I recently underwent minor surgery, during which I had to be put out. Everything went fine, and I am perfectly well recovered now. Looking back, my overall impression of the experience is dominated by how much waiting I had to do. I got dressed in my hospital gown and lay down in a bed and waited.

While waiting, I remarked to the editor of this blog — I was extremely fortunate to have her by my side through the entire ordeal — that one day (hopefully far in the future) I would be in a hospital bed just like this, except it would be my deathbed.

Read on for some thoughts about the deathbed in Finnegans Wake and the need to accept our mortality.

The bed in which the dreamer of the novel slumbers is also his deathbed and funeral bier. Near the end of I.7, when Shaun interrogates his brother, he asks,

Where have you been in the uterim, enjoying yourself all the morning since your last wetbed confession?

The term “interim” has blended with “uterus,” as if he continually returns to the womb, which is also equated with the deathbed, which is simultaneously the “wetbed” in which the newborn baby pees himself (cf. the first page of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold”).

Everything is jumbled together here: birth and death, lying in bed with your own waste as an infant, returning to the womb and deathbed throughout life, and giving a confession.

Although Shaun is acting like a priest here, imploring his brother to confess, this is no sacrament: he is police interrogator, trying to get him to admit to his wrongdoings, either to punish him or simply to feel superior to him.

Yet confession is what an artist, and a dreamer, does: as the sleeping body lies in bed, it pours forth volumes of literature. As ALP says to her sleeping husband in the final chapter, “But there’s a great poet in you.”

Such confessions are full of the unconscious Oedipal energy of childhood, which are captured in the child’s urinary attack on the parents in Portrait (which causes the sudden emergence of the grammatical second person “you” in that text: a split is introduced in consciousness, and an idea of the self begins to develop; maybe instead of Lacan’s “mirror stage,” in which self identity begins to emerge from seeing oneself in the mirror, Joyce would postulate a “urinary stage” as part of this development; I’m [mostly] joking).

Earlier in I.7, we saw that deathbed/wetbed when Shem fled there after being attacked:

the scut in a bad fit of pyjamas fled like a leveret for his bare lives, to Talviland, ahone ahaza, pursued by the scented curses of all the village belles

This is the equivalent of that scene in I.4, where “all the twofromthirty advocatesses within echo, pulling up their briefs at the krigkry: Shun the Punman!: safely and soundly soccered that fenemine Parish Poser (how dare he!) umprumptu rightoway hames”

In that earlier scene, they chase him to his home, “Drinkbattle’s Dingy Dwellings where (for like your true venuson Esau he was dovetimid as the dears at Bottome) he shat in (zoo).”

This is exactly what happens in I.7. The paragraph continues that Shem

kuskykorked himself up tight in his inkbattle house, badly the worse for boosegas, there to stay in afar for the life, where, as there was not a moment to be lost, after he had boxed around with his fortepiano till he was whole bach bamp him and bump him blues, he collapsed carefully under a bedtick from Schwitzer’s, his face enveloped into a dead warrior’s telemac, with a lullobaw’s somnbomnet and a whotwaterwottle at his feet to stoke his energy of waiting

“Drinkbattle” from the passage in I.4 has become “inkbattle” here in I.7.

So there he is on his “wetbed.” A “tick,” the annotations say, is a kind of mattress, but it reminds us that he has entered the fallen world, where we are dominated by our sense of passing time, and where time has been measured out for the purpose of capitalist productivity (Blake writes, “The hours of folly are measured by the clock, but of wisdom no clock can measure”).

The word “telemac” recalls Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, whose name literally means “the end of the war.” [supposedly “mac” is short for macintosh, as in the coat: I remember Homer Simpson’s proposed solution to one of his problems: hide under a bunch of coats and hope everything gets better] Here we find the end of Shem’s war: far from an epic hero, or the son of one who is to come into his own, his end is being locked up in his “inkbattle house,” the same one we see later in I.7 — the “Haunted Inkbottle,” the “house O’Shea or O’Shame” — where we’re treated to an epic catalogue of all the clutter he keeps.

Shem of course reiterates his father here. Just as HCE was laid in his bed/grave, so is the son: the father was locked into his coffin/Stonehenge in I.3, and his son gets locked up in his home that is both an inkbottle and bottle of booze.

Thinking of my own time in a hospital — and my father’s recent stay in one, on his literal deathbed — I feel like there’s some deep wisdom in welcoming our coming deathbed, in accepting our mortality fully. There’s a meditation in the Buddhist tradition where you imagine your own corpse and concentrate on that image, the idea being that all things are impermanent and we need to accept our inevitable (some might say ineluctable) deaths as natural and necessary, and even important, allowing the wheel to turn and the cycle of generations to continue, exactly as Finnegans Wake shows us.

Our death is inseparable from our birth, and from new births and new lives that feed upon the old. In our wake will be left behind our legacy. For writers, this means that their work will be left, especially since writers are figuratively “killed” by the act of writing, allowing their texts to “live” in the minds of readers, who will interpret them in myriad ways not intended by the writer (cf. Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author”). And even those of us who aren’t writers will have our acts of creativity left behind. The stories we tell ourselves and others — including especially stories about who we are — are our art, and we die to ourselves and are born again in our stories anew continually. For HCE, his creativity is represented in part by his sinful urination, defecation, and masturbation in the Park, detailed in II.3, among other places. For Shem, his lesser echo of this crime is his soiling himself (from II.1: “he make peace in his preaches and play with esteem” — he pees in his britches and plays with himself/his stem), writing literary works with the “ink” of his own waste, and expelling his shameful waste/art on the wetbed/deathbed that is also the crib in which he is laid as an infant/reborn self.

The passage in I.7 ends with a description of him on that bed,

his cheeks and trousers changing colour every time a gat croaked.

[note: “gat” is both a weapon that threatens Shem (gatling gun) and a cat — I will write a post soon on cats in Finnegans Wake; Joyce was a cat person]

Here, Shem is messing himself, blushing with embarrassment, and hearing “croaking” — both in the sense of his death and the noise of frogs that are associated with life and art: the titular Frogs from Aristophanes make noise on the second page of Finnegans Wake, the sounds of the primordial swamps out of which life got started, and Shem himself summons this croaking with the phallic pen that is the tool of his art. The final line of I.7 is “He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak.”

The ultimate affirmation of life, and of art, is the affirmation of death. There can be no life without death, and a person who has not died yet is incomplete. Seen in this way, death is not something to fear. It’s something to welcome and love as much as one loves life.

I’m reminded of one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms from Beyond Good and Evil: “One should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa — blessing it rather than in love with it.”

I was about to object that Nietzsche is all about loving life, but then I recalled that his idea Amor Fati doesn’t mean love of life but love of fate: to love everything that happens to you because, in a sense, it must happen. This is different than loving life itself because, as Nietzsche would be the first to note, there are things that people would surrender life and comfort for. People aren’t motivated simply by living in and of itself.

Affirming life, rather than loving it, entails affirming pain and loss and, in the end, death. Those affirmations are part and parcel of loving fate. This is the Eternal Affirmation, the Great Yes that ends Ulysses.

I note that in the above passage from I.7, describing Shem retreated to his house, the narrator uses the phrase “there was not a moment to be lost.” Joyce is playing with words again. Literally, the phrase means Shem had to hurry, but it reminds us that in the philosophy endorsed by the Wake, all the moments of time are always available to us and can never be lost. There is thus also not a single moment in which we can be lost, and at every Moment, we die and are reborn.