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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/11/23, SPi
Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce’s

Finnegans Wake
Philosophical Allusions
in James Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
R O B E RT BA I N E S
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Robert Baines 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023942433
ISBN 978–0–19–889404–9
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198894049.001.0001
Printed and bound in the UK by
Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
For Jennika
Contents
Abbreviations ix
Transcriptional Conventions xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1. The History of the Letter (FW 116.36–119.09) 9
2. Professor Jones vs. The Time Philosophy
(FW 149.14–150.14) 49
3. The Unity and Duality of Burrus and Caseous
(FW 160.06–167.17) 92
4. A Portrait of the Ondt as a Young Man
(FW 414.16–419.10) 133
5. Seeing through Balkelly (FW 609.24–612.15) 168
Conclusion 202
Bibliography 207
Index 217
Abbreviations
References to the following works have been recorded throughout using the abbreviations
and editions as set out below.
FDV Hayman, David. A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake. Austin: University of

Texas Press, 1963.
P Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin Books, 2000.
AFW McHugh, Roland. Annotations to Finnegans Wake. 4th ed. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2016.
FW Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake, edited by Robbert-Jan Henkes, Erik Bindervoet,
and Finn Fordham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. References to this
edition always take the following format: FW (page number).(line number).
Letters Joyce, James. Letters of James Joyce. Vol. I, edited by Stuart Gilbert. New York:
Viking Press, 1957; reissued with corrections 1966. Vols II and III, edited by
Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1966.
JJA Joyce, James. The James Joyce Archive, edited by Michael Groden et al. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1977–8. References to the JJA always take the following
format: JJA (volume number):(page number).
U Joyce, James. Ulysses, edited by Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Random House,
1986. References to this edition always take the following format: U (episode
number).(line number).
Transcriptional Conventions
Kind of Change: Symbols:

Additions Matched set of nested caret marks: base ^added text^ text
Further additions on Matched set of nested caret marks: ^added ^further
same manuscript added text^ text^
Deletions Matched set of angled brackets: <deleted text>
Revisions Combination of angled brackets and caret marks:
^<deleted text> new text^
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Sam Slote, who supervised the bulk of the Ph.D. thesis from
which this book grew. Sam has helped me a great deal over the years, and I’m
particularly appreciative of the guidance he offered when this project was
struggling.
I would also like to thank John Nash, who was my first Ph.D. supervisor and
who also oversaw the master’s thesis that evolved into my Ph.D. project. John’s
influence permeates this book.
During my time in Joyce studies, I’ve received a lot of advice and kindness
from leading figures within that field. I would like to thank Luca Crispi, Anne
Fogarty, Finn Fordham, and the late, great John Bishop.
I was fortunate to start my career as a Joycean alongside many brilliant young
Joyce scholars. Of all my outstanding contemporaries, I would particularly like to
thank my good friends Ronan Crowley and Liam Lanigan.
On completing my Ph.D., I moved to America where I first worked at Le
Moyne College in Syracuse. I would like to thank Kate Costello-Sullivan and Ann
Ryan for helping me to take my first steps in American academia.
I presently work at the University of Evansville alongside many excellent
professors. I would like to thank all of the literature professors within my

department—Mark Cirino, Kristie Hochwender, and Sara Petrosillo—as well as
my former colleagues Larry Caldwell and Bill Hemminger. I would also like to
thank the indomitable Dan Byrne in the History department.
Many kind individuals have helped me to write particular parts of this book.
I would like to thank Jason Aleksander for his remarks on Nicholas of Cusa, Paul
Richard Blum for his thoughts on Bruno, Jeffrey Braun for his advice on Einstein,
Arnold Brooks for his guidance on Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction,
Alan Code for his insights into Aristotelian logic, Bill Hemminger for reviewing
my French translations, Leonard Lawlor for reading my discussions of Bergson,
Robert Miner for his assistance with Vico, and David Roochnik for his observa-
tions on Plato.
In 2015, I received a fellowship from the Moore Institute at the University of
Galway which allowed me to spend a month there. During that time, I conducted
research for this book. I would like to thank Daniel Carey and everyone at the
Moore Institute.
An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as “Time and Space: The Opposition
of Professor Jones in Finnegans Wake I.6” in volume 8 of the Dublin James Joyce
xiv Acknowledgments
Journal. It is reproduced with the kind permission of Anne Fogarty, Director of

the UCD James Joyce Research Centre.
On a related note, I would also like to thank the Zurich James Joyce Foundation
for generously allowing me permission to quote the manuscript note “Two Kinds
of Monism” from the Hans E. Jahnke Bequest.
I would like to thank Ellie Collins, Alexander Hardie-Forsyth, and Karen Raith
at Oxford University Press for their sage guidance. At Straive, I would like to
thank Jothi Aloysia Stephenson for her excellent project management and Rachel
Addison for her meticulous copy editing. I would also like to thank Sergey
Lobachev at Brookfield Indexing Services for his splended index.
I would like to thank my parents, Simon and Elisabeth, and my brother Philip
for their enduring love and support throughout my entire life.
I would like to thank my dogs—Barkley, Nula, and Bernie—for taking me on
the walks during which much of this book was mentally written.
Lastly, and most of all, I would like to thank the person to whom this book is
dedicated, my wife Jennika. She has supported and encouraged and enabled this
book in innumerable ways over the many years it has taken to write it. Without
her, I would neither have written this book nor have had a reason to write it.
Introduction
There are two primary ways to approach James Joyce’s relationship to philosophy.
One is to regard Joyce as a philosopher. Philip Kitcher offers an example of this
approach when he writes:
Joyce’s mature fiction is much concerned with a reworking of the oldest, most
central philosophical question, Socrates’ “How to live?” Joyce hopes to under-
stand how to avoid the factors that confine our lives, how we might find some
direction when we inevitably go astray, how we might come to terms (honestly)
with our inevitable faults, missteps, and misdeeds.1
If to be a philosopher is to address the question “How to live?,” then Kitcher is

certainly right that Joyce is a philosopher. One thinks here first of Ulysses and the
“good man” Leopold Bloom, but all of Joyce’s works explore that question, including
Finnegans Wake.2
The other way to consider Joyce’s relationship to philosophy, which is the
approach of this book, is to examine the philosophical allusions within his works.
One finds references to philosophy in Dubliners, Portrait, Exiles, and Ulysses. Yet
none of those works point to philosophy as often as Joyce’s last. The Wake con-
tains more philosophical allusions than any of Joyce’s other works, and it references
a broader range of thinkers than any other text in Joyce’s oeuvre.
For this reason, Finnegans Wake criticism has frequently explored the philo-
sophical allusions within Joyce’s last novel. The very first work to do this was
Samuel Beckett’s “Dante. . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” That essay was the first piece in
the collection Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of
Work in Progress, which was published in 1929, ten years prior to Finnegans
Wake, when that novel was still known as Work in Progress. While Our
Exagmination ascribes its twelve essays to twelve different authors, there was one
man who guided them all. In a letter to Valery Larbaud, Joyce said, “I did stand
behind those twelve Marshals more or less directing them what lines of research
to follow” (Letters I, 283). This was certainly the case with Beckett’s essay. Joyce
1 Kitcher, “Introduction,” 16.

2 Joyce said of Bloom: “I see him from all sides, and therefore he is all-round in the sense of your
sculptor’s figure. But he is a complete man as well—a good man. At any rate, that is what I intend that
he shall be.” (Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses and Other Writings, 17–18.)
Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Robert Baines, Oxford University Press.
© Robert Baines 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198894049.003.0001
2 Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce ’ s Finnegans Wake
commissioned that essay from the young Beckett, gave him the subject matter,
and provided him with many of the essay’s key ideas. Beckett’s title includes the
names of two Italian philosophers, Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico, and
the latter dominates the essay. The bulk of “Dante. . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” is
devoted to explaining Vico’s philosophy and to showing how Work in Progress
references that philosophy.
Beckett’s essay led the way in a field whose central works include James
Atherton’s The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake (1959), Clive Hart’s Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake
(1962), John Bishop’s Joyce’s Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake (1986), and
Donald Phillip Verene’s Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New
Science and Finnegans Wake (2003). Like “Dante. . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” these
books focus primarily on Vico. The other philosopher in the title of Beckett’s
essay receives little to no attention within them. The privileging of Vico over
Bruno in these books is broadly representative of how Wake studies has
approached those two philosophers. The only book devoted to Bruno’s influence
on the Wake is Frances Boldereff ’s 1968 work, Hermes to His Son Thoth: Being
Joyce’s Use of Giordano Bruno in Finnegans Wake. This is an idiosyncratic text that
has little in common with the aforementioned studies of Vico’s role in Joyce’s last
novel. Yet, while the definitive book on Joyce and Bruno remains to be written,
that relationship has been successfully examined in book chapters and articles by
critics like Gareth Joseph Downes, Federico Sabatini, and Theoharis C. Theoharis.3
The most recent major exploration of the philosophical allusions in Finnegans
Wake is Verene’s 2016 work, James Joyce and the Philosophers at Finnegans Wake.
As one would expect from a celebrated Vico scholar, Verene’s book focuses pri-
marily on Vico. Two of the five chapters are devoted to him, and the chapter on
Beckett’s “Dante. . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” mostly discusses the third figure within
the title of that essay. At the same time, Verene’s book also has a chapter on Bruno
and Nicholas of Cusa, as well as a chapter that considers many of the other philos-
ophers to whom the Wake alludes. After the book’s five chapters, there is a very
helpful appendix titled “Register of Philosophers at the Wake” that offers a list of
the philosophers referenced in Joyce’s last novel.
My book builds upon the insights of the works mentioned above. Its approach
is not to elucidate every philosophical reference within Joyce’s last novel, but
rather to examine how the Wake references the philosophers who feature most
3 Downes has published several articles on Joyce’s relationship to Bruno, including “The Heretical
Auctoritas of Giordano Bruno: The Significance of the Brunonian Presence in James Joyce’s The Day of
the Rabblement and Stephen Hero,” in Joyce Studies Annual, 14 (2003): 37–73. Sabatini has also written
many articles on Joyce and Bruno, most notably “James Joyce and Giordano Bruno: An ‘Immarginable’
and Interdisciplinary Dialogue,” in Daniel Ferrer, Sam Slote, and André Topia (eds.), Renascent Joyce
(Florida James Joyce Series. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 25–37. Theoharis has a
chapter on Joyce’s understanding of Bruno in his excellent book Joyce’s Ulysses: An Anatomy of the
Soul (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
Introduction 3
prominently within it. In conducting this examination, the book carefully

explores the Wake’s allusions to a range of great philosophers including Aquinas,
Aristotle, Bergson, Berkeley, Nicholas of Cusa, Hegel, Spinoza, Plato, and, of
course, Vico and Bruno.
When considering the myriad philosophical references within Joyce’s final
work, it is helpful to have a sense of Joyce’s knowledge of philosophy. As Fran
O’Rourke observes, while Joyce only formally encountered philosophy during his
time at University College Dublin through his classes on logic, all of Joyce’s stud-
ies at that university “took place within an atmosphere permeated by Aristotelian
Scholasticism.”4 This sparked an abiding interest in philosophy within Joyce, and
that interest can be seen in his works, his notes, his libraries, and his numerous
utterances on that field. That being said, as Sam Slote observes, Joyce did “not
actively engage in the history of philosophy in a sustained manner.”5 For this
reason, while Joyce knew of many different philosophers, he lacked a detailed
understanding of how those philosophers fit into the larger philosophical
tradition. Furthermore, his education did not give him the skills to interpret
works of philosophy or to engage with philosophical ideas as a trained philosopher
would. One can therefore understand why O’Rourke says that “Joyce’s attitude to
philosophical questions was that of the amateur: fascinated, wondering but still
puzzled.”6
When Joyce drew upon the discipline of philosophy during the writing of
Finnegans Wake, he did so as an artist utilizing a resource to enrich and develop
an artwork. Joyce was happy to transform philosophers and philosophical ideas
to suit his aesthetic and conceptual purposes. Accuracy of representation was not
one of his goals. One must therefore be careful in how one interprets the
philosophical allusions in Finnegans Wake.
For example, within the Wake there are three recurring structures that point to
philosophical ideas: the thunderwords allude to the fact that, in Vico’s historical
scheme, the first era begins with the first storm after the mighty flood of the Book
of Genesis; the four-part cycles reference the cycles of Vico’s model of history;
and the numerous plays on the name “Browne and Nolan” evoke Bruno’s princi-
ple of the coincidence of contraries. On first glance, the relationships between
those structures and those ideas seem straightforward. Yet, when one examines
those relationships more carefully, one can recognize their complexity. The thun-
derwords point to a key moment in Vico’s conception of history, but they do not
embody an idea within Vico’s thought. The cycles of the Wake derive from those
of Vico, but they are different to them in a number of important ways. Joyce’s
novel consistently alludes to Bruno’s principle of the coincidence of contraries
4 O’Rourke, Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas, 12.

