The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake Norris, Margot Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Norris, Margot. The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake: A Structuralist Analysis. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.69484. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/69484 [ Access provided at 2 Oct 2021 08:08 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. HOPKINS OPEN PUBLISHING ENCORE EDITIONS Margot Norris The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake A Structuralist Analysis Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press Published 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. CC BY-NC-ND ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3025-6 (open access) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3025-8 (open access) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3130-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3130-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3131-4 (electronic) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3131-9 (electronic) This page supersedes the copyright page included in the original publication of this work. THE DECENTERED UNIVERSE OF FINNEGANS WAKE A Structuralist Analysis MARGOT NORRIS THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS B,,ltimorc and London To my grandmother, Leopoldine Hochherger This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Copyright© 1974, 1976 by The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or 1ncch.111ical, including photocopying, recording, xerography, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Manufactured in the United States of America The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 76-25507 ISBN l}-8018-1821}-6 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data will be found on the last printed page of this book. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS V ABBREVIATIONS vii INTRODUCTION: THE CRITICAL METHOD Structure and Language 1 Dream Theory 5 Chapter One: READING FINNEGANS WAKE The Novelistic Fallacy 10 The Integration of Elements 15 Chapter Two: THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE The Function of Repetition 23 Form and the Oedipus Myth 28 Myth Structures in the Dream 30 The Myths of Trespass 35 Chapter Three: THE THEMES Family and Society 41 The Primal Scene 44 Triangular Desire 47 In the Name of the Father 54 Redemption: The Failure of the Son 61 Redemption: Maternal Salvage 64 1v CONTENTS Chapter Four: THE ONTO LOCICA L CONDITION Guilt 73 Idle Talk 79 Truth 85 Death 92 Chapter Five: DREAM AND l>OETR Y The Dream Process 98 Displacement 101 Condensation 108 Substitutability 111 Wit 114 Chapter Six: TECHNIQUE Deconstruction 119 Imitative Form 123 13ricola5;c 130 NOTES 141 BIBLIOGRAPHY 149 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A first book is always a collaborative effort. Mine has in it much of the teaching, dialogue, and example of my instructors. Joseph Riddel's lectures on structuralism provided me with those large and subtle ideas in the modern tradition that make a whole new approach to literature possible and that gave me the confidence to try to shed some light on Finnegans Wake. His counsel played the most vital part in generating the theoretical framework of the book. One of my biggest challenges was the effort to write lucidly, about a very opaque work, in the difficult language of the structuralist method. Mark Shechner deserves credit for helping some stylistic clarity survive this challenge, and for augmenting my lean theories with his own sensitive readings of Joyce and Freud. Albert Cook's astute suggestions informed the major revisions of the original dissertation. All of this professional help was given with much generosity, and with a friendship that continues to sustain me in my academic life. Portions of this book have previously appeared as articles in journals: "The Consequence of Deconstruction: A Technical Perspec­ tive of Joyce's Finnegans Wake," in ELH, A Journal of English Literary History, vol. 41, no. 1, Spring 1974, published by The Johns Hopkins University Press; "The Function of Mythic Repetition in Finnegans Wake," in James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 4, Summer 1974, published by the University of Tulsa; "The Language of Dream in V v1 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Finnegans Wake," in Literature and Psychology, vol. 24, no. 1, 1974. I wish to thank these journals for their permission to use this material here. Manly Johnson, Charmaine Wellington, and Betty Stokes helped with the final preparation of the manuscript. I am grateful to the University of Tulsa for helping to underwrite the publication costs of this work. There arc others, always, whose influence on a work like this is indirect, but whose affection and faith are necessary ingredients: my family, particularly my uncle, Ernst Hochberger; my favorite professor at the University of Florida, T. Walter Herbert; my feminist sisters in Buffalo and Tulsa; Christopher D. Morris; and my eleven-year-old son, Josef, whose liberated views on working mothers make many things possible. ABBREVIATIONS The primary texts used in this work are all American editions of Joyce's work. The following abbreviations are adopted: CM Chamber Music. New York: The Viking Press, 1972. D Dubliners. New York: The Viking Press, 1962. F Finnegans Wake. New York: The Viking Press, 1971. P A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: The Viking Press, 1975. U Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1966. Book/chapter and page/line numbers for Finnegans Wake are included in parentheses in the text without a preceding symbol. Book/chapter numbers are given as follows: I. 3 (Book I, Chapter 3 ). Page/line references indicate the line on which the quotation begins and are given as follows: 338. 9 (page 338, line 9). Footnotes in Finnegans Wake are indicated in the following manner: F4 ( footnote 4 ). vu INTRODUCTION �� THE CRITICAL METHOD STRUCTURE AND LANGUAGE Thanks to the patient toil of its dedicated cxplicators, the major contours of Joyce's Finnegans Wake have gradually come into focus in the thirty-five years since its publication. Y ct while more allusions, motifs, and linguistic details are continually coming to light, the intel­ lectual orientation of the work remains largely obscure. The attempt to assess the teleology of Finnegans Wake has always presented critics with a dilemma: the choice between a radical and a conservative interpretation of the book. A radical interpretation would maintain that Finnegans Wake subverts not only the literary status quo but the most cherished intellectual preconceptions of Western culture as well-a position most clearly maintained in the pioneer studies of the work. Yet in these early studies, such as Our J;'xagmination, 1 the weakness of the radical interpretation also becomes apparent. While proclaiming the revolutionary nature of Work in Progress, the writers lack scholarly pegs on which to hang their theories and finally resort to ad hoc analogies to support their theses. In contrast, the conservative critics, who have dominated Wake criticism for the last thirty years, possess a small but scholarly arsenal: the stylistic and thematic con­ servatism of the early manuscript drafts, the inclusion of traditional, even arcane, literary material in the work, Joyce's admission that the 1 2 INTRODUCTION: THE CRITICAL METHOD work's structural and philosophical models are derived from a six­ teenth-century metaphysician and an eighteenth-century philosopher, and finally, Joyce's own decidedly reactionary tastes. Even the recently published A Conceptual Guide to "Finnegans Wake, "2 which aims at a comprehensive study of the work, embraces this conservative tradition by approaching the work as a novel: "along with the problem for the reader of deciphering Joyce's language goes the stumbling block of figuring out the narrative or the plot." Joyce is himself partly responsible for this unsettled state of affairs. Throughout the progress of his writing, he sent friends and disciples scurrying to reference books that would unlock the secret of a phrase or passage, while his comments on the overall purpose and construction of the book remained enigmatic and vague-often phrased in negative terms that suggest what Finnegans Wake is not, rather than what it is. "l might easily have written this story in the traditional manner.... Every novelist knows the recipe.... It is not very difficult to follow a simple, chronological scheme which the critics will under­ stand.... But I, after all, am trying to tell the story of this Chapelizod family in a new way.... " 3 We are left to wonder about the nature of this new way of telling the story. Joyce's sanction and supervision of Our Exagmination was clearly an effort to answer this question. Yet while approving his disciples' defense of his work on radical grounds, he failed to supply them with a theoretical base other than his references to Bruno and Vico. Since the time of these pioneer Wake critics, an enormous amount of detailed explication of the text has become available, and new tools for critical investigation have emerged that make it possible to examine more thoroughly those aspects of the work that resist novelistic analy­ sis. With these advantages, I hope to resume the radical viewpoints of the early critics and demonstrate the extent of the challenge that Joyce offered not only to conventional literary modes but also to many of the epistemological presuppositions of our culture.