Finnegan’s Wake and Finnegans Wake

Finigans Wake (Durnal Version)

The plot of Finnegan’s Wake is fairly simple, but the variant readings of the lyrics—in the last few articles we have examined four variants—have confused some of the details. In outline, the story goes as follows:

Tim Finnegan is an Irish emigrant to America. He lives in Walker Street, New York, and is employed as a hodman on a building site. He is a chronic alcoholic, who starts each day with a glass of whiskey. One morning he goes to work quite drunk and falls from a ladder. He breaks his skull and is presumed dead. His friends take him home and prepare his wake. Tim’s “corpse” is wrapped up in a white sheet and laid out on the bed, with a gallon of whiskey at his feet and a barrel of porter at his head. Mrs Finnegan (who may be Tim’s mother or his wife) provides tea, cakes, pipes, tobacco and whiskey punch for the guests, who then commence to dance.

—Such a neat clean corpse did you ever see? says Biddy O’Brien, a young woman who fancied Tim. Arrah, Tim avourneen, why did you die?

—Ah, hould your gab! says Judy Magee, a rival lover.

A third woman, Peggy O’Connor, rebukes Judy:

—Now, Judy, says she, you’re wrong, I’m sure.

But Judy responds by giving her a belt on the mouth.

Everyone takes sides and a riot ensues. The women claw at one another with their finger nails, while the men beat one another with shillelaghs. When Mickey Mulvaney sticks his head in, Tim Donavan flings a measure of whiskey at him. It misses but lands on the bed and some of the whiskey splashes on Finnegan’s face. To everyone’s amazement, Tim comes back to life. He rises from the bed and proceeds to attack both the men and the women:

—T’anam ’on dhiabhal! D’ye think I’m dead!

Taking a synoptic view of all four versions of the song, I would have to say that the Durnal Version is the most faithful one to this simple story. Its lyrics are quite crude, but they are internally consistent. The other three versions all have certain inconsistencies or plot holes:

As I pointed out in an earlier article, only the Durnal Version “kills off” Tim before we first hear the chorus describing his wake. The other versions first describe the dancing and the fun at Tim’s wake when Tim is still alive and well.
In the Durnal Version the argument that leads to the riot proceeds logically: Biddy and Mrs Finigan bewail Tim’s death : Judy tells them to shut up : Peggy rebukes Judy : Judy punches Peggy : A riot ensues.
In the Bryant-Glover Version, Peggy rebukes Biddy, which makes no sense. Then Judy punches Peggy, which also makes no sense. The next line—I left her sprawling on the flure—is also anomalous. Clearly, the writer of this version has mixed things up. The Poole and Ellmann Versions are also inconsistent here.
The line ’Twas woman to woman and man to man, occurs in all four versions, making the point that in the riot the men and the women fight separately. But only the Durnal Version mentions two types of weapons: Shillelaghs for the men and “nails” for the women. Shillelagh law may have been all the rage in the men’s riot, but Irish women would not attack one another with shillelaghs.

It may be ridiculous to look so closely into the lyrics of a vulgar comic song from a New York music hall—’Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so—but if there is any merit in this analysis, it suggests that the Durnal Version, for all its crudities, may be the original version after all. Perhaps it was published in 1854, as the title page claims—though I still think that is a misprint for 1864, the date given on page two.

James Joyce (Zürich 1915)

Joyce and Finnegan’s Wake

What was it about this vulgar song that Joyce found so appealing? Around the time Finnegans Wake was published, someone sent Joyce a typescript of the lyrics of the Poole Version of the song and Joyce scribbled the following message on the sheet:

This, of course, is not mine. It is an old wellknown and quite vulgar Irish “comic” song of the 50’s or so which I have used as title.

Joyce’s Handwritten Note on Tim Finigan’s Wake

So even Joyce considered it quite vulgar. And note how “comic” is dressed up in quotes. Is Joyce suggesting that behind the vaudevillian slapstick there is a serious side to the song?

