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NEW: the online shorter Finnegans Wake:
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/fwake/shortwake.html
Some years ago on rec.arts.books, 'SubGregious' summarized the conventional view of FW's plot, presented especially in Joseph Campbell and H.M. Robinson's "Skeleton Key to FW":
...the Wake is, simply stated (which is to say, to some extent mistated) a record of the dream-thoughts of a man whose dream name is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and whose waking name is, I believe, Porter. He has a wife named Ann who becomes the source of all life, a daughter Isabel, and twin sons Kevin and Jerry who go by many names and who are all forces in opposition. Earwicker is the builder of cities, eternal and indestructable but entirely mutable, his creative power endlessly required to reconstruct what was built before, containing the seeds of its destruction in the sexuality, which is sin, which allowed its erection. His sons are the sundered halves of the creative power, synthesis degenerate into antitheses, and the wife is the river, which eventually always must be the Liffey as all the cities must eventually be Dublin.
The view that FW is the dream of a peculiar publican called Porter originated, I think, with Edmund Wilson, whose very early review of FW was the first and (almost) only one until C&R that showed a real effort to comprehend the book.
FW's Book Two (the third of the four 'books' to be written, and by far the most difficult) does seem to show a family-group with a publican-and-wife, twin sons (Shem and Shaun), and a daughter (Issy). II.1 shows the children playing a guessing game at dusk, II.2 shows them doing their homework, II.3 shows a nightscene in the pub, and II.4 shows a publican cleaning up after the customers' departure. But if this is part of the dream, is it any evidence at all about the dreamer?
And Books One and Three don't fit this pattern very well, except that in III.4 a couple called Porter answer a cry in the night from the nursery overhead-- where the twins and Issy reappear, re-named and much younger than in Book Two. This scene has a sort of clarity that makes it plausibly the 'dreamer' awakening...
Book Four shows a brief dawn, and definitely reconnects to chapter one, making the book as a whole circular and unending-- but Book One doesn't really seem to cover the dawn-to-dusk interval it ought.
Joyce explicitly claimed he was retelling the history of humankind in a new way, centered on this primal family, and he claimed it was a book of the night, and a dream. But his only comment on the 'dreamer' was that it was an old man dying by the Liffey-- possibly Finn MacCool himself (though this seems hard to take 'literally').
There's a really strong argument possible that the dreamer is Leopold Bloom of Ulysses, and the night is 16-17 June 1904. That Joyce would have left this trick entirely unhinted is not at all difficult to believe... especially given his unexpected early death, just two years after FW's publication.
Book Three of FW (not counting III.4) is especially baffling, in terms of the dream-scheme and the overall 'plot', for hardly anything happens. III.1, III.2, and III.3 show the character "Shaun" (one of the twin-sons) travelling backwards thru the events of Book One, getting younger but not really doing much. III.3 is especially lovely and dreamlike, showing the sleeping "Yawn" being interrogated in some weird, occult fashion by the four old masters (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, or Mamalujo)... but compared to Book One which it's supposed (according to JAJ himself) to be echoing-in-reverse, it's entirely uneventful. (I suspect that Joyce plays a time-travel game here in III.3 that was later filmed in the scifi tvshow "Outer Limits" where a person answers questions before they're asked...)
Book One has the most 'plot', and is therefore a good place to start, but I usually suggest Chapter 2 over Chapter One because Ch1 is a preamble, consisting of a series of stunning vignettes that survey all the themes but have no discernible sequential connections.
Chapters 2 thru 4 present a fairly clear plotline, full of extremely puzzling twists, in which the hero HCE betrays his guilty conscience to a stranger in the park (the Cad with a Pipe), who starts a chain of gossip that leads circuitously to HCE's utter disgrace, and probably his transformation into Shem, the sinister twin. This sequence in all its intricate bizarre glory was rattled off in about one month's time, (November 1923), and the gradual encrustation process over the next 16 years changed the sequence not at all, simply adding new linguistic complications. (See below for the simpler early drafts of HCE plus this 'Cad kernel'.)
