A Guide Through "Finnegans Wake," (review)

If one were to apply a Vichian perspective to the history of Joyce studies, then Edmund Lloyd Epstein would surely belong to the heroic age, that is, to the first generation of critics working after Joyce's death. Despite having produced many pioneering and still-relevant works, Epstein has unfortunately not met with the same recognition as his contemporaries, Richard Ellmann, David Hayman, Hugh Kenner, and Fritz Senn. Hopefully, his latest book, A Guide Through "Finnegans Wake," will redress this imbalance since it can be construed as the culmination of many decades spent studying both Joyce's final book and the criticism it continues to spawn. Fortunately, Epstein wears his erudition and knowledge lightly, thereby making this a volume suitable for seasoned experts, as well as for novices, as an introduction to the Wake. Indeed, a reliable introduction to the Wake is itself a valuable contribution. Over the past few decades, the increasing specialization of Joyce studies (not to say literary studies as a whole) has entailed a substantial decline in the number of fresh critical works aimed primarily at the educated lay reader, which would, in part, help to explain the continued popularity of Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson's Skeleton Key to "Finnegans Wake."¹ Along with Finn Fordham's Lots of Fun at "Finnegans Wake,"² there is now, finally, some real competition for Campbell and Robinson.³

Unlike Fordham's book, Epstein's is a prescriptive guide rather than a descriptive one. That is, avoiding issues of Wakean equivocation, he tells his reader what the Wake is about (or, less charitably, what he claims it is about), rather than illustrating a protocol (or, as Fordham does, protocols) with which one may approach reading it on one's own. Aside from the introduction, Epstein devotes his book to a thorough, but reductive, summary of a narrative line that is presented as if it were the essence of the Wake distilled and unencumbered by linguistic tomfoolery. Unlike Fordham, Epstein does not really allow for polysemy in the Wake. True, he admits that individual passages can denote multiple meanings, but, within his argument, such multiple denotations are always narratologically delimited. For example, in describing Anna Livia in Book IV, Epstein claims, "As she rounds the Hill of Howth and comes into sight of the Irish Sea, the sudden sea wind from the north leaps into her river mouth like . . . apocalyptic bow and arrows, and the cruel violence of the Norsemen, the Lachlanns, lashes her cheeks. . . . The invasion of her mouth resembles a kiss (pogue in Irish), and the whipping of her 'cheeks' provides a masochistic thrill to the aging river" (279). According to this description, the text establishes one primary tributary of meaning: the tidal Liffey reaches the sea. This Liffey is also a female character. The wind that strikes the water is likened to a kiss, which is also compared to a hail of bows and arrows—"Jumpst shootst throbbst into me mouth like a bogue and arrohs!" (FW 626.05-06). In this way, all the various connotations of the passage contribute to and are collected in the single narrative line of a river flowing to the sea. Joyce's text equivocates between different senses whereas Epstein's analysis, which proceeds in a full declarative mode, undermines this equivocation by restituting parallel narrative lines that are analogically threaded together.

In his introduction, Epstein spends little time dealing with an explication of the complexity of Joyce's wordplay, which he reduces to falling under either the rubric of paronomasia or antanaclasis. He spends almost no time explaining or suggesting to the reader how to proceed through a book that operates in such a way, nor does he attempt to analyze the implications of Joyce's wordplay beyond suggesting it as an offshoot of Hayman's notion of the Arranger (16-18).⁴ Here Epstein follows Hayman's original conception of the Arranger as an absent character whose influence has a subtle impact upon the tenor...