Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London

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eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Issue 1 (2011) 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. 6
eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Issue 1 (2011) 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. 7
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Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London

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