It occurs to me that I should have a page where I lay out the “story” in Finnegans Wake, such as it is.

It is sometimes said that Finnegans Wake doesn’t have a story, which is not quite true. There is a sort of story being told, in a very unusual and roundabout way, and I would explain it something like this:

A man who goes by the initials HCE (H.C. Earwicker, or Here Comes Everybody, an everyman figure) is rumored to have committed some kind of offense in Phoenix Park or to have been the victim of an offense. We never find out what it is. We only hear some of the stories about it.

In some tellings, the offense involves two girls, and the implication is that HCE did something sexual, like masturbating while spying on them or violating them in some other way. In other tellings, the offense involves another man (a “Cad,” who is HCE’s own alter ego) who accosts HCE, questions him, propositions him, and/or tries to rob/attack him. In still other tellings, it involves three men (soldiers or tailors, who appear to be aspects of the Cad), who either attack HCE and/or spy upon his crime.

Regardless of the exact offense, the Cad and/or the three men spread rumors about HCE. These rumors spread far and wide and destroy HCE’s reputation, symbolically killing him. One way or another, HCE vanishes.

In this state of death, HCE is replaced by two men, his sons who represent his aspects: an extroverted side (Shaun, the politician and exoteric priest) and an introverted side (Shem, the artist and mystic). Shem and Shaun battle with each other, often over a girl named Issy, and their conflicts sum up all the battles of history. Through Shem’s art, the brothers become reconciled and unite into a new HCE, who marries a grown-up Issy so that the whole cycle can start over again.

Through it all, HCE’s wife or female aspect, called Anna Livia or ALP, is responsible for both his destruction and rebirth. She summons the girls who tempt HCE to his crime. She combines together the sides of his divided personality, Shaun and Shem, to resurrect him (she inspires Shem’s art, which appears as a Letter that simultaneously condemns and exonerates HCE). She manifests as Issy to marry the new HCE and start the process all over again.

*

The above is a rough attempt to put the story into conscious language. The novel reads like a dream, so different variations on the story are told all the time, sometimes at once. Chapter I.2, for instance, narrates the accusation against HCE involving the two girls. Then, it presents an encounter with the Cad, which it says happens far after the incident with the girls.

But elements of the story bleed into each other, and it’s impossible to keep them separate. Before either of those stories are told, chapter I.2 opens with a story of how HCE got his name from the king long ago, and it’s clearly a variant on the Cad episode (and in that story, the male figure who accosts him is accompanied by two other men, so it’s also a version of the three soldiers story). After telling the king story, the narrator dismisses as “fallacy” the idea that HCE had actually encountered “not the king kingself but his inseparable sisters.” So even though the narrator dismisses it, this informs us that some people believe that the king/Cad story is *actually* the two girls story and has just been misreported. Various tellings of various versions of the story will be given through the book. Often, the novel will present versions of the scandalous offense as separate events, but they’re really different ways of expressing the same idea.

And what is that idea? Finnegans Wake is, at least in part, about the “Fall of Man,” the same idea that is symbolized in the Christian tradition as the Fall from the Garden of Eden. In its simplest terms, something has gone wrong and made things bad, and it needs to be fixed. While it could be interpreted in a supernatural sense — i.e. that humanity has committed a crime that has separated us from a literal divine being who exists apart from the material world — I see no reason that this Fall cannot be interpreted in an entirely secular way: through our individual transgressions against others (or their transgressions against us, or our guilt), or through our myopic or selfish attitudes, we make things bad (and produce the “fallen world”) and can try to make things better.

On the macrocosmic, universal level, HCE’s fall is represented by the mythic Tim Finnegan falling off a ladder, breaking apart like Humpty Dumpty into all different characters who brawl across history, and being reassembled through the action of a cosmic ALP.

Chapter I.1 of Finnegans Wake gives an overture that hits some main themes of the story, with lots of emphasis on the mythic Finnegan. At the end of the chapter, Finnegan tries to rise but is held down by mourners/brawlers at the Wake, who tell him to rest because his substitute, HCE, is arriving. As ever, one everyman falls and is replaced by a new one.

Chapters I.2-4 tell various versions of HCE’s fall and replacement by the sons, Shem and Shaun.

As I read it, the rest of Book I looks at parts of this story — the fallen father, the battling brothers, and the feminine principle that divides and unites them — through different lenses.

I.5 narrates the story as an analysis of a religious scripture.

I.6 narrates the story as answers to a quiz contest at a pub and as folklore (“The Mookse and the Gripes”).

I.7 narrates it as literature (Shem as James Joyce, or as modernist artist trying to remedy the Fall).

I.8 narrates it as gossip.

In all of the above, language has the ability both to divide and to heal/unite.

Book II of the Wake concentrates on the battles of the children, narrating these conflicts as children’s games (II.1), schoolwork (II.2), and a radio play in a bar (III.3). These chapters sum up the battles of history. In that third chapter, the brothers start to merge back together, and the chapter ends with three soldiers/tailors/pub customers beating up HCE and beginning to take his place. II.4 shows a vision of the brothers combined into the next HCE making love to a young ALP/Issy (in the form of Tristan and Isolde). The scene is anxiously spied upon by the consciousness of the dreamer/HCE.

Book III starts off by concentrating on Shaun’s efforts to take his father’s place (III.1-2), but he cannot because he needs Shem to fully do this. When Shaun is questioned extensively in III.3 (a version of the cross examination at HCE’s trial), the questioners reveal that Shaun is not actually a self-sufficient individual, which is how many people like to see themselves: no, he’s part of a much larger whole, as we all ultimately are. All of the other characters from the novel are inside him, and they speak in turn, culminating in a huge monologue from HCE (which is a version of his speech to the Cad). As a renewed HCE, Shaun/Shem/Tristan is ready to take his place, so III.4 gives the same scene as II.4 — spying on the lovemaking — except the mythic Tristan and Isolde have dissolved into a middle-aged Dublin couple whose lovemaking is disturbed by one of their children.

What this suggests to me is that history doesn’t move toward the mythic: it comes back to earthy reality to start the cycle over again.

And so, Book IV is a single chapter that gives us a final overture before ALP’s stunning monologue that “ends” the book — except that the ending is a new beginning, as her monologue wraps back around to the first chapter, to start the cycle over and over and over and over.

*

What does this story “mean”? As I said above, it is a symbolic way of discussing the “fall and redemption of humanity,” which is just a fancy way of talking about how people make things worse and can try to make things better.

A major clue is in the name HCE: Here Comes Everybody. It’s the story of humanity. It sums up the cycle of generations — where each human generation rises to replace the one that came before it, committing along the way versions of similar mistakes. It sums up power dynamics between people in the fallen world, especially in families. And it sums up the energies of each individual person’s psyche, all the guilts and lusts and anxieties and potential to develop and partially overcome a fallen outlook.

But no one can succeed in achieving complete enlightenment. Every rise is followed by a fall, as surely as every fall is followed by a rise. The same Eternal Story is playing itself out over and over again in each our lives and across the generations. But we can work with each other and hopefully move closer toward the goal of Waking from the nightmare of history.