To the prophet, the whole world is a manifestation. Joyce has always regarded himself as such a prophet, and has always believed that his own works have the same divine revelation function as propheti

To the prophet, the whole world is a manifestation. Joyce has always regarded himself as such a prophet, and has always believed that his own works have the same divine revelation function as prophetic books. He called his creation the forging of the uncreated conscience of his nation in the smelting chamber of his soul. In "Finnegan's Wake," he also called the work "the book that saves humanity." Joyce's novels always seek to see something beyond reality in everyday things. These factors that belong to the "original light inside" of objects are not naturally included in the description of reality like realist novels. Instead, they are often the artist's prophetic epiphany that captures a flash of inspiration at an ordinary moment.

In the text of "Finnegan's Wake", Joyce completely gave up the limitations of realism in expressing limited individuals in a limited environment, and wrote directly in the novel "Finnegan's Wake" The entire history of mankind makes the novel a story for all people, allowing the absolute existence of no time and no place in the constructed historical maze. Joyce declares to readers what he has seen with the wisdom of the prophets. fundamental destiny.

Joyce intentionally wrote "Finnegan's Wake" as a maze. The rules of the game of this maze were determined by him, and readers must abide by his rules and pay attention to his intentions. By creating the independent world of the labyrinth, Joyce was able to establish his status as an authorial creator.

In "Finnegan's Wake", readers must look for clues left by Joyce from beginning to end, and interpret the text by interpreting the author, "Joyce created a world , a world that can only find its way in if the reader knows how to humbly obey the author’s wishes.” In this work, the author's dominant position cannot be underestimated. In the words of "Finnegan's Wake", readers "must have no useless doubts about the author's authorship and divine authority." Writing Technique

In "Finnegan's Wake", Joyce once called the environment in the book "a labyrinth of their similarities and their false selves." Indeed, "Finnegan's Wake" changed the traditional aesthetic principles of the novel. The whole work is full of uncertain factors, which makes readers puzzled. Some reviewers angrily called it "the madness of a literary self-entertainment person". dance" .

The maze feature of "Finnegan's Wake" first comes from the constant changes in the names and identities of the characters in the novel. Although there seems to be a set of characters throughout the novel: a family consisting of a father, mother, daughter, two sons, a maid and a male employee, 12 guests, and 28 girls, these characters Their names are not fixed until the end of the work, and their identities and relationships are as unpredictable as a kaleidoscope.

The male protagonist is mainly the owner of a small hotel in Dublin, named H·C·Er Micro Oyster, or HCE for short. But as his abbreviation "Here Comes Everybody" indicates, the protagonist's identity varies from volume to volume, chapter to chapter, and passage to paragraph. Sometimes he is St. Patrick who spread Christianity to Ireland, sometimes he is the "Iron Fist" who led the Anglo-Normans to conquer Ireland, and sometimes he is Cromwell who bloody suppressed the Irish Royalists in the Puritan Revolution.

In addition, HCE is also the Irish legend about the bricklayer Finnegan who fell from the wall and died but was resurrected by a glass of wine. He is also the cuckold king in the story of Tristan and Iser. Mark is the sleeping Irish giant Jon, and the Irish hero Finn Michael who resisted foreign invasion. In the short story of "Finnegan's Wake", he is also Jach von Huth, whose child was snatched away by the Queen of Mischief in the ballad, and the Russian general who was shot to death in the Crimean War in the joke. In scattered narrative sentences, he is also Adam, Prometheus, Osiris, Christ, Buddha, etc. He is all and the Father of all (Havth Childels Everywhere); He is Himself and everyone. His name also indicates that he is an insignificant little insect that burrows into people's ears.

HCE’s two sons also play an important role in the work, and their names and identities are as complex and changeable as HCE’s. They most often appear as "Shem" and "Shaw". In the book, they are also called Jerry and Kevin, Matt and Judt, Dolph and Kraft, Gragg and Kraft, Bart and Toph. In the short story, they are also the fox and the grapes, the ant and the grasshopper, and the "Xiao" is Professor John, Juan (Don Juan), etc.

Two female images, one old and one young, often appear in the book, such as the famous chapter about the washerwoman on the shore. Sometimes, the two women can be identified by context as HCE's wife and daughter, especially since the name ALP refers specifically to HCE's wife - and of course, like HCE, ALP refers to all women, especially women with wife status, Eve, Isis et al. However, in more cases, it is not easy to judge whether the women appearing in the book are daughters, wives, or just other women. For example, there are no clear clues in the book for readers to distinguish between Mrs. Kate, the gatekeeper of Wellington Memorial Hall, the lone narrator in the last chapter, and even the washerwoman by the river. From beginning to end, the characters of the entire book are as vague as a mystery. As Joyce said in the book, "In this comic platter of One Thousand and One Nights, the sword of fact that makes the identity certain is never clear." It will fall."

