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The Monomythic Language of the Night Reading Finnegans Wake

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The Monomythic Language of the Night: Reading Finnegans Wake
It would be wise for anyone working on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to be able to
answer the question “Why?” closely followed by “What is it about?” because you will be
asked.It turns out that most of those asking the question, my fellow students foremost among
them, had dipped into the book, became like me intrigued, and then exasperated to give up at last
in disgust. Needless to say, having set Campbell’s model of a heroic quest as a guide through the
earlier sections of the dissertation, the stage when the hero pauses and decides to quit is one that
surely comes on very quickly when coming before the results of fully seventeen years of labour
by Joyce, “forged from the smithy of my soul” as he put it earlier in his famous resolution. The
underlying reason for grappling with a very strange and forbidding text lies in its beauty, its
reach, its strangeness, its ability to transform the reader’s life, as this chapter seeks to
demonstrate.
That particular question of the reason why the book is worth the exceptional demands
made upon its readers is a difficult one to answer, but very important. Why should we devote
that enormous time it takes to read even fragments of such a perplexing work when the related
question “what is it about?” is not easy to answer. Most recently, Michael Chabon (2012) went
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through the Joyce material we had studied so far with a deserved appreciation of how richly
Joyce’s work, text after text, had illuminated his life. “After that I came up against the safety
perimeter, beyond which there lurked, hulking, chimerical, gibbering to itself in an outlandish
tongue, a frightening beast out of legend,” which was Finnegans Wake before us. As Joyce
himelf asked about a journey through his text; You is feeling like you was lost in the bush,
boy?”(FW, 395). For sure.
Much of the failure is for a time blamed on a deficiency on the part of the reader that
concordances and summaries would remedy by deconstructing Joyce word- by -word as it were
Old Norse (a language Joyce read) and there were only a dictionary, but not a grammar or formal
structure which identifies the sentence parts and roles they play. Not that there is lacking
suggestions among which the dream framework is the most prominent, earliest and supported by
Joyce who had at the time of writing by his bedside a notebook to record his dreams and quizzed
family members on their dreams each morning. From some of its earliest reading by Edmund
Wilson how Joyce’s last and most challenging work should be read, a great deal had to do with
its dream framework. Only that requires a dreamer. Wilson complained in “The Dream of H. C.
Earwicker” that the work perplexed him until its conclusion when its underlying structure was
unveiled constituted out of a dream by a drunken publican in Chapelizod. That particular key
would open up all manner of possibilities for an archetypal reading of a very difficult text around
that particular axis as arising from the mind of HCE, as he is called in Joyce’s work, or so this
dissertation writer foolishly believed.
But close reading of a text, even at its most basic level requires a structure in which the
elements of the text (characterization, plot, symbolic framework) all work together to render the
work meaningful. In this respect, Michael Chabon in his article goes through the experience that
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is not at all unusual, one in which Joyce’s last work both attracted him and exasperated him,
despite the many guides he had consulted that sought to explain the work by tracing references.
Then at last Chabon’s son asked the question that he had failed to answer, and one which this
dissertation writer was often asked: “What is it about?”
Unable to answer after so many years, Chabon banished the work forever from further
consideration implicitly suggesting that the sophisticated audience of the New York Review of
Books for which he was writing do the same. He based his conclusion on the very
indistinctiveness of dream life in Finnegans Wake leading to “murky waters” and “grand futility”
which was in essence a failure of form. “The Wake’s failure to render up a true account of the
experience of dreaming, of the unconscious passage of a human consciousness across an
ordinary night, was only a figure for a greater failure, a more fundamental impossibility,”
Chabon writes of the incoherence of a text seemingly going nowhere, at least when read in a
linear fashion and not in a serial manner as this reading proposes
It goes without saying that we should be able to answer the questions Chabon’s son
poses. This is especially important because both fellow students and a troubling inner voice ask
the very questions posed : why spend time on the work and what is it about. In brief, it may be
answered this way, though it may take a chapter to explain. In the first place, once the underlying
serial format of a particular modernist tradition to which Finnegans Wake adheres is understood
and accepted, a system may be found to conceive of a particular order that guide our reading,
though in a particularly non-linear manner. All the elements of a psychological quest for
wholeness are present that we had been tracing through Joyce’s more accessible works with an
archetypal system supporting its stages from division, disunity and pain to a joyful overcoming
of what is dreadful in the night. That quest motif begins at the most constricted level of a pub and
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widens at last to embrace that “snotgreen sea” of Ulysses turned in the end to death as a loving
father embracing his daughter, Ana Livia Plurabella, in the very last , wondrous lines of
Finnegans Wake joined as the river Liffey with which she is identified reaching the sea at last.
We will return to that scene at the end.
The point is that the darkness of Finnegans Wake is peopled by characters who are fully
awake, purposeful and active, but seem to have no substantiality. Indeed, the very language of
Finnegans Wake comes across more like a dream language in which characters arise, blend into
each other both as the opposites and in their resolution as male/female, patriarchy/ matriarchy,
and as sibling rivalry. But supporting the varied tales, almost skits, Joyce calls in each one upon
what psychoanalysis and anthropology was so absorbed by in diverse areas, not only dreams but
mythic constructions, primitive rites, a religious interrogation of the journey toward death, and
most of all that rich storehouse of symbolism that Jung had identified across cultures and
considered as active agents in human consciousness giving the individual and his human
relationship a universal significance of cosmic proportions.
