Finnegans Wake
Encyclopedia
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author
James Joyce
, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's death, Finnegans Wake was Joyce's final work. The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language
, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical item
s and neologistic multilingual pun
s and portmanteau words, which many critics believe attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. Owing to the work's expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions
, free dream associations
, and its abandonment of the conventions of plot and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public.
Despite these obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book's central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot. However, a number of key details remain elusive. The book treats, in an unorthodox fashion, the Earwicker family, composed of the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Post, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book, in a nonlinear dream narrative, follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle. Many noted Joycean scholars such as Samuel Beckett
and Donald Phillip Verene link this cyclical structure to Giambattista Vico
's seminal text Scienza Nuova ("New Science"), upon which they argue Finnegans Wake is structured.
Joyce began working on Finnegans Wake shortly after the 1922 publication of Ulysses
. By 1924 installments of Joyce's new avant-garde
work began to appear, in serialized form, in Parisian literary journals transatlantic review
and transition
, under the title "fragments from Work in Progress". The actual title of the work remained a secret until the book was published in its entirety, on 4 May 1939. Initial reaction to Finnegans Wake, both in its serialized and final published form, was largely negative, ranging from bafflement at its radical reworking of the English language to open hostility towards its lack of respect for the conventions of the novel.
The work has since come to assume a preeminent place in English literature
, despite its numerous detractors. Anthony Burgess
has praised the book as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page." Harold Bloom
called the book "Joyce's masterpiece", and wrote that "[if] aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon [Finnegans Wake] would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante
." In 1998, the Modern Library
ranked Finnegans Wake 77th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Having completed work on Ulysses
, Joyce was so exhausted that he did not write a line of prose for a year. On 10 March 1923 he wrote a letter to his patron, Harriet Weaver
: "Yesterday I wrote two pages—the first I have since the final Yes of Ulysses. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so that I could read them." This is the earliest reference to what would become Finnegans Wake.
The two pages in question consisted of the short sketch "Roderick O'Conor
", concerning the historic last king of Ireland
cleaning up after guests by drinking the dregs of their dirty glasses. Joyce completed another four short sketches in July and August 1923, while holidaying in Bognor
. The sketches, which dealt with different aspects of Irish history, are commonly known as "Tristan and Isolde
", "Saint Patrick
and the Druid," "Kevin
's Orisons" and "Mamalujo". While these sketches would eventually be incorporated into Finnegans Wake in one form or another, they did not contain any of the main characters or plot points which would later come to constitute the backbone of the book. The first signs of what would eventually become Finnegans Wake came in August 1923 when Joyce wrote the sketch "Here Comes Everybody", which dealt for the first time with the book's protagonist HCE.
Over the next few years, Joyce's method became one of "increasingly obsessional concern with note-taking, since [he] obviously felt that any word he wrote had first to have been recorded in some notebook." As Joyce continued to incorporate these notes into his work, the text became increasingly dense and obscure.
By 1926 Joyce had largely completed both Books I and III. Geert Lernout asserts that the Wake had, at this early stage, "a real focus that had developed out of the HCE ["Here Comes Everybody"] sketch: the story of HCE, of his wife and children. There were the adventures of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker himself and the rumours about them in chapters 2–4, a description of his wife ALP's letter in chapter 5, a denunciation of his son Shem in chapter 7, and a dialogue about ALP in chapter 8. These texts [...] formed a unity." In the same year Joyce met Maria
and Eugene Jolas
in Paris, just as his new work was generating an increasingly negative reaction from readers and critics, culminating in The Dial
s refusal to publish the four chapters of Book III in September 1926. The Jolases gave Joyce valuable encouragement and material support throughout the long process of writing Finnegans Wake, and published sections of the book in serial form in their literary magazine transition
, under the title Work In Progress. For the next few years Joyce worked rapidly on the book, adding what would become chapters I.1 and I.6, and revising the already written segments to make them more lexically complex.
However, by this time some early supporters of Joyce's work, such as Ezra Pound
and the author's brother Stanislaus Joyce
, had grown increasingly unsympathetic to his new writing. In order to create a more favourable critical climate, a group of Joyce's supporters (including Samuel Beckett
, William Carlos Williams
, Rebecca West
and others) put together a collection of critical essays on the new work. It was published in 1929 under the title Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress
. In July 1929, increasingly demoralised by the poor reception his new work was receiving, Joyce approached his friend James Stephens
about the possibility of his completing the book. Joyce wrote to Weaver in late 1929 that he had "explained to [Stephens] all about the book, at least a great deal, and he promised me that if I found it madness to continue, in my condition, and saw no other way out, that he would devote himself heart and soul to the completion of it, that is the second part and the epilogue or fourth." Apparently Joyce chose Stephens on superstitious grounds, as he had been born in the same hospital as Joyce, exactly one week later, and shared both the first names of Joyce himself and his fictional alter-ego Stephen Dedalus
. In the end, Stephens was not asked to finish the book.
In the 1930s, as he was writing Books II and IV, Joyce's progress slowed considerably. This was due to a number of factors including the death of his father John Joyce
in 1931; concern over the mental health of his daughter Lucia
; and his own health problems, chiefly his failing eyesight.
Finnegans Wake was published in book form, after 17 years of composition, on 4 May 1939. Joyce died two years later in Zürich
, on 13 January 1941.
Given the book's fluid and changeable approach to plot and characters, a definitive, critically agreed-upon plot synopsis remains elusive (see Critical response and themes: Difficulties of plot summary below). As such, the following synopsis attempts to summarise events in the book which find general, although inevitably not universal, consensus among critics.
and Environs", and introduces Dublin hod carrier "Finnegan
", who falls to his death from a ladder while constructing a wall. Finnegan's wife Annie puts out his corpse as a meal spread for the mourners at his wake
, but he vanishes before they can eat him. A series of episodic vignettes
follows, loosely related to the dead Finnegan, most commonly referred to as "The Willingdone Museyroom", "Mutt and Jute", and "The Prankquean". At the chapter's close a fight breaks out, whiskey splashes on Finnegan's corpse, and “the dead Finnegan rises from his coffin bawling for whiskey and his mourners put him back to rest”, persuading him that he is better off where he is. The chapter ends with the image of the HCE character sailing into Dublin Bay
to take a central role in the story.
I.2 opens with an account of "Harold or Humphrey" Chimpden receiving the nickname
"Earwicker" from the Sailor King, who encounters him attempting to catch earwig
s with an inverted flowerpot on a stick while manning a tollgate through which the King is passing. This name helps Chimpden, now known by his initials HCE, to rise to prominence in Dublin society as "Here Comes Everybody". He is then brought low by a rumor that begins to spread across Dublin, apparently concerning a sexual trespass involving two girls in the Phoenix Park
, although details of HCE's transgression change with each retelling of events.
Chapters I.2 through I.4 follow the progress of this rumor, starting with HCE's encounter with "a cad with a pipe" in Phoenix Park
. The cad greets HCE in Gaelic and asks the time, but HCE misunderstands the question as an accusation, and incriminates himself by denying rumours the cad has not yet heard. These rumours quickly spread across Dublin, gathering momentum until they are turned into a song penned by the character Hosty called "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly
". As a result, HCE goes into hiding, where he is besieged at the closed gate of his pub by a visiting American looking for drink after hours. However HCE remains silent – not responding to the accusations or verbal abuse – dreams, is buried in a coffin at the bottom of Lough Neagh
, and is finally brought to trial, under the name Festy King. He is eventually freed, and goes once more into hiding. An important piece of evidence during the trial – a letter about HCE written by his wife ALP – is called for so that it can be examined in closer detail.
ALP's Letter becomes the focal point as it is analysed in detail in I.5. This letter was dictated by ALP to her son Shem, a writer, and entrusted to her other son Shaun, a postman, for delivery. The letter never reaches its intended destination, ending up in a midden heap where it is unearthed by a hen named Biddy. Chapter I.6 digresses from the narrative in order to present the main and minor characters in more detail, in the form of twelve riddles and answers.
In the final two chapters of Book I we learn more about the letter's writer Shem the Penman (I.7) and its original author, his mother ALP (I.8). The Shem chapter consists of "Shaun's character assassination of his brother Shem", describing the hermetic artist as a forger and a "sham", before "Shem is protected by his mother [ALP], who appears at the end to come and defend her son." The following chapter concerning Shem's mother, known as "Anna Livia Plurabelle", is interwoven with thousands of river names from all over the globe, and is widely considered the book's most celebrated passage. The chapter was described by Joyce in 1924 as "a chattering dialogue across the river by two washerwomen who as night falls become a tree and a stone." These two washerwomen gossip about ALP's response to the allegations laid against her husband HCE, as they wash clothes in the Liffey. ALP is said to have written a letter declaring herself tired of her mate. Their gossip then digresses to her youthful affairs and sexual encounters, before returning to the publication of HCE's guilt in the morning newspaper, and his wife's revenge on his enemies: borrowing a "mailsack" from her son Shaun the Post, she delivers presents to her 111 children. At the chapter's close the washerwomen try to pick up the thread of the story, but their conversation is increasingly difficult as they are on opposite sides of the widening Liffey, and it is getting dark. Finally, as they turn into a tree and a stone, they ask to be told a Tale of Shem or Shaun.
II.1 opens with a pantomime programme, which outlines, in relatively clear language, the identities and characteristics of the book's main protagonists. The chapter then concerns a guessing game among the children, in which Shem is challenged three times to guess by "gazework" the colour which the girls have chosen. Unable to answer due to his poor eyesight, Shem goes into exile in disgrace, and Shaun wins the affection of the girls. Finally HCE emerges from the pub and in a thunder-like voice calls the children inside.
Chapter II.2 follows Shem, Shaun and Issy studying upstairs in the pub, after having been called inside in the previous chapter. The chapter depicts "[Shem] coaching [Shaun] how to do Euclid
Bk I, 1", structured as "a reproduction of a schoolboys' (and schoolgirls') old classbook complete with marginalia
by the twins, who change sides at half time, and footnotes by the girl (who doesn't)". Once Shem (here called Dolph) has helped Shaun (here called Kev) to draw the Euclid diagram, the latter realises that he has drawn a diagram of ALP's genitalia, and "Kev finally realises the significance of the triangles [..and..] strikes Dolph." After this "Dolph forgives Kev" and the children are given "[e]ssay assignments on 52 famous men." The chapter ends with the children's "nightletter" to HCE and ALP, in which they are "apparently united in a desire to overcome their parents."
II.3 moves to HCE working in the pub below the studying children. As HCE serves his customers, two narratives are broadcast via the bar's radio and television sets, namely "The Norwegian Captain and the Tailor's Daughter", and "How Buckley Shot the Russian General". The first portrays HCE as a Norwegian Captain succumbing to domestication through his marriage to the Tailor's Daughter. The latter, told by Shem and Shaun ciphers Butt and Taff, casts HCE as a Russian General who is shot by the soldier Buckley. Earwicker has been absent throughout the latter tale, having been summoned upstairs by ALP. He returns and is reviled by his customers, who see Buckley's shooting of the General as symbolic of Shem and Shaun's supplanting their father. This condemnation of his character forces HCE to deliver a general confession of his crimes, including an incestuous desire for young girls. Finally a policeman arrives to send the drunken customers home, the pub is closed up, and the customers disappear singing into the night as a drunken HCE, clearing up the bar and swallowing the dregs of the glasses left behind, morphs into ancient Irish high king Rory O'Connor, and passes out.
II.4, ostensibly portraying the drunken and sleeping Earwicker's dream, chronicles the spying of four old men (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) on Tristan and Iseult
's journey. The short chapter portrays "an old man like King Mark being rejected and abandoned by young lovers who sail off into a future without him", while the four old men observe Tristan and Isolde, and offer four intertwining commentaries on the lovers and themselves which are "always repeating themselves".
III.1 opens with the Four Masters' ass narrating how he thought, as he was "dropping asleep", he had heard and seen an apparition of Shaun the Post. As a result Shaun re-awakens, and, floating down the Liffey in a barrel, is posed 14 questions concerning the significance and content of the letter he is carrying. However, Shaun, "apprehensive about being slighted, is on his guard, and the placating narrators never get a straight answer out of him." Shaun's answers focus on his own boastful personality and his admonishment of the letter's author – his artist brother Shem. After the inquisition Shaun loses his balance and the barrel in which he has been floating careens over and he rolls backwards out of the narrator's earshot, before disappearing completely from view.
In III.2 Shaun re-appears as "Jaunty Jaun" and delivers a lengthy sermon to his sister Issy, and her 28 schoolmates from St. Brigid's School. Throughout this book Shaun is continually regressing, changing from an old man to an overgrown baby lying on his back, and eventually, in III.3, into a vessel through which the voice of HCE speaks again by means of a spiritual medium
. This leads to HCE's defence of his life in the passage "Haveth Childers Everywhere". Book III ends in the bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Porter as they attempt to copulate while their children, Jerry, Kevin and Isobel Porter, are sleeping down the hall and the dawn is rising outside (III.4). Jerry awakes from a nightmare of a scary father figure, and Mrs. Porter interrupts the coitus to go comfort him with the words "You were dreamend, dear. The pawdrag? The fawthrig? Shoe! Hear are no phanthares in the room at all, avikkeen. No bad bold faathern, dear one." She returns to bed, and the rooster crows at the conclusion of their coitus at the Book's culmination.
. After an opening call for dawn to break, the remainder of the chapter consists of the vignettes "Saint Kevin", "Berkely and Patrick" and "The Revered Letter". ALP is given the final word, as the book closes on a version of her Letter and her final long monologue, in which she tries to wake her sleeping husband, declaring "Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long!", and remembers a walk they once took, and hopes for its re-occurrence. At the close of her monologue, ALP – as the river Liffey – disappears at dawn into the ocean. The book's last words are a fragment, but they can be turned into a complete sentence by attaching them to the words that start the book:
, John Gordon, Anthony Burgess
and William York Tindall. While no two summaries interpret the plot in the same way, there are a number of central "plot point
s" upon which they find general agreement. However, a number of Joyce scholars question the legitimacy of searching for a linear storyline within the complex text. As Bernard Benstock highlights, "in a work where every sentence opens a variety of possible interpretations, any synopsis of a chapter is bound to be incomplete." David Hayman has suggested that "For all the efforts made by critics to establish a plot for the Wake, it makes little sense to force this prose into a narrative mold." The book's challenges have led some commentators into generalised statements about its content and themes, prompting critic Bernard Benstock
to warn against the danger of "boiling down" Finnegans Wake into "insipid pap, and leaving the lazy reader with a predigested mess of generalizations and catchphrases." Fritz Senn has also voiced concerns with some plot synopses, saying "we have some traditional summaries, also some put in circulation by Joyce himself. I find them most unsatisfactory and unhelpful, they usually leave out the hard parts and recirculate what we already think we know. I simply cannot believe that FW would be as blandly uninteresting as those summaries suggest."
The challenge of compiling a definitive synopsis of Finnegans Wake lies not only in the opacity of the book's language, but also in the radical approach to plot which Joyce employed. Joyce acknowledged this when he wrote to Eugene Jolas that:
This "new way" of telling a story in Finnegans Wake takes the form of a discontinuous dream-narrative, with abrupt changes to characters, character names, locations and plot details resulting in the absence of a discernible linear narrative, causing Herring to argue that the plot of Finnegans Wake "is unstable in that there is no one plot from beginning to end, but rather many recognizable stories and plot types with familiar and unfamiliar twists, told from varying perspectives." Patrick A. McCarthy expands on this idea of a non-linear, digressive narrative with the contention that "throughout much of Finnegans Wake, what appears to be an attempt to tell a story is often diverted, interrupted, or reshaped into something else, for example a commentary on a narrative with conflicting or unverifiable details." In other words, while crucial plot points – such as HCE's crime or ALP's letter – are endlessly discussed, the reader never encounters or experiences them first hand, and as the details are constantly changing, they remain unknown and perhaps unknowable. Suzette Henke has accordingly described Finnegans Wake as an aporia
. Joyce himself tacitly acknowledged this radically different approach to language and plot in a 1926 letter to Harriet Weaver, outlining his intentions for the book: "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." Critics have seen a precedent for the book's plot presentation in Laurence Sterne
's famously digressive The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
, with Thomas Keymer stating that "Tristram Shandy was a natural touchstone for James Joyce as he explained his attempt "to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose" in Finnegans Wake".
Book II is usually considered the book's most opaque section, and hence the most difficult to synopsize. William York Tindall said of Book II's four chapters "Than this [...] nothing is denser." Similarly, Patrick Parrinder has described Book II as the "worst and most disorienting quagmire[..] in the Wake."
Despite Joyce's revolutionary techniques, the author repeatedly emphasized that the book was neither random nor meaningless; with Ellmann quoting the author as having stated: "I can justify every line of my book." To Sisley Huddleston he stated "critics who were most appreciative of Ulysses are complaining about my new work. They cannot understand it. Therefore they say it is meaningless. Now if it were meaningless it could be written quickly without thought, without pains, without erudition; but I assure you that these 20 pages now before us [i.e. chapter I.8] cost me twelve hundred hours and an enormous expense of spirit." When the editor of Vanity Fair
asked Joyce if the sketches in Work in Progress were consecutive and interrelated, Joyce replied "It is all consecutive and interrelated."