Here's 100k of hypertext annotations to a single paragraph of the published version of Chapter 4.
Chapters 5 thru 8 of Book One go off in less-clear directions:
Ch5: A description of 'The Letter' (a central 'plot' element that was composed by ALP, inscribed by Shem, (mis)delivered by Shaun, with the intent of exonerating or incriminating HCE or his enemy). It's based in part on the drama of the
Book of Kells (Ireland, offline GIFs).
Ch6: A quiz show introducing all the characters
Ch7: A portrait of Shaun's twin Shem, the sinister artist
Ch8: The famous ALP/river chapter, with hundreds of rivernames woven into the text.
An entirely different picture of the whole is given by a study of Joyce's early notebooks and vignettes.
The first vignette (March 10, 1923) was "Roderick O'Conor" which became the ending of II.3, where the publican, in the person of the (historic) last king of Ireland (RO'C) cleans up after the departed guests by drinking off the dregs of their dirty glasses. I take this as the low point of the book's cycle, and the midpoint of HCE's life-- but significantly it was written first. From the perspective of Joyce's family, ROC may represent his father John S. Joyce.
The second vignette to be begun, Tristan and Isolde, was rewritten completely in August, and so will be treated here as the fourth. For our purposes, the second was Saint Kevin, who seems to be Shaun to ROC's Shem. The Kevin vignette ended up in Book IV, at the opposite 'pole' from ROC. It shows the pretentiously pure (and sterile) twin retreating back to the womb at the end of his backward journey. Kevin could be James's brother Stanislaus (Stannie).
It's followed in Book IV by the third vignette, "The Conversion of Patrick by Ireland" (Joyce's title, my emphasis), an incredibly opaque paragraph in which the archdruid Berkeley reveals some secret to the silent, white-clad Patrick, regarding the druid's own king Leary. One guess is that Joyce was mapping this onto the hellfire sermon which served as centerpiece in A Portrait of the Artist. But given that it's also the story of Buckley and the Russian general, it sems to be about hesitation in choosing between right and wrong, Shaun and Shem, and maybe dualism vs non-dualism. As the Joyce family, it seems likeliest that Berkeley is James, Patrick is Stannie, and Leary is father Jack.
The fourth vignette, Tristan and Isolde, is a heartbreakingly gorgeous and scathingly sarcastic portrait of two self-infatuated lovers, Wagner's T&I, fleeing King Mark, and kissing their first kiss. When Joyce finally worked this into the book, shortly before publication, he botched it up so violently that the earlier version comes as a complete surprise, even to those quite familiar with the version in II.4. I see it as the opposite pole of the cycle from ROC's nadir, wrapped back around so that it lies next to the ROC vignette, where the world ROC has lost seems to belong to the lovers, who are effectively one self-reflecting being. In the Joyce family, Isolde must be Nora, and Tristan either James or his competitors.
At this point in 1923, Isolde/Issy was in no visible way the daughter in anyone's 'primal family' (except in the notebooks). And Tristan here, although he resembles the later Shaun-twin, would reappear occasionally in Joyce's later writing as a third brother, who unified the polar traits of the twins (Shaun and Shem). (No critic has dealt at all adequately with Tristan!)
In fact, so little of the final FW 'story line' was visible at this point that the two main scholars of the period-- David Hayman and Danis Rose-- who agree on nothing else, agree that Joyce was groping blind up to this point.
In fact, in September 1992 Rose announced his 'discovery' that these vignettes constituted an unrecognised collection of short stories, which Joyce intended to call "Finn's Hotel". Rose's reconstructed FH was to be published by Viking/Penguin in March 1993, but Joyce's grandson, Stephen James Joyce, rejected Rose's claims and refused permission to publish it. (Rose had also announced his 'corrected' edition of FW for 1995, but Stephen has vowed to block that, too.)