Much of the failure is for a time blamed on a deficiency on the part of the reader that
concordances and summaries would remedy by deconstructing Joyce word- by -word as it were
Old Norse (a language Joyce read) and there were only a dictionary, but not a grammar or formal
structure which identifies the sentence parts and roles they play. Not that there is lacking
suggestions among which the dream framework is the most prominent, earliest and supported by
Joyce who had at the time of writing by his bedside a notebook to record his dreams and quizzed
family members on their dreams each morning. From some of its earliest reading by Edmund
Wilson how Joyce’s last and most challenging work should be read, a great deal had to do with
its dream framework. Only that requires a dreamer. That particular key would open up all
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manner of possibilities for an archetypal reading of a very difficult text around that particular
axis as arising from the mind of HCE, as he is called in Joyce’s work.
Only it doesn’t work, at least for this researcher who spent time looking at Joyce’s
bewildering text with varied guides and still failed to see any coherence, however much great
scholars insisted that a dream structure in the work establishes continuity with shifting signifiers
expressing “lack” (Lacan), repressed desire (Freud) or archetypes( Jung and Campbell). In the
end actually looking at Joyce’s text and reading about him led to a vision of the author who
wrote over seventeen years in a tiny apartment in Paris with his wife Nora beside him, evidently
giggling wildly at his text waking Nora repeatedly. The so called “little magazines”, especially
Eugene and Mary Jolas transition that carried much of his work also had segments from equally
difficult T.S Eliot and Ezra Pound, long poems unfolding in serial publication over a very long
time attracting devotees along the way, including the young scholars who insisted that the works
are perfectly comprehensible.
From that came two assumptions that simply do not work. That it all takes place in the
sleep of Finnegan who disappears after the first pages, or simply the common world of dreams of
everyman who turns into others as “Here Comes Everybody” or HCE
H. C. Earwicker.” a. k. a.,” “Haveth Childers Everywhere” or else just “HCE.,” is the
publican we meet early in the text. (FW 32.18-19). Named after an earwig-catching device that
he carries, H.C.E hosts the guests who tell separate tales such as "How Buckley Shot the Russian
General", a tale told by Butt of an incident during the battle of Sebastopol when he didn’t have
the heart to shoot a Russian general in the act of defecating. That leads to other tales within tales
as the most varied cast of characters, sometimes with astonishing names and almost always in
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pairs (Shem and Shaun, Tuff and Butt, Justius and Studiosus). They are not fully formed
characters but archetypes with constantly shifting and unstable identities who set out a dispute
and resolve it to restore harmony, most frequently by the merging of identities.
In the end, it is a novel we put together ourselves through its segments, It is strongly
recommended that the reading not be linear. In this instance we shall read the text following a
nuclear family at its core HCE and ALP as they are mostly known and their twin sons Shem and
Shaun and daughter Issy. There are, to be sure, varied stories that will be generally bracketed and
set aside save in one instance. After all, they were separately published as the Tales of Shem and
Shaun, and it’s painful to read how God’s quarrel with Satan in the Mick and Nick episode, or
the debate between St Patrick and the Archdruid at the end has anything to do with the central
and ever returning family. In this way,it may be possible to explain why everyone should read, in
fact live with, the book: it’s wildly funny and quite readable as long as it is not read in a linear
fashion
One of the many great delights of Finnegans Wake are its luminous archetypes drawn
from many sources, mythical, historical, textual that form a pattern that winds its way through
the text. Thus the night which makes everything indistinct brings sexual relations, the presence
of ghosts, goblins and things of the night, the unconscious and much else made more visible. It
is then not wise to employ the dream framework as the sole organizing principle, however
tempting it may be to establish the archetypal quest that we have been studying within the
collective unconscious of any single character. Still, the aim of this dissertation remains to
employ the tools of archetypal criticism as a means to give a close reading where Michael
Chabon had feared to tread.
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There is indeed a process in which the themes that obsessed Jung as the work of
archetypes serve as the organizing principal of Finnegans Wake. Only, very sophisticated Joyce
scholars who worked along these lines confess to considerable challenges, a structural
incoherence in Finnegans Wake coming about through the absence of elements which would
allow the work to be organized readily around a single person dreaming over one night with the
varied tales, songs and skits somehow elements of a dream world with its own language that
Freud and Jung interpreted variously. Obviously, we need first to study precedents for this
investigation and seek counsel along the way, especially given the very great difficulty
Finnegans Wake poses to attempts at sustained and meaningful reading.
The conventional approach bypasses the all-important question of form which would
determine how the literary elements (plot, symbolization, characterization, style and theme) work
together to establish a meaningful whole as novels had traditionally done, at least until the advent
of Modernism with its characteristic defiance of traditional styles and structuring principles. The
problem is that explication of Finnegans Wake from its earliest defenders sought to explain the
text in a linear fashion, attempting to read a dream as if it had at its core a conscious ego in the
irreversible past-to -future course of life.
