Finnegans Wake

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Finnegans Wake
Author James Joyce
Country France/Switzerland
Language English
Genre(s) Novel
Publisher Faber and Faber
Publication date 1924 to 1939
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN ISBN 0-14-118126-5
Preceded by Ulysses
(1922)

Finnegans Wake, published in 1939, is James Joyce's final novel. Following the publication of Ulysses in 1922, Joyce began working on Wake and by 1924 installments of the work began to appear in serialized form, first under the title "A New Unnamed Work" and subsequently as "Work in Progress." (The final title of the work remained a secret between the writer and his wife, Nora Barnacle, until shortly before the book was finally published.)

The seventeen years spent working on Finnegans Wake were often difficult for Joyce. He underwent frequent eye surgeries, lost long-time supporters, and dealt with personal problems in the lives of his children. These problems and the perennial financial difficulties of the Joyce family are described in Richard Ellmann's biography James Joyce.

Contents

John Bishop opened his introduction to Finnegans Wake in 1999 with these less-than-encouraging words: "There is no agreement as to what Finnegans Wake is about, whether or not it is 'about' anything, or even whether it is, in any ordinary sense of the word, 'readable'."[1] Since Joyce's sentences are packed with obscure allusions, often written in dozens of different languages, it remains impossible to compile a definite synopsis of Finnegans Wake. While many Joyceans—such as Joseph Campbell, John Gordon, Anthony Burgess and William York Tindall—have made valiant attempts to summarise Finnegans Wake's plot, many respected Joycean scholars question the validity of many of the plot summaries in existence (especially those pertaining to Book II), and whether the concept of a linear storyline should be pursued at all. Fritz Senn said on the currently available summaries:

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.[2]

The reasons for the huge difficulties in providing "plot synopses" for Finnegans Wake which can be agreed upon are manifold. Firstly, the book follows an always shifting dream-narrative, with a sort of arbitrary dream logic which means that characters, character names, locations and plot can change abruptly - resulting in a distinct lack of a narrative red line, at least superficially. Secondly the text is constructed out of dozens of languages, which creates the intricately woven and obscure (and even sometimes impenetrable) language in which it is written. Added to these issues is the problem that the the novel draws on all sorts of specialist topics, such as mythology, theology, mystery, philosophy, history, sociology, astrology, other fiction, alchemy, music, colour, nature, sexuality, human development, etc., to the point that a great deal of scholarly exegesis is needed to make sense of the text. Finally "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." [3]. In other words, while crucial plot points are endlessly discussed—such as HCE's crime, ALP's letter, etc.—the reader never gets to encounter or experience them for himself, and as such they remain unknown and most likely unknowable.

Joyce himself as much as acknowledged all of the above in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver in 1926, when outlining his intentions for the book (in reference to it as a dream narrative):

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 [4]

In general, it is accepted that the introductory chapter (1.1) provides an overview of the novel's themes - Joyce himself referred to it as a "prelude". [5] First, we hear of a central character, here called Finnegan and identified as a hod carrier in Dublin, falling to his death from a scaffold or tower or wall, thus transforming him into the landscape upon which Dublin is built[6]. HCE's corpse becomes a meal spread for the mourners at his wake, but he vanishes like a conman before they can eat him [6]. Eventually, in keeping with the comic song "Finnegan's Wake" that provided Joyce's title, a fight breaks out, whiskey splashes on Finnegan's corpse, and he rises up again alive (Finnegan awakes).

However, until Finnegan's rise at the end of the chapter we are presented with a series of vignettes (usually referred to in critical circles as "The Museyroom", "Mutt and Jute" [7], and "The Prankquean"). "The Museyroom" presents a guided tour through a museum in Wellington Monument in Phoenix Park, which commemorates HCE's ambush by two pissing girls (most commonly referred to throughout as the Maggies) and three spying soldiers. Finnegan is shown mostly in this vignette as a warrior (in particular, as Wellington at Waterloo). "Mutt and Jute" describes a dialogue between near deaf and dumb aboriginal ancestors, and "The Prankquean" depicts Finnegan as the victim of a vengeful pirate queen (Grace O'Malley).

