Finnegans Wake

Prior to each of our seminars, I've jotted down some thoughts to introduce the day's discussion. I thought it might be useful to provide a summary of them, with the idea that they might serve as a memory assist as we proceed through the Wake. I hope you enjoy them and find them helpful.

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“Finnegans Wake” is a book like no other. Having spent 7 years in the writing of “Ulysses,” Joyce spent 17 years writing “Finnegans Wake.” He considered it his masterpiece. It is conceived as a living work of art intended to provoke and grow with discussion. It is an ideal work to cover in a seminar. But we shouldn’t feel that we must completely master the work. Joyce wrote, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring immortality.” In fact, I think we can say that our inability to pin the Wake down is an important part of our experience of the book and of Joyce’s intent.

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I’ve been thinking about one of the ways we can experience “Finnegans Wake.”

To begin with, the work grows almost organically through allusion, association, ambiguity, and suggestion.

The first sentence catches us up in the flow of the river Liffey, which we will come to learn is a manifestation of one of the principal characters of the book, Anna Livia Plurabelle. It also identifies one of the principal male characters, Howth Castle and Environs, or HCE. In this manifestation, Joyce uses the landscape of Howth Castle and Environs to evoke a recumbent giant, whom he will identify with the fallen hod carrier Finnegan and the legendary Irish chieftain and giant, Finn McCool--as well as many other characters. In addition, the first sentence introduces one of the structuring methods of the Wake—the Viconian cycles of history.

None of this is spelled out for us in this first sentence. Instead, the work is like a work of music, introducing by allusion themes to be developed later in the work. Stylistically, this continues a thought process Joyce used in the Sirens section of “Ulysses,” where he began the episode with syllables and phrases that were developed later in the episode into motifs and themes.

From there we get some of the basic building blocks of life in the Wake. We do not yet have but will have Sir Tristram; a crossing from Brittany to Ireland; a crossing from Ireland to Georgia and the founding of Dublin, Georgia; a voice from a burning bush; the assertion “Thou art Peatrick,” which evokes not only Peter as founder of the church of Rome but Patrick as founder of the church in Ireland and James Stuart as King of England and Ireland; the story of Isaac with Jacob and Esau; an obscure allusion to a cadet; an allusion to Issac Butt, the Irish politician; an allusion to the two Esthers loved by Jonathan Swift and a cryptic reference to Swift himself; an allusion to Lot’s drunkenness and his two sons. This is all yet to happen in the cycle that has not yet begun. What we see now is the angry red end of the rainbow that precedes the Fall that will precipitate another cycle of history.

Each of these allusions will ramify in the text to follow—then ramify some more. To take one example: Sir Tristram will evoke the 12th Century Romance of Tristram and Iseult, but also Sir Amorey Tristram who defeated the Danes at Dublin and won the lordship of Howth in 1177; it will also evoke the novel “Tristram Shandy” by the Irish giant of literature Lawrence Sterne.

A second giant of Irish literature, Jonathan Swift, will be evoked as “Twone Nathandjoe.” This is both Jonathan (spelled backwards) and a play on the theme of dualism that will be developed throughout the book (“twone” is two in one). Swift gave us Gulliver, who was a giant among the Lilliputians and a Lilliputian among the Brobdingnagian giants. Swift also gave us the allegory “A Tale of a Tub.” These two Irish giants, Swift and Sterne, will be juxtaposed--become two in on-- through the medium of Bygmester Finnegan in paragraph 5 on page 4, who “sternely struxt his tete in a tub.”

Yet one more example shows that the Wake finds humorous parallels between high culture, history, fantasy, mythology, and folk tale. This is something Joyce developed in “Ulysses,” in which the legendary hero Ulysses manifests in the modern day as the Dublin advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom. In the Wake, a fall from the Wall Street wall evokes Humpty Dumpty, the egg broken never to be assembled again, who in turn suggests Haroun Childeric Eggeberth and the thousand and one tales of both the Arabian Nights and the Wake. The modern Moses, Finnegan, does not separate the Red Sea, but “by the might of moses” the very water in his tub was “eviparated.” He is not the Moses of the Pentateuch, but a “Punch and Judy” chap.

