Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London

eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies 

Issue 1 (2011) 

Falling into Heidegger and Joyce: Finnegans Wake and 

Dasein as Existential Narratives of Guilt 

English Abstract 

MICHAEL GILBERT 

(QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, UK) 

This paper attempts to read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake alongside the philosopher 

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, examining similarities in order to illuminate the 

narratives of each text. To this end, the paper seeks to establish a broadened notion 

of intertextuality between the works of Heidegger and Finnegans Wake. It therefore 

proposes a ‘Wakean hermeneutics of openness’ whereby an interpretive methodology 

is developed in accordance with the Wake’s proposed wish for a contract of 

meaning with its readers. With this hermeneutical strategy it will develop a 

comparative reading of Joyce’s everyperson archetypes, Humphrey Chimpden 

Earwicker (HCE) and Anna Livia Plurabell (ALP), and Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, 

examining their relation to themes of guilt, fallenness, idle talk and gender. The 

article will suggest a similarity between Dasein and HCE, proposing that the above 

themes can be explored as ontological constituents of their structure. It will argue 

that these constituents form non-temporal narratives; in Being and Time as a solemn 

cultural commitment; in Finnegans Wake as comical farce. 

German Abstract 

Dieser Aufsatz stellt James Joyces Finnegans Wake neben Martin Heideggers Sein und 

Zeit und versucht, durch eine vergleichende Lektüre ein neues Licht auf beide Werke zu 

werfen. Zu diesem Zweck soll ein weiter gefasstes Konzept von Intertextualität zwischen den 

Werken Heideggers und Finnegans Wake entworfen werden. Vorgeschlagen wird eine 

‚Wake’sche Hermeneutik der Offenheit’, mit deren Hilfe eine Verstehensweise begründet 

wird, die dem Wunsch in Finnegans Wake nach einem ‚Sinnstiftungsvertrag’ mit den 

Lesern Rechnung trägt. Mit dieser hermeneutischen Strategie wird eine vergleichende Lesart 

von Joyces Jedermann-Archetypen, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE) und Anna Livia 

Plurabell (ALP), sowie Heideggers Vorstellung von Dasein durchgeführt und ihre 

Beziehung zu den Konzepten Schuld, Gefallensein, Gerede und Geschlecht untersucht. 

Dieser Aufsatz vermutet eine Verwandtschaft zwischen Dasein und Humphrey Chimpden 

Earwicker und geht davon aus, dass die genannten Themen als ontologische Bestandteile 

ihrer Struktur wahrgenommen und erforscht werden können. Diese Bestandteile bilden 

zeitlose Erzählungen – die einer feierlichen kulturellen Verpflichtung in Sein und Zeit; die 

einer komischen Farce in Finnegans Wake. 

I. World and Method 

Broadly speaking, Finnegans Wake studies may be divided according to critical 

conceptions of language and meaning. If historical and genetic studies of Joyce offer 

an invaluable tool for explication, we must guard against their tendency towards 

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exclusivity. The Wake’s structure and thematic content also demand interpretation. 

The text itself, at least, perhaps suggests its hermeneutic openness, 

her leaves, my darling dearest, sinsinsinning since the night of time and each and all 

of their branches meeting and shaking twisty hands all over again in their new 

world through the germination of its germination from Ond’s outset to till Odd’s 

end. 1 

The pages (“leaves”) of the Wake reach its readers in a gesture of interpretation, 

“shaking twisty hands all over again in their new world.” Curiously, in a 

dendrological inversion, it is the “branches” of the “leaves“ that meet, suggestive 

perhaps of the Wake’s four books interlocking with each other in their Vichian cycle, 

but the “new world” (my emphasis, M.G.) of this interaction is bound up with a 

“germination” of meaning, belying any notions of textual isolation or cyclic stability. 

The text, that is, is not merely internally referential but comes to have meaning in 

new horizons of interpretation. The world of the text is important — it provided the 

enabling conditions, the historical climate in which its author wrote. Indeed, we learn 

from the expert who advises on the interpretation of ALP’s great letter that, “to 

concentrate solely on the literal sense […] of any document to the sore neglect of the 

enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is […] hurtful to sound sense” (FW 

109). The text itself, however, is encountered in a “new world,” and the “twisty 

hands” of its interpretation elude any claims for perfected, linear meaning. As Hans- 

Georg Gadamer realised, both author and reader exist within tradition, subject to 

particular horizons of understanding and conditioned by particular prejudices. 

Sensitive interpretation occurs through a fusion of horizons [Horizontverschmelzung] 

whereby a reader establishes a dialectic between his own horizon and that of the 

text’s. 

Just as the events of history do not in general manifest any agreement with the 

subjective ideas of the person who stands and acts within history, so the sense of a 

text in general reaches far beyond what its author originally intended. The task of 

understanding is concerned above all with the meaning of the text itself […]. The 

hermeneutical reduction to the author’s meaning is just as inappropriate as the 

reduction of historical events to the intentions of their protagonists. 2 

1 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 505. In the following this source will 

be quoted in the continuous text as FW. 

