Because it is the story of so many stories, the title removes the expected possessive apostrophe from 'Finnegans.' Tim Finnegan in the Irish ballad falls off a ladder and dies, only to revive to participate in the «funagain» everybody seems to be having at his wake, the 'grand funferall' of human history.
Finnegans Wake is the Irish Book of the Dead, or, more aptly, a riotous version of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken. The narrative makes good on the offhand remark Bloom drops in the Hades episode of Ulysses: 'The Irishman's house is his coffin,' and Joyce takes special delight in the power of the artist to give voice to the quick and the dead in writing up the multivarious activity at the symbolic wake of Finnegans Wake: 'Suppotes a Ventriloquorst Merries a Corpse.' In the biblical Genesis, which serves as one of the many models for the narrative action of Finnegans Wake, a man and woman, Adam and Eve of the first human homestead, make a terrible mistake and experience mortality for their fall. In Finnegans Wake, first principals die a billion deaths but always rise again to celebrate the error-ridden romance of humanity's lives and loves. The unwary reader of fiction might demand from Finnegans Wake an explanation of how characters behave and what they should expect from the normal contingencies that affect a life. But Joyce's narrative explains very little; rather it invites everyone to join its -785- events, to celebrate its readings. The Wake centers in Dublin every imaginary or real human foible that Joyce can possibly remember having taken place-'This is Dyoublong,'-and buries the question to which the answer is an inevitable yes, 'Do you belong?'
There is no single satisfactory key or reading that suffices to explain all of Finnegans Wake, despite the efforts by critics to provide one. There are instead extremes of interpretation that set the boundaries within which Joyce operates. The literalist interpretation holds that every detail in Joyce's book is a description of the circumstances of one evening in the lives of a Dublin publican and his household, a wife, twin sons, a young daughter, and a maid and a handyman of sorts. The family-run pub is in Chapelizod, with living quarters upstairs and drinking quarters beneath. Alternately there is a reading of the book that works against the idea of any novelized or literalized events contained in it by claiming that the narrative has the structure of a night vision. It is not a dream so much as a giant phantasmagoric compilation in words and phrases of all the myths and neuroses engendered in and from a father's guilt-ridden human mind, or, in Wakean language, a 'reconnoitring through his semisubconscious the seriousness of what he might have done had he really polished off his terrible intentions.'
To choose insistently either the literalist or phantasmagoric reading of Finnegans Wake profits little. The pleasure in the Wake is to savor the scraps of local detail and then to imagine the most ingenious superimpositions upon those details by the manipulating, layering, or arranging of letters within words. Much is made in the Wake of an actual letter that seems to have been dug up from a dump heap near Phoenix Park in Dublin, a letter that includes or becomes the substance of the book. The letter is at once a document and a single 'letter,' an ornate illuminated design, put together with other letters in thousands of combinations, 'riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles,' that opens up the world of possibilities for narrative. Playing on an ancient name for letter (rune) and the fall of the Wake (ruin), Joyce writes: 'But the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever.'
With the events of an evening and night in the life of the Earwicker family as his warp and woof, Joyce weaves the story of the family from Genesis, the Oedipal encounter of the weakened father and the empowered son ('Finn again's weak'), the romance of Tristan and Isolde, the geographical disposition of the city of Dublin between Howth -786- Head and the river Liffey, the military history of Western Europe, the story of Humpty Dumpty, and the wheels within wheels that contribute to the universal fable of all history for all time. The book ranges from a portrait of the «fall» as gossip to an allegory of the fall as gospel, from a rendition of history as chronicle to a presentation of life as a series of images on the latest invented plaything of the twentieth century, television.
The best way to approach this Joycean farrago is to read with a very open mind, eye, and ear. The look of the text demands that the eye see whatever words are buried in the disposition of letters on the page and that the ear hear homonyms and echoes. Limitation misses the point of Finnegans Wake. The book is really Joyce's fullest epiphany. Everything in it means something and something more. The narrative is a constant challenge for the reader, a challenge more or less satisfied as one reads more or less of the book. By offering so many possibilities for reading, Joyce builds a provisional story into the text at almost every point. A reader can go in a number of directions with almost any sentence or paragraph. What might seem impenetrable about Joyce's prose is in another sense reader friendly. Interpretation is only limited by a failure of ingenuity or endurance, a 'mutton leg's getting musclebound from being too pulled.'
Finnegans Wake may well seem an outrage at the expense of a reader's indulgence, but Joyce had been heading in that direction ever since he recorded his fascination with the look and sound of words in Portrait of the Artist. And in
Take as another instance the reference in the Ithaca episode of Ulysses to Leopold Bloom as a kind of archetypal wanderer, 'Darkinbad -787- the Brightdayler.' All of literature's sustaining, revivifying impulses are contained in that collection of syllables, the dark in bed soon-to-be-rising sun. Joyce keeps recycling his plots into his renewable language, just as Finnegans Wake takes over from the day-night world of Ulysses and produces a night-day world, circling round in space as well as time when the last sentence of the book, and its last plaintive words about the flow of the Liffey into old father ocean, 'a long the,' trails into the opening sentence, 'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's.' Or there is another way to look at it. For a writer as obsessed with language as James Joyce, it is an understated tribute that «the» is the last creative word he ever wrote. The reader, who has worked so hard to comprehend Joyce's language, now gets the chance to supply whatever word he or she deems appropriate for sustaining Joyce's narrative experiment.
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Virginia Woolf
VIRGINIA WOOLF adopted two very different novelistic perspectives in the course of her
