Finnegans Wake has a way of burrowing into the mind, and after readers have internalized enough of it, they can more easily connect it to their everyday experience. In this post, I briefly examine how the word “clipper” in everyday life can become a jumping off point for reflecting on Joyce’s literature and, ultimately, the human condition. It is as Buck Mulligan says in Ulysses: “Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.” Mulligan is, of course, being his usual, mocking self, but — as Joyce often reveals — a lot of Truth can be said in jest.

I was recently traveling in the Bay Area, and I downloaded an app to navigate their transit system. The app is called Clipper.

As I stared at the word on my phone, the following passage from Finnegans Wake jumped into my mind. It takes place in I.4, during the trial of Festy King, a new version of HCE who arises long after the original figure. In a lengthy paragraph on pages 86-90, King’s lawyer cross examines a witness about what he saw. The lawyer and the witness are proto-Shem and proto-Shaun figures, and by page 92, they will separate more fully into Shaun and Shem, for the first time in the novel fully recognizable as such. Before that happens, there is this exchange:

The mixer, accordingly, was bluntly broached, and in the best basel to boot, as to whether he was one of those lucky cocks for whom the audible-visible-gnosible-edible world existed. That he was only too cognitively conatively cogitabundantly sure of it because, living, loving, breathing and sleeping morphomelosophopancreates, as he most significantly did, whenever he thought he heard he saw he felt he made a bell clipperclipperclipperclipper.

The question put to the witness is whether he was someone for whom the external world exists (or perhaps the implication of the question is whether he believes in the existence of an external world). This is a famous philosophical conundrum: while it seems obvious to most people that there is an external world, our only evidence of its existence comes through our senses and is mediated by our minds. It is therefore impossible to prove that there is a world external to our senses.

Incidentally, I’ve never been much impressed by this philosophical “problem.” Questions about whether the world is “really real” — which crop up throughout the history of thought, from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to the movie The Matrix — have always struck me as kind of silly. My senses reveal a world that is apparently external to me, that is distinct from my thoughts about it, and that works on regular, consistent rules of which I appear not to be in control. Whatever the ultimate ontology of this world, it is clearly different from my thoughts and feelings, so I am fine with conventionally calling it “the external world” or “reality,” without making any claims about what it “really is,” if that’s even a sensible question. However, the mere fact that I speak of an “external world” does not mean that I deny the role of our mind in shaping our experience through the power of storytelling, as I’ve explored in a number of posts. [see, for instance, here and here]

In the scheme of Finnegans Wake, Shaun represents a naive materialism that takes for granted the existence of an external world in which there are fully separate objects, while Shem represents a mystical idealism that suggests that all things are connected (perhaps via consciousness, with all “objects” being appearances in the mind only). I take HCE to represent a fusion of these perspectives, along the lines of my own view that I sketched out in the above paragraph (that is, an apparently external world exists, and we should treat it as such, but we should also recognize that our minds constantly impose ideas upon that world in our experience and that embracing impermanence and emptiness can break down barriers that create our suffering).

In this passage, a form of Shem asks a form of Shaun whether the external world exists for him. The external world is described as four senses: audible-visible-gnosible-edible. That’s hearing, seeing, smelling (“nose-able”), tasting. “Gnosible” puns on the Greek gnosis (knowledge), which means direct knowledge and often was used to mean mystical knowledge of God. I’ve often used it to mean unmediated experience, as happens in meditation: experience that is free of the veil of discursive thought. It’s interesting that Joyce links it to the sense of smell, which has a close relationship to memory. Absent from this list is touch, but John Gordon, on his blog, usefully notes,

The omission may be in line with evolutionary theory: cellular life begins with touch; other senses follow […] Joyce’s note in Notebook VI.B.5.091: “all senses = touch”

That’s interesting: touch is primary, and the other senses emerge from it, so all of the other senses together add up to touch or are contained in touch. I’m tempted to map this idea to the Four Old Men being contained in HCE. That is, HCE is the sense of touch, and the Four Old Men emerge from him as the senses of the fallen world. Touch, however, is primary and is, perhaps, the key to redemption. There’s more to say about this, including the idea that the Four Old Men might map to Blake’s Four Zoas and their attributions to the senses (Joyce calls the Four Old Men the Four Zoans…more to come on this at a later time).

At any rate, the witness is “cognitively conatively cogitabundantly sure of it.” Cognitive obviously means having to do with thinking or being conscious; “cogitabundantly” means having an abundance of thoughts; surprisingly (to me), “conatively” is a form of the real word “conative,” which means “connected with a wish, intention, or effort to do something.” Shaun is associated with action and rationality (technically reductive and short-sighted rationalism), so these are all appropriate words for him.

Why is he so sure of it? Because “living, loving, breathing and sleeping morphomelosophopancreates, as he most significantly did, whenever he thought he heard he saw he felt he made a bell clipperclipperclipperclipper.”

Let’s take the first part first: the -ing phrase that begins this section. Again, the number four: four actions are given to denote experience in the external world. He engages in these actions “morphomelosophopancreates.” A great Joycean word. Morpho = form (and also, via the god Morpheus, sleep). Melo = melody, music (it also reminds me of the Greek milo, apple — the forbidden fruit that causes the Fall [into a perception of disparate objects in an inert, entirely external universe]). Sopho = wisdom. Pan = all. There are four parts to this word before the “creates” part.

Putting that all together, it means experiencing in a way that creates all (physical) form through wisdom and music. Or creating all forms of wisdom through music. Or creating all forms of music through wisdom. Although this Shaunish character experiences an external world, he’s not quite the naive materialist Shaun we meet later: in this proto-Shaun stage, he acknowledges that he participates in the creation of the world (through the mind’s tendency to impose forms on the flux of the universe). [The idea of creating music through wisdom, and wisdom through music, also sounds like the kind of thing Joyce is doing in Finnegans Wake. As ever, artistic creation and the work of “God” are similar and perhaps identical for Joyce]

The second part: “whenever he thought he heard he saw he felt he made a bell clipperclipperclipperclipper.” I think there’s an implicit comma after the word “felt.” That is, he says whenever he thought this, he rang a bell, as if in an experiment (or a hearing test, where you press the button when you hear the sound). That is, I think grammatically the sentence is saying that he was so sure “because…he made a bell clipperclipperclipperclipper” when he sensed the external world.

There are another four components here: thinking, hearing, seeing, feeling. Smell and taste, from the phrase in the previous sentence, have been replaced by thought and touch. Perhaps the question is the lawyer’s speculation about the external world, while the answer is the witnesses’ experience of it. The word “felt” is last, implying that touch is primary. He feels something, and then sees that he felt it, and then hears that he saw it, and then thinks that he hears it…and then rings the bell.

The bell corresponds with the bell that tolls at the moment of HCE’s fall.

This section appears to be sketching out the mechanism of the Fall, the feeling and falling into ego consciousness. It is no coincidence that “felt” is the final verb here. “First we feel, then we fall,” indeed. Feeling leads to seeing and hearing (the “ineluctable” senses that absorb Stephen Dedalus in Chapter 3 of Ulysses), which leads to thought — which imposes forms on the flux and produces our ideas of the universe, which produces our idea of Selfhood, which produces desire and suffering.

It’s the Fall in a nutshell.