At the end of 1.1, Finnegan is roused back into consciousness, but is persuaded by the mourners at his wake to lie down again and sleep ("Now be aisy, good Mr Finnimore, sir. And take your laysure like a god on pension and don't be walking abroad"). A new version of Finnegan-Everyman is sailing into Dublin Bay to take over the story: Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, whose initials HCE ("Here Comes Everybody") lend themselves to phrase after phrase throughout the book (Note they appear as "Howth Castle and Environs" in the opening sentence).

Chapter two (1.2) opens with an account of how HCE was given the name "Earwicker" by the king, who catches HCE trying to catch earwigs with an inverted flowerpot on a stick when he is supposed to be manning a tollgate. Although the name begins as an insult, it helps HCE rise to prominence in Dublin society (as "Here Comes Everybody"), but then he's brought down by a rumor about a sexual trespass involving two girls in the Phoenix Park (close by Chapelizod).

Most of chapters 1.2 through 1.4 follow the progress of this rumor, starting with HCE's encounter with "a cad with a pipe." The cad asks the time, but HCE misunderstands it as either an accusation or a proposition, and incriminates himself by denying rumors the cad has not yet heard. [8] Eventually, HCE becomes so paranoid he goes into hiding, where he'll write a book that evidently resembles Joyce's own Ulysses. As the rumour gathers momentum HCE is accused of more and more crimes, sins and transgressions, and is eventually brought to trial. Despite a letter signed by "A Laughable Party" (HCE's wife ALP) defending HCE, he is locked up in prison, reviled by a visiting American, and eventually put into a coffin and buried at the bottom of Lough Neagh (in "their present of a protem grave in Moyelta of the best Lough Neagh pattern") [9]

The book is transformed into a letter (analysed in 1.5), dictated to Shem by ALP, entrusted to Shaun for delivery, but somehow ending up in a midden heap, where it is dug up by a hen named Biddy [10]. The letter is perhaps an indictment, perhaps an exoneration of HCE. Chapter I.6, often known as "the Quiz", consists of a slight digression from the narrative (as it is) in order to present the protagonists in the form of twelve riddles and answers. According to Robbert-Jan Henkes and Erik Bindervoet, the chapter is "strategically placed at the end of the two big questions raised in the previous chapters that are by no means resolved: what is Earwicker’s secret sin and what was the letter all about?" [11] In the final two chapters of Book I we learn more about its writer Shem and author ALP, the latter in the book's most celebrated passage published separately as "Anna Livia Plurabelle".

While Book I of Finnegans Wake deals mostly with the parents HCE and ALP, Book II shifts that focus onto their children; we see them at play in 2.1, and studying mathematics in a room above the pub in 2.2. These chapters are murky in themselves—William York Tindall said of them "Than this [...] nothing is denser" [12]—yet 2.3 and 2.4 are often acknowledged as the most difficult of the work.

2.1 opens with a pantomime programme, which is one of the clearest indicators in the entire book as to the nature of its characters, as it outlines (in relatively clear language) the identities and characteristics of the novels main protagonists. Tindall et. al generally summarise the rest of 2.1 (most commonly known as "The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies") as concerning a guessing game among the children (presented also in the terminology of a theatrical play), in which Shem is the victim of the girls' riddle. Shem is asked three times to guess by "gazework" the colour which the girls have chosen [13]. Unable to answer due to his poor eyesight, Shem goes into exile in disgrace, and Shaun, his un-riddled twin-brother, wins the affection of the girls. Finally HCE emerges from the pub and in a thunder-like voice calls the children inside [14]. According to Joyce, the piece was based on a children's game called "Angels and Devils" or "Colours," in which one child ("the devil", here played by Shem, or Nick) is supposed to guess a colour that has been chosen by the others ("the angels," here played by the girls) [15]

