Being Resourceful

 

Archbishop Marsh’s Library, Dublin

Now that we are finally ready to crack open a copy of Finnegans Wake and start reading, this might be an appropriate time to take a brief look at some helpful resources for the reader. Some of these resources are online, some offline.

Online Resources

Let us begin with some online resources.

FWEET is Raphael Slepon’s Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury. This is probably the best online source for searching and elucidating the text of Finnegans Wake, but it is much more than that. It also contains links to dozens of works that Joyce is known to have used as sources for Finnegans Wake, a bibliography of works used by Slepon to build the site, and links to relevant websites. The Finnegans Wake pagination and lineation are taken from the Faber and Faber new edition (1950) and the Viking Press 8th printing (1958), both of which retain the pagination of the original edition of 1939 but incorporate Joyce’s own corrections.

There was a project on the FWEET site to identify and catalogue all 9,000 or so emendations made by Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon, the editors of The Restored Finnegans Wake, which is my preferred edition of the text. Sadly, this project was abandoned after the tenth chapter, II.2, and has not yet been resumed.

The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection is a digital collection of Joycean studies maintained by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. All sixteen of these works are now out of print, but they are not out of copyright. Adaline Glasheen’s Third Census of Finnegans Wake, Louis O Mink’s A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer, and David Hayman’s A First-Draft Version of Finneganns Wake are particularly useful for the inexperienced reader, while Roland McHugh’s The Sigla of Finnegans Wake and Clive Hart’s Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake are aimed at more experienced readers. All sixteen works, however, are worth reading. (I might also add McHugh’s The Finnegans Wake Experience on the Internet Archive.)

FinnegansWiki is an online project to annotate the text of Finnegans Wake. I have contributed to this site myself, but I do not know if there are any active contributors working on it now. It’s worth consulting when elucidating Finnegans Wake, but the further you get into the book the more likely it is to find yourself staring at a page of unannotated text.

From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay is Peter Chrisp’s wonderful blog on Finnegans Wake and all things Joyce. There are now a plethora of private blogs devoted to all things Joycean—I’ve added to their number myself—but Peter’s is one of the better ones out there. It is always worth a look.

Jorn Barger

Robot Wisdom is an archived version of Jorn Barger’s blog, the Internet’s first ever weblog. Barger is one of the most insightful and valuable contributors to Joycean scholarship ever, but navigating one’s way through this treasure trove of riches is no longer as easy as it was when Barger was actively blogging on his own site. Some of Barger’s Joycean blogs have been rescued and given new life by another blogger who calls himself Tim Finnegan—is this Barger himself?

Ricorso is Bruce Stewart’s huge online encyclopaedia of Irish literature. The James Joyce section is quite extensive and worth browsing.

Genetic Joyce Studies is an electronic journal for the study of the genesis and evolution of Joyce’s works. It may be too academic for the casual reader of Finnegans Wake, but many of its articles shed invaluable light on the darker aspects of the book.

Finnegans, Wake! is the homepage of the Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin (Texas) and a valuable blog “devoted to Finnegans Wake containing interpretations, reflections, relevant links, and other information concerning James Joyce’s greatest but least-read masterpiece.”

John Gordon’s Finnegans Wake Blog John Gordon, Professor Emeritus in English at the University of Connecticut, is best known as the author of Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary. I don’t agree with Gordon’s largescale interpretation of the novel—a subject I will be returning to in due course—but many of his insights are pure gold. His Finnegans Wake blog was created to supplement Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake.

Through Finnegans Wake is artist Gian Paolo Guerini’s curious site. It contains some interesting files and links, including one in which the entire text of Finnegans Wake has been arranged in alphabetic order!

Print Media

These offline resources are books that are not freely available or easily accessible online.

The Restored Finnegans Wake: This version of Finnegans Wake was edited by brothers Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon, and was first published by Houyhnhnm Press in 2010. This is the edition that I now use, though it is good advice to keep the classic text handy as a reference.

Annotations to Finnegans Wake: Roland McHugh’s classic work, now in its fourth edition, was compiled with the express intention that it might be used side-by-side with Joyce’s text. McHugh imagined the reader holding both books open and scanning across from Finnegans Wake to the corresponding page in the Annotations. I do not recommend this approach to Joyce’s monster. I think it is much more rewarding to keep these two procedures—reading Finnegans Wake and elucidating Finnegans Wake—separate. Read a passage through from beginning to end without interruption—preferably aloud and as part of a public reading group—and do not worry whether you understand it or not. Later, at your leisure, go through the same passage line by line, word by word, and squeeze as much meaning out of it as you can. This too can be a shared experience.

