Renascent Joyce

4. The Dream and the Wake: An Alchemy of Words and Scenes in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Finnegans Wake

4 The Dream and the Wake An Alchemy of Words and Scenes in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Finnegans Wake Tracey Eve Winton James Joyce’s interest in François Rabelais is well documented. But in his 1959 study of Joyce’s sources, The Books at the Wake, James Atherton makes no mention of one of Rabelais’ own principal sources of inspiration, the 1499 erotic dream novel, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.1 This incunabulum , published anonymously at the humanist press of Aldus Manutius in Venice, is noteworthy for its beautiful illustrations yet historically little read because it is written in an invented language. In research to date I have not discoveredanyconfirmationthatJoyce—Italophileashewas—didreadthe Hypnerotomachia, but certain lines and themes in Finnegans Wake strongly suggestthathehaditinmind.2 Superficialsimilaritiesoflanguageanddream form stirred me to examine the parallels between the two books. While no short essay could do justice to two books of rival complexity and literary significance, I will outline some general similarities that can cast new light on both works. Assuming a readership more familiar with Finnegans Wake, I will focus the comparison through the Hypnerotomachia (HP). ThisuniquetitleiscompoundedofthreeGreekroots:hypnos,adream;eros, love; and machia, strife or battle. The story is narrated in the first person by its own“idealreadersufferingfromanidealinsomnia”(FW120.14)—Poliphilo— whose name means both “he who loves all (or many)” and “lover of Polia.” “Hic cubat edilis” Poliphilo’s insomnium (nightmare) occurs at dawn, as he finds himself lost in an unknown wilderness, searching for Polia, who does not requite his An Alchemy of Words and Scenes 39 love. In a series of misadventures, in a dream within the dream, he wanders through a mysterious realm that interweaves archetypal city with rural landscape, examining the ruins of classical antiquity—Egyptian, Greek, Roman—describing in phenomenal detail the ornate and beautiful 4.1. Poliphilo dreaming among the many architectural remains and statuary fragments of classical antiquity. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499). Photo: Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome. 40 Tracey Eve Winton buildings, gardens, statuary, and rituals he encounters, as well as ruins and a necropolis, reading inscriptions in the languages of the prisca theologia and the ancient poetic wisdom: hieroglyphic, Attic Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Etruscan, always translating for the reader—though not necessarily into vernacular Italian. Eventually he finds Polia, and after a sequence of initiatory ceremonies she tells her own story, nested within his, often logically contradicting what we (the readers) already “know.” Polia’s story fills most of Book II and includes detailed descriptions of her own dreams and nightmares. Finally, as Poliphilo is on the point of consummating his burning love with his muse, the Sun—whose image initiates the book—rises (out of jealousy) and awakens him from his marvelous dream. Poliphilo and Polia are archetypal characters in the literary ancestry of HCE and ALP. Poliphilo is, like HCE, a somewhat foolish, lustful everyman .Hisnarrationandvocabularyamplyhinttothereaderthatinthe“real” world he, like “Bygmester Finnegan . . . freemen’s maurer” (FW 4.18–19), the hodcarrier or master builder, and like HCE, is involved in the architectural art. Poliphilo is also, within his dream, a species of landscape deity, a lesser god or demiurge, dreaming the world in his own image. Early on, wandering the ruins of an ancient city, he encounters a bronze colossus sprawled on the ground as if asleep—just like him, moaning in torment (HP 39–40). The pneumatic statue is so huge that he is able to climb inside through its mouth, andwhileexploringitsinnerspaceshe findsmodeledorgansmuseologically labeled in three antique languages, with their names, diseases, and cures. This is a visual, not verbal, Rosetta stone, a clue that every materialized and externalized setting is a mirror of his inner self, metaphorical for the contents of his imagination framed in architectonic form.3 “riverrun past Eve and Adams” Polia, her name suggesting both the Athenian polis (whose tutelary deity was Athena Polias) and material plurality, is a Plurabelle figure. In contrast to the stable geometries, the solid objects, in which Poliphilo is reflected, she is named a nymph, having a liquid, volatile reality—a watery spirit like ALP, whose “riverrun” (FW 3.1) generates the story’s flow. In Book II of the Hypnerotomachia, a tearful Polia describes her genealogy, descended from a Rhoa or Rhea—meaning flow (HP 387)—and explains how the goddess 4.2. The fountain in the Palace forecourt, showing the devolving watery spiritus of the nymphs fecundating the sculpted heads...