You took the words out of my mouth
What is Finnegans Wake? Between 1922 and 1939, scattered throughout Joyce’s correspondence—and the writings of people who knew him—there are isolated remarks bearing on the nature of Finnegans Wake. Some of these are of great value to the first-time reader, but equally as many are probably misleading, having been superannuated by the evolution of the book. The following list has been culled mostly from Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce, which the curious reader should consult for the full context and sources:
I think I will write a history of the world. (Ellmann 537)
I made [Ulysses] out of next to nothing. [Finnegans Wake] I am making out of nothing. (Ellmann 543)
It’s hard to say [what I am writing]. (Ellmann 543)
I don’t know [what the title will be]. It is like a mountain that I tunnel into from every direction, but I don’t know what I will find. (Ellmann 543)
As Joyce informed a friend later, he conceived of his book as the dream of old Finn [mac Cumhail], lying in death beside the river Liffey and watching the history of Ireland and the world—past and future—flow through his mind like flotsam on the river of life. (Ellmann 544)
My view is that Mr Joyce did not intend the book to be looked upon as the dream of any one character, but that he regarded the dream form with its shiftings and changes and chances as a convenient device, allowing the freest scope to introduce any material he wish—and suited to a night-piece. (Ellmann 544, Lidderdale & Nicholson 428)
Je suis au bout de l’anglais [I have reached the end of English]. (Ellmann 546)
I have put the language to sleep. (Ellmann 546)
In writing of the night, I really could not, I felt I could not, use words in their ordinary connections. Used that way they do not express how things are in the night, in the different stages—conscious, then semi-conscious, then unconscious. I found that it could not be done with words in their ordinary relations and connections. When morning comes of course everything will be clear again ... I’ll give them back their English language. I’m not destroying it for good. (Ellmann 546)
Joyce set out upon this radical technique, of making many of the words in his book multilingual puns, with his usual conviction. He called it “working in layers”. “After all,” he said to Frank Budgen, “the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church was built on a pun. It ought to be good enough for me.” (Ellmann 546)
Yes. Some of the means I use are trivial—and some are quadrivial. (Ellmann 546)
He said to Edmond Jaloux that his novel would be written “to suit the esthetic of the dream, where the forms prolong and multiply themselves, where the visions pass from the trivial to the apocalyptic, where the brain uses the roots of vocables to make others from them which will be capable of naming its phantasms, its allegories, its allusions.” (Ellmann 546)
Do you know that when we dream we are reading, I think it’s really that we are talking in our sleep. But we cannot talk as fast as we read, so our dream invents a reason for the slowness. (Ellmann 546)
In sleep our senses are dormant, except the sense of hearing, which is always awake, since you can’t close your ears. So any sound that comes to our ears during sleep is turned into a dream. (Ellmann 546-547)
I use Vico’s cycles as a trellis. (Ellmann 554)
I would not pay overmuch attention to [Vico’s] theories, beyond using them for all they are worth, but they have gradually forced themselves on me through circumstances of my own life. I wonder where Vico got his fear of thunderstorms. It is almost unknown to the male Italians I have met. (Ellmann 554)
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? (Ellmann 554)
[Finnegans Wake is] a Mah Jongg puzzle. (Ellmann 555)
The dream-visions of Book III [of Finnegans Wake] are a mirror-image of the legends of Book I. (Hart 67)
I have the book fairly well planned out in my head (Letters 21 May 1926)
One great part of every human existence [ie sleep] is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot. (Ellmann 584-585)
They say [Finnegans Wake is] obscure. They compare it, of course, with Ulysses. But the action of Ulysses was chiefly in the daytime, and the action of my new work takes place at night. It’s natural things should not be so clear at night, isn’t it now? (Ellmann 590)
The night world can’t be represented in the language of day. (Ellmann 590)
It is all so simple. If anyone doesn’t understand a passage, all he need do is read it aloud. (Ellmann 590)
I am really one of the greatest engineers, if not the greatest, in the world besides being a musicmaker, philosophist and heaps of other things. All the engines I know are wrong. Simplicity. I am making an engine with only one wheel. No spokes of course. The wheel is a perfect square. You see what I am driving at, don’t you? I am awfully solemn about it, mind you, so you must not think it is a silly story about the mouse and the grapes. No, it’s a wheel, I tell the world. And it’s all square. (Ellmann 597, Letters 16 April 1927)
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 twenty pages now before us cost me twelve hundred hours and an enormous expense of spirit. (Ellmann 598)
There will be a sequel, a reawakening. (Ellmann 603)
I am now hopelessly with the goats and can only think and write capriciously. Depart from me ye bleaters, into everlasting sleep which was prepared for Academicians and their agues! (Ellmann 613)
... the structure of Finnegans Wake, which he insisted was mathematical. (Ellmann 614)
I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description. (Ellmann 626 – Joyce was actually discussing a projected opera based on Byron’s drama Cain.)
