This post looks at the recurrence of telescopes in Finnegans Wake.

The first appearance is in the Willingdone (Wellington) scene in I.1:

This is big Willingdone mormorial tallowscoop Wounderworker obscides on the flanks of the jinnies.

I’m imagining this telescope to resemble a looking glass a general would use on a battlefield.

I recall my surprise when I finally learned what “Wounderworker” references. In my first reads of this scene, my first few times through the novel, I had never really registered that word before. Is that the name of his telescope? It suggests that it is a thing that works wounds…so, a looking glass on the battlefield certainly enables a military commander to work wounds more effectively. 

But no — this is specifically a reference to “Wonder Worker,” a real product sold at the turn of the century that Leopold Bloom recalls an advertisement of in Ulysses.

It is a…relief for “rectal distress.” It is a tube that you are to insert in your anus for the purpose of relieving gas and hemorrhoids, and it was apparently touted as a wonderous cure all with almost talismanic properties.

This page contains more information about it, including an image of this device.

Notice also that the telescope is rendered as the word “tallowscoop” — tallow is animal fat that is used to make candles, to cook, and similar uses. A scoop of tallow.

I interpret this to mean that the telescope in question is the human body itself, our fatty, fleshy animal bodies. Our body is an instrument to observe the universe through our senses. We are the universe manifested into a form through which it may observe itself. That is, we are a living telescope, an instrument for engaging with life.

Also, like everything else remotely phallic in this book, this telescope refers especially to a specific part of the body, one that is useful for “knowing” the universe in an intimate sense (Biblically, if you will). Note that this term does not have to refer to a literal penis but to the sexual energies that run through both male and female bodies.

There’s a lot that one could do with the concept of the body — and the phallus, in both its literal and symbolic meanings — as simultaneously a “wonder worker” and a “wound worker.” Once again, it refers to the Fall and the Redemption, both contained in one word. It’s the idea of the Fortunate Fall: the fallen world, seen properly, is a source of endless joy.

*

Later, in I.6 (the quiz chapter), one of the questions is about the dream landscape itself. Basically, it asks if a person was tired after a long day and entered a state of suspended animation in sleep (“suspensive exanimation”), and he saw the panorama of the dream state, then “what would that fargazer seem to seemself to seem seeming of, dimm it all?”

“Answer: A Collideorscape.”

A kaleidoscope is sort of like a telescope, and this particular kaleidoscope — a dreamscape with opportunities both to collide with others and to escape — is clearly Finnegans Wake itself.

I take this to be equivalent to the Willingdone’s “tallowscoop.”

The body — and literature properly understood — are both tools for seeing the glories of the universe clearly. Maybe the two of them paired together are like the union of Shaun-Shem impulses.

Both Shaun and Shem have their fallen versions of this telescope.

Shaun, as the professor in I.6, talks about his “faroscope of television,” an instrument appropriate to his focus on space and the physical, zero-sum universe.

He draws on another learned professor here to support his contention:

though, as he says: ‘by Allswill’ the inception and the descent and the endswell of Man is temporarily wrapped in obscenity, looking through at these accidents with the faroscope of television, (this nightlife instrument needs still some subtractional betterment in the readjustment of the more refrangible angles to the squeals of his hypothesis on the outer tin sides), I can easily believe heartily in my own most spacious immensity as my ownhouse and microbemost cosm when I am reassured by ratio that the cube of my volumes is to the surfaces of their subjects as the sphericity of these globes (I am very pressing for a parliamentary motion this term which, under my guidance, would establish the deleteriousness of decorousness in the morbidisation of the modern mandaboutwoman type) is to the feracity of Fairynelly’s vacuum.

He admits that the instrument needs to be improved, but he says that it assures him of his own greatness (spatial immensity). 

[This parts about the “sphericity of these globes” and the “feracity of Fairynelly’s vacuum” appear to be dirty jokes, which I will leave to each reader’s ingenium to decode…talk about “temporarily wrapped in obscenity”! I think the reference to All’s Well that Ends Well — Allswill, the will of all/God, and endswell, the end/goal of, um, “swelling” — means that, to the Shaun type, as long as you are great in the external world, a victor in the zero-sum game, the ends justify the means. Buried under his attitude, however, is the truth that the dreamer ultimately knows but is difficult to remember in the thick of the dream of life: all is ultimately well]

[The last clause above requires a little further explication: from the perspective of Zen Buddhism, all problems (and thus all suffering) are products of the mind’s tendency to label things, attribute stable essences to “things,” and grasp for them — yearning for some kind of permanence in the flux of Becoming. In the practice of meditation, when one makes full contact with the Moment of experience, accepting all aspects of the Moment and relinquishing the rational constructs of the mind — in that Moment, one perceives clearly that one is without problems, that all is flux and all is well. One sees directly that the All’s Will ends well and is swell. Every Moment cannot be but what it is. It is difficult to describe this kind of experience properly to someone who has no direct knowledge of it.]

Shem, for his part, actually has a telescope, spelled correctly!

only once (dia dose Finnados!) [Shem] did take a tompip peepestrella throug a threedraw eighteen hawkspower durdicky telescope, luminous to larbourd only like the lamps in Nassaustrass, out of his westernmost keyhole, spitting at the impenetrablum wetter, (and it was porcoghastly that outumn) with an eachway hope in his shivering soul, as he prayed to the cloud Incertitude, of finding out for himself, on akkount of all the kules in Kroukaparka or oving to all the kodseoggs in Kalatavala, whether true conciliation was forging ahead or falling back after the celestious intemperance and, for Duvvelsache, why, with his see me see and his my see a corves and his frokerfoskerfuskar layen loves in meeingseeing, he got the charm of his optical life when he found himself (hic sunt lennones!) at pointblank range blinking down the barrel of an irregular revolver of the bulldog with a purpose pattern, handled by an unknown quarreler who, supposedly, had been told off to shade and shoot shy Shem should the shit show his shiny shnout out awhile to look facts in their face before being hosed and creased (uprip and jack him!) by six or a dozen of the gayboys.

