Describing the torments and suicide of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu and a Dr Sig Heiler, spanker of girl bottoms and spunky spittoon-user:
Being unwilling to suffer another relapse after this blessed state of perfect mental repose, but knowing it could not last, she did what another patient had done in distant France, at a much less radiant and easygoing ‘home.’ A Dr Froid, one of the administerial centaurs, who may have been an émigré brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu in the Ardennes or, more likely, the same man, because they both came from Vienne, Isère, and were only sons (as her son was), evolved, or rather revived, the therapistic device, aimed at establishing a ‘group’ feeling, of having the finest patients help the staff if ‘thusly inclined.’ Aqua, in her turn, repeated exactly clever Eleonore Bonvard’s trick, namely, opting for the making of beds and the cleaning of glass shelves. The astorium in St Taurus, or whatever it was called (who cares — one forgets little things very fast, when afloat in infinite non-thingness) was, perhaps, more modem, with a more refined desertic view, than the Mondefroid bleakhouse horsepittle, but in both places a demented patient could outwit in one snap an imbecile pedant.
In less than a week Aqua had accumulated more than two hundred tablets of different potency. She knew most of them — the jejune sedatives, and the ones that knocked you out from eight p.m. till midnight, and several varieties of superior soporifics that left you with limpid limbs and a leaden head after eight hours of non-being, and a drug which was in itself delightful but a little lethal if combined with a draught of the cleansing fluid commercially known as Morona; and a plump purple pill reminding her, she had to laugh, of those with which the little gypsy enchantress in the Spanish tale (dear to Ladore schoolgirls) puts to sleep all the sportsmen and all their bloodhounds at the opening of the hunting season. Lest some busybody resurrect her in the middle of the float-away process, Aqua reckoned she must procure for herself a maximum period of undisturbed stupor elsewhere than in a glass house, and the carrying out of that second part of the project was simplified and encouraged by another agent or double of the Isère Professor, a Dr Sig Heiler whom everybody venerated as a great guy and near-genius in the usual sense of near-beer. Such patients who proved by certain twitchings of the eyelids and other semiprivate parts under the control of medical students that Sig (a slightly deformed but not unhandsome old boy) was in the process of being dreamt of as a ‘papa Fig,’ spanker of girl bottoms and spunky spittoon-user, were assumed to be on the way to haleness and permitted, upon awakening, to participate in normal outdoor activities such as picnics. Sly Aqua twitched, simulated a yawn, opened her light-blue eyes (with those startlingly contrasty jet-black pupils that Dolly, her mother, also had), put on yellow slacks and a black bolero, walked through a little pinewood, thumbed a ride with a Mexican truck, found a suitable gulch in the chaparral and there, after writing a short note, began placidly eating from her cupped palm the multicolored contents of her handbag, like any Russian country girl lakomyashchayasya yagodami (feasting on berries) that she had just picked in the woods. She smiled, dreamily enjoying the thought (rather ‘Kareninian’ in tone) that her extinction would affect people about ‘as deeply as the abrupt, mysterious, never explained demise of a comic strip in a Sunday paper one had been taking for years. It was her last smile. She was discovered much sooner, but had also died much faster than expected, and the observant Siggy, still in his baggy khaki shorts, reported that Sister Aqua (as for some reason they all called her) lay, as if buried prehistorically, in a fetus-in-utero position, a comment that seemed relevant to his students, as it may be to mine. (1.3)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): horsepittle: ‘hospital’, borrowed from a passage in Dickens’ Bleak House. Poor Joe’s pun, not a poor Joycean one.
James Joyce's favorite English word was "cuspidor." A cuspidor is a spittoon, a receptacle for spitting. A play on Sieg heil! ("Hail Victory!"), the name Sig Heiler brings to mind "Seek hells" (Joyce's version of the Nazi greeting). Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu seems to hint at J. M. Synge (an Irish playwright, poet, writer, essayist, and collector of folklores, 1871-1909) and “My Lourde! My lourde!” (Joyce's version of "My Lord! My Lord!"). Lourd is French for "heavy, cumbersome, onerous." In 1858, Lourdes (a market town in the Pyrenees) rose to prominence in France and abroad due to the Marian apparitions to the peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous (later canonized a saint by the Catholic Church for her virtuous life). Shortly thereafter, the city and its Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes became among the world's most important sites for pilgrimage and religious tourism.
From Benjamin Boysen's "A War in Words: James Joyce’s Last Comedy (Finnegans Wake)" (1990):
Joyce’s criticism of the Christian God in Finnegans Wake is not merely limited to questioning the metaphysical dimension of that religion, but also the very authority which this heavenly, paternal embodiment exercises. By doing so, Joyce seems to endorse the Russian anarchist Bakunin’s (1814-76) famous inversion of Voltaire’s dictum: “if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.” The metaphysical collapse is brought to work by the blasphemous ridicule in which God (German Gott), to take just one example among others, is juxtaposed with contagious venereal diseases: “Gotopoxy” – got a pox or God a pox (it is obviously of no small importance to bear in mind here that the final medical phase of syphilis often culminates in insanity). This manoeuvre runs parallel to the disrespectful metamorphosis of the religious supplicant’s ejaculation (My Lord! My Lord!) to: “My Lourde! My lourde!” In the new modern world, God is not only perceived to be a heavy (French lourde) burden; he is also impiously reduced to the abject state of shit (Danish lort). In other words, God (French Dieu) is quite simply deaf and dumb: “Dieuf and Domb.”
Dombey and Son (1848) is a novel by Charles Dickens. Describing the library of Ardis Hall, Van mentions Heinrich Müller, the author of Poxus, etc.:
Paradoxically, ‘scient’ Ada was bored by big learned works with woodcuts of organs, pictures of dismal medieval whore-houses, and photographs of this or that little Caesar in the process of being ripped out of the uterus as performed by butchers and masked surgeons in ancient and modem times; whereas Van, who disliked ‘natural history’ and fanatically denounced the existence of physical pain in all worlds, was infinitely fascinated by descriptions and depictions of harrowed human flesh. Otherwise, in more flowery fields, their tastes and titters proved to be much the same. They liked Rabelais and Casanova; they loathed le sieur Sade and Herr Masoch and Heinrich Müller. English and French pornographic poetry, though now and then witty and instructive, sickened them in the long run, and its tendency, especially in France before the invasion, of having monks and nuns perform sexual feats seemed to them as incomprehensible as it was depressing. (1.21)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Heinrich Müller: author of Poxus, etc.
The Rosy Crucifixion is a trilogy (consisting of Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus) by Henry Miller.