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Answer: What is Finnegans Wake mean?
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It has been called "a work of fiction which combines a body of fables ... with the work of analysis and deconstruction".: 210–211 It is significant for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works in the Western canon. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years and published in 1939, Finnegans Wake was Joyce's final work. The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, which blends standard English words with neologistic portmanteau words and puns in multiple languages to unique effect. Many critics believe the technique was Joyce's attempt to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams, because of the way concepts, people and places become amalgamated in dream consciousness. It is an attempt by Joyce to combine many of his aesthetic ideas, with references to other works and outside ideas woven into the text; Joyce said, "Every syllable can be justified". Due to its linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and abandonment of narrative conventions, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public. However, it has a devoted cult following, and some people commit long periods of study to it and hold the book in high aesthetic regard.
Despite the obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book's central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot, but key details remain elusive. The book discusses, in an unorthodox fashion, the Earwicker family, comprising the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book, in a nonlinear dream narrative, follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle. Many noted Joycean scholars such as Samuel Beckett and Donald Phillip Verene link this cyclical structure to Giambattista Vico's seminal text La Scienza Nuova (The New Science), upon which they argue Finnegans Wake is structured.
Joyce began working on Finnegans Wake shortly after the 1922 publication of Ulysses. By 1924 installments of Joyce's new avant-garde work began to appear, in serialized form, in Parisian literary journals The Transatlantic Review and transition (sic), under the title "fragments from Work in Progress". The actual title of the work remained a secret until the book was published in its entirety, on 4 May 1939. Initial reaction to Finnegans Wake, both in its serialized and final published form, was largely negative, ranging from bafflement at its radical reworking of the English language to open hostility towards its lack of respect for the conventions of the genre.
The work has since come to assume a preëminent place in English literature. Anthony Burgess has lauded Finnegans Wake as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page". The prominent literary academic Harold Bloom has called it Joyce's masterpiece, and, in The Western Canon (1994), wrote that "if aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon, [Finnegans Wake] would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante".
Finnegans Wake can be appreciated in view of Joyce's entire oeuvre. All of Joyce's work was set in a realistic version of Dublin with recurrent characters. Joyce saw the Wake as a logical follow-up to Ulysses, a book which meticulously follows the progression of the 24 hours of the day. Finnegans Wake, he said, "is a book of the night", and has been suggested to take place in the mind of a dreaming drunk somewhere in Dublin.
Joyce delighted in the willful complexity of the work, sometimes rewriting pages with his assistants on the grounds that it "was not obscure enough". Joyce had a rich sense of humour, a precocious intellect, and was aware of his reputation for writing unwieldy books. Tongue in cheek, he famously quipped that making it obscure was the only way to ensure the work's immortality since it would force scholars to continue studying it for long periods of time.
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