The "De-essencing" of Words - Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce and Some Personal Thoughts

Stephen Alexander Beach 

(1693 Words) 

When thinking about a particular time and place, such as when one considers a culture and its beliefs, it is helpful to remember that in order to understand it properly one must look to its religion, its philosophy, and its literature and remember that they are all intertwined with one another, reflecting one another in their manifestations. For much of the past two thousand years of Christian reign and influence in the West, philosophy and literature were rooted in a type of metaphysics of hylomorphic essences. To be a particular thing was to have a stable identity as that thing down to the very core. Reality, having a stable nature, also had a stable teleology and purpose by which each thing could strive to fulfill its nature. This objective view of the world slowly began to fall out of popularity in the 19th and 20th centuries, being replaced with views of the world untethered from truth and more akin to a process of flux and change at the hands of those in power. Such we see with the ideologies of Communism, and its offspring in Postmodernism. One of the most extreme examples of this type of "de-essencing" of reality could be considered to be James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake; a 600+ page "entity," for lack of a better word, in which every word and line lends itself to a variety of meanings, puns, and references, and which is patently unreadable for most people. 

In the introductory essay to the Wordsworth Classic edition, Len Platt attempts to describe Finnegan's Wake in terms of its literary forms and style. It becomes clear that all of the literary components that go into making a piece of literature are employed in Finnegan's Wake, and at the same time are stretched to their very limits of comprehensibility. It employs explanations and references spanning all of history, all of mankind and the human experience, and all of the great works of the past. The story tries to be everything and yet achieves nothing at the same time. Take the traditional components of story telling, such as setting, character, and narration, for example. 

Narration and Truth 

In terms of narration style, Joyce attempts to incorporate all types into FW. There are modes taken from traditional children's story telling, such as in Hans Christian Anderson or Grimm's fairytales. There are stories which take place within other stories so that they are layered. There are narratives based upon sounds and rhythm, such as with jokes. There are stories which reference the works of history such as the Bible, the Koran, and other great works of Western literature. The narrative unfolds endlessly and yet is circular in many ways. Truth and gossip become indistinguishable. "... the Wake moves into a new and unique version of modernism. Here narrative functions at overdrive, every possible dimension of story-telling being activated - except completion of any kind." (XVI) 

On a related note, one of the first things that one might notice in perusing FW is that the words boarder on non-intelligibility. Some words are references, some names, and regular words obscured through a phonetical writing, but there is no sentence which provides comfort to the reader through a direct intelligibility that most people are used to when reading. There is an unsettling and frustrating effect which is set upon the reader. "As the Wake is a book obsessed by story telling, so it is a book that desperately tries to establish meaning. But just as its narrative is subject to the most severe disruptions and dislocations, so with its drive towards truth telling and knowledge. As virtually any phrase, sentence, paragraph or page will show, the capacity of the Wake for communication is constantly under siege, at every level from the single word, to the sentence, passage, page, episode, and, indeed, the book. It is not that the Wake has no meaning, or that it produces from its bizarre amalgamations some version of superior meaning. The typical condition of the Wake is rather that it has over-meaning, too many competing possibilities which run entirely counter to expectations raised by the will to knowledge, equally so characteristic of the Wake." (XXII) 

Comfort for a reader is also traditionally found in the shared notions of universal concepts and truths which give stability to the world, as I mentioned above. "It is 'difficult' and challenging not as a result of some secret ambition to achieve some greater truth beyond but, rather, in the sense that its bizarre mix ups and entanglements so much undermine the drive for order and stability in the world. The first question to ask of the Wake, then, is not what does it mean but, rather, why does it not mean? What does its refutation of stability, order, clarity, and singularity amount to?" (XXII, XXIII) For example, when one says the word "dog", the hearer and the speaker share a notion of the core characteristics of dog, and thus the world is intelligible to them both and them to each other. But to say "Fetch" the dog is to confuse the hearer because Fetch is a singular and individual in nature, shunning a universal understanding without knowing "Fetch-ness." 

