I recently had the opportunity to see The Lion King on Broadway with my daughter. It was the first time I had seen it, and the first time I heard the song “He Lives in You.”

As I found myself humming it this week, I realized that it sums up a major idea of Finnegans Wake, that we each embody the past. An Eternal Story plays through all of history, and it is present right here, right now, in each of us.

In this post, I explore this idea and discuss the one sentence I found in the Wake that contains the name “Simba.”

The idea that the past “lives in us” is everywhere in Finnegans Wake. There is nothing supernatural about such an idea: it does not mean that people from the past literally still exist as spirit beings watching us, which is perhaps the idea behind the Lion King song (at the least, it might be a real belief that informed the writing of the song; I’m not sure).

But Finnegans Wake is talking about the way in which each generation plays out a version of the same Eternal Story that runs through all of human history. Our ancestors “live in us” not as literal spiritual entities but in the sense that we embody patterns similar to the ones that that they did. One of the many, many passages that expresses this is a paragraph in II.2 that describes HCE’s tavern, a microcosm of the world. And the barkeep is described as

Rolf the Ganger, Rough the Gangster, not a feature alike and the face the same […] it vild need olderwise since primal made alter in garden of Idem.

“Rough the Gangster” is the replacement of (son of) “Rolf the Ganger,” a self-similar version of the past. One version of HCE is replaced by another. The new one has different features, but the essential properties are the same (or close enough to call the same). “Idem” means “same” in Latin. The Garden of Eden (Phoenix Park), where the Fall occurred, is the place where the Same rearranges itself ever into new forms.

The son is a new version of the father, the present is a new version of the past. The same renews.

Hence, our world is

solarsystemised, seriolcosmically, in a more and more almightily expanding universe under one, there is rhymeless reason to believe, original sun. […] O felicitous culpability, sweet bad cess to you for an archetypt!

Our serio-comic world of sorrows and joys are serial cosmic, an expanding solar system circling the archetype of HCE, which underlies all things and is present in all things.

The past disappears but is ever present in the present. Hence, “grampupus is fallen down but grinny sprids the boord” (I.1). The All-Father Finnegan falls like Humpty Dumpty and cracks open to be served as food, symbolizing our experience at the feast of life. The father HCE is fallen and buried in the ground but rises as the crops that sustain us, we who live his story anew. Where is the past? Recycled into the present moment, all of its molecules in new (but similar) configurations, all of its stories playing out in self-similar ways.

The past is gone forever, but in an uncanny way it never leaves because it is embodied anew every moment. Finnegans Wake is written so that all of history (and all fiction, truer than fact) is layered on top of itself so that any moment can be accessed at every moment. The Fall of Adam is the Fall of Humpty Dumpty is the Fall of Macbeth is the defeat of Napoleon is the scandal of Parnell is the redemption brought by Christ is Humpty Dumpty’s reassembly is the victory of Wellington is the triumph of Macduff.

Where is the past? It’s still here. It’s happening now. It lives in you.

*

In the washerwoman chapter (I.8), the women gossip about ALP’s first lover, who was a priest or monk named Michael, a character who serves as one of the masks for Shaun. In the Wake‘s cyclical structure, Shaun (as part of the Three Soldiers/Cad) overthrows HCE and cuckolds him by sleeping with his wife/daughter, who is here the young ALP. Later, he will merge with Shem and mature into a new HCE; she will grow into a new ALP; the couple with have children, and the cycle will begin again with the new children overthrowing the new HCE, merging into an even newer HCE, marrying the daughter when she grows up into an even newer ALP, and starting the cycle over, on and on and on.

So the washerwomen are talking about a phase of the cycle where Shaun first gets with ALP when she’s a young girl (Issy). From the perspective of the washerwomen, this event is both the past and the future, since history is a circle. But it’s also now: it exists again as they tell it. The three questions one of them asks just before the story (“Wasut? Izod? Are you sarthin suir?”) recall the three questions asked by the novel’s narrator on page 4: “But was iz? Iseut? Ere were sewers?” Their gossip rehearses Finnegans Wake. The whole novel lives in their gossip. To put it another way, we could consider those two sets of questions an identical moment, just seen from a different point of view. From this perspective, the entirety of Finnegans Wake is a single Moment — an Eternal Now — and its apparently separate events are simply different ways of looking at that single Moment. This explains why all history is available at all times, because each apparently separate moment of history is really just a different way of conceiving the same transcendent Thing, which is always present but cannot entirely be put into words.

Everyone got that?

I realize that I sound like a rambling lunatic, but some people have proposed that time actually works something like that, with the past and future all existing at once, as a single “block.” Under this view, our perception of time as linear is a result of each person’s consciousness embodying one particular perspective from which to view that block, where pieces of the block seem to proceed one after another.

Now is that actually true? Eh. It’s a cool story, at least. Fun to think about.

But it doesn’t have to be literally true for it to be a symbolic way of talking about how all time can be present at once, in the (perhaps more factually accurate) sense that each moment reiterates patterns that have played themselves out before in history. The story of Michael the hermit/priest with young ALP/Issy reiterates the courtship of young HCE with ALP:

Well, there once dwelt a local heremite, Michael Arklow was his riverend name, (with many a sigh I aspersed his lavabibs!) and one venersderg in junojuly, oso sweet and so cool and so limber she looked, Nance the Nixie, Nanon L’Escaut, in the silence, of the sycomores, all listening, the kindling curves you simply can’t stop feeling, he plunged both of his newly anointed hands, the core of his cushlas, in her singimari saffron strumans of hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it, that was deepdark and ample like this red bog at sundown. By that Vale Vowclose’s lucydlac, the reignbeau’s heavenarches arronged orranged her. 

This moment is identified with the rainbow (reignbeau) that accompanies the arising of a new HCE, like the rainbow that comes at the end of the Prankquean episode, where the boys are formed into Mark the Tris (Tristan, the new HCE) and the old HCE is overthrown with a thunderclap. This new beau comes to reign.

Afrothdizzying galbs, her enamelled eyes indergoading him on to the vierge violetian. Wish a wish! Why a why? Mavro! Letty Lerck’s lafing light throw those laurals now on her daphdaph teasesong petrock. Maass! But the majik wavus has elfun anon meshes. And Simba the Slayer of his Oga is slewd.

“Simba the Slayer” is a garbled version of “Sinbad the Sailor,” one of Joyce’s favorite characters from A Thousand and One Nights — the very one that Leopold Bloom thinks about while drifting off to sleep in Ulysses Chapter 17 (“He rests. He has travelled. / With? / Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer….” etc.).

Simba Uranga and Ogi are rivers, continuing with the river theme of I.8. Oga is the Swahili word for “cowardice” or “fear” (it also sounds like “ogre” and the giants Gog and Magog). And simba, of course, means “lion.”

With his cuckolding by the son/Cad/Shaun/Michael, the king who had slain his own father/fear has himself been slain (and acts lewd, just like the last king/HCE whom he overthrew). And on it goes.