Yareah Magazine

Martín Cid

The writer Martin Cid reviews Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

From 1922 to 1939, James Joyce wrote this unique extraordinary book, novel? Some critics have claimed it is unclassifiable, it is neither an essay nor a novel or, even, it is the result of an insane mind. The truth, it is that James Joyce broke with all of the previous novelistic rules making a different writing, one which joints the discoveries of avant-garde movements and goes far away.

More than 600 pages, full of strange sentences which combine words of 62 different languages: “Finnegans Wake” is The Babel Tower, impossible to be translated, impossible to be understanding if we are not able of jumping into its musical metaphoric universe (symbolism?) to live, as H. C. Earwicker’s family, in a sexual criminal nightmare (surrealism?) where nobody can communicate the truth because words, historical beliefs and philosophical truths are not enough to overcome The Babel Tower that mankind created the day that myths and legends started to be forgotten and official religions repressed our natural being.
It is not a surprise that this book was printed in 1939, the year that started the Second World War and finished the avant-garde movements. It is not a surprise that T.S. Elliot supported the novel or that Scott Fitzgerald or Hemingway applauded it. It is not a surprise that it was written in Paris and that the first edition was published by Faber and Faber in London and The Viking Press in New York. “Finnegans Wake” agglutinates the worries and quests of a time which was going to be disappeared: Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Heidegger, Frazer… If “Ulysses” was the culmination of the modern novel initiated by Flaubert, this is the culmination of “Ulysses”.
“Ulysses” uses the metaphoric structure of Homer, “Finnegans Wake” uses Gianbaptista Vico’s four times of mankind. Why four? Maybe the author wants to explain us (or to reconsider) the four cabalistic worlds, maybe just to tell us an unfriendly joke. “I had written a book to entertain the critics during a century”. Fakes and double-fakes, behind some realistic jokes, make this book inaccessible.
Or maybe not.
James Joyce establishes here a solid deep criticism of the patriarchal order, political forms and traditional story telling, building an unfinished book which must be completed by the reader: nobody knows what can find nobody in it, into its 62 different languages, into its Celtic, Christian, Hebrew myths or, why not?, in James Joyce’s sense of mood.
At the end, a woman, A. L. P. (Anna Livia Plurabelle), has the answer: she comes from the Ocean, from the waves that her daughter, Issy (the cloud), waters with her rain. She represents that free protohistoric time that still murmurs on the river Liffey, in Dublin, where Earwicker’s family runs a pub, where a crime has been committed, where every family member tries to hide it but it is revealed every night, in dreams.
This bizarre nightmare drives the reader to the most bizarre nightmare: the lost language through the lost of language structure, the lost character finding all of the characters into one (HereComesEverybody-HCE-E.C. Earwicker). The nightmare of one man is the nightmare for the whole history of mankind. Where we lose our souls? Maybe we lost them across the waves of the words and maybe the only way to find them is into the language. We feel this fear across Anna Livia’s hair, we felt this pleasure through H.C.E’s sin: one night, he is dreaming to be a person.

Read more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake

http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/jjoyce/

Bio:

"The Ashes Century" by Martin Cid

Read more:

http://www.martincid.com/english/index.php