Onetwo moremons more
An LDS Translation of Finnegans Wake
Byway of briefest background, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is the recounting of a dream, told in an obscure language of night run through with puns, allusions, hundred-letter thunderwords, and countless portmanteaus cobbled together from different languages of the awoken world. The dreamer of this dream dreams not of Finnegan, but Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (commonly referred to by his initials “HCE” outside the text),Humphrey’s wife Anna Livia Plurabelle (“ALP”) and their three children: Shem, Shaun and Isobel. The dreamer dreams about the lives of these characters in a suburb of Dublin, but also in this dream these central characters and their supporting cast take on forms historical, mythological, fictional, religious and mundane.
In Book 1, Chapter 8 (“I.8”) of Finnegans Wake we find two washerwomen working on opposite sides of the River Liffey as it runs to, and through, Dublin towards the sea. The roughly twenty-paged chapter is saturated with the names of rivers, Joyce having inserted between 800 and 1000 of them into it in the punning tongue of the Wake.
As these two women wash the clothes of HCE, ALP, and their family they gossip about their employers—that is, they expose the family’s dirty laundry as they wash it, making “private linen public” (FW 196.16). When the younger of the washerwomen urges the older (“Tell me moher. Tell me the moatst”) to dish a little dirt on HCE, the older obliges, describing Humphrey in a sorry state:
Well, old Humber was a glommen as grampus, with the tares at this thor and the buboes for ages and neither bowman nor shot abroad and bales allbrant on the crests of rockies and nera lamp in kitchen or church and giant’s holes in Grafton’s causeway and deathcap mushrooms round Funglus grave and the great tribune’s barrow all darnels occumule, sittang sambre on is sett, drammen and drommen, usking queasy quizzers of his ruful continence, his childlinen scarf to encourage his obsequies where he’d check their debths in that mormon’s thames, be questing and handsetl, hop, step and a deepend, with his berths in their toiling moil, his swallower open from swolf to fore and the snipes of the gutter pecking his crocs, hungerstriking all alone and holding doomsdag over hunselv, dreeing his weird, with his dander up, and his fringe combed over his eygs and droming on loft till the sight of the sternes, after zwarthy kowse and weedy broeks adn the tits of buddy and the loits of pest and to peer was Parish worth thette mess. (198.28-199.9)
Or, in other words (with many words left out):
Humphrey[1] was as glum as could be, sick and lonely in a desolate place, he’d check for death notices in the morning’s Times or by question and answer, just a hop skip and a jump from going off the deepend, with mouth wide open and birds picking at his teeth, angrily enduring his fate, with his hair combed over his eyes and dreaming until the stars come out.
That is just the barest summary of the sentence, it can be broken down into many references, possible meanings and puns and each reader may find something that stands out to them, and in my case, what stood out to me was “he’d check their debths in that mormon’s thames.”
Translated from pun-language, Joyce seems to be saying (as pointed out above): “he’d check for their deaths in that morning’s Times.” But when I first read the line, my brain made a different connection. I’ll try to replicate the reasoning. Beginning with the question, “What could the ‘Mormon’s Thames’ be?” it seems we are looking for, like the Thames, a major river with a major city on its banks, and in this case a river and city of importance to Mormons. I was quick to understand this “mormon’s thames” to be the Mississippi river where, like London on the Thames, early members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or, you know, “Mormons”) founded the city of Nauvoo in 1838, which grew until it nearly rivaled Chicago in population in 1845. Additional evidence that the Mississippi is the river we’re looking for comes thanks to the words “check their debths,” which bring to mind Samuel Clemens taking his pen name from the Mississippi riverboat cry (“mark twain!”) for a measured depth of two fathoms. And, like Joyce, Clemens wrote his own river-book about a Finn.
So, this “mormon’s thames,” it’s an interesting little line that lead to this reader’s imagination shooting off into different readings, but the curious thing is this isn’t the only reference to Mormonism in the book. Depending on how you count and what you decide counts, in Finnegans Wake there appear to be twelve to fourteen allusions that can be tied, fairly neatly, to Mormonism, its beliefs, and adherents.
For a puzzle book of 628 pages, that’s not a lot of references (especially if we again consider the 800-1000 references to rivers in the 20 pages of I.8)—but they are more references to Mormons and Mormonism than I was expecting to find when I first began reading the book. In contrast, the word “Mormon” appears just once in the 730 pages of Joyce’s Ulysses—compared to this, Finnegans Wake overflows with Mormons.
In this essay, I will examine each of Finnegans Wake’s references to Mormonism and attempt to decode them in relation to their context within the story as well as their possible additional meanings. Some of these references will prove to be solitary puns and others little stones that set off landslides of critical interpretation.