Dreams are in this sense understood simply a stream-of-consciousness activity that can
enter our consciousness, even take it over for a time, but always in the service of a fully
developed personality, as with Stephen and Bloom in Ulysses. In opposition to received wisdom,
and after greatly benefitting from it, it will be posited that we are led directly from the waking
world into which archetypes intrude at critical moment as in Ulysses to Finnegans Wake in
which archetypes take over in a decentered text. The coherence and purposeful movement among
its parts are best explained through the modernist texts that appeared in the journals that featured
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excerpts from the work as “Work in Progress” following the serial publishing format to which
we will return after we look at the relevant scholarship without which it is not wise to venture
into a very challenging literary terrain
Just How is Finnegans Wake Structured: A Review of Criticism
Campbell and Robinson’s (2005) in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake walk the reader
through the text by ignoring the plot and simply listing briefly just what we are looking at
beneath the sometimes incomprehensible surface of Joyce’s text. The experience feels like being
on a tour bus in a foreign country listening to a guide briefly name sights with deep historical
significance going by without establishing the events that connect them and render them
historically significant. Thus, we learn that the first chapter introduces “Finnegans’ all suffusing,
all feeding slumberous presence” (39) , and promptly lists the pages where the reader can find
material on the landscape, epochs of human history with special attention to the dawn of
historical thinking, a goodly amount of folklore and a Vaudeville song. What is missing is a plot
or some means of linking the multiple meaning of the references with a person or event, and still
less with meaning according to our very linear cause-and-effect thinking about a closed text with
clear signaling from the author about our directions in reading.
Similarly, Roland McHugh (2016) in Annotations to Finnegans Wake works patiently
page by page through important references while telling the story, which is extremely necessary
to lighten the task of reading, but works as a Cliff’s Notes noting each event without giving its
significance, for that would require an interpretive framework . Without that structuring device
of conventional narrative, it is very hard indeed to discover how the very baffling Kersse the
tailor it could be “some of Joyce’s finest writing”.
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In fact the tale begins with 12 customers bringing in a radio/television lovingly described
whose weather announcement concludes the episode. The tale involves a Norwegian captain who
requires a suit. The ship’s mate at the pub suggests Kersse the tailor who accepts the
commission. The captain comes back, pronounces the suit unsatisfactory and leaves. Kersse
comes back and strongly insists that the captain is impossible to fit. It turns out that the captain is
about to marry the tailor’s daughter. The radio/televisioncomes back on and that was that.
Clearly, what happens is made available but the crucial issue of “why” is not resolved, while the
entire exercise of Finnegans Wake seems yet again in doubt. This is one of the episodes to which
we shall return at greater length.
It is often admitted that characters are not fully developed, but rather have a fluid nature
that can be reduced to initials, blend with each other and disappear into nature becoming river,
rock, tree, sky and earth. But there seems no alternative. We must work with what we have, and
that is make use of the fact that as Margot Norris (1993) assures us “something like characters
and something like narratives do emerge from the reading of Finnegans Wake” (163).
Methodologically that is performed in her work by reducing all the characters to just two
somehow endlessly metamorphosing into the most unlikely combinations.
The structural coherence occurs in the mind of a single individual whose varied issues,
possibly including incest and oedipal struggle with his sons, the twins Shaun and Shem, are
being worked out in sleep, rather along the lines of a psychoanalytic model. “The different
speaking voices may therefore represent different personae of the dreamer relating different
versions of the same event,” as Margot Norris points out. “For example, since a single dreamer
can be a father, a son, and a brother all at once, he can play out the Oedipal drama in his dream,
in which he takes the parts of Laius, Oedipus, and Creon all at once. In this way he can express
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many conflicting feelings simultaneously.” (170) It is, to say the least, hard to imagine a play
where one character plays the son who inadvertently kills his father and marries his mother.
Somehow, unity of the text is forced upon it by having characters so insubstantial that they blend
with each other.
Begnal (1988) in “Dreamscheme: Narrative and Voice in Finnegans Wake seeks to
employ the dream framework to insist that the conventional genre of a family saga supported by
a narrative voice and character development as we normally understand it, “a grand design” is in
fact present, but only in a highly veiled form as a “narrative trail’ consisting of linguistic
techniques working as disembodies voices independent as a dream in which may be found a
minimal coherence, that is “aspects of narrative technique and threads of narrative itself" out of
which may be constituted "some sort of plot".
A great deal of credit is due to the post-modernist follower of Lacan, Rabaté (1998-
1999) in "Joyce and Jolas: Late Modernism and Early" for giving me at last a direction that was
followed to an entirely different perspective on how Joyce most difficult work may be
approached without losing the thread that had guided my understanding of Joyce until this very
problematic Work in Progress. It was a belief that the quest motif in the heroic journey need be
linear and read as a form of character development within the conventional narrative mode rising
to a climax and descending into a satisfying resolution characteristic of the naturalistic novel.
Rabaté insists that such reading overlooks the key organizing device of Finnegans Wake which is
language, freed of the claims of an ego caught in the past-to-future course of life, is liberated to
render meaning through a system of significations at the level of a universal language or
discourse that Joyce has invented. Still, Rabaté sets out the obstacle to close reading of the text
for “in no other text are the indeterminacies of the speaking voice so dense and overwhelming
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that the reader has only a blurred impression that something is being told, though he cannot
ascertain what or by whom.”
What was truly fruitful in his article is the link that was established with Eugene Jolas
who introduced Joyce in different issues of transition magazine that he edited in Paris with his
wife. Reading the text that was so puzzling became relatively easy when looked at from the point
of view of a modernist artistic movement under the label “Revolution of the Word” that Jolas
promoted to free language from its debased uses between world wars from the many constraints
of conventional structures. It was on short a language of the night which covers with darkness
our unconscious desires now released, and mythic constructs which can emerge in dreams, but
also a consciousness like Joyce’s awake at night and writing a masterpiece.
