“When We Dead Awaken” by Henrik Ibsen

*** SPOILER WARNING: The following post inevitably reveals some of the plot details of this play, and so, if such things are important to you (they needn’t be), it is possibly best not to read this post till you’ve read or seen the play for yourself.  

All quoted passages are taken from the translation by Barbara Haveland and Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife, published by Penguin Classics

IRENE: When we dead awaken.
RUBEK [ shakes his head sadly] Yes, and what do we see then?
IRENE: We see that we have never lived.

Ibsen subtitled his play “A Dramatic Epilogue”, but what it is an epilogue to he left unclear. As, indeed, he did so much of the play. It could be an epilogue of the series of plays he wrote after finally returning to Norway in 1891, that is, from The Master Builder onwards. It could be an epilogue to the series of twelve prose plays from The Pillars of Society onwards – the twelve plays that he had himself referred to as a cycle. Or maybe we can cast the net even further back, and include the verse plays Brand and Peer Gynt that he had written in the 1860s.

Neither is it particularly clear what precisely Ibsen had meant by “epilogue”. Did he mean a conclusion to the series? Or did he mean an addition once the series had already been completed – a sort of afterthought?

From The Pillars of Society onwards, Ibsen had published a new play every two years, regular as clockwork (the only exception being An Enemy of the People, which he had written in one year): this last play had taken him three years, and, shortly after completion, he had suffered a severe and debilitating stroke. The internal evidence of the text suggests that what we have is an unfinished play: the last of the three acts is surprisingly short, and while it wraps up the two strands of the plot, this third act, very uncharacteristically for Ibsen, takes us thematically no further than where we had been at the end of the second.  It isn’t hard to infer that Ibsen could sense his health failing, and finished it as best he could.

To my mind, this final play, unfinished as it probably is, is an epilogue in the sense that it is the conclusion of a long series, and, indeed, of a long journey.  If we think of this journey as starting with The Pillars of Society, we may see it as a passage from the hurly-burly of day-to-day life to the mysterious and elusive regions of death. But if we cast our nets back further, and see Brand and Peer Gynt as the starting point of that journey, we may see this epilogue as returning to where he had started: for much of the time here, we are not in the real, material world, but, as in his verse plays, in a world of poetry and of symbols. (Michael Meyer said that, as a translator, he would have preferred this play to have been written in verse, as so much of its content seemed to him to lend itself to poetic metre). And as in Brand, this play too ends with a seemingly divine voice of forgiveness as the protagonist is overwhelmed by an avalanche high in the mountains: it is hard to believe that this striking similarity is merely accidental.

But no matter how we may choose to view this play, it has never found much acclaim. It is rarely revived, and, as late as 1980, Michael Meyer was complaining (in the preface to his translation) that “it has never been adequately staged in London”. It wasn’t much admired at the time either: after publication in 1899, Ibsen’s English translator, William Archer, wrote in a private letter that “it is scabrous to a degree – if it weren’t like deserting the Old Man, ’pon my soul, I’d let someone else translate it”. He also said, again privately, that it seemed like evidence of senility on Ibsen’s part.

The play was, admittedly, admired at the time by Bernard Shaw, who found in it “no decay of Ibsen’s highest qualities” (although it is interesting that he felt compelled specifically to reject that criticism); and also by a young James Joyce, who thought it among Ibsen’s greatest works, “if not, indeed, the greatest”. But generally, it is a play that tends only dutifully to be admitted to the canon, a somewhat disappointing finale to whatever it is that it’s an epilogue to. It is granted almost a grudging acknowledgement as the last work of a great writer, but it seems not to have stirred the imagination as the earlier plays have done. While there is a stream of actors and actresses queuing to play Stockmann and Solness and Borkman, Nora and Rebecca and Hedda, Rubek and Irene remain, in contrast, barely known.

Perhaps it is not too hard to discern why this play is so unloved. There is, about this play, a curious lack of solidity. Even other difficult plays, such as, say, The Master Builder, for all their poetic imagery and the symbolism, are very recognisably set in a real world, and the characters are beset by real worldly concerns. But here, for much of the time, especially in the dialogues between Rubek and Irene, the dialogue is barely intelligible at all in terms of reality. Throughout the series from The Pillars of Society onwards, Ibsen had been moving steadily from a real world to one that was more poetic, more mythic, but reality had never completely disappeared: but here, that is just what it seems to do. In writing about the previous play, John Gabriel Borkman, I had suggested that in the final act, the three protagonists are already dead, and what we see played out on stage is a sort of dream of spirits set in some vague hinterland beyond life. However, it is still possible to see it as real action in a real world. But in this play, even that possibility seems to disappear – and it is perhaps not surprising that the most disappointed reactions to this play tend to come from those who try to see it primarily in realistic terms. We are in a shadowland here: Irene specifically describes herself as dead, and it is not clear that she means it merely as a metaphor; Rubek, too, is most likely dead; indeed, the very title of the play tells us they are dead. There is about the play an ethereal, rarefied, fleshless quality that seems to hold both the audience and the reader at a distance. No wonder Ibsen referred to this play as an “epilogue”: where, after all, was it possible to go beyond this?

