Finnegans Wake

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Finnegans Wake is the final work by Irish author James Joyce . The novel was written between 1923 and 1939 . For a long time Joyce called the work "Work in Progress" and published it in parts. The first complete edition appeared in 1939 under the title Finnegans Wake by Faber & Faber in London.

Meaning and interpretation

Finnegans Wake is considered to be one of the most remarkable, but also one of the most difficult to understand works of 20th century literature , to which, among other things, its unusual language contributes: Joyce shapes its own language by reassembling, rebuilding, separating or helping to create English words Mixes words from dozens of other languages ​​( Portmanteaux ). The result eludes a linear understanding and opens up possibilities for multiple interpretations.

Repeated reading reveals new meanings to the reader. With his standard work Annotations to Finnegans Wake, Roland McHugh has published concise notes on Finnegans Wake, with explanations in the form of geographical references or references to languages ​​from which the respective word or variants thereof could be borrowed on the same page for many of the words used in the Wake .

The title, Finnegans Wake , comes from the Irish ballad Finnegan’s Wake about the builder Tim Finnegan, who fell drunk from a ladder and died in the process, but at his boozy funeral (English wake ), in which a bottle of whiskey broke on his coffin, came back to life.

Tim Finnegan's rise and fall and his resurrection are both a metaphor for the rise and fall of humanity. Finnegans Wake is about the ups and downs of human life, portrayed by the Dubliner Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE), his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), his sons Shem and Shaun and his daughter Isabel / Isolde. However, the protagonists face us in different personifications, for example HCE as Adam, Christ, Wellington ... or as a human being (Here Comes Everybody) . One of the explanations for the unusual structure and language of the wake is the interpretation as (HCEs?) Dream, in which different storylines mix, things are suppressed and come to light in various forms.

A (first) aid for understanding is provided by Reichert's multiple sense of writing and Tindall's A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake .

In his radio essays, Arno Schmidt deals with this late work by Joyce, which he interprets as an insult to his brother Stanislaus and deciphered many of the unconventional neologisms of the work. In addition, he denies the work its high status, since Joyce encrypts his abuse well (also to be safe from legal challenges), but it is now nothing more than a rant, full of bad insults. Schmidt is the translator of the book "Meines Bruders Hüter", the unfinished work by Stanislaus Joyce , which Schmidt interprets as an opposition to Finnegans Wake.

The well-known Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan called the sometimes overly long suitcase words in Finnegans Wake "Ten Thunders" ("Ten Thunders", after the word "bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthuuntrovarrhounawnskawnt" in different languages, which is composed of ten words for thunderous denownskawnto Malagasy to Gothic) and, among other things, advocates the thesis based on this that Finnegans Wake is a huge riddle that should tell the entire history of humanity.

content

It is debatable among literary scholars whether Finnegans Wake tells a story or not. MH Begnal summarized the different opinions as follows: “Now there is a plot as we conventionally know it […] Yet still there is a plot to Finnegans Wake, but it is a plot which is being told in a completely new and experimental way. “In any case, there is no coherent progression of the plot, but a myriad of individual stories, some intensely interwoven, some loosely linked. These individual stories are also bursting with allusions to literary works and historical stories and use fragments of the entire Western and partly also non-Western educational canon. The difficulty of deciphering is made even more difficult by a language that is also made up of fragments of all kinds and that creative ways of combining these fragments in such a way that the impression of a legible language is just retained, but its deciphering is extremely difficult. And this, too, is increased by the fact that the linguistic components do not only come from English, although English is the basic language, but from around forty other languages. Another factor contributing to the apparent chaos is that the names of the people appearing keep changing.

TS Eliot wrote in 1951: “Ulysses was so epoch-making and definitive that people wondered if Joyce would be able to write anything else afterward ... And when parts of Finnegans Wake were published in a Paris magazine in 1927, they seemed so crazy and incomprehensible that all but his ardent admirers said Joyce had gone too far ”. However, it is now generally recognized that the text contains little that is accidental, on the contrary, that it is very well constructed. A very large number of subjects, objects, names and people keep coming up, and certain structures run like a red thread through the work. In an interview with ORF , the philosopher and communication scientist Ernst von Glasersfeld told the following story:

