1132

1132 recurs in Finnegans Wake as a date that gathers incompatible histories rather than fixing events in a reliable chronology. It is associated with a flood, legendary and political recollections, communal memory, and documentary fragments; the same year can appear as a date in the past, a label for inherited records, or part of a damaged address. The number’s significance lies in this circulation: 1132 becomes one of the book’s devices for showing how history is remembered, altered, and made to begin again.

Flood-Time and Legendary History

One recollection calls 1132 the year of the flood and places the official landing of Lady Jales Casemate within it. The passage then gathers other accounts of drowning, including Pharaoh and his people and Merkin Cornyngwham, whose death at sea is recalled alongside a mourning notice. These episodes do not establish a continuous historical sequence. Instead, 1132 sits amid mythic and invented names, flood imagery, and the cadences of remembered testimony, making the date a loose hinge between catastrophe and retrospective storytelling.

Another recollection attaches the year to the scattering and drowning of a Flemish armada, placing the event after a universal flood and near the coast of Cominghome. It also evokes a later Frankish fleet and a Noah-like figure, then shifts into a separate account of a man’s encounter with a maid in single combat beneath sycamores. The movements between fleets, flood traditions, and personal scandal make the year less a calendar entry than a container into which distinct historical and legendary materials are repeatedly poured.

Public Memory and Repeated History

The date also appears in a scene of public instruction and institutional memory. Lectures on history are imagined as grand performances extending from sea to sea, with Matt and Marcus Lyons named as speakers. Students, scholars, the old senate, saints, sages, and members of the Plymouth Brethren gather around tables, listening and nodding. The passage emphasizes repetition: history is taught through accounts that repeat themselves, and an admired woman’s teaching likewise returns to the past and present as recurring material. In this setting, 1132 belongs to a world where public memory is delivered as performance, not preserved as a single uncontested account.

Elsewhere, a remembered court scene is dated uncertainly to 1132, 1169, or 1768. The competing dates surround an episode involving Mrs Dowager Justice Squalchman, Johnny of the clan of the Dougals, and a decree of divorce and interdict. A further recollection links 1132 or 1169 to a later account of a man’s public disgrace and legal troubles. Such episodes do not clarify the year’s historical identity; they show dates slipping between episodes, judgments, and stories. The effect is both comic and unsettling: public record appears to promise precision while the surrounding narrative continually scrambles it.

The Four Old Men and the Work of Recall

In the recollections associated with the four old men, time arrives through belated, repetitive acts of remembering. They are depicted as weary and often asleep, gathered around a table in an old house, where they read letters at night and return to an old book bearing the date 1132 on its cover. The book is described as a one-page codex and linked to the old Irish legal tradition. Their reading and repeated recitation frame the year as something inherited through artifacts and ritualized consultation, even as their memories prove unstable and entangled with dreams.

The surrounding imagery resists a clean division between past and present. The four old men’s nocturnal routines include waiting for a postscript, handling documents, and revisiting the traces of earlier lives. In a dreamlike recollection, their movements and remembered episodes cycle back upon themselves. The date on the book therefore does not settle the age or order of what they recall; it gives their acts of remembrance a material point of return, while the narrative’s looping form keeps reopening the past.

The Letter as a Shifting Record

A fragmentary document begins by identifying itself as a letter carried by Shaun, written by Shem, and uttered for Alp, with Hek also named in its chain of transmission. It is initialled and followed by an address-like string of dates, places, names, and clipped notices. Among them appears 31 January 1132 A.D., beside Baile-Atha-Cliath and a sequence of commercial and legal-sounding entries. The letter’s date is thus embedded in a record already difficult to read: authorship and delivery are divided among several figures, while the document’s contents break into unstable fragments.

The letter continues through references to banks, a drowning in the Laffey, a return to the city, an explosion, a condemned house, arrests, and missing persons. It closes with another date-like notation and directions that repeatedly mark stops and movement. These entries do not provide a dependable chronology for 1132. Rather, they show how a date can survive inside damaged writing while the history around it becomes dispersed among names, places, and reports. The year’s repeated appearances in books, memories, and documents make it a compact emblem of the work’s larger temporal method: the past is never simply left behind, but returns in altered forms that invite yet resist reconstruction.