The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
James Joyce · a novel in four books · seventeen chapters · 219,317 words · Faber and Faber, London, and the Viking Press, New York, 1939 · scored on the text with Joyce’s own corrections, read in the Faber printing of 1975
Mode
Universal history as one night’s dream; comic epic, fable, catechism, schoolbook and broadcast in a single language
Mythos
The fall and the wake: Finnegan from his ladder, Humpty Dumpty, Adam, Lucifer and Parnell in one father; the twins at war; the daughter and her mirror; the river-mother running to the sea
Phase
One night in a Chapelizod public house and the bedroom above it, from the father’s fall to morning; all of history in Vico’s three ages and the return
Presentation
Fiction; four books and seventeen chapters, the last sentence running into the first; ten words of a hundred letters or more; a chapter set as a schoolbook, with margins and footnotes; closed by a dateline
Register
From the music hall, the street ballad and the tavern to the Mass, the annals and the washerwomen’s gossip; English made to carry dozens of other languages inside the word
Scale
One family of five, with a servant and a potman, in one night; the river from source to sea, and the history of the world
Governing Proposition
A publican in Chapelizod is said to have done something in the Phoenix Park; the rumour becomes a ballad and the ballad a trial, while his twin sons divide his place, his daughter grows into her mother’s, and his wife, who is the river, writes the letter and at morning goes out to sea. The wager of the book is that one family’s night holds the whole of history, and that a language made of English and dozens of others, in a book whose last word runs back into its first, can show that history as one fall repeated and one return.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” The book opens without a capital, in the middle of a sentence, on a river already running, and the first sentence carries it round and back to a place whose initials are the father’s, H, C and E. Its last page ends without a stop: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the”. The article waits for its noun, and the noun is the first word of the book. Early on the book names what it is, “the book of Doublends Jined” (I.1): a volume with its two ends joined, to be read as a circle.
Around the circle stands a plain architecture. There are four books and seventeen chapters: eight in the first, four in the second and the third, and one in the last, which holds under six per cent of 219,317 words. The first three are the three ages of Vico’s history, and the short fourth is the return. Within the frame the night keeps its order. The father falls and is talked about; a letter is found and the two sons are drawn; the mother is gossiped over at the river; the children play and learn their lessons, and the tavern fills; one son makes his journey, the father is examined, the parents go to bed; and morning comes. Under the last line Joyce set the place and the years of the making, Paris, 1922 to 1939: seventeen years for one night.
The language is made as the book is. Counted on the text, 57,578 different words make up the whole, and 45,739 of them occur once; by a rough measure about one word in five and three kinds of word in four are made or foreign. Ten words run to a hundred letters or more, nine of a hundred and one of a hundred and one, 1,001 letters in all: the book’s thunder. The father’s initials run through the book as a signature, H, C and E beginning three words in a row 130 times where chance would give about eleven: “Here Comes Everybody”, “Haveth Childers Everywhere”, “Hircus Civis Eblanensis”, “Human Conger Eel”. The mother’s, A, L and P, run seventy-three times against thirty: “Annabella, Lovabella, Pullabella”. The family is written into the alphabet.
Movement II
The first fall comes in the first paragraphs, and a thunderword of a hundred letters stands in brackets inside the sentence that tells it. Finnegan falls from his ladder, and the fall is at once Humpty Dumpty’s, Adam’s, Lucifer’s and Parnell’s. The promise comes with it: “Phall if you but will, rise you must” (I.1), and later in the chapter, “O foenix culprit! Ex nickylow malo comes mickelmassed bonum.” (I.1). Between them comes a slapstick Waterloo in the Willingdone Museyroom, with a warning at the door, “Mind your hats goan in!”, where an old general is mocked for half a hat. The father’s fall and the father’s farce are the same story from the first page.
The second chapter gives him his name and his trouble. He is a publican in Chapelizod, with a stammer and a hump, and his initials become a name for everyone: “Here Comes Everybody” (I.2). Something happened in the Phoenix Park, and the book never says what. What it shows is the telling. The rumour passes from mouth to mouth and hardens, at the end of the chapter, into a street ballad, the ballad of Persse O’Reilly, printed with its music and set with its chorus. By the time the song is finished the father is guilty of whatever it says.