In "Finnegan's Wake", there is no unified connection between characters with different identities, and each character appears and disappears at any time. "Finnegan's Wake" can be said to be just a plate of scattered beads, and the thread must be woven by the readers themselves. Joyce only uses the repeated appearance of names to hint to readers that there is some mysterious connection between these names, suggesting that readers should not regard them as randomly piled stones, but as a carefully constructed maze.

With the maze of characters comes the maze of stories. If telling a good story is the basic requirement of traditional novels, "Finnegan's Wake" is a story without a story. "Although it is composed of stories, it does not tell any story." The reader gets the impression in the first volume that the book will be about a crime committed by Yelvik, which will be as symbolic of the fall of mankind as Adam was expelled from the Garden of Eden and Finnegan fell from the wall. In the first volume, although the narrative slips away from this crime from time to time, it can still grasp the thread and move on.

However, in the second volume, Joyce seems to have forgotten the story. Without any foreshadowing, the reader is taken to Yelvek's children, "Shem" and "Xiao" Taking center stage. The story of "Shen" and "Xiao" has almost no connection with Yi'er Micro Oyster. The two brothers sometimes explore the secrets of their mother together, and sometimes compete with each other with their sister Aisi as the axis, until "Xiao" wins and "Shan" "The exile pushed "flash" out of the focusing light. Then, the narrative returns to the scene where the Yelvik family is sleeping. The love of the couple and the children's exclamations in their dreams seem to bring the readers to reality. However, when the narrative becomes clearer, the story ends in sleep. Until the end of the book, readers still don't know who the protagonist of the story is, and they don't know whether they should ask about Yelvik's crime or the fight between "Shen" and "Xiao".

In addition, even if the plot of Yi Er Wei's crime is relatively clear, once you investigate further, you will find that it is still a "garden of forking paths." There is only one idea that something is wrong, but all the reader can see are conflicting rumors. The reader knows that this crime involves Yi Erwei and a young woman, and the reader also knows that two soldiers were involved in this incident, but what exactly happened, was it rape or voyeurism, was HCE and ALP having sex in the park, or was it... There is incest between "Xiao", "Shem" and Aisi, and the readers don't know it. Readers only see how this "rumor" spread again and again, eventually leading to HCE being put on trial. However, it is equally unclear whether it was a formal prosecution in court or a drunken quarrel between drinkers in Yi Erwei's shop. At the same time, since the crime was the result of several rumors, it is also unclear whether the crime actually existed.

There is another important plot in the book, which is a letter dug out by a hen. As the book says, the letter has been chopped into pieces by chickens, so the content of the letter, as well as the time and place where the letter was found, and the identity of the hen, have become a mystery. In the book, Joyce devotes a lot of space to discussing these issues: the issue of crime, the issue of letters, the issue of "Shadow" and "Shem". But every discussion does not so much clarify the mystery as it weaves another mystery beyond the mystery. Opinions varied, evidence was presented that was conflicting, and more often than not, the discussion was, at least superficially, irrelevant to the issue. These irrelevant discussions either lead people astray, or set up another wall, making it more difficult for readers to solve the puzzle. In the words of a reviewer, they are "holding back readers."

The biggest maze that Joyce weaves in "Finnegan's Wake" is the maze of language. "The entire rational and logical structure of language seems to have collapsed." Not to mention the irregular grammar used by Joyce, the relationship between the various words in a sentence often disrupts the traditional subject, predicate and object pattern. Moreover, Joyce's most bold attempt is to transform English words, Add, subtract or rearrange original letters, combine some letters in several words, or even create new words. This type of word modification is not limited to certain paragraphs or chapters, but runs throughout the entire book, thus completely putting readability aside and placing extremely high demands on readers. "The book is not to be browsed casually. It challenges the imagination and demands self-control and perseverance from those who read it."

The emergence of a large number of newly coined words makes "Finnegan's "The Wake" looks like computer gibberish. However, these new words in "Finnegan's Wake" were not made up by Joyce at will. Every word and sentence of the text was carefully considered by Joyce. In Joyce's own words, if you ask the writers themselves about a passage with ambiguous meaning in their works at that time, they will not be able to tell what they are talking about, but the author can prove that every line in the author's book is meaningful. Many times, Joyce created new words to achieve the effect of pun and polysemy. A typical example is Joyce's transformation of Finnegan's funeral (funeral), writing it as funferall or funferal, so that, The word means both funeral and fun-for-all, because in Irish customs, the wake is a carnival party, and Finnegan in the ballad is He was resurrected from the dead by drinking the wine spilled by the drunken attendees, so the funeral was actually a "joydrinks".

In addition, Joyce coined the term because he intended "Finnegan's Wake" to be a comedy full of gags, both "all the fun" and There is "Love Game" (lovesoftfun). The title "Finnegan's Wake" also contains several puns. The more obvious pun is on the word wake, which means both wake and awakening, so it contains both the Irish folk song and the word wake. It also shows that "Finnegan's Wake" is about the regeneration and cycle of human beings.