Chapter 2.2; the main narrative of which [16] is known critically as "The Triangle" and which Joyce referred to in letters as "Night Lessons" [17]; follows Shem, Shaun and their sister Issy studying upstairs in the pub, after having been called inside in the previous chapter. Joyce described the chapter as depicting "[Shem] coaching [Shaun] how to do Euclid Bk I, 1" [18], and elsewhere he described its structure (which includes observational notes and footnotes surrounding the text) thus: "the technique here is 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), a Euclid diagram, funny drawings, etc." [19]. However, this story concerning Shem and Shaun studying together is preceded by an extremely long, complicated and seemingly unrelated introduction. Joyce rewrote and re-ordered the chapter many times, imposing its distinctive schoolbook format along the way, and significantly restructuring it again just a year before the Wake was published. These many transformations Joyce forced on what were already fairly stable texts account in large for its disrupted narrative and help to explain why following its plot can be so difficult. [20] Rose also criticises the final published version of the chapter, stating that "it was not the optimal, nor the original, arrangement of the parts." [21]

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, inter alia, the story is told 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 to take place in the bar of Earwicker's hotel [22]

2.3 is generally interpreted as dealing 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" and "How Buckley Shot the Russian General." According to Bishop, it shows an aged HCE worrying about work in his pub, and offers narratives about him succumbing to domestication, senescence and decline as he is climatically overthrown by his sons (through the symbolic shooting of The Russian General by Buckley) [23]. Tindall also agrees that the two stories represent Earwicker's marriage and replacement by his son [24], however exact details and consensus continue to remain elusive. Joyce himself called the Norwegian Captain's story a "wordspiderweb" [25], and referred to it as "perhaps the most complacently absurd thing that I ever did until now [...] It is the story of a Captain [...] and a Dublin tailor which my god-father told me forty years ago, trying to explain the arrival of my viking in Dublin, his marriage, and alot of things I don't care to mention here." [26] After Buckley has shot the Russian General, Earwicker returns from upstairs [27] and all of his customers revile HCE [28], which forces him to deliver a general confession of his crimes, including an incestuous desire for young girls [29] [30]. Finally Sigurdsen - cast as a policeman - arrives to send the drunken customers home [31], the pub is closed up ("Shatten up ship" 376.30 - 371.5), and the customers disappear singing into the night as Earwicker clearing up the bar, already drunk, drinks the dregs of the glasses left behind, mysteriously morphs into ancient Irish high king Rory O'Connor, and passes out [32]

2.4 is a composite of two shorter pieces called "Mamalujo" and "Tristan and Isolde", which Joyce had written as early as 1923 [33] The chapter chronicles the spying of four old men (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) on Tristan and Iseult's journey. Bishop describes it as evoking "an old man like King Mark being rejected and abandoned by young lovers who sail off into a future without him" [34], while Tindall sees it as focusing more on the four old men who observe Tristan and Isolde, and their four commentaries on the lovers and themselves which are "always repeating themselves" [35]. Rose has criticised the chapter as a "rather forced composite of the two pieces [i.e. "Tristan and Isolde" and "Mamalujo"] which in their original forms are radically different in mood, style and technique." [33]

Book III concerns itself almost exclusively with Shaun, and his strange task of having to deliver a letter in his role as postman. Joyce referred to its four chapters as "The Four Watches of Shaun", and characterised it in one of his letters as "a description of a postman traveling backwards in the night through the events already narrated. It is narrated in the form of a via crucis of 14 stations but in reality is only a barrel rolling down the river Liffey" [36]. Shaun's sudden and somewhat unexpected promotion to the book's lead protagonist is explained by Tindall with the assertion that "having disposed of old HCE, Shaun is becoming the new HCE." [37] Most of the book concerns Shaun's own boastful personality rather than any discernible plot as such, as he spends his time lecturing to and flirting with the twenty-nine girls of St. Brides, and admonishing his artist brother Shem. Throughout this book Shaun is continually regressing, moving from an old man to an overgrown babbling baby lying on his back, and eventually a vessel through which the voice of HCE speaks again through a spiritual medium (in 3.3), leading to HCE's defence of his life in the celebrated passage "Haveth Childers Everywhere". Book 3 ends in the bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Porter as they attempt to copulate while their children are sleeping down the hall, and the dawn is rising outside.

Book IV consists of only one chapter, which much like the book's opening chapter is mostly consisted of vignettes, which are known critically as "Saint Kevin", "Berkely and Patrick" and "The Revered Letter"[38]. The novel ends with a long monologue by ALP, with the river Liffey disappearing at dawn into the vast possibilities of the ocean. The last sentence is incomplete, however it can be closed by the sentence that starts the book--another cycle. Thus, reading the final sentence of the book, and continuing on to the first sentence of the book, it is: "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."

The 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 novel
  • Anna Livia Plurabelle – (or ALP) HCE's wife
  • Shem & Shaun (or Jerry and Kevin, also known by many other names) - the sons of HCE and ALP
  • Issy, Iseult (or Isolde), Isabel, daughter of HCE and ALP

HCE is (at one level) a Scandinavian who has taken a native Irish wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle (whose initials ALP are also found in phrase after phrase). At some point these two have settled down to run a public house in Chapelizod, a suburb of Dublin named for the Irish princess Isolde. HCE personifies the city of Dublin (which was founded by Vikings), and 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. 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, and two sons, Shem and Shaun, eternal rivals for replacing their father and for Issy's affection (among other things). Shem and Shaun are akin to Set and Horus of the Osiris story, as well as the biblical pairs Jacob & Esau and Cain & Abel, as well as Romulus & Remus and St. Michael & the Devil (Mick & Nick).

Shaun is portrayed as a dull postman, conforming to society's expectations, while Shem is a bright artist and sinister experimenter. (As HCE retreats before the rumors, he seems to transform into Shem, the artist who writes the book.) They are sometimes accompanied by a third personality in whom their twin poles are reconciled, called Tristan or Tristram. Presumably, 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).

HCE can also be 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 Piggott is also HCE, 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.

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. Browne later distinguished himself as an important photographer (best known for taking the last known photographs of RMS Titanic) and Jesuit preacher.

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" [39]. 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? [40]

According to Richard Ellman, Joyce once informed a friend: "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." [41]

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 element in which the book can be said to be a "dream," few agree on who the possible dreamer of such a dream might be - is it a character by the name of Mr. Porter (a theory popular in early Wakean criticism which has since gone slightly out of fashion ), Joyce's dream, or the universal dream of everybody?

Edmund Wilson's early and pioneering analysis of the book, The Dream of H. C. Earwicker, made the unwarranted assumption that Earwicker himself is the Dreamer of the dream; a concept 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 novel, 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, an argument which has triggered a number of similarly-minded views on the matter; although her assertion that HCE's son Shem/Jerry was the dreamer has found less support [42]

The assertion that the dream was that of one Mr.Porter, whose dream personality personified iteself 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, summarised 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 - Humphphrey Chimpden Earwicker. [43]. 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." [44]

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. [45]

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." [46] Other critics have been more skeptical of the concept of identifying the Dreamer of the novel. Clive Hart summarised 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.

Most recently John Bishop has been the most vocal supporter of exactly the opposite - that is, treating Finnegans Wake absolutely, in every sense, as a description of a dream, the dreamer, and of the night itself; arguing that the novel 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 [47]

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." [48]

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 (primarily the journal transition, edited by Eugene Jolas). Some admirers of Joyce's Ulysses were disappointed that none of its characters reappeared in the new work, and that the author's linguistic experiments were making it increasingly difficult to pick out any continuous thread of a plot. Some literary figures believed the book to be a joke, pulled by Joyce on the literary community. Joyce's brother Stanislaus "rebuked him for writing an incomprehensible night-book".[49] Literary critic and friend of the author Oliver Gogarty called it "the most colossal leg pull in literature since Macpherson's Ossian".[50] When Ezra Pound 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 clapp can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization."[51] D.H. Lawrence declared, in reaction to the sections of the Wake being published individually under the title "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!" [4]. Vladimir Nabokov, who is a renowned admirer of Ulyssess, 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." [4] Martin Amis has also dismissed the novel as a '600-page crossword clue'; he sometimes adds, 'Whose answer is "The".'