2 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth & Method, trans. Weinsheimer, Joel & Marshall, Donald (London: 

Continuum, 2006 [1975]), 366 f. 

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Authorial intent lays an important claim but does not exhaust textual meaning. One 

must allow meaning to enjoy the “germination of its germination” in new worldly 

horizons. Thus, Wakean interpretation is not solely archival but rather the archive 

supplements our evolving knowledge of the text as we encounter it in our time. 

Thus, as an evolving work, one must allow Finnegans Wake its prophetic resonance 

where it appears to anticipate an event ahead of its time, or its language recalls a 

modern colloquial expression unknown to its author. One must further allow 

approaches to the text through various theoretical discourses with which Joyce 

would not have been familiar. As Jacques Derrida recognised, Joyce anticipates these 

approaches and mocks them even as they produce their critical yield. 3 The Wake must 

retain this challenging force; criticism is never satisfying where it moves by 

domestication. 

The danger risked, of course, by total hermeneutic openness is that interpretation 

is reduced to complete textual anarchy. Joyce scholars remain particularly sensitive 

to the allegation that Finnegans Wake can mean absolutely anything. Yet this danger is 

avoided with the Wakean hermeneutics outlined above. The work’s pages are 

described as “shaking hands” with a “new world.” A contract of meaning is 

established. It is not at all that in thus reading the Wake ‘anything can mean 

anything’. Rather, it is that the strength of any possible interpretation must be 

ascertained by its receptive context. Literary and critical theories are now able to 

engage with the work if the novel’s text provides a successful thematic or syntactic 

context for their employment. This contextual hermeneutic provides a much needed 

rubric for Terry Eagleton’s humorous observation that “it is always worth testing out 

any literary theory by asking: How would it work with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.” 4 We 

are no longer in a realm where critical norms exert complete interpretive control over 

the text, yet we have avoided the anarchism of textual solipsism. Critical discourses 

3 Jacques Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear say yes in Joyce,” trans. Shari Benstock, in James Joyce: 

The Augmented Ninth, eds. Bernard Benstock (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1988). Jacques 

Derrida, “Two Words For Joyce,” trans. Geoff Bennington, in Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the 

French, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 

4 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 71. 

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with which Joyce was unfamiliar may be legitimately employed, provided they are 

carefully grounded in a sensitive consideration of the text. 

But can such sensitive approaches develop anything like a Wakean subject stable 

enough to sustain thematic exploration? Many critics reject the notion of stable 

narrative meaning in Finnegans Wake, 5 but upon learning of the “fall of a once 

wallstrait oldparr” 6 being “retaled early in bed and later on down through all 

Christian minstrelsy” (FW 3), perhaps we find a narrative of this very instability. 

That is, it is the confusion surrounding the fall of Earwicker that leads to the 

dissolution of narrative stability, and this instability is itself incorporated into the 

very fall narrative it embodies. The underlying ‘story’ of Finnegans Wake; the 

seduction of HCE in the park by the young maids, the observance of this 

transgression by the three soldiers and the attempt by ALP to redeem her husband 

through an explanatory letter (delivered by Shaun; written by Shem) is an atomic 

theme, repeated endlessly in its many iterations. It subverts and lays claim to almost 

all other narratives. Within this destabilising master narrative, certain tropic elements 

— in particular guilt and fallenness — are explored more as ontological constituents 

of character than traditional thematic constructs. That is, as David Hayman observes, 

Joyce seems first to have located his archetypes and then to have discovered himself 

and his world in them. The movement was from the archetype to the contemporary, 

to the personal, from the eternal to the (submerged) present. 7 

Joyce’s everyperson archetypes provide an existential structure in terms of which the 

personal subject is understood. The ontological constituents of these archetypes 

provide a peculiar presubjective, non-temporal narrativity whereby HCE and ALP 

are by turn guilt ridden, subject to idle talk and redeemed in their very being. The 

5 Cf. (e. g.): Bernard Benstock, “Beyond Explication: The Twice Told Tales in Finnegans Wake,” and 

Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Narratology and the Subject of Finnegans Wake,” in James Joyce: The Centennial 

Symposium, eds. Morris Beja, Phillip Herring, Maurice Harmon and David Norris. (Urbana and 

Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986). Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos — The Middle 

Ages Of James Joyce (Tulsa: The University of Tulsa, 1989 [1982]). 

6 ’Wallstrait’, of course, carries the resonance of Wall Street, and the Wall Street crash of 1929, being 

also suggestive of ’straightness’, or honest moral decency. ’Oldparr’ suggests the vernacular ’pa’, or 

father and also references Old Tom Parr (1483–1635), an alleged English supercentenarian accused 

of adultery. 