The Internet and its search engines have rendered McHugh’s Annotations almost obsolete. Although I replaced my copy of the first edition with a copy of the second edition as soon as it came out, and subsequently replaced that with a copy of the third edition, I have so far resisted the temptation to upgrade to the fourth edition, which was published six years ago. Furthermore, the pagination and lineation follow those of the classic text, not The Restored Finnegans Wake, which I use. Nevertheless, it is ignored at one's peril.

James Joyce: Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce first came out in 1959, but a revised version was published in Joyce’s centenary year 1982. At times, Ellmann’s text is more hagiography than biography: biographers should not write biographies of people they admire. The true Joyce—who was not nearly as admirable or as likeable a character as Ellmann’s Joyce—is often lost in the blizzard of minutiae and biographical details. But, like McHugh’s Annotations, this is a classic of Joycean scholarship that simply cannot be ignored.

I could quite easily extend this booklist to librarial dimensions, but it is probably wiser to add new titles to our Wakean bookshelf on a piecemeal basis.

Recordings of Finnegans Wake

The original 1939 text of Finnegans Wake is now in the public domain, and there are several free recordings available online. There are also some commercially available recordings. These are of mixed quality.

Patrick Horgan

Patrick Horgan: Made in 1985 by the English actor Patrick Horgan, this was the first unabridged recording of Finnegans Wake. It is still one of the best. Unfortunately, the audio quality of the online version is quite poor. I wish someone with expertise in this field would remaster the audio files. In the meantime, if you import the files into Audacity and apply Noise Removal and Click Removal, the quality can be improved significantly.

Waywords and Meansigns is an online project to set the whole of Finnegans Wake to music. They have already recorded two complete settings of the text and are currently adding settings of shorter passages on a piecemeal basis. The music often overpowers the text, and there are many misreadings and mispronunciations, but the enthusiasm is obvious and infectious.

Simon Loekle

Simon Loekle’s Finnegans Wake Audio Archive: Simon Loekle had only completed about six of the seventeen chapters in Finnegans Wake at the time of his all-too-early death. These readings are of high quality.

James Joyce

James Joyce Reads Anna Livia Plurabelle: In 1929 Joyce himself recorded the closing pages of I.8, Anna Livia Plurabelle. It is the only recording of Finnegans Wake by the author, and is still the best introduction to the novel. A cleaner recording can also be heard on the YouTube channel transformingArt.

The Most Ever Company: The YouTube channel Tmec Rep has an ongoing project to record the Wake. Currently (June 2022), they have posted videos for the first nine chapters. You can follow the text onscreen while you listen.

Gian Paolo Guerini

Through Finnegans Wake: Gian Paolo Guerini has compiled a number of recordings drawn from various of the sources listed above.

Patrick Healy

Patrick Healy’s Reading of Finnegans Wake: This is a complete recording of Joyce’s original text. It was made by Irish writer Patrick Healy over a period of four days in 1992 and has a running time of about 25 hours. Healy reads at breakneck speed and introduces many egregious errors. It is still in copyright and The Lilliput Press’s current price-tag is prohibitive—thankfully. The website UbuWeb, however, has posted all 132 tracks online. I don’t know whether this is legal and above board—I leave the browser to decide. The kindest comment I can make on Healy’s performance is that it was done as an experiment, but, in my opinion, it is an experiment that should never be repeated.

Barry McGovern and Marcella Riordan: It has been said that the advent of the audiobook has revolutionized the reading of Finnegans Wake. Irish actors Barry McGovern and Marcella Riordan’s performance for Naxos Audiobooks is the first commercially available unabridged recording of Finnegans Wake. It is now available as an Audible download, making it easier than ever for anyone to make their way through this mighty tome. The recording lasts more than 29 hours and is exceptional. It is surely worth one credit.

At the time of writing (June 2022), there are still no recordings of Finnegans Wake on Librivox. Hopefully, this inexplicable state of affairs will change in the near future.

And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.

