Finnegans Wake

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Finnegans Wake
Author	James Joyce
Language	English
Genre(s)	Sui generis
Publisher	Faber and Faber
Publication date	4 May 1939
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
ISBN	ISBN 0-14-118126-5
Preceded by	Ulysses (1922)

Finnegans Wake is a work of comic fiction by Irish author James Joyce, published in 1939, renowned for its difficulty and experimental style. Joyce's final work, it was written in Paris over a period of 17 years, and published two years before the author's death. The entire book is written in an idiosyncratic language, consisting of multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. ^[1] Due to its expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and its abandonment of conventions of plot and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the larger public.^[2]

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, many details remain elusive. The book treats, in an unorthodox fashion, the exploits of the Earwicker family, comprised 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's 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.

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. The first published parts were announced as A New Unnamed Work; later installments were published as fragments from Work in Progress. The actual title of the work remained a secret between Joyce and his wife Nora Barnacle until shortly before the book was published in its entirety, on 4 May 1939, after 17 years of composition.

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 many 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." ^[3] In 1998, the Modern Library placed Finnegans Wake seventy-seventh amongst its list of "Top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century."^[4]

Contents 1 Background 2 Plot summary 2.1 Book I 2.2 Book II 2.3 Book III 2.4 Book IV 3 Critical response and themes 3.1 Difficulties of plot summary 3.2 Themes 3.3 A reconstruction of nocturnal life 4 Characters 4.1 The Earwicker family 4.2 Minor characters 5 Language and style 6 Allusions to other works 7 Literary significance & criticism 8 Publication history 9 Allusions/references in other works 9.1 Adaptations 9.2 References 9.3 In popular entertainment 9.4 In Irish culture 10 Notes 11 References 12 Further reading 13 External links

[edit] Background

Having completed work on Ulysses, Joyce was so exhausted that he did not write a line of prose for a year.^[5] 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."^[6] 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.^[7] Joyce completed another four short sketches in July and August 1923, while vacationing 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".^[8] 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.^[9]

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." ^[10] 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.^[10] 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.

Some early supporters of Joyce's work, such as Ezra Pound and the author's brother Stanislaus Joyce, grew increasingly unsympathetic to his new writing.^[11] 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.

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 in the 1930s, as he was writing Books II and IV, his 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. During this period he enlisted younger writers to help him with the formidable amount of research the book required, such as Samuel Beckett. For a while Joyce considered asking his friend James Stephens to complete the book, on the grounds that Stephens was born in the same hospital as Joyce, exactly one week later, and shared the first name of both Joyce and of Joyce's fictional alter-ego.^[12] In the end, Stephens was not asked to finish the book.

Finnegans Wake was published in book form, after 17 years of composition, on 4 May 1939. Joyce died two years later in Zurich, on 13 January 1941.

[edit] Plot summary

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.

The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment, which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making the entire work cyclical in nature. Joyce himself revealed that the book "ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence."^[13]

[edit] Book I

""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."— The opening line of Finnegans Wake, which continues from the book's unfinished closing line[14]"

The introductory chapter (1.1) establishes the book's setting as "Howth Castle and Environs", "before the flood, before the fall",^[15] and introduces Dublin hod carrier "Finnegan", who falls to his death from a ladder while constructing a wall.^[16][17] 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.^[17] A series of episodic vignettes follows, loosely related to the dead Finnegan, most commonly referred to as "The Willingdone Museyroom", ^[18]"Mutt and Jute", ^[19][20] and "The Prankquean". ^[21] 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”,^[22] persuading him that he is better off where he is as a new version of Finnegan is sailing into Dublin Bay to take over the story: HCE.^[23]

1.2 opens with an account of "Harold or Humphrey" Chimpden receiving the agnomen "Earwicker" from the Sailor King, who encounters him attempting to catch earwigs 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 which 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 1.2 through 1.4 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.^[24] However HCE remains silent - not responding to the accusations or verbal abuse - dreams, is buried in a coffin at the bottom of Lough Neagh, ^[25] 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 1.5. 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 (I.7) and its original author ALP (I.8), the latter in the book's most celebrated passage, published separately as "Anna Livia Plurabelle" in 1930. This chapter, which is interwoven with thousands of river names from all over the globe, 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."^[26]

[edit] 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.

