It is the fault of your myopia and not of the essence of things if you believe that you see firm land anywhere in the ocean of Becoming. You need names for things, just as if they had a rigid permanence, but the very river in which you bathe a second time is no longer the same one which you entered before. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks)

Finnegans Wake is hard to understand. More often than not, students of the Wake focus on its narrative content at the expense of understanding the form in which it is delivered, or set aside the ambiguous narrative and treat individual words and paragraphs as puzzles to be solved. I will take a slightly different approach. I will attempt to present a philosophical framework in which to understand its difficult language and its ambiguous and elusive narrative content. I will do this with the help of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. My intention is not to argue that Joyce had either of these figures in mind when working on the Wake. Rather, I want to show how these three figures—Heraclitus, Nietzsche and Joyce—fit together to form a compelling philosophical system, and how this system can help elucidate Joyce’s often mystifying text.

Finnegans Wake can be thought of as a sequence of dreams that affords its reader access to the dreamer’s unconscious experience. The dream experience Joyce presents is delivered in a “dream-language” suited to the indeterminate and often conflicting nature of the dreamer’s thoughts and anxieties. The experience he wishes to convey requires this dream-language. This is the basis of the theoretical framework I wish to propose for reading Finnegans Wake. However, since the dream-language is both syntactically and morphemically English, this claim needs to be more specific. The project of Finnegans Wake does not require an entirely new language with its own grammar and syntax; rather, it requires what I will call a flexible lexicon. The “Finneganese” lexicon must surpass ordinary language in its capacity for signification in order to be adequate to its content. This flexible lexicon, I will argue, allows Joyce to achieve a level of truthfulness that is otherwise impossible.

In the epigraph above, Nietzsche paraphrases and augments a fragment from Heraclitus. Heraclitus, via Nietzsche, denies stable, eternal, permanent being in favor of flux. The river is a metaphor for this. Those things in the world we might pick out and name as unchanging entities are, in fact, constantly in the process of changing—just as the water of a river is replaced by new water, though we call that river by the same name. Constant and eternal change is, for Heraclitus, the essential nature of the world. His claim that the “rigid permanence” of language is fundamentally unsuited to the nature of reality reveals the unusual capacities of the Wake’s flexible lexicon. Here’s an example:

“Funferall” is perhaps the most famous of Joyce’s made-up portmanteau words. Tim Finnegan’s funeral—the namesake of Finnegans Wake—is an event unlike most other funerals. The story goes that after drunkenly falling from his ladder, Tim Finnegan is pronounced dead. When a guest at his wake spills a bottle of whiskey, however, he miraculously rises from his deathbed. A word like “funeral’” can refer to a single thing, in this case Tim Finnegan’s funeral, and to funerals generally, i.e. to a funereal essence, as though there were an unchanging entity that corresponds to that essence. But some funerals, e.g. Tim Finnegan’s funeral in which the honored dead man is alive and partakes in the fun, bear no resemblance to that essence. The word “funferall,” unlike most words in the English lexicon, allows for Tim Finnegan’s wake to be both a funeral and a fun-for-all. It is flexible in the sense that it can accommodate seemingly opposite properties into a single word.

Heraclitus’ conception of the fundamental nature of the world (namely, flux and contradiction)—which cannot be captured within the bounds of ordinary language—can be captured by a lexicon that is equally as malleable as the entities to which its units refer.

The way Heraclitus accounted for the transitoriness of the world was via the phenomenon of, as Nietzsche described it, “polarity.” A seemingly singular, unchanging entity is actually composed of opposite forces, and is itself, in some sense, those opposite things together. Heraclitus’ (and Nietzsche’s) insight is not the obvious point that things change through time. Rather, their insight is that it is contrary to our ordinary conception of the world—one in which there is the constant, “Being”—to truly account for the contradictoriness that constant and eternal flux entails. Because things change and pass out of existence, every entity in the world must be ascribed the opposite properties “being” and “not-being”—for Heraclitus and for Nietzsche this means that in some sense, the fundamental nature of the world is contradiction.

This notion (which is, it is worth noting, quite different from our ordinary use of “contradiction”) applies to the unconscious mind—the territory of Finnegans Wake. A distinguishing feature of the unconscious mind is that it is tolerant of a certain kind of dissonance of which the conscious mind is not. Contrary emotions, even contrary accounts of a single event, condition or thing, might be entertained simultaneously by the unconscious mind, while the same set of contraries might, by the conscious mind, be triaged, and the unfit dismissed or repressed. It is the project of Finnegans Wake to reveal those dissonant emotions and accounts that the conscious mind does not tolerate. The flexible lexicon is the tool with which this project is carried out.

The project of excavating the unconscious mind—and allowing for the confusion that lies at its core—can be messy and unpleasant. It is, as Joyce describes it, “[seeing] life foully the plak and the smut.” As the dreamer examines his life through the central figure HCE, the most repulsive facts of human life emerge. The nauseating, the horrifying, the painful and the mundane are brought to light. The grit of human life—in its conscious and unconscious conditions—is exposed in the radically flexible language of Finnegans Wake. It gives expression to a human scale of contradiction—a scale on which at one end the conscious mind is working in rigid, individuated, non-contradictory terms, and at the other, the unconscious mind is working in murkier territory. It is Joyce’s aim to give every point on this scale a substantial and necessary place (in strictly Nietzschean terms) in his final and most elaborate artwork. For Nietzsche, this kind of expression is true in an important sense. If an artwork gives maximally human expression to human life, it is true to its subject matter. Insofar as Joyce permits of the unpleasant and the everyday—the “plak and the smut”—and the contradictory mental activity that generates it, both via the flexible lexicon I have described, he has provided a truthful and ultimately, I think, affirmative picture of human life. Every awful detail is unearthed and proclaimed in order that it may get the famous “Yes” that concludes Ulysses.

Heraclitus’ account of the world as flux and contradiction has a second implication for Joyce’s project. Individual humans are among those entities that are utterly transitory and hence, in strictly Heraclitean terms, contradictory. Insofar as we are individuals with names and life spans, we are both being and not-being. I have described truth in the sense of maximal expression of a given sphere of the world—in our case, human life.

A second kind of truth is also achieved in Finnegans Wake: the contradiction that underlies the world beyond the scale of humanity is also given expression. The life Joyce examines is a nameless one, and it is nearing its end. The primary figure through which life’s questions are considered is designated by the three letters H, C and E. In perhaps the most telling instance, these initials stand for Here Comes Everybody. In an important sense, Finnegans Wake operates on a level beyond that of the individual, and aims to defend the status of human life generally within an uncertain picture of the world beyond it. For Nietzsche, this is truth-giving in an important sense: if the transitoriness of human existence is permitted and even embraced, then the fundamental contradictoriness of the world is given true expression. In form and in matter, Finnegans Wake is successful on this count; its language, to quote Nietzsche, “[strains] to its limits to imitate music.” It rumbles from beyond the rigid bounds of human language to deliver universal ideas. The dream figures in Finnegans Wake, who have perhaps arrived at their final night, demand more vitality, and they demand it in the fleeting and contradictory form in which it exists. They “[escape] from liquidation by the heirs of their death,” writes Joyce. Their finitude is also their infinitude.

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