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Finnegans Wake

Scarlett Baron

in ‘Strandentwining Cable’: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality

Chapter 6 is divided into two main sections. The first examines Finnegans Wake notebook VI.B.8, in which Joyce made three Flaubert-related jottings. It relates these momentous notes to Joyce’s ... More

Chapter 6 is divided into two main sections. The first examines Finnegans Wake notebook VI.B.8, in which Joyce made three Flaubert-related jottings. It relates these momentous notes to Joyce’s travels through Normandy (home to Flaubert as well as Emma Bovary, Bouvard and Pécuchet) in the summer of 1925 and suggests that both the journey and the jottings reflect Joyce’s preoccupation with Flaubert and with issues of intertextuality during the early stages of his work on Finnegans Wake. The second section considers allusions to Flaubert in the Wake: these are read as knowing indications of a connection between the radical intertextuality deployed by Joyce in his final work and the precedent of Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet.Less

The Geohistory of Two Cities in Finnegans Wake

Eleni Loukopoulou

in Up to Maughty London: Joyce's Cultural Capital in the Imperial Metropolis

“The Geohistory of Two Cities in Finnegans Wake” examines Joyce’s interest in contemporary London-set writings, taking as a case study H. M. Tomlinson’s book London River (1921). Through textual ... More

“The Geohistory of Two Cities in Finnegans Wake” examines Joyce’s interest in contemporary London-set writings, taking as a case study H. M. Tomlinson’s book London River (1921). Through textual comparisons, it analyzes how the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section of Finnegans Wake, which captures textually Dublin’s river, the Liffey is inflected by Tomlinson’s writings about the Thames. The last part of the chapter aims to pin down the geo-historical concerns about London and Dublin prevalent in Joyce’s work by investigating the textual presence of London in Finnegans Wake through a plethora of portmanteau words. Such references culminate in the formation of the word “Londub” produced by Joyce for the monumental finale of the book in November 1938. Thus, Clayton’s insightful formation “Londublin” to discuss the negotiations of power and textual interaction between London and Dublin in Ulysses will be pitched against Joyce’s “Londub” to explore how Finnegans Wake describes a dialogue and a correspondence between the two cities in equal terms.Less

Finnegans Wake

Herschel Farbman

in The Other Night: Dreaming, Writing, and Restlessness in Twentieth-Century Literature

This chapter examines Finnegans Wake, a work of comic fiction by Irish author James Joyce. It argues that writing has never thrown questions back at its questioners with as much energy as Finnegans ... More

This chapter examines Finnegans Wake, a work of comic fiction by Irish author James Joyce. It argues that writing has never thrown questions back at its questioners with as much energy as Finnegans Wake. Full of exclamations, historical presents, onomatopoeia, and the most extreme exuberances of free indirect discourse, the text presents an uncanny enargeia that suggests a living presence. Faced with a new kind of literary enigma, the first critics of Finnegans Wake developed the interpretive scheme through which the book is still most often seen. According to this scheme, the elusive subject of the Wake is, in one way or another, “a dream”. The word “wake” names many things at once in the title of Finnegans Wake: Irish waking of the corpse; staying awake in the night; following in the wake of a fallen giant; and waking up from sleep.Less

Here Comes Everybody: Technopoetics and Mystical Tradition in Joyce

in The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human

This chapter reads James Joyce's Finnegans Wake to recapitulate, in light of the emerging technomodernity that informs the poetic work of the Wake, the structure and movement of a dynamic and ... More

This chapter reads James Joyce's Finnegans Wake to recapitulate, in light of the emerging technomodernity that informs the poetic work of the Wake, the structure and movement of a dynamic and mystical cosmos whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere—a cosmos where, as in the poetic technomodernity the work also evokes throughout, a subject absent or opaque to itself proves, in and through its very own unknowing, ever to create and recreate itself and its world. The intersection or interweaving Joyce realizes between the depths of mystical tradition and the currency of an emerging technological postmodernity opens a path for rethinking not only “tradition” and its presumed delimitations, but also the role these might play in placing or locating—which means in defining—the human.Less

