The first time I saw the word “pentschanjeuchy” in Finnegans Wake I.1, I thought it simply referred to the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Thanks to my days in Catholic school, I had memorized the names of these books in order (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), and I recognized references to them in the lines just before “pentschanjeuchy” appeared. Why the weird spelling? Eh, who knows, I figured. Joyce can be weird. The Wake is a weird book.

Years later, I consulted annotations and was surprised to learn that this word is also a reference to a puppet show called “Punch and Judy”: “a traditional British slapstick puppet show; Punch is a hunchback [HCE symbol], Judy is his wife [ALP symbol].”

Okay, I thought. The dreamer’s mind contains both his ego and Anima, the feminine portion of the psyche (cue Buck Mulligan’s dirty joke from Ulysses: “Every man his own wife”).

I didn’t think that much of it, and I certainly never set out to learn much about Punch and Judy. Perhaps over the years I came across the idea that Punch is over-the-top violent, but it never interested me much. Flash forward to just the other week when I was reading The Magicians of Caprona with my daughter. This book is a fantasy story by Diana Wynne Jones, author of Howl’s Moving Castle, which I’ve written about here. In this story, the show Punch and Judy plays a rather large role, as one of the characters is a fan and collector of the puppets, and there’s a brilliant chapter later in the book where the show takes center stage.

When a character attends a Punch and Judy show early in the book, I was surprised to see a sentence announce that the character got to the front of the crowd and was “able to watch Punch beat Judy to death at the top of his little painted sentry-box.”

The content of the sentence is horrible, but the casualness with which it is relayed is funny (the essence of comedy is in contrasts, mismatches, and exaggerations). It also made me read up some more on Punch and Judy and ponder their connection to Finnegans Wake.

Read on for a few of my thoughts and my musings about the question of whether HCE is an abuser.

The references to Punch and Judy in the Wake are pretty offhand and incidental. They’re little things like calling HCE “Mr. Pencho” on page 349. Or this ode to rum on 334: “O rum it is the chomicalest thing how it pickles up the punchey and the jude.” The phrase “puncheon jodelling” on 455 is also glossed as a reference. Maybe the most direct reference is on 255: “Punch may be pottleproud but his Judy’s a wife’s wit better.” There, the phrase “pleased as punch” (an alcoholic punch?) mixes with a “bottle” of booze (and the idea that HCE is sacrificial “cattle,” maybe?), while ALP is a “bit better,” has better “wit,” or gets wet (with fertility connotations, both rain and intercourse; from the Prankquean episode: she “made her wit foreninst the dour”). [By the way, I was surprised to learn that the phrase “pleased as punch” comes from Punch and Judy!]

In I.2, the Cad is talking about his encounter with HCE in his sleep, and when the narrator says that he snored the story in parts, a parenthetical aside comments that “he” (presumably HCE, but also the Cad) was before the Ides of March, “he having beham with katya when lavinias had her mens lease to sea in a psumpship doodly show.” There’s a lot we could do with these lines, but the important point is that the fallen world — in which men are lost to sea, or “lease to sea” in the fallen world of owing and debt — is represented as a Punch and Judy puppet show (and simultaneously a ship that carries characters: compare the “dummyship” at the end of the Prankquean episode, the canoe at the end of the sugar daddy passage in I.3, and the life bark in II.3. All of them are forms of Noah’s Ark, and I’ll need to write about ships in Finnegans Wake sometime).

[quick note on that sentence: the Cad seems to be snoring out part of HCE’s confession and/or HCE’s attempt at an alibi, all of which might be just the Cad’s mind misremembering or twisting HCE’s words as the Cad dreams about it. Katya might be Kate (the elderly form of ALP). “Mens” is simultaneously men lost at sea, the Latin mens (mind), and menses (menstruation). Lavinia is married to Aeneas in The Aeneid to produce the Roman empire of Virgil’s day. “Pumpship” is apparently slang for urination, a reference to HCE’s scandal in the Park.]