The next two chapters try him and cannot find the facts. The third begins with the book’s plainest admission: “Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude” (I.3). It then lists, at length, the names the father is called. The fourth brings the matter to a trial that never establishes what he did, and states the law the hearing obeys: “The war is in words and the wood is the world.” (I.4). Guilt here is not discovered. It is manufactured by rumour, song and court.
Movement III
Then the letter. It is found on a midden, scratched up by a hen: “when to the shock of both, Biddy Doran looked at literature.” (I.5). The chapter studies the scrap as scholarship studies a scripture, and lists, at length, the titles it has gone by. In doing so it describes the book that contains it: “The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture.” (I.5). It also names the reader the book requires, “that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia” (I.5). Literature, in this account, begins on a rubbish heap, and its reader never sleeps.
The sixth chapter is a quiz about the family, and its first question runs 4,978 words before the answer, “Finn MacCool!”. Inside it the two sons appear as fable. A Mookse and a Gripes quarrel by a river, and Nuvoletta looks down on them from above. At the end of the fable she leaves them: “She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone.” The quarrel of the twins will return as Burrus and Caseous, as the Ondt and the Gracehoper, as Butt and Taff, and at the end as Patrick and the archdruid, and it is always the same quarrel.
The seventh chapter is the portrait of the brother who writes. “Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is joky for Jacob.” (I.7). The chapter holds him in contempt, “Shem was a sham and a low sham” (I.7), and gives him the book’s own work: he is shown “writing the mystery of himsel in furniture”. Against him stands his twin, Shaun the postman, whose round the third book will follow. The writer of the family is its disgrace.
Movement IV
The second book is the children’s evening. It opens “Every evening at lighting up o’clock” on the children’s games, and ends with their prayer: “Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low!” (II.1). Then the lessons. The tenth chapter is set as a schoolbook, the text in the middle, one twin’s notes in one margin and the other’s in the other, the sister’s in footnotes, with a geometry figure among the lessons. Three minds are the architecture of the page.
Below the children, the tavern. The eleventh chapter, more than two-fifths of the second book, runs through the customers’ stories, the Norwegian Captain and Butt shooting the Russian General, retold through the noise of the bar, a radio broadcast and a racing commentary. Here the book is at its densest, and the density does not always carry: for long stretches the puns pile on one another and the voice seldom lifts. The last chapter of the second book is short, and turns to the honeymoon ship of Tristan and Isolde, where a jeer goes up: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” (II.4).
The third book is the son’s night journey and the father’s return through him. Shaun the postman sets out, and the twins’ quarrel comes round again as the fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper: “But, Holy Saltmartin, why can’t you beat time?” (III.1). He preaches a long sermon. In the fifteenth chapter, the longest in the book, an inquest is held over the sleeping son, a séance as much as a hearing, and voices rise through him until the father’s own speaks: “Haveth Childers Everywhere” (III.3). Then the bedroom: the parents’ bed, the children asleep, and “Salmonpapered walls” (III.4).
Movement V
The mother has two chapters, at the end of the first book and at the end of the whole. The first is given to two washerwomen at the Liffey and their gossip. “O tell me all about Anna Livia!” Her story is told in the names of rivers, so that the river tells its own, and in one sentence she is past, present and future: “Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be.” (I.8). As the dusk comes on the sentences shorten and thicken, and the women go deaf: “Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of.” They turn to elm and stone. “Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm!” The first book ends: “Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!”
The last book is a single chapter, and it begins with a call to the dawn: “Sandhyas! Sandhyas! Sandhyas!” It is short, the return after the three ages, and it gives its last 3,729 words to her. From “Soft morning, city!” the river speaks as she runs out to sea, and she sees her husband plainly. “I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You’re only a bumpkin.” She sees her daughter in her place, “Now a younger’s there”. She puts the book’s law in six words: “First we feel. Then we fall.”
She goes to meet the sea as a daughter goes back to a father, “my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father”, and lets her leaves go: “My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still.” Then, near the end: “Lps. The keys to. Given!” The last line is “A way a lone a last a loved a long the”, with no stop, and under it the place and the years of the making. The line does not end. Its article waits for the word that begins the book, the river runs back into its first sentence, and the night starts again.