, the motif of the warring brothers, the personification of the landscape and the question of Earwicker's crime in the park, the precise nature of which is left uncertain throughout the Wake." Such a view finds general critical consensus, viewing the vignettes as allegorical appropriations of the book's characters and themes; for example, Schwartz argues that "The Willingdone Museyroom" episode represents the book's "archetypal family drama in military-historical terms." Joyce himself referred to the chapter as a "prelude
", and as an "air photograph of Irish history, a celebration of the dim past of Dublin." Riquelme finds that "passages near the book's beginning and its ending echo and complement one another", and Fargnoli and Gillespie representatively argue that the book's cyclical structure echoes the themes inherent within, that "the typologies of human experience that Joyce identifies [in Finnegans Wake] are [..] essentially cyclical, that is, patterned and recurrent; in particular, the experiences of birth, guilt, judgment, sexuality, family, social ritual and death recur throughout the Wake. In a similar enumeration of themes, Tindall argues that "rise and fall and rise again, sleeping and waking, death and resurrection, sin and redemption, conflict and appeasement, and, above all, time itself [..] are the matter of Joyce's essay on man."
Henkes and Bindervoet generally summarise the critical consensus when they argue that, between the thematically indicative opening and closing chapters, the book concerns "two big questions" which are never resolved: what is the nature of protagonist HCE’s secret sin, and what was the letter, written by his wife ALP, about? HCE's unidentifiable sin has most generally been interpreted as representing man's original sin
as a result of the Fall of Man. Anthony Burgess sees HCE, through his dream, trying "to make the whole of history swallow up his guilt for him" and to this end "HCE has, so deep in his sleep, sunk to a level of dreaming in which he has become a collective being rehearsing the collective guilt of man." Fargnoli and Gillespie argue that although undefined, "Earwicker's alleged crime in the Park" appears to have been of a "voyeuristic
, sexual, or scatological
nature". ALP's letter appears a number of times throughout the book, in a number of different forms, and as its contents cannot be definitively delineated, it is usually believed to be both an exoneration of HCE, and an indictment of his sin. Herring argues that "[t]he effect of ALP's letter is precisely the opposite of her intent [...] the more ALP defends her husband in her letter, the more scandal attaches to him." Patrick A. McCarthy argues that "it is appropriate that the waters of the Liffey, representing Anna Livia, are washing away the evidence of Earwicker's sins as [the washerwomen speak, in chapter I.8] for (they tell us) she takes on her husband's guilt and redeems him; alternately she is tainted with his crimes and regarded as an accomplice".
Joyce's claims to be representing the night and dreams have been accepted and questioned with greater and lesser credulity. Supporters of the claim have pointed to Book IV as providing its strongest evidence, as when the narrator asks “You mean to see we have been hadding a sound night’s sleep?”, and later concludes that what has gone before has been “a long, very long, a dark, very dark [...] scarce endurable [...] night.” Tindall refers to Book IV as "a chapter of resurrection and waking up", and McHugh finds that the chapter contains "particular awareness of events going on offstage, connected with the arrival of dawn and the waking process which terminates the sleeping process of [Finnegans Wake]."
However, this conceptualisation of the Wake as a dream is a point of contention for some. Harry Burrell, representative of this view, argues that "one of the most overworked ideas is that Finnegans Wake is about a dream. It is not, and there is no dreamer." Burrell argues that the theory is an easy way out for "critics stymied by the difficulty of comprehending the novel and the search for some kind of understanding of it." However, the point upon which a number of critics fail to concur with Burrell's argument is its dismissal of the testimony of the book's author on the matter as "misleading... publicity efforts". Parrinder however, equally skeptical of the concept of the Wake as a dream, argues that Joyce came up with the idea of representing his linguistic experiments as a language of the night around 1927 as a means of battling his many critics, further arguing that "since it cannot be said that neologism is a major feature of the dreaming process, such a justification for the language of Finnegans Wake smacks dangerously of expediency."
While many, if not all, agree that there is at least some sense in which the book can be said to be a "dream", few agree on who the possible dreamer of such a dream might be. Edmund Wilson's early analysis of the book, The Dream of H. C. Earwicker, made the assumption that Earwicker himself is the dreamer of the dream, an assumption which continued to carry weight with Wakean scholars Harry Levin, Hugh Kenner, and William Troy. Joseph Campbell, in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
, also believed Earwicker to be the dreamer, but considered the narrative to be the observances of, and a running commentary by, an anonymous pedant on Earwicker's dream in progress, who would interrupt the flow with his own digressions.
Ruth von Phul was the first to argue that Earwicker was not the dreamer, which triggered a number of similarly-minded views on the matter, although her assertion that Shem was the dreamer has found less support.
The assertion that the dream was that of Mr. Porter, whose dream personality personified itself as HCE, came from the critical idea that the dreamer partially wakes during chapter III.4, in which he and his family are referred to by the name Porter. Anthony Burgess representatively summarized this conception of the "dream" thus: "Mr. Porter and his family are asleep for the greater part of the book [...] Mr. Porter dreams hard, and we are permitted to share his dream [...] Sleeping, he becomes a remarkable mixture of guilty man, beast, and crawling thing, and he even takes on a new and dreamily appropriate name – Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker."
Harriet Weaver was among the first to suggest that the dream was not that of any one dreamer, but was rather an analysis of the process of dreaming itself. In a letter to J.S. Atherton she wrote:
Other critics have been more skeptical of the concept of identifying the dreamer of the book's narrative. Clive Hart argues that "[w]hatever our conclusions about the identity of the dreamer, and no matter how many varied caricatures of him we may find projected into the dream, it is clear that he must always be considered as essentially external to the book, and should be left there. Speculation about the 'real person' behind the guises of the dream-surrogates or about the function of the dream in relation to the unresolved stresses of this hypothetical mind is fruitless, for the tensions and psychological problems in Finnegans Wake concern the dream-figures living within the book itself."
John Bishop has been the most vocal supporter of treating Finnegans Wake absolutely, in every sense, as a description of a dream, the dreamer, and of the night itself; arguing that the book not only represents a dream in an abstract conception, but is fully a literary representation of sleep. On the subject Bishop writes:
argued that "the characters in Work in Progress, in keeping with the space-time chaos in which they live, change identity at will. At one time they are persons, at another rivers or stones or trees, at another personifications of an idea, at another they are lost and hidden in the actual texture of the prose, with an ingenuity far surpassing that of crossword puzzles." Such concealment of character identity has resulted in some disparity as to how critics identify the book's main protagonists; for example, while most find consensus that Festy King, who appears on trial in I.4, is a HCE type, not all analysts agree on this – for example Anthony Burgess believes him to be Shaun.
However, while characters are in a constant state of flux; constantly changing names, occupations, and physical attributes; a recurring set of core characters, or character types (what Norris dubs "cipher
s"), are discernible. During the composition of Finnegans Wake, Joyce used signs, or so-called “sigla”, rather than names to designate these character amalgams or types. In a letter to his Maecenas, Harriet Shaw Weaver (March 1924), Joyce made a list of these sigla. For those who argue for the existence of distinguishable characters, the book focuses on the Earwicker family, which consists of father, mother, twin sons and a daughter.
male, of Scandinavia
n lineage, connected with the pubkeeping business somewhere in the neighbourhood of Chapelizod
, who has a wife, a daughter, and two sons."
HCE is referred to by literally thousands of names throughout the book; leading Terence Killeen to argue that in Finnegans Wake "naming is [..] a fluid and provisional process". HCE is at first referred to as "Harold or Humphrey Chimpden"; a conflation of these names as "Haromphreyld", and as a consequence of his initials "Here Comes Everybody". These initials lend themselves to phrase after phrase throughout the book; for example, appearing in the book's opening sentence as "Howth Castle and Environs". As the work progresses the names by which he may be referred to become increasingly abstract (such as "Finn MacCool
", "Mr. Makeall Gone", or "Mr. Porter").
The original "HCE" came from the initials of the portly politician Hugh Childers
(1827–96), who had been nicknamed "Here Comes Everybody" for his size. Childers' 1894 investigation and report on Irish taxation was considered supportive by Irish nationalists
in the following decades, and so he was well known to many Irish people. Childers' cousin Erskine Childers
used the report's findings to justify Irish Home Rule in his popular book "The Framework of Home Rule" (1911).
Many critics see Finnegan, whose death, wake and resurrection are the subject of the opening chapter, as either a prototype of HCE, or as another of his manifestations. One of the reasons for this close identification is that Finnegan is called a "man of hod, cement and edifices" and "like Haroun Childeric Eggeberth", identifying him with the initials HCE. Parrinder for example states that "Bygmester Finnegan [...] is HCE", and finds that his fall and resurrection foreshadows "the fall of HCE early in Book I [which is] paralleled by his resurrection towards the end of III.3, in the section originally called "Haveth Childers Everywhere", when [HCE's] ghost speaks forth in the middle of a seance
."
-founded city of Dublin, and his wife ALP personifies the river Liffey
, on whose banks the city was built.
and a postman by the name of Shaun the Post, who are rivals for replacing their father and for their sister Issy's affection. Shaun is portrayed as a dull postman
, conforming to society's expectations, while Shem is a bright artist and sinister experimenter, often perceived as Joyce's alter-ego in the book. Hugh Staples finds that Shaun "wants to be thought of as a man-about-town, a snappy dresser, a glutton and a gourmet... He is possessed of a musical voice and is a braggart. He is not happy in his work, which is that of a messenger or a postman; he would rather be a priest." Shaun's sudden and somewhat unexpected promotion to the book's central character in Book III is explained by Tindall with the assertion that "having disposed of old HCE, Shaun is becoming the new HCE."
Like their father, Shem and Shaun are referred to by different names throughout the book, such as "Caddy and Primas"; "Mercius
" and "Justius
"; "Dolph and Kevin"; and "Jerry and Kevin". These twins are contrasted in the book by allusions to sets of opposing twins and enemies in literature, mythology and history; such as Set
and Horus
of the Osiris
story; the biblical pairs Jacob
and Esau
, Cain and Abel, and Saint Michael and the Devil
– equating Shaun with "Mick" and Shem with "Nick
" – as well as Romulus and Remus
.
, the twelve customers, the Earwicker's cleaning staff Kate and Joe, as well as more obscure characters such as "McGrath", Lily Kinsella, and the bell-ringer "Fox Goodman".
The most commonly recurring characters outside of the Earwicker family are the four old men known collectively as "Mamalujo" (a conflation of their names: Matt Gregory
, Marcus Lyons
, Luke Tarpey
and Johnny Mac Dougall
). These four most commonly serve as narrators, but they also play a number of active roles in the text, such as when they serve as the judges in the court case of I.4, or as the inquisitors who question Yawn in III.4. Tindall summarises the roles that these old men play as those of the Four Masters
, the Four Evangelists
, and the four Provinces of Ireland
( "Matthew, from the north, is Ulster
; Mark, from the south, is Munster
; Luke, from the east, is Leinster
; and John, from the west, is Connaught
"). According to Finn Fordham, Joyce related to his daughter-in-law Helen Fleischmann that "Mamalujo" also represented Joyce's own family, namely his wife Nora (mama), daughter Lucia (lu), and son Giorgio (jo).
In addition to the four old men, there are a group of twelve unnamed men who always appear together, and serve as the customers in Earwicker's pub, gossipers about his sins, jurors at his trial and mourners at his wake. The Earwicker household also includes two cleaning staff: Kate, the maid, and Joe, who is by turns handyman and barman in Earwicker's pub. These characters are seen by most critics as older versions of ALP and HCE. Kate often plays the role of museum curator, as in the "Willingdone Museyroom" episode of 1.1, and is recognisable by her repeated motif "Tip! Tip!" Joe is often also referred to by the name "Sackerson", and Kitcher describes him as "a figure sometimes playing the role of policeman, sometimes [...] a squalid derelict, and most frequently the odd-job man of HCE's inn, Kate's male counterpart, who can ambiguously indicate an older version of HCE."
solely for the purpose of this work. This language is composed of composite words from some sixty to seventy world languages, combined to form pun
s, or portmanteau words and phrases intended to convey several layers of meaning at once. Senn has labelled Finnegans Wakes language as "polysemetic
", and Tindall as an "Arabesque
". Norris describes it as a language which "like poetry, uses words and images which can mean several, often contradictory, things at once" An early review of the book argued that Joyce was attempting "to employ language as a new medium, breaking down all grammatical usages, all time space values, all ordinary conceptions of context [..] the theme is the language and the language the theme, and a language where every association of sound and free association is exploited." Seconding this analysis of the book's emphasis on form over content, Paul Rosenfeld reviewed Finnegans Wake in 1939 with the suggestion that "the writing is not so much about something as it is that something itself [..] in Finnegans Wake the style, the essential qualities and movement of the words, their rhythmic and melodic sequences, and the emotional color of the page are the main representatives of the author's thought and feeling. The accepted significations of the words are secondary."
While commentators emphasize how this manner of writing can communicate multiple levels of meaning simultaneously, Hayman and Norris contend that its purpose is as much to obscure and disable meaning as to expand it. Hayman writes that access to the work's "tenuous narratives" may only be achieved through "the dense weave of a language designed as much to shield as to reveal them." Norris argues that Joyce's language is "devious" and that it "conceals and reveals secrets." Allen B. Ruch has dubbed Joyce's new language "dreamspeak," and describes it as "a language that is basically English, but extremely malleable and all-inclusive, rich with portmanteau words, stylistic parodies, and complex puns." Although much has been made of the numerous world languages employed in the book's composite language, most of the more obscure languages appear only seldom in small clusters, and most agree with Ruch that the latent sense of the language, however manifestly obscure, is "basically English". Burrell also finds that Joyce's thousands of neologisms are "based on the same etymological
principles as standard English." However, the Wake's language is not entirely unique in literature; for example critics have seen its use of portmanteaux and neologisms as an extension of Lewis Carroll
's Jabberwocky
.
Although Joyce died shortly after the publication of Finnegans Wake, during the work's composition the author made a number of statements concerning his intentions in writing in such an original manner. In a letter to Max Eastman, for example, Joyce suggested that his decision to employ such a unique and complex language was a direct result from his attempts to represent the night:
." A great many of the book's puns are etymological in nature. Sources tell us that Joyce relished delving into the history and the changing meanings of words, his primary source being An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat (Oxford, at the Clarendon Press; 1879). For example, one of the very first entries in Skeat is for the letter A, which begins: "...(1) adown; (2) afoot; (3) along; (4) arise; (5) achieve; (6) avert; (7) amend; (8) alas; (9) abyss..." Further in the entry, Skeat writes: "These prefixes are discussed at greater length under the headings Of, On, Along, Arise...Alas, Aware, Avast..." It seems likely that these strings of words prompted Joyce to finish the Wake with a sentence fragment that included the words: "...a way a lone a last a loved a long..."
Samuel Beckett
collated words from foreign languages on cards for Joyce to use, and, as Joyce's eyesight worsened, wrote down the text from his dictation. Beckett described and defended the writing style of Finnegans Wake thus:
Faced with the obstacles to be surmounted in "understanding" Joyce's text, a handful of critics have suggested readers focus on the rhythm and sound of the language, rather than solely on "meaning." As early as 1929, Eugene Jolas stressed the importance of the aural and musical dimensions of the work. In his contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, Jolas wrote:
The Canadian critic, historian and novelist Patrick Watson has also argued this point, writing that
" from which the book takes its name, Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico's La Scienza Nuova, the Egyptian Book of the Dead
, the plays of Shakespeare, and religious texts such as the Bible and Qur'an
. These allusions, rather than directly quoting or referencing a source, normally enter the text in a contorted fashion, often through humorous plays on words. For example, Hamlet Prince of Denmark becomes "Camelot, prince of dinmurk" and St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews
becomes a "farced epistol to the hibruws".
The book begins with one such allusion to Vico's New Science:
"Commodius vicus" refers to Giambattista Vico
(1668–1744), who proposed a theory of cyclical history in his work "La Scienza Nuova" (The New Science). Vico argued 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. These ideas recur throughout Finnegans Wake, informing the book's four-part structure. Vico's name appears a number of times throughout the Wake, indicating the work's debt to his theories, such as “The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.” That a reference to Vico's cyclical theory
of history is to be found in the opening sentence which is a continuation of the book's closing sentence – thus making the work cyclical in itself – creates the relevance of such an allusion.
One of the sources Joyce drew from is the Ancient Egypt
ian story of Osiris
, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead
, a collection of spells and invocations. Bishop asserts that "it is impossible to overlook the vital presence of the Book of the Dead in Finnegans Wake, which refers to ancient Egypt in countless tags and allusions." At one of their last meetings, Joyce suggested to Frank Budgen that he write an article about Finnegans Wake, entitling it "James Joyce's Book of the Dead". Budgen followed Joyce's advice with his paper "Joyce's Chapters of Going Forth by Day", highlighting many of the allusions to Egyptian mythology in the book.
