Intermisunderstanding MindsThe First Gospel in Finnegans Wake Roy Benjamin (bio) 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 intermis-understanding 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 [End Page 221] (up), their pater familias” (FW 386.13), correspond to a conflict within the gospel itself. As Wainwright points out, there is a dual tendency in Matthew both to promote “women’s inclusion” in the life of the growing spiritual community, and to affirm the more exclusive “patriarchal familial structures” (Wainwright 339). The former tendency is dramatically presented in the genealogical table that opens the gospel. The first line of Matthew—“The book of the Genealogy of Jesus Christ” (1.1)4—is rendered in the Wake as “the leabhour of my generations!” (FW 484.29–30). The list is notable for its recognition of the role of women (“Tamar” [1.3], “Rahab” [1.5], “Ruth” [1.5], and “the wife of Uriah” [1.6] [Bathsheba]) in the genealogical endeavor that produced the Messiah. Along these lines, Joyce uses the Irish word for book (“I leabhar: book”5 to suggest both the painful labor of women in bringing forth the generations, and the erotic element (liebe hour: love hour), which is antiseptically removed from the joyless list of patrilineal “begats.” Wainwright goes on to examine how this challenge to patriarchal supremacy is later suppressed and “incorporated into patriarchal structures and androcentric perspectives” (Wainwright 162) by redactors who favored the latter view. The incorporation, however, was only partially successful. This idea is hinted at in the Wake when HCE appears in bed with ALP in the guise of “Matt. Male partly masking female” (559.22). While in the more traditional genealogical tables that affirm the patriarchal view of marriage “the woman as simply the means of reproduction is rendered invisible” (Wainright 62), in Matthew’s list she appears intermittently through the masking narrative of patriarchal domination. Joyce elaborates on the first gospel’s theme of inclusion when a Wakean voice, which stretches “from sea to sea,” is revealed to be “Matt speaking!” (FW 388.30). Matthew’s delivery of “the grandest gloriaspanquost universal howldmoutherhibbert lectures” (388.28–9) envisions both a new role for women and a new trend toward the universal. The reference to the suffragette leader Sylvia Pankhurst accords with the first gospel’s promotion of the right of women to partake in theological discourse, examine the scriptures, and receive the benefits of the kingdom...