PATRICK A. McCARTHY

At the nearest licensed counter [ Mick Shaughnessy] studied the amber charm of a glass of whiskey and made up his mind once again that he must behave himself. Finnegans Wake, though, and all that line of incoherent trash be damned! What was the teaching of the Church on this question of literary depravity? He did not know but perhaps he could find out from one of those little Catholic Truth Society pamphlets, price tuppence.

-- Flann O'Brien, The Dalkey Archive

Commenting briefly but perceptively on James Joyce's habit of shocking the reader of Ulysses by changing the book's style with each new chapter, one critic recently has argued that Joyce's reader "takes on an aspect suspiciously close to that of martyr--or masochist." ¹ If we are thus moved to pity the reader of Ulysses, or perhaps to admire him or her for attempting an heroic journey comparable to those described by Homer and by Joyce, then how much more sympathy and admiration should we feel for the foolhardy readers of Finnegans Wake, who find their efforts at comprehension mocked by the very book they are reading? What is the tone of a passage like "You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest notions what the farest he all means" ( FW 112.3-6): does Joyce here reveal his compassion for the reader's plight, or his derision and contempt, or merely his profound sense of the ironic? Regardless of Joyce's intentions, an address of this kind, combined with the punning language, the obscure narrative situation, and complex problems in characterization, might be enough to convince us that the book is as "usylessly unreadable" as Shem's letter ( FW 179.26-27) had Joyce not also counseled patience, reminded us to be alert for what we can hear as well as what we see, and assured us that the book "is not a miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed: it only looks as like it as damn it" ( FW 118.28-31).

One thing is clear: no book since Tristram Shandy demonstrates its author's concern with tricking, manipulating, and toying with its readers so incessantly as Finnegans Wake. The comparison with Sterne's comic masterpiece was in fact suggested by Joyce himself: telling Eugene Jolas that he was "trying to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose," he added, rather pointedly, "Did you ever read Laurence Sterne?" ² Like Tristram Shandy, Finnegans Wake works on several levels at once, and Joyce challenges his readers to discover the relationship between one level and another; like Sterne, who declares that his "work is digressive, and it is progressive too,-----and at the same time," ³ Joyce eschews "wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot" ( L III, 146). Both writers thus make unusual demands of their readers, and both are aware of the ironies inherent not only in the burdens they place on readers but also in their own roles as mentors or guides through their labyrinthine fictions. As penance for her failure to realize that Tristram's mother was not a papist, Sterne (or, rather, Tristram) sentences his hypothetical female reader to review the previous chapter; while she is gone he addresses himself to the remainder of his audience, defending his action on the grounds that it was necessary "to rebuke a vicious taste which has crept into thousands besides herself,-----of reading straight forwards, more in quest of the adventures, than of the deep erudition and knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would infallibly impart with them." ⁴ Typically, too, Joyce's readers find themselves lectured by someone posing as an omniscient narrator (although the tendency of this lecturer to speak in the bourgeois voice of Shaun renders his authority dubious), and in the process of reading Finnegans Wake, even more than in reading Ulysses, we continually find ourselves searching for other appearances of a character, theme, or verbal motif in order to shed some light on the passage at hand. Reading Finnegans Wake, then, consists partly of locating cross-references and making marginal notes on what we have discovered this time around. For the most part, those people who do not like to write in their books do not bother with the Wake.

C. S. Lewis has observed that "The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is--what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used." ⁵ The debate over what Finnegans Wake really is, and what Joyce intended it to be, is hardly over: Sheldon Brivic even claims-with some justification--that "questions about the Wake seem to be increasing." ⁶ There is little doubt, however, that Finnegans Wake is a fine example (in fact, the ultimate example) of what semioticians have called the open, or plural, text. Such a text is meant to be "generated" by the reader through a sort of cooperative venture with the author; as Umberto Eco puts it, "the 'original' text {is} a flexible type of which many tokens can be legitimately realized." ⁷ The open text, then, gives the impression of being deliberately incomplete, of having "gaps" which elicit a response from the reader who must fill in those gaps by resorting to any of a number of strategies (for example, by bringing a body of knowledge to bear upon the text, by recognizing a relationship of part to part within the text, or by analyzing the text from a carefully narrowed point of view). Finding ourselves "lost in the bush," we regain our bearings just in time to become disoriented again, for every new fact must be assimilated into our total interpretation of the text--an interpretation that is inevitably unstable, that (like our composite view of the universe) derives its sense of order only from a careful selection of those facts that support the hypothesis we have in mind at any time.

Although this disorientation of the reader is more evident in Finnegans Wake than in other works, it is a factor in much of modern literature--in Virginia Woolf's novels, for example, and in the works of such nouveau roman writers as Alain Robbe-Grillet. Iser has noted the same effect in Beckett's fiction:

Beckett's trilogy deprives the reader not temporarily but totally of his usual privileged seat in the grandstand. These characters possess a degree of selfconsciousness which the reader can scarcely, if at all, keep up with. Such texts act as irritants, for they refuse to give the reader any bearings by means of which he might move far enough away to judge them. The text forces him to find his own way around, provoking questions to which he must supply his own answers. ⁸

Nothing could be closer to the situation of the reader in Finnegans Wake, if we substitute the self-consciousness of the book for that of the characters. To a large extent Finnegans Wake is a running commentary on itself--how it came to be written, what its implications are about the nature of time, space, history, dream psychology, etc., and what problems the reader faces in grappling with Joyce's "wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer" ( FW 614.27). The selfconsciousness, or reflexivity, of the book is apparent in every page, but it is perhaps most pervasive and most important in discussions of the mysterious letter whose reappearances continually give us new hope that we will decode its meaning this time around, then frustrate that hope with new complexities or uncertainties.

