The Prankquean and the Localization of Legend

Abstract

The Prankquean and the Localization of Legend Vincent Deane (bio) Time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of my book. ... Yet the elements are exactly what any novelist might use: man and woman, birth, childhood, night, sleep, marriage, prayer, death. ... There is nothing paradoxical about this. ... Only I am trying to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose. ... Did you ever read Laurence Sterne ...?1 The story of the prankquean and Jarl van Hoother is one of the most widely analyzed passages in Finnegans Wake and it is easy to see why. Coming near the beginning of the book (FW 21.05-29.36), it is a manageably short and self-contained set piece. Even if we cannot gloss many of the words we are carried along by what has all the appearances of a racy anecdote full of tart exchanges between its leading characters. Unlike the 'bluddle filth' (FW 10.08-9) of the 'Museyroom' episode that was written at the same time (FW 8.09-10.23), the mysteries of the prankquean story's content are offset by a reassuringly graspable form and a narrative that sticks fairly closely to its original plot, which is more than can be said for the supine meanderings of the mistress Kathe. Yet it seems to me that some of the most important aspects of the story and its characters have been insufficiently dealt with by previous commentators. At the local level, there are the names of those involved. We have a quite satisfactory explanation for the jiminies (Latin gemini, twins),2 a partial one for Tristopher and Hilary (why 'Tristopher'?),3 but what about the names given to the prankquean and van Hoother? Why does the prankquean urinate each time she visits Jarl van Hoother's keep? Or does she? And why does Jarl van Hoother defecate at the end of the story? Or does he? Readers might well imagine that such matters, along with the prankquean's riddle, which has been dyed with countless hues and slipped under all manner of microscopes, would have been fairly well exhausted by now, but some of the most simple [End Page 30] and basic elements have not been explained. At a more general level I hope to throw some new light on the function of the story within Book I, Chapter 1 and against the larger framework of Finnegans Wake as a whole. Readers of the Wake are often rightly suspicious of the use of Joyce's manuscripts and notebooks as tools for exegesis. Too often this leads to a reduction of the richly ambiguous and allusive text of the book to a Skeleton Key-like narrative, or to the application of otherwise irretrievable glosses to words and passages within the book. I hope to avoid these pitfalls. Through a detailed account of the way that Joyce built up the episode, my intention is to make more visible the different metaphorical layers that he has superimposed in the finished text; if I privilege some of these layers it is not to deny the role of the others. Most of the notebook-based material will be self-evident. Work in Progress 1923-6 By the time he started writing the 'prankquean', Joyce had written all the chapters of Book I except the first and sixth; the 'Four Watches of Shaun', which make up Book III; as well as 'The Triangle' (also known as 'the geometry lesson'), which forms part of Book II, Chapter 2 (FW 282.05-304.04). In the process he had gradually arrived at the five members of the Earwicker family in Chapelizod through a complicated and extremely varied series of sketches derived from myth, history, and popular culture. The Mark-Tristan-Isolde triangle was the starting point for HCE, Issy, and the idea of a rebellious, treacherous son figure, as well as the location of the family home in Chapelizod. The Mark aspect of HCE, which had already been prefigured in Joyce's very first sketch for his new book — a portrait of Roderick O'Conor, 'the last preelectric King of all Ireland' (see FW 380.12-13) — was further developed by means...