Tag Archives: The Prankquean

William Blake’s Contraries and Finnegans Wake

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“It was of a night,” begins the Prankquean paragraph. It’s an opening that suggests traditional beginnings of stories, but the odd phrasing reminds me of the opening lines of William Blake’s most famous and most anthologized poem, “The Tyger”:

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night

The phrase “forests of the night” sounds strangely abstract, and Joyce’s clause “It was of a night” is even more so, using the indefinite article, rather than the definite: it is impossible to know where we are in time or space. It’s not even that it was night – it was of a night. Some indefinite night. Like Blake, Joyce evokes a hidden quality of the night, something that is universal and nonspecific. In Finnegans Wake, this aspect corresponds to the Unconscious, the dark parts of our mind.

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The Prankquean

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Book 1, Chapter 1 of Finnegans Wake consists largely of a survey of all existence to show that the fallen Finnegan/HCE is the substance of the world around us. Everywhere we look, from the landscape to the history found in museums to books and poems and stories, we find variations on the same story, the old tale of the Fall of Man peeking through.

One of the set pieces in the chapter concerns the encounter of “Jarl Van Hoother” with “the Prankquean.” It’s an example of how even a folk story and oral poem like this (the “first peace of illiterative porthery” or alliterative poetry) contains variations of the same Eternal Tale. In other words, it is Finnegans Wake condensed down into a paragraph (arguably every paragraph is Finnegans Wake condensed down into a paragraph — every part contains the whole).

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