Rabaté proposes tin a post-modernist vein that “The Ego (Moi) has been replaced by a
Mot,( Latin Verbum, English Word) that condenses all the qualities formerly associated with an
egoistic or egocentric subject.” (245) It is very difficult for those not initiated to follow Lacan’s
psychology, but the hint that we are reading a decentered text led to Eugene Jolas, who was
incidentally a major influence on Joseph Campbell whose vision of the heroic quest more than
his work on Joyce governs this reading .In a sense, this investigation has not at all deviated from
its original thrust then, once its author came upon a passage from Joseph Campbell’s memoirs in
which as a young student in Paris came across Joyce’s work, met the master and was personally
guided through the text by Eugene Jolas.
Campbell remembers how he had bought Ulysses and was predictably attracted and
baffled, which it turns out is common among those who become devoted to Joyce at his most
difficult. In the end, young Campbell embarked upon his career as a Joyce scholar, having started
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out studying medieval philology and Old French and Provençal by that “ineluctable modality of
the visible” which begins the third chapter of Ulysses. Very wisely, he returns to Sylvia Beach, at
Shakespeare & Co. in “high academic indignation’:
So Sylvia Beach gave me the clues about how to read Ulysses, and then she sold me this
journal called transition, published by Eugne Jolas, in which sketches of the early
chapters of Finnegans Wake were appearing under the title “Work in Progress.” That’s
what taught me. And there you have it. It’s funny how it changed my career.(277)
With his wife Jolas founded transition, "An International Quarterly for Creative
Experiment," in which they published serially various sections of Joyce's work as it existed for
seventeen years as Work in Progress. Not only was Jolas one of the key contributors to a series
of essays, published in transition called Our Exagmination round His Factification for
Incamination ofWork in Progress, but there is a good deal of what is most admirable in
Campbell’s writing on Joyce that had its origins in Jolas under a strongly modernist dispensation
that was most militant on its insistence of the vital cultural role of literature in saving mankind
from the corruption of its own language. Jolas was first to propose in his manifesto “Revolution
of the Word” that Joyce was a myth-maker and the renovator of the debased language of the
times through a language and personally devised mythology that was the universal “language of
the night”.
Here again we find the “monomyth” that Jolas called “paramyth” expressed in a universal
“language of babel”. In fact, far from isolated, Joyce in Finnegans Wake led an avant-garde
modernist movement to reclaim civilization by purifying its language. “The literature of the
future will have no interest in competing with the possibilities presentation of the spirit inherent
in the magic tale and poetry toward the poet’s presentation of the heretofore hidden strata of the
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human personality, ” he wrote. “ It will probably express the irruption of the supernatural, the
fantastic the eternal into quotidian life.” (Jolas 1999, 277)
It is striking how very different Finnegans Wake looks when read in transition in
segments. More importantly, in this period the reader will come upon a great many modernist
long poems that demonstrate at the very least how very much Joyce in his last works was in a
modernist tradition which manifested itself more in the long poem. By appealing to this tradition
and its conventions, we will see literary work expanding along the lines indicated by a tradition
which includes T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Four Quartets, Ezra Pound’s The Cantos,
William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, Charles Olson The Maximus Poems and Louis Zukofsky’s
“A”. It is hoped that by setting out the common features of this tradition which employs what
Eliot called “the mythic method” in a review of Ulysses, a way may be found to read Finnegan’s
Wake within its own conventions and literary program. The tradition had embraced myth, ritual
and the classic epic forms while staking for their authors a place of honour that Homer, Dante
and Milton once commanded.
Almost at a glance when looking into these poems, we can find parallels in the very
structure which supports close reading, but only if the circumstances of how the genesis of these
works is taken into account. They generally appeared in segments over the period of the poet’s
lifetime in magazines of avant-garde culture where they raised support as they were published in
segments. Moreover, it was very much a self-aware movement in which a particular poetics was
very much the point of the exercise, though the very long gestation in segments precludes a
linear reading. These segments each contain elements from what Eliot called a “mythic method”
in his “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” devised programmatically in a failing civilization of the post-
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war years and a means of “giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility
and anarchy which is contemporary life.” (178)
This is a method which looks at the mythology of the past and the literature in which it is
expressed as one continuum regardless of its origins in the varied cultures in which it is found to
underline their common reference to a timeless human experience that is entirely outside and
transcendent to the temporal narrative of realistic literature. It is in most instances critical of the
present in its many episodes in which mythical, anthropological, historical, and the literary
references are advanced in juxtaposition against each other, requiring that an army of scholars
follow each text to elucidate it. The method requires the reader’s most active participation in
constructing meaning which the writer’s authoritative voice is diminished. The many texts that
underline the expansion over time of a text create a mythology by mixing the past with modern
life at the expense and criticism of the latter. Indeed, the very reason for devising a modern epic
in prose or poetry is precisely to save through its formal expansion and great literary claims a
civilization in severe crisis between world wars.
These works teach us that we ourselves need to find the links without the lead of an
authoritative narrator’s voice guiding us. It becomes then like the work itself a sort of a quest in
which we ourselves order the discontinuities and make our own connections within the text. This
is what makes Finnegans Wake difficult, but in the end immensely rewarding. “There is not
past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present,” Joyce explained in a letter. (Cited in
Deming 1997, 22) Samuel Becket put it beautifully in “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce” calling
attention to how a flow in the eternal present of mythology is in the end a very joyous affair in
which we are called upon to participate following the lead of the modernist generation. In fact,
Becket gives us the best reason for why we should not only read but devotedly live with
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Finnegans Wake:
Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in
English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read--or rather it is not only to be read. It is
to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something
itself. (14).
