The matter of (with) Finnegans Wake

Thus begins James Joyce's last work, figuratively and thematically in midstream. The sinuous sentence, the swerving phrase, continues a journey: by water, by bodily fluid, by verbal fluency. If we, the readers, are encompassed in the ambiguous 'brings us', then we can begin to understand why the voice of that opening sounds so like the narration of a tour guide. For we have no way of knowing where we, as readers, are situated in this opening. Are we on a boat in the river Liffey in Dublin, or are we inside a human body; are we at the beginning of time, or in the eternal present of every human utterance? The opening of Finnegans Wake drops us, without map, clock, compass, glossary, or footnotes, into an unknown verbal country, and the voice of the tour guide, alas, speaks their language rather than ours, although we catch enough cognates to keep from drowning altogether in that verbal stream. The role of that tour guide is, in a sense, duplicated by the enterprise of this essay. Surely, no other existing literary work needs a 'guide' more sorely than James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, with its strange language, its neologisms, its generic ambiguity, the obscurity of its allusions, the mysterious status of its speech.

John Calvin was born on July 10, 1509 in the small French town of Noyon about sixty miles north-east of Paris, and died on May 27, 1564 in Geneva, an independent city-state whose common interests increasingly lay with the major cities of Switzerland. Noyon would remain a fairly unimportant place, but the fact that Calvin was a Frenchman - originally Jean Cauvin by name - is integral to understanding his role in church history. This made him an outsider in Geneva, but paradoxically it was his achievement, far more than anyone else's, that promoted Geneva to a city of European stature. Most of Calvin's adult career was spent in Geneva, from 1536 to his death, with a break during 1538-41. Prior to his time, it was a place of modest size with scant claim to distinction. It had no university nor leading light of the new learning of Renaissance humanism, it housed no major industries or finance enterprise, it was home to no significant printing press and wielded little or no political or military clout. It was, however, a regional trade center and not far from routes carrying traffic of all kinds between northern and southern Europe.

It was the Reformation, formally accepted by the citizen assembly in1536 before Calvin’s arrival, which would make Geneva internationallyinfluential.

Academic accounts of the differences between eighteenth-century and Romantic poetry are often over-stated, sometimes accepting on trust self-interested narratives of the renaissance of a pure poetry of imagination and feeling such as Wordsworth's 'Essay, Supplementary to the Preface' (1815). The rebirth of 'pure poetry' was being declared as early as Joseph Warton's Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (1756), and even some decades before. Warton wrote against satire and what he saw as the versified morality of the Scriblerians, yet he could still find in Pope's Eloisa to Abelard (1717) at least signs of the raptures of the true poet: 'Poetry, after all, cannot well subsist, at least is never so striking, without a tincture of enthusiasm' (i: 320). Shaun Irlam's recent study of mid-century poetry describes the emergence of a 'poetics of enthusiasm'. Joseph Addison, John Dennis, and Shaftesbury are identified as the critical progenitors and James Thomson and Edward Young the major poets of this cultural transformation. Others that Irlam would include in his line of enthusiasm include Mark Akenside, William Collins, Thomas Gray, Christopher Smart, and Joseph and Thomas Warton.

One of the longstanding stereotypes of British Romanticism features the Romantic poet as a solitary genius, an outcast bard like Blake's Rintrah in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, either communing with Nature in sublime isolation or delving into the inner reaches of the imagination for visionary prophecies of a new millennial order. Exemplified in the vatic utterances of Wordsworth's 'Prospectus' to The Recluse (a fragment first published in his 1814 preface to The Excursion), this model of the Romantic poet gained widespread prevalence through M. H. Abrams's landmark study Natural Supernaturalism. However, more recent scholarship on Romanticism, much of which attends more closely to the social contexts of literary experience, places new emphasis on the group interactions and collaborative dynamics that generated a significant amount of the era's major poetry. Jack Stillinger, for instance, qualifies the Romantic ‘myth of solitary genius’ in his important analyses of the ‘multiple consciousnesses’ in Wordsworth’s Prelude and the various ‘helpers’ involved in the production of Keats’s Isabella (1818).

Since the sixteenth century, the life and thought and works of John Calvin have provided a fertile field for scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including theology, history, linguistics, economics, and political science, to name but a few. Periodically, in order to guide interested researchers through the continually expanding mass of material on Calvin and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Calvinism, various bibliographical survey articles have been prepared. These articles have varied in their comprehensiveness, categories, and their chosen time period. In order not to go over previously charted territory, this contribution will focus on works published since 1990, and will focus on books rather than articles. Those wishing to keep abreast of literature, including articles, on Calvin and Calvinism on a yearly basis, are advised to consult the Calvin bibliography published annually in the November issue of the Calvin Theological Journal. The bibliography, together with other relevant material, are accessible through the Meeter Center's website www.calvin.edu/meeter. Another fine, though now slightly outdated, resource for finding information on Calvin resources is the second volume of Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, edited by William S. Maltby.

In order to provide the most coherent picture possible of recent scholarship,this contribution will begin with a wide lens, pointing out key referenceworks and tools for Calvin scholars, before moving on to primary and secondarysources. Throughout this chapter, it is our contention that Calvinscholars, from whatever discipline, need to take into account the contextof the medieval and early modern world which shaped John Calvin and inwhich he made his mark.

Far more people read Joyce than are aware of it. Such was the impact of his literary revolution that few later novelists of importance in any of the world's languages have escaped its aftershock, even when they attempt to avoid Joycean paradigms and procedures. We are indirectly reading Joyce, therefore, in many of our engagements with the past half century's serious fiction - and the same is true of some not-so-serious fiction, too. Even those who read very few novels encounter the effects of Joyce's revolution every week, if not every day, in television and video, film, popular music, and advertising, all of which are marked as modern genres by the use of Joycean techniques of parody and pastiche, self-referentiality, fragmentation of word and image, open-ended narrative, and multiple point of view. And the unprecedented explicitness with which Joyce introduced the trivial details of ordinary life into the realm of art opened up a rich new territory for writers, painters, and film-makers, while at the same time it revealed the fruitful contradictions at the heart of the realist enterprise itself.

Of course, this momentous cultural shift, which can be said to have altered the way we understand and deploy systems of representation, was not achieved single-handedly and at a stroke by James Joyce. His changing understanding of the way language relates to the world, the work of art to its cultural situation, the commonplace and repetitive in life to the remarkable and the unique, was symptomatic of a wider mutation of thought which had begun before he started writing at the very end of the nineteenth century, and had its complicated roots in the social, economic, and political transformations that occurred before and during his lifetime. But in the field of prose literature, this much broader set of movements found its most potent representative in Joyce, and his own contribution helped to determine the particular form it took in this field.

What do we need to know in order to read Ulysses properly? An intimidating question, perhaps, by which to introduce a notoriously intimidating book. But reading of any kind, whether of Ulysses or of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, never takes place in an entirely blank or virgin mind. Other discourses are always implicated. Unlike Goldilocks, however, Ulysses poses the question of prior knowledge with some urgency because it can make us feel so unknowing, and with such devastating speed, and because sometimes a small bit of information available outside the novel, or inside it but hundreds of pages further on, can just as quickly unravel pages of confusion. One of the questions raised by such difficulties is central to literary studies in general: what is inside the literary object? What lies outside it? Can the border lines be drawn with any certainty? My intention is not to proclaim boundaries, nor to choose between right or proper readings and wrong ones, but only to indicate the kinds of knowledge that Ulysses seems to require. My survey is brief, and hardly exhaustive. It is a preface to the major focus of this essay: what is Ulysses 'about', and how can it be read?

It is not easy to do justice to Calvin's writings in a short article. Most of his writings deal with the Bible and the church, which is not surprising. As a reformer, Calvin devoted himself to the church's reformation. In this he let himself be guided by the Bible. The Bible and then the church - that was the right order for Calvin, and that is the order that we will be following in this chapter.

Calvin thought that people needed to have at their disposal a good translation of the Bible and he did everything to make that possible. He also spent much of his energy in explaining the Bible. Most of his writings are a direct fruit of this effort. Other writings can be connected to his devotion to church reformation of which his fight against heresy, sects, and other abuses is also a part. Some of his writings about doctrinal subjects like free will, election, and the Trinity are also significant. However, my decision to focus on the Bible and church means that those subjects will only be mentioned at the end of the article.

CALVIN AS A HUMANISTIC JURIST

Calvin’s earliest writing has nothing to do with theology. On the adviceof his father who in 1527 became involved in a conflict with the cathedralchapter of Noyon, Calvin studied law in Paris at the Collège de Montaigu.

Anyone, whether historian or theologian, who writes on John Calvin is likely to venture judgments concerning his place in Christian theology. Over the years the judgments have varied widely. Calvin's admirer Benjamin B. Warfield, for example, argued that the man the Roman Catholic Church judged a heretic actually marked a fresh epoch in the history of the catholic dogma of the Trinity. A less generous opinion, made from another ecclesiastical corner, is that Calvin was at best a mere epigone of Martin Luther, at worst a debaser of pure Reformation doctrine. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was said that Calvin represented a certain “atrophy” or “degeneration” of the idea of Protestantism (Ferdinand Kattenbusch), and in the mid-twentieth century one of the most widely used textbooks of church history in Germany could still present Calvin's theology in the form of six “deviations” from the theology of Luther (Kurt Dietrich Schmidt). Yet another well-known estimate from the last century judged Calvinism a more creative intellectual force in the modern world than Lutheranism but placed Calvin himself, with Luther, on the side of the “old Protestantism,” which only tried to give a new answer to an old medieval question, “What must I do to be saved?” (Ernst Troeltsch).

There are many kinds of modernism - one has only to think of the differences between Picasso and Kandinsky, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, or Joyce and Kafka to appreciate this. The number of books and articles devoted to attempts at defining the term is huge. In what follows I wish to see Joyce's relationship to what is often loosely called the 'modernist movement' in a fairly simple way. First of all I look at his becoming 'modernist' in the most obvious sense - that is, by moving beyond his nineteenth-century predecessors. I then sketch his relationships to others who had diversely managed the same feat, and thus opened up an extraordinary avant-garde market-place of competing styles. Joyce made a contribution to this critical moment so great that he posed an acute problem to his successors: after Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, what types of expression in writing could possibly remain undiscovered?

Modernist artists at the beginning of the century were to a large degree moved to this unprecedented freedom and confidence in stylistic experiment by what they saw as radically new ideas, current in that period, concerning consciousness, time, and the nature of knowledge, which were to be found in the work of Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud, Einstein, Croce, Weber, and others. And these ideas contested in a dramatic manner the beliefs of the older generation.

John Calvin's Institutes have earned him the title of “the preeminent systematician of the Protestant Reformation.” His reputation as an intellectual, however, is often seen apart from the vital spiritual and pastoral context in which he wrote his theology. For Calvin, theological understanding and practical piety, truth, and usefulness are inseparable. Theology first of all deals with knowledge - knowledge of God and of ourselves - but there is no true knowledge where there is no true piety.

Calvin’s concept of piety (Lat. pietas) is rooted in the knowledge of Godand includes attitudes and actions that are directed to the adoration andservice of God. In addition, his pietas includes a host of related themes,such as filial piety in human relationships, and respect and love for theimage of God in human beings. Calvin’s piety is evident in people whorecognize through experiential faith that they have been accepted in Christand engrafted into his body by the grace of God. In this “mystical union,” theLord claims them as his own in life and in death. They become God’s peopleand members of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. This relationshiprestores their joy of fellowship with God; it re-creates their lives.

James Joyce's writing is famously, notoriously difficult, especially his two epic works, Ulysses, sometimes described as the book everyone claims to have read but no one actually has, and Finnegans Wake, whose difficulties have led to innumerable reading groups formed for the sometimes lifelong task of reading and puzzling over the book, a page or two at a time. A famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe exhibits the paradox of Joyce's fame as a writer, coupled with the complexities of his writing: Monroe, wearing a swimsuit, sits in a park absorbed in Ulysses. The contradictory conjunction of movie star with great book in the picture is worth, as they say, at least a thousand words - how could the icon of mass celebrity culture, and a supposed 'dumb blonde' to boot, undertake the reading of the twentieth century's supreme work of high literature? It turns out that Marilyn Monroe did succeed in reading at least parts of the book, and the fact that she wanted to make the effort says as much for the celebrity of Joyce and his novel as it does for the intellectual aspirations of the star. In fact, the paradox of the photograph lies not its seeming encounter between opposite poles of modern culture, but in its proof that James Joyce's rarefied literary works are also themselves artifacts of mass culture. Any reader or student approaching them for the first time has Marilyn Monroe as an inspiration, and as quirky evidence that Joyce's writing, like Joyce the author, is as much a part of mass culture or consumer culture as we all are.

It is only comparatively recently, as a result of realignments in the disciplines of literary studies and history, that the centrality of the theatre in Georgian culture and society has been properly recognized. As the pre-eminent forum of entertainment, art and instruction, the status of which was affirmed by royal authority in the form of patents or licences to perform, and by parliamentary scrutiny in the form of censorship, the stage loomed large in the Georgian cultural landscape, often literally so. The imposing neo-classical edifices of Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres, employing thousands of people, were unmistakable landmarks in Regency London, as indeed were the so-called 'minor' theatres across the Thames such as the Royal Coburg which competed with Covent Garden and Drury Lane in scale and opulence.1 As the memoirs, fiction, and visual art of the period suggest, the experience of theatre meant much more than what was happening on the stage, striking though that was with its spectacular scenery and effects, and the towering presence of star actors. It also entailed the drama of the audience’s self-representation, ranging from the crush of bodies outside the pit door, the display of dandies and prostitutes in the lobbies, to the monarch’s appearances in the royal box. The role of Covent Garden and Drury Lane in metropolitan life was emulated, with varying degrees of success, by many smaller theatres throughout the British isles.

Calvin was born on July 10, 1509, in Picardy in northern France, farm country marked by strong religious and ecclesiastical ties. His birthplace, Noyon, along with Amiens, Beauvais, Laon, and Senlis, belonged to the cathedral cities of this province, rich in tradition, which also possessed important abbeys such as Corbie and Péronne. The Picards made up one of the four recognized “nations” among the students of the University of Paris, and Calvin was proud throughout his life to belong to this elite. Even his character largely matched the “Picardian”:intelligent, logical, sensibly diligent, morally serious, and devoted to freedom and order - as well as overly sensitive, self-confident, and irritable. At the time of his birth, both a religiosity bordering on mysticism and a growing openness to humanist ideas were determining the spiritual climate of the land.

Calvin’s father was a financial administrator of the cathedral chapterof Noyon. His mother, who died early, was a truly humble woman aboutwhom little is known other than her zeal for pilgrimages. Calvin had fourbrothers and two sisters, most of whom are later found in the reform camp.Calvin admired his somewhat authoritarian father and profited from thisaspiring man who tried to raise himself from a humble background to movingin educated circles, even that of the elegant family of de Hangest-Genlis.According to his father’s wishes, John was intended to become a priest. Hisstudies were financed by generous ecclesiastical benefices that soon madeit possible for him to enjoy instruction in famous Parisian schools.

As a theologian and pastor, Calvin addressed political ideas and issues more from necessity than from direct inclination or intention. The proper relationship of the church to civil government inevitably became a major concern for each of the reformers. So Calvin was obliged to work out, at least in outline form, the foundational political ideas he perceived to be generated by Holy Scripture. Calvin's chapter “On Civil Government” from the last book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion remains his most explicit statement. But just as important for seeing fully his framework for thinking politically are his earlier pages on issues of church polity, his earlier chapter “On Christian Freedom,” his extensive commentaries on scriptural references to political questions, and, of course, his many tracts and letters.

By exploring these various sources,we can form some coherent answersto the following key political questions: (1) What is the source and justificationfor civil government among human beings? (2) What is the purpose andproper role of civil government? (3) How ought civil government accomplishits rightful aims? and (4) Under what circumstances, if any, mightChristians under government properly disobey or resist that government?