A Working Hypothesis
Navigating your way through the manifold text of Finnegans Wake is difficult at the best of times : without a map, it is all but impossible. In this article I will lay out my own working hypothesis—a map, if you will, or, if you prefer, a set of sailing directions—which I have used to orient myself while exploring Joyce’s Wakean world. I call it a working hypothesis because it is still tentative, speculative and unproven. It is a work in progress, a flawed patchwork of observations and educated guesses, which will undoubtedly have to be modified as I become better acquainted with the book.
Nevertheless, I still commend this hypothesis to the novice reader. Since adopting it, my own understanding of the big picture of Finnegans Wake has improved immeasurably. When I first read Finnegans Wake I was hopelessly lost on all levels. Not only were the details incomprehensible to me, but I also had no idea what was going on in general. If someone had asked me to explain what I was reading, I would not have known where to begin:
Where are we at all? And whenabouts in the name of space? I don’t understand. I fail to say. I dearsee you too. (RFW 435.01-02)
Now it is only the details that give me pause. I can make out the broad brushstrokes. I see what Joyce is trying to do in Finnegans Wake. I finally get it.
I think.
A Multilayered Text
We have it on the author’s own authority that Finnegans Wake is to be read and understood on more than one level:
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. 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? (Manley 11-12, Ellmann 554)
I choose to take Joyce at his word: there are several planes of narrative in Finnegans Wake. OK. But how many?
Four. That, at least, is how many there are in my working hypothesis as it currently stands. Perhaps there are more, perhaps fewer, but let us not complicate matters. I can discern four—just about—and that is more than enough to be getting on with.
I believe that each of these planes of narrative can be located in space and time, and that is what I am going to try and do in the remainder of this article.
A Joycean Template
Joyce’s earlier epic, Ulysses, is a good place to begin. Everyone knows that Ulysses tells the story of a single day in Dublin. Joyce even provided his readers with a pair of schemata to help them find their way through his labyrinthine text:
Although there are some discrepancies between the two, it is not disputed that Ulysses takes place in Dublin, that it begins at approximately 8 am on Thursday 16 June 1904, and that it ends in the small hours of the following morning. We can also pin down many of the incidents in the novel to specific points in space and time. For example, when Leopold Bloom hears the bells of George’s church chiming 8:45 am, he is standing in the back garden of his house at 7 Eccles Street. At precisely the same moment, Stephen Dedalus is walking along the upwardcurving path at the Forty Foot in Sandycove.
There is clearly a plane of narrative in which the events of Bloom’s and Stephen’s lives on this particular day and in this particular city are located. In Ulysses, Bloom and Stephen are real people. They are of course _fictional _ characters in a novel, but in that novel they are just as real as you and me. They really do have breakfast, feed the cat, teach history, go to a funeral, get drunk, etc.
But not everything in Ulysses is as real as this. Some of the things attributed to Bloom only occur in his imagination, or in his unconscious. For instance, Bloom does not really become pregnant and give birth to eight male yellow and white children, as is narrated in the Circe episode. And the ghost of Stephen’s mother does not really confront him in the same episode. Nor do the Royal and Grand Canals really swap places, as is implied in the Wandering Rocks episode. These events are located on another plane of narrative.
The First Plane of Narrative – Nocturnal
Is there a narrative plane in Finnegans Wake that corresponds to the real world, the world of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus? I believe there is. This is the plane Joyce was referring to when he made the following statement to Ole Vinding in Copenhagen in 1936:
There are, so to say, no individual people in the book—it is as in a dream, the style gliding and unreal as is the way in dreams. If one were to speak of a person in the book, it would have to be of an old man, but even his relationship to reality is doubtful. (Vinding et al 180-181)
While Ulysses is populated with dozens of real people, there is only one truly real person in Finnegans Wake—an old man—and even he is not quite as real as Bloom and Dedalus. Who is this old man, and what do we know about him?
- He is the landlord—retired?—of the Mullingar House in Chapelizod.
- He is seventy years old.
- He is a widower.
- He has three grown-up children: twin sons and a daughter.
On the opening page of the book he falls asleep in the four-poster bed in the master bedroom on the first floor at the rear of the Mullingar House. The precise moment he falls asleep—punctuated by the word fall (RFW 003.14)—is 11:32 pm on Saturday 12 April 1924. He sleeps, more or less soundly, for about eight hours and wakes up the following morning on the last page of the book. The precise moment of his awakening is punctuated by the words a way (RFW 493.07).