7 David Hayman, The “Wake” in Transit (New York: Cornell University Press, 1990) 167. 

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subject has here fallen into language, where it evades attempts at theoretical 

classification. As critic Jean-Michel Rabaté notes, 

[w]e generally agree that any theory, while covering a certain field, also designates 

by its elaboration a gap, an empty space which it attempts to bridge, to fill in, to 

recover. In the case of the Wake, however, the real object of narratology may prove to 

be the gap itself. 8 

The structure of the subject is formed around a pre-theoretical lack, or gap. The 

narrative subject of Finnegans Wake is not man as he is revealed by scientific theory or 

literary allegory. Nor is it even, as Donald Theall avers, the machinic processes upon 

which these theories and allegories are predicated; 9 for it is clear that these processes 

— correctly and skillfully identified by Theall — themselves tear apart the fixed 

identify of the subject and are hence a cause of its dissolution. No, the subject of the 

narrative of Finnegans Wake is something very like Martin Heidegger’s notion of 

Dasein; the site upon which anything like a subject can show up. As Alan Roughley 

notes, if we “consider ALP and HCE as simulacra of what Heidegger designates as 

Dasein”, perhaps we will discover that a comparative reading forms a “necessary 

part of our ‘rocky road’ into the Wake”. 10 With a view to adumbrating this similarity I 

will now explore this shared site of narration — the pre-subjective structure of Being 

termed Dasein and the universal character archetype HCE — revealing how it is 

structurally bound-up with narratives of fallenness, guilt and the dangers of idle talk. 

8 Rabaté, “Narratology and the Subject of Finnegans Wake,” (cf. note 6), 137. 

9 Donald Theall, James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics (London: University of Toronto Press, 1997). It falls 

outside the scope of this paper to consider the relationship between what Theall calls Joyce’s 

“techno-poetics” and Heidegger’s notion of Gestell and desire for a reawakening of the question of 

language’s relation to Being. If Heidegger offers us a sanctification of language, against Gestell, 

perhaps Joyce presents a diabolical linguistic equivocation, playfully embracing ‘techno-poetics’. 

10 Alan Roughley, “ALP’s ‘Sein’ und ‘Zeit’: Questions of Finnegans Wake’s Being and Language in a 

Philosophical Context,“ in Finnegans Wake: 50 Years, ed. Begnal & Senn (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 

129. Margot Norris observes that when considering the theme of guilt, “interchangeability in the 

Wake is too easily dismissed as a stylistic flourish!” She suggests that “[i]n examining these issues, 

reference to the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger is particularly helpful, since Heidegger […] 

in his contemporary concern with the relationship of the self to others, addresses himself to the 

ontological aspects of guilt in relation to the dislocated self”. Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe 

of Finnegans Wake (London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976), 74–79. 

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II. Fallenness and Idle Talk 

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger seeks to retrieve what he calls the question of 

the meaning of Being [Sinn von Sein]. This is not a question of formal or definitional 

meaning [Bedeutung] but an enquiry into our everyday (pre-ontological/pre- 

theoretical) background sense of Being, or that which allows us to understand Being 11 

in general. In order to get at this meaning of Being in general, Heidegger declares 

that he must lay bare the existential structure of the questioner. This will allow him 

to interpret hermeneutically the meaning of Being from the meaning of Dasein within 

Being. This second announced task was never completed but the first provides the 

motivating force for Being and Time’s desire to excavate man’s ontic, existentiell (the 

particular public modality in which Dasein understands itself as dwelling — e. g. 

“philosopher”) structure to reveal an ontological, existential (the underlying 

structure upon which interpretive existentiell possibilities are predicated) ground. In 

laying bare these structures, philosophy offers what Heidegger calls in Basic 

Questions the “immediately useless, though sovereign, knowledge of the essence of 

things.” 12 This region of fundamental ontology is more primordial than the realms of 

entities at stake in theoretical ontologies (such as anthropology, theology, 

philosophy, science), affording Heidegger a locus of operation immune to the 

vicissitudes of scientific or theoretical destabilisation. It is in this region that 

Heidegger develops notions of fallenness as constituents of the temporal and 

interpretive structure of Dasein. 

In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce is also concerned with fundamental existential 

ground. Much like Heidegger, Joyce demonstrates his intention to excavate 

traditional notions of the human subject to find an underlying existential or 

ontological structure. 13 In Joyce’s case, this structure is an archetypal narrative of 

man’s fallenness. In the characters of Bygmester Finnegan, Humphrey Chimpden 

Earwicker (HCE) and Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), he presents existential 

11 I capitalise Being as a translation of the German Sein in order to preserve something of the term’s 

gravitas. 

12 Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer 

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 5. 

