8/16/2017 The Joyce of Science - The Theory of Relativity in Finnegans Wake

The Joyce of Science: New Physics in Finnegans Wake

Index Introduction Background Physics Philosophy Relativity Quanta Conclusion

The Theory of Relativity in Finnegans Wake

Contents:

Joyce and Einstein

Joyce's Use of Source Material
Relativity and Joyce's Vision of the World
The Temporal Continuity
Newton and the Fall of Classical Physics
Einsten and the Time-Space Polarity
The Conjunction of Time and Space
Timespace and the Four Old Men
The New Cosmogony
Joyce and Wyndham Lewis
The Lecture of Professor Jones "What subtler timeplace of the weald ..."
The Story of the Ondt and the Gracehoper Finnegans Wake (80)
[This text is also available in Belorussian translation by Galina Miklosic.]

Joyce and Einstein

James Joyce and Albert Einstein never met. In 1919, when Joyce was living in Zurich,
Einstein visited the city for a series of lectures. For a short time the world lines of the two
men came close but they never crossed. It is tempting to speculate what such a meeting
would entail, for the two men shared much more than an interest in the nature of time. Both
received their initial education in a Catholic school system and broke out from under the
influence of religion to pursue their goals. Joyce was educated by Jesuits but as a young
man he denounced God and chose to serve Art instead. Einstein experienced a similar
transformation at the age of twelve: he renounced formalized religion and resolved to
unravel the mystery of the universe on his own.

The two men also shared a keen interest in music. Joyce described himself in Finnegans
Wake as "quite a musical genius in a small way and the owner of an exceedingly niced ear,
with tenorist voice to match" (48.20-21). His tenor, Ellmann says, was "sweet and
mellifluous" (150), and several times in his life Joyce considered a singing career. Einstein
played music exclusively for relaxation but he studied it for eight years in early youth and
became an accomplished violinist. His ideal was Mozart in whose music he heard the same
harmony he found in the workings of the universe. Both Joyce and Einstein were
expatriates, having been forced by the circumstances of their lives to choose exile as a
condition necessary for intellectual freedom. Both achieved remarkable recognition for their
revolutionary innovations in their fields and this similarity did not go unnoticed. In the
opening of his lecture on Joyce, given in Paris in 1921, Valery Larbaud observed that
"literary people were as accustomed to hearing [Joyce's] name as scientific people the
names of Freud or Einstein" (Ellmann 522). Despite international recognition, however,
both Einstein and Joyce were to end their lives in grief and alienation. While publication of
Finnegans Wake, crowning the work of seventeen years, was eclipsed by the outbreak of the
Second World War, Joyce also had to cope with the mental breakdown of his daughter
Lucia. Einstein was faced with a similar mental breakdown of his younger son Eduard,

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while he himself in later years became estranged from most theoretical physicists by his
refusal to accept the ultimate implications of the quantum theory.

Not only the general direction and circumstances of life but also the time frame of their
work joins Joyce and Einstein. Both men came of age at the turn of the century and had the
course of their lives determined to a great extent by events which took place within the first
few years of the modern age. Upon his graduation in 1902 Joyce left Ireland for France, but
he returned to Dublin the following year. In 1904, the year he would return to in Ulysses,
Joyce made a final resolution to leave Ireland permanently. His goal, as expounded by
Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist, was "to encounter . . . the reality of experience
and to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race." This he did
with such a singleminded determination and accomplishment that recognition and fame
came to him after the publication of Ulysses in 1922. As a youth, Einstein had made little
progress in the rigidly disciplined German school system, which he found stifling and
intimidating. He left Germany for Switzerland and graduated from the Zurich Polytechnic
Institute in 1900. In 1905, Einstein received his doctorate and published his revolutionary
papers on the special theory of relativity and on the quantum nature of light. These two
publications determined the course of his future professional activities which, briefly,
consisted in developing relativity to include non-uniform motion and in attempting to unify
relativity with quantum mechanics--a task he never realized. Like Joyce, Einstein became a
celebrity at the beginning of the second decade. The Nobel Prize was awarded to him in
1922, the same year in which Ulysses was published.

Joyce's Use of Source Material

Joyce, who was living in Paris since 1920, must have been exposed to the publicity
surrounding the experimental confirmation of the general theory of relativity in 1919, both
through media coverage and through his contacts with the artistic milieu of the French
capital. Early twentieth-century Paris was a mecca for artists, philosophers, and restless
spirits. Relativity and its implications were an important part of the intellectual atmosphere
of the time. The spirit of Einstein's theory was too well suited for the modernistic temper of
the Paris avantgarde to go unnoticed. The radical character and abstract nature of the new
theory, the sense of crisis accompanying its creation, and the emphasis on the subjective
element in the new definition of time led several artists to embrace relativity as a dramatic
scientific counterpart to their own artistic and philosophical endeavors.

