James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and the War to Come

James A. W. Heffernan

About 25 years before W.H. Auden lit an "affirming flame" at the end of "September 1, 1939," his dark meditation on the prospect of fighting yet another war, James Joyce conceived a still more potent metaphor for history itself.¹ In Chapter 2 of Ulysses, which Joyce began writing just as World War I broke out in 1914, Stephen Dedalus--a fictional version of Joyce's younger self--gets a would-be history lesson from the headmaster of the school where he has been teaching. His nonce tutor is a thoroughly benighted reactionary named Deasy. Reviewing for Stephen the history of Ireland, Deasy not only ignores England's brutal oppression of its neighbor and muddles some major facts about the union of the two (which lasted to 1922, when Ulysses was published); he also makes a vacuously pious pronouncement. "All human history," says Deasy, "moves toward one great goal, the manifestation of God" (U 2. 380-81). Stephen's opinion could hardly be more different. "History," he says, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" (U 2. 377).

Since Joyce wrote Ulysses during the nightmare of World War I, it seems more than fitting that the title of his next novel, which was published just four months before the outbreak of World War II, should echo Stephen's yearning to awake. By 1939, seventeen years after the publication of Ulysses, Finnegans Wake had long been eagerly awaited by readers fed on its appetizers. Starting in 1924, two Parisian literary journals began to serialize fragments from what was then called simply Joyce's "Work in Progress," and in 1929, a group of admirers including Samuel Beckett and William Carlos Williams collaborated on what they called their "exagmination" of the Wake in a book of essays whose willfully clunky title links just three of the thousands of neologisms that Joyce coined for his book.² When officially published on May 4, 1939, the book drew mostly bafflement and outrage from its reviewers, but as the last of Joyce's seven books (he died in Zurich two years later), it is now recognized as a staggeringly original achievement.

It is also one of the most difficult books ever written: a novel seemingly designed, as an early reviewer noted, to fill the mind with "panic"(Troy 97).³ Yet if it rouses panic, it sometimes makes the intercourse of words beget meanings we can readily construe. On the very first page, its recondite allusions and uniquely Joycean coinages include "prumptly," which pinpoints just how Finnegan, like Humpty Dumpty, promptly fell on his rump.⁴ Elsewhere on the first page, however, we need French to see how a bilingual pun such as "passencore" turns the French phrase "pas encore" ("not yet") into a "passenger" who has not yet arrived. Besides such verbal knots, the plot of this novel is far more labyrinthine than that of Ulysses, which is daunting enough on its own but almost laughably legible when set beside Finnegans Wake. Ulysses narrates a day in the life of a middle-class Dubliner named Leopold Bloom. Since Ulysses uses words that are on the whole recognizably English, and since it makes the events of Bloom's day recall and re-enact the episodes of Homer's Odyssey, we can more or less follow the steps of Bloom's setting out, wandering, and homecoming even though the novel itself often wanders into the minds of other characters and even though Bloom is sometimes identified with Shakespeare as well as with the hero of Homer's epic. But Finnegans Wake wanders much farther. Via the dreams of a pubowner named Porter, it roams through all of history as Porter's alter-ego, HCE, is by turns identified with a host of characters such as Noah, the medieval Irish King Roderick O'Connor, the English Duke of Wellington, the ill-fated Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell, and Tim Finnegan, the hod carrier whose fall from a ladder "prumptly" killed him and thus led to his wake. But in the New York Irish ballad from which this story comes, Finnegan's corpse is revived by a splash of whiskey that strikes him in the midst of a brawl among the mourners at the wake: a "funferall" (13.15) boisterously enlivened by "shoutmost shoviality" (6.19). Hence the "wake" of "Finnegans wake" becomes a verb in the title of the book, which either states that two or more Finnegans are waking up or perhaps exhorts them to do so: Finnegans, wake!

