~ [Part 1](https://steemit.com/literature/@harlotscurse/finnegans-wake-a-prescriptive-guide-1) ~ [Part 2](https://steemit.com/literature/@harlotscurse/finnegans-wake-a-prescriptive-guide-2) ~ [Part 3](https://steemit.com/literature/@harlotscurse/finnegans-wake-a-prescriptive-guide-3) ~ [Part 4](https://steemit.com/literature/@harlotscurse/finnegans-wake-a-prescriptive-guide-4) ~ [Part 5](https://steemit.com/literature/@harlotscurse/finnegans-wake-a-prescriptive-guide-5) ~ [Part 6](https://steemit.com/literature/@harlotscurse/finnegans-wake-a-prescriptive-guide-6) ~ [Part 7](https://steemit.com/literature/@harlotscurse/finnegans-wake-a-prescriptive-guide-7) ~ [Part 8](https://steemit.com/literature/@harlotscurse/finnegans-wake-a-prescriptive-guide-8) ~ [Part 9](https://steemit.com/literature/@harlotscurse/finnegans-wake-a-prescriptive-guide-9) ~ [Part 10](https://steemit.com/literature/@harlotscurse/finnegans-wake-a-prescriptive-guide-10) ~ https://i.imgsafe.org/0b302be31c.png**A Phoenix Park Nocturne** # You mean to see we have been hadding a sound night’s sleep? # _Finnegans Wake_ is a book of the night. Reduced to its simplest terms, it is a depiction of a single night in the life of a single character. Everything else is ancillary to this fundamental concept: >There are in a way no characters. It’s like a dream. The style is also changing, and unrealistic, like the dream world. If one had to name a character, it would be just an old man. (Ellmann 696) Recently, while I was researching these articles, I came across an essay by the South-African academic [Derek Attridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Attridge), in which he asked a very simple question that I had never considered before, and which I could not answer: At what point in the long process of crafting _Finnegans Wake_ did Joyce decide that his book was to be a book of the night? There is no compelling evidence that Joyce envisaged his new work as being in any way nocturnal when he first drafted the early vignettes—_Roderick O’Conor_, _St Kevin’s Orisons_, _Mamalujo_, etc—in 1923.

https://i.imgsafe.org/06b4c4e496.jpg Derek Attridge

>For nearly four years, from early 1923, when Joyce began work on his last book, to late 1926, by which time he had perfected his stylistic technique, completed versions of twelve of the seventeen chapters, and worked out an overall structure, there is very little evidence to suggest that he associated his laborious project with the night, sleep, or dreams. (Attridge 17-18)

Attridge surmised that the idea of _Finnegans Wake_ as a nocturnal counterpart to _Ulysses_ may have been put in Joyce’s mind by his brother [Stanislaus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaus_Joyce). In August 1924, a few months after [Ford Madox Ford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Madox_Ford) had published the first fragment from Joyce’s _Work in Progress_, Stanislaus wrote to his brother Jim:

https://i.imgsafe.org/06c36d9184.jpg Stanislaus Joyce

>I have received one instalment of your yet unnamed novel in the _Transatlantic Review_. I don’t know whether the drivelling rigmarole about half a tall hat and ladies’ modern toilet chambers (practically the only things I understand in this nightmare production) is written with the deliberate intention of pulling the reader’s leg or not. You began this fooling in the Holles Street episode in _Ulysses_ ... Or perhaps—a sadder supposition—it is the beginning of softening of the brain. (_Letters_ 7 August 1924)
By April 1926, however, there is some evidence that Joyce was beginning to see the nocturnal potentiality latent in his new work, and was even envisaging it as a counterpart of sorts to _Ulysses_. The following words were addressed to his patron [Harriet Shaw Weaver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Shaw_Weaver): >My brother says that having done the longest day in literature I am now conjuring up the darkest night. (_Letters_ 17 April 1926) By November, there can no longer be any doubt that Joyce saw his new work as nocturnal. Writing again to Weaver, apparently in response to criticisms of Book III by [Ezra Pound](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound), he remarked: >One great part of human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot. (_Letters_ 24 November 1926) Attridge believed that it was only around this time that the nocturnal nature of _Finnegans Wake_ took hold of Joyce’s imagination. With increasing regularity, he found himself defending his _Work in Progress_ against accusations of incomprehensibility and obfuscation, and the simplest way to disarm the critics was to invoke this nocturnal defense. In December 1929, [_The New Republic_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Republic) published an appraisal of Joyce’s _œuvre_ by the literary critic [Edmund Wilson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Wilson). By then, [_transition_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_(literary_journal)) had brought out more than a dozen fragments of _Work in Progress_, including all twelve chapters of Books I and III. Wilson summed up Joyce’s unfinished work as follows:

https://i.imgsafe.org/06fe0204c3.jpg Edmund Wilson

>It is a sort of complement to _Ulysses_; Joyce has said of it that, as _Ulysses_ deals with the day and with the conscious mind, so his new work is to deal with the night and with the subconscious. The whole of this new production is apparently to occupy itself with the single night’s sleep of a single character. (Wilson )

