This post looks briefly at the rhythm of the nursery rhyme “The House that Jack Built,” which occurs several times in Finnegans Wake.

Wikipedia nicely describes this rhyme as a “cumulative tale that does not tell the story of Jack’s house, or even of Jack who built the house, but instead shows how the house is indirectly linked to other things and people, and through this method tells the story of ‘The man all tattered and torn’, and the ‘Maiden all forlorn’, as well as other smaller events, showing how these are interlinked.”

Well, sheesh, doesn’t that sound like Finnegans Wake? Like the rhyme, the Wake refuses to tell us directly of HCE’s transgression but instead shows us how all things are linked to the tattered, torn, and forlorn husband and wife pair that are the male and female aspects of a sleeping mind.

One of the earliest instances of the rhyme appears in I.4, describing a form of HCE who arises after the original HCE is buried in his grave amid the wars of the fallen world, though he may have “Blueblitzbolted from there.” After we hear about Old Kate (a form of ALP who here corresponds to the hen who found the Letter) digging through the “filthdump near the Serpentine in Phornix Park” in which the Letter has been hidden, we hear the voice of God in the thunder as the floods of the fallen world retreat from a “timberman torchpriest”:

For hear Allhighest sprack for krischnians as for propagana fidies and his nuptial eagles sharped their beaks of prey: and every morphyl man of us, pome by pome, falls back into this terrine: as it was let it be, says he! And it is as though where Agni araflammed and Mithra monished and Shiva slew as mayamutras the obluvial waters of our noarchic memory withdrew, windingly goharksome, to some hastyswasty timberman torchpriest, flamenfan, the ward of the wind that lightened the fire that lay in the wood that Jove bolt, at his rude word. Posidonius O’Fluctuary! Lave that bloody stone as it is! What are you doing your dirty minx and his big treeblock way up your path? Slip around, you, by the rare of the ministers’! And, you, take that barrel back where you got it, Mac Shane’s, and go the way your old one went, Hatchettsbury Road! And gish! how they gushed away, the pennyfares, a whole school for scamper, with their sashes flying sish behind them, all the little pirlypettes! Issy-la-Chapelle! Any lucans, please?

One Fall has ended, and the cycle is about to repeat, and God seems to have caught this new version of HCE in whatever offense he’s committing, and the girls go rushing away like a school of fish, anticipating a passage in in III.3 that I discuss here (in which I say that the end of the passage “seems to indicate both sides of the libido, revving it up and cooling it down, both sides simultaneously attributed to the Fall and Redemption (‘Hearasays in paradox lust’).”

This “ward of the wind” is flatulent, and his lighted fire is perhaps his lust. His wood (erection) is connected to the thunderbolt of the King of the Gods who speaks here. Everywhere in Finnegans Wake, thunder is associated with the end of a cycle and the beginning of the next one (as in Giambattista Vico’s philosophy, where it signals the repetition of the ages of history), the destruction of an HCE and his succession by a Tristan/Cad, a new version of the Everyman. This destruction and resurrection are again linked to the erotic energies of humanity.

Another instance comes in the cross examination of III.3, which recalls the “crossexanimation” in I.4, as well as the Mute and Jute passages in I.1 and IV.1:

—So this was the dope that woolied the cad that kinked the ruck that noised the rape that tried the sap that hugged the mort?

—That legged in the hoax that joke bilked.

—The jest of junk the jungular?

—Jacked up in a jock the wrapper.

There’s a lot compressed here, including Jack the Ripper (suggesting sinister aspects to HCE) and the reference to the version of the Fall in I.3 in which HCE kicked or battered a door (Back in I.3, Lally [a form of the Cad] swears on the stand that he met “a right querrshnorrt of a mand in the butcher of the blues who […] hickicked at the dun and dorass against all the runes”; a version of HCE also claims he was merely “trying to open zozimus a bottlop stoub by mortially hammering his magnum bonum […] against the bludgey gate”; also, in I.7, the narrator asks “Kick?” from the Lithuanian kiek (“how much”) in response to Shem’s claims to the police officer).

That he “tried the sap” could mean he tested the patience of the sappy HCE or tasted sap from his, um, tree (the annotations says that “sap” is a Romani word for snake). HCE of course “hugged the mort,” embraced death, both literal and the “little death” of sexual pleasure (the annotations say that “mort” is slang for a sexually promiscuous woman). The word “leg” reminds me of the “Daughters Benkletter” in I.3 who “murmured in uniswoon: Golforgilhisjurylegs!” (a “jury leg” is a wooden leg, apparently, which is maybe another phallic reference and a reference to the jury that tries him). The word “bilk” instead of “built” reminds me of the ideas discussed in this post (there, I ask, “Are we building or bilking? Are we prophets or hacks seeking profits?” and I answer with Molly Bloom’s final word in Ulysses).

But the instance of the “House that Jack Built” that I enjoyed the most comes in III.4, describing HCE as

the slave of the ring that worries the hand that sways the lamp that shadows the walk that bends to his bane the busynext man that came on the cop with the fenian’s bark that pickled his widow that primed the pope that passed it round on the volunteers’ plate till it croppied the ears of Purses Relle that kneed O’Connell up out of his doss that shouldered Burke that butted O’Hara that woke the busker that grattaned his crowd that bucked the jiggers to rhyme the rann that flooded the routes in Eryan’s isles from Malin to Clear and Carnsore Point to Slynagollow and cleaned the pockets arid ransomed the ribs of all the listeners, leud and lay, that bought the ballad that Hosty made.

This brings us back around to the rann/song that Hosty sings in I.2, which spreads rumors about HCE and destroys him.

Also, I can’t think of the nursery rhyme without also thinking of this joke: The House that Frasier Built.