09 July 2022

Overture

James Joyce’s Sketch of Dublin (1926)

Riverrun

If Finnegans Wake were an opera, the first chapter would be the overture that the orchestra plays before the curtain goes up. When Joyce began the first draft of his novel in 1923, he started with I.2 [Book I, Chapter 2, the Humphriad I]—and by all appearances he intended this to be the opening chapter of the book. It was only in 1926 that he saw the need for an introduction of sorts. By then, he had already drafted much of I.2-5, I.7-8 and III.1-4 and a fragment of II.2. I summarized this in Part 8 of this series, Putting It all Together.

The overture is very often the last part of the opera to be composed. It is said that Mozart wrote the overture to Don Giovanni the night before the première and that the ink was still wet when the parts were distributed to the players. Over the centuries, composers have adopted a number of different approaches to the overture. Beethoven’s Leonore Overture Number 3 is a distillation of the complete opera: it is so dramatic in its own right that it overshadows the opera it is introducing. The Vorspiel to Wagner’s Siegfried, on the other hand, is just a short prelude that sets the scene effectively. In his Introducing Music, the Franco-Hungarian musicologist Ottó Károlyi coined the memorable phrase thematic directory for a third type of overture: one which the composer has farced with all the hit tunes from the opera, as though his intention was to compose a trailer for his new opera (Károlyi 113). The prelude to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a good example of this type of overture.

Ottó Károlyi

The opening chapter of Finnegans Wake is a thematic directory of the novel. Every salient moment or significant event in Finnegans Wake is foreshadowed in this chapter. The overarching structure of the novel—which, as we saw in Part 10, Our Exag and the Holy Trinity of Finnegans Wake, owes much to the philosophy of Giambattista Vico—is repeated in this chapter. That is why it is very important for the reader to become as familiar as possible with this difficult chapter.

And, yes, I am afraid it is quite difficult.

Chapelizod in 1900

A Working Model

Let me remind you of the working model that I have constructed to help orient myself as I read Finnegans Wake. I outlined this model in Part 13, A Working Hypothesis, and supplemented it in Part 16, The Text of Finnegans Wake, but a quick revision would not be out of place here:

  • Finnegans Wake has several levels, or planes of narrative, each of which contributes something to the whole.

  • The surface level depicts a single night in the life of the novel’s only real character: the elderly landlord of the Mullingar House, which is a pub in Chapelizod on the western outskirts of Dublin. This man is seventy years old. He is a widower. His three children are now adults. His daughter is married and living in Clontarf. His two sons have emigrated, one to Australia and one to America. On the opening page of the novel on this nocturnal plane of narrative, it is 11:32 pm on the night of Saturday 12 April 1924. At this precise moment the landlord falls asleep (RFW 003.14: The fall ...). He sleeps more or less soundly for the rest of the night, waking up around dawn the following morning (RFW 493.07: A way ...). His square bedroom is at the rear of the middle floor of his three-storey public house.

  • Immediately beneath this surface level, Finnegans Wake depicts a day in the life of the same character. This day is Friday-Saturday 21-22 March 1884. On this diurnal plane of narrative, the novel begins at 11:32 am and ends at the same time the following morning. The landlord is now a young man of thirty. He is happily married, with a wife and three young children. His hopes and dreams for the future have not yet foundered on the rocky reef of reality.

  • Beneath these levels there are undoubtedly other planes of narratives—a weekly one, for example, and an annual one—but for the first-time reader these are not nearly as important as the two I have just described, and may be largely ignored for the moment.

  • The text of Finnegans Wake is the stream of collective unconsciousness that passes through the landlord’s mind as he sleeps.

  • The history of the world is the story of the family writ large : The story of the family is the history of the world writ small. This is Finnegans Wake in a nutshell.

I hasten to add that much of this—perhaps, even, most of it—may be completely wrong. Each time I work my way through the book, or read someone else’s opinion of what Finnegans Wake means, I find that my working model has changed slightly. To recoin a phrase: it is a work in progress. But it has helped me to finally glimpse the wood in spite of the trees. I commend it to you at your own peril.

