Continuing our analysis of the Humphriad II—Finnegans Wake, Book I, Chapter 3—we turn now to the fates of Hosty and his confederates. The last sixty-six lines of the long opening paragraph of this chapter comprises a series of obituaries for the more prominent of these characters—not unlike the death notices in a newspaper.
In this article, we shall take a close look at Hosty’s obituary, which occupies just nine lines in The Restored Finnegans Wake.
First Draft
Joyce’s first draft of Hosty’s death notice is surprisingly short and an almost perfect specimen of the King’s English:
Of Hosty, quite a musical genius in small way, the end is unknown. (Hayman 69)
In the much-expanded final version, Joyce retained most of this, fleshing it out after his usual manner with a wealth of details:
Of ... Osti-Fosti, described as quite a musical genius in a small way ... no one end is known. (RFW 039.14 ... 17 ... 21)
Note how the first-draft’s “in small way” has been emended to the more regular “in a small way”. It is possible that the omission of the indefinite article in the earlier draft was an oversight that Joyce corrected in the later. On the other hand, the omission may simply be a typo in Hayman’s text. According to Rose & O’Hanlon’s James Joyce Digital Archive, the article was present in the first draft. If true, then the original draft was good English, with none of the irregularities that characterize the language of the Wake.
Eyrawyggla Saga
Joyce was a passionate reader of newspapers. A significant number of allusions in Finnegans Wake were gleaned from print media. Among the many newspapers he regularly read in the early-to-mid 1920s, the Freeman’s Journal, the Irish Times, the Irish Independent and the Connacht Tribune may be noted. But Joyce was just as likely to find something useful in a newspaper that he did not regularly read. One such journal was the Sunday Pictorial, which was renamed the Sunday Mirror in 1963. Joyce appears to have read a single copy of this paper on 29 October 1922, when he was holidaying in Nice. It was around this time that he first conceived of Finnegans Wake, so we know that he was actively compiling material in his notebooks (Norburn 106). Three items in this particular issue caught his attention and were duly transcribed to one of the Finnegans Wake notebooks—VI.B.10. On page eighteen of this issue is a short story by the prolific English novelist Henry St John Cooper called Less than the Dust. The narrative is preceded by a list of the People in the Story, just like the Dramatis Personae that preceded each of Shakespeare’s plays in Nicholas Rowe’s edition of 1709:
Joyce’s original note underwent a few metamorphoses before it achieved its final form:
VI.B.10 (1922) People in the Story
VI.B.17 (1926) the persons in the N / story
MS British Library 47472 146-156 (1927) the persons in the story
British Library 47472 173-193 (March 1927) the persins sin the story
(April 1927) the persins sin this Eyrawyggla saga
The initial alteration of People to persons was probably a nod to the Shakespearean Dramatis Personae. By altering persons in to persins sin, Joyce has drawn in a few more allusions:
Persse O’Reilly A nickname for HCE, from the French: perce oreille, earwig. Hosty’s Rann is entitled The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly.
Italian: persi, lost and persino se, even if. Hosty’s epitaph (see below) is in Italian, so these allusions may be relevant. The persons in this saga are now lost to time. They are dead and largely forgotten. Less than their dust survives. I’m not sure, however, that persino se is relevant.
Sin Hosty’s Rann recounted HCE’s Original Sin, the Crime in the Park.
Persians In the Crimean War, the Persians made a semi-secret agreement with the Russians to remain neutral in exchange for the cancellation of the indemnity from the Russo-Persian War (1826-28) (Article 6 of the Treaty of Turkmenchay). But I doubt whether any of this is relevant.
In Finnegans Wake, HCE is often given a Scandinavian background. In the epic tale How Kersse the Tailor Made a Suit of clothes for the Norwegian Captain, HCE plays the role of the Norwegian Captain, a Viking warlord who settles in Dublin. This all makes sense, as Dublin was a Scandinavian city for over three hundred years, ruled by a dynasty of Viking warlords. It is entirely fitting, then, that the Earwicker story should appear in Finnegans Wake as an old Norse saga, the Eyrawyggla Saga.