2.1 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.^[27] 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.^[28]

Chapter 2.2 follows Shem, Shaun and Issy studying upstairs in the pub, after having been called inside in the previous chapter.^[29][30] 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)".^[31][32] Once Shem (here called Dolph) has helped Shaun (here called Kev) to draw the Euclid diagram [3], 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." ^[33]

"Section 1: a radio broadcast of the tale of Pukklesen (a hunchbacked Norwegian Captain), Kersse (a tailor) and McCann (a ship's husband) in which the story is told inter alia of how HCE met and married ALP. Sections 2-3: an interruption in which Kate (the cleaning woman) tells HCE that he is wanted upstairs, the door is closed and the tale of Buckley is introduced. Sections 4-5: the tale, recounted by Butt and Taff (Shem and Shaun) and beamed over the television, of how Buckley shot the Russian General (HCE) — Danis Rose's overview of the extremely complex chapter 2.3, which he believes takes place in the bar of Earwicker's hotel[34]"

2.3 deals with the situation in the pub below where the children are studying, as it relates the episodes of "The Norwegian Captain and the Tailor's Daughter", ^[35][36] and "How Buckley Shot the Russian General." It shows an aged HCE worrying about work in his pub, as narratives are broadcast via the bar's radio and television sets. These tales portray HCE succumbing to domestication through his marriage to the Tailor's Daughter, and old age and decline as he is ultimately overthrown by his sons, represented in the symbolic shooting of The Russian General by Buckley.^[37][38] After Buckley has shot the Russian General, Earwicker returns from upstairs, where he had been summoned by ALP, and is reviled by his customers. This condemnation of his character forces HCE to deliver a general confession of his crimes, including an incestuous desire for young girls.^{[39][40][41][42]} Finally a policeman arrives to send the drunken customers home, the pub is closed up, ^[43] 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.^[44][45]

2.4, 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. ^[46] 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", ^[47] while the four old men observe Tristan and Isolde, and offer four intertwining commentaries on the lovers and themselves which are "always repeating themselves".^[48]

[edit] 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. ^[49]

III.1 opens with the Four Masters' ass narrating how he thought, as he was "dropping asleep", ^[50] he had heard and seen an apparition of Shaun the Post. ^[51] 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." ^[52] Shaun's answers focus on his own boastful personality and his admonishment of the letter's author - his artist brother Shem. Shaun's sudden and somewhat unexpected promotion to the book's central character is explained by Tindall with the assertion that "having disposed of old HCE, Shaun is becoming the new HCE."^[53] 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. ^[54]

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; while their children are sleeping down the hall and the dawn is rising outside, they attempt to copulate.

[edit] Book IV

"1: The waking and resurrection of [HCE]; 2: the sunrise; 3:the conflict of night and day; 4: the attempt to ascertain the correct time; 5: the terminal point of the regressive time and the [Shaun] figure of Book III; 6: the victory of day over night; 7: the letter and monologue of [ALP] — Roland McHugh's summary of the events of Book IV[55]"

Book IV consists of only one chapter, which, like the book's opening chapter, is mostly composed of a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes. After an opening call for dawn to break, ^[56] the remainder of the chapter consists of the vignettes "Saint Kevin", "Berkely and Patrick" and "The Revered Letter".^{[57] [58]} In an echo of Ulysses the female protagonist has the final word; the book closes on a version of ALP’s Letter ^[59] and her final long monologue.^[60] 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.

[edit] Critical response and themes

[edit] Difficulties of plot summary

“

Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude... [61]

”

Many Joyce experts - such as Joseph Campbell, John Gordon, Anthony Burgess and William York Tindall - have summarised Finnegans Wake's plot. While no two summaries are exactly alike, there are many points upon which these commentators agree. However, a number of Joyce scholars question the legitimacy of a linear storyline. 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."^[62] 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".^[63] Fritz Senn has also voiced concerns with some plot synopses:

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.^[64]

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 radically unique approach to plot which Joyce employed. The book follows 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." ^[65] 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."^[66] 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.^[67] 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."^[68]

Book Two is usually considered the book's most opaque section, and hence the most difficult to synopsize. William York Tindall said of the book's four chapters "Than this [...] nothing is denser"^[69]

Despite Joyce's many revolutionary techniques, the author repeatedly emphasized that the book was neither random nor meaningless. 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."^[70]