Ce qu’apportent les yeux n’est rien. J’ai cent mondes a créer, je n’en perds qu’un. [What the eyes bring is nothing. I have a hundred worlds to create, I am losing only one of them [if I go blind].] (Ellmann 664)
The most natural thing for a writer to do is to call a spade a spade. The mistake which some moralists make, even today, is that they hate unpleasant phenomena less than they do those who record them. It’s always the same. People go on judging an author immoral who refuses to be silent about what in any case exists. Immoral! Why, it’s a mark of morality not only to say what one thinks is true—but to create a work of art with the utmost sacrifice; that’s moral, too. I admire Ibsen precisely for these two reasons: his morality consisted not only in the proclamation of his ethical ideals, but in the fierce struggle for the perfection of his work. (Ellmann 688)
[In Dubliners and Ulysses] I described the people and the conditions in my country; I reproduced certain city types of a certain social level. They didn’t forgive me for it. Some grudged my not concealing what I had seen, others were annoyed because of my way of expressing myself, which they didn’t understand at all. In short, some were enraged by the realistic picture, others by the style. They all took revenge. (Ellmann 689)
The devil mostly speaks a language of his own called Bellsybabble which he makes up himself as he goes along but when he is very angry he can speak quite bad French very well though some who have heard him say that he has a strong Dublin accent. (The Cat and the Devil – Ellmann 692 calls the devil’s language Bellysbabble. Which spelling has the typo?)
I don’t believe in any science, but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung. (Ellmann 693)
Now they’re bombing Spain. Isn’t it better to make a great joke instead, as I have done? (Ellmann 693)
Having written Ulysses about the day, I wanted to write [Finnegans Wake] about the night. Otherwise it has no connection with Ulysses, and Ulysses didn’t demand the same expenditure of energy. (Ellmann 695)
There is no connection between the people in Ulysses and the people in [Finnegans Wake]. 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. But his own connection with reality is doubtful. (Ellmann 695-696)
I’m not interested in politics. The only thing that interests me is style. (Ellmann 697)
If you took a characteristic obscure passage of one of these people [modern writers] and asked him what it meant, he couldn’t tell you; whereas I can justify every line of my book. (Ellmann 702)
I have discovered I can do anything with language I want. (Ellmann 702)
One day a visiting Englishwoman listened to him reading a passage from [Finnegans Wake] and sternly remarked, “That isn't literature.” “It was,” Joyce replied, meaning that it was while she was listening to it. The musical aspect of the book was one of its justifications. “Lord knows what my prose means,” he wrote his daughter. “In a word, it is pleasing to the ear. And your drawings are pleasing to the eye. That is enough, it seems to me.” (Ellmann 702)
Another visitor, Terence White Gervais, asked him if the book were a blending of literature and music, and Joyce replied flatly, “No, it’s pure music.” “But are there not levels of meaning to be explored?” “No, no,” said Joyce, “it’s meant to make you laugh.” (Ellmann 702-703)
I am only an Irish clown, a great joker at the universe. (Ellmann 703)
In risu veritas. [In laughter is the truth.] (Ellmann 703)
Why have you written [Finnegans Wake] this way? To keep the critics busy for three hundred years. (Ellmann 703)
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my work. (Ellmann 703)
He justified its content as a third of human life—the night third. Those who objected to his method must consider what better way there might be to represent the shiftings of dream life. He defended its theme, its view of life as a recurrence of stock characters and stock situations, another aspect in which the psychology and anthropology of his time did not controvert him. He defended the complexity of the book as necessary to the theme, a claim which has come to be accepted for modern poetry. He defended its technique or form in terms of music, insisting not on the union of the arts—although that seems to be implied—but on the importance of sound and rhythm, and the indivisibility of meaning from form, an idea which has become a commonplace in the critical assessment of Eliot’s later verse. Finally, he defended his language both in terms of linguistic theory, as a largely emotional medium built up by splitting and agglutination, and in terms of the appropriateness of linguistic distortion to a book which traced the distortion of dreams and suggested that history was also paranomastic [paronomastic], a jollying duplication of events with slight variations. (Ellmann 703)