There is no evidence that Joyce systematically read on the subject of the new physics, but
neither did he do so with many other ideas which found their way into Finnegans Wake.
Joyce's method consisted in selecting sources which had a direct bearing on his work and
disregarding whatever did not suit his purpose. He was not interested in assimilating ideas
in their entirety but rather in determining which of the ideas could be useful to him. His use
of the writings of Giambattista Vico serves as a good example of Joyce's way with sources.
Vico's cyclical view of history furnished one of the important structural devices for
organizing Finnegans Wake. Joyce provided his patroness Harriet Weaver with a clue to that
source, but he also cautioned skepticism: "I would not pay overmuch attention to these
theories, beyond using them for what they are worth, but they have gradually forced
themselves on me through the circumstances of my life" (Letters I 241). The same applies
to his use of Huckelberry Finn in Finnegans Wake. Joyce had never read Twain's book
himself. Instead, he commissioned a young relative to read Huckelberry Finn, write the plot
summary, and return the book with relevant passages marked in different colors on the
margin, so that he could "try to use whatever bears upon" Finnegans Wake (Letters III 401).
Given this strategy, it is difficult to determine how much in-depth knowledge or
understanding of Einstein's theory Joyce really had. The question, however, is not crucial
because Joyce's use of relativity in Finnegans Wake involves mostly the basic concepts
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rather than intricate details of the theory. It is important to point out, however, that these
basic concepts did suit his purpose better than the details because they confirmed,
reinforced, and refined other motifs already present in the structure of the book.

Joyce's method of composition was accretive. He constantly added on to Finnegans Wake,

but the additions rarely involved new ideas. Rather they were meant to enrich the texture of
the book by providing new points of view, or commenting on the text, or even contradicting
it to bring out its meaning. Such, for the most part, is the way the relativity theory occurs in
Finnegans Wake: Joyce apparently was not concerned with the development and meaning of
the theory itself but rather with incorporating into his work those elements which he found
useful because they reinforced his own ideas and themes.

Relativity and Joyce's Vision of the Word

The publication of the relativity theory was bound to have at least a general impact on Joyce
for the theory was characterized by a number of features which duplicated or resembled the
elements of his own vision of the world. To begin with, the creation of a new definition of
time and space and of the resulting new cosmogony was in itself a powerful act of
imagination that Joyce could not help but admire. Joyce found the lack of imagination to be
a deficiency in science. Asked whether he really believed in Vico's Scienza Nuova, he
replied: "I don't believe in any science, but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it
doesn't when I read Freud or Jung" (Ellmann 693). Perhaps Joyce could not have
appreciated the beauty of Einstein's creation in the way contemporary scientists did, but he
must have admired the creative power of Einstein's mind. The relativity theory was partly
the result of Einstein's thought experiments (Gedankenexperimente). These were mental
exercises in which the physicist imagined a situation that was impossible to arrange in
practice, though believable in theory (such as, for example, an elevator moving close to the
speed of light). The physicist then tried to speculate on the possible outcome of experiments
conducted by an imaginary scientist in those conditions. In some of his thought experiments
Einstein was not afraid to postulate conditions which contradicted everyday experience and
common sense, such as when he assumed that the velocity of light, unlike any other form of
motion, is not subject to classical transformation laws and always remains constant. Beside
a new thought approach, Einstein also had to develop an entirely new vocabulary to
communicate his mathematical findings. This aspect of relativity paralleled Joyce's own
situation: he, too, had to invent a new language to write Finnegans Wake.

Another feature of the relativity theory that Joyce must have found pleasing was its stress
on subjectivity and the peculiar role of the observer. In classical physics, as in traditional
fiction, reality was characterized by its own independent existence. The world of objects
and events, and their description in fiction, were said to exist regardless of whether they
were experienced or perceived or the books were read. The new theory, on the other hand,
postulated that the observer plays a more active role than that of a registering instrument
because he can influence the outcome of a measurement by his behavior. This new role of
the observer parallels the role of Finnegans Wake reader, for in Joyce's book the "meaning"
does not rest solely in the printed word as it does in traditional fiction; it also has to be
generated by the act of reading, thus letting the reader participate more actively in shaping a
fictional reality.

