“In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass”
– Eliot, Four Quartets, East Coker
Eliot’s Four Quartets is a personal and cyclical look at life and time, a common theme that pervades and guides the whole spectrum of literature, not just the canon. Where there is life there is death, and the inverse holds as true. The end and the beginning are indeterminate and seamlessly dovetailed. From the ashes grows a mighty tree and someday, due to natural or artificial causes, the tree will return to ashes, dust to dust, the phoenix will fly again. We are caught in the cycle of creation and destruction that defines time and age and rules the cosmos.
The cyclical model is exemplified in its full efficacy in both highbrow and lowbrow literature wherein neither is mutually exclusive. Themes, motifs, characters, and their actions that are caught in the cycle of literature are in a constant state of change or metamorphosis where they develop; but because the core themes, metaphorically speaking, retain their essential base materials throughout the process, nothing new or original is ever created. The exploration of how the essential, central, base material: the “rubbish of life” and “the unity of matter,” in literature reveal the deep connection and relationship with the lowbrow and the highbrow. Barbara DiBernard explores the symbiotic purposes James Joyce uses of base material and alchemy in her aptly named book, Alchemy and Finnegans Wake, explaining that, “The artist/alchemist, however, can unite the physical and the spiritual by operating on both levels simultaneously, turning the rubbish of life into art or the Philosopher’s Stone, yet not ignoring or negating its earthly origins” (137). This is both Joyce’s modus operandi and his primary aesthetic aim in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
The intricacies of Joyce’s book of the dark, Finnegans Wake are loosely based on nearly everything, even the “the rubbish of life,” like the internet in book format. Finnegans Wake was notably influenced by an Irish drinking song “The Ballad of Tim Finnegan.” In a sense, what the Odyssey is to Ulysses, “The Ballad of Tim Finnegan” is to Finnegans Wake. The popular material in the Irish Ballad is transformed into a highbrow, inscrutable text, Finnegans Wake, which is perhaps better understood through its original medium of song, but the extricable remains totally indefinable. If the world is a never-ending cross reference, as mentioned in The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom, links into links in digression and distraction, then it makes sense that we need the lowbrow and the highbrow, and, in order to be good readers we must read both.
I spent time learning and singing “The Ballad of Tim Finnegan” with my guitar. The experience of the lowbrow gives one a greater appreciation for the highbrow because there is an intimacy with the material that was Joyce’s inspiration. It is, in essence, the lowbrow version of the vast human condition of life and death. Perhaps he was using nursery rhymes and popular songs of the time as a template, “humbly dumbly” (Joyce 628). Joyce’s work in Finnegans Wake has a beat and a rhythm when it is read out loud. “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howeth castle and Environs” (Joyce 1). As Walter Pater said in The Renaissance, “All arts aspire to the condition of music.” Here is the last verse of the “Ballad of Tim Finnegan”, (with an Irish accent):
Mickey Maloney ducked his head when a bucket of whiskey flew at him
It missed, and falling on the bed, the liquor scattered over Tim
Bedad he revives, see how he rises, Timothy rising from the bed
Saying "Whittle your whiskey around like blazes, t'underin' Jaysus, do ye think I'm dead?"– (“Traditional Irish Music”)
In the Ballad, whiskey, the elixir of life, the Philosopher’s Stone, is present at death, and Tim Finnegan’s wake turns from a funeral into a “funferal.” Tim wakes at his wake because whiskey spills on him. How could Joyce resist that? How can a reader resist that? Joyce couldn’t, but nearly everyone else has. The Philosopher’s Stone is the alchemical key to everlasting life, a good metaphor for the whiskey’s properties in the ballad. This is evidenced by my octogenarian neighbors Hank and his wife Marilyn, who graduated from Montana State College in ‘46 and ‘47; they drink whiskey daily, like a vitamin. When the lowbrow popular qualities of “The Ballad of Tim Finnegan” and the pedantry of Finnegans Wake are known in conjunction with one another, they ultimately enrich and expand upon each other:
Whack fol the dah will ya dance to yer parner around the flure yer trotters
shake Wasn't it the truth I told you? Lots of fun at Finnegan's Wake –
(“Traditional Irish Music”)
“Lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake,” is transformed by Joyce into, "Lovesoftfun at Finnegan's Wake” and "fun I had in that fanagan's week." (Joyce 607, 351). Both versions of Tim Finnegan’s Wake create interplay between the lowbrow and the highbrow. The cycle of common themes and stories in literature from lowbrow to highbrow, and back to lowbrow again make it so that each illuminates the other. Finnegans Wake is so rich with allusions and wordplay that this argument could be made for almost any lowbrow material in relation to Finnegans Wake, life and death, light and dark.
