|
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
[DUSK] Tim Finnegan falls down, gets up, and goes back to
sleep; H.C. Earwicker is subject to a scandalous rumor and flees town to
evade punishment; A hen finds a letter from Earwicker’s wife; Pictures from
the family album are examined; Shem is a filthy, degenerate writer;
Washerwomen talk about Anna; [EVENING] Shem can’t guess his sister’s underpants color,
draws a map of his mother’s bottom instead; HCE serves customers at his pub,
collapses after they leave; Four old men watch a young couple kissing; [NIGHT] Shaun
sets out on his mail route, admonishes his sister and runs after his hat,
gets interrogated by the old men about HCE; A child’s cry; Coitus; [DAWN] The Liffey
river returns to the ocean. Such a summary would is worthless, however. It betrays
all the beauty, philosophy, and mystery which James Joyce imbued the novel
with over seventeen long years. If the paragraph above were all that Finnegans
Wake contained, the novel would be discarded out of hand as 600+ pages of
sheer nonsense. In fact, some people do just that anyway, because the Wake
is not a novel made for the reader. It’s a novel made for humanity, and as
such must be universally accessible – not in that anyone can read it, but
that anyone who can unlock its secrets can relate to it. This is no easy task by any means. There isn’t a literary scholar alive who will claim they fully understand Finnegan’s Wake, and there likely will never be. Joyce didn’t gift mankind with the ultimate novel for it to be disseminated in book clubs and on casual reading lists. It’s an encapsulation of nearly everything Joyce knew, and even things he didn’t know. It’s the exploration of an unconscious mind, floating in free-form and uninhibited by conventions of language and logic. It’s a counterpoint to Ulysses, a novel about city life. It’s a book that can amuse even a child with its singsong passages and infantile babble, but stimulate the most serious book critic with its encrypted knowledge. It’s a book that will be debated and deconstructed for centuries, and Joyce will live on in its pages. |
|
|||||
|
|
Conclusions |
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
