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PARTISAN REVIEW
and colleague, Horace Taylor, at that time in Zurich, and as Taylor
was an Englishman Joyce supposed that it was a typically English funny
story. Joyce didn't think it was funny at all, nor did I, another English–
man, for that matter, though I forget what it was-something about a
man falling out of a window, I think. Then Joyce went on to tell me
the story of how Buckley shot the Russian general in its original spit
and sawdust taproom Irish idiom, a story which he regarded as ex–
emplifying the exclusively Irish sense of the comic. He retells the story
with baroque exuberance in the dream idiom of
Finnegans Wake,
follow–
ing its manifold implications in the Taff-Shem Butt-Shaun dialogue,
and the metamorphosis the story undergoes furnishes as good an example
as any of the treatment the common stuff of life receives at Joyce's
hands in that composition. Here is the story, in substance, in ordinary
language and, in parentheses, some relevant passages from the Taff-Butt
rendering of it.
Buckley on duty in the trenches before Sevastopol sights a high–
ranking Russian officer coming into the open ("With all his cannonball
wappents. In his raglanrock and his malakoiffed bulbsbyg and his var–
nashed roscians and his cardigans blousejagged and his scarlett man–
chokuffs and his treecoloured camiflag and his perikopendolous gael–
storms."), a general at least, and Buckley notes that he is about to obey
a call of nature. ("Foin duhans! I grandthinked after his obras after
another time about the itch in his egondoom he was legging boldylugged
from some pulversporochs and lyoking for a stooleazy for to nemesis–
plotsch allafranka and for to salubrate himself with an ultradungs
heavenly mass at his base by a surprime pompship....") Now was
the time for Buckley to do his duty as a soldier. There's the enemy.
Whatever he's doing fire at him. But one touch of nature makes the
whole world kin, and Buckley hasn't the heart to shoot a man in just
that hour of need. ("But meac Coolp, Arram of Eirzerum, as I love
our Deer Dirouchy, I confesses without pridejealice when I looked
upon the Saur of all the Haurousians with the weight of his arge fallin
upon him from the travaillings of his tommuck and ruecknased the fates
of a bosser there was fear on me the sons of Nuad for him and it was
heavy it was for me then the way I immingled my Irmenial hairmeier–
ians ammongled his Gospolis fomiliours till, achaura moucreas, I adn't
the arts to....") So far, out of sympathy with a fellow mortal, Buckley
has just looked on and has done nothing. But when he sees the Russian
general claw up a piece of turf to make his parts clean his Irish temper
boils up. He goes mad and ups with his gun and shoots the Russian
general, presumably where Frankie shoots Johnnie in the well known
ballad. ("For when meseemim, and tolfoklokken rolland allover our-
