''Finnegans Wake'' is a

novel A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itsel ...

by Irish writer

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...

. It is well known for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the

Western canon The Western canon is the body of high culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly valued in the West; works that have achieved the status of classics. However, not all these works originate in the Western world, and ...

. It has been called "a work of fiction which combines a body of fables ... with the work of analysis and

deconstruction The term deconstruction refers to approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. It was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who defined it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences w ...

". Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years and published in 1939, ''Finnegans Wake'' was Joyce's final work. The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, which blends standard English words with neologistic

portmanteau A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsIrish mannerisms and puns in multiple languages to unique effect. Many critics believe the technique was Joyce's attempt to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams, reproducing the way concepts, people and places become amalgamated in dreaming. It is an attempt by Joyce to combine many of his aesthetic ideas, with references to other works and outside ideas woven into the text; Joyce declared that "Every syllable can be justified". Due to its linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and abandonment of narrative conventions, ''Finnegans Wake'' remains largely unread by the general public.Kitcher 2007
/ref> Despite the obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book's central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot, but key details remain elusive. The book discusses, in an unorthodox fashion, the Earwicker family, comprising the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book, in a

nonlinear In mathematics and science, a nonlinear system is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input. Nonlinear problems are of interest to engineers, biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and many other ...

dream narrative, follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle. Many noted Joycean scholars such as

Samuel Beckett Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic expe ...

and

Donald Phillip Verene Donald Phillip Verene (born October 24, 1937) is an American philosophy professor and author. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Emory University. at Emory University Early life and education Donald ...

link this cyclical structure to Giambattista Vico's seminal text ''

La Scienza Nuova ''The New Science'' ( it, La Scienza Nuova ) is the major work of Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico. It was first published in 1725 to little success, but has gone on to be highly regarded and influential in the philosophy of history, sociol ...

'' (''The New Science''), upon which they argue ''Finnegans Wake'' is structured. Joyce began working on ''Finnegans Wake'' shortly after the 1922 publication of ''Ulysses''. By 1928 installments of Joyce's new

avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...

work began to appear, in serialized form, in Parisian literary journals ''

The Transatlantic Review ''The Transatlantic Review'' (often styled ''the transatlantic review'') was an influential monthly literary magazine edited by Ford Madox Ford in 1924. The magazine was based in Paris but was published in London by Gerald Duckworth and Company. ...

'' and '' transition'' (''sic''), under the title "fragments from ''Work in Progress''". The actual title of the work remained a secret until the book was published in its entirety, on 4 May 1939. Initial reaction to ''Finnegans Wake'', both in its serialized and final published form, was largely negative, ranging from bafflement at its radical reworking of the English language to open hostility towards its lack of respect for the conventions of the genre. The work has since come to assume a preeminent place in

English literature English literature is literature written in the English language from United Kingdom, its crown dependencies, the Republic of Ireland, the United States, and the countries of the former British Empire. ''The Encyclopaedia Britannica'' defines E ...

. Anthony Burgess has lauded ''Finnegans Wake'' as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page". The prominent literary academic Harold Bloom called it Joyce's

masterpiece A masterpiece, ''magnum opus'' (), or ''chef-d’œuvre'' (; ; ) in modern use is a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or a work of outstanding creativity, ...

, and, in ''

The Western Canon ''The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages'' is a 1994 book about Western literature by the American literary critic Harold Bloom, in which the author defends the concept of the Western canon by discussing 26 writers whom he sees as ce ...

'' (1994), wrote that "if aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon, 'Finnegans Wake''would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of

Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

and

Dante Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called (modern Italian: '' ...

Background and composition

Having completed work on ''Ulysses'', Joyce was so exhausted that he did not write a line of prose for a year. On 10 March 1923, he wrote a letter to his patron, Harriet Weaver: "Yesterday I wrote two pages—the first I have since the final ''Yes'' of ''Ulysses''. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of

foolscap Foolscap or fool’s cap may refer to: * Foolscap folio, a paper size of × inches (216 × 343 mm) * Foolscap, a paper size of 17 × inches (432 × 343 mm) * ''Foolscap'', a book by Michael Malone * Fool’s cap, a cap with bells worn by co ...

so that I could read them." This is the earliest reference to what would become ''Finnegans Wake''. The two pages in question consisted of the short sketch "

Roderick O'Conor Roderick, Rodrick or Roderic (Proto-Germanic ''* Hrōþirīks'', from ''* hrōþiz'' "fame, glory" + ''* ríks'' "king, ruler") is a Germanic name, recorded from the 8th century onward.Förstemann, ''Altdeutsches Namenbuch'' (1856)740 Its Old Hi ...

", concerning the historic last

king of Ireland King is the title given to a male monarch in a variety of contexts. The female equivalent is queen, which title is also given to the consort of a king. *In the context of prehistory, antiquity and contemporary indigenous peoples, the tit ...

cleaning up after guests by drinking the dregs of their dirty glasses. Joyce completed another four short sketches in July and August 1923, while holidaying in

Bognor Bognor Regis (), sometimes simply known as Bognor (), is a town and seaside resort in West Sussex on the south coast of England, south-west of London, west of Brighton, south-east of Chichester and east of Portsmouth. Other nearby towns i ...

. The sketches, which dealt with different aspects of Irish history, are commonly known as " Tristan and Isolde", "

Saint Patrick Saint Patrick ( la, Patricius; ga, Pádraig ; cy, Padrig) was a fifth-century Romano-British Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland. Known as the "Apostle of Ireland", he is the primary patron saint of Ireland, the other patron saints be ...

and the Druid", " Kevin's Orisons", and "Mamalujo". While these sketches would eventually be incorporated into ''Finnegans Wake'' in one form or another, they did not contain any of the main characters or plot points which would later come to constitute the backbone of the book. The first signs of what would eventually become ''Finnegans Wake'' came in August 1923 when Joyce wrote the sketch "Here Comes Everybody", which dealt for the first time with the book's protagonist HCE. Over the next few years, Joyce's method became one of "increasingly obsessional concern with note-taking, since eobviously felt that any word he wrote had first to have been recorded in some notebook." As Joyce continued to incorporate these notes into his work, the text became increasingly dense and obscure. By 1926 Joyce had largely completed both Parts I and III. Geert Lernout asserts that Part I had, at this early stage, "a real focus that had developed out of the HCE Here Comes Everybody"sketch: the story of HCE, of his wife and children. There were the adventures of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker himself and the rumours about them in chapters 2–4, a description of his wife ALP's letter in chapter 5, a denunciation of his son Shem in chapter 7, and a dialogue about ALP in chapter 8. These texts ..formed a unity."Lernout, in Crispi, Slote 2007, p. 50 In the same year, Joyce met Maria and

Eugène Jolas John George Eugène Jolas (October 26, 1894 – May 26, 1952) was a writer, translator and literary critic. Early life John George Eugène Jolas was born October 26, 1894, in Union Hill, New Jersey (what is today Union City, New Jersey). His pa ...

in Paris, just as his new work was generating an increasingly negative reaction from readers and critics, culminating in '' The Dials refusal to publish the four chapters of Part III in September 1926. The Jolases gave Joyce valuable encouragement and material support throughout the long process of writing ''Finnegans Wake'', and published sections of the book in serial form in their literary magazine '' transition'', under the title ''Work in Progress''. For the next few years, Joyce worked rapidly on the book, adding what would become chapters I.1 and I.6, and revising the already written segments to make them more lexically complex. By this time some early supporters of Joyce's work, such as

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...

and the author's brother Stanislaus Joyce, had grown increasingly unsympathetic to his new writing. In order to create a more favourable critical climate, a group of Joyce's supporters (including

, William Carlos Williams,

Rebecca West Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books ...

, and others) put together a collection of critical essays on the new work. It was published in 1929 under the title ''

Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress ''Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress'' is a 1929 collection of critical essays, and two letters, on the subject of James Joyce's book ''Finnegans Wake'', then being published in discrete sections under th ...

''. In July 1929, increasingly demoralised by the poor reception his new work was receiving, Joyce approached his friend James Stephens about the possibility of his completing the book. Joyce wrote to Weaver in late 1929 that he had "explained to tephensall about the book, at least a great deal, and he promised me that if I found it madness to continue, in my condition, and saw no other way out, that he would devote himself, heart and soul, to the completion of it, that is the second part and the epilogue or fourth." Apparently Joyce chose Stephens on superstitious grounds, as he had been born in the same hospital as Joyce, exactly one week later, and shared both the first names of Joyce himself and his fictional alter-ego

Stephen Dedalus Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce's literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographic novel of artistic existence ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'' (1916) and an important character in Joyce' ...

. In the end, Stephens was not asked to finish the book. In the 1930s, as he was writing Parts II and IV, Joyce's progress slowed considerably. This was due to a number of factors including the death of his father John Stanislaus Joyce in 1931; concern over the mental health of his daughter

Lucia Lucia may refer to: Arts and culture * ''Lucía'', a 1968 Cuban film by Humberto Solás * ''Lucia'' (film), a 2013 Kannada-language film * '' Lucia & The Best Boys'', a Scottish indie rock band formerly known as ''LUCIA'' * "Lucia", a Swedish c ...

; and his own health problems, chiefly his failing eyesight. ''Finnegans Wake'' was published in book form, after seventeen years of composition, on 4 May 1939. Joyce died twenty months later in

Zürich Zürich () is the list of cities in Switzerland, largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zürich. It is located in north-central Switzerland, at the northwestern tip of Lake Zürich. As of January 2020, the municipality has 43 ...

, on 13 January 1941.

Chapter summaries

''Finnegans Wake'' consists of seventeen chapters, divided into four Parts or Books. Part I contains eight chapters, Parts II and III each contain four, and Part IV consists of only one short chapter. The chapters appear without titles, and while Joyce never provided possible chapter titles as he had done for ''Ulysses'', he did title various sections published separately (see ''Publication history'' below). The standard critical practice is to indicate part number in Roman numerals, and chapter title in Arabic, so that III.2, for example, indicates the second chapter of the third part. Given the book's fluid and changeable approach to plot and characters, a definitive, critically agreed-upon plot synopsis remains elusive (see ''Critical response and themes: Difficulties of plot summary'' below). Therefore, the following synopsis attempts to summarise events in the book, which find general, although inevitably not universal, consensus among critics.

Part I

The entire work forms a cycle: the last sentence—a fragment—recirculates to the beginning sentence: "a way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." Joyce himself revealed that the book "ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence."Joyce, ''Letters I'', p.246 The introductory chapter (I.1) establishes the book's setting as "

Howth Castle Howth Castle ( ) and estate lie just outside the village of Howth, County Dublin in Ireland, in the administration of Fingal County Council. The castle was the ancestral home of the line of the St Lawrence family (see: Earl of Howth) that had h ...

and Environs" (i.e. the

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of th ...

area), and introduces Dublin hod carrier " Finnegan", who falls to his death from a ladder while constructing a wall. Finnegan's wife Annie puts out his corpse as a meal spread for the mourners at his

wake Wake or The Wake may refer to: Culture *Wake (ceremony), a ritual which takes place during some funeral ceremonies *Wakes week, an English holiday tradition * Parish Wake, another name of the Welsh ', the fairs held on the local parish's patron s ...

, but he vanishes before they can eat him. A series of episodic

vignettes Vignette may refer to: * Vignette (entertainment), a sketch in a sketch comedy * Vignette (graphic design), decorative designs in books (originally in the form of leaves and vines) to separate sections or chapters * Vignette (literature), short, i ...

follows, loosely related to the dead Finnegan, most commonly referred to as "The Willingdone Museyroom", "Mutt and Jute", and "The Prankquean". At the chapter's close a fight breaks out, whiskey splashes on Finnegan's corpse, and "the dead Finnegan rises from his coffin bawling for whiskey and his mourners put him back to rest", persuading him that he is better off where he is. The chapter ends with the image of the HCE character sailing into

Dublin Bay Dublin Bay ( ga, Cuan Bhaile Átha Cliath) is a C-shaped inlet of the Irish Sea on the east coast of Ireland. The bay is about 10 kilometres wide along its north–south base, and 7 km in length to its apex at the centre of the city of Du ...

to take a central role in the story. Anna Livia Plurabelle

I.2 opens with an account of "Harold or Humphrey" Chimpden receiving the

nickname A nickname is a substitute for the proper name of a familiar person, place or thing. Commonly used to express affection, a form of endearment, and sometimes amusement, it can also be used to express defamation of character. As a concept, it is ...

