This post looks at a connection between a passage in I.8 and the very beginning and end of Finnegans Wake.

In I.8, the washer women are gossiping about ALP’s first lover, and they say she herself hardly knew who her first was. One of them describes a lover who sounds just like HCE (they all do — he’s every man and every person). There is a sentence here talking about ALP as a young woman:

She was just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing then, sauntering, by silvamoonlake and he was a heavy trudging lurching lieabroad of a Curraghman, making his hay for whose sun to shine on, as tough as the oaktrees (peats be with them!) used to rustle that time down by the dykes of killing Kildare, for forstfellfoss with a plash across her.

When I read the bolded part on my second or third time through the text, I realized that I had heard it before. It’s from the next-to-last page of the entire book, during ALP’s monologue at the end of her life, thinking of the next (younger) ALP who will replace her (Issy):

Just a whisk brisk sly spry spink spank sprint of a thing theresomere, saultering.

There are seven adjectives in both (corresponding to, among other things, the seven colors of the rainbow, the seven rainbow girls who are her aspects, the seven chakras or energy centers of the body)

The washer women think back to ALP as a young woman, and the old ALP looks forward to the next one, who *is* her own young self. It’s brain bending in the best ways.

I really like the word forstfellfoss. I read it as “forest fell for us” (HCE is compared to a tree in many passages, our sovereign “being stalk”). But it also read to me as “force felled us” (the force of humanity’s lust or propensity to sin?).

And then I thought about how “os” is Latin for bone, suggesting the sexual nature of the offense in the Park, or just the flesh and bone reality of the Fall.

Then I went to the annotations: fossefald is the Danish word for “waterfall,” and a -foss ending is the Norwegian ending given to waterfalls. That’s interesting — I initially took it to be a masculine word, but it’s denoting ALP as a waterfall with a “plash” (which is not only a splash but a word that means puddle).

Putting it all together, it means something like the waterfall that contains the force that felled us, that felled the forest by means of bone, but that also gives off a rainbow in its mist, the sign of redemption and resurrection.

“Peats be with them”/Peace be with them reminds me of the very beginning of the book:

The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay.

And speaking of the beginning of the book, that same passage in I.8 recalled something else from the novel’s opening. The other washer woman says that no, ALP’s first lover was ages before that. And the first woman asks garbled versions of three questions: What? Is it so? Are you sure?

Wasut? Izod? Are you sarthin suir?

I saw that, and I immediately thought of a bit on the second page of the novel:

But was iz? Iseut? Ere were sewers?

It especially reminded me of this because of the question marks. From Campbell and Robinson’s book, I first learned years ago that Joyce introduced the question marks to those three questions on the second page when he corrected the first printed version.

I always wondered why he did that. Now I know one reason: to make this part of I.8 better echo the opening. 

Iseult is the woman that Tristan steals from King Mark (“Three quarks for Muster Mark!” etc.) “Ere were sewers?” suggests the scatalogical nature of the offense in the Park. But Tindall’s guide pointed out that “soeurs” is French for “sisters” (the girls in the Park, young ALP, Iseult).

Oh, and just to complete the references to the beginning of the book, I.8 mentions

her daphdaph teasesong petrock.

The first full paragraph of the book announces that a whole bunch of things have not yet happened. Not yet has “avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick.”

So anyway, the million dollar question: why are there references to the very beginning and end of the book here?

Because this paragraph in I.8 is about ALP’s (love) life, her history with lovers, who are all forms of HCE, and she frames this book as the beginning and end, the alpha and omega (Alph is Coleridge’s river in Kubla Khan, corresponding to Joyce’s riverrun).

She’s the universe, the woman whose body is made of stars. The universe embraces all of us — Here Comes Everybody — and at the beginning and end of all things, in this endless cycle of life that continuously “roturns,” we are left with the universe of which we are part, that will gather us into her and keep rolling right along, running like the river but “lapping as though her heart was brook.”