Michael Groden — James Joyce's Ulysses
English 4520F — Fall 2013
Introductory Notes on Finnegans Wake
list of excerpts to read
1) If Ulysses is a
book of the day, then Finnegans Wake is a book of the
night. One way to approach the text is to consider it as a
dream. The narrative operates like a dream: it is full of
distortion, fragmentation, and sudden and unexplained shifts in
the story. If you try to understand or interpret the details,
the text is also like a dream in that almost every detail is
overdetermined - that is, each one can be explained in more than
one way.
Joyce
claimed to disdain Freud, but two of the features of dreams that
Freud considered paramount operate in the Wake's text:
condensation and displacement. For psychologists, condensation
is "the process by which a single symbol or word is associated
with the emotional content of a group of ideas, feelings,
memories, or impulses" (in other words, one detail, many
associations) and displacement is "a defense mechanism
in which there is an unconscious shift in emotions, affect, or
desires from the original object to a more acceptable or
immediate substitute" (that is, any detail might be a stand-in
for something else).
Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver, "One great
part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot
be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry
grammar, and goahead plot" (letter dated November 24, 1926; Letters
3:146; Selected Letters 318).
2) But, if Finnegans Wake
is a dream, it is a dream without a dreamer. Or, rather, since
the text never gets outside the dream, we have no idea who the
dreamer is. If we are never outside the dream, it isn't possible
to relate the dream's details to anything "real" in a person's
conscious life, as you do when you try to interpret your own
dreams or when you tried to make sense of some of the details in
the "Circe" episode of Ulysses.
In the Wake, we remain inside the dream
throughout, which means that we stay entirely inside the dream's
logic without any recourse to an outside frame of reference. We
may see signs of guilt, for example, but we have no idea what
the dreamer may be feeling guilty about or whether these
feelings bear any relation to anything the dreamer may have done
in his (presumably his) waking life.
3) In the way that The
Odyssey stands behind Ulysses, there is a book
behind Finnegans Wake as well. But it is a work of
philosophy rather than of literature: Giambattista Vico's Scienza
Nuova, or New Science (1725, 1744). Vico argues
that history is cyclical and that each cycle consists of three
different ages—an age of gods, an age of heroes, and an age of
humans—followed by a short transitional age, a ricorso,
that also initiates the next cycle. Joyce took the attitude he
had already worked with in Ulysses, that Homer's
larger-than-life characters could find equivalents in ordinary
1904 Dublin, and expanded this to the point that all ages, and
people and characters in them, can be seen as reflections of one
another. Patterns persist, but for Joyce, following Vico, they
always fall into this four-part cyclical structure. This is a
profoundly comic view, since, although all happy moments or ages
will eventually turn sad or tragic, the reverse is also true:
everyone on high will eventually fall, but everyone who has
fallen will eventually rise as well.
Vico's theory lies behind the structure of Finnegans
Wake in terms of both its narrative, to the extent that
there is one, and its chapter divisions. Like Ulysses,
the Wake has chapters that are marked off by page breaks
and white space but that have no names or numbers. Critics have
supplied numbers and names to make it easier to talk about the
units. There are four large divisions, numbered I, II, III, and
IV. Book I has eight chapters and Books II and III each have
four. Book IV has only one fairly short chapter. Thus, in its
large division into parts, the book follows the 3 + 1 structure
from Vico, and each of Books I-III also follows the structure,
with I having two cycles and II and III one each.
The Viconian pattern is entirely cyclical and
circular. And so, notoriously, Finnegans Wake begins in
the middle of a sentence (its first words are "riverrun, past
Eve and Adam's, from swerve of short to bend of bay, brings us
by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and
Environs." ) and ends with the first half of a sentence that
loops into the opening one ("A way a lone a last a loved a long
the"). Yes, the last word in the book is "the," the one word
that, it would seem, could never be a last word. And note how
Vico's name appears within "vicus" in the book's first sentence.
Vico said that the different ages would be
announced by huge thunderclaps, and Joyce built ten different
hundred-letter words into the book as an equivalent of these
thunderclaps. One of these appears in the first excerpt, on the
book's first page:
"bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!"
(page 3, lines 15-17).
4) More than Viconian patterns
or dream logic, a reader is immediately confronted with the Wake's
language. Joyce essentially created his own language here, one
based on English (and, despite some very long sentences, based
on English grammar) but in no way limited to English. Just as a
dream's details are overdetermined, almost every word in Finnegans
Wake is more than one word packed into a single lexical
unit. The words are sometimes considered puns—that is, a play on
words in which the sounds turn one set of letters into two
different words or in which two different meanings of one word
can both operate at one time.
But a better description of the Wake's
words is the one that Humpty Dumpty tells to Alice as he
interprets "Jabberwocky" in Lewis Carroll's Through the
Looking-Glass, Chapter 6. Humpty Dumpty is explaining
"Jabberwocky"'s first line, "'Twas brillig, and the slithy
toves," and he says: "Well, slithy means 'lithe' and
'slimy.' 'Lithe' is the same as 'active.' You see, it's like a
portmanteau—there are two meanings packed into one word."
Almost every word in the Wake is a
portmanteau word, whether visually or aurally, or both.