“When 'Finnegans Wake' came out in 1939, we sat down in Ireland, we were fifteen or sixteen people who spoke several languages ​​- together we knew 25 different languages ​​- to read Finnegans Wake. A hundred different languages ​​are said to have been used in the book. We didn't do that for long because puzzling out word games quickly gets boring, but the word 'vicus' appears in the first line of 'Finnegans Wake' on the first evening. [Quoted from memory:] Riverrun past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to ... nevermind ... [laughs] I had learned some Latin and said: 'Vicus, that is called 'village'. How does that get in there? ' And someone said: 'Yes, that must be an allusion to an Italian philosopher named Vico .' I then read on in Finnegans Wake. Vico appears there again and again, in different versions. I thought if that was important to Joyce, then there must be something behind it. And there was another stroke of luck. There was an old Italian edition of Vico's 'Scienza nuova' in the city library in Dublin. "

Position in the complete works of J. Joyce

Finnegans Wake is not only in terms of time, but also in terms of content, style and form the end point of a line of development in the literary work of James Joyce, the main cornerstones of which are the works of Dubliner , Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. A constant further development and increase can be observed, which leads from the concrete to the symbolic, from the vivid to the non-visual, from the conventional to the unconventional, from the personal to the impersonal, from the logically connected to the externally connected (associative) and from the regular standard language to a flowing artificial language . Joyce's oeuvre is also classified as part of the so-called stream of consciousness literature, although here, too, the sequence of works reveals a development of constantly decreasing filtering of thoughts. Joyce's biographer Jean Paris also postulates a three-part epiphany of the genres “from poetry in Chamber Music to the epic Ulysses and the cosmic drama Finnegans Wake”, with portrait belonging to the same genre as Ulysses .

Translations

Finnegans Wake was often considered untranslatable, or at least one of the most difficult to translate works in literary history. A work that, as Jacques Aubert asserted, is “illegible” should of course remain incomprehensible and therefore untranslatable. Translations into other languages ​​therefore inevitably have the character of creative re-poetry in this work than in any other. Since the text contains elements from 40 different languages, including 80 words from Japanese, it is not possible to speak of the language anyway , but only of the "basic language", which in the original is undoubtedly English.

The following translations into German should be mentioned: (partial) translations by Georg Goyert (Anna Livia Plurabelle in the magazine Die Fähre , 1946), Hans Wollschläger (chapter Anna Livia Plurabelle , published under this title by Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt), Wolfgang Hildesheimer and Dieter H. Stündels Finnegans Wehg. Kainnäh ÜbelSätzZung des Wehrkess fun Schämes Scheuss (published by Jürgen Häusser, Siegen 1993, and Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt a. M. 1993). Partial translations were also done by Reinhard Markner, Harald Beck, Kurt Jauslin, Friedhelm Rathjen, Helmut Stoltefuß, Ingeborg Horn, Robert Weninger, Klaus Hofmann, Birgit König, Peter Otto, Klaus Reichert , Ulrich Blumenbach and Wolfgang Schrödter (see James Joyce: Finnegans Wake. Collected Approaches German , Frankfurt 1989). The corresponding working copy is available in facsimile by Arno Schmidt , who tried very seriously to translate the book but failed due to pecuniary considerations by the publishers (Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1984).

Complete translations are available in the following languages ​​(translator and year of publication in brackets):

  • French (Philippe Lavergne 1975/1982, Hervé Michel 2007.).
  • German (Dieter H. Stündel 1993).
  • Japanese (Naoki Yanase 1993).
  • Korean (Chong-keon Kim 1998).
  • Portuguese (Donaldo pupil 1999-2003).
  • Dutch (Erik Bindervoet and Robbert-Jan Henkes 2002).
  • Polish (Krzysztof Bartnicki 2012).
  • Greek (Eleftherios Anevlavis 2013)
  • Spanish (Marcelo Zabaloy 2016).
  • Turkish (Fuat Sevimay 2016).
  • Italian (Fabio Pedone and Enrico Terrinoni 2019).

There are extensive partial translations in the following languages:

  • Italian (Luigi Schenoni 1982).
  • Hungarian ( Endre Bíró 1992).
  • Spanish (Alberte Pagán 1997).
  • Polish (Maciej Słomczyński 1998).
  • Russian (Anri Volokhonsky 2000, Andrey Rene 2017).
  • Japanese (Kyoto Miyata 2004).
  • Chinese (Dai Congrong 2013).
  • Turkish (Umur Çelikyay 2015).