5 Humphreys, “How Does James Joyce Rate as a Philosopher?”
6 Humphreys, “How Does James Joyce Rate as a Philosopher?”
but, when it offers that principle, what is offered is quite different to Bruno’s prin-
ciple. On each occasion, Joyce redefines the idea he has borrowed.
Furthermore, within the Wake the most significant philosophical allusions are
often those that connect philosophers or philosophical ideas to characters within
the novel. These characters are usually versions of Shem or Shaun. Linking phi-
losophers and philosophical ideas to particular characters helps Joyce to define
the identities and worldviews of those characters. It also often allows him to
define his own position. This is because Shem and Shaun frequently represent
Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. Joyce’s relationship with Lewis collapsed during the
writing of Finnegans Wake, and so Lewis is regularly presented within that novel
as Joyce’s antagonist. There are consequently a number of scenes within the Wake
in which the philosophers and philosophical ideas that are connected to Shem are
also connected to Joyce and the thinkers and ideas that are aligned with Shaun are
also aligned with Lewis and, thereby, against Joyce. These scenes offer insights
into how Joyce saw his relationship to particular philosophers and philosophical
ideas. At the same time, the manner in which Joyce connects characters to think-
ers and ideas is not always so helpful. There are characters within the Wake who
principally represent philosophers. The best known such character is book four’s
Balkelly, a Wakean rendering of George Berkeley. What makes these characters
difficult to fully define is that, while Joyce ties each of them to a particular philos-
opher, he often ascribes to these characters ideas and actions that do not accord
with the philosophies of the thinkers they represent. One must therefore be cau-
tious in how one characterizes the relationship between such a character and the
philosopher that inspired them.
As can be seen, the Wake’s philosophical allusions offer many challenges. In
this book, I respond to those challenges by examining such allusions using a form
of the following procedure. First, I offer a concise introduction to the original
form of the referenced philosophical idea that explains where and when that idea
first appeared and how it was understood by its originator. After this, I look
at Joyce’s initial interaction with that idea and show both how he acquired it and
how he first understood it. Joyce’s notes and non-fiction writings are invaluable
resources for locating his initial impressions of philosophical ideas. When neces-
sary, I then demonstrate how Joyce’s conception of the idea in question developed
over time. This is often required because Joyce gathered most of the philosophical
ideas referenced in the Wake years before he began that work, and, when Joyce
retained a philosophical idea for a long period of time, that idea invariably
evolved in his mind. In the last stage of the process, I turn my attention to the
piece of text within the passage under examination that references Joyce’s concep-
tion of the idea in question at the time of writing. In examining that piece of text,
I offer its earliest version, show how Joyce incorporates that version into a draft,
and then follow the evolution of that piece of text as it moves across drafts and
into the Wake. The purpose of this methodical approach is to illuminate every
Introduction 5
stage in the production of a philosophical reference. This is the only means of

fully demonstrating how such references operate.
Just as it is important to consider how the Wake’s philosophical references
function in themselves, so it is equally important to assess how they work
together. This is because the Wake’s philosophical references frequently appear in
clusters that bring together the ideas of different philosophers. While Joyce some-
times connects philosophers in order to suggest parallels between their ideas, he
at other times unites philosophers in order to set them in opposition. In examin-
ing a passage in which philosophers are connected, I follow a similar procedure to
the one described above. After considering the passage’s philosophical references
in the usual manner, I then explain the relationship between the philosophers
that the passage connects. This explanation focuses on the aspects of their philos-
ophies that are referenced in the passage under analysis. In the next phase of the
procedure, I follow the development of Joyce’s conception of the relationship
between the philosophers in question. This is not always possible, but there are a
number of thinkers that Joyce continually groups together. Aristotle and Aquinas
is the classic example of this. Lastly, I explore how the passage under consider-
ation defines the relationship between the philosophers it connects. To offer a
basic example of this, if one thinker within a pair is aligned with the character of
Shem and the other with that of Shaun, then, by virtue of the largely antagonistic
relationship between those characters, those two thinkers are primarily defined as
being opposed to one another.
What differentiates this book from most prior studies of the philosophical allu-
sions in Joyce’s last work is less how it explores those allusions and more how it
reads the Wake. Most of the critics who have examined the Wake’s philosophical
allusions—and this includes the likes of Atherton, Hart, Bishop, and Verene—
have read the Wake by looking at particular words and phrases from throughout
the novel. They rarely look at clauses or sentences, let alone larger units like
speeches or paragraphs. In the works of these critics, individual words and
phrases are either considered by themselves or woven together. Here is an exam-
ple of the latter approach from Bishop:
The Wake, in turn, not simply resists visualization, but actively encourages its
reader not to visualize much in its pages, where “it darkles . . . all this our fun-
naminal world” (244.13). Because HCE passes through the night “with his eyes
shut” (130.19), he regards the world from the interior of “blackeye lenses”
(183.17) sunk in “eyes darkled” (434.31) and kept firmly “SHUT” behind “a bind
of black” (182.32-3); through the “eyewitless foggus” of this “benighted irismaimed”
(489.31 [his eyes “benighted,” each “iris maimed”]), we regard a universe of
profound “unsightliness” (131.19).7
7 Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, 217.

The words and phrases quoted in this passage do not derive from a single section
of the Wake, but are rather drawn from chapters from across the novel. What’s
more, as can be seen from the page and line references, the quoted words and
phrases are not used in the order in which they appear in the Wake.
There are two good reasons why the studies of Joyce’s last work that have exam-
ined its philosophical allusions have frequently read that novel by focusing on
particular words and phrases from across its whole span. The first is that the
Wake’s references to philosophy are distributed unevenly throughout the novel. It
is often the case that references to a particular philosopher can be found in sev-
eral different chapters. To offer just one example of this, the chapters that contain
references to Aristotle include I.5, I.6, II.2, III.1, and III.3. It is therefore difficult
to speak of any one philosopher’s role within the text by focusing on only one
section or even one chapter of the novel. Since the density of the Wake makes it
extremely difficult for regularly sized monographs to discuss large sections of it in
any detail, it is understandable that critics looking to examine the Wake’s scat-
tered references to a particular philosopher have frequently chosen to read that
novel by focusing on textual fragments drawn from multiple chapters.
The second reason why studies of the Wake’s philosophical allusions have fre-
quently read that novel through words and phrases rather than clauses or sen-
tence relates to the manner in which the Wake was written. In Structure and Motif
in Finnegans Wake, Hart observes that “the sentence in Finnegans Wake is hardly
ever the unit of composition.”8 For all that Joyce’s compositional methods during
the writing of the Wake were numerous, complex, and unstable, Hart is not wrong
here. The sentences of the Wake are usually long, elaborate sentences that contain
many parts. Joyce generally did not write these sentences from beginning to end.
Most often, he began with a comparatively simple core sentence and then
expanded it repeatedly through the addition of words, phrases, and clauses. This
is why the sentences of the Wake are usually heterogenous masses that have
homogenous sections within them. Critics of all kinds, not only those interested
in philosophy, have often responded to the Wake’s sentence structures by focusing
on individual words and phrases, as this allows a critic to look at particular parts
of a sentence without having to work through the whole.
I take a different approach to reading the Wake in this book. Each chapter
focuses on a section of Joyce’s novel that contains a number of significant philo-
sophical allusions. These sections are generally only a few pages long. This
approach was inspired by one of the best recent books on the Wake, Finn
Fordham’s Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals. My reading
style is similar to that of Fordham, but it is not entirely the same. Whereas he
reads the sections on which he focuses genetically, which is to say that he follows
8 Hart, Structure and Motif, 40.

Introduction 7
the composition of each section from its first draft to the version that appears in
the Wake, I focus on the text of the Wake and read each of my chosen sections
from beginning to end. For the purposes of space, I do not consider every sentence
or even every paragraph within a section. Rather, I privilege the passages within
each section that contain philosophical allusions. I use this reading style because
it allows the Wake’s philosophical allusions to be considered within their con-
texts. When one isolates a philosophical allusion by plucking a word or phrase
from a sentence, there is no way of accurately judging the nature of that allusion
because there is no way of knowing how it is informed by the surrounding text.
As regards Hart’s idea that “the sentence in Finnegans Wake is hardly ever the
unit of composition,” this is undoubtedly an important idea that should influence
every reading of the Wake.9 At the same time, it is also important to acknowledge
that Joyce’s novel is largely made up of sentences. Long, complex, challenging sen-
tences certainly, but sentences nonetheless. Therefore, rather than abstracting
particular words and phrases and regarding them as independent units, it is more
appropriate to treat the Wake as consisting of sentences made up of parts that
have an integrity of their own. In examining a sentence within Joyce’s last novel,
one should consider its parts, its whole, and the relationship between the two.
Happily, thanks to the greater availability of the Joyce archive and the heroic
efforts of genetic Joyce scholars, it is now easier than ever to understand how the
sentences of the Wake operate. In looking at the drafts of a sentence, one can see
how the sentence evolved during the composition process and so gain an under-
standing of both the parts into which the sentence is divided and how those parts
unite to form the whole. This is one of the main reasons why the readings in this
book consistently draw upon archival materials, such as Joyce’s drafts and notes.
Naturally, the downside of my approach to reading the Wake is that, in discuss-
ing how that novel alludes to a particular philosopher, I cannot examine all of the
Wake’s allusions to that philosopher. I respond to this problem within the book by
focusing on the sections of the Wake in which Joyce most consistently and
purposefully references the key philosophers of the novel. For example, Chapter 1
considers the role of Vico in the Wake by looking at a section of I.5. That section
contains two paragraphs in which Joyce repeatedly references Vico and points to
numerous aspects of his thought. While the Wake contains a multitude of refer-
ences to Vico, there is no other section of the novel that so frequently alludes to
Vico’s ideas. Consequently, while one cannot obtain a complete sense of how the
Wake references Vico from examining those paragraphs, one can certainly gain
an understanding of many important facets of how it does so.
This book’s methodology allows it to demonstrate that the Wake’s references to
philosophy collectively create a network of ideas, thinkers, and texts. For all the
9 Hart, Structure and Motif, 40.

intricacy of this network, it has a logic and an integrity. At its center sit Joyce’s
interpretations of Vico’s model of history and Bruno’s principle of the coincidence
of contraries. All of the other philosophical ideas that play a significant role
within the text are defined in relation to Joyce’s conceptions of those ideas. This is
principally done through the characters of Shem and Shaun. Joyce connects Vico,
Bruno, and all the philosophers he views as their kin to Shem. Since Shem and
Shaun are in many ways opposites, it makes sense for Joyce to associate Shaun
with all the thinkers he views as opposing Vico’s model of history and/or Bruno’s
principle of the coincidence of contraries. Joyce gives the reader a sense of his
stance toward to this division by repeatedly associating himself with Shem and
his antagonist Lewis with Shaun. In presenting and explaining this network, this
book shows how the Wake’s philosophical allusions function, how they fit together,
and how Joyce uses them to define his relationships to the ideas referenced
by them.
1
The History of the Letter
(FW 116.36–119.09)
As mentioned in the introduction, the idea that Vico plays an important role in
Joyce’s final work was first put forward by Samuel Beckett in his 1929 essay
“Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” and it has been a critical mainstay ever since. Many
Wake scholars have argued that Joyce’s novel was heavily influenced by Vico’s
major work, Scienza Nuova (New Science). John Bishop, for example, asserts that
Joyce “seems to have conceived of the New Science, in fact, as an intellectual foun-
dation that would underlie Finnegans Wake as The Odyssey had Ulysses.”1 In
recent decades, however, the idea that Vico’s philosophy is integral to the Wake
has been challenged. Textual scholars have looked carefully at how Joyce gathered
the Viconian terms and ideas that he utilizes within his novel, and their findings
have brought into question the nature of Joyce’s interest in Vico. Wim Van Mierlo,
for example, has contended that the “dissipation of thematic interest” within
Joyce’s notes on Vico in notebook VI.B.1 makes it “clear” that, in taking those
notes, Joyce “was not looking for any intelligible and comprehensive summary of
Vico’s philosophy.”2 Textual scholars have also examined how Joyce incorporated
his references to Vico into the text and have suggested that Vico is not always the
point of origin for the passages that reference him. For instance, Andrew Treip
has argued that, when Joyce made Viconian additions to the drafts of II.4, he did
so in order to enhance pre-existing aspects of the text.3 This chapter will explore
the debate regarding Vico’s role within the Wake by examining a section of I.5
that is full of references to Vico. That examination will demonstrate both how
those references allude to Vico’s ideas and how they relate to the larger concerns
of the chapter in which they appear.
1 Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, 176.

