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.

References

Thomas Goddard Bergin, Max Harold Fisch, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Translated from the Third Edition (1774), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York (1948)
Frank Budgen, Further Recollections of James Joyce, in Clive Hart (editor), James Joyce and the Making of ‛Ulysses’, and Other Writings, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1972)
Mary and Padraic Colum, Our Friend James Joyce, Doubleday & Company Limited, Garden City, New York (1958)
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
Matthew John Caldwell Hodgart, James Joyce: A Student’s Guide, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London (1978)
Adolf Hoffmeister, Michelle Woods (translator), The Game of Evenings, Granta Publications, London
James Joyce, Ulysses, Shakespeare and Company, Paris (1922)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939, 1949)
James Joyce, Stuart Gilbert (editor) & Richard Ellmann (editor), The Letters of James Joyce, Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Viking Press, New York
James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
Roland McHugh, The Finnegans Wake Experience, University of California Press, Berkeley (1981)
Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Fourth Edition), The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland (2016)
Jacques Mercanton, Lloyd C Parks (translator), The Hours of James Joyce, Part I, The Kenyon Review, Volume 24, Number 4, Pages 700-730, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio (1962)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
Donald Phillip Verene, On Vico, Joyce and Beckett, in Matthew Feldman & Karim Mamdani (editors), Beckett/Philosophy, ibidemVerlag, Stuttgart (2015)
Ole Vinding (author), Helge Irgens-Moller (translator) and Brookes Spencer (translator), James Joyce in Copenhagen, James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 14, Number 2, Joyce Reminiscences Issue, Pages 173-184, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1977)

Image Credits

Early Draft of the Opening Words of Finnegans Wake: James Joyce (December 1926), British Library, BL MS 47472, Fair Use
Bill Bird: Copyright Unknown, Fair Use
Adolf Hoffmeister: Copyright Unknown, Fair use
Giambattista Vico: Francesco Solimena (artist), Public Domain
Tom Kristensen: Copyright Unknown, Fair Use

Finnegans Wake - A Prescriptive Guide

28 June 2022