Adaptations

Movie

Mary Ellen Bute filmed excerpts from Finnegans Wake under the title Passages from Finnegans Wake . The film was awarded for Best Debut Film at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 .

Comic

The Austrian draftsman Nicolas Mahler has adapted motifs from the extensive novel on 24 pages in DIN A6 format as a comic and included the comic characters Mutt and Jeff . The issue was published on October 27, 2020 as number 92 in the “mini kuš!” Series by the small Latvian publisher Grafiskie stāsti.

Effects

As soon as the parts appeared as " Work in Progress ", the text triggered violent, mostly negative reactions in the literary world, as Ulysses had done before. As time went on, both works were increasingly rated positively. Many contemporary writers were fascinated by both works and were thus in part encouraged to conduct their own language experiments and novels, including authors as diverse as TS Eliot , Virginia Woolf , William Faulkner , Dos Passos , Hemingway , Hermann Broch and Italo Svevo . Although Finnegans Wake in particular has always remained closed to a broad literary audience, the work has radiated into various areas right up to the present day, including popular literature.

  • Finnegans Wake is used in a number of novels and films as a prime example of a text that is difficult to read or incomprehensible. In the novel, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath , a fictional character engaged in " extremely difficult Finnegans Wake ," triggering her emotional disorientation. In the novel, High Priest of California by Charles Willeford , the main character of the book, Russell Haxby relaxed after stressful days by rewriting passages from Finnegans Wake and Ulysses in simple, understandable language. The American comedian Jon Stewart writes in his book America (The Book) that the utter illegibility of Finnegans Wake is proof that Europe is in decline. In the film Enough , the character played by Jennifer Lopez calls Finnegans Wake "the hardest book to read in English" and that she has been reading it for six years (which she later reveals as a lie). Woody Allen mentions the book in his film Manhattan Murder Mystery . The editor Larry Lipton tells the author Marcia Fox (played by Anjelica Huston ) that her book manuscript "makes Finnegans Wake look like reading a plane". The American composer John Adams described the 4th Symphony by Charles Ives as the "Finnegans Wake of American Music".
  • In many novels and films, Finnegans Wake also appears in a positive way, sometimes even central elements of Finnegans Wake are used as material. Finnegans Wake finds z. B. Mentioned in Salman Rushdie's book Fury . In the 1947 novel On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes by Raymond Queneau (German: You are always too good to women ), the IRA members are mostly named after minor characters from Ulysses and use the password Finnegans Wake . In Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates by Tom Robbins (dt. Peoples of this world, relaxed!, 2003) the main character named Switters reads the Finnegans Wake again and again and obsessively deals with the topic of language development and the "cybernetic future". Although Vladimir Nabokov disparagingly referred to Finnegans Wake as "Punnigans Wake", it is mentioned in one scene in his Lolita . MH Begnal is even of the opinion that Nabokov's novel Das Bastardzeichen (Orig. Bend Sinister , 1947) is structurally based on the two Joyce novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Gardener Martin Halpin, from a footnote in Finnegans Wake, is a main character in Mulligan Stew (1979) by Gilbert Sorrentino . In it, Martin Halpin "works" as a fictional character by the 'experimental' author Antony Lamonts, in whose manuscript he leads a life of his own and thereby gains insights into the constitution of fictions. In Don DeLillo's novel Die Stille (2020), Finnegans Wake is also quoted. Finnegans Wake also appears in a number of science fiction novels, for example in The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick , in which the character Herb Asher says of James Joyce that he can see into the future, with the several sections from Finnegans Wake cited to back up his point of view. Even with Philip Jose Farmer (in Riders of the Purple Wage ), is quoted from Finnegans Wake, the text is partly held in a kind Joyce'schem style and a central figure called Finnegan . Finnegans Wake ( A Case of Conscience ) was also used by Samuel R. Delany (in Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones ) and James Blish . In Blish's Star Trek story, Spock Must Die! Blish creates the name "Eurish" for the "mixed language" used in Finnegans Wake, apparently assuming that the elements are only taken from European languages.
  • In 1979 John Cage composed the radio play "Roaratorio" based on Finnegans Wake.
  • An instrumental album by the German electronics group Tangerine Dream from 2011 was inspired by the novel.

