Finnegans Wake is the final novel by Joyce, first published in 1939 after a 17-year composition period in Paris, during which time it was serialized as Work In Progress. A heavily experimental “novel”, the Wake spews a near-constant stream of multilingual puns, neologisms, and encoded allusions, leaving the reader constantly searching for a stable foothold of meaning: it does not come. Many critics have identified this style as following the logic of dreams, rather than reality.

It remains a bogey text for many. Some critics, like Samuel Beckett (who had helped Joyce compose the work as his eyesight was failing) offered strong praise (Beckett would contribute the essay “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a book praising the early excerpts of the Wake). Others, such as Vladimir Nabokov, would slam the book, though, calling it “nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore”– an especially pointed criticism given Nabokov’s lavish praise of Ulysses.

Joyce is often quoted (perhaps apocryphally) as saying: “I spent seventeen years writing it, you should spend seventeen years reading it.”

Click here to see passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Directed by Mary Ellen Bute
Screenplay by Mary Manning
Cinematography by Ted Nemeth
Music by Elliot Kaplan

A note on the annotations:

HSW = Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce’s patron.
FDV = Finnegans Wake First-Draft Version

Many of these annotations are reused with permission from Siniša Stojaković’s finwake.com, a site that collects information on Finnegans Wake from various sources. His full bibliography is here.

“Finnegans Wake might be said to be ‘about’ not being certain what it is about: its subject is the nature of indeterminacy itself” (Margot Norris).

“[T]he apostrophe was omitted because it meant both the death of Finnegan and the resurgence of all Finnegans” (Richard Ellmann).

When Faulkner gave this speech at the Nobel Prize banquet he spoke so softly that the audience could not hear him, and many thought the speech was weak. It wasn’t until the next day, when his words were printed in newspapers, that people realized how profound and moving the speech really was. It has become one of the most notable statements on writing ever delivered.

Light in August tells the story of Joe Christmas, an orphan of ambiguous ancestry who believes himself to be part-black. The novel is significant in its themes of community, race, and gender, as well as in its depiction of Calvinistic religion.

The novel opens and closes with Lena Grove, a literally barefoot and pregnant girl from Alabama who leaves her home to seek for her unborn child’s father, Lucas Burch, who has fled to avoid the burdens of parenthood. Her search leads her to the similarly-named Byron Bunch, a simple planing mill hand, who befriends her and falls in love with. Byron discusses his feelings for her with his closest friend and spiritual advisor, the Rev. Gail Hightower, a former Presbyterian minister who was forced to give up his pulpit after his wife committed suicide.

At the heart of the novel, however, is Joe Christmas, also a worker at the planing mill and roommate for Lucas Burch. Raised as an orphan (and named for the day on which he was found on the steps of the orphanage as a baby), Christmas’s uncertainty about his racial lineage leads him on a wayward—and at times, destructive—journey of self-discovery, culminating finally in Jefferson, Mississippi, in a disastrous affair with a spinsterish civil rights activist, Joanna Burden, that leads to his downfall. [2]

Faulkner on Lena in Light in August:

Unidentified participant: Sir, in Light in August, much of the action comes back to the scene or the picture of a column of yellow smoke coming up from Joanna Burden’s cabin. I was wondering—you had said that in Sound and the Fury you got the idea for the story from seeing a little girl like Caddy in a tree. I was wondering if that happened with Light in August. Perhaps that was the scene that you had seen and that you started from in that story.

William Faulkner: No, that story began with Lena Grove, the idea of—of—of the young girl with nothing, pregnant, determined to find her sweetheart. It was—that was out of my—my admiration for women, for the courage and endurance of women. As I told that story, I had to get more and more into it, but that was mainly the story of Lena Grove.

Hemingway’s “Today Is Friday” is about three Roman soldiers at eleven o’clock in the evening still drinking after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

In his Paris Review interview Hemingway claimed to have written it and two other of his best stories in one day:

INTERVIEWER

You once wrote me that the simple circumstances under which various pieces of fiction were written could be instructive. Could you apply this to The Killers—you said that you had written it, Ten Indians, and Today Is Friday in one day…?"

HEMINGWAY

The stories you mention I wrote in one day in Madrid on May 16 when it snowed out the San Isidro bullfights. First I wrote The Killers, which I’d tried to write before and failed. Then after lunch I got in bed to keep warm and wrote Today Is Friday. I had so much juice I thought maybe I was going crazy and I had about six other stories to write. So I got dressed and walked to Fornos, the old bullfighters’ café, and drank coffee and then came back and wrote Ten Indians. This made me very sad and I drank some brandy and went to sleep. I’d forgotten to eat and one of the waiters brought me up some bacalao and a small steak and fried potatoes and a bottle of Valdepeñas."

I wrote this for the Mud Luscious Stamp Stories Project. They asked me to write a fifty (or near fifty) word story and they would put it on a stamp. They handed them out with different indie presses books. They collected them in a book that exists somewhere.

This is the first paragraph of the second chapter of The Sound and the Fury, rendered in the voice of Quentin Compson, who chronicles the last day of his life in a first person account that purposefully identifies itself with the drama, specifically with tragedy, more specifically with tragic soliloquies, and more specifically yet with a particular tragic soliloquy from Macbeth:

She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing (V, 5).