The title itself, then, exemplifies not only Joyce's irrepressibly playful manipulation of language but also his equally irrepressible faith in the resiliency of the human race, its capacity to outlive all disasters right up to death. Implicitly, his final book confronts the war to come not by bemoaning the prospect that it will re-enact the horrors of the first Great War, as Auden did ("We must suffer them all again"), but by celebrating the power of life to survive them. Ulysses is among many other things a manifesto of pacificism, a novel whose protagonist adumbrates the fiercely antiwar arguments made in 1939 by New York intellectuals such as Philip Rahv and Dwight McDonald.⁵ Though hardly an intellectual, much less a New Yorker, Bloom forecasts their tirades in just fifteen words. In what is arguably his finest hour, he defies the anti-Semitic belligerence of a drunken Irish nationalist by denouncing all war. "Force, hatred, history, all that." Bloom says. "That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred."⁶

It took four years for Europe to learn this simple lesson. But in November 1918, the massive slaughter of the first Great War gave way to peace and the re-awakening of life. And in 1922, the year Ulysses first appeared, the birth of the Irish Free State fulfilled the prophecy made by Yeats in 1916, when--in "Easter Rising"--he construed the execution of Ireland's Republican leaders as merely the prelude to new life: "a terrible beauty is born" as Ireland awakens to freedom. In Joyce's own time, therefore, the current history of Ireland and Europe furnished two striking demonstrations that world history is cyclic.

In Finnegans Wake, the cycles of advancement, degeneration, and revival that shape the history of the world are recycled in the dream of a middle-aged father of three named Mr. Porter (aka HCE, Humphrey Chimpden Warwicker), who owns a pub in the Dublin suburb of Chapelizod. Porter's dream, which stretches from Saturday night into Sunday morning, springs in part from his desire for his daughter Isobel. Feeling guilty of incest, a word he dare not speak, he casts himself in the dream as Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE), a name combining--as Anthony Burgess notes--"the hump of sexual guilt he carries on his back (he is a different porter now), a hint of the ape, and more than a hint of the insect." Since his name also recalls that of Humpty Dumpty, he is clearly a man predestined to re-live the primordial story of the fall of humankind, which the very first line of the novel evokes by telling us that Dublin's River Liffey runs past a church called "Eve and Adam's." Yet while the river dies by emptying itself into the sea, the fall of rain drawn from the evaporation of the sea replenishes the river and thus renews it. Likewise, the very name Finnegan prefigures the cyclic pattern by which fallen man rises again. The story of HCE exemplifies this pattern. Accused of exposing himself to a pair of nursemaids in Dublin's Phoenix Park, he is defended by his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle, who writes a letter on his behalf with the help of her son Shem the Penman. Though the letter was meant to be delivered by Shem's twin brother, Shaun the Postman, it goes astray until it is excavated or resurrected from an "orangeflavoured mudmound" (111.34) and finally revealed near the end of the book, where the river itself speaks through the mouth of the woman named for it (Livia for Liffey). At the very end of the novel, she first buries her husband with terms of withering deprecation and then calls him back to life. Addressing HCE with startling lucidity, she says, "I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You're only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You're only a puny" (617. 20-23). Yet in the last lines of the book, she regenerates him. She envisions him flying with the "whitespread wings" of the dove from the Book of Genesis: the dove whose return to Noah with an olive branch announced the end of the flood, and who also--ever since the 11^th century--would come to symbolize the Holy Spirit in paintings of the Annunciation, when the Virgin Mary learned that she would be the mother of Christ (Luke 1:26-38). If Anna Livia Plurabelle saw her husband flying like such a dove, she says, "I sink I'd die down over his feet, humbly-dumbly, only to washup" (628.10-11). In other words she says or implies: I think I'd sink, and die / lie down humbly and dumbly (silently) over the feet of this fallen Humpty Dumpty only to wash his feet as Mary Magdalen washed the feet of Christ (Luke 7:38). But "washup" also suggests "wake up": rise again after dying. "Finn, again!" she says three lines later, just before rolling away in a sentence that abruptly breaks off but also runs back to the opening words of the book, thereby recycling the river itself: "A way a lone a last a loved a long the // [first words of novel] riverrun, past Eve and Adam's . . ."

