Gricean Dialogue in Joyce

--- By J. L. S.

I should supply here the famous dialogue in Finnegans Wake, as analysed along Gricean lines by a scholar or two.

Jute: Greetings, Jute!

Mutt: My pleasure.

Jute: Are you deaf?

Mutt: A little hard of hearing.

Jute: But not deaf-mute?

Mutt: Nono, but I stutter.

Jute: What? What’s the matter with you?

Mutt: I have a st-stammer.

Jute: What a ho-ho-horrible thing. How did it happen?

Mutt: At the battle, Sir.

Jute: Whose battle? Where?

Mutt: The inns of Clontarf, where He used to be.

Jute: On that side, your voice is almost inaudible. Come closer so I can see you.

Mutt: I’m hesitant. Up Boru! Boru, usurp! I tremble from wrath in my mind when I remember him!

Jute: One moment. Business is business. Let me for your hesitancy give you a little something. Here’s a silver coin and a piece of oak.

Mutt: It’s him on the coin! How I know the great cloak of Cedric Silkyshag. Old grisly, growler! He was dispatched on that identical spot. Here...where the liberties took place, at the monolith. There where the misses mooned and urinated in the bushes.

Jute: Dispatched, simply because, as Tacitus tells it, he dumped a pile of rubbish onto the soil here.

Mutt: All that rock (that built the city) he dumped by the river.

Jute: Lord almighty! What a babble of noise it must have made?

Mutt: Similar to a bull in the field. Or rooks roaring over the king’s tomb. (He sings) I could talk to him /of the spumy horn/ with the woolly side in/ by the neck of Sutton/did Brian O’Linn.

Jute: Pour boiled oil and raw honey on me if I believe a word from start to finish of your utter damned rot! It’s unheard of and obscene! Good afternoon! I’ll see you damned!

Mutt: I quite agree. But wait a second. Walk a bit round this isle and you shall see the old plain of my ancestors, homefree and ours, where one hears the wail and whimper of the peewee over the salt marshes. There is a city made by the law of this man, where by right of his written decree all was his, from ‘In the beginning’ to the fullstop of our finish. Let Ireland remember, that we are a merging of two races, light and dark, and a little red dog too. Each pushed eastwards in insurgencies and then fell back. Countless lives were lost at this place, they fell like snowflakes, litters of them from aloft, in a western blizzard of a whirlwind. Now they are entombed in the mound, ashes to ashes, earth to earth. Pride, O pride! This is your prize.

Jute: What a stench there must have been!

Mutt: As it was, so let it be. Hereunder they lie. Large by the small, the well-known with the stranger, the babe alone, in the great grand hotel of the mound, a house if you like, forming a mountain on top of Earwicker, all drowned by the ages. All are equal in this mound cemetery that we love.

Jute: All that death!

Mutt: Melded together! From the fierce ocean they came, singing despondently. And into the ancestors’ mound they were swallowed. The earth is nothing but bricks and the remains of human beings. He who understands, can read its story down on all fours. [He sings a spell] One castle, two castle, three castles crumbling/ tell me true the way into Dublin/Hum-bloody-fair. …But say it softly, and be very quiet!

Jute: Why quietly?

Mutt: Because of the giant Earwicker with his wife Anna the fair.

Jute: In the mound?

Mutt: See, this is his Viking grave!

Jute: What?

Mutt: Are you astonished, are you?

Jute: Aye, I am thunderstruck. I’m going mad!

(c) Joyce.

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