Every telling has a taling, and that’s the he and the she of it

Finnegans Wake, I.8

In many ways, Finnegans Wake is a book about storytelling. It’s a collection of stories. In some places, full stories are told from beginning to end; in other places, they abruptly start and stop, get interrupted, meld into other tales, or get lost in confusion (like the history of HCE in I.2-4).

As I’ve discussed before, Finnegans Wake seems to be suggesting that each person is similarly a collection of stories, a series of tales told. We tell ourselves stories about “who we are”: our personal histories, our families, our “race,” our gender, etc., etc. However, I think the Wake suggests that these stories aren’t stable, and that people often take one story (or set of related stories) as a stable essence (a “Who I Am”) that can lead to suffering, as well as to belligerent conflict with others. Finnegans Wake is a work of art that acts upon us, if we will let it, to dissolve these stable “Selfhoods” by recognizing that they are stories that could be narrated differently.

I continue to agree with all of the above, but I think it’s important to add a qualification: the above paragraph does not deny that there are bare facts about ourselves and the world, facts that must be acknowledged by any reasonable story we tell about ourselves or the world.

Obviously, it’s not true that I am “whatever story I tell,” in the simple sense of that phrase. I can’t actually become 50 feet tall by telling myself that I am. I can’t suddenly gain skills by telling myself that I have them. And I can’t change my feelings about things by wishing them away through storytelling.

When I write that I am an ever-changing collection of molecules that I’m always telling stories about, I don’t mean to imply that any and all stories are equally consistent with the facts about reality. Our storytelling must be constrained by these facts, as best we can determine them, if we want to get the most out of our experience.

If I’m struggling with a task, for instance, I can’t make my problem go away by telling myself I’m not struggling. Of course, I’m free to try to tell myself I’m not, but either I’m going to fail or I’m going to succeed at deluding myself (and routinely deluding oneself is a recipe for disaster).

Instead, what I can do is acknowledge the bare fact that I’m struggling, and then change the story I tell myself about the bare fact. To invoke a cliché, I can see the situation not as a crisis but an opportunity. In “narrating my experience differently,” while still recognizing facts, I can actually change how I engage with those facts and how I feel about them.

To acknowledge facts about the self isn’t to assert that there is some eternal “I” that exists as a Platonic essence. Discovering facts is just the process of abstracting details about this collection of atoms called “me” – details that are so generally accurate that to deny them would be absurd. Sure, the atoms in my body are always fluctuating, so there’s a sense in which I can’t be said to have a stable height; but “five foot ten” is firmly within the range of those fluctuations, and is incredibly useful in just about every practical context, and “fifty feet tall” is outright false.

The reason this subject is on my mind is that I’ve been thinking about conflicts I’ve seen that have their basis not in stories but in people’s inability to acknowledge facts. Take, for instance, climate change. Acknowledgment of man-made climate change and denial of it aren’t two “different stories” (with the implication that they’re both equally valid ways of thinking about things with an equal chance to be correct).

One of them is an acceptance of fact, and the other is delusion, and delusion is the dark side of storytelling.

Ideally, we should acknowledge the range of stories that we can tell about the bare facts. But we should also acknowledge which stories are disconnected from reality and should therefore be regarded as existing mostly in the realm of fantasy.

Finnegans Wake shows us how HCE’s reputation is ruined by storytelling, by rumor-mongering that spirals out of control and probably vastly exaggerates whatever offense he committed, if any. Finnegans Wake might teach us that we’re all a collection of stories, but it also cautions us against taking as accurate all of the stories we hear. This lesson might especially be true of the stories we want to believe about ourselves.

If wisdom entails seeing ourselves not as a stable essence but a collection of stories that can be narrated differently, it also entails puncturing our faulty fantasies about ourselves and bringing those stories more into line with the bare facts.

I might argue that both realizations constitute kinds of Joycean epiphany, which is a subject I might explore in a future post.

For now, I’ll end with this thought: the puncturing of fantasy happens most poignantly at the very end of Finnegans Wake when ALP realizes that the stories she’s told herself about her husband and their relationship are not true.

Addressing her sleeping husband (the fallen HCE, the dreamer), she realizes that he is to be resurrected as a younger version of himself, who will take for his wife a younger version of ALP (not this old version that is fading out). Her fantasy of her husband rising will not go as she had anticipated and narrated for herself.

But you’re changing, acoolsha, you’re changing from me, I can feel. Or is it me is? I’m getting mixed. Brightening up and tightening down. Yes, you’re changing, sonhusband, and you’re turning, I can feel you, for a daughterwife from the hills again

[…]

How small it’s all! And me letting on to meself always. And lilting on all the time. I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You’re only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You’re but a puny.

The truth often deflates the stories with which we dress reality. We can let such deflations depress us, or – realizing that we are creatures of storytelling – we can resolve to reverse the metaphor of clothing, as Joyce does: we can strive to dress our stories with the bare facts, so that the stories of our lives rise out of the facts, make contact with the archetypes that dwell within creativity, and enrich our experience of those facts.

When ALP realizes that her stories of HCE have done little more for her than encouraging her to cling to him, she is able to let go and (re)turn to the Ocean (her father, a higher/earlier version of HCE/Finnegan). And though the final page is shot through with memories – culminating in the one leaf of life that remains (the last page of this very book, still to be finished) – the last sentence finds ALP embracing a “way” that will lead her out of her limiting conceptions of herself and the world, a way that will, as it must, lead her back to renew the cycle.

If ALP’s flowing out to sea is an escape from the cycles of life and death, that escape is found nowhere but *deeper within* those cycles, in a deeper embrace of them. We free ourselves from attachment so that we can enjoy all the more the necessary turning of the wheel, in which all things fade and in which all things are renewed. “Ever building and ever decaying,” as Blake puts it.

If “every telling has a taling,” then not only does every story have an artistry behind it (the crafting or “taling” of the tale), but every telling has an end, a tail. When our stories cease to serve us, we need to end them, and stories that obscure the truth don’t serve anyone.