I had the opportunity recently to visit the Great Jones Distilling Company in Manhattan and take a tour of their distillery. [No, they are not sponsoring this post] It was a marvelous time — an excellent tour I took with a friend — at the first distillery opened in Manhattan since prohibition (and it opened in…2021!).

The experience put me in mind of references to distilling in Finnegans Wake, which is what this post will be about.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of distilling and Finnegans Wake is the line in I.8, where one washerwoman gossips about HCE’s offense,

It was put in the newses what he did, nicies and priers, the King fierceas Humphrey, with illysus distilling, exploits and all. But toms will till.

The phrase “illicit distilling” is rendered with the word “illysus,” which recalls the novel Ulysses (in addition to the Greek river Illisus — one of this chapter’s hundreds of river references). Tindall reads this sentence as signifying that one of the crimes HCE committed was the writing of Ulysses. That is, Tindall takes HCE to represent Joyce, and the creation of the scandalous novel is one version of the scandalous crime in the Park.

However, I have always taken the “distilling” here to have been done by the three sons/soldiers, the “toms” (they are called peeping toms elsewhere). As the three tailors (or tale-ers, tale-spiners), they tell and retell the sordid story of humanity, thereby creating literature and art. Their work is to [dis]till this experience into art, just as they till the land to produce crops (another version of the dying-and-reborn fertility god that HCE represents: the seeds are buried in the earth and rise again as crops). Under this interpretation, the process of creating literature from the Fall — which is the province of the sons, especially Shem — is likened both to news reporting (the newspaper being equivalent to ALP’s Letter) and to distilling.

As I learned on my distillery tour, the term “spirits” for alcoholic drinks comes from the belief that the process extracts some kind of essence from the grains. Alcohol evaporates faster than water, so the alcohol is drawn up from the grains and then condensed back into liquid.

The most direct reference to the process of distilling I could find in the Wake occurs during the consequential brother battle paragraph that begins on page 81, which I’ve written about several times now. During the fight, one side of HCE/the dreamer speaks to the other. His interlocutor is carrying a piece of distilling equipment:

in the course of their tussle the toller man, who had opened his bully bowl to beg, said to the miner who was carrying the worm (a handy term for the portable distillery which consisted of three vats, two jars and several bottles though we purposely say nothing of the stiff, both parties having an interest in the spirits): Let me go, Pautheen! I hardly knew ye.

According to the annotations on fweet.org, a worm is a “spiral condenser used for whiskey distilling,” and it is here presented as one of the many phallic objects carried by the forms of HCE and the Cad in this early part of the novel.

This phallic weapon — which is similar to the Willingdone’s telescope and presages the weaker weapons the sons will carry later in the novel — contains the energies of the Fall, as indicated by the numbers, which refer to the characters present at the incident in Phoenix Park: throughout the novel, three objects refer to the three soldiers/sons/tailors and two refer to the two girls. This tool marks this scene as another version of HCE’s Fall in the Park, which is here mixing with a version of the encounter with the Cad in the battle/mugging on pp. 81-84: the whole thing is becoming confused as the two sides of the dreamer amalgamate before beginning to come apart into Shem and Shaun. What was presented as two distinct stories in I.2 — the encounter with the girls and the encounter with the Cad — are now overlapping.

“Stiff” refers to the dead body at the wake and/or the sleeping body of the dreamer, out of whose Unconscious mind these two sides are separating (and it’s a sex joke, of course). The word also anticipates how one side will “stiff” the other (rip him off) — which will precipitate a Fall into a perception of the world as a zero-sum game (though it is forgiven by Proto-Shem in the brother battle paragraph).

The appearance of the worm has me wondering about the symbolic application of distilling to this scene. It’s been argued that other parts of the Wake symbolically correspond to the creation of alcohol, such as this fascinating article that reads the Prankquean paragraph in terms of brewing. I am tempted to read similarly the brother battle paragraph on page 81 in terms of distilling. Perhaps the initial combat of the two figures corresponds to the heating of the grains and adding yeast, the cessation of hostilities reflects the evaporation of alcohol, and the “torgantruce” they strike is the condensation of liquid.

