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).