We set aside the question, “why would someone name an elemental particle, the quark, after a word in Finnegans Wake?” Let’s set aside another question. “If the style captures the language of dreams, who is the dreamer?

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Joyce expands upon the Viconian cycles in Finnegans Wake. They don’t just apply to broad cycles of human history; aspects of the cycles apply to human history, to human intercourse in every sense of the word, to Irish history, to literary history, to the history of Europe, to the history of the Middle East, to the history of religion, and, more broadly, to nature itself. The Wake is populated not just by Visogoths and Histogoths, but by oyster gods and fish gods; by ash trees and elm trees and even by stones. All rise, thrive and fall consistent with the Viconian cycles.

The overture found us in Howth Castle and environs and introduced the Viconian cycles. Toward the end of the overture we find ourselves in these environs again, this time personified as a Brontoichthyan form, a word playing on the themes of thunder and fish, but also pointing to a second unifying philosophy of the Wake: Giordano Bruno’s clash and ultimate reconciliation of complementary pairs. This form led us quite naturally to Finnegan and his Wake, then to the Wellington Museum situated on his recumbent form. We will experience a series of vignettes, invoked by association. These include

The hen digging up a midden heap, suggesting a visual pun on the hen scratch that is Finnegans Wake;

the historians Mammonlujius;

Mutt and Jute, from the stone age, Irish history, and a comic strip;

a meandering tale of when head-in-clouds walked the earth;

the book of double ends jined, another self conscious allusion to Finnegans Wake;

the story of Jarl Van Hoother and the Prankquean;

the soothing of Finnegan back to sleep at the the Wake;

and rumors of HCE. Hum the Cheapner, Esq: arriving by sea, who will be responsible for the Hubbub Caused in Edenborough.

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Many thanks to Susana, who posted a letter H. G. Wells sent to James Joyce attacking “Finnegans Wake.” I think Joyce must have loved the letter—he read praise and criticism from Carl Jung aloud to his house guests with evident pleasure.

Both Wells and Joyce were interested in history. The following passage about Wells is from Wickipedia:

“The Outline of History, subtitled either "The Whole Story of Man" or "Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind", is a work by H. G. Wells chronicling the history of the world from the origin of the Earth to the First World War. It appeared in an illustrated version of 24 fortnightly installments beginning on 22 November 1919 and was published as a single volume in 1920.[1][2] It sold more than two million copies, was translated into many languages, and had a considerable impact on the teaching of history in institutions of higher education.[3] Wells modeled the Outline on the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot.”

In short, Wells saw history as facts you could lay out plainly. There might be some unknowns, but for the most part, history was something you could write down and put on a shelf and you would always have access to a correct representation and interpretation of history. It was possible to have a “plain history of life and mankind.”

Joyce’s view of history is not so simple. It is closer to that of Stephen Daedalus in “Ulysses,” who says, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” In “The Wandering Rocks” section of “Ulysses” we find that our understanding of people and events changes depending upon the point of view of the observer. There is no privileged point of view. All points of view contribute to sometimes contradictory truths. In “Finnegans Wake,” Joyce explores, I think--among other themes--the nature of history.

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Since “Finnegans Wake” proceeds in part by digression, and pays tribute to the Irish authors Sterne and Swift, whose works proceed by digression, I’d like to digress.

The Great Books approach takes us to the classics that provide the source material of so much that we value today. When we think of “Finnegans Wake,” we may tend to think of it as an isolated masterpiece. It’s fascinating, but what does it have to do with anything else? The answer, I think, is a great deal.