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 (entitled "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce") along with essays by William Carlos Williams, Stuart Gilbert, Marcel Brion, Eugene Jolas and others.

The actual publication of the novel was somewhat overshadowed by Europe's descent into World War II. Joyce died just two years after the novel was published, leaving a work whose interpretation is still very much "in progress."

In the time since Joyce's death, many leading literary critics have struggled against public perception of the novel 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 (only 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" [52] In 1957 Northrop Frye described Finnegans Wake as the “chief ironic epic of our time” [53]; 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 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."

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

The former Ten Pound Banknotes of the Republic of Ireland presented a quote of the book's first sentence.

The characteristic for which Finnegans Wake is best known is the strange, obscure and entirely unique language in which Joyce chose to write his book. An essentially new language - referred to by many commentators as Wakese - invented by Joyce solely for the purpose of this novel, it is comprised of composite words from some sixty to seventy world languages to form puns, or Portmanteau words and phrases intended to convey several layers of meaning at once. Senn has labeled this language as "polysemetic" [2], while Tindall refers to it as an "Arabesque" [54].

Although much has been made of the many languages employed in the novel'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". [55]

Regardless of this, many find the language of Finnegans Wake confounding, as in the following:

O here here how hoth sprowled met the duskt the father of fornicationists but, (O my shining stars and body!) how hath fanespanned most high heaven the skysign of soft advertisement! (page 4, lines 11–14)

This sentence has a literal reading which requires a small amount of interpretation: The neologism sprowled is a combination of sprawled/prowled, both words with sinister connotations. Duskt is dusk/dust, alluding to the time setting and to "ashes to ashes, dust to dust". Fanespanned is literally sacredly spanned, from the Irish root fane, and is hopeful. The words hoth and hath are symmetrically placed and serve similar purposes in their respective clauses, as are sprowled and fanespanned. The sentiment passes from sinister to spiritual. The parenthetical O my shining stars and body alludes to the internal world of the sleeper, comprising the whole world in a dream, while the skysign of soft advertisement recalls the stars once again. Apart from its poetry, the sentence serves a pedestrian literary purpose: it sets the time and location.

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.

The book also draws heavily on Irish mythology with HCE sometimes corresponding to Finn MacCool, Issy and ALP to Grania, and Shem/Shaun to Dermot (Diarmaid). This is just a small hint of the many roles that each of the main characters finds him or herself playing, often several at the same time.

The book begins with one such complex 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 believed in 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.

One of the many sources Joyce drew from is the Ancient Egyptian story of Osiris, who was torn apart by his brother or son Set, and the pieces 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." [56]

  • In Tom Robbins's Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, the main character, Switters, makes constant references to Finnegans Wake throughout the novel.
  • Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar features a protagonist contending with Finnegans Wake - indeed, Esther Greenwood's reading of its first pages seems to presage her emotional deterioration.
  • Finnegans Wake is mentioned several times in James Blish's science fiction novel A Case of Conscience, where it plays a significant role in the solution to the novel's "case of conscience". Blish also quoted Finnegans Wake in his Star Trek novel Spock Must Die! .
  • The influence of Finnegans Wake can also be seen in Philip José Farmer's science fiction novella Riders of the Purple Wage, which is written in a Joycean style and includes a central character named Finnegan, as well as referring explicitly to Joyce's novel.
  • 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".
  • In Raymond Queneau's We Always Treat Women Too Well, the IRA members are mostly named after minor characters in Ulysses, and use the password Finnegan's Wake.
  • 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."
  • 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.
  • In Philip K. Dick's The Divine Invasion, the character Herb Asher declares James Joyce to have the ability to see the future. This character uses various sections from Finnegans Wake to prove his point.
  • In Salman Rushdie's Fury, there are a few references made to Finnegans Wake