Joyce’s source for this was Annie Walsh’s short study Scandinavian Relations with Ireland during the Viking Period, which was published in Dublin in 1922:
Dublin is frequently mentioned in the sagas and seems to have been very well known to Icelandic dealers ... Eyrbyggia Saga tells of both Thórodd, the owner of a large ship of burden, and Guthleif, 2 who went with other traders on voyages “west to Dublin.” (Walsh 30 ... 31)
The Eyrbyggja Saga is an anonymous Icelandic saga from the 13th century. The title translates literally as The Saga of the Gravel Bank Builders. Eyri (Eyr, Eyrr) was a settlement on the Álftafjörður in Snæfellsnes, a long peninsula in the west of Iceland:
Eyrr or Eyri was a gravelly bank as either of the banks of a river or also used of small tongues of land running into the sea. The Eyrr-byggjar were the buildings upon the Eyrrar gravelly beach, and the Eyrbyggjia Saga, literally the Saga of the Eyrri builders, was the history of those men who had builded or settled there. (Ellwood 57 fn)
Adaline Glasheen adds a few interesting details:
Eyrbyggja—saga which, Mr Atherton says, Morris translated as The Ere-landers Saga [Atherton 218]; Mrs Christiani says it is an Icelandic family saga. Eyra is Old Norse “ear” ... with Earwicker. (Glasheen 88)
The Eyrbyggja Saga mentions a journey made by Guðleifr Guðlaugsson from Dublin to Iceland. He is blown off course and lands instead in a place where the people speak Irish. This is believed to be a reference to Great Ireland, an Irish colony in North America mentioned in other Norse sagas. There is, however, no evidence that Joyce ever read any of these sagas, so this Viconian reference to a New Ireland in the New World never found its way into Finnegans Wake. Nevertheless, Atherton suggests that some of the saga’s details may have influenced Joyce:
There are also many references to the Sagas, indeed the Wake itself is once described as ‛this Eyrawyggla saga’ (48.16). This is a good description for it refers to the Eyrbyggja saga, a title which Morris translated as The Ere-landers Saga, and ‛Ere’ would be near enough to Éire or Erin for Joyce’s purposes. The saga itself describes how an increasing number of ‛undead’ who were causing trouble by their hauntings were finally laid by holding a court over them and passing judgement upon them. Joyce probably had this in mind when he wrote about the trial of Shaun. (Atherton 218)
In Parentheses
One of the things that makes the reading of Finnegans Wake challenging is Joyce’s penchant for interrupting sentences with passages in parentheses. Sometimes these parenthetical passages can be quite protracted, and sometimes a parenthetical passage is itself interrupted by nested parentheses. In this short passage of nine lines, there are no less than two pairs of parentheses. The first of these is a passage that can be reverse-engineered to give good English:
(which, though readable from end to end, is from top to bottom all factitious, anti-libellous, and nonactionable and this applies to its whole volume)
If the Eyrawyggla Saga—which is both Hosty’s Rann and Finnegans Wake itself—is factitious (fictional, fabricated, made up), then it cannot libel anyone. And if it is not libellous, then it is nonactionable: that is, it does not afford grounds for legal action.
thorough The old meaning of thorough was from end to end or throughout.
to int from and It is interesting that the opening page of Finnegans Wake contains the word pikepointandplace, in which int is immediately followed by and. Is this just a coincidence? It is typical of Joyce to invert the order (to ... from), a nod to Vico’s cyclical model of human history, in which every beginning is preceded by an end. Joyce did something similar on the opening page when he wrote: Eve and Adam’s.
tubb to buttom I presume there is an allusion to Jonathan Swift’s short satirical work A Tale of A Tub. A butt is a large wooden cask for storing wine. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word tub is loosely applied to a butt, a barrel or a cask. A Tale of a Tub was first published in 1704 with another of Swift’s short works, The Battle of the Books, which might be relevant (see the Classical allusions below).
falsetissues Not just factitious but also a tissue of falsehoods. And if the saga is facetious, then it ought not be taken seriously, in which case it is probably not libellous.
antilibellous Some Classical allusions may be relevant here (O’Hehir & Dillon 32). I am not convinced by any of them, but if The Battle of the Books is alluded to, who knows?
Latin: ante libellos, before booklets, before petitions.
Greek: ἀντιλίβελλος [antilibellos], anti-booklet, anti-petition.
Greek: ἀντί λῐβέλλου [anti libellou], against a booklet, instead of a petition, etc.and this applies to its whole wholume Before settling on this form, Joyce also considered & this applies to the whole in the volume. In the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter (I.8), the phrase occurs: a hole in the ballad for Hosty (RFW 166.01). When a singer can’t remember the next verse of a song, he excuses his lapse by saying: “There’s a hole in the ballad.”
Osti-Fosti
By altering Hosty to Osti-Fosti, Joyce has transformed his balladeer from a humble street busker into an operatic tenor. The name is Italianate—Osti is a genuine Italian surname, though no-one bearing that name is being alluded to. It was not an uncommon practice for international tenors to adopt Italian stage-names both before and during Joyce’s day. The Irish tenor Michael O’Kelly, who created the roles of Don Curzio and Basilio in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, was sometimes billed as Signor Ochelli. Conrad Boisragon, the English bass-baritone who created the role of King Charles II of Spain in William Vincent Wallace’s Maritana, was billed as Conrado Borrani. He also created the role of Count Arnheim in another Irish opera, The Bohemian Girl by Michael William Balfe.
