In brief
A hod carrier called Finnegan falls from a ladder and dies, and is revived at his wake when whiskey splashes on the corpse. From that Dublin ballad James Joyce made a book seventeen years long and 628 pages thick. Somewhere under it lies a family: a publican in Chapelizod, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker; his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle; their twin sons, Shem and Shaun; their daughter, Issy. Something shameful may have happened to the father in Phoenix Park. Nobody can say what. The rumour spreads, his wife writes a letter in his defence, the letter goes astray, his sons wrestle for his place, the night passes, and at dawn the mother, who is also the river Liffey, flows out to sea.
The sentence that closes the book stops on the word “the” and is finished by the first word of page 3: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s”. So the book has no outside. It is written in an English that has been crossed with some sixty or seventy other languages, one pun laid on another, and no reader has ever understood all of it. It is also very funny, more musical than its reputation allows, and easier to enter than the legend says, once you stop reading it the way you read a novel.
This page gives the argument. A companion site, a chapter-by-chapter guide with its own Mindstr map set, gives the detail.
The argument
Joyce’s own case was simple and has never been bettered. Ulysses covers a day; this book covers a night. In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver in 1926 he said that a great part of every human life passes in a state that cannot be rendered by “wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot”. Asked about the difficulty by Max Eastman, he said that words in their ordinary connections could not express how things are at night, and added a promise: “I’ll give them back their English language.” The obscurity was the subject.
The second claim is larger. If everyone dreams, and every dream is built of what came before, then a single sleeper holds the species. Earwicker’s initials turn up as “Here Comes Everybody”, and that is the book’s anthropology: one family, endlessly repeated, is all the people there have been. The father falls and is accused. The sons fight. The daughter tempts. The mother forgives and tidies up. Adam, Humpty Dumpty, Wellington, Parnell and a Dublin barman are the same man at different hours. The result is either the most generous book of the century, in which nobody’s shame is special, or the most monotonous.
The view taken here is that the comedy decides it. A book about guilt written as an unending pun cannot condemn anyone. Earwicker’s offence is never established, the evidence dissolves in the telling, and every court in the book collapses into gossip. That is a serious position on sin and history.
Vico’s wheel
The first sentence carries the plan in a pun: a “commodius vicus of recirculation”. Giambattista Vico, a Neapolitan professor of rhetoric, argued in The New Science (1725, revised to 1744) that nations pass through an age of gods, an age of heroes and an age of humans, then break down and begin again. Language moves with them, from gesture and hieroglyph through metaphor to vulgar prose. Each cycle begins in fear of thunder, the first voice men took for a god’s. Joyce met him in his Trieste years and was delighted to find a philosopher who treated etymology and myth as evidence. There was also a Vico Road in Dalkey, on the Dublin coast, and Joyce never turned down that sort of luck: “The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin”.
So the four books are read as gods, heroes, humans and the return, the ricorso. Ten thunderwords of a hundred letters each, the last of a hundred and one, make 1,001 letters and sound through the first three books. The first is on page 3, in the same breath as the fall.
Hold this loosely. The scheme is real, and it helps, but it does not predict what is on any given page, and Joyce himself said he would “not pay overmuch attention to these theories, beyond using them for all they are worth”. Vico gave him a shape for his indifference to progress and a licence for his etymologies. He gave him no plot. Giordano Bruno, whose coincidence of opposites drives the warring twins, matters as much on the page.
The four books
The book has seventeen untitled chapters. Readers cite them as I.1 to IV, and pages by the standard pagination, which every edition and commentary shares. Chapters below link to the companion site, book names to their maps.
Book I: the parents (pp. 3–216)
Book I has eight chapters, and it is where to begin. I.1 is an overture: the fall, the wake, the tour of the “Willingdone Museyroom”, the Prankquean’s riddle. In I.2 Earwicker gets his name and meets a cad with a pipe who asks him the time, and he incriminates himself by denying what nobody has said. I.3 and I.4 follow the rumour into a ballad, a siege at the pub gate, a burial under Lough Neagh and a trial without a verdict. I.5 is a parody of learned commentary on the mother’s letter, dug out of a midden by a hen, and it includes the line about “that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia”. I.6 is a quiz of twelve questions, with the fable of the Mookse and the Gripes. I.7 is Shaun’s denunciation of Shem, Joyce’s self-portrait as a filthy forger. I.8 is Anna Livia Plurabelle.