Isn’t this the way the Demiurge must calculate in making our fine world? Perhaps, after all, he reflects less than we. I reconstruct the life of the night the way the Demiurge goes about his creation, on the basis of a mental scenario that never varies. The only difference is that I obey laws that I have not chosen. And he ..? (Ellmann 707-708)
He told how the idea of the book had come to him in 1922 when he was at Nice [17 October – 12 November 1922] (Ellmann 715)
Joyce insisted to Jacques Mercanton that he worked strictly in accord with laws of phonetics. “The only difference is that, in my imitation of the dream-state, I effect in a few minutes what may have taken centuries to bring about.” (Ellmann 716)
He thought Edmund Wilson’s review [of Finnegans Wake] in The New Republic had flashes of insight but made a few mistakes ... (Ellmann 723)
Joyce indomitably reserved a few hours each day to correct misprints in Finnegans Wake, with the help now of Paul Léon. (Ellmann 733)
Wilson makes some curious blunders. (Letters End July 1939)
With absolute simplicity, quite devoid of pretentiousness, he furnished me with the key to his work. He explained to me the mystery of the titanic figure H.C.E., the unique, many-faceted hero of innumerable incarnations ... He told me about the language he had adopted in order to give his vocabulary the elasticity of sleep, to multiply the meaning of words, to permit the play of light and colour, and make of each sentence a rainbow to which each drop is itself a many-hued prism. (Louis Gilet 1931)
In the summer of 1923 when Mr. Joyce was staying with his family in England he told me [Harriet Shaw Weaver] he wanted to write a book which should be a kind of universal history and I typed for him a few preliminary sketches he had made for isolated characters in the book.
Such an amount of reading seems to be necessary before my old flying machine grumbles up into the air. (Letters 16 February 1931)
Taking Stock
There are some inconsistencies here—unavoidable in a work that evolved over the course of more than a dozen years. A number of facts, however, seem secure:
Finnegans Wake is a depiction of a single night in Dublin.
The book is written in a strange and obscure language precisely because it is a depiction of the night and the dream-state.
There is only one “real” character in the book: an old man.
There are different levels—planes of narrative—in the book.
The book is—among other things—the story of a Chapelizod family.
Finnegans Wake is a comedy. It should provoke laughter.
Finnegans Wake is a nocturnal counterpart to Ulysses. Although Joyce initially played around with the possibility that the two narratives would be somehow related, he abandoned this idea early on as Finnegans Wake developed a personality of its own. There is no connection between the characters in Ulysses and those in Finnegans Wake.
Finnegans Wake is a book to be read aloud. The music, rhythm and sounds of the book contribute at least as much to its overall impact as do the meanings of the words on the page.
Behind Finnegans Wake is an entire library of books, newspapers, and journals from which Joyce drew inspiration. “Such an amount of reading seems to be necessary before my old flying machine grumbles up into the air,” Joyce complained to Harriet Shaw Weaver in 1931. And if we want to understand this book, we too will be required to undertake such an amount of reading.
References
- Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
- Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, Northwest University Press, Evanston, Illinois (1962)
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939)
- James Joyce, The Letters of James Joyce, Volumes I, II, III, Stuart Gilbert (editor), Richard Ellmann (editor), Viking Press, New York (1966)
- Jane Lidderdale, Mary Nicholson, Dear Miss Weaver: Harriet Shaw Weaver, 1876-1961, Viking Press, New York (1970)
- Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
Image Credits
- James Joyce and Paul Léon: Gisèle Freund, ©Estate Gisèle Freund/IMEC Images, Fair Use
- Joyce, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier: Gisèle Freund, ©Estate Gisele Freund/IMEC Images, Fair Use
- Tristan und Isolde: Adolphe Appia, Fair Use
- Joyce Dreaming: Berenice Abbott, Fair Use