Back يقظة فينيغان Arabic Бдение над Финеган Bulgarian Finnegans Wake Catalan Finnegans Wake Czech Finnegans Wake Danish Finnegans Wake German Η αγρύπνια των Φίννεγκαν Greek Finnegans Wake Esperanto Finnegans Wake Spanish Finnegans Wake Basque

Finnegans Wake

This article is about the book. For the street ballad after which it is named, see Finnegan's Wake. For the Tangerine Dream album, see Finnegans Wake (album).

Finnegans Wake
Simple book cover, unadorned
AuthorJames Joyce
LanguageEnglish
PublisherFaber and Faber
Publication date
4 May 1939
OCLC42692059
823/.912 21
LC ClassPR6019.O9 F5 1999
Preceded byUlysses (1922) 

Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is known for its experimental style and its reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the Western canon.[1] Written over a period of seventeen years and published in 1939, the novel was Joyce's final work. It is written in a largely idiosyncratic language that blends standard English with neologisms, portmanteau words, Irish mannerisms, and puns in multiple languages. It has been categorized as "a work of fiction which combines a body of fables [...] with the work of analysis and deconstruction";[2] many critics believe the technique was Joyce's attempt to recreate the experience of dreams and hypnagogia, reproducing the way in which concepts, memories, people, and places become amalgamated in dreaming.[3] It has also been regarded as an attempt by Joyce to combine many of his prior aesthetic ideas, with references to other works and outside ideas woven into the text. Although critics have described it as unintelligible, Joyce asserted that every syllable could be justified.[4]: 125  Due to its linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and abandonment of narrative conventions, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public.[5][6]

Despite the obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book's central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot, but key details remain elusive.[7][8] The book explores, in an unorthodox fashion, the lives of the Earwicker family, comprising the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book, in a nonlinear dream narrative,[9] follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment that continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making it cyclical.[10] Scholars have linked this cyclical structure to the influence of Giambattista Vico's The New Science, upon which they argue the structure of Finnegans Wake is based.[11][12]

Joyce began working on Finnegans Wake shortly after the 1922 publication of Ulysses. By 1928 installments of Joyce's new avant-garde work began to appear, in serialized form, in Parisian literary journals The Transatlantic Review and transition [sic], under the title "fragments from Work in Progress". The actual title of the work remained a secret until the book was published in its entirety, on 4 May 1939.[13] The initial reception of Finnegans Wake, both in its serialized form and especially in its final published form, was largely negative, ranging from bafflement at its radical reworking of the English language to open hostility towards its seeming pointlessness and lack of respect for literary conventions.[14]

The work has since come to assume a preeminent place in English literature. Anthony Burgess has lauded Finnegans Wake as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page".[15] Literary scholar Harold Bloom called it Joyce's masterpiece, and, in The Western Canon (1994), wrote that "if aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon, [Finnegans Wake], like Proust's [In Search of Lost Time], would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante".[16]

  1. ^ Joyce, Joyceans, and the Rhetoric of Citation, p 3, Eloise Knowlton, University Press of Florida, 1998, ISBN 0-8130-1610-X
  2. ^ Parrinder, P., James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 210–211.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference mercanton was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Loxterman, A. S., "Every Man His Own God: From Ulysses to Finnegans Wake", in Anon., Routledge Library Editions: James Joyce (Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis, 2022), p. 125.
  5. ^ Joyce critic Lee Spinks argued that Finnegans Wake "has some claim to be the least-read major work of Western literature." Spinks, Lee. A Critical Guide to James Joyce, p.127
  6. ^ Kitcher 2007
  7. ^ James Atherton states that despite the amount of critical work "explaining [the book's] profundities from various viewpoints and in varying ways [...] agreement has still not been reached on many fundamental points" Atherton 2009, p. ii; Vincent Cheng similarly argues that "through the efforts of a dedicated handful of scholars, we are approaching a grasp of the Wake. Much of Finnegans Wake, however, remains a literary outland that is still barely mapped out." Cheng 1984, p.2
  8. ^ The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce, p 98, Eric Bulson, Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-521-84037-6
  9. ^ James Joyce A to Z, p 74, A. Nicholas Fargnoli, Oxford University Press US, 1996, ISBN 0-19-511029-3
  10. ^ Chaucer's Open Books, p 29, Rosemarie P McGerr, University Press of Florida, 1998, ISBN 0-8130-1572-3
  11. ^ Beckett, Samuel (1929). "Dante . . . Bruno . . . Vico . . . Joyce". In Beach, Sylvia; Gilbert, Stuart (eds.). Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. Faber and Faber.
  12. ^ Donald Phillip Verene's Giambattista Vico article in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
  13. ^ The Oxford companion to Irish literature, p 193, Robert Welch, Oxford University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-19-866158-4
  14. ^ "From the archive: Who, it may be asked, was Finnegan? | From the Guardian | The Guardian". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
  15. ^ "Putting It into Words ~ Finnegans Wake". It's About Women. Archived from the original on 15 August 2015.
  16. ^ Bloom, Harold (1994). The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. p. 422. ISBN 0-15-195747-9. Retrieved 8 March 2018.

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