13 That is, metaphysical approaches in general and most notably the Cartesian cogito. 

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disclosures that share many of the structural features of Dasein. To begin our close 

reading of Finnegans Wake, I will present two long quotations exploring the text’s 

notion of fallenness which will then be analysed in detail. Upon the “fall of a once 

wallstrait oldparr,” we learn of Finn that, 

[t]he humptyhillhead of humself promptly sends an unquiring one well to the west 

in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock in 

the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst 

loved livvy […]. Well, Him being so on the flounder of his bulk like an overgrown 

babeling […] from the foot of the bill to ireglint’s eye he calmy extensolies. (FW 3–6) 

“Humptyhillhead” suggests the head of the fallen HCE (in his primordial incarnation 

as Big Master Finnegan) lies at the hill of Howth Castle (HCE is ‘Howth Castle 

Environs’). West of Howth hill lies the village of Chapelizod, with its turnpike, and 

Phoenix Park, where it is suggested Finn’s feet rest “upturnpikepointandplace”. We 

are told that, lying prone he “calmly extensolies”, suggesting “extended, so lies” with 

perhaps also an echo of ‘existential’. We learn similarly of his son, Shaun, that, as the 

four judges approach him to enquire into the nature of his Being, 

[a]feared themselves were to wonder at the class of a crossroads puzzler he would 

likely be, length by bredth nonplussing his thickness, ells upon ells of him, making 

so many square yards of him, one half of him in Conn’s half but the whole of him 

nevertheless in Owenmore’s five quarters. There would he lay till they would him 

descry, spancelled down upon a blossomy bed, at one foule stretch, amongst the 

daffydowndillies, the flowers of narcosis fourfettering his footlights, a halohedge of 

wild spuds hovering over him, epicures waltzing with gardenfillers, puritan shoots 

advancing to Aran chiefs. (FW 475) 

Shaun is described as lying across Ireland’s ancient divide between “Conn’s half” 

and “Owen’s half,” being covered by various kinds of potatoes (Flounders, Epicures, 

Garden Fillers, Aran Chiefs). Much like Dasein, HCE does not, in its regular, 

everyday comportment, encounter itself as a detached, Cartesian subject. Both Finn 

and Shaun are woven into the landscape. Like Dasein, HCE is an existential clearing 

in which man and world show up. If Dasein is said to be ‘Being-in-the-world’, HCE 

might be termed, in accordance with his publican profession, as ‘Being-INN-the- 

world’. The world of the Wake is not a simple ‘wherein’ of a narrative but a surreal 

manifestation bound-up with that narrative. 

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Let us examine the narrative more closely. According to McHugh, the etymology 

of the Basque word for orange is “the fruit which was first eaten.” 14 Taken with the 

Irish flag we find in “oranges laid to rust upon the green,” this suggests that the Irish 

nation is itself in some sense fallen. This biblical imagery is enhanced when we 

realise that “devlin first loved livvy” reveals not only a relationship between Dublin 

and the River Liffey but the Devil (as a tempting serpent) and Eve. We are even told 

that Finn lies like an overgrown “babeling” (Tower of Babel). He is symbolised by 

the ‘Ш’ rune depicting man’s prone state. Shaun is described as lying in “one foule 

stretch” for “ells upon ells,” a Miltonic metaphor reminding of Satan lying prostrate, 

outcast to the fires of Hell. This “fall of a once wallstrait oldparr” is repeated 

endlessly in all forms of HCE from Adam to Shaun. 

As statements of the recurring “fall” theme, these biblical and national images 

suggest that Irish religious and cultural structures have themselves grown out of the 

underlying structure of human being. We learn of HCE that “Father Barley […] got 

up of a morning arley and he met with a plattonem blondes names Hips and Haws” 

(FW 257), suggesting how the archetypal man, in his fallen state, is similar to John 

Barleycorn, a pagan symbol for the process of the barley harvest and brewing of beer 

and whiskey. The theme of Earwicker’s seduction by the two maids (“Hips” and 

“Haws”) finds echo here in the process of brewing beer. The world of the Wake is 

narratively bound to the fall of man. This narrative structure is imbricated into the 

very landscape itself. 

Fallenness [Verfallenheit] is also an important aspect of Dasein, being associated 

with its authenticity [Eigentlichkeit]. Indeed, “falling reveals an essential ontological 

structure of Dasein itself.” 15 Hubert Dreyfus outlines three forms of this structure: 

absorption, language and reflexivity. 16 Let us examine these. Dasein does not exist as 

a subject but is instead already bound up with the world such that it is the clearing- 

foundation in which human subjectivity shows up. 

14 Roland McHugh, Annotations To Finnegans Wake (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 

3. 

15 Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie, John & Robinson, Edward (Oxford: Blackwell 

Publishing, 2006 [1962]), 224. In the following this source will be quoted in the continuous text as BT. 

16 Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-world (Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1991). 

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In falling, Dasein itself as factical Being-in-the-world, is something from which it has 

already fallen-away […]. [It] has fallen into the world, which itself belongs to its 

being. […] 

In the kind of handling and being-busy which is “absorbed in the thing one is 

handling” […] the essential structure of care — falling — makes itself known. (BT 

226 ff.) 