The scene locations are always important in Ibsen’s plays. In Hedda Gabler, for instance, it is important that all four of its claustrophobic acts are set in Hedda’s drawing room. But generally, in the later plays of the series, we tend to break out of the bourgeois drawing room. In the three plays previous to this one – The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman – the action had moved, significantly, from the confines of the drawing room to the open, unconfined spaces outside. In Little Eyolf, there had also been a vertical movement – first, from the drawing room down to the shore of the fjord, and then, for the final act, up high above the fjord, and above the house. This descent, and then the ascent, had reflected the mental states prevalent in each of the three acts. In When We Dead Awaken, all three acts are set outside, and, once again, we have a vertical movement, but this time, we are constantly ascending. In the first act, we are, as the stage directions tell us, “outside a spa hotel”. In the second, we are “at a sanatorium high up in the mountain”. In the third and final act, spa hotel and sanatorium both disappear:

Wild, high mountain ravine with sheer precipices in the background. Snow-capped peaks rise to the right and are lost in the floating mist high above.

We are very far here from the stuffy drawing room bourgeois drama that Ibsen is still associated with. The physical movement of the drama, as implied by the stage directions, takes us away from everyday life into something far more elemental. And one wonders to what extent these stage directions describe not so much what we may see on stage, but, rather, landscapes of the mind. For, as Peter Watts points out in the introduction to his translation (in the older Penguin Classics edition), Ibsen, as a practical man of the theatre, must surely have known it would be impossible to depict on stage a stream upon which characters float leaves or flowers, or children playing in the distance. Neither could he have expected he stage directions at the end of the play to be realised in performance:

The clouds of mist sink more densely over the landscape. Rubek, holding Irene’s hand, climbs up over the snowfield to the right and soon disappears among the lower clouds. Biting stormblasts thrust and howl to the air … Suddenly, a thunderous roar is heard up in the snowfield, which slides and hurtles down at furious speed. Rubek and Irene are indistinctly glimpsed as they are hurled along in the mass of snow, and are buried by it.

Perhaps modern stagecraft can handle all this, but certainly in Ibsen’s own time, it was a tall order. Which seems rather to suggest that Ibsen was not writing with the theatre in mind, but, as with Brand and Peer Gynt, he was intent more upon creating a theatre of the mind – something to be imagined rather than realised in actuality. It’s not that he necessarily intended this to be closet drama: rather, he wanted us to imagine, to play over in our minds, that which could not be realised in reality. And it is much the same with the drama itself: it demands that we imaginatively enter Ibsen’s poetic world. If we insist on tying it down to reality, we are bound to be disappointed.

And yet, the opening scene would not be out of place in any of the earlier realistic plays. The whole thing starts off with a scene that promises a drama rather different from what subsequently unfolds. In the grounds of the spa hotel, sits Rubek, an elderly and distinguished sculptor, and his much younger wife Maja. And, in the course of what is really quite a short and naturalistic dialogue between them, the entire story of the marriage is laid out. One can understand why Shaw, no stranger himself to the art of drama, declared that this play “shews no decay” in Ibsen’s artistry: had Ibsen wanted to write a strictly realistic drama, he was still more than capable of doing so.

And yet, we don’t need to look too far into this apparently realistic dialogue to catch intimations of deeper matters. Almost he first words spoken by Maja are: “Just listen to how silent it is here!” She finds the silence “overwhelming”. Soon, their relationship is laid bare. They have been married for “four or five years” now. He is a distinguished man, honoured and feted – a sculptor, internationally renowned. She, much younger, is, in effect, almost a sort of “trophy wife”. Although there is no acrimony between the two, there is not much evidence of warmth either. They have a villa somewhere in the foothills of the Alps – which Maja insists on referring to as a “house” rather than as a “home”; and whatever it is they had been looking for in the marriage, neither has found it. The history of their marriage is laid out in symbolic terms as they speak in realistic terms of their train journey into Norway, back “home”:

RUBEK: I noticed how silent it became when we stopped at all the little stations – . I heard the silence – just like you, Maja –
MAJA: Hm – yes, just like me.
RUBEK: – and then I realized we’d crossed the border. That we really were home. Because the train would stop and wait at all the little stations, even though there were no passengers.
MAJA: Why did it wait for so long? When there was nothing there?
RUBEK: Don’t know. No passengers left the train, no-one boarded.

Four or five years of marriage, of uneventful monotony, no-one coming or going, and hearing only the overwhelming silence.

Maja is bored. She had not wanted to come “traipsing” up here, she says, and has to be reminded that it was she who had wanted to make this trip. And she has noticed that Rubek is restless, and can no longer settle his mind on his work.

