The Mar of Murmury (FW266.18?267.11)

Abstract

Me Lemory in Finnegans Wake is if anything the opposite of Proust's luminous remembrance of times that are lost.1 It is the perils and not the triumph of that is the theme. An elegiac speaker starts to speak the phrase To the (503.27) but then has to break off. So elusive is that invoking it makes the speaker forget what he is about to say. truth slips out, and unfailing comes out as memory. Unavailing is discouraging, but, worse, the veil in unaveiling brings in the the veil drawn by time and the (still vexed) question of suppressed or veiled memories. Even if they are unveiled, they will be seen only in teasing peeks, the mode of striptease, as in Salome's dance (497.33). This elusiveness of in the Wake justifies the pun remembrandts (403.10) since the objects of in the Wake are only just glimpsed in an accidental light and emerge for a moment from darkness like the dramatic scene (It is Rape of Proserpina2\) in a Rembrandt painting. Retrospection in Joyce is essential yet imperfect and obscure. One tries to place the object of in space and time; but here those coordinates (at best a memory schemado ? 240.07) appear only blurrily. Space is an and time an weed: The mar of murmury mermers to the ear, uncharted rock, evasive (254.18-19). sea of memory, its features a rock unmapped and a weed unclassified, is almost a void, with Shaun and Shem, space and time, the usual coordinates, weathered almost beyond recognition. Remembrance is not so much silent as it is muffled, and it is hardly sweet; if it occurs in sessions, the court is unruly. Shakespeare and Proust-Moncrieff imply that recollection can be coherent and orderly. But in the Wake, the questing mind gropes in the dark and perceives only darkly: The mar of murmury mermers to the indistinct reports of what was, and the murmured memories mar the ear (a supplement to the mind's eye, the site at which Hamlet perceives the past, I.ii.186). As in Proust, memories come involun-