My favorite comedian, George Carlin, once poked fun at the expression “your own words.” You hear it especially often in classrooms and courtrooms, he noted. “Tell us in your own words….” And then he joked, “Do you really have your own words? I’m using the same words everyone else is using!”

That’s cute. In a way, Finnegans Wake is an attempt to create Joyce’s “own words,” in that comically literal sense. It is unique in literature, in that it’s an example of an author communicating a message in this kind of “his own words.”

But here’s a related question: as an interpreter, do you have your “own Finnegans Wake“? I was talking to someone once who suggested that everyone who reads the Wake has “their own novel,” their own unique book, and he contrasted the reading of the Wake with the watching of a popular movie, where there is one obviously correct and direct narrative that all viewers share.

But is that the case? *Do* you have your own Finnegans Wake? Read on to find out!

In one sense, I guess it’s true you have your own experience of reading the Wake, and your experience won’t be the same as anyone else’s, but this is true of every novel, every movie.

But the idea that you have your “own” Wake is the idea that you can think entirely different things are happening in the novel than someone else does. This is actually not really true, regardless of how confusing Finnegans Wake seems on first glance. There are more or less objective statements we can make about what’s happening in the novel, even though the exact details of what’s happening contain all kinds of references that only some readers might grasp, and even though some words or even syllables of the text summon meanings that are unique to different readers.

For instance, I’ve written already about how I interpret the Prankquean’s riddle, which is my own personal take on its confusing grammar, and I’ve even written about how the word “gruebleen” in the Prankquean episode contains a meaning that is probably unique to me. All those meanings are probably for me alone, although I think I make a good case for the significance of the Prankquean’s riddle in terms of the novel’s overall focus on storytelling and understanding of selfhood.

But what’s objectively true is that that paragraph in I.1 describes the Prankquean coming to Jarl Van Hoother’s castle, disturbing him three times with a riddle, and running away each time. That’s not up for debate. That’s what happens. Even at the end, when it’s unclear whether the Prankquean shoots down Van Hoother (possibly with the help of the dummy) or whether he slams the door in her face, the mixing of those possible endings is the thing that’s happening. The objective fact is that the end of the passage blends together the fall and triumph of Van Hoother. What that blending means is, of course, up for interpretation, but the fact is that it happens.

My stance here may seem needlessly restrictive to some readers, who want Finnegans Wake to be madcap insanity with no real stable meaning, but I take my stance in part because I spent many years at the beginning of my Wake studies basically believing Finnegans Wake was an “anything goes” sort of text. No one “really knows what it’s about,” I told myself. To me, it was all a mystery, all a symphony of strange sounds that you were supposed to let wash over you. Now, I’m not sure I really believed this because I read the guidebooks and worked my way half-heartedly through the novel, and I definitely saw that there were things happening in the book that the guidebooks were correct about. But I think part of me held on to this idea that each guidebook was just giving one interpretation among an infinite.

Here’s the problem: this attitude kept me from really diving into the book and really exploring it. So long as I had it in my head that Finnegans Wake could mean “anything,” it really meant very little to me. Looking back, I see that that point is obvious. A text that truly means anything at all has no value. To say a book means everything is functionally the same as saying it means nothing. It’s a little like saying “God is all things”: if “God” truly is just a word for “every last thing that exists,” then there functionally is no God. If Finnegans Wake means absolutely anything that anybody wants to say it means, then it doesn’t mean anything at all. Why even bother reading it, if it’s just going to mean whatever you want it to mean?

No, the thing that made the text valuable to me — the thing that got me fascinated by it to the point that I wanted to work through it in earnest when I picked it up again in 2020 after almost fifteen years — was my realization that each paragraph was advancing some kind of meaning, sketching out some event or theme related to the whole of the novel. As soon as you grant that there is some objective meaning to be found in each paragraph, something that is objectively “happening” in each paragraph, you can start locating patterns in words and phrases that point to it. This is infinitely more rewarding than just letting nonsense words wash over you and grinning every now and then and going “great pun, Joyce!” when you hear something cute. You’ll get tired of that in no time. But puzzling out meanings that are there waiting to be discovered? Now that holds the attention.

