Moby Dick and Finnegans Wake

Herman Melville

James Joyce

Two classics of literature separated in time by nearly 90 years. Very different in their style of writing, yet similar in size, and in the full on aim of attempting to consider everything imaginable in life and in death. Both works come chock full of philosophy, metaphysics, alchemy, magic, and bardo information but differ drastically in presentation. The narrative seems clear and evident in Moby Dick, we always know where we are in the story. It's just the opposite, extremely opaque, in Finnegans Wake. The new reader often has no idea what's going on in terms of any storyline and is advised to consult a reader's guide such as the excellent one by Tindall or Campbell & Robinson's Skeleton Key.  The surface plot of Finnegans Wake seems either inconsequential or non existent. It all takes place over one night with the protagonists asleep until the end. Moby Dick's plot is more substantial, but you could probably cut out two thirds of it or more and not affect the basic elements of the story.  

These two magnum opuses offer masterpieces of metaphor over multiple levels of sense. W.H. Auden called Moby Dick an 'elaborate synecdoche' in which whale fishing becomes an image of all our lives, teeming with parable and multiple symbolic correspondences. The same description could easily apply to Finnegans Wake sans the whale fishing. A snapshot of the microcosm - the local environment, representing the macrocosm – all and everything, seems the ultimate synecdoche. One example of this in Finnegans Wake: the initials HCE, that of the main protagonist Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, also stand for "Here Comes Everybody." 

Melville writes of uniting the microcosm with the macrocosm at the end of chapter 70, "The Sphynx:"

"O Nature and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." In this chapter, they behead a Sperm Whale and "in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert." Captain Ahab proceeds to address the dismembered head as if its spirit lived on and could communicate what it has seen in its travels. This seems on par with a magician grilling a non-human entity that's been invoked:

"speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in there. Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved among this world's foundations.  Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot, where in her murderous hold, this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home."

This quote alludes to the land of the dead at the end; that subject is another point in common between MD and FW as we shall see. Death runs throughout Moby Dick. The first words in the book come from a person who is dead. Chapter 49, "The Hyena," laughs at death. The cycle of death and rebirth/renewal appears throughout Finnegans Wake. Obviously, the title itself immediately suggests Finnegan's death. The reader confronts death on the front cover. 

The use of Cabala provides another commonality between Joyce and Melville. Cabala appears evident in the above quote. The Hebrew letter Resh means "head" and corresponds with The Sun in the Tarot. Melville demonstrates this correspondence with the phrase: "That head upon which the upper sun now gleams."

No direct evidence exists that Joyce read Moby Dick except, possibly, for the apparent appearance of it in the Wake. The occurs in FW page 13 in the penultimate paragraph. Before we examine that, let's look at what immediate precedes the great white whale's entrance. Top of page 13:

"So. This Is Dyoublong?

Hush! Caution! Echoland!"

Dyoublong alludes both to Dublin and to the phrase "do you belong?"

The second line suggests the Bardo of HCE, with the suggestion reinforced in the subsequent paragraph which has multiple references to death. For instance:

"gravemure" = grave + mure (wall). This gets reinforced a couple sentences later with: "Hear? By the mausolum wall." Then: "With a grand funferall" (funeral, combined with the suggestion of laughing at death).  In this paragraph we find multiple references to music and listening or hearing, and a couple to magic. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, aka the Bardo Thodol, translates as the power of liberation by sound. At the end of the paragraph for example: "They will be tuggling foriver. They will be lichening for allof. They will be pretumbling forover. The harpsdischord shall be theirs for ollaves."

"They" and "theirs" in the last four sentences could easily refer to disembodied souls traveling in the land of the dead; "foriver" alludes to both "forever" and "for river." The river, in Finnegans Wake represents the flowing of LIFE.  Next sentence: "lichening" = listening; "for allof" – all of time or all of life? Then "pretumbling forover" seems a unique way to represent the Bardo, the territory a soul enters after life ("forover") and before rebirth ("pretumbling"). The last sentence: "harpsdischord" – many events feel discordant in the Bardo, but some things feel harmonious like a harpsichord might sound; "ollaves" reflects "allof" again, but also suggests "all loves" (all our dearly departed) by switching the "o" with the "a"; "ollaves" also reminds me of those small balls of fruit that go in martinis though I honestly don't know what that has to do with anything.

The paragraph just examined also contains another reference to Dublin, "Dbln." Dublin plays prominently into the Bardo or subconscious mind of both HCE and Joyce. Believe it or not, all this appears relevant to Moby Dick. 