Remaining Relevant

 

James Joyce (Zürich 1938)

During the seventeen years that James Joyce spent writing Finnegans Wake, he was beset by one abiding fear: that of becoming irrelevant. The publication of Ulysses had thrust Joyce into the public eye. He was lionized by his readers and vilified by his detractors, while the critics placed him on a pedestal and worshiped him as though he were a second Shakespeare.

The composition of Finnegans Wake would take a heavy toll on Joyce’s fading eyesight, but the fear of going blind was nothing compared to this fear of becoming irrelevant.

Joyce knew from the outset that his next book would not be following Ulysses into print anytime soon. The completion of what became known as Work in Progress would require the labour of many years, and long before he reached the end, Joyce would come to look upon his creation as a Frankenstein’s monster:

He told me about new difficulties with his editor, objectively moreover, knowing full well himself that his book was a monster. Yet, that monster was his only pleasure ... (Mercanton & Parks 714)

Harriet Shaw Weaver

Joyce made use of several ploys to maintain public interest in his monster. Rather than write in splendid isolation—the Romantic artist in his Parisian garret—he co-opted the littératrice Harriet Shaw Weaver as his collaborator. This remarkably patient and generous woman was for seventeen years his muse, sounding board, editor, patron, banker, librarian, wet nurse, secretary, archivist, and tireless correspondent.

Joyce was also anxious to have early drafts of the chapters of Work in Progress appear at regular intervals in progressive or well-established literary journals. About fifty such bleeding chunks appeared in print between April 1924, when Ford Madox Ford published the Mamalujo vignette in The Transatlantic Review, and April 1938, when Eugene and Maria Jolas published a fragment of the Butt and Taff episode from II.3 in transition. A few fragments were even issued in limited editions as actual books in their own right.

Curiously, though, Joyce consistently declined to be interviewed by professional journalists. Appearing in the pages of the popular press was a bridge too far for him: not even Finnegans Wake was worth that level of humiliation.

Haveth Childers Everywhere and Anna Livia Plurabelle

The Title of the Book

We do not know for certain when Joyce hit upon Finnegans Wake as the title of his new book. By his own admission it was around 1923, but even as late as 1927 he was reserving the right to play around with it.

The materials for a new book had been forming slowly in his mind. The structure of it was still obscure to him, so that when the sculptor August Suter asked what he was writing, he could answer truthfully, “it’s hard to say.” “Then what is the title of it?” asked Suter. This time Joyce was less candid: “I don’t know. It is like a mountain that I tunnel into from every direction, but I don’t know what I will find.” Actually he did know the title at least, and had told it to Nora in strictest secrecy. (Ellmann 543)

The secret of the true title of Work in Progress was another game Joyce played to ensure that both he and the book remained relevant to the reading public during the long interval between the publication of Ulysses and the eventual appearance of Finnegans Wake. The first victim to be inveigled into playing this silly game was, once again, the hapless Harriet Shaw Weaver:

While in London for the P.E.N. Club meeting in April 1927, he had suggested that she try to guess the title of his book. It was another effort to bring her within Finnegans Wake’s binding circle. For the next several months their correspondence was full of rather misleading hints and good, but wrong, guesses. (Ellmann 597)

On 16 April 1927, Joyce sent a postcard to Weaver, in which he wished her a pleasant Easter and dropped a few obtuse hints:

I am making an engine with only one wheel. No spokes of course. The wheel is a perfect square. You see what I am driving at, don’t you? I am awfully solemn about it, mind you, so you must not think it is a silly story about the mouse and the grapes. No, it’s a wheel, I tell the world. And it’s all square. (Letters I 16 April 1927)

In Ulysses Bloom had dreamt of squaring the circle. In Finnegans Wake Joyce succeeded in circling the square: the book is a circle in the sense that its opening and closing sentences are actually the two halves of the same sentence : it is a square in the sense that it comprises four parts.