The care structure of Dasein’s skilled coping makes falling a necessity. Only as result 

of its fallenness can something like a subject (‘factical Being-in-the-world’) emerge 

within the pre-subjective clearing of Dasein. This subject, or self, which emerges in 

Dasein, is given identity by the inherited ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ 17 upon which Dasein 

takes a public stand. This possibility gives meaning to the ‘handling and being-busy’ 

of Dasein’s daily concerns, and provides the identity upon which it publicly takes a 

stand. That is, in falling, Dasein interprets itself in terms of the care structure that 

reveals the ‘there’ into which it has fallen, the situation into which it is ‘thrown’ 

[geworfen]. This situation is the nature of Dasein’s facticity. Dasein can never recover a 

grounded essence. It is always already ‘thrown’ [geworfen] into Being in that its being 

is always already an issue for it. Dasein’s ‘thrownness’ [Geworfenheit] is the content of 

its ‘facticity’ [Faktizität], or worldly situation, flavoured by its ‘state-of-mind’ 

[Befindlichkeit], or ‘attunement’ [Stimmung]. Because it is thus fallen, and hence not 

grounded, Dasein is “interpretation all the way down.” 18 It did not choose the 

thrownness of its existence but must inexorably take a stand on it. 

As it is ungrounded in this way, occupying only public stations of Being, 

Heidegger speaks of Dasein having fallen into the ‘one self’ [das Man] (an agreed upon 

way of public being). Unless Dasein comes to awareness of its existential thrownness, 

and chooses to inhabit the one with resolute authenticity; that is, in a way which 

recognises its groundless nature but heroically presses towards a public identity 

nonetheless, Dasein obscures the anxiety of its own thrownness. In Finnegans Wake, 

Shem poses the question, “when is a man not a man?” and answers “when he is 

sham.” When is he “sham”? When he “yeat the abblokooken” (FW 170) (eats the 

17 Dasein’s ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ is the particular existentiell modality into which, as a possibility, it 

projects itself. Dasein projects itself towards its possibilities by enpresenting [gegenwärtingen] beings 

in its world as the ‘towards-which’ [das Wozu] of an ‘in-order-to’ [das Um-zu]. In being a student, for 

example, Dasein enpresents the ready-to-hand of a computer towards typing in order to write an essay 

for the sake of being a student. 

18 Dreyfus, Being-in-the-world (cf. note 17), 300. 

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cooking apple), when he falls away from himself, when he loses himself in the one, 

when he covers over his own mortality. 

“For the most part, everyday Dasein covers up the ownmost possibility of its 

Being — that possibility which is non-relational and not to be outstripped” (BT 301). 

Dasein, like HCE fleeing from his accusers, tries to deny its own structure. The 

“possibility which is non-relational and not to be outstripped” is nothing other than 

the phenomenon of death, or Dasein’s demise. For Shem and for Heidegger, men are 

not men when they evade the truth of their guilt, (or for Heidegger, the truth of their 

death). As with Finnegans Wake, Being and Time appears to cultivate a peculiarly 

buried, non-temporal narrative, with Heidegger proposing that Dasein switches from 

inauthenticity to resoluteness after its conscience calls it to guilt. Later we will 

explore the concept of resolute Dasein and the notion of guilt in greater depth. First, 

though, we will investigate another modality of Dasein’s fallenness, that of language. 

While Dasein is always already fallen, severed from the nothingness of its roots, 

we are afforded a glimpse of HCE in a pre-fallen state, “before he fell hill he filled 

heaven: a stream, alplapping streamlet, coyly coiled um, cool of her curls” (FW 57). 

Yet while this vista, an eirenic vision of male and female archetypes lying in coitus, 

demonstrates the harmonious interaction of HCE and ALP, it remains but a fleeting 

thought, and is rarely realised in all the ages of the Wake. HCE falls with the first 

thunderclap, announcing the end of the ginnungagap (in Norse mythology the void 

before time), the brief moment before the Vichian ages reset themselves and the cycle 

begins anew. Far from “filling heaven,” he is brought low by the scandalous rann 

(satirical song once used to humiliate ancient Irish kings) composed by his 

detractors. This song, “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” (perhaps a pun on the female 

genitalia and a garrulous “oh really?”) chortles with loquacious glee, humiliatingly 

asking all and sundry: “Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty/How he fell with a 

roll and a rumble […]/He was one time our King of the Castle/Now he’s kicked 

about like a rotten old parsnip” (FW 45). Although we are told that at one time HCE 

was “King of the Castle,” as with the Edenic vision, this is never substantiated in 

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actuality. The facticity, in Heideggerian terminology, of HCE seems always to inherit 

the thrownness of its fall. It is the rann that holds sway throughout Lucalizod. 

