The Other Night: Dreaming, Writing, and Restlessness in Twentieth-Century Literature

Four: Finnegans Wake

f o u r Finnegans Wake An ‘‘Ideal Insomnia’’ The ‘‘quaqua on all sides’’ that Beckett’s speakers distantly hear in the mud and whisper back to the mud in which they hear it echoes a call that Finnegans Wake makes to its readers (and to the birds): ‘‘Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq !’’1 Joyce’s ‘‘Quoiquoiquoiq . . .’’ is the answer of Shem, Sham, Shames (James),2 a Stephen Dedalus–like figure for the writer in Finnegans Wake (seen here in the person of Mercius), to the accusation, thrown at him by his brother Shaun (seen here in the person of Justius),3 that Shem’s pen creates nothing, originates nothing, and does nothing but kill. Concluding his accusation, Shaun/Justius satirically takes the bone of contention (Shem’s pen) into his own hands in order to give a demonstration of its infertility: ‘‘He points the deathbone and the quick are still’’ (193). Shem/Mercius responds by returning his brother’s gesture with a flourish: He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak. —Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq! 89 90 Finnegans Wake Though the dumb—in the figure of a seagull or perhaps an ocean duck flying toward the mouth of the Liffey4 —may indeed be made to speak through Shem’s gesture here, that speech is only an echo of the bottom line of his brother’s accusation (‘‘What does this mean?’’ ‘‘What have you made?’’ ‘‘What have you done?’’—‘‘Quoi, quoi, quoi?’’). The echo gives no answer to the question. The only thing the echo adds is a shift in tone, by which the question is turned into an exclamation. Shem/ James has no voice of his own, but his echoing of the voices of others introduces ironies into the tones of those voices. Accusation becomes celebration in the ‘‘shamebred music’’ (164) of this ironic echoing, just as questioning becomes exclamation.5 Writing, as Socrates complained, cannot respond to questions posed to it.6 But writing has never thrown questions back at its questioners with as much energy as Finnegans Wake. No text has ever produced more bafflement. Hardly indifferent to questioning (despite its inability to respond ), the Wake sends back the interpreter’s questions with a vigor that begs a further question: where is this vigor coming from? That is, who or what, in the end, is speaking here? But no speaking subject can ultimately be made responsible for the text’s ‘‘Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq !’’ Full of such exclamations and full of historical presents, onomatopoeia, and the most extreme exuberances of free indirect discourse , the text presents us with an uncanny (because subjectless) enargeia that, suggesting a living presence, makes us forget, against all evidence, what Socrates knew about writing. Maintaining all of this enargeia takes precisely the kind of energy that Beckett’s speakers have been sapped of, though their drive remains stunningly unaffected. There’s a manic strain in the tone of Joyce’s ‘‘quoiquoiquoiq .’’ In Beckett, the ‘‘quaqua on all sides’’ is a depressive murmuring. Quoting it back into the mud that both muffles and transmits it, Beckett’s speakers repeat not a grand exclamation but a rhetorical question. Faced with the imperative, face down in the mud, to go on (writing, speaking, thinking), they ask and ask again ‘‘avec quoi?’’7 The mania in Joyce’s ‘‘quoiquoi’’ was bound to come to this. There’s nothing ideal about the situation of Beckett’s speakers, but in their inability to find the rest they seek, they embody the real fatigue that the ‘‘ideal Finnegans Wake 91 reader’’ of Finnegans Wake would feel. Giving the Wake to readers, Joyce wishes an ‘‘ideal insomnia’’ upon them: And look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and puddenpadded very like a whale’s egg farced with pemmican as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.8 This ‘‘prepronominal funferal’’ is ALP’s letter, which stands here for the whole of Finnegans Wake, in which speakers can never be firmly identi- fied as ‘‘hes,’’ ‘‘shes,’’ or ‘‘its’’ with namable antecedents. As a tough egg to crack (the letter is written by an ‘‘original hen’’ [110], sometimes named Biddy Doran) the Wake requires that its reader ‘‘nuzzle’’ it not forever and a day but ‘‘for ever and a night.’’ The addition of this ‘‘night’’ makes forever look longer than it...