Geert Lernout (1990) reviewed the earlier influence of postmodernism on his reading of
Finnegans Wake, his gradual epiphany of “what every Joycean must have found at some point:
that Finnegans Wake was about me.” (201) In that spirit, the text is by no means a testimony to
the influence of Jungian psychology or its scientific veracity, but rather a method of archetypal
criticism somewhat neglected in the post-modern era that is about to be tested.
“His producers are they and not his consumers”: A Language of the Night reading
In sum, we shall be looking at a flow of a river Liffey metamorphosed into an anima
figure Anna Livia Plurabelle or A.L.P. and back to the river again meeting at last her father the
sea in the last glorious passage of the work. Her consort and the male animus figure is H. C.
Earwicker or H.C.E who blends at last into a landscape of Ireland through which the river passes
as a master builder, presumably of Dublin. Shem and Shaun, their offspring, complete the
nuclear family which is at once joyously parodies and raised to mythic heights which the gods of
lost cultures which gave the material for the epic works of Homer and Dante.
The work, to answer the initial question of what it is about, is about its own creation, a
modernist epic to rival the cultural masterpieces of the past and support by that means a failing
civilization. We can read it as a timeless monomyth in which the archetypal patterns and
mythical references guide our reading of a text meant to be read serially as if each section could
stand on its own save for the symbolism of that joins the segments and the programmatic avant-
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garde reason for its creation. We are entering “the worldroom beyond the roomwhorld” (FW
100.29).
It is the world of night which includes sleep, but also unconscious desire, the coming of
death and the workings of the mythological framework lost in the modern world and recovered
in “the worldroom” which joins mythology East or West into a single framework of reference.
The work itself was written, it will be remembered, at night with Joyce’s constant laughter at his
own creation annoying his wife, Nora. It is darkness that brings on the light of enlightenment at
the first light of day associated with the Buddhist symbol of a lotus opening at dawn:
Nuctumbulumbumus wanderwards the Nil. …It was a long, very long, a dark, very dark,
an allburt unend, scarce endurable, and we could add mostly quite various and
somenwhat stumbletumbling night. Endee he sendee. Diu! The has goning at gone, the is
coming to come. Greets to ghastern, hie to morgning. Dormidy, destady. Doom is the
faste. Well down, good other. Now day, slow day, from delicate to divine, divases.
Padma, brighter and sweetster, this flower that bells, it is our hour or risings. Tickle,
tickle. Lotus spray. Till herenext. Adya. (FW 598.5-14)
We witness the union of the mythological constructs become at last the harmony of a world-
myth where “that earopean end meets Ind” (FW598.15-16), as the Hindu image of a lotus
blossoming from the navel of Vishnu creates (and recreates) the universe, “Padma, brighter and
sweetster, this flower that bells, it is our hour or risings. Tickle, tickle. Lotus spray”(FW598.12-
14).Let’s therefore boldly if fearfully enter that “stumbletumbling night” of Finnegans Wake
until its ending at dawn.
Joyce himself urges us on the quest:
Numerous are those who, nay, there are a dozen of folks still unclaimed by the death
angelin this country of ours today, humble indivisibles in this grand continuum,
overlorded by fate and interlarded with accidence, who, while there are hours and days,
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will fervently pray to the spirit above that they may never depart this earth of theirs till in
his long run from that place where the day begins, ere he retourneys postexilic. (FW
472.28-34)
There were from the start supporters and opponents among the scholars and writers of the
avant-garde who experienced the work as it appeared, segment by segment. That they were
incorporated in the text testifies to a structure in which we are invited to participate making it an
endless Work in Progress constantly taken apart and reconstructed with each person coming
before it. For instance the 12 contributors to Our Exagmination Round his Factijication for
Incamination of Work in Progress are alluded to in the work focusing on one of the scholars who
was deeply influenced by and promoted Finnegans Wake. Is there a system which makes use of
the past to save the future and can it be understood is the question that was posed from the start
of this chapter. Joyce asks innocently whether anyone could be confused by Finnegans Wake,
rather “Quinigan's Quake”, having his disciple’s explanations in hand:
If there is a future in every past that is present Quis est qui novir quinnigan and Qui quae
quot at Quinigan's Quake! Stump! His producers are they and not his consumers Your
exagmination round his factification for incamination of a warping process. Declaim.
(FW 496. 36-37).
These are also the byeboys "With however what sublation of compensation in the
radification of interpretation by the byeboys?"( FW 369 .0 6 -7) and incidentally the 12 who
carry that radio/television “their tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler” (309.14) instrument which
is a continuing feature of the work. H. C. Earwicker who will address the world by its means in
the final chapter of the work. The instrument was equipped with “supershielded umbrella
antennas for distance” (FW 309.17-18) , a Bellini-Tosti coupling system with a vitaltone speaker
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” ( Fw 309.19) featuring “harmonic condenser enginium (the Mole)”and a “magazine battery
called the Mimmim Bimbim” (FW 310.1-2) .
Beginning with an extended description of the radio-televisual device in the background
of Earwicker’s pub that concludes the episode with a weather announcement of depression,
presumably expressing the author’s depression also represented by Kersse the Tailor whose work
is criticized with the reply that the client is hard to suit. The tailor is also “the teller” delivered by
HCE to a very indifferent and uncomprehending reaction for “Well, you know or don‟t you
kennet or haven‟t I told you every telling has a tailing and that‟s the he and the she of it. (FW
213.11-12). It is the tailing after the telling which is left to us.