Remember that all of this is highly conjectural. It is just a working hypothesis. But there are many bits of circumstantial evidence to back it up—some internal and some external.
In addition to the comments quoted above, Joyce said numerous other things that confirm the nocturnal nature of Finnegans Wake. Most of these were made late in the process of composition to men like Jacques Mercanton and Ole Vinding, so they represent Joyce’s mature reflections on the book.
I reconstruct the nocturnal life. (Mercanton & Parks 704)
I want to describe the night itself. Ulysses is related to this book as the day is to the night. Otherwise there is no connection between the two books. (Vinding et al 180)
In the final chapter of the book itself, a very revealing statement is made:
You mean to see we have been hadding a sound night’s sleep? (RFW 466.06)
In the course of the book, we learn various things about the protagonist:
[He] owns the bulgiest bungbarrel that ever was tiptapped in the privace of the Mullingar Inn ... (RFW 109.29-31)
[He] came at this timecoloured place where we live ... and has been repreaching himself like a fishmummer these sixtyten years ever since ... (RFW 023.20-26)
... in his windower’s house ... (RFW 019.17)
... he’s such a granfallar, with a pocked wife in pickle that’s a flyfire and three lice nittle clinkers, two twilling bugs and one midgit pucelle. (RFW 023.09-11)
The number 1132 pops up all over Finnegans Wake. Its significance will be discussed in due course. Clive Hart was the first—I believe—to suggest that the book begins at 11:32:
The whole book ... begins at the magical hour of 11.32 a.m. ... (Hart 71)
Hart’s analysis here is relevant to my second plane of narrative, which I believe begins at 11:32 in the morning. But what I have been calling the first plane of narrative begins at 11:32 at night.
As for the date—Saturday 12 – Sunday 13 April 1924—there are several scraps of evidence scattered throughout the final text and Joyce’s notebooks in support of this. In the Roman calendar 13 April was the ides of April:
They tell the story ... how one happy-go-gusty Ides-of-April morning ... (RFW 027.39-028.01)
The other spring offensive on the heights of Abraham ... (RFW 062.28)
One of the oft-recurring motifs in Finnegans Wake is ALP’s Letter. This document frequently symbolizes the entire book itself. For example, when the Letter is referred to as The Suspended Sentence (RFW 084.30-31) we are to understand that this also applies to Finnegans Wake itself:
The book really has no beginning or end. (Trade secret, registered at Stationers Hall.) It ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence. (Letters 8 November 1926)
During the lengthy and piecemeal drafting of the book, Joyce first conceived of the Letter as a postcard, as we learn from the following note in one of the earliest of the Finnegans Wake notebooks, Scribbledehobble:
on the N.E. slope of the dunghill the slanteyed hen of the Grogans scrutinised a clayed p.c. from Boston (Mass) of the 12th of the 4th to dearest Elly from her loving sister with 4½ kisses (VI.A: 271)
It is true that the final version of this passage speaks not of a postcard dated 12th April, but of:
a goodishsized sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass.) of the last of the first ... (RFW 088.20-21)
But I’m going to assume that Joyce changed the date from the actual one to a symbolic one (The last shall be first and the first shall be last) because he did not want to make things too clear.
One last point about the date. On Sunday 13 April 1924, at 2 am in the morning, the clocks went forward one hour as Irish summer time began:
SUMMER TIME ACT, 1924 ... For the purpose of this Act, the period of summer time for the year 1924 shall be taken to be the period beginning at two o’clock, West-European time, in the morning of the 13th day of April, in the year 1924, and ending at two o’clock, West-European time, in the morning of the 21st day of September, in the year 1924 (Achtanna an Oireachtais, Number 12 of 1924 )
In Finnegans Wake the following telling remark occurs:
And we put on your clock again, sir, for you. (RFW 022.11-12)
Personal dates were important to Joyce. He set Ulysses on the day of his first date with Nora Barnacle, and took pains to have it published on 2 February 1922, his own fortieth birthday. 13 April turns up more than once in the Joycean canon. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one of Stephen’s entries in his diary is dated 13 April:
13 April: That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other! (Joyce 1916:297)
Handel’s Messiah had its world première in Dublin on 13 April 1742, and Catholic Emancipation was passed into law on 13 April 1829. But if this particular date held any special significance for Joyce, I am not aware of it.
The Second Plane of Narrative – Diurnal
In my working hypothesis, the second plane of narrative is diurnal, lasting a full twenty-four hours. It begins at 11:32 am on the morning of Friday 21 March 1884 and it ends at 11:32 am on Saturday 22 March 1884. Some of you may recognize this as the birthdate of Joyce’s wife Nora Barnacle.
Several interpreters of Finnegans Wake have approached the work from a point of view that Roland McHugh once called naive realism (McHugh 1981:50). According to this approach Finnegans Wake is a novel with a plot, just like Ulysses : only the style is unorthodox. To these interpreters the diurnal plane of narrative is the most important one—and possibly the only one. At least one of these interpreters has hazarded a guess as to the exact day on which this novel is set:
The date of Finnegans Wake is Monday, the twenty-first of March, 1938, and the early morning of Tuesday the twenty-second. (Gordon 39)
I and John Gordon are agreed on the date and the month—Nora’s birthday—but he is convinced that the novel is set in 1938. I find it hard to believe that Joyce spent sixteen years writing a book that was set in the future. It makes Finnegans Wake sound like a work of science fiction. Joyce was interested in the past, not the future.
In Ulysses Bloom tries to distract himself from the depressing events of Bloomsday—the funeral of a dear friend, his cuckolding by Boylan, his altercation with the Citizen—by escaping into a happier past, when he was young and in love. The calendar may say June 1904, but for Bloom it is May 1887, when he first met Molly at Mat Dillon’s garden party, or May 1888, when he proposed to her and they consummated their relationship on Ben Howth. I believe that the lonely, elderly and widowed landlord of the Mullingar House does something similar when he falls asleep. In March 1884, he was a thirty-year-old, happily married and respected businessman, with three young children.
Clive Hart also recognized a diurnal plane of narrative. He did not settle on a specific date or year, but he does agree with me as to the day of the week:
The naturalistic plot, such as it is, is concerned with events at a public house near Dublin on one day fairly early in this century, while at the second level the individual incidents of this single day are divided up by Joyce and distributed in order throughout an entire week, thus expanding a daily into a weekly cycle. A morning event, for example, takes place on a Wednesday, an evening event on a Friday, and so on. Confusion resulting from the failure of the critics to appreciate this technique of time-expansion and compression has led to a misunderstanding about the day of the week on which the whole twenty-four hour cycle takes place. This is a Friday ... (Hart 70)
Until I read Hart’s thesis on how Joyce took the events of a Friday and redistributed them throughout the days of an entire week, I was not confident that my date of 21 March 1884 was correct. John Gordon cited passages from the book that seemed to prove conclusively that the book was set on a Monday-Tuesday. Then I noticed that the tombstone on Nora Barnacle’s grave in Zurich gives her date of birth as 25 March 1884. Now, 24 March 1884 was a Monday, so perhaps the diurnal plane of Finnegans Wake begins on 24 March. Unfortunately, the tombstone is simply wrong. I can’t find any other evidence that Nora Barnacle was born on 25 March or was ever thought to have been born on 25 March. Apparently the tombstone mason blundered.
But Clive Hart has restored my confidence. If he thinks that on the diurnal plane of narrative Finnegans Wake is set on a Friday, that’s good enough for me.
The fact of the matter is that a certain amount of cherry-picking is required to support whatever day or date one cares to choose. The last word has not been written on this subject.
Third Plane of Narrative – Hebdomadal
Hart’s temporal analysis of Finnegans Wake is worth quoting here:
Within these macro- and microcosmic limits Finnegans Wake functions at a number of symbolic levels, each based on its own particular time-period. As the main temporal cycles have not hitherto been properly understood, I shall sketch them in here, as briefly as possible, before going on to analyse the related dream-cycles. At the naturalistic level, corresponding to “Bloomsday”, Finnegans Wake is the detailed account of a single day’s activities; at the next remove it depicts a typical week of human existence; and, next in importance to the archetypal daily cycle, the book runs through a full liturgical year. There are many other time-schemes, of course, but these three are the most important. (Hart 70)
Hart has completed overlooked the nocturnal level, which I identify as the naturalistic level, corresponding to “Bloomsday”. As discussed above, however, he believes that Joyce redistributed the events of a single Friday-Saturday among the seven days of one week. This plane of narrative has only very recently become part of my working hypothesis and I am still not sure what to make of it. What week of what year is this? Is it the week that includes 21 March 1884 or the one that includes 12 April 1924? Or another week altogether? I have no idea. Perhaps the next time I make my way through the text I will discover the answers to these questions.
Fourth Plane of Narrative – Annual
On the opening page of Finnegans Wake the phrase scraggy isthmus occurs (RFW 003.05). At an early date this was glossed as happy Xmas (McHugh 2006:3). Does this imply that, on some level, the book opens around Yuletide? In the penultimate chapter, the bells of Dublin’s churches ring in the New Year, and we are told that it is holyyear (RFW 443.02-09). A Holy Year was convoked by Pope Pius XI in 1925. This plane of narrative would seem to represent 1924.
Originally I conceived this plane as annual, but Clive Hart sees it as liturgical:
The important yearly cycle is the simplest of all. Finnegans Wake begins at Easter, at “about the first equinarx in the cholonder” (347.02 [RFW 268.06-07]); it ends at dawn on the following Easter Day, just before the Resurrection. Each of the four cycles in Books I–III apparently lasts for three months: I.1-4 represents Spring; the fertile I.5-8 in which Anna rises “hire in her aisne aestumation” (204.02 [RFW 160.08-09]) is Summer, ending at “milkidmass” (215.21 [RFW 169.05]), the autumnal equinox; II is Autumn, ending at Christmas (at 380.09 [RFW 294.10] it is Thanksgiving Day); III is Winter (“white fogbow”, 403.06 [RFW 313.06]), beginning with the entry of the Son and ending with the Good Friday death (590 [RFW 459]). Book IV is the moment of transition from Holy Saturday to Easter Morning. The four poles of Joyce’s liturgical year are thus the equinoxes and the solstices, as they were in ancient times. The constant allusions to the twenty-nine February-girls suggest that the particular year in question is a leap-year, but I have not been able to determine which date Joyce had in mind if, as we may suppose, he gave Finnegans Wake a year to correspond with the 1904 of Ulysses. (Hart 74-75)
1924 was a leap-year, as was 1884. If Hart is right about the book beginning and ending at Eastertide, then what are we to make of the opening page’s happy Xmas? Or the ringing in of Holy Year near the end? I detect some more cherry-picking.
Disclaimer
While researching this article, I came across the following comment by Joycean scholar Fritz Senn:
Clive Hart’s Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake took a much wider view, away from individual particles, and it was a big step forward. But I also know that Clive no longer believes in its results and would now throw about 95 per cent of it overboard. (O’Neill 32)
Perhaps one day my working hypothesis will suffer a similar fate.
Higher Planes of Narrative?
Logically speaking, what comes next in the sequence: Night, Day, Week, Year? I am guessing that the next plane of narrative represents a human lifetime, from birth or conception on the first page to death on the last page. But I have not yet succeeded in working out any of the details.
As for even higher—deeper?—planes of narrative, perhaps there is one in which Finnegans Wake recapitulates the whole of human history (after Vico or Hegel). But let’s stop here.
The first two planes of narrative are the important ones when trying to orient yourself in the spacetime of Finnegans Wake. The third and fourth planes are helpful in explaining away discrepancies.
Summary
| Plane | Beginning | End |
|---|---|---|
| Nocturnal | 11:32 pm Saturday 12 April 1924 | Sunday 13 April 1924 |
| Diurnal | 11:32 am Friday 21 March 1884 | 11:32 am Saturday 22 March 1884 |
| Hebdomadal | ? | ? |
| Annual | ?? 1924 | ?? 1925 |
References
- Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
- Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, Northwestern University Press, Evanston IL (1962)
- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, B W Huebsch, New York (1916)
- 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)
- Seon Manley (editor), James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, Vanguard Press, New York (1963)
- Roland McHugh, The Finnegans Wake Experience, Irish Academic Press, Dublin (1981)
- Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Third Edition), The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland (2006)
- Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
- Christine O’Neill (editor), Joycean Murmoirs: Fritz Senn on James Joyce, The Lilliput Press, Dublin (2007)
- Ole Vinding (author), Helge Irgens-Moller (translator) and Brookes Spencer (translator), James Joyce in Copenhagen, James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 14, Number 2, Joyce Reminiscences Issue (Winter, 1977), pp 173-184, University of Tulsa, Tulsa OK (1977)
Image Credits
- László Moholy-Nagy’s Diagram of Finnegans Wake: László Moholy-Nagy, Public Domain
- James Joyce: Gisèle Freund, © IMEC, Fair Use
- Joyce’s Linati Schema: Lockwood Memorial Library (SUNY, Buffalo), Public Domain
- Ole Vinding: Unknown Copyright, Fair Use
- Clive Hart: University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia, Fair Use