Although not as widespread as the celebrations of Ulysses , especially on Bloomsday , there are a number of regular performances or events around the world, mostly of a more amusing nature. The wake , the wake from the eponymous drinking song, on St. Patrick's Day , often in connection with the parade that takes place on that day or in a pub, is often recreated, for example in New Dublin, Wisconsin, USA (parade) or in Pittsburgh (in the Harp & Fiddle pub ). Public readings from Finnegans Wake are also a tradition in some cities, such as New York City.

About the name Finnegans Wake

Until the complete edition was published in 1939, the title Finnegans Wake was kept secret by Nora and James Joyce. The name comes from an Irish drinking song: Tim Finnegan is a carrier for brick, who falls from the ladder and dies. His friends put him in a coffin and hold a wake that leads to an argument. When a whiskey bottle is finally thrown and the alcohol spills over the corpse, it brings Tim Finnegan back to life.

The Ballad of Tim Finnegan or Finnegan's Wake

Tim Finnegan liv'd in Walkin Street
A gentle Irishman mighty odd.
He had a tongue both rich and sweet,
An 'to rise in the world he carried a hod .
Now Tim had a sort of a tipplin 'way,
With the love of the liquor he was born,
An' to help him on with his work each day,
He'd a drop of the craythur ev'ry morn.
(Chorus :)
Whackfolthedah, dance to your partner,
Welt the flure yer trotters shake,
Wasn't it the truth I told you,
Lots of fun at Finnegan's Wake.

One morning Tim was rather full,
His head felt heavy which made him shake,
He fell from the ladder and broke his skull,
So they carried him home his corpse to wake.
They rolled him up in a nice clean sheet,
And laid him out upon the bed,
With a gallon of whiskey at his feet,
And a barrel of porter at his head.
(Chorus :) Whackfolthedah…

His friends assembled at the wake,
And Mrs. Finnegan called for lunch,
First they brought in tay and cake,
Then pipes, tobacco, and whiskey punch.
Miss Biddy O'Brien began to cry,
"Such a neat clean corpse, did you ever see,
Arrah, Tim mavourneen, why did you die?"
"Ah, hould your gab," said Paddy McGee.
(Chorus :) Whackfolthedah…

Then Maggy O'Connor took up the job,
“Biddy,” says she, “you're wrong, I'm sure,”
But Biddy gave her a belt in the gob,
And left her sprawling on the floor;
Oh, then the war was all the rage,
Twas woman to woman and man to man,
Shillelagh law did all engage,
And a row and a ruction soon began.
(Chorus :) Whackfolthedah…

Then Micky Maloney raised his head,
When a noggin of whiskey flew at him,
It missed and falling on the bed,
The liquor scattered over Tim;
Bedad he revives, see how he rises,
And Timothy rising from the bed,
Says, "Whirl your liquor round like blazes,
Thanam o'n dhoul, do ye think I'm dead?"
[Irish, “Soul to the devil…”]
(Chorus :) Whackfolthedah…

It should be noted that in the title of the novel the apostrophe denoting the genitive is missing in contrast to the ballad, so that “Finnegans Wake” becomes “Finnegans awaken” (a whole family? All Finnegans?) - or, according to the story told, that waking up ( wake ) from a dream; that wake can also be called vortex fits in with this novel, where everything is swirled around, all the better. The main character becomes a multitude of people, and that corresponds completely to the circumstances in the book, because the Finnegan (s) appear there too, albeit - like all the protagonists of the novel - under changing names (Fine Egan, Fillagain, Finfoefum, Finnimore, Finniche etc., with different meanings) and with different roles: he is Finn, the mythical forefather of the Finns, but also Finn Mac Cumhail, his (historical) Irish doppelganger, and many others. But the story of the drinking song also appears in the novel, albeit in a different form: the sound of the uncorking of a whiskey bottle wakes him from the dead, and the friends explain to him that his successor has already been found and put him back in the coffin.