Introduction: The Prodigal Text

Kimberly J. Devlin and Christine Smedley

in Joyce's Allmaziful Plurabilities: Polyvocal Explorations of Finnegans Wake

The introduction uses the anniversary of the seventy-fifth publication of Finnegans Wake as an occasion to reflect on the book’s critical reception and the resistance to its excesses. While ... More

The introduction uses the anniversary of the seventy-fifth publication of Finnegans Wake as an occasion to reflect on the book’s critical reception and the resistance to its excesses. While acknowledging its notorious “darknesses and unintelligibilities,” the editors propose that readings of the Wake which explore its prodigal experimentalism may provide more helpful entrances to the text than earlier models, by exposing the futility of a potential mastery of its mysteries, instead underscoring an unlimited and unruly proliferation of meanings—what Joyce called “Plurabilities” (104.02). Though reading some sections of the Wake may require courage, those who undertake the book’s challenges are amply rewarded. Its radical re-visioning of absolutes may inspire alternative imaginings of entrenched political, linguistic, historical and religious forms, generating for readers potential revolutions of their own.Less

Coda: An Eyed Ear

Matthew Bevis

in The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce

The coda to the book focuses on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a book which may initially seem a world away from the literary art of eloquence, but which in many ways is the exaggerated summation of ... More

The coda to the book focuses on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a book which may initially seem a world away from the literary art of eloquence, but which in many ways is the exaggerated summation of that art — at once its most challenging example and its reductio ad absurdum. A brief excursion through the pages of the Wake serves to highlight the characteristic rhythms and concerns of this art of eloquence — and to underscore the dangers and opportunities that may attend it. The book ends with a defence of (and commitment to) what Joyce most valued in literary art: ‘a deep sympathy with the cross-purposes and contradictions of life, as they may be reconcilable with a hopeful awakening’.Less

Work

Lee Spinks

in James Joyce A Critical Guide

This chapter describes the body of James Joyce's work. Joyce' wrote Chamber Music as a protest against himself. One of the fundamental aesthetic principles ofDubliners is that the limits of a ... More

This chapter describes the body of James Joyce's work. Joyce' wrote Chamber Music as a protest against himself. One of the fundamental aesthetic principles ofDubliners is that the limits of a character's world-view are defined by the limits of their language. The real distinction between Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man lies at the level of narrative style. Exiles presents his only excursion into drama and remained relatively neglected until its 1970 London revival. With Ulysses, Joyce realised his aesthetic ambition of composing a great epic statement about modern European civilisation. Finnegans Wake makes considerable use of the symbols of marriage, burial, religion and the family, it is a mistake simply to map Joyce's narrative onto Vico's tripartite structure. A significant strand of Wakecriticism concerns itself with the creative and compositional process that brought the text into being.Less

Charting Wakean Territory

Ciaran McMorran

in Joyce and Geometry

This chapter explores how geometry is presented as a language for describing both visual and nonvisual spaces in Finnegans Wake. It demonstrates how the Wake’s Protean visual landscape is shaped by ... More

This chapter explores how geometry is presented as a language for describing both visual and nonvisual spaces in Finnegans Wake. It demonstrates how the Wake’s Protean visual landscape is shaped by its polyphonic narrative, and how the Wakean landscape’s boundaries expand and contract in accordance with the movement and breathing of human bodies. With reference to Bruno’s notion that “the infinite straight line […] becomes the infinite circle,” it illustrates how straight lines and rectilinear thought processes veer off course as they are projected onto the uneven bodily, textual, and terrestrial surfaces which record the Wake’s ouroboric narrative. This chapter also investigates how James Joyce incorporates the notion of a “4d universe” in Finnegans Wake, in which time constitutes the fourth dimension of space, and how the “fourdimmansions” of Wakean space-time are framed by the quadrilateral gaze of its four historians as they chart the Wake’s territories using crisscrossing lines of sight. By examining the four old men’s attempts to describe Mr. and Mrs. Porter’s “sleepingchambers” in cycles around the four bedposts in III.4, this chapter considers how the penultimate chapter of Finnegans Wake reflects Joyce’s own concerns with the quadrature of the circle in his writing of the Wake.Less

“Joyce has made me a different reader: I am just glad I don't have to understand him”: The Institutionalization of “Joyce” after 1945

Robert K. Weninger

in The German Joyce

This chapter examines the literary and academic reception of James Joyce and his works from 1945 to the present, with a focus on translations and editions, scholarly reviews and criticism, and ... More

This chapter examines the literary and academic reception of James Joyce and his works from 1945 to the present, with a focus on translations and editions, scholarly reviews and criticism, and contemporary writers’ appropriations of and statements on Joyce’s œuvre (Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Franz Mon, Ernst Jandl, Arno Schmidt, Hans Wollschläger, among others). Attention is further given to the roles played by the Frankfurt Joyce symposium in 1984, the Frankfurt edition of Joyce’s works in German translation, and the Zurich Joyce Foundation in the dissemination of Joyce’s works in the German-speaking countries. The chapter concludes with a comparative discussion of select translations of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.Less

Playful Reading: I.6 and Game Theory

Sean Latham

in Joyce's Allmaziful Plurabilities: Polyvocal Explorations of Finnegans Wake

Sean Latham opens up I.6 through contemporary Game Theory. He argues that this unique chapter of questions and elaborate answers involves the interplay of constraint and creativity, much like games ... More

Sean Latham opens up I.6 through contemporary Game Theory. He argues that this unique chapter of questions and elaborate answers involves the interplay of constraint and creativity, much like games themselves. He focuses on I.6—and by extension, the Wake itself as a whole—as a play of “emergence” (in contrast to those of “progression”): the text implicitly evokes rules within which lie possibilities for actions and interpretationsLess

Finnegans Wake for Dummies

Sebastian D.G. Knowles and Sebastian D.G. Knowles

in At Fault: Joyce and the Crisis of the Modern University

Chapter 3 argues that there is a way to read and understand Finnegans Wake, if we can only read according to a new path that starts in the middle and works out to the beginning and the end. Included ... More

Chapter 3 argues that there is a way to read and understand Finnegans Wake, if we can only read according to a new path that starts in the middle and works out to the beginning and the end. Included is a report of a successful experiment in pedagogy that read the Wake in outwardly radiating circles, as dictated by the principle of ascending difficulty, beginning with the easiest sections and working out to the hardest ones. This “spiral reading” path then turns out to track very closely the process of Joyce’s compositional process, and so gives us an insight into Joyce’s method. A syllabus for the original course is included as an Appendix, in an invitation to future teachers.Less

From Finnegans Wake: A Sentence in Progress

David Hayman

in Foundational Essays in James Joyce Studies

This chapter focuses on the word formation and symbolic patterns implemented while framing sentences for Finnegans Wake. Joyce's use of symbolic patterns in Finnegans Wake to engross the reader is ... More

This chapter focuses on the word formation and symbolic patterns implemented while framing sentences for Finnegans Wake. Joyce's use of symbolic patterns in Finnegans Wake to engross the reader is exemplified by the symbolic use of the goose that laid the golden egg, which has become a nocturnal symbol for pleasant dreams and light fantasies. Joyce uses both rhythmic and the visual patterns by the addition of the echoing “leaves,” while the double l in “till” finds its reflection in “heoll's” and “hoerrisings.” Joyce applies letters as well as words to be symbolic for sounds, shapes, and symbols.Less

The Cultural Transfer of Film, Radio, and Television

Thomas Jackson Rice

in Cannibal Joyce

This chapter discusses the introduction and the cultural transfer of film, radio and television which created an anxiety in Joyce' response toward sound recording wherein he saw this new ... More

This chapter discusses the introduction and the cultural transfer of film, radio and television which created an anxiety in Joyce' response toward sound recording wherein he saw this new communication means as a threat to the power of literature to engage its readers. In this chapter, the focus is centered on his ambivalent response to both motion pictures and radio — technologies which he likewise cannibalized to his advantage in his books Ulysses and Finnegans Wake wherein he saw both as forms of communication inferior to literature in terms of their abilities to actively engage the critical consciousness of their consumers.Less

“Here Comes Everybody”: HCE and the Existence of Others in I.2

Jim LeBlanc

in Joyce's Allmaziful Plurabilities: Polyvocal Explorations of Finnegans Wake

Jim LeBlanc introduces readers to the proliferative motif of “the sin in the park” and its metaphysical implications as they emerge most clearly in I.2. He uses a philosophical framework provided by ... More

