Recently, I’ve been thinking about the song “Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie (1979). My daughter heard it for the first time the other day, and she immediately hated it (ha). But as I listened to it to appreciate her distaste for it, I was struck by the idea that rainbows symbolize a connection between our reality and our dreams and hopes.

The rainbow is a significant symbol in Finnegans Wake, and this post considers it alongside some of the ideas about “storytelling” I’ve been developing on this blog.

The rainbow is in the Bible the sign given by God after the flood in Genesis 9:12-15:

And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations:

I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.

And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud:

And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.

Finnegans Wake associates the flood with the Fall, so the rainbow symbolically stands for the Rise, the Resurrection, the dissolution of the ego or Selfhood, the creation of an Organized Innocence, whatever you want to call it. Although the Wake appropriates this symbol from a religious text, and while religious readers are free to apply religious meaning, I take its function in the Wake to be secular, with no specifically Christian or generally supernatural meaning. I also associate rainbows with leprechauns from Irish folklore, which Joyce surely also has in mind.

The rainbow appears right at the beginning of the text, on the first page:

Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.

The sons (of Noah) brew their liquor by arclight — in the light of the rainbow over the Ark, which bends in an arc. “Rory end” recalls King Rory O’Connor (Ruaidrí mac Tairrdelbach Ua Conchobair), the last High King of Ireland, and the phrase sounds like “orient,” pertaining to the East, the direction of the rising sun, which gives light to create the sign of the rainbow. The “regginbrow” is both rainbow and the brow of the king/HCE/Rory, visible on the water, a reference to Genesis 1:2 (“the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”). This is also the dreamer entering the flooded world of the dream, a parallel to his washing his face in the morning after waking.

The rainbow is referenced on the next page as well:

O here here how hoth sprowled met the duskt the father of fornicationists but, (O my shining stars and body!) how hath fanespanned most high heaven the skysign of soft advertisement! 

The rainbow mixes with advertisements — I think of the bright ads of Times Square, high in the air — the “art” associated with Shaun in the Wake (“I adn’t the arts,” he laments in II.3). Although advertisement can be considered a corruption of true art, a profaning of art for commercial purposes, its conflation with the rainbow here suggests that even advertisement, done properly and/or understood properly, can create a true aesthetic experience. Cf. Leopold Bloom’s reflections on good and bad advertisements in Ulysses, especially Chapter 17.

There are many, many references to rainbows throughout the text. I’ll give a few highlights here.

Most importantly, Finnegans Wake itself is identified with the rainbow: during I.6, it is called a kaleidoscope, a “collideorscape,” the answer to that chapter’s question 9, which describes the novel’s dreamscape, a place that provides ample opportunities to explore the fallen world, with its collisions with others, or to rise from low conceptions of the self and escape from these limitations:

what roserude and oragious grows gelb and greem, blue out the ind of it! Violet’s dyed!

The rainbow is also identified in I.1 with ALP’s work in gathering up the pieces of the Fall to pass them on to the next generation and resurrect HCE through the reconciliation of the brothers/contraries:

Here, and it goes on to appear now, she comes, a peacefugle, a parody’s bird, a peri potmother, a pringlpik in the ilandiskippy, with peewee and powwows in beggybaggy on her bickybacky and a flick flask fleckflinging its pixylighting pacts’ huemeramybows, picking here, pecking there, pussypussy plunderpussy. 

The word “huemeramybows” belongs to the “pacts” that are “pixylighting,” the reconciliation of the children, who are here compared to little pixies (“pixy” makes me think of the “pax in embrace or poghue puxy as practised between brothers of the same breast,” the kiss with fists from I.4, which I discuss here). “Humeramybows” sounds like a Greek word that means “success,” which characterizes ALP’s work of turning the wheel of the generations.

Since the rainbow is associated with the Rise, and since the Rise and the Fall are connected to each other in the Wake (each being the opposite side of the same coin), the rainbow appears at moments of falls. For instance, when Jarl Van Hoother comes out of his castle in I.1, just before being shot down by the Prankquean (or, alternatively, slamming the door shut), producing the thunderclap of the Fall (the overthrow of one HCE and his replacement by the new, by the son Tristan). He comes out

like a rudd yellan gruebleen orangeman in his violet indigonation

Similarly, the rainbow appears when Tristan (the new HCE) in the form of Michael makes love with the young ALP/Issy in I.8, cuckolding the old, fallen HCE, and rising to take his place:

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 is, essentially, the same moment as the Prankquean’s triumph over Van Hoother, just seen from a different angle.