LATTERDAY PAINT
In Book 3, Chapter 2 of the Wake, we find HCE’s son Shaun (at the time called Jaun) traveling down the River Liffey in a barrel (or perhaps he is a barrel, it’s been read that way, too). The barrel stops at St Bride’s Academy where its 29 pupils (Shaun’s sister Isabel and her 28 classmates) play at the water’s edge. To this audience Shaun/Jaun (Don Juan?) delivers a sermon on correct living. Among his foolish wisdoms, he speaks of the means of entering heaven and what one might find there:
If you want to be felixed come and be parked. Sacred ease there! The seanad and pobbel queue’s remainder. To it, to it! Seekit headup! No petty family squabbles Up There nor homemade hurricanes in our Cohortyard, no cupahurling nor apuckalips nor no puncheon judelling nor no nothing. With the Byrns which is far better and eve for ever your idle be. You will hardly reconnoitre the old wife in the new bustle and the farmer shinner in his latterday paint. (FW 454.34-455.5)
So, in peaceful heaven, free of family squabbles and fights, Jaun describes a husband/wife Adam and Eve pair (ALP and HCE) repentant and exultant, and you will hardly recognize (in spite of inspection) this old wife in her new bustle and the former sinner in his latter-day paint.
“latterday paint” stands out as a pun on “Latter-day Saint” (although some commenters have suggested this could be read as “Saturday paint,” perhaps a new suit of clothes put on just before a Sunday)—our redeemed pair have taken on new outward appearances to reflect their inward changes to better fit into their new surroundings. For the wife, a new bustle, and to the husband a new coat of paint. “Shinner” no more, he is, at least for this time, a saint among his people. With his pun on “Latter-day Saint,” Joyce has found a convenient way of adding extra emphasis to the change come over the husband in his new religious life.
TWO PROPHETS
Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the first Latter-day Saint prophets, both make appearances in Finnegans Wake. Joseph Smith appears in a footnote of page 262 in chapter II.2: “1Yussive smirite and ye mermon answerth from his beelyingplace below the tightmark, Gotahelv!”
“Yussive smirite” is read here as “Joseph Smith”—aside from matching as a bit of slant rhyme, “Yusuf” is Arabic for “Joseph.” The sentence seems to say: “Joseph Smith and the Mormon answer from his be-lying place below the tidemark: ‘Go to hell!’”
“beelyingplace” might also be read as “bee-lying place”, or “burying place.” For Mormons, “bee” might trigger thoughts of the hard-working honeybee and its popularity in the church’s early iconography. Also, if “Go to hell!” is too rough a reading for you, it might say “Go to help!” or “God (from the German “Gott”) to help!” And “mermon” might be “merman” (as opposed to a mermaid)…and “Yussive smirite” might also be read as “You’re so smart.”
Fixing the context of the footnote in relation to the text, in hopes of illuminating its meaning any further, is difficult. The footnote appears in a chapter where, after a preceding episode that described ALP and HCE’s three children at play, describes the children returned home for their “night studies.”
The text at the center of the page is the content of the lesson. In the right-hand margin we find Shaun’s commentary on the lesson, “abstract, professional, and profounder than their occasion.” On the left, Shem’s “gay and irrelevant” commentary[2] Their sister Isobel “swamps the footnotes” with her own “head-reeling ‘little language.’[3]” So, the footnotes in this chapter aren’t, as is conventional, information added to illuminate a work further, but features of the text that serve to confound and obscure even more.
This is the text that Isobel supplements by further destabilizing (and note appearances by her parents in the first line):
Easy, calm your haste! Approach to lead our passage
This bridge is upper.
Cross.
Thus come to castle.
Knock1
A password, thank.
Yes, pearse.
(FW 262.1-8)
In the scene of the lesson, someone approaches a castle, a drawbridge is lowered for them, and at the gate they knock. A password is politely requested, the knocker receives a request in return, and the knock itself gets Isobel’s footnote in which, apparently, she imagines Joseph Smith (and other Mormons, or perhaps a merman), beneath the moat water, answering this request to enter with either a shout of “Go to hell!” or “God help you!”
It does strike me as interesting that a Mormon should appear in association with knocks being answered with a request for a password before entry can be granted to a castle, castles themselves being where the presence of a king can be expected within his kingdom. But in response to the request for a password from behind the door, the knocker who has traveled to seek access to the castle seems to be without the necessary word (or words) to enter, and replies with a simple and polite request for the missing knowledge[4]:
A password, thank you.
Yes, please.
On the next page of the book a character named “Egyptus” makes their sole appearance in the Wake:
That same erst crafty hakemouth which under the assumed name of Ignotus Loquor, of foggy old, harangued bellyhooting fishdrunks on their favorite stamping ground, from a father theobalder brake. And Egyptus, the incestrobed, as Cyrus heard of him? (263.1-7)
In the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price, Egyptus is the name of both the wife of Ham (son of Noah), and then, a generation later, the name given to a daughter of Egyptus and Ham who discovered Egypt “while it was under water” (Abraham 1:23). I don’t know if James Joyce read the Book of Abraham, noticed Egyptus, and then made her a man for one sentence in Finnegans Wake, so I’m just going to leave this one here, for the sake of partial-completeness. Most critics take Egyptus to be Joyce’s dream-spelling for “Aegyptus”, an Egyptian king whose 49 sons were killed by their wives, the Danaides.
