Intermisunderstanding Minds: The First Gospel in Finnegans Wake

Abstract

If, as H. G. Wells said, Joyce’s mind was ‘‘obsessed by a monstrous system of contradictions’’ (JJ 608), it is likely that he would have had a special affinity for the first gospel. Matthew is the most self-contradictory of the evangelists. He is, by turns, pro-Jewish and anti-Jewish, pro-gentile and anti-gentile, inclusive of women and exclusive of women. He represents Jesus as simultaneously anarchic and authoritarian, merciful and merciless, an upholder and a transgressor of the law. Elaine Wainwright observes that the gospel is marked by ‘‘[t]ension, ambiguity and anomaly,’’1 and this characteristic has produced a wide range of conflicting interpretations. One of the more radical attempts to account for the anomalous tension is Ernest Abel’s claim that there were actually three Matthews: the apostle himself who wrote down the sayings of Jesus, and two redactors—M (1) and M (2)—who wrote at cross-purposes (so to speak).2 The Wake appears to be making a similar assertion when it observes ‘‘that Father Matt Hughes looked taytotally threbled’’ (FW 330.5–6) (totally tripled). In any case, the title of Abel’s article—‘‘Who Wrote Matthew?’’—bears a family resemblance to the Wake’s self-referential question ‘‘who in hallhagal wrote the durn thing anyhow’’ (107.36– 108.1).3 Abel’s claim that what we subsume under the name of Matthew is actually the combined effort of ‘‘separate individuals, working independently of one another, and each writing with a different purpose and audience in mind’’ (Abel 138) reads like a description of the Wake’s letter, which is creased and fissured by ‘‘the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators’’ (118.24–6). The contrasting portrayals of Matthew in the Wake as both ‘‘poor Matt, the old perigrime matriarch’’ (FW 392.19–20) and ‘‘poor Matt Gregory