Finnegans Wake

HCE, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, keeps a pub in Chapelizod and carries an obscure, never-clarified guilt over some act in Phoenix Park, possibly voyeurism, possibly worse, that the book's rumor mill inflates and multiplies without ever settling into a single fixed accusation. His initials scatter through the text disguised as dozens of different three-word phrases, Here Comes Everybody among them, Joyce's method for making one guilty man stand in for a whole species' inherited shame.

Anna Livia Plurabelle, HCE's wife, fuses with the River Liffey so completely that her chapter, written to be read partly for sound, lists the names of hundreds of rivers folded into ordinary dialogue, treats her as landscape and person at once, flowing from the book's opening word, riverrun, through washerwomen's gossip on the riverbank toward the sea her final monologue will eventually reach.

Shem and Shaun, the couple's twin sons, replay a single mythic opposition across the book's many disguises, the exiled artist against the establishment man of action, roughly Joyce's own self-image against everything that rejected him, while their sister Issy fractures into multiple flirtatious selves reflected in mirrors and rainbow girls, a family romance told so many times, in so many costumes, that plot dissolves into pattern.

Joyce structures the book's four parts on Giambattista Vico's theory that history moves through recurring ages, theocratic, aristocratic, democratic, and a ricorso that returns civilization to the start again, and the title itself performs the same trick: the comic Irish-American ballad Finnegan's Wake tells of a bricklayer named Tim Finnegan who falls from a ladder, is presumed dead, and revives at his own wake when spilled whiskey splashes his corpse. Joyce drops the ballad's apostrophe, turning Finnegan's into Finnegans and wake from a noun into a command, every reader's own awakening built into the same word that names a funeral. He spent seventeen years assembling the book this way, publishing sections under the working title Work in Progress and only announcing its real name on the eve of publication, portmanteau words fusing a dozen languages into single syllables so that a word like bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk can carry an entire history of human falls, Adam's, Finnegan's, Humpty Dumpty's, at once.