BOOKS: Night Thoughts

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There is no plot in the novel, no story in the usual sense of the word. What happens to Earwicker or what has happened to him—whether, indeed, he is as central a figure as he appears to be—is open to question: readers can construct a dozen theories to explain the form of the book, and find plausible evidence for each. Thus, it sometimes seems that sane speeches are not part of the dream, but voices from the waking world which dimly reach the sleeper. Sometimes it seems that he is hearing confused sounds of some turbulent life going on around him, which he dimly apprehends but in which he takes no part —as Finnigan might semiconsciously register the fighting and weeping over his bier. And there is a suggestion that as the dream ends, life itself ends, in the utter and profound sleep of death.

But however they interpret it, readers are not likely to miss the development in the rhythm and mood of the writing: the bobbing facetious note in the first passages; the clogged, heavy, stupefied quality that marks the middle section; the mood, half-exultation, half-sadness, on which it ends: "A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights?"

Method. Joyce's idea in Finnegans Wake is not new. More than a hundred years ago, when Nathaniel Hawthorne was living in Salem, he jotted in his notebook an idea for a story: "To write a dream which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its strange transformations . . . with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no such thing has ever been written."

But Joyce's method is new. Dreams exist as sensation or impression, not as speech. Words are spoken in dreams, but they are usually not the words of waking life, may be capable of multiple meanings, or may even be understood in several different senses by the same dreamer at the same moment. Since dreams take place in a state of suspended consciousness, out of which language itself arises, Joyce creates, in Finnegans Wake, a dream language to communicate the dream itself.

Compounded of puns, disjointed syllables, half-words, it is closest to English, but Erse, Latin, Greek, Dutch, French, Sanskrit, even Esperanto appear, usually distorted to suggest both an alien and an English notion. The ablest punster in seven languages, Joyce sometimes combines puns and snatches of songs. Example: "ginabawdy meadabawdy!" (from a passage dealing with Earwicker's dream of a night out). Using a favorite device, he suggests that Anna Livia is the River Liffey by slyly punning on the names of other rivers: "he gave her the tigris eye," "rubbing the mouldaw stains," "And the dneepers of wet and the gangres of sin in it"—for the Tigris, Moldau, Dnieper and Ganges.*

Readers who like plain-spoken words may grow impatient, but lovers of words for themselves will find in Finnegans Wake some lyric passages to make them sit up: