[Excerpts from THE BOOKS AT THE WAKE by James S. Atherton:]
Vico based his theory of the origin of language on the assumption that thunder was the voice of God. The first men, he tells us, were mute; their only language was gesture. But they attempted (blasphemously perhaps) to imitate the voice of the thunder. Their first words were stuttering, as was to be expected since the thunder itself stutters. In Finnegans Wake we meet them as Jute and Mutt:
‘Jute.—Whoa? Whoat is the mutter with you?
Mutt.—I became a stun a stummer.
Jute.—What a hauhauhauhaudibble thing, to be cause!’ (16.16)
So, says Vico, ‘Mutes utter formless sounds by singing and stammerers by singing teach their tongues to pronounce.’ Joyce tells us that ‘the sibspeeches of all mankind have foliated (earth seizing them!) from the root of some funner’s stotter’ […] And it must be remembered that stuttering, according to the modern psychologists, is a neurotic symptom caused by consciousness of guilt. Joyce is suggesting that the original masterbuilder is God and that he stutters when His voice is heard in the thunder—thus proving that He is conscious of having committed a sin!
This attribution of Original Sin to God is one of the basic axioms of Finnegans Wake. Joyce had studied theology under Jesuit teachers and knew that the official Catholic solution to the problem of the existence of pain in a world controlled by an omnipotent and loving God was to be found in the doctrine of Original Sin. Joyce transferred the responsibility for Original Sin to God. This, he says, is the original Fall. […]
From what has been said so far it can, I think, be laid down that the following axioms from Vico apply to Finnegans Wake. 1. History is a cyclic process repeating eternally certain typical situations. 2. The incidents of each cycle have their parallels in all other cycles. 3. The characters of each cycle recur under new names in every other cycle. 4. Every civilization has its own Jove. 5. Every Jove commits again, to commence his cycle, the same original sin upon which creation depends. It would appear to follow from this that creation is the original sin.