As a sculptor, he had made his name with a piece he called Resurrection Day. On that, he had worked day and night. And it is a masterpiece, he insists, with a vehemence that doesn’t quite suggest confidence:

… because Resurrection Day is a masterpiece! Or was, at first. No, it still is. And it shall, shall, shall be a masterpiece!

It is acclaimed by the whole world, but the “whole world”, Rubek insists, “knows nothing! Understands nothing!” They are but the mob and the masses. Since that work, Rubek has settled for sculpting portrait busts for wealthy clients. But what they do not know is that, despite the strictly realist exteriors, Rubek had, for his own satisfaction, worked in, “under the skin”, features of animals.

The picture that emerges of Rubek is not a very attractive one. He is a man utterly immersed in his own ego, contemptuous of humanity around him, seeing others as mere beasts. And, despite the fame and fortune he has won, he is uncertain of his own worth: both his fame and fortune, after all, derives from the “mob” that he despises – that knows and understands nothing – mere beasts.

When he had married Maja, he had, she reminds him, promised to take her to the top of a mountain, and show her “the glory of the world”. He is now surprised he had said that to her, and confesses, quite unashamedly, that it was merely an old catchphrase of his, one that he had said that before to others: whatever glory of the world he had believed in, it means nothing to him now. Perhaps he had never quite believed it himself.

All this Maja hears, and, so the stage directions tell us, she looks at him bitterly. But she is far from distraught. Rubek’s honesty in admitting all this is brutal; that he can admit this so openly to Maja suggests that, in his all-consuming egotism, he doesn’t really care what she may feel. And she, having lived with him for four or five years, isn’t really surprised. When he asks her teasingly if she is offended, she (“coldly, not looking up”) answers “No, not in the least”. Why should she be?

It is at this point that the drama, somewhat abruptly, moves to a different plane. A new element is introduced almost as if it were a ghost story – and, as we soon find out, it is, in a sense, a ghost story. The previous night, Rubek had seen, or thought he had seen, at a distance, passing through the grounds of the hotel, a pale lady dressed in white, and a small dark figure behind her. The manager of the spa solves this apparition easily: it is one of the guests, accompanied by a “Diakonisse” (which as is explained in the notes of the latest Penguin edition, is “a woman in charge of the social work of a Lutheran parish”). Michael Meyer and Peter Watts refer to her as a “nun” in theor traslations, but this suggests the Catholic rather than a Lutheran church; Barbara Haveland and Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife, translators of the new Penguin edition, refer to her, no doubt more accurately though perhaps a bit more awkwardly, as a Sister of Mercy. As soon as the manager has explained the apparitions, we see them ourselves, walking across the back of the stage, crossing across the park towards the pavilion. Almost immediately, another figure enters, a figure as earthy and as physical as the pale lady had been ghostly – Ulfheim, a somewhat brash and bumptious squire, who is out bear-hunting. His presence injects into the play a rough vitality that had, till now, been missing, and Maja, fascinated by his bear-hunting stories, is instantly attracted. Soon, Rubek is left alone on stage (Maja having most happily left with the bear-hunter Ulfheim), and he is joined by the pale lady in white. The two had recognised each other.

The introduction of Ulfheim so soon after the appearance of the ghostly pale lady brings to the proceedings a somewhat schematic symmetry that warns us not to take what we see too literally: this is not a naturalistic drama. And soon, once Rubek is left on his own, the mysterious lady joins him. They had known each other before. And whatever indication of realism we had been given till now vanishes in the scene that now unfolds.

This scene, which takes up most of the latter part of the first act, is impossible to summarise: in dramatic terms, it couldn’t be more different from the realistic scene we had had seen earlier between Rubek and Maja. This lady’s name is Irene: it was she who had modelled for Rubek’s Resurrection Day, the masterpiece that had made his name, and which, he vehemently insists, is, and must be, a masterpiece. But she states quite explicitly, right at the start of the scene, that she is dead, and I am not sure we shouldn’t take her literally: she may indeed be a ghost. Since she had known Rubek, she says, she had married twice: she had driven her first husband mad, and had murdered the second (“with a fine, sharp dagger I always take to bed with me”). She had had many children, she tells us, but she had murdered them too. She had stood naked on a revolving stage in variety shows, in tableaux vivants; she had been committed to a lunatic asylum, bound in a strait-jacket. And now, she insists, she is dead.

How much of this are we to take literally? Ibsen doesn’t help us. But at this point of the play, after the naturalistic opening scene, we feel the ground very noticeably shifting beneath us, and we aren’t sure quite where we stand. Or, indeed, if we stand at all.

And, as Hilde had done to Solness, and Ella Rentheim to Borkman, Irene accuses Rubek. The love she had offered him then, when she had posed for him and let him gaze upon her naked form, he had never returned. He had never so much as acknowledged that love. He used here merely for what he needed.

RUBEK [defensively]: I never committed any sin against you! Never, Irene!
IRENE: Yes, you did! You sinned against my innermost being!