The Mutt and Jute episode influenced Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot,” in which Vladimir and Estragon repeatedly swap hats during an absurdist dialogue. We’ve parked the question of why an elementary particle, the quark, received its name from “Finnegans Wake.” Now I’d like to look for a moment at Joyce’s character, HCE. Does he have a life beyond the Wake?

“Finnegans Wake” was published in 1939. Early appreciators were Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, who published “A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake” in 1944. Four years later, Campbell, with assistance from Robinson, wrote the hugely influential masterpiece of psychology and comparative mythology, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.”

On page 56 of “A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake,” William York Tindall points out that a recurring theme of the Wake is not only “the young man challenging and replacing the old man but the son challenging and replacing the father and marrying the mother . . . .” That is, in the Wake we will meet versions of Oedipus in Dublin and in other places and at various times.

I know some of you are reading or have read “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” It is a vastly influential and popular work that has sold over a million copies. Page 2 of the Prologue contains the memorable line “The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.” The title of the Prologue is “The Monomyth.” In a footnote, Campbell notes that the word “monomyth” is from James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.” As we proceed through “Finnegans Wake,” I think those of you have read or will read “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” will find the works tend to complement each other in an extraordinary way. Campbell owed and acknowledged a debt to Joyce.

One more digression, and this, I think, is an accidental correspondence. I personally puzzled a great deal over why Joyce would give his character HCE the surname of Earwicker. I have a theory, which may be way off base, but I enjoy it and I hope you will.

The most famous episode of “The Twilight Zone,” an episode written by Rod Serling, involves a man who has an earwig crawl into his ear and eat into his brain. At the end of the episode, the man is given the good news: the earwig has crawled out his other ear. The bad news, though, is that the earwig was a female, she had been pregnant, and she has laid her eggs in the man’s brain.

I think Joyce and Serling had a similar idea. Joyce’s Earwig will get into our brain and lays its eggs. We’ll have HCE in our brains for a long time to come.

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Since Joyce has alluded frequently to “A Tale of a Tub,” I thought it would be fun to share a passage from that short work, considered by many to be Swift’s best allegory. I think it shares Joyce’s sense of humor and provides insight into “Finnegans Wake.” It refers to how authors become famous after their deaths and seems to have special relevance when we recall that Joyce conceived “Finnegans Wake” as a book of the night.

“Tis true, indeed, the Republick of dark Authors, after they once found out this excellent Expedient of Dying, have been peculiarly happy in the Variety, as well as Extent of their Reputation. For, Night, being the universal Mother of Things, wise Philosophers hold all Writings to be fruitful in the proportion they are dark; And therefore, the True Illuminated (that is to say, the Darkest of all) have met with such numberless Commentators, whose Scholiastick Midwifry hath deliver’d them of Meanings , that the Authors themselves, perhaps, never conceived, and yet may very justly be allowed the Lawful Parents of them. The Words of such Writers being like Seed, which, however scattered at random, when they light upon a fruitful Ground, will multiply far beyond either the Hopes or Imagination of the Sower.”

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Before we dive into today’s look at “Finnegans Wake,” I’d like to share something from a book I am reading on Giordano Bruno, a 16th century priest, philosopher, and heretic.

As we’ve seen before, James Joyce considered a stage name of Gordon Brown. He identified with Giordano Bruno. Like Joyce, Bruno had a troubled relationship with the Roman Catholic Church and, like Joyce, he was self-exiled from his birthplace of Nola and his beloved city of Naples. Bruno was ultimately burned at the stake.