Mullingar House

Elucidating Finnegans Wake

Everyone knows that Finnegans Wake is not written in the simple, wideawake language found in your typical English novel. Its language is a strange polyglot—one which is clearly based on English but which has been enriched with a plethora of multilingual puns and phrases drawn from dozens of other languages. On a first reading, much of the text is—and should be—incomprehensible. That is the whole point. This is a book of the night, and textual obscurity is the literary equivalent of physical darkness. The extent of incomprehensibility, however, varies greatly from passage to passage.

If Finnegans Wake is music, it is polyphonic music. It does not make much sense when you follow only one line of the music. You must try to hear as many of the lines as possible. This is not easy. It is like juggling with five or six balls, and trying to keep them all in the air at the same time.

With the publication of the first fragments of Work in Progress in the mid-1920s, there began the game of deciphering this strange music—a task that goes hand-in-hand with that of reading the text. Joyce himself contributed some crumbs to this endeavour, but most of the work has been done by the scholars and readers who came after him. The task is still ongoing. The fruits of this labour can be found online at a number of websites, most notably FWEET, or between the covers of Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake. I mentioned a few other useful sources in Part 18, Being Resourceful.

Leslie L Lewis’s Diagram of Finnegans Wake

The pioneers of Wakean scholarship generally used the term gloss to denote any word, phrase or meaning hidden in the text of Finnegans Wake. McHugh adopted the term annotation as a catch-all for both glosses and any other exegetical matter that sheds light on the text. Raphael Slepon, the creator of FWEET, prefers the term elucidation, which literally means the shedding of light.

When elucidating a passage of Finnegans Wake, there are two extreme approaches one may take:

  • The Minimalist Approach

  • The Maximalist Approach

The minimalist approach is the one favoured by Danis Rose. He believes that any gloss not supported by an entry in one of the Finnegans Wake notebooks (or some other authorial source, such as a letter by Joyce), should not be accepted unless it is so obvious as to require no justification. The maximalist approach takes the opposite tack and tries to squeeze every last possible drop of meaning out of the text, no matter how strained or unlikely the resulting interpretation. This latter approach is the one favoured on FinnegansWiki, where anything goes. The correct approach probably lies somewhere between these two forms of insanity.

The minimalist approach has some obvious advantages: it does not lead us astray on wild-goose chases, and it is less likely to introduce bogus meanings into our interpretation of the text. It has one big drawback, though: many genuine glosses will undoubtedly be missed. Danis Rose himself has estimated that as many as ten of the Finnegans Wake notebooks have been lost, perhaps for good (Rose & O’Hanlon 519). How many glosses does that amount to? And, pace Rose, there must be many legitimate but far from obvious glosses that Joyce created on the spur of the moment without drawing upon a pre-existing note.

The biggest drawback of the maximalist approach should be too obvious to need stating, but I will state it: that of introducing false interpretations. But even if the more questionable glosses are dropped and only well-grounded ones are admitted, the maximalist approach can still overwhelm the first-time reader with too much information.

For the record, Joyce himself could be cited in support of the maximalist approach. There is an argument—I repeated it above—that the text of Finnegans Wake is a stream of unconsciousness. So, the argument proceeds, might there not be legitimate meanings hidden in the text that even Joyce himself was not aware of? In a letter to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce glosses an early draft of the opening page of the book. Note the phrase:

viola in all moods and senses (Letters I 15 November 1926)

This could be taken to mean every possible interpretation of the word viola, even ones Joyce is not consciously aware of.

For the first-time reader, there is probably a minimum amount of glossing that is required to make some sense of a given passage—just enough sense that the reader is not completely lost. Once this critical mass has been reached, you should stop interpreting and start reading again. Don’t try to understand everything the first time round: it’s a hopeless task.

One last point is worth repeating: reading Finnegans Wake and interpreting Finnegans Wake are two very different processes and should be kept separate. When you are reading a passage in Finnegans Wake and you come across something that makes no sense to you, don’t stop to look it up: keep reading and come back to it at a later date. No matter how well you come to know the text, there will always be something that makes no sense to you on almost every line. That is just how it is.

Well, I seem to have finally run out of reasons for further procrastination. Time to see what all the fuss is about.

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

References

  • 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)

  • Ottó Károlyi, Introducing Music, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex (1965, 1979)

  • Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, Fourth Edition, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland (2016)

  • Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)

  • László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, Paul Theobold, Chicago (1947)

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