James Joyce · 1939 · A visual guide
The most famous unreadable book in English. Joyce spent seventeen years on it, writing in a language he assembled from about sixty others. It has no ending. Its last sentence flows into its first, and the story starts over.
Four keys open it up. Once you have them, the noise starts to sound like music.
Key I · Night
Joyce’s previous novel, Ulysses (1922), follows one Dublin day, hour by hour. Finnegans Wake is its twin: one Dublin night, from dusk to dawn, told from inside sleep.
In a dream, a person can be your father and a mountain at once. Words slide into other words. The story forgets itself and starts again. Joyce decided the night couldn’t be written in what he called wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot
. So he let his sentences fall asleep.
Put the first sentence to sleep
The river flows past the Church of Adam and Eve, from the curve of the shore to the bend of the bay, and carries us along a wide, circling road back to Howth Castle and the land around it.
Awake. A guidebook sentence. Every word does one job.
“His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.”
Key II · Words
In dreams, two people fuse into one. Joyce fuses words. Lewis Carroll named the trick in 1871, when Humpty Dumpty explains the nonsense word slithy (lithe plus slimy) to Alice: “You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.”
Joyce packs in four or five at a time. They come from English, Irish, Latin, French, German, Norwegian and dozens more, plus hymns, pub songs, street names and headlines. Humpty Dumpty turns up in the Wake too, as one of the father’s many selves: the egg who had a great fall.
The title
Finnegans Wake
Notice what’s missing: the apostrophe.
The fan of channels is a delta, the shape a river makes where it meets the sea. It is also Joyce’s own symbol for Anna Livia, the river-mother of the book. One stream goes in and many come out.
Page 3 · The first thunderword
A few lines into the book, a man falls off a ladder, and the fall makes this sound. It is exactly 100 letters long, and it’s built from the word for thunder in about ten languages. It opens with a stammer, ba-ba-ba, that sounds like baby talk and like Babel, the tower where one human language split into many.
Vico believed civilization began when early people heard thunder, took it for the voice of an angry god, and in their fear invented religion, then marriage, then burial of the dead. In the Wake, every thunderclap starts history over.
There are ten thunderwords. Nine are 100 letters long and the tenth, on page 424, has 101. That last one rumbles with Norse gods: Thor’s hammer Mjölnir, the wolf Fenrir, Loki and Ragnarök. Together they add up to 1,001 letters, the number of the Thousand and One Nights, the other great book of stories told through a night. You can see where each one strikes on the wheel below.
Key III · Circle
Giambattista Vico, a philosopher from Naples who died in 1744, argued that every civilization passes through the same three ages: gods, heroes and ordinary people. Then it collapses into confusion, thunder sounds, and the cycle begins again. He called the return the ricorso.
Joyce built the Wake on Vico’s wheel. It has four books, one for each age and a short fourth for the return. The last page runs back into the first, so you can start anywhere and go round forever.
“The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.”FW 452
Joyce puns on Vico constantly, starting with the commodius vicus of recirculation
in the first sentence. His real subject is less the past than repetition: every fall is the same fall, every return the same return, and each version is slightly different, like a song passed from singer to singer.
Key IV · Everybody
At its simplest the Wake is about five people living over a pub in Chapelizod, a village on the river just west of Dublin: the landlord, his wife, their twin sons and their daughter. In a dream, though, identities overlap. The father is also Adam, a fallen giant, an egg and a mountain. The mother is also Eve and every river on earth.
Joyce hardly thought of them as names. In his notebooks he marked each one with a symbol, and scholars call these the sigla. Hover over or tap a card to find that person in the landscape below.
HCE · the father
Runs the pub. Rumored to have done something shameful in Phoenix Park, though no one agrees on what.
Also appears as
AdamNoahHumpty DumptyTim FinneganFinn MacCoolKing Markthe Duke of Wellingtona Norwegian sea captainthe Russian GeneralHowth HeadDublin itself
His symbol is the letter E knocked onto its side. He is always falling.
ALP · the mother
Writes the letter that defends her husband. Her name holds the river: the Liffey was once called the Anna Liffey.
Also appears as
Evethe River Liffeyevery river on eartha hen scratching up a letterthe letter’s authoran old woman going out to sea
Her symbol is Δ, a delta: the mouth of a river.
Shem · a twin
The writer: an outcast, a joker, a scandal to his family. A portrait of Joyce himself as his critics saw him.
Also appears as
CainJerryGluggDolphNick the devilthe Gripesthe GracehoperMerciusthe treetime
He and his brother are opposites who keep trading places.