When Joyce chose the title "Work in Progress" for the serialized segments of Finnegans Wake, he chose carefully, for the title refers not only to the incomplete state of the text in the period between 1923 and 1939, but also, and more importantly, to the "finished" text which constantly gives its readers the feeling that they are looking at something that is incomplete in itself--something that never permits any genuine resolution of the questions it raises but merely poses them in new, more enigmatic ways. ⁹ By concluding his book in the middle of a sentence, Joyce achieved the perfectly circular form he aimed at; but books are not printed in circular patterns, so the reader inevitably comes to the end and discovers that something is missing: an article like "the" makes little sense without a noun to modify, and unless we return to the opening page we are left hanging. The same pattern confronts the examiners of the letter which is supposed to have been written by Shem at the request of ALP, and is dug out of a dungheap by Biddy the Hen: the text of the letter is variously described as blurred, stained, punctured, incomplete, unsigned, indecipherable, untitled, and contradictory, while the envelope was apparently addressed to a nonexistent person and was "Opened by Miss Take" ( FW 420.26). Thus, the failure to deliver the letter provides us with one more image of fragmentation or incompleteness, the unsuccessful odyssey of the letter being a metaphor for the reader's inability ever to reach a point where all the book's mysteries are revealed to him.

Although Joyce claimed to be able to communicate whatever he liked with language, he also recognized that the complexity of life requires that any such idea must be played off against its opposite, the counterpoint serving to indicate the futility of the search for absolute truth in a universe ruled by relativism, randomness, and uncertainty. Thus every time we encounter the letter, it has changed, which is another way of saying that in one sense, the letter is a work constantly in progress. Sometimes the epistle is sympathetic to Earwicker, sometimes it is hostile to him, and on occasion it seems to have nothing at all to do with him. Our first glimpse of the letter ( FW10-11) reveals nothing particularly suspicious, although on later examination we might recognize references to the two girls and three soldiers involved in Earwicker's sin in Phoenix Park ("Our pigeons pair are flewn for northcliffs. The three of crows have flapped it southenly"); most of the letter deals with the mother's role as preserver and restorer, a role reproduced in the act of digging the letter out of the dungheap so that later we can be told that "at this deleteful hour of dungflies dawning" we should be happy to have any letter to read, regardless of its condition ( FW 118.31-34).

That the hen is on some level identified with the mother-wife figure, Anna Livia, becomes particularly evident in the fifth chapter, where Joyce devotes himself to an apparently exhaustive analysis of the letter from every possible angle. Here the hen who scratches the letter up from the midden heap becomes the wife as author of a letter in defense of her erring husband:

Mesdaims, Marmouselles, Mescerfs! Silvapais! All schwants (schwrites) ischt tell the cock's trootabout him. Kapak kapuk. No minzies matter. He had to see life foully the plak and the smut, (schwrites). There were three men in him (schwrites). Dancings (schwrites) was his only ttoo feebles. With apple harlottes. And a little mollvogels. Spissially (schwrites) when they peaches. Honeys wore camelia paints. Yours very truthful. Add dapple inn. ( FW 113.11-18)

Several fundamental reading problems are illustrated by this passage. Many readers will catch echoes of familiar languages, including French (Mesdames, mesdemoiselles, messieurs, s'il vous plaît; honi soit qui mal y pense) and Latin (camilla: "maiden unblemished in birth and character"), ¹⁰ but without a reference guide few readers will catch puns on Albanian kapak kapak (little by little), minzë (pupil of eye), plak (old), smût (sick), molle (apple), or vogel (small). ¹¹ Even a reading that includes all likely foreign language puns, all literary, geographical, and historical references, and everything else that we can imagine annotating, will not necessarily account for the relationship of these elements to one another or for the tone of the passage, so that even "that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia" ( FW 120.13-14) can never claim to have exhausted the possibilities of any given passage.

What appears at first to be the reader's real problem--the difficult language of the Wake, with its arcane references and multilingual puns--is actually more susceptible to remedy than the enduring dilemma of deciding what to do with the facts that we have marshalled. Again and again, the experience of Wake explicators is not that all the facts somehow reinforce one another and fit into a nice, easily summarized pattern, but, rather, that no general scheme accounts for all the elements in the text. This effect is quite intentional, and it is one of the book's real strengths; as Norman Rabkin has observed (writing of Shakespeare's plays), "If one hallmark of an authentic work of art and a central source of its power is its ability to drive us to search out its central mystery, another way may be its ultimate irreducibility to a schema." ¹² Finnegans Wake constantly frustrates the move toward reductive interpretation, yet by throwing together great masses of materials that cannot always be reconciled with one another, Joyce imposes conditions on his reader that make impossible any reading that is not selective and reductive. ¹³ Reading Finnegans Wake thus becomes "a warping process" ( FW 497.3), and those who have been victimized by the book's conflicting demands--that we select in order to systematize, and that we then recognize the inadequacy of our system--may well begin to regard themselves as martyrs.

The problem facing the reader may be defined in another way. As Manfred Pütz has observed, the fictitious reader of the Wake is only vaguely defined, and at times the reader is indistinguishable from the writer. Indeed, it appears that "Somebody (author) has written a letter to his other self (reader), penning it really to himself." ¹⁴ Part of the reason for this tendency of the reader and writer to blend into one another is that they both represent aspects of the dreamer, whose mind censors its own messages in order to prevent the guilty truth from being known. Margot Norris is therefore quite correct in analyzing the reader's situation in Freudian terms: