Mutt and Jute

• Mutt and Jeff: Mutt and Jeff were the comic strip characters Augustus Mutt and Jim Jeffries, in U.S. cartoonist Henry Conway ("Bud") Fisher's San Francisco Chronicle strip, which debuted in 1907. Used allusively from 1917 in reference to 'a pair of stupid men, affable losers,' or to one tall (Mutt) and one short (Jeff). In some ways they were a precursor to Laurel and Hardy. Two working-class everymen - drinking, gambling, and getting in trouble with their wives. The strip was originally called 'Mr. Mutt' but Jeff was later added. Mutt was a tall, lanky man with a penchant for horse racing, while Jeff was short and fat.
  • Third Census of Finnegans Wake
  • Wikipedia

• Mutt and Jute: A Jute and a person of mixed descent.

Commentary

There are three Mutt and Jeff dialogues in Finnegans Wake:

• FW 016-10: Mutt and Jute

• FW 338.05: Butt and Taff

• FW 609.24: Muta and Juva

Clive Hart has offered a possible interpretation of these episodes in his work Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake:

... in the next frame of reference both Shem and Shaun circumnavigate the globe ... Their orbits, like those of Plato's Same and Other [in the Timaeus] are inclined to each other. Shaun follows an east—west trajectory, while Shem prefers to travel north—south, passing through the antipodes ... Shem's and Shaun's cycles intersect in the first place in Dublin, where a conflict between the two always takes place, just as Christ and Satan find common ground on earth, midway between Heaven and Hell ... Shaun's orbit, on which lie Dublin, Eire, and Dublin, Ga., though approximately "horizontal" (that is, east—west) at the Dublin meridian, is sufficiently inclined to the equator to take him into the southern hemisphere at his farthest distance from Ireland "around the back of the globe", and Joyce represents the secondary crossing of the brothers' ways as taking place each time in Australia ....
Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake pp. 109 ff.

It is clear that Finnegans Wake is woven out of two such strands of World-Soul, represented by the Shem—Shaun polarity. There are two extremes to the function of this polarity, between which the line of development swings to and fro: when their orbits are in close proximity they war with each other and — at a moment of exact equilibrium — even manage to amalgamate,while at the other extreme there is total incomprehension and a failure to communicate, symbolised by the point of farthest separation of the orbits. The two structural meeting-points are at the coincident beginning and end, I.1 and IV, and at the centre, II.3 — that is, diametrically opposed on the sphere of development. The strands spread out from the initial point of contact — the conversation of Mutt and Jeff, who have just met — widen throughout Book I and converge until they meet once more during the Butt and Taff episode, at the end of which they momentarily fuse, only to cross over and separate again during Book III before the final meeting (identical with the first) when Muta and Juva converse. "Mutt and Jeff" and "Muta and Juva" are the same event looked at from opposite sides; the book begins and ends at one of the two nodal points, while, when Joyce has cut the circles and stretched them out flat, the other nodal point falls exactly in the centre of the fabric. Represented in this way, the basic structure of Finnegans Wake thus looks rather like a figure 8 on its side, which forms the "zeroic couplet" (FW 284.11) oo, or the symbol for "infinity".
Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake p 130