Finnegans Wake

Based on Wikipedia: Finnegans Wake

The Book That Breaks All the Rules

Imagine spending seventeen years writing a novel that begins in the middle of a sentence and ends in the middle of the same sentence. A book where the English language is stretched, melted, and fused with dozens of other languages into something entirely new. A work so bewildering that even its earliest champions eventually threw up their hands in frustration.

This is Finnegans Wake, James Joyce's final novel and arguably the most challenging work in all of literature.

When Joyce finally revealed the title in May 1939 after years of publishing excerpts under the working title "Work in Progress," readers discovered something unprecedented. The base language was technically English, but Joyce had transformed it by combining and altering words from languages around the world into his own distinctive idiom. Some scholars believe he was trying to capture something specific: the way memories, people, and places blend together and transform when we're dreaming or half-awake. It's metaphor mixing taken to its logical extreme.

From Exhaustion to Obsession

The story of how Finnegans Wake came to exist begins with exhaustion.

After completing Ulysses—itself a revolutionary work that had taken years to write—Joyce was so depleted that he didn't write a single line of prose for an entire year. Then, on March 10, 1923, he sent a letter to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver announcing a breakthrough: "Yesterday I wrote two pages—the first I have since the final Yes of Ulysses."

Those two pages contained a short sketch about Roderick O'Conor, the historic last king of Ireland, doing something decidedly unkingly: cleaning up after guests by drinking the dregs from their dirty glasses. It was an odd beginning for what would become one of the most ambitious literary projects ever attempted.

Over the following months, Joyce wrote more sketches during a holiday in Bognor, a seaside town in England. These dealt with various aspects of Irish history and mythology: "Tristan and Isolde," "Saint Patrick and the Druid," "Kevin's Orisons," and "Mamalujo." None of these contained what would become the book's main characters or plot. The real beginning came in August 1923 with a sketch called "Here Comes Everybody," which introduced the novel's protagonist for the first time.

What followed was an increasingly obsessive creative process. Joyce became consumed with note-taking, feeling that any word he wrote had to first be recorded in some notebook. By 1926, he had largely completed the first and third parts of the book.

The Earwicker Family

Despite the book's notorious difficulty, readers and scholars have managed to identify a central cast of characters and something resembling a plot. The story—if we can call it that—revolves around the Earwicker family.

The father is HCE, whose initials stand for "Here Comes Everybody" among many other things. The mother is ALP, known as Anna Livia Plurabelle. Their three children are Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and their sister Issy.

The action, such as it is, concerns an unspecified rumor about HCE involving some kind of transgression. His wife attempts to clear his name with a letter. His sons struggle to replace him. The book ends with a monologue by ALP at dawn. And then that famous circular structure kicks in: the last words loop back to complete the opening sentence.

But here's the thing about trying to summarize Finnegans Wake: the book actively resists it. Crucial plot points—like the exact nature of HCE's crime or the contents of ALP's letter—are discussed endlessly throughout the text, but we never actually experience them directly. The details change with each retelling. They remain, in the end, unknowable.

A Dream Made of Words

Joyce himself explained his approach in a 1926 letter to Harriet Weaver: "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."

He was talking about dreams. About the half-conscious states where logic dissolves and associations reign. To capture this on the page, Joyce felt he needed to invent a new kind of language entirely.

Consider the book's opening line: "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."

The word "riverrun" isn't a word—or wasn't, until Joyce made it one. "Commodius vicus" puns on the Roman emperor Commodus and the Latin word for road, while also referencing the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, whose cyclical theory of history deeply influenced the book's structure. "Eve and Adam's" refers to a real Dublin church, but also inverts the Biblical order, suggesting we're moving backward in time or seeing things through a mirror.

And that's just nineteen words. The book contains over six hundred pages of this.

The Critical War

As Joyce worked on the book through the late 1920s, reactions ranged from bafflement to hostility. Even some of his earliest supporters turned against him. Ezra Pound, the poet and critic who had championed Joyce's earlier work, grew increasingly unsympathetic. So did Joyce's own brother Stanislaus.