Shaun · a twin
The postman: popular, pious, preachy and adored by the girls. He carries the letter but can’t read it.
Also appears as
AbelKevinChuffKevMick the archangelthe Mooksethe OndtJustiusJaunYawnthe stonespace
Where Shem is time, Shaun is space.
Issy · the daughter
Talks to her own reflection. Both brothers compete for her attention, and so does her father.
Also appears as
IsoldeNuvoletta, a little cloudthe rainbow girlsher mirror imagethe rainthe next Anna Livia
Her symbol is a T tipped on its side.
X · the watchers
Four old men who watch, gossip and get history wrong. Joyce merged their names into one: Mamalujo.
Also appears as
Matthew, Mark, Luke and Johnfour old historiansIreland’s four provincesfour bedpostsVico’s four ages
In the landscape they watch from the four corners.
Also in the house: Kate the cleaner, old Joe the handyman, and twelve regulars at the bar, who double as the twelve apostles, a jury and the months of the year.
Seen from above, Dublin is the whole family. The father is the hill of Howth at the mouth of the bay. The mother is the River Liffey. The twins stand on opposite banks as a tree and a stone. The daughter is a cloud whose rain feeds the river, so the daughter grows into the mother. The mother runs into the sea, rises again as cloud, and the cycle continues.
Scroll the picture sideways to see all of it.
Legend says the giant Finn MacCool lies asleep under Dublin, head at Howth and toes in Phoenix Park. Page 3 says so too: his humptyhillhead
lies in the east, his tumptytumtoes
in the west.
The book begins and ends with this water. The first word is a river, and the last pages are the river reaching the sea. Between them the rain keeps falling.
Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be.
The mother’s name in past, present and future tense. FW 215
Once you know the father’s initials, you hear them all through the book. His surname comes from the earwig, and a street ballad mocks him as Persse O’Reilly, from the French perce-oreille, which also means earwig.
The plot, roughly
Under the wordplay there is a story, told again and again in different disguises. A Dublin publican is rumored to have done something shameful in Phoenix Park. No two witnesses agree on what. The rumor spreads, he is put on trial, his wife writes a letter in his defense, his sons fight, his daughter flirts, and the night goes by.
Book I · pages 3–216
Evening: the legend of the father
The overture. Finnegan, a builder, falls from his ladder and dies. At his wake the mourners drink, and when the corpse stirs they soothe him back down, because someone new has arrived to take his place. Also here: a guided tour of a Waterloo museum, two prehistoric men named Mutt and Jute, and the Prankquean, who kidnaps children after asking a riddle.
How Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker got his name: a king found him catching earwigs. A stranger in Phoenix Park asks him the time, and HCE nervously denies a crime nobody has mentioned. The gossip becomes a street ballad mocking him, “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly,” printed in the book with its music.
The story mutates as it passes from mouth to mouth, and the evidence keeps shifting. A drunk hammers on the door of HCE’s pub for hours, shouting insults. HCE says nothing, as though he were already buried.
HCE lies in something like a tomb while the world argues about him. A courtroom farce follows in which the witnesses contradict each other until the case falls apart. His wife prepares his defense.
A hen scratching in a rubbish heap finds a letter, written by the mother to clear her husband’s name. It is torn, tea-stained and nearly illegible. A pedantic scholar analyzes it the way experts analyze the Book of Kells. The letter is a portrait of the book you’re reading.
A quiz with twelve questions about the characters. Shaun, playing a know-it-all professor, answers with fables: the Mookse and the Gripes (a fox and some grapes, and also a pope and the Irish church), and Nuvoletta, a little cloud who falls into the river as a single tear.
Shaun’s savage portrait of his twin: a coward, a drunk, a plagiarist, a writer who makes ink from his own excrement and writes on his own skin. It is Joyce seeing himself through his critics’ eyes. At the end Shem answers back, and gives the mother a voice.
Two washerwomen on opposite banks of the Liffey scrub the family’s laundry and gossip about ALP. As night falls and the river widens, they can no longer hear each other, and they turn into a tree and a stone. Hundreds of the world’s river names flow through the text.
Book II · pages 219–399
Twilight to closing time
Twilight outside the pub. The children play a game in which Glugg (Shem) must guess the girls’ secret color. He fails three times. The answer is heliotrope, the purple this page uses for its highlights. Their father calls them in, thunder rolls, and they say their bedtime prayers.
The twins and Issy do their lessons. The page turns into a schoolbook, with the brothers’ notes in both margins and Issy’s cheeky footnotes at the bottom. Dolph (Shem) teaches Kev (Shaun) geometry with a diagram of where they came from. Kev punches him, and then they make up.