Another useful parallel between Einstein's understanding of time and the fiction of Joyce is
found in the relativistic concept of temporal dilatation. Prior to Einstein's theory, the
absolute time of classical physics, with its even and steady flow, was the only form of
temporality admitted by science. Newtonian time, measured in fixed units, formed the basis
of the scientific description of reality. It also corresponded to the concept of time in
practical affairs of everyday life. Society is organized around the face of a clock and the
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pages of a calendar, and without a conventional system of time it could not possibly
function as it does. In contrast to Newtonian time, however, individual human experience of
the temporal passage does not involve measurable quantities and standard units. It is always
a unique experience in which the sense of duration is dependent on the circumstances
surrounding the subject and on the state of the subject's mind. This aspect of time was
considered irrelevant in classical physics, and it had also been neglected in much of
traditional fiction. The writer made no attempt to recreate the personal sense of time flow of
his character. Instead, he treated the temporal passage as a mere framework to organize the
events of his fictional reality, much as the classical physicist viewed time and space as "an
absolute framework within which the material events of the world ran their course in their
imperturbable order" (Bronowski, Ascent 249). Einstein's assertion that physical time can
dilate legitimized the attempts of many modern writers who tried to render the act of human
temporal experience by presenting it through the prism of the character's mind rather than
by employing the spatial view of traditional novel. Joyce was a part of that new "time
school," which also included such distinguished and diverse authors as Marcel Proust,
Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf.

The relativity theory also encouraged a new treatment of time in fiction by removing the
boundary between the past and the future. The classical concept of time was that of linear
progression. According to Newtonian physics, any event which had already taken place was
a part of the past and had no bearing on other events. Such a linear progression, however, is
not compatible with the actual nature of human temporal experience. The mind never
perceives reality as restricted to "the present;" on the contrary, the past events and
experiences (as well as imaginary projections into the future) intermingle with the present to
form a complex response in which the past, the present and the future merge. Einstein's
theory claimed that such also is the nature of physical time. Events do not form a linear
progression axis. Instead, like the different constituents of human temporal perception, they
coexist as parts of the timespace continuum.

The "time school" novelists attempted to recreate that complexity of time consciousness by
means of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Its essence was the assumption that the
significance of man's existence can be found in the mental processes rather than in the
external world. Consequently, the writer's goal was to represent the endless flow of
consciousness rather than describe the objective reality. Joyce had extensively employed the
stream of consciousness technique in Ulysses. By skillfully entering the minds of his
characters he managed to render their mental processes with such verisimilitude that many
readers have commented on the novel seeming at times more real than reality. Although the
action of Ulysses describes the course of a single day, the coexistence of the consciousness
of the characters' past, present and projected future enables the reader to understand fully
the characters in the context of the formative events of their lives. As Molly Bloom lies in
bed, her past, present and future ceaselessly flow together. She recalls and relives past
events, but she also hears "Georges church bells" and plans to check her husband's fidelity
the next morning. Her thoughts form a continuum in which there are no temporal divisions:
it is an eternal present where differentiated time zones do not exist.

This vision of time as eternal present is further reinforced in Ulysses by the parallels
between the novel and the Odyssey. Joyce not only borrowed the title from Homer, and
organized the novel according to the structure of the Odyssey, but he also included in his
text innumerable parallels and correspondences between his Dubliners and Homer's
characters. This strategy again stressed the idea of oneness of all ages which lay at the core
of Joyce's vision of time.

The Temporal Continuity

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Temporality is further explored in Finnegans Wake, although the exploration takes a

different form. Joyce's last book does not attempt to re-create everyday reality of in the way
Ulysses does. Instead, Joyce creates a reality of his own. His new reality is completely freed
from the rational logic which dominates our waking state. Instead it resembles the logic of
the dreaming mind, or the working of consciousness, where images are subject to constant
movement and transformation. In place of realistic characters, in Finnegans Wake Joyce
creates types: "Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies" (20.12-13). These
five principal types of characters are Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, his wife Anna Livia
Plurabelle and their children: Shem, Shaun and Issy. In the book they undergo constant
transformations, each metamorphosing into dozens of other personages, fictional or
historical, with which they share similarities (or contrasts--for Joyce also believed in the
unity of opposites). Thus the characters interact with one another not only spatially, as when
HCE calls his chlidren home, but also temporally, when HCE, a Dublin publican, is
transformed into Adam, Napoleon, Finn MacCool or Tim Finnegan, thereby proving that
Joyce indeed wrote his book "with the help of the simulchronic flush in his pann" (182.11-
12). This spatiotemporal interaction in Finnegans Wake not only conveys the idea of time
without boundaries between the past, present and future, but it also expresses the relativistic
fusion of time and space into a timespace continuum.