Rose's seven 'stories' were already available in several obscure published forms:
1. Roderick O'Conor (FDV203-4, JJA55 p463-65, FW380-82)
2. Saint Kevin (FDV273-4, JJA63 p38e-f, FW604-606)
3. Berkeley and Patrick (FDV279, JJA63 p148-165, FW611-12)
4. Tristan and Isolde (FDV208-12, JJA56 p20-24, FW383-99 mixed with MMLJ)
5. H.C.E. (FDV62-3, JJA45 p14-17, FW30-34)
6. Mamalujo (FDV213-19, JJA56 p71-80, FW383-99 mixed with T&I)
7. The Revered Letter (FDV81-3, JJA46 p281-87, FW615-19)
FDV = Hayman's "First Draft Version of FW"
JJA = 63-volume "James Joyce Archive" facsimiles
FW = published "Finnegans Wake"
(Most were also in the first issue of The James Joyce Review (1957) in transcriptions by M.J.C. Hodgart.)
Rose had previously presented an argument, in the Spring 1989 issue of "A Finnegans Wake Circular", that "Finn's Hotel" was the 'real' original title of FW, based mostly on a couple of ambiguous hints in Joyce's unpublished letters. This case is not strengthened by claiming the original vignettes were for an entirely different book! But the astonishing thing is that the early history of FW is still so poorly understood, that a claim like this is hard to argue for or against!
The first four vignettes were completed in July and August 1923, while Joyce was vacationing in Bognor on the southern coast of England.
Here's a photo of Joyce taken then.
Joyce himself found something about the occasion significant enough that he referred back to it a few months later in his notebook:
Apr24 1.163: "Sunday evg Bognor (cad)"
Which clearly went into the text in the 'Cad kernel' (cf FW51ff):
It is a well vouched for fact of the commonest knowledge that the shape of the average human face frequently alters with the passing of years. Hence it is no smooth matter to identify the individual in baggy pants with already an inclination in the direction of baldness who was asked by some broadfaced boardschool children over a wall to tell them that bedtime story. It was the Lord's day and the request was put to the party (a native of Ireland by his brogue which is said to have been average Dublin who had made the southeast bluffs of the sister isle his headquarters) as he paused for ten or fifteen minutes for a fragrant calabash during his weekend pastime of executing by cockshot with deadly accuracy empty bottles which had not very long before contained Reid's family stout. He rose to his feet and there in a quiet English garden where the joyshots rang no more his simple intensive language called up before the group of precocious caremakers the now to us mythical habiliments Humphrey's latitudinous hat, the four-in-hand bow, the gauntlet upon the hand which in an hour not for him solely evil had struck down the mighty mighthavebeen Destrelle of whom his nation seemed almost already to be about to have need. Then in befitting words a bit duskish, flavoured with a smile seeing that his thoughts chiefly consisted of the cheery, he aptly sketched for our soontobe fathers and mothers the scene and, among lesser items of passing interest, the monolith rising stark from the twilit pinebarren, the angelus hour with ditchers bent upon their farm implements, the soft bell of the fallow doe advertising her milky approach as the hour was late and how brightly the great Tribune outed his smokewallet and he gives him a topping swank cheroot and he says he was to just bluggy well suck that brown boyo and spend a whole half hour in Havana. And says he: As sure as eggs is known to be what they commercially are in high British quarters my business credit will immediately stand open as straight as that neighboring monument's fabrication before the hygienic globe (this was where the reverent sabbath bottlebreaker uncovered himself of his tricoloured boater, cordially inviting the adolescents whom he was wising up to do in like manner which all did so that he was able to add) globe before the great schoolmaster's eye.
After finishing these first four, Joyce drove on to introduce HCE, which Hayman and Rose see as the beginning of FW-proper. He then wrote a 'sidebar' on the four old masters, Mamalujo, and then carried on HCE's story thru the lengthy 'Cad kernel'. He ended 1923 with the 'Revered Letter' vignette.
Early drafts of HCE
Early drafts of Mamalujo
Early draft of the Cad kernel
Early draft of the Revered Letter
My guess is that the early vignettes were written by a technique of fusion. Joyce was refining unified images that fused dozens of examples, from history and literature, of these first few universal themes.