Another connection can be drawn to Joseph Smith from the contents of the Wake. There is a letter that turns up throughout Finnegans Wake with history, contents, and purpose as unfixed from definition and discernment as any of the characters of the book. Sometimes the letter can be interpreted to be an “untitled Mamafesta memorializing the mosthighest” (FW 104.4) written by HCE’s son Shem (a.k.a. “Shem the Penman”), but inspired by a higher power (his mother). This letter can be understood to be the text of Finnegans Wake itself, the cyclical record of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. When Shem acts as the author of this letter, he does so under the “oleas Mr Smuth” (“alias Mr Smith”) (424.36).
This letter of Mr. Smuth’s is expected to arrive “next morning” (66.10), or after the events of this dream, and is addressed to someone who lives at “Hyde and Cheek, Edenberry.” (66.17-18). The intended recipient of the letter is HCE[5],and what HCE is to receive is a record of himself—just as Mr. Joseph Smith produced a cyclical record of inhabitants of the American continent which was been preserved to be delivered later to the inhabitants of the American continent.
And there is a parallel between the composition and delivery of the Book of Mormon and Shem’s letter as well: as the prophet Mormon, inspired and called to the task by the divine, wrote the golden plate text of the Book of Mormon but his son Moroni “delivered it up,” after Shem wrote the letter at the behest of his mother to capture her words, his brother Shaun (a.k.a. “Shaun the Post”) took responsibility for its delivery. And as the golden plates were buried at the top of the Hill Cumorah before Joseph Smith would uncover them, Shem’s letter winds up buried at the top of a dungheap until it is later discovered and dug out. By a chicken[6].
Now you may be ready to argue: “Ok, but are you saying Shem is Joseph Smith or are you saying Shem is Mormon? And is the letter the Book of Mormon or is it the golden plates?” To this I have two answers: 1. “Meanings” and identities in the Wake often vary or even contradict themselves, so this complication should basically be expected and 2. To someone who does not believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God or that the Book of Mormon is the product of divinely inspired translation, are not Mormon and Joseph Smith the same person? And the golden plates and Book of Mormon the same work?
Brigham Young appears in a string of puns where HCE seems to think he’s found a kindred spirit when he connects his own interest in younger women to Brigham Young’s polygamy:
…I hesitant made replique: Mesdememdes to leursieuresponsor: and who in hillsaide, don’t you let flyfire till ou see their whites of the bunkers’ eyes! Mr Answers: Brimgem young, bringem young, bringem young!: in my bethel of Solyman’s I accouched their rotundaties and I turnkeyed most insultantly over raped lutetias in the lock:… (FW 542)
Scholar John Gordon makes a keen observation about HCE’s connection to Brigham Young, while commenting on his repeatedly identifying with the prophet Mohammed in the book, which “suits him because in legend it combines the best of both worlds, piety and promiscuity: it allows him to be holier-than-them and still get the girls, like the polygamous Mormon-elder incarnation which will later cry out ‘Brimgem young, bringem young, bringem young![7]’
Joyce’s punning here is an early occurrence of a pun that persists to this day, “bring-them-young” for “Brigham Young.” Consider the joke: “What’s Michael Jackson’s favorite college? Bring’em Young,[8]” as well as a popular mispronunciation of “Brigham” that I’ve dealt with since childhood. It is not uncommon for some, when pronouncing the name “Brigham,” to insert a non-existent “n” between the “i” and “g” in “Brigham” and pronounce it “Bringham.” The popularity of this mispronunciation then trickles down into misspellings of the name, even at the most highly regarded educational institutions, as can be seen in this parking pass for a basketball game at Stanford University between their Cardinals and the Cougars of BYU [9]:
And if I could find it, I would insert here a copy of my High School diploma, made out to “Bringham Taylor Barnes.” I suppose I can feel slightly better about a life spent correcting the pronunciation and spelling of my name knowing that James Joyce gamed with it a little himself.
MOREMON
On the last page of Finnegans Wake, ALP, as the River Liffey, flows out to sea, monologuing along the way, and we find a Mormon pun among her final words:
I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremons more. So. Avelaval! My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! (FW 628)
Although the sound of this pun does ring to “one, two moments more” (or, as some readers again suggest, “merman,” which, yes, sure, there could be mermen in the Liffey headed out to sea as well) I read it as punning with “Mormon” to say “one, two more men more.” For a more recent use of this pun, consider this dialogue from an episode of the television show Cheers where, as manager Rebecca envies flowers that were delivered to Carla the waitress, she and Sam the bartender share this exchange (with an appearance by bar patron Norm, as well):
Rebecca: "Oh, why can't more men send flowers?"
Sam: "I didn't know Mormons couldn't send flowers."
Rebecca: "I said more men, not Mormons."
Sam: "I know they can't dance."
Norm: "No, Sammy, that's the — that's the Amish."
Sam: "Why can't Mormons send flowers?"
Rebecca: "They can."
Sam: "What are you talking about?"
Rebecca: "I just wish someone would send me some roses!"