Although the “tale told by an idiot” surely alludes to Benjy’s (Quentin’s afflicted brother, the fourth and youngest of the Compson children) autistic, mute soliloquy that composes the novel’s first chapter, and although he who is “full of sound and fury,” strutting and fretting, can only be Jason (the third of the four Compson children), the rancorous, spiteful soliloquizer of the third chapter, the first paragraph of Quentin’s soliloquy, cited above, also works closely with the tomorrow speech, in terms of shadow (shadow of the sash), time (tomorrow, creeps, petty pace,time, yesterdays, brief, hour, no more), fools (“folly and despair,” “philosophers and fools”), and nihilism (signifying nothing), the latter conviction voiced mainly by Father, as remembered (or authored; in any case, as mediated) by Quentin.

Father’s equivocating cynicism, “No battle is ever won…not even fought” of course refers to the Civil War and the Lost Cause that burdens the world of S and F, but it also echoes the witches of Macbeth, they who famously equivocate, “When the battle’s lost AND (my emphasis) won.” N.B., Not only the tomorrow speech, but both subtle and overt echoes of Macbeth as a whole sound throughout S and F.

Also of note in the first paragraph of chapter 2: Father’s “excruciating-ly” picks up on the the theme of Christic sacrifice (crucifixion) introduced by Benjy in chapter 1, and developed by Quentin in chapter 2. Father’s overly deliberate pronunciation of “excruciating-ly” (the Vintage edition supplies a dash before the “ly”), together with his slurring of “reductio ad absurdum” into “reducto absurdum” (Father is too erudite simply to bungle the Latin) is meant to suggest that he was drunk when he presented the watch to Quentin.

At any rate, it is meant to suggest that as Quentin recalls it, or as Quentin wishfully or self-servingly authors it, Father was drunk when he presented the watch to Quentin as a token of his meaningless patrimony.

That Faulkner means to present Quentin (as well as Jason and the third person narrator of chapter 4) as an unreliable narrator is emphatically confirmed by contrast to Benjy’s stunning first person narration. Benjy’s autistic inability to interpret, editorialize, author, or do anything but rewind silently, in his mind’s ear, unadulterated transcripts of past utterances and present streams, proffers, ingeniously, perhaps the only reliable narration in English language literature, a feat in which Faulkner takes justifiable pride.

“A Rose For Emily” was first published on April 30, 1930 in Forum magazine–Faulkner’s first publication in a national magazine. A revised version was printed in his 1931 collection, These Thirteen, and also in Collected Stories.

The cover of the first edition of These Thirteen, via Wikimedia Commons.

In a non-linear narrative, we’re told of the life and times of Miss Emily Grierson, whose death opens the story, before the circumstances of her life are unraveled: she was part of a Southern aristocratic family whose fortunes dipped after the war, and never really came to terms with the death of her father. She maintains a fearsome reputation, though, and following a romance with a laborer she would have once deemed beneath her, the town is unable to confront her as she becomes reclusive and a foul smell begins to emanate from her house. Her eventual death reveals a cycle of unacceptance.

In Lion in the Garden, Faulkner wrote of the title, “A Rose for Emily”:

…that was an allegorical title; the meaning was, here was a woman who had had a tragedy, an irrevocable tragedy and nothing could be done about it, and I pitied her and this was a salute, just as if you were to make a gesture, a salute, to anyone, to a woman you would hand a rose, as you would lift a cup of sake to a man.”

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NAUSICAA

TIME: 8.00 pm.
SCENE: The rocks on Sandymount Strand where Stephen had walked in PROTEUS.
ORGAN: Eye, nose
ART: Painting
COLOURS: Gray, blue
SYMBOL: Virgin

TECHNIQUE: Tumescence, detumescence

CORRESPONDENCES: Phaeacia-Star of the Sea; Nausicaa-Gerty. (Handmaidens, Alcinoos and Arete, Ulysses. Sense: The Projected Mirage).

HOMERIC PARALLELS: In book 5 of The Odyssey Odysseus leaves Calypso’s isle, is harassed by Poseidon and is washed up on a Phaeacian beach near the mouth of a river. He hides, and in book 6 he is awakened by Princess Nausicaa and her maids who have come to the river to do their laundry. He emerges from hiding, returning a ball that the women had been playing with, praises Nausicaa’s beauty and begs her to help him, which she does.

SUMMARY: Cissy Caffrey, her twin brothers, and her friends Edy Boardman and Gerty MacDowell (who sits a little apart), are on the Sandymount Strand. Gerty is impatient with the boys and their noise and mess, and her friends, who are a little common, and she daydreams at length about herself and both her romantic aspirations (her suitor, Reggy Wylie, has neglected her), and her spiritual strivings (her thoughts often turn to religious themes) . The twins kick their ball to Bloom, who is also on the beach, and Gerty weaves him into her thoughts (she notices that he is in mourning and constructs a tragic but romantic tale around him). Cissy cockily goes to ask Bloom the time, but his watch has stopped. A fireworks display begins. Her friends run along the beach, but Gerty stays near Bloom and leans back to watch the fireworks (she knows that men can be excited by immodest women, and she is allowing Bloom to see up her skirt). When she leaves, Bloom notices that she has a limp, and we learn that he has masturbated while she “was on display”. Bloom’s thoughts run along the lines of women, marriage and smells (which join sight, taste and sound in the novel’s sensory compendium). He thinks of writing a story about himself—The Mystery Man on the Beach. He thinks of his children, and of Gerty.

Notes on James Joyce’s Ulysses