Sometimes the double (or triple or quadruple or more) meanings
are profound, sometimes trivial, often both at the same time.
For example, at one point the text says "Wipe your glosses with
what you know." Every reader has to do this: you respond to each
word and interpret it ("gloss" it) based on what you recognize
in it. But you also wipe your glasses, and you wipe your asses,
not only with what you know but with you know what.
Famously, the title of the book is a portmanteau
word. At one level, it refers to an Irish pub song called
"Finnegan's Wake" (or "The Ballad of Tim Finnegan"), about the
funeral of a man named Finnegan who fell off a ladder. It can
also mean "in the wake of Finnegan," that is, everything
post-Finnegan. It can also be "Finnegan is awake" or "Finn again
is awake." Because it doesn't have an apostrophe, it can be
"Finnegans, Wake!"—wake up, all you Finnegans. "Finn" is also
Finn MacCool, a hero in Irish legend (who lies sleeping under
all of Dublin and who will once again wake up). "Fin" is French
for ending. And this is just a start.
The title is very often printed incorrectly with
an apostrophe. Now you know better and can feel superior to
those who make the mistake.
5) Finnegans Wake
doesn't have any characters in a novelistic sense. Figures keep
merging and blending into others. (In a book called A Census
of "Finnegans Wake" [later versions are A Second
Census . . . and A Third Census . . .], Adaline
Glasheen calls her overview of the book's figures "Who Is Who
When Everybody Is Somebody Else.") There is a basic
configuration, though, that involves a nuclear family of
husband, wife, twin sons, and daughter. At a level closest to
something that might be called "real," the husband/father is
called Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE), the wife/mother is
Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP; the subject of Book I, Chapter 8
[excerpt 3] and the speaker of the book's closing monologue
[excerpt 4]), the twin sons are Shem and Shaun, and the daughter
is Issy. HCE owns and runs a pub in the Dublin suburb of
Chapelizod. ALP supports her husband and raises the children.
Shem and Shaun are utter opposites. Shem (sometimes called Shem
the Penman) is the writer, the discoverer of secrets, the
private person, the disreputable conveyor of hidden information.
Shaun (sometimes called Shaun the Postman) is the deliverer of
the writings, the public person who is horrified at everything
Shem is. The brothers are constantly at war, but they need to
merge to become successors to their father. Often they are at
war over Issy, their younger sister. Issy is sometimes a whole
person, but sometimes she divides into 7 (the colours of the
rainbow) and sometimes into 28 (the phases of the moon's cycle).
There
is a kind of base plot: HCE, with vague political aspirations,
did something in Dublin's Phoenix Park. He seems to have exposed
himself to a couple of young women, or watched them expose
themselves, or urinated or masturbated in front of them, or
spied on them urinating. What he did, or whether he did anything
at all, is uncertain, but his reputation is shattered (excerpt
2). His wife needs to rush to defend him and pick up the pieces,
and his children (who will eventually supplant him and ALP in
the next generational cycle) need to live with the rumours.
There is much talk and gossip about the event, and people look
for clues that might provide evidence of his guilt or innocence.
Any other story that falls into this pattern
attaches itself to this basic one. The pattern is rise,
accusation, and fall, with possible exoneration. Parallel
stories: Christ, Parnell, Finn MacCool (the Irish legendary hero
lying under Dublin who will awake again some day), Humpty Dumpty
(who fell off a wall), Tim Finnegan (from the song - he fell off
a ladder).
One of the ways in which the "characters" appear
in the Wake is purely linguistic: their initials appear
in phrases throughout the book. There are many, many phrases
that begin with "h," "c," and "e" and also with "a," "l," and
"p" (look, for example, at the third line of excerpt 1 or the
eighth line of excerpt 3; HCE's name is spelled out near the
start of excerpt 2).
6) Many of the incidents in Finnegans
Wake involve storytelling and gossip. Some of the stories
come from the distant past, even the legendary past, and some
from the recent present.
Excerpt 1, the first few
pages of the book (from Book 1, Chapter 1), begins the
storytelling and gossip involving the HCE husband/father/builder
figure.
Excerpt 2, from Book 1,
Chapter 2, offers another take on the storytelling and gossip.
Excerpt 3 is from Book 1,
Chapter 8, the chapter about Anna Livia Plurabelle. She is the
wife figure and also the river Liffey (the river that runs
through the center of Dublin). Two washerwomen wash clothes on
opposite sides of the Liffey and gossip about ALP. As they
describe her, they are also describing the river. As the river
widens as it approaches the Dublin Sea, and as night approaches,
the women get farther and farther apart and can't hear each
other. Eventually, they start to turn into a tree and a stone.
Typically for Joyce, he decided to work the names of about 500
rivers into the chapter. He made a recording of the last three
pages of the chapter.
Excerpt 4, from Book 4, includes
the last two pages of the book. Like Ulysses, Finnegans
Wake ends with a monologue in a female voice, in this case
that of the ALP wife/mother/river figure.
7) Try to keep this in mind: Finnegans Wake is funny, often hilarious. In many places it's incredibly beautiful, and it does things with language that no one else had ever imagined doing. And no one fully understands it. So try to enjoy the excerpts without worrying too much about what you don't understand. As the refrain of "The Ballad of Tim Finnegan" says, "Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake!"