2 Van Mierlo, “Finnegans Wake and the Question of Histry!?,” 62.
3 See Andrew Treip, “Lost Histereve: Vichian Soundings and Reverberations in the Genesis of
Finnegans Wake II.4,” 641–57.
Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Robert Baines, Oxford University Press.
© Robert Baines 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198894049.003.0002
Joyce and Vico
To understand the Vico references in I.5, one must begin by examining the
history of Joyce’s interest in Vico’s philosophy.4 The exact starting date of this
interest is difficult to locate. Verene observes that Joyce may have been introduced
to Vico between 1898 and 1902 by his Italian teacher at University College
Dublin, Father Charles Ghezzi.5 As captured in Portrait, Ghezzi spoke to the
young Joyce about Bruno and so was evidently happy to discuss Italian philoso-
phy with his students.6 While at University College Dublin, Joyce may also have
heard of Vico through reading Raffaello Fornaciari’s Disegno storico della lettera-
tura italiana (Historical Outline of Italian Literature), which contains a number of
positive references to Vico. Constantine Curran, who attended University College
Dublin at the same time as Joyce, says that Joyce was reading this book in 1901.7
However, Joyce’s first biographer, Herbert Gorman, argues that Joyce’s initial
interaction with Vico came after he left university. According to Gorman,
“Giambattista Vico and his Scienza Nuova . . . must have penetrated the subcon-
scious mind of Joyce” in 1904 during Joyce’s stint as a teacher at Clifton School in
Dalkey.8 Max Harold Fisch goes one year later and claims that Joyce “read and
digested Vico in Trieste about 1905.”9 While none of these possible dates for
Joyce’s discovery of Vico can be dismissed, it is also the case that none can pres-
ently be substantiated. One of the reasons it is hard to say when Joyce discovered
Vico is that it is difficult to define what discovery means in such a context. Joyce
may, for example, have read of Vico in Fornaciari’s book in 1901, but that was not
necessarily the encounter that sparked Joyce’s enthusiasm for Vico.
What can be said with greater certainty is that, by the early 1910s, Joyce was an
admirer of Vico. Evidence for this comes from Joyce’s conversations with Paolo
Cuzzi, a Triestine lawyer who took English lessons with Joyce between 1911 and
1913. As Joseph Mali observes, the meetings between the two “took place at
Joyce’s home in via Donato Bramante 4, right on the Piazza Giambattista Vico.”10
It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that the two should have discussed Vico.
Richard Ellmann describes their conversations:
But often their subjects were less predictable, as when Cuzzi, who was studying
Vico in school, discovered that Joyce was also passionately interested in the
Neapolitan philosopher. Freud too became a subject of conversation. Cuzzi was
4 Arthur Walton Litz, Donald Phillip Verene, and Joseph Mali have all examined the development
of Joyce’s interest in Vico. The account that follows draws from all three of those examinations. See
Litz, “Vico and Joyce,” 245–55; Verene, Knowledge of Things Human and Divine, 10–20; and Mali, The
Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History, 74–8.
5 Verene, Knowledge of Things Human and Divine, 10. 6 See P 271.
7 Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 121. 8 Gorman, James Joyce, 114–15.
9 Fisch, “Introduction,” 97. 10 Mali, The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History, 77.
The History of The Letter 11
reading Freud’s Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, and he talked with Joyce about
slips of the tongue and their significance. Joyce listened attentively, but remarked
that Freud had been anticipated by Vico.11
This quote shows Joyce’s belief in the significance of Vico’s philosophy as well as
his sense of its breadth. Joyce portrays Vico neither as a philosopher nor a histo-
rian, but rather as a proto-psychologist. What’s more, in bringing Vico into a dis-
cussion of verbal slips, Joyce offers early evidence of his interest in Vico’s ideas on
speech and language.
Around the same time as Joyce was discussing Vico with Cuzzi, he was also
taking notes from commentaries on Vico. In the Cornell collection of Joyce’s
papers, there are three pages of notes on Vico.12 These pages consist of typed
paragraphs in English and Italian. The paragraphs in English are from the elev-
enth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was published between 1909
and 1911. The source of the Italian paragraphs has not been identified. Andrew
Treip argues that they come from Benedetto Croce’s La Filosofia di Giambattista
Vico (The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico), which was published in 1911. He sup-
ports this idea by pointing to the fact that Croce’s book was published around the
same time as the edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica from which Joyce drew
his English notes on Vico.13 The reason Treip cannot be more definitive in his
identification is that the Italian paragraphs in Joyce’s notes on Vico are not direct
quotes from Croce’s book on Vico. If those paragraphs do derive from that book,
they must be summaries or paraphrases. While the lack of a clear source for the
Italian paragraphs makes it difficult to date Joyce’s notes on Vico, it seems most
likely, based on the available evidence, that they were written shortly after 1911.
The notes on Vico in the Cornell collection have three main themes. Several of
the paragraphs in both English and Italian consider Vico’s theories of historical
development and especially the idea that the histories of nations move in three-
part cycles. Indeed, the whole first page is devoted to this subject. The other para-
graphs often focus on Vico’s ideas regarding the evolution of language and, in
particular, the role of myth within that evolution. There are also two paragraphs
that discuss Homer and consider the relationship between poetry and philoso-
phy. Of these three themes, the first is particularly striking because that is the
aspect of Vico’s thought that Joyce would principally reference in the Wake.
While there is evidence that Joyce was interested in Vico in the 1910s, this
interest is not immediately apparent in the texts he worked on during that decade.
The word “Vico” appears in Ulysses, but only within the name of the Vico Road in
11 Ellmann, James Joyce, 340. It is worth noting that the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Vico from
which Joyce took notes speaks of Vico as having “made the original discovery of certain ideas which
constitute the modern psychologico-historic method” (“Vico, Giovanni Battista,” 23).
12 See Cornell–1–3; JJA 3:391–3. 13 Treip, “The Cornell Notes on Vico,” 218.
Dalkey, and there are no hints that Joyce’s mention of this road is intended to
serve as a reference to Vico.14 Since Vico is also missing from Joyce’s remarks on
Ulysses, it seems that Joyce did not regard Vico’s ideas as being directly relevant to
that novel.
By contrast, there is plenty of evidence of Joyce’s interest in Vico during the
writing of Wake. Joyce urged friends such as Padraic Colum, Constantine Curran,
and Harriet Shaw Weaver to read the New Science in order to understand his new
work.15 When Colum responded to Joyce’s request by indicating that he could not
read the New Science in the original Italian, Joyce directed him toward the French
translation by the historian Jules Michelet.16 Joyce also took notes on Vico during
the composition of the Wake. Notebook VI.B.1 contains two clusters of notes that
relate to him.17 The Brepols edition of that notebook identifies some of those
notes as deriving from the same Encyclopedia Britannica article that Joyce used
for his earlier notes on Vico, but the sources of most of those notes are as yet
unknown.18 In addition to appearing in Joyce’s notebooks, Vico also pops up in
Joyce’s readings of the Wake. For example, in a November 1926 letter to Weaver
in which he explains the opening page of the novel, Joyce glosses the word
“passencore” as “pas encore and ricorsi storici of Vico” (FW 3.04–05).19 (The
term “ricorsi storici” here points to Vico’s idea that the ideal cycles of history
return to their starting points once they have completed all three of their
stages.) The reference to Vico within Joyce’s explanation of the first page of the
Wake is important because, as is often pointed out, that page references many
of the major ideas within the novel. Vico’s presence on page one is therefore
quite the accolade.
For all the evidence of Joyce’s enthusiasm for Vico during the writing of the
Wake, one of the key questions that has yet to be answered is whether Joyce read
the New Science in the original Italian. He was certainly familiar with Michelet’s
French translation, but, as will be discussed later, Michelet’s translation is more of
an adaptation than an accurate rendering of the original. No editions of the New
Science have been found in Joyce’s libraries and none of his notes have been shown
to derive directly from that work. Although it seems probable that Joyce read the
New Science in the Italian original at some stage, no conclusive evidence has been
offered to show that this is the case.
14 See U 2.25.
15 See Ellmann, James Joyce, 564; Colum and Colum, Our Friend James Joyce, 122; and Curran,
James Joyce Remembered, 86–7.
16 Colum and Colum, Our Friend James Joyce, 122.
17 The first cluster is on pages 96–7 and the second is on pages 114–17. For the first, see VI.B.1:
96–7; JJA 29:50, and for the second see VI.B.1: 114–17; JJA 29:59–60.
18 Joyce, The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo. Notebook VI. B.1, 155–6. Treip suggests that the
notes on pages 96–7 “probably derive from some extensive Italian text commenting on Vico’s New
Science” (Treip, “Histories of Sexuality: Vico and Roman Marriage Law in Finnegans Wake,” 183).
19 Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce, 317.
That being said, Joyce’s written and spoken remarks on Vico during the writing
of the Wake evidence a knowledge of many of Vico’s ideas. Joyce’s familiarity with
those ideas is also demonstrated by the complexity of the Wake’s references to
Vico’s New Science. Yet, to be interested in a thinker is not necessarily to agree
with that thinker, and Joyce’s enthusiasm for Vico’s ideas should not be taken as a
sign that he fully supported them. When Joyce wrote or spoke of Vico, it was
often with ambivalence. For instance, Tom Kristensen asked him if he believed in
Vico’s new science and Joyce responded, “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.”20
Similarly, when Jacques Mercanton brought up the subject of Vico, Joyce remarked:
I don’t know whether Vico’s theory is true; it doesn’t matter. It’s useful to me;
that’s what counts.21
Arguably the most telling of all of Joyce’s comments on Vico’s theories is to be

found in a 1926 letter to Weaver:
I would not pay overmuch attention to these theories beyond using them for all
they are worth, but they have gradually forced themselves on me through cir-
cumstances of my own life. I wonder where Vico got his fear of thunderstorms.
It is almost unknown to the male Italians I have met. (Letters I, 241)
These three quotes all contain both a dismissal of Vico’s ideas and a suggestion of
their value. In the first, Joyce locates the value of Vico’s writings in how they foster
his imagination. By speaking of his imagination rather than his knowledge or his
understanding, Joyce here defines Vico’s writings more as art than works of his-
tory or philosophy. The second and third quotes are similar in that they both
characterize Vico’s theories as being “useful.”22 By this, Joyce seems to mean that
Vico’s theories provided him with ideas that he could adapt to suit his purposes
and then integrate into his writings. What makes the third quote different to the
other two is that it contains a new element. After rejecting Vico’s theories and then
pointing to their worth, Joyce goes on to suggest that there is a sense in which he
finds Vico’s theories to be true. Joyce says that those theories have “forced them-
selves” on him through the “circumstances” of his “own life” (Letters I, 241). He
here suggests that he considers Vico’s theories to be true insofar as they have been
supported by his personal experiences. Joyce then goes on to provide an example
of this by speaking of Vico’s “fear of thunderstorms” (Letters I, 241). Such storms
play a key role in Vico’s thought. In the New Science, the first thunderclaps and
lightning strikes after the end of the great flood of the Book of Genesis scare
20 Ellmann, James Joyce, 693. 21 Mercanton, “The Hours of James Joyce,” 207.
22 Mercanton, “The Hours of James Joyce,” 207.
mankind into conceiving of its gods and this begins the first cycles of history.23
Since Joyce was also terrified of thunderstorms, it makes sense that he would find
an element of truth in this notion. What’s more, when Joyce speaks of Vico’s “fear
of thunderstorms,” he suggests that Vico’s understanding of history was informed
by the circumstances of his own life (Letters I, 241). In offering this suggestion,
Joyce defines Vico’s histories as containing both events that are true in that they
actually took place and events that reveal truth by representing the character of
their creator. One can understand why Joyce, as a creator of semi-autobiographical
fictions, would relate to such an approach. The personal connection between the
two is one of the reasons why Vico is so frequently referenced in the Wake.
Viconian Cycles
The section of the Wake that is densest with Vico references occurs in I.5, the
chapter about the letter that the hen Biddy Doran finds in a dump. Over the
course of the chapter, the narrator examines every aspect of the letter, from its
authorship to its handwriting to even the envelope in which it was sent. This allows
Joyce to consider a number of the major challenges of textual interpretation.
The chapter’s key references to Vico can be found in FW 116.36–117.32, a pas-
sage that Joyce created as an addition to an existing discussion of the letter.24 That
passage begins by focusing on the subject of love:
So hath been, love: tis tis: and will be: till wears and tears and ages. Thief us the
night, steal we the air, shawl thiner liefest, mine! Here, Ohere, insult the fair!
Traitor, bad hearer, brave! (FW 116.36–117.02)
The key sentence here is the first: “So hath been, love: tis tis: and will be: till wears
and tears and ages.” Love is here described as a transhistorical phenomenon that
has been, is, and will be. At the same time, love is also presented as something
that has a fixed life span. To say that love exists “till wears and tears and ages” is to
suggest that a love can become old and worn and begin to fall apart. The word
“tears” functions in a double sense because it points both to the destruction of
love and to the weeping that so often results from such destruction. However, if
love is always of a finite length, it may be that that length is great. Just as the term
“ages” can be taken to suggest that love can grow old, so one can also read it as
suggesting that love “will be” until ages have passed. Evidently, the temporality of
23 See Vico, The New Science, §62, 53. [Citations of Vico’s works in this book take the form: Vico,
Title of Work, Paragraph Number, Page Number.]
24 The JJA dates the first draft of FW 116.36–117.32 as “probably June 1927” (JJA 46:419). No date
is provided for the first draft of the preceding section, FW 115.11–116.35, but the second draft is dated
“March 1925” (JJA 46:321). The earliest draft of the following section, FW 117.33–119.09, is dated
“December–January 1923–1924” (JJA 46:297).
love is a complex matter. This is the most important sentence of the opening four
because, in thinking about how love exists both within and without time, it points
to issues that will become of central importance in the discussion that follows.
As the paragraph continues, it proceeds to reference Vico:
The lightning look, the birding cry, awe from the grave, everflowing on the
times. Feueragusaria iordenwater; now godsun shine on menday’s daughter; a
good clap, a fore marriage, a bad wake, tell hell’s well; such is manowife’s lot of
lose and win again, like he’s gruen quhiskers on who’s chin again, she plucketed
them out but they grown in again. So what are you going to do about it? O dear!
(FW 117.03–09)
These sentences contain two examples of a form that is commonly known within
Wake criticism as a Viconian cycle. The first is the first sentence: “The lightning
look, the birding cry, awe from the grave, everflowing on the times.” The second
appears within the second sentence: “a good clap, a fore marriage, a bad wake, tell
hell’s well.” These cycles are just two among the many that can be found within the
book. According to Fweet, a website that offers annotations to Finnegans Wake,
there are forty-nine such cycles in the Wake as a whole.25 Joyce made the connec-
tion between his cycles and those of Vico explicit when he said of Vico, “I use his
cycles as a trellis.”26 Vico’s cycles are here defined as a framework from which
Joyce could grow his text. That Joyce should focus on Vico’s cycles in the Wake is not
surprising. Those cycles are one of the best-known features of Vico’s thought, and
Joyce had shown his interest in them as early as the notes in the Cornell collection.
The work in which Vico most fully defines his historical cycles is the New
Science. For the sake of ease, this is commonly referred to as a single work, but
there were in fact three editions, and each is quite different. As Leon Pompa
explains, Vico significantly revised the first edition of 1725 for the second edition
of 1730. He then made a number of additions to the second edition in order to
create the third edition, which was published posthumously in 1744.27 Within
Vico criticism, it is common to identify the three editions as the First New Science,
the Second New Science, and the Third New Science. The standard edition is the
third because that is where Vico most fully explains his ideas. All of the evidence
of Joyce’s knowledge of the New Science suggests that the edition he knew was the
Third New Science.
To understand how Vico’s historical cycles operate within that edition, one must
first gain a sense of the primary mode of history offered by the Third New Science.
This can be done by looking at a section of the introduction to that edition in
which Vico discusses his methodology:
25 “Fweets of Fin (_M,ViconianCycle_) with FW Text.”

