Understanding

Finnegan’s Wake.

This is my summary understanding of what Beckett was trying to say regarding Joyce's "Finnegans
Wake”.

The Wake is a very difficult book to read if you do not realise what it is all about but once you have the
“key”, it all falls into place.

For me this key is Giovanni Battista Vico’s “New Science” which deals with constructivist epistemology.
(The history of knowledge traced through the development of language: i.e. every word has a
history).What Joyce, Vico and Beckett tried to do in their lifetimes was revolutionary in its objective and
scope.

They tried to make people understand what language was. For them language was the basis of reason,
logic, religion, culture, society and civilization itself. The development of language is the development
of man. However “language” is a double-edged sword. As well as bringing “rationality” and “reason”
it can also bring “conditioning” and “brain-washing”. This is why, in the old days, those who could not
read thought that people who were reading were “spell-bound” and under a “spell” i.e. tranced into a
conditioned space and no longer “natural”.

Joyce believed that modern man was under such a spell through the use of the English language: “the
most artificial language in the world”, according to him. By writing “Finnegan’s Wake” Joyce sought to
help modernity understand what language was and thereby break the “Spell” which modern man was
under. He sought to end the conditionality of contemporary society and so revitalize mankind so that it
could “escape the night-mare cycle of history” which can be encapsulated in the word formula: “poet-
priest-emperor-politician-general-thug”. Contemporary society is now entering the “thug” latter stage of
this cycle as national economies around the world degenerate under the pressure of corporate
globalization. This globalized process is leading to the unwinding of the social contract promoted by the
French Revolution and the American founding fathers and will eventually lead to anarchy and dispersion
as foretold by Vico (take Detroit at the moment as an example). According to Joyce the only way to
combat this spiritual, social and cultural disintegration is to break the “conditioning” of language and
become an engagingly conscious and passionate individual. This is the purpose of “Finnegan’s Wake, the
most important piece of Western literature of the 20th. Century.

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A Samuel Beckett Reader:
Beckett’s Excerpt: "Dante... Bruno.. Vico. Joyce"
It is first necessary to condense the thesis of Vico, the scientific historian. In the beginning was the
thunder: the thunder brought “awe” which led to “awe-thority”. The thunder set free Religion, in its most
objective and unphilosophical form - idolatrous animism: Religion produced Society, and the first social
men were cave-dwellers, taking refuge from a passionate Nature. This primitive “religious” family life
receives its first impulse towards development from the arrival of terrified vagabonds: admitted, they are
the first slaves: growing stronger, they exact agrarian concessions, and a despotism has evolved into a
primitive feudalism: the cave becomes a city, and the feudal system a democracy: then an anarchy: this is
corrected by a monarchy: the last stage is a tendency towards inter-destruction: the nations are dispersed,
and the Phoenix of Society arises out of their ashes.
To this six-termed social progression corresponds a six-termed progression of human motives: necessity,
utility, convenience, pleasure, luxury, abuse of luxury: and their incarnate manifestations: Polyphemus,
Achilles, Caesar and Alexander, Tiberius, Caligula and Nero.

His (Vico's) treatment of the origin of language proceeds along similar lines. Here again he rejected the
materialistic and transcendental views: the one declaring that language was nothing but a polite and
conventional symbolism; the other, in desperation, describing it as a gift from the Gods.

As before, Vico is the rationalist, aware of the natural and inevitable growth of language. It its first dumb
form, language was a gesture. If a man wanted to say "sea," he pointed to the sea. With the spread of
animism this gesture was replaced by the word: "Neptune." He directs our attention to the fact that every
need of life; natural, moral and economic, has its verbal expression in one or other of the 30,000 Greek
divinities. This is Homer's "language of the Gods." Its evolution through poetry to a highly civilized
vehicle, rich in abstract and technical terms, was as little fortuitous as the evolution of society itself.

Words have their progressions as well as social phases. "Forrest-cave-cabin-village-city-academy" is one

rough progression. Another: "mountain-plain-riverbank." And every word expands with psychological
inevitability. Take the Latin word: "Lex."

1. Lex = Crop of acorns

2. Ilex = Tree that produces acorns.
3. Legere = To gather.
4. Aquilex = He that gathers water.
5. Lex = Gathering together of peoples, public assembly.
6. Lex = Law.
7. Legere = To gather together letters into a word, to read.

(According to Vico the root of any word whatsoever can be traced back to some pre-lingual symbol).

(In "Finnegan's Wake) Mr. Joyce has desophisticated language. And it is worth remarking that no
language is as sophisticated as English. It is abstracted to death. (Vico and Mr. Joyce) both saw how
worn out and threadbare was the conventional language of cunning literary artificers; both
rejected an approximation to a universal language.

Christopher Michael Quigley

4th March 2024.