Joyce Illustrates Finnegans Wake and HCE Goes Tomb-Hopping
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Chapter I.4 of Finnegans Wake was first published in the April-July 1927 issue of transition. Ten years later in a letter dated August 6, 1937, Joyce writes to his Dublin friend Constantine Curran, “I am trying to finish my wip [Work in Progress]. (I work about 16 hours a day, it seems to me) . . .” (LI 395). What Joyce was working on in 1937 and 1938 was the editing and proofreading of the galleys for Finnegans Wake, including I.4. As he proofread, he continued expanding and embellishing the text, inserting directly into the galleys new words and phrases, which he culled from the notebooks that he had been amassing since 1922.
Joyce’s intention was to obfuscate his night book further by introducing references to various artworks, such as Rembrandt’s The NightWatch (Figure 1), with the phrase, “Wacht even!,”1 (76.23). There are also references to Michelangelo’s Night statue (Figure 2) in the Medici Chapel in Florence. This latter work is suggested by the lyrics from the French song, “La femme à barbe,”2 as well as by other phrases that Joyce added to the galleys in 1937–38. Using the images of these artworks, and the words associated with them, Joyce sends HCE on a path emulating that of the Egyptian god Osiris.
To establish the context for these events, we should recall that at the end of chapter I.3 of Finnegans Wake, HCE has been barraged with insults (71.10–72.16); rumors of his illicit behavior and crimes fly indiscriminately. Under the weight of these assaults, HCE finally succumbs and “Sdops” (74.19), i.e., drops, stops. As John Bishop points out, when I.4 opens, HCE reveals a “stream of unconsciousness of a man sleepily dead to the world.”3 He longs to be brought back to life, and Joyce portrays HCE seeking refuge in the Book of the Dead4 (BOD). This text was “believed to give the dead strength to resist the attacks of foes and to [End Page 248] withstand the powers of darkness and of the grave and enabled them to enjoy everlasting happiness” (Bishop 89). The circular nature of the BOD resonated with Joyce: it deals with the myth of Osiris—his trial by the gods as to his worthiness for resurrection, his descent into the underworld as he struggles with obstacles in his path, and his final resurrection.
Book of the Dead
The first words of chapter 4 immediately link us to some of the themes of the BOD, e.g., “teargarten” (75.1), which may represent a cemetery (among other things), thus immediately placing us in the appropriate realm of the dead. However, before HCE can proceed, he must pass muster, as the deceased do in the BOD. The Wake text reads as follows:
Any number of conservative public bodies, through a number of select and other committees having power to add to their number . . . by a fit and proper resolution, following a koorts order of the ground-wet, 5 once for all out of plotty existence . . . so you maatskippey might to you cuttinrunner on a neuw pack of klerds,6 made him, while his body still persisted . . .
(76.14–20 emphases mine; words and phrases in bold were added in 1937–38).
Our hero must go before a court (“koorts”), as did Osiris Ani in “The Weighing of the Heart” scene (Figure 3). The corpse is elaborately decked out in new clothes (“neuw pack of klerds”) and then must be judged by the goddess Maat (“maatskippey”), the personification of the feather of truth, justice, and cosmic order. In the upper register of the Ani papyrus, a row of gods sits in judgment. Osiris Ani is then subjected to the weighing of the heart in which the heart and a feather are placed on a balance scale. If the heart is heavier than the feather, the deceased will not be eligible for the afterlife. It is this judgment scene that Joyce chose to illustrate in the guise of The Night Watch “Wacht even!”—hence the exclamation point: Judgment!