We may be remined here of Ella Rentheim’s accusing Borkman of the sin for which there is no forgiveness.

In a realistic drama, we would have expected Rubek simply to have dismissed Irene as some sort of madwoman: after all, he was an artist and she a model, and that’s all there is to it. But, for reasons we may only guess at, Rubek doesn’t dismiss her. He, like Solness, is stricken with guilt. We have seen Rubek consumed by his own ego, and locked in a loveless marriage; the humanity around him he holds in contempt – depicting others merely as beasts; in his calling, he had not so much brought stones to life, but had turned the warmth of humanity itself into stone – into something less than human. The charge he now faces, of having rejected a love hat had been offered him, of – as Ella Rentheim had put it in the previous play – killing the love in another being, he cannot now dismiss. None of this may make much sense on a strictly realistic level, but we are in a dream play now.

As the curtain goes down on Act One, we may feel somewhat disoriented: what kind of play is this, really? It seems a play divided: the realism with which it opens doesn’t so much modulate into a dream: rather, the realistic element and the dreamlike element are almost brutally juxtaposed right next to each other.

And the second act doesn’t really clarify matter either. The stage directions tell us that there are children playing in the distance, and throughout this act, we can hear their happy laughter. It seems almost like a vision of a prelapsarian paradise, or maybe the Elysian fields we may go to once we too, like Irene, are dead. We are, admittedly, a bit higher up the mountain, but are we still in the real world? The opening scene of this second act may suggest that we are (as before, the first part of this act is dominated by a realistic scene between Rubek and Maja); but the second part consists of a scene between Rubek and Irene, and here, all semblance to reality seems to vanish. We have to take this as a sort of dream play: it makes little sense to consider it otherwise.

The scene between Rubek and Maja is, however, in a realist mode, and it serves but to confirm the impression we had received of Rubek as a narcissist. He had, as we know, told Maja that he would take her to the top of a mountain and show her “the glory of the world”, but, as he had admitted, without any embarrassment at all, that was just a pat formula he had been in the habit of using: he had not meant it seriously. He had married her, effectively, to be served by her. But Maja is no mere cipher in the play: she refuses the task allotted her:

RUBEK [somewhat uncertain]: What I now feel so vividly – and so painfully – that I need, is to have someone around me who is genuinely close to me –
MAJA [interrupts him tensely]: Aren’t I, Rubek?
RUBEK [dismissively]: Not in that sense. I need to live with another human being who can complement me – complete me – be one with me in everything I do.
MAJA [slowly]: Yes, I wouldn’t be much help to you in those difficult things.
RUBEK: No, you’d make sure you weren’t, Maja.
MAJA [in an outburst]: God knows, I wouldn’t really want to be!

Rubek, self-absorbed, can see Maja only insofar as she serves him, or is capable of serving him, but Maja is having none of that. She can sense that Rubek has more of a relationship with the mysterious pale lady than he does with her, and she doesn’t in the least resent it, any more than Rubek resents Maja being attracted to Ulfheim, the bear-hunter. They are both honest about where they are: it is too late in the day for jealousy.

Rubek is aware of some deficiency in his own self, of some vast, empty chasm. His Resurrection Day sculpture had bought him fame and wealth and public acclaim, but by then, he no longer loved his own work. “Those public homages and those bouquets left me,” he says, “left me nauseated and desperate, and nearly drove me deep into the darkest forests.” But Maja has had some four or five years of hearing Rubek talk about himself: she doesn’t even pretend to be interested.

And then, as in the first act, the very realistic scene between Rubek and Maja is followed b a scene between Rubek and the ghost-like Irene, and, once again, we are in a different world, where the rules of everyday life seem no longer to apply. They speak again, as they must, of the time when Irene had posed for him, and had been his inspiration. That sculpture, Resurrection Day, Irene refers to as their “child”, just as, in Hedda Gabler, Thea had referred to Loevborg’s writing as their “child”. But this child did not turn out as Irene had thought. What she had posed for was a figure of a girl, bright and young and fresh, awakening to a new day, with a “transfiguring joy of light” upon her face: this was the Resurrection Day that she had thought of as her child: it was a sculpture of hope, of idealism. But then, afterwards, Rubek had coldly thanked her, and referred to their entire relationship as an “episode”. Which, in a realistic world, it is, but we aren’t in a realistic world any more, and we are asked to accept that in this dream world, Rubek’s cold indifference to her had sucked out her very soul, and left her spiritually dead.

We cannot be sure what exactly had occurred between the two in the real world. Ibsen is concerned here with poetic imagery, not with the mere mechanics of the plot. But whatever had happened, Irene had offered him love, and life, and he had turned them down. And after she had left, Rubek had turned against the idealism that he had initially depicted: he had enlarged the plinth, and had moved to the background the figure of the young girl  awakening to a new day with the transfigured light of joy on her face; and around this figure, he had placed others – other people, with “animal faces  concealed beneath the skin”. And in the front of what is now a group, he had placed himself, “a guilt-marked man who cannot quite free himself from the earth’s crust”.