"Earwicker" from the Sailor King, who encounters him attempting to catch earwigs with an inverted flowerpot on a stick while manning a

tollgate A tollbooth (or toll booth) is an enclosure placed along a toll road that is used for the purpose of collecting a toll from passing traffic. A structure consisting of several tollbooths placed next to each other is called a toll plaza, tollgat ...

through which the King is passing. This name helps Chimpden, now known by his initials HCE, to rise to prominence in Dublin society as "Here Comes Everybody". He is then brought low by a rumour that begins to spread across Dublin, apparently concerning a sexual trespass involving two girls in the

Phoenix Park The Phoenix Park ( ga, Páirc an Fhionnuisce) is a large urban park in Dublin, Ireland, lying west of the city centre, north of the River Liffey. Its perimeter wall encloses of recreational space. It includes large areas of grassland and tre ...

, although details of HCE's transgression change with each retelling of events. Chapters I.2 through I.4 follow the progress of this rumour, starting with HCE's encounter with "a cad with a pipe" in

. The cad greets HCE in Gaelic and asks the time, but HCE misunderstands the question as an accusation, and incriminates himself by denying rumours the cad has not yet heard. These rumours quickly spread across Dublin, gathering momentum until they are turned into a song penned by the character Hosty called "

The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly is a song in book one of James Joyce's novel ''Finnegans Wake'' (pages 44.24 to 47.32), where the protagonist H.C.E. has been brought low by a rumour which begins to spread across Dublin, apparently concerning a sexual ...

". As a result, HCE goes into hiding, where he is besieged at the closed gate of his pub by a visiting American looking for a drink after hours. HCE remains silent – not responding to the accusations or verbal abuse – dreams, is buried in a coffin at the bottom of

Lough Neagh Lough Neagh ( ) is a freshwater lake in Northern Ireland and is the largest lake in the island of Ireland, the United Kingdom and the British Isles. It has a surface area of and supplies 40% of Northern Ireland's water. Its main inflows come ...

, and is finally brought to trial, under the name Festy King. He is eventually freed, and goes once more into hiding. An important piece of evidence during the trial – a letter about HCE written by his wife ALP – is called for so that it can be examined in closer detail. ALP's Letter becomes the focal point as it is analysed in detail in I.5. This letter was dictated by ALP to her son Shem, a writer, and entrusted to her other son Shaun, a postman, for delivery. The letter never reaches its intended destination, ending up in a

midden heap A midden (also kitchen midden or shell heap) is an old dump for domestic waste which may consist of animal bone, human excrement, botanical material, mollusc shells, potsherds, lithics (especially debitage), and other artifacts and ecofact ...

where it is unearthed by a hen named Biddy. Chapter I.6 digresses from the narrative in order to present the main and minor characters in more detail, in the form of twelve riddles and answers. In the eleventh question or riddle, Shaun is asked about his relation to his brother Shem, and as part of his response, tells the parable of the Mookse and the Gripes. In the final two chapters of Part I, we learn more about the letter's writer Shem the Penman (I.7) and its original author, his mother ALP (I.8). The Shem chapter consists of "Shaun's character assassination of his brother Shem", describing the hermetic artist as a forger and a "sham", before "Shem is protected by his mother LP who appears at the end to come and defend her son." The following chapter concerning Shem's mother, known as "Anna Livia Plurabelle", is interwoven with thousands of river names from all over the globe, and is widely considered the book's most celebrated passage. The chapter was described by Joyce in 1924 as "a chattering dialogue across the river by two washerwomen who as night falls become a tree and a stone." These two washerwomen gossip about ALP's response to the allegations laid against her husband HCE, as they wash clothes in the River Liffey. ALP is said to have written a letter declaring herself tired of her mate. Their gossip then digresses to her youthful affairs and sexual encounters, before returning to the publication of HCE's guilt in the morning newspaper, and his wife's revenge on his enemies: borrowing a "mailsack" from her son Shaun the Post, she delivers presents to her 111 children. At the chapter's close, the washerwomen try to pick up the thread of the story, but their conversation is increasingly difficult as they are on opposite sides of the widening Liffey, and it is getting dark. Finally, as they turn into a tree and a stone, they ask to be told a Tale of Shem or Shaun.

Part II

While Part I of ''Finnegans Wake'' deals mostly with the parents HCE and ALP, Part II shifts that focus to their children, Shem, Shaun and Issy. II.1 opens with a pantomime programme, which outlines, in relatively clear language, the identities and attributes of the book's main characters. The chapter then concerns a guessing game among the children, in which Shem is challenged three times to guess by "gazework" the colour which the girls have chosen. Unable to answer due to his poor eyesight, Shem goes into exile in disgrace, and Shaun wins the affection of the girls. Finally, HCE emerges from the pub and in a thunder-like voice calls the children inside. Chapter II.2 follows Shem, Shaun and Issy studying upstairs in the pub, after having been called inside in the previous chapter. The chapter depicts " hemcoaching

haun Haun is both a surname and a given name. Notable people with the name include: Surname * Christopher Haun (1821–1861), American potter * Eberhard Haun (1949–1976), German footballer * Henry P. Haun (1815–1860), American politician * Jeremy ...

how to do

Euclid Euclid (; grc-gre, Wikt:Εὐκλείδης, Εὐκλείδης; BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician active as a geometer and logician. Considered the "father of geometry", he is chiefly known for the ''Euclid's Elements, Elements'' trea ...

Bk I, 1", structured as "a reproduction of a schoolboys' (and schoolgirls') old classbook complete with

marginalia Marginalia (or apostils) are marks made in the margins of a book or other document. They may be scribbles, comments, glosses (annotations), critiques, doodles, drolleries, or illuminations. Biblical manuscripts Biblical manuscripts have ...

by the twins, who change sides at half time, and footnotes by the girl (who doesn't)". Once Shem (here called Dolph) has helped Shaun (here called Kev) to draw the Euclid diagram, the latter realises that he has drawn a diagram of ALP's genitalia, and "Kev finally realises the significance of the triangles .and..strikes Dolph." After this "Dolph forgives Kev" and the children are given " say assignments on 52 famous men." The chapter ends with the children's "nightletter" to HCE and ALP, in which they are "apparently united in a desire to overcome their parents." II.3 moves to HCE working in the pub below the studying children. As HCE serves his customers, two narratives are broadcast via the bar's radio and television sets, namely "The Norwegian Captain and the Tailor's Daughter", and "How Buckley Shot the Russian General". The first portrays HCE as a Norwegian Captain succumbing to domestication through his marriage to the Tailor's Daughter. The latter, told by Shem and Shaun ciphers Butt and Taff, casts HCE as a Russian General who is shot by Buckley, an Irish soldier in the British army during the

Crimean War The Crimean War, , was fought from October 1853 to February 1856 between Russia and an ultimately victorious alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, the United Kingdom and Piedmont-Sardinia. Geopolitical causes of the war included the de ...

. Earwicker has been absent throughout the latter tale, having been summoned upstairs by ALP. He returns and is reviled by his customers, who see Buckley's shooting of the General as symbolic of Shem and Shaun's supplanting their father. This condemnation of his character forces HCE to deliver a general confession of his crimes, including an incestuous desire for young girls. Finally a policeman arrives to send the drunken customers home, the pub is closed up, and the customers disappear singing into the night as a drunken HCE, clearing up the bar and swallowing the dregs of the glasses left behind, morphs into ancient Irish high king Rory O'Connor, and passes out. II.4, portraying the drunken and sleeping Earwicker's dream, chronicles the spying of four old men (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) on

Tristan and Iseult Tristan and Iseult, also known as Tristan and Isolde and other names, is a medieval chivalric romance told in numerous variations since the 12th century. Based on a Celtic legend and possibly other sources, the tale is a tragedy about the illic ...

's journey. The short chapter portrays "an old man like

King Mark Mark of Cornwall ( la, Marcus, kw, Margh, cy, March, br, Marc'h) was a sixth-century King of Kernow (Cornwall), possibly identical with King Conomor. He is best known for his appearance in Arthurian legend as the uncle of Tristan and the husb ...

being rejected and abandoned by young lovers who sail off into a future without him", while the four old men observe Tristan and Isolde, and offer four intertwining commentaries on the lovers and themselves which are "always repeating themselves".

Part III

Part III concerns itself almost exclusively with Shaun, in his role as postman, having to deliver ALP's letter, which was referred to in Part I but never seen. III.1 opens with the Four Masters' ass narrating how he thought, as he was "dropping asleep", he had heard and seen an apparition of Shaun the Post. As a result, Shaun re-awakens and, floating down the Liffey in a barrel, is posed fourteen questions concerning the significance and content of the letter he is carrying. Shaun, "apprehensive about being slighted, is on his guard, and the placating narrators never get a straight answer out of him." Shaun's answers focus on his own boastful personality and his admonishment of the letter's author – his artist brother Shem. The answer to the eighth question contains the story of the Ondt and the Gracehoper, another framing of the Shaun-Shem relationship. After the inquisition Shaun loses his balance and the barrel in which he has been floating careens over and he rolls backwards out of the narrator's earshot, before disappearing completely from view. In III.2 Shaun re-appears as "Jaunty Jaun" and delivers a lengthy and sexually suggestive sermon to his sister Issy, and her twenty-eight schoolmates from St. Brigid's School. Throughout this book Shaun is continually regressing, changing from an old man to an overgrown baby lying on his back, and eventually, in III.3, into a vessel through which the voice of HCE speaks again by means of a spiritual

medium Medium may refer to: Science and technology Aviation *Medium bomber, a class of war plane * Tecma Medium, a French hang glider design Communication * Media (communication), tools used to store and deliver information or data * Medium of ...

. This leads to HCE's defence of his life in the passage "Haveth Childers Everywhere". Part III ends in the bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Porter as they attempt to copulate while their children, Jerry, Kevin and Isobel Porter, are sleeping upstairs and the dawn is rising outside (III.4). Jerry awakes from a nightmare of a scary father figure, and Mrs. Porter interrupts the coitus to go comfort him with the words "You were dreamend, dear. The pawdrag? The fawthrig? Shoe! Hear are no phanthares in the room at all, avikkeen. No bad bold faathern, dear one." She returns to bed, and the rooster crows at the conclusion of their coitus at the Part's culmination.

Part IV

Part IV consists of only one chapter, which, like the book's opening chapter, is mostly composed of a series of seemingly unrelated

. After an opening call for dawn to break, the remainder of the chapter consists of the vignettes "Saint Kevin", "Berkely and Patrick" and "The Revered Letter". ALP is given the final word, as the book closes on a version of her Letter and her final long monologue, in which she tries to wake her sleeping husband, declaring "Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long!", and remembers a walk they once took, and hopes for its re-occurrence. At the close of her monologue, ALP – as the river Liffey – disappears at dawn into the ocean. The book's last words are a fragment, but they can be turned into a complete sentence by attaching them to the words that start the book:

A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Critical response and themes

Difficulties of plot summary

Commentators who have summarised the plot of ''Finnegans Wake'' include

Joseph Campbell Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) was an American writer. He was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the ...

, John Gordon, Anthony Burgess,

William York Tindall William York Tindall (1903–1981) was an American Joycean scholar with a long and distinguished teaching career at Columbia University. Several of Tindall's classic works of criticism, including ''A Reader's Guide to James Joyce'' and ''A Reade ...

