Opposing traits, which in their father were strangely and ambiguously combined, in these sons are isolated and
separately
embodied.
A-Skeleton-Key-to-Finnegans-Wake
Clearly, such a book is not meant to be idly fingered.
It tasks the imagination, exacts discipline and tenacity from those who would march with it.
Yet some of the difficulties disappear as soon as the well-disposed reader picks up a few compass clues and gets his bearings.
Then the enor- mous map of Finnegans Wake begins slowly to unfold, characters and mo- tifs emerge, themes become recognizable, and Joyce's vocabulary falls more and more familiarly on the accustomed ear.
Complete understanding is not to be snatched at greedily at one sitting; indeed, it may never come.
Nevertheless the ultimate state of the intelligent reader is certainly not be- wilderment.
Rather, it is admiration for the unifying insight, economy of means, and more-than-Rabelaisian humor which have miraculously quick- ened the stupendous mass of material.
One acknowledges at last that James Joyce's overwhelming macro-microcosm could not have been fired to life in any sorcerer furnace less black, less heavy, less murky than this, his in- credible book.
He had to smelt the modern dictionary back to protean plasma and re-enact the "genesis and mutation of language" in order to de- liver his message.
But the final wonder is that such a message could have been delivered at all!
The first clue to the method and mystery of the book is found in its title, Finnegans Wake. Tim Finnegan of the old vaudeville song is an Irish hod carrier who gets drunk, falls off a ladder, and is apparently killed. His friends hold a deathwatch over his coffin; during the festivities someone splashes him with whisky, at which Finnegan comes to life again and joins in the general dance. On this comedy-song foundation, Joyce bases the title of his work. But there is more, much more, to the story. Finnegan the hod carrier is identifiable first with Finn MacCool, captain for two hundred years of Ireland's warrior-heroes, and most famous of Dublin's early giants. Finn typifies all heroes--Thor, Prometheus, Osiris, Christ, the Buddha--in whose life and through whose inspiration the race lives. It is by Finn's coming again (Finn-again)--in other words, by the reappear- ance of the hero--that strength and hope are provided for mankind.
By his death and resurrection, hod carrier Finnegan comically refigures the solemn mystery of the hero-god whose flesh and blood furnish the race
? with spirit-fructifying meat and drink. At the wake of Finnegan, the watch- ers eat everything that belongs to the dead hero. Not only do they devour all the edibles in the house, but they partake of his very body, as of a eu- charist. By its fall, the shell of the Cosmic Egg has been shattered, but the essential egg substance has been gathered and served for the nutriment of the people, "sunny side up with care. "
Finnegan's fall from the ladder is hugely symbolic: it is Lucifer's fall, Adam's fall, the setting sun that will rise again, the fall of Rome, a Wall Street crash. It is Humpty Dumpty's fall, and the fall of Newton's apple. It is the irrigating shower of spring rain that falls on seeded fields. And it is every man's daily recurring fall from grace. These various fallings (imply- ing, as they do, corresponding resurrections) cause a liberation of energy that keeps the universe turning like a water wheel, and provide the dynamic which sets in motion the four-part cycle of universal history.
But why a "four-part" cycle? This reference is to a conception of the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, whose La Scienza Nuova provides the philosophic loom on which Joyce weaves his historical allegory. Essentially, Vico's notion is that history passes through four phases: theocratic, aristocratic, democratic, and chaotic. The last phase is characterized (like our own) by individualism and sterility, and represents the nadir of man's fall. It is terminated by a thunderclap, which terrifies and reawakens mankind to the claims of the supernatural, and thus starts the cycle rolling again with a return to primeval theocracy. ?
In Joyce's composition, the comical Finnegan episode is only the pro- logue to the major action. It is related to the later episodes as prehistory is related to history; or (to use a Viconian image) as the giants of the dawn- chaos are related to the patriarchs of orderly history. In Finnegans Wake the transition from the earlier to the later hero takes place on pages ? ? to ? ? ,? where the company at the wake forcibly hold Finnegan down and bid him rest in peace. They tell him that a newcomer, his successor, has just sailed into Dublin Bay. This newcomer is HCE, or more specifically, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who thereafter dominates the work.
As the tale unfolds, we discover that this H. C. Earwicker is a citizen of Dublin, a stuttering tavernkeeper with a bull-like hump on the back of his neck. He emerges as a well-defined and sympathetic character, the sorely harrowed victim of a relentless fate, which is stronger than, yet
? ? A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake Introduction to a Strange Subject ?
? ? identical with, himself. Joyce refers to him under various names, such as Here Comes Everybody and Haveth Childers Everywhere--indications of his universality and his role as the great progenitor. The hero has wandered vastly, leaving families (that is, deposits of civilization) at every pause along the way: from Troy in Asia Minor (he is frequently called "the Turk") up through the turbulent lands of the Goths, the Franks, the Norsemen, and overseas to the green isles of Britain and Eire. His chief Germanic mani- festations are Woden and Thor; his chief Celtic, Mananna? n MacLir. Again, he is St. Patrick carrying the new faith; again, Strongbow, leading the Anglo-Norman conquest; again, Cromwell, conquering with a bloody hand. Most specifically, he is our Anglican tavernkeeper, HCE, in the Dublin suburb Chapelizod.
As in Ulysses, the principal action takes place in Dublin and its environs. We are introduced at once to Howth Castle, Phoenix Park, the River Liffey, Wellington Monument, Guinness's Brewery, and other important land- marks, all of which have allegorical significance. Phoenix Park, for example, is reminiscent of the Garden of Eden. And the product of Guinness's Brewery is the magic elixir of life, the immortal drink of heroes and gods. Many an allusion is clarified by consulting a detailed map of Dublin. For example, "the knock out in the park" (p. ? ) is Castle Knock, in a cemetery near the west gate of Phoenix Park. The neighboring hillocks are figuratively the upturned toes of the giant whose head is the Hill of Howth. This giant, whose belly is the city of Dublin itself, is none other than the prostrate com- ical hero-god of the wake. Indeed, all the living, loving, fighting, and dying of Dublin is precisely the hurly-burly of Finnegans Wake.