It is at this point that Irene draws a knife, and is about to strike – to kill him as she had, so she says, killed her second husband, and all her children. And if that was metaphorical, then, perhaps, this is too: there seems no ground rules whereby we may interpret the dramatic action. But she puts her knife away. Back then, she remembers, Rubek had promised her too that he would take her to the top of a mountain, and show her the glory of the world. Perhaps, back then, before it had become but an empty catchphrase, he really had believed that. But now, Irene reminds him of that old promise, and they decide to do just that. When we dead awaken, Irene says, we shall find we have never lived.

One wonders how Ibsen had intended to write to third act. What we have now is but a few almost perfunctory pages that complete the plot, such as it is.  The second act had ended with Maja, now determined to leave Rubek for Ulfheim, singing like some Ariel of her new-found freedom. But Rubek and Irene, who are now both dead (maybe Irene did kill him after all!), head for the mountain-top, perhaps to Resurrection Day, and perhaps to see the glory of all the world.

Most of the third act, as it currently is, concerns Maja and her new partner Ulfheim. Maja has at last found the freedom she wants, and, in the brief scene between them, she shows herself more than capable of holding her own with her new chosen partner. One suspects that Ibsen had planned after this a long scene between Rubek and Irene, before they head willingly to their deaths – or, perhaps, to their resurrection, since they are already dead. But this scene is now cut to only a few lines. Although they know there is a storm coming, they head upwards, to the mountain top. And as they are inevitably overcome by the avalanche, the Sister of Mercy who had accompanied Irene speaks over their deaths a Latin benediction – “Pax vobiscum” (“peace be upon you”); and meanwhile, in the background, we hear Maja sing her song of freedom.

***

It is not hard to see why this very strange play has not won the acclaim of Ibsen’s earlier plays. This strange mix of the realism and the dream play, with the abrupt swings between the two modes, gives it, as it were, two dramatic centres of gravity, and the two remain in contention with each other to the very end, as the pax vobiscum blends with Maja’s singing from below. At one level, we are, with Maja and Ulfheim, very much in the land of the living; at the other, we are, even more certainly than in the final act of John Gabriel Borkman, in the company of those who are already dead. And yet, this contention between these two worlds is surely what Ibsen had intended.

More puzzling still is the content. Put simply and crudely, it concerns a man who is, in the eyes of the world, a great success, but who feels an emptiness inside, because, despite having been offered both life and love, he had rejected them; and who is finally persuaded by her whom he had rejected that he is as dead as she is, and that he may only redeem himself by looking towards a resurrection. All this is fine and dandy till we ask ourselves what all this actually means. What would have happened had Rubek not rejected Irene? A life of happy domesticity? Once we dead awaken, we find out that we have never lived; but what does it mean to truly live? For Maja and for Ulfheim, the answer is simple enough: but could such an answer have sufficed for Rubek or for Irene? In The Ambassadors, another late masterpiece by another Henry, and published only some four years after When We Dead Awaken, the middle-aged Strether, approaching old age, tells the young people around him simply “to live”, but he never quite articulates what he means by that – most certainly because he does not know himself. All he knows, and all we can know as we get older, is that there is inside us an emptiness, and a vague sense that there is something we have missed, something we have left undone, and which we cannot rectify even if we had the chance to go back and live our lives all over again, because we wouldn’t even know how to rectify it.

And what is it that Irene and Rubek so joyfully go to at the end? They speak of Resurrection. The entire play speaks of Resurrection, and is awash with religious imagery. And yet, there is no mention of God: the play had begun with an overwhelming silence, and, once the roar of the avalanche has passed, we are left again with that vast silence. Is it really redemption these two head towards? – a redemption that may finally fill that emptiness that we have carried within us? Or is it merely annihilation? The Sister of Mercy pronounces pax on them, but it is unclear whether this is the pax that follows redemption, or merely the pax of nothingness.

Perhaps even more than Rosmersholm or The Master Builder, When We Dead Awaken remains Ibsen’s most difficult and most elusive play. Despite the pax vobiscum of the Sister of Mercy, his “dramatic epilogue” does not end in peace or in harmony: it ends instead with more questions than we could possibly answer – more, perhaps, than we could even articulate.

Inching forward with “Finnegans Wake”

Ah – the plans one makes for retirement! So many things I had wanted to do, but had told myself I would do once I was retired, when I no longer had the pressure of work to contend with, that day-to-day grind. What one doesn’t take into account when making such plans are the increasing physical tiredness that accompanies age (although, having only just turned sixty, I flatter myself I’m merely on the lower slopes of old age), and, more importantly, sheer damn laziness. Nonetheless, two ambitions have survived: the first is to learn French properly, so I could, some day, read Molière’s Le Misanthrope rather than Molière’s The Misanthrope (that project has begun, and is progressing, albeit slowly); and the other is to read Finnegans Wake. These last few months, I have been inching my way through it, and only last week, I finished the first of its four parts – which is roughly one third of he length of the book. And currently, I am taking a wee break from it, while basking in a sense of smugness and self-satisfaction.

