In my last post, I discussed how our storytelling about ourselves, others, and the world should be constrained by the facts of reality. In this post, I explore the value of more fictionalized storytelling, creating narratives that are less bound by the facts of reality but that are no less in touch with creative archetypes.

This latter type of story has tremendous value, so long as it is understood to be imaginary.

There’s a famous account of a Chinese Taoist master who dreamed he was a butterfly. On awakening, he remarked that he wasn’t sure whether he was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly who was dreaming he was a man. It’s a question about identity: which one “is” he?

I’ve noted before that there’s a sense in which we “are” the stories that are told about us. Who you tell yourself you are shapes your experience and behavior, just as who other people think you are influences their reactions to you as well. But there’s another sense in which we “are” simply the contents of our consciousness.

When I read a book and fill my consciousness with vivid images of the characters and situations, feeling their feelings and thinking through their problems – or when I have a vivid dream – there is a sense in which I temporarily “am” those characters and situations during those acts of imagination. And there is a sense in which my experience of “being” those characters can rub off on my behavior in other contexts.

I said in my last post that I can’t become 50 feet tall by telling myself that I am, and that’s true, but there is also a sense in which having vivid daydreams about being that height actually does mean that I temporarily “become” so.

Imagination has an amazing capacity for providing escape – especially for people who desperately need relief from rough circumstances for a little while. And it has great power for simple entertainment. But it can also be a way to shape our attitudes and behavior. Someone who wishes to cultivate virtues like kindness and tolerance will find that reading stories of heroic characters who exhibit such traits can actually help a reader imitate those behaviors. The trick, of course, is not to stop at acts of imagination, but work on observing the self in everyday life and actively applying the lessons gained from imagination. The imagination can help with that, so long as sitting around daydreaming is not the primary activity of a person’s “growth.”

I suspect I’ve been using the word “storytelling” too broadly in my blog posts. I’ve used it to encompass everything from writers making up science fiction tales to people drawing conclusions about their daily life.

Making up fictional stories and daydreaming is one thing. Discovering one’s own characteristics and preferences in everyday situations is another thing. Considering various attitudes that one could adopt to the situations of life is another. Considering different frames through which to conceptualize one’s life is yet another. These are all very different things that could be described as “storytelling.”

Taking a false story as literally true is a way to delude yourself, but so is the tendency (which we all have) to take a set of stories as an essence.

Finnegans Wake asks us to see humans as freer than these limiting conceptions. And its method of liberating its readers is storytelling.

It is, after all, language and storytelling that is the source of redemption in Finnegans Wake. The novel is a celebration of the storytelling instinct: “Tell me all,” implores one of the washerwomen of I.8 famously, “tell me” blending into “elm,” the “stem” of “stem and stone” that is also the pen / phallic implement / wand of creative, artistic power. Earlier in I.8, a washerwoman answers the question of whether she’s listening to the gossipy storytelling about ALP by declaring, “idneed I do,” suggesting that storytelling fulfills a need of the id, the primal part of the psyche.

Finnegans Wake suggests that the Redemption is all about our storytelling, the narratives we spin of ourselves and others and the world. The text acts on us, challenges our understanding of language and storytelling, and dares us to see ourselves as artists who can create ourselves and the world anew. This process happens through our engagement with the text, which is both an act of creativity and an act that will fuel our future creativity.

The idea of storytelling as central to redemption appears, among other places, at the end of the ballad that ends I.2. The French name for an earwig is perce-oreille, so when a scurrilous ballad circulates about HCE (who is known as Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, after the phallic earwig), the name is transformed into Irish and the song is called the Ballad of Persse O’Reilly.

Consider its final verse:

And not all the king’s men nor his horses

Will resurrect his corpus

For there’s no true spell in Connacht or hell

    (bis) That’s able to raise a Cain.

The final line is not just a dirty joke about his impotence: it’s a reference to the two constituent parts of him — Cain and Abel (Shem and Shaun). Together, each taking turns inhabiting both of those Biblical roles, the brothers will “raise a Cain” (in both the dirty joke sense and the exalted spiritual sense of resurrection, which signifies the kind of liberation I describe above). “Bis” indicates that you’re supposed to sing the line twice, one for each brother. But also, it suggests that those brothers are bi(sexual)s who will sublimate a lust for each other, division and reconciliation being erotic phenomena (both, on the one hand, between ourselves and other people, and, on the other, intrapsychically, within ourselves). Once again, the sublime and the dirty co-exist.

The ballad denies that anyone can resurrect HCE with a “true spell,” but ironically the very act of telling his story (through the art/song of the ballad) is a way of making him live again. Suppressed by this denial is the hope for a spell to raise the dead – and the word “spell” suggests spelling, words, the idea that redemption can be found through language and our shaping of it through art.

The ballad imagines a true spell that can connect or “Connacht” those scattered pieces of the Fall.

Finnegans Wake itself is such a spell. It’s an incantation to raise the dead, to lift our fallen parts into reconciliation with our brothers and sisters, to finally achieve atonement (at-one-ment) with the world from which we are divided, a process that can never be complete but toward which we can ever strive.