The Mar of Murmury ( FW 266.18-267.11)

Memory in Finnegans Wake is if anything the opposite of Proust's luminous remembrance of times that are lost. ¹ It is the perils and not the triumph of memory that is the theme. An elegiac speaker starts to speak the phrase "To the unfailing memory" (503.27) but then has to break off. So elusive is memory that invoking it makes the speaker forget what he is about to say. The truth slips out, and "unfailing memory" comes out as "unaveiling memory." Unavailing is discouraging, but, worse, the veil in "unaveiling" brings in the the veil drawn by time and the (still vexed) question of suppressed or veiled memories. Even if they are unveiled, they will be seen only in teasing peeks, the mode of striptease, as in Salome's dance (497.33). This elusiveness of memory in the Wake justifies the pun "remembrandts" (403.10) since the objects of memory in the Wake are only just glimpsed in an accidental light and emerge for a moment from darkness like the dramatic scene (It is The Rape of Proserpina ² !) in a Rembrandt painting. Retrospection in Joyce is essential yet imperfect and obscure. One tries to place the object of memory in space and time; but here those coordinates (at best a "memory schemado"—240.07) appear only blurrily. Space is an "uncharted rock" and time an "evasive weed": "The mar of murmury mermers to the mind's ear, uncharted rock, evasive weed" (254.18-19). The sea of memory, its features a rock unmapped and a weed unclassified, is almost a void, with Shaun and Shem, space and time, the usual coordinates, weathered almost beyond recognition. Remembrance is not so much silent as it is muffled, and it is hardly sweet; if it occurs in sessions, the court is unruly. Shakespeare and Proust-Moncrieff imply that recollection can be coherent and orderly. But in the Wake, the questing mind gropes in the dark and perceives only darkly: "The mar of murmury mermers to the mind's ear" indistinct reports of what was, and the murmured memories mar the mind's ear (a supplement to the "mind's eye," the site at which Hamlet perceives the past, I.ii.186). As in Proust, memories come involuntarily, but here they are troubling, not marvelous. This is the torment of the self-accused for whom memory is so subtly mixed with murmurs (that is, rumor) that they cannot be told apart—hence "murmury." What murmury calls up we would rather not hear. The sea itself murmurs, and the underlying image may be that of the sea's "eternal whispering," ³ or, to go by the sound, a mermaid—here siren-like—murmuring a song from a weedy rock; but this mermaid song is insinuating rather than seductive. The song is the murmur of repressed memories, of events that harmed us and, recalled, can harm us again.

The theme of memory recurs in the Lessons chapter at 266.18-21:

After sound, light and heat, memory, will and understanding.

Here (the memories framed from walls are minding). . . .

First, memory is invoked reverentially, a third mental faculty that with will and understanding sustains some man's well-ripened mind. Second, so instructed, he reflects upon "memories framed from walls," perhaps pictures of the family hanging on the wall as prompts to memory. But the mind works deviously, and memory detaches itself from willed understanding. ⁴ The mind moves back and forth between the mementos that aid memory and the powers of memory itself. Memory itself or herself may be the referent of "thou who fleest flicklesome the fond fervid frondeur" (266.28-9). The passage that follows is especially difficult because two ideas are compounded, made parallel, and interwoven: the courting of memory (Mnemosyne) as if by the writer of an epic, and the courting of a girl, or at least the tendency to fantasize about unattainable...