But mention of Finnegans Wake raises eyebrows. Even when speaking to someone online, I can sense that eyebrow raised. Even more so than Ulysses, it has a reputation of being a book utterly unreadable, indeed, utterly nonsensical – a mad, meaningless joke that is not to be taken seriously, and, perhaps, best left alone. Why on earth would I want to read something like that? Something that makes no sense, and is, most likely, no more than a grotesque practical joke?

I think my answer is that I do not believe that the writer gifted enough to create Ulysses would spend seventeen years of his life just to create a meaningless practical joke. After all, had I given up in the face of difficulty, and not at least have tried to penetrate what had initially appeared impenetrable, I would never have got to know Ulysses.

Of course, I know there are some who say Ulysses isn’t difficult at all, and that they took to it right away. They may even say the same for Finnegans Wake. Well, if so, then all I can say is that their minds are very different from mine. Mine is quite slow, and I find I have to work at everything. But I like to think that what my mind lacks in agility, it compensates with a certain doggedness – in this case, a bloody-minded determination at least to understand what that mad eejit Joyce was up to. Now that I have read the first part of this volume, I ask myself if it makes sense, and the answer, I think, is “No, not really”. But, once upon a time, I did graduate in physics, and though I have forgotten much, I do remember from the lectures in quantum mechanics that certain things do not need to make sense to be nonetheless true.

So why Finnegans Wake? I blame Anthony Burgess, to be frank. In my teens and my early twenties, Mr Burgess was, in effect, my literary mentor. Not that I knew him personally, of course (although he did sign a copy of A Clockwork Orange for me after I had attended one of his lectures): but not only did I enjoy his fiction, I enjoyed also his literary non-fiction – his various books and articles and essays. I used to look forward eagerly to his articles as they appeared every Sunday in The Observer (in those days, its literary editor was Terence Kilmartin). As a science student in a university oriented towards sciences and engineering (Strathclyde), I did not personally know anyone who was interested in literature, and with whom I could share my own literary interests: Anthony Burgess, in a sense, filled that gap. It was something of a one-way conversation, of course, but it would have remained one-way even if I had known him personally: I was (and remain still, I think) more interested and enthusiastic than I was knowledgeable.

And so I followed the leads he provided. His three main literary heroes were Shakespeare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and James Joyce. Shakespeare I was already absorbing, but the other two I knew only by reputation. And, as I read Mr Burgess’ sparkling prose about their works, I was determined to get to know them also. Of course it was difficult. One doesn’t come to “The Wreck of the Deutschland” or to Ulysses expecting plain sailing, and, lacking nimbleness of mind even then, it was a slog. But once these works did penetrate through my thick skull, they stayed there. Part of the prism through which, for better or for worse, I see the world, is constructed from these works.

And so on to Finnegans Wake. Once I had got to a stage where I could truthfully say that I have read Ulysses, and, what’s more, understood it (at least up to a point where I could love it), I obviously wanted to get on to the next one. After the magnificent Symphony of Daytime with its resplendent major key coda, what could that “next one” be but that mysterious and elusive Song of the Night, in which our unthinking and yet unsettled minds elide together all the solidities of the world, and in which all forms and shapes, and all people and all times, collide, merge, and melt into each other in a state of infinite plasticity?

I tried, I did try, but my young mind, already stretched to its limits by Ulysses (not to mention the lectures on quantum mechanics), couldn’t take it in. Not even armed with Joseph Campbell’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake and with Roland McHugh’s Annotations, and, of course, with Burgess’ own writings. Eventually, despite my doggedness, I admitted defeat. But only temporarily. I would come back to this once I had retired, I told myself, retirement being in those days so distant a prospect that it was not a state I could even visualise. But now that I am retired, it’s time to keep that youthful promise to myself, no matter how many eyebrows are raised in the process.

Finnegans Wake famously starts and ends mid-sentence, and the unfinished half-sentence at the end may be completed by the unstarted half-sentence at the beginning. So the structure is that of a cycle, and one can, in theory at least, read it for ever, turning back to the beginning once one has reached the end, and travelling repeatedly around the cycle. This structure is taken from Giovanni Batista Vico, who saw time itself as cyclical – first a theocratic age, then an aristocratic age, followed by democratic age, and then a ricorso, a return back to the theocratic age. Whether Joyce subscribed to all this, I do not know, but it did provide him with a structure for his myth-making: the four books of Finnegans Wake reflect the four stages described by Vico: first, corresponding to the theocratic age, there’s the Book of the Parents (consisting of eight chapters, four for the Father and four for the Mother); the next book, corresponding to the aristocratic age, is the Book of the Children, who supplant their parents; then follows, for the democratic age, the Book of the People; and finally, there is a shorter book, the Ricorso, leading back again to the opening. The parents, the creating God and the nurturing Goddess, are overthrown by a newer generation, who become the aristocracy, until they too, in turn, are replaced, this time by the people in an age of democracy; and, finally, when the democracy collapses under the strain of its plurality, the theocratic age establishes itself again. Whatever reservation we may have about such a schematic view of human history, it is holds together the massive mythopoeic contents of the book into a coherent structure.