Jim LeBlanc introduces readers to the proliferative motif of “the sin in the park” and its metaphysical implications as they emerge most clearly in I.2. He uses a philosophical framework provided by Jean-Paul Sartre: the famous Being and Nothingness postdated the writing of Finnegans Wake, but its arguments bear uncanny resonances when placed in the context of Joycean themes. LeBlanc emphasizes the Wake’s representation of being as inevitably splintered and self-alienated, stolen by the Other’s gaze, temporality, and language.Less

The Law in/of Finnegans Wake: A Starchamber Quiry

Terence Killeen

in Joyce and the Law

This essay argues that scholars have underestimated the degree to which Finnegans Wake is shaped by James Joyce's interest in and reading about law and legal history, specifically the Bywaters trial ... More

This essay argues that scholars have underestimated the degree to which Finnegans Wake is shaped by James Joyce's interest in and reading about law and legal history, specifically the Bywaters trial and Maamtrasna murder trial. More generally it shows the book's debt to the notion of legal inquiry, a mode he asserts is fundamental to its structure and technique.Less

Free Play and Childhood from The Gift to Ada

Thomas Karshan

in Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play

Over the course of the 1930s, Nabokov's writing moves ever closer to the terrifying prospect of play without rules. The fifth chapter is about free play and childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, and ... More

Over the course of the 1930s, Nabokov's writing moves ever closer to the terrifying prospect of play without rules. The fifth chapter is about free play and childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, and deals with Nabokov's poems and plays in the late 1930s and early 1940s, going on to substantial discussions of Bend Sinister, Speak, Memory, and Lolita, before finishing with a brief section on Ada. Meeting Joyce in Paris in 1938 and reading the already published parts of Finnegans Wake (1939)—the nearest literature has ever come to absolute free play—encouraged Nabokov's writing in its movement towards indeterminacy. The chapter of Finnegans Wake on children's games, ‘The Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Maggies’, is referred to in Lolita. Nabokov's son Dmitri had been born in 1934 and in all the American novels Nabokov confronted his fears about the well-being of children and the harm posed to them by free play. Yet for Nabokov as for Joyce, children's play was also desirable and in need of protection from control. Like dreams, it resists interpretation and it therefore served Nabokov as a figure for the aesthetic uncertainty towards which his art was progressively moving in the thirty years after The Gift.Less

“Ricorso”: The Flaming Door of IV

Vicki Mahaffey

in Joyce's Allmaziful Plurabilities: Polyvocal Explorations of Finnegans Wake

Using Egyptian mythology as her backdrop, Vicki Mahaffey addresses the themes of fire and water, the twin principles of creation in Book IV. The “Ricorso” explores how the world is regenerated ... More

Using Egyptian mythology as her backdrop, Vicki Mahaffey addresses the themes of fire and water, the twin principles of creation in Book IV. The “Ricorso” explores how the world is regenerated through the diurnal reappearance of the sun, replicated in man’s self-renewal through his “son,” and through the washing and cleansing of water by rain and baptism—the liquid being the element gendered in the Wake as female. One lover of water and of the mother ALP is Kevin/Shaun, who is simultaneously misogynistic in his desire for a phobic chastity. The argument between saint and sage—Muta and Juva—focuses (as a complement to hydrophilia) on light, colors, and the visual world. Mahaffey’s discussion of ALP’s letter and monologue suggests that in closing the maternal figure grows younger and younger as she passes out and away into her “salvocean” (623.29), in which she will simultaneously die and begin again.Less

Aisy Now, You Decent Man

Philip Kitcher

in Joyce's Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegans Wake

This chapter summarizes the principal ideas that have emerged throughout the chapter-by-chapter reading of Finnegans Wake. It aims to serve both as a helpful guide for those who are approaching ... More

This chapter summarizes the principal ideas that have emerged throughout the chapter-by-chapter reading of Finnegans Wake. It aims to serve both as a helpful guide for those who are approaching Joyce's last novel for the first time and as a detailed elaboration and defense of the book's interpretation. Even more, it hopes to inspire others to undertake their own large-scale readings. Meanwhile, music runs through Joyce's prose, and through the Wake, in particular. It is not simply a matter of the constant eruption of the songs Joyce had heard his father sing, or had sung himself but the use of rhythm to set the mood and of tonal coloring to evoke reactions in his readers.Less