As I discussed in “The Prankquean’s Riddle,” one of the issues raised by the riddle — “Why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease?” — is the enigmatic question of identity.

Some ways of glossing the riddle include “Why do I look like you?” or “Why do I look like our children?” or “Why are we a family; what makes us a family (the Porter family, a pod of peas)?”

What is a family, anyway? What am “I,” that I can resemble or be something at all?

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Since humans are social creatures, our identity has much of its roots in others with whom we interact.

It’s a little like the old adage in theatre that the one role that cannot be acted is a king: it’s all the other actors’ reactions to another actor that convince us he is a king. And even in real life, someone who says he is a king but is not recognized and treated by others as one is functionally not a king, even if he has a legitimate claim to a throne.

I would argue that much of what we call “identity” works in a similar way, and it is thus dependent on the reactions of others. This phenomenon is perhaps easiest to see in examples of racial “passing,” where a person has ancestry of a certain minority group but is light-skinned enough to “pass” for a white person. In these cases, the “passing” person is perceived by others to be white and is thus treated by others in ways that they would treat white people in certain situations. That person might “really be” part of a different group – just as a scion of royalty might “really be” a king – but if no one else recognizes it and if no one else therefore treats that person as that particular identity, that person functionally (for all intents and purposes, in ways that cash out in material consequences in society) is not.

I’ve been thinking of this concept of identity – apropos of the Wake – in terms of competing stories. Our culture has a bunch of stories about different groups and identities, and individuals tell themselves stories about themselves in response to these stories, trying to position their narratives of self with those broader social narratives.

Seen in this way, identity ultimately has its roots in the other and the other’s reactions to the individual.

In other words, rather than understanding the self as an essence, some static “true me” that one can somehow discover to provide a stable identity and meaning to life, and a connection to a family or lineage or the past, the self might better be conceived as a collection of stories that are always changing and always in competition with the stories that others tell about us and about the groups that we supposedly belong to.

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The idea that the self is not some fixed, static essence accords nicely with the Buddhist ideas to which I alluded in my last post. Seen from this perspective, there are no stable “things” lurking behind the flux of Becoming: under this view, Plato was wrong to believe that there are eternal Essences or Ideas that manifest in the world.

Plato, you will recall, argued that there is a World of Forms that contains the Ideas that become manifest in the physical world of our experience. To Plato, the leaves we see on trees are not ultimate reality: they are mere copies of the Idea of Leaf, the Form of a Leaf. It is the Idea, he believed, that allows us to recognize all those very different manifestations as variations on the Idea.

However, according to the Buddhist perspective that I referenced above — which includes the notion that there is no stable self or permanent essence to anything — there is no Form of Leaf underlying all manifest leaves. There is only a collection of ever-changing objects. The Idea of “Leaf,” to the extent that the Idea actually exists, is not a fixed essence that precedes manifest reality and exists apart from it; instead, the Idea of Leaf is a mental abstraction created by humans in response to reality, a rough approximation that humans create to navigate the world. I am suggesting that that there are no stable, static things that exist behind the phenomenal world.

An example I first encountered in Nietzsche’s writings makes this perhaps elusive idea of “no things” clearer. When we see lightning, we might say something like, “The lightning flashes.” Grammar compels us to put that sentence in the form of subject-verb. However, there is not actually a separate thing called “lightning” that does an action called “flashes.” The lightning is the flashing. It’s just that the conventions of grammar compel us to invent a thing and project it into the phenomenon. But there is no “thing.” There is only the action, which happens and then is gone.

It reminds me of these beautiful lines from Yeats:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Just as there is not lightning apart from the flashing, there is arguably no dancer apart from the dancing, or at least not one to be known. The dancer is the dancing. And so it is for all “things” and all “actions.” At this very moment, I am the process of composing this post, and you, at this (different) moment, are the process of reading and thinking about the post. There is no “I” that exists out in the universe that is somehow separate from what I’m doing right now, separate from all the constant changes and fluctuations of my body and mind.

In much the same way, how can we tell the Idea of Leaf from leaves? There is no separate “Ideal Leaf” that exists apart from manifest leaves.

To the extent that “I” exist, I exist as the Idea of Leaf does: as an abstraction; more precisely, as a series of mental abstractions and stories that my consciousness narrates about this being called “I” that it induces from various situations I’ve been in.

Certainly, this “I” exists in some sense because some of these abstractions are general statements about the abilities that this ever-changing collection of molecules tends to have, at least at certain times and in certain ways. I know, for instance, that “I” am not terribly skilled at basketball, and if I had to place a bet on whether “I” would win a one-on-one basketball game against another collection of molecules conventionally called “Lebron James,” then I would bet on Lebron.

And certainly my mind narrates all kinds of other stories about this “I” — many of them more embellished, fictionalized, and questionable. I tell myself (and others) stories about my relationships, my work, my childhood, my personality, etc. These stories are in flux: they change over time, but there are certain consistent elements to them. And I develop these stories in relation to other stories – things I’ve been told about my family, my neighborhood, my schools, my gender, my race, my class, my ideas about my experiences, etc. In some cases, my stories about me align with those broader stories about groups I supposedly belong to; in other cases, my stories about me resist or challenge those other stories.