[edit] Themes

Despite these difficulties, Henkes and Bindervoet generally summarise the critical consensus when they argue that 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?^[71] The 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 sins. 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." ^[72]

The opening chapter is considered to provide an overview of the book's themes; Joyce himself referred to it as a "prelude", ^[73] and as an "air photograph of Irish history, a celebration of the dim past of Dublin." ^[74] For example, Schwartz argues that "The Museyroom" episode represents the book's "archetypal family drama in military-historical terms." ^[75]

[edit] A reconstruction of nocturnal life

Throughout the book's seventeen year gestation, Joyce alluded many times to the fact that with Finnegans Wake he was attempting to "reconstruct the nocturnal life".^[1] While tackling the question of why his peers and public at large were having such problems dealing with the book and its peculiar language, Joyce said in conversation with William Bird:

I can't understand some of my critics, like Pound 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?^[76]

According to Richard Ellman, Joyce 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."^[77]

Critics have mostly pointed to Book IV as providing some of the strongest evidence that the book represents the nocturnal state of sleep and dreaming; such as when the narrator asks “You mean to see we have been hadding a sound night’s sleep?”,^[78] and later concludes that what has gone before has been “a long, very long, a dark, very dark [...] scarce endurable [...] night.”^[79]Tindall, for example, refers to Book IV as "a chapter of resurrection and waking up", Tindall 1969, p.306 </ref> 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]." ^[80]

Various critics have accepted Joyce's claims to be representing the night and dreams either at face value or with a dose of skepticism, and while most agree 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 much weight with Wakean scholars such as Harry Levin, Hugh Kenner, and William Troy. Joseph Campbell, co-author of The Skeleton Key, the first full-length study of Joyce's final work, 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. ^[81]

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, representative of this type of thinking on the matter, summarized the "dream" with which the book concerns itself 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.^[82] Burgess sees Mr. Porter 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."^[83]

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.^[84]

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."^[85] Other critics have been more skeptical of the concept of identifying the dreamer of the book's narrative. Clive Hart summarized this point in 1962 thus:

Whatever 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 a superficial or abstract way, but is a literary representation of what it means to be "dead to the world" or asleep. 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 dreams^[86]

Bishop 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."^[87] 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."^[88]

[edit] 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, ^[89] while Margot Norris argues that the "[c]haracters are fluid and interchangeable". ^[90] As such, many find that the "characters" in Finnegans Wake are rather "archetypes or character amalgams, taking different shapes", ^[91] and Riquelme similarly refers to the books cast of mutable characters as "protean". ^[92] 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 "ciphers"), 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. ^[91] 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.

[edit] The Earwicker family

• Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker – (or HCE) an Irish publican, possibly a reincarnation of Finnegan, the hod carrier of the street ballad who falls at the start of the book.
• Anna Livia Plurabelle – (or ALP) HCE's wife
• Shem the Penman & Shaun the Post (or Jerry and Kevin, also known by many other names) – the twin sons of HCE and ALP
• Issy, Iseult (or Isolde), Isabel, – daughter of HCE and ALP

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". ^[93] HCE is at first referred to as "Harold or Humphrey Chimpden";^[94] a conflation of these names as "Haromphreyld",^[95] and as a consequence of his initials "Here Comes Everybody";^[96] but as the work progresses the names by which he may be referred to become more and more abstract (such as "Finn MacCool",^[97] "Mr. Makeall Gone",^[98] or "Mr. Porter"^[99]). Bishop argues that while the constant flux of HCE's character and attributes may lead us to consider him as an "anyman," he also 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 Protestant male, of Scandinavian lineage, connected with the pubkeeping business somewhere in the neighbourhood of Chapelizod, who has a wife, a daughter, and two sons."^[100] HCE personifies the city of Dublin (which was founded by Vikings), and his wife ALP personifies the river Liffey, on whose banks the city was built. In the popular eighth chapter, hundreds of names of rivers are woven into the tale of ALP's life, and similarly hundreds of city names are woven into "Haveth Childers Everywhere," the passage at the end of III.3 which focuses on HCE. Joyce universalizes his tale by making HCE and ALP stand, as well, for every city-river pair in the world. And they are, like Adam and Eve, the primeval parents of all the Irish and all humanity.