The father is Finnegan himself, whose wake, after all, we are at. And, in a fashion that we are accustomed to from Ulysses, Joyce blends together the mythic with the everyday, thus deflating the mythic in a sense, but also, in another more important sense, elevating the everyday. For Joyce is dealing with big themes here – the nature of time, the rise and falls of generations, the history of mankind itself; but his materials remain low, and ordinary. The very title of this book, after all, is taken from a popular comic song “Finnegan’s Wake”, describing a builder, Tim Finnegan, who falls from his ladder, is thought dead, but who, at his own wake, comes back again to life when some whiskey is accidentally spilt upon him. But in the title of the book, the apostrophe is omitted: if history is indeed cyclical, there are many Finnegans, and the wake refers to their resurrections as well as to their deaths. The lowbrow comic song sets the pattern for endless human cycles of falling and rising, of deaths and resurrections.

But who is this Finnegan? He is Tim Finnegan, the builder in the song, who falls off his ladder. He is the mythical giant Finn McCool. He is the primal being, the modern man, Ibsen’s Master Builder Solness (Bygmester Solness, who fears being supplanted by a younger generation, and who falls off a ladder at the end). Finnegan can be anyone you like, really. Personal identity never stays stable here. All identities, all personages, collide and merge into each other. This book itself Joyce describes at one point as a “collideorscape”.

If all this doesn’t sound mad enough, there is the language. The language we use in our waking hours is not adequate to describe the unrestrained drifting of the sleeping mind. It’s not the syntax that is difficult: that stays quite straight-forward throughout. It’s the vocabulary. Most of the words aren’t really proper English words at all, but are composites, a colliding (or scaping) of many different words, sometimes from many different languages. So a single word here can have multiple meanings, or multiple associations, multiple references. These references can be to history, to mythology, to folklore, to popular music-hall songs, to anything and everything – there are no boundaries in a dream. Some of the words are simply nonsense words, existing for the sound alone.

At this stage, encountering a book with no fixed time or space, with no character who can keep their identity for long without being transformed into someone (or something) else, it is tempting simply to throw up one’s arms and declare the whole thing to be impossible – mere gibberish. But sometimes, one has simply to trust the author, and given my past experience with Joyce’s works, I trust Joyce. So I armed myself with Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake, which, page by page, disentangles every single of these compound words, pointing out its different levels of meaning, its different references. But that didn’t really work. It slowed down my reading to an impossible pace, and whatever music, whatever momentum, whatever sense of continuity the writing had, I wasn’t getting any of it. It was merely checking each nut and each bolt, but not really understanding what the nuts and bolts are there for.

The chapters on Finnegans Wake in Anthony Burgess’ Here Comes Everybody helped in this respect, but only up to a point: if McHugh’s Annotations were at too low a level, Burgess’ writing, splendid though it is, was at too high a level. Help came eventually in the form of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell and by Henry Morton Robinson, and soon, I settled into a mode of reading that, at least, worked for me (I’m not suggesting this will work for everyone). I would read a passage, getting as much as I can out of it (and it is quite incredible how much can be communicated simply by the sounds and the rhythms of the prose); I’d then turn to the Skeleton Key to get a better understanding of the import of the passage; and, then, once I have a good idea of its outline, I’d return to the passage again, this time with McHugh’s Annotations, to examine at least some of the nuts and bolts. Of course, progress is excruciatingly slow, and, even with all this help, I don’t understand it all: most of it, indeed, remains mysterious and probably always will, even when I have lived with this book for a while and become more familiar with the text than I am now. But I was expecting progress to be slow; and as for understanding – how much of a dream can one reasonably expect to understand anyway?

But is it worth it? Many readers, I know, will find the very idea silly that a book can only be read with the aid of other books. Perhaps. I won’t argue with that. Each reader will have to decide this point for his or her self. Speaking for myself, I am enjoying the struggle. Once I had accustomed myself to this kind of reading, I found I could sense, sometimes even without the aid of the Skeleton Key or the Annotations, a veiled magnificence, a shadowy majesty. I could sense the presence of something behind layers of veils, something elusive that I couldn’t quite capture (dreams cannot, after all, ever be captured), but something that is, all the same, resplendent, and sublime.

