Finnegans Wake

A frequent question about “Finnegans Wake” is whether it is worth the effort required to read it. One form this frequently takes is the comment, “It seems strange that I should have to read a book to understand a book.”

The question may arise from the distinction between our expectations of literature and of the other arts. Most of us appreciate the assistance given us in books written by art critics so that we can grasp a cubist artist’s intent, and we have a far deeper appreciation of a symphony if we know something of music history and read the program notes for a performance.

The common expectation for literature, though, is that language is a vehicle for telling a story well. Poetry is more inclined to compress and intensify meaning than prose, using symbols and allusions, sometimes rhythm and meter and rhyme, the length of the line on the page, and various tropes and sound devices to achieve a desired effect. We expect to work a bit to understand a poem-- but we still expect poems to communicate readily to a diligent and attentive reader. Why doesn’t “Finnegans Wake”?

Language, for Joyce, is less a tradesman’s set of tools than a living entity. It doesn’t talk about the plot: it is the plot. The form expresses the content. In “The Sirens” section of “Ulysses,” the language becomes a fugue. In the Molly Bloom soliloquy, the stream of her thought flows unimpeded by punctuation for pages.

In “Finnegans Wake,” Joyce’s style becomes a world of the night, with the obscurity and darkness both of dreamless sleep and a sleep filled with dreams, as well as sleep-like states that range from various theories of the afterlife to the drunken stupor of a tavern keeper in Dublin. This does not mean that the book is chaotic or disorganized. As we know from “Ulysses,” Joyce loved structure. He was a Master Builder, building his work upon multiple interrelated structures. This is equally if not even more true for “Finnegans Wake.”

Joyce loved music, and he was intimately aware of the psychological developments of his time. He did not always approve of Freud and Jung, but he knew their work and would gladly employ their methods when useful for his art. Musical composition, with its motifs, themes, and variations, and the psychoanalytic approach to uncovering the unconscious through association, offer two of many keys to enjoying the nonlinear development of “Finnegans Wake.”

Joyce did not live long enough to share a chart of the many structures of “Finnegans Wake.” He did share some, most notably that of the Viconian cycles, and he pointed the reader to Giordano Bruno, who believed in metempsychosis, in many worlds, and in an ultimate unity of all things in which all contraries were reconciled. A partial list of other recurring structures includes the history of Ireland, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bible, elements of the Koran, the Book of Kells, the legend of Finn MacCumhal, Celtic ritual, Norse mythology, stories of the Buddha and Confucius, world literature, and the life and work of the author, James Joyce.

An example of his method is in the theme of the Fall, which occurs in a seemingly infinite number of variations, from a fall from a ladder to the fall of the stock market to falling asleep to the fall of mankind to the fall of Humpty Dumpty from the wall. Motifs, themes, variations, analogies and associations move us seamlessly, though not exclusively linearly, through the Viconian cycles. The first eight chapters provide a burlesque representation of the age of the Gods, with the seeds of the future ages represented as well. Book 2 brings us to the age of heroes, in the unlikely forms of Nick and Mick, Glugg and Chuff, Shem and Shaun. They resemble the heroes of Vico in the same parodic fashion that the Irish Citizen of “Ulysses” resembled Polyphemus.

But still—why is the text so difficult??? I’d like to revisit some possible points of view in the text that we discussed previously. These are not intended to be exhaustive.

Point of View One: A dream of the Universal Mind. This has the virtue of accounting for the encyclopedic nature of the text. It is also consistent with Frank Budgen’s observation that James Joyce was attracted to the idea of Anima Mundi William Butler Yeats described in his 1901 essay “Magic,” in which Yeats identified three doctrines:

“These doctrines are—

(1)    That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.

(2)    That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

(3)    That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.”

Point of View Two: It is the dream of Finn MacCumhal (Finn McCool). This is sanctioned by the author. The following quote is from Richard Ellman’s biography, “James Joyce.”

“The title came from the ballad about the hod-carrier who falls from a ladder to what is assumed to be his death, but he is revived by the smell of the whiskey at his wake. But behind this Irish master builder was a more ancient Irish prototype, the legendary hero and wise man, Finn MacCumhal. As Joyce informed a friend later, he conceived of his book as the dream of old Finn, lying in death beside the river Liffey and watching the history of Ireland and the world—past and future—flow through his mind like flotsam on the river of life.”

This point of view is consistent with the first point of view, as it requires Finn to somehow tap into a universal mind.

Point of View Three: The first sixteen chapters are the dream of a tavern keeper in Chapelizod, Mr. Porter, who is briefly awakened by his son’s cry in Book Three, Chapter Four. This interpretation suggests the final chapter, seventeen, is the dream of his wife Mrs. Porter. Presumably, we tap into the universal mind when we sleep.

This point of view would establish a parallel between “Finnegans Wake” and “Ulysses,” in which all episodes except the last are masculine narratives, with the last word given to the woman.

Point of View Four: In Book 1, Chapter 5, a hen scratches a letter from the mud. A scholarly professor determines it was composed by Anna Livia Plurabelle and dictated to a scribe. If this letter is “Finnegans Wake,” Anna Livia Plurabelle, the “river of life” is the life force that narrates the story.

Point of View Five: The center of man’s reality, according to Vico, is history. “Finnegans Wake” is the voice of history—a humorous nightmare from which we are trying to awake.

I think each of these is correct, and they help explain the difficulty of the language. The rich diversity of the words is required by the all-inclusive nature of the theme. To become the voice of all history, the language must become the language of all history. To become the universal mind, it must operate according to rules not limited to rational thought. To become the flow of history on the river of life, it must expand beyond the immediately accessible. With Bruno, it aspires to a vision that reconciles all contraries into a universal affirmation.

Of course, Joyce no doubt had other objectives as well. Stephen Daedalus felt English was the language of the conqueror. He wanted to make the language his own. Joyce made English his own in “Finnegans Wake.”

The Druids who fought Saint Patrick employed a “dark language” that employed some of the same techniques as Joyce does—he may have wished to restore the vanquished druids to a place of honor. The book “Wake Rights” finds one of the structures underlying the book is a rendition of the Teamhur Feis rituals of ancient Tara.

One very important objective, I think, was creation itself. He wanted to breathe life into his language in a way that causes the reader to interact with it and co-create—keeping the living work growing long after the death of its author. We continue to commune with James Joyce. “Finnegans Wake” is an interactive portrait of the artist.

It may also be a fulfillment of the promise made at the conclusion of the novel “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” “Ulysses” concludes with an affirmation, but “Finnegans Wake goes much further. I think it may be read as an affirmation of the Life Force in all of its forms—human, vegetable, mineral, physical and temporal. It celebrates not just moments of heroism and dignity but the most trivial and humiliating moments as well. Through his repeated reference to Dublin as the microcosm of the macrocosm, “Finnegans Wake” fulfills the promise of Stephen Daedalus in “The Portrait of an Artist” to go forth and forge the unborn conscience of his race. Mankind and the cosmos are put on trial—and they are judged to be laughable—but lovable.