“The Ondt and the Gracehoper” — like The Mookse and the Gripes — is a fable told by Shaun to illustrate the flaws of Shem.

In The Mookse and the Gripes, the Shaun-like professor is using the story to explain his refusal to help a beggar (who doesn’t understand the zero-sum rules of Space). But as I have discussed, that fable doesn’t quite do what he intends — it exposes both perspectives as insufficient, and it hints at a need for the brothers to reunite.

The Ondt and the Gracehoper does a better job of condemning the Gracehoper than the earlier tale did to condemn the Gripes. In the original fable by Aesop, the ant gathers food while the grasshopper idles around and wastes his time, so that when winter comes he is very hungry and begs the ant for food, and the ant refuses. The grasshopper is exposed as a fool.

That’s basically what happens here. The Gracehoper is James Joyce — “always hoppy on akkant of his joyicity” — who spends all his time chasing girls and wasting his efforts on his silly art. He tries to get the female bugs to “commence insects with him, there mouthparts to his orefice and his gambills to there airy processes, even if only in chaste.”

He goes around singing his little silly songs like “Ho, Time Timeagen, Wake!” He’s working on Finnegans Wake, in other words. He believes in the power of art, that it can pitch in where its brother, science, is mute:

For if sciencium (what’s what) can mute uns nought, ’a thought, abought the Great Sommboddy within the Omniboss, perhops an artsaccord (hoot’s hoot) might sing ums tumtim abutt the Little Newbuddies that ring his panch.

If science is mute about God (who is not within the world), perhaps art can sing us something about the nobodies who surround his patch (the universe…or his garden? Of Eden?). [Or ring his…pants? Another reference to whatever scandal went down in the Park?]

“Soma” means body in Greek. Sommboddy is the Great Body, which suggests that God is one with flesh. We could take this in a specifically Christian sense (the Word became flesh in one specific person, Christ), or we could take this to signify how, more broadly, the Spirit and flesh are one and the same: there is no physical matter that is not holy, and there is no Spirit apart from matter. Either way, these are mysteries that science cannot discover. This great “Sommboddy” is contrasted with “Newbuddies” — we’re all nobodies, but we’re all able to be new buddies to each other as we each incarnate that Sommboddy.

Even if we’ve known each other for a long time, we can still be new buddies to each other. That’s part of what makes being a nobody so cool.

I also have in my notes, “Omniboss, that’s cute.”

Science, and other Shaunish ways of thinking, can’t tell us “abought” the Big Questions — a reference to his capitalist and zero-sum ways of conceiving of everything.

“Tumtims” points back to the names Tom/Tim, the brothers, the new buddies who are always meeting and fighting their battles.

Science is all about “what’s what,” strictly the facts.

Art is all about who’s who, the human stories that make the facts meaningful to us. Art is therefore also “hoot’s hoot,” the joyful hooting that accompanies a life deeply lived — as well as the owlish hoots of wisdom.

This sentence makes me think of two earlier lines: the artsaccord — Shem’s art that accords with reality — recalls a reference to the Brother Battle in the first chapter, I.1:

’Tis optophone which ontophanes. List! Wheatstone’s magic lyer. They will be tuggling foriver. They will be lichening for allof. They will be pretumbling forover. The harpsdischord shall be theirs for ollaves.

Ollaves is “all of us,” but it’s also the Irish word for sages.

(“Allof” is obviously “all of” and “ever,” but also sounds like Aleph/Alpha…the very beginning all over again, like Coleridge’s River Alph in “Kubla Khan”)

Their battle is a harps’ discord, but the true artist can balance that discord (“accordo” is the Italian word for agreement).

And the “Newbuddies that ring his panch” also makes me think of Chapter I.1’s depiction of humans hopping along the (paunchy) stomach of the fallen Finnegan. He is the fallen giant whose body is the landscape, and the dramas of history are acted out on his dead/sleeping form:

Olaf’s on the rise and Ivor’s on the lift and Sitric’s place’s between them. But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life’s robulous rebus, hopping round his middle like kippers on a griddle, O, as he lays dormont from the macroborg of Holdhard to the microbirg of Pied de Poudre.

*

Meanwhile, the Ondt is serious and frugal:

The Ondt was a weltall fellow, raumybult and abelboobied, bynear saw altitudinous wee a schelling in kopfers. He was sair sair sullemn and chairmanlooking when he was not making spaces in his psyche, but, laus! when he wore making spaces on his ikey, he ware mouche mothst secred and muravyingly wisechairmanlooking.

The word “Ondt” is Norwegian for hard, ill, wickedly, evil. It suggests to me also ontos or being (what “ontology” studies). If Shaun is being — and the idea of identity as fixed Platonic ideals or essences — Shem as “Gracehoper” is becoming.