But to return to HCE. He is a man who has won his place in society, a place not of high distinction but of decent repute. He is a candidate in a local election. Gossip, however, undoes his campaign and his reputation as well.
It was in Phoenix Park (that Garden of Eden), near his tavern, that he committed an indecorous impropriety which now dogs him to the end of his life-nightmare. Briefly, he was caught peeping at or exhibiting himself to a couple of girls in Phoenix Park. The indiscretion was witnessed by three drunken soldiers, who could never be quite certain of what they had seen; from them it went out to the world. Earwicker's anxiety to justify himself riddles his every utterance with incriminating slips of the tongue,
? and contributes to his bulky presence a flavor of slightly rancid butter, ex- posing him to further gossip on every hand. The rumors grow. He is said to suffer from an obscure disease, suspiciously venereal, a physiological counterpart of his psychological taint.
Unquestionably his predicament is of the nature of Original Sin: he shares the shadowy guilt that Adam experienced after eating the apple. It is akin also to the bewilderment and confusion that paralyze Hamlet, and is cognate with the neurotic misease of modern times. Stephen Dedalus, who suffers from an analogous malady in Ulysses, calls it the "agenbite of inwit," the incessant gnawing of rat-toothed remorse. Earwicker, suffering from this taint, yet aware of his claims to decency, is torn between shame and aggressive self-satisfaction, conscious of himself both as bug and as man (an earwig is a beetlelike insect, popularly supposed to creep into the human ear). Worm before God and giant among men, he is a living, aching arena of cosmic dissonance, tortured by all the cuts and thrusts of guilt and conscience.
A very specific ramification of the Guilt motif crops out constantly in the old-man, young-girl situations sprinkled throughout the book. In the Swift-Vanessa, Mark-and-Iseult episodes, graybeards are passionately fired with a half-incestuous, half-lyrical yearning for young love. Earwicker him- self is troubled by a passion, compounded of illicit and aspirational desires, for his own daughter, Isabel, whom he identifies with Tristram's Iseult, and who is the sweet little reincarnation of his wife. Himself he envisions now as gallant Tristram and now as cuckolded King Mark.
Although Earwicker is a citizen of Dublin, he is resented by the popu- lace as an intruder, even a usurper. Why? Because, springing from Germanic rather than Celtic stock, he typifies all the invaders who have overrun Ireland--Danes, Norsemen, Normans, and English. The clash of arms that resounds through the first pages of the book recalls the battles of all Irish history and furnishes a background to the battlefields of the tav- ern--and the battlefields of Earwicker's own soul.
The rumors about HCE are started by a native Dubliner, smoking a pipe, who encounters Earwicker at midnight in Phoenix Park. This Cad with a pipe asks HCE for the time, and is surprised when the great per- sonage exhibits uneasiness and launches into an elaborate self-defense. The Cad goes home, broods over a bottle, and mumbles what he has heard. His
? ? A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake Introduction to a Strange Subject ?
? ? wife, catching the suspicious words, communicates them to her priest, who, in turn, passes them on at the racetrack. Three down-and-outers pick up the tale, exaggerate it comically, and finally turn it into a scurrilous lam- poon ("The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly," p. ? ? ).
The rumor runs through the city like a virulent infection. Several pages (? ? -? ? ) are devoted to round robins of public opinion. The plague of evil gossip that encircles the present Mr. H. C. Earwicker races back through the past--touches and contaminates every likeness of the unfor- gettable great citizen through all the annals, not only of Ireland, but of man. Thus the inquirer finds it impossible to distinguish between the tu- multuous earwigging (gossiping) of the present and that of remoter days. The scandal-stew boils gloriously with ingredients from every moment of human time.
While the man in the street gossips, twelve stately citizens of the jury sit in formal though tipsy session. These twelve are, locally, the twelve con- stant customers of Mr. Earwicker's tavern. They are also leading mourners at Finnegan's wake. They are also the twelve signs of the zodiac. Their presence betrays itself with sonorous sequences of words terminating in "-ation"; as, for instance, on page ? , "all the hoolivans of the nation, pros- trated in their consternation, and their duodisimally profusive plethora of ululation. "
In addition, there are four slobberishly senile judges who remember and rehearse the anecdotes of old times. They are identified with the four winds, the Four Master Annalists of Ireland, the Four Evangelists, the four Viconian ages, and so forth. Their principal charge is to care for a Donkey, which, in its better moments, is revealed as an archaic incarnation of the Logos. Pages ? ? ? to ? ? ? are devoted largely to the recollections of the Four. They themselves, in younger days, were protagonists of the great life-roles which they can now only regard and review. Life once stirred in them and shaped them; but it has moved on, so that they now are but cast- off shells. Crotchety, brittle crystallizations out of the past, they have only to await disintegration. Meanwhile, however, they sit in judgment over the living present.
A dim-witted policeman, crony of the Four, arrests HCE for disturb- ing the peace, and gives testimony against him (pp. ? ? -? ? , and ? ? ). But he has many of the traits of the hero himself--as have, indeed, all the male
? characters of the populace-opposition. For, in the last analysis, the univer- sal judgment against HCE is but a reflection of his own obsessive guilt; and conversely, the sin which others condemn in him is but a conspicuous pub- lic example of the general, universally human, original sin, privately effec- tive within themselves. Thus, throughout the work, there is a continual intermelting of the accused and his accusers. All these characters, moving around and against one another, are but facets of some prodigious unity and are at last profoundly identical--each, as it were, a figure in the dream complex of all the others. One is reminded of Schopenhauer's wonderful image of the world in his essay On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual: "It is a vast dream, dreamed by a single being, but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Thus everything interlocks and harmonizes with everything else. "
Earwicker has a wife, the psyche of the book--bewitching, ever-changing, animating, all-pervading. She appears typically under the name of Anna Livia Plurabelle, abbreviated to ALP. Just as Earwicker is metamorphosed into Adam, Noah, Lord Nelson, mountain, or a tree, so ALP becomes by subtle transposition, Eve, Isis, Iseult, a passing cloud, a flowing stream. She is the eternally fructive and love-bearing principle in the world--a little crone who goes about gathering fragments into a basket; Isis picking up the dismembered body of her brother-husband, Osiris. She is the widow who serves the feast at the wake: "Grampupus is fallen down but grinny sprids the boord" (p. ? ). Again, she is a mother hen that scratches out of a dung heap the torn scrap of a gossipacious letter filled with all the secrets of a woman's heart (pp. ? ? ? -? ? ), a bewitching letter, which, only partially re- covered, tantalizes with its life riddle through every page of Finnegans Wake: the entire book, in fact, is but a dreamlike emanation of this "un- titled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest" (p. ? ? ? ), written (time and place unknown) by ALP herself.
But above all, Anna is a river, always changing yet ever the same, the Heraclitean flux which bears all life on its current. Principally, she is the River Liffey, running through Dublin, but she is also all the rivers of the world: the heavenly Ganges, the fruitful Nile, the teeming Irrawaddy, the mysterious Nyanza. She is the circular river of time, flowing past Eve and Adam in the first sentence of the book, bearing in her flood the debris of dead civilizations and the seeds of crops and cultures yet to come.
? ? ? A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake Introduction to a Strange Subject ? ?
? ? The circular course of the River Liffey illustrates her cycle of transfor- mation. Her brooklet source in the Wicklow Hills finds her as a young girl, free, dancing gaily, a delicious nymph. Passing the Chapelizod of HCE's tavern, she is a comely, matronly stream. Still farther on, running through the city of Dublin, she is an old haggard scrubwoman, carrying away the filth of the city. At last, she flows back to Father Ocean, from whence she rises again in mist, to descend in showers and become once more the sparkling mountain stream. Anna's cycle is a perfect example of the Viconian corso and ricorso--the circular ground-plan on which Finnegans Wake is laid.
It is the role of the younger Anna to shatter HCE as the container of fixed energy. It becomes the function of the older Anna, the widow, to gather up the remains of her broken lord and consign them again to a fresh start. As Joyce says, "she puffs the blaziness on," converts past into future, and displays the female's typical concern for the future of her race. Among her younger manifestations are Earwicker's daughter and her twenty-eight little companions (the days of the month), seven beaming rainbow-colored girls, and the two temptresses in the Park. Among her older incarnations are the writer and receiver of the letter, and the garrulous housekeeper of the Earwicker establishment, Kate the Slop, "put in with the bricks. " The roles are continually shifting and mingling into each other. Anna is the principle of vivid movement, ever setting in motion and keeping in mo- tion the river-flow of time.
Earwicker and his wife have two sons, called in their symbolic aspect Shem and Shaun, and in the domestic aspect Jerry and Kevin. They are the carriers of a great Brother Battle theme that throbs through the entire work. Just as HCE and ALP represent a primordial male-female polarity, which is basic to all life, so Shem and Shaun represent a subordinate, ex- clusively masculine battle polarity which is basic to all history.
Opposing traits, which in their father were strangely and ambiguously combined, in these sons are isolated and separately embodied. As characters, therefore, these boys are very much simpler than their father; accordingly, the chap- ters of the work devoted to the delineations of their caricature-portraits (Bk. I, chap. ? (pp. ? ? ? -? ? ) for Shem; Bk. II, chaps. ? and ? (pp. ? ? ? -? ? ? ) for Shaun) are comparatively easy reading, excellent places for trial spins.
? Shem (Jerry), the introvert, rejected of man, is the explorer and dis- coverer of the forbidden. He is an embodiment of dangerous brooding, in- turned energy. He is the uncoverer of secret springs, and, as such, the possessor of terrific, lightning powers. The books he writes are so mortify- ing that they are spontaneously rejected by the decent; they threaten, they dissolve the protecting boundary lines of good and evil. Provoked to action (and he must be provoked before he will act), he is not restrained by nor- mal human laws, for they have been dissolved within him by the too pow- erful elixirs of the elemental depths; he may let loose a hot spray of acid; but, on the other hand, he can release such a magical balm of forgiveness that the battle lines must themselves become melted in a bacchanal of gen- eral love. Such absolute love is as dangerous to the efficient working of society as absolute hate. The possessor of the secrets, therefore, is con- strained to hold his fire. Nobody really wants to hear what he has to say; the shepherds of the people denounce him from their pulpits, or else so di- lute and misrepresent his teachings as to render them innocuous. Thus Shem is typically in retreat from society; he is the scorned and disinherited one, the Bohemian, or criminal outcast, rejected by Philistine prosperity. Under the title of Shem the Penman, he is the seer, the poet, Joyce himself in his character of misunderstood, rejected artist. His characteristic behav- ior is to take refuge in his own room, where, on the foolscap of his own body, he writes a phosphorescent book in a corrosive language which Shaun cannot understand.
The character of Shaun (Kevin), the folk-shepherd brother, the politi- cal orator, prudent, unctuous, economically successful favorite of the people, policeman of the planet, conqueror of rebels, bearer of the white man's burden, is developed by Joyce elaborately and broadly. He is the contra- puntal opposite of Shem: the two brothers are the balanced ends of the human dumbbell. And if it is the typical lot of Shem to be whipped and despoiled, Shaun is typically the whipper and despoiler.
When he turns from making empires and preserving the peace of the world to the writing of best sellers, the favored son does not himself de- scend to those dangerous, obscene, and forbidden depths from which the other brings forth his mad productions; his works are never in danger of censorship and rejection; they are the censors and the rejectors. Indeed,
? ? ? A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake Introduction to a Strange Subject ? ?
