Jeri Johnson, who edited the current Oxford edition of Ulysses (still probably the best edition on the market) summarizes the novel’s formal structure as twofold: namely a vast naturalist novel, as well as an “anti-novel”. For our purposes, I would add a few more “ways” the novel operates: a sublimely ironic retelling of an Epic Myth (The Odyssey), a Dantean encyclopedia effortlessly created of daily life, as well as a somehow Dickensian style of having characters find their ultimate vocation echoing New Testament figures. At this count, Ulysses is a carefully crafted eight-year work that it becomes five “things” at once. If we were to do the same for Finnegans Wake we would end up with (at my last count) a carefully crafted seventeen-year work that is twelve “things” at once. I cannot list here them for fear of sounding like Polonius making his absurd little list of theatrical genres. I will identify two of the “ways” that are reused and create a narrative line through Finnegans Wake.
The title of Finnegans Wake is from a traditional Irish ballad; a fact which many readers know, but few fully investigate. The Song is about an “Irish Gentleman”, Tim Finnegan, who loves his drink, and one day falls from a ladder and apparently dies. He is placed in a coffin and at the wake, liquor is placed around him for the guests. An argument erupts, and a thrown bottle spills liquor all over Tim’s corpse, which promptly rises from the dead. The song has a rather noticeable amount of Irish slang built into it, most noticeably a pun on whiskey, which would to Irish speakers be recognized as the “Uisce beatha”--meaning “Breath of Life”--and the origin of the English word “Whiskey”. Being a music hall ballad, any performance the song—-especially to accompany dance—-would be repeated several times, the last verse function simply as a segue to singing the first verse again. As you may have guessed, almost all of this gets the ball rolling for the novel stylistically, at least as much so as Homer’s Odyssey did for Ulysses.
As far as mythological traditions go, Joyce mostly relied on Scandinavian mythology (Joyce had learned Norwegian much earlier in life in order to read Ibsen’s plays in the original) for the incidence, as well as the Anglo-Saxon Tristan and Iseult (which many English readers now find unfamiliar) in Finnegans Wake. These sections are relatively the most “narrative” of the novel, and readers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in particular will feel at home here. The technique is an ancient one, and is basically a re-lateralization of what Freud called the Family Romance (romance here meaning both sexual exploits and more generally wanderings) that has deep roots in Literary culture, at least as far back as the Book of Genesis. To read Finnegans Wake it is not required that one knows these mythologies, in fact it may be best to read them in the Wake for the first time.
Joyce’s main source for what is considered Holy taken from another source altogether. Whether of a Christian spirit or not, Joyce used the New Testament allusions in Ulysses generally in the same way Dickens did; to mark the main characters’ highest epiphanies. While Bloom’s epiphany, like all things Bloom, wildly original, echoes Bottom’s garbled Pauline epiphany in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Molly’s epiphany at the end of her sublime soliloquy echoes the “Yes” that The Virgin Mary gives to God and the World at the Annunciation. Stephen’s struggling with “servanthood” is very much similar to Dickens characters, especially Sidney Carton, struggling with Christ’s conceits without even knowing their source.
Which brings us to the principal “hole” in Christian “mythology”. While the resurrection is undoubtly a central dogma of Christianity from its earliest days, nowhere is the process actually “witnessed”. Christ is seen promising his resurrection in the earliest written Gospels, and Paul clearly has the performed resurrection in mind when writing his earliest epistles. Christ appears to many after his resurrection and even ascension, but I would argue that the best metaphysical humour and literary power of the gospels themselves occurs when ordinary people are witness to immortality. Christ does not reveal the process of resurrection to humans for the same reason that he does not reveal to them the process of healing; these things do not occur on mortal planes. Neither does Dante reveal them, “hiding them in light” of his evasive Paradiso. So the list goes with Christian writers: Chaucer, Cervantes and Milton happily taking the resurrection for granted, or for inevitable. Which brings us to the crucial religious text Joyce uses in the Wake.
The Book of the Dead, the nickname for the funerary text of Egypt titled The Book of Coming Forth by day owes its obscurity to a massive history of misunderstandings and presumptions placed on it. The book is not a sacred text, but a book of spells to be uttered at the funerals of dead nobility, assuring the soul’s deliverance into the afterlife. The spells are united by reference to the story of Isis, Osiris, and Horus. The story itself is rather long (though well-worth the read) and it would be more advantageous for our purposes to reflect on its preoccupations in a few scenes. Osiris, the King of Egypt is murdered by his usurping brother Seth, cut into fourteen pieces and thrown into the Nile. His wife Isis quests to collect him. To ensure Osiris’ resurrection, Isis comes to discover the secret and true name of Ra, the sun god. By assembling the body in the bulrushes of the Nile and speaking spells involving the True Name, Isis resurrects Osiris. Osiris impregnates Isis before dying again, and returning to rule the Underworld or “Western Lands”. His son Horus comes to rule the Overworld or Egypt. The spells flowing from The Book draw their power from various aspects of this story: Ra’s true name, The Water of the Sacred Nile, the True Progeny of Osiris, and the powers of the Underworld.
In Ulysses, the Liffey is conjured by Joyce as a type of counter-symbol to Buck Mulligan’s invoking of Whitman and Swinburne’s archetype of the Sea as both the Great Mother and Death. There it functions as a pun on the word Life itself, “transubstantiated” into beer at the breweries along the river in the “Laestrygonians” episode. The most admired part of Finnegans Wake—even to its detractors—is the long “Anna Livia” passage near the end of Book I, where two washerwomen chat idly about the river, the sexual circumstances of the family, and further into a praise of the particulars of this river as the universal of all rivers the world over. In this way, Joyce establishes the Liffey as the new Nile, forever bringing forth new life by “naming” in the cosmos of the Wake. With it, arrive too the themes of Sons, Family, and generally the Underworld.
In fact, the novel’s chief ironic force is in the fact that the novel occurs in this Underworld. Traditionally, it has been referred to by critics as the Dream that accompanies the very full day of Ulysses, and at several points does the novel refer to dreaming and The Dream of the sleeping Giant. But even more so, the novel is an Underworld, between life and death in which the larger enthusiasms of language are played out and by dream-logic, may well come to be true spells, or not. Or simply that “we have slumbered [t]here, while these visions did appear”. This I promise to the reader about Finnegans Wake, and nearly every book of high standing; that if we choose to dream in the places the author did, like a dream, reality will begin answer things we remember from the work. This is by far the greatest pleasure I know to be derived from the novel.
I suggest all this lightly, and in hopes of giving a framework for reading the novel. While the novel is not itself a single mythological framework, it is a reaction to one. It has come to be my experience that the quality of reading difficult work is not in the ability to consciously remember or ruminate every single detail, but being able to suspend judgment in such a way that the reader can join themselves to the author’s thinking and eventually, find their invention somehow inevitable. Beyond this, any reader should know that the opening passage of the Finnegans Wake—like Paradise Lost, or The Iliad—is probably among the most difficult in the whole book. Once you get through that with the techniques I first discussed (When in Doubt, Read Aloud), the rest of the book will not necessarily be easier, but you will very unlikely be required to remember large pieces of information from that section.
Like the Zohar, to make the book the butt of a joke may be both more instantly gratifying and funny than actually taking the time to find and enjoy the enormous amount of inner architecture. I would argue that to learn to enjoy Finnegans Wake is to find oneself most pleasurably drowned in World Literary Tradition, and at a loss for the new worlds one can step into. Late into his Stupid Period, Saul Bellow has a character joke about saving Finnegans Wake for “the nursing home”. This attitude has far too often been adopted with the book; that it is at best, a method of staving off boredom in late life. But much other art and literature has suffered this type of cynical “pragmatism”. While it is true that some higher pleasures must wait, I cannot help but to challenge the reader to find the higher pleasures of the work themselves, which yield up an even higher pleasure: the ability to share these higher pleasures with others who have experienced them. It’s simply a cliché that mention our saturation at this present, but not so much our amount of waste. While committing to the Wake is difficult, its powers are not of the species of simplicities we use amuse ourselves to waste our time and narrow our own world, but resound like notes played in a Cathedral to our very Being, and effortlessly continue doing so into our futures. To dedicate the time to it is not to waste time, but to in fact multiply it and find a good measure of eternity in the present.
Helpful products would include the complete text read by somebody with Dublin accent over at Audible. Thornton Wilder’s play By the Skin of Our Teeth is generally accepted as being based on Finnegans Wake, and though it cannot be relied on for plot or character detail itself, reading it is a short and easy way to get onself into the “mood” of the Wake. James Joyce made several recorded readings of important passages of the book which in turn are spread wide over the Internet.
I shall leave you with what George Eliot said of Fielding, “For time, like money, is measured by our needs”.
*I was initially hoping to make clear the necessity of reading Joyce's novels, and mark the Exiles as helpful, but not necessary to reading nor understanding the main sequence. However, I at the time made omission of the rest of Joyce's "orbital works", (similarly helpful, but not necessary to understand the main novel sequence). Now due to certain marketing endeavours, publishers seem to enjoy listing all of the works together, while designation between major and minor works. I shall therefore list them here and to a certain degree why they are here. The Major works being; Dubliners (a short story collection which establishes Dublin as the theatre of Joyce's morality), The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (a semi-autobiographical novel about Artistic values, introducing Stephen Dedelus), Ulysses (the culmination of both Joyce's Artistic theory as well as characters from both Portrait and Dubliners), and Finnegans Wake (coming to be seen as the fulfillment of all of Joyce's artistic promises, and type of shadow response to Ulysses).
The minor works being all of the poetry (though Joyce does make a pun on the title of the first volume, Chamber Music in Ulysses), the draft of Portrait now published as Stephen Hero, the play Exiles, and the critical writings and lectures which are currently published in various editions (like the sermons of Laurence Sterne, these are wonderful, but the best parts make their way into the author's fiction).
