Finnegans Wake

Novel by James Joyce, first published in 1939. Parts of an earlier version of the novel, named “Work in Progress” had been published before.

Finnegans Wake is considered to be one of the twentieth-century novels that are the most difficult to read. It has some claim to be the least read major work of Western literature in general. At the same time, it is possibly the most experimental work attempted in prose fiction.

Literary scholars disagree about the question whether the novel tells a story or if it is rather a mosaic of prose fragments (and very often new word compositions) without any clear line. One approach is that “though the book does not offer a conventional narrative, elements of a plot do continue to drift to the surface. […] The Wake’s narrative proceeds vertically, rather than horizontally, as one separate incident after another is piled upon what has gone before” (Begnal, xiv).

Most of Finnegans Wake takes place in the suburb of Chapelizod on the western side of Dublin. The novel is, “at one level, the story of a family” (Spinks, 128). This family consists of the Dublin publican H.C. Earwicker, his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, their daughter Isabel and their twin sons Shaun and Shem. These characters, however, appear in many different ways with different surnames, as short cuts or even in the phrase “Here Comes Everybody” (HCE=H.C. Earwicker)(Finnegans Wake, 32) – one of the most famous lines of the book – which represents humankind in general.

Another way of dealing with the novel is to see it as “the story of Joyce’s twenty-year labour to develop a style and a mode of narrative presentation with which to represent the dreams, desires and repressions that constitute the ‘unconcious’ of modern culture” (Spinks, 131).

Due to its complexity, Finnegans Wake is open to many kinds of interpretation. Summing up one common interpretation very briefly, it can be stated that the novel deals with the highs and lows in human life, illustrated by the example of H.C. Earwicker and his family.

Sources:

Begnal, Michael/Eckley, Grace. Narrator and Character in Finnegans Wake. London: Associated University Presses, 1975.

Begnal, Michael H. Dreamscheme. Narrative and Voice in Finnegans Wake. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1988.

Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. 3rd ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1982.

Spinks, Lee. James Joyce. A Critical Guide. Edinburgh: University Press, 2009.