This post briefly looks at the word bunk/bunkum/buncombe in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

During Chapter 16 of Ulysses (“Eumaeus,” the chapter where Bloom takes Stephen to the cabman’s shelter), Bloom reads about that day’s Gold Cup race in the newspaper and thinks, “Winner trained by Braime so that Lenehan’s version of the business was all pure buncombe.” Lenehan had been recommending the horse Scepter all day, and even convinced Blazes Boylan to bet on him: “Boylan plunged two quid on my tip Sceptre for himself and a lady friend” (later confirmed to be Molly).

Anyway, I became curious about this word “buncombe,” which you have to pronounce to hear that it is an alternate spelling of “bunkum.” Where does it come from?

I was surprised to find in the OED that it’s an American word, named after Buncombe, North Carolina. The etymology is that a politician from there gave a speech in Congress that was irrelevant to the matter at hand, saying he “was bound to make a speech for Buncombe.” The spelling seems to have changed very quickly to “bunkum” and from there to the shortened “bunk.” It lost the “talking to” part of the phrase, and “bunk,” by itself, became the term.

Earlier than that, it appears there is a Buncombe Hill in Broomfield, Somerset, UK. The word seems to derive from bun (reed) + comb (valley).

I find it fascinating that this place name traveled over the sea to label a new location and then to be reborn, through linguistic metempsychosis, into a new slang expression and word.

The syllable “bunk” appears several times in Finnegans Wake, but I’ve been thinking about this one in I.3 about HCE:

The house of Atreox is fallen indeedust (Ilyam, Ilyum! Maeromor Mournomates!) averging on blight like the mundibanks of Fennyana, but deeds bounds going arise again. Life, he himself said once, (his biografiend, in fact, kills him verysoon, if yet not, after) is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our breadwinning lies the cropse of our seedfather, a phrase which the establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across the chestfront of all manorwombanborn. 

Ooh, it says life is a wake! That’s exciting. It’s like when a character in a movie says the title.

[Obligatory joke: My favorite part of Ulysses is when Leopold Bloom says, “It’s Ulysses time” and starts Ulyssying all over everyone]

In the above quote, the work that each of us does in life to win our bread is underwritten by the past, which is a corpse that bears crops. The reference is to the various dying and reborn gods of world mythology, who die and go under the earth as seeds to rise again as crops that sustain our lives. Cosmically, all of existence can be regarded as the “crops” produced by the fall of the All-Father — or, to put it less supernatural-sounding, our experience interrupts cosmic unity with the dream of individuality (“feeling and falling”).

I always got the feeling of the word “bank” from this word here, like crops growing on the bank of a river (reflecting I.1: “this man of hod, cement and edifices in Toper’s Thorp piled buildung supra buildung pon the banks for the livers by the Soangso”). “Bunk” is also something one can sleep in, recalling the novel’s conceit of the narrator dreaming in bed and simultaneously lying in his coffin at his wake (and by way of the FIrefly joke that I reference in the title to this post, it even carries with it a wisp of HCE’s masturbatory scandal, though that obviously couldn’t have been intended by Joyce).

But from a certain perspective, so much of what we do with our lives is a bunch of bunk. That perspective is captured by the claim that HCE was something of a disingenuous businessman, a “soffsoaping salesman,” claims the Ballad that ends I.2, whom “our local lads nicknamed” “He’ll Cheat E’erawan.” The perspective also shows up in the idea that Shem (who in some ways represents James Joyce himself, and/or all of Modernist literature) is a plagiarist and fraud. For example, to repurpose a famous phrase from Macbeth, as the above quote does at the end, could be seen as unoriginal recycling or original creation (connecting the play to Joyce’s novel and causing us both to reflect on the womb as a figurative “manor” and to contemplate the role of gender in both texts). Every pun in Finnegans Wake is like that, but so is, say, so much of The Wasteland and so much of modernity as a whole. There’s nothing new under the sun. Modernity is belated. Anything we could ever want to create has been done before in some way. HCE is a “monsterbilker”/Masterbuilder (II.2). And as Shem declares at the end of that same chapter, beginning to reconcile with his brother, “He prophets most who bilks the best.” Are we building or bilking? Are we prophets or hacks seeking profits?

Is Finnegans Wake the most profound book ever written, or is it just a bunch of bunk? Did James Joyce create the most original work in literary history, or is he just a “Fraudstuff” [Fallstaff] who stole all the phrases he ever heard (“covetous of his neighbour’s word,” I.7), and most of the people he met, and recycled them in his books? Are we all a bunch of frauds mooching off the past and spending our lives on bullshit, or are we the newest incarnations of an Eternal story that plays itself through us?

Finnegans Wake considers these weighty questions and answers them, like Molly Bloom, with an eternal affirmation.