Sam: "Why does it have to be a Mormon?"[10]
A similar pun can also be found elsewhere in the book in a scene where HCE argues in his defense against allegations of impropriety in Phoenix Park:
And I cantango can take off my dudud dirtynine articles of quoting here in Pynix Park before those in heaven to provost myself, by gamercy of justness, I mean veryman and moremon, stiff and staunch for ever, and enter under the advicies from Misrs Norris, Southby, Yates and Weston, Inc, to their favoured client, into my preprotestant caveat against the pupup publication of libel by any tixtim tipsyloon or tobtomtowley of Keisserse Lean (FW 534.11-18)
What may have been Finnegans Wakes’s most direct reference to Mormonism existed in an earlier draft of this section, where instead of “I mean veryman and moremon” it read “now I, Moremon” mimicking the opening line of the first verse of the Words of Mormon (the seventh of the books that make up the Book of Mormon): “And now, I Mormon….” Such a specific reference to a line from the Book of Mormon appears to serve as unexpected evidence that James Joyce’s familiarity with the Book of Mormon may have extended beyond just knowing of its existence.
Also of note, even though a number and the word “article” does trigger a Mormon mind to think of the church’s thirteen Articles of Faith, the “dirtynine articles” here is understood to refer to the Thirty Nine Articles of the Anglican church.
Additional appearances of what appear to be puns on the word “Mormon” can be found at other points in the Wake. In the case of these examples, I haven’t found additional meanings to be inferred from their possible mention of Mormons. It just seems like Joyce punning for obscurity or musicality’s sake. But feel free to discover your own connections:
One:
But, vrayedevraye Blankdeblank, god of all machineries and tomestone of Barnestaple, by mortisection of vivisuture, splitten up or recompounded, an isaac jacquemin mauromormo milesian, how accountibus for him, moreblue? (FW 253.33-36)
Two (the “four of us” speaking here are the book’s “four old men” a.k.a. “Mamalujo”, the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John):
…and what do you think of the four of us and there they were now, listening right enough, the four in the olden times Mormonian, throw darker hour sorrows, the princest day, when Fair Margrate waited Swede Villem, and Lally in the rain, with the blank prints, now extincts, after the wreak of Wormans’ Noe, the barmaisigheds, when my heart knew no care, and after that then there was the official landing of Lady Jales Casemate… (FW 387.15-23)
Three:
—O Tara’s thrush, the sharepusher! And he said he was only taking the average grass temperature for green Thurdsday, the blutchy scaliger! Who you know the musselman, his muscle-mum and mistlemam? Maomi, Mamie, My Mo Mum! He loves a drary lane. (FW 491.26-30)
And then sometimes Joyce just right out writes “Mormon,” as in the case of this next pun: “…safe in bed as he dreamed the he’d wealthes in mormon halls when wokenp by a fourth loud snore out his land of byelo….” (FW 64.4-5)
Here “he dreamed that he’d wealthes in mormon halls” puns on I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls, an aria from Irish composer Michael Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl In this aria, Arline, the titular Bohemian girl, sings of a dream she had of the wealth of her royal past:
I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,
With vassals and serfs at my side,
And of all who assembled within those walls,
That I was the hope and the pride.
I had riches too great to count, could boast
Of a high ancestral name;
But I also dreamt, which pleased me most,
That you lov'd me still the same... [11].
Prior to Finnegans Wake, James Joyce referenced The Bohemian Girl in two stories from Dubliners, “Clay” and “Eveline,” and in “Eveline” the character Maria sings I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls so sweetly that “no one tried to show her her mistake” of repeating the first verse twice (Dubliners 82). Joyce seems to be using “Mormon” in this quote for punning purpose, although it does help to contribute to the mystical or religious feeling of the excerpt, tying in with the sleeper being woken out from “his land of byelo.” Here “byelo” could be punning on the land Beulah from Isaiah 62:4:
Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and they land shall be married.
Also, in the writings of William Blake, the paradisiacal Land of Beulah, which appears in his works 182 times, represents “the realm of the subconscious, the source of poetic inspiration and dreams.[12]”
REMARKABLE LITTLE ENDOWMENT GARMENT
As I became more invested in examining the references to Mormonism in Finnegans Wake, I began searching for other research on the topic. Critics and commentators had pointed out some of the references and puns that I had, but the only unified research on the matter I found, through the aid of Latter-day Saint James Joyce scholar Glen Nelson, was LL Lee’s The Mormons at the Wake from University of Tulsa’s James Joyce Quarterly Fall 1968 issue. Lee’s article touches on many of the same allusions I have discussed so far, but I feel the analysis falls short on a few.
Consider Lee’s take on this portion of a line from page 532, where an undressing ALP is described as wearing “…a remarkable little endowment garment.” Lee writes that “it is at best speculation that Joyce is making a glancing reference to Mormon temple garments, used in certain ‘endowment’ ceremonies.” But reading the line along with the sentence that follows it reveals something either unnoticed by or unknown to Lee: “…a remarkable little endowment garment. Fastened at various places.” (FW 532.35-6)
Early versions of the Latter-day Saint temple garment were kept fastened using tie-string before the fasteners were replaced by buttons in 1923, and now there’s no buttons at all[13]. With this accurate representation of the appearance of the garments of his time, it seems Joyce is making more than a “glancing reference” to the temple garment.
