“Finnegans Wake,” The Final Chapter: The Illnes-Straited Colossick Idition by James Joyce (review)

Joyceans are delighted when those who are not professional scholars devote parts of their lives to illuminating Joyce’s works. Tim Ahern is a biotechnologist, and this is his second entrancing book of illustrations for Finnegans Wake; his first was on the first chapter.¹ The new book uses the same procedure as its predecessor, with a highly imaginative drawing for every dozen or so words. The Final Chapter is longer and more elaborate than the first volume. Like it, the current book contains the full text of Joyce’s chapter, but it has more frequent illustrations, over seven hundred, and some even for individual words.

Joyce’s inventiveness with language is paralleled by the variety of Ahern’s designs. His idiosyncratic images take different forms on every page, and he arranges Joyce’s words in hand-printed compositions that are often suggestive and revealing. Ahern is not a master of realistic artistic draftsmanship, but he is capable of drawing substantial and precise figures when he wants to do so. His style is always marvelously expressive and varies widely from solid images to sketchy scribbles that suggest vague impressions. They allow the reader to watch meanings undergo transformations.

Ahern’s superb illustrations demonstrate how necessary cartoons are to represent the Wake’s technique. Suzanne Buchan presented an interesting paper on this point at the XXIII International James Joyce Symposium in 2012.² The words of the Wake commonly go through transfigurations that only animation can enhance. This may be true of Ovid’s Metamorphoses also, and Ahern excels at turning human features to animals and plants, but he also includes more complicated images (114). For example, ALP’S aggrandizing description of HCE—“The honourable Master Sarmon they should be first born like he was with a twohangled warpon” (FW 615.18-19)—appears as a brightly smiling salmon who seems to be wearing a suit of mail and is encased in a tall, shield-like enclosure bearing the image of a long broadsword (131). Like the Wake, Ahern’s book has funny stuff on virtually every page. It is wonderful to see “holy Kevin” performing his ablutions in the middle of what seems to be an enormous vagina (77).

Another image expands on “[y]ou hald him by the tap of the tang” (FW 598.03-04) by showing two hands holding pincers pulling a man’s tongue out of his mouth while he clings to a beer tap (38). The drawings enact the emergence of fanciful insinuations, with the emphasis on freedom of association rather than on complexity of levels. For example, the implication in “twohangled warpon” that HCE is seriously warped seems have been omitted (or maybe it is there). And the idea of pulling someone away from his own preoccupations by holding his tongue produces a provocative level of meaning.

The line “[m]ildew, murk, leak and yarn now want the bad that they lied on” (FW 598.22-23) is presented as a fourposter bathtub, with the posts (the evangelists) seen as a pile of mildew, a murky cloud, a dripping shower, and a hank of thread (41). This view generates stimulating concepts of the Gospels. If there is an illustrator to compare to Ahern, it is Salvador Dalí, and surrealism fits the Wake well.

Ahern uses methods that introduce multiple levels to counteract the emphasis that each drawing places on the freedom of particular interpretations. The compositions of the pages, for example, reflect drawings in relation to each other. Ahern’s seventh page illustrates the first five lines of page 594 of the Wake, which begin with Sanskrit words and then refer to the constellation of Arcturus. The top half of the page has an Indian divinity casting off stars, while the bottom half has the Greek figure of Arcturus outlined in stars and following a bear (Ursa). The juxtaposition of Indian and classical visions highlights the cultural...