The rainbow also appears at Shem’s fall when Shaun socks him in the face in II.2. After being punched, Shem reports,

I’m seeing rayingbogeys rings round me

This always makes me think of I.5, which speculates that the writer of the Letter (which stands for Finnegans Wake itself or, more broadly, all of literature) was

presenting a strangely profound rainbowl in his (or her) occiput.

Apparently, the occipital bone is in the back of the skull, but I always assumed that “occiput” was related to “ocular,” suggesting the eye. Shem, the writer of the Letter, was slugged in his face, making him see rainbows in his vision, or in his head. The Letter is, ultimately, ALP’s: as muse, she dictates it to Shem, making the “his (or her)” appropriate. Shem the writer has rainbows in his head, while ALP the muse/mother/universe has rainbows in her activities, the huemeramybows.

And ALP comments on the rainbow’s presence at the Fortunate Fall when her voice pours out of Yawn/Shaun’s in III.3:

Yes, there was that skew arch of chrome sweet home, floodlit up above the flabberghosted farmament and bump where the camel got the needle. Talk about iridecencies! Ruby and beryl and chrysolite, jade, sapphire, jasper and lazul.

It’s worth noting that the seven colors of the rainbow appear in some places of the novel as seven aspects of Issy, the rainbow girls who tempt HCE to his crime and/or reject Shem in favor of Shaun (and ultimately Tristan). I believe they can also be mapped to the seven chakras, the purported “energy centers” of the body in occult tradition (upon which Shem/Dolph comments in II.2).

Anyway, I could continue pulling out examples from the Wake, but you get the point.

*

As “Rainbow Connection” points out, rainbows are both real and illusion. They’re very much a part of our experience — we literally see them in the sky — but we know that a rainbow is not a solid object off in the distance but in fact a trick of light. “Rainbows are visions but only illusions,” Kermit sings, but he immediately qualifies this point:

So we’ve been told and some choose to believe it
I know they’re wrong, wait and see.
Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection,
The lovers, the dreamers and me.

This idea that an illusion might also be real in a sense can be compared to the notion of “storytelling” that I’ve been developing on this blog. You can read more about my ideas here (as well as here and here, among other posts). To recap briefly, I suggest that identity is kind of storytelling, or a collection of stories we tell ourselves and others about ourselves in response to various other narratives. This view of identity is starkly different than the view that identity is a fixed, static essence, somewhat like Plato’s Forms. Those who understand their identity as stories are more capable of narrating them differently, while those who understand identity as an essence tend to be locked into ways of viewing themselves that can be unhelpful or damaging in many contexts. Permit me to quote a bit from the first post I linked to earlier in this paragraph:

while “I” exist as a collection of abstractions and stories – and while “I” exist as a label for the constantly transforming collection of molecules and consciousness arising out of those molecules – there appears to be no permanent self beyond these mental phenomena, these sets of stories and these general but elastic tendencies of this collection of molecules.

What am I, at the end of the day? I’m stories. I’m a bunch of abstractions and narratives built on the back of a continual flux.

[…]

What am “I”? There are many tales told. Am I an “American”? From a certain narrative frame, yes. Am I a “man” who is “white”? Again, from certain narrative frames, sure. But there are other narrative frames where all of those designations can be called into question or rendered trivial.

There are many ways to narrate my story of myself to myself and to others. What about narrating my story as, say, an inhabitant of the Pale Blue Dot of our planet, in whose interest it is to cooperate with other such inhabitants?

In which situations are which frames of reference most useful, and in which situations are many of them a hindrance? The best way to tell the story will vary, depending on the situation and the audience and the goals. But it’s the people who refuse to understand all of it as a story, the people who cling desperately to a “self” and an “identity” at the bottom, who will close themselves off from broader possibilities for their lives and for the world as a whole.

Stories, in the way I’ve been discussing them, are like rainbows: they’re effervescent illusions that nevertheless have very real effects on the world. Someone who believes that their identity is a kind of stable inner essence is like a person who takes a rainbow to be a solid object in the distance.

Our stories are incredibly powerful, shaping the way we experience the world moment to moment. For instance, the difference between walking around all day telling yourself that the latest unexpected event is a catastrophe and walking around all day telling yourself that it is an opportunity is enormous. The difference is tangible in blood pressure and levels of stress hormones in the body. And in a sense, we could say that every achievement that a person accomplishes starts off as a kind of story, where people have to envision the desired result and where they narrate to themselves the path to achieving it (a plan), a story that becomes revised and refined over time, particularly as they take specific actions guided by that story.