A month later Joyce gave Weaver some more hints:

The title is very simple and as commonplace as can be. It is not Kitty O’Shea as some wit suggested, though it is in two words. I want to think over it more as I propose to make some experiments with it also ... My remarks about the engine were not meant as a hint at the title. I meant that I wanted to take up several other arts and crafts and teach everybody how to do everything properly so as to be in the fashion. (Letters I 12 May 1927)

Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann takes up the story:

Richard Ellmann

Her next suggestion, on May 19, 1927, was “One Squared.” Joyce liked this one too, but said, “The title I have projected is much more commonplace and accords with JJ and S and AGS & Co., and ought to be fairly plain from the reading of [HCE’s siglum on its back]. The sign in this form means HCE interred in the landscape.” [Letters I 31 May 1927] (He was hinting at Finnegan’s interment.) Her next try was “Dublin Ale” on June 13, Dublin being a play on “doubling,” then on June 28, “Ireland’s Eye,” “Phoenix Park,” and others in a reckless heap. He said Phoenix Park was close. She came closer yet with “Finn MacCool,” and, abetted by more hints, “Finn’s Town” or “Finn’s City” on September 17. This was close enough so that Joyce, who did not really want her to guess the title, but only to guess around it, did not encourage her further. Finnegan went unidentified. (Ellmann 597)

Those last few guesses are very close to Finn’s Hotel, which was probably Joyce’s original choice (RFW 399.35), before he finally settled on Finnegans Wake. The references to Jameson whiskey, Guinness and HCE’s siglum, however, lend more weight to the latter. It is possible that he was keeping his options open, but clearly some reference to the ballad Finnegan’s Wake was in the hat by 1927 at the latest.

By the spring of 1938 the title of the book was still a secret, and many of Joyce’s admirers had joined the game. On one occasion, Stuart Gilbert almost guessed the title of the book, albeit unwittingly. Joyce didn’t bat an eyelash:

Jacques Mercanton

“I didn’t even smile. I thanked the good fathers who trained me so well,” Joyce said later. “Some,” he said, “have put the title in an envelope, but they will be disappointed,” He seemed to take a pleasure, both childish and magical, in this game, prolonged for so many years, as though it were essential that his mysterious book be veiled with one mystery the more before making its appearance in the world. (Mercanton & Parks 711)

Joyce hoped that the book would be ready for publication on 4 July 1938, his father’s birthday, despite his publisher’s objections that summer publications were bad for sales. But this deadline passed with the book still unfinished:

When the publisher begged for the book’s title, still undivulged, Joyce said he would give it to him just before the book went to the binder, and no sooner. (Ellmann 707)

Then he talked about his arguments with his publisher, Faber and Faber, who insisted on knowing the real title of his book, which Joyce refused to divulge. “I have kept it to myself for sixteen years. I will supply it at the last minute, when I please. To be so exacting about a book like mine is absurd.” (Mercanton & Parks 707)

Finally, in the summer of 1938, the secret came out:

James Joyce and Eugene Jolas

That summer of 1938 Joyce had to give up to some of his Paris friends, though still not to Faber & Faber or the Viking Press, the one secret about his book which he wished to keep a little longer, its title. He had often issued a challenge to his intimates to guess what it might be, and offered a thousand francs to anyone who succeeded. Gilbert, Gorman, Beckett, Léon, and Jolas had all tried and failed, like Miss Weaver before them. One July night on the terrace of Fouquet’s Joyce repeated his offer over several bottles of Riesling. Mrs. Joyce began to sing an Irish song about Mr. Flannigan and Mr. Shannigan. Joyce, startled, asked her to stop. When he saw no harm had been done, he very distinctly, as a singer does it, made the lip motions which seemed to indicate F and W. Maria Jolas guessed, “Fairy’s Wake.” Joyce looked astonished and said, “Brava! But something is missing.” The Jolases thought about it for some days, and suddenly on the morning of August 2 Eugene Jolas saw that the title must be Finnegans Wake. At dinner that evening he threw the words in the air, and Joyce blanched. Slowly he set down the wineglass he held. “Ah Jolas, you’ve taken something out of me,” he said almost sadly, then became quite merry. When they parted that night, Jolas wrote later, “He embraced me, danced a few of his intricate steps, and asked: ‘How would you like to have the money?’” Jolas replied, “in sous,” and the following morning Joyce arrived with a bag filled with ten-franc pieces, which he instructed Jolas’s daughters to serve their father at lunch. But he swore the Jolases to secrecy until he had written “the final full stop, though there is none.” (Ellmann 708)

Curiously, no one thought of informing Harriet Shaw Weaver of Jolas’s discovery. It is possible that the woman who had done more for Joyce than anyone else to bring Finnegans Wake into the world, and who had made the first guesses back in 1927, only discovered the title of the book when Joyce sent her a copy on the day of its publication, 4 May 1938. As a further insult, it is also possible that the thousand francs Joyce gave to Jolas as his prize for finally guessing the title were actually supplied by Joyce’s generous benefactor—the same Harriet Shaw Weaver! Mais qui sait?