ALP and HCE have a daughter, Issy - whose personality is often split (represented by her mirror-twin) - and twin sons, the writer Shem the Penman and postman Shaun the Post, eternal rivals for replacing their father and for Issy's affection. Like their father, Shem and Shaun are known by many different names throughout the book, such as "Caddy and Primas";^[101] "Mercius"^[102] and "Justius";^[103] "Dolph and Kevin" (in II.2); and "Jerry and Kevin" (in III.4). These twins are contrasted in the book by allusions to many sets of opposing twins and enemies in literature, mythology and history, such as Set and Horus of the Osiris story, the biblical pairs Jacob & Esau and Cain & Abel, as well as Romulus & Remus and St. Michael & the Devil (with the book's equation of Shaun with "Mick" and Shem with "Nick").

Shaun is portrayed as a dull postman, conforming to society's expectations, while Shem is a bright artist and sinister experimenter. 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." ^[104] These twins are sometimes accompanied by a third personality; in whom their opposite poles are reconciled; called Tristan or Tristram. A common belief among critics is that, by synthesizing their strengths, Tristan is able to win Issy and defeat/replace HCE, like Tristan in the triangle with Iseult (Issy) and King Mark (HCE).

[edit] Minor characters

The book is also populated by many mysterious minor characters, such as Kate, "McGrath", the bell-ringer "Fox Goodman", and the Four Masters. The character of "Mr Browne the Jesuit" was based on Francis Browne, a classmate of Joyce's at Royal University.

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"). ^[105]

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. ^[106] 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. ^[107] 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!"

[edit] Language and style

Joyce invented a unique polyglot-language or idioglossia solely for the purpose of this work. This language is composed of composite words from some sixty to seventy world languages ^[108], combined to form puns, or portmanteau words and phrases intended to convey several layers of meaning at once. Senn has labelled Finnegans Wake's language as "polysemetic",^[64] and Tindall as an "Arabesque".^[109] Norris describes it as a language which "like poetry, uses words and images which can mean several, often contradictory, things at once"^[110] An early review of the book - despite conceding that the book "does not admit of review" and that "in 20 years' time [..] one might be ready for an attempt to appraise it" - 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." ^[111]

While many commentators emphasize how this manner of writing can communicate many levels of meaning simultaneously, some 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."^[112] Norris agrees, claiming that Joyce's language is "devious" and that it "conceals and reveals secrets."^[110] 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."^[113] However, the Wake's language is not entirely unique in literature; for example many critics have compared its use of portmanteau and neologisms to Lewis Carroll'sJabberwocky, although more extensive.

In a letter to Max Eastman, 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.^[114]

Although much has been made of the many languages employed in the book's composite language, most of the more obscure languages appear only seldom in small clusters, and the sense of the language, however obscure, is, for the most part "basically English".^[115] Burrell also finds that Joyce's thousands of neologisms are "based on the same etymological principles as standard English."^[116] 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.^[117] 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. ^[118]

Faced with the obstacles to be surmounted in "understanding" Joyce's text, many 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.^[119]

[edit] Allusions to other works

As a sprawling and intricately woven work of metafiction, Finnegans Wake alludes to many other texts, including the Irish ballad "Finnegan's Wake" from which it takes its name, Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico's "La Scienza Nuova", the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Bible and many more. 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"^[120] and St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews becomes a "farced epistol to the highbruws".

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 (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, the book even taking its four-part structure from them. Vico's name appears many more 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.”^[121] 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 - demonstrates the relevance of such an allusion.

One of the many sources Joyce drew from is the Ancient Egyptian story of Osiris,^[122] who was torn apart by his brother or son Set. The pieces of his body were gathered and reassembled by his sister or wife, Isis, with the help of their sister or daughter Nephthys. In this narrative, their other brother or son, Horus, emerges to slay Set and rise as the new day's sun, as Osiris himself. Osiris's night journey through the otherworld is described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of spells and invocations to enable the recently deceased to join Osiris and rise with the sun. In fact, 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."^[123] 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".^[124]

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 many 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 Piggott 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 Piggott as well, for just as HCE betrays himself to the cad, Piggott 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. This is just a small indicator of the many roles each character finds him or herself playing - often simultaneously - and the complex nature of allusion in the work.

