A Brief Exploration of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
George M Cummins IV
Finnegans Wake was conceived and meticulously concocted within seven years,
after completing a set of fragments known as “Work in Progress,” while according to
Joyce’s notes, it seemed to be that his major attempt is not “invent a new, different
English,” or “use English as an another device of a language,” but most of all, it was
focused upon its theatrically-thematical structure of a travesty, a combination of humor
and pure tragedy, Irish legends, and universalism of meanings; but, seemed to him, that
(what his brother Stanislaus, same as famously later, E. Pound considered unwanted for
the work), so far as concerned to this point of mystification and even universalizing the
language in its potential, itself, -- that is to say -- based then only and just upon a puzzle
and cryptic quasi-language, if not invented, then figuring as the device itself also, the
meta-metaphor in another sense. “It stands as itself by itself.” It is the thing itself. – That
is its meaning.
As later, when J. Joyce being asked about its “meaning” or in defense of its
readability, or character in general (as he was so familiar with his ‘universality’ in art, and
conceptions for an art, based upon logical arguments and reasoning of St. Thomas
Aquinas, Ibsen and Shakespeare including his own), he mostly only jokingly mentioned
L. Sterne’s “Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.” also is well remembered
his simile between his own “Ulysses” and FW. He said, “If Ulysses was difficult,
Finnegans Wake is cryptic.”
All that, like having for a model a rather “ridiculous story” of a hod, perhaps a
cad-person, a con-man, a stone minor, living in Dublin Chapelizod, having children and
wife, who’s described nocturnal state of his dream and dreams within dreams supposing
to explore and “explain” and describe the essence of existence for humankind, solution
for finalization artificial forces or resolving moral conflicts in daily life – if “Ulysses is a
book about a day, FW is a novel about a night,” – is also a fall of mankind in this
“recirculation,” return or resurrection from its ending, not only because the first sentence
continues where this literary curiosa was ending. It is crafting and entreating, enthralling
and mystical book of exploration of a Dubliner who one Thursday falls from a ladder on
his head, dies, one moment during his Irish Wake was splashed a little of Whiskey upon
his face and he returns to life.
All what can be Irish, is there available. There is not missed any other form of any
from present familiar and especially “reconstro-deconstructed” the literary device; all
about puns and songs, to esotericism and science as well. It roughly follows G. Vico’s“New Science,” a conception of four human stages of existence: Being divine, heroic,
humane, and finally ricorso – a return.
Its hero, HCE, an everyman, Humphrey Chimpden Earwiscker, is having a wife,
Anna Livia Plurabella, a daughter and two sons. Plot is much more complicated that the
myth itself; the text transcends itself, flows and interchanges while reading, so you as a
reader and analyst, a listener, can quietly realize that each time you try to approach it, it
cares another new unexpected story-line. –
Wife is also, “Universal,” being symbolized as river, associated with water, who’s
face is described in the beginning as “aquaface.” – Shem and Shaun, the brothers,
eternally symbolizing eternal conflict during the fall (any fall, Fall of Mankind, original
sin, or simply the Fnnegan’s fall from the ladder, or such), he is a hearer himself, while he
sleeps, all is quiet and also noisy by all the sleeping and dreaming characters, while
events are developing, or “reconstructing.” – It must be just about “anything” you can
imagine, and still it will make its sense. If you are a literary scientist, or a bookkeeper, the
analyst or writer yourself, or ‘anything,’ you will definitively find “your meaning” inside
as a story of your own in it.
Note:
For the second part of the article:
(Its most crucial points related to the “plot-summary,” more as to the characters, and
finally some major themes in the novel, I will elucidate in my next part of this writing,
since I’ve finished the reading of Finnegans Wake recently twice).