The vision of the “Girl Cloud Pensive flout[ing] above them” might be an image of evaporation, and the condensation might be represented by proto-Shaun going off to buy whiskey (J.J. and S., John Jameson and Son). The truce between brothers is also referred to as the “treatyng to cognac.” Perhaps in some future post I will trace out these speculations more fully.

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When my friend first invited me to come on the distillery tour, I thought of the bolded line below, which is actually not about a distillery at all, but which sort of sounds like it:

And forthemore let legend go lore of it that mortar scene so cwympty dwympty what a dustydust it razed arboriginally but, luck’s leap to the lad at the top of the ladder, so sartor’s risorted why the sinner the badder! Ho ho ho hoch! La la la lach! Hillary rillarry gibbous grist to our millery! A pushpull, qq: quiescence, pp: with extravent intervulve coupling.. The savest lauf in the world.

This bit occurs in III.3, after the one of the Falls of the Norwegian Captain/Bartender. And while the bolded sentence doesn’t contain the word “distill,” it does describe the three tailors’ reaction to the Fall: they see it as grist for their mill. “Gibbous” means “hunchbacked” according to fweet.org (HCE is depicted as having a hump, which resonates with one of his names, Humphrey, and which works as a sex joke). The whole phrase sounds like “give us grist to our millery.” Give us that hunchbacked sex scandal for us to grind into something useful by spinning tales about it (the metaphors have to get mixed in this chapter because it’s impossible to keep all the stories and symbols apart so deep in the novel’s dream).

The P and the Q recall the Prankquean, which is an alternate version of the Norwegian Captain story that the tailors are spinning in III.3. A pushpull is a kind of electronic circuit, and an intervulve coupling sounds like another part of a machine, so this might be describing the radio that is apparently on in the tavern, and whose description appears at the beginning of III.3 — but these words also capture the sexual energies of the Fall, which are present in both the Norwegian Captain story and (especially) the Prankquean paragraph. “Quiescence” is a real word that means inactivity or dormancy, so pushpull and quiescence are each words that could symbolically correspond to both the Fall and Redemption, the cycle that these stories sum up. “Quiescence” reminds me of “quintessence,” the fifth element, the ultimate essence of all things that dwells within the push-pull of the fallen world.

To be clearer about my idea that both words refer at once to the Fall and Redemption: “pushpull” primarily corresponds to the fallen world and the conflict of forces within it, but the fallen world occurs when HCE/the dreamer is lying dormant/quiescence. Meanwhile, “quiscence” primarily corresponds to the Redemption, wherein we learn to identify with the quintessence, but Redemption in the Wake is usually attributed to waking up, ending the dream of the fallen world, and no longer being dormant/quiescence. And when we wake, we encounter the pushpull of everyday conflict. To “wake” is both to enter enlightenment and to enter the fallen world, or rather, to enter that world in a new way. As in some Buddhist traditions, the Wake is saying that redemption is found within the apparently “fallen” world, not outside it. You can read more about my thoughts on this at the end of this post and this post.

The “savest lauf” uses the German “lauf” (course, movement, from “laufen,” to run). But also laughter. This eternal story will give us the safest laugh (and map the safest course through eternity), but it will be a laughter and path that saves us, redeems us. I’m put in mind of the line in I.1, where ALP (the Prankquean herself) is “livving in our midst of debt and laffing through all plores for us.” “Plores” are both tears and applause. In the Mookse and the Gripes fable, she is, in the form of the river, “lapping as though her heart was brook.” Laughing through a broken heart (lapping at it to heal it), laughing as if she was still a young girl, a brook, maintaining an innocence in the fallen world.

The lauf/course that is savest is equivalen to the “way” of the final sentence of Finnegans Wake. I associate it too with the sexual energies of the I.1 sentence “The was a wall of course in erection.”