FWEET points out that fosti is Italian for you were, which anticipates Hosty’s Italian epitaph in line 23. The other Italian allusions listed by FWEET are already implied by the word host in the busker’s given name. Note also the Latin: ostium, mouth, which is surely relevant, given the operatic context (O’Hehir & Dillon 32).
Hosty is quite a musical genius with an exceedingly niced ear, with tenorist voice to match. A tenorist is a tenor singer. In this context, the Oxford English Dictionary’s Definition 12b of nice seems most relevant:
Nice ... 12. ... b Of the eye, ear, etc. : Able to distinguish or discriminate in a high degree. (OED)
The phrase exceeding nice, which Joyce recorded in FW VI.B.11 (compiled September-November 1923), occurs in Chapter III.2 (The Second Watch of Shaun, or Jaun), in which Jaun is taking leave of his sister:
— Sister dearest, Jaun delivered himself with express cordiality, marked by clearance of diction and general delivery, as he began to take leave of his scholastica at once so as to gain time with deep affection, we honestly believe you soeurly will miss us the moment we exit yet we feel as a martyr to the dischurch of all duty that it is about time, by Great Harry, we would shove off to stray on our long last journey and not be the load on ye. This is the gross proceeds of your teachings in which we were raised, you, Sis, that used to write to us the exceeding nice letters for presentation and would be telling us anun (full well do we wont to recall to mind) thy oldworld tales of homespinning and derringdo and dieobscure and daddyho, those tales which reliterately whisked oft our heart so narrated by thou, gesweest, to perfection, our pet pupil of the whole rhythmetic class and the mainsay of our erigenal house, the time we younkers twain were fairly tossing ourselves (O Phoebus! O Pollux!) in bed, having been laid up with Castor’s oil on the Parrish’s syrup (the night we well remember) for to share our hard suite of affections with thee. (RFW 335.01-16)
The word niced is listed in the OED, where it is flagged as obsolete and rare. It is defined as: Made foolish or delicate.
A Very Major Poet
Hosty is not merely the musical genius who performs The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly. He is also the poet who wrote it. The previous chapter attributed the lyrics of the ballad to A. Hames¡, but this is just another way of saying that Hosty made a hames of the words (RFW 035.20, which is not in any previous edition).
Hosty is described as a very major poet of the poorly meritary order. There is a cluster of military allusions packed into this phrase.
major A military rank.
poorly meritary purely military.
Pour Le Mérite (French: For Merit) An order of merit established in 1740 by Frederick II of Prussia and awarded as both a military and civil honour.
meritary Latin: meritare, to serve as a soldier.
Another Italian allusion may also be relevant here: meritare, to earn (wages), to merit, to deserve.
The military theme may simply be a holdover from the reference to the Zouave Theatre at Inkerman in the Crimea ten lines earlier. In the context of the Crimean War, Tennysonian cannot but evoke one of Tennyson’s most famous poems: The Charge of the Light Brigade.
Tuonisonian ... Animandovites: Note the contrast between Finnish: tuoni, death and Italian: animando, animating, giving life, and vite, lives. There is also the contrast between the Italian: tuoni, thunders, thunderous roars and Latin: anima, breath.
If Tuonisonian means Tennysonian, then to whom does Animandovites refer? In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen prefers Lord Byron to Lord Tennyson, whom he dismisses as a mere rhymester. It’s hard to see how Animandovites can have any connection with Byron. In the previous chapter the following was written about Hosty and his colleagues:
the rejuvenated busker ... and his broadawake bedroom suite (our boys, as our Byron called them) were up and ashuffle ... (RFW 032.36 ... 38-39)
Our Boys was a popular comedy by another Byron—Henry James Byron. This is a bit of a stretch, but it’s the best I’ve got (Glasheen 47).
Again in the context of the Crimean War, Animandovites does have a slightly Russian sound to it: Amandovich is a Russian surname, but I am not aware of any Russian combatants in the Crimean War with a name like this.
It was Benjamin Franklin who is alleged to have said to his fellow signatories of the American Proclamation of Independence:
We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
Does Animandovites contain an allusion to this Benjamin? Franklin did famously experiment with lightning, which could be suggested by the thunder in Tuonisonian.
