I’ve been laughing for decades at a joke on The Simpsons in which Rainier Wolfcastle (a fictional analogue of Arnold Schwarzenegger, complete with a thick German accent) is coached on how to pronounce “Up and atom!” He is playing comic book hero Radioactive Man, so it’s a pun on the saying “Up and at them!” (You can watch the scene here)

Plays on the phrase “Up and at them!” appear many times in Finnegans Wake, so imagine my surprise when I went to look it up the other day and found that it is a saying attributed to the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo (!).

Read on for brief reflections on Waterloo and Finnegans Wake.

The Battle of Waterloo is yet another symbol in the novel for the Fall of HCE, in which one side of him, as Napoleon, is defeated by the other. It is also a key representation of the Brother Battle, an archetype for the wars and conflicts and disagreements of history.

The defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo also maps to the defeat of the Russian general by Buckley. The energies of both events are contained in the Brother Battle in I.4, where the pair of combatants are described parenthetically as either “Nippoluono engaging Wei-Ling-Taou [Napoleon and Wellington] or de Razzkias trying to reconnoistre the general Boukeleff [the Russian General and Buckley].” As indicated by the pidgin English in that sentence, this scene further echoes the Druid versus St. Patrick from IV.1.

I’ve always taken Napoleon, Buckley, and the Druid to be representations of the Cad. So while Wellington (HCE) vanquishes Napoleon (the Cad) and St. Patrick (HCE) defeats the Druid (Cad), Buckley (the Cad) shoots the Russian General (HCE).

Here’s how I’m thinking of the connection of these symbols right now:

The Cad/Druid/Buckley triumphing over HCE in the center of the novel (II.3) is the victory of dream logic over the conscious mind, and the victory of HCE (as St. Patrick) over the Cad (in the form of the Druid) at the end of the novel in IV.1 is the beginning of the reinstatement of the conscious mind over the dream. We would expect Wellington defeating Napoleon to appear at the beginning of the text to act as a bookend. Yet in the first chapter, it would appear that Wellington is actually defeated by a Cad figure.

I take this alteration of history to reflect the beginning of dream logic and the beginning of the triumph of the Cad, which will blossom in II.3 and finally be undone in IV.1.

I notice also that in I.2, when HCE encounters the Cad and fears for his life (worried that the Cad will attack or mug him), the text reads parenthetically, “the nearest help relay being pingping K. O. Sempatrick’s Day and the fenian rising.” In an earlier post, I connected these terms to Patrick beating the Druid and Buckley shooting the General:

HCE feels threatened and fears for his life (and worries he might be shot, as if the pipe is a gun), so he gives him the time. Notice that he thinks of both St. Patrick’s Day (the “K.O.” is knockout, when Patrick fells the Druid, but also “Knights of St. Patrick,” an Irish club in the States) and the Fenian Rising (an Irish revolt against the English). The two events referenced here roughly correspond to the Russian General’s/St. Patrick’s victory over Buckley and Buckley shooting the Russian General, both later in the Wake. This Cad encounter is the prototype for both events, the destruction of HCE and his resurrection as St. Patrick (which is the Cad becoming the next HCE…both events, though, mean the end of *this* HCE).

The Cad encounter of I.2 is also the prototype of Wellington’s victory in real life and his defeat (as the “Willingdone”) in the Wake. The Cad encounter will lead to the two sides of HCE becoming more separated in the Brother Battle of I.4 and finally separating more fully into a recognizable Shaun and Shem after the Festy King episode of I.4 (and, as always, we could see these events either as developments along a linear timeline or as the same event [the Fall] seen from different perspectives).

This is the reason for “Up, guards, and at ’em!” repeated throughout the text. It’s a slogan that represents the warring sides of HCE.

A future post will have to examine the “Willingdone” paragraph of I.1, which presents history, family relations, and the psyche of each individual as a battle.

As far as the “atom” of “Up and atom,” there is no pun exactly like this in the Wake, though the novel mentions atoms several times, from the opening sentence moving past “Eve and Adam’s” (past an orderly “even atoms” into disorder) to the resolve of Kersse (the Cad/Tailor) to hunt down the Norwegian Captain/HCE: “he is consistently blown to Adams,” vaporized into atoms and returned to life into new incarnations or Adams.

At some point, it may be worth writing a post that discusses HCE’s Fall in terms of the annihilation of the atom — the “The abnihilisation of the etym,” which links atoms to language/etym (apparently, “etym,” as in etymology, means something like “true sense,” which is fascinating when thinking of HCE as an eternal archetype, and perhaps the very foundation of language itself).