Interestingly, there are also similarities between what ALP has on over this garment and Latter-day Saint ceremonial temple clothing. ALP wears a dress described as not just green but leafy: “I am so exquisitely pleased about the loveleavest dress I have. You will always call me Leafiest, won’t you, dowling?” (FW 624.21-3). The washerwomen remark about her “gown of changeable jade that would robe the wood of two cardinals’ chairs” (200.02-3)—in other words, the green of the dress would rob the woods of two branches or trees (because cardinals sit on branches. In trees). When the dress hangs by a nail over the keyhole of ALP and HCE’s bedroom door it is described as a “leafscreen” against their childen’s curious eyes (131.19). ALP also sometimes goes about wearing a veil[14] add to this the fact that, as HCE stands-in for Adam, ALP stands-in for Eve and I find myself squaring off with a veiled Eve-figure wearing the endowment garment beneath clothing made from leaves and I begin to fear a whole additional research project coming on.
Lee also argues that “it is unlikely that [Joyce] had heard of the Mormon practice of baptizing the dead, especially dead ancestors, by proxy” when considering these lines, relating a religious conversion on page 537:
…like Browne umbracing Christina Anya, after the Irishers, to convert me into a selt (but first I must proxy babetise my old antenaughties) (FW 537.7-8)
But I don’t know what it could mean to “proxy babetise” “antenaughties”—antenati being Italian for “ancestor”—besides a baptism of the dead. Given that Joyce has already referenced one element of Latter-day Saint temple-worship with his nod to the temple garment, there’s a good chance he was aware of Latter Day Saints carrying on the early Christian practice of proxy baptisms for the deceased (and Lee does concede that “Nevertheless, the possibilities exist”). Also, it’s worth clarifying that Latter-day Saints do not babe-tise by proxy, as they understand infant baptism to be unnecessary. In the next section of this essay I will look at an additional piece of evidence that points strongly to this pun being a reference to the Latter-day Saint practice of baptism for the dead.
BE QUESTING AND HANDSETL
Seeing that Joyce has so far referenced church leaders, holy apparel, holy ordinances, possibly quoted from the Book of Mormon, and referred to the church by its official name as well as by its common nickname, eventually one begins to wonder how much Joyce knew about the church, how he had come to know it, and how it was there references made it into Finnegans Wake.
While I have not uncovered any smoking-gun accounts or records of Joyce, say, interacting with Mormons—missionaries or otherwise—while abroad in Europe or at home in Ireland (where, in fact, LDS missionary efforts were described as meeting with little success[15], nor his plainly expressing any candid opinions regarding the church, its membership, beliefs or reputation, I do have two pieces of history that I believe should at least be considered when contemplating this conundrum. The first relates to the popular entertainment of Joyce’s day, the second Joyce’s processes of writing of Finnegans Wake.
Beginning in the mid-1880’s, authors discovered that tales of Mormons laden with sordid details regarding murderous Danites, an 1830’s fraternal vigilante organization made up of members of the church, sold well. By the late 1800s, fifty-six books had been published about the Danites in United States and England, with 21 being published in the 1880’s alone[16]. The most famous of these would have to be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887)—a Danite murder conspiracy story which introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world. Robert Louis Stevenson spun his own tale of an international Danite network of spies and assassins a couple of years earlier in Story of a Destroying Angel (1885). For many Europeans, stories such as these may have been the primary context through which they were familiar with the church.
The lone reference to Mormons or Mormonism in Ulysses reflects the influence of these fictional portrayals. Published in 1922 but set in 1906, Ulysses’s central figure, Leopold Bloom, is, among other things, a consumer of popular literature, the works of Conan Doyle, Stevenson, and other Danite-tale spinners conceivably having factored into his reading. In the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses, Bloom slinks through Dublin’s red-light district, seeking to retrieve Stephen Dedalus from a house of ill repute. Still dressed in the dark mourning clothes he wore to a funeral earlier that day, Bloom worries that a pair of patrolmen may take him for an object of suspicion. He imagines them sharing this exchange:
FIRST WATCH
He is a marked man. Another girl’s plait cut. Wanted: Jack the Ripper. A thousand pounds reward.
SECOND WATCH
(Awed, whispers.) And in black. A mormon. Anarchist.
(U 445)
To everyman Bloom, it was natural at this time to associate Mormons with anarchy, murder, and the generally sinister.
After the era of Ulysses, a resurgence of anti-Mormon sentiment in the 1910’s renewed the profitability for authors to publish any type of anti-Mormon fiction and keep the church in the minds of readers of the day[17] . Roughly forty-four such books were published between 1900 and 1920, but at the same time, anti-Mormon dramas began to outshine anti-Mormon literature. Two of the biggest stage hits of the time were Through Death Valley, or the Mormon Peril (which premiered on Broadway in October 1907 and later played in London in 1911) and The Girl from Utah (1913), a tale of an American woman fleeing to London to escape a bigamous suitor[18].
