Finnegans Wake, published in 1939, is James Joyce's final novel. Following the publication of Ulysses in 1922, Joyce began working on the "Wake" and by 1924 installments of what was then known as Work in Progress began to appear. (The final title of the work remained a secret between the writer and his wife, Nora Barnacle.)
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| Author | James Joyce |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Faber and Faber |
Publication date | 1924 to 1939 |
| Publication place | France/Switzerland |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | ISBN {{isbn}}: Check isbn value: invalid character (help) |
The seventeen years spent working on Finnegans Wake were often difficult. He underwent frequent eye surgeries, lost long-time supporters and dealt with personal problems in the lives of his children. These problems and the perennial financial difficulties of the Joyce family are described in Richard Ellmann's biography James Joyce.
Plot summary
Template:Spoiler Because Joyce's sentences are packed with obscure allusions and puns in dozens of different languages, it remains impossible to offer an undisputed and definitive synopsis.
The book begins with one such allusion:
"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."
"Commodious vicus" refers to Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). Vico believed in a theory of cyclical history. He believed that the world was coming to the end of the last of three ages, these being the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of humans. This opening also contributes to the effect of Joyce's novel as a whole, since it begins and ends with "riverrun" on the lips.
More generally, the introductory chapter gives an overview of the novel's themes. First, we hear of a central character, here called Finnegan and identified as a hod carrier in Dublin (seen as representing all builders of all kinds throughout world history), falling to his death from a scaffold or tower or wall. At his wake, in keeping with the comic song "Finnegan's Wake" that provided Joyce's title, a fight breaks out, whiskey splashes on Finnegan's corpse, and he rises up again alive (Finnegan awakes).
This Finnegan is all men, and his fall is all men's fall. Subsequent vignettes in the first chapter show him as a warrior (in particular, as Wellington at Waterloo), as an explorer invading a land occupied by his aboriginal ancestors, and as the victim of a vengeful pirate queen (Grace O'Malley).
At the end of chapter one, Joyce puts Finnegan back down again ("Now be aisy, good Mr Finnimore, sir. And take your laysure like a god on pension and don't be walking abroad"). A new version of Finnegan-Everyman is sailing into Dublin Bay to take over the story: Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, whose initials HCE ("Here Comes Everybody") lend themselves to phrase after phrase throughout the book (Note they appear as "Howth Castle and Environs" in the opening sentence).
Chapter two opens with an account of how HCE was given the name "Earwicker" by the king, who catches HCE "earwigging" when he's supposed to be manning a tollgate. Although the name begins as an insult, it helps HCE rise to prominence in Dublin society, but then he's brought down by a rumor about a sexual trespass involving two girls in Phoenix Park (close by Chapelizod).
Most of chapters two through four follow the progress of this rumor, starting with HCE's encounter with "a cad with a pipe." The cad asks the time, but HCE misunderstands it as either an accusation or a proposition, and incriminates himself by denying rumors the cad has not yet heard. Joyce expresses HCE's confusion by spelling the cad's Gaelic phonetically, making it look like a suggestive English phrase. Eventually, HCE becomes so paranoid he goes into hiding, where he'll write a book that evidently resembles Joyce's own Ulysses.
HCE is (at one level) a Scandinavian who has taken a native Irish wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle (whose initials ALP are also found in phrase after phrase). At some point these two have settled down to run a public house in Chapelizod, a suburb of Dublin named for the Irish princess Isolde. HCE personifies the city of Dublin (which was founded by Vikings), and ALP personifies the river Liffey, on whose banks the city was built. In the popular eighth chapter, hundreds of names of rivers are woven into the tale of ALP's life. Joyce universalizes his tale by making HCE and ALP stand, as well, for every city-river pair in the world. And they are, like Adam and Eve, the primeval parents of all the Irish and all humanity.
ALP and HCE have a daughter, Issy, whose personality is often schizophrenically split, and two sons, Shem and Shaun, eternal rivals for replacing their father and for Issy's affection (among other things). Shem and Shaun are akin to Set and Horus of the Osiris story, as well as the biblical pairs Jacob & Esau and Cain & Abel, as well as Romulus & Remus and St. Michael & the Devil (Mick & Nick).
