BOOKS: Night Thoughts

• Share

(2 of 6)

On this old song Joyce has played a characteristic trick. Besides reminding readers that they are in for an Irish evening, his title might be taken as a simple declarative sentence meaning that Finnegans wake up. Hence the implication: ordinary people (such as his hero) do not; the nightmare existence of Everyman ends merely in a deeper sleep.

Story. As readers hack their way through the thorny pages of Finnegans Wake, they become aware of certain figures and phrases that recur frequently—H. C. Earwicker, Anna Livia, Maggie, Guinness, Phoenix Park, the River Liffey that curves through Dublin. Tracing these characters and places as they bob in and out of apparently unrelated words and sentences, Critic Edmund Wilson has worked out the most intelligible interpretation of the book, supported by Joyce's own statement that, as Ulysses is a Dublin day, Finnegans Wake is a Dublin night. The long confused passages in which people change shape, the speeches that sound matter-of-fact but turn out to be gibberish, the flights, pursuits, embarrassing situations which are oddly taken for granted—all these are not mere plays on words or literary jokes; they are dreams.

Central figure appears to be a middle-aged Dubliner of Norwegian descent named H. C. Earwicker, once a postman, a shopkeeper, hotelkeeper, an employe of Guinness' Brewery. He is married to a woman named Maggie, and father of several children, but involved in some way with a girl named Anna. Earwicker has been mixed up in some drunken misdemeanor, his dreams are filled with fears of being caught by the police. He dreams that he is coming out of a pub with his pals; a crowd gathers; one of the revelers sings a song, but it turns into a recital of Earwicker's sins and folly. He dreams that he is called upon to explain the fable of "the Mookse and the Gripes"; as he begins, the Mookse comes swaggering up and attacks the Gripes, and suddenly Earwicker himself is going over one of his encounters with the police.

He changes shape in his dream: sometimes he is H. C. Earwicker, but sometimes he is Here Comes Everybody, or Haveth Childers Everywhere. Sometimes he is an old man, worried, half-sick, mixed up in vulgar and unpleasant affairs, sometimes his dreams spring back to his youth when he was, in Critic Wilson's words, "carefree, attractive, well-liked ... as dawn approaches, as he becomes dimly aware of the first light, the dream begins to brighten and to rise unencumbered."

Earwicker's dreams, like most people's, are troubled by hints of depravity, but they remain hints. Even suggestive words are disguised. Is the book dirty? Censors will probably never be able to tell. Melting and merging in Earwicker's dream-state, like smoke in a fog, readers sense Anna, the girl with whom he is in love: Anna on the riverbank, Anna Livia, Anna Livia Plurabelle. Through the menacing or ridiculous distortions of his dreams, the thought of Anna Livia breaks with singular lyric beauty.