Celtic Unconscious, The by Barlow Richard;

Author:Barlow, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2017-04-05T16:00:00+00:00

“THE PICKTS ARE HACKING THE SAXUMS”

At bedtime the twins “jerry” (FW, 565.10) and “keve” (565.15), versions of Shem and Shaun, respectively, are slightly traumatized by the nocturnal sight of their father’s less than callipygian bare arse. This view becomes Phoenix Park, “Finn his park” (564.8), the site of HCE’s mysterious crime (see Gordon, Plot Summary, 256–67). The mother attempts to calm the boys by reassuring them that they were only “dreamend” (FW, 565.18) or having a “nightmail”:

Sonly all in your imagination, dim. Poor little brittle magic nation, dim of mind! Shoe to me now, dear! Shoom of me! While elvery stream winds seling on for to keep this barrel of bounty rolling and the nightmail afarfrom morning nears.

When you’re coaching through Lucalised, on the sulphur spa to visit, it’s safer to hit than miss it, stop at his inn! The hammers are telling the cobbles, the pickts are hacking the saxums, it’s snugger to burrow abed than ballet on broadway. Tuck in your blank. (565.29–566.1)20

As with the “united states of Scotia Picta” (43.29–30), a link is made here between dreams, or the imagination, and countries in the phrase “magic nation.” Much like Benedict Anderson’s conception of the “imagined community,” the suggestion is that nations are illusory mental constructions. In the same chapter HCE is described as “The old humburgh” (560.7), recalling Hogg’s “odinburgh” (487.9–10) and the earlier passage alluding to Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Further adding to the sense of opposition or doubling, the prose is again set into twinned phrases with “The hammers are telling the cobbles” complementing “the pickts are hacking the saxums.”

The boys are settled in their beds—“burrow abed … Tuck in your blank”—and the song “The Heavens Are Telling the Glories” is sung as a lullaby (McHugh, Annotations, 565). Superficially, the song becomes an image of construction or building. The word “pickt” contains “pick,” and saxum is Latin for “stone.” So, “the Picts are carving the stones”—an activity the historical Picts were constantly engaged in—which tallies with “the hammers are telling the cobbles.”21 However, the lullaby is not as reassuring as the mother intended. Lurking not very far beneath the surface, in keeping with past tweaked occurrences of the word Pict, are disturbing images of ethnic conflict and violence. The “pickts” are “hacking” the “saxums.” Simultaneously suggestive of both construction and destruction, this possesses signature Wakean double—or multiple—connotations. The famous letter, which will bring some relief, has not yet arrived, but “the nightmail afarfrom morning nears.”

Why then do the Saxons replace the Scots as the opposition of the Picts at this critical juncture? Chapter III.iv, as John Gordon points out, is a “home-coming” of sorts (Plot Summary, 254). There is a feeling in the chapter that events are drawing to a close as the family prepares to bunk down in bed. The parents check on the young girl on page 561 and on the boys on page 562. In this context the appearance of the Saxons arrives at a time when past exertions are supposedly over and everything is settled.

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