Book II: the children (pp. 219–399)
Book II is the hardest and the strangest. In II.1 the children play a guessing game at dusk, staged as a pantomime, and Shem loses. II.2, the night lessons, is set out like a schoolbook, with the twins’ comments in the margins and Issy’s notes at the foot of the page, and a geometry lesson that turns into a diagram of the mother’s body. II.3 takes place in the pub below, with stories on the radio, the shooting of the Russian General, the customers turning on their host and Earwicker alone at closing time, draining the glasses. II.4 has four old men spying on Tristan and Isolde at sea.
Book III: Shaun (pp. 403–590)
Book III belongs to the postman, who fails to deliver and shrinks as he goes. III.1 gives him a barrel on the Liffey, fourteen questions and the fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper. In III.2 he is Jaun, preaching a sermon to his sister’s schoolmates that is not fit for them. In III.3 he is Yawn, a body on a hill, questioned by the old men, and through him the father’s voice returns in the great defence called “Haveth Childers Everywhere”, with cities woven through it as rivers run through I.8. III.4 is the parents’ bedroom at the end of the night, a child woken by a nightmare and the mother going to him, and it is the nearest the book comes to plain domestic realism.
Book IV: dawn (pp. 593–628)
Book IV is one chapter. Morning is called for, Saint Kevin keeps his vigil in the water, Berkeley and Saint Patrick argue about colour, and the letter is at last read out, more or less. Then the voice is Anna Livia’s, old and tired, trying to wake her husband, remembering a walk, and realising as she goes that she is leaving him for her cold father, the sea. The last page is the most moving thing Joyce wrote. It ends “A way a lone a last a loved a long the”, and to find out what comes next you have to go back to the start.
The language
The method is the portmanteau, which Lewis Carroll named, pressed into service for all purposes. “Commodius” holds a commode, the emperor Commodus and the word commodious. Most of it is English at the root, and the foreign words mostly come in small themed clusters, not a constant babel. It works by rhythm first, and a sentence you cannot gloss will often still sound like a Dublin woman pausing for effect, a barrister, a radio announcer or a priest. Say it aloud and the ear catches jokes the eye misses. Eugene Jolas was already saying so in 1929.
It rests on an enormous quantity of paperwork. Joyce filled dozens of notebooks and revised by adding, so that a clean early sentence thickens over years into the printed one. The James Joyce Digital Archive lets you watch that happen. In a letter of 1924 he listed the private signs, or sigla, that he used for the characters in his manuscripts, and he kept to them. He claimed that the twenty pages of I.8 alone cost him twelve hundred hours.
To the charge of triviality Joyce replied that some of his means were trivial and some quadrivial. The joke is also the argument: if words have no fixed edges, neither do persons or nations, and nobody can be cleanly convicted.
The people
Critics disagree on whether the book has characters at all or only types that change shape. The working answer is that a few recurring figures can be told apart by their habits.
HCE
Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker is big, stammering when accused, Protestant, of Scandinavian descent, and keeps a pub near Chapelizod. His initials hide in phrase after phrase, from “Howth Castle and Environs” in the first sentence onward, and he has thousands of names. He is the city of Dublin, lying asleep across its landscape, and a crime in the park, with two girls and three soldiers in it, that no one can pin down.
ALP
Anna Livia Plurabelle is the river Liffey, a small, quick, restless, unstoppable presence, and author of the letter. The whole book talks about her and she hardly speaks until the end, a trick Joyce had used with Molly Bloom. I.8 begins “O tell me all about Anna Livia” in the voice of one of two washerwomen, who gossip across a widening river as night falls and turn into a tree and a stone. Hundreds of river names run through it.
Shem and Shaun
Shem the Penman is the writer, a coward and exile who makes ink from his own waste, and Shaun the Post is the popular, pious, greedy brother who carries what Shem writes and cannot read it. They are Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Mick and Nick, tree and stone, time and space. Neither wins, because Bruno’s opposites keep turning into each other, and in old age each will have become his father.