, and Philip Kitcher. While no two summaries interpret the plot in the same way, there are a number of central " plot points" upon which they find general agreement. A number of Joyce scholars question the legitimacy of searching for a linear storyline within the complex text. As

Bernard Benstock Bernard Benstock (1930 – July 14, 1994) was a literary critic and professor of English at the University of Miami and an authority on British mystery writers and Irish writers Seán O'Casey and James Joyce. Benstock was editor of the ''James J ...

highlights, "in a work where every sentence opens a variety of possible interpretations, any synopsis of a chapter is bound to be incomplete." David Hayman has suggested that "For all the efforts made by critics to establish a plot for the ''Wake'', it makes little sense to force this prose into a narrative mold." The book's challenges have led some commentators into generalised statements about its content and themes, prompting critic Bernard Benstock to warn against the danger of "boiling down" ''Finnegans Wake'' into "insipid pap, and leaving the lazy reader with a predigested mess of generalizations and catchphrases." Fritz Senn has also voiced concerns with some plot synopses, saying "we have some traditional summaries, also some put in circulation by Joyce himself. I find them most unsatisfactory and unhelpful, they usually leave out the hard parts and recirculate what we already think we know. I simply cannot believe that FW would be as blandly uninteresting as those summaries suggest." The challenge of compiling a definitive synopsis of ''Finnegans Wake'' lies not only in the opacity of the book's language but also in the radical approach to

plot Plot or Plotting may refer to: Art, media and entertainment * Plot (narrative), the story of a piece of fiction Music * ''The Plot'' (album), a 1976 album by jazz trumpeter Enrico Rava * The Plot (band), a band formed in 2003 Other * ''Plot' ...

which Joyce employed. Joyce acknowledged this when he wrote to Eugène Jolas that:

"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.

This "new way" of telling a story in ''Finnegans Wake'' takes the form of a discontinuous dream-narrative, with abrupt changes to characters, character names, locations and plot details resulting in the absence of a discernible linear narrative, causing Herring to argue that the plot of ''Finnegans Wake'' "is unstable in that there is no one plot from beginning to end, but rather many recognizable stories and plot types with familiar and unfamiliar twists told from varying perspectives." Patrick A. McCarthy expands on this idea of a non-linear, digressive narrative with the contention that "throughout much of ''Finnegans Wake'', what appears to be an attempt to tell a story is often diverted, interrupted, or reshaped into something else, for example, a commentary on a narrative with conflicting or unverifiable details." In other words, while crucial plot points – such as HCE's crime or ALP's letter – are endlessly discussed, the reader never encounters or experiences them first hand, and as the details are constantly changing, they remain unknown and perhaps unknowable. Suzette Henke has accordingly described ''Finnegans Wake'' as an aporia. Joyce himself tacitly acknowledged this radically different approach to language and plot in a 1926 letter to Harriet Weaver, outlining his intentions for the book: "One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot." Critics have seen a precedent for the book's plot presentation in Laurence Sterne's digressive ''

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman ''The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'', also known as ''Tristram Shandy'', is a novel by Laurence Sterne, inspired by ''Don Quixote''. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others followin ...

'', with Thomas Keymer stating that "Tristram Shandy was a natural touchstone for James Joyce as he explained his attempt "to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose" in ''Finnegans Wake''". Part II is usually considered the book's most opaque section, and hence the most difficult to synopsize. William York Tindall said of Part II's four chapters that "nothing is denser." Similarly,

Patrick Parrinder Patrick Parrinder (born 1944) is an academic, formerly Professor of English at the University of Reading. He retired in 2008.

has described Part II as the "worst and most disorienting quagmire ..in the ''Wake''." Despite Joyce's revolutionary techniques, the author repeatedly emphasized that the book was neither random nor meaningless; with

Richard Ellmann Richard David Ellmann, FBA (March 15, 1918 – May 13, 1987) was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for ''James ...

quoting the author as having stated: "I can justify every line of my book." To Sisley Huddleston he stated "critics who were most appreciative of ''Ulysses'' are complaining about my new work. They cannot understand it. Therefore they say it is meaningless. Now if it were meaningless it could be written quickly without thought, without pains, without erudition; but I assure you that these 20 pages now before us .e. chapter I.8cost me twelve hundred hours and an enormous expense of spirit." When the editor of '' Vanity Fair'' asked Joyce if the sketches in ''Work in Progress'' were consecutive and interrelated, Joyce replied "It is all consecutive and interrelated."

Themes

Fargnoli and Gillespie suggest that the book's opening chapter "introduces hemajor themes and concerns of the book", and enumerate these as "Finnegan's fall, the promise of his resurrection, the cyclical structure of time and history (dissolution and renewal), tragic love as embodied in the story of

, the motif of the warring brothers, the personification of the landscape and the question of Earwicker's crime in the park, the precise nature of which is left uncertain throughout the ''Wake''."Fargnoli, Gillespie, ''James A–Z''
p.78
/ref> Such a view finds general critical consensus, viewing the vignettes as allegorical appropriations of the book's characters and themes; for example, Schwartz argues that "The Willingdone Museyroom" episode represents the book's "archetypal family drama in military-historical terms." Joyce himself referred to the chapter as a "

prelude Prelude may refer to: Music *Prelude (music), a musical form *Prelude (band), an English-based folk band *Prelude Records (record label), a former New York-based dance independent record label *Chorale prelude, a short liturgical composition for ...

", and as an "air photograph of Irish history, a celebration of the dim past of Dublin." Riquelme finds that "passages near the book's beginning and its ending echo and complement one another", and Fargnoli and Gillespie representatively argue that the book's cyclical structure echoes the themes inherent within, that "the typologies of human experience that Joyce identifies n ''Finnegans Wake''are .essentially cyclical, that is, patterned and recurrent; in particular, the experiences of birth, guilt, judgment, sexuality, family, social ritual and death recur throughout the ''Wake''. In a similar enumeration of themes, Tindall argues that "rise and fall and rise again, sleeping and waking, death and resurrection, sin and redemption, conflict and appeasement, and, above all, time itself ..are the matter of Joyce's essay on man." Henkes and Bindervoet generally summarise the critical consensus when they argue that, between the thematically indicative opening and closing chapters, the book concerns "two big questions" which are never resolved: what is the nature of protagonist HCE's secret sin, and what was the letter, written by his wife ALP, about? HCE's unidentifiable sin has most generally been interpreted as representing man's

original sin Original sin is the Christian doctrine that holds that humans, through the fact of birth, inherit a tainted nature in need of regeneration and a proclivity to sinful conduct. The biblical basis for the belief is generally found in Genesis 3 (t ...

as a result of the Fall of Man. Anthony Burgess sees HCE, through his dream, trying "to make the whole of history swallow up his guilt for him" and to this end "HCE has, so deep in his sleep, sunk to a level of dreaming in which he has become a collective being rehearsing the collective guilt of man." Fargnoli and Gillespie argue that although undefined, "Earwicker's alleged crime in the Park" appears to have been of a "

voyeuristic Voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of watching other people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other actions of a private nature. The term comes from the French ''voir'' which means "to see". A ...

, sexual, or scatological nature". ALP's letter appears a number of times throughout the book, in a number of different forms, and as its contents cannot be definitively delineated, it is usually believed to be both an exoneration of HCE, and an indictment of his sin. Herring argues that " e effect of ALP's letter is precisely the opposite of her intent ..the more ALP defends her husband in her letter, the more scandal attaches to him." Patrick A. McCarthy argues that "it is appropriate that the waters of the Liffey, representing Anna Livia, are washing away the evidence of Earwicker's sins as

he washerwomen speak, in chapter I.8 He or HE may refer to: Language * He (pronoun), an English pronoun * He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ * He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets * He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' in ...

for (they tell us) she takes on her husband's guilt and redeems him; alternately she is tainted with his crimes and regarded as an accomplice".

A reconstruction of nocturnal life

Throughout the book's seventeen-year gestation, Joyce stated that with ''Finnegans Wake'' he was attempting to "reconstruct the nocturnal life",Mercanton 1967, p.233 and that the book was his "experiment in interpreting 'the dark night of the soul'." According to Ellmann, Joyce stated to

Edmond Jaloux Edmond Jaloux (19 June 1878, Marseille – 22 August 1949, Lutry) was a French novelist, essayist, and critic. His works tended to be set in Paris or his native Provence. He was interested in German Romanticism and English writers. In 1936 h ...

that ''Finnegans Wake'' would be written "to suit the esthetic of the dream, where the forms prolong and multiply themselves", and once informed a friend that "he conceived of his book as the dream of old Finn, lying in death beside the river Liffey and watching the history of Ireland and the world – past and future – flow through his mind like flotsam on the river of life." While pondering the generally negative reactions to the book Joyce said:

I can't understand some of my critics, like
Pound Pound or Pounds may refer to: Units * Pound (currency), a unit of currency * Pound sterling, the official currency of the United Kingdom * Pound (mass), a unit of mass * Pound (force), a unit of force * Rail pound, in rail profile Symbols * Po ...
or Miss Weaver, for instance. They say it's ''obscure''. They compare it, of course, with ''Ulysses''. But the action of ''Ulysses'' was chiefly during the daytime, and the action of my new work takes place chiefly at night. It's natural things should not be so clear at night, isn't it now?

Joyce's claims to be representing the night and dreams have been accepted and questioned with greater and lesser credulity. Supporters of the claim have pointed to Part IV as providing its strongest evidence, as when the narrator asks "You mean to see we have been hadding a sound night’s sleep?", and later concludes that what has gone before has been "a long, very long, a dark, very dark ..scarce endurable ..night". Tindall refers to Part IV as "a chapter of resurrection and waking up", and McHugh finds that the chapter contains "particular awareness of events going on offstage, connected with the arrival of dawn and the waking process which terminates the sleeping process of 'Finnegans Wake''" This conceptualisation of the ''Wake'' as a dream is a point of contention for some. Harry Burrell, representative of this view, argues that "one of the most overworked ideas is that ''Finnegans Wake'' is about a dream. It is not, and there is no dreamer." Burrell argues that the theory is an easy way out for "critics stymied by the difficulty of comprehending the novel and the search for some kind of understanding of it." The point upon which a number of critics fail to concur with Burrell's argument is its dismissal of the testimony of the book's author on the matter as "misleading... publicity efforts". Parrinder, equally skeptical of the concept of the ''Wake'' as a dream, argues that Joyce came up with the idea of representing his linguistic experiments as a language of the night around 1927 as a means of battling his many critics, further arguing that "since it cannot be said that neologism is a major feature of the dreaming process, such a justification for the language of ''Finnegans Wake'' smacks dangerously of expediency." While many, if not all, agree that there is at least some sense in which the book can be said to be a "dream", few agree on who the possible dreamer of such a dream might be. Edmund Wilson's early analysis of the book, ''The Dream of H. C. Earwicker'', made the assumption that Earwicker himself is the dreamer of the dream, an assumption which continued to carry weight with Wakean scholars

Harry Levin Harry Tuchman Levin (July 18, 1912 – May 29, 1994) was an American literary critic and scholar of both modernism and comparative literature. Life and career Levin was born in Minneapolis, the son of Beatrice Hirshler (née Tuchman) and Isadore ...

Hugh Kenner William Hugh Kenner (January 7, 1923 – November 24, 2003) was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor. He published widely on Modernist literature with particular emphasis on James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Samuel Beckett. His major ...

, and William Troy.Hart 1962
p.78
/ref> Joseph Campbell, in '' A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake'', also believed Earwicker to be the dreamer, but considered the narrative to be the observances of, and a running commentary by, an anonymous pedant on Earwicker's dream in progress, who would interrupt the flow with his own digressions.Hart 1962
p.79
/ref> Ruth von

Phul Olympian spirits (or ''Olympic spirits'', ''Olympick spirits'') refers to seven (or sometimes fourteen) spirits mentioned in several Renaissance and post-Renaissance books of ritual magic/ceremonial magic, such as the ''Arbatel de magia veterum'', ...

was the first to argue that Earwicker was not the dreamer, which triggered a number of similarly minded views on the matter, although her assertion that Shem was the dreamer has found less support. J.S.Atherton, in a 1965 lecture, 'The Identity of the Sleeper', suggested that the dreamer of ''Finnegans Wake'' was the Universal Mind:

'As I see FW it is everyone’s dream, the dream of all the living and the dead. Many puzzling features become clear if this is accepted. Obviously we will hear many foreign languages....To my mind, the most revealing statement Joyce ever made about his work was: 'Really it is not I who am writing this crazy book. It is you, and you, and you, and that man over there, and that girl at the next table.' This is stressed, once you start looking for it, in the ''Wake'' itself. It is 'us.' who are brought back to 'Howth Castle and Environs' in the third line of the book. The washerwoman says: 'of course, we all know Anna Livia'. It is easy to miss the 'we'. Chapter 2 has 'we are back' in line 3. In fact all the first five chapters use "us" or "we" by the ninth line at the latest—and the sixth chapter ends 'Semus sumus.' We are Shem. All of us....It is the universal mind which Joyce assumes as the identity of the dreamer; he, of course, is writing it all down but everyone else contributes.'