Anti-Mormon sentiment progressed from books to drama to film, the first such films being produced in England and Denmark around 1910. The popularity of these early anti-Mormon films is particularly interesting in relation to the life of James Joyce. James Joyce was a fan of film, and with the aid of Italian investors, he opened Dublin’s first movie theater, the Cinematograph Volta, in December 1909. Scholars have assembled a complete listing of the films that played at the Volta during Joyce’s involvement with the theater and, unfortunately for this investigation, no anti-Mormon films are to be found among them[19]. But one of the reasons given for Joyce’s swift divestment from the venture was his frustration that the Italian staff mainly played Italian films that were largely unpopular with the Dublin public—perhaps the Volta would have drawn bigger crowds with popular releases like Tily and the Mormon Missionary (1911) or The Flower of the Mormon City (1912).
That this second-wave of popularity for anti-Mormon entertainments occurred while Joyce was involved in the industry suggests that, along with the earlier anti-Mormon fiction of the late 19th century, he would have been familiar with these films and that they could have made an impression with Joyce and lay something of a groundwork of knowledge about the church that would later inform some of the writing of the Wake as well as prepare his audience to recognize these allusions, at least through a dark lens, that seem curious to us now in the 21st century.
A more precise explanation of how the references to Mormonism made their way into Finnegans Wake comes from Joyce’s process of writing the book.
In January 1930, while working on Book III, Chapter 3 of the Wake, Joyce mined the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica for names of cities to use in a section where HCE builds the city of Dublin. Joyce’s then-assistant, Mrs. Helen Fleishmann, would read entries on cities out loud to Joyce and when she would come to the name of a street, suburb, park, etc. she would pause for Joyce to see if he could think of a way to pun on the name[20]. Consider the possibility that, during this trawling, Fleishmann came to the entry on our previously mentioned city of Nauvoo, Illinois. One can only guess whether or not Joyce was familiar with Nauvoo before then, but had Mrs. Fleishman begun reading him the entry, his attention may have been caught by the city’s being on the Mississippi river and the seat of two institutions of the Benedictine sisters, both facts contained in the first paragraph of the article, and he could have asked her to keep reading. From there he’d hear that the first settlement of importance in Nauvoo was “made by the Mormons in 1839-1840” and that “they named it Nauvoo, in obedience to a ‘revelation’ made to Joseph Smith. A footnote here indicates that “Mormons said the name was of Hebrew origins and meant ‘beautiful place’; Hebrew ‘navch’ means ‘pleasant’”—perhaps this cross-language word-creating appealed to Joyce. The remainder of the column-length entry relates that the population of Nauvoo grew to 15,000 and a large Mormon temple was built there before “gentile” hostility was aroused, the charter of Nauvoo was revoked, and Joseph Smith was killed by a mob. The article notes that, at the time of its writing, “Traces of Mormonism, however, still remain in the ruins of the temple and the names of several of the streets.[21]”
Perhaps from there he asked Fleishman to read him the encyclopedia’s entry on Mormonism—well, whether or not he asked her to or even if he was read the article on Nauvoo or not, the encyclopedia’s entry on Mormonism contains material useful for the construction of the Wake. The entry on Mormons begins by explaining that it is “the common name given to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a religious sect founded by Joseph Smith, jun.” before describing Joseph Smith, Jr. as being “a good-natured, lazy boy, suffereing from a bad heredity physically and psychically” as he was the son of “parents, who like his grandparents, were superstitious, neurotic, seers of visions and believers in miraculous cures and in heavenly voices and direct revelation”—Joyce here may have sensed familial characters and drama with some similarity to that of the family he was writing his book about.
Then the entry continues on to describe the angel Moroni appearing to Joseph Smith, Smith’s call to recover and translate the golden plates, and a short summary of the contents of the Book of Mormon, saying that it contains the history of the ancient Jaredites, who came to the Americas after the “confusion of tongues” at Babel (perhaps an interest to Joyce as he was involved in confusing the tongues of his speakers in his work in progress) as well as the history of the coming to America of “Lehi, his wife, and four sons, with ten friends, all from Jerusalem, who landed on the east coast of Chile.” The ensuing brief descriptions of the split of this family into two warring tribes, the Nephites and Lamanites, may have also reminded Joyce of the warring Shem and Shaun in his book, and the history of the church provided by the article would have supplied him with some details on the ascension of Brigham Young within its ranks to eventually replace Joseph Smith as well as the “downfall” of Joseph Smith that the entry attributes to his polygamy (perhaps bringing to Joyce’s mind shades of HCE’s mysterious misdeeds in Phoenix Park and the downfall that he suffers for them). The article continues to summarize the history of the church before moving on to descriptions of some of the practices of the church, the entry concluding with a small paragraph on the church’s baptisms of the dead wherein in “the deceased, also, can be baptized by proxy,” connecting to the reference to baptisms of the dead in 1 Corinthians 15:29[22].