Out of all this, characters, of a sort, do emerge. After the fall of Finn McCool (or Finnegan, or Bygmester Solness, or whoever), he is replaced by a foreigner, who had originally come from somewhere in Scandinavia. (There are passages referring to the influx into ancient and medieval Ireland of people from abroad.) This foreigner is, it seems, the keeper of apub in Chapelizod, and his name, it seems, is Humphrey Chimpden Earwhicker. No, don’t believe that either. But these initials, HCE, are embedded throughout the book, and refer always to various incarnations of this character. And it is he, Humphrey Chimpden Earwhicker (and I still don’t believe it) who appears throughout this book in various guises. He has his fall too: in Phoenix Park, Dublin, he had “behaved with ongentilmensky immodus opposite a pair of dainty maidservants”. We are never sure what this “ongentilmensky immodus” is, but when, later, he is asked the time by a passerby, he becomes very defensive about it all, stutters guiltily, and protests his innocence at quite considerable length. Soon, rumours start spreading, and collectively, the stories circulating about the Fall of a Man in a Park take on epic proportions. He is tried, sentenced, and is buried deep under Lough Neagh, or under “lough and neagh”. But, like the Tim Finnegan of the song, or the Finn McCool of the myth, whom he had replaced (and who, confusingly enough, is also a form of himself, HCE), he rises. You can’t keep a good Finnegan down.

His wife, known as Anna Livia Plurabelle (the initials ALP represents throughout the feminine principle as insistently as HCE represents the masculine), writes a letter in her husband’s defence, but the letter is lost, and later, it turns up in a rubbish pile, unearthed by a hen. There is much pseudo-scholarly examination of this letter, which turns out to be not unlike the Book of Kells. Anna Livia Plurabelle is also a river – the River Liffey that flows through Dublin; and, indeed, she is all the rivers of all the world, watering the land with her nurturing grace.

And there are twin sons, who, it will later turn out, are, or may be, named Kevin and Jerry, but who are, to begin with, named as Shaun and Shem – Shaun the postman and Shem the penman; or as Burrus and Caseous (Brutus and Cassius, butter and cheese); or stone and stem (the unchanging, and the developing); or space and time; or the old Irish church and the Catholic church that supplants it; or any other pair of opposites one may think of. For among the themes that emerge from the mist is that of opposites meeting, or colliding, and becoming one. This theme Joyce traces to Giordano Bruno – or Bruno the Nolan (as Bruno originated from Nola). Which is rather convenient, as there was at the time a Dublin publisher called Browne and Nolan. And these two names appear in all sorts of guises throughout the text, always signifying opposites that are essentially a single unity, and which will, eventually, merge, and be seen as such.

And there is a daughter, Izzy. Or Issy. Or maybe Isabel. Or something. One can never be too sure. Maybe she is the Iseult to whom the chapel (Chapelizod) is dedicated. Or the Isolde from Wagner’s opera (she appears at one stage as a certain Mildew Lisa – a reference to the opening line of the Liebestod in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, “mild und leise”).

There are a few minor characters as well – the elderly cleaning lady as HCE’s pub, who is, really, another version of Anna Livia herself. There’s old Joe, who also works at the pub. And there are the twelve mourners at Finnegan’s wake, who are also customers in the pub. Or maybe, they are all manifestations of HCE and ALP and their children – who knows? It’s hard to be specific about anything here.

The question remains: is it worth all this effort for this madness? For madness it is. It was madness sitting down to write it; it was madness spending seventeen years of one’s life working over it; and perhaps the greatest madness of all was expecting people to read it. I don’t know if I am yet in a position to answer this question. I do admit that there are times I have doubts – grave doubts. But the doubts are, more often than not, dispelled by the wit; by the audacity; by that glint in the eye that is, admittedly, sometimes the glint of megalomania, but is, more often, the glint of good humour; and, perhaps most importantly, by the music of the prose. In the famous recording made by Joyce himself of the concluding passage of the first book, the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” chapter, it is the musical sounds and rhythms that make their impact, even before we start looking for the meanings of the words. And this, I think, is how we should approach the book: the sound comes before the sense. Indeed, it is the sound that conveys the sense. The rest are but the nuts and bolts.

And the vague, shadowy vision that becomes apparent underneath all these layers of veils is magnificent indeed. It is nothing less than a mythologised history of the whole of mankind. And yet, as in Ulysses, the magnificence of this vision is built from often everyday materials.

In that last chapter of the first book, we have two washerwomen, standing on either side of the Liffey, washing clothes, and gossiping about Anna. As the chapter progresses, we come further downstream, and the river widens, till the two washerwomen cannot hear each other from the opposite banks. And, Ovid-like, one turns into a rock, and the other into a tree, a stem and a stone – one growing in time, the other still.

As Anthony Burgess writes in Here Comes Everybody:

The language is cosmic, yet it is the homely speech of ordinary people. We seem to see a woman who is also a river and a man who is also a city. Time dissolves; we have a glimpse of eternity. And the eternal vision is made out of muddy water, old saws, half-remembered music-hall songs, gossip, and the stain on a pair of underpants. The heart bows down.  

I shall be starting on the next part soon, but since it is thanks to the urgings of Mr Burgess that I am reading this book in the first place, I may as well let him have the last word for now. I hope to be returning here to write more of my impressions once I have read the later books.