In response, a group of Joyce's remaining supporters—including the young Samuel Beckett and the poet William Carlos Williams—assembled a collection of critical essays defending the work. Published in 1929, it bore a typically Joycean title: Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. The title itself mimics the book's wordplay, bending "examination" and "incarnation" into something new.

By July 1929, Joyce had become so demoralized by the poor reception that he approached his friend James Stephens about possibly finishing the book for him. The choice of Stephens wasn't random—Joyce learned that Stephens had been born in the same Dublin hospital as himself, exactly one week later, and shared both Joyce's first name and that of his fictional alter-ego Stephen Dedalus from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. It was the kind of coincidence that Joyce, deeply superstitious, found meaningful.

In the end, he finished it himself.

The Long Final Stretch

The 1930s were difficult years. Joyce's progress slowed dramatically as life intervened.

His father John Stanislaus Joyce died in 1931. His daughter Lucia's mental health deteriorated, eventually leading to her institutionalization. Joyce's own eyesight, always poor, was failing. He had already undergone numerous eye surgeries and would need more.

Through all of this, he kept working on Parts II and IV. The book that had consumed so much of his life would not be abandoned.

Finnegans Wake was finally published on May 4, 1939. Joyce died twenty months later in Zürich, on January 13, 1941, following surgery for a perforated ulcer. He was fifty-eight years old.

The Structure of Dreams

The completed book consists of seventeen chapters divided into four parts. Part I has eight chapters, Parts II and III have four each, and Part IV contains only one short chapter. Joyce never gave the chapters titles, though various sections published separately during the writing process did receive names.

Scholars typically refer to chapters using Roman numerals for the part and Arabic numerals for the chapter—so III.2 means the second chapter of Part III.

The first chapter establishes the setting as Dublin and introduces Finnegan, a hod carrier (someone who carries bricks and mortar for bricklayers) who falls to his death from a ladder while building a wall. His wife Annie lays out his corpse as a meal spread for mourners at his wake—but he vanishes before they can eat him. A series of loosely connected vignettes follows, commonly known by names like "The Willingdone Museyroom" and "The Prankquean." At the chapter's end, a fight breaks out, whiskey splashes on Finnegan's corpse, and he rises from his coffin demanding drink. The mourners convince him he's better off staying dead. The chapter closes with the HCE character sailing into Dublin Bay to take over the story.

The Fall of HCE

The second chapter introduces Harold or Humphrey Chimpden, who receives the nickname "Earwicker" in a wonderfully absurd encounter. The Sailor King passes through a tollgate that Chimpden is manning, and finds him trying to catch earwigs with an inverted flowerpot on a stick. This nickname becomes the foundation for his rise in Dublin society as "Here Comes Everybody."

Then comes the fall. A rumor begins spreading about HCE, apparently concerning some kind of sexual trespass involving two girls in Phoenix Park. But the details shift with every retelling. The transgression remains perpetually undefined.

Chapters two through four trace the rumor's spread. It begins when HCE encounters "a cad with a pipe" in Phoenix Park. The cad merely greets him in Irish and asks the time. But HCE, perhaps guilty of something, misunderstands the innocent question as an accusation and incriminates himself by denying rumors the cad hasn't even heard yet.

The rumors spread. They gain momentum. Eventually they're turned into a mocking song called "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly." HCE goes into hiding, besieged at his pub's closed gate by an American looking for an after-hours drink. He stays silent, dreams, is buried in a coffin at the bottom of Lough Neagh, and finally faces trial under the name Festy King. He's freed but goes into hiding again.

Throughout the trial, an important piece of evidence keeps coming up: a letter about HCE written by his wife ALP.

The Letter That Never Arrives

ALP's letter becomes central to the fifth chapter, which analyzes it in detail. The letter was dictated by ALP to her son Shem, who is a writer, and given to her other son Shaun, who is a postman, to deliver. But the letter never reaches its destination. It ends up in a midden heap—a garbage pile—where it's dug up by a hen named Biddy.

This is characteristic of Finnegans Wake: a crucial document that everyone discusses but no one quite possesses. Evidence that's always being examined but never definitively understood. Meaning that eternally defers.