  • John Cage's Roaratorio: an Irish circus on Finnegans wake takes words from the text and rearranges them in poetic form. The text is Cage's Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake, one of a series of five writings that he did based on the Wake. He also set texts from the book as songs, including The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs and Nowth upon Nacht.
  • Stephen Albert's Symphony No. 1, subtitled 'Riverrun' after the 1st word in Joyce's novel, is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
  • Toru Takemitsu composed a piece called 'A way a lone', after the last sentence in Joyce's novel.
  • Experimental musicians Current 93 begin the extremely brief "Be", opener to Side B of the album Imperium, with the line "from swerve of shore, to bend of bay".
  • Ronnie Drew of Irish trad band The Dubliners did an a capella rendering of a passage from Finnegans Wake entitled "Humpty Dumpty", an allegorical passage about the fall of Man. 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." This is presumably meant to be ironic, as the passage is extremely complicating and confusing, referencing Oliver Cromwell, Mountjoy Jail, the Immaculate Conception, Cain and Abel and Vikings. [1]
  • Phil Minton has set passages of the Wake to music, on his album mouthfull of ecstasy.
  • Sleepytime Gorilla Museum uses an excerpt of the book as lyrics for the song "Helpless Corpses Enactment" on their third album, "In Glorious Times"
  • The Dropkick Murphys have a song entitled "Finnegan's Wake."
  • Terrence McKenna describes Finnegan's Wake explicitly in an audio lecture titled "Surfing Finnegan's Wake"

  • In the movie Enough, Jennifer Lopez's character mentions that the book, "is the hardest book to read in the English language" and she has been reading it for 6 years, though she says later it was not true.

In Season 3, Episode 4 (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.

  • 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 phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark" on page 383 of Finnegans Wake is the origin of the spelling given by physicist Murray Gell-Mann to quarks, a type of subatomic particle.[57] (In the novel, the phrase is sung by a chorus of seabirds, and probably means 'three cheers' or--judging from Joyce's notes--three jeers.)
  • In the Roleplaying Game Trinity exists a psionic order called ISRA practising clairsentience. In this order exists a faction called Joyceans, which think that Finnegans Wake is a "perfect representation of the psionic universe" and muchly studied by this faction (although not exclusively)

Mary Manning wrote a play version - Passages from Finnegans Wake - which was made into a film by Mary Ellen Bute.

  • Italian singer Pippo Pollina wrote a song called "Finnegans wake", published in the album "Rossocuore", performed with another Italian singer called "Franco Battiato"
  • Danish visual artists Michael Kvium and Christian Lemmerz made a multimedia project called "the Wake" based on the book. It's an 8 hour long silent movie and the visual style is ferverish, dream-like."The Wake"
  • 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.

