The word ‘had’ and the calendar in Finnegans Wake

A calendar in the Wake

The Finnegans Wake can be seen as an attempt to understand the history of humanity through the lens of Viconian philosophy. There are some clear cyclic patterns in the book: it is widely known that it has “Doublends Jined". However, Finnegans Wake wouldn’t be a book “that people should spend a lifetime figuring out” if it were not for some patterns that are not so trivial to notice.

I claim that there is an Enochian calendar inside the Wake. So far this calendar has been overlooked by Joycean scholars, and its days are indicated by occurrences of the word had. As far as I can tell, I’m the first person to claim that Joyce intended the word had to mark a cyclical pattern, maybe because no one else (other than Joyce himself) ever bothered to count how many times the word occurs in the book. I’m aware that pareidolia and apophenia are real risks while dealing with the Wake. However, I feel there is strong evidence to suggest that the word had wasn’t being utilized by Joyce in a casual fashion.

Counting 364 days

Here we build a frequency table of the substring had in the Wake.

The result is the table below.

|    | word           |   frequency |
|---:|:---------------|------------:|
|  0 | had            |         362 |
|  1 | Shady          |          14 |
|  2 | shadow         |          12 |
|  3 | shade          |           7 |
|  4 | shades         |           7 |
|  5 | shadows        |           5 |
|  6 | shady          |           2 |
|  7 | hadded         |           2 |
|  8 | shadowed       |           2 |
|  9 | Thaddeus       |           2 |
| 10 | marchadant     |           1 |
| 11 | hade           |           1 |
| 12 | shaddo         |           1 |
| 13 | limpshades     |           1 |
| 14 | Shadow         |           1 |
| 15 | bahad          |           1 |
| 16 | haddock        |           1 |
| 17 | shad           |           1 |
| 18 | showshadows    |           1 |
| 19 | pleashadure    |           1 |
| 20 | shadowstealers |           1 |
| 21 | nighadays      |           1 |
| 22 | retchad        |           1 |
| 23 | shadyside      |           1 |
| 24 | hadding        |           1 |
| 25 | comrhade       |           1 |
| 26 | whad           |           1 |
| 27 | shadowers      |           1 |
| 28 | Upanishadem    |           1 |
| 29 | treeshade      |           1 |
| 30 | writchad       |           1 |
| 31 | Whaddingtun    |           1 |
| 32 | Whad           |           1 |
| 33 | hadbeen        |           1 |
| 34 | chades         |           1 |
| 35 | hads           |           1 |
| 36 | Drughad        |           1 |
| 37 | shadda         |           1 |
| 38 | Shadows        |           1 |
| 39 | hadtobe        |           1 |
| 40 | rehad          |           1 |
| 41 | shader         |           1 |
| 42 | hadde          |           1 |
| 43 | Thady          |           1 |
| 44 | thadark        |           1 |

The word had appears 362 times, and if hadbeen and hadtobe are to be counted, then Joyce utilized the word had 364 times in the Wake.

Words such as rehad and hadded are either made-up words or loanwords in disguise (rehad is the Estonian for rake). hads and hadde are Old English forms of the word had. Other words that feature had as a substring are not related to the word had.

The Enochian calendar

This day count brings us to my main point: Joyce utilized the word had to mark the days in Finnegans Wake. The entire Wake is a calendar of 364 days, where the sunrise of each day is indicated by an occurrence of the word had.

This was intended as a tribute to Aleister Crowley. Crowley wrote a very favorable review of Ulysses called The Genius of Mr. James Joyce. The first line of his most famous book, Liber AL Vel Legis ( The Book of the Law ), starts with Had! The manifestation of Nuit. Had is the Egyptian sun-god, the manifestation of the Egyptian sky goddess Nuit.

Crowley constantly referred to Enochian magic, and in the Book of Enoch we read about the Enoch calendar:

And the sun and the stars bring in all the years exactly, so that they do not advance or delay their position by a single day unto eternity; but complete the years with perfect justice in 364 days.

The word had appeared for the first time in the Wake manuscripts as had passencore arrived. The syllable pa didn’t appear in the first draft version ( Rather it was Had not encore arrived ).

pa is a reference to Giambattista Vico. In his La Scienza Nuova, he states:

It seems likely that, when the first lightning bolts had awakened the wonder of humankind, Jupiter’s exclamations called forth the first human exclamation, the syllable pa.

So here we have a reference to Jupiter and Horus, both which rule over the sunrise, put together side by side, right at the beginning of the book.

The word had and the thunderwords

The thunder is another pattern in the Wake. It was initially deciphered by Marshall McLuhan and expanded by his son Eric McLuhan in his book [The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake.

According to McLuhan, is his book War and Peace in the Global Village:

Joyce’s Wake is claimed to be a gigantic cryptogram which reveals a cyclic pattern for the whole history of man through its Ten Thunders. Each “thunder” below is a 100-character portmanteau of other words to create a statement he likens to an effect that each technology has on the society into which it is introduced. In order to glean the most understanding out of each, the reader must break the portmanteau into separate words (and many of these are themselves portmanteaus of words taken from multiple languages other than English) and speak them aloud for the spoken effect of each word. There is much dispute over what each portmanteau truly denotes.

That being said, is there any correlation between the thunders at the Wake and the calendar defined by the word had?

When we plot this calendar against the thunderwords, some relationships become immediately apparent.

This graph shows the 364 days of the Wake along the x-axis. The duration values on the y-axis stand for how many lines apart an occurrence of the word had is from the next one. Finally, the vertical black lines indicate where the thunderwords occur in the book.

We immediately notice that the largest gap between two thunders includes the largest gap between two occurrences of the word had. These are the fifth and the sixth thunders, which according to McLuhan, are related to the invention of the printing press and the Industrial Revolution.

If we are familiar with the work of Giambattista Vico, the long days indicate the heroic age. After we descend into the human age, the days become short again due to barbarism of reflection, and then we cyclically go back to the divine age. It is like waking up in the middle of the night and then falling back into the dream again.

Therefore, we can gather evidence for an Enochian calendar inside the Wake in the structure of the book itself, as well as outside: it is quite reasonable to assume that Joyce decided to pay a tribute to Crowley by building an Enochian calendar around the very first word of Crowley’s most famous book. Such patterns are quite hard to notice without the assistance of a computer, which would explain why it has been overlooked by Joycean scholars ever since the book was first published.