This post looks briefly at the word “gruebleen” in the Prankquean episode, illustrating how Finnegans Wake can contain meanings specific to individuals as well as more generally to wider audiences.

What does it mean for a text to “mean”? That’s a complicated question, one that I won’t cover exhaustively here, but I will say that there are at least two different ways of conceiving “meaning”: the first is something decided by an author; this view makes a work of literature a delivery system for an author’s ideas. Under this way of looking at meaning, literary criticism is, or ought to be, the act of trying to discern authorial intention. I’m reminded of a joke Joyce made to the guy who helped him translate “Anna Livia Plurabelle” (Finnegans Wake I.8) into French: he said something like, “We have to work quickly because I’m the only person on earth who knows what this means, and there’s no guarantee that I’ll remember in a few years.” That’s funny, but it’s also a pretty grim outlook: it makes a lot of literary criticism a kind of hopeless task, a gloomy game of “guess what the author is thinking.” It’s also kind of a nonsensical outlook: who determines what the author’s “intention” is anyway? After all, I’m not totally aware of all of my intentions and motivations: who’s to say that authors are aware of all of their own?

The other way of looking at meaning is that it is a product of a text meeting the minds of an audience. Under this view, texts can contain meanings not intended by their authors. Or an author could intend a meaning but fail in communicating it: the text itself might suggest something entirely different to most readers. This view is epitomized by Roland Barthes’ famous essay “The Death of the Author,” which ends with the idea that the death of the author is the “birth of the reader.” While this view is more appealing to many readers and critics, its limitation is that it opens up critics to the accusation that they’re just making up any old nonsense. It’s like when college freshmen complain in literature class that they can’t write about a text because “it could mean anything,” so therefore they think the class is just a bunch of BS.

I would submit that under this second view, it’s not that texts can mean anything: it’s that the text itself becomes the authority, not the author or the reader, and that there are a range of reasonable interpretations contained by the text itself (its words, its structure, its literary devices, its relationship/dialogue/intertextuality with other texts, etc.). My standard joke here is that the novel Frankenstein might be about many things — perhaps scientific innovation, parenthood, gender, the French Revolution, the early Industrial Revolution, slavery — but it’s definitely not about colonizing the moon. There is objectively a range of reasonable interpretations dictated by the text itself. But over and beyond those, individual readers can bring all kinds of personal, subjective meanings that might be meaningful only for them or for their age. Shelley didn’t live to see nuclear weapons or AI, so she didn’t intend to address them specifically, nor does the novel address them specifically, but to the extent that the text speaks to the idea of scientific discoveries in general, or the possibility of creating consciousness, it can help us think through issues of which Shelley wasn’t even aware. But the text itself must be the authority on the meanings it contains. Anyone claiming to interpret a text must root an argument about its meaning in the specifics of the text.

Finnegans Wake is the ultimate text of the death of the author. Simultaneously it’s not. For better or worse, James Joyce is all over the text, and a thorough knowledge of his life, his works, and his interests are huge aids in interpretation. But at the same time, like the dreamer of the novel, its author (like all authors when we read their work) is absent. In the wake of Finnegan/HCE/Joyce [get it? wake?] we are left with the text and its dream characters, who can have as many meanings as there are readers, and none of those meanings are bound by Joyce’s intentions (any more than a dream’s meaning is bound by the dreamer’s conscious thoughts).

But there are meanings in Finnegans Wake that are general — a range of meanings that are objectively suggested by the text — and those that are very specific and personal to individual readers. The latter can be deeply significant (or deeply trivial) to the interpreters, but they should not be confused for more general insights.

Here’s a relatively trivial, fun meaning that a word in the text has for me specifically (and probably only for me). When Jarl Van Hoother emerges from his castle at the end of the Prankquean episode in I.1, his arrival (and subsequent fall/triumph) is accompanied (appropriately) by the rainbow. He emerges wearing seven articles of clothing and is described with the seven colors:

like a rudd yellan gruebleen orangeman in his violet indigonation

This time, my eye was caught by “gruebleen,” which obviously suggests green-blue. Why the transposition?

