“It was of a night,” begins the Prankquean paragraph. It’s an opening that suggests traditional beginnings of stories, but the odd phrasing reminds me of the opening lines of William Blake’s most famous and most anthologized poem, “The Tyger”:

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night

The phrase “forests of the night” sounds strangely abstract, and Joyce’s clause “It was of a night” is even more so, using the indefinite article, rather than the definite: it is impossible to know where we are in time or space. It’s not even that it was night – it was of a night. Some indefinite night. Like Blake, Joyce evokes a hidden quality of the night, something that is universal and nonspecific. In Finnegans Wake, this aspect corresponds to the Unconscious, the dark parts of our mind.

To be clear, I’m not asserting that Joyce is deliberately echoing Blake here. I’m merely pointing out that Joyce’s opening resonates with one of the most famous lines in literature. Whether Joyce consciously intended a resemblance is unknown, and ultimately unimportant: perhaps the phrase bubbled up from the depths of his unconscious, where Blake’s “Tyger” had taken root.

Blake’s poem is part of the 1794 collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience, subtitled Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The two collections, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, each also produced separately by Blake, are composed of poems that are clearly meant to be compared to each other. Many poems in Songs of Innocence have companion pieces in Songs of Experience, each providing different perspectives on the same (or similar) subjects. The companion piece of “The Tyger,” for instance, is “The Lamb.”

As Blake’s subtitle indicates, he considers both Innocence and Experience to be mental states that can (and do) exist in the same individual. He does not conceive of them as proceeding in a linear chronological fashion, where Experience follows Innocence, where people start out innocent in childhood and then grow to maturity and lose that purity as they gain experience. To translate this point into symbols of the Christian tradition (relevant to Finnegans Wake), Blake’s perspective is not simply that there was a Fall from an Innocent state of Paradise to an Experienced state. Songs of Innocence and of Experience presents both children and adults who each embody various aspects of these contrary states, and the collection implies that a full picture of reality can only be achieved by combining the best aspects of each state.

There are drawbacks and benefits to both Innocence and Experience, as Blake explores. At its worst, Innocence can lead to naivety, ignorance, and even narcissism, perpetuating exploitation and sorrow (see “The Chimney Sweeper” poems for a stunning example). At its worst, Experience can produce cynicism and hopeless despair, along with fear and anger. And yet Innocence enables a joyful appreciation of life, while Experience assists an individual in identifying the negative parts of the world more clearly so that they can be improved. The best parts of each state can work together.

Blake believed that it was possible for individuals not only to enter the states of Innocence and Experience in turn but to arrive at a higher state of Organized Innocence, where they could reclaim an Innocent joy while still acknowledging the lessons of Experience. These two “Contrary States of the Soul,” then, should ideally cooperate, and out of their dialectical tension comes wisdom. As Blake puts it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Without Contraries, there is no progression.”

What in blazes does this have to do with Finnegans Wake? Well, for starters, the characters of Shem and Shaun – the sons and component halves of HCE – signify among other things the universe’s contrary forces, which ultimately must learn to cooperate and find themselves in each other. That is, they must come to recognize themselves as part of a cohesive wholeness, much in the way that Giordano Bruno held that the opposite forces of the universe are ultimately one (Joyce calls this idea the “coincidance of contraries” in I.3, emphasis on the “dance”). In this sense, the Wake is Blakean to the core. We can read the battle of the brothers – which is the brawl at the wake of Tim Finnegan, which stands for all the conflicts of history – and their ultimate reconciliation, followed by their descent once more into combat, as the process of contrary forces engaging in what Blake called the “Mental Wars of Eternity,” driving forward progression for both society and the individual. [Here, Hegel’s philosophy of dialectical opposition of thesis and antithesis is worth comparing]. The brothers can represent Innocence and Experience, reason and energy, the mind and the body, introversion and extroversion, self and other, good and evil, and so on.

All of these forces are necessary in the world and in the psyche. To reject any of them by refusing to acknowledge their existence and/or necessity is to create suffering.

Other pairs in the Wake signify contrary forces as well, including – drumroll, please – the Prankquean and Jarl Van Hoother, the characters I have talked about in the last several posts.

One set of contraries I’ve been considering here, especially in regard to other episodes in the Wake, are fact and fiction, nature (as in Blake’s “The Lamb”) and artifice (as in “The Tyger”).

Among the many contrary forces we can map onto Van Hoother and the Prankquean, we can take Van Hoother to be Innocence and fact roused into action by Experience and fiction. Here, he would represent nature conceived in dull, mechanistic terms (bare fact), as opposed to nature conceived imaginatively as a source of creativity (the fiction of storytelling). The symbols could also be attributed the other way around: the Prankquean could signify the dynamic unruliness of nature and natural energy (fact) disrupting the rational ego-boundaries of the Jarl (fiction). [I will return to the tension between fact and fiction in later posts, as fiction appears to have a privileged place in the Wake, especially in I.5]

The conflict of these contraries produces a state closer to Blake’s Organized Innocence by the end of the paragraph, which is nevertheless ready to begin the cycle again.

As Shem and Shaun summarize the process near the end of the Wake (in their guise of Muta and Juva),

So that when we shall have acquired unification we shall pass on to diversity and when we shall have passed on to diversity we shall have acquired the instinct of combat and when we shall have acquired the instinct of combat we shall pass back to the spirit of appeasement?

It is significant that these contraries are halves of the same person because the battle of the Prankquean and Van Hoother, like the battle of Shem and Shaun, is not just a symbol for historical conflicts – it also signifies an inner process. Indeed, we could say that the Wake makes those historical conflicts into symbols of the inner process, or that it encourages us to see history as such a collection of symbols.

This inner process entails recognizing contrary forces and — rather than siding with one of them or denying one of them — allowing their interaction to spur on creativity.

When Blake’s speaker asks the tiger, “Did He who made the lamb make thee?” it is, on one level, a question of theodicy: whether the source of evil is the same as the source of good. But on another level, the answer is clearly yes. Both “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” — as objects of art — were made by the same artisan.

Similarly, Innocence and Experience inhere in the same mind, are “made” by the same mind. Ideas of fact and fiction, too.

All of these contraries can be coordinated within the same mind, brought into a state of dynamic interplay — a new state of Organized Innocence, which looks a lot like Innocence but without the naivety, where the insights perceived through Experience have been incorporated without the cynicism or resentment.

The way this happens is through an internal process, which Blake illustrates in his long poems and which Joyce explores throughout the Wake. Their works – especially their bizarre artistic styles that challenge conventional expectations – stimulate this kind of internal process.

The goal is the liberation of the individual and the society, casting off what Blake calls the “mind-forged manacles” and the “Spectre.”

As Joyce puts it,

And they all drank free.

Or, to use Blake’s terms

Such visions have appeared to me as I my ordered race have run

Jerusalem is named Liberty among the Sons of Albion

Blake’s long poems point toward a state of Eternity in which the contraries exist in a dynamic tension that drives creativity and social progress. This state can never be a final resting point but is a continual development fueled by productive conflict. I take Finnegans Wake to be pointing toward a similar notion of dynamic tension, one that I will discuss in future posts.