The word Finnegans is just a name on the surface, but Joyce also gives it multiple meanings through the transformation of vocabulary in the book. First of all, Joyce did not add a possessive sign between the name Finnegan and the letter "s". Therefore, readers can read the title as either the Irish folk song "Finnegan's Wake" or Can be read as "Finnegans Wake" or "Finnegans Wake". In this way, the name Finnegan corresponds to HCE in the book, which is both one person and all people. Secondly, in the book, Joyce made many deformations based on this word, giving it more meanings, such as "return to evil", "recover to health" (fine again), rebirth of phoenix (Phoenican wakes), etc.

Finnegan's Wake is full of "charades" that make up puns, and most of the words contain ambiguities and hints.

Since these words often have as many as three or four meanings, their effect is the same as the mystery of the theme, leading readers to countless branching paths. Joyce uses "puns and puzzles" to combine Finnegans Wake Woven into a "maze".

Narrative Aesthetics

The works of "Finnegan's Wake" are full of images of ruins. At the three textual levels of words, syntax and chapters, the novel form also presents the characteristics of ruin aesthetics such as fragmentation and contingency. The image of ruins has always fascinated poets, novelists, and artists. The beauty of ruins has even been named "alternative existence" or "third type of beauty".

Ruins, as a narrative thread and core image, run through the entire novel text of "Finnegan's Wake". It not only frequently appears in novels as a narrative background, for example, the "Eye of Ireland" where the "Three Sons Church" is located in the Nissan area is one of the oldest ruins in Ireland:

"St Paul's Cathedral" "The ruins of the church"; in Finglas, north of Dublin, there are the ruins of an ancient church and a remaining Irish cross; the home of H.C. Earwicker is also submerged in ruins, "through Il "You can see skylarks flying among the ruins of the roof of Vic's house"; what's more, Irvic's own body sometimes deforms into ruins; "over the ruins of the hesitant Yi Er Wei Oyster's body, shrouded in People maligned his curse."

Among the many images of ruins in "Finnegans Wake", the most representative and thematic ones are the ruins of ancient empires swaying with wild flowers. This narrative fragment appears repeatedly in the novel in the form of parody. “Today, as in the days of Pliny and Grumella, hyacinths sway in Gaul, periwinkles spread in Illyria, daisies play among the ruins of Numantia; and around them, those City-states changed their names frequently, and some cities were destroyed. However, these wild flowers have continued to bloom from generation to generation, and they are still blooming before our eyes today. , just like how they bloomed on the ancient battlefield."

In addition, plant imagery from the ruins of the ancient Carthage kingdom, such as wild daisies, daffodils and hyacinths, are also scattered throughout the novel. The decline of ancient empires, such as the final defeat of King Arthur, the fall of Dedalus into the sea, or the fall of the Celtic bard on his way back to fairyland, are all irresistible consequences of the arrow of time and the arrow of fate. Metaphor, so Joyce wrote: "Sleep, villages, tombs, cave cairns, ruins in search".

Ireland is an island full of ruins. The holy places, castles and towers there are like the remnants of mountains and rivers in Chinese Southern Song Dynasty landscape paintings. They have a kind of decayed beauty, a unique atmosphere of isolation and independence unique to the Celts. They are "the ruins of the Irish paradise". and well-being”. However, these ruins are not empty and void; on the contrary, they are sometimes sacred places full of spirituality. Because these ancient ruins still contain the traces and spirit of Celtic civilization, immersed in the hazy mythical light and sharp realistic color. Ruins are a crack in the world, an other, which has always been entangled in the imagination of intellectuals. The ruins as the "other" also constitute a so-called "hole" in people's vision; this "hole" extends to infinity. And an empty and ruined world is a metaphor for Joyce's modern Western society that experienced the catastrophe of war in the 20th century.

In "Finnegan's Wake", the ruins as the theme image also reflect the aesthetic tendency of the work, that is, fragmentation; and fragmentation is the core feature of its ruin aesthetics.

"Finnegan's Wake" is also a baroque fable, a fable about human survival in ruins, a fable about Finnegans, HCE and the An allegory of Anna's (ALP) journey from fall to resurrection.

The reason why the image of ruins has aesthetic value is that ruins tell the truth in one word and express the unique scene of decline in the 20th century, that is, the disintegration of the world, the split between meaning and image, and the dissociation of the signifier and the signified. , and the mental melancholy it brings to people.

When the values ??of traditional philosophy are subverted, the work becomes a heap of ruins. The word "ruins" undoubtedly provides a new key to unlocking the narrative mystery of "Finnegan's Wake".

The aesthetic feature of "Finnegan's Wake" lies in the fragmentation of "timely" events, that is, "ruinization", and the core of ruin aesthetics lies in contingency and fragmentation.