Or maybe the Gracehoper represents someone only beginning to grasp the idea of becoming — because right now, he seems immature: he wastes all his money and time, and he becomes sick and poor:

Now whim the sillybilly of a Gracehoper had jingled through a jungle of love and debts and jangled through a jumble of life in doubts afterworse, wetting with the bimblebeaks, drikking with nautonects, bilking with durrydunglecks and horing after ladybirdies (ichnehmon diagelegenaitoikon) he fell joust as sieck as a sexton and tantoo pooveroo quant a churchprince […] Meblizzered, him sluggered! I am heartily hungry!

So he travels around three times, repeating the novel’s pattern of threes from Vico:

He took a round stroll and he took a stroll round and he took a round strollagain till the grillies in his head and the leivnits in his hair made him thought he had the Tossmania. Had he twicycled the sees of the deed and trestraversed their revermer? Was he come to hevre with his engiles or gone to hull with the poop?

That last question is “Was he come to heaven with his angels or gone to hell with the pope?”

He then throws himself “in the vico” — this alludes to Shem refusing in I.7 to end his life: “he would not throw himself in Liffey” (see also the story of Reuben J. Dodd’s son trying to drown himself in the Liffey, told in Ulysses 6). Campbell and Robinson gloss this as the Gracehoper giving himself over to fate, to the cycles of Vico.

To emphasize the triple cycle, we get an echo of the Prankquean’s riddle when he

promptly tossed himself in the vico, phthin and phthir, on top of his buzzer, tezzily wondering wheer would his aluck alight or boss of both appease

And when he next saw the Ondt, there was a “world of differents.” Now, the Ondt is living like a sultan with the female insects around him like Islamic Houris (the virgins that the faithful will receive in the afterlife).

And the Ondt celebrates that he is the successful one, while his brother is a phony failure:

Let [Shem] be Artalone the Weeps with his parisites peeling off him I’ll be Highfee the Crackasider. Flunkey Footle furloughed foul, writing off his phoney, but Conte Carme makes the melody that mints the money.

This twisted version of Yankee Doodle makes me wonder about an idea of mine that I have about the rhyme “London Bridge” in Finnegans Wake that I shall write about in the future.

Anyway, the thing that makes it really interesting is that at this point the Gracehoper sings a song/poem forgiving the Ondt and reminding him that they are both necessary for humanity and that the Ondt, for all his great wealth and power, doesn’t have the artistic integrity that the Gracehoper does.

It’s interesting that it’s Shaun telling this story because it suggests that he is aware, on some level, of the Shem perspective, even if he can’t fully embody it.

I’m still digesting the poem, but here are a few choice lines:

*

I pick up your reproof, the horsegift of a friend,
For the prize of your save is the price of my spend.
Can castwhores pulladeftkiss if oldpollocks forsake ’em
Or Culex feel etchy if Pulex don’t wake him?
A locus to loue, a term it t’embarass,
These twain are the twins that tick Homo Vulgaris.

*

Horsegift is the Trojan horse, maybe suggesting there’s something insincere about the ant’s dismissal of the grasshopper? There’s a reference to the twins Castor and Pollux in the third line (and Philadelphia, is that? The New World of the sons, the city of brotherly love).

Some more:

Ere those gidflirts now gadding you quit your mocks for my gropes
An extense must impull, an elapse must elopes,
Of my tectucs takestock, tinktact, and ail’s weal;
As I view by your farlook hale yourself to my heal.

[…]

Your feats end enormous, your volumes immense,
(May the Graces I hoped for sing your Ondtship song sense!),
Your genus its worldwide, your spacest sublime!
But, Holy Saltmartin, why can’t you beat time?

*

That’s how it ends. The above lines contain a reference to the Mookse and the Gripes. The girls will come back to his “gropes” when the cycle turns around again.

“Tectucs” is the tick tocks of the clock, but also remind me of tea cups, and all the associations with tea in the novel (mainly semen and lifeblood). “Ail’s weal” is cute: it’s “all’s well” [that ends well] garbled into the benefit (weal) provided by what ails you. Essentially, it’s the idea of the Fortunate Fall.

He concludes by saying, You are great, Ondt, but why can’t you beat time? The Gracehoper will always have a different gift that the Shaunish type need. Making money and conquering the world of Space is all well and good, but it’s art that gives life its meaning.

*

I was inspired to post about the Ondt and the Gracehoper because I was thinking about Leopold Bloom’s bee sting in Ulysses (mentioned in chapters 13, 14, and 18, that I can recall, at least…is it mentioned in 16? I can’t recall). I’m not sure what symbolism, if any, is behind the bee sting, but it made me look up bees in Finnegans Wake, and there are a whole bunch of references to them, along with many insect references, in this fable. So I said, “Ohhh yeah, the Ondt and the Gracehoper….”

In my earlier reads through the Wake, I was usually exhausted by the time I got to this part, and I kinda checked out, especially since I like the Mookse and the Gripes so much better. But I liked the Ondt and the Gracehoper a lot more on more recent reads, and I find that it nicely fits Book III, Chapter 1, where Shaun sets out on his own to replace HCE but realizes that he is incomplete, that the conception of the individual as a self-sufficient ego is deeply faulty. No man is an island. The contraries need each other, and we all need each other to fully realize our Humanity, for this is the book of Here Comes Everybody.