The Russian General

You Hurt Him! See, He’s NOT a Machine, 

He’s a MAN — Be MORE Man Than He Is!

“I’m inclined to suspect that Jung was influenced by Joyce, because Jung certainly had the highest regard for “Ulysses”. 

He recommended it as a new Bible for the white race on the grounds that The Bible has warped the development of Western Humanity in certain egotistic directions, and Jung thought the development of the True Self - The Higher Self - required a dose of Oriental thinking and feeling - he said Joyce had brought that into Western literature with “Ulysses”.  

When Finnegan’s Wake started to appear, Jung wrote a comment on it in which he said that ‘This is either Mental Illness, or a degree of Mental Health inconceivable to most people’, and I think Jung finally decided it was a degree of Mental Health inconceivable to most people, because a lot of Jung develops right out of FW, just like a lot of Joseph Campbell did.  

The synchronistic element includes many seeming cases of precognition.  I’m going to do a whole book about this eventually, just to annoy The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, but Joyce has much better credentials as a prophet than Nostradamus does.  

So many things in FW seem to refer to events after 1939, when FW was published.  For instance, the middle chapter of the book, The Story of How Buckley shot The Russian General.

Buckley was a friend of Joyce’s Father who served in The Crimean War, which for Joyce was a symbol of all wars, because it had the word ‘crime’ in it, and Buckley saw A Russian General in The Field, and was going to shoot him, because The Primary Military Rule is ‘Always shoot the highest ranking officer of The Enemy Army’.  

As Buckley was about to shoot, The General took down his pants and sat down to take a crap in The Field, and Buckley, telling The Sory in Dublin pubs as he was (inaudible) to in old age, said ‘It made him look so Human, I couldn’t shoot.’.  

And then The General finished and pulled his pants up again, and he was An Enemy Officer again, and Buckley shot the poor bastard down in his tracks.  

And somehow, to Joyce, this is the symbol of The Fight or The Predicament or The Comedy of Humanity, that The General is Human with his pants down and his ass sticking out, and he’s Not Human with The Uniform on.  

And in telling The Story of How Buckley shot The Russian General, Joyce incorporates all the battles of human history.   

You can find every battle in every history book, The Charge of The Light Brigade, and Bryan Boru fighting The Danes at Clontarf in 1014, the Peloponnesian Wars; there have been long commentaries on all the military histories that Joyce put into that one chapter, together with all the anal jokes of which the English language is capable.  

Joyce seems to have shared Freud’s view that war is anal sadism, and mixed in with this is a running theme about the atoms and if’s, which goes back to the first sentence of the book, “Riverrun past Adam and Eve’s”.  

Eve And Adam are the male and female archetypes that dominate the book, and become all the different male and female combinations.  

And they’re like the Yin and the Yang in the I Ching, they’re also A River and A Mountain as well as a woman and a man, and they seem to be complementary cosmic principles.  

And the ‘atoms and the if’s’ is a pun on the ‘Adam’s and the Eve’s’, the basic Yin and Yang duality, but it also refers to The Uncertainty Principle in atomic physics, atoms and if’s, everything is uncertain on the quantum level, and Joyce has all these quantum puns running through the chapter, not only atom’s and if’s, but ‘blown to atoms’, which takes you back to The Garden of Eden again, and there are “sullied bodies all atom’d”, and then there’s a reference to “nokie-soakie”, followed closely by  a reference to “lipinese long-wage” which is the 'Nipponese language', which is followed by “Sayonara Poke-hole son” which is Nipponese language for  “Farewell Honorable Pookah”, the pookah being a six-foot tall white rabbit who resides in County Kerry and is well-known in Irish folklore.  

But “Sayonara poke-hole son” is also a well known in Norwegian yiddish for “Look at the hunchbacked fool”, and there’s a theme about The Hunchbacked Sailor cheating The Tailor all through that chapter, and The Sailor and The Tailor are like The Two Twins changing places, The Sailor is The Tailor and The Tailor is The Sailor, it’s just an S-T transformation, which is part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the S-T transformations in the Space-Time equations, then there’s The Charge of The Light Barricade, which refers to The Two-Hole Experiment in Quantum Mechanics where Light is both Particles and Waves, and that’s followed by a geranium curtain, which sounds like the flower the geranium but Joyce spells it with a ‘u’ so you’ve got Uranium in there, that’s The Trigger of The Atom Bomb, and it runs all through the chapter, you can find this theme of the atom bombing of Nagasaki, which hadn’t happened yet except in Joyce’s Head.  

And that’s the aspect of FW, as I said, that I’m most interested in these days.