But okay, what does it mean that HCE is compared to Punch from Punch and Judy? The story of Mr. Punch is another manifestation of HCE, just like the story of Adam, the story of Noah, the story of Jarl Van Hoother, the story of Wellington and Napoleon, etc. Although Punch and Judy shows always differ a bit from performance to performance, the Wikipedia entry for Punch and Judy details several elements that are always present:

Everyone knows that Punch mishandles the baby, that Punch and Judy quarrel and fight, that a policeman comes for Punch and gets a taste of his stick, that Punch has a gleeful run-in with a variety of other figures and takes his stick to them all, that eventually he faces his final foe (which might be a hangman, the devil, a crocodile, or a ghost). 

This is sounding somewhat similar to HCE’s story. The violent slapstick world of the puppet show could signify the fallen world into which HCE descends, in which we all quarrel (sometimes violently) with one another.

So here’s a question: is HCE, as depicted in Finnegans Wake, an abusive husband like Mr. Punch?

The answer, like almost everything in the Wake, is yes and no. The question speaks to the tension between HCE as an “Everyman” (and thus the fact that every story, including stories of abusive spouses, contains him) and HCE as a specific character. There actually are specific facts about HCE that don’t correspond to all stories: he’s hunchbacked, he has a disease, he owns a tavern, he has three children, etc.

I see HCE as an archetypal figure who is depicted with specific qualities that vary even across the Wake. For example, he has or had a wife, but did she divorce him? Did she die and make him a widower? Does she exist only in his mind as an ideal wife after his girlfriend jilted him? Did he kill her? Did she kill him? You can find evidence for any and all of the above points because the “story” of HCE is told and retold and repeated with thousands of variations — these variations include specific examples from history and literature, the legendary exploits of a figure whose initials are HCE, and the lives of each and every one of us. HCE is the story of Humanity, Human, Erring, Condonable. Afflicted with the figurative illness of our tendency to do wrong, we all “Fall” and “Rise” many times and in many ways. Here Comes Everybody.

So yes, to the extent that Humanity has abusers — in fact, to the extent that each of us has violent and cruel impulses that may or may not manifest in action — we could say that “abuser” is one of the masks that HCE wears, one of the roles he plays (in literature and in human history), one of the zillions of aspects of human energy that is rolled up inside the archetype HCE.

I’m reminded of a story the washerwomen tell in I.8 in which ALP brings HCE breakfast and he throws away the food, almost hitting her in the backside. First, one woman describes the funk he was in:

Well, old Humber was as glommen as grampus […] sittang sambre on his sett, drammen and drommen, usking queasy quizzers of his ruful continence, his childlinen scarf to encourage his obsequies where he’d check their debths in that mormon’s thames, be questing and handsetl, hop, step and a deepend, with his berths in their toiling moil, his swallower open from swolf to fore and the snipes of the gutter pecking his crocs, hungerstriking all alone and holding doomsdag over hunselv, dreeing his weird, with his dander up

He’s gloomy. His sits around feeling somber and asking quiz questions (like I.6). He holds his mouth open like a crocodile to swallow (his children, like Cronos?) but he simultaneously is engaged in a hunger strike. His dander is up, and perhaps he has an erection.

It’s an unflattering portrait, but it’s one version of HCE because there are unlikeable people, and HCE is all of us, even the not so pleasant ones.

And there she was, Anna Livia, she darent catch a winkle of sleep, purling around like a chit of a child […] for to ishim bonzour to her dear dubber Dan […] And an odd time she’d cook him up blooms of fisk and lay to his heartsfoot her meddery eygs, yayis, and staynish beacons on toasc and a cupenhave so weeshywashy of Greenland’s tay or a dzoupgan of Kaffue mokau an sable or Sikiang sukry or his ale of ferns in trueart pewter and a shinkobread (hamjambo, bana?) for to plaise that man hog stay his stomicker till her pyrraknees shrunk to nutmeg graters while her togglejoints shuck with goyt and as rash as she’d russ with her peakload of vivers up on her sieve (metauwero rage it swales and rieses) my hardey Hek he’d kast them frome him, with a stour of scorn, as much as to say you sow and you sozh, and if he didn’t peg the platteau on her tawe, believe you me, she was safe enough. 