The temporality of the book's structure is further reinforced with verbal and grammatical
motifs: "Then's now with now's then in tense continuant" (598.28-29). This "tense
continuant" is further suggested by such verbal constructions as "at this auctual futule
preteriting unstant" (143.07-08), or "there is a future in every past that is present" (496.35-
36), or again in "Between me rassociations in the postleadeny past and mi disconnections
with aplompervious futules" (348.05-06). The same effect is achieved by grammatical
transformations, for usually "a time has a tense" (599.14). Joyce builds complex predicates
without much regard for the rules of grammatical tense, as in "will had been having"
(143.12), "can could" (141.32), or "willbe isnor was" (236.28). His purpose is always to join
a specific instance with every other instance, regardless of their temporal coordinates. Thus
we learn, for example, about a "child . . . [that] wouldbewas kidnapped at an age of recent
probably, possibly remoter" (595.34-36), for in Finnegans Wake , as in the relativistic time
concept, "there's a split in the infinitive from to have to have been to will be" (271.21-22).

Newton and the Fall of Classical Physics

Joyce also explores in Finnegans Wake several new aspects of temporality relevant to the
publication of Einstein's theory. Newtonian physics for two centuries had been considered
the bedrock of Western science. The fall of classical physics and the emergence of relativity
in itself illustrated one of Joyce's main themes in the Wake : that of the fall and resurrection,
or the constant renewal of the world. This fall of Newtonian physics is associated in
Finnegans Wake with the fall of the apple, both the fall of fruit as a symbol of nature's cycle
of renewal, and the fall of the apple which effected Newton's insight into the similarity
between earthly and heavenly bodies when, as he relates, he suddenly saw a likeness
between the falling apple and the movement of the moon. Through the apple image, the
modern fall of classical physics is linked in Finnegans Wake with the biblical fall and
sometimes the two motifs are interrelated: Thus, for example, we hear: "For then it was the
age . . . of a pomme full grave and a fammy of levity" (20.28-30), followed by "newt"
(21.02), a typical Joycean clue. The apple in question is, of course, the forbidden fruit, with
its grave consequences, and the woman of levity is Eve, but the applefall (any fall) is also
the result of gravity, whose description brought Newton fame and made him an eponymous
figure.

In another reference to Newton, HCE is described as one who "thought he weighed a new
ton when there felled his first lapapple" (126.16-17), or had a sudden insight into the nature
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of gravity while looking at the falling fruit, and that preceded by "albert [Einstein?]"
(126.15). A little later the same motif reappears: "Let's hear what science has to say, pundit-
the-next-best-king. Splanck! -Upfellbowm" (505.27-29), preceded by "stein" (505.21).
"Splanck!" is the sound of the falling fruit, as well as the physicist Max Planck, the father of
the quantum theory; "Upfellbowm" is German Apfelbaum: appletree, distorted to bring out
the idea of gravity and fall. A similar distortion appears earlier in abfalltree," (88.01) and is
used in a temporal context. Finally, among the names of ALP's "untitled mamafesta"
(104.04-05) we find "the Fall of Fruit," followed by "Apples" and the scientist himself:
"Sare Stood Icyk Neuter" (106.21-29).

Einsten and the Time-Space Polarity

Such are the Wakean glances at Newtonian physics and its fall. Predictably, the resurrection
which followed in the form of new physics is also present in Finnegans Wake . Einstein's
theory and the space-time debate which accompanied its creation provided Joyce with a
convenient motif to augment his theme of the unity of opposites, represented by the Shem-
Shaun polarity. This polarity takes different forms in the book. In one aspect, the conflict
between the two brothers represents the opposition between time and space: Shem is
associated with temporality while Shaun typifies the spatial approach. The polarity between
Shem and Shaun is often presented in the Wake in the form of an opposition between an elm
and a stone. Einstein's name suggested a way to enhance this motif since the physicist was
born in Ulm (German for elm; Latin ulmus ). Joyce often blends these two motifs, as in "on
the hike from Elmstree to Stene," preceded by "it was mutualiter foretold of him by a
timekiller to his spacemaker" (247.01-04); or in "the Turnpike under the Great Ulm (with
Mearingstone in Fore ground)" (293.13-14). Einstein and his theory are recalled when HCE
is described as "a onestone parable, a rude breathing on the void of to be" (100.26-27), that
is, Einstein's description of our existence (God's breath) as an essentially immaterial entity.
This nonmateriality is also evoked in a preceding line where a thinking being is reversed
into a "being thinking" (100.24). HCE as the "onestone parable" is "the cluekey to a
worldroom beyond roomwhorld" (German Weltraum : space; 100.29). Newtonian
"gravitational pull," (100.32) which relativity rejected as a feature of nature, calling it a
fiction instead, is indicated as an argument used by the doubters of the new theory, and then
HCE transforms into a tesseract, a fourdimensional analog to a cube. The passage closes
with "Ulma" (100.36). The children's geometry lesson, with its Euclidian axioms, proofs
and drawings, ends with a reference to "Eyeinsteye" (305.06) who showed that geometry of
the universe is non-Euclidian. The name is echoed in "stein" (305.29) while "will gift uns
his Noblett's surprize" (306.04), with its German pronoun, may well refer to Einstein's
Nobel Prize in physics.