In the 1950s, Richard Ellmann saw Finnegan as a latter-day version of a mythical character of the past:

The title came from the ballad about the hod-carrier who falls from a ladder to what is assumed to be his death, but is revived by the smell of the whisky at his wake. But behind this Irish master builder was a more ancient Irish prototype, the legendary hero and wise man Finn MacCumhal. (Ellmann 543-544)

Roland McHugh also saw a connection between Tim Finnegan and the legendary Irish hero:

Finnegan’s name suggests that of the hero Finn MacCool, of monumental stature and exploits. (McHugh 14)

This is all very fine, and no one would deny the connection, but Finn MacCool is really beside the point. McHugh came closer to the mark when he interpreted the song as a resurrection myth:

One of the primary ... avatars [of HCE] is Tim Finnegan the builder, who falls from a ladder and is taken home with a fractured skull, assumed dead. When splashed with whiskey during his wake he revives. The resurrection myth is influential in I.1. Finnegan falls at 006.07-10 [RFW 005.22-25] and attempts to rise at 024.15 [RFW 019.23], the words of the ballad being parodied at both points. (McHugh 13)

Finnegan’s Wake as resurrection myth is a much more important element—one which the English novelist Anthony Burgess had already pointed up in 1967:

Anthony Burgess

This ballad may be taken as demotic resurrection myth and one can see why, with its core of profundity wrapped round with the language of ordinary people, it appealed so much to Joyce. (Burgess xx)

The first serious examination of the role of Finnegan’s Wake in Finnegans Wake was Adaline Glasheen’s article Notes Towards a Supreme Understanding of the use of “Finnegan’s Wake” in Finnegans Wake, which appeared in A Wake Newslitter in 1968. Glasheen was blazing a trail with this short essay, but to my knowledge no one has followed in her footsteps. Even she failed to provide a promised sequel. What she has left us, however, is full of illuminating observations:

The classic, simple and beautiful way to make a mock-epic is to shrink the large heroic into small social potatoes, and that is what Joyce does in Ulysses, reduces gods, kings, warriors to muddle-crass Dubliners ... When he came to Finnegans Wake, Joyce did the opposite. Starting off from a bare, unbeautiful ballad, he raised a humble hod-carrier up in the world, up to be gods, kings, warriors. The two processes—bringing-down-from and carrying-up-to—are opposites that move to the one, the identical epiphany: Leopold Bloom and Tim Finnegan shown to be Everyman, ‘a state more exalted than kings’. (Glasheen 4-5)

It is not at all unusual for myth and literature to be brought down to the demotic level. I am reminded of Richard Wagner’s discovery, while he was researching German myth and literature for his operatic tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung, that the Grimms’ fairy tale The Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was was essentially the story of the Teutonic hero Siegfried.

Glasheen also makes an interesting point about the plethora of different versions of Finnegan’s Wake:

Variant readings are thickest in “Finnegan’s Wake” when it comes to the names, sex, and actions of the guests. Look at any four versions of the ballad. You cannot get from them a coherent account of who did what to whom in the skirmishing that leads up to the war at the wake. Look at 11 versions, or 32 versions, and you will end up looney like the man of [Samuel Butler’s] The Fair Haven who tried to harmonize the gospels ... In Finnegans Wake Joyce tells and tells again and again some few naive stories about people who are not pictorially described, who have no “character” as the novelist knows character. From telling to telling, often within a given telling, the people’s names, sex, roles change—a little or a lot—without warning or explanation. As is well known, people and events in Finnegans Wake remain the same, though different; are different, though the same. It seems to me that in Finnegans Wake Joyce employs a delicate, deliberate, complex technique of obscurity that imitates the obscurity of the popular ballad as it moves through time and oral transmission. Indeed, the popular ballad, with its infinite capacity for corruption, is a principal model for Finnegans Wake. (Glasheen 8 ... 9-10)

Textual and narrative fluidity is a theme that Joyce explores extensively in Finnegans Wake, so the mere idea that there is a definitive version of the ballad is inherently anti-Joycean.