So the telescope he looks through becomes the barrel of a gun held by an attacker (in a parallel to HCE being accosted by a man with a gun in one of those tellings in I.3).

The telescope is “threedraw eighteen hawkspower” — it’s Ulysses, which has 18 chapters broken into 3 sections.

I wrote about this when explaining the Shem the Penman chapter: through literature, Shem tries to work out whether the “true conciliation” consists in looking forward or backward in time. Do we obsess over the past and fetishize the wound? Or do we look forward to an imaginary future when all will magically be better? But he’s not using his instrument in the correct manner because both of those options are not satisfying. Each one is a kind of grasping, a refusal to accept the flux of the Moment. The answer is found neither in thoughts of the past nor in thoughts of the future, for the answer is not a thought: the Redemption is found in this Moment here, in a Moment that contains the Fall at the same time, “one present tense integument” of the art of Finnegans Wake. The Fall contains the Redemption and the Redemption contains the Fall. The Wounding contains the Wonder and the Wonder contains the Wounding. Shem can’t see this yet.

The true telescope, I would suggest, is a union of HCE’s body and literature properly understood. Shaun looks to the body, and Shem looks to literature: both have an incomplete vision.

*

Chapter II.2 brings all of this to a head.

During the math problem, when Shem is showing Shaun how to draw the mother’s private parts, here’s something he says briefly as they draw the circles:

One of the most murmurable loose carollaries ever Ellis threw his cookingclass. 

Putting aside the Lewis Carroll reference for a moment — a topic worthy of its own future post! — this sentence is describing a looking glass, like that thing a pirate would have. Here, it’s the looking glass of an explorer seeking to discover new land (Henry Ellis — I thought perhaps of Ellis Island fame, but no — that island is named after someone else).

Shem gives instructions to draw:

With Olaf as centrum and Olaf’s lambtail for his spokesman [that is, taking point A as the center and line AL as the radius…see the diagram on 293] circumscript a cyclone. Allow ter! Hoop! As round as the calf of an egg! O, dear me! O, dear me now! Another grand discobely! 

The looking glass — a means of discovery or “discobely” — is round like an egg (Humpty Dumpty, the Fall) and a calf (the legs of the girls in the Park, the Fall). The circles they’re drawing are eggs, calves, and looking glasses. [Like cracking eggs — the Fall is a cooking class, looking glass]

And then Shem later recalls his mother:

The mystery repeats itself todate as our callback mother Gaudyanna, that was daughter to a tanner, used to sing, as I think, now and then consinuously over her possetpot […] In effect, I remumble, from the yules gone by, purr lil murrerof myhind, so she used indeed. When she give me the Sundaclouths she hung up for Tate and Comyng and snuffed out the ghost in the candle at his old game of haunt the sleepper. Faithful departed. When I’m dreaming back like that I begins to see we’re only all telescopes. 

Through memory that unlocks the endless repetition of the self-similar in history, Shem can appreciate that what we are — what all of us ultimately are — are telescopes, instruments that allow us to behold the universe through our senses.

[She used to sing “consinuously,” great pun, over her “possetpot” — a bit of the Prankquean’s riddle there]

Earlier in that chapter, there is a very dense paragraph, and Shem’s marginal comment is this:

Two makes a wing at the macroscope telluspeep.

Telluspeep = telescope. 

We peep and we tell. On one level, this is connected back to the boys watching in the Park.

[This topic is also worthy of a whole other post: the Wake is obsessed with “watching” — to the point that I am actually wondering if James Joyce saw something traumatizing as a boy, and whether his book is an attempt to work through it somehow by talking about it in coded ways]

But on another level, our telescope/senses let us peep at the universe, and we “tell” about it in our art. This is parallel to peeping on HCE and telling rumors about him.

What is art but gossiping about the scandalous nature of Humanity (HCE, Here Comes Everybody)?

[In I.2, the Cad’s wife whispers the “gossiple” — a gospel consisting of gossip — into the ear of a priest. HCE’s Fall is the shame that underlies all religion and art]

Shaun’s marginal comment is, as ever, far more pompous:

FROM CENOGENETIC DICHOTOMY THROUGH DIAGONISTIC CONCILIANCE TO DYNASTIC CONTINUITY.

[All of his marginal comments are in all caps]

“Cenogenetic” means a variation in members of a species not present in ancestors.

Dichotomy and cenogenetics — the breaking apart of the past (HCE) into a present that consists of new variations on the old story (Shem and Shaun) — leads to reconciliation and finally to dynastic continuity…the crowning of a new king to continue the line, a new HCE made up of the recombination of his sons. 

The king is dead; long live the king. The story of every human generation. The children growing up to re-enact the parents, with continuous variations but the same eternal story playing through them.

Not a microscope but a macroscope — seeing far into the whole.

In its truest, highest sense, this what the telescope is about. It is our senses allowing us to observe the universe — allowing the universe to observe itself through us — but by refining this instrument, we get a broad view of life where can understand how the whole thing is the “Seim anew,” always and ever, how the “true conciliation” is always in our reach — is right here in this moment, along with all of history — once we properly calibrate this instrument and cease to reach after our belief in our own greatness (Shaun), or look to an imaginary past or future for our redemption (Shem).

Or, y’know, it’s just a dirty joke.