30 pages • 1 hour read
James JoyceFinnegans Wake
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1939A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Search for Identity
While HCE sleeps, his identity becomes a blur. Even his name is reduced to a set of initials as Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker becomes HCE. Throughout the novel, the narrative returns to these initials. Even in the opening line, the phrase “a commodius virus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs” (3) leads the reader back to HCE as well as a geographic location. One of the plays on the HCE initials is Here Comes Everybody, which also refers to the complexity of HCE’s identity. Rather than a person, a character, or a string of three letters, HCE is presented as a layered series of identities that combine to form a blurred, complicated individual who functions as the novel’s protagonist. The search for the truth behind HCE’s identity propels the novel forward, exploring ancient myths, local rumors, criminal court cases, and the interactions with his family. As he dreams, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker struggles to understand himself. Rather than an individual, he realizes that he is an amalgamation of many different identities that existed long before he was born and will exist long after he dies. HCE is part of a cycle of identities that repeats forever.
Part of HCE’s search for identity is the crime he may or may not have committed. HCE is accused of exposing himself to two women in a park, which was supposedly witnessed by three soldiers. HCE believes that he is innocent. Part of his identity is that—in his opinion—he is an innocent man who has been unfairly prosecuted. But HCE’s identity is not limited to his own beliefs. Instead, the identity of HCE is a complicated construction that intersects with many pieces of information. As the rumor of his crime spreads around the city, the identity of HCE changes. To the public, he is now HCE the criminal. The man on trial is HCE, but he is not necessarily the same HCE who began the novel. Rather, this is a nervous, anxious man who struggles to express his innocence. Gossip and rumor fuel the change in identity to the point where HCE can no longer be sure about his own identity. He struggles to defend himself because he does not know how to fight back against the modern mythmaking of gossip and rumor. HCE is no longer an individual. Rather, his identity belongs to the public. Like the ancient folk heroes, he has become a part of the story of Dublin. The songs about him ring through the streets, and washerwomen by the Liffey share snippets of information about him that may or may not be true. In this fashion, a new identity for HCE is formed. He is another iteration of the mythology of Ireland, a part of the folklore who now belongs to the culture rather than himself.
HCE’s search for identity also extends to his family. After his departure, his sons Shaun and Shem feel pressure to take over from their father. Shem is the artistic son who has his mother’s favor, while Shaun is the more practical son who is best positioned to inherit his father’s position. However, neither Shaun nor Shem are ready to become their father. They are still too unsure of their identities and try to understand themselves better by arguing. The disputes between the two brothers illustrate how they are separate parts of the same identity, unfortunately split in two. Because they have been split apart, they can never be a cohesive whole and thus never take over from their father. They are fundamentally fractured, and they can only succeed by working together. That they are desperate to understand their own identity, however, means that they will forever be fighting against one another. They will never be in a position to take over from HCE as the embodiment of a living Ireland because they are so busy trying to understand their identities in opposition to one another. As such, they force HCE to return, and thus the cycle begins all over again. The quest for identity drives the story forward and brings it back to the beginning, ready to begin the search again.
The Constraints of Language
Finnegans Wake does not adhere to many of the traditional rules and expectations that govern the English language. Spelling, punctuation, grammar, and syntax are ignored, manipulated, or deployed in unexpected ways throughout the novel. The use of language in the novel illustrates the liminal space between dreams and waking life. Throughout the novel, trying to express the nuance and complexity of this unknown, abstract space is impossible through traditional language and its rules. Like a dream, the novel’s prose is used in an unexpected fashion that does not adhere to the guidelines governing language or life. Words are combined, for example, to illustrate how a single word can contain more than one idea at a time. Words are spelled incorrectly to force the reader to break down the sounds of the word into constituent parts, reassembling the syllables just as the novel tries to reassemble the identity of HCE from its individual and disparate parts. Furthermore, non-English languages are used to express the complexity of perspective. The same word repeated in numerous languages describes how culture and language shape the perception of an object or a person. The use of the Irish language to describe a place, for example, conjures a memory of the colonial oppression of the language by the English. The contrast between the Irish and English languages reveals the innate colonial tension still felt in Ireland, even after the independence in the south of the island. Finnegans Wake combines new and old languages to create something new, just as HCE combines new and old identities in a quest to understand himself.
Another feature of the novel’s use of language is musicality. At times, this musicality is explicit. The novel switches to a musical notation at one point, continuing the narrative in the form of a folk song accompanied by the full musical score. The musical score is another form of language: a written expression of sounds and ideas, governed by a set of widely accepted rules. A crochet or a quaver functions like punctuation in prose, providing another language system through which the novel can explore identity and mythology. A simple folk song is expressed in an entirely different written framework; the musical score is not inherently musical but contains everything needed to understand the music and recreate it, just as the memories of HCE contain elements of his identity, if not the identity itself.
Similarly, the novel is punctuated by so-called thunderwords. These thunderwords are 100 letters long and interrupt the novel’s prose in rumbling, thunderous, ominous ways. The thunderwords are inventions, created by blurring together raw emotions, existing words, and a primordial expression of noise. They interrupt, disjoint, and dominate the narrative with their power, overpowering traditional and comprehensible language and hinting at the ancient power that rumbles beneath modern communication modes. Like the musical notation, the thunderwords are a way to illustrate the power of language by presenting similar ideas through a new and alien system. The thunderwords operate less as actual words and more as tonal indicators of raw power. Like all language in Finnegans Wake, they hint at something complicated, nuanced, and almost impossible to understand on an individual level. In their totality, however, and placed within the context of the novel, the thunderwords become another tool through which the narrative can demonstrate the complexity of identity in the space between waking life and the dream world.
Waking Life and Dreams
Finnegans Wake describes a liminal space between waking life and dreams. A liminal space is a place that exists between two known locations, often functioning as a transition from one place to the next. The novel shows the threshold between dreams and waking life, a space in which reality, unconsciousness, and traditional rules no longer matter. The characters are neither asleep nor awake but on the cusp of both, operating in a dazed and delirious world in which nothing is fixed or real. Every element of Finnegans Wake operates within this liminal space. Structure, language, identity, and other traditionally fixed literary ideas become blurred and disjointed, as though they are being reimagined as a person drifts away to sleep. The prose of the novel exists between understandable language and nonsense, containing enough semblance of traditional English to be understood while also sublimating this legibility with other languages, invented languages, and—on certain occasions—leaving written language behind altogether in favor of musical notation, drawings, or empty space on the page.
Hints of the waking world are glimpsed at the novel’s beginning and end. In this world, HCE and ALP become Mr. and Mrs. Porter. The Porters are shown to be sleeping or waking, in a constant state of flux between one world and the other. They comfort crying children, try to have sex, and then drift back to sleep, returning to the narrative that exists between the two worlds. The world of the Porters is no less complex than the worlds of mythology or dreams. The language remains complicated, and even the presence of mythological characters can be felt as the four elderly judges transform into the posts at the corner of the Porters’ bed and observe the couple at their most intimate moments. Rather than creating two different worlds in which waking life is conventional and understandable in comparison to the abstract and hallucinatory dream world, Finnegans Wake shows how the waking life is just as impenetrable and complicated as the dreams or the spaces between. The same problems exist, in which the characters struggle to understand themselves and others due to the overwhelming complexity and nuance of a world that can never be truly understood. Instead, the complicated intersection between dreams, waking life, mythology, and identity must be understood as a whole that comes together to form reality.
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By James Joyce