Then the publician falls, reminding us of his role as a fore-father, or Adam.In fact there
are two other falls prefigured on the first page of Joyce’s text combining Humpty Dumpty. the
Christian creation story and afterwards the fall of a great wall that H.C.E was building evoking
the building of Babel and the failure of that universal language that has held people together:The
great fall of the off wall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man,
that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of
his tumptytumtoes: and their upturapikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where
oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.(FW 1.16-25)
The person around whom events happen as in a dream is called HCE, an acronym of
“Here Comes Everybody”(FW 32.18-19) , "Haveth Childers Everywhere" (FW 535 .3 4 ), the
"multipopulipater" (81.05) and the "folkenfather of familyans" (382.18). He is a mythological
everyman figure ridiculously elevated by his male vanity and narcissism “An imposing
everybody he always indeed looked constantly the same as and equal to himself and
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magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalisation” (FW 32.19-21). In fact, his
pretensions represented as being equal to himself. When we first meet him, he is both on stage as
Napoleon played by H.C.E. “a veritable Napoleon the Nth, our worldstage’s practical jokepiece
and retired cecelticocommediant in his own wise” (FW 33.2-4) and admiring himself in the
audience, a vice regal sitting in “his viceregal booth” (FW 32.36) . Still there is the question,
“But to speak broken heaventalk, is he? Who is he? Whose is he? Why is he? Howmuch is he?
Which is he? When is he? Where is he? How is he? And what the decans is there about him
anyway, the decemt man?” (FW, 261-62).
In fact the “decempt” man falls and fails in love. HCE’s is named for his earwick
catching equipment by the king he greets “bearing aloft amid the fixed pikes of the hunting
party a high perch atop of which a flowerpot was fixed earthside hoist with care” (FW 31.1-3). In
fact, he is also a builder who manages to impregnate his mate ALP in his construction outfit
producing thereby the twins Shem and Shaun, and thereby fulfilling the Biblical commandment
to multiply “Wither hayre in honds tuck up your part inher. Oftwhile balbulous, mithre ahead,
with goodly trowel in grasp and ivoroiled overalls which he habitacularly fondseed, like Haroun
Childeric Eggeberth he would caligulate by multiplicables the altitude and malltitude” (FW 4.29-
33).
He was making love to his wife when the skyscraper of which the wall constituted a
fragment fell because of a misplaced brick. For the disaster, he blamed in his wife handing him
sour apple reminding us yet again of the kind of marital tensions Adam and Eve had
experienced. He blames her whereupon she issues a “mamafesta” called “Rockabill Booby in the
Wave Trough” (FW 104.6-7) in which her husband is variously a sea-beast and the baby who
falls with his cradle from the tree-top in the famous lullaby. Clearly she finds him repulsive “Yet
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may we not see still the brontoichthyan form outlined aslumbered, even in our own
nighttime.”(FW 7.20-21)
He is something of a dirty old man “hiding the crumbends of his enormousness in the
areyou” observed trying to persuade two urinating young girls in Wellington park to remove
their clothing as he shows them his penis, rather “Waddlewurst” (FW 494.17) after he “drapped
has draraks an Mansianhase parak” (FW 491.18) becoming“ Mr Hairwigger who has just hadded
twinned little curls” (FW 491.30-31) which are pubic hair.
He seems to have dressed for the seduction of little girls in sweets, that is, “camouflaged
as a blancmange and maple syrop!” (FW 494.21) while reading to the girls “Citizens’ Obedience
Is City’s Happiness” to get them to strip themselves of their trousers or “sitinins” (FW 494.22)
He ends up being walled in his own building listinga ll the bad names he had been called in the
book: “Earwicker, [ . . . ] in the sititout corner of his conservatory, behind faminebuilt walls, [ . .
. ] compiled, [ . . . ]a long list (now feared in part lost) to be kept on file of all abusive names he
was called’(FW 70.35-71.6).
The children, the twins Shem and Shaun witness their parents love-making as do the four
bedpost named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John after the four apostles, except that their names
are Matthew Gregory, Mark Lyons, Luke Tarpey, and Johnny MacDougal. They are the four
gospellers, as well as the four provinces of Ireland and the four classical ages in Vico’s circular
version of history, or so we are guided in many guides to the text. Each apostle describes the
love-making from a different angle as it is broadcast to the world by the radio/television
instrument: “‘[p]hotoflashing it far too wide. It will be known through all Urania soon. Like
Name 21
jealousjoy titaning fear; like rumour rhean round the planets; like china’s dragon snapping japets;
like rhodagrey up in the east’ (FW 583.15-18).
CE takes the upper position in love-making and behold Sham and Shem peeping see to
their amazement their fathers behind featuring in detail Phoenix Park where the attempted
seduction of the two little girls had taken place. It is given as a tourist guide. A “straight road”
“bisexes” (bisects) the park, with “vinesregent’s lodge” (Viceregal’s Lodge) on one cheek and
“chief sacristary’s residence” (Chief Secretary’s Lodge) on the other side (FW 564.11-15). This
is joined to an earlier scene when HCE was observed in the park in his sordid affair with the two
girls. The behind of the giant identified sometimes with Dublin and sometimes with all of Ireland
(the head in the North , the rest of the Irish Republic).
