This post reflects on the motif of looking and watching in Finnegans Wake.

I have sometimes wondered: is Finnegans Wake about some kind of traumatic thing that James Joyce saw as a boy? Did he walk in on, say, his dad doing something dirty?

The book centers on the rumors of an unnamed crime committed in Phoenix Park. It is claimed that HCE was witnessed doing whatever he was doing. The ideas of watching and being watched recur again and again in the book.

At the very end of FW I.1, when HCE is introduced to take the place of Finnegan, here’s what it says about him:

And aither he cursed and recursed and was everseen doing what your fourfootlers saw or he was never done seeing what you coolpigeons know, weep the clouds aboon for smiledown witnesses, and that’ll do now about the fairyhees and the frailyshees. 

Is he seeing or being seen? Both. He is the accused and the accuser. He is each of us, concealing our insecurities with accusations of others.

In III.3, the following exchange happens while Yawn (who was one of the boys in the Park) is being questioned about the two girls in the Park:

—Were they now? And were they watching you as watcher as well?>
—Where do you get that wash? This representation does not accord with my experience. They were watching the watched watching. Vechers all.

Vecher is the Russian word for “evening.”

The word watching sounds like washing, which recalls the washerwomen of I.8, who wash out the clothes marked by sin (alternate forms of the temptress Girls in the Park, who are forms of Issy, who is a form of ALP). The girls in the Park were watching HCE watching them…or perhaps they were watching the boys watch HCE? The word watch additionally recalls time, the Cad asking the time in I.2, so the word is linked to both the male and female aspects of the cosmos.

During the cross examination in I.4, one of the questions and answers about what happened in the Park is

The two childspies waapreesing him auza de Vologue but the renting of his rock was from the three wicked Vuncouverers Forests bent down awhits, arthou sure? Yubeti, Cumbilum comes!

The boys (or maybe the girls) are called the “child spies,” who were appraising him (or praising him or pressing him). The annotations say “eau de Cologne” — perhaps the stench of his crimes.

Vuncouverers…uncoverers…uncovering the secrets of the father.

Yubeti…yube is Japanese for night. But also, “You bet” (or just…bet). Maybe “bet” is an appropriate phrase here, given the monetary implications: the “renting of his rocks,” which recalls Christ’s death and Ragnarok, the Viking end times. Money suggests the idea of the father “tipping” the children elsewhere in the book, like colonizers “tipping” the colonized. The word “renting” additionally makes me think more specifically of the Irish renting from English landlords.

The three soldiers are bent down spying, but also bent down for a sexual reason?

This idea of cologne reminds me of all the references to smelling HCE, and the way the Park encounter is described in II.2,

with Mary Owens and Dolly Monks seesidling to edge his cropulence and Blake-Roche, Kingston and Dockrell auriscenting him from afurz

Anyway, back to peeping toms:

The four old men reflecting on the scandal in I.4:

the four of them, in Milton’s Park under lovely Father Whisperer and making her love with his stuffstuff in the languish of flowers and feeling to find was she mushymushy, and wasn’t that vely both of them, the saucicissters, a drahereen o machree!, and (peep!) meeting waters most improper (peepette!) ballround the garden, trickle trickle trickle triss, please, miman, may I go flirting? farmers gone with a groom and how they used her, mused her, licksed her and cuddled.

“Milton’s Park” is an appropriate name for it (Milton’s Paraise Lost, that other great epic about the Fall of Man). Peeping at pissing?

In II.3, young ALP is depicted as daydreaming about HCE arriving, and it reads,

O, and playing house of ivary dower of gould and gift you soil me peepat my prize

There are many references to eyes watching. Almost too many.

A pair of sycopanties with amygdaleine eyes, one old obster lumpky pumpkin and three meddlars on their slies. And that was how framm Sin fromm Son, acity arose, finfin funfun, a sitting arrows. Now tell me, tell me, tell me then!

Over and over, HCE appears with two girls and three boys (Shem, Shaun, their combined form [Cad/Tristan], plus Issy and her mirror reflection). He spies on the girls while committing some offense, like publicly masturbating or urinating or defecating (or all at once). Perhaps the girls see him. The three soldiers see all. Various lines from all around the book (especially II.3) imply that HCE had sex with some or all of these characters. These are a symbolic expression of the elemental sexual energies that are buried in all of our Unconscious minds, that underlie all civilization, every city that arose from sin/sexuality/Oedipal anxiety, erected from humanity’s creative energies, which are bound up in the erotic energies of the body. I will leave it to the reader’s interpretive skill to decipher what “sitting arrows” might mean in this context.

[It’s worth noting that the idea that any of these natural feelings are “sinful” expresses the attitude of the superego (Shaun) and/or conventional religion toward the sexual impulses. Clearly, Joyce internalized a great deal of “Catholic guilt” and anxiety over sex. He likely understood that sexuality is natural and good but struggled with attitudes that he had absorbed from his society/religion. By happenstance, I just read the other night the passage in Ulysses 14 where Stephen feels fear at the sound of thunder — just as Joyce really did — and reflects on how he had been prevented from achieving the “promised land” of salvation called “Believe-on-Me” because he had fallen in with a “certain whore” named “Bird-in-the-Hand.”

[Even though Stephen is a professed nonbeliever, there is a part of him that fears a wrathful God will condemn him for being a human being who enjoys masturbation and sex. There is a part of him that must know how silly it is to believe that, but…try telling the traumatized child inside Stephen who sat through that hellfire sermon from Portrait. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce compresses all of the sexual energies, with all of the anxiety surrounding them, guilt and shame attached to them, joy contained in them, and creativity enabled by them — he compresses them into this wild scene in Phoenix Park, where this great and traumatic crime is seen, feared to be seen, and recounted again and again for all of time]

One more, from III.3. Let’s have a recount (on the fingers):

I have it here to my fingall’s ends. This liggy piggy wanted to go to the jampot. And this leggy peggy spelt pea. And theese lucky puckers played at pooping tooletom. Ma’s da. Da’s ma. Madas. Sadam.

Here we have fingering and licking, urinating, peeping, pooping, and playing with tools.

[I can’t help but recall the classic sitcom character Tim “The Toolman” Taylor: “This is gonna need….more power!”]

There are many, many more references to watching, including Napoleon sending Wellington a message that reads, in part, “Fieldgaze thy tiny frow.” It’s supposed to sound like the German phrase for “how’s the wife,” and it’s a sly accusation that she’s unfaithful to him. But it’s written to suggest (in English) spying on her.

In that same scene (from I.1), the jinnies (the girls) laugh, “Shee, shee, shee!” That’s hee, she, si (yes), but also see (look). They are, after all, “jillous,” as the next sentence says.

The word look — and luck — shows up a lot throughout the book as well.

Just look at what pours out of the unconscious in dreams!