wake

FINNEGANS WAKE
Far more elaborately planned and embellished even than Ulysses, Finnegans Wake on one level concerns the family of a pubkeeper in Chapelizod, a Dublin suburb, named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, his wife, two sons, and daughter. But character, time, and place seldom remain fixed for more than a sentence in this work; the ultimate male character appears in a wide variety of guises signalled by the initials "HCE", such as "Haveth Childers Everywhere" or "Here Comes Everybody", and in a great number of less easily identifiable ones as well, such as Adam, Humpty Dumpty, Parnell or King Mark of the "Tristan and Isolde" legend. This figure merges into that of Tim Finnegan, hero of an Irish comic song about a man who arises at his own wake to share the drink, and with the mythic Irish hero Finn, who is also a mountain. The main female figure, usually called Anna Livia Plurabelle, or ALP, is most frequently identified with rivers, although she too has a variety of mythic and historical guises. The two embattled sons, Shem and Shaun, represent respectively the "artistic" personality--withdrawn, exiled, obsessed with sex and with excrement, a universal scapegoat--and the successful public personality--alternately postman, policeman, politician, and empire-builder. The daughter, Issy, merges into virtually any young woman, or splinters into groups of them. But even this vague summary is far too explicitly literal: Joyce indicated his "characters" by "sigla", geometric symbols that seem to represent functions rather than anything we would ordinarily call "characters." In its own strange fashion the book reprises the history of Ireland, the author's life, and a selection of major myths from European culture. But more than any narrative line, the Wake's structure depends upon a conception by the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, the idea that history progresses in a three-part cycle followed by a "ricorso" that returns us to an initial stage, passing through theocratic, aristocratic, democratic, and chaotic phases. The book's three major chapters, followed by a briefer one, mirrors this structure.

As with Ulysses, Joyce tried to orchestrate the reception of the Wake. He encouraged twelve of his friends, including Stuart Gilbert and Samuel Beckett, who had informally apprenticed himself to Joyce, to produce a volume treating the book. This was published as Our Exagmination round His Factification for Incamination of "Work in Progress" in 1929. But events conspired against him. By the time the book was finally published, in 1939, the world was on the brink of war. Joyce's own health and eyesight were failing during his last decade. Most painfully, his children, whom he had grown to cherish passionately, were in trouble. By 1929 it was becoming clear that his daughter Lucia, a bright and talented girl, was mentally unstable. Joyce fought the realization as long as possible, arranging projects in which she could express her artistic impulses and encouraging her in everything, but by 1932, when she had conceived a hopeless passion for Samuel Beckett, even he had to seek treatment for her, and finally institutionalization. In 1931 for various reasons, including the wish to make a gesture of reconciliation with his father, who was dying, Joyce took Nora to a London registry office to legalize their marriage. Joyce's son Giorgio was unable to undertake a successful career, and his marriage was troubled; in 1939 his wife had a breakdown and the two were separated. Perhaps the brightest spot in this period was the birth of Joyce's grandson Stephen James Joyce in 1932, less than two months after Joyce's father's death. Perhaps Joyce's most moving poem, "Ecce Puer" ("Behold the Child"), commemorates these two events with stunning simplicity.

In 1940 the Joyces were forced to leave Paris for Vichy, where they stayed with a family friend while Joyce carried on protracted negotiations to be allowed to enter Switzerland. Meanwhile, he was assisting a number of Jewish friends to escape to neutral territory. He left only a few scattered comments about his ideas for his next book: that it would be a book of reawakening (after the dream-world of the Wake) and that it would be short and simple. In December 1940 the Joyces entered Switzerland, and soon returned to Zurich. Less than a month later, Joyce was taken to the hospital with severe stomach cramps and was diagnosed as suffering a perforated duodenal ulcer. Although an operation was apparently successful, he soon weakened, passed into a coma, and died on January 13, just before his fifty-ninth birthday. He was buried in the Fluntern cemetery above Zurich. Nora, out of respect for her husband's lifelong rebellion, refused the offer of Catholic rites.