Struct.Wake

The Structure of the "WAKE"
                The structure of the Wake is complex although it is based on simple principles. There is one abiding story, that of the Fall, which is repeated over and over again, there is one abiding dispute which in effect involves two questions, what was the fall, and what were or are its consequences. There is one enduring group that engages in this dispute and suffers from this mysterious Fall, the Earwicker family of the suburb of Chapelizod in Dublin, consisting of the father, the mother, the sons and the daughter. They live in a pub above the river Liffey and the time of the novel is night, the setting is, despite endless mutations, always this one of Dublin and its river. The abiding trope of the book is that of the dream. It may be HCE that is dreaming, it may be communal dream shared by them all, but it is definitely a world that is known, remembered, interpreted below the level of the conscious mind. The dream-language of the work is a polyglot amalgram, involving words from sixty-five different world languages, occasionally observand of the conventions of English grammar and syntax but more usually subversive of them.
                This is a family sorely exercised by its awareness of a fundamental crime committed by HCE. It is sexual in nature, it involves his daughter, Issy, and it happened in the Phoenix Park, Dublin´s equivalent of the garden of Eden. The crime, so-called, has to do with the exposure of the genitalia, male and female, to a voyeuristic gaze. The father gazes on the daughter, the daughter on the father, each on him or her self. And both are gazed on by three soldiers who represent the Earwicker children themselves and also the violence that is intimately connected both with sexuality and its repression and with the Phoenix Park and its dominating monument, an Obelisk. Inevitably phallused in the text, to the triumph at the battle of Waterloo of the Irish Duke of Wellington who is also the embodiment of a certain stereotype of Englishness, just as his famous opponent, Napoleon, is an Italian-Corsican who is taken to embody a certain stereotype of Frenchness. It is the repression of this crime in the family subconscious that is the source both of its vitality and its distress. It is taboo to speak of it in day language, therefore unavoidable in night language. The crime is sexual and thus has at its heart a declaration of difference, difference man and woman, difference between day and night, conscious and unconscious, word and world. Yet, within this endless differentiation, there is sameness, a unity that can only be inferred from the experience of the pain of difference.
                Perhaps there is here a further distinction that is both crucial and elusive. Unity is not identical with sameness. The latter involves repetition, tedium, the inescapable return of one pattern through all variation. Unity is prior to all that, it is before history. It is a condition for which the family longs but can never reach. Sameness is the closest approximation to unity. There is no language for unity because unity precedes language. Language, which is fissiparous, lends itself to the heterogeneus, prismatic nature of experience. To permit of acknowledge such heterogeneity is to be feminine, to censor it, to dictate for it a pattern or patterns of order, is to be masculine. Women are forever the Greeks in an implacably male and Roman world. Thus the book enacts a struggle between the genders, between an acceptance of difference and a refusal of it, between fertile chaos and authoritarian order. The accounts of the work´s composition reflect this. The research into Joyce´s notebooks and the comparisson of early with later drafts of various episodes would seem to indicate that the whole book is architecturally planned and constructed with minute care. On the other hand, much of the anecdotal material surrounding the history of its writing would indicate that Joyce took his luck with whatever came his way. Anything and everything could go into the Wake. Many of its local meanings are randomly generated. Anything found is ben trovato, well found, and for many readers, is on that account also well-founded.
                It is proper that such a book should be concerned so radically with authoring and authority, with origin and repetition, with liberation and repression. From the start, if the first page can be called the start, since its opening sentence really begins on the last page. We are told that none of the events referred to have yet happened. More precisely, they have not yet happened again. Sir Tristram has not yet again arrived. We are before history and yet within a history that has happened over and over. The hundred letter word, signifiyng trunder and the fall, or the double fall, since there was a war in heaven and Luciferian fall before there was a human Fall and war on earth, is a kind of molten Ur-language that will flow into the various mouldings of diverse languages, its noise formed into sounds and the souns assuming to themselves the property of signification. He lived back in the timeless zone of the unsconcious, just as he lived back of his house above the pub and as he mimed the advice given to all Irish cultural revival of the 1830, to live back in the country they live in order to regain theit identity. Like Milton at the opening of Paradise Lost, Joyce is confronting the impossibility of writing, an activity that is the product of history, about that which is prior to history , even though the idea of priority is, in such a double-bounded context, itself historical. From the beginning, there is no beginning. But even the Wake has to start somewhere. So it starts at the end and by its famous commodius vicus of recirculation leads us into the second sentence in which history has not yet begun to happen twice.