Finnegans Wake

Finnegan’s Wake is the title of a popular Irish-American ballad about a drunken Irish navvy who falls from a ladder and breaks his skull, only to wake up during a riot at his wake. In Joyce’s book the song features most heavily in the opening chapter, so we will be taking a closer look at it then.

Shortly after publication, Faber and Faber and Viking Press had to reassure their readers that the omission of the apostrophe in the title of Finnegans Wake was not a typo, but what the author wrote—or, rather, didn’t write (Herbert 14). At the very outset, Joyce is warning the reader that what the eye sees and what the ear hears are not necessarily the same thing. Both contribute something to the overall meaning. By omitting the apostrophe from the title, he is also opening it up to fresh interpretations—though, of course, it still sounds the same. Finnegans becomes the plural of Finnegan, an Irish Everyman, and Wake is now a verb. But is the verb in the indicative mood or the subjunctive?

The title can also be analysed into three parts: one French, one Latin, and one English:

• French: Fin, end

• Latin: negans, denying, negating

• English: Wake, awaken!

A circular novel that begins again as it ends, Finnegans Wake also reminds one of the unboundedly long song Michael Finnegan.

Finnegan also reminds one of the legendary Irish figure Finn MacCool, a giant among Lilliputians, who features prominently in the book: Finn again’s awake.

And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.

The Text of Finnegans Wake

 

Early Draft of the Opening Words of Finnegans Wake

In Ulysses Joyce famously pioneered a narrative mode known as stream of consciousness, in which the writer tries to capture in print the thoughts and emotions passing through the conscious mind of one of his characters. The technique is used episodically throughout the novel, but it achieves its apotheosis in the final episode, Penelope, in which Molly Bloom’s interior monologue is presented without interruption as a series of eight huge “sentences” with no internal punctuation:

... and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. (Ulysses)

In Finnegans Wake Joyce uses a similar technique, but with three important differences:

• In this book of the night, it is the unconscious mind that speaks to us.

• The technique is used continuously throughout the book, without a break.

• The unconscious mind that speaks to us is not that of a single individual.

That’s worth repeating: The text of Finnegans Wake is a stream of collective unconsciousness. Joyce, however, was skeptical of the newfangled science of psychoanalysis. Carl Jung does make an appearance in Finnegans Wake—he even treated Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter Lucia for a time—but the source of Joyce’s shared mind was closer to home. As his longstanding friend Frank Budgen put it:

With regard to the language used by Joyce, particularly in Finnegans Wake, it is sometimes forgotten that in his early years in Dublin Joyce lived among the believers and adepts in magic gathered round the poet Yeats. Yeats held that the borders of our minds are always shifting, tending to become part of the universal mind, and that the borders of our memory also shift and form part of the universal memory. This universal mind and memory could be evoked by symbols. When telling me this Joyce added that in his own work he never used the recognized symbols, preferring instead to use trivial and quadrivial words and local geographical allusions. The intention of magical evocation, however, remained the same. (Budgen 361)

Frank Budgen

This idea of a universal mind and the tendency of the individual mind to become part of it is central to Finnegans Wake. We have Joyce’s own testimony that there is really only one character in the book—an old man—and that his grip on reality is tenuous at best:

There are, so to say, no individual people in the book ... If one were to speak of a person in the book, it would have to be of an old man, but even his relationship to reality is doubtful. (Vinding et al 180-181)

I have identified this old man with the elderly landlord of the Mullingar House in Chapelizod, on the western outskirts of Dublin. But this man’s mind seems to be a repository of all human knowledge—past and present (and possibly even future). The text of Finnegans Wake is brimming with things that the landlord of an Irish pub could not possibly know. But the universal mind knows them, and it is this mind that is speaking to us through the unconscious mind of the individual. In fact, in one chapter of the book—III.3—several characters speak to the Four Old Men using Shaun as a mouthpiece.