? ? Shaun is not concerned with spiritual or esthetic matters except in so far as he can exploit them; the life of the flesh and the senses is good enough for him. In a diverting passage beginning on page ? ? ? , Shaun addresses the little daygirls of St. Bride's Academy, smiting their tender ears with admo- nitions of good counsel and very practical advice. "Collide with man, col- lude with money" is a typical Shaunian saw. In sum: Shaun is a man nai? vely and shrewdly outgoing, whereas Shem, his brother, has been touched by the "agenbite" which probes back again to the source. Shaun execrates Shem, maligns him, with the frank but not altogether unfearful disdain of the man of action for the man of thought. Under the title of Shaun the Postman, he delivers to mankind the great message which has been actually discovered and penned by Shem, and enjoys thereby all the rewards of those who carry good tidings.
Shem's business is not to create a higher life, but merely to find and utter the Word. Shaun, on the other hand, whose function is to make the Word become flesh, misreads it, fundamentally rejects it, limits himself to a kind of stupid concretism, and, while winning all the skirmishes, loses the eternal city.
HCE, the father of this pair, represents the unity from which their po- larity springs. Compared with the rich plasticity of HCE, the boys are but shadow-thin grotesques. Their history plays like a strange mirage over the enduring core of the basic presence of HCE. The energy generated by their conflict is but a reflex of the original energy generated by the father's fall. Furthermore, antipodal as the brothers may be, they are both easily em- braced by the all-inclusive love of their wonderful mother ALP. (See, for instance, the charming passages on pages ? ? ? to ? ? ? . )
Toward the close of the work (specifically during the third chapter of Book III (pp. ? ? ? -? ? ? )), the forms of the son's world dissolve and the ever- lasting primal form of HCE resurges. The all-father is reunited with his wife in a diamond-wedding anniversary, as if to demonstrate that behind the complexity of their children's lives, they still continue to be the motive- givers. Together, they constitute the primordial, androgynous angel, which is Man, the incarnate God.
What, finally, is Finnegans Wake all about? Stripping away its accidental features, the book may be said to be all compact of mutually supplementary antagonisms: male-and-female, age-and-youth, life-and-death, love-and-hate;
? these, by their attraction, conflicts, and repulsions, supply polar energies that spin the universe. Wherever Joyce looks in history or human life, he discov- ers the operation of these basic polarities. Under the seeming aspect of diver- sity--in the individual, the family, the state, the atom, or the cosmos--these constants remain unchanged. Amid trivia and tumult, by prodigious symbol and mystic sign, obliquely and obscurely (because these manifestations are both oblique and obscure), James Joyce presents, develops, amplifies, and re- condenses nothing more nor less than the eternal dynamic implicit in birth, conflict, death, and resurrection.
? ? Synopsis and Demonstration
? Synopsis
Finnegans Wake is divided into four great Parts, or Books, not named, but numbered from I to IV. In leaving these books untitled, Joyce is not wan- tonly casting the reader adrift without such chart or compass as chapter headings ordinarily provide. Rather, he intends that the subject matter of each Book shall develop organically out of its own life cell, making known its nature and direction as the development proceeds. The titles we have as- signed to these Books in the following synopsis are based on the relationship of Joyce's fourfold cycle to the Four Ages of the Viconian Corso-Ricorso. As here presented, the titles, and the synopsis itself, are intended to serve as a handrail for the reader groping his way along unfamiliar galleries.
Book I: The Book of the Parents
Chapter ? : Finnegan's Fall (pp. ? -? ? )*
The first four paragraphs are the suspended tick of time between a cycle just past and one about to begin. They are in effect an overture, resonant
? ? * Our titles for the sixteen chapters into which the work is subdivided are adaptations from phrases in Joyce's text.
? ?
? ? A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake ? ? Synopsis and Demonstration ? ?
? with all the themes of Finnegans Wake. The dominant motif is the polylingual thunderclap of paragraph ? (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronnton- nerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk! ) which is the voice of God made audible through the noise of Finnegan's fall.
Narrative movement begins with the life, fall, and wake of hod carrier Finnegan (pp. ? -? ). The Wake scene fades into the landscape of Dublin and environs. Whereupon we review scenic, historic, prehistoric, and leg- endary evidences of Finnegan's all-suffusing presence (pp. ? -? ? ). The Wake scene re-emerges. At the sound of the word "whisky" (usqueadbaugham! ) the deceased sits up and threatens to rise, but the company soothes him back. The whole structure of the new day has been founded on the fact of his demise (pp. ? ? -? ? ). Primeval Finnegan has already been supplanted by HCE, who has arrived by sea to set up family and shop (pp. ? ? -? ? ).
Chapter ? : HCE--His Agnomen and Reputation (pp. ? ? -? ? )
A half-trustworthy account is given of the earliest days of HCE and of how he came by his curious name. The rumors of his misconduct in the Park are reviewed. We next are regaled with the story of how these rumors grew after his encounter with a certain tramp in Phoenix Park. The scurrilous tales culminate in a popular lampoon, "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly," which fixes on HCE the blame for all local ills.
Chapter ? : HCE--His Trial and Incarceration (pp. ? ? -? ? )
Through the fog screen of scandal little can be clarified. As the author points out, it all happened a long time ago and the participants are no longer alive--yet their counterparts dwell among us. A series of personages voluntarily arise to explain HCE's case. Somehow they all resemble the ac- cused. Passers-by are interviewed for their opinion of the celebrated wrong- doer (pp. ? ? -? ? ). The story is told of his arrest. His fate is compared to that of an American sugar-daddy. The women in the case are said to have come to unhappy ends. After the hurly-burly is over, HCE, the eternal scapegoat, is incarcerated for his own protection and roundly insulted through the keyhole of his cell by a visiting hog-caller from the U. S. A. (pp. ? ? -? ? ).
