Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake is a novel by the Irish writer James Joyce. It was published in installments starting in 1924, under the title "fragments from Work in Progress". The final title was only revealed when the book was published on 4 May 1939.
Although the base language of the novel is English, it is an English that Joyce modified by combining and altering words from many languages into his own distinctive idiom. Some commentators believe this technique was Joyce's attempt to reproduce the way that memories, people, and places are mixed together and transformed in a dreaming or half-awakened state; metaphor mixing.
The initial reception of Finnegans Wake was largely negative, ranging from bafflement at its radical reworking of language to open hostility towards its seeming pointlessness and lack of respect for literary conventions. Joyce, however, asserted that every syllable was justified. Its allusive and experimental style has resulted in it having a reputation as one of the most difficult works in literature.
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. The book explores 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 follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. Emphasizing its cyclical structure, the novel ends with an unfinished line that completes the fragment with which it began.

Background and composition

Having completed work on Ulysses, Joyce was so exhausted that he did not write a line of prose for a year. On 10 March 1923, he wrote a letter to his patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver: "Yesterday I wrote two pages—the first I have since the final Yes of Ulysses. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so that I could read them." This is the earliest reference to what would become Finnegans Wake.
The two pages in question consisted of the short sketch "Roderick O'Conor", concerning the historic last king of Ireland cleaning up after guests by drinking the dregs of their dirty glasses. Joyce completed another four short sketches in July and August 1923, while holidaying in Bognor. The sketches, which dealt with different aspects of Irish history, are commonly known as "Tristan and Isolde", "Saint Patrick and the Druid", "Kevin's Orisons", and "Mamalujo". While these sketches would eventually be incorporated into Finnegans Wake in one form or another, they did not contain any of the main characters or plot points which would later come to constitute the backbone of the book. The first signs of what would eventually become Finnegans Wake came in August 1923 when Joyce wrote the sketch "Here Comes Everybody", which dealt for the first time with the book's protagonist HCE.
Over the next few years, Joyce's method became one of "increasingly obsessional concern with note-taking, since obviously felt that any word he wrote had first to have been recorded in some notebook."
By 1926, Joyce had largely completed both Parts I and III. Geert Lernout asserts that Part I had, at this early stage, "a real focus that had developed out of the HCE sketch: the story of HCE, of his wife and children. There were the adventures of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker himself and the rumours about them in chapters 2–4, a description of his wife ALP's letter in chapter 5, a denunciation of his son Shem in chapter 7, and a dialogue about ALP in chapter 8. These texts... formed a unity." In the same year, Joyce met Maria and Eugène Jolas in Paris, just as his new work was generating an increasingly negative reaction from readers and critics, culminating in The Dial's refusal to publish the four chapters of Part III in September 1926. The Jolases gave Joyce valuable encouragement and material support throughout the long process of writing Finnegans Wake, and published sections of the book in serial form in their literary magazine transition, under the title Work in Progress. For the next few years, Joyce worked rapidly on the book, adding what would become chapters I.1 and I.6, and revising the already written segments to make them more lexically complex.
By this time, some early supporters of Joyce's work, such as Ezra Pound and the author's brother Stanislaus Joyce, had grown increasingly unsympathetic to his new writing. In order to create a more favourable critical climate, a group of Joyce's supporters put together a collection of critical essays on the new work. It was published in 1929 under the title Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. In July 1929, increasingly demoralised by the poor reception his new work was receiving, Joyce approached his friend James Stephens about the possibility of Stephens completing the book. Joyce wrote to Weaver in late 1929 that he had "explained to all about the book, at least a great deal, and he promised me that if I found it madness to continue, in my condition, and saw no other way out, that he would devote himself, heart and soul, to the completion of it, that is the second part and the epilogue or fourth." Apparently Joyce chose Stephens on superstitious grounds, as he had been born in the same hospital as Joyce, exactly one week later, and shared both the first names of Joyce himself and his fictional alter-ego Stephen Dedalus. In the end, Joyce finished the book himself.
In the 1930s, as he was writing Parts II and IV, Joyce's progress slowed considerably. This was due to a number of factors including the death of his father John Stanislaus Joyce in 1931; concern over the mental health of his daughter Lucia; and his own health problems, chiefly his failing eyesight.
Finnegans Wake was published in book form, after seventeen years of composition, on 4 May 1939. Joyce died twenty months later in Zürich, on 13 January 1941.

Plot

Finnegans Wake consists of seventeen chapters, divided into four Parts or Books. Part I contains eight chapters, Parts II and III each contain four, and Part IV consists of only one short chapter. The chapters appear without titles, and while Joyce never provided possible chapter titles as he had done for Ulysses, he did title various sections published separately. The standard critical practice is to indicate part number in Roman numerals, and chapter title in Arabic numerals, so that III.2, for example, indicates the second chapter of the third part.
Given the book's fluid and changeable approach to plot and characters, a definitive, critically agreed-upon plot synopsis remains elusive. The following synopsis attempts to summarise events in the book, which find general, although inevitably not universal, consensus among critics.

Challenges of summary

Joyce scholars question the legitimacy of searching for a linear storyline within the complex text of Finnegans Wake. As Bernard Benstock highlights, "in a work where every sentence opens a variety of possible interpretations, any synopsis of a chapter is bound to be incomplete." David Hayman has suggested that "For all the efforts made by critics to establish a plot for the Wake, it makes little sense to force this prose into a narrative mold." The book's challenges have led some commentators into generalised statements about its content and themes, prompting critic Bernard Benstock to warn against the danger of "boiling down" Finnegans Wake into "insipid pap, and leaving the lazy reader with a predigested mess of generalizations and catchphrases." Fritz Senn has also voiced concerns with some plot synopses, saying "we have some traditional summaries, also some put in circulation by Joyce himself. I find them most unsatisfactory and unhelpful, they usually leave out the hard parts and recirculate what we already think we know. I simply cannot believe that FW would be as blandly uninteresting as those summaries suggest."
The challenge of compiling a definitive synopsis of Finnegans Wake lies not only in the opacity of the book's language but also in the radical approach to plot which Joyce employed. Joyce acknowledged this when he wrote to Eugène Jolas that "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".
While crucial plot points – such as HCE's crime or ALP's letter – are endlessly discussed, the reader never encounters or experiences them firsthand, and as the details are constantly changing, they remain unknown and perhaps unknowable. Joyce himself tacitly acknowledged this radically different approach to language and plot in a 1926 letter to Harriet Weaver, outlining his intentions for the book: "One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot." Critics have seen a precedent for the book's plot presentation in Laurence Sterne's digressive The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, with Thomas Keymer stating that "Tristram Shandy was a natural touchstone for James Joyce as he explained his attempt "to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose" in Finnegans Wake".
Despite Joyce's revolutionary techniques, the author repeatedly emphasized that the book was neither random nor meaningless; with Richard Ellmann quoting the author as having stated: "I can justify every line of my book." To Sisley Huddleston he stated "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 20 pages now before us cost me twelve hundred hours and an enormous expense of spirit." When the editor of Vanity Fair asked Joyce if the sketches in Work in Progress were consecutive and interrelated, Joyce replied "It is all consecutive and interrelated."