My point is this: while “I” exist as a collection of abstractions and stories – and while “I” exist as a label for the constantly transforming collection of molecules and consciousness arising out of those molecules – there appears to be no permanent self beyond these mental phenomena, these sets of stories and these general but elastic tendencies of this collection of molecules.

What am I, at the end of the day? I’m stories. I’m a bunch of abstractions and narratives built on the back of a continual flux.

In the words of the Buddhists, I am “empty.” I arise mutually with everything else: everything I am is a product of my environment; there’s not even a clear boundary between “inside” and “outside”: my every breath draws in some of my environment and transforms my environment; so too does my every action alter the world. Why should my concept of “I” stop at the ends of my fingertips and not extend to the keyboard, or to the words that I craft with it? How can you tell the blogger from the blog?

Everywhere I look for a permanent “self,” I find only a flux of riverrun. The closest thing I have to a self are stories.

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And yet most people don’t think of themselves as stories.

They experience themselves as stable things — an essence, a self — that partake in all of these identity categories that are, to their way of thinking, equally stable things, and they encounter a world of others – stable others who are part of equally stable categories that can be judged. Even when people are wracked with self-doubt and apprehension, they tend to conceive of themselves as a “person wracked with self-doubt and apprehension,” and they maintain a faith that there is a stable self that they can be concerned and worried and curious about, a “real me” that they seek to discover or worry that they may fail to live up to. At bottom, most people are confident that there is a “self.”

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Finnegans Wake is a radical challenge to these conventional conceptions of self and identity. It dares us to understand ourselves not as essences locked into a zero-sum competition with other essences (and who can judge others by whichever Platonic Forms they embody) but as stories – tales that we have crafted and that we could, perhaps, narrate a different way if we so choose.

I think of that passage from Portrait of the Artist where Stephen gives a map of himself and (some ways of narrating) his identity (that is, frames in which to consider himself):

Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe

What am “I”? There are many tales told. Am I an “American”? From a certain narrative frame, yes. Am I a “man” who is “white”? Again, from certain narrative frames, sure. But there are other narrative frames where all of those designations can be called into question or rendered trivial.

There are many ways to narrate my story of myself to myself and to others. What about narrating my story as, say, an inhabitant of the Pale Blue Dot of our planet, in whose interest it is to cooperate with other such inhabitants?

In which situations are which frames of reference most useful, and in which situations are many of them a hindrance? The best way to tell the story will vary, depending on the situation and the audience and the goals. But it’s the people who refuse to understand all of it as a story, the people who cling desperately to a “self” and an “identity” at the bottom, who will close themselves off from broader possibilities for their lives and for the world as a whole.

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William Blake wrote, “Distinguish therefore States from Individuals in those States.” Among other things, this declaration insists on a difference between people and the various conceptions they have about themselves, conceptions that they insist on taking to be essences.

One way to describe the purpose of art – or, at least, some kinds of (the best) art – is to free individuals from “states,” from their belief in the fixed reality of some of the stories about who they are. Finnegans Wake is such a work.

Published during World War II – a time when nationalist and racialist narratives were taken to be such stable “states” and were creating havoc across the globe – Finnegans Wake dares us to imagine telling our story in a different way, not as members of antagonistic tribes whose ghostly essences live in Plato’s dreary other world, but as a global and creative community, intermixing as surely as the world’s languages mix in the Wake. Here Comes Everybody. Guilt and glory. “It is the same told of all. Many.”

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And so what does all of this have to do with the Prankquean?

She asks, “Why do I am alook alike […]?” Do. Am. Look like. Three verbs: doing, being, seeming.

What we are, ultimately, is the doing and seeming: our actions and appearances. In a sense, it’s wrong that say that that is what we “are”: it would be better to say that we “become.” On the back of our fluctuating characteristics, our minds form the stories of what the self “is” — the “I am” — the stories of a stable being. But they are just that: stories. We are all constantly in danger of forgetting that they are stories, in danger of taking our tales of ourselves as a Fixed Essence. A Self. An Identity. A set of stable Identities. What William Blake called “states,” the ideas that we mistake for individuals, the ideas that trap and constrain us.

The Prankquean’s riddle, if we allow it to work on us — and, more broadly, if we allow the whole of Finnegans Wake or literature or art to work on us — may begin the process of shaking us out of these “states.” Like the Prankquean at Van Hoother’s door, art like the Wake comes to us to disturb our peace and equilibrium, our naïve Innocence. It confuses and threatens us, dares to suggest that we are not our stories of ourselves. It dares to suggest that our normal, everyday consciousness is a kind of dream. And it can initiates a Fall that is also a Rise into new understandings, one that can lead us from a kneejerk rejection of its challenge (“Unlikelihud”) to affirmation (“Am liking it”) and wisdom (the Thunderword), a process that entails accepting all parts of the universe, the contrary forces that are eternally at play and encouraging ever new stories.

You are not the being you fondly dream you are. To read Joyce’s work closely, to study art closely, is to feel the call to wake.