Funagain

A SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce, edited by Anthony Burgess. 256 pages. Viking. $6.

Even the Irish, with their taste for enjoying their troubles, admit that a wake can go on too long for everybody but the corpse. And Finnegans Wake is the longest wake in history. It is also the most conjested wake in history: hundreds of fictional and historical characters dance attendance on poor Finnegan as he is laid out over 628 pages.

These and other things have not helped its readers in the 28 years since James Joyce's labyrinthine masterpiece was published. Its comic genius is buried in a mountainous midden of language that is neither English nor Irish. Nor, for that matter, is it any other European tongue. It is all of them at once--"Eurish," a maze of European tongues, polylingual puns, multiple meanings, parodies, philosophy, public events and private jokes, and a multitude of characters, real and imaginary, in a span of time from Genesis to Judgment Day.

Bravely, Britain's Anthony Burgess, novelist (A Clockwork Orange) and Joyce scholar (Re Joyce), has threaded the labyrinth, determined to demonstrate that Finnegans Wake is more than just a grammarian's funeral. He has reduced the text by about two-thirds, added an introduction that is admirable for clarity, good sense and erudition, and has placed commentaries here and there to help any dog-Latinist through the Joycean style. Even so, the plain reader (if such exists) will soon find himself in waters deeper than the River Liffey.

Vico's Cycle. In brisk, schoolmasterly fashion (both Burgess and Joyce once taught school), Burgess expounds, for those who came in late, the ABCs of Wake. The structure of the book, he explains, follows the four-cycle theory of history devised by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1774), in which human societies progress through the four stages of theocracy, aristocracy, democracy and ricorso (or recurrence). The title of the book is itself a Joycean wordplay. "Finn (fin or finis) -egan" could mean "end again," suggesting the completion of Vico's cycle, while "Wake" suggests rising from sleep, or beginning life again.

Bearing out that notion, the book deals directly with a man who is made to "relive the whole of history in a single night's sleep." He is a pubkeeper named Porter, but his Freudian alias in the dream is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Why Earwicker? Well, Porter's night life is invaded by an incestuous passion for his daughter Isobel (Iseult-Isolde). The inadmissible word "incest" sneaks by as "insect," specifically "earwig." Thus the odd name, says Burgess, is "dreamily appropriate."

Furthermore, in Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, "we have the hump of sexual guilt he carries on his back (he is a different porter now), a hint of the ape, and more than a hint of the insect." To the straightforward reader, it may appear that the explanation only compounds the problem, especially when Burgess points out that the French for "earwig" is perce-oreille, which "can be Hibernicized into Persse O'Reilly," a name appropriate to H. C. Earwicker's dream career as an Irish patriot. His initials also mean "Here Comes Everybody" (turning the sleeper into Everyman) and "Haveth Childers Everywhere" (making him Adam, father of all living). Once the reader gets the hang of this, the possibilities are endless: H.C.E. can also stand for "Human Conger Eel" and a hypothetical chemical formula, H^2CE^3 As a game, it beats parlor (or bedroom) psychonalysis.

Dream Logic. With such details in mind, and with Burgess' assurance that Joyce was not a deliberate mystifier but "an intellectually superior writer unwilling to compromise with subject matter of great complexity," the reader is presumably in shape to cope with the first sentence of Wake: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs"--a reference, on one level, to the Liffey, which runs past Adam and Eve's Church and Howth Castle in Dublin, and, on another level, to the beginning of mankind's story. And the reader will be wiser when he reaches the end: "Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here Us then. Finn, again!"

Burgess defends Wake against the obvious objection that it lacks intelligibility: "A book about a dream would be false if it made everything as clear as daylight. If it woke up and became rational it would no longer be Finnegans Wake." True enough, but a more serious charge is that the dream of H. C. Earwicker does not in fact follow a dream like logic but conforms to the logic imposed upon it by the esthetic, moral and historical theories of James Joyce.

Burgess uneasily concedes this point against his master by saying that Joyce simply imposed his dream upon the dreamer--which is, after all, an author's prerogative. What Joyce imposed, however, was less a dream than a highly conscious apparatus of thought, scholarship and linguistic virtuosity.

Tongue Ties. It has often been said that Joyce's titanic creative labors have liberated the language. They have done nothing of the sort; the language is incapable of liberty, one man's tongue being tied to the next man's ear. But if Joyce failed to liberate the language, instead attempting to make it his private domain, he did try to overthrow the English ascendancy of grammar and set up his own fabulous linguistic kingdom.

Finnegans Wake represents the failure of that grandiloquent scheme. But it is a failure so brilliant that it can still illuminate the mind and gladden the spirit of all who do not regard words as mere tokens or tools, who see them as playthings capable of magic, creating awe by liturgy, or laughter by a conjurer's sleight of alphabet.

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