Finnegan's Wake: Music-Hall James Joyce Whiskey Irish ( Iʃkʲə Bʲahə) Apostrophe

The document discusses the novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. It provides background on the Irish ballad "Finnegan's Wake" that inspired Joyce's novel. While many scholars have attempted summaries of the complex, nonlinear plot of Finnegans Wake, there is no definitive synopsis due to the book's unique dream-like narrative style and constantly shifting details. Some key elements like the main character HCE's crime and a woman's letter are discussed throughout but never resolved. Critics debate whether the book can truly be reduced to a linear storyline.

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Finnegan's Wake: Music-Hall James Joyce Whiskey Irish ( Iʃkʲə Bʲahə) Apostrophe

Uploaded by

Елена Петровска

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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

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Finnegan's Wake

"Finnegan's Wake" is a ballad that arose in the 1850s in the music-hall tradition of comical Irish songs. It is famous for being the basis of James Joyce's masterwork, Finnegans Wake, in which the comic resurrection of Tim Finnegan is symbolic of the universal cycle of life. Whiskey, which causes both Finnegan's fall and his resurrection, is derived from Irish uisce beatha (IPA: [ik bah]), meaning "water of life." So too, the word "wake" represents both a passing and a rising. Joyce removed the apostrophe in the title of his novel to suggest an active process in which a multiplicity of "Finnegans," that is, all members of humanity, fall and then wake and arise. Finnegan's Wake is featured as the climax of the primary storyline in Philip Jos Farmer's award-winning novella, Riders of the Purple Wage. The song is also a staple of the Irish folk-music group, The Dubliners, who have played it on many occasions and included it on several albums, and is especially well-known to fans of The Clancy Brothers, who performed and recorded it with Tommy Makem.

Plot summary
The challenge of compiling a definitive synopsis of Finnegans Wake lies not only in the opacity of the book's language, but also in the radically unique approach to plot which Joyce employed. The book follows a discontinuous dreamnarrative, with abrupt changes to characters, character names, locations and plot details resulting in an apparent lack of narrative line. Herring has argued that the plot of Finnegans Wake "is unstable in that there is no one plot from beginning to end, but rather many recognizable stories and plot types with familiar and unfamiliar twists, told from varying perspectives." [15] In the words of Patrick A. McCarthy, "throughout much of Finnegans Wake, what appears to be an attempt to tell a story is often diverted, interrupted, or reshaped into something else, for example a commentary on a narrative with conflicting or unverifiable details." [16] According to Henkes and Bindervoet, the book concerns "two big questions" which are never resolved: "what is Earwickers secret sin and what was the letter all about?" [17] In other words, while crucial plot points - such as HCE's crime or ALP's letter - are endlessly discussed, the reader never encounters or experiences them first hand, and as the details are constantly changing, they remain unknown and perhaps unknowable. Many Joyce experts - such as Joseph Campbell, John Gordon, Anthony Burgess and William York Tindall - have summarised Finnegans Wake's plot. While no two summaries are exactly alike, there are many points upon which these commentators agree. However, a number of Joyce scholars question the legitimacy of a linear storyline. David Hayman has suggested that "For all the efforts made by critics to establish a plot for the Wake, it makes little sense to force this prose into a narrative mold."[20] The book's challenges have led some commentators into generalised statements about its content and themes, prompting critic Bernard Benstock to warn against the danger of "boiling down" Finnegans Wake into "insipid pap, and leaving the lazy reader with a predigested mess of generalizations and catchphrases". [21] Fritz Senn, another Joyce scholar, has also voiced concerns with some plot synopses: We have some traditional summaries, also some put in circulation by Joyce himself. I find them most unsatisfactory and unhelpful, they usually leave out the hard parts and recirculate what we already think we know. I simply cannot believe that FW would be as blandly uninteresting as those summaries suggest. [22] Despite Joyce's many revolutionary techniques, the author repeatedly emphasized that the book was neither random nor meaningless. When the editor of Vanity Fair asked Joyce if the sketches in Work in Progress were consecutive and interrelated, Joyce replied "It is all consecutive and interrelated."