However they got there, Mormons were especially on Joyce’s mind when he composed III.3 as in this chapter we find the Wake’s Mormon-references at their highest density—the previously mentioned “remarkable endowment garment” at page 532, “veryman and moreman” (or “Now I, Mormon” as it appeared in Joyce’s earlier draft) at page 534, proxy “babetism” at 537, and the Brigham Young puns at 542. And the possibility that these references made it into III/3 thanks to the Encyclopaedia Britannica is reinforced by the fact that all of these references have a corresponding reference in the “Nauvoo” or “Mormon” in entries that I have just described—information on the endowment could have been arrived at from chasing down curiosity about the ruined temple in Nauvoo, “moreman” reflects the very topic of interest at hand (or a possible investigation of the “supplement to the New Testament” that Joseph Smith produced from the golden plates buried “on a hill called Cumorah, now commonly known as ‘Mormon Hill’.”), Brigham Young’s biography is prominent in the early history of the church provided by the article, and as I just barely pointed out, the entry on Mormons concludes with information on the church’s baptisms for the dead, as well as noting that the church does not practice infant baptism (“babetism”).
Aside from just city names, the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is a known major resource of Joyce’s in the writing of Finnegans Wake. Scholar James Atherton wrote that “everything [Joyce] uses in Finnegans Wake about the Cabbala seemed to be contained in the article on that subject in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Birtannica[23]” and that he also certainly read articles from it on polar exploration and wax figures, as well[24]. Scholar Len Platt has identified that Joyce used notes from EB articles such as “Herder,” “Geography,” “Ireland,” “Ramadan,” “Orkney Island,” “River Brethren,” “Wales,” “Roman Law,” and “Rumania,” as well[25]. Just as Joyce learned everything he needed to know about a branch of Jewish mysticism from the Encyclopedia Britannica, his allusions to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may have been born of these volumes as well. And if it’s the case that these entries, and the writing of III.3, are the origin of references to Mormons and Mormonism in the Wake, the inclusion of references to Mormons earlier in the book (such as the “mormon halls” at page 64 or “mormon’s thames” at 198) can be attributed to Joyce’s constant revising of the Wake’s text during its composition and the references written later in the book (one of which we’ve still got coming up) to his keeping Mormons in mind for the later writing of the Night Lesson in 1934 or the final chapter of the book in 1938.
But then there is still the question of why Joyce decided to add these references to his book at all, and I think the answer to this is also connected to his method of writing Finnegans Wake. While Finnegans Wake weighs in at an impressive and intimidating 628 pages, it was preceded by at least 25,000 pages worth of notes and drafts produced over the roughly 26 years it took for Joyce to write the book[26]. Joyce kept notecards and notebooks filled with details large and small that he thought might find a place in his book—he collected things he knew about and things he heard about or just things he liked the sound of. The composition of Finnegans Wake has been compared to a “continual embroidery upon a fixed pattern[27]” where Joyce piled jokes, puns and references upon set themes as high—or as deep—as they could go. Scholar Margot Norris observed that “A typical Wakean sentence serves to illustrate how contiguous associates create a vertical debth along a narrative line.[28]” Any sentence in Finnegans Wake may have begun as a straight-forward ordering of words meant to express itself conventionally or connect one idea to another, but then each sentence is loaded with as many puns or references as can fit (or sometimes more than can fit) until it boils over with possibility and the direction of meaning in the book ceases to progress along a horizontal line and suddenly we need to add a y axis (or maybe a z?) to “understand” what is going on. At first it seemed surprising that a dozen or so references to Mormonism would find their way into the 628 pages of the Wake…but considering they were born of at least 25,000 pages of work and a mind centered on adding as much darkness to this night-book as possible, now maybe I wonder why there weren’t more?
ONE CONTINUOUS ROUND
I am not quite done.
At the beginning of the book’s final chapter, another river-word caught my eye and set off my Mormon-connection seeking brain:
Edar’s chuckal humuristic. But why pit the cur afore the noxe? Let shrill their duan Gallus, han, and she, hou the Sassqueehenna, makes duskcs runs at crooekd. Once for the chantermale, twoce for the pother and once twoce threece for the waither. (FW 594.28-32)
In the excerpt above, Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna river appears as the “Sassqueehenna.” How unusual, it seemed to me, to find the river known to Latter-day Saints for being the place where the first of the church’s baptisms were performed in 1829 just running right through this final portion of the Wake. I scanned the lines and pages around it for anything else Mormon-ish to help understand what it was doing there without success. I squeezed on the rock as hard as I could but nothing came out. I let it go as a case of wanting to see more than what was there, after all, not every single thing that has a bit of a connection to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was going to have an actual connection.
But, when considering the larger themes of the Wake, this rock turned into a curious spring.
Joyce’s work on the Wake was known to have been influenced by Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico’s The New Science. In the concluding pages of the New Science, Vico argues that history operates in a repetitive cycle which he separates into four ages of man, and critics such as Joseph Campbell have identified this four-part cycle as having influenced Joyce in the crafting of the themes and content of the four sections of Finnegans Wake.