Mythic Elements in Finnegan’s Wake

As McHugh and Burgess noted, Finnegan’s Wake is, at its core, a death-and-resurrection story. This brings it within the orbit of many ancient myths, in which a heroic figure or deity dies only to be subsequently resurrected:

Jesus
Osiris
Adonis
Tammuz

Several of these figures appear in Finnegans Wake, Jesus and Osiris being particularly prominent. In Finnegan’s Wake whiskey is the cause of both Finnegan’s death and his resurrection. The word whiskey comes from the Irish uisce beatha, or water of life.

Tim Finnegan’s fall is preceded by his rise in the world. This too is a prominent motif in both myth and literature. In ancient Greek tragedy, the hero’s fall was typically precipitated by his hubris, or pride, which caused him to fly too high. The same idea can also be found in a Judaeo-Christian setting in the Fall of Lucifer and the Fall of Man. The former was precipitated by Lucifer’s pride, the latter by man’s desire to become like God. In literature, the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play The Master Builder describes the same trajectory.

Another theological and mythical motif that is hinted at in the lyrics of Finnegan’s Wake is the Mastication of the Host, or Eating the God, which Joyce found in James Frazer’s classic study of mythology The Golden Bough:

We have now seen that the corn-spirit is represented sometimes in human, sometimes in animal form, and that in both cases he is killed in the person of his representative and eaten sacramentally. (Frazer 479-480)

In time, the literal sacrifice and cannibalism of a human victim was replaced by a figurative substitute, such as the bread and wine of the Catholic Mass:

The custom of eating bread sacramentally as the body of a god was practised by the Aztecs before the discovery and conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards. (Frazer 488)

In Finnegan’s Wake Mrs Finnegan calls for lunch, and the items on the menu are enumerated: tay [tea], cake, tobacco and whiskey punch. The eating and drinking take place in the presence of Tim’s “corpse”, so it is not much of a stretch to see in this another symbolic instance of the Mastication of the Host, with Tim as the sacrificial victim or god:

We are then presented with a full-length portrait of Shem and at the same time introduced to the big food-theme which plays so important a part in the story. At that wake of Finnegan, the flesh to be devoured was that of the dead hero; with the coming of the brothers, it is the substance of the father HCE which must nourish the new rulers. Shem eats all the wrong food: he will not take the Irish salmon of Finn MacCool, for instance, but prefers some foreign muck out of a tin. (Burgess xxii)

Love and War

The rivalry between Tim’s lovers is reflected in the love triangles in which the text of Finnegans Wake abounds. And the riot that this rivalry precipitates at his wake can be seen as an analogue for the wars and historical conflicts that drive the wheel of history and ensure that it keeps on rolling. Throughout all of human history, it seems, Shillelagh Law has been all the rage.

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

References

Anthony Burgess, A Shorter Finnegans Wake, The Viking Press, New York (1967)
Samuel Butler, The Fair Haven, Second Edition, Trübner & Co, London (1873)
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Abridged Edition, The Macmillan Company, New York (1925)
Adaline Glasheen, Notes Towards a Supreme Understanding of the use of “Finnegan’s Wake” in Finnegans Wake, A Wake Newslitter, New Series, Volume 5, Number 1, Pages 4-15, University of Essex, English Department, Colchester (1968)
Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, Translated by Edmund Gosse and William Archer, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York (1912)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939, 1949)
James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)
Roland McHugh, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas (1976)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)

Image Credits

Finigans Wake (Durnal Version): Brendan Ward (creator), Made with Frescobaldi and Lilypond, After John Durnal, F inigans Wake, Lester S Levy Sheet Music Collection, Sheridan Libraries and University Museum, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, Kopimi
James Joyce (Zürich 1915): Ottocaro Weiss (photographer), University at Buffalo Libraries, Copyright Unknown, Fair Use
Joyce’s Handwritten Note on Tim Finigan’s Wake: Hans E Jahnke Bequest, © Zurich James Joyce Foundation, National Library of Ireland, Dublin (2014), Fair Use

Useful Resources

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