This is the bedpost talking about the sexual position of bad sex, the “second position of
discordance” it is called:
Jeminy, what is the view which now takes up a second position of discordance, tell it
please Mark! ….You notice it in that rereway because the male entail partially eclipses
the femecovert. I Is it not that we are commanding from fullback, woman permitting, a
profusely fine birdseye view from beauhind his park? Finn his park has been much the
admiration of all the stranger ones, grekish and romanos, who arrive to here. The straight
road down the centre (see relief map) bisexes the park which is said to be the largest of
his kind in the world. On the right prominence confronts you the handsome vinesregent’s
lodge while, turning to the other supreme piece of cheeks, exactly opposite, you are
confounded by the equally handsome chief sacristary’s residence. (FW 564.01-15)
This section implies a violation of the Biblical injunction against uncovering the nakedness of
the father, and thereby challenging his patriarchal authority and also a comparison to loving
copulation that two washerwoman by the Liffey gossip about seemingly cleansing her of sin in
their obvious excitement and expression of desire.
Name 22
Everybody loves these lines:
O
tell me all about
Anna Livia! I want to hear all
about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of
course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. (FW
There is a lot to tell so . “Wash quit and don’t be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your
talktapes. And don’t butt me—hike!—when you bend. Or whatever it was they threed to make
out he thried to two in the Fiendish park.” ( FW 196.1-3,) That’s the hubby. As for his wife, she
knew what good sex is and it is lovingly described:
foaming under Horsepass bridge . . . . Well, there once dwelt a local heremite, Michael
Arklow was his riverend name, . . . and one venersderg in junojuly, oso sweet and so cool
and so limber she looked, . . . in the silence, of the sycamores, all listening, the kindling
curves you simply can’t stop feeling, he plunged both of his newly anointed hands . . . in
her singimari saffron strumans of hair” (FW 202. 24-36, 203. 1-25).
Then at last in the darkness, as the old women leave, they call upon the Liffey at night and set us
up for the key archetypal images associated with Anna Livi, the river Liffey at night flowing on
like the book, stories to tell:
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Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk
talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can't hear with bawk of bats,
all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us ! My foos won't moos. I feel as old as yonder
elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia's daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night!
Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who
were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell
me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of,
hitherandthithering waters of. Night
Shem is a hustler, a fake, a “sham”. Shem had “a close-cropped skull, not ‘four-
eyes’ but eight, a whorl for a nose, a numb arm from writing, a few hairs only on his head and
lip, a goatee of three barbells hung from a plough-like chin, had one shoulder higher than the
other, huge ears…” It is he who answers that
first riddle of universe, ‘When is a man not a man?’ and offered a prize of a crab apple as
it was for them a time before mints or money. One said ‘when the heavens quake’
[thunder], a second ‘when a Bohemian lisps’a third said ‘when he is hungry and
determined’, and next said ‘when he dies, another ‘when he is drunk’, and another said
‘when he is married’, another ‘when papa fathered the nation’, one of wittiest said, ‘when
he ate the apple and seemed so shaken’, and another said ‘when he’s old and grey’, and
still another ‘when the dead awaken’, and another, ‘when he is under-sized’, another
‘when he has no manners’, and one said ‘when pigs fly’. All were wrong, and Shem took
the prize, the correct answer being ‘when he is a Sham’ (FW 170)
Shem the Penman who writes in ink made of feces mixed with urine and Shaun the Postman
despise and constantly fight with each other, though when Shaun is accused of his father's crime
of indecency toward the two young girls in Phoenix Park. He bears false witness and gets him
freed.
Sibling rivalry takes on classic psychoanalytic dimensions with strong mythological
features characteristic of the great interest in it by anthropology, psychoanalysis and the writers
of very difficult long poems in awe of both Joyce and Ezra Pound. The boys simply can’t get
together to overthrow their father, especially when the Flora girls turn up “with Floh biting his
Name 24
leg thigh and Luse lugging his luff legand Bieni bussing him under his bonnet and Vespatilla
blowing cosy fond tutties up the allabroad length of the large of his smalls’ (FW 417.17-20) and
surround him with ‘allallahbath of houris’(FW 417.27-28). Shem is a masturbator, that is,
suffered ‘the Tossmania” for the poor lad had “grillies in his head” (FW 417.29-30).
It is only at the end while lying on the ground in a graveyard that Shem longing for his
brother at last hears his voice and sees him approaching in the darkness carrying a lantern. It may
be a dream, but a sweet voice interrogates him as if he were facing the Last Judgement,
Shem and Shaun literally become in this way the top and bottom half of one person.
Trying “to isolate i from my multiple Mes”(FW 410.12) is a wonderful moment of epiphany for
Shem, as well as a hint to the reader not to overdo the identification of the core characters with
the ones who appear and disappear through the text. Just take Shem’s explanation of why he had
never worked. See, he had to walk all day from church to church as a devout pilgrim in prayer:
“There is no sabbath for nomads, and I mostly was able to walk, being too soft for work proper
sixty off eilish miles a weak between three masses a morn and two chaplets at eve.” (FW 410.
26-32). Incidentally, the “I” was lowered in a sentence which refers to Hitler’s Germany building
the autobahn on which grey concentration camp inmates walk like the dead” “I am now
becoming rather fed up be going circulating about tham new hikler’s highways like them
nameless souls ercked and scorned band grizzled all over, till its rusty october in the bleak
forest.(FW 410.7-9)
Shem says of an experience which begins with the con-artist going to sleep on hearing
Shaun, the twin brother and writer calling for him. Perhaps we should stay briefly with how the
dream is understood specifically in the text on the principle that it is also joined symbolically to
the night, darkness, death and desire, in this instance to link up with a twin brother, Shaun, which
Name 25
may be thought of as happening in the dream or else as a journey through the valley of darkness
to death.