26 Colum and Colum, Our Friend James Joyce, 123. 27 See Pompa, “Chronology,” xliii–xliv.
Herein, philosophy proposes to examine philology—that is, the study of all the
things depending upon human choice, namely, the histories of languages, of
customs, of deeds, and of peoples, in peace as well as in war…; thus, philosophy
reduces philology to the form of a science by discovering therein the design of
an ideal eternal history in accordance with which the histories of all nations run
their temporal course.28
As can be seen from the end of that sentence, Vico’s view of history focuses on the
histories of nations. He uses the term “nation” very loosely, and so the Roman
Empire, the Hebrews, and France are all described as nations in the Third New
Science. In the above quote, Vico observes that his approach to exploring the his-
tories of nations draws upon two different disciplines: philology and philosophy.
The offered definition of philology is extremely broad, and it shows that, when
Vico considers the history of a nation from a philological perspective, he consid-
ers not merely the history of the language(s) of that nation, but rather the histo-
ries of “all the things” of that nation that depend on “human choice.” Those things
include languages, customs, deeds, and peoples. Verene speaks of such things as
the “certains or particulars of the human world.” He explains how Vico combines
philology and philosophy when he goes on to observe that “In the form of thought
of the New Science, philosophy, which by its nature and past history inclines
towards the universal, is to join its mode of understanding to the philological
understanding of these particulars.”29 Vico is able to unite the universal and the
particular in the Third New Science because, in examining the histories of multi-
ple nations through the framework of his conception of philology, he found
within those histories “the design of an ideal eternal history in accordance with
which the histories of all nations run their temporal course.”30 The primary mode
of history in Vico’s major work is this “ideal eternal history.” It is “ideal” because,
while it draws specific examples from particular nations, it is principally focused
on the formal process of development shared by all nations. Within that process,
the forms that characterize the larger development of a nation are mirrored in the
forms that mark the development of its human institutions.
Vico’s ideal eternal history is certainly, on one level, a theory of how nations
develop, but there is also another level on which it is more than that. To see this,
one must recognize how the word “eternal” functions within the term “ideal
eternal history.” In addition to denoting Vico’s belief that the formal process of
development undergone by all nations occurs across all time, it also points to
the source of that process. Within the Third New Science, Vico argues that
human history is shaped by providence, which he regards as “an attribute of the
28 Vico, The New Science, §7, 9.

29 Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination, 57. 30 Vico, The New Science, §7, 9.
true God.”31 What complicates this idea is that Vico also asserts that the “civil
world has certainly been made by men.”32 To understand how he can hold both of
these positions, one must consider his understanding of the relationship between
providence and mankind. Several aspects of that understanding can be gleaned
from this passage:
Hence, this science must be a demonstration, so to speak, of the history of prov-

idence in what is actual, for it must be a history of the orders which providence
has given (without any human discernment or counsel, and often contrary to
what human beings have proposed) to this great city of humankind; the orders
which providence has posited, although this world was created in time and is
particular, are nevertheless universal and eternal.33
Vico here points out how different providence and mankind are. Whereas the
former posits orders that are “universal and eternal,” the latter resides in a world
that “was created in time and is particular.” He also highlights the lack of human
influence on providence when he speaks of how providence functions “without
any human discernment or counsel, and often contrary to what human beings
have proposed.” Yet, one should not infer from the above quote that Vico regards
providence and mankind as separate. Karl Löwith explains why:
Modern critics of Vico’s notion of providence are indeed justified in saying that,
with Vico, providence has become as natural, secular, and historical as if it did
not exist at all. For in Vico’s “demonstration” of providence nothing remains of
the transcendent and miraculous operation which characterizes the faith in
providence from Augustine to Bossuet . . . . Vico’s God is so omnipotent that he
can refrain from special interventions. He works completely in the natural
course of history by its natural means: occasions, necessities, utilities.34
This being so, it is not contradictory for Vico to describe providence as the direc-
tor of human history and mankind as the creator of the civil world. Within his
philosophy, providence shapes human history from within by working through
mankind and so both providence and mankind are, in different ways, responsible
for that history and for the civil world that has resulted from it. On recognizing
this, one can see that Vico’s ideal eternal history is not just a historical theory, but
also a revelation of the course of providence.
The most famous feature of Vico’s model of history is that it consists of cycles.
This idea appeared in the First New Science, and it gradually evolved as Vico
31 Vico, §362, 126. 32 Vico, §331, 110. 33 Vico, §342, 117.

34 Löwith, Meaning in History, 123–4.
revised his major work. Its final form is offered in the Third New Science and can
be broadly summarized as follows:
Providence acting through man causes the history of each nation to adhere to a
fixed ideal structure. This structure consists of eras. Each era is divided into
three ages: the age of gods, the age of heroes (semi-divine humans), and the age
of men. Within an era, all nations pass through each of these three ages, but they
do so at different speeds. As a nation moves through its three ages, it evolves in
positive ways. The progress of the nation as a whole is mirrored in the progress
of its human facets, such as its languages and its customs. At the end of each era,
all nations collapse, and a new era begins.
This summary reflects what Vico says most of the time in the Third New Science.
It does not reflect what Vico says all of the time, because, even within that work,
Vico frequently changes how he defines his cycles. The inconsistencies are numer-
ous and, while some can be easily resolved, others point to fundamental tensions
within Vico’s ideas. For example, while Vico frequently speaks of his cycles as
applying to all nations, he also often excludes the Hebrews from his historical
scheme and defines that scheme as relating only to the gentile nations. The reason
for this exclusion is that, to use Vico’s words, “The Hebraic religion was founded
by the true God upon a prohibition against divination, the divination upon which
arose all the gentile nations.”35 The word “divination” here points to Vico’s idea
that, in the first age, the age of gods, the people of a nation collectively construct
their god through the use of their imaginations. Vico argues that the Hebrews are
different to the gentile nations because they never did this. They were prohibited
from such “divination” because they had already discovered “the true God.” Since
the Hebrews never carried out the act that causes the first age to begin, their history
is not defined by the eras of the other nations. Vico is forced to enact, as Giuseppe
Mazzotta puts it, a “drastic separation of Jewish history from the history of the
gentiles” because, while he wants to suggest that mankind develops an ever-greater
understanding of its world and itself as it passes through the cycles of an era, he also
wants to define Christianity as offering access to the absolute truths of God.36 If he
could separate religious knowledge from secular knowledge, then he could resolve
this tension, but, for Vico, the goal is always to unite the human and the divine.
Thunderwords
Despite the inconsistencies in Vico’s conception of history, Joyce repeatedly drew

upon Vico’s historical cycles in writing his last novel. The Wake references those
35 Vico, §167, 83. 36 Mazzotta, The New Map of the World, 238. His italics.
cycles in two main ways. The first is through its thunderwords. These massive
words are all 100 letters long and many take the form of an amalgamation of dif-
ferent translations of one word or phrase. Here, for example, is the thunderword
that appears on the first page of the novel:
bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovar-
rhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk! (FW 03.15–17)
As Roland McHugh observes, this word unites renderings of the words for
“thunder” from languages including, to name only a few, Danish (“tordenen”),
Greek (“brontaô”), Hindustani (“karak”), Japanese (“kaminari”), and Portuguese
(“trovāo”).37
The Wake’s ten thunderwords all allude to Vico’s idea that it was the first storm
after the great flood of the Book of Genesis or, as Vico usually terms it, the
“Universal Flood” that caused the first nations to conceive of their first gods and
so begin the era that is the first manifestation of Vico’s historical cycles.38 This
connection explains both why a thunderword appears on the first page of the
Wake and why the form of the thunderword recurs throughout the novel in dif-
ferent manifestations. To understand how Joyce’s thunderwords relate to the
storm that launches Vico’s first era, one must examine the linguistic consequences
of that storm. In starting the first era, that storm also starts the process of linguis-
tic development within that era. Vico’s historical scheme argues that the languages
of all nations develop across each era by passing through the same three forms:
the first form of language is a “mute language of signs and objects which have a
natural correspondence to the ideas which they are meant to signify”; the second
consists of “heroic devices—that is, the similes, analogies, images, metaphors, and
natural descriptions which made up the bulk of the heroic language found to have
been spoken in the time when heroes reigned”; and the last form is “human lan-
guage through words agreed upon by peoples.”39 Vico also uses the terms “articu-
late language” and “articulate speech” to describe the language of the third stage.40
While that form of language does not become dominant until the final linguistic
stage of an era, the articulate language of the first era has its origins in the first
storm after the universal flood. According to Vico, in the aftermath of that crucial
storm, as each nation began to conceive of its god, articulate language began to be
formed through onomatopoeia: “And this Jove for the peoples of Latium was
because of the crash of thunder originally called Ious; because of the crackle of
lightning, he was, for the peoples of Greece, called Ζεύς [Zeus]; for the peoples of
the Near East, because of the sound of burning fire, he was called Ur, from which
37 See FW 03.15–17. 38 Vico, The New Science, §43, 43. 39 Vico, §32, 26.
40 For “articulate language,” see, for example, Vico, §490, 189. For “articulate speech,” see, for
instance, Vico, §560, 228.
came Urim, the power of fire.” Vico goes on to assert that, after using onomatopoeia,
those peoples began “forming human words with interjections—that is, articulate
words under the impetus of violent passions, which in all languages are monosyl-
lables.” This idea leads him to suggest that “when the start of the first lightning
bolts awakened wonder in men, the first interjection came into being from the
interjection of Jove, taking form in the word ‘pa!’ which was later retained in the
duplication ‘papa!’ an interjection expressing wonder; hence came into being
Jove’s title, ‘father of men and gods,’ and later, all the gods were called ‘fathers,’ all
the goddesses ‘mothers.’ ”41
As Verene observes, the eighth thunderword points to Vico’s discussion of the
interjections “pa!” and “papa!” because it begins “Pappappappa” (FW 332.05).42
The thunderwords also reference the idea that the first peoples tried to replicate
the sounds of that seminal first storm because those words are mimetic of the
sound of thunder. Yet, while the thunderwords certainly allude to Vico’s descrip-
tions of the oral responses of the people of the first nations to the first storm after
the universal flood, they are also quite different to those responses by virtue of
their length. Whereas the thunderwords are all very long, the words and interjec-
tions by which the inhabitants of the first nations are said to have responded to
the first storm after the universal flood are all very short. Consequently, if the
thunderwords are to represent the oral responses of the people of the first nations
to the key storm within Vico’s historical scheme, they must represent either a
string of responses from one individual or the collective response of a group.
The larger purpose of Joyce’s vast, multilingual thunderwords is to suggest that
at the dawn of religion, and thereby history, all languages were one. Those words
are consequently in keeping with the Wake’s numerous references to the myth of
the Tower of Babel, a myth which posits a time when all the people of the earth
spoke the same language. Indeed, the first thunderword begins by pointing to the
Tower of Babel because it starts “bababadal” (FW 03.15). Joyce’s last novel repeat-
edly references the notion of an original linguistic unity because that is one of the
models for the language of the Wake. In speaking to Mercanton, Joyce said of his
last work, “All the languages are present, for they have not yet been separated.”43
Joyce did not derive the idea of an original universal language from Vico. As
will be discussed, Vico did believe in the existence of “a mental language common
to all nations,” but this mental language is a language of ideas. It is not, as Vico
would put it, an articulate language, which is to say a spoken language that, to
borrow from the OED, consists “of clearly distinguishable parts (usually words
and syllables) capable of conveying meaning.”44
41 Vico, §447–8, 171–2.

