Building Metonymic Meaning with Joyce, Deleuze, and Guattari

Abstract

HCE serves at least a double function with regard to cities and citybuilding in Finnegans Wake. Geert Lernout aptly describes him as “the builder of cities who is interred in the landscape.”1 As Tim Finnegan, HCE is a builder; he carries a hod in order to rise in the world. But as the giant Finn MacCool, he doesn’t so much rise as drop: Stretched out along the river Liffey in his sleep, he forms part of the landscape. What does this double role entail? What are we to make of Joyce’s folding together of disparate meanings in a manner that creates this fusion of the builder and the ground, of the body and its surroundings, of the phenomenon and its situation? What should we do with meaning that is already in the process of becoming different meaning, that is changing before our very eyes? When HCE appears as “Howth Castle and Environs” (FW 3.3), this tells us that he is an environment, specifically the geography of Dublin. He embodies this geography in his manifestation as the “form outlined aslumbered, even in our own nighttime by the sedge of the troutling stream [ . . . ]. Hic cubat edilis” (FW 7.20–3). That this slumbering form relates to Dublin is again indicated when we read that “the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park” (FW 3.20–2). Roland McHugh comments: “If Howth is the head of a sleeping giant, his feet stick up in Phoenix Park.”2 Moreover, the city HCE describes himself as building in chapter III.3 of the Wake may likewise be Dublin. This would make it a city built on and