My perspective also means it’s possible to have debates about exactly how to interpret these objective things about the novel. Take, for instance, the trial of Festy King in I.4. There is absolutely a narrative here: ages after HCE, a guy named Festy King rehearses parts of HCE’s story: he is arrested and put on trial. Someone gives testimony and is cross-examined. The judges set the defendant free. The defendant and the witness face different destinies. One is praised and the other is rejected.

All of the above is basically “what happens.” Only after acknowledging that these are objective facts about the episode can we get into the details of all the many things that are being referenced in the episode and what it might mean.

For example, you can observe that King is definitely linked to HCE: he is brought in “under an incompatibly framed indictment […] flying cushats out of his ouveralls and making fesses immodst his forces on the field.” He was making faces but also making feces, just like HCE. The word “immodst” connects him to HCE behaving (allegedly) with “ongentilmensky immodus” in I.2. Like HCE, he may be “framed” (or maybe there’s just a problem with the way the charges were constructed/framed).

To me, what’s most significant is that the end of the Festy King episode marks the first appearance of Shaun and Shem in the novel under those names. They are the two different destinies. Having been glimpsed in the brother battle and its “torgantruce” earlier in I.4 — a conflict between HCE and the Cad in which elements of Shem and Shaun emerge toward the end — the brothers more fully separate from each other and are given their names at the conclusion of the Festy King episode.

But how we attribute the brothers to the characters in the Festy King episode is open to debate. I find myself in disagreement with several critics who have commented on it. Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson identify Festy King with Shaun and the Witness with Shem, and they make those identifications right from the beginning of the episode. Anthony Burgess, in his summary in A Shorter Finnegans Wake concurs.

My own position is closer to William Tindall, who suggests that Festy King is “as composite as Hosty” (a form of the Cad from I.2), “a mixture of father and son.” I’m mostly in agreement when he says the witness is a “Shaun type” and the defense attorney is a “Shem type.” Personally, I’ve come to regard Festy King and the Witness as representing, at first, the two sides of HCE, himself and the Cad. The witness was not just an eyewitness but an “eye, ear, nose and throat witness,” recalling that the Cad in I.2 makes his appraisal of HCE through the “eustacetube,” a body part that connects the ears and throat. I’ve speculated that this reference, linking two ears and one throat, recalls that the Cad, like HCE, had “three men in him” (as it says in I.5): Shem, Shaun, and their combined form as Cad/HCE. During the cross-examination, the witness and attorney manifest the Cad’s separation into Shaun and Shem, which they do properly at the end of the passage. See here, for instance, to read my reflections on a question in this cross-examination that suggests the Fall into ego consciousness (and into the limited positions of either naive materialism or mystic otherworldliness), complete with a bell ringing (the same bell that tolls during HCE’s Fall in I.2). [I describe the witness as a Proto-Shaun there, much as I described one of the brothers in the “torgantruce”]

Once they more obviously separate from each other, the witness becomes Shaun, praised by the “maidies of the bar” (both senses of “bar”), and the defendant/attorney becomes Shem.

Is the above interpretation my “own” FInnegans Wake, in contrast to Campbell, Robinson, Burgess, and even Tindall? Eh. I guess you could call it that, but my point is that all of these critics agree with me about more or less what happens. Different reasonable cases can be made about what it all represents, and the same can be said of any novel, movie, or piece of fiction whatsoever.

This cross-examination, by the way, is written “crossexanimation” — the Brother Battle of history animated by the cross/phallus (the X or Ex), the symbol of both the Fall and the Redemption, as I’ve written about here. I’ll need to compose a post linking it to the cross-examination in III.3, as well as the Mute/Jute episodes in I.1 and IV.1.