Issy
Issy is the daughter, flirting with her reflection, who is her twin. Her father’s shame turns on her, and so do the sons’ rivalry and the Tristan story. Her footnotes in II.2 are some of the wittiest pages in the book.
The others
Four old men, Mamalujo, are the Evangelists, the four provinces of Ireland and a pack of doting historians. Twelve customers serve as jury, mourners and gossips. Kate keeps the museum and Joe sweeps up. Tim Finnegan may be Earwicker himself or his ancestor.
Work in Progress
On 10 March 1923 Joyce told Weaver that he had written two pages, the first since the final Yes of Ulysses. They concerned Roderick O’Conor, the last high king, draining the dregs of his guests’ glasses. More sketches followed that summer at Bognor, none yet with the family in them, and in August came “Here Comes Everybody”, which gave him his man. The first piece in print was “Mamalujo”, in Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review in April 1924, under a heading shared with other contributors: “From Work in Progress”. Joyce kept that as the book’s public name, and the real title stayed secret until publication. From 1927 Eugene and Maria Jolas serialised it in transition in Paris. The composition timeline sets out every fragment.
It nearly broke him. By 1926 his best friends were deserting him: Stanislaus Joyce rebuked him for an incomprehensible night-book, Ezra Pound said that nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clap could be worth it, and Weaver, his patron, complained in 1927 of his “Wholesale Safety Pun Factory”. In 1929 Joyce asked the poet James Stephens if he would finish the book should Joyce be unable to. He had picked Stephens partly because he believed they shared a birthday. Through the 1930s Joyce went on working through a dozen eye operations, the death of his father and the worsening mental illness of his daughter Lucia, and his sight declined so far that friends took dictation. Finnegans Wake came out from Faber in London and Viking in New York on 4 May 1939. Joyce died in Zürich twenty months later.
Beckett’s essay
In 1929, to answer the critics, Joyce’s circle published twelve essays under a title he had a hand in: Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. The first was Samuel Beckett’s “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce”, his first commissioned work. The dots in the title measure the centuries between the names. He was helping Joyce at the time, collecting words on cards and taking dictation.
It is still the best short thing on the book, and it opens with a warning aimed at everyone who has written on it since: “The danger is in the neatness of identifications.” Beckett goes on to expound Vico anyway and then turns on the complainers with the sentences that are always quoted. “Here form is content, content is form.” The stuff is not written in English, he grants, and it is not written at all: “It is not to be read—or rather it is not only to be read.” And then: “His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.” This is a manifesto and also a little unfair, since the book does have a story and it helps to know it. But it fixes the right instinct: hear it first, ask questions afterwards.
Burgess, Campbell and the keys
The first full guide came from an indignant discovery. In 1942 Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson recognised Thornton Wilder’s hit play The Skin of Our Teeth as a raid on the Wake and said so in the Saturday Review. Two years later they published A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, a page-by-page paraphrase arguing that behind the fog stood a novel with a plot, characters and a Viconian frame. Critics complain, and they are right, that it boils the book into solemn myth and leaves out the hard parts. Bernard Benstock warned against reducing the Wake to “insipid pap”, and Fritz Senn finds such summaries blandly misleading. Even so, a first reading without some such crutch is lonely. The site has a fuller account of Campbell and the book. He took the word monomyth from it for his own later work.
Anthony Burgess is the better companion for pleasure. Here Comes Everybody (1965), written for what he called the ordinary reader, treats Joyce as a comic novelist and a craftsman of words, and his praise of the book as one that can make us “laugh aloud on nearly every page” is the most useful thing a beginner can be told. In the mid-1960s he also published A Shorter Finnegans Wake, a set of cuts with linking commentary, which purists scorn and many readers have been grateful for. His later Joysprick looks at the language closely. After those two come the standard tools: Roland McHugh’s Annotations, Clive Hart’s Structure and Motif (1962), Adaline Glasheen’s Third Census, and John Bishop’s Joyce’s Book of the Dark (1986), the fullest case for reading the book as a night.
Readers and critics
The early response was contempt from the people who might have been expected to welcome it. D. H. Lawrence called it a “clumsy olla putrida”, H. G. Wells wrote to ask “who the hell is this Joyce” who demanded so many waking hours of the few thousand he had left, and Nabokov, who loved Ulysses, called it “a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room”. Oliver Gogarty thought it the biggest leg-pull since Ossian. The reviews of 1939 were mixed at best, though the Manchester Guardian’s B. Ifor Evans wisely declined to judge for twenty years.
Evans was about right. Hart’s study arrived in 1962, Northrop Frye had already called it the “chief ironic epic of our time”, and from the 1960s French thought took it up. Jacques Derrida measured his ideas against it, and Umberto Eco analysed it as a labyrinth in which each word opens on all the others. Readings since have turned to the Irish politics in it, its treatment of gender, and the notebooks. Whether it is a dream at all has been contested: Harry Burrell says flatly that it is not and that there is no dreamer, and Clive Hart warned against hunting for the real person behind the sleeping figures. Harriet Weaver was perhaps first to suggest that the book describes dreaming and not any one dreamer, and that remains the safest formula.
Afterlives
Its best-known gift is to physics: in 1963 Murray Gell-Mann, needing a spelling for a sound he had in mind, found “Three quarks for Muster Mark” and took the word. Composers have used it steadily. John Cage set words from page 558 in The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942) and made Roaratorio (1979) from its sounds; Samuel Barber’s Nuvoletta (1947), Toru Takemitsu’s riverrun (1984) and André Hodeir’s jazz cantata Anna Livia Plurabelle (1966) all draw on it. Olwen Fouéré’s solo play riverrun has toured widely. The book has been translated, against all reason, into French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, Russian and others. Joyce’s own recording of the end of I.8, made in Cambridge in 1929, lasts about eight minutes, and it is the single best way to learn how the book should sound.
What is free, and where
The legal position differs by country. The International James Joyce Foundation’s summary says that editions published in Joyce’s lifetime are in the public domain in the EU, the UK, Ireland, Canada and Australia, while in the United States the 1939 book remains in copyright until 1 January 2035. Standard Ebooks gives the same date and is waiting for it, and neither Project Gutenberg nor Wikisource has the book. Faded Page, the Canadian proofreaders’ library, publishes a complete transcription under Canadian law, which readers elsewhere can look up by name if it is lawful where they are. This page links no full text for that reason.
What is free everywhere: the companion site and its map set, the FWEET annotation database with its hundred thousand notes, and the audio and reading groups the site lists. To follow a commentary you will want a printed copy with the standard page numbers.
How to read it
- Get the right copy. The Viking or Penguin edition keeps the standard pagination that McHugh and everyone else use. The 2012 Oxford edition (Henkes, Bindervoet and Fordham) has a good apparatus. Rose and O’Hanlon’s Restored Finnegans Wake (2010) makes thousands of changes that have been criticised for being hard to inspect, so keep it for later.
- Read it aloud, and do not stop. A page a day, spoken. If a sentence defeats you, carry on. Understanding builds in waves, and every motif will come back.
- Know the outline first. Read one chapter’s summary on the site before each chapter. A two-minute synopsis tells you who is on stage. The first-steps map sets out a plan.
- Start where it sings. Try I.8 with Joyce’s recording, then the end of Book IV, then go back to page 3. I.7 and III.1 come next. Leave II.2 and II.3 until you are fond of it.
- Look up a word, not every word. Use FWEET when a line nags at you, then get back to reading. A reading group helps more than a dictionary, since everyone hears something different.
- Follow one thing. The second time through, take a single thread: the letter, the rivers or the falls.
Read next
- James Joyce, Ulysses (1922). Read the day before the night. Its last episode already gives a woman’s voice the final word.
- Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–67). The earlier Irish-born comic who made a book of never getting on with the story.
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871). The source of the portmanteau, and Humpty Dumpty’s fall and his theory of words.
- Giambattista Vico, The New Science (1725, revised 1744). Long and odd, but its chapters on poetic wisdom show what Joyce saw in him.
- Samuel Beckett, Molloy (1951). The opposite conclusion from the same apprenticeship, a language worn down where Joyce’s was piled up.