Finally, we might acknowledge a few more Latin allusions in the words Tuonisonian and Animandovites (O’Hehir & Dillon 32). Note the contrast between the physical and the psychical:
tuor: sight, vision
sonus: noise, sound
anima: air, breath, breath of life, life, soul
As the Oedipal Character, who conflates both Shem and Shaun, Hosty is a complex of opposites—Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum, which will be alluded to on the next page. This accounts for these pairs of contrasting ideas. But why are we told that Hosty worked his passage up? Here is FWEET’s commentary:
to work one’s passage: to pay for one’s travel on a ship by working during the voyage.
to work one’s way up: to rise in position or rank through hard work (‛way’ is one of the meanings of ‛passage’).
Is Hosty going into exile?
Whistle
John Gordon’s comments on the next sentence are worth quoting, as there is not much more that I can add:
48.24-49.1: “If they whistled him before he had curtains up they are whistling him still after his curtain’s doom’s doom:” whistling a stage performance was a rowdy sign of disapproval, only slightly less insulting than booing. This performer couldn’t catch a break: they were whistling him from before his act started, up until after the curtain had gone down. Given the common (and current) expression “It’s curtains,” for imminent death, this also tracks the course of his blighted life. Semi-long shot: “doom doom” may be the sound of the stage’s safety curtain (see 220.11-2 [RFW 174.02], and note) being lowered to the stage floor. Made of asbestos and, before that, literally of iron, safety curtains were very heavy. They were typically dropped either at the beginning of a show or at intermission. (John Gordon)
He Was
Each of the six death notices in this paragraph ends with the epitaph He was in six different languages. Hosty’s epitaph is in Italian: Ei fù. As Osti-Fosti, the busker is transformed into a tenor singer—tenorist—of Italian opera. As we have seen, fosti (you were) is the second person singular of the past historic of essere (to be), while ei fu is the third person singular. Note that Joyce has added a grave accent to fu. This is grammatically incorrect. Is this a mistake? In Mandarin Chinese, fù is a pinyin transcription of an ideogram which means to fall forward, but this is probably coincidental.
And that’s a good place to stop.
References
- James S Atherton, The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL (1959, 2009)
- Dounia Bunis Christiani, Scandinavian Elements of Finnegans Wake, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL (1965)
- Thomas Ellwood (translator), The Book of the Settlement of Iceland : Landnámabók : Translated from the Original Icelandic of Ari the Learned, Kendal, London (1898)
- Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA (1977)
- David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, TX (1963)
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, The Viking Press, New York (1958, 1966)
- James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
- Roger Norburn, A James Joyce Chronology, Palgrave Macmillan, London (2004)
- Brendan O’Hehir, John M Dillon, A Classical Lexicon for Finnegans Wake, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA (1977)
- Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
- Giambattista Vico, Goddard Bergin (translator), Max Harold Fisch (translator), The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY (1948)
- Annie Walsh, Scandinavian Relations with Ireland during the Viking Period, The Talbot Press Limited, Dublin (1922)
Image Credits
- Poor Osti-Fosti: © 2010 Stephen Crowe, Fair Use
- Don Cæsar de Bazan (Maritana): Nanteuil (artist), Samuel Holland Rous, The Victrola Book of the Opera, Page 289, Fourth Revised Edition, Victor Talking Machine Company, Camden, NJ (1917), Public Domain
- Sunday Pictorial 29 October 1922 (Page 18): Harold Harmsworth, Sunday Pictorial, Public Domain
- Giant Padlock View (Snæfellsnes): © 2020 Emstrur sf, Fair Use
- The Scandinavian Dynasty of Dublin (853-902): Family Tree of Clann Ímair (Irish Annals), Public Domain
- A Gravel Bank in Iceland: Gravel Bank of Kjósarlaekur, Skaftafell, Iceland, © Wikiloc, Fair Use
- A Tale of a Tub: Frontispiece of Le Conte du tonneau, French Translation of A Tale of a Tub, Henri Scheurleer, The Hague (1732), Public Domain
- Alfred Tennyson: Julia Margaret Cameron (photographer), The Art Institute of Chicago, Public Domain
- Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida (After Tennyson’s The Princess): Savoy Theatre Programme for Princess Ida (1884), Public Domain
- Michael William Balfe: Nadar (photographer), Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Public Domain
- William Vincent Wallace: Mathew B Brady (photographer), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, Public Domain
- The Safety Curtain in the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin: © Ian, Fair Use
Useful Resources
- Sunday Pictorial 29 October 1922
- Joyce Tools
- FWEET
- The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection
- FinnegansWiki
- James Joyce Digital Archive
- John Gordon’s Finnegans Wake Blog
- A Manual for the Advanced Study of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
