Among the catalogue of rumors about HCE in I.3 comes this sentence:

A wouldbe martyr, who is attending on sanit Asitas where he is being taught to wear bracelets, when grilled on the point, revealed the undoubted fact that the consequence would be that so long as Sankya Moondy played his mango tricks under the mysttetry, with shady apsaras sheltering in his leaves’ licence and his shadowers torrifried by the potent bolts of indradiction, there would be fights all over Cuxhaven.

The most interesting thing I learned from the annotations is that Cuxhaven is a real place! It’s a German port where an air-raid was conducted in World War I. On an initial read, I assumed it was a made-up name meant to sound like “cucks haven,” which is an appropriate name for the fallen world in Finnegans Wake.

Read on for thoughts about this haven for “cucks,” which I connect to the idea of the deathbed.

First, it should be noted that the rest of that sentence draws upon the image of the Buddha seated beneath the bodhi tree, achieving enlightenment by meditating and releasing his grasp for permanence. “Sankya Moondy” is a garbled version of the Buddha’s title “Sakya Muni” mixed with Sankey and Moody, publishers of Christian hymns and gospel songs in the late nineteenth century. Clearly, this is HCE — that archetypal figure who lurks behind all religions and myths — and as long as he’s playing his mango tricks (magic tricks, banjo tricks, committing the first sin with forbidden fruit) under the tree (the spelling makes me think of Blake’s Tree of Mystery, which grows from religion/supernaturalism and misapplications of human reason), there will be “fights all over Cuxhaven,” the battles of history between Shem and Shaun.

[Apparently, “apsaras” are “maidens set to entertain Buddha when young,” so these correspond to the girls in the Park, and the “shadowers” are HCE’s “ombre players” from Chapter 1. The thunder and lightning of the Fall are also the “potent bolts” of his flatulence or defecation]

As ever, it’s an image of the Fall and Redemption all at once. The world is both fallen and redeemed simultaneously; it’s just a matter of how we turn our eyes toward it.

The connection of these fallen battles to cuckoldry — and, more broadly, to sexual jealousy and what William Blake terms the “Torments of Love and Jealousy” — has been on my mind recently. In Blake’s long poems, war and oppression are presented as effects of the repression of the sex drive, due to so-called “moral” codes of cold chastity and denial of desire, which include the strange ideas underlying the concept of cuckoldry. For me, the connection is clearest when Blake depicts in his poem Jerusalem a warrior declaring, ““I must rush again to War: for the Virgin has frownd & refusd.” In one canceled stanza for this poem, he calls “Glory & Victory a phallic whip,” indicating that war (the glory or kleos of the classical epic tradition) and punishment are displacements of the sex drive.

The battles of Shem and Shaun are driven by sexual jealousy and competition over Issy — their desire to make cuckolds out of each other — and also by their desire to cuckold the father. Issy is, after all, a form of the mother, ALP. In their combined form as the Cad/Tristan, Shem and Shaun succeed in taking Issy/ALP from the old HCE, and through them a new HCE arrives, just as each generation inevitably takes over from the previous one.

It occurs to me that the image of cuckoldry, and the dreamer’s anxiety over it, is linked strongly to anxiety over death. I was recently re-reading my post on Howl’s Moving Castle and Finnegans Wake, and this bit struck me: I called the “lovemaking of Tristan and Isolde” from II.4, an “image of cuckolding/replacement by the son/death anxiety that the dreamer’s mind is trying to repress as it incessantly returns to it.” In this context, I’ve also been thinking about my post on HCE’s encounter with the Cad in I.3 and the idea that the Cad there represents the future that will replace HCE, which I speculate might be something our minds conceive as “more fully authentic” than the present, and I suggest there that the Fall may involve being caught in (grasping) narratives about the past or the future, moping about the past or worrying about the future to the neglect of the present Moment (which is, ultimately, all that ever exists).

Putting these scattered thoughts together, I arrive at the tentative conclusion that the bed of cuckoldry in Finnegans Wake is in a sense identical to the deathbed and funeral bier. To look upon it — as the Old Men do in II.4 and III.4 — is to behold one’s own mortality, the inevitable fact that a replacement is coming for you, that you’ll be gone and life will go on without you.

At the risk of sounding crude about this, I’ll put it this way: your dalliance with Life will come to an end, and then it will be somebody else’s turn with her.

And yes, that is a sexist and weird way of putting it, and it frames everything from a heterosexual male point of view, but…this is Joyce’s idea I’m trying to sketch out. Don’t blame the messenger.

[It occurs to me that, in this context, it would be interesting to think through ALP’s death at the end of the book and her return to the Father…how does it differ from HCE’s many deaths, and how is it differently related to fear of, and desire for, sharing one’s partner with others?]

I ought to state directly the elephant in the room: this is a kink for Joyce. He was turned on by the idea of being cuckolded, even as he feared and loathed it. If we take a broad view of these issues, there’s a lot to say about how regressive the concept of cuckoldry is, its bizarre assumptions (especially the idea that women in a sense “belong” to their male partners, who derive some kind of “honor” from the fidelity of “their” women), and its function in regulating female sexuality as part of patriarchy, patrilineal descent, and what’s been described as “compulsory heterosexuality.”

There’s a lot to say, much of it quite valid. But my interest here is on the psychological import for the individual and the way the symbols function within the bounds of Finnegans Wake as a text. There seems to me to be a productive analogy: in the same way that the dreamer of the Wake, like Joyce, fears cuckoldry and seeks to repress it, but also continually returns to it, cannot help returning to it, finds something compelling about it, and finds a kind of perverse pleasure in it…so too should each of us seek to find in the idea of our own mortality a kind of pleasure, or at least acceptance.

My mind keeps going back to Nietzsche’s aphorism, which I discussed here, that one should leave life like Odysseus parting from Nausicaa: not in love with her but blessing her.

To put this in other terms, you shouldn’t be so jealous or possessive of Life. You had your turn. Some other person’s next, and that person is another version of you, ultimately. It’s not anything to be afraid of, or resentful of, or sad about. It’s the way of the world. You bless it. I’m reminded of another great work of Western Civilization: “I guess there’s something in me that says, a salut,” Tony Soprano muses when it comes to accepting other people for who they are. Accept Life for who she is too. Cultivate the apathy of the stars.

All of these reflections have me thinking that the Buddhist meditation I mentioned in my last post — where one concentrates on the image of one’s own corpse — has a kind of parallel practice in reading and studying the Wake‘s scenes of the deathbed/cuckbed. It would require a careful reading and sustained meditation on II.4 and III.4 (and possibly III.3, which is the Four Old Men examining Shaun as he lies in sleep/death, before HCE is reborn anew at the end of the chapter). The goal of the meditation and study would be to inhabit the perspective of the Old Men, which is really the perspective of the dreamer: they go from looking with longing at the joining couple in II.4 (“their mouths making water”), to an analysis of death in III.3 (leading to the resurrection of HCE)…to an acceptance of the cycles of the universe at the end of III.4 (“Tiers, tiers and tiers. Rounds.” Of course, that’s also “tears.” I’m interested in thinking more about this).

There’s probably a way to unite these ideas with Blake’s brilliant poem The Four Zoas — since Joyce’s Old Men or “zoans” reflect Blake’s characters to some degree — and treat the whole study of these subjects as a path to releasing the need for permanence, and ultimately releasing one’s attachment to Life, to blessing it and letting it go.

More to come on this topic, maybe. I think it would be interesting to do a deep dive into those three chapters from this perspective, and I might do it in dribs and drabs over the next…however long. Stay tuned.