In the essay "Moby Dick's Hyphen" by David Collard, which appears in his book, Multiple Joyce, he writes that what Melville does for whales and the whaling industry, i.e. going into it at considerable length and detail, Joyce does for Dublin in Ulysses. If you're thinking of picking up a copy of Multiple Joyce to read how Moby Dick may have influenced him, don't. I just communicated everything he has to say on the subject. It's not a bad essay on Moby Dick, yet with little connection to Joyce. If you, like me, wondered why the original title of Moby-Dick has a hyphen in it that never appears in the text, there's nothing mysterious about it. According to Collard, a typesetter inadvertently put a hyphen in the title and it stayed, basically a typo. The rest of Multiple Joyce looks good, but I haven't read enough to recommend it.

Skipping the next paragraph in FW p. 13 after the one just analyzed brings us closer to our whale friend:

"So, how idlers' wind turning pages on pages, as innocens with anaclete play popeye antipop, the leaves of the living in the boke of the deeds, annals of themselves timing the cycles of events grand and national, bring fassilwise to pass how."

The first phrase: how idlers' wind turning pages on pages could suggest reading a book. I know Joyce scholars give a different interpretation of "idlers'" so this may seem purely coincidental, but in Moby Dick chapter 102, "A Bower in the Ardacides" Melville calls the skeleton of a dead Sperm Whale washed up on the beach "a gigantic idler!" The next sentence has: "the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver." Weaver is used metaphorically – when you read the whole passage it appears akin to the Sufi metaphor of weaving together the fabric of existence. 

"the leaves of the living in the boke of the deeds" = the leaves of the living in the book of the dead. Joyce uses "leaves" multiple times in FW as a pun for leaving the body – told to me by Robert Anton Wilson in his Tales of the Tribe class. 

In the same chapter, slightly before Melville calls the whale skeleton a gigantic idler, he writes: "Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure." The weaving metaphor plays throughout this section. "Leaves", as a metaphor for the soul leaving the body, right beside "the great sun" recalls the Egyptian Book of the Dead where the primary goal of the soul is to unite with Osiris after bodily death. Osiris qabalistically corresponds with the sun.

In his mid 19th Century ornate language Melville sums up this section with: "Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories."

Books of the dead deliver instructions and navigational tips for passing through the Bardo hopefully liberating the soul or programming a favorable rebirth (curly-headed glories). This information appears practically useful whether going through a physical, biological death or a psychological one with a temporary death of the ego. Both Finnegans Wake and Moby Dick qualify as books of the dead. 

"bring fassilwise to pass how." I don't have a good read on this line and would only be speculating. In an earlier missive on FW, I postulated that the question "how?" appears central to the opus. 

At last we get to our whale:

1132 A.D. Men like to ants or emmets wondern upon a groot hwide Whallfisk which lay in a Runnel. Blubby wares upat Ublanium.

1132 A.D. looks like a date, but seems more cabalistic, to me. 

11 = magic, or energy tending to change; 11 also = a circularity of form or motion. Joyce had a strong interest in cycles of time. Finnegans Wake has a circular form. 

32 = the ten Sephiroth (spheres) on the Tree of Life + the twenty-two paths that run between them. The Tree of Life provides the form for the filing cabinet of correspondences. Qabala can be considered one kind of coding or mapping of consciousness. It also maps the Bardo. These particular correspondences appeared in Sepher Sephiroth first published in 1909 by Aleister Crowley and derived from the work of MacGregor Mathers and Allan Bennett of the Golden Dawn. Joyce knew people from those circles such as William Butler Yeats and others. It seems probable those correspondences were known to him. 

A.D. = after death therefore indicating the Bardo. 

"groot hwide Whallfisk" sounds like great white whale-fish. "groot" = Danish and Dutch for "big;" "hwide" = Danish for "white;" "Whalfisch" = German for whale; "fisk" = Danish for fish. Melville mostly (incorrectly) considers whales to be fish in Moby Dick. The exception being when he considers how they have to breath air in chapter 85, "The Fountain."

Joyce's word for whale, "Whallfisk"  contains both "all" and "whall" (sounds like "wall") – connecting  with the multiple mentions of "wall" and "all" earlier on this page. Two earlier instances of "wall" occur beside images of death – by the grave and by the mausoleum. The Hebrew letter "nun" translates as "fish" in English and corresponds with the Tarot card Death. Whallfisk shows another wall beside death with the fish correspondence. Could this wall indicate the separation or boundary between life and death?

