“Bound to a Wheel”: James Joyce, Joanna Newsom, and the Art of a Loopy Line
When Joanna Newsom’s album Divers first appeared in 2015, many people were quick to point out that it was a loop, that the last song ends on a “half word” that is completed by the first word of the first song.
Listeners then uncovered a nod from the artist to another great work with a similar looping structure—James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The last song on Divers contains the line “a way a lone a last a loved a long”, which is lifted directly from the last line of the Wake. The reference is certainly intentional—she mentions Joyce by name in her liner notes:
For liberties taken, my apologies to Messrs. Smith, Shelley, Streeton, Washington, V. Gogh, and Joyce.
[Note: For an audio version of these notes, please check out my narration here.]
Some background on Finnegans Wake
I can’t pretend to unpack all the possible ways in which Divers and Finnegans Wake might intersect, especially given how dead-set Joyce was on his goal of keeping scholars busy with the layers of meaning (as a way of “ensuring one’s immortality”). We’ll just focus on a few key areas. Also, I don’t want you to feel at a loss if you haven’t read the Wake, because you probably have better things to do with your hard-earned free time.
To illustrate three key themes in Joyce’s book, we can look to the passage that culminates with the line Newsom borrows for Divers. Those themes are: cycles, family, and the fall. If you get caught on any of the words in the quote below, don’t worry—sound them out (the book is actually very melodical, and you may hear other words that sound like what you see) or just skip over. It’s meant to be the language of dreams, with all their disjointedness and ephemerality. But like Joanna Newsom says about her songs, you don’t have to understand it all to appreciate it.
O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the
— Finnegans Wake p.627–628
Echoes of those 3 themes come out in this passage and in many others throughout the book.
- Cycles, Seasons, Repetition: “O bitter ending!”, “First. […] End here.”, “My leaves have drifted from me.”, “Finn, again!”, and of course the unfinished sentence that wraps back to the first word of the book, “riverrun”.
- Family: “I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father”, “Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair!”
- The Fall: “humbly dumbly”, and “bearing down on me now under whitespread wings […] I sink […] only to washup” (the reference to Icarus here is strong).
This passage is part of the beautiful monologue spoken by the mother, Anna, in an extended metaphor about the cycle of water, beginning as a drop in a cloud (“First we feel. Then we fall.”) and ending as part of a river rushing out to the sea. Evaporation and rainfall.
In other places, I’ve written a decent amount about how Divers is filled with imagery and references to cycles, circles, spirals, etc. One of the famous Finnegans Wake scholars, Joseph Campbell, who was a student of mythology and symbolism — and source of inspiration for Star Wars, shared some rich thoughts on the circle in his conversation with Bill Moyers (see the clip below). I love that his interviewer starts off with, “Your friend Jung…” when referring to the famous psychologist Carl Jung, who said that “the circle is one of the great primordial images of mankind.”
When asked about why the circle became so important, Campbell says:
Well, because it’s experienced all the time. You experience it in the day, in the year…And you experience it leaving home, going on your adventure, hunting or whatever it may be, and coming back to home. And there’s a deeper one, also… the mystery of the womb and the tomb. When people are buried, it’s for rebirth. That’s the origin of the burial idea. You put back into the womb of Mother Earth for rebirth.
The title of the book (“wake”) itself is a reference to that death/birth cycle and a playful nod to resurrection. Finnegan is a man who falls off a ladder and dies. At his funeral wake, the mourners knock whisky on him, which wakes him up.
I’ve also said a few things about falling, and even about Humpty Dumpty. When Larry King asked her about what the title “Divers” means, Newsom replied: “It’s sort of describing the narrators or lead…protagonist or subject of all of the songs. There’s some character in each song that is engaged in some version of diving, falling, or … you know, diving a plane, falling through water, falling through space.”
The third theme, family, is one area that I haven’t delved into much—yet it’s a frequent topic for both Joyce and Newsom.
In the closing passage of Finnegans Wake, we see the line blur between the mother and the daughter. She speaks of her “cold mad feary father” and evokes a memory of her “taddy”, in what could be seen as a return to daughterhood or a passing on between generations. Without exploring that blurring too much (others have, no doubt), I’m reminded of the importance of matrilineal descent in Joanna Newsom’s earlier song: “And they will recognize all the lines of your face / in the face of the daughter of the daughter of my daughter.”
The first song of Divers, “Anecdotes”, has a coda filled with circle imagery (kettle, table, sun, and the shape made by the family) which also speaks of a daughter:
— and daughter, when you are able,
come down and join! The kettle’s on,
and your family’s round the table.
Will you come down, before the sun is gone?
Hearing things
Of course, the proximity of “daughter” and “sun” brings to mind the homophone “son”. Language — and the sound of language — are a fascination both writers share. We’ve seen before how Newsom layers meaning upon meaning within just one word like “undarked”, and creates new words like “simulacreage”.
Joyce, too, famously pushes words to their limits in this book especially. Finnegans Wake uses creative spelling, familiar sayings, and portmanteaus of words to make something new. He also mixes in foreign expressions and word spellings where they can layer on additional meaning. Many times, it can be easier to make sense of the words spoken out loud than to try to decipher the strings of words in your head. Anthony Burgess (the author of A Clockwork Orange) describes it well, tying the language back to the premise of the Wake as a dream-world book:
[…] the story is inseparable from the language in which Joyce tells it. It is the language, not the theme, which makes for difficulty, and the difficulty is intentional. The purpose of a dream is to obscure truth, not reveal it: reality comes in flashes of lightning out of dark clouds of fantasy, but it is the fantasy which it is the author’s duty to record. Joyce is presenting us with a dream, not with a piece of Freudian or Jungian dream-exegesis. Interpretation is up to us: he makes up the riddles, not the answers.