The Conjunction of Time and Space

Through time-space and elm-stone correspondences, Einstein is omnipresent in Finnegans

Wake , but the main ideas of the relativity theory find their reflection in the book even more
often than the theory's creator. Among those ideas the joining of time and space must have
especially appealed to Joyce, for he made frequent use of it, turning it into one of the motifs
of the book. Time and space, so clearly discrete to the rational intellect and yet now joined
by science, provided Joyce with a convenient motif to express his belief in the unity of
opposites. His use of the motif typically consists in referring to both time and space
coordinates in either a temporal or a spatial context. By placing temporal and spatial terms
together he brings out the opposition between them, but at the same time he shows their
unity by suggesting that a reference to either spatial or temporal coordinates requires the use
of both in conjunction, time and space having been united by Einstein. A spatial context, for
example, is augmented with a temporal reference in the following passage: "[HCE] came at

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this timecoloured place where we live in our paroqial fermament one tide or another"
(29.20-21). "Timecoloured place" consists of space joined by time to form the new
continuum. The substitution of "tide" for "time" also brings out the notion of gravity, whose
new interpretation was an essential aspect of Einstein's theory.

Conversely, a temporal context may be augmented by space. This happens, for example,
when at the time is rendered as "for the space of the time being" (109.22), thereby both
unifying and juxtaposing the notions of time and space. Similar is the phrase "just in time as
if he fell out of space" (462.31). In another example the timepiece of a character is
transformed into timespace:

Having reprimed his repeater and resiteroomed his timespiece His Revenances,
with still a life or two to spare for the space of his occupancy of a world at a
time, rose to his feet. (52.06-09)

"Room" suggests German Raum : space, while "the space of his occupancy of a world at a
time" typically joins the spatial and temporal coordinates. Another way of suggesting the
conjunction of time and space in Finnegans Wake consists in replacing the spatial
coordinates with the temporal ones, and vice versa. Such constructions as "thenabouts"
(69.24), "anywhen" (427.34-35), "whenabouts" (555.03), or "place of endearment" (571.04)
clearly illustrate the idea. "Where are we at all?" asks a confused character, "and
whenabouts in the name of space?" (558. 33). Spatially minded Shaun finds this method a
convenient way to avoid temporal references: "Johns is a different butcher's. Next place you
are uptown pay him a visit. . . . His liver . . . is a great value, a spatiality!" (172.05-09).

Timespace and the Four Old Men

The conjunction of time and space into the fourdimensional continuum provided Joyce with
another chance to explore the correspondences between relativity and his book. He
identified the four dimensions of timespace with The Four Old Men of Finnegans Wake :
Matthew Gregory, Mark Lyons, Luke Tarpey and Johnny MacDougal, who at different
times may appear as The Four Evangelists, the Irish historians of The Annals of the Four
Masters , the four provinces of Ireland, and several other tetrads. Four, apparently a
mysterious number, plays an important role in Finnegans Wake . The book is divided into
four parts and among Joyce's sigla is a square. This fourfold division is also based on Vico's
concept of time as a cyclical recurrence of four periods: three ages: divine, heroic and
human, followed by a ricorso , a period of confusion which "brings us by a commodius
vicus of recirculation back to [the beginning]" (3.02). Vico's division of time into three
periods and the ricorso provided a parallel to the new scientific concept of time with its
coordinates consisting of three dimensions of space and one of time. The Four Evangelists
furnished an equally convenient correspondence to the concept of timespace itself. The
Three-to-one division of the four spatiotemporal coordinates found a parallel in the division
of the Gospels into the first three Synoptic Gospels and that of St. John:

Our four avunculists. And, threestory sorratelling was much too many, they
maddened and they morgued and they lungd and they jowld. Synopticked on
the world. (367.24-27)

The Four--evangelists and historians--constantly scan the world around them, "facing one
way to another way and this way on that way, from severalled their fourdimmansions"
(367.26-27). Johnny, the added fourth dimension, is always a little apart or behind, as
evident in these comments by gossiping washerwomen:

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Are you meanam Tarpey and Lyons and Gregory? I meyne now, thank all, the
four of them, and the roar of them, that draves the stray in the mist and old
Johnny MacDougal along with them. (214.34-215.01)

