Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is well known for its experimental style and its reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the Western canon. Written over a period of seventeen years and published in 1939, the novel was Joyce's final work. It is written in a largely idiosyncratic language which blends standard English with neologisms, portmanteau words, Irish mannerisms and puns in multiple languages to create a refracted effect. It has been categorized as "a work of fiction which combines a body of fables [..]. with the work of analysis and deconstruction"; many critics believe the technique was Joyce's attempt to recreate the experience of dreams and hypnagogia, reproducing the way in which concepts, memories, people and places become amalgamated in dreaming. It has also been regarded as an attempt by Joyce to combine many of his prior aesthetic ideas, with references to other works and outside ideas woven into the text. Although critics have described it as unintelligible, Joyce declared that "every syllable can be justified". Due to its linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and abandonment of narrative conventions, Finnegans Wake has been agreed to be a work largely unread by the general public.Despite the obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book's central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot, but key details remain elusive. The book explores, in an unorthodox fashion, the lives of the Earwicker family, comprising the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book, in a nonlinear dream narrative, follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making it cyclical. Noted Joycean scholars such as Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett and Donald Phillip Verene have linked this cyclical structure to the influence of Giambattista Vico's La Scienza Nuova (The New Science), upon which they argued Finnegans Wake is structured.

Joyce began working on Finnegans Wake shortly after the 1922 publication of Ulysses. By 1928 installments of Joyce's new avant-garde work began to appear, in serialized form, in Parisian literary journals The Transatlantic Review and transition (sic), under the title "fragments from Work in Progress". The actual title of the work remained a secret until the book was published in its entirety, on 4 May 1939. The initial reception of Finnegans Wake, both in its serialized form and especially in its final published form, was largely negative, ranging from bafflement at its radical reworking of the English language to open hostility towards its seeming pointlessness and lack of respect for literary conventions.The work has since come to assume a preeminent place in English literature. Anthony Burgess has lauded Finnegans Wake as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page". The prominent literary academic Harold Bloom called it Joyce's masterpiece, and, in The Western Canon (1994), wrote that "if aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon, [Finnegans Wake] would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante".