FINNEGANS WAKE
107
the great mother-"the turfhrown
mum~y"-is
surging down on
both of them to take them in her embrace. Because of this destruc–
tion of his original unity the First Man must take on all the innu–
merable forms that history will impose on him, and the episode
closes with the dancing footsteps and the trilling voice of Anna
Livia-the mother of heroes and men.
With the famous Anna Livia Plurahelle episode, we
com~
to
the end of what in Vico is the Theocratic period, when men were
engaged in making their gods out of their readings of the universe.
All
the symbols here are of the elemental forces. The two washer–
women on either hank of the Liffey represent organic and inorganic
nature, life and death, wrangling between them over the flux of
human history that rolls indifferently on toward its goal. At the end
the one will he turned into an elm and the other into a stone. The
Hill
of Howth, overlooking Dublin hay, stands as the symhof of
male permanence. As in Proust's "Overture", the episode includes
nearly all the themes and motifs that will he elaborated in the suc–
ceeding parts; the river holds in precipitation, so to speak, all the
figures and events that will rise to its surface with the passage of
the generations.
Beyond this point there will he no effort in these notes to
proceed. It is reasonable to suppose that the next two parts will
bear some kind of significant correspondence to the Vician cycle.
Part II opens with descriptions of the Ice Age and the Flood,
which suggests that we are picking up the thread at a moment when
mankind has so doomed itself that it has to start all over again. It
concludes with the first full statement of the Tristan-Isolde theme,
which is to he so prominent in the third part. The progression
would seem to he from boisterous .heroic action through feudal
romance to the combination of abstract and psychotic preoccupa–
tion with sex of the modern civilized period. It is evident that
Earwicker is reliving his own youth through identification with his
children, who become transformed into all the most cherished
archetypes of strength and beauty that rise up out of the racial
tradition. We will probably have to keep in mind Jung's descrip·
tion of the manner in which by this process we seek to work out for
ourselves in sleep a new equilibrium for our waking life. But just
to
the extent that the hero's actual experience rises to the surface
and becomes involved in the fantasy the language seems to become
