The simplest answer to this question – but also maybe the most profound – is that Finnegans Wake is about you. Or, more accurately, it’s about us. All of us (the “Real Us,” 62.26).

Finnegans Wake is written as a dream, and the dreamer – or, at least, the character who represents the dreamer within the book – is called HCE. These letters stand for many things, and are repeated many, many times throughout the book in various combinations of words, but their most important meaning is Here Comes Everybody.

HCE is the humanity common to everyone.

The basic idea of the story is that HCE has committed some kind of offense, about which he feels guilty and for which he is condemned. To the extent that HCE is us, his offense represents the ways we wrong others in our lives, fall short of our expectations for ourselves, or feel guilty over our own desires. For Joyce, it also signifies Oedipal guilt, an unconscious feeling that Freud believed develops out of infantile fantasies of killing the father and taking his place.

This is Joyce’s version of the “Fall of Man.” HCE’s unspecified offense is compared to Adam and Eve’s Original Sin in the Christian tradition – much as the Fall from the Garden ushered in death and sorrow, so too does HCE’s Fall give rise to the battles of his divided aspects, his two sons, and their battles become metaphors for all conflicts throughout history. The story of the brothers shows us, gradually over the course of the book, how forgiveness and reconciliation (the “true conciliation”) can be achieved, and their peace merges them into a new HCE, ready to start the cycle again.

Part of the Christian tradition considers Original Sin the “Felix Culpa” – the happy fault, or the fortunate fall – Joyce calls HCE a “Phoenix culprit!” In some interpretations of the Christian tradition, the Fall was actually a good thing because it necessitated the greater good of redemption. As St. Augustine put it, “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.” One need not be a Christian to see the value of forgiveness, or to see the wisdom of looking at people’s unavoidable faults – the fact that we will all necessarily hurt other people in life – as opportunities for bringing about greater good through forgiveness.

Joseph Campbell – one of the earliest interpreters of Finnegans Wake and co-author of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake – once remarked that he curiously observed how the numbers 11 and 32 recur frequently throughout the Wake. He first decided that the significance was the fall (32) and redemption (11): objects on earth fall at the rate of 32 feet per second per second (a fact Joyce uses symbolically in Ulysses), and 11 is the number of renewal, as it begins a new cycle after 10 (Qabalistic symbolism, based around the numbers 1-10, is everywhere in the Wake). But then Campbell reports that he was one day studying the Bible when he came across a passage that struck him as summing up Finnegans Wake: “For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that He might have mercy on them all.” So he went to write down the chapter and verse, and he saw it was Romans 11:32.

Joyce renders this disobedience with comic symbolism. In the novel, HCE’s crime is never described. At various points, there are hints that he exposed himself, masturbated, urinated, or defecated in public. He was tempted to his crime by two girls in bushes, who may have been urinating or engaging in sexuality activity themselves. He was observed by three soldiers. Later, he is accosted by a “Cad” in the Park, who asks him the time. With a guilty mind, HCE misinterprets the question as an accusation (or a sexual proposition), and he proceeds to vigorously deny all charges against him. But the man doth protest too much. The Cad repeats the defense later that evening to his wife, who repeats it to a priest, who is overheard by another man, and on and on and on the growing rumors spread everywhere until they inspire a scurrilous ballad and destroy HCE’s reputation. The mob that brings down HCE is comprised of his own component parts, the dream characters from within his psyche. In some versions of the story, he is then put on trial, where he is acquitted but then torn limb from limb by the people. In other versions, he imprisons himself for his own safety in Stonehenge or beneath Loch Ness, which serves as his grave. Either way, he is gone. In his wake (as at the wake of Tim Finnegan from the vaudeville song that gives the book its title), brawling chaos breaks loose – which represents the battles of history.

In one passage, the people of Ireland act to “condemn [HCE] so they might convince him, first pharoah, Humpheres Cheops Exarchas, of their proper sins” (62). That is, he is a scapegoat: the people sought to convict him of their own sins. The people project their guilt onto HCE (for good reason: because he is all of them). Yet it is not enough that they accuse him and try to convict him legally: they also wish to convince him that their own sins are “proper” (this word here is an archaic way of saying their “own sins,” but it also suggests that they wanted to convince him that their own offenses were appropriate and thus not really offenses in the way that his sin was). The sentence suggests the psychology of people trying to alleviate themselves of guilt by condemning their own faults in someone else.

The people’s relationship to HCE illustrates our tendency to blame others before we blame ourselves, to overlook our own faults by exaggerating the wrongs of others. To the extent that these people are parts of HCE, they represent how self-condemnation and denunciation of others are often interrelated. Angrily and obsessively fixating on the failures of others can be a way to avoid facing up to our own misdeeds.

The reworking of HCE’s name here into that of a pharaoh – and the suggestion that he was a victim of a French Revolution-style “premiere terror of Errorland [Ireland]” – suggests that the people in this scapegoating mindset conceptualize him as a monarch, patriarch, authority, a force to be resisted and deposed (as the son longs to depose the father in Freud’s Oedipal stage). They do not recognize themselves reflected in him – they are people in error, unable to recognize our shared humanity, incapable of seeing that all people (most of all ourselves) are capable of mistakes, unable to see that Here Comes Everybody.

Yet for Joyce, “A man of genius makes no errors. His errors are his portals of discovery.”

Toward the end of I.4, after describing how smoke issues from the “buttertower” where HCE is buried or hiding – like the smoke announcing a new pope, a signal that there shall be a new HCE, a resurrection – Joyce calls him “tristurned initials, the cluekey to a worldroom beyond the roomwhorld.”

The German word “weltroam” (literally “world room”) means “space.” A “worldroom beyond the roomwhorld” would be a space beyond space (one that apparently is inverted in some way, as signaled by switching the syllables). The passage goes on to compare HCE to a tesseract, which is a geometrical shape that is to a cube as a cube is to a square. If you take a square and make it three dimensional, you get a cube. If you take a cube and make it four dimensional, you get a tesseract. No, our minds cannot picture that. But that would be a space beyond space.

What I think this passage suggests is that HCE is a clue and a key to an escape from our normal, limited ways of viewing the world. The little roomwhorled of our minds and egos – the tiny “room” of egotism and self-regard and self-worry that we are all trapped in, between our ears – can and should be opened to the worldroom beyond, a wider view of things.

HCE is the key to starting to escape the prison of our subjectivity and beginning to see more broadly, more widely, more objectively. Beginning to see things from perspectives beyond our own.

[There are also references to Catholicism in this passage, and “room” may also suggest “Rome.” The implication might be that such self-transcendence includes overcoming the limitations of religious sectarianism]

But how is HCE a key to this?

It’s in the initials. As it says elsewhere in Chapters 2 and 3:

“Here Comes Everybody […] human, erring, condonable.”

The Wake contains the key to breaking out of your roomwhorld and accessing the worldroom: the key has always been acceptance and love and forgiveness. The Fortunate Fall. Phoenix Culprit. Eleven thirty-two.

That’s what the Trinity (H-C-E) is actually about, in the highest sense. 

[Joyce later describes the shamrock – symbol of the Trinity – as a clee, suggesting both the German clee (clover) and the French cle (key)…cle clee, clue key, clover key. The keys to the kingdom: Here Comes Everybody]

[The concept of “keys” comes up repeatedly in the Wake. The word “keys” is one of the final words in the book, and I shall return to this topic and the use of the word “key” throughout the book in another post]

[A few scattered thoughts to conclude: The fact that the letters of HCE are “tristended” suggests Tristan, the replacement for HCE (who will become HCE in the next cycle), and thus it suggests cuckoldry (as he becomes the next husband of the female principle summed up in ALP), as does the word cluekey (cuck-y). “Cluekey” also sounds like “clucky,” the sound of the hen discovering the letter, another recurring image in the text. And it also sounds like “kooky,” which this book – and especially this paragraph of mine speculating on it – certainly is.]

Overall, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a comic and joyful acceptance (and forgiveness) of the flawed nature of humanity. All of us. The Real Us. We would do well to bring its attitude into our everyday lives.