                In part I, representing the theocratic Age of Vico, in which authority is both oppressive and feared, the sleeping and fallen father, HCE, is assailed by rumours and whispers of his crime. The whole Earwicker family is , in fact, the subject of comment and gossip, especially Shem the son and ALP, the mother. History is a whispering gallery in which the voices are those of others and also of oneself. An old man is dying, and as he dies he reverts to his beginnings in the womb. The individual life encapsulates and is encapsulated by history. The investigation that dominates the book centres on a trial that has, as its documentary evidence, a letter that is unsigned, that tells a complex story that seems to indicate a crime has been committed, and that must be interpreted despite the many difficulties that it contains. Even the material on which it is written has acquired accretions of terricious matter whilst loitering in the past, this makes the difficult to read. It has a particular style, so why pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own. That may be the style of language itself, not that of an author, and language itself may be derivative of the language of sigh, grunt and groan, especially as they themselves derive from sexual pleasure and therefore from the act of coition which is the originating act and perhaps the original crime. If all texts their commentaries were, at base, repressions of an original and inarticulate sexual pleasure that has through such biblical and other filterings been rendered criminal then where would civilization be it this were to be admitted. Of course, it is admitted in dreams, Joyce is treading in Freud´s footsteps in seeing civilizationm at least in this theocratic and authoritarian form if its nevertheless inescapable origins.

Part II is dominated by seeing and looking, although the third episode introduces again a variety of ways of hearing radio, dialogue and a curious televisual section. Looking, like listening, involves both desire and the accompanying fear that the desire is shameful. All the longshots, upcloses, outblacks and stagtolets of the children´s games in the first chapter end in the coming of night and the roll of thunder, the children are tucked away in their houses and policed by guards, their play is replaced by prayer. They have entered into the workd of order, even as they are also enclosed in the world of law and censorship. The policing of anything that threatens to be anarchic id the mode of repression favoured also in the following Nightlessons chapter in which a Swiftian satire on the organization of the book as an instrument of knowledge dwindles into a series of subject headings and mock essay titles under the governance of the figure that appears in the right-hand margin. The battle between anarchy and official sense is engaged in chapter III in the tale of Kersse the Tailor and the Norwegian Captain and in the Mutt and Jeff episode that recounts how Buckley shot the Russian general. These episodes are among the most difficult in the Wake, although it is clear that they are both designed to show the relationship, in the male world, between shame and violence. HCE, in his pub in Chapelizod, is the teller of the first tale but is forced to lower his voice and deepen his narrative to keep it out of range of the gossips. The point is that the parable, which concerns his marriage to ALP, should stay beyond the interpretive as well as the hearing range of the gossipy customers who are, at their nether end of the bar, very like readers of the text in their grasping bits and pieces and losing the general gist. In effect, HCE, who is dreaming in a drunken stupor, and who is in a sense hiding his story, not from the Guinnesses, but from himself with the aid of porter, staggers his narrative way, he is both a tribal and triple stammerer, tribalbalbutience between sea and land, sailor and tailor, Ireland and the Vikings, young love and marital misery, in an attempt to make language speak the truth of experience. He fails because of his triple and male-tribal roles of Ship husband and wife´s hopesend. He is thrice-married, to a ship, a shop and a woman, the Tailor´s daughter, and all three marriages have failed. All three are associated with violence, the freedom of the sea and the imprisonment of the shop are both matched and countered by the condition his marriage offers, a compromise between the two which for him is neither rather than, from the feminine view, both. In the Butt and Taff episode, the shooking of the Russian general by Buckley is another bar-room tale that is itself framed within the Butt-Taff dialogue which in turn is part of the Shem Shaun dispute. The Crimean War of !853-6, fought between Russia and the allied forces of France and England, is this episode´s analogue for the wars of Brian Boru and the Norse invaders, evident in the Tailor and Sailor episode, but now more painstakingly detailed. As the wars and invasions fit one into the other, so too do the emblematic moments in the stories. The russian general is shot with his trousers down. By a characteristic series of name-shadings.