Shaun is portrayed as a dull postman, conforming to society's expectations, while Shem is a bright artist and sinister experimenter. (As HCE retreats before the rumors, he seems to transform into Shem, the artist who writes the book.) They are sometimes accompanied by a third personality in whom their twin poles are reconciled, called Tristan or Tristram. Presumably, by synthesizing their strengths Tristan is able to win Issy and defeat/replace HCE, like Tristan in the triangle with Iseult (Issy) and King Mark (HCE).
The book also draws heavily on Irish mythology with HCE sometimes corresponding to Finn MacCool, Issy and ALP to Grania, and Shem/Shaun to Dermot (Diarmaid). This is just a small hint of the many roles that each of the main characters finds him or herself playing, often several at the same time.
The book is transformed into a letter, dictated to Shem by ALP, entrusted to Shaun for delivery, but somehow ending up in a midden heap, where it is dug up by a hen named Biddy (the diminutive form of Brighid, which is the name of both a saint and a goddess on whose feast day Joyce was born). The letter is perhaps an indictment, perhaps an exoneration of HCE, just as Finnegans Wake is a vast "comedy" that seeks to indict and simultaneously redeem human history.
If HCE can also be identified with Charles Stewart Parnell, Shem's attack mirrors the attempt of forger Richard Piggott to incriminate Parnell in the Phoenix Park Murders of 1882 by means of false letters. But Piggott is also HCE, for just as HCE betrays himself to the cad, Piggott betrayed himself at the enquiry into admitting the forgery by his spelling of the word "hesitancy" as "hesitency"; and this misspelling appears frequently in the Wake.
The progress of the book is far from simple as it draws in mythologies, theologies, mysteries, philosophies, histories, sociologies, astrologies, other fictions, alchemy, music, colour, nature, sexuality, human development, and dozens of languages to create the world drama in whose cycles we live.
The book ends with the river Liffey disappearing at dawn into the vast possibilities of the ocean. The last sentence is incomplete. As well as leaving the reader to complete it with his or her own life, it can be closed by the sentence that starts the book – another cycle. Thus, reading the final sentence of the book, and continuing on to the first sentence of the book, we have: "A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."
Characters in "Finnegans Wake"
The family
- Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker – (or HCE) an Irish publican, possibly a reincarnation of Finnegan, the hod carrier of the street ballad who falls at the start of the novel
- Anna Livia Plurabelle – (or ALP) HCE's wife
- Shem & Shaun (or Jerry and Kevin, also known by many other names) - the sons of HCE and ALP
- Issy or Iseult (or Isolde), daughter of HCE and ALP
Literary significance & criticism
The value of Finnegans Wake as a work of literature has been a point of contention since the time of its appearance, in serial form, in literary reviews of the 1920s (primarily the journal transition, edited by Eugene Jolas). Some admirers of Joyce's Ulysses were disappointed that none of its characters reappeared in the new work, and that the author's linguistic experiments were making it increasingly difficult to pick out any continuous thread of a plot. Some literary figures believed the book to be a joke, pulled by Joyce on the literary community. Joyce's brother Stanislaus said that it was either "the work of a psychopath or a huge literary fraud." Literary critic and friend of the author Oliver Gogarty called it "the most colossal leg pull in literature." When Ezra Pound was asked his opinion on the text, he wrote "Nothing so far as I can make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all that circumambient peripherization."
In response to such criticisms, transition published essays throughout the late 1920s, defending and explaining Joyce's work. In 1929, these essays (along with a few others written for the occasion) were collected under the title Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress and published by Shakespeare and Company. This collection featured Samuel Beckett's first published work (entitled "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce") along with essays by William Carlos Williams, Stuart Gilbert, Marcel Brion, Eugene Jolas and others.
The actual publication of the novel was somewhat overshadowed by Europe's descent into World War II. Joyce died just two years after the novel was published, leaving a work whose interpretation is still very much "in progress."
In the time since Joyce's death, many leading literary critics have struggled against public perception of the novel in order to establish for Finnegans Wake a preeminent place in English literature: in 1957 Northrop Frye described Finnegans Wake as the “chief ironic epic of our time” (Anatomy of Criticism 323); in the 1960s, Jacques Derrida developed his ideas of literary "deconstruction" largely inspired by Finnegans Wake (as detailed in the essay "Two Words for Joyce"); and in 1994, in The Western Canon, Harold Bloom wrote of Finnegans Wake that "[i]f aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon [it] would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante." In 1998, the Modern Library placed Finnegans Wake amongst its list of "Top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century."
