This post briefly discusses the re-use of certain phrases in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Toward the end, I’ll address my clickbaity title. I’ll let you decide (…but the answer’s no).

In re-reading the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses — which is written like a play in which Bloom and Stephen confront visions of their subconscious anxieties — I discovered that there are a number of phrases that Joyce re-used in Finnegans Wake.

For example, Bella Cohen — the madam of the brothel they visit — tells Bloom that she will torture and beat him: “You’re in for it this time! I’ll make you remember me for the balance of your natural life.”

When I read that, I said, “Hey, that’s echoed in Finnegans Wake.” So I scrawled “FW” in the margin and I set about finding where exactly in the book I remembered the phrase. I initially felt it was from the Shem chapter, but after a little searching, I discovered it was from the Norwegian Captain episode (II.3). As the story is being told in the bar, the barkeep (HCE) tries to listen to the tavern customers gossip about the Captain (which is himself):

Recknar Jarl […] still passing the change-a-pennies, pengeypigses, a several sort of coyne in livery, pushed their whisper in his hairing […] the same to the good ind ast velut discharge after which he had exemptied more than orphan for the ballast of his nurtural life.

That last bit says he had emptied bottles (drank them or drank the empties of his customers, as he does at the end of the chapter) or exempted himself from their accusations more than often (resulting in his children being orphaned? Or himself becoming an orphan?) for the balance of his natural life, where he was nurtured and/or nurtured others.

The word “ballast” might imply that HCE is mostly dead weight on the ship of life — or, rather, that his alcoholic habits (and the associated Fall) make him little more than dead weight, instead of a nurturer.

Leopold Bloom isn’t a drunk, but his poison of choice is lust, not alcohol, and he certainly does try to exempt himself from guilt/shame for his desires. And he generally tries to avoid confronting unpleasant thoughts and situations, like when he narrowly avoids passing Blazes Boylan on the street earlier in the novel.

There are a number of intriguing parallels between Bloom and HCE. The latter’s crime of acting with “ongentilmensky immodus opposite a pair of dainty maidservants” is mirrored by Bloom’s behavior in the “Nausicaa” chapter with Gerty McDowell. That language — “ongentilmensky immodus” or ungentlemanly immodesty — appears during a part of “Circe” when J.J. O’Molloy is defending Bloom in a courtroom, claiming his client

would be the last man in the world to do anything ungentlemanly which injured modesty could object to or cast a stone at a girl

Bloom also has a memory of peeping with his father’s opera glasses on a young woman named Lotty Clarke “at her night toilette through illclosed curtains,” which again recalls HCE’s crime (the diagram in the middle of the Wake could also be the lenses of binoculars [or “bicurculars,” the text says on 295], suggesting that HCE peeped with the aid of some looking device). Indeed, the narrator of “Cyclops” reports having seen Bloom “with his cod’s eye counting up all the guts of the fish,” and HCE is describe with a cod’s eye by a washerwoman in I.8: “H.C.E. has a codfisck ee.” Bloom’s visions in “Circe” include being put on trial, like HCE, and there’s a moment when he is pursued by a crowd with bloodhounds, which recalls HCE being similarly chased in the form of a fox in I.4. The crowd follows Bloom in “hot pursuit of follow my leader,” much as the crowd led against HCE in I.2 by Hosty is drawn together by a song (“lubeen”) that is called a “fellow-me-lieder.”

There are many other verbal echoes, most of them small. Stephen Dedalus cites Swift’s remark that “one man in armour will beat ten men in their shirts,” which appears garbled in the Prankquean episode of Finnegans Wake. Bloom’s reference to “Tansy” as an aphrodisiac reminds me of the Shaunish professor of I.6 saying, “(Correspondents, by the way, will keep on asking me what is the correct garnish to serve drisheens with. Tansy Sauce. Enough).” Bloom says “I’m teapot with curiosity,” which reminds me of “Teapotty. Teapotty. Kod knows. Anything ruind. Meetingless” (from II.1).

Bloom even thinks of the Norwegian Captain in the “Calypso” chapter!

So does all this prove that Leopold Bloom is the dreamer of Finnegans Wake?

Eh. To me, this question is best answered with “who cares?”

The way I read Finnegans Wake is as the story of the Everyman, so rooting the novel in a specific person, known to the audience, would somewhat work against its universalizing tendency. Yes, Joyce believed the general is contained in the specific, but what does it add to Finnegans Wake to identify its dreamer as a specific person? What new meanings are unlocked by accepting that Bloom — or Stephen Dedalus or any other specific person — is its dreamer?

I’ve always been kind of bored by attempts to figure things out about the “real life” of the dreamer. Does he have a troubled marriage? Is he a widower? Is he divorced? Does he have three children or two or four? Is he a tavern keeper? Is he a salesman? Does he have an American cousin named Maggie? Does he know a priest named Father Michael who recently died? Is his name Bartholomew Porter? (see page 560)

Who cares? You can find “evidence” for any of the above — that is, things that are consistent with what you want to believe. But what new insights do any of these theories give us into the meaning of the text?

The beauty of Finnegans Wake is that it applies equally to a person in any and all of those circumstances, and arguably any and all circumstances at all.

Personally, I think if there has to be a “narrator” of the Wake, it’s something like language itself, or the essence of human experience, which is something that Bloom, like Stephen and like James Joyce and like each one of us, taps into.