The main motif of the drinking song are the death and rebirth of Finnegan and thus the change and the return, but also the uncertainty of reality, and these are also the leitmotifs of the novel: "His return becomes the constant return of a recurring principle throughout the book" , writes Michael Grossmann , and Jean Paris works this out as an essential difference between the Wake and its predecessor: "In Ulysses, a hundred leitmotifs remind us of its immortality ... The only law in Finnegans Wake is metamorphosis, the infinite flow of our uncertain world".

literature

  • Markus Bandur: “I prefer a wake”. Berio's Sinfonia , Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Eco's poetics of the 'open work of art'. In: Luciano Berio: Music Concepts , New Series 128. Edition text and criticism, Munich, 2005, pp. 95-109, ISBN 3-88377-784-6
  • Bernard Benstock: Joyce-Again's Wake: An Analysis of Finnegans Wake. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1965.
  • John Bishop: Finnegans Wake: Joyce's Book of the Dark. University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0-299-10824-3 .
  • Ito Eishiro: The Japanese Elements of Finnegans Wake: Jishin, Kaminari, Kaji, Oyaji. In: Joycean Japan, No. 15. The James Joyce Society of Japan, June 16, 2004, pp. 36-50.
  • Adaline Glasheen: Third Census of Finnegans Wake: An Index of the Characters and Their Roles. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1977.
  • John Gordon: Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary . Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1986.
  • Stanislaus Joyce : My brother's keeper . Translated by Arno Schmidt . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-518-22375-5 .
  • Roland McHugh: Annotations to Finnegans Wake . (Report. Ed.) Baltimore, 1991, ISBN 0-8018-4190-9 .
  • Klaus Reichert : Multiple sense of writing. To Finnegans Wake. Suhrkamp Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-518-11525-1 .
  • Klaus Reichert, Fritz Senn (ed.): James Joyce: Finnegans Wake. Collected approximations German . Edition Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, 1989, ISBN 978-3-518-11524-4 .
  • Arno Schmidt : Messages from books and people 2: Seven original radio essays . 2006 at cpo; Recordings by Süddeutscher Rundfunk 1956, 1958–60, 1963, 1969, 1974 (9 audio CDs and booklet)
  • William York Tindall: A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake . Syracuse, NY 1969, ISBN 0-8156-0385-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roland McHugh: Annotations to Finnegans Wake . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1980.
  2. ↑ a b Catrin Siedenbiedel: Metafictionality in Finnegans Wake . In: text & theorie Volume 4, p. 29. Königshausen & Neumann.
  3. ↑ After Jean Paris: James Joyce in self-testimonies and image documents . Rowohlt 1960, p. 169.
  4. ↑ Ernst von Glasersfeld in an interview. Quoted from Günter Hack: Constructivism and creativity . Austrian Broadcasting Corporation , April 20, 2008.
  5. ^ A b Jean Paris: James Joyce in self-testimonies and image documents . Rowohlt 1960.
  6. ↑ Catrin Siedenbiedel: Metafiktionalität in Finnegans Wake . In: text & theorie Volume 4, p. 9. Königshausen & Neumann.
  7. ↑ Monthly must see cinema: Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Irish Film Institute, accessed August 15, 2015 .
  8. ↑ Andreas Platthaus: The fat and the thin Joyce. Illegible? Indescribable! Nicolas Mahler draws “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . November 5, 2020, p. 11 ( faz.net [accessed November 15, 2020]).
  9. ↑ Nicolas Mahler, James Joyce: Finnegans Wake (=  mini kuš! No. 92 ). Grafiskie stāsti (komikss.lv), Riga 2020, ISBN 978-9934-58130-4 .
  10. ^ P. 383 of the first edition of Finnegans Wake or in the edition of Penguin Books, 1992, ISBN 0-14-018556-9 .
  11. ↑ Murray Gell-Mann: Interview on December 16, 1990 in Pasadena (CA), USA . In: A Unifying Vision of the Natural World. Academy of Achievement 1991.
  12. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition. Houghton Mifflin Co. 2006.
  13. ↑ Michael H. Begnal: Bend Sinister: Joyce, Shakespeare, Nabokov , in: Modern Language Studies, Selinsgrove (PA), 1985.
  14. ↑ p. 97.
  15. ↑ Michael Grossmann: Comments on Finnegans Wake , in: Arbeit zu James Joyce , 2007 (quoted from < http://www.anracom.com/forum/grossmann/pdf/aboutfinn.pdf >).