The assertion that the dream was that of Mr. Porter, whose dream personality personified itself as HCE, came from the critical idea that the dreamer partially wakes during chapter III.4, in which he and his family are referred to by the name Porter. Anthony Burgess representatively summarized this conception of the "dream" thus: "Mr. Porter and his family are asleep for the greater part of the book ..Mr. Porter dreams hard, and we are permitted to share his dream ..Sleeping, he becomes a remarkable mixture of guilty man, beast, and crawling thing, and he even takes on a new and dreamily appropriate name – Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker." Harriet Weaver was among the first to suggest that the dream was not that of any one dreamer, but was rather an analysis of the process of dreaming itself. In a letter to J.S. Atherton she wrote:

In particular their ascription of the whole thing to a dream of HCE seems to me nonsensical. My view is that Mr. Joyce did not intend the book to be looked upon as the dream of any one character, but that he regarded the dream form with its shiftings and changes and chances as a convenient device, allowing the freest scope to introduce any material he wished—and suited to a night-piece.

Bernard Benstock also argued that "The Dreamer in the ''Wake'' is more than just a single individual, even if one assumes that on the literal level we are viewing the dream of publican H.C. Earwicker." Other critics have been more skeptical of the concept of identifying the dreamer of the book's narrative. Clive Hart argues that " atever our conclusions about the identity of the dreamer, and no matter how many varied caricatures of him we may find projected into the dream, it is clear that he must always be considered as essentially external to the book, and should be left there. Speculation about the 'real person' behind the guises of the dream-surrogates or about the function of the dream in relation to the unresolved stresses of this hypothetical mind is fruitless, for the tensions and psychological problems in ''Finnegans Wake'' concern the dream-figures living within the book itself." John Bishop has been the most vocal supporter of treating ''Finnegans Wake'' absolutely, in every sense, as a description of a dream, the dreamer, and of the night itself; arguing that the book not only represents a dream in an abstract conception, but is fully a literary representation of sleep. On the subject Bishop writes:

The greatest obstacle to our comprehension of ''Finnegans Wake'' ..has been...the failure on the part of readers to believe that Joyce really meant what he said when he spoke of the book as a "reconstruction of the nocturnal life" and an "imitation of the dream-state"; and as a consequence readers have perhaps too easily exercised on the text an unyielding literalism bent on finding a kind of meaning in every way antithetical to the kind of meaning purveyed in dreams.

Bishop has also somewhat brought back into fashion the theory that the ''Wake'' is about a single sleeper; arguing that it is not "the 'universal dream' of some disembodied global everyman, but a reconstruction of the night – and a single night – as experienced by 'one stable somebody' whose 'earwitness' on the real world is coherently chronological." Bishop has laid the path for critics such as Eric Rosenbloom, who has proposed that the book "elaborates the fragmentation and reunification of identity during sleep. The masculine ..mind of the day has been overtaken by the feminine night mind. ..The characters live in the transformation and flux of a dream, embodying the sleeper’s mind."

Characters

Critics disagree on whether discernible characters exist in ''Finnegans Wake''. For example, Grace Eckley argues that Wakean characters are distinct from one another, and defends this with explaining the dual narrators, the "us" of the first paragraph, as well as Shem-Shaun distinctions while Margot Norris argues that the " aracters are fluid and interchangeable". Supporting the latter stance, Van Hulle finds that the "characters" in ''Finnegans Wake'' are rather "archetypes or character amalgams, taking different shapes", and Riquelme similarly refers to the book's cast of mutable characters as " protean". As early as in 1934, in response to the recently published excerpt "The Mookse and the Gripes", Ronald Symond argued that "the characters in ''Work in Progress'', in keeping with the space-time chaos in which they live, change identity at will. At one time they are persons, at another rivers or stones or trees, at another personifications of an idea, at another they are lost and hidden in the actual texture of the prose, with an ingenuity far surpassing that of crossword puzzles." Such concealment of character identity has resulted in some disparity as to how critics identify the book's main protagonists; for example, while most find consensus that Festy King, who appears on trial in I.4, is a HCE type, not all analysts agree on this – for example Anthony Burgess believes him to be Shaun. While characters are in a constant state of flux—constantly changing names, occupations, and physical attributes—a recurring set of core characters, or character types (what Norris dubs "

cipher In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is ''encipherment''. To encipher or encode i ...

s"), are discernible. During the composition of ''Finnegans Wake'', Joyce used signs, or so-called "sigla", rather than names to designate these character amalgams or types. In a letter to his Maecenas, Harriet Shaw Weaver (March 1924), Joyce made a list of these sigla. For those who argue for the existence of distinguishable characters, the book focuses on the Earwicker family, which consists of father, mother, twin sons and a daughter.

Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE)

Kitcher argues for the father HCE as the book's protagonist, stating that he is "the dominant figure throughout .. His guilt, his shortcomings, his failures pervade the entire book". Bishop states that while the constant flux of HCE's character and attributes may lead us to consider him as an "anyman," he argues that "the sheer density of certain repeated details and concerns allows us to know that he is a particular, real Dubliner." The common critical consensus of HCE's fixed character is summarised by Bishop as being "an older

Protestant Protestantism is a Christian denomination, branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Reformation, Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century agai ...

male, of

Scandinavia Scandinavia; Sámi languages: /. ( ) is a subregion#Europe, subregion in Northern Europe, with strong historical, cultural, and linguistic ties between its constituent peoples. In English usage, ''Scandinavia'' most commonly refers to Denmark, ...

n lineage, connected with the pubkeeping business somewhere in the neighbourhood of Chapelizod, who has a wife, a daughter, and two sons." HCE is referred to by literally thousands of names throughout the book; leading Terence Killeen to argue that in ''Finnegans Wake'' "naming is ..a fluid and provisional process". HCE is at first referred to as "Harold or Humphrey Chimpden"; a conflation of these names as "Haromphreyld", and as a consequence of his initials "Here Comes Everybody". These initials lend themselves to phrase after phrase throughout the book; for example, appearing in the book's opening sentence as "Howth Castle and Environs". As the work progresses the names by which he may be referred to become increasingly abstract (such as " Finn MacCool", "Mr. Makeall Gone", or "Mr. Porter"). Some ''Wake'' critics, such as Finn Fordham, argue that HCE's initials come from the initials of the portly politician Hugh Childers (1827–96), who had been nicknamed "Here Comes Everybody" for his size. Many critics see Finnegan, whose death, wake and resurrection are the subject of the opening chapter, as either a prototype of HCE, or as another of his manifestations. One of the reasons for this close identification is that Finnegan is called a "man of hod, cement and edifices" and "like Haroun Childeric Eggeberth", identifying him with the initials HCE. Parrinder for example states that "Bygmester Finnegan ..is HCE", and finds that his fall and resurrection foreshadows "the fall of HCE early in Book I

hich is Ij ( fa, ايج, also Romanized as Īj; also known as Hich and Īch) is a village in Golabar Rural District, in the Central District of Ijrud County, Zanjan Province, Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also ...

paralleled by his resurrection towards the end of III.3, in the section originally called "Haveth Childers Everywhere", when CE'sghost speaks forth in the middle of a seance."

Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP)

Patrick McCarthy describes HCE's wife ALP as "the river-woman whose presence is implied in the "riverrun" with which ''Finnegans Wake'' opens and whose monologue closes the book. For over six hundred pages, Joyce presents Anna Livia to us almost exclusively through other characters, much as in ''Ulysses'' we hear what Molly Bloom has to say about herself only in the last chapter." The most extensive discussion of ALP comes in chapter I.8, in which hundreds of names of rivers are woven into the tale of ALP's life, as told by two gossiping washerwomen. Similarly hundreds of city names are woven into "Haveth Childers Everywhere", the corresponding passage at the end of III.3 which focuses on HCE. As a result, it is generally contended that HCE personifies the

Viking Vikings ; non, víkingr is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and se ...

-founded city of Dublin, and his wife ALP personifies the river Liffey, on whose banks the city was built.

Shem, Shaun and Issy

ALP and HCE have a daughter, Issy – whose personality is often split (represented by her mirror-twin). Parrinder argues that "as daughter and sister, she is an object of secret and repressed desire both to her father ..and to her two brothers." These twin sons of HCE and ALP consist of a writer called Shem the Penman and a postman by the name of Shaun the Post, who are rivals for replacing their father and for their sister Issy's affection. Shaun is portrayed as a dull

postman A mail carrier, mailman, mailwoman, postal carrier, postman, postwoman, or letter carrier (in American English), sometimes colloquially known as a postie (in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom), is an employee of a post ...

, conforming to society's expectations, while Shem is a bright artist and sinister experimenter, often perceived as Joyce's alter-ego in the book. Hugh Staples finds that Shaun "wants to be thought of as a man-about-town, a snappy dresser, a glutton and a gourmet... He is possessed of a musical voice and is a braggart. He is not happy in his work, which is that of a messenger or a postman; he would rather be a priest." Shaun's sudden and somewhat unexpected promotion to the book's central character in Part III is explained by Tindall with the assertion that "having disposed of old HCE, Shaun is becoming the new HCE." Like their father, Shem and Shaun are referred to by different names throughout the book, such as "Caddy and Primas"; " Mercius" and " Justius"; "Dolph and Kevin"; and "Jerry and Kevin". These twins are contrasted in the book by allusions to sets of opposing twins and enemies in literature, mythology and history; such as

Set Set, The Set, SET or SETS may refer to: Science, technology, and mathematics Mathematics *Set (mathematics), a collection of elements *Category of sets, the category whose objects and morphisms are sets and total functions, respectively Electro ...

and

Horus Horus or Heru, Hor, Har in Ancient Egyptian, is one of the most significant ancient Egyptian deities who served many functions, most notably as god of kingship and the sky. He was worshipped from at least the late prehistoric Egypt until the P ...

of the

Osiris Osiris (, from Egyptian ''wsjr'', cop, ⲟⲩⲥⲓⲣⲉ , ; Phoenician: 𐤀𐤎𐤓, romanized: ʾsr) is the god of fertility, agriculture, the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life, and vegetation in ancient Egyptian religion. He was ...

story; the biblical pairs

Jacob Jacob (; ; ar, يَعْقُوب, Yaʿqūb; gr, Ἰακώβ, Iakṓb), later given the name Israel, is regarded as a patriarch of the Israelites and is an important figure in Abrahamic religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. J ...

and

Esau Esau ''Ēsaû''; la, Hesau, Esau; ar, عِيسَوْ ''‘Īsaw''; meaning "hairy"Easton, M. ''Illustrated Bible Dictionary'', (, , 2006, p. 236 or "rough".Mandel, D. ''The Ultimate Who's Who in the Bible'', (.), 2007, p. 175 is the elder son o ...

Cain and Abel In the biblical Book of Genesis, Cain ''Qayīn'', in pausa ''Qāyīn''; gr, Κάϊν ''Káïn''; ar, قابيل/قايين, Qābīl / Qāyīn and Abel ''Heḇel'', in pausa ''Hāḇel''; gr, Ἅβελ ''Hábel''; ar, هابيل, Hāb� ...

, and Saint Michael and the

Devil A devil is the personification of evil as it is conceived in various cultures and religious traditions. It is seen as the objectification of a hostile and destructive force. Jeffrey Burton Russell states that the different conceptions of t ...

– equating Shaun with "Mick" and Shem with "Nick" – as well as

Romulus and Remus In Roman mythology, Romulus and Remus (, ) are twin brothers whose story tells of the events that led to the founding of the city of Rome and the Roman Kingdom by Romulus, following his fratricide of Remus. The image of a she-wolf suckling the ...

. They also represent the oppositions of time and space, and tree and stone.