In the eyes of Joyce, then, the rise of Hitler and his would-be thousand-year Reich could not check the cyclic force that would one day throw him down. I do not mean that Finnegans Wake makes a specific prophecy, as Yeats does in "Easter 1916." But Joyce's last great novel sprang from the mind of a writer who could look upon Hitler with comic detachment rather than either admiration or anguish. By the late 1930s, Richard Ellmann tells us, Joyce "had surveyed the rise of German nationalism without sympathy: the world of discipline, anti-Semitism, and national frenzy was not his."⁷ The tone with which Joyce appraised them all is exemplified by his comment on the failure of the Nazi coup against the government of Austria in late July 1934. Writing to Harriet Weaver, his patroness, on July 28, 1934, he not only jokes about the coup but also makes fun of Wyndham Lewis, whose admiring book about Hitler was published in 1931, and Ezra Pound, who (unlike Lewis) remained both pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic until the last years of his life. Apropos the failed Nazi coup, Joyce mockingly writes, "I am afraid poor Mr. Hitler-Missler will soon have few admirers in Europe apart from your nieces and my nephews, Masters W. Lewis and E. Pound" (qtd. Ellmann 675).

By January of 1939, Hitler's gains had made him harder to mock. But in Finnegans Wake, Joyce not only refers to Charlie Chaplin as "Chorney Choplain" (351: 13) but also anticipates the mockery with which Chaplin would portray the Führer in The Great Dictator (1940). Though Joyce mentions Hitler nowhere properly, he name-twistingly alludes to him twice: as the builder of the German Autobahn--"them new hikler's highways" (410: 8)--and as the manic voice of the Third Reich endlessly asserting the oneness of its domain and people ("Ein Reich! Ein Volk!) and endlessly demanding to be hailed as its one and only ruler ("Ein Fuhrer!"). In Joyce's novel, Hitler becomes the would-be"helper" who cannibalistically devours everything and everyone: "heal helper! One gob, one gap, one gulp and gorger of all!" (191: 7-8).

From the Olympian viewpoint of Joyce, the rise and fall of empires--including Hitler's would-be "thousand year" Reich--was no more world-shattering than the rise and fall of a hod carrier named Finnegan. Hence the voracious dictator who had already devoured Austria and much of Czechoslovakia by the end of 1938 and who now threatened to consume the rest of Europe makes only a fleeting appearance in Finnegans Wake. In the cycles of history, Joyce implies, this great gulper will himself be eventually gulped.

But on the eve of World War II, Joyce also anticipated that it could end with a blast of nuclear annihilation. Three months after Finnegans Wake was published, in fact, the expatriate Alfred Einstein (then living on Long Island) set in motion the project that eventually begot the atomic bomb. In a letter to President Roosevelt on August 2, 1939, Einstein wrote that it "may be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium" and thereby lead the way to the building of "extremely powerful bombs."⁸

Joyce could hardly have seen this letter at any time, much less when he was writing Finnegans Wake. But in November 1922, shortly before Joyce began writing his novel, Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics, and his theories were frequently described in popular newspapers such as the Irish Times, which Joyce read regularly.⁹ Given not only Einstein's celebrity but Joyce's fascination with all things modern including relativity, atomic structure, and quantum theory, it is safe to assume that Joyce picked up some knowledge of Einstein's work while writing his novel, especially since the name of the famous physicist appears twice in a notebook for the Wake (number VI.B.1) that he used between February and April 1924 (Sypek 64). In the novel itself he nowhere mentions Einstein, but the following passage from the Wake clearly reflects his familiarity with the explosive potential of what he called "adomic structure" (615. 7). Up to date in all ways, Joyce imagines the tale of "How Buckley Shot the Russian General" interrupted by a television broadcast (something brand new in 1939) of an extraordinary explosion:

The abnihilisation of the etym by the grisning of the grosning
of the grinder of the grunder of the first lord of Hurtreford ex-
polodotonates through Parsuralia with an ivanmorinthorrorumble
fragoromboassity amidwhiches general uttermosts confussion are
perceivable moletons skaping with mulicules . . .(353. 22-26)

Does this seem pure jibberish? Let me first skim its surface with a very rough translation:

The annihilation of the atom by the thunder of the first lord of Hurtreford explodes / detonates through Parsuralia with an Ivan the Terrible rumble, crash, and uproar, amidst which general uttermost confusion are perceivable molecules escaping with molecules.