Or in the following example, where Johnny requires as much as seven centuries to catch up
with his companions, but does so eventually because his participation is necessary:

. . . 4.32 M.P., old time, to be precise, according to all three doctors waterburies
that was Mac Auliffe and poor MacBeth and poor MacGhimley to the
tickleticks, of the synchronisms, all lauschening, a time also confirmed seven
sincuries later by the quatren medical johnny, poor old MacAdoo MacDollett,
with notary, whose presence was required by law of Devine Foresygth and
decretal of the Douge . . . (290.05-11)

Johnny's presence is required because the book is fourdimensional: in one of the many
selfreflecting passages, Finnegans Wake describes itself as a tetradomational
gazebocroticon" (614.28). The necessity to supplement the three spatial coordinates with the
temporal one is also suggested in the scene where the four old men, "three kings of three
suits and a crowner," (474.18-19) find exhausted Yawn and interrogate him:

Those four claymen clomb together to hold their sworn starchamber quiry on
him. . . . First klettered Shanator Gregory, seeking spoor through the deep
timefield, Shanator Lyons, trailing the wavy line of his partition footsteps
(something in his blisters was telling him all along how he had been in that
place one time), then his Recordership, Dr Shunadure Tarpey . . . and, up out of
his prompt corner, old Shunny MacShunny, MacDougal the hiker, in the rere of
them on the run, to make a quorum." (475.18-31)

The relativistic connotations in the passage are reinforced by "timefield" suggesting the
quantum field theory which dematerialized the universe by claiming that matter is only a
momentary manifestation of interacting fields. Shanator Lyons's "wavy line" evokes the
undulatory nature of light, while his blisters and his impression that "he had been in that
place one time" suggests another aspect of relativity that Joyce found suitable for inclusion
in his work--the curvature of the timespace continuum.

This curvature was suitable to Joyce because the circular nature of the relativistic universe
resembled the eternal return of the Viconian vision of time. Einstein's universe, curving
back upon itself, is further suggested, for example, in the following passage: "we come to
newsky prospect from west the wave on schedule time (if I came any quicker I'll be right
back before I left)" (442.11-13). Finnegans Wake, called "Work in Progress" during its
composition, is in fact "a warping process" (497.03). The line AL in the diagram used in the
geometry lesson (293) may appear straight, but it is described as a "strayedline"(294.02-03),
curved, like everything else in Joyce's book. The idea of a re-entrant universe, in which the
future somewhere has to meet the past, is also implied in "the only wise in a muck's world
to look on itself from beforehand" (576.22-23). The following passage explores the same
idea:

Bloody certainly we've got to see to it . . . that down the gullies of the eras we
may catch ourselves looking forward to what will in no time be staring you
larrikins on the postface in that multimirror megaron of returningties, whirled
without end to end. (582.16-21)

This "conjugation of the last with the first" (121.31) found a convenient symbol in the
curved timespace of Einstein's theory.

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The New Cosmogony

The relativity theory is also evoked in Finnegans Wake in the allusions to its new
cosmogony. Einstein's discovery brought about a thorough revision of the scientific views
on the nature and the origin of the universe. The new understanding of light and its behavior
opened new ways to man's inquiry into the cosmos. The most significant change in the
outlook was the realization that the universe is not a permanent and static entity, but that it
expands at enormous speed. This expansion is accompanied by internal dynamism: stars are
not static objects; they have lives of their own. Some collapse upon themselves to form
blackholes, others suddenly flare up as novae only to fade away into their former obscurity.
Finnegans Wake comments on both the expansion and the evolutionary nature of the
universe. Both are combined, for example, in the scene where traveling Jaun halts "to fetch
a breath . . . at the weir by Lazar's Walk," and, while resting, he experiences a
transformation which is likened to the expansion of the universe and the explosion of a
nova:

He was there, you could planemetrically see, when I took a closer look at him,
that was to say, (gracious helpings, at this rate of growing our cotted child of
yestereve will soon fill space and burst in systems, so speeds the instant!)
amply altered for the brighter. (429.02-13)

The image of receding stars in an expanding universe is suggested when in response to

Juva's "Dies is Dorminus master," Muta exclaims: "Diminussed aster!" (609.28-30). The
expansion is also directly referred to during the children's lesson:

all . . . [is] solarsystemized, seriolcosmically, in a more and more almightily

expanding universe under one, there is rhymeless reason to believe, original
sun." (263.22-27)

