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7 The Ass Dreams of Shaun’s Bottomless Heart Shakespeare and the Dream-Work in Finnegans Wake 403–407 Jim LeBlanc As Book III of Finnegans Wake begins, it is midnight and the atmosphere of Joyce’s narrative is especially somnolent: “Hark! . . . Pedwar pemp foify tray (it must be) twelve. And low stole o’er the stillness the heartbeats of sleep” (FW 403.1–5). We soon hear the voice of a dreamer, one who seems to be a protagonist in the dream of another, who narrates events surrounding and including a dream he had: “Methought as I was dropping asleep somepart in nonland of where’s please (and it was when you and they were we)” (403.18–19). He thought he saw Shaun: “Shaun! Shaun! Post the post!” (404.07) as he, the speaker, was “jogging along in a dream as dozing I was dawdling, arrah, methought” (404.3–4). Later, as this dreamer’s vision becomes clearer: “Yet methought Shaun . . . Shaun in proper person . . . stood before me” (405.07–11). By this point we know that the narrator of Book III’s overture is the donkey that accompanies the four old men throughout the text of the Wake: “but I, poor ass, am but their four-part tinkler’s dunkey” (405.6–7). Vincent Cheng, in his monograph on Shakespearean elements in Finnegans Wake, has outlined parallels between the narrative of the opening pages of Book III and Nick Bottom’s dream vision in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There is the occurrence of the phrase “dhove’s suckling” in Joyce’s text (FW 403.16–17), echoing Bottom’s “sucking dove” in Shakespeare’s play (MND 1.2.82–83; cited in Cheng 36). Then there are the repeated variations of the Elizabethan phrase “methinks” and the fact that both events occur around midnight (Cheng 36). The ass’s dream, Cheng notes, is “perhaps 82 Jim LeBlanc incomprehensible, resisting rational analysis or decoding,” like Bottom’s, and since Finnegans Wake, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “is both dream and drama, the Ass’s dream vision thus finds a parallel in Bottom’s dream” (37–38). Those familiar with Shakespeare’s work will recall that the mischievous sprite, Puck, on orders from Oberon, the fairy king, gives Bottom a donkey’s head as part of a ruse to embarrass Oberon’s fairy wife, Titania. After having her eyelids anointed by Puck with the juice of a magic flower while she sleeps, Titania awakens to dote on the first creature she sees, which Puck ensures will be the buffoonish and cranially transformed Bottom. Titania lavishes her affections on the perplexed but pleased mortal for a brief period before the two fall asleep, with Titania entwining Bottom in her arms. Puck then breaks the spell. When Nick Bottom returns to consciousness, he remembers the strange events as a dream. Here is his reaction to the dream’s contents: I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,—and methought I had,—but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue not able to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom. (MND 4.1.204–16) Nick Bottom wants his dream to be named after him, and after precisely what his fuzzy recollection of his dream is not: a text with a “bottom.” And if anyone is foolish enough to try to explicate this dream, then he or she is an ass—precisely what Bottom was in his enchanted state. This paradoxical commentary on one of the several oneiric moments in Shakespeare’s play by one of the dream’s participants could well serve as a general observation regarding the reading of Finnegans Wake: it is difficult to ascertain exactly what the dream is about, except that one feels like an ass when trying to interpret it. It seems indeed to have no bottom, this text of Joyce. In the...

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