  1. ^ John Bishop's "Introduction" to the 1999 Penguin Books edition of Finnegans Wake, p. vii
  2. ^ a b Fritz Senn and Finnegans Wake. The Joyce Foundation. Retrieved on 2007-11-19.
  3. ^ McCarthy, Patrick A. ((2005)). Attempts at Narration in Finnegans Wake. Genetic Joyce Studies, Issue 5. Retrieved on 2007-12-03.
  4. ^ a b c Joyce - Quotations. The Modern World. Retrieved on 2007-12-03.
  5. ^ Joyce, Letters I, p.246
  6. ^ a b The Online shorter Finnegans Wake. Robot Wisdom. Retrieved on 2007-11-19.
  7. ^ Herman, David. The Mutt and Jute dialogue in Joyce's Finnegans Wake: Some Gricean Perspectives - author James Joyce; philosopher H.P. Grice. bnet Research Center. Retrieved on 2007-11-20.
  8. ^ Joyce expresses HCE's confusion by spelling the cad's Gaelic phonetically, making it look like a suggestive English phrase
  9. ^ Burgess, Anthony, A Shorter Finnegans Wake, p.17
  10. ^ the diminutive form of Brighid, which is the name of both a saint and a goddess on whose feast day Joyce was born
  11. ^ Henkes, Robbert-Jan; Erik Bindervoetid. The Quiz Chapter as the Key to a Potential Schema for Finnegans Wake. Genetic Joyce Studies - Issue 4 (Spring 2004). Retrieved on 2007-11-20.
  12. ^ Tindall, William York; A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake, p.153
  13. ^ Joyce, James; Finnegans Wake, p.224. lines 22,26
  14. ^ Tindall, William York; A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake; pp. 153-170
  15. ^ Joyce, Letters, I, p.295
  16. ^ Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pp.282.05-304.04
  17. ^ Finnegans Wake II.2§8 (282.05-304.04) first appeared as "The Triangle" in transition 11 in February 1928 and then again under the newer title “The Muddest Thick That Was Ever Heard Dump” in Tales Told of Shem and Shaun, and finally as a slim book called "Storiella as She is Syung" in 1937 (Paris: Black Sun Press, June 1929). See JJA 52 and 53.
  18. ^ Joyce, Letters I, p. 242
  19. ^ Joyce, Letters I, p405-6
  20. ^ The James Joyce Archive from an Archival Perspective. Genetic Joyce Studies - Special Issue JJA (Summer 2002). Retrieved on 2007-11-20.
  21. ^ Rose, The Textual Diaries of James Joyce, p.120
  22. ^ Rose, The TExtual Diaries of James Joyce, p.122
  23. ^ Bishop, John; Introduction to Penguin's 1999 edition of Finnegans Wake, pp. xxii-xxiii
  24. ^ Tindall, A Reader's Guide, p.187
  25. ^ Joyce, Letters, III, p. 422
  26. ^ Rose, The Textual Diaries of James Joyce, p.122-3
  27. ^ Rose, The Textual Diaries of James Joyce, p.129
  28. ^ Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 361.36-363.16
  29. ^ Burgess, A Shorter Finnegans Wake, p.166
  30. ^ Tindall, A Reader's Guide, pp.202-203
  31. ^ Rose, The Textual Diaries of James Joyce, p. 131
  32. ^ Tindall, A Reader's Guide, p.205
  33. ^ a b Rose, The Textual Diaries of James Joyce, p.131
  34. ^ Bishop, Introduction, p.xxiii
  35. ^ Tindall, A Reader's Guide, p.210
  36. ^ Joyce, Letters, 1, p.214
  37. ^ Tindall, A Reader's Guide, p. 223
  38. ^ Finnegans Wake chapter 17 review. Robot Wisdom. Retrieved on 2007-11-19.
  39. ^ Mercanton, The Hours of James Joyce, p.233
  40. ^ Ellmann, James Joyce, p.590
  41. ^ Marsh, Roger. Finnegans Wake: the Purest Blarney You Never Heard. The Modern World. Retrieved on 2007-11-28.
  42. ^ von Phul, Ruth (1957), Who Sleeps at Finnegans Wake?, in The James Joyce Review vol. I, no. 2, pp. 27—38
  43. ^ Burgess, A Shorter Finnegans Wake, p.7
  44. ^ Burgess, A Shorter finnegans Wake, p.8
  45. ^ quoted in Hart, Clive, Structure and motif in Finnegans wake, p.81
  46. ^ James Joyce Quotes. angelfire.com. Retrieved on 2007-12-03.
  47. ^ Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark, p.309
  48. ^ Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark, p.283
  49. ^ Ellmann, p. 603.
  50. ^ Quoted by Ellmann, p. 722, from "the Observer, May 7, 1939".
  51. ^ Ellmann, p. 584, from a letter from Pound to Joyce, dated Nov, 15, 1926.
  52. ^ Burns (ed.), A Tour of the Darkling Plain, p.xxi
  53. ^ Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p.323
  54. ^ Tindall, p.13
  55. ^ Tindall, p. 20
  56. ^ Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark, p. 86
  57. ^ M. Gell-Mann (1964). "A schematic model of baryons and mesons". Phys. Lett. 8: 214-215. 

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Works by James Joyce
Novels

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) · Ulysses (1922) · Finnegans Wake (1939)
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)
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