Minor characters

The most commonly recurring characters outside of the Earwicker family are the four old men known collectively as "Mamalujo" (a conflation of their names: Matt Gregory, Marcus Lyons, Luke Tarpey and Johnny Mac Dougall). These four most commonly serve as narrators, but they also play a number of active roles in the text, such as when they serve as the judges in the court case of I.4, or as the inquisitors who question Yawn in III.4. Tindall summarises the roles that these old men play as those of the Four Masters, the Four Evangelists, and the four

Provinces of Ireland There have been four Provinces of Ireland: Connacht (Connaught), Leinster, Munster, and Ulster. The Irish language, Irish word for this territorial division, , meaning "fifth part", suggests that there were once five, and at times Kingdom_of_ ...

( "

Matthew Matthew may refer to: * Matthew (given name) * Matthew (surname) * ''Matthew'' (ship), the replica of the ship sailed by John Cabot in 1497 * ''Matthew'' (album), a 2000 album by rapper Kool Keith * Matthew (elm cultivar), a cultivar of the Ch ...

, from the north, is

Ulster Ulster (; ga, Ulaidh or ''Cúige Uladh'' ; sco, label= Ulster Scots, Ulstèr or ''Ulster'') is one of the four traditional Irish provinces. It is made up of nine counties: six of these constitute Northern Ireland (a part of the United King ...

;

Mark Mark may refer to: Currency * Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible mark, the currency of Bosnia and Herzegovina * East German mark, the currency of the German Democratic Republic * Estonian mark, the currency of Estonia between 1918 and 1927 * Fi ...

, from the south, is

Munster Munster ( gle, an Mhumhain or ) is one of the provinces of Ireland, in the south of Ireland. In early Ireland, the Kingdom of Munster was one of the kingdoms of Gaelic Ireland ruled by a "king of over-kings" ( ga, rí ruirech). Following the ...

;

Luke People *Luke (given name), a masculine given name (including a list of people and characters with the name) *Luke (surname) (including a list of people and characters with the name) *Luke the Evangelist, author of the Gospel of Luke. Also known as ...

, from the east, is

Leinster Leinster ( ; ga, Laighin or ) is one of the provinces of Ireland, situated in the southeast and east of Ireland. The province comprises the ancient Kingdoms of Meath, Leinster and Osraige. Following the 12th-century Norman invasion of Ir ...

; and John, from the west, is Connaught"). According to Finn Fordham, Joyce related to his daughter-in-law Helen Fleischmann that "Mamalujo" also represented Joyce's own family, namely his wife Nora (mama), daughter Lucia (lu), and son Giorgio (jo). In addition to the four old men, there are a group of twelve unnamed men who always appear together, and serve as the customers in Earwicker's pub, gossipers about his sins, jurors at his trial and mourners at his wake. The Earwicker household also includes two cleaning staff: Kate, the maid, and Joe, who is by turns handyman and barman in Earwicker's pub. Tindall considers these characters to be older versions of ALP and HCE. Kate often plays the role of museum curator, as in the "Willingdone Museyroom" episode of 1.1, and is recognisable by her repeated motif "Tip! Tip!" Joe is often also referred to by the name "Sackerson", and Kitcher describes him as "a figure sometimes playing the role of policeman, sometimes ..a squalid derelict, and most frequently the odd-job man of HCE's inn, Kate's male counterpart, who can ambiguously indicate an older version of HCE."

Language and style

Joyce invented a unique polyglot-language or ''

idioglossia An idioglossia (from the Ancient Greek , 'own, personal, distinct' and , 'tongue') is an idiosyncratic language invented and spoken by only one person or only two people. Most often, ''idioglossia'' refers to the "private languages" of young chi ...

'' solely for the purpose of this work. This language is composed of composite words from some sixty to seventy world languages, combined to form puns, or

portmanteau A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordspolysemetic", and Tindall as an "

Arabesque The arabesque is a form of artistic decoration consisting of "surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils" or plain lines, often combined with other elements. Another definition is "Foli ...

". Norris describes it as a language which "like poetry, uses words and images which can mean several, often contradictory, things at once"Norris, ''The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake'', p.120 The style has also been compared to rumour and gossip, especially in the way the writing subverts notions of political and scholarly authority. An early review of the book argued that Joyce was attempting "to employ language as a new medium, breaking down all grammatical usages, all time space values, all ordinary conceptions of context [... the theme is the language and the language the theme, and a language where every association of sound and free association is exploited." Seconding this analysis of the book's emphasis on form over content, Paul Rosenfeld reviewed ''Finnegans Wake'' in 1939 with the suggestion that "the writing is not so much about something as it is that something itself .in ''Finnegans Wake'' the style, the essential qualities and movement of the words, their rhythmic and melodic sequences, and the emotional color of the page are the main representatives of the author's thought and feeling. The accepted significations of the words are secondary." While commentators emphasize how this manner of writing can communicate multiple levels of meaning simultaneously, Hayman and Norris contend that its purpose is as much to obscure and disable meaning as to expand it. Hayman writes that access to the work's "tenuous narratives" may be achieved only through "the dense weave of a language designed as much to shield as to reveal them." Norris argues that Joyce's language is "devious" and that it "conceals and reveals secrets." Allen B. Ruch has dubbed Joyce's new language "dreamspeak," and describes it as "a language that’s basically English, but extremely malleable and all-inclusive, a fusion of portmanteau words, stylistic parodies, and complex puns." Although much has been made of the numerous world languages employed in the book's composite language, most of the more obscure languages appear only seldom in small clusters, and most agree with Ruch that the latent sense of the language, however manifestly obscure, is "basically English". Burrell also finds that Joyce's thousands of neologisms are "based on the same etymology, etymological principles as standard English." The ''Wakes language is not entirely unique in literature; for example critics have seen its use of portmanteaus and neologisms as an extension of

Lewis Carroll Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet and mathematician. His most notable works are ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865) and its sequel ...

's '' Jabberwocky''. Although Joyce died shortly after the publication of ''Finnegans Wake'', during the work's composition the author made a number of statements concerning his intentions in writing in such an original manner. In a letter to Max Eastman, for example, Joyce suggested that his decision to employ such a unique and complex language was a direct result from his attempts to represent the night:

In writing of the night I really could not, I felt I could not, use words in their ordinary connections. Used that way they do not express how things are in the night, in the different stages – the conscious, then semi-conscious, then unconscious. I found that it could not be done with words in their ordinary relations and connections. When morning comes of course everything will be clear again ..I'll give them back their English language. I'm not destroying it for good.Ellman, ''James Joyce'', p.546

Joyce is also reported as having told Arthur Power that "what is clear and concise can't deal with reality, for to be real is to be surrounded by mystery." On the subject of the vast number of puns employed in the work Joyce argued to

Frank Budgen Frank Spencer Curtis Budgen (1 March 1882 – 26 April 1971) was an English painter, writer and socialist activist acquainted with the author James Joyce. Life Born in Crowhurst, Surrey, Budgen spent six years at sea before working in London ...

that "after all, the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church was built on a pun. It ought to be good enough for me", and to the objection of triviality he replied "Yes. Some of the means I use are

trivial Trivia is information and data that are considered to be of little value. It can be contrasted with general knowledge and common sense. Latin Etymology The ancient Romans used the word ''triviae'' to describe where one road split or forked ...

– and some are quadrivial." A great many of the book's puns are etymological in nature. Sources tell us that Joyce relished delving into the history and the changing meanings of words, his primary source being ''An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language'' by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat (Oxford, at the Clarendon Press; 1879). For example, one of the first entries in Skeat is for the letter A, which begins: "...(1) adown; (2) afoot; (3) along; (4) arise; (5) achieve; (6) avert; (7) amend; (8) alas; (9) abyss..." Further in the entry, Skeat writes: "These prefixes are discussed at greater length under the headings Of, On, Along, Arise...Alas, Aware, Avast..." It seems likely that these strings of words prompted Joyce to finish the ''Wake'' with a sentence fragment that included the words: "...a way a lone a last a loved a long..."

collated words from foreign languages on cards for Joyce to use, and, as Joyce's eyesight worsened, wrote down the text from his dictation. Beckett described and defended the writing style of ''Finnegans Wake'' thus: "This writing that you find so obscure is a quintessential extraction of language and painting and gesture, with all the inevitable clarity of the old inarticulation. Here is the savage economy of

hieroglyphics Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,00 ...

". Faced with the obstacles to be surmounted in "understanding" Joyce's text, a handful of critics have suggested readers focus on the rhythm and sound of the language, rather than solely on "meaning." As early as 1929, Eugène Jolas stressed the importance of the aural and musical dimensions of the work. In his contribution to ''Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress'', Jolas wrote:

Those who have heard Mr. Joyce read aloud from ''Work in Progress'' know the immense rhythmic beauty of his technique. It has a musical flow that flatters the ear, that has the organic structure of works of nature, that transmits painstakingly every vowel and consonant formed by his ear.

Allusions to other works

''Finnegans Wake'' incorporates a high number of

intertextual Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text, either through deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche or parody,Gerard Genette (1997) ''Paratexts'p.18/ref>H ...

allusions and references to other texts; Parrinder refers to it as "a remarkable example of intertextuality" containing a "wealth of literary reference." Among the most prominent are the Irish ballad "

Finnegan's Wake "Finnegan's Wake" is an Irish-American comic ballad, first published in New York in 1864. Various 19th-century variety theatre performers, including Dan Bryant of Bryant's Minstrels, claimed authorship but a definitive account of the song's origi ...

" from which the book takes its name, Italian philosopher

Giovanni Battista Vico Giambattista Vico (born Giovan Battista Vico ; ; 23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist during the Italian Enlightenment. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationali ...

's ''La Scienza Nuova'', the Egyptian

Book of the Dead The ''Book of the Dead'' ( egy, 𓂋𓏤𓈒𓈒𓈒𓏌𓏤𓉐𓂋𓏏𓂻𓅓𓉔𓂋𓅱𓇳𓏤, ''rw n(y)w prt m hrw(w)'') is an ancient Egyptian funerary text generally written on papyrus and used from the beginning of the New Kingdom ...

, the plays of Shakespeare, and religious texts such as the Bible and

Qur'an The Quran (, ; Standard Arabic: , Quranic Arabic: , , 'the recitation'), also romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation from God. It is organized in 114 chapters (pl.: , sing. ...

. These allusions, rather than directly quoting or referencing a source, normally enter the text in a contorted fashion, often through humorous plays on words. For example, Hamlet Prince of Denmark becomes "Camelot, prince of dinmurk" and the Epistle to the Hebrews becomes a "farced epistol to the hibruws". The book begins with one such allusion to Vico's ''New Science'': "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs". "Commodius vicus" refers to Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), who proposed a theory of cyclical history in his work ''

'' (''The New Science''). Vico argued that the world was coming to the end of the last of three ages, these being the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of humans. These ideas recur throughout ''Finnegans Wake'', informing the book's four-part structure. Vico's name appears a number of times throughout the ''Wake'', indicating the work's debt to his theories, such as "The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin". That a reference to Vico's

cyclical theory The cyclical theory refers to a model used by historians Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. to explain the fluctuations in politics throughout American history. In this theory, the United States's national mood alternates betwe ...

of history is to be found in the opening sentence which is a continuation of the book's closing sentence – thus making the work cyclical in itself – creates the relevance of such an allusion. One of the sources Joyce drew from is the Ancient Egyptian story of

, and the Egyptian ''

,'' a collection of spells and invocations. Bishop asserts that "it is impossible to overlook the vital presence of the ''Book of the Dead'' in ''Finnegans Wake'', which refers to ancient Egypt in countless tags and allusions." Joyce uses the ''Book of the Dead'' in ''Finnegans Wake'', "because it is a collection of the incantations for the resurrection and rebirth of the dead on the burial". At one of their final meetings, Joyce suggested to Frank Budgen that he write an article about ''Finnegans Wake'', entitling it "James Joyce's Book of the Dead". Budgen followed Joyce's advice with his paper "Joyce's Chapters of Going Forth by Day", highlighting many of the allusions to Egyptian mythology in the book. The

legend – a tragic love triangle between the Irish princess Iseult, the Cornish knight

Tristan Tristan (Latin/ Brythonic: ''Drustanus''; cy, Trystan), also known as Tristram or Tristain and similar names, is the hero of the legend of Tristan and Iseult. In the legend, he is tasked with escorting the Irish princess Iseult to wed ...

and his uncle

– is also oft alluded to in the work, particularly in II.4. Fargnoli and Gillespie argue that "various themes and motifs throughout ''Finnegans Wake'', such as the

cuckold A cuckold is the husband of an adulterous wife; the wife of an adulterous husband is a cuckquean. In biology, a cuckold is a male who unwittingly invests parental effort in juveniles who are not genetically his offspring. A husband who is aw ...

ry of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (a King Mark figure) and Shaun's attempts at seducing Issy, relate directly to Tristan and Isolde ..other motifs relating to Earwicker's loss of authority, such as the forces usurping his parental status, are also based on Tristan and Isolde." The book also alludes heavily to

Irish mythology Irish mythology is the body of myths native to the island of Ireland. It was originally passed down orally in the prehistoric era, being part of ancient Celtic religion. Many myths were later written down in the early medieval era by C ...