The Tristan and Iseult
legend – a tragic love triangle between the Irish princess Iseult, the Cornish knight Tristan
and his uncle King Mark
– is also oft alluded to in the work, particularly in Book II chapter 4. Fargnoli and Gillespie argue that "various themes and motifs throughout Finnegans Wake, such as the cuckold
ry of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (a King Mark figure) and Shaun's attempts at seducing Issy, relate directly to Tristan and Isolde [...] other motifs relating to Earwicker's loss of authority, such as the forces usurping his parental status, are also based on Tristan and Isolde."
The book also alludes heavily to Irish mythology
, with HCE sometimes corresponding to Fionn mac Cumhaill
, Issy and ALP to Gráinne
, and Shem/Shaun to Dermot (Diarmaid). Not only Irish mythology, but also notable real-life Irish figures are alluded to throughout the text. For example, HCE is often identified with Charles Stewart Parnell
, and Shem's attack on his father in this way mirrors the attempt of forger Richard Pigott to incriminate Parnell in the Phoenix Park Murders
of 1882 by means of false letters. But, given the flexibility of allusion in Finnegans Wake HCE assumes the character of Pigott as well, for just as HCE betrays himself to the cad
, Pigott betrayed himself at the inquiry into admitting the forgery by his spelling of the word "hesitancy" as "hesitency"; and this misspelling appears frequently in the Wake.
Finnegans Wake also makes a great number of allusions to religious texts. When HCE is first introduced in chapter I.2, the narrator relates how "in the beginning" he was a "grand old gardener", thus equating him with Adam
in the Garden of Eden
. Spinks further highlights this allusion by highlighting that like HCE's unspecified crime in the park, Adam also "commits a crime in a garden".
, as the setting for Finnegans Wake, it is perhaps not surprising that Joyce incorporated a number of Norwegian
linguistic and cultural elements into the work (notably Riksmål references for the most part). For example, one of the main tales of Book II chapter 3 concerns a Norwegian tailor, and a number of Norwegian words such as bakvandets, Knut Oelsvinger and Bygmester Finnegan (the latter a reference to Ibsen's Bygmeester Solness
) are used throughout. Indeed, most of Ibsen's works, many of his characters and also some quotations are referenced in the Wake. While Joyce was working on Finnegans Wake, he wanted to insert reference
s to Scandinavia
n language
s and literature, hiring five teachers of Norwegian. The first one turned out to be the poet Olaf Bull
. Joyce wanted to read Norwegian works in the original language, including Peter Andreas Munch
's Norrøne Gude- og Heltesagn (Norse
tales of gods and hero
es). He was looking for pun
s and unusual associations across the barriers of language, a practice Bull well understood. Lines from Bull's poems echo through Finnegans Wake, and Bull himself materializes under the name "Olaph the Oxman", a pun on his surname.
of the 1920s. Initial response, to both its serialised and final published forms, was almost universally negative. Even close friends and family were disapproving of Joyce's seemingly impenetrable text, with Joyce's brother Stanislaus
"rebuk[ing] him for writing an incomprehensible night-book", and former friend Oliver Gogarty believing the book to be a joke, pulled by Joyce on the literary community, referring to it as "the most colossal leg pull in literature since Macpherson's
Ossian
". When Ezra Pound
, a former champion of Joyce's and admirer of Ulysses
, was asked his opinion on the text, he wrote "Nothing so far as I make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization." H.G. Wells, in a personal letter to Joyce, argued that "you have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence [...] I ask: who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousands I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?" Even Joyce's patron Harriett Weaver wrote to him in 1927 to inform him of her misgivings regarding his new work, stating "I am made in such a way that I do not care much for the output from your Wholesale Safety Pun Factory nor for the darknesses and unintelligibilities of your deliberately entangled language system. It seems to me you are wasting your genius."
The wider literary community were equally disparaging, with D. H. Lawrence
declaring, in reaction to the sections of the Wake being published individually as "Work in Progress", "My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate journalistic dirty-mindedness – what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!" Vladimir Nabokov
, who had also admired Ulysses, described Finnegans Wake as "nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room [...] and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity." 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 commissioned work, the essay "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce", along with contributions by William Carlos Williams
, Stuart Gilbert
, Marcel Brion
, Eugene Jolas
and others.
Upon its publication in 1939, Finnegans Wake received a series of mixed, but mostly negative reviews. Louise Bogan
, writing for Nation, surmised that while "the book's great beauties, its wonderful passages of wit, its variety, its mark of genius and immense learning are undeniable [...], to read the book over a long period of time gives one the impression of watching intemperance become addiction, become debauch" and argued that "Joyce's delight in reducing man's learning, passion, and religion to a hash is also disturbing." Edwin Muir, reviewing in Listener wrote that "as a whole the book is so elusive that there is no judging it; I cannot tell whether it is winding into deeper and deeper worlds of meaning or lapsing into meaningless", although he too acknowledged that "there are occasional flashes of a kind of poetry which is difficult to define but is of unquestioned power." B. Ifor Evans, writing in the Manchester Guardian, similarly argued that, due to its difficulties, the book "does not admit of review", and argued that, perhaps "in twenty years' time, with sufficient study and with the aid of the commentary that will doubtless arise, one might be ready for an attempt to appraise it." Taking a swipe at many of the negative reviews circulating at the time, Evans writes: "The easiest way to deal with the book would be [...] to write off Mr. Joyce's latest volume as the work of a charlatan. But the author of Dubliners
, A Portrait of the Artist
and Ulysses
is not a charlatan, but an artist of very considerable proportions. I prefer to suspend judgement..."
In the time since Joyce's death, the book's admirers have struggled against public perception of the work to make exactly this argument for Finnegans Wake. One of the book's early champions was Thornton Wilder
, who wrote to Gertrude Stein
and Alice Toklas in August 1939, a few months after the book's publication: "One of my absorptions [...] has been James Joyce's new novel, digging out its buried keys and resolving that unbroken chain of erudite puzzles and finally coming on lots of wit, and lots of beautiful things has been my midnight recuperation. A lot of thanks to him". The publication in 1944 of the first in-depth study and analysis of Joyce's final text—A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
by mythologist Joseph Campbell
and Henry Morton Robinson
—proved to a skeptical public that the book could be read as a novel with characters and plot, and slowly its critical capital began to rise to the point that, in 1957, Northrop Frye
described Finnegans Wake as the “chief ironic epic of our time”. Anthony Burgess
lauded the book as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page." John Bishop has described it as "the single most intentionally crafted literary artifact that our culture has produced [...] and, certainly, one of the great monuments of twentieth-century experimental letters." The section of the book to have received the most praise has been "Anna Livia Plurabelle" (Book I, chapter 8), which Parrinder describes as being "widely recognized as one of the most beautiful prose-poems in English."
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 as a result literary theory
—in particular post-structuralism
—has embraced Joyce's innovation and ambition in Finnegans Wake. Derrida tells an anecdote about the two books' importance for his own thought; in a bookstore in Tokyo,
wrote of Finnegans Wake: "[if] 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
." The text's influence on other writers has grown since its initial shunning, and contemporary American author Tom Robbins
is among the writers working today to have expressed his admiration for Joyce's complex last work:
In 1998, the Modern Library
placed Finnegans Wake seventy-seventh amongst its list of "Top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century."
and Eugene Jolas
's transition
. It has been argued that "Finnegans Wake, much more so than Ulysses, was very much directly shaped by the tangled history of its serial publication." In October 1923 in Ezra Pound
's Paris flat, Ford Madox Ford
convinced Joyce to contribute some of his new writings to the Transatlantic Review, a new journal Ford was editing. As a result, the eight page "Mamalujo" sketch became the first fragment from the book to be published in its own right, in Transatlantic Review 1.4 in April 1924. The sketch appeared under the title "From Work in Progress", a term applied to works by Ernest Hemingway
and Tristan Tzara
published in the same issue, and the one by which Joyce would refer to his final work until its publication as Finnegans Wake in 1939. The sketch would appear in the final published text, in radically altered form, as chapter 2.4.
1925 saw four sketches published from the developing work. "Here Comes Everybody" was published as "From Work in Progress" in the Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers, edited by Robert McAlmon
. "The Letter" was published as "Fragment of an Unpublished Work" in Criterion 3.12 (July 1925), and as "A New Unnamed Work" in Two Worlds 1.1. (September 1925). The first published draft of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" appeared in Le Navire d'Argent 1 in October, and the first published draft of "Shem the Penman" appeared in the Autumn–Winter edition of This Quarter.
In 1925-6 Two Worlds began to publish redrafted versions of previously published fragments, starting with "Here Comes Everybody" in December 1925, and then "Anna Livia Plurabelle" (March 1926), "Shem the Penman" (June 1926), and "Mamalujo" (September 1925), all under the title "A New Unnamed Work".
Eugene Jolas befriended Joyce in 1927, and as a result serially published revised fragments from Book I in his transition literary journal. This began with the debut of the book's opening chapter, under the title "Opening Pages of a Work in Progress", in April 1927. By November chapters I.2 through I.8 had all been published in the journal, in their correct sequence, under the title "Continuation of a Work in Progress". From 1928 Book's II and III slowly began to emerge in transition, with a brief excerpt of II.2 ("The Triangle") published in February 1928, and Book III's four chapters between March 1928 and November 1929.
At this point, Joyce started publishing individual books of chapters from Work in Progress. The first of these, Tales Told of Shem and Shaun was published by Harry
and Caresse Crosby's publishing house Black Sun Press
. The slim volume contained three short fables pertaining to the novel's three children Shem, Shaun and Issy; namely "The Mookse and the Gripes", "The Triangle", and "The Ondt and the Gracehoper". Faber and Faber
published book editions of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" (1930), and "Haveth Childers Everywhere" (1931), HCE's long defence of his life which would eventually close chapter III.3. A year later they published Two Tales of Shem and Shaun, which dropped "The Triangle" from the previous Black Sun Press edition. Book 2 was published serially in transition between February 1933 and May 1938, and a final individual book publication, Storiella as She Is Syung, was published by Corvinus Press in 1937, made up of sections from what would become chapter II.2.
By 1938 virtually all of Finnegans Book was in print in the transition serialisation and in the booklets, with the exception of Book IV. However, Joyce continued to revise all previously published sections until Finnegans Wakes final published form, resulting in the text existing in a number of different forms, to the point that critics can speak of Finnegans Wake being a different entity to Work in Progress. The book was finally published by Faber and Faber on 4 May 1939, after 17 years of composition.
In March 2010, a new "critically emended edition" was published in a limited edition of 1,000 copies by Houyhnhnm Press in conjunction with Penguin. This edition is to be published in a trade edition in 2012. Edited by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, is the "summation of thirty years’ intense engagement by textual scholars Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon verifying, codifying, collating and clarifying the 20,000 pages of notes, drafts, typescripts and proofs." It claims to "incorporates some 9000 minor yet crucial corrections and amendments, covering punctuation marks, font choice, spacing, misspellings, misplaced phrases and ruptured syntax." According to the publisher, "Although individually minor, these changes are nonetheless crucial in that they facilitate a smooth reading of the book’s allusive density and essential fabric."
A musical play, The Coach with the Six Insides by Jean Erdman
, based on the character Anna Livia Plurabelle, was performed in New York in 1962. Parts of the book were adapted for the stage by Mary Manning as Passages from Finnegans Wake, which was in turn used as the basis for a film of the novel by Mary Ellen Bute
. Danish visual artists Michael Kvium and Christian Lemmerz created a multimedia project called "the Wake", an 8 hour long silent movie based on the book. A version adapted by Barbara Vann with Music by Chris McGlumphy was produced by The Medicine Show Theater in April 2005 and received a favorable review in the 11 April 2005 edition of The New York Times.
John Cage
's Roaratorio: an Irish circus on Finnegans Wake combines a collage of sounds
mentioned in Finnegans Wake, with Irish jigs and Cage reading his Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake, one of a series of five writings based on the Wake. The work also sets textual passages from the book as songs, including The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs
and Nowth upon Nacht
. Phil Minton
set passages of the Wake to music, on his 1998 album Mouthfull of Ecstasy.
André Hodeir
composed a jazz cantata on Anna Plurabelle (1966).
In January 1992 Patrick Healy read and recorded the complete text in Bow Lane Recording Studios, Dublin, over a four-day period. The unabridged twenty-hour recording was released in a box-set of 17 compact discs with a limited run of 1000 by The Lilliput Press.
In the academic field, physicist
Murray Gell-Mann
named a type of subatomic particle
as a quark
, after the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark" on page 383 of Finnegans Wake, as he already had the sound "kwork". Similarly, the comparative mythology
term monomyth
, as described by Joseph Campbell
in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces
, was taken from a passage in Finnegans Wake. The novel also was the source of the title of Clay Shirky
's book Here Comes Everybody
.
Irish literature
For a comparatively small island, Ireland has made a disproportionately large contribution to world literature. Irish literature encompasses the Irish and English languages.-The beginning of writing in Irish:...
James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's death, Finnegans Wake was Joyce's final work. The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language
Idioglossia
An idioglossia is an idiosyncratic language invented and spoken by only one person or very few people. Most often, idioglossia refers to the "private languages" of young children, especially twins, the latter being more specifically known as cryptophasia, and commonly referred to as twin talk or...
, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical item
Lexical item
A Lexical item is a single word or chain of words that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon . Examples are "cat", "traffic light", "take care of", "by-the-way", and "it's raining cats and dogs"...
s and neologistic multilingual pun
Pun
The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic,...
s and portmanteau words, which many critics believe attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. Owing to the work's expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions
Allusion
An allusion is a figure of speech that makes a reference to, or representation of, people, places, events, literary work, myths, or works of art, either directly or by implication. M. H...
, free dream associations
Free association (psychology)
Free association is a technique used in psychoanalysis which was originally devised by Sigmund Freud out of the hypnotic method of his mentor and coworker, Josef Breuer....
, and its abandonment of the conventions of plot and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public.
Despite these obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book's central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot. However, a number of key details remain elusive. The book treats, in an unorthodox fashion, the Earwicker family, composed of the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Post, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book, in a nonlinear dream narrative, follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle. Many noted Joycean scholars such as Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
and Donald Phillip Verene link this cyclical structure to Giambattista Vico
Giambattista Vico
Giovanni Battista ' Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist....
's seminal text Scienza Nuova ("New Science"), upon which they argue Finnegans Wake is structured.
Joyce began working on Finnegans Wake shortly after the 1922 publication of Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
. By 1924 installments of Joyce's new avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
work began to appear, in serialized form, in Parisian literary journals transatlantic review
Transatlantic Review
Transatlantic Review was a literary journal founded and edited by Joseph F. McCrindle in 1959, and published at first in Rome, then London and New York...
and transition
Transition (literary journal)
transition was an experimental literary journal that featured surrealist, expressionist, and Dada art and artists. It was founded in 1927 by poet Eugene Jolas and his wife Maria McDonald and published in Paris...
, under the title "fragments from Work in Progress". The actual title of the work remained a secret until the book was published in its entirety, on 4 May 1939. Initial reaction to Finnegans Wake, both in its serialized and final published form, was largely negative, ranging from bafflement at its radical reworking of the English language to open hostility towards its lack of respect for the conventions of the novel.
The work has since come to assume a preeminent place in English literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....
, despite its numerous detractors. Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
has praised the book as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page." Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
called the book "Joyce's masterpiece", and wrote that "[if] aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon [Finnegans Wake] would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante
DANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...
." In 1998, the Modern Library
Modern Library
The Modern Library is a publishing company. Founded in 1917 by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright as an imprint of their publishing company Boni & Liveright, it was purchased in 1925 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer...
ranked Finnegans Wake 77th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Background and composition
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
, Joyce was so exhausted that he did not write a line of prose for a year. On 10 March 1923 he wrote a letter to his patron, Harriet Weaver
Harriet Shaw Weaver
Harriet Shaw Weaver was a political activist and a magazine editor. She also became the patron of James Joyce....
: "Yesterday I wrote two pages—the first I have since the final Yes of Ulysses. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so that I could read them." This is the earliest reference to what would become Finnegans Wake.
The two pages in question consisted of the short sketch "Roderick O'Conor
Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair
Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair , often anglicised Rory O'Connor, reigned as King of Connacht from 1156 to 1186, and from 1166 to 1198 was the last High King before the Norman invasion of Ireland .Ruaidrí was one of over twenty sons of King...
", concerning the historic last king of Ireland
King of Ireland
A monarchical polity has existed in Ireland during three periods of its history, finally ending in 1801. The designation King of Ireland and Queen of Ireland was used during these periods...
cleaning up after guests by drinking the dregs of their dirty glasses. Joyce completed another four short sketches in July and August 1923, while holidaying in Bognor
Bognor Regis
Bognor Regis is a seaside resort town and civil parish in the Arun district of West Sussex, on the south coast of England. It is south-south-west of London, west of Brighton, and south-east of the city of Chichester. Other nearby towns include Littlehampton east-north-east and Selsey to the...