Men would look like ants when doing their business with a great white whale; "emmets" appears an archaic British word for ants. Extensive whale hunting would seem archaic even in Joyce's time; "wondern" sounds like wandering, but also "wonder" = a cabalistic pun for "all" when considering the mystical tautology, "all is one," (found at the very end of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, and elsewhere);  "wondern" = wonder + n; nun = n = Death; ergo wondern cabalistically puts "all" besides "death." When you die, either biologically or egotistically, mystics say you have an opportunity to connect with "all."

"Blubby wares" = the oil obtained from whale blubber used as fuel in lamps at one time.  

"upat" = "up at," but also translates as "four" in the Cebuano language, a language spoken in the Phillipines near where a lot of the action in Moby Dick takes place. Of course, for Joyce and his unbridled use of homonyms, four = for.  Joyce uses the word "for" multiple times on this page (see above). Joyce starts the paragraph on p. 13 that I didn't examine: "Four things therefore..." as kind of a humorous pun on "four" with "therefore."

"Ublanium" appears close to an archaic name for Dublin (Eblana) and also sounds like Dublin. 

Blubby wares upat Ublanium translates as"Whale oil for Dublin." Perhaps Joyce alludes to the archaic name for Dublin because of the archaic nature of this illumination. Whale oil stopped being used to light up lamps somewhere around 1860. 

"Blubby wares" could easily indicate a shorthand term for Moby Dick (full original title Moby-Dick or, The Whale) as Melville provides encyclopedic information (wares) on just about every aspect of whales one can think of. Since Joyce identifies so strongly with Dublin, could blubby wares for Dublin, or blubby wares up at Dublin be a sly acknowledgement by Joyce of the influence of Moby Dick? 

It's true that these passages analyzed don't provide an explicit connection to Melville or Moby Dick, but it comes pretty close with "great white whale," Moby Dick indisputably being the most famous one in literature. Let's call this circumstantial evidence.

More circumstantial evidence: Moby Dick begins by looking at the etymology of "whale." The first quote comes from Richard Hakluyt (Melville incorrectly spells it Hackluyt) and refers to a "whale-fish," very close to Joyce's "Whallfisk." Hakluyt goes on to stress the importance of "the letter H, "which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word..." Joyce's word for white, "hwide" begins with h.

* * * * * * 

This seems the extent of Moby Dick appearing in Finnegans Wake if indeed it does at all. There are a couple of other parallels, but they don't seem convincing to me as anything more than coincidence. The closest comes on FW page 210 with: ". . . a reiz every morning for Standfast Dick" followed a couple of lines later by"two appletweed stools for Eva Mobbely." Someone else might have more luck connecting this, or anything else in this section to Moby Dick, I don't buy it, or maybe I don't see it.  FW p. 492 has the name, Afamado Hairductor Achmed Borumborad whose initials make AHAB, and does show Arabic overtones, but the rest of the section appears to connect with One Thousand and One Nights more commonly known as Arabian Nights. It seems to have nothing to do with Captain Ahab.

Some general parallels between the two novels:

• both appear very influenced by The Bible and by the works of Shakespeare.

• the writing in both novels sounds musical, at times; moreso with Joyce. Both books incorporate songs; I only recall one in Moby Dick in chapter 9, "The Sermon," but the "Extracts" section at the beginning quotes from songs.

• Joyce got known for putting lists and catalogs in. Melville has a little of that as does Rabelais who influenced them both. Melville quotes Rabelais in the opening section and directly mentions him later in the text.

• Moby Dick originally was published in England as The Whale before assuming its final title, Moby-Dick or, The Whale. Wake and Whale sound alike and rhyme at the beginning. In the latter, taking out the "h" and replacing "l" with "k" turns Whale into Wake. The word Joyce uses for whale, "Whallfisk" removes the "h" in fish and replaces it with a "k." Would Joyce make such a subtle nod to Melville, by switching two letters? In my opinion, absolutely yes.

• Water runs in the background (often the foreground), throughout both novels. Finnegans Wake famously starts with riverun, sometimes called the "river of life." Most of the action in Moby Dick occurs in the ocean. It starts in the rain with Ishmael deciding to go to sea. The second paragraph begins a lyrical ode to water continuing for a few pages before landing on the same metaphor Joyce uses: "But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all." Joyce ends FW with "The keys to. Given!" before returning to the river that started it all.

Oz Fritz

December 19, 2024

Nevada City, California