This sort of error is called a “spoonerism,” where the first syllables of a phrase are mixed up. Perhaps here it suggests some kind of close connection of blue and green? They’re next to each other in the rainbow, I suppose? Hm. Maybe it signifies how Van Hoother’s anger and egotism are twisting the normal order of things.

One amusing reference I personally associate with the syllable “bleen” comes from the old sitcom Married…with Children, a show I grew up watching. Having watched the show practically every night throughout my teenage years, my twenties, and even into my thirties and forties (though less frequently as the years have worn on), I have now seen almost each episode dozens of times. Like a reader who has read and re-read a novel repeatedly, I have internalized much of the language from these texts, and quoted them with others in various contexts, and lines of dialogue/jokes from the show therefore have a special meaning to me that they would not have for others.

[There’s an interesting parallel to the way that quoting and thinking of works of literature like Finnegans Wake in relation to everyday life has the effect of making both those literary texts and the circumstances with which the mind connects them more meaningful: see my example at the beginning of this post]

One episode of Married…with Children finds the dimwitted Kelly Bundy researching an acting role by pretending to be a scientist at the local university. She tells a professor there that she is funded by a “Crayola grant” to invent a new color: Bleen.

“Is that a combination of blue und green?” asks the professor in a heavy accent.

“No, blood and spleen,” she answers. “It’s for kids who want to draw accident scenes.”

So “gruebleen” means, for me personally, the gruesome color bleen, which paints the fall of Tim Finnegan that is re-enacted in Van Hoother’s defeat.

This story of Van Hoother’s anger (this one iteration of him, the idea of him that precipitates his downfall) is represented by a rainbow: the symbol thus contains both destruction and rejuvenation. This duality is emphasized by the Married…with Children episode:

Kelly later leaves the mix of deadly chemicals that she calls “Bleen” where she is sure that no one will find it: Al Bundy’s shower (the joke being that Al rarely bathes). When Al uncharacteristically takes a shower that night, he confirms that he did use the bottle marked “Bleen”: “It’s just like the commercial says,” he enthuses. “It tingles and burns.”

Kelly informs him that Bleen is actually chemicals that she threw together at the lab. “It could be that this tingling you’re feeling is the start of a massive stroke.”

Al thinks for a moment, shrugs, and says, “Either way, I thank you: I love Bleen!”

Yet when he removes the towel from his head, he finds that a full head of long hair has grown. Bleen is thus both danger and renewal. His analysis — “Man has searched for the cure for baldness since…the invention of the younger woman” — is itself interestingly Wakean. Yet he finds himself consternated when he discovers the chemical is also a powerful aphrodisiac that causes him to behave amorously toward his wife against his own will.

The more I think about this silly and absurd sitcom episode, the more relays emerge between it and the Wake. This is mostly a testament to the tendency of the human mind to find patterns and connections everywhere, rather than an indication of anything contained in the text itself or in Joyce’s intentions. But as the Wake contains the elemental patterns of storytelling, it will be rare to find a story that cannot, in some way, be connected with some part of Joyce’s masterpiece. The trick is for readers to recognize the difference between, on the one hand, a highly personal and coincidental reading and, on the other, an assessment of ideas created by the words, patterns, and structures of the text itself. It’s all fun and games to find references to Tiger Woods and Batman in Finnegans Wake, but such playfulness has to be matched by a sober recognition that those cherry pickings from a sea of randomness tell us much more about the interpreter than about the Wake itself. Otherwise, it’s too easy to treat the Wake like the “Bible Code.”

For the sake of my own amusment:

Although Van Hoother is left gruesomely bleen, perhaps he (or his replacement, Tristan) could exclaim with Al Bundy, stroking his newly restored, long hair, “I’m a hunk! I’m a dude! I’m a hunky dude!”

Or maybe he would put it, “Hunkalus Childared Easterheld” (III.3).