A legendarily difficult novel, Finnegans Wake is the culmination of James Joyce’s life and work as an artist. It is a playground, a wrecking yard, a battlefield of literary experimentation and mythic allegory, placing demands on its readers that can intimidate anyone expecting the familiar and comfortable devices of plot, character, theme, narration, and symbolism—although these are there as well. It has been described by scholars as the unique instance of a new literary genre.
The novel is staggeringly ambitious, seeking to form a response to the entire intellectual and creative tradition of the myth, art, philosophy, and history of the Western world. It begins quite literally in medias res: not merely in the middle of the action, but in the middle of a sentence, the first half of which can be found at the end of the novel’s last line. The text thus circles back on itself, forming a cycle of heroic-quest motifs.
At its most basic level, the action covers the events of one night in the lives of a family in the Dublin suburb of Chapelizod: the Protestant innkeeper Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, his twin sons Shem and Shaun (the former a sensitive artist, the latter a coarse dullard), and his daughter Issy.
Humphrey goes to bed guiltily mulling over an incident in Phoenix Park in which some indecency was proffered to two girls. Like Nietzsche’s recognition that all “original” texts are inextricably obscured by centuries of copying errors, misrememberings, editorial emendations, and a host of other “corruptions,” Humphrey’s thoughts on this incident and Dublin’s response to it have blurred the exact nature of whatever it was that happened. In his sleep, Humphrey’s dream vision further obscures the original incident while also rehearsing much of European literature and history in terms of it.
The actual words of the text and the syntax in which they are arranged—the formal elements of language itself—take precedence over the traditional forms of narration on a first viewing, requiring readers to tease a meaning (not the meaning) out of them. Joyce uses his characters as puppets or actors or instantiations through which he presents, represents, and parodies the key events of European—indeed of human—history and culture.
He revisits themes such as the fall—the inauguration of humankind into the world it continues to occupy—through many kinds of falls: the serious kind, such as the fall of the Roman Empire, and the silly kind, such as the fall of Humpty Dumpty. He re-examines a key interest of his, the role of the father and the struggle of sons with their fathers; he also contemplates the contradictions in the double role women must play as mothers and mistresses, engaging one generation of men carnally in order to give rise to a further generation that they must nurture and help to—or hinder from attaining—maturity (or both).
He examines the role of the innovator and the imitator through the lives of irresponsible-but-imaginative Shem and dull-but-diligent Shaun. Through it all, he questions how a single universe can accommodate sameness and unity while also allowing the existence of difference and flux: the crucial cosmological paradox in philosophy of the One and the Many.
Joyce gives the reader permission to suspend the dictates of familiar cause-and-effect linearity, inviting a playful interaction with the text. Readers will be helped by a thorough familiarity with the four-stage theory of cultural evolution that Giambattista Vico developed in 1744, popularly known in English as The New Science (the phases of which are the theocratic, the aristocratic, the democratic, and the anarchic). Or they may acquire interpretive assistance by recourse to one of the many “keys” to Finnegans Wake; in doing so, however, they will have already abandoned the task—the journey, the imaginative exercise—that the author has enjoined them to undertake.
Bibliography
Attridge, Derek. The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Campbell, Joseph, and Henry Morton Robinson. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944.
Litz, A. Walton. The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961.
McHugh, Roland. The Sigla of Finnegans Wake. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976.
Categories: British Literature, Experimental Novels, Irish Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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