According to Campbell’s interpretation of Vico’s historical cycle, the first age is a time of “godless barbarians” where those who hear the voice of God, “threatening and disciplining mankind” realize “that they have been living in a beastly and inhuman manner, and they turn to decent living. They become God-fearing souls….” And from there man enters the second age, the age of fathers, where “the patriarchs who have heard the word of God carry civilization to the stage beyond savagery.” These men toil and “build up property and gain wealth” and are followed by the third age, the age of their sons. These are “the aristocrats who have not heard the voice of God but inherit the knowledge that God spoke to their fathers, just as they have inherited their father’s property.” The age of the sons is followed by the final age of the cycle, the age of the people, where “nobody has heard the voice of God or even inherited the moral order.” Here man is only interested in goods and property and begins to fight again. Embattled man plunges into chaos, and the cycle finds itself once more in the godless first age, where man has unknowingly been readied to hear the word of God once more[29]. Finnegans Wake begins in the second age, the age of the fathers[30], so in the fourth and final section of the book we find ourselves in the first age, where Godless society is primed for a return to God.
And then suddenly this final chapter is a perfect place for a float down the Susquehanna, a river associated by Latter-day Saints with the restoration to the earth of the authority of Jesus Christ and his gospel in a chapter where civilization stands at the ready for a restoration of the divine and an awakening from religious ignorance.
This description of Vico’s cyclical history, the ascending and descending Ages of Man in accordance to their spiritual and material interests, might remind students of the Book of Mormon of that book’s own repeating historical cycle of men finding and then forgetting God. Sometimes called “The Pride Cycle”, it is a pattern where humble, repentant people accept God and live in righteousness. For this righteousness these people are blessed and prosper, but their prosperity causes them to grow prideful and reject God. This rejection of God leads the people to wickedness, and this state of wickedness leads to their downfall, destruction, and suffering. Having lost what they valued, the people enter a humbled state and become repentant and ready to turn to God once more. And the cycle continues. The similarity between Joyce’s use of Vico’s cyclical history of man and the Book of Mormon’s pride cycle is just one of several elements of Finnegans Wake which cause me think of the Book of Mormon, and it is connections and similarities between these two complex, esoteric texts that I would like to examine in the next part of my work in progress:
“like it were unto us a dream”
a Woke Reading of the Book of Mormon
NOTES:
[1] You might recall he was called ‘Humber’ in the quote. Throughout the book HCE is referred to by many names or hides in the text under many aliases, but anytime you see a man with an h-name, or a collection of three words that spell out his initials, you can be sure that Earwicker is present. Anna Livia can also be found in similar ALP initial-trios[1] and Shem and Shaun go by a number of other warring-pair names.
[2] William Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake (Syracuse: Syracuse Press, 1969), 172
[3] Anthony Burgess, A Shorter Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 112
[4] I think I’ll note here another place in Joyce’s work where you can find this sort of thing. Ithaca, the penultimate chapter of Ulysses, is an extended question and answer exchange preceding admittance to a final destination itself.
[5] John Bishop, Joyces Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake (New York: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986) 310.
[6] I have yet to find many parallels between Joseph Smith and this “kindly fowl” (FW 112.9) named Biddy.
[7] John Gordon, Finnegnas Wake: A Plot Summary (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986) 110.
[8] Oh you’ve never heard this one? Here it is on the internet a couple of times: https://www.newschoolers.com/forum/thread/40807/michael-jackson-jokes , https://www.goner-records.com/board/index.php?action=vthread&forum=4&topic=5315
[9] https://www.cougarboard.com/board/message.html?id=11575939
[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5evKY5n0GM
[11]For a famous singing of the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yebOy5Ne6bQ
[12] S. Forster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: the Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (New York: Brown, 1988) 42.
[13] Google according to your curiosity or comfort for visual examples and additional history on how the garments were held together.
[14] Gordon, 65.
[15]Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Mormons.” Cambridge: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910.
[16] Randy Astle, Mormon Cinema: Origins to 1952 (New York: Mormon Arts Center, 2018) 154
[17] Astle, ibid., 156.
[18] Astle, ibid., 157.
[19] John McCourt, editor. Roll Away the Reel World (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010) 187-203
[20] Luca Crispi, Editor How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter by Chapter Genetic Guide, (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2008), 392.
[21] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Nauvoo.” Cambridge: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910.
[22] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Mormons.” Cambridge: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910.
[23] James S Atherton, The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (Southern Illinois University Press; 2nd ed., 2009) 47.
[24] Atherton, ibid., 87.
[25] Len Platt, ‘Unfallable encycling’: Finnegans Wake and the Encyclopaedia Britannica Goldsmiths, University of London, https://research.gold.ac.uk/5511/2/The_Encyclopaedia_Britannica_and_the_Wake2.pdf
, p5
[26] Crispi, 31.
[27] Crispi, ibid., 164.
[28] Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake: A Structuralist Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) 13.
[29] Joseph Campbell, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce (Novato: New World Library, reprint edition, 1993) 125-6.
[30] Ibid., 198.