. The sketches, which dealt with different aspects of Irish history, are commonly known as "Tristan and Isolde
Tristan and Iseult
The legend of Tristan and Iseult is an influential romance and tragedy, retold in numerous sources with as many variations. The tragic story is of the adulterous love between the Cornish knight Tristan and the Irish princess Iseult...
", "Saint Patrick
Saint Patrick
Saint Patrick was a Romano-Briton and Christian missionary, who is the most generally recognized patron saint of Ireland or the Apostle of Ireland, although Brigid of Kildare and Colmcille are also formally patron saints....
and the Druid," "Kevin
Kevin of Glendalough
Saint Cóemgen , popularly anglicized to Kevin is an Irish saint who was known as the founder and first abbot of Glendalough in County Wicklow, Ireland.-Life:...
's Orisons" and "Mamalujo". While these sketches would eventually be incorporated into Finnegans Wake in one form or another, they did not contain any of the main characters or plot points which would later come to constitute the backbone of the book. The first signs of what would eventually become Finnegans Wake came in August 1923 when Joyce wrote the sketch "Here Comes Everybody", which dealt for the first time with the book's protagonist HCE.
Over the next few years, Joyce's method became one of "increasingly obsessional concern with note-taking, since [he] obviously felt that any word he wrote had first to have been recorded in some notebook." As Joyce continued to incorporate these notes into his work, the text became increasingly dense and obscure.
By 1926 Joyce had largely completed both Books I and III. Geert Lernout asserts that the Wake had, at this early stage, "a real focus that had developed out of the HCE ["Here Comes Everybody"] sketch: the story of HCE, of his wife and children. There were the adventures of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker himself and the rumours about them in chapters 2–4, a description of his wife ALP's letter in chapter 5, a denunciation of his son Shem in chapter 7, and a dialogue about ALP in chapter 8. These texts [...] formed a unity." In the same year Joyce met Maria
Maria Jolas
Maria Jolas , born Maria McDonald, was one of the founding members of transition in Paris with her husband Eugene Jolas....
and Eugene Jolas
Eugene Jolas
John George Eugene Jolas was a writer, translator and literary critic.-Biography:Eugene Jolas was born in Union City, New Jersey, but grew up in Forbach in Elsass-Lothringen , to which his family returned when he was two years old. He spent periods of his adult life living in both the U.S...
in Paris, just as his new work was generating an increasingly negative reaction from readers and critics, culminating in The Dial
The Dial
The Dial was an American magazine published intermittently from 1840 to 1929. In its first form, from 1840 to 1844, it served as the chief publication of the Transcendentalists. In the 1880s it was revived as a political magazine...
s refusal to publish the four chapters of Book III in September 1926. The Jolases gave Joyce valuable encouragement and material support throughout the long process of writing Finnegans Wake, and published sections of the book in serial form in their literary magazine transition
Transition (literary journal)
transition was an experimental literary journal that featured surrealist, expressionist, and Dada art and artists. It was founded in 1927 by poet Eugene Jolas and his wife Maria McDonald and published in Paris...
, under the title Work In Progress. For the next few years Joyce worked rapidly on the book, adding what would become chapters I.1 and I.6, and revising the already written segments to make them more lexically complex.
However, by this time some early supporters of Joyce's work, such as Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
and the author's brother Stanislaus Joyce
Stanislaus Joyce
Stanislaus Joyce was an Irish teacher, scholar, and writer who lived for many years in Italy. He was the brother of James Joyce. Considered a "whetstone" by his more famous brother, who shared his ideas and his books with him, Stanislaus was three years younger than James, and a constant boyhood...
, had grown increasingly unsympathetic to his new writing. In order to create a more favourable critical climate, a group of Joyce's supporters (including Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, Rebecca West
Rebecca West
Cicely Isabel Fairfield , known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public...
and others) put together a collection of critical essays on the new work. It was published in 1929 under the title Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress is a 1929 collection of critical essays, and two letters, on the subject of James Joyce's book Finnegans Wake, then being published in discrete sections under the title Work in Progress...
. In July 1929, increasingly demoralised by the poor reception his new work was receiving, Joyce approached his friend James Stephens
James Stephens (author)
James Stephens was an Irish novelist and poet.James Stephens wrote many retellings of Irish myths and fairy tales. His retellings are marked by a rare combination of humor and lyricism...
about the possibility of his completing the book. Joyce wrote to Weaver in late 1929 that he had "explained to [Stephens] all about the book, at least a great deal, and he promised me that if I found it madness to continue, in my condition, and saw no other way out, that he would devote himself heart and soul to the completion of it, that is the second part and the epilogue or fourth." Apparently Joyce chose Stephens on superstitious grounds, as he had been born in the same hospital as Joyce, exactly one week later, and shared both the first names of Joyce himself and his fictional alter-ego Stephen Dedalus
Stephen Dedalus
Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce's literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographical novel of artistic existence A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and an important character in Joyce's Ulysses...
. In the end, Stephens was not asked to finish the book.
In the 1930s, as he was writing Books II and IV, Joyce's progress slowed considerably. This was due to a number of factors including the death of his father John Joyce
John Joyce
John Stanislaus Joyce was the father of writer James Joyce, and a well known Dublin man about town. The son of James and Ellen Joyce, John Joyce grew up in Cork, where his mother's family, which claimed kinship to "Liberator" Daniel O'Connell, was quite prominent.Following his father's death in...
in 1931; concern over the mental health of his daughter Lucia
Lucia Joyce
Lucia Anna Joyce was the daughter of Irish writer James Joyce and Nora Barnacle.Italian was her first language and the language in which she corresponded with her father. She studied ballet while she was a teenager, becoming good enough to train with Isadora Duncan...
; and his own health problems, chiefly his failing eyesight.
Finnegans Wake was published in book form, after 17 years of composition, on 4 May 1939. Joyce died two years later in Zürich
Zürich
Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...
, on 13 January 1941.
Plot summary
Finnegans Wake comprises 17 chapters, divided into four Books. Book I contains 8 chapters, both Books II and III contain 4, and Book IV consists of only one short chapter. The chapters appear without titles, and while Joyce never provided possible chapter titles as he had done for Ulysses, he did title various sections published separately (see Publication history below). The standard critical practice, however, is to indicate book number in Roman numerals, and chapter title in Arabic, so that III.2, for example, indicates the second chapter of the third book.Given the book's fluid and changeable approach to plot and characters, a definitive, critically agreed-upon plot synopsis remains elusive (see Critical response and themes: Difficulties of plot summary below). As such, the following synopsis attempts to summarise events in the book which find general, although inevitably not universal, consensus among critics.
Book I
The entire work is cyclical in nature: the last sentence—a fragment—recirculates to the beginning sentence: "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." Joyce himself revealed that the book "ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence." The introductory chapter (I.1) establishes the book's setting as "Howth CastleHowth Castle
Howth Castle lies close to the village of Howth, Fingal County in Ireland. It is the ancestral home of the line of the St Lawrence family that died out in 1909. From 1425 to 1767 the title had been Lord Howth, holding the area since the Norman invasion of 1180. It is now held by their heirs, the...
and Environs", and introduces Dublin hod carrier "Finnegan
Finnegan's Wake
"Finnegan's Wake" is a ballad that arose in the 1850s in the music-hall tradition of comical Irish songs. The song is a staple of the Irish folk-music group, The Dubliners, who have played it on many occasions and included it on several albums, and is especially well known to fans of The Clancy...
", who falls to his death from a ladder while constructing a wall. Finnegan's wife Annie puts out his corpse as a meal spread for the mourners at his wake
Wake (ceremony)
A wake is a ceremony associated with death. Traditionally, a wake takes place in the house of the deceased, with the body present; however, modern wakes are often performed at a funeral home. In the United States and Canada it is synonymous with a viewing...
, but he vanishes before they can eat him. A series of episodic vignettes
Vignette (literature)
In theatrical script writing, sketch stories, and poetry, a vignette is a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives a trenchant impression about a character, an idea, or a setting and sometimes an object...
follows, loosely related to the dead Finnegan, most commonly referred to as "The Willingdone Museyroom", "Mutt and Jute", and "The Prankquean". At the chapter's close a fight breaks out, whiskey splashes on Finnegan's corpse, and “the dead Finnegan rises from his coffin bawling for whiskey and his mourners put him back to rest”, persuading him that he is better off where he is. The chapter ends with the image of the HCE character sailing into Dublin Bay
Dublin Bay
Dublin Bay is a C-shaped inlet of the Irish Sea on the east coast of Ireland. The bay is about 10 kilometres wide along its north-south base, and 7 km in length to its apex at the centre of the city of Dublin; stretching from Howth Head in the north to Dalkey Point in the south...
to take a central role in the story.
Agnomen
An agnomen , in the Roman naming convention, was a nickname, just as the cognomen was initially. However, the cognomina eventually became family names, so agnomina were needed to distinguish between similarly named persons...
"Earwicker" from the Sailor King, who encounters him attempting to catch earwig
Earwig
Earwigs make up the insect order Dermaptera, found throughout the Americas, Africa, Eurasia, Australia and New Zealand. With 1,800 species in 12 families, they are one of the smaller insect orders...
s with an inverted flowerpot on a stick while manning a tollgate through which the King is passing. This name helps Chimpden, now known by his initials HCE, to rise to prominence in Dublin society as "Here Comes Everybody". He is then brought low by a rumor that begins to spread across Dublin, apparently concerning a sexual trespass involving two girls in the Phoenix Park
Phoenix Park
Phoenix Park is an urban park in Dublin, Ireland, lying 2–4 km west of the city centre, north of the River Liffey. Its 16 km perimeter wall encloses , one of the largest walled city parks in Europe. It includes large areas of grassland and tree-lined avenues, and since the seventeenth...
, although details of HCE's transgression change with each retelling of events.
Chapters I.2 through I.4 follow the progress of this rumor, starting with HCE's encounter with "a cad with a pipe" in Phoenix Park
Phoenix Park
Phoenix Park is an urban park in Dublin, Ireland, lying 2–4 km west of the city centre, north of the River Liffey. Its 16 km perimeter wall encloses , one of the largest walled city parks in Europe. It includes large areas of grassland and tree-lined avenues, and since the seventeenth...
. The cad greets HCE in Gaelic and asks the time, but HCE misunderstands the question as an accusation, and incriminates himself by denying rumours the cad has not yet heard. These rumours quickly spread across Dublin, gathering momentum until they are turned into a song penned by the character Hosty called "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly
The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly
The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly is a poem in book one of James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake , where the protagonist H.C.E. has been brought low by a rumor which begins to spread across Dublin, apparently concerning a sexual trespass involving two girls in Phoenix Park; however details of HCE's...
". As a result, HCE goes into hiding, where he is besieged at the closed gate of his pub by a visiting American looking for drink after hours. However HCE remains silent – not responding to the accusations or verbal abuse – dreams, is buried in a coffin at the bottom of Lough Neagh
Lough Neagh
Lough Neagh, sometimes Loch Neagh, is a large freshwater lake in Northern Ireland. Its name comes .-Geography:With an area of , it is the largest lake in the British Isles and ranks among the forty largest lakes of Europe. Located twenty miles to the west of Belfast, it is approximately twenty...
, and is finally brought to trial, under the name Festy King. He is eventually freed, and goes once more into hiding. An important piece of evidence during the trial – a letter about HCE written by his wife ALP – is called for so that it can be examined in closer detail.
ALP's Letter becomes the focal point as it is analysed in detail in I.5. This letter was dictated by ALP to her son Shem, a writer, and entrusted to her other son Shaun, a postman, for delivery. The letter never reaches its intended destination, ending up in a midden heap where it is unearthed by a hen named Biddy. Chapter I.6 digresses from the narrative in order to present the main and minor characters in more detail, in the form of twelve riddles and answers.
In the final two chapters of Book I we learn more about the letter's writer Shem the Penman (I.7) and its original author, his mother ALP (I.8). The Shem chapter consists of "Shaun's character assassination of his brother Shem", describing the hermetic artist as a forger and a "sham", before "Shem is protected by his mother [ALP], who appears at the end to come and defend her son." The following chapter concerning Shem's mother, known as "Anna Livia Plurabelle", is interwoven with thousands of river names from all over the globe, and is widely considered the book's most celebrated passage. The chapter was described by Joyce in 1924 as "a chattering dialogue across the river by two washerwomen who as night falls become a tree and a stone." These two washerwomen gossip about ALP's response to the allegations laid against her husband HCE, as they wash clothes in the Liffey. ALP is said to have written a letter declaring herself tired of her mate. Their gossip then digresses to her youthful affairs and sexual encounters, before returning to the publication of HCE's guilt in the morning newspaper, and his wife's revenge on his enemies: borrowing a "mailsack" from her son Shaun the Post, she delivers presents to her 111 children. At the chapter's close the washerwomen try to pick up the thread of the story, but their conversation is increasingly difficult as they are on opposite sides of the widening Liffey, and it is getting dark. Finally, as they turn into a tree and a stone, they ask to be told a Tale of Shem or Shaun.
Book II
While Book I of Finnegans Wake deals mostly with the parents HCE and ALP, Book II shifts that focus onto their children, Shem, Shaun and Issy.II.1 opens with a pantomime programme, which outlines, in relatively clear language, the identities and characteristics of the book's main protagonists. The chapter then concerns a guessing game among the children, in which Shem is challenged three times to guess by "gazework" the colour which the girls have chosen. Unable to answer due to his poor eyesight, Shem goes into exile in disgrace, and Shaun wins the affection of the girls. Finally HCE emerges from the pub and in a thunder-like voice calls the children inside.
Chapter II.2 follows Shem, Shaun and Issy studying upstairs in the pub, after having been called inside in the previous chapter. The chapter depicts "[Shem] coaching [Shaun] how to do Euclid
Euclid
Euclid , fl. 300 BC, also known as Euclid of Alexandria, was a Greek mathematician, often referred to as the "Father of Geometry". He was active in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I...
Bk I, 1", structured as "a reproduction of a schoolboys' (and schoolgirls') old classbook complete with marginalia
Marginalia
Marginalia are scribbles, comments, and illuminations in the margins of a book.- Biblical manuscripts :Biblical manuscripts have liturgical notes at the margin, for liturgical use. Numbers of texts' divisions are given at the margin...
by the twins, who change sides at half time, and footnotes by the girl (who doesn't)". Once Shem (here called Dolph) has helped Shaun (here called Kev) to draw the Euclid diagram, the latter realises that he has drawn a diagram of ALP's genitalia, and "Kev finally realises the significance of the triangles [..and..] strikes Dolph." After this "Dolph forgives Kev" and the children are given "[e]ssay assignments on 52 famous men." The chapter ends with the children's "nightletter" to HCE and ALP, in which they are "apparently united in a desire to overcome their parents."
II.3 moves to HCE working in the pub below the studying children. As HCE serves his customers, two narratives are broadcast via the bar's radio and television sets, namely "The Norwegian Captain and the Tailor's Daughter", and "How Buckley Shot the Russian General". The first portrays HCE as a Norwegian Captain succumbing to domestication through his marriage to the Tailor's Daughter. The latter, told by Shem and Shaun ciphers Butt and Taff, casts HCE as a Russian General who is shot by the soldier Buckley. Earwicker has been absent throughout the latter tale, having been summoned upstairs by ALP. He returns and is reviled by his customers, who see Buckley's shooting of the General as symbolic of Shem and Shaun's supplanting their father. This condemnation of his character forces HCE to deliver a general confession of his crimes, including an incestuous desire for young girls. Finally a policeman arrives to send the drunken customers home, the pub is closed up, and the customers disappear singing into the night as a drunken HCE, clearing up the bar and swallowing the dregs of the glasses left behind, morphs into ancient Irish high king Rory O'Connor, and passes out.
II.4, ostensibly portraying the drunken and sleeping Earwicker's dream, chronicles the spying of four old men (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) on Tristan and Iseult
Tristan and Iseult
The legend of Tristan and Iseult is an influential romance and tragedy, retold in numerous sources with as many variations. The tragic story is of the adulterous love between the Cornish knight Tristan and the Irish princess Iseult...
's journey. The short chapter portrays "an old man like King Mark being rejected and abandoned by young lovers who sail off into a future without him", while the four old men observe Tristan and Isolde, and offer four intertwining commentaries on the lovers and themselves which are "always repeating themselves".
Book III
Book III concerns itself almost exclusively with Shaun, in his role as postman, having to deliver ALP's letter, which was referred to in Book 1, but never seen.III.1 opens with the Four Masters' ass narrating how he thought, as he was "dropping asleep", he had heard and seen an apparition of Shaun the Post. As a result Shaun re-awakens, and, floating down the Liffey in a barrel, is posed 14 questions concerning the significance and content of the letter he is carrying. However, Shaun, "apprehensive about being slighted, is on his guard, and the placating narrators never get a straight answer out of him." Shaun's answers focus on his own boastful personality and his admonishment of the letter's author – his artist brother Shem. After the inquisition Shaun loses his balance and the barrel in which he has been floating careens over and he rolls backwards out of the narrator's earshot, before disappearing completely from view.
