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L. Boom as Dreamer in Finnegans Wake

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Bernard Benstock
Bernard Benstock*
Affiliation:
Kent State University, Kent, Ohio
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Extract

It has taken a relatively short time for critics to become convinced of the basic continuity of James Joyce's entire body of work, despite Joyce's own protestations while in the process of creation that he had forgotten each previous effort in favor of the one in progress. While concerned with Leopold Bloom, Joyce impatiently asserted that “Stephen no longer interests me. He has a shape that can't be changed,” and when writing Finnegans Wake, he contemptuously shrugged off Ulysses: “Ulysses! Who wrote it? I've forgotten it.” It was imperative for him as an artist to concentrate on his new effort, and since he acted as his own publicity agent, it was necessary for him to call attention to it; but a retrospective appraisal should take note of the manner in which each work overlaps with one another: the child in the first three stories of Dubliners is very much the child Stephen in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist, Richard Rowan in Exiles is a projected image of the mature Stephen, and Shem the Penman is a caricature of both. Finnegans Wake in fact is a summation of all that Joyce had previously written: it recapitulates themes and motifs, reworks many of the same characters, and puns every previous Joyce title into its fabric. The Dreamer in the Wake is more than just a single individual, even if one assumes that on the literal level we are viewing the dream of publican H. C. Earwicker.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 1 , March 1967 , pp. 91 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

1 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 473, 603, n.

2 Page numbers are to the 1937 Bodley Head edition of Ulysses, designated hereafter by “U.”

3 Page numbers refer to the Compass edition of Exiles.

4 Page numbers (followed after the period by inclusive line numbers) are to the Viking Press edition of Finnegans Wake, hereafter prefaced by “FW”; Ch. x footnotes are designated by “n.” and the footnote number. Corrections have been made from Joyce's errata.

5 Other significant instances of the intrusive newspaper in the Wake are found in: “the moaning pipers could tell him to his faceback” (FW, p. 23.30–31); “reading her Evening World. To see is it smarts, full lengths or swaggers. News, news, all the news. Death, a leopard, kills fellah in Fez” (FW, p. 28.20–22); “the hakusay accusation againstm had been made, what was known in high quarters as was stood stated in Morgans-post” (FW, p. 36.4–5); and the four Dublin dailies of 1904; “Christ in our irish times! Christ on the airs independence! Christ hold the freedman's chareman! Christ light the dully expressed!” (FW, p. 500.14–16).

6 Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1962), pp. 70–71.

7 The cigar neatly links Bloom with Earwicker: in the Cyclops chapter Bloom declines a drink, “saying he wouldn't and couldn't and excuse him no offence and all to that and then he said well he'd just take a cigar” (U, p. 288), while Earwicker gives one away: “he tips un a topping swank cheroot … suck that brown boyo, my son, and spend a whole half hour in Havana” (FW, p. 53.22–26).

8 See two other instances in the Wake: the initial encounter between H. C. E. and the Cad (FW, p. 35.1–38.8) and the summation of events (FW, p. 580.23–36), where the Citizen and his dog are combined into “the fenian's bark” (FW, p. 580.28).

9 Joyce toyed a good deal with the -morphous-Morpheus-Murphy pun, both in the Wake and in Ulysses. As the answer to the question regarding the customers, the triple pun exists in the one word, while the punning in Ulysses covers several portions of the chapter: “in the arms of Morpheus” (U, p. 600) modulates into “the arms of Murphy” (U, p. 622). See also “andrewpaulmurphyc” (FW, p. 31.35) and “a dozen of the Murphybuds” (FW, p. 161.28–29).

10 James S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1960), finds every book of the Old Testament mentioned at least once in the Wake; see his listing, p. 180.