Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is the last novel written by James Joyce. After Ulysses was published in 1922, installments of Work In Progress soon began to appear, the final title being a secret between the writer and his partner, Nora Barnacle. The finished book was published in 1939, and Joyce died less than two years later, leaving a work whose reading is still very much "in progress."The language of Finnegans Wake is confounding; consider, for example:
- "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)
In that sense, the book can be seen to have abandoned many of the conventions of the waking mind to embody the working of the sleeping mind. In dreaming, the images and plots that we perceive are not distinct or discreet -- they shift and conglomerate and constantly reform. Joyce captures this protean quality of dreams through complex puns and layering of meaning (often contradictory). Though he writes "however basically English" (page 116, line 26), he universalizes the "dream" by incorporating dozens of other languages and argots.
Not only spatially, but temporally as well, Joyce aimed to contain the full knowledge of humanity in Finnegans Wake. The novel is packed with allusions to world myth, history, the arts. Along with "high" culture, Joyce did not ignore the "low." The Wake (as it is often called) is very much formed by popular jingles, nursery rhymes, and other fragments from popular culture. Indeed, the title itself is taken from an American vaudeville song.
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; their other brother or son, Horus, emerges to slay Set and rise as the new day's sun, as Osiris himself. Reading Finnegans Wake might be seen as analogous to the process of Isis regathering the dismembered portions of Osiris -- there are fragments and allusions and confusing messages that the reader must put together into a conscious form.
Osiris's night journey through the otherworld is described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of spells and invocations for recently deceased to successfully join Osiris and rise with the sun. Such a journey, too, is analogous to the experience of reading the Wake -- the reader enters its dark world and hopes to emerge in a sense reborn.
Warning: Plot details follow.
The book begins with the fall of Finnegan, a hod carrier, from a scaffold. At his wake, in keeping with the song "Finnegan's Wake," a fight breaks out, whiskey splashes on Finnegan's corpse, and he rises up again alive. Note how the simple removal of the song's apostrophe emphasizes and universalizes the theme of awakening: At Finnegan's wake, Finnegans wake. (Not only is the "wake" simultaneously Finnegan's funeral and his birth, the beginning of the dream in which he is paradoxically awakened, it is also the turbulence left by his absence, the expanding ripples and rhythm in the wake of his vessel.)
Continuing past the original song, Joyce has Finnegan put back down again ("Now be aisy, good Mr Finnimore, sir. And take your laysure like a god on pension and don't be walking abroad"). Someone else is sailing in to take over the story: Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, whose initials HCE ("Here Comes Everybody") lend themselves to phrase after phrase throughout the book.
HCE is a foreigner who has taken a native Irish wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle (whose initials ALP as well are found in phrase after phrase), and they settle 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 ALP and HCE 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 person 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. They often are seen with a third fellow in whom their two halves may join against HCE or in winning Issy. This third son-character is likened, for example, to Napoleon Bonaparte against HCE's Duke of Wellington and to Tristan in the triangle with Iseult (Issy) and King Mark (HCE). This is just a small hint of the many roles that each of the main characters finds him- and herself playing, often several at the same time.
Scandal concerning an incident in Phoenix Park (across the river from Chapelizod) threatens HCE's reputation, perhaps his life. In a midden heap, a hen named Biddy (the diminutive form of Brighid, the goddess on whose new-year feast day Joyce was born) finds a letter that ALP has dictated to Shem and which Shaun is charged with carrying to the ruling power of the time, which may be HCE himself. It is a letter that is hoped will redeem his past, just as Finnegans Wake is a vast "comedy" that seeks to redeem human history.
The progress of the book, however, is far from simple as it draws in mythologies, theologies, mysteries, philosophies, histories, sociologies, astrologies, other fictions, alchemy, music, color, nature, sexuality, human development, and dozens of languages to create the world drama in whose cycles we live.
The book ends with the river Liffey disappearing at dawn into the vast possibilities of the ocean. The last sentence is incomplete. As well as leaving the reader to complete it with his or her own life, it can be closed by the sentence that starts the book -- another cycle.