? Chapter ? : HCE--His Demise and Resurrection (pp. ? ? -? ? ? )
Various thoughts pass through the mind of the captive HCE. Meanwhile, a subaqueous grave is prepared for him at the bottom of Lough Neagh, which, presently, he is induced to enter. During the general chaos that im- mediately ensues, phantom apparitions of HCE are variously reported from several battlefields (pp. ? ? -? ? ).
The filthy paganism of his day and the origin of a certain mud mound in which a letter was deposited are described by the scrubwoman, Widow Kate. This is the first hint of the great Letter theme which foliates hugely throughout the book (pp. ? ? -? ?
The first clue to the method and mystery of the book is found in its title, Finnegans Wake. Tim Finnegan of the old vaudeville song is an Irish hod carrier who gets drunk, falls off a ladder, and is apparently killed. His friends hold a deathwatch over his coffin; during the festivities someone splashes him with whisky, at which Finnegan comes to life again and joins in the general dance. On this comedy-song foundation, Joyce bases the title of his work. But there is more, much more, to the story. Finnegan the hod carrier is identifiable first with Finn MacCool, captain for two hundred years of Ireland's warrior-heroes, and most famous of Dublin's early giants. Finn typifies all heroes--Thor, Prometheus, Osiris, Christ, the Buddha--in whose life and through whose inspiration the race lives. It is by Finn's coming again (Finn-again)--in other words, by the reappear- ance of the hero--that strength and hope are provided for mankind.
By his death and resurrection, hod carrier Finnegan comically refigures the solemn mystery of the hero-god whose flesh and blood furnish the race
? with spirit-fructifying meat and drink. At the wake of Finnegan, the watch- ers eat everything that belongs to the dead hero. Not only do they devour all the edibles in the house, but they partake of his very body, as of a eu- charist. By its fall, the shell of the Cosmic Egg has been shattered, but the essential egg substance has been gathered and served for the nutriment of the people, "sunny side up with care. "
Finnegan's fall from the ladder is hugely symbolic: it is Lucifer's fall, Adam's fall, the setting sun that will rise again, the fall of Rome, a Wall Street crash. It is Humpty Dumpty's fall, and the fall of Newton's apple. It is the irrigating shower of spring rain that falls on seeded fields. And it is every man's daily recurring fall from grace. These various fallings (imply- ing, as they do, corresponding resurrections) cause a liberation of energy that keeps the universe turning like a water wheel, and provide the dynamic which sets in motion the four-part cycle of universal history.
But why a "four-part" cycle? This reference is to a conception of the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, whose La Scienza Nuova provides the philosophic loom on which Joyce weaves his historical allegory. Essentially, Vico's notion is that history passes through four phases: theocratic, aristocratic, democratic, and chaotic. The last phase is characterized (like our own) by individualism and sterility, and represents the nadir of man's fall. It is terminated by a thunderclap, which terrifies and reawakens mankind to the claims of the supernatural, and thus starts the cycle rolling again with a return to primeval theocracy. ?
In Joyce's composition, the comical Finnegan episode is only the pro- logue to the major action. It is related to the later episodes as prehistory is related to history; or (to use a Viconian image) as the giants of the dawn- chaos are related to the patriarchs of orderly history. In Finnegans Wake the transition from the earlier to the later hero takes place on pages ? ? to ? ? ,? where the company at the wake forcibly hold Finnegan down and bid him rest in peace. They tell him that a newcomer, his successor, has just sailed into Dublin Bay. This newcomer is HCE, or more specifically, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who thereafter dominates the work.
As the tale unfolds, we discover that this H. C. Earwicker is a citizen of Dublin, a stuttering tavernkeeper with a bull-like hump on the back of his neck. He emerges as a well-defined and sympathetic character, the sorely harrowed victim of a relentless fate, which is stronger than, yet
? ? A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake Introduction to a Strange Subject ?
? ? identical with, himself. Joyce refers to him under various names, such as Here Comes Everybody and Haveth Childers Everywhere--indications of his universality and his role as the great progenitor. The hero has wandered vastly, leaving families (that is, deposits of civilization) at every pause along the way: from Troy in Asia Minor (he is frequently called "the Turk") up through the turbulent lands of the Goths, the Franks, the Norsemen, and overseas to the green isles of Britain and Eire. His chief Germanic mani- festations are Woden and Thor; his chief Celtic, Mananna? n MacLir. Again, he is St. Patrick carrying the new faith; again, Strongbow, leading the Anglo-Norman conquest; again, Cromwell, conquering with a bloody hand. Most specifically, he is our Anglican tavernkeeper, HCE, in the Dublin suburb Chapelizod.
As in Ulysses, the principal action takes place in Dublin and its environs. We are introduced at once to Howth Castle, Phoenix Park, the River Liffey, Wellington Monument, Guinness's Brewery, and other important land- marks, all of which have allegorical significance. Phoenix Park, for example, is reminiscent of the Garden of Eden. And the product of Guinness's Brewery is the magic elixir of life, the immortal drink of heroes and gods. Many an allusion is clarified by consulting a detailed map of Dublin. For example, "the knock out in the park" (p. ? ) is Castle Knock, in a cemetery near the west gate of Phoenix Park. The neighboring hillocks are figuratively the upturned toes of the giant whose head is the Hill of Howth. This giant, whose belly is the city of Dublin itself, is none other than the prostrate com- ical hero-god of the wake. Indeed, all the living, loving, fighting, and dying of Dublin is precisely the hurly-burly of Finnegans Wake.
But to return to HCE. He is a man who has won his place in society, a place not of high distinction but of decent repute. He is a candidate in a local election. Gossip, however, undoes his campaign and his reputation as well.
