Fenian Topography in Finnegans Wake
1997; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 1; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/nhr.1997.a925375
ISSN1534-5815
Autores Tópico(s)Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism
Resumo Nowhere in European literature of the Middle Ages have legends of placenames been so abundantly recorded as in Ireland. The practical purpose of this tradition , known as the dinnsenchas, was to explain the origins of noteworthy Irish placenames or dinn (literally,"raised ground"), ultimately associating the geographical point with the exploits of a god or, after the fifth-century conversion to Christianity, with the deed of a saint. Dinnsenchas poets, in the tradition of Amergin mac Amhalgaidh, poet to King Diarmuid mac Cearbaille in the sixth century, had, by the eleventh and twelfth centuries, created a sort of dictionary of national topography. The Book of Leinster (c. ..), the oldest extant copy of these dry metrical treatises, defines nearly two hundred placenames and contains eighty-eight poems. Tales from the Book of Invasions can be plotted on a map, but, in general, lack aesthetic appeal. Similar attention to topography may be found in the work of James Joyce; and recent scholarship discusses Joyce's role as the senchaid, or recorder of topographical matters.While the peregrinations of Leopold Bloom, his central character in Ulysses (), have been compared to the wanderings of Homer's hero in the Odyssey, Joyce's detailed recording of Dublin locations underscores the Irishness of this work and an awareness of a certain Hibernian reverence for physical features and landmarks in Dublin. As John Paul Riquelme observes, the combining of Irish and Homeric material represents the joining of a culture Joyce knew best with a wellspring of Western culture in general. The catalogues and lists in Ulysses, while indisputably a characteristic of the epic form and a biblical tradition as well, also suggests a modeling of such dinnsenchas recordings , as may be found in The Tripartite Life of St. Patrick—a list of reigns and times of Ireland "after the faith"—painstakingly translated by Whitley Stokes in . Recording the genealogies of prominent families of early Ireland and situating the tribes and their exploits within a geographical and historical conMarguerite Quintelli-Neary Fenian Topography in Finnegans Wake . Ancient Irish Tales, ed. Tom Pete Cross and Clark Harris Slover (New York: Barnes and Noble, ), p. . . Douglas Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland (London: T. Fisher Unwin, ), p. . . John Paul Riquelme, Teller and Tale in Joyce's Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, ), p. . text fitted the purview of the poets, or filí, to whom the preserving of cultural achievements was entrusted. It is also a stylistic device that Joyce exploited in imitative and parodic fashion. Joyce's attention to placenames and addresses in Ulysses, as Maria Tymoczko suggests, was generated by his memories of walks about Dublin with John Joyce, master storyteller, who told tales associated with Dublin places, and it imbues the work with a texture that only such precise chronicling can produce. The minute attention to placelore in Ulysses foreshadows another exhaustive handling of Irish geography in Joyce's mythic Finnegans Wake (), one which encompassed the genesis of Ireland itself. And the natural resources, physical features of eminent locations, and the history of their naming received strong emphasis and more obvious prominence in Finnegans Wake. Joyce plots and graphs with multilayered puns as he constructs his map of Ireland and beyond. In Book Two,Part Two of Finnegans Wake, Joyce parodies the dinnsenchas motif, pattern, and purpose. Joyce's awareness of the significance of the geography of high, holy places may derive from his reading of Patrick Weston Joyce's Origin and History of Irish Names of Places. Embittered by publication problems with Dubliners, Joyce composed the satirical poem "Gas From a Burner" while on a train between London and Munich, and in it he referred to"Irish Names of Places,"an allusion to P. W. Joyce's text. Joyce owned a copy of P. W. Joyce's Irish Peasant Songs in the English Language, a source for portions of Book Three of Finnegans Wake. Further, Joyce read the United Irishman, which ran several articles on placelore between and . One of them recommended P.W. Joyce's Irish Names of Places, in spite of its many inaccuracies, as a means of developing national self-respect. Such articles may have influenced Joyce's decision to transpose rural placelore to an...
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