In III.2 Shaun re-appears as "Jaunty Jaun" and delivers a lengthy sermon to his sister Issy, and her 28 schoolmates from St. Brigid's School. Throughout this book Shaun is continually regressing, changing from an old man to an overgrown baby lying on his back, and eventually, in III.3, into a vessel through which the voice of HCE speaks again by means of a spiritual medium
Mediumship
Mediumship is described as a form of communication with spirits. It is a practice in religious beliefs such as Spiritualism, Spiritism, Espiritismo, Candomblé, Voodoo and Umbanda.- Concept :...
. This leads to HCE's defence of his life in the passage "Haveth Childers Everywhere". Book III ends in the bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Porter as they attempt to copulate while their children, Jerry, Kevin and Isobel Porter, are sleeping down the hall and the dawn is rising outside (III.4). Jerry awakes from a nightmare of a scary father figure, and Mrs. Porter interrupts the coitus to go comfort him with the words "You were dreamend, dear. The pawdrag? The fawthrig? Shoe! Hear are no phanthares in the room at all, avikkeen. No bad bold faathern, dear one." She returns to bed, and the rooster crows at the conclusion of their coitus at the Book's culmination.
Book IV
Book IV consists of only one chapter, which, like the book's opening chapter, is mostly composed of a series of seemingly unrelated vignettesVignette (literature)
In theatrical script writing, sketch stories, and poetry, a vignette is a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives a trenchant impression about a character, an idea, or a setting and sometimes an object...
. After an opening call for dawn to break, the remainder of the chapter consists of the vignettes "Saint Kevin", "Berkely and Patrick" and "The Revered Letter". ALP is given the final word, as the book closes on a version of her Letter and her final long monologue, in which she tries to wake her sleeping husband, declaring "Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long!", and remembers a walk they once took, and hopes for its re-occurrence. At the close of her monologue, ALP – as the river Liffey – disappears at dawn into the ocean. The book's last words are a fragment, but they can be turned into a complete sentence by attaching them to the words that start the book:
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.
Difficulties of plot summary
Commentators who have summarised the plot of Finnegans Wake include Joseph CampbellJoseph Campbell
Joseph John Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience...
, John Gordon, Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
and William York Tindall. While no two summaries interpret the plot in the same way, there are a number of central "plot point
Plot point
In television and film, a plot point is a significant event within a plot that digs into the action and spins it around in another direction. It can also be an object of significant importance, around which the plot revolves. It can be anything from an event to an item to the discovery of a...
s" upon which they find general agreement. However, a number of Joyce scholars question the legitimacy of searching for a linear storyline within the complex text. As Bernard Benstock highlights, "in a work where every sentence opens a variety of possible interpretations, any synopsis of a chapter is bound to be incomplete." David Hayman has suggested that "For all the efforts made by critics to establish a plot for the Wake, it makes little sense to force this prose into a narrative mold." The book's challenges have led some commentators into generalised statements about its content and themes, prompting critic Bernard Benstock
Bernard Benstock
Bernard Benstock was a literary critic and a professor of English at the University of Miami. He was an authority on British mystery writers, and Irish writers Sean O'Casey and James Joyce. He was editor of the "James Joyce Literary Supplement" and a co-founder of the International James Joyce...
to warn against the danger of "boiling down" Finnegans Wake into "insipid pap, and leaving the lazy reader with a predigested mess of generalizations and catchphrases." Fritz Senn has also voiced concerns with some plot synopses, saying "we have some traditional summaries, also some put in circulation by Joyce himself. I find them most unsatisfactory and unhelpful, they usually leave out the hard parts and recirculate what we already think we know. I simply cannot believe that FW would be as blandly uninteresting as those summaries suggest."
The challenge of compiling a definitive synopsis of Finnegans Wake lies not only in the opacity of the book's language, but also in the radical approach to plot which Joyce employed. Joyce acknowledged this when he wrote to Eugene Jolas that:
"I might easily have written this story in the traditional manner [...] Every novelist knows the recipe [...] It is not very difficult to follow a simple, chronological scheme which the critics will understand [...] But I, after all, am trying to tell the story of this ChapelizodChapelizodChapelizod is a picturesque Irish village preserved within the city of Dublin, Ireland. It lies in the verdant wooded valley of the River Liffey, on the way to the slopes of the Strawberry Beds, below the Phoenix Park. The village is associated with Iseult of Ireland and the location of Iseault's...
family in a new way.
This "new way" of telling a story in Finnegans Wake takes the form of a discontinuous dream-narrative, with abrupt changes to characters, character names, locations and plot details resulting in the absence of a discernible linear narrative, causing Herring to argue that the plot of Finnegans Wake "is unstable in that there is no one plot from beginning to end, but rather many recognizable stories and plot types with familiar and unfamiliar twists, told from varying perspectives." Patrick A. McCarthy expands on this idea of a non-linear, digressive narrative with the contention that "throughout much of Finnegans Wake, what appears to be an attempt to tell a story is often diverted, interrupted, or reshaped into something else, for example a commentary on a narrative with conflicting or unverifiable details." In other words, while crucial plot points – such as HCE's crime or ALP's letter – are endlessly discussed, the reader never encounters or experiences them first hand, and as the details are constantly changing, they remain unknown and perhaps unknowable. Suzette Henke has accordingly described Finnegans Wake as an aporia
Aporia
Aporia denotes, in philosophy, a philosophical puzzle or state of puzzlement, and, in rhetoric, a rhetorically useful expression of doubt.-Definitions:...
. Joyce himself tacitly acknowledged this radically different approach to language and plot in a 1926 letter to Harriet Weaver, outlining his intentions for the book: "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." Critics have seen a precedent for the book's plot presentation in Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne was an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...
's famously digressive The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others following over the next 10 years....
, with Thomas Keymer stating that "Tristram Shandy was a natural touchstone for James Joyce as he explained his attempt "to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose" in Finnegans Wake".
Book II is usually considered the book's most opaque section, and hence the most difficult to synopsize. William York Tindall said of Book II's four chapters "Than this [...] nothing is denser." Similarly, Patrick Parrinder has described Book II as the "worst and most disorienting quagmire[..] in the Wake."
Despite Joyce's revolutionary techniques, the author repeatedly emphasized that the book was neither random nor meaningless; with Ellmann quoting the author as having stated: "I can justify every line of my book." To Sisley Huddleston he stated "critics who were most appreciative of Ulysses are complaining about my new work. They cannot understand it. Therefore they say it is meaningless. Now if it were meaningless it could be written quickly without thought, without pains, without erudition; but I assure you that these 20 pages now before us [i.e. chapter I.8] cost me twelve hundred hours and an enormous expense of spirit." When the editor of Vanity Fair
Vanity Fair (magazine)
Vanity Fair is a magazine of pop culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast. The present Vanity Fair has been published since 1983 and there have been editions for four European countries as well as the U.S. edition. This revived the title which had ceased publication in 1935...
asked Joyce if the sketches in Work in Progress were consecutive and interrelated, Joyce replied "It is all consecutive and interrelated."
Themes
Fargnoli and Gillespie suggest that the book's opening chapter "introduces [the] major themes and concerns of the book", and enumerate these as "Finnegan's fall, the promise of his resurrection, the cyclical structure of time and history (dissolution and renewal), tragic love as embodied in the story of Tristan and IseultTristan and Iseult
The legend of Tristan and Iseult is an influential romance and tragedy, retold in numerous sources with as many variations. The tragic story is of the adulterous love between the Cornish knight Tristan and the Irish princess Iseult...
, the motif of the warring brothers, the personification of the landscape and the question of Earwicker's crime in the park, the precise nature of which is left uncertain throughout the Wake." Such a view finds general critical consensus, viewing the vignettes as allegorical appropriations of the book's characters and themes; for example, Schwartz argues that "The Willingdone Museyroom" episode represents the book's "archetypal family drama in military-historical terms." Joyce himself referred to the chapter as a "prelude
Prelude (music)
A prelude is a short piece of music, the form of which may vary from piece to piece. The prelude can be thought of as a preface. It may stand on its own or introduce another work...
", and as an "air photograph of Irish history, a celebration of the dim past of Dublin." Riquelme finds that "passages near the book's beginning and its ending echo and complement one another", and Fargnoli and Gillespie representatively argue that the book's cyclical structure echoes the themes inherent within, that "the typologies of human experience that Joyce identifies [in Finnegans Wake] are [..] essentially cyclical, that is, patterned and recurrent; in particular, the experiences of birth, guilt, judgment, sexuality, family, social ritual and death recur throughout the Wake. In a similar enumeration of themes, Tindall argues that "rise and fall and rise again, sleeping and waking, death and resurrection, sin and redemption, conflict and appeasement, and, above all, time itself [..] are the matter of Joyce's essay on man."
Henkes and Bindervoet generally summarise the critical consensus when they argue that, between the thematically indicative opening and closing chapters, the book concerns "two big questions" which are never resolved: what is the nature of protagonist HCE’s secret sin, and what was the letter, written by his wife ALP, about? HCE's unidentifiable sin has most generally been interpreted as representing man's original sin
Original sin
Original sin is, according to a Christian theological doctrine, humanity's state of sin resulting from the Fall of Man. This condition has been characterized in many ways, ranging from something as insignificant as a slight deficiency, or a tendency toward sin yet without collective guilt, referred...
as a result of the Fall of Man. Anthony Burgess sees HCE, through his dream, trying "to make the whole of history swallow up his guilt for him" and to this end "HCE has, so deep in his sleep, sunk to a level of dreaming in which he has become a collective being rehearsing the collective guilt of man." Fargnoli and Gillespie argue that although undefined, "Earwicker's alleged crime in the Park" appears to have been of a "voyeuristic
Voyeurism
In clinical psychology, voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other activity usually considered to be of a private nature....
, sexual, or scatological
Scatology
In medicine and biology, scatology or coprology is the study of feces.Scatological studies allow one to determine a wide range of biological information about a creature, including its diet , healthiness, and diseases such as tapeworms. The word derives from the Greek σκώρ In medicine and biology,...
nature". ALP's letter appears a number of times throughout the book, in a number of different forms, and as its contents cannot be definitively delineated, it is usually believed to be both an exoneration of HCE, and an indictment of his sin. Herring argues that "[t]he effect of ALP's letter is precisely the opposite of her intent [...] the more ALP defends her husband in her letter, the more scandal attaches to him." Patrick A. McCarthy argues that "it is appropriate that the waters of the Liffey, representing Anna Livia, are washing away the evidence of Earwicker's sins as [the washerwomen speak, in chapter I.8] for (they tell us) she takes on her husband's guilt and redeems him; alternately she is tainted with his crimes and regarded as an accomplice".
A reconstruction of nocturnal life
Throughout the book's seventeen year gestation, Joyce stated that with Finnegans Wake he was attempting to "reconstruct the nocturnal life", and that the book was his "experiment in interpreting 'the dark night of the soul'." According to Ellmann, Joyce stated to Edmond Jaloux that Finnegans Wake would be written "to suit the esthetic of the dream, where the forms prolong and multiply themselves", and once informed a friend that "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." While pondering the generally negative reactions to the book Joyce said :I can't understand some of my critics, like PoundEzra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
or Miss Weaver, for instance. They say it's obscure. They compare it, of course, with Ulysses. But the action of Ulysses was chiefly during the daytime, and the action of my new work takes place chiefly at night. It's natural things should not be so clear at night, isn't it now?
Joyce's claims to be representing the night and dreams have been accepted and questioned with greater and lesser credulity. Supporters of the claim have pointed to Book IV as providing its strongest evidence, as when the narrator asks “You mean to see we have been hadding a sound night’s sleep?”, and later concludes that what has gone before has been “a long, very long, a dark, very dark [...] scarce endurable [...] night.” Tindall refers to Book IV as "a chapter of resurrection and waking up", and McHugh finds that the chapter contains "particular awareness of events going on offstage, connected with the arrival of dawn and the waking process which terminates the sleeping process of [Finnegans Wake]."
However, this conceptualisation of the Wake as a dream is a point of contention for some. Harry Burrell, representative of this view, argues that "one of the most overworked ideas is that Finnegans Wake is about a dream. It is not, and there is no dreamer." Burrell argues that the theory is an easy way out for "critics stymied by the difficulty of comprehending the novel and the search for some kind of understanding of it." However, the point upon which a number of critics fail to concur with Burrell's argument is its dismissal of the testimony of the book's author on the matter as "misleading... publicity efforts". Parrinder however, equally skeptical of the concept of the Wake as a dream, argues that Joyce came up with the idea of representing his linguistic experiments as a language of the night around 1927 as a means of battling his many critics, further arguing that "since it cannot be said that neologism is a major feature of the dreaming process, such a justification for the language of Finnegans Wake smacks dangerously of expediency."
While many, if not all, agree that there is at least some sense in which the book can be said to be a "dream", few agree on who the possible dreamer of such a dream might be. Edmund Wilson's early analysis of the book, The Dream of H. C. Earwicker, made the assumption that Earwicker himself is the dreamer of the dream, an assumption which continued to carry weight with Wakean scholars Harry Levin, Hugh Kenner, and William Troy. Joseph Campbell, in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by mythologist Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson is a work of literary criticism. One of the first major texts to provide an in-depth analysis of Finnegans Wake , A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake is considered by many scholars to be a seminal work on the...
, also believed Earwicker to be the dreamer, but considered the narrative to be the observances of, and a running commentary by, an anonymous pedant on Earwicker's dream in progress, who would interrupt the flow with his own digressions.
Ruth von Phul was the first to argue that Earwicker was not the dreamer, which triggered a number of similarly-minded views on the matter, although her assertion that Shem was the dreamer has found less support.
The assertion that the dream was that of Mr. Porter, whose dream personality personified itself as HCE, came from the critical idea that the dreamer partially wakes during chapter III.4, in which he and his family are referred to by the name Porter. Anthony Burgess representatively summarized this conception of the "dream" thus: "Mr. Porter and his family are asleep for the greater part of the book [...] Mr. Porter dreams hard, and we are permitted to share his dream [...] Sleeping, he becomes a remarkable mixture of guilty man, beast, and crawling thing, and he even takes on a new and dreamily appropriate name – Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker."
Harriet Weaver was among the first to suggest that the dream was not that of any one dreamer, but was rather an analysis of the process of dreaming itself. In a letter to J.S. Atherton she wrote:
In particular their ascription of the whole thing to a dream of HCE seems to me nonsensical. My view is that Mr. Joyce did not intend the book to be looked upon as the dream of any one character, but that he regarded the dream form with its shiftings and changes and chances as a convenient device, allowing the freest scope to introduce any material he wished—and suited to a night-piece.Bernard Benstock also argued that "The Dreamer in the Wake is more than just a single individual, even if one assumes that on the literal level we are viewing the dream of publican H.C. Earwicker."
Other critics have been more skeptical of the concept of identifying the dreamer of the book's narrative. Clive Hart argues that "[w]hatever our conclusions about the identity of the dreamer, and no matter how many varied caricatures of him we may find projected into the dream, it is clear that he must always be considered as essentially external to the book, and should be left there. Speculation about the 'real person' behind the guises of the dream-surrogates or about the function of the dream in relation to the unresolved stresses of this hypothetical mind is fruitless, for the tensions and psychological problems in Finnegans Wake concern the dream-figures living within the book itself."
John Bishop has been the most vocal supporter of treating Finnegans Wake absolutely, in every sense, as a description of a dream, the dreamer, and of the night itself; arguing that the book not only represents a dream in an abstract conception, but is fully a literary representation of sleep. On the subject Bishop writes:
The greatest obstacle to our comprehension of Finnegans Wake [...has been...] the failure on the part of readers to believe that Joyce really meant what he said when he spoke of the book as a "reconstruction of the nocturnal life" and an "imitation of the dream-state"; and as a consequence readers have perhaps too easily exercised on the text an unyielding literalism bent on finding a kind of meaning in every way antithetical to the kind of meaning purveyed in dreamsBishop has also somewhat brought back into fashion the theory that the Wake is about a single sleeper; arguing that it is not "the 'universal dream' of some disembodied global everyman, but a reconstruction of the night – and a single night – as experienced by 'one stable somebody' whose 'earwitness' on the real world is coherently chronological." Bishop has laid the path for critics such as Eric Rosenbloom, who has proposed that the book "elaborates the fragmentation and reunification of identity during sleep. The masculine [...] mind of the day has been overtaken by the feminine night mind. [...] The characters live in the transformation and flux of a dream, embodying the sleeper’s mind."