Act III · The Twelve
Length is not a cost; the question is whether the parts are required, and the frame passes. The last sentence runs into the first; the four books are Vico’s three ages and the return; the night keeps its order from the father’s fall to morning. None of that can go. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the sediment of seventeen years: the first question of I.6 runs 4,978 words; the names the father is called (I.3), the titles of the mamafesta (I.5), the Norwegian Captain retold through tavern noise (II.3), Shaun’s sermon (III.2) and the middle of the inquest (III.3) say at length what is said briefly elsewhere. Perhaps a quarter could go unmissed.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and three parts of it hold. Guilt is made by the telling: what the father did in the park is never established, “Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude” (I.3), yet rumour becomes a ballad and the ballad a trial. Language is history, every word a deposit of it. The family is the engine of history: the father falls, the sons divide his place, the daughter replaces the mother, who sees it, “Now a younger’s there” (IV). Held well off the top: much of the book discloses a condition, sleep, more than a meaning; its largest claim, recurrence, was Vico’s and Freud’s first; and the dream as encyclopedia is not true of dreams.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Height reaches the ceiling often. The close of I.8, where the washerwomen go deaf in the dusk: “Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of.” Nuvoletta at the end of the Mookse and the Gripes: “She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone.” (I.6). The children’s prayer that ends II.1; the dawn call of IV; Anna Livia’s last pages, “My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still.” (IV). Held below the top by frequency: II.2, II.3 and III.3 run for tens of thousands of words of comic density where the voice seldom lifts.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Myth built, down to the syllable. Five figures and a few events bear the load: the father’s fall (Finnegan from his ladder, Humpty Dumpty, Adam, Lucifer, Parnell), the sin in the park, the letter scratched up from the midden by a hen, the war of the twins, the daughter and her mirror, the river-mother. The father’s initials are the book’s running signature, 130 runs against about eleven by chance: “Here Comes Everybody” (I.2). The particular stays particular: a Chapelizod publican with a stammer and a hump, a wife who lays out his shirt, the Phoenix Park, the Liffey. Held a step down because the figures are often functions rather than persons, and between the mother’s two chapters the family thins to a grammar.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The inheritance is plain: Vico and Bruno, Sterne, Swift and Carroll, the Irish annals, the music hall, and Joyce’s own Ulysses, which had already redirected the novel. The departure is total: a prose fiction in a language made of English and dozens of others, with no narrative surface, ordered by a night instead of a day, whose last word runs back into its first. The safe course was a second Ulysses; Joyce took the other, and staked seventeen years and the readers Ulysses had won. The book states its wager: “The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture.” (I.5). Held a tenth below the top only because the break had begun in the late chapters of Ulysses.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The portmanteau is the instrument: “chaosmos” (I.5) and “collideorscape” (I.6) hold two things in one word because the book’s knowledge is that they are one, “Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be.” (I.8). The circle makes recurrence a structure, not a claim. I.8 is written in river names, so the river tells its own story. II.2 is set as a schoolbook, one twin’s notes in each margin and the sister’s in footnotes: the children’s minds are the architecture of the page. Without the form there is a family anecdote. Held below the top because in II.3 and III.3 the accreted density lets the form go slack into a holder for notebook matter.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: eighty-seven years of return that have not exhausted it. Campbell and Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944); Adaline Glasheen’s Census (1956, revised twice); James Atherton’s The Books at the Wake (1959); Clive Hart’s Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (1962); Roland McHugh’s Annotations (1980); John Bishop’s Joyce’s Book of the Dark (1986); the genetic study of the notebooks; reading groups that cross the book over years and begin again. The questions stay open: what the father did in the park, who wrote the letter, whether the dreamer is one man. Held a step down because much of the labour is decoding, a sign of difficulty before it is a sign of depth.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The field is the novel in English and Irish writing, and the language of modernism. The force is the largest reorganisation of what a prose fiction can be made of: the word made polyphonic, and a book given to a sleeping mind. What holds it down: it did not redirect the novel at large as Ulysses did, and its heirs, mostly in the avant-garde, music and theory, often imitate a manner more than they extend a method. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Beckett’s essay on Dante, Bruno, Vico and Joyce in Our Exagmination (1929), a title the book echoes (III.3); Murray Gell-Mann’s quark, taken from “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” (II.4); and a long passage through literary theory.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over eighty-seven years, with no discount for age. The book has been in print in London and New York since 1939, corrected by its author’s own list of misprints and fixed in a pagination every commentary cites; it is read aloud in groups on several continents, and it has put “Here Comes Everybody”, “riverrun” and the quark into common use. The text survives whole. Charged: the readership is narrow, and the book is more famous than read; its surface (the music hall, the Dublin of 1900, Parnell, the radio and newspapers of the 1930s) needs heavy annotation; and eighty-seven years is a short demonstration beside the centuries behind the summit.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on Joyce’s English, which carries its other languages inside it. The making is load-bearing. The cadence of I.8’s last page, where the sentences shorten and thicken into monosyllables as night falls. The ballad of Persse O’Reilly (I.2), set as a street song with its chorus. The forms parodied exactly: the inquest, the quiz, the schoolbook, the broadcast and the racing commentary, the fables. Ten thunderwords, 1,001 letters in all. The pun controlled on several levels at once: “The war is in words and the wood is the world.” (I.4). Charged: in stretches of II.3 and III.3 the density defeats itself, the splicing becomes a manner, and some of the opacity is noise, not music.