He goes on, mentioning the familiar egg (it’s worth remembering that Through the Looking-Glass is also a dream experience).
But, as with so much of Joyce, a key to the language awaits us in popular literature: the verbal technique comes straight out of Lewis Carroll. HCE [one of the main characters] is identified with that great faller Humpty Dumpty, and it is Humpty Dumpty who explains the dream-language of “Jabberwocky”. What Humpty Dumpty calls “portmanteau-words” -like “slithy”, which means “sly” and “lithe” and “slimy” and “slippery” all at the same time are a very legitimate device for rendering the quality of dreams. In dreams, identities shift and combine, and words ought to mirror this. Waking life tells us that out of a buried body new life will spring, but it is our custom to work out the life-death cycle in terms of a logical proposition. The language of Finnegans Wake takes a short cut in the rendering of such notions, and the word “cropse” sums up in one syllable a whole resurrection-sermon. Waking language is made out of time and space, the gaps between the substances that occupy the one and the events that occupy the other; in dreams there are no gaps.
(In his example, Burgess is referring to how “the cropse of our seedfather” can both be read as the life-filled “crops” or the cold, rotting “corpse” of the father.)
In another place in the text, Joyce combines references to both German and Swedish words, all while maintaining a layer of meaning in English. Just as Newsom plays on the word “son”, we see Joyce employ a homophone of “daughter”:
Now is it town again, londmear of Dublin! And off coursse the toller, ples the dotter of his eyes with her […]
— Finnegans Wake p. 372
The spelling dotter is Swedish for “daughter”. The word Eidotter is German for “eggyolk”—again evoking the cycle of birth as well as Humpty Dumpty’s fall. But perhaps what stands out most are the English phrases we hear, “dotter of his ‘i’s” and “daughter of his eyes”.
When Joanna Newsom’s song “Make Hay” was released, people were likely scratching their heads about the line “dotted her eyes”, especially if they googled it (Newsom once told the NY Times “I need to use Google more”). I’ve explored some other readings of that expression, but would argue that in light of the connections between Divers and Finnegans Wake, it’s highly likely that Newsom was aware of the reference to this Joycean line, too.
Like Charley Parkhurst, Joyce wore an eye patch.
Seeing things
The irony must not have been lost on James Joyce. He had trouble seeing with his physical eyes, and yet he was able to see what most people couldn’t.
Divers, too, stands as a reminder of things we’re blind to. Again and again, the songs bring to light many strong, inspiring, and unsung women. Along with films like “Hidden Figures”, projects like Amy Padnani’s Overlooked and The Paris Review’s Feminize Your Canon, Newsom’s work is helping to raise awareness of the debt we owe these women.
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that after following this thread through some twists and turns, we find yet another woman hidden in plain sight. Her name was Lucia. She was named after the patron saint of eyesight, who also serves as a guide in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Lucia’s father, James Joyce, would have been aware of these references, particularly with his history of eye problems. And by the time he was writing his book Finnegans Wake, she would periodically be called on to take dictation for his book, to dot his i’s and cross his t’s.
James Joyce thought his daughter was clairvoyant, and admired how she created new words. Some have argued that she was an inspiration for the language of the Wake. She trained as a dancer with some of the best teachers in avant-garde dance, and had relationships with both Samuel Beckett and Alexander Calder. Lucia Joyce’s story, though, is a tragic one. She was prone to outbursts, and after periods being taken in and out of hospitals (and in and out of straightjackets), she was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and eventually institutionalized for the remainder of her life. She wasn’t buried with the rest of her family in Switzerland, but instead “interred with other daughters” in England. A lot of her letters and writing has been destroyed since her death.
Before “the girl who used to dance” was locked up, one of the doctors Joyce took his daughter to see was none other than Carl Jung (who had written a mixed review of Ulysses). Jung believed that the patient and her father’s mental situations were linked, though different. What made James a genius writer was what made Lucia a schizophreniac. The metaphor he used recalls both that final, water-filled passage of Finnegans Wake and Newsom’s explanation of her album’s title. Jung described James and Lucia Joyce in this way:
two people going to the bottom of a river,
one falling and the other diving.
Believing things
I’ll leave it to each of you to take what you want from this exploration. There are certainly times where we venture out onto thinner ice, but maybe it’s worth the experience. Recently, I looked back at an interview Joanna Newsom did with the Guardian, where she talked about how she feels when creating the lyrics to her songs. What she said resonated with my process of exploring her songs. There are some hunches I follow that peter out, and then there are others—while they might not seem so plausible to begin with—that end up leading to fascinating discoveries.
Here’s how she responded to the interviewer calling her creative process “research”:
I don’t know I’d describe what I’m doing leading up to that song as “research” […] For me, it’s more having a hunch and following through on the hunch. Having an almost religious faith in the fact that certain things are connected and I have to lasso them all into the same place. Research: that word feels so cold to me in a way. Because it’s all very compulsive and very emotion-driven.
I’m aware that what I write can come across as convoluted at times, and I apologize if that’s not to everyone’s liking, because my intention is to applaud the incredible work that this artist has done. At the end of the day, what I’m really hoping to convey in the twists and turns is some part of the experience I’ve gone through—following those hunches, and believing that the connections will fall into place.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for taking the time to go on the journey with me!
Read more…
If your curiosity is piqued, why not check out some other thoughts I’ve shared about Joanna Newsom’s Divers—and some of the themes discussed above?