42 Vico, §448, 172. Verene, Knowledge of Things Human and Divine, 9.
43 Mercanton, “The Hours of James Joyce,” 207. 44 “Articulate, Adj. and n.”
One finds Vico disavowing the idea of an original universal language in his
discussion of how, in the myth of the Tower of Babel, God stops the building of
that tower by creating a “confusion of languages.” Within that discussion, Vico
notes that “it was on account of this confusion of languages that the Fathers
wished for the purity of a sacred, antediluvian language that gradually came to be
lost.”45 As is evident from Vico’s use of the word “wished,” he does not believe in
the idea that, at Babel, God transformed one original universal language into all
the languages of the earth. His explanation of why this is the case rests on his idea
that the gentile nations emerged after the universal flood through the sons of
Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. According to Vico, the Biblical account of the
“confusion of languages” only refers to “the languages of the peoples of the Near
East, among whom Shem propagated humankind.” He goes on to say that “for the
nations in all the rest of the world, the need [for language] must have proceeded
differently insofar as the races of Ham and Japheth must have been dispersed
throughout the great forest of the earth in feral wandering for two hundred years,”
and, during that period, those races were “deprived of any human speech.”46 In
the sentences that follow, Vico depicts the storm that begins the first era of history
as occurring after the end of that migration. Therefore, when the gentile nations
began to develop their respective languages, those nations were already widely
distributed and many were only just beginning to speak again. What’s more, even
if the gentile nations had shared a common language, it would still not have been
universal because it would not have included Hebrew.
Joycean Cycles
Alongside thunderwords, the other principal means by which Joyce references

Vico’s historical cycles in the Wake is through his own historical cycles, which are
adaptations of those of Vico. It is a commonplace of Wake criticism to refer to the
cycles that appear in that novel as Viconian cycles, but the structure of the Wake’s
cycles is quite different to those described in the Third New Science. Therefore,
I will refer to the cycles that appear in the Wake as Joycean cycles. Each such cycle
consists of four short phrases. While Joyce’s cycles do not all share the same form,
they do adhere to a common flexible structure. One can gain a sense of this struc-
ture by comparing one of the Joycean cycles within I.5’s discussion of love with
two other such cycles from elsewhere in the novel:
reberthing in remarriment out of dead seekness to devine previdence

(FW 62.07)
45 Vico, The New Science, §62, 52. 46 Vico, §62, 52–3.

The lightning look, the birding cry, awe from the grave, everflowing on the times.
(FW 117.03–04)
eggburst, eggblend, eggburial and hatch-as-hatch can (FW 614.32–3)
The first of the four parts of a Joycean cycle usually refers to birth, as in
“reberthing,” or to storms. In the latter case, Joyce generally alludes to thunder.
The word “eggburst” in the third example is intended to evoke the idea of a
burst of thunder. However, there are also a few occasions on which he speaks
of lightning, such as “The lighting look” in the second example. Part two of a
Joycean cycle most often refers to marriage. The words “remarriment” and
“eggblend” are both examples of this. The only exceptions occur when the second
part instead points to the idea of auspices. An auspice is a sign from the
heavens. Vico speaks extensively of auspices and, when he does so, the auspices
he discusses normally derive from storms or the flights of birds. So as not to
confuse the storms that offered auspices with the storm that created the first
religions, when Joyce references auspices in the second part of a cycle, he
always refers to birds. One can see an example of this in the phrase “the birding
cry” in the second of the above cycles. The third part of the Joycean cycle
points either directly to death, as in “out of dead seekness,” or indirectly via the
notion of burial. The phrases “awe from the grave” and “eggburial” are both
examples of the latter. The fourth and final part of a Joycean cycle usually takes
one of two forms. It either gestures at the notion of divine providence or it
points to the idea of recurrence by suggesting that a new cycle is about to
begin. The term “devine providence” at the end of the first of the above cycles is
an example of the former. The last part of the egg-themed cycle, “hatch-as-hatch
can,” is an instance of the latter.
One can learn a lot about how Joyce created his cycles by looking at the section
of “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” in which Beckett relates the four parts of Work
in Progress to Vico’s historical cycles:
Part 1 is a mass of past shadow, corresponding therefore to Vico’s first human

institution, Religion, or to his Theocratic age, or simply to an abstraction—Birth.
Part 2 is the lovegame of the children, corresponding to the second institution,
Marriage, or to the Heroic age, or to an abstraction—Maturity. Part 3 is passed
in sleep, corresponding to the third institution, Burial, or to the Human age, or to
an abstraction—Corruption. Part 4 is the day beginning again, and corresponds
to Vico’s Providence, or to the transition from the Human to the Theocratic, or
to an abstraction—Generation.47
47 Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” 7–8.

To make the parts of Work in Progress connect to the parts of Vico’s cycles, Beckett
radically reworks those cycles, creating connections that don’t exist in Vico’s
thought and adding entirely new features. He then tries to force his versions of
those cycles together with the parts of Work in Progress. The result is a passage
that misrepresents Joyce’s last work as much as it does Vico’s ideal eternal history.
Beckett’s correspondences do, however, frequently describe the structure of
Joyce’s cycles. For example, he relates part one of Work in Progress to birth, part
two to marriage, part three to death and burial, and part four to providence. Had
Beckett spoken of the parts of Joyce’s cycles rather than those of Work in Progress,
these correspondences would have been broadly correct. When one recognizes
this and one recalls that Joyce directed Beckett’s essay, one can see that the above
quote offers an insight into how Joyce adapted Vico’s cycles to create his own.
Beckett begins each of his descriptions of the first three parts of Work in
Progress by connecting the part in question to a “human institution.” The institu-
tion of the first part is “Religion,” that of the second is “Marriage,” and that of the
third is “Burial.”48 The idea of the three human institutions has two sources within
the Third New Science. At the start of that work, Vico speaks of the early “divine
things” of the gentiles, by which he means practices such as offering sacrifices to
help them “understand auguries with a view to following divine warnings.” These
“divine things” gradually gave way to “human things.” The first human thing is
said to be marriage and the second burial.49 When Beckett speaks of the three
human institutions, he also draws upon Vico’s suggestion that there are three cus-
toms that are shared by all nations:
We observe that all the nations—whether barbarous or humane, and in spite of

being founded in vastly different ways on account of immense distances from
one another in place and time—are guardians of three human customs. They all
have some religion, they all contract solemn marriages, and they all bury
their dead.50
This is where Vico most directly defines religion, marriage, and burial as a triad.
The institutions that Beckett connects to the first three parts of Work in Progress
relate to the first three parts of Joyce’s cycles, which often reference religion, mar-
riage, and burial. In the case of the first part of a Joycean cycle, the reference to
religion is usually made through the use of storm imagery. This is because, for
Vico, it was at the moment at which “the earth, after it had dried out from the
dampness of the Universal Flood, could send into the air the dry evaporation
which can generate the lightning” that the religions of the first era were born.51
48 Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” 7–8.

49 Vico, The New Science, §10–12, 11–12. 50 Vico, §333, 110–11. 51 Vico, §62, 53.
As well as connecting each of the first three parts of Work in Progress to an

institution, Beckett also links each of those parts to an age. The first is associated
with the “Theocratic age,” the second with the “Heroic age,” and the last with the
“Human age.”52 While the three ages that he mentions are clearly the three ages
that Vico presents as defining each era, the titles that Beckett gives those ages
suggest that he is particularly drawing upon the “Three Kinds of Governance”
section of book four of the Third New Science.53 In aligning the first three parts of
Work in Progress with three institutions and three ages, Beckett suggests that the
three institutions correspond to the three ages. One can understand how the
Third New Science might lead one to such an interpretation. Vico says that reli-
gion, marriage, and burial came into being successively, and it stands to reason
that the institution of religion should be the institution of the first age, the theo-
cratic age. Yet, despite this, Beckett is wrong to suggest that the three ages corre-
spond to the three human institutions. The Third New Science clearly states that
marriage and burial were both carried out in the first age by those who “founded
and divided up the first domains of the earth.”54
While the first three parts of Joyce’s cycles relate to Beckett’s three human
institutions, they do not correspond to Beckett’s three ages to the same extent. As
noted, the thunder and the lightning that can often be found in the first part of a
Joycean cycle point to the birth of religion, which causes the first age and so
begins the whole cycle. Yet it is conspicuous that Joyce’s cycles barely reference
the other two ages. Even within the flexibility of those cycles, there is little space
for the age of heroes or the age of men. The only time that a Joycean cycle points
to either is when its second part uses bird imagery to reference the notion of aus-
pices. Joyce seems to have associated auspices with the age of heroes. One of the
Vico notes in notebook VI.B.1 reads “auspices heroes/ gentiles dark/ Livius mid-
dle.”55 For Vico, there is a link between auspices and the age of heroes in that
avian auspices play an important role in that age, but such auspices do not have a
special connection to the heroic age, and the idea of learning the will of the divine
from the flights of birds actually begins in the age of gods.56 Consequently, Joyce’s
references to auspices within his cycles are not the most effective means of allud-
ing to the age of heroes. That Joyce should not point more directly to Vico’s three
ages within the cycles of the Wake is rather surprising given how important Vico’s
ages are to his ideal history and how strongly those ages feature in the discussions
52 Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” 7–8. 53 Vico, The New Science, §925–7, 367.
54 Vico, §13, 13.
55 VI.B.1: 96; JJA 29:50. The Brepols edition of VI.B.1 suggests that “Livius” refers to the Roman
historian Titus Livius but does not provide a source for the quote. (Joyce, The Finnegans Wake
Notebooks at Buffalo. Notebook VI. B.1, 138).
56 In discussing how the first storm after the universal flood inspired the first religions of that era,
Vico speaks of how, at that time, the “races of Ham and Japheth” struck upon “a kind of divination by
which they divined what was to come from thunder and lightning and the flight of eagles, which they
believed to be the birds of Jove” (Vico, The New Science, §62, 53).
of Vico that Joyce knew. In not privileging the major cycle within Vico’s thought,
Joyce shows one of the most important ways in which his priorities differ from
those of Vico. Joyce’s cycles do not seek to define the ages of eras.
Beckett points to the unit of time on which Joyce’s cycles most often focus
when he connects each of the first three parts of Work in Progress to “an abstrac-
tion.” The three abstractions are “Birth,” “Maturity,” and “Corruption.”57 Given
that the third part of Work in Progress is also associated with burial, the third
abstraction, “Corruption,” clearly denotes death. Therefore, these three abstrac-
tions together chart the course of a life. It is not easy to find a basis for Beckett’s
abstractions within Vico’s thought, which makes sense given that Vico’s principal
concern was not the lives of individuals, but rather the histories of nations.
Beyond the aforementioned link between corruption and burial, the most effec-
tive means of tying Beckett’s abstractions to Vico’s ideas is to focus on the first
abstraction, “Birth,” and to view it as a reference to the fact that Vico frequently
compares the inhabitants of the first age to children. For example, in the intro-
duction to the Third New Science, Vico observes that the “earliest men (those in
the childhood of an emerging humankind) believed that heaven was no higher
than the tops of the mountains, just as even now children believe it to be little
higher than the roofs of their houses.”58 Despite the lack of correlation between
Beckett’s abstractions and Vico’s philosophy, those abstractions are very impor
tant to Joyce’s cycles. The first and third parts of those cycles frequently refer to
birth and death. The second parts of those cycles don’t fit with Beckett’s abstrac-
tions as well because, instead of pointing to maturity, they most often allude to
marriage. Yet one could certainly make the argument that, for Joyce, marriage
and maturity are related. The contrast between the immature Stephen and the
married Bloom in Ulysses very much suggests this.
After offering three human institutions, three ages, and three abstractions,
Beckett faces a challenge: Vico was obsessed with triads, but Joyce’s final work has
four parts. Consequently, Beckett has to create an additional fourth stage for each
of the progressions that he outlines. There must be a fourth human institution, a
fourth age, and a fourth abstraction. Taking his cue from the idea that the final
part of Work in Progress “is the day beginning again,” Beckett focuses on the
notion of recurrence in describing the fourth stages of his progressions. The
fourth abstraction is “Generation,” which is very similar to the first abstraction,
“Birth.”59 Similarly, in defining the age of the fourth stage Beckett goes back to
the start. The final age is said to be “the transition from the Human to the
Theocratic.”60 This is clearly not an age in itself, but rather, as Beckett terms it, the
“transition” from one age to the next. It is therefore unclear whether Beckett’s
57 Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” 7–8. 58 Vico, The New Science, §4, 7.
59 Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” 8. 60 Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” 8.
progressions actually have four stages or whether the final stage is just Vico’s
ricorso, the return to the beginning of the cycle.
Beckett defines his fourth human institution as “Vico’s Providence.”61 One can
understand why Beckett speaks of providence as a “human institution” by looking
at his description of Vico’s conception of providence:
This is not Bossuet’s Providence, transcendental and miraculous, but immanent

and the stuff itself of human life, working by natural means. Humanity is its
work in itself. God acts on her, but by means of her. Humanity is divine, but no
man is divine.62
The source of this passage lies in Michelet’s preface to the second edition of his
Selected Works of Vico:
The text of the New Science is this: Humanity is its own work. God acts upon it,
but by it. Humanity is divine, but no man is divine.63
Michelet influenced Joyce’s understanding of Vico, and so it makes sense for