[edit] Literary significance & criticism

The value of Finnegans Wake as a work of literature has been a point of contention since the time of its appearance, in serial form, in literary reviews of the 1920s. 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",^[125] 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".^[126] 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."^[127] The wider litrerary 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!".^[68] 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."^[68]

In response to such criticisms, Transition published essays throughout the late 1920s, defending and explaining Joyce's work. In 1929, these essays (along with a few others written for the occasion) were collected under the title Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress and published by Shakespeare and Company. This collection featured Samuel Beckett's first published work "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce", along with contributions by William Carlos Williams, Stuart Gilbert, Marcel Brion, Eugene Jolas and others.

In the time since Joyce's death, the book's admirers have struggled against public perception of the work in order to establish for Finnegans Wake a preeminent place in English literature. 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".^[128] 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”.^[129] 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,

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.^[130]

In 1994, in The Western Canon, Harold Bloom 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 intial shunning, and contemporary American author Tom Robbins is among many 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.^[131]

In 1998, the Modern Library placed Finnegans Wake seventy-seventh amongst its list of "Top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century."

[edit] 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 Review 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." ^[132] 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. ^[132] The sketch would appear in the final published text, in radically altered form, as chapter 2.4. ^[133]

1925 saw four sketches published from the developing work. "Here Comes Everybody" ^[134] was published as "From Work in Progress" in the Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers, edited by Robert McAlmon. "The Letter"^[135] 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). ^[133] The first published draft of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" ^[136] appeared in Le Navire d'Argent 1 in October, and the first published draft of "Shem the Penman" ^[137] appeared in the Autumn-Winter edition of This Quarter. ^[133]

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". ^[133]

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". ^[138] 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. ^[138]

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 Crosby and Mary Phelps Jacob'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", ^[139] "The Triangle", ^[140] and "The Ondt and the Gracehoper". ^{[141] [138]}. 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. ^[142][143]. 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, comprised of sections from what would become chapter II.2. ^[143] Book IV was not published in any form until Finnegans Wake, in its final form, was published by Faber and Faber 4 May 1939, after 17 years of composition.

[edit] Allusions/references in other works

[edit] Adaptations

Finnegans Wake has proved a source of inspiration for many succeeding writers, and a number of adaptations of the text exist. For example Jean Erdman's 1962 musical play The Coach with the Six Insides takes its title from a line in Joyce's text, ^[144] and is "is a combination of dance, mime, and Joycean stream-of-consciousness language." ^[145] Mary Manning adapted parts of the book for the stage as Passages from Finnegans Wake, which was in turn used as the basis for a film of the novel by Mary Ellen Bute.^[146]

In other media, 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. Regarding their approach to this seemingly unfilmable book, Kyium and Lemmerz emphasise that the film is not a filmatisation of Finnegans Wake per se, but rather a free-association on the text. "At bottom we thought that if it was a dream book, why not just continue the dream? We read from it at night before going to sleep, and wrote the scenes the following morning."^[147]

Finnegans Wake has provided the source for a number of musical adaptations, its musicality and lack of fixed meaning perhaps more suited to music than other print or film media. John Cage's Roaratorio: an Irish circus on Finnegans wake utilises a collage of sounds mentioned in Finnegans Wake, combine with Cage's 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. ^[148] Some songwriter's have also used the Wake's unique language as inspiration for their own lyrics. Experimental musicians Current 93 begin the brief "Be" (opener to Side B of the album Imperium) with the line "from swerve of shore, to bend of bay", from the book's opening line. Italian singer Pippo Pollina wrote a song called "Finnegans Wake" for his "Rossocuore" album, performed with the Italian singer Franco Battiato. Phil Minton set passages of the Wake to music, on his 1998 album Mouthfull of Ecstasy. ^[149] Sleepytime Gorilla Museum uses an excerpt of the book as lyrics for the song "Helpless Corpses Enactment" on their third album, "In Glorious Times". A number of composers have used excerpts of the book's unique language to title their instrumental pieces, such as Stephen Albert's Pulitzer Prize-winning Symphony No. 1, which is subtitled 'Riverrun' after the book's opening word, and Toru Takemitsu's piece 'A way a lone', named for the book's closing line.