Attridge took issue with this interpretation, which he suspected was largely Wilson’s own, though he did concede that a close associate of Joyce’s, [Stuart Gilbert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Gilbert), had made a similar comment in an extract from his book on _Ulysses_, which appeared in _transition_ in November 1929: >_Work in Progress_, which deals exclusively with the night-hours, is thus the complement of _Ulysses_, an epic of the day. (Jolas 130, fn 1) Among the many interpreters of _Finnegans Wake_, one stands out as the champion of this nocturnal aspect: John Bishop, associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. In _Joyce’s Book of the Night_, Bishop took Joyce at his word when he told [Jacques Mercanton](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Mercanton_(%C3%A9crivain)):

https://i.imgsafe.org/071581f1a8.jpg Jacques Mercanton

>_Work in Progress_? A nocturnal state, lunar. That is what I want to convey: what goes on in a dream, during a dream. Not what is left over afterward, in the memory. Afterward, nothing is left. (Bishop 8, Mercanton 701). >I reconstruct the nocturnal life. (Bishop 4, Mercanton 704)

Attridge, however, was not impressed with Bishop’s interpretation, which smacked of cherry-picking: >One of the problems with the methodology of John Bishop’s interpretation ... is his manipulation of the text in order to make it appear that one strand of thematic concerns—those relating to night, darkness, and the sleeping body—is more prominent than all the others. He achieves this by weaving together into his own sentences fragments from widely diverse parts of the book, and by privileging one out of the many meanings of a [portmanteau](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/portmanteau_word#English) when this one alone suits his argument. (Attridge 27). Attridge’s criticisms should always be borne in mind when reading _Finnegans Wake_. Joyce’s book is a multilayered work. The nocturnal aspect is paramount to the surface layer, which depicts a sleeping man, but it is less relevant to the deeper—and, arguably, more important—layers of the work. # _Finnegans Wake_ in a Nutshell # My favourite English translation of Homer’s _Iliad_ is the prose translation of [W H D Rouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._D._Rouse), _The Iliad: The Story of Achilles_. It begins: >An angry man: there is my story. The very first word of the ancient poem—μηνιν, wrath—encapsulates the entire epic of twenty-four books and more than fifteen thousand lines. _The Wrath of Achilles_: that’s the _Iliad_ in a nutshell. And what of Joyce’s epic? Can _Finnegans Wake_ be encapsulated by a handful of words? I believe it can: https://i.imgsafe.org/0761462816.jpg The history of the world is the story of the family writ large The story of the family is the history of the world writ small There is _Finnegans Wake_ in a nutshell. There is Joyce’s story. In _Finnegans Wake_ Joyce recounts the history of mankind by relating the story of a single family: >I think I will write a history of the world. (Ellmann 537) >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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapelizod) family in a new way. Time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of my book. Yet the elements are exactly what every novelist might use: man and woman, birth, childhood, night, sleep, marriage, prayer, death. There is nothing paradoxical about all this. Only I am trying to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose. Did you ever read [Laurence Sterne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Sterne)? (Ellmann 554) Joyce realized that the cyclic pattern which [Giambattista Vico](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_Vico) had discerned in the ebb and flow of human history could also be found in the generations of a single family—any family in any country in any age—for all families follow the same laws. The laws that govern history are ultimately the laws that govern human behaviour. Human beings are the atoms out of which history is made. Joyce’s story is a story of men, women and children, while Vico’s is one of states, empires and nations. --- ## References ## * [Derek Attridge](http://www.jstor.org/stable/25485003), _Finnegans Awake: The Dream of Interpretation_, _James Joyce Quarterly_, Volume 27, Number 1, European Perspectives (Fall, 1989), pp 11-29, University of Tulsa, Tulsa OK (1989) * [John Bishop](https://muse.jhu.edu/book/13379), _Joyce’s Book of the Dark_, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI (1986) * Richard Ellmann, _James Joyce_, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982) * Stuart Gilbert, _James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: A Case Study_, Faber & Faber, London (1930) * Eugène Jolas, _transition_, Number 18, November 1929, Shakespeare & Co, Colombey-les-deux-Eglises (1929) * James Joyce, _Finnegans Wake_, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939) * James Joyce _et al_, _The Letters of James Joyce_, Volumes I, II, III, Stuart Gilbert (editor), Richard Ellmann (editor), Viking Press, New York (1966) * [Jacques Mercanton](http://www.jstor.org/stable/4334273), Lloyd C Parks (translator), _The Hours of James Joyce, Part I_, _The Kenyon Review_, Volume 24, Number 4 (Autumn 1962), pp 700-730, Kenyon College, Gambier OH (1962) * Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, _The Restored Finnegans Wake_, Penguin Classics, London (2012) * W H D Rouse, _The Iliad: The Story of Achilles_, Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, London (1938) * [Giambattista Vico](https://archive.org/details/newscienceofgiam030174mbp), Goddard Bergin (translator), Max Harold Fisch (translator), _The New Science of Giambattista Vico_, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY (1948) ## Image Credits ## * [A Phoenix Park Nocturne](http://peterchrisp.blogspot.ie/2013/11/a-phoenix-park-nocturne.html): Public Domain * [Derek Attridge](https://www.york.ac.uk/english/our-staff/derek-attridge/): © University of York, Fair Use * [Stanislaus Joyce](http://www.museojoycetrieste.it/english/studies/): Public Domain * [Edmund Wilson](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edmund_Wilson.jpg): Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain * [Jacques Mercanton](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jacques_Mercanton_(1990)_by_Erling_Mandelmann.jpg): Wikimedia Commons, Erling Mandelmann / photo©ErlingMandelmann.ch / CC BY-SA 3.0

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