, with HCE sometimes corresponding to Fionn mac Cumhaill, Issy and ALP to

Gráinne Gráinne (), sometimes anglicised Grania, is the daughter of king Cormac mac Airt in the Fianna Cycle of Irish mythology. She is one of the central figures in the Middle Irish text ''Finn and Gráinne'', as well as the 17th-century tale ''The P ...

, and Shem/Shaun to Dermot (Diarmaid). Not only Irish mythology, but also notable real-life Irish figures are alluded to throughout the text. For example, HCE is often identified with

Charles Stewart Parnell Charles Stewart Parnell (27 June 1846 – 6 October 1891) was an Irish nationalist politician who served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1875 to 1891, also acting as Leader of the Home Rule League from 1880 to 1882 and then Leader of the ...

, and Shem's attack on his father in this way mirrors the attempt of forger

Richard Pigott Richard Pigott (1835 – 1 March 1889) was an Irish journalist, best known for his forging of evidence that Charles Stewart Parnell of the Irish National Land League had been sympathetic to the perpetrators of the Phoenix Park Murders. Parn ...

to incriminate Parnell in the

Phoenix Park Murders The Phoenix Park Murders were the fatal stabbings of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke (civil servant), Thomas Henry Burke in Phoenix Park, Dublin, British rule in Ireland, Ireland, on 6 May 1882. Cavendish was the newly appoint ...

of 1882 by means of false letters. But, given the flexibility of allusion in ''Finnegans Wake'' HCE assumes the character of Pigott as well, for just as HCE betrays himself to the

cad Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers (or ) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. This software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve co ...

, Pigott betrayed himself at the inquiry into admitting the forgery by his spelling of the word "hesitancy" as "hesitency"; and this misspelling appears frequently in the ''Wake''. ''Finnegans Wake'' also makes a great number of allusions to religious texts. When HCE is first introduced in chapter I.2, the narrator relates how "in the beginning" he was a "grand old gardener", thus equating him with

Adam Adam; el, Ἀδάμ, Adám; la, Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, ''adam'' is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as " ...

in the

Garden of Eden In Abrahamic religions, the Garden of Eden ( he, גַּן־עֵדֶן, ) or Garden of God (, and גַן־אֱלֹהִים ''gan-Elohim''), also called the Terrestrial Paradise, is the Bible, biblical paradise described in Book of Genesis, Genes ...

. Spinks further highlights this allusion by highlighting that like HCE's unspecified crime in the park, Adam also "commits a crime in a garden".

Norwegian influence

With

, an early Viking settlement, as the setting for ''Finnegans Wake'', it is perhaps not surprising that Joyce incorporated a number of Norwegian linguistic and cultural elements into the work (e.g., Riksmål references). One of the main tales of chapter II.3 concerns a Norwegian tailor, and a number of Norwegian words such as ''bakvandets'', ''Knut Oelsvinger'' and ''Bygmester Finnegan'' (the latter a reference to

Ibsen Henrik Johan Ibsen (; ; 20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a Norwegian playwright and theatre director. As one of the founders of modernism in theatre, Ibsen is often referred to as "the father of realism" and one of the most influential playw ...

's ''Bygmester Solness'') are used throughout. Indeed, most of Ibsen's works, many of his characters and also some quotations are referenced in the ''Wake''. While Joyce was working on ''Finnegans Wake'', he wanted to insert references to

Scandinavian languages The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages—a sub-family of the Indo-European languages—along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is also r ...

and

literature Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...

, hiring five teachers of Norwegian. The first one turned out to be the poet

Olaf Bull Olaf Jacob Martin Luther Breda Bull (10 November 1883 – 29 June 1933) was a Norwegian poet. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature six times. Biography Olaf Bull was born in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway. His parents were autho ...

. Joyce wanted to read Norwegian works in the original language, including Peter Andreas Munch's ''Norrøne gude- og heltesagn'' ( Norse tales of gods and

hero A hero (feminine: heroine) is a real person or a main fictional character who, in the face of danger, combats adversity through feats of ingenuity, courage, or Physical strength, strength. Like other formerly gender-specific terms (like ...

es). He was looking for puns and unusual associations across the barriers of language, a practice Bull well understood. Lines from Bull's poems echo through ''Finnegans Wake'', and Bull himself materializes under the name "Olaph the Oxman", a pun on his surname.

Hundred-letter words

An extreme example of the ''Wake's'' language are a series of ten one-hundred letter words spread throughout the text (although the tenth in actuality has a hundred and one letters). The first such word occurs on the text's first page; all ten are presented in the context of their complete sentences, below. These ten words have come to be known as ''thunders'', ''thunderclaps'', or ''thunderwords'', based upon interpretation of the first word as being a portmanteau of several word-forms for thunder, in several languages. The Canadian media theorist

Marshall McLuhan Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his ...

(with

Quentin Fiore Quentin Fiore (February 12, 1920 – April 13, 2019) was a graphic designer, who worked mostly in books. Early life and education Quentin Fiore was born on February 12, 1920, in the Bronx, New York to Antonino, a tailor, and Bice (née Bononi) ...

and Jerome Agel) made this connection explicit in his ''

War and Peace in the Global Village ''War and Peace in the Global Village'' is a 1968 book by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. It contains a collage of images and text that illustrates the effects of electronic media and new technology on man. Marshall McLuhan used James Joyc ...

'', where he identified the ten words as "thunders", reproducing them in his own text. For the purposes of his book, McLuhan appropriated the ten words and interpreted them as symbolizing various forms of human technology, which together with other liberal quotations from the ''Wake'' form a parallel rhetoric which McLuhan used to discuss technology, warfare, and human society. Marshall's son

Eric McLuhan Eric McLuhan (19 January 1942 – 18 May 2018) was a communications theorist and media ecologist, son of Marshall McLuhan. Biography Eric McLuhan was the eldest of Marshall McLuhan's six children. He received his BSc in Communications from Wis ...

carried on his father's interpretation of the thunders, publishing ''The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake'', a book expressly devoted to the meaning of the ten words. For ricMcLuhan, the total letter count of the above ten words (1001) intentionally corresponds to the ''

One Thousand and One Nights ''One Thousand and One Nights'' ( ar, أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ, italic=yes, ) is a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the ''Arabian ...

'' of

Middle East The Middle East ( ar, الشرق الأوسط, ISO 233: ) is a geopolitical region commonly encompassing Arabian Peninsula, Arabia (including the Arabian Peninsula and Bahrain), Anatolia, Asia Minor (Asian part of Turkey except Hatay Pro ...

ern folklore, which buttresses the critical interpretation of the ''Wake'' as being a book of the night.

-The hundredlettered name again, last word of perfect language. But you could come near it, we do suppose, strong Shaun O', we foresupposed. How?Joyce 1939
p. 424

Literary significance and criticism

The value of ''Finnegans Wake'' as a work of literature has been a point of contention since the time of its appearance, in serial form, in

literary reviews Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...

of the 1920s. Initial response, to both its serialised and final published forms, was almost universally negative. Even close friends and family were disapproving of Joyce's seemingly impenetrable text, with Joyce's brother

Stanislaus Stanislav and variants may refer to: People *Stanislav (given name), a Slavic given name with many spelling variations (Stanislaus, Stanislas, Stanisław, etc.) Places * Stanislav, a coastal village in Kherson, Ukraine * Stanislaus County, Cali ...

"rebuk nghim for writing an incomprehensible night-book", and former friend

Oliver Gogarty Oliver Joseph St. John Gogarty (17 August 1878 – 22 September 1957) was an Irish poet, author, otolaryngologist, athlete, politician, and well-known conversationalist. He served as the inspiration for Buck Mulligan in James Joyce's novel ...

believing the book to be a joke, pulled by Joyce on the literary community, referring to it as "the most colossal leg pull in literature since Macpherson's ''

Ossian Ossian (; Irish Gaelic/Scottish Gaelic: ''Oisean'') is the narrator and purported author of a cycle of epic poems published by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, originally as ''Fingal'' (1761) and ''Temora'' (1763), and later combined under t ...

''". When

, a former champion of Joyce's and admirer of Joyce's ''Ulysses'', was asked his opinion on the text, he wrote "Nothing so far as I make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization."

H. G. Wells Herbert George Wells"Wells, H. G."
Revised 18 May 2015. ''

..I ask: who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousands I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?" Even Joyce's patron Harriett Weaver wrote to him in 1927 to inform him of her misgivings regarding his new work, stating "I am made in such a way that I do not care much for the output from your Wholesale Safety Pun Factory nor for the darknesses and unintelligibilities of your deliberately entangled language system. It seems to me you are wasting your genius." The wider literary community were equally disparaging, with

D. H. Lawrence David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English writer, novelist, poet and essayist. His works reflect on modernity, industrialization, sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct. His best-k ...

declaring in a letter to Maria and Aldous Huxley, having read sections of the ''Wake'' appearing as "Work in Progress" in ''Transition'', "My God, what a clumsy '' olla putrida'' James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate journalistic dirty-mindedness – what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!" Vladimir Nabokov, who had also admired ''Ulysses'', described ''Finnegans Wake'' as "nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room ..and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity." In response to such criticisms, '' Transition'' published essays throughout the late 1920s, defending and explaining Joyce's work. In 1929, these essays (along with a few others written for the occasion) were collected under the title ''

'' and published by Shakespeare and Company. This collection featured

's first commissioned work, the essay "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce", along with contributions by William Carlos Williams,

Stuart Gilbert Arthur Stuart Ahluwalia Stronge Gilbert (25 October 1883 – 5 January 1969) was an English literary scholar and translator. Among his translations into English are works by Alexis de Tocqueville, Édouard Dujardin, André Malraux, Antoine d ...

Marcel Brion Marcel Brion (; 21 November 1895 – 23 October 1984) was a French essayist, literary critic, novelist, and historian. Early life The son of a lawyer, Brion was classmates in Thiers with Marcel Pagnol and Albert Cohen. After completing his ...

, Eugene Jolas and others. As Margot Norris highlights, the agenda of this first generation of Wake critics and defenders was "to assimilate Joyce's experimental text to an already increasingly established and institutionalized literary avant-garde" and "to foreground Joyce's last work as spearhead of a philosophical avant-garde bent on the revolution of language".Norris 1992
p.344
Upon its publication in 1939, ''Finnegans Wake'' received a series of mixed, but mostly negative reviews. Louise Bogan, writing for ''Nation'', surmised that while "the book's great beauties, its wonderful passages of wit, its variety, its mark of genius and immense learning are undeniable .. to read the book over a long period of time gives one the impression of watching intemperance become addiction, become debauch" and argued that "Joyce's delight in reducing man's learning, passion, and religion to a hash is also disturbing." Edwin Muir, reviewing in ''Listener'' wrote that "as a whole the book is so elusive that there is no judging it; I cannot tell whether it is winding into deeper and deeper worlds of meaning or lapsing into meaningless", although he too acknowledged that "there are occasional flashes of a kind of poetry which is difficult to define but is of unquestioned power." B. Ifor Evans, writing in the ''Manchester Guardian'', similarly argued that, due to its difficulties, the book "does not admit of review", and argued that, perhaps "in twenty years' time, with sufficient study and with the aid of the commentary that will doubtless arise, one might be ready for an attempt to appraise it." Taking a swipe at many of the negative reviews circulating at the time, Evans writes: "The easiest way to deal with the book would be ..to write off Mr. Joyce's latest volume as the work of a charlatan. But the author of '' Dubliners'', '' A Portrait of the Artist'' and ''Ulysses'' is not a charlatan, but an artist of very considerable proportions. I prefer to suspend judgement..." In the time since Joyce's death, the book's admirers have struggled against public perception of the work to make exactly this argument for ''Finnegans Wake''. One of the book's early champions was

Thornton Wilder Thornton Niven Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes — for the novel ''The Bridge of San Luis Rey'' and for the plays ''Our Town'' and ''The Skin of Our Teeth'' — a ...

