"A Country Far Away from This Country": Joyce's Egypt

you born ijypt, and you're nothing short of one!

—FW 198.01–2

Egypt stretches wide across Joyce's work, from the roots of "gnomon" in ancient Egyptian chronometry¹ to the flight of the phoenix, or "bright Bennu bird" (FW 473.17). Joyce's substantial use of Egyptian mythology in Finnegans Wake (particularly his interest in The Book of the Dead) has, over the years, been excavated by many scholars, among them James Atherton, Adaline Glasheen, Mark L. Troy, John Bishop, and Vicki Mahaffey, and I will have only a very little to add to that particular enterprise.² Instead, I propose to see that interest in a wider historical context, to see how it persists and deepens over the course of Joyce's career. In doing so, I hope to show how Egypt is not only perpetually in Joyce's thinking but is perpetually conflated with other concerns, themes, and ideas. Bloom's summary of "[a]ll that long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage alleluia" (7.208–9) points to the contradictions in Egypt as a place from which one escapes but also to which one may flee, a place of the distant past and yet always present—contradictions that are, for Joyce, compelling attractions.

The fact that Joyce's knowledge of Egypt is entirely based on his reading, and generally proceeds from the Old Testament to later studies of the myths of Osiris, Isis, et al., bids us to remember that when we say that Joyce "writes about" Egypt, in every case we mean that he imagines Egypt; or, if you like, he "remembers" Egypt in a different way than he "remembers" Ireland. As obvious as this is, it is easily forgotten amid the heat of the sometimes manic forging of connections, and so it also serves as a kind of admonition: Joyce insists that his readers, too, are imaginers of Egypt, and that invocations of the "land of engined Egypsians" (FW 355.23) are invariably grand feats of engineering, no less than the pyramids themselves were.

One reason that Egypt and invention are bound together for Joyce is that Egypt invented writing. Thoth, credited by Plato "with the invention of writing, mathematics and astronomy," was effectively given Greek citizenship.³ In A Portrait, whose sky and sea are crowded with birds, Stephen links "the hawklike man whose name he bore" with "Thoth, god of writers" with his "narrow ibis head" and in so doing links the present with the distant past, one the continuation of the other.

And for ages men had gazed upward as he was gazing at birds in flight. The colonnade above him made him think vaguely of an ancient temple and the ashplant on which he leaned wearily of the curved stick of an augur. A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawklike man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osier-woven wings, of Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon.

He smiled as he thought of the god's image for it made him think of a bottle-nosed judge in a wig, putting commas into a document which he held at arm's length, and he knew that he would not have remembered the god's name but that it was like an Irish oath.

(P 5.1803–16)

He comes to Stephen's mind again in Ulysses, struck by the enclosure of the library ("the discreet vaulted cell" [9.345]), yet mindful of the "possibilities of the possible as possible" (9.349–50):

Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks.

(U 9.352–55)⁴

The phrase about "the voice of that Egyptian highpriest" comes from John F. Taylor's...