Joyce certainly seemed to think that through storytelling, the mind was capable of transmuting experience into something almost divine. To describe his artistic work, he used the metaphor of transubstantiation, the Catholic belief that a priest could transform the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ (literally: for Catholics, this is not metaphor or symbolism: they believe that when bread and wine are properly consecrated, they cease to be bread and wine and become, in their essence, God himself).

Here’s how Joyce put it in a letter to his brother Stanislaus:

Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying … to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own … for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.

This reminds me also of Stephen Dedalus’s desire to “recreate life out of life” in Portrait. 

This Joycean/Dedalean desire to transubstantiate everyday experience into art is elaborated in Finnegans Wake, which suggests that all of us are engaging in a kind of storytelling and art by weaving narratives of ourselves through which we navigate our lives, internal maps and stories that help constitute what we think of as our “identity.” These stories partake of archetypes that recur in culture and storytelling, and the Wake suggests that, in a way, these archetypes or fictions are “more real” than what we normally think of as “reality” (an idea I explore here — and follow up here and here).

Even though we are all artists in a sense, the kind of person conventionally called an artist tries to set down some of these narratives and archetypes so that his or her particular conception of them will endure for audiences.

This process appears in I.7’s description of Shem/Joyce’s artistic method, which I have written about here. I will reproduce a section of the chapter below because here I want to focus on the end of it. Shem

wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal) but with each word that would not pass away the squidself which he had squirtscreened from the crystalline world waned chagreenold and doriangrayer in its dudhud. This exists that isits after having been said we know. 

Shem’s art squirts out a concept of his self from the “crystalline world” of the mind, where the stories/forms/ideas are created and sustained by acts of imagination. In doing so, he takes his inner narratives — of the kind that all of us are forming all the time — and sets some of them down into “word[s] that would not pass away,” giving a kind of permanence to these ideas by fixing them in ink. Yet these words cannot help but change, a la the picture of Dorian Gray, perhaps suggesting the way that each reader, and each subsequent generation of readers, brings new interpretations to an artist’s work. The everyday stories we tell of ourselves also change and pass away, more quickly, as our mortal lives (our dead skin, “dudhud”) are swept through existence. The thing that has more permanence, at least from our perspective, are the archetypes in which we participate (that is, in which the stories that constitute the self participate).

Our stories are the rainbows that connect us to these archetypes and the process of creativity. In a sense, they’re not “real” because they have no existence outside of our heads and our social discourse, but in another sense, they are the very nature of our reality because they mediate all of our experience. Each of us exists as a collection of such stories, each of us real and not real at once. We are the rainbow.

Thus, the last sentence of that quote above, to which I had never before paid much attention: “This exists that isits after having been said we know.”

I take this to mean that that which exists — our stories of all things — is the reality we experience after it has been “said” by us, after our storytelling has transmuted the flux of experience into relatively stable stories we can conceptualize and reflect on. That flux of reality is called the “isits,” which is simultaneously that which is [id est] and that which is constantly Becoming and changing. We might think of this Becoming as captured in the marriage of “is” (present tense) to “it’s” (the beginning of progressive action, as in the sentence “it’s doing X”). It could also be the question “is it?” denoting our minds’ confusion about the Becoming until our storytelling starts to fix it down. 

After “having been said” — after we experience this flux and begin to pin it down in stories — only then can we know it, or our approximations of it. To a degree, we speak reality into existence. Or as Nietzsche puts it, knowledge requires the continual falsification of reality, the continual casting of it into stories and abstractions.

*

The final major appearance of the rainbow in Finnegans Wake comes when St. Patrick challenges the Druid in IV.1, practically the final thing that happens in the novel. This scene is complex enough that it deserves its own post in the future, but I can say generally that the contest between the saint (a form of proto-Shaun, corresponding roughly to Cad, as in the brother battle that appeared back in I.4) and the sage (a form of proto-Shem, closer to HCE, as in I.4) is a competition between different ways of seeing reality, which are represented by different ways of regarding the rainbow. The Shuanish view is the perspective of the land of space, the zero-sum competition created by a fallen perspective of reality. To him, in the common-sense light of day (toward which the dreamer is moving as the dream ends), people and objects are all separate, discrete entities. Under this view, I could see things around me now, such as my desk (dark brown), the nearby videogame controller (black), the book on top of the pile of books (blue), my skin (pink), and conclude that they are separate objects.

