Renascent Joyce

2. Textual Atomism in Finnegans Wake

2 Textual Atomism in Finnegans Wake Jonathan Pollock Giordano BrunoofNolaismentionedoverahundredtimesin Finnegans Wake, under various denominations: “Nolan” (50.05), “Father San Browne” (50.18), “Padre Don Bruno” (50.19), “Fratomistor Nawlanmore and Brawne” (50.22), “O’Breen” (56.32), “Nolans Brumans” (93.01), “brulobrulo ” (117.12), “O’Bruin” (128.24), “Bruno Nowlan” (152.11), “Nolan Browne” (159.22), “Davy Browne-Nolan” (177.20), “Brawn . . . Nayman of Noland” (187.24–28), “B. Rohan” (251.33–34), “N. Ohlan” (251.34), “Browne and Nolan” (268.08–9), “nolens volens” (271.20), “brune in brume” (271.21), “Jordani” (287.24), “Boehernapark Nolagh” (321.09), “The Nolan of the Calabashes” (336.33), “Saint Bruno” (336.35), “the widow Nolan” (380.31), “the Brownes girls” (380.32), “Nolans” (418.31), “Bruneyes” (418.31), “Bruno and Nola” (488.04), “Nola Bruno” (488.07), “egobruno” (488.08), “alionola ” (488.09), “brunoipso” (488.09), “Bruno at being eternally opposed by Nola” (488.10–11), “Bruin” (488.14), “Nolans” (488.15), “Nolan” (490.07), “Mr Nolan” (490.08), “pronolan” (490.15), “Mr Nobru” (490.26), “Mr Anol” (490.27), “Browne” (503.34), “Nolan” (503.35), “brigadier-general Nolan” (567.22), “buccaneer-admiral Browne” (567.22–23), “Bruno Friars” (569.09), “Senior Nowno” (569.32), “Senior Brolano” (569.32), “Browne yet Noland” (599.23), and so forth. The name of Bruno’s birthplace, Nola, becomes that of his alter ego, in keeping with the doctrine of the coincidentia oppositorum that Bruno and Joyce gleaned from another Renaissance philosopher, Nicholas of Cusa. As Umberto Eco points out, Joyce is given to quoting the following passage from Coleridge’s essay on Bruno in The Friend: “Every powerinnatureorinspiritmust evolveanoppositeasthesoleconditionand means of its manifestation; and every opposition is, therefore, a tendency Textual Atomism in Finnegans Wake 17 to reunion” (Eco 297). “The contraries are in the contraries,” says Filoteo in De l’infinito, universo e mondi (Bruno 1958, 165), one of three metaphysical dialogues that Bruno published in London in 1584. We know that Joyce was familiar with Toland’s eighteenth-century English translation, An Account of Jordano Bruno’s “Of the Infinite Universe and Innumerable Worlds.” And Eco has taught us how Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, transposes the doctrine of the coincidence of opposites to the linguistic material itself, by creating thousands of Mischworte, or portmanteau words, “the metamorphic nature of [which], of each and every etymology, [is] always on the point of becoming “other,” of exploding in new semantic directions” (Eco 272). We all have our favorites, I imagine: “laughtears” (FW 15.09), “folsage” (119.05), “playguehouse ” (435.02), “truefalluses” (506.18), and Anna Livia’s “lothe” in the last pages of the novel (627.33), mixture of love and loath, for which Jacques Lacan’s“hainamoration”(98),isthepsychoanalyticequivalent.Suchwords, “by the coincidence of their contraries[,] reamalgamerge in that indentity of undiscernibles” (FW 49.35–50.01) that Bruno attributes to all natural and spiritual powers. However, it is another dimension of Bruno’s influence that I wish to examine in this essay: his atomism. In this respect, Bruno is to be seen as participating in the revival, during the Italian Renaissance, of a scientific and ethical doctrine that the early Christians and the medieval church had done their utmost to vilify and suppress. A manuscript of Lucretius’s De rerum natura was discovered in an Alsatian monastery in 1417; copies circulated throughout Europe until a printed version appeared in Brescia around 1473. The edition to which Bruno refers is Lambin’s, a collation of several manuscripts published in Paris in 1564. Bruno quotes extensively from De rerum natura at both the beginning and end of De l’infinito, and his trilogy of Latin poems, De minimo, De monade, andDeimmenso(1591,inBruno,Opera),isimpregnatedwiththemannerand the matter of Lucretius. For the purposes of the present essay, I will limit my analysisofBruno’sdoctrinetoDel’infinito,asthistextisquotedinFinnegans Wake. My underlying presupposition is that Epicurean atomism not only provided Renaissance thinkers with a means of challenging the medieval world picture, largely inspired by Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics, but has also proved to be a major source of aesthetic and literary innovation from the sixteenth century to the present day. That Finnegans Wake is itself an experiment in atomist aesthetics becomes plausible when one considers the extent to which Bruno was indebted to the Epicurean tradition. What are the essential aspects of atomism as they appear in De l’infinito, 18 Jonathan Pollock and where does...