The wararrow went round, so it did, (a nation wants a gaze) and the ballad… stumpstampaded 

on to a slip of blancovide and headed by an excessively rough and red 

woodcut, privately printed at the rimepress of Delville, soon fluttered its secrets on 

white highway and brown byway to the rose of the winds and the blew of the gaels, 

from archway to lattice and from black hand to pink ear, village crying to village, 

through the five pussyfours green of the united states of Scotia Picta. (FW 43) 

Thus the intoxicated song spreads across Ireland (Scotia) as a ‘war arrow’ and brings 

low Earwicker. Just as Heidegger notes that we never encounter an objective present 

“east wind” but rather “wind in the sails”(BT 100) it would seem here that the rann 

“flutters its secrets […] to the rose of the wrings and the blew of the gaels.” The very 

elements themselves are disclosed by the narrative fall. As well as signifying Ireland, 

Scotia may also be suggestive of Duns Scotus, renowned for his univocal ontology 

and doctrine of the categories. If we allow ourselves this interpretation, the “united 

states” may perhaps refer to his categories of Being, with the rann itself the univocity, 

or “one voice” of Being itself. 19 Given this reading, Being itself is a comedic and 

humiliating song with human being the fallen sinner thrust into its midst. The 

singers of the rann may hold themselves to have embarked on a Dionysiac dance but 

in their dreamlike, Appollonian facticity they constantly morph into HCE himself. 

One is left to contemplate whether the song of Being is the wisdom of Silenus, that 

the truth of human existence is that it would have been better for it never to have 

existed at all. 20 

19 Scotus proposed a univocal ontology that studied being qua being. For Scotus, Being was 

transcendent of the Aristotelean categories: substance, time, quality, passion, habitus, relation, 

action, place, position and quantity. In rejecting the Thomist distinction between essence and 

existence, Scotus proved an influence for Heidegger's conception of truth by cultivating the notion 

of haecceity, or the principle that causes a particular being to be understood as the thing it is. This 

moved away from Thomistic conceptions of esse that stressed identification of beings by genera or 

universal type. Heidegger’s conception of Being as employed in Being and Time suggests something 

of Scotus’ haecceity. For more on Heidegger’s relation to Duns Scotus see his Die Kategorien- und 

Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus (1916). 

20 Georges Bataille contemplates the farcical absurdity of Finnegans Wake, proposing that HCE counters 

Hegel’s notion of the pious lord with that of a comic sovereign, finding humour in the realisation 

that meaning arises only as it is projected upon non-meaning, or death. Derrida explores the 

implications of the Wake’s laughter, both tyrannous and absurdly whimsical. See Georges Bataille, 

“Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,” in Deucalion 5 (1955), reproduced in Yale French Studies 78. On Bataille, 

trans. Jonathan Strauss, ed. Allan Stoekl (1990), 9–28, and Jacques Derrida, “Two Words For Joyce,” 

(cf. note 4). 

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Before we see why this reading can be avoided, let us observe that with this rann 

we have encountered another way in which Dasein is fallen: its subjection to idle talk 

[Gerede]: 

Discourse, which belongs to the essential state of Dasein’s Being and has a share in 

constituting Dasein’s disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk. And 

when it does so, it serves not so much to keep Being-in-the-world open for us in an 

articulated understanding, as rather to close it off, and cover up the beings within 

the world. (BT 213) 

Discourse, as the logos, is the way in which we let something be shown, or 

articulated as the thing it is. As Being-in-the-world, Dasein pre-ontologically discloses 

beings as they are given by the world’s background nexus. This world-nexus can be 

articulated like joints (perhaps in a skeleton). Discourse can take the form of telling, 

in which one articulates, for example, a hammer as being ‘too heavy’, before reaching 

for another. “Telling is the articulation of intelligibility” (BT 204 f.). It need not be 

linguistic in character — for example, one can tellingly articulate the intelligibility of 

an escalator by using it, or can articulate the above proposition regarding the 

hammer by simply discarding it and reaching for another. However, when it speaks 

about something towards which it bears no comportment, Dasein has fallen into idle 

talk. Idle talk has become de-worlded and, as such, does not articulate the 

intelligibility of the world, but represents a detached, impoverished way of 

understanding. In short, idle talk passes over the phenomenon of the world, 

“clos[ing] it off, and cover[ing] up the beings within the world.” 

The groundlessness of idle talk is no obstacle to its becoming public; instead it 

encourages this. Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without 

previously making the thing one’s own. If this were done, idle talk would founder 

[…]. Idle talk is something which anyone can rake up; it not only releases one from 

the task of genuinely understanding, but develops an undifferentiated kind of 

intelligibility, for which nothing is closed off any longer. (BT 213) 

Idle talk does not grant informed articulation but empty, de-worlded speculation. In 

idle talk, Dasein has not articulated a being in its world situation, ‘making the thing 

one’s own.’ Against analytical tradition, Heidegger holds that interpretation is 

impoverished when it is detached and observational as the merely observational 

‘releases one from the task of genuinely understanding.’ The ‘present-to-hand’ of de- 

worlded objects, that is, is the province of the correct but not of truth. 

