23 June 2022

A Phoenix Park Nocturne

 


A Phoenix Park Nocturne

You mean to see we have been hadding a sound night’s sleep?

Finnegans Wake is a book of the night. Reduced to its simplest terms, it is a depiction of a single night in the life of a single character. Everything else is ancillary to this fundamental concept:

There are in a way no characters. It’s like a dream. The style is also changing, and unrealistic, like the dream world. If one had to name a character, it would be just an old man. (Ellmann 696)

Recently, while I was researching these articles, I came across an essay by the South-African academic Derek Attridge, in which he asked a very simple question that I had never considered before, and which I could not answer: At what point in the long process of crafting Finnegans Wake did Joyce decide that his book was to be a book of the night?

There is no compelling evidence that Joyce envisaged his new work as being in any way nocturnal when he first drafted the early vignettes—Roderick O’Conor, St Kevin’s Orisons, Mamalujo, etc—in 1923:

For nearly four years, from early 1923, when Joyce began work on his last book, to late 1926, by which time he had perfected his stylistic technique, completed versions of twelve of the seventeen chapters, and worked out an overall structure, there is very little evidence to suggest that he associated his laborious project with the night, sleep, or dreams. (Attridge 17-18)

Derek Attridge

Attridge surmised that the idea of Finnegans Wake as a nocturnal counterpart to Ulysses may have been put in Joyce’s mind by his brother Stanislaus. In August 1924, a few months after Ford Madox Ford had published the first fragment from Joyce’s Work in Progress, Stanislaus wrote to his brother Jim:

I have received one instalment of your yet unnamed novel in the Transatlantic Review. I don’t know whether the drivelling rigmarole about half a tall hat and ladies’ modern toilet chambers (practically the only things I understand in this nightmare production) is written with the deliberate intention of pulling the reader’s leg or not. You began this fooling in the Holles Street episode in Ulysses ... Or perhaps—a sadder supposition—it is the beginning of softening of the brain. (Letters III 7 August 1924)

By April 1926, however, there is some evidence that Joyce was beginning to see the nocturnal potentiality latent in his new work, and was even envisaging it as a counterpart of sorts to Ulysses. The following words were addressed to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver:

My brother says that having done the longest day in literature I am now conjuring up the darkest night. (Letters III 17 April 1926)

 

Stanislaus Joyce

By November, there can no longer be any doubt that Joyce saw his new work as nocturnal. Writing again to Weaver, apparently in response to criticisms of Book III by Ezra Pound, he remarked:

One great part of human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot. (Letters III 24 November 1926)

Attridge believed that it was only around this time that the nocturnal nature of Finnegans Wake took hold of Joyce’s imagination. With increasing regularity, he found himself defending his Work in Progress against accusations of incomprehensibility and obfuscation, and the simplest way to disarm the critics was to invoke this nocturnal defense.

In December 1929, The New Republic published an appraisal of Joyce’s œuvre by the literary critic Edmund Wilson. By then, transition had brought out more than a dozen fragments of Work in Progress, including all twelve chapters of Books I and III. Wilson summed up Joyce’s unfinished work as follows:

It is a sort of complement to Ulysses; Joyce has said of it that, as Ulysses deals with the day and with the conscious mind, so his new work is to deal with the night and with the subconscious. The whole of this new production is apparently to occupy itself with the single night’s sleep of a single character. (Wilson 92, Attridge 194)

 

Edmund Wilson

Attridge took issue with this interpretation, which he suspected was largely Wilson’s own, though he did concede that a close associate of Joyce’s, Stuart Gilbert, had made a similar comment in an extract from his book on Ulysses, which appeared in transition in November 1929:

Work in Progress, which deals exclusively with the night-hours, is thus the complement of Ulysses, an epic of the day. (Jolas 130, fn 1 : Attridge 195)

Among the many interpreters of Finnegans Wake, one stands out as the champion of this nocturnal aspect: John Bishop, associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. In Joyce’s Book of the Night, Bishop takes Joyce at his word when he told Jacques Mercanton:

Work in Progress? A nocturnal state, lunar. That is what I want to convey: what goes on in a dream, during a dream. Not what is left over afterward, in the memory. Afterward, nothing is left. (Bishop 8, Mercanton 701).

I reconstruct the nocturnal life. (Bishop 4, Mercanton 704)

 

Jacques Mercanton

Attridge, however, was not impressed with Bishop’s interpretation, which smacked of cherry-picking:

One of the problems with the methodology of John Bishop’s interpretation ... is his manipulation of the text in order to make it appear that one strand of thematic concerns—those relating to night, darkness, and the sleeping body—is more prominent than all the others. He achieves this by weaving together into his own sentences fragments from widely diverse parts of the book, and by privileging one out of the many meanings of a portmanteau when this one alone suits his argument. (Attridge 27).

Attridge’s criticisms should always be borne in mind when reading Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s book is a multilayered work. The nocturnal aspect is paramount to the surface layer, which depicts a sleeping man, but it is less relevant to the deeper—and, arguably, more important—layers of the work.

Finnegans Wake in a Nutshell

My favourite English translation of Homer’s Iliad is the prose translation of W H D Rouse, The Iliad: The Story of Achilles. It begins:

An angry man—there is my story.

The very first word of the ancient poem—μηνιν, wrath—encapsulates the entire epic of twenty-four books and more than fifteen thousand lines. The Wrath of Achilles: that’s the Iliad in a nutshell.

What about Joyce’s epic? Can Finnegans Wake be encapsulated by a handful of words? I believe it can:

There is Finnegans Wake in a nutshell. There is Joyce’s story. In Finnegans Wake Joyce recounts the history of mankind by relating the story of a single family:

I think I will write a history of the world. (Ellmann 537)

I might easily have written this story in the traditional manner. Every novelist knows the recipe. It is not very difficult to follow a simple, chronological scheme which the critics will understand. But I, after all, am trying to tell the story of this Chapelizod family in a new way. Time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of my book. Yet the elements are exactly what every novelist might use: man and woman, birth, childhood, night, sleep, marriage, prayer, death. There is nothing paradoxical about all this. Only I am trying to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose. Did you ever read Laurence Sterne? (Ellmann 554)

Joyce realized that the cyclic pattern which Giambattista Vico had discerned in the ebb and flow of human history could also be found in the generations of a single family—any family in any country in any age—for all families follow the same laws. The laws that govern history are ultimately the laws that govern human behaviour. Human beings are the atoms out of which history is made. Joyce’s story is a story of men, women and children, while Vico’s is one of states, empires and nations.

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

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