Joyce had already toyed with the idea that individual conscious minds might be linked to one another on a subliminal level. In Ulysses, there are many instances of a telepathic connection between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. In the first hour of Bloomsday, we have the following points of contact between these two men:

• They are both in mourning

• They both observe the same cloud in the morning sky

• They both contemplate the geography of Ireland

• They both learn from postcards about Milly Bloom and Alec Bannon

• They both think of a dead man

• They both leave the house key behind when they depart

• They both hear clock chimes at 8:45 and imagine what the bells are singing

This list is far from exhaustive.

In Finnegans Wake this pattern of parallelism—or, perhaps, parallax—becomes fractal. The same patterns recur at different levels of the book. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce tells the same tale over and over again.

Jacques Mercanton

Obscurity

Finnegans Wake is a notoriously difficult book to read. But this unreadability is not perverse: it is an essential part of the book’s nature. Joyce took pains to achieve this effect. The young Swiss writer, Jacques Mercanton, who knew Joyce during the final years of composition, recounted:

That day I found him installed in his bedroom, half-reclining in a chaise longue, Stuart Gilbert seated near him at a little table. They were going over a passage that was “still not obscure enough,” as Joyce said, and inserting Samoyed words into it. (Mercanton & Parks 710)

At the simplest level, Finnegans Wake is a depiction of a single night in the life of a single character. It takes place in a dark world coloured only in shades of gray. It is only in the final chapter, as the Sun rises, that colour returns to the world.

Bill Bird

Joyce once told the American journalist Bill Bird:

About my new work—do you know, Bird, I confess I can’t understand my critics, like Pound and Miss Weaver. They say it’s obscure. They compare it of course with Ulysses. But the action of Ulysses was chiefly in the daytime, and the action of my new work takes place at night. It’s natural things should not be so clear at night, isn’t it now? (Ellmann 590)

The Latin word for darkness is obscuritas, the origin of our word obscurity: obscurity of language is the literary equivalent of physical darkness. Reading Finnegans Wake is like groping in the dark: you feel your way along : you reconstruct your environment from a series of vague hints : you are never completely sure where you are, but nor are you ever completely lost.

Joyce, however, insisted that the obscurity of Finnegans Wake was not haphazard or arbitrary. Jacques Mercanton again:

The terrible question about the value of his efforts, about the rigor of his method of invention, about the ultimate truth of his work, seemed to vanish before his eyes. Nothing stood but the magical text, with its multiple and subtle significations, some of which he explained to me as we read along, modulating certain phrases as though they were to be sung. (Mercanton & Parks 709)

Using whatever examples came to hand, he later explained to me his precise method of working according to the precise laws of phonetics, the laws that rule over all languages and preside over their evolution, since to do that was, in his opinion, to obey the laws of history.

So too, in his minute and exhaustive researches, he forced himself to avoid all arbitrary choices. (Mercanton & Parks 718)

Whether Joyce actually followed this plan as meticulously as he claimed is another matter. Sometimes the obscurity does strike the reader as perverse—even slapdash. One of the pioneers of Wakean scholarship, Matthew Hodgart, once noted:

He drew up lists of key words in several dozen languages, and at a very late stage in the revision of the text he threw them in, in a casual and even random manner, as if using a pepper-pot. Since he did not know these languages he often made mistakes, or so the experts tell us. The result is a wilful obscuring of that which was already highly obscure, while the passages most heavily loaded with obscure languages are neither very witty nor very melodious. (Hodgart 136)

Padraic Colum

But another of Joyce’s associates, the Irish writer Padraic Colum, corroborates Mercanton’s testimony:

From time to time I was asked to suggest a word that would be more obscure than the word already there. Joyce would consider my offer, his eyes with their enlarged pupils behind glasses expectant, his face intent, his figure upstanding, “I can’t use it,” was what he would say five times out of six. (Mary and Padraic Colum 158)

Wherever the truth lies, Joyce believed that the obscurity of the text would not deter the determined reader. As he told the Czech artist Adolf Hoffmeister in 1930:

I don’t agree that difficult literature is necessarily so inaccessible. Of course each intelligent reader can read and understand it—if he returns to the text again and again. He is embarking on an adventure with words. In fact, Work in Progress [ie Finnegans Wake] is more satisfying than other books because I give readers the opportunity to supplement what they read with their own imagination. Some people will be interested in the origins of words; the technical games; philological experiments in each individual verse. Each word has all the magic of a living thing. Each living thing can be shaped. (Hoffmeister)

Adolf Hoffmeister

There is no substitute for familiarity with the text, and this is best acquired by reading the book over and over again—preferably aloud, and preferably as part of a public reading group. Understanding, however, also requires word-by-word analysis, which should supplement the reading. Finnegans Wake must be approached on two fronts.

Vico

In an earlier article in this series I referred to the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico as one of the three Patron Saints of Finnegans Wake (the other two being his fellow Italians Dante Alighieri and Giordano Bruno). In his epochal work the New Science (Scienza Nuova), Vico spoke of a common mental language:

161: There must in the nature of human things be a mental language common to all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social life, and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as these same things may have diverse aspects. A proof of this is afforded by proverbs or maxims of vulgar wisdom, in which substantially the same meanings find as many diverse expressions as there are nations ancient and modern.

162: This common mental language is proper to our Science, by whose light linguistic scholars will be enabled to construct a mental vocabulary common to all the various articulate languages living and dead. We gave a particular example of this in the first edition of the New Science. There we proved that the names of the first family fathers, in a great number of living and dead languages, were given them because of the various properties which they had in the state of the families and of the first commonwealths, at the time when the nations were forming their languages. As far as our small erudition will permit, we shall make use of this vocabulary in all the matters we discuss. (Bergin & Fisch 60)

Giambattista Vico

Thirty years ago, the American professor of philosopher Donald Phillip Verene asserted that the language of Finnegans Wake is Vico’s common mental language:

Vico’s “common mental language” is Joyce’s language; and Vico’s claim that “memory is the same as imagination” is Joyce’s guiding principle ... Since this is a mental language, it can never be spoken or written as such ... Yet such a mental language must exist or we could not identify any particular language as language. Since human nature is constant from nation to nation, there must exist in the human mind an order of meanings such that any particular language may be regarded as an attempt to draw these meanings forth in its own way, much as an orator draws forth his speech from topics and places, and the same places can be used to draw forth other speeches. If we work backward from the myriad of articulate languages, we should be able to reach commonalities that would most nearly represent this original mental language from which the world is made by the human mind ... the language of Finnegans Wake ... is as close as we can come to grasping the common mental language as a language expressing the particular universals of humanity. Vico points the way to this conception of language; Joyce enacts it. (Verene 57 ... 62-63)

Donald P Verene

In 1936, while visiting Copenhagen, Joyce met the Danish poet Tom Kristensen:

Kristensen asked him for help on Work in Progress, and Joyce referred him to Vico. “But do you believe in the Scienza Nuova?” asked Kristensen. “I don’t believe in any science,” Joyce answered, “but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn't when I read Freud or Jung.” (Ellmann 693)

Tom Kristensen

Vico did not take this idea of a common mental language any further, so Joyce was left to his own devices when he invented one for himself—if, indeed, that is what he was doing when he wrote Finnegans Wake.

Vico did assign a particular type of language to each of the three ages that comprise a cycle of World history (the theocratic age of gods, the aristocratic age of heroes, and the democratic age of men) and from these he derived the common mental language:

35: From these three languages is formed the mental dictionary by which to interpret properly all the various articulated languages, and we make use of it here wherever it is needed ... Such a lexicon is necessary for learning the language spoken by the ideal eternal history traversed in time by the histories of all nations ... (Bergin & Fisch 20)

482: From the foregoing we gather that the first laws everywhere were the divine laws of Jove. So ancient in origin is the usage which has come down in the languages of many Christian nations of taking heaven for God. We Italians, for example, say voglia il cielo, “may heaven please,” and spero al cielo, “I hope to heaven,” meaning God in both expressions. The Spanish have the same usage. The French say bleu for “blue,” and since blue is a term of sense perception they must have meant by “bleu” the sky; and, just as the gentile nations used “sky” for Jove, the French must have used bleu for God in that impious oath of theirs, moure bleu!, “God’s death!”; and they still say “parbleu!”, “by God!” And this may serve as an example of the Mental Dictionary proposed in the Axioms [162], which has been discussed above. (Bergin & Fisch 144-145)

It is doubtful, however, whether any of this is helpful to the reader—seasoned or novice—of Finnegans Wake.

And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.