, duplicitly and diplussedly, was promulgating ipsofacts and sadcontras this raskolly Gripos he had allbust seceded in monophysicking his illsobordunates. But asawfulas he had caught his base semenoyous sarchnaktiers to combuccinate upon the silipses of his aspillouts and the acheporeoozers of his haggyown pneumax to synerethetise with the breadchestviousness of his sweeatovular ducose sofarfully the loggerthuds of his sakellaries were fond at variance with the synodals of his somepooliom and his babskissed nepogreasymost got the hoof from his philioquus.

Joyce really packed that paragraph with references to all sorts of obscure heresies and church doctrines, to the point that it is practically incomprehensible. Monophysitism is the heresy that Christ has one nature (divine), instead of being both divine and human. So the Gripes had almost succeeding in getting his church bodies to agree to that. But…thanks to a whoolllle bunch of doctrines about the Holy Spirit, he was defeated by the filioque controversy (“philioquus”). Filioque is Latin for “and by the Son,” and it’s a clause inserted into the Creed that was accepted by the Roman Church (but it was rejected by the Eastern Church). Basically, it’s an argument over whether the Holy Spirit comes from God the Father alone or from both the Father and the Son.

The Gripes “got the hoof” (Was considered the devil? Got kicked out or excommunicated?) from this controversy.

They yell at each other:

—Efter thousand yaws, O Gripes con my sheepskins, yow will be belined to the world, enscayed Mookse the pius.

—Ofter thousand yores, amsered Gripes the gregary, be the goat of MacHammud’s, yours may be still, O Mookse, more botheared.

So the Mookse predicts the Gripes will be blind, and the Gripes predicts the Mookse will be deaf (bothered is Irish for deaf).

But that’s also, unconsciously implied by the narrator, be-lined (as in poetry — having his artistic inspiration arranged into a definite form) and both-eared (hearing with both ears, learning to listen)

They go back and forth and end with these insults:

—Unuchorn!

—Ungulant!

—Uvuloid!

—Uskybeak!

And bullfolly answered volleyball.

Horns and beaks are emblems of cuckoldry. Uskybeak suggests a drinker, from the Irish for whiskey.

“Bullfolly” is the Mookse, and his folly of a papal bull. The punching bag Gripes is the volleyball, always being pounded. Notice the words reflect each other inverted, like the brothers: bull/ball, folly/volley.

To be continued in the next post.