Only one town, perhaps, could rival Trieste in its claim as the ideal host for this discussion: Dublin—not Dublin, Ireland, but rather Dublin, Georgia, USA.
This city, founded on the River Oconee in Laurens County by Irish emigrant Peter Sawyer, finds its way into the
Wake’s first complete sentence, whose second clause reads: “nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time” (FW 3.06–9).
Topsawyer’s rocks are a formation on the Oconee’s banks;
“rocks” also means both testicles and money.
“Ochone!” is the Gaelic for “alas!”
The image here is of mothers wailing as their sons, fruits of their father’s swollen loins, depart across the waters in an effort to win wealth and status in the new world, to swell their coffers.
Campbell and Robinson, always keen to emphasize the “story” of the
Wake, interpret the passage thus: “A successful son of HCE emigrates from East to West, as his father before him. Settling in America, he begets a large progeny and bequeaths to them a decent, even gorgeous prosperity.”
Joyce’s own son was, of course, Giorgio.
Downstream of Topsawyer’s Rocks, the bilogic and the economic blur together, much as they do in Shakespear’s sonnets, where “from fairest creatures we desire increase,” “increase” being both economic profit and physical reproduction. What is “doublin their mumper”? Rocks: balls, wealth, world in the sense of place and poplulace. The town motto of Dublin, Georgia, is “Doubling all the time,”
and Joyce keeps doubling Dublin into “Dyoublong,”
“durlbin,” and “Dybbling” (FW 13.04, 19.12, 29.22).
—Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy,
“Of Chrematology: Joyce and Money”
in
Derrida and Joyce Text and Contexts,
Edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote,
State University of New York Press, (2013):
250.