When I read this, I can’t help thinking about the end of Ulysses, where Mr. Bloom asks Molly to make him breakfast in bed the next morning. Here, ALP makes her husband “blooms of fisk” (fish). This is the “brookfisht” (breakfast) that ALP looks forward to in her monologue at the end of the book. So is the word “blooms” here proof that Leopold Bloom is the dreamer of Finnegans Wake??! Eh, not really. It’s an interesting coincidence, I guess. The word “fisk” is also interesting because the sentence from earlier in I.8 “HCE has a codfisk ee” also calls back to Ulysses. Is any of this important? Eh. As I discuss in the post I just linked too, I find it very boring to wonder who the dreamer of the Wake is.

For me, the important thing here is that HCE is at least kind of a jerk, if not downright abusive. Let’s not forget that HCE’s Cad aspect has a lot of violent rage (see his threats to HCE at the end of I.3). In his manifestation as Shaun, and specifically Jaunty Jaun in II.2, he threatens to beat Issy in an erotic manner that recalls spanking. First he says, “I’ll smack your fruitflavoured jujube lips well for you, so I will well for you, if you don’t keep a civil tongue in your pigeonhouse.” Then he says, “I’ll have it in for you. I’ll teach you bed minners.” And look at his awful justification: “For your own good, you understand, for the man who lifts his pud to a woman is saving the way for kindness.”  Yipes.

Shaun’s threats to spank her — “For I’ll just draw my prancer and give you one splitpuck in the crupper, you understand, that will bring the poppy blush of shame to your peony hindmost till you yelp papapardon and radden your rhodatantarums to the beat of calorrubordolor” — are echoed by HCE’s description of spanking ALP in III.3, when his voice breaks through Shaun/Yawn and gives a long speech to end the chapter: “her chastener ever I did learn my little ana countrymouse in alphabeater cameltemper, from alderbirk to tannenyou, with myraw rattan atter dundrum.”

A “rattan” is a cane used for beating someone.

So is my point that HCE is an awful abuser and we should stop reading this book and #CancelHCE? (In a sense, that’s exactly what happens to HCE in the book, as the people turn against him)

No, but we should acknowledge that Joyce’s characters exhibit all kinds of less than honorable behavior. Look at Leopold Bloom’s conduct in Ulysses, starting with his public masturbation in front of a young girl in Chapter 13 and extending to the shameful memories and desires that plague him in Chapter 15 (“Circe”). Joyce doesn’t want us to revile these characters, but he’s also not celebrating their behavior in their most ignoble moments.

I see him as laying bare on the page what humanity is. All of us have impulses and deeds that are both noble and ignoble, respectable and dishonorable. Surely, some people are (much) better than others, and the point of Joyce’s work is not to excuse the worst excesses and crimes that people commit. But at the same time, if we’re going to accept Humanity — if we’re going to open our arms and say with a welcoming attitude, “Here Comes Everybody” — then we have to accept the less pleasant parts of Humanity, the parts that are at least echoed in the basest impulses of every last one of us.

That doesn’t mean we cease to fight against misdeeds, it doesn’t mean we become indifferent to wrongdoing. But we acknowledge and accept that we all have our shades of good and bad, and that out of the bad — both in ourselves and what we encounter from others — we can strive to create good. This is the Fortunate Fall, the Felix Culpa that Joyce calls “Phoenix Culprit”: out of the Fall, out of the bad stuff that people do, comes the possibility for Redemption, for building a better world together.