, who wrote to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas in August 1939, a few months after the book's publication: "One of my absorptions ..has been James Joyce's new novel, digging out its buried keys and resolving that unbroken chain of erudite puzzles and finally coming on lots of wit, and lots of beautiful things has been my midnight recuperation. A lot of thanks to him". The publication in 1944 of the first in-depth study and analysis of Joyce's final text—'' A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake'' by mythologist

and Henry Morton Robinson—tried to prove to a skeptical public that if the hidden key or " Monomyth" could be found, then the book could be read as a novel with characters, plot, and an internal coherence. As a result, from the 1940s to the 1960s critical emphasis moved away from positioning the ''Wake'' as a "revolution of the word" and towards readings that stressed its "internal logical coherence", as "the avant-gardism of ''Finnegans Wake'' was put on hold nddeferred while the text was rerouted through the formalistic requirements of an American criticism inspired by New Critical dicta that demanded a poetic intelligibility, a formal logic, of texts." Slowly the book's critical capital began to rise to the point that, in 1957,

Northrop Frye Herman Northrop Frye (July 14, 1912 – January 23, 1991) was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century. Frye gained international fame with his first book, '' Fearful Symmet ...

described ''Finnegans Wake'' as the "chief ironic epic of our time" and Anthony Burgess lauded the book as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page." Concerning the importance of such laughter, Darragh Greene has argued that the ''Wake'' through its series of puns, neologisms, compounds, and riddles shows the play of Wittgensteinian language-games, and by laughing at them, the reader learns how language makes the world and is freed from its snares and bewitchment. In 1962, Clive Hart wrote the first major book-length study of the work since Campbell's ''Skeleton Key'', ''Structure and Motif in "Finnegans Wake"'' which approached the work from the increasingly influential field of

structuralism In sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, structuralism is a general theory of culture and methodology that implies that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader ...

. However through the 1960s it was to be French post-structuralist theory that was to exert the most influence over readings of ''Finnegans Wake'', refocussing critical attention back to the work's radical linguistic experiments and their philosophical consequences.

Jacques Derrida Jacques Derrida (; ; born Jackie Élie Derrida; See also . 15 July 1930 – 9 October 2004) was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in numerous texts, and which was developed t ...

developed his ideas of literary "

" largely inspired by ''Finnegans Wake'' (as detailed in the essay "Two Words for Joyce"), and as a result

literary theory Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Culler 1997, p.1 Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, mo ...

—in particular post-structuralism—has embraced Joyce's innovation and ambition in ''Finnegans Wake''. Derrida tells an anecdote about the two books' importance for his own thought; in a bookstore in Tokyo,

an American tourist of the most typical variety leaned over my shoulder and sighed: "So many books! What is the definitive one? Is there any?" It was an extremely small book shop, a news agency. I almost replied, "Yes, there are two of them, ''Ulysses'' and ''Finnegans Wake''.

The text's influence on other writers has grown since its initial shunning, and contemporary American author Tom Robbins is among the writers working today to have expressed his admiration for Joyce's complex last work:

the language in it is incredible. There's so many layers of puns and references to mythology and history. But it's the most realistic novel ever written. Which is exactly why it's so unreadable. He wrote that book the way that the human mind works. An intelligent, inquiring mind. And that's just the way consciousness is. It's not linear. It's just one thing piled on another. And all kinds of cross references. And he just takes that to an extreme. There's never been a book like it and I don't think there ever will be another book like it. And it's absolutely a monumental human achievement. But it's very hard to read.

More recently, ''Finnegans Wake'' has become an increasingly accepted part of the critical literary canon, although detractors still remain. As an example, John Bishop described the book's legacy as that of "the single most intentionally crafted literary artifact that our culture has produced ..and, certainly, one of the great monuments of twentieth-century experimental letters."Bishop, John. Introduction to ''Finnegans Wake'', Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition, 1999
p. vii
/ref> The section of the book to have received the most praise throughout its critical history has been "Anna Livia Plurabelle" (I.8), which Parrinder describes as being "widely recognized as one of the most beautiful prose-poems in English."Parrinder 1984, p. 205.

Publication history

Throughout the seventeen years that Joyce wrote the book, ''Finnegans Wake'' was published in short excerpts in a number of literary magazines, most prominently in the Parisian literary journals ''

Transatlantic Review Transatlantic, Trans-Atlantic or TransAtlantic may refer to: Film * Transatlantic Pictures, a film production company from 1948 to 1950 * Transatlantic Enterprises, an American production company in the late 1970s * ''Transatlantic'' (1931 film), ...

'' and Eugene Jolas's '' transition''. It has been argued that "''Finnegans Wake'', much more so than ''Ulysses'', was very much directly shaped by the tangled history of its serial publication." In late October 1923 in

's Paris flat, Ford Madox Ford convinced Joyce to contribute some of his new sketches to the ''Transatlantic Review'', a new journal that Ford was editing. The eight-page "Mamalujo" sketch became the first fragment from the book to be published in its own right, in ''Transatlantic Review'' 1.4 in April 1924. The sketch appeared under the title "From Work in Progress", a term applied to works by

Ernest Hemingway Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fic ...

and

Tristan Tzara Tristan Tzara (; ; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, comp ...

published in the same issue, and the one by which Joyce would refer to his final work until its publication as ''Finnegans Wake'' in 1939.Crispi, Slote 2007, p. 17 The sketch appeared in the final published text, in radically altered form, as chapter 2.4.Crispi, Slote 2007, p. 490 In 1925 four sketches from the developing work were published. "Here Comes Everybody" was published as "From Work in Progress" in the ''Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers'', edited by

Robert McAlmon Robert Menzies McAlmon (also used Robert M. McAlmon, as his signature name, March 9, 1895 – February 2, 1956) was an American writer, poet, and publisher. In the 1920s, he founded in Paris the publishing house, Contact Editions, where he publ ...

. "The Letter" was published as "Fragment of an Unpublished Work" in ''Criterion'' 3.12 (July 1925), and as "A New Unnamed Work" in ''Two Worlds'' 1.1. (September 1925). The first published draft of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" appeared in ''

Le Navire d'Argent ''Le Navire d'Argent'' (''The Silver Ship'') was a short lived but influential literary review, published monthly in Paris from June 1925 until May 1926. It was "French in language, but international in spirit". Founded by Adrienne Monnier, with ...

'' 1 in October, and the first published draft of "Shem the Penman" appeared in the Autumn–Winter edition of ''This Quarter''. In 1925-6 ''Two Worlds'' began to publish redrafted versions of previously published fragments, starting with "Here Comes Everybody" in December 1925, and then "Anna Livia Plurabelle" (March 1926), "Shem the Penman" (June 1926), and "Mamalujo" (September 1925), all under the title "A New Unnamed Work". Eugene Jolas befriended Joyce in 1927, and as a result serially published revised fragments from Part I in his ''transition'' literary journal. This began with the debut of the book's opening chapter, under the title "Opening Pages of a Work in Progress", in April 1927. By November chapters I.2 through I.8 had all been published in the journal, in their correct sequence, under the title "Continuation of a Work in Progress".Crispi, Slote 2007, p. 491 From 1928 Part's II and III slowly began to emerge in ''transition'', with a brief excerpt of II.2 ("The Triangle") published in February 1928, and Part III's four chapters between March 1928 and November 1929. At this point, Joyce started publishing individual chapters from ''Work in Progress''. In 1929, Harry and

Caresse Crosby Caresse Crosby (born Mary Phelps Jacob; April 20, 1892 – January 24, 1970) was the first recipient of a patent for the modern bra, an American patron of the arts, publisher, and the "literary godmother to the Lost Generation of expatriate writ ...

, owners of the

Black Sun Press The Black Sun Press was an English language press noted for publisher, publishing the early works of many Literary modernism, modernist writers including Hart Crane, D. H. Lawrence, Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, and Eugene Jolas. It enjoyed ...

, contacted

through bookstore owner

Sylvia Beach Sylvia may refer to: People *Sylvia (given name) *Sylvia (singer), American country music and country pop singer and songwriter *Sylvia Robinson, American singer, record producer, and record label executive *Sylvia Vrethammar, Swedish singer credi ...

and arranged to print three short

fables Fable is a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral ...

about the novel's three children Shem, Shaun and Issy that had already appeared in translation. These were "The Mookse and the Gripes", "The Triangle", and "The Ondt and the Gracehoper". The Black Sun Press named the new book ''Tales Told of Shem and Shaun'' for which they paid Joyce US$2,000 for 600 copies, unusually good pay for Joyce at that time. Their printer Roger Lescaret erred when setting the type, leaving the final page with only two lines. Rather than reset the entire book, he suggested to the Crosby's that they ask Joyce to write an additional eight lines to fill in the remainder of the page. Caresse refused, insisting that a literary master would never alter his work to fix a printer's error. Lescaret appealed directly to Joyce, who promptly wrote the eight lines requested. The first 100 copies of Joyce's book were printed on Japanese vellum and signed by the author. It was hand-set in Caslon type and included an abstract portrait of Joyce by

Constantin Brâncuși Constantin Brâncuși (; February 19, 1876 – March 16, 1957) was a Romanian Sculpture, sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France. Considered one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th-century and a pioneer of ...

, a pioneer of modernist abstract sculpture. Brâncuși's drawings of Joyce became among the most popular images of him.

Faber and Faber Faber and Faber Limited, usually abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in London. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot (an early Faber editor and director), W. H. Auden, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel B ...

published book editions of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" (1930), and "Haveth Childers Everywhere" (1931), HCE's long defence of his life which would eventually close chapter III.3.Crispi, Slote 2007, p. 492 A year later they published ''Two Tales of Shem and Shaun'', which dropped "The Triangle" from the previous Black Sun Press edition. Part II was published serially in ''transition'' between February 1933 and May 1938, and a final individual book publication, ''Storiella as She Is Syung'', was published by Corvinus Press in 1937, made up of sections from what would become chapter II.2. By 1938 virtually all of ''Finnegans Wake'' was in print in the ''transition'' serialisation and in the booklets, with the exception of Part IV. Joyce continued to revise all previously published sections until ''Finnegans Wakes final published form, resulting in the text existing in a number of different forms, to the point that critics can speak of ''Finnegans Wake'' being a different entity to ''Work in Progress''. The book was finally published simultaneously by Faber and Faber in London and by Viking Press in New York on 4 May 1939, after seventeen years of composition. In March 2010, a new "critically emended edition" was published in a limited edition of 1,000 copies by

Houyhnhnm Houyhnhnms are a fictional race of intelligent horses described in the last part of Jonathan Swift's satirical 1726 novel ''Gulliver's Travels''. The name is pronounced either or . Swift apparently intended all words of the Houyhnhnm language ...

Press in conjunction with Penguin. This edition was published in a trade edition in 2012. Edited by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, is the "summation of thirty years' intense engagement by textual scholars Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon verifying, codifying, collating and clarifying the 20,000 pages of notes, drafts, typescripts and proofs." In the publisher's words the new edition "incorporates some 9,000 minor yet crucial corrections and amendments, covering punctuation marks, font choice, spacing, misspellings, misplaced phrases and ruptured syntax." According to the publisher, "Although individually minor, these changes are nonetheless crucial in that they facilitate a smooth reading of the book’s allusive density and essential fabric."

Translations and derivative works

Despite its linguistic complexity, ''Finnegans Wake'' has been translated into French, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Spanish (by M. Zabaloy), Dutch, Portuguese, Turkish, and Swedish (by B. Falk). Well-advanced translations in progress include Chinese, Italian, and Russian. A musical play, ''The Coach with the Six Insides'' by

Jean Erdman Jean Erdman (February 20, 1916 – May 4, 2020) was an American dancer and choreographer of modern dance as well as an avant-garde theater director. Biography Early years and background Erdman was born in Honolulu. Erdman's father, John Piney ...