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Issue 1 (2011) 

In Finnegans Wake, as we have seen, Joyce certainly seems to suggest that human 

beings suffer negative consequences from idle talk. After relentlessly heckling HCE 

over his alleged scandals, the customers at his inn announce that “you’ll read it 

tomorrow, marn, when the curds on the table” (FW 374). The scandal of Earwicker 

lacks any ground. It is confused, and those who partake in spreading it themselves 

merge into the accused. Yet nothing can prevent it being blared by tabloid headlines. 

Perhaps feeling that he has strayed too far from what Heidegger would term the 

public identity of how one is a gentleman, Earwicker scrambles to articulate a defence 

of himself, arguing that though he has surely done wrong in his life, “I like to think 

[…] confessedly in my baron gentilhomme to the manhor bourne”(FW 365). That is, 

he considers himself a gentleman (or gentle homme) still, though even this defence is 

contaminated with “confess[ion]”, barrenness, and the unchaste image of ‘man 

whore’. The tension between idle talk and discourse thus gives rise to panic and 

guilt. In idle talk, the subtlety of the human being and its complexity is levelled into 

dismissive categorisation. One is ‘guilty’ because they say so. Propositional 

definitions have replaced (and obscured) discursive understanding. HCE is defeated, 

beaten and left to lie fallen on his bar room floor. 

III.Existential Guilt: Resolution or Redemption? 

Pressing our enquiry into these narratives we approach the issue of guilt. In the face 

of idle talk, the futility of Earwicker’s discourse reveals him in his guilt. Conversely, 

for Dasein, as we will see, guilt is what calls human being away from idle talk. In both 

instances guilt is a core structure of human being. In regards to their function as 

narratives, does guilt reveal in Being and Time and Finnegans Wake what might be 

called ‘resolute salvation’? 

In Being and Time, guilt is that which reveals Dasein as the being it is. Dasein is 

called to authenticity by its guilty conscience. “This call whose mood has been 

attuned by anxiety is what makes it possible first and foremost for Dasein to project 

itself upon its ownmost potentiality for being” (BT 322). This “ownmost possibility” 

is Dasein’s death. Only by embracing this revelation can Dasein comport itself 

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Issue 1 (2011) 

authentically. The call of conscience to guilt [Gewissensruf] reveals a fundamental 

lack. For Heidegger, “if one takes ‘laden with moral guilt’ as a ‘quality’ of Dasein, one 

has said very little.” (BT 328). Guilt is not a simple emotion; 21 Dasein is guilty, rather, 

in its very existential structure. Dasein is guilty in its ownmost possibility. Heidegger 

writes: “We define the formally existential idea of the ‘Guilty!’ as ‘Being-the-basis for 

a Being which has been defined by a “not”’ — that is to say, as ‘Being-the-basis of a 

nullity’”(BT 328). What is this nullity? Heidegger writes that Dasein is 

[…] never existent before its ground, but rather in each case only in terms of it and as 

it. Being the ground therefore means never to have power over One’s ownmost 

being from the ground up. This not belongs to the existential sense of thrownness. 

Being the ground is itself a nullity of itself. (BT 284) 

That is, Dasein cannot ever get back behind its thrownness, it is “never existent before 

its ground.” Dasein can never climb out of the world such that its existence is no 

longer of any concern to it, being instead always already bound up with a care 

structure that presents its thrown facticity in accordance with its attunement. In 

anxiety, Dasein realises it is thus imprisoned, and realises that grounded meaning is 

forever elusive outside of its ownmost possibility of death. 

The call of conscience, then, reveals Dasein as guilty, and to be authentic, Dasein 

must embrace this guilt. In the vernacular, it might be said that Dasein must accept 

itself for what it is. By accepting fallen meaning as fallen, Dasein casts off distraction 

and dwells mindfully in the heritage of the one. This has profound implications as a 

social narrative, as Dasein opens itself up to cultural, religious and even literary 

narratives as the determining source of its meaning. But what of Earwicker? Does 

guilt likewise lead him out of fallenness? HCE’s guilt, while no less axiological, may 

seem at fist glance more traditionally moral, though, as we will see, as an archetypal 

narrative Earwicker is no less prone to his thrown nullity. 

The Earwicker narrative is universal to all men. “[I]t was […] a pleasant turn of 

the populace which gave him as sense of those normative letters the nickname Here 

comes Everybody” (FW 32). In every incarnation, HCE is tempted into scandal. Like 

Dasein, HCE seems unable to get behind its thrownness. Earwicker is always unable 

to avoid its facticity, characterised by its thrownness into moral guilt. Earwicker’s fall 

21 For Heidegger, there is no ethical transgression involved in the guilt. 

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Issue 1 (2011) 

is predicated on Finn’s and re-enacted by Shaun. As Campbell and Robinson aver, 

“the bier of Finnegan is the stage on which history enacts itself in the goings and 

comings of HCE.” 22 Finn, as the original faller, is the existential structure of HCE who 

in turn is the existential structure of Shaun and Shem. Together the male archetypes 

of Finnegans Wake are the paternal structure of human being. As a trinity, 

grandfather, father and sons are ‘Dadsein’. 