Characters
Critics disagree on whether or not discernible characters exist in Finnegans Wake. For example, Grace Eckley argues that Wakean characters are distinct from each other, and defends this with explaining the dual narrators, the "us" of the first paragraph, as well as Shem-Shaun distinctions while Margot Norris argues that the "[c]haracters are fluid and interchangeable". Supporting the latter stance, Van Hulle finds that the "characters" in Finnegans Wake are rather "archetypes or character amalgams, taking different shapes", and Riquelme similarly refers to the book's cast of mutable characters as "protean". As early as in 1934, in response to the recently published excerpt "The Mookse and the Gripes", Ronald SymondRonald Symond
Ronald Tudor Symond was born in Liverpool, England in December, 1895, the son of a solicitor Elwy Davies Symond, and died at the age of 51 of a heart attack in London in February, 1947...
argued that "the characters in Work in Progress, in keeping with the space-time chaos in which they live, change identity at will. At one time they are persons, at another rivers or stones or trees, at another personifications of an idea, at another they are lost and hidden in the actual texture of the prose, with an ingenuity far surpassing that of crossword puzzles." Such concealment of character identity has resulted in some disparity as to how critics identify the book's main protagonists; for example, while most find consensus that Festy King, who appears on trial in I.4, is a HCE type, not all analysts agree on this – for example Anthony Burgess believes him to be Shaun.
However, while characters are in a constant state of flux; constantly changing names, occupations, and physical attributes; a recurring set of core characters, or character types (what Norris dubs "cipher
Cipher
In cryptography, a cipher is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption — a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is encipherment. In non-technical usage, a “cipher” is the same thing as a “code”; however, the concepts...
s"), are discernible. During the composition of Finnegans Wake, Joyce used signs, or so-called “sigla”, rather than names to designate these character amalgams or types. In a letter to his Maecenas, Harriet Shaw Weaver (March 1924), Joyce made a list of these sigla. For those who argue for the existence of distinguishable characters, the book focuses on the Earwicker family, which consists of father, mother, twin sons and a daughter.
Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE)
Kitcher argues for the father HCE as the book's main protagonist, stating that he is "the dominant figure throughout [...]. His guilt, his shortcomings, his failures pervade the entire book". Bishop states that while the constant flux of HCE's character and attributes may lead us to consider him as an "anyman," he argues that "the sheer density of certain repeated details and concerns allows us to know that he is a particular, real Dubliner." The common critical consensus of HCE's fixed character is summarised by Bishop as being "an older ProtestantProtestantism
Protestantism is one of the three major groupings within Christianity. It is a movement that began in Germany in the early 16th century as a reaction against medieval Roman Catholic doctrines and practices, especially in regards to salvation, justification, and ecclesiology.The doctrines of the...
male, of Scandinavia
Scandinavia
Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...
n lineage, connected with the pubkeeping business somewhere in the neighbourhood of Chapelizod
Chapelizod
Chapelizod is a picturesque Irish village preserved within the city of Dublin, Ireland. It lies in the verdant wooded valley of the River Liffey, on the way to the slopes of the Strawberry Beds, below the Phoenix Park. The village is associated with Iseult of Ireland and the location of Iseault's...
, who has a wife, a daughter, and two sons."
HCE is referred to by literally thousands of names throughout the book; leading Terence Killeen to argue that in Finnegans Wake "naming is [..] a fluid and provisional process". HCE is at first referred to as "Harold or Humphrey Chimpden"; a conflation of these names as "Haromphreyld", and as a consequence of his initials "Here Comes Everybody". These initials lend themselves to phrase after phrase throughout the book; for example, appearing in the book's opening sentence as "Howth Castle and Environs". As the work progresses the names by which he may be referred to become increasingly abstract (such as "Finn MacCool
Fionn mac Cumhaill
Fionn mac Cumhaill , known in English as Finn McCool, was a mythical hunter-warrior of Irish mythology, occurring also in the mythologies of Scotland and the Isle of Man...
", "Mr. Makeall Gone", or "Mr. Porter").
The original "HCE" came from the initials of the portly politician Hugh Childers
Hugh Childers
Hugh Culling Eardley Childers was a British and Australian Liberal statesman of the nineteenth century. He is perhaps best known for his reform efforts at the Admiralty and the War Office...
(1827–96), who had been nicknamed "Here Comes Everybody" for his size. Childers' 1894 investigation and report on Irish taxation was considered supportive by Irish nationalists
Irish nationalism
Irish nationalism manifests itself in political and social movements and in sentiment inspired by a love for Irish culture, language and history, and as a sense of pride in Ireland and in the Irish people...
in the following decades, and so he was well known to many Irish people. Childers' cousin Erskine Childers
Robert Erskine Childers
Robert Erskine Childers DSC , universally known as Erskine Childers, was the author of the influential novel Riddle of the Sands and an Irish nationalist who smuggled guns to Ireland in his sailing yacht Asgard. He was executed by the authorities of the nascent Irish Free State during the Irish...
used the report's findings to justify Irish Home Rule in his popular book "The Framework of Home Rule" (1911).
Many critics see Finnegan, whose death, wake and resurrection are the subject of the opening chapter, as either a prototype of HCE, or as another of his manifestations. One of the reasons for this close identification is that Finnegan is called a "man of hod, cement and edifices" and "like Haroun Childeric Eggeberth", identifying him with the initials HCE. Parrinder for example states that "Bygmester Finnegan [...] is HCE", and finds that his fall and resurrection foreshadows "the fall of HCE early in Book I [which is] paralleled by his resurrection towards the end of III.3, in the section originally called "Haveth Childers Everywhere", when [HCE's] ghost speaks forth in the middle of a seance
Séance
A séance is an attempt to communicate with spirits. The word "séance" comes from the French word for "seat," "session" or "sitting," from the Old French "seoir," "to sit." In French, the word's meaning is quite general: one may, for example, speak of "une séance de cinéma"...
."
Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP)
Patrick McCarthy describes HCE's wife ALP as "the river-woman whose presence is implied in the "riverrun" with which Finnegans Wake opens and whose monologue closes the book. For over six hundred pages, however, Joyce presents Anna Livia to us almost exclusively through other characters, much as in Ulysses we hear what Molly Bloom has to say about herself only in the last chapter." The most extensive discussion of ALP comes in chapter I.8, in which hundreds of names of rivers are woven into the tale of ALP's life. Similarly hundreds of city names are woven into "Haveth Childers Everywhere", the corresponding passage at the end of III.3 which focuses on HCE. As a result it is generally contended that HCE personifies the VikingViking
The term Viking is customarily used to refer to the Norse explorers, warriors, merchants, and pirates who raided, traded, explored and settled in wide areas of Europe, Asia and the North Atlantic islands from the late 8th to the mid-11th century.These Norsemen used their famed longships to...
-founded city of Dublin, and his wife ALP personifies the river Liffey
River Liffey
The Liffey is a river in Ireland, which flows through the centre of Dublin. Its major tributaries include the River Dodder, the River Poddle and the River Camac. The river supplies much of Dublin's water, and a range of recreational opportunities.-Name:The river was previously named An Ruirthech,...
, on whose banks the city was built.
The children: Shem, Shaun and Issy
ALP and HCE have a daughter, Issy – whose personality is often split (represented by her mirror-twin). Parrinder argues that "as daughter and sister, she is an object of secret and repressed desire both to her father [...] and to her two brothers." These twin sons of HCE and ALP consist of a writer called Shem the PenmanJames Townsend Saward
James Townsend Saward was a Victorian English barrister and forger also known by the nickname of Jim the Penman. In addition to his legal career he forged money orders for almost 30 years....
and a postman by the name of Shaun the Post, who are rivals for replacing their father and for their sister Issy's affection. Shaun is portrayed as a dull postman
Mail carrier
A mail carrier, mailman, postal carrier, postman, postwoman , postman/postwoman , letter carrier or postie is an employee of the post office or postal service, who delivers mail and parcel post to residences and businesses...
, conforming to society's expectations, while Shem is a bright artist and sinister experimenter, often perceived as Joyce's alter-ego in the book. Hugh Staples finds that Shaun "wants to be thought of as a man-about-town, a snappy dresser, a glutton and a gourmet... He is possessed of a musical voice and is a braggart. He is not happy in his work, which is that of a messenger or a postman; he would rather be a priest." Shaun's sudden and somewhat unexpected promotion to the book's central character in Book III is explained by Tindall with the assertion that "having disposed of old HCE, Shaun is becoming the new HCE."
Like their father, Shem and Shaun are referred to by different names throughout the book, such as "Caddy and Primas"; "Mercius
Mercy
Mercy is broad term that refers to benevolence, forgiveness and kindness in a variety of ethical, religious, social and legal contexts.The concept of a "Merciful God" appears in various religions from Christianity to...
" and "Justius
Justice
Justice is a concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, natural law, religion, or equity, along with the punishment of the breach of said ethics; justice is the act of being just and/or fair.-Concept of justice:...
"; "Dolph and Kevin"; and "Jerry and Kevin". These twins are contrasted in the book by allusions to sets of opposing twins and enemies in literature, mythology and history; such as Set
Set (mythology)
Set was in Ancient Egyptian religion, a god of the desert, storms, and foreigners. In later myths he was also the god of darkness, and chaos...
and Horus
Horus
Horus is one of the oldest and most significant deities in the Ancient Egyptian religion, who was worshipped from at least the late Predynastic period through to Greco-Roman times. Different forms of Horus are recorded in history and these are treated as distinct gods by Egyptologists...
of the Osiris
Osiris
Osiris is an Egyptian god, usually identified as the god of the afterlife, the underworld and the dead. He is classically depicted as a green-skinned man with a pharaoh's beard, partially mummy-wrapped at the legs, wearing a distinctive crown with two large ostrich feathers at either side, and...
story; the biblical pairs Jacob
Jacob
Jacob "heel" or "leg-puller"), also later known as Israel , as described in the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, the New Testament and the Qur'an was the third patriarch of the Hebrew people with whom God made a covenant, and ancestor of the tribes of Israel, which were named after his descendants.In the...
and Esau
Esau
Esau , in the Hebrew Bible, is the oldest son of Isaac. He is mentioned in the Book of Genesis, and by the minor prophets, Obadiah and Malachi. The New Testament later references him in the Book of Romans and the Book of Hebrews....
, Cain and Abel, and Saint Michael and the Devil
Devil
The Devil is believed in many religions and cultures to be a powerful, supernatural entity that is the personification of evil and the enemy of God and humankind. The nature of the role varies greatly...
– equating Shaun with "Mick" and Shem with "Nick
Old Nick
Old Nick can mean:* an English appellation of Christian teaching about the Devil* Old Nick , from Young's Brewery...
" – as well as Romulus and Remus
Romulus and Remus
Romulus and Remus are Rome's twin founders in its traditional foundation myth, although the former is sometimes said to be the sole founder...
.
Minor characters
The book is also populated by a number of minor characters, such as the Four MastersAnnals of the Four Masters
The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland or the Annals of the Four Masters are a chronicle of medieval Irish history...
, the twelve customers, the Earwicker's cleaning staff Kate and Joe, as well as more obscure characters such as "McGrath", Lily Kinsella, and the bell-ringer "Fox Goodman".
The most commonly recurring characters outside of the Earwicker family are the four old men known collectively as "Mamalujo" (a conflation of their names: Matt Gregory
Matthew the Evangelist
Matthew the Evangelist was, according to the Bible, one of the twelve Apostles of Jesus and one of the four Evangelists.-Identity:...
, Marcus Lyons
Mark the Evangelist
Mark the Evangelist is the traditional author of the Gospel of Mark. He is one of the Seventy Disciples of Christ, and the founder of the Church of Alexandria, one of the original four main sees of Christianity....
, Luke Tarpey
Luke the Evangelist
Luke the Evangelist was an Early Christian writer whom Church Fathers such as Jerome and Eusebius said was the author of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles...
and Johnny Mac Dougall
John the Evangelist
Saint John the Evangelist is the conventional name for the author of the Gospel of John...
). These four most commonly serve as narrators, but they also play a number of active roles in the text, such as when they serve as the judges in the court case of I.4, or as the inquisitors who question Yawn in III.4. Tindall summarises the roles that these old men play as those of the Four Masters
Annals of the Four Masters
The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland or the Annals of the Four Masters are a chronicle of medieval Irish history...
, the Four Evangelists
Four Evangelists
In Christian tradition the Four Evangelists are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the authors attributed with the creation of the four Gospel accounts in the New Testament that bear the following titles:*Gospel according to Matthew*Gospel according to Mark...
, and the four Provinces of Ireland
Provinces of Ireland
Ireland has historically been divided into four provinces: Leinster, Ulster, Munster and Connacht. The Irish word for this territorial division, cúige, literally meaning "fifth part", indicates that there were once five; the fifth province, Meath, was incorporated into Leinster, with parts going to...
( "Matthew, from the north, is Ulster
Ulster
Ulster is one of the four provinces of Ireland, located in the north of the island. In ancient Ireland, it was one of the fifths ruled by a "king of over-kings" . Following the Norman invasion of Ireland, the ancient kingdoms were shired into a number of counties for administrative and judicial...
; Mark, from the south, is Munster
Munster
Munster is one of the Provinces of Ireland situated in the south of Ireland. In Ancient Ireland, it was one of the fifths ruled by a "king of over-kings" . Following the Norman invasion of Ireland, the ancient kingdoms were shired into a number of counties for administrative and judicial purposes...
; Luke, from the east, is Leinster
Leinster
Leinster is one of the Provinces of Ireland situated in the east of Ireland. It comprises the ancient Kingdoms of Mide, Osraige and Leinster. Following the Norman invasion of Ireland, the historic fifths of Leinster and Mide gradually merged, mainly due to the impact of the Pale, which straddled...
; and John, from the west, is Connaught
Connacht
Connacht , formerly anglicised as Connaught, is one of the Provinces of Ireland situated in the west of Ireland. In Ancient Ireland, it was one of the fifths ruled by a "king of over-kings" . Following the Norman invasion of Ireland, the ancient kingdoms were shired into a number of counties for...
"). According to Finn Fordham, Joyce related to his daughter-in-law Helen Fleischmann that "Mamalujo" also represented Joyce's own family, namely his wife Nora (mama), daughter Lucia (lu), and son Giorgio (jo).
In addition to the four old men, there are a group of twelve unnamed men who always appear together, and serve as the customers in Earwicker's pub, gossipers about his sins, jurors at his trial and mourners at his wake. The Earwicker household also includes two cleaning staff: Kate, the maid, and Joe, who is by turns handyman and barman in Earwicker's pub. These characters are seen by most critics as older versions of ALP and HCE. Kate often plays the role of museum curator, as in the "Willingdone Museyroom" episode of 1.1, and is recognisable by her repeated motif "Tip! Tip!" Joe is often also referred to by the name "Sackerson", and Kitcher describes him as "a figure sometimes playing the role of policeman, sometimes [...] a squalid derelict, and most frequently the odd-job man of HCE's inn, Kate's male counterpart, who can ambiguously indicate an older version of HCE."
Language and style
Joyce invented a unique polyglot-language or idioglossiaIdioglossia
An idioglossia is an idiosyncratic language invented and spoken by only one person or very few people. Most often, idioglossia refers to the "private languages" of young children, especially twins, the latter being more specifically known as cryptophasia, and commonly referred to as twin talk or...
solely for the purpose of this work. This language is composed of composite words from some sixty to seventy world languages, combined to form pun
Pun
The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic,...
s, or portmanteau words and phrases intended to convey several layers of meaning at once. Senn has labelled Finnegans Wakes language as "polysemetic
Polysemy
Polysemy is the capacity for a sign or signs to have multiple meanings , i.e., a large semantic field.Charles Fillmore and Beryl Atkins’ definition stipulates three elements: the various senses of a polysemous word have a central origin, the links between these senses form a network, and ...
", and Tindall as an "Arabesque
Arabesque
The arabesque is a form of artistic decoration consisting of "surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils" or plain lines, often combined with other elements...
". Norris describes it as a language which "like poetry, uses words and images which can mean several, often contradictory, things at once" An early review of the book argued that Joyce was attempting "to employ language as a new medium, breaking down all grammatical usages, all time space values, all ordinary conceptions of context [..] the theme is the language and the language the theme, and a language where every association of sound and free association is exploited." Seconding this analysis of the book's emphasis on form over content, Paul Rosenfeld reviewed Finnegans Wake in 1939 with the suggestion that "the writing is not so much about something as it is that something itself [..] in Finnegans Wake the style, the essential qualities and movement of the words, their rhythmic and melodic sequences, and the emotional color of the page are the main representatives of the author's thought and feeling. The accepted significations of the words are secondary."
While commentators emphasize how this manner of writing can communicate multiple levels of meaning simultaneously, Hayman and Norris contend that its purpose is as much to obscure and disable meaning as to expand it. Hayman writes that access to the work's "tenuous narratives" may only be achieved through "the dense weave of a language designed as much to shield as to reveal them." Norris argues that Joyce's language is "devious" and that it "conceals and reveals secrets." Allen B. Ruch has dubbed Joyce's new language "dreamspeak," and describes it as "a language that is basically English, but extremely malleable and all-inclusive, rich with portmanteau words, stylistic parodies, and complex puns." Although much has been made of the numerous world languages employed in the book's composite language, most of the more obscure languages appear only seldom in small clusters, and most agree with Ruch that the latent sense of the language, however manifestly obscure, is "basically English". Burrell also finds that Joyce's thousands of neologisms are "based on the same etymological
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
principles as standard English." However, the Wake's language is not entirely unique in literature; for example critics have seen its use of portmanteaux and neologisms as an extension of Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...