Score: 9.4 / 10
One law governs the whole: fall and return, in a dreaming mind where any figure may become any other, but only ever into the same five. Take the two most distant elements, the slapstick Waterloo of the Willingdone Museyroom (I.1) and Anna Livia going out to sea (IV). In the first an old general is mocked for half a hat; in the last an old husband is found out, “You’re only a bumpkin.” Both are the father fallen, seen by the young, laughed at and mourned. Butt and the Russian General, the Ondt and the Gracehoper, Patrick and the archdruid are one quarrel. Charged: the dream law is permissive, so coherence comes cheap; and in III.3’s séance and II.3’s broadcasts it is present but idle.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Many orders, held in one family and one night. Consciousness: the sleeping mind, its slips and fusions. The family: father, mother, twin sons and daughter, with Kate the servant and the potman. Labour: the publican’s trade, the postman’s round, the washerwomen. The state and history: Danes and Normans, Cromwell, the Union, Parnell, the Free State, Waterloo and the Crimea, and the world in Vico’s ages. The sacred: the Mass, Patrick and Kevin, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Koran, the Upanishads. The natural order: the river from source to sea, hill, stone, tree, weather and stars. They are integrated by fusion, each order the same family again. Held a step down: the integration rests on allusion more than on lived particulars, and catalogues do part of the holding.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.7 and The Living Form at 9.6, with The Archetypal Deep, The Bottomless Well and The Encompassed at 9.5. A total departure from the novel, staked on seventeen years; a form in which the portmanteau, the circle and the schoolbook page are the knowledge itself; a myth built down to the syllable on five figures; eighty-seven years of return without exhaustion; and every order from the sleeping mind to the history of the world held in one family and one night.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.6, held by the sediment of seventeen years: the 4,978-word question of I.6, the names the father is called, the titles of the mamafesta, the Norwegian Captain retold through tavern noise, Shaun’s sermon and the middle of the inquest, perhaps a quarter of the whole, saying at length what is said briefly elsewhere. The frame itself cannot be cut. Next above it, The Unconcealment and The Imperishable at 8.6: a book that discloses a condition as much as a meaning, and a survival of eighty-seven years among a narrow readership.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.6, The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.7, The Archetypal Deep at 9.5, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by a tenth each. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.5. Every summit condition is met, three of them by a single tenth.
Basis · James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, published by Faber and Faber in London and the Viking Press in New York in 1939, scored as one work in four books and seventeen chapters, the last sentence running into the first, closed by a dateline giving Paris and the years 1922 to 1939. The text scored is the 1939 text with Joyce’s own corrections: he drew up a list of misprints after publication, and what the maker added in the life of the work is part of it. Earlier states of the book are evidence of the making, and a text rebuilt from the drafts by other hands is evidence, not the object. Text · the Open Editions TEI file of Finnegans Wake, made by pandoc from a scan of the Faber printing of 1975, which carries the corrected text; read whole and in order. Its faults are not charged to the work: typographic ligatures, and line-end hyphens left inside words, both closed silently here as in print; the four images, among them the music of the ballad and the geometry figure, absent; the margins and footnotes of II.2 flattened into the run of the text; the closing dateline mangled. Every quotation on this page has been checked against that file. The book is quoted sparingly, for criticism. Counts were made by script on the file, with words joined across line-end hyphens and the dateline excluded; the share of made and foreign words is an upper bound, measured against a narrow lexicon. Citations are by book and chapter: I.8 is Book I, chapter 8, and IV the single chapter of Book IV.