The sixth chapter takes a different approach entirely, presenting the main and minor characters through a series of twelve riddles and answers. In the eleventh riddle, Shaun is asked about his relationship to his brother Shem, and his response includes a story-within-the-story called "the parable of the Mookse and the Gripes"—one of the book's most celebrated passages.

Shem and ALP

The final two chapters of Part I focus on the letter's writer and its original author: Shem the Penman and his mother Anna Livia Plurabelle.

The Shem chapter is essentially Shaun's character assassination of his brother. Shem is described as a hermetic artist, a forger, a sham (the pun is intentional). But at the chapter's end, their mother ALP appears to defend her maligned son.

The chapter that follows—known simply as "Anna Livia Plurabelle"—is widely considered the book's most celebrated section. Joyce described it in 1924 as "a chattering dialogue across the river by two washerwomen who as night falls become a tree and a stone." The two women gossip about ALP's response to the allegations against her husband while washing clothes in the River Liffey. Joyce wove thousands of river names from around the world into the text, so that reading it is like hearing water flow.

"I Can Justify Every Line"

Critics complained that the book was meaningless. Joyce disagreed fiercely.

"I can justify every line of my book," he told his biographer Richard Ellmann.

To the journalist Sisley Huddleston, he was more specific: "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 cost me twelve hundred hours and an enormous expense of spirit."

Twelve hundred hours for twenty pages. That's five hours per sentence, on average.

When the editor of Vanity Fair asked whether the various sketches in the work were consecutive and interrelated, Joyce's reply was unequivocal: "It is all consecutive and interrelated."

Why Bother?

So why would anyone read a book this difficult? What's the point of a novel that requires, by some estimates, a lifetime of study to fully understand?

Joyce himself addressed this when he wrote to Eugène Jolas: "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."

That new way was the way of dreams. Of the unconscious. Of the night-mind where everything connects to everything else, where puns reveal hidden truths, where history repeats in spirals, where a fall from a ladder echoes the Fall of Man echoes the fall of Rome echoes every fall that ever was or will be.

The book's circular structure—ending where it begins—reflects Giambattista Vico's theory that history moves through recurring cycles of divine, heroic, and human ages before collapsing and beginning again. It also suggests that the entire book might be the dream of a single sleeper, cycling through the night until dawn arrives in the final chapter and the sleeper begins to wake.

The Book as Music

Joyce was nearly blind by the end of his life. He experienced language increasingly through sound. And Finnegans Wake is, perhaps above all else, a musical achievement.

The river names in "Anna Livia Plurabelle" create rhythms and textures that work even when their meanings escape you. The puns and portmanteau words generate harmonics, multiple meanings ringing together like overtones on a plucked string. Reading the book aloud—or better yet, hearing one of the many recordings—reveals something that silent reading misses: this is a book composed for the ear.

Critics have compared it to chamber music, to symphony, to jazz improvisation. Joyce himself, who loved music and had a fine tenor voice, may have created the closest thing literature has to a tone poem.

A Living Puzzle

More than eighty years after publication, scholars continue to discover new layers in Finnegans Wake. The internet has enabled collaborative annotation projects that would have been impossible in Joyce's time. Readers around the world pool their knowledge of obscure languages, historical references, Dublin geography, and thousands of other subjects to slowly illuminate the book's darkness.

And yet it remains irreducibly strange. Critic Fritz Senn has expressed frustration with traditional plot summaries: "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."

He's right. Any summary—including this one—necessarily betrays the book by making it sound comprehensible in conventional terms. Finnegans Wake is not comprehensible in conventional terms. That's the point. Joyce set out to capture in language what language normally cannot express: the experience of dreaming, of being half-awake, of existing in that strange borderland where meaning dissolves and reforms according to its own nocturnal logic.

Whether he succeeded is a question readers have argued about for decades. But that he attempted something unprecedented, and that he devoted seventeen years of his life to completing it with obsessive precision, is beyond dispute.

The book begins and ends with the same unfinished sentence, a river running past Eve and Adam's, bringing us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to where we started, always the same, always different, eternal return, riverrun.