Part III is really the book of Shaun. Shaun is full so standardized wisdom, a petrifying confidence that, nevertheless, begins to waver when he reveals that he has the dread letter and that Shem is not really the author. There is no author, just an amalgam of others. Whereas Shaun has true authority. This is the authority of fear and threat, the word-production that is automated and automatic, the noise that cannot bear silence spickspookspokesman of our specturesque silentousness. Shaun is so anxious to establish authority that he betrays its absence. In the long passage with Issy in chapter II, he reveals the libidinal longing that are hidden behind his otherwise ruthless and banal worldly advice, even if the various Polonius-like declarations contradict themselves at various points. In Shaun, the language of law and command breaks down, theocracy is secularized. Finally, in the account of the Earwickers making love in bed, Shaun surveys his return to his own origin and, in observing that origin, comes face to face with all that law had served to repress. It is after this recognition that Shaun can begin to sleep and in his sleep to reunite with Shem, the twin from whom he had been separated by the original sin that he has now witnessed. As the twins fade into one another and into their origins, so the father and mother come awake and begin to reformulate all that has gone and all that is to come.

Just before his reincarnation in Part IV, HCE defends himself against the charges that have been laid against him. ALP also defends him. The sin or crime does not belong to this solid citizen, Bigmeester Finnegan or Mr Porter. He is, in these incarnations, very much a man of the daylight and of the city, along with his wife, he enjoys respectability and social status. As the book begins its inevitable repetition of itself, we see liberation and repression begin their endless as husband and wife begin to stir into life again, absolving themselves of the guilt they had passed to their children and that had been passed on to them. Although there is no ultimate resolution possible, there is a new force in the rewritings of the old Shem-Shaun battle, in the to-and-fro between the polyglot and the monoglot, between the female and the male. The colloquy between St. Patrick and Balkelly, the Irish philosopher and the Irish soldier Buckley who shot the Russian general is one of the most famous passages and was one of the earliest in the composition of the Wake. It is a return of a well-known account of the battle between St. Patrick and the Druids in his mission to convert Ireland to Christianity. In Joycean terms, it is a battle between the pluralistic and the univocal or in the metaphor chosen for this passage, between a theory of colours and a theory of whiteness. The prismatic richness of the pagan civilization is not simple cancelled by the nude light of its Christian successor. Each is contained within the other as is Shem in Shaun and both in HCE and ALP. So, rather turgidley but emphatically, the scene is set for the reappearance of Anna Livia Plurabelle, now the sacred river ALP, the mother of us all, the voice that understands the speech of heterogeneity, anarchy and the speech of rationality, difference and discipline. The final ten pages of the work are not only among the most radical. ALP speaks the alphabet, she is an originator of language, she seeks origin and the closer she comes to it the more intensely direct the language becomes. This is writing that is attempting to declare itself free from repression and oppression. It is not astonishingly unconventional in its form, it is not opaque and impossible. The woman-river wants to die so that she may be reborn.She hungers for the process of death and renewal that, in so many elaborate and bewildering ways, characterize the movements of history, languag3e, consciouscess. She dies into a beginning, cadenced out on the uniflected word the silence of this ending is never complete, but it is almost so, but then, there is the other, sadder ending.