This lame paraphrase, of course, clarifies the "uttermost confussion" of the passage only by ditching nearly all of its complexity and polyglot richness. The very word "confussion" is a characteristically Joycean conflation of "fusion" and "fission," the two ways of exploding the atom. Since molecules are composed of atoms, atoms might be considered skeletons of matter ("moletons") escaping in an atomic explosion: "moletons skaping with mulicules," something theoretically "perceivable" on a television screen (though obviously one far advanced). The crash and uproar emanate from a single word--a resounding conflation of the Anglicized Latin word fragor (crash) and the Italian word rombazzo (uproar), giving us "fragoromboassity."

Just before that comes an adjective (of sorts) that fuses still more words: "ivanmorinthorrorumble." Having just above read the words grisning and grosning, which evoke the Russian words groza (thunderstorm) and groznyi (terrible), we are primed--or would be if we knew Russian!--to read this word as a more-in-the-horror or more horribly rumbling version of Ivan the Terrible, the sixteenth-century Grand Prince of Moscow and then Czar of all Russia, fearful precursor to both Stalin and Hitler.

But what or who is "Parsuralia," which comes just before "ivan"? Here we must follow a trail blazed by generations of intrepid Joyceans.
"Parsuralia" resembles the title of an epic poem by the Roman poet Lucan, who thus narrated the civil war between Pompey and Julius Caesar in the mid first-century BCE. Since the decisive battle of that war took place near the northern Greek town of Pharsalus, the poem is called Pharsalia, and its theme nicely fits the above passage. Having repeatedly surveyed past cycles of war and peace rather than wringing his hands over the one to come, Joyce aptly links a futuristic explosion with an ancient war. But he does not stop there. By turning Lucan's Pharsalia into "Parsuralia," he also suggests Persse O'Reilly, an Irish name that Joyce has previously concocted from the French word "perce-oreille." Since that word means "earwig" in English, we are thus led back to the humble protagonist of this novel, whose surname is Earwicker. He too is caught up in this stupendous explosion. Just as war once raged across the ancient battlefield of Pharsaly, this new weapon blows up "through" Earwicker, the man who dreams his way through world history in a single night.

What then is Hurtreford? Here we need a touch of Gaelic. The city of Dublin stands on the River Liffey near a place originally called (in Gaelic or Irish) Baile Átha Cliath, which means "town on the hurdled ford": a place where the river was shallow enough to be forded or perhaps even hurdled, crossed on foot or leapt over. In any case, Hurdle Ford (Baile Átha Cliath) has come to mean Dublin itself. During the whole of the 1930s, when most of the Wake was being written, the Lord Mayor of Dublin/ Hurdle Ford--its "first lord"-- was a man named Alfie Byrne, who had nothing to do with atoms. But notice that Hurdle Ford has become Hurtreford. If you re-arrange the first six letters of that name, it comes out "Rutherford." And it just so happens that Lord Rutherford (a New Zealander who spent most of his life working in England) not only discovered what is now called the nucleus of the atom but also oversaw the first fully controlled splitting of the nucleus in 1932. Given the reference to "Parsuralia," he might even be said to have "parsed" uranium by resolving it into its component parts.¹⁰ Thus his name and work fit perfectly into this passage.

His work is here described by a series of four alliterative words: "of the grisning of the grosning of the grinder of the grunder." As already noted, the first two are Joycean twists on the Russian words groza (thunderstorm) and groznyi (terrible), with perhaps a hint of the English words grisly and groaning. "Grinder" is a simple (or simplistic) English word for an atom-splitter, and "grunder," more precisely "gründer"--is the German word for "founder." As founder or one of the founders of atomic theory in the early twentieth century, Rutherford ground or split the atom with--potentially at least--something like the terrible crack of a thunderstorm.