The section opens at midnight to where the sound of a church reaches at a time when
night conceals all things, even among bitter British and Irish rivals, bringing harmony to feuding
brothers and covering all differences in a darkness in which the only light is from the outflow of
laundry water from a recent washing, beautifully expressed in the cleansing quality of that
“riverrun” which begins and ends the book, that is, “listery gleam darkling adown surface of
affluvial flowandflow as again might seem garments of laundry reposing a leasward” The
“vixen’s laughter among midnight’s chimes” is most certainly Anna Livia Plurabelle, most
interestingly an incarnate of Jung’s female principle, the anima against the strongly male impulse
(animus) of her husband, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE). She is in fact a symbol of
liberated inclusiveness as ALP which stands for “Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the
Bringer of Plurabilities” (FW 104.1-2). All the main characters in the end dissolve their identities
in the whole of “nonland of where’s please (and it was when you and they were we)”. In sum,
leave your ego at the door.
It is cited in full to give one reason for cherishing this work---the very great beauty of
some of the lines which the invented dream language and its archetypal symbols, these twins
among them.
And low stole o’er the stillness the heartbeats of sleep. …Black! Switch out! Methought
as I was dropping asleep somepart in nonland of where’s please (and it was when you and
they were we) I heard at zero hour as ’twere the peal of vixen’s laughter among
midnight’s chimes from out the belfry of the cute old speckled church tolling so faint a
goodmantrue as nighthood’s unseen violet rendered all animated greatbritish and Irish
objects nonviewable to human watchers save ’twere perchance anon some glistery gleam
darkling adown surface of affluvial flowandflow as again might seem garments of
laundry reposing a leasward close at hand in full expectation. And as I was jogging along
Name 26
in a dream as dozing I was dawdling, arrah, methought broadtone was heard and the
creepers and the gliders and flivvers of the earth breath and the dancetongues of the
woodfires and the hummers in their ground all vociferated echoating: Shaun! Shaun! Post
the post! with a high voice and O, the higher on high the deeper and low, I heard him so.
(FW 203. 24-30)
A light comes on and his brother carrying a flashlight appears to ease the darkness of his
alonness in the darkness.
Many of the stories have death as a chief concern from the Fall of Man with Adam and
Eve to the death rites and mythic narratives, as we shall witness when the archetypes are
employed to read the text along the lines of archetypal criticism. The variety of narratives in
which death is presented is exemplified by the variety of different mythical religious ways in
which death is understood within different cultural settings, but so blended that boundaries that
separate classic texts, ancient myths and modern psychoanalysis are collapsed at the most basic
level of word-formation.
The work ends curiously unfinished, which is a structural feature deliberately and
meaningfully chosen as a constitutive feature of the work. The female principle dissolved into
initials and then into the landscape has become the river by which the passing away of a person
is resolved into the softness and blessedness of the morning with malevolent male principles and
impositions from the text turned into the blessedness of the reunion between daughter and father
as the Liffy finds rest in the ocean. It is a very lovely passage and one to be read to still the inner
voice and those of others who think that a reading of Finnegans Wake is a futile exercise:
O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss
me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my
cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles
and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I
see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. So.
Avelaval. My leave have drifted from me. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along,
taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under
Name 27
whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly
dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush
to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then, Finn, again! Take.
Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a
loved a long the (FW 627 .28-31 628. 1-16)
Conclusion
At the end, this constitutes “a reading” of Finnegans Wake which is open to multiple
readings. It was through its gestation a Work in Progress over seventeen years, which greatly
affected its structure .Its fragments gathered support as it came together without anyone asking
how they fit together. Ezra Pound was bringing out his Cantos and T.S.Eliot his Four Quartets at
the same time. The very attempt to challenge traditional canons and to constitute long works in
the style of Homer or Dante on modernist artistic practices is something no writer seems to be
doing today, still less to actually situate their art as an attempt to save civilization. It takes time to
accept that this work is an endless Work in Progress that is constantly reconstituted by every
person and with every reading. In its own terms, it is a work of surpassing loveliness and a rich
modern myth open to archetypal reading if it is read through its recurring patterns as a modern
mythology at a time of little belief. It is a fitting end to Stephen Daedalus’ quest.
Name 28
Works Cited
Becket, Samuel. “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce” in Our Exagmination Round his
Factijication for Incamination of Work in Progress. Ed. Sylvia Beach Paris:
Shakespeare& Company, 1928. Web.
Begnal, Michael H. Dreamscheme: Narrative and Voice in Finnegans Wake. Syracuse
University Press, 1988. Print.
Campbell, Joseph. Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the art of James Joyce. New World
Library, 2003. Print,
Chabon, Michael. “What to Make of Finnegans Wake”, The New York Review of Books ( 12
July 2012). Web.
Eliot,T.S, “Ulysses , Order and Myth” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Kermode (London,
1975), 171-178. Print
Lernout, Geert. The French Joyce. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990. Print.
McHugh, Roland. Annotations to Finnegans wake. JHU Press, 2016.Print
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London : Harper Collins,1994. Print
Margot Norris, “Finnegans Wake: The Critical Method” in James Joyce: A Collection of Critical
Essays, ed. Mary T. Reynolds (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1993. 163-170. Print
Name 29
Rabaté, Jean-Michel. "Joyce and Jolas: Late Modernism and Early." Journal of Modern
Literature 22.2 (1998): 245-252. Web.
Wilson, Edmund. “The Dream of H. C. Earwicker” in Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s
& 40s. Vol. 177. Library of America, 2007. 438-457.Print

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