Finnegans Wake I.1 is a survey of the fallen world, a prelude to the novel. At the end, whiskey is spilled on the body of the fallen Finnegan, the All-Father. He begins to rise, but the mourners at his Wake hold him down and tell him to go back to sleep: the universe is predicated on his fall and death, the splitting open of the cosmic egg so that his many children, his dream selves, can live their lives. This entire concept is an analogy for the arising of individuality out of the flux of the universe, as we feel and fall.

The mourners tell him to be easy and rest. Everything is going along just fine without him, and someone is coming to replace him, someone who is “respunchable for the hubbub caused in Edensborough.” Check those initials: HCE is his dream avatar, the next version of the ancient Finnegan. He is guilty and responsible for causing the conflicts of the fallen world, the battles between the divided parts of the Eternal Human. He is the one who is “punchable,” knocked out by the Cad in I.2, shot down by Buckley in II.3. But, since he is also the Cad/Buckley, he too is the one who does the punching. He is Everybody. He is human nature itself, all sides of the combat, the eternal story that will ever be told with continual variations.

As the mourners tell him to rest in I.1, they let the dead/sleeping Finnegan know that they will be his “ombre players” and rake the gravel over his grave.

I saw that phrase on a first read as the card game ombre (I actually thought the game appears in a marginal note of II.2, but that turned out to be euchre).

But the word “ombre” also suggests shadow (umber) and shade/ghost. To the extent that the mourners at the Wake represent all of us, laying the past to rest so that we can live, we are the ghosts of that past. We are the past reborn in the present day, as every generation renews the story. We play our games of life in the shadow of the past, whether we use the symbol of card games like ombre or children’s games (as in Chapter II.1).

But I missed the obvious meaning on both my first read and the second. Back in 2021, as I was working through the text for a third time, my five-year-old asked me to teach her Spanish words, and when I got to the word for “man,” I smacked my head for not thinking of it sooner.

So long as we feel and fall, we play the role of an individual. But in the core of our being — our becoming — we are at one with the flux of the cosmos, and at one with our conception of a past that we must continually put down so that we may continue that story.