We come at last to the opening three words of this passage--the richest of all its phrases. At first glance or first hearing, "abnihilisation of the etym" suggests "annihilation of the atom," as already noted. But the last word of the phrase is actually etym, which means the original basis or root meaning of a word: etymology is the study of such roots and how they combine with other verbal roots to form the words we use. For this reason, etyms might be considered the atoms of language, the indivisible particles that make up its words. The word atom itself combines two Greek roots: a, meaning "not," and tomos, meaning a "cut," or "slice." For some two thousand years, the atom was so called because it was thought to be uncuttable, indivisible. But just as Rutherford split the atom in 1932, Joyce specializes in splitting etyms, the roots of words.

He was not the first to do so. In a nonsense poem called "Jabberwocky," which first appeared in Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Lewis Carroll made new coinages--what he called "portmanteau words"-- by combining parts of existing words, so that from "lithe" and "slimy" he made "slithy." But while Lewis's coinages are at best vaguely suggestive, Joyce's crack open brand new meanings. The word funeral derives from the Latin verb funero, which means "to bury with solemn rites." In fusing funeral with fun for all to create funferal, Joyce explodes the solemnity of the first word and reveals the paradox embedded in rites of mourning. In Ireland at least, or among the Irish anywhere, wakes can sometimes turn into boisterous displays of "shoutmost shoviality,"

In the word abnihilisation, the paradox of meaning exemplified by funferal rises to the level of self-contradiction. Annihilation is a word made of two Latin etyms: ad, meaning "to," and nihil, meaning "nothing." To annihilate, then, means "reduce to nothing." But in changing ad to ab, Joyce radically changes the meaning of the whole word. The root ab means "from" or "out of," as in creation "ab ovo"--from the egg. So ab nihil means something like ex nihilo, creation from nothing: the very opposite of ad nihil or annihilation.

In splitting ad and fusing it with ab, Joyce does something like what Rutherford did to the atom. Instead of annihilating the atom by splitting it, he releases its hidden energy. Still more energy springs from the conversion of "ation" to "isation" at the end of the word. Since the suffix "ise" or "ize" (American spelling) normally means "make," as in actualize (make actual) or sterilize (make sterile), abnihilisation means "making [something] out of nothing." By means of linguistic fission and fusion, splitting old roots and turning them into new wholes, Joyce thus shows how creative--as well as explosive--his transformation of language can be. Summing up his own analysis of Joyce's phrase, Sean Golden writes:

So the abnihilisation of the etym is also the creation: the creation of the Word from nothing, the creation of the atom from nothing. God created by means of the Word, Joyce creates the word. Since etym/ atom also suggests Adam, we have the creation of Adam as well, whom God created from mud and clay, breathing life into him, inspiring him with wind or spirit--the substance of Word. And etym / atom / Adam also suggests Atem, the Egyptian god of creation, who also created by means of the word, creating himself first by pronouncing his own name.¹¹

Are you still with me? If you haven't yet dozed off or flung this article aside, you may still be wondering why anyone would take the trouble to read such a passage, let alone unwind its myriad coils of meaning or try to figure out its relevance to the coming war.

My answer to this question comes in two parts. First, as I have already noted, Joyce's description of an atomic explosion--something readily obvious to any reader--uncannily anticipates the ending of World War II, when the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 killed an estimated 225,000 people and thus forced the Japanese to surrender. Second, and more important, Joyce's radical disruption of the English language throughout Finnegans Wake is his distinctive way of waging war against the univocal concept of language exemplified by Hitler's use of it. In stridently proclaiming, again and again, that Germany has only "Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Fuhrer!," Hitler presupposed that words themselves have only one meaning: the meaning he gives them. There can be no dissent among his people, no resistance or Widerstand to his rule, no other word but the Word of the Führer. Joyce repudiates this word. In relentlessly splitting and fusing the atoms of language, he undermines Hitler's univocism and asserts the irrepressibly creative power of the human spirit. Against the threat of war and annihilation, Joyce proclaims--in his own inimitable way--the power to re-create language, to ridicule dictatorship, and to rise again--like Finnegan.