The Four Old Men appear throughout Finnegans Wake in a number of guises. Campbell and Robinson list some of these appearances as four judges, four winds, Four Master Annalists of Ireland, Four Waves of Ireland, Four Evangelists, four Viconian ages, and four chroniclers.

This post discusses the Four Old Men and elaborates the connection Joyce draws between them and William Blake’s Four Zoas. I consider how both sets of symbols can be attributed to four of the five senses, the fifth sense (touch) being attributed to their combination or that which underlies the four (HCE or, in Blake, Albion). My speculations are tentative and incomplete, but they may be an interesting jumping off point for future thoughts on the subject.

In I.3, Joyce calls the Four Old Men the four “Zoans.” This pun mixes Blake’s “Four Zoas” with the word “zones,” as if to say that they are places in addition to characters.

Indeed, in William Blake’s long poems, the Four Zoas are both the constituent parts of the human psyche and regions through which characters can travel (Blake is here drawing upon Milton’s innovation of making Heaven and Hell both places and psychological states; Milton’s Satan isn’t just in Hell: he carries Hell within him). The following famous illustration from Blake’s 1804 poem entitled Milton (which deals with John Milton returning from the afterlife to inspire Blake) shows “Milton’s tract” through the worlds or zones of the Four Zoas:

The image is parodied by Joyce on page 293 of Finnegans Wake:

Who are the Four Zoas? The word comes from a Greek word meaning “living creature.” They appear in the Bible in the Books of Ezekiel and Revelation, where they surround a heavenly chariot and the throne of God, respectively. In Blake’s mythology, the Four Zoas originally lived in balance and dynamic harmony (four aspects of Man) until the Fall. His poem Vala, or the Four Zoas defines these beings on the first page:

Four Mighty Ones are in every Man; a Perfect Unity

Cannot Exist. but from the Universal Brotherhood of Eden

The Universal Man. To Whom be Glory Evermore Amen

What are the Natures of those Living Creatures the Heavenly Father only

Knoweth no Individual Knoweth nor Can know in all Eternity 

We are told that Los, the prophet-poet who somewhat corresponds to Joyce’s Shem the Penman, was the “fourth immortal starry one”: before the Fall, he was the Zoa named Urthona. In his present fallen state, he uses art to attempt to redeem the world. The theme of the poem is stated on the next page when Blake asks his muse to sing

His fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity

His fall into the Generation of Decay & Death & his Regeneration by the Resurrection from the dead

In some versions of the Fall — which are told and retold at various points in Blake’s long poems, somewhat like the stories told and retold in Finnegans Wake — Urizen (who represents the human faculty of reason) attempts to take charge of the human person and imprisons Luvah (passion). Jealousy commences when Albion (the entire human person) takes Vala for himself (Vala is Luvah’s emanation/wife/female portion who represents not only passion but nature conceived as a material reality sundered from the spirit). In other versions of the Fall, Albion jealously hides away his own emanation/wife, Jerusalem, refusing to share her with God, whom he is led to deny by his Selfhood or rational Spectre. It would seem that the Fall appears different from the perspective of each character of Blake’s myth. But however the specifics are narrated, the Fall is consistently caused by rationalism, the adhering to (seemingly) reasonable ideas of conduct instead of following the Divine Imagination that leads one to create. The primary symptom of the Fall is jealousy and possessiveness in relationships, the “torments of love and jealousy.”

Next to the above lines, Blake places in the margins, “John XVII” with reference to verse 21-23, where Jesus prays,

that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

When Blake writes of the “Perfect Unity” of the “Four Mighty Ones” in each of us, the “Universal Man,” this is the sort of thing he means. The margins also contain a reference to a line from John I, which reads, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Altogether, Blake appears to interpret the Scriptures in a poetic way, describing an original unity that was broken into a fragmented fallen world ruled by supposed reason, selfishness, and jealousy. The Word made flesh is the imagination or creative impulse that has been incarnated as each of us, each person being an echo of the fallen Father, the fallen unity of all people. Blake’s imaginative poetry continues the work of (his interpretation of) the imaginative Bible.

So far, so Joycean. Blake attributes these Zoas to four senses, as well as to the four cardinal directions. His Zoas are:

Urizen (fallen form: Satan): South –> the eyes and sight (reason)

Urthona (fallen form: Los): North –> the ears and hearing (inspiration/prophecy)

Tharmas (fallen form:…also Tharmas?): West –> the tongue and taste (the physical body)

Luvah (fallen form: Orc): East –> the nostrils and smell (passion)

You can also map these correspondences to the parts of Blake’s city of art, Golgonooza, and its gates to the Four Worlds in his mythology (the name Golgonooza is perhaps derived from Golgotha, possibly blended with “zoa”…it is London as seen through the spiritual/imaginative vision, and it is the Heavenly Jerusalem itself when seen from Eternity).

The fifth sense (touch) would correspond to Albion, the universal man who is composed of the Four Zoas brought back into dynamic harmony. The “dynamic” part is important: Blake understands Eternity as perpetual creative activity, which is driven and sustained by “mental wars” (not the corporeal wars of the fallen world). Creativity comes from productive conflict and “mental fight,” which is the precise opposite of the destructive conflict most people find themselves in.

As I noted in this post, drawing on a point John Gordon makes on his blog, touch may have been the first sense to evolve. Therefore, we could consider touch to correspond to primordial unity and the other four senses to represent ways of mapping the world that arose after the Fall from that unity.

There are obvious similarities between Joyce’s and Blake’s ideas, several of which I have sketched out in this blog. See, for instance, this post on the role of Blakean contraries in Finnegans Wake.

Joyce, however, does not necessarily have precise correspondences for his four figures, as Blake does. In Finnegans Wake, the Four Old Men serve a different narrative purpose than Blake’s Four Zoas do in his long poems. The Four Old Men are the remnants of earlier incarnations of HCE, observing the Eternal Story continue to play out with new players. Here is how Campbell and Robinson describe them:

They themselves, in younger days, were protagonists of the great life-roles which they can now only regard and review. Life once stirred in them and shaped them; but it has moved on, so that they now are but cast-off shells. Crotchety, brittle crystallizations out of the past, they have only to await disintegration. Meanwhile, however, they sit in judgment over the living present.

The Four Old Men appear most prominently in II.4, the chapter in which these Old Men — in the form of seagulls — watch the love making of Tristan and Isolde, which is the cuckolding of King Mark (HCE). As ever, Finnegans Wake bends our brains: the Four Old Men were each an HCE in the past (in a previous cycle), which means that they once also (before they were HCE) were a Tristan who cuckolded an even older HCE. And now they observe the current HCE dead (or dead drunk, as at the end of II.3), replaced by a new Tristan who will grow into a new HCE so that the cycle can continue. That dead/drunk/cuckolded HCE will join their ranks and become another of the Four Old Men. And on the wheel of existence turns.

Something like that. I suppose for this arrangement to be truly circular, one of the Old Men would have to incarnate as the next Cad/Tristan. I’ll bet you we could find some evidence of this in the text (the Four Old Men are associated with an HCE/Cad-like figure called Lally, who might very well be an Old Man shifting into the role of the new HCE’s son….).

In Chapter II.4, the Old Men express a deep longing for the past, recalling as they witness the lovemaking how *they* used to kiss Isolde like that:

And so there they were, with their palms in their hands, like the pulchrum’s proculs, spraining their ears, luistening and listening to the oceans of kissening, with their eyes glistening, all the four, when he was kiddling and cuddling and bunnyhugging scrumptious his colleen bawn and dinkum belle […] they all four remembored who made the world and how they used to be at that time in the vulgar ear cuddling and kiddling her

This chapter is repetitious, full of repeated phrases that circle the same subjects repeatedly. They “remembored” because they are bored — or we, the readers, grow bored — with their endless recollections of the same. I’m reminded a bit of the wastrel in the Dubliners story “An Encounter,” the old pervert who talks to the boys endlessly about young boys with sweethearts and about punishing boys for having sweethearts:

He gave me the impression that he was repeating something which he had learned by heart or that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit. […]  He repeated his phrases over and over again, varying them and surrounding them with his monotonous voice.

The Four Old Men appear something like hungry ghosts at the banquet of life, “their mouths making water” as they watch the couple. They are salivating with desire, and the phrase “making water” recalls the scandalous urination in the Park (whether HCE peeped at urinating girls or whether he urinated himself as part of his sin). Their peeping on Tristan and Isolde is a variant of HCE’s crime of peeping at the girls:

with their mouths watering, all the four, the old connubial men of the sea, yambing around with their old pantometer, in duckasaloppics, Luke and Johnny MacDougall and all wishening for anything at all of the bygone times, the wald times and the fald times and the hempty times and the dempty times, for a cup of kindness yet, for four farback tumblerfuls of woman squash, with them, all four, listening and spraining their ears for the millennium and all their mouths making water.

The four parts of this short chapter are attributed to each of the Four Old Men, who are here called by the names of the Gospel authors. I had the idea that it might be possible to go through these sections and figure out how to map them to Blake’s Zoas, or at least to the four senses.

But now that I sit down to do it, I fear this would be a fool’s errand because it’s not clear that each one should be attributed to a single sense.

If I had to assign them to senses, however, I would attribute Mark (the second Old Man discussed in the chapter) to hearing: he recalls his time in university, learning

the spirit of nature as difinely developed in time by psadatepholomy, the past and present […] and present and absent and past and present and perfect arma virumque romano.

The word “psadatepholomy” is glossed by fweet.org as a reference to pseudotelephony, a pseudophone being a device whereby sounds are transposed from one ear to the other. If that’s difficult to visualize, here’s an image I found online:

So if this poor guy had someone yammering on his right side, he would hear it in his left ear, and vice versa.

In the passage above, “psadatepholomy”/pseudotelephony probably refers to the way that the past, present, and future are to some degree interchangeable in Finnegans Wake since they all tell the same Eternal Story (which is told through the whispers of gossip in the ear, which fells HCE like the ear poison felled Hamlet’s father). By playing out this story, the spirit of nature develops itself through time and becomes defined/finite/limited (“difinely”). [I am reminded of how, in I.4, Shem and Shaun “evolved by a onesame power of nature or of spirit, iste, as the sole condition and means of its himundher manifestation and polarised for reunion by the symphysis of their antipathies”: I think it is this process that is being referred to here. There are further comparisons to ALP’s infinity shrinking into definite forms at the end of the math problem in II.2. The process is likely a reference to Hegel’s philosophy, which held that history is in unfolding of the spirit in matter).

Maybe the weird spelling “psadatepholomy” suggests that the “date” (as in, calendar date, any given day) is boloney (nonsense, since all time is compressed into each moment), or is an occasion for HCE’s crime or felony/pholomy, or that any given day is one in which HCE’s fall occurs, rendering him sedate/psadate (at a sad date) or…as if he had a lobotomy? I dunno, I’m just playing with words and ideas suggested by the spellings and the sounds.

Matthew (the fourth one discussed in the chapter) would correspond to taste because there is a reference to the feast at the Wake of Finnegan: “with his can of tea and a purse of alfred cakes from Anne Lynch and two cuts of Shackleton’s brown loaf and dilisk […] All devoured by active parlourmen, laudabiliter.” [Here, the Fall is associated with the Papal Bull Laudabiliter, which authorized England’s invasion of Ireland (with a connection drawn between papal bulls and acts of parliament). See my posts on “The Mookse and the Gripes,” an episode that serves partially as a retelling of this invasion, with the Mookse playing the role of Pope Adrian and Henry II]

Sight, I suppose I would attribute to John (the first one discussed), only because that section mentions, “they had their fathomglasses to find out all the fathoms ,” but this applies to all of the Old Men. Also, the Gospel of John is the only one to mention the story of Christ healing a blind man by putting mud on his eyes.

That leaves Luke to be attributed to the sense of smell, perhaps because his section mentions how someone named Marcus Bowandcoat “forgot himself, making wind and water, and made a Neptune’s mess of all of himself,” which is a restatement of HCE’s scatalogical crime in the Park, which must have smelled bad. But then again, this messy, noisome fate is given to Mark in Luke’s section. The name Luke (which sounds like “look”) would connect more easily to eyesight, but I can’t find any specific references to eyesight in his section.

At the end of the day, I don’t think these (very) tentative correspondences I’m creating mean much because I can’t see what they would change about an interpretation of the Wake. The Four Old Men appear again prominently in III.3, where they interrogate the sleeping Yawn, drawing out of him the voices of many other characters from the novel. I wonder if my tentative correspondences would add anything to a reading of that chapter, though I remain skeptical because it’s difficult to figure out in that chapter which Old Man is speaking at any given time. The other place they appear is III.4, where they observe the lovemaking of HCE and ALP (which is the same scene as the Tristan/Isolde scene, just observed differently — since everything in Finnegans Wake depends on how you look at it).

But if I were to try to connect the Old Men to Blake’s Zoas, it would look something like this:

Matthew –> taste (Tharmas, the West)

Mark –> hearing (Urthona, the North)

Luke –> smell (Luvah, the East)

John –> sight (Urizen, the South)

Do these correspondences reveal anything about Finnegans Wake or any of Blake’s long poems? Or are they just an exercise in pointless correspondence (which, to be fair, both Joyce and Blake enjoyed)? The test will be for me to keep these ideas in mind as I revisit all of these texts.

In general, though, the Four Old Men represent (among other things) how the Fall leads to the division of the senses, and that by learning to make the senses cooperate with each other (as we can do when studying Finnegans Wake), we can strive toward that unity signified by HCE.

Stay tuned for more!