, based on the character Anna Livia Plurabelle, was performed in New York in 1962. Parts of the book were adapted for the stage by Mary Manning as ''Passages from Finnegans Wake'', which was in turn used as the basis for a film of the novel by

Mary Ellen Bute Mary Ellen Bute (November 21, 1906 – October 17, 1983) was a pioneer American film animator, producer, and director. She was one of the first female experimental filmmakers, and was the creator of some of the first electronically genera ...

. Danish visual artists

Michael Kvium Michael Otto Albert Kvium (born 15 November 1955) is a Danish artist. He has excelled in a number of fields such as painting, illustrating, sculpting and various performing arts, performance genres. Since the early 1980s, he has created grotesque r ...

and

Christian Lemmerz Christian Lemmerz (born January 30, 1959) is a German-Danish Sculpture, sculptor and Visual arts, visual artist who attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Carrara, Italy, from 1978 to 1982 and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1983 to 198 ...

created a multimedia project called "the Wake", an 8 hour long silent movie based on the book. A version adapted by

Barbara Vann Barbara Vann (December 12, 1938 - August 26, 2015) was an American theatre director and actor, best known for co-founding the Off-Off-Broadway company the Medicine Show Theater Ensemble, one of the longest continually running experimental theater ...

with music by Chris McGlumphy was produced by The Medicine Show Theater in April 2005 and received a favorable review in the 11 April 2005 edition of ''The New York Times''.

André Hodeir André Hodeir (22 January 1921 – 1 November 2011) was a French violinist, composer, arranger and musicologist. Biography Hodeir was born in Paris and trained as a classical violinist and composer. He studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, whe ...

composed a jazz cantata on Anna Plurabelle (1966).

John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading fi ...

's '' Roaratorio: an Irish circus on Finnegans Wake'' combines a collage of sounds mentioned in ''Finnegans Wake'', with

Irish jig The jig ( ga, port, gd, port-cruinn) is a form of lively folk dance in compound metre, as well as the accompanying dance tune. It is most associated with Irish music and dance. It first gained popularity in 16th-century Ireland and parts o ...

s and Cage reading his ''Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake'', one of a series of five writings based on the ''Wake''. The work also sets textual passages from the book as songs, including ''

The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs ''The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs'' is a song for voice and closed piano by John Cage. It was composed in late 1942 and quickly became a minor classic in Cage's oeuvre. The text was a reworked version of a passage from James Joyce's ''Finne ...

'' and ''

Nowth upon Nacht ''Nowth upon Nacht'' is a song for voice and piano by John Cage. It was composed in 1984 in memoriam for Cathy Berberian, the celebrated soprano singer, wife of composer Luciano Berio. The text is from page 555–6 of James Joyce's ''Finnegans Wa ...

''. Phil Minton set passages of the ''Wake'' to music, on his 1998 album ''Mouthfull of Ecstasy''. Thornton Wilder's '' The Skin of Our Teeth'' uses many devices from ''Finnegans Wake'', such as a family that represents the totality of humanity, cyclical storytelling, and copious Biblical allusions. In recent years Olwen Fouéré's play ''riverrun'', based on the theme of rivers in ''Finnegans Wake'' has received critical accolades around the world. Adam Harvey has also adapted ''Finnegans Wake'' for the stage.

Martin Pearlman Martin Pearlman (born May 21, 1945 in Chicago) is an American conductor, harpsichordist, composer, and early music specialist. He founded the first permanent Baroque orchestra in North America with Boston Baroque (originally called Banchetto Music ...

's three-act ''Finnegan's Grand Operoar'' is for speakers with an instrumental ensemble. In 2015 ''

Waywords and Meansigns ''Waywords and Meansigns: Recreating Finnegans Wake n its whole wholume' is an international project setting James Joyce's novel ''Finnegans Wake'' to music. Waywords and Meansigns has released two editions of audio, each offering an unabridged mu ...

: Recreating Finnegans Wake

n its whole wholume N, or n, is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''en'' (pronounced ), plural ''ens''. History ...

' set ''Finnegans Wake'' to music unabridged, featuring an international group of musicians and Joyce enthusiasts. In the years 2014–2016, particularly many adaptations of ''Finnegans Wake'' saw completion in

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous ...

, including publication of the text as a musical score, a short film ''Finnegans Wake//Finneganów tren'', a multimedia adaptation ''First We Feel Then We Fall'' and K. Bartnicki's intersemiotic translations into sound and verbovisual. In October 2020, Austrian illustrator

Nicolas Mahler Nicolas Mahler (born 1969) is an Austrian cartoonist and illustrator. '' Die Zeit'', '' NZZ am Sonntag'', ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung'' and ''Titanic'' print his comics. He is known for his comics ''Flaschko'' and ''Kratochvil'' a ...

presented a small-format (ISO A6) 24-page comic adaptation of ''Finnegans Wake'' with reference to comic figures Mutt and Jeff.

Cultural impact

''Finnegans Wake'' is a difficult text, and Joyce did not aim it at the general reader. Nevertheless, certain aspects of the work have made an impact on popular culture beyond the awareness of it being difficult. Similarly, the

comparative mythology Comparative mythology is the comparison of myths from different cultures in an attempt to identify shared themes and characteristics.Littleton, p. 32 Comparative mythology has served a variety of academic purposes. For example, scholars have used ...

term '' monomyth'', as described by

in his book ''

The Hero with a Thousand Faces ''The Hero with a Thousand Faces'' (first published in 1949) is a work of comparative mythology by Joseph Campbell, in which the author discusses his theory of the mythological structure of the journey of the archetypal hero found in world myths ...

'', was taken from a passage in ''Finnegans Wake''. The work of

was inspired by James Joyce; his collage book ''

'' has numerous references to ''Finnegans Wake''. The novel was also the source of the title of Clay Shirky's book ''

Here Comes Everybody Here Comes Everybody may refer to: * ''Here Comes Everybody'' (album), by Spacey Jane, 2022 * ''Here Comes Everybody'' (book), by Clay Shirky, 2008 * ''Here Comes Everybody'', a 1925 reprint of the novel ''Finnegans Wake'' * ''Here Comes Everybod ...

''. Esther Greenwood, Sylvia Plath's

protagonist A protagonist () is the main character of a story. The protagonist makes key decisions that affect the plot, primarily influencing the story and propelling it forward, and is often the character who faces the most significant obstacles. If a st ...

in ''

The Bell Jar ''The Bell Jar'' is the only novel written by the American writer and poet Sylvia Plath. Originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963, the novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed. The book ...

'', is writing her college thesis on the "twin images" in ''Finnegans Wake'', although she never manages to finish either the book or her thesis. According to James Gourley, Joyce's book features in Plath's "as an alienating canonical authority". In music, the American composer

Samuel Barber Samuel Osmond Barber II (March 9, 1910 – January 23, 1981) was an American composer, pianist, conductor, baritone, and music educator, and one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century. The music critic Donal Henahan said, "Proba ...

composed a piece for orchestra in 1971 entitled ''Fadograph of a Yestern Scene'', a quote from the first part of the novel. The Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu used several quotes from the novel in his music: its first word for his composition for piano and orchestra, ''riverrun'' (1984). His 1980

piano concerto A piano concerto is a type of concerto, a solo composition in the classical music genre which is composed for a piano player, which is typically accompanied by an orchestra or other large ensemble. Piano concertos are typically virtuoso showpiec ...

is called ''Far calls. Coming, far!'' taken from the last page of ''Finnegans Wake''. Similarly, he entitled his 1981

string quartet The term string quartet can refer to either a type of musical composition or a group of four people who play them. Many composers from the mid-18th century onwards wrote string quartets. The associated musical ensemble consists of two violinists ...

''A Way a Lone'', taken from the last sentence of the work.Siddons, James (2002) "Toru Takemitsu" in ''Music of the Twentieth-century Avant-garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook'', ed. Larry Sitsky. Santa Barbara:

Greenwood Green wood is unseasoned wood. Greenwood or Green wood may also refer to: People * Greenwood (surname) Settlements Australia * Greenwood, Queensland, a locality in the Toowoomba Region * Greenwood, Western Australia, a suburb of Perth C ...

.
p. 521
The German

New Age New Age is a range of spiritual or religious practices and beliefs which rapidly grew in Western society during the early 1970s. Its highly eclectic and unsystematic structure makes a precise definition difficult. Although many scholars conside ...

musical group Tangerine Dream composed in 2011 an album called '' Finnegans Wake'', with each track named after a quote from the book.

Notes

References

* D. Accardi. ''The Existential Quandary in Finnegans Wake'' (Loudonville, Siena College Press, 2006) * *

; William Carlos Williams; et al. ''

Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress ''Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress'' is a 1929 collection of critical essays, and two letters, on the subject of James Joyce's book ''Finnegans Wake'', then being published in discrete sections under th ...

'' ( Shakespeare and Company, 1929) * * Benstock, Shari. ''Nightletters: Woman's Writing in the Wake: Critical Essays on James Joyce''. Ed. Bernard Benstock. Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall & Co., 1985. 221–233. * *Borg, Ruben (2007).
The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida
'. London: Continuum. * * Burgess, Anthony (ed.) ''A Shorter 'Finnegans Wake (1969) * —, ''Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader'' (1965); also published as ''Re Joyce''. * —, '' Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce'' (1973) *

and Henry Morton Robinson (1961). '' A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake'' * *Colangelo, Jeremy. "Waking from History: The Nation's Past and Future in ''Finnegans Wake''."
The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism
'. Eds. Maud Ellmann, Siân White, and Vicki Mahaffey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. pp. 67–81. * * * * ''Flashpoint''

* Fordham, Finn. 'Lots of Fun at ''Finnegans Wake'': Unravelling Universals' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) * Glasheen, Adaline. ''Third Census of Finnegans Wake''. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1977) * Gluck, Barbara Reich, ''Beckett and Joyce: Friendship and Fiction''. Bucknell University Press, 1979. . * Greene, Darragh, "'It's meant to make you laugh': Wittgenstein's joke book and Joyce's ''Finnegans Wake''"
''Textual Practice''
34 (2020) * Gordon, John ''Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary '', Gill and Macmillan and Syracuse University Press, 1986 *
available online
* Henke, Suzette. ''James Joyce and the Politics of Desire''. (New York: Routledge, 1990) * Herring, Phillip F (1987). ''Joyce's Uncertainty Principle'' Princeton University Press, New Jersey. . * Hofheinz, T. C
''Joyce and the Invention of Irish History: Finnegans Wake in Context''
Cambridge University Press (26 May 1995). * * * Joyce, James (Stuart Gilbert, ed.) ''Letters of James Joyce'' * * McHugh, Roland. ''Annotations to Finnegans Wake''. 3rd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. . * —, ''The Sigla of Finnegans Wake''. (University of Texas Press, 1976) * —, ''The Finnegans Wake Experience''. (University of California Press, 1981) * * * * * Rose, Danis. ''The Textual Diaries of James Joyce'' (Dublin, The Lilliput Press, 1995) * * * (Reprint). * Wilson, Robert Anton. ''Coincidance''. (New Falcon Publications; Rev edition (February 1991)). Contains several essays on Finnegans Wake.

External links

Complete text of Finnegans Wake at Archive.org
(however, note that the OCR'd text found there is riddled with typos, so it is not recommended to use it for searching through the book; a much more accurate text can be found on FWEET, although that one may still contain a few typos too).
''Finnegans Wake'' Extensible Elucidation Treasury (FWEET)
A searchable database with more than 93,000 notes on ''Finnegans Wake'' gathered from numerous sources.
The James Joyce Scholars' Collection
includes etexts of several works of Wakean scholarship.

Art of the States: To Wake the Dead
song cycle by Stephen Albert set to texts from ''Finnegans Wake''
Concordance of ''Finnegans Wake''
{{good article 1939 novels Books written in fictional dialects Dreams in fiction Experimental literature Faber and Faber books Irish novels Irish satirical novels Macaronic language Modernist novels Nonlinear narrative novels Novels by James Joyce Novels first published in serial form Novels set in Dublin (city) Novels set in Ireland Works originally published in The Transatlantic Review (1924)