The Shemish view is that all of these things are not ultimately separate but are in fact interconnected. After all, each of those objects is absorbing all of the light spectrum. The book on my desk, for instance, absorbs all the colors of the spectrum *except* for blue, which it reflects back into my eyes. In a sense, blue is the only color it is *not*. I could look at those apparently separate objects I listed above and note that they each contain green, since they all absorb that part of the spectrum. Light binds them together.

This is the argument that the Druid makes in that passage in IV.1, calling the various objects he sees green because he perceives how they are internally connected to each other. This “internal connection” does not need to be understood as supernatural: in the terms I’ve been sketching out on this blog, all “things” are connected in that they are constructed by the mind as concepts/narratives/stories. I mean this literally and concretely: it is a matter of perspective whether I call my desk a single “thing” or several wooden parts (many “things”) or a collection of molecules or atoms (so many “things” that it defies imagination). “Things” are a product of how we frame and discuss reality, our stories. The actual reality itself is an ever-changing Becoming that we try to master by imposing the idea of stable “things” onto it.

That book on my desk is a soup of molecules that I conceptualize as a separate object from the books below it. But I could just as easily frame the whole stack of books on my desk as one thing. Or I could argue the book and I are both part of the same object (the room), or that we’re both parts of my consciousness (conceptions of the “self” and stories about it being objects that appear in consciousness, just as the book does). It is to some degree arbitrary where I draw the boundary between the molecules that comprise “me,” that comprise the “book,” and that comprise the “air” between the two.

You have to be careful with thoughts like these because they can quickly descend into nonsense — and not the good kind of nonsense like Finnegans Wake! I’ve always been deeply suspicious of people who use mystical-sounding platitudes to support vague assertions like “we are all one.” Too often, people who say this simply want to use your wallet as if it were theirs.

But there actually is something legitimate and profound in the idea that we all participate in each other and in everything in the universe. Take, for instance, the fact that “no man is an island,” to quote John Donne. Each of our lives is sustained by the labor of other people. This idea of “participating in each other” can be developed and deepened — I’ve tried before to put it in the following way, from this post: we can shift

our perspective to see all things as connected to each other in a way suggested by the Wake’s mixing of words. The perception of such interconnection allows someone to open themselves up to the dynamic interplay of contrary forces and, ultimately, the realization that not only do all things participate in each other but all “things” (including the self) are ultimately narratives in the mind.

[…]

Interested readers should investigate the Buddhist concept of mutual co-arising, the idea that all phenomena arise together and interdwell, along with the Buddhist notion of impermanence, emptiness, and anatta (“no self”). All phenomena are “empty” in the sense that there is no ultimate, permanent substance to them, and in the sense that their identity as separate objects is constructed by an observing mind; in point of fact, every “thing” participates in all things and co-arises with all else.

My contention is that a careful study of the Wake can induce a mode of perception that entails directly experiencing what is referred to by these Buddhist concepts. A reading of the Wake can be a kind of training for the mind to achieve such states of consciousness.

What’s really important is that these insights cannot remain something you fondly and pleasantly think about a few times a day while continuing to go about business as usual. If these insights are worth anything — if they are actually to be insights — they must cash out in specific action.

The realization that you and all others are “empty,” that everything is a collection of stories and that all things participate in each other within the flux of Becoming, that all things inter-dwell: this realization is worth nothing unless it has a concrete impact on how you act. For instance, maybe it helps you let go of a grudge and take a specific action of kindness toward someone, an action that also improves your own life. Maybe it helps you to not feel so insulted if someone makes an unpleasant remark or doesn’t quite understand one of your little stories about yourself, so instead of flipping out at them, you shrug and change the subject. Maybe you see that one of your own prejudices is really stupid, and you offer to collaborate with someone you otherwise wouldn’t, etc.

Something like that. Anything. There’s nothing worse than someone who goes around all day thinking about how enlightened and wise he is — and how he so totally gets Joyce, don’t you know — but then none of that supposed wisdom or education has any tangible effect whatsoever.

Blake writes, “He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars,” in specific actions, not generalities. I’d extend that to doing good to one’s own self as well.

I’ll end by reflecting on a joke my daughter made, wondering what the “Rainbow Connection” even means, and proposing that it might be a “new weapon.”

That’s funny. But maybe it’s true: properly understood, the art of storytelling exemplified by Finnegans Wake could be considered a weapon that threatens and challenges every idea we have about ourselves and our “identities.” It reveals that so many of our cherished notions of “who we are” — about which so many of us are so damn sure and passionate — are stories, and often faulty and limited ones at that.