Beckett’s Joyce-directed essay to quote him. At the same time, in considering the
above quote, it is important to keep in mind that Michelet’s humanist conception
of Vico did not entirely align with Joyce’s understanding of Vico. This will be dis-
cussed in greater detail later in the chapter.
Beckett’s description of the fourth part of Work in Progress broadly applies to
the fourth part of a Joycean cycle. That description points to the notions of recur-
rence and providence, and these are the notions most commonly referenced in
the fourth part of a Joycean cycle.
By adapting Vico’s cycles, Joyce was able to create cycles of his own that pri-
marily represent his conception of historical recurrence. While that conception
was no doubt influenced by Vico, it is not that of Vico. In Joyce’s works, when
history recurs, what recurs is the forms of characters and narratives rather than,
as was the case for Vico, the forms that define the ages of all nations. One can see
this clearly in all of Joyce’s novels. Stephen Dedalus shares certain characteristics
with the Greek referenced in his last name. Leopold Bloom has encounters which
in different ways and to different extents parallel those of Odysseus. Within the
overdetermined realm of the Wake, every major character and narrative has mul-
tiple historical antecedents. It therefore makes complete sense that Joyce’s cycles
should principally be cycles of individual lives. In suggesting that lives across time
are defined by the three basic events of birth, marriage, and death, Joyce’s cycles
point directly to one of the ideas that underpins all of Joyce’s representations of
61 Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” 8. 62 Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” 7.
63 Fisch, “Introduction,” 78. For the French original see Michelet, “Preface,” 3.
historical recurrence, that of the transhistorical unity of human experience.

Thanks largely to the prevalence of Bruno’s principle of the coincidence of con-
traries within the Wake, such gestures at larger unities are common in Joyce’s
last novel.
Having said all that, one must still be careful about how one characterizes
Joyce’s understanding of historical recurrence. To borrow a phrase from
Ulysses, what one finds in Joyce’s novels is “history repeating itself with a difference”
(U 16.1525–6). Within Joyce’s conception of historical recurrence, as in that of
Vico, the repetitions are formal and so manifestations of the same form can vary
greatly. This idea is demonstrated by Joyce’s cycles because, while all derive their
forms from a common flexible structure, no two are the same. Joyce’s recognition
that the repetitions of history are also marked by difference shows there was a
counterpoint within his thought to the notion of the transhistorical unity of
human experience. If not the major note, it is nonetheless present.
In thinking about how Joyce’s understanding of historical recurrence incorpo-
rates the notion of difference, it is worth recalling this anecdote from Mercanton:
During lunch on a narrow terrace overhanging the lake, he [Joyce] showed me a

photograph in the Irish Times of O’Connell’s statue in Dublin. In it, by chance
and probably without his being aware, a tramp leaned with his back against the
base in the same pose as the tribune, his arms crossed, his head bent forward,
heavy with energy and eloquence. Joyce was delighted with it. “Altogether the
meaning of Work in Progress: history repeats itself comically, this is our funnam-
inal world.”64
In Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, legendary figures reappear in the Dublin
of Joyce’s day in all-too-human guises, and this is comic to the extent that it is
bathetic. At the same time, it is worth noting how, in the above quote, after asserting
that “history repeats itself comically,” Joyce goes on to speak of our “funnaminal
world.” While the word “funnaminal” evokes “fun” and “phenomenal,” it derives,
as Fweet observes, from a note in notebook VI.B.32 that reads “fun nominal.”65
There is therefore a sense in which to speak of a “funnaminal world” is to speak of
world in which there is not much fun at all. This notion is relevant to the above
quote because it points to the fact that there is also a certain tragic quality to the
idea that “history repeats itself comically.”66 Within that version of historical
development, each repetition is always necessarily in some significant sense less
than its original. Were it not, there would be no bathos.
64 Mercanton, “The Hours of James Joyce,” 234. The phrase “our funnaminal world” appears in
FW 244.13.
65 “Fweets of Fin (^244) with FW Text.” VI.B.32: 138; JJA 36:383.
66 Mercanton, “The Hours of James Joyce,” 234.
The idea that the repetitions of history are comic does not derive from Vico.
Indeed, Pompa notes that, in the later editions of the New Science, the “consider-
able optimism” of the first edition gives way to a “considerable pessimism” as Vico
“actively considers the possibility of a further recurrence of the whole [historical]
pattern, at least in the Europe of his day.”67 This being so, one can at least say that
the tragic strand within Joyce’s predominantly comic historical vision is also pres-
ent within Vico’s historical scheme.
Just as Joyce’s cycles help him to argue for his conception of history, so they
also aid him in pushing back against a famous historical model with which he
disagreed. That model is encapsulated in the “Nestor” episode of Ulysses when
Mr. Deasy asserts that “All human history moves towards one great goal, the man-
ifestation of God” (U 2.380–1). Don Gifford notes that “In Mr. Deasy’s mouth this
expresses the Victorian faith in the inevitability of man’s moral and spiritual
progress.”68 Joyce’s cycles do not preclude the possibility of progress because they
are formal cycles and so successive manifestations of a form can progress in their
matter. That being said, Joyce’s idea that history repeats itself comically is in many
ways at odds with, to use Gifford’s words, “the Victorian faith in the inevitability
of man’s moral and spiritual progress.”69 What principally differentiates Joyce’s
cycles from Mr. Deasy’s historical model is that they directly challenge all teleo-
logical conceptions of history. There is no indication within Joyce’s cycles that
they move toward a particular end. In fact, as mentioned, the fourth part of a
Joycean cycle often suggests that that cycle will go on recurring. What’s more,
since Joyce’s cycles appear in a cyclical novel, there is a sense in which they will
collectively continue to recur. One should not, however, assume from the fact that
Joyce’s cycles challenge the model of history offered by Mr. Deasy that those cycles
are entirely opposed to the Christian conception of history. When Joyce’s cycles
don’t end by suggesting their recurrence, they usually conclude with a reference
to providence. This is one of the most prominent signs of their Viconian heritage.
That being said, if Joyce’s cycles are being guided by providence, it is a very differ-
ent form of providence to that which directs Vico’s cycles. The force behind the
historical scheme of the New Science has no discernible sense of humor.
Now that we have considered how and why Joyce adapted Vico’s cycles, we can
return to the two previously quoted Joycean cycles at the top of page 117. Here
again is the paragraph in which they appear:
So hath been, love: tis tis: and will be: till wears and tears and ages. Thief us the
night, steal we the air, shawl thiner liefest, mine! Here, Ohere, insult the fair!
Traitor, bad hearer, brave! The lightning look, the birding cry, awe from the
grave, everflowing on the times. Feueragusaria iordenwater; now godsun shine
67 Pompa, “Introduction,” xxxvi. 68 Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 39.

69 Mercanton, “The Hours of James Joyce,” 234. Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 39.
on menday’s daughter; a good clap, a fore marriage, a bad wake, tell hell’s well;
such is manowife’s lot of lose and win again, like he’s gruen quhiskers on who’s
chin again, she plucketed them out but they grown in again. So what are you
going to do about it? O dear! (FW 117.03–09)
The first cycle is in the middle of the paragraph: “The lightning look, the birding
cry, awe from the grave, everflowing on the times.” As previously discussed,
within the four parts of that cycle, one finds a storm, auspices, burial, and the
suggestion that the cycle will continue on forever. The second cycle can be found
in the sentence that follows: “a good clap, a fore marriage, a bad wake, tell hell’s
well.” Here one can see a storm, marriage, burial, and another suggestion of the
eternity of the cycle. The phrase “tell hell’s well” sounds like “till hell’s well.” By
definition, hell will never be well and so the phrase suggests that the cycle will
continue indefinitely.
While these two cycles follow the conventions of the Joycean cycle, they are
also informed by the subject of the paragraph in which they appear, love. In the
first sentences of the paragraph, the narrator speaks of the eternity of love and
references Tristan and Iseult. In this context, “the lightning look” that opens
the first cycle can be understood as the look of love. It is followed by the phrase
“the birding cry.” The earlier reference to Tristan and Iseult suggests that this
phrase alludes to the fact that, in Joseph Bédier’s version of the legend of Tristan
and Iseult, a version that Joyce knew, the narrator speaks of how, when Tristan
and Iseult lived together in the forest, Tristan would often call the birds of the
forest to him through song.70 This reference to when the two lived together is
quite fitting given that the second parts of Joycean cycles are often concerned
with marriage. The first cycle ends by suggesting that the cycle it has presented
will be “everflowing on the times” and so it makes sense that what follows con-
tains a recapitulation of that cycle (FW 117.03–04).
The next sentence begins with the phrase “Feueragusaria iordenwater”
(FW 117.04). As McHugh observes, this phrase references all four classical
elements. “Feuer” is the German for “fire,” “aria” is the Italian for “air,” “iorden”
points to “Jorden,” which is the Danish for “the earth,” and the second half of the
second word is “water” (AFW 117). These allusions to elements point back to the
preceding cycle: “The lightning look, the birding cry, awe from the grave, ever-
flowing on the times” (FW 117.03). This is because lightning strikes cause fires,
birds fly in the air, graves are in the earth, and water flows. In connecting the four
parts of that cycle to the four classical elements, Joyce suggests that his cycles are
essential and natural.
70 See Bédier, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, 94–5. For Joyce’s knowledge of Bédier’s version,
see Hayman, “Tristan and Isolde in Finnegans Wake: A Study of the Sources and Evolution of a
Theme,” 93–112.
The clause that follows “Feueragusaria iordenwater” reads: “now godsun shine
on menday’s daughter” (FW 117.04–05). The “now” at the start of this clause
marks a new beginning. While the prior phrase points back to the previous
Joycean cycle, this clause sets up the next. If one reads “godsun” as “good sun,”
one can interpret the clause as a whole as an expression of hope for the growth
and success of a young woman. At the same time, if one reads “godsun” as
“godson,” one can read that clause as a request to a young man to smile at a young
woman. Both interpretations are supported by the fact that the first two elements
of the cycle that follows, “a good clap, a fore marriage,” suggest that a man and
a woman have succeeded in creating a relationship (FW 117.05). In this context,
“a good clap” primarily suggests sex, but it also offers an ironic, not to mention
comic, reference to gonorrhea.
By considering how the two cycles in this paragraph relate to its central
topic, one can see that these cycles are not conventional Joycean cycles. The
span of time that is most often covered by a Joycean cycle is that of a life. The
first part of a Joycean cycle often points to birth and the third to death. The two
cycles in this paragraph, however, begin not with a birth, but rather with the
start of a relationship. Consequently, instead of telling the story of a life, both
tell the story of a love. In keeping with the earlier references to Tristan and
Iseult, both cycles define love as ending with death. Separation seems not to be
an option.
The idea that the two cycles in this paragraph depict relationships is reinforced
immediately after the second cycle when the narrator characterizes it for the
reader: “such is manowife’s lot of lose and win again” (FW 117.06). In speaking of
“manowife’s lot,” the narrator points to a term for a married heterosexual couple,
“man and wife.” The word “manowife” suggests “man or wife,” and so the “lot” of
“manowife” can be that of a heterosexual husband or wife. That lot is said to be to
“lose and win again” (FW 117.06). Since there must be a relationship before it can
be lost, the process outlined here is a cyclical process of gain and loss: marriage to
a person of the opposite sex, loss of that partner, marriage to another person of
the opposite sex. This idea is illustrated by the narrator in the remainder of the
sentence: “like he’s gruen quhiskers on who’s chin again, she plucketed them out
but they grown in again” (FW 117.07–08). While the comparison between rela-
tionships and facial hair is of course humorous in nature, it does suggest how
commonplace it is for heterosexual men and women to gain and lose spouses.
The paragraph ends by pointing to the inevitability of the recurrence of the
described cycle: “So what are you going to do about it? O dear!” (FW 117.08–09).
Just as the cycle of life, the cycle to which Joycean cycles most often point, must
necessarily continue to turn, so must the cycle of relationships, and this is true of
all relationships. The paragraph speaks of heterosexual marriage, but its ideas
apply more broadly. Love and loss will always follow one another, just as life and
death do.
Another random document with
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nature of the true Calamite leaves is considered more fully on a later
page.
PALAEOZOIC EQUISETITES.
The examples of supposed Equisetites sheaths referred to below

