This post follows up on Part 1 and Part 2 by reflecting on references to the fable in other parts of Finnegans Wake.

Allusions to The Mookse and the Gripes pop up throughout Finnegans Wake. For instance, in the first chapter, when the mourners at the Wake are holding down Finnegan and coaxing him back to sleep, they tell him that everything is going on in the world of the living just as it was and that his wife is doing fine, “sewing a dream together” (as the tailor’s daughter: the tailor is another version of HCE/the Cad) (“Her hair’s as brown as ever it was!”). Among their description of ALP is a reference to the end of The Mookse and the Gripes, where Issy’s “singult tear” falls into the river:

There’ll be bluebells blowing in salty sepulchres the night she signs her final tear. Zee End.

In I.4, during Festy King’s trial, there is a cross-examination of a witness to King’s/HCE’s crime (an interrogation that functions as a version of the brother battle and an anticipation of the questioning of Yawn in III.3). The witness alleges that Hyacinth O’Donnell (HCE) attacked “another two of the old kings” (the two sons) for a variety of reasons, including that

they were creepfoxed andt grousuppers over a nippy in a noveletta

(The Ondt and the Gracehoper — the other of the Aesop parodies, which appears in III.1 — is referenced in this line as well)

And when HCE is verbally abused by a visitor from America who is upset that something has been stolen from him (perhaps a jacket or sweater of lambswool), the man yells insults at HCE through the door of his house/coffin (Stonehenge), where he has been locked. The narrator describes this aggressive fellow (a version of the Cad) as speaking in

mooxed metaphores

This reference suggests that the Mookse/Shaun is aligned with the Cad, especially in his more aggressive manifestations. In the highest sense, of course, both Shem and Shaun inhere in both HCE and the Cad, since all of them are aspects of one person (the dreamer, who functions as a representative of humanity as a whole). But as the two separate out (and cease to be “sysentangled,” as I.6 puts it), the extroverted side (Shaun) becomes more aggressive and confrontational while the introverted side (Shem) becomes more obsequious and retreats.

One of the more interesting, and less obvious, references to the Mookse and the Gripes is when Nuvoletta shows up during the first brother battle between proto-Shem and proto-Shaun depicted in the long paragraph that begins on page 81. I’ve already discussed this scene here. The moment in which the Cloud Girl appears is when the two halt their combat and begin to reconcile:

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 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 “Girl Cloud Pensive flout[ing] above them” is the equivalent of Nuvoletta looking down upon the quarreling Mookse and Gripes.

This early iteration of the Brother Battle is somewhat like a blueprint for the Mookse and the Gripes, establishing a pattern in the world of the Father/HCE that is reiterated in the world of the children. Under this way of looking at the novel (and history), the children re-enact (in the external world) the quarrel of the Father’s warring sides (his internal world) until they finally reconcile in II.3 and merge into a new HCE to repeat the cycle all over again. The female principle (ALP/Issy) breaks apart the pieces of HCE and restores them by inspiring art. Hence, the references in all these various stories to the ALP/Issy figures of the Cad’s wife, the Cloud Girl, and Nuvoletta.

But even this way of looking at the novel is fairly linear, and there is another way to regard the book. As I’ve suggested, one can see ALP as the force that enables us to turn our gaze at reality and to regard it differently. Under this way of looking at the novel (and history), these events — HCE and the Cad, the proto-Brothers battle, and the Mookse and the Gripes — aren’t even fully separate. They’re different ways of looking at the same event, which is the Fall (which is simultaneously the Redemption, if we could only shift our eyes again differently).

All of history is happening at once — “one present tense integument,” as it is described in I.7 through the lens of Shem’s/Joyce’s art. Each moment, each episode, contains all of the others, as if they were nesting dolls. Every way of turning our eyes at reality — every influence of ALP — unlocks a different layer.

Finnegans Wake is, in a sense, training us to “read” its text — and, by extension, reality — in unusual ways that shake us out of our normal patterns of thought, where we regard our default way of looking at the world, the stories we tell ourselves, as essences.

Each iteration or layer of the Wake‘s narrative speaks to different aspects of the human experience. While the battle of proto-Shem and proto-Shaun shows us the sides of HCE beginning to separate and therefore contains the seeds of Redemption (the image of the Cloud Girl portending their cutting each other some slack and forming a “torgantruce”), the Mookse and the Gripes shows the process of separation when it has gone further along: there, Nuvoletta can only watch helplessly as the brothers argue themselves into a stalemate until they are finally carried away by the female principle and converted into stem and stone — solidified in their Selfhood until the later reconciliation of II.3. Even then, however, little moments in the Mookse and the Gripes remind us of the potential for redemption, from the reference to Miserentissimus Redemptor to HCE’s umbrella/phallus/wholeness being hinted at in the words Par la pluie! (which sounds like parapluie, umbrella) [a redemptive unity underlying the flooding rain of the fallen world].

Everywhere in Finnegans Wake we are asked to turn our eyes differently to discover the universe in each moment. We find not only, as Blake wrote, a world in a grain of sand, but a world of words — a “waast wizzard all of whirlworlds,” I.1 — where every grain, every word, every story, every moment, reflects all others. It is not unlike the Net of Indra in Hinduism or the Buddhist idea of mutual co-arising (that all aspects of the universe contain all other aspects). Acquiring the ability to perceive this state of things — the ability to break out of our small “roomwhorled” (I.4) and turn our eyes differently toward reality, to shed the clothing of the particular story of ourselves that we are telling — enables us to narrate our story of ourselves differently, to recognize our shared humanity with others, and to cut others some slack — to offer them a “torgantruce” beyond the zero-sum game that we too often create for ourselves.