And so given that metaphysical essences are universal in nature, forms which apply to a variety of individual incarnations, to write a grand work in which there are but endless amounts of individual examples, is to unsettle the reader and to obscure the traditional modes of knowing and communicating. Is reality communicable? Is it intelligible?, one might ask after having attempting to read FW. "Some of the key figures here - Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous - have addressed themselves directly the Wake, understanding it not as a particular reply to 1930's fascism or the specifics of other colonial empires, but rather as a more comprehensive assault on the very idea of the universal, a radical subversion of 'the most cherished preconceptions of Western culture.'" (XXIV) 

Setting and Character

Just like with narration, Joyce's use of setting in time and the identity of characters is just as hard to pin down as well. Each place one turns to in the work there is an attempt at an immediate context and yet the work delves into the very origins of the world and of mankind at the same time. "The first man, the first woman, the first copulation, building, city, flood and language - all are important reference points in the Wake, albeit points never reached." (XIV) Even the same scene can be layered between places and times all in one. "Similar conflations are organised around space and time. The Wake is a place where a single paragraph can produce an 'amalgamation' of the Tudor court; nineteenth-century Fenians; vikings; 'Idahore shopgirls' along with old soldiers - 'killmaimthem pensioners' - retired from service in British empire. Or it can conflate Middle Eastern Islam with Western Christianity; a twentieth-century luxury car (the Rolls Royce); Celtic monuments (at Carnac, Brittany); the modern press and legal institutions in classical Greece." (XV) 

The same amalgamations of characters is present as well. "... the amalgamation of identities, for example, so that the story of HCE is somehow mixed up with the stories of Finn MacCool, Howth Head, Noah, Adam Kadmon, St Patrick, John Jameson, Arthur Guinness, St Peter, John Joyce, James Joyce, Roderick O'Connor, Henry VIII, Cromwell, Lewis Carroll, Mark of Cornwall, the Russian General, William I, William Gladstone, Prospero and so on - just as the story of ALP forms itself around such identities as Grace O'Malley, the Prankquean, Elizabeth I, Penelope, Molly Bloom, Nora Joyce, the river Liffey (and many other rivers), Eve and Mrs Noah." (XV) 1

A Few Personal Thoughts

In many ways FW reminds me of some of the most frustrating recurring dreams which I have experienced. They are characterized not by the exact same sequence playing out over and over, but rather by trying to live out some drama in a world which does not operate like normal. One of the reoccurring examples of this is for me to be driving a car where the brake pedal never quite works, causing me to never be able to fully stop, and to therefore cause accidents not matter how hard I push the pedal down. Likewise, for the steering to not work as expected, so that I may not be able to get where I intend to go. 

Another example from my dreams is a desperate need to text certain people a message, and yet I can never convey the message to them because every time I go to text on the phone the buttons never function correctly. Pressing certain letters types other different letters, and so I have to erase it and try it again. Again and again I type the correct thing and something wrong comes out, preventing me from ever communicating. Likewise, in many dreams I go to yell or scream for some reason to communicate something important, and no sound ever comes out, leaving me frustrated. 

Of course, as in most people's dreams, there's also the incongruity of time and place in my dreams, with sequences that are not connected in real life being amalgamated together. What can be terrifying about these dreams is that they strike right at the coherence of reality. To be a part of a world in which lacks coherent intelligibility, a world which has no patterns, a world in which things have no stable identity, can only be described as a hellish nightmare. And yet, this is how many contemporary philosophies attempt to convey reality. Such is the Postmodern worldview, for example. 

In all of this, though, the most basic truth is overlooked in their attempt to rid the world of truth ... and that is that "error," by definition, can only be identified in relation to "truth". And so all statements which seek to affirm something and deny something else, only have any meaning if there is an objective and coherent world of which these statements are spoken. And so in the act of denying the coherence of reality, one is actually confirming it. Joyce’s 600 page attempt to dismantle objective reality, ironically, only serves to affirm it all the more. 

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1 - Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Wordsworth Edition Introduction by Len Platt.