may serve to illustrate the kind of evidence on which this genus has
been recorded from Upper Palaeozoic rocks. I have retained the
name Equisetites in the description of the species, but it would
probably be better to speak of such specimens as ‘Calamitean leaf-
sheaths’ rather than to describe them as definite species of
Equisetites. We have not as yet any thoroughly satisfactory evidence
that the Equisetites of Triassic and post-Triassic times existed in the
vegetation of earlier periods.
In Grand’Eury’s Flore du Gard[501] a fossil strobilus is figured under
the name Calamostachys tenuissima Grand’Eury, which consists of
a slender axis bearing series of sporophylls and sporangia
apparently resembling those of an Equisetum. There are no sterile
appendages or bracts alternating with the sporophylls; and the
absence of the former suggests a comparison with Equisetites rather
than Calamites. Grand’Eury refers to the fossil as “parfois à peine
perceptible,” and a recent examination of the specimen leads me to
thoroughly endorse this description. It was impossible to recognise
the features represented in Grand’Eury’s drawing. Setting aside this
fossil, there are other strobili recorded by Renault[502] and referred by
him to the genus Bornia (Archaeocalamites), which also exhibit the
Equisetum-like character; the axis bears sporophylls only and no
sterile bracts. It would appear then that in the Palaeozoic period the
Equisetaceous strobilus, as we know it in Equisetum, was
represented in some of the members of the Equisetales.
Fig. 57. A. Equisetites Hemingwayi Kidst. From a specimen in the British
Museum. ⅔ nat. size. B. Diaphragm and sheath of an Equisetaceous
plant, from the Coal-Measures. ⅔ nat. size. From a specimen in the
British Museum.
1. Equisetites Hemingwayi Kidst. Fig. 57, A.

Mr Kidston[503] founded this species on a few specimens of cones
found in the Middle Coal-Measures of Barnsley in Yorkshire. The
best example of the cone described by Kidston has a length of 2·5
cm., and a breadth of 1·5 cm.; the surface is divided up into several
hexagonal areas 4 mm. high and 5 mm. wide. Each of these plates
shows a fairly prominent projecting point in its centre; this is
regarded as the point of attachment of the sporangiophore axis
which expanded distally into a hexagonal plate bearing sporangia.
An examination of Mr Kidston’s specimens enabled me to recognise
the close resemblance which he insists on between the fossils and
such a recent Equisetaceous strobilus as that of Equisetum limosum
Sm. Nothing is known of the structure of the fossils beyond the
character of the superficial pattern of the impressions, and it is
impossible to speak with absolute confidence as to their nature. The
author of the species makes use of the generic name Equisetum; but
in view of our ignorance of structural features it is better to adopt the
more usual term Equisetites.
Since Kidston’s description was published I noticed a specimen in
the British Museum collection which throws some further light on this
doubtful fossil. Part of this specimen is shown in fig. 57, A. The stem
is 21 cm. in length and about 5 mm. broad; it is divided into distinct
nodes and internodes; the former being a little exaggerated in the
drawing. The surface is marked by fine and irregular striations, and
in one or two places there occur broken pieces of narrow linear
leaves in the neighbourhood of a node. Portions of four cones
occurring in contact with the stem, appear to be sessile on the
nodes, but the preservation is not sufficiently good to enable one to
speak with certainty as to the manner of attachment. Each cone
consists of regular hexagonal depressions, which agree exactly with
the surface characters of Kidston’s type-specimen. The manner of
occurrence of the cones points to a lateral and not a terminal
attachment. The stem does not show any traces of Equisetaceous
leaf-sheaths at the nodes, and such fragments of leaves as occur
appear to have the form of separate linear segments; they are not
such as are met with on Equisetites. It agrees with some of the
slender foliage-shoots of Calamitean plants often described under
the generic name Asterophyllites. As regards the cones; they differ
from the known Calamitean strobili in the absence of sterile bracts,
and appear to consist entirely of distally expanded sporophylls as in
Equisetum. The general impression afforded by the fossil is that we
have not sufficient evidence for definitely associating this stem and
cones with a true Equisetites. We may, however, adhere to this
generic title until more satisfactory data are available.
2. Equisetites spatulatus Zeill. Fig. 58, A.

This species is chosen as an example of a French Equisetites of
Permian age. It was recently founded by Zeiller[504] on some
specimens of imperfect leaf-sheaths, and defined as follows:—
Sheaths spreading, erect, formed of numerous uninerved coherent leaves, convex on
the dorsal surface, spatulate in form, 5–6 cm. in length and 2–3 mm. broad at the base,
and 5–10 mm. broad at the apex, rounded at the distal end.
The specimen shown in fig. 58, A, represents part of a flattened

sheath, the narrower crenulated end being the base of the sheath.
The limits of the coherent segments and the position of the veins are
clearly marked. Zeiller’s description accurately represents the
character of the sheaths. They agree closely with an Equisetaceous
leaf-sheath, but as I have already pointed out, we cannot feel certain
that sheaths of this kind were not originally attached to a Calamite
stem.
The portion of a leaf-sheath and a diaphragm represented in fig.
57, B, agrees closely with Zeiller’s examples. This specimen is from
the English Coal-Measures, but it is not advisable to attempt any
specific diagnosis on such fragmentary material. It is questionable,
indeed, if these detached fossil leaf-sheaths should be designated
by specific names. Another similar form of sheath, hardly
distinguishable from Zeiller’s species, has recently been described
by Potonié from the Permian (Rothliegende) of Thuringia.
Fig. 58.
A. Equisetites spatulatus, Zeill. Leaf-sheath. ⅘ nat. size. (After Zeiller.)
B. E. columnaris, Brongn. From a specimen in the British Museum. ¾ nat.
size.
C. Equisetum ramosissimum, Desf. × 2.
D. Annularia stellata (Schloth.). Leaf-sheath. Slightly enlarged. (After
Potonié.)
E. Equisetites zeaeformis (Schloth.). Leaf-sheath. ⅘ nat. size. (After
Potonié.)
F. E. lateralis, Phill. From a specimen in the Scarborough Museum. Nat.
size.
3. Equisetites zeaeformis (Schloth.)[505] Fig. 58, E.
The sheaths consist of linear segments fused laterally as in
Equisetum. In some specimens the component parts of the sheath
are more or less separate from one another, and in this form they are
apparently identical with the leaves of Calamites (Calamitina)
varians, Sternb. The example shown in fig. 58, E is probably a young
leaf-sheath; the segments are fused, and each is traversed by a
single vein represented by a dark line in the figure. The regular
crenulated lower margin is the base of the sheath, and corresponds
to the upper portion of fig. 58, A. This species affords, therefore, an
interesting illustration of the difficulty of separating Equisetites leaves
from those of true Calamites. Potonié has suggested that the leaf-
sheath of a young Calamite might well be split up into distinct linear
segments as the result of the increase in girth of the stem.
• • • • •
Other Palaeozoic species of Equisetites have been recorded, but
with one exception these need not be dealt with, as they do not add
anything to our knowledge of botanical importance. The specimen
described in the Flore de Commentry as Equisetites Monyi, by
Renault and Zeiller[506], differs from most of the other Palaeozoic
species of Equisetites, in the fact that we have a stem with short
internodes bearing a leaf-sheath at each node divided into
comparatively long and distinct teeth. This species presents a close
agreement with specimens of Calamitina, but Renault and Zeiller
consider that it is generically distinct. They suggest that the English
species, originally described and figured by Lindley and Hutton[507] as
Hippurites gigantea, and now usually spoken of as Calamitina,
should be named Equisetites. It would probably be better to adopt
the name Calamitina for the French species. The type-specimen of
this species is in the Natural History Museum, Paris.
EQUISETITES PLATYODON.
Fig. 59. Equisetites platyodon Brongn. (After Schoenlein, slightly
reduced.)
When we pass from the Permian to the Triassic period, we find
large casts of very modern-looking Equisetaceous stems which must
clearly be referred to the genus Equisetites. The portion of a stem
represented in fig. 59 known as Equisetites platyodon Brongn.[508]
affords an example of a Triassic Equisetaceous stem with a clearly
preserved leaf-sheath. The stem measures about 6 cm. in diameter.
One of the oldest known Triassic species is Equisetites Mougeoti[509]
(Brongn.) from the Bunter series of the Vosges.
The Keuper species E. arenaceus is, however, more completely
known. The specimens referred to this species are very striking
fossils; they agree in all external characters with recent Horse-tails
but greatly exceed them in dimensions.
4. Equisetites arenaceus Bronn.
This plant has been found in the Triassic rocks of various parts of
Germany and France; it occurs in the Lettenkohl group (Lower
Keuper), as well as in the Middle Keuper of Stuttgart and elsewhere.
The species may be defined as follows:—
Rhizome from 8–14 cm. in diameter, with short internodes, bearing lateral ovate
tubers. Aerial shoots from 4–12 cm. in diameter, bearing whorls of branches, and leaf-
sheaths made up of 110–120 coherent uni-nerved linear segments terminating in an
apical lanceolate tooth. Strobili oval, consisting of crowded sporangiophores with
pentagonal and hexagonal peltate terminations.
The casts of branches, rhizomes, tubers, buds and cones enable

us to form a fairly exact estimate of the size and general appearance
of this largest fossil Horse-tail. The Strassburg Museum contains
many good examples of this species, and a few specimens may be
seen in the British Museum. In the École des Mines, Paris, there are
some exceptionally clear impressions of cones of this species from a
lignite mine in the Vosges.
It is estimated that the plant reached a height of 8 to 10 meters,
about equal to that of the tallest recent species of Equisetum, but in
the diameter of the stems the Triassic plant far exceeded any
existing species.
It is interesting to determine as far as possible, in the absence of
petrified specimens, if this Keuper species increased in girth by
means of a cambium. There are occasionally found sandstone casts
of the pith-cavity which present an appearance very similar to that of
Calamitean medullary casts[510]. The nodes are marked by
comparatively deep constrictions, which probably represent the
projecting nodal wood. The surface of the casts is traversed by
regular ridges and grooves as in an ordinary Calamite, and it is
probable that in Equisetites arenaceus, as in Calamites, these
surface-features are the impression of the inner face of a cylinder of
secondary wood (cf. p. 310). Excellent figures of this species of
Equisetites are given by Schimper in his Atlas of fossil plants[511],
also by Schimper and Koechlin-Schlumberger[512], and by Schoenlein
and Schenk[513].
5. Equisetites columnaris Brongn. Figs. 11 and 58, B.
This species, which is by far the best known British Equisetites,
was founded by Brongniart[514] on some specimens from the Lower
Oolite beds of the Yorkshire coast. Casts of stems are familiar to
those who have collected fossils on the coast between Whitby and
Scarborough; they are often found in an erect position in the
sandstone, and are usually described as occurring in the actual
place of growth. As previously pointed out (p. 72), such stems have
generally been deposited by water, and have assumed a vertical
position (fig. 11). Young and Bird[515] figured a specimen of this
species in 1822, and in view of its striking resemblance to the sugar-
cane, they regarded the fossil as being of the same family as
Saccharum officinarum, if not specifically identical.
A specimen was described by König[516] in 1829, from the Lower
Oolite rocks of Brora in the north of Scotland under the name of
Oncylogonatum carbonarium, but Brongniart[517] pointed out its
identity with the English species Equisetites columnaris.
Our acquaintance with this species is practically limited to the
casts of stems. A typical stem of E. columnaris measures 3 to 6 cm.
in diameter and has fairly long internodes. The largest stem in the
British Museum collection has internodes about 14 cm. long and a
diameter of about 5 cm. In some cases the stem casts show irregular
lateral projections in the neighbourhood of a node, but there is no
evidence that the aerial shoots of this species gave off verticils of
branches. In habit E. columnaris probably closely resembled such
recent species as Equisetum hiemale L., E. trachyodon A. Br. and
others.
The stems often show a distinct swelling at the nodes; this may be
due, at least in part, to the existence of transverse nodal diaphragms
which enabled the dead shoots to resist contraction in the region of
the nodes. The leaf-sheaths consist of numerous long and narrow
segments often truncated distally, as in fig. 58, B, and as in the
sheath of such a recent Horse-tail as E. ramosissimum shown in fig.
58, C. In some specimens one occasionally finds indications of
delicate acuminate teeth extending above the limits of a truncated
sheath. Brongniart speaks of the existence of caducous acuminate
teeth in his diagnosis of the species, and the example represented in
fig. 58, B, demonstrates the existence of such deciduous
appendages. There is a very close resemblance between the fossil
sheath of fig. 58, B, with and without the teeth, and the leaf-sheath of
the recent Equisetum in fig. 58, C. In some specimens of E.
columnaris in which the cast is covered with a carbonaceous film,
each segment in a leaf-sheath is seen to be slightly depressed in the
median portion, which is often distinctly marked by numerous small
dots, the edges of the segment being flat and smooth. The median
region is that in which the stomata are found and on which deposits
of silica occur.
6. Equisetites Beani (Bunb.). Figs. 60–62.

Bunbury[518] proposed the name Calamites Beani for some fossil
stems from the Lower Oolite beds of the Yorkshire coast, which Bean
had previously referred to in unpublished notes as C. giganteus. The
latter name was not adopted by Bunbury on account of the possible
confusion between this species and the Palaeozoic species
Calamites gigas Brongn. The generic name Calamites must be
replaced by Equisetites now that we are familiar with more perfect
specimens which demonstrate the Equisetean characters of the
plant.
Fig. 60. Equisetites Beani (Bunb.). ⅔ nat. size. [After Starkie Gardner (86)
Pl. ix. fig. 2.]
Schimper[519] speaks of this species as possibly the pith-cast of
Equisetites columnaris, but his opinion cannot be maintained; the
species first described by Bunbury has considerably larger stems
than those of E. columnaris. It is not impossible, however, that E.
columnaris and E. Beani may be portions of the same species. The
chief difference between these forms is that of size; but we have not
sufficient data to justify the inclusion of both forms under one name.
Zigno[520], in his work on the Oolitic Flora, figures an imperfect stem
cast of E. Beani under the name of Calamites Beani, but the species
has received little attention at the hands of recent writers. In 1886
Starkie Gardner[521] figured a specimen which was identified by
Williamson as an example of Bunbury’s species; but the latter
pointed out the greater resemblance, as regards the external
appearance of the Jurassic stem, to some of the recent arborescent
Gramineae[522] than to the Equisetaceae. Williamson, with his usual
caution, adds that such appearances have very little taxonomic
value. Fig. 60 is reproduced from the block used by Gardner in his
memoir on Mesozoic Angiosperms; he quotes the specimen as
possibly a Monocotyledonous stem. The fossil is an imperfect cast of
a stem showing two clearly marked nodal regions, but no trace of
leaf-sheaths. A recent examination of specimens in the museums of
Whitby, Scarborough, York and London has convinced me that the
plant named by Bunbury Calamites Beani is a large Equisetites. As a
rule the specimens do not show any indications of the leaf-sheaths,
but in a few cases the sheaths have left fairly distinct impressions.
Fig. 61. Equisetites Beani (Bunb.). From a specimen in the British
Museum, ⅔ nat. size. (No. V. 2725.)
In the portion of stem shown in fig. 61 the impressions of the leaf
segments are clearly marked. This specimen affords much better
evidence of the Equisetaceous character of the plant than those
which are simply internal casts. The narrow projecting lines
extending upwards from the nodes in the figured specimen probably
represent the divisions between the several segments of each leaf-
sheath.
In the museums of Whitby and Scarborough there are some long
specimens, in one case 44 cm. in length, and 33 cm. in
circumference, which are probably casts of the broad pith-cavity.
These casts are often transversely broken across at the nodes, so
that they consist of three or four separate pieces which fit together
by clean-cut faces. This manner of occurrence is most probably due
to the existence of large and resistant nodal diaphragms which
separated the sand-casts of adjacent internodes. In the York
museum there are some large diaphragms, 10 cm. in diameter,
preserved separately in a piece of rock containing a cast of
Equisetites Beani. The nodal diaphragms of some of the
Carboniferous Calamites were the seat of cork development[523], and
it may be that the frequent preservation of Equisetaceous
diaphragms in Triassic and Jurassic rocks is due to the protection
afforded by a corky investment.
The stem shown in fig. 62 appears to be a portion of a shoot of E.
Beani not far from its apical region. From the lower nodes there
extend clearly marked and regular lines or slight grooves tapering
gradually towards the next higher node; these are no doubt the
impressions of segments of leaf-sheaths. The sheaths themselves
have been detached and only their impressions remain. The
flattened bands at the node of the stem in fig. 60, and shown also in
fig. 61, mark the place of attachment of the leaf-sheaths. On some of
these nodal bands one is able to recognise small scars which are
most likely the casts of outgoing leaf-trace bundles.
Some of the internal casts of this species are marked by
numerous closely arranged longitudinal lines, which are probably the
impressions of the inner face of a central woody cylinder. In the
smaller specimen shown in fig. 62 we have the apical portion of a
shoot in which the uppermost internodes are in an unexpanded
condition.
Fig. 62. Equisetites Beani (Bunb.). From a specimen in the Scarborough
Museum. Very slightly reduced.
It is impossible to give a satisfactory diagnosis of this species
without better material. The plant is characterised chiefly by the great
breadth of the stem, and by the possession of leaf-sheaths
consisting of numerous long and narrow segments. Equisetites
Beani must have almost equalled in size the Triassic species, E.
arenaceus, described above.
7. Equisetites lateralis Phill. Figs. 58, F, 63, and 64.

This species is described at some length as affording a useful
illustration of the misleading character of certain features which are
entirely due to methods of preservation. The specific name was
proposed by Phillips in his first edition of the Geology of the
Yorkshire Coast for some very imperfect stems from the Lower
Oolite rocks near Whitby[524]. The choice of the term lateralis
illustrates a misconception; it was given to the plant in the belief that
certain characteristic wheel-like marks on the stems were the scars
of branches. Lindley and Hutton[525] figured a specimen of this
species in their Fossil Flora, and quoted a remark by “Mr Williamson
junior” (afterwards Prof. Williamson) that the so-called scars often
occur as isolated discs in the neighbourhood of the stems.
Bunbury[526] described an example of the same species with narrow
spreading leaves like those of a Palaeozoic Asterophyllites, and
proposed this generic name as more appropriate than Equisetites. In
all probability the example shown in fig. 63 is that which Bunbury
described. It is certainly the same as one figured by Zigno[527] as
Calamites lateralis in his Flora fossilis formationis Oolithicae.
Fig. 63. Equisetites lateralis Phill. From a specimen in the British
Museum. Slightly reduced.
This specimen illustrates a further misconception in the diagnosis
of the species. The long linear appendages spreading from the
nodes are, I believe, slender branches and not leaves; they have not
the form of delicate filmy markings on the rock face, but are
comparatively thick and almost woody in appearance. The true
leaves are distinctly indicated at the nodes, and exhibit the ordinary
features of toothed sheaths.
Heer[528] proposed to transfer Phillips’ species to the genus
Phyllotheca, and Schimper[529] preferred the generic term
Schizoneura. The suggestion for the use of these two names would
probably not have been made had the presence of the Equisetum
sheaths been recognised.
The circular depressions a short distance above each node are
the ‘branch scars’ of various writers. Schimper suggested that these
radially marked circles might be displaced nodal diaphragms.
Andrae[530] figured the same objects in 1853 but regarded them as
branch scars, although in the specimen he describes, there are
several of them lying apart from the stems, and to one of them is
attached a portion of a leaf-sheath. Solms-Laubach[531] points out
that the internodal position of these supposed scars is an obvious
difficulty; we should not expect to find branches arising from an
internode. After referring to some specimens in the Oxford museum,
he adds—“In presence of these facts the usual explanation of these
structures appears to me, as to Heer, very doubtful.... We are driven
to the very arbitrary assumption that they represent the lowest nodes
of the lateral branches which were inserted above the line of the
nodes of the stem.” Circular discs similar to those of E. lateralis have
been found in the Jurassic rocks of Siberia[532] and elsewhere. There
are one or two examples of such discs from Siberia in the British
Museum. If the nodal diaphragms were fairly hard and stout, it is
easy to conceive that they might have been pressed out of their
original position when the stems were flattened in the process of
fossilisation. It is not quite clear what the radial spoke-like lines of the
discs are due to; possibly they mark the position of bands of more
resistant tissue or of outgoing strands of vascular bundles. A
detached diaphragm is seen in fig. 64 C; in the centre it consists of a
flat plate of tissue, and the peripheral region is traversed by the
radiating lines. In the stem of fig. 64, A the deeply divided leaf-
sheaths are clearly seen, and an imperfect impression of a
diaphragm is preserved on the face of the middle internode. In fig. 64
B a flattened leaf-sheath is shown with the free acuminate teeth
fused basally into a continuous collar[533]. The short piece of stem of
Equisetites lateralis shown in fig. 58, F, shows how the free teeth
may be outspread in a manner which bears some resemblance to
the leaves of Phyllotheca, but a comparison with the specimens
already described, and a careful examination of this specimen itself,
demonstrate the generic identity of the species with Equisetites. The
carbonaceous film on the surface of such stems as those of fig. 58,
F, and 64, A, shows a characteristic shagreen texture which may
possibly be due to the presence of silica in the epidermis as in recent
Horse-tails.
There is another species of Equisetites, E. Münsteri, Schk., from a
lower geological horizon which has been compared with E. lateralis,
and lends support to the view that the so-called branch-scars are
nodal diaphragms[534]. This species also affords additional evidence
in favour of retaining the generic name Equisetites for Phillips’
species. Equisetites Münsteri is a typical Rhaetic plant; it has been
found at Beyreuth and Kuhnbach, as well as in Switzerland, Hungary
and elsewhere. A specimen of Equisetites originally described by
Buckman as E. Brodii[535], from the Lower Lias of Worcestershire,
may possibly be identical with E. Münsteri. The leaf-sheaths of this
Rhaetic species consist of broad segments prolonged into acuminate
teeth; some of the examples figured by Schenk[536] show clearly
marked impressions of displaced nodal diaphragms exactly as in E.
lateralis. Another form, Equisetum rotiferum described by Tenison-
Woods[537] from Australia, is closely allied to, or possibly identical
with E. lateralis.
Fig. 64. Equisetites lateralis Phill. A. Part of a stem showing leaf-sheaths
and an imperfect diaphragm. B. A single flattened leaf-sheath. C. A
detached nodal diaphragm. From a specimen in the York Museum.
Slightly reduced.
8. Equisetites Burchardti Dunker[538]. Fig. 65.

This species of Equisetites is fairly common in the Wealden beds
of the Sussex coast near Hastings, and also in Westphalia.

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stage in the production of a philosophical reference. This is the only means of

7 Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, 217.

6 Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce ’ s Finnegans Wake

8 Hart, Structure and Motif, 40.

9 Hart, Structure and Motif, 40.

8 Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce ’ s Finnegans Wake

1 Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, 176.

10 Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce ’ s Finnegans Wake

Joyce and Vico

The History of The Letter 11

12 Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce ’ s Finnegans Wake

The History of The Letter 13

Arguably the most telling of all of Joyce’s comments on Vico’s theories is to be

14 Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce ’ s Finnegans Wake

The History of The Letter 15

25 “Fweets of Fin (_M,ViconianCycle_) with FW Text.”

16 Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce ’ s Finnegans Wake

28 Vico, The New Science, §7, 9.

The History of The Letter 17

Hence, this science must be a demonstration, so to speak, of the history of prov-

31 Vico, §362, 126. 32 Vico, §331, 110. 33 Vico, §342, 117.

18 Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce ’ s Finnegans Wake

Despite the inconsistencies in Vico’s conception of history, Joyce repeatedly drew

The History of The Letter 19

20 Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce ’ s Finnegans Wake

41 Vico, §447–8, 171–2.

The History of The Letter 21

Alongside thunderwords, the other principal means by which Joyce references

reberthing in remarriment out of dead seekness to devine previdence

45 Vico, The New Science, §62, 52. 46 Vico, §62, 52–3.

22 Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce ’ s Finnegans Wake

Part 1 is a mass of past shadow, corresponding therefore to Vico’s first human

47 Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” 7–8.

The History of The Letter 23

We observe that all the nations—­whether barbarous or humane, and in spite of

48 Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” 7–8.

24 Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce ’ s Finnegans Wake

FDV Hayman, David. A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake. Austin: University of

We observe that all the nations—whether barbarous or humane, and in spite of