Deluge

The Deluge in Finnegans Wake is at once a mythic break in time and a recurring image through which the book connects catastrophe to the unstable survival of stories. It marks a boundary between antediluvian and later worlds, but the boundary never holds: floodwater, buried traces, public songs, and damaged documents carry the past forward in altered forms.

A date without a settled chronology

The book places a crone’s discovery in 566 A.D., “after deluge”: on Baalfire’s night, she runs with a wickered kish, a basket for drawing dead tunes from a bog, and looks beneath its covering out of curiosity. Instead of the expected dead songs, she finds herself full of dark, lively, small shoes, rich in sweat. The episode attaches the Deluge to a specific calendrical marker while giving its aftermath the texture of a discovery whose meaning is not securely explained. Flood, bog, song, and footwear accumulate in a compressed scene where what has been submerged returns in an unfamiliar form.

Elsewhere, the narrative refuses to supply a reliable date for the break. It imagines the copyist fleeing with his scroll in the interval between the antediluvian and the dominion of Anno Domini. A flood might have risen; an elk might have charged him; a thunderbolt might have spoken from above; or human violence might have intervened. These incompatible possibilities leave the loss of the scroll unresolved. The Deluge is therefore not merely an event placed in a finished past: it becomes one candidate explanation for why the record is missing, among natural, supernatural, and political causes.

Flood and the compromised record

The missing copyist’s scroll turns catastrophe into a problem of transmission. A later scribe or official is led away under an old code and fined six marks, or ninepins in metalmen, for the dross of his labor; in a further, intermittent return of military and civil engagements, a woman is sent to the scaffold for covertly meddling with a neighbor’s drawers. The passage makes historical disorder recur through documents, laws, fines, and accusations rather than offering a continuous account of what the flood destroyed. Its movement from a lost manuscript to later punishments suggests that the record survives as fragments and reprisals, not as a dependable chronology.

That uncertainty meets the book’s larger image of a text whose forms cannot be stabilized. The proteiform graph is described as a polyhedron of scripture: its documents bear a multiplicity of personalities, and its apparently opposed traits can coalesce into one “stable somebody.” The flood’s possible role in the copyist’s disappearance belongs to this same unsettled world of inscription. A text may be lost, altered, or assigned to more than one hand, just as the catastrophe that supposedly divides eras remains one possibility among several.

Aftermath in accusation and performance

The flood also enters a comic, damaging account of public shame. In a ballad about Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, the speaker calls him the “crux of the catalogue” of an antediluvial zoo after accusing him of pursuing a maid. The song links an allegation about sexual conduct to Noah’s animals and to a scene near Wellington’s Monument; its flood-time language turns the accused man into a creature displayed in a popular spectacle. The Deluge here is not a narrated disaster but a measure of how far back a community can push its insults, making scandal seem as old as the world it claims to describe.

The ballad is itself staged as an act of transmission. Hosty’s song is introduced as a work made and circulated in communal performance, with refrains and responses preceding its printed lyric. Its insults travel by voice and repetition, just as accounts of a flood travel across generations. The old catastrophe supplies a ready-made vocabulary for judging the present, while performance reshapes that inherited vocabulary into a local act of accusation.

Recurrence, play, and return

The Deluge’s cultural afterlife is not limited to the ballad. A long catalogue of children’s games includes Waterloo, dream-telling, letter-writing, and the washerwoman; elsewhere, dance and seasonal revelry are said to have continued through successive changes in currency and custom. Such lists do not provide a straight history of post-flood society. They show practices being handed down, renamed, and mixed, so that the past returns not as an intact account but as play, song, and communal habit.

Near the end of one passage, after an all-night encounter recounted in teasing, unstable language, the text insists that a light still moves along the river and that the way is free. The image does not settle what the Deluge means or close its chronology. Instead, water and movement remain open to renewed telling: the catastrophe stands behind the book as a possible origin, while its narrative forms continually make old material flow into new scenes of loss, accusation, and return.