Joyce and Wyndham Lewis

Joyce's use of relativity in Finnegans Wake has yet another important aspect, resulting from
his quarrel with Wyndham Lewis. In Time and Western Man (1928), his polemic on the new
time philosophy and the "time school" writers, Lewis launched a personal attack on Joyce.
In the chapter entitled "An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce," Lewis blasted Ulysses,
describing it as a disorganized quantity of "material, that was scraped together into a big,
variegated heap" (83). He condemned Bergsonian philosophy and the relativistic concept of
timespace for their reliance on the flux of reality instead of solid objects, and he assaulted
Joyce, calling him "the poet of the shabby-genteel, impoverished intellectualism of Dublin."
Joyce, he said, "is steeped in the sadness and the shabbiness of the pathetic gentility of the
upper shopkeeping class, slumbering at the bottom of a neglected province" (77). The
conclusion Lewis reached in his analysis was that "there is not very much reflection going
on at any time inside the head of Mr. James Joyce" (90).

Joyce's response to Lewis in Finnegans Wake takes several forms. He plays with Lewis's
conclusion by observing: "Nonsense! There was not very much windy Nous blowing at the
given moment through the hat of Mr Melancholy Slow!"(56.28-30). Time and Western Man
, itself an allusion to Bergson's Time and Free Will, is transformed into "Spice and Westend
Woman (utterly exhausted before publication, indiapepper edition shortly)" (292.06). Joyce's
book repeatedly puns on Lewis's name, often in a non-laudatory way, as in "wind hound
loose" (471.21-22). The Wake extends Lewis's objection to Ulysses as a chaotic depository
of lifeless objects, by referring to itself as "a jetsam litterage of convolvuli of times lost or
strayed, of lands derelict and of tongues lagging too" (292.15-17).

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The Lecture of Professor Jones

Joyce's most direct answer to Lewis is contained in two passages: the lecture of Professor
Jones followed by the fable of the Mookse and the Gripes (148-68); and in the fable of the
Ondt and the Gracehoper (414-18). Professor Jones, who represents Wyndham Lewis (or
space-oriented Shaun as opposed to temporal Shem), delivers a lecture on the "dime-cash
problem." Speaking "from the blinkpoint of so eminent a spatialist," he begins his lecture by
dismissing both Bergsonian flux and Einsteinian physics, claiming that "the sophology of
Bitchson . . . is in reality only a done by chance ridiculisation of the whoo-whoo and
where's hairs theorics of Winestein" (149.17-28). Next he attacks "Professor Loewy-
Brueller" (the anthropologist Levy-Bruhl, who also studied temporality) and places him in
the same group of thinkers "hopelessly vitiated" by what he has now resolved to call "the
dime and cash diamond fallacy" (150.23-24)--the damned temporal fallacy. Then, in his
clumsy and rambling style, which seems to owe much to the idiom of Lewis's opus, he
attempts to expound his view of temporality, but is not altogether successful.

The fallacy of his opponents, Professor Jones explains, is their belief that "the inception,
and the descent and the endswell of Man is temporarily wrapped in obscenity," whereas he,
in his "own spacious immensity," prefers to be "reassured by ratio that the cube of [his]
volumes is to the surfaces of their subjects as the sphericity of these globes . . . is to the
feracity of Fairynelly's vacuum" (150.30-151.07). Thus self-assured spatially, he dismisses
Levi-Brullo's investigation of time as just another case of "romanitis"--like Keats's rebellion
against Pope. "What the romantic in rags pines after," Professor Jones pronounces to be "the
poorest commononguardiant waste of time" (151.20-21). According to him, it is not when
that counts but where, since "[one] man's when is no otherman's quandour . . . while the all
is where (151.34-36).

Pleased with his "augmentatively uncomparisoned" discourse, but doubting the capabilities
of his audience, Professor Jones now "revert[s] to a more expletive method" (152.06-07)
and offers his version of Aesop's fable of the fox and the grapes. Carefully avoiding
temporal terms, Professor begins his tale:

Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast ere whoned a Mookse. The
onesomeness wast alltolonely, archunsitslike, broady oval, and a Mookse he
would a walking go. (152.18-19)

However, his attempts to eradicate time are only partly successful since "onesome" and
"Eins" evoke Einstein's name, and with it not only the notion of time but also that of
spatiotemporal conjunction. Such problems of temporal interference in his purely spatial
existence continue to plague the Mookse in his "roaming run through Room [ Raum ]," and
when he finds a place to sit down he is again joined with time, for the seat he has chosen is
a stone, and a stone represents Einstein's name.