Chapter I.2 of Finnegans Wake closes with the Joyce-penned song "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly," written in the Wake's own language and replete with a handwritten musical score.^[150] Ronnie Drew of Irish trad band The Dubliners performed an a capella rendering of this - which he retitled "Humpty Dumpty". Drew introduces the piece by saying "James Joyce is renowned for having written some very very complicated material. Surprisingly he wrote the next song, which is very simple."^[151]

[edit] References

Physicist Murray Gell-Mann's coined the term quarks, a type of subatomic particle, after the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark" on page 383 of Finnegans Wake.^[152] Gell-Mann went into further detail regarding the name of the quark in his book, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex:

In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork". Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark". Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark", as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork". But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau" words in "Through the Looking-Glass". From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark", in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.

—Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex ^[153]

Similarly, the comparative mythology term Monomyth; as described by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces;^[154] was taken from a passage in Finnegans Wake.^[155]

Finnegans Wake is often referenced in other works of fiction as the ultimate example of a difficult or unreadable text. Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar features the protagonist contending with the extremely difficult Finnegans Wake, as Esther Greenwood's reading of its first pages presages her emotional deterioration. In Charles Willeford's High Priest of California, the central character Russell Haxby mentions unwinding after a day of mischief by rewriting passages of Finnegan's Wake (and Ulysses) in plain and simple language. American political comedian Jon Stewart's America (The Book) lists Finnegans Wake as a sign that Europe is in decline, with the explanatory caption "More unreadable by the hour."

The book has also been used in film and television as a synonym for "difficult" or "unreadable," such as in the movie Enough, in which Jennifer Lopez's character mentions that the book "is the hardest book to read in the English language" and that she has been reading it for 6 years, though she later admits this to be untrue. In the episode "Ghosts Forge" of the Jonathan Creek TV series, Jonathan mentions to Maddie that the book is "virtually unreadable" but notes the significance of the apostrophe to describe one Finnegan's wake or many Finnegans waking up.^[156] Woody Allen references the book in his film Manhattan Murder Mystery, in which his character, Larry Lipton, a book editor, tells Marcia Fox, a writer, that her manuscript "makes Finnegans Wake look like airplane reading." John Adams (composer) has described Charles Ives' Symphony No. 4 as being the "Finnegans Wake" of American Music with a similar intention.

In other references, Finnegans Wake is evoked in order to ponder the nature of language itself,such as in Tom Robbins's Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, in which the main character, Switters, "reads and rereads Finnegans Wake, and obsessively ponders the fate of language in the cybernetic future that is rapidly taking shape around us."^[157] Marshall McLuhan calls the extremely long portmanteaux that occur throughout Finnegans Wake the "Ten Thunders" and uses them to support the claim that Finnegans Wake is a giant cryptogram narrating the whole of human history.

The book is also referenced in Salman Rushdie's Fury, Chuck Klosterman's Downtown Owl, ^[158] Raymond Queneau's We Always Treat Women Too Well, ^[159] and Robert Anton Wilson's "Prometheus Rising". ^[160] Although Vladmir Nabokov had a low opinion of the book (referring to it as "Punnigans Wake"), Finnegans Wake is referenced in passing in his Lolita, in the scene when H.H. and Lolita watch a play by Quilty.^[161] Argentinian major writer and Princeton professor of Latin American literature Ricardo Piglia includes a Joycean short story called "La Isla" in his book "Cuentos Morales". The story also appears as a chapter of his postmodern fiction "Ciudad Ausente" under the title "La Isla de Finnegan".The book, perhaps because of its subjective representation of reality, has also been referenced in a number of science fiction texts, such as Philip K. Dick's The Divine Invasion, ^[162] Philip José Farmer's science fiction novella Riders of the Purple Wage ^[163] Samuel R. Delany's science fiction novella Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones ^[164] and James Blish's science fiction novel A Case of Conscience ^[165] as well as Blish's Star Trek novel Spock Must Die! In the latter, Blish provides a name for Joyce's artificial language, "Eurish"; an allusion to the European source of many of the languages from which it was culled.

[edit] In popular entertainment

In the role-playing game Trinity there exists a psionic order called ISRA who practise clairsentience, and contains a faction called "Joyceans", who think that Finnegans Wake is a "perfect representation of the psionic universe". In another role-playing game, Mage: The Awakening, the Tatterdamalions, a group of mages, believe that the secrets of the universe are hidden inside the book. The Canadian rock group Triumph refers to Finnegan's Wake by means of the ten thunders that the book is interpreted to contain in their album THUNDER SEVEN. The record sleeve contains the following statement: "There are ten thunders in the wake: The seventh thunder is tribal man again."