's Jabberwocky
Jabberwocky
"Jabberwocky" is a nonsense verse poem written by Lewis Carroll in his 1872 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...
.
Although Joyce died shortly after the publication of Finnegans Wake, during the work's composition the author made a number of statements concerning his intentions in writing in such an original manner. In a letter to Max Eastman, for example, Joyce suggested that his decision to employ such a unique and complex language was a direct result from his attempts to represent the night:
In writing of the night I really could not, I felt I could not, use words in their ordinary connections. Used that way they do not express how things are in the night, in the different stages – the conscious, then semi-conscious, then unconscious. I found that it could not be done with words in their ordinary relations and connections. When morning comes of course everything will be clear again [...] I'll give them back their English language. I'm not destroying it for good.Joyce is also reported as having told Arthur Power that "what is clear and concise can't deal with reality, for to be real is to be surrounded by mystery." On the subject of the vast amount of puns employed in the work Joyce argued to Frank Budgeon that "after all, the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church was built on a pun. It ought to be good enough for me", and to the objection of triviality he replied "Yes. Some of the means I use are trivial – and some are quadrivial
Quadrivium
The quadrivium comprised the four subjects, or arts, taught in medieval universities, after teaching the trivium. The word is Latin, meaning "the four ways" , and its use for the 4 subjects has been attributed to Boethius or Cassiodorus in the 6th century...
." A great many of the book's puns are etymological in nature. Sources tell us that Joyce relished delving into the history and the changing meanings of words, his primary source being An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat (Oxford, at the Clarendon Press; 1879). For example, one of the very first entries in Skeat is for the letter A, which begins: "...(1) adown; (2) afoot; (3) along; (4) arise; (5) achieve; (6) avert; (7) amend; (8) alas; (9) abyss..." Further in the entry, Skeat writes: "These prefixes are discussed at greater length under the headings Of, On, Along, Arise...Alas, Aware, Avast..." It seems likely that these strings of words prompted Joyce to finish the Wake with a sentence fragment that included the words: "...a way a lone a last a loved a long..."
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
collated words from foreign languages on cards for Joyce to use, and, as Joyce's eyesight worsened, wrote down the text from his dictation. Beckett described and defended the writing style of Finnegans Wake thus:
This writing that you find so obscure is a quintessential extraction of language and painting and gesture, with all the inevitable clarity of the old inarticulation. Here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics.
Faced with the obstacles to be surmounted in "understanding" Joyce's text, a handful of critics have suggested readers focus on the rhythm and sound of the language, rather than solely on "meaning." As early as 1929, Eugene Jolas stressed the importance of the aural and musical dimensions of the work. In his contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, Jolas wrote:
Those who have heard Mr. Joyce read aloud from Work in Progress know the immense rhythmic beauty of his technique. It has a musical flow that flatters the ear, that has the organic structure of works of nature, that transmits painstakingly every vowel and consonant formed by his ear.
The Canadian critic, historian and novelist Patrick Watson has also argued this point, writing that
Those people who say the book is unreadable have not tried reading it aloud. This is the secret. If you even mouth the words silently, suddenly what seemed incomprehensible (Hubert Butler called it "Joyce's learned gibberish,") leaps into referential meaning, by its sound, since page after page is rich in allusion to familiar phrases, parables, sayings of all kinds – and the joyous and totally brilliant wordplay, over and over again imperceivable until you actually listen to it – transforms what was an unrelievable agony into an adventure.
Allusions to other works
Finnegans Wake incorporates a high number of intertextual allusions and references to other texts; Parrinder refers to it as "a remarkable example of intertextuality" containing a "wealth of literary reference." Among the most prominent are the Irish ballad "Finnegan's WakeFinnegan's Wake
"Finnegan's Wake" is a ballad that arose in the 1850s in the music-hall tradition of comical Irish songs. The song is a staple of the Irish folk-music group, The Dubliners, who have played it on many occasions and included it on several albums, and is especially well known to fans of The Clancy...
" from which the book takes its name, Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico's La Scienza Nuova, the Egyptian Book of the Dead
Book of the Dead
The Book of the Dead is the modern name of an ancient Egyptian funerary text, used from the beginning of the New Kingdom to around 50 BC. The original Egyptian name for the text, transliterated rw nw prt m hrw is translated as "Book of Coming Forth by Day". Another translation would be "Book of...
, the plays of Shakespeare, and religious texts such as the Bible and Qur'an
Qur'an
The Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...
. These allusions, rather than directly quoting or referencing a source, normally enter the text in a contorted fashion, often through humorous plays on words. For example, Hamlet Prince of Denmark becomes "Camelot, prince of dinmurk" and St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews
Epistle to the Hebrews
The Epistle to the Hebrews is one of the books in the New Testament. Its author is not known.The primary purpose of the Letter to the Hebrews is to exhort Christians to persevere in the face of persecution. The central thought of the entire Epistle is the doctrine of the Person of Christ and his...
becomes a "farced epistol to the hibruws".
The book begins with one such allusion to Vico's New Science:
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.
"Commodius vicus" refers to Giambattista Vico
Giambattista Vico
Giovanni Battista ' Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist....
(1668–1744), who proposed a theory of cyclical history in his work "La Scienza Nuova" (The New Science). Vico argued 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. These ideas recur throughout Finnegans Wake, informing the book's four-part structure. Vico's name appears a number of times throughout the Wake, indicating the work's debt to his theories, such as “The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.” That a reference to Vico's cyclical theory
Cyclical theory
The cyclical theory refers to a model used by historian Arthur Schlesinger to attempt to explicate the fluctuations in politics throughout American History. Liberalism and conservatism are rooted in the “national mood” that shows a continuing shift in national involvement between public purpose and...
of history is to be found in the opening sentence which is a continuation of the book's closing sentence – thus making the work cyclical in itself – creates the relevance of such an allusion.
One of the sources Joyce drew from is the Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
ian story of Osiris
Osiris
Osiris is an Egyptian god, usually identified as the god of the afterlife, the underworld and the dead. He is classically depicted as a green-skinned man with a pharaoh's beard, partially mummy-wrapped at the legs, wearing a distinctive crown with two large ostrich feathers at either side, and...
, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead
Book of the Dead
The Book of the Dead is the modern name of an ancient Egyptian funerary text, used from the beginning of the New Kingdom to around 50 BC. The original Egyptian name for the text, transliterated rw nw prt m hrw is translated as "Book of Coming Forth by Day". Another translation would be "Book of...
, a collection of spells and invocations. Bishop asserts that "it is impossible to overlook the vital presence of the Book of the Dead in Finnegans Wake, which refers to ancient Egypt in countless tags and allusions." At one of their last meetings, Joyce suggested to Frank Budgen that he write an article about Finnegans Wake, entitling it "James Joyce's Book of the Dead". Budgen followed Joyce's advice with his paper "Joyce's Chapters of Going Forth by Day", highlighting many of the allusions to Egyptian mythology in the book.
The Tristan and Iseult
Tristan and Iseult
The legend of Tristan and Iseult is an influential romance and tragedy, retold in numerous sources with as many variations. The tragic story is of the adulterous love between the Cornish knight Tristan and the Irish princess Iseult...
legend – a tragic love triangle between the Irish princess Iseult, the Cornish knight Tristan
Tristan
Tristan is one of the main characters of the Tristan and Iseult story, a Cornish hero and one of the Knights of the Round Table featuring in the Matter of Britain...
and his uncle King Mark
Mark of Cornwall
Mark of Cornwall was a king of Kernow in the early 6th century. He is most famous for his appearance in Arthurian legend as the uncle of Tristan and husband of Iseult, who engage in a secret affair.-The legend:Mark sent Tristan as his proxy to fetch his young bride, the Princess Iseult, from...
– is also oft alluded to in the work, particularly in Book II chapter 4. Fargnoli and Gillespie argue that "various themes and motifs throughout Finnegans Wake, such as the cuckold
Cuckold
Cuckold is a historically derogatory term for a man who has an unfaithful wife. The word, which has been in recorded use since the 13th century, derives from the cuckoo bird, some varieties of which lay their eggs in other birds' nests...
ry of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (a King Mark figure) and Shaun's attempts at seducing Issy, relate directly to Tristan and Isolde [...] other motifs relating to Earwicker's loss of authority, such as the forces usurping his parental status, are also based on Tristan and Isolde."
The book also alludes heavily to Irish mythology
Irish mythology
The mythology of pre-Christian Ireland did not entirely survive the conversion to Christianity, but much of it was preserved, shorn of its religious meanings, in medieval Irish literature, which represents the most extensive and best preserved of all the branch and the Historical Cycle. There are...
, with HCE sometimes corresponding to Fionn mac Cumhaill
Fionn mac Cumhaill
Fionn mac Cumhaill , known in English as Finn McCool, was a mythical hunter-warrior of Irish mythology, occurring also in the mythologies of Scotland and the Isle of Man...
, Issy and ALP to Gráinne
Gráinne
Gráinne is the daughter of Cormac mac Airt in the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology. She is one of the central figures in the Middle Irish text Finn and Gráinne and most famously, in the 17th-century tale The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne, which tells of her betrothal to Fionn mac Cumhaill, leader...
, and Shem/Shaun to Dermot (Diarmaid). Not only Irish mythology, but also notable real-life Irish figures are alluded to throughout the text. For example, HCE is often identified with Charles Stewart Parnell
Charles Stewart Parnell
Charles Stewart Parnell was an Irish landowner, nationalist political leader, land reform agitator, and the founder and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party...
, and Shem's attack on his father in this way mirrors the attempt of forger Richard Pigott to incriminate Parnell in the Phoenix Park Murders
Phoenix Park Murders
The Phoenix Park Murders were the fatal stabbings on 6 May 1882 in the Phoenix Park in Dublin of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke. Cavendish was the newly appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, and Burke was the Permanent Undersecretary, the most senior Irish civil servant...
of 1882 by means of false letters. But, given the flexibility of allusion in Finnegans Wake HCE assumes the character of Pigott as well, for just as HCE betrays himself to the cad
Rake (character)
A rake, short for rakehell, is a historic term applied to a man who is habituated to immoral conduct, frequently a heartless womanizer. Often a rake was a man who wasted his fortune on gambling, wine, women and song, incurring lavish debts in the process...
, Pigott betrayed himself at the inquiry into admitting the forgery by his spelling of the word "hesitancy" as "hesitency"; and this misspelling appears frequently in the Wake.
Finnegans Wake also makes a great number of allusions to religious texts. When HCE is first introduced in chapter I.2, the narrator relates how "in the beginning" he was a "grand old gardener", thus equating him with Adam
Adam
Adam is a figure in the Book of Genesis. According to the creation myth of Abrahamic religions, he is the first human. In the Genesis creation narratives, he was created by Yahweh-Elohim , and the first woman, Eve was formed from his rib...
in the Garden of Eden
Garden of Eden
The Garden of Eden is in the Bible's Book of Genesis as being the place where the first man, Adam, and his wife, Eve, lived after they were created by God. Literally, the Bible speaks about a garden in Eden...
. Spinks further highlights this allusion by highlighting that like HCE's unspecified crime in the park, Adam also "commits a crime in a garden".
Norwegian influence
With Dublin, an early Viking settlementEarly Scandinavian Dublin
The First Viking Age lasted from 795, when Viking raids on Irish settlements began, until 902, when the ruling Norse dynasty was expelled from Dublin. This period of Irish history is characterised by a series of conflicts involving the native Irish and two Viking factions that the Irish called...
, as the setting for Finnegans Wake, it is perhaps not surprising that Joyce incorporated a number of Norwegian
Norwegians
Norwegians constitute both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway. They share a common culture and speak the Norwegian language. Norwegian people and their descendants are found in migrant communities worldwide, notably in United States, Canada and Brazil.-History:Towards the end of the 3rd...
linguistic and cultural elements into the work (notably Riksmål references for the most part). For example, one of the main tales of Book II chapter 3 concerns a Norwegian tailor, and a number of Norwegian words such as bakvandets, Knut Oelsvinger and Bygmester Finnegan (the latter a reference to Ibsen's Bygmeester Solness
The Master Builder
The Master Builder is a play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It was first published in December 1892 and is regarded as one of Ibsen's most significant and revealing works.-Performance:...
) are used throughout. Indeed, most of Ibsen's works, many of his characters and also some quotations are referenced in the Wake. While Joyce was working on Finnegans Wake, he wanted to insert reference
Reference
Reference is derived from Middle English referren, from Middle French rèférer, from Latin referre, "to carry back", formed from the prefix re- and ferre, "to bear"...
s to Scandinavia
Scandinavia
Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...
n language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
s and literature, hiring five teachers of Norwegian. The first one turned out to be the poet Olaf Bull
Olaf Bull
Olaf Jacob Martin Luther Breda Bull or Olaf Bull was a Norwegian poet. He was born on November 10, 1883 in Kristiania , Norway, and died on June 29, 1933.-His life:...
. Joyce wanted to read Norwegian works in the original language, including Peter Andreas Munch
Peter Andreas Munch
Peter Andreas Munch , usually known as P. A. Munch, was a Norwegian historian, known for his work on the medieval history of Norway. Munch’s scholarship included Norwegian archaeology, geography, ethnography, linguistics, and jurisprudence...
's Norrøne Gude- og Heltesagn (Norse
Norse
Norse may refer to:In history:* Norsemen, the Scandinavian people before the Christianization of Scandinavia** Norse mythology** Norse paganism** Norse art** Norse activity in the British IslesIn language:...
tales of gods and hero
Hero
A hero , in Greek mythology and folklore, was originally a demigod, their cult being one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion...
es). He was looking for pun
Pun
The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic,...
s and unusual associations across the barriers of language, a practice Bull well understood. Lines from Bull's poems echo through Finnegans Wake, and Bull himself materializes under the name "Olaph the Oxman", a pun on his surname.
Literary significance and 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 reviewsLiterary magazine
A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters...
of the 1920s. Initial response, to both its serialised and final published forms, was almost universally negative. Even close friends and family were disapproving of Joyce's seemingly impenetrable text, with Joyce's brother Stanislaus
Stanislaus Joyce
Stanislaus Joyce was an Irish teacher, scholar, and writer who lived for many years in Italy. He was the brother of James Joyce. Considered a "whetstone" by his more famous brother, who shared his ideas and his books with him, Stanislaus was three years younger than James, and a constant boyhood...
"rebuk[ing] him for writing an incomprehensible night-book", and former friend Oliver Gogarty believing the book to be a joke, pulled by Joyce on the literary community, referring to it as "the most colossal leg pull in literature since Macpherson's
James Macpherson
James Macpherson was a Scottish writer, poet, literary collector and politician, known as the "translator" of the Ossian cycle of poems.-Early life:...
Ossian
Ossian
Ossian is the narrator and supposed author of a cycle of poems which the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have translated from ancient sources in the Scots Gaelic. He is based on Oisín, son of Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, anglicised to Finn McCool, a character from Irish mythology...
". When Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, a former champion of Joyce's and admirer of Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
, was asked his opinion on the text, he wrote "Nothing so far as I make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization." H.G. Wells, in a personal letter to Joyce, argued that "you have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence [...] I ask: who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousands I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?" Even Joyce's patron Harriett Weaver wrote to him in 1927 to inform him of her misgivings regarding his new work, stating "I am made in such a way that I do not care much for the output from your Wholesale Safety Pun Factory nor for the darknesses and unintelligibilities of your deliberately entangled language system. It seems to me you are wasting your genius."
The wider literary community were equally disparaging, with D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
declaring, in reaction to the sections of the Wake being published individually as "Work in Progress", "My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate journalistic dirty-mindedness – what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!" Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
, who had also admired Ulysses, described Finnegans Wake as "nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room [...] and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity." In response to such criticisms, Transition
Transition (literary journal)
transition was an experimental literary journal that featured surrealist, expressionist, and Dada art and artists. It was founded in 1927 by poet Eugene Jolas and his wife Maria McDonald and published in Paris...
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
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress is a 1929 collection of critical essays, and two letters, on the subject of James Joyce's book Finnegans Wake, then being published in discrete sections under the title Work in Progress...
and published by Shakespeare and Company
Shakespeare and Company (bookshop)
Shakespeare and Company is the name of two independent bookstores on Paris' Left Bank. The first was opened by Sylvia Beach on 17 November 1919 at 8 rue Dupuytren before moving to larger premises at 12 rue de l'Odéon in the 6th arrondissement in 1922. During the 1920s, it was a gathering place for...
. This collection featured Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
's first commissioned work, the essay "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce", along with contributions by William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, Stuart Gilbert
Stuart Gilbert
Stuart Gilbert was an English literary scholar and translator. Among his translations into English are works by André Malraux, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Georges Simenon, Jean Cocteau, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre...
, Marcel Brion
Marcel Brion
Marcel Brion was a French essayist, literary critic, novelist, and historian. -Biography:The son of a lawyer, Brion was classmates in Thiers with Marcel Pagnol and Albert Cohen. After completing his secondary education in Champittet, Switzerland, he studied law at the University of Aix-en-Provence...