Roderick O'Conor:the crucifixion of Jesus King Arthur at low ebb John Joyce at low ebb James Joyce at low ebb Roderick Random King Roderick O'Conor the IRA-1922 Roderick O'Conor
Saint Kevin:
Stannie Joyce James Joyce as adolescent Kevin of Glendalough Jesus in the desert? all saints and hypocrites
Berkeley & Patrick:
Father Cullen/Arnall and JAJ/SD J Joyce and JF Byrne J Joyce and Stannie the druid and Patrick Berkeley and philosophy Ham and Shem the serpent and Adam Buckley and the Russian general
Tristan & Isolde:
James and Nora Preciozo and Nora Robert Hand and Bertha Wagner and Mathilde TS Eliot and the poetry-reading public Byron & Mary Shelley? Adam and Eve
Saint Patrick's real-life story was one of Joyce's startingpoints for FW, and embodies many of the themes in unique ways. Here's the text of Patrick's own autobiography, the 'Confessio'
NEW: Speculations about Shem and Shaun as archetypes
All during this period Joyce carried pocket notebooks for jotting ideas and phrases, and most of these have survived. They show Joyce very early determining to create a universal drama of successive generations, son-becoming-father, with intense autobiographical overtones.
HCE's encounter with the Cad in the park seems to have been inspired by Joyce's own traumatic hallucination, on Feb 1, 1922, of a stranger in the Bois de Boulogne saying as he passed, in Latin, "You are an abominable writer." We wouldn't know anything about this except that Djuna Barnes was walking with him at the time (the day before Ulysses' publication), and mentioned it to a friend some weeks later, who jotted it in his diary! But several notes in the notebook make it clear that this event was the kernel of the whole drama of Book One...
Here's a recent article on Joyce's earliest
notetaking for FW.
Here's a more technical look at the problem of dating these notes.
For dating FW notes, though, there's an extremely important sequence in the early notebooks, as the generic human roles begin to take on personal identities. (Hayman was the first to point this out, in "Wake in Transit".) The following abbreviations appear even in the Ulysses notes, and persist in the earliest FW notes: M(an), W(oman), H(usband), W(ife), OGG (Old Gummy Granny), RL (Rich Lady?), OM (Old Man)
In the spring of 1923, characters from Wagner's Tristan suddenly predominate: Trist, T, I, Is, Brang(aene), M(ark) ...along with P for Patrick and K for Kevin. Mark's identity is extended to make him Isolde's father, and his name changes to 'Pop'. His wife appears briefly as Mop. By autumn 1923, Pop has become Earwicker or HCE or E, and his wife ALP soon after.
Tristan and Isolde are usually T+I, and the idea that they're mirror images probably led to the adoption of an inverted-T siglum for Issy. Then quite suddenly in B1, a whole range of sigla are introduced, including most of these:
888888 8888888888 888888 88 88 88 _8_
88 88 88 88 88 88 88 88 88 88
888888 88 88 88 888888 88 88 88 88 88
88 88 88 88 88 88 88 88 88 88
888888 88 88 88 888888 8888888888 88888888888
$E HCE (M for Mark?) HCE 'interred $A ALP
in the landscape'
88888 _8_ 888888 88 88 88
88 88 88 8888 88 88 88
88 88 88 88 88 88 8888888 8888888
88 88 88 88 88 88 88 88
88888 88 88 88 88888 88888888 88 88
$[ Shem $/\ Shaun $/[ Tristan $I.1 Issy $I.2 the Maggies
(The '$' form is a compromise designed by the FW Circular people.)
Most of the others are just capital letters:
$P for Patrick (just the letter P, used as a siglum)
$T as an earlier alternate for Tristan
$S for the serpent, or Sigurdsen/Sackerson, the old butler
$K for Kate, the old gummy granny [paper] (or for Kevin)
$X for the four masters Mamalujo
except:
$[] for FW-the-book (a square)
$I.3 for Issy's mirror-twin (a sideways T)
$I.29 for the 29 rainbow girls (an oval)
$O for the twelve citizens (a circle)
McHugh's analysis of these in "The Sigla of FW" is a raw first approach, well worth reading, but to be taken with a grain of salt.
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