It was in Phoenix Park (that Garden of Eden), near his tavern, that he committed an indecorous impropriety which now dogs him to the end of his life-nightmare. Briefly, he was caught peeping at or exhibiting himself to a couple of girls in Phoenix Park. The indiscretion was witnessed by three drunken soldiers, who could never be quite certain of what they had seen; from them it went out to the world. Earwicker's anxiety to justify himself riddles his every utterance with incriminating slips of the tongue,
? and contributes to his bulky presence a flavor of slightly rancid butter, ex- posing him to further gossip on every hand. The rumors grow. He is said to suffer from an obscure disease, suspiciously venereal, a physiological counterpart of his psychological taint.
Unquestionably his predicament is of the nature of Original Sin: he shares the shadowy guilt that Adam experienced after eating the apple. It is akin also to the bewilderment and confusion that paralyze Hamlet, and is cognate with the neurotic misease of modern times. Stephen Dedalus, who suffers from an analogous malady in Ulysses, calls it the "agenbite of inwit," the incessant gnawing of rat-toothed remorse. Earwicker, suffering from this taint, yet aware of his claims to decency, is torn between shame and aggressive self-satisfaction, conscious of himself both as bug and as man (an earwig is a beetlelike insect, popularly supposed to creep into the human ear). Worm before God and giant among men, he is a living, aching arena of cosmic dissonance, tortured by all the cuts and thrusts of guilt and conscience.
A very specific ramification of the Guilt motif crops out constantly in the old-man, young-girl situations sprinkled throughout the book. In the Swift-Vanessa, Mark-and-Iseult episodes, graybeards are passionately fired with a half-incestuous, half-lyrical yearning for young love. Earwicker him- self is troubled by a passion, compounded of illicit and aspirational desires, for his own daughter, Isabel, whom he identifies with Tristram's Iseult, and who is the sweet little reincarnation of his wife. Himself he envisions now as gallant Tristram and now as cuckolded King Mark.
Although Earwicker is a citizen of Dublin, he is resented by the popu- lace as an intruder, even a usurper. Why? Because, springing from Germanic rather than Celtic stock, he typifies all the invaders who have overrun Ireland--Danes, Norsemen, Normans, and English. The clash of arms that resounds through the first pages of the book recalls the battles of all Irish history and furnishes a background to the battlefields of the tav- ern--and the battlefields of Earwicker's own soul.
The rumors about HCE are started by a native Dubliner, smoking a pipe, who encounters Earwicker at midnight in Phoenix Park. This Cad with a pipe asks HCE for the time, and is surprised when the great per- sonage exhibits uneasiness and launches into an elaborate self-defense. The Cad goes home, broods over a bottle, and mumbles what he has heard. His
? ? A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake Introduction to a Strange Subject ?
? ? wife, catching the suspicious words, communicates them to her priest, who, in turn, passes them on at the racetrack. Three down-and-outers pick up the tale, exaggerate it comically, and finally turn it into a scurrilous lam- poon ("The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly," p. ? ? ).
The rumor runs through the city like a virulent infection. Several pages (? ? -? ? ) are devoted to round robins of public opinion. The plague of evil gossip that encircles the present Mr. H. C. Earwicker races back through the past--touches and contaminates every likeness of the unfor- gettable great citizen through all the annals, not only of Ireland, but of man. Thus the inquirer finds it impossible to distinguish between the tu- multuous earwigging (gossiping) of the present and that of remoter days. The scandal-stew boils gloriously with ingredients from every moment of human time.
While the man in the street gossips, twelve stately citizens of the jury sit in formal though tipsy session. These twelve are, locally, the twelve con- stant customers of Mr. Earwicker's tavern. They are also leading mourners at Finnegan's wake. They are also the twelve signs of the zodiac. Their presence betrays itself with sonorous sequences of words terminating in "-ation"; as, for instance, on page ? , "all the hoolivans of the nation, pros- trated in their consternation, and their duodisimally profusive plethora of ululation. "
In addition, there are four slobberishly senile judges who remember and rehearse the anecdotes of old times. They are identified with the four winds, the Four Master Annalists of Ireland, the Four Evangelists, the four Viconian ages, and so forth. Their principal charge is to care for a Donkey, which, in its better moments, is revealed as an archaic incarnation of the Logos. Pages ? ? ? to ? ? ? are devoted largely to the recollections of the Four. They themselves, in younger days, were protagonists of the great life-roles which they can now only regard and review. Life once stirred in them and shaped them; but it has moved on, so that they now are but cast- off shells. Crotchety, brittle crystallizations out of the past, they have only to await disintegration. Meanwhile, however, they sit in judgment over the living present.
A dim-witted policeman, crony of the Four, arrests HCE for disturb- ing the peace, and gives testimony against him (pp. ? ? -? ? , and ? ? ). But he has many of the traits of the hero himself--as have, indeed, all the male
? characters of the populace-opposition. For, in the last analysis, the univer- sal judgment against HCE is but a reflection of his own obsessive guilt; and conversely, the sin which others condemn in him is but a conspicuous pub- lic example of the general, universally human, original sin, privately effec- tive within themselves. Thus, throughout the work, there is a continual intermelting of the accused and his accusers. All these characters, moving around and against one another, are but facets of some prodigious unity and are at last profoundly identical--each, as it were, a figure in the dream complex of all the others. One is reminded of Schopenhauer's wonderful image of the world in his essay On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual: "It is a vast dream, dreamed by a single being, but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Thus everything interlocks and harmonizes with everything else. "
Earwicker has a wife, the psyche of the book--bewitching, ever-changing, animating, all-pervading. She appears typically under the name of Anna Livia Plurabelle, abbreviated to ALP. Just as Earwicker is metamorphosed into Adam, Noah, Lord Nelson, mountain, or a tree, so ALP becomes by subtle transposition, Eve, Isis, Iseult, a passing cloud, a flowing stream. She is the eternally fructive and love-bearing principle in the world--a little crone who goes about gathering fragments into a basket; Isis picking up the dismembered body of her brother-husband, Osiris. She is the widow who serves the feast at the wake: "Grampupus is fallen down but grinny sprids the boord" (p. ? ). Again, she is a mother hen that scratches out of a dung heap the torn scrap of a gossipacious letter filled with all the secrets of a woman's heart (pp. ? ? ? -? ? ), a bewitching letter, which, only partially re- covered, tantalizes with its life riddle through every page of Finnegans Wake: the entire book, in fact, is but a dreamlike emanation of this "un- titled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest" (p. ? ? ? ), written (time and place unknown) by ALP herself.
