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CHAPTER 8 The Old Testament 'Old dustamount' (359.II) Ihave already suggested that the basic axiom underlying Finnegans Wake is that the artist is the God ofhis creation.1 Joyce seems to have gone a step further than that and considered that the work on which he was engaged was itself a new sacred book. 'I go', he wrote in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 'to forge in the smithy ofmy soul the uncreated conscience of my race.'2 Finnegans Wake was to be the fulfilment of this promise. It was to contain within itself all the sacred books which had ever been written. The method which Joyce adopted to make his book subsume all others was his customary one of selecting fragments from all he could find and distributing the fragments in his own pages. Its success depended on the skill with which the fragments were selected, transformed, and redistributed; and Joyce wrote, 'I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description.'3 He was, in fact, aware of his own defects and chose his methods with deliberation. But it is impossible to say whether or not Joyce really set out to include references to all the world's sacred books in the Wake. Since he usually aimed at completeness the probability seems to be that he tried to fit them all in. But the number ofbooks which have at one time and place or another been considered sacred is so large, and the obscurity of many of these books so great, that it would require an enormous amount of research to say with any precision what proportion of the whole is mentioned in Finnegans Wake. There are, for example, the forty-nine volumes edited by Max Mtiller with the general title The Sacred Books of the East, and the hundred and thirty-six volumes ofthe Theravada Canon which have been published by the Pali Text Society in English translation: and in both cases the editors point out tllat the 1 See above: 'The Structural Books', p. 27. • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Travellers' Library ed., p. 238. 3 Letters, p. 297. Letter to George Antheil, dated '3 January I93I'. 169 THE SACRED BOOKS books translated are not the entire body of works that couid have been included but just a selection. It therefore appears that Joyce's 'ideal reader' must possess not only an 'ideal insomnia' but an ideal library. Furthermore he must be able to read the books for Joyce sometimes quotes from them in the original language, as will be seen later in this chapter. He is known to have asked for words in eastern languagespresumably so as to include them in his book. He wrote to Miss Weaver that 'A Chinese student sent me some letterwords I had asked for. The last one is W. It means "mountain" and is called "Chin", the common people's way of pronouncing Hin or Fin.'l The sign used here is the one which Joyce employed for H.C.E., but only another Chinese student could say what Joyce did with the information he received. The word 'mountain' is used rather frequently in the Wake in phrases such as 'a man that means a mountain' (309.4) or 'mightmountain Penn' (19.32) and 'mountynotty man' (21.7). It seems probable that the word 'mountain' in the Wake is meant to include H.C.E. in its group of implications. Probably Joyce wished to include in the Wake at least one specimen of every language he could find. His readers can console themselves with the reflection that the book is still written chiefly in English, with occasional additional meanings from French, German and other European languages, while the proportion of incomprehensible fOfe:Lgn words that may have been extracted from obscure sacred books is very small. On the other hand there are some quotations disguised as English phrases and almost unrecognizable. 'Seek it Hatup! ... Suckit Hotup!' (415.34) is from the Middle Egyptian Sekhet Hetepu, 'the fields of heaven'; and several similar examples will be pointed out later. There are undoubtedly many more which I have not been able to spot; and-as usual-the reader can never be certain that he has understood everything. Joyce's distortions of spelling make this inevitable. Is, for example, 'Ansighosa' (246.10) intended to suggest the Asvaghosa...

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