106
PARTISAN REVIEW
Sygstryggs to nine, more holding with the Ryan vogt it was Dane
to pfife".
Mter the account of the Fall just mentioned, nothing less than
the whole terrain of human history lies before us. Part I is a treat·
ment of man in his first stage of heroic fatherhoQd; Earwicker has
heard the thunder-clap--the voice of authority that is here some–
times identified with the police--and settles down to the relatively
more stable life of the hearth. He has fallen from the state of grace
as a result of the infamous charges that have been made against
him. These are hinted at in the blasphemous "Ballad of Persse
O'Reilly". It is clear that Earwicker is one with all the heroes who
have ever walked the earth; the different epithets by which he has
been known are listed on pages 71-72. Because with the sense of
sin men ceased to copulate in the open fields but hid their shame in
the caves that were the first homes, the All-Father of the race must
submit to marriage. Not until this event can we say that history
hegins; for the woman-principle is also the time-principle. Man,
the idea of Man, is no more than an eternal abstraction, which
would be condemned to sterility if it did not become united with
time, which is history.
In the hilarious fifth episode there is much description of a
book which is at once the book that we are reading, since Ear–
wicker is actually writing it in his sleep, and also the book of the
e~rth-a
"daybook".
It
would seem, however, that the author of
this book is not Earwicker but one Shem the Penman, who is vili–
fied at length in a later episode and whose career bears remarkable
points of resemblance to that of Joyce himself. This is a conundrum
that begins to approach solution only when we apply some of the
Cabalist-Gnostic symbolism which Joyce probably acquired from
Blake and which figures so largely in
Ulysses.
For here Earwicker
would seem to represent Adam-Caedmon, the original and perfect
man, from whose dismembered body have come the multiple
phenomena of the earth. Shem is that principle of reason which is
responsible for the separation of the Many from the One.
If
he
is reviled by the Father, it is because he has preferred the con–
sciousness of existence to existence itself, knowledge to life. He is
guilty of the primal impiety. Like his Biblical prototype, who was
punished for looking on his father's nakedness, he is branded as a
"Pariah, cannibal Cain''. Because of this betrayal and irreverence,