But above all, Anna is a river, always changing yet ever the same, the Heraclitean flux which bears all life on its current. Principally, she is the River Liffey, running through Dublin, but she is also all the rivers of the world: the heavenly Ganges, the fruitful Nile, the teeming Irrawaddy, the mysterious Nyanza. She is the circular river of time, flowing past Eve and Adam in the first sentence of the book, bearing in her flood the debris of dead civilizations and the seeds of crops and cultures yet to come.
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? ? The circular course of the River Liffey illustrates her cycle of transfor- mation. Her brooklet source in the Wicklow Hills finds her as a young girl, free, dancing gaily, a delicious nymph. Passing the Chapelizod of HCE's tavern, she is a comely, matronly stream. Still farther on, running through the city of Dublin, she is an old haggard scrubwoman, carrying away the filth of the city. At last, she flows back to Father Ocean, from whence she rises again in mist, to descend in showers and become once more the sparkling mountain stream. Anna's cycle is a perfect example of the Viconian corso and ricorso--the circular ground-plan on which Finnegans Wake is laid.
It is the role of the younger Anna to shatter HCE as the container of fixed energy. It becomes the function of the older Anna, the widow, to gather up the remains of her broken lord and consign them again to a fresh start. As Joyce says, "she puffs the blaziness on," converts past into future, and displays the female's typical concern for the future of her race. Among her younger manifestations are Earwicker's daughter and her twenty-eight little companions (the days of the month), seven beaming rainbow-colored girls, and the two temptresses in the Park. Among her older incarnations are the writer and receiver of the letter, and the garrulous housekeeper of the Earwicker establishment, Kate the Slop, "put in with the bricks. " The roles are continually shifting and mingling into each other. Anna is the principle of vivid movement, ever setting in motion and keeping in mo- tion the river-flow of time.
Earwicker and his wife have two sons, called in their symbolic aspect Shem and Shaun, and in the domestic aspect Jerry and Kevin. They are the carriers of a great Brother Battle theme that throbs through the entire work. Just as HCE and ALP represent a primordial male-female polarity, which is basic to all life, so Shem and Shaun represent a subordinate, ex- clusively masculine battle polarity which is basic to all history.
Opposing traits, which in their father were strangely and ambiguously combined, in these sons are isolated and separately embodied. As characters, therefore, these boys are very much simpler than their father; accordingly, the chap- ters of the work devoted to the delineations of their caricature-portraits (Bk. I, chap. ? (pp. ? ? ? -? ? ) for Shem; Bk. II, chaps. ? and ? (pp. ? ? ? -? ? ? ) for Shaun) are comparatively easy reading, excellent places for trial spins.
? Shem (Jerry), the introvert, rejected of man, is the explorer and dis- coverer of the forbidden. He is an embodiment of dangerous brooding, in- turned energy. He is the uncoverer of secret springs, and, as such, the possessor of terrific, lightning powers. The books he writes are so mortify- ing that they are spontaneously rejected by the decent; they threaten, they dissolve the protecting boundary lines of good and evil. Provoked to action (and he must be provoked before he will act), he is not restrained by nor- mal human laws, for they have been dissolved within him by the too pow- erful elixirs of the elemental depths; he may let loose a hot spray of acid; but, on the other hand, he can release such a magical balm of forgiveness that the battle lines must themselves become melted in a bacchanal of gen- eral love. Such absolute love is as dangerous to the efficient working of society as absolute hate. The possessor of the secrets, therefore, is con- strained to hold his fire. Nobody really wants to hear what he has to say; the shepherds of the people denounce him from their pulpits, or else so di- lute and misrepresent his teachings as to render them innocuous. Thus Shem is typically in retreat from society; he is the scorned and disinherited one, the Bohemian, or criminal outcast, rejected by Philistine prosperity. Under the title of Shem the Penman, he is the seer, the poet, Joyce himself in his character of misunderstood, rejected artist. His characteristic behav- ior is to take refuge in his own room, where, on the foolscap of his own body, he writes a phosphorescent book in a corrosive language which Shaun cannot understand.
The character of Shaun (Kevin), the folk-shepherd brother, the politi- cal orator, prudent, unctuous, economically successful favorite of the people, policeman of the planet, conqueror of rebels, bearer of the white man's burden, is developed by Joyce elaborately and broadly. He is the contra- puntal opposite of Shem: the two brothers are the balanced ends of the human dumbbell. And if it is the typical lot of Shem to be whipped and despoiled, Shaun is typically the whipper and despoiler.
When he turns from making empires and preserving the peace of the world to the writing of best sellers, the favored son does not himself de- scend to those dangerous, obscene, and forbidden depths from which the other brings forth his mad productions; his works are never in danger of censorship and rejection; they are the censors and the rejectors. Indeed,
? ? ? A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake Introduction to a Strange Subject ? ?
? ? Shaun is not concerned with spiritual or esthetic matters except in so far as he can exploit them; the life of the flesh and the senses is good enough for him. In a diverting passage beginning on page ? ? ? , Shaun addresses the little daygirls of St. Bride's Academy, smiting their tender ears with admo- nitions of good counsel and very practical advice. "Collide with man, col- lude with money" is a typical Shaunian saw. In sum: Shaun is a man nai? vely and shrewdly outgoing, whereas Shem, his brother, has been touched by the "agenbite" which probes back again to the source. Shaun execrates Shem, maligns him, with the frank but not altogether unfearful disdain of the man of action for the man of thought. Under the title of Shaun the Postman, he delivers to mankind the great message which has been actually discovered and penned by Shem, and enjoys thereby all the rewards of those who carry good tidings.
