Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London

eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
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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