One of my favorite characters in all of literature is Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. There is, as far as I am aware, one (1) single reference to Heathcliff in Finnegans Wake. Read on to learn about it!

In II.1, Shem (in the form of Glugg) runs away when the girls reject him and starts writing about his parents. He defends his father from the rumors that others spread about him. We are told about the father:

Big dumm crumm digaditchies say short again akter, even while lossassinated by summan, he coaxyorum a pennysilvers offarings bloadonages with candid zuckers on Spinshesses Walk in presents to lilithe maidinettes for at bloo his noose for him with pruriest pollygameous inatentions, he having that pecuniarity ailmint spectacularly in heather cliff emurgency on gale days because souffrant chronic from a plentitude of house torts.

So heather cliff emurgency, Healthcliff, is another HCE.

This passage contains another version of the accusations leveled against HCE, here mixed up with Heathcliff and his issues with inheritance and houses.

HCE is described as having “that pecuniarity ailmint.”

Pecuniary means pertaining to money, but it’s spelled here to resemble “peculiarity.” His “ailment” is something that is minted, having to do with coins. The annotations say that “gale days” are days when payments are made. The phrase also references both the windy conditions for which the house Wuthering Heights is named and HCE’s flatulence amid his defecation in the Park (“the hippic runfields of breezy Baldoyle“).

Speaking of ailments, it’s rumored that HCE was sick. From I.2:

It has been blurtingly bruited by certain wisecrackers (the stinks of Mohorat are in the nightplots of the morning), that he suffered from a vile disease.

I assume the rumor is that he had an STD (maybe acquired from a prostitute in the Park), but I like to think of this disease as the stain of human nature, original sin, that runs through us all. As always, there is no need to interpret this stain here in a religious, or supernatural, sense. In regular, everyday ways, people routinely disappoint each other and themselves. There is no need to postulate anything supernatural to explain that people just tend not to live up to their ideal images. A major theme of Finnegans Wake is learning to accept the imperfections of Humanity, and ourselves, and even celebrate those imperfections. It’s the Fortunate Fall: the Fall makes possible the greater good of forgiveness. We might even call this forgiveness “Redemption” if we’re being poetic, a kind of symbolic “waking up” from the dream of Selfhood and ego that leads us to fixate on blaming ourselves and others.

The disease is described as a “pecuniarity ailmint” because it manifests in the fallen world as the zero-sum game of debts and owing money, having to pay up on gale days, and owing and collecting money for “torts” and property.

Wuthering Heights could be considered an exploration of this fallen world. The understanding of the world as a zero-sum game becomes Heathcliff’s obsession, as he uses the rules of property and inheritance to punish his tormentors, as well as the innocent. But as he does so, he also punishes himself.

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The other parts of this passage compress a lot of sexual energy. HCE is giving to girls silver pennies, blood oranges, apples (bloa is Latin for apple) — forbidden fruit, in other words. The Fall from the Garden of Eden. And he’s giving them candies for them to suck, which has erotic implications. It puts me in mind of a passage from I.3, where, in one telling of the Cad encounter, he tips a cigar to the son-figure: “he was to just pluggy well suck that brown boyo, my son, and spend a whole half hour in Havana.” Tip. “House torts” is also the German Haustorte, cake of the house, another sweet. And the girls are blowing his nose, like a mother to a child, and preparing his noose.

We find here Oedipal longing, incestuous fantasies, sex acts of many kinds, the Fall from the Garden of Eden, paying and owing (the “tips” of the older generation create the feeling of debt), marriage (polygamy, mixed with lusting after their gams/legs), and property and houses.

The Fall is frequently equated throughout the Wake with the torments of love and jealousy and the zero-sum game of capitalist owing and paying. Heathcliff is but one literary example of this.

The girls have “pruriest pollygameous inatentions.” Both pure and prurient. Playing the zero-sum marriage game (the word “game” is hidden in there), as Catherine does in Wuthering Heights. Her intentions are informed by her inattention to Heathcliff.

The word “Spinshesses” is unclear to me. I thought Sphynx at first, which would link again to Oedipus. Pronouncing it out loud sounds like Princesses. Maybe spinsters, girls who spin (weaving the dream together like the tailors).

The Anima, the female portion of the dreamer’s psyche, sews the dream of life, Penelope-like.

From I.1, a cat reference and a tailor reference:

Boald Tib does be yawning and smirking cat’s hours on the Pollockses’ woolly round tabouretcushion watching her sewing a dream together, the tailor’s daughter, stitch to her last.

And speaking of cats — the name Heathcliff puts me in mind of the 80s cartoon of the same name, which explores the adventures of the “other orange cat” (aside from Garfield, that is). The only thing I remember about this show from my childhood is its excellent theme song. The one line from the song that I’ve used as the title of this post calls to my mind the Fortunate Fall once again: out of “each calamity” of fallen experience comes the possibility of joy. To affirm life is to affirm both its joy and its pain, an Amor Fati.

I should write another post about cats in Finnegans Wake.