A long time ago this was our future
Finnegans Wake is a work of comic fiction by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author’s death, Finnegans Wake was Joyce’s final work.
Joyce invented a unique polyglot-language or idioglossia solely for the purpose of this work. This language is composed of composite words from some sixty to seventy world languages, combined to form puns, or portmanteau words and phrases intended to convey several layers of meaning at once, which many critics believe attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. Owing to the work’s expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and its abandonment of the conventions of plot and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public.
Despite these obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book’s central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot. However, a number of key details remain elusive. The book treats, in an unorthodox fashion, the Earwicker family, composed of the father Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, the mother Anna Livia Plurabelle, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Post, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book, in a nonlinear dream narrative, follows his wife’s attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons’ struggle to replace him, Shaun’s rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn.
The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book’s unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle. Many Joycean scholars such as Samuel Beckett and Donald Phillip Verene link this cyclical structure to Giambattista Vico’s seminal text Scienza Nuova (”New Science”), upon which they argue Finnegans Wake is structured.