Language and style
The language of Finnegans Wake is confounding. Consider this example:
"O here here how hoth sprowled met the duskt the father of fornicationists but, (O my shining stars and body!) how hath fanespanned most high heaven the skysign of soft advertisement!" (page 4, lines 11–14)
The language is like that of a dream, not quite conscious or formed, shimmering with layers of possible meaning. Yet this is a return to possibility, shaped by the experiences of the world we have fallen (into sleep) from.
In that sense, the book can be seen to have abandoned many of the conventions of the waking mind to represent the working of the sleeping mind. In dreaming, the images and plots that we perceive are not distinct or discrete – they shift and conglomerate and constantly reform. Joyce captures this protean quality of dreams through complex puns and the layering of (often contradictory) meaning. Though he writes "however basically English" (page 116, line 26), he universalizes the "dream" by incorporating dozens of other languages and argots.
His use of the world's languages is part of Joyce's aim to contain the full knowledge of humanity in Finnegans Wake. The novel is packed with allusions to world myth, history, and the arts. Along with "high" culture, Joyce did not ignore the "low". The Wake (as it is often called) is largely composed of popular jingles, nursery rhymes, and other fragments from popular culture, exemplified, as mentioned above, in the title itself.
One of the many sources Joyce drew from is the Ancient Egyptian story of Osiris, who was torn apart by his brother or son Set, and the pieces were gathered and reassembled by his sister or wife, Isis, with the help of their sister or daughter Nephthys. In this narrative, their other brother or son, Horus, emerges to slay Set and rise as the new day's sun, as Osiris himself. Reading Finnegans Wake might be seen as analogous to the process of Isis regathering the dismembered portions of Osiris – there are many fragments and allusions and confusing messages that the reader must put together into a conscious form.
Osiris's night journey through the otherworld is described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of spells and invocations to enable the recently deceased to join Osiris and rise with the sun. Such a journey, too, is analogous to the experience of reading the Wake – the reader enters its dark world and hopes to emerge in a sense reborn.
Allusions/references from other works
- In Tom Robbins's Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, the main character, Switters, makes constant references to Finnegans Wake throughout the novel.
- Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar also features a protagonist contending with Finnegans Wake - indeed, Esther Greenwood's reading of its first pages seems to presage her emotional deterioration.
- John Cage's Roaratorio: Reading Again Through Finnegans Wake takes words from the text and rearranges them in poetic form.
Adaptations
- Jean Erdman's 1962 musical play, The Coach with the Six Insides, is based upon Finnegans Wake [1]. The title is a line from the text, found in episode II.3.359 [2].
Trivia
The phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark" on page 383 of Finnegans Wake is commonly believed to have led to the naming of quarks. However, Murray Gell-Mann claims to have come up with the term independently, as he intended 'quark' to be pronounced to rhyme with 'walk' and not 'Mark'[citation needed]. (In the novel, The phrase is sung by a chorus of seabirds, and probably means 'three cheers' or-- judging from Joyce's notes-- three jeers.)
Further reading
- Samuel Beckett; William Carlos Williams; et al. Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress (Shakespeare and Company, 1929)
- Bishop, John. Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1986)
- Burgess, Anthony (ed.) A Shorter Finnegans Wake (1969)
—, Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965); also published as Re Joyce.
—, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973)
- Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944)
- Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. (Oxford University Press, revised edition 1983)
- Hart, Clive. Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake. (Northwestern University Press, 1962)
- McHugh, Roland. Annotations to Finnegans Wake. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991)
—, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake. (University of Texas Press, 1976)
—, The Finnegans Wake Experience. (University of California Press, 1981)
- Eric Rosenbloom. A Word in Your Ear: How & Why to Read James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. (Booksurge Publishing, 2005)
- William York Tindall. A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake. (Syracuse University Press, 1996 (first published 1969))
External links
- James Joyce reads from Anna Livia Plurabelle: downloadable audio and text
- Elucidations to Finnegans Wake; Home Fweet Home
- Etext of Finnegans Wake
- Annotated version of Finnegans Wake
- Online shorter Finnegans Wake
- Editions of Finnegans Wake
- The James Joyce Scholars' Collection includes etexts of several works of Wakean scholarship.
- Finnegans Wiki, an ambitious project to Wiki the Wake
- "Icon O Graphing Finnegans Wake" is a visual fable based on James Joyce’s novel "Finnegans Wake" by Toronto artist Boris Dimitrov.