, Eugene Jolas
Eugene Jolas
John George Eugene Jolas was a writer, translator and literary critic.-Biography:Eugene Jolas was born in Union City, New Jersey, but grew up in Forbach in Elsass-Lothringen , to which his family returned when he was two years old. He spent periods of his adult life living in both the U.S...
and others.
Upon its publication in 1939, Finnegans Wake received a series of mixed, but mostly negative reviews. Louise Bogan
Louise Bogan
Louise Bogan was an American poet. She was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in 1945.-Early years:...
, writing for Nation, surmised that while "the book's great beauties, its wonderful passages of wit, its variety, its mark of genius and immense learning are undeniable [...], to read the book over a long period of time gives one the impression of watching intemperance become addiction, become debauch" and argued that "Joyce's delight in reducing man's learning, passion, and religion to a hash is also disturbing." Edwin Muir, reviewing in Listener wrote that "as a whole the book is so elusive that there is no judging it; I cannot tell whether it is winding into deeper and deeper worlds of meaning or lapsing into meaningless", although he too acknowledged that "there are occasional flashes of a kind of poetry which is difficult to define but is of unquestioned power." B. Ifor Evans, writing in the Manchester Guardian, similarly argued that, due to its difficulties, the book "does not admit of review", and argued that, perhaps "in twenty years' time, with sufficient study and with the aid of the commentary that will doubtless arise, one might be ready for an attempt to appraise it." Taking a swipe at many of the negative reviews circulating at the time, Evans writes: "The easiest way to deal with the book would be [...] to write off Mr. Joyce's latest volume as the work of a charlatan. But the author of Dubliners
Dubliners
Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. They were meant to be a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century....
, A Portrait of the Artist
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialised in the magazine The Egoist from 1914 to 1915, and published first in book format in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch, New York. The first English edition was published by the Egoist Press in February 1917...
and Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
is not a charlatan, but an artist of very considerable proportions. I prefer to suspend judgement..."
In the time since Joyce's death, the book's admirers have struggled against public perception of the work to make exactly this argument for Finnegans Wake. One of the book's early champions was Thornton Wilder
Thornton Wilder
Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.-Early years:Wilder was born in Madison,...
, who wrote to Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
and Alice Toklas in August 1939, a few months after the book's publication: "One of my absorptions [...] has been James Joyce's new novel, digging out its buried keys and resolving that unbroken chain of erudite puzzles and finally coming on lots of wit, and lots of beautiful things has been my midnight recuperation. A lot of thanks to him". The publication in 1944 of the first in-depth study and analysis of Joyce's final text—A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by mythologist Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson is a work of literary criticism. One of the first major texts to provide an in-depth analysis of Finnegans Wake , A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake is considered by many scholars to be a seminal work on the...
by mythologist Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell
Joseph John Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience...
and Henry Morton Robinson
Henry Morton Robinson
Henry Morton Robinson was an American novelist, best known for A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake written with Joseph Campbell and his 1950 novel The Cardinal, which Time magazine reported was "The year's most popular book, fiction or nonfiction."-Biography:Robinson was born in Boston and graduated...
—proved to a skeptical public that the book could be read as a novel with characters and plot, and slowly its critical capital began to rise to the point that, in 1957, Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye
Herman Northrop Frye, was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century....
described Finnegans Wake as the “chief ironic epic of our time”. Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
lauded the book as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page." John Bishop has described it as "the single most intentionally crafted literary artifact that our culture has produced [...] and, certainly, one of the great monuments of twentieth-century experimental letters." The section of the book to have received the most praise has been "Anna Livia Plurabelle" (Book I, chapter 8), which Parrinder describes as being "widely recognized as one of the most beautiful prose-poems in English."
In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
developed his ideas of literary "deconstruction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
" largely inspired by Finnegans Wake (as detailed in the essay "Two Words for Joyce"), and as a result literary theory
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
—in particular post-structuralism
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...
—has embraced Joyce's innovation and ambition in Finnegans Wake. Derrida tells an anecdote about the two books' importance for his own thought; in a bookstore in Tokyo,
an American tourist of the most typical variety leaned over my shoulder and sighed: "So many books! What is the definitive one? Is there any?" It was an extremely small book shop, a news agency. I almost replied, "Yes, there are two of them, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.In 1994, in The Western Canon, Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
wrote of Finnegans Wake: "[if] 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
DANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...
." The text's influence on other writers has grown since its initial shunning, and contemporary American author Tom Robbins
Tom Robbins
Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins (born July 22, 1936 is an American author. His best-selling novels are serio-comic, often wildly poetic stories with a strong social and philosophical undercurrent, an irreverent bent, and scenes extrapolated from...
is among the writers working today to have expressed his admiration for Joyce's complex last work:
the language in it is incredible. There's so many layers of puns and references to mythology and history. But it's the most realistic novel ever written. Which is exactly why it's so unreadable. He wrote that book the way that the human mind works. An intelligent, inquiring mind. And that's just the way consciousness is. It's not linear. It's just one thing piled on another. And all kinds of cross references. And he just takes that to an extreme. There's never been a book like it and I don't think there ever will be another book like it. And it's absolutely a monumental human achievement. But it's very hard to read.
In 1998, the Modern Library
Modern Library
The Modern Library is a publishing company. Founded in 1917 by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright as an imprint of their publishing company Boni & Liveright, it was purchased in 1925 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer...
placed Finnegans Wake seventy-seventh amongst its list of "Top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century."
Publication history
Throughout its seventeen-year composition, Finnegans Wake was published in short excerpts in a number of literary magazines, most prominently in the Parisian literary journals Transatlantic ReviewThe Transatlantic Review (1924)
The Transatlantic Review was an influential monthly literary magazine edited by Ford Madox Ford in 1924...
and Eugene Jolas
Eugene Jolas
John George Eugene Jolas was a writer, translator and literary critic.-Biography:Eugene Jolas was born in Union City, New Jersey, but grew up in Forbach in Elsass-Lothringen , to which his family returned when he was two years old. He spent periods of his adult life living in both the U.S...
's transition
Transition (literary journal)
transition was an experimental literary journal that featured surrealist, expressionist, and Dada art and artists. It was founded in 1927 by poet Eugene Jolas and his wife Maria McDonald and published in Paris...
. It has been argued that "Finnegans Wake, much more so than Ulysses, was very much directly shaped by the tangled history of its serial publication." In October 1923 in Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
's Paris flat, Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...
convinced Joyce to contribute some of his new writings to the Transatlantic Review, a new journal Ford was editing. As a result, the eight page "Mamalujo" sketch became the first fragment from the book to be published in its own right, in Transatlantic Review 1.4 in April 1924. The sketch appeared under the title "From Work in Progress", a term applied to works by Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
and Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement...
published in the same issue, and the one by which Joyce would refer to his final work until its publication as Finnegans Wake in 1939. The sketch would appear in the final published text, in radically altered form, as chapter 2.4.
1925 saw four sketches published from the developing work. "Here Comes Everybody" was published as "From Work in Progress" in the Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers, edited by Robert McAlmon
Robert McAlmon
Robert Menzies McAlmon was an American author, poet and publisher.-Life:McAlmon was born in Clifton, Kansas, the youngest of ten children of an itinerant Presbyterian minister....
. "The Letter" was published as "Fragment of an Unpublished Work" in Criterion 3.12 (July 1925), and as "A New Unnamed Work" in Two Worlds 1.1. (September 1925). The first published draft of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" appeared in Le Navire d'Argent 1 in October, and the first published draft of "Shem the Penman" appeared in the Autumn–Winter edition of This Quarter.
In 1925-6 Two Worlds began to publish redrafted versions of previously published fragments, starting with "Here Comes Everybody" in December 1925, and then "Anna Livia Plurabelle" (March 1926), "Shem the Penman" (June 1926), and "Mamalujo" (September 1925), all under the title "A New Unnamed Work".
Eugene Jolas befriended Joyce in 1927, and as a result serially published revised fragments from Book I in his transition literary journal. This began with the debut of the book's opening chapter, under the title "Opening Pages of a Work in Progress", in April 1927. By November chapters I.2 through I.8 had all been published in the journal, in their correct sequence, under the title "Continuation of a Work in Progress". From 1928 Book's II and III slowly began to emerge in transition, with a brief excerpt of II.2 ("The Triangle") published in February 1928, and Book III's four chapters between March 1928 and November 1929.
At this point, Joyce started publishing individual books of chapters from Work in Progress. The first of these, Tales Told of Shem and Shaun was published by Harry
Harry Crosby
Harry Crosby was an American heir, a bon vivant, poet, publisher, and for some, epitomized the Lost Generation in American literature. He was the son of one of the richest banking families in New England, a member of the Boston Brahmin, and the nephew of Jane Norton Grew, the wife of financier J....
and Caresse Crosby's publishing house Black Sun Press
Black Sun Press
The Black Sun Press was an English language book publisher founded in 1927 as Éditions Narcisse by poet Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse Crosby , American expatriates living in Paris...
. The slim volume contained three short fables pertaining to the novel's three children Shem, Shaun and Issy; namely "The Mookse and the Gripes", "The Triangle", and "The Ondt and the Gracehoper". Faber and Faber
Faber and Faber
Faber and Faber Limited, often abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in the UK, notable in particular for publishing a great deal of poetry and for its former editor T. S. Eliot. Faber has a rich tradition of publishing a wide range of fiction, non fiction, drama, film and music...
published book editions of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" (1930), and "Haveth Childers Everywhere" (1931), HCE's long defence of his life which would eventually close chapter III.3. A year later they published Two Tales of Shem and Shaun, which dropped "The Triangle" from the previous Black Sun Press edition. Book 2 was published serially in transition between February 1933 and May 1938, and a final individual book publication, Storiella as She Is Syung, was published by Corvinus Press in 1937, made up of sections from what would become chapter II.2.
By 1938 virtually all of Finnegans Book was in print in the transition serialisation and in the booklets, with the exception of Book IV. However, Joyce continued to revise all previously published sections until Finnegans Wakes final published form, resulting in the text existing in a number of different forms, to the point that critics can speak of Finnegans Wake being a different entity to Work in Progress. The book was finally published by Faber and Faber on 4 May 1939, after 17 years of composition.
In March 2010, a new "critically emended edition" was published in a limited edition of 1,000 copies by Houyhnhnm Press in conjunction with Penguin. This edition is to be published in a trade edition in 2012. Edited by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, is the "summation of thirty years’ intense engagement by textual scholars Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon verifying, codifying, collating and clarifying the 20,000 pages of notes, drafts, typescripts and proofs." It claims to "incorporates some 9000 minor yet crucial corrections and amendments, covering punctuation marks, font choice, spacing, misspellings, misplaced phrases and ruptured syntax." According to the publisher, "Although individually minor, these changes are nonetheless crucial in that they facilitate a smooth reading of the book’s allusive density and essential fabric."
Derivative works
Jean Erdman
Jean Erdman is a dancer and choreographer of modern dance as well as an avant-garde theater director.-Early years:Erdman was born on February 20, 1916 in Honolulu, Hawaii...
, based on the character Anna Livia Plurabelle, was performed in New York in 1962. Parts of the book were adapted for the stage by Mary Manning as Passages from Finnegans Wake, which was in turn used as the basis for a film of the novel by Mary Ellen Bute
Mary Ellen Bute
Mary Ellen Bute was a pioneer American film animator significant as one of the first female experimental filmmakers. Her specialty was visual music and, while working in New York between 1934 and 1953, made fourteen short, abstract musical films...
. Danish visual artists Michael Kvium and Christian Lemmerz created a multimedia project called "the Wake", an 8 hour long silent movie based on the book. A version adapted by Barbara Vann with Music by Chris McGlumphy was produced by The Medicine Show Theater in April 2005 and received a favorable review in the 11 April 2005 edition of The New York Times.
John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
's Roaratorio: an Irish circus on Finnegans Wake combines a collage of sounds
Sound collage
In music, montage or sound collage is a technique where sound objects or compositions, including songs, are created from collage, also known as montage, the use of portions of previous recordings or scores...
mentioned in Finnegans Wake, with Irish jigs and Cage reading his Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake, one of a series of five writings based on the Wake. The work also sets textual passages from the book as songs, including The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs
The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs
The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs is a song for voice and closed piano by John Cage. It was composed in late 1942 and quickly became a minor classic in Cage's oeuvre...
and Nowth upon Nacht
Nowth upon Nacht
Nowth upon Nacht is a song for voice and piano by John Cage. It was composed in 1984 in memoriam for Cathy Berberian, the celebrated soprano singer, wife of composer Luciano Berio....
. Phil Minton
Phil Minton
Phil Minton is a jazz/free-improvising vocalist and trumpeter.Minton is a highly dramatic baritone who tends to specialize in literary texts: he has sung lyrics by William Blake with Mike Westbrook's group, Daniil Kharms and Joseph Brodsky with Simon Nabatov, and extracts from James Joyce's...
set passages of the Wake to music, on his 1998 album Mouthfull of Ecstasy.
André Hodeir
André Hodeir
André Hodeir was a French violinist, composer, arranger and musicologist.-Biography:André Hodeir was born in Paris. His initial training was as a classical violinist and composer. He studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, where he took Olivier Messiaen's analysis class, and won first prizes in...
composed a jazz cantata on Anna Plurabelle (1966).
Recordings
Joyce made a recording in 1929 of an excerpt from the "Anna Livia Plurabelle" section of the book (Book I, chapter 8).In January 1992 Patrick Healy read and recorded the complete text in Bow Lane Recording Studios, Dublin, over a four-day period. The unabridged twenty-hour recording was released in a box-set of 17 compact discs with a limited run of 1000 by The Lilliput Press.
Cultural impact
Finnegans Wake is a difficult text, and it has been noted that Joyce would not have aimed it at the general reader; however, certain aspects of the work have made an impact on popular culture beyond the awareness of it being difficult.In the academic field, physicist
Physicist
A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...
Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann is an American physicist and linguist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles...
named a type of subatomic particle
Subatomic particle
In physics or chemistry, subatomic particles are the smaller particles composing nucleons and atoms. There are two types of subatomic particles: elementary particles, which are not made of other particles, and composite particles...
as a quark
Quark
A quark is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. Due to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never directly...
, after the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark" on page 383 of Finnegans Wake, as he already had the sound "kwork". Similarly, the comparative mythology
Comparative mythology
Comparative mythology is the comparison of myths from different cultures in an attempt to identify shared themes and characteristics. Comparative mythology has served a variety of academic purposes...
term monomyth
Monomyth
Joseph Campbell's term monomyth, also referred to as the hero's journey, is a basic pattern that its proponents argue is found in many narratives from around the world. This widely distributed pattern was described by Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces...
, as described by Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell
Joseph John Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience...
in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a non-fiction book, and seminal work of comparative mythology by Joseph Campbell...
, was taken from a passage in Finnegans Wake. The novel also was the source of the title of Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He has a joint appointment at New York University as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Assistant Arts Professor in the New...
's book Here Comes Everybody
Here Comes Everybody
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is a book by Clay Shirky published by Penguin Press in 2008, which evaluates the effect of the Internet on modern group dynamics. The author considers examples such as Wikipedia and MySpace in his analysis...
.
Further reading
- Beckman, Richard. Joyce's Rare View: The Nature of Things in Finnegans Wake. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8130-3059-3.
- Brivic, Sheldon. Joyce's Waking Women: An Introduction to Finnegans Wake. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. ISBN 978-0-299-14800-3.
- Crispi, Luca and Sam Slote, eds. How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-By-Chaper Genetic Guide. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-299-21860-7.
- Deane, Vincent, et al. The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2001–. LCCN 2003-442392.
- Epstein, Edmund L. A Guide Through Finnegans Wake. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8130-3356-3
- Fordham, Finn. 'Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. ISBN 978-0-1992-1586-3.
- McHugh, Roland. Annotations to Finnegans Wake. 3rd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. ISBN 978-0-8018-8381-1.
- Platt, Len. Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. ISBN 978-0-521-86884-6.
External links
- Etext of Finnegans Wake (but note that this etext is known to have many errors, more than 150 of which are listed on FWEET)
- Online shorter Finnegans Wake
- Online really short 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
- Terence McKenna lecture 'Surfing Finnegan's Wake'
- Art of the States: To Wake the Dead song cycle by Stephen AlbertStephen AlbertStephen Albert was an American composer.-Biography:Born in New York City, Albert began his musical training on the piano, French horn, and trumpet as a youngster. He first studied composition at the age of 15 with Elie Siegmeister, and enrolled two years later at the Eastman School of Music, where...
set to texts from Finnegans Wake - James Joyce reading a portion of "Anna Livia Plurabelle"
- Finnegans Wake public domain in Canada
- The Writing Of Finnegans Wake
- Concordance of Finnegans Wake
- Encarta Article on Joyce and His Work (Archived 2009-10-31)
- "Genesis, Geniuses, and Guinesses," The Common Review, Fall 2005, pg. 58: a pop-culture gloss for effective reading, with headings based on Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
- Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury (FWEET) A searchable database with notes on Finnegans Wake gathered from numerous written sources. About 80 000 entries.
- Wake in Progress Page by page illustrations of Finnegans Wake