[edit] In Irish culture

• A café at University College Dublin, which Joyce attended, was named Finnegan's Break in his honour.
• The former Ten Pound Banknotes of the Republic of Ireland presented a quote of the book's first sentence: 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.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• D. Accardi. The Existential Quandary in Finnegans Wake (Loudonville, Siena College Press, 2006)
• Samuel Beckett; William Carlos Williams; et al. Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress (Shakespeare and Company, 1929)
• Benstock, Bernard (1965). Joyce-Again's Wake: An Analysis of Finnegans Wake. (Seattle: University of Washington Press)
• Benstock, Shari. Nightletters: Woman's Writing in the Wake: Critical Essays on James Joyce. Ed. Bernard Benstock. Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall & Co., 1985. 221-233.
• Bishop, John (1986). Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake, University of Wisconsin Press.
• Burrell, Harry. Narrative Design in Finnegans Wake: The Wake Lock Picked (University Press of Florida, 1996)
• Burgess, Anthony (ed.) A Shorter 'Finnegans Wake' (1969)
• —, Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965); also published as Re Joyce.
• —, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973)
• Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1961)
• Cheng, Vincent John. Shakespeare and Joyce: A Study of Finnegans Wake. (Pennsylvania State University Press: 1984)
• Crispi, Luca and Sam Slote, eds. How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-By-Chaper Genetic Guide. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-2992-1860-7.
• Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1959, revised edition 1983. ISBN 0-19-503381-7.
• Glasheen, Adaline. Third Census of Finnegans Wake. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1977)
• Gluck, Barbara Reich, Beckett and Joyce: Friendship and Fiction. Bucknell University Press, 1979. ISBN 0-8387-2060-9.
• Hart, Clive. Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake. (Northwestern University Press, 1962)
• Henke, Suzette. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. (New York: Routledge, 1990)
• Herring, Phillip F. Joyce's Uncertainty Principle (Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1987) ISBN 0-691-06719-8.
• Hofheinz, Joyce and the Invention of Irish History: Finnegans Wake in Context, Cambridge University Press (May 26, 1995). ISBN 978-0521471145
• Joyce, James (1939). Finnegans Wake. Faber and Faber, London.
• McHugh, Roland. Annotations to Finnegans Wake. 3rd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. ISBN 978-0-8018-8381-1.
• —, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake. (University of Texas Press, 1976)
• —, The Finnegans Wake Experience. (University of California Press, 1981)
• Mercanton, James (1967). Les heures de James Joyce. (Diffusion PUF) ISBN 2868692079
• Rose, Danis. The Textual Diaries of James Joyce (Dublin, The Lilliput Press, 1995)
• Tindall, William York (1969). A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake. Syracuse University Press.
• Wilson, Robert Anton. Coincidance. (New Falcon Publications; Rev edition (February 1991)). Contains essay on Finnegans Wake.

[edit] 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 978-0-2991-4800-3.
• Platt, Len. Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. ISBN 978-0-5218-6884-6.

[edit] External links

• Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury (FWEET)

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: James Joyce

• Etext of Finnegans Wake
• Annotated version of Finnegans Wake
• 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
• "Icon O Graphing Finnegans Wake" is a visual fable based on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake by Toronto artist Boris Dimitrov.
• Terence McKenna lecture 'Surfing Finnegan's Wake'
• "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"
• Art of the States: To Wake the Dead song cycle by Stephen Albert set to texts from Finnegans Wake
• Finnegans Wake (public domain in Canada)

v • d • e Works by James Joyce Novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) · Ulysses (1922) · Finnegans Wake (1939) · Stephen Hero (1944) Dubliners (1914) (short stories) "The Sisters" (1904) · "An Encounter" (1905) · "Araby" (1905) · "Eveline" (1904) · "After the Race" (1904) · "Two Gallants" (1906) · "The Boarding House" (1905) · "A Little Cloud" (1906) · "Counterparts" (1905) · "Clay" (1905) · "A Painful Case" (1905) · "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" (1905) · "A Mother" (1905) · "Grace" (1906) · "The Dead" (1907) Play Exiles (1918) Poetry Chamber Music (1907) · Pomes Penyeach (1927) · Giacomo Joyce (1968)