Edited post: Joyce, Yeats and the gyres of time
Joyce’s euclidian diagram as drawn by the children Shem, Shaun, and Issy in the Nightlessons chapter of Finnegans Wake. It serves as a diagram of the book itself. FW is structured around, very broadly, a modified Viconian cycle: Age of Gods, Age of Heros, Age of Men, and the “ricorso”, a disastrous clap of thunder which begins the cycle again. FW is situated around this added age as three is made four. The ricorso and the beginning of a new age does not place one back where one started, but at the beginning of a NEW cycle which will follow the same thematic trajectory.
The gyres of Yeats function very similarly when looked at in a 3D way as in here. The famous words “the center cannot hold” is about the intersecting of these gyres. As one age contracts, the other expands, its opposite spiral unwinding the acts of the previous. The rape of Leda by a swan is unwound opposite by the annunciation of Christ by a dove to Mary. Yeats believe himself to be living in the narrow end of a 2000 year gyre started by Christ’s death a new age threatening to unwind into anarchy. He was in that place where the gyres pull at each other equally. The center could not hold. But consider that here still the gyre goes in circles reminiscent of ancient cyclical time, though moving serially towards a teleological end in a synthesis of Christian teleology and ancient pagan time we generally recognize today as progress.
Yeats had at times said his ambitious project of visualizing a cosmology in A Vision, was his attempt to “put the tail in the serpents mouth.” Yeats wanted his poetic system to be a perfect monad. He believed it his duty as a poet saying, “Perhaps the poet lives in the serpents mouth,” where this saintly poet must bear witness to the eternal recurrence, the forever winding and unwinding of the world.
Joyce and Yeats both loosely ascribed to these ideas of cyclically progressive time. Joyce, however, in the Wake was very possibly poking fun at Yeats’ desire to square the circle of eternity in such a neat way. Yeats diagram of the great wheel (b) operates on a spoke of 28 wheels. Joyces Wake almost always adds that transcendent 1 to make 29, reminding that with each cycle we must add 1 for the rotation we’ve completed.
Now to Giordano Bruno, the astronomer who both these Irishmen were playing off of in their diagrams. Yeats’ Great Wheel (b) is directly inspired by Giordano’s mnemonic system (a). While Joyce’s diagram bears far more resemblance to the Copernican diagram of the universe, the action of the book his Wakian diagram describes is Brunotian. Copernicus’ system is static and eternally recurring. A heliocentric system where the sun is at the center of the whole universe which rotates like a clock, always returning to its initial position.
Bruno is the man who suggested that this Copernican system was in fact itself moving through an infinite and decentralized universe. The stars were not fixed, we were not fixed. The night sky would remain forever unable to return to exactly its original position. The solar system rotated like a clock and could ricorso to its initial position, but the system itself will have moved through infinite space. Time cycles, but moves ever forward. This is Joyce’s transcendent 1 and Yeats spiraling gyres of time.
Barbarically shoehorning Milton and Blake back into this rambling post we almost see this same function in a way. A mythic system of Blake’s own design. Something circular, seemingly static, is shot through by this object, Milton, with a definite Christian teleology. Milton is a line, firing into this dormant egg at the center of all things like a sperm (This sounds far fetched, but based on how horny for Milton Blake I absolve myself) to awaken it as a new primordial man.
