Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London

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eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Issue 1 (2011) 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. 4
eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Issue 1 (2011) 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. 5
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