The longest, loudest chapter. HCE pours drinks while the radio and the television blare. The customers hear the tale of a Norwegian captain and a tailor, and watch a TV sketch called “How Buckley Shot the Russian General.” The crowd turns on the landlord. After closing time he drinks the dregs and collapses on the floor.
Seagulls cry Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Four old men spy on Tristan and Isolde kissing aboard a ship, and reminisce, badly, about history.
Book III · pages 403–590
Midnight to first light
Midnight bells. The dreamer sees Shaun, now an enormous, well-fed postman, who answers questions, tells the fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper (the ant and the grasshopper), sneers at his brother, and rolls away down the river in a barrel.
Shaun, renamed Jaun, preaches a long, pious and secretly lecherous sermon to Issy and her 28 classmates about virtue, food and sex. Then he drifts off downstream.
Shaun, now called Yawn, lies collapsed on a hill. The Four interrogate him like mediums at a séance. Voices rise from inside him, older and older, until the father himself speaks, boasting of the city he built for his wife.
Early morning. A child cries out from a nightmare, and the parents get up to comfort him before going back to bed together. The scene is described from four positions in turn, like four cameras, or four bedposts.
Book IV · pages 593–628
Dawn
It opens with Sandhyas! Sandhyas! Sandhyas!
, Sanskrit for the sacred twilight of dawn. Saint Patrick debates an archdruid about light and color. The letter appears one last time. Then Anna Livia, old now, flows out to sea and says goodbye. The final sentence has no full stop.
The book inside the book
In chapter I.5, a hen scratching in a rubbish heap turns up a letter. It is torn, stained with tea and punctured with holes. It seems to be from the mother, defending the father.
A scholar then spends the whole chapter analyzing it, with the fussiness experts bring to the Book of Kells. Anyone who has tried to read the Wake knows the feeling. The letter is the book, and Joyce wrote its critics into it in advance.
In 1929, ten years before the book was finished, Joyce arranged for twelve writers to publish essays explaining it. One of them was the 23-year-old Samuel Beckett. The collection’s title is already in Wake-speak: Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress.
Where the Wake leaked out
In 1963 the physicist Murray Gell-Mann needed a name for a new kind of particle. He had a sound in mind, kwork, but no spelling. Then he came across a line in the Wake, jeered by seagulls at old King Mark: Three quarks for Muster Mark!
His particles come in threes inside every proton and neutron, so the word stuck. Quark is now in every physics textbook, and every atom in your body contains some.
Joyce’s eyesight failed as he wrote. He went through operation after operation on his eyes and worked with magnifying glasses and thick crayons. For a time the young Samuel Beckett took dictation.
As Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann tells it, someone once knocked during a session and Joyce said “Come in.” Beckett wrote it down. When it was read back, Joyce decided: “Let it stand.”
For years, pieces of the book appeared in magazines under the name Work in Progress. Joyce told almost no one the real title and offered a prize to anyone who could guess it. In 1938 his friend Eugene Jolas did.
Joyce collected words and phrases in dozens of small notebooks, from newspapers, conversations, encyclopedias and songs, and struck through each entry in colored crayon once he had used it. Scholars are still working through them.
“The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works,” he reportedly told a friend.
Some readers have taken him up on it. The book has become a shared project: a century of annotators, reading groups and translators, each adding a little to the map without ever finishing it.
If you want to try
People who love the Wake rarely claim to understand all of it. They enjoy it the way you might enjoy music in a language you half know.
Joyce’s advice for a difficult passage, as friends reported it, was simply to read it aloud. Many jokes are invisible on the page and obvious to the ear. An Irish accent helps.
Nobody gets every word, including the experts. Let the rhythm carry you. The sense arrives as patterns more than as sentences.
The initials H.C.E. and A.L.P., a fall, a river, two brothers fighting, a letter, a thunderclap. Once you can hear them, you always know roughly where you are.
Chapter I.8, pages 196 to 216, is the most musical, and Joyce recorded part of it in 1929. Then try the last four pages, then the first. Feel the loop.
Reading groups around the world spend years on the book, a page or two a meeting. It is a book that likes an audience.
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson (1944) retells the story. Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake explains it line by line. FWEET is a free, searchable online collection of annotations.
Page 628
The last pages belong to Anna Livia. It is dawn. She is old and tired, a river running out into the bay. She talks to her sleeping husband, remembers being a girl, and lets herself go into the sea, her cold mad feary father
.
On the final page there is a promise, Finn, again!
Then she hands over the keys, and the sentence stops in mid-air.
Thekeysto.Given!Awayalonealastalovedalongthe