What of the female? In Being and Time, Heidegger is silent on the question of 

gender, referring to Dasein in the neuter and presumably regarding sex as a specific 

existentiell. ALP, however, as female, is complicit in HCE’s transgression and yet is 

also HCE's loyal defender. She offers “a reiz every morning for Standfast Dick and a 

drop every minute for Stumblestone Davy” (FW 210). As her namesake suggests, 

Anna Liffey is the river of life that flows around HCE. The dramatic narrative of 

human being is always a question of gender: “Every telling has a taling and that’s the 

he and she of it” (FW 213). The narratives of HCE and ALP are entwined in primal 

Being-with. Joyce once wrote that, in her youth, “[ALP’s] Pandora’s box [contained] 

all the ills flesh is heir to.” 23 Yet still she offers “the primal sacrament of baptism or 

the regeneration of all men by affusion of water,” (FW 564) consoling her husband: 

“Rise up […] you have slept too long. You did so drool. I was so sharm. But there’s a 

great poet in you too!” (FW 619). ALP is both the alpha of the fall and the omega of 

redemption. Ultimately, HCE’s guilt is made bearable because it is washed clean by 

ALP in the forgetful (Lethe) waters of her life (Liffey). HCE is forgiven his 

transgressions by the very being against whom he has transgressed. There can be no 

permanent resolution or closure, but, as the narrative repeats, perpetual consolation. 

It is this consolation that provides a way out of despair. Existentially, ‘Dadsein’ is cast 

between these poles of transgression and redemption. ALP first entices, flowing like 

a river from “swerve of shore to bend of bay” (FW 3) before washing clean her 

husband’s guilt. Guilt is primal but so is salvation. One is the possibility for the other 

and these two faces of ALP flow around the bifurcated, lustful-penant HCE. 

22 Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (New York: The 

Viking Press, 1972), 95. 

23 Richard Ellman, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 564. 

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Issue 1 (2011) 

But is ALP herself wholly subordinate to a male protagonist? For Joyce, is woman 

placed into existence to be the plaything and comforter of man? In her final 

epiphanic moments before rebirth, ALP is presented as if with a choice. Running out 

towards the sea, weary with the detritus of life, she realises, as if addressing her 

husband on the shore, “I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. 

You’re only a bumpkin. I thought you were great in all things, in guilt and in glory. 

You’re but a puny. Home!” (FW 627). The cares of her life, her concern for her 

husband, are suddenly cast off and placed into perspective. Man’s guilt and 

redemption, his existential meaning, are “puny” irrelevances. She is free to turn 

towards her home. ALP’s existential narrative will be interrupted by the ginnungagap 

of her dissolution in a primal sea. 

I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, cold mad feary father, till the 

near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, 

makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. (FW 628) 

But what is this? This primal sea is not feminine. Having scarcely finished 

renouncing the concerns of men, ALP greets not her primal mother but her father. 

How exactly are we to interpret this passage? 

The diabolical duality of Finnegans Wake rises here to a crescendo. ALP seemingly 

longs to return to her father, and yet speaks of him as a lover, suggesting a return to 

HCE. Addressing this male entity, she wishes to “rush, my only, into [his] arms” and 

yet at once proclaims him “cold,” “mad” and “feary.” It becomes clear that an 

obscene phallic pun runs through the passage, with ALP exclaiming at the “mere size 

of him” and complaining of being “seasilt saltsick” after his “moananoaning” 

(echoing onanism). To be blunt, it appears ALP has said farewell to men only to rush 

into the arms of her lover who is also her father upon whom she performs incestuous 

fellatio. The possibility of simple redemption or resolution for either character is thus 

scandalised by the complexity of the final male archetype into which ALP flows. 

Even here, at the end of the cycle, the dual nexus of guilt and redemption continues 

to provide the uttermost horizon of human being. Guilt-redemption is the rootless 

thrownness of existence. And then it begins again: a comedy of secular soteriology. 

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Issue 1 (2011) 

Resolute Dasein is ‘redeemed’ from inauthenticity as it presses into the identities 

of its cultural world, mindfully aware of their ultimate groundlessness. If Heidegger 

seems oblivious to the Wildean irony this commitment entails, something of his 

bluster is avoided in the troubled social standings of HCE and ALP. For Here Comes 

Everybody, replacing solemn heroism with uproarious farce. 

Contact Address: 

Michael Gilbert, michaelgilbert577@hotmail.co.uk. 

Keywords: 

English: James Joyce, Finnegans Wake; Martin Heidegger, Being and Time; 

Hermeneutics; Ontology; Phenomenology. 

German: James Joyce, Finnegans Wake; Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit; 

Hermeneutik; Ontologie; Phänomenologie. 


http://eTransfers.uni-giessen.de 

http://www.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/research/anglogerman/etransfers/ 

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Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London

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