Anyway, that was a long digression about a sentence that deals not with distilling but with milling. But since the three soldiers are also distillers, their milling work is arguably relevant here. Their task is to transform the energy of the Fall into art, taking “dictation” from ALP as the muse, as Shem does (who is part of the three soldiers/tailors).

Those tailors/distillers/millers directly reference distilling at the beginning of their long monologue at the end of III.3, when they grumble about the tavern keeper HCE and eventually beat him up and take over (signifying the sons taking control of the family). They start this way:

—He shook be ashaped of hempshelves, hiding that shepe in his goat. And for rassembling so bearfellsed the magreedy prince of Roger. Thuthud. Heigh hohse, heigh hohse, our kindom from an orse! Bruni Lanno’s woollies on Brani Lonni’s hairyparts. And the hunk in his trunk it would be an insalt foul the matter of that cellaring to a pigstrough. Stop his laysense. Ink him! You would think him Alddaublin staking his lordsure like a gourd on puncheon. Deblinity devined. Wholehunting the pairk on a methylogical mission whenever theres imberillas! And calling Rina Roner Reinette Ronayne. To what mine answer is a lemans. Arderleys, beedles and postbillers heard him. Three points to one. Ericus Vericus corrupted into ware eggs. Dummy up, distillery! Broree aboo!

Here, we see them putting their distilling into practice, turning their complaints about the All Father HCE, and their gossip about his Fall, into the art of Finnegans Wake itself. To “Ink him!” is to turn him into ink, to write about his story (get it “put in the newses,” to go back to the first quote of this blog post — and I can’t help but notice that “newses” sounds like “nooses”: to gossip about him is to condemn him in the court of public opinion).

[Side note: “To what mine answer is a lemans” reminded me of the bit in Ulysses 15 where Bloom’s vision/memory of Mrs. Breen says, “The answer is a lemon” in response to Bloom’s question of whether she could have betrayed Molly by having an affair with him. I scrawled in the margin, “Lemon soap?” This is perhaps the subject for a future post]

“Dummy up” means to shut up, but it also recalls the dummy (Issy) from the Prankquean paragraph. The structure of that bolded sentence suggests it is an address, so they’re calling someone “distillery” — is it one of the three tailors calling another tailor that, or is he/they calling HCE that? Both.

The distilling process, which is driven by ALP/the Prankquean/the dummy and in which the three tailors participate, raises up the dummy to take the Prankquean’s place in the next cycle. At the end of the Prankquean paragraph, it says, “The Prankquean was to hold her dummyship”: she’s in charge of the ship of life, she’s in charge of the dummy (who unites with her and becomes her in the act of overthrowing HCE); she holds the dummy like a mother holds a child (“her dummyship” being a title, like “her majesty”); and she’s a bit of a dummy like Issy. [see the end of this post for a discussion of the PQ and the dummy] “Broree abo” is “Brugh Ríogh abú!” which is Irish for “Bruree to victory!” (Fweet.org also informs me that “Bruree was ancient capital of Munster”).

To me, “Broree abo” sounds like Brian Boru, an Irish king who repelled the Vikings and to whom HCE is compared throughout the novel.

In the distilling process, HCE becomes distilled into three soldiers, and the two brothers among them, whose production of art — and/or whose battle — refines him further into the next HCE/Brian Boru, which is Mark the Tris in the Prankquean paragraph (the new HCE who slams the door shut at the same moment the old HCE is overthrown and falls).

Alcoholic spirits are at once the cause of the Fall and its product, the vehicle of Redemption: in the same way, HCE is the condemned criminal and pardoning judge, the dead body and resurrected body. See my previous post for a discussion of how alcohol and the sexual impulse are both simultaneously sources of the Fall and Redemption.

And so, distilling is more than a simple process of producing a beverage. It is “illysus,” illicit and illustrious, containing within it the energies of all true art like Ulysses: these include all impulses of humans (especially sexual impulses), our tendencies to fall, forgive, and become redeemed, over and over, turning the cycle within each life and across the generations.