Inevitably, as the story unfolds, the problem of time fallacy is brought up by the Mookse
when he reacts violently to Gripes's innocent question: "By the watch, what is the time,
pace?" To the Mookse, the question is insolent. Enraged, he informs the Gripes that
clarifying the question of temporal fallacy is precisely the goal of his mission and then
attempts to impose his spatial geometrical approach on the Gripes:

Quote awhore? This is quite about what I came on my missions with my

intentions laudibiliter to settle with you , barbarousse. Let thor be orlog. Let
Pauline be Irene. Let you be Beeton. And let me be Los Angeles. Now measure
your length. Now estimate my capacity. Well, sour? Is this space of our couple

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of hours too dimensional for you, temporizer? Will you give you up? (154.16-
27)

But the other cannot give up his sense of time. The Mookse then is forced to revert to the
formerly unsuccessful method of discourse. With the help of Greek, Latin and Rosicrucian
literature he proves his point over and over, a hundred and thirty-three times in all, and then
the same number again:

[H]e gathered together the odds docence of his vellumes, gresk, letton and
russicruxian, onto the lapse of his prolegs, . . . and set about his widerproof. He
proved it well whoonearth dry and drysick times, . . . [proved it] by Neuclidius
and Inexagoras and Munifsen and Thumpsem, by Orasmus and Amenius, . . .
he reproved it ehrltogether when not in that order sundering in some different
order, alter three thirty and a hundred times. (155.26-156.02)

But this "promulgating [of] ipsofacts and sadcontras" has only as much effect on the Gripes
as Professor Jones's lecture had on his "muddlecrass pupils" (152.08). The temporal Gripes
remains as ethereal as he has always been: "Mee are relying entirely," he says, "on the
weightiness of mear's breath" (156.33-34).

The fable finished, Professor Jones proclaims that he has now successfully explained his
point, but he still returns to the question of temporal fallacy. Echoing Lessing's discussion of
the spatial and temporal arts in Laocoon , the Professor takes the example of music to
further clarify his views:

Of course the unskilled singer continues to pervert our wiser ears by

subordinating the space-element, that is to sing, the aria , to the time-factor,
which ought to be killed, ill tempor . (164.32-35)

He advises any singer "to forget her temporal diaphragm at home . . . and attack the roulade
with a swift colpo di glottide to the lug," and thus to eliminate the time-factor in music
entirely (164.34-165.02). Professor Jones's attitude towards music expresses Lewis's own.
"To the trance of music," Lewis wrote, "with its obsession of Time , with its inalienable
emotional urgency and visceral agitation, we prefer what Bergson calls 'obsession of space'"
(428).

The Story of the Ondt and the Gracehoper

Joyce explores this correspondence between temporality and music in his second fable, the
story of the ant and the grasshopper. Here Shaun is asked to sing a song, but he refuses to
engage in this purely temporal form of art. He apologizes and offers instead to spin a yarn
"from the grimm gests of Jacko and Essaup . . . [and] consider the casus . . . of the Ondt and
the Gracehoper" (414.17-21). As in the story of the Mookse and the Gripes, the characters
of this fable represent the Shem-Shaun polarity, but in another of their aspects they are
Joyce's response to Wyndham Lewis.

In the fable Lewis is the stern and prudent Ondt, "thothfolly making chilly spaces at hisphex
affront of the icinglass of his windhame" (415.28-29). A clearly spatial character, he is a
"raumybult" fellow, "chairmanlooking when not making spaces in his psyche" (416.01-66),
and smokes "a spatial brunt of Hosana cigals" (417.12-13). The musicmaking Gracehoper is
Joyce himself, "always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity, . . . [with a] pair of
findlestilts to supplant him" (414.22-24). When they meet, the Ondt is "making the greatest
spass a body could," while the famished Gracehoper, like the ethereal Gripes at the close of
the earlier fable, is a "featherweighed animule, actually and presumptuably sinctyfying

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chronic's despair" (417.24-35). But, unlike the Mookse and the Gripes tale, this time Joyce
does not leave the space-time question unresolved. The Ondt may have the upper hand in
the story but in the Gracehoper's song which closes the fable the opposition of space and
time is dissolved into a unity:

A locus to loue, a term it t'embarass

These twain are the twins that tick Homo Vulgaris
...
We are Wastenot with Want, precondamned, two and true,
Till Nolans go volants and Bruneyes come blue. (418.24-31)

Space and time are thus pronounced to be one: each can only develop its essence by
opposition to the other. It is this interdependence that ultimately unifies them. And as for the
last word in the argument, it belongs of course to Joyce. It is a personal question addressed
directly to Wyndham Lewis - both as a writer of prose and as a champion of space:

Your genus is worldwide, your spacest sublime,

But, Holy Saltmartin, why can't you beat time?

Index Introduction Background Physics Philosophy Relativity Quanta Conclusion

Copyright 1997 Andrzej Duszenko

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