Shem's business is not to create a higher life, but merely to find and utter the Word. Shaun, on the other hand, whose function is to make the Word become flesh, misreads it, fundamentally rejects it, limits himself to a kind of stupid concretism, and, while winning all the skirmishes, loses the eternal city.
HCE, the father of this pair, represents the unity from which their po- larity springs. Compared with the rich plasticity of HCE, the boys are but shadow-thin grotesques. Their history plays like a strange mirage over the enduring core of the basic presence of HCE. The energy generated by their conflict is but a reflex of the original energy generated by the father's fall. Furthermore, antipodal as the brothers may be, they are both easily em- braced by the all-inclusive love of their wonderful mother ALP. (See, for instance, the charming passages on pages ? ? ? to ? ? ? . )
Toward the close of the work (specifically during the third chapter of Book III (pp. ? ? ? -? ? ? )), the forms of the son's world dissolve and the ever- lasting primal form of HCE resurges. The all-father is reunited with his wife in a diamond-wedding anniversary, as if to demonstrate that behind the complexity of their children's lives, they still continue to be the motive- givers. Together, they constitute the primordial, androgynous angel, which is Man, the incarnate God.
What, finally, is Finnegans Wake all about? Stripping away its accidental features, the book may be said to be all compact of mutually supplementary antagonisms: male-and-female, age-and-youth, life-and-death, love-and-hate;
? these, by their attraction, conflicts, and repulsions, supply polar energies that spin the universe. Wherever Joyce looks in history or human life, he discov- ers the operation of these basic polarities. Under the seeming aspect of diver- sity--in the individual, the family, the state, the atom, or the cosmos--these constants remain unchanged. Amid trivia and tumult, by prodigious symbol and mystic sign, obliquely and obscurely (because these manifestations are both oblique and obscure), James Joyce presents, develops, amplifies, and re- condenses nothing more nor less than the eternal dynamic implicit in birth, conflict, death, and resurrection.
? ? Synopsis and Demonstration
? Synopsis
Finnegans Wake is divided into four great Parts, or Books, not named, but numbered from I to IV. In leaving these books untitled, Joyce is not wan- tonly casting the reader adrift without such chart or compass as chapter headings ordinarily provide. Rather, he intends that the subject matter of each Book shall develop organically out of its own life cell, making known its nature and direction as the development proceeds. The titles we have as- signed to these Books in the following synopsis are based on the relationship of Joyce's fourfold cycle to the Four Ages of the Viconian Corso-Ricorso. As here presented, the titles, and the synopsis itself, are intended to serve as a handrail for the reader groping his way along unfamiliar galleries.
Book I: The Book of the Parents
Chapter ? : Finnegan's Fall (pp. ? -? ? )*
The first four paragraphs are the suspended tick of time between a cycle just past and one about to begin. They are in effect an overture, resonant
? ? * Our titles for the sixteen chapters into which the work is subdivided are adaptations from phrases in Joyce's text.
? ?
? ? A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake ? ? Synopsis and Demonstration ? ?
? with all the themes of Finnegans Wake. The dominant motif is the polylingual thunderclap of paragraph ? (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronnton- nerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk! ) which is the voice of God made audible through the noise of Finnegan's fall.
Narrative movement begins with the life, fall, and wake of hod carrier Finnegan (pp. ? -? ). The Wake scene fades into the landscape of Dublin and environs. Whereupon we review scenic, historic, prehistoric, and leg- endary evidences of Finnegan's all-suffusing presence (pp. ? -? ? ). The Wake scene re-emerges. At the sound of the word "whisky" (usqueadbaugham! ) the deceased sits up and threatens to rise, but the company soothes him back. The whole structure of the new day has been founded on the fact of his demise (pp. ? ? -? ? ). Primeval Finnegan has already been supplanted by HCE, who has arrived by sea to set up family and shop (pp. ? ? -? ? ).
Chapter ? : HCE--His Agnomen and Reputation (pp. ? ? -? ? )
A half-trustworthy account is given of the earliest days of HCE and of how he came by his curious name. The rumors of his misconduct in the Park are reviewed. We next are regaled with the story of how these rumors grew after his encounter with a certain tramp in Phoenix Park. The scurrilous tales culminate in a popular lampoon, "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly," which fixes on HCE the blame for all local ills.
Chapter ? : HCE--His Trial and Incarceration (pp. ? ? -? ? )
Through the fog screen of scandal little can be clarified. As the author points out, it all happened a long time ago and the participants are no longer alive--yet their counterparts dwell among us. A series of personages voluntarily arise to explain HCE's case. Somehow they all resemble the ac- cused. Passers-by are interviewed for their opinion of the celebrated wrong- doer (pp. ? ? -? ? ). The story is told of his arrest. His fate is compared to that of an American sugar-daddy. The women in the case are said to have come to unhappy ends. After the hurly-burly is over, HCE, the eternal scapegoat, is incarcerated for his own protection and roundly insulted through the keyhole of his cell by a visiting hog-caller from the U. S. A. (pp. ? ? -? ? ).
? Chapter ? : HCE--His Demise and Resurrection (pp. ? ? -? ? ? )
Various thoughts pass through the mind of the captive HCE. Meanwhile, a subaqueous grave is prepared for him at the bottom of Lough Neagh, which, presently, he is induced to enter. During the general chaos that im- mediately ensues, phantom apparitions of HCE are variously reported from several battlefields (pp. ? ? -? ? ).
The filthy paganism of his day and the origin of a certain mud mound in which a letter was deposited are described by the scrubwoman, Widow Kate. This is the first hint of the great Letter theme which foliates hugely throughout the book (pp. ? ? -? ?
