Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

by Finn Fordham

This book is a critical introduction to Finnegans Wake and its genesis. Finn Fordham provides a survey of critical, scholarly, and theoretical approaches to Joyce's iconic masterpiece. He also analyses in detail the compositional development of certain key passages which describe the artist (Shem) and his project; the river-mother (ALP) and her "first kiss;" the Oedipal shooting of the universal father (HCE) by the priestly son (Shaun); and the bewitching and curious daughter (Issy). His analyses demonstrate 'genetic' ways of reading the text which illustrate its immense range and playfulness and how these qualities were generated in composition.

As well as opening up the densely detailed textuality of the Wake in all its multiplicity, Fordham argues for a relation between the way the text was formed and key aspects of its thematic an uprising of particularity and detail against universality, absolutes, and generality. He shows that the proliferation of individuated textual details overwhelms any unitary concept to the text. And this reflects an idealized and utopian uprising as it overcomes centralizing Finnegans do wake up. As part of this argument he proposes a qualified return to a notion of character - qualified in that characters can be understood in part as reflecting the character of compositional self-criticism and concealment, expansion and growth, flow and reflection, transferral and transformation. The character of the text's composition as a whole can be, paradoxically, summed up in the force of individuated in the people, male and female, young and old, combining to
overwhelm syntactic uniformity and singular signification.

282 pages, Hardcover

First published August 30, 2007

Reviews

[Benji · Rating 5 out of 5]

'The attacks on Finnegans Wake for its triviality might occur particularly in time of war, when texts are required to be politically engaged, ‘relevant’ in their concern with the pressing conflicts whose outcome will affect the lives of its readers. This reputation of importance, twinned with the disclosures of its impotence, is something, however, that Finnegans Wake actively contributes to itself. Through its experimentation with language, and the demands it makes on the reader, through its sheer concentrated effort, it seems to suggest there must be some profoundly meaningful justification to it all. But then by tipping into the abyss of meaninglessness and irrelevance, Joyce laughs at the presumptions of his own project to tell a ‘universal history’, and other projects with similar goals. This is another way of communicating its thematic preoccupation with the fall that is the fall of anything pompous. As we’ve seen with King Roderic, one of the basic shapes given to its manifold stories is a comedy of defeat, of collapse, of the fall, of a slapstick clown slipping over at the circus, and, perhaps self-consciously, getting up—if only to fall over again. This shape is a means of laughing at power’s mechanisms and representations of its upright self, its towers and rhetoric and laws, its ever- improving technologies of transport and communication.'







Fun indeed !!

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent genetic reading of parts of Finnegans Wake. I have only read the first 170 pages Parts 1 and II since that is how far I am in Finnegans Wake. When I start reading Part III of Finnegans Wake I will return to this book

[Lenhardt Stevens · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really the two stars are less to do with Fordham, who is likely a very interesting person, but investigating the Wake more generally and the fruits it yields. I cannot recommend it as a piece of literature.

[DeterminedStupor]

Stopped at p. 45 (end of Part I, A.1, Early 1924: ‘Slowly Unfolded Universal History’)

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a different take on Finnegan's Wake than the other supporting texts I've read. Fordham excavates Joyce's authorship of sample texts, demonstrating how it developed over 17 years from a somewhat transparent story to the opaque masterpiece that is in our hands today. I most enjoyed the last chapter, when he walked through the development of "the little people" in the book.

Plenty of worthwhile insights provided, and a very helpful piece on understanding the "Wake a bit more.