The first sentence of Finnegans Wake takes the reader back to the beginning, the end of the book ends mid sentence that continues on as the first sentence of the book. The very structure of Finnegans Wake is cyclical, the beginning is the end, “...alchemy embodied the reconciliation of opposites; in it such dichotomies as death-rebirth, body-soul, base metal-gold were resolved” (DiBernard 3). “In my beginning is my end” (Eliot 23). People need the highbrow and the lowbrow to explore the themes that saturate our world, because we all experience the human condition.
What is the one thing guaranteed to happen in life? Death and Darkness. As mortals it is inevitable that we will die: taking off is optional, but landing isn’t, however whiskey (in the case of Tim Finnegan), alchemy, and literature are all ways to achieve immortality. As we cycle from demotic language, to the language of men, to that of heroes, and finally of gods, we bottom out again in demotic language, and find that attempts at everlasting life remain only successful in literature, both high and low.
The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot which revolves around the cycle of time and, again, life and death, creation and destruction, but from destruction there is creation. In Disney’s movie “The Lion King” Mufasa explains to Simba that it is okay to eat gazelles, for when lions die they become grass and gazelles eat the grass, thus the cyclical nature is complete, yet never-ending. Like Badger says in The Wind in the Willows, “People come-they stay for a while, they flourish, they build-and they go. It is their way” (Grahame 70). And back up to the highbrow in The Four Quartets, East Coker:
“Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and
faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.” – Eliot, Four Quartets,
East Coker
Our lives as humans are also cyclical; when we are born we are in a constant state of peril in terms of survival, then not long after we are in a constant state of decay. Our beginning is immediately our potential end, and depending on what comes after we die, our death can also be a beginning. Death can also resemble our beginning if we get that far, because old men look like babies, bald, mewling and puking again.
A lowbrow poetry rival to the cycle of themes such as life and death in Eliot’s Four Quartets is Wallace McRae from Forsyth, Montana, and his poem “Reincarnation,” (Kittredge, and Smith 1100):
"What does Reincarnation mean?"
A cowpoke asked his friend.
His pal
replied, "It happens when
Yer life has reached its end.
They comb yer
hair, and warsh yer neck,
And clean yer fingernails,
And lay you in a
padded box
Away from life's travails."
"The box and you goes in a
hole,
That's been dug into the ground.
Reincarnation starts in when
Yore planted 'neath a mound.
Them clods melt down, just like yer box,
And you who is inside.
And then yore just beginnin' on
Yer
transformation ride."
"In a while, the grass'll grow
Upon yer
rendered mound.
Till some day on yer moldered grave
A lonely flower is
found.
And say a hoss should wander by
And graze upon this flower
That once wuz you, but now's become
Yer vegetative bower."
"The
posy that the hoss done ate
Up, with his other feed,
Makes bone, and
fat, and muscle
Essential to the steed,
But some is left that he can't
use
And so it passes through,
And finally lays upon the ground
This
thing, that once wuz you."
"Then say, by chance, I wanders by
And
sees this upon the ground,
And I ponders, and I wonders at,
This object
that I found.
I thinks of reincarnation,
Of life and death, and such,
And come away concludin': 'Slim,
You ain't changed, all that much.'"
There are perhaps boring people who only read lowbrow material and other pretentious people who only read highbrow literature. These people who are exclusive in their reading habits miss out on the interplay and interconnectedness of literature and life, both highbrow and lowbrow. The cycle of themes and stories go through a transformation of merit, depending on the intelligence and creativity of the reader. It is the same theme or the same story, yet through some potentially alchemical process the quality is changed, for higher or for lower.
Works Cited
DiBernard, Barbara. Alchemy and Finnegans Wake. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980. 3,137. Print.
Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1971. 23. Print.
"Finnegans Wake Traditional." Traditional Irish Music. Rod Smith, 27 APR 2010. Web. 27 Apr 2010.
Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the WIllows. New York: Dell Publishing, 1969. 70. Print.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: The Viking Press, 1969. 351,607. Print.
Kittredge, William, and Annick Smith. "Reincarnation." The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology. Seattle: Falcon Press, 1992. Print.
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