Bruno devised a mnemonic system based on mathematical principles and drawings, one of which consisted of five concentric circles of associations with letters, which he further associated with the germs of stories. This allowed him to perform feats of memory that astonished Pope Sixtus IV and King Henri III of France. Ingrid Rowland writes, “Bruno declared that the organizing impulses expressed in the art of memory begin at nature’s most minute level of organization, the “seeds of those first principles” that were his name for atoms.” Here is how Bruno describes “the soul’s grandest enterprise, its emergence, as he says himself, from the Forest of Matter”:

“The light—life, understanding, the primal unity—contains all species, perfections, truths, and degrees of phenomena. Whereas those things that occur in Nature are different from one another, contrary, and diverse, in [the light] they are like, harmonious, and single. Try, therefore, if you are able with your powers, to identify, harmonize, and unite the phenomena you perceive, and you shall not exhaust your faculties, you shall not upset your mind, and you shall not confound your memory.”

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I’ve placed a link that will let you see some of the elaborate illustrations from “The Book of Kells,” which is kept in the Trinity College library in Dublin. I thought of these in the context of a question we brought up earlier about “Finnegans Wake.” Is it true that you can open it at any page and start your reading? If so, does it matter where you start your reading?

The illustrations of the Book of Kells suggest to me one answer to these questions. Yes, you can open the book to any page and begin reading and find illumination and pleasure. The Chi Rho, the two letters that begin the Greek word for Christ, as illuminated in “The Book of Kells” would justify long term study. They tell a story in and of themselves and are independently beautiful. Their beauty and their meaning, however, are exponentially magnified when placed in their broader Biblical context.

There are chapters, paragraphs and even sentences in the Wake that suggest the independent beauty and storytelling impact of the illustrations in the Book of Kells. When we recall the highly organized infrastructure of “Ulysses,” though, we have reason to suspect that Joyce will build this work on multiple underlying structures. William York Tindall suggests two of these, one in the guide to Chapter 3 and one in the introduction to the Reader’s Guide.

First, our chapters seem to be following Viconian cycles: The Religious Age; the Heroic Age; and the Modern Human age of Man. Chapter 1, a primitive religious age, gives us the Punch and Judy Pentateuchy Finnegan, a simple and outsized character like Gilgamesh or Hercules, or like Adam, who walked naked in the Garden of Eden with God. Chapter 2 is the cycle of a traveling hero, like Odysseus or Siegried, mixing winning ways and guile and both winning over and alienating the people. Chapter 3 brings us to the modern democratic age of the everyday man. As Shakespeare has written, “Enter Rumour, painted with many tongues.” HCE is accused and defended, praised and ridiculed, exonerated and incarcerated in a wide-ranging discussion that feels like a centuries-long argument on Facebook.

The second structure is a structure of dream. The introduction to our book suggests that as we progress from Chapter 1 through Chapter 3, Finnegan/HCE is falling into a deeper sleep. Finnegan merged in to HCE at the conclusion of Chapter 1, and in Chapter 2 we met an array of characters who mocked and ridiculed HCE in a relatively coherent story. Treacle Tom and Frisky Shorty were “off the hulks” and attending the races when they overheard a good Father telling the story of HCE’s seeming wrongdoing. Treacle Tom was in his bed at the Liberties in a drunken state when he snored out the tale and was overheard by Peter Cloran, a discharged drapery executive, O’Donnell, a secretary of no fixed abode, and Hosty, an ill starred busker hoping to borrow a parabellum, or machine gun, for a robbery. Hosty composed “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly.”

These characters reappear in Chapter 3, but our consciousness of them is tenuous and their names have changed. Hosty has become Osti-Fosti. His fate is unknown. Cloran, now Paul Horan, became an inmate in an asylum. O’Donnell, now A Hara, enlisted in the Crimean War under the assumed name of Blanco Fusilovna Bucklovich. Treacle Tom, now Sordid Sam, was propelled from behind into the great beyond by a Norwegian sailor and his mate and Frisky Shorty, “the dozendest sort of a frusker,” disappeared from the face of the earth—presumably into its interior. The priest, it turns out, who may now be Padre Brown, may have been the cad with